A president losing grip with reality. Warnings of environmental disaster and apocalypse. An early reference to the Covid vaccine.
The Wooster Group’s revival of the deliriously trippy “Symphony of Rats,” a Richard Foreman play from 1988 that originally starred Kate Valk, who directs this production along with Elizabeth LeCompte, invites dark topical readings. It’s an election year, after all.
So why does this production feel so sweet and escapist?
For one thing, the vaudevillian madness onstage — which juxtaposes twee songs with violent video, highbrow with Hollywood, the mundane with the alien — does not build on its political subject matter. It’s only the surface of a far weirder, digressive production whose obsession is not with the real world but what is underneath. The President (a suitably intense Ari Fliakos) does not stand in for any specific politician, and can come off as an ordinary figure overwhelmed by events. In one of the show’s many dreamy lines, he says, “I seemed to have returned from a profound experience of elsewhereness.”
This is what it felt like to return from a new play by Richard Foreman, who stopped making new shows a decade ago. And for the theater fans who mourn his loss from the cultural landscape, this Wooster Group show operates like a delightful love letter, from one giant of experimental theater to another.
Foreman didn’t break traditional rules of narrative or character so much as invent his own. His surreal shows existed in their own meticulously realized world, whose distinctive designs were bisected by wires that turned the stage into a web. The mood was somehow both menacing and playful, its meaning ineffable and the overall effect entirely singular. Asked in a 2020 interview if he would ever make new work, he balked and then said exactly what you would want the éminence grise of the avant-garde to say: “We are living in decadent times, surrounded by nothing but trash.”
“Symphony” has hints of such flamboyant gloom. The President is presented as a puppet (even his bowel movements are performed with assistance), and the stage is filled with rodents — some small (look out for creepy props), others the size of the wonderful actor Jim Fletcher, whose sharp nails and dramatic flair project an otherworldly deadpan.
The dominant theme here isn’t these animals so much as alternative realities, whether it be an alien world, a “mirror mind,” a lozenge that when eaten takes you — “Alice in Wonderland” style — to a magical land.
That’s not even getting into Tornadoville. LeCompte, whose video-game-like production designs are consistently playful, nods to the Foreman aesthetic: the cluttered set, transparent panes, the wires. But the Wooster Group is more technologically and pop culture savvy. Yudam Hyung Seok Jeon’s video work is elaborate and abstract, with references to “Star Wars” or a John Cena movie, and a re-creation of a famously balletic scene from Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” is performed with grace by Fletcher and Fliakos.
There’s a conspiratorial streak in this play that this production doesn’t do much with, a darkness that goes underexplored. Its rodents do not seem to represent exploitation and corruption so much as the assumption that the world is too bizarre for realism, too cracked for happy endings or closure. At the end, Fletcher seems to address the need for some coherence, speaking into a microphone: “Is it possible that all of you out there were participating in a detective story?” Then he adds bluntly: “Here’s what happened.”
Don’t be fooled. What follows is a yarn complemented by a cooking show where we see the torso of a woman turn excrement into chocolate chip cookies — one of several gross-out moments aimed at the gut rather than the head. It’s a show that reminds us that just because art aims to disorient doesn’t mean that it is a puzzle to be solved.
Symphony of Rats
Through May 4 at the Performing Garage, Manhattan; thewoostergroup.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.