Copyright
© 1998 by The Johns Hopkins
University
Theatre Journal 50.3 (1998) 380-382
Performance
Review
House/Lights
House/Lights. By The Wooster
Group.
On its way home to the Performing Garage for a Spring 1998 run, the
Wooster Group's House/Lights stopped briefly at the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Chicago. House/Lights juxtaposes
two unlikely source texts: Olga's House of Shame, a 1964 B-movie by
Joseph Mawra, and Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights,
by Gertrude Stein. The stark contrasts between Stein's play and scenes from the
film create a complex critical space in which the audience is left to examine
issues of gender, greed, and human spirit or essence. Stein's play is not a
retelling of the Faust myth but rather a meditation on Faust-ness; what or who is "Faust." In Mawra's
film, Olga and her brother Nick, who run a crime empire of drugs, prostitution,
and jewel smuggling, discover that one of their hired
girls, Elaine, has stolen a cache of jewels. After beating Elaine severely for
her deception, Olga frees her to become assistant punisher of the crime ring.
Director Elizabeth LeCompte and the collaborative
group mix the cultural icon of Faust with a B-movie, creating wonderfully
strange parallels between the two. For instance, Peyton Smith, who plays both
Olga and Mephistopheles, gallops about the stage wearing silly devil horns and
brandishing a riding crop, growling her lines into the microphones.
The Elaine character and
Faust are both played by
LeCompte draws attention to the
representation of women at various points in the performance. When Olga
searches Elaine and Nadja for the jewels, LeCompte has both women turned upside down in stirrups
while video screens with Nick "looking" down their skirts mimics a
disturbing gynecological exam. Supposedly searching them for hidden treasure,
Nick meanwhile massages his own crotch. At another point, when the film
suggests that women should be trained as fillies, the performers break into a
funny and dark game of horse and rider as various members mount others and
streak across the stage. In the original Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights,
Gertrude Stein calls for a ballet sequence with bright lights and a talking
dog. The Wooster Group turns this moment into a furious romp about the stage
while Jenny (Helen Eve Pickett) slowly crosses upstage wearing a tutu and using
actual ballet technique. The real ballet becomes affected and silly, while the
other characters' mad dash about the stage seems poetic and passionate.
Similarly, Jenyon's costumes ironically question
notions of female beauty as portrayed in the 1964 film. The women wear
wrap-around hip padding that works as a grotesque interpretation of period
fashion. Valk's padding gradually moves into
unflattering positions, and late in the play the performers massage and
sexually caress each other's padding as LeCompte
plays on the undertones of lesbian desire in Olga's House of Shame.
Hans Peter Kuhn's music
resembles the scores he has created for Robert Wilson: ethereal, haunting, and
disturbing. However, his score here is mixed into the collage of source texts
and is not as primary as it is in
Jim Findlay's set is a
moving mechanical nightmare. Framed by a downstage bar of microphones, [End
Page 381] video monitors, laptop computers, and stools, the whole stage is
stripped to its most necessary items. Meanwhile, Jennifer Tipton's lights
rhythmically define this utilitarian landscape. Oversized light bulbs on poles
hang far downstage and are fastened to a complex grid structure that frequently
keeps the bulbs in motion. The glare of these incandescent giants alerts us to
both the absence and presence of light, as level changes define what we can and
cannot see. Similarly, the texts used emphasize what we can and cannot know, as
repeated phrases undermine any sense of what is real. The pairing of Stein's Faustus
with Olga's House of Shame equally works to demystify the Faust myth. As
Valk's baby-voiced Elaine/Faustus foolishly wanders
through the story, Faust's struggle seems at once silly and self-important.
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