A PINK CHAIR (In Place of a Fake Antique) 

Reviewed by Vanessa Cate 
The Wooster Group 
Through April 15^th

RECOMMENDED 

Tadeusz Kantor was a revolutionary artist and theatre director, creating experimental works with his company Cricot 2 until his death in 1990 (he was 75). If this review gives the false impression of being an obituary, it is because A PINK CHAIR (In Place of a Fake Antique) was commissioned by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Poland and the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at New York’s Bard College to honor, conjure, and connect with the late Kantor.

Choosing the Wooster Group to devise such a theatrical eulogy is both a fitting and daring choice. If you’re looking for a linear celebration or a straightforward homage, you won’t find it here. But maybe that’s the point. The Wooster Group famously deconstructs its subjects, sometimes to the point of obscurity — with its devised theatre giving new and different life to the original subject. 

Pink Chair is an odyssey, which evolves over five movements and runs a tight 70 minutes in length. As in any journey play, it is good to begin with some sense of security before diving into the unknown. Therefore, our guide is Kantor’s real-life daughter (not an actress), Dorota Krakowska, introduced by way of the Wooster’s oft-used television monitor. Krakowska yearns to reconnect with her father’s spirit, or “duch” (Polish), and the Woosters yearn to connect to the pulse of his art.

From there, we bound into a meta-meta play. Zbigniew “Z” Bzymek embodies director Tadeusz Kantor as he appeared in his penultimate play I Shall Never Return — in a black suit, smoking a cigarette, and being accosted by characters from his previous works. Clips of a filmed dress rehearsal play onscreen as the Wooster ensemble recreate, with precision, haunting reenactments (brilliantly staged by LeCompte).

The title of the play itself references both one of Kantor’s essays, A Kitchen Chair in Place of a Fake Antique (in which he mused that given the nature of illusion and reality onstage, conventional props have no place in the theatre), and a pink chair that the Woosters have used in productions over the past 20 years. To audience members who come prepared with such knowledge, an artistic meeting in the middle is made implicitly clear.

The thing about watching a Wooster show is that feeling of “I didn’t do my homework”. There are so many subtle references to unfamiliar sources that watching becomes active rather than passive, a desperate attempt to grasp onto anything.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. When Part 5 of Pink Chair presents a portion of the Odysseus saga and the return to Ithaca, that uneasy feeling of being lost at sea and longing for some sense of security to latch onto seems intentional. Perhaps that was the idea all along. The production’s return to familiar ground is calming. And a choral climax moving in some base and indescribable way.

Since the Wooster Group was founded in 1975, it has forged an aesthetic approach to theatre entirely its own. So, after decades of producing far-out intellectual happenings, it might be fair to accuse the group of being intentionally removed from mainstream sensibilities — but it is also an undeniably enthralling thing to experience. The transparent Brechtian approach is pushed further off the deep-end by including the rehearsal process itself in the finished product. The whole act of doing theatre is in of itself “art”. 

The beauty of the piece is that it really doesn’t require any special familiarity with its subject walking in. Everything you need, even if unorthodox or uncomfortable, is up there on the stage. The show is not just a poetic elegy to one man, but to the ephemeral nature of theatre and the ineffable immediacy of live performance — a mournful but ultimately life-affirming love letter across the decades from one avant-garde stage artist to another. And something that, if you can stay the course, may inexplicably resound in the gut (or wherever inspiration comes from) for artists in the audience. 

The Wooster Group at REDCAT, located in the Walt Disney Concert Hall Complex of the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, 631 West 2^nd Street, Los Angeles 90012; Performances Thurs.-Sat. 8:30p.m. & Sun 3:00 p.m. thru April 15; For tickets visit https://www.redcat.org/event/wooster-group-pink-chair-place-fake-antique; Running time: Approximately 70 minutes with no intermission.

NOTE: Shows by the Wooster Group are often best processed over conversation. This reviewer would like to thank Bill Raden for his contribution of thought, sometimes tangible, in this review.