Review: A Madcap Take on T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party Is Revisited in Nayatt School Redux

“They don’t make theater like that anymore.” Maybe not 100 percent true, but that’s what I thought when I walked out of Nayatt School Redux, the Wooster Group’s re-creation of Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte’s 1978 theater piece Nayatt School. Zany, no-holds-barred productions were the rage in the 1960s and ’70s. Not so much today.

Nayatt School first ran at the Performing Garage, the same venue where LeCompte now directs its new incarnation, though one could argue that it’s all but impossible to really bring back so ephemeral a show (a videotape of the premiere, however, plays a large part in this reconstruction). The Wooster Group is treating audiences to this special re-creation (what the program refers to as “a reaction”) for a brief run through this weekend. While not as unsettling as the original must have been, Nayatt School Redux captivates, even when we have no idea what the hell is going on.

LeCompte has designed the set to replicate the original one as much as possible, with a long table positioned at the foot of audience risers. That’s the scene for the show’s first half, during which Kate Valk takes on the role of Gray as we watch the taped black-and-white video of him and other cast members performing on a monitor behind her. Valk tells us about Gray growing up as a Christian Scientist and listening to tales of horror on his record player, and about Libby Howes, a Nayatt School actor who ran away to Canada with future Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis.

For a true theater lover, this stuff is catnip. But the meat of Nayatt School Redux comes in the second half, when scenes from T.S. Eliot’s metaphysical play The Cocktail Party get a madcap rehash onstage as our eyes zip back and forth between that and the video of Gray and his castmates. Maura Tierney stares blankly up at the audience while reciting the part of Celia in a near monotone while OG cast member Joan Jonas does the same in the video. The juxtaposition of the two actors giving the same weird performance makes for a satisfyingly uncanny merging of past and present.

In the show’s second half, Scott Shepherd takes over the role of Gray along with Ari Fliakos as Ron Vawter in a verbatim reenactment of a segment of the video, but none of that quite prepares us for what takes place in the “cocktail party” itself, which devolves into sheer bedlam. The 1978 production cast included four children in addition to several adults, but no attempt to replicate that ensemble is made here. Instead, Andrew Maillet, Michaela Murphy, and Suzzy Roche, in addition to Fliakos and Shepherd, take on all the roles, alternating between Eliot’s lines and ecstatic, almost orgiastic dancing and smashing of props while Omar Zubair’s disco-infused soundtrack thumps wildly and David Sexton’s lighting pulsates.

There’s a point where your brain turns off and stops trying to comprehend it all. The words begin to mean nothing, and the mind becomes lost in a swirl of events that make no sense. In that respect, Nayatt School Redux does indeed start to feel like a “reaction” to the world right now, and it makes you wonder if more avant-garde theater like this isn’t due for a revival.