A Pink Chair (In Place of a Fake Antique)

NYU Skirball will present the Wooster Group’s acclaimed A Pink Chair (In Place of a Fake Antique), directed by Elizabeth LeCompte.

In A Pink Chair (In Place of a Fake Antique), the celebrated Wooster Group takes on one of the greatest figures in 20th century avant-garde theater: the iconic Polish stage director Tadeusz Kantor. Kantor’s only daughter, Dorota Krakowska, serves as dramaturg and guide in this theatrical rite of communication with spirits past.

The primary source materials for A Pink Chair are a film of Kantor’s late work, I Shall Never Return, and, through it, the myth of the return of Odysseus, which was a lifelong obsession of Kantor. The title A Pink Chair (In Place of a Fake Antique) comes from one of Kantor’s manifestos. It describes a theater that gives simple, everyday objects — for instance, chairs — hallucinatory power to summon up forgotten history and memory.