NAYATT SCHOOL REDUX & More Set for The Wooster Group 2025 Season

The Wooster Group will perform two productions this season at its home base, The Performing Garage: a return engagement of Symphony of Rats, starting in early January 2025, and the US premiere of the Group’s latest piece, Nayatt School Redux, beginning in early March 2025. Full listings information is available at the end of this release.

SYMPHONY OF RATS

Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk, Symphony of Rats is a new work bringing together two leading American avant garde theater artists: The Wooster Group and Richard Foreman. The show is about a President of the United States who undergoes a series of strange encounters of a phantasmagorical kind. It opened with a sold-out run at The Performing Garage in spring 2024, when The New York Times called it “A delightful love letter from one giant of experimental theater to another,” and the The New Yorker described it as “The Wooster Group in full flood . . . full of laughter and a radiating sense of pleasure.” During Symphony of Rats’ recent run in Los Angeles, The Los Angeles Times said it will “delight and derange the theatrical senses.”

The first production of Symphony of Rats was staged in 1988 at The Performing Garage, with Richard Foreman directing. The Wooster Group has made an entirely new piece by transposing Foreman’s text into verse and setting it to a “captivating” (Los Angeles Times) multi-layered sound and video score. In their re-imagining of Symphony of Rats, now set in a sort of hybrid spaceship-museum, The Wooster Group assesses the evolution of technology in relation to what it means to be human. 

Symphony of Rats is performed by Niall Cunningham, Jim Fletcher, Ari Fliakos, Andrew Maillet, Michaela Murphy, and Guillermo Resto. The production design is by LeCompte. Sound design and original music are by Eric Sluyter, with songs featuring music by Suzzy Roche. Video design is by Yudam Hyung Seok Jeon with Maillet; the lighting design is by Jennifer Tipton and Evan Anderson; and the costumes are by Antonia Belt. The full ensemble includes: Matthew Dipple (dramaturg), Tavish Miller (technical director), Aaron Amodt (production manager), Clay Hapaz (archivist), Monika Wunderer (general manager), and Cynthia Hedstrom (producer).

NAYATT SCHOOL REDUX

Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, Nayatt School Redux reanimates Nayatt School, an original 1978 Wooster Group piece. Nayatt School was composed by LeCompte and Spalding Gray. It was the third part of their trilogy, beginning with Sakonnet Point (1975) and Rumstick Road (1977), that was based on Gray’s autobiography. The text of Nayatt School included sections from T.S. Eliot’s play The Cocktail Party and featured Gray’s first foray into the monologue form, launching his influential career as a monologist.

In his Nayatt School monologue, Gray described his beginnings in the theater and played LPs from his theatrical record collection, including an LP of The Cocktail Party. Nayatt School culminated in staged scenes from Eliot’s play, performed by Gray, Ron Vawter, Libby Howes, Joan Jonas, and four children.

Nayatt School Redux begins with a new monologue from Wooster Group member Kate Valk. She reveals newly-restored archival video recordings of Gray in the original production and tells her own story of how she came to work with the company in the late 1970s. Then Valk and the Group’s current company channel the final scenes from the original production, deepening its exploration of Eliot’s text.

In this new version, director LeCompte again displays her mastery of what the New York Times calls “ravishing, meticulous marriages of live and recorded performance.”

Nayatt School Redux is presented with permission of the T.S. Eliot Estate. Casting information will be announced in a later release.
 

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