In-depth study with interviews of one of the handful of ground-breaking experimental theatre ensembles, and one of the longest in existence, in the United States.  They work collectively on original material primarily.  Ron Vawter is one of the members of the company.  David Savran is the interviewer and author.  Spalding Gray is the company member whose family is implicated in one of the works discussed.  Spalding Gray is now known mostly for his solo monologue shows which he writes and performs live and on film.  Another member, Willem DaFoe, is known for his film acting.  The director is Elizabeth LaCompte. 

Ron Vawter:  In the Tilogy I took a lot of pleasure from performing in a new way.  I saw myself as a stand-in, or surrogate, not playing a role so much as standing in for people that Spalding wanted to have in the same room, in the scene. 

David Savran:  Like, in Rumstick Road, his father or grandmother.
Ron Vawter:  Yes.  But I never tried to act older, or like I thought his father would be.  I always saw myself as a surrogate who, in the absence of anyone else would stand in for him.  And even now, when I'm in front of an audience and I feel good, I hearken back to that feeling, that I'm standing in for them.  Anybody might as easily be up there, but I'm the one who happens to be there at the moment.  That's the feeling I have about any character I play, that I'm there in place of the real thing or of anyone who's watching it.  And that makes me feel very generous, very energized.  This feeling came out of the Trilogy because I behaved in those pieces in place of people who were important in Spalding's life, or members of his family.  So I always had the feeling, not so much of inhabiting an imaginative or fictional world of my own, but of being a theatrical "stand-in".

In performance as it has been traditionally conceived, the performer must surrender his identity to that of the character he plays.  He must allow himself to be usurped, to be violated by another, just as, in Rumstick Road, Libby Howes is violated by the image of Bette Gray.  In all its work the Wooster Group breaks with this pattern by asking the performer not to sacrifice his subjectivity, but to retain it and simply stand in for someone else.  The performer will make no attempt to impersonate, to portray a character with any fullness or psychological depth.  He just goes through the motions. 

In Nayatt School the performers work from an instrumental rather than a psychological basis.  They never become the characters they play, remaining simply the medium used to produce them.  Like Willem Dafoe animating the red tent, the performer and his activity remain clearly separated, and the former can disappear into the latter only because the two are qualitatively, unmistakably different.  The red tent only becomes the chicken heart because it is so obviously not a chicken heart.  The performance retains its identity as work, as a product of human labor, by clearly separating performer and character as two stages in a process of production.  Both performer and character thereby resist reduction to a psychological essence, remaining simply figures among a series of surrogates, dancers in the choreography of displacement.

As a result of the gulf between actor and role, the possibility of meaning is always being disseminated across a wild proliferation, across a series of doubles.  This play of substitutes ensures that none of the objects (as well as none of the performers) can be used as conventional symbols.  Instead, they seem to mock any attempt to read them symbolically.  The red tent, for example, may appear to be a symbol for woman from the accumulated weight of the earlier pieces.  It is kept at a distance from the main performing areas in Sakonnet and most of Rumstick, and is used as a haven for women in both pieces, a place of music and rest.  Although it is, in shape and coloration, suggestive of breast or womb, it never becomes a symbol for woman (or the Woman).  To become one, it would have to lose its original identity, its literality, and become filled with a second, invasive identity.  Rather than surrender its specificity, this non-symbol offers in Nayatt School a parody of the process whereby it would become a symbol for the Woman: it chews her up.  It thereby suggests that this process, like the character-making process, necessitates a destruction of identity, that it can only produce a secondary meaning by evacuating the old.  Nayatt School refuses to empty object or performer.  Instead, it exposes the "femininity" of all symbols, the fact that, in order to mean, they will have had to be emptied, violated, transgressed.