Elizabeth LeCompte in Rehearsal: An Intern's Perspective

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Abstract

During a six month internship (from May to November 2009) with the experimental theatre company the Wooster Group, I had the opportunity to sit through rehearsals and document what I saw while the company developed their production of Tennessee Williams’s Vieux Carré. This experience offered me the unique position to compare what I had learned about Elizabeth LeCompte in the library (through such writers as David Savran and Andrew Quick) with what I saw in the flesh.

When LeCompte arrived on my first day, she started rehearsals with three pieces of inspiration: first, a film clip of an actor in Farewell My Concubine whose performance she mocked for poor precision; second, a Ben Brantley review criticizing JoAnne Akalaitis’s The Bacchae for lacking “teeth;” and third, a line from Alexander Star’s appreciation of recently deceased literary critic Richard Poirier, which says, “the most powerful works of literature offer ‘a fairly direct access to pleasure’ but become ‘on longer acquaintance, rather strange and imponderable.’” These pieces of inspiration mark what I discovered to be three distinct qualities of LeCompte’s personality in rehearsal: precision, teeth, and the imponderable. I offer here an inside perspective of LeCompte in rehearsal as she collaborates with her company, sifting through the challenges inherent in Williams’s play, to demonstrate how LeCompte works, not only as a director, but a artist subject to the pressures and restraints of a not-for-profit company in the heart of New York City.

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