House/Lights
With its mastery of multidisciplinary collage and montage, the Wooster Group transfuses Gertrude Stein’s opera libretto, Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights, with a ’60s soft-core film, Olga’s House of Shame, by Joseph Mawra.
The combination is atomic, or cubist as Gertrude Stein would say, featuring cartoon characters from a B movie adapted for the stage, a stage consisting of a battery of video screens. In the middle of this virtual bordello, Marguerite-Ida-Faust-Hélène, a’30s pin-up who appears to have been created by computer, is assaulted by an equally incredible Olga-Mephisto. Eight performers, completely at ease with the language of cinema, distortion techniques and diffractions of image and voice, are completely frenetic in pantomimes choreographed by Trisha Brown as they put this infernal machine into motion. The mingling of flesh and technology pushes the logic of both pornography and the media to the limit.
BASED ON DOCTOR FAUSTUS LIGHTS THE LIGHTS BY GERTRUDE STEIN (1939) AND OLGA’S HOUSE OF SHAME BY JOSEPH MAWRA (1964)
DIRECTED BY ELIZABETH LECOMPTE CREATED BY THE WOOSTER GROUP
