Olivia Jane Smith

Kate Valk in ‘Brace Up!’ (photo by Mary Gearhart)

Though it pains me to admit it, there are times when the thrills of the Wooster Group have eluded me. When I think back now on productions like “The Hairy Ape,” the more recent “Hamlet,” and several other pieces, I would like to think there were moments that captivated and astonished me (I’m sure there were). I just can’t remember them amid the noisy barrage of theater-as-expected being ripped apart.

So their current production at St. Ann’s Warehouse, of what are referred to as Eugene O’Neill’s Glencairn, or “sea” plays, is startling in its quietness. Directed by Richard Maxwell in a collaboration with his New York City Players, “Early Plays,” as the show is billed, is a study in blunt impact, all the more brutal for being unsparingly direct. The effect is of throwing back a shot of whiskey and being punched in the jaw. The next morning, you won’t need aspirin or a slab of raw meat to take down the swelling, but you will still feel the pain of these characters’ harsh, hopeless lives.

I saw Brian Mendes in a production this past fall of Adam Rapp’s “Animals & Plants,” (part of The Amoralists’ “Hotel/Motel” double bill) and was stuck by his ability to seem simultaneously present and of another world. Here uses this same quality to great effect as Yank, a seaman not long for this life. His deathbed yearnings for the solace of connection, when he shares with his best friend his dream of their cultivating a farm together, are nothing short of heartbreaking. Maxwell creates the compressed feeling of a ship’s barracks by staging the scene back in the far corner of the stage, hemmed in by darkness, so that mostly what we see is Mendes’ face illuminated as if by a lantern. It’s like we were watching the whole scene through a window, immediate and far away at the same time. The main stage area is covered with glowering fog, and figures on the deck of the ship move through it as if already ascending heavenward, or descending into hell.

A few days after my voyage into O’Neill’s bitter seas I had another encounter with the Wooster Group, thanks to Anthology Film Archives’ film and video series of a impressive selection of their work. On a drizzly Saturday evening I attended a screening of “Brace Up!”, the troupe’s 2003 take on Chekhov’s “Three Sisters.” The video quality, when stretched to fill a big screen, was grainy, and the back wall of the stage—along which performers seem to be preparing for some variety of Japanese theater performance—was a wash. But the video had at least one distinct advantage, I would think, over watching the piece live: actors’ faces, shown via live video on small TV monitors during the actual performance, were pulled out and rendered larger in the film, giving us a better look at cinematic, extreme close-ups of their wonderfully alive, expressive faces as they intone Chekhov’s words. These little portraits—particularly of Sheena See as Olga and Anna Kohler as interloping in-law Natalya—are at once sincere and a little soapy, teasing the strands of melodrama out of Chekhov’s story of being stuck in the sticks.

“Brace Up!” had a number of charmingly offhand dance sequences not unlike the kind we expect from “Elevator Repair Service” (who was inspired by whom, I wonder, since this was the first time I’d seen the Wooster Group bust a move in this fashion). Overall the piece was more overtly playful and buoyant than I’ve come to expect from The Wooster Group, as if Olga, Masha, and Irina were—as the title “Brace Up!” implies—determined to keep on dancing, whether there is anyone around who truly appreciates it or not. Kate Valk is credited with the choreography, which only makes me like her even more. In both “Brace Up!” and “Early Plays,” her presence is arresting, every line she speaks quietly commanding our attention as if it had come from some deep place most of us can’t get to. Whether she’s spitting out a retort as a denizen of a baleful Irish pub or pining in an armchair as the unlucky-in-love Masha, she’s a case study for the acting adage that a character should have a secret. We don’t need to know what it is; watching Valk is an answer in itself.