‘Poor theater’ rich in allusion

Much innovative theater these days is certainly “poor,” but not gladly so. Given the glorification of wealth in our popular culture, to say nothing of the inflated prices of the art market, poverty is hardly in. But then long ago that happy-go-lucky gang in “La Boheme,” so often portrayed by overstuffed opera singers for well-heeled patrons, gave a bad name to the romantic concept of creativity in garrets.

Even in the 1960s, when it was more fashionable for an artist to be down and out, Peter Brook wrote that the innovative Polish theater artist Jerzy Grotowski had produced “perhaps the only avant-garde theatre whose poverty is not a drawback.”

We don’t hear much about Grotowski’s “poor theater” anymore, but his idea of stripping acting down to its elementary particles, and his theater -- which came out of Stanislavski’s Method acting, Niels Bohr’s quantum mechanics laboratory and yogic ego release -- have long bubbled under the minimalist stagings of the likes of Robert Wilson and Wooster Group founders Elizabeth LeCompte and the late Spalding Gray. So a certain moody nostalgia, exacerbated by Gray’s sad suicide last winter, might well have cast a gloomy pall over LeCompte’s latest -- and she says last -- theatrical exercise for the New York-based Wooster Group.

“Poor Theater: A Series of Simulacra,” which had its West Coast premiere Wednesday night at REDCAT in Walt Disney Concert Hall, is a touching tribute to Grotowski and also, weirdly, to William Forsythe, the American choreographer who headed the Frankfurt Ballet in Germany until a no-longer-flush municipal government forced its dissolution this year.

But gloomy this show is not.

For some 30 years, the Wooster Group has been in the deconstruction trade, which often takes the form of hurling classic theater -- anything from Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” to Racine’s “Phedre” -- against modern culture, as well as juxtaposing introspection and manic wackiness. That is how LeCompte honors Grotowski, proving that humorous irreverence can actually be an even higher form of reverence.

The stage, designed by Ruud van den Akker, is a simulacrum of Grotowski’s theater laboratory in Poland -- bare but high tech, what with three large flat-screen monitors. First we see LeCompte’s actors watching a video of Grotowski at work. But there doesn’t seem much likelihood that the members of this inattentive, peacocky cast (Ari Fliakos, Sheena See, Scott Shepherd, Kate Valk) will transcend ego and actorly technique to find their dangerous inner essences.

The brilliance of “Poor Theater” is that they don’t. They screw around. They go through Grotowski motions grotesquely. Fliakos, a talented mimic, serves as a hilariously clumsy Polish translator for a video of Grotowski’s super-serious theatrical experiment “Akropolis.” He describes the world as a tribe of cemeteries, a face as having been eaten by suffering. Yet when the cast acts along, in exaggerated Polish and with exaggerated gestures, to a video of the final 20 minutes of “Akropolis,” those strange images haunt.

In the second half, devoted to Forsythe, Shepherd does a terrific imitation of the choreographer’s broken-phrase style of speech. Valk and Fliakos throw themselves around, Forsythe style. An improvisation is mounted, inspired by cowboy movies. It’s all pretty silly. But it’s not. Forsythe’s fragmented observations are often deceptively deep. Just as modern physics finds it impossible to separate the vortex from the water, he says you can’t separate the dance from the dancer.

He also dismisses choreography as a channel for the desire to dance. But LeCompte finds in Grotowski a channel for new theater. Nothing like Grotowski’s poor theater, hers is rich in unexpected allusions and illusions. Yet while appearing to have more fun at it, she, like Grotowski, breaks things down and rebuilds them -- making discoveries that relate to our time.

Theater would indeed be poor if this was the end of the line for LeCompte. But of course it isn’t. The key to her work is that she starts with one idea and winds up with another. She says that every new piece will be her last, and never means it.

*

The Wooster Group

Where: REDCAT, Walt Disney Concert Hall, West 2nd and South Hope streets, L.A.

When: 8:30 tonight and Saturday; 3 p.m. Sunday

Price: $30 to $44

Contact: (213) 237-2800

Running time: 90 minutes