Ryan M. Davis

The Wooster Group’s North Atlantic, presented at The Baryshnikov Arts Center, March 2010.

The Wooster Group pulls out the old warhorse again. Elizabeth LeCompte and company look to their naval classic North Atlantic to inaugurate a three-year residency at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Oft revisited, this marks the satire’s third major New York reincarnation since 1983. But, after nearly three decades since its maiden voyage, does the troupe’s maritime excursion have any steam left?

First conceived during the puffed-up Reagan years, North Atlantic was crafted amidst the paranoia excited by the spectacle of Cold War politics and its consequent expansion of America’s bellicose bluster. A remount of this darkly comic vision of the military-industrial “complex” might have had an acute topical sting a few years ago, at the peak of the Bush administration’s manufactured “War on Terror.” The play’s battleship setting could have been the aircraft carrier where Bush touched down for a Mission Never-To-Be-Accomplished. And now, all the post-9/11 rhetoric—harping us into a perpetual state of “Red Alert”—has mushroomed into something more pervasive and reflexive. The incessant stream of news media, hourly signaling interchangeable terrorist threats or other data on geopolitical discord and inspiring mindless dread, can be read against the North Atlantic’s world of “armed observation.”

One of the Group’s more narrative-driven shows (that is, if you can keep pace with playwright James Strah’s machine gun fire dialogue), North Atlantic is about a U.S. reconnaissance flotilla twelve miles off the Dutch coast, staffed with dim-witted military personnel on the make. Their mission: to intercept transmissions and gather “intelligence.” An outfit of data-entry gals, led by Ensign Ann Pusey (Kate Valk) and Master Sergeant Mary Bryzynsky (Frances McDormand), stations itself at the Group’s requisite elongated table, where they pore over the world’s most top-secret communiqués, unspooling, tearing, and re-threading yards of audiotape. Nobody seems to know what they’re listening to, nor do the smug officers in charge of this operation give a hoot. After all, as Captain Roscoe Chizzum (the devilish Ari Fliakos) says, “you have to face the fact that all these code things are created after the fact of the production of the material to be encoded. Or put out. That’s the meat of it.” What’s essential is that there’s code everywhere, waiting to be collected, and, as far as anyone’s concerned, the actual content of all this information to be deciphered is beside the point.

Like the incompetent code-breakers, the Wooster Group’s purpose has long been to contend with a world that’s all code and no core. With a steely, tech-laden approach the Group’s experimental works have set the standard for staging the ironically disconnected experience of life in an over-connected information age from its incipience. This postmodern attitudinal hallmark is what theorist Jean Baudrillard calls a “radical disenchantment, the cool cybernetic phase following the hot fantasy.”[1] Recently the company has presented a live reenactment of Richard Burton’s filmed 1964 performance of Hamlet, as well as a scramble of Francesco Cavelli’s baroque opera with an Italian sci-fi horror flick titled Planet of the Vampires, featuring a company favorite technique of displacing performers’ limbs with film images. The company figurehead, LeCompte is avowedly fascinated by the way we receive information indirectly through the endless stream of self-referential media inspires us to “look, not watch”:

The cable channels, with these things that ramble on and on and seem to have no point, where I have to discover somehow the drama that’s deeply hidden there…I have a remote, and I just switch through them, pick what I want, and I make my own stories up...And it’s like I didn’t think of media as a different thing from the theater. [2]

Consequently, in their staging the Wooster Group is rarely as occupied with a message as its means and manner of conveyance—or rather manner becomes the message.

Repurposing the adage “It’s not what you say, but how you say it,” the Wooster Group’s stellar performers barrel through the hyper-verbose chatter with kamikaze celerity and nimble tongues. Roscoe fires off,  “What I want’s a real fightin’ force, no namby-pampy ad-min flag staffers, fat ass fly boys jackin’ off over Virginia. I wanna crack rifle-man, a hawk-eye sucker take the whole thing, the whole shootin’ match no matter where it takes place, any kin’a terrain, mud, water, fire-storm, twenty-thou, outta space. You name it!” Strah’s text sounds like series of redundant Morse code clicks. Against such a wall of blitzkrieg double-talk it seems inconceivable that anyone in the audience, or onstage for that matter, might make heads or tails of its meaning, much less discern the significance of the crew’s intercepted ciphers (the audience is never privy to them anyway). The two jarhead flunkies at ship’s helm—a pipsqueak named Doberman and a slack-jawed yokel named Houlihan (Zachary Oberzan, moonlighting from his usual gig with Nature Theater of Oklahoma)—are certainly content to remain in the dark. We too are expected to Roscoe and the rest occasionally admit with a wink throughout, “Naw, I’m not saying nothing,” they sure say a lot of it.

Nobody really gets debriefed, but in large swaths of this fragmented speech rings the squarely American patois heard in scores of naval battle movies. Taking this intentional superficiality to its extreme, the Wooster Group uses the script as an excuse for performances that throw up an impenetrable veneer of caricature. Everybody strikes poses, especially Fliakos, who struts and mugs like John Wayne while rattling off Strah’s canned lingo of clipped sentences. McDormand, every bit the commanding officer with her sinewy stage presence, plays matron to a ladies’ auxiliary with a grimace reminiscent of Patricia Neal’s in the Pearl Harbor soap-opera In Harm’s Way. Meanwhile, cutey-pie Maura Tierney and her compatriots behind the table resemble pin-up girl switchboard operators and tease the boys with a measured chorus of feminine purrs. The men sound like recruitment officers, and the women like Pollyannas-cum-soulless sex kittens. Throw in some wistful country-western crooning and a few faux-patriotic ditties with stilted choreography to temper the martial swagger, and you’ve got the Group’s customary recombinant aesthetic. Everything on display is culled from America’s collective memory banks. Cultural echoes from cinema and television ricochet off each other and compound into a fantasia of recycled American attitudes. Its ironic texture is woven from celluloid reductions of America’s signal naval campaigns, in which "Git Along Little Doggies" and The Sands of Iwo Jima are fused into a perverted South Pacific.

This accruing mash of mediating clichés is just one strategy for staging the disconnected postmodern experience. The audio interference provided by a kitchy tech set-up of microphones and of rotary-dial telephones further detaches speech from sense, and the background racket of roaring aircraft lift-off doesn’t help the feeling of disorientation that follows from the discrepancy between words from meaning, code and message, and image and reality.  Indeed, Baudrillard, who is as concerned with a “reality confused with its own image,” diagnoses a sensation of “schizophrenic vertigo.”[3] Without a sure sense of what truth, if any, underlies a world of semblances, reality loses its ballast. As a conceptual cognate, Jim Clayburgh’s scenic design—with its absurdly raked platform serving as North Atlantic’s hub of operations, deck, and eventually capsized hull—upsets all centers of gravity and has actors wobbling and rappelling into position throughout the show. Clayburgh leaves this fearless crew not knowing which end is up.

In this light, North Atlantic is a prescient assessment of the increasingly amorphous war machine’s infiltration into everyday consciousness, being rendered as series of artificial sounds and images by the whole range of media. It’s Baudrillard again, whose thought has such an affinity with the Wooster Group’s and who theorizes this changing nature of war, from specific conflicts to a more diffuse, ubiquitous, and self-sustaining spectacle. According to his understanding, events after 9/11 continue and expand the Cold War’s imaginative grip. The nebulous War on Terror represents less a “clash of civilizations,” than a “triumphant globalization at war with itself,” bent on homogenizing everything within reach.[4] Anticipating such a worldview, the military intelligence of North Atlantic has no particular target for its eavesdropping assignment; Dutch mothers, French school girls, German priests (or North Korea, Iran, and al Qaeda)—any of these could jeopardize the new world order, and all must be kept in check. The imminent threat of faceless enemies, constantly indicated by the incoming stream of coded broadcasts, inspires an unremitting stance of alertness from the ship’s crew.

This situation whips up incredible tension, in more ways than one. Instead of bothering with the intellectual heavy-lifting of decoding the intercepted messages, the staff is distracted—or shall we say, in heat. They’re busy getting worked up over the upcoming Miss G.I. Dream Girl Wet Uniform Contest. The increasingly bawdy “skirts” are jockeying to win the lewd floorshow, while the truculent Roscoe is feeling the stiff competition of his Johnny-come-lately rival—a corn-fed hotshot named Colonel Ned Lud (Scott Shepard). Even the brass, General Benders (Paul Lazar), is looking to score. At the same time, suspicion of “potentially collaborational” activity is brewing. Lud snoops around for floppy disks, while Roscoe’s sense of inadequacy swells. And, in an accusatory fit, Benders, Roscoe, and the rest of the crew enact an extended interrogation scene, in which they ultimately “waterboard” Lud, wringing a wet rag down his nostrils as he’s suspended upside-down and grilled. This boat’s a hotbed of sexual frustration and paranoia. “Loose lips sink ships,” after all.

But, while all this paranoia is frothing, the “real” action is some five hundred miles away, and apparently this outfit is just a decoy—its only purpose is to present a spectacle of surveillance. In this revelation, North Atlantic offers an uncanny prognosis for what the technocratic war games of the Cold War era would set the stage for in thirty years: the simulacra of war would become so impossible to pin down that even the crew’s assignment of “armed observation” itself would be a vacant performance. Indeed, the reflections of war—as distorted through endless Hollywood representations—in North Atlantic present less a moral or political quandary than a mode of reproduction for the Wooster Group to critique. As one character insists, “These days it’s all mechanical. What’s good got to do with it?”

The only antidote to the vacuity and passionless officialdom that maintains the amalgamated performances of North Atlantic’s military culture is sex. Or is it? It’s commonplace to imagine the libido as a volatile combatant against repressive systems of power, and recreational sex against moralistic limits and productive directives. All that tension, pent-up from the doldrums of mechanized efficiency for its own sake, is surely begging for release. General Benders promotes the wet uniform contest as a prime outlet, saying, “It’s important for the boys to see you girls soaked to the skin every once in a while.” “Message” becomes “massage,” and “tactical” becomes “tactile,” right? Given its barrage of dirty jokes, and all the winkings at hanky-panky between a pack of horndog functionaries and a coterie of blueballing word processors, North Atlantic would appear to be a case of biological juices boiling over and trumping the stale procedures of a dispiriting bureaucracy. Nothing like a good ole conjugal morale booster. But, this is the Wooster Group, and their work is about performance itself, even when it comes to fornication.

In a major letdown for the hot and bothered boys and girls on the not-so frontlines, there’s no wet uniform contest at Officer’s Club social after all. Instead, there’s only a frigid contra dance and dosado, in which the men are buttoned up and the women are bedecked in unflattering get-ups—thick bolts of prom dress and combat boots. Dance partners trot with pelvises thrust backward to maintain an unsalacious remoteness of private parts. All the lurid verbal ejaculations amount to impotent performances, more likely for the sake of stature in the eyes of confederates than out of genuine lust. At the heart of America’s sexual verve is a timid conservatism. The adolescent puns pack no heat, and there’s an emptiness to all sexual energies on display—overblown quotations of soft femininity and masculine virility that are equally false and ultimately swallowed up in a larger sea of simulacra.

But, beyond its apparent politics—martial or sexual—North Atlantic remains resonant with each reiteration because it delivers a ribald, all-out assault on America’s cock-of-the-walk culture, zeroing in on its propensity toward apish militarism and sexual bravado as hollowed out performances of power. For the Wooster Group this America is just another set of codes with nothing underneath.

[1] Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. pp. 147-8.

[2] LeCompte, Elizabeth, interview on The South Bank Show. February 22, 1987. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iW0q4XJp-w)

[3] Baudrillard, 152.

[4] Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism, 2001. (http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/the-spirit-of-terrorism/)