The Wooster Group brings Vieux Carre to Los Angeles

Following sold-out performances at the Edinburgh International Festival, the Festival d'Automne in Paris, and the Strasbourg National Theatre, The Wooster Group's Version of Tennessee Williams' Vieux Carre comes to REDCAT in Los Angeles for its U.S. premiere. Vieux Carre is the latest in The Wooster Group's line of radical restagings of great 20th-century American playwrights. Performances will run at REDCAT beginning on Wednesday, December 1, 2010 through Sunday, December 12, 2010.

Like Williams' first big success The Glass Menagerie, Vieux Carre is a "memory play," set in the boarding house in New Orleans where Williams himself stayed as a young man during the Depression. The young writer, as narrator, remembers his artistic and sexual awakening there. Inhabitants of the house swirl up out of the writer's mind as archetypal Williams characters, longing for release and haunted by thwarted dreams.

"This house was occupied once. In my mind it still is, but by shadowy occupants like ghosts." from Vieux Carre

In The Wooster Group's Version of Tennessee Williams' Vieux Carre, the Group experiments with new modes of expression for Williams' lyric voice, borrowing stylistically from frenetic Gen Y video art and 1970s improvisational films produced out of Andy Warhol's Factory.

The Daily Telegraph (UK) writes, "...weird and wild though it is, this striking production seems truer to the wild spirit of Tennessee Williams than many more conventional productions of his work... I have a hunch that Williams himself would have loved this production." The Independent adds, "The Woosters are seriously world class, wackily idiosyncratic yet sensitive. Multimedia pioneers for decades, they're still up there with the best..."

The company includes performers Ari Fliakos, Daniel Pettrow, Kaneza Schaal, Scott Shepherd and Kate Valk and Jennifer Tipton (lighting), Matt Schloss and Omar Zubair (sound), Andrew Schneider (video), Bozkurt Karasu (production), Teresa Hartmann (stage manager), Aron Deyo (technical director), Kent Barrett (master electrician), and Daniel Jackson (technical assistant), Cynthia Hedstrom (producer) and Edward McKeaney (general manager).

The Wooster Group's Version of Tennessee Williams' Vieux Carre makes its U.S. premiere at REDCAT on Wednesday, December 1, 2010 and runs through Sunday, December 12, 2010. Curtain for performances on Tuesday-Saturday is 8:30 pm with Sunday performances at 7:00 pm. Tickets are $55 ($45 for students with current I.D.) and are available at www.redcat.org or by calling 213 237-2800. REDCAT is located at the corner of W. 2nd and Hope Streets, inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex (631 West 2nd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012).