Tennessee Williams, Wired

This production, however, reintroduces humor, but in the form of parody — not so much a parody of the characters but of Williams' entire sensibility. It's not a vicious parody — it comes from droll readings of poetical ruminations by characters in dressing gowns, such as the ludicrously bewigged Nightingale (Scott Shepard), sashaying across the platforms led by a huge, erect rubber penis, which serves as a kind of divining rod leading him to the crotch of the newcomer Writer (Ari Fliakos). When his member wilts, we know Nightingale's days are running similarly short. We also know this from the escalating spew of blood he coughs up into a white silk hanky that flutters in the tuberculean breeze, while the Writer taps out his observations via a 21st-century keyboard (his notes sometimes appear on an upstage screen). With dexterity and intelligence, Kate Valk doubles as the cruel landlady, Mrs. Wire, and as a doomed tenant, Jane Sparks, lusting for her sexually ambivalent beau, Tye (Shepard again). And so on.

LeCompte provides richly textured curtains of aural and visual images accompanying the text, thanks in large part to the sound collage designed by Matt Schloss and Omar Zubair, and by Jennifer Tipton's lighting scheme. Some of the images are tiny but crucial. On a small downstage monitor, for example, a flame flickers. Later the image on that screen becomes water. This symbolically mirrors Mrs. Wire's attempt to squelch the debauchery in her flophouse by sending scalding water through her floorboards onto the rooms below. It's hard, just from the drama of that event, to pluck images of fire and water as elemental forces of life and death, yet it's there for the taking in Andrew Schneider's video design.

PHOTO BY NANCY CAMPBELL

The Writer (Fliakos) embraces the doomed (Valk)

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More About

• Lee Breuer
• Elizabeth LeCompte
• Vieux Carre
• Theatrical Plays
• Theater

There's a balance of sorts between the glib and the faithful, with the former prevailing. These guys just can't quite contain their mockery, despite some heroic efforts to keep it in check. Which raises the paradox of doing a play about passion and despair while making fun of both. This is a very different paradox from that of doing a play through a radical interpretation of it. The Woosters are capable of using technological wizardry to soulful effect, as they did in Hamlet, also a play about mortality but with characters from ancient films of the play disappearing into static, like the rest of us. Here, that effect goes awry, in a deficit that has nothing to do with the decision to reconceive the text, but something to do with the tones within that concept. Traditional productions often suffer from the same.

For all the interpretive goofing with the play by the company, when I went back to read it, it was a story made familiar by the Wooster Group. Its production is as good a way as any to become acquainted with it. Probably better.

THE WOOSTER GROUP'S VIEUX CARRÉ | By TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, staged by ELIZABETH LECOMPTE and THE WOOSTER GROUP | REDCAT, 631 W. Second St., dwntwn.; Wed.-Sat., 8:30 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; thru Dec. 12. (213) 237-2800.