With all that’s happening in the Los Angeles theater scene, it can be hard to keep track of the many opportunities to see original work. On a recent trip I managed to see two excellent productions within a few days of one another, both in downtown L.A., and both produced and directed by women. One, THE B-SIDE: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons” A Record Album Interpretation presented by The Wooster Group at REDCAT offered me a chance to reconnect with a group whose work I’ve known for several decades and that had an outsized impact on my interest in theater. The other, FILL FILL FILL FILL FILL FILL FILL presented by We The Women in a workshop production at the Los Angeles Theater Center represented an entirely different, yet equally distinctive strand in the tapestry of live performance that’s emerging in downtown Los Angeles circa 2019.
In part inspired by The Wooster Group’s earlier record album interpretation of “Early Shaker Spirituals,” THE B-SIDE delivered an unforgettable, yet deliberately ambivalent charge of elemental vitality and documentary realness. The piece was created by performer Eric Berryman, who gave a matter of fact curtain speech describing the origins of this collaboration in a conversation he had with director Kate Valk while waiting on her table at a New York restaurant. I have no idea how the meal was, or how big the tip, but it was certainly a good night for Berrryman, who has now seen his dream of performing this unusual set of field recordings fulfilled, and for the Wooster Group, which has been operating continuously for more than four decades and continues to create entrancing and relevant performance.
Phillip Moore and Jasper McGruder joined Berryman onstage in a fascinating and at times oblique session defined by the two sides of an obscure vinyl record, “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons.” Comprised of work songs, prison ballads, and satirical “toasts,” this ethnographic recording from 1965 was compiled by folklorist Bruce Jackson. The performers listen to the record through wireless earpieces whenever Berryman cues it up on a turntable. Once the record begins to spin, all the audience hears is the voices of these three men as they sing or speak along with the otherwise unheard field recording.