Free and open to the public! Seating is on a space-available basis.

The Wooster Group’s Rumstick Road (Ken Kobland and Elizabeth LeCompte, USA, 2013, 77m)
A Video Reconstruction of the 1977 theater piece originally composed by Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte in collaboration with Libby Howes, Bruce Porter, and Ron Vawter.

The Wooster Group’s 1977 theater piece Rumstick Road has been recognized by critics and scholars as a landmark work that helped usher in a new era of experimental performance. Conceived by Spalding Gray as a response to the suicide of his mother, and directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, Rumstick Road combines Gray’s personal recorded conversations, family letters, the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, 35mm slides, music, and dance.

This 2013 video reconstruction of Rumstick Road keeps faith with the theater piece by registering, in a new composite, the texture of time and memory that shaped the original production. LeCompte and filmmaker Ken Kobland have worked with Wooster Group archivist Clay Hapaz to layer, juxtapose, and blend together numerous archival fragments—including U-Matic video, Super-8 film, reel-to-reel audio tapes, photographs, and slides—in order to reconstruct that lost performance.

“A brilliant and engrossing work; one whose abstraction and complexity are at the service of genuine emotion.” —Richard Eder, The New York Times