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St. Ronnie the Oblivious: Richard Foreman’s Symphony of Rats
The Wooster Group brings back a Reagan-era yawp of discontinuity.
Richard Foreman’s Symphony of Rats and I were born under the same president, a man with an easy drawl and a shiny grin, a background in performance and slate of policies fueling the machine that’s still—like some kind of fascist tugboat—pulling the country’s political center ever-rightward. When I say that those were some of the thoughts rattling through my head while watching the Wooster Group’s new production of Foreman’s surreal meditation on power, imagination, and other human absurdities, I don’t mean to imply that the show is a dour intellectual slog. His body certainly seems to be breaking down — as his assistants (Niall Cunningham and Andrew Maillet) roll him around; or as he’s subjected to various strange scans and tests; or as he nonchalantly unbuttons the back of his trousers to present the scuttling supernumeraries around him with stool samples, a creepily familiar picture forms.
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