The Wooster Group's Rumstick Road Roars Back, Ephemeral But For All Time

Village Voice: When an aspirant student of literature sets about learning the canon, the masterworks will be waiting. Indeed, they're always there, resting on library shelves across America. Young film scholars needn't travel very far to enjoy the classics of their medium, either, now that almost any opus can be downloaded at high speed and in high definition. Only the theater denies its disciples this luxury. You can't simply buy, rent, pirate, or otherwise track down Jerzy Grotowski's Orpheus as it was performed in 1959, nor the Manhattan Project's Alice in Wonderland as it was mounted in 1970. The enthusiast is only afforded the compromise of ancillary evidence: scripts, production notes, a handful of firsthand accounts and reviews. Great performances are by nature impermanent. When it comes to the masterpieces of the theater, we have to take history's word for it.