At 50, the Wooster Group Is Experimenting on Itself | USAEMALL.com

Gray — who would go on to become a celebrated film actor and monologuist before taking his own life in 2004 — is the most elaborately represented member of the original “Nayatt” cast. (Ari Fliakos reincarnates Vawter, who died of complications from AIDS in 1994.) Gray’s words and gestures are replicated, as much as the distortions of old tapes allow, by two stand-ins: that fine actor and Wooster member Scott Shepherd, who plays Gray playing a psychiatrist in “The Cocktail Party,” and Valk, who becomes Gray as he riffs about his personal connection to the Eliot work.

This is achieved by the use of headsets, which allow the actors to sync their speech with that of whom they’re listening to. “I’ve learned so much from Spalding,” said Valk, who marvels at his timing. “I did when he was alive, too.” It feels right that Valk discovered that the “Nayatt” tape seems to overlay a slightly older recording of “Rumstick Road,” an earlier Wooster work centered on the suicide of Gray’s mother.

At moments, she can detect beneath Gray’s perorations the faint, high-pitched sound of the actor Libby Howes screaming, while being tickled in a diabolical doctor sketch. Howes, who once spent her nights in the Garage while homeless people occupied her apartment, figures memorably in the monologue with which Valk introduces “Nayatt School Redux.” When Howes left the original “Nayatt” (that was after Valk had taken her to Bellevue Hospital), it was Valk who replaced her.

“Classic theater story,” Valk says in the current production, with the glimmer of a deadpan smile.

AS A CRITIC for The New York Times, I had written about the Wooster Group for a quarter-century. But I had never met either Valk or LeCompte before I joined them one misty Monday morning in LeCompte’s loft, a script’s throw from the Garage. Artworks by Alex Katz and Joan Jonas (who appeared in the original “Nayatt” and is channeled by Maura Tierney) are on the walls of the sleeping area; so is the floor from the Wooster’s “Emperor Jones,” marked with Valk’s boot prints and stage blood. (LeCompte has lived in that building — first with her former partners, Gray and then Dafoe — since the 1970s.)

Of course, I recognized Valk, one of my favorite actresses, whose heavy-lidded eyes and bowed mouth bring to mind tough but winsome Hollywood stars of the 1930s, like Sylvia Sidney; seeing her on the street had always been for me like spotting Garbo. But I realized that for years I had been mistaking another member of the troupe for LeCompte.