Elizabeth LeCompte

Who are your favorite New Yorkers?
Elizabeth LeCompte: Oh, God, you’re killing me. What do you need for this? It’s so big.

Just some people from your world, as an artist.
Elizabeth LeCompte: All right. Well, first of all, obviously, some of them are dead. Ron Vawter is huge.

Yeah. I saw him in your remount of Frank Dell’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Blew me away.
Elizabeth LeCompte: All I know is he was a wonderful person and a great performer. Obviously, Kate [Valk], who is sitting here right beside me. I don’t know…my nanny, Dennis Dermody, who used to write film reviews for Paper. He was my son Jack’s nanny and does dramaturgical work in film for us. He’s a fantastic New Yorker. I can’t imagine him living anywhere but New York. Joe Papp! When I was young and came to the city, he was the only one doing scary stuff in theater. See, when you get some as old as me, a lot of them are dead. But they’re still here. I’m standing in front of the Dead Wall, here at the Performing Garage. We have a wall with pictures of all the people we’ve known and loved who died. Right here, I’m staring at them. Ethyl Eichelberger, Charles Ludlam, the best New Yorkers. Richard Foreman is there, but he’s not dead. He’s shouldn’t be on this list. He just happens to be in the picture with Ludlam.

In the last 13 years, what is the biggest thing to happen to New York?
Elizabeth LeCompte: The artists who come to New York now come from universities. Twenty years ago, art wasn’t so specifically academic. It’s changed New York, the art scene. People who come into the city now are ambitious in a different way.

Kids who graduate and come to work with you and the Wooster Group—
Elizabeth LeCompte: —have already studied me! That’s new! You know, before, people like Ron just dropped by because he wanted some acid. It’s exciting, though—now people come to us who have years of training. What else has changed in New York? More traffic. What do you think, Cote?

Well, uh…uh…
Elizabeth LeCompte: [Mockingly] “Uh…uh…” I could say it’s gotten more corporate. Things shift around, that’s all.

Do you have a favorite place in New York?
Elizabeth LeCompte: The Performing Garage. Also Wooster Street. I like thinking about the Garage in a larger context. You know what I love about New York? This is really important. It’s a grid pattern. You can have a thousand stories in the grid pattern. If you live this long, you can walk a story. This happened on this block. Up in that window, you were there then. Someone committed suicide on that rooftop. As you go across the grid, you can make series of events form a story. But if you want to change the story, you change the block, or you stay with how the lights let you go. You can only cross when the lights are green. That creates a new story. The grid pattern holds it in some kind of formality. I love that.

Do you have a personal favorite moment in New York?
Elizabeth LeCompte: I remember the blackout of 1977. Spalding [Gray] and I were walking downtown from one of the old film theaters we’d go to in Times Square. And we were walking into Times Square when the lights went out. That was incredible, because the looting began there. One second it was all tourists and beautiful lights, and the next second it was the scariest place I’ve ever been.

What’s the future of New York?
Elizabeth LeCompte: I see us heading toward a kind of entropy. There’s so little money being put into infrastructure. I see it crumbling, basically. Especially touring as much as the company does. It’s like the ’70s. It was pretty bad then, too. When we travel and then when I come back to the city, I’m always amazed because it does feel like a South American city.

If you could have a drink with anyone else on our Top 40 list, who would it be?
Elizabeth LeCompte: I’d like to have a drink with Peter Gelb, the mayor, and Jonathan Lethem. And obviously, Tina Fey. I wouldn’t like a drink with Joe Torre. I like to watch him work. I like to watch how he wrangled the heifers, so to speak.

What does Time Out mean to you?
Elizabeth LeCompte: That we didn’t have to rely on one hideous reviewer from the Times, who made us stop inviting reviewers. If we got a good review in Time Out, it worked against the Times. It gave the downtown scene more seriousness. You can say I’m pandering. But seriously, it’s good to have another vibrant voice out there.

Complete this sentence: New York is…
Elizabeth LeCompte: A mutt.

I always wanted to ask this: People always say that you guys “deconstruct” texts or movies or cultural objects in your shows. Do you use those terms in rehearsal: “postmodern” or “deconstruct”?
Elizabeth LeCompte: [Laughs] No, of course not. But every art form has a different way of thinking. And writing is so different. I enjoy reading about us as deconstructionists. But it has nothing to do with the way we work.

Back in the ’90s, I ushered at one performance, and when I got there, they told me to go clean the bathrooms. I hear it’s pretty communal there. Is it true that everyone eventually cleans the toilet?
Elizabeth LeCompte: Oh, I wish. But the people who clean the toilets are the ones who care about them being clean. It’s the same as in a marriage. Some people do, some don’t. But there’s no one person who does it. It’s mostly me and Kate. Wouldn’t you say, Kate?

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