Ben
Brantley

April 7, 2015

There’s smoke rising from the tepee that occupies upstage-center at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. But as hard as you may look, you won’t find the fire — dramatic, emotional or intellectual — in “Cry, Trojans!,” the befuddled and befuddling work in which the mighty Wooster Group lays siege to Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida.” This being a production of an iconoclastic company that likes to occupy several dimensions at the same time, that smoke is only virtual, a rising wisp on a screen. Such is the classic stuff that the Wooster Group’s mind-bending dreams are made on. And there are plenty of the sort of witty, senses-melding touches here that have become Wooster signatures. Staged by Elizabeth LeCompte, one of the troupe’s founders and its artistic director, this Native American-themed production features artful layering of voices artificial and real, and eye-popping costumes that might have been culled from an epochs-spanning cultural compost heap. There is also exactingly choreographed movement, often synced to replicate scenes from movies on video monitors. But to what purpose? Since its founding in the mid-1970s, the Wooster Group has been performing acts of blessed profanation on sacred texts, including Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” Eugene O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones” and Racine’s “Phèdre.” As a rule, the company’s text-scrambling, anachronism-flaunting productions confuse only to clarify, and usually wind up commenting astutely not only on their source materials but also on our changing perspectives in interpreting them.