Fran & Kate’s Drama Club featuring Wooster Group Director Elizabeth LeCompte

On the occasion of The Wooster Group production of ‘Symphony of Rats’ at REDCAT, join actor Frances McDormand and theater artist Kate Valk as they reprise their ‘Drama Club,’  a free-flowing conversation, based on their shared experiences in the theater, augmented with video highlights. Loosely based on the idea of a book club, this discussion at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles will feature The Wooster Group Director Elizabeth LeCompte focusing on theater, film and life alongside materials pulled from The Wooster Group’s video archive. 

Tickets 
Tickets are $15 each. All proceeds will be donated to The Wooster Group. Tickets will be released on a first come, first served basis. All sales are final. Click here to register.

About Elizabeth LeCompte 
Elizabeth LeCompte is a theater artist and the director of The Wooster Group, one of America’s foremost experimental theater companies. With the Group, LeCompte has created over 50 innovative theater, film and media pieces, which challenge convention with their structural, technological and visual experimentation. LeCompte studied fine arts and art history at Skidmore College in the 1960s before teaming up with actor Spalding Gray, and in 1970, joining Richard Schechner’s Performance Group based at The Performing Garage in the Soho neighborhood of New York City. In the mid-1970s, LeCompte and Gray began making their own work based on Gray’s autobiographical impulses, creating three seminal pieces ‘Sakonnet Point’, ‘Rumstick Road’ and ‘Nayatt School’. In 1980, they formally founded The Wooster Group, along with Ron Vawter, Kate Valk, Jim Clayburgh, Willem Dafoe and Peyton Smith. The group has evolved and changed over the nearly five decades of the Group’s work, with the one constant: LeCompte’s direction. The Performing Garage remains the Group’s home base. 

LeCompte has received the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize and an inaugural Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. She is a MacArthur Fellow and has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, USArtists and the National Endowment for the Arts. LeCompte was named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and, in 2023, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

About Frances McDormand 
Frances McDormand received an MFA from the Yale School of Drama. On stage, she received the Tony Award and Drama Desk for her performance in David Lindsay-Abaire's ‘Good People’. Other theater credits include Stella in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’; ‘The Country Girl’; Caryl Churchill’s ‘Far Away’; ‘The Sisters Rosenzweig’; ‘Awake and Sing’; and again, in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ as Blanche. With The Wooster Group, she performed in NYC and internationally: ‘To You, The Birdie!’, ‘North Atlantic’ and ‘Early Shaker Spirituals.’ 
 
With her company Hear/Say Productions, McDormand produced ‘Olive Kitteridge’ (nominated for 13 Emmys, receiving eight awards including Outstanding Limited Series and Lead Actress in a Limited Series), ‘Nomadland’ (receiving the Academy Award for Best Picture), ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’ and ‘Women Talking.’ 
 
McDormand was seen as Lady Macbeth opposite Denzel Washington in the film, ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth,’ directed by Joel Coen. Additional film credits include Academy Award winning performances in Chloé Zhao’s ‘Nomadland,’ Martin McDonagh’s ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’ and Joel and Ethan Coen’s ‘Fargo,’ with three additional nominations for ‘Mississippi Burning,’ ‘Almost Famous’ and ‘North Country.’ McDormand has appeared in five additional Coen Brother’s films: ‘Hail, Caesar!’, ‘Burn After Reading,’ ‘The Man Who Wasn’t There,’ ‘Raising Arizona’ and ‘Blood Simple’. 

About Kate Valk 
Kate Valk joined The Wooster Group in 1979. She began as an assistant to Elizabeth LeCompte, working on scripts and costumes. She started performing in 1980 and appeared in all Group works through the early 2020s. Most recently, she was named Best Actor by New York Magazine for her role in ‘The Mother’ (2020). Valk has also directed three Group works—all record album interpretations: ‘Early Shaker Spirituals’; ‘The B-Side: Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons’; and ‘Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me’—and co-directed ‘Symphony of Rats’ with LeCompte. Valk founded the Group’s Summer Institute for public high school students, now in its 28th year. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others, and was a mentor with the Rolex Arts Initiative.
 
About The Wooster Group  
The Wooster Group is a company of artists based in New York City that makes work for theater, dance and media. We develop and perform our work at The Performing Garage in Manhattan at 33 Wooster Street. We also bring our work to other venues in New York as well as other theaters around the world on national and international tours. 
 
The company has sustained a full-time, ongoing ensemble since the mid-70s. We are constantly morphing. With our many artistic associates, we have created and performed over 50 works directed by Elizabeth LeCompte. 
 
Our commitment to working as an ensemble and self-producing outside the commercial system has allowed us to create work in-depth over long periods of time. This way of working defines our artistic practice and evolving aesthetic. 

About ‘Symphony of Rats’ 
A president of the United States is receiving messages by mysterious means, and he doesn’t know whether to trust them. In this new production by The Wooster Group, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk, Richard Foreman’s 1988 play is reimagined with a multilayered sound and video score that draws from wide-ranging literary and cinematic sources, including William Blake, D. H.  Lawrence and Charlie Chaplin. Set in a spaceship-museum gallery, this surreal production follows the president as he plunges into a series of encounters with otherworldly beings, among them a giant rat with a special message. Moving between the apocalyptic and the mundane, The Wooster Group considers how technology questions what it means to be human. 

_{Please be advised that photographs may be taken at this event for use on the Hauser & Wirth website, social media and in other marketing materials.}