Presented by Baryshnikov Arts Center

Text by James Strahs
Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte

The Wooster Group’s NORTH ATLANTIC takes a satiric look at the role of the military and the growing influence of technology in American culture during the late Cold War period, after Vietnam and before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The work follows an international peacekeeping force on an aircraft carrier in the North Atlantic, tracing the cultural and sexual dynamics that rise to the fore as they carry out their top-secret mission. Written expressly for the company by James Strahs in 1982, North Atlantic joined a series of Wooster Group works rooted in American themes and told in the rhythms of the American vernacular—works based on texts by Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill and Gertrude Stein. NORTH ATLANTIC plays with nostalgia for the analog (pre-digital) 1980s through slang, song and dance. 

Featuring Steve Cuiffo, Ari Fliakos, Koosil-ja, Paul Lazar, Frances McDormand, Zachary Oberzan, Jenny Seastone Stern, Scott Shepherd, Maura Tierney, and Kate Valk.

So sit forward and let “illuminating patterns emerge…as the troupe keeps feeding its food processor of an entertainment machine with chunks of the American memory”
-The New York Times

THE WOOSTER GROUP is an ensemble of artists who, under the direction of Elizabeth LeCompte, make work for theater, dance and media.

For more than thirty years, The Wooster Group has cultivated new forms and techniques of theatrical expression reflective of and responsive to our evolving culture, while sustaining a consistent ensemble and maintaining a flexible repertory. Wooster Group theatre pieces are constructed as assemblages of juxtaposed elements: radical staging of both modern and classic texts, found materials, films and videos, dance and movement, multi-track scoring, and an architectonic approach to theatre design.

The Wooster Group has played a pivotal role in bringing technologically sophisticated and evocative uses of sound, film and video into the realm of contemporary theatre, and in the process has influenced a generation of theatre artists nationally and internationally. The Group’s work is unique because it attracts not only the theatre-going community but also artists and enthusiasts of many other cultural disciplines, such as dance, painting, music, video & film.