Rommel Ruiz
A 2014 production of Waiting for Ulysses at the White Church Theatre Project.
South of Spring Green on Highway 23, a small clapboard church is nestled into the Wyoming Valley. After parking along the road, patrons make a small donation and find their chairs. The pews are gone, replaced by 60 seats and a wide proscenium stage. Blackout curtains cover the stained glass windows. This is the White Church Theatre, a.k.a. Theatre de l’Ange Fou (Theater of the Crazy Angel), and I am here to see a production of The Lesson, the classic “Theatre of the Absurd” play by the French-Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco. I find myself in a waking dream.
The Lesson is a three-person show, and in this case, the cast is made up of family members who work together with clockwork timing. Fiona King plays a young woman studying under a professor, played by her father, Dee King. His maid, who warns him against this new pupil, is played by Gail Grigg, Dee’s wife.
The actors control every twitch, the angle of each knuckle, the position of their eyes. It would seem robotic if it weren’t thriving energy and passion. It is what one hears that theater can be, but rarely is. Those who try it often fail because it is too weird to pull off. And yet, here it is, successful true and total art theater in an Iowa County church.
The Lesson is a rare example of Theatre de l’Ange Fou founders and The Lesson directors Steven Wasson and Corinne Soum working with a fully formed text. But, they do not bind themselves to what is expected from this strange horror-comedy. The production (which runs twice more, on August 12 and 13) may not be the truest example of Ionesco’s vision, as it prioritizes movement over words, but it is true to l’Ange Fou.
L’Ange Fou took a long route to Wisconsin. It was founded in Paris in 1984, moved to London in the 1990s and finally to Spring Green in 2014. This unexpected move, in a way, brought the theater (or at least one of its co-founders) home.
Wasson, a native of Illinois, studied drama in Colorado, and wanted to follow in the footsteps of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. This led him to the now-defunct Valley School, between Dodgeville and Spring Green, which in the 1970s was “the only full-time mime and physical theater school in America.”
Wasson moved to Paris in 1979 to continue his training under Étienne Decroux, known as the “father of corporeal mime.” Decroux brought the art of pantomime into the modern era, and it is the foundation of the work done at the White Church. Among Decroux’s most notable students were Jean-Louis Barrault (with whom he performed in the movie Children of Paradise) and Marcel Marceau.
“I was only going to stay in Paris for six months with Decroux,” says Wasson. “I ended up meeting Corinne there and we ended up being Decroux’s assistants.” A native of France, Corinne Soum is Wasson’s collaborator and wife. “We met at that mythic school and we got married.”
In 1984, they opened up their own school and theater in Paris and in 1995, they moved their operation to London where they stayed for nearly two decades. They taught students from all over the world, but after the 2005 subway bombings, immigration policies tightened up, and Wasson and Soum began considering a move.
In 2010, Reed Gilbert, founder of the Valley School, asked Wasson and Soum if they would be interested in making Wisconsin their next stop. When visiting the area, they discovered a deconsecrated Methodist church for sale, and they thought it might serve as a performance space. “The drive was to have a place here dedicated to the theater. Not a conventional place,” says Soum. “A place that would be open to every kind of performance.”
In 2012, l’Ange Fou produced its first show in Wisconsin. Since then, the company has started branching out. Last season, they began a collaboration with Madison’s Kanopy Dance, whose founder Lisa Thurrell believes Wasson and Soum to be kindred spirits: “Being a modern dance company, certain elements align with corporeal mime work, from the exploration of movement, dramatic meaning, metaphor and more,” says Thurrell. The two companies are collaborating again this season with a production of Bluebeard Through the Looking Glass-Darkly, which will premiere at the church on Aug. 26 before moving to the Overture Center for the Arts.
L’Ange Fou will also stage The Lesson along with Idleness, Sorrow, a Friend and a Foe, a new solo movement piece, at Broom Street Theater Sept. 7-10. Doug Reed, Broom Street’s new artistic director, says the show is something new for the longtime experimental theater on Willy Street: “The world Theatre de l’Ange Fou creates is immersive. They have an all-out investment in their craft. We’re drawn in totally to the rules of the world they’ve set up.”
Madison exposure cannot be a bad thing for this remarkable little theater and its iconoclastic co-founders. Dee King said it simply after the performance of The Lesson: “They’re known everywhere in the world. Except here.”
The schedule for the White Church Theatre can be found at thewhitechurchtheatre.org. They do not take reservations. Admission is a $15.00 suggested donation.
