The Town Hall Affair

New York’s Wooster Group were the experimental darlings of the 1986 Adelaide Festival, along with the long monologues of their co-founder, the late Spalding Gray.

Now Wooster debuts in Sydney, still sitting at the same long table with mics, deconstructing classic texts and major cultural events. 

Their subject is the landmark 1971 Manhattan debate on women’s liberation, which was documented in the film, Town Bloody Hall. Extracts are screened as the Wooster actors play out the same sequences at the table and lectern. 

The performances are technically impressive, the feminist topic is timely, but does this theatrical replication add much to a good doco?

The raucous debate, which was surprisingly obscure intellectually, was/is chaired by the misogynist Norman Mailer. An odd choice really, but he’d just declared his biological imperatives for women in an essay, The Prisoner of Sex.

Taking him on is Germaine Greer (acted more moderately than expected by Maura Tierney), the lesbian activist Jill Johnston (a colourfully disobedient Kate Valk) and the conservative feminist and literary critic Diana Trilling (effectively realised by a male, Greg Mehrten).  

Mailer is played by two actors, Ari Fliakos and Scott Shepherd, another random casting decision apparently, but it certainly works when his two parts end in bloody conflict.

The Town Hall Affair is ingenious and sometimes affecting time travel, and upstage the Wooster Group bristles with more audio and screen technology than before.  But as an edited debate, directed by the other Wooster co-founder, Elizabeth LeCompte, it lacks a fresh and strong editorial interpretation.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Prudence Upton