Theatre Review: ‘Early Shaker Spirituals,’ Plain-Spoken Tribute

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Ben Brantley

A scene from the Wooster Group's "Early Shaker Spirituals."

NEW YORK---The gift of being simple has never been widely associated with the Wooster Group, whose austere and profoundly affecting “Early Shaker Spirituals” opened on Thursday night at the Performing Garage in SoHo. So to find the Wooster Group paying plain-spoken tribute to the Shakers, a sect celebrated for its religious ardor and unadorned aesthetic, feels like a setup for a joke. Abstemiousness is also a hallmark of the Shaker religion, a celibate 18th-century offshoot of the Quakers and now nearly extinct. A Dionysian spirit is reined in and refined until it becomes a precise worldly expression of something impalpable and divine. That’s what the Wooster Group, like the Shakers, has aimed for. May their lessons, too, be preserved for the generations to come. [link]