Breaking the Rules
student megan cohen writes
on how writer david savran
wrote on the wooster group

(who were talking about timothy leary, arthur miller, and other things.)

In Breaking the Rules, David Savran plays with the physical visual form of the critical essay by incorporating at least three different kinds of relationships to his source materials. Savran’s resultant relationship to source text becomes complicated, multifaceted, palpable. By treating his source material sometimes as artifact, sometimes as evidence, always as distant, Savran helps the reader taste one aspect of what the Wooster Group’s work does.

Throughout the article, Savran will be swimming along towards a seemingly inevitable critical statement when a full page of quoted interview suddenly emerges like the Loch Ness monster. The pictures stand as an unflinching testament to how much of L.S.D. (...Just the High Points....) we have missed. The boxes are essentially Found Criticism.

This is not to imply that the boxed quotes, or any other source materials, stand without Savran's comment. Yes, the quotes are a Xerox sent from across the years, but Savran has chosen these texts for particular reasons to provide us with particular views of the Wooster Group from particular frames. However, we understand these views not by explicit comment but by context, by collision, by complication. Savran’s ideas about the Wooster Group and the historical moment they existed in are everywhere, embedded in his work as Elizabeth LeCompte’s views on Leary are embedded in L.S.D.

Savran's article does not pretend to succeed in alchemically transforming the ideals of the three-dimensional Group into a two-dimensional scrap of paper—when he says at the close of his article that L.S.D. “suggests...that theatre, on account of its pretense, its use of simultaneous actions and its separation of role from actor, is the most suitable medium in which to ‘write’ history.” (pg 219), he might well be slyly describing his own failure and celebrating the impossibility of his own triumph. However, by adopting aspects of the Wooster Group’s attitude towards source materials, Savran does help his readers understand what he believes LeCompte’s vision of history to be.