(Charles Isherwood’s article appeared in The New York Times, 2/22.)
Last seen in sober work attire, with his nose buried in a book for about six hours, the protean actor Scott Shepherd appears in far more garish guises in the Wooster Group’s restless but surprisingly reverent production of “Vieux Carré,” a little-seen Tennessee Williams play in which the writer exhumes a macabre assortment of lonely ghosts from his youthful, desperate days in New Orleans in the late 1930s.
Mr. Shepherd, who played the narrator Nick Carraway in “Gatz,” the fall season’s acclaimed word-by-word enactment of “The Great Gatsby,” enters the darkened playing space at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in what might be called a state of faux tumescence. You hardly notice the dilapidated kimono robe or the frazzled gray fright wig that almost obscures the actor’s pale, angular features, for strapped to Mr. Shepherd’s waist is a rubber phallus that enters the room before he does.