Who

LeCompte is the co-founder and director of the Wooster Group, the experimental acting troupe that has been delighting and confusing audiences for nearly three decades.

Backstory

Growing up in suburban New Jersey, LeCompte showed an early taste for subversion—she was the only girl on the junior high softball team. While a student at Skidmore, she worked as a waitress in an artsy coffeehouse, where she began performing in plays alongside a young actor named Spalding Gray, who became her boyfriend. After graduation in 1967, LeCompte and Gray moved to New York, where they worked as extras in B-movies and she sold postcards at the Metropolitan Museum. Gray soon got a part in an off-Broadway show with an acting company called the Performance Group, and in 1970 LeCompte began work as a designer with the company, soon graduating to directing plays. In 1980, LeCompte—who by now had left Gray for then-unknown actor Willem Dafoe—took over as artistic director, renaming the company the Wooster Group (the company's space was, and still is, at 30 Wooster Street).

In the years following, LeCompte established herself as a fan of thinking outside the box. The 1983 production of L.S.D. included courtroom scenes modeled after The Crucible juxtaposed with actors simulating tripping on acid (Arthur Miller's lawyers quickly issued a cease-and-desist). House/Lights in 1998 fused Gertrude Stein's Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights with the 1960s lesbian S&M movie Olga's House of Shame. With its meager $1 million annual budget, The Wooster Group continues to perform challenging and surprising works, some of them original and some of them oddball takes on already-established plays.

Of note

The tightly-knit Wooster Group has not just survived but thrived in underground theater for decades, despite rising rents and the commercialization of SoHo. As ever, LeCompte has churned out transgressive, genre-defying fare in recent years—works that merge standouts from the Western theatrical canon with pop cultural dross, and employ a broad range of mixed media along the way. Known for her weird casting choices, she recruited performance artist/Fischerspooner frontman Casey Spooner to star in the group's recent production of Hamlet despite his lack of any actual acting experience. Frances McDormand was enlisted to star in the 2002 drama To You, the Birdie, a re-imagining of the 19th century French tragedy Phèdre involving a badminton tournament and an on-stage enema. Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the hallmarks of Wooster Group productions is audience members walking out in frustration or disgust. LeCompte hardly cares: As long as she incites controversy, she'll likely keep selling tickets.

For the record

LeCompte attends every performance of every play the Wooster Group puts on so that she can overhear the audiences' responses, some of which she surreptitiously tapes so that she can review them later.

Personal

After calling things off with Spalding Gray, LeCompte was romantically partnered with Willem Dafoe, who's 11 years her junior, for 27 years; Dafoe reportedly broke things off in 2004 so he could hook up with Giada Colagrande, who is 20 years his junior. Lecompte and Dafoe have a son, Jack, a public policy researcher. LeCompte lives in a loft on Wooster Street, across the street from her theater. She also has a cabin in Maine.