In wonderfully bewildering shows, New York’s venerable avant garde theatre company mash together everything from baroque opera to sci-fi B-movies. Their next trick? A seance-style tribute to an old friend

Spalding Gray used to perform a show called Interviewing the Audience. The celebrated monologist would invite a stranger he had met in the lobby to join him on stage. Through a sequence of innocuous questions, he would get them to open up about their lives. At one performance, a guest broke the audience’s hearts by talking about her daughter’s murder. At benefit nights, people living with HIV shared their tales. Other times, the anecdotes would be eccentric or amusing. Gray said they showed us “what it is to live in the world”.

Watching Gray conjure up this material made a big impression on a young actor called Scott Shepherd. It was the show he saw on his first visit to the Performing Garage, the New York home of the Wooster Group. The pioneering avant garde company had been established a few years earlier by Gray and director Elizabeth LeCompte with their colleagues Kate Valk, Ron Vawter, Jim Clayburgh, Willem Dafoe and Peyton Smith.