[photograph] Elizabeth LeCompte '67 ELIZABETH LECOMPTE '67 As artistic director of the Wooster Group in New York City, Elizabeth LeCompte is a master of experimental theater so spellbinding that her work has won critical raves. “The best-kept secret in New York theater,” The New York Times calls the Wooster Group; “arguably the most adventurous company in the United States,” exclaims the Newark Star Ledger. LeCompte herself has reaped numerous honors: an NEA Distinguished Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement in American Theater, a “Bessie” (New York dance and performance award), a Village Voice Obie (off-Broadway) Award, an LA Drama Critics Circle Award — even a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” the no-strings award whose thrust the Times once paraphrased as “Here’s the money, now go make some art.” LeCompte has been doing just that since 1975, developing and producing the dozen multimedia performance pieces she describes as “assemblages of juxtaposed images, actions and texts.” Performed in live action, film, and video and augmented with multitrack scoring, movement, and dance, her pieces boldly explore issues like sexual politics, race, madness, spirituality, violence, and identity. Anyone from the Keystone Kops to Saint Anthony to Lenny Bruce might pop up in a Wooster work, leaving critics gleefully scrambling to applaud the “intellectual vaudeville.” Take LeCompte’s version of Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones, which traces the fall of an ex-Pullman porter from his post as “emperor” of a West Indies island. In a 1995 Wooster production, the performers wore Japanese kimonos, a ponytailed technician hopped onstage to do a jig, and oh, yes, the black emperor was played by a white woman. As an art major at Skidmore, LeCompte was encouraged to go her own creative way by art professor Arnold Bittleman. “He expected something that hadn’t been asked of me before,” she recalls. “He expected me to be a great artist” — a studio artist, that is. But her life took an unexpected turn when, waitressing at the now legendary Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs, she met actor and monologist Spalding Gray, who was there with an experimental theater group that occasionally drafted LeCompte as last-minute understudy. “I wouldn’t even know the lines,” she told The Christian Science Monitor. “I’d fake it, sometimes reading directly from the script. So I really ‘came upon’ theater, with a certain sense that anything was possible — even the mistakes became part of the process.” LeCompte and Gray joined Richard Schechner’s Innovative Performance Group in New York City, and when Schechner left her temporarily in charge, LeCompte began experimenting with blending drawing and photography into the theater process. Soon LeCompte, Gray, and five others spun off into the Wooster Group, then together bought The Performing Garage, the modest Soho theater space at 33 Wooster Street that made them independent producers. By 1975, LeCompte was layering Gray’s memories of his mother’s death into Three Places in Rhode Island, and by 1981 she hit her stride with works like the highly controversial Route 1 & 9— bits of Our Town melded with a faked Clifton Fadiman movie plus a porn movie. LeCompte has been pushing the edges of experimental theater ever since. Over the years, dedicated charter members like Gray and Willem Dafoe, LeCompte’s longtime companion and father of their son Jack, have stayed with the group in spite of fame of their own. Academy Award nominee Dafoe (whose movie credits include Platoon, Mississippi Burning, Wild at Heart, and The English Patient) once played a chicken heart at the Performing Garage — “you get under a red tent and make it pulsate,” he told Newsweek. “That’s how Liz has kept the company together,” explains Dafoe, who last spring played the juicy title role in a Wooster production of O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, presented uptown in an unusual Broadway run. “She gives us all very special things to do.” “We like to play,” says LeCompte simply. Her newest work will feature a Gertrude Stein drama tossed with ’60s cult film Olga’s House of Shame, spliced with some Marx Brothers and a soup9on of Yiddish Art Theater — just a little playful theater magic. [photograph] Ruby Puryear Hearn '60 RUBY PURYEAR HEARN '60 “Our mission,” says Ruby Puryear Hearn, “is to ensure that all Americans have appropriate and timely health care.” That’s a tall order, but one that she pursues relentlessly as senior vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the largest health-care philanthropy in the nation. “As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a doctor,” says Hearn, recalling how her parents had always urged their daughters “to reach for the stars.” It was with the warm support of her parents (a social worker and a teacher) that Hearn left Atlanta for Skidmore at age 16 with her sights set on pre-med. Her focus soon switched to medical research, and under the guidance of chemistry professor Charlotte Fahey she cultivated an interest in “understanding diseases and finding cures.” In I960, she earned a B.A. degree with honors in the double major of chemistry and biology, and then went on to Yale, where as the only woman in her class she earned a Ph.D. in the newly emerging field of biophysics (and met her husband, Robert W. Hearn). Juggling home and career after the birth of two daughters, Hearn worked on the innovative Health Show Project at Children’s Television Workshop and published articles on health issues and policy, pediatrics, poverty, AIDS, and drug abuse, in journals such as Biochemistry, Advances in Pediatrics, and AIDS and Public Policy Journal. She found her life’s work not in the research lab but in national health care, when in 1976 she became a program officer with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. There she has been instrumental in developing and overseeing programs designed to help the nation’s most vulnerable populations: women, children, the elderly, the poor, the uninsured, the chronically ill, and the mentally ill. “We supported early work in pediatric AIDS — both health care and social services for children and families — before people even realized that AIDS could affect children,” explains Hearn. Among the programs she currently oversees are an urban ini- “I have seen, through my work, that progress can be made.” tiative to improve the health and safety of children, the All Kids Count immunization program, and the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. Appointed senior vice president in 1996, she now plays a triple role as strategic planner, special advisor to the foundation’s president, and liaison to the nonprofit community. “One of the challenges for us, now that these issues have become political, is how we can continue to pursue them in a nonpartisan way,” she says. “We try to help people understand the current health-care system through policy research, public information, and policy models. We work with government, find ways to combine federal, state, and local resources, then document the impact and share our findings.” With her two daughters grown, Hearn commutes to the foundation’s Princeton, N.J., offices from her home in Baltimore, where her husband is the mayor’s urban-policy advisor. She also squeezes public service into her private life: she is a Fellow of the Yale Corporation and member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine and the Science Board for the Food and Drug Administration. She has also served with the National Forum on the Future of Children and Families, the advisory committee of the National Institutes of Health, and other groups. In 1972 Skidmore named Hearn one of the College’s “outstanding alumnae” and in 1994 awarded her an honorary doctorate. As she told the audience at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center upon receiving her honorary degree: “Sometimes the most challenging medical or research problems can be solved more easily than apparently simple ones like fairness and social justice. But I have seen, through my work, that progress can be made, that diverse groups can set aside their differences and work toward a common purpose. And this is where the real hope for the future lies.”