As the lights dimmed and applause erupted for the opening performance of Tennessee Williams’s Vieux Carré at the Fleck Dance Theatre on Wednesday night, both the actors and technicians gathered and bowed together. For the Wooster Group, a legendary experimental theatre company returning to Toronto after an interregnum of 22 years, there is no separation between departments. Sensory elements are no less integral to a production than words or plot, and designers conduct a performance as layered and precise as the cast.

 The signature Wooster style, which the collective has refined since 1975, is often imitated but never replicated. With it, they’ve transformed classic playwrights like Arthur Miller, Anton Chekhov, and Gertrude Stein into contemporary visual nightmares, somehow staying true to the text while rendering the work entirely unrecognizable. They’ve done the same with Tennessee Williams’ rarely-produced Vieux Carré, aptly retitled The Wooster Group’s Version of Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carré. So the audience applauded with extra vigour, but as both actors and technicians lapped it up, only several audience members mustered the strength to actually stand. That’s another aspect of the Wooster style–it’s enthralling, but exhausting.

Vieux Carré is an autobiographical memory play, taking place in the New Orleans rooming house Williams called home as a struggling young writer coming to terms with his sexuality. It took about 40 years for him to finish the script, returning to it again and again from 1939 until its premiere in 1977–a flop that lasted five shows on Broadway. He rips the characters straight from the house’s hallways, which Wooster presents as a bleak stage of rolling black platforms, sliding doors, metal poles, and gleaming video screens, strewn with abandoned clothes and household objects. There’s Williams, known simply as The Writer (Ari Fliakos), the landlady Mrs. Wire (Kate Valk), Nursie the maid (Kaneza Schaal), aged and dying painter Nightingale (Scott Shepherd), and a melancholy wife and husband, Jane Sparks and Tye McCool (Valk and Shepherd again).

Williams paints this moment in time as an exaggerated sequence of comings-and-goings that fall into a hard, fast downward spiral, interjected with a few comedic moments as a sort of theatrical aside from the playwright, saying: “Man, we were pretty fucked up, weren’t we.” Director Elizabeth LeCompte, a founding member of the Wooster Group and director of all their shows, picks up on these moments with the supremely phallic Nightingale, a gay lech who pulls The Writer out of the closet; Nursie, the up-talking ditz inspired by performance artist Ryan Trecartin; and the frizzy-haired wannabe mother hen Mrs. Wire. There is some bitter humour in this Southern slum.

But the myriad of visual and auditory elements — including Jennifer Tipton’s lighting, Matt Schloss and Omar Zubair’s sound, Andrew Schneider’s video work, Aaron Deyo’s projections, and Dennis Dermody’s cineturgy — takes Vieux Carré‘s farcical qualities in an entirely different direction, elevating the script’s flurry of entrances and exits to a full-blown frenzy. This is why the Wooster Group is so renowned. There are cues everywhere: screens playing ‘70s porn and videos by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey, flashes of light dictating a scene change, soundtracks playing within the ear buds of the actors, noises initiating their movements, video projections that overlap and interact with the people onstage. Together, technicians and actors engage in a carefully-orchestrated Frankenstein ballet — one that sucks you in for two hours, until the audience, like The Writer, feels it’s going mad. In one scene between Tye and Nightingale, both played by Shepherd, the use of a body double had us doubting our own sanity.

LeCompte presents plays in the way she believes they are meant to be staged, and that takes priority. Though Wooster is known for public rehearsals and audience involvement throughout a play’s development, don’t expect to walk away with a clear idea of beginning, middle, and end. Wooster’s mandate is to make art, and it’s the audience’s job to try and keep up. So while the show’s applause was enthusiastic, butts remained in their seats, brains too preoccupied with making sense of what they had just experienced. By the time the Wooster Group comes to Toronto again, in another two decades or so, we might just have recovered.

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Carly Maga is an arts writer for Toronto Standard. Follow her on Twitter: @RadioMaga.