Tales from the Dark Side

Review of American Gothic at the Yale Cabaret American Gothic, the third offering by the Yale Cabaret this season, brings together three tales by renowned short story writers: Raymond Carver’s “Popular Mechanics,” (also known as “The Little Things”), Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” and Jorge Luis Borges’ “El Sur” (“The South”). The show also brings together three creative disciplines: Nahuel Telleria, director and adapter (School of Drama), Sam Vernon (School of Art), and Sam Suggs (School of Music). The presentation, in front of a large curtain-like backdrop that is actually a sculpture by visual artist Vernon, presents a sense of “Gothic” as it comes down to us from Gothic fiction, with the three actors in the play—Kevin Hourigan, Libby Peterson, Jenny Schmidt—arriving gowned in hooded robes and carrying candles. Once revealed, their faces, pale with make-up, sport dark-rimmed eyes, giving a ghoulish cast to the proceedings. Suggs’ musical score is at times a fourth character, providing much of the dominant mood.

But are these stories really “Gothic” in that ghostly sense? Granted, they all three present situations that are tense with threats, with a feel for the darker, perhaps grotesque, aspects of life. But only Borges’ tale, which gets short-shrift, plot-wise, in the proceedings, is an outright “Gothic” tale, in the manner of, for instance, Poe. It’s a story of what may be a deathbed experience that becomes fraught with the kind of peril that may be mind-forged. As the closing tale, “The South,” with dramatic visual effects and voice-overs, segues into the end of the play, wherein the very production itself seems to become a phantasmagoria born of a book.

Sometimes a narrator reads from the book before the actors take over, as in the lengthiest segment, the O’Connor story, and the precise minimalism of the production, with its significant props and moody lighting by Joey Moro, works to set-off the fact that stories, even when played on stage, take place primarily in the audience’s imagination. One could say American Gothic relies on that kind of inner transformation more than most drama does.

The Carver story, because of its simplicity, comes across well as a mimed enactment of the narrative. A brief account of a couple at odds with one another that comes to focus on who will get the child, the story has the feel of a folk tale and, in its grip on a certain desperation, shows us that we’re in the world of “Southern Gothic.” The tale ends cryptically but, we assume, horribly. So move along to one of the stories that defines the genre, O’Connor’s “Good Man.”

With the cast of three taking on the five roles in the family—comprised of a married couple, their two children, and the husband’s mother—acting out the story as it's narrated, the dramatization feels a bit like “storytime.” But what a story. Hourigan, sort of insipid as the father, does a convincing transformation into “The Misfit,” a criminal at large that the family encounters after a freak accident on the road to Florida. The story has long been noted as an example of Southern Gothic with its well-detailed grasp of the persons in a certain milieu—here a somewhat dysfunctional lower middle-class family dynamic—thrown against the kind of malevolence that, real enough, feels like fatalism. O’Connor keeps a knowing grasp of her characters so that there is even grim humor in its horrific conclusion.

The special features of the show—the installation art, the score, the projections (Jon Roberts, James Lanius)—go a long way to make American Gothic an interestingly atmospheric production, though how the three tales hang together—without a Rod Serling figure putting it in a nutshell—is, perhaps fittingly, left to the viewer’s imagination.

American Gothic Conceived by Eli Epstein-Deutsch and Nahuel Telleria Directed by Nahuel Telleria

Dramaturg: David Clauson; Choreographer: Anita Shastri; Installation Artist: Sam Vernon; Costumes: Steven Rotramel; Lights: Joey Moro; Composer: Sam Suggs; Sound: Nok Kanchanabanca, Jon Roberts; Projections: Jon Roberts; Associate Projections: James Lanius; Stage Manager: Anita Shastri; Technical Director: Sam Lazar; Producers: Jason Najjoum, Libby Peterson; Production Manager: James Lanius III

Yale Cabaret October 9-11, 2014

Our Town Opens

This Wednesday, October 8, previews for the first show of the Long Wharf Theatre’s 50th anniversary season begin. And that first show is an American classic: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Not only an American classic that many probably think they already know, the play has direct links to “our town” (i.e., New Haven) because Wilder lived here and is buried here. Not that Grover’s Corners should remind us of New Haven exactly. The play is actually set in a fictional New Hampshire town, and yet: Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein, who directs the play, has conceived of his cast as representing our local demographic more than any small town in Wilder’s day would have. That means that his cast is of diverse ethnicity, and, what’s more, his Stage Manager—a role associated with lean-jawed white actors such as William Holden, Hal Holbrook, and Paul Newman—is a black woman (Myra Lucretia Taylor).

That fact alone should make for an out-of-the-ordinary Our Town. And, to make the production even more “ours,” Edelstein has cast it with Long Wharf alums. So, if you’ve been going to the LW with any degree of regularity in its 50 year existence, you’re bound to see someone up there you’ve seen before.

Two such returners glad to be back are Jenny Leona, who will play Emily, and Rey Lucas, George. These two roles are, of course, the “romantic interest” characters in the play, who begin as neighbors and high school classmates who then become sweethearts and then . . . .

Both Leona and Lucas have experience playing younger than their years. In fact, Leona has played an adolescent boy on more than one occasion, and Lucas played the Boy in Eric Ting’s well-received adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea in 2009. Leona, on the other hand, was anything but boyish in last season’s The Underpants, also directed by Edelstein.

When I talked to the two actors about Wilder’s play and their roles, both admitted that Our Town was a play they’d had youthful familiarity with—as most of us do, they encountered it in high school. Leona saw the TV version at some point and says “it stuck with me.” Returning to work with Edelstein, she says, is a “great opportunity” and found that, reading the play again—it had been about 10 years—she found it truly beautiful and thought she would be “perfect for Emily.” And why not? Leona comes by the quaintness of Our Town naturally—she spent 7 years of her childhood in Ardsley, an idyllic little village in West Chester County, and says it has remained a touchstone for her sense of small-town life.

For Lucas, a YSD grad raised in Queens by Dominican parents, Our Town brought to mind “folksy” TV shows like My Three Sons or Capra films like It’s a Wonderful Life—“a little cheesy.” Invited to take part in the show, he was intrigued by Edelstein’s color-blind casting and deliberate effort to diversify the cast ethnically. What’s more, he sees Edelstein’s approach as “more moving and compelling” than what Lucas may have formerly thought of the show. “If we forget what we’ve seen” the play’s truth will be more direct, he says. The play shows us “real families, with struggles and troubles.” Following Wilder’s intention, Lucas says, should give us a play that “combines Norman Rockwell and Pablo Picasso.” An apt expression of the everyday charm of the play contained within its sense of the more abstract and mythic possibilities of human life.

Both Leona and Lucas are excited by the opportunity to play romantic leads, and both find that there is unexpected comedy in the relationship of George and Emily that comes from inviting the audience to think back to their own introduction to teen-age love, to grasp how awkward and thrilling is the experience for these two. Lucas notes that Emily “calls George on his arrogance” and he responds quickly by falling in love with someone who cares enough to want him to improve—“not the sort of thing I was looking for in high school,” Lucas chuckles. Leona finds the awkwardness of the young lovers “adorable” and is glad of the opportunity, thanks to Edelstein’s search for “the true moments in the play and its spirit,” to find the humor in the early situations in the play. The later parts of the play, where things grow more troubled and dark, Leona says, are where she feels her strengths as an actress lie. Which may come as a surprise to anyone who saw her broadly comic role in The Underpants. That role, for Leona, was something of a surprise, and Our Town gives her an opportunity to show a full range of emotions.

The camaraderie of the cast should be expected, since all have worked at Long Wharf before and many with Edelstein, but, even so, both actors remarked on how quickly the process of bonding as a cast occurred on this production. When I spoke to Leona and Lucas, the rehearsals had not yet gone into tech, with scenery and so forth, but both pointed out that the sets will be unusually spare. Though both have had training with minimal sets, the challenge of acting out interactions with non-existent props presents another interesting aspect of the staging of Our Town.

For audiences who may think they know all there is to know about Grover’s Corners, Leoana suggests that this production will be “eye-opening” and Lucas points out the play’s satisfying sense of, as it were, “telling the stories behind the photo albums” most of us keep of our lives. The Long Wharf 50th Anniversary production of Our Town invites us to look a little closer at the “givens” we live with and our assumptions about the significance of our own lives. “Our town” has changed, and, with this cast, so should Our Town.

Our Town By Thornton Wilder Directed by Gordon Edelstein

Long Wharf Theatre October 8-November 2, 2014

Tickets and info: Long Wharf

All in the Family

Review of Don't Be Too Surprised, Yale Cabaret This weekend the Yale Cabaret is dark. Last weekend, Cab 2 offered Don’t Be Too Surprised by Korean actor and playwright Geun-Hyung Park, translated and directed by Kee-Youn Nahm, a YSD dramaturg. As a production, the show was indicative of the ad hoc approach the Cab often boasts, as none of the performers in the play were actually actors and two were non-YSD students. A chance to work outside discipline is one of the attractions of the Cab for YSD students and others, so we shouldn’t be too surprised.

The show’s menu featured the names of all dishes in both English and Korean and that gave immediate indication of the kind of hybridity the play sported. Finding a Korean equivalent for “lemon madeleines” might be as interesting as finding English equivalents for the dynamics of Park’s offbeat play, as filtered through Nahm’s translation. At times we might wonder how what we’re seeing would sound and feel in its native language, where the odd family dynamic featured in the play might be embraced as obvious satire or maybe even as tragi-comic melodrama. The playbill statement from the Artistic Directors and Managing Director asserts that “this production tackles a cultural translation—one that offers a fresh perspective on the absurdity of our everyday.”

Indeed, the humor of absurd theater keeps the play unpredictable and enigmatic, where Father (Helen Jaksch) seems to be in low-key mourning for a colleague who recently committed suicide and then, to the surprise (though not too much) of his Second Son (David Clauson), hangs himself in the bathroom. That might not seem the least bit amusing but for the fact that he continues to hang in plain view of the audience every time the door to the bathroom is open—as it frequently is due to Second Son’s constipated but determined attempts to void his bowels. Clauson crouched on the commode grunting beneath his dead father’s more or less sympathetic eye becomes a regular “gag,” if you will—one that might have, depending on how you view such things, considerable symbolic meaning for anything from customs of potty-training to customs of burial and commemoration. Or it might just be a protracted bathroom joke.

The other members of this dysfunctional family include First Son, played by David E. Bruin as a self-involved filmmaker who barely notes in passing late in the play that his wife (Caitlin S. Griffin) gave their child up for adoption. The child, as his wife reveals, also in passing, had a blood type that indicated the child could not have been her husband’s. Other shenanigans: in addition to Second Son’s constipation he is also unwilling or unable to leave the house; the wife seems to occupy the role of waitress/exotic dancer/escort at a local bar, a position she says her husband urged her to take. And why not, her fees for her services there—including bringing home a client (Justin Meadows)—seem to be the household’s only real income.

The latter might seem a minor point, but as the play goes on the “absurdity” of its situation seems to teeter more to a kind of “toilet seat realism” where the throes of this family hitting rock bottom is buoyed only by their rather odd and amusing detachment from what they’re going through. A situation which might seem potent with plenty of O’Neill-like psychic misery and verbal breast-beating is instead delivered with a zest only a few notches lower than a sit-com. We could even say that its sit-com nature predominates when—as occurs several times—characters enact karaoke routines that appear, sometimes, on their living room console (in Ni Wen’s colorful projections) and also on flatscreens strategically placed in the theater. Griffin in particular does a great job of presenting the at-times brutally direct speech of the play with engagingly forthright delivery. Similarly, Meadows as the rather nonplussed “gentleman caller” in one little scenario is hilariously off-hand when meeting his escort’s husband, brother, and the corpse of her father-in-law. In perfect he-handyman fashion, he offers to fix the fan in the bathroom to help with the stench.

In the midst of all this are moments, gestures, speeches that may cause us to contemplate the precariousness of family relations, the difficult accommodations that any of us might have to make with our place and time, and even fable-like tales of an octopus and a crab, as well as talismanic memories—for Second Son, of his mother—that create a kind of post-Freudian (in the West anyway) fabric of potential symptoms, regressions and repressions. While that might sound heady, the play’s language is so precise in its casual rhythms we don’t really feel confronted, though we may well be uncomfortable.

The costumes and set by Chika Shimizu combine to form what we might call an aesthetic of the second-hand. The TV console is an ungraceful embarrassment that might be salvageable as a kitschy keepsake. And the same applies to the vaguely hipsterish look of First Son’s jacket and pants and the economy-store eroticism of his wife’s costume. As an elderly man with a certain dignity in his depression, Jaksch does most to remind us that these characters were written as modern day Koreans. That aspect of the play—its relation to a where and when that Park might have in mind—becomes tenuous as we progress, despite kowtows by First Son and Second Son to their father’s hovering corpse—or is that to the toilet bowl?

Don’t Be Too Surprised is an oddly engaging and amusing play that keeps us guessing about its intentions long after we’ve seen it.

A week from this Thursday, the Cab returns with American Gothic, a newly derived work combining short stories by three exemplars of the form: Jorge Luis Borges, Flannery O’Connor, and Raymond Carver.

Don’t Be Too Surprised Written by Geun-Hyung Park Translated and directed by Kee-Yoon Nahm

Dramaturg: Helen Jaksch; Costumes: Chika Shimizu; Set: Chika Shimizu; Lights: Carolina Ortiz; Sound: Kate Marvin; Projections: Ni Wen; Stage Manager: Emily DeNardo; Technical Director: Kate Newman; Producer: Sally Shen

Yale Cabaret September 25-27, 2014

Mommie Dearest

The Yale Cabaret is back, kicking off their new season this weekend with Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time, a new play by Emily Zemba, third-year playwright in YSD, and directed by Ato Blankson-Wood, a third-year actor. The play places Liddy (Sarah Williams)—younger sister of Alice (Libby Peterson)—in the snares of a beauty pageant for children when her older sister, according to their mother (Celeste Arias), fell down a hole and “isn’t coming back.” Liddy, with misgivings, is game—anything to please Mom. The majority of the play depicts for her, and us, just what she has let herself in for.

It’s campy, zany fun rife with cultural references that zing and swirl as we, with Liddy, try to get our bearings. We (I’m assuming) have the benefit of knowing something about Alice in Wonderland, so we’re not as out of our depth as Liddy is when confronting new characterizations of Lewis Carroll’s characters: Aubie Merrylees’ White Rabbit is hilariously manic with verbal tics, odd voices—some reminiscent of Jeremy in Yellow Submarine (Merrylees speaks to an invisible “Jeremy” over his headset)—and a cute little cottontail on his white hot-pants; Shaunette Reneé Wilson’s Tweddle-dee/dum is an aggressive schizo who has maybe been in just a few too many pageants; Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s MC Hattah looks like he could be Captain Hook and moves like he wants to be James Brown, and also manifests as a preacher and as a creepy befriender to befuddled Liddy; Andrej Visky’s Caterpillar Custodian does a softshoe mime routine with a broom (reminding me of the Lorenzo TV show but there’s no way this cast could know that, is there?)—and actually tries to be helpful, in a “there’s no place like home” fashion, to Liddy. Then there’s Mom as a Red Queen who has a few schizoid tendencies herself, one minute a beseeching Blanche Dubois, the next ready to belt like Ethel Merman as Gypsy Rose Lee, all while remaining a Southern Lady who only wants—desperately—what’s best for her beloved daughter—and the higher the heels, the better. And as the White Queen Melanie Field preens and pouts, representing the truly psychotic aspect of these mothers living vicariously through the cosmeticized beauty and poise of their little pre-teens. Or even pre-double digits. Oddly, the parts of the sisters seem a bit underwritten, with Williams suitably childish and Peterson a bit peremptory (as perhaps only older siblings can be). Her little aria about the demonic qualities of the looking-glass are accompanied by a very suitable soundtrack.

The set is a minor miracle in its own right as it creates a stage door where there is no door. The layout of the Cab generally only affords two exits/entrances—both of which are also fire exits—but Kurt Boetcher’s set for Look Up… has the cast coming in and out through a great curtained area at one end as well as a cartoonish set of stairs that takes them in and out of what is actually a window. Though I’m familiar with the Cab layout, it took some time for that fact to sink in. That’s part of the charm of the topsy-turvy world of Look Up… and costumes that combine the talents of Soule Golden and Montana Blanco will keep you entertained.

But it’s not all for laughs. The cult of glam and youth that causes mothers to make dress-up dolls of their children is in poor taste, if nothing else, and Zemba’s play is at its most barbed in depicting the toxic relation between these Queen Mothers and their hapless offspring; the more baleful side—wherein pre-pubscent girls are tricked out as miniature Lolitas—is underscored by the creatures of Lewis Carroll’s imaginary: Carroll, in his own person as Charles Dodgson, has been presumed by some a borderline pedophile with a penchant for pretty little girls—such as 11-year-old Alice Liddell, the model for his fictional Alice. MC Hattah’s brief “Billy Jean” inspired moonwalk might put us in mind of other “harmless” friendships between those too young to consent and those old enough to know better.

Yet it would be wrong to see the play as polemical or predominantly satirical. It’s primarily a fantasia, much as Carroll’s endlessly entertaining Alice books are, and that means an occasion to indulge imaginative sallies about childhood, motherhood, dressing up (in all it’s theatrical aspects, including drag), playacting, and those mysterious “judges” out there in the shadowy areas off-stage who ultimately determine who wins and who loses in show-biz.

Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time Written by Emily Zemba Directed by Ato Blankson-Wood

Dramaturg: Nahuel Telleria; Set: Kurt Boetcher; Lights: Joey Moro; Sound: Kate Marvin; Costumes: Soule Golden, Montana Blanco; Projections: Kristen Ferguson; Stage Manager: Avery Trunko; Producer: Kelly Kerwin

Yale Cabaret September 18-20, 2014

Yale Cabaret Season 47: Down the Stairs We Go

Next weekend the Yale Cabaret returns—Cab 47—helmed by Artistic Directors, Hugh Farrell, a dramaturg, Will Rucker, a stage manager, Tyler Kieffer, a sound designer (who have participated in 19 shows at the Cab and/or Summer Cab amongst them), and Managing Director Molly Hennighausen, who ably managed the Summer Cabaret of 2013.

The Cab is the go-to spot for the unusual, the off-the-wall, the below-stairs (it’s literally in a basement, which this year’s logo capitalizes on, creating the look of a movie ad from the Sixties where a trip down the stairs may lead to unimagined things). It’s a place of creative ferment, where students see what they can do—often in areas they aren’t being officially trained in—and what they can get away with. The audience can be a mix—as Molly Hennighausen says—of many first-timers, drawn by the word-of-mouth of a specific show, and many dedicated regulars, who come no matter what’s on offer.

It’s also a convivial place to dine, thanks to Anna Belcher’s kitchen skills, with a changing menu that always offers 3 entrees, a number of small plates, a salad, a soup, and a choice of desserts, not to mention a fairly varied wine-list and a selection of beers. All the dining business is over before the show begins, with tables cleared, generally, so there’s little of the distraction of plates and forks while the play’s playing.

If you like your theater up-close and personal, with, as it were, the strings showing, then the Cab is a dream. And, if you come more than once, you’re likely to see the people who, one week, put on the show doing the service and such another week. It’s a “we all muck in together” entity, even more so now that Work Study support has been withdrawn. Previously, Work Study picked up half the wage of the Cab’s workers, so now the Cab, to stay on budget, will lean upon generous donors and sponsors—and full houses—more than before. The Cab’s site lists the different levels of patronage available, including the popular “show sponsor”—an innovation begun by Managing Director Jonathan Wemette in the 45th anniversary season, 2011-12. Check back here to get a brief preview of the shows when they’re announced, then hand over a check for the show you want to back. And if that’s too big a commitment, smaller donations—as Enthusiast, Friend, and even “Starving Artist” level—are available. The Cab is a unique institution, well worthy of support.

The site claims two mantras for this season: Make Happen the Make Believe—a good imperative for any creative endeavor—and Now or Never, which certainly puts an emphasis on timeliness and limited time. Theater, more than any other creative work, requires presence in the here and now.

The first three shows of the season have been announced, and the new décor—which features a classically appointed entranceway/lobby that will be complete with tech features, such as piped-in music or live audio feeds from inside the theater—is developing. The team—Hugh, Will, Tyler, and Molly—stress an “open door” policy and their accessibility as a team to audience input, and likewise to the students who may have ideas for proposals. They looked at 7 proposals for the first 3 slots and take a supportive, enabling role in all projects they accept, and can help teams get together for resubmitting proposals not successful at first. The teamwork of the projected work is key.

Hugh says the proposal by the Cab 47 team focused on “community and collaboration”—the community of YSD, certainly, but also the community that the theater serves, with “collaboration” a broad term that extends from the various talents of the people involved in the show—from those who build the sets and make the costumes to those who research and write and act and direct and keep the place running—to those who provide attention and feedback as audience. Will stresses “generosity without expectation” which is a way of saying “just show-up, ready for whatever.” It’s different each week and what you get should be something other than what you expected. The team wants to make a season “full of that Cab show”—the one everyone talks about and remembers. And that’s not necessarily to say it’s all about love and praise. Making people grapple with what they’ve seen, or offer personal insights, is part of the Cab experience.

First up is Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time—a new play by third-year playwright Emily Zemba, who collaborated on last year’s crowd-pleasing season opener, We Know Edie LaMinx Had a Gun. Look Up will feature a “sort of mash-up” of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with Toddlers and Tiaras. Directed by third-year actor Ato Blankson-Wood, who’s been turning in worthwhile Cab performances since the Summer Cab of 2013, and featuring Celeste Arias, ditto, the play follows Liddy, a young girl coping with the pressures of a child beauty pageant while encountering a series of characters right out of Lewis Carroll by way of whatever cultural associations the team tosses in. September 18-20

Cab 2 is a new translation by Kee-Yoon Nahm of Geun-Hyung Park’s Don’t Be Too Surprised. Nahm, trained as a dramaturg at YSD, also directs the cast, which will not include YSD actors, in “a really dark comedy” from 2009. Park is a prolific Korean actor—on screen, TV and stage—who also writes, and his play is about a fraught relationship between father and grown son, that features karaoke and an on-stage suicide. September 25-27

The third of the first three shows is American Gothic—no, not the painting by Grant Wood, nor the novel by William Gaddis, but an ambitious combining of three stories: Jorge Luis Borges’ “The South,” Raymond Carver’s “Popular Mechanics,” and Flannery O’Connor’s oft-anthologized and taught, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”—which puts the “Southern” in Southern Gothic. Proposed by two dramaturgy students, Eli Epstein-Deutsch and Nahuel Telleria, and directed by Telleria, the play represents a collaboration by students in YSD, the Yale School of Music, and the Yale School of Art, and features an “installation-like set” by Sam Vernon. October 9-11

When speaking about the Cab 47 team’s leadership and guidance in soliciting, aiding, and choosing proposals, Molly stresses how “safe” the Cab is: in the sense that almost anything can get a try-out there. Its small size means the house is frequently sold out, and that creates an exciting environment for both audience and performers. As a “safe house” for theatrical experiment, the Cab is truly a New Haven treasure.

It’s now or never: help make happen the make believe. Your eyes and ears are required.

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven, CT

Eggs and Bones

Two former Cab shows to be re-staged in New York this fall. Listen! That sound you hear is the long, withdrawing roar of the summer. And that means the fall theater season is about to begin. Shortly, I’ll be posting a preview of the first three shows of the upcoming Yale Cabaret season, along with other announcements of interest for local theater here in New Haven. But right now, a few words about two shows opening soon in New York.

Fans and supporters of both the Yale Cabaret and Summer Cabaret may be interested to know that two former artistic directors of the Summer Cabaret, Devin Brain (*10) and Dustin Wills (*14), have further developed two shows that began life in the term-time Cabaret—Bones in the Basket and The Fatal Eggs, respectively—and this fall they will both be staged on back-to-back weekends at the Araca Project in New York. The Araca Project is an initiative to foster entrepreneurs from Yale, Syrcause, University of Michigan, Northwestern University, and Florida State. Artists selected are enabled to produce their work in an Off-Broadway venue.

Both shows have online sites for fund-raising. The Fatal Eggs, which has support through a Princess Grace grant, recently met its goal, but there’s always room for more; Bones in the Basket has 3 days left to reach its goal and, last I looked, had just under 60% of goal pledged

About the shows:

Bones in the Basket Devin Brain was co-artistic director, with Chris Mirto, of the Cabaret in the 2009-10 season, which happened to be my first season of attendance at the Cab. And that means I missed the Cab production of Bones, though I did catch a workshop staging of it about a year ago in NY. Brain was also the artistic director of the Summer Cabaret in the 2011 season; titled The Yale Summer Shakespeare Festival, the program featured two Shakespeare plays and The Rose-Mark'd Queen, Brain’s own ambitious and entertaining condensation of four Shakespeare history plays into one gripping show. In addition to Bones, and working as assistant director on a version of the Tempest at La Mama, Brain has a production of Macbeth in the works that will go on tour—beginning at the Guthrie in Minneapolis—and return to NYC in the spring.

Drawn to works with, shall we say, darker-than-average themes, Brain has found in Bones a greatly simpatico project. The show originated when cast member Alexandra Henrikson (*11) brought around a book of folk tales translated from the Russian, stories she was raised with. As with Grimm “fairytales,” these folk tales—many of them animal fables as in Aesop—have elements of the bizarre, the magical, the eerie. But unlike the Grimm tales—particularly in what Brain calls their “cleaned-up versions” familiar from Disney films and the like—the tales in Russian were, Brain says, told in bars for drinks and to entertain the clientele. They were decidedly not conceived as bedtime stories for kiddies. And, in comparison to Aesop, the “morals”—if that’s what they are—of the stories accept a rather harsh universe in which, at best, cleverness is rewarded and stupidity punished. Brain and company found the stories “morbid and dark in a comic, laughing way.” They adapted a selection of the tales into a form well-suited to the experimental space of the Cabaret and produced one of “those shows”—the ones that its audience remembers and its cast hopes to have a chance to do again.

That chance has come—Brain thanks YSD Dean James Bundy for suggesting he apply to Araca—with more money than before, 3 1/2 weeks of rehearsal, and a 140-seat auditorium with proscenium stage. It will be “the fullest set” the company has worked with and, Brain says, the theater has a certain decrepitness that suits Bones’ destitute “on the run” troupe, cadging what they can from whatever audience they can find. A bit like off-off-off Broadway theater. Returning again to the troupe are YSD grads Danny Binstock (*11), Jillian Taylor (*11), Blake Segal (*11), Alex Henrikson (*11), and Stéphanie Hayes (*11)—who has been back to stages in CT twice since she graduated: February House at Long Wharf, and a play also inspired by Russian folktales, last seasons’ The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls at the Rep.

Since the iteration of Bones last year, a new tale has been added and the ending has changed yet again (none of the three versions has ended the same way). Another advantage this year over last year, besides locale and coffers, is the return of Michael McQuilken (*11) of Old Soundroom, as the onstage musician absent last time. He joins the cast of Ringmaster, two divas, and three “roadies” who, as a troupe fallen upon hard times, tell their tales as Russian expats representing, Brain says, “art in need, teaching lessons on loss and how to deal with it.”

It’s not about “happily ever after,” it’s about the unhappy here and now and how to cope. Rather than stories of triumph, Bones showcases stories that give lessons in the mentality needed to survive, stories that in certain circles—such as the Russia of their day—might be considered, Brain says, “treasonous or blasphemous.” With contemporary Russia wading through another dark era, Bones tells us something about the kind of wit and wisdom Slavic culture derives from our existential predicament where a certain general malevolence—in nature, in humanity—is assumed.

And yet the show is not a downer. It’s about the stories humanity tells itself to keep despair at bay.

For more info, tickets, donation: here.

Bones in the Basket October 8-12, 2014 American Theatre of Actors 314 W. 54th Street, New York, NY

***

The Fatal Eggs Mikhail Bulgakov wrote a short story called “The Fatal Eggs” (1925) in order to satirize the political institutions of his day—and the work, as most of what Bulgakov wrote did, immediately ran afoul of authorities in Stalinist Russia. With its attitude toward the people as preyed upon by their government and toward science as sinister—especially when co-opted by the State—“The Fatal Eggs” managed to be a sci-fi tale with bite.

Director Dustin Wills says Bulgakov is “my jam,” and has turned to the writer before when stalled with a project. The first time, he turned to Black Snow which he had first seen in a high school theater competition (Wills' project was The Crucible). The Bulgakov play, about the rigors of the author’s relations with Stalin—who liked some of his work and then kept the writer on a short leash, with little opportunity for publication or staging—lit Wills’ interest. When he needed something to propose for a term-time Cab show his second year at YSD, Wills turned to Bulgakov again, and this time enlisted dramaturg Ilya Khodosh to translate. Their script of The Fatal Eggs is an original dramatic version in English.

As a director, Wills seems to like nothing better than a challenge, and one of the key aspects of the Eggs production at the Cab was how to stage its sci-fi effects—such as a monstrous snake caused by scientific tampering—and how to pack the numerous settings and the dizzying number of characters into the Cab’s minimal space. They did it, after a fashion. But now Eggs, with 7 actors—most former YSD students such as Chris Bannow (*14, co-artistic director of the Summer Cab, with Wills, in 2013), Ceci Fernandez, Michelle McGregor, and Khodosh (all YSD class of 2014 and all in the original production), joined this time by Josiah Bania (*13), Mickey Theis (*14), and two grads of NYU’s Tisch School, Jeanna Phillips and Sathya Sridharan—enacting 56 roles, will get a much fuller staging in a more expansive space. The auditorium for the Araca Project gives Wills a chance to go further into the sometimes extreme effects he’s been noted for in his work at YSD—such as the very physical comedy of Mary Laws’ Blueberry Toast, the outrageous comedy of Kate Tarker’s Thunderbodies, and the ingenious “improv” staging of his dark and endearing thesis show of Peter Pan. This time around, the space should help the narrative of Eggs so that it will be easier to keep the story straight through a use of more distinct settings, with inventive staging by the same creative team Wills worked with the first time around.

As the website describes it, The Fatal Eggs “skewers political incompetence and corruption, misguided faith in technology, a gullible and complacent populace, and a fear-mongering media.” In Bulgakov’s Russia, such skewering meant he would always be a kind of loose cannon whose work would not be staged; in today’s U.S., the play’s targets may seem at times broadly vaudevillian, but bringing together a popular genre like sci-fi with misgivings about the state of our world and of our future is by no means uncommon. Indeed, Bulgakov took his inspiration from H.G. Wells’ Food of the Gods, with its giant chickens and humans, and The War of the Worlds’ manner of disposing of a sci-fi threat. In Bulgakov’s hands, these incidents fuel doubts about the wisdom of “experimenting” with humanity—experiments which may include radical political solutions.

For more info, tickets, donation: here

The Fatal Eggs October 2-5, 2014 American Theatre of Actors 314 W 54th St, New York, NY

For those who have appreciated the student work of these directors, actors, and teams, this is a rare opportunity to see Cab shows expanded and developed further for an audience of New York theater folk and fans, and friends. And the shows complement each other well, though very different in tone: Two darkly comic tales with the macabre trappings of popular genres—the one of sci-fi, the other of folk tales. Both deriving their sense of the human comedy from acerbic Russian sources. Both featuring, in cast and crew, recent graduates of the Yale School of Drama program and directed, respectively, by two former artistic directors responsible for two very successful Summer Cabaret seasons, the one in 2010 and the other in 2013. Two weekends in October, when the thrill of fall should be in the air with the tang of dying leaves. Bones, eggs, so white, and so easily broken.

Get your tickets now!

Summer 2014 Issue of New Haven Review Now In

An announcement to all who have so patiently waited.  The Summer 2014 issue of New Haven Review is now in and starting to ship.  Featured in this issue... “Meditation on the Shore (Ocean City, NJ)” by Benjamin Goodney  (poetry)

“The New Bag Men. How it is in New Haven when you don’t win the lottery” Alexis Zanghi (essay)

“What Happened, the Winter You Found the Deer” Genevieve Valentine  (fiction)

“And then house exploded” and “And then I played hooky from the apocalypse” Nick DePascal  (poetrys)

“Over at the Shiva Piano Lounge the Woman Who Was Sawn in Half Is Drinking a Hipster Variant (Green Chartreuse and Gin) of Lydia E. Pinkham’s 1876 Original Vegetable Compound” Sue D. Burton (poetry)

“The City Voiced. R.E.M.’s Überlin” Katarzyna Jerzak (essay)

“James Taylor vs. the King” Douglas W. Milliken (fiction)

“The Cup of Sun” Maxwell Clark (poetry)

“Reckoning with Athol Fugard. On the playwright, age eighty-one, and his work” Leon de Kock (essay)

“Vague You” Mark Gosztyla (poetry)

“Hooky” E.A. Neeves (fiction)

“Depending Upon Whose Side You’re On. Living with John Lennon’s most personal Beatles song” Colin Fleming (essay)

“The Death Row Dream” Rachel Hadas (poetry)

To subscribe, just visit us here.

Yours,

Bennett Graff Publisher

A Season in Miniature

The 40th anniversary Summer Cabaret closed this past weekend with a four-day festival of short plays. “Summer Shorts” offered two series of four plays each, all by former YSD students, including recent graduates Hansol Jung, Mary Laws, Kate Tarker (all class of 2014), Rolin Jones—most recently celebrated for These! Paper! Bullets! last season at the Yale Rep—MJ Kaufman, and A. Rey Pamatmat. In general, the Festival turned the Summer Cab—after a summer of mostly lengthy plays—back to the brevity for which the term-time Cab is justly celebrated. What the usual 50-70 minute running time of the Cabaret displays is that much can be done in a short time. Of the plays in the festival, only Hansol Jung’s Undesirables—with music by last year’s Co-Artistic Director Chris Bannow—is an excerpt from a longer work. The others are self-contained plays—from 10 minutes to over 30—that mostly showcase a comically dramatic situation (Rolin Jones’ Ron Bobby Had Too Big a Heart) and/or comic and bizarre exchanges between a small cast (Jones’ Another in a Long Line of Idiot Children; Mary Laws’ All Saints; MJ Kaufman’s Your Living Room is Full of Ghosts, and Jones’ The Mercury and the Magic). Kate Tarker’s M.A.H. [A Museum Play] is more developed, with a plot that unfolds using six chararcters, and a key setting—the Museum of the National Tragedy. A. Rey Pamatmat’s We Have Cookies, though a two-person play, has more of a developmental arc than the other plays with a cast of two or three. And Undesirables—with 8 cast members—is an introduction to a musical with themes of immigration, assimilation, and alienation in the U.S. The two series were well-balanced with perhaps Series A’s larger cast plays edging out Series B in memorability.

The overall effect of the Festival was like seeing a Cabaret semester—which usually consists of 8 or 9 plays—in miniature. So, let’s take each Series as a unit:

Series A

Kicking off the Festival, Ron Bobby Had Too Big a Heart (Rolin Jones, directed by Luke Harlan) is a quick study of two murderous Southern would-be prom queens (Annelise Lawson, Shaunette Renée Wilson) out to avenge their shattered dreams on a local rival (Jenelle Chu); Jones’ verbiage is sort of slang Southern Gothic and crackles with comic intensity. Little more than a bite-size bit of satire on the guns-not-hugs rationale of contemporary America, the play jump-started the festival with a jolt.

M.A.H. [A Museum Play] (Kate Tarker, directed by Jessica Holt) offers a bizarre cast of misfits with Maia, a Mexican woman (Jenelle Chu, from airy to fiery) and Heiner, a German journalist (Matt Raich, awkwardly precise, as only a German can be) waiting to see someone at the Museum of the National Tragedy where nerdish Ellen (Aaron Bartz) presides over a private institution seeking to commemorate “national tragedy” in both a specific and generic sense. As Ellen, Bartz turns in his funniest performance of the summer as the sort of person one once encountered on late-night local or cable television, a huckster of indifferent skill, smarts, and resources making the best of his personal obsessions. He’s served by Shelby (Ato Blankson-Wood, as flappable office drone) and is interviewed by Monika (Annelise Lawson, one-part femme fatale and two-parts Kommendant). Meanwhile, the highly affecting Pearl (Shaunette Renée Wilson, in gleeful Southern Gothic mode) lurks behind the scenes and has her own intimate manner of determining Maia’s suitability for the job. Tied into the theme of our national manner of exploiting our tragedies are themes of racial stereotypes and gay—particularly lesbian—bashing. More than a bit confusing at times, the production felt close to the slap-dash quality of the term-time Cab where student-generated works still finding their feet are common.

Then it’s back to Rolin Jones for more inspired words in a very static tableau, Another in a Long Line of Idiot Children (directed by Jessica Holt): Mother (Maura Hooper, flamboyantly drunk as a sort of bottle-blonde Morticia) chugs half liters of wine while waxing confidential—about family, fortunes, fate and the ghastly nature of life—to her brooding son (Matt Raich, seemingly bound in a beach chair and mostly non-committal), while Father (Julian Elijah Martinez, with hilariously frightening tremors and a vague air of acceptance) listens in whilst playing Solitaire. One assumes Jones knows well the targets he’s aiming for—venom enough is levied at them—but the play, essentially a long, rambling tour de force monologue, seems a mere exercise in characterization by caricature.

Finally, Excerpt from Undesirables (Book/Lyrics by Hansol Jung, music by Chris Bannow; directed by Luke Harlan), takes us back to Ellis Island where, arguably, most of us have ancestors who passed through on their way to becoming Americans for our sakes. In “The Layout” and “In America,” Jung and Bannow have their cast revisit the traditional tale of America’s welcoming arms by apprizing us of the situations of the unwelcome “undesirables” who met with rebuff, particularly immigrants from Asia who were not welcome at all, as well as those “deviates”—homosexuals, prostitutes, and others of the European demimonde—who might bring their “undesirable” habits to the New Land. With the brio of the “it’s not so bad if you can sing about it” logic that seems to underpin every musical addressing hardship themes, Undesirables intimates an interesting tale about its unusual inmates. The excerpt ended Series A on a high note with the entire Festival cast present on stage.

Series B

“Playing possum” generally equates with pretending to be dead or inert, but in Rolin Jones’ The Mercury and the Magic (directed by Jessica Holt), two opossums, Joe (Ato Blankson-Wood) and Mike (Julian Elijah Martinez) are anything but passive. They “own the road” and assert themselves by running out when cars come by, frightening the drivers (Matt Raich). Meanwhile, Joe is questioning the nature of opossum-hood, as, indeed, any mammal might. The skit has the feel of the kind of thing Saturday Night Live is famous for—comical “what-ifs” that kill time before something else happens.

What happens next is A. Rey Pamatmat’s We Have Cookies. Directed by Jessica Holt, the play is the centerpiece of Series B, its themes more sharply delineated than most of Series A. Iris (Jenelle Chu) is benign and gracious, only too happy to welcome Blink (Annelise Lawson) into a community that does, indeed, have cookies. The cookies, a fairly impressive pile, are in the center of the table that separates the two women. The repetitive ‘cookie monster’ noise that occurs every time one of them—usually Blink—takes a cookie gets a bit old, but its almost percussive punctuation serves the task of bringing us back again and again to the central matter: Blink’s attempt to come to terms with simple facts of life: some people have cookies and other people don’t; cookies do not grow on trees but must be extracted from those who are capable of making cookies though without the wherewithal to enjoy them; cookies, once you become fond of them and take them for granted, seem to justify activities that will cement one’s advantage—such as, eventually, physical struggles between Iris and Blink themselves. Part allegory, part blackout sketch, We Have Cookies puts its actors through their paces as they have to work in quick, structured segments and go from rational and meek to aggressive and, in Lawson’s case, autocratic and demanding, and childishly gluttonous. While perhaps a bit too obvious in its intentions, Pamatmat’s play offers a quick study of how resources—particularly luxuries—become defining and defensible for any privileged population.

MJ Kaufman’s Your Living Room is Full of Ghosts, directed by Luke Harlan, begins with an absurd premise: Mom (Ato Blankson-Wood) has taken to living in Ikea showrooms; her daughter (Shaunette Renée Wilson) visits and tries to get at what’s going on. Ostensibly a send-up of the model lives that the middle class try desperately to live (here, the black protagonists might add a further racial dimension to the dry aspiration to live surrounded by the simplicity of Scandinavian design), the play yokes in other aspects of dysfunction, as between mother and daughter and between mother and neighbor. The pay-off seems a bit flat and the real pleasure of the exchange is in watching Blankson-Wood’s cool and pragmatic mother, who may be mad, and Wilson’s irritable reactions, jumping on a couch or settling with deep suspicion into a big armchair.

Dysfunction of a much more hysterical register animates Mary Laws’ All Saints, directed by Luke Harlan. Here, a couple, Thomas (Aaron Bartz) and Joan (Maura Hooper), already settled into bed and about to set the alarm for the morrow, must come to grips with Joan’s announcement: she is an alligator. The meeting of domestic drama and absurdist comedy goes as far as it can go, with Hooper’s reasonableness gradually becoming more fierce and animalistic. As with Jones’ Idiot Children, the play requires a comic tour de force from Hooper, crawling the floor in her jammies and reaching, nonplussed, for straws as her patient husband—constantly underlining how “sturdy” Joan is—defeats each of her points. Could she be an alien? A glass of water? Anything but a human woman! Laws’ script toys with the kinds of transformations that magic realism—and, indeed, saints’ lives—hold to be possible, and moves toward a conclusion that’s willing to let symbol or enigma stand for resolution.

Summer Shorts: A Festival of New Voices ended the season with themes that find common cause with the full-length plays presented during the summer, where the banality of domestic life, the oddity of relationships, the efforts to remember and invent, and to live meaningful and authentic lives were handled with effects that come from satire, vaudeville, classic naturalism, thrillers and improv. As eclectic as such approaches may be, the Summer Cabaret cast rose to an impressive variety of roles and situations, making the case that “voices at the forefront of American theater” are nothing if not conscious of the tensions of our times. And kudos to the tech people—especially Scenic Design by Kevin Bret Klakouski and Costumes by Steven M. Rotramel—for the wherewithal to compress so many different shows into such a short compass.

Up soon: a preview of the first three shows of term-time Cabaret, led by Hugh Farrell, Tyler Kieffer, Will Rucker and Molly Hennighausen. For now, a fond farewell to the team of the Yale Summer Cabaret 2014, led by Co-Artistic Directors Jessica Holt and Luke Harlan, and Managing Directors Gretchen Wright and Sooyoung Hwang.

Yale Summer Cabaret Summer Shorts: A Festival of New Voices

Written by Rolin Jones; Hansol Jung and Chris Bannow; MJ Kaufman; Mary Laws; A Rey Pamatmat; Kate Tarker Directed by Luke Harlan; Jessica Holt

Cast: Aaron Bartz; Ato Blankson-Wood; Jenelle Chu; Maura Hooper; AnneLise Lawson; Julian Elijah Martinez; Matt Raich; Shaunette Renée Wilson

Production Team: Associate Scenic Designer: Kevin Bret Klakouski; Costume Designer: Steven M. Rotramel; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Sound Designer: Kate Marvin; Stage Manager/Series A: Will Rucker; Stage Manager/Series B: Avery Trunko; Photography: Christopher Ash

August 14-17, 2014

This Island Earth

Review of Will Eno’s Middletown The Yale Summer Cabaret paid tribute to its 40-year existence last night and the festivities included a performance of Will Eno’s Middletown, directed by 2014 Co-Artistic Director Luke Harlan. It’s a very fitting match as the play opens with a welcoming monologue that extends to “everyone,” and certainly feels right as an address to “fellow Middletonians,” including the board members, supporters, founders, patrons, fans, and other friends of the Summer Cab who showed up for the evening. Ato Blankson-Wood’s delivery of the opening greeting invited comparisons to a stand-up comic working the crowd as his pacing had to accommodate bursts of laughter and delight from the audience. It would be hard to imagine a more apropos setting for the opening speech, or a better speech for the occasion.

Middletown certainly puts the Summer Cab on its mettle. It’s a large, sprawling play with 11 cast members, including a young teen (Livia Sarnelli), an ingenious set—complete with trapdoors—graced by Nick Hussong’s animated projections of drawings that outline backdrops—a stop sign, a tree, a house, and, at one point, a NASA control panel—and musical interludes that cover the numerous set-changes with the brio I associate with unspecified-TV show breaks. Eno’s play is also the most easily likeable of the Summer Cab’s offerings this year, full of hominess, wit, and a deep regard for the uncertainties of the human condition. Though there are laughs, there really aren’t jokes. The humor is of the “laughing at ourselves” variety. And though there’s death and dysfunction and an occasional threat of violence, the dramatic stakes don’t seem too daunting. Or rather say the stakes don’t seem heightened for dramatic effect. The stakes of the play are as high and deep as life itself.

A play you might easily have in mind while watching Middletown is Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Both plays use the setting of an “Anytown” as the vehicle for meditations about what makes humanity human, and both want us to contemplate the aeons that preceded our modern burgh’s grasp of its niceties and the vastness that surrounds its little plot of ground. The planet itself is just such a “plot” and Eno’s play nicely brings us back again and again to thoughts of this island earth: a monument propped on a village green, a landscaper planting a tree and digging up rocks (with a wink at Hamlet’s gravedigger), a story about a rock a rather dissolute young man found as a child, recalled by the town’s famous son—Greg, an astronaut—as he orbits earth, looking at the rock that is our world.

Eno’s play is very much a verbal construct. Dialogue and speeches lose their point if presented too naturalistically, and so he throws in odd asides and self-reflections, and, for some characters, occasional awareness of the audience, to keep the audience off-guard. Every character that appears before us—a Cop (Matt Raich), a Librarian (Annelise Lawson), a Tour Guide (Shaunette Renée Wilson), Tourists (Julian Elijah Martinez and Jenelle Chu)—may seem obvious and easily grasped, and yet Eno wants us to feel the friction between the role and the person in that role. At one point the landscaper (Martinez) and the Cop, his brother-in-law, trade quips about “person” as a temporary job. The deep “need” (as the male tourist expresses it) is to find things about life on earth that can please, amuse or inspire us, distracting us from the presence of death that is everywhere around us, much as outer space surrounds our globe.

The spaciness of certain elements of the show are grounded by what seems to be the budding romance—or maybe just strong personal attachment—between newly arrived neglected wife and soon-to-be-mother Mary (Maura Hooper) and vaguely employed handyman and hobbyist John (Aaron Bartz). Played with forthright charm, their meetings are cute and coy with a kind of anxious agreeableness, commiserating on “dark nights” and sleeping troubles and, generally, trying to figure out what living together in the same place at the same time actually means. Thus the play’s many gestures at how we all occupy similar places keep us implicated, as well as letting us consider how “sense of place” is communicated by what is simply “understood” by inhabitants.

Central to Eno’s vision is the character of Mechanic (Aubbie Merrylees, tremulous and troubled) who provides, in his disaffected and direct asides and uneasy friction with the status quo, the soul of the play. Suspected of everything from bashing a mailbox to writing a dirty word on a sign, Mechanic is the loose cannon, remembered by the Librarian for an odd essay he wrote as a child, and currently appearing in costumes to entertain kids at the hospital as part of a plea deal for an unnamed offense. The play opens with the Cop giving him a hard time for sitting on a bench and a demand that he feel “awe” while being strangled with a billy club. Mechanic becomes something of a Greek chorus or audience surrogate—crouching outside windows, eavesdropping, giving us time to think of some reasons he started drinking again—and, after a sudden death scene, his dance and chant while dressed in a Native American costume epitomizes the play’s sense of how the inauthentic can become authentic (enough) when we need it.

In general, the cast works hard at the timing and pitch of Eno’s carefully calibrated dialogue, which shines at its highest gloss in the exchange between Ato Blankson-Wood’s doctor and Maura Hooper’s musing, bemused, and very pregnant Mary. The doctor’s well-meant string of palliatives about how to behave toward an infant are filled with Eno’s sense both of human precariousness and our (so far) successful instinct for survival. Likewise the scene amongst audience members just before the intermission (which knowingly trumps the chitchat at Cab tables) points toward another of Eno’s great themes: how language communicates and miscommunicates simultaneously, so that, as Mary says, we’re all “just making different sounds with [our] mouth[s].”

Playful and profound, Eno’s Middletown throws its arms around the world in a loving embrace while also retaining a sense of the prickly absurdities and inconveniences that rankle our togetherness in our placid orbit. Luke Harlan’s ambitious production, mounted under the constraints of the Summer Cab’s relentless schedule, highlights the tight weave of the social fabric and the warmth of breathing bodies. This is theater that's as alive as you are.

Middletown has three more showings: tonight and tomorrow night at 8, and Sunday night at 7.

Middletown By Will Eno Directed by Luke Harlan

Scenic Designer: Christopher Thompson; Costume Designer: Steven M. Rotramel; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Sound Designer: Kate Marvin; Projection Designer: Nick Hussong; Stage Manager: Avery Trunko

Cast: Aaron Bartz, Ato Blankson-Wood, Jenelle Chu, Maura Hooper, Annelise Lawson, Julian Elijah Martinez, Aubie Merrylees, Matt Raich, Stephanie Rolland, Livia Sarnelli, Shaunette Renée Wilson

Photographs by Christopher Ash

Yale Summer Cabaret July 31-August 10, 2014

There's No Success Like Failure

Review of We Are Proud to Present... Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, between the Years 1884-1915, the third play in Yale Summer Cabaret’s 40th Anniversary season, isn’t a play so much as a provocation.

As directed by Co-Artistic Director Jessica Holt, the play is willing to demonstrate the way theater can fail, even the way it can fail to get off the ground. We watch a group of actors—designated only by number, Actor 1 through 6, or by generic tags—White Man, Black Man—try to put together a presentation on the genocide of the Herero tribe by colonial Germans in the years designated. When compared to the murderous machinations that the Third Reich perpetrated in Europe, the near-extermination of the Hereros, like the near-extermination of certain Native American tribes, is generally not so well acknowledged by history, in part because, in the African case, the methods and the outcome are not so well documented. All that the cast—and presumably the playwright—has to draw upon are letters home written by German soldiers, strangers in a strange land trying to keep up their spirits by addressing “the girl they left behind” who is figured in the play as one omni-Fraulein, Sarah (Jenelle Chu).

The provocation of the script, then, doesn’t come simply from that fact that, in letting us in on “the process” by which characters are formed and situations created, we have to accept how tenuous all that is, but from the fact that these actors—mostly out of their depth, and led by Actor Six (Shaunette Renée Wilson) as a kind of den mother—confront themes of racism and colonialism and genocide and must find a way to make such matters “portrayable.” And that, as they learn, is nearly impossible.

Which is a way of saying that Drury’s play points out the lack of clothing on almost any emperor you’d care to name, not least the idea of “historical verisimilitude” or “realism.” Every staging is an approximation of something but that “something” is never “what actually happened.” Even the letters back home—the documents, the evidence—say little about what is really going on. Granted, there may be ways to make a documentary on the subject, but that’s not the purpose of theater: theater has to create a representation, it must find a way to make an audience experience something that—in this case—it would probably rather not experience. Why do certain peoples detest and work to destroy certain other peoples? Why are certain peoples viewed as “less than human” by certain other peoples who have decided that they alone meet the criteria for “human”? There are no adequate answers to these questions and yet Drury’s play—and the commendable cast and crew of the Summer Cab production—attempt to grapple with them, for our benefit.

In the early going, there are fertile moments of vaudevillian goofing that let us find some amusement in how theater treats us to amusement. By giving us young actors (a strength of the production is that, as seldom happens, the actors are supposed to be and are twentysomethings) not too versed in history or playwriting as our surrogates, Drury confronts us—with good comic timing from Holt and her cast—with the ignorance that underlies, often, our efforts to “understand” and “empathize;” such ignorance can sometimes become the basis for deliberate acts of violence. Not knowing and not wanting to know are close kin.

The actors want to know just enough to make a show—we can say that, mostly, their hearts are in the right place—but what they mostly show is that they don’t know enough. What they know are what we know: the racist clichés, the racial stereotypes, the bad attempts at accents, the mimicry that can’t help becoming mockery. Early on, an argument about “Cologne” or “Köln” as the name of the German town demonstrates how even place-names and places can be in seen in two ways: by those who live there, and by those who are outsiders. This becomes particularly pertinent when the African-American actors disagree on how to characterize Africans (neither has ever been to Africa, much less Namibia), and even go so far as to imply there is a right and wrong way to “be black.”

A comical, and also very pertinent, moment occurs when Actor 3 (Aaron Bartz—in his third play this summer, demonstrating great versatility and commitment to the Cabaret experience) “becomes” Actor 6’s “grandma” and, while his “mamminess” is a cliché, his improv does get at a truth of the play: you can put on someone else’s shoes, but that doesn't make them your shoes. Ultimately none of the actors (in the play) are able to own their parts or to create the presentation they are aiming for. The presentation we get shows us why they fail.

What makes that “failure” so powerful is that it draws upon the oldest feature of theater—catharsis. And catharsis, as ancient theater teaches, needs a scapegoat. Here the scapegoat is well-chosen: Actor 2 (Ato Blankson-Wood) is the one who is most critical of the others' ill-informed efforts, calling them on their lack of knowledge and their willingness to work with stereotypes. In making Actor 2 the “black victim,” the cast gets uglier and uglier, letting us see not only the logic of domination that can lead to murder, but the group mind that delights in the discomfort of “the Other.” The moment—with its insistent chant, “I’ve been black my whole life” and “ooga booga”—attains both a pinnacle (dramatically) and a nadir (socially). The aftermath is played well by the cast as tantamount to kids lost and self-conscious when the make-believe goes too far then ends abruptly. As the parental dictum would have it: “It’s fun until somebody gets hurt.”

And when it comes to humanity’s anxious policing of its racial and national and ideological boundaries, somebody always gets hurt.

Three of the actors playing actors we have seen before this summer: Aaron Bartz makes Actor 3 a fairly gifted improv actor with good instincts; Ato Blankson-Wood makes Actor 2 rather truculent but also the voice of reason, which, as things go, generally becomes a casualty when “the blood is up”; as Actor 4, Julian Elijah Martinez is primarily a reactor, though we might say, in the end, he’s the conscience of the play; new to the summer season are Matt Raich as Actor 1, the actor least comfortable with what his role—the soldier pining for his homeland or policing newly claimed German territory against its former Herero inhabitants—demands, until he finds a “motivation” in Southern U.S. racism; Jenelle Chu gives Actor 5/Sarah a certain ditzy charm as she “acts out” her cat or pines or breaks into “Edelweiss” or a bad German accent, becoming a kind of Nazi-ish Über-Mutter; and Shaunette Renée Wilson’s Actor 6 is the director with an eye on the ball, whose acknowledgement that she saw in the face of a Herero woman in a magazine her own grandmother forms the personal basis for the entire process. In other words, this isn’t simply an exercise in historical empathy, it’s a question of how to recognize legacy and claim kin when the legacy has been expunged and the kinship is a vague racial recognition.

Jackie Sibblies Drury, Jessica Holt, and the Yale Summer Cabaret team provide a provocation that entertains and discomfits. If I have a criticism it’s at the level of “plot points”—Drury asks actors to be not very good actors so that they break character inappropriately, or “unconsciously” use accents, or act their way into dead ends, to serve her purposes. Such things are part of the process, certainly, and generally that’s behind the scenes; here, much rides on not getting it right in just the right way.

And, as has been the case all summer, the tech team delivers—special mention for Andrew F. Griffin’s Lighting (this is really one where you don’t even notice how much work it takes to make it all seem “natural”), Nick Hussong’s very valuable Projections, and Kate Marvin’s Sound Design which makes you wonder why any production ever uses the sound of blanks when a gunshot is needed.

We Are Proud to Present… plays for two more nights—tonight and tomorrow. See it if you can get in.

We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, formerly known as Southwest Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, between the Years 1884-1915 By Jackie Sibblies Drury Directed by Jessica Holt

Scenic Designer: Christopher Thompson; Costume Designer: Steven M. Rotramel; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Projection Designer: Nick Hussong; Sound Designer: Kate Marvin; Stage Manager: Will Rucker

Yale Summer Cabaret July 11-July 26, 2014

Yale Summer Cabaret: Summer Shorts Festival

Tonight the Yale Summer Cabaret resumed with Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, formerly known as Southwest Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, between the Years 1884-1915, directed by Jessica Holt, which runs until July 26. It will be followed by Will Eno’s Middletown, directed by Luke Harlan. The first is, at first, a “laugh riot,” Harlan says, that gradually becomes a very moving experience that boldly examines questions of race in America. In returning, the Cab space has been partially reconfigured from the set-up of the first two plays of the season, with the main difference being the placement of the audience: both in and around the action. Actors may be seated at tables with the viewers.

Then the space will be completely changed for Middletown, involving a cast of 11, with the action set up in a different location and most likely using a higher stage platform than has generally been used at the Cab. After Middletown’s run from 31 July to 10 August, including a special 40th Anniversary celebration dinner by invitation, the final slot in the season is occupied by a festival of short plays.

Both Co-Artistic Directors Holt and Harlan have considerable previous experience with festivals of short plays and are enthusiastic about what a shorter playing time affords. “Short plays are often more challenging,” Harlan said, “less safe, and more willing to move beyond boundaries.” A full-length play requires a complete investment in an idea, one able to be fleshed out into a full show. Short plays can make their points more quickly, with greater concentration, and sometimes greater risks.

The intention all along has been to invite plays from alums of the Yale School of Drama. Everyone Holt and Harlan approached was interested. In two cases, with plays by A. Rey Pamatmat and MJ Kaufman, the plays were written expressly for the festival. Others are plays that pre-existed, and one play, by Hansol Jung, is an excerpt from a musical that had been proposed for last year’s term time Cabaret.

Here are the plays, none of which has been previously staged:

Rolin Jones, much lauded for his mash-up of Shakespeare and The Beatles in the Yale Rep show, These! Paper! Bullets!, provides three short plays, each about 10 minutes: Ron Bobby Had Too Big a Heart; Sovereignty; The Mercury and the Magic.

Hansol Jung, whose play Cardboard Piano was at the Carlotta Festival here in the spring, offers an excerpt from a musical, The Undesirables.

MJ Kaufman, winner of the 2013 ASCAP Cole Porter Prize in Playwriting, whose Sagittarius Ponderosa was featured in Carlotta 2013, presents Your Living Room is Full of Ghosts, which is set in an IKEA.

Mary Laws, whose Bird Fire Fly played in Carlotta 2014, returns with All Saints.

A. Rey Pamatmat, recipient of the 2012-13 Hodder Fellowship in Playwriting at Princeton, wrote We Have Cookies specifically for the Festival.

Kate Tarker, author of Thunderbodies, which appeared in Carlotta 2014, offers M.A.H. (A Museum Play).

The plays will be presented in two sets of three plays each, Series A on Thursday, August 14, Series B on Friday, August 15, and both Series on Saturday and Sunday, to close out the Summer Cabaret Season with a marathon of short plays. The plays inclusive to each Series TBA later.

According to Harlan, the playwrights were asked to submit plays less than 30 minutes in length, though one or two may be a bit longer. The entire running time for a Series is 90-100 minutes. Harlan says the majority of the plays are comedies, though comedies that risk violence and, in some cases, look at unpleasant aspects of America. The playwrights were also informed about the actors available for the Festival. There will be 8 actors, all of whom will have been seen during the course of the Summer Season. Two of the short plays feature larger casts, while some require 3 or 4 actors, and there are a few 2 handers as well.

Holt and Harlan will trade-off directing duties, so that each will be involved more or less to the same degree in staging the plays. The strong collaboration that has been shown so far in this year’s Summer Cabaret should be even more on view in this final effort.

Regulars of the Cab know that a surprisingly effective theatrical experience can be provided by short plays, and with the varied casts, playwrights, and running times, the Summer Short Festival offers an excellent opportunity to see the kinds of things the Cab does best.

With only three opportunities to see each Series, spread over four days, secure your tickets early for the Summer Shorts Festival. The end of summer is sooner than you think.

Yale Summer Cabaret 40th Anniversary Season Summer Shorts Festival, August 14-17, 2014

For more information: Summercabaret.org

Bygone Tunes of Boomer Summers

The Bikinis, a 60s Musical Beach Party offers a fun night tripping down Memory Lane—a lane paved with some of the big hits of the era. The four women—Annie (Valerie Fagan), her sister Jodi (Lori Hammer), Barbara (Regina Levert) and Karla (Karyn Quackenbush)—from the Jersey showr have a mission: to stir up memories of beloved Sandy Shores, a trailer park—er, mobile home resort—at the beach that has been given a big money offer from major developers. Will the locals sell out on their past? That question seems to put us firmly in the Eighties, when “the legacy” of the Sixties was a going concern in the era of rampant corporate glut and the lifestyles of the rich and predatory. Indeed, the most recent song in this nostalgic trip back in time is from 1982—and that’s where the conceit of all this begins to flag a bit. The songs from the Sixties have almost talismanic familiarity, but the later songs—do they catalyze a sense of time and place in the same way?

In the first half, the songs sustain the fantasy well. The four women formed a purely local girl-group dreaming of producing “a 45” (“remember 45s?” Karla asks soulfully) to get on American Bandstand. This plot lets the four take turns leading us through some of the best fun-time music available: “It’s In His Kiss (The Shoop Shoop Song),” “Heat Wave,” “ Be My Baby,” “Shop Around,” “Under the Boardwalk.” If such music brings with it visions of “beach blanket bingo,” so be it. The game girls enact for us the risible plot of a favorite beach bimbo film—including the risqué theme song “Beach Blankets, Boards and Balls”—that includes a “Secret Agent Man,” and cameos by Nancy “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” Sinatra, and Elvis himself, “Shakin’ in the Sand.” The story moves between retrospect—as the girls tell the tale of their “act”—and the present, where a vote for sell or stay has been placed before us (aka, the good people of Sandy Shores), while sisters Annie (stay) and Jodi (sell) vie for swaying our sympathies.

By the time The Bikinis realize their dream—in the Second Part—the changing times have produced psychedelia and groups of girls singing together are “an endangered species.” I’m assuming “The Age of Aquarius”—the go-to song for that Summer of Love era—was unavailable, so we get “Time of the Season,” “Incense and Peppermints” (the statement about girl groups no longer cutting it is apropos), and then Annie—the one with the hippie gleam in her eye—gives us a rousing evocation of Melanie, a performer at Woodstock and a girl from Queens, who was a familiar hippie chick for a time. Also in this segment, Karla sings “Dedicated to the One I Love” for all the boys overseas. The bridge between the unabashed silliness of the First Part and the changing fortunes in the Second is the simple fact that “where the boys are” went from being the shores of Jersey to being the jungles of Nam.

This aspect of the show—trying to interject a tribute to soldiers as well as demonstrating the “make love, not war” enthusiasms of many of the young at the time—stretches a bit thin the show's aim at a generational credo. And yet it’s commendable that the show’s authors, Ray Roderick and James Hindman, with musical arrangements and additional music and lyrics by Joseph Baker, try to work in one of the mainstays of the Baby Boomers’ youth: the war. It’s impossible to understand how youth culture developed without keeping in mind the draft and the increasing unpopularity of the military commitments in Southeast Asia, symbolized here by a telling choice: Bobby Darin’s “Simple Song of Freedom.” It’s not that Darin was ever “the voice of a generation,” but when the singer of “Splish Splash” and “Beyond the Sea” starts singing songs with “a message,” then the times were a-changin’ indeed.

The show’s main attention is to the experience of women, and since women weren’t being drafted, theirs is either a “wait and worry” or a “march and protest” experience. Then comes the era of divorce and ERA, and—fittingly to a country-style tune—the songs of feisty women dumping errant men. Linda Ronstadt’s cover of Buddy Holly’s “When Will I Be Loved” is a well-chosen referent point as well, as one of the most successful singers ever showed the purchasing power of women for a woman. The “change” is best expressed by Melissa Manchester’s Easy Listening classic, “Midnight Blue”—“once more for all the old times.”

But even the attempt to cash in on disco—Barbara knows a bouncer at a club—with “Last Dance,” “I’m Every Woman,” and “I Will Survive” falls hard as the phase doesn’t last. It’s at that point that “It’s Raining Men” takes us toward camp. But what about Sandy Shores? Who will decide the fate of the happy hunting ground for the bikinis of tomorrow?

The Bikinis mixes both story-telling and illustration into its playlist and is best at letting the audience relive the appeal of the era's music, which is undeniable. And tying the songs to historical changes—in the country and in the lives of women—gives the show more dimension, though almost more than it can handle. As the story of four women who shared the times together The Bikinis will no doubt be a great night out for any who shared that road as well.

As Barbara, Regina Levert has the best voice for belting and gets to shimmy in a shiny disco dress; as Karla, Karyn Quackenbush does comic turns—such as a “Don” calling for an Italian number, or Annette complete with big . . . mouse ears—and is the most expressive as the ditzy little blonde of the group; as the sisters at loggerheads, Jodi and Annie, Lori Hammel is the more sensible and Valerie Fagan the more idealistic; Hammel adds fun by acting the male parts—take-offs on Elvis and Frankie Avalon. One of the interesting aspects of the show is seeing how the figures of entertainment of earlier eras become tropes for a bygone Americana that is always, from the perspective of the present, a Golden Age of fun and excitement, even when it wasn’t.

As a send-up, a tribute, and a re-cap, The Bikinis keeps it fun and bouncy, with even a touch of vaudeville . . . but no bikinis.

Long Wharf Theatre and Miracle or 2 Productions present The Bikinis Created and written by Ray Roderick and James Hindman Music Arrangements by Joseph Baker Additional Music and Lyrics by Joseph Baker and Ray Roderick Directed and Choreographed by Ray Roderick

Cast: Valerie Fagan; Regina Levert; Karyn Quackenbush; Lori Hammel; Lighting Design: Jamie Roderick; General Manager: James Hindman; Associate Director: Becky Timms; Associate Producer: Nancy Rosati; Musical Supervisor: Joseph Baker; Musical Direction: Dan Pardo

Long Wharf Theatre July 9-27, 2014

50th Anniversary Season of the Long Wharf Theatre

Now that the International Festival of Arts & Ideas has come and gone, and even the Yale Summer Cabaret is on a hiatus until it resumes on the 11th, what is a theater person to do? One possibility is start thinking about next season.

Last week at the Long Wharf Theatre, Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein and Associate Artistic Director Eric Ting, in a conversation on stage, situated in two comfy chairs, outlined the coming 50th Anniversary Season of the New Haven theater staple, giving a nearly full house details on the process behind their choices and introducing three dramatic readings from the final three plays to be featured.

Ting, taking the role of interviewer, asked Edelstein “what is the process” in picking plays for a season. There was a charge of applause indicating that many in the audience wonder about that very question. While allowing that the process of selection is the “hardest thing,” Edelstein alluded to his 25 year experience of “picking seasons” both at Long Wharf and in Portland. He mentioned some of the logistics that affect decisions—most notably the “shrinking size of shows,” so that shows with huge casts are harder and harder to put on. And yet Edelstein said he always begins with what he “dreams of doing”—the shows he most would like to put on or see put on. “All our dreams are never realized,” he admitted, but he never loses sight of the main purpose: that a play “say something about what it’s like to be alive now.” And, throwing the question open to the audience a bit, he asked how many would agree that the future of the theater is in new writing and in finding works that appeal to a younger demographic. Most present seemed to agree heartily with this proposition.

Alluding to “the bumpy road and false starts and detours” of a process Edelstein called “complicated” and “non-predictive,” he also spoke of the three main desiderata: that the play be relevant to our local community, that it reflect the times and the country we all live in, and that the season end with a balanced budget. He added that one of the key questions each year is what the centerpiece of the season will be. This year, for the 50th anniversary of the Long Wharf Theatre, he gave that question considerable consideration, with some ideas including works by Arthur Miller, such as The Crucible, which was the first play produced at the Long Wharf, or Death of a Salesman which has never been staged there and which Edelstein would like to direct, though, he added, he felt it was “the wrong statement” at this time.

What play did fit the bill? Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which Edelstein defended (against those who hear the title and think “high school production”) as perhaps the greatest play in the U.S. canon, a play “misunderstood” as “folksy” when in fact it was conceived by its author, who attended Yale and is buried in Hamden, as engaging with avant-garde literature of its time. What’s more, set in “all white” New Hampshire in the early 1900s, Our Town has come to seem a bit of a relic of a more homogeneous America. Edelstein intends to change all that by directed an interracial, multicultural Our Town that “looks like our town now.” He admitted to being “nervous as hell” about tackling this perhaps over-familiar chestnut with new vision as the first play of the season, then added a further wrinkle: the play would be cast using only Long Wharf “alum”—actors and crew who had worked there before. The combination of American classic, Long Wharf familiars, and a more contemporary approach should add up to an Our Town that—if you live in this town—you will not want to miss. Edelstein assured us that we “will not be disappointed.”

OUR TOWN BY THORNTON WILDER DIRECTED BY GORDON EDELSTEIN CLAIRE TOW STAGE IN THE C. NEWTON SCHENCK III THEATRE OCTOBER 9-NOVEMBER 2, 2014 PRESS OPENING: WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2014

Ting, still the interviewer, set up the next play on the bill by restating a “story” he heard that author, comedian, actor, playwright Steve Martin, upon seeing Edelstein’s version of Martin’s The Underpants at Hartford Stage last year decided that he must have the director do Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile. Edelstein recounted how he met Martin at a production of The Underpants and knew that Martin felt the show had been done to perfection. Next thing he knew, he heard that Martin told the producers planning a revival of Lapin Agile that, it’s hoped, may go to Broadway for the first time, that Edelstein was the man for the job. Consequently, Long Wharf audiences will find another clever Martin comedy offered up with a sense of both its verbal absurdities and its slapstick pace, as was The Underpants. And if it does get to Broadway, you can say you saw it here first.

PICASSO AT THE LAPIN AGILE BY STEVE MARTIN DIRECTED BY GORDON EDELSTEIN CLAIRE TOW STAGE IN THE C. NEWTON SCHENCK III THEATRE NOVEMBER 26-DECEMBER 21, 2014 PRESS OPENING: WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2014

Next is the return of Dael Orlandersmith, the playwright, actress, and poet, whose works have “quite a fan base in New Haven,” where Yellowman and The Blue Album were staged at Long Wharf. Forever will be on its world premiere run, beginning in LA and stopping in New Haven en route to New York. Centered around the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, where, it so happens, American expats such as rock star Jim Morrison and renowned African-American author Richard Wright are buried among French literary figures and other notables, Forever deals with the ghosts of the past, and the sense of family—“the ones we were born into, the ones we create for ourselves”—and is, Edelstein says, Orlandersmith’s “most powerful piece yet.”

FOREVER BY DAEL ORLANDERSMITH DIRECTED BY NEEL KELLER WORLD PREMIERE STAGE II JANUARY 2-FEBRUARY 1, 2015 PRESS OPENING: WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 7, 2015

Called by the New York Times one of the best comedies of the 2013-14 season in New York, Joshua Harmon’s Bad Jews takes up the theme of legacy where two cousins, one male and one female, battle over a religious necklace, an heirloom that their late grandfather, a survivor of the Holocaust, kept concealed on his person throughout his years of captivity. The jousting between the staunchly Hebraic Daphna and her less observant cousin Liam fuels a play of the comic ties and trials of blood relations. The except on stage at the Long Wharf preview readily attested to the comic potential of Daphna’s belligerence and the hapless niceness of Liam’s non-Jewish girlfriend in the face of such superior attitudes.

BAD JEWS BY JOSHUA HARMON STAGE II FEBRUARY 18-MARCH 22, 2015 PRESS OPENING: WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2015

For the penultimate production of the season, director Eric Ting brings us a play that has its finger on the dismaying news events that continue to surface in the supposedly “post-racial” America of the Obama presidency. Kimber Lee’s brownsville song (b-side for tray) tells of the aftermath, for an interracial family, of the loss of young, engaging and promising Tray. Revealed to us in flashbacks, Tray’s life involves, in the scene enacted for us at the preview, managing a Starbucks where his step-mother, who abandoned Tray and his younger sister to their grandmother’s care, shows up, looking for a job. An “issue play on some level,” Ting said, “at heart it’s about family,” and the role it plays in dealing with tragic events and the hardships of contemporary life.

brownsville song (b-side for tray) BY KIMBER LEE DIRECTED BY ERIC TING CLAIRE TOW STAGE IN THE C. NEWTON SCHENCK III THEATRE A co-production with Philadelphia Theatre Company MARCH 25-APRIL 19, 2015 PRESS OPENING: WEDNESDAY, APRIL 1, 2015

The final play of the season, directed by Edelstein, will be the world premiere of The Second Mrs. Wilson, a play that revisits an interesting historical situation. President Woodrow Wilson’s first wife died while he was in office and he became the first president to woo and wed a woman while president. That would be interesting enough, perhaps, but the situation of the play is more pressing: not long after the wedding, Wilson suffered a stroke and was largely incapacitated. Di Pietro’s play looks at a situation in which a woman, persona non grata to the Cabinet and others trying to run the president’s administration, has to take charge in a man’s world in her husband’s stead as de facto head of the Executive Branch. In the scenes enacted at the preview, we saw Edith Boling Galt, a widow, charm the donnish president Wilson; in the second we watched her take command, delicately but firmly, of a meeting with one of the chiefs of staff. A play about the kinds of tests and resources in life that demand strong resolve, the play is relevant to the changing role of women in American politics.

THE SECOND MRS. WILSON BY JOE DiPIETRO DIRECTED BY GORDON EDELSTEIN CLAIRE TOW STAGE IN THE C. NEWTON SCHENCK III THEATRE WORLD PREMIERE MAY 6-31, 2015 PRESS OPENING: MAY 13, 2015

Subscriptions are already on sale. Single tickets will go on sale Monday, August 4. For more information about the 50th anniversary season, visit www.longwharf.org or call 203-787-4282.

Death-defiers

Review of Traces Traces, the production by Les 7 Doigts de la Main at this year’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas, presents an varied mix of incredible circus tricks, busy choreography and musical interludes, blending rougher street effects with elements that are more lighthearted. The troupe’s stated intention of incorporating harsher themes—as evidenced by the title’s reference to what we leave after we die or after our very civilization is gone—could be seen in bits like the drawing of chalk outlines around fallen bodies, a voice-over invoking fall-out from nuclear attack, and theatrics that seemed to involve edgier interactions such as playful punches, rough-housing, and taking aim at one another, together with inscriptions about memory.

The upshot of the show is that the kind of acrobatic theater the group specializes in can be adapted to different moods and occasions. Against the sense of fatality in the world at large, the troupe offers a banded-together sense of purpose, even as the show made considerable efforts to differentiate the players. Introduced by speaking individually into a hanging mike—like the kind familiar from the boxing ring—the members of the cast were also presented by typed fact sheets that, as projections, gave us the vital statistics of each member fleshed out by three adjectives to describe personality or attitude. There’s even a moment at the end where each member presents themselves as if contestants of a reality show, beseeching votes from the audience. The combined effect is to convince us of the reality of the “characters”—which is to say the presented personalities of the cast: Lucas Boutin, Mathieu Cloutier, Hou Kai, LJ Maries, Fletcher Sanchez, Renaldo Williams, Naomie Zimmerman-Pichon.

As contributors to the overall effect, each also has their specialty, though in the fast paced action it can be difficult to keep track of who does what. There is a blend of exhilarating, gravity-defying stunts in climbing poles and leaping between poles, with interludes such as a song Cloutier plays on guitar, and each member takes turns at a rough-hewn piano, treating it as a means to compete further. Some of the more lyrical aspects of the show fall to its only female member—her ballet-like movements suspended in space was a high point of tension and grace, and her solo turn with a settee and book—you’ve never seen anyone treat furniture that way though every child perhaps tries—is fun; she also engages in a charming pas de deux with Renaldo Williams early in the show. Other memorable escapades include the entire company working out a delightful routine with skateboards to a jazzy arrangements of “Paper Moon,”a stunning ride on a spinning hoop, or cyr wheel, intricate work on aerial straps, wild vaults from a teeterboard, and, my favorite segment, the endlessly satisfying and inventive leaps through rings in varied configurations and postures.

The troupe may feel that their kind of theater should be able to make more of a point, but to hear the gasps of delight of the audience and the glee of many of the children present is to see the point of such theater. The purpose of 7 Doigts de la Main is to inspire us with defiance of gravity, with amazing feats that most humans can only dream of doing, and to let us exult in what seems effortless precision, strength, agility and camaraderie.

International Festival of Arts & Ideas presents

Traces Les 7 Doigts de la Main

Direction and choreography: Shana Carroll, Gypsy Snider; Assistant to the Artistic Director: Francisco Cruz; on stage: Lucas Boutin, Mathieu Cloutier, Hou Kai, LJ Maries, Fletcher Sanchez, Renaldo Williams, Naomie Zimmeran-Pichon; Touring Team: Tour Manager: Anna Cassel; Sound: Sébastien Marion; Lights: Olivier Rosa; Rigger: Stéphane Beauchet; Artistic Crew: Lights: Nol van Genuchten; Costumes: Manon Desmarais; Set & Porps Original Design: Flavia Hevia; Set & Props Adaptation, Music & Soundscape: Les 7 doigts de la main; Video: Paul Ahad; André Biron; Les 7 doigts de la main; Props Adaptation: Bruno Tassé; Head Coaches: Jérôme Le Baut and Francisco Cruz; Coach for Sofa and Aerial Strap Acts: Isabelle Chassé; Cyr Wheel Coach: Krin Haglund; Piano Coach: Sophie Houle et Francisco Cruz; Stage Manager: Patrick Loubert; Musics for Hand to Hand and Aerial Acts: Seth Stachowski

University Theatre, York Street June 24-27, 8pm; June 28, 1pm & 5pm

Coming to Grips

Review of The Events David Grieg’s The Events, brought to the International Festival of Arts & Ideas by Actors Touring Company, directed by Ramin Gray, is a play very much of our time. In the twenty-first century, so far, there seems to be no end to random acts of violence directed, most often, by a lone gunman against some more or less helpless community—school children, college students in class, movie-goers, office-workers, or, in Norway (the event that jump-started Grieg’s effort), campers. In The Events, “the events” refer to a young man opening fire on a community choir in an unnamed town. Claire, a clergyperson and the leader of the choir, survived, and has been trying to come to terms with the events.

One way to do that is by getting her choir-members to deal with it through various efforts—from the intrusions of shamanic exercises to, one supposes, consciousness-raising forays into multicultural music. That’s the humorous side of the play, which stems from the fact that Claire, played with very natural, real-person charm by Derbhle Crotty, is essentially an outgoing, positive person who finds herself trying desperately to fit the atrocity into a worldview that could make sense of it. The reality of Claire’s position as a choir-instructor is ably supported by the play’s use of actual choirs, local to wherever the play is staged. This adds not only actual members of the community to the drama, but also creates, for the viewer, a very telling sense of the random and fortuitous. You may know someone onstage, or not, but in either case, you are aware that those onstage might as easily be from the audience. Grieg’s view of what makes our experiences “common” takes its impetus from the way “we” all suffer from attacks upon random citizenry and translates it into a changing collection of persons who just happen to be there when you are. The night I saw the play, the Greater New Haven Community Choir took the stage and did a fine job, particularly in the soprano parts.

Claire, obsessed and still likely in shock and mourning, goes off to interview those who knew the young man—The Boy, and everyone else Claire interacts with, including her gamely supportive partner Catriona, is played by the same actor, in this case Clifford Samuel. The interest this affords is in letting the “others” to Claire’s search for answers morph at will between different persons. In a sense, Claire is always interrogating “The Boy,” so why not let him be everyone? The problem it creates has to do with characterization, where little effort is made to differentiate the people Claire comes into contact with. At one point, interviewing the man The Boy chose as political spokesperson—a racist whose views seem to jibe with those who, for instance, would drive all non-indigenous persons out of a once homogenous country--, as well as The Boy’s father, and another boy The Boy went to school with, the differences in person are mainly suggested by changing to a different chair. That’s not so troubling when these persons can be reduced to different speeches of denial—denial that they had much to do with The Boy and insistence that they cannot be implicated in his murderous actions—but it is a bit more bothersome when Catriona and The Boy himself take the stage.

These latter two roles aren’t simply ancillary to Claire and The Boy. Catriona takes on stature as the person whom Claire herself begins to abuse in her anxiety. Those events seem to suggest that trying to deal with violence—as a choice, as an act, as an aftermath—might make bullies of us all, but that level of the play would be aided by a different actor for the role. Similarly, using the members of a local choir to be, en masse, a character, or, in small ways, voices who read from scripts to ask questions or respond as audience members to The Boy’s fantasy of himself as a spokesman for a celebrated warrior ideal (or is that Claire’s fantasy of him?), undermines a sense of individuality. In other words: there really is no one else in this universe but Claire and The Boy, which may be true from Claire’s perspective, but certainly isn’t true from The Boy’s nor from that of anyone else who suffered loss from the events. Claire becomes a representative of an idée fixe. So, finally, much rides on her ultimate meeting with The Boy.

It should be said that the lead-up to that event is Claire’s “fame” as the woman who advocates forgiveness for The Boy. She, it seems, has understood the Christian injunction to forgive those who trespass against us, particularly those who strike us with the greatest enmity. That aspect of Grieg’s play draws upon the notion that someone who strikes against a community from within that community is still part of that community and can’t be relegated to “an enemy” or outsider status. The soul-searching that comes from such events is due to the fact that the killer not only killed some of us but is one of us. Claire’s position becomes the one that a Christian community should favor, and yet, that’s not how the general or legal community necessarily views it. And we have doubts as to how sincere Claire’s forgiveness is too.

Indeed, the weakest part of Grieg’s play is in the scene between Claire and The Boy. In part, this has to do with the labels Claire brings to the meeting: either The Boy is or was insane, or he is or was evil. Neither tag does much to illuminate what, in fact, he is. And Grieg doesn’t seem to know either. What we get is a kid much like any kid—one who is now and for the foreseeable future a prisoner, a ward of the State, we might say, with a psychotherapist and many more people, than ever before, concerned about his well-being. What he isn’t is insane or evil. Perhaps the point is a lesson for Claire but, in dropping any of the racist rhetoric that seemed to motivate The Boy, the scene plays out with no great difference between Claire and The Boy, as if all that separates them is which side of the gun they were on, that day. I think we might reasonably expect a bit more consistency from racist ideologues and clergy both.

The staging of the play on the wide, mostly bare stage—but for a piano, risers, and chairs that Crotty arranges and removes at various times—at the Yale Rep has an air of rehearsal and demonstration, as though we—the audience—happened upon a choir class and got caught up in an enactment of recent events by its leader and another member. What draws us into the play is its vivid sense of Claire’s personality and her very real sense of not being adequate to what she must live with and make sense of.

In the end, the community she has striven to serve serves her as a place to enact her commitment to others and to the healing and communal aspects of song, offering if not answers about the recurring wounds to our social body, then at least a figure for the therapeutic loss of self in the embrace of the communal that seems to elude the haters, the attackers, and the dispossessed.

The Events plays for two more showings, today at 3 p.m. and 8 p.m.

International Festival of Arts & Ideas presents

The Events By David Greig Directed by Ramin Gray

Commissioned by Actors Touring Company and Drammatikkenshus, Oslo Co-produced by Actors Touring Company, Young Vic Theatre, Brageteatret and Schauspielhaus Wien

Composer: John Browne; Actors: Derbhle Crotty, Clifford Samuel; Pianist: Magnus Gilljam; Designer: Chole Lamford; Lighting Designer: Charles Balfour; Sound Designer: Alex Caplen; Associate Director: Polina Kalinina; Dramaturg: Oda Radoor; Dramaturg: Brigitte Auer; Casting Director: Julia Horan; Company Stage Manager: Jess Banks; Technical Stage Manager: Jon Jewett

Participating choirs: New Haven Chorale, Western Connecticut State University; Greater New Haven Community Chorus; The Wayfaring Choir; The New Growth & Friends Choir, The Cathedral of the Holy Spirit Mass Choir; West Hartford Women’s Chorale

Yale Repertory Theatre June 24-27: 8 p.m.; June 28: 3 p.m. and 8 p.m.

No Child Left Behind

Review of A Map of Virtue Erin Courtney’s A Map of Virtue, the second offering of the 40th Anniversary Yale Summer Cabaret this year, is certainly a curiosity. Structured by titled segments—virtues like “Honesty,” “Integrity,” “Love”—that form a symmetrical arrangement around a central section, the play, as directed by Co-Artistic Director Luke Harlan, keeps us guessing about its ultimate ends.

Along the way float much imagery and narrated events and lingering details, which might be red herrings or what Alfred Hitchcock liked to call “MacGuffins,” plot-driving elements that never get a full explanation because they are actually incidental to the story. Mention of Hitchcock and MacGuffins is all-too germane to Courtney’s play, which opens with two characters—Sarah (AnneLise Lawson), an artist and free-spirit, and Mark (Ato Blankson-Wood), an intrigued gay man—describing their first encounter, in a diner where a bird attack straight out of Hitchcock’s The Birds takes place. And, as MacGuffins go, one of the prime examples is the bird statue in The Maltese Falcon. Oh, did I mention that A Map of Virtue is narrated by a little bird statue that Mark stole from the office of the headmaster who abused him and other boys? The statue—enacted by Ariana Venturi—gives us the titles of the segments and also reflects on the action from time to time.

Apart from whatever the play may be saying about the values of virtues, the plot itself has more to say about haphazard events, serendipitous meetings, personal obsessions, and, well, curiosity—which some may regard as a virtue and others if not exactly a vice then—a meaningful word for this play I’d say—a nemesis. Indeed, the multiplying instances of bird imagery and the history of the little statue itself could stand for that ancient concept, as a tendency of fate.

In Courtney’s play, the bird statue comes into Mark’s possession during a traumatic time as a child and he keeps it until, a grown man, he gives it to Sarah, in part because she has birds tattooed on her chest, and in part because of the bird attack and in part because he encounters her, by sheer “chance,” on a cliff in Ireland when he’s considering disposing of the little keepsake. The statue's ultimate fate occurs during a desperate weekend in the country where Mark, Sarah, and her husband Nate are held captive by a creepy couple, June and Ray (the latter often donning a bird mask that might put you in mind of the mask of human flesh in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, if you’re into that kind of thing). The period in the one-room prison, complete with dirty mattress and odd headmistress-like commands from June, might give you the creeps—nothing occurs to lighten the tension—but it plays out like a nightmare that will be over at some point (or a rural “urban story”), and becomes a crucible for the tensions in the play.

The upshot of all this are the changes in the relationship between Mark and his boyfriend Victor and between Sarah and Nate, with Sarah possessed by a new obsession that there were children, or a child, present at the site of their captivity, children who needed to be rescued.

Harlan and company play to the strengths of the Cabaret in putting on this oddly dreamlike morality tale. The space’s intimacy makes us accept the character’s (including the statue’s) direct address easily, bringing us into the events they narrate even when they seem rather unrealistic or off-putting. As Sarah, Lawson gives us a woman who seems believable as an artist-type, driven by hunches and intuition (the latter is a named virtue), but who also seems capable of going off the deep end at some point. Blankson-Wood’s Mark, despite his penchant for encountering creepy headmaster/mistress types, seems much warmer and engaging, though he did slash Sarah’s painting of “his” statue, one of the many acts or statements in this play that seem fit for an airing on a psychiatric couch.

As the creepy couple, Celeste Arias plays June like a somewhat psychotic schoolteacher and Aaron Bartz makes Ray oddly soulful in his interludes of song (his banjo retaining its Deliverance-inspired status as creepy rural instrument par excellence), and his “I’ve Still Got the Goods” might well be a tagline for hen-pecked husbands everywhere. As husband Nate, Aubie Merrylees seems pretty much steadily bemused by life with Sarah and will be remembered for his joyous outburst, “thank God for GPS!” Victor, Mark’s boyfriend, is played as the godsend he is by Julian Elijah Martinez. Finally, as “bird statue,” Ariana Venturi’s flowing garment, regal profile, and air of warm regard for human frailty combine to make her the centerpiece of the play, a MacGuffin who, in my reading of the play, is the figure for Courtney’s sense of agency.

Kate Marvin’s Sound Design is great at making us jump or freaking us out, and the Scenic Design (Christopher Thompson) and Lighting Design (Andrew F. Griffin) make the most of the amorphous Cab space to let us imagine diverse settings, with that room far upstage the kind of space you might find in your darker dreams at some point. Played close to the chest, thus letting viewers make up their own minds about matters of “empathy” (another cited virtue) and identification with the characters, A Map of Virtue is a bit like trying to make sense of someone else’s dream. Elusive, imaginative, and ultimately a matter of one’s trust in patterns and perceptions, this is one you’ll have to talk about.

A Map of Virtue returns tonight and plays until its closing Sunday night.

A Map of Virtue By Erin Courtney Directed by Luke Harlan

Sarah: AnneLise Lawson; Mark: Ato Blankson-Wood; Nate: Aubie Merrylees; Victor: Julian Elijah Martinez; Bird Statue: Ariana Venturi; June: Celeste Arias; Ray: Aaron Bartz

Scenic Designer: Christopher Thompson; Costume Designer: Steven M. Rotramel; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Sound Designer: Kate Marvin; Stage Manager: Avery Trunko; Photography: Christopher Ash

Yale Summer Cabaret June 19-June 29, 2014

Habeas Corpus

Review of Arguendo Elevator Repair Service’s Arguendo, directed by John Collins, is a gutsy idea: take a Supreme Court hearing and turn it into theater. But wait, Supreme Court hearings—like any courtroom proceedings—are already theater. Their sense of the theatrical nature of the “performance” of argument—which is what court proceedings are all about—is what gives ERS the wherewithal to get away with this.

You’d think listening to lawyers and justices, for the lay audience, would be pretty tedious, and, indeed, that would be the case if the case were contract law or something, but ERS judiciously chooses the kind of hearing that will get an audience interested. And few things get those who love art and theater more motivated than questions concerning the First Amendment right to free expression. The U.S., we all know, hasn’t actually been sterling in its attitudes toward censorship. There’s an old Puritan ethic deeply engraved on the books, so to speak, and that old “I know when I see it” attitude toward indecency, obscenity, and moral turpitude has made do-righters ban and outlaw and confiscate and fine for quite some time.

The case in Arguendo (Latin for “for the sake of argument”) is Barnes vs. Glen Theatre (1990-91) and has to do with whether or not the good people of Indiana are within their rights in insisting that erotic or exotic dancers wear pasties and a G-string while performing for their public (if you think “pasties and a G-string” is a silly phrase—as I do—you’ll be even more convinced after hearing it introduced into high-toned courtspeak, and any attempt to find synonyms fails comically), or whether said dancers are within their rights of free expression, under the First Amendment, to cavort as God intended—or, at least, as Nature created.

The comic potential of this face-off should be obvious at once. When is movement actually “dance” (which is expressive) as opposed to “conduct” (which isn’t?); when is nudity allowed—in high-brow pursuits like theater (where we don’t expressly pay to see it) and not in salacious arenas of sleaze (where we do), apparently; when is a prohibition on “manner” permitted without invoking censorship—whether or not rock music is music or has “a message,” you can legally set a volume limit for public performances without fear of circumventing free speech. All the briefs and decisions that fuel these sorts of absurd abstruosities are wonderfully presented as projections behind the action and in an interactive manner, so that the lawyers and the justices can fling them about or jump to the relevant passage.

Indeed, Arguendo is more visually stimulating than one might expect. In addition to the fast-moving projections of text, there are projections of austere columns to create a courtroom air of rectitude; there are heavy red drapes to suggest solemnity but also, perhaps, something a bit hush-hush behind the scenes. A cast of two women and three men enact all the justices, the two lawyers, the press, and an outgoing dancer from Michigan concerned about the case, and there is lively use of movement as the justices fling themselves about on wheeled office chairs, strike poses, form huddles, and slump and fidget with a great sense of body language and the dignity (and comic potential) of their office. At a certain point, the sheer absurdity of hypotheticals and nick-picking explodes in an avalanche of paper and the nudity of the counsel for Glen Theatre.

And the nudity on stage speaks brilliantly to the matter the court must decide (and how they rule on the case may surprise you): if a person is nude in public by free will (as opposed to, say, by theft of clothes) does that nudity have a message or is it simply gratuitous, having no meaning, no merit, etc.?

Those of us in the arts know, of course, that the nude always has meaning and merit because it is nude. The justices are not likely to be halted by aesthetic niceties and press on to find the means to support a statute (which Glen Theatre, et al., is fighting) to stop nudity simply intended to make money from those who pay to see nudity. Though never stated as such, that becomes the contention. The ideal that the good people of Indiana staunchly support is that paying to see nudity much less being paid to reveal nudity should be “beneath” the behavioral norms of their citizenry and, if it isn’t, the law will enforce that ideal. To this the majority of the court can concur, though there were, in the Decision, three separate statements as to why they reached that decision.

The flagrant nudity in Arguendo, though, supports an interesting point: none of us paid to see that nudity; we paid to see a play containing it. We might well have preferred to do without it, and yet it is part of the play and so is acceptable and not to be regarded in terms of comeliness. The message of such nudity is that it can occur, that it manifests something about the nature of theater. It makes a worthwhile comment, particularly when set against the clever little coda at the end of the play—as with all of the play, all words come verbatim from previous sources—in which Chief Justice Rehnquist puts chevrons on his judicial robe to avoid being “upstaged” (his term) by the women on the bench who have taken to wearing finely wrought collars.

In the end, Arguendo gives fresh insight into that ancient notion that “all the world’s a stage” and, by re-enacting this well-chosen, though minor case, they stage one of the great assets of live performance over any other representation of action, whether as words or on film. The justices may be loathe to reflect on the performative nature of the law but the very word “arguendo” implies sophistry, or argument simply for its own sake or for its rhetorical finesse. At that point, we’re well launched on the arc that theater makes explicit: nothing intentional, such as courtroom conduct or decoration or disrobing in public, is without “meaning,” and only the nicety of choosing which messages we value creates the hierarchy the law—always provisional and revisable—will uphold in the social arena.

We all go about our business in the midst of a grand work in progress.

Arguendo appears as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas

Elevator Repair Service’s Arguendo Directed by John Collins

Cast: Maggie Hoffman, Mike Iveson, Vin Knight, Susie Sokol, Ben Williams

Created and performed by Elevator Repair Service Media Software by The Office of Creative Research Set Designer: David Zinn; Lighting Designer: Mark Barton; Costume Designer: Jacob A. Climer; Sound Designer: Matt Tierney; Video Designer: Ben Rubin; Producer: Ariana Smart Truman

June 18-20: 8 p.m.; June 21: 3 p.m. & 8 p.m.; June 22: 1 p.m.

Yale Repertory Theatre

Keeping Afloat

Review of Split Knuckle Theatre's Endurance When is a Hartford insurance company like a ship stuck in ice in the Antarctic? When they’re both sinking.

Split Knuckle Theatre’s Endurance parallels the travails of erstwhile Walter Spivey (Christopher Hirsh), as he rises from the ranks to take over a drowning insurance claims department, with the voyage of Ernest Shackleton to the South Pole aboard the Endurance, a ship that floundered, then sank, causing the expedition to spend months aboard an ice floe before finally making landfall on a desolate island. In other words, even when your ass is out of the fire, it may still be in the frying pan. That’s the lesson for Spivey as well, as he meets with setbacks, triumphs, and setbacks, all while trying to apply the lessons Shackleton set down in a little book about managing men in unpropitious circumstances.

One of the best aspects of this show’s endlessly inventive staging is the miming or enacting of routine, from rising in the morning to the bus ride and the elevator klatsch to the “assembly line” of the claim division, and the ways in which the small troupe of four play a multitude of roles and voices—a particularly fun moment occurs when Walter journeys to the Hartford library (“no late fees, Walter,” sounding in his head as the command of the higher-ups) and every book glanced into offers its advice in a succession of voices. At that point Walter finds inspiration in Shackleton’s account of how he weathered—without losing a man—the grueling navigation from ice floe to island. The upshot is that what serves in one dire circumstance may well serve in another: for Shackleton the necessary factor is optimism as a moral force.

We see abundant evidence of Shackleton’s sense of optimism—the explorer is played with can-do-or-die pluck by Greg Webster—but it mainly amounts to having the men sing. Indeed, one of the questions Shackleton poses to his prospective crew members is “can you sing?” The songs are authentic-sounding and lively but they don’t go a long way to differentiate the crewmen, though we can easily spot the pessimist of the bunch. Andrew Grusetskie plays him with a sort of hangdog ruefulness and also puts in a good turn as Mark, the ailing elder of the insurance group who finds serenity, to a scary degree, in organization.

As Spivey, Hirsh makes the most of the kinds of nebbishy twitches that put me in mind of Monty Python’s Terry Jones enacting a straight arrow. Then there’s Jason Bohon as Larry, the mama’s boy who knows what’s what about computers, and, finally Greg Webster as Ben Brody, the loose cannon. When he sets about to learn something about his “men” as Shackleton advises, Spivey uncovers little bits of individuality in each—for Brody, it’s the fact that there was a good priest back there somewhere who taught the boy the “Ave Maria.” When all is dark and you’ ve got to sing, you could do worse.

As a way to buoy spirits in a desolate landscape with small hope of survival, Shackleton’s methods make sense. And we might reflect on how “knowing the song” is tantamount to being “one of the crew”—thus making an apt figure for the very notion of “banding together.” But in the modern-day office? That’s where the hopes of Endurance start to seem a bit wishful, even as we much credit the Split Knuckle team for their grasp of the rigors of a day in the life. Any breakthrough must make the right mark on the balance sheet and Spivey and his team could be cast adrift at any time. Shackleton, you see, was master and commander of his vessel, answerable to none but the Almighty. Spivey and his group are answerable, at last, to the almighty buck.

The parallel between these perilous journeys may break down a bit, but the imaginative physical theater of this four man troupe—new to New Haven—never does, creating a fun and varied theatrical experience.

Split Knuckle Theatre Endurance

Jason Bohon: Larry, Orde-Lees, etc.; Andrew Grusetskie: Mark Mercier, etc.; Christopher Hirsh: Walter Spivey, etc.; Greg Webster: Shackleton/Ben Brody

Playwright: Nick Ryan; Costume Designer: Lucy Brown; Lighting Designer: Dan Rousseau; Music: Ken Clark; Dramaturg: Dassia Posner; Stage Manager: Carmen A. Torres

Long Wharf Theatre June 17-29, 2014

Dancing in the Dark

Review of Why Torture is Wrong and the People Who Love Them The first offering of the 2014—40th anniversary—Yale Summer Cabaret stages the work of former YSD student, founding member of the Summer Cabaret, and recent Tony-winning playwright Christopher Durang. Why Torture is Wrong and the People Who Love Them dates from 2009. Not long ago, or is it? What Durang risks, with topical reference points—like French toast being rechristened “Freedom toast”—is that, in a few years, or even now, the times he gleefully skewers will become “quaint” in their own way or even, God help us, the basis for nostalgic revisiting.

If you become misty with memory thinking back to Abu Ghraib, the John Yoo declaration, the heyday of girls go crazy—a Cosmo, anyone?—and hangouts for tacky middle-Americans (remember them?) like Hooters, to say nothing of the “what’s in a name” fun, post 9-11, of ragging on any vaguely Arab-sounding names, then let this play wrench you back to those less than stellar times, if only to laugh at them. Durang’s lively, giddy, and inventive play—directed with absurdist spirit by Co-Artistic Director Jessica Holt—hits its targets in a way that makes cartoonishness a positive aesthetic. U.S. history certainly has a sense of the absurd, and, in the immediate aftermath of W., we were all Looney Tunes. Here, one interrogator suffers from Mel Blanc Tourette syndrome and can’t get out two words without reverting to the voice of a Looney Tunes character (voiced, in their heyday, by Blanc), such as “I say, I say, waterboarding,” as Foghorn Leghorn would deliver the line.

As is often the case with this level of broad playacting, most of the fun is in the set-up, or the First Act. That’s when we meet (almost) everyone who populates this domestic sit-com of the Terrorist Era: first, dubious daughter Felicity (Ariana Venturi, both dreamy and soulful), the barometer of decency here. Will she stop being the sort of generic single girl who objects to her parents without ever reasoning with them, or get involved in trying to do something for the good of all? Then, there’s Zamir (James Cusati-Moyer, hyper and faced with carrying the dual aspects of the play—try being funny and threatening at the same time), who claims he and Felicity were married during a drunken binge (at Hooters!) and expects her parents to support them—if only to stop him from his vaguely illegal activities and from giving his wife a “date-rape drug” to get what he wants when he wants it.

Then there’s Luella (Maura Hooper) and Leonard (Aaron Bartz), the mom and dad. Hooper’s performance is a hilarious barrage of ditzy mannerisms crossed with Kate Hepburn hauteur and Leave It To Beaver unflappable mom syndrome. It’s wildly, remarkably ridiculous, while also giving us some of the show’s bite. Durang wants us to see how the “life as usual” trappings of bourgeois indifference during the protracted obscenities of the Bush Years is simply a form of dementia. Luella’s constant commentaries on “the-ah-ter” are fun and, perhaps, a bit specific for a general audience, though Durang can generally assume that his audience is in the house. Durang bites the hand that feeds him, a bit, but that’s part of the fun of being an American: the ability to laugh at yourself. Dad is also an appealing caricature, an all-male, gun-toting Father Knows Best type, but likeable enough to have a beer with; he’s also up to vigilante “shadow government” undertakings undercover in a special room for “butterfly collecting.”

Rounding out the absurd cast we have Rev. Mike (Aubie Merrylees, sporting CA-inspired threads and speaking with the loud, grooving-on-life voice of a guy who has done too many raves), a porn-making reverend who may be Durang’s best inspiration: after all, Jesus said to love one’s neighbor, and that led the early church toward agape-fests . . . . Not least here is another bravura comic turn by Celeste Arias (if you saw her in Kate Tarker’s Thunderbodies at the Carlotta Festival, you know what I mean) as Hildegaarde, Leonard’s Gal Friday incapable of keeping her underpants up and devoted to the anti-terrorist skullduggery of her hero (though she does get all “weaker sex” when the torture actually starts). Andrew Burnap’s multiple roles include the “agent” suffering (succotash) from Looney Tourette, also the voices in Felicity’s head, and a suave Hooters waiter capable of crooning a sparkling “Dancing in the Dark.”

In the Second Act things turn darker—though with still the same glibness—with Zamir undergoing torture at Leonard's hands (in accord with Yoo’s dicta on legal torture) upstairs as wife and daughter wait, shut out of the blood-letting till bags of removed appendages are brought into the livingroom. At that point, Felicity takes us on a re-sequencing of events that would spare us, the cast, and the U.S. from a collective spin through a dark night of the soul, or at least a consideration of where the logic of “ends justify the means” takes us. Durang may, after all, be not so far removed from the desires of Luella, who goes to the theater to learn what is “normal,” as he ends with a comfortable and comforting idea we might express as “so long as we can still date, there’s hope.”

Holt and company’s Why Torture is Wrong gets it right, with perhaps a bit too much reverence for the recent. No one thinks twice of trimming Shakespeare or Chekhov, but it seems all of Durang's play is necessary for its effect though, by Cab standards, it takes rather long to get where it’s going. The Scenic Design repeats the proscenium-style arrangement of last year’s Summer Cab, and Alexander Woodward’s designs and scene changes are vivid and fun, particularly Dad’s special room. Steven Rotramel's costumes—like Luella’s same dress in many colors, Felicity’s night-out dress, and Hildegaarde’s Republican-red business suit (to say nothing of Rev. Mike’s ensemble)—all do the piece proud. There are enough interludes and changes in mood to give Sound Designer Kate Marvin and Lighting Designer Andrew F. Griffin opportunities to show off their talents, made easier by the fact that this is a play that never wants us to forget it’s a play.

The Yale Summer Cabaret is off to a great start with (in Sylvester’s voice) a slap-happy serving of silly skewerings of shibboleths and sacred cows, satirizing a self-serving and hardly short-lived era in a style that should inspire some soul-searching.

Why Torture is Wrong and the People Who Love Them By Christopher Durang Directed by Jessica Holt

Scenic Designer: Alexander Woodward; Costume Designer: Steven Rotramel; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Sound Designer: Kate Marvin; Stage Manager: Will Rucker; Photographs: Christopher Ash

The Yale Summer Cabaret June 5th-15th, 2014

Next up, opening June 19th and running till June 29th, is Erin Courtney’s A Map of Virtue, described as “part interview, part comedy, part middle-of-the-night, middle-of the-forest horror story,” that is about “the ways we try to understand evil,” directed by Co-Artistic Director, Luke Harlan.

Split Knuckle Theatre's Connecticut Debut at Long Wharf

An acclaimed theatrical group is relocating to New Haven. Split Knuckle Theatre, founded in London in 2005, will be performing their new show Endurance at the Long Wharf Theatre, June 17-29. According to Greg Webster, one of the founding members and a professor of Movement Theater at UConn in Storrs, the group was formed mainly by American students abroad in England at the London International School of Performing Arts in 2005. Their intention from the start was “to combine activity with complex ideas,” with all members of the troupe “rooted in acting as physical bodywork.” Webster likens the group to the same tradition as Rude Mechs of Texas, where theatrical space is part of the show, with unlikely objects and props put into service, as opposed to the kind of “kitchen naturalism” that is still the basis of most regional theater.

Endurance came about, Webster says, when the group was trying to come up with a new project and he found himself channel-surfing one night and stumbled on what he describes as an excellent BBC documentary on the Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton’s expedition to Antarctica in 1914. Somehow—let’s call it creative ferment—Webster’s impressions of the documentary got mixed with a dream in which an office worker was being attacked by a Xerox machine. Add to the mix the fact that the Split Knuckle show was being developed during the nose-diving economy of 2007-08, with such memorable events as the federal bail-out of AIG and Fannie and Freddie Mac, and you’ve got the makings of a show that treats reality in a rather cavalier fashion as it works between two settings at once: an office where Walter Spivey must rally his troops to survive the blood-letting taking place in a Hartford insurance firm, and the exploratory voyage of Shackleton who, with his ship, appropriately named Endurance, floundering in ice, must keep his crew alive and optimistic—for two years. For Webster, that’s the takeaway: as Shackleton himself said, “we must always remember that optimism is true moral courage.” The play attempts to bring that insight to bear on the everyday workplace to show that it’s true of any endeavor; not only death-defying situations, but wherever the task is to “weather the crisis.”

Webster says that the play moves with the speed of something like The 39 Steps, and all the shifts in scene are done with a collection of objects used as props to suggest the different settings. Trained in the influential methods of Jacques Lecoq, a master of physical theater, Split Knuckle has played in 19 different countries and, though Webster lives now in New Haven and the troupe has become based here, this is its first time staging a show in CT. At a conference trade show, Long Wharf’s PR man Steve Scarpa took an interest in the Split Knuckle’s presentation and went to Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein and Associate Artistic Director Eric Ting, with the result that the show has been brought home, so to speak.

Webster says the name “split knuckle” came from a literal split knuckle he endured during a period when his frustration with theater—don’t get him started on open calls—caused him to punch a door and injure his hand. Out of that frustration came the desire to work with actors who would be in control of the entire venture, rather than lining up at 5 a.m. for “cattle calls” with a host of others all matching the same character description. Rehearsal for the group, Webster says, is “fooling around” to find what works, and likens the troupe’s dynamic to being in a jazz ensemble, albeit one in which every musician can play, potentially, every instrument. The intention is always “organic collaboration” with no “methodology of hierarchy” where one voice dominates or overrides others. Once the piece has evolved into its form, it’s fixed and “runs like a clock, precise and beautiful.” Though it may still appear somewhat improvisational to an audience seeing it for the first time, it has, by then, already shown itself sea-worthy.

Why Shackleton, an explorer often forgotten by history buffs who tend to remember the heroic stories of someone like Scott who lost his entire expedition? For Webster, Shackleton is important because he gave up on his goal of reaching the pole in 1909 when it became clear he couldn’t achieve it without the loss of life. Other explorers were willing to suffer casualties to achieve success; Shackleton’s “no man left behind” ethos might well be a kind of heroism more meaningful in a time when the wounds of employee attrition are still smarting.

Split Knuckle Theatre’s Endurance promises an evening of lively, physically inventive, and entertaining theater, bridging different times and situations—each dire in its own way—to explore the inspiring themes of survival and sacrifice.

Split Knuckle Theatre Endurance

Devised by Jason Bohon, Andrew Grusetskie, Michael Toomey, and Greg Webster, with Nick Ryan, collaborating writer; Ken Clark, musical composition; Dan Rousseau, lighting; Carmen Torres, stage manager

The Long Wharf Theatre Stage II June 17-29