Multiplied by Itself

Review of The Square Root of Three Sisters, at International Festival of Arts & Ideas

The International Festival of Arts & Ideas in New Haven ended on Saturday, and I closed out the events with a viewing of The Square Root of Three Sisters, conceived, written, and directed by Dmitry Krymov and created and performed by Dmitry Krymov Lab and the Yale School of Drama. It was not only the end of the show’s run, and of the festival, but a last hurrah—and first post-graduation assignment—for a number of fine actors who graduated this May from the Yale School of Drama.

To begin with: Square Root is not a play in any conventional sense. It’s theater, conceived as an event that takes place with, as Krymov says, “the seams showing.” Before the show even begins, the cast is on hand, organizing cardboard rectangles to create the playing space, all while the Iseman theater’s workroom, with arrays of tools and implements, is on display.

The performers play actors as well as characters in the piece, which uses props and costumes sparingly. The purpose of the approach, it seems to me, is to let us—and that “us” includes actors, director, crew, the Lab, and viewers—look at Chekov’s landmark classic Three Sisters from a variety of perspectives, never forgetting that the process of theater alters and adapts whatever the playwright creates.

So it’s key to the vision of this work that a playwright be present. Krymov imports Kolya Trigorin, the sensitive and avant-garde playwright from Chekov’s The Seagull, to open the show. Aubie Merrylees, who has brilliant comic timing, is well-chosen to play the nervy, breathless Trigorin, eager to get everything just right—including paper rolls to be adorned by the cast with strips of black tape to create white birches. As he literally sets the scene—with cardboard boxes suggesting different places referred to in Three Sisters—and bosses his fellow cast-members, a minor error gets corrected by a painfully loud, distorted and autocratic voice. In that moment, Krymov references the power play of theater. The director calls the shots. The actors—and Chekov himself, to the extent that Trigorin is a figure for him—must submit.

With that said, there’s a further aspect that comes to light as Trigorin, and later, the actors themselves, narrate the backstory of Chekov’s characters. Three Sisters and its world come to seem a real world where fiction has created not characters, but actual people. To deviate from which sister—Olga, the spinster/teacher; Masha, the unhappily married wife; Irina, the youngest who might yet marry—is which, or who the suitors are, would be to alter the unalterable. The characters in Three Sisters seem folkloric in so indelibly stamping the imaginations of generations of theater-goers, especially but not only in Russia.

Annelise Lawson, Annie Hägg

What can we still learn about them? What will Krymov’s approach show us? Many things, indeed. It’s a breath-taking show in its variety and imaginative flights, in its use of technical features—such as the beautiful moment when the cast discovers inside boxes lit from within the military overcoats that are their costumes, each with a character-determining tag—and even “YouTube” videos. And so much depends on the routines each actor performs in turn, routines that establish for us not only a particular Chekovian character but also, to some extent, the actor’s relation to that character.

All begin seated around a large wooden work table, and that table becomes a center, a stage upon the stage, where the incredibly ripe passions of the work display themselves. Early on, in a dialogue both charming and freaky, a teapot moves about in space between would-be lovers, the relentlessly intense Vershinin (Niall Powderly) and dour in black Masha (Annelise Lawson), suggesting not only the force of their attraction but the gentility that keeps such passions at bay. Later, in stalwart Olga’s turn, Shaunette Renée Wilson’s insistent iteration “I don’t need to be loved” alternates with a distracted insistence on the mundane: “this is a fork, this is a cup,” and so on, while constantly shifting the props about on the table with increasing violence. The seething resentment at the heart of Olga, controlled by all the force of her personality, couldn’t be more powerfully rendered. Then there’s Irina (Melanie Field). Hiding beneath the table, she’s lured out by her comically timid suitor Tuzenbach (Bradley James Tejeda) and hen-pecked brother Andrey (Kevin Hourigan) with a promise to sing the songs her mother loved. Soon music begins to play and Irina, like a cat to catnip, emerges to belt out “Someone to Watch Over Me,” with Field evoking the sheer joy of a child in performance.

Every character gets a turn—including Julian Elijah Martinez’s dance like a constricted flame to evince the self-love and self-loathing of Solyony “who thinks he looks like” the poet Lermontov, and Annie Hägg’s table-top flouncing as Natasha, the preening and pathetically insecure wife of Andrey. At times the routines feel like improv, at other times like a physical manifestation of all that words will never convey, and even a bit like an audition for the pleasure of that ultimate watcher.

Late in the show, as a brigade of soldiers cart off all the possessions the Prozorov sisters hold dear, the table becomes a life-raft the sisters cling to and the base for the automaton they become. Along the way, the autocratic voice—which by now has begun to feel like a call to emergency evacuation or of military invasion—demands “give me a new Masha.” There follows a comical scene, nonplussing enough for anyone who hasn’t made the cut, in which Hägg, formerly Natasha, now shrugs her way into the role of the most dramatic of the Prozorov sisters while Lawson, stricken, pouts. Vershinin, however, won’t make the switch and still pines for Lawson as Masha. At this point, it’s not simply a question of how a character is conveyed by a performer, but how a performer takes over a character.

Shaunette Renée Wilson

So, when Wilson is replaced—by “that writer”—as Olga, she resists on the basis of her stature and commitment. Both of which, we sense, is her downfall. The very commitment of actor to character must be undermined. This isn’t about personalities, it’s about art aligning with the mailed fist of history. All are expendable, all are replaceable. And anyone can inhabit our treasured myths of tradition, or join the plaintive voices of the Three Sisters figurine on perpetual exhibit upon its pedestal.

A show for those who love their theater freewheeling and speculative, The Square Root of Three Sisters makes us wonder why we feel the need to have people dress up and pretend to be other, non-existent people—in other words, it makes you wonder a lot about theater and performance. In putting onstage the interplay of concepts of character, of actors as characters, and of actors as individuals, Square Root kicks against the text while scripting dissent and suppression, and manifesting an abundance of some intangible thing we lamely call “theater magic.”

International Festival of Arts & Ideas presents
The Square Root of 3 Sisters
World Premiere
Conceived, written, and directed by Dmitry Krymov, based on plays by Anton Chekov
Created and performed by Dmitry Krymov Lab & Yale School of Drama

Creative Team: Choreographer: Emily Coates; Performance Coach: Maria Smolnikova; Production Designer: Valentina Ostankovich; Sound Designer: Pornchanok (Nok) Kanchanabanca; Lighting Designer: Elizabeth Mak; Projection Designer: Yana Birÿukova; Production Stage Manager: Emely Selina Zepeda

Performers: Melanie Field; Annie Hägg; Kevin Hourigan; Annelise Lawson; Julian Elijah Martinez; Aubie Merrylees; Niall Powderly; Bradley James Tejeda; Shaunette Renée Wilson

Video Performers: Lucy Gardner; Mary Winter Szarabajka; Remsen Welsh

Artistic Staff: Assistant Director: Luke Harlan; Associate Production Designer: An-Lin Dauber; Associate Production Designer: Claire DeLiso; Puppet Designer: Matt Acheson; Fight Director and Dance Captain: Julian Elijah Martinez; Videographer: Lisa Keshisheva; Senior Interpreter to Dmitry Krymov and the Production: Tatyana Khaikin

Iseman Theater
June 21-25, 8 p.m.

Donned If You Do . . .

Review of Don Juan at Yale School of Drama In Don Juan, the life and times of a cad, Molière sought to skewer some of the pieties of his time, presenting Don Juan as a heartless seducer who doesn’t hide behind hypocrisy. He lies to women to lure them into bed, marrying and separating from his duped spouses with alarming alacrity, but he’s true to his principles. Life is a farce, so why not have some fun with it?

Molière’s Don Juan, the third Yale School of Drama thesis show this season, directed by Andrej Visky as an adaptation, with dramaturg Samantha Lazar and playwright Brian Pelsue, from Pelsue’s translation, benefits greatly from its transposition into a period much like ours. The comedy of the early going—up through its biggest laughs in Acts II and III—derives from a light comic touch that makes Don Juan, who enters with a towel around his waist and a turban towel atop his head, a laughable figure. As played by James Cusati-Moyer, Don Juan is a roguish libertine, more jaded than seductive. His servant Sganarelle (Aubie Merrylees) is a cartoonish accomplice who clues us in on his master’s proclivities while both envying him and looking on aghast.

The best idea here is the presentation of the “Jersey Shore” region where Don Juan, on a boat to lure a damsel into his clutches, gets capsized, nearly drowns, and is rescued by, literally, a clown. Pierrot (Bradley James Tejeda) wears a Ronald McDonald bozo wig, a red squeezie nose, and the motley of the carny clown. His vacillating girl, Charlotte (Ann Katherine Hägg), is clad in the red and white uniform of a burger-joint waitress and pants for a glimpse of the aristocratic bearing of Don Juan. Striding onstage in the black cloak and distressed black jeans of a rocker, thick locks aswirl, Don Juan seems a sex-drugs-and rock’n’roll fantasy in the flesh. Think of how a rock star like Freddie Mercury could milk a sensual androgyny that kept both males and females fascinated. As Sganarelle lets us know early on, the Don fucks anything that moves.

So when Don Juan saves the life of Don Carlos (Aaron Luis Profumo), the brother of Elvira (Jenelle Chu), the latest woman Don Juan has wronged, and Carlos hesitates about avenging his sister’s honor and his father’s death (the Don offed the General in a duel), Don Alonzo (Tejeda), his more vehement brother, accuses Carlos of being in love with Juan. It’s that kind of world. Don Juan wraps 'em all around his finger. The broad comedy of the play’s dealings with family honor and the Don’s efforts to court two girls at once—the wide-eyed Charlotte as well as tough-cookie Mathilde (Ariana Venturi, remarkably skanky)—opens the possibility that the play is peopled with clowns, so that themes like seduction, thwarted love, and vengeance can all be played for laughs. In such a world, no one can be deserving of any response but derision.

This Don Juan comes close to that vision, but a different tone comes into play in the later acts, after a high-spirited visit to a mausoleum, where the General is interred beneath a statue, leads to a date with destiny: the statue of the General will dine with Don Juan who must then, in turn, be the guest of the General. We move then to Juan’s palatial estate—made somber by, on its high walls, huge “paintings” that are actually ghostly videos of, it seems, some of the many women Don Juan has seduced and abandoned. Here we see Don Juan squirm his way out of a lawsuit, deride the good intentions of Elvira, and, in a visit from his pious father (Julian Elijah Martinez), face his dad’s wrath and disinheritance.

The darker shadings of the later acts reveal the extent to which Molière’s comic touch is not up to creating the requisite pathos we must feel for Don Juan to care what becomes of him. Our hero is given a notable speech in which he defends himself—“a fashionable vice is as good as a virtue”—in terms that might be agreeable enough to our own amoral age with its “Wolf of Wall Street” protagonists, but it’s not easy to put ourselves in Don Juan’s place. Flouncing about in a serpentine silk gown that shadows in gaudy eddies his every flamboyant gesture, Don Juan, clad otherwise in rather gladiatorial black briefs, with a torso even more so, is an epicene epigone of the philosophes, swilling cognac and spitting malevolent bon mots.

The play’s end seems to give us a question mark in place of a resolution. Is this a Don Juan who has taken upon himself the sins of our self-serving era? Is he a child again, returned to the darkness that precedes birth and follows death? We’re left to make sense of what we see, as the play is wordless after Don Juan, nothing loathe, follows the General’s statue, which has become a fetching sprite-like female (Venturi). One thing is certain: Don Juan isn’t so smug any more.

Along the way, there’s great support work, particularly from Merrylees as a grab-bag of reactions, second-thoughts, doubletakes, narrative asides, and, at one point, a speech of riotous “reasoning” that makes Daffy Duck seem a paragon of profundity. Profumo’s Don Carlos by way of a lower-order DeNiro is spot on, matched by Tejeda’s more Pescian brother, complete with meth beard, a Hell’s Angel to Juan’s sympathy for the devil; then there’s the already mentioned comic abilities of Hägg and Venturi as dim, richly imagined “babes” you wish would stay longer, and Chu’s Elvira, in her first appearance, all wild hair, bleeding mascara and virginal white gown matched with black leather jacket and boots, is a sight to be seen as she dresses down our hero in terms worthy of a steely heroine, only to show up far too much later in the nun-like apparel of a bleeding-heart doormat. Martinez, as a prayerful, pan-handling beggar, and a bike messenger, gets a lot of mileage out of minor bits and, as Juan’s overbearing father, has no choice but to play it straight. Indeed, the succession of “straight men” in the later going makes us long for more comical hi-jinx from Juan. Instead, we get a brief glimpse of a marked change of tact as Juan seems to repent, spooked by that talking statue at his table.

Memorably costumed, agreeably staged—with lots of open space for Cusati-Moyer’s stage-prowling stride—with a good grasp of how to keep things moving, Visky’s Don Juan benefits from Pelsue’s ear for comic speech, fleshed out with occasional taglines from movies, the lingua franca of our day that makes us all Don Juanna-bes.

Don Juan By Molière Translaed by Brendan Pelsue Adapted by Andrej Visky, Brendan Pelsue, and Samantha Lazar Directed by Andrej Visky

Scenic Designer: Alexander Woodward; Costume Designer: Sydney Gallas; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Composer and Sound Designer: Jing (Annie) Yin; Projection Designer: Yana Biryukova; Production Dramaturg: Samantha Lazar; Stage Manager: Avery Trunko

Yale School of Drama January 27-31, 2015

Saints Alive!

Ryan Campbell, a second-year playwright in YSD, is a ballsy writer. A New Saint for a New World, now playing at the Yale Cabaret, begins with the premise of Joan of Arc returned to earth in 2010 to “have fun and hang out,” to make up for the bad shit that happened to her the first time, back in the 15th century, and it ends with a vision of God, in a cameo by the Big Man himself, confessing he’s a bit at loose ends. Campbell’s play, directed by second-year director Sara Holdren, is equal parts audacious comedy and earnest searching. The opening scene between Joan and her boyfriend, Bott (Aaron Bartz, suitably bemused), smacks of those sit-coms where “the wife” has to explain something, such as “I’m really a witch” (Bewitched) or a spy, or what-have-you. Here, the revelation that she’s really that Joan of Arc inspires comic understatement and characterizations of the French aristocracy and Churchmen that would feel natural in The Sopranos. As Joan, Maura Hooper has an appealing way of beseeching her boyfriend’s suspension of disbelief, in the character of her alias, while at the same time becoming more and more emphatically Joan. It’s a great tour de force of the off-hand casualness of today’s speech meeting the inspired dicta of the Age of Faith.

In some ways, the play never quite recovers from that outrageous opening gambit, but each of its scenes—black-out vignettes more than a continuous play, we might say—has something to offer that extends the story beyond that initial comic exploration. Joan, who got returned to earth on the condition that she not stir up any trouble, can’t help herself. Eventually she’s started another Civil War in these formerly United States. The actual terms of the battle go by a bit quickly, but the gist is that Joan, facing interrogation, has fought for the people against the kinds of power mongers who think they “represent God.” She’s being held in Arizona, so draw your own conclusions. Ariana Venturi does a great job as a chilling captor: it’s like facing capital charges at the hands of your Sunday School teacher. A steelier sense of self-righteousness, matched with meek “doing my duty” candor, would be hard to imagine.

That scene does go on a for a bit, but then there’s another explosion of comedy: Christopher Geary as a pissed-off Archangel forced to visit Joan in her holding cell, accompanied by his graphic-novel-reading sidekick (James Cusati-Moyer). Geary manages to spout exposition with the mounting ire of one who finds the situations he’s describing increasingly maddening, including the info that God has decided to go with a new start-up universe he’s just devised. Seems Earth won’t be his favorite toy for much longer.

Which leads to that new world, Kia, where Joan gets to pass some time in anything but bliss. Though we meet—in a very Dr. Who-ish vision and visitation—Okun (Annie Hägg and Elizabeth Mak), one of the oddly serene double-beings that inhabit this world, and who tries to placate Joan with offers of the goods on demand, once a warrior always a warrior, and our Joan is restless to be up to something more than “hanging out and having fun.”

Finally, looking like a coke-dusted film producer or some other Player, Jeremy Funke, in a special guest appearance, shows up to beseech Joan to play his game, offering intensity, sincerity, and a cosmic sense of detachment. It’s definitely a grand payoff.

Well-cast, well-played, with a versatile set (Jean Kim, Izmir Ickbal) that looks like bargain-basement Star Trek and costumes (Fabian Aguilar) of tacky splendor, New Saint is fun to look at as it jabs at our modern lack of belief and hope, giving us a gutsy heroine aching to achieve something in a universe that may be rather less hieratic than it was in the Middle Ages. And, like other after-worldly comedies we could mention, New Saint gets its laughs from the incongruity between our suppositions about the Grand Scheme and the way it actually tends to play out. More of that “we get the afterlife we deserve”—which now includes “after-earth” and other universes—which has been somewhere at the heart of the whole problem of how to live righteously, in principio.

An amusing, irreverent, and relevant little gem for the Easter season.

A New Saint for a New World By Ryan Campbell Directed by Sara Holdren

Dramaturg: Helen Jaksch; Set: Jean Kim, Izmir Ickbal; Lights: Oliver Wason, Caitlin Smith Rapoport; Sound: Sinan Zafar; Costumes: Fabian Aguilar; Projections: Joe Moro; Technical Director: Alix Reynolds; Stage Manager: Sally Shen; Producer: Sally Shen

Yale Cabaret April 17-19, 2014