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!

Recap: Yale Cab 46

Yale Cabaret Season 46 is now just a memory. So let’s test our memories. Surveying the season, I’ve come up with five top picks in thirteen categories, as I have done for Seasons 45 (’12-’13) and 44 (’11-’12). Picks are listed in order of the show’s appearance, except the last named is my top choice. First up, the category of pre-existing play adapted to the unique opportunities afforded by the ever-intimate Cab space: All of these had something to do with power dynamics and each was a gripping experience: Dutchman, the challenging provocation about erotics and racial profiling by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka; erotomania as a work ethic between sisters in Jean Genet’s The Maids; He Left Quietly, Yaël Farber’s dramatization of the incarceration of an innocent man sentenced to death in apartheid South Africa; YSD alum Tarell Alvin McCraney’s exploration of the bonds and frictions between brothers as archetypes in The Brothers Size; and . . . Edward Bond’s daunting look at a world bereft of goods and memories, Have I None.

New plays inaugurated at the Cab this season, as usual, were a mixed bag, trying out eclectic forms: We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun, by Helen Jaksch (*15), Kelly Kerwin (*15), Emily Zemba (*15) is a drag-show drama with music, comedy, and pathos; The Most Beautiful Thing in the World, conceived by Gabriel Levey (*14) and devised with Kate Tarker (*14), is a performance piece that invites the kinds of pitfalls theater is prone to, and brought the audience into the performance; The Defendant, by Elia Monte-Brown (*14), commands the attitudes and language of its teen characters, while walking a difficult line between comedy and unsettling social reality; The Mystery Boy, adapted by Chris Bannow (*14), is a frenetic theatrical romp as weird and vivid as the mind of a pre-teen; and . . . A New Saint for a New World by Ryan Campbell (*15) is a funny dialogue-driven exploration of faith and defiance through the figure of Joan of Arc.

For Sets, the created space wherein everything happens: the runway by way of Warhol for the camp and glam denizens of We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun, by Christopher Ash (*14); the gritty prison space open to our view to make theater of incarceration for He Left Quietly, by Christopher Thompson (*16); the posters and atmosphere of a bygone theatrical era that lent much visual interest to The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion, by Reid Thompson (*14); the striking combination of modern and ancient ruin that served as backdrop to graffiti art in We Fight We Die, by Jean Kim (*16); and . . . the improbable rooms within a room, meticulously outfitted and wrought for The Maids, by Kate Noll (*14).

For Lighting, that magical aspect of theater that adds so much atmosphere and affect to our viewing experience: Elizabeth Mak (*16) for the highly effective illuminations of the will-of-the-wisp figures in Crave; Oliver Wason (*14) for the use of light and dark to evoke the uncertain occurrences in The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs; Oliver Wason (*14) for the intricate lighting of actual interior space in The Maids; Oliver Wason (*14) for the different lighting for the different worlds—from domestic earth to prison to another planet—in A New Saint for a New World; and . . . Andrew F. Griffin (*16) for playing with light and dark in an almost musical way in The Brothers Size.

For Costumes, that aspect of the experience that helps us suspend our disbelief, and helps actors convince us of their characters’ reality: Hunter Kaczorowski (*14) for the stylish retro outfits of Radio Hour; Elivia Bovenzi (*14) for a cast of regular people and inspired clowns in Derivatives; Asa Benally (*16) for costuming a cavalcade of different plays in a short compass in The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion; Fabian Aguilar (*16) for the varied habiliments of Joan of Arc’s ordeals in A New Saint for a New World—including space-age angels; and . . . Grier Coleman (*15) for the pastiche and aplomb, charm and chutzpa of We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun.

More ethereal even than Lighting is Sound, but a telling aspect of any production in augmenting the action and creating a mental space to support the visual: Joel Abbott (*14) for tying together all the moods and styles of We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun; Tyler Kieffer (*15) for the use of scored moments in the presentation of The Most Beautiful Thing in the World; Brian Hickey (*15) and Steve Brush (*14) for the razzle-dazzle TV-esque documentary and comedy productions of Derivatives; Tyler Kieffer for letting us eavesdrop so effectively in The Maids; and . . . Tyler Kieffer (*15) and Steve Brush (*14) for the radio soundscape and Foley art of Radio Hour.

For some productions, the visual element doesn’t end with Lighting, Sets, and Costumes, but acquires more presence through the use of projections and other special Visual Effects: Christopher Ash (*14) for the enhancement of the performance space of We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun; Nick Hussong (*14) for the various charts and logos and floating backdrops in Derivatives; Kristin Ferguson (*15) for the striking and lyrical use of photographic projections in Bound to Burn; Joey Moro (*15) for the creation of different visual moods so important to Joan of Arc’s odyssey in A New Saint for a New World; and . . . Rasean Devonte Johnson (*16) for the graffitied visuals of We Fight We Die, and for adding to the fluid visual experience of The Brothers Size.

Use of Music is another element that, for some productions, is almost like adding another character or a special effect to color the action or complete it: Steve Brush (*14) for the songs and jingles and accompaniment so crucial to the aural world of Radio Hour; Jenny Schmidt (*14) for adding to the tensions and suggestiveness of The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs; Pornchanok Kanchanabanca (*16) for the enlivening musical asides that fleshed out the variety of The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion; Mike Mills for the percussion that acts as Greek chorus to comment musically on—and even control—the action of The Brothers Size; and . . . Joel Abbott (*14) for the sensitive accompaniment that helped render the range of possible motives and actions in We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun.

Another aspect of the experience of the play’s physical presence is how it moves—sometimes that means actual choreography and the creation of dance, other times it has to do with how much activity and physical interaction takes place in the show; choice examples of how intricate Movement greatly enhances a play are: the choreography of the drag queen sleuths by Kelly Kerwin (*15) for We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun; the fluid use of the entire space and the highly expressive interactions directed by Hansol Jung (*14) in Crave; the dance numbers that told stories with movement and mime, choreographed by Rob Chikar (*14) and Alyssa Simmons (*14), in Bound to Burn; the incredibly active interludes bursting out of The Brothers Size, directed by Luke Harlan (*16); and . . . the prop-happy cast, creating sound effects and a variety of characters in different costumes while constantly on stage, of The Mystery Boy, directed by Chris Bannow (*14) and Helen Jaksch (*15).

In terms of Performance, some roles and actors move beyond the traditional “actor”/”actress” dualism, but as such is still the norm of awards shows, I’ll follow suit; for the xy chromosomes: as the one, the only, the much maligned and deeply mourned Edie La Minx: Seth Bodie (*14) in We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun (*14); as Claire, “the pretty one” that Mistress should have designs on: Mickey Theis (*14) in The Maids; for his show-stopping turn as a Lena Horne impersonator in We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun, and for acting out the gripping ordeal of Duma Kumalo in He Left Quietly, Ato Blankson-Wood (*15); as Ogun, the god of iron in the form of a paternalistic and truly fraternal car-shop owner in The Brothers Size, Jonathan Majors (*16); and . . . as the alleged brother who brings death to his sister in Have I None, and as the manipulative “sister” in The Maids, Chris Bannow (*14).

And in Performance, those actors with xx chromosomes: as Lula, the mercurial provocation on a subway car in Dutchman, Carly Zien (*14); as the introducer forced to provide the presentation, with improvised patter and invited responses, Kate Tarker (*14) in The Most Beautiful Thing in the World; as the curious, distraught and distrustful wife in The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs, Chasten Harmon (*15); as a Joan of Arc forced to be normal and then again extraordinary, Maura Hooper (*15) in A New Saint for a New World; and . . . as a woman at her wits’ end in a world of deprivations, Ceci Fernandez (*14) in Have I None.

For the task of somehow orchestrating all this diverse input and making decisions that create a coherent theatrical experience—for Directing, in other words: Jessica Holt (*15) for the harrowing world, driven by complex language and meaningful actions and silences, of Have I None; Cole Lewis (*14) for the mounting tensions and effective contrapuntal presentation of The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs; Sara Holdren (*15) for keeping a handle on comedy with cosmic dimensions, and drama with unsettling implications in A New Saint for a New World; Luke Harlan (*16) for the combination of movement, music, intense dialogue and strong characterizations in The Brothers Size; and . . . Dustin Wills (*14) for the challenging presentation and darkly comic tone of drama queens seduced by death behind closed doors but bare windows in The Maids.

Finally, for overall Production, which means having the wherewithal to make this thing happen, as enablers and aider-abetters, the producers and dramaturgs of the shows that impressed me most: We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun: Emika Abe (*15), producer, and Helen Jaksch (*15), dramaturg; Have I None: Molly Hennighausen (*15), producer, and Hugh Farrell (*15), dramaturg; A New Saint for A New World: Sally Shen, producer, and Helen Jaksch (*15), dramaturg; The Brothers Size: Alyssa Simmons (*14) and Melissa Zimmerman (*14), producers, and Taylor Barfield (*16), dramaturg; and . . . The Maids: Lauren Wainwright (*14), producer, and Tanya Dean (*14), dramaturg.

Some of those mentioned have completed their time at YSD—best of luck in all you do!—and others have a year or two to go. Thanks to all for their dedication, talent, and spirited engagement with the special performance space that is the Yale Cabaret. And to this year's departing team, Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, Kelly Kerwin, and Shane Hudson, many thanks for a lively season.

Coming soon: a preview of the Yale Summer Cabaret, with Artistic Directors Jessica Holt and Luke Harlan, and Managing Director Gretchen Wright.

See you next year, at the Cab!--with Artistic Directors Hugh Farrell, Tyler Kieffer, Will Rucker, and Managing Director Molly Hennighausen.

Peek-a-Boo, I See You

Third-year YSD director Dustin Wills will be remembered as the guy who, recently, transformed the viewing experience at the Yale Cabaret. As Co-Artistic Director of the Yale Summer Cabaret 2013, he altered the playing space to create a deep thrust stage, doing away with the tendency to remake the place with every new play. In his production of The Maids, he goes further, creating a room, or rooms, within the room that is the Cabaret. The premise of this production is that the audience are voyeurs and eavesdroppers, positioned outside panes of glass, spying on what happens in someone’s apartment.

Whose apartment? Why, Madame’s. And exactly what are her maids, Solange and Claire, getting up to while their mistress is away? Solange plays Claire and Claire plays Madame. The point of the masquerade is that moment when the two, nearly fainting for a love they dare not give in to, bond in the death of someone—most likely (the real) Madame. Add to this the fact that Solange may or may not want her sister to die (as Madame), or may or may not want to die as her sister (dying with Madame). In other words, the world of The Maids is a world where desire and death (together) are the thrills. All the rest is masquerade.

Wills’ production adds an extra dimension to this dress-up game. Traditionally played with a cast of three female actors, The Maids was conceived by its author, Jean Genet, as enacted by a trio of male actors playing women. In following this intention, Wills’ The Maids becomes a drag show of sorts, with men masquerading as women, but this dimension also makes The Maids an even more complex play because we are watching men playact men who are playacting women. Wills’ cast begins in high camp and I’m sure a few playgoers seeing the play for the first time might assume they are watching a gay sex farce. Chris Bannow (Solange/Claire) and Mickey Theis (Claire/Madame) enact their parts with a kind of personal theatricality that we are encouraged to think is what goes on behind closed doors—and undraped windows—with these two, able to “act out” in private. Privy to this playacting within the play, we can only begin to determine its point as we watch, trying hard to follow the action and the whispers, as the pair, early on glad only in “tighty whities,” move about Kate Noll’s sumptuously tacky interior space.

Bannow and Theis are two of the most accomplished actors in the YSD program, and here they do some of the best work either has done. It’s not easy suggesting the subtle psycho-sexual drama between these two “sisters,” moving through a range of moods—passionate, bitchy, frightened, bullying, beseeching—but that is what this play requires. Bannow’s Solange is who we meet first, performing autoerotic acts solo—the entire play is in some ways a protracted sexual fantasy that is also an examination of power relations between classes and within gender. Much of the struggle here is between Claire and Solange who enact everything from sibling rivalry to lovers’ tiffs to actors’ differences of artistic vision. It’s all in the game. As the prettier one, who should be the object of Madame’s unspoken homoerotic desire, Theis’s performance is something of a revelation, as he finds, as it were, his inner little girl. As Madame, first-year actor Andrew Burnap has a regal height and a distracted air, but doesn’t quite seem the mistress of this threesome.

About the staging: Wills’ decision to enclose the playing space stems from his view that sight-lines in the Cab are always a problem. Certainly there is rarely the full frontal presentation common to most theaters. Here, the Cab’s strongest feature—the fact that the audience and the players occupy the same space—is obviated in striking fashion. Bold, innovative, the design for The Maids makes a drama out of our efforts to see the drama. What you see at the Cab is often dependent on your vantage point but, here, some vantages afford a view of the action on camera, as though watching a surveillance stream.

No more telling staging of how we pry—the idea of our age as one lacking in any sense of privacy is common—could be imagined. The implications about private life and the public imagining of intimacy provide a layer of suggestion to The Maids that goes beyond the old upstairs/downstairs dichotomy that can seem a bit stuffy by now. Inspired and arresting, The Maids is unsavory and seductive, making us all somewhat suspect, like people watching other people watch other people have sex.

The Maids By Jean Genet Directed by Dustin Wills

Dramaturg: Tanya Dean; Set: Kate Noll; Lights: Oliver Wason; Sound: Tyler Kieffer; Costumes: Hunter Kaczorowski; Technical Director: Rose Bochansky; Stage Manager: Molly Henninghausen; Producer: Lauren Wainwright; Creative Consultants: Michelle McGregor, Sophie von Haselberg; Sound Mixer: Sinan Zafar; Carpenters: Nick Vogelpohl, Sean Walters

The Yale Cabaret February 20-22, 2014

Back to the CAB

Last weekend the Yale Cabaret offered its second-ever Yale School of Drag—memorable for many things, including Lupita Nyong’o drag, but if you missed it, then you missed it. And if you saw it, far be it from me to tell you what you saw. This week the Cab is back with the first of the eight shows that continue the second part of the 2013-14 Season. Artistic Directors Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, and Kelly Kerwin have arrived at an interesting mix of shows. Five are pre-existing plays, two are never-before-seen productions, and one is a mixture: a devised setting for known pieces (a bit like Radio Show in the fall).

The first three shows are scheduled beginning this week and for the next two weeks, then a two-week break, three more shows, a week dark, and then the final two. Got it? Here’s what’s coming:

Cab 11 is The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs, proposed by 2nd-year Set Designer Adrian Frausto (whose excellent work on Hedda Gabler closed recently) and directed by 3rd-year Director Cole Lewis, whose varied and unsettling thesis show The Visit was offered in the fall. The play, running for the Valentine's Day weekend, looks at the darker side of romance with a revisiting of the Bluebeard tale of the wealthy man who marries a woman and gives her everything, except . . . she can’t go into that room at the top of the stairs. If your Valentine is the kind who loves a good scare, then this is the place to be. And when was the last time the Cab offered a thriller based on tension and suspense? Written by Canadian playwright Carole Fréchette, the play, Dibo promises, will offer an unusual configuration of the Cab playing space and, with its theme of trust in romance, is perhaps all-too apropos for Valentine’s Day. February 13-15

Next comes Jean Genet’s psychological drama The Maids, proposed by 3rd-year Director Dustin Wills, Co-Artistic Director of Yale Summer Cabaret 2013, whose startlingly unusual Peter Pan played in December. The play, which usually takes place among three women—the mistress and her two maids—will be played by three males, “performing rituals of gender,” according to Dubowski, within a staged space constructed by Kate Noll with sound design by Tyler Kieffer. The idea is to present us with a space full of mirrors and different lines of sight so that the audience is placed in the roles of voyeurs and eavesdroppers, spying on what the maids get-up to behind the scenes. Mainstays of the Summer Cab 2013, Mickey Theis and Chris Bannow, will be joined by first-year actor, Andrew Burnap. February 20-22

The third show before the break is He Left Quietly, proposed by 1st-year Director Leora Morris, a play by Yaël Farber about Duma Kumalo, a man sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit in apartheid South Africa. Kumalo’s story, which involves a stay-of-execution delivered on the day the death sentence was to be carried out, followed by another four years of incarceration for a total of 7 years in prison, is a story of a man’s spirit triumphing over unspeakable deprivations. The show, which features three 2nd-year actors, Ato Blankson-Wood, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Maura Hooper, returns us to the dark realities of apartheid South Africa and a search for justice. February 27-March 1

After two dark weeks, the Cab will return with The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion, a partly devised piece proposed by 1st-year Dramaturg David Bruin. The show will transform the Cab into a Greenwich Village basement in the early 1960s where beatniks and bohemians gather to check out two one-acts by two of their own: Edward Albee and María Irene Fornés. The production takes us back to when these darlings of the theatrical world were still “up-and-coming” and where the surroundings for the play are part of the play in a time of porous conceptions of theater. March 20-22

Cab 15 is We Fight We Die by Long Island-born playwright Timothy J. Guillot and directed by 1st-year playwright Jiréh Breon Holder; the play looks at the fate of the work of graffiti artist Q in his tussle with City Hall, which aims to stamp out his form of art. With a Greek chorus rapping to us about the struggle and original works of art by MFA students in the Yale School of Art, the show provides an interesting collaboration between art forms and media that should be aurally and visually challenging, and, with the recent obliteration of 5Pointz in Long Island City, very timely. March 27-29

Next comes an unusual devised piece from 3rd-year actor and Co-Artistic Director of Summer Cabaret 2013, Chris Bannow. The source material: The Mystery Boy, Bannow’s sister’s original 126-page novel, written two years ago when she was 11. With 2nd-year dramaturg Helen Jaksch (seen in the fall as M in Crave) co-directing, the ensemble cast will be put through their paces with a love triangle, adventures involving the Mafia, vacation romance, and the various pleasures and perils of social media as the lingua franca of our current pre-teen world. April 3-5

2nd-year playwright Ryan Campbell—his Dead Ends was a studio play this past fall—offers his own A New Saint for a New World, directed by 2nd-year director Sara Holdren, who directed Tiny Boyfriend in the fall. The premise: Joan of Arc wants to return to earth; God finally agrees on the condition that she not start any wars or revolutions. Conceived as “a real big play for a small room,” Saint considers the possibilities for faith in 2014 NYC and the frustrations faced by a heroic crusader forbidden to crusade. April 17-19

Cab 18, the last of the season, might be a somewhat obvious choice: The Brothers Size by Tarell Alvin McCraney, the YSD graduate playwright who recently won a Yale Windham-Campbell Writing Prize and a MacArthur “genius” Award in the same year. Three 1st year actors, Jonathan Majors, Julian Elijah Martinez, and Galen Kane proposed the play, written while McCraney was a third-year at YSD, and made their case that it’s a play they have an urgent need to enact due to their personal histories and the unique opportunity offered by the Cab. Directed by Luke Harlan, the play is the story of two brothers—Ogun runs a car-repair shop, the other, Oshoozi, recently released from prison, comes to work for him—and a third man, Elegba, also come from jail, who visits to bring Oshoozi a gift. Set in the bayou country of Louisiana and involving music and African myths, the play should end the Cab’s 46th Season with a strong finish as YSD pays tribute to one of its own. April 24-26

So, that’s what you can look forward to in the weeks ahead. See you at the Cab!

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven, CT

Season 46 Co-Artistic Directors: Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, Kelly Kerwin Managing Director: Shane Hudson

Straight On Til Mourning

Third-year YSD director Dustin Wills’ thesis production of J. M. Barrie’s classic Peter Pan is everything a thesis show should be: a unique vision of a well-known work that revisits familiar (and not so familiar) terrain with a new perspective. Wills’ adaptation places Pan in an orphange during World War I, an alteration that creates an entirely different play. It’s also an exemplary thesis show in presenting resources of ensemble acting that set a new standard for the School, which does rather strive to get as many of its acting students involved in any project as possible. In Wills’ Pan, the actors play multiple roles but, in essence, each play one role: a child/orphan, enacting various parts in a child’s version of Peter Pan, and that entails marshaling all props themselves and creating before our wondering eyes all the necessary spaces and events of Peter’s adventures, from the house of the Darlings to a pirate ship, from a rock in the sea at rising tide to a battle with bayonets affixed—and, in Joey Moro’s ingenious design, lighting themselves, as well as seeming to construct Grier Coleman’s costumes ex tempore. The cast is so tremendously busy we have scarcely time to catch our breath, never mind how they do. And, with such a large cast—13—and so many events, it comes as a surprise how fast these two hours with no intermission pass. If you’ve attended many thesis shows then you know that what comes hardest is pacing. This Peter Pan must be pursued by the clock-containing crocodile, so well does it make use of its time.

Wills and his scenic designer, Mariana Sanchez Hernandez, present us with a set that is a testament to war-time austerity and dilapidation, with peeling, no doubt asbestos-ridden paint, hot water pipes overhead, opaque window panes, and uniform cots. The kids in the orphanage are in hopes of adoption and so their story of how a young girl comes to play mother for a host of Lost Boys in Neverland is at once a fantasy projection and a compensation. This innovation adds greatly to characters who, in the play, are simply take-offs on boyhood types, as these actors might, at any time, break character when something in the play strikes too close to home.

I don’t doubt that any parental types in the audience will arrive at a favorite they would gladly adopt—Tootles (Chris Bannow) is the most endearing, but there’s also the know-it-all, Curly (Aaron Luis Profumo), the preening Slightly (Aaron Bartz), the winsome Nibs (Maura Hooper), and the Twins (Hugh Farrell with a hand mirror and an authentic expression of dazed excitement); all also play Indians and/or pirates as required; then there are those who stay pretty much in one or two characters: Prema Cruz’s petulant Tinkerbell and regal Tiger Lily; Michelle McGregor’s blustering Smee and doting Mrs. Darling; Matthew McCollum’s thoughtful John; Mariko Nakasone’s feisty Michael, the baby of the family, and Sophie von Haselberg’s Wendy, a girl almost too mature for make-believe who playacts Mother in hopes of winning Peter’s heart.

Any might at any time step to the footlights and stammer something heartfelt; at one point, after hearing Wendy sing about what her ideal house would be like, all the kids rush to the edge of the stage to fling at us their individual visions of the home of their dreams. Such breaks in the orphans’ make-believe register a reality all are usually at pains to mask.

Their show begins with willful play-acting when “Mrs. Darling,” observes “her children” Wendy and John play-acting as their parents; soon enough the “real” Mr. Darling (Tom Pecinka) shows up and scolds everyone, especially the dog, Nana (Christopher Geary) who is banished from the nursery, thus setting up Peter’s arrival. What this production loses in whimsical magic—no “actual” elfin child floating into the room with fairy dust—it gains in the kinds of magical conjurations that children find in their collective imaginings—sheets as the sea, lifted beds indicating flight, characters pulled about on wagons and wheeled ladders. And forget the fey, androgynous Peters common to productions with a woman in the role; Mickey Theis’ Peter is robust and boyish, and when he takes on Hook (Pecinka) late in the play it feels like a boxing match as well as a duel to the death.

This is a very physical production, with tons of moving parts—some favorite moments are Wendy floating off the rock on a kite, the rock itself a mountain of valises; the props grabbed together to make the crocodile; Tootles’ stray shot with a real gun; the picture-book rescue of Peter from the rock by way of the Neverbird (Christopher Geary, looking like a downed airman—he is also relentlessly amusing as the pirate Starkey); everything said by Pecinka’s Hook, generally in a state of high dudgeon, letting envy of Peter’s fecklessness become, at last, thwarted love; near the end, Hook, in a fit of pique, threatens Peter with a “holocaust of children”—a potent phrase that seems to bring on a grim series of events that all the make-believe in the world can’t prevent. The final moments of the production flip into the nightmarish as children who don’t want to grow up become children who don’t get to.

Inventive, lively, and surprisingly serious, this Peter Pan lets us feel not only a very real cry for the cozy world of a mother’s care but makes us feel the threats to childhood that we should care about: the final images, set in the time of the Great War, can easily be transported to the time of the Blitz or to the sites of our contemporary drone strikes. Wills and company reach out from an orphans’ nursery—filled with children already missing important aspects of family and identity—to grab us with a sense of the atrocity that is the loss of innocence, and the loss of innocent lives.

This Peter Pan is not for children.

Peter Pan By J.M. Barrie Adapted and directed by Dustin Wills

Composer: Daniel Schlosberg; Scenic Designer: Mariana Sanchez Hernandez; Costume Designer: Grier Coleman; Lighting Designer: Joey Moro; Sound Designer: Tyler Kieffer; Production Dramaturg: Dana Tanner-Kennedy; Stage Manager: Anita Shastri

Yale School of Drama December 13-19, 2013

A Town Without Pity

The Visit, the first YSD thesis show of the year, directed by Cole Lewis, is a play by Friedrich Dürrenmatt dating from the 1950s. We might say it’s a play about “justice, greed, and the American way” but for the fact that the play is set in a German town called Güllen and, thus, was initially intended as a comment on the bad consciences of post-war Germans, where virtually any town had its distressing history of fascism and scapegoating. The YSD production doesn’t update the setting, much—which allows for fun with certain period aspects of German costuming—but makes the play abundantly relevant to our country and our times, where many townships that can’t boast major industry or global investment companies are falling into the dire penury we find among the good folks of Güllen. What will they do to pull themselves out of the economic quagmire? Why, find a patron, a donor, or maybe even an investor. The potential “good angel” is Claire Zachanassian, a native of Güllen who has been abroad for forty years—long enough to have had seven marriages and to have amassed a fortune of at least $3 billion. Her return has all the townsfolk a-tizzy as the play opens, including her girlhood flame Alfred Ill, who the city fathers hope can sweet-talk Claire into generosity. Despite a lyrical, two-on-a-swing interlude between the former lovebirds, we find out that something rather bad befell Claire thanks to Alfred, and that she’ll pay up to the town’s coffers only if she gets payback. She wants Alfred dead.

Of course, the mayor and all the townsfolk reject this proposal—even if Alfred did in fact do her wrong in the remote past, it’s not justice to put a billion dollar price on his head, making the town’s salvation dependent on his execution. And so, as many “good Germans” would immediately recognize, the horrible and hidden past can hold the present hostage. What’s more, one finds that one’s fellow citizens are apt to join together against whoever stands between them and prosperity. And that person—here only an individual (a shopkeeper) but elsewhere an entire race—can become a scapegoat for the will of the people.

That is the ingenious plot that Lewis’ cast enacts in this impressive ensemble affair. Few are the actors here who play only one role, and the movement and activity in the Iseman's varied playing space keeps this longish show lively. Most of the fun is in the early going, as things get increasingly sinister and appalling as the play goes on, and it does go on. Be prepared to be exhausted by the time it’s over.

The principals in the cast carry their roles with aplomb: as Claire, Mariko Nakasone is an extremely sexy sexagenarian, combining a steely sturdiness with feline graces—and she gets some great costumes too; she’s too odd to command our sympathies, though she does have grounds for claiming herself wronged. Chris Bannow’s Alfred seems more appropriately aged and we sense that, whatever his faults in the past, he has tried to overcome them in good bürgerlich fashion. His role grows in stature when we begin to sense, as he does, that the whole town is against him—a chilling moment when he tries to leave town plays like something out of the Twilight Zone. As the Mayor, Matthew McCollum is affable and unctuous and keeps us—we sometimes double as the citizens of Güllen, waving flags at appropriate moments—in the palm of his hand.

Among the rest of the cast, there are many fine moments as well, particularly Mamoudou Athie as the Schoolmaster, the one figure here who mounts an effective plea—on television, no less—against what is happening. It’s good to see Athie given a role not predominantly comic, though he does also get hit over the head with a painting. Other fun comes from Celeste Arias, as a moustache-sporting film star (two different versions) married to Claire, and as the frowsy wife of Alfred, and from Iris O’Neill, a child actress who gets to do things like pull a wagon across stage and vamp on a toy accordion, and pretty much steal her every scene.

Elsewhere, Ceci Fernandez and Mickey Theis cavort enthusiastically as roly poly eunuchs, creepy and unsettling—and they also lend great effect as the TV team who come to cover Alfred’s great “sacrifice.” In fact, dressing up Theis in a variety of outfits is almost endlessly entertaining—he plays three other roles, including a teenager. Montana Levi-Blanco’s costumes are inspired: the outfit for the Butler, besides making Elia Monte-Brown almost unrecognizable, seems a surreal, androgynous take-off on something out of Monopoly. And then there are the cast's tell-tale yellow shoes…

The scenic design by Chika Shimizu is wide open in the first half, with different spaces provided by small-scale buildings to represent the brick and mortar sturdiness of the town. Later, we get a shop, and a cardboard cut-out car that works quite effectively. There are also plenty of entrances, exits, use of the catwalk, and special effects. Kristen Ferguson’s collage projections in the slideshow segment are wonderful in evoking a hint of Georg Grösz by way of early Cubism. Brian Hickey’s sound design, I suspect, will yield new things on every viewing. I was keen enough the first night to pick up the sound of a gramophone stylus spinning in the endless groove at the end of a record as things began to close in on Alfred. Caitlin Smith Rapoport’s lighting design met the challenge of so much action in so many places, creating outdoors, indoors, and, in one great sequence when the Doctor (Merlin Huff, winningly and ineffectually conscience-stricken) attempts to appeal to Claire's good nature, raking autumnal light flowing through a fence over scattered leaves.

Cole Lewis aims her version of The Visit at the human ability to rationalize any barbarity or indulgence in the name of our capacity to please ourselves and avoid considering the consequences. If you don’t find yourself stabbed at some point in this production, then you just aren’t paying attention.

The Visit By Friedrich Dürrenmatt Translated by Maurice Valency Directed by Cole Lewis

Scenic Designer: Chika Shimzu; Costume Designer: Montana Levi Blanco; Lighting Designer: Caitlin Smith Rapoport; Sound Designer: Brian Hickey; Projection Designer: Kristen Ferguson; Production Dramaturg: Lauren Dubowski; Stage Manager: Emily DeNardo

Cast: Celeste Arias; Mamoudou Athie; Chris Bannow; Jabari Brisport; Cornelius Davidson; Ceci Fernandez; Christopher Geary; Merlin Huff; Sarah Krasnow; Matthew McCollum; Elia Monte-Brown; Mariko Nakasone; Iris O’Neill; Jennifer Schmidt; Mickey Theis

Yale School of Drama October 29-November 2, 2013

Diary of a Madhouse Wife

The third play in the Yale Summer Cabaret “Summer of Giants” is Federico García Lorca’s The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, a play that departs from the naturalism of the previous play—Strindberg’s Miss Julie—as much as the latter departed from the rhymed farce of Molière’s Tartuffe. Lorca’s play is typical of what we get in theater once naturalism bit the dust—stylized acting, amorphous sets, significant props—and the Cab production, directed by Artistic Director Dustin Wills, goes further, with puppets, projections, a mayor on stilts, comic turns and ambient music. The setting has been transposed from Spain to West Texas, and that’s where the fun starts. The story centers on a young wife (Prema Cruz) married to a shoemaker (Gabe Levey) and the fact that they make each other miserable. As the shoemaker says at one point, “my house isn’t a house, it’s a madhouse!” The wife spends a lot of time chatting with the many interested men in the town—when she’s not reviling her husband or screaming out the window at the townsfolk who mock the couple as a local entertainment. Enough is enough, and so, cursing his sister (“may God rest her soul”) who made the match, the 53 year-old sets off from town and trade, leaving his 18-year-old wife to fend for herself.

If you expect her to dress for fun and flirt like crazy, guess again. She opens up a tavern to pay her way and is no-nonsense with all her drowsy customers, men who congregate but who accept that she’s not up for grabs. But there’s more to it. Lorca fashions a play that explores the wife’s psyche without engaging in psychological realism—providing, for instance, a child from the town who acts as her confidante and informant, and former suitors a bit mythic, and Wills follows Lorca’s logic into some strange byways.

First of all there’s that mayor on stilts (Mickey Theis, sounding and looking like Howard Hughes by way of Leo DiCaprio) who walks softly and wields a big stick (ok, “no symbols where none intended,” as Beckett would say); then there’s Ato Blankson-Wood as the wide-eyed Boy, who is also a puppet and who bursts into a lovely trance-like song about a butterfly, and he also plays Don Blackbird, one of the wife’s admirers equipped with a talismanic version of his namesake; then there’s those neighbors—Ceci Fernandez and Michelle McGregor—who generally carry around windows to suggest their incessant voyeurism, but also become croaking old crones to tell Mr. Shoemaker “the best thing is to take it easy.” And then there’s Mamoudou Athie sporting outrageous accents and insinuating his way into the play in a very amusing fashion.

As the Wife, Cruz isn’t quite as winsome as we might expect an 18 year-old to be but she excels at the “at wit’s end” frenzy that drives her husband away. She always has a soft word for the Boy, and during her husband’s exile grows in stature, but Wills’ production seems loathe to play her for laughs—until the ending. And as Mr. Shoemaker, Levey is a study in constrained complaint, crouched on a low chair with knees high, hugging himself and beseeching heaven. As the Puppet Master who visits the town late in the play, Levey comes into his own, narrating, with the warm manner of a born raconteur, a comic drama uneasily close to home for the Shoemaker’s Wife.

Lorca’s play provides the kind of satisfying closure that we expect from fables and folk tales, though with high irony as well. The Cab’s production respects the material all the way, adding great touches like a Colts-drawn stand-off worthy of a Sergio Leone Western or Quentin Tarantino, and projections that serve to remind us that what we’re watching is taking place in a conceptual space—the play opens with a puppet of The Dramatist (Fernandez, queen of oddball voices) to let us know it’s all “theater”—where the inner landscape is dreamy and tinged with surrealism, like that weird moment with the trampled lamb.

Original music, from Mickey Theis, is atmospheric and pointed enough to carry some scenes on its own, which means that the play gets to take its time, working into moods and out again, while at other moments it switches gears in deliberately jarring ways. Anything to keep us from settling in too easily. Like Theis’ moody guitar, Kate Noll’s set recalls Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, that morality tale from the Eighties that also featured a husband on a hegira, with its receding telephone lines in an otherwise desolate place. The openness and depth of the stage works too, giving the set distinct spaces that never quite cohere—light-years away from Miss Julie’s real-as-a-skillet kitchen space.

The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife is a pointed comedy, poetic and quizzical with many interesting touches.

The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife By Federico García Lorca Directed by Dustin Wills Translated by Gwynne Edwards

Stage Manager: Geoff Boronda; Scenic Designer: Kate Noll; Costume Designer: Seth Bodie; Lighting Designer: Solomon Weisbard; Sound Designer: Nok Kanchanabanca; Production Manager & Technical Director: James Lanius III; Assistant Technical Director: Joey Moro; Artistic Intern & Program Designer: Rocky Bostick; Management Intern: Jonathan Esty

Artistic Director: Dustin Wills; Managing Director: Molly Hennighausen; Associate Artistic Director: Chris Bannow; Associate Managing Director: Anh Le

Photographs by Christopher Ash, courtesy of Yale Summer Cabaret

Yale Summer Cabaret July 11-July 20, 2013

Fun with a Fraud

Molière’s Tartuffe, the first play offered in the Yale Summer Cabaret’s Summer of Giants, is the very definition of a rollicking comedy. Molière is the kind of playwright who keeps the action and every character clearly defined without pandering—producing plays that are the basis for almost any kind of farce that came along after his heyday in the late 1600s. The dialogue is in rhymed couplets—in Richard Wilbur’s deft translation—and that keeps the talk bouncing, and adds charm and wit in spades.

As directed by Dustin Wills, the play is a steady stream of comic moments, a sort of “choose your own” of favorite bits. For some, it may be Prema Cruz’s opening dressing-down of the entire household due to their lack of respect for Tartuffe, a fraudulent holy man who has won her allegiance; or it may be Chris Bannow as deluded and domineering Orgon, hiding under a table to overhear the woo pitched at his wife Elmire (Michelle McGregor) by the hypocritical horndog Tartuffe (Mamoudou Athie)—McGregor’s darting, silent-screen-actress eyes as she listens was a high point for me.

For others it will be the droll spat between the lovers earnest Valere (Mitchell Winter) and winsome Mariane (Celeste Arias) after Valere climbs none-too-adroitly through her window to confront her—their scene together is a great instance of the sport Molière likes to have with lovers.

For others, it may be Ashton Heyl as the ever-attendant ladies’ maid Dorine, offering moral support and cutting remarks—and even a deafening vacuum-cleaner to drown out Orgon’s demands that his daughter marry the insufferable Tartuffe; or may be Ato Blankson-Wood as Damis, son of Orgon and Elmire, who hides in a piano at one point and elsewhere doesn’t brandish a blade so much as try to boat it; or perhaps Mickey Theis as Cleante, Elmire’s brother, he of the widened waist coat, a penchant for preachy apothegms, and an addiction to vanilla wafers.

Then there’s the title character: as Tartuffe, Athie is at times a deadpan foil, at others—when his doting host’s back is turned—a churlish manipulator choking on his dastardly desires. The company is rounded out by Ceci Fernandez in several small roles, most notably the be-wigged fop who provides a hilariously inspired deus ex machina moment in praise of the ever-vigilant prince.

The physical comedy is broad and the characterizations broader, but it’s not just in fun. If you think the theme of how fools can be made the dupes of pious frauds who say one thing and do another ever goes out of currency, think again.

Regulars to the Yale Cabaret space are in for a surprise: the Cab’s usually amorphous configuration of tables and playing-space has been redesigned as a deep stage with wings, while the seating includes, in addition to the familiar high and low tables, a riser of seats in the back and a row of “splash seats” on each side of the action. It’s a fitting set-up for a season of “giant” authors, giving plenty of theatrical space for each show. For Tartuffe, Kate Noll’s scenic design has raided the set of the Rep’s Marie Antoinette among others to give us some of the trappings of the era, filled out with backdrops of faces lifted from engravings of the time; Seth Bodie’s colorful costumes play with period stylings while also flaunting modern touches.

Thoroughly entertaining and engagingly delivered, Tartuffe is a big production that kicks-off the summer season with panache and verve. The show closes June 15th.

Yale Summer Cabaret Molière’s Tartuffe Translated by Richard Wilbur Directed by Dustin Wills

Stage Manager: Geoff Boronda; Scenic Designer: Kate Noll; Costume Designer: Seth Bodie; Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason; Composer: Bob Greenfield; Sound Designer: Steve Brush; Production Manager/Technical Director: James Lanius

Yale Summer Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven, CT

The Kids Are Alright

Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine is something of a schizophrenic play.  As staged by Margot Bordelon, a third-year director in the YSD program, the show is a wildly entertaining first half yoked to a second half that isn’t nearly so nimble.  The first half is set in 1880, on a colonial outpost in Africa, and laughs abound.  The second half is set in England c. 1980, and … not so much. Maybe it’s just me, and my antipathy for that particular past—the era contemporaneous with the writing of the play—is my problem.  And yet, it’s obviously much easier to imbue the 1880s with charm and fun and a frothy lubricity that makes everyone ready to have sex with someone, than it is to derive much in the way of lasting uplift, drama or entertainment from the people who inhabit the late Seventies/early Eighties.  Too close to home but also dated?  Maybe that’s it.  The cast—and they are extremely well-cast—gives it a game try and there are some notable bits in the show’s second half to make it worthwhile.

Before the show even starts we’re treated to the cast posed as figures in displays in a sort of living museum of natural history.  And the exhibits’ backgrounds remain as the set for the African outpost where rigidly upstanding Brit Clive (Gabe Levey, a comic revelation) lives with his family: his blushingly compliant wife Betty (Timothy Hassler, as winsome as one could want a man in a dress to be), Edward, his goldilocked adolescent son (played with inspired awkwardness by a woman), Maud, his no-nonsense mother-in-law (Hannah Sorenson, a study in gray), his daughter Victoria (a stuffed doll) and the child’s nanny, Ellen (Brenda Meaney, self-effacing), as well as his Man Friday Joshua (Chris Bannow—more later), who has renounced his tribe to be a trusted servant.  Enter into this world of domestic bliss and disrupted white tranquility—the natives, as they say, are restless—a rugged explorer, Harry (Mickey Theis, increasingly profound), and a woman with a tendency to be rather assertive, Mrs. Saunders (Meaney again, anything but self-effacing).

As with any broad farce, one isn’t surprised to find that Betty and Harry have a concealed passion for each other of long-standing.  Nor is it surprising to find that Clive has the hots for Mrs. Saunders as a supplement to his overly demure wife (there’s a fairly outrageous scene of coupling between the two, with Levey and Meaney getting all the humor they can out of it).  But when Edward begins to pant for Harry, and the latter slips away with Joshua for a fuck in the stable, and when Ellen tries to make a move on Betty, and when, after some mixed signals are let slip, Harry comes on to Clive, much to the latter’s outrage, well, let’s just say everyone but Maud is ready to do it with someone (the old lady mainly gets her kicks having one doll bitch-slap another).  You see how it is: Victorian propriety masks a libidinal free-for-all.  In Churchill’s 1880s, no one was standing around waiting for Freud to invent sexual repression.  Everyone is sexually expressive, it’s just that the expression had to be a bit more clandestine than would later be the case.

All of this is very amusing with a cast so equal to the task, and the roles of Clive, Betty, Harry, and Edward, especially, manage to be both caricatures as well as bravura bits of characterization by the respective actors in the roles.  Scenes between Harry and Edward are particularly spirited, as are the scenes when Clive tries to upbraid his wife and son.  But to Bannow, as Joshua, falls one of the more interesting roles.  Indeed, it should be mentioned that Bannow has done an estimable job of playing perfectly the kinds of ancillary roles that matter much to the overall effect.  He did it in both parts of Jack Tamburri’s thesis show, Iphigenia Among the Stars, and he does it again in both parts of Cloud Nine.  Joshua is anything but a caricature; he’s a complex witness to a world that tries desperately to hide its truths from itself, and his “Christmas song” is a plaintive grasp at love from someone denuded of his own identity in favor of an invention.  It’s one of the finest moments in the play.

In the second half, after a curtain painted as a Union Jack has fallen to the floor, we enter the post-punk era of Margaret Thatcher.  It’s a brave new world in which women like Victoria (that doll grown up, we’re meant to assume, despite the leap in time) can leave an earnest, well-meaning and hilariously “progressive” husband (Theis, in a sustained comic role) in favor of, first, Lin, a recently divorced single- mother lesbian (Sorenson, lower class than Vickie), and, later, a sexual ménage à trois with Lin and her own bisexual brother—little Edward (Hessler), now grown into a sensitive cross between his earlier, feminized self and Harry, the manly explorer he adored back there in Part One.  The cavorting about on a picnic blanket by Vickie, Lin and Edward is not only intense, it’s also preceded by an invocation of “the goddess.”  While that sort of thing should invite acerbic parody in our time—aren’t the New Agey trappings of the New Woman of the Seventies as risible as the era’s Sensitive Man?—the trio manages to turn the moment into a liberated expression of collective ecstasy. Almost.

Act Two, then, isn’t all farce but aimed at something like a naturalized representation of people trying to find their way in the minefield of human relationships.  The emotional center is Vickie and she gets a sensitive portrayal, with spirited support from Meaney’s newly divorced Betty, looking like a Thatcher wanna-be and yet displaying the good sense to embrace the moment’s potential, and from Bannow’s feckless but direct Gerry—as Edward’s sometime lover he exudes the kind of low-key sexual know-how that seems never to go out of date.

Where the play loses some of the moorings that helped give power to Part One is in the part of Cathy—Lin’s little girl.  With pigtails and Clive’s handle-bar moustache, in a short velvet frock above manly legs, Levey is let run rampant as a kind of androgynous, butch pixie of the Id.  With prepubescent preening, tantrums, and naughty asides, Levey is so riotously girlish he becomes a one-man drag show, but there’s no room for something Part One had and Part Two needs: the sensitivity with which the child—Edward, in Part One—was allowed to put heart into the play via understated comedy.

In Churchill’s script, the actor playing Clive—the ultra-male bastion of all things British—must become a little girl in Part Two, and Bordelon’s production lets us see how such a transformation is no transformation, really, since, Clive or Cathy, it’s Levey’s role to dominate the scene, as Cathy dominates her well-meaning but somewhat clueless elders.  It’s prescient, certainly, as patriarchy makes way for . . . pueri-archy?

Cloud Nine By Caryl Churchill Directed by Margot Bordelon

Scenic Designer: Kate Noll; Costume Designer: Elivia Bovenzi; Lighting Designer: Masha Tsimring; Sound Designer: Sam Ferguson; Composer: Palmer Hefferan; Production Dramaturgs: Emily Reilly, Alexandra Ripp; Stage Manager: Sonja Thorson

Yale School of Drama January 22-26, 2013

Stayin' Up for Days in the Chelsea Hotel

If you missed the early Seventies, for whatever reason, you might not have much grasp of what made the period unique.  The Sixties were over—and that meant an end to a number of things, some of which have become a cliché—but the direction of where things were going, culturally, politically, and in other areas of life, was not yet clear.  It was a lively, hybrid time, in other words.  The Yale Cabaret’s production of Cowboy Mouth, a play co-authored by two obscure but up-and-coming writers named Sam Shepard and Patti Smith in 1971, lets us return to that fabled and fractured time to see a staging of two artistes of the moment—Slim (Mickey Theis) and Cavale (Michelle McGregor)—thrash out a vision. A vision of what?  Well, that’s what makes the play so much fun.  Cavale, the Smith character, knows that religious icons have been replaced, in the collective unconscious of those coming of age in the Sixties and after, by rock icons.  So, what any self-respecting artist must have is a vision of the rock god of tomorrow.  Slim, despite his misgivings, seems to have signed on for a role somewhat like a male Trilby to Cavale’s female Svengali, if only so he can riff off her frantic jabs at poetry.  In the end, we know, it’s Smith, not Shepard, who will become a rock artist.  (But a rock god?  Well, around this time, over in north Jersey—Smith’s from south Jersey—there was this cat named Bruce…)

Life together for Slim and Cavale is a series of provocative assertions, of trying on roles, of taking positions that might be inspiring or might be dispiriting.  Slim wants to hear Cavale tell stories. Cavale wants Slim to get intimate with Raimond, her dead crow.  Slim, restless, pounds a drum kit to punctuate his annoyance, or cranks an electric guitar to reduce Cavale to the postures of an abased groupie.  Cavale plays dead, or slaps the wall, or postures and preens.  And there are many well-choreographed gropes and clutches—body language in this play is a treat, almost a treatise, with director Jackson Moran helping to give it its flair.

And for laughs, there’s Lobster Man, a figure—yes, in a bright red lobster suit—who delivers takeout and returns to become the guinea pig of the duo’s plans.  Fulfilling the inevitable “triangulation” role in a Shepard play, Lobster Man seems to take his cue from the lobster that French 19th-century poet Gérard de Nerval walked in the park on a blue ribbon. Nerval hanged himself on the date of Cavale’s birth (albeit almost a century prior).  That’s the kind of thing that gets Cavale worked up.

As Slim, Theis does the “undiscovered rock god” thing well—he looks good and he knows how to do “stage presence”—but he also knows how to do Shepard’s trademark laconic staccato.  Shepard’s verbal jousting can gesture toward Beat poetry without ever getting lost in its jazzy embellishments.  He’s too “true west” for that.  As Cavale, McGregor’s costume is spot on, and, whereas some of Cavale’s pronouncements could come off as spacey, late hippie-meets-proto punk, McGregor manages to give the role a gravitas that, we might say, can only come from a retrospect on what a female artist of today owes the gutsiness of a female artist of then.  Cavale seems only a little retro, certainly not a throwback.  Both actors are dervishes of movement and play off each other with astute timing and staging.  For my money, both could’ve gone a bit more for the drawl that is so notable in Shepard and Smith, a grasping, searching speech-rhythm that, with Smith especially, is not afraid of going spastic and out of control, ditto her movements.

The look of the show is great—Meredith Ries, Set; Jayoung Joon, Costumes; Masha Tsimring, Lighting—the lines of the play come alive (I particularly liked the echo effects on the mics—Palmer, Sound), and the ending, with The Lobster Man revealed as a female rock god, is apropos.  Drop the notion—dead as of Patti Smith and Chrissie Hynde, if not Grace Slick and Janis—that a rock god can’t be a woman, and lo! Lobster Man stands revealed as the Future of Rock, kinda like glam sans drag.

Jenny said when she was just five years old, There was nothin’ happenin’ at all Everytime she put on the radio, There was nothin’ happenin’ at all Then one fine morning she put on a New York station, She didn’t believe what she heard at all She started dancin’ to that fine, fine music Her life was saved by rock’n’roll —Lou Reed, “Rock’n’Roll” (1970)

Cowboy Mouth By Sam Shepard and Patti Smith Original music composed by Mickey Theis; Lyrics by Sam Shepard and Patti Smith Directed by Jackson Moran Produced by Tanya Dean Yale Cabaret October 25-27, 2012

Tales from the Basement

According to Mary Zimmerman, author of The Secret in the Wings, the setting for the play is “some strange place balanced between a basement and a forest.”  The Yale Cabaret, in other words. The Secret in the Wings is now showing in repertory as part of The Yale Summer Cabaret’s 50 Nights: A Festival of Stories, and is the kind of show the intimate acting space thrives on.  The Cab’s basement space has been revamped, by Adam Rigg and Solomon Weisbard, as a cluttered and creepily-lit set looking like the kind of basement kids would enter on a dare, and, with chalk drawings of trees all about, it’s also the kind of forest kids playacting in a basement might create.  With the audience seated at tables hugging the periphery, a talented cast of six—three males and three females—conjure up a sequence of fairy tales told, in the best Grimm Brothers tradition, without sparing us their violence, grotesque oddities, and fantastic variants of the eternal “find a mate and please your parents” agenda that children have been tasked with since feudal times.

It all begins—well, “once upon a time” there was a little girl named Alex (Alex Trow) whose parents (Ethan Heard and Monique Barbee), being somewhat preening and capricious, chose to leave her for the evening in the care of creepy Mr. Fitzbania (Josiah Bania), a neighbor with a garden of roses, a surly demeanor, and, according to the anxious Alex, a tail!  Indeed he does have a tail, several tales, in fact, and the play consists of the stories he regales the girl with, preceded by his simple question, “will you marry me?”

Beauty and the Beast, right?  Yes, and all the tales have both beauty and beastliness, the latter generally attended with a certain sportive sense of the comical: sure, the unsuccessful suitors for “The Princess Who Would Not Laugh” (Hannah Sorenson, kind of channeling Winona Ryder in Heathers) are decapitated, but the basketballs that roll onto the set as their hapless heads are pretty amusing.  As is the little vaudeville routine the three fellas in "Three Blind Queens" enact with gusto as the everyday life of three princes.  When an evil Nursemaid (Sorenson again—she does evil well, if you saw her as Tamora you know what I mean) demands that the three queens the guys marry have their eyes gouged out (while the princes are away at war), we get a jar of marbles.

At times the props become more poetic—as for instance the little stacks of twigs for the blinded queens’ children—and the choreography even more so: the repetitive routine by which six sons transform into swans and back, due to their piqued father’s unthinking curse, is a bit like watching someone become a bird automaton.  Mickey Theis (as “the worst” son, according to his father), has to do this solo in a corner the way a bad child would, with a look of transfixed wonder and horror mixed.  And Bania does a nice turn as the dad, a simple man driven to his wit's end by his noisy sons.

Each tale Mr. Fitzbania reads is left unfinished as he moves on to another, letting these tales of dark doings hang suspended, until we get to The Swan Sons and a sort of entr’acte tale about a dinner party, a ghostly visitor (Trow—who has a flair for wide-eyed ingenue parts) and two coins.  Then we get, fairly rapidly, the outcomes of the tales.

The story I liked best is sung by the whole cast, and the lyric of the madrigal-like song—“where are you going my one true love, never go there without me”—suits perfectly this tale about the possibilities of love after death.  This time Trow gets to be not so nice, and Ethan Heard, as the lover who agrees to be entombed, alive, with his beloved goes through it all with stoic grace.

Prospects for necrophilia not macabre enough for you?  How about incest in the tale of Allerleira, a beautiful blonde (Sorenson of course) whose dad (Theis) wants to wed her since no other woman in the kingdom can match the beauty of her deceased mom?  This story incorporates fun devices such as a hopscotch jingle that says it all, and a bit in which three kids (Heard, the leader, Trow, the minx, and Barbee, the flighty one) try to get the story straight.  It’s an entertaining glimpse of how children take in and make sense of the kinds of odd things adults tell them in books.

And what is Zimmerman telling us?  The upshot of it all seems to be something like Bruno Bettelheim’s “the uses of enchantment” argument: the tales we tell—and the odder the better—create our capacity for imagination and allow kids to work through the eternal mysteries of life, such as “what’s up with mom and dad?” and “how do I find love?”

Director Margot Bordelon shows that the great pleasure of Zimmerman’s piecemeal reworking of old themes is to be found in the rapid staging and each cast member’s seemingly impromptu changes, and that its value will be revealed in glimpses of beauty and mystery that surprise us.  The whole evening seems not too far removed from what gifted children might get up to in a basement, working through bewilderment and angst via the magic of make-believe.

The Secret in the Wings is that, no matter how happily ever after the story ends, something is always left hanging—and what you do with that, my child, is up to you.

Yale Summer Cabaret

50 Nights: A Festival of Stories

June 20-August 19, 2012

The Yale Cabaret

The Secret in the Wings by Mary Zimmerman

Directed by Margot Bordelon

Cast: Josiah Bania, Monique Barbee, Ethan Heard, Hannah Sorenson, Mickey Theis, Alex Trow

Adam Rigg: Sets; Maria Hooper: Costumes; Solomon Weisbard: Lighting; Matt Otto: Sound

July: 21st, 8pm; 22nd, 8pm; 25th, 8pm; 28th, 2pm August: 3rd, 8pm; 4th, 2pm; 9th, 8pm; 11th, 8pm; 15th, 8pm; 19th, 8pm

50 Nights: A Festival of Stories:

Tanya Dean, Artistic Director; Reynaldi Lolong, Producer; Eric Gershman, Associate Producer; Shane Hudson, Associate Producer; Dana Tanner-Kennedy, Associate Artistic Director/Resident Dramaturg; Jacqueline Deniz Young, Production Manager/Technical Director; Alyssa K. Howard, Production Stage Manager; Rob Chikar, Stage Manager

A World of Its Own

Beautiful, mysterious, eerie, surprising, frustrating, poetic, comic, fascinating—Adam Rigg’s Of Ogres Retold, the second play in the Yale Summer Cabaret’s 50 Nights: A Festival of Stories, is all these things and more.  Conceived by Rigg and devised by the Ensemble—Josiah Bania, Ethan Heard, Hannah Sorenson, Mickey Theis, Alex Trow—the show offers a succession of vignettes, each a highly stylized use of mime, movement, music, puppets and props, to tell brief stories derived from Japanese folktales involving demons, spirits, and ogres. Without use of dialogue or narration, each story must emerge from repetitive, precisely choreographed actions and interactions.  The aura of the show is like a funhouse where transformational enactments are the order of the day.  The task for the audience is to derive the narrative thrust of these pieces, each a kind of ritual puzzle.  The tonalities of the action at times are hard to infer because Matt Otto’s music—often oddly robotic or processed, at other times ethereal and atmospheric—makes no effort to infuse the action with the kinds of tell-tale emotionalism one finds in film scores.

A perfect example of the fusion of music, movement, and tale is in the story of a woman trying to reach, apparently, a spouse who died.  The woman (Alex Trow) crawls nimbly across the floor toward four figures under shrouds, cloaked as well in shadow.  The foremost figure (Ethan Heard) is kneeling or crouching, and when the woman gets close enough to grasp the veil, she wrenches it off to reveal, in a sudden spike of bright light and jolting electric static sounds, a ghostly death-mask.  This happens three times, and on the fourth try—all to the exact same musical loop—there is a different result that is lovely and melancholic, before swiftly becoming something else.

Many of the stories thrive on repetition, with or without a difference.  In another repetitive scene, the entire cast kneels around a low table—two of the men (Josiah Bania and Mickey Theis) pass a bottle.  All are engaged in slapping the table at rhythmic intervals, while segments hewn earlier from the tail of a humanoid fish, or merman (Ethan Heard), are passed around; each participant, it seems, is either unwilling to consume or is prevented from consuming a morsel.  Eventually, one girl (Trow) takes a bite and enters at once into a kind of twilight world where she engages in repeated clutches involving each member of the company in turn.

Another fascinating ritualistic pas de deux occurs at the start with Mickey Theis and Hannah Sorenson as a couple engaged in some kind of love/hate courtship—after a somewhat erotic if theatrical embrace, Theis inevitably flings Sorenson to the floor and drags her the length of the playing space, then steps over her and continues on his way.  She pines; he returns and the same occurs, until . . . things end badly.

Elsewhere there are evocative presentations of a boat at sea, with undulating blue tapestry, of a merman swimming (a puppet moving gracefully behind a blue drape), of twin ogres (Bania and Sorenson) threatening a boat, and an amusing segment in which Heard, in a delightful fantasy of a cook’s outfit, attempts to prepare rice balls, only to be thwarted by one ball that becomes animated.  This segment has a kooky charm and is a welcome change from the intensity of the rest of the show.  Heard plays the cook with a feel for the exaggerated comedy of silent films (and a very funny slow motion lope), and Trow, as the animator of the rice ball, is superb at mute facial expressions.

Throughout the play, lights (Solomon Weisbard) tend to be muted, bathing the cast in blues and reds, and avoiding strong spots, keeping much of the action shadowy and dreamlike.  The costumes (Maria Howard) are wonderful, giving the actors freedom of movement while also creating some impressive effects—the merman costume, for instance, and the many masks.  The cast is fluent in their movements and are all lovely to watch.

Expect to be engaged by this unique production, but also to have your sense of what constitutes a story challenged.  Without a narrator to set the tone, or dialogue to create characters, the stories must rely on their visual elements in depictions that are dramatic, but also somewhat static, spectacles.  Thanks to Adam Rigg's fine flair for design,  Of Ogres Retold takes us into a world of dreamlike arabesques, filled with the ambivalent magic of legends, of cautionary tales, and of eerie occurrences.  It’s a world of its own making.

Yale Summer Cabaret presents

50 Nights: A Festival of Stories

June 20-August 19

Of Ogres Retold

Conceived and directed by Adam Rigg; devised by the Ensemble: Josiah Bania, Ethan Heard, Hannah Sorenson, Mickey Theis, Alex Trow

July: 11th, 8 pm; 14th, 4:30 pm; 19th, 8 pm; 21st, 2 pm; 27th, 8 pm August: 2nd, 8 pm; 5th, 8 pm; 8th, 8 pm; 11th, 4 pm; 18th, 2 & 8 pm

Photographs courtesy of Yale Summer Cabaret