muse, the final show of the Yale Summer Cabaret 2010 season, is an original dance-theater piece, a two-character drama that presents the story of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald from the point of view of the afterlife.

Brenna Palughi conceived the idea, scripted it in collaboration with her production team, Danny Binstock, Walter Chon, and Adina Verson, directs and choreographed the show, and stars as Zelda.  She finds in the story of these literary icons the kind of vivid fascination that, these days, attaches to the likes of Brangelina.  Scott and Zelda lived lives that were not only passionate and artistic, but were also emblems of their era, the Roaring Twenties, forever associated with them, both because of Scott’s works, such as The Great Gatsby (1925), and the couple’s lifestyle.

To present the reality of the couple, Palughi’s script uses only the duo’s actual words — mainly from their considerably articulate correspondence.  But rather than try to recreate the events of the couple’s life, Palughi cannily creates a retrospective fantasy, a kind of Satrean “no exit” space where the couple have to face eternity by trying to make sense of what they were to each other and why it went so wrong.

One of the most unforgettable moments, as a glimpse into the abyss the public couple tried to skirt, derives from a transcript of a session at the Fitzgeralds’ home with a  psychologist (voice of Joby Earle) in attendance to act as arbitrator.  Zelda, who had wanted to be a dancer, published a novel, thus treading on her husband’s territory.  Worse, she was now working on a novel based on events Scott was trying for years to draft as material for what would eventually become Tender is the Night (1934).  To hear Scott baldly declare the conditions under which his wife must live, in order to continue being his wife, is rather appalling to anyone who expects something closer to mutuality in marriage.  On the other hand, the position Scott speaks from is not really one of bullying strength, no matter how his words sound.  He is in need of Zelda, hence the title of the piece: muse.  Without Zelda’s participation in his life, Scott seems to fear a loss of his bearings, but at the same time, any act she might take in her own interest would be considered a complete betrayal.

As Scott, Binstock enacts vividly Scott’s nature via dance and dialogue.  He displays graceful self-control in a lengthy dance piece with Palughi that narrates the couple’s entire story with considerable economy and aplomb, but we see the pressures he faces take actual physical toll on his movements.  And in his spoken protests and pleas Binstock shows us a Scott verging on a loss of control that, if it were to occur, might have been a saving grace.  Instead, we always feel Scott’s grasp of himself, so thoroughly buttoned up in his lovely suits, no less tenacious for being tentative and vulnerable.  Only when he dances do we see some of the “light fantastic” that makes the prose so golden, so self-assured.

In a segment where word and movement are particularly well matched and powerful, Zelda kneels on the stage reading a letter from Scott comprised of nothing but hurtful, insistent, resentful, relentless questions while behind her Scott performs a marionette’s series of jerks, slaps, and contortions.  Here we see the perfect visual realization of something almost inhumanly mechanical — the way his concept of himself as a writer controlled Scott just as fiercely as his need to control Zelda.

As Zelda, Palughi’s dancing is able to express an openness and abandon that seems, from all accounts, to have been part of Zelda’s fascination.  But it’s also fascinating to hear how lucid she could be, even when threatened with an asylum.  Palughi’s voice at times gets strident but never veers into the kind of hysteria we might expect.  Her Zelda is verbally in control, even if her expression at times becomes a doll-like fixity, the mournful gaze of a spirit trapped forever in her husband’s vision of her.

For all the tensions and darkness of this marriage, Palughi’s sense of the material highlights its romantic potential.  Elizabeth Groth’s costumes are lovely; her set is a world literally papered with words; the music — Gershwin for instance — breathes with rapture and jaunty melancholy; Sarah Lasley’s newsreel-like projections add the necessary touch of the mediated reality that encroached on these lives, making them famous and a part of our nation’s permanent record.

In the afterlife, “hell is other people,” but if the people were truly a couple — overriding even “til death do us part” — it may be possible to see that the feeling “to be young then was very heaven” might also override all-too-human failings with the heady thrill of being “beautiful and damned” for all time.

muse;  conceived and directed by Brenna Palughi

July 29-August 14, 8 p.m.; August 7, 2 p.m.

Yale Summer Cabaret: 203.432.1567; SummerCabaret.org

When it debuted in Yale Cabaret’s 2009/10 Season, Janyia Antrum’s campy sci-fi musical Strange Love in Outer Space was the success story of The Dwight/Edgewood Project (see my review here).  Now its success continues with the play’s debut in New York in the eclectic and exciting New York Fringe Festival, Aug. 14, 17, 19, 21, and 23, including a mention in the New York Times.

The Dwight/Edgewood Project is held every July under the auspices of Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theater.  It’s a four week program that introduces New Haven area kids to the elements of theater, from playwrighting and design to acting and directing, with classes staffed by Yale School of Drama students.  For the last two years, August Lewis Troup Middle School and Wexler-Grant Community School have been partners in the project.

Janyia wrote the first part of Strange Love in summer 2009, at the age of twelve.  When she got home after the project ended, she felt the urge to continue the story and wrote a second part.  The Yale Cabaret commissioned a third act and then produced the play.  Jorge Rodriguez, who has worked with Janyia as a producer from the beginning, comments: Janyia “wrote a play that was incredibly well structured, with outstanding character development and incredibly funny.”  The play impressed her fellow students at D/EP and the staff “was stunned by her sense of comedic timing.  The zany, campy humor that distinguishes this play were of her own creation and a result, as she often joked about, of years of watching TV sitcoms like The Nanny.”

Christopher Mirto, who directed the D/EP production and the Yale Cab production, is at the helm again for the Fringe production.  He also plays the memorable role of Mr. Grumis, a fish-like alien who courts the statuesque Splontusia.  For Mirto, the play works for a lot of reasons:

“Janyia’s story is actually really moving and has a strong leading female character. It’s campy fun but very serious and imaginative and comes from such a genuine place. It’s surprisingly smart, has great comic timing, [and] the songs move the plot forward; the characters are crazy, but have very clear desires. The Fringe is a good fit because it’s an unusual show in style, form, characters, design. It doesn’t have a big or complicated design, so it’s easy to transfer. Kind of like Pixar films, it appeals to adults and children.”

The Fringe version features some of the same cast as the Cabaret version — Mirto, and his longtime associate Brian Valencia, who also mentored Janyia in D/EP, as the dastardly Dr. Tuscanunin — but also presents some changes, with Caitlin Clouthier, from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, in the central role of multi-eyed Splontusia, and recent YSD graduate Aja Naomi King as B’Quisha Star Jones, the dog/pirate queen.  The new production also boasts a new song.

The Fringe is a huge, sprawling drama festival that Mirto calls “a total crapshoot.”  The sublime and the ridiculous rub shoulders and you go in not quite knowing what you’re going to get.  Strange Love has already proven itself capable of mixing it up with the challenging and off-the-wall offerings of the Cab, and now it will run side-by-side with the off-off-Broadway shows of the West Village.

Mirto’s excited by the challenge and comments, “There is this really nice non-jaded aspect of Janyia that is refreshing for me: she reminds me that it should be fun, it should entertain, and it should be simple; and that imagination goes a long way!”

It’s an imagination that has created a play that’s out of this world, a play that has already gone a long way from an afterschool project to a New York city debut.

Strange Love in Outer Space, A Musical Traumedy

Book and Lyrics by Janyia Antrum; Music by Nick Morgan; Directed by Christopher Mirto

The Cherry Pit (venue #14), 155 Bank Street, New York, NY (West & Washington Street)

Sat. Aug. 14, 2:15 p.m.; Tues. Aug. 17, 10:30 p.m.; Thurs. Aug. 19, 8 p.m.; Sat. Aug. 21, 5:30 p.m.; Mon. Aug. 23, 4 p.m; Tickets $15-$18; for tickets: www.FringeNYC.org

Presented by The New York International Fringe Festival; A Production of The Present Company

Director Devin Brain and the cast of the current Yale Summer Cabaret show, The Phoenix, have given themselves quite a task: to render a situation that could be either fantasy or reality, but either is potentially alienating.  Based on a haunting story by best-selling Australian author Isobelle Carmody, the play has been derived by the cast via an improvisational process of discovery, which means that the presentation is not scripted so much as agreed upon through trial and error during a long period of gestation.

If that sounds daunting, it should.  But it also may be the best way to approach a story like this which relies so much on shared fantasy among its characters.  The logic seems to be: if the actors are making things up together to make the play exist in the first place, they’ll be all the more convincing as the fantasizing characters they portray.

William (Ben Horner), we’re told, is the “local feral child” — an amusing appellation, but one that means his character will be hard to read.  He addresses Ragnar (Shannon Sullivan) as a princess — and not figuratively.  He actually seems to believe they are foundlings from another world, left to wander a beach deserted but for a wounded gull Ragnar names Greedy.  In addition to using a bird puppet, the play fleshes out the bird via William Demeritt, complete with feathers at his temples, a brace, and a crutch, appearing at times like a guardian spirit fallen on hard times as he manipulates dolls that emulate the scenes the actors play out.

Though the dark backstories of Ragnar and William are a bit sketchily thrown at us before we have much idea of what’s going on, Horner and Sullivan fascinate us with the strange mix of desperation, denial, and happy inspirations that unite the duo.  One device I particularly liked was Sullivan showing us, mutely, a series of photographs while looking at us with facial expressions that telegraphed exactly how Ragnar felt about each image and how we should read them.  That didn’t mean we necessarily grasped the narrative, but the effort to communicate it was palpable.

But when Torvald (Joby Earle), a charismatic boy from a different class and school, enters the scene, things really begin to click.  Before that we’re just trying to follow the logic of a folie à deux that seems harmless if unsettling; once the third character is introduced we have a conflict.  Will he enter — as he seems to — the rather grand, Dungeons and Dragons-like world the other two mentally inhabit, or repudiate it?  And if he does enter it, is he sincere or after something?

At this point in the story, the three principals act out their interactions via the dolls, and suddenly a feeling of truly being transported to those fabled lands of childhood playtime comes to life.  And once Brain and company has us entertaining how wonderfully trusting and expressive and vulnerable that world of shared make believe can be, they’ve got us primed for where they want to take us.  It becomes an uncompromising and tragic play about the unwritten laws we intuit and then either respect or betray when entering into private, personal bonds with one another.

As ever at the Cabaret, it’s the unexpected touches that impress us as theater: the song William makes up, seemingly on the spot; Ragnar’s bike helmet; Torvald’s inspired use of an overhead projector; moody musical tones, particularly an expressive acoustic guitar part, that surrounds the action, provided by musical director Nathan Roberts; and, finally, that frail craft — a boat upon a boat — that gives us poetry as closure.

The Phoenix, from the story by Isobelle Carmody; adapted by Devin Brain and the cast; directed by Devin Brain

July 1-17, 8 p.m.; additional 2 p.m. show on the 10th; Yale Summer Cabaret, 203.432.1567

David Rabe, Girl By The Road At Night, NY: Simon and Schuster, 228 pgs.

One could say that David Rabe is obsessed with the Vietnam War.  Best known for a trio of award-winning plays in the ’70s that deal with that conflict and its effect on those who fought in it, Rabe has more recently turned from theater and taken up fiction-writing and now, with his latest novel, returns to the war that made him famous.  We could say that he does so because he knows he can write about it well — Rabe served in Vietnam in the mid-’60s — and because, perhaps, it’s a part of our history that never goes away.

I found myself questioning that last supposition in the early going of this poetically spare, episodic novel.  Is Vietnam a national obsession still, or is it Rabe’s more than ours?  Perhaps more to the point — regardless of what you think of the war and its era — is the question: is there anything more to be done with it?

It may be an unfair question, but when you see the novel’s rather taciturn and self-involved protagonist Joseph Whitaker, on the eve of his depature into the army, hanging around in DC hoping to get laid by a war-protesting flowerchild, you might be excused for thinking it all a bit too familiar.  But when Whitaker drops in on his former girlfriend, now involved with a new guy, he begins to come alive a bit more, taking on dimension due to a feeling of unfinished emotional business that could lead him to more interesting experiences.

Rabe alternates the chapters depicting Pfc. Whitaker’s misgivings about service in the war and his general lot in life with chapters that introduce us to Quach Ngoc Lan, a Vietnamese prostitute plying her trade at Madame Lieu’s, where GIs can get their jeeps washed and their junk moved simultaneously.  Rabe is very effective at rendering how the GIs view these locals, but there aren’t many surprises here amidst the general racism and, occasionally, grudging appreciation of what would’ve been thought of as “oriental mystery.”  But gradually the interiority of Lan, attenuated as it may be by lack of education and a rather elemental sense of life, becomes louder and louder for the reader as her pidgin English — where Rabe gets to show his command of dialogue — comes to seem not a limitation so much as a unique form of communication.  Her motives and her actions are often glimpsed through the viewpoint of others, but Rabe’s greatest achievement is making us feel not that we know Lan but that we would very much like to.

Is Lan the all-too-familiar whore with a heart of gold, and Whitaker the GI who tries to save her from a world they never made?  Frankly, Rabe’s tale is not as far from that soapy terrain as some readers might like, or, alternately, doesn’t wallow in it to the degree that others might wish.  There is a connection between the two and it might mean something, but Rabe keeps us furnished with enough sense of the grim realities of the setting to prevent us from expecting any improvement for either of them.

But what the interest of Girl hinges on is not its depiction of prostitution and the war — as forms of exploitation that put both Whitaker and Lan in something of the same position as expendable vassals — but in its willingness to look unsentimentally at the power that even a minimum of communication and connection can provide between people who are strangers to one another and, to some extent, the situation in which they find themselves and each other.

“Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows” Shakespeare said, and the journalist Charles Dudley Warner famously stated that “politics makes strange bedfellows”  Rabe’s novel takes for granted that the politics of the war and the misery it gives rise to create a condition that might throw together unlikely bedfellows, and the novel’s best effect is making us believe they might have something to offer each other.

David Rabe reads at RJ Julia Booksellers, Wed. June 23, 7 p.m., $5, which may be used toward purchase of the book; 768 Boston Post Road, Madison, CT; www.rjjulia.com

The Yale Summer Cabaret debuted its 2010 season with cult favorite Hedwig and The Angry Inch, text by John Cameron Mitchell, songs by Stephen Trask.  Directed by Jesse Jou, artistic director of the Cab this summer, the working conceit of the piece is that we aren’t watching theater but rather a rock band, The Angry Inch, led by Hedwig, perform in some dive.  Between musical numbers, Hedwig regales us with tales of her life in an ongoing monologue — and colorful, kinky, comical, disheartening and inspiring it is.

Hedwig began life as a boy named Hansel living in East Germany before the Wall fell.  An American soldier named Luther falls in love with the “girlyboy” and in order for them to marry, Hansel, who adopts his mother’s name and passport, also agrees to have a sex change operation to become female in fact.  The operation is botched and Hedwig is left genitally indeterminate — neither male nor female, a perfect character to explore the in-between manner of the transgendered.

As Hedwig, Chad Raines is phenomenal.  His Hedwig is slyly insinuating, an introvert who has become an extrovert in self-defense.  The special condition of Hedwig’s sexuality is both a trial by error that makes her grimly ironic about fate, but also a badge of honor that gives credit to her tale.  For this to work, Hedwig can’t seem campy — simply a guy in drag — and Raines brings it off admirably.  He gives Hedwig an aloof Dietrich air that can veer into Janis-like vocal lacerations at will.

The latter are fueled by the vulnerability of Hedwig’s romantic attachment to Tommy Gnosis, a bigtime rock star whom she had an affair with in their youth (when Tommy was a repressed Christian in a Bible Belt trailer park), and whom she now trails about the country as he enacts musical self-celebration in huge arenas, performing songs Hedwig wrote with and/or for him.  According to Hedwig, Tommy is her missing other half, separated from her à la  Aristophanes’ story in Plato’s  Symposium.  The double whammy — thwarted romance, thwarted career — makes Hedwig a true rock diva, showing us the scars on her heart.

But our Hedwig is also cruel (the East German accent helps with that, ja) to herself and to her smitten assistant Yitzhak (Adina Verson), a one-time drag queen whom Hedwig insists wear butch clothing — in this production, vintage Grunge.  Yitzhak gets no spoken lines — except for two ‘unprintable’ epithets directed at her lover/boss — but Verson’s eyes speak plenty as Yitzhak shares the limelight with Hedwig, providing powerful vocal backup, or cringes somewhere in the background as Hedwig confides — or performs confiding — in the audience.

The backing band kicks ass and theater-goers who aren’t used to musicals that really rock may be somewhat taken aback.  This is not a rock musical with songs cleaned up for the stage in Broadway’s neutered idea of what rock sounds like. The Cab space is, appealingly, just the sort of basement venue Hedwig might be playing in the play’s reality, and it’s easy enough to feel like a spectator in a club, fascinated by a performer who lets it all hang out, even throwing tantrums at the band that may be real or may be staged, or both.

At the heart of it all is the girlyboy with the brittle wit, the belting voice, and an array of costumes — the Ziggy Stardust get-up was a dead ringer — that, like the songs, trigger glam memories and rock’n’roll dreams.

As the song by Spoon says: “when you don’t believe, it shows, they tear out your soul / when you believe, they call it rock’n’roll.”

I call this rock’n’roll.

Yale Summer Cabaret presents Hedwig and the Angry Inch; text by John Cameron Mitchell; music and lyrics by Stephen Trask; directed by Jesse Jou; music directed by Nathan A. Roberts; photo: Nick Thigpen

June 4th-19th 2010, 8 pm. (No performances on Sunday or Monday evenings.) Additional performance, June 12th, 11 p.m.  To purchase tickets and for more information, please visit summercabaret.org or call (203) 432 1567

Steven Dietz’s Private Eyes is a playful play.  We’re never quite sure what we’re watching.  Sure, it’s a play, and we accept that plays are supposed to be a likeness of reality.  A stage with a desk and a round table and a few chairs can be a space where a woman (Rebecka Jones) tries out for a part with a man (Philip M. Gardiner) who seems to be a director; when later the woman, Lisa, working as a waitress, finds the director, Matthew, at her table, we accept, for the sake of make believe, that the action has moved to a restaurant.  And that’s what lets Dietz produce his “gotcha” effect: they both are still on stage, we find, and both scenes, the try out and the restaurant, are part of a rehearsal, and the two are married, and in a play being directed by Adrian (Robert Resnikoff).

Scenes that seem like they’re happening in real life — Lisa and Adrian debate how to reveal to Matthew that they have been having an affair — turn out to be a narrative Matthew is telling to his therapist Frank (Jackie Sidle).  At any moment what is real, what is staged, what is fantasized is in question and sometimes the switches from one “level” to another and back are lightning fast and quite comical.  For instance, Adrian and Lisa are cuddling in bed when suddenly Adrian speaks offstage to Matthew telling him that’s how he’d like him to play the bed scene — the bed is literally on stage of course but at that moment we realize it’s actually on stage and that Matthew has walked into the scene.

It might sound like the play is about play acting, about how to represent plausible reality on stage and how to keep breaking through the fourth wall, playing on the audience’s willing acceptance of staged activity as actual behavior.  But the play has more to offer than that.  The theatrical sleights of hand keep us off-guard and laughing; meanwhile, we’re witnessing how staging scenes — of seduction, of concealment, of confrontation, of confession — is a part of the theatricality of everyday life.

Like sociologist Erving Goffman’s study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Dietz’s play accepts that human interactions always contain an element of performance.  In a sense, we never get to the bottom of these characters because they, like us, are always in a play.

The performance style of contemporary theater is key to making the shifting levels effective:  roles requiring minimal costume change, staged with minimal props and sets, vocal deliveries that stress a declamatory approach to speech — as if people don’t converse so much as aim monologues at each other or try to use verbal cues as a means to assert themselves — all add up to an open-ended performance that is “like” life only because we accept such theatrical conventions as true to reality, which of course they aren’t.

In a way, it seems that Dietz’s play is questioning those conventions, but if so, not in any very critical way.  As played by Theatre 4, the play was mainly good fun — Gardiner in particular made the most of his character’s comical state of knowing and not knowing what was going on.  And Mariah Sage, as supposedly a detective tailing Adrian at his wife’s request, added some unexpected and racy fun to Matthew’s life.  Jones had the task of generating sympathy for a cheater and managed it by suggesting the dramatic thrill of secrecy and the fact that, in theater and in life, we mainly want something to happen.

Steven Dietz’s Private Eyes, directed by Janie Tomarkin for Theatre 4, plays June 4 & 5 at Oddfellows Playhouse in Middletown, 203.654.7111, $20 suggested price; and June 10-13, at The Kate in Old Saybrook, 877.503.1286, tickets $32.  For more information: www.t4ct.com.

Poetry in Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversation with America’s Poets. Edited by Alexander Neubauer.  Knopf, 342 pp.

This book is a perfect gift for any reader or writer of poetry.  It consists of transcripts excerpted from the amazing classes held by Pearl London at the New School in New York, from 1970 to the late ’90s.  The class, Works in Progress, featured invited guests — some of the major American poets of our day — to speak with London and her students about poems the poets were working on, distributing drafts and commenting on the process of revision that goes into the making of a poem.

These exchanges should be of considerable value to anyone who writes, for it’s safe to say that not even the most grizzled veteran of the poetry workshop circuit can lay claim to having been in the presence of such an array of literary notables.  From Maxine Kumin in 1973 to Eamon Grennan in 1996, twenty three poets in all, featuring the likes of Frank Bidart, Louise Glück, Robert Hass, June Jordan, Philip Levine, James Merrill, Robert Pinsky, Muriel Rukeyser, Derek Walcott.

Neubauer, who taught fiction at the New School, provides an informative introduction about London and the class, and a brief forward on each poet, focused on the stage of the career when he or she appeared in London’s class, and often characterizing the mood of the exchange.  Neubauer had access to 90-minute tapes of each class that, transcribed, ran to over fifty pages apiece.  Distilling each exchange to about fifteen printed pages took considerable editorial skill, but it means there’s rarely a dull moment.  In each case, Neubauer selects a substantive discussion that gives real insight into a poet’s personality, frame of reference, and attitude toward a particular poem and to poetry in general.

Not surprisingly, all the guests take their work very seriously, but it’s quite refreshing that they don’t seem ponderous or self-serving.  The book demonstrates that a great public value of contemporary poets is their ability to speak engagingly about their craft and their motivations as writers.

The exchanges also make one marvel at how fully in her element a great teacher like London can be.  She leads the discussion but never dominates, nor is she timid or fawning.  Informed, relaxed, she easily inserts comments the featured poet has made on other occasions — sometimes previous visits to the course — and, like the poets, is quick to call to mind lines from poems to illustrate points about great poetry.

And that is the main issue under discussion: how to make a good poem better.  Each poet confronts this problem in an individual way, but each is clearly committed to a sense of poetry that does not permit being satisfied with anything less than the best effort.  And each is quite candid about the trials and errors that goal entails.  Neubauer helpfully provides a photostat of the poem under discussion, in most cases in both draft and published versions.

I could cite examples from every exchange that illuminate what choices poets consider in creating a poem.  In particular, I liked the way several poets pondered what they consider to be the main tasks of form, and of the relation of the sentence to the poetic line.  But to pick a favorite moment, it’s this comment from Glück, in 1979: “Something can be marvelous and still need to be stopped.  Otherwise you don’t change.  It’s as simple as that.  And if you don’t change, then you stop writing good poems.”

This is a truly challenging formulation, not simply to student writers but to the most accomplished poet.  And it shows that teaching writing is not simply about improving the words on the page but should inspire constant exploration and discovery.  Poetry in Person does that.

The Long Wharf Theatre production of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House managed a surprising feat: it made the play more entertaining without significantly altering it.  If you’re a purist who wants to see Ibsen played straight, it does that; but if you think that a play like ADH, with its winsome wifey who gets into some hot water due to an “innocent” forgery, then gets out of it only to slam the door on her happy-ever-after home, is a bit dated and could use some kind of make-over, well, this show does that too.

And that’s what I found surprising: first, that one could perch Ibsen on the terrain of a sitcom or a soap; second, that I found myself thinking, well, isn’t ADH simply a more revered soap?  After all, the plot of the story is pure soap opera, and there’s nothing in the dialogue that aims beyond the play’s basic premise, which is something like: happiness is only skin deep.  Scratch it, and it bleeds.  So why not give us an A Doll’s House (1879) that resonates in a world of McMansions where — as is only too timely — a bit of financial chicanery might bring the whole cloud castle down on a bank manager’s ears.

Gordon Edelstein, who did the adaptation and directed, deserves great credit for mining the comic potential in the material.  It mainly seemed to be a matter of emphasis.  The dialogue, a bit modernized, was close to any version of the play we might already be familiar with, but this production included laughs that might be in Ibsen’s script but which a less enterprising director might overlook.  There was a breeziness to it that kept it from taking itself too seriously, a breeziness derived from the giddy fun of looking into our neighbors’ glass house.

What’s important, for a modern production, is that we not be laughing at Nora, the little bluebird, squirrel, chipmunk, as though she were simply in over her airhead and deserving of a little domestic contretemps for our amusement.  Ana Reeder made the most of making Nora likeable, cannily dim rather than actually so.  She managed the protean shifts that are necessary — the play makes us see — to be the “perfect wife”: temptress, adoring partner, household manager, confidante to friends both male and female, defender of the threatened nest, even sacrificial victim (the latter a melodramatic touch that can’t help seeming a bit 19th century).  When, in the end, she does what she’s got to do, the shifts from comically desperate to happily saved to proudly determined occur a bit too fast for realism, but Reeder “kept it real,” as they say, helped by the change to casual jeans and sweatshirt after the hiked skirt, hose and low neckline of her belle of the ball costume as a dancing peasant girl.  The “street clothes” underscored that her role in the household had been a command performance all along, and it was time for a curtain call.

In the supporting cast, special mention goes to Tim Hopper as Dr. Peter Rank, the ailing best friend of Nora’s husband Torvald who carries a torch for her himself.  Their scenes had enough heat to make up for the rather lukewarm affections of Torvald, and Hopper’s doomed departure, in cowboy costume with a big cigar going, deserved an ovation.  As Torvald, Adam Trese kept a part that could easily be a caricature sympathetic, even up to his panicked outburst at Nora for exposing him to his enemies.  I liked him best at the end as he babbled about how he forgave her, sitting in his big papa chair, and his attempts to defeat her logic resonate so well, even 21st century males might easily hear Ibsen laughing at us.

As the villain in the piece, Mark Nelson’s Nils Krogstad had a kind of shaky petulance that worked well enough in confronting Nora with her wrongdoings, and in his pleas to be reinstated at the bank, but made it hard to see what her friend Christine Linde (Linda Powell) could see in him.  He seemed more eager to end it all rather than able to blackmail a boss’s wife or rekindle an old romance.

Michael Yeargan’s set was a wonderfully detailed doll’s house, its fakery part of its appeal, with plenty of floorspace for Ibsen’s and Edelstein’s playthings to move about and grope toward some satisfactory vision of the future.

And what of the kids?  It may be much easier for today’s male to accept without much soul-searching Nora’s claim that she needs to educate herself and find a place in the world; but does today’s woman find it any easier to pursue that goal at the sacrifice of her ties to her children than women would in Ibsen’s day?  “You’ve come a long way, baby,” since Ibsen’s Nora first walked out — but, Edelstein’s production seems to ask, “how far would you go?”

LONG WHARF THEATRE, Gordon Edelstein, Artistic Director; Ray Cullom, Managing Director

presents:

A DOLL’S HOUSE by Henrik Ibsen, Adapted and Directed by Gordon Edelstein, Set Design by Michael Yeargan

through May 23, 2010

Bernard-Marie Koltès’ Battle of Black and Dogs (Combat de nègre et de chiens), translated by Michaël Attias, and directed by Robert Woodruff, is the second play this season at the Yale Rep to take us to vague environs in Africa to witness a drama among a small group of people cut off from the world at large.  Like Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed, BBD places us in a compound, but this time it’s a “construction site run by a foreign company in a West African country, anywhere from Senegal to Nigeria,” where the main characters, white and French, are confronted by Alboury (Albert Jones), a member of a local Wolof tribe who wants to retrieve the body of a worker at the site who has recently died or been killed.

At the site, the boss, Horn (Andrew Robinson), primarily drinks and gambles with his underling Cal (Tommy Schrider), an engineer who should be higher on the ladder than Horn, but is not exactly what you’d call management material.  In fact, he killed the Wolof worker for almost hitting his shoe with a gob of spit, then insisted it was an accident, then tried to dispose of the body in various ways before finally flinging it in the sewer.

This interracial workplace drama is further complicated by the fact that Horn has recently returned from a trip to Paris and brought back a woman he hopes will become his wife.  Léone was a chambermaid at the hotel he stayed at who, as he puts it, always answers yes — particularly to the offer to come with him to Africa, to see the fireworks display he’s going to set off before leaving the country for good.

Cal will make a pass at her (or rather will paw her in an unsettling fashion while babbling inanities); she’ll fall for Alboury (in an odd courtship in which she speaks German and he speaks Wolof, though he does understand French, her native language; the double estrangement is no doubt meaningful, but rather leaves the audience in the dark about what they are saying to each other — does the fact that she’s reciting the well-known poem “The Erlking” help?).  Things will not end well, though, all things considered, not as badly as they might have.

In such a stylized play, all the emphasis is on performance.  Robinson, resembling the aged Jon Voight and sounding at times like the aged Jack Lemmon, inspires a certain Everyman confidence as Horn, particularly as he’s not that virulent a racist, and speaks for the most part sensibly to Alboury, even addressing him as “sir” initially, and though trying to buy him off may be crass, that too is sensible since the body of Nouofia is unrecoverable.

As Alboury, Jones is given a cipher rather than a character, a representation of elemental difference, perhaps; the “nègre” of the French title is no doubt infused with ideas of “négritude,” which makes the whole feel a bit dated or at least resolutely Francophone.

But even harder, for me, was reading the character of Léone who, in the girlish, lost little lamb voice Middendorf used, might well have fallen from the moon rather than Paris, despite a remark about Saint-Laurent’s Africa boutique.  Her ritual cum guilt cum scarification cum symbolic gesture of blood-letting late in the play was heavy with portent but light on sense or catharsis.

As Cal, Schrider is the live wire in this production and the play’s most dynamic character: unpredictable, seething, at times funny in the way that those who speak in earnest rants can be — at first, a bit of Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now to Boss Kurtz, though way more unstable than Horn.  He also appears in one scene naked and coated in what is — rather believably — meant to be shit, and also showers in full view of the audience before donning his sacrificial whites.  It’s a demanding part, to say the least.  Whether or not the nudity is gratuitous — it’s Woodruff and not Koltès who insists on it — it did rather distract from the dialogue.

While there are problems with the play’s plot and staging, it should be said that, to give Koltès his due, each character does get at least one fascinating monologue, and it’s the talk that mainly sustains our interest.  My favorite speech was Horn’s description of a city that would take up only half of France and could house the entire population of the world in 40-story apartment blocks.

The set, designed by Riccardo Hernandez, is interesting, with a big basement room with a cot and cage visible below — and more naturalistically furnished than — the spare stage above,the latter dominated by a kind of shack of corrugated slats, a table for the drinking/gambling, little spots of dirt, and some bougainvillea hanging in the cylindrical lights above.   It looks like nowhere on earth, and if we were told it was a construction site on a planet somewhere far, far away, that would be easy enough to believe.

BATTLE OF BLACK AND DOGS, Yale Repertory Theatre, April 16 to May 8, 2010, written by Bernard-Marie Koltès, translated by Michaël Attias, directed by Robert Woodruff; photograph, Joan Marcus

On March 23rd, Terry Castle gave a talk in the Yale English department about academic writing and read from her new book The Professor and Other Writings; on March 25th, David Shields spoke at a Master’s Tea in Pierson College about his new book Reality Hunger; and on April 1st, James Longenbach gave a talk in the Yale English department on “the art of writing badly.”

What linked these events for me, other than the fact that they occurred in less than a week and a half, was the attention to the question of writing — who it’s for, what it’s for, and what we make of it.

Castle’s talk, in the end, seemed to be little more than a complaint about jargon in the academic profession.  Her handout, originally designed for a graduate course, gave students pointers on things to avoid in writing, the kinds of things editors will eventually take them to task for, but there was a bit of a polemical edge to it as well — in picking on the use of terms such as “hegemony” and “interpellation,” she was targeting not so much the specific meaning of those words (as derived from Althusser), but rather their far too ubiquitous use (and possibly misuse) in the many theses that cross her desk.

Fine.  But there was another aspect to her talk that bothered me: the “this is the end of days” tone that one finds in many of the Baby Boomer generation coming up to retirement while recognizing that much of what constituted their glory days may not in fact stand the test of time.  Jargon has destroyed the profession, we learn.  Maybe so, but if so, it happened on their watch.

The sourness of this point, for me, was dramatized by Castle reading from a memoir in which, as a young would-be graduate student in the early ‘70s, she came into contact with a dope-smoking professor who may have intended to seduce her before learning she was a lesbian.  In recreating the hip jargon of that era — not only in her reminiscence but also in far too many verbatim transcriptions of her journal of that time — Castle made a point she didn’t seem to want to acknowledge: every generation has its way of speaking to others in that generation, but how seriously should we take such efforts to “talk the talk” of the time?  Current grad students may outgrow their jargon too, but might they not, when also silver-haired and fêted, choose to amuse the youngsters with the Althusserian, Derridean lingo of their day?  In Castle’s memoir, the old guard, all-male previous generation of academics seemed barely worth more than a dismissive glance.  But what will be the fate of the stoned, free love-seeking, in touch with their feelings generation Castle revisited?  Too early to say, but I was not encouraged by the prospect of “tell-all” memoirs rubbing our noses in Reichian drivel for the sake of verisimilitude.

David Shields is a critic and was a novelist, but the argument he presented to the audience in Pierson College was that the novel is not equipped to address the times we live in, for that a new form is needed: the lyric essay.  What that might require could perhaps be found in the direction Castle was taking: in her case, giving up stilted, depersonalized, overly abstract (supposedly “objective”) academic writing for something more personal, subjective, revealing.  In Shields case, giving up the deliberate creation of a fictional world for a first person rendering of one’s intellectual state in the world one actually inhabits.  My first thought was: if the novel is not adequate to these times we need better novelists — the novel itself is whatever we make of it.   That said, I’m quite sympathetic to Shields’ idea of dropping the “traditional” novel in favor of something more experimental — but then that was always the frisson of reading Beckett, Proust, Miller, and others who don’t really write “novels.”

Is Shields’ new book something along those lines?  Well, at least his talk made me want to read it.  The less interesting, to me, aspect of his presentation centered on the issue of appropriation. His book is a “mash up”: a tissue of quotations borrowed, edited, re-used as he sees fit.  Far from the work of academic citation, this method wants to treat the printed world as writers in the time of Montaigne could: whatever they read was grist for the mill and could be put to what service they liked — of course, those texts were mostly in Latin and not protected by copyright.  So that part of Shields “defense” of his method became an argument, not about fiction vs. non-fiction, but about how writers should treat the writing of others, which might lead to the kind of “if it’s online its yours” cut-and-paste methods that too many students already use in the writing of their papers.

I’m willing to believe Shields may be enough of a stylist to get away with it, but I’ll have to read the book to see.

Finally, Longenbach, a critic of poetry and a poet, wanted to draw our attention to how often “bad writing” appears in the work of good writers.  What he meant by this was actually the art of what he called “dilation”: those passages that seem simply to pile up words, sometimes abstract terms, sometimes cursory details, in such a way that risks the reader’s boredom.  It’s always gutsy to talk about bad writing when reading to people from one’s own prose, as the tendency of any audience members to drift off might signal that one is reading an example of the problem one is addressing.  But the overall point of the presentation was to alert us to how often, in poems, one can’t address the quality of a given line or passage without taking into account its context.  A memorable line may be that, but a limping line may limp for a reason.

Castle’s writing may well have been an example of what Longenbach meant by “bad”: plenty of longeurs meant to recall a by-gone idiom that bored the crap out of me.  Longenbach’s prose escaped the faults Castle pilloried — no jargony terms were used — but the essay didn’t offer the kind of engaged and personal address to the work that Castle called for and, for some, evinced, and seemed not to satisfy Shields’ call for the lyric essay, what’s more Longenbach dutifully provided a handout with his many quotations from poems duly noted.  Shields didn’t read to us, but one suspects that it’s easy to write well if one steals only from the best.