New Plays

This year, the 7th Annual Carlotta Festival at the Yale School of Drama, a showcase developed by Paula Vogel, Pulitzer-winning playwright and Chair of the YSD Playwriting Department, for the school’s graduating playwrights, features three plays that explore the vicissitudes of that oft-misunderstood creature, the human male. In Fox Play, which begins the festival on May 4th, the focus is on how men grieve; in Petty Harbour, opening May 5th, the story is a tale of forgiveness involving a patriarch and his three sons; and The Bachelors, opening May 6th, looks at the possibilities for romance outside the “bromance” of three thirtyish guys, long-time friends and housemates.

For Jake Jeppson, author of Fox Play, the issue is to explore what he calls “the ideal masculinity of an ideal America,” a code of conduct that doesn’t allow grief to be aired easily among men.  His main characters are isolated males who have suffered a loss: Franklin, an elderly shoesalesman, is a widower; Sean, a much younger man, is “an aspiring YouTube personality” who mainly posts videos of the girlfriend that got away.  Both begin hearing voices that lead them into the woods outside Washington D.C. where they live (and where Jeppson grew up). But what they find in the woods departs from their prosaic realities in favor of something akin to magical realism.

For this phase of the play—a two-act boasting 14 characters played by a cast of 9 actors—Jeppson draws upon the art of James Prosek, a Yale grad and Peabody affiliate, who specializes in “unnatural history.”  One of Prosek’s taxidermied fantasias—a winged fox—figures in the play as a talismanic creature.  For Jeppson, Prosek’s idea that “the real myth is the myth of order” opens up possibilities for how imaginative and empathetic interactions outside our usual modes of conduct can lead to release.

But don’t get the idea that a play about grief is a downer.  Jeppson’s play also goes for laughs and a sense of the absurd in its blend of silly and serious.  Like Prosek’s enhanced creatures, Jeppson’s play offers a mash-up in which a historical figure like Grover Cleveland can preside over a forest full of eccentrics, all coping in entertaining ways with what might be called “our national wound.”

For Martyna Majok, from Poland by way of New Jersey and the University of Chicago, taking on an epic two-act on the theme of patriarchy sent her to reference points like King Lear and The Godfather.  She set out to write a play “as linear as anything,” observing the unities of place and time, as it unfolds from evening to early morning.  Three grown, banished sons—Shane, the “golden child,” Nolan, the needy, neglected child, and Dean, the angry, ostensibly successful son—each must find some way back into the life of their father Eamon, who has decided to make a church of the family homestead.

Majok’s plays usually emphasize women and, while the men have center stage this time, two female characters bring new tensions to the situation.  Bett arrives from Southside Chicago in pursuit of Shane, but the other is a more surprising visitor whose entry marks the dramatic close of Act One.

The play’s title, Petty Harbour, refers to the setting, an actual, fairly insular area of Newfoundland, but we might wonder whether “being petty” and “finding safe harbor” are also referenced in the play, which takes place during a storm and explores the storied hurts of family life where “every conversation references all previous conversations.”  Majok found that concentrating on male characters allowed her to discover aspects of patriarchy, especially when considered in relation to God, that are both “complicated and beautiful.”

Caroline McGraw’s The Bachelors also concentrates on three males, but here the drama is not based on familial relations but rather on how hard it is to know oneself within the dynamics of a group.  McGraw first wrote a play at 15, in a workshop in her native Cleveland, and, like Majok, she has also concentrated on female characters, which are usually going through a process of development that features a certain menace.  Here, in what her director Alex Mihail calls “a vicious comedy,” she’s deliberately taking on the kind of “American men behaving badly” plays made famous by the likes of David Mamet and Neil LaBute, but with overtones of a sit-com about guys.

Though no female characters appear on stage, much depends on the effect of offstage women on her characters—all types we’ll recognize, McGraw says, so that we might be surprised at which emerges as the hero or Everyman.

The play also occurs in “real time,” avoiding the leaps in time McGraw usually favors; we live an hour and twenty-five minutes in the lives of these characters, guys who have been friends for a decade, now living together on a frathouse row in a college town.  Laughs abound, but part way through an event occurs that transforms the situation so that “it costs more to laugh.”

A notable rite of passage in the YSD school year, The Carlotta Festival pairs graduating directors—Alexandru Mihail and Lileana Blain-Cruz, director of Fox Play—with the final projects of playwrights in the program.  This year, a graduate of the program, Tea Alagić, 07, returns to direct Majok’s play.  After the opening weekend—Fox Play, 8 p.m., May 4; Petty Harbour, 8 p.m., May 5; The Bachelors, 8 p.m., May 6—the plays continue to run in rotating repertory from the 8th to the 12th.  At the Iseman Theater, New Haven.  For more information: http://drama.yale.edu/carlotta

The Last Romantic

The Broken Tower, written and directed by James Franco, starring James Franco, with Michael Shannon. The most obvious comment is that Hart Crane deserves better.

A complex poet who tried to combine the ecstatic reach of Whitman with a Shakespearean richness of syntax and verbal excess, while haunted by the modernist search for prevailing myths found in Eliot’s The Waste Land, Crane, born in 1899, also "wrestled the angel” that wouldn’t get full exploration until the era of the Beats: whether or not to express openly a gay sensibility.

In addition to all that, Crane was the scion of a man made rich by crass commercialism—his father invented that symbol of polite social hygiene, the Life Saver mint—with ambitions to be a writer of a more Baudelairean era. He was doomed to be “the last romantic,” a figure living out a version of the tortured artist tale that was a familiar cautionary fable before poets—beginning with the generation after Crane—regularly became tenured professors. Crane’s, then, is a very American story, poised flamboyantly between the wars, looking backward to the Paris spleen of the symbolists, participating in the Paris fads of the expatriates, and looking forward to the Paris squats of the Beats. It’s a story that partakes of an age-old incentive to suffer for art while proclaiming a noble indifference to the demands of the work-a-day world.

Does this story have anything to teach us today? Perhaps it might be the lesson that one man’s rich dilettante is another man’s outcast genius. James Franco, director and star and author and editor and co-producer of The Broken Tower, and currently a grad student in English at Yale, might be said to be resurrecting the ghost of Crane for the sake of his own romantic ambitions: as a celebrity actor, thanks in part to the meaningless but lucrative distinction of playing Harry Osborne, Peter Parker/Spider-Man’s friend/nemesis in a trio of crassly commercial comic-book rip-offs, Franco craves artistic respectability and achievement. He’s an author, an installation artist, a performance artist, a filmmaker, an exploiter/sufferer of his own celebrity—the latest post-ironic subject position in line with what used to be known as being “a poor little rich kid”—and a living, breathing, endlessly replicated image of the artist as PR stunt, or as pop image, surface sans depth, or as a self-perpetuating commodity fetish, perhaps. And, sometimes, he’s just an actor, man.

If this sounds like I’m reviewing Franco more than his film, I can’t help it. Never for a moment watching this film did I believe in Franco as Crane. Franco’s idea of convincing us of his subject’s reality is to have the folks from wardrobe put him in period costume and then let Christina Voros film him, with a sort of YouTube version of cinema verité, walking around parts of New York or Paris or the Cayman Islands or Mexico that don’t feature any anachronistic details. Unfortunately, such visuals don’t immediately transport us to the Jazz Age perambulations of Crane. Nor does watching Crane/Franco—Cranco—chop wood outside a rustic cabin while we hear him earnestly reading from a letter in which the poet voices his grand ambitions give us any real access to the ritual of withdrawal that Crane felt was necessary for his art.

And, typical of most biopics of the artist type, whenever Crane is around people he acts like a fool. He’s insufferable as, I suppose, only the truly gifted can be, but, his little moustache notwithstanding, it’s hard to separate the character Franco portrays this time around from the character he portrayed when he essayed the role of Allen Ginsberg for the film Howl, particularly when Crane sits hashing out his views over wine with a friend, sounding as if he’s waiting for a Charlie Parker sax sound-byte to catch up with him any minute. Impersonating literary mavericks seems to be Franco’s thing (he also plays Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner in short films he made for an installation), but, as an actor, he hasn’t begun to excavate what made these men who they were, rather than simply free-floating signifiers of literary greatness one finds on a college syllabus.

Franco, who began the film as a thesis at the Tisch School of the Arts, cops a bit of cinematic style from Andy Warhol in the early going, enough, particularly with Franco’s even prettier younger brother Dave playing the teen-aged Crane, to make us think fond thoughts of Joey Dallesandro, and if that’s not enough to make us feel we’ve entered a “gay sensibility,” there are quasi-explicit moments of sex with men to register Crane’s lonely candle. And there’s even—naively—Robert Lowell’s poem “Words for Hart Crane” printed on the screen (unattributed) to let us know that everything this film is trying to say, about the poet maudit “wolfing the stray lambs of the Place de la Concorde,” was masterfully said in sonnet form in the late Fifties.

And that brings me to what dismays me most about The Broken Tower: the sense that Franco, dissatisfied, understandably, with the roles Hollywood sends his way, is trying to find his own path by standing on the shoulders of giants. The background most significant to this foray into what is ultimately a vanity project about Hart Crane is Franco’s early role as James Dean. The greatness of Dean as an actor is unplayable by another actor; one can only look foolish trying to “be” James Dean on screen. And yet Franco took on the task. It helps that he resembles Dean at times, and that’s enough to make us think sometimes of Dean while watching The Broken Tower, and that produces an odd Franco-inspired palimpsest that is surely the point of this film—Hart Crane was a rebel without a cause, got it? Dean was doomed to be Dean; Crane, Crane. Franco seems doomed to be a well-intentioned interpreter of an ineffable greatness that eludes him.

The effort is not without its pathos, but it’s the pathos of Franco, rather than of Crane. The closest we get to the latter is when Crane reads “The Marriage of Faustus and Helen” to a stuffy literary salon. Franco reads the poem dutifully, respectful of its sonorities but never relishing them, and we get a shot of what John Berryman called “spelled, all-disappointed ladies,” eyes alight, listening. For a moment we get an idea, with the poet’s words ringing in our ears, of what an unheralded creature young Crane was, overwrought at times but always graceful, at his best “original . . . and pure.” We glimpse his greatness and we see that, like Baudelaire’s albatross, his wingspan will make him an awkward figure in life.

The rest is a montage of clichés in search of a script.

The film opened this weekend at IFC Center, 323 Sixth Avenue, W. 3rd Street, New York; James Franco will be on hand for Q&A following the 7:35 p.m. screening (sold out) and will give an extended introduction to the 10 p.m. screening, on Sat., April 28th; he will also be in person on Sunday, April 29th, for Q&A following the 5:10 p.m. screening and will provide an introduction before the 7:35 p.m. screening.

An Evening with Ann Patchett

The New Haven Free Public Library, in partnership with R.J. Julia Booksellers and First Niagara, is thrilled to welcome Ann Patchett to New Haven. Please join us for two special literary events.

Meet Ms. Patchett at a special, pre-event Audience Appreciation Reception to be held on Tuesday, May 29 from 6:00 to 6:45 in the Ives Main Library Program Room. Spend time with Ms. Patchett before her reading and enjoy dessert as we prepare to be dazzled by her presentation. Tickets are $25.00; all proceeds will benefit the New Haven Free Public Library's adult fiction collection.

Then, stay for a free public reading from 7:00 to 8:00, as Ann reads from her latest work, State of Wonder. Ms. Patchett will sign books at 8:00.

Please follow the link below to purchase tickets to the Appreciation Reception.

Purchase Tickets Now!

Can't make the event? Please support the library: Make a Donation.

Thank you for your support and we look forward to seeing you on May 29.

For further information, p,lease contact: Clare Meade, cmeade@nhfpl.org, 203-946-8130 x314

The Circus Is In Town

The Yale Cabaret’s 44th Season ends this weekend with Carnival/Invisible.  Written and directed by Benjamin Fainstein and created by the Ensemble, it’s a show in some ways reminiscent of Church, the play by Young Jean Lee that was featured last semester.  Both shows riff on a collective, participatory experience, akin to theater but different from it, as usually practiced, in significant ways. Carnival/Invisible leans upon “Tent Chautauquas”—a traveling means of bringing entertainment and moral uplift to rural communities—the way Church leans upon sermons, homilies, and testimonials.  But Carnival/Invisible also draws upon time-honored tropes of the traveling circus in its more profane variety.  Thus we get harmless miming of carousel rides, and tightrope walking (Emily Reilly), and sword-swallowing, with, at the end, something a bit more sinister: a stab at a collective allegiance that advocates exterminating the children of one’s enemies.

The latter speech, delivered by Barker Masterful Majestic (Merlin Huff, charismatic in the red waistcoat and top hat of the classic circus ringleader), surfaces as a kind of dream fulfillment of the audience’s hopes and wishes, with Barker’s worshipfully submissive love, Dustbowl Diana (Hannah Sorenson) and the other participants voicing their approval.  The sentiments, for all their delivery of rosy uplift, are rather chilling and make one begin to question other bits of business, like the fable of the turtle who came out of his shell to a sad and horrific conclusion, or the jibes between the clowns Popcorn Peter (Chris Bannow) and Cotton Candy Cameron (Tim Brown) that become viciously scurrilous, or “the elixir” of goat’s piss, offered as a cure-all.

Performed on a simple clearing comprised of a dirt-colored figure of the flag reminiscent of one of Jasper John’s works, Carnival/Invisible seems to offer a mindless exploration of goodtime, oldtime America—the costumes by Nikki Delhomme are charming and lively, evoking familiar figures, the Barnum & Bailey clown, the saloon maid, the prairie flower.  And some of the skits are played with the skilled whimsy of Nickelodeon thrills, as when Death (Brandon Curtis) does-in two damsels (Whitney Dibo and Carly Zien), only to restore them to life as his paramours.  Through all the fun and games, though, there’s a kind of double vision, an acknowledgement that “panem and circensus” (bread and circuses) were the means whereby Roman emperors kept the hoi polloi happy with their yoke.  Fainstein’s show, capriciously carnivalesque, keeps us wondering about who gets the last laugh.

The show ends with the chorus of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a spiritual about meeting after death in a heavenly realm.  The final verse, unsung, rings fittingly with the end of a dramatic Season: “One by one their seats were emptied. / One by one they went away. / Now the family is parted. / Will it be complete one day?

See you next year, with Season 45 under Artistic Director Ethan Heard.

Coming soon: my picks for the “best ofs” from Season 44.

Carnival/Invisible Created by The Ensemble (Chris Brannow, Tim Brown, Brandon Curtis, Whitney Dibo, Merlin Huff, Emily Reilly, Hannah Sorenson, Carly Zien) Written and Directed by Benjamin Fainstein

The Yale Cabaret April 12-14, 2012

Theatrical Extremity

Playing for its second weekend in an unlikely performance space—The Institute Library at 847 Chapel Street—is a stripped-down production of Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe.  Staged by The Young Mechanics Theatre Ensemble, in its inaugural production, the play is both intimate and enigmatic.  Consisting of only three characters—a Director (Jeremy Funke), his Assistant (Kaia Monroe), and a Protagonist (Brian Riley)—the dramatic comedy seems as if it is primarily intended as a meditation upon theater. We see the Assistant lead the Protagonist onto a “plinth” or “pedestal” (actually a chair) in a stage space; he’s gowned in black, looking somewhat priestly, hobbled, drooling.  The Director proceeds to put him through his paces, demanding the Assistant remove clothes, alter his pose, whiten his skin, looking, we suppose, for the right image to express his idea.  We’re clearly in a place where “humanity” (whatever we might conceive that to be) can be compressed into one forlorn figure made to bend or stretch at the autocratic whims of a dictatorial Director.  The Assistant at times hesitates, but gamely makes a note of each alteration the Director calls for.

The handbill informs us that the play is “for Vaclav Havel,” and, since Havel was himself a playwright, the play might read as a wry reflection on how potentially dehumanizing theater can be for its participants.  It’s to the credit of the play’s director (as opposed to the Director in the play) James Leaf that the element of dramatic commentary is never lost sight of.  We’re always aware that what we’re witnessing is not far removed from the grueling rehearsal procedures of theater, to say nothing of the fact that the Protagonist is also always an Actor.  A man who has actually to stand silently on a chair for the play’s duration (a half hour, tops) and endure what must be endured.

And yet, Havel, who died last year, was also an important Czech political leader, imprisoned at the time the play was written.  With this in mind, it’s easy also to read the Protagonist as a man being oppressed by a regime that dictates how he must move, or stand, or comport himself.

As the Director, Jeremy Funke sucks on a cigar, demands a light frequently, is impatient and distracted but not wholly uncommunicative.  He expresses quite well the feeling that this is the Director’s project and his task is to satisfy his audience—his line about having “them all on their feet” suggests he feels he knows best what the audience wants.  His Assistant, Kaia Monroe, pleads a little for her touches—she has the Protagonist in a gown and a hat—but doggedly pursues the Director’s vision, as an Assistant must.  When the Director withdraws for a bit, her frenzy of cleaning his chair, after she had collapsed into it briefly, expresses the emotional toll of her work, and also her status between the silent Protagonist and the demanding Director: she has liberty of movement even if she has to retract most of what she does of her own will.  As the Protagonist, Brian Kiley is superb.  He maintains the right degree of dereliction so common with Beckett’s heroes, and, while looking on at the Assistant at the chair, manages a mute expression of inner revelation that strongly suggests a rapport.  In the end his gaze off into the distance and what we read there carries much of the play’s ultimate meaning.

Beckett is always a wonder in how much he can convey with so little, and Catastrophe is suggestive on many levels.  The title itself can mean, as it generally does, a “disaster,” typically a natural kind, but in its more theatrical meaning it refers to the turn toward a play’s conclusion—the happy outcome of comedy, the disastrous outcome of tragedy.  This relatively late play of Beckett’s is perhaps somewhat unique in seeming to offer a deliberate comic catastrophe, though not unequivocally.  The final action of the Protagonist, in appearing stoical, defiant, or at least self-willed, can be construed as a message of political hope for the fortunes of dissidents like Havel, or it could also, in the manner of Beckettian irony, allude to the comedy of such hopes and assertions in the face of the surrounding conditions.

In other words, it’s the sort of play you have to make up your own mind about, and to do that you have to see it.  And you should:

Performances will be held at 8:00 p.m. at the Institute Library, 847 Chapel Street, March 23, 24, 30, and 31. $5 suggested donation. Because of limited seating, reservations are strongly recommended. To make reservations, please email home@institutelibrary.org and specify the night you wish to attend and the number of people in your party.  Each performance concludes with refreshments and a salon-style discussion.

Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe Directed by James Leaf

Produced by The Young Mechanics Theatre Ensemble: Will Baker, Megan Black, Jeremy Funke, Alice-Anne Harwood, James Leaf, Kaia Monroe, Brian Riley, and Elisabeth Sacks

March 23, 24, 30, 31 The Institute Library 847 Chapel Street, New Haven

Ladies' Night

Arthur Kopit’s Chamber Music, the most recent show at The Yale Cabaret, dates from the Sixties and could be called a carnivalization of the women’s movement.  The ‘carnival’ aspects are familiar enough from other counter-cultural works of the time: the characters are inmates in an asylum for the insane, the asylum itself is a cultural microcosm, and the insane are, in some allegorical sense, representative of certain trends that might liberate us all from the asylums to which we, in our insanity, have relegated ourselves.  Kopit’s play takes this a step further: the allegorical meaning of the inmates are worn on their sleeves, like Halloween costumes or superhero alter egos: each member of the cast is a woman with an attribute: Woman with a Notebook (Michelle McGregor), Woman in Armor (Marissa Neitling), Woman with a Gavel (Ashton Heyl), Woman in Aviatrix’s Outfit (Monique Barbee), and so on.  We see emblems, but also, because the women address each other by the names they have assumed, we see alter-egos: Gertrude Stein, Joan of Arc, Susan B. Anthony, Amelia Earhart, respectively. The easy interpretation would be that, though crazy, these women, in identifying with such successful and significant women, are trying to assert possibilities beyond the drab realities to which women generally succumb, and the only way male society—represented by Man in White (Fisher Neal) and his Assistant (Mitchell Winter)—can cope is to lock them up and let them have their carping, chaotic meetings that go nowhere.  That interpretation is certainly present—especially when the men come in to caution the ladies on not getting out of hand, and on keeping the window closed, threatening them with the disbanding of their little sorority if they don’t maintain—and the term is stressed—“decorum.”

Of course, when no policing male gaze is present, the ladies are free to be themselves, though the selves they manifest are silly and childish versions of what they deem the characteristics of the women they mimic: Stein, a writer making notes; Joan a warrior with a large, cumbersome wooden cross, Constanze Mozart (Sophie von Haselberg), a musical appreciator clutching a recording of one of her husband’s treasured works; Susan B. Anthony, a presider and leader; Woman in Gossamer Dress, aka silent film actress Pearl White (Mariko Nakasone), ingratiating and easily upset; Queen Isabella of Spain (Ceci Fernandez), regal and imperious; Amelia Earhart, aggressive in her demeanor and sarcastic toward the idées fixes of her colleagues.  As tensions amongst them mount, and as the Woman in Safari Outfit/Osa Johnson tries to advance a cannibalistic plan on how to defeat the men’s ward that, they are certain, will attack them shortly, the situation requires a sacrifice.  Any guesses who it will be?  No, not Joan.

The play mostly takes place at a table (with placards reminiscent of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party) surrounded by the audience, who may feel somewhat like eavesdroppers on a meeting, with minutes and motions, that is best understood by those participating.  Where our participation is required is in the role of those who—ostensibly sane—can see what these women can’t see: the comic and grotesque aspects of their delusions.  On that score, the cast was mostly equal to the iconic nature of the characters (though Kopit’s version of Stein seemed considerably at odds with my impression of that author, preferring to make her a nitpicking oddity of idiolalia) with special mention going to Barbee, Neitling, Heyl, von Haselberg, and the one in the pith helmet (kudos to Carmen Martinez’s simple but effective costumes).

The comedy—Joan and her cross, Pearl and her insecurities—shifted toward violence and menace inevitably and effectively (the delusions of the mad can be both amusing and chilling), and the “twist” at the end arrived with just enough absurdist malevolence (accent on “male”) to cause the allegory to deepen ever so slightly. Chamber Music might be considered as a score for ten voices, and Katie McGerr’s direction kept the voices in frantic and revealing cross-purposes that felt natural but pointed.

Up next at the Cab—madness in great ones: Yiddish King Lear, based on Jacob Gordin’s 1903 attempt to retell the Shakespeare tale in a Jewish immigrant context.  The play, which hasn’t been performed since 1934, has been adapted for the Cab by Whitney Dibo and Martha Kaufman.  Museum relic or revitalized Americana?  See for yourself, March 8-10.

Chamber Music By Arthur Kopit Directed by Katie McGerr

The Yale Cabaret March 1-3, 2012

Sticking to the Union

Ever since the scope of our “great economic downturn” became clear, comparisons of the late-aughts and the Thirties’ Great Depression have been common.  And, with all those tents decorating the New Haven Green since the fall, it’s also clear that things aren’t improving in any hurry.  What better time—before we meet on the barricades—to stage a classic of the American stage that makes heroes of the underemployed, the unemployed, the working poor, and “the little guy” of all varieties?  Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty (1935) was a hit in its day because its simple message struck a nerve—it dramatized the situation effectively: on the Right, the owners; on the Left, the Unions, supposedly for the working-class, but often corrupt, existing simply to support an intermediate level of bosses between the workers and the owners.  And, beyond the impasse of those “two parties,” the radical solution: in Odets’ day, the Communists, or the radical Left; in our day, the radical Right. It wouldn’t be hard to rewrite some of Lefty to make it even more pertinent to our times, but the production staged by The New Haven Theater Company, directed by Steve Scarpa, is faithful to the text.  As Scarpa points out, his production even adds a scene that was cut by Odets in later versions of the play.  It involves on out-of-work actor trying to talk his way into a stage role; he’s rejected by the fractious producer, but is given a saving grace by the bigwig’s benign secretary: The Communist Manifesto, comrade.

Viewers today may wish there were some easily issued solution that would solve all our problems, and find themselves nostalgic for a time when the formula seemed graspable: read a book, change the world.  In any case, it’s hard not to hear the characters who advocate a strike—the play’s vignettes are framed by a workers’ meeting—as voicing some version of today’s “occupy” movement, and it’s hard not to hear the excuses of the bosses as the same kind of lame rhetoric that always begs best intentions while scraping off the underclass.  The dramatic vignettes of the downtrodden (aka, the 99%) (which includes a surgeon for the poor fired because she’s Jewish—we can reflect that at least the medical profession has learned to look out for itself since Odets’ day!)—are mostly soap opera-ish, but that’s where Odets’ gift lay: he was able to translate the problems of the day into brief emotive exchanges anyone not well-off can relate to, and which almost anyone can act: the couple arguing over rent and food; the technician being asked to do some corporate spying to get ahead; the minority professional getting the axe; the applicant desperate for work facing a brush-off; the young couple who can’t get started in life because they simply don’t have the skills or job prospects needed.  Meanwhile, back at the union meeting, things get ugly, with strike-breakers in their midst, then turn violent.

In the vignettes, the scenes between a man and woman have the most skill: Joe (Brian Willetts) and his wife Edna (Hallie Martenson) establish early the emotional center of the play: these are desperate times and these are ordinary people, grasping at straws: Lefty will help change things; Florrie (Hilary Brown) and Sid (Peter Chenot) are the young couple having to part due to economic constraints, but not before they share a well-played scene involving romantic comedy elements and a sense of thwarted hopes.

The real fire of the play takes place in the meeting with Fatt the Union Leader (George Kulp—he also has fun as Mr. Grady, the theater producer worrying about his dog) attempting to silence the speakers trying to incite action: Joe (Willetts), Keller (Scarpa), and Phillips (Christian Shaboo), who denounces his own brother (Erich Greene) when the latter tries to break the strike.

Special mention also goes to Ben Michalak who covers the scene changes with songs of the times, played on guitar and banjo, giving us the voice of dissent in sing-along form.

Odets’ message: “Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.”  Have times really changed?

Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty Directed by Steve Scarpa The New Haven Theater Company March 1-3, 2012

118 Court Street New Haven, CT nhtcboxoffice@gmail.com

Take Back The Space

Something's been missing of late.  We're five weeks into the spring semester and there have only been two shows at The Yale Cabaret thus far.  But never fear: the Spring 2012 Yale Cabaret is now ready to offer seven more weeks of experimental theater.

Regulars know it’s been a challenging season thus far, with the combined efforts of Artistic Directors Kate Attwell, Lileana Blain-Cruz, Sunder Ganglani, and Michael Place, along with Managing Director Matt Gutschick, providing varied offerings that keep audiences guessing.

To say that the Cab thrives on the offbeat and improvisational is to state the obvious—consider Brainsongs, the one-man show by Gabe Levey that ran on the last weekend of January.  Described by Attwell, who helped develop the project with Levey and Cole Lewis and other contributors, as “an exercise in presence,” the show combined a great soundtrack of old jazz classics of the Ragtime era with various Andy Kauffmanesque activities featuring Levey.  Whether “soft-shoeing” in place, or getting freaky with an inflatable dolphin, or making a typewriter dance or paper petals levitate, Levey portrayed a kind of theatrical shut-in, coyly showing us around his private kingdom.  Just when you thought it was all for laughs, Levey would make you feel sad, and when you thought it was going to get creepy, it would turn endearing.

So what’s ahead?  Starting this Thursday, February 16th, the Cab offers four straight weeks of advanced theater.  First up, Third Year Director Jack Tamburri offers his take on Mac Wellman’s version of Dracula, which dates from 1987.  Wellman, a professor of playwrighting at Brooklyn College, is known for his impatience with such things as plot and character development.  Audiences can expect an experimental treatment of the literally deathless undead character first created by Bram Stoker in the nineteenth century and famously interpreted on screen by the likes of Bela Lugosi, and Christopher Lee . . . and Frank Langella, and Gary Oldman.  Using puppetry, song, comedy, and direct address, the play won’t be the musty old Gothic story we all know so well . . . for starters, the Count is a she.  Vampires, of course, are all the rage these days among the young and it will be interesting to see what Tamburri et al. do with the blood-sucking seductions of the genre.  Feb 16-18.

The following weekend, February 23-25, things get loose with Clutch Yr Amplified Heart Tightly and Pretend.  An exploration of dance for non-dancers, the piece is all about movement and creating “visual text” to celebrate first moments of intimacy: kissing, holding hands, hugs, even staring contests—whatever gets someone across to someone else—and involves YSD students who have done great work pushing the Cab farther out-there: designer Adam Rigg, and third-year actors Chris Henry and Jillian Taylor.

Dating from the early Sixties, Arthur Kopit’s Chamber Music takes us into an asylum where eight women each believes herself to be a famous woman from history—Joan of Arc, Amelia Earhart, Susan B. Anthony, Gertrude Stein, Queen Isabella I of Spain, Mozart’s wife Constanze, silent-film actress Pearl White, and explorer Osa Johnson—as they prepare for conflict with the men’s ward.  In its time, the play could be considered an effort to carnivalize the nascent women’s movement, and it should be interesting to see how director Kate McGerr interprets the play's sexual politics for our ostensibly more enlightened time; March 1-3

Shakespeare is being celebrated in various manifestations at Yale this semester, and the last play before a brief Spring Break Week is Yiddish King Lear, March 8-10, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s tale of intergenerational conflict and a tragic comeuppance to patriarchal power.  In the 1890s, Jacob Gordin adapted the play’s plot—Lear’s division of his kingdom among his three daughters—into Yiddish in a Jewish immigrant context, with the three daughters represented by three different aspects of Judaism.  Adapted by Martha Kaufman and Whitney Dibo, the play now moves back into English to address questions of “assimilation, family wealth and gender expectation.”

Check back later for more info about the final three shows of the season, and for more information about tickets, dining, and other fun facts about the Cab, visit: www.yalecabaret.org

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven, CT 06511 (203) 432-1566 ysd.cabaret@yale.edu

See you at the Cab!

Surfacing at the Shubert

When I first heard Neutral Milk Hotel it was 2000 and my daughter brought the CD of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea home from college.  By then, the album had been out for about two years and its composer/singer Jeff Mangum was already passing into legend as a young, quirky genius who had produced a distinctly offbeat, ‘alternative’ masterpiece and then dropped out of the music biz, more or less.  There were tales of him spending his days making field recordings of Bulgarian music.  What, the rumors strongly suggested, do you do after In the Aeroplane Over the Sea? So, when I heard that Mangum was back in public, that he’d performed as part of All Tomorrow’s Parties, and in Zuccoti Park for OWS, and then announced a mini-tour that would commence at the Shubert in New Haven, January 18, 2012, there was no way I was going to miss it.  And it seemed that everyone who attended had the same feeling I did: this dude is just too original to miss.  What’s more, I had the impression that the nearly sold-out venue was filled with other listeners who had, for one reason or another, pretty much committed every note of that album, and maybe more or less all of its predecessor—1996’s On Avery Island—to memory.  We weren’t just fans or consumers.  We were a kind of faithful who believed in what Mangum had given us—a gift that, like the best gifts, you didn’t know you needed till someone gave it to you.

What he gave us on Wednesday night was an almost solo walk-through of most of his recorded output (he was accompanied on musical saw on a few tunes, and the final song of the show proper was the unnamed instrumental that follows “Ghost,” in which he was abetted by The Music Tapes, the Athens band that opened the show with a set featuring a seven-foot metronome, “Static, the Magical TV,” stories of Roumanian circus acts, and a banjo played with a violin bow).  Of course, a cruise through the best of the recorded work is pretty much what anyone expects when going to see a concert, and most artists with a small output tend to play everything they’ve got.  But in Mangum’s case the songs, on the records, are enhanced by flugelhorns and percussion and instrumentation somewhat unusual for a “rock album.”  Solo, on a simple chair surrounded by four guitars, with two bottles of water and a music stand, it was all a matter of voice and guitar.  What was so stunningly impressive is that the songs never needed more than that.

The songs, on record, also have an elusive, DIY quality that makes them oddly compelling, delivered in a strident voice that seems always close to dissolution in shrieks, or ever-ready to go off in almost manic ‘dee-dee-dees’ that make Mangum sound like some kind of musical idiot savant.  On Wednesday, Mangum played through it all as though it cost him no great effort, as if, indeed, he is a professional singer-songwriter, with a distinctive musical style and impressive vocal control, when one had perhaps conceived of him as something both more and less: some rare and fabled beast from the Id, wailing songs thick with odd changes, with lyrics bristling with strangely neurotic images of the family romance, of a two-headed boy, a piano full of flames, of falls from fourteen-story buildings, of things to do “when you realize you’re dead,” of semen-coated mountain tops, and ghosts, and brains falling out through teeth.  Wednesday Mangum even offered a song he introduced as one he “rarely plays”: called “Little Birds,” it had, like most Mangum songs, gently devastating lyrics that also sound a bit like demented nursery rhymes.

What are his songs about?  I have no idea.  And I also find it hard to say what the overwhelming emotion is while listening to this music.  My daughter told me of a friend who put Aeroplane on while making dinner and felt like he should start crying by the time it was done.  The album is plaintive, hallucinogenic, nakedly alive, at times uncomfortably so—as in the acapella drone of “I love you, Jesus Christ / Jesus Christ, I love you” in “The King of Carrot Flowers, 2”—but also thrilling, which makes it rather memorably uplifting.  And that was the main feeling I got from every song Wednesday night: joy.

At one point, Mangum, who fielded the shouted song requests—the best was, “play a song of your own choosing”—and the shouts of adoration with a benign, amused cool, asked “Is everyone happy?”  Yes, happy to see and hear him do those songs, regardless of whether or not the music is “happy.”  Then again, I can never hear these lines from “In the Aeroplane over the Sea” (the encore and last song of the night), “And one day we will die / and our ashes will fly / from the aeroplane over the sea / but for now we are young / let us lay in the sun / and count every beautiful thing we can see,” without feeling elated.  It’s not the words themselves so much, but rather the way they ride the emotion of Mangum’s voice, which seems to arrive at the benediction with a slap of being—sort of like the slap on a newborn’s butt to make it cry, or sing.

Victim Missives

Walking into the Yale Cabaret last night down Prospect Street from above the Divinity School after 10 p.m. and back after midnight, I didn’t see many pedestrians about. There were, however, numerous police cars—both New Haven and Yale Security—hanging about, keeping an eye on the mostly vacant streets. One could feel a bit paranoid about surveillance, or one could feel secure—protected from the various urban threats lurking out there in the darkness. Does a police presence make you feel more afraid or less? Well, that might depend on what demographic of race, age, gender, and income you fit. And that answer plays into the theme developed in this week’s Yale Cabaret show: keeping the streets around Yale safe means casting a suspicious eye on anyone who doesn’t match the profile of racial privilege that most Yalelies—though not all by any means—meet. Street Scenes, conceived by MFA Yale student and installation artist Maayan Strauss and Colin Mannex, a DFA candidate at YSD, is based upon the all-too-frequent email missives the Yale Community receives from Yale Police Chief Ronnell Higgins.

The missives—a number of them are read verbatim by the company—consist of details about assaults and robberies that take place in the vicinity of Yale. In addition to giving Yalelies the what and where, Higgins asks for anyone with further information to come forward and generally recommends Yalelies not go about alone on foot, but avail themselves of transportation the university provides free of charge. At the very least, Higgins warns, use caution and be streetwise on these streets.

The performance piece Strauss and Mannex have created, aided by co-director Jessica Rizzo, a dramaturgy student at YSD, interrogates the assumptions that these communiques express, even if only implicitly. The dramatization of the confrontations described is highly stylized, with the role of victim and perpetrator distributed equally amongst the multicultural cast of three males and three females. The readings of the missives is flat and unemphatic, and most of the play’s dialogue consists of the earnest natterings of various pairs as they try to express—in self-consciously liberal academese—their unease with the implicit racial subtext of the missives, usually with one of the duo holding forth and the other nodding and uh-huhing.

Intermittently, the company gyrate in place as though automatons trapped in repetitive movements. In the background, projections of a few familiar New Haven street corners play, depicting slow-mo pedestrians while the ambient noise of the streets flows around the audience. It all seems so benign! And yet…

In the final segment, we hear the voices of victims and their responses to what happened to them yanks away, to some extent, the well-meaning sociology-speak of the discussants: we realize that what Higgins reports to the community is an event that was first reported to him. These aren’t simply texts for a course on the semiotics of crime reporting, but little bits of life—and in one case, death—that are happening around us all the time.

And yet, even there, the play grimly suggests, the Yale community remains largely untouched, aware of a certain unease now and then, but nothing major, more inclined to blame the messenger than to understand the real message.

Street Scenes Conceived by Maayan Strauss, Colin Mannex Directed by Colin Mannex, Maayan Strauss, Jessica Rizzo The Yale Cabaret November 10-12

Theater News

New Haven is a great town for theater.  If you have any doubts on that score, check out the following:

Thursday, 10/20 till Saturday, 10/22, The Yale Cabaret offers a student-generated theater piece, Creation 2011, that asks its performers to revisit and re-enact events or experiences that inspired their desire to work in theater.  Co-Artistic Director Michael Place assures us the show will be "sweet and engaging on a personal level," but will also entertainingly visit some tropes of academia--certainly we can all recognize the inherent comedy of a powerpoint presentation.  Yale Cabaret, 217 Park Street, New Haven.

Arts Council Award-Winning local theater group Broken Umbrella debuts its first play of the season this weekend, Friday, 10/21 through Sunday, 10/23,  with Play with Matches, developed by the company with playwright Jason Patrick Wells and director Ian Alderman, the play "tells the story of quirky New Haven inventor Ebenezer Beecher" (euphonious name!), who developed matches at a factory that once stood where Westville's Mitchell Library now stands.   The show continues for the next two weekends: 10/28-10/30 and 11/4-11/6.  Tickets on sale now for all shows.  Broken Umbrella.  The Smokestack, 446A Blake Street, New Haven.

New Haven Theater Company, another local conclave of thespians, is now selling tickets to its second show of the season, Conor McPherson's The Seafarer, set in Dublin and featuring a card game that may cost someone his soul.  NHTC’s Talk Radio was a strong showing this fall, and this show, directed by Hilary Brown, like the latter will feature the group's trademark ensemble acting.  11/10-12 and 11/17-19, 8 p.m., The New Haven Theater Company, 118 Court Street, New Haven.

At the Long Wharf, the Tony-Award-Winning musical Ain’t Misbehavin’ is getting up and running and purports to be a lively show, tickets on sale now for shows running from 10/26 to 11/20.  And, also at the Long Wharf, tickets have gone on sale this week for what should be a hot show: respected actor of stage and screen Brian Dennehy delivers the memory-ridden monologue of Samuel Beckett’s caustically funny and generally existential play Krapp’s Last Tape, which will run on Long Wharf's Stage II, 11/29 to 12/18.  Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargeant Drive, New Haven.

And, at The Yale Repertory, the world premiere of new playwright Amy Herzog’s Belleville, about a contemporary Parisian couple newly immersed in 21st century malaise, begins previews on 10/21, with its official opening on the 27th.   The Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel Street, New Haven.  And coming up shortly, 10/25-10/29, provocative YSD director Lileana Blain-Cruz’s thesis show: a rendering of Gertrude Stein’s Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights, which should give us a memorable sense of how modernism plays a hundred years on.  Yale School of Drama, Iseman Theater, 1156 Chapel Street, New Haven. 

A great season is shaping up!  Check back for reviews of these shows as they open.    And for more theater news and reviews, check out Chris Arnott's site.

A Decade of Dedication

Gordon Edelstein’s ten years as Artistic Director of the Long Wharf Theater were celebrated last week with an outpouring of tributes, reminiscences, send-ups, and eloquent testimonies to one man’s inspiring journey in theater, from early days in acting classes to directing landmark productions of such classics as The Glass Menagerie and Uncle Vanya, to becoming, as the world-renowned playwright himself stated in the “Script for the Evening,” Athol Fugard’s “Zorba”—“because Gordon, like Kazantzakis’s magnificent Greek, is a man of appetites—for life, for love and most of all, for all the beautiful unmanageable paradoxes and ambiguities of the human heart.” The premieres of new plays by Fugard—such as last season’s The Train Driver—have become staples of Long Wharf’s reputation.

Highpoints of the evening, which began with a reception in the Long Wharf lobby with notable attendees such as seasoned actress Lois Smith, young actor Josh Charles of The Good Wife, James Bundy, artistic director of the Yale Rep, Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater, and Yale’s Pulitzer-winning playwright Paula Vogel, as well as many other habituees of the New Haven theater scene, included a very knowing reminiscence by Paula Vogel; a dazzling oration by Pulitzer-winning playwright Donald Margulies; a tribute to Edelstein’s keen sense of casting, by members of his production of The Glass Menagerie, who comically switched parts to show that, indeed, the best line-up was Judith Ivey as Amanda, Keira Keeley as Laura, and Patch Darragh as Tom; heartfelt thanks from the young playwright Judith Cho and lovely actress Karen Kandel, and a warmly resonant rendition of a song from the new musical Table by composer David Shire.

Edelstein, when he spoke at the evening’s end, presented himself as honored, humbled, and determined, despite the difficulties of the current economic climate, to continue bringing to the New Haven area quality theater with the dedication he has shown for the last decade. One such opportunity will be the premiere of Sophie’s Choice, a play directed by Edelstein and adapted from the well-known film, starring Meryl Streep, from 1982, and the novel by William Stryon, 1979. The challenging new production will cap the current season in April.

As a night celebrating the love and regard for one man’s role in keeping theater vital, a fine time was had by all. Cheers, Gordon!

This week at the Long Wharf ends the run, October 16, of Molly Sweeney, Brian Friel’s monologue-driven story of personal struggle, ambition and good intentions, boasting a trio of nuanced performances, led by Simone Kirby as the unflappable Molly.

And up next, beginning October 26, the Long Wharf welcomes a production of Ain’t Misbehavin’, the tuneful celebration of Fats Waller and the jazz of the Harlem Renaissance era, returning the Tony-winning musical to its cabaret-style roots, with the original 1978 production team.

Events This Week

Robert Pinsky, former US Poet Laureate, and a highly accomplished poet reads this week at the Whitney Humanities Center, New Haven, at 4 p.m., introduced by Langdon Hammer of the Yale English Department.  See our own Donald Brown’s review of Pinsky’s recently published Selected Poems, here. The Yale Cabaret is back after a week off, showcasing Alex Mihail’s staging of Ingmar Bergman’s psychodrama, Persona, one of the existential Swede’s best films, showing at 8 p.m. Thursday, 8 and 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 10/6-10/8.  See our preview of the first three shows of the Cab season, here.

Through October 8, The Yale Rep continues its run of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, a sprawling play of sacrifice and yearning, with many fine supporting performances, reviewed on our site, here.

The Irish Repertory Theatre’s production of Brian Friel’s engaging Molly Sweeney continues at the Long Wharf, with a stellar performance by Simone Kirby as Molly, and fascinating monologues by Ciarán O’Reilly and Jonathan Hogan, through October 16; reviewed by our own Donald Brown for The New Haven Advocate, here.

Elizabeth Strout at Benefit for New Haven Free Public Library

Elizabeth Strout, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008 for her novel Olive Kitteridge, will be the featured guest at the annual Book Lover’s Luncheon on Thursday, November 3, 2011 from 12:00am – 2:00pm. Held at the Quinnipiack Club, 221 Church Street in New Haven, the luncheon benefits the public library.  Tickets are $150.00 per person and include lunch plus a signed book. Strout attended Bates College, graduating with a degree in English in 1977.  Two years later, she went to Syracuse University College of Law, where she received a law degree along with a Certificate in Gerontology.  She worked briefly for Legal Services, before moving to New York City, where she became an adjunct in the English Department of Borough of Manhattan Community College.  By this time she was publishing more stories in literary magazines and Redbook and Seventeen.  Juggling the needs that came with raising a family and her teaching schedule, she found a few hours each day to work on her writing.

In 1998, Amy and Isabelle was published to much critical acclaim.  The novel had taken almost seven years to write, and only her family and close friends knew she was working on it.  Six years later she published Abide With Me, and three years after that, Olive Kitteridge. While her life as a writer has increasingly become a more public one, she remains as devoted to the crafting of honest fiction as she was when she was sixteen years old, sending out her first stories.

Having lived in New York for almost half her life, she continues to thrill at the crowded sidewalks and the subways and the small corner delis.  “It’s simple,” she has said.  “For me – there is nothing more interesting than life.”

For more information about the Book Lover’s Luncheon, and to purchase tickets, please contact Clare Meade, Library Development Office, 860-978-8155,  email at cmeade@nhfpl.org, or visit the library’s website at: www.cityofnewhaven.com/library

And Away We Go…Yale Cabaret 44

  Thursday night the Yale Cabaret will open its doors for its new season.  Regulars will find, even before they get through the doors into the performance space, that the aura of the Cab has changed once again.  The box office and waiting area now feels like a somewhat seedy, somewhat creepy hotel (it immediately put me in mind of the McKittrick Hotel from Sleep No More), a fitting enough indication that what’s on offer through the doors will surprise, delight, and discomfit.

Since its inception in 1968, the Yale Cabaret has been a special space for students in the Yale School of Drama: it’s where they can work on what motivates them, things they might not be able to do in the work that satisfies grad school requirements, but thanks to the resources of the school the Cab’s theater artists can work out ideas in conjunction with a large, supportive network of colleagues representing all the disciplines of theater.  As the Cab’s new website states: “Nowhere else in the world are there more than 200 theater artists living in a four-block radius – the possibilities are endless.”  Indeed they are, given the extreme restrictions of the space itself and the fact that the budget for every show is about $300 and that, incredibly, shows go up and play for a total of five performances before changing over to the next feature.  It’s a frenetic pace, but once you get “the Cab Habit” you’ll be back each weekend to see what’s on offer.

This year the leadership of the Cab, in something of a departure from recent years, will feature, like some of the best shows that have been presented there, an ensemble: four Artistic Directors: three third years—Lileana Blain-Cruz (director), Sunder Ganglani (dramaturg), Michael Place (actor)—and a second year, Kate Attwell (dramaturg); they are joined by theater manager Matt Gutshick to create a team that is fully interdisciplinary within the world of theater.  When I spoke to them this week they had yet to vet the proposals for the shows that will fill out the season, but if there’s any underlying theme, it’s the belief that a theater like the Cab exists to promote experiment, the kind that involves risk and vulnerability, not only for the company and the technical support, but for the audience as well.

All four of the artistic directors are united in their view that theater’s importance as art, and its primary attraction as entertainment, is due to the unpredicable interaction that takes place between audience and spectacle.  What makes one person guffaw makes someone else sad or uneasy.  The proximity of audience to event is a factor that informs each piece—there’s nowhere to hide from a Cab show, for the audience.  And for the performers, the audience can’t be ignored either.  The audience completes the work, and the viewers’ individual and collective reactions help reveal what the work means.

The first show of the new season looks directly at the interactive dynamic of performers and audience.  Entitled Slaves, it’s a musical piece for three actors—actors who, for the duration of the performance, are enslaved to one another, and to the music, and to the audience. The piece, according to Sunder Ganglani, who wrote the book and primary music, explores the theatrical experience as an imposition upon the performers who must in some way take upon themselves emotions and ideas not their own and find a way to express them to an audience.  Slaves uses musical cues to switch gears and to bring on certain behaviors, but does that make the work the master of the cast?  Or, because it’s for us, does that make the audience the master?  Or is it rather theater that masters us all, enslaved to the interaction between our imaginations and a performance?  With three risk-taking performers like Chris Henry, Jillian Taylor and Adina Verson in the cast, the show should be memorable.  Sept. 15th, 8 p.m., Sept. 16th & 17th, 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.

The following week, fellow Artistic Director Kate Attwell launches the hundredyearspacetrip, developed with Nina Segal, of We Buy Gold, and the ensemble.  The show, which involves communication between the earth and a manned spacecraft hurtling 39,900,000,000,000 km to Alpha Centauri, is a meditation on time—as aging, as the lapse between one event and another, as passage from one age or state to another, as for instance pregnancy to childbirth, and of course youth to death on a journey to a star system far, far away.  Attwell says the show is surprisingly funny because of the interactions among the characters, bringing to life a situation that is literally out of this world.  Featuring Brenda Meaney and Ryan Davis.  Sept. 22nd, 8 p.m., Sept. 23rd & 24th, 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.

The third in the initial run of shows will be a staging of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, adapted and directed by Alexandru Mihail.  With the death of Swedish master filmmaker Bergman a few years back, there have been several notable efforts to stage his films, most recently Robert Woodruff’s version of Autumn Sonata at the Yale Rep last spring, and Cries and Whispers will be coming to the Brooklyn Academy of Music this fall.  Persona though is vintage Bergman, before he used color, and is a film limited primarily to two main characters: an actress who suddenly cannot perform and will not speak, and the nurse hired to attend her—on a secluded Scandinavian island.

The film is a high point in the major phase of Bergman’s career, when Liv Ullmann was his acting muse, and, more than the other films so far brought to the stage, incorporates the problem of performing as it relates to theater and to the theater of identity that is social life.  Mihail has always found the film compelling but recently read the script—which was published after the film but which differs from the film in certain important ways.  The point of the show, then, is not to recreate Bergman’s “European cinematic experience,” but to do with theater something not “already done” in film.  With Laura Gragtmans, Monique Barbee, Lucas Dixon, Emily Reilly. Oct. 6th, 8 p.m., Oct 7th & 8th, 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.

Those are the shows lined up thus far, each provocative and thought-provoking in its own way, each a unique theatrical experience.  The Artistic Directors of the Cab see the space as a laboratory where we’re all part of the experiment.

See you at the Labaret . . . the Caboratory.  The Cab.

The Yale Cabaret Artistic Directors: Kate Atwell, Lileana Blain-Cruz, Sunder Ganglani, Michael Place Managing Director: Matthew Gutshick

217 Park Street, New Haven, CT: 202.432.1566; http://www.yalecabaret.org/

Summer Mummers

Late in Shakespeare’s Tempest, Prospero, having dazzled Ferdinand, his daughter’s suitor, with a phantasmal pageant in which goddesses bless the couple’s imminent nuptials, insists that the spectacle was transitory as life itself and, the lines strongly suggest, as is theater, which all-too quickly “melts into air, into thin air.” But soft! All’s not lost.  For look you: The Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival has not yet wrung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.  There are two weeks yet—18 performances—in which to catch-as-catch-can the miraculous transformations of the basement space at 217 Park Street into Prospero’s isle, and into the Forest of Arden, and into a contentious arena for the bloody feuds of Britain’s royalty (yes, that’s three different sets and sometimes two shows a day—can ambition be made of sterner stuff?).

The three shows are The Tempest, As You Like It, and a right witty concentration of Henry V, Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, 3, and Richard III into a blood-and-guts psycho drama called Rose Mark’d Queen.  And the shows boast a concentrated cast that have been playing their parts all summer, becoming one with their characters’ antic dispositions, their sighs and fleers and jests, their studied mummery, festive songs, passionate proclamations, yea, their wanton romps, clownish conceits, and vaulting ambitions.  And before each production there is most excellent meat in the form of short presentations, much to the point, on aspects of Shakespearean theater: on sets, pre-The Tempest; on the language, pre-As You Like It; on the use and abuse of history, pre-Rose Mark’d Queen.

Having seen all three shows twice, at opening and at a little past mid-point, I can observe that the vision of Shakespeare on view at the Cab is of malleable texts in service to the joys of playing.  While respectful of the poetry of the plays, these productions are not servile flatterers of the Bard’s big rep nor timid courters of the audience’s clemency.  Each show grabs for what it wants to wrest from the play, and each has the guts and gusto and gonads to make it work, mostly.

The Tempest (directed by Jack Tamburri) is largely played for laughs, suborning its romance elements and the tensions about legitimate and illegitimate power to a broader conception of general folly.  The part of Prospero is shared among the company and this adds a lively sense of make believe to the entire proceedings.  Off-putting, perhaps, if you’d rather have some fledgling McKellan imposing his magic on the hapless visitors to his island kingdom, but, as the play rolls along, the odd overlaps as each actor takes turns with the cloak and book begin to wield a life of their own.  As a device it’s nimble enough to invite reflections on who lords it over whom—even Miranda and Caliban get to “be” Prospero at times—and as theater it’s a challenge to our efforts to “enter into” the play, though a form of “magic” in its own right.  Some highpoints for me: the comic timing of the cast in the mutterings of the stranded aristocracy—King Alonso, his brother Sebastian, Duke Antonio, and Gonzalo (it’s rare to want to spend more time with these characters)—and Ariel’s songs as voiced by Adina Verson, in a get-up that put me in mind of a Dr. Seuss creation.

As You Like It (directed by Louisa Proske) presents a likeably fast-paced first act outside in the courtyard, complete with a wrestling contest and some agreeable love-at-first sight importunings between Adina Verson’s breathless Rosalind and Marcus Henderson’s open-book Orlando.  Inside, things get mellow with a sojourn in the forest of Arden that’s perhaps a bit too long on songs.  The cast plays and sings right well, but one begins to realize that the best parts of the play happen when Rosalind’s on stage, for its her native intelligence and wit, her skill at directing and counterfeiting (like The Beatles’ song says: “and though she feels as if she’s in a play, she is anyway”), and her experience of all roles (pined for and pining after, male and female, fool and critic) that create the intellectual content of the play.  This production aims for and mostly achieves a feel for touching comedy spiced with the absurd spirit of contemporary Rom-Coms.  Highpoints: Rosalind’s dialogues with her confidante Celia/Aliena and her repartee with Orlando; the brothers Duke, both given a comic kick-in-the-pants by Brenda Meaney in wildly different tonsorial and sartorial style; Babak Tafti as the put-upon fool Touchstone burdened with his Lady’s luggage, and in his lust-above-love courtship of game Audrey (Jillian Taylor); Tim Brown’s lovesick swain and Tara Kayton’s fiery Phebe; Matt Biagini’s mercurial satire of melancholic Jaques.

Rose Mark’d Queen (directed by Devin Brain) serves up a fast-paced interpretation of a handful of Shakespeare’s histories, centered by strong characters—King Henry VI (Marcus Henderson, gaining in pathos and stature as the play proceeds) and his Queen Margaret (Jillian Taylor in a demanding role in which she is lover, chider, schemer, fiend and grief-stricken mother by turns)—with more than able support provided by Babak Tafti, as several figures in the House of York, providing now fierce, now more bemused opposition to the King and his supporters, Matt Biagini in a number of supporting roles pretty much destined for death, and Andrew Kelsey, who shines bright as Suffolk, the Queen’s power-hungry lover, and then, as Richard, becomes a lethal attack dog off the leash.  The first half is razor sharp, moving from a scene of kids playacting battle and martial pomp to acts of murderous treason; the second half dallies a bit more, with a comic courtship scene (of an inflated doll) presumably to lighten things up though it also seems to lengthen the proceedings more than is needful.  High-points: when a sword is held at the throat of an audience member to force a capitulation; when representatives of York and Lancaster go amongst the audience, trying to enlist supporters by drawing upon them either a white or red mark (even your selection of a wine for the evening might be a political gesture!—stick with beer and support Jack Cade); the use of light and sound and those big armoires at either end of the space.  It’s a play that keeps you guessing and, of the three, was the one that impressed me most, if only because Brain has somehow managed to underscore how these histories are proto-versions of many more familiar moments in Shakespearean tragedy.

What’s gratifying, for a returning spectator, is to watch the audience get caught up in the pressures of the plays, waiting to see the knots come undone—two of the plays do end happily—and to marvel at how inviting and interactive Shakespeare can be.  These aren’t pious productions stuffed with pretty pomp set up on a stage leagues away.  This is an in-your-face—maybe even on-your-lap—Festival, with characters beseeching their audience to take a side, share a dilemma, lend an ear.  If you think you know the plays, I guarantee you you don’t quite know them like you’ll find them here.

And that’s all to the good.  For what are plays anyway?  Certainly they are texts, but if you want a scholarly Shakespeare, stay at home and read a book.  If you want to hear Shakespeare alive and lived, given shape by young talent and shared as though a communal feast, then stay not, unresolved, unpregnant of your cause (to go or not to go) but exeunt omnes and severally and head for the Yale Summer Cabaret’s Shakespeare Festival.

The Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival August 2-14 Artistic Director, Devin Brain; Producer, Tara Kayton

203-432-1567; or summercabaret.org

The Hotel Unheimlich

It was my daughter’s idea.  She had heard of the show from a friend and so had some idea what to expect.  Her experience was therefore more extensive than mine, it seems.  I was a bit disappointed that I didn’t see all I heard about from her, but at the same time our divergent experiences simply underlined a wonderful aspect of the show: the experience you have of it is largely determined by your own volition.  I could have stuck with her, went where she went, followed the actors she followed, but then I’m not her and I wanted my wandering through the dreamlike, nightmarish world of Sleep No More to be mine. Sleep No More is theater as performance art, as installation, as dance and mime, as full immersion experience, as a trip into the collective uncanny.  Developed by a group called Punch Drunk (aptly enough), the show first had a run in Boston and true cognoscenti are quick to say they saw it there (New Yorkers don’t get everything first), but, from what I’ve heard, the Boston show was not as extensive, didn’t take up, as it does in New York, four stories of a warehouse in Chelsea, reconfigured as the McKittrick hotel, a kind of living movie set you never emerge from until the show is over (or until you choose to leave).  After four hours inside, I was ready to go, I suppose, but that’s not to say I would’ve left any time soon.  Like a child at closing time at the carnival, one feels there must be one more thrill, one more odd sensation, one more unexpected event still to come.

If you haven’t heard about it (or have), here are some facts you’re likely to hear: the audience is free to roam wherever they wish through the four floors but must wear the provided masks and maintain silence; these restrictions prevent audience intrusion into the spectacle—if a member of the cast wants you to interact, he or she will involve you—but they also create a side spectacle of roving, masked and silent watchers (or voyeurs, to make it sound as creepy as it sometimes feels) who are your doubles or comrades, and in their company one feels part of a collectivity less like a theater audience and more like a scavenger hunt or like “free time” on an unguided tour of the Twilight Zone.

About the show itself: it dramatizes, in somewhat free associative dumbshow, the story of Macbeth—which means there’s death and blood and satanic rites—combined with elements extracted from Alfred Hitchcock’s noirish version of Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic novel Rebecca, and other elements that, as best my daughter and I could piece it together, had to do with murder in a hotel and a stint in an insane asylum.  It would be easier to parse the action if, say, the different threads were self-contained on one floor or another, so that the audience could peek in or pass through, “story-surfing” amongst the floors.  But it doesn’t work that way.  Actors pass you on their way to or from a scene and you can choose to follow or not.  Maybe you’d rather keep looking at the fascinating set of an apothecary’s store, or a post office filled with hand-written messages, or a taxidermy shop, or the graveyard, or the grand ballroom where you may move amidst a moving grove.

I found it hard to fix on characters per se, to say nothing of performances.  It gets underway in the ball room where all the characters are present for a dance and then go their different ways.  Who you find yourself following might be due to whim or to an effort to stick with Macbeth, say, or, as I did, because you saw one woman drink drugged milk and wanted to see what would happen to her next.  If you’ve ever dreamed of not being bound by linearity, this is the show for you.  What you “learn” is largely dependent on what kind of sleuth you are, what kind of things you notice, what your imagination, once aroused, does to you.

If you’ve ever sat through a performance where you found yourself not too engaged by who was on stage and wondered what the other characters, off stage, were up to, it’s liberating, here, to know you can go wander in search of them.  Someone is up to something somewhere, so seek and ye shall find.  And whatever you find seems somehow intended for you, if only because you led yourself there.  That’s the dramatic element that I found most haunting and inspiring: the feeling of being implicated in what I saw because I stayed and watched it, or because I trailed someone to see what they were going to do.  The only comparable experience is a dream where you seem to be doing something for your own reasons and yet have no control over what happens.

The other aspect that stayed with me and wouldn’t let go is amazement at the design elements, the lighting, the smells, the sounds, the full sensory experience that creates a range of reactions—some rooms you just want to get out of, others you could imagine hanging out in if you were a member of the Addams family, others might feel, oddly, like a place you’ve been before and may find yourself in again—like returning to Manderley, or to the witches’ den—led by a shuddering sense of repetition compulsion.

When we attended, back in April, the show was slated to close in the first week of June.  Now it’s the end of July and the show is slated to close on Labor Day weekend.  I suppose it will close, but the longer the show lasts, the more people hear about it and want to see it, and those who have already been want to go again.  I have to admit I’m wondering if I can manage to work in another visit before the end.  Maybe I’ll see my earlier self wandering amongst the onlookers, a remnant of myself that never left, like Nell at the end of The Haunting of Hill House.

“Still it cried, ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house.”

http://sleepnomorenyc.com/

NHR Library Event This Wednesday

Sure, the New Haven Review's books have been out for a while. But that doesn't mean we can't revel in their release a few months after the fact. In a dramatic rescheduling of an event that was snowed out in March (raise your hand if you're still glad this winter is over), the New Haven Review will be throwing a triple-decker reading from How to Win Her Love, Blue for Oceans, and Kentauros, by Rudolph Delson, Charles Douthat, and Gregory Feeley, respectively. The readings will be held at the main branch of the New Haven Free Public Library, at 133 Elm Street, this Wednesday, June 22, at 6 pm. Your correspondent, alas, cannot attend, but can say with reasonable certainty that participants will be prepared to celebrate afterward, so please stick around. And thanks again to Carol Brown at the library for graciously hosting the event.

Silent Movies and Live Music at Lyric Hall, Sunday, 7 pm

OK, so it's not, strictly speaking, literary. But neither, strictly speaking, are we. Ladies and gentlemen! The New Haven Review announces its first evening of silent movies, accompanied by live music, this Sunday evening at 7 pm. It will take place in the gorgeous old vaudeville theater inside Lyric Hall, at 827 Whalley Avenue—which, if you haven't seen it too recently, has been renovated so beautifully that it looks like something from czarist Russia. It is worth the $5 admission just to spend time inside that room.

The evening will consist of two short movies—each of them about 10 minutes long. The first one is a Georges Melies film called The Doctor's Secret; the second is an unbelievably collapsed version of Alice in Wonderland. You want to come just to see these movies. The music is provided by Dr. Caterwaul's Cadre of Clairvoyant Claptraps, which sounds like this. (Full disclosure: Your correspondent is a member of this band.)

But wait, there's more! In addition, there will be some live music performed by the Claptraps and Tyler Bussey, a quietly soulful CT singer who reinterprets old songs in a style reminiscent, to this correspondent, of Sam Amidon. It's great stuff. Probably there will be a brief intermission, making for a thoroughly pleasant evening's entertainment. And if we really get our act together, we may bring appropriate refreshments.

Hope to see you all there!

The Ship of Death

Oh build your ship of death, your little arkand furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine for the dark flight down oblivion.--D. H. Lawrence, “The Ship of Death"

How do they do it?  How does the Yale Cabaret take a story of utter desperation—the doomed expedition of the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, under the command of Sir John Franklin, in search of the Northwest Passage in the Arctic Ocean in 1845—and make an entertaining evening of it?

Maybe it’s because director Devin Brain heads to the dark side the way most kids go to their favorite playground, and because the ensemble cast are clearly having so much fun in this dire tale of dwindling hopes.  And maybe it’s because the many tunes in the show, sea shanties like “What do you do with a drunken sailor?” and jigs like “The Rocky Road to Dublin,” are so irrepressibly infectious.

Conceived by Alexandra Henrikson, who is luminous as Franklin’s indefatigable wife back home, resolutely refusing to consider herself his widow, Erebus and Terror is credited to the cast, and that could be why the parts seem so perfect for each actor: Max Gordon Moore, clipped and distinguished as Officer Downing; Ben Horner, swarthy and bawdy as Ferry (his eager pursuit of Lady Death is a high-point, to say nothing of dining upon the deceased Downing); Andrew Kelsey as Oxford, a sympathetic bloke who gives an effective delivery of the seductive speech of Titania to “translated” Bottom in the crew’s impromptu enactment of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Stéphanie Hayes, skittish and fearful as Paddy, a young Irish lad (her shrieks of joy from the crow’s nest have a “top of the world, ma” feel); Dipika Guha, wide-eyed and mesmerized as Fin, a mate going “off his tit,” and Irene Sofia Lucio, as Timmy, or Kid, the youngest and most comical of the swabbies.  Add Pierre Bourgeois’s songs, richly evocative of the world of these seamen, all bound—in a string of distinctive endings—for Davey Jones’ Locker, and you’ve got the main elements for a successfully gripping show, supported by Ken Goodwin’s watery sound effects, by Lighting Designer Alan C. Edwards’ dramatic variations of light and dark that, playing on Aaron P. Mastin’s authentic costumes, put me in mind of Rockwell Kent’s nautical drawings, and, through the exit door that was opened a few times as part of Julia C. Lee’s set, by mounds of snow provided by Nature, making the effort to imagine the frozen wastes surrounding the ship that much easier.

Have you built your ship of death, O have you? O build your ship of death, for you will need it.

Erebus and Terror, Songs of Ghosts and Dreams Conceived by Alexandra Henrikson; Written and Created by the Ensemble January 13-15, 2011; Thurs, 8 p.m.; Fri. & Sat., 8 p.m. & 11 p.m. The Yale Cabaret