Upcoming Carlotta Festival

Every year the graduating playwrights of the Yale School of Drama each have a final play produced, much as the graduating directors offer their thesis shows throughout the year.  For the playwrights, the occasion is called the Carlotta Festival of New Plays and it runs for two weeks in May, beginning a week from today.  Each play is directed by a graduating director and features, for the most part, first year acting students.

This year the line-up consists of Amelia Roper’s Lottie in the Late Afternoon, directed by Ethan Heard; Justin Taylor’s House Beast, directed by Jack Tamburri; MJ Kaufman’s Sagittarius Ponderosa, directed by Margot Bordelon.

Amelia Roper, a playwright from Australia, says she likes fiction of the modernist era and has devised a comedy that harkens to the comedies of manners of that period.  In Lottie in the Late Afternoon, the laughs derive from Lottie’s effort to create an ideal vacation for herself and her friends—a plan that goes awry, leading to tense and awkward situations that viewers may find hitting close to home.  In particular, Lottie is a play concentrating on a certain demographic now reaching their late thirties and coming to terms with the status of their relationships, their ambitions, and their pasts.

Taking place in the present during a weekend in the off season at a New England beach house, Roper’s play lets us into the intimate dynamics among a couple—Lottie and her husband Aaron—and two of Lottie’s best friends: Anne (married, but with a husband who chose not to come away for the weekend), and Clara, who has some history with Anne.  Roper says that in some ways the play is “all about the meals,” as the foursome have to sort out the usual tasks and tastes that make for a successful ménage—in the face of the kind of economic instabilities that may well be a defining context for this generation.  Add to that the fact that Lottie has packed a stack of books by the likes of E. M. Forster, Jane Bowles, and Iris Murdoch that purport to be vacation tales, but which help to cast over the proceedings a kind of nostalgia for a past that none of these characters has experienced, though they might like to wish they had.

Roper looks to plays by Will Eno, Sarah Ruhl, and Martin Crimp for inspiration, and sees in comedies such as hers a risk in registering “existential angst” as an aspect of otherwise vital friendships.  The drama in such situations is not found in major conflict, but in the characters’ struggles to get across feelings and insights amidst the disappointments of not connecting.  In other words, the play is as real as your next small social gathering—and maybe as desperate—but bound to be funnier.

Justin Taylor describes his play House Beast as a “comedy when trauma is possible.”  Fair enough, given that the play opens with a prologue set in 1992, during the early teens of two of the three characters—Chris and Matt—as they try to make a DIY horror film in an abandoned house in a fictional Californian suburb called Pleasant Valley.  Unexpectedly on the scene as well is Matt’s older brother Terry, as a wild afternoon ensues involving some creepy occurrences, a flying goat—and something dramatic between Terry and Chris that ends badly.

Skip ahead twenty years and we find Matt and Chris hooking up—or almost—via the “grinder app” that helps gays get together.  In the interim, Matt has moved to LA to be a Hollywood type (or so he hopes), Chris has led a peripatetic life with Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms, and Terry, a married man with two daughters, is a well-liked firefighter with a closeted secret life.  House Beast looks at how past shame and trauma can haunt the present. We enter the dynamics of a triangle where the two possible love objects for Chris are brothers—and he has baggage with both.  The characters are amusing—with the two brothers playing to type and Chris something of a grandiose progressive idealist—though things can get ugly.

Taylor cites Caryl Churchill as a master of the dark comedy he aims for, and says the romantic aspects of the play engage with the timely question of whether happiness is sustainable.  His characters would all like to find a means to change the outcome of their pasts together.  Taylor gives the characters enough room in which to grow and enough rope with which to hang themselves.      

For MJ Kaufman in Sagittarius Ponderosa, the only thing that’s really sustainable is what he calls “the landscape of constant change.”  Set in central Oregon, Kaufman’s native state, in a landscape dominated by Ponderosa pines, the play depicts three generations of a family coming to grips with various kinds of transformation in the dark time of the year ruled by Sagittarius—late November.

For Archer, there are the changes that come with turning thirty on top of a gender transformation his family hasn’t quite accepted; for Archer’s dad, hitting sixty and terminally ill from diabetes, there’s that most permanent of transformations—from life into death; and for Archer’s grandmother, in her 80s, there is the possibility of a late-in-life love, though it’s Archer (Angela, to her) she’s trying to make a match for.  Landscape in the play is not only emotional and familial, it also partakes of the concerns of Oregon where research into controlled burning, as a technique of combating forest fires, brings a researcher named Owen into the family circle and gives resonance to the play’s location.

The play travels a year from Thanksgiving to Thanksgiving, allowing us to see change and development in the characters over time.  The naturalism of the play accommodates devices such as a love potion Grandmother wields, and a ghostly visitation from Archer’s late father as he merges with Peterson, a neighbor in the form of a puppet.  Kaufman’s play began as an assignment from Sarah Ruhl that encouraged him to work with Ovidian metamorphosis.  The work has allowed Kaufman to engage with the kind of archetypal naturalism found in Thornton Wilder, a favorite playwright of his, handling major themes of love and death and identity with a light touch.

Each playwright feels blessed by the director each is working with.  For Roper, Ethan Heard’s sensitivity to characters is perfect for her comedy of relationships; Taylor finds Jack Tamburri’s gutsy energy particularly helpful in creating the exaggerated memory of adolescence the prologue aims for; and Kaufman was inspired by the personal urgency and great visual sense Margot Bordelon has brought to the staging of his play.  All three pairings seem matches made in heaven and we can expect a trio of brave, thoughtful and entertaining plays at this year’s Carlotta Festival.

The Carlotta Festival of New Plays

The Yale School of Drama

May 6-14, 2013

1156 Chapel Street, New Haven

Poetry. Performance. Party.

Mario Biagini is a man who believes in the power of the word—spoken, recited, sung.  As a performer and director he has brought together 9 performers—musicians, singers, actors—to travel to Yale and New Haven as part of Interdisciplinary Performance Studies at Yale (IPSY).  Biagini’s group, originating in the Open Program of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, pride themselves on a collective approach to performance that aims to include its audience, creating an environment that feels like “a holiday, a relaxation” of our routine responses.

While in New Haven, the troupe will perform a show called Electric Party Songs, twice at Yale’s Calhoun College, Feb. 22 and 23, and, in a more extended version, at BAR, March 3—the latter show is billed as “an experiment in the potentialities of a party as an art form.”  If your winter has been as low on energy as mine, you too might find yourself intrigued by that idea.

The troupe will also perform I Am America at the Whitney Theater in the Whitney Humanities Center, with a set built by children at the Eli Whitney Museum, Feb. 28 and March 1, and will hold a symposium on Poetry as a Practice of Encounter, also at the WHC, on March 2.

The Open Program likes to include the contribution of locals in their shows, using materials found in the streets of the different cities they visit, and at times, as in Italy, have set out to create self-generated festivals in the streets.  Traveling about New Haven by bus, Biagini noted the racial segregation of New Haven where almost all bus riders are black and almost all students at Yale are white.  He told his collaborators: “we should do our show right here on the bus.”  Instead, he does his best to engage people wherever he finds them, offering a kind of contact high from his joy in performance.

The performances consist of an unusual mix: selections from the poems of Allen Ginsberg—the late Beat Guru, Bop Buddist, Singalong Shaman and Clown Prince of Poetry—are turned into songs and are then intermixed with African American spirituals, shouts, and worksongs.  The mix is thoroughly American, as Ginsberg is perhaps the poet of the last 60 years most concerned with trying to live up to “America” in a Whitmanian sense.  Whether or not he succeeded, Ginsberg was astute at assessing the kinds of mash-ups that drive our national psyche.  He was into jazz, rock, folk, blues, as well as dipping into most religions, particularly Judaism via his upbringing and Buddhism via his own searches into mysticism.  He also participated readily in the cults of personality that float so many boats in the media, and could make pop culture read like holy texts.

Some of the best moments in Electric Party Songs come from the performers’ grasp of the essential showmanship at the heart of Ginsberg’s poetry (Lloyd Bricken, looking a bit Waits-like, is particularly effective in his delivery).  Ginsberg’s work is about exposure—of the highest self, of the lowest urges, of the deepest shame and the most inspiring ecstasies.  The troupe does not offer reverential recitals, but rather dynamic musical numbers that bounce off Ginsberg’s lines, making the songs assume a bodily urgency—whether it’s Biagnini recreating an old and infirm poet or Alejandro Tomás Rodriguez writhing about on the floor to the yearnings of love.

Add to that the spirituals—with many rhythmic shout-outs to Jesus—and you have a kind of revival meeting that may make all feel either welcome or uncomfortable.  These lithe and sinuous young men and women sing gracefully a capella (Felicita Marcelli and Agnieszka Kazimierska ) or with the accompaniment of guitars and percussion, and to see them up and swaying to songs from the South is to harken to a kind of cultural trance and transcendence.  How are these predominantly European performers—from Italy, Poland, France and elsewhere, looking like an ad hoc collection of gypsies and free spirits—able to lose themselves so readily in traditional songs?  And what is the principle force behind the vibe they create like a band of charismatics?

Biagini likes to think back to the farm he grew up on in Italy, where a holiday was a true transformation.  People knew the value of letting down their guard, of giving up their daily tasks for a collective enjoyment of the free flow of time.  His group has sometimes staged a “night watch” where the audience and the performers stay together through the night, interacting, singing, playing, sleeping, moving about freely, finding themselves, in the end, not the same as they were when it began.  He believes fervently that letting music and poetry, lyrics and rhythms inhabit one is to liberate—at least for a little—the spirit.

The spirit—that’s the place where the poet Ginsberg meets the songs of faith amidst oppression.   And that’s where Biagini and his troupe try to meet their audience.  It may take a leap of faith to get beyond your New England reticence and intellectual skepticism on a cold February night—but it might just be worth the effort.

Interdisciplinary Performance Studies at Yale presents The Open Program of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards

Electric Party Songs: Feb. 22 & 23: 8pm, Calhoun Cabaret, 189 Elm Street

I Am America: Feb. 28 & March 1: 8pm, Whitney Theater, 53Wall Street

Symposium: Poetry as the Practice of Encounter: March 2: 11 am-4pm, Whitney Theater, 53Wall Street

Electric Party Songs: March 3: 4 pm, BAR, 254 Crown Street

Events are free and open to the public.  Seating is limited.

A Contemporary "Curse." Sam Shepard Comes to the Long Wharf

Potentially one of the most sharply relevant plays in the current season in New Haven is the Long Wharf Theatre’s revival of Sam Shepard’s The Curse of the Starving Class.  Shepard has long been a staple of the American theater but the last time one of his plays was given a professional production here was the Yale Rep’s Curse in 2000.  Bad as those times were, we may have even more to curse about currently. According to the show’s director, Gordon Edelstein, the play is “hard to get right,” and yet is perhaps his personal favorite of Shephard’s plays, a play that is both timeless and “startlingly resonant for the moment.”

As a satiric, at times surreal play, Curse has, Edelstein says, “a very specific style” and its action is both “real and not real.”  While those who know Shepard’s work may find entering that particular space familiar, there is bound to be a certain defamiliarization as well.  One thing audiences might be faced with is determining how recognizable the world of Curse of the Starving Class is.  First produced in the late Seventies, the play was one of Shepard’s first attempts at a full-length, three act play.  Somewhat more traditional in form, the play takes on what could be called the locus classicus of American plays: the family drama.  With a father, Weston, a mother, Ella, a son Wesley, and a daughter, Emma, the doubling in the family romance is explicit, and the sense that the characters we’re viewing are both people and types makes for a shifting focus that is rich and suggestive, if also mercurial.  As a writer, Shepard has a unique gift for both the absurdist comedy of modern American types as well as a sense of, at times, tragic grandeur.  His is a poetic idiom that is rarely literal.

For Edelstein, one main reason for the current Long Wharf production is the occasion of working with a cast equal to the play.  “Shepard demands a company of actors skilled in the specifics of his text,” he notes, while praising, in particular, his chief actors’ “extraordinary ability.”  With Judith Ivey, a two-time Tony winner, as matriarch Ella, the production brings together a notable actress, esteemed for her work at Long Wharf in plays such as Shirley Valentine and The Glass Menagerie, with a part that offers much complexity.  Kevin Tighe (Weston) has also worked with Edelstein before at the Long Wharf, most recently in Mourning Becomes Electra.

The main question for a production of Curse, which Edelstein feels is truly a great play by a playwright able to hold his own with Miller, O’Neill and Williams, is: does the production  find “the pitch of the play, the specific tone of the piece?”  “Shepard is sui generis and nothing else is like him,” Edelstein says, so that finding that tone is a matter of “listening carefully to the play.” As a director, Edelstein sees his task as investigating “the linings of the stomach of each play” to understand what that play requires, to find “an imaginative and interesting way to put it on the stage.”  He finds Shepard, whose work he has staged many times, though this will be his first in his 12 years as Artistic Director of Long Wharf, challenging, but is confident that Curse of the Starving Class is very much a contemporary play that will speak to its audience.

Curse of the Starving Class opens on February 20th and runs until March 10th.  Starring Judith Ivey and Kevin Tighe, the play is a darkly comic depiction of  the struggles of a farming family in California as they cope with economic pressures, alcoholism, and internal tensions that question not only the stability of the American Dream but the viability of the American family.

Coming Up at The Cabaret

Yale’s spring semester starts this week, so that means not only are the kids back in town but so is the Cab.  The Yale Cabaret has announced its new line-up and the first show of the second half of the season—with ten shows rather than the traditional nine—should be getting ready to go up even as we speak. That show is All of What You Love and None of What You Hate, a play by Phillip Howze as recent as last year, about a teenage girl coming to a major decision about herself with what Artistic Director Ethan Heard describes as “a lot of noise” coming at her from her mother, her boyfriend and a friend.  The play is very fast-paced and contemporary, so contemporary, in fact, that three of its four actors are First Years in the YSD program.  The play is directed by Kate Tarker, a 2nd-year Playwright, who worked in the fall on the Cab’s Cat Club.  January 17-19.

The Island is an early-ish play by Athol Fugard, developed with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, in his Brechtian period, 1972, and set in a prison cell in Robben Island, the South African prison that held Nelson Mandela at the time.  The two men in the cell are rehearsing Antigone, Sophocles’ great play about a clash with the State in the name of mourning, ritual and blood ties.  The play, directed by native South African and 3rd-year dramaturg Kate Attwell, stars Winston Duke and Paul Pryce, both 3rd-Year Actors, recently shown to great effect in Iphigenia Among the Stars.  January 24-26.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day comes Ermyntrude & Esmeralda, a “naughty puppet play” derived from the naughty epistolary novella by Lytton Strachey.  Directed by 2nd-year Costume Designer Hunter Kaczorowski (who recently did such an excellent job on the YSD’s production of Sunday in the Park with George), the play’s titular characters confide in each other about all sorts of things that, we imagine, young Edwardian ladies were not supposed to notice, much less comment upon.  It’s an intimate world of bow-wows and pussycats and whimsical euphemisms. February 14-16.

The first of the two shows this semester not derived from a pre-existing source, All This Noise* is the creation of 3rd-year Actor Jackson Moran, who directed last semester’s tour de force, Cowboy Mouth.  In this one-man show based upon interviews with persons who have had experience with mental illness—as professionals, patients, and relatives—Moran seeks to create some of that “conversation about mental health” that politicians in the media profess an earnest interest in, but which seems to never get started. February 21-23.

The second show originating with YSD students is The Bird Bath, a movement piece created by The Ensemble and directed by 3rd-year Actor Monique Barbee, who shone in last semester’s Sunday in the Park with George and last summer’s K of D, at the Summer Cabaret.  Inspired by the art of the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington*—partner of Max Ernst—this piece uses text from the artist's account of her experiences in a mental institution. February 28-March 2.

Contemporary Irish playwright Enda Walsh’s The Small Things is a chilling play for two actors, directed by 3rd-year dramaturg Emily Reilly.  The characters, a man and a woman, tell stories in a kind of dialect, both to explore the power of speech and to reconstruct occurrences from a devastating past. March 7-9.

Lindbergh’s Flight by Bertolt Brecht was written as a radio play with music by Kurt Weill.  As carried out by an Ensemble that includes Kate Attwell and 3rd-year Actors Brenda Meaney and Gabe Levey, the play, Heard says, is “mischievous fun” with potential for audience participation, and a political dimension to the hero worship of Lindbergh. March 14-16.

Heard’s own project this semester is a production of Arthur Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, or Opus 21.  A moody musical piece involving 21 poems by Belgian poet Albert Giraud, the composition dates from 1913 and is an open-ended working through of Symbolist motifs, most notably the figure of “the sad clown” Pierrot.  The work calls for five instrumentalists and a soprano, but Heard is still deciding how much action will be expected from the musicians and how many actors will be involved.  In any case, the piece seems an even more ambitious combination of music and drama than Basement Hades, the show Heard directed in last year’s Cab.  March 28-30.

The Twins Would Like to Say, by collaborators Seth Bockley and Devon de Mayo, continues the “twinning” that seems a theme this semester.  And like E & E, it involves two girls looking on at their community, and, like The Small Things, it involves the rigors of a private, shared life.  Directed by a duo, Lauren Dubowski and Whitney Dibo, two 2nd-year Dramaturgs, the play is about twin sisters from the Caribbean trying to cope with life in Wales.  The play is usually presented “promenade” style, which means the audience moves around, spending time in one area or another as things happen simultaneously. April 4-6.

The final show of the season is Marius von Mayenberg’s The Ugly One, directed by 2nd-year Director Cole Lewis, who directed the gripping and entertaining show “Ain’t Gonna Make It” in the fall semester.  This four-person play takes place in a slightly futuristic world in which a person who has been deemed the ugliest has undergone plastic surgery to become the most beautiful.  The play is about appearance and substance, we might say, but also about the worship of beauty in our looks-conscious culture. April 11-13.

And that’s that.  See you at the CAB.

The Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven, CT

*Corrections: the original post used the working title Halfway House for the piece entitled All This Noise, and misidentified Leonora Carrington as Dora Carrington, a British artist in the Bloomsbury Group.

Weight Watchers, Watch Out

It’s a new year and traditionally the time of resolutions as people make plans to improve their lives.  One staple of the New Year’s Resolution list is the vow to lose weight, and one of the givens of that vow is that it will be accompanied with a lot of drama.  What should be a simple, private decision to alter one’s diet or undertake an exercise regimen becomes fraught with the dynamics of the game show—can she/he do it?—together with the psychic costs of failing—if not, what’s “wrong” with her/him?  We even have TV shows like The Biggest Loser dedicated to the weight-loss ordeal. January Joiner: A Weight Loss Horror Comedy, the new play by Laura Jacqmin  debuting this week at the Long Wharf Theatre, takes on the high anxiety of self-improvement with comedy, horror elements, and a knowing sense of the absurd.  Set in a “weight-loss boot camp” in Florida, it follows the travails of two sisters, Myrtle (Meredith Holzman) and Terry (Ashlie Atkinson).  Terry, the elder, experienced a recent cardiac incident that has sent her scurrying to Total Xtreme, run by Brian (Anthony Bowden) and April (Tonya Glanz).  Myrtle is along to offer moral support, which means that she is both with the program and looking a little askance at it.  And dedication is clearly an issue since a “January Joiner” is the term for the memberships at health spas that begin with New Year’s resolutions and fade by spring.

According to the script, Myrtle and Terry are overweight young women—5'5" and well over 200 lbs. They are joined by Darnell (Daniel Stewart Sherman), a happy-go-lucky heavy person who tips the scale at over 300 lbs. and keeps coming back to make what little adjustments he can.  Thus, among the three dieters we have desperation—Terry claims she will lose 50 lbs. during her stay—acceptance, and indifference.  Then there are creepier elements—such as Not-Terry and Holy Shit Ghost, both played by Maria-Christina Oliveras—that add a touch of the uncanny to the proceedings.

An undercurrent of the play is certainly the question: why is weight an issue, and what’s the solution?  The question of one’s appearance, in our image-conscious world, is not simply physical.  It comes loaded with moral, personal, psychological, and social implications—the kinds of things that plays thrive on.

But the play, in the view of its director, Eric Ting, is more than just a satire on the effect of social injunctions to be thinner, better-looking, or to have such goals. It’s a play about change. “At its heart it is a play about two sisters growing apart, about becoming so different that they don’t recognize each other,” Ting said.

To change one’s appearance—all the ads say—is to change one’s life.  A “new you.”  But what gets shed and lost with the “old you”?  For Laura Jacqmin, its author, the play asks: “What happens to us when the people who are closest to us change?”  What is the effect on our relationships when we take on roles, tasks or goals that change our relations to others already in our lives?

January Joiner: A Weight Loss Horror Comedy runs from from January 9 through February 10, 2013 on Stage II.  Opening night is Wednesday, January 16, at 7:30 p.m.

Setting Up a Sunday in the Park

Opening December 14th on the University Theater stage is a revival of Sunday in the Park with George, the Pulitzer-winning musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine.  The show will be the thesis production of Ethan Heard, third-year directing student at the Yale School of Drama and currently the Artistic Director of the Yale Cabaret.  It’s by no means a regular thing for a YSD thesis show to be a big, popular Broadway musical, but, Heard says, he’s found there are many “closeted musical theater lovers” at the Drama School, and his fellow colleagues have rallied to the production, which has been in rehearsals since early November.

Heard says he favors “big-hearted shows that move me, nourish me, and teach me.”  Sondheim “is a genius, and Sunday is one of the most important pieces of theater in the last fifty years.”  Heard has seen three professional productions and sees the work as a fully satisfying, “wildy theatrical” project.  When he proposed the musical for his directing project, Heard found that Victoria Nolan, Deputy Dean of YSD, also loves Sondheim and that, as Acting Instructor Ron Van Lieu points out, it’s not uncommon for YSD alums to find themselves in musicals.  Indeed, Heard feels fortunate that the School currently boasts sufficient vocal talent to bring off the ambitious project, which features a cast of about fourteen, and that “pretty much every one has been in a musical.”

As Heard has learned in the rehearsals thus far, directing such a spectacle requires skills in “traffic control.”  At an early rehearsal I attended, there was considerable satisfaction in watching the finale of Act One find its pace: the complex composition that is La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat comes together to the tune of “Sunday.”  It’s a moment that is both lyrical and epic in establishing the relation between two kinds of composition: the painterly kind which yields the tableaux we see forming before our eyes, a bourgeois slice of life from late nineteenth-century Paris, and the writerly kind that consists of the words and music of Sondheim and Lapine, giving expression to the ambiance surrounding the painting.  Seeing students who are still discovering their parts find their places in the great oeuvre was fascinating.

The kind of acting Sunday requires is a departure from the kind of “kitchen-sink dramas” more common on the contemporary stage, Heard says.  Musicals are stylized and, unlike works in the public domain, there are few liberties that can be taken with the material.  The score makes its demands and finding room for interpretation might be said to be one of the challenges.  For Heard, much of the dramatic value of a musical is in the “thrill of singing,” with the songs producing “tour de force moments” that, like speeches in Shakespeare, create a poetry that interprets the characters’ feelings, allowing them to be larger than life.

Heard believes that, from our current perspective, what Sunday says about making art is instructive.  The play juxtaposes the artistic life in the 1880s—as emblematized by Georges Seurat, a loner who sacrificed love and a possible family for art—with the 1980s, where we see Seurat’s ficitional great-grandson, also called Georges, trying to cope with the demands of the self-contained art-world during one of its great “boom” periods.  Heard suggests that he and his contemporaries in the Drama School can find much to identify with: “Artists between 25 and 32, like the two Georges in the play, are trying to make a mark by creating a legacy that will realize their vision and voice in the world.  But there’s always the problem of balancing art and private life.”

Getting the balance right is not only a theme of the play, but a challenge of the production itself: balancing music and words, static tableaux with carefully choreographed action, the demands of art against the demands of romance, the obligations to personal vision and to collective concerns, and the desire to find an overarching aesthetic responsive and rigorous enough to celebrate the richness found in the twin demands of art and life.  Heard and his very talented and capable company, including his musical director, Daniel Schlosberg, of the Yale Music School, are working on it, by George.

The show will run from December 14-20 at the Yale University Theatre, 222 York Street.

Photographs by Nicholas Hussong

Mamet Revisited

Next Wednesday, November 14, The New Haven Theater Company kicks off its four show run of David Mamet’s edgy and entertaining play, Speed-the-Plow.  The director, George Kulp, and two of the three cast members were involved in the troupe’s production of the playwright’s Glengarry Glen Ross in 2010.  It’s good to see a return to Mamet as his dialogue-driven dramas bring out the strengths of the Company, letting them show off their ability with close ensemble work.  The key to good Mamet is pacing, and Kulp feels that his actors—J. Kevin Smith as Bobby Gould, a recently risen movie studio bigwig, Steve Scarpa as Charlie Fox, a lower-level associate but friend of long-standing, certain that he has a property that will be his big break, and Megan Keith Chenot as Karen, a temporary secretary new to the world of movie-making who might represent other values, or who might be a hustling go-getter—are finding new and interesting aspects of the play.

The NHTC’s recent productions have offered a certain degree of timeliness in this uncertain era of economic downturn.  I remember seeing their Glengarry Glen Ross on a night when the stock market hit a new low and the desperation of real estate salesmen in the play could easily extend to Wall Street traders.  Smith played the loquacious Ricky Roma, Scarpa was Williamson the less-than-savvy office manager, and Kulp played Shelly “Machine” Levine, the hinge for much of the pathos in the play.  All three actors were also involved in Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty, which Scarpa directed with a relevant sense of solidarity and struggle at a time when there were OWS tents on the New Haven Green.  Then came their big production of Urinetown, the musical by Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis, a show with a theme of straitened circumstances and the tensions between haves and have-nots.  Kulp played Caldwell B. Cladwell, the resident big-wig, and Chenot played his daughter, Hope, who falls in love with Bobby Strong, a rabble rouser.  Scarpa played Officer Barrell, a bullying cop who had more than a buddy’s affection for his partner Officer Lockstock.

Scarpa, a big fan of Mamet, initially proposed that the group tackle another of the playwright’s works, known for their bristling dialogue, earthy vocabulary, fast, overlapping exchanges and arresting non sequiturs.  Kulp offered to direct when he saw that Scarpa and Smith and Chenot were perfect for the roles.  “It’s great when we can find a play that matches us and what we do,” Kulp said, “I think people who have seen Kevin, Steve, and Megan in other plays will be impressed to see them stretch themselves as actors, as they do in this play.  I’m very honored to be working with them.”

The play will be staged at Upcrown on Crown Street, a new space for NHTC, but one with, Kulp says, an upscale classiness that makes it suitable for the slick office of a Hollywood movie producer.  Because NHTC doesn’t have a permanent theatrical space and makes do with what’s available, or what best suits (as in their staging of Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio at Ultra Radio station on College Street), plays like Mamet’s, which don’t demand elaborate sets and can be produced almost anywhere, are ideal.

What might the play—which Kulp describes as a drama about one’s priorities and the decisions that make one question one’s loyalties—have to say to us following so closely on the heels of a major election?  The idea that someone might have second thoughts about a sure way to make money, in favor of a goal more worthwhile, could have some relevance.  Though Kulp and company are doing the play in the present day, Speed-the-Plow initially appeared in the Eighties, at a time when Hollywood was in search of bigger and bigger blockbusters.  One of the plot points is that Gould asks Karen to read a novel about the end of the world and then report on it—at his place. It’s a seduction ploy on his part, but he ends up swayed by her enthusiasm for the project.  Certainly, today, apocalyptic film scenarios are a dime-a-dozen and we might have reasons to question Karen’s sincerity; then again, the real concern isn’t the topics of the films pitched by Charlie and Karen, but rather the stakes of the “old boy” camaraderie between Bobby and Charlie and the more intangible and probably less enduring sex appeal between Bobby and Karen.  Still, at a time when more women are directors and producers and in politics than was the case in the Eighties, it will be interesting to see how Mamet’s power struggle plays out. What carries the day, in the end?  What, if anything, is Gould committed to?

The New Haven Theater Company is back, and they’re doing Mamet.  God speed the play.

David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow Directed by George Kulp

Upcrown Creative Studios 216 Crown Street, 2nd Floor November 14 & 16 at 7 p.m. November 17 at 4 p.m. &  7 p.m.

For tickets and info visit: New Haven Theater Company

The Show Must Go On

Sandy notwithstanding, theatrical offerings are plentiful as this week of hurricane hysteria draws to its close. Local theater group A Broken Umbrella Theater offers the third of its three-weekend run of The Library Project, Nov. 3-4, with four more performances. Developed to coincide with the celebration of the New Haven Free Public Library’s 125 years of existence, the play requires its audience to move about through the historic building facing the Green, led by charming escorts with glowing umbrellas. After introductory pieces in the entranceway and main hall that give a bit of the historical circumstances that gave rise, back in the 1880s, to the Public Library, featuring dialogue between its architect, Cass Gilbert (Matthew Gafney) and its patron, Mary Ives (Mary Jane Smith), the audience divides into groups determined by a star on each program that denotes which of the five pieces will be encountered first.

Moving through the library in a group brings back memories of ye olde class trip—which may or may not be fond memories, depending—and, indeed, the tour has the air of a compelled itinerary as no one breaks ranks or moves about freely. It’s all rather impressively organized so that there is never much waiting, once everyone has seated themselves in a new area, before the site-specific performance begins. Because of differences in where each group begins, the experience differs from group to group, but the sequence is the same. My group began with “RIP” and concluded with “Balance a Dime”—an instructive bracketing, as these two pieces manage to look a bit askance at the history of the Ives Branch Library.

In “RIP,” directed by Ian Alderman and developed by the Ensemble, Salvatore DeMaio (Ruben Ortiz) is a muralist of the WPA era, who painted the Library’s murals depicting the story of Rip Van Winkle—in the play he’s going about his business, only to find himself a ghost haunting, unbeknownst to them, the conservators (Charlie Alexander and Halle Martenson) trying to restore his murals. The tension between their effort—with lack of funds and, apparently, a lack of will by the powers that be—and his shock at what has become of his work creates a somewhat critical air regarding the stewardship of the building we had seen so nobly celebrated in the hall upstairs. And, at the close, “Balance a Dime,” also directed by Alderman, and written by Jason Patrick Wells, features a kind of dueling libraries account of the events by which the NHFPL wound up with funds originally earmarked for The Institute Library. With the latter represented by its Executive Director, Will Baker, or its Outreach Coordinator Megan Black, and the NHFPL represented by its Executive Director, Christopher Korenowsky, and the City of New Haven enacted by Lou Mangini, the playlet airs the bad blood between the two libraries which “turns on the dime,” as it were, of the wording in the will of Mr. Merritt, who left the $60,000 start-up fund for a library in New Haven.

Between these two pieces filled with the tensions of funding, managing, and conserving a civic landmark are lighter pieces that conjure up the romance of the library. Whether it’s dancing patrons “In Circulation” (Robin Levine, choreography), or the songs in the mouths of friends Noah Webster (Kenneth Murray) and Samuel Morse (Peter Chenot) as they, in “Noah & Sam” (directed by Rachel Alderman, with Book, Music & Lyrics by Rob Shapiro) discuss the challenges and opportunities of technology in “the Information Age,” or, in my favorite segment, the very charming children (Kaatje Welsh and Remsen Welsh) and their musical mentor (Josie Kulp) who, in “Branching Out” (written and directed by Rachel Alderman), inhabit the children’s wing as though it were truly a fabled place promised in fairy tales, these interludes aim to enchant with the sense of the library’s magic, and mostly succeed.

With over 70 people providing their talents and expertise, and with the Library allowing free run of its impressive building, The Library Project marks the most ambitious ABUT offering yet, and is effective in rallying pride and surprise as it deepens its viewers’ sense of the library’s place and purpose in the community.

Tonight (postponed from last night) sees the opening of Iphigenia Among the Stars, the thesis show for Jack Tamburri, third year directing MFA at the Yale School of Drama, which takes two tragedies by Euripides, centered on Agamemnon’s daughter, the ill-fated Iphigenia, and, as adapted by Ben Fainstein, mashes them with the Mighty Marvel Comics-style of Jack “King” Kirby to create something that should entertain and instruct, we assume. Oct. 31-Nov. 1, Iseman Theater, 1156 Chapel Street.

On Friday, the Argentinian theater group Las chicas de blanco (The Girls in White) presents La edad de la ciruela (The Age of the Plum), an interpretive piece that renders conflicting feelings about home and place in light of the central metaphor of a rooted plum tree. The play, which premiered in 2010, represented Buenos Aires in the 2011 National Drama Festival. Las chicas de blanco explore theater through expressive dramaturgy and the humor of an ironic female perspective. The performing duo involve work from “The Subway Lives,” a program that uses unusual spaces, such as subways, for artistic performances, and are the originators of “Women Take Up Art,” an all-female group that promotes the possibilities for cultural transformation through theater.

Free and open to the public, the performance is in Spanish and is aimed to provide access to Spanish language productions for Yale and New Haven communities. At Yale’s Off-Broadway Theater, 41 Broadway, New Haven, Nov. 2, 2 p.m.

Persistent Beauty

“all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty.”—Robert Adams, artist statement, The New West, 1974

Persistent beauty could be said to be the theme of the Robert Adams retrospective which closes this Sunday at the Yale University Art Gallery.  This is a wonderfully comprehensive show of the photography projects that Adams, a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient in 1994, has undertaken since 1968/70.  Sprawling across the first and fourth floors of the Gallery, “The Place We Live” offers numerous opportunities for contemplation and reflection.  Adams is not only a meticulous craftsman and a thorough master of his art, he is also an artist committed to preserving images of our nation—particularly the very land of our nation—that speak eloquently about who we really are.  The amazing paradox is that even when what he shows us is not “a pretty picture”—the tract housing, the prefab corridors of business, the glut of tacky products, the clear-cutting of huge swathes of primary growth forests—each image still has considerable aesthetic fascination.

Adams sets his work in that cultural space where natural beauty meets the beauty of form in the artist’s keen eye to create the man-made beauty of his photographs.  “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is an old adage, and Adams gives it new spirit, teaching us to see how he sees.  Every image shows a lot; in the jargon of our times, we might say “contains a lot of information.”  But in Adams’ images, information is not the guiding principle.  Certainly, we learn something about Denver  or Eden, CO, in looking at these pictures, and about areas of CA and even a sad and striking memorial for U.S. war casualties, but Adams’ work is not simply about clueing us in or letting us know.  His photographs combine a formal, compositional clarity with an unflinching sharpness that makes us think about seeing, about how we choose to look at things or not.

I toured the first floor exhibit last Saturday with my friend Rob Slifkin, an assistant professor of Art History at NYU, and we spent almost two hours examining each photograph closely, rarely flagging in our admiration of Adams’ art.  The earliest pictures here—so stark and yet so formally appealing, landscapes with an unerring sense of how to make us feel the contrast between the wide spaces of the west and the cramped, miminalist possibilities of the man-made objects and habitations of the time (early 1970s)—captured much of our attention, forming a canon by which to judge Adams’ subsequent work.  The famous photograph of a silhouette framed in the picture window of a modest, Sixties tract-dwelling speaks with the eloquence of the perfect shot: both emblem for an entire way of life, but also an aesthetic statement about surfaces, shading, light.

In shot after shot, in his earliest period, Adams performs wonders in making the mundane and unprepossessing reveal its beauty to the eye.  A street at night, where the streetlights create huge dark mounds of trees and a brightly enticing far horizon; a gutter near an undeveloped area where the asphalt road, concrete gutter, and swathe of gravel and dirt create a triptych of surfaces, each with a particular texture but also a particular reference; a baby in a car seat sitting on a stoop outside a closed screen door—a gesture toward the ephemeral made monumental, as if the child’s entire life could be summed up in the framing of that instant.  We found ourselves making comparisons to Cézanne, an artist whose grasp of the formal principles of his art created new ways of seeing, looking and showing, and whose works, like Adams’ photographs, give the eye much to take in, a fascinating interplay of foreground and background and shapes and planes, voids and solids.

As we went on, it became clear that Adams’ intentions were changing.  There was a period where his work became almost “Victorian” in its willingness to court “pretty” images—but with a sense of the fragility of a copse of trees, or of a place that would be done away with due to urban sprawl.  By the time we were looking at the trash and detritus, the building sites and big department stores of the late Seventies and early Eighties, it became clear that Adams’ art is also socially conscious to a degree that many artists like to pretend they are.  Without lecturing us, or at least by leaving the editorializing to titles and wall text, the exhibit turns a corner and begins to consider how hard it can be to find “persistent beauty” in the utter lack of taste and aesthetic sense in much of what America happily produces and consumes—and discards.

If you lived through the periods Adams is depicting, you might find yourself wincing with a terrible recognition of how “material progress” not only despoils our land, it substitutes one environment for another: one is pleasing to the eye and fully sensual in its engagement with our senses, but also, perhaps, sublime in its existence beyond us; the other is ours—indifferent to our natural preference for the irregular, the unplanned, the untouched, it simply replicates our endless search for greater ease and comfort, for more stuff, and our worship of gimcracks and commodities for the sake of novelty.  Adams doesn’t need to write manifestos on the wall-cards.  His images speak for themselves.

At the end of the first floor exhibit, we stood before a wall of images depicting people—actual figures in Adams’ work to this point had not been plentiful but were always meaningful.  Here, we saw people of the early Eighties in shopping mall parking lots, on small town streets, in suburbs that could be anywhere in the U.S.  We had already moved from considering how Adams had gone from existentialist and minimalist in his approach—showing us the “thereness” of unadorned human habitations and businesses in a vast, indifferent space—to social and editorial—showing us a way of life and its depredations.  And yet the images could still yield affectionate responses and could show us “us” in no uncertain terms.  In the end, we were back to formal considerations, but with a difference: to see how Adams’ artful configurations of space, shadow, figures create subliminal messages about our mortality.  Rob cited Susan Sontag from “On Photography”: “Every photograph is a memento mori.”  The power of these shots—and the artfulness of their seemingly artless presentation—is in how Adams makes us aware of what Sontag means when she says: “To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.”  What this leaves us with, then, is the effort to understand the terms and values of our “participation.”  For we too are mortal, vulnerable, and mutable.  And these pictures make us feel that.

Rob went off to another engagement, and I toured the fourth floor on my own.  I have to confess, I took it a bit more speedily.  The sheer number of photographs was becoming overwhelming.  And perhaps, in the reflections above, I’d already traced a path to my moment; to the place in time and the time of the place where I was doomed to be.  Or something.  In any case, the upper floor is more emphatic in its outrage.  Here, Adams brings his camera’s clarity to the tragic dimensions of our time: lives lost to war and landscape shorn of ancient trees both speak of phenomenal levels of waste, and, as photographs—as with shots of the northwest coast and pleasure-seekers, or a descending plane frozen, entering the open sky above a river, or of fragile plants posed almost as decorative motifs—make a strong claim on our attention.  We are looking at how we live, and Adams wants us to reflect on what we see, and what that says about who we are and what we’re willing to live with.

This is a powerful and important show by an American treasure: an artist of superb skills and worthwhile convictions.  Robert Adams, The Place We Live, is not to be missed.  Its beauty persists.

Robert Adams The Place We Live A Retrospective Selection of Photographs Yale University Art Gallery New Haven, Connecticut August 3–October 28, 2012

http://artgallery.yale.edu

8 and the Marriage Debate

We all love courtroom drama, right?  It’s so American.  It’s the place where the goodies and the baddies get to have their say, or, literally “their day in court.”  It’s the place where justice gets to prove itself impartial, or maybe deaf, dumb, and blind.  It’s the place where, we hope, wrongs are righted and rights are upheld.  Watching that happen thrills us with the virtues of the American way. 8, a play by Dustin Lance Black (Academy Award-winner for his screenplay for Milk), condenses the transcript of the Federal District Court trial, Perry vs. Schwarzenegger, from August 2010—twelve days of procedure—into 90 minutes of courtroom drama.  That was the trial that resulted in the decision that overturned the effects of Proposition 8.  Proposition 8 was a ballot proposal in California that added, by public vote, a state constitutional amendment that insisted that only male-female marriage would be legally recognized, thus invalidating a CA Supreme Court decision from May 2008 that permitted same-sex marriage.  The trial in 2010, since upheld as Perry vs. Brown in February 2012, declared the amendment unconstitutional.

That’s simply looking at the back and forth of law in terms of its effects and outcomes.  The trial proceedings give us a chance to look at the back and forth of law as the story of people with different views and different goals pitted against one another in a civic arena.  And that’s where theater comes in.

8 is being produced by the Yale School of Drama, with licensing from the American Foundation for Equal Rights and Broadway Impact, which have been involved in previous stagings of the trial—including an all-star version in L.A. in 2012 (Brad Pitt as a District Court judge?).  With a similar injunction against same-sex marriage in New York recently over-ruled, the politics of the case are still very much with us, particularly as the CA case may go to the U.S. Supreme Court.  All the more reason to get a sense of how the deal went down in CA.

The production at Yale—one night only, Monday, October 22—will be a staged reading, directed by Sonja Berggren of the theater group Panndora Productions, in Santa Ana, CA, who is at Yale as a Special Research Fellow this semester.  Berggren is ideal for the task because she was actually a lawyer in CA for years and so has a feel for the realities of courtroom procedure.  YSD students Lico Whitfield, Jabari Brisport, and Chris Bannow were instrumental in getting the licensing to stage the piece and in helping to put together the team that's putting on the show—via an e-blast for volunteers.  The team includes administration, faculty, students, and staff of YSD—playing all the principals involved in the proceedings, including, as Berggren points out, two attorneys, Ted Olson and David Boies, famous as opposing counsel in Bush v. Gore, who joined forces for the plaintiffs against Proposition 8.

The trial was supposed to be broadcast but at the last minute there was a ruling that prohibited it.  That outraged a lot of people and, while it’s not as exciting following a trial with an outcome already decided, it does justify the interest in seeing the trial acted out.  For YSD fans, the interest will also be provided by Berggren’s creation of a trial-like atmosphere—complete with milling witnesses—and by the familiar YSD figures who will be participating, such as Director of Theater Safety Bill Reynolds, by benefit of his judicious mein, playing presiding judge Vaughn Walker, and Victoria Nolan, Deputy Dean of YSD and Managing Director of Yale Rep, as well as many students, including Ethan Heard, Artistic Director of the Yale Cabaret, and Managing Director Jonathan Wemette.

Following the play there will be a talk-back discussion, moderated by Joan Channick, Associate Dean of YSD, with participants from Yale Law School, Yale Divinity School, and the School of Drama.  The event is free and open to the public and invites public discussion of this important social issue, so far being decided state by state.

What: A staged reading of “8,” the courtroom play based on the landmark marriage equality decision in CA

Who: Yale School of Drama Students, Faculty, and Staff

When: Monday October 22, 2012 @ 7PM

Where: University Theatre, 222 York Street, New Haven, CT 06511

How Much: Free

Imminent Theater

Beginning this weekend and running for the next two, A Broken Umbrella Theatre brings its latest fall project to the Ives Main Library in New Haven.  If you know the work of ABUT, you know that they concoct new theatrical pieces as site-specific works in various historical New Haven locations.  The current work, entitled simply The Library Project, was commissioned by the New Haven Free Public Library Foundation to mark the 125th anniversary of the library, a fixture upon the green since 1887.

The audience will tour three floors of the library, moving from room to room in different groups, finding in their travels seven original works—involving song, dance, puppets, spectacle—staged in suitable areas of the building.  For instance, the story of “RIP” involves a muralist going between different times the way Rip Van Winkle does—and that segment is set in the basement of the library where the WPA murals featuring Rip are located.  All the segments feature some aspect of the history and function of the library, and are produced by the team of ABUT in collaboration with others—ABUT’s ranks for this production, their grandest yet, have been expanded to over 60 participants, all volunteer, including the Executive Director of the New Haven Free Public Library, Christopher Korenowsky, and Will Baker, Executive Director of the Institute Library (which predates the NHFPL).

If earlier ABUT projects are any indication, the show will be entertaining, lively, and fun for viewers age 8 and up.

A Broken Umbrella Theatre is committed to making theater accessible to all, so the pricing for the shows is “pay what you can.”  Reservations are strongly recommended: www.abrokenumbrella.org.  Box office opens one hour prior to the show at Ives Main Library, 133 Elm Street, New Haven.  And before the show begins, you can avail yourself of beer or wine in the lobby and chat about the facts behind the fiction with ABUT’s Artistic Directory Ian Alderman and historian Colin Caplan.

A Broken Umbrella Theatre The Library Project October 20–21, 27–28; November 3–4 Saturdays at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. Sundays at 4:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. Later in November, New Haven’s other local theater group, New Haven Theater Company, will be mounting David Mamet’s Speed the Plow, another intense, confrontational play from the master of late 20th-century speak.  Directed by company member George Kulp, the show includes two members of last year’s ambitious NHTC project, Urinetown: Megan Keith Chenot as Karen, and Steve Scarpa, who directed last year’s rousing Waiting for Lefty, as Fox; J. Kevin Smith, memorable as Ricky Roma in the NHTC production of Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, plays Gould.

Mamet is the go-to guy for small theater companies like NHTC, as his dramas have small casts, don’t require much scenery, and offer commanding showcases for character interaction.  NHTC has already been noted for their grasp of Mametry with Glengarry Glen Ross, and Speed the Plow which, yes, actually features a woman in its cast, should give them ample opportunity to sling speech in this satire of movie industry insiders.  Gould is the new Head of Production at a major Hollywood studio, and Fox, his friend for 11 years, brings him a project: a film that should be a blockbuster and make them both rich.  Karen, an office temp, questions the value of the film, opening up Gould and Fox to considerations of their priorities.

New Haven Theater Company David Mamet's Speed the Plow UpCrown Studios, 216 Crown Street, New Haven

Wednesday, Nov. 14, 7 p.m. Friday, November 16, 7 p.m. Saturday, November 17, 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. Tickets are $20 and go on sale Tuesday, October 23.

http://www.newhaventheatercompany.com/

Passion and Purpose

After a brief week's hiatus, the Yale Cabaret resumes this week.  First up is a play about which not much can be said.  White Rabbit, Red Rabbit by Nassim Soleimanpour presents a different actor each night who opens a sealed envelope containing the script and proceeds to enact what he or she finds.  The play, according to Artistic Director Ethan Heard, has taken the Fringe Festival circuit by storm but can’t be performed in the playwright’s native Iran.  Is the play incendiary toward the standards acceptable in Iran?  A blog has been set up to chronicle productions of the play, but don’t peek.  The best way to find out what it’s all about is to attend the show—more than once, as each performance will be different.  October 18-20. Playwright Sam Shepard has won 15 Obie Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize.  Patti Smith, poet and rock artist, has won the National Book Award.  But in the early Seventies they were both largely unknown and were living together as lovers.  During that time they wrote a play called Cowboy Mouth, which they also enacted.  Set in a hotel, the play involves Slim and Cavales, two artistic types trying to workout their differences.  Interestingly, the two actors in the show—Michelle McGregor and Mickey Theis—first undertook a long scene from the play in an acting workshop; meanwhile, designer Masha Tsimring worked on the play for a class assignment in a different class.  The stars aligned, obviously, and the trio united to propose the play, directed by Jack Moran, with Chris Bannow assisting, with aid from dramaturg (and Summer Cabaret Artistic Director) Tanya Dean as producer.  Oct. 25-27.

Cab #6 is a contemporary comedy: Joshua Conkel’s MilkMilkLemonade tells the story of Emory, an 11 year-old boy growing up gay in a generic place called Malltown, U.S.A., where he lives on a farm and has, of course, a pet chicken.  Conkel’s play, which features a cast of six or seven, encourages transgender casting in its account of the imaginative life of a kid who wants to be a star and get out of Malltown, while featuring some amazing ribbon dancing.  Xaq Webb, the Cab’s Associate Managing Director, stars, and the play is directed by second-year acting student Jabari Brisport.  Nov. 8-10.

The Chairs, by Eugene Ionesco, is the fourth (and final) show of the Cab’s fall semester that derives from a pre-existing play.  In this case, Ionesco’s absurdist play of social ceremony—an older male and female couple welcome unseen, but nonetheless characterized, guests to their gathering—has very definite requirements for staging.  YSD play-writing student Justin Taylor directs from his own new translation of the play, and part of the fun will be to see how Ionesco’s vision of the play can be made to work in the Cab’s protean but rather finite space. Nov. 15-17.

Paul Lieber and Tim Hassler have been working on songs together since they met in the Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival in 2011,  while playing, with considerable aplomb, comic relief characters in the Tempest and As You Like It.  Drawing on their repertoire of original songs and their instincts as Cab performers, Lieber and Hassler bring us Cat Club, inspired (perhaps) by a YouTube video of a little girl wearing cat ears and intoning little ditties. Lieber works in projections; Hassler just gave a great musical performance in Cab #3; Ben Fainstein, who brought us last year’s final show Carnivale/Invisible, directs. What’s this show about?  What won’t it be about?  Nov.29-Dec. 1

The developers of Cab #9 have been working all semester to create the rules that will govern the show.  Dilemma is designed to involve the audience, requiring us to make choices—call them moral dilemmas—about how the actors enact the situations they meet with. Conceived by Michael Bateman with help from Reynaldi Lolong, Jack Tamburri, Cole Lewis, and The Ensemble, the show should be utterly unpredictable, depending on you, the audience.  Dec. 6-8.

Artistic Director Ethan Heard said he’s “thrilled so far” at the work submitted for consideration for the Cab’s slots, and some that didn’t make the cut may, with a little work, have a chance for spring.  The key to the shows chosen, he said, are "the passion and purpose of the show and the strength of the team involved."  The line-up purports to showcase the inventiveness and oddity, the rawness and vision that the Cab is known for.  See you at the CAB!

Multitudinous Tunes

David Byrne & St. Vincent, The Beacon Theater, NY, 9/26/2012

Step into the Beacon Theatre and you’re hit with layer upon layer of eye-popping visuals: huge bronze doors, white marble floors, a Classical pastoral mural over the entrance, mahogany wood paneling, gold and burgundy wool carpeting, gold-tasseled draperies, and gilded everything-in-sight. And all of this is before you get to the auditorium. Once inside you’re treated to 30-foot-tall sculpted goddesses flanking the stage (I’m guessing Athena based on the long spear she’s holding), which themselves are flanked by murals of an elephant-led Eastern caravan. Over the stage hangs a Moorish-inspired decorative flap reminiscent of a circus big top, topped off by a riot of Art Deco and Arabesque decorative patterns, a 900-pound chandelier, and a gigantic ornately-carved pendant.

Designed by Chicago architect Walter W. Ahlschlager and opened to the public in 1929, New York’s Beacon Theater is both reassuringly stately—reassuring because of the steep ticket prices—and wonderfully tacky. The American Institute of Architects describes it as “Greco-Deco-Empire with a Tudor palette” while the New York Times goes with a “pastiche of Greek, Roman, Renaissance, and Rococo elements.” Built as a vaudeville palace—vaudeville must have been the perfect counterpart to the Beacon’s visual aesthetic, a democratizing mashup of ‘high’ and ‘low’ arts, entertainment and exploitation—the theater has since played host to everyone from the Allman Brothers to ZZ Top, from the Dalai Lama to Louis C.K. In other words, the Beacon contains multitudes, and contains them in a way that’s distinctly American.

Enter David Byrne and St. Vincent, aka Annie Clark, making a two-night stand at the Beacon in support of their first album together, Love This Giant (4AD). It’s a great pairing. Both might appear under “art damaged” in the dictionary—Byrne in the 1970s and 80s, and St. Vincent today. Both are known for music that’s austere one minute and feral the next (“feral” is probably the best word for St. Vincent’s guitar playing as a whole) and for lyrics that range from unsettling to playful. If they come across a little stiff at first—Byrne, St. Vincent, and the Beacon—it doesn’t mask their underlying weirdness for long.

Of course David Byrne pioneered the whole buttoned-up/unhinged thing—best captured in audiovisual form by Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense. The Beacon show has some interesting parallels to the Talking Heads concert-doc masterpiece. The stage is filled with musicians, dressed in black and white, and each song is treated as its own mini-theater piece with distinct lighting and choreography. The ten-piece band includes eight brass players, a drummer, and a keyboardist/percussionist. Most of the musicians are fully mobile, with choreographer Annie-B Parson taking full advantage. She arranges them in lines, clusters, and circles, draped across the floor at the beginning of one song, facing off in two groups like the Jets and the Sharks in the next, their formations attuned to the unusual rhythms and textures. And for her part St. Vincent creates a new signature move—a variation on the duckwalk except it’s more like a centipede missing 98 of her legs.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ4c1yEBI6Y&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]

The show opens with a baritone sax melody weaving in and out of the brass section. David Byrne enters over their stuttering rhythms, wondering who will share his taxi, who will help a dying soldier, who exists inside of him (the song is called “Who”). Suddenly, the nervous sonics drop away and St. Vincent sings over a shuddering drum line, ‘who is an honest man?’ Her melody is meandering and disorienting, much like one of her guitar parts, but it’s seductive nonetheless. In this song as elsewhere, the brass ensemble shifts between enveloping slabs of sound and dancing, intertwining lines. This interplay is the unique sonic thumbprint of the concert and of Love This Giant. It’s a distinct sound, but it contains echoes of the American pop music past and nods to world music genres ranging from Balkan brass band to Latin jazz. Again, the music meshes perfectly with the venue—a relic that seems new and strange.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsdBKbQy_Pw&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]

In the songs they’ve written together, Byrne and Clark make heavy use of juxtaposition as a literary device: ‘hideous, virtuous, both of us’ for one example. Their song’s narrators find delight in the everyday—drinking coffee, doing laundry, lost in reverie on 30th Street—while dismissing horrific events as mere annoyances. In “Dinner For Two” a party is inconvenienced by raging street battles outside: ‘Harry’s gonna get some appetizers / now he’s keeping out of range of small arms fire.’ In “The Forest Awakes,” there’s assurance when ‘bombs burst in air / my hair is alright,’ pausing to note ‘the shifting of light on the trees and the houses.’ In “Lightning,” the narrator observes a ‘funny lightning’ that she finds puzzling and thrilling: ‘But if I should wake up and find my home’s in half…I guess I have to laugh.’ Control is a recurring theme as well—maintaining it and relinquishing it—seen in images of nakedness or remaining clothed, especially when least expected: ‘we were totally naked / outside that small cafe’ vs. ‘dare to keep our shirts on / rolling in the mud.’

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAGsmPg6Qik&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]

These strands come together—the magical mundane, multiple contradictions, control issues—on “I Should Watch TV.” In the song, Byrne finds agency in a passive medium, engaging with people when he’s all alone. With the help of his TV he describes losing himself, being opened up and set free by ‘the weird things that live in there.’ In some ways the song is the centerpiece of the album (its title comes from a line in the song). It’s also a rare autobiographical song for Byrne (see the clip below) that taps into a long-term obsession reaching back to his Talking Heads days. Opening with a pulsating electronic pitch—its digital glitchiness immediately sets the song apart from the rest of the album—Byrne sings, ‘I used to think that I should watch TV / I used to think that is was good for me.’ The lyrics go on to detail the view he ‘used’ to hold—a TV-based transcendentalism that advocates diving into the collective electronic slipstream, casting off one’s alienation in “the place where common people go.”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXqFu7b4oaw[/youtube]

In this regard, Byrne even goes so far as to quote from Walt Whitman—‘behold and love this giant’ is adapted from ‘I behold the picturesque giant and love him’ in the great American poet’s “Song of Myself.” Here as elsewhere, it’s not hard to see how Whitman’s transcendentalism may have inspired Byrne’s artistic worldview, but what’s most striking is the particular choice of quotation. The ‘picturesque giant’ in “Song of Myself” is a black carriage driver described in loving detail by Whitman—a brave and progressive gesture at the time, perhaps, but a gesture that today comes off as more than a little objectifying and patronizing. Byrne’s choice to quote this line, and to name the album after it, is curious. He’s way too smart and self-aware not to realize the negative implications, of course,  and the lines ‘behold and love this giant / big soul, big lips / that’s me and I am this’ only highlight the diceyness of the original context. At the song’s conclusion, however, Byrne seems to cast doubt on how he ‘used to think.’  Near the two-minute mark he wonders, “How am I not your brother / how are you not like me?” as the frantic rhythms briefly cease.  The final stanza makes no mention of the mass culture he idealized and exoticized before, suggesting instead:

Maybe someday we can stand together Not afraid of what we see Maybe someday understand them better The weird things inside of me.

Whether or not we understood them better by the end of night, the weird things inside of David Byrne and St. Vincent put on quite a show. I’m not sure how often audiences get up and dance in their seats at the Beacon but it happened this night. Adding an extra layer of resonance to it all were the weird things inside the Beacon Theatre, a building no doubt inspired by the 1893 Chicago Exposition and the White City, a dizzying assemblage of neoclassical cityscapes and midway attractions that gave physical form to Whitman’s ideal. You could hardly find a more appropriate setting for David Byrne and St. Vincent’s songs—a musical world populated by a cast of all-American eccentrics (including themselves) and fascinated with spectatorship, whether watching TV or simply watching life go by.

Jason Lee Oakes studied ethnomusicology at Columbia University and now teaches at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. His blog on music in the 2012 presidential race can be read here.

The 45th Time Around

Look around.  School’s back in session.  That means it must be time for the new theater season to get up and running.  Since the close of the Yale Summer Cabaret’s 50 Nights: A Festival of Stories, the space at 217 Park Street has been transformed into readiness for the launch, on September 20, of the 45th season of the Yale Cabaret. With 45 years under its belt, serving up a feast of great theatrical experiences, as well as literal feasts in the form of inventive food service, the Yale Cabaret should be well-known to New Haveners and, indeed, to anyone in the region interested in adventurous theater—and that should certainly include New Yorkers on the lookout for out-of-town talent.  The Cabaret is entirely run by grad students in the Yale School of Drama, and each season provides a satisfying element of surprise, as audiences get to find out first hand what the current YSDers find provocative, exciting, and challenging.  Each play plays for only three nights, five shows—Thursday, twice on Friday, and twice on Saturday—thus the change-overs are fast and furious and the offerings are as varied as possible, making each week a fresh discovery.

Ethan Heard, a third-year director in YSD, is the Artistic Director this year, aided by Managing Director Jonathan Wemette, and by two Associate Artistic Directors, Ben Fainstein and Nicholas Hussong, and Associate Managing Director Xaq Webb.  In the previous two years of the program, Heard was involved in two memorable shows—for 2010-11, he directed and contributed as a writer to the gender-bending comedy musical Trannequin!, and in 2011-12, he directed a rather more brooding music-based theater piece called Basement Hades.  Which is a way of saying that Heard has already paid his dues in showing his commitment to the possibilities of the Cab.

I asked Heard if he could elaborate on what, as the leader of the enterprise, he might consider his vision of the season to be (when we spoke, only three of the first semester’s plays had been chosen, with the process of determining the offerings of the other six weeks to take place shortly).  Heard said he and his team had developed five core values to the Cab as they see it.  Enumerating them should give you a fair idea of the kinds of things the Cab hopes to accomplish this year.

First, “presence”—the “essential component of live theater” as practiced at the Cab, which, in practice means, that whatever you’re watching doesn’t feel removed or remote—it feels like it’s part of the space and the world the audience inhabits.  Next comes “inclusivity” and that has to do with who the audience is.  Heard would like all manner of theater-goers to attend, and so the Cab has established “Ambassadors” appointed to spread the word, to bring together groups to attend, and generally to act as grease to the wheels of publicity—in particular, Heard and company are in hopes that Yalelies, both grad and undergrad, who have a tendency to withdraw into their own circles and fields of study, will want to find out more about this local treasure.  Then there’s “risk”—a key element of the entire enterprise and one that needs stressing: while outreach says everyone should feel welcome to attend, there’s the proviso that a certain amount of risk is involved.  The work the Cab aims at stresses an active audience whose presence is part of the show in subtle ways.  Which leads us to 4: transformation, the idea that a theatrical experience can change you, that you will not leave exactly as you came.  It’s an interesting and challenging idea, perhaps common to performers and audience alike, but how often do we really accept it?  Certainly, we go looking for “something different,” but when we find it do we let it make us be different?  And for the cast and crew to stress transformation, the show can’t be just a resumé-stuffer—it’s got to be the sort of thing where being a part of it matters.  Finally, then, the big one: purpose.  Without getting too meta, we can say that the purpose of theater is to make us think about the purpose of anything and everything.  Why, as social beings, do we do what we do, and what does it mean to gather together to see human behavior—in all its varieties—enacted?

So, what’s ahead?

First up is an adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novella, The Fatal Eggs (1925), translated from the Russian by Ilya Khodosh, and directed by Dustin Wills.  Heard describes Bulgakov as a “slightly livelier Chekhov” and the plot of the play sounds like it would be at home in a Hollywood B-movie of the Fifties: zoologist discovers a means to speed up the development of animal life, and the method is seen as a must-have boon when a dire plague exterminates Russia’s chickens.  The Chicken That Ate Moscow?  Maybe not, but Bulgakov landed in hot water for seeming to send-up the foundational 1917 revolution that gave us so much.  The Cab’s version will feature live music, giant puppets and a cast of seven assaying 62 roles.  And, unless I miss my guess, in the Cab’s hands a satiric, frightening, comic treatment of manipulative media and mass hysteria is bound to feel much closer to home than the U.S.S.R. of the 1920s.

Next up is This., a project developed by director Margot Bordelon, playwright Mary Laws, and dramaturg Alex Ripp from interviews conducted with volunteers from the Yale and the New Haven communities; the 40+ interviews, together with solicited anonymous emails, provided the material of the play, an ensemble piece that pulls together the kinds of stories people don't usually tell about themselves.  Heard said that themes of loss and regret seemed to surface the most, as the participants took stock of their lives and looked back on important decisions and outcomes.  In performance, the play is bound to be a fascinating experience: some in the audience will be seeing their stories turned into drama, others will be seated near the source of some element in the play, and the intimate space of the Cab should make those aspects of the drama very much present and part of the show.  Whose story is it, anyway?

Third will be Ain’t Gonna Make It—ostensibly the phrase that corresponds to the baleful acronym AGMI, which, when inscribed by a doctor on a patient’s chart, spells “finis.”  In this show, developed by Lauren Dubowski, dramaturg, Nicholas Hussong, design, Cole Lewis, directing, and Masha Tsimring, lighting design, Tim Brown is the patient and his confrontation with mortality will involve filmed projections, a band, and sentiments about life delivered via rockabilly and a strong visual presence.

Certainly these shows feature presence and risk and have purpose—the transformative power will be determined by you, the audience, and the Cab would like to make that experience as inclusive as possible.  These are divisive times we live in.  We should welcome the Cab’s ambition to be something we can all experience differently—together.

Theater, 45, youthful, engagement-minded, seeks adventurous audience looking for something different…

The Yale Cabaret 45 Ethan Heard, Artistic Director Jonathan Wemette, Managing Director Ben Fainstein and Nicholas Hussong, Associate Artistic Directors Xaq Webb, Associate Managing Director

The Fatal Eggs, by Mikhail Bulgakov, adapted by Ilya Khodosh and Dustin Wills; directed by Dustin Wills Sept. 20-22

This., conceived and created by Margot Bordelon, Mary Laws, Alex Ripp; script by Mary Laws, directed by Margot Bordelon Sept. 27-29

Ain’t Gonna Make It, conceived by Lauren Dubowski, Nicholas Hussong, Cole Lewis, and Masha Tsimring Oct. 4-6

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

A Few More Nights

Summer has entered the month of August, and that means the usual hiatus before things begin again in September.  If you can tear yourself away from the Olympics to see something happening locally, let us remind you that the Yale Summer Cabaret season, 50 Nights: A Festival of Stories, is drawing to its close.  There are extremely limited opportunities remaining to see three plays that evoke the art of storytelling in unique and mutually supporting ways.

K of D, a suspenseful one-person play by Laura Schellhardt, directed by Tanya Dean, and starring Monique Barbee as an entertaining assortment of teens and adults in rural Ohio, has only four more shows.  Of Ogres Retold, the challenging dance, movement, music and puppet piece masterminded by Adam Rigg and the ensemble, is down to three more shows. And The Secret in the Wings, Mary Zimmerman’s daisy-chain of interlinked stories, directed with amusing flair by Margot Bordelon, has also dwindled to three and one of those, at last glance, has limited availability.  Simply put: it’s now or never.

To aid in the viewing of all three before they become fondly recalled memories, a marathon festival will take place this Saturday, August 12th, with K of D at 1, Of Ogres Retold at 4:30, and The Secret in the Wings at 8.

Each play has an interesting approach to the common theme of storytelling, and seeing them in rapid succession, either all on Saturday at the marathon, or between this weekend and next, can only highlight the links.

K of D foregrounds the human dimension of stories—specifically that brand of story called “urban legend” (often rural in setting) that tends to involve a certain “believe it or not” quality, where tall-tale meets gossip to become a strange and fascinating “just-so” story of folk wisdom.  Here the kids are a kind of Greek chorus to the local goings-on involving odd twins, the neighborhood sociopath, and forces from beyond the grave.

Of Ogres Retold mimes stories with movements and actions that require interpretation—making the audience find a way of turning what they see into narratives.  Each vignette is based on a Japanese folktale, and all involve odd creatures that the cast enacts with fanciful and beautiful puppetry.

The Secret in the Wings takes us back to the place where all stories start: childhood and the “once upon a time” fairytales by the likes of the Brothers Grimm, here dramatized as a series of entertaining meditations on courtship and family ties told by a creepy neighbor to an anxious little girl.

As ever, the Cabaret’s cast and production team have found creative ways to transform the intimate, basement performing space into places where the imagination is free to follow these tales as they morph into one another and mesmerize us with their implications.

With so few shows left, we can expect lively and enthusiastic audiences, making the most of a summer treasure before it’s gone.

Wednesday 8/8 - Of Ogres Retold - 8pm - SOLD OUT Thursday 8/9 - The Secret in the Wings - 8pm - SOLD OUT Friday 8/10 - The K of D - 8pm Marathon Saturday 8/11 The K of D - 1pm | Of Ogres Retold - 4:30pm | The Secret in the Wings - 8pm

FINAL WEEK OF PERFORMANCES:

Wednesday 8/15 - The Secret in the Wings - 8pm Thursday 8/16 - The K of D - 8pm Friday 8/17 - The K of D - 8pm Saturday 8/18 - Of Ogres Retold - 2pm, 8pm Sunday 8/19 - The Secret in the Wings - 8pm Click here to BUY TICKETS now and make a reservation!

Story Art

Visit 756 Chapel Street and step into the world of Dan Greene: colorful pastels, boldly drawn, presenting the mysterious activities of heroes and villains. There are archers, scribes, monks and nuns, and the fearsome knife throwers, trained by the villainous Hypnotist to thwart the lovers seeking a path to the Blue Fort that contains a mystic orchard.

Greene, currently a singer/songwriter with his group The Mountain Movers, first became known in indie music circles while a member of the group The Butterflies of Love, a band which had radio and concert success in the UK from the mid-90s to mid-2000s, even performing on air for legendary DJ John Peel.  Around the time that he moved on from that band and formed The Mountain Movers with bassist Rick Omonte (aka Shaki Presents, former scheduler of the free concerts at BAR), Greene began to create drawings that, at first, were illustrations for a long poem, but that gradually took on a life of their own.  At times Greene draws something and then has to decide what story goes with it, or how the image fits in with what he has already drawn.

A selection of the voluminous works Greene creates are now hanging on the walls at Intercambio, in a show called Knife Thrower.  The show is the result of the efforts of Omonte and his partner Gabrielle Svenningsen, curators of the show under their name Ephemeroptera, to bring Greene’s work to the public.  Each image is accompanied by lines typed by Greene to indicate what is happening in the picture.

Greene, originally from Worchester, Massachusetts, is a teacher at a private elementary school in New Haven, and describes himself as self-taught both as a musician and as an artist.  In both music and art he prefers a do-it-yourself style and an aesthetic that is rough-hewn and ready made, using “cruder equipment.”  The surfaces he adorns with his art are generally found on bulk trash day in the area: scrap wood, pieces of furniture, a door, old cardboard.  And Greene is quick to point out infelicities, as for instance a fixative unevenly applied, or a drawing that suffered rubbings and discoloration simply because he hadn’t considered preserving or displaying it.  Previously, he was happy to give drawings away to friends who admired them and made no effort to title or catalog his output.  As an influence, Greene cites frequent visits to exhibits of folk and outsider art in New York; his primary development as an artist has been to become fluent with his own childlike, naïve, and unrefined style.

While certainly describing the simplicity of Greene’s line drawings, and his use of flat planes of color in a manner reminiscent of cartoon panels, such terms don’t do full justice to the odd power of the works on display.  One can’t help thinking of medieval artists, not only because of the medieval characters and settings of Greene’s pastels, but also because Greene’s compositional spaces and his sense of figure derive from a medieval manner—unlike many fantasy artists who render the Medieval with the overwrought renderings of pre-Raphaelite artists.  Stained glass images come to mind, in part because of the saturated colors Greene achieves.

Sometimes the borrowing is deliberate, as for instance in Handing Over The Works, one of the more complicated compositions that clearly draws upon St. Bridget of Sweden (an image of the 14th century original is stuck to the wall next to Greene’s pastel in the exhibit).  Both Greene’s version and the medieval picture portray the importance of texts.  In Greene’s tale, particular books create the visions that enable the First Saint to envision a new city, or monastery, a refuge for study and what we would call sustainable living.  Both images show three levels of action, with communication occurring between the saints of the past and the devout of the present.

More often what is recalled by Greene’s art isn’t so much a specific image or artist from the past, but rather an access to stories that we find in storybook art for children, in comix or graphic novels, or in illuminated manuscripts: elastic space, mostly frontal presentations, details and texture achieved by overlays of color (Greene begins each composition with yellow and orange outlines, working toward the darker and heavier colors), and the aura of a coherent if otherworldly narrative.  Blue Knife Thrower, for instance, might be taken at first for an alien or a spaceman or super hero until one realizes he is garbed in mail, but even so the mask-like head somehow communicates a haunting character.

And the imperfections that indicate Greene’s less than curatorial approach to his art add a sense of the haphazard and spontaneous.  Almost as if the works we’re looking at are relics from the world Greene depicts.  After The Kill, depicting the Nun in Black with the head of a vanquished Knife Thrower, looks rather talismanic, as if a heroic image carved into wood and kept by the people of the monastery to commemorate an important victory.

As with the best fantasy tales, Greene’s Knife Thrower implies an extensive backstory, where animals can be hypnotized to aid the Knife Throwers, where the lovers—the Nun in Black and the Skyscraper Worker—can reach the orchard or fail and die and return to try again and again, where there is a Land of Stalagmites, where the unwary may be impaled, and a Land of Pillars, and other lands that Greene’s imagination, guided by what his hand discovers in drawing, has yet to explore fully.  As the story continues to evolve, so does Greene’s music.  The Mountain Movers, whose three vinyl albums are on sale at the gallery, have also been evolving from “folk garage band” to something more driving and raucous. The band performed at Knife Thrower’s opening and created a loosely textured sound to accompany the beguiling textures of Greene’s fantasy art.

Knife ThrowerDrawings by Dan Greene

An Ephemeroptera exhibition

Intercambio, in association with Project Storefronts 756 Chapel Street, New Haven May 12-June 15, 2012

Photographs by Kurt Heumiller

What's The Story?

All the world tells stories.  Some for entertainment, some as explanation, some for identification, some for cautionary purposes.  Some are called escapist, some are called educational.  Some are called fables, fairy tales, myths, tall tales, urban or rural legend.  Some are based on what happened, some are about things that could never happen, some imagine things that might happen.  Some are about things happening right now. When Reynaldi Lolong, a third-year Theater Managing student at Yale School of Drama, asked Tanya Dean, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Drama and a 2011 MFA in Dramaturgy, to meet with him at Chocopologie for a casual chat about his ideas for a 2012 Yale Summer Cabaret proposal, they immediately clicked in their love of a variety of fictional fare: comix, sci fi stories, Dr. Who episodes, tales of the supernatural, as well, of course, as Shakespeare and classic theater.  What they quickly established is that what they love best in all these genres is the story itself, the tale to be told.  They also agreed that the Cabaret “is the perfect venue for celebrating storytelling.”

Finding themselves “increasingly obsessed” with a search for stories that became “enjoyably all-consuming,” Reynaldi and Tanya consulted colleagues at the YSD and came up with a letter of intent for three theatrical experiences that will run in repertory throughout the summer.  It didn’t hurt that Reynaldi, the Producer this year, was the Director of Marketing for last year’s Summer Cab, nor that Tanya has been involved in some capacity in a total of thirteen regular season Cab shows.

All three shows of 50 Nights: A Festival of Stories will be up by the end of the first week of the season, which begins June 20th, with a show per night, and two shows performed each Saturday, at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m., throughout the run of 8 weeks, or 50 nights.  There will also be two marathon Saturdays—July 14 and August 11—on which all three plays will be staged (at 1, 4, and 8).

First up, June 20 to August 17, is Laura Schellhardt’s The K of D (short for “Kiss of Death”), a one-woman play featuring Monique Bernadette Barbee as sixteen different characters in a rural Ohio town.  Directed by Tanya Dean, the play explores the kind of legends that small communities can sustain, with flights that are both funny and frightening, involving both tragedy and youthful high spirits.  Can a kiss from a dying brother give a young girl the power to kill with a kiss?

Next, June 22 to August 18, Of Ogres Retold.  The play is the brain-child of YSD designing genius Adam Rigg (also the scenic designer for the Summer Cab this season) who uses several Japanese folktales as the basis for this original piece of puppet theater, with a cast of five, involving other-wordly creatures and a sense of the mysterious, the macabre, the monstrous and the miraculous.

Finally, June 23 to August 19, Mary Zimmerman’s The Secret in the Wings, directed by Margot Bordelon, uses the full cast of six actors for this intriguing revisiting of fairy tales.  A journey into the world of “once upon a time,” in a play that weaves together strange and strangely familiar elements from childhood, as a young girl experiences an unsettling night with an unusual sitter who regales her with tales of menace and magic.

As Reynaldi says, each Summer Cabaret is in dialogue with previous years, and the 2012 version builds on last year’s repertory offering of three shows with a dedicated team of actors.  This year there will be six actors, with each actor performing in two of the shows.  The main difference is that there will be one set for all three shows, a versatile playing space able to transform the Cab into the environment needed for each unique play.  Tanya describes the basic set as a kind of “cabinet of curiosities” adaptable to the dock on a lake for K of D, the props and costumes discovered in the course of The Secret in the Wings, and the projection surfaces for the “Victorian macabre” of Ogres Retold.  The doorway into the Cab this summer is like the door of the wardrobe into Narnia, a passage into a world of  surprises, secrets and summer wonder.

Additionally, selected performances throughout the summer will be followed by the Fireside Series, a reading of stories under the stars, with an opportunity to chat with others about the show, and to hear firsthand some of the tales that have been incorporated into the plays.  The Series will recreate that familiar locus of storytelling: the camp fire, and, if it rains, there will be ghost stories with flashlights inside the Cab.

And once again the Summer Cab will boast the cuisine of Anna Belcher of Anna’s on Orange.  There will be light fare, snacks and beverages beginning at 12:30 for the 2 p.m. shows and full dinner beginning at 6:30 for the 8 p.m. shows.  For info, tickets, schedule visit: http://summercabaret.org/.  This year there’s also a blog with behind-the-scenes notes, chat with the production team, and ongoing updates about production and performances, at: http://50nights.wordpress.com/

And, if you like what you see on the site, consider helping the Summer Cab to meet it’s goal of $4,500.  At the link below there is a pledge drive, with various rewards even for minimal contributions of $5—every little bit helps, so don’t hesitate, stress Reynaldi and Tanya, to give whatever you can.  And the Summer Cab Board, a highly supportive and enthusiastic group, have agreed to a two for one deal: so whatever you pledge will be matched by them.  If pledgers meet the goal, that means a total of $9,000 for production, money you will see on the stage.  So, if the thought of stories, creatively told in an intimate performance space by gifted theater students, thrills you, get in on this early and help Reynaldi and Tanya meet their goal.

http://www.rockethub.com/projects/7673-50-nights-a-festival-of-stories

We Like Bikes

At last weekend’s Art Walk in Westville, one of the main attractions was A Broken Umbrella Theatre’s performance of their latest theatrical outing, Head Over Wheels.  And there are two more opportunities to see the show: Sat., May 19th, at 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. Situated outdoors at 446A Blake Street, beside the purling waters of the West River, the performance space consists of bleachers on the grass facing a friendly and fun-looking bike shop.  The sun shines, the breeze breezes, and young children, parents, and other audience members are welcomed by the voice of a lively DJ (Matthew Gafney), introducing The Pierre Lallement Annual Community Bicycle Ride.

Clint (Ryan Gardner), the proprietor of the shop, is what might be described—putting it mildly—as a bike enthusiast.  With his outgoing manner he makes bike-riding seem more natural than walking, and his bike buddies more than concur: a mild-mannered “paper boy”—a full-grown man (Lou Mangini) who delivers papers via bike as a family business—a pizza-delivery guy (Jason Wells) complete with a stack of pizza boxes, and a preening bicyclist-athlete (Ruben Ortiz) happily regale us with their love of bicycling.

With a catchy tune, they invite all the kids to take part in a drawing to see who will be the Grand Marshal of, with syncopated movements, “The Pierre Lallement Annual Community Bicycle Ride When the Entire Community Communes to Celebrate New Haven’s Rich History and Its Innovative Inventions Including the Bicycle…and Picnic.” When the winner is announced, the problems begin: Clint’s twin brother Flint (Ian Alderman) receives the honor, but there’s a major hitch: as he confides to us (and to the children particularly), Flint can’t ride a bike!

If you have small children and take them to live performances, you won’t want to miss this: the play not only involves a bit of New Haven history, it also works within a child’s perspective, as the best kids’ shows do.  The company, particularly Ian Alderman, have a natural skill in eliciting responses from kids—getting them to participate in the lottery, and also—one of the more charming bits— to shout unscripted encouragement to Flint as he tries desperately to overcome his fear of bikes and his awkward uncertainty about how to ride the darn thing.

Some of the kids were so demonstrative about how he should go about this task that they clearly and proudly have mastered, there’s no doubt he would’ve gotten the hang of it.  Fortunately, for the dramatic aspects of the show, he gets aid from another quarter: La La Lallement (Michelle Ortiz), descendent of the legendary Pierre himself, arrives with an air of fairy-godmother magic, to—with song and dance moves—get Flint up to speed.

But it’s not so simple, which requires Flint to come clean about his fear of bicycling.  A judicious plot point, since it’s important, we realize, that Flint own up to the facts.  Played as an engaging man-child by Alderman, Flint’s predicament stretches into all kinds of areas where kids might worry about not knowing how to do what everyone else seems to grasp already.  So, there is instruction amidst all the fun.

The music (provided by Chrissy Gardner) keeps things lively, and the comic patter gets laughs—particularly from Antonio (Ruben Ortiz), who speaks in an unplaceable accent, picked up, he tells us, from all the places he’s biked through, and who offers to transport on his back on his bike the entire audience because his thighs are so strong.  There are also sight gags, like Alderman trying to mount a bicycle, inventively finding every way to do it except the right way, and, later, his choices in protective attire.

Children generally enjoy watching adults being silly, and they won’t be disappointed here.  And because the goal—riding a bike—is one they are familiar with or will be, the play, while fanciful, is also real enough.

Engaging and interactive, Head Over Wheels is another appealing offering from A Broken Umbrella Theatre.

Head Over Wheels

May 12 and May 19, 2012

Conceived and developed by A Broken Umbrella Theatre

Directed by Rachel Alderman

Story Development Team: Ian Alderman, Rachel Alderman, Chrissy Gardner, Ryan Gardner, Michelle Ortiz, Ruben Ortiz, and Jason Wells; Music: Chrissy Gardner; Choreographer: Robin Levine; Design Team: Janie Alexander, Jacy Barber, Ryan Gardner, and Laura Miracle Tamarkin; Stage Manager: Micah Stieglitz

Hanging On The Telephone

La Voix Humaine, Francis Poulenc’s one act opera adapted from Jean Cocteau’s play from the ‘30s, will be staged for two shows only, tonight, May 17, and Saturday, May 19, at 7 p.m.

The staging is an independent directing project for graduating Yale School of Drama directing student Louisa Proske, and represents one of the few collaborations between the School of Drama and the School of Music that has been staged for the public.  For Proske, the project fulfills a longing to work more fully with students in the School of Music that began when she took part in a class in 2010 that included opera singers and theater directors.

The opera consists of one side of a phone conversation, sung by a woman trying to get through to her lover.  The play, Proske says, was Cocteau’s answer to critics who thought him too detached in his handling of characters, using actors as “props.”  He wanted to create a character study and chose to present a woman facing a major loss in her emotional life: The man she still is passionately in love with has broken with her and agreed to a final phone call.  In a sense, the entire relationship becomes the context of the call—all that has been in the past is reduced to whatever the woman can get across on the phone.  The call itself is challenged by interruptions and interference, an element of the absurd that Cocteau introduces to underscore the phone’s status as “an infernal machine,” promising intimacy but at the same creating a mechanical and spatial alienation.

Poulenc’s adaptation, Proske says, works at times with, at times against the romantic clichés of the woman’s language—for instance, when she speaks of her recent suicide attempt, the music becomes very lush, and, Proske says, “collapses into opera,” from its more a-melodic patterns.  Poulenc treats the language as “scored speech”—letting the text’s sing-song elements and colloquial nature dictate his adoption of tritones for qualities as unpredictable and erratic as the woman’s varied efforts to play upon her lover’s sympathies.

This is not the first time Proske has directed opera—her production of Invisible Cities, based on the book by Italo Calvino, was a world premiere at the Italian Academy in New York.  But the seeds for her final project at Yale were planted much earlier than that: Proske describes her youth as a “choir child” in Berlin, performing in operas and other works twice a week. Familiarity with the rigors of such a schedule is quite useful when working with opera singers and musicians.  At first Proske dreamed of putting on La Voix Humaine with an orchestra, but found that the estate of Poulenc would not sanction an orchestral performance with anything less than a full orchestra; fortunately, they would permit a piano reduction.  And so that’s what Proske is staging.

That constraint, the director found, is not so constraining.  Proske alluded to a piano reduction of The Magic Flute she saw not long ago, staged by Peter Brook, with a cast well less than half the size of a full production, and recalled it as the most memorable and brilliant version of the opera, which she had sung in as a choir member, she had ever seen.  Proske found that, for her project, reduction to piano and voice allows for much greater intimacy and a greater concentration on acting.  Opera singers in the Music School, she says, rarely get a chance to act and the collaboration with singer Jamilyn Manning-White was a delight.

Part of the difference in directing singers, Proske finds, is that they already command a thorough grasp of the musical component of a character, which determines, to a great extent, the performance. They aren’t still searching for the character.  This makes them perhaps more amenable to the director’s choices about how to put across the expressive aspects of a character on stage.

Another difference in directing theater as opposed to opera, Proske says, is that “time is not yours.”  The score determines tempo in a way that’s not true with spoken texts, and the music contains much of the emotional thrust of the piece, so the problem of searching for the most dramatic reading of a charater is shifted onto the problem of staging.  Proske and Jiyoun Chang, Set and Light Design, have hit upon a stage that invokes the relation between abstract space and a palpitating disfigured figure that one finds in the work of Francis Bacon.  For Proske, the emotions of Cocteau’s woman are wrenching, at times overwhelming to the woman herself, and yet she must remain in contact through a highly artificial device, the telephone, unable to make any more direct or mute appeal to the man she loves.  Cocteau, Proske says, was greatly interested in invoking “the mythic element in the modern” and conceived of the play as a virtuoso challenge for an actress.

When asked if the play might be, for today’s audience, too passionate, too unironic, in its depiction of a woman so hopelessly enthralled to a man, Proske said that her primary struggle was to not let the beauty of the piece, its aesthetics of suffering, dominate.  She went after “the ugliness” in the opera, hoping to evoke “the monstrous face” of both ecstasy and pain.  She admitted that at times the woman elicits her full sympathy and at other times she finds herself judging her and distancing herself.  The audience, she expects, will do the same, and believes that everyone can share in the opera’s depiction of someone who tries desperately to revive a former happiness, or who simply wants very much to make a connection.

La Voix Humaine Music by Francis Poulenc; Lyrics by Jean Cocteau Directed by Louisa Proske; Featuring Jamilyn Manning-White

Two Performances Only May 17 and May 19, 2012, 7 p.m.

The Iseman Theater 1156 Chapel Street 203.432.1234 drama.yale.edu

Eureka! Jack Hitt's Bunch of Amateurs

From the press release for the latest book by New Haven resident and author Jack Hitt:

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What is it that drives America’s sharp-eyed bird-watchers, home-brew biologists, rogue paleontologists, backyard astronomers, and garage inventors to pursue their passions with such vigor and gusto? What inspires the amateurs who tinker in garages on their solar-powered cars and space elevators or who set out by canoe to catch a glimpse of a rare ivory-billed woodpecker? In BUNCH OF AMATEURS: A Search for the American Character (Crown, May 15, 2012) acclaimed writer, Peabody Award winner, and frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and This American Life, Jack Hitt argues that amateurs are more than just semi-professionals who are driven by a singular obsession . . . they are what drives the success of America and the identity of its people.

Filled with stories that highlight the ongoing American experience, Hitt’s Bunch of Amateurs is the hitchhiker’s guide to amateurism. Like Malcolm Gladwell on pop psychology, Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan on food, and Bill Simmons on sports, Hitt provides that high-caliber narrative acumen to the world of amateurs. From a heavily tattooed young woman in the Bay Area trying to splice a fish’s glow-in-the-dark gene into common yogurt (all done in her kitchen using salad spinners) to a space obsessive on the brink of developing the next generation of telescopes from his mobile home, Hitt not only tells the stories of people in the grip of a passion but argues that America’s history is bound up in a cycle of amateur surges, like so many trends in this country.

America is a land of fresh starts and second acts. TV shows like America’s Got Talent, Project Runway, and American Idol help to elevate the amateur to the prime-time ranks. Magazines like Popular Science and Make cater to the resurgence of the do-it-yourself impulses in America. Contests summoning amateurs to their workbenches and offering large rewards are sponsored by the Pentagon, NASA, and even Google. All of this, Hitt argues, shows just how deeply the amateur narrative is encoded in our national DNA. Amateur pursuits are always lamented as a world that just passed until a Sergey Brin or Mark Zuckerberg steps out of his garage (or dorm room) with the rare but crucial success story.

Mixing Ben Franklin, T. Rexes, robot clubs, and Clovis Man in a unique and profound way, Hitt’s BUNCH OF AMATEURS shows how America is always pioneering new frontiers that will lead to the newest version of the American dream.

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Jack Hitt is a contributing editor to the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and public radio’s This American Life. He also writes for Rolling Stone, GQ, Wired, and Garden & Gun. He has won the Peabody Award, as well as the Livingston and Pope Foundation Awards. His stories can be heard on This American Life’s greatest hits CD, Lies, Sissies & Fiascoes, and The Best Crimes and Misdemeanors: Stories from The Moth. He is the author of a solo theater performance, Making Up the Truth.

BUNCH OF AMATEURS by Jack Hitt

Crown Publishers • On sale: May 15, 2012 • Price: $26.00 hardcover • Pages: 288 ISBN: 978-0-307-39375-3

Also available as an ebook and on audio from Random House

Visit www.crownpublishing.com or www.jackhitt.com