The Seafarer is Coming

As Virginia Woolf knew, a room of one’s own is necessary for a writer, or indeed for any creative endeavor to flourish—say, a studio of one’s own for artists, performers, musicians. The New Haven Theater Company have learned that lesson too. Having a performance space they can count on and call their own—the open area at the back of the English Building Markets on Chapel—has made planning successive shows as a full season much easier and more secure. The troupe of thespians have already used the space for productions of Our Town, Shipwrecked!, Almost, Maine, and The Magician, an original play by NHTC member Drew Gray, and have recently announced three upcoming shows: The Seafarer, by Conor McPherson, Doubt: A Parable, by James Patrick Shanley, and a new Drew Gray play, The Cult. All three shows, interestingly enough, have to do with situations that test beliefs and all three take a metaphysical reality as a given. Tickets for The Seafarer are on sale, and the show will be staged two consecutive weekends in November. A popular play from 2006, The Seafarer is an actor’s show, as are the plays of David Mamet, which NHTC has done well by in the past. Five men play cards in a working-class northern suburb of Dublin, an ordinary occurrence, but what is at stake is extraordinary. NHTC had plans to stage the show earlier, back in their peripatetic days, and have waited for the right time to come back to it. As the show is set on Christmas eve and has occult features, the perfect time of year would seem to be the weeks between Halloween and Christmas.

A five-man play, the production will include most of the male actors who have directed for NHTC in the past. Deena Nicol-Bifford, who played in Almost, Maine, was approached by the guys to direct this time and says she found in the play themes, about fate and destiny, that drew her in. “The more we delved into the stuff, the more we found to work with—like religious iconography, Irish myth and lore.” Working with her fellow NHTC players is always a pleasure, and she quickly saw how the long-term friendships among the troupe aid a play like Seafarer, about kin and friends and drinking buddies who have known each other forever. A serious play with serious themes about the trials of friendship and the need to protect others—even from themselves—the dialogue can be very funny, as all these Irishmen like to put one another on a bit.

Relative newcomer to NHTC Jim Lones (who played in Our Town) plays the eldest among the foursome, Richard Harkin, who has recently gone blind due to a freak accident. His erring brother James “Sharky” (J. Kevin Smith, who played in NHTC productions of Our Town and Speed-the-Plow, and played Tony Roma in Glengarry Glen Ross) returns home to help his brother and finds that Richard likes taking out his frustrations on his younger brother. Also on hand is longtime friend Ivan Curry (Steve Scarpa, recently seen on the Long Wharf stage as a townsperson in Gordon Edelstein's production of Our Town, and who directed NHTC’s Our Town and also played in Almost, Maine and Speed-the-Plow), a kind of generally benign ne’er-do-well who recently lost his glasses and is suffering from myopia, and, arriving in the second act, their friend, the gadabout Nicky Giblin (Peter Chenot, who directed Shipwrecked! and had the main roles in Urinetown and Talk Radio and played Picasso in Picasso at the Lapin Agile), who just happens to have taken up with Sharky’s ex. But that’s not the main plot-point, rather it’s the fellow Nicky has brought along and invited to their card game: a stranger Nicky befriended while on the most recent leg of his drinking binge, a distinguished-looking gent called Mr. Lockhart (George Kulp, who has acted at Long Wharf in Macbeth 1969, directed Speed-the-Plow, and acted in Our Town and Urinetown).

Lockhart and Sharky have a history. Baggage in the form of a wager that took place 25 years ago in Bridewell Prison where Sharky’s winning a card game led to his release and a promise to play Lockhart again. Lockhart is back to make sure Sharky fulfills that promise. So while the others think it’s just a friendly game of cards, we know different.

The whole cast cites the “wonderful writing” as a main attraction of the play, but also feel that it is an “uplifting play, that makes you want to cheer in the end,” as Scarpa says. The cast is well-selected and when Chenot and Kulp enter drunk together in the second act, you may recall seeing them as steady drinkers together in last season’s The Magician. Indeed, Kulp seems to get the “distinguished gent” roles rather regularly, while Chenot can always be counted on to be somewhat brash and outgoing. To Smith often goes the thornier and weightier roles and Scarpa generally provides key support roles. That situation will change next time when Scarpa will play the conflicted and possibly guilty priest in Doubt, with Margaret Mann, who directed Almost, Maine and played Mrs. Soames in Our Town, and Mallory Pellegrino, who played Emily in Our Town, as his accusers. Kulp directs.

The Seafarer takes its title from an Old English poem in which the hazards that threaten our faith are figured as the trials of seafaring in winter and in which we are exhorted to oppose the devil. The play was nominated for a Tony as Best Play of 2006 in its premiere New York run and has been called by the New York Times, “a long night’s journey into day.” The NHTC says it’s “an uproariously funny, charming, and chilling play” and shows “that redemption can come from the most unlikely of places.”

For tickets and more information: NHTC

The New Haven Theater Company present The Seafarer By Conor McPherson Directed by Deena Nicol-Bifford

The NHTC Stage at The English Building Markets 839 Chapel Street

8 p.m., November 13-15 and 20-22

The New Haven Theater Company is: Megan Keith Chenot, Peter Chenot, Drew Gray, Erich Greene, George Kulp, Margaret Mann, Deena Nicol-Bifford, Mallory Pellegrino, Steve Scarpa, Christian Shaboo, J. Kevin Smith, and John Watson

A Devilish Task

YSD First Thesis Show Opens . . . The first Yale School of Drama thesis show of 2014-15 goes up this week. Third-year director Sara Holdren presents Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a mercurial and elusive play, metaphysical, satirical, and challenging, involving the Devil’s visit to Moscow under Stalin, the travails of a writer—called simply “the Master”—under a police state, and his love affair with his muse, Margarita, as well as the Master’s ongoing concerns in attempting to stage, without censorship, his theatrical treatment of Yeshua before Pilate—for a society “officially” atheist.

While “common in Russia,” Holdren says, productions of the play—which was written as a novel by Bulgakov and subsequently adapted for stage—are not easy to come by in the U.S. In part, that has to do with the vexed history of the text itself: having begun the work in 1928, Bulgakov burned the first version in despair of its seeing the light of day, then painstakingly rewrote it beginning in 1931, finishing it, essentially, in 1936, though he was still working on it at his death in 1940. A censored version of the novel was published in 1966-67. A complete version appeared in 1973, and the most authoritative version not until 1989. Stage adaptations have been ongoing since 1971. The YSD production uses the adaptation by Edward Kemp, dating from 2004, for a theatrical festival in the UK.

Directing students in YSD propose two possible thesis shows, then one is selected by the committee. Holdren’s other proposal was a better-known Russian classic, Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Why Russians? I asked. After a second, Holdren gave a ready reply: “because of the combination of humor with the fearlessness of their emotional scale.” Holdren values the combined darkness and absurdist humor in their works, which she likened to Beckett. M&M, she points out, “isn’t afraid of unwieldy ideas and unabashed spectacle.” Bulgakov’s masterpiece references another masterpiece—and a very unwieldy “theatrical” work in itself—Goethe’s Faust, and Holdren found inspiration for her project in Goethe’s “Prologue” to his monumental story of a scholar’s pact with the devil for the sake of unfettered experience and knowledge. In the Prologue, a director, a playwright and a comedian (or actor) debate how best to stage such a work, with the director favoring spectacle, the playwright ideas, and the actor, as mediator, insisting on both. That, for Holdren, is what a production of M&M should strive for as well.

The show does involve spectacle: there is the devil and his uncanny retinue—including a giant, talking cat called Behemoth—as well as segments in an unworldly space, and segments set in the Jerusalem of the Master’s play, and segments occurring in the social and political reality of Bulgakov’s time. Holdren feels her production is blessed in its cast, and combines, in her crew and collaborators, “adventurous talents willing to go anywhere,” able to translate all these worlds, ingeniously present in Kemp’s adaptation, to the stage at the Iseman. Holdren says her collaborators are “all I could ask for” and allow her “to work the way I love to work.” I got a peek at the set—which includes a runway up into the stadium seating—and it involves a rotating “turntable” portion, a spiral staircase, and a very modernistic design—recalling the Russian art movement of the Twenties, Constructivism—that may well be the most striking set I’ve seen at the Iseman.

Holdren finds the themes of the play very relevant to our times, in which ideological differences and faith-based differences, as well as racial and historical divides, continue to bedevil mankind. Bulgakov wrote under fear, without the freedom to give his ideas fullest expression in public. His novel is a brave statement in favor of, in Holdren’s view, “compassion and forgiveness,” and of love, not only as the very real love story between the Master and Margarita (who trades her soul to Satan to save the Master’s life), but of “love as a world-saving force.” For Holdren, the play has a “sad happy ending,” and she admits “every time at the end I cry.” The tears, we might say, are not those of mourning or loss, but of commitment to the vision of human possibility, and to our chances for salvation. Like most great world-spanning works in the Western canon, Bulgakov’s play—along with Dante’s Commedia and Goethe’s Faust and Milton’s Paradise Lost—renders the human condition not as tragedy but as a spectacular comedy of ideas and of love.

The Master and Margarita By Mikhail Bulgakov Adapted by Edward Kemp Directed by Sara Holdren

Dramaturg: Helen C. Jaksch; Set Designer: Christopher Thompson; Costume Designer: Fabian Fidel Aguilar; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Projections Designer: Rasean Davonte Johnson; Sound Designer: Sinan Zafar

Yale School of Drama Iseman Theater October 21-25, 2014

Coming to Yale Cabaret . . .

Now previewing Yale Cabaret shows for the rest of the semester and into January—Cab 4 through 10. The Artistic Directors Hugh Farrell, Tyler Kieffer, Will Rucker, and Managing Director Molly Hennighausen have joined forces, reviewed the applicants, and determined upon the following, an eclectic mix of the new, the untried, the recent, the experimental—even, perhaps, the confrontational. Here we go: Cab 4: Rose and the Rime, a play by Nathan Allen, Chris Mathews, Jake Minton; directed by Kelly Kerwin, a third-year dramaturg. Kerwin was an Artistic Director at last year’s Cab, and a director and developer of the very popular We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun, and this time she’s directing and choreographing a show that features dance, song—with the vocal talents of Andrew Burnap, whose singing graced Why Torture is Wrong . . . in the first show of the last Summer Cab—and original music. The show, which was first developed in the House Theatre of Chicago, features a cast of 9 to tell this modern myth in which a plucky young girl (Chalia La Tour, who is on a roll this semester) sets off on a quest to free the town of Radio Falls, Michigan, from a permanent blizzard visited upon it by the Rime Witch. Because the eternal winter trope graces “The Snow Queen” fairytale, the show is open to comparisons with the most successful animated film of all time, Disney’s Frozen. OK, fine, so come on and see what’s different. October 16-18.

Cab 5: Touch, a play by Toni Press-Coffman; directed by Elijah Martinez, a second-year actor. Newish playwright Press-Coffman brings us a tale about loss and bereavement, couched in cosmic terms. It’s also a play with a four-person cast that starts with a mammoth monologue that will be fielded by second-year actor Jonathan Majors, a major factor in the success of The Brothers Size at the close of last year’s Cab season. The script riffs on Keats and the stars and the infinite expanse that pretty much identifies as “the Romantic Sublime.” Directed by Martinez, who was also an asset in The Brothers Size and a strong presence in the most recent Summer Cabaret. October 23-25.

Cab 6: Hotel Nepenthe, a play by John Kuntz; directed by Rachel Carpman, a third-year dramaturg. Poe fans no doubt recognize “nepenthe” as the stuff the speaker of “The Raven” is supposed to “quaff” so as to “forget the lost Lenore.” Keep that in mind, because Kuntz’s play, which debuted at the Huntington Theater in Boston in 2012, is about a “nebulous hotel” where lots of things are going on and—as was said by Scatman Crothers’ character in The Shining—“not all of them was good.” Four actors play four characters each in this feast of off-beat characterization that, the press release says, is a “hilariously horrific play” “where strangers tangle themselves” in mysteries and “wind up covered in whipped cream.” November 6-8.

Cab 7: MuZeum, a play by Raskia and Sumedh; translated and directed by Ankur Sharma, a special research fellow in directing. The horrendous rape and murder of a woman on a bus in South Delhi, India, in 2012, inspires this play, a journey through the history of the treatment of women in India, from the celebrated goddesses of myth, to the colorful heroines of Bollywood extravaganzas, to street victims of mutilation and rape. Co-Artistic Director Hugh Farrell says this is the show he’s “probably most excited about in [his] entire life,” as it captures the realities of India in ways not generally seen in the West or acknowledged by India itself. A Brechtian theater-piece based on contemporary incidents with a cast of 3 female actors as the women speaking their own truth. November 13-15.

Cab 8: Solo Bach, conceived and directed by Yagil Eliraz, a second-year director. Violinist Zou Yu of the Yale School of Music undertakes to play live two Bach pieces for violin each show; before our eyes these pieces are interpreted by 4 performers—2 male, 2 female—who “represent” the different voices of the violin through patterns of movement. Featuring a startling set with use of scrims, this unique production should be a feast for eyes and ears, as the visual and the aural work together in concert to the sublime measures of Johann Sebastian Bach. December 4-6.

Cab 9: The Zero Scenario, a play by third-year playwright Ryan Campbell; directed by Sara Holdren, a third-year director. In last year’s Cabaret, they brought us the outrageous tale of Joan of Arc in the Space Age in A New Saint for a New World, and this time Ryan Campbell and Sara Holdren are back with a “sci-fi comedy” that features 6-ft. field tics, a boyfriend along on a mysterious roadtrip his girlfriend instigates, and the question “can you terrify people in the theater”? Starring Ariana Venturi, who shone in the first two shows of the Yale Summer Cabaret. December 11-13.

Cab 10: 50:13, a play by Jireh Holder, a second-year director; directed by Jonathan Majors, a second-year actor. What does that title mean? It’s a ratio. 13% of males in the U.S. are African-American; 50% of males in U.S. prisons are. This important theater-piece looks at that disparity through the eyes of the incarcerated, using oral histories to tell the story of Dae Brown who, in three days, tries to impart all he knows about being a man to a teen inmate serving an adult sentence. January 15-17.

That's what's on the way.  See you at the Cab!

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street For more information and tickets and menus: Yale Cab

Our Town Opens

This Wednesday, October 8, previews for the first show of the Long Wharf Theatre’s 50th anniversary season begin. And that first show is an American classic: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Not only an American classic that many probably think they already know, the play has direct links to “our town” (i.e., New Haven) because Wilder lived here and is buried here. Not that Grover’s Corners should remind us of New Haven exactly. The play is actually set in a fictional New Hampshire town, and yet: Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein, who directs the play, has conceived of his cast as representing our local demographic more than any small town in Wilder’s day would have. That means that his cast is of diverse ethnicity, and, what’s more, his Stage Manager—a role associated with lean-jawed white actors such as William Holden, Hal Holbrook, and Paul Newman—is a black woman (Myra Lucretia Taylor).

That fact alone should make for an out-of-the-ordinary Our Town. And, to make the production even more “ours,” Edelstein has cast it with Long Wharf alums. So, if you’ve been going to the LW with any degree of regularity in its 50 year existence, you’re bound to see someone up there you’ve seen before.

Two such returners glad to be back are Jenny Leona, who will play Emily, and Rey Lucas, George. These two roles are, of course, the “romantic interest” characters in the play, who begin as neighbors and high school classmates who then become sweethearts and then . . . .

Both Leona and Lucas have experience playing younger than their years. In fact, Leona has played an adolescent boy on more than one occasion, and Lucas played the Boy in Eric Ting’s well-received adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea in 2009. Leona, on the other hand, was anything but boyish in last season’s The Underpants, also directed by Edelstein.

When I talked to the two actors about Wilder’s play and their roles, both admitted that Our Town was a play they’d had youthful familiarity with—as most of us do, they encountered it in high school. Leona saw the TV version at some point and says “it stuck with me.” Returning to work with Edelstein, she says, is a “great opportunity” and found that, reading the play again—it had been about 10 years—she found it truly beautiful and thought she would be “perfect for Emily.” And why not? Leona comes by the quaintness of Our Town naturally—she spent 7 years of her childhood in Ardsley, an idyllic little village in West Chester County, and says it has remained a touchstone for her sense of small-town life.

For Lucas, a YSD grad raised in Queens by Dominican parents, Our Town brought to mind “folksy” TV shows like My Three Sons or Capra films like It’s a Wonderful Life—“a little cheesy.” Invited to take part in the show, he was intrigued by Edelstein’s color-blind casting and deliberate effort to diversify the cast ethnically. What’s more, he sees Edelstein’s approach as “more moving and compelling” than what Lucas may have formerly thought of the show. “If we forget what we’ve seen” the play’s truth will be more direct, he says. The play shows us “real families, with struggles and troubles.” Following Wilder’s intention, Lucas says, should give us a play that “combines Norman Rockwell and Pablo Picasso.” An apt expression of the everyday charm of the play contained within its sense of the more abstract and mythic possibilities of human life.

Both Leona and Lucas are excited by the opportunity to play romantic leads, and both find that there is unexpected comedy in the relationship of George and Emily that comes from inviting the audience to think back to their own introduction to teen-age love, to grasp how awkward and thrilling is the experience for these two. Lucas notes that Emily “calls George on his arrogance” and he responds quickly by falling in love with someone who cares enough to want him to improve—“not the sort of thing I was looking for in high school,” Lucas chuckles. Leona finds the awkwardness of the young lovers “adorable” and is glad of the opportunity, thanks to Edelstein’s search for “the true moments in the play and its spirit,” to find the humor in the early situations in the play. The later parts of the play, where things grow more troubled and dark, Leona says, are where she feels her strengths as an actress lie. Which may come as a surprise to anyone who saw her broadly comic role in The Underpants. That role, for Leona, was something of a surprise, and Our Town gives her an opportunity to show a full range of emotions.

The camaraderie of the cast should be expected, since all have worked at Long Wharf before and many with Edelstein, but, even so, both actors remarked on how quickly the process of bonding as a cast occurred on this production. When I spoke to Leona and Lucas, the rehearsals had not yet gone into tech, with scenery and so forth, but both pointed out that the sets will be unusually spare. Though both have had training with minimal sets, the challenge of acting out interactions with non-existent props presents another interesting aspect of the staging of Our Town.

For audiences who may think they know all there is to know about Grover’s Corners, Leoana suggests that this production will be “eye-opening” and Lucas points out the play’s satisfying sense of, as it were, “telling the stories behind the photo albums” most of us keep of our lives. The Long Wharf 50th Anniversary production of Our Town invites us to look a little closer at the “givens” we live with and our assumptions about the significance of our own lives. “Our town” has changed, and, with this cast, so should Our Town.

Our Town By Thornton Wilder Directed by Gordon Edelstein

Long Wharf Theatre October 8-November 2, 2014

Tickets and info: Long Wharf

Yale Cabaret Season 47: Down the Stairs We Go

Next weekend the Yale Cabaret returns—Cab 47—helmed by Artistic Directors, Hugh Farrell, a dramaturg, Will Rucker, a stage manager, Tyler Kieffer, a sound designer (who have participated in 19 shows at the Cab and/or Summer Cab amongst them), and Managing Director Molly Hennighausen, who ably managed the Summer Cabaret of 2013.

The Cab is the go-to spot for the unusual, the off-the-wall, the below-stairs (it’s literally in a basement, which this year’s logo capitalizes on, creating the look of a movie ad from the Sixties where a trip down the stairs may lead to unimagined things). It’s a place of creative ferment, where students see what they can do—often in areas they aren’t being officially trained in—and what they can get away with. The audience can be a mix—as Molly Hennighausen says—of many first-timers, drawn by the word-of-mouth of a specific show, and many dedicated regulars, who come no matter what’s on offer.

It’s also a convivial place to dine, thanks to Anna Belcher’s kitchen skills, with a changing menu that always offers 3 entrees, a number of small plates, a salad, a soup, and a choice of desserts, not to mention a fairly varied wine-list and a selection of beers. All the dining business is over before the show begins, with tables cleared, generally, so there’s little of the distraction of plates and forks while the play’s playing.

If you like your theater up-close and personal, with, as it were, the strings showing, then the Cab is a dream. And, if you come more than once, you’re likely to see the people who, one week, put on the show doing the service and such another week. It’s a “we all muck in together” entity, even more so now that Work Study support has been withdrawn. Previously, Work Study picked up half the wage of the Cab’s workers, so now the Cab, to stay on budget, will lean upon generous donors and sponsors—and full houses—more than before. The Cab’s site lists the different levels of patronage available, including the popular “show sponsor”—an innovation begun by Managing Director Jonathan Wemette in the 45th anniversary season, 2011-12. Check back here to get a brief preview of the shows when they’re announced, then hand over a check for the show you want to back. And if that’s too big a commitment, smaller donations—as Enthusiast, Friend, and even “Starving Artist” level—are available. The Cab is a unique institution, well worthy of support.

The site claims two mantras for this season: Make Happen the Make Believe—a good imperative for any creative endeavor—and Now or Never, which certainly puts an emphasis on timeliness and limited time. Theater, more than any other creative work, requires presence in the here and now.

The first three shows of the season have been announced, and the new décor—which features a classically appointed entranceway/lobby that will be complete with tech features, such as piped-in music or live audio feeds from inside the theater—is developing. The team—Hugh, Will, Tyler, and Molly—stress an “open door” policy and their accessibility as a team to audience input, and likewise to the students who may have ideas for proposals. They looked at 7 proposals for the first 3 slots and take a supportive, enabling role in all projects they accept, and can help teams get together for resubmitting proposals not successful at first. The teamwork of the projected work is key.

Hugh says the proposal by the Cab 47 team focused on “community and collaboration”—the community of YSD, certainly, but also the community that the theater serves, with “collaboration” a broad term that extends from the various talents of the people involved in the show—from those who build the sets and make the costumes to those who research and write and act and direct and keep the place running—to those who provide attention and feedback as audience. Will stresses “generosity without expectation” which is a way of saying “just show-up, ready for whatever.” It’s different each week and what you get should be something other than what you expected. The team wants to make a season “full of that Cab show”—the one everyone talks about and remembers. And that’s not necessarily to say it’s all about love and praise. Making people grapple with what they’ve seen, or offer personal insights, is part of the Cab experience.

First up is Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time—a new play by third-year playwright Emily Zemba, who collaborated on last year’s crowd-pleasing season opener, We Know Edie LaMinx Had a Gun. Look Up will feature a “sort of mash-up” of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with Toddlers and Tiaras. Directed by third-year actor Ato Blankson-Wood, who’s been turning in worthwhile Cab performances since the Summer Cab of 2013, and featuring Celeste Arias, ditto, the play follows Liddy, a young girl coping with the pressures of a child beauty pageant while encountering a series of characters right out of Lewis Carroll by way of whatever cultural associations the team tosses in. September 18-20

Cab 2 is a new translation by Kee-Yoon Nahm of Geun-Hyung Park’s Don’t Be Too Surprised. Nahm, trained as a dramaturg at YSD, also directs the cast, which will not include YSD actors, in “a really dark comedy” from 2009. Park is a prolific Korean actor—on screen, TV and stage—who also writes, and his play is about a fraught relationship between father and grown son, that features karaoke and an on-stage suicide. September 25-27

The third of the first three shows is American Gothic—no, not the painting by Grant Wood, nor the novel by William Gaddis, but an ambitious combining of three stories: Jorge Luis Borges’ “The South,” Raymond Carver’s “Popular Mechanics,” and Flannery O’Connor’s oft-anthologized and taught, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”—which puts the “Southern” in Southern Gothic. Proposed by two dramaturgy students, Eli Epstein-Deutsch and Nahuel Telleria, and directed by Telleria, the play represents a collaboration by students in YSD, the Yale School of Music, and the Yale School of Art, and features an “installation-like set” by Sam Vernon. October 9-11

When speaking about the Cab 47 team’s leadership and guidance in soliciting, aiding, and choosing proposals, Molly stresses how “safe” the Cab is: in the sense that almost anything can get a try-out there. Its small size means the house is frequently sold out, and that creates an exciting environment for both audience and performers. As a “safe house” for theatrical experiment, the Cab is truly a New Haven treasure.

It’s now or never: help make happen the make believe. Your eyes and ears are required.

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven, CT

Eggs and Bones

Two former Cab shows to be re-staged in New York this fall. Listen! That sound you hear is the long, withdrawing roar of the summer. And that means the fall theater season is about to begin. Shortly, I’ll be posting a preview of the first three shows of the upcoming Yale Cabaret season, along with other announcements of interest for local theater here in New Haven. But right now, a few words about two shows opening soon in New York.

Fans and supporters of both the Yale Cabaret and Summer Cabaret may be interested to know that two former artistic directors of the Summer Cabaret, Devin Brain (*10) and Dustin Wills (*14), have further developed two shows that began life in the term-time Cabaret—Bones in the Basket and The Fatal Eggs, respectively—and this fall they will both be staged on back-to-back weekends at the Araca Project in New York. The Araca Project is an initiative to foster entrepreneurs from Yale, Syrcause, University of Michigan, Northwestern University, and Florida State. Artists selected are enabled to produce their work in an Off-Broadway venue.

Both shows have online sites for fund-raising. The Fatal Eggs, which has support through a Princess Grace grant, recently met its goal, but there’s always room for more; Bones in the Basket has 3 days left to reach its goal and, last I looked, had just under 60% of goal pledged

About the shows:

Bones in the Basket Devin Brain was co-artistic director, with Chris Mirto, of the Cabaret in the 2009-10 season, which happened to be my first season of attendance at the Cab. And that means I missed the Cab production of Bones, though I did catch a workshop staging of it about a year ago in NY. Brain was also the artistic director of the Summer Cabaret in the 2011 season; titled The Yale Summer Shakespeare Festival, the program featured two Shakespeare plays and The Rose-Mark'd Queen, Brain’s own ambitious and entertaining condensation of four Shakespeare history plays into one gripping show. In addition to Bones, and working as assistant director on a version of the Tempest at La Mama, Brain has a production of Macbeth in the works that will go on tour—beginning at the Guthrie in Minneapolis—and return to NYC in the spring.

Drawn to works with, shall we say, darker-than-average themes, Brain has found in Bones a greatly simpatico project. The show originated when cast member Alexandra Henrikson (*11) brought around a book of folk tales translated from the Russian, stories she was raised with. As with Grimm “fairytales,” these folk tales—many of them animal fables as in Aesop—have elements of the bizarre, the magical, the eerie. But unlike the Grimm tales—particularly in what Brain calls their “cleaned-up versions” familiar from Disney films and the like—the tales in Russian were, Brain says, told in bars for drinks and to entertain the clientele. They were decidedly not conceived as bedtime stories for kiddies. And, in comparison to Aesop, the “morals”—if that’s what they are—of the stories accept a rather harsh universe in which, at best, cleverness is rewarded and stupidity punished. Brain and company found the stories “morbid and dark in a comic, laughing way.” They adapted a selection of the tales into a form well-suited to the experimental space of the Cabaret and produced one of “those shows”—the ones that its audience remembers and its cast hopes to have a chance to do again.

That chance has come—Brain thanks YSD Dean James Bundy for suggesting he apply to Araca—with more money than before, 3 1/2 weeks of rehearsal, and a 140-seat auditorium with proscenium stage. It will be “the fullest set” the company has worked with and, Brain says, the theater has a certain decrepitness that suits Bones’ destitute “on the run” troupe, cadging what they can from whatever audience they can find. A bit like off-off-off Broadway theater. Returning again to the troupe are YSD grads Danny Binstock (*11), Jillian Taylor (*11), Blake Segal (*11), Alex Henrikson (*11), and Stéphanie Hayes (*11)—who has been back to stages in CT twice since she graduated: February House at Long Wharf, and a play also inspired by Russian folktales, last seasons’ The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls at the Rep.

Since the iteration of Bones last year, a new tale has been added and the ending has changed yet again (none of the three versions has ended the same way). Another advantage this year over last year, besides locale and coffers, is the return of Michael McQuilken (*11) of Old Soundroom, as the onstage musician absent last time. He joins the cast of Ringmaster, two divas, and three “roadies” who, as a troupe fallen upon hard times, tell their tales as Russian expats representing, Brain says, “art in need, teaching lessons on loss and how to deal with it.”

It’s not about “happily ever after,” it’s about the unhappy here and now and how to cope. Rather than stories of triumph, Bones showcases stories that give lessons in the mentality needed to survive, stories that in certain circles—such as the Russia of their day—might be considered, Brain says, “treasonous or blasphemous.” With contemporary Russia wading through another dark era, Bones tells us something about the kind of wit and wisdom Slavic culture derives from our existential predicament where a certain general malevolence—in nature, in humanity—is assumed.

And yet the show is not a downer. It’s about the stories humanity tells itself to keep despair at bay.

For more info, tickets, donation: here.

Bones in the Basket October 8-12, 2014 American Theatre of Actors 314 W. 54th Street, New York, NY

***

The Fatal Eggs Mikhail Bulgakov wrote a short story called “The Fatal Eggs” (1925) in order to satirize the political institutions of his day—and the work, as most of what Bulgakov wrote did, immediately ran afoul of authorities in Stalinist Russia. With its attitude toward the people as preyed upon by their government and toward science as sinister—especially when co-opted by the State—“The Fatal Eggs” managed to be a sci-fi tale with bite.

Director Dustin Wills says Bulgakov is “my jam,” and has turned to the writer before when stalled with a project. The first time, he turned to Black Snow which he had first seen in a high school theater competition (Wills' project was The Crucible). The Bulgakov play, about the rigors of the author’s relations with Stalin—who liked some of his work and then kept the writer on a short leash, with little opportunity for publication or staging—lit Wills’ interest. When he needed something to propose for a term-time Cab show his second year at YSD, Wills turned to Bulgakov again, and this time enlisted dramaturg Ilya Khodosh to translate. Their script of The Fatal Eggs is an original dramatic version in English.

As a director, Wills seems to like nothing better than a challenge, and one of the key aspects of the Eggs production at the Cab was how to stage its sci-fi effects—such as a monstrous snake caused by scientific tampering—and how to pack the numerous settings and the dizzying number of characters into the Cab’s minimal space. They did it, after a fashion. But now Eggs, with 7 actors—most former YSD students such as Chris Bannow (*14, co-artistic director of the Summer Cab, with Wills, in 2013), Ceci Fernandez, Michelle McGregor, and Khodosh (all YSD class of 2014 and all in the original production), joined this time by Josiah Bania (*13), Mickey Theis (*14), and two grads of NYU’s Tisch School, Jeanna Phillips and Sathya Sridharan—enacting 56 roles, will get a much fuller staging in a more expansive space. The auditorium for the Araca Project gives Wills a chance to go further into the sometimes extreme effects he’s been noted for in his work at YSD—such as the very physical comedy of Mary Laws’ Blueberry Toast, the outrageous comedy of Kate Tarker’s Thunderbodies, and the ingenious “improv” staging of his dark and endearing thesis show of Peter Pan. This time around, the space should help the narrative of Eggs so that it will be easier to keep the story straight through a use of more distinct settings, with inventive staging by the same creative team Wills worked with the first time around.

As the website describes it, The Fatal Eggs “skewers political incompetence and corruption, misguided faith in technology, a gullible and complacent populace, and a fear-mongering media.” In Bulgakov’s Russia, such skewering meant he would always be a kind of loose cannon whose work would not be staged; in today’s U.S., the play’s targets may seem at times broadly vaudevillian, but bringing together a popular genre like sci-fi with misgivings about the state of our world and of our future is by no means uncommon. Indeed, Bulgakov took his inspiration from H.G. Wells’ Food of the Gods, with its giant chickens and humans, and The War of the Worlds’ manner of disposing of a sci-fi threat. In Bulgakov’s hands, these incidents fuel doubts about the wisdom of “experimenting” with humanity—experiments which may include radical political solutions.

For more info, tickets, donation: here

The Fatal Eggs October 2-5, 2014 American Theatre of Actors 314 W 54th St, New York, NY

For those who have appreciated the student work of these directors, actors, and teams, this is a rare opportunity to see Cab shows expanded and developed further for an audience of New York theater folk and fans, and friends. And the shows complement each other well, though very different in tone: Two darkly comic tales with the macabre trappings of popular genres—the one of sci-fi, the other of folk tales. Both deriving their sense of the human comedy from acerbic Russian sources. Both featuring, in cast and crew, recent graduates of the Yale School of Drama program and directed, respectively, by two former artistic directors responsible for two very successful Summer Cabaret seasons, the one in 2010 and the other in 2013. Two weekends in October, when the thrill of fall should be in the air with the tang of dying leaves. Bones, eggs, so white, and so easily broken.

Get your tickets now!

Yale Summer Cabaret: Summer Shorts Festival

Tonight the Yale Summer Cabaret resumed with Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, formerly known as Southwest Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, between the Years 1884-1915, directed by Jessica Holt, which runs until July 26. It will be followed by Will Eno’s Middletown, directed by Luke Harlan. The first is, at first, a “laugh riot,” Harlan says, that gradually becomes a very moving experience that boldly examines questions of race in America. In returning, the Cab space has been partially reconfigured from the set-up of the first two plays of the season, with the main difference being the placement of the audience: both in and around the action. Actors may be seated at tables with the viewers.

Then the space will be completely changed for Middletown, involving a cast of 11, with the action set up in a different location and most likely using a higher stage platform than has generally been used at the Cab. After Middletown’s run from 31 July to 10 August, including a special 40th Anniversary celebration dinner by invitation, the final slot in the season is occupied by a festival of short plays.

Both Co-Artistic Directors Holt and Harlan have considerable previous experience with festivals of short plays and are enthusiastic about what a shorter playing time affords. “Short plays are often more challenging,” Harlan said, “less safe, and more willing to move beyond boundaries.” A full-length play requires a complete investment in an idea, one able to be fleshed out into a full show. Short plays can make their points more quickly, with greater concentration, and sometimes greater risks.

The intention all along has been to invite plays from alums of the Yale School of Drama. Everyone Holt and Harlan approached was interested. In two cases, with plays by A. Rey Pamatmat and MJ Kaufman, the plays were written expressly for the festival. Others are plays that pre-existed, and one play, by Hansol Jung, is an excerpt from a musical that had been proposed for last year’s term time Cabaret.

Here are the plays, none of which has been previously staged:

Rolin Jones, much lauded for his mash-up of Shakespeare and The Beatles in the Yale Rep show, These! Paper! Bullets!, provides three short plays, each about 10 minutes: Ron Bobby Had Too Big a Heart; Sovereignty; The Mercury and the Magic.

Hansol Jung, whose play Cardboard Piano was at the Carlotta Festival here in the spring, offers an excerpt from a musical, The Undesirables.

MJ Kaufman, winner of the 2013 ASCAP Cole Porter Prize in Playwriting, whose Sagittarius Ponderosa was featured in Carlotta 2013, presents Your Living Room is Full of Ghosts, which is set in an IKEA.

Mary Laws, whose Bird Fire Fly played in Carlotta 2014, returns with All Saints.

A. Rey Pamatmat, recipient of the 2012-13 Hodder Fellowship in Playwriting at Princeton, wrote We Have Cookies specifically for the Festival.

Kate Tarker, author of Thunderbodies, which appeared in Carlotta 2014, offers M.A.H. (A Museum Play).

The plays will be presented in two sets of three plays each, Series A on Thursday, August 14, Series B on Friday, August 15, and both Series on Saturday and Sunday, to close out the Summer Cabaret Season with a marathon of short plays. The plays inclusive to each Series TBA later.

According to Harlan, the playwrights were asked to submit plays less than 30 minutes in length, though one or two may be a bit longer. The entire running time for a Series is 90-100 minutes. Harlan says the majority of the plays are comedies, though comedies that risk violence and, in some cases, look at unpleasant aspects of America. The playwrights were also informed about the actors available for the Festival. There will be 8 actors, all of whom will have been seen during the course of the Summer Season. Two of the short plays feature larger casts, while some require 3 or 4 actors, and there are a few 2 handers as well.

Holt and Harlan will trade-off directing duties, so that each will be involved more or less to the same degree in staging the plays. The strong collaboration that has been shown so far in this year’s Summer Cabaret should be even more on view in this final effort.

Regulars of the Cab know that a surprisingly effective theatrical experience can be provided by short plays, and with the varied casts, playwrights, and running times, the Summer Short Festival offers an excellent opportunity to see the kinds of things the Cab does best.

With only three opportunities to see each Series, spread over four days, secure your tickets early for the Summer Shorts Festival. The end of summer is sooner than you think.

Yale Summer Cabaret 40th Anniversary Season Summer Shorts Festival, August 14-17, 2014

For more information: Summercabaret.org

50th Anniversary Season of the Long Wharf Theatre

Now that the International Festival of Arts & Ideas has come and gone, and even the Yale Summer Cabaret is on a hiatus until it resumes on the 11th, what is a theater person to do? One possibility is start thinking about next season.

Last week at the Long Wharf Theatre, Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein and Associate Artistic Director Eric Ting, in a conversation on stage, situated in two comfy chairs, outlined the coming 50th Anniversary Season of the New Haven theater staple, giving a nearly full house details on the process behind their choices and introducing three dramatic readings from the final three plays to be featured.

Ting, taking the role of interviewer, asked Edelstein “what is the process” in picking plays for a season. There was a charge of applause indicating that many in the audience wonder about that very question. While allowing that the process of selection is the “hardest thing,” Edelstein alluded to his 25 year experience of “picking seasons” both at Long Wharf and in Portland. He mentioned some of the logistics that affect decisions—most notably the “shrinking size of shows,” so that shows with huge casts are harder and harder to put on. And yet Edelstein said he always begins with what he “dreams of doing”—the shows he most would like to put on or see put on. “All our dreams are never realized,” he admitted, but he never loses sight of the main purpose: that a play “say something about what it’s like to be alive now.” And, throwing the question open to the audience a bit, he asked how many would agree that the future of the theater is in new writing and in finding works that appeal to a younger demographic. Most present seemed to agree heartily with this proposition.

Alluding to “the bumpy road and false starts and detours” of a process Edelstein called “complicated” and “non-predictive,” he also spoke of the three main desiderata: that the play be relevant to our local community, that it reflect the times and the country we all live in, and that the season end with a balanced budget. He added that one of the key questions each year is what the centerpiece of the season will be. This year, for the 50th anniversary of the Long Wharf Theatre, he gave that question considerable consideration, with some ideas including works by Arthur Miller, such as The Crucible, which was the first play produced at the Long Wharf, or Death of a Salesman which has never been staged there and which Edelstein would like to direct, though, he added, he felt it was “the wrong statement” at this time.

What play did fit the bill? Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which Edelstein defended (against those who hear the title and think “high school production”) as perhaps the greatest play in the U.S. canon, a play “misunderstood” as “folksy” when in fact it was conceived by its author, who attended Yale and is buried in Hamden, as engaging with avant-garde literature of its time. What’s more, set in “all white” New Hampshire in the early 1900s, Our Town has come to seem a bit of a relic of a more homogeneous America. Edelstein intends to change all that by directed an interracial, multicultural Our Town that “looks like our town now.” He admitted to being “nervous as hell” about tackling this perhaps over-familiar chestnut with new vision as the first play of the season, then added a further wrinkle: the play would be cast using only Long Wharf “alum”—actors and crew who had worked there before. The combination of American classic, Long Wharf familiars, and a more contemporary approach should add up to an Our Town that—if you live in this town—you will not want to miss. Edelstein assured us that we “will not be disappointed.”

OUR TOWN BY THORNTON WILDER DIRECTED BY GORDON EDELSTEIN CLAIRE TOW STAGE IN THE C. NEWTON SCHENCK III THEATRE OCTOBER 9-NOVEMBER 2, 2014 PRESS OPENING: WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2014

Ting, still the interviewer, set up the next play on the bill by restating a “story” he heard that author, comedian, actor, playwright Steve Martin, upon seeing Edelstein’s version of Martin’s The Underpants at Hartford Stage last year decided that he must have the director do Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile. Edelstein recounted how he met Martin at a production of The Underpants and knew that Martin felt the show had been done to perfection. Next thing he knew, he heard that Martin told the producers planning a revival of Lapin Agile that, it’s hoped, may go to Broadway for the first time, that Edelstein was the man for the job. Consequently, Long Wharf audiences will find another clever Martin comedy offered up with a sense of both its verbal absurdities and its slapstick pace, as was The Underpants. And if it does get to Broadway, you can say you saw it here first.

PICASSO AT THE LAPIN AGILE BY STEVE MARTIN DIRECTED BY GORDON EDELSTEIN CLAIRE TOW STAGE IN THE C. NEWTON SCHENCK III THEATRE NOVEMBER 26-DECEMBER 21, 2014 PRESS OPENING: WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2014

Next is the return of Dael Orlandersmith, the playwright, actress, and poet, whose works have “quite a fan base in New Haven,” where Yellowman and The Blue Album were staged at Long Wharf. Forever will be on its world premiere run, beginning in LA and stopping in New Haven en route to New York. Centered around the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, where, it so happens, American expats such as rock star Jim Morrison and renowned African-American author Richard Wright are buried among French literary figures and other notables, Forever deals with the ghosts of the past, and the sense of family—“the ones we were born into, the ones we create for ourselves”—and is, Edelstein says, Orlandersmith’s “most powerful piece yet.”

FOREVER BY DAEL ORLANDERSMITH DIRECTED BY NEEL KELLER WORLD PREMIERE STAGE II JANUARY 2-FEBRUARY 1, 2015 PRESS OPENING: WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 7, 2015

Called by the New York Times one of the best comedies of the 2013-14 season in New York, Joshua Harmon’s Bad Jews takes up the theme of legacy where two cousins, one male and one female, battle over a religious necklace, an heirloom that their late grandfather, a survivor of the Holocaust, kept concealed on his person throughout his years of captivity. The jousting between the staunchly Hebraic Daphna and her less observant cousin Liam fuels a play of the comic ties and trials of blood relations. The except on stage at the Long Wharf preview readily attested to the comic potential of Daphna’s belligerence and the hapless niceness of Liam’s non-Jewish girlfriend in the face of such superior attitudes.

BAD JEWS BY JOSHUA HARMON STAGE II FEBRUARY 18-MARCH 22, 2015 PRESS OPENING: WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2015

For the penultimate production of the season, director Eric Ting brings us a play that has its finger on the dismaying news events that continue to surface in the supposedly “post-racial” America of the Obama presidency. Kimber Lee’s brownsville song (b-side for tray) tells of the aftermath, for an interracial family, of the loss of young, engaging and promising Tray. Revealed to us in flashbacks, Tray’s life involves, in the scene enacted for us at the preview, managing a Starbucks where his step-mother, who abandoned Tray and his younger sister to their grandmother’s care, shows up, looking for a job. An “issue play on some level,” Ting said, “at heart it’s about family,” and the role it plays in dealing with tragic events and the hardships of contemporary life.

brownsville song (b-side for tray) BY KIMBER LEE DIRECTED BY ERIC TING CLAIRE TOW STAGE IN THE C. NEWTON SCHENCK III THEATRE A co-production with Philadelphia Theatre Company MARCH 25-APRIL 19, 2015 PRESS OPENING: WEDNESDAY, APRIL 1, 2015

The final play of the season, directed by Edelstein, will be the world premiere of The Second Mrs. Wilson, a play that revisits an interesting historical situation. President Woodrow Wilson’s first wife died while he was in office and he became the first president to woo and wed a woman while president. That would be interesting enough, perhaps, but the situation of the play is more pressing: not long after the wedding, Wilson suffered a stroke and was largely incapacitated. Di Pietro’s play looks at a situation in which a woman, persona non grata to the Cabinet and others trying to run the president’s administration, has to take charge in a man’s world in her husband’s stead as de facto head of the Executive Branch. In the scenes enacted at the preview, we saw Edith Boling Galt, a widow, charm the donnish president Wilson; in the second we watched her take command, delicately but firmly, of a meeting with one of the chiefs of staff. A play about the kinds of tests and resources in life that demand strong resolve, the play is relevant to the changing role of women in American politics.

THE SECOND MRS. WILSON BY JOE DiPIETRO DIRECTED BY GORDON EDELSTEIN CLAIRE TOW STAGE IN THE C. NEWTON SCHENCK III THEATRE WORLD PREMIERE MAY 6-31, 2015 PRESS OPENING: MAY 13, 2015

Subscriptions are already on sale. Single tickets will go on sale Monday, August 4. For more information about the 50th anniversary season, visit www.longwharf.org or call 203-787-4282.

Split Knuckle Theatre's Connecticut Debut at Long Wharf

An acclaimed theatrical group is relocating to New Haven. Split Knuckle Theatre, founded in London in 2005, will be performing their new show Endurance at the Long Wharf Theatre, June 17-29. According to Greg Webster, one of the founding members and a professor of Movement Theater at UConn in Storrs, the group was formed mainly by American students abroad in England at the London International School of Performing Arts in 2005. Their intention from the start was “to combine activity with complex ideas,” with all members of the troupe “rooted in acting as physical bodywork.” Webster likens the group to the same tradition as Rude Mechs of Texas, where theatrical space is part of the show, with unlikely objects and props put into service, as opposed to the kind of “kitchen naturalism” that is still the basis of most regional theater.

Endurance came about, Webster says, when the group was trying to come up with a new project and he found himself channel-surfing one night and stumbled on what he describes as an excellent BBC documentary on the Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton’s expedition to Antarctica in 1914. Somehow—let’s call it creative ferment—Webster’s impressions of the documentary got mixed with a dream in which an office worker was being attacked by a Xerox machine. Add to the mix the fact that the Split Knuckle show was being developed during the nose-diving economy of 2007-08, with such memorable events as the federal bail-out of AIG and Fannie and Freddie Mac, and you’ve got the makings of a show that treats reality in a rather cavalier fashion as it works between two settings at once: an office where Walter Spivey must rally his troops to survive the blood-letting taking place in a Hartford insurance firm, and the exploratory voyage of Shackleton who, with his ship, appropriately named Endurance, floundering in ice, must keep his crew alive and optimistic—for two years. For Webster, that’s the takeaway: as Shackleton himself said, “we must always remember that optimism is true moral courage.” The play attempts to bring that insight to bear on the everyday workplace to show that it’s true of any endeavor; not only death-defying situations, but wherever the task is to “weather the crisis.”

Webster says that the play moves with the speed of something like The 39 Steps, and all the shifts in scene are done with a collection of objects used as props to suggest the different settings. Trained in the influential methods of Jacques Lecoq, a master of physical theater, Split Knuckle has played in 19 different countries and, though Webster lives now in New Haven and the troupe has become based here, this is its first time staging a show in CT. At a conference trade show, Long Wharf’s PR man Steve Scarpa took an interest in the Split Knuckle’s presentation and went to Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein and Associate Artistic Director Eric Ting, with the result that the show has been brought home, so to speak.

Webster says the name “split knuckle” came from a literal split knuckle he endured during a period when his frustration with theater—don’t get him started on open calls—caused him to punch a door and injure his hand. Out of that frustration came the desire to work with actors who would be in control of the entire venture, rather than lining up at 5 a.m. for “cattle calls” with a host of others all matching the same character description. Rehearsal for the group, Webster says, is “fooling around” to find what works, and likens the troupe’s dynamic to being in a jazz ensemble, albeit one in which every musician can play, potentially, every instrument. The intention is always “organic collaboration” with no “methodology of hierarchy” where one voice dominates or overrides others. Once the piece has evolved into its form, it’s fixed and “runs like a clock, precise and beautiful.” Though it may still appear somewhat improvisational to an audience seeing it for the first time, it has, by then, already shown itself sea-worthy.

Why Shackleton, an explorer often forgotten by history buffs who tend to remember the heroic stories of someone like Scott who lost his entire expedition? For Webster, Shackleton is important because he gave up on his goal of reaching the pole in 1909 when it became clear he couldn’t achieve it without the loss of life. Other explorers were willing to suffer casualties to achieve success; Shackleton’s “no man left behind” ethos might well be a kind of heroism more meaningful in a time when the wounds of employee attrition are still smarting.

Split Knuckle Theatre’s Endurance promises an evening of lively, physically inventive, and entertaining theater, bridging different times and situations—each dire in its own way—to explore the inspiring themes of survival and sacrifice.

Split Knuckle Theatre Endurance

Devised by Jason Bohon, Andrew Grusetskie, Michael Toomey, and Greg Webster, with Nick Ryan, collaborating writer; Ken Clark, musical composition; Dan Rousseau, lighting; Carmen Torres, stage manager

The Long Wharf Theatre Stage II June 17-29

The Imponderables and The Institute Library

The Institute Library, which is now serving as a home for the New Haven Review, is about to see a big shift. It's an exciting change, but one I cannot help, personally, but be a little sad about. After three years, Will Baker is leaving his post as Executive Director of the Library, and moving to Pittsburgh. Now, I'm sure he'll have a grand old time there, as he is known for his love of Rust Belt cities. But this small New England city will not be the same without him. The Board of Directors of the Library spent a few months working on selecting a new Executive Director, and it was, I can tell you, a strange process filled with unexpected turns. I was, myself, on the search committee, and we read resumes from people living all over the United States. There were a lot of folks who were very hot to trot to come to the Library and take over where Will would be leaving off. I entered this process with a very open mind, thinking, "It is entirely possible that the next ED will be someone from Tennessee who hasn't ever been here but just somehow Gets It." Because, of course, this is a position where diplomas and straight-arrow resumes don't necessarily make someone the right candidate. This is a position where it really boils down to what Jeeves might refer to as "imponderables."  Having an MLS is nice, but not the point. What matters is having, oh, I don't know -- a kind of spirit and energy and gung-ho-ness; and having a real grasp of what the library has been about, and, what it can be about in the future. Those are really hard to quantify qualities.

It surprised me very much when at the end of the day, the library's new Executive Director turned out to be none other than a neighbor of mine, someone who I met last year when I found her lost mitten on Orange Street, someone who I see several times a week, in passing. Her name's Natalie Elicker, and she's someone who has been doing tremendous work around New Haven the last few years, working in various capacities. She's been working as a lawyer, but she's actually better known to me for doing all kinds of volunteer work and being one of those people that everyone seems to know. (At the time I met Natalie, returning her lost mitten to her, I was actually a little sheepish because I realized I'd probably walked past her house a million times, passed her on the street eight million times, and never once said hello. We ought to've known each other already.) So: Will Baker, who also has made his home on Orange Street the last few years, will be passing the baton to Natalie, resident of Orange Street. He's very happy about it, he tells me -- it turns out he has known Natalie since he moved to New Haven, years and years ago, and thinks very highly of her. (Will is clearly a better neighbor than I am.)

On Saturday, May 24th, the Library will be hosting an open house from 4 to 6 in the afternoon, so that any and all members of the New Haven community can come and celebrate Will's tenure at the Institute Library. When they come up the stairs, they will see a library that has changed so much from the place the Library was in 2011, when Will was hired.

When Will came on board, the Library was, granted, a pleasantly sleepy place -- it was a heavy mug of hot milk with honey in it: comfortable, eminently enjoyable, something that made you feel you were living in a novel of another era. But it was floundering in many ways, and it needed help. The Board had put a lot of energy into organizing that help, and was doing the best it could, but the fact was, someone was needed to be at the Library full-time, every day, and help wake the place up. We needed to change the Institute Library in some ways, yet find a way to maintain the old elements that made the Library the sanctuary it was. Somehow, Will Baker grasped this. He said, basically, "Hi, I'm Will, I think I can help you out." And he did. He took ideas we had and ran with them; he added his own ideas to the mix, and implemented them. People began to come into the library and then they added their ideas, and the day-to-day of the Library got very wondrously complex. The third floor was renovated, and a gallery was formed. It had been an utterly neglected space for decades -- decades! -- and it was, within a year, I think, of Will's hiring, a place where huge, crazy art pieces were installed, pieces that wouldn't have been displayed anywhere else in New Haven. (Thanks for this are, for sure, to be directed to Stephen Kobasa, who guided the gallery into existence and then made sure all was well for three years -- but it wouldn't have happened at all, I suspect, were it not for Will being there in the first place.)

With Will at the helm, the library was able to expand its hours. This is no small thing. This is a huge thing. There was a time when the library was only open about 10 hours a week, or something dismal like that, because financial worries made it impossible to do more. But the library made the investment in Will, who made the investment in the Library, in turn, and he changed the way things worked. Suddenly the library was open Monday through Friday, 10-6; and on Saturday, a corps of volunteers kept the place open mid-day. This was, at least to me, a huge sign. Being open -- almost nothing was as important as that, to me. The way the library had been so dormant all those years before -- the short hours were, to me, a symbol of all the sleepiness. It was quaint to read about but so hard to love ... because you simply couldn't get inside. But that changed.

The Library became a little daytime writer's colony. It became a place where alter kockers came to read magazines and peruse old books of essays and talk socialist politics. It became a place where teenagers came and helped out because they thought it was fun and because they felt like this was their place. Everyone's been at home at the library. This is an astounding level of change for some of the board members to contemplate. It seemed so improbable.

But we had to admit this: Library could not continue as it was. It had to adapt. The miracle here isn't really merely that Will changed the Library. A lot of people could have changed the Library and led it to a more stable place -- and while it's not sustainable, currently, it is closer to a sustainable financial footing than it has been in years -- because there are a lot of people who have fancy degrees in management and arts administration and such. And they could have come in and said, "OK, so, what we're going to do is this." And maybe the place would have thrived. But it would almost certainly have become an entirely different sort of place. And it could easily have lost its grounding in history, local history, because a lot of people aren't sensitive to that kind of thing. It's easy to talk about preservation, and have good intentions, but it is damned hard to achieve the preservation of a place like the Library. I've talked with a lot of people about it, over the years, and it's one of those things where either you Get It or you Don't. So I can tell you:

Few people would have allowed the Library to change and thrive with the style and manner that Will did. Will married Change with Preservation; he got the old and the new to talk with one another, civilly, and with laughter, and over cups of hot coffee. The Library may not be a double mocha cappuccino, but it is no longer the mug of hot milk and honey. It is something new, at the same time that it is something old. The Institute Library is a better place thanks to Will Baker, and we are indebted to him. I am indebted to him.

All are welcome Saturday afternoon. Four to six. Thanks, Will.

Inventive Theater Opens Friday: A Broken Umbrella Theatre is Back

The Broken Umbrella Theatre is back. After their stint as part of the Arts and Ideas Festival last year—where their show Freewheelers was one of the hottest tickets—BUT has more to live up to than ever. The troupe is known for its fresh way of incorporating facts, locations, and famous personages from New Haven history into original theatrical productions that are entertaining, educational, and inventive.

The subject of their latest production—opening tomorrow night for its first weekend run, and continuing for the next two successive weekends, through June 8—is A. C. Gilbert, the man who invented the Erector set, a build-it yourself “play set” that has turned 100. Gilbert’s toy company, originally called the Mysto Manufacturing Company when the Erector set was first developed in 1913, was one of the biggest local employers in New Haven as the A. C. Gilbert Company from 1916 and for nearly fifty years, till Gilbert’s death in 1961. According to Rachel Alderman, a producer of Gilbert the Great, Gilbert saw the idea of toys as “trinkets or baubles”—which they had been mostly—as a disservice to children. Gilbert believed that toys should be “educational, instructive, and amusing” (the claim for his Erector set), and that they should develop boys into “builders of tomorrow.” And, yes, he did mean boys. Gilbert’s ideal of manhood—the kind of guys who would fight two World Wars and return to bolster the economy through innovation and know-how—was served by his development of such “toys” as chemistry kits and an “atomic kit” that contained actual radioactive material. Gilbert wasn’t kidding around.

The breakthrough invention, though, was clearly the Erector set and so Gilbert the Great will be staged in what was once Gilbert’s factory—Erector Square, of course. The Erector set, which came in a variety of formats depending on how much money you could spare and how intricate you wanted your constructions to be, consisted of actual steel girders and could also include pulleys, caster wheels for motion and even, in the advanced kits, the means to build functional motors. Indeed, Alderman says, Gilbert, who was a noted inventor and not just a toy manufacturer, developed enamel-coated wire that made possible the creation of tiny motors, a key factor in the production of smaller appliances, such as blenders and hair dryers, and for beloved toys such as the model train. And trains are part of the story.

“One story,” Alderman says, “is that Gilbert got the idea for the Erector set while on a train into New York City when he observed the steel girders built to carry the electric lines for the train.” However, she adds, Gilbert was also savvy enough to buy up a European competitor—called Meccano—that was already on the market. Gilbert, she says, was a genius at marketing and was also skilled as a proselytizer for his products. When, during World War II shortages, there was a plan to suspend the production of such expendable items as toys, the titan of the toy industry took his argument to Congress, insisting that the toys of today build the men of tomorrow and that children need toys in order to become responsible and capable adults. It worked.

The key to Gilbert’s Erector set was the hands-on approach, and visitors to the BUT production will find in the lobby displays from the Eli Whitney Museum that inform about Gilbert’s company, including a timeline and exhibits of Erector sets. The story of Gilbert is part of New Haven history, and Alderman and her associates found, in researching and preparing the dramaturgy of the production, that many current residents of New Haven worked for Gilbert’s company, which was the first job for many now retired.

Gilbert himself is something of a character and will be played—as a character in the play—by different actors at different times. An inventor, a manufacturer, a marketer, an athlete, Gilbert was the kind of all-purpose businessman that lots of people have in mind when they talk about the American way of business. But Gilbert was also an Olympian gold medalist, in the long jump and in pole-vaulting, a graduate of Yale, and, to pay his way through college, a practicing magician. In fact, his first toy line was a magic kit for kids. Such a larger than life figure should have a play written about him.

Gilbert the Great celebrates Gilbert’s values of brainstorming, innovation, and collaboration. The play is set in 1954, the year Gilbert published his autobiography, in Gilbert’s factory where a group of workers—Betty (Lisa Daly), Morty (Ryan Gardner), Gladys (Rachel Alderman), Herb (Lou Mangini), Donald (Matthew Gaffney)—are expected to collaborate on a project. The process of their interactions and ideas mirrors the process of theater and gives the troupe the opportunity to work in certain fantastical elements, a bit of magical realism (fitting enough for a guy who was a magician), and unexpected developments. The characters, to some extent, are inspired by stories the play-writing team of Charles Alexander and Jes Mack heard from locals they interviewed about the factory in its heyday. “People will recognize the details of the story, such as parents bringing home stray pieces from sets for their children, and will be able to connect with the intergenerational experience Gilbert's industry provided," Alderman says.

Alderman calls the play “a fast-paced, whimsical and poignant” reflection on Gilbert’s legacy at a time when people are becoming wary of the passivity of children spending so much time looking at screens and foregoing the kinds of exploration and do-it-yourself, hands-on manipulation and experiential learning that Gilbert insisted was paramount for engagement with the world of things, the world we all live in.

Just at the Erector sets were not toys for small children, Gilbert the Great is not recommended for children under 7.

Special events are planned during the show’s run:

Friday, May 23, Opening Night: a special champagne toast after the show with its cast, crew and creative team

Saturday, May 31: a post-show talkback, with dessert, and discussion with Bill Brown, of the Eli Whitney Museum

Saturday, June 8, 2 p.m.: a Gilbert-inspired walking tour with guide Colin Caplan, location TBA

Directed by Ruben Ortiz, Ian Alderman, and Ryan Gardner, the show’s creation team also includes Rachel Alderman, Charles Alexander, Dana Astmann, Megan Brennan, Lisa Daly, Ian Dunn, Matthew Gaffney, Jes Mack, Louis Mangini.

A Broken Umbrella Theatre presents Gilbert the Great At Erector Square, Building 5, Floor 2 315 Peck Street, New Haven May 23-June 8 Fridays: 8 p.m.; Saturdays: 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.; Sundays: 4 p.m.

for information and tickets

I was wrong in 1988. Bob Dylan Matters. OK?

So, in 1988, I was sitting in Broadway Pizza eating pizza and talking with some friends of mine who both happened to be named Dave. We were all people who cared a lot about music. I mean, a lot. We were the sort of people who went to record conventions to buy bootleg recordings of stuff, we spent hundreds of dollars collecting Japanese imports of, you know, whatever we were into. We were whack jobs. I worked at Cutler's Records, in those days. The subject of Bob Dylan came up. He had a new album out, and the Daves weren't drooling to get their hands on it, but they were saying things like, "yeah, I gotta get the new Dylan, I'll pick it up this weekend." And I snorted, "Bob Dylan is irrelevant."

This led to one of the biggest arguments about music I think I've ever had, and the Daves and I still talk about it today, when I run into them. Which isn't often, but this is New Haven, so, you know, it happens, now and then.

We laugh about it.

Dylan has proven to be important to a lot of people for longer than I could possibly have imagined, back then in June of 1988. Now, I personally still don't care much. I had a phase when I really enjoyed The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, and thanks to a college roommate who was obsessed with Blood on the Tracks, I came to really love that album too. But otherwise? I have to admit I don't really give a hoot.

Here's what I give a hoot about: Donald Brown's book about Bob Dylan. The Institute Library is hosting a book release party this week. Come on down. Maybe get the book. Here's why you should do this: because you know -- if you're a reader of the NHR's site -- Don is a smart guy. He's got a good sense of humor (something I find many Dylan types sorely lack). He's a really good writer. And... it's coming toward the end of May, and you need to get out more.

I'll see you there. I'll be the woman standing around arguing heatedly with whoever will listen, insisting that for my money, Lou Reed is more interesting than Dylan...

Here's the NHR / Institute Library site for reserving a spot.

And here's the amazon listing for the book, which already has some good review! (The book will be on sale at the party, slightly cheaper than on amazon.)

40 Years On: A Preview of Yale Summer Cabaret, 2014

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Yale Summer Cabaret, a theatrical entity separate from Yale Cabaret (or “term time Cabaret”), which began life in 1974.

In tribute to the four decades of its existence, the current Yale Summer Cabaret, led by Artistic Directors Jessica Holt and Luke Harlan, with Managing Director Gretchen Wright and Associate Managing Director Sooyoung Hwang, will be staging plays by living American authors, beginning with Christopher Durang, who was one of the founding members of the Summer Cabaret 40 years ago. Today, of course, he’s celebrated for plays such as his most recent, the Tony Award-winning “Best Play” of 2013, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (which Summer Cab wanted to mount this year but Hartford Stage got there first), but, once upon a time, he was a YSD student working in the Summer Cabaret.

The decision to feature contemporary American playwrights follows nicely on last year’s program, which was a kind of syllabus of world theater, from the neoclassicism of Molière through naturalism, symbolism, and ending with the absurdist and pointed work of contemporary British playwright Caryl Churchill. The note reached at the end of last year’s Summer Cab, with Churchill’s Drunk Enough to Say I Love You looking askance at American dominance since WWII, sets up nicely this year’s program of “voices at the forefront of American theater,” works that encapsulate complex perspectives on our cultural heritage, our place in the world, our self-image, and our values, as a nation.

The shows will, like last year, open sequentially and play for about two weeks each. At midsummer, a break will give the company time to reconfigure the space so that, unlike last year, the seating arrangements will not remain fixed for the entire summer but will alter midway. This, Holt and Harlan feel, gives audiences the best of both worlds: the stage-like setup of last year’s Summer Cab, for two shows, and the more amorphous arrangements typical of term-time Cab for the next two shows. Capping off the two months of contemporary full-length plays will be a four-day program of very recent short plays, all by YSD alums, including the three playwrights currently featured at this year’s Carlotta Festival, Hansol Jung, Mary Laws, Kate Tarker.

The Program

First up, in June, is Christopher Durang’s 2009 absurdist comedy Why Torture is Wrong and the People Who Love Them which Holt, who will direct, describes as a “wildly funny, wacky, and zany” comedy about such laughing matters as torture, terrorism, gun violence, domestic dysfunction, male domination, and the fraught nature of interracial or cross-cultural marriage in America. In Holt’s view, the play is “grappling with what it means to be American,” and so, ultimately, fits the Summer program better than Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike would have.

We meet Felicity (Ariana Venturi), a young woman who has apparently married the unsettling Zamir (James Custati-Moyer) while drunk, so that she seems to be meeting him when we do, as she has no previous recollection of him. Then, of course, we go home to meet the folks: father (Aaron Bartz) and mother (Maura Hooper), with support from Aubie Merrylees as the seedy Reverend Mike, Celeste Arias as Hildegarde, dad’s “colleague,” and Andrew Burnap providing the cartoonish voice over. The play takes on most of the things the news keeps Americans fretting about, as stories of violence and the threat of violence are as American as television. From 5 June to 15 June

Next, still in June, Luke Harlan will direct Erin Courtney’s A Map of Virtue (2012), a New England premiere. Harlan calls the play a “journey into darkness” that mixes genres—romantic comedy, horror story, mystery, docu-drama—to keep the audience guessing. Narrated by a bird statue, the play tweaks expectations at every turn, but is also structurally symmetrical, with 6 scenes leading to a major event and 6 scenes following that key moment. With a cast of 7, the play mainly focuses on Sarah and Nate, a stranger named Mark and a house in the woods. An “exploration of evil,” the play, Holt says, is also “charming, brilliant, and ebulliently written,” and addresses the effect on relationships of traumatic events. From 19 June to 29 June

After 11 days off, including the 4th of July weekend, the Summer Cabaret returns with Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, formerly known as Southwest Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, between the Years 1884-1915. Director Jessica Holt calls the play, which played at SoHo Rep in 2012, directed by Eric Ting of the Long Wharf, a “meta-theatrical inquiry into cultural anthropology” as we watch a theatrical troupe in the process of creating a play about the “first genocide of the twentieth century.” Germany, during the inclusive years in the play’s title, controlled what was then called Deutsch-Südwestafrika, which is today the nation of Namibia, and during that time found cause to destroy the Herero tribe. With a ruthless efficiency that seems the prototype for genocide against Jews and Poles in WWII, German soldiers were put in the position of executioners of a native population. But the only record of what took place can be found in the soldiers’ letters home. In Drury’s play, the actors’ difficulties with imagining and inhabiting the roles dictated by the extreme situations—particularly with gaps in knowledge and motivation—leads to obvious analogies to violence against native and slave populations in the U.S. Holt sees the play within the play as an ingenious device to bring the audience into the situation through the comic and seemingly improvised interactions of rehearsal, inviting the audience to consider the implications of their own presence in the room with the actors. From 11 July to 26 July

The final full-length play is Will Eno’s Middletown, the author’s breakthrough play. Eno has been called, by Charles Isherwood, “the Samuel Beckett of the Jon Stewart generation,” and, while I don’t know that many see themselves as defined generationally by watching Stewart, the notion of unsettling existentialism rubbing up against the self-aware ironies of the American media does strike a chord. Eno’s The Realistic Joneses, currently on Broadway, debuted at the Yale Rep in 2012 and was one of the best new plays to show up there in recent memory. Middletown dates from 2010 and is a kind of Our Town for an edgier era. In director Luke Harlan’s view the play asks, as does Our Town for an earlier time, “what does it mean to be alive right now?” Without romanticizing or dismissing everyday lives, but with real “humor and fear,” Harlan says, Eno’s play looks at normal people living normal lives in an “Anytown U.S.A.” but lets them say things no one says aloud. With a cast of 10 actors playing 20 characters, the show will be an opportunity to sample the excellent ensemble work of YSD and Cabaret shows. From 31 July to 10 August

Finally, the Summer Cabaret closes with Summer Shorts, a four-day festival of new short plays by six playwrights “whose work was first nurtured and developed at the Yale School of Drama.” Divided into Series A and Series B, there will be at least three plays in each Series (or evening), and on the last two days, Saturday and Sunday, August 16th and 17th, all the plays will be staged in two sequences, at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m., respectively, both evenings. The line-up of plays will be previewed here during the Summer Cab’s July interim. This part of the program should be very interesting, seeing what can be done in a short compass by playwrights that Holt and Harlan regard as the future of theater. From 14 August to 17 August

The Team

Jessica Holt, rising third year directing candidate, and Luke Harlan, rising second year directing candidate, met at the meet-and-greet last spring when Harlan visited Yale as a prospective YSD student. They hit it off then, with their belief in new plays that had been fostered by their work in, respectively, the San Francisco and New York theater scenes. By the time Harlan was midway through his first year, the two had begun to plan a proposal for the Summer Cabaret, where Holt put in time working last summer. Their mission statement focused on the virtues of new and challenging works that had enjoyed successful and highly regarded first or, at most, second runs.

Very aware that they are presenting the 40th anniversary season of the beloved experiment that is the Summer Cabaret, the Co-Artistic Directors wanted to provide a provocative line-up of plays that tell stories. Both directed plays in last year’s term-time Cabaret: Holt directed Edward Bond’s darkly comic dystopian play Have I None, a U.S. premiere, and Harlan reached back to The Brothers Size, an early play by YSD alum Tarell Alvin McCraney that gave Yale Cabaret 46 a strong finish. Holt’s and Harlan’s choices showed the commitment to current plays and youngish playwrights demonstrated by the Summer Cab line-up.

For their Managing Director, Holt and Harlan asked around “and heard and observed good things” about Gretchen Wright, whose background in choreography may afford participation beyond the key role of keeping the Cabaret running smoothly. As regular patrons of the Summer Cabaret know, the summer is a different animal from the term-time Cabaret, becoming a welcome oasis in a college town whose median age ratchets up considerably in the summer months. Other entertainments of the “afterhours” variety may be added later.

With its first offering, the 40th anniversary Summer Cabaret will touch base with its origins before taking us on a journey that will demonstrate some of the contemporary values of theater—bending genres, looking at the problem of historical enactment, re-imagining the “domestic quotidian,” and demonstrating the resources of short but powerful recent pieces.

The key terms for the 40th Summer Cabaret, devised by Holt and Harlan, are Community. Excellence. Imagination. Innovation. Investigation. Wonder. Providing excellent theater to the New Haven community through innovative works that investigate our ways of life with a sense of imaginative wonder, the Summer Cabaret will up and running in three and a half weeks.

Prepare to be challenged.

The Yale Summer Cabaret 2014 Voices at the Forefront of American Theater

Photographs by Christopher Ash

Passes and single tickets are available online at summercabaret.org, by phone at (203) 432-1567, by email at summer.cabaret@yale.edu, and in person at the Yale Summer Cabaret box office (217 Park Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06511).

Life During Wartime: a new program from Cantata Profana

Last spring, I was quite impressed by members of Cantata Profana in performance of the challenging score of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire in a dramatic staging of that work directed by Ethan Heard at Yale Cabaret. This weekend, Cantata Profana is back with a new program, “The Rest of the World at War: Germany—America—1942,” which their press release describes as “both a deep reflection on the War and a comedy show for music nerds.” Artistic Director Jacob Ashworth says that the idea for the program began with the Richard Strauss sextet that opens his last opera Capriccio. Written in 1942, in wartime Berlin, the work is striking, as Ashworth sees it, for its lack of engagement with a world at war. Six characters in a salon debate “which is more important in opera: music or words.” The opera's opening is “decadent and irresponsible,” Ashworth says, “for someone in such a highly influential position.” In his 70s, Strauss seems to have chosen to detach his music from any real world relevance. Praising the work as “stunningly beautiful,” Ashworth wanted to find companion pieces that would help create an artistic and historical context for Strauss’ preference for aesthetic contemplation over engagement with the times.

Last year Cantata Profana performed a program as a centennial celebration for works composed in 1913. Though 1942, as a year, is not as directly related to 2014, Ashworth chose other works from the period when the U.S. entered the war as companion pieces with the Capriccio sextet. Bookending the program is a work by the avant-garde composer Arthur Schoenberg who, in 1942, was 10 years younger than Strauss when he wrote Ode to Napoleon, a work which uses lines from a poem written by Lord Byron in 1814 to characterize the fall of the world-dominating “tyrant,” and references Austria—later, the birthplace of Hitler—while addressing Napoleon in an interesting fashion: “Must she too bend, must she too share / Thy late repentance, long despair, / Thou throneless Homicide?”

Other works chosen for the program offer contrasts to the German romanticism and modernism of Strauss and Schoenberg. Elliott Carter, the long-lived American composer who died recently in 2012, at age 103, was influenced by Stravinsky and created avant-garde works but, Ashworth says, often forgotten are his earlier forays into Copland-like Americana such as The Defense of Corinth, a piece for a speaker, a male chorus and piano, four hands. The choral work is highly comedic, according to Ashworth, in its evocation of the preparations for war by the town of Corinth, as described by Rabelais in the Prologue to Book III of Pantagruel. Carter’s score suggests the sound effects of martial preparations as well as the useless activity of the philosopher Diogenes who joins in the busy activities by engaging in the Sisyphean labor of repeatedly hauling an empty tub up a mountain and letting it clatter down. In 1941, when the piece was written, the U.S. had not yet entered the war and Carter’s piece could be a look askance at the war mania throughout the world or a prescient glance ahead to the war effort that would soon occupy the U.S. after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of that year.

John Cage, the youngest of the composers on the program, was only 30 in 1942 and his Credo in Us was written that year in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Cage approaches his piece in what Ashworth describes as “a very slippery” manner. On the one hand, it is “a love letter” to his partner Merce Cunningham who devised dance to go with portions of the piece, so that “Us” is Cage and Cunningham, but, on the other hand, “Us” is the U.S. and the piece, with its use of classical phonograph recordings, the radio, boogie woogie, percussion including tom toms, could be said to be a microcosm of the soundscapes available at the fatal moment when the war in Europe became truly a “world” war with the East attacking the West.

Founded in 2013 by students at the Yale School of Music and the Institute for Sacred Music, Cantata Profana is an ensemble comprised of a dedicated group of players, with a flexible arrangement for additions and collaborations, "able to combine anything from duos to chamber operas in one evening.” The group has been praised in the New York Times for their ability to encompass a range of musical periods and styles in their performances. Often choosing works that have a strong narrative or descriptive component, Ashworth sees the future of the group as based on greater merging of music and theatrical ventures; one such venture is collaboration with the newly formed Heartbeat Opera company, which involves working with Ethan Heard and Louisa Proske, both alums of the Yale School of Drama, whose work in musical theatricals has been noted here: Pierrot Lunaire and La Voix Humaine. Ashworth and other company members of Cantata Profana will act as “pitband” for Heartbeat in their upcoming workshop presentation of Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins, which, Cantata Profana hopes, “will be the beginning of a long-standing relationship.”

The 1942 program will be performed this Saturday, May 10, at Trinity Lutheran Church on Orange and Wall Streets in New Haven, and on Sunday, May 11, in Brooklyn.

THE REST OF THE WORLD AT WAR: GERMANY - AMERICA – 1942 R. Strauss, Sextet from Capriccio; Elliott Carter, The Defense of Corinth; John Cage, Credo in US; Schoenberg, Ode to Napoleon (featuring John Taylor Ward)

Saturday, May 10, 8:00pm at Trinity Lutheran Church in New Haven Sunday, May 11, 8:00pm at 22 Boerum Place in Brooklyn

Carlotta Festival: New Plays Soon to Open

Carlotta is coming! The annual festival of new plays by the three playwrights graduating from Yale School of Drama—this year, Hansol Jung, Mary Laws, Kate Tarker—opens next week, May 9th and continues till May 16th. The plays are directed by the three graduating directors whose thesis shows were staged earlier this school year: Cole Lewis, who directed Dürrenmatt’s The Visit, directs Jung’s Cardboard Piano, Katherine McGerr, who directed Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, directs Laws’ Bird Fire Fly, and Dustin Wills, who directed Barrie’s Peter Pan, directs Tarker’s Thunderbodies.

According to Hansol Jung, the plays for this year’s Carlotta began as “Not-Carlotta Plays”—for their final play to be produced as students at YSD, all three playwrights returned, as chance would have it, to plays written in their second year for a workshop with Sarah Ruhl; at the time, none were consciously writing a play for Carlotta, nor felt the plays would eventually become their Carlotta plays. Working on the plays in such close proximity may have had its effect, however, as all three plays are concerned to some degree with war, and each features a soldier amongst its characters.

The inspiration for Jung’s play came from documentaries she had watched about “The Bang Bang Club”—a group of photographers who placed themselves in harms’ way to take hard-hitting photographs of parts of Africa facing war and famine. Jung also points to the viral online video about Joseph Kony and his depredations, involving child soldiers and other crimes against humanity. At the time when Carlotta proposals were due, Jung “had three plays, in various states of draft, on the table.” Director Lewis and dramaturg Whitney Dibo, Co-Artistic Director of Yale Cabaret 46, as well as faculty advisors, were unanimous in seeing Cardboard Piano as the play Jung should go with.

Jung says the play “gravitates toward trauma”; Cardboard Piano begins on New Year’s Eve, 2000, in a cathedral where two teen-aged girls, one the daughter of missionaries, have gone to unite themselves in marriage, only to be interrupted by child soldiers, hiding out. Part two opens, after an intermission, 14 years later as the girls, women now, return to the scene. For Jung, one challenge in writing the play is its strict adherence to “the unities” of time, place, and duration. Each part occurs in one location and in real time, offering “a day in the life” quality that should also resonate, in the second part, as a recognition scene with “super high stakes.” Large in scope and execution, the play retains something of the stagecraft minimalism that Jung prefers.

Jung worked as a director’s assistant in South Korea before coming to the States, where she received an MFA in Directing at Penn State before embarking on play-writing. She has done extensive work with musicals and always finds a place for song in her plays, but none so far have been musicals—though she is working on a musical side project at present. Her play’s title comes from a story told to calm one of the soldiers, and she finds in the image of a fragile, artful thing that can be destroyed but also restored a figure for the effect her play achieves.

Cardboard Piano plays Fri, 5/9; Mon, 5/12; Thurs, 5/15, at 8 p.m. and Wed, 5/14, at 2 p.m.

Mary Laws’ play Bird Fire Fly departs rather notably from the three unities. A short play in three parts, with a cast of three male actors, Bird Fire Fly’s tripartite title indicates the three distinct segments of the play, the 1st, “Bird,” depicting children, the 2nd, “Fire,” young adults, and “Fly,” soldiers.

“The three character names stay the same,” Laws says, though they are not the same people nor played, from section to section, by the same actor. The choice to avoid even the most basic unity of character identity was spurred by Laws’ interest in creating “a larger landscape less about individuals, and in following the arc of an experience.” The play, in her view, depends more on its poetry, its symbols and metaphors, rather than on static characterization. “There’s a contained story in each part, each a piece of the puzzle” that is the question of the whole play.

Of her plays that might have worked for Carlotta, Laws chose the one she wrote in the same workshop with Sarah Ruhl that spawned the other Carlotta plays this year. Laws finds the play well-suited to the Carlotta format, and is excited by her “last chance” at YSD to work with director Katherine McGerr. The violence in the play—Laws says her theme is “crushed innocence”—is necessary because, Laws says, the play treats “things that scare me and provoke questions I might not know how to ask in real life.” The presence of war in our time is one such frightening aspect of modern life, and Laws aims for a cathartic exploration of her theme, which may leave the audience somewhat troubled. Her second-year play, Blueberry Toast, was violent in a more satiric way, and—as directed by Dustin Wills—went for extremes of behavior.

Key to Bird Fire Fly is its tempo and rhythm, in Laws’ view of her work. And to achieve her ends she’s willing to take risks with the conventions. Educated at Baylor in Texas, her home state, Laws was encouraged by generous teachers to write plays and then worked for three years at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in New York to hone her craft further. She recently had the experience of seeing an early play of hers worked on in a drama class at Baylor and looks forward to the day when one of her plays will be given a full production in Texas, where theater, she says, is an important part of the local culture.

Bird Fire Fly plays Sat, 5/10, and Wed, 5/14, at 8 p.m., and Tues, 5/13, and Fri, 5/16, at 2 p.m.

Kate Tarker calls her play Thunderbodies “a fun play” and “a little war comedy.” Originating in the same workshop class with her Carlotta colleagues, the play received a reading with professional actors and was viewed by everyone as “clearly my breakthrough play.” The anarchic style of the play was nurtured by the Clown class Tarker took with Christopher Bayes, YSD’s master of extremely energetic comedy. At ninety minutes, Thunderbodies is “an epic one act” consisting of separate scenes that “come together at the end.” The approach is satiric, “topsy-turvy,” with “lots of physical comedy, body talk, and lower body energy.”

The play derives from both physical and intellectual inspirations. Written when, in fall of her 2nd year, she broke her foot, the play was influenced by an experience that, Tarker says, made her much more aware of her body and the physics of doing formerly simple tasks. At the same time she was reading M. M. Bakhtin’s study of Rabelais, in which Bakhtin formulates his ideas of the “carnivalesque” as a subversive force and the “grotesque body” as a means of liberating that force. Reading that work, Tarker says, gave her “more permission to create ravenous characters.” And to set her play in what she calls “the medieval now.”

With her background in visual art, Tarker comes to theater from a somewhat different perspective and says she likes to write about “outsiders looking in.” Her “origin story” as a playwright, she says, occurred when she went to an African chimpanzee sanctuary to work on a visual art project. For half of her time there, the art supplies did not arrive and so she spent a lot of time writing detailed journal entries. The act of writing took her toward other interests, such as the varied arts approach the Interlochen Arts Academy, her high school in Michigan, fostered. In addition to play-writing, while at Yale she directed a play by Phillip Howze at the Cabaret and acted in a show, The Most Beautiful Thing in the World, devised with Gabriel Levey, this past fall.

Thunderbodies plays Sun, May 11, Tues, May 13, and Fri, May 16, at 8 p.m., and Thurs, May 15, at 2 p.m.

This year’s Carlotta plays, while having in common, perhaps, a willingness to address the theme of war to provoke rawer or more visceral emotions from the viewer, take three decidedly different approaches to their themes and offer three unique theatrical experiences. The shows, besides adding to the challenging work of the three graduating directors, feature casts of first and second-year actors, many of whom have been seen in thesis shows or at the Cabaret, such as Celeste Arias, Aaron Bartz, James Cusati-Moyer, Melanie Field, Christopher Geary, Jonathan Majors, Julian Elijah Martinez, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Tom Pecinka, Bradley James Tejeda, Shaunette Renée Wilson.

Look forward to interesting offerings this year at the Carlotta Festival of New Plays.

The Carlotta Festival of New Plays Yale School of Drama May 9-May 16, 2014 The Iseman Theater 1156 Chapel Street

[Note: an earlier version of this article erred in the chronology of Kate Tarker's trip to the chimpanzee sanctuary (before college, not after), the location of her high school (Michigan not Colorado), and her studies at Reed (Literature-Theatre, not Visual Arts). Our apologies for any confusion.]

A Challenging Musical Comes to Long Wharf

For James Sampliner, musical director for Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, which opens previews May 7 at the Long Wharf, directed by Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein, taking on the assignment is “a major milestone.” Sampliner, who will be performing the show eight times a week, conducting from his piano’s keyboard, sees the complicated and varied score as both an immense pleasure and a challenge.

In Sampliner’s view, the show is a test of a musician’s stamina as, among devotees of musical theater, The Last Five Years is known for its demanding piano score. What’s more, the show is a “two-hander,” meaning that there are only two characters on stage throughout, and the entirety of the show consists of the songs each character sings about their relationship. For Cathy (Katie Rose Clarke), the story of her relationship with Jamie (Adam Halpin) is told from their break-up backwards to her first date with him, while for Jamie the sequence follows a chronology of first to last.

The challenges of the show, for a musical director, entail not only the physical task of playing the show each night—which Sampliner views as a good cardiovascular workout—but also reacting sensitively, even intuitively, to the singers/actors as they tell their parallel stories in song. Sampliner has never worked at the Long Wharf before but has worked with Brown on the latter’s Honeymoon in Vegas adaptation, and feels that his grasp of Brown’s music is important to the show’s delicate dynamic.

“Jason’s music is very carefully written,” Sampliner stresses, so that the musical director’s task is not so much interpreting the music as communicating to the other musicians the different emphases of the actors in performance. One begins to see at once what he means by “complicated.”

Drawing on blues, jazz, rock’n’roll, and classical techniques—all the musical forms he and Brown share a love for—the show, Sampliner says, is “one I needed to do.” Rehearsing with Edelstein, Clarke and Halpin, they have been asking lots of questions of the material, finding their unique way of bringing the show to life. “It’s not so much a question of new layers that other productions haven’t discovered, but asking ‘what do you think this is about,’” finding their own answers to the questions that arise.

The play’s structure is “a brilliant idea,” Sampliner finds, with Cathy moving from her lowest point to her highest and Jamie following the opposite trajectory. “They sing together at the middle point between the two extremes,” and each song offers its individual challenges, so that, for Sampliner, it’s not a question of finding the show’s highpoints, as each song has its highpoints and its rewards. “In so many ways,” Sampliner says, “The Last Five Years is Brown’s magnum opus,” the kind of musical that has musical directors “champing at the bit” for a chance to perform it.

When it comes to conducting, Sampliner finds that being able to conduct his ensemble of six players from the keyboard is the kind of skill necessary at a time when theater demands versatility and smaller orchestras. “It’s not uncommon,” he says and rising to the challenge of playing as well as conducting has him very excited by the opportunity to be, as he says, “the bus driver.”

“At the meet-and-greet when rehearsals began, everyone asks one another what they do, and I like to say ‘I’m the bus driver.’” Making sure the show gets where it needs to go and that all parts of this tuneful, challenging, funny, and moving show get there in concert is not unlike the task of steering an unwieldy vehicle to its proper destination, come what may.

Meanwhile, fans of musical theater and of Jason Robert Brown—currently enjoying a hit on Broadway with The Bridges of Madison County, and likened to Stephen Sondheim in his crowd-pleasing grasp of musical theater—should be lining up to take the ride.

The Last Five Years Written and composed by Jason Robert Brown Directed by Gordon Edelstein

The Long Wharf Theatre

May 7-June 1, 2014

Tuesdays and Wednesdays: 7 pm Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays: 8 pm Wednesdays, Saturdays, Sundays: 2 pm

Shipwrecked! with New Haven Theater Company

Ensconced in their home at the back of the English Markets, the New Haven Theater Company now have the rights—and the right space—for their production of New Haven resident Donald Margulies’ Shipwrecked! An Entertainment: The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (As Told By Himself). Margulies, a Pulitzer-winning playwright and a professor at Yale, first debuted the play in 2008, and there was a Long Wharf production that same year. Among the audience of the latter was Peter Chenot, who will be directing the NHTC production, which opens two weeks from today. For Chenot, the show accentuates the idea of the power of the imagination. With all the mechanics of the theater occurring onstage—including the sound effects of Foley art—the audience is not asked to suspend their disbelief in the usual fashion. Everything that Rougemont (Christian Shaboo) tells us, in his fantastic adventures involving, among other things, an attack by a giant octopus, is portrayed for the audience not as if it’s real but as if it’s an elaborate act of storytelling, happening before our very eyes.

Chenot was drawn to the play—which NHTC was initially slated to produce last spring at the Whitney Arts Center before the rights became unavailable—by the kinds of challenges and rewards it presents. It forces the troupe “to be more creative onstage” as well as “adding improv techniques” to their rehearsals—techniques that are part of the background of Chenot’s involvement with the group, as he’s a veteran of The Funny Stages, the improv comedy group that included Shaboo and Erich Greene, also a featured player in Shipwrecked! Also in the show is Margaret Mann, who directed Almost, Maine in the winter and was in the cast of NHTC’s production of Our Town, as was Mallory Pellegrino, also in Shipwrecked! and Almost, Maine. The NHTC regulars are joined by three debuts with the company: Jesse Gabbard, Katelyn Marshall, and Trevor Williams.

NHTC’s work on Our Town is an appropriate reference point, as Margulies himself references Thornton Wilder’s great play in his intro to Shipwrecked! The concept of theater freed of the effort to replicate realism in favor of imaginative flight unites both. As Chenot says, the stagehands are part of the play and seeing Drew Gray’s projections from an old-time magic lantern, or puppets made from found objects in two big steamer trunks onstage lets us know that the show is partly a matter of a willful redirection of reality. That element is significant for the story of Rougemont, a real person of Victorian England whose memoir chronicling his adventures was celebrated in his day, only to find the public turn against him when doubts about the veracity of his tale began to circulate.

Chenot likens Rougemont’s tale to the Odyssey where, famously, Odysseus tells his own “sea story” of strange lands and fantastic creatures. Uniting both is a love of storytelling for its own sake and the ability of a sailor to spin a yarn for the sake of his own skill. “For the players,” Chenot says, “it doesn’t matter if it’s true.” The troupe becomes “a family of believers in Rougemont” who are interested in the value of a good story and not in duping a gullible public.

NHTC is aiming the show for ages 8 and up, and indeed Shipwrecked! is the kind of show that might be said to be aimed at the child in us all, the one who is willing to be awed by reality’s potential to be more than we expect it to be. Is Rougemont a charlatan? Only if he doesn’t deliver the kind of entertainment we expect of the fabulous and incredible.

As Chenot comments, Shaboo, onstage the entire time as Rougemont, has to keep us enthralled and willing to follow his lead. A bit perhaps like the main character in NHTC’s most recent production, The Magician, Rougemont is trying to convince us that magic is what happens in our own minds, and this time all the sleight-of-hand will be right before our eyes.

Shipwrecked! An Entertainment: The Amazing Adventures of Louis De Rougemont (As Told By Himself) By Donald Margulies Directed by Peter Chenot

Showtimes: Thurs, May 1 and Thurs, May 8: 8 pm Fri, May 2 and Fri, May 9: 8 pm Sat, May 3 and Sat, May 10: 5 pm and 8 pm

New Haven Theater Company At The English Building Markets 839 Chapel Street, New Haven

$20, adults; $12, students, children

For tickets and information:new haven theater company

Priorities

James Berger’s first book, Prior (BlazeVOX, 2013), is not so much a collection as it is a condensed career. Drawing on decades of poems, Berger compresses his past into a book. We don’t read for a dominant theme but rather to see the different threads revealed. And yet this is also not a “selected,” where the volumes drawn from would be clearly marked. Berger has compiled his poems, we might say, and chosen an arrangement for them. And that’s what we read. That said, we can isolate different versions of Berger the poet, and different interests over time. The book is divided into four sections, linked by recurring short poems entitled, severally, “Prior to Earth,” “Prior to Air,” “Prior to Water,” but the sections seem to blend the kinds of manner to which Berger is prone. There is the abstract poet, pursuing a more disembodied style, where a sense of language is the key pursuit; there is the family man poet, who reacts to a death, to the birth and growth of his children, who reflects on his sisters, and explores the imaginative dimensions of marriage; there is the discontented commentator on culture and, to use the Onion’s phrase, “our dumb century,” a poet who finds little enough to praise and chafes at his status quo; then there is the more profound poet, who sees that the purpose of poetry, after all, is its ability to contain life and thought, the actual existence and the virtual existence. Poetry may be cloying if it tries to be wisdom literature, and Berger is too ironic toward language to endorse gestures too large, but moments of careful reflection surface due to the poet’s willingness to attend to the implications in a turn of phrase, a new shade of the mind.

In the first section, “In the Shape of Breathing,” the dominant mood is the poet’s discontentment with himself and his world. “He asks his father, ‘Am I Oedipal?’” Almost a joke, the question is answered, “Of course not, no one will harm you.” Which, of course, is a tremendous lie. The harm of attachment is interrogated again and again, as the poet tries on alternative lives (“There is always some slim girl”), which seem to include becoming a nature poet, and is haunted by “My sister and her beautiful serious face,” and reflects on, more than anything, the attitude one should wear toward a life that inevitably disappoints.

The section opens with a 10-part poem called “In the Shape of Breathing” (“What have I lost— / the whole fucking deal that’s what—“) that sets a tone anxious and defeated. Toward the end of the first section, “A Place to Start” alerts us to all the things the speaker doesn’t have to do or be: “live forever or be happy”; “I don’t have to be good in bed”; “I don’t have to exude anything.” The idea that “Life might have turned out differently” produces, we might say, mature reflection upon the poet’s task: “seeing it through / all the way / as it is.” Insisting “the imagination has no right / to metamorphosis,” we can see that, “Oedipal” or not, the poet is in a struggle with those who would use poetry as wish fulfillment, or as means to avoid or obscure “the deep, daily commitment to this life’s / limits and needs.”

Section II, “New Resolutions of Memory,” seems to kick back at the notion of a poetry adequate to life as it is lived. The title poem of the section plays with recurring phrases, detached from their referents, seemingly, but still able to be turned to account: “I’ve always found occasional schools / of children living in ruins, / hiding from vehicles. / Everything I’ve loved / will take you away from us.” The entire section is given over to a different sense of poetic possibility—“Word-photons,” “The only thing open is wild / experiment.” And yet a phrase on the first page of the section—“My heart accepts its pitch”—keeps open the sense that discourse on form and on the daily encounters with the assaults of our time (“The Children of Terror”) cannot distract, ultimately, from poetry as operations upon the self: “Tacit” considers as inadequate a theory of writing that has left out of account, till now, the human dimension of a family affliction, and “Epithalamium: The Contraption” has the courage to imagine marriage as a kind of surrealist machine, using all it comes upon in untold and unpredictable ways: “A million parts churn and fidget, we have no idea what’s going on.” Here, the anxious and defeated tone gives way to something more definite, grasped, perhaps, in the final line of “New Resolutions”: “Later, mature, you will enter one.”

Part III, suitably enough, is called “The Enclosure”, and we might say that here we find Berger restlessly at home in his house of poetry, bending his attention on the ways in which the world can still fuck up our best intentions, and having fun at its expense: “There may be a Malthusian problem. / There may be a problem of vaguely defined invasiveness, / It could mean zombies.” “Civilization Credits” even smacks of the truly satiric toward our age of scarcity (for the many) and ludicrous abundance (for the few): “Eternal dominance is the price of comfort. / Amnesia is the prerequisite.”

The main poem of this section is not the title piece, but a 17-part poem called “The Fragilist.” This figure—in some respects an alter-ego—confronts the task of concocting poisons, of registering Jewishness in the figure of Mosiach, of rebounding from imaginative recreations of pregnancy and of making pregnant, of parental injunctions and moments of instruction, of becoming an object: “poured to a shape, / unable to blink; / the same baked function.” Other poems investigate, again, roads not taken (“I could have turned a hundred times”), the burden of family (“I See Where it Leads”), and the “vaguely defined invasiveness” that demands a poetics, a project. Berger hits upon, in place of poetry workshops, the poem makeover TV show, and pronounces his rather more morose goal: “to slog / my mortality in the dried vein / of lyric.”

In Part IV, “I Do Return, I Keep Returning,” we could say the poet has found his way to live up more directly to the injunction about “the deep, daily commitment to this life,” with poems about middle-aged love (“Return”), his daughters’ naming (“The Naming”), a story about, seemingly, ancestors—two sisters (“Sara and Lili”)—and poems that, like “My Goal” and “Only Happiness,” attest to the poet’s struggle to undertake the most quotidian of cares—fatherhood—while retaining a right to his own imagination.

My aim, which is my goal, is to love babblerockthis semblance, ordering of bordering babblerockbatshitdubreturn to the true strophes bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbthat delineate the catastrophe.

(“My Goal”)

The most problematic poem in the final section, wherein Berger seems to become a much more plainspoken poet, is called “The Art of the Future,” for there we find the poet trying as many pirouettes as possible so as to keep up a hope in an inspiration still to come, while returning to formal experiments dating back to W. C. Williams at least:

theWhat makes it theWhainteresting eWhat thmaare the changes. What makes it theWhatare the changes themakesarewhat makes theWhataretheit interesting are thechangeswhat makes the thechanges.whatchanges arethecthe what makes it changesthewhatwhat makes changestheit interesting changesthe changes

Throughout the book, Berger flirts with what used to be called “confessional poetry”—the poetry that assumed an existential continuity between the author and the speaker of the poem, so that everything said reflected on an autobiographical self. Berger, who studied with Kenneth Koch, is too much an ironist and a lover of the self-animated phrase to allow his poems to reduce to one man’s experience. And yet, there is a presence in the poems that we accept as the peculiar in-dwelling of James Berger as he tries to reflect and represent the world as he knows it and the world as he projects it. As “The Art of the Future” warns: “Don’t mistake / my intention / for intention.” Berger reserves the right to elude his own formulations through radical skepticism, perhaps, but, in middle-age, we may see that he was all along a poet of retention, that rather than having lost “the whole fucking deal,” he has kept it—and at it – all along and after all.

One wonders, then, what work this lengthy debut will be “prior” to.

James Berger Prior BlazeVOX [Books] 2013

James Berger, a resident of New Haven and a Senior Lecture in American Studies at Yale, reads with Joel Lewis, Saturday, March 29, 7:30 p.m., at Infinite Well LLC, 123 Court Street, New Haven.

I Has Cheeseburger!

A Review of Mark Lamoureux’s 29 Cheeseburgers + 39 Years Linking experiment to tradition without becoming stodgy, Mark Lamoureux’s 29 Cheeseburgers + 39 Years (Pressed Wafer, 2013) comprises two short Bildungsromans divided into tidy Elliptical poems that explore the self’s relation to consumerism.

The consumerism theme is apparent immediately, for who can glance at that delicious-looking, orange-and-white cover without craving an Orange Julius; who can see the title’s defiantly analytical plus-sign, and not be reminded of Fugazi’s Repeater + 3 Songs? The fast-food of “cheeseburgers,” the fruit-flavored smoothie coloration, and the typography of a post-Hardcore album sold in Hot Topic all bring to mind a shopping mall.

This is the world Lamoureux’s speaker inhabits, with all its empty glitz, and Lamoureux is well-aware of the fact, even as his speaker clings to his kitschy surroundings as models of how he wishes life were: Dualistic, plastic, with Hollywood-endings—in other words, easy.

Specifically, the speaker’s many enumerations of pop-culture references—some referring to actual products and media, others to imagined “properties”—can all be read as adolescent daydreaming. Intrusions from outside voices only carry trauma, as when the prosaic coherence of “Your father’s not coming back” inserts itself into “No. 5 Bernice Burger, Shady Glen Restaurant, Manchester, CT.”

Locating 29 Cheeseburgers’ scenes within the year-in-review poems of 39 Years, then, we realize these intrusions only exacerbate the speaker’s focus on his naively materialistic fantasies, as in “1982”:

            … Zicon*        X-Ray Man^† Cryasor, master of elements Chess Man Blue Swordsman‡ poetry review Red Lance§ Steel Star Knights: Lance, Sword, Axe, poetry review Mace, Bow      Thunderball¶ Utopian god of sound & light New Haven Review The terrific Triton Review of New Poetry, New Haven The changing Vulture…

Yes, much of 29 Cheeseburgers + 39 Years is escapism, but, as any American born after 1950 will recognize, escapism is almost universally a very real facet of our late 20th-century childhoods. Perhaps taking a cue from Carolyn Forché, Lamoureux is ostensibly reporting reality. The difference is that Lamoureux’s speaker is both subject and reporter, allowing for all the complex subjectivity implicit in a report on action nearly exclusively internal. Is, for instance, a “Cryasor” a bad-ass ‘cry(ogenic)-(dino)saur’ the speaker idolizes? Or is it the speaker’s at once humorous and tragic name for himself: ‘cry-a-sor(e)’?

In fact, Lamoureux is ingenious in unaffectedly offering such complex, refracting details, and in the case of the “Cryasor,” he is revealing a momentary flash of misunderstood maturity among the speaker’s thoughts. The “Cryasor” is a powerful idol, a disappointing reality and a terrifying beast all rolled into one, not merely a popgun prop or pun.

As such, this piece of pop-culture bric-a-brac foreshadows greater circumspection: As one of the objects with which the speaker identifies, the “Cryasor” is the ideal self, actual self and animal self—or super-ego, ego and id. It is “master of the elements” in every sense because it semantically unites all three elements of self into one word, one identity. After all, as Lamoureux is subtly telling us, power comes to the child when all aspects of the individual accept they are part of the unity; that is what we call, “adulthood.”

Of course, there is plenty of comic relief too, and much of it comes from the many riotous jabs several poems’ footnotes take at stodgy “literariness,” as when, footnoting “Doctor Doom” in “2000,” Lamoureux directly quotes the referenced comic-book character: “Before I tell you of my plan, let me demonstrate the power of my magnetic brainchildren.” Importantly, Lamoureux doesn’t use the footnote in a traditional way to explain what he’s referencing, nor does he surround the footnote’s text with quotation marks.

The reader unfamiliar with comic books, then, has no point of reference for this particular footnote. And, as Lamoureux is not attributing the quotation or even indicating it is one with punctuation, it becomes part of his speaker’s monologue, rather than authorial material intended to elucidate. In fact, cut off from its context as much any group of words can be, the statement becomes a cheeky aside from the speaker, the poem commenting on itself.

Moreover, this meta-text is a bit of facetious showboating, inserted as it is between the deftly executed mouthful of a pop-culture litany and an equally well-executed explication of that litany’s import. In other words, here we are hearing from a fully confident, adult speaker who has no problem taking the words out of Stan Lee’s mouth, while explaining and executing—at once—one hell of a verbal hat trick. Or, put even more simply, the words in the poem’s opening enumeration are the speaker’s “magnetic brain children,” while the less unmooring text following them is the “plan,” and the speaker is who else but Doctor Doom himself.

What more can we say about such goofy, if often bewildering, prose appendages, except that Lamoureux is obviously being a smartass with them. As with the example given above, every footnote in 29 Cheeseburgers + 39 Years bucks the traditional purpose of footnotes and obscures more than it reveals for any reader unwilling to unpack the text; sometimes, Lamoureux uses the notes to argue with the book’s editors, rebelliously reinserting deleted lines, while at other times he is telling readers to research a reference themselves or fuck off.

But, in any case, as with the “Doctor Doom” footnote and the “Cryasor” reference, there is typically a lot more going on psychologically for the speaker of 29 Cheeseburgers + 39 Years behind every word of its kitschy confusion than might initially come across. Lamoureux’s book simply wants acutely engaged readers willing to break out Google and Wikipedia as they read, and should that really be too much to ask?

Finally, we have the question of how to read this book. As mentioned above, Lamoureux is writing Elliptical poetry that, in some instances, borders on Language poetry. Yet the problem with placing these poems in either the Elliptical or Language categories is that Lamoureux isn’t disregarding syntax and diction or using jarring parataxis merely to be cute, unnerving or gimmicky.

Rather, these mechanisms make his poems cinematic, and the reader would do well to read each word as a frame in a montage: As when watching a movie, our minds must construct the book’s narrative out of pieces that are actually discrete. In this way, Lamoureux’s poems, in their presentation as products of Hollywood, are structurally true to their settings and themes. What results, then, is a melding of method and theme into a totality that would satisfy classical aesthetics while doing so in a way that answers the postmodern call to experimentation and disjunction to a degree of which few poets are capable.

29 Cheeseburgers + 39 Years Mark Lamoureux Pressed Wafer, 2013

Mark Lamoureux, a New Haven resident, reads Saturday, March 29, 8 p.m, at WAVEMACHINE, 1175 Chapel Street #601, New Haven, with poets Ossian Foley and David James Miller.

Making Magic

The New Haven Theater Company has had a run of revivals, with the two most recent—Our Town and Almost, Maine—staged at the English Markets. Next month—actually, next week—finds them going for something the company, in its twenty year history, has never done: an original play. The Magician, written by NHTC member Drew Gray, was given a staged reading last August and is now ready for a full premiere.

The story of a magician, Mark Wonderton, working “the big time” in a casino on the outskirts of Las Vegas, the play is one of a trio of plays that Gray has written about three brothers—one a thief, one a magician, one a gambler—and, for The Magician, was drawn to the idea of a play that would portray a performer onstage. Thus the staging of Act II—when Wonderton is onstage—entails the interesting doubling that takes place when a play’s audience doubles as the audience to a show in the play. To that end, NHTC has had to find a few tricks up its sleeve in order to pull off some actual magic tricks.

“Some will fail,” Gray says, but the audience should have a sense of Wonderton as “a polished performer having a bad night,” rather than, say, a middling magician. One of the reasons for Wonderton’s lackluster performance of his routine has to do with his own crisis, another has to do with news of one of his brothers. In the reading in August, Gray says, most of the audience emerged from the experience feeling “the emphasis of the play” was on Wonderton’s reaction to his brother’s fate. For Gray, the story to be told uses that event as “an instigating act,” the catalyst that causes the magician’s state of mind, but not the dominant feature of the play or of Wonderton’s situation.

“There’s a different ending entirely” now, Gray says, thought the emphasis is still on Mark Wonderton as a guy onstage having to go on with the show though his heart isn’t in it. It’s a situation with interesting dramatic parallels to the situation of acting. Gray, who is also directing the play and is responsible for scenic design as well, does everything—we can say—but act. The Magician explores the plight of the showman stuck in his show, no matter what.

Much of the play’s success, Gray feels, depends on “educating the audience in the first ten minutes about what is possible and potential with Mark.” Act I is mostly backstage, a dialogue between Wonderton and his voluble manager, Ronnie. Gray has cast two of the more versatile actors of the company, with George Kulp as Mark and Peter Chenot as Ronnie. Much relies on Kulp’s ability to balance the unhinged qualities that Wonderton develops as the show goes on with the more staid and steadfast character that Kulp is a natural at rendering. The NHTC has a thing for dialogue-driven plays—the plays of David Mamet are a key inspiration—and The Magician is right up their alley in that regard with Mark and Ronnie trading off insults, wise-cracks, and comments on the state of the act and the state of their working relationship.

From an audience perspective, we may find ourselves hoping that Wonderton will succeed—after all, no one wants to see a performer bomb, not even if an actor is doing a good job of playing just that. Gray looks to “the unique experience of live theater” to provide “a true and interesting experience,” so that such tensions add to the play’s realism. The audience, like Wonderton himself, have to find out that “disappointment is acceptable.”

The Magician plays for the first two weekends in March at the English Markets on Chapel Street.

The New Haven Theater Company The Magician By Drew Gray Directed by Drew Gray

March 6-8 and 13-15 The English Markets 839 Chapel Street, New Haven