Summer of Giants

Voted Best Community Theater in the 2013 “Best of” at the New Haven Advocate, the Yale Cabaret offers compelling theater in a very intimate space. During the summer months, the frenetic pace of the Cab’s three-night stands slows a bit, as the Yale Summer Cabaret takes over the space.  For the last few years, the Summer Cab has offered three plays over two months. In the last two years, the offerings have been presented in repertory style, with overlapping runs. For 2013, Artistic Director Dustin Wills has changed that, going back to earlier versions of the Summer Cabaret, which was founded in 1974. As a student in Austin, Wills worked with Fran Dorn who, he later discovered, was one of the founders of the Summer Cab. When he spoke to her about it, he learned that the initial Summer Cab offered 17 shows in a single summer. (Incidentally, a few of those plays were written by the likes of Wendy Wasserstein and Christopher Durang, students at the time.)

Wills wants the hallmark of this year’s Summer Cab to be “ambition and variety.” The initial ambition of six shows was trimmed to five but, as Wills says, these are “real plays.” Great authors providing great theater—“big plays in a tiny space.” The shows will be offered successively, which means audiences have two weeks to see each play—at 8 p.m. shows only, no matinees or late shows—before it gives way to the next.

With a troupe of eight core actors, plus two guest actors, chosen from 32 auditions, Wills has the basis for what he sees as a “standing circus”—the communal life of ensemble acting, with actors “eating, breathing theater.” Wills, a directing student entering his third year in the Drama School, will direct three of the shows, and Associate Artistic Director Chris Bannow, a third year acting student recently seen as Osric in the Rep’s Hamlet, with Paul Giamatti, will direct two. The cast consists of Celeste Arias (*15), Mamoudou Athie (*14), Ato Blankson-Wood (*15), Prema Cruz (*14), Ceci Fernandez (*14), Ashton Heyl (*14), Gabe Levey (*14), Michelle McGregor (*14), Mickey Theis (*14), Mitchell Winter (*14).

Wills and company have selected the plays carefully for their “Summer of Giants.” The plays represent a variety of eras, places, and countries of origin. Conceived as a “journey in time,” the roster of plays reads like a syllabus for a mini-survey of theater. The program begins in 17th-century France, moves to 19th-century Sweden, then to Spanish folktales turned into a comedy first published in 1930, then to an American play from 1969, set in Tokyo, Japan, and finally to two British one acts from 1987 and 2006, respectively.

Opening with Tartuffe, one of the greatest plays by the French master Molière, lives up to the “Giants” title. Wills directs a play that he says offers “a collision of comedy and severity.” Spoken in rhyming couplets but with modern touches—such as a vacuum cleaner—the Cab staging explores the excess of the period as setting for its theme of love vs. hypocrisy, and of youth vs. deluded elders—themes as relevant to our day of puffed-up charlatans in high places as to the highly mannered era of Louis XIV. With the full troupe. May 30 through June 15.

The second play of the summer is a pas de deux of power. Chris Bannow directs August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, a psychological study of passions, a clash between the sexes set amidst class distinctions. Sweden, a bit ahead of the curve in developing some of the freedoms we now take for granted, is the setting for this confrontation with the abyss of identity that can open when the old order is questioned by turn-of-the-century youngsters at the height of the summer festival. Featuring Ceci Fernandez, Mitchell Winter, and Celeste Arias. June 20 through June 29.

Spanish poet and dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca is not best-known for comedies, but Wills sees the hilarious farce The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife as an opportunity for the Summer Cab to lighten up a bit after the heaviness of Strindberg. It’s also a chance to engage with puppetry and the “expressivity of theater,” as a traveling puppeteer visits a town where the local shoemaker has abandoned his teen-aged, unsatisfied wife. Using song, poems, and folk tales, Lorca creates a timeless tale of the struggle of marriage and the vibrancy of small-town life. Wills directs Prema Cruz, Gabe Levey, Ato Blankson-Wood, Mickey Theis, Mamoudou Athie, Michelle McGregor, Ceci Fernandez, and Chris Bannow. July 11 through July 20.

Tennessee Williams is best-known for his explorations of Southern manners in his plays of the Forties and Fifties (such as A Streetcar Named Desire, which will kick-off the Yale Rep season in the fall). In his 1969 play In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, Williams takes on the trends of modern art—notably expressionism, in the role of Mark, an expat in Japan who is trying to discover new inspiration for his painting. Meanwhile his bored wife is getting predatory with the Japanese barman. Wills sees the play, with its artist figure destroying himself, as autobiographical for Williams. And with its setting of Americans in Japan, the play works within the post-war relations of the formerly adversarial nations. Bannow directs Celeste Arias, Mickey Theis, Mamoudou Athie, and Mitchell Winter. July 25 through August 3.

Caryl Churchill is one of the undisputed masters of the last thirty years of theater and her two short plays, Heart’s Desire and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You combine to showcase what Wills calls “the absolute breakdown of language.” That includes the polite language of everyday speech, as a mother and father, in Heart’s Desire, await the return of their daughter, only to find, as the play repeats and restarts, that anxieties can surface in different ways; and in Drunk, the dialogue of two men becomes a reflection on the tensions between England and the U.S. in a play that dates from the era of Tony Blair and "W." Wills directs Chris Bannow, Ceci Fernandez, Michelle McGregor, Mamoudou Athie, Prema Cruz, Mitchell Winter, Ato Blankson-Wood and Celeste Arias in Heart’s Desire, and Ato Blankson-Wood and Mitchell Winter in Drunk. August 8 through August 18.

Such demanding and challenging plays might require some “down time,” and so the Summer Cab will also host Friday Late Nights. With free admission from 10:30 p.m. to 2 a.m., the Cab’s bar will remain open and special late night events will be taking place—such as dance parties, karaoke, Tom Waits imitators, and a Boy Band sing-along. Which means the Cab, in addition to bringing us great plays by great authors with a young and adventuresome cast and artistic staff, will also be poised to be one of the best late-night hang-outs Fridays during the dog days.

See you at the Cab!

The Yale Summer Cab presents Summer of Giants Dustin Wills, Artistic Director Chris Bannow, Associate Artistic Director Molly Henninghausen, Managing Director Anh Le, Associate Managing Director

May 30 through August 18, 2013

for more information, schedules, and tickets/season passes:

www.summercabaret.org

Upcoming Carlotta Festival

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Carlotta Festival of New Plays

The Yale School of Drama

May 6-14, 2013

1156 Chapel Street, New Haven

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weight Watchers, Watch Out

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

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

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

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

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

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

Setting Up a Sunday in the Park

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photographs by Nicholas Hussong

Mamet Revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For tickets and info visit: New Haven Theater Company

Looking Ahead at the Long Wharf

One of the most popular of last season’s productions at the Long Wharf Theatre—My Name is Asher Lev—will be produced Off-Broadway at the Westside Theatre, 407 W. 43^rd Street, beginning on November 8, with the opening night set for November 28. Director Gordon Edelstein, and Ari Brand and Mark Nelson—both excellent in the Long Wharf show—will reunite in New York to recreate this thoughtful and compact re-telling of Chaim Potok’s novel about a young Jewish painter coming to terms with his faith’s prohibition on images, while also tracing the drama of the artist’s growth within his family and his community.

The play closed last year’s Long Wharf season, offering an autobiographical drama staged as a direct address to the audience.  And this year’s Long Wharf season begins with an autobiographical play that is a direct address to the audience, also directed by Edelstein.

This time the play is Satchmo at the Waldorf, written by Terry Teachout, drama critic for the Wall Street Journal, and the biographer of Louis Armstrong, the subject of the play.  Unlike Asher Lev, Satchmo is a one-man show, with celebrated actor John Douglas Thompson (recently featured in a New Yorker profile) playing the jazz great, known as “Satchmo” (short for “satchel mouth,” a nickname invented because of his wide mouth and the distinctive style of trumpet playing that issued from it).

Unlike the production of Ella in the Long Wharf’s 2010 Season, Satchmo is not about the music.  Teachout has created a play that, set backstage after Armstrong’s last performance, looks at the musician’s life and long career from his perspective, bringing forward the fraught relationship with his controlling manager, Joe Glaser.  Thompson plays Armstrong, Glaser, and at one point Miles Davis.  Teachout said he deliberately avoided the “unchallenging, sweet-tempered exercises in hagiography” that most biographical plays become, wanting to give us an unadorned Armstrong, closer to the actual man than the stage persona beloved by so many. Much of the play’s success, one suspects, will ride on Thompson’s skill at getting us inside the character.

Satchmo at the Waldorf opens tomorrow night, Wednesday, October 3, and runs to Sunday, November 4 on Stage II.

The season showcases Long Wharf’s two resident directors: Edelstein, the Artistic Director, and Eric Ting, Associate Artistic Director, with Edelstein helming Satchmo, and two works on the Main Stage by hard-hitting playwrights: Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class, a drama of a family tearing itself apart to get ahead, and William Mastrosimone’s Ride the Tiger, about the behind-the-scenes sex and shenanigans leading up to the election of 1960, with John F. Kennedy, mob boss Sam Giancarlo, and Frank Sinatra trying to bed the same woman.  Judith Ivey, whose work in Shirley Valentine at the Long Wharf was warmly received in 2010, will be featured in the Shepard play.

Ting will direct Clybourne Park; Bruce Norris’ drama on race in America is set in the house bought by the Youngers, the upwardly mobile black family in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.  The much acclaimed play—it won both the Pulitizer Prize for Drama in 2011 and the Tony Award for Best Play in 2012—will close the season.  Midseason, Ting directs January Joiner, a world premiere, on Stage II; it's a “horror comedy,” by young playwright Laura Jacqmin, set at a weight-loss boot camp (a “January joiner” is someone who joins a weight-loss program in January as a New Year’s resolution, but soon drops out).

The play this season not directed by Edelstein or Ting should be interesting as well: film star and Broadway actress Kathleen Turner will direct herself in The Killing of Sister George, Frank Marcus’s 1964 play, a bristling comedy about a radio-actress unwilling to let her role go off the air without a fight.  The 1968 film of the play played up, rather sensationally, the lesbian relationship between the radio star and her housemate, and it will be interesting to see what spin the play receives today, directed by its star.

Meanwhile, the much-anticipated renovation continues for the mainstage.  The seating is being greatly improved—more leg room!—and the lobby has been redesigned, the bathrooms enlarged, and the façade has had “work done.”

The 45th Time Around

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

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

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

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

So, what’s ahead?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hill-Stead Museum Celebrates 20th Anniversary of Sunken Garden Poetry Festival

Farmington, CT (March 12, 2012)     –    Hill-Stead Museum will celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival with a line-up of top tier American poets, including U.S. Poets Laureate/ Pulitzer Prize winners, and publication of an anniversary anthology, Sunken Garden Poetry, 1992-2011. One of the premier poetry events in America, the summer performance series has drawn tens of thousands of poetry lovers to Hill-Stead, each year featuring major poets as well as emerging and student writers, along with a diverse program of live music.  All events are held on the grounds of Hill-Stead Museum, 35 Mountain Road, Farmington, CT.

Summer 2012 Schedule:

Opening Weekend June, 1-3

Poetry readings, featuring Richard Wilbur, live music, Connecticut Young Poets Day, workshops, poet talks, house tours, Poetry on the Trails nature walks (details below)

Wednesday Evening Performances: gates open at 4:30 p.m. for picnicking on the grounds, pre- performance talks at 5:00 p.m., music at 6:15 p.m., and poetry at 7:30 p.m.

Wednesday, June 13

Dana Gioia, poet and former chairman, National Endowment for the Arts, with music by Eight to the Bar

Wednesday, June 27

Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine and 1^st place Sunken Garden Poetry Prize winner, Marilyn Annucci, with music by Liz Queler & Seth Farber

Wednesday, July 11

Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize winning poet, and 2^nd place Sunken Garden Poetry Prize winner, Sue Burton, with music by Rani and Daisy Mayhem

Wednesday, July 25

Donald Hall, former U.S. Poet Laureate, with music by Brass City Brass

Wednesday, August 1

Tony Hoagland, award-winning poet, with music by Ed Fast and Conga Bop

ALSO: July 30-August 1 - Three-day Workshop, Five Powers of Poetry: Reading, Writing, and Teaching Contemporary Poetry, led by Tony Hoagland. Fivepowerspoetry.com.

General festival information/detailed information about all artists available on hillstead.org/activities/poetry or contact us at poetry@hillstead.org or 860-677-4787 x134.

Detailed Schedule of June 1-3 Kick-Off Weekend Activities (see hillstead.org for list of times):

Friday, June 1, 4:00-9:00 p.m.: The opening reading will feature award-winning poet, Suji Kwock Kim.  The evening will also include a reading of Freedom Journeys in Four Voices by poet Bessy Reyna (in collaboration with the New Haven’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas) and the film Poetry of Resilience by Katja Esson, Alison Granucci, and Jan Warner.  Poetry of Resilience is a finalist for the prestigious human rights award, the Cinema and Peace Award for the Most Valuable Documentary of the Year at the Berlin Film Festival.

Saturday, June 2, 8:30 a.m.-8:30 p.m.: Hill-Stead presents Connecticut Young Poets Day, featuring select high school- and college-age readers/winners of eight state writing programs, including: Hill-Stead’s Fresh Voices Competition and Hartford Student Poetry Outreach, Connecticut Poetry Circuit, Poetry Out Loud, Connecticut Young Writers Trust, Connecticut State University Poetry Competition, New Haven Free Public Library Poetry Contest, and ASAP’s Celebration of Young Writers.  The 21-year-old slam poet and international hip hop star, B. Yung, will give a student workshop and a performance in the afternoon, while the evening’s featured poet will be former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, Richard Wilbur.  “Poetry in Perspective” talks will be led by poets Steve Madsen, Dennis Barone, and former festival director, Rennie McQuilkin. The days concerts represent a spectrum of musical genres: Earth Mass, created by the Paul Winter Consort, will be performed by the choirs of Joyful Noise choirs and gospel legend, Theresa Thomason; and MetaFour brings together Andy Wrba from Barefoot Truth and guitar virtuoso Jeff Howard to create one of the best up-and-coming young bands in the state.

Sunday, June 3, 8:30 a.m.-9:00 p.m.: The day includes Ten for Ten, a reading by ten Connecticut poets from the festival’s first decade, featuring Doug Anderson, Robert Cording, Margaret Gibson, Gray Jacobik, Rennie McQuilkin, Marilyn Nelson, Pit Pinegar, Vivian Shipley, Steve Straight, and Sue Ellen Thompson.  Poet/ story teller Minton Sparks brings her wildly original show to the Sunken Garden alongside world-class musician, guitarist John Jackson, followed by poet Toi Derricotte, winner of numerous literary awards and co-founder of the Cave Canem Foundation for African-American writers.  The evening concludes with a community dance on the estate’s west lawn, with music by Ten Penny Bit and caller Jim Gregory.

Anniversary anthology: Hill-Stead’s anthology, Sunken Garden Poetry, 1992-2011, published by Wesleyan University Press and funded by the Connecticut Humanities Council, will be for sale on the opening weekend.

General information

Venue: All performances at Hill-Stead Museum, rain or shine, under tents during inclement weather.

Opening weekend: June 1, gates open at 4:00 pm; June 2 and June 3, gates open at 8:30 am.  See full schedule on website for event times.

Wednesday evenings: Gates open at 4:30 pm. Prelude pre-performance talks are at 5:00 pm; music begins at 6:15 pm; poetry begins at 7:30 pm.

Admission: *Please note changes for 2012* OPENING WEEKEND, June 1–3: $10 per person, per day, or $25 per person for the weekend. Parking is free. WEDNESDAY NIGHTS, June 13 & 27, July 11 & 25, and August 1: $5 per person, children ages 12 and under free. Parking is free.Seating: Bring a lawn chair or blanket for seating in and around the garden.

Food: Al fresco dining is allowed on the grounds  Participants are welcome to bring their own picnic suppers or purchase food/beverages on site from Epicurean Caterers (www.theepicureancaterers.com).

Opening weekend reservations/pre-registration: Registration and payment are required for guided nature walks ($5 members/$8 members-to-be) and writing workshops ($20 members/$25 members-to-be/$15 high school and college students). Please contact Sarah Wadsworth, Poetry Program Coordinator, at 860.677.4787 ext. 134 or poetry@hillstead.org.

Hill-Stead is noted for its 1901 33,000-square-foot house filled with art and antiques. Pioneering female architect Theodate Pope Riddle designed the grand house, set on 152 hilltop acres, to showcase the Impressionist masterpieces amassed by her father, Alfred A. Pope.  Collections include original furnishings, paintings by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, James M. Whistler and Mary Cassatt.  Stately trees, seasonal gardens, meadows, over three miles of stone walls and blazed hiking trails accent the grounds.  A centerpiece of the property is the circa 1920 sunken garden designed by Beatrix Farrand, today the site of the renowned Sunken Garden Poetry Festival.

For more information, contact:

Mimi Madden, Artistic Director, Sunken Garden Poetry Festival

Hill-Stead Museum

35 Mountain Road

Farmington, CT 06032

maddenm@hillstead.org

860.677.4787, ext. 133

www.hillstead.org

Davy Jones on Crown Street

We cannot all be artists and writers. Though I'm writing this right now, I'm not really a writer. And though I know how to strum a few chords, I am hardly a musician. What I am is a really intense appreciator of writing and music in a few select categories. My tastes are not catholic or even particularly flexible, but within my genres, I know what's good. I am enchanted by rock and pop music, obsessing on single tracks, playing them over and over again: songs that serious musicians would call silly, music that my longhair parents wouldn't even describe as music. Of all the three-chord wonders I've spent hours listening to, though, the Monkees were the band I remember appreciating first. Watching re-runs of their show on one of the two TV sets in my bedroom, I fell in love. I don't really know why my parents couldn't have forseen that I was not going to grow up to be a classical pianist. Basically, my entire life, I now see, could have been predicted on the basis of this single fact: when I was not much more than a toddler, I bought a handful of Monkees albums, already rather worn, at the Salvation Army on Crown Street, and every night I fell asleep listening to them on my little orange plastic record player, gazing at the pictures of Mike Nesmith.

Davy Jones has died, and on hearing the news I was overwhelmed with memories of being so small and listening to those Monkees records. I was also a huge fan of the TV show, but I loved the records just as much. As I now find my daughter is enraptured by the unlikeliest songs (tracks by the Bobby Fuller Four? by the Pixies?) I had some kind of spell cast on me by Monkees tracks, most of all "Valleri." I even had a Monkees book, with some cartoon story about the Monkees in the Wild West or something like that; I am positive I still have it somewhere because there is no way I would ever have thrown out that book. (Actually, I know exactly where it is. It's packed in a box, the same box with my three copies of the book of Yellow Submarine.) The Monkees were central to my development as a cultural appreciator. And while it's true that I wasn't a Davy Jones fan -- I was a Mike Nesmith girl through and through, which will surprise no one who knows me -- the fact is, it was Davy's sunny charisma that allowed the rest of the Monkees to be famous, to shine too. You couldn't have Mike Dolenz, the dopey one, or Peter Tork, the spacey/arty one, or Mike Nesmith, the "intellectual" Monkee, without Davy, the cute one, who was a little silly but also basically normal, as their foil. And so I acknowledge my debt to Davy Jones. Without Davy Jones, we wouldn't have the Monkees. But the way I see it, there are other important things we wouldn't have. Repo Man, for example. How could Mike Nesmith have gone on to produce that movie if he hadn't had those years as a Monkee behind him? Impossible.

I remember that my babysitter, Laurie, took me to the Salvation Army on Crown Street now and then; it was just down the street from our apartment. I don't know if she was shopping for herself or for us or if she just used the store as a space where we could kill time in bad weather. But we went there, and I remember that I was able to buy my Monkees albums there for for 25 cents each; I saved my allowances to do so. I think Laurie thought it was funny that I wanted those records so badly. I am sure my parents had no idea what the stuff was, but I know that they knew about the records, because I still have them and one of them has been annotated on its sleeve by my father in his remarkable handwriting. If they'd had any idea that a tiny little degenerate was being created at the time, I'm sure they'd have tried to stop it. But they didn't know. It's sort of funny, actually. The Salvation Army fostered my love of pop music trash; it costumed me when I was in my cranky-with-no-cash wee rock and roll girl phase; and even now it costumes me and my daughter. I no longer buy records there, I admit, but I never walk into the Salvation Army without remembering that my long history with pop music -- my life in record collecting -- began there. With a bunch of guys singing someone else's songs, on Colgems, of all labels...

Thanks, Davy Jones. Thanks, Salvation Army. Thanks, Laurie.

David W. Goldman up for a Nebula

We are thrilled to announce that David W. Goldman's short story, "The Axiom of Choice," which appeared in the Winter 2011 issue of the  New Haven Review, is a finalist for a Nebula award for best short story of 2011. Congratulations to David and to all the other nominees.

Theater News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Decade of Dedication

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

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

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

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

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

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

Events This Week

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

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

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

Elizabeth Strout at Benefit for New Haven Free Public Library

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

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

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

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

Scott Warmuth and the New York Times

So, yesterday, Dave Itzkoff at the New York Times Arts Beat covered a show of paintings by Bob Dylan in which it appears—OK, it totally is—that some of the paintings are essentially copies of photographs, some of them famous. In our own Issue 6, Scott Warmuth's piece discussed how Dylan loves to tread the fine lines separating homage, appropriation, and—as Dylan's own album title has it—theft. That must be why Itzkoff himself gives Warmuth a little shoutout in the second-to-last paragraph. Thanks, Mr. Itzkoff. And thank you again, Scott, for writing such a great piece.

The Keillor-Douthat Affair

We strongly suspect that Garrison Keillor may be having a literary love affair with New Haven Review poet--yes, we claim for our own--Charles Douthat, whose book Blue for Oceans: Poems was published by NHR Books, our book imprint. It appears that a third poem has been selected by Keillor's team at Writer's Almanac for public reading and revealing. Charles has already had two of his poems featured: "The Polishings" and "Crying Man"--both of which appear in Blue for Oceans: Poems.

As Charles suggested to us: the third may well be the charm. What the intended effect of the spell is, however, remains a mystery.

Congratulations, Mr. Douthat!

Eric Weinberger: Honorable Mention in Best American Sports Writing 2011

We at New Haven Review recently got this very kind note from Eric Weinberger, who authored "The Skiing Life: An Appreciation" in our Winter issue no. 7:

I just saw the new Best American Sports Writing 2011 volume... "The Skiing Life" didn't make "Best," but it did make the "Notable" list in the back, chosen by the series editor with fine company from New Yorker, NYT Magazine, Sports Illustrated and others. Something for the NHR website to mention in 'News' maybe? All hail Brian Slattery [New Haven Review editor] who chose the piece --

Mentioned, and all hail, indeed!

And Away We Go…Yale Cabaret 44

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life at the Cabaret

The Yale Cabaret 2010-11 Season ended in April, and today a cohort of talents graduated from the Yale School of Drama, where most Cab participants are students, so I’d like to take a moment to commend some highpoints of the Cab's recent season, citing the work of some who have taken their final bow there, and of others who might be back. For best overall productions, four original plays, relying on great ensemble work: Good Words, written by Meg Miroshnik, directed by Andrew Kelsey, a movingly musical valedictory treatment of a long life; Vaska Vaska, Glöm, written by Stéphanie Hayes, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, an odd allegorical play, both endearing and unnerving; Erebus and Terror, developed by the ensemble from an idea by Alexandra Henrikson, directed by Devin Brain, a dark but lively play about doomed lives; and Trannequin!, conceived by the ensemble, with Book by Ethan Heard and Martha Jane Kaufman, directed by Ethan Heard, a clever and engaging gender-bending musical; and a notable ensemble production of an already existing work: Alex Mihail’s kick-ass, raucous version of Anton Chekhov’s The Wedding Reception.

For memorable performances, I have to start by citing Max Gordon Moore’s tour de force one-man show as the librarian with an idée fixe in Under the Lintel

Trai Byers’ affecting performance as an old man revisiting his life at his son’s funeral in Good Words

Babak Gharaeti-Tafti, as a passionate wedding guest in The Wedding Reception, and as a nonconformist in The Other Shore

Lucas Dixon as the hilarious special guest at The Wedding Reception, and Brett Dalton’s comic double roles in Debut Track One.

Of the ladies: Alexandra Henrikson’s edgy Harper in Far Away

Adina Verson for her comic flair in pleasureD, and, for sheer oddity, her performance in a barrel of water in Vaska Vaska, Glöm; Stéphanie Hayes for her frenetic part in pleasureD and as a young male Irish deckhand, in Erebus and Terror

Sarah Sokolovic, swaddled in rags, in Vaska Vaska, Glöm, and giddy and singing in The Wedding Reception; and Alexandra Trow, intelligent and naïve, as Pepper in Debut Track One.

And what about the ingenuity of transforming a basement into whatever the play demands?  Particularly effective work in Sets: Meredith Ries’ cluttered library backroom in Under the Lintel

Julia C. Lee’s doomed ship in Erebus and Terror, aided by Alan C. Edwards’ moody and evocative Lighting

Justin Elie’s visually rich radio studio in The Musicality Radio Hour; Adam Rigg’s dollhouse world for  pleasureD

and, especially, the combined talents of Kristen Robinson, Meredith Ries, Adam Rigg, with Lighting by Hannah Wasileksi and Masha Tsimring, for the fascinatingly ornate aesthetic of Dorian Gray’s puppetshow.

And for transforming students into what is required, some memorable work in Costumes: Aaron P. Mastin for the period sailors in Erebus and Terror; Maria Hooper for the Victorian dress of both people and puppets in Dorian Gray; Summer Lee Jack for the Brecht-meets-Beckett world of Vaska Vaska, Glöm

and for the truly awful threads sported by the ‘80s-era wedding guests in The Wedding Reception.

For Sound: Junghoon Pi for the aural embellishments of The Other Shore; Palmer for the different aural registers of Debut Track One, and Ken Goodwin’s Sound Design and Elizabeth Atkinson’s Foley work in The Musicality Radio Hour.

And for Music: the inspiring vocals provided by Taylor Vaughn-Lasley, Christina Anderson, Sunder Ganglani, and Nehemiah Luckett in Good Words Pierre Bourgeois’s lively shanties in Erebus and Terror; the inspired songs of Trannequin!, by Ethan Heard, Max Roll, Brian Valencia, and Tim Brown; the Zappa-esque musical work of The Elastic Notion Orchestra in The Musicality Radio Hour; and the performative percussionists, Yun-Chu Chiu, John Corkill, Michael McQuilken, Ian Rosenbaum, Adam Rosenblatt in The Perks.

That’s all for this year—stay tuned for info on The Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival, starting next month!

Photos copyright Nick Thigpen, courtesy of Yale Cabaret