Reviews

The Hotel Unheimlich

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://sleepnomorenyc.com/

 

That Tragic History

The third and by far the most ambitious of the three plays offered by The Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival has now been added to the line-up.  Directed by Artistic Director Devin Brain, the play is called Rose Mark’d Queen, a condensation (and we do mean condensed!) of five plays: Henry V, Henry VI (Part 1, 2, and 3), and Richard III, and provides the “blood” in the Festival’s tagline, “Blood, Love, and Fools.” As a director, Brain, who was the Co-Artistic Director of the challenging 2009-10 Yale Cabaret Season, knows the Cab space well and pitches his production to the qualities that can make Cab shows such involving—and at times alienating—experiences.  Brain’s grasp of the darker side of drama comes to the fore again.  Last summer, his show The Phoenix began as an adolescents’ fantasy world and ended in a devastating conflagration.  In the 2010-11 Season, he directed the ensemble piece Erebus and Terror in which we watched a shipful of plucky explorers succumb to madness and cannibalism.  Now he’s back with a play that illuminates the British monarchy of the Wars of the Roses period in the 15th century as a blood-boltered tale of bravery and betrayals, of back-stabbings and battles, of lusts and jests and thrusts at the vitals.  It’s stirring stuff.

And marvelously, memorably entertaining.

A lighter note is leant the proceedings by a brilliant conceit: we open with kids entertaining themselves with dolls and costumes and toy soldiers, playing dress-up as they take on the roles of the first wave, of many successive waves, of characters embroiled in dynastic succession—involving rival houses and wars with and for France.  It’s risky because we might want these kids to intrude upon the action to explain it for our benefit, or to make it silly for our amusement, and indeed they do throw a bit of foolery into the mix, but—and here the risk pays off—the unwavering force with which they speak the lines convinces the way a child lost in a fantasy convinces.  Gradually, the “play-acting” of the playing falls away and we’re launched into the clashing and contending personalities of the Histories.

For me the transition moment was when Matt Biagini, as Duke Humphrey, rails against the injustice of seeding prime French territories—already won with the blood of British troops—back to France in exchange for Margaret (Jillian Taylor), the “rose-mark’d queen” who the conniving Suffolk (A. Z. Kelsey) has wooed for young King Henry VI (Marcus Henderson), so that he may manipulate the king through her.  The love scene between Suffolk and Margaret packs a lot of punch too, but at that point (end of Henry VI, pt. 1)—with the other members of the court (i.e., the other kids) seeming to be looking on—it was still possible to be “in a game.”  When Gloucester goes rogue, at the opening of Henry VI, pt. 2, the playground struggle—White Rose vs. Red as a kind of Shirts and Skins game—deftly shifts into history come alive.

Don’t expect me to explain the historical consequences of all the ups and downs of the characters this intense ensemble enacts.  The playbill offers a useful Who’s Who—grace à Dramaturg Elliot Quick—coded to the costumes of the various characters, for those who want to keep score.  What stays with the viewer are numerous events that dramatize the high-stakes power struggle: Margaret’s cruel taunting of York (Babak Tafti) in the “king on a molehill” speech; York’s controlled and defiant response, wiping his tears on a handkerchief stained with his murdered child’s blood, ragging on the Queen; the rebel Jack Cade (Biagini armed with a toy chainsaw) enumerating the changes he will make in England as king (“first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”); Henry’s wistful longing for a simple life, and his heartfelt denigration of Richard (Kelsey) moments before being murdered by him.

Indeed, the fixed stars of this pole are Henry VI, as more sinned against than sinning, and Richard, the Duke of Gloucester, aka Richard Crookback, the vicious killer who will eventually become Richard III.  Whether Henry is too timid to swim in this pool of sharks or too noble to sully himself is a matter of interpretation—Henderson evokes noble caution, but Henry is simply never equal to the machinations going on around him. One reason for that is the unfaithfulness of his queen Margaret, who prefers Suffolk, and who wages fierce war against the forces of York, beyond what Henry would marshal on his own.  Taylor plays Margaret’s many moods with fire and ire, along the way creating a figure almost the equal of Lady Macbeth (who knew?), a woman with a naked lust for power who by the end seems distracted by the force of the enmity she has inspired.

As Suffolk, Kelsey is a lively and engaging conniver and it’s shrewd to bring him back, after Suffolk’s death, to play Richard—in a strait-jacket imprisoning his withered arm, a knife strapped to his back, and a length of chain for his lame foot—for then all the charisma of the Queen’s lover gets channeled into the Queen’s most bloody enemy.  Late in the play, a scene with Richard on a chair in the sandbox, upbraided roundly by Margaret at her wits’ end, quite wonderfully suggests the dark days, still to come, of Richard’s reign.

There are many fine effects in the production: dramatic shifts in lighting from raking to glaring (Alan C. Edwards); toy piano glissandos and rolling thunder throbs (Nathan A. Roberts); twin wardrobes, boasting white and red doors respectively, at either end of the space, that open for exits and entrances, but also become closets of shelves with props (Kristen Robinson); sumptuous robes (Mark Nagle) that help shape identity—with Margaret’s Superman cape an odd bit of humor, like the inflated doll, standing in for Widow Grey, that Edward (Tafti, unctuous at times as Vincent Price) woos with PG-13 levity.

To put it simply: you haven’t seen anything like Rose Mark’d Queen.  And once you have, you’ll want to see it again.

Rose Mark’d Queen adapted from William Shakespeare’s Henry V, Henry VI (Part 1, 2, and 3), and Richard III Directed by Devin Brain

The Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival July 7-August 13 Yale Cabaret

As You'll Like It

The Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival’s second play of the season, As You Like It, opened last week, and a lively good time it is. First of all, it’s a play that keeps moving—Shakespeare’s tendency to verbal excess doesn’t get the better of the action, even with the abundance of couples trying to make a go of it. And it’s also one of the easiest plays to follow: the situations are crystal clear, the dialogues further the action, and there’s precious little speechifying for its own sake.

Director Louisa Proske’s production is varied enough in its approach to keep things interesting even if you know the play well. The action begins outside in the courtyard where a platform is set up for the wrestling match that will take place between Orlando, our hero, the youngest son of Roland de Bois, but dispossessed by arrogant older brother Oliver (Paul Lieber), and Charles the wrestler. Orlando (Marcus Henderson) is a guileless youth who manages to best the bruiser Charles (Tim Brown in a funny performance that sounded to me like a take-off on Christian Bale in The Fighter), earning himself the enmity of casually ruthless Duke Frederick (Brenda Meaney in the first of three shape-shifting performances), who hands out banishments the way cops do parking-tickets.

Orlando departs for the forest of Arden, already fabled as a place where youths are flocking to disport idyllically with banished Duke Senior.  But first there are some passionate exchanges between Orlando and Rosalind (Adina Verson), the daughter of Duke Senior, who must follow her father into banishment. It’s a real love-at-first-sight moment for Orlando and Rosalind, wherein both characters say what they mean and can’t believe they really mean what they’re saying.

Back inside, the Cab has been transformed into the forest of Arden, and things get much funnier with the arrival of Rosalind, now disguised as the male youth Ganymede, her close confidante Celia, now Aliena, and their sour attendant, the fool Touchstone (Babak Tafti). Much of the play’s fun is found in the Bard’s ability to make wooing and resistance comical—either love will win or it won’t: in either case, the lovers can’t do much about it. A strength of the Cab’s show is how amusing are the exchanges and attitudes of the two friends, imbuing the roles with a sense of the contemporary, an effect aided by whimsical costuming (no photos—you’ll have to see for yourself).

The costuming is particularly effective when we meet the banished Duke (Meaney again, in her best guise of the evening) wearing a wreath of flowers and talking about the simple pleasures of life in the forest of Arden as if he dropped acid with Jerry Garcia. His troupe of faithful (Tim Brown, armed with lute; Tara Kayton, with books of Ginsberg poems and Buddhist philosophy; Paul Lieber, with guitar and a bearded look that recalls Paul McCartney from the Let It Be period) stand about nodding in blissful counterpoint. With a troupe like this, you know the songs will be lilting and they are (had they burst into “Yellow Submarine” it would not have been out of place).

A notable exception to the “no speechifying,” of course, is the melancholy Jaques’s famous disquisition on the Ages of Man. Played by Matt Biagini as the troupe’s black-clad, posturing poet, Jaques enlists a group enactment of the different stages, making the speech into a deliberate communal moment, rather than a personal rant aimed to bum everyone out.

As the lovers impeded by disguise and subterfuge, Verson’s Rosalind is more eager than skeptical; Verson gives a heartfelt performance of a Rosalind head-over-heels, forced to feign otherwise, and not easily won because not believing herself truly deserving. Henderson’s Orlando is primarily driven by reactions, a powerful figure forced to wait on the pleasures of others, and the actor is good at effusive glee.

In smaller roles, the courtship of Touchstone and Audrey (Jillian Taylor) is vulgar and comical in merrily broad fashion, and the lusty pursuit of Ganymede by Phebe (Tara Kayton), while fleeing her lovelorn pursuer Silvius (Tim Brown), makes for a diverting comic complication in the later scenes. Kayton steps into the play from her more familiar role as highly capable Producer of the Festival to enact a no-nonsense rustic who gets thrown for a considerable loop.

My one complaint: Hamlet, we know, tells the players not to let the fools speak more than is set down for them, but he doesn’t say you should cut what is set down for them: I missed Touchstone's deflating mockery of Orlando’s attempts at love poetry, and, elsewhere, he seemed to have shed a few barbs. But all’s well, there are laughs enough in this likeable As You Like It as the entire company is quite adept at playing the fool.

Photos by Ethan Heard, by courtesy of Yale Summer Cabaret

William Shakespeare's As You Like It Directed by Louisa Proske

The Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival July 1-August 14

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street, Hew Haven 203-432-1567, or summercabaret.org

Such Stuff as Dreams are Made on

A comic Tempest opens the Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival The Yale Summer Cabaret’s ambitious Shakespeare Festival, brain-child of Devin Brain and Tara Kayton, has launched.  The first play in the series, which will run three plays in repertory with a dedicated company of ten actors through August 14, is The Tempest.  A late play, if not the last, in Shakespeare’s canon, it’s a fantastic and lively tale in which all’s well that ends well, but, along the way, it gives much food for thought about the arbitrary nature of power relations, of courtship, of claims to authority, and, in this production especially, some laughs.

There are two daring and potentially off-putting aspects to director Jack Tamburri’s production: the first has to do with design (Kristen Robinson and Andrew Freeberg are the Scenic Design team), and involves fixed stilts with foot- and hand-holds placed at strategic points across the playing space.  This is the airy province of that airy sprite Ariel (Adina Verson), who touches ground as rarely as possible, primarily at entrances and exits.  But no matter how gamely and gracefully Verson navigates the gym course, we don’t get an illusion of movement swift as thought (Ariel’s special quality) and tend to be distracted by the actions.  What’s more, the posts offer little in the way of scenery, even if, with the aid of some magical transformative power akin to Propsero’s, we imagine them as trees upon the island.  The benefit: Ariel hovers over the action and speaks to the other characters from slightly above, which creates some nice effects in dialogue with Prospero when his captive sprite speaks directly into his ear, or when “he” (Ariel is male; Verson is female, and plays the role in a shiny body suit with a noticeable jockstrap bulge) spooks the conspirators from somewhere in the air above them.

The other oddity here is that all the cast members play Prospero at some point.  This requires much shedding and donning of the sparkly cloak that denotes our magical majesty, and also increases potential confusion for viewers having enough trouble keeping, say, Antonio and Trinculo (both played by Paul Lieber) or Alonso and Stephano (both A. Z. Kelsey) straight.  In other words, go with some of the play under your belt or you may find yourself a bit at sea.  Some of the transformations are indeed swift as thought, especially in the denouement when the passing about of Prospero’s book began to resemble a game of hot potato.

The more problematic aspect of this innovation is that, to echo Gertrude Stein’s comment about Oakland, there isn’t any there (or Prospero) there.  Rather, we get six actors in search of a character, which translates into Prospero-schtick most of the time.  This, I assume, is strategic—an effort to undermine this dominant figure, to make him as mercurial as possible, and to show that the trappings of power he wields can indeed be taken up and shed by turns.  He is a sometime Duke and a sometime magus, a sometime father, brother, and so on.  The point, as it should be in theater, is made, as it were, between the lines, but I couldn’t help feeling it was also made at the expense of some lines—as when an actor fully steeped in the role allows us to watch the character change, rather than watch a number of actors change into the character.

The strengths of this production:  First of all, the language.  Short of slowing things down into Shakespeare-ease, as Kenneth Branagh films sometimes do, the cast is quite adept at making Shakespearean speeches sound spoken as opposed to recited.  Second: the audience’s closeness to the action made for enlivening effects when the characters spoke directly to audience members in a conversational way.  Third: the clowns—and, as all are at times Prospero, all are at times clowns.  It’s to the audience’s benefit that these actors are so good at Shakespearean comedy, which can get tedious fast when a cast isn’t.  Kelsey, as Stephano, a butler, and Paul Lieber, as Trinculo, a jester, in particular, made the most of their scenes together, often involving drunken mood swings, but more modulation of tone would’ve helped us perceive their transformations into, respectively, Alonso, King of Naples, and Antonio, Prospero’s usurping brother, as they seemed a bit too broad for aristocracy.

Tim Brown, on the other hand, moved effectively between Sebastian, the rather dim-witted brother of the King, and romantic lead Ferdinand.

A female actor as Caliban is a move against type for it makes for a more refined “monster,” and Brenda Meaney’s performance, while active and comic, lacked the surly pathos the role can command.  Casting a female actor as Ariel is not unusual, and, apart from her headdress and costume, I loved everything about Verson’s Ariel, particularly the glowing sound of her vocals on the songs and her childish enthusiasm in playing all the roles, with Adam Rigg’s effective puppets, during the enchantment scene.  Her rendition, as Prospero, of the curtain speech was effective enough to make one willing, indeed, to “free all faults.”

All in all, a rough and ready Tempest on its way to becoming seaworthy.

 

The Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival Devin Brain,  Artistic Director; Tara Kayton, Producer June 23-August 14, 2011

William Shakespeare’s The Tempest; Directed by Jack Tamburri June 23-August 12, 2011

Photos by Ethan Heard, courtesy of Yale Summer Cabaret

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

Not With a Whimper, But a Bang

The Yale Cabaret’s 2010-11 Season ended this weekend with the bang of drums and other percussion. Michael McQuilken’s The Perks gave a new meaning to the term “musical theater.”  Usually that means characters in a play bursting into song-and-dance in an abundance of feeling.  At the Cab show, we were treated to musical pieces given a variety of theatrical treatments: as accompaniment to dramatic action, such as the death and burial of winter (Lupita Nyong’o) to Adrian Knight’s lyrical Mary’s Waltz; or as performance pieces, such as percussionists in rabbit masks playing Thierry de Mey’s Table Music on a table; or as theatrical musical pieces, as in the delightfully inventive Dressur by Mauricio Kagel, which calls for interaction amongst the musicians.  Then there was the big finale: a maelstrom of activity from choreographer Jennifer Harrison Newman and the cast to a storm of percussion from McQuilken and his cohorts (percussionists Yun-Chu Chiu, John Corkill, Ian Rosenbaum, Adam Rosenblatt).

Conceived to celebrate the return of spring, The Perks included video footage of the great outdoors: McQuilken climbing a tree to enhance a rhapsodic piece played by Chiu, and of Nyong’o rushing, like a crazed fan, across streets and across various locations on Yale’s campus, toward her object of adoration (the camera).

Each separate musical number was a mini-drama in its own right if only because playing percussion seems so performative to begin with—add an array of odd noisemakers constructed for the occasion, and you’ve got props as well as instruments.  This was nowhere more evident than in Dressur, which was scripted by its composer to be enacted, and which turns upon the successive failure of the percussionists to communicate the musical idea until finally the last one—Chiu—threw away her sticks and ran off.

Whether or not all the music expressed the theme of spring, the high spirits of the performers and the energetic nature of the pieces combined as a jolt to the system, just in time for the Passover / Easter season.

The Perks, A Rite of Spring; directed by Michael McQuilken

Created by Artists from the Yale Schools of Music, Art, and Drama

The Yale Cabaret, April 14-16

Let Down The Puppet Strings

Theater doesn’t need words. That’s the lesson of Dorian Gray last weekend at the Yale Cabaret. Oscar Wilde’s novel of a young fop who runs afoul of Victorian mores, schooled in the delights of debauchery by Lord Henry, the irrepressible originator of bon mots and apothegms galore, was adapted as a puppet show, staged in a cluttered set of Victoriana and stray junk, with moody lighting and a cloying toy piano score. Odd, to say the least. Once we got beyond the main problems—the difficulty of taking in all the action as no vantage point was ideal, the slowness of the action, the requisite concentration to see puppets “act,” and the need to infer much of what we were meant to be seeing—I think the audience was more or less on board. On the one hand, there was a lot of repetition (time and again Dorian sat before the theater box, watching his favorite actress Sibyl Vane enact the great Shakespearean heroines) and not a lot of forward movement; on the other, there were fascinating hypnotic effects and the sort of etherealized beauty that Wilde himself worshipped.

But it was not a Wilde-heavy evening, as we heard none of the author’s brilliant verbiage, and yet it was extremely Wildean, as we were treated to a sense of theatricality—as pantomime and tableau—that would have doubtlessly appealed to dear Oscar. I particularly liked the mustached puppet-wranglers, all females in Lord Henry drag, and the tantalizing overtones of Sir Edward Gorey, particularly in the eerie death scene. There was also a bit of shadow puppet bawdry depicting the sorts of things Victorian prudes would have conniptions over.

Shadow was provided by Hannah Wisileski, Light by Masha Tsimring—and nothing would’ve worked without them. The puppets, and the conception, and the direction came from Adam Rigg (who also played the artist in the show), and Wasileski, along with Maria Hooper (costumes), Meredith Ries and Kristen Robinson (both set designers) were the puppet-wranglers. In other words, the show was performed by its designers and was primarily interesting as a design showcase. Short on story, long on studied moments of visual magic.

Dorian Gray Adapted from Oscar Wilde Conceived and directed by Adam Rigg

Yale Cabaret, April 7-9, 2011

Such Sweet Sorrow

You want to know something? William Shakespeare was a master playwright. That's the immediate observation to be made after seeing Romeo and Juliet at the Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Shana Cooper, a Yale School of Drama grad, with a cast featuring many second and third year actors from the School, as well as a few notable former students. In other words, it’s Old Home Week at the Yale Rep, and nothing says, “Old Home” like a return to a venerable classic by our tongue’s most widely lauded, taught, and re-enacted playwright. The greatest success of Cooper's vision for this production is that it makes one marvel at how Old Bill manages to mix violence (feuding families that, in this modern dress and highly active version—credit Fight Director Rick Sordelet—recall gangland battles, mob hostilities, and, of course, The Sharks and The Jets from West Side Story, which was a variation on R&J to begin with), hilarity (The Nurse is always funny, and Cynthia Mace makes the most of it, adding plenty of Yenta charm, but does anyone talk about how funny Balthasar is? After seeing Blake Segal in the role, you will.), death (five corpses by the end—the death-begat-death structure is well-known, but it seems to me that the death of Countee Paris (Ben Horner, dutiful in a thankless role) isn’t always played, though here it is, and it gives more tooth to Romeo, sometimes seen as a fey ladies’ man, to see him kill a member of each of the other leading families), generational tensions, familial difficulties (the Capulets are given much presence, thanks to Christina Rouner’s affecting portrayal as Juliet’s mother, svelte as hell in a black funeral dress, mixing comic touches and frenetic, modern-mother-at-her-wits’-end gestures with stormy mourning over her possum-playing daughter, and Andy Murray, blunt and muscular, with a Jason Statham look and shades of an East End delivery, as he berates Tybalt (Marcus Henderson, dangerous and seething) as an upstart, and later his daughter for her contrary ways, underscoring that there’s something rotten in the house of Capulet), flights of fancy (boy, that Mercutio (John Patrick Doherty) can talk!, and here he’s as gay as you probably always assumed he was, but Michael Jackson didn’t grab his own crotch as often as Doherty thrusts his), jokes (most coming from Mercutio—to say nothing of some comic butt baring), poetic musings (Friar Laurence (Henry Stram) in a lovely little soliloquy that slows everything down just when it needs to—consummate craftsman, our Will), the best romantic badinage ever written (and placed in the mouths of teens), and all the tragic baggage of “star-cross’d lovers” (a hoary enough conceit even in The Bard’s day), and gets away with it—more, establishes a bar that has never been bettered.

So what about those lovers, eh? I can’t think of Romeo without recalling the Shakespearean actor in a Monty Python skit who recalled he was “frightfully awkward with all that happy prancing” the role requires. Our Romeo (Joseph Parks) is anything but awkward, and prance he does. He also swings from bars and wears an ape costume (with sneakers). In fact, one of the pleasures of this production is watching Parks own the stage; his is a tight, sinewy Romeo, in physical presence, but his delivery has few nuances—it’s all exhortatory cadences, making every speech a song in the same key. I found myself longing for a more varied music. And that extends also to his lady love, Juliet (Irene Sofia Lucio), though for a different reason. Lucio is great as the winsome teen of the first half—she acts the age (not yet fourteen) that Juliet is supposed to be—and rises to splendor in Juliet’s long riff on the word “banished,” managing to make Will’s asides-within-asides jump nimbly to the rising despair she feels. But, as Hamlet says, “something too much of this.” I couldn’t help feeling that this Juliet was out of touch with the world she inhabited—a shambles of warring families and preening coxcombs, where even her Man of the Hour kills in haste and repents at leisure, and quits her bed like the Captain of the Team who just scored the winning goal and has to hit the showers. I found myself longing for the tones of today’s teen queen, more deadpan irony, less fluttery gush.

Finally, as is usually the case at the Rep, the technical stuff is all great: Costume Designer Leon Dobkowski has fun, so you can too; the set (Po-Lin Li) and lighting (Laura J. Eckelman) enhance all that verbal poetry with some of the visual kind: the figures lurking in the shadows were a nice touch, but even better was the odd, background mound, and the upper story gave a sense of a proscenium-within-the-proscenium, especially when that big bed was center stage; and Composer Gina Leishman’s music added commentary—the first half Curtain sounded like a Twin Peaks-style Soap score, archly suggesting bathos and something sinister to come.

The production will be enacted for area high school students through the WILL POWER! program, and should go over well with a young adult audience—for what teen hasn’t envisioned his or her own death as the “serves ‘em right” payback to overbearing parents? As Aristotle would say, that’s catharsis, folks!

The Yale Repertory Theatre presents William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet Directed by Shana Cooper

March 11 to April 2, 2011

Everybody’s Critic

William Logan, Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue, Columbia University Press, 2009, 346 pgs. Disclosure 1: I haven’t read much Logan previously, though I know he is notorious for poking holes in inflated poetic reputations; Disclosure 2: I don’t read a lot of poetry criticism because most of it is ego-stroking blather aimed to curry favor with the poet reviewed; Disclosure 3: I wanted to read this book because Logan includes two essays on later novels by Thomas Pynchon: Mason & Dixon and Against the Day, respectively.

About Logan’s rep: he seems to me to live up to it in this collection of his critical pieces from the recent decade, the earliest review first appearing in 1997 and the latest in 2008.  If you read poetry crit with some regularity, you’ve probably heard some of the best bits, for Logan’s pithiness has a way of excerpting itself into anti-blurbs: Billy Collins is “the Caspar Milquetoast of contemporary poetry, never a word used in earnest, never a memorable phrase”; on Tony Hoagland: “You don’t ever get the feeling that he reads, or is affected by anything he can’t shut off with a remote control”; “Readers adore Bishop and adore themselves for adoring her”; “Nobody does a better Heaney imitation than Heaney”; “Drama queens can be charming at thirty; at sixty, they’re insufferable.” And so on, in reviews that cover front-runners like Robert Hass, Geoffrey Hill, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Mark Strand, Richard Wilbur, Charles Wright, and newcomers like Natasha Trethewey, Cathy Park Hong, and a host of others.  I found myself laughing aloud quite often, which is to say that watching Logan handle the Pulitzer-prized poets of our day and other notables is way more entertaining than reading most of them ("There's nothing natural about Muldoon's poems now--they're full of artificial sweeteners, artificial colors, and probably regulated by the FDA.").  And it’s also true that I rarely found myself disagreeing with him, even about poets I read and admire.  Here’s a comment about Robert Pinsky that seems to me quite accurate:

“Well-meaning, often charming, sincere as a traffic sign, he has all the gifts that education and rationality can provide; but you never feel he’s actually moved to write.” Logan gives us all the “good” qualities of Pinsky while making them seem inadequate for poetry, where the important thing is the passion or feeling that compells composition.  While it would be naïve to suggest that one writes out of emotion (even Wordsworth said poems were based on “emotion recollected in tranquility”), we still have to concede that a problem with Pinsky is how controlled and deliberate it all is.  No rapture, no divine afflatus.

Or, on Ashbery: “when you read Ashbery you have to forget much of what you know about reading poetry.  You have to take satisfaction where pleasures are rarely given and never let yourself wish for what isn’t there. (There’s so much that isn’t there.)”  While I can’t imagine someone saying that “pleasures are rarely given” in Ashbery’s poems (if there’s any poet writing today who seems to live by Stevens’ dictum “It Must Give Pleasure,” that poet must be Ashbery), I do concede that the kinds of pleasures Logan means may well be rare in Ashbery—“so much that isn’t there” (echoing, it seems to me, Stevens’ “the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”) calls to mind the things other poets do that readers of such poets seem to like.  Which is to say that the pleasures of Ashbery are the pleasures of Ashbery; you’ll never confuse him with Lowell, or Auden, or Larkin, or any of the other poets that Logan uses as a measuring rod.

Then there’s this, from the close of his review of the Library of America edition of the complete Hart Crane:

Crane was no innovative genius like Whitman; he was perhaps closer to a peasant poet like John Clare, an outsider too susceptible to praise and other vices of the city. Defensive about his lack of education, a Midwestern striver out of a Sinclair Lewis novel, Crane tried to make it among the big-city literary men, a rum in one hand and a copy of The Waste Land in the other.  Had beauty been enough, he might even have succeeded.

This review apparently brought down much complaint upon Logan’s head, for it’s the only review here that is followed by a response to critics of his criticism.  The objections to what Logan has to say about Crane are easily imaginable—is it worth mentioning that someone is “no Whitman”?  But what’s instructive here is how Logan makes Crane critique-able.  He raises an issue that is often lost sight of when we try to appraise those (seemingly) secure in the canon: how much of what they did is truly remarkable, how much of it achieved what was intended?  Logan’s assessment of Crane—that he was too ambitious for his abilites, that he was out of his league with his intentions, that he was a writer of gorgeous lines rather than completely satisfying poems—is accurate, as far as it goes.   And that’s far enough to offset the outrageous claims for Crane as one who achieved more than he did.  But, though I’m sympathetic to Logan’s effort to be even-handed here (and entertaining—that rum and Eliot remark is funny but also sadly true: you don’t become the next Eliot by worrying so much about the current Eliot, and drinking to escape your inadequacies), I also find his appraisal to be ungenerous, not simply to Crane, but to the value of beauty in poetry.  No, it’s not enough simply to be gorgeous, but Crane, arguably, is never simply gorgeous—the beauty he courts comes, when it does, at considerable risk, costing, it may be, “not less than everything”—including the kind of sense that Logan would like more of.

And it’s here that I can say I grew tired of Logan when read at such length.  If we find it hard to imagine Pinsky being moved to write, we also find it hard to imagine Logan ever being transported by the pleasures of poetry, or simply overwhelmed by beauty.  Logan is Lowellian, it seems, and that puts him off to the side of the leading taste of our day, I’d say, but I share his admiration for Life Studies and feel it’s the rare poet who can achieve as much as Lowell does in such deceptively simple diction.  But the chaos and crazed ambition that lurk everywhere in Lowell’s work inspire, it seems to me, a bit more acceptance of a poet like Crane who wrestles with many of the same problems—a Lowell who never got from Lord Weary to Life Studies, let’s say.  Logan, as a critic, is too-much enamored of his Johnsonian parallels—reading Logan’s criticism at length makes one feel trapped in an apothegm factory—and too-little concerned with poems as affective experience (which requires, I’d suggest, assuming a bit more what the poem assumes).

But, that said, Logan is to be praised for doing what he does with such aplomb, wit, and succinctness.  The book opens with a reflective essay on his work as a critic, “The Bowl of Diogenes; or, The End of Criticism,” where Logan claims that the critic’s “besetting vice is generosity,” so I suppose it’s pointless to rebuke him for showing too little vice, and the essay is valuable for showing what Logan thinks of criticism, which he seems to regard as largely a necessary vice.  How else to decide what is worth our time?  We can’t read everything, so we look to critics to give us some idea of what we’re missing, maybe making claims that send us to things we’d otherwise avoid or convincing us to avoid something we’d otherwise waste time with.

In an interview included here, Logan, a poet, modestly refuses to claim company with grander poet/critics (such as Eliot and Jarrell), and that seems more than fitting.  Logan, as critic,  has the assured and captious tone of the entertaining friend one values for his ability to find fault with disarming confidence.  One rarely feels antagonized by his pronouncements, and even more rarely does one feel challenged to delve more deeply into his meaning.  His is the strength of the surface assessment; it’s often enough for him to quote a few damning lines of a lackluster poem to convince us that poetry is often simply the name for willful idiosyncracy in writing, but the effect is more like punching buttons on a radio to see if one catches a sound that will make one stay and listen.  Logan gives us a pretty good idea of what he’s hearing, but apparently doesn’t feel he has to bother to spell out what he’s listening for—which Eliot and Jarrell were not so reticent about.

And what about the Pynchon reviews?  I was pleased to find that Logan admires the audacious pleasures of Pynchon’s style, though as critic he also has to provide a caveat (on Mason & Dixon): “This intensity of imagery, this continual and immodest word-by-word invention, ruptures the plain understandings most fiction now requires.”  And this assessment comes fully informed by the challenges even a sympathetic reader of Pynchon is apt to find: “Joyce and Proust offered character in lieu of plot, and many novelists substitute plot in lieu of character.  It’s difficult for a novel, even a novel everywhere touched by brilliance, to offer so little of either.”  And Logan is even less accepting of Against the Day (as were most).  The point, we might say, contra this judgment, is that a writer like Pynchon wants us to get out of the habit of thinking in terms of plot and character as the mainstays of what the fictive reading experience offers, and I would like to think that dedicated readers of Pynchon have done so.  And yet there is much justice in Logan’s assessment, but, as is often the case when one tries to hold the willfully slippery still long enough to deliver one’s plodding objection, his criticism boils down to wanting Pynchon to stop goofing around and simply give us the story.

Pynchon may have conceived Mason & Dixon as a supreme fiction, a poetic act freed of the slavery of plot and character; but conventions are cruel to those who betray them.  As his stand-up comedy becomes merely a seven-hundred-page improvisation, the jokes grow hollow as the Earth itself.  Here Pynchon’s poetics have seduced him: it hardly matters if most poems mean what they say.  Poetry is the saying, but fiction (the drama, the action, the consequence, the regret) is the having said.

As a statement this can’t be argued against (except that M&D is the one Pynchon novel where “the regret” becomes palpable in the character of Mason).  But IF M&D is a seven-hundred-page improv, then it’s all about the jokes and that might well grow tedious, but what’s at issue is what Pynchon is joking about (the thematics of the work) and part of what he’s joking about are the very conventions that, to Logan’s mind, he has “betrayed.”  But is mocking, lampooning, satirizing, tickling, poking, needling, and slapping in the face with a custard pie the same as “betraying”?  And, while it may sound wonderfully Johnsonian to say "poetry is saying and fiction the having said," it only makes sense to the degree that poetry is a form valued for its immediacy and fiction a form valued for its ability to impose order on what has occurred.  But poetry’s order and fiction’s order are likewise impositions, the more so when convention becomes determinate for what can be said or shown.  Logan wants more matter, less art, and certainly understands that Pynchon writes from a perspective in which that distinction becomes indistinct.   No one can fault a critic for saying "something too much of this," and Logan earns respect for reading Pynchon carefully; if at times he sounds like a school teacher trying to hold his most irreverent student to the standard of his "best students," so be it.

Again, there is no deficiency in Logan’s position, it simply isn’t one that best serves the work under discussion.  If poetry is the saying, and fiction the having said, I suppose that criticism is having one’s say.  If not always saying much, Logan’s say is always well-said, and that’s saying something.

Method in the Madness

This season’s second presentation in the Yale Rep and World Performance Project at Yale’s No Boundaries series was The Method Gun, a play/rehearsal-within-a-play written by Kirk Lynn, directed by Shawn Sides, and enacted by an ensemble, including Sides, called Rude Mechs (short for Mechanicals), from Austin, TX. Staged as a recreation of high points in a nine-year process of rehearsal for an avant-garde production of A Streetcar Named Desire (with each actor in the show playing an actor in the original production, from 1975), The Method Gun purports to elucidate “the approach”—a theatrical doctrine concocted by Stella Burden, a fictional drama teacher whose name pays tribute both to Stella Adler, of the famed acting studio that trained the young Brando for the stage, and Stella Kowalski, the wife of Stanley, the on-stage and, later, film role with which the young Brando was memorably associated (his well-known shout of “Stella” duly received comic acknowledgment in the course of The Method Gun).   In short, then, “the approach” mocks but also pays tongue-in-cheek tribute to theories of acting—as for instance Lee Strasberg's “method acting”—and there you have the primary attraction of this evening of theater: if you aren’t interested in how theater gets rehearsed and staged, you aren’t likely to find much in the show to like.

On the other hand, if you want to enter into the spirit of things, you have to be ready for a night of theater that consists of what seem to be improvs, bad readings of a classic play (Streetcar, in 1975, was staged without the dialogue or presence of the four main characters: Stanley, Stella, Blanche, and Mitch), at times believable, at times stilted “rehearsal” interaction, and various unexpected physical moments.  Some high points of the latter: Thomas Graves impromptu “dance,” involving contortions and much rhythmic falling about on the floor; the moment when Graves and E. Jason Liebrecht cavorted onstage nude, to the tune of King Harvest’s “Dancing in the Moonlight,” each with the strings of a collection of helium balloons tied to his penis; the point, late in the play, when five swinging pendulum lamps were set in motion simultaneously and the company had to thread its way amongst the paths—a rather “man on a flying trapeze” effect.

The fact that such moments might occur at any time gave the play its edge, such as it was.  Oh, and there was also the threat that a talking tiger, wearing dress pants and speaking into a mic, might appear at any moment and eat whichever character we were “most bored with.”  The tiger and his commentary was one of the few elements of outright comedy and as such was a crowd-pleaser.

What was less successful was the dialogue the cast spoke.  Whether improvised or actually written, their lines had little bite or wit and for the most part didn’t convincingly enact a troupe at their wits’ end after nine years of rehearsal.  Only occasionally—I seem to recall Shawn Sides being best at it—did a sense of frayed nerves come across.  If you’ve seen Jacques Rivette’s L’amour fou, you know that watching endless rehearsal can be fascinating, but that was not the case here, particulary in the play’s first half.  By the time the overheads were telling us we were weeks, then days, away from the Streetcar performance, the pace did pick up, but that also had to do with the sense that a release from the company’s company was imminent.

And yet there were unusual experiences to be had.  When Sides, as Elizabeth Johns playing Eunice in Streetcar, welcomes Blanche to New Orleans she spoke directly to the audience and for a moment there was a disquieting sense of having to feel like Blanche, a stranger arriving in a strange land; and the predominant sense of the ‘70s was palpable, not only in the choice of a fairly obscure song like “Dancing in the Moonlight” (a radio tune in 1973), but in the dress and attitude of the cast—it was hard to say exactly why the kind of theater we were watching, in 2011, gained its energy from the experimental theater of the ‘70s, but the feeling was there and it was easy to imagine this young cast right at home in the earlier period.

And that, I think, is the point of the piece: a chance to think about how American theater, which got a big boost from Stella Adler’s studio in the ‘50s, with Brando in Streetcar as the iconic image, moved into the ‘70s, where experimental, off-the-wall approaches abounded, and on to our era where, we like to think, ensemble pieces about theatre can still find new boundaries to cross.

The Method Gun, written by Kirk Lynn, directed by Shawn Sides

Created by Rude Mechs

Yale Repertory Theatre and World Performance Project at Yale

February 23-26, 2011

and coming to Dance Theater Workshop, New York, March 2-12

The Children's Hour

Once upon a time there were three YSD actresses—a third year (the tall one), a first year (the small one), and a second year (the medium-sized one)—and they lived together in a little room with a sink on one side, a toilet on the other, and a bench in between.  There was also a little door to come and go through and some pictures on the wall. These three actresses were really children and never spoke to one another.  Their time was spent in pantomime and songs.  Each had routines and the routine each had in common was tooth-brushing.  At first it made the tall one weep, but later she did it orgiastically, with liberal lather.  It was not unlike her dance routine upon the toilet, waiting for that liberating splash.  For the small one, the toothbrush was a bullhorn, and brought on a kind of oral/aural seizure.  And for the middle one, the toothbrush was a seductive partner at a dance.

And so the three lived and played and did little tasks—peeling a potato, going to confession, folding laundry—and sang nonsense songs and lip-synched and danced, and mimicked love scenes from Gone With The Wind, From Here to Eternity, and It’s a Wonderful Life.

A big box was delivered to each and contained something important, maybe even something each needed.  For the middle one, the box held a little box she could wear, with clouds inside; for the tall one, the box gave her a light that touched her heart and sent her on wings toward heaven; for the small one, the box held a power drill that got stuck in the wall.

All three actresses have considerable comic skills: the tall one recently played Dogberry in a YSD production of Much Ado About Nothing and was very funny; here she was the sister with the most anxiety and the tears of a clown; the small one had fewer routines but she liked phallic things, like a big, thick dildo and that power drill; the middle one was the most endearing, enacting cute sock puppets making love, or giving out a succession of mouth farts.

Everything they did gave them pleasure or recalled pleasures or, like the cackling baby who was really a vacuum-cleaner, created a sense of the pleasure things have in giving pleasure to humans.  And that’s why the play was called pleasureD.

The Yale Cabaret, where these three actresses performed, will be dark now until March 24-26.  And then there will be a new play and it will be a musical, about a mannequin who might be a boy or might be a girl or might be both, called Trannequin.

pleasureD, conceived, created, and performed by a trio of YSD actresses

The Yale Cabaret, Feb. 17-19

McGrath's American Hero

Campbell McGrath, Shannon. Ecco/Harper Collins, 2009. $23.99 This long poem’s opening, spoken in the confiding, companionable first-person voice of a young man eager to stand out on Lewis & Clark’s team in the summer of 1804, rolls through unsettled American land near the Missouri river. Determined to prove himself, this youngest member of the Corps of Discovery rides out, without much food or ammunition, after runaway horses. He finds the horses the first day. Two weeks pass before the Corps finds him, starving, with buffalo all around him (no bullets left). The subsequent sections of the poem mark the days of the young man’s solitary trial.

The historical George Shannon—c. 1785-1836, eventually a Missouri judge known as “Peg-Leg” after an Indian ambush nearly killed him—left no journal or memoir, so the poem’s language is entirely McGrath’s. His Shannon is alert to every sight, sound, smell. He’s working. And wise, right away, to more than the surface: “the fugitives appeared/Not unhappy at sight of me.” He’s curious, excited, humorous, ambitious, self-conscious—all in the first moments of his first day alone.

For Shannon McGrath has found language that opens the mind of this emblematic New (white, Christian, colonizing) American without intruding on the reader’s experience of him. There’s Action: killing one rabbit with hard wood in place of a bullet. Suspense: in the quest for food; more, in the struggle to register every lesson in the landscape. And fantasy sex, reluctant theology, geopolitical prophecy, ant visions, buffalo dreams. It’s a film you want to watch again and again.

Actual journal entries by William Clark record Shannon’s departure before he begins to speak and his rescue after he stops on the fifteenth day. The lines of irregular length feel transparent, at the far end of the poetic scale from the charged, boisterous lines of the work McGrath is best known for. In Shannon it’s the line-breaks that make music:

Small herds Of elk coming out from the arroyo To silver water & shadows Of clouds over the same hills & wind Amongst the grasses grown Ceaseless now.

Shannon enjoys time to think. At first a conqueror, naming the place around him “Shannontown,” he begins to question

. . . our grand purpose Here, that being to keep moving To forge if even blindly Onward.

All the political fury and rhetorical dazzle McGrath packed into “The Bob Hope Poem” in Spring Comes to Chicago (1996); all the fire of his quest for America in road-trip poems from his first book, Capitalism (1990), through his prose-poem book, Road Atlas (1999), to his lumpy, fascinating journal book, Seven Notebooks (2008), take new form in Shannon (2009), his eighth book. All to ask: How do we (Americans) serve—let alone deserve—this glorious land we have lucked into?

Shannon’s hunger for food NOW becomes his ambition for the future; his awareness that he’s lost in the land becomes the new nation’s uncertain development. McGrath enlarges upon Shannon’s ambitions in this major work that has been under-noticed because Shannon doesn’t sound like “McGrath,” and because readers balked at the subtleties of Seven Notebooks. Concluding his Afterword, McGrath links our hopes to his hero’s: “George Shannon often got lost, but he always got found. May the same hold true for those who continue to follow in his footsteps, the majestic land he wandered, and the nation he was proud to call home.”

It's Not Easy Being Blue

The most recent Yale Cabaret offering was inspired by the art theory of Wassily Kandinsky, the modernist painter and Bauhaus instructor who earlier was a founder of the avant-garde group The Blue Rider.  If you’re wondering how art theory can supply the basis for drama, you have to imagine a series of dialogues between blue and yellow. For Kandinsky, these two primary colors represent the first principles of color in painting—yellow, terrestial warmth; blue, celestial coolness.  In Out of the Blue, written by Kee-Yoon Nahm, a dramaturgy student at YSD, and directed by Elliot B. Quick, the Cab’s Associate Artistic Director this semester, Blue and Yellow become, respectively, an artist (Jack Moran) and his model (Jillian Taylor).  “Art can only begin at the point where love and compassion end,” Kandinsky wrote, and with that statement as the tagline for the play, you can intuit that whatever the desires of the individuals might be, the pursuit of art is going to overwhelm any attempt at intimacy.

In the play, Yellow represents the aggressive nature of human interaction, always trying to make something happen between people, and Blue represents the withdrawal from interaction, the attempt to remain solitary and unprovoked.   If that sounds incredibly abstract, that’s appropriate to Kandinsky’s view of art, but in practice it produced several amusing vignettes in which the artist figure became a French monk, a Russian explorer, and an American Man in the Moon.  In each case Yellow became the figure for human interest, the busy destroyer of solitude, arriving to insist on a relation to other people.

Back at the painting studio, the artist has to explain to his mother why he dropped out of art school, and overcome his model’s aggressive suggestion that he represent her entire body, not just her hands.  Both actors expressed the qualities of their respective colors, with Moran moody and detached, Taylor bright with bonhomie.  The set (Kristen Robinson, designer) and lighting (Yi Zhao, designer) added dimension by providing painted blue shadows to objects—a chair, an easel, a bookshelf—bathed in yellow light.  And there were slide projections (Hannah Wasileski, designer) that seemed derived from a personality test in which the viewer was asked to describe the relation between a yellow triangle and a blue circle.  The fact that the circle seemed at times like an ovum subjected to the triangle’s efforts to penetrate only added to the old notion that the artist is “feminine,” and the imagination a world unto itself.  And yet, the play suggested, looking at art, no matter how detached from the everyday worlds we inhabit, might still bring us together.

Out of the Blue, written by Kee-Yoon Nahm; directed by Elliot B. Quick

The Yale Cabaret, February 10-12, 2011

Unfinished Business

August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson has returned to The Yale Rep where it debuted in 1987.  The play is part of a cycle of ten plays, one for each decade of the twentieth century, that Wilson wrote to depict African American experience.  With that sense of epic reach in mind, one approaches The Piano Lesson a bit awestruck, ready to watch a master work through family history and racial history in telling ways, making his characters “representative” but also fully weighted with individuality.  The play, as written and as presented, stands upon venerable traditions of naturalistic theater, with a grasp of character dynamics that recall Chekhov and O’Neill, playwrights celebrated for their ability to make dramatic points arise out of what seem to be everyday conversations. But that may be a misleading claim, for the plot of The Piano Lesson hinges upon events unusual in themselves, beginning with Boy Willie’s bumptious visit to his sister Berniece, coming all the way from Mississippi to Pittsburgh in 1936 as a man with a mission.  But once he gets there, with his slow-spoken friend Lymon along, the first mission—to sell a truckload of watermelons—doesn’t seem too pressing, and the other mission—to convince Berniece to let him sell the family heirloom piano—becomes the occasion for all sorts of reminiscences, grandstanding, arguing, haranging, and hauntings.  And there the feel of how porous is the difference between the usual and the unusual, the natural and the unnatural, becomes more portentous, investing the Charles family heirloom with a fetishistic quality that partakes of different forms of magic, all tellingly presented in the play.

The house is haunted by the ghost of Sutter, grandson of the slave owner who sold off Boy Willie and Berniece’s great-grandmother and grandfather to buy the piano.  He has died recently, pushed down a well, and that means his land, which the Charles family worked as slaves, is now available for Boy Willie to purchase.  And that’s why he needs to sell the piano.  Though we never see the apparition, it appears to different members of the family, indicating to Berniece that her brother may have been responsible for Sutter’s death, but also seeming to indicate that, even beyond the grave, Sutter is concerned with what becomes of the piano, a piano that was stolen by Boy Charles, father of Boy Willie and Berniece, along with his two brothers, Wining Boy and Doaker, and brought to Pittsburgh.  Carved into the piano are images of the two who were sold as well as images of other notable moments in the Charles family history (all this history comes out in Scene II in a wonderful speech, delivered as collective memory,  by Uncle Doaker).

Giving an object such historical and familial meaning is significant enough, but Wilson goes further, letting us feel the appeal of music—the prison worksongs (another great moment is when Boy Willie, Lyman, Doaker, and Wining Boy all join together on the song “Berta Berta,” beating time on kitchen implements), the boogie-woogie tunes (Wining Boy is an aging former saloon singer and piano player), the hymns and ballads that the piano seems to incarnate.  Berniece’s most persistent suitor, Avery, is an elevator attendant who aspires to be a preacher and his attempt to exorcise Sutter by blessing the house brings into play the strong evangelical magic that speaks to these folks to varying degrees.  Then there is the magic attraction of the loose woman, Grace, that speaks to both Boy Willie and Lymon, to say nothing of the alleged magic of the silk suit and Florsheim shoes Wining Boy convinces Lyman to buy from him, "guaranteed" to get him a woman.

In other words, talismans abound, and cultural reference points, and songs, and fluent rhythms of speech, all coming together to form a vast expressive fabric.

The battle between brother and sister about how best to live up to what the burden of the past means is the heart of the piece, as everywhere there is unfinished business—between Willie Boy and Berniece (she blames him for her husband’s death), between the Charles family and the Sutter family—the slaves and the masters—and between the North and the South, the rural and the urban, as sites of African American identity.

The question of who carries the day and why is what we leave discussing.  If we’re meant to sympathize with Berniece and her intentions to retain the emblematic piano, the performance by Eisa Davis made that difficult.  Her Berniece sounded brittle and strident, only appearing warm and appealing in her touching quasi-courtship scene with Lyman (Charlie Hudson, III) where the latter’s easy-going nature brought her out of a settled irritability.  LeRoy McClain’s Boy Willie, while engaging, energetic and instantly likeable, appeared at times so wrong-headed and insistent we can’t completely sanction his claim nor entirely dismiss his intention to sell off the past to improve the present.

The siblings’ struggle was fleshed out entertainingly by Charles Weldon as Wining Boy, a pivotal figure every time he was on stage because his command of a repertoire of moves and voices made vivid a character of vast experience, and by Keith Randolph Smith’s Doaker, a stolid figure with an air of bedrock solidity.  We might feel at times a taint of cliché hanging about these characters: the plainspoken railroad man, the feckless entertainer, the prim widow, the naïve hayseed, the sexy city-woman, the knockabout with a plan, but that sense of the familiar only proved uninspired in one instance: as Avery, the upright worker turned preacher man, Tyrone Mitchell Henderson was neither comical nor wholly convincing, there being an earnest dullness in the character he couldn’t quite overcome.

At times, there were places where the play could move more quickly, but time seems to be part of the burden Wilson wants to present, and director Liesl Tommy gives us a play we have to settle into and learn how to live with, providing just enough jolts to keep us off-guard, but also giving us a lesson in naturalistic action and ensemble work.  The piano may be all too obvious as an emblem of slavery, song, and family, but the genius of the play is in making the past—like the uneasy revenant Sutter—a real presence.

The Piano Lesson by August Wilson; directed by Liesl Tommy

Original music by Eisa Davis; lyrics by August Wilson

Yale Repertory Theatre, January 28 to February 19, 2011

Lebanon (Film Review)

Lebanon is an Israeli film that played in U.S. theaters for a few weeks last summer.  For those who missed its initial release, it just came out on DVD and is worth catching.  While not the absolute masterpiece that some of my fellow critics have claimed, it is a very good film that boasts the ability to milk unbearable suspense out of war film cliches. Set during the First Lebanon War, it tells the story of an Israeli tank crew.  Shmulik (Yoav Donat) is the gunner and the new member of the crew.  Assi (Itay Tiran) is the ineffectual leader who fails to command the respect of his men.  Hertzel (Oshri Cohen) is the ammunition loader and the closest thing in the film to a live wire—his constant challenging of Assi’s authority quickly becomes a nuisance for everyone in the tank.  The final member of the crew is Yigal (Michael Moshonov), the quiet driver who tries to stay out of everyone’s way.

Accompanying a squad of paratroopers into enemy territory, the tank moves into an urban area where it’s hard to tell the difference between civilians and fighters.  Most of the film is seen through Shmulik’s scope as he scans the area for fighters.  But Shmulik is fresh from training where the only thing he was asked to shoot were barrels.  When he is faced with firing on a truck full of enemy fighters, he freezes, focusing on the panicked face of the driver which, through the scope, looks to be only inches away.  Despite repeated calls to shoot, he cannot do so and this action results in a firefight that finds not only the enemy dead but also one of the Israeli soldiers.  With no way to evacuate the body from the area, Jamil (Zohar Strauss), the major in charge of the operation, orders the body placed in the tank.  This is done as much as a punishment to Shmulik as it is for pragmatic reasons.  Inevitably, the next truck that comes along is not the enemy but still pays the price for Shmulik’s inability to fire on the first truck.

The story is one we’ve seen many times before.  It simply morphs from a film of “men on a mission” to one of “trapped behind enemy lines.”  But for the most part writer/director Samuel Maoz is not interested in plot.  He was a member of a tank crew in the First Lebanon War, and this experience informs every frame of the film as he focuses on the smallest of details.  From the myriad indignities of being stuffed inside a tank (the heat, dehydration, claustrophobia, choking fumes, and being forced to urinate in metal boxes) to the horrors of war (fear of the unknown, confusion of battle, grisly sight of mangled bodies), Maoz keeps the film uncomfortably intimate.  Taking cues from claustrophobic war film classics like Das Boot and Kanal, Lebanon isn’t a film you watch so much as smell and feel.  “Everyone knows war is hell,” Maoz seems to be saying, “but did you know it smells like smoke, blood, and shit?”

While it may be obvious, this intentional demythologizing of warfare is the only overarching message that Maoz seems intent on exploring.  He avoids any political statement about the situation in the Middle East that led to the war and, aside from one extremely heavy-handed shot (the only point that Maoz loses firm control of the tone), there is no reference to the numerous problems the region has seen since the war.  All that matters in the film is that war is a dehumanizing, horrible experience that no one should find entertaining.  This is reinforced by the constant use of seeing the war through Shmulik’s scope.  This perspective gives much of the film the same look as a first person shooter video game.  But unlike a video game, much of what is shown is horrific or mundane, never exciting or fun.

If this doesn’t exactly sound entertaining, that’s because it isn’t.  It’s a film that I find myself reluctantly recommending.  Despite the familiar genre tropes on display, it manages to carve out its own identity through Maoz’s stellar direction and solid work by the cast.  It’s effective at what it wants to do, but that’s also where it becomes difficult to watch.  It’s a film that deserves to be seen, just don’t expect a popcorn flick.

Matt Wedge is a film reviewer, New Haven resident, and co-founder of The Parallax Review, a totally awesome film criticism site.

The Eyes Have It

Bernard Berenson, the famous art connoisseur, made his name and reputation through a seemingly unfailing fidelity to his own cognizance of what constitutes the characteristic style of a master; his attributions made the fortune of the dealers and collectors who sold and owned the works he authenticated, or, likewise, could undermine a buyer or seller who tried to pass off as a masterpiece what was in fact an apprentice work. Simon Gray’s The Old Masters, now playing at the Long Wharf Theater, is set at a time when Berenson’s (Sam Waterston) expertise is not commanding the prices it had formerly; not only that, his beloved Italy, where he and his wife reside, is now being run by “the Duck” (aka Il Duce), and, not only that, the big buyers in the art world are no longer men who aim to acquire taste as well as prestige–such as Mellon or Frick—but rather men whose fortunes are made by, for instance, a string of five and dime stores.  In other words, the old verities are no longer quite so veracious, and perhaps even Berenson’s imprimatur can be had for the right price.

At least that’s what art dealer Joe Duveen (Brian Murray) hopes.  He wants to sell Mellon a Giorgione; unfortunately, Berenson insists the painting is an early Titian, a breakthrough in which the pupil comes close to the master, but not quite getting there.  The sparring between these two old masters, B.B. and Joe—as the latter tries to convince the former to concede that he might be mistaken—is the main dramatic substance of the play, the only scene where Gray’s mastery of his own medium is in evidence.  Early on, the proceedings are much slimmer, consisting of busywork aimed at dramatizing the ménage à trois of the Berenson home.  B.B.’s ailing but forceful and likeable wife Mary (Shirley Knight) suffers her husband’s amours with his private secretary, Nicky Mariano (Heidi Schreck), who must also suffer his amours with his Swedish masseuse, apparently, but all these references to B.B.’s erotic interests seem to be present primarily for the sake of running time and because Gray has obviously based much of this material on Mariano’s memoir.

The scenes between B.B. and the women add, arguably, a grasp of the great man’s character through knowledge of his domestic dealings, but Waterston’s truculence undermines any amorous interest.  And, though Schreck  is gamely graceful and Knight ruefully doting in their attitude to the man in their lives, Waterston’s irritable, blustering B.B. simply shines brightest with a male foil.  And that’s what Murray provides with delightful panache.  With a twinkle in his eye, a leonine head of hair, and an elegant moustache, his Duveen, ailing and driven, uses all his powers of persuasion, and the two men evince all the fascination of old counterparts perilously close to becoming enemies.

The sets are sumptuous, as befits a man of consummate taste, creating a sense of the style beyond means of the Villa I Tatti.  The pacing is too slow in the early going and the final scene seems a largely extraneous afterword.  In between, the best scenes are Waterston and Murray, then Waterston, Murray and Knight—her genuine affection for Joe as well as her sense of their need for his financial benefits add poignancy to the fact that the old friends cannot see eye to eye.

And it’s B.B.’s faith in his eye—not in art per se, nor in love, nor in loyalty—that is the driving force of the play because it’s what makes B. B. who he is, a factor of pride and authority that he can’t surrender without losing, no matter the financial gain.  But what the play ultimately dramatizes is how untenable are claims for art in an absolute sense.  What Gray wants to give us, it seems, is grounds for seeing the status of the art object, the very aspect that makes art Art, as inevitably up for grabs, nothing more than a gentleman’s agreement, quaintly doomed if gentlemen no longer call the shots with their accustomed integrity.

The Old Masters, by Simon Gray; directed by Michael Rudman

Long Wharf Theatre, January 19-February 13, 2011

The Ship of Death

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

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

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

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

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

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

The End of the Line: Literary TV and Showtime's 'Brotherhood'

As popular wisdom would have it, the end of TV’s Golden Age of Drama may already be upon us.  But while its possible deathblow is up for debate (the end of Lost? The rise of Glee?), bloggers and critics of all stripes agree on its birth. It is no coincidence that the form-defining triumph of The Sopranos marked a retraction from the over-hyped New York that we sipped in a trendy coffee shop through the 90s, to offer in its wake a macabre kind of success story from across the bridge. Wall Street and high fashion gave way, for the most part, to McMansions and the hot-pink thongs of a Jersey strip club, while Manhattan became just a place to take your wife out to dinner or to hawk a movie script. HBO’s crown jewel ushered in an era of self-consciously literary television, capitalizing on the shifting, ambivalent viewer involvement that long-form narrative demands. David Simon of The Wire compares his magnum opus to Greek tragedy and Shakespeare; hip college professors are inclined to agree. “David Chase is Dostoevsky for television,” Blake Masters once said of The Sopranos’ creator. This was a high bar for Masters’ own show to live up to.  But though Brotherhood—a little-known Showtime series that fuses elements of mob drama with the best of urban dejection—ran for only three seasons from 2006-2008, it is an indispensable stop on the line from the metropolis to a smaller, post-industrial enclave just an Amtrak ride away.

Brotherhood takes place in Providence, Rhode Island, a city more like our own New Haven than perhaps any of the other TV-drama settings. Its neighborhood of focus is a fictional, but insistently particular, place called The Hill, a working-class Irish Catholic stronghold struggling with lay-offs, new immigrants and gentrification. In terms of literary comparison, the show conjures up nothing so epic as The Brothers Karamazov or King Lear: the larger-than-life gangsters of The Wire’s “Bodymore, Murdaland” are replaced by the day-to-day headaches of low-level ambition. In its unrelenting interrogation of what it means to be from somewhere, Brotherhood is more like Saul Bellow’s Chicago novels: to be from a place means to “stick to your guns”—to know it before and against signification.

Brotherhood’s creator is from New England, and it is evident in the way he treats both the show’s financially beleaguered city—which he likened in an interview to the world’s biggest high school—and his two main characters. Michael and Tommy Caffee are at the top of their game, on opposing teams: one is a local mob boss, and one is a rising star in state politics. They both do some bad things and wind up in good places, and they both do some good things that don’t lead to much. It’s a narrative constructed as all means, no end, and major events seem to happen at random. Even Michael’s return from years of exile to kick off the series is oddly humdrum—he simply shows up one night for Sunday dinner and pulls up a chair around his mother’s dining room table.

The characters in Brotherhood develop, but the plot refuses to arc: when mobster Michael kills an FBI agent in one of the show’s most brutal scenes, he does it because he’s pissed off. He is not the victim of grand social injustice that we are privy to while he is not, and we shake our heads in dismay rather than bristle with indignation. There’s no symmetrical interweaving of anti-heroes on either side of a blurred ethical or institutional line, like in The Wire’s finely wrought structure. This leads to a show that is grim but convincing, and which commands admiration for its refusal to mythologize the condition it brings to life.

It may be this hermetic quality that kept Brotherhood from catching on, in spite of its strong acting and a soundtrack that had me rewinding just to sit and soak it up (one episode closes with a suicide and the Martin Sexton lyrics, “I’m tired, scared and wide open…to the rest of my life”). And while Meadow Soprano lands at Columbia to begin her climb into Manhattan’s good graces, the Ivy League university of Providence is as far off the Caffee family radar as the tri-state glitz of Mad Men. We know this city’s problems link it with others like it, but we don’t quite know how. It is a testament to the nuance of Masters’ writing that the stakes we do experience keep us focused on what he shows us.

For better or worse, then, Brotherhood is a peephole into life as it is, not life as it aspires to be. It’s about a city whose troubles define it from inside, because the people there aren’t trying to get out. It’s neither galvanizing, nor glamorized, nor likely all that eye-opening to the viewers it would probably appeal to most. But the show does satisfy, showing that small places have big stories to tell.  And even if that’s the whole point, right there, getting that story right makes Brotherhood worth a look.

A native of Meriden newly transplanted to Boston, Jeanne-Marie Jackson is a doctoral candidate at Yale, working in Russian and Afrikaans fiction.

Palimpsest

By Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Books, 2009)

Through incredible energy and talent, Catherynne M. Valente has been steadily building a name for herself pretty much since the day she started publishing. Her two-book story cycle, The , was at one point perhaps her best-known work, nominated for several awards and winner of a few, too. That was until was nominated for a , while Amazon's editors deemed it the best science fiction and fantasy novel of 2009. All of this success, however, still doesn't quite prepare you for—and perhaps disarms you against—the fact that Palimpsest is kind of freaky.

As the gossip preceding its publication went—possibly lifting a phrase from the author herself—Palimpsest is about a sexually transmitted city; that is, you're only allowed to visit if you find someone who has already been there and have sex with them. When you fall asleep afterward, you go to the city in your dreams; and if you are so blessed—or so unlucky?—after you visit it once, the waking world seems much diminished, and you do everything you can to return. Aiding you is that everyone who has visited is marked with a tattoo—perhaps small, perhaps large—that is itself a piece of a map of, a part of, that dream place. So you spend your time moving away from the life you knew, looking for those other people, for those tattoos, to connect with them, just to stay, in your dreams, in Palimpsest, as long as you can. The plot of the book follows four people who arrive in Palimpsest at the same time, first relating what each of them are willing to do just to get back—and then what happens when they discover that they are connected in a deeper way than they first understood.

Those of you who aren't habitually science fiction or fantasy readers—and maybe some of you who are—may be turning away at this point. You should not. Because Palimpsest, to me, works best as an extended metaphor: for addiction, disease, and profound loss; for the ways disparate people build their own tribe based on a common need, a dissatisfaction that overrides their differences. It's a fantastical book about some very real things, and in its fantasy, comes perhaps closer to letting the reader touch the real than a more realistic portrayal of the same thing ever could.

Which is another way of saying that the best reason to read Palimpsest is because it's absolutely beautiful, heady, hopeful and sad. This isn't just because of Valente's muscular imagination, her seemingly inexhaustible ability to create image after arresting image; it's also because she writes as well as anyone out there. The idea that literary fiction has all the best writers is as false as it is shopworn—obviously, there are great (and lousy) writers in every genre of both fiction and nonfiction. But Valente is a particular feast for those who love language and literature. To me, her writing is folkloric, medieval, Romantic, and at the same time, startlingly modern. There aren't many people who can write sentences as eerie and gorgeous as hers. How gorgeous are they really? I can hear you asking. You'll just have to find the book and find out.

P.S. Here's the word palimpsest in Merriam-Webster:

1 : writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased. 2 : something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface.

Yes, I had to look it up. You're welcome.

Whose Identity Is It, Anyway?

Kirsten Greenidge’s new play, Bossa Nova, now in its world premiere run at the Yale Repertory Theatre, addresses the notion of identity—particularly African-American cultural identity—as a theatrical experience, a matter of roles, costumes, lines, demeanor, comportment, and all the other aspects of theater that lend themselves as metaphors for social expectations.  The play gives us five distinctly mannered characters—four adults and one child—and a protagonist, Dee Paradis (twenty-seven, but seventeen in flashbacks), as the loose cannon, the figure who hasn’t quite accepted any manner as definitively her own. Dee’s mother, Lady Paradis, tries to help her daughter by training her.  As played by Ella Joyce, Lady is self-assured, definite, judgmental, a woman who, by her own admission, has scraped and clawed to escape the taint of her race, the aspects of being “colored” that she wouldn’t let mark her and determine her place.  She spends most of her scenes as an haute bourgeois matron at her dressing-table, putting on her face, choosing her wardrobe and accessories, and exhorting her daughter to find a face she can wear, to make the most of the privileges her parents have gained for her.

In flashbacks to Dee’s school days at a boarding school called St. Ursula’s, we hear of her outcast status among the daughters of the privileged.  The only people to befriend her are her equally misfit roommate Grace Mahoney (Libby Woodbridge) an Irish girl from Southey in Boston, eagerly attempting to discover her “talent,” so as to have a purpose, while sending school-girl crush vibes toward Dee, and Michael Cabot, a history teacher desperately trying to become hip by listening to jazz and by extolling black experience: naturally, he seduces Dee and that’s where the trouble really begins, not only because of the inevitable complications, but because Michael would place a costume on Dee supposedly authentic, as relics from tribal Africa, but as artificial to the girl as her mother’s painted face.

As Michael, Tommy Schrider gets all the comedy he can from the teacher’s gyrations as he rather anachronistically praises bebop jazz as “the future” (in the early Seventies!), and speaks a lingo that suggests Jack Kerouac is not only still alive (he died in 1969) but in his first flush of success.  Where’s this guy been, we wonder, and why the bossa nova (a “new trend” in the early Sixties)—when this should be the era of late Motown and Stevie Wonder?  In other words, either the time-frame of Dee’s school days are askew, partaking of the mid Sixties rather than the early Seventies in which they ostensibly occur, or Michael is a colossal throwback.  Either way, he’s the most fun character in the play.

The other fun thing is director Evan Yionoulis’ staging: very sparsely decorated, Ana M. Milosevic’s scenic design propels furniture and characters about the space for scene changes, and, with Laura J. Eckleman’s lighting design and Michael Vincent Skinner’s sound design, creates wonderfully integrated effects as we move through three different settings, two different periods, and a range of sounds, from old records to barking dogs to a busy paintbrush on canvas.

The other strengths of this production are its two main actresses: Ella Joyce wrings all the fait accompli dignity she can from Lady, with a weathered but musical voice that speaks its owner’s strong will, and, as the mercurial Dee, Francesca Choy-Kee has to act girlish for twenty-seven, and precocious for seventeen (its her essay that first gets Michael’s attention), straight-laced one minute and an Aretha-style “natural woman” the next, and, before the play’s over, call up an outcast’s heart-rending cries.  Hers is an intelligent, wary, and finally emotionally convincing performance in a play that could be, without her and her director’s grasp of the character, somewhat dubious.

Yale Repertory Theatre presents the world premiere of Bossa Nova by Kirsten Greenidge, directed by Evan Yionoulis

November 26 to December 18, 2010