Trial By Friendship

American Buffalo, first produced in 1975 in Chicago, then on Broadway in 1977, is noted as the play that established playwright David Mamet as the premiere poet of American speech—emphatic, riddled with profanity, full of vague nouns with referents that change according to context, with meaning guided always by inflection.  Mamet’s influence has been so pervasive that it’s hard to say at times whether he simply found the means to convey the way we talk or in fact invented a mannerism we now recognize as our own.  It does seem to be the case that the dialogue in his plays has ceased to be unsettling and become “normal.” Staged in Westville’s Kehler Liddell Gallery, the Elm Shakespeare production of America Buffalo, directed by Mark Zeisler, could be said to offer an immediate contradiction: Mamet’s trio of seedy shop flies in an art gallery?  Could it be that Mamet’s style of visceral, streetwise theater has become a museum piece?   Perhaps, as there’s no denying that the used goods shop that comprises Elizabeth Bolster’s spare but effective set is situated in a setting that is genteely artsy.  It might’ve been interesting to have staged the play in some abandoned New Haven retail space, but, that said, the fictional shop the characters inhabit wouldn’t be out of place on Whalley Avenue, home of the gallery, and so the immediate locale lends a certain aura of authenticity to the production.

The play itself is dialogue driven, so there’s no problem staging it in a confined space, and the closer the audience is to the action, the better.  We hover on the periphery of the card table, small desk and display case of the shop, watching interactions that could be taking place in our midst.  With no great distance to overcome in the staging, this American Buffalo finds its virtues in being intimate and realistic, its scale measured to a confined space we share with its characters.

The cast is uniformly excellent.  As Donny Dubrow, the proprietor of the store, Tracy Griswold looks perfect for the part—lean, experienced, accommodating.  He appears as a small-time businessman, essentially trusting, but also on the lookout for weaknesses in others that may be to his benefit: the kind of man who could strike a hard bargain or choose to be generous, as he sees fit.  His plan to pull off “a score” on an unsuspecting well-heeled guy who visited his shop earlier and paid $90 for an American buffalo nickel is the dramatic focus, and, though criminal in his intentions, Donny is the good heart of the play.  Donny’s effort to remain simpatico with his confreres, even when they lie to him and bully him, is of the essence of Mamet’s vision of the odd sincerities found in the midst of the dog-eat-dog world of daily life, an essence that Griswold’s face is able to express as he listens to the others.

As Bob, an addict who Donny would like to help, by employing him as his errand boy, and who he tries to mentor in a small way, Ryan Barry owns the part.  He’s got the requisite slow speech, seemingly of one not all there, but he also can convey the idea that Bob is sharper than we—and his friends—think he is.  Bob is a man of few words, almost everything he says is pulled out of him by Donny, and Barry is terrific at making Bob’s minimal words carry the weight and ambiguity Mamet requires.  He has a tendency to repeat what’s said to him, a buying-time device that also seems to question everything he’s told, and, often, even what he himself says.  This is important because how the plot “resolves” has to do with when Bob is lying and why.  Zeisler’s actors are able to express a lot about their characters when they are silent as much as when they speak.

As Teach, the friendly nemesis of the slow-talking duo, a garrulous ne’er-do-well with an inflated opinion of himself, James Andreassi is a live wire.  He pitches his voice to achieve what seems always to be a reasonable tone, even when he’s spouting nonsense or berating others for situations he himself creates.  He has the ability to apologize and accuse in the same breath.  In Teach, Mamet creates an important American type: the mastermind of speculative supposition.  Teach has an explanation for everything, a way of creating narratives that suit his turn of mind, usually based on suspicions, irritations, gripes and grudges.  Constantly wiping back his longish hair, throwing his size around, restlessly grabbing chairs, checking himself in the mirror, looking musingly or anxiously out the storefront at the street, Andreassi’s Teach is a man of useless activity, all his energy in service to a fantasy in which he makes a big score or saves the day.  The drama of the play is to watch how his reckless need for control and self-assertion brings everything to a standstill, and, as Donny says, spreads “poison.”

American Buffalo is about small-timers in hard times, grasping at straws.  The bleakness of these characters’ lives comes out slowly, allowing us to sympathize with their criminal plot, if only to see something go right for them.  A working assumption of the play is that when “bad guys” are our “heroes,” someone will have to be worse than bad.   Rather than scaring us with ruthlessness, the method of Zeisler’s production is to make these guys, even Teach, likeable enough and typical enough—and funny enough—to keep us on their side, sort of, to make us relax and accept them, so that their moral lapses and failures of imagination are ours as well.

Local in feel, relentless in pacing, familiar in its hard truths, Elm Shakespeare’s American Buffalo delivers.

American Buffalo By David Mamet Directed by Mark Zeisler, with: Dave Stephen Baker (Sound & Original Music), Elizabeth Bolster (Costume & Set Design), Jamie Burnett (Lighting), Emily DiNardo (Stage Manager), Emmett Cassidy and Liz Cecere (Tech Crew)

The Elm Shakespeare Company May 10-13 and 17-20

The Kehler Liddell Gallery 873 Whalley Avenue, New Haven

For tickets and information: www.elmshakespeare.org / 203.393.1436 / info@elmshakespeare.org

Yale Cab Recap

The Yale Cabaret’s Season 44 ended last month and a number of its practitioners will be graduating from the Yale School of Drama this month.  The work the YSD students do at the Cab doesn’t count as part of their work toward graduation—it’s done for love of theater and for the joy of working together on pet projects. And for numerous Cab fans, the productions at the Cab—intimate, avant-garde, inspired, off-the-wall, experimental, outrageous, inviting—are the live wire of the YSD season.  And so it’s time for a “thanks for the memories” moment to take note of the more memorable productions, performances, and displays of artistry that took place in the 2011-12 season (the procedure here: four notables in each category, chronologically by production date, with the fifth-mentioned earning top billing, in my estimation) [note: dates after names indicate prospective year of graduation from YSD]: First, overall Production: the skilled staging of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, produced by Michael Bateman (*13); the comically outrageous first-semester ender, Wallace Shawn’s A Thought in Three Parts, produced by Kate Ivins; the frenetic staging of Adrienne Kennedy’s The Funnyhouse of a Negro, produced by Alyssa Simmons (*14); the moody, musical trip to the underworld, Basement Hades, produced by Kate Ivins; and . . . the crowd-pleasing Victorian Gothic Camp of Mac Wellman’s Dracula, produced by Xaq Webb (*14).

Next comes attention to the technical accomplishments that are often so remarkable in transforming the tiny, unprepossessing space of the Cabaret:

In Set Design: Kristen Robinson (*13) for creating the distinct spaces of Persona; Adam Rigg (*13) and Kate Noll (*14) (aka Daniel Alderman and Olivia Higdon) for the gallery exhibit space of Rey Planta; Reid Thompson (*14) for the creepy and campy locations of Dracula; Brian Dudkiewicz (*14) for the historical and ethnic space of The Yiddish King Lear; and . . . Kate Noll (*14) for the Miss Havisham-like clutter of The Funnyhouse of a Negro.

For work in Costumes: Martin Schnellinger (*13), for the interplay of clothed and unclothed in A Thought in Three Parts; Elivia Bovenzi (*14), for helping create the theatrical layers of The Yiddish King Lear; Kristin Fiebig (*12), for the fantasia of whiteness in The Funnyhouse of a Negro; Nikki Delhomme (*13), for the lively get-ups of Carnival/Invisible; and . . . Seth Bodie (*14), for the uncanny outfitting in Dracula.

For memorable work in Sound Design: Palmer Heffernan (*13), for the roving speakers in Street Scenes; Ken Goodwin (*12), for the atmospheric aura of reWilding; Jacob Riley (*12), for the full scale presence of Dracula; Palmer Heffernan (*13) and Keri Klick (*13) for the soundscape of Basement Hades; and . . . Ken Goodwin (*12), for the wrenching sound effects of The Funnyhouse of a Negro.

For illuminating work in Lighting: Solomon Weisbard (*13), for the psychic landscapes of reWilding; Solomon Weisbard (*13), for the interplay of lights with movement in Clutch Yr Amplified Heart and Pretend; Masha Tsimring (*13), for the moody madhouse of The Funnyhouse of a Negro; Masha Tsimring (*13) and Yi Zhao (*12), for the Underworld of Basement Hades; and . . . Masha Tsimring (*13), for the stylish thrills of Dracula.

For striking use of Visuals: Paul Lieber (*13)’s projections and “home movies” in Persona; Christopher Ash (*14, aka Glenn Isaacs)’s ghostly projections in Rey Planta; Michael Bergman (*14)’s intimate use of visuals in Creation 2011; Michael Bergman (*14)’s atmospheric projections in Dracula; and . . . the rich use of projections in Basement Hades, by Hannah Wasileski (*13), and assistants Michael Bergman (*14), Nick Hussong (*14), and Paul Lieber (*13).

For striking use of Music: the ambiance of Sunder Ganglani (*12) and Ben Sharony’s music-scapes in Slaves; the mood-setting popular songs in Persona; the expressive tunes in Clutch Yr Amplified Heart and Pretend; the accompaniment and sound effects of The Yiddish King Lear, Dana Astman, Music Director; and . . . the beautifully evocative score and performances of Basement Hades, Daniel Schlosberg, Composer, and Schlosberg and company as the instrumentalist Orpheuses.

One of the strengths of the Cabaret is its mix of pre-existing plays with new, often conceptual creations by students in YSD or in other disciplines at Yale.  First, among the published plays offered, the ones I was most pleased to make the acquaintance of: Persona, Ingmar Bergman’s harrowing exploration of the self; Rey Planta (translated by Alexandra Ripp, *13), Manuela Infante’s caustic exploration of manic consciousness; Dracula, Mac Wellman’s comic exploration of vampirism and Victorian mores; The Funnyhouse of a Negro, Adrienne Kennedy’s haunting exploration of racial identity; and . . . Church, Young Jean Lee’s arch and affecting exploration of religious community.

Among the concept pieces this year—and Season 44 was strong in such offerings—the ones I liked best were: Slaves, an enigmatic investigation of theater by Sunder Ganglani (*12)  and the ensemble; Creation 2011, a celebration of awkward theatricality by Sarah Krasnow (*14) and the ensemble; Clutch Yr Amplified Heart and Pretend, a celebration of theatrical movement by the ensemble; Carnivale/Invisible, a questioning of American entertainment by Ben Fainstein (*13) and the ensemble; and . . . the deft interweaving of myth and music in Justin A. Taylor (*13) and the ensemble’s Basement Hades.

And, because most of the shows at the Cab feature strong ensemble work, let’s recognize special merit in ensemble: the entire lubricious cast of A Thought in Three Parts; the large cast of seekers in reWilding; the mad women at the table, and their attendants, in Chamber Music; the actors in the play, in the Purim play within the play, and in the audience in The Yiddish King Lear; and . . . the demonically entertaining cast of Dracula.

With so much concept and ensemble work, it becomes trickier to pick out individual performances, but I’ll follow the industry practice of dividing performances by gender and proceeding as if these actors/actresses can somehow be subtracted from the wholes of which they provided memorable parts, ladies first:

For her expressive, uninhibited performances in Slaves, A Thought in Three Parts, and Clutch Yr Amplified Heart and Pretend, Jillian Taylor (*12); for her roles as the silent actress in Persona, the voice in Rey Planta, and the stridently “sane” Amelia Earhart in Chamber Music, Monique Bernadette Barbee (*13); for her riveting portrayal of the conflicted nurse in Persona, Laura Gragtmans (*12); for her awkward Joan of Arc in Chamber Music, and her deliciously demur and brazen Lucy in Dracula, Marissa Neitling (*13); and . . . for the stand-out performance of Season 44: Miriam Hyman (*12) in The Funnyhouse of a Negro.

For his roles as the blinking, speechless king in Rey Planta, and as the badgering inspector in Christie in Love, Robert Grant (*13); for his intensely realistic character studies in reWilding, Dan O’Brien (*14); for his scene-stealing Van Helsing in Dracula, Brian Wiles (*12); for his kvetching patriarch in The Yiddish King Lear, William DeMeritt (*12); and . . . for his play-as-cast gusto in such roles as the confused husband in Persona, the appalled constable in Christie in Love, the babbling, spider-eating Jonathan Harker in Dracula, and the unforgettable Chicken Man in reWilding, Lucas Dixon (*12)

And for great work in directing: Alex Mihail (*12), for exploring the psychic tensions of Persona; Dustin Wills (*14), for orchestrating the varied misfits in reWilding; Jack Tamburri (*13), for finding the perfect pitch for the vaudevillian creepshow of Dracula; Ethan Heard (*13), for conducting the interplay of music, miming, and monologue in Basement Hades; and . . . Lileana Blain-Cruz (*12), for the inspired tour de force mania of The Funnyhouse of a Negro.

Deep appreciation for all the work and all the fun, and . . . see you next year!

Just Being Neighborly

Now on stage at the Yale Repertory Theatre, Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses is a funny and sad play that ponders the very real terror we use other people to avoid acknowledging.  The unique strength of the play is that it both builds and batters the kinds of sympathy and companionableness that make human relationships possible.  The effect is ultimately positive because Eno keeps his play within the realm of the humorous—avoiding the kind of Sturm und Drang moments that someone like Edward Albee would go after.  And yet, at any moment in the play’s hour and a half running time, things could get much uglier and/or wilder, and that uncertainty—for the audience and the characters—is what gives the play its edge. Recalling, to me at least, an Albee play that brings together an older couple with a younger, like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but also a play like A Delicate Balance (on stage at the Rep last season) where one couple is suddenly called upon by another because the latter are “afraid,” Eno brings together two couples, both named Jones, one settled, the other new in a vaguely rural town near mountains, and lets them brush up against one another in a succession of brief scenes.  The older couple, Bob (Tracy Letts) and Jennifer (Johanna Day) are working through Bob’s illness, a condition that seems to interfere with his memory and his ability to process normal speech.  The younger couple, John (Glenn Fitzgerald) and Pony (Parker Posey), are the perfect foils for the older couple because their speech is never quite normal.  Instead, they speak in patterns of verbal anomie, disguised as quips or ironic asides: Pony: “Say no more.” Jennifer: “Have you had experience with something like this?” Pony: “I just didn’t want you to say any more.”  The effect at times is like fencing in the dark where, having missed one’s target, one immediately accepts whatever one hits as the target.

This could become very fatiguing, but it’s not because the cast is marvelous: under Sam Gold’s direction, each actor is able to modulate speech that, taken as single lines, would sound like banal chit-chat but that, when placed in the context of Eno’s verbal see-sawing, become epigrams, odd insights, and the kind of comebacks that open or close on vistas of inference.  Eno’s gift is to convince us that all language works this way: almost any statement can be a test, a defense, an experiment, a joke, a mistake, a feint, a plea.  In normal speech, we tend to think we’re pretty adept at deciding if not what we’re hearing than at least how we choose to hear it.  But in speech as the characters in The Realistic Joneses use it, we’re never quite sure how what they say affects, expresses, interacts with what they mean.  The effect is fascinating and generally comic, with the characters often witty despite themselves: Pony: “Sorry.  I wasn’t expecting that. Or I guess I was expecting that there wasn’t going to be that.”

There isn’t so much a plot as there are certain “reveals” that come out in the dialogue.  If you nod, you might miss that someone has said something with plotlike implications, and if you do pay close attention you might still wonder what to make of how the four choose to talk around what’s happening.  Eno works with the plot of couples mirroring each other and then swapping partners, not in the smarmy sense of musical beds, but rather in the effort to “keep up” with what the “other Joneses” are all about.  More important, almost, than what’s happening is what the couples choose to say about it.  A few times, the effort to have someone say something amusingly odd begins to tell, but for the most part remains amusing.

The action takes place on a clever stage design by David Zinn that can be both inside and outside—we’re never inside Bob and Jennifer’s house, but we’re at times both inside and outside John and Pony’s—as well as, for one brief but important scene, a supermarket aisle. The amorphous nature of the set—at one end an outdoors table, at the other end, a cluttered-with-boxes kitchen, and, in between, a sliding glass door—helps to erase the very boundaries that more “realistic” drama strives to render.  The world of the Joneses is full of provisional spaces, spaces in both how they live and how they speak.

It’s also a world where time is a matter of Mark Barton’s realistic lighting (at one point John opines that “death and taxes” is not the phrase to measure verities, but rather “bodies and light”), and fun with props—a dead squirrel, a refrigerator, an old lamp, a ship in a bottle, a screwdriver, a transistor radio—measures our friction with our environment.  There’s a great bit, sort of like waiting for Godot in a backyard, when Bob and John, in the latter’s yard, fool with each other’s groping attempts to find out something without admitting anything, while interacting with a motion-detection light.

The female characters carry much of the gravitas of the play: Jennifer must cope with how difficult living with her husband is becoming—a great bit on that score is the “we’re late for the doctor” scene—while Pony becomes, at least elliptically, a catalyst.  As Jennifer, Johanna Day maintains a muted vitality that makes Jennifer the most sympathetic person on stage, her tone implying the kinds of inner resources we’re glad at least one character possesses, while, as Pony, Parker Posey is the most vulnerable because her familiar and distinctive voice (great to hear live) can make her tone both forthright and oblique at once, giving us the sense that Pony’s not quite sure what in her speech is mannerism and what matter.

As her husband, John is the most troubled character, apt to say things for effect and apt to be saddened or bitter about how little effect what he says has; Glenn Fitzgerald, it seemed to me, could go for a bit more pathos, in the end.  As it is, his John Jones is the most difficult character—interesting, amusing, perhaps even threatening at times, but ultimately cold, or, in Jennifer’s words, “committed to not being sympathetic.”  As Bob Jones, Tracy Letts puts the real in “realistic”: he seems to meld so fully with the character we feel we’re getting to know an actual person, finding in the incremental information we glean a man’s resources in teetering between what he’s always been and what he’s never been—nothing.  Almost every word out of his mouth carries a lifetime’s worth of tired exasperation at how little words accomplish.  It’s wonderful.

When the abyss comes close, Eno suggests, we value our banalities. In showing us that social interaction is largely a matter of taking comfort in, or exception with, something someone else just said, Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses is keeping it real.

The Realistic Joneses By Will Eno Directed by Sam Gold

The Yale Repertory Theatre April 20 to May 12, 2012

The Last Romantic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Circus Is In Town

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Yale Cabaret April 12-14, 2012

Racial Rollercoaster Ride

This week’s show at The Yale Cabaret, the penultimate of the 44th Season, features the penultimate directorial offering by Co-Artistic Director Lileana Blain-Cruz before she graduates from the Yale School of Drama this spring. And her last Cab show, like her first Cab show at the end of the 2010 season, is something to behold. The play, Funnyhouse of a Negro, by Adrienne Kennedy, follows in interesting ways from two shows presented recently at the Cab: Arthur Kopit’s Chamber Music, directed by Katie McGerr, and Whitney Dibo and Martha Kaufman’s reworking of Jacob Gordin’s The Yiddish King Lear. Like Kopit’s play about loony ladies in an asylum that represented, in its seclusion, the etiolated potential of women in our general culture, Funnyhouse confronts the “insanity” of minority status, dramatizing the psychic distress that comes with oppression in any form. And like The Yiddish King Lear, the figure to be confronted is the threatening father, though in that play, a comedy, the gender struggle was leavened with a racial dimension that made Jewish patriarchy a role, a certain kind of staging and inflection, recalled for purposes of entertainment.

In Funnyhouse, the masquerade of racial identity is much more harrowing, and very much of the essence of what makes Negro Sarah (Miriam Hyman) sick. While the play has many comic touches, they tend to be of the acid rather than affirmative variety. In Sarah’s mind, her own father was a “black beast” who raped her white mother, giving birth to herself, a “pallid Negro” who worships whiteness and longs to be freed of any remnant of blackness in her appearance and in her being. In appearance, she can’t overcome her head of kinky hair, and in her being, she can’t overcome the dire implications, to her fantasy of selfhood, of what a black father means. A twist at the end, almost a throwaway line, suggests that this story of interracial rape and progeny may itself be a fantasy. In other words, everything is black and white in this play, but never only black and white.

The figures oppressing Sarah seem oddly chosen but maybe that’s the very point: first of all, two regal beings, the Duchess of Hapsburg (Elia Monte-Brown) and Queen Victoria Regina (Prema Cruz), whose ultra-whiteness is beyond question, then her white boyfriend Raymond (Mamoudou Athie)—all played by black actors in whiteface, alluding at once, visually, to Sarah’s inability to imagine herself in a world without blackness, try as she might. Then there’s Jesus (Jabari Brisport), in a loincloth, looking much more primeval than most depictions of him, indicating the extent to which whites themselves have largely created a white fantasy of him, and finally Patrice Lumumba (Paul Pryce), the first Prime Minister of the Congo after its independence from Belgium, seeming to represent political hope for black independence and self-governance; he had been assassinated a few years before the play initially appeared, so he also represents black martyrdom and, we’re told, Sarah’s father hung himself in a New York hotelroom not long after Lumumba’s death.

All these symbolic figures heckle, manhandle, and at times soothe Sarah, creating a fragmented and poetic drama that flirts with mad causalities and associative logic, while laying bare for the audience the fraught self-hatred of the person who pursues an imposed ideal they can never attain.

As is generally the case with Blain-Cruz’s work, the technical skill involved is stellar: Lighting by Masha Tsimring creates the “funhouse” effects that make the show so fascinating, and creepy, to watch; the Scenic Design by Kate Noll, assisted by Carmen Martinez, contributes the cracked sense of décor that reminded me of a kind of Miss Havisham boudoir, New Orleans-style, with a big brass bed, lots of mirrors, old books, draped crepe, muslin curtains; the Costumes by Kristin Fiebig add to this mustiness with hoop skirts for Sarah’s fantasy friends, Sixties-ish suits for the males, and sorta “timeless” black student-wear for Sarah, and, of course, white greasepaint, white powder, latex masks, and wigs. The getup of Prema Cruz as Funnyhouse Lady was a fetching business suit that only underscored how wild and crazy that character is—her look and moves at times created the effect of a thoroughly bleached Tina Turner.   Then there's Ken Goodwin's Sound Design which is nothing short of remarkable, letting hissed whispers crackle and rattling noises off unsettle and adding much of the wildness to the ride.

Great as all those features of the piece are, the car wouldn’t go without Miriam Hyman. She gives an extraordinary performance, unflagging in its self-possession even when she has to go totally ga-ga. Powdering her face, preening, throwing fits on the bed, humping the air sympathetically during the rape, cavorting, shrieking, trembling, and through it all maintaining the confidential tone of the person who inhabits this place and is familiar with its distortions. At one point snapping her head to the side, with bug eyes and slack mouth, mimicking the father’s death by hanging, Hyman makes Sarah’s sense of comedy and misery strongly self-aware, letting the character be, while still a mess, a commentator and a comment.

Sarah’s predicament, in the play, occupies a time before the Black Panthers, before “black is beautiful,” and well before the power of Oprah and Obama to suggest black self-determination and influence. Lest we imagine this play occurs in some historical museum-space, the mourning for Lumumba at one point becomes a mourning for Trayvon Martin. Is it fair to compare an assassinated political figure with an unarmed teen killed in the street by a vigilante? Not really, but it makes the point that outrages done against blacks as blacks is always a current event.

Funnyhouse of a Negro plays for two more shows: tonight at 8 and 11 p.m.

Funnyhouse of a Negro By Adrienne Kennedy Directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz

The Yale Cabaret March 29-31, 2012

The final play of the Cabaret’s 2011-12 Season will be in two weeks: Carnival/Invisible, created by Benjamin Fainstein, recreates the sense of “carnival” (farewell to the flesh) as an element in the traveling circuses and tent shows of American popular entertainment, places people go to “get out of their skins” and to find belonging amidst the improbable and colorful spectacle. April 12th-14th.

Theatrical Extremity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe Directed by James Leaf

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

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

A Tale of Two Kingdoms

The strangeness of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, now playing at The Yale Repertory Theatre in a sumptuous and stylish version directed by Liz Diamond, is ultimately its strength.  The plot yokes together elements that seem impossibly disparate, almost a test, from start to finish, of the audience’s ability to suspend its disbelief.  The play is generally called “a romance,” not only to differentiate it from comedy and tragedy, but also to indicate its novelistic elements.  The narrative arc of the play is rather complex, and also surprisingly and amusingly cavalier with audience expectations.

Early in the play, Mamillius (Remsen Welsh), the young son of King Leontes and Queen Hermione of Sicilia, says he will tell his very pregnant mother “a sad tale” because that’s “best for winter.”  He’s ripped away from his mother—object of her husband’s insane jealousy regarding his best friend, King Polixenes of Bohemia (Hoon Lee)—before he can tell it.  We never see the boy again as he dies offstage of health complications that follow his mother’s imprisonment for adultery and treason, but in some ways the story of the play is a tale a child might conceive of, with insane rage, exciting escapes, a man-eating bear, a colorful pickpocket, rousing rustic antics, true love, and magical reconciliations, to say nothing of a leap of about sixteen years in the middle.  It’s fun to trash Aristotle’s unities!

Though he’s offstage for the long middle section of the play, Leontes is key to the play’s success.  Here, Rob Campbell manages superbly to humanize a man suddenly driven to autocratic excess.  Driven by a restless jealousy, he destroys his family, losing a child, imprisoning his wife, and sending his newborn daughter to almost certain death in a remote locality.  In almost constant movement about the stage like a man in search of a comfort he once knew, Campbell’s Leontes is a victim of his own sick fancies to an extent that almost amuses him in a rueful, despondent way.  It’s a powerful performance matched by the noble suffering of his wife Hermione as played by Susannah Schulman.  Her trial scene enacts a dramatic staging of the worst sort of spousal dysfunction, an overt display of male tyranny that draws a passionate outburst from Hermione’s staunch friend Paulina (Felicity Jones) in a great confrontation scene where the outraged meets the outrageous.

Sicilia, in Michael Yeargan’s Scenic Design, consists of high walls that move to form corridors, or withdraw to provide open spaces, against brooding darks and raking light and the effective use of silhouettes in Matt Frey’s Lighting Design.  Together they make the University Theater stage a fascinating space, intimate and forbidding as needed.

The crowd-pleasing second half—after that infamous bear scene gets a notable enactment, together with Thomas Kopache’s soliloquy, as Time, delivered with an audacious flair for absurd necessity—takes place mostly in the kingdom of Bohemia.  Presented here as a rustic land of splendid, multi-colored clothes (Jennifer Moeller, Costumes), music (composer Matthew Suttor’s gypsy-like tunes), dancing (even with buffalo heads in Randy Duncan’s light-hearted choreography), and the love in idleness of Polixenes’ son Florizel (Tim Brown) and a stunning maiden called Perdita (Lupita Nyong’o) who seems to be more regal than her station as a lowly Shepherd’s daughter would suggest.  Both actors do a fine job of conveying both the idyllic nature of the lovers’ wooing and the tensions of their status, especially when Polixenes and his courtier Camillo (Tyrone Mitchell Henderson, excellent in an under-appreciated role) spy on their nuptials in disguise.

The comic turns of Autolycus (Luke Robertson) should be the fun of this section of the play, but his scenes are a bit too broad and blustery, not quite up to the nimble clowning Rep audiences have become used to in Christopher Baye’s riotous productions.  That spirit is more in evidence in the scene where two gentlemen (Francis Jue and Adam O’Byrne) report on the reconciliations in the court of Sicilia with “you had to be there” hilarity.

After such comedy, what conclusion?  The final scene is all it should be: a chastened Leontes finds himself rich beyond his imagining, with nearly all his relations renewed.  The theme of winter, as a time of life, is impressed upon us by the aging royal couple exiting as silhouettes.  Their daughter has become a woman in their absence, and now, beyond the rages and the suffering they have endured, they have only their twilight together.  It’s a bittersweet triumph Shakespeare gives us, the lost time hovering over the happy conclusion like a certain little boy’s absence.

The Winter’s Tale, in this impressive production, receives an almost definitive treatment thanks to Diamond’s ability to render the true colors of the play’s varied palette.

William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale Directed by Liz Diamond

The Yale Repertory Theatre March 16-April 7, 2012

Impious Grief

In Hamlet, the prince is overcome by grief for his dead father.  Everyone in the court, especially his mother, the Queen, and his uncle, the new King, tells him to get a grip.  His grief is called “impious” and “unmanly.”  In Basement Hades: Songs of the Underworld, now playing at the Yale Cabaret, Hades (Dustin Wills) shares this point of view.  Appalled by humanity’s tendency to have issues with death, Hades lectures us in wildly flamboyant fashion about the pointlessness of our grief.  He’s all about people getting on with life—the province of the living—and leaving the dead to him.  We want to hold onto the dead because we’re selfish and unreasonable.  Let them be dead.  We’ll be with them soon enough anyway.  “What’s dead is dead is dead,” he intones.

It would be hard to argue with Hades even if he weren’t so imperious, boasting most of the lines in the play, even those given to his wife Persephone (a hand puppet) who still bemoans an attachment to life.  Though Hades rehearses for us the five stages of grief—Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance—ticking them off as leading inevitably to the latter, Persephone isn’t buying it.  And so, here comes legendary “grief junkie” Orpheus to attempt to rescue his dead wife Eurydice and lead her back to life.  Everyone who has lost someone can easily relate.

But Orpheus, in an interesting twist, is not a character in this show—written by Justin A. Taylor, developed by the Ensemble, and directed by Ethan Heard—but rather a gathering of musicians assigned the task of playing the music that speaks for Orpheus, and that enables him to bypass threats like the boatman Charon and the three-headed dog Cerberus.  The latter encounter, in which the dog is represented by three cast members behind drum-masks that Orpheus soon manages to play to his tune, is striking.  Percussionist Michael Compitello is a stand-out of the evening, able to give aural expression to the Anger phase of things.

And that’s the way the evening goes—Hades belittling Orpheus’ efforts, until the latter begins to overwhelm the voiced objections through music, mime, movement, sing-along, and, now and then, plainspoken narratives of loss addressed to the audience by the collective Orpheus.  Eurydice is visualized quite effectively as a silhouetted projection of a woman (Katie McGerr) dancing, swinging and so forth on double screens (Hannah Wasileski, Projection Designer; Nick Hussong, Paul Lieber, William Gardiner, Assistant Designers; kudos as well to the Lighting Designers—Masha Tsmiring and Yi Zhao—and to Set Designer Edward T. Morris’ fascinating set).

The part at which Orpheus looks back and loses his wife a second time was a little murky to me, though perhaps I missed something (it became increasingly easy to overlook action in favor of concentrating on the music, which features pieces by Gluck, Shostakovich, and Philip Glass).  In any case, the after-effect was stunningly moving: as Hannah Collins played a cello live, in concert with herself playing a viola de gamba in a beautifully filmed projection, the collective Orpheus (Compitello; Anne Lanzilotti, viola; Daniel Schlosberg, keyboard and composer for the piece; and Annie Rosen, voice) poured libations in a large metal bucket to the somber tones of Marin Marais’ “Les Voix Humaines,” which includes the sound of what feels like disembodied voices—led by Rosen’s lovely vocals—mourning.

The simple activity accompanied by Marais’ aching and stately piece said all that needed to be said about the sixth stage of grief, the one that Hades can’t understand: commemoration, the ritual of remembering.  An enactment of those in life recalling those in death, the scene felt to me more profound “than the profoundest pit of hell.”

Basement Hades: Songs of the Underworld Created by the Ensemble Text by Justin A. Taylor Original Music by Daniel Schlosberg Directed by Ethan Heard

Photos by Ethan Heard

The Yale Cabaret March 23-25, 2010

Are You One Of Them?

John van Druten’s Bell, Book & Candle is a play from a time when subtext was anything not acceptable to polite convention.  His characters have class, in a vaguely bohemian milieu (it’s set ostensibly in the 1950s’ Greenwich Village), and they preen and pose with the regulated pauses of the great screen stars of the 1940s.  In such a world, the fact that there are things going on that we can’t talk about (we’ve since learned to call them subcultures) would be still somewhat risqué for the average audience.  Van Druten, with his comic suggestion that a hunt for witches might turn them up “anywhere,” is a bit ahead of the widespread search for Communists and their sympathizers in the McCarthy “witch hunt,” and way ahead of the political self-outing of the gay community.  And yet, in Darko Tresnjak’s production, more respectful than revisionist, those associations are clearly present—to say nothing of any other sub rosa collectivity that might come to mind.

The square to be initiated into it all is Shep Henderson (Robert Eli), a publisher without much imagination who’s all set to marry a Southern harridan we only hear over the phone, until a sort of accidental run-in with his neighbor, the mysterious and grandly available Gilllian Holroyd (Kate MacCluggage), sends him soon enough head-over-heels and all over the floor for her.  Tresnjak makes the couple couple much more quickly than they ever would have in films or plays of the period, but not, one assumes, than they would’ve in wicked old Greenwich.  It’s to the play’s credit that it seems written for adults—it gives one a nice frisson of nostalgia to watch something that might appeal to people who were all grown up in the 1950s, happily unaware of what the various coming cultural revolutions would do to entertainment.  This is romantic comedy before The Pill and Women's Lib.

Case in point: recall the days when a leading man needed only to be a presentable hunk who looks good in a dinner jacket.  Eli does, and his Henderson has the doggedness of a man who isn’t expecting much excitement or surprise from life and then finds both in the form of his neighbor, a woman who, supposedly, he’s barely noticed until her witchcraft changes his tune.  And of course, “witchcraft,” here is synonymous with whatever “feminine wiles” our parents alluded to when they talked about how a gal gets her man.  The fact that Gillian’s wiles are indeed supernatural adds charm rather than menace, but with little of the slapstick spell-casting that was a staple of TV's Bewitched, the Sixties sitcom that recalls some of Van Druten's characters.

Van Druten’s dialogue never sizzles or pops, its sense of the humorous is droll more often than clever, full of charm rather than laugh-filled.  It’s the kind of play that won’t work without a game cast willing to become anachronisms with relish, and Tresnjak has coached his cast to get the feel of lines uttered on a sound-stage and etched on celluloid.  MacCluggage especially—who was last on the Long Wharf stage as a 40s’ radio actress in Eric Ting’s production of It’s a Wonderful Life—has the look, moves, and voice of a screen star of the era.  Always dressed seductively and lit perfectly, she carries herself with feline pleasure in her every move, her voice sensual in its precision, a sympathetic seductress about to be hoist on her own petard: making Shep fall in love with her, she finds that she fulfills “the old wives’ tale” that a witch in love loses her powers, becoming merely human (with a touch of Doris Day).

The play pirouettes on the familiar theme of lovers’ truth: if, in love, we should always be ourselves, why does it always feel so risky to be honest?  What’s more, once a gal’s wiles are seen through, then what?  Be warned, suspense isn’t really a feature of this plot, but that doesn’t matter.  Though two intermissions drag out the playing time, the pleasures of the show come from the exacting pace, Alexander Dodge's wonderfully mod set, from its “womb chair” to its suspended fireplace to its snowflake chandelier, Fabio Toblini's bright and sprightly costumes—particularly Aunt Queenie (Ruth Williamson)’s revamped Andorra (the Agnes Moorehead character in Bewitched) and the jackets and cape sported by Gillian’s teasing brother Nicky (Michael Keyloun, a study in understated camp), and that game cast.

The cast is filled out by Gregor Paslawsky as Sidney Redlitch, a toupee-wearing, booze-swilling “witch expert,” played with the broad panache of a sitcom’s zany neighbor or clueless boss.

Today, vampires and zombies are our chosen avatars of supernatural allegory.  Once upon a time, in a Manhattan of sparkling martinis and swirling mambos, of barefoot femmes fatales clad in capri pants, of songs by Sinatra and Ella evincing the spirit of swagger and swing, witchcraft—which has, in New England at least, real historical antecedents—could stand for all those “practices” not yet relegated to the melting pot.  Bell, Book, and Candle is a fun throwback to a time not so much innocent as blithely indifferent to the changes to come.  And, in Tresnjak’s version, the play ends with a nice touch not in the script, a way of indicating that love without witchcraft is, perhaps, rather Puritan.

Bell, Book & Candle By John Van Druten Directed by Darko Tresnjak

Long Wharf Theatre March 7-April 11

Photos by T. Charles Erickson, courtesy of Long Wharf Theatre

Freilichin Purim

The current offering at the Yale Cabaret features a trip into the past: turn of the century Yiddish theater is invoked to create the proper spirit in which to view The Yiddish King Lear.  Rather than a Yiddish language version of Shakespeare, as was created by Jacob Gordin in 1903 and whose work this production draws on, Martha Kaufman and Lauren Dubowski’s adaptation presents the story of Reb Dovidl (William DeMerrit), a patriarch at Purim who wants to engage in some festive drinking with his family and distribute jewels to his lovely daughters: two of whom, Etele (Prema Cruz) and Gitele (Tanya Dean) are married, while the third, his favorite, Taybele (Alex Trow) has a suitor—Yaffe (Chris Bannow) known as the “heretic” and the “unbeliever.”  Thus there are Lear-like tensions in this story right from the start. Like Lear, Reb Dovidl, after smoothing over Taybele’s rebuff when she refuses the costly brooch he would lavish upon her, decides to partition his worldly goods amongst his three children—so he can live the rest of his days, unburdened by care, in Israel.  His eldest daughter, married to the unsympathetic Avrom Harif (Benjamin Fainstein), is only too happy to take over management of the estate, while the second daughter, a bit more conscientious, though married to a partying pseudo-scholar (Mamoudou Athie), goes along.  Only Taybele, Cordelia-like, demurs.  Lest anyone in the audience miss the echoes of Shakespeare, Yaffe tells the old man his unreasoning behavior makes him “the Yiddish King Lear.”  He tells him this first in naturalistic style, and then again in the more operatic style of turn-of-the-century theater. And that’s the nature of the “two worlds at once” fun of this production, directed by Whitney Dibo.

As the master of ceremonies (Paul Lieber) informs us at the start (in something of a come-and-go Yiddish accent), we are going to witness a feat of “naturalism”—the cutting-edge theatrical technique of the time.  With that said, it’s quite entertaining to watch the YSD students give us dated “naturalistic” acting, in quotation marks, as it were.  The power/comedy of the naturalism is underscored by the show’s best feature: audience members who are also part of the show, lending a kind of hilarious hysteria to the proceedings as they “ooh” and “ah” at plot turns and shout advice to the characters (not to the actors, mind you), and, at one particularly distressing point, have to be calmed by Reb Dovidl himself.  On opening night these audience players included Lieber, Kate Tarker, Joshua Safran, who reads between scenes a statement about theater that invokes actors as gods, and Inka Guðjónsdóttir, the most vocal and comically stressed-out of the onlookers.

As contrast to all that naturalism, there’s a play within the play: a stagey enactment of the Purim story whereby Esther (Trow) thwarts the murderous Haman (Fainstein)—he of the famous tri-cornered hat that inspired the shape of hamentaschen (very tasty versions of which are supplied on the tables, courtesy of Westville Kosher Market), so that “nothing bad will ever happen to the Jews again!”  That line, voiced by Trytel (Matt McCollum), Reb Dovidl’s fool, gives a fair idea of the spirit of the show, both respectful and enthusiastic about the sources but also winking at the naïvete of the era.  Entertainingly and affectionately, the production celebrates how important theater was to Jewish immigrants. As Lieber says between scenes: the two sights everyone was immediately taken to see upon arrival in Brooklyn were the Brooklyn bridge, and the Yiddish theater.

Special credit to the set decorator, Brian Dudkiewicz, the musicians providing both musical accompaniment and sound effects—Tess Isaac, Martha Kaufman, Elizabeth Kim—and the spirited cast, especially DeMerritt’s moody paternalism and over-the-top recognition of himself as “the Yiddish King Lear”; Trow’s applause-demanding grandstanding everytime Taybele expresses views about female and male equality or hypes her knowledge as a doctor; McCollum, for Trytel’s grumpy asides and his devotion to Reb Dovidl; and Bannow’s Yaffe in his rationalist raining on the ritual.

The sense of pride and participation in theater, as an art that centers a community and puts on stage the kinds of stories the people recognize as part of their own lives, isn’t a bad goal to have and is one that the Cabaret, for its coterie of enthusiasts, often satisfies.  L’chaim.

The Yiddish King Lear Directed by Whitney Dibo Adapted, Assembled, and Created with Martha Kaufman and Lauren Dubowski Based on Jacob Gordin’s 1903 play

Yale Cabaret March 8-10, 2012

Ladies' Night

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

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

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

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

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

Chamber Music By Arthur Kopit Directed by Katie McGerr

The Yale Cabaret March 1-3, 2012

Sticking to the Union

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's Not a House, It's a Home

“The house in Brooklyn is a symbol for me…it’s a risk, it’s a gamble with myself and others.” Thus George Davis, onetime novelist, fiction editor late of Harper’s, when, in 1940, he undertook to set up what today would be called “an artist’s colony” in a somewhat dilapidated Victorian house in Brooklyn Heights. The place became known as “February House” due to the February birthdates of the house’s two most famous residents—W(ynstan). H(ughes). Auden (Erik Lochtefeld) and Carson McCullers (Kristen Sieh)—and is the inspiration, as symbol, for a different sort of gamble: February House, a musical, Music and Lyrics by Gabriel Kahane, Book by Seth Bockley, that dramatizes the creative aspirations, romantic trysts, and interpersonal squabbles of a group of writers and intellectuals.

In addition to Auden and McCullers, and Davis himself (Julian Fleisher), there is Chester Kallman (A. J. Shively), a young poet and Auden’s object of desire; Benjamin Britten (Stanley Bahorek), the composer; his partner Peter Pears (Ben Barnett), a tenor; Erika Mann (Stephanie Hayes), German writer, performer, and daughter of novelist Thomas Mann; and the famous “ecdysiast” (or striptease artiste) Gypsy Rose Lee (Kacie Sheik). Together they make for a gathering of rather genteel bohemians—four Americans, and four expatriates fleeing the Nazis over-running Europe and battering at England.

These are heady times certainly, and interesting people unquestionably, but is this the stuff of musical theater? Certainly not of the big, rousing, brassy Broadway variety, but it’s ideal for a more leisurely and lyrical kind of entertainment, one that depends—hence the gamble—on its ability to make people known primarily for what they write engaging as persons apt to burst into song to express their states—whether primarily internal, as in Auden’s lovely love song to Chester, “Awkward Angel,” or more physical, as in Benjy’s and Peter’s frantic fit about “Bed Bugs.” There are moments when any character’s fussiness can become a bit cloying—each, in true artist fashion, tends to be the center of his or her own world—and we might begin to feel there’s not enough drama to give us a sense of dread, of something at stake.

The big questions are: whether McCullers’ husband Reeves (Ken Clark) will get her back, or if she’ll run off with Erika; whether the operetta about Paul Bunyan, on which Benjy and Wynstan labor, will be a success; whether or not Chester will be true to the latter, his romantic suitor; and, of course, whether this ramshackle affair of free spirits setting sail in a house in Brooklyn will remain shipshape. The darker dread, which bursts in most dramatically at a New Year’s dinner in Part Two, where Reeves is also present, poking away at the friends’ complacency, as Erika does from time to time, is what the Huns are doing to civilization over there in Europe. February House, without benefit of newsreels or other showy intrusions (only one brief radio announcement enters from the outside world) manages to convey a sense of the period and the perilous times in which these young people (most of them not yet thirty) try to go where their talents lead them. But since we know how the war turns out, that element isn’t enough to keep us on edge.

So, while there’s not a lot of drama, there is delight aplenty in February House, most of it provided by the songs, which have the knack of seeming to arise spontaneously from the characters’ interactions. Backed, on-stage, by a pianist (Andy Boroson) and accompanist (Andy Stack) on guitar and banjo, the arrangements have simple, direct presentations that avoid the kind of bombast we tend to associate with “show tunes.” Even brassy Gyspsy Rose Lee (the least developed character, no pun intended) is relatively sedate in her big show-stopping and clothes-shedding number, “A Little Brain” (when strippers reference Melville and Woolf, we’re decidedly above lowbrow).

February House is a show worth seeing a second time, once you know the story, to simply concentrate on the songs—the one that stayed with me most was “Goodnight to the Boardinghouse,” the haunting tune with which George closes Act One, reprised for the conclusion by George and Carson. More insinuating than strident, the song captures the very hopeful, personal, emotional pride and joy that one invests in a project, as well as the somewhat sad but not utterly chastened feeling one has at its conclusion. It’s a strong but subtle emotion to end on: no one has died, no one is ruined, no one is fabulously happy or successful at the show’s end. All, but George, have simply moved on, and we stay with him, poignantly, as the person here who will be most forgotten by history, his “February House,” as Carson says to him, his magnum opus.

With that in mind, applaud the casting of Julian Fleisher as George—he has the bonhomie, the knowing looks, the den-mother coddling, the grade-school teacher cheer, the man-of-the-world theatricality, the self-deprecating humor of a man with a great idea and the personality to pull it off. He’s so vividly rendered you believe he might walk off the stage and, if you’re lucky, invite you to a Forties soiree—and you would go with him most anywhere. Fleisher’s singing voice is less than overpowering, but his songs in the show are the kind that make you lean forward and listen. He’s a major strength of this production. You would be glad of the chance to spend time with him even if his housemates weren’t famous writers.

Then there’s the literary stars: As Auden, Erik Lochtefeld is a more blustery Brit than I expected the chain-smoking poet to be, and his primary colors are bemusement and, when Chester’s around, infatuation, but he also carries well the dignity of the enterprise—we have the sense that anything Auden attaches himself to can’t be an utter waste of time (not even an operetta on Paul Bunyan). As McCullers, Kristen Sieh is peppy, more Southern Gosh than Gothic, but for that very reason it’s hard not to like her, particularly as her enthusiasm helps turn Auden from snide into graciously supercilious.

Much of the comedy comes from Britten and Pears as a kind of Gilbert and George by way of Gilbert and Sullivan—Barnett particularly earns plaudits for playing Pears as the kind of wry British “ponce” that can’t help but be entertaining, and Bahorek gives us Britten as a dapper milquetoast who might yet come out of himself and achieve something. They get most of the musichall comedy songs.

Then the love interests: Shivelly’s Kallman is a pretty boy who wants to be taken seriously (his fun number is “Chester’s Etiquette”; sung to Britten and Pears, it more or less updates Wilde’s advice on how to succeed in society for Forties Manhattan); Stephanie Hayes’ Erika is teutonically dour in her mannish suits, only to surprise us with the ardour of her passion for Carson—her goodbye look is heartbreaking; Ken Clark’s Reeves is a bit of a cipher—we aren’t sure whether Carson is right to leave him or should go back, but his criticisms of the House aren’t simply boorish and that’s to his credit. Finally, Kacie Sheik’s Gypsy Rose Lee enters late in Act One, and persists in Act Two primarily for comic tension, but I felt she needed to queen it up quite a bit more to keep pace with these boys.

Which leads to a comment about the play’s sexual politics: when Wynstan, on bended knee, proposes marriage to Chester, and when Benjy and Peter, who have been posing as brothers on Long Island, hold hands and think of the benefits of living here (“Let everyone know the truth of it”), we should further applaud February House’s debut at Long Wharf in a state that has recognized same-sex marriage since 2008, and civil unions for same-sex couples since 2005. One wishes the show a successful cross-country tour.

February House A World Premiere Musical A Co-Production with The Public Theater Book by Seth Bockley, Music and Lyrics by Gabriel Kahane Directed by Davis McCallum Choreographed by Danny Mefford Musical Direction by Andy Boroson Orchestrations by Gabriel Kahane

Long Wharf Theatre, Stage II February 15-March 18, 2012

Photos: T. Charles Erickson, by permission of Long Wharf Theatre

Mind Your Body

Watching Clutch Yr Amplified Heart Tightly and Pretend, the current offering at the Yale Cabaret, I thought about actors: How are they trained?  How do they do the things they do?  Like: how do they express something dramatically without benefit of characters? That final question is germane, I think, because CYAHTAP is not really “about” anything—there are some amusing skits and lots of vigorous movement—I particularly enjoyed the ensemble’s dance to Arcade Fire’s “Rebellion (Lies)”—but there’s little in the way of dialogue and no characters per se.  And yet it’s an actors show, or rather, an actors-as-dancers show.  The interest is in what the actors, mostly silently, are able to convey as actors in movement—and what they convey is about the dynamics of love and loss, of belonging and fighting, of one body getting to know itself and another.

Which is to say: these aren’t dancers per se and this isn’t only a dance piece. Seeing Michael Place throwing a carefully choreographed bodily fit across the entire length of the Cab’s floorspace is to see something expressed, arguably, within a play, rather than within a dance.  Everyone in the piece is portraying something or at least projecting something.  And that’s what kept me engaged with it.  In fact, the spoken parts tended to detract.

It begins with Merlin Huff’s seemingly off-the-cuff monologue that begins to ramble toward the philosophic, apostrophizing Rene Descartes (I suppose because of that mind/body duality notion he takes the rap for)—and later Huff returns to broach a series of rhetorical philosophical questions that become exceedingly dull to listen to, like maybe listening to a tedious teacher possessed by the Socratic method.  But Huff isn’t a total bore—his frenetic involvement, like a kid watching his favorite show, with the company's Robot dance and his threats to Solomon Weisbard, the Lights technician who cuts them off (only to perform a kind of spastic dance of his own), were nutty enough to be amusing.

Then there was the male-to-male pas de deux by Mickey Theis and Dustin Wills.  It managed to be poetic and ironic and athletic and erotic all at the same time—certainly I’ll hear Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” differently from now on.

There’s also fun with light and dark and projections and space and making faces (special credit to Chris Henry on that score) and miming (Jabari Brisport escaping from a wrecked vehicle was funny) and dancing (especially Jillian Taylor) and filling the time with different kinds of pretending.

Clutch Yr Amplified Heart Tightly and Pretend Yale Cabaret February 23-25, 2012

Thirsty Girls

You know something hardly anyone ever talks about?  Lighting design.  At the Yale Cab’s recent run of Mac Wellman’s Dracula, directed by second-year director Jack Tamburri, Masha Tsimring’s lighting was a joy to behold.  Consider that there were five different areas of the Cab in which actors performed, not to mention wandering areas in between, and consider that they all had to be illuminated in such a way as to serve a variety of dramatic purposes—from creepy to funhouse to vaudevillian.  Tsimring’s skill at doing just that was impressive—the lighting was to a large degree responsible for creating the necessary magic, that intangible something that allows us to believe a YSD student standing a few inches away from the audience is actually existing in an entirely different space, a world where the undead walk and insane inmates eat sparrows and the Victorian era’s “angel of the house” becomes a blood-sucking fiend. I single out Tsmiring’s work because I found myself marveling at it several times in the course of the evening, but a special round of applause should be given to the entire technical team: Seth Bodie (Costume Design—Drac’s sumptuous get-up and the vamping Vampirettes’ lacy nothings, and Simmon’s Mary Poppinsesque lackey, and the oh-so-Masterpiece Theatery duds for the bourgeoisie—Jonathan, Mina, and Seward—and Lucy’s transformation from a good girl’s frilly nightwear to a party girl’s knock ‘em undead one-piece); Reid Thompson (Set Design); Jacob Riley (Sound Design); Michael F. Bergman (Projection Design); Adam Rigg (Puppet Design); Matthew Groenveld (Technical Director); Karen Walcott and Nicole Bromley (Special Effects); Steve Brush (Sound Engineer); Nate Jasunas (Scenic Artist); Keny Thomason (Technical Assistant); Alyssa K. Howard (Stage Manager); Xaq Webb (Producer).  This was a show where the technical aspects of simply putting it on in the Cab’s claustrophic space was remarkable in itself.  As you can tell from that roll-call, much talent and effort was expended and was greatly appreciated.

What was it all in service to?  Mac Wellman’s cut-ups of the oft-adapted tale of Dracula, as stirred up into a boiling-over broth by Jack Tamburri.  You know the drill: Dracula (Inka Guðjónsdóttir), ancient Transylvanian Count, invites Jonathan Harker (Lucas Dixon), a Brit real estate agent, to his home in the Carpathian mountains (aka “the land beyond the forest”) to discuss buying some property in England.  Along the way the latter is spooked by the locals’ superstitions regarding vampires, and then some nasty things happen to him.  In Wellman’s version, Harker becomes a patient at an asylum that happens to be next to the property that Drac bought.  The Count comes to England and proceeds to vampirize the marriageable Lucy Westenra (Marissa Neitling) who has three suitors: Dr. Seward (Jack Moran) of the asylum,  who also courted, in her maidenhood, Harker’s wife, Mina (Hannah Sorenson); the obligatory American Quincey Morris (Justin Taylor); and the vampire expert Prof. Abraham Van Helsing (Brian Wiles).  In the world of Stoker’s original novel, if, to protect her from demonic influence, you’ve been in a young maiden’s room, where she slumbers in a coma in her nightdress, you pretty much have to ask to marry her.  What happens, in most versions, is that Drac is stopped, and everyone emerges sadder but wiser.

Wellman jazzes all this up considerably but is amusingly faithful to much of the narration (lots of it told through letters and journals, so in a kind of direct address even in the novel) and to much of the breathless “I feel so queer” aspects of the original.  Key to the tone is Neitling’s curiouser and curiouser Lucy, a charming girl apt to salivate over males and praise their stalwart natures intermittently, and who finally becomes a fiendish feral creature.  It’s quite a transformation and Neitling is a blast.  Add some great fun from Sorenson, a priggish Maggie Smith understudy as Mina, and Dixon, having the time of his life humping walls and delectating over insects, as well as Moran as a creepy Seward, a character Wellman makes a linchpin of ambivalence in this tale, and Matt Gutshick’s leering cockney attendant, and Brian Wiles giving one of the funniest performances I’ve seen in a while as the daffiest Van Helsing one could imagine.  Then, of course, there’s the quiet dignity and supercilious superiority of Guðjónsdóttir’s Count, all cheekbones and aquiline nose and large, lambent eyes and aristocratic, feline accent.

And if all that’s not enough, there are songs, and puppets, and blood tranfusions while Seward and Mina couple against a wall, and a baby in a bag, and a dog in a dressing gown, and Halloween make-up and high Gothic camp.  To what end?  The Count is coming to America (where he’ll probably open his own nightclub, or maybe a cabaret…), and those thirsty girls Lucy and Mina get a whole new lease on undying life.

This is the most fun the Cab’s been in a while, sexily superior silliness brought off in style.

Mac Wellman’s Dracula Directed by Jack Tamburri

Yale Cabaret February 16-19, 2012

If The Spirit Moves You

Good Goods, new playwright Christina Anderson’s Yale Rep debut currently onstage, is an old-fashioned play, with a plot that turns upon realizations that alter the status quo for each of the five main characters. As such it’s classic drama, and much of its success depends upon the audience making realizations with the characters.  They talk themselves and us into an understanding of what’s at stake in the choices they make. At its heart, with a bravura performance by Angela Lewis, Good Goods explores the theme of possession—of oneself, of one’s goods (in every sense of the term), of one’s past and future—through a comic and cathartic sense of the uncanny. The play works because Anderson’s imagination participates about equally in the naturalistic and fabulistic features of drama.  Set in a mythic Anytown, USA (“a small town/village that doesn’t appear on any map”) in an indeterminate period (“1961 and 1994.  And everything in between.”), the play’s set consists of a hodgepodge General Store called Good Goods, after Mr. Good, the absent patriarch who has skedaddled, leaving behind the family business, now looked after by his faithful factotum Truth (you see at once how symbolic this can get) and his son Stacey, a thirtyish entertainer called home from the comedy circuit where he teams as an act with local gal Patricia, who soon enough turns up to find out what the future of the act will be.

Stacey and Truth are a grudging team maintaining the store, as the play opens, with undercurrents familiar from folktale struggles of a legitimate son and an illegitimate son over a blessing.  Patricia and Stacey were once a team—we might imagine as both a performing and a romantic duo—but there’s triangulation afoot: Patricia’s twin brother Wire (who seems at least five years younger than her in demeanor) has romantic inclinations toward Stacey, who may reciprocate them.  Finally, before you can say “Beloved,” a young, naïve ingenue named Sunny turns up, a winsome pick-up for Patricia, only to undergo a diabolical alteration for a hair-raising curtain at Intermission.

Sunny becomes possessed by the spirit of a man from a local family, the Evanses, noted, thanks to a late-lamented seer amongst them called Ivory, for its history of prophecy and for a high-toned sense of persecution.  The man, Emekah, dies off-stage in an accident at the pencil factory—itself a darkly referred to entity that seems to stand both for economic progress in this rural backwater but also soul-enslaving drudgery.  Both bemused and aroused by finding himself in the body of this fine young thing, Emekah rants and froths and aims to do all kinds of harm.  The forthright foursome must put their heads together to overcome this threat from beyond, which they do with their sense of humor and romantic possibility intact, and with help from the local Hunter Priestess—herself a spirit now inhabiting a likeable fellow named Waymon.

The play manages to keep its folk motifs and magical realism in play without overwhelming its grasp of a plausible sort of everyday reality.  This in itself is no mean feat and indicates, in Anderson, a grasp of drama as not so much a window on the world as it is or was but rather as a realm of possibility where what people really want and are can become accessible through well-chosen devices.

One such device, Scenic Designer James Schuette’s set, is a pleasure to behold in its palpable thereness—and in its usefully divided linear space.  Toni-Leslie James’ costumes help support our uncertainty about “when” we are, and the overall presence of the visual components of the play keep us firmly grounded in a natural-feeling world shared by the likes of August Wilson and Tennessee Williams.  The cast, directed by Tina Landau with relaxed precision, complement well the visual purpose of the play—they all move and look and feel at home, and are able to speak Anderson’s ringing mouthfuls of phrase with, for the most part, suitable dispatch.

To the women go the more commanding roles—Lewis’s Sunny is scene-stealing after Intermission if a bit too cloying at first, and De’Adre Aziza, as Patricia, runs a fun gamut from steely to gleeful to smoldering to maternal and nurturing.  The main male role, for my money, is Truth, if only because the character is a bit inscrutable and, as played by Marc Damon Johnson, bears and speaks the dignity of common wisdom well; Clifton Duncan’s Stacey is a more problematic study; his identities as a black boss and as a gay man looking for love both seem in some sense unresolved, as if Anderson sees the importance of such a character but isn’t quite sure what to make him do or become; that said, the facet of his character I found least believeable was his role as a comedian, even if “a straight man.”  As Wire, Kyle Beltran seemed everyone’s younger brother—an early bit in which he tries to remind Truth that it’s his birthday seemed more suitable for someone proudly turning twenty-one rather than—with no apprehension?—thirty.  Finally, as Waymon, Oberon K. A. Adjepong adds a great stage presence to the Second Part as well as a gripping song of exorcism—with help from Sound Designer Junghoon Pi’s ghostly talking drums.

Good Goods not only makes us suspend our disbelief, it makes us believe in suspending reality, to make good on the potential of the past.

Good Goods by Christina Anderson Directed by Tina Landau

Yale Repertory Theatre February 3 to 25, 2012

Toil and Trouble

Shakespeare’s Macbeth is the story of a Scottish nobleman’s ambition leading to his downfall; the play follows the transformation of a war hero into a murderous villain and traitor, with, to explain such an extreme change, the influence of baleful supernatural forces in the form of three witches, or “weird sisters.” The power of the play derives from the portrayal of evil as an all-consuming, dramatically compelling force in the human psyche. Macbeth’s lucidity—whether speaking to ghosts or encountering phantom daggers or convincing killers to kill, or, in the grand fifth act, going to pieces in a frenzy of resolution and paranoia—keeps us clued into his vantage point as we watch him, like many an historical personage whose reach has exceeded his grasp, put personal gain above public virtue and go down in flames. Eric Ting’s Macbeth 1969, now playing at the Long Wharf, boldly adapts Shakespeare’s text for a new setting—a Veteran’s hospital during the heyday of the U.S. war in Vietnam—and distributes the various parts amongst a cast of three men and three women. Here, Macbeth/Soldier 1 (McKinley Belcher III) is a traumatized soldier returned from war; he visits a severely wounded fellow soldier—Banquo/Soldier 2 (Barret O’Brien)—at the hospital where his own wife (Shirine Babb) is a nurse. The nurses—1/Matron (Socorro Santiago), 2 (Babb), and 3 (Jackie Chung, pregnant and the wife of MacDuff/Civilian (O’Brien)—a draft deserter)—are also the “weird sisters.” It’s an interesting notion to make nurses—who are often both needed and reviled in their service—“witches” to a soldier not quite in his right mind.

Duncan, the benign king Macbeth kills in Shakespeare’s play, is here a wooden politician (George Kulp) who visits the wounded soldier as a campaign stunt and stays to party with the nurses (it’s Christmas), and it’s a compelling idea to imply that a deranged soldier might take it into his head to kill a politician, blaming him for the carnage of the war. Good Soldier 2 finds this treason insupportable, and so Soldier 1 plots to get rid of him too. And for good measure, thanks to dire hallucinations Soldier 1 experiences while undergoing electro-shock, the wife of MacDuff gets put to the sword too. In the end the draft dodger husband returns from exile and offs the culprit. Which I guess suggests that war wins out over other scruples. If there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no pacifists in a fight to the death either.

For Ting’s Macbeth to work, we have to ignore the fact that the text is speaking of thanes and kings and potions and the English army and a moving wood, but, even if we do, that doesn’t mean we’ll enter this new timeframe easily. The show doesn’t recreate the Vietnam War era to me—not even The Archies and The Guess Who on the radio, nor the suggestion that “the insane root” is a joint. What’s more, we have to be willing to indulge oddities: like the “dagger of the mind” speech transposed from preceding the killing of Duncan to preceding the death of Banquo and interlarded with lines about Macbeth’s misgivings about Banquo, or the mad scene of Lady Macbeth witnessed by Nurse 1 and MacDuff, who then learns of his wife’s death from his enemy’s wife. If you know the play well (and I do), it’s best to forget what you know, but there’s a certain amusement that comes from the cut-up quality of the text—so that Nurse 1, before being smothered under a pillow, spouts lines that belong to Malcolm, otherwise not a character in this version.

Mimi Lien’s set is remarkable—it looks and feels like a hospital, and that’s enough right there to estrange one from Shakespeare’s play, so that when Lady Macbeth scrubs the floor rather than her hands (“yet here’s a spot”) it seems perfectly in keeping with the spic-and-span nature of hospitals. Elsewhere incongruity adds entertainment: it’s funny to have Macbeth “spoil the feast”—a tin of hospital food—and to have Banquo “ride” for the hours before dinner in his wheelchair.

In the cast, O’Brien, Chung, and Babbs are best at the naturalized delivery of the lines, making us almost believe at times that we’re hearing normal speech, and Chung—as a drunken expectant mother (it’s the Sixties, y’know)—has some fun with the Porter’s speech. As Macbeth, Belcher is more clueless than conniving, more shrill and anxious than tragic. It seems that Ting, in asking his actors to play the modern setting, lets them fly quickly over lines packed with the play’s actual import—that Macbeth is in fact a tragic figure at war with himself, and not simply a soldier strung out in nightmare hospital.

Macbeth 1969 is earnest in its efforts to make modern warfare and its traumas relevant to Shakespeare’s play, and it partly succeeds, but it’s much less successful at making Shakespeare’s play meaningful in the context of the Vietnam conflict.

Macbeth 1969 A World Premiere Adaptation by Eric Ting The Long Wharf Theatre

January 18-February 12, 2012

Wrestling Chekhov

The final thesis show of the Yale School of Drama’s 2011-12 season finds director Alex Mihail wrestling with Anton Chekhov’s classic comedy The Seagull, much as Jacob wrestled with the Angel: I will not let thee go except thou bless me.  What might Chekhov’s blessing look like?  I found myself wondering about this very question and have to say that waiting for the outcome provided, for me, a good deal of the drama of watching this production. The play itself is one of those signal works of the late 19th century that aimed to confront its audience with changes in the purposes of art, in this case theater.  To call it a comedy, as Chekhov does, is to distort its audience’s expectations somewhat, perhaps leading viewers to find funny what they might not otherwise.  But that designation also lets us know that the author himself does not take his characters too seriously and asks us not to as well. All of which is to say that the tone of the play is elusive, that outright silliness and comic vanity share the stage with poignant evocations of aging and frailty, that ruined expectations and sad resignation occur amidst family farce and romantic misprisions, and suicide.

From its very design, this production establishes its interrogatory tone—instead of an estate with a lake in the distance where young Treplev, aka Kostya (Seamus Mulcahy) puts on his symbolist play for a skeptical audience led by his actress mother, Arkadina (Brenda Meaney), Scenic Designer Kristen Robinson gives us a traditional interior, minus the fourth wall, that also is an exterior when need be, and is situated so that we, the audience, are seated in what should be the lake, while the distance, seen through the door when open and at times above the walls, is comprised of a theater with a long center aisle and rows of empty seats.  On stage, a rather Godot-like tree remains in place throughout both Parts, most of the time hovering above the ground, and across the windows of the interior—which includes an upright piano and a desk—play various projections (Paul Lieber, Projection Design), including a wandering deer, snowfall, and dancing lights.

As we are self-consciously in a theatrical space throughout, one could say the play takes place in a sort of Chekhov set of the mind, asking us to wonder what it is exactly that realist drama symbolizes.  And if that’s the sort of question that young, earnest and possibly deluded Kostya would ask, so be it.  Which is another way of saying that the play feels like it’s very much in the mind of Kostya, that, as a would-be playwright wrestling with the need for “new forms,” he stands-in both as Chekhov’s and his director’s double.  Indeed, Mihail never lets us forget Kostya’s centrality, allowing him to be present throughout the play, even for scenes he’s not scripted to be part of.  Mulcahy brings to the role endless energy: he hovers, he witnesses, he reacts, he mimicks, flies into rages, pouts, and playacts an artist playacting being an artist.  It’s exhausting.

That level of energy extends to the rest of the cast as well—as it must, since Chekhov tends to write sprawling plays in which people walk in and out and never quite come to saying what they mean, and when they do it’s easy to miss it because someone is always interrupting.  The first half, in which the actors establish their roles, can sometimes be slow going, but in the second half our familiarity with them all allows things to sharpen up considerably.  We have to live with these people a while to get anything from them.

As Arkadina, the leading lady, Brenda Meaney is a grande dame all the way, never letting us forget that, for Kostya’s mother (apt to start playing Hamlet’s mother apropos of nothing), she is always the central figure of every scene.  Everyone else should be willingly eclipsed.  Will Cobbs, as her increasingly decrepit brother Sorin, declines with a comic edge that keeps the character mischievous.  Chris Henry plays successful and fatuous author Trigorin with perhaps more winning a personality than one expects; his best scene is with Masha (Carmen Zilles).  As a single woman in love with Kostya, Masha has to spill her guts and keep herself buttoned up at the same time—Zilles does a capable job in a role no one under thirty should be asked to play.  As the man she marries, because he loves her, Josiah Bania’s Medvedenko is a constant figure of fun, always good for a laugh.  In the roles of Masha’s parents, Winston Duke and Sheria Irving flesh out scenes with, from Duke, a boisterous, life of the party feel (his “caught in a crap” anecdote is great fun), and, from Irving, a pointed pining for the ladies’ man Dr. Dorn (Max Roll, as dapper and jaded a country libertine as one could wish).  Finally, Jillian Taylor as Nina, would-be actress, and muse to those dueling writers Kostya and Trigorin, matches Mulcahy in energy and achieves, in her final transformation, something extraordinary.

Which is to say: the blessing comes late, but it does come.  When Nina reprises, at the end of the play, the grandiose speech from Kostya’s play that she delivers early in Part One, she suddenly renders the absurd lines with a passion that the intervening two years of hardship makes both poignant and transcendent.  And then we get the moment I can’t get out of my head, the moment of pure theater: Kostya’s long walk up that central aisle, followed by the rush of a descending curtain.  Bam!

Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull Translated by Paul Schmidt Directed by Alexandru Mihail

Yale School of Drama January 24-28, 2012

Surfacing at the Shubert

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

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

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

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

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