Telling Tales

A man and a woman, wearing the obvious greasepaint makeup of amateur theatricals, sit in a little triangular room on a makeshift stage, complete with naked-bulb footlights and a painted curtain.  They speak to us with the emphatic and cadenced accents of the Lancashire area of England, in a manner that feels confidential and forthright though also oddly prickly and at times slightly distracted. As the two take us into their confidences—the Man (Christopher Geary) talking about his encounters, as a six year old, with his mother’s breasts, the Woman (Emily Reilly) describing her father’s imposition of “order” and multiplication tables on the household—we might begin to feel they aren’t quite “all there,” particularly as the man keeps worrying an alarm clock and the woman treats her little array of knickknacks as though they are alive.  They have a fondness in their manner that makes them easy to listen to, even if the implications of much of what they say is left to us to interpret—as when they both chortle about “chit-chat, chit-chat, chit-chat” as though the phrase calls up liberating associations.

As the parallel monologues go on, we realize they are reminiscing about events from the same period of their lives—from six, when they first met one another, to about twelve—and that the period is warmly recalled by both, as a time inspired by the strength of their feeling for one another.  It is to Walsh’s credit that he gives such vibrant voices to figures assumed to be elderly, making their recollections create a view of childhood romance that is truly striking.

Gradually, within the same extended recollections, the memories become infused with the horrific and traumatic, having to do with a draconian imposition of conformity by Woman’s father and the Man from the Chip Shop: the two decide who will be silenced by slicing out the tongues of anyone they choose, which leads as well to random killings.

Our entry into this world of past horror follows a unique trajectory—from verbal comedy to an understanding that speech itself can be a crime and, finally, to the sense that only the ability to keep talking about the past, giving words to experience, is what allows humans to maintain a grasp on meaning and identity.

Both performers in the piece are to be commended for letting us into this world. The play, almost static in its staging, must take over our imaginations almost entirely by speech alone—with a few props, an entertaining use of a recorded song Man, as a boy, gave to Woman, as a girl, and a telling use of dramatic percussion and lighting.  At one key moment the duo, bathed in a kind of transcendent light, seem to see one another as Man bids Woman speak of what she remembers.  In that one moment, we might say, he is face-to-face with his past, and with the love of a life that involves a horrible act of betrayal.

Geary is wonderful at remaining in character while also having an eye out for the audience as an element of the play.  He helps us realize that the use of the curtain and footlights and facepaint is meant to give us a feel for the failings of the naturalism of theater, and a sense that the past is something we always to some extent “stage” upon the present.  Reilly is particularly good at creating the fond regard of a doting woman for whom even betrayal and brutality are part of the vitality of her youth.  It’s a performance that stays with you as both endearing and sinister.

While I have caveats about how well thought-out Walsh’s backstory is—it’s best taken as a kind of nightmare of village life, insular and absolute (the age of the children is necessary to the effect)—I have no doubts about the skill, ingenuity, and power of this production.  We owe Reilly, her co-director Hugh Farrell, and company thanks for The Small Things.

The Small Things By Enda Walsh Directed by Emily Reilly and Hugh Farrell

Costume Designer: Nikki Delhomme; Co-Sound Designer: Palmer Hefferan; Co-Sound Designer: Tyler Kieffer; Dramaturg: Hugh Farrell; Percussionist: Victor Caccese; Stage Manager: Rob Chikar; Producer: Eric Gershman

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street March 7-9, 2013

We Three

The Bird Bath, the latest show at the Yale Cabaret, like the show the previous week, was developed entirely by YSD students and treats the theme of mental illness.  Directed by Monique Barbee and created by an ensemble of three women—Chasten Harmon, Hannah Leigh Sorenson, Ariana Venturi—who enact three different aspects of the British-born surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, the play is set, more or less, in an asylum.  The drama is in how the three actresses pantomime the artist’s states of psychic duress. For Carrington, apparently, the trinity explained everything, so the set consists of three separate areas: the one to our left seems neat and methodical, somewhat like a lab, somewhat like a writer’s workroom; the central space consists primarily of a very graceful bathtub and curtain; the area to our right contains a bed with an old metal frame.  Each space is decorated with interesting objets d’art.  White is the predominant non-color.

At left and right, respectively, Venturi and Harmon enter through the windows, climbing in to take up residence shortly after Sorenson, in the center, ceases vomiting into a large bucket.  This opening tableau—a woman crouched on the side of a tub attempting to spit up by drinking quantities of orange blossom water—goes on for a bit, while the actress’s voice-over speaks lines derived from Carrington’s book about her treatment in a mental institution after a breakdown.

In other words, the show establishes early its intent to give us a visceral experience of physical distress, but such discomfort is offset by an enthralling series of tableaux vivants that work because of the rigorous physicality of the actresses and the wonderful set design (Mariana Sanchez Hernandez) and lighting (Masha Tsimring) and music/sound (Palmer).  Each actress is mostly contained in a setting that becomes her entire world, a space, we might suppose, that is an external manifestation of Carrington’s internal state.  The three aspects are distinct enough, if somewhat obvious.

Simply, we can see the left-side figure (Venturi) as Carrington attempting to maintain her intellectual and artistic bearings, often clutching a lab jacket to her throat or at times crushing an egg while the other figures convulse; the right-side figure (Harmon) presents the more animal, bodily passions—Harmon moves often in a crouch and at one point enacts an animal defecating, then nosing its feces, while at other times, with a lemon in her mouth, she grips the bed and shakes like someone undergoing shock treatment; the central figure (Sorenson) bathes and primps, convinced she is Queen Elizabeth, and at other times writhes on the floor.  This figure, we might suppose, is the spirit, or at least the spirit as manifested in the artist’s creativity in combat with her own delusions.  Sorenson does a quite spectacular job of both embodying the kind of feminine principle that a male artist might use to represent beauty or spirit, while also giving us the frantic, quivering flesh of a female artist grappling with her demons.  It’s stunning physical theater.

Carrington, the notes by Dramaturg Sheria Irving, tell us, “was treated with Cardiazol, a drug . . . that induced convulsions and hallucinations.”  Just the thing for a surrealist, we might suppose.  And one of the tensions The Bird Bath seems to want to explore, as did Jackson’s All This Noise last week, to some extent, is the relation between artistic self-conceptions and mental illness.  The idea that madness is a form of creativity is very old, and the idea that truly creative spirits, in their innovation, might be taken for insane is also prevalent at times.  Carrington herself seems to have shared some of those notions—as did other surrealists—and so the play might be said to culminate with each of the three women creating an effigy or bust that might be a way of externalizing her anxieties.

Venturi and Harmon create constructions that could be entered as found objects in a Duchampian display. But Sorenson’s Carrington becomes an effigy herself.  In the best sequence in the play, she puts a latex mask over her head, powders it white and draws a red mouth on the powdered mask over her lips.  “Eyeless in Gaza,” so to speak, she becomes an image of the surrealist muse, perhaps, a figure out of Man Ray, that is also the artist as abject heroine of her own life.

Three, of course, is the number of the Graces, the Fates, and the Furies, in Greek myth.  These three women, together with their director, set-up a tripartite tableau of the mind and soul of a figure sorely tried by her own mind and by a drug that invades her body and causes terrors and trauma.  In the end there’s a glimpse of expressive grace—Sorenson, wet and half naked, leaning out three sets of windows, successively, as though gulping the air of freedom and relief—before the fury resumes again.

We might suppose that’s the best we can hope for.

The Bird Bath Created by Ensemble Directed by Monique Barbee

Dramaturg: Sheria Irving; Scenic Designer: Mariana Sanchez Hernandez; Lighting Designer: Masha Tsimring; Sound Design & Original Music: Palmer; Stage Manager: Alyssa K. Howard; Producer: Emika Abe

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street

February 28-March 2, 2013

The Rural Absurd

The Long Wharf production of Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class, directed by Gordon Edelstein, presents us with a living classic. Shepard’s play dumps us in an America that always seems to be vanishing while remaining still tangible. It’s rural California, beloved of Steinbeck in the Depression Era, and of “back to nature” hippies in the Sixties.  By the late Seventies, when the play was first produced, the region is on its way to becoming strip malls and apartment buildings.

With a stripped-down kitchen surrounded by prairie-like earth, Michael Yeargan’s set speaks of archetypes even before the play begins.  What could be more emblematic of family life than a refrigerator, sitting near center stage?  And what could be more enigmatic than a tall door frame with no door, attached to no wall?  Emblems.  Enigmas.  The theater of Sam Shepard makes the most commonplace things bristle with crazy possibilities.  It’s the nightmare of the everyday.

The first half of the show, while able to keep us off-guard with the oddity of the Tate family, is mainly comic.  Much of the humor derives from Judith Ivey’s delivery as Ella, the mother.  She has mastered an emphatic tone that plays it slow as if considering possible replies, coming out with comments that can be prickly or non-committal.  Ivey’s pitch is perfect, as she transforms from a frumpy housewife into a woman on the make, trying to sell the family property out from under her drunken, abusive husband Weston (Kevin Tighe).  It’s he who broke down the door and, listening to her comments, we might readily take her part in what might seem a play of domestic disturbances.  That is until we meet the smarmy lawyer Taylor (John Procaccino) with whom she may be doing more than business.

Shepard is the poet of the proles—his grasp of the intonations and rhythms of the everyday Americans we find in trailer parks and malls and on ranches and rural hang-outs is as distinct to him as flowery Southern politesse is to Tennessee Williams.  Hearing the lines of the play delivered with a feel for its curious mix of the lyrical and the laconic is reason enough to see this production.  But Shepard is also the kind of playwright who wants the theatrical experience to be off-putting.  And so there’s a live lamb onstage at times, in a pen; there’s urination, nudity, an explosion, an appalling episode of binge eating, and a creepy carnivalesque feeling that makes the Second Part seem a descent into an accursed place indeed.  Edelstein’s production delivers all the unpleasantness with a casual absurdity that benefits from the Long Wharf’s thrust stage.  It’s a fascinating show.

Much of the unsettling nature of the play comes from Wesley (Peter Albrink), the eldest child and only son of the Tates.  Wesley is unpredictable, surly and rather unsettled himself.  A tour de force speech delivered early in the play establishes the kind of dread he feels in relation to his father.  Wesley seems attached to the farm while the others are determined to sell it or leave it or both, but his attachment may be based on neurotic frustrations.  Of all the characters, he is the most enigmatic, and Albrink has a command of the character’s shuffling uncertainty and morose sarcasm.  We might easily take the younger generation’s side against the elders if it weren’t that Wesley is so brooding.  Urinating on his sister’s 4-H posters is the kind of callow act that keep us distanced from him.

As the daughter, Emma, Elvy Yost is tomboyish and pert.  She wears a 4-H outfit at first and seems girlishly forthright—as her mother lectures her about getting her first period—but, later, in a cowboy hat and chaps, she begins to transform into the kind of figure we might assume Shepard wants to pin our hopes on.  She is clear-eyed enough to see through Taylor—Procaccino gives Taylor’s efforts to put her at her ease a nice, slowburn comic tension—and determined enough, perhaps, to get away from the family vacuum.  Yost sounds perhaps a bit too contemporary in her tone, but that only underscores that she, if anyone here, is the future.  Her fate says much about what Shepard thinks about that.

As Weston, the irascible patriarch, Kevin Tighe is commanding.  Our early view of him finds him even more surly than his son.  He has nothing but disdain for his family and their home.  His humor is of the kind that comes close to abuse, and yet he compels a kind of natural respect.  He is the man of the house, regardless.  Later, he sobers up, and Shepard gives the character a great speech about how he got into debt that rings with right-on familiarity in Fiscal Cliff America.  Seeing Tighe cooking breakfast at the stove and lecturing his son and wife takes us close to the “father knows best” America we once grew up with.  Of course it will all go bad.

And don’t forget the lamb.  As a sacrificial victim, scapegoat, what-have-you, the symbolism is a bit too overt, but, in her actual presence, Edie steals her scenes—on Opening Night, she reacted to Ella’s insistence that the creature be removed from the kitchen with a perfectly timed bleat, and seemed to hush up contentedly while the man-of-the-house maundered about, talking to her as to himself.  It made the audience laugh and play to see a lamb on stage, too much perhaps, but I suspect that its antics will be the one heart-warming moment people take away from this harrowing, at times hilarious, at times grotesque production.

Curse of the Starving Class By Sam Shepard Directed by Gordon Edelstein

Set Design: Michael Yeargan; Costume Design: Clint Ramos; Lighting Design: James F. Ingalls; Sound Design: Fitz Patton; Composer: Doug Wieselman; Animals: William Berloni; Stage Manager: Bryce McDonald; Assistant Stage Manager: Amy Patricia Stern; Assistant Stage Manager: Sara Cox Bradley; Casting: James Calleri, CSA

Long Wharf Theatre February 13-March 10, 2013

Coping with Crisis

Jackson Moran’s All This Noise, a one-man show at the Yale Cabaret, is a courageous exploration of one family’s hardships, made more gripping by the fact that the family is Moran’s own.  Drawing a straight line on a wall with chalk, Moran proceeds to note key events in a linear series that is truly harrowing: From the early signs of mental instability in Moran’s younger brother Chris, who also suffers from seizures, to a tumor that ends their father’s life prematurely, to Moran’s and his brother’s alcoholism, to Chris’s suicidal tendencies, to a fateful surgical procedure that leaves Chris seriously impaired, to the indignities of cuts in mental healthcare that afflict New Jersey, where Chris is institutionalized. Along the way, Moran offers comments from mental health professionals—about Chris, specifically, from one very sympathetic care-giver at Hagedorn in New Jersey, and about the situation in NJ from someone involved in the politics of Governor Christie’s cuts.  Moran takes on Christie himself in a staged community talk-back in which Christie (Moran gets at the Jersey-swagger of the man) tries to dodge an outright attack from Moran, as the latter grows more insistent about the contradictions in the public stance that says, in the wake of national tragedies like Newtown, “we must do more about mental healthcare,” while yanking the plug on institutions like Hagedorn.  In other words, Moran has an ax to grind and the times we’re living through serve to whet it.

All This Noise is at its most appealing in showing Moran’s concern for his brother—who at one time had ambitions to be an actor—and the latter’s deterioration.  The play is at its most moving in suggesting the human costs of mental illness, both for the patient and those close to him, particularly the young men’s mother.  And Moran is at his most passionate in taking on the shallow political discourse that surrounds events like Newtown and the effort to address healthcare in the U.S.

The play is enlivened by moments such as Moran re-enacting his audition at YSD—a soliloquy from Hamlet, though perhaps the one about bearing “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” would be more apropos—and by jarring moments such as Chris’s breakdown at a Christmas party where a crescendo of voices apprizes us of how nightmarish even mundane social interactions can become.

All This Noise is certainly involving, and it poses many unresolved dramatic moments: in hearing of the trajectory of Chris’ condition, we only learn “the facts,” not much about how anyone, much less Chris himself, actually feels about what has occurred.  Chris, despite photos from his life, remains a mystery at the heart of the play, a collection of catastrophes.  We hear little about the decision to undergo an operation on his amygdala and why the procedure produced the outcome it did.  Moran is not interested in assigning blame for Chris’s state, but rather in drawing-out its dramatic potential and poignancy—at play’s end we hear Chris recite after his brother, line by line, a poem he wrote.  As a slice-of-life, the play is effective in making us sad that a life of potential has come to this pass.  As a statement, the play aims to make us angry that mental healthcare remains such a low priority for many state governments.

Moran is impressively nuanced as an actor, likeable as a narrator, and quite skilled at keeping our attention and at providing glimpses of his life with Chris.  The production is refreshingly free of caricatures and maintains a stripped-down intensity that aids its personal, confessional nature.  All This Noise is a brave and unsettling tightrope walk across the abysses that lurk in real life.

All This Noise Created by Jackson Moran With Ethan Heard, Kate Ivins, and Martha Jane Kaufman

Additional text by Christopher Moran Additional script development with Alyssa K. Howard, Jack Tamburri, and Masha Tsimring

Director: Ethan Heard; Dramaturg: Martha Jane Kaufman; Scenic Designer: Souri Yazdanjou; Costume Designer: Seth Bodie; Lighting Designer: Masha Tsimring; Sound Designer: Matt Otto; Projection Designer: Nicholas Hussong; Stage Manager: Alyssa K. Howard; Producer: Kate Ivins

Yale Cabaret February 21-23, 2013

Eminent Edwardians

Precocious kids have always wondered about sex before their folks are willing to clue them in, we suppose.  But in Edwardian times, apparently, young women could be considered of “marriageable” age and still be utterly clueless about what exactly transpires on the wedding night.  To the rescue: Lytton Strachey composed Ermyntrude and Esmeralda, a little novella in which the eponymous heroines, in a series of breathless letters, try to work it all out.  Transformed into a play by Hunter Kaczorowski at the Yale Cabaret, E & E entertains—and might even make you blush!  (Indeed the novella, written in 1913, didn’t see the light of day till 1969—when the lifting of illegality for same-sex liaisons should have made its enlightened acceptance of homosexual sex acceptable.) Ermyntrude is played by Sophie von Haselberg with a steely practicality in her eye: she’s after the gory details about what she calls “pussy-cats” and “bow-wows”—the genitalia of females and males, respectively—and what happens when they “pout” for one another.  Esmeralda, played with gleeful girlishness by Ceci Fernandez, is more interested in what those pouting pets have to do with love.  And, since no one has quite worked that out to date, E & E is engagingly enlightening.

The back and forth “entre nous” epistles of the duo are illustrated from time to time by shadow puppetry in little framed spaces on the back wall (manipulated by Christopher Ash, Soule Golden, and Carmen Martinez; designed by Kaczorowski).  Depending on where you might be sitting in the packed Cab, you may get the full effect of these little figurines or not—they seem a bit too small to make the kind of visual impression they may be intended to achieve—but they are certainly well-done and evocative of the kind of picture-book politesse that our heroines are endeavoring to delve beneath.  Until, of course, a rather rampant bow-wow vigorously mounts a fulsome feline…

The space (Kate Noll, Scenic) and costumes (Seth Bodie), along with lighting (Solomon Weisbard) and sound/music (Steve Brush) all contribute considerably to the gentility of the evening.  And that’s important to make the quaintness of the young ladies’ questionings seem apropos.  Along the way, E & E espy surprising developments—such as a passionate embrace between Esmeralda’s brother Godfrey and his male instructor (“which buttons were undone?” Ermyntrude presses her), to say nothing of Ermyntrude’s exciting flirtation with the new footman Henry, which leads to ecstatic expressions emoted with an exuberant twinkle by von Haselberg.

As Esmeralda, Ceci Fernandez is inestimable and explosive; she glows and gloats and free associates and turns away one would-be betrothed (the Dean, who cannot countenance her curiosity about Godfrey) only to find another—the dashing Major.  Meanwhile, Ermyntrude, like Godfrey, faces a comeuppance for her pert pursuit of carnal knowledge across class lines.  Heaven forfend!

In the end, as so often happens, the teens may be seen to be following different paths, though we—like them—may wait breathlessly the epistles depicting Ermyntrude’s adventures in sexy-sounding Saxony and Esemeralda’s nuptial discoveries.  All-in-all,  Ermyntrude and Esmeralda is ebullient entertainment.

Ermyntrude & Esmeralda A Naughty Puppet Play Based on the novella by Lytton Strachey Directed and Adapted by Hunter Kaczorowski

Puppet Design: Hunter Kaczorowski; Dramaturgy: Emily Reilly; Scenic Design: Kate Noll; Costume Design: Seth Bodie; Lighting Design: Solomon Weisbard; Sound Design & Original Music: Steve Brush; Stage Manager: Sonja Thorson; Technical Director: Lee O’Reilly; Assistant Technical Director: Joey Moro; Producer: Sarah Williams; Puppetry Captain: Carmen Martinez

The Yale Cabaret February 14-16, 2013

At the Rainbow's End

With a two-person cast that enacts over a dozen characters, Marie Jones’ Stones in His Pockets, at the Yale Rep, directed by Evan Yionoulis, makes us think about the hierarchy of acting.  Typically, in any theatrical production, there are starring roles, minor roles, and extras, and there are character actors and caricatures.  Fred Arsenault and Euan Morton, between them, give us all the parts in the play—as presented by Jake Quinn (Arsenault) and Charlie Conlon (Morton), two likeable locals enlisted as extras on a big Hollywood movie being shot in picturesque County Kerry, Ireland.  There’s Caroline Giovanni (Morton), the campy American female lead; Clem (Morton), the dour British director; Mickey (Arsenault), the crusty veteran extra (he was in John Ford’s The Quiet Man), and other locals, including Sean (Arsenault), persona non grata on the set, and movie people, such as Aisling (Arsenault), the prancing assistant director in charge of the extras.

The comedy of this lively and thoroughly entertaining show derives not only from the clash of locals and Hollywood, but also from poking fun at a certain type of silly film.  Part Two opens with a “gag reel” of attempts by Ms. Giovanni and her leading man (Arsenault) to get their delivery right, and the sequence helps distance the utterly fake world of film from the more realistic world of theater.  No mean feat, since any play in which two men change into a range of characters by changing their speech, accents, and body language, but, mostly, not their costumes, can be called anything but “realistic.”

And that’s the paradox.  The play manages to get at the realities behind the business of staging fake worlds, and it does it with a battery of a more or less stock characters, including that stereotypical “stage Irishman,” the irascible drunk.  Among the characters, then, there’s little you haven’t seen before, but, on the other hand, that very familiarity helps rope us in.  What Jones has in mind is the idea that the only way to intrude reality into predictable Hollywood fare is to focus on “the extras.”  And it’s the perspective of the extras that keeps things real.

Charlie, you see, has a script he wants to have made into a film, but, due to a tragic event that occurs during the making of  the film he's an extra for (Quiet Valley), he decides to shift the focus to a local lad brutalized by insensitive professionals and humiliated in his own town pub.  The scene in which the director tells the novices why Hollywood would never be interested in such a tale (“People don’t go to the movies to get depressed. That’s what the theatre’s for.”) puts the proper critical emphasis on the play we’re watching.  A suicide—drowned with stones in his pockets—is the basis of Charlie’s script.  And that script is our play, which is why it’s left to our two extras to enact the entire show.  Only Charlie and Jake belong to both worlds, so only they can act out the mannerisms of both.  And only a play with a limited cast, it seems, can afford to tell the truth.

Along the way, the fun is in the caricatures Morton and Arsenault put on and off as fast as gold can sheen, and in stage business, such as miming and a “Lord of the Dance” routine from out of nowhere, and in the clash of worlds and accents and expectations—and in an absurdist use of cows.  Arsenault and Morton are wonders of timing and mugging and swishing and falling about the place, and there’s great pleasure in watching them, at play’s end, take bows as each character.  The production also runs its credits on the big screen, and it’s fun to see the production crew and the Rep staff scroll by like names in a Big Budget Production.

Stones in His Pockets ribs the Film Industry as a Land of Cockaigne for otherwise strapped people, able to be bought as background authenticity for a world of fake emotions, fake nostalgia, fake laughs.  And the play mainly has sport with that—until something real happens.  At that point, the interest is in seeing which characters will cease to simply “play as cast” and which will cast the first stone.

Stones in His Pockets By Marie Jones Directed by Evan Yionoulis

Scenic and Projection Designer: Edward T. Morris; Costume Designer: Nikki Delhomme; Lighting Designer: Solomon Weisbard; Sound Designer: Matt Otto; Production Dramaturg: Sarah Krasnow; Dialect Coach: Stephen Gabis; Casting Director: Tara Rubin Casting; Stage Manager: Nicole Marconi

Photos by Joan Marcus, courtesy of Yale Repertory Theatre

Yale Repertory Theatre January 25-February 16, 2013

Taking It to the Streets

The mission: to save New Haven—but how? Gob Squad, a band of four video improvisors, hit the streets of New Haven to find out how, in a show called Super Night Shot.  Brought to New Haven as part of the Yale Rep’s No Boundaries series, Sarah Thom (location), Mat Hand (PR), Berit Stumpf (casting), and Bastian Trost (the hero) tape their experiences, each armed with a 60 minute tape in a handheld camera.

What the audience sees, after giving the group a returning hero’s welcome as they enter from their mission, is what was taped on the cameras, synched and playing simultaneously.  It’s not nearly as chaotic as that might sound, thanks to some skillful planning.  There are moments when each camera records its respective owner doing something in tandem with the rest: a dance routine with an umbrella, for instance, or donning an animal mask.  Then there are the moments when one camera dominates, making the others provide side stories.  What’s key is developing a rhythm of part to whole that Gob Squad has got down cold.

Speaking of cold: it’s not that much fun to be wandering the streets of New Haven on a February night.  The extremities of the situation are real.  Each member of the group must kill the hour doing something that they will relentlessly tape.  And each has a task, stated at the outset: Trost has agreed to kiss a total stranger.  Thom must scout out a location for the event; Stumpf must find a willing participant off the streets; Hand must promote the event, pasting Trost’s face around town and boldly entering commercial establishments (such as Starbucks on High and Chapel) to proclaim the coming of the hero.  Meanwhile, Trost wanders about exuding the “naïve blind faith” that is the collective modus operandi of the group.

Watching the show, the audience only knows one thing: the four members made it back with their recordings.  What they did and how each will align with the others is part of the magic of the spectacle.  The effects—wonderful, comical, eerie, sad—of the overlap is what drives the show.

It helps greatly that the four have mastered the skill to remain on camera without losing direction.  Rather than watch cameras move through the streets, we watch the players move about, interacting at random with other people—a charming incident on Friday night was when Trost told an arguing couple to kiss and they did—or following a solo course that at times made Thom seem as if she were trapped in a Blair Witch Project.

Hand has to be the most outgoing, and his dance, in chicken mask and shiny body suit, in front of Basta is silly in all the right ways.  Trost is the most charming; finding out from a random person that he must free New Haven of politics he persuades a student of political science to agree to leave town.  Stumpf, shyly enthusiastic, manages to find a young woman who agrees to “kiss a rabbit” (“I’d go for it,” her friend advises), and so the night’s shoot ends happily, with Trost, who wears a rabbit mask for the kiss, stripping to his skivvies in honor of the stranger who “has given me everything.”

The best thing about the show, besides the qualities that make each of the four participants engaging, is seeing our town through a stranger’s eyes.  As the four wander about—on Chapel Street from York to the Green, mostly—the familiar sights in the background both estrange us from our environment and make it seem welcoming.  Even the police officers are friendly, Hand finds.  And Stumpf converses with a man waiting for a bus who seems simply to enjoy the conversation without caring about the camera.  Thom curls up on the street near Wave and we watch indifferent New Haveners pass by.  Meanwhile, Trost, after changing into a white suit with bowtie and cummerbund, asks strangers for messages—“take a left” he’s told—and for tasks—“help me find a job as a male escort,” he’s asked.

In the end, the star of the show tends to be the city that hosts the shenanigans.  The show has been done nearly 200 times in distinct locations.  No two shows are the same, but the satisfactions of seeing the foursome pull it off—like some vaguely transgressive but benign social act—is exhilarating and suggests, indeed, that all the world’s a stage.

Super Night Shot By Gob Squad

Devised by: Johanna Freiburg, Sean Patten, Elyce Semenec, Berit Stumpf, Sarah Thom, Bastian Trost, Simon Will On the Streets of New Haven: Mat Hand, Berit Stumpf, Sarah Thom, Bastian Trost Live Sound Mix: Jeff McGrory

Sound Design: Sebastian Bark, Jeff McGrory; Production Management: Eva Hartmann; Touring Management: Mat Hand

Yale Repertory Theatre February 1 & 2, 2013

Prisoners' Pageant

The Island, the second show of the Yale Cabaret’s spring semester, is a powerful two-man play, directed by Kate Attwell and featuring Paul Pryce (John) and Winston Duke (Winston).  The play was written by Athol Fugard in collaboration with the actors—John Kani and Winston Ntshona—who initially played in it. As prisoners in a South African prison known as “the island,” the two men’s crimes, we can assume, are political, and thus their bond is based on the deprivations of their condition.  We meet them as they return to their cell, winded from running, injured, exhausted.  As unlikely as it might seem, much of their interaction will be about their plan to present a performance of Sophocles’ Antigone in a show for the other prisoners.

Staged with the actors on a platform flanked by comissary-style tables and with chairs at the head and foot, the space is intimate and the actors, as they loom above us, seem at times larger-than-life.  It’s an interesting means to create a heroicizing perspective on the two men as they work out their production, which entails Winston, as Antigone, having to don a wig of straw and a bra with tins for cups.  He rebels against the affront to his dignity and must be placated by John, who is determined that Antigone be presented, to lodge the theme of blood ties and honor against the dehumanizing demands of the State.

What carries the play and makes it riveting throughout is the interplay between Pryce and Duke.  Fully immersed in their parts, they establish the sense of familiarity between the men, due to intimate proximity, but also the degree to which they are quite different in their attitudes and expectations. That difference becomes paramount when John learns that he will be released in three months’ time.  Their shared elation swiftly becomes a deeply moving nostalgia for the time they shared together and then, gradually, a sense of dejection and even resentment on Winston’s part, even as John keeps insisting he doesn’t want to think about his release—that it might be all a trick.

What isn’t a trick is the extent to which playacting is a part of the prisoners getting through their ordeal.  Early on John acts out imaginary phone calls to friends back home and to the two men’s wives.  The scene quickly establishes the power and fascination of make believe—the power of suggestion comes out in the playacted phone call, in the reminiscences of the day they were incarcerated together, and in Winston’s projections of what life will be like for John when he returns home.  Fugard makes all this take place in dialogue between two half-naked men, with little in the way of props or theatrical tricks.  The Island demonstrates effectively that the best drama takes place in our heads while listening to characters talk.

The staging of Antigone is a significant change of scene: Pryce as John as King Creon and Duke as Winston as Antigone prowl the walk space behind the tables, moving about as if sizing each other up for a duel to the death.  The fact that John, who has been approved for release, should have the role of the State questioning Winston as the defiant Antigone—who insists on burying her brother, condemned as a traitor, though the law forbids it—makes the playacting reflect a struggle between the two men as well.  John, as the one who initially quizzes Winston on the parts they will play and who seems the more articulate and quick-witted, becomes, by means of the play, a further goad and even persecutor of his cellmate.  Winston, then, as Antigone—the gender roles also are relevant—must give voice to a defiance that stands for the enemies of the State of Apartheid, but also for those oppressed by the constructions placed upon them by others.

The play creates a subtle relation between the two men and Pryce and Duke bring home the passion, power and dignity of these men with great skill.  The show’s design, use of song—via “Singers from Shades”—and lighting combine to create one of those Cab shows that reinvents the space and the audience’s relation to the spectacle a bit as well.  The Island is a commanding production.

The  Island By Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona Directed by Kate Attwell

Assistant Director: Gabriel DeLeon; Scenic Designer: Kristen Robinson; Costume Designer: Seth Bodie; Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason; Sound Designer: Matt Otto; Stage Manager: Louisa Balch; Producer: Lico Whitfield; Singers from the Shades: Carol Crouch, Edwina Kisanga, Dianne Lake, Ian Miller, Naima Sakande

The Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street January 24-26, 2013

The Cab will be dark for two weeks, then return on Valentine's Day weekend with Ermyntrude and Esmeralda, a naughty puppet-play by way of an Edwardian novella by Lytton Strachey.

The Kids Are Alright

Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine is something of a schizophrenic play.  As staged by Margot Bordelon, a third-year director in the YSD program, the show is a wildly entertaining first half yoked to a second half that isn’t nearly so nimble.  The first half is set in 1880, on a colonial outpost in Africa, and laughs abound.  The second half is set in England c. 1980, and … not so much. Maybe it’s just me, and my antipathy for that particular past—the era contemporaneous with the writing of the play—is my problem.  And yet, it’s obviously much easier to imbue the 1880s with charm and fun and a frothy lubricity that makes everyone ready to have sex with someone, than it is to derive much in the way of lasting uplift, drama or entertainment from the people who inhabit the late Seventies/early Eighties.  Too close to home but also dated?  Maybe that’s it.  The cast—and they are extremely well-cast—gives it a game try and there are some notable bits in the show’s second half to make it worthwhile.

Before the show even starts we’re treated to the cast posed as figures in displays in a sort of living museum of natural history.  And the exhibits’ backgrounds remain as the set for the African outpost where rigidly upstanding Brit Clive (Gabe Levey, a comic revelation) lives with his family: his blushingly compliant wife Betty (Timothy Hassler, as winsome as one could want a man in a dress to be), Edward, his goldilocked adolescent son (played with inspired awkwardness by a woman), Maud, his no-nonsense mother-in-law (Hannah Sorenson, a study in gray), his daughter Victoria (a stuffed doll) and the child’s nanny, Ellen (Brenda Meaney, self-effacing), as well as his Man Friday Joshua (Chris Bannow—more later), who has renounced his tribe to be a trusted servant.  Enter into this world of domestic bliss and disrupted white tranquility—the natives, as they say, are restless—a rugged explorer, Harry (Mickey Theis, increasingly profound), and a woman with a tendency to be rather assertive, Mrs. Saunders (Meaney again, anything but self-effacing).

As with any broad farce, one isn’t surprised to find that Betty and Harry have a concealed passion for each other of long-standing.  Nor is it surprising to find that Clive has the hots for Mrs. Saunders as a supplement to his overly demure wife (there’s a fairly outrageous scene of coupling between the two, with Levey and Meaney getting all the humor they can out of it).  But when Edward begins to pant for Harry, and the latter slips away with Joshua for a fuck in the stable, and when Ellen tries to make a move on Betty, and when, after some mixed signals are let slip, Harry comes on to Clive, much to the latter’s outrage, well, let’s just say everyone but Maud is ready to do it with someone (the old lady mainly gets her kicks having one doll bitch-slap another).  You see how it is: Victorian propriety masks a libidinal free-for-all.  In Churchill’s 1880s, no one was standing around waiting for Freud to invent sexual repression.  Everyone is sexually expressive, it’s just that the expression had to be a bit more clandestine than would later be the case.

All of this is very amusing with a cast so equal to the task, and the roles of Clive, Betty, Harry, and Edward, especially, manage to be both caricatures as well as bravura bits of characterization by the respective actors in the roles.  Scenes between Harry and Edward are particularly spirited, as are the scenes when Clive tries to upbraid his wife and son.  But to Bannow, as Joshua, falls one of the more interesting roles.  Indeed, it should be mentioned that Bannow has done an estimable job of playing perfectly the kinds of ancillary roles that matter much to the overall effect.  He did it in both parts of Jack Tamburri’s thesis show, Iphigenia Among the Stars, and he does it again in both parts of Cloud Nine.  Joshua is anything but a caricature; he’s a complex witness to a world that tries desperately to hide its truths from itself, and his “Christmas song” is a plaintive grasp at love from someone denuded of his own identity in favor of an invention.  It’s one of the finest moments in the play.

In the second half, after a curtain painted as a Union Jack has fallen to the floor, we enter the post-punk era of Margaret Thatcher.  It’s a brave new world in which women like Victoria (that doll grown up, we’re meant to assume, despite the leap in time) can leave an earnest, well-meaning and hilariously “progressive” husband (Theis, in a sustained comic role) in favor of, first, Lin, a recently divorced single- mother lesbian (Sorenson, lower class than Vickie), and, later, a sexual ménage à trois with Lin and her own bisexual brother—little Edward (Hessler), now grown into a sensitive cross between his earlier, feminized self and Harry, the manly explorer he adored back there in Part One.  The cavorting about on a picnic blanket by Vickie, Lin and Edward is not only intense, it’s also preceded by an invocation of “the goddess.”  While that sort of thing should invite acerbic parody in our time—aren’t the New Agey trappings of the New Woman of the Seventies as risible as the era’s Sensitive Man?—the trio manages to turn the moment into a liberated expression of collective ecstasy. Almost.

Act Two, then, isn’t all farce but aimed at something like a naturalized representation of people trying to find their way in the minefield of human relationships.  The emotional center is Vickie and she gets a sensitive portrayal, with spirited support from Meaney’s newly divorced Betty, looking like a Thatcher wanna-be and yet displaying the good sense to embrace the moment’s potential, and from Bannow’s feckless but direct Gerry—as Edward’s sometime lover he exudes the kind of low-key sexual know-how that seems never to go out of date.

Where the play loses some of the moorings that helped give power to Part One is in the part of Cathy—Lin’s little girl.  With pigtails and Clive’s handle-bar moustache, in a short velvet frock above manly legs, Levey is let run rampant as a kind of androgynous, butch pixie of the Id.  With prepubescent preening, tantrums, and naughty asides, Levey is so riotously girlish he becomes a one-man drag show, but there’s no room for something Part One had and Part Two needs: the sensitivity with which the child—Edward, in Part One—was allowed to put heart into the play via understated comedy.

In Churchill’s script, the actor playing Clive—the ultra-male bastion of all things British—must become a little girl in Part Two, and Bordelon’s production lets us see how such a transformation is no transformation, really, since, Clive or Cathy, it’s Levey’s role to dominate the scene, as Cathy dominates her well-meaning but somewhat clueless elders.  It’s prescient, certainly, as patriarchy makes way for . . . pueri-archy?

Cloud Nine By Caryl Churchill Directed by Margot Bordelon

Scenic Designer: Kate Noll; Costume Designer: Elivia Bovenzi; Lighting Designer: Masha Tsimring; Sound Designer: Sam Ferguson; Composer: Palmer Hefferan; Production Dramaturgs: Emily Reilly, Alexandra Ripp; Stage Manager: Sonja Thorson

Yale School of Drama January 22-26, 2013

Weighty Issues

When it comes to our looks, almost all of us have issues.  Should we battle those issues and strive to overcome them, or should we work to alter our appearance?  That’s one of the questions asked by Laura Jacqmin’s January Joiner: A Weight Loss Horror Comedy, playing at the Long Wharf Stage II, directed by Eric Ting.  Set in a “fat farm” in Florida, the play focuses on three characters dealing with weight issues.  Terry (Ashlie Atkinson) needs to lose weight for health reasons, and she’s adamant about doing so.  Her sister Myrtle (Meredith Holzman) doesn’t feel her weight is an issue, and takes a more quizzical look at the weight-loss program.  The only other enrollee in this off-period is Darnell, or Big D (Daniel Stewart Sherman), a “fat-proud” Minnesota native who comes back year after year “for the people.”

Staged against a long bank of frosted glass, terminating, at times, in a vending machine, January Joiner is streamlined in appearance and in its script.  We get some backstory for each character—particularly in the story told by the main instructor, Brian (Anthony Bowden), that explains where he comes from and why he’s concerned about his body.  Since most of us are concerned with our bodies in one way or another, the stories the characters tell about themselves carry an element of immediate identification.

The stand-out characterization in the play comes from Tonya Glanz as April, an uptight, relentlessly hyper instructor who has the hots for Brian—thwarted—and who seethes with righteousness about her super-trim—“svelte,” as she would have it—form.  The play doesn’t really have a villain, but April is the character we’re not meant to sympathize with—and Glanz brings a brittle, boyish-girl quality to the role that helps with the humor at the character’s expense.

As Darnell, the character who is meant to evince the most sympathy, Sherman is good at giving us D’s forced brightness, a quality he has clearly learned so as to avoid whining, which would be much easier.  We easily believe that the social interactions at Evolve are more important to him and his self-esteem than his weight is, and that’s why the tragedy that befalls him seems a bit unearned.  The blow to the ego that he suffers is important because it works with the play’s theme that improving our appearances doesn’t necessarily improve us, but it’s hard to believe he would take it so hard.

The key character for the “tragic” aspect of the play is Terry.  Played initially by Atkinson, Terry is likeable, easy-going and giggly; in the second half of the play, after she starts to see results, she is played by Maria-Christina Oliveras.  But the fact that the character Oliveras plays is called “Not-Terry” immediately lets us in on the dynamic involved.  Not-Terry is driven, impatient and cutting.  As she “cuts away the fat”—to use the terms April exhorts them with—she also cuts away a lot of her empathy for others and her willingness to see someone like Darnell as a potential boyfriend.

The linchpin of the plot is Myrtle.  She’s the one who initially is troubled by the demonic vending machine and its ominous tendencies, and she is the one for whom Brian, very unprofessionally—in a good comic sequence—develops “hard feelings,” so to speak.  We could be watching a story of true love in weight loss, where only the one not concerned with her body finds love, but Jacqmin’s plot is a little more complicated than that.  Terry, or rather Not-Terry, has her own designs on Brian, and maybe the sister with the more “svelte” body that will get the guy.

If this sounds like it’s adding up to an einy-meiny-miny-moe for Brian—or maybe it’s a judgment of Paris—choosing amongst thin (April), heavier (Not-Terry) and heaviest (Myrtle), that’s because it is.  So when Darnell shows up at one point with wings, we might be meant to think more of Cupid than an angel.  Which is to say the romantic aspects of the play override both its comedy and horror elements, though both are certainly present.

One of the more jarring aspects of the show is the use of the vending machine: it seems to represent all that is fraught with guilt and unease about the process of dieting, but it also has a homicidal side that matches to the idea that “improving” oneself also means “doing away with” an earlier self.  That theme is what keeps January Joiner interesting.  What keeps it amusing is its ability to show us the attitudes we have about weight and make us laugh at them.  The cast, both thin and plus-sized, is very game in that regard, having to do sit-ups—there’s one very funny sequence with Myrtle spotting for Darnell—and work out as well as cavort about in revealing costumes.

There are good effects throughout, via Set (Narelle Sissons), Lighting (Stephen Strawbridge) and Sound (Leah Gelpe)—the scary machine, and the suggestion of a swimming pool, and the beds/counters that rise from the floor.  Some of the dramatic elements don’t fully jell—for all the fun of the evil vending machine, its contribution has little to do with the plot—but what keeps the play appealing is its appeal to situations we can readily recognize.  Somewhere between Darnell’s fatalistic “it’s all in the genes” and Not-Terry’s steely efforts to cut away, through will power, the part of her she doesn’t want is where most of us reside, trying to look better without necessarily also trying to be better.  January Joiner weighs in on the importance of the latter over the former.

January Joiner A Weight Loss Horror Comedy By Laura Jacqmin Directed by Eric Ting

Set Design: Narelle Sissons; Costume Design: Oana Botez; Lighting Design: Stephen Strawbridge; Sound Design: Leah Gelpe; Casting: James Calleri, CSA; Production Stage Manager: Matthew Melchiorre

Long Wharf Theatre January 9-February 10, 2013

The Teen Scene

All of What You Love and None of What You Hate, the first show of the Yale Cabaret’s spring semester, starts things off with a visceral play that keeps its audience off balance.  What at first might seem to be a satire of online self-presentations, the gap between parents and teens, and the gap between the genders, turns out to be more fraught than that: it’s also about teen pregnancy and the difficult, and scarring, choice of abortion, and the attitudes and mores of the kids in the hood. YSD first year playwright Phillip Howze establishes himself from the get-go as a skilled manipulator of the vernacular—the lines here grasp the peculiarities of personal usage, set within the context of a lingua franca that all the teen characters have internalized.  At least part of the play’s focus is on rendering the kind of “group mind” that teens inhabit in their collective effort to “grow up.”  The situation that Girl A (Zenzi Williams) faces—at fifteen—shows how ill-considered that effort can be.  And yet, the play seems to say, such is a part of life for far too many teens at risk.

We might ask why Girl A doesn’t “know better”: we don’t get definite answers.  Her mother, played with steely prissiness by Prema Cruz, is not entirely unsympathetic, but, with her own efforts to find a man the main thing we know about her (besides the fact that she also has an infant and no husband), we can assume she’s just not there enough to steer her daughter.  Girl B (Tiffany Mack), Girl A’s best friend, is more balanced, seeming to have control over the urges that lead the young astray—but, when it comes down to it, she’s too into herself to be much help to her friend.

That’s not to say that the play is out to point fingers—though the fecklessness of Boy (Cornelius Davidson), the young man who fucks and then wants to forget Girl A, is certainly pointed—but rather to give us a ringing sense of reality.  To that end the voices that act as chorus—coming out of the dark or provided by perambulating figures in hoodies—help us hear how the choices of a Girl A are spun and rung and sung by that “everybody” we’re always aware of, looking over our shoulders, casting stones.

In the end, what are we to make of Girl A?  Played with passive sullenness throughout most of the play, she speaks to us in monologue after the trial by fire of her self-administered abortion: when she says she wanted something but didn’t even know what she wanted, we hear her, in a kind of flashback, tease as a proud young girl enticing a guy, and when she returns to her sadder but wiser voice, Howze and Tarker and Williams give her a stance that makes this girl’s problem our problem.  “You feel me?” she asks.  Yes, we do.

Good work by all in the mostly First Year production, directed by Kate Tarker.  The staging is perhaps a bit too “proscenium” for those who expect more fluid use of space from the Cab, but putting it all on a stage makes what we see a deliberate staging, and that helps us keep our distance.  Lighting, music, scenic design, and projections all add dimension to this dynamic production, full of notable Cab debuts.

All of What You Love and None of What You Hate By Phillip Howze Directed by Kate Tarker

Choreographer: Jabari Brisport; Co-Scenic Designers: Portia Elmer, Mariana Sanchez; Costume Designer: Grier Coleman; Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason; Co-Sound Designers: Pornchanok Kanchanabanca, Sang Ahm; Projection Designer: Paul Lieber; Dramaturg: Helen C. Jaksch; Stage Manager: Rob Chikar; Co-Producers: Stephanie Rolland, Sarah Williams

The Yale Cabaret January 17-19, 2013

Broadway on York with George

Rarely does Broadway come to York Street, but Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George, the thesis show from YSD directing student Ethan Heard, brings to the University Theater a sense of the “big production.”  Heard’s approach, with Scenic Designer Reid Thompson, makes the most of the huge stage space at the UT, letting props rise and fall, letting the wings remain visible throughout, setting the orchestra at the back of the stage, using a raised, tilted platform as “la grande jatte”—the setting for French painter Georges Seurat’s neo-impressionist masterpiece—and staging the scenes in George’s studio at the footlights. Not only does Heard’s production use stage space in all its variety, it uses painterly space in interesting ways: there are empty canvas frames to let us see George (Mitchell Winter) at work, and hanging sketches to show us what he’s  so busily working on.  When one of the sketches explodes into color thanks to some wonderful work with projections (Nicholas Hussong), the visual panache of the show ratchets up a notch.  All in all, the show is a spectacular, from the care with which the costumes (Hunter Kaczorowski) match the figures in Seurat’s painting, to the use of compositional space in arranging the figures, to the effects of color and light (Oliver Watson, Lighting Design) able to suggest the Neo-Impressionist’s approach, to—in Act Two, set in the Eighties—hanging TVs and subtly illuminated canvases, to say nothing of one helluva blue suit.

In the cast, the star of the show is Monique Bernadette Barbee as George’s girlfriend and reluctant model, Dot, and, in Act Two, as Marie, Dot’s daughter who claims George as her father.  Barbee seems simply born to be on a stage, able to find Dot’s roguish nature, her plaintive bid to be George’s main love—she loses out to painting—and her strength in “moving on.”  As Marie, Barbee's delivery of “Children and Art,” hunched in a wheel-chair, is the most affecting segment of Act Two, and her bravura opening song of Act One, “Sunday in the Park with George” is, frankly, a hard act to follow.  The play starts off with its best bit, in other words, and we have to wait awhile before anything as enthralling takes place again.

Along the way, there’s fun with two culture vultures, Jules (Max Roll) and Yvonne (Ashton Heyl), in “No Life,” movement and mood from the entire company in “Gossip” and “Day Off”—Robert Grant handles the physicality of Boatman well, and Marissa Neitling and Mariko Nakasone are chipper and silly as Celeste 1 and Celeste 2—and “Beautiful,” a thoughtful song delivered in a sparkling vocal by a reminiscing Old Lady (Carmen Zilles).  The professional and personal setbacks of George are paralleled to his increasing obsession with his method, and that’s enough to keep the wheels turning within a set that never stays still.

And Act One does deliver a great ending to match the great beginning: the entire Company—and all the tech assistance—is to be commended for making “Sunday” come together.  It’s the sequence in which the pieces of George’s great canvas finally fall into place, and it’s one of those theatrical moments often referred to as a “triumph of the human spirit,” except here it’s actually the triumph of artistic method.  Sunday on the Isle of La Grand Jatte is the painting that showed the full artistic possibilities of Seurat’s method, generally called “pointillism” (after the French word “point” or “dot”), and seeing the composition come together, as George, singing his mantra, moves the quarrelsome and busy-body characters into their defining places, in a burst of color and with the best melody in the play, gives one of those curtains that theater is all about.

The problem is that Sunday in the Park with George has little to offer by way of an Act Two.  Perhaps, in the Eighties, when the play debuted, seeing the Eighties artworld put on stage had a freshly satirical edge, but from our standpoint now, it’s just an excuse to dress up the characters in clothes of yet another “period” (I particularly liked the costumes for George (Winter, as Seurat’s alleged great-grandson), Naomi Elsen (Ashton Heyl, as a stagey video artist), Blair Daniels (Carmen Zilles, as a brittle art critic) Billy Webster (Matt McCollum, in quintessential art connoisseur duds), and Alex (Dan O’Brien, reeking of SoHo).  Indeed, looking the part is pretty much being the part in Act Two, as there is even less in the way of characterization available for these actors.  Again, it’s Barbee, as Marie and Dot, who gets the plum bits, and she delivers; Barbee's rascally Marie upstaging her grandson at his art expo makes her very much Dot's daughter.

As Act One George, Winter does intensity well, making us feel how driven and difficult George can be.  His best song segment is the playful mocking of his models and patrons in the voice of two dogs in “Day Off,” and in duet with Barbee for the quite affecting number “We Do Not Belong Together,” a song that spells out the romantic chasm between the lovers.  In Act Two, Winter and the Company put a lot of energy into “Putting It Together” but there’s something in his manner that makes this George not matter to us.  Ostensibly, the point is to bring present-day George into line with previous century George, but there’s not much pay-off in that happening because there doesn’t seem to be much at stake.

As entertainment, the play’s comedy is a bit wan, having to do mostly with hypocritical French bourgeois and stupid American tourists (Matt McCollum and Carly Zien—we could’ve used more of them) of the 19th century, and preening, pretentious art-world aficionados of the 20th.  Even with its clever opening song, “It’s Hot Up Here,” which matches the discomfort of actors forced to remain motionless with figures frozen on a canvas for all time, Act Two is mostly anti-climax.

The YSD production works as an ambitious staging of a bit of Broadway and its pleasures are not to be missed.  Sondheim and Lapine are best at characterizing that sequence of Sundays in the park, and Heard and company are best at putting all the pieces together.  As the song says, “There are worse things.”

Sunday in the Park with George Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim Book by James Lapine Directed by Ethan Heard

Musical Director, Conductor, Orchestrator: Daniel Schlosberg; Scenic Designer: Reid Thompson; Costume Designer: Hunter Kaczorowski; Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason; Sound Designer: Keri Klick; Projection Designer: Nicholas Hussong; Production Dramaturg: Dana Tanner-Kennedy; Stage Manager: Hannah Sullivan

Yale School of Drama December 14-20, 2012

Photographs by T. Charles Erickson

The Star's Turn

The renovated Long Wharf Theatre has debuted with The Killing of Sister George, featuring a star turn by Kathleen Turner.  The play seems a curious choice: an all-female play that recreates a somewhat dated view of lesbian relationships from the England of 1964.  The original play, by Frank Marcus, has been adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher to lend a bit more nuance to the characters, but without altering its most troublesome fact: it’s set in a Britain still enamoured of its wireless broadcasts, which were full of sentimental evocations of a world where Sister George—the character Turner’s June Buckridge plays on a BBC Radio Programme—is a beacon of good works and selfless behaviour in a rural village.  The humour of the play—which does not really aim at camp—relies upon a wry dryness in evoking British quirks that simply doesn’t translate well to an all-American cast in our day.  Consequently, the play, as directed by Turner, feels a bit compromised, as if in search of a new unifying perspective that eludes it.

The point of the play, though, still manages to come through, once we get past the faux British mannerisms, and that point has to do with a tough-as-nails, matronly star getting her comeuppance from the BBC for fractious behavior and, what’s worse, losing her role as the beloved Sister George simply because the powers that be insist upon a change.  The arbitrariness of fortune afflicts everyone, even prized actors—a lesson that may have attracted Turner to the part.  Her version of June is brash and barking.  Some of the best bits are delivered with the cutting swagger of Alan Bates at his most truculent, and the strength of the role is in the fact that June never drops her caustic assessment of the weaknesses of those around her.  Despite the mawkishness of Sister George, the character that has been her claim to fame, June has no tolerance for the bathetic in day-to-day life.

The play is built upon the tension of liking someone we’d rather dislike—though the role never quite gets to the “love to hate” level, if only because Turner is so deft at exposing June’s insecurities.  Her flat-mate and paramour, Alice, aka Childie (Clea Alsip), is a case in point: she’s a child-woman much older than she seems, preferring a somewhat anxious life as June’s whipping-girl and factotum to life fending for herself.  The conceit that Marcus/Hatcher explore is that co-dependence is a compromise that will eventually suck away one’s life (Alice) or leave one exposed to an emotional comeuppance (June).  The two play off each other well, with Alsip’s Childie obviously cannier than June gives her credit for; blinded by Childie’s willingness to be an abused “bottom” to her own bullying “top,” June little suspects her paramour may outgrow her.

The most affecting moment from the point of view of the love story between June and Childie is when the two, decked out for a fancy dress ball, cavort in the guise of Laurel and Hardy.  We glimpse not only archetypes for their love-hate relationship, but also the camaraderie of their life together.  Of course, it’s shortly after this that things take a turn for the worse.

The villain in the piece, from June’s point of view, is Mrs. Mercy Croft (Betsy Aidem, making the most of it), a hatchet-woman of the BBC—and also a radio personality in her own right for her broadcast bromides—whose clipped politesse is anathema to June, and who manages to woo Childie with flattery of her literary gifts.  One suspects that Marcus has seen this sort of thing enough—a younger prize up for grabs between wheedling elders—to give it the right tone of arch inevitability.  The satisfaction of the play, in the end, is in seeing June not cave-in.  Turner—as director and actress—has the guts to let the play maintain the principles of June’s scorn.

The set and costumes—as is generally the case when Long Wharf goes for ‘period’—are quite good.  June and Childie live in a kind of over-stuffed world where the older woman’s trophies and plaques vie for space with the younger woman’s collection of Victorian dolls (June likes to threaten horrible fates for one called Emmeline whenever Childie gets out of line).  Costuming for Turner is particularly appropriate, as she sets off twinges of memory recalling Simone Signoret in the Sixties.

The Long Wharf continues to develop its penchant for middling comedies that might be spinnable into something more.  Here, the sadomasochistic touches are neither campy nor creepy enough to give us much purchase on what Marcus had in mind.  The Killing of Sister George is not entirely bloodless—there’s a great speech from Mercy, late in the play, about the BBC’s wisdom in choosing its sacrificial victims, and one imagines that anyone whose career is not immune to the whims of management will identify with June’s final utterances. Bracing and brash, and never bathetic, Turner’s Sister George is worth catching.

The Killing of Sister George has made a “killing” in selling more tickets on one day (November 26th, Cyber Monday) than at any time in the Long Wharf’s history.  A star gracing the stage at the Long Wharf's newly renovated C. Newton Schenck Theatre is reason enough, perhaps, for the flood of interest.  The seating is greatly improved and the lobby and façade are more graceful, but Stage II also hit a new record with Satchmo at the Waldorf in the fall.  Unlike certain larger venues in the vicinity, the Long Wharf is more than ever the place—on both stages—to see great acting up close and comfortably.

Kathleen Turner in The Killing of Sister George By Frank Marcus Adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher Directed by Kathleen Turner

Set Design: Allen Moyer; Costume Design: Jane Greenwood; Lighting Design: John Lasiter; Sound Design/Composer: John Gromada; Miss Turner Wig Design: Paul Huntley; Dialect Coach: Deborah Hecht; Stage Manager: Bryce McDonald; Assistant Stage Manager: Amy Patricia Stern; Casting: Pat McCorkle Casting, Ltd.

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

Long Wharf Theatre November 28-December 23, 2012

Poets of the Post

There’s no doubt that Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell were two of the most gifted poets of their generation.  And there’s no doubt that theirs was a long-lived relationship of, to some degree, kindred spirits.  Nor is there any surprise in finding that their letters to each other are well worth reading—as glimpses into the working process, into the world of letters in the first exciting decades of post-World War II America, and into the always fraught and dramatic life that seemed de rigueur for any world-conquering poet of the day.  And Dear Elizabeth, the play by Sarah Ruhl adapted from the letters of Bishop and Lowell, and directed by Les Waters, at the Yale Repertory Theatre, dispels any doubt that poets in their prose can make for compelling, moving and satisfying drama. Granted, it helps to be interested in the writing life, and, perhaps, in the relation of these two rare birds, but Dear Elizabeth’s greatest assets are characters who are articulate about their lives, and a time-scheme that roves through the thirty years—from 1947 to 1977—during which the poets corresponded, finding the highlights that make a relationship a story.  The lifelong trade-off began shortly after they first met and continued until Lowell’s death—indeed, Bishop’s last letter to her friend was in the mail when she learned of his fatal heart attack at age 60 (Bishop, six years Lowell’s senior, outlived him by two years).

Creating theater out of the necessarily fragmented view of a relationship contained in letters is no small task, but it’s aided here by the considerable brio with which the letters were written, and by the fact that there was drama enough in the writers’ lives.  During the period covered by the play, Lowell moved from first wife to second to third, and had children with the latter two; Bishop’s partner, architect Lota de Macedo Soares, with whom she began living in Brazil in 1951, committed suicide in 1967.  And, from time to time, Lowell was placed under care for attacks of mania, while both poets had on-and-off affairs with the bottle.  In Ruhl’s version, all interlocutors are left offstage; this is a two-person play illuminating how, for writers (and their readers) what they say to each other in writing is the measure of whatever happens in the mundane world where real lives are led.

Ruhl’s script carefully weaves bits of the correspondence into a love story of sorts.  After years of collegial affection, Lowell (Jefferson Mays) seems ready to make things more intimate, perhaps even permanent—one of the most naked moments in the play is when Lowell looks back on an evening when it seemed possible to imagine Bishop and himself as husband and wife, stating that he nearly took the chance to propose but chose to wait for the right moment.  Whatever she actually felt about such confessions, Bishop (Mary Beth Fisher) plays it close to the chest, neither repudiating her would-be lover nor giving him any encouragement.  And yet, as played on stage, Fisher’s Bishop seems a woman who, initially, might be infatuated with Lowell enough to give him the impression he nearly acted on.  At times, Bishop’s replies to Lowell, as he exults about fatherhood or advertises a new bride, seem brittle with envy if not jealousy.

Lowell, meanwhile, tends to brood, moving into so-called ‘confessional poetry’ as a means to make his life meaningful as art.  The play gets some tension out of a terse and anxious exchange when Lowell, in his late poem “The Dolphin,” chooses to use excerpts—doctored to suit his purpose—from letters his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick wrote.  The strength of Bishop’s condemnation of mixing “fact and fiction” spills over into what we might consider to be the sacred and private bond between correspondents—whether Lowell and Hardwick or Lowell and Bishop—so that Bishop, we might say, is seeing her own confidence violated in Lowell’s betrayal of Hardwick.  Even more to the point, her harangue at Lowell might extend beyond his poem to Dear Elizabeth itself, where words never meant to be dramatized find themselves become a script.  Whatever Bishop’s misgivings might be, we accept Ruhl’s intervention: public lives are always to some extent theatrical, and those who write must be ready to be re-written.

As theatrical experience, Dear Elizabeth uses scenic ingenuity to distract us from the fact that everything this play means is in the writing, in the fascinating signals, suggestions, confessions, comments, poem crits, and corrections that these two gifted persons choose to share with one another.  Les Waters and Scenic Designer Adam Rigg have concocted some technical marvels—waters flood the stage at certain times, either stranding the two poets high and dry or allowing Lowell to pace about like a lecturer wading into the shallows.  Elsewhere, Lowell, in one of his manic phases, hitches a ride on a crescent moon through a door.  And, in a tableau that seems quite eloquent about the poets’ respective reputations after death, Bishop, saying she would like to write from another planet, ascends on a mini-planetarium while Lowell gazes up at her from below.  Such stunts could be said either to distract us unnecessarily from the main matter at hand or to provide some moments of visual stimulation in an otherwise static setting—the basic set is a stunningly accurate early Sixties-ish “brown study,” lit to give us times of day and projected upon to give us a sense of the outdoors that the oft-traveling duo travel through.  Such effects mostly work and add interest, though that’s not to say one couldn’t easily imagine a stripped-down version of the play, without the Rep’s technical resources, dispensing with special effects and letting glowing prose provide all the color.

As Bishop, Fisher ages well into the part, from bright-eyed and young, she becomes bright-voiced and older.  Her sense of Bishop’s steadiness never really flags, not even when the poet is getting a bit sloshed and an able stage-hand (Josiah Bania) has to come in to relieve her of her bottle, nor when she's forced to type one-handed due to an operation.  We can intuit Bishop’s demons, but, in the letters used here, she mostly presents Lowell with a stoic outlook on her own travails and his, and crisp commentary on the same.  And Lowell is recreated in a spot-on interpretation so close to the original it's magical: Mays wields the vaguely distracted air and the intense glare, the voice of bemused befuddlement delivering choice aperçus, and, of course, his Lowell is readier than Bishop to wear his Weltschmerz on his sleeve, but never—here anyway—becoming tedious about it.

Dear Elizabeth is a wonderful evocation of friendship, of the passion for the word that can unite lives that but rarely shared the same space—a few “interludes” presented in dumb-show capture the sometimes awkward, or worse, occasions when these two geniuses found themselves in each other’s presence.  The play is wise and wistful, and delights with its slightly arch attitude toward persons who, in their rather single-minded pursuit of the art they shared in common, led messy lives they were never done commenting upon.  Ruhl and Waters also let us consider that behind or beside the gimmicks of art, the rhetoric of poetry, and the feints of personality is, as Dickinson would say, “where the meanings are.”

Dear Elizabeth By Sarah Ruhl A play in letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and back again Directed by Les Waters

A World Premiere

Scenic Designer: Adam Rigg; Costume Designer: Maria Hooper; Lighting Designer: Russell H. Campa; Sound Designer: Bray Poor; Projection Designer: Hannah Wasileski; Production Dramaturg: Amy Boratko; Casting Director: Tara Rubin Casting; Stage Manager: Kirstin Hodges; Original Music by Bray Poor and Jonathan Bell

Photographs by Joan Marcus, courtesy of The Yale Repertory Theatre

Yale Repertory Theatre November 30-December 22, 2012

A Choice Play

With Dilemma! the Yale Cabaret closed the first semester of the 2012-13 season this past weekend.  Conceived by Michael Bateman and created by an ensemble of players and an artistic team mostly working outside their disciplines, Dilemma! is an interactive play that demands audience participation.  Stopping the action with a chiming sound and the word “dilemma,” MC Ben Fainstein puts to the crowd two choices faced by the characters at that moment.  Once a choice is made, the play continues until the next dilemma arises, with the audience gaining a rooting interest as their choices are followed or not. The story takes its cue from a major storm situation like Hurricane Sandy with power outages and scarce resources: two roommates, Hugh (Hugh Farrell) and Sarah (Sarah Krasnow), receive a desperate call from their other roommate, Larry: he’s stuck in an elevator and the water level is rising!  Hugh and Sarah, in comical panic mode, begin to rush about trying to find a map to where he is, a car to get them there, and various implements that they will need to rescue their hapless friend.  Rather than a treasure hunt with clues to find the needed objects, Dilemma! presents the duo with a series of situations involving one or two interlocutors who they must decide how to deal with: do they, for instance, steal a useful shovel from a somewhat daft old woman trying to free her “pussies” from a prison of debris, or should they waste valuable time aiding her? Should they fulfill the condition of a truculent barkeep and car owner—find him a live musical act that can play with no electricity—in order to use his car to drive to Larry’s aid, or simply deck the dude and take the keys?  Such are the decisions before the audience, with the winning vote determining what path our “avatars” will follow.

The mechanism by which deciding votes are cast for one choice or the other varies, which in turn contributes to how things go.  If the whole crowd chooses, you can get a very different outcome than if the choice is left to one table or one argument.  The variety of methods, and Fainstein’s quick choices of how to decide, kept everyone guessing—who is really directing this show?  And where is it going?  What’s more, some of the choices are clearly crucial to the plot—the one about the inhaler (Sarah has asthma), for instance—while others simply force one to make a moral choice—who gets a scarce flashlight, who gets punched out for information—that make little difference to the story’s outcome, but which might affect one’s satisfaction with how our avatars play the game.  At a certain point it became clear that the real point might not simply be rescuing Larry, but how dirty “our” hands would be by that point, and, also, ethics aside, how much fun we would have getting there.  Sometimes the best choice from the view of expediency is not the best choice from the point of view of dramatic or comic interest.

In the end, it’s likely that no one is completely happy with the outcome.  The Cab posted the tallies for each choice on Facebook, though without the flowchart that would be necessary to see which choice followed which.  Certain possibilities were never explored—Larry was always in love with Hugh, not Sarah, for instance—and the final outcomes—Larry is rescued, or a group of strangers, also trapped, is rescued instead—balanced out.

Everyone in the play—Fainstein, Farrell, Krasnow, Rachel Carpman, Zach LeClair, Dan Perez—acquitted themselves well.  Bateman and the Ensemble offer, cleverly, situations in which there are winners and losers, and one’s attitude toward that is often determined by whether or not one feels the right person is winning.  Dilemma! made for an engaging evening of theater that felt almost like a spectator sport. It was quite fun, and more exciting if you felt strongly about one choice or another.   The situations could be silly or sinister; the consequences might be lethal or laughable—along the way we might reflect on how much violence and illegality we’ll accept in the name of an emergency, and, the ultimate dilemma, do we want a play to end happily or unhappily?  And for whom?

Dilemma! Conceived by Michael Bateman Created by Ensemble Director: Michael Bateman; Set/ Projection/Lighting Designer: Christopher Ash; Costume Designer: Seth Bodie; Sound Designer: Matt Otto; Technical Director: James Lanius; Dramaturg: Rachel Carpman; Stage Manager/Producer: Reynaldi Lolong

Yale Cabaret December 6-8, 2012

The Yale Cabaret’s Spring Season will begin on January 17th.

Kitty Skits

The Yale Cabaret is back for two more shows before the semester ends and the holidays begin.  Up now is Cat Club, with two final shows tonight, and next weekend is Dilemma. Cat Club was created by an ensemble group: Paul Lieber, Timothy Hassler, Benjamin Fainstein, Hansol Jung, and Kate Tarker, with Lieber and Hassler in the guise of two cats—cool cats, yes, but also scaredy cats—who host a program rather reminiscent of that show those two dudes in Aurora, IL, got up to in a suburban basement.  Yet there’s no need to harken to the public access days of cable, this is quirky comedy for the YouTube generation: Cat Club takes its name from a DIY program uploaded by Leelu Cutie Special, a little girl with cat ears, on the public site known for spawning viral views of often embarrassingly or riotously amateurish entertainment.

Lieber, Hassler, and Company go for something similar: the show we’re allegedly watching—as the TV audience—features opening and closing songs, a cooking demonstration, and an interview with the duo’s “biggest fan,” a segment that flirts with “dead air” the way some of the ground-breaking TV comedy of Andy Kaufman did, in his stand-up years.  Like great comedy teams of yore—whether that means The Smothers Brothers or Wayne and Garth—Cat (Hassler, in the speckled costume) and his adopted brother Cat (Lieber, in the black and white costume) are often provoking each other, squelching each other, and backing each other up.  They’re also willing to risk prop misfires, audience back-chat, dropped or batted ad-libs, and a scripted power failure, all for the sake of the high-wire of “live TV.”

As scripted, Cat Club gives us three episodes—and that’s where the trouble lies.  Concluding each segment and opening the next takes the wind out of the sails pretty quickly—even with the amusing fake TV commercials in between—and thus the show is never so appealing as in that first episode.  Even the windy pronouncements of the Fan are amusing the first time.  Still, I couldn’t help thinking that the progressive loss of fun was part of the point, as if we were to imagine Kitty Cat Estragon and Kitty Cat Vladimir waiting for the end of the show.  Stranded in live TV-land in cat costumes—could there be anything more absurd?  It’s a question that comes up because Cat Club is willing to let some existential dread waft in from time to time.

Were there more of that, it would be easier to say what the show—as a Cab show—is after.  As it is, the production showcases Lieber and Hassler as likeable comics—Lieber likes to sport with an avocado seed, while Hassler tends to be reactive—and as a songwriting duo.  A different song is played at each opening and closing of the show—doubtless the most compelling reason for the gimmick.  The songs are lively, and as singers the two complement each other well, but one wonders if standing on a mini-stage in cat costumes  is the best of all possible presentations for the material.

Two musicians in search of a variety show?  Perhaps, but if so, Cat Club would benefit from a little more variety.  There are reasons why a single Saturday Night Live skit doesn’t run for an hour.

Cat Club Conceived by, and all music and lyrics by Paul Lieber and Timothy Hassler

Created by Paul Lieber, Timothy Hassler, Benjamin Fainstein, Hansol Jung, and Kate Tarker

Director: Benjamin Fainstein; Set Designer: Solomon Weisbard; Costume Designer: KJ Kim; Lighting Designer: Solomon Weisbard; Sound Designer: Palmer; Asst. Sound Designer/ Mixer: Tyler Kieffer; Video Designer: Michael F. Bergmann; Technical Director: Matthew Groeneveld; Stage Manager: Will Rucker; Producer: Caitie Hannon

The Yale Cabaret November 29-December 1, 2012

The Mexican Fantastic

Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the FantasticEduardo Jiménez Mayo and Chris N. Brown, eds. (Small Beer Press, 2011)

From where I'm standing, Latin American literature in the United States is still more or less defined by magical realism, and the more colorful, soap-opera edge of magical realism at that, even as—as should be pretty obvious after a couple seconds' thought—the literature itself is much more diverse than that, and even though the countermovements to magical realism are at least a decade old. (Part of the problem, I think, is that fewer non-magical realist works are translated into English, because somebody thinks that English-speaking North Americans don't want to read about Latin America unless it also involves a thousand butterflies flying out of someone's mouth. Are they right?)

As the title implies, Three Messages and a Warning doesn't break realist writers for a American audience. It does, however, show that, even within the realm of the fantastic, literature written in Spanish has more going on than just magical realism. It also makes a compelling case for considering the works to be distinctly Mexican. Writers of the fantastic from other Spanish-speaking countries aren't represented in the book—and I'm not well-read enough to make the comparison myself—but the volume, taken as a whole, points to an aesthetic that the writers seem to share. A certain tone is struck, a certain taste runs through everything; it isn't quite like anything else I've read before, and it's on every page, even as the stories themselves are remarkably diverse.

There are stories of personal anxiety, touched with both humor and horror. In Amparo Dávila's "The Guest"—a cousin of Julio Cortázar's famous story "House Taken Over"—a stranger moves into a house and terrorizes the women living there, while the man of the house doesn't seem to care. In Alberto Chimal's "Variations on a Theme of Coleridge," a man gets a cell phone call, and then a visit, from himself. Guillermo Samperio's "Mr. Strogoff" is constructed as a breathless excerpt of a much longer story, of crime, betrayal, love, and corruption. In Óscar de la Borbolla's "Wittgenstein's Umbrella," seemingly everything that is possible happens to you—the story is written in the second person—in an astonishing four pages. Then there are stories of societal disarray, or straight-up apocalypse, though unlike the usual American version of it—it's zombies! It's a nuclear war!—the causes are stranger, more complicated, more difficult to understand or sort out. A city is overrun by lions ("Lions," by Bernardo Fernández, perhaps my favorite story in the book); a village is overrun by wolves ("Wolves," by José Luis Zárate). In "The Hour of the Fireflies," the country has been plagued by terrorism and a "war among the corporations," which leads the government (or someone) to justify a series of Tuskeegee-like experiments in a certain city. In what can be read as a pretty biting commentary on foreigners' (i.e., us) appreciation of magical realism and not much else from Latin America, the experiments, as a by-product, produce a flood of electrically charged fireflies that swarm the city every evening. The fireflies become a tourist attraction—"visitors from all over the globe pay exorbitant premiums to rent views of the street"—though the fireflies themselves are deadly, the charge from one of them enough to kill three people, which means no one who lives there can go out. Mauricio Montiel Figuerias' "Photophobia" and Liliana V. Blum's "Pink Lemonade" are both much grittier versions of society in total collapse, again from a confluence of several factors, taken from today's headlines. Finally, there are the metastories, which feel most familiar to people who've read, say, Borges and Cortazar: Agustín Cadena's "Murillo Park," in which a man has a friendship with an old woman whom he may or may not have dreamed; Carmen Rioja's "The Nahual Offering," in which the narrator dreams a character who may be dreaming her; Gabriela Damián Miravete's "Future Nereid," in which a woman reading an obscure book discovers that she might a character in it.

See what I mean about diversity? There's more where that came from, too. But about the commonality: What each of the stories share with the other is the overwhelming feeling that there is a much, much bigger story out there, beyond the ability of the narrator or the characters to comprehend, and that story is tinged not just with wonder and tragedy, but with outright menace, toward the narrator, toward society, toward the reader. It's this uniquely eerie sense of threat, just around the corner, just out of sight, that's tempting to label as Mexican—what the editors in the introduction describe as "a multicultural, media-drunk, post-postmodern society" whose "literary culture still enjoys mass appreciation of the importance of verse, where large crowds gather in public plazas to hear poets read their work" while it's simultaneously "plugged into the mediated networks that dominate our global perceptions"—even though the editors also point out that the "stories come from a culture that itself would probably never collect these authors in a single volume."

The sense of threat has some resonance in contemporary current events in Mexico: the persistent questions regarding just how much control the government really has over the place; the constant allegations of corruption; the increasingly unsettling sense that large-scale drug traffickers operate with impunity; the wave of murders in Ciudad Juarez, in which hundreds of women have been killed and nobody still seems to know who's doing it or why. (Roberto Bolaño barely fictionalizes these killings in the fourth, and, in my and apparently most people's opinions, best part of 2666, "The Part About the Crimes.") But it also resonates here, in our own insecurities and sense that things are getting a little out of control. U.S. culture is seeing its own wave of popularity of weird and postapocalyptic stuff; if this strain of pop culture is here to stay in the United States, then these writers on the other side of the border offer a way for it to move forward.

Manic Mamet

The Yale Cabaret is unexpectedly dark this weekend, so what’s a fan of New Haven theater to do? Answer: go see The New Haven Theater Company’s production of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, delivered in quick and dirty fashion by director George Kulp at UpCrown Creative Studios on Crown Street. The play builds upon triads to create a dilemma: three characters, three scenes, and a choice: which of two films to “green light.” For recently promoted movie producer Bobby Gould (J. Kevin Smith, anxiously expansive), it’s not simply a choice about which film would do better or make more money, it’s also a choice about loyalties, about love and lust, about—yes, even in Hollywood—responsibility. The situation also carries implications of sexual politics and office politics. With the Petraeus scandal currently running amok in the press, the NHTC has yet again pulled out of its hat a play that speaks to its moment.

Of the two films, one is a sure-fire blockbuster—a buddy prison picture that would be a vehicle for Doug Brown, a big-name star—while the other is a do-gooder: a film about “the end of the world” through a nuclear disaster (think: The Morning After). The first film is pitched by Charlie Fox (Steve Scarpa, aggressive and fast-talking).  Sweaty and dying for a coffee, Charlie is a friend and colleague of Bobby’s from way back, who now is poised to deliver the coup that will make them both rich men and set them on to bigger and better things. The Brown film is the proverbial pot of gold the rainbow’s end always promised.

When Charlie enters, Bobby is giving a “courtesy read” to the nuclear disaster novel and scorning it. The idea of making it into a film is poised to be a joke until. . . . Male sexual one-upmanship rears it head when the two men bet on Bobby’s ability to seduce his pretty, temporary secretary, Karen (Megan Keith Chenot, lithe and blithe), who seems to know nothing about the film business and not much about being a secretary. Seemingly guileless, in other words. And, in Charlie’s view, not slutty enough to sleep with Bobby “just because,” and also not ambitious enough to sleep with him just to get ahead. So, the wager: if Bobby can get her into bed, it will have to be on the basis of his own charms.

The play’s middle scene, then, is the seduction scene at Bobby’s place, and the final scene is the fall-out, so to speak, on the morning after (10 a.m., time for the do-or-die meeting with Ross, the man upstairs whose OK is needed for the Doug Brown project). Bobby is only going to pitch one film and his new “change of heart” (if we can call it that) is leaning toward the disaster picture. What about friendship?

The strength of this production is that it moves at a fast and furious pace—Scarp and Smith are gangbusters at delivering the rapid-fire speech Mamet is famous for, talking over each other, responding to cues before the other has finished speaking. The technique creates a believable social friction between two colleagues, also friends, who know each other’s moves and are happy to be on the same page. Things slow down a bit with Karen, who at first, seen through the men’s eyes, seems like the kind of prize that goes with being newly made kings. Chenot plays Karen with detached intelligence: she doesn’t fawn over the men nor try to entice, but in the scene at Bobby’s place, all comfy on the couch, we see that her matter-of-factness about the quid pro quo seduction surprises Bobby, who still thinks you have to use subterfuge in these matters.

It’s the sort of thing you don’t expect to find in Mamet: the scene is almost sweet and is gently comical. It also shows how easily the manipulator becomes the manipulated. Karen, you see, believes passionately in the nuclear disaster picture, called The Bridge. And that passion, now shared suddenly by Bobby, becomes the bridge between them.  This part of the play would benefit from Smith switching gears a little more to convince us Bobby is convinced.

The play’s outcome can be read various ways, and one of the demands of Speed-the-Plow is that the production has to decide which way it’s going to go. Are we meant to side with Charlie or with Karen? Which film is in the “best interests” of Bobby, and what exactly are those interests and when should personal interest in a project be set aside for some other criteria, more neutral or more noble, as the case may be?

Is The Bridge part of a temptation best set aside, or is it the path to salvation?

Kulp's direction goes for the pragmatism of the play, which makes sense since it's hard to see a moral high-ground in Mamet's vision. The final scene climaxes with gripping precision: Scarpa explodes without making a mess and Smith manages to salvage Bobby’s dignity even as we see that he has ceased being his own man.

This is entertaining Mamet, and the NHTC keeps its eye on the ball throughout, delivering a speedy Speed-the-Plow.  It goes by fast, and you might have to lean forward a little to catch it all.

The play shows for two more nights, three performances: Friday, 7 p.m.; Saturday, 4 & 7 p.m.

Speed-the-Plow By David Mamet Directed by George Kulp Produced by Drew Gray

Stage Manager: Erich Greene; Lighting Technician: Tom DeChello

New Haven Theater Company at UpCrown Creative Studios 216 Crown Street, New Haven

November 14, 16, 17, 2012

Milking It

The Yale Cabaret likes to take chances.  One of its chancier methods, as is the case with Joshua Conkel’s MilkMilkLemonade, is to cast an entire play with non-acting majors, here directed by an actor, Jabari Brisport.  Other students—both in YSD and in other schools at Yale—step out of their area of concentration to take part as well.  Sometimes this approach gives to the proceedings a feel of liberation from the strictures of theater—we have the sense that the play is open to everyone.  But it’s also an approach that works best, it seems to me, with plays that don’t have quite as many lines and as much busyness as MilkMilkLemonade does. It’s the story of Emory (Xaq Webb, winningly fey), a boy who likes to play with his Barbie-like doll, and who has befriended an enormous chicken he calls Linda (Lico Whitfield, in feathers and blonde wig, with his glasses and beard intact), but who also gets bullied by his “Rockin’ Nanna” (Melissa Zimmerman, surly, complete with oxygen mask and walker) for not doing what boys should do, and both bullied and molested by the local tough kid, Elliot (Bonnie Antosh, appealingly androgynous) for being, well, different. There’s also Lady in a Leotard (Heidi Liedke, perky) who helps with exposition and also interprets Linda’s clucks at times, as well as enacting the evil twin that Elliot imagines living inside him.   It all takes place on a chicken farm not too far from thriving Malltown where Emory would like to shop and have Cinnabon everyday.  He also wants to perform his ribbon dance routine on an American-Idol-like show on TV, thus rocketing to fame.

The cast is game, and there are more than a few comic instances—such as some cavorting in nude suits by Webb and Antosh, little sewn-on penises dangling, and Zimmerman’s changeable Nanna, gasping and shaky when it suits her purpose but otherwise—“I’ll outlive you all”—tough as nails, and everything Whitfield does is funny; I particularly liked his routine as a bad stand-up comedian of the Andrew Dice Clay variety.  Liedke is charming as Lady in a Leotard, but I found myself questioning at times Conkel’s choices in breaking up action with asides.  At the heart of it all is not simply “tolerance” of gays, but rather acceptance and understanding, as Emory and Elliot enact a sensitive scene in which they try to come to terms with what’s happening between them, made amusing by their idea of “playing house”: a bit of Tennessee Williamsesque vamping à la Stanley and Blanche.

MilkMilkLemonade has a lot on its plate, and a great, bright, kid-show-like set by Brian Dudkiewicz and Samantha Lazar, and fun costumes by Soule Golden. By its end the play seemed to be groping for what note it wanted to end on—an interlude between Linda and a spiteful spider with a ghetto attitude (Liedke with a recorded voice) seemed extraneous whimsy, and torching the chicken farm, I guess, a stab at liberating the oppressed.  MilkMilkLemonade runs long for the usually quick and dirty Cab, and could do with some trimming, though it does fulfill Andy Warhol’s dictum: “always leave them wanting less.”

Next week, due to unforeseen circumstances, Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs has been cancelled, which means the Cab will be dark for the next two weeks and return on November 29-December 1 with Cat Club, an entertainment act involving songs, cats, and cooking.

MilkMilkLemonade By Joshua Conkel Directed by Jabari Brisport

Set Designer: Brian Dudkiewicz; Assistant Set Designer: Samantha Lazar; Costume Designer: Soule Golden; Lighting Designer: Caitlin Smith Rapoport; Sound Designers: Steve Brush, Matt Otto; Dramaturg: Hugh Farrell; Stage Manager: Kate Ivins; Producer: Shane D. Hudson

Yale Cabaret November 8-10, 2012

Off With Their Heads

Is it possible to write a review of David Adjmi’s Marie Antoinette, now playing at the Yale Rep in a production directed by Rebecca Taichman, without mentioning the 99% or making some comment situating the play within the time of OWS unrest and the like?  Probably not, so I’m glad I got that out of the way. It’s a timely play, then, yes?  Mais oui et non.  Adjmi’s Marie (Marin Ireland) speaks like a contemporary airhead, certainly (and amusingly), but the play follows the timeline of the destruction of the reign of Louis VI closely, and peppers its dialogue with jibes au courant for the 1780s—name-dropping Rousseau, and joking about oaths in tennis courts, and taking potshots at that novel experiment in America: “common people can’t take care of themselves.  Democracy can’t work.”  We might take to heart the fate of a patron saint of the privileged as a send-up of what might befall those too high to fall, but Marie Antoinette isn’t really about cautionary catharsis.  And anyway, among historical moralists, for every leftist railing against the empowered, there’s a rightist reminding us of how chaotic and blood-thirsty the reign of “the people” is.  No morals where none intended, to paraphrase Beckett.

OK, so the play’s not quite political allegory, and it’s not quite historical drama, nor even quite historical fantasy.  It’s far too confectionery to want to give us a sense of lived history, but it does seem to have something on its mind, other than laughs, giddy women (Ireland, Hannah Cabell, Polly Lee) with 3-foot-tall wigs on their heads, a king (Steven Rattazzi) who reminded me of Abbott’s little buddy Costello and who likes to play with clocks, and a queen in a Bo-Peep outfit who converses with a sheep (David Greenspan).  Adjmi seems most interested in how a teenaged twit—Marie was married off by her mother at age 14—became the emblem of aristocratic indifference and noblesse indulge.  In his hands, Marie’s tale is the story of how a fashion queen became a scourge—a bit like how, in our day, every pop diva eventually gets dissed—while remaining, y’know, classic and iconic.

Riccardo Hernandez’s set, initially, is all bright colors and shine, with the characters positioned in it as if sitting ducks in an arcade. There are props to prop-up an illusion of surroundings, but this is a streamlined fantasy of court life as bodies in space, with very precise marks to hit.  Gabriel Berry’s costumes play in a lively space between period fashions and what our era might do with them, and, in the early going, the play has the feel of a lively burlesque of the eighteenth century.  Once Marie begins conscientiously to scrimp a bit on egregious ostentation, things get more straitened—and part of the drama is to watch her go from the absurd wigs to having her actual hair—turned white—shorn from her head by a Guard (Brian Wiles, great at steely contempt).

Such gestures are where most of the drama occurs, along with wonderful touches like an explosion of sound (Matt Hubbs, sound design) and fake dirt that expresses to visceral effect the loss of aristocratic status once the revolution comes, and a very powerful moment of echoing laughter from Louis, Marie and their son (Ashton Woretz) that speaks eloquently about the humanity of even the most detestable tyrant.  Here, the rulers aren’t detestable so much as clueless, which helps to pump some pathos into them, but, in the end, it also flattens them a bit too much into caricatures.  When Marie says, “Sometimes I feel like a game that other people play but without me,” it rings true—in part because the play plays her that way too, kind of like “Gidget Goes Regal.”

The great asset of this show—besides its look and sound—is Marin Ireland: her Marie is so vapidly winning or winningly vapid you hope to protect her from unsettling lessons about reality, and you do begin to feel something for someone who has to live such a relentlessly scrutinized life, even if her whining about it gets old.  Ireland’s performance scores so often on comic timing you’re never quite sure if you’re laughing at her or with her.  And isn’t that how it is with the upper-class: we know we can’t beat ‘em or join ‘em, so let’s be amused by them.  When things turn bleak, we’re not exactly going to embrace the likes of the Sauces (Fred Arsenault and Hannah Cabell), two rustics who grab the Royals on their bid for freedom, nor side much with a Guard who spits in his ex-sovereign’s face. Or are we?

That’s the sticking point of the play, really.  Its vignettes start to feel like the clips in a reality TV show, though instead of a make-over toward beauty, power and prestige, this one is going in the opposite direction—toward state-mandated death.  And we’re along for the ride, deciding at which point to disengage.  As the sheep (and this play could use more David Greenspan) says to Marie in a very chilling moment: “Step carefully.”

And if that tsunami of dirt makes you think of the famous line “aprés moi, le déluge,” often attributed to Louis’s dad, Louis XV, seeing the show soon after Hurricane Sandy might make the play’s “before and after” seem even closer to home.  C’est la vie, ma chérie, it goes to show you never can tell.

Marie Antoinette By David Adjmi Directed by Rebecca Taichman

Choreographer: Karole Armitage; Scenic Designer: Riccardo Hernandez; Costume Designer: Gabriel Berry; Christopher Akerlind: Lighting Designer; Matt Hubbs: Sound Designer; Matt Acheson: Puppet Designer; Jane Guyer Fujita: Voice Coach; J. David Brimmer: Fight Director; Tara Rubin Casting: Casting Director; Amanda Spooner: Stage Manager

Yale Repertory Theatre October 26-November 17, 2012

Photographs by T. Charles Erickson, courtesy of the Yale Repertory Theatre