Straight On Til Mourning

Third-year YSD director Dustin Wills’ thesis production of J. M. Barrie’s classic Peter Pan is everything a thesis show should be: a unique vision of a well-known work that revisits familiar (and not so familiar) terrain with a new perspective. Wills’ adaptation places Pan in an orphange during World War I, an alteration that creates an entirely different play. It’s also an exemplary thesis show in presenting resources of ensemble acting that set a new standard for the School, which does rather strive to get as many of its acting students involved in any project as possible. In Wills’ Pan, the actors play multiple roles but, in essence, each play one role: a child/orphan, enacting various parts in a child’s version of Peter Pan, and that entails marshaling all props themselves and creating before our wondering eyes all the necessary spaces and events of Peter’s adventures, from the house of the Darlings to a pirate ship, from a rock in the sea at rising tide to a battle with bayonets affixed—and, in Joey Moro’s ingenious design, lighting themselves, as well as seeming to construct Grier Coleman’s costumes ex tempore. The cast is so tremendously busy we have scarcely time to catch our breath, never mind how they do. And, with such a large cast—13—and so many events, it comes as a surprise how fast these two hours with no intermission pass. If you’ve attended many thesis shows then you know that what comes hardest is pacing. This Peter Pan must be pursued by the clock-containing crocodile, so well does it make use of its time.

Wills and his scenic designer, Mariana Sanchez Hernandez, present us with a set that is a testament to war-time austerity and dilapidation, with peeling, no doubt asbestos-ridden paint, hot water pipes overhead, opaque window panes, and uniform cots. The kids in the orphanage are in hopes of adoption and so their story of how a young girl comes to play mother for a host of Lost Boys in Neverland is at once a fantasy projection and a compensation. This innovation adds greatly to characters who, in the play, are simply take-offs on boyhood types, as these actors might, at any time, break character when something in the play strikes too close to home.

I don’t doubt that any parental types in the audience will arrive at a favorite they would gladly adopt—Tootles (Chris Bannow) is the most endearing, but there’s also the know-it-all, Curly (Aaron Luis Profumo), the preening Slightly (Aaron Bartz), the winsome Nibs (Maura Hooper), and the Twins (Hugh Farrell with a hand mirror and an authentic expression of dazed excitement); all also play Indians and/or pirates as required; then there are those who stay pretty much in one or two characters: Prema Cruz’s petulant Tinkerbell and regal Tiger Lily; Michelle McGregor’s blustering Smee and doting Mrs. Darling; Matthew McCollum’s thoughtful John; Mariko Nakasone’s feisty Michael, the baby of the family, and Sophie von Haselberg’s Wendy, a girl almost too mature for make-believe who playacts Mother in hopes of winning Peter’s heart.

Any might at any time step to the footlights and stammer something heartfelt; at one point, after hearing Wendy sing about what her ideal house would be like, all the kids rush to the edge of the stage to fling at us their individual visions of the home of their dreams. Such breaks in the orphans’ make-believe register a reality all are usually at pains to mask.

Their show begins with willful play-acting when “Mrs. Darling,” observes “her children” Wendy and John play-acting as their parents; soon enough the “real” Mr. Darling (Tom Pecinka) shows up and scolds everyone, especially the dog, Nana (Christopher Geary) who is banished from the nursery, thus setting up Peter’s arrival. What this production loses in whimsical magic—no “actual” elfin child floating into the room with fairy dust—it gains in the kinds of magical conjurations that children find in their collective imaginings—sheets as the sea, lifted beds indicating flight, characters pulled about on wagons and wheeled ladders. And forget the fey, androgynous Peters common to productions with a woman in the role; Mickey Theis’ Peter is robust and boyish, and when he takes on Hook (Pecinka) late in the play it feels like a boxing match as well as a duel to the death.

This is a very physical production, with tons of moving parts—some favorite moments are Wendy floating off the rock on a kite, the rock itself a mountain of valises; the props grabbed together to make the crocodile; Tootles’ stray shot with a real gun; the picture-book rescue of Peter from the rock by way of the Neverbird (Christopher Geary, looking like a downed airman—he is also relentlessly amusing as the pirate Starkey); everything said by Pecinka’s Hook, generally in a state of high dudgeon, letting envy of Peter’s fecklessness become, at last, thwarted love; near the end, Hook, in a fit of pique, threatens Peter with a “holocaust of children”—a potent phrase that seems to bring on a grim series of events that all the make-believe in the world can’t prevent. The final moments of the production flip into the nightmarish as children who don’t want to grow up become children who don’t get to.

Inventive, lively, and surprisingly serious, this Peter Pan lets us feel not only a very real cry for the cozy world of a mother’s care but makes us feel the threats to childhood that we should care about: the final images, set in the time of the Great War, can easily be transported to the time of the Blitz or to the sites of our contemporary drone strikes. Wills and company reach out from an orphans’ nursery—filled with children already missing important aspects of family and identity—to grab us with a sense of the atrocity that is the loss of innocence, and the loss of innocent lives.

This Peter Pan is not for children.

Peter Pan By J.M. Barrie Adapted and directed by Dustin Wills

Composer: Daniel Schlosberg; Scenic Designer: Mariana Sanchez Hernandez; Costume Designer: Grier Coleman; Lighting Designer: Joey Moro; Sound Designer: Tyler Kieffer; Production Dramaturg: Dana Tanner-Kennedy; Stage Manager: Anita Shastri

Yale School of Drama December 13-19, 2013

A Simple Twist of Faith

Watching Ian Cohen’s He Who Laughs, the inaugural production of JCC Theaterworks, directed by Reuven Russell at Yale’s Off-Broadway Theater, I found myself asking the question: can every myth be modernized? What are the costs and benefits of taking a Bible story and putting it in the present day? The story of Abraham and Isaac is one of the world’s great mythic tales. Called upon by God, whom he trusts, Abraham is told to sacrifice “the son he loves,” Isaac, as a burnt offering—the way one would offer a fatted calf or a lamb. A true test of faith for a patriarch, the story also bears great significance for the relation between generations—usually understood as “fathers to sons,” particularly when it was sons who fought in wars and thus were “sacrificed” for the common good. Times have changed and such changes might lead us to ask questions about such great foundational stories: are they gender specific or gender neutral? What is the role of women in such a story? As the basis for the true lineage of faith in Judaism, the story carries major connotations about the relation of the faithful to God, even about the very conception of God’s “character.”

Moved to the present day, of course, such a story immediately invites other considerations: a father who might kill his son because a voice only he hears commands it would be seen as delusional, possibly psychotic, and perhaps a religious fanatic to boot. And how would a teen of today react to his father’s mission? Would he make jokes, whine, fight, run?

The best thing about He Who Laughs is the interplay between father and son. Cohen manages—against, perhaps, our own working assumptions—to make the situation feel both contemporary, mythic, and fraught with the big questions that the story, in no matter what setting, invites. The title refers to the tradition that Isaac—Zach in the play—laughed at birth. Zach (Gore Abrams) is a fairly representative teen—a nerd who loves video games, Star Wars, making bad jokes, and is uncertain about girls. He also trusts his father, Al (Chuck Montgomery), and believes that when his father suddenly “got religion” it was for real. God speaks to Al and Zach is hoping to hear the call as well someday. As Al, Montgomery looks patriarchal and easily manifests the kind of seriousness of purpose that makes us want to trust him too.

The key dramatic situation—the father and son car ride to Ramapo in New Jersey to commit the deed—occupies most of Act One. The upshot—after all the possible interpretations of the command (none of which include “dad, you’re nuts”) are discussed—is that Zach sees it from the perspective of true faith. He’s willing to be sacrificed because that’s what God wants. This is achieved without homilies but rather through the give-and-take of dialogue.

The main dramatic situation of Act Two is the father and son happening upon a young runaway girl who has been beaten up and left upon the road by an irate pickup. This “Girl With the Backpack” (Kate Kenney) becomes a possible catalyst. Left alone with her while Al goes to the necessaries with his meds, Zach gets a glimpse of a free spirit’s life on the road. “Girl,” played with forthright charm, is crude, from Zach’s point of view, but she finds him cute and sweet and quickly tries to talk him out of death at his dad’s hands in favor of seeking fortune. The fact that the girl also hears voices lets us wonder whether she could be some version of that lamb trapped amidst the brambles that lets Isaac off the hook in the Bible story.

In the end, Cohen’s play dramatizes a key aspect left out of the story as I learned it. What if Isaac was ready to go and meet God? Wouldn’t being “spared” be something of a bummer? Attainment of supreme exaltation versus . . . . inheriting your dad’s trucking business in New York? Put like that, it might seem a facetious point, and it’s to Abram’s credit that he lets us feel Zach’s disappointment and skepticism about his father’s excuse for not going through with it. The play takes us from a shared acceptance of one will to a dispersal of such faith. The questioning of God, surprisingly, is not when one is going under the ax, but when, rather, the burden is lifted. Al is accused of “bad faith,” in a sense, and that’s sobering to all.

Cohen adds to his central drama an ill-advised role for Sheila—Al’s wife and Zach’s mother, played by Janie Tamarkin. From an intro scene in which one of Al’s co-workers, Sam (Matt Walker), tells her about Al’s extreme behavior, we move to another journey by car to try to stop Al from doing what Sheila suddenly realizes is Al’s goal (a car ride lacking any of the dramatic interest of the father/son ride and any of the useful temptations of the Girl With the Backpack). Sheila at some point runs off in desperation, convinced that Sam is Satan, which leads to a final intervention of sorts that I suppose is meant to give a little comic uplift but which seems tacked on—unless one feels that the story of Abraham and Isaac always needed to be a bit more heymisch with a heavenly bubbe figure.

The sets are spare—wooden outlines of a house and a car—but sufficient, though the car-door sound effects could be louder. Music is used well too to create atmosphere when needed.

An interesting and at times challenging debut of JCC Theaterworks, this workshop production of He Who Laughs provides, as intended, food for thought. Next up is The Last Seder by Jennifer Meisel, March 6-10, with auditions scheduled for January 5th and 6th at the JCC, 360 Amity Road, Woodbridge; for more info: dedek@jccnh.org.

He Who Laughs By Ian Cohen Directed by Reuven Russell Workshop production

Stage Manager: Julius L. Stone, Jr.; Dramaturg: Yoni Oppenheim; Lighting Designer: Justin Bennett; Set Consultant: Brian Dudkiewicz; Technical Designer: Kate Newman; Sound Board Operator: Zachary Grabko

December 14-16, 2013 Off-Broadway Theater at Yale

A Doubter In Spite of Myself

Dario Fo is a Nobel-winning dramatist, famed for skewering the powers that be, catching the absurd contradictions that expose the willful sham of a powerful few operating against the good of the many. Accidental Death of an Anarchist, now playing at the Yale Rep, has been translated and adapted and performed all over the world, as its basic situation is germane to the non-transparent operations of any state in its often arbitrary and pernicious impositions, at times provoking violence and death. And even when the state isn’t the killer outright, its agents often are, for reasons of their own. In Fo’s play, based on a real event that took place in 1969 in Milan, a worker, believed to be an anarchist and accused of a political terrorist act (bombing a train station) was held for questioning and fell to his death from the window of the police station. The outcry about such methods of interrogation and torture that might have been involved became even greater when it became clear that the deceased was innocent of the crime. Not exactly the stuff of slapstick, you might assume, but that’s where you’d be wrong. Fo’s play intrudes into the very same police station, a few floors below and a little while after the death, a “Maniac” who, in his mania for playing professional roles, decides to adopt the disguise of a visiting judge whose task is to find out if the police were culpable in the anarchist’s death. Think Groucho Marx in any of his preposterous masquerades and you’ve got the tone of the proceedings—with “here come da judge” jive laid on for good measure.

Christopher Bayes, who directs this slaphappy farce, and Steven Epp, who plays the Maniac, are masters of stage comedy in all its forms. Their grasp of commedia dell’arte is fertile and fun, and that permits the kind of playful staging that Anarchist depends upon. For there isn’t much happening beyond the gags—a first act that stretches out the Maniac’s shenanigans from his interrogation by the splenetic Bertozzo (Jesse J. Perez) to his duping of inspector Pissani (Allen Gilmore) and the Superintendent (Liam Craig), going so far as inspiring a heartfelt rendition of the Anarchist’s Song; and a second act that continues with the interrogation of the interrogators, abetted, eventually, by a exposé-seeking journalist, Feletti (Molly Bernard), ending, as it were, with a hung jury. We begin with: Did the anarchist jump or was he pushed? We end with: If a bomb goes off in the police station, who will be the victims?

Bayes and Epp, with their adapter Gavin Richards (from a translation by Gillian Hanna), have the imaginative wherewithal to live up to the play’s requisite shift of time and place to wherever it happens to be played. The play's amorphous quality lets it jab at whatever matters might be unsettling the body politic wherever. It’s not that the play gets moved to New Haven, exactly, but any character at any time might decide to reference something as close to home as they choose. And with that bombing in Boston still in everyone’s mind, as well as the recent sad and suspicious death of a Yale professor in the lock-up of the New Haven police, to say nothing of a lock-down of Yale’s campus and downtown New Haven last month, Accidental Death is, in a sense, happening where we live. We want the police to protect us from threat but do we want to sanction any means necessary? And who will protect us from the police when their ends and ours aren’t exactly simpatico?

That’s where the bite of Fo’s play comes from. It’s aimed at an audience that knows, at some level, it is complicit with whatever is done in the name of “society,” so it wants a state with a human face, liberal and benign, but, like the attack dog we’ve trained to attack and which lacks our finely tuned nuance about who’s “ok” and who’s not, the state might not really be our best friend. “The mere fact that he jumped was clear admission of his guilt,” of course. Fo goes further, but then, his play was written for a country that actually had fascism and has actual anarchists (come back, Sacco and Vanzetti!). Extremes of right and left, you see, help a play such as this, rather than that creeping moderate muddle that tends to swallow U.S. politics, radio demagogues notwithstanding.

Which is all by way of saying that, while I was enthralled as ever with the Rep’s stagecraft, I was somewhat less than tickled pinko by the proceedings. Kate Noll’s scenic design is wonderfully cluttered and cheerily lit by Oliver Wason, with Michael F. Bergmann’s projections creating not only different rooms but also collaged treatments when images seem appropriate—such as anarchists marching, slogans, clouds. The costumes by Elivia Bovenzi tell us right away we’re in the country of the mad with couture that no one in his right mind would wear—and I’m talking about the two inspectors. The Maniac’s costume is even loonier and if he’s not wearing a squirting boutonniere that must be because it was confiscated.

And then there’s the added enjoyment of having the accompanying musicians—Aaron Halva and Nathan A. Roberts—onstage and dressed as cops. One of my earliest laughs was when Roberts, as a cop, is asked to perform some task but has to demur because “I’ve got to play this musical cue.” The breakaway asides are the best part of the play because, though scripted, they feel fresh. And everyone has some bits that work—such as Liam Craig’s limp finger questioning of Molly Bernard’s aggressively leg-crossing reporter, in the second act (which is better than the first, so don’t leap from the window midway), and Eugene Ma’s Constables should get a permanent gig in some comedy troupe somewhere.

The problem? From the start, the repartee lacks tee-hee—“your grammar’s a bit retarded” earns the riposte “did you call my grandma retarded?” But that’s only logistical—and someone may find that side-splitting, especially if delivered, as every second of the play is, with relentless zaniness. It might be easiest to say it thus: if everything’s funny, nothing is. Every line’s a gag, a throwaway, nothing is for real. Satire would make us believe in the police station before it skewered it, but that’s impossible here. Farce—based on characters—would let us sense the absurd contradictions as something a character is blind to but which we laugh insanely to see exposed, but here the characters aren’t even blind to the fact that they’re in a farce, as Bertozzo tells us in his opening speech. In commedia dell’arte—as perpetrated by Bayes and Epp in A Servant of Two Masters and A Doctor In Spite of Himself—the only target is human stupidity, cupidity and the ever-present possibility of a sight-gag or a pun or a fleeting reference to the gags of yesteryear. And you can bet your bippy that such is enough when the point is simply the power of comedy, but when your point is . . . . the state is corrupt but comedy will save us? The agents of the state may be brutal, but let's laugh about it anyway? We’re all screwed and the laugh’s on us? The latter seems the strongest takeaway of this production, once Epp/Maniac (hard to tell them apart) starts pontificating about Bush/Cheney, then Romney, with understandable impatience but not exactly witty sallies. At that point, button-holed, we’d really rather he had that squirting boutonniere.

The critics in the audience get a shout-out at one point, shortly before Gilmore, as Pissani, launches into a stand-up comedy routine that the middle-aged among us will find amusing. And maybe that’s part of the problem—step aside and let some youngsters have a chance! I get more laughs about our stupid century reading The Onion. But I’m starting to sound like a ponderous commentator (imagine the insufferable Alan Alda character in Crimes and Misdemeanors: “if it bends it’s funny, if it breaks…”) and it might be better to put my dissatisfaction in the terms of the text: Sometimes the vehicle (varooom) and the tenor (laaaaaaaa!) work (va-laaaaaaa-room!) and sometimes not so well (mimes vehicle running over tenor).

Accidental Death of an Anarchist By Dario Fo Adapted by Gavin Richards, from a translation by Gillian Hanna Directed by Christopher Bayes

Music Director: Aaron Halva; Composers: Aaron Halva and Nathan A. Roberts; Scenic Designer: Kate Noll; Costume Designer: Elivia Bovenzi; Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason; Projection Designer: Michael F. Bergmann; Sound Designers: Nathan A. Roberts, Charles Coes; Vocal Coach: Walton Wilson; Production Dramaturg: Samantha Lazar; Casting Director: Tara Rubin; Stage Manager: Carolynn Richer

Photographs by Joan Marcus, courtesy of Yale Repertory Theatre

Yale Repertory Theatre November 30-December 21, 2013

Everybody Hurts

“’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all,” Tennyson said. A nice retrospective reflection, but what about when you’re in the midst of the “losing” part? Bound to Burn, a dance-theater piece at Yale Cabaret, by Rob Chikar and Alyssa Simmons, is an expressive enactment of that part. The show features three couples—Valerie (Elizabeth Mak), the breadwinner, and Tim (David Clauson), her husband; Jessica (Chasten Harmon), a free spirit, and Mark (Daniel Reece), her heart; Ryan (Steven Rotramel), a prostitute, and Braden (Rob Chikar), his hope—who all end badly, couple-wise. The dance routines take us through each couple’s journey—from hopeful coupling to longing separations to suicidal despair—in very lyrical movements that are greatly enhanced by lighting and projections.

Kristen Ferguson’s projections—on three large panels or screens—interact in very evocative ways with the movements, choreographed by Chikar and Simmons, while a variety of all-white costumes by Steven Rotramel also do a lot for visual interest. There are projections of texts, of large close-ups of the dancers, sometimes static, portrait-like, sometimes in motion (I particularly liked the hair movement in a close-up of Mak perfectly synched with the song); there are shadow figures of the dancers, and dancers in front of the panels interacting with dancers behind the panels. The dances, in couples and as solo figures, manage to trace a progress through each number, so that we are following both movement and narrative. Very well thought-out.

The show’s tech is excellent, and all six dancers are expressive as actors as well—especially Harmon and Reece (the couple I thought was going to “work”) as Harmon’s expression of loss is very moving. As Valerie, moving on from her marriage, Mak executes a few balletic moves that add greatly to the sense of release that can come when something’s really “over.” The story between Ryan and Braden, involving the offer of a wedding ring, savvily put the age-old trope of the rejected marriage proposal into the context of gay prostitution, reminding us that the downer of unworkable relations is indifferent to gender. As R.E.M. might say, “everybody hurts.”

And apropos of that musical reference, I have to say that the choice of music for the show surprised me a bit. I found myself thinking about how “mainstream” the music made the show feel, to me. Which is a way of saying that the Cab, here, seems to be exploring the possibilities of a show able to speak to formulas of romance and sentiment found in contemporary popular music—for a wide audience. The music, by the likes of Damien Rice, Jason Walker, Plumb, and SafetySuit, is varied enough to allow for different moods, but mainly conveyed yearnings and chagrin with the restrained gush of emo sensibility. I started (almost) hoping for an ABBA song.

Which led me to this reflection: if the music in Bound to Burn expresses your sense of the possibilities of romance, change the soundtrack!

Bound to Burn Conceived by Rob Chikar, directed with Alyssa Simmons

Choreographers: Rob Chikar, Alyssa Simmons; Producer: Melissa Zimmerman; Scenic Designer: Brian Dudkiewicz; Costume Designer: Steven Rotramel; Lighting Designer: Andrew Griffin; Sound Designer: Rob Chikar; Sound Engineer: Steven Brush; Projection Designer: Kristen Ferguson; Technical Director: Keny Thomason; Stage Manager: Melissa Zimmerman; Photographs by Nick Thigpen

Yale Cabaret December 5-7, 2013

Death of a Garbageman

August Wilson’s Pulitzer-winning Fences, directed by Phylicia Rashad and playing at the Long Wharf Theatre, is a winner all the way. Wilson’s script has the resonance and depth one finds in great novels and in the landmark works of naturalist theater. Character-driven and language-based, it’s a play that is larger than life only in the sense that it might feel, while you’re watching it, more real than your own life. For this is slice-of-life drama with no expressionistic extremes of behavior, no tragic inflation or comic exaggeration. Wilson’s command of his characters and Rashad’s command of her actors combine to create great drama—involving, entertaining, full of wisdom and the true contradictions found in real life. Start with that set by John Iacovelli. Even before the play opens, we sit looking at the backyard of the home of Troy and Rose Maxson, located in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where Wilson hailed from, in the 1950s. It’s homey, inviting even. No, it’s not a grand structure, nor is it ramshackle. It’s not poor, nor is it middle-class. The house, the porch, the tree in the yard—it all feels lived in and unapologetic. Folks can drop in, no problem.

Troy, the master of this home, is a big man with well-defined, even classical features. He’s the kind of barely educated workingman who exudes amazing amounts of charisma. There’s nothing phoney about him in the least, no effort to be something he’s not. What he is is a good friend to his old army—and drinking—buddy, Jim Bono, and a doting husband to his wife, though his doting takes the form of the condescension to women common among breadwinning males in that day and age. He rules the roost, but generally strives to stay in her good graces. And, when we first meet them, Troy and Rose seem as happy as any two people married for over seventeen years could expect to be.

And yet. The dramatic conflicts in the play all come from Troy’s own nature. Wilson provides a character study that is relentless in revealing—simply through speech with others—everything we need to know about Troy Maxson; indeed we learn everything the man knows about himself. For Troy was a gifted baseball player before blacks were allowed in the professional leagues, and the chip he carries on his shoulder from that fact poisons his relation to Cory, the teenaged son he fathered with Rose. We also learn, from his attitude to Lyons, his elder son from a previous relationship, that his past is full of things he’d rather not be reminded of, but which he reveals to Lyons in a gripping speech about his life as a thief. Later, a larger confession materializes that serves to poison his relationship with his supportive wife. Along the way, we hear about how some decisions Troy made affect his brother Gabriel, a vet damaged by the war, whose relief money is the basis of Troy’s financial well-being.

In other words, Troy is nothing if not imperfect. He is so deeply flawed and yet so fully alive that we have no choice but to see his point of view, primarily because his failings are obvious to himself even if he tries to talk his way to justifications. We might say he’s “all talk,” except that Esau Pritchett gives Troy such earnest soul, and a presence of mind that refuses to be glib simply for its own sake. Even when he tells facetious tall tales about meeting Death or finding the Devil at his door, offering him credit terms, his way with a story—placing himself always as the hero tried by external forces—carries with it a convincing moral resonance. Even when he’s fooling around, he’s not just fooling around.

And when he’s in deadly earnest, he can be truly scary, a father whose sense of his obligations and of his manhood are utterly unselfconscious about how overbearing he is and how—in refusing to let Cory play football, in never going to hear Lyons play jazz, in not doing more for his brother, in having a mistress—often he is wrong. Much of the play’s power derives from showing this man as he is—without irony or ridicule or sentimentality. Troy is no Lear and his bad decisions don’t destroy a kingdom or anyone’s life, ultimately—though they do cause pain—but he is just as much a figure for the self-delusions and insecurities and abundance of what can justifiably be called “the masculine principle.”

One of the wonders of the play is its language—it’s a natural-sounding speech that is yet very musical, full of rhythms that sound “easy” but are actually hard to get right. The cast does a splendid job with the text and everyone deserves credit for their work. From little Taylor Dior, the child who plays Raynell with artless sincerity, to Chris Myers as Cory, who struggles with his father without sounding petulant and who acquits himself well in the emotionally charged singing of his grand-dad’s song about a dog called Blue late in the play, to Jared McNeill as Lyons, a nuanced performance that conveys effectively the note of a different kind of male—the hepcat or hipster of the fifties—who condescends to his father but also wants his respect, to Phil McGlaston as Jim Bono, the neighborly crony who registers both genial acceptance of Troy as well as a distance that comes later, to G. Alvarez Reid as Gabriel, Troy’s wounded brother who stirs guilt (watch Troy’s face whenever he shows up), remorse, and brings with him visions of St. Peter’s gate and hellhounds, to Portia as Rose, who delivers two quite affecting arias—the first, to Troy, is a rhapsody of betrayed love and deep accusation that Portia does full justice to; the other, to Cory, a proud defense of her deceased husband that feels only slightly more mannered than it might; to Esau Pritchett as Troy, a commanding performance that lets us feel the fearsome self-possession of a man who can’t ever admit he’s wrong.

And is he? One of the interesting aspects of Fences is that Troy does have a vision of life that he intends as the best for all. It’s self-serving, but that doesn’t mean it’s misguided. Would Corey’s football-playing plans have panned out? We don’t know. Is it wrong to have children with three different women? Wrong to the women, certainly, but wrong to the children? The final scene makes us feel the purpose of the father, even in his absence. All are indebted to him, at some level, simply by being there. And that’s because Wilson wants to respect men like Troy—denied the chance to be their best because of racism, and yet able to rise up from the lowest job to the job of driver, normally reserved for white men, without even having a driver’s license. Like Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, Troy is a man his sons find hard to love, but who is loved deeply by his author, flaws and all. Troy is the hero of his own life, and Wilson, in Rashad’s compassionate production, lets us see what a burden that can be.

This Fences is the real deal. Go!

August Wilson’s Fences Directed by Phylicia Rashad

Scenic Design: John Iacovelli; Costume Design: Esosa; Lighting Design: Xavier Pierce; Sound Design: John Gromada; Hair & Wig Design: J. Jared Janas & Rob Greene; Fight Diretor: Michael Rossmy; Production Stage Manager: David Blackwell; Assistant Stage Manager: Amy Patricia Stern; Casting by Calleri Casting; Photographs by T. Charles Erickson

Long Wharf Theatre November 27-December 22, 2013

Insourcing

“Derivative” is an interesting word. Its base—“derive”—refers to the act of using some source as the basis for something else. Our language’s ability to make noun forms of verbs gives us the “thing”: “a derivative.” In economics, a derivative is a financial product that is based on some other financial product. Recently, when the housing bubble broke, the credit and holdings derived from faulty mortgages and other bad debt nearly brought banking to its knees. But there are other meanings. When we say a theater-piece is “derived” we mean it doesn’t start with a script but rather ends with a script; it’s worked out as the rehearsals progress. We can also mean that its source is something else: an existing play or some other work. In the case of Derivatives, the Yale Cabaret show conceived by YSD acting student Jabari Brisport and directed by third-year director Cole Lewis, the show is derived from interviews with the regular folk of New Haven. The show’s purpose is to give us, on the one hand, a snapshot of the economic realities in downtown, and, on the other, to take pot-shots at our wider culture of political double-talk, disparity and, the key term, “economic inequality.”

Let’s start with the fun stuff. The show features a number of lively take-offs of the type that Saturday Night Live is famous for: it’s like TV but in some more madcap version where “the truth” actually comes through. So, whether it’s two blonde sistahs (Cornelius Davidson and Brisport) telling you that you too can be like Obama—just use hope—or an earnest cooking-show host (Tanya Dean) telling you how to make Doritos the basis of your cuisine, or a heartfelt paean to the losses incurred by CEOs in the economic slump, the comedy segments—while ‘derivative’ in yet another meaning of the term—had more bite and wit than many things I’ve seen on SNL. Lauren Wainwright as Today’s Woman, peddling self-injected Botox and celebrating multitasking as utter fulfillment was a high-point of cranked-up comedy, worthy of Amy Poehler. With projections of graphics and the use of a variety of “stages,” the show’s visual sense is dynamic.

Interleaved with the send-ups of the downturn were the voices of the people, situated so as to speak from amongst us. It must be said that the interviewers got some candid statements from their subjects, but the harder sell is what a random sample of people tells us about life as it’s lived in New Haven. We meet a street person—very sweetly enacted by Lewis—who feels himself better off than those who go to shelters; a construction worker (also Lewis) with the somewhat libertarian view that the difference between himself and a rich person is “choices they made”; a retail-working SCSU student (Dean) with some vague idea of getting into marketing; members (Brisport) of Yale’s staff, in security and elsewhere, who feel fortunate to work for the city’s big employer and its privileged denizens; a fire-person (Dean) who has seen New Haven in much worse shape than it is now, but who darkly predicts that it’s going back to that; and an East Havener (Wainwright) who tries to give an account of the demographics of neighborhoods on the sliding scale of how impoverished they are, or how unsafe.

All in all, the picture is bleak if measured by the yardstick given to us in a game show about “Jumping a Class,” that indicates where everyone falls, by income and education, in the loosely understood terms of upper-class, upper-middle-class, middle-class, and so on. The friction between people speaking for themselves and letting economists, commentators, TV hosts and well-intentioned sociologists speak for them is where the real drama occurs—some, like Davidson’s homeless man, don’t feel that they even have a “lifestyle” (one of the more privileged coinages we encounter).

Nobly, Derivatives tries to bring the perspective of “the regular people” into the room, though it’s unlikely any of them would ever be in that room. At times, the effort might seem a bit like caricature—though it’s important to note that the actors all mimicked their subjects without irony—within the context of the arch comedy of the rest of the show. The most positive assessment would say the show lets us contemplate “how other people have it”; the least positive assessment would say the show lets us condescend to those who we aren’t ever likely to be.

In the end, Derivatives shows that “economic inequality” and “the 99%” are the buzzwords of the commentating class—shared by those people who mostly showed up at Occupy installations to proclaim that they aren’t getting a good return on their investment in themselves and their careers. If it wasn’t already clear to you before you saw the show, it should be after, that looking for an “us vs. them” in which “they” (the 1%) are against “us” (everyone else) is not going to play too well if only because certain shared assumptions are lacking, depending on who you are and where you come from.

The company of Derivatives is clearly distressed enough to want to do something about the lack of what used to be called “a safety net” for our plummeting economic expectations, and maybe even to find a language to speak about such matters that can engage everyone. To that end, humor is a good test of any hypothesis that invokes one or more of our popular social markers, that trinity of race, class, and gender: at what point do you stop laughing, or, at what point does it hurt to laugh? Unless, of course, you're laughing all the way to the bank.

Derivatives Conceived by Jabari Brisport Directed by Cole Lewis

Dramaturg: David E. Bruin; Set Designer: Reid Thompson; Associate Set Designer: Christopher Thompson; Costume Designer: Elivia Bovenzi; Lighting Designer: Seth Bodie; Projection Designer: Nick Hussong; Co-Sound Designers: Brian Hickey and Steve Brush; Stage Manager: Hannah Sullivan; Producer: Emika Abe; Additional Performances by David E. Bruin, Hansol Jung, Matthew Raich; Photographs by Nick Thigpen

Yale Cabaret November 21-23, 2013

A Victim of Voices

The most recent Yale Cabaret production, Sarah Kane’s Crave, directed by playwright Hansol Jung, is staged as a kind of dark night of the soul of a writer. Sitting at a table with sheaves of paper, M (Helen Jaksch) interacts at first with disembodied voices that seem external but also possibly internal. Soon, the voices take shape as three distinct interlocutors—A (Taylor Barfield), B (David Clauson), and C (Ashley Chang). The trio come at M from all directions, bursting through screens, leaping out from behind curtains, popping up from a big plastic trash can. Their mixture of memory, poetry, confrontation, and exhibition drives the show.

At times there is argument and contestation among the voices, at times there are moments of tenderness or hilarity, and seductive arias and impassioned pleas. It’s a very vocal show but unlike the Cab's recent Radio Hour—another show driven by voices—Crave is anything but static as the four characters move all about the playing space as though the audience just happens to be sitting in their personal playground.

The tech of the show is superlative as lights (Elizabeth Mak) and sounds (Cahyae Ryu) have to create much of the atmosphere—an atmosphere that is nothing if not mercurial. And because the set is a part of our space, and vice versa, the set design (Samantha Lazar and Andrew Freeburg)—like that deconstructable desk or the paper screen of texts or a blanket grabbed up for all four to get behind—counts for a lot. The tale-telling trio are clad in loose white outfits that make them easy to focus on as they dart about amongst the tables like will o’ the wisps.

M, in glasses with sturdy frames and a rather no-nonsense attitude—all things considered—roots the proceedings in a reality not as threatening as it might be. This could be a play of someone losing her mind, coming apart in a schizophrenic meltdown, but as enacted by Jacksch seems rather to be a lengthy, therapeutic exploration. Kane gives us a protracted whine about sex and death and the ineluctable modalities of physical existence and mental distraction—the conditions of inner angst that a writer has only the dwindling resources of imagination and graceful utterance to combat or overcome.

At times we might be in the midst of repressed memories—the kind that come out on the psychiatrist’s couch—at other times we might be in a moment of truth one might reveal to a lover or friend. B is the most petulant, seeming to want something to be resolved, preferably in his favor; A is the most histrionic, at one point mooning us or grabbing a microphone like a game show host looking to entertain with embarrassing factoids; C is generally like some Id-child, storming about, almost hyperventilating, and having “accidents” we associate with childhood. M is often like a patient teacher or older sister, stern but forgiving, until the whirlwind of loose ends begins to take its toll.

Like a kind of verbal Rorschach test, the text of Crave is something that no two audience members will experience the same way, and this staging by a playwright and four dramaturgs brings that text to life in imaginative ways, so whether or not we follow every implied dramatic situation, we still get the kind of visceral pleasures we come to the Cabaret to find. At times moving, at times funny, at times wildly histrionic, Crave is a fascinating “treatment” of a certain kind of modern ailment—the compunction to find words adequate to experience. If only to find the final word we all crave.

Crave By Sarah Kane
Directed by Hansol Jung

Dramaturg: Kee-Yoon Nahm; Producer: Sally Shen; Set Designer: Samantha Lazar; Assistant Set Designer/Tech Consultant: Andrew Freeburg; Costume Designer: Hunter Kaczorowski; Lighting Designer: Elizabeth Mak; Sound Designer: Gahyae Ryu; Projection Designer: Ni Wen; Stage Manager: Emily DeNardo; Assistant Director: Gabrielle Hoyt-Disick; Photographs: Nick Thigpen

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street
November 14-16, 2013

New Haven Maine-stays

The New Haven Theater Company’s production of Almost, Maine makes a virtue of its minimalist set to create a kind of fantasy space where all the action takes place. That’s fitting because Almost, Maine almost takes place in a real place, but John Cariani’s script likes to interject little fabulistic touches that let characters be symptoms as much as people. Which is a way of saying that the point of each of the nine vignettes that comprise the play is that love makes everything different. We might think we’re normal people in normal situations, but when love gets involved, magical or bizarre or at least unusual things happen, and the way we talk about what we’re going through has to make use of metaphors and imagery. So if Glory (Jenny Schuck) is carrying a broken heart, or a man (Erich Greene) has been reduced by the loss of hope, well, Cariani’s play is going to treat such things literally. Which means you may be like Phil (Steve Scarpa) and Marci (Anna Klein), who have come to the end of their relationship—waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The NHTC has the knack of playing things with a straight-forward gusto that lets us in on the joke while also being as forthright as these characters need to be. It’s fun to watch pratfalls of emotion (fall in love, get it?) overtake two beer-drinking buddies, Randy (Peter Chenot) and Lendall (Christian Shaboo) because the guy-ness of these guys is so vivid. It’s fun to watch Steve, a guy who can’t feel pain (Scarpa) get hit with an ironing board by someone else’s wife (Deena Nicol) who has just the right air of annoyed woman doing laundry on a Friday night. Scarpa takes a page from Dustin Hoffman’s autistic fellow in Rain Man to make us feel both sympathy and amusement.

And that’s the key note of the evening. Every one of these characters is suffering in some way—I particularly liked Chenot as Jimmy, the sad sack behind a wall of downed Buds who cheerily confronts Sandrine (Anna Klein) who ditched him months ago and is now on the way back to her bachelorette party (ouch!)—and yet the comedy is always there too. So whether it’s a couple (Mallory Pellegrino and Christian Shaboo) whose bags full of love seem rather wildly disproportionate or two snow-sports friends (Jenny Schuck and Peter Chenot) who suddenly discover there are such things as indoors sports, there is usually an outcome that seems for the best.

Directors Megan Chenot and Margaret Mann should be happy with the pacing of their evening, and the Chenots’ incidental music adds very appropriate touches to backgrounds and transitions—I particularly liked the banjo that adds a jauntiness to the proceedings. Nothing goes on too long, though some scenes are more developed than others—Scarpa and Klein’s scene felt the most real—and not all the scenes end with love triumphant: Greene’s Man gets the most biting lines in the play about how leaving someone with just a little hope can be like stealing their oxygen bit by bit, and Deena Nichol dragging a wheelie suitcase away while saying “yes, yes” stabs as well.

NHTC have found another dialogue-driven entertainment that showcases their grasp of regular folks in irregular circumstances—a strength of their Our Town as well. Added to the regulars of the company are newcomers who add a lot, replacing some who have left our town for other horizons.

Almost, Maine plays again tonight at 8 p.m. and next Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. at the English Building Markets on Chapel Street.

Almost, Maine Written by John Cariani Directed by Megan Chenot and Margaret Mann

Peter Chenot, Erich Greene, Anna Klein, Deena Nicol, Mallory Pellegrino, Steve Scarpa, Christian Shaboo, Jenny Schuck

Original music written and performed by Megan and Peter Chenot Technical production: George Kulp and Drew Gray

New Haven Theater Company at English Building Markets 839 Chapel Street

Owning Up

Caryl Churchill’s Owners, the second show of the Yale Repertory Theatre season, directed by Evan Yionoulis, is an insidious play. It’s so much fun to watch—with the fabulous scenic design by Carmen Martinez that shifts magically before our eyes—that we might be lulled into forgetting how barbed it is. In Yionoulis’ take on the show, the characters don’t seem to be really appalling—well, except for Marion—and so there is much entertainment value in watching how they cope with straitened circumstances and windfall offers, with marital melt-downs, new babies, and old flames, with skullduggery and borderline thuggery. Everyone keeps the comic timing skimming along, making us chuckle . . . until the ending brings home how lethal it all it is. How callous and shallow the world these characters inhabit . . . and perpetuate.

It’s Britain in the early seventies and the “owners” are taking over, a situation that we might say “resonates” with our times, though the more perceptive attitude, I think, is to see that Churchill is showing us how things began to change for the worse—all the way back then. Marion (Brenda Meaney) is the live-wire here, the rapacious woman Churchill shows us to remind us that, once in power, a woman can be as unreasoning, as blood-thirsty, as fascist as a man. It’s the other side of that great Equality demand the times were fraught with, and, in “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” fashion, indicates that the real problems lie elsewhere.

Marion wears the pants, we might say, except that her husband, Clegg (Anthony Cochrane), a butcher going out of business—and chatting to her employee Worsely (Joby Earle) about how he might do Marion in—when we first meet him, considers himself quite manly. He delivers spot on comments, common enough in those days when the ERA was being bandied about in the States, about how a man controls a woman. His idea of revenge on Alec, Marion’s old flame who he believes is back on the job, is to have sex with Alec’s wife Lisa. It’s all about ownership, you see. “She’s mine; she’s yours,” and so on.

That other couple—Alec (Tommy Schrider) and Lisa (Sarah Manton)—have kids and another on the way. They also are living, with Alec’s mum, in a flat in a building that Marion is taking over. So that precipitates a visit from Worsely to buy them out. It’s the standard practice of taking over a property, ditching the undesired (with rent-controlled leases), and soliciting the interest of the upwardly mobile—like the Arlingtons who eventually move in below. The stakes of this game are pretty clear, but it gets more complicated when Marion and Clegg take on ownership of the other couple’s new baby. It’s not quite clear why Lisa gives her child up except that she’s very distraught and a bit dim. Further complications circle around whether or not Marion can somehow take on ownership of Alec as well. And a running gag is Worsely’s attempts to kill himself, to give up ownership of what he stands up in, as he puts it.

As Clegg, Anthony Cochrane is more or less “the main character” in the sense that his rapport with Marion, from his point of view, is the only business really to be decided—that, and whether or not there will be an heir for “Clegg and Son.” In the end he still loves Marion because of a decision she makes about doing-in Alec. Peachy. Cochrane reminds me a little of Bob Hoskins combined with Jack Warden, which is a way of saying he’s a very likeable guy, in his manner, and if he’s a bully, he’s also a man trying to make do in a Man-and-woman’s World. He was in the army too, so, there you have it. He’s adaptable. And maybe even a little sentimental toward Lisa and her new baby.

As Marion, Brenda Meaney has the toughest role of the play. It’s easy to dislike her and to read all kinds of Iron Lady associations into her, but, on the other hand, she seems really to have feelings about Alec. It’s just that, as she says at the close, “I might be capable of anything. I’m just beginning to find out what is possible.” Why should Lady Macbeth have to stand behind that conscience-stricken fool she married? So then you ask yourself: what would the tragedy of such a woman be? Meaney has the perfect stature and statuesque qualities for this role. She’s commanding and powerful and, chomping chocolate bars or offering to buy Clegg a stripper, she has the same off-hand grace that says, “yes, this is my world. I’ve accepted it, what’s your problem?”

Alec, her problem, is the part that requires the most work. If his lines aren’t spoken with the right kind of Brit diction, Alec could turn into a caricature. Tommy Schrider nails it. His Alec is someone who has opted out, quasi-Bartleby-like. Not only would he rather not, he doesn’t see much point in doing or not doing. If Marion wants him to go to bed with her, he will, but there’s not much behind it. “I don’t keep,” he says. He dispatches his mum, when she’s in a coma, and the play lets you decide if that’s mercy or not. In the second part of the play, he seems to begin to accept that his wife and kids are actually a part of his life. Better late than never, we might say. And then he does something extraordinary, in the end.

Sarah Manton’s Lisa has heart and a grasp of realities, eventually. No caricature either, she could be contemptible in her useableness, but. She comes across as “woman, old school.” She’s nice and gracious to Worsely even when he barges in on her and Alec after their home has been robbed; she’s pregnant, at first, then a mother who has to abandon her baby. She’s confused and apt to cry until Marion gives her one across the face. Lisa is blonde and lithe, willing to have sex with Clegg to further her cause. Women’s wiles, you see.

Joby Earle’s Worsely is as likeable as Eric Idle always is, with that kind of self-effacing sociability that seems passively winning, but then such social graces mask that there’s something deeply wrong with Worsely. He keeps telling us this, and we see the evidence as more and more bandages bedeck his person, but it’s just a macabre gag, isn’t it? That is until we see Churchill’s point that, for every grasping villain like Marion, there are those walking dead, those moral nullities, that will do any bidding, for lack of anything better to do.

To Alex Trow falls two small but important roles: as Mrs. Arlington, she’s the well-heeled and well-meaning forces that stand above Marion. Marion worked hard in a man’s world to get something. Mrs. Arlington’s already got it. And a baby she lets the neighbors look after as she rushes to the theater. Heh. Trow is sweet in the mannered way of betters to lessers. But as Alec’s Mum, she’s a surprise. At first, given the use of mannequins, you might thing she’s one too, sitting in a chair like a piece of furniture. Then she speaks from the depths of her dementia. Then, later, she gets up, gets the kettle, attempts to make tea, all in a tour de force of muscular memory continuing beyond conscious thought. It stays with you.

About Marion and those pants—fortunately she doesn’t really wear them. We might arrive in fear of pants suits, but Seth Bodie’s costumes go for the patterned midis of the times, back when working women wanted to look like women, not business-women, which meant seeming to be on a date with life, in bold colors and big hair. Lisa, meanwhile, looks pretty much like the hippy turned hausfrau that was the outcome of the sexual revolution by the time its style trickled down. The men’s attire is flared where necessary and printed, matching or not, and Worsely, in particular, has the requisite not-quite-placeable seediness that speaks tomes.

The scene changing, on spinning sets, is fun to watch, especially as it is led-up to by “freeze frames” that work with Benjamin Ehrenreich’s lighting to create tableaux, which adds to the fun. Martinez’s sets include a nondescript butcher shop and an upscale one with blazing neon. The difference between the two says it all, as we go from post-war to posh.

See Owners if you can. This one’s really something, I’ll own.

Owners By Caryl Churchill Directed by Evan Yiounoulis

Scenic Designer: Carmen Martinez; Costume Designer: Seth Bodie; Lighting Designer: Benjamin Ehrenreich; Sound Designer: Joel Abbott; Production Dramaturg: Hugh Farrell; Vocal and Dialect Coach: Beth McGuire; Fight Director: Rick Sordelet; Casting Director: Tara Rubin; Stage Manager: Sonja Thorson

Yale Repertory Theatre October 25-November 16, 2013

The Art of the Airwaves

Radio Hour, the latest Yale Cabaret offering, was a good choice for Halloween weekend, featuring “Zero Hour,” an eerie sci-fi tale by Ray Bradbury, adapted for radio, and an episode of John Meston’s Gunsmoke. The show, a live “broadcast” in the style of late fifties radio, offers not only the entertainment of experiencing the variety of voices an actor is capable of, but also the opportunity to see the making of all the special sound effects, called Foley.

Conceived by Tyler Kieffer—who gets to do the unmistakeable voice of Sheriff Matt Dillon’s sidekick, Chester, in Gunsmoke—and Steve Brush, who, like Kieffer, performs some of the many sound effects, and directed by Paula Bennett, the show is a straight-forward homage to an era of entertainment that predates most of us in the audience. The best thing about the show is its grasp of the showbiz conventions that made radio programs so indelible for their listeners, and its wonderful evocation, via Hunter Kaczorowski's costumes and the props of Reid Thompson's scenic design, of radio as it was two generations ago.

And yet it's no disservice to say that, while it’s hard not to look at actors and Foley artists performing before one, the entire show might be best enjoyed with one’s eyes closed, letting it all take place in one’s mind, as it did for listeners in the time of classic radio. The show includes genuine commercial breaks, a part of the whole that becomes one of the more entertaining aspects of Radio Hour as nothing says nostalgia like the ads of yesteryear. (I saw the show late Saturday night with my daughter and we were greatly amused to see and hear a rendition of the Choo-Choo Charlie commercial for Good’n’Plenty that, in an animated version on TV, was a part of my childhood that I verbalized for her childhood.)

Anyone watching Radio Hour is bound to have his or her favorite voice moment—Prema Cruz’s laconic Shilo is a voice that immediately creates an image, and her little kid voice is entertainingly vivid, as is Ariana Venturi’s Mink, a bratty kid who turns against her parents in favor of a mysterious playmate called “Dril”; Brendan Pelsue creates a bizarre over-the-top pastiche of accents for the Announcer that amuses and surprises, while Aaron Luis Profumo performs the toffee-voiced tones of a patient dad, as well as the masculine composure of Sheriff Dillon, matched by the coy affection of Ashton Heyl’s Big Kate. Seconding all the vocal talent—and creating footsteps, slamming doors, fist fights, gunshots, dramatic music and jingles—the one for Mr. Clean is bound to stay in your head—are Foley artist/musicians Kieffer, Brush, Jing (Annie) Yin, and David Perry.

The stories selected are easy to follow, and also somewhat didactic: parents learn the price of their condescension to their children’s imaginations in Zero Hour, and a would-be husband learns that even in the patriarchal Old West taking a woman for granted can lead to humiliation, especially with Matt Dillon around to set things right. The cast played well to the audience’s sense of old-time charm, so that the entire evening was a bit like time travel.

It’s interesting that shows which, whether on radio or TV, would strike us as corny or simplistic, can inspire a respect when played with a sense of history and irony for audiences otherwise too sophisticated for such genre fare. Which leads me to wonder if, with shows like Mad Men trading on the “romance” of advertising, it’s not time for a TV show set on an old-time radio program where the interface between what happens on and off the air is where the comedy or drama lies.

For Radio Hour, the entertainment is in the staging even more than in what is staged.

Radio Hour Featuring Ray Bradbury’s Zero Hour and John Meston’s Gunsmoke Conceived by Tyler Kieffer and Steve Brush Directed by Paula Bennett

Dramaturg: Helen Jaksch; Scenic Designer: Reid Thompson; Costume Designer: Hunter Kaczorowski; Lighting Designer: Joey Moro; Sound Designer: Tyler Kieffer; Sound Designer/Composer: Steve Brush; Stage Manager: Kate Pincus; Technical Director: Rose Bochansky; Producer: Melissa Zimmerman; Photographs by Nick Thigpen

Yale Cabaret October 31-November 2, 2013

This week the Cab is dark, then returns November 14-16, with Sarah Kane’s Crave, directed by Hansol Jung, a play that investigates the psychic costs of the creative act with a quartet of actors enacting voices all alive in a writer’s mind.

A Town Without Pity

The Visit, the first YSD thesis show of the year, directed by Cole Lewis, is a play by Friedrich Dürrenmatt dating from the 1950s. We might say it’s a play about “justice, greed, and the American way” but for the fact that the play is set in a German town called Güllen and, thus, was initially intended as a comment on the bad consciences of post-war Germans, where virtually any town had its distressing history of fascism and scapegoating. The YSD production doesn’t update the setting, much—which allows for fun with certain period aspects of German costuming—but makes the play abundantly relevant to our country and our times, where many townships that can’t boast major industry or global investment companies are falling into the dire penury we find among the good folks of Güllen. What will they do to pull themselves out of the economic quagmire? Why, find a patron, a donor, or maybe even an investor. The potential “good angel” is Claire Zachanassian, a native of Güllen who has been abroad for forty years—long enough to have had seven marriages and to have amassed a fortune of at least $3 billion. Her return has all the townsfolk a-tizzy as the play opens, including her girlhood flame Alfred Ill, who the city fathers hope can sweet-talk Claire into generosity. Despite a lyrical, two-on-a-swing interlude between the former lovebirds, we find out that something rather bad befell Claire thanks to Alfred, and that she’ll pay up to the town’s coffers only if she gets payback. She wants Alfred dead.

Of course, the mayor and all the townsfolk reject this proposal—even if Alfred did in fact do her wrong in the remote past, it’s not justice to put a billion dollar price on his head, making the town’s salvation dependent on his execution. And so, as many “good Germans” would immediately recognize, the horrible and hidden past can hold the present hostage. What’s more, one finds that one’s fellow citizens are apt to join together against whoever stands between them and prosperity. And that person—here only an individual (a shopkeeper) but elsewhere an entire race—can become a scapegoat for the will of the people.

That is the ingenious plot that Lewis’ cast enacts in this impressive ensemble affair. Few are the actors here who play only one role, and the movement and activity in the Iseman's varied playing space keeps this longish show lively. Most of the fun is in the early going, as things get increasingly sinister and appalling as the play goes on, and it does go on. Be prepared to be exhausted by the time it’s over.

The principals in the cast carry their roles with aplomb: as Claire, Mariko Nakasone is an extremely sexy sexagenarian, combining a steely sturdiness with feline graces—and she gets some great costumes too; she’s too odd to command our sympathies, though she does have grounds for claiming herself wronged. Chris Bannow’s Alfred seems more appropriately aged and we sense that, whatever his faults in the past, he has tried to overcome them in good bürgerlich fashion. His role grows in stature when we begin to sense, as he does, that the whole town is against him—a chilling moment when he tries to leave town plays like something out of the Twilight Zone. As the Mayor, Matthew McCollum is affable and unctuous and keeps us—we sometimes double as the citizens of Güllen, waving flags at appropriate moments—in the palm of his hand.

Among the rest of the cast, there are many fine moments as well, particularly Mamoudou Athie as the Schoolmaster, the one figure here who mounts an effective plea—on television, no less—against what is happening. It’s good to see Athie given a role not predominantly comic, though he does also get hit over the head with a painting. Other fun comes from Celeste Arias, as a moustache-sporting film star (two different versions) married to Claire, and as the frowsy wife of Alfred, and from Iris O’Neill, a child actress who gets to do things like pull a wagon across stage and vamp on a toy accordion, and pretty much steal her every scene.

Elsewhere, Ceci Fernandez and Mickey Theis cavort enthusiastically as roly poly eunuchs, creepy and unsettling—and they also lend great effect as the TV team who come to cover Alfred’s great “sacrifice.” In fact, dressing up Theis in a variety of outfits is almost endlessly entertaining—he plays three other roles, including a teenager. Montana Levi-Blanco’s costumes are inspired: the outfit for the Butler, besides making Elia Monte-Brown almost unrecognizable, seems a surreal, androgynous take-off on something out of Monopoly. And then there are the cast's tell-tale yellow shoes…

The scenic design by Chika Shimizu is wide open in the first half, with different spaces provided by small-scale buildings to represent the brick and mortar sturdiness of the town. Later, we get a shop, and a cardboard cut-out car that works quite effectively. There are also plenty of entrances, exits, use of the catwalk, and special effects. Kristen Ferguson’s collage projections in the slideshow segment are wonderful in evoking a hint of Georg Grösz by way of early Cubism. Brian Hickey’s sound design, I suspect, will yield new things on every viewing. I was keen enough the first night to pick up the sound of a gramophone stylus spinning in the endless groove at the end of a record as things began to close in on Alfred. Caitlin Smith Rapoport’s lighting design met the challenge of so much action in so many places, creating outdoors, indoors, and, in one great sequence when the Doctor (Merlin Huff, winningly and ineffectually conscience-stricken) attempts to appeal to Claire's good nature, raking autumnal light flowing through a fence over scattered leaves.

Cole Lewis aims her version of The Visit at the human ability to rationalize any barbarity or indulgence in the name of our capacity to please ourselves and avoid considering the consequences. If you don’t find yourself stabbed at some point in this production, then you just aren’t paying attention.

The Visit By Friedrich Dürrenmatt Translated by Maurice Valency Directed by Cole Lewis

Scenic Designer: Chika Shimzu; Costume Designer: Montana Levi Blanco; Lighting Designer: Caitlin Smith Rapoport; Sound Designer: Brian Hickey; Projection Designer: Kristen Ferguson; Production Dramaturg: Lauren Dubowski; Stage Manager: Emily DeNardo

Cast: Celeste Arias; Mamoudou Athie; Chris Bannow; Jabari Brisport; Cornelius Davidson; Ceci Fernandez; Christopher Geary; Merlin Huff; Sarah Krasnow; Matthew McCollum; Elia Monte-Brown; Mariko Nakasone; Iris O’Neill; Jennifer Schmidt; Mickey Theis

Yale School of Drama October 29-November 2, 2013

Panting for Something

Whether or not Louise Maske is hot to trot, her unpremeditated exposure of her underpants—sometimes called, rather anachronistically here, “panties”—while out to view the King on parade sets off the comic shenanigans in The Underpants, famed comic Steve Martin’s adaptation of a 1911 play by Carl Sternheim. Louise, a fetching young woman married to Theo, doesn’t even know she’s repressed, but, due to a loose tie, her knickers drop to her ankles in public, exposing her to a certain kind of male attention lacking in her life before. She stoops—to take off the underpants—and conquers, sparking the riveted attention of a pair of bachelors: one, Frank Versati, a proudly unpublished poet ready to rhapsodize her into bed; the other, Benjamin Cohen, a nebbishy barber who wants to worship her underthings.

With the well-timed intrusions of Gertrude Deuter, the nosy upstairs neighbor playing the part of eager duenna, we’re given a farce where cuckolding the self-possessed and rather clueless bourgeois husband is a comic given. Or, almost. In the end, the play is about the elasticity of marriage rather than the elation of adultery: the men who show up, beckoned by a glimpse of bloomers, are no better than the callous father-figure husband who, after all, has set Louise up as a perfectly respectable middle-class Hausfrau.

The play’s situation is primarily an excuse for arch innuendo, for comic turns by a sparkling cast, for jibes at Germans and their notorious attitude toward Jews, and for the kind of situations that, in a Frenchman’s hands, would’ve resulted in spicier bedroom schtick. Martin throws in the occasional racy bit—mostly coming from Gertrude, an eager onlooker panting to live vicariously through her very beddable neighbor—and we do get to see lacy underpants that are less revealing than a pair of boxers. To the extent that there’s an idea behind it all, it seems to be that our objects of desire—those random occasions for our libidinal spikes and fetishistic fervor, some even quite famous—can be remarkably short-lived, whereas baby-making, when all’s done, is what the fuss is inevitably about. Family values—“a man’s got to take care of someone”—and all that. Martin, as the playbill points out, realized in writing his adaptation that the bourgeoisie are us—regardless of politics.

As Louise, Jenny Leona is perfect. She’s cute, lively, demure but not dumb, not easily cozened, but willing to stray. It’s a performance so natural you have to stop to think about how badly it might be done. What director Gordon Edelstein gets across is that this blonde bombshell can be both the “angel in the house” that stands behind her man, as well as the object of those looking for a “geile Hausfrau.” The men are another matter. All clearly no match for her, or for Gertrude’s sense of possibility, we get to laugh at all of them, and each for a different reason.

Jeff McCarthy as Theo Maske is overbearing in that oblivious manner of the manly male. His wife is one of the things in his possession, not really a partner. As played here, he’s not really despicable, nor really hopeless. He’s the man of the house and the man Louise married, for better or worse, as the saying goes, and she (and we) might be forgiven for thinking he might get better. To Frank, played with pompous self-regard by Burke Moses, Louise is a source of inspiration—his best scene is when he lights her fire only to rush off to pen some lines, inspired by a conquest he never consummates. Much of the really funny stuff falls to Steve Routman as “Cohen with a K,” who gets to present us with the caricature that might be nearest Martin’s heart, or maybe it’s just a tribute to the kind of schlemiel and ambivalent Jew—humming Wagner and wondering aloud how anyone who cites Herder or Schiller could ever be less than humane—that Woody Allen established himself playing early in his career.

Routman’s rubber-legged departure after swallowing a sleeping draught is great fun, as is his slide across stage on a pillow while clutching a mirror to see up his hostess’s dress. The other comic standout is Didi Conn’s Gertrude, playing up moments like fanning her pelvis with the refrigerator door—after Theo turns her on—or miming a husband “doing his job.” It’s a role that requires charm to avoid crudity, and Conn certainly charms the audience.

Indeed, charm is a large part of what makes the Long Wharf production work. Start with Lee Savage’s set, with the Old World charm of its kitchenette, its double-door perfect for well-timed entrances and exits, its stairs and settees begging for the kind of physical comedy Edelstein’s production showcases. Jess Goldstein’s costuming—including Louise’s stripped-for-fun period underclothing, a pair of German flag underpants, and Kaiser regalia—is bright and eye-catching, and the play’s timing mostly on point.

A bit understated, perhaps, The Underpants is a brisk and benign evening of fun. “That’s where the danger lies. Under,” opines Theo early in the play, certainly a worthy thought in the play’s Freudian era, but, despite gestures to Nietzsche and Einstein, The Underpants, though willing to catch its characters with their pants down, and even off, doesn’t give any character the wherewithal to get down to it.

The Underpants By Steve Martin Adapted from Carl Sternheim Directed by Gordon Edelstein

Set Design: Lee Savage; Costume Design: Jess Goldstein; Lighting Design: Robert Wierzel; Wig and Hair Design: Charles LaPointe; Fight Consultant: Tim Acito; Production Stage Manager: Melissa M. Spengler; Assistant Stage Manager: Amy Patricia Stern; Assistant Stage Manager: Kelly Hardy; Casting: Calleri Casting; Photographs: T. Charles Erickson

The Long Wharf Theatre October 16-November 10, 2013

What We Talk About When We Talk About Carver

Raymond Carver’s short story “Beginners” became his published short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” and therein lies a tale. The published title and story became “Carveresque” in the minds of his admirers, but it turned out that the title, and many other elements in the story, were due to the editorial efforts of Gordon Lish, a writer and editor who nurtured Carver as his mentor and publisher. Was Carver more “Carver” after Lish’s intervention or before? Whose story is it, anyway? This literary question seems to be the matter being dramatized in Phillip Howze’s Beginners by Raymond Carver; or, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love at Yale Cabaret, but, as might be expected, that story-behind-the-story is not so easy to dramatize.

Sitting before the audience are four people around a table, just like in both versions of Carver’s story: Mel/Herb (Aaron Bartz) and Terri (Prema Cruz) are a couple, as are Nick (David E. Bruin) and Laura (Ashley Chang). In the story these four get onto the subject of “love.” In Carver’s “Beginners,” Herb holds forth about his views more than the others, mostly in an effort to offset Terri’s claim that the abusive man, Carl, with whom she had lived before Herb and who eventually took his own life, loved her. “If that’s love, you can have it,” Herb says, more than once. In “What We Talk…” Herb is called Mel, and he says most of the same things. (You can know this by looking up the changed text—The New Yorker printed the original with Lish’s emendations some time after Carver’s death.)

On stage, we get a brief gesture to the name change and maybe the sense that we’re going to be watching an enactment that registers the alterations, so that “the story” will morph according to which version we’re getting. The problem with that approach is the changes are often too subtle to enact. So, Howze and director Andras Viski append to the story happening in front of us voice-overs from Carver’s letters to Lish, read by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, to give a sense of how the story got away from Carver. And yet nothing he says comments on any specific changes. We can only infer what Carver objects to, as he goes from gratefully “taking the changes” to questioning what Lish has done to his story.

As someone who both edits the writing of others and writes, I found this aspect of the play to be the most interesting. I could feel for Carver, and Abdul-Mateen reads the prose in a clear and forceful voice that lets us hear how carefully—and even desperately—Carver was choosing his words, trying to call off the editorial license he had called down upon his tale. But what about the story in front of us and the interplay?

The things Lish struck out of the story float at times behind the players as ghostly text, then as struck-through text. No one reads this text aloud—I suppose because it has been silenced by Lish—so if you read quickly you know what’s happening in “Beginners”; if you don’t you only get “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

The disparity is very important at the story’s close when Mel/Herb, now pretty drunk, starts to flounder around about calling his kids—from whom he is separated by his divorce from his first wife—and then goes off to take a shower before, ostensibly, the two couples go out to eat. In Carver’s original version, there is much more speech from Terri; in the Carver/Lish version, not. Both include the speech by Nick, looking out the window and away from the women—Laura comforting Terri, who is upset—, with which Howze’s play ends. It’s hard to say, at that point, what version of the story we’re getting. Neither Carver’s nor Carver/Lish’s because, most obviously, neither were written as a stage play.

So, what about Howze’s version? The best thing about the play version is Aaron Bartz’s reading of Mel/Herb. While he doesn’t “look” like I imagine a Carver character looking, he is closer to that image than the others and capably delivers the long speeches—particularly the story-within-the-story about the old couple hospitalized after an accident—that describe Mel/Herb’s view of what married love should be. The fact that neither of the couples is enjoying that kind of married love is clear, but, at the same time, we do experience the hopefulness of Laura—Ashley Chang makes the most of the reactions her character is there for—and the neutrality of Nick.

In the story, though, Nick is our narrator, so his neutrality is partly offset by the fact that we get everything through his perspective. Howze doesn’t let us in on that until Nick delivers the final statement of the play, and that has the effect of making his words sort of hang there, even more than they do in the short story.

As Terri, Prema Cruz’s role is crucial because, as the night goes on, we come to realize that much of Mel’s fulmination is directed at her previous love. Mel can forthrightly state that he now hates his former wife, while allowing he must’ve loved her at one time, but Terri’s silence on that point tells us that she won’t say she hates the at-times violent man she previously married. She still feels his love was love because she still loves him (she sat at his side until his death, three days after the self-inflicted gunshot that killed him), and that love makes her current husband increasingly surly. All this is dramatized quite well in Viski’s production, though Cruz seems too detached to be the kind of "open heart" I imagine Carver imagined Terri to be.

What is much more murky is what any of that has to do with the drama between Lish and Carver, and if we’re to read the lines that pass by us too quickly—as the figures at the table turn away from us to read the wall with us—as part of the play or not.

Howze and Viski’s version of the content of “Beginners/What We Talk About…” works because Carver’s story has enough verbal interaction to be stageable. The four-way conversation is interesting and Bartz engaging enough to carry the evening. But what doesn’t get across is the “Carver” element of story-telling: that rather laconic and undemonstrative narrative voice that floats ghostly behind-the-scenes, here, but which is the whole point, in narrative fiction. Instead, we get the drama of those letters, whose reality almost overwhelms the playlet before us. Which may be the point. Or not.

Beginners by Raymond Carver; or, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love Adapted by Phillip Howze Directed by Andras Viski

Dramaturg: Rachel Carpman; Producers: Emika Abe, Libby Peterson; Set Designer: Jean Kim; Costume Designer: Sara Holdren; Lighting Designer: Joey Moro; Sound Designer: Joel Abbott; Projections Consultant: Shawn Boyle; Projections Engineer: Joey Moro; Stage Manager: Kate Pincus; Technical Director: Ted Griffith; Photography: Nick Thigpen

Yale Cabaret October 17-19, 2013

Be All You Can Be

Who is most affected when a show doesn’t go off as it’s supposed to? The audience? The promoter? The MC? We might suppose that’s one of the questions being posed by Gabe Levey’s The Most Beautiful Thing in the World, at Yale Cabaret. Ostensibly, we’re gathered to “discover the power of the Youniverse” with inspiring motivational speaker Chase Michaels (Dan O’Brien), but what we get is something completely different.

So different that, I suspect, the show will be different for each audience gathered for the event. If mainly literalists of the “see the show” variety are gathered, then that’s what will happen: they’ll see a show of some sort. If more interactive viewers are present, they may well find that they’re helping to make the show they’re seeing. The point of the exercise, then, isn’t simply to entertain but to manifest something inherently precarious about theatrical experience. The “house” has a lot to do with what you get. Which might be a way of saying that, though we each live in our own “youniverse,” we are always also inhabiting other people’s, and, beyond that, the same actual universe. We can’t escape that fact any more than we can escape the fact of “what’s happening in Washington.”

The latter trope—for everything that affects us that we can’t directly control—was present in the version of the show I saw Thursday night. When asked—with searching earnestness by Carol (Kate Tarker), Chase’s John the Baptist supposedly unfit to tie his sandal-strap—“what is your problem?,” members of the audience were willing to volunteer answers such as “Republicans” and “all politicians.” While we might imagine a show in which all the problems mentioned were of the “youniverse” variety (I was thinking of saying “aging,” if asked; someone else told me she would’ve said “uncomfortable shoes”), the fact that part of what might be bringing us down is “the world at large” is instructive, and indicative of the show's implications.

It’s structured like a self-help session that doesn’t quite come off, and yet does. Carol does all she can, and let’s hear it for that plucky presenter, mustering her best “show must go on” gumption and stepping into the breach—nay, the gaping chasm—that occurs when breathless fans of Chase Michaels' every move find themselves confronted with so much less than the answer to everything. Unless the answer to everything is . . . entertaining yourselves? Showmanshipwise, there are spacey projections of the slideshow variety (wielding “the clicker” is a lot like wielding the remote in domestic situations), and a great moment of eerie “out-of-body” vocalizing to ambient sounds that felt like an astral plane version of scream therapy.

As Carol, Tarker is charming. Sporting a vaguely Justin Bieber-like head of hair, wearing a no-nonsense business gal suit, Carol seems as androgynous as she can be. She’s like anyone’s cute younger sister/brother at that guileless age—eight? nine?—before major anxieties set in. As such, she seems equal to the task of mucking through because she has no ego to be destroyed by audience dissatisfaction. She quickly makes herself one of us—let he or she who has never had things go wrong in public cast the first cat-call. When Chase finally does arrive he’s a decided party-pooper. It’s like watching a TV personality intrude on a heart-to-heart between nobodies. He expects the spotlight but his show’s already over.

I suspect that the “plot” element to the show—Carol showing Chase what’s what—may have been a late arrival in the process, if only because the show seems predicated on the idea that drama happens even when nothing happens, when the best-laid plans, as they say, “gang agley.”

Maybe seeing the giftedly glib get their come-uppance is “The Most Beautiful Thing in the World,” or maybe it’s just finding out that your “YOUniverse” includes lots of other “you’s,” enough, even, to be an “us.”

The Most Beautiful Thing in the World Conceived and Directed by Gabe Levey

Scenic Designer: Kurtis Boetcher; Costume Designer: Soule Golden; Sound Designer: Tyler Kieffer; Projection Designer: Gabe Levey; Stage Manager: Anita Shastri; Technical Director: Lee O’Reilly; Producer: Alyssa Simmons; Creative Collaborators: Mickey Theis, Mitchell Winter; Projection Engineer: Nick Hussong; Photography: Nick Thigpen

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street

October 3-5, 2013

The Unforgiveable Thing

Without doubt, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire is a great play. While some might choose The Glass Menagerie as the quintessential Williams play, I’ve always preferred the goings-on in Elysian Fields, giving us that fascinating threesome plus one of Stanley, Stella, Blanche, and Mitch. The play is so good in giving these characters interesting things to say and do that, we imagine, all a director and cast need do is get out of the way and let the thing work. Directed by Mark Rucker, the Yale Rep’s Streetcar aims for and mostly achieves the kind of definitive version admirers of the play would hope for.

Start with that set (Reid Thompson, Scenic Design): the size of the University Theater stage is put to good effect—particularly its height, with an upstairs we can see just below the overhanging curtain, so that there is a real feel for a two-room apartment below another one. It’s the classic proscenium with missing fourth wall, and it’s satisfying to see it used so well, with very fluid movements from one room to another and from outside to inside. The action is all blocked with an animated naturalism that moves at just the right pace. The play is long—with two intermissions that are required for dramatic curtains along the way—but never tiring. If you already know the play well, it’s still a great opportunity to study Williams’ ability to structure scenes and dialogue. Theater, film, television—rarely are scripts this good.

All the buzz in the media has focused on Joe Manganiello as Stanley. While I can’t claim any knowledge of Manganiello’s work as a werewolf, I feel certain his fans will get what they came for. In his very first scene he strips off his shirt to expose his ultra-buff bod—he’s so built, it’s almost a special effect—and in general he struts his stuff so as to give us a Stanley who is a bit more muscle-bound than might be common. The physical threat of Stanley is therefore palpably present, and so I found myself struck by how reserved this Stanley can be. I mean, he could really cause some damage, but is generally an easy-going guy. To a certain extent, Stanley—as written—received a disservice in the widespread view of Marlon Brando as the definitive performance of the role. Brando’s Stanley is far too fascinating, full of an intensity that goes well beyond the kind of guy Stanley is meant to be. Manganiello’s Stanley, to my mind, is closer to the “average Joe” qualities we should find in the master of 632 Elysian Fields.

In the demerits column, Manganiello’s performance at times left a bit to be desired in terms of elocution—the effort to give Stanley a certain tone and voice is appreciated, but at times the lines get a little swallowed, and there wasn’t quite as much comedy as there might be—as with the Napoleonic Code and the contents of Blanche’s trunk. But then comedy is hard, as they say.

The main emphasis in any production of Streetcar must fall on the role of Blanche. René Augesen takes on this exhausting role with amazing energy and a full sense of its many nuances. There aren’t any surprises in her performance, but there is a great feel for Blanche’s wit, and for the comic aspects of the play. Even knowing the outcome, we can watch the play with a sense that nothing that happens is a foregone conclusion. Even when the revelations about her past begin to surface, Blanche has the presence of mind to face them with style. Sure, she’s on a downward spiral after her last scene with Mitch, but it’s still the assault from Stanley that tips her over the edge. What I enjoyed most in Augesen’s performance is a sense of just how resilient and adaptable Blanche is. It’s a role full of the tragedy of indignity and Augesen gets it all across. And her costumes (Hunter Kaczorowski) are amazing—particularly the robe of Della Robbia blue in which she departs her sister’s home.

There’s fine support all along the way: April Matthis and Marc Damon Johnson, as Eunice and Steve Hubbell, the upstairs neighbors, have a proprietary sense of belonging that underscores the uniqueness of the DuBois sisters, and Adam O’Byrne’s Mitch meets the challenge of playing awkwardness gracefully. As the most “sensitive” of Stanley’s friends, Mitch might be just what Blanche needs—and Streetcar is perhaps at its best in showing that illusion can only go so far in masking the hard line of reality. The interplay of illusion and realism—as dramaturg Helen Jaksch’s playbill points out—is crucial to Williams’ sense of theater, and to see fond illusions crumple is both sad, inevitable, and dramatically satisfying, even if that means deliberate cruelty is the victor.

In the end, the female roles are what make this production—particularly the many nice comic touches in the sisterly rapport between Blanche and Sarah Sokolovic’s Stella. Sokolovic plays Stella as a realist who accepts the world she lives in without expecting more from it than it can provide; she’s a constant contrast to Blanche’s genteel volubility and fanciful conceptions, and Sokolovic lets her facial expressions in silent reactions say a lot. We have the sense of a woman who has been found wanting in Blanche’s view of things all their lives, and her solicitude for her sister is matched by her sense of Blanche’s pretensions. Some of the best scenes are the ones when the sisters are alone together.

One cavil: the moment when Stella, after her make-up session with Stanley, climbs out of bed nude in her sister’s presence. Nudity on stage is fine, but when it’s not specified in the text, we can wonder what purpose it serves. While it might be in character for Stella to be nude in front of her sister—which I doubt, given her sense of Blanche’s dignity—it seems to me completely out of character for Blanche not to say something. But she can’t say anything because Williams didn’t intend for her to be reacting to nudity.

It’s the one ill-chosen contemporary touch in this otherwise faithful, entertaining, and fascinating revival.

A Streetcar Named Desire By Tennessee Williams Directed by Mark Rucker

Scenic Designer: Reid Thompson; Costume Designer: Hunter Kaczorowski; Lighting Designer: Stephen Strawbridge; Composer and Sound Designer: Steven Brush; Production Dramaturg: Helen C. Jaksch; Dialect Coach: Jane Guyer Fujita; Fight Director: Rick Sordelet; Casting Director: Tara Rubin; Stage Manager: James Mountcastle; Photographs: Carol Rosegg, courtesy of Yale Repertory Theatre

Yale Repertory Theatre September 20-October 12, 2013

Mystery Train

Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman—playing for two more shows at Yale Cabaret—was first written and produced when Baraka was still writing under the name LeRoi Jones, his given name, at a time when the Civil Rights movement in America was finally catching fire. Times have certainly changed since then—a fact that “New Black Math,” a poem performed before the play, apprizes us of with its rapid fire listing of traits we might suppose a “Black Play” to have, or not. The point, I think, is to keep us from seeing Dutchman as stuck in its moment, while at the same time letting us know that—whether we feel progress has been made since the Sixties or not—the very notions of “white” and “black” remain very much with us.

And that’s where the play begins: a subway car in NYC, a black man sits reading—poetry, we learn—and a rather provocative white girl gets on. Something might happen between them, or nothing. The girl, who calls herself Lula, wants something to happen; the man, called Clay, could go either way. Lula acts the part of a vamping temptress only too aware of what she’s doing. Gradually she provokes Clay into moving past his guardedness and his politeness, eventually he has to assert himself—with violence. This, we might say, is what Lula has been aiming for; taunting him, teasing him, treating aspects of his life as stereotypical, using outrageous body language to arouse him.

In a wonderfully self-possessed performance by Carly Zien, Lula comes across as extremely manipulative and aggressive—rather than, say, pathetic or scary. Cornelius Davidson gives us Clay’s patience and diffidence, his coolness with regard to what we call today “racial profiling”—Lula’s belittling of his New Jersey origins and “Uncle Tom” aspects. Dutchman dates from a time when the worse insult you could hurl at a self-respecting black man was that he was, essentially, white.

The poetry of Baraka’s play resounds in the back and forth of these two protagonists. It should be said that not all of Lula’s moves are over-the-top; at times, she seems to want to find a common ground, a way for the two to meet free of the racial past and gender divides. As directed by Katherine McGerr, the play cannily keeps before us not simply the appeal and rejection that occur when strangers try to “hook up,” but also the degree to which these characters are “emblematic,” freighted with their social roles as “white woman” and “black man.”

Jones himself was married to a Jewish woman at the time of Dutchman, and there is much in Clay, the would-be “black Baudelaire,” that feels aimed at the author himself. In part, that means a rejection of the expectations of white audiences for the artistic expression of black consciousness through the Black Arts Movement. In that light, Dutchman is almost a manifesto for rejecting the “temptations”—expressed and voiced by Lula, complete with proffered apple—that the white liberal mainstream would saddle black artists with, while “accepting” their work. Dutchman was once very much a play working toward clarity about its own situation.

A strength of the Cab production is that it doesn’t try to recreate any particular time—Clay has earbuds in, so we know it’s our time, more or less—nor does it go overboard in making the situation archetypal. What it maintains is a certain sense of fluidity, that what takes place between the two could go differently, and that what does happen is because of a flaw in the social fabric. In other words, one won’t get too far trying to treat these characters only as realistic subway riders alive in a specific time. Baraka, more famous as a poet than a playwright, knows how to make language act, and is less concerned with character per se.

For those who want backstory and “what happens next,” there is the question of whether Lula actually knows of Clay or if this is a first encounter, and, even more, what happens at the end. The Cab production, which has no bystanders (other than the audience), seems to make the repetition at the end conceivable as a “re-set” that could lead to a different conclusion, with Lula already on the train when “Clay,” or a different black man much like him, enters. The play as written gives one a stronger sense of Lula as more predatory, in a serial search for either a victim or a date. I liked the Cab’s version because it seems to me that the play aims to gesture to an “eternal” situation, rather than a series of discrete encounters.

For me, the main point of the play today—which makes it extremely timely and a great show to revive—is the speech Clay gives to explain his attempt to get along with white society, after Lula provokes him by trying to affront his “manhood” and then his blackness. What Clay gestures to is the possibility of a world where the black man can rise by playing the white man’s game—and thus come to power over his one-time “masters.” What Baraka gives voice to is the perceived threat that many in our allegedly “post-racial” society find in Barack Obama as president. In other words, the racism Dutchman sees is still very much with us and has taken on a new wrinkle in our time.

A play that once seemed rife with the “threat” of interracial sexual relations—still a hot topic in 1964—now seems to play out as a meditation on cultural strategies. In that view, Lula’s temptress moves smack of the “sex card” played by every pop diva, while her own act of violence becomes more ambiguous: a blow against the oppressive male alive in every man? A gesture toward white supremacy (which sees every black man as a threat)? A turning of the tables, where women cease to be victims? However we take it, it’s clear that the nerve Dutchman touches is still a live one.

Dutchman By Amiri Baraka Directed by Katherine McGerr

Producers: Caitie Hannon, Charles J. Felix; Scenic Designer: Adrian Martinez Frausto; Costume Designer: KJ Kim; Lighting Designer: Joey Moro; Sound Designer: Joel Abbott; Dramaturgs: Jennifer Schmidt, Sarah Krasnow; Technical Director: Emily Erdman; Stage Manager: Rob Chikar; Creative Consultant: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II; Photographs: Nick Thigpen; courtesy of Yale Cabaret

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street

September 26-28, 2013

The Changing Same

Like more than a few of us, I suspect, I had never seen a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. It’s one of those classic texts that it’s easy to be pretty sure we know all about without bothering to see it. I do recall reading it aloud, round-robin style, in English class in 11th grade. A budding literary sophisticate, I scorned much of it, and I can still remember my main objections: its normative assumptions about what makes for “regular folks” in the good ol’ U.S. of A. seemed to me not only dated but insufferably corny. If you went to school any time after 1964, it was simply too hard to accept a town that’s all-white, and where the “other” is signified by Polish Catholics across the train tracks. Sure, the actual setting of the play is the end of the 19th century to the eve of World War I (and it was first produced in the era of fascist sympathies pre-WWII), and Wilder is quite aware that the world he is depicting was already history. Still, for any child of the Sixties, the play was simply too retrograde, its fond evocation of how parents repeat themselves in offspring just, y’know, Squaresville, man. And that’s one of the things about Our Town—it tends to, and is intended to, inspire thoughts about how time passes and about the changes and the sames of ye olde status quo. There’s a priceless moment where the elderly presider over the local soda fountain reminisces about how it was once possible for a dog to take a nap in the middle of Main Street in the middle of the afternoon, undisturbed. Ah, the good old days—now there’s horses and carriages everywhere and even those encroaching horseless carriages! While no one in a contemporary audience would remember anything like that, we all have similar recollections that date us. Who still remembers milk delivered to the door? Newspapers routes? Wilder wrote the play not to preserve the past, conservatively, but to show that whatever we know as “normal” is going to go the way of all flesh right into the graveyard, eventually.

Which is a way of saying: Don’t judge a play by its first Act. Sure, Our Town starts homey enough to fit squarely in some kind of Will Rogers-type recollection about what life was like when everyone in town knew everyone else’s ancestors, but by the end it has let in the space of the beyond. Back before outer space was the answer to our striving beyond the quotidian earth, it was possible to let “eternity” be the common Unknown looming over us all, and Wilder does a good job of bringing the time beyond time into the play—by making it just as homely and familiar, but with a key difference. The dead know what we don’t know, and what they know reveals at last what has been implicit all along: the perspective of the Stage Manager is “from beyond the grave”—like poets and saints, seeing the length of an individual human life as the speck in the span of the ages that it is.

The New Haven Theater Company’s production, directed by Steven Scarpa, in a spare playing space in a big, high-ceiling room at the English Building Market, its set consisting of two groups of three chairs and a quartet of black monoliths that look like pillars holding up the sky and like monuments to the dead, gives us a straight-forward rendering of Wilder’s script that lets us appreciate how much specificity there is in the play’s seemingly generic approach. Grover’s Mill is a town with an identity, and it's great the way the NHTC production lets us imagine the town the way the play wants us to.

Helping greatly with that task is our Stage Manager (Megan Chenot). Rather than the usual benign old codger who is supposed to keep us apprized of the whos and whats of the town, Chenot has the fresh forthrightness of those tour guides you might see leading a bunch of prospectives, their families, and random shutterbugs around Yale’s campus. She’s got the skinny on everything and delivers it all with the kind of amused forbearance we expect from grade school teachers. It’s like the whole town is her “class” (us too) and she wants to lead them along the path to greater knowledge, no matter how painful it may be. Chenot creates a very warming, reassuring effect, and that helps, particularly as there’s likely to be much sniffling and wiping of eyes by the time Act Three ends.

Other reflection on this well-cast show—special mention of the perfect match of Mallory Pellegrino for the role of Emily Webb. The heart of the play comes in Act Two when Emily and George Gibbs, the boy next-door, finally realize what their lives have been leading to. Pellegrino shows just the right mix of bashfulness and smart-girl knowingness not only to win over George—the town’s top athlete, bound for agricultural college—but everyone else as well. It’s a moment that seems so sincere and intimate it justifies everything the Stage Manager is trying to show us.

Other fine touches from this familiar ensemble: Margaret Mann’s comic turns as a professor eager to take us back to the Pleistocene in explaining the town’s interest, and as everyone’s maiden aunt in the wedding scene, gushing with the kind of fulsomeness that makes cliché both comical and real; Christian Shaboo, as George, seems young enough to be as unselfconscious as George is; George Kulp and Susan Kulp play the Webbs with a familiarity that seems as if we’re actually in their home, and the awkward, prenuptial visit of George to his future father-in-law is comic, and almost lets in lots of things best left unsaid; as Doc Gibbs and his wife, J. Kevin Smith and Deena Nicol have a more weary hominess than the Webbs—with the Doctor having to make housecalls (who remembers that ancient custom?), and his wife fantasizing about a trip to Paris as though it were on the other side of the earth; the families’ breakdown at the graveyard feels genuine rather than stagey, a big plus; Peter Chenot, as deliveryman-about-town Howie Newsome, is as real as the imaginary (to us) carthorse he leads around.

Perhaps the most forward-looking aspect of Wilder’s play is when George and Emily, in their respective bedrooms in their respective parents’ next-door houses, try to set up a means of surreptitious communication, if only to study together. Do we need look any further for an early version of the urge to text and share files? And when the Stage Manager comments on the fact that most people end their lives married, it’s a rather obvious reflection that—in these parts, anyway—more people than ever, even those who eschew heterosexual coupling, have that opportunity.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, I reckon.

Our Town By Thornton Wilder Directed by Steven Scarpa Produced by George Kulp Production Design by Drew Gray Stage Management by Mary Tedford

Cast (in order of appearance): Megan Chenot; J. Kevin Smith; Sam Taubl; Peter Chenot; Deena Nicol; Susan Kulp; Christian Shaboo; Josie Kulp; Spenser Long; Mallory Pellegrino: Margaret Mann; George Kulp; Donna E. Glen; Erich Greene; Jim Lones; Rick Beebe; Jesse Jo Toth

English Building Market 839 Chapel Street

2013, September 19, 20, 21; 26, 27, 28 8 p.m.

Queen for a Day

The curtain has gone up on the new Yale Cabaret season—Cab 46—and the debut show is We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun, written by YSD students Helen Jaksch, Kelly Kerwin, and Emily Zemba, and directed by Kerwin. The show has a lot of what makes Cab shows work—a sense of the audience’s proximity, a showy self-consciousness, and a lot of moxy. The play is not so much a whodunit as a howwasit, involving a late, beloved drag queen, Edie (played with show-stopping flair by Seth Bodie), a mummified, gunshot body in her apartment, and a gun. What the hell happened?

Well, of course, the entire subculture of which Edie was a reigning queen has its conjectures, so we meet a variety of possibilities—some plausible, some comically outrageous (my favorite was Edie in full Mae West drag getting the drop on a bandanna-ed bandit)—with all the enacted scenes employing the genre markings of any drama queen’s inner cinema; the bottom line: “he done her wrong.”

The real fire of the show is in the musical performances (original songs, and accompaniment as Charlie the Piano Guy, by Joel Abbott). Bodie/Edie could’ve sung more, for my money, and bravo to Ato Blankson-Wood, looking like a Grace Jones impersonator, for taking the passed baton from Lena Horne’s “The Man I Love” and scoring. Then there are the big, uplift moments, some with lip-synching, that have the audience clapping and cheering. Yes, despite murder and death, this show is a celebration of what Iggy calls “Lust for Life.”

Christopher Ash’s stage set is Warholian with its projections of Edie and it’s glitzy “everybody’s a star” aura; the other queens seem to recall tropes from the 70s and 80s as well—my favorite is the über-slinky Cabaret-like Mistress of Ceremonies played by Tom Pecinka, with her tale of carnations—and there’s a trio of comic turns by James Cusati-Moyer as a blonde ditz, complete with New Yawk squawk, in Daisy Dukes, a leather-skirted conchita hot for fun, and a hilarious Pacino take-off as one of Edie’s more aggressive paramours. Kristen Ferguson works best as the tersely barking flatfoot stumped by this cold case. And Christopher Geary rounds out the cast as a speculative intimate with a place in his bitchy heart for some of the loveable oddities of Edie in her prime.

Apart from all the comedy and song and dance, Bodie really shines in an intimate boudoir moment where Edie takes the entire audience into her confidence—we’ve all been given envelopes containing little icons that she lovingly identifies by the names of the queens they stand for. It’s perhaps the most Warholian moment of all—the idea that, without a historical sense, a scene, a subculture, an art-form, a performance, an identity will be forgotten as if it never was. Well might the other queens rehearse the stories of Edie’s alleged act of violence—she not only had a gun, but a heart and a memory. Viva La Minx!

We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun Written by Helen Jaksch, Kelly Kerwin, Emily Zemba Directed by Kelly Kerwin

Dramaturg: Helen Jaksch; Producer: Emika Abe; Sets, Lights, & Projections: Christopher Ash; Costumes: Grier Coleman; Sound, Original Music: Joel Abbott; Stage Manager: Anita Shastri; Set/Technical Assistant: Samantha Lazar; Tango Consultant: Joel Abbott; Photographs by Nick Thigpen courtesy of Yale Cabaret

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street

September 19-21, 2013

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

Ever have that experience where you feel almost taken hostage by your host? Sorta like a “guestage?” That’s the situation facing Tom (James Leaf) and Diane (Mariah Sage), two teachers—a prof, she earns twice his salary, he’s only a poet and high school teacher—who have car troubles on a road-trip. When we meet them they’ve been brought to the home of Ivan (Daniel White) and Ruth (Irina Kaplan), husband and wife—he, big, burly, effusively and physically friendly; she, kittenish and confiding—after an afternoon of drinks at a roadhouse.

Ivan is the sort of host who thrives on some hopped-up idea of copacetic encounters, looking for openings and outpourings. Ruth just seems ecstatic at having some longed-for company even if she’s shy about playing the hostess (it means having to cook and clean, y’know). We can tell that days on the road seem to be exposing the faultlines in Tom and Diane’s relationship, while Ivan’s status as a member of a Special Operations Unit—a military mercenary, in other words—and Ruth’s as an ex-stripper make them, one would imagine, interesting interlocutors for two teachers at large.

If the idea of two couples downing vast amounts of liquor and talking, squabbling, confessing, and flirting far into the night makes you recall George and Martha hosting Nick and Honey, that’s fitting enough, since this kind of theatrical evening probably dates—in its sense of unspecified unease—from Albee’s play of the early Sixties, but Steven Bellwood’s play, directed by James Leaf, is far less arcane in the kinds of “games” going on, though one is never quite sure, with Ivan, if or when his sense of grievance might turn into something ugly. Nor, for that matter, Diane’s, who seems to play with the idea of, Martha-like, exposing her partner’s frailties.

Tom, the less developed character here, has a tendency to crib lines from Eliot or Shakespeare, and even taking a psilocybin mushroom doesn’t make him more loquacious, or interesting, for that matter. He’s sort of the witness more than anything, though Leaf gives him some fire when he tries to argue for Ivan's trustworthiness against Diane’s fears for Ruth’s safety. Kaplan’s Ruth is at times clueless but—as a former professional stripper—she also knows how to be tough and how to flaunt her sexiness. Ruth is given two pathetic moments, and that’s perhaps one too many—the first, in the first act, might recall “the bit about the kid” in Virgina Woolf, in an oddly literal way; the other precipitates the climax and comes a bit out of nowhere.

Bellwood seems to want to play on the educated classes’ discomfort with the less educated, a discomfort that can be protective, projective, and quite misguided. Ruth’s role in her marriage is stronger than Diane assumes it is, blinded by her own intimidation when faced with preachy Ivan, his domestic arsenal, his jokey Obama mask, and his “what you need is a real man” innuendo. Played by Daniel White with large-as-life gusto, Ivan is the live-wire here and our time in his home may make us uncomfortable, but he’s really just trying to have a good time. In the end, the others just aren’t up for it, particularly Diane who, as played by Sage, maintains a brittle sense of timid intelligence and a belief that others just aren’t as smart as she is. More could be done to express what we’re to make of her attachment to Ruth, but as it is, Diane is the character who stands to be changed most profoundly by what takes place.

The staging—all on one level in the first half, and with a provocative split between levels in the second—is surprisingly intimate given the large, multipurpose room at the Whitney Arts Center—and the cast swiftly establishes a naturalistic rhythm that gets us from awkward-but-well-meaning strangers meeting to exposures, both purposeful and unthinking, that make us worry where it’s all going.

The Specials is entertaining, suspenseful, and full of the kind of unease common not only to being strangers in a strange home, but also to being strangers in our own land.

“Who’s afraid of guns and drugs and the Big Bad Wolf, Martha?” “I am, George, I am.”

Three more shows: Friday and Saturday, Sept. 20 & 21, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, Sept. 22, at 3 p.m.

The Whitney Arts Center, 591 Whitney Avenue, New Haven

The Specials by Steve Bellwood Directed by James Leaf Produced and Assistant Directed by David Pilot

Cast: Mariah Sage, James Leaf, Irina Kaplan, Daniel White

Co-producers: Margaret Carl, Annia Bu, James Leaf, Steve Bellwood; Stage Manager: Beatrix Roller; Assistant Stage Manager, Set and Costume Designer: Lisette Lux; House Managers: Baileigh Rae Massey, John Roeller, Claire Gabriele; Publicity: Jane Mills

The Elephant in the Room

The final show in the Yale Summer Cabaret’s “Summer of Giants” combines two plays by contemporary British playwright Caryl Churchill—Heart’s Desire and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You—into an evening of theater that ends the eleven-week season not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a feisty kick-in-the-pants. Churchill, as evidenced by these two plays at least, is that rarest of creatures, an absurd satirist—or is that a satirical absurdist? Heart’s Desire tends more toward the absurd while not completely satirizing the affections of the sitcom lives on view; Drunk Enough tends more toward satire of the make-you-bleed variety, poking sore spots and squeezing out pus with a caustic twinkle in the eye. And don’t forget that both these plays are, at bottom, love stories. As directed by Dustin Wills—who recently received a Princess Grace Award for his final year of study next year—these plays confront the audience with highly theatrical experiences that reflect in significant ways upon the quality of modern life. Churchill leaves naturalism behind in favor of stylized and mannered presentations, commenting not only on the resources of comic theater but on the kinds of empathy we naturally bring to the theater-going experience.

Heart’s Desire takes us into the heart of a family gathered in a sentimental-looking sitting room—very middle-class Brit—where Brian (Chris Bannow), the father, Alice (Ceci Fernandez), the mother, and Maisie (Michelle McGregor), the aunt, are awaiting the return of twenty-five-year-old Susy (Celeste Arias) from Australia. The “backstory” seems to be that Susy’s return marks the end of her first significant departure from the family nest, and so there are feelings of anticipation and apprehension attendant upon her arrival. If this were a play from the “kitchen-sink” era of Brit drama, we’d have lots of honest emotion about how this couple is coping with the recognition that their little girl is grown and all they have now is their marriage, in whatever tattered form it now exists. That play—the naturalistic side of Heart's Desire—is all about the tedium of waiting and the minor revelations that occur when people look forward too much, depending on others to both share a feeling while masking it, swallowing up the momentous in the everyday.

But Churchill isn’t that kind of playwright, so, while she nimbly gives us enough to sink our teeth into, so to speak, she also keeps pulling the carpet out from under this little domestic drama through a variety of skillful, and manic, techniques: carefully manipulated repetitions that underline the tenuous tightrope we walk in our “scripted” dealings with others; fast-forwards that cast life as memory even while its happening; visual non sequiturs that wrench us from the norm with farce, fantasy, horror—as for instance when masked figures enact a quick and darkly comic home invasion, or when a pantomime ostrich suddenly shows up for no apparent reason; and subplots and alternate “takes” that let us glimpse roads not taken and possible spin-offs, as when the family begins to muse about forensics and a body found in the garden, or when the son, Lewis (Mamoudou Athie), bursts in as a punk prole one moment, or a fidgety nerd the next, or a drunken lout (all ostensibly the same character).

Through it all, the main trio hit the same marks again and again, following the same script until it veers off-course, then resets. Sometimes we’re back to the moment before Brian’s entrance, sometimes we’re back to when he begins to get edgy (“you’ve spoilt it!”), sometimes we’re back to when he finally calls his wife “a nasty woman” right before the bell rings to announce their darling’s arrival. In each repetition something new is revealed if only the odd hopscotch logic by which we navigate through what we say and what we feel, and what we acknowledge from others.

As Brian, Chris Bannow is marvelous. I won’t soon forget the manic glee of his speech about letting his mouth gobble up his entire body, bit by bit. It’s either an instance of complete insanity or a deliberate “comic turn” on Brian’s part, and there’s no way to say for certain. Likewise, Michelle McGregor’s Maisie can, one moment, dither on about the attractions of the platypus like someone a bit “dotty,” and at another deliver an affecting rumination on the emotional perils of departure and seeing people off. While, as Alice, Ceci Fernandez maintains that infernal “brightness” so familiar from almost any role Emma Thompson has assayed (“be nice to her, that’s all!”), giving us a tour de force turn as a kind of emotional wind-up toy—now caustic, now gleeful, now imploring, now detached. In a summer of great ensemble work, the paces Wills puts his three main actors through here hits a high point.

The support is also fun—Athie’s comic intrusions and a brief scene with Prema Cruz as a special friend who suddenly shows up in Susy’s stead extend the situation into other possibilities—but in the end every extraneous element only more relentlessly concentrates our attention on the “no exit” space of this couple picking at each other’s scabs. Tensions are brought to high relief by the return of the absent one whose absence makes her more present than ever, and whose imminent presence heightens how abject this home is without her.

Consider Kate Noll’s set in its vivid use of middling detail. Quite marvelous. Now stay through intermission to see it transformed into a seedy lavatory, complete with urinals, graffiti, and a coffee maker. Both sets are wonderfully realized, with Drunk Enough creating a space entirely determined by Wills and his technicians as Churchill gives no guidance about where the play should be set nor how played. Once you realize that, you can only be rather awed by the pas de deux of seduction, sexual interaction, hurt feelings, lovers’ tiffs, and boastful braggadocio that takes place between Sam (Ato Blankson-Wood), “a country,” and Guy (Mitchell Winter), “a man.”

About that “a country”: Sam and Guy speak almost entirely in the terms of U.S. acts of aggression and/or geopolitical dominance. It’s an ideological courtship, we could say, with Sam setting the terms by which Guy must show his love. This includes simulated fellatio, simulated anal sex, and shooting up heroin and snorting coke and, while we might expect Sam to be “the top,” Wills makes Sam play the rather demanding “bottom.” In other words, the sexual politics of this staging rub against—in provocative ways—its geopolitics. The script is almost a history lesson of U.S. foreign policy, but always delivered as half-formed and half-finished statements between two lovers trying to stay on the same page.

Blankson-Wood is suitably mercurial as Sam, at times domineering, at times sneering, at times yielding, at times truly hurt—as in the aftermath of the dreaded phrase “the Towers!” As Guy, Winter has the difficult task of remaining reactive (which isn't the same as reactionary), pulled this way and that by his importunate lover’s demands (for world dominance with good PR). Later in the play Guy starts to question Sam, hitting “below the belt” with questions about environmental effects and a wasteful lifestyle that receive petulant replies that amount to “anyone would do the same thing who could” and, perhaps, a rift not so easy to overcome. Could it be the end of the American century?

The Yale Summer Cabaret has lived up to its ambition this year, giving us two great classics—Tartuffe and Miss Julie—in lively and, in the latter especially, memorable productions, as well as two lesser-known plays by masters—Lorca and Williams respectively—that, while not great plays, were given treatments by the cast, directors and tech that were truly inspired, ending with two challenging plays that confirm the unique strength of small-scale, intimate theater and adventurous choices.

Heart’s Desire and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You By Caryl Churchill Directed by Dustin Wills

Stage Manager: Geoff Boronda; Scenic Designer: Kate Noll; Costume Designer: Seth Bodie; Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason; Sound Designer: Rob Chikar; Projection Designer: James Lanius; Puppet Designer: Dustin Wills; Production Manager/Technical Director: James Lanius; Assistant Technical Director: Joey Moro

Photographs by Christopher Ash, courtesy of Yale Summer Cabaret

Yale Summer Cabaret August 8-August 18, 2013