Earthless is Worthless

Review of Elon Musk and the Plan to Blow Up Mars The Musical, Yale Cabaret

In Liam Bellman-Sharpe’s sci-fi musical, Elon Musk and the Plan to Blow Up Mars, Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind Tesla, SpaceX, and other tech concerns, is a man with a mission. After commiserating with a group of billionaires—including Jeff Bezos (Eli Pauley)—who confide to us that it’s great to be rich but it’s hard to be rich, Musk (David Mitsch) comes forward with a song describing his love of Mars, a view that seems true of the actual Musk with his dream of a colony there someday.

It comes as a surprise, then, when the crew of a spaceflight to Mars—Captain (Nomè SiDone), Eyes (Madeline Seidman), Hands (Maal Imani West), Navigator (Isuri Wijesundara)—learn that Musk is aboard, that he chartered the flight, and that he has plans to destroy the Earth’s nearest neighbor. Musk’s change of heart—from colonizing Mars to destroying it—comes via “the Voice of the Night Sky,” a kind of burning-bush moment that converts Musk from a proselytizer for humanity’s destiny among the stars to a kind of interplanetary terrorist, willing to obliterate the red planet to save the blue one.

The absurdity of the musical’s plot could be said to be an intentional mirroring of the absurdity of financial titans becoming space-age saviors, but the show also features the kind of daffy shenanigans that have been the basis of grade B sci-fi films for decades. And that makes for some very entertaining bits, such as Patrick Young as a quintessential mad scientist enlisted by Musk to plumb the possibilities of antimatter, which is key to his scheme, and some offbeat satirical science presentations.

In the first, Maal Imani West delivers a “thought experiment” on how scientific breakthroughs, in affording new products, can solve problems that are more lucrative to leave unsolved. Using dentures as her example, and aided by great graphics by projection designers Erin Sullivan and Hannah Tran, West reflects on how a demand for new teeth could lead to plans to undermine tooth and bone to make the general populace dependent on new products to save them from conditions created by the breakthrough itself. Sound familiar?

Bellman-Sharpe’s target in all this isn’t simply the absurd wealth and power of Musk or Bezos but the system that has enriched and empowered them. And if their grasp of capitalist principles weren’t enough, we’re faced with their space manias as a prospect of what the rich may do when they decide they needn’t be stuck on this woefully mismanaged rock with the rest of us. As Educational Host (Isuri Wijesundra) delivers a bouncy science lesson on “slime molds” and their ability to proliferate and form bonds with the complexity “of the interstate system,” Bezos is desperately trying to reach Musk to dissuade him from making Mars extinct. The dovetailing of Bezos’ fear of capitalism imploding and the Host’s upbeat ditty about the wonders of single-cell lifeforms works as an ironic commentary on how far we’ve come—in evolutionary terms—and how far we can fall.

While not quite a full musical in its lack of a big finale musical number, Elon Musk . . . does boast the requisite romantic interlude. Here it’s a wonderfully comic and spirited encounter between Eyes and a being made of Antimatter (Patrick Falcon). The pas de deux and duet (Antimatter’s lovely voice provided by Taylor Hoffman) puts both heart into the show and a spanner in the works of Musk’s plan, as Eyes, now in love with Antimatter, wants to preserve the creature at the cost of not destroying Mars.

The show’s oddity is its saving grace, but its narrative arc tends to be a bit hodgepodge, including a vaudeville routine about speeding in space and a song by a Drag King (Maal Imani West in male drag that smacks a bit of Little Richard, with a sumptuous smoking jacket) about the world not being a place to bring children into. Thanks to West’s great singing voice, the song is a standout even if we might wonder how it fits in, exactly.

All in all, one might say, that whether you’re trying to destroy a planet or to save one, a kitchen-sink approach is best, and one wouldn’t want to underestimate the enormous profits to be made by capitalizing on either project. In Elon Musk and the Plan to Blow Up Mars the Musical, science as a means to get rich and science as a means to save the Earth and/or mankind has reached its tipping point. That timely reflection and the possibilities of a sci-fi musical with big name power players in its dramatis personae certainly gives Bellman-Sharpe’s play remarkable potential. Per aspera ad astra.

Elon Musk and the Plan to Blow Up Mars the Musical
Music, Text, and Direction by Liam Bellman-Sharpe

Choreographer: Mariel Pettee; Set Designer: Alex McGargar; Costume Designer: David Mitsch; Lighting Designer: Noel Nichols; Sound System Designer: James T. McLoughlin; Projections Designer: Erin Sullivan; Associate Projections Designer: Hannah Tran; Associate Stage Manager: Kevin Jinghong Zhu; Dramaturg: Henriette Rietveld; Technical Director: Jonathan Jolly; Producer: Carl Holvick; Stage Manager: Sam Tirrell

Cast: Patrick Ball, Patrick Falcon, David Mitsch, Eli Pauley, Madeline Seidman, Nomè SiDone, Bailey Trierweiler, Maal Imani West, Isuri Wijesundara, Patrick Young

Musicians: Sharon Ahn, keyboards; Roberto Granados, guitar (alternate); Thomas Hagen, drums; Satchel Henneman, guitar; Taylor Hoffman, vocals; Paul Mortilla, violin; Adin Ring, bass

Yale Cabaret
January 23-25, 2020

Living At Risk

Review of Pike Street, Hartford Stage

Character, we might say, is outwardly a question of manner and inwardly a question of one’s openness to others. By such a measure, Nilaja Sun’s Pike Street, at Hartford Stage through February 2, directed by Ron Russell, is full of character.

Nilaja Sun in Pike Street, at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

All of its characters, enacted by Sun, the author and performer of the play, are manners she adopts at will, carrying on vivid dialogues, and Sun’s openness to others is what makes the play work. She is able to inhabit these folk because they aren’t just figments of her imagination: they are people who live a precarious existence on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, an existence made perilous by the imminent arrival of a hurricane. The backstories come to light as necessary to fill us in on the situation, but the main gist is the way the impending crisis brings out the character in these characters.

Evelyn is a Puerto Rican mom, beset by the fact that her daughter Candi, fifteen, has suffered an aneurysm that leaves her confined to a chair and in need of a respirator and a dialysis machine—and, with yet another major storm on the way with its possible attendant loss of electricity, Candi is at risk. The family, which includes Evelyn’s truculent and womanizing father, Poppi, played mainly for laughs, should evacuate to a shelter, says Con Ed, but moving Candi in her chair up and down five flights with no elevator is no picnic, and the kind of callous treatment the girl suffered last time—during Hurricane Sandy—leaves Evelyn loath to endure such indignities. Her solution: a generator in the apartment should they lose power.

Nilaja Sun in Pike Street, at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Other characters come and go to flesh out the proceedings, particularly Evelyn’s brother Manny, just now returned from service in Afghanistan and the source of the income the family manages on. Manny is generally an ingratiating and agreeable sort—except when indeterminate triggers set off his PTSD, making him apt to cause some havoc with local Arab merchants. Neighbors, such as senile Mrs. Appelbaum, Ty, Manny’s pot-smoking chum, and Migdalia, Poppi’s woman-for-hire, add voices and occasions for reactions, as Evelyn tries her best to be staunch and patient like her deceased mother was—a healer who ran a botanica now closed.

Sun’s sure way of conjuring these characters opens their world to us and us to their world. One of the show’s more memorable moments is when a flashback lets us see Candi, as a child, campaigning for class president and sounding like a font of wisdom.

Nilaja Sun in Pike Street at Hartford Stage, photo by T. Charles Erickson

Before the show begins, Sun sits on the set’s lone chair, shelves of candles behind her, as the audience enters, seeming to commune within herself. She opens the show by reaching out to the audience, inviting rhythmic handclaps interspersed with deep breaths, as not only a way of focusing our attention but a way of making us all alert to each other and to the transformative possibilities of her story. Being present is key to the show’s message, showing how important the cohesion of this family—any family—is, while also hitting the audience with a tragedy that comes from the everydayness of bad decisions and bad luck.

The show’s final, indelible image is of the most at-risk character’s resilience, which is also in its way a cry for help. Nilaja Sun’s Pike Street finds its passion and its humor in the trials and joys of living and creates theater that feels—in our storm-stressed times—like a humanitarian effort.

Nilaja Sun in Pike Street, at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Pike Street
Written & performed by Nilaja Sun
Directed by Ron Russell

Scenic Design: Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams; Costume Design: Clint Ramos; Lighting Design: Tyler Micoleau; Sound Design: Ron Russell; Production Stage Manager: Molly Minor Eustis; Assistant Stage Manager: Nicole Wiegert; Production Manager: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy

Hartford Stage
January 9-February 2, 2020

Twins, Man, and a Vengeful God

Review of Is God Is, Yale Cabaret

One way to describe Aleshea Harris’ Is God Is—at Yale Cabaret directed by Christopher D. Betts, a second-year director at Yale School of Drama—is as a revenge play that might have been written by Sam Shepard, if Shepard were a black woman. Harris gleefully enters into Shepard terrain: the myths of the family played out in a world that mixes the underclass with the leisure class and grabs from tropes of the Western—with its willingness to trade on being compelled by fate—the road picture, as the place where paired psyches find bonds and lines of fracture, and the hoary story of how a younger generation must forge its being in some kind of struggle or fulfillment with an older one. The irony and absurdity of Shepard is there too, as well as a gripping sense of a cracked world where all debts must be paid in blood.

But there’s a further irony Harris mines as well. Sometime in the 1960s the phrase “black comedy” became pervasive, not as a racial distinction but rather to signify the notion that some comedy is “dark,” not vanilla, not easy-going and safe. Harris creates a form of black comedy that is deliberately black in a racialized way, making her African American characters take their rightful place in a certain American mythos. It’s as if all the nods to black culture of a Hollywood filmmaker eager to trade in appropriation—like Quentin Tarantino—has finally met a sensibility equal to that incentive. This is black black comedy and its ultimate target is not a culture of exclusion or misappropriation, but of a country—the one we all live in—that is full of deep injustices that can sometimes be entertainingly offset by violent revenge. The violence is almost cartoonish, in a nod to the way action films generally treat these matters, but because this is theater in a small space there is discomfort too.

Twin sisters Racine (Ciara Monique) and Anaia (Tavia Hunt) suffered bad burns as children in a fire set by their father that, they believe, left their mother dead. They were together through a series of foster homes as objects of, at best, pity, Anaia with lasting scars all over her face, Racine with scars covered by clothing. As the play opens, with the twins about 21, they learn by letter that their mother is still alive and living in a care facility in the “dirty south.” They journey to visit her. Known in the playbill as She, their mother (played by Abigail Onwunali) is known by the girls simply as God. Making her directive that they kill the man who tried to kill her a “mission from God.”

In some ways that set up is the best of the play. The interplay between Monique and Hunt is full of a kind of knowing mystery that compels us to figure out this world even as they must. Nothing like incredible childhood trauma to make the present an extension of the past. And Onwunali’s She is scary, funny and incredibly evocative. As the scripture has it: “thy God is a vengeful God,” and the girls accept their mission readily enough even though, as Anaia the “emotional” one says, they aren’t killers. Watching Racine transform into one is a journey in itself, one that Monique accomplishes by going deeper into the character, letting us see her as, indeed, her cold-blooded father’s child.

The first task the girls’ undertake—to worm their father’s whereabouts from Chuck Hall (Matthew Elijah Webb), a former associate of dad’s, now drinking heavily to get up the nerve to pill himself to death—is a classic of miscommunication with plenty of style to spare. Hall is a mess but he’s memorable and the girls are apt to think aloud in tandem in a very amusing way. Next up is dad’s yellow house on a hill, shared with his very bougie family, quite comically rendered by Gloria Majule as Angie, a Real Housewife at her wits’ end, son Riley (Anthony Brown), an arugula fetishist whose final freak out is full of manic energy, and his twin brother Scotch (Seun Soyemi), a would-be poet giddy with inspiration. Once Angie’s out of the way, the girls get mistaken by the boys as strippers and . . . well, the entire scene plays out as a takedown of showdowns and of a certain kind of status lifestyle that maybe needs to be beaten into submission.

Finally, there’s Brandon E. Burton in bad guy getup, complete with black cowboy hat, as Man. He’s well-spoken (aren’t villains always?) until he explodes, and he’s chilling in his utter detachment. The possibilities for rapport between father and offspring are there and might beguile us for a moment—particularly as Burton renders well the fascination of a man beyond the pale who might be capable of anything and who knows it—but we know in our hearts this is a “last one standing” deal.

That the show is so entertaining is a credit to Betts and his cast, all of whom create indelible characters, and his team, which uses the entire Cab playing space to make the action sprawl as it must—shout out particularly for the set design by Stephanie Bahniuk with Marcelo Martínez Garcia, and to Anteo Fabris’ sound design and the work on fights and intimacy of Kelsey Rainwater and Jonathan Jolly (which includes, I imagine, how to play dead body or maybe dead body convincingly in close proximity to the audience).

This version of Is God Is is not a play of fixed locations. It’s a play of legendary spaces we find ourselves in the midst of at key moments. Stage and the wider playing area blend to create the world the twins move through on their mission—which reads as a fate, as an idée fixe, as a plot that makes of parricide a blow against toxic masculinity, and as a final retribution that no doubt creates new scars for the already heavily scarred.

Is God Is
By Aleshea Harris
Directed by Christopher D. Betts

Set Designer: Stephanie Bahniuk; Costume Designer: April M. Hickman; Lighting Designer: Tully Goldrick; Sound Designer/Music Supervisor: Anteo Fabris; Projections Designers: Erin Sullivan and Hannah Tran; Fight and Intimacy Director: Kelsey Rainwater; Associate Set Designer: Marcelo Martínez Garcia; Associate Fight Director: Jonathan Jolly; Scenic Artist: Sarah Karl; Dramaturg: Faith Zamble; Technical Director: Lu Shaoqian; Producer: Dani Barlow; Stage Manager: Edmond O’Neal

Cast: Anthony Brown, Brandon E. Burton, Tavia Hunt, Gloria Majule, Ciara Monique, Abigail Onwunali, Seun Soyemi, Matthew Elijah Webb

Yale Cabaret
January 16-18, 2020

Love's the Word

Review of Spring Sonnets by Don Yorty

In his sonnets, the poet Don Yorty gives us a piece of his mind and a chunk of his spirit.

Not so much small as compact, that literary miniature known as the sonnet has held pride of place—not just in English—for 500 years. From the oft-quoted creations of Shakespeare and John Donne to Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets, 1964—considered his greatest work—the 14-line stanza, of varying rhyme schemes and assorted structures, has proven a satisfying form. Is it the brevity? Is it the fact that, whether as writer or reader, we know approximately what we’re getting? Is it because this deft instrument seems particularly amenable to certain feeling-states, or to any?

To one writer it’s a nature poem, to another the perfect vehicle for elegy or celebration. For the late Wanda Coleman in her American Sonnets, it’s a vehicle for ex-lover vengeance, bitter wit, and funky reminiscence. This malleability provides a good deal of the sonnet’s allure. You can cover the waterfront of feeling and experience. The poems may look similar but produce all manner of effects.

In the paragraph-length afterword to his Spring Sonnets, New York poet and novelist Don Yorty says he began writing sonnets after not having written a poem for twenty years. The immediate occasion, he explains, was America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. “I think because I opposed the invasion so much,” he writes, “I needed something I could control.” The sonnet was something he’d never attempted. He wrote 180, initially, then culled them to the 90 included here.

Bush’s criminal war may have been the catalyst, but the war and its destruction and the more general predations of imperial policy are rarely mentioned in Spring Sonnets. Rather, war as a constant presence constitutes the psychological and spiritual backdrop to Yorty’s poems, creating a sense of helplessness and existential angst that is our “new normal,” out of which a new awareness, a clearer vision, comes into being and is duly recorded (think Auden in the Thirties). Poem #20 is one of the few that mentions the war(s). Here it is in full:

Just as I write two hawks above the trees
fly fast away. Shadow of a buzzard
passes over my shoulder hopefully.
I was expecting rain, impeded start
but the sun’s come out, made the day open
as a pursued lover turning might smile
and kiss me on the mouth. Surprised I am
chosen I am happy as can be while
everything gets worse. Soldiers still fight
in Afghanistan and Iraq, two wars
I hadn’t wanted, but then who am I?
The wind blows my pages while I write for
those killed in battle. Wind, give me the breath
the word eternal not alive or dead.

The tone, typical throughout this volume, is both personal and direct. The method lets the poet trace out the movement of thought across the mind, notating the places where it happens to land. Anything is game, and any set of circumstances, seemingly, can make this happen. For instance, thought itself becomes subject to examination, as in #28 where Yorty pauses to reflect on language and its relation to consciousness and cognition:

[…] What’s thinking
but flying, following thoughts. Why are they
always words?

They’re not, of course. Thoughts are often simply feelings to which specific sounds have yet to attach. Or, if they are attached, are not words. (Music, for instance, where tonality leads us directly into specific, but undefined, emotional states.) This is an idea that quickly gathers complexity. The poet’s question is rhetorical, necessarily, since to answer it would take us into linguistics and theories of language. Yorty’s sonnet, whether considering the relation of thought to words or of a private citizen to war, is allusive rather than exploratory. Its insights awaken curiosity rather than supply answers.

The poems are intimate, not so much in the “confessional” way wherein contemporary American poetry makes the Catholic church look like a piker, but in the sense of their tone being wholly unguarded. If making decisions, or forming clearer observations, arrives as a result of the various voices in our heads engaging in debate, then on these pages we’re allowed (encouraged?) to eavesdrop. This tone of confident disclosure makes for an engaging and ongoing I-and-thou effect. Reading these puts us in the presence of a mind often astonished at the ordinary because the ordinary rarely is merely that to a mind willing to look further or deeper, or to step back and gain perspective about what it observes. This curiosity and commitment enable the poet to take on just about any subject matter and say something startling or new. 

Yorty does not abuse that freedom by running hither and yon, making us chase after his meaning. He sticks to his ken, and that adds to the power of the performance. Spring Sonnets maps out a world the reader can readily comprehend and stays there. That world consists of two places: the New York City neighborhood where Yorty has lived and worked as a second-language instructor for thirty years, and a rural retreat somewhere in the Pennsylvania mountains. The poems move between these locales. A single season is the time frame, what happened then is the subject matter.

More importantly, the poetic voice leans on experience without making that the point, giving the poems not just a significant tonal difference but determining choices all around: what to notice, what to write about, what to say, finally. The first sentence of Sonnet #31, for instance (“Today for the first time in my life…”) launches a disquisition on technology. The loss of a cell phone becomes a reverie about the telephone. No one ever lost one when it came with a cord plugged into a wall. Moreover, there was a time when if you noticed someone walking down the street alone and talking volubly, the implication was that mental illness was somehow involved. Now we see such behavior all the time and assume a cell phone conversation is taking place. But our reliance on this torqued up communication device means “no one’s alone anymore.” The fact that technology shears away, one by one, the dimensions of privacy, is alarming but inescapable.

[…] Times change. There’s nothing about
it you can do, if you don’t change, you
don’t move and you’re run down by the future.

Whether it’s Cachito the cat, squirrels on a park bench, a butterfly making its way across a pond, whatever the subject these poems are invariably meditations on the immediate, as for instance #41 (“At any moment it’s going to rain…”), wherein a rainstorm effectively stops composition in mid-measure. Add to that the notion that anything is a fit subject for poetry and (thank you, Dr. Williams) what results is a simplicity of expression and gratifying absence of self-conscious literary affect. In poems mentioning war, politics, death, classroom repartee, or describing the woods or milkweed pods, the effectiveness of the level of engagement owes much to the plain-speaking that avoids that recognizably elevated vernacular—poetry!—alerting readers that someone’s trying to say something important. The voice of Spring Sonnets is the same one we use to share our thoughts and observations in everyday conversation. Sonnet #19 (“My hands are numb and yet the sun is bright.”), for instance, observes and records the changes evident in nature as spring manifests. Its subject is the strange, unfolding chaos that ensues when the temperature rises a few degrees and the grip of frost is broken. It’s the suddenness and multifariousness of this process that always surprises, and that effect is replicated in certain details (bird sounds, vanished ice, sudden appearance of white flowers) before shifting to thoughts of how we change as we get older, looking behind to that time of life—youth—when we tended to think only of ourselves.

Though sonnets can be about anything, they gained their preeminent place in English as expressions of love. Love is not just ardor, romance or sexual attraction. The Greeks, for instance, recognized multiple forms of love, including affection, friendship, familial love, universal love (for strangers, nature, or God, known as Agape), practical love and self-love. All emerge in these poems one way or another. The transforming power of love is Yorty’s theme here, I suspect, because, as an older poet “with time to spare but not one hour to waste,” he sees love as an animating force, always present, often concealed:

[…] As I grow
old it seems possible to really love
even the startled snake scared in the leaves […]

That’s not to say the view is all Woodstock. When the poems shift back from the Poconos to the Lower East Side, a certain tension surfaces. Poem #11, for example, fumes at the manner in which a crew of anarchists trashed the local public space, “gerrymandered the park bench to drink, drug / take a long piss when the beer filled them up.” The poet’s willingness to go where emotion takes him—whether pleasant, deep or seriously annoyed—deepens the tone of Spring Sonnets. Mostly, though, Yorty takes the long view, one in which light stands in for our fleeting present and night is the death that’s waiting around the corner.

This being a book of sonnets, it’d be impossible not to weigh in on technical matters. Various rules hold that, for instance, the lines of a sonnet must be ten syllables each, that sonnets are written in iambic pentameter, that they deploy end rhymes in an ABAB CDCD pattern, etc. All that would’ve made for a different kind of book than Spring Sonnets. Here the rhymes, internal and at line ends, are playful rather than constricting or self-conscious. Some, like the poem that got rained out, employ ABBA end rhymes, some AABB. Slant rhymes often suffice and are gestural, even whimsical. Several times, for example, the poet rhymes “a” with “the.” This works both to keep the lines rolling and to acknowledge the five-century provenance of the form. The sonnet, here, turns out to be the mode most appropriate for Don Yorty’s re-entry as a poet. He’s clearly comfortable working it and it works because he knows how to make it work. As Sonnet #158 notes:  “…the music’s always true while it plays.”

Spring Sonnets
By Don Yorty
Indolent Books, 2019
Paperback, 114 pages

The book may be ordered here.

Don Yorty is a poet, educator, and garden activist living in New York City. He is the author of two previous poetry collections, A Few Swimmers Appear and Poet Laundromat (both from Philadelphia Eye & Ear), and he is included in Out of This World, An Anthology of the Poetry of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 1966–1991. His novel What Night Forgets was published by Herodias Press in 2000. He blogs at donyorty.com: an archive of current art, his own writing, and work of other poets.

Jim Cory’s most recent publications are Wipers Float In The Neck Of The Reservoir (The Moron Channel, 2018) and 25 Short Poems (Moonstone Press, 2016). He has edited poetry selections by contemporary American poets including James Broughton (Packing Up for Paradise, Black Sparrow Press, 1998), Jonathan Williams (Jubilant Thicket, Copper Canyon Press, 2005), and, most recently, Have You Seen This Man, the Castro Poems of Karl Tierney (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019).

Putting the Fun in Dysfunction

Review of Fun Home, Yale School of Drama

The Yale School of Drama production of Fun Home, the Tony-winning musical by Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron, based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, is something to behold. A two-story home, with a band in the back on the ground floor and an artist-studio/observation post on the second-floor, graces the stage at the University Theater. The design by Jimmy Stubbs wonderfully foregrounds the notion of “home” that the musical, playing through December 20, interrogates with its story of dysfunction and coping.

The open playing space in front can become the Bechdel family’s museum-like home with its prized antiques, or easily morph into the funeral home that Bruce, the father (JJ McGlone), operates out of the house, or the dorm-room where Middle Alison (Doireann Mac Mahon) discovers the wonders of lesbian love with Joan (Madeline Seidman) or a hotel room where Small Alison anxiously interrogates her dad. A sliding door in a wall gives onto the piano Helen, the mother (Zoe Mann), an actress, practices on and, in one eerie tableau, the space where Bruce works on a naked cadaver (Dario Ladani Sanchez). Key to the appeal of this well-paced production is the way director/choreographer Danilo Gambini makes use of the space, moving the characters through a kind of memory house as Alison (Eli Pauley) tries to come to terms with the enduring influence of her troubled father.

The company of Fun Home with music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, directed by Danilo Gambini. Photo by T. Charles Erickson, Yale School of Drama, 2019

As told, the story of Alison, a comic-book artist, consists of nonlinear scenes, as they seem to occur in Alison’s memory. Always addressing the audience, Alison pitches her appeal to us, making us witnesses to her vexed history. It’s not just the funeral home and her dad’s way of imposing his tastes and his standards (he dismisses comic-book art in favor of serious art). We learn that Bruce pursues young men for sex while remaining the patriarch and, though his wife is aware of his proclivities, that he hides behind a lie of heteronormativity that seems to warp him. And his underage liaisons put the entire family at risk. Then there’s that night in New York when Bruce is willing to leave his kids asleep in a hotel room while he goes out for . . . whatever he goes out for. Alison is upfront about all she doesn’t know about him, and her father’s death—she’s convinced it was suicide—confronts her as a need to weigh both his failings and hers.

The perspective of Alison, as someone who gradually finds the entertainment value of her life, is key to the power of the YSD production. Pauley gives Alison a reflective irony and her presence as onlooker is made manifest by the way Gambini keeps her placed on the periphery of scenes. The effect, aided by visual effects such as Camilla Tassi’s evocative projections of drawings, scribbles and text, and Nicole E. Lang’s varied lighting design, is of a world that is shaping itself into expressive arrangements as Alison gropes to find her own truth.

The songs that make Fun Home a musical have a certain obligatory quality, as if the story of Alison and her family—essentially a tale of estrangement—might be made alright if they can sing about it. The fun songs, like “Come to the Fun Home” and “Raincoat of Love,” show a lively knack for the kinds of family performers—the Jackson Five, the Partridge Family—that Small Alison loves (the latter number features Sanchez as a teenybopper heartthrob and Seidman and Mac Mahon as dead-ringers for Susan Dey in Phuong Nguyen’s costumes). When they appear in tandem, the three Bechdel children—Alison (Taylor Hoffman), Christian (Juliana Aiden Martinez) and John (Laurie Ortega-Murphy)—are fast-moving stick puppets, giving them the infectious charm of the kind of televised entertainment that would appeal to the children. Small Alison, a larger puppet voiced by Hoffman, with puppeteering by Martinez and Ortega-Murphy, maintains an air of melancholy that might be less available to a child actor (puppet design by Anatar Marmol-Gagne).

Middle Alison’s big number of coming out, “Changing My Major,” is thoroughly charming in Doireann Mac Mahon’s rendering—there’s shyness and heat and awkwardness and joy, and Mac Mahon moves about the space as if in a pas de deux with her own sense of wonder. The more emotionally taxing “Days and Days” is a knockout, delivered by Zoe Mann as the one place in the show when Helen comes into her own, finally reaching out to Alison and acknowledging the emotional costs of life with Bruce.

As Bruce, JJ McGlone is perfectly suited to the role. He looks the English teacher—one of Bruce’s occupations—and he plays the doting or disgruntled father well and is able to mood-swing in a way that makes Bruce feel complicated. His striped suit and glances at his reflection while singing “not too bad,” let us know he’s something of a player, but he’s also vulnerable in ways that make him not quite the grown-up Small and Middle Alison assume he is.

Alison (Eli Pauley) and Bruce (JJ McGlone) in Fun Home with music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, directed by Danilo Gambini. Photo by T. Charles Erickson, Yale School of Drama, 2019

The trajectory of Bruce’s character is given two powerful moments late in the play. Gambini places the important car ride between Bruce and Middle Alison (but with Alison taking her place—indeed, the shutting out of Middle Alison behind a sliding wall is very effective) on the edge of the stage. The intimacy that the two almost find is there for us more than for them, and so the scene registers as the tragic lost chance Alison sees it as. Finally, Bruce’s big number, “Edges of the World,” is sung by McGlone from a platform on the second floor, a provisional space from which he tries to survey not only an old house he’s trying to renovate, but also a life that, like the house, may be beyond repair. Like Helen’s “Days and Days,” “Edges” expresses Alison’s sense of her parents’ desperation, which becomes, via song, uplifting and poignant.

Finally, the flying Small Alison—a puppet sustained in midair—is fully buoyed by the merging voices of Hoffman, Pauley and Mac Mahon, affording us a complex moment in which the child contains the elders and the elders share the child’s simple trust in a father who has yet to bully or betray her. Fun Home, in this fully satisfying production, lets the wishful thinking of art’s answer to life hang on that fleeting moment of perfect balance.

Fun Home
Music by Jeanine Tesori
Book and Lyrics by Lisa Kron
Based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel
Directed by Danilo Gambini

Music Director: Jill Brunelle; Scenic Designer: Jimmy Stubbs; Costume Designer: Phuong Nguyen; Lighting Designer: Nicole E. Lang; Sound Designer: Noel Nichols; Projection Designer: Camilla Tassi; Puppet Designer: Anatar Marmol-Gagne; Production Dramaturg: Emily Sorensen; Technical Director: Dominick Pinto; Stage Manager: Edmond O’Neal

Musicians: Jill Brunelle, keyboard 1; Liam Bellman-Sharpe, guitar; Margaret E. Douglas, bass; Frances Pollock, keyboard 2; Jim Stavris, drums; Emily Duncan Wilson, reeds

Cast: Taylor Hoffman, Doireann Mac Mahon, Zoe Mann, Juliana Aiden Martinez, JJ McGlone, Laurie Ortega-Murphy, Eli Pauley, Dario Ladani Sanchez, Madeline Seidman

Yale School of Drama
December 14-20, 2019

Worn-out Whiteness

Review of Two Mile Hollow, Yale Cabaret

“O wad some pow’r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us,” mused Scottish poet Robert Burns in his “To a Louse.” White folk are being gifted by some newly empowered powers, this century, to perhaps see ourselves as others see us, and some might be loath to open the present. In Two Mile Hollow, now playing at Yale Cabaret, Japanese American playwright Leah Nanako Winkler takes aim at the “white people by the water” play, and the particularities of that oft-treated scenario—she draws on Chekhov, Williams, O’Neill, Tracy Letts, to name but a few—means that “we” may feel let off the hook, for the moment. Even a few less than nimble references to Old Blue only go so far in cracking the high culture façade that makes “whiteness”—like capitalism—simply that thing you exist in. As the old Palmolive soap commercial intoned: “Dish-soap? You’re soaking in it.”

Directed by Kat Yen with a nonwhite cast drawn from New York, rather than the Yale School of Drama, the play has a certain manic charm. Its comic sense, with Asians in blonde wigs and a Hampton’s sense of “down home,” is more appropriate to sketch comedy than to a satire of canonical plays, which means we can all laugh at little cost. We’ve all been bored by bad productions of such plays, whether or not we felt ourselves akin to their inhabitants.

Blythe (Cynthia Fernandez), Mary (Diane Chen), Joshua (Vishaal Reddy), Christopher (Vin Kridakorn), Charlotte (Jennifer Tsay) in the Yale Cabaret production of Two Mile Hollow, directed by Kat Yen, December 12-14, 2019

One Mile Hollow indeed shows that you needn’t be white to mock obtuse, affluent, and grandly self-involved characters like Winkler’s Donnellys. The fun had at the expense of the shiftless son, Joshua (Vishaal Reddy), younger son Christopher (Vin Kridakorn), the heir apparent to deceased dad’s film stardom, twice-divorced daughter Mary (Diane Chen), a walking complex of neuroses, and pill-popping hot mom Blythe (Cynthia Fernandez) is keen, with the characters self-importantly aware of their theatrical antecedents. So we get Mary acting like a bird and the family’s collective “Ach!” is instead a “caw!” to honor The Seagull that flits about the periphery of the action. Yen’s set, of kitchen, dining room table, and garden, gives us at a glance the range of domestic space. The stage is set, we see at once, for skeletons in closets, for confessions and accusations, wandering desires, and messy humanness—with laughs. In that, the play doesn’t let us down.

The interloper in this quasi-incestual soup is Charlotte (Jennifer Tsay), Chris’s assistant whom Joshua sees as “the help,” then tries to woo away from his Oscar-nominated brother. Charlotte gets to be not only the focus of a triangle with the brothers, she’s also triangulated in Winkler’s threesome of dramatic arts: theater (the family onstage), movies (the father and son’s careers), and, where Charlotte hopes to find meaning and celebrity, streaming online video. We may laugh at the spiral down from the classic locus of collective catharsis to the individual interface on a device in your palm, but such is where we’re headed as “collective” comes to be yet another exploded myth, like “universal.”

Charlotte turns out alright, though not unironized, in Tsay’s shrugging acceptance of her status outside those bastions she needn’t conquer. She manages because she stops wanting to do things the way those people do, and because she’s able to let herself get bought off, and to resist Blythe’s overtures which might’ve hooked someone more beguiled by privilege.

Joshua (Vishaal Reddy), Christopher (Vin Kridakorn) in Yale Cabaret’s production of Two Mile Hollow, December 12-14, 2019

On the privileged front, Vishaal Reddy gives the most fun, sending up the vocal mannerisms of a host of white boys apt to find their inner worlds precious cargo. The pitch of Mary’s pathos, in Diane Chen’s rendering, has a cartoonishness that makes the occasional quaver into lunacy all the more arresting. Vin Kridakorn has the requisite looks and detachment that make Christopher a desirable property, and his arguments with Joshua are the stuff of spoiled immaturity. As the mother they all fear to offend, Cynthia Fernandez is mercurial and commanding—a caricature that steals from the best and knows how. The show is a constant barrage of mannerisms and allusions and jabs and jibes, so that even if one or another doesn’t land the next one likely will.

The effort to depict a family—any family, and comprised however exclusively or inclusively you like—if genuine, always opens private life to mockery. Time was, the introduction of the “downstairs” view of “upstairs” was enough to assure a certain irony, then it had to be the “kitchen comedy” of the folks at home, insular in their petty familial wars. Here, it’s the masquerade of “the type” itself that is up-for-grabs, aiming to expose white, privileged cliché but without risking a tangible alternative. After all, Charlotte’s big idea is a show that foregrounds the “fat girl” and “Asian chick” caricatures that usually play sidekick in some white girl feature. Will she get to star in her own romcom one day? Maybe, but what’s that got to do with Chekhov?

All in all, life is pretty hollow in Two Mile Hollow, and too many of the laughs, like the lobster dish at the French bistro Blythe no longer frequents, “lack bite.”

Two Mile Hollow
By Leah Nanako Winkler
Proposed & Directed by Kat Yen

Producer: Jason Gray; Scenic Designer: Kat Yen; Costume Co-Designers: Phuong Nguyen, Miguel Urbino; Lighting Co-Designers: Tully Goldrick, Casey Tonnies; Sound Designer & Composer: Daniela Hart; Technical Director: Laura Copenhaver; Dramaturg: Henriette Rietveld; Stage Manager: Zak Rosen; Choreographer: Michael Raine

Cast: Diane Chen, Cynthia Fernandez, Vin Kridakorn, Vishaal Reddy, Jennifer Tsay

Yale Cabaret
December 12-14, 2019

The Art of Interfacing

Review of I=N=T=E=R=F=A=C=E, Yale Cabaret

The terms by which we understand human interaction are fluid, including biological and sociological descriptors (e.g., “mating ritual”) and more abstract or rhetorical ones (e.g., “communicative tropes”) and, for quite some time, technological terms. Such as “interface.” A word for the communication between computing systems, it has become a term for how a complex system (such as “you”) interact with another complex system (such as “me”). What is the means of our “interface”? What “computes,” exactly, in any interaction between us?

I=N=T=E=R=F=A=C=E is the name of the current show at Yale Cabaret (last show tonight at 11 pm), proposed and performed by Dakota Stipp, a third-year sound designer at Yale School of Drama, with contributions from MFA students from the schools of Music and of Art: Kyla Arsadjaja, performer and movement designer, Cam Camden, producer and technical director, Ross Wightman, performer and instrument designer, and Ye Qin Zhu, performer and content designer. The roles of design and performance are indeed interfacing throughout the piece, as the performers interact with various devices, instruments and mechanisms designed to make the performance happen. What they create occurs in a space that is part performance, part art installation.

A still of I=N=T=E=R=F=A=C=E at Yale Cabaret, December 5-7, 2019

What this means for the audience is that we look on at five figures who move about purposely in what seems another world. In most theatrical pieces, that “world” is an imagined one that acts as a facsimile of the one we live in, with actors playing other people who occupy that world. Here, the performers play with props that are works of art while inhabiting a space enhanced by projections on hanging scrims and spoken word and sound effects, lighting effects, and musical sounds. It’s a textured world of “effects,” and what effect that has depends upon the viewers and their capacity as receptors.

For me, the delight of the show is provided by Ross Wightman in a sort of comic relief sidebar. Wearing a voluminous wig, he sits at a table across from a full-size plastic or vinyl skeleton, operating miked plate and cutlery, creating a sound poem of scratches, clanking, feedback, echo and vibration. It’s not mime because sound is its purpose, but it’s not a scene either. It’s an enactment, a making-something-happen that occurs three times in the course of the evening, each time (and from evening to evening) different. The night I saw the show (Friday at 11), Wightman, in the second segment, kissed the hand of the skeleton. In the third, he drew the skeleton in close, both leaning across the table. When he collapsed and released the skeleton, it sat upright. That, to me, seemed a fitting end to the entire show, though there was a bit more to follow.

As theater, Wightman’s segments give us a bit of what we expect: setting, costume, lighting, props, and actions that could be “symbolic”—a figure appearing to eat and drink while an onlooker has died, or perhaps stands in for those who are starving. There’s also the neat reference to the annual enactments of our national fall holidays—the skeleton of Halloween and the ostentatious meal of Thanksgiving. No matter how you take it, though, in the end my admiration was for how Wightman “played” objects as instruments and how Stipp had created a sound stage so that we could appreciate the music of the mundane.

Ye Qin Zhu and Dakota Stipp in I=N=T=E=R=F=A=C=E, Yale Cabaret, December 5-7, 2019

Elsewhere, that sound stage creates other remarkable effects, such as spoken elements that become a texture of sounds and words that can feel as close as a voice in one’s ear at times, or can be made to drop to the status of sound effects through distortion. Phrases float out of the flow and stick in the mind, about parasites, or feasting on a mango, or how bodies become water.

And while the aural stimulation is almost constant, so is the visual. One sequence has the performers carrying onto the playing space wire sculptures. There are lights throwing the objects’ wiry shadows on the scrims, and the pieces, at first separate, are assembled until one grouping resembles a kind of giant monument, the other perhaps a store display. We watch assembly and disassembly, we see the scrims become a ground for flowing images that look like dendrites or that solidify into patterned fabric, or become a view into a plane of bouncing lights.

In a sense, the show is all about patterns—of light, of sound, of texture, of behavior—and where the main focus falls is apt to be a bit like picking out the exact moment when image and sound coalesced with just the right balance. The ingenuity of the show is in its technical features—and that includes the performers/technicians of the event—but its effect is like spending time in a gallery of kinetic artworks. Something with which, you’ll soon realize, you rarely get to interface.

I=N=T=E=R=F=A=C=E
Proposed by Dakota Stipp
Created by Kyla Arsadjaja, Cam Camden, Dakota Stipp, Ross Wightman, Ye Qin Zhu

Performers: Kyla Arsadjaja, Cam Camden, Dakota Stipp, Ross Wightman, Ye Qin Zhu

Production Designer: Dakota Stipp; Technical Director: Cam Camden; Content Designer: Ye Qin Zhu; Movement Designer: Kyla Arsadjaja; Instrument Designer: Ross Wightman

Yale Cabaret
December 5-7, 2019

Next week the Cabaret returns for its last show of 2019: Leah Nanako Winkler’s Two Mile Hollow, directed by third-year director Kat Yen. The director, playwright and 4 out of 5 cast members are Asian as well as members of the creative team, which quite likely hasn’t been the case for  a Yale Cabaret show before. The play, by a Japanese American from Kentucky, satirizes the tendency to represent, in plays and television, “the” American family as middle-class white. December 12-14.

Matchmaking Games

Review of Pride and Prejudice, Long Wharf Theatre

Jane Austen’s much admired novel Pride and Prejudice got the Kate Hamill treatment in 2017. Hamill, trained as an actor, starred in new plays she adapted from old properties, allowing her, in the latter years of this decade, to assay three great heroines of British fiction: Marianne Dashwood (Sense & Sensibility), Becky Sharp (Vanity Fair), and Lizzy Bennet (Pride & Prejudice), as reconceived by her comic skills. The latter play, sans Hamill and directed by Jess McLeod, occupies the slot reserved for “a modern adaptation of a classic play” in the Long Wharf Theatre’s current season. In fact it’s a revival of a contemporary play adapted from a classic novel with some of the verve for skewering the 19th century that one finds, for instance, in the first act of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9. (From 1979, Cloud 9 was performed at Yale School of Drama in 2013 and Hartford Stage in 2017.)

Jane Bennet (Octavia Chavez-Richmond), Lizzy Bennet (Aneisa J. Hicks), Charlotte Lucas (Rami Margron) in Pride and Prejudice at Long Wharf Theatre, 2019

I was put in mind of the latter play by P&P’s use of comical casting, or casting against the grain. In Cloud 9, whoever plays the happy Victorian hunter and man of the house in Act One has to play a modern female child in Act Two. There, the doubling is mostly a jab at music hall comedy (men in female clothing having been trusted to raise guffaws for centuries). Here, when a very tall male (Luis Mareno) plays silly aristocrat Bingley as well as Mary, the most ill-favored of the Bennet clan (the third of four girls rather than Austen’s five), the hoary comic trope still lands, determined to inspire cheap laughs.

However, thanks to what Mareno does with the role, the doubling has perhaps something more behind it. Mareno makes Mary a loose cannon of odd asides, sad/funny bids for attention, and the kind of note-taking that family members readily store against others (“you locked me in a closet,” as a multivalent line, cuts more each time Mary says it). Likewise, the fact that whoever plays Mr. Bennet also plays Charlotte, the friend of Lizzy who takes one for the team by marrying unctuous Mr. Collins (Brian Lee Huynh, more later), lends a kind of paternalism to Charlotte and BFF status to Mr. Bennet. Here both roles are played by Rami Margron with notable command of both feminine and masculine registers.

Mary Bennet (Luis Moreno) in Pride and Prejudice at Long Wharf Theatre

The cross-casting is intrinsic to Hamill’s conception, letting the play step nimbly amongst the ruins of gender roles that performativity would have us progress beyond. What might push the theatrical effect a step further? All the cross-gender roles are ancillary. It’s still a story of boy, cast as such, meets girl, cast as such. While there’s no way anyone would mistake this for a faithful rendering of Austen, we don’t get anything really surprising either. At the Long Wharf, Pride and Prejudice is a comedy of manners where the posh British tones of classic Austen have been dismissed as mannered while the nonwhite cast is left to veer among mannerisms. How funny you find that I leave to you.

In my view, who fares best in this production—which is never quite as rollicking as it seems to hope it is (pacing!)—is Brian Lee Huynh. The actor has an always comical grasp of how to exploit the manner of each of his three parts. As the supercilious Miss Bingley—she detests those Bennet girls—Huynh might be a catty male in drag or a catty female past bloom (and dares you to tell the difference); as the caddish but sympathetic Mr. Wickham, he’s part comic villain, part dashing lead, and part ironic commentary on both, and as Mr. Collins, a poseur poised to marry at his patroness’s dictate, he’s divertingly daffy. In each role, both Austen and Hamill are well served. Well played.

Lydia (Dawn Elizabeth Clements), Mr. Wickham (Brian Lee Huynh) in Pride and Prejudice at Long Wharf Theatre

Elsewhere, the effects are more grab-bag, but Act Two lands better than Act One. The latter has not one but two grand balls where the lack of extras makes space itself seem to hang, while at home the fond rapport between Mr. Bennet and Lizzy (a linchpin of the novel) barely registers. Margron’s Mr. B. really comes into his own in Act Two when suitors come thick and fast. Jane Bennet (Octavia Chavez-Richmond), who’s supposed to be “the catch,” seems to be the rather tepid lover Darcy takes her for, early on. Chavez-Richmond has more fun with Miss Anne De Burgh’s neurasthenic quaver and a fantasy of Jane as temptress, both in Act Two. As Mr. Darcy, Biko Eisen-Martin does haughtily awkward well and bursts into pained eloquence in Act Two with force enough to melt even the skepticism of Lizzy, we imagine.  As Lizzy, Aneisa J. Hicks, ever-arrayed in patterned culottes, seems willfully obtuse in Act One, but her passions and bashfulness come to the fore in Act Two (after Darcy does her a service and she gets to see the dude’s sumptuous domicile). And yet the pair’s happy-ever-after kiss is all but spoiled by the bad matches made by Charlotte and by Lydia.

As the youngest (fourteen), Lydia is played by Dawn Elizabeth Clements as a sitcom princess, all cutesy girlish sashay in Act One; in Act Two she reappears as the Mean Girl/Dame, Lady De Burgh, and, while Lydia’s ultimate comeuppance seems way harsh, Clements is at her best in making us register the heart-shaking incomprehension of the child-bride. As Mrs. Bennet, for whom railroading her daughters into the best possible marriages is the key to success, Maria Elena Ramirez is never as vacuous as the role is generally deemed (even by Austen, I daresay). Her gravitas comes from preemptive mourning over her girls’ missed chances, a sort of memento mori for the death-in-life that yawns when marriageability ends.

Lizzy Bennet (Aneisa J. Hicks), Jane Bennet (Octavia Chavez-Richmond), Mrs. Bennet (Maria Elena Remirez), Mary Bennet (Luis Moreno), Lydia Bennet (Dawn Elizabeth Clements), Mr. Bennet (Rami Margron) in Pride and Prejudice at Long Wharf Theatre

Costumes, by Izumi Inaba, are a riot of patterns and overlays on female characters that seem designed not to flatter their wearers (more of that against the grain aesthetic, I assume), though the male costumes generally do. The set by Gerardo Díaz Sánchez features a handsome staircase and ballroom/sitting-room—with a décor like a bordello on acid. Sound Designer/Original Music Composer Megumi Katayama’s boomy rhythms come through loud and clear but the dialogue at times less so amidst all the movement.

The Long Wharf’s Pride and Prejudice takes pride in overcoming any prejudices about who is able to play whom. Fine, but it could be much funnier.

Pride and Prejudice
By Kate Hamill
Adapted from the novel by Jane Austen
Directed by Jess McLeod

Set Design: Gerardo Díaz Sánchez; Costume Design: Izumi Inaba; Lighting Design: Jennifer Fok; Original Music & Sound Design: Megumi Katayama; Choreography: James Beaudry; Hair, Wig & Make Up Design: Samantha Abbott; Production Stage Manager: Kelsey Vivian; Assistant Stage Manager: Amy Patricia Stern; Casting by Calleri Casting

Cast: Octavia Chavez-Richmond, Dawn Elizabeth Clements, Biko Eisen-Martin, Aneisa J. Hicks, Brian Lee Huynh, Rami Margron, Luis Moreno, Maria Elena Remirez

 Long Wharf Theatre
November 27-December 22, 2019

Watch Yourself

Review of Rubberneck, Yale Cabaret

The Yale Cabaret is back for its second weekend in November and won’t return until December 5th. This week Rubberneck by Mattie McGarey, a New York-based choreographer and performer, brings to the Cab its second wordless performance piece of the season. Here, unlike Bodyssey, the third show of the season, narrative trajectory is less marked in favor of vignettes of movement. A cast of six, garbed in becoming outfits with pleasing color coordination (Yunzhu Zeng, costumes), move through a series of routines. Some, like the opening—in which all perform morning routines such as showering, arranging hair, dressing—contain elements of mime. Others, like one that seems to be taking place, judging by the rhythmic music, in a club, makes the six seem like parts of the same collective organism. The overall impression is of six parts of the same machine, located in separate spaces, but answerable to the same directives.

The cast of Rubberneck by Mattie McGarey at Yale Cabaret, November 14-16, 2019

The different arrangements of the six make for changing patterns, and each performer interprets the movements differently. The ad hoc cast, which includes McGarey, is drawn from Yale College, the Yale School of Music, the Yale School of Drama, and from the New Haven community. Rubberneck, the statement by the artistic team reads, “interrogates body language, symbolic gestures, and unspoken social cues as essential ingredients to the expansion and extinction of our society.” With that in mind, the repetitions can be seen as the rote movements we all perform as a means to exist in society (I won’t say simply “exist,” for who knows what that might be like?) and the personal je ne sais quoi each brings to such repetitive movements is the little friction of individuality.

The six performers often enough seem robotic, moving upon mindless tracks. The impression is strengthened by the many times the performers extend a palm in front of their faces, staring into the little screen that now dominates all social spaces. At one point, with the six sitting on chairs, each throws out looks into the social space as if trying both to be seen and to avoid seeing. Or maybe just trying to see who might actually see them. A related sequence found each slipping about on the hard vinyl chairs, trying to find some sweet spot between relaxation and vigilance, some almost falling, some never quite at ease.

There’s a heightened sense throughout the show of what it means to watch others move. If you’re the type of person who can be occupied for hours watching people in parks, train stations, airports and so on, you should find the show very appealing. There’s always new information coming at the viewer even when it works at some subliminal level, the way we—perforce—have to process whatever takes place around us. Here, the show is for our attention and yet it’s the kind of show that makes us attentive to what makes sense, what has significance, in what others do and how they look while doing it. What it means, in other words, to be a spectator is implied in everything we notice in public. “Rubberneck,” of course, refers to the way people acknowledge something untoward happening, most commonly used to describe how an accident suddenly, in the midst of the routine behavior of driving, makes us spectators again, watchers at what has happened to someone else.

Mattie McGarey in Rubberneck at Yale Cabaret, November 14-16, 2019

Several times McGarey detaches from the simpler movements the others perform. It starts with a dramatic movement as if being ejected, in a slide across the floor backwards, while the other five stand in a sort of fortified coffee klatch. At other times, she’s apt to spiral about on the floor, creating movements with more rhythmic fluidity than the group tends to enact. There are also dispersals of the cast in ways that have an obvious symbolic logic, as when the two male performers sit off to the side as if in their own world, leaving the four female performers to work through other routines. Or a variation on musical chairs—all six walk around the line of six chairs and, in sequence, the performers break out of the rhythm to remove their own chairs, one at a time. What are the chairs? A habitation, a comfort, a personal space we each bring and take with us?

The show is greatly aided by Taiga Christie’s lighting and Bailey Trierweiler’s compositions which at times feel trancelike, at times using flurries of more anxious rhythm, at times brandishing silence as perhaps the most awkward of social conditions. Full of suggestion more than statement, the vignettes offer stylized interactions that may or may not seem opaque depending on the viewer. In any case, Rubberneck gives us something to look at even while perhaps making us pause to wonder why are so eager to find things to look at.

Rubberneck
Created, directed, and choreographed by Mattie McGarey

Producer: Sarah Cain; Costume Designer: Yunzhu Zeng; Lighting Designer: Taiga Christie; Composer & Sound Designer: Bailey Trierweiler; Sound Engineer: Anteo Fabris; Stage Manager: Leo Egger

Performers: Faizan Kareem, Xi Luo, Mattie McGarey, Hannah Neves, Adrianne Owings, Arnold Setiadi

Yale Cabaret
November 14-16, 2019

Hair Today . . .

Review of Steel Magnolias, Music Theatre of Connecticut

The first thing to take in about the production of Steel Magnolias at Music Theater of Connecticut is how Jessie Lizotte’s set design has opened up the playing space, creating a beauty salon with several work areas, a reception desk, a waiting area, a hair dryer, and two doors, one inner and one to the outside. The shop is run by Truvy (Raissa Katona Bennett) in what was formerly a carport on her property and it provides an isle of sanity for a coterie of women in the town who drop in regularly to get their hair done and to chat about whatever might be going on in the town of Chinquapin, Louisiana.

Directed by Pamela Hill, this fine ensemble cast captures the rhythms of everyday talk in Robert Harling’s script and the movements about the shop, as side conversations and common discussions join, overlap or conflict, is vividly enacted. Which is a good thing because all the action takes place in the shop and it’s important we feel as at home there as these women do. There’s nothing claustrophobic or phony about Truvy’s. It is an impressive and effective space in which to watch this discursive comedy-drama unfold.

M’Lynn (Kaia Monroe), Annelle (Rachel Rival), Truvy (Raissa Katona Bennett), Shelby (Andrea Lynn Green) in MTC Mainstage production of Steel Magnolias (photo by Heather Hayes)

Taking place in two Acts, each with two scenes, the play’s chattiness provides a context for four key moments in the life of Shelby Eatenton (Andrea Lynn Green), the daughter of M’Lynn (Kaia Monroe) who is one of the mainstays at Truvy’s, along with Clairee Belcher (Cynthia Hannah), widow of the late mayor, and Ouiser Bourdeaux (Kirsti Carnahan), the local curmudgeon. In the first scene, we see preparations for Shelby’s marriage that afternoon and meet, as do the women, Annelle Dupuy-DeSoto, a new hairdresser Truvy hired more from pity than need. The young woman, it emerges, has been abandoned by her husband and is living at a rooming-house. Soon she is welcome as one of group, and changes in her status—from abandoned to engaged to expectant mother—mark the passage of time over the course of the play.

Clairee (Cynthia Hannah), foreground, Annelle (Rachel Rival), Ouiser (Kirsti Carnahan), background in MTC Mainstage production of Steel Magnolias (photo by Heather Hayes)

In that first scene we learn that Shelby has diabetes when she undergoes a hyperglycemic episode, which is dramatic but easily coped with. The main tension seems to be between Shelby’s “get on with life” attitude and her mother’s pricklier concerns. Monroe makes M’Lynn seem something of a wet blanket, more apt to be gently sarcastic rather than merry. The merriest is Clairee, who will do just about anything to get a rise out of Ouiser, her foil. Carnahan and Hannah do a lot to keep things lively. As Truvy, Bennett’s Dolly Parton-style hairdo makes her look brassier than she is; there’s a genuine openness in her dealings with Rachel, who, as played by Rival, is very sweet but not that bright. The main figure is Shelby, and Andrea Lynn Green, who played the cunning Maggie the Cat in MTC’s sharp Cat on a Hot Tin Roof last season, plays her as a young woman with a lot on her mind, clearly used to being the young one doted on by these older ladies. The big reveal at the end of Act One shows us that she will live her own life, even if it kills her.

Shelby (Andrea Lynn Green) in MTC Mainstage production of Steel Magnolias (photo by Heather Hayes)

In Act Two we learn of the consequences of Shelby’s decision to have a child despite her doctor’s warnings and against M’Lynn’s wishes. The first scene of Act Two, a year and a half since the end of Act One, seems to mark life as usual, except that Shelby, as everyone learns to their shock and concern, needs her mother in a very particular way, and that creates a spotlight for M’Lynn as she continues to be essential in her daughter’s life. Green makes Shelby’s exit touching as she manages to think of others while facing major surgery. The final act gives M’Lynn the focus as she has to accept her daughter’s outlook and believe it is for the best. Monroe keeps M’Lynn tightly wound so that her breakdown is the more powerful, the kind of letting go and recovery that only happens with trusted friends.

Truvy (Raissa Katona Bennett), M’Lynn (Kaia Monroe) in MTC Mainstage production of Steel Magnolias (photo by Heather Hayes)

Steel Magnolias is noted, I suspect, for its ability to bring out tears and hankies. Truvy says that one of the best emotions is “laughter through tears” and that’s the feeling the play aims for. While only M’Lynn and Shelby are family, these six women provide a family-like space for each other, a context of wisecracks and pep-talks and shared confidences that allows for both laughter and tears. M’Lynn, who the others think of as tough, can only go so soft; Clairee, the joker, has to find something to make the others laugh; Ouiser, who has “been in a very bad mood for forty years,” can’t go too touchy-feely. It’s a fine line of playing as cast in the little company they have created, with Truvy as the one who, no matter what’s going down, has to help the ladies find a look to meet it with. It’s a play about life, loss, love, and the importance of familiar routine played to perfection with this perfectly chosen cast.

Steel Magnolias
By Robert Harling
Directed by Pamela Hill

Scenic Design: Jessie Lizotte; Lighting Design: RJ Romeo; Costume Design: Diane Vanderkroef; Sound Design: Will Atkin; Prop Design: Merrie Deitch; Hair Design: Peggi De La Cruz; Stage Manager: Jim Schilling

Cast: Raissa Katona Bennett, Kirsti Carnahan, Andrea Lynn Green, Cynthia Hannah, Kaia Monroe, Rachel Rival

Music Theatre of Connecticut
November 8-24, 2019

The Artful Dodger

Review of Don Juan, Westport Country Playhouse

Molière’s version of Don Juan remains, after all this time, somewhat enigmatic. An antihero, Don Juan is an atheistic libertine who prides himself on seducing women and marrying and abandoning them serially. A new translation and adaptation by Brendan Pelsue, directed by David Kennedy at Westport Country Playhouse, inhabits a cartoonish world that almost saps any gravitas from Don Juan’s many interlocutors. For all his glib narcissicism, Don Juan, played by Nick Westrate with cool hauteur, is at least not afraid to acknowledge his own nature. Everyone else seems more or less a clown. Except perhaps that living statue (Paul DeBoy).

Don Louis (Philip Goodwin), Sganarelle (Bhavesh Patel), Don Juan (Nick Westrate) in Don Juan, Westport Country Playhouse (photo by Carol Rosegg)

The key clown, of course, is Sganarelle (Bhavesh Patel), a practiced lackey to Don Juan through whose view, more or less, the action unfolds. He’s always on the scene, he provides much joking commentary, and his reactions recall Bud Costello. As played by Patel, he’s principled, up to a point, and able to accommodate even the most unpleasant requests from his boss with a philosophic acceptance of his lot in life. He’s owed many back-wages and lets us know he has to play along to get his due. In this, he’s any of us who will stick with a status quo, no matter how undignified, in the hopes that it will pay off.

The fact that Sganarelle’s wages, should he ever be paid, are owed for the part he plays in his master’s unsavory way of life might give him pause, and might give us grounds to see that what Sganarelle earns is his just deserts. And yet one can’t help thinking that there’s insufficient high ground here with which to censure the agreeable fellow. Part Two opens with Sganarelle performing a service that one would think is about as low as it goes—except that it could be considered a role played by a parent to a child.

It’s not a groundless thought, since Don Juan tends to be childlike in his inability to, as they say, “commit.” He’s flighty and capricious almost in self-defense, to avoid any world in which he must grow up and mean what he says. Late in the play, his father, Don Louis (Philip Goodwin), pays him two visits to upbraid his wayward son and in both cases gets the short end of the stick, though in the second he thinks his son has reformed. Dona Elvira (Suzy Jane Hunt), Don Juan’s most recent wife whom he lured away from a convent, gets even more humiliating treatment in her two visits. Both characters, who might be taken as examples of the morality Don Juan deplores, are also, in their stock conventions, tiresome company who deserve to be the butt of a joke.

And that’s finally what gives this updated, world premiere adaptation its bite. Pelsue lets Molière’s sense of human foible undermine anyone who might stand above anyone else. Once upon a time, that outlook met with censorship, causing certain parts of the play to be suppressed. Now, we’re familiar, in our carnival democracy, with the notion that an even playing-field means everyone’s the lowest common denominator, and to suggest otherwise, as Don Juan sees, is to be hypocritical.

Beggar (Philip Goodwin), Don Juan (NIck Westrate) in Don Juan, Westport Country Playhouse (photo by Carol Rosegg)

And yet, for all its ironies, the play isn’t cynical. It sets two or three saving graces or higher laws against the naked self-interest of its hero. One is the question of what one owes to one’s God or one’s faith, enacted here by a Beggar (Goodwin) who won’t blaspheme even for the sake of a gold coin Don Juan tempts him with. Another is the question of honor, which comes up in the comic disputation between Don Carlos (Jordan Bellow), whom Don Juan saved from assault, and his brother Don Alonzo (Bobby Roman), who says the brothers must kill Don Juan for his treatment of their sister Dona Elvira. Molière is able to mock such honor codes while also showing how fidelity to them makes things fairer. And the brothers, in their phlegmatic discourse in the midst of a vendetta, are delightful fun.

Don Carlos (Jordan Bellow), Don Alonzo (Bobby Roman) in Don Juan, Westport Country Playhouse (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Finally, there is love. Don Juan seems incapable of it and indifferent to it when it comes to him from another, but there is a sense in which the profligate’s fate is earned by his disdain of those truly concerned for him, like his father and Dona Elvira and even, at least for the sake of his wages, Sganarelle. Don Juan flaunts God, honor and love and goes to his end wondering what all the fuss was about.

Kennedy’s treatment of the material moves quickly and throws several vivid clowns at us. Besides the indefatigable Sganarelle, there’s Carson Elrod as a peasant Pierrot, who is energetically dim, and as the creditor Dimanche who is out of his depth. There’s Ariana Venturi as Charlotte, the suitably dim beloved of Pierrot who lets herself get romanced by Don Juan—and Venturi gets credit for giving the character a sufficient hint of depth to suggest she might just be the jewel in the mud Don Juan pretends he takes her for. As Mathurine, another woman whom Don Juan has promised to marry, Claudia Logan is scrappy and energetic, and, as the Ghost, quite a vision.

Pierrot (Carson Elrod), Charlotte (Ariana Venturi) in Don Juan, Westport Country Playhouse (photo by Carol Rosegg)

The costumes by Katherine Roth and the set designs by Marsha Ginsberg are equally colorful, combining a flair for amusing touches, like Don Juan’s T-shirt with “narcissist,” printed to be read by the shirt’s wearer, and the piles of plastic bags of trash next to a Coke machine in the scene with the peasants, or Don Juan’s gold lamé suit and a background Fragonard in the first scene.

Dona Elvira (Suzy Jane Hunt), Don Juan (Nick Westrate) in Don Juan, Westport Country Playhouse (photo by Carol Rosegg)

The play’s Second Part is shorter and lacks the outright fun of the First Part and that’s where we start to sense that the cavalier tone of the play was a distraction from something more dire. A comeuppance will come. Whether you like him or not, there is a certain sexiness in Don Juan’s insistence that girls just wanna have fun and that he shouldn’t deny himself to any who are so inclined. And, anyway, he’s not nearly as vile as a contemporary libertine like Jeffrey Epstein. Still, the conclusion shows that belittling the claims of others is if no avail at the final judgment.

Don Juan
By Molière
A world premiere translation and adaptation by Brendan Pelsue
Directed by David Kennedy

Scenic Design: Marsha Ginsberg; Costume Design: Katherine Roth; Lighting Design: Matthew Richards; Original Music & Sound Design: Fitz Patton; Fight Director/Intimacy Coach: Michael Rossmy; Associate Scenic Design: Samuel Vawter; Props Supervisor: Karin White; Production Dramaturg: Dana Tanner-Kennedy; Production Stage Manager: Shane Schnetzler

Cast: Jordan Bellow, Paul DeBoy, Carson Elrod, Philip Goodwin, Suzy Jane Hunt, Claudia Logan, Bhavesh Patel, Bobby Roman, Ariana Venturi, Nick Westrate

Westport Country Playhouse
November 5-23, 2019

Frankenstein Revisited

Review of Manual Cinema’s Frankenstein, Yale Repertory Theatre No Boundaries Series

It may be surprising to see Mary Shelley’s cautionary novel about the overweening hubris of those who would play God in a time of scientific advance altered to become a story of the importance of nurturing in a time of anxiety about the future, but that’s what Manual Cinema’s Frankenstein, at Yale’s University Theatre as part of the No Boundaries Series, offers. By linking the death of Clara, the child of Mary (Sarah Fornace)  and Percy Shelley (Leah Casey), after weeks of life, with the reanimation of dead tissue undertaken by Mary’s famed hero, goggle-eyed Victor Frankenstein (Fornace), this version of the Gothic story becomes a sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy of bereavement.

That thematic interest, however, does get lost a bit in the trappings of the familiar horror-story genre that Manual Cinema, an experimental theater troupe from Chicago, also freely borrows from. “The Creature” created by Victor in his lab has become known popularly as “the Frankenstein monster” or simply Frankenstein, and that makes for an expectation of moody castles and grave-digging and callous crimes (all lovingly evoked). In Shelley’s version, the Creature does some horrible things to Victor’s family in revenge for how his “father” treated him; here, the Creature is more sinned-against than sinning and therein lies a key difference—though the fate of the family he encounters, including the requisite friendly blindman, is unclear to me, their house is torched.

Manual Cinema’s Creature, who is misshapen but childlike, is a puppet, a live actor (Kara Davidson) and a shadow puppet. That should indicate the range of what this incredibly inventive and entertainingly creative troupe manages to manifest to our wonderment. Their key technique is creating a film live, using shadow puppets, actual puppets, live actors, and a handful of musicians on the front of the stage playing the score of this silent film/theatrical event live. At one point, shadow puppets give way to actor-shadows in a subtle sleight-of-hand. Visually rich and complex, the show is a compelling hybrid of theater and film.

Leah Casey in Manual Cinema’s Frankenstein (photos by Elly White, Michael Brosilow at Court Theatre, Chicago, from Manual Cinema website)

The audience can concentrate on the projections (which is Rasean Davonte Johnson’s métier) while stealing glances at the group upstage who are making those visuals happen. Camera work can be astounding, with close-ups of the Creature both unsettling and full of pathos, and Furnace’s tendency to press close to the camera becomes an emotive crux much like certain stylized facial expressions in silent films. Indeed, the only language in the film comes from silent-movie placards containing Shelley’s text and the only voice heard is the lovely, ethereal vocals of Leah Casey.

The score, by Ben Kauffman and Kyle Vegter, uses percussion in a mood-creating way and all the musicians, led by Peter Ferry, make percussive sounds as well as playing flutes, clarinets, cello and piano. The texture of the sounds and the texture of the visuals make for a seamless, immersive experience and that, more than story per se, is the most fascinating aspect of the show. The sound design (by the composers) and the visual design (Johnson), including costumes and wigs by Mieka Van Der Ploeg and lighting by Claire Chrzan, with puppetry by Lizi Breit and props by Lara Musard, is remarkable throughout and almost preternatural in effect. To help satisfy your curiosity about how the 90+ minute multimedia epic you’ve just seen was done, the audience is invited up onto the stage after the show to tour the props, puppets, screens, cameras, costumes and instruments.

Peter Ferry in Manual Cinema’s Frankenstein (photos by Elly White, Michael Brosilow at Court Theatre, Chicago, from Manual Cinema website)

Does the show offer a fully satisfying realization of Shelley’s famed creation? The manner of the story is incredibly well-conveyed, with the dark atmosphere and great backgrounds apropos to the Gothic imagination. The prologue—about the birth and loss of Clara and the storied summer in 1816 vacationing on Lake Geneva when the Shelleys, along with Lord Byron and his personal physician, were each challenged to create “a ghost story,” that led to Mary writing Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus—makes for a slow start, though it’s key to the concept by Drew Dir (and the depiction of Byron and Shelley as dudes of our day grabs laughs).

The insistence, in this all female cast, on Victor mirroring Mary makes for a refreshing spin, a way for Mary to appease the ghosts of her dead mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died shortly after Mary’s birth, and her own dead daughter (no mention is made of William, the child born to the Shelleys in 1816). The effort by Romantic studies to possess this material has led to all sorts of conjectures about Mary’s relation to her characters. Manual Cinema’s take seems much in-keeping with the notion of Mary Shelley as the hero of her own story, and thus akin to the mad genius who gave birth to one of the most enduring, mysterious and chilling figures in English literature.

Frankenstein
Adapted from the novel by Mary Shelley
Concept by Drew Dir
Devised by Drew Dir, Sarah Fornace, and Julia Miller
Original music by Ben Kauffman and Kyle Vegter

Storyboards: Drew Dir; Music and Sound Design: Ben Kauffman and Kyle Vegter; Shadow Puppet Design: Drew Dir and Lizi Breit; Projections and Scenic Design: Rasean Davonte Johnson; Costume and Wig Design: Mieka Van Der Ploeg; Lighting Design: Claire Chrzan; 3D Creature Puppet Design: Lizi Breit; Prop Design: Lara Musard; Stage Manager, Video Mixing, and Live Sound Effects: Shelby Glasgow; Assistant Stage Manager: Kate Hardiman; Sound Engineer: Mike Usrey

Cast: Leah Casey, Maren Celest, Kara Davidson, Sarah Fornace, Myra Su

Musicians: Peter Ferry, percussion; Michael Chen, clarinets, aux percussion; Rachael Dobosz: flutes, aux percussion, piano; Lia Kohl: cello, aux percussion, vocals

Yale Repertory Theatre
No Boundaries Series
November 7-9, 2019

As On A Darkling Plain

Review of Retreat from Moscow, New Haven Theater Company

One of the more subtle and satisfying aspects of William Nicholson’s Retreat from Moscow, playing for two more shows tonight and tomorrow at New Haven Theater Company, directed by Margaret Mann and John Watson, is the way this play about a fraying marriage of thirty-three years is filtered through the view of the couple’s thirty-two year-old son, an only child who lives alone. At some point—usually when parents are old enough to see their children as adults—offspring see their parents as the results of decisions made long ago. When the key decision made—to marry—comes into question, then everything is up for grabs.

Because Nicholson and his characters are British, the tone of the play is apt to feel a touch mannered to American audiences. Directors Mann and Watson, with their effectively thoughtful cast, render the tonalities of the couple and son with deft moments of characterization. Kiel Stagno, as Jamie (the son), is quite good at wearing the look of patient attentiveness that his mother, Alice (Susan Kulp), has come to rely on as she sets out one grievance or another. It may be her treatment at the hands of an indifferent serviceperson at a computer store, it may be her husband’s insistence on doing the crossword puzzle when she would rather talk. Alice, who loves to intone classic British poetry, from the Metaphysicals to the Victorians, is what is generally called “high-strung,” which means that, even when she means to be ingratiating she is more likely to be grating.

Edward (George Kulp), Alice (Susan Kulp), Jamie (Kiel Stango) in New Haven Theater Company’s production of The Retreat from Moscow, directed by Margaret Mann & John Watson

Dad is Edward (George Kulp) who seems the epitome of the unassuming spouse, a kind of silent partner to his wife’s expressive sallies, some at his expense. He tends to be apologetic but also can’t see why his behavior is an issue. Alice is the type of woman who simply assumes she knows better—and so her son can’t really not believe in God, and her husband can’t really find soldiers’ journals written during the Napoleonic retreat from Moscow as fascinating as he claims. Of course there’s a God and going to church is a way to entreat his mercy, and of course Edward’s interests are really just a means to avoid doing something she’d rather he do.

The revelation that Edward at first addresses to his son sets up the play’s main device. Jamie is put in the middle, as go-between, as counselor, as put-upon support staff. That he lives a good drive away, in London, and has little interest in visiting “home” with such regularity is simply a fact. He’s a good son, or trying hard to be, and his patience is laudable. As the play goes on, we begin to understand the extent to which this event—his parents’ estrangement—marks him deeply not only because of what he has to learn about them, but also what that teaches him about himself.

Alice (Susan Kulp), Edward (George Kulp) in The Retreat from Moscow, NHTC

Not particularly witty or acerbic, much of the energy of Nicholson’s play comes from Susan Kulp’s portrayal of Alice as a woman desperately trying to make the past contain the future. Twice she moans about what will become of her when she’s old. On one level she’s the embodiment of the idea of marriage as an insurance policy, taken out in youth, that will pay benefits throughout one’s lifetime. Watching her learn to cope is lively—from changing her wardrobe, to getting a dog, called “Eddie,” that she can command, to wielding a sharp knife with devil-may-care casualness. Edward’s role, in its quieter dimensions, is a harder read. George Kulp gives to Edward’s speeches a uniform intensity of guilty reflection punctuated with breathy hope that seems to give the lie to his view that he’s found new meaning. And that makes us wonder till the end if a rapprochement might suddenly emerge.

The lighting of this spare but attractive set adds to the play’s impact. The feeling of domestic spaces as “sets” for private drama complements Jamie’s role as a stand-in for the playwright, a role that we see Stango grow into before our very eyes. We are made aware of how Jamie’s perceptions of this unexpected development in his parents’ lives becomes a means to doing them homage, in all their messy, human inadequacy.

Once again New Haven Theater Company finds a worthwhile domestic drama that suits their intimate playing space and capably naturalistic actors.

The Retreat from Moscow
By William Nicholson
Directed by Margaret Mann & John Watson

Cast: George Kulp, Susan Kulp, Kiel Stango

Stage Manager/Board Op: Stacy Lupo

Special thanks to Wendy Marans as dialect coach and Liz Saylor, costumes

New Haven Theater Company
October 31-November 9, 2019

One Big Happy Family

Review of Cry It Out, Hartford Stage

Human services. What does that phrase make you think of? Care of the sick, disabled, elderly? What about the form of care that is among the most time-consuming and anxiety-ridden: the care of newborn children. Molly Smith Metzler’s Cry It Out, now at Hartford Stage in a delightful production directed by Rachel Alderman, gets the rigors of the latter “service” exactly right, making comic drama of the way we tend to make light of all the potential heartache that comes with being the adults in the room.

The show features my earliest choice in this season of Connecticut theater for outstanding performance: Rachel Spencer Hewitt plays new mom Jessie with a voice pitched perpetually in wonderment at what’s become of her. She’s a  latter-day “angel in the house,” a doting mother who nearly lost her baby pre-birth, a successful lawyer (this could be partnership year) who is learning she might rather remain at home, and sometimes she can let herself go, abetted by the brash, comic, and spot-on support of Evelyn Spahr’s Lina, the next-door new mom. This can-do duo becomes regulars in the backyard playground, a circular arena of scrappy grass beneath silhouettes of townhouses, with a graceful space between, in Kristen Robinson’s handsome set. There these breast-feeding buddies find that, despite their differences in background and paygrade, they can actually talk to each other about the one thing they both really care about: being a mom.

Jessie (Rachel Spencer Hewitt), Lina (Eveylyn Spahr) in Hartford Stage’s production of Cry It Out, directed by Rachel Alderman (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

What makes the play work so well is the way these two gifted performers, under Alderman’s feel for human foible, fully inhabit Smith Metzler’s funny and perceptive script. Jessie and Lina could be caricatures but they are knowing enough to know that, and that gives them a personal irony and exuberance that’s fun and infectious, even when they have to vent about things like Lina’s alcoholic mother-in-law or Jessie’s husband’s sudden need to have a cottage on Montauk next to his parents. The first scene plays out best simply because we’re happy to overhear the way these two outgoing women get on.

Mitchell (Erin Gann) in Hartford Stage’s production of Cry It Out (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The complications come in two forms. One is the need to return to work—Lina’s date is already set—to keep both two-income households running, and that means the days of their joyful routine are numbered. The other is an odd request from the well-heeled neighbor up the hill. Mitchell (Erin Gann), a nice suit in a rush to make a train, barges in on them like a walking explosion of awkwardness, his gesturing hands and glancing eyes moving everywhere at once. His request: could he set up a playdate between his wife, a new mom having trouble coping (despite a support staff), and these two comfortably at-home mommies?

When we finally meet his wife Adrienne (Caroline Kinsolving), she’s the proverbial third wheel. She’s not into anything the others are into, she exudes professional froideur, and she’s exactingly rude and contemptuous. At first we might think this very successful jewelry designer is only there to be a foil, giving Lina someone to mock and Jessie someone to feel sorry about. And she is that, but she’s also going to give the requisite speech that lets us know what makes the mean girl mean. That moment, near the end, is not all it could be—Kinsolving keeps Adrienne cool even when she’s literally throwing eggs—but her speech does offer a cautionary point about stones and living in glasshouses.

Lina (Evelyn Spahr), Jessie (Rachel Spencer Hewitt), Adrienne (Caroline Kinsolving) in Hartford Stage’s production of Cry It Out (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Underneath all the banter and the angst about letting down the child is, perhaps, some idea like Tolstoy’s famed line: “all unhappy families are unique in their unhappiness.” Which is to say that not only do we all fail to be perfect parents, but that the way each of us fails isn’t something that can be fixed by some all-purpose remedy. Like the “cry it out” method of getting an infant to go to sleep, the choices parents make tend to be policed in odd ways by an implied collectivity. In watching parents with their children (or, in this case, hearing discussions of spouses and children), there’s always a detail or two that screams “socialization.” And that’s what keeps us in this game. Whether or not you are a parent, some version(s) of a parent raised you. And you wonder how it might all have gone differently.

And if you are a parent it’s hard to imagine that you won’t find much here to amuse you and maybe choke you up. In particular, Smith Metzler is able to evoke—in Spencer Hewitt’s giddy domestic rapture, self-conscious but pure—what it’s like to spend time with an infant on a daily basis. If you haven’t had that pleasure in a while, be prepared to have your memory renewed. And if you have, maybe even more so.

Jessie (Rachel Spencer Hewitt), Lina (Evelyn Spahr) in Hartford Stage’s production of Cry It Out (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Smith Metzler is also sure enough of her material—and of an audience at child-rearing age—to end with an interrogative. Many plays today try to prod us into thinking about the practices of exclusion and inclusion in our society. Cry It Out takes that question down to a basic formulation: how long should we keep our children to ourselves and how soon should we put them out there with everyone else?

Cry It Out
By Molly Smith Metzler
Directed by Rachel Alderman

Scenic Design: Kristen Robinson; Costume Design: Blair Gulledge; Lighting Design: Matthew Richards; Sound Design: Karin Graybash; Dramaturg: Shaila Schmidt; Casting: Laura Stancyzk, CSA; Production Stage Manager: Kelly Hardy; Assistant Stage Manager: Chandalae Nyswonger; Production Manager: Bryan T. Holcombe

Cast: Evelyn Spahr, Rachel Spencer Hewitt, Erin Gann, Caroline Kinsolving

Hartford Stage
October 24-November 17, 2019

Postwar Reunion

Review of A Shayna Maidel, Playhouse on Park

Every family has its injustices, I suppose. But when historical tragedy becomes a factor, the injustice can be huge. In A Shayna Maidel by Barbara Lebow, now playing at Playhouse on Park directed by Dawn Loveland Navarro, the overt differences between two Jewish sisters has to do with their experiences during the period of the Holocaust. The upshot of it all is how family can endure, but the path to that conclusion is tangled and, in this production, a bit confusing.

After a mostly purposeless prologue showing the birth of Mordechai Weiss in 1876, during a pogrom in Poland, we leap ahead to 1946 and the rather spacious West Side apartment of Rose Weiss (Laura Sudduth). Mordechai (Mitch Greenberg), her 70 year-old father, tells her that her older sister, Lusia Pechenik, is coming to New York at last. The sisters haven’t seen each other since Rose was four, in the 1920s. That’s when Mordechai left his native Poland to seek his fortune in America. He took the baby, but left Lusia behind with Mama (Krista Lucas) because the older girl was sick. Then came the Great Depression, then the rise of Nazism in Germany and the invasion of Poland. Most of the Weiss family became casualties in the Holocaust.

Rose, the “lovely girl” of the title, has little memory of Poland and little interest in her absent sister, apparently. Her reaction to her father’s peremptory commands that she take in Lusia, give her the bedroom, sleep on the couch and learn to keep kosher is a bit of a panic attack, as if she’s going to be visited by a housekeeping critic. As played by Laura Sudduth, Rose lacks any appreciable Jewishness. She has a bit of what might be considered a New York accent and is thoroughly assimilated. Lusia, when she arrives, looks and sounds like we expect a Jewish Polish refugee would. There are some amiable moments of bonding, most notably a picnic on the rug.

Lusia Pechenik (Katharina Schmidt), Rose Weiss (Laura Sudduth), Mordechai Weiss (Mitch Greenberg) in Playhouse on Park’s production of Barbara Lebow’s A Shayna Maidel (photo by Meredith Longo)

Lusia has a little notebook in which the fate of all family members has been dutifully recorded. Mordechai has his notebook as well and makes a notation as Lusia doggedly reads out the litany of who was murdered when and in which place of internment. It’s a revealing moment: Mordechai acts as if the fates of those left behind—while he was getting by in New York, remember—is a bit of historical detail, satisfying a vague curiosity. He and Rose really only react to the specifics of Mama’s demise. Lusia, on the other hand, reads each name and fate—including the uncertainty about the fate of her husband Duvid and the date of their child’s death—as though each is a stake through the heart.

Lusia speaks halting English in New York, and, in flashbacks with Duvid (Alex Rafala) and her girlhood friend Hanna (Julia Tochin), speaks Yiddish that we hear as fluent English. The scenes in the past show us a lively, vibrant young woman; in the scenes in New York we see an anxious, depressed, but forceful mature woman. The best reason for seeing the Playhouse production is Schmidt’s performance. She gives the personality of Lusia a vividness that helps greatly to keep this slow story moving, making it a moving experience, ultimately—particularly when Lusia reads to Rose a letter written to her lost daughter by Mama. A dead mother’s letter to a child is a sure way to break out the hankies.

Lusia Pechenik (Katharina Schmidt), seated, Rose Weiss (Laura Sudduth), standing in A Shayna Maidel at Playhouse on Park (photo by Meredith Longo)

Another strength of the show is Greenberg’s dapper and somewhat feckless Mordechai. He appears to be a survivor who bears little guilt. A late reveal tells us much about his nature; certainly, he couldn’t have predicted the Depression that would make it impossible to pay the fare for his wife and other daughter, and certainly he couldn’t know what was going to become of the Jews in Poland, but, when confronted by Lusia about his refusals to accept monetary help, his manner is to act the aggrieved one. Greenberg delivers perfectly the self-absorbed patriarch, more concerned with his status in the new country than his obligations to the old.

Much of the play—at which Rose is mostly a bystander—seems structured to render Lusia’s life and to enact an ultimate reconciliation with Mordechai. Some sequences, such as a dream of the entire family present for the marriage/reunion of Lusia and Duvid, seem simply a contrived effort to lighten the mood. As Duvid, Alex Rafala, in his third show at Playhouse on Park, renders well the chastened hopes Duvid brings to a late scene.

There’s a discursiveness to Lebow’s scenes that feels a bit like a television script. Navarro’s production, with its blackouts for scene changes and faithful rendering of the play, could have done the material a favor by trimming scenes and finding quicker transitions. The story’s power—as a dramatic rendering of refugee hardships, and of America as a necessary destination for immigrants, and as an important chapter in the trials of a Jewish family—should allow audiences to overlook the production’s defects in favor of its deeply human resonance.

A Shayna Maidel
By Barbara Lebow
Directed by Dawn Loveland Navarro

Scenic Designer: David Lewis; Lighting Designer: Marcus Abbott; Sound Designer: Kirk Ruby; Costume Designer: Lisa Steier; Stage Manager: Mollie Cook; Props Artisan/Set Dresser: Eileen OConnor

Cast: Mitch Greenberg, Krista Lucas, Alex Rafala, Katharina Schmidt, Laura Sudduth, Julia Tolchin

Playhouse on Park
October 30-November 17, 2019

Broken-Promise Land

Review of Pass Over, Collective Consciousness Theatre

Beneath the skyline of New Haven—look, there’s the Connecticut Financial Center and the Knights of Columbus building and some of Yale’s gothic spires—sits an end-of-the-road alley/corner. Here, two homeless African American teens, Moses (Tenisi Davis) and Kitch (Stephen Gritz King) hangout, making the most of each other’s company as, seemingly, the only surviving family either has. The tone of their exchanges is familiar and jokey, full of the banter of brothers. In Pass Over, now playing for one more weekend at Collective Consciousness Theatre at Erector Square, playwright Antoinette Nwandu achieves a poetic language that feels real but that is also stylized in interesting, ear-catching ways. Put simply, the two youths are street poets and listening to them entertain each other is very entertaining.

But there’s a sense of dejection as well. While the occasional burst of a police siren inspires quick postures of defense or concealment, these two live in constant denial of how dire their circumstances are. They like to play a wish-fulfillment game called “Promised Land Top Ten,” an enumerated list of ten comforts that either might hope to find having “passed over” into the promised land.

Directed by Jenny Nelson, Davis and King have a cautious and canny directness, an innocence that is reassuring, given their circumstances, and, deliberately, a hint of the existentialist gallows humor of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Which means that the repetitious routines the duo indulge in are Nwandu’s way of equating the bleak lack of prospects of Beckett’s post-war tramps with two urban outsiders who have survived—so far—a general war upon nonwhite populations. At the same time, the script eschews any sense of deliberate echo (as, for instance, having the two wait for a connection for a job or drugs or a communication) to let us ponder what passing time to no purpose feels like.

At last someone does turn up. Mister (Griffin Kulp) is a gosh and golly caricature of a privileged white, complete with picnic basket, who has strayed into an unfamiliar part of town. The interaction with Mister can feel a bit overly cautious, as if some kind of street cred test is being faced simply by talking to, much less taking food from, such an offensively benign figure. Moses, the one more concerned with his image and—perhaps—a sense of dignity that comes with his name, finds Kitch’s eager and obsequious attitude an affront. And so the scene plays out comically with any possible understanding on either side buried under layers of awkward pretense.

Left to their own devices again, the pay-off is Moses trying to school Kitch in how to sound white. The realization has dawned that their preference for identifying themselves and each other by what Mister euphemistically calls “the n-word” makes them sound suspect. As if to prove this point, a cop called Ossifer (Kulp) shows up and is at first fooled by the boys’ new tone, only to become even more hostile when he sees them as the hapless street kids they are. The scene plays out as (almost) the worst of their nightmares since nothing they can say for themselves can appease a judge who would convict them simply for being themselves.

The play’s conclusion is swift and comes with a shock. The tragedy for Moses and Kitch, Nwandu says, is not simply due to the fact that police mistreat and abuse African Americans, but because the society Mister represents requires a bullying wall between the whites’ complacent abundance and everyone they exclude. The conclusion is fully in-keeping with Nwandu’s gift for emblematic theater.

In essence, Pass Over is a morality play in which a hell-on-earth is contrasted with the promised land of the boys’ imagination and in which the trials of this life—in the form of empowered white men—are figures for temptation: the temptation of assimilation, the temptation of subservience, the temptation of uprising. In the latter case, the act of violence comes from daring to stop waiting for nothing in an effort to pass over to a better future.

Another strong installment in the Collective Consciousness repertoire, Pass Over marks the welcome return of Tenisi Davis, who memorably played the mercurial Booth in 2017’s Topdog/Underdog and of director Jenny Nelson whose bracing staging of Marco Ramirez’s The Royale closed the 2018-19 season. First produced in 2017, Pass Over provides a contemporary play that has much to say to many American cities, like New Haven, where the racial divide runs deep.

Pass Over
By Antoinette Nwandu
Directed by Jenny Nelson

Stage Manager: Ashley Sweet; ASM/Propsmaster: Molly Flanagan; Set Design: David Sepulveda, Jamie Burnett and Amie Zinder; Lighting Design: Jamie Burnett; Costume Design: Carol Koumbaros; Sound Design: Tommy Rosati; Producer: Dexter J. Singleton

Cast: Tenisi Davis, Stephen Gritz King, Griffin Kulp

Collective Consciousness Theatre
October 24-November 10, 2019

Surviving with the Simpsons

Review of Mr. Burns, a post-electric play, Yale School of Drama

Post-disaster stories—often called ‘post-apocalyptic’—are fairly common these days. Some kind of global catastrophe—which may involve zombies, aliens, superheroes, angels, demons, mutants, environmental mismanagement, war, or what-have-you—destroys the world as we know it and we get to imagine what kind of world will follow. Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, a post-electric play, the first show of the Yale School of Drama’s 2019-20 season, varies the approach with interesting if not always intelligible results. It’s a play less about how humans endure in survivalist mode, and more about how the cultural reference points we may take for granted—like television and theater—will be affected. The play’s effect, in this busy production directed by Kat Yen, is at times funny, at times confusing, and finally beautiful, and its tone seems to be one of reflection with gestures at satire and suspense.

The phrase “post-electric” is key. Without electricity—which has been wiped out somehow and which causes nuclear power plants to fail with calamitous results—people can’t watch anything except each other. The play opens with a small group gathered around a makeshift hearth: a fire in a trash can. Sitting on mismatched chairs, including a sofa, Matt (Anthony Holiday), Maria (Ilia Isorelýs Paulino) and Jenny (Madeline Seidman) are reminiscing about a certain episode of Matt Groening’s celebrated cartoon phenomenon, The Simpsons (the episode that’s a take-off on the film Cape Fear) while Sam (Reed Northrup) patrols the perimeter with a gun. Eventually they are joined by Gibson (Dario Ladani Sanchez), a wanderer who, after being treated at first with fear and suspicion, reports on his travels and what he’s seen of devastated areas, not too far from the theater we’re in.

Jenny (Madeline Seidman), Matt IAnthony Holiday), Maria (Ilia Isorelýs Paulino), Sam (Reed Northrup) in Yale School of Drama’s production of Mr Burns by Anne Washburn, directed by Kat Yen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

What emerges is a vague sense of how the world is fairing after a major meltdown. Most of which we can easily imagine thanks to all those apocalyptic films we’ve seen. Judging by their speech, the group is twentysomething and maintain their relation to the recent past in two ways: by recalling The Simpsons episode as a common reference point—Gibson, who claims he never saw an entire episode of the show, manages some details as well and does a killer Marge impression—and by reading lists of ten names apiece, with ages provided. This rollcall of the most valued dead or missing serves as a kind of memorial. We have a sense of randomness, of survival by sheer chance.

The best aspect of the opening scene—the play is comprised of three scenes in two acts—is the engaging recall of the “Cape Fear episode” (audience members with no knowledge of The Simpsons may find this opaque but entertaining). The comedy of the dialogue doesn’t seem a denial of the direness of the situation but rather the kind of bond that residents of McLuhan’s “global village” would exercise. And that sentiment must sustain us through the other scene of Act 1.

The long second scene is where things get murkier. Now joined by Colleen (Ciara Monique) who acts as director and Quincy (Jessy Yates) who is playing a woman who wants to take a bath as only women in TV commercials can, the group has become a troupe. They enact Simpsons episodes—like “Heretic Homer”—with commercials included. Rival troupes are discussed with a distressed sense of how to improve what we would call the market share. The main avenue to a successful show seems to be not talent or inspiration but budget, for props and effects and to “buy lines.” Apparently, post-electric writers will be those who can recall the lines from shows with accuracy, lines which have a certain talismanic appeal to the audience and players alike.

All this information comes to us through dialogue that also includes a Simpsons scene featuring Homer (played by Matt) and two FBI Agents (played by Colleen and Maria), the bath commercial (which includes Gibson as “Loving Husband,” and comedic efforts at Foley effects), and a spirited dance number by the entire cast that presents an imaginative mix-up of bits of hits with inventive moves (choreography by Michael Raine). All the movement—and the singing, particularly by Paulino, Sanchez, and Yates—is a welcome relief from the backstage chatter that Washburn exploits at length. The scene ends with the kind of climax that seems more gratuitous than dramatic.

Mr Burns (John Evans Reese), background; Homer (Madeline Seidman), Bart (Ciara Monique), Marge (Anthony Holiday), foreground in Yale School of Drama production of Mr. Burns (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

After intermission we get the final scene—75 years into the future—where the descendants of the people we’ve already met, presumably, are staging a musical pageant. It’s Simpsons-themed, of course, and retains elements from the TV-recall of Scene 2. Sideshow Bob, the evil threat in the “Cape Fear episode,” has morphed into Mr. Burns (John Evans Reese), a dastardly villain who, on the show, is Homer’s boss and the owner of a nuclear power plant. The showdown, with swords drawn, plays like Captain Hook vs. his nemesis Peter Pan, here Bart (Monique), with both Reese and Monique excellent in their multilayered roles. The confrontation takes place (as does the climax of the “Cape Fear episode”) on a ship (cleverly designed by scenic designer Bridget Lindsay) after Bart’s hapless family—Marge (Holiday), Lisa (Northrup), Homer (Seidman), and little Maggie (a doll)—have been ruthlessly dispatched.

The songs, accompanied by Liam Bellman-Sharpe, composer, and Bel Ben Mamoun, music director, in gowns with skullcaps, playing large, intricate, makeshift instruments, are a pastiche as well, with an elevated score from Michael Friedman. The irony that TV should “evolve” into Broadway-esque ritual is funny and, depending on your sensibilities, inspiring. Paulino, garbed like a sideshow Lady Liberty, impresses with the range of her vocals and her statuesque bearing. The costume for Mr. Burns is an even more striking fantasia, while the possible antecedents for other costumes (all by Stephen Marks) make for interesting conjecture. What, we may wonder, are the source materials for shows at some future point near the end of our century?

The cast of Mr. Burns works the show’s material as a gifted ensemble should. Presented in the round at the Iseman Theater, the play keeps us involved even when it seems to indulge itself rather than enlighten. The prospect of playing a makeshift troupe suits this young cast and vice versa. To bring off so well a show with so many moving parts and such an amorphous sense of mise en scène is a feat, and the final act—which inspires both gravitas and glee—shows director Yen’s knowing grasp of how theater must often transcend or transform its material. All for the sake of some unnamed quality that may endure even longer than The Simpsons.

Mr. Burns, a post-electric play
By Anne Washburn
Score by Michael Friedman
Lyrics by Anne Washburn
Additional music by Liam Bellman-Sharpe
Directed by Kat Yen

Choreographer: Michael Raine; Music Director: Bel Ben Mamoun; Scenic Designer: Bridget Lindsay; Costume Designer: Stephen Marks; Lighting Designer: Riva Fairhall; Sound Designer: Daniela Hart; Projection Installation Designer: Erin Sullivan; Production Dramaturg: Patrick Denney; Technical Director: Matthew Lewis; Stage Manager: Amanda Luke

Cast: Anthony Holiday, Ciara Monique, Reed Northrup, Ilia Isorelýs Paulino, John Evans Reese, Dario Ladani Sanchez, Madeline Seidman, Jessy Yates

Musicians: Liam Bellman-Sharpe, Bel Ben Mamoun

Yale School of Drama
October 26-November 1, 2019

Riding the Gravy Train

Review of Red Speedo, Yale Cabaret

We’re all familiar with the notion that the driving force in any contest is winning, winning at any cost. We’re also familiar with the ethical notion that “it’s not about winning or losing but how you play the game.” The implications of those two outlooks float upon the reflective surface of Lucas Hnath’s Red Speedo, the fifth show of Yale Cabaret’s current season. Directed by Eli Pauley, a third-year actor at Yale School of Drama, and played by four students in the program, Red Speedo is an in-your-face, tour de force of contested strategies, provocation—as both defense and attack—pleas, bullying, flailing and railing, outright lies, and fights, both verbal and physical. There is the prospect of great success, of scandal, of disgrace, and even of death. And all in the insular world of championship swimming.

Ray (Adam Shaukat) in Yale Cabaret’s production of Lucas Hnath’s Red Speedo, October 24-26, 2019

The red Speedo of the title, and nothing else but a serpent tattoo and a vacant expression, is worn throughout the play by Ray (Adam Shaukat), a swimmer who has climbed the ranks to be in competition for a place on the Olympic team. It’s the day before the final tryout and his times have been good. His brother Peter (Patrick Ball), a lawyer who may be about to give up his day job to be Ray’s manager and agent, full time, is in talks with Speedo about making Ray the company’s new spokesperson. But there’s a snag. As the play opens, Peter is talking a mile a minute, hectoring Ray’s coach (Brandon E. Burton) into seeing the reason for not letting any governing body know about the cooler full of enhancement drugs Coach found in his office. The bad publicity for the club could affect Ray adversely.

And that’s only the first of many ethical problems in this fraught and taut play. And each character, as Ray says late in the play in a moment of clarity, is kinda good and kinda bad. That means we get jerked around a lot in how we respond to what is being said and why. Peter, for all his bullish lack of subtlety (vividly enacted by Ball), seems to have Ray’s best interests at heart. Until we realize how much he has riding on Ray’s success, and, indeed, how little Ray has other than a body that is treated as a prize animal, groomed to perform at its peak. And that involves substances that Ray’s former girlfriend Lydia (Nefesh Cordero Pino), a physical therapist who lost her license thanks to Peter, provided him once upon a time.

The stress of all this is made quite palpable in the Cabaret production. We can see the toll it takes on each character to be called on the tiles, so to speak, to make his or her case. Along the way we see Ray get manipulated by everyone. Cordero Pino makes Lydia seem sympathetic, someone who has gotten out of Ray’s charmed circle the hard way and wants to stay out, but her position is negotiable, we learn. Coach, in a wonderfully varied reading by Burton, can be a source of strength but he’s also desperate in his reliance on what Ray’s success means to him, not just financially but as a badge of achievement.

Eventually Ray learns, to his chagrin, that even his faith in his ability and in his drugs is misplaced. Shaukat renders Ray’s humanity best when he’s most beset by confusion and opposed views, which is often. Ray is not quite as bereft of interiority as we may at first think, and others seem to assume. He’s a cipher on his way to becoming conscious.

There’s a deep abyss at that heart of this play, a sense of how the drive to be the best can be so tragically empty but also how meaningless any effort becomes when it entails a betrayal of every trust and every standard of merit. The grippingly violent struggle between Ray and Peter at the end, choreographed with great realism by Burton, is staggering in its visceral brutality, and, it seems, necessary to the play’s central truth: winner-takes-all means destroying your opponent. To paraphrase Pyrrhus, “Another victory like that and we are ruined.”

Red Speedo
By Lucas Hnath
Directed by Eli Pauley

Producer: Will Gaines; Scenic Designer: Elsa GibsonBraden; Lighting Designer: Evan C. Anderson; Costume Designers: David Mitsch, Yunzhu Zeng; Sound Designer: Emily Duncan Wilson; Dramaturg: Callie Frosburgh; Technical Director: HaoEn Hu; Stage Manager: Julia Bates; Fight Director: Brandon E. Burton

Cast: Patrick Ball, Brandon E. Burton, Nefesh Cordero Pino, Adam Shaukat

Yale Cabaret
October 24-26, 2019

It Seems Society is to Blame

Review of American Son, TheaterWorks

A woman sits alone checking her cellphone in the waiting area of a Miami police station. She’s clearly upset. An officer finally appears and confirms that her missing son’s car has been involved in an incident, with no further information. The woman is black, the officer, a baby-faced newbie, is white. Her efforts to get some definite information—such as her son’s whereabouts—meet with patient, evasive feints and excuses. We can believe the officer simply doesn’t know or that he doesn’t want her to know. She should just wait for the officer in charge.

Scott Connor (J Anthony Crane), Kendra Ellis-Connor (Ami Brabson) in TheaterWorks’ production of American Son (photo by Lanny Nagler)

Who arrives first is her estranged husband, an FBI agent and white, whom—while the woman is away getting a drink of water—the officer mistakes for the awaited Lieutenant and so immediately reveals more than he told the woman and also his discomfort with the aggressive black woman. Contrived? Yes, and what’s more it makes for a fuzziness that the play—American Son by Christopher Demos-Brown, now playing at TheaterWorks, directed by Rob Ruggiero—wants to maintain as a strength. Instead of giving us the officer’s clearly marked preference for speaking to a white father rather than a black mother, we get a deeply dumb mistaken identity.

Despite that and other ham-fisted efforts to push its audience’s buttons, American Son does one thing well: it dramatizes, thanks to Ami Brabson’s performance as Kendra Ellis-Connor, a mother’s mounting frustration at not getting answers, her terror at her worst fears, and her educated contempt for the automatic racist assumptions of by-the-book Officer Larkin (John Ford-Dunker). The anxiety parents feel for teens launching into adult life in these highly violent times is rendered well, and, as we learn more and more about the son’s recent actions, the fear of what might befall a black youth in an expensive car feels like a fait accompli given the times we live in.

And yet Demos-Brown’s script tries hard to place this investigation of racial profiling and police malfeasance in a neutral area where mistakes happen, and all are to blame. It implies that the real fault lies with how this interracial couple failed their son.

Scott Connor (J Anthony Crane), Kendra Ellis-Connor (Ami Brabson) in American Son, TheaterWorks (photo by Lanny Nagler)

Kendra Ellis-Connor is a smart, articulate psychologist. Her profession seems to have been chosen so she can mouth Psych 101 assessments of the difficulties an 18-year-old is having because his white father left his black mother for a white woman. And yet she finds it impossible to speak to the plodding Officer Larkin with anything less then barely suppressed hysteria, or, when asked to describe her son, she veers from rejection of his presumed tats, earrings and gold teeth, to his fondness for Emily Dickinson and “Puff the Magic Dragon.” (Demos-Brown’s idea of how to cut tension is to employ bathos. It’s his go-to tone more than once.)

The father, Scott Connor (J Anthony Crane), not only spells “privileged white” with his look and every word and move (Crane is very well-cast and looks the part), he’s very manly in his plans for his son’s future and in his testosterone-fueled rage at, first, that plodding officer, and, second, the lieutenant on the case, Stokes (Michael Genet), who is black. The tension in the fight scene, no matter how well enacted, feels like an imposition. Much of the escalation in anger has to do with a video clip on a smartphone that we can’t see and can barely hear. Suffice to say, it adds a sense of emergency.

Scott Connor (J Anthony Crane), Officer Paul Larkin (John Ford-Dunker) in American Son, TheaterWorks (photo by Lanny Nagler)

The earlier discussions between Scott and Kendra about their son, Jamal (including a reminiscence about how they disagreed about naming him!), pile up into a sketch of the only black kid at an elite school where he’s forced to be “the face of the race”; he resents his father’s desertion and, in retaliation, has begun to act “ghetto,” including a bumper-sticker on the Lexus his dad bought him that might be deemed incendiary to law officers. He’s a cipher at the center of all this.

As Officer Larkin, Ford-Dunker seems as doughy as the Dunkins he likes to imbibe. One suspects, from the first scene, that there might be a version of this play in which Officer Larkin can be perceived as hostile to or at least uncomfortable with black women, but director Ruggiero seems to steer this version of the play so that the officers are seen as exemplars of dogged patience rather than anything more abrasive. Even Stokes, who explodes at Scott’s provocations, maintains his professionalism, mostly. As Stokes, Genet is good with the man-to-man tone in his effort to calm Connor down, which only infuriates the unruly agent more, and his interactions with Brabson, in a bit of who can out-black whom, have the impatient energy of a decent man tired of being seen as a bad guy.

Kendra Ellis-Connor (Ami Brabson), Lieutenant John Stokes (Michael Genet) in American Son, TheaterWorks (photo by Lanny Nagler)

The end of all this—including an unlikely interlude in which Kendra asks Scott why he spoke to her when they first met—is a foregone conclusion. Still, Demos-Brown seems to pride himself on creating the most implausible, but just possible, scenario as the gotcha moment his play aims toward.

Which may invite one to reflect whether the outrageous injustices and bad choices that occur in real life become anything more than a basis for melodrama when invoked through contrived situations and ill-conceived characters. When awful things happen in life, survivors often remark “it felt like a movie” to underscore its seeming unreality. Rarely, if ever, does one say, if felt like a contrived one-act, but that’s what Demos-Brown provides, turning national tragedies into topical theater.

American Son
By Christopher Demos-Brown
Directed by Rob Ruggiero

Set Design: Brian Prather; Costume Design: Herin Kaputkin; Lighting Design: Matthew Richards; Sound Design: Frederick Kennedy; Fight Director: Michael Rossmy; Production Manager: Bridget Sullivan; Stage Manager: Kate J. Cudworth

Cast: Ami Brabson, J Anthony Crane, John Ford Dunker, Michael Genet

TheaterWorks
October 18-November 23, 2019

Love American Style

Review of On the Grounds of Belonging, Long Wharf Theatre

Maybe love is always dangerous. It risks exposure, it requires commitment—often life-changing—and it alters, sometimes subtly, sometimes outrageously, the status quo. But when the two lovers are men—one white, one black—in 1950s’ Houston, Texas, love comes with heavy threats.

Ricardo Pérez González’s On the Grounds of Belonging, in its world premiere at Long Wharf Theatre through November 3, directed with a great sense of space and energy and intimacy by David Mendizábal, is a rare achievement in its even-handed treatment of same-sex love and interracial love in a time when both were illegal in the U.S. and, worse, could provoke the kind of vicious hatred that has become highly visible in the twenty-first century. The play registers tellingly the tonality of the Jim Crow era without too much anachronism. It is something of a period play, but fired by the conviction of our own moment. And that makes for a vital evening of theater.

Russell MOntgomery (Calvin Leon Smith), Tom Ashton (Jeremiah Clapp) in Long Wharf Theatre’s production of On the Grounds of Belonging (photo T. Charles Erickson)

The opening sets the tone. We meet two regulars of the Red Room, a black gay bar: Russell Montgomery (Calvin Leon Smith) a bookish type often the object of the lust of Henry Stanfield (Blake Anthony Morris), a player with a florid manner. As they’re hanging out after a set by Tanya Starr (Tracey Conyer Lee), the kind of diva forever an inspiration to drag acts, with Hugh Williams (Thomas Silcott), a wonderfully canny onlooker, on the bar, a white woman comes to the door unexpectedly. Turns out the woman—to whom everyone present is obsequiously deferential at once—is Tom Aston (Jeremiah Clapp) in drag. He was set to perform at the Gold Room, the white gay bar across the street, but wants to hideout until a raid in progress there blows over.

Russell Montgomery (Calvin Leon Smith), On the Grounds of Belonging, Long Wharf Theatre (photo T. Charles Erickson)

In that first scene, Pérez González demonstrates a great feel for repartee among familiars and among the same when someone new—and socially different—arrives. The scene is engaging on several levels and Tom’s efforts to flirt with Russell are free of camp as they ratchet up the heat between them. We’re hooked on this budding romance, one that’s abetted by Hugh, but which must be concealed from Henry who, though he only trifles with Russell, would be affronted by his friend having an interracial affair. As Russell, Calvin Leon Smith displays a thoughtful intensity that makes his character an instant focus. This is his story, as we see his love for Tom lead him into new terrain.

Mooney Fitzpatrick (Craig Bockhorn), On the Grounds of Belonging, Long Wharf Theatre (photo T. Charles Erickson)

The dramatic stakes are further inflated by Mooney Fitzpatrick (Craig Bockhorn), owner of both bars and a character who is truly singular: a racist Southern gay man. The portrayal of this figure is a good indication of the quality of the writing and acting here. Mooney could be a one-dimensional bully or simply a foil, instead he has sympathetic moments and, like Hugh, a knowing sense of the mores of the area. He makes clear that, while gay bars may be tolerated, with occasional raids and beatings, interracial amours will bring on a lynching. And the way he sucks the air out of the room, treating all blacks as lackeys, lets us know where and when we are.

Hugh Williams (Thomas Silcott), On the Grounds of Belonging, Long Wharf Theatre (photo T. Charles Erickson)

A standout scene occurs late in the play when Hugh, dallying with a baseball bat, finally confronts Mooney in terms that make no bones about their enmity. It’s a satisfying rendering of how longstanding grievance can inspire succinct confrontation. As Tanya, Tracey Conyer Scott enjoys a moment of assertion as well, a key scene that shows how the indignities we see her face find their outlet in a command of others. Scott’s singing is a great plus as well, especially in a number that helps cut tension as the play transitions from lighter to darker.

Tanya Starr (Tracey Conyer Lee), Henry Stanfield (Blake Anthony Morris), On the Grounds of Belonging, Long Wharf Theatre (photo T. Charles Erickson)

The main set is a comfortable if simple bar with a leafy walkway above. There Tom and Russell have a touching moment of love set against fears of where their romance is taking them. The overtones of other “star-crossed” loves remain in play though without necessarily tending to tragedy. A scene of violence midway through, around a bed that served as the site of Russell and Tom’s first coupling, nicely juxtaposes the two sides of physical interaction—loving and fighting. The conclusion of that scene sets up a plot device that may cause a feeling of being a bit played, in the end. But then again, it’s not the end. Pérez González has said On the Grounds of Belonging is the first installment of a trilogy. Here’s hoping Long Wharf will bring us the next part when it’s ready.

The 2019-20 season finds new Artistic Director Jacob G. Padrón putting his mark on Long Wharf, an enduring theater that began in the mid-1960s (not too long after the period of On the Grounds of Belonging) with its eye on (in Board Chair Laura Pappano’s words) a “social-justice-activism-meets-art-to-spur-conversation vibe.” The breath of new life in the theater was evident on opening night, boding well for the transformation Padrón speaks of in the show’s program, with a season “highlighting an inclusive culture in all its complexities.” The season is off to an inspiring start.

On the Grounds of Belonging
By Ricardo Pérez González
Directed by David Mendizábal

Set Design: Wilson Chin; Costume Design: Ntokozo Fuzunina Kunene; Lighting Design: Cha See; Composition & Sound Design: Mauricio Escamilla; Fight & Intimacy Director: Unkledave’s Fight-House; Production Stage Manager: Bianca A. Hooi; Assistant Stage Manager: Amy Patricia Stern

Cast: Craig Buckhorn, Jeremiah Clapp, Tracey Conyer Lee, Blake Anthony Morris, Thomas Silcott, Calvin Leon Smith

Long Wharf Theatre
October 9-November 3, 2019