So, yesterday, Dave Itzkoff at the New York Times Arts Beat covered a show of paintings by Bob Dylan in which it appears—OK, it totally is—that some of the paintings are essentially copies of photographs, some of them famous. In our own Issue 6, Scott Warmuth's piece discussed how Dylan loves to tread the fine lines separating homage, appropriation, and—as Dylan's own album title has it—theft. That must be why Itzkoff himself gives Warmuth a little shoutout in the second-to-last paragraph. Thanks, Mr. Itzkoff. And thank you again, Scott, for writing such a great piece.
Quiet Desperation
“The mass of men,” wrote Thoreau, “lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” This might well be the signpost hanging over Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, a tale of the Pozorov sisters—Olga, Masha, and Irina—as they pine for a life of excitement in Moscow, their former home, while providing the only diversion for a military regiment garrisoned in a provincial Russian town. The drama of the play comes from allowing us into these lives long enough to watch everything change for the worse. A depressing prospect, indeed. Yet what makes it entertaining is Chekhov’s view of life as not essentially tragic, so that touches of humor and tenderness, of awkwardness and passion, and other displays of the pathos of personality, involve us but let us keep ourselves a bit distant. Chekhov’s sisters are stuck there, but we get to watch them for awhile then leave, and one’s feeling about the experience, in the end, is shaped by that final tableau of the trio clumped at the edge of the stage, so near they might almost step off and be free, joining us in the world we’re trapped in, but instead they remain there to mirror for us stoical resignation (Olga), shattered romance (Masha), and dashed hopes (Irina).
Much rides on the last because, as the youngest, Irina is still too young to be crushed and, in this more brisk than yearning version now playing at the Yale Repertory Theatre, translated by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Les Waters with the Berkeley Rep, she gives us a vision of “the modern woman” forced to make her way herself. We might well say that the death of the dream of a nostalgia-tinged Moscow that no longer exists, and the desire, in Irina, “to work” and, in Olga, “to know,” and the acceptance, in Masha, “to live,” indicate an improvement in their condition at last.
The best thing about this production is Ruhl’s thoughtful translation which manages to bypass some of the more stilted aspects of translated Chekhov, albeit with liberties—would the doctor really say “shtupping”?—that mostly serve comic purposes. The feel of the language seems right for the characters, so that even the philosophizing seems character-driven rather than abstract. Though that’s not to say the production has mastered the play. The main problem is that there’s too much stage, too much space. The production has to work hard to create any sense of intimacy on the University Theater stage, and I’ve rarely been so aware, watching a play, of characters as actors standing in place to speak. This was particularly the case in the final Act outdoors where the set’s huge and uninviting porch simply overwhelmed what the scene needs to express.
Earlier scenes fare better: the best being Act Three in the upstairs bedroom while a fire rages in the town, and the first half keeps the action moving with liveliness between intimate conversations in the foreground and activity at the large diningroom table upstage, and yet, in the opening night show, there was a static quality that seemed to get between us and these people we’ve dropped in on. The times when we were made to feel like privileged onlookers worked best—Irina being petted by Chebutykin, Vershinin reacting to a message about his wife, the sisters gossiping about their brother Andrei—and one of the marvels of the play is that every character—in a cast of thirteen—gets at least one “moment” to impress a personality upon us.
For that reason, it’s a play where “the support” is extremely important, and much commendation goes to James Carpenter as the fond, drunk, irascible, and perhaps even wise Chebutykin, to Sam Brelin Wright as the dour, mocking and ultimately dangerous Lermontov-wannabe Solyony, to Barbara Oliver, a figure of focused pathos as the used-up servant Anfisa, to Richard Farrell as the servant Ferapont, exhausted by indulging his superiors’ whims, and especially to Emily Kitchens as the repellently selfish Natasha, first Andrei’s fiancée, then wife, whose passive aggressiveness and single-minded conquest of the Pozorov household is both comic and chilling. A word too for the young soldiers: as the boisterous Fedotik, Brian Wiles knows how to fill a space, and as the more bashful Rode, Josiah Bania made the most of his parting echoes.
In the larger roles, Keith Reddin's Kulygin seems neither comic nor pathetic enough as a cuckolded school master determined to be “content”; Thomas Jay Ryan as Irina’s dutiful beau Baron Tuzenbach gains in stature as the play progresses, his leavetaking from her finding its perfect expression in a request for coffee; as Vershinin, Bruce McKenzie has the bearing of a serious man surprised to find himself still capable of frivolity and affairs of the heart; we sense that we, like the other characters, could never really know him.
Then there are the Pozorovs: Alex Moggridge, as Andrei, seems too often simply awkward, as in Act Three, not giving us any insight into a man who marries a vain woman, unseats his sisters, and nearly gambles away their patrimony; as Irina, Heather Wood takes us from giddy youth to a more weary version quite well, while Wendy Rich Stetson is good both at Olga’s stoicism and her peevishness, together making up the sister most long-suffering but also most secure in herself; as Masha, the linchpin of the play, the sister who should be settled but is anything but, who flirts and wins and loses, Natalia Payne was best at moments of unspoken emotion—as for instance flying to join Vershinin or, with her sisters, staring off into the future at the end—but should be brought up more in the mix: Masha isn’t simply petulant, she’s the throwback to the 19th century novels of adultery—the woman who chose not to make her own way, as Olga and Irina do, but instead married her way into an eternal limbo. The play, we might say, is only as strong as Masha’s suffering. In the show on opening night, she was too easily eclipsed, thus slighting the “confirmed desperation” of her love for Vershinin.
On the whole: a well-played and respectful classic needing a bit more fire and movement.
Three Sisters, by Anton Chekhov A new version by Sarah Ruhl, with Elise Thoron, Natalya Paramonova, and Kristin Johnsen-Neshati Directed by Les Waters Yale Repertory Theatre, in a co-production with Berkeley Repertory Theatre
September 16-October 8, 2011
The Keillor-Douthat Affair
We strongly suspect that Garrison Keillor may be having a literary love affair with New Haven Review poet--yes, we claim for our own--Charles Douthat, whose book Blue for Oceans: Poems was published by NHR Books, our book imprint. It appears that a third poem has been selected by Keillor's team at Writer's Almanac for public reading and revealing. Charles has already had two of his poems featured: "The Polishings" and "Crying Man"--both of which appear in Blue for Oceans: Poems.
As Charles suggested to us: the third may well be the charm. What the intended effect of the spell is, however, remains a mystery.
Congratulations, Mr. Douthat!
Eric Weinberger: Honorable Mention in Best American Sports Writing 2011
We at New Haven Review recently got this very kind note from Eric Weinberger, who authored "The Skiing Life: An Appreciation" in our Winter issue no. 7:
I just saw the new Best American Sports Writing 2011 volume... "The Skiing Life" didn't make "Best," but it did make the "Notable" list in the back, chosen by the series editor with fine company from New Yorker, NYT Magazine, Sports Illustrated and others. Something for the NHR website to mention in 'News' maybe? All hail Brian Slattery [New Haven Review editor] who chose the piece --
Mentioned, and all hail, indeed!
Beyond
Hundred Year Space Trip, now playing at the Yale Cabaret for two more shows tonight, 8 and 11 p.m., is an amusing little fantasia about space travel, sorta; more accurately it’s about being at home somewhere (anywhere) in the universe. The show features—stage right—two “not astronauts,” Kate Attwell and Nina Segal, the originators of the piece (under their stage name webuygold), seated side-by-side, wearing orange space suits. Their charmingly laconic commentary is, we’re to imagine, the banter of two girls in space.
Meanwhile, back on earth, Ryan Davis rummages around stage left with transparancies on an overhead projector showing earth from space and other intergalactic images, and reads aloud in a now-hear-this radio spot voice letters the duo wrote to guys they were hoping to get sperm donations from: their plan, as enacted for us around a dining room table center stage rear by Brenda Meaney and partner, in the spritely “can-do” tones of liberated gals of another era, is to travel to far off Alpha Centauri and back; if they get pregnant at the right time on the voyage out, and their progeny get pregnant at the right time, then the duo’s grandchildren can complete the journey back to Earth (with a capital “e”).
The idea of an intergalactic journey in which our progeny’s progeny might achieve something their ancestors intend has a lot of resonance if you’ve ever contemplated the problem of handing anything very specific on, through time and space. The question of what is memorable, of what is worth handing on, is another theme that gets toyed with, as well as the potentially alienating experience of leaving the planet and returning. At one point, Davis, with a flashlight in the darkened theater, wearing headgear and speaking through a distorting bullhorn, reports on what he finds among the “creatures” looking on as he explores the space. This segment features the kind of audience interaction the Cab thrives on, a mix of improvised and scripted behavior and amusing asides.
In the end, the piece seems to flesh out only partially the routines of Attwell and Segal, which remain the most engaging part of the evening. Which is to say that the efforts to find ways to dramatize what is essentially a quirky, almost telepathic brand of interpersonal comedy only partially work as theater. The game participation of Davis, Meaney et al. notwithstanding, it’s the non sequiturs, word games, silences and subtle interactions between Atwell and Segal that finally get us “beyond” theater into a different space.
webuygold presents: HUNDRED YEAR SPACE TRIP 22-24 September, 2001
The Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven, CT
Dead Air
Two local theatrical pieces are presenting the final shows of their brief runs tonight: The New Haven Theatre Company’s production of Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio, at Ultra Radio, across from the Shubert, on 242 College Street, at 8 p.m., and The Yale Cabaret’s Slaves, book and music by Sunder Ganglani, at 8 and 11 p.m, 217 Park Street. Both shows, we might say, know something about the risks of “dead air”: a stretch of no music or talk on a radio broadcast, the phrase can also be used to describe a stretch of no sound or speech in a play. Radio broadcasters strive to avoid dead air. Playwrights and performers choose sometimes to manipulate it artfully.
ART IS US
As a theatrical experience, Slaves is all about theatrical experience as artful manipulation. Sound rather circular? It is. The show, which consists of three separate “acts” or segments, takes place where “a play” (dialogue, characters, setting, plot) has become “performance” (a space and performers, in this case three, and, in this case, music). The “setting” is the Cabaret, and the “characters” are the people performing in the play (Adina Verson, Chris Henry, Lilian Taylor) who aren’t themselves, and us, the audience. In the early going, as Verson and Henry sit before a long, dark, heavy curtain in insistent light, their promptings and musings have the air of Beckettian characters who have decided to confront their onlookers rather than enact a play. At one point some noises off are identified by Verson as coming from “an actress” (Taylor) who seems to be a menial at first—handing in props (a large ceramic tortoise) and repeating what she’s told. Verson and Henry, on the other hand, hector, beseech, and ask for audience members to volunteer words, while assuring us that laughter is ok but not intended, and anything we might do is ok (one person chose to walk out). What was stunning about the opening is the rigor required for these actors to hold onto “dead air” (there are many pauses and gaps) and invigorate it with their presence, staring back at us staring at them.
The next act, with the curtain pulled back revealing a muted neon triangle, involves more singing and music (the three performers’ voices match well: Verson sounding angelic, Henry more earthy and Taylor somewhere in between), accompanied by somewhat robotic movements that eventually led to Taylor, before the curtain, apologizing, in earnest actress mode, for not performing at her best.
After that, it was time to milk Verson and Henry, via tubes connected to milk jugs down their shirts, into a porcelain receptacle adorned with two white birds. Earlier Verson had spoken about “waiting” only to falter mid line and make us wait for something more to be said. To wait for two separate quarts of milk to run out twin I V lines into a birdbath isn’t something you’d probably line up for, but, on the other hand, there’s no way I can tell you what effect sitting through it will have on you (when Henry’s jug, which took longer, finally ran dry there was a small burst of spontaneous applause). And that’s partly the point: you have to be there, just as the performers do, and wait for the milk to run out. Real time, like dead air, can be one of the riskiest elements in any performance, but also, oddly, one of the most pregnant.
Fast on the heels of the fluids scene came what seemed a song of ecstatic praise as Verson’s and Henry’s voices became a choir accompanying the whirling, vigorous dance Taylor enacted in non-stop movement for what seemed like ten minutes, illuminated only by the triangle’s neon in full brightness. An image of the body happy to be body, or as in Eliot’s Four Quartets: “you are music while the music lasts,” this final segment had the feel of culmination but how it “furthered” or “responded” to what preceded it was left to the spectator.
For me, the opening segment commented on the rigors of theater as a participatory spectacle that we might not normally think of that way; the second segment had more to do with the dynamic amongst the performers themselves, attempting to make what they do “work”; the final segment required us, as audience, to lose ourselves in the illusion of a dancer losing herself in dance. Illusion because the rigor of the movements belies the spontaneity they evoke, and yet . . . is there any more effective image of freely given servitude than a body dancing?
Slaves by Sunder Ganglani with Chris Henry, Jillian Taylor, Adina Verson Additional Music by Ben Sharony The Yale Cabaret September 15-17, 2011 217 Park Street, New Haven, CT
US IS ENTERTAINMENT
Forget the film Oliver Stone made of Bogosian’s Talk Radio; the play which first appeared in 1987, before the murder of “shock jock” Alan Berg and before the rise of Howard Stern, much less Russ Limbaugh. As performed by the NHTC, the original is not as over-the-top dark as the film, and is even, in comparison to the kinds of wise-mouths and numbskulls who haunt the airwaves today, rather sweet. As late night caller-based talk show host Barry Champlain, who has progressed from Akron to Cleveland and is poised to go national the very next night, Peter Chenot seems more like a hectoring older brother than a truly malicious razor-tongued cynic. He berates the stupid—the vast majority of his callers—and is even more uncivil to the bigots and phonies, but he has our sympathy. It’s a thankless task (though many of his callers worship him)—entertaining people by insulting them, so that they’ll come back for more.
Everyone else in the studio: Linda (Hilary Brown), his sometime girlfriend and Gal Friday, Stu (Erich Greene) the old buddy and colleague who has got his back (mostly) on the switchboard, and Dan (Steve Scarpa), the Suit who wants the show to be its best for the Big Boys, are all riding the gravy train in good show-biz fashion. The toll his tirades and tiffs take on Barry is the main plot of the play as we see him veer into an area he rarely gets into—first, the almost phone-sex-like seduction of a lonely mother, and then an actual in-studio meeting with a zonked-out stoner type, Kent (Jack Rogers), whose momentary upstaging of Barry comes as a final straw.
Like the radio show, the play, directed with a great feel for the benefits of the tight, intimate space by Hallie Martenson, is very much Barry’s show and Chenot has the charisma to make it work. The voice feels right—a gripping, slightly-sharper-than-thou tone that keeps his listeners listening—and, because he’s not just a voice to us, we see how much his performance is also for the benefit of his “handlers,” all mostly silenced while he talks. They each get their say when Barry is “off” and they reveal nothing very profound, apart from the fact that each seems to feel Barry could crack or go off the deep-end any given night. Scarpa’s Dan is mostly unflappably pragmatic; he takes credit for inventing “Barry Champlain” and is pleased with how far he’s gone, but knows its just a job, not a calling; Brown’s Linda, in a very winning bid for our sympathy, tells us what it’s like to be seduced by the great Barry Champlain, but also keeps her distance: “nice to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there”; the most telling confidence comes from long-suffering Stu who was with Barry when he made the move to talk radio and has seen plenty of crazy on-air stunts, but now notices a widening rift between them. Greene is great at conveying the tired bonhomie of the background support and the sure eye of the knowing professional, watching from the sidelines.
The supporting cast—including Roger’s disarmingly goofy Kent and Marty Tucker as the voice of the financial advisor in the show preceding Barry, and the voices of the callers—go a long way to making us feel we are watching a real broadcast and not a sit-com version of one. Bogosian’s lines for the callers often sounded to me far too Saturday Night Live silly—some are hilariously off the wall, like the woman in fear of the trash disposal in her sink—but not as vivid as they might be if the show were written today. Which is a way of saying that Barry is nicer than today’s shock jocks, in the style of the older advisor/on air shrink, and his callers mostly insomniacs or dopers looking for a little connection. Barry’s final riff on the ills of society—“your fear, your own lives have become your entertainment”—is certainly prescient enough about where media and “reality” are going, and it’s perhaps nice, in a nostalgic way, to return to an era when they could still be separated.
The dead air that Barry hangs fire through near the end is a respite from his own disgust with his audience, and with himself as the flame attracting these mindless moths, but in Talk Radio it’s the dead air of a big breath, the moment a show hangs upon before the show goes on. As Beckett says, “I can’t go on I’ll go on.”
Talk Radio by Eric Bogosian Directed by Hallie Martenson Presented by New Haven Theater Company and Ultra Radio September 14-17, 2011 Ultra Radio 242 College Street, New Haven, CT
And Away We Go…Yale Cabaret 44
Thursday night the Yale Cabaret will open its doors for its new season. Regulars will find, even before they get through the doors into the performance space, that the aura of the Cab has changed once again. The box office and waiting area now feels like a somewhat seedy, somewhat creepy hotel (it immediately put me in mind of the McKittrick Hotel from Sleep No More), a fitting enough indication that what’s on offer through the doors will surprise, delight, and discomfit.
Since its inception in 1968, the Yale Cabaret has been a special space for students in the Yale School of Drama: it’s where they can work on what motivates them, things they might not be able to do in the work that satisfies grad school requirements, but thanks to the resources of the school the Cab’s theater artists can work out ideas in conjunction with a large, supportive network of colleagues representing all the disciplines of theater. As the Cab’s new website states: “Nowhere else in the world are there more than 200 theater artists living in a four-block radius – the possibilities are endless.” Indeed they are, given the extreme restrictions of the space itself and the fact that the budget for every show is about $300 and that, incredibly, shows go up and play for a total of five performances before changing over to the next feature. It’s a frenetic pace, but once you get “the Cab Habit” you’ll be back each weekend to see what’s on offer.
This year the leadership of the Cab, in something of a departure from recent years, will feature, like some of the best shows that have been presented there, an ensemble: four Artistic Directors: three third years—Lileana Blain-Cruz (director), Sunder Ganglani (dramaturg), Michael Place (actor)—and a second year, Kate Attwell (dramaturg); they are joined by theater manager Matt Gutshick to create a team that is fully interdisciplinary within the world of theater. When I spoke to them this week they had yet to vet the proposals for the shows that will fill out the season, but if there’s any underlying theme, it’s the belief that a theater like the Cab exists to promote experiment, the kind that involves risk and vulnerability, not only for the company and the technical support, but for the audience as well.
All four of the artistic directors are united in their view that theater’s importance as art, and its primary attraction as entertainment, is due to the unpredicable interaction that takes place between audience and spectacle. What makes one person guffaw makes someone else sad or uneasy. The proximity of audience to event is a factor that informs each piece—there’s nowhere to hide from a Cab show, for the audience. And for the performers, the audience can’t be ignored either. The audience completes the work, and the viewers’ individual and collective reactions help reveal what the work means.
The first show of the new season looks directly at the interactive dynamic of performers and audience. Entitled Slaves, it’s a musical piece for three actors—actors who, for the duration of the performance, are enslaved to one another, and to the music, and to the audience. The piece, according to Sunder Ganglani, who wrote the book and primary music, explores the theatrical experience as an imposition upon the performers who must in some way take upon themselves emotions and ideas not their own and find a way to express them to an audience. Slaves uses musical cues to switch gears and to bring on certain behaviors, but does that make the work the master of the cast? Or, because it’s for us, does that make the audience the master? Or is it rather theater that masters us all, enslaved to the interaction between our imaginations and a performance? With three risk-taking performers like Chris Henry, Jillian Taylor and Adina Verson in the cast, the show should be memorable. Sept. 15th, 8 p.m., Sept. 16th & 17th, 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.
The following week, fellow Artistic Director Kate Attwell launches the hundredyearspacetrip, developed with Nina Segal, of We Buy Gold, and the ensemble. The show, which involves communication between the earth and a manned spacecraft hurtling 39,900,000,000,000 km to Alpha Centauri, is a meditation on time—as aging, as the lapse between one event and another, as passage from one age or state to another, as for instance pregnancy to childbirth, and of course youth to death on a journey to a star system far, far away. Attwell says the show is surprisingly funny because of the interactions among the characters, bringing to life a situation that is literally out of this world. Featuring Brenda Meaney and Ryan Davis. Sept. 22nd, 8 p.m., Sept. 23rd & 24th, 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.
The third in the initial run of shows will be a staging of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, adapted and directed by Alexandru Mihail. With the death of Swedish master filmmaker Bergman a few years back, there have been several notable efforts to stage his films, most recently Robert Woodruff’s version of Autumn Sonata at the Yale Rep last spring, and Cries and Whispers will be coming to the Brooklyn Academy of Music this fall. Persona though is vintage Bergman, before he used color, and is a film limited primarily to two main characters: an actress who suddenly cannot perform and will not speak, and the nurse hired to attend her—on a secluded Scandinavian island.
The film is a high point in the major phase of Bergman’s career, when Liv Ullmann was his acting muse, and, more than the other films so far brought to the stage, incorporates the problem of performing as it relates to theater and to the theater of identity that is social life. Mihail has always found the film compelling but recently read the script—which was published after the film but which differs from the film in certain important ways. The point of the show, then, is not to recreate Bergman’s “European cinematic experience,” but to do with theater something not “already done” in film. With Laura Gragtmans, Monique Barbee, Lucas Dixon, Emily Reilly. Oct. 6th, 8 p.m., Oct 7th & 8th, 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.
Those are the shows lined up thus far, each provocative and thought-provoking in its own way, each a unique theatrical experience. The Artistic Directors of the Cab see the space as a laboratory where we’re all part of the experiment.
See you at the Labaret . . . the Caboratory. The Cab.
The Yale Cabaret Artistic Directors: Kate Atwell, Lileana Blain-Cruz, Sunder Ganglani, Michael Place Managing Director: Matthew Gutshick
217 Park Street, New Haven, CT: 202.432.1566; http://www.yalecabaret.org/
The Laugh's On Us
Colin Quinn’s Long Story Short is a very familiar experience—a combination of listening to a jokey guy inveighing about the State of Things in a friendly bar, or of following the manic lecture of a comic prof who affects the “common man” touch, or of feeling like the studio audience for some televised raconteur who knows how to spice up his talk with laughs should things get too quiet. What’s it not like, much, is a stand-up comedian’s routine, thankfully. Quinn’s show avoids personal/confessional bits, doesn’t use random free association much, and represses non sequiturs, all because this monologue, unlike most comedians’, has to get somewhere. It’s a fast-moving history of the world or a “how we got where we are now” and that means the audience has to be ready to sprint along as Quinn takes us on a whirlwind tour of some of the highspots of what was once known as “Western Civilization.” The set is simple: two curving blocks of fake stone meant to replicate the seating of ancient Greek ampitheaters and, above, a big screen on which images—mostly architectural reference points like the Colosseum or Hagia Sophia—flash and morph and hang. Beneath the video, Quinn wears contempo-casual and waves his arms a lot. The piece is directed by Jerry Seinfeld, but what that amounts to more than, like, advice on where to stand (“it would be cool if you kinda, y’know, slouch against the wall when you’re pretending to be French”) would be hard to imagine. It would help if someone would get Quinn to slow down a little—a bit more faux professorial tone might help, to create the illusion we should be taking notes—and enunciate a bit more clearly.
But that’s being fussy, I know. Quinn’s charm is that he sounds like a Brooklyn bus driver simply sounding off on whatever occurs to him, and there’s a fair amount of sotto voce mumbling and self-amused asides to punctuate the patter. The general manner could be said to have fallen out of Robin Williams’ pocket, but Quinn is never so desperate to be “brilliant” as Williams often is, and he’s not nearly so deliberately irreverent. He’s more Everyman than Genius and that helps sell his talk because most reasonably educated people would probably come up with many of the same reference points in producing a pocket-size summary of “our” history, and the stress on how silly history is keeps us all in the game. Those unable to laugh at history are doomed to see in it reruns, or something.
This is, though, “our” history, and you might begin to wonder who “we” are. Average white guys with European immigrants in their backgrounds, primarily. For Quinn history starts with the Greeks of the age of Pericles, pretty much, with little attention to what Egyptian, Hebraic, or Sumerian civilizations were about. Common enough? I don’t mean to say that Quinn has any reason to be comprehensive, simply noting the way the logic runs. The point isn’t really to cover history (truly harrowing things like wars are left aside, and you might wonder what happened to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment) but to characterize the world through the peculiarities of its peoples.
The Williams-like aspect of the show is in Quinn’s rapid aping of the world’s peoples speaking English. The requirement for this style of comedy is a chameleon-like ability to quickly become—in voice, tone, body language—instant stereotypes of any national or ethnic manner. And Quinn mostly manages it. The night I saw the show, the Frenchman sounded at times a little more Italian than he should. Speaking of Italians, the comic that Quinn put me most in mind of was Robert De Niro playing Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, but maybe that's because of the long passage describing Rome under Caesar, “adapted” mutatis mutandis from Ray Liotta’s speech about how the local mob worked under Paulie in Goodfellas.
Along the way, there are funny encapsulations of entire cultures—Britain’s great contribution to world history is that they invented contempt (the routines to support this thesis were some of my favorites)—religions (confessing teen “sins” to a priest who’s a jaded pedophile)—races (Arabs sound angry when happy and happy when angry)—lifestyles, like capitalism’s “anything goes” mentality (maybe “girls gone wild” isn’t the best way to woo orthodox cultures to our views)—and families (the aunt who spared one of her dying breaths to complain about the other family sharing the hospital room). It’s all served up with the brio of someone who finds where he can the comic potential of other people.
“History,” Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus said, “is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.” It might be better, after all, to see history as a joke that just keeps on delivering.
Colin Quinn: Long Story Short, A History of the World in 75 Minutes Directed by Jerry Seinfeld Long Wharf Theatre Mainstage August 13-21, 2011
Village of the Damned Idiots
Next door to my place of work is the Barnes & Noble that faces south on Union Square, and toward the rear of the fourth floor of this—by New York City standards—monstrous bookstore is the table of books “favorited” by the bookstore staff, a selection far more interesting than the pay-to-play tables that crowd the front entrance. It was from this table that I plucked Stephen Brijs’ The Angel Maker. The selling point? According to the blurb, the Brijs’ variation on themes featured in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, of an outside world looking in and failing to understand the true meaning (and importance) of events that unfolded behind closed doors. The Angel Maker reflects mightily on this argument between appearance and reality through the story of Dr. Victor Hoppe, a victim of biology and circumstance.
Dare one discuss any aspect of this book without ruining its plot? This is no small challenge for a novel that literally throws the mystery of its story in the reader’s face on the first page when the good doctor arrives in his boyhood hometown after a long exile with three tiny and terribly ugly children in tow. Hoppe is barely communicative on the why and wherefore of his absence, his return, and origin of the little deformities. As the story switches back and forth among narrators, from local townsfolk to the children’s nurse, from Hoppe’s colleague to the good doctor himself, the wall between what is hidden within and suggested without is breached for the reader and, presumably with truth in hand, we are set free.
In Jekyll and Hyde, that truth is ugly and Darwinian. Beneath every top-coated and becaned Edwardian lives a murderous, club-wielding simian. What Utterson and the reader will reckon with by the novel’s end is a science recast as evil-smelling green, smoky potions little different from the mood-altering opiates of sunny England's shady dens, threatening civilization as they knew it. It is the science of the Gatling and Maxim gun, of exploded bodies from long-range munitions. A pretty picture it was not in Stevenson’s time and, as we look back, all seeming just a run-up to the atrocities of World War I.
The Angel Maker suggests an equally ugly future, albeit with a little less science fiction sturm und drang. At first, readers are drawn to think Brijs is berating us with a novel of biotechnology run amok when placed in the hands of the misdiagnosed and mistreated. But scientific prey is not what is being stalked, although there are perfunctory jabs at scientific careerism. No, the true culprit of The Angel Maker is religious ignorance, and Hoppe’s ancestral home of Wolfheim is rife with it, from the parish priest and local abbess to Hoppe’s housekeeper and the triplets’ mother. The ignorance of basic biology, largely replaced by Christian palliatives, reveals the dependence of Wolfheim’s natives on an education that has no basis in the scientific understandings of the late 20th-century, an education that precipitates all of the disasters that ensue, from Hoppe’s Frankensteinian experiments to the untimely deaths and literal bodily misuses of those who come within his reach.
What most disturbs the American reader of Brijs’ condemnation of religious parochialism is how shockingly universal that ignorance may well be. As an addict of left-leaning blogs, I’m too familiar with the remarkable stupidities of America’s true believers (favorite bumper sticker alert: “Dear Jesus, please save me…from your followers”). What I know less well are the dangers associated with Europe’s own breed of religious tunnel visionaries. Is Brijs’ Wolfhem of the 1980s a literary convenience? Has the appalling lack of knowledge of reproductive biology been done away with in the more rustic climes of the European Union? Or does such ignorance prevail today, perhaps gaining in ferocity as in the U.S., paving the way for European versions of Texas school boards and Creation Museums?
At a minimum, Brijs answers Stevenson when he suggests our better angels are not the moral credos of religion done right. While there is at first reason to think The Angel Maker a profoundly religious book because of the energy with which it takes up its Christian themes, it is, if anything, a profoundly anti-religious work—and not specifically anti-Christian at that—because it holds nothing but disdain for the education in misperception any religious weltanschaung demands.
Summer Mummers
Late in Shakespeare’s Tempest, Prospero, having dazzled Ferdinand, his daughter’s suitor, with a phantasmal pageant in which goddesses bless the couple’s imminent nuptials, insists that the spectacle was transitory as life itself and, the lines strongly suggest, as is theater, which all-too quickly “melts into air, into thin air.” But soft! All’s not lost. For look you: The Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival has not yet wrung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. There are two weeks yet—18 performances—in which to catch-as-catch-can the miraculous transformations of the basement space at 217 Park Street into Prospero’s isle, and into the Forest of Arden, and into a contentious arena for the bloody feuds of Britain’s royalty (yes, that’s three different sets and sometimes two shows a day—can ambition be made of sterner stuff?).
The three shows are The Tempest, As You Like It, and a right witty concentration of Henry V, Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, 3, and Richard III into a blood-and-guts psycho drama called Rose Mark’d Queen. And the shows boast a concentrated cast that have been playing their parts all summer, becoming one with their characters’ antic dispositions, their sighs and fleers and jests, their studied mummery, festive songs, passionate proclamations, yea, their wanton romps, clownish conceits, and vaulting ambitions. And before each production there is most excellent meat in the form of short presentations, much to the point, on aspects of Shakespearean theater: on sets, pre-The Tempest; on the language, pre-As You Like It; on the use and abuse of history, pre-Rose Mark’d Queen.
Having seen all three shows twice, at opening and at a little past mid-point, I can observe that the vision of Shakespeare on view at the Cab is of malleable texts in service to the joys of playing. While respectful of the poetry of the plays, these productions are not servile flatterers of the Bard’s big rep nor timid courters of the audience’s clemency. Each show grabs for what it wants to wrest from the play, and each has the guts and gusto and gonads to make it work, mostly.
The Tempest (directed by Jack Tamburri) is largely played for laughs, suborning its romance elements and the tensions about legitimate and illegitimate power to a broader conception of general folly. The part of Prospero is shared among the company and this adds a lively sense of make believe to the entire proceedings. Off-putting, perhaps, if you’d rather have some fledgling McKellan imposing his magic on the hapless visitors to his island kingdom, but, as the play rolls along, the odd overlaps as each actor takes turns with the cloak and book begin to wield a life of their own. As a device it’s nimble enough to invite reflections on who lords it over whom—even Miranda and Caliban get to “be” Prospero at times—and as theater it’s a challenge to our efforts to “enter into” the play, though a form of “magic” in its own right. Some highpoints for me: the comic timing of the cast in the mutterings of the stranded aristocracy—King Alonso, his brother Sebastian, Duke Antonio, and Gonzalo (it’s rare to want to spend more time with these characters)—and Ariel’s songs as voiced by Adina Verson, in a get-up that put me in mind of a Dr. Seuss creation.
As You Like It (directed by Louisa Proske) presents a likeably fast-paced first act outside in the courtyard, complete with a wrestling contest and some agreeable love-at-first sight importunings between Adina Verson’s breathless Rosalind and Marcus Henderson’s open-book Orlando. Inside, things get mellow with a sojourn in the forest of Arden that’s perhaps a bit too long on songs. The cast plays and sings right well, but one begins to realize that the best parts of the play happen when Rosalind’s on stage, for its her native intelligence and wit, her skill at directing and counterfeiting (like The Beatles’ song says: “and though she feels as if she’s in a play, she is anyway”), and her experience of all roles (pined for and pining after, male and female, fool and critic) that create the intellectual content of the play. This production aims for and mostly achieves a feel for touching comedy spiced with the absurd spirit of contemporary Rom-Coms. Highpoints: Rosalind’s dialogues with her confidante Celia/Aliena and her repartee with Orlando; the brothers Duke, both given a comic kick-in-the-pants by Brenda Meaney in wildly different tonsorial and sartorial style; Babak Tafti as the put-upon fool Touchstone burdened with his Lady’s luggage, and in his lust-above-love courtship of game Audrey (Jillian Taylor); Tim Brown’s lovesick swain and Tara Kayton’s fiery Phebe; Matt Biagini’s mercurial satire of melancholic Jaques.
Rose Mark’d Queen (directed by Devin Brain) serves up a fast-paced interpretation of a handful of Shakespeare’s histories, centered by strong characters—King Henry VI (Marcus Henderson, gaining in pathos and stature as the play proceeds) and his Queen Margaret (Jillian Taylor in a demanding role in which she is lover, chider, schemer, fiend and grief-stricken mother by turns)—with more than able support provided by Babak Tafti, as several figures in the House of York, providing now fierce, now more bemused opposition to the King and his supporters, Matt Biagini in a number of supporting roles pretty much destined for death, and Andrew Kelsey, who shines bright as Suffolk, the Queen’s power-hungry lover, and then, as Richard, becomes a lethal attack dog off the leash. The first half is razor sharp, moving from a scene of kids playacting battle and martial pomp to acts of murderous treason; the second half dallies a bit more, with a comic courtship scene (of an inflated doll) presumably to lighten things up though it also seems to lengthen the proceedings more than is needful. High-points: when a sword is held at the throat of an audience member to force a capitulation; when representatives of York and Lancaster go amongst the audience, trying to enlist supporters by drawing upon them either a white or red mark (even your selection of a wine for the evening might be a political gesture!—stick with beer and support Jack Cade); the use of light and sound and those big armoires at either end of the space. It’s a play that keeps you guessing and, of the three, was the one that impressed me most, if only because Brain has somehow managed to underscore how these histories are proto-versions of many more familiar moments in Shakespearean tragedy.
What’s gratifying, for a returning spectator, is to watch the audience get caught up in the pressures of the plays, waiting to see the knots come undone—two of the plays do end happily—and to marvel at how inviting and interactive Shakespeare can be. These aren’t pious productions stuffed with pretty pomp set up on a stage leagues away. This is an in-your-face—maybe even on-your-lap—Festival, with characters beseeching their audience to take a side, share a dilemma, lend an ear. If you think you know the plays, I guarantee you you don’t quite know them like you’ll find them here.
And that’s all to the good. For what are plays anyway? Certainly they are texts, but if you want a scholarly Shakespeare, stay at home and read a book. If you want to hear Shakespeare alive and lived, given shape by young talent and shared as though a communal feast, then stay not, unresolved, unpregnant of your cause (to go or not to go) but exeunt omnes and severally and head for the Yale Summer Cabaret’s Shakespeare Festival.
The Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival August 2-14 Artistic Director, Devin Brain; Producer, Tara Kayton
203-432-1567; or summercabaret.org
The Hotel Unheimlich
It was my daughter’s idea. She had heard of the show from a friend and so had some idea what to expect. Her experience was therefore more extensive than mine, it seems. I was a bit disappointed that I didn’t see all I heard about from her, but at the same time our divergent experiences simply underlined a wonderful aspect of the show: the experience you have of it is largely determined by your own volition. I could have stuck with her, went where she went, followed the actors she followed, but then I’m not her and I wanted my wandering through the dreamlike, nightmarish world of Sleep No More to be mine. Sleep No More is theater as performance art, as installation, as dance and mime, as full immersion experience, as a trip into the collective uncanny. Developed by a group called Punch Drunk (aptly enough), the show first had a run in Boston and true cognoscenti are quick to say they saw it there (New Yorkers don’t get everything first), but, from what I’ve heard, the Boston show was not as extensive, didn’t take up, as it does in New York, four stories of a warehouse in Chelsea, reconfigured as the McKittrick hotel, a kind of living movie set you never emerge from until the show is over (or until you choose to leave). After four hours inside, I was ready to go, I suppose, but that’s not to say I would’ve left any time soon. Like a child at closing time at the carnival, one feels there must be one more thrill, one more odd sensation, one more unexpected event still to come.
If you haven’t heard about it (or have), here are some facts you’re likely to hear: the audience is free to roam wherever they wish through the four floors but must wear the provided masks and maintain silence; these restrictions prevent audience intrusion into the spectacle—if a member of the cast wants you to interact, he or she will involve you—but they also create a side spectacle of roving, masked and silent watchers (or voyeurs, to make it sound as creepy as it sometimes feels) who are your doubles or comrades, and in their company one feels part of a collectivity less like a theater audience and more like a scavenger hunt or like “free time” on an unguided tour of the Twilight Zone.
About the show itself: it dramatizes, in somewhat free associative dumbshow, the story of Macbeth—which means there’s death and blood and satanic rites—combined with elements extracted from Alfred Hitchcock’s noirish version of Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic novel Rebecca, and other elements that, as best my daughter and I could piece it together, had to do with murder in a hotel and a stint in an insane asylum. It would be easier to parse the action if, say, the different threads were self-contained on one floor or another, so that the audience could peek in or pass through, “story-surfing” amongst the floors. But it doesn’t work that way. Actors pass you on their way to or from a scene and you can choose to follow or not. Maybe you’d rather keep looking at the fascinating set of an apothecary’s store, or a post office filled with hand-written messages, or a taxidermy shop, or the graveyard, or the grand ballroom where you may move amidst a moving grove.
I found it hard to fix on characters per se, to say nothing of performances. It gets underway in the ball room where all the characters are present for a dance and then go their different ways. Who you find yourself following might be due to whim or to an effort to stick with Macbeth, say, or, as I did, because you saw one woman drink drugged milk and wanted to see what would happen to her next. If you’ve ever dreamed of not being bound by linearity, this is the show for you. What you “learn” is largely dependent on what kind of sleuth you are, what kind of things you notice, what your imagination, once aroused, does to you.
If you’ve ever sat through a performance where you found yourself not too engaged by who was on stage and wondered what the other characters, off stage, were up to, it’s liberating, here, to know you can go wander in search of them. Someone is up to something somewhere, so seek and ye shall find. And whatever you find seems somehow intended for you, if only because you led yourself there. That’s the dramatic element that I found most haunting and inspiring: the feeling of being implicated in what I saw because I stayed and watched it, or because I trailed someone to see what they were going to do. The only comparable experience is a dream where you seem to be doing something for your own reasons and yet have no control over what happens.
The other aspect that stayed with me and wouldn’t let go is amazement at the design elements, the lighting, the smells, the sounds, the full sensory experience that creates a range of reactions—some rooms you just want to get out of, others you could imagine hanging out in if you were a member of the Addams family, others might feel, oddly, like a place you’ve been before and may find yourself in again—like returning to Manderley, or to the witches’ den—led by a shuddering sense of repetition compulsion.
When we attended, back in April, the show was slated to close in the first week of June. Now it’s the end of July and the show is slated to close on Labor Day weekend. I suppose it will close, but the longer the show lasts, the more people hear about it and want to see it, and those who have already been want to go again. I have to admit I’m wondering if I can manage to work in another visit before the end. Maybe I’ll see my earlier self wandering amongst the onlookers, a remnant of myself that never left, like Nell at the end of The Haunting of Hill House.
“Still it cried, ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house.”
That Tragic History
The third and by far the most ambitious of the three plays offered by The Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival has now been added to the line-up. Directed by Artistic Director Devin Brain, the play is called Rose Mark’d Queen, a condensation (and we do mean condensed!) of five plays: Henry V, Henry VI (Part 1, 2, and 3), and Richard III, and provides the “blood” in the Festival’s tagline, “Blood, Love, and Fools.” As a director, Brain, who was the Co-Artistic Director of the challenging 2009-10 Yale Cabaret Season, knows the Cab space well and pitches his production to the qualities that can make Cab shows such involving—and at times alienating—experiences. Brain’s grasp of the darker side of drama comes to the fore again. Last summer, his show The Phoenix began as an adolescents’ fantasy world and ended in a devastating conflagration. In the 2010-11 Season, he directed the ensemble piece Erebus and Terror in which we watched a shipful of plucky explorers succumb to madness and cannibalism. Now he’s back with a play that illuminates the British monarchy of the Wars of the Roses period in the 15th century as a blood-boltered tale of bravery and betrayals, of back-stabbings and battles, of lusts and jests and thrusts at the vitals. It’s stirring stuff.
And marvelously, memorably entertaining.
A lighter note is leant the proceedings by a brilliant conceit: we open with kids entertaining themselves with dolls and costumes and toy soldiers, playing dress-up as they take on the roles of the first wave, of many successive waves, of characters embroiled in dynastic succession—involving rival houses and wars with and for France. It’s risky because we might want these kids to intrude upon the action to explain it for our benefit, or to make it silly for our amusement, and indeed they do throw a bit of foolery into the mix, but—and here the risk pays off—the unwavering force with which they speak the lines convinces the way a child lost in a fantasy convinces. Gradually, the “play-acting” of the playing falls away and we’re launched into the clashing and contending personalities of the Histories.
For me the transition moment was when Matt Biagini, as Duke Humphrey, rails against the injustice of seeding prime French territories—already won with the blood of British troops—back to France in exchange for Margaret (Jillian Taylor), the “rose-mark’d queen” who the conniving Suffolk (A. Z. Kelsey) has wooed for young King Henry VI (Marcus Henderson), so that he may manipulate the king through her. The love scene between Suffolk and Margaret packs a lot of punch too, but at that point (end of Henry VI, pt. 1)—with the other members of the court (i.e., the other kids) seeming to be looking on—it was still possible to be “in a game.” When Gloucester goes rogue, at the opening of Henry VI, pt. 2, the playground struggle—White Rose vs. Red as a kind of Shirts and Skins game—deftly shifts into history come alive.
Don’t expect me to explain the historical consequences of all the ups and downs of the characters this intense ensemble enacts. The playbill offers a useful Who’s Who—grace à Dramaturg Elliot Quick—coded to the costumes of the various characters, for those who want to keep score. What stays with the viewer are numerous events that dramatize the high-stakes power struggle: Margaret’s cruel taunting of York (Babak Tafti) in the “king on a molehill” speech; York’s controlled and defiant response, wiping his tears on a handkerchief stained with his murdered child’s blood, ragging on the Queen; the rebel Jack Cade (Biagini armed with a toy chainsaw) enumerating the changes he will make in England as king (“first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”); Henry’s wistful longing for a simple life, and his heartfelt denigration of Richard (Kelsey) moments before being murdered by him.
Indeed, the fixed stars of this pole are Henry VI, as more sinned against than sinning, and Richard, the Duke of Gloucester, aka Richard Crookback, the vicious killer who will eventually become Richard III. Whether Henry is too timid to swim in this pool of sharks or too noble to sully himself is a matter of interpretation—Henderson evokes noble caution, but Henry is simply never equal to the machinations going on around him. One reason for that is the unfaithfulness of his queen Margaret, who prefers Suffolk, and who wages fierce war against the forces of York, beyond what Henry would marshal on his own. Taylor plays Margaret’s many moods with fire and ire, along the way creating a figure almost the equal of Lady Macbeth (who knew?), a woman with a naked lust for power who by the end seems distracted by the force of the enmity she has inspired.
As Suffolk, Kelsey is a lively and engaging conniver and it’s shrewd to bring him back, after Suffolk’s death, to play Richard—in a strait-jacket imprisoning his withered arm, a knife strapped to his back, and a length of chain for his lame foot—for then all the charisma of the Queen’s lover gets channeled into the Queen’s most bloody enemy. Late in the play, a scene with Richard on a chair in the sandbox, upbraided roundly by Margaret at her wits’ end, quite wonderfully suggests the dark days, still to come, of Richard’s reign.
There are many fine effects in the production: dramatic shifts in lighting from raking to glaring (Alan C. Edwards); toy piano glissandos and rolling thunder throbs (Nathan A. Roberts); twin wardrobes, boasting white and red doors respectively, at either end of the space, that open for exits and entrances, but also become closets of shelves with props (Kristen Robinson); sumptuous robes (Mark Nagle) that help shape identity—with Margaret’s Superman cape an odd bit of humor, like the inflated doll, standing in for Widow Grey, that Edward (Tafti, unctuous at times as Vincent Price) woos with PG-13 levity.
To put it simply: you haven’t seen anything like Rose Mark’d Queen. And once you have, you’ll want to see it again.
Rose Mark’d Queen adapted from William Shakespeare’s Henry V, Henry VI (Part 1, 2, and 3), and Richard III Directed by Devin Brain
The Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival July 7-August 13 Yale Cabaret
As You'll Like It
The Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival’s second play of the season, As You Like It, opened last week, and a lively good time it is. First of all, it’s a play that keeps moving—Shakespeare’s tendency to verbal excess doesn’t get the better of the action, even with the abundance of couples trying to make a go of it. And it’s also one of the easiest plays to follow: the situations are crystal clear, the dialogues further the action, and there’s precious little speechifying for its own sake.
Director Louisa Proske’s production is varied enough in its approach to keep things interesting even if you know the play well. The action begins outside in the courtyard where a platform is set up for the wrestling match that will take place between Orlando, our hero, the youngest son of Roland de Bois, but dispossessed by arrogant older brother Oliver (Paul Lieber), and Charles the wrestler. Orlando (Marcus Henderson) is a guileless youth who manages to best the bruiser Charles (Tim Brown in a funny performance that sounded to me like a take-off on Christian Bale in The Fighter), earning himself the enmity of casually ruthless Duke Frederick (Brenda Meaney in the first of three shape-shifting performances), who hands out banishments the way cops do parking-tickets.
Orlando departs for the forest of Arden, already fabled as a place where youths are flocking to disport idyllically with banished Duke Senior. But first there are some passionate exchanges between Orlando and Rosalind (Adina Verson), the daughter of Duke Senior, who must follow her father into banishment. It’s a real love-at-first-sight moment for Orlando and Rosalind, wherein both characters say what they mean and can’t believe they really mean what they’re saying.
Back inside, the Cab has been transformed into the forest of Arden, and things get much funnier with the arrival of Rosalind, now disguised as the male youth Ganymede, her close confidante Celia, now Aliena, and their sour attendant, the fool Touchstone (Babak Tafti). Much of the play’s fun is found in the Bard’s ability to make wooing and resistance comical—either love will win or it won’t: in either case, the lovers can’t do much about it. A strength of the Cab’s show is how amusing are the exchanges and attitudes of the two friends, imbuing the roles with a sense of the contemporary, an effect aided by whimsical costuming (no photos—you’ll have to see for yourself).
The costuming is particularly effective when we meet the banished Duke (Meaney again, in her best guise of the evening) wearing a wreath of flowers and talking about the simple pleasures of life in the forest of Arden as if he dropped acid with Jerry Garcia. His troupe of faithful (Tim Brown, armed with lute; Tara Kayton, with books of Ginsberg poems and Buddhist philosophy; Paul Lieber, with guitar and a bearded look that recalls Paul McCartney from the Let It Be period) stand about nodding in blissful counterpoint. With a troupe like this, you know the songs will be lilting and they are (had they burst into “Yellow Submarine” it would not have been out of place).
A notable exception to the “no speechifying,” of course, is the melancholy Jaques’s famous disquisition on the Ages of Man. Played by Matt Biagini as the troupe’s black-clad, posturing poet, Jaques enlists a group enactment of the different stages, making the speech into a deliberate communal moment, rather than a personal rant aimed to bum everyone out.
As the lovers impeded by disguise and subterfuge, Verson’s Rosalind is more eager than skeptical; Verson gives a heartfelt performance of a Rosalind head-over-heels, forced to feign otherwise, and not easily won because not believing herself truly deserving. Henderson’s Orlando is primarily driven by reactions, a powerful figure forced to wait on the pleasures of others, and the actor is good at effusive glee.
In smaller roles, the courtship of Touchstone and Audrey (Jillian Taylor) is vulgar and comical in merrily broad fashion, and the lusty pursuit of Ganymede by Phebe (Tara Kayton), while fleeing her lovelorn pursuer Silvius (Tim Brown), makes for a diverting comic complication in the later scenes. Kayton steps into the play from her more familiar role as highly capable Producer of the Festival to enact a no-nonsense rustic who gets thrown for a considerable loop.
My one complaint: Hamlet, we know, tells the players not to let the fools speak more than is set down for them, but he doesn’t say you should cut what is set down for them: I missed Touchstone's deflating mockery of Orlando’s attempts at love poetry, and, elsewhere, he seemed to have shed a few barbs. But all’s well, there are laughs enough in this likeable As You Like It as the entire company is quite adept at playing the fool.
Photos by Ethan Heard, by courtesy of Yale Summer Cabaret
William Shakespeare's As You Like It Directed by Louisa Proske
The Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival July 1-August 14
Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street, Hew Haven 203-432-1567, or summercabaret.org
Such Stuff as Dreams are Made on
A comic Tempest opens the Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival The Yale Summer Cabaret’s ambitious Shakespeare Festival, brain-child of Devin Brain and Tara Kayton, has launched. The first play in the series, which will run three plays in repertory with a dedicated company of ten actors through August 14, is The Tempest. A late play, if not the last, in Shakespeare’s canon, it’s a fantastic and lively tale in which all’s well that ends well, but, along the way, it gives much food for thought about the arbitrary nature of power relations, of courtship, of claims to authority, and, in this production especially, some laughs.
There are two daring and potentially off-putting aspects to director Jack Tamburri’s production: the first has to do with design (Kristen Robinson and Andrew Freeberg are the Scenic Design team), and involves fixed stilts with foot- and hand-holds placed at strategic points across the playing space. This is the airy province of that airy sprite Ariel (Adina Verson), who touches ground as rarely as possible, primarily at entrances and exits. But no matter how gamely and gracefully Verson navigates the gym course, we don’t get an illusion of movement swift as thought (Ariel’s special quality) and tend to be distracted by the actions. What’s more, the posts offer little in the way of scenery, even if, with the aid of some magical transformative power akin to Propsero’s, we imagine them as trees upon the island. The benefit: Ariel hovers over the action and speaks to the other characters from slightly above, which creates some nice effects in dialogue with Prospero when his captive sprite speaks directly into his ear, or when “he” (Ariel is male; Verson is female, and plays the role in a shiny body suit with a noticeable jockstrap bulge) spooks the conspirators from somewhere in the air above them.
The other oddity here is that all the cast members play Prospero at some point. This requires much shedding and donning of the sparkly cloak that denotes our magical majesty, and also increases potential confusion for viewers having enough trouble keeping, say, Antonio and Trinculo (both played by Paul Lieber) or Alonso and Stephano (both A. Z. Kelsey) straight. In other words, go with some of the play under your belt or you may find yourself a bit at sea. Some of the transformations are indeed swift as thought, especially in the denouement when the passing about of Prospero’s book began to resemble a game of hot potato.
The more problematic aspect of this innovation is that, to echo Gertrude Stein’s comment about Oakland, there isn’t any there (or Prospero) there. Rather, we get six actors in search of a character, which translates into Prospero-schtick most of the time. This, I assume, is strategic—an effort to undermine this dominant figure, to make him as mercurial as possible, and to show that the trappings of power he wields can indeed be taken up and shed by turns. He is a sometime Duke and a sometime magus, a sometime father, brother, and so on. The point, as it should be in theater, is made, as it were, between the lines, but I couldn’t help feeling it was also made at the expense of some lines—as when an actor fully steeped in the role allows us to watch the character change, rather than watch a number of actors change into the character.
The strengths of this production: First of all, the language. Short of slowing things down into Shakespeare-ease, as Kenneth Branagh films sometimes do, the cast is quite adept at making Shakespearean speeches sound spoken as opposed to recited. Second: the audience’s closeness to the action made for enlivening effects when the characters spoke directly to audience members in a conversational way. Third: the clowns—and, as all are at times Prospero, all are at times clowns. It’s to the audience’s benefit that these actors are so good at Shakespearean comedy, which can get tedious fast when a cast isn’t. Kelsey, as Stephano, a butler, and Paul Lieber, as Trinculo, a jester, in particular, made the most of their scenes together, often involving drunken mood swings, but more modulation of tone would’ve helped us perceive their transformations into, respectively, Alonso, King of Naples, and Antonio, Prospero’s usurping brother, as they seemed a bit too broad for aristocracy.
Tim Brown, on the other hand, moved effectively between Sebastian, the rather dim-witted brother of the King, and romantic lead Ferdinand.
A female actor as Caliban is a move against type for it makes for a more refined “monster,” and Brenda Meaney’s performance, while active and comic, lacked the surly pathos the role can command. Casting a female actor as Ariel is not unusual, and, apart from her headdress and costume, I loved everything about Verson’s Ariel, particularly the glowing sound of her vocals on the songs and her childish enthusiasm in playing all the roles, with Adam Rigg’s effective puppets, during the enchantment scene. Her rendition, as Prospero, of the curtain speech was effective enough to make one willing, indeed, to “free all faults.”
All in all, a rough and ready Tempest on its way to becoming seaworthy.
The Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival Devin Brain, Artistic Director; Tara Kayton, Producer June 23-August 14, 2011
William Shakespeare’s The Tempest; Directed by Jack Tamburri June 23-August 12, 2011
Photos by Ethan Heard, courtesy of Yale Summer Cabaret
NHR Library Event This Wednesday
Sure, the New Haven Review's books have been out for a while. But that doesn't mean we can't revel in their release a few months after the fact. In a dramatic rescheduling of an event that was snowed out in March (raise your hand if you're still glad this winter is over), the New Haven Review will be throwing a triple-decker reading from How to Win Her Love, Blue for Oceans, and Kentauros, by Rudolph Delson, Charles Douthat, and Gregory Feeley, respectively. The readings will be held at the main branch of the New Haven Free Public Library, at 133 Elm Street, this Wednesday, June 22, at 6 pm. Your correspondent, alas, cannot attend, but can say with reasonable certainty that participants will be prepared to celebrate afterward, so please stick around. And thanks again to Carol Brown at the library for graciously hosting the event.
Life at the Cabaret
The Yale Cabaret 2010-11 Season ended in April, and today a cohort of talents graduated from the Yale School of Drama, where most Cab participants are students, so I’d like to take a moment to commend some highpoints of the Cab's recent season, citing the work of some who have taken their final bow there, and of others who might be back. For best overall productions, four original plays, relying on great ensemble work: Good Words, written by Meg Miroshnik, directed by Andrew Kelsey, a movingly musical valedictory treatment of a long life; Vaska Vaska, Glöm, written by Stéphanie Hayes, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, an odd allegorical play, both endearing and unnerving; Erebus and Terror, developed by the ensemble from an idea by Alexandra Henrikson, directed by Devin Brain, a dark but lively play about doomed lives; and Trannequin!, conceived by the ensemble, with Book by Ethan Heard and Martha Jane Kaufman, directed by Ethan Heard, a clever and engaging gender-bending musical; and a notable ensemble production of an already existing work: Alex Mihail’s kick-ass, raucous version of Anton Chekhov’s The Wedding Reception.
For memorable performances, I have to start by citing Max Gordon Moore’s tour de force one-man show as the librarian with an idée fixe in Under the Lintel
Trai Byers’ affecting performance as an old man revisiting his life at his son’s funeral in Good Words
Babak Gharaeti-Tafti, as a passionate wedding guest in The Wedding Reception, and as a nonconformist in The Other Shore
Lucas Dixon as the hilarious special guest at The Wedding Reception, and Brett Dalton’s comic double roles in Debut Track One.
Of the ladies: Alexandra Henrikson’s edgy Harper in Far Away
Adina Verson for her comic flair in pleasureD, and, for sheer oddity, her performance in a barrel of water in Vaska Vaska, Glöm; Stéphanie Hayes for her frenetic part in pleasureD and as a young male Irish deckhand, in Erebus and Terror 
Sarah Sokolovic, swaddled in rags, in Vaska Vaska, Glöm, and giddy and singing in The Wedding Reception; and Alexandra Trow, intelligent and naïve, as Pepper in Debut Track One.
And what about the ingenuity of transforming a basement into whatever the play demands? Particularly effective work in Sets: Meredith Ries’ cluttered library backroom in Under the Lintel
Julia C. Lee’s doomed ship in Erebus and Terror, aided by Alan C. Edwards’ moody and evocative Lighting
Justin Elie’s visually rich radio studio in The Musicality Radio Hour; Adam Rigg’s dollhouse world for pleasureD
and, especially, the combined talents of Kristen Robinson, Meredith Ries, Adam Rigg, with Lighting by Hannah Wasileksi and Masha Tsimring, for the fascinatingly ornate aesthetic of Dorian Gray’s puppetshow.
And for transforming students into what is required, some memorable work in Costumes: Aaron P. Mastin for the period sailors in Erebus and Terror; Maria Hooper for the Victorian dress of both people and puppets in Dorian Gray; Summer Lee Jack for the Brecht-meets-Beckett world of Vaska Vaska, Glöm
and for the truly awful threads sported by the ‘80s-era wedding guests in The Wedding Reception
.
For Sound: Junghoon Pi for the aural embellishments of The Other Shore; Palmer for the different aural registers of Debut Track One, and Ken Goodwin’s Sound Design and Elizabeth Atkinson’s Foley work in The Musicality Radio Hour.
And for Music: the inspiring vocals provided by Taylor Vaughn-Lasley, Christina Anderson, Sunder Ganglani, and Nehemiah Luckett in Good Words 
Pierre Bourgeois’s lively shanties in Erebus and Terror; the inspired songs of Trannequin!, by Ethan Heard, Max Roll, Brian Valencia, and Tim Brown; the Zappa-esque musical work of The Elastic Notion Orchestra in The Musicality Radio Hour; and the performative percussionists, Yun-Chu Chiu, John Corkill, Michael McQuilken, Ian Rosenbaum, Adam Rosenblatt in The Perks.
That’s all for this year—stay tuned for info on The Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival, starting next month!
Photos copyright Nick Thigpen, courtesy of Yale Cabaret
The Baby in Emily Brownlow's Tummy
There’s a baby in Emily Brownlow’s tummy. Emily Brownlow babysits for my daughter Saskia most Friday mornings so we’ve been watching her belly rise like dough in a bowl and talking about the baby inside. The timing’s good for us—to see this belly rise, and mull that whole “where babies come from” question. Saskia turns three in about a month, around the time Emily Brownlow’s baby will be born. The timing’s good for us not because Saskia’s going to have a baby brother or sister—we are not, Saskia’s the fourth, our eldest is fifteen and we are done with babies—but because Saskia is adopted and Emily Brownlow’s belly provides an opportunity to talk about birth and babies—and adoption.
Through Emily Brownlow, we kind of “get” the idea that babies grow in tummies. Through Jamie Lee Curtis’ Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born we kind of “get” adopted. Putting those two ideas together, though, that’s harder.
The little girl’s story in Tell Me Again is about a closed adoption: the adoptive parents say the first mom couldn’t be a mom and the baby flies home from the hospital with her new parents, their family a neat, pretty triangle. Our family isn’t really like that, with four kids and five grandparents from us, plus the mother Saskia doesn’t know as her mother, and aunts, uncles, cousins plus four more grandparents...
Saskia knows her birth mother, Caroline, as Auntie Cece. While she knows her grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins on that side, all those connections elude most two year-olds. She knows things like, “Grandma Lisa has two dogs at her house,” or “Liz and Bob’s house has a small crib and a big bathtub.” I am the Mama and my husband is the Papa; we don’t really require parents because we are the parents. Caroline suggested that Saskia call her Auntie Cece the way her nieces and nephews do. Maybe it fits, in terms of the kind of relationship they have when they see each other. But it doesn’t speak to the essential mother role Caroline plays.
Last night we had dinner with Auntie Cece, Aunt Margaret, cousins Sydney and Adam, and one set of grandparents, Janet and Jacques. Saskia had a grand time eating plenty of pasta with cheese, hamming it up for her audience, wandering the restaurant and meeting all the babies there and opening wonderful presents from the family she accepts as her family although she does not understand the relationships much beyond very nice to me.
Yet, clearly, she sort of understood something was up. Because at bedtime, she told me this: “When I was a baby at the hospital, I was small.” We’ve talked about babies and hospitals before. It did not seem coincidental that after seeing Caroline, she brought the hospital up again.
I asked whether she knew whose belly she was in when she was born at the hospital. She pointed to me. Huh. I took a deep and I hoped upbeat breath. “I would have loved you to be in my tummy,” I said. “But you were in Auntie Cece’s tummy before you born and your Mama and your Papa were at the hospital, too, waiting for you, and we were so happy to be there to hold you right away.” I paused. Her dark eyes were wide, and trained upon mine. I tried to look relaxed and assured, as I continued, “Your Mama and Papa took you home from the hospital right to your brothers.”
She asked, “Did we go home in our car?”
I answered, “It was a different car, a station wagon, before we had a van that could fit us all.”
It really didn’t matter that she’d heard the Auntie Cece part before. It was like the first hearing. It was somehow real.
She looked sad, her mouth drooping down, her eyes shiny although not wet. She hugged me a few minutes later and I asked, “Are you sad about the bellies? Whose belly did you want to be in?” She pointed to me. I hugged her closer and said, “I was right there when you were born and I was your Mama right away. And I was so happy to be your Mama." ***
All the questions that could follow about did Auntie Cece really want me are a ways off. Saskia has a Mama and a Papa and she doesn’t want it another way.
A few minutes later though, Remy came in (he is eight) and Saskia told him, “I was at the hospital and I was born and after Auntie Cece’s tummy I went to Mama and Papa and then we went home in a different car.” Phew. ***
Right now, Emily Brownlow’s baby is letting us talk about tummies and mommies and how I came to be Saskia’s Mama in a more complicated way than some mamas get to be mamas. Later, I imagine that pregnant women and birthdays and all kinds of little things I can’t yet imagine will sometimes sting, the way learning about the tummies was sad for Saskia. I will keep telling her how happy I was to become her Mama—and hope my words and my arms will be enough for her. ***
Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser writes a blog, Standing in the Shadows, at the Valley Advocate site. She has contributed to various newspapers and publications including Child Magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Southwest Review, and the anthology The Maternal is Political, edited by Shari MacDonald Strong. Sarah lives in Northhampton, Massachusetts, with her husband and four children.
Not With a Whimper, But a Bang
The Yale Cabaret’s 2010-11 Season ended this weekend with the bang of drums and other percussion. Michael McQuilken’s The Perks gave a new meaning to the term “musical theater.” Usually that means characters in a play bursting into song-and-dance in an abundance of feeling. At the Cab show, we were treated to musical pieces given a variety of theatrical treatments: as accompaniment to dramatic action, such as the death and burial of winter (Lupita Nyong’o) to Adrian Knight’s lyrical Mary’s Waltz; or as performance pieces, such as percussionists in rabbit masks playing Thierry de Mey’s Table Music on a table; or as theatrical musical pieces, as in the delightfully inventive Dressur by Mauricio Kagel, which calls for interaction amongst the musicians. Then there was the big finale: a maelstrom of activity from choreographer Jennifer Harrison Newman and the cast to a storm of percussion from McQuilken and his cohorts (percussionists Yun-Chu Chiu, John Corkill, Ian Rosenbaum, Adam Rosenblatt).
Conceived to celebrate the return of spring, The Perks included video footage of the great outdoors: McQuilken climbing a tree to enhance a rhapsodic piece played by Chiu, and of Nyong’o rushing, like a crazed fan, across streets and across various locations on Yale’s campus, toward her object of adoration (the camera).
Each separate musical number was a mini-drama in its own right if only because playing percussion seems so performative to begin with—add an array of odd noisemakers constructed for the occasion, and you’ve got props as well as instruments. This was nowhere more evident than in Dressur, which was scripted by its composer to be enacted, and which turns upon the successive failure of the percussionists to communicate the musical idea until finally the last one—Chiu—threw away her sticks and ran off.
Whether or not all the music expressed the theme of spring, the high spirits of the performers and the energetic nature of the pieces combined as a jolt to the system, just in time for the Passover / Easter season.
The Perks, A Rite of Spring; directed by Michael McQuilken
Created by Artists from the Yale Schools of Music, Art, and Drama
The Yale Cabaret, April 14-16
Let Down The Puppet Strings
Theater doesn’t need words. That’s the lesson of Dorian Gray last weekend at the Yale Cabaret. Oscar Wilde’s novel of a young fop who runs afoul of Victorian mores, schooled in the delights of debauchery by Lord Henry, the irrepressible originator of bon mots and apothegms galore, was adapted as a puppet show, staged in a cluttered set of Victoriana and stray junk, with moody lighting and a cloying toy piano score. Odd, to say the least. Once we got beyond the main problems—the difficulty of taking in all the action as no vantage point was ideal, the slowness of the action, the requisite concentration to see puppets “act,” and the need to infer much of what we were meant to be seeing—I think the audience was more or less on board. On the one hand, there was a lot of repetition (time and again Dorian sat before the theater box, watching his favorite actress Sibyl Vane enact the great Shakespearean heroines) and not a lot of forward movement; on the other, there were fascinating hypnotic effects and the sort of etherealized beauty that Wilde himself worshipped.
But it was not a Wilde-heavy evening, as we heard none of the author’s brilliant verbiage, and yet it was extremely Wildean, as we were treated to a sense of theatricality—as pantomime and tableau—that would have doubtlessly appealed to dear Oscar. I particularly liked the mustached puppet-wranglers, all females in Lord Henry drag, and the tantalizing overtones of Sir Edward Gorey, particularly in the eerie death scene. There was also a bit of shadow puppet bawdry depicting the sorts of things Victorian prudes would have conniptions over.
Shadow was provided by Hannah Wisileski, Light by Masha Tsimring—and nothing would’ve worked without them. The puppets, and the conception, and the direction came from Adam Rigg (who also played the artist in the show), and Wasileski, along with Maria Hooper (costumes), Meredith Ries and Kristen Robinson (both set designers) were the puppet-wranglers. In other words, the show was performed by its designers and was primarily interesting as a design showcase. Short on story, long on studied moments of visual magic.
Dorian Gray Adapted from Oscar Wilde Conceived and directed by Adam Rigg
Yale Cabaret, April 7-9, 2011
Such Sweet Sorrow
You want to know something? William Shakespeare was a master playwright. That's the immediate observation to be made after seeing Romeo and Juliet at the Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Shana Cooper, a Yale School of Drama grad, with a cast featuring many second and third year actors from the School, as well as a few notable former students. In other words, it’s Old Home Week at the Yale Rep, and nothing says, “Old Home” like a return to a venerable classic by our tongue’s most widely lauded, taught, and re-enacted playwright. The greatest success of Cooper's vision for this production is that it makes one marvel at how Old Bill manages to mix violence (feuding families that, in this modern dress and highly active version—credit Fight Director Rick Sordelet—recall gangland battles, mob hostilities, and, of course, The Sharks and The Jets from West Side Story, which was a variation on R&J to begin with), hilarity (The Nurse is always funny, and Cynthia Mace makes the most of it, adding plenty of Yenta charm, but does anyone talk about how funny Balthasar is? After seeing Blake Segal in the role, you will.), death (five corpses by the end—the death-begat-death structure is well-known, but it seems to me that the death of Countee Paris (Ben Horner, dutiful in a thankless role) isn’t always played, though here it is, and it gives more tooth to Romeo, sometimes seen as a fey ladies’ man, to see him kill a member of each of the other leading families), generational tensions, familial difficulties (the Capulets are given much presence, thanks to Christina Rouner’s affecting portrayal as Juliet’s mother, svelte as hell in a black funeral dress, mixing comic touches and frenetic, modern-mother-at-her-wits’-end gestures with stormy mourning over her possum-playing daughter, and Andy Murray, blunt and muscular, with a Jason Statham look and shades of an East End delivery, as he berates Tybalt (Marcus Henderson, dangerous and seething) as an upstart, and later his daughter for her contrary ways, underscoring that there’s something rotten in the house of Capulet), flights of fancy (boy, that Mercutio (John Patrick Doherty) can talk!, and here he’s as gay as you probably always assumed he was, but Michael Jackson didn’t grab his own crotch as often as Doherty thrusts his), jokes (most coming from Mercutio—to say nothing of some comic butt baring), poetic musings (Friar Laurence (Henry Stram) in a lovely little soliloquy that slows everything down just when it needs to—consummate craftsman, our Will), the best romantic badinage ever written (and placed in the mouths of teens), and all the tragic baggage of “star-cross’d lovers” (a hoary enough conceit even in The Bard’s day), and gets away with it—more, establishes a bar that has never been bettered.
So what about those lovers, eh? I can’t think of Romeo without recalling the Shakespearean actor in a Monty Python skit who recalled he was “frightfully awkward with all that happy prancing” the role requires. Our Romeo (Joseph Parks) is anything but awkward, and prance he does. He also swings from bars and wears an ape costume (with sneakers). In fact, one of the pleasures of this production is watching Parks own the stage; his is a tight, sinewy Romeo, in physical presence, but his delivery has few nuances—it’s all exhortatory cadences, making every speech a song in the same key. I found myself longing for a more varied music. And that extends also to his lady love, Juliet (Irene Sofia Lucio), though for a different reason. Lucio is great as the winsome teen of the first half—she acts the age (not yet fourteen) that Juliet is supposed to be—and rises to splendor in Juliet’s long riff on the word “banished,” managing to make Will’s asides-within-asides jump nimbly to the rising despair she feels. But, as Hamlet says, “something too much of this.” I couldn’t help feeling that this Juliet was out of touch with the world she inhabited—a shambles of warring families and preening coxcombs, where even her Man of the Hour kills in haste and repents at leisure, and quits her bed like the Captain of the Team who just scored the winning goal and has to hit the showers. I found myself longing for the tones of today’s teen queen, more deadpan irony, less fluttery gush.
Finally, as is usually the case at the Rep, the technical stuff is all great: Costume Designer Leon Dobkowski has fun, so you can too; the set (Po-Lin Li) and lighting (Laura J. Eckelman) enhance all that verbal poetry with some of the visual kind: the figures lurking in the shadows were a nice touch, but even better was the odd, background mound, and the upper story gave a sense of a proscenium-within-the-proscenium, especially when that big bed was center stage; and Composer Gina Leishman’s music added commentary—the first half Curtain sounded like a Twin Peaks-style Soap score, archly suggesting bathos and something sinister to come.
The production will be enacted for area high school students through the WILL POWER! program, and should go over well with a young adult audience—for what teen hasn’t envisioned his or her own death as the “serves ‘em right” payback to overbearing parents? As Aristotle would say, that’s catharsis, folks!
The Yale Repertory Theatre presents William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet Directed by Shana Cooper
March 11 to April 2, 2011