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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Davy Jones on Crown Street

We cannot all be artists and writers. Though I'm writing this right now, I'm not really a writer. And though I know how to strum a few chords, I am hardly a musician. What I am is a really intense appreciator of writing and music in a few select categories. My tastes are not catholic or even particularly flexible, but within my genres, I know what's good. I am enchanted by rock and pop music, obsessing on single tracks, playing them over and over again: songs that serious musicians would call silly, music that my longhair parents wouldn't even describe as music. Of all the three-chord wonders I've spent hours listening to, though, the Monkees were the band I remember appreciating first. Watching re-runs of their show on one of the two TV sets in my bedroom, I fell in love. I don't really know why my parents couldn't have forseen that I was not going to grow up to be a classical pianist. Basically, my entire life, I now see, could have been predicted on the basis of this single fact: when I was not much more than a toddler, I bought a handful of Monkees albums, already rather worn, at the Salvation Army on Crown Street, and every night I fell asleep listening to them on my little orange plastic record player, gazing at the pictures of Mike Nesmith.

Davy Jones has died, and on hearing the news I was overwhelmed with memories of being so small and listening to those Monkees records. I was also a huge fan of the TV show, but I loved the records just as much. As I now find my daughter is enraptured by the unlikeliest songs (tracks by the Bobby Fuller Four? by the Pixies?) I had some kind of spell cast on me by Monkees tracks, most of all "Valleri." I even had a Monkees book, with some cartoon story about the Monkees in the Wild West or something like that; I am positive I still have it somewhere because there is no way I would ever have thrown out that book. (Actually, I know exactly where it is. It's packed in a box, the same box with my three copies of the book of Yellow Submarine.) The Monkees were central to my development as a cultural appreciator. And while it's true that I wasn't a Davy Jones fan -- I was a Mike Nesmith girl through and through, which will surprise no one who knows me -- the fact is, it was Davy's sunny charisma that allowed the rest of the Monkees to be famous, to shine too. You couldn't have Mike Dolenz, the dopey one, or Peter Tork, the spacey/arty one, or Mike Nesmith, the "intellectual" Monkee, without Davy, the cute one, who was a little silly but also basically normal, as their foil. And so I acknowledge my debt to Davy Jones. Without Davy Jones, we wouldn't have the Monkees. But the way I see it, there are other important things we wouldn't have. Repo Man, for example. How could Mike Nesmith have gone on to produce that movie if he hadn't had those years as a Monkee behind him? Impossible.

I remember that my babysitter, Laurie, took me to the Salvation Army on Crown Street now and then; it was just down the street from our apartment. I don't know if she was shopping for herself or for us or if she just used the store as a space where we could kill time in bad weather. But we went there, and I remember that I was able to buy my Monkees albums there for for 25 cents each; I saved my allowances to do so. I think Laurie thought it was funny that I wanted those records so badly. I am sure my parents had no idea what the stuff was, but I know that they knew about the records, because I still have them and one of them has been annotated on its sleeve by my father in his remarkable handwriting. If they'd had any idea that a tiny little degenerate was being created at the time, I'm sure they'd have tried to stop it. But they didn't know. It's sort of funny, actually. The Salvation Army fostered my love of pop music trash; it costumed me when I was in my cranky-with-no-cash wee rock and roll girl phase; and even now it costumes me and my daughter. I no longer buy records there, I admit, but I never walk into the Salvation Army without remembering that my long history with pop music -- my life in record collecting -- began there. With a bunch of guys singing someone else's songs, on Colgems, of all labels...

Thanks, Davy Jones. Thanks, Salvation Army. Thanks, Laurie.

Mind Your Body

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

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

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

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

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

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

David W. Goldman up for a Nebula

We are thrilled to announce that David W. Goldman's short story, "The Axiom of Choice," which appeared in the Winter 2011 issue of the  New Haven Review, is a finalist for a Nebula award for best short story of 2011. Congratulations to David and to all the other nominees.

Thirsty Girls

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

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

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

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

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

Mac Wellman’s Dracula Directed by Jack Tamburri

Yale Cabaret February 16-19, 2012

If The Spirit Moves You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Goods by Christina Anderson Directed by Tina Landau

Yale Repertory Theatre February 3 to 25, 2012

Take Back The Space

Something's been missing of late.  We're five weeks into the spring semester and there have only been two shows at The Yale Cabaret thus far.  But never fear: the Spring 2012 Yale Cabaret is now ready to offer seven more weeks of experimental theater.

Regulars know it’s been a challenging season thus far, with the combined efforts of Artistic Directors Kate Attwell, Lileana Blain-Cruz, Sunder Ganglani, and Michael Place, along with Managing Director Matt Gutschick, providing varied offerings that keep audiences guessing.

To say that the Cab thrives on the offbeat and improvisational is to state the obvious—consider Brainsongs, the one-man show by Gabe Levey that ran on the last weekend of January.  Described by Attwell, who helped develop the project with Levey and Cole Lewis and other contributors, as “an exercise in presence,” the show combined a great soundtrack of old jazz classics of the Ragtime era with various Andy Kauffmanesque activities featuring Levey.  Whether “soft-shoeing” in place, or getting freaky with an inflatable dolphin, or making a typewriter dance or paper petals levitate, Levey portrayed a kind of theatrical shut-in, coyly showing us around his private kingdom.  Just when you thought it was all for laughs, Levey would make you feel sad, and when you thought it was going to get creepy, it would turn endearing.

So what’s ahead?  Starting this Thursday, February 16th, the Cab offers four straight weeks of advanced theater.  First up, Third Year Director Jack Tamburri offers his take on Mac Wellman’s version of Dracula, which dates from 1987.  Wellman, a professor of playwrighting at Brooklyn College, is known for his impatience with such things as plot and character development.  Audiences can expect an experimental treatment of the literally deathless undead character first created by Bram Stoker in the nineteenth century and famously interpreted on screen by the likes of Bela Lugosi, and Christopher Lee . . . and Frank Langella, and Gary Oldman.  Using puppetry, song, comedy, and direct address, the play won’t be the musty old Gothic story we all know so well . . . for starters, the Count is a she.  Vampires, of course, are all the rage these days among the young and it will be interesting to see what Tamburri et al. do with the blood-sucking seductions of the genre.  Feb 16-18.

The following weekend, February 23-25, things get loose with Clutch Yr Amplified Heart Tightly and Pretend.  An exploration of dance for non-dancers, the piece is all about movement and creating “visual text” to celebrate first moments of intimacy: kissing, holding hands, hugs, even staring contests—whatever gets someone across to someone else—and involves YSD students who have done great work pushing the Cab farther out-there: designer Adam Rigg, and third-year actors Chris Henry and Jillian Taylor.

Dating from the early Sixties, Arthur Kopit’s Chamber Music takes us into an asylum where eight women each believes herself to be a famous woman from history—Joan of Arc, Amelia Earhart, Susan B. Anthony, Gertrude Stein, Queen Isabella I of Spain, Mozart’s wife Constanze, silent-film actress Pearl White, and explorer Osa Johnson—as they prepare for conflict with the men’s ward.  In its time, the play could be considered an effort to carnivalize the nascent women’s movement, and it should be interesting to see how director Kate McGerr interprets the play's sexual politics for our ostensibly more enlightened time; March 1-3

Shakespeare is being celebrated in various manifestations at Yale this semester, and the last play before a brief Spring Break Week is Yiddish King Lear, March 8-10, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s tale of intergenerational conflict and a tragic comeuppance to patriarchal power.  In the 1890s, Jacob Gordin adapted the play’s plot—Lear’s division of his kingdom among his three daughters—into Yiddish in a Jewish immigrant context, with the three daughters represented by three different aspects of Judaism.  Adapted by Martha Kaufman and Whitney Dibo, the play now moves back into English to address questions of “assimilation, family wealth and gender expectation.”

Check back later for more info about the final three shows of the season, and for more information about tickets, dining, and other fun facts about the Cab, visit: www.yalecabaret.org

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven, CT 06511 (203) 432-1566 ysd.cabaret@yale.edu

See you at the Cab!

Toil and Trouble

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 18-February 12, 2012

"How's East Haven?" "Sucks."

The movie Ocean's Twelve, which came out in 2004, is one of my favorite movies of the last ten years. (Make of that what you will.) I don't know how many times I've watched it -- certainly a dozen, which seems right and just. Part of my affection for the movie stems from a little detail at the beginning of the movie. We see Danny Ocean (George Clooney) talking to a bank employee, talking about safe deposit boxes and retirement funds, and a caption flits onto the screen: East Haven, Connecticut. The moment I saw this, my first thought was: Why would a guy like Danny Ocean be in East Haven, Connecticut? And why does the shot of him leaving the bank and strolling through the center of town, then dumping his flowers into the trash so he can rush back to his wife, Tess, show a quaint, charming, subtly-decorated New England town which bears no resemblance to East Haven, Connecticut? He’s not in any East Haven I’ve ever seen; he’s in Guilford. He’s in Litchfield. He’s somewhere in Connecticut, sure -- but it sure as hell isn’t East Haven. I've discussed this with people who are more capable of nuanced thought than I. My original theory was, "Whoever wrote the movie (George Nolfi) thinks that all of Connecticut is like Westport, and has no idea that East Haven is just this blue collar town where rich people do not go to retire, where art curators are not going to redecorate their beach house and quibble with the housepainters about how much brown to add to the white paint." That it was a mistake borne out of ignorance of the true cultural geography of Connecticut.

But a cooler head suggests that perhaps the explanation is more complicated but also more mundane: that the screenwriter knew what he was doing when he wrote "East Haven, Connecticut," but that the director (Steven Soderbergh) didn't know what was envisioned by Nolfi when he went to film, and so, that segment of the movie wound up being the stereotypical "Connecticut" that people are used to in Hollywood product (with the exception of Mystic Pizza, which does a pretty good job of depicting working class life in Mystic -- at least, it LOOKS like Mystic, and not Westport. Or Guilford). The cooler head suggests that perhaps a town like East Haven would actually be an excellent place for Danny Ocean to hide out: claiming he’s a retired high school basketball coach, he’d have a chance to just blend into the community.

But here's what I'm having fun thinking about now: how lots of people who watch that movie from now on will see that little line of text -- East Haven, Connecticut -- and it's gonna mean something different now because of this hullabaloo with the mayor and tacos and the cops who've been harassing the Latinos who've been making East Haven their homes for the last 20 odd years.

When you factor in Ocean’s pseudonym, which he takes on to blend in to the charming little community of East Haven, is Diaz, the whole thing just becomes more comical. Wrong ethnic group to pick, it seems, if you're trying to sketch a character who's just trying to blend in. But maybe someone knew this would be a problem. When Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt) asks Ocean, “How’s East Haven?” Ocean doesn’t skip a beat. “Sucks,” he says. So perhaps the screenwriter knew something about the real East Haven after all?

I am a sucker for bloopers -- you know, the gag reels they tack onto DVDs as “extras” off the main menu -- and it seems to me that more than ever, those opening scenes of “Ocean’s Twelve” are just one giant blooper. Mr. and Mrs. Diaz, you really picked the wrong place to go if you were trying to escape the attention of local police. Fortunately, in your cases, though, it was just a movie.

Wrestling Chekhov

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yale School of Drama January 24-28, 2012

Surfacing at the Shubert

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

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

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

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

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

We're All Misfits

In the playbill for reWilding, now showing through Saturday night at the Yale Cabaret, YSD playwrighting student Martyna Majok writes of “a rural community in North Carolina that lives in the wild.”  The people she describes have their reasons for living on the edges of what most of us recognize as “civilization.”  What she wants to provide for the playgoer is some sense of the kinds of damage and drama and oddity that cause people to drop-out of one kind of culture to find community in the wilds. Majok asks, “What if you lose it? What if you chose the wrong thing? What if you realize you never had it?  What if you simply perceive a lack, if you don’t know even the name of what you’re seeking?”  Probing questions in this time of social unrest, volatile professions, of unemployment, of lost savings and property.  If it’s not exactly easy to imagine alternatives to the world we live in, we have perhaps better reason than ever to ask our artists to imagine other possibilities for us.

Majok’s play is in itself a mixed bag: an eclectic assortment of rural types tell stories to us and to each other, and interact along, mostly, trajectories of reveal and conceal.  This is not an open, easy-going community, it’s one fraught with psychic wreckage, with tensions that only fitfully rise to the surface—as for instance in Julian’s (Tim Brown) monologue about disappearing children—but elsewhere—as for instance when Eddie’s (Dan O’Brien) tale of how a pick-up he spent the night with was found dead is punctuated by testy comments from his girlfriend (Amanda Bermudez)—the full scope of these lives is only hinted at.

In a mix like this, almost everyone will find their stand-out character or performance. The play, directed by Dustin Wills with a good feel for the space, is a good match for the Cab since it’s always a treat to see so many students—it’s a cast of twelve—get a chance to try out well-written monologues and dialogues.  Majok’s prose is at times insistently poetic, but never gratuitously so.  It’s a play that’s a pleasure at times to listen to—as when Eddie tells, while changing lug nuts, a grippingly compressed story of a rather existential fishing-trip with his dad and brother.  At other times there’s the fascination in how much can be communicated without many words—as in the awkward courtship rituals Quinn (Chris Bannow) directs at Adam (Mickey Theis), or in the rather baleful welcome that Agnes (Margot Bordelon) gives Eda (Ashton Heyl).  Then there’s all-too brief comic grotesquerie when Chicken Man (Lucas Dixon) regales us with exploding, pill-popping chickens at the “disco-tecky.”

The set, also by Wills, is stark, almost maze-like with doors that serve as plank-bridges and lots of interesting detritus in the ceiling, evoking a kind of subterranean space, a junkyard of misdirections.  Maybe somewhere in there is the “it” you lost, or the “it” you’ll find.

reWilding by Martyna Majok Directed by Dustin Wills

Yale Cabaret January 12-14, 2012

You're An Animal Too

A dog is a man’s best friend, they say.  But what do you do when a dog marks you as an enemy?  Here, Jonathan Kiefer ponders this problem with some help from Edward Albee’s play The Zoo Story.  

My neighbor’s dog reminds me of Edward Albee. Not the man himself, but one of his plays, The Zoo Story, which happens to be the first play I ever saw and one I’ve always wanted to perform. Any experienced actor will tell you that the highlight of the play is its meaty 7-page monologue, aptly referred to by the character who delivers it as “The Story of Jerry and the Dog.”

“I still don’t know how to this day the other roomers manage it, but you know what I think: I think it had only to do with me,” says Jerry of his problem with a neighbor’s dog. “If you think about it, this dog had what amounted to an antipathy toward me; really.”

That’s what my neighbor’s dog reminds me of.  An antipathy?  The dog hates me. She barks violently and loudly whenever I come or go. Her name is Brownie, though she’s mostly black; she is middle-aged and middle-sized, and—it bears repeating—she hates me. I am sure I don’t deserve it.

Brownie can hear my doorknob, and even its faintest rattle will send her tearing across the yard, barking furiously. She runs up a wooden staircase on the side of my neighbor’s apartment and looks down over the fence at me, snarling and growling, baring her teeth, barking, barking, barking. She won’t stop until someone comes to get her or I go away. This has gone on “from the very beginning,” as Jerry so wearily puts it. The neighbors do scold Brownie for the racket she makes, and they even spank her, hard. I hate to see that, not least because I worry she will associate the pain with me and bark harder next time.

I believe Brownie is a German Hunt Terrier, which, according to the Internet, qualifies her as a “vigilant” and “cantankerous” guard dog, typically “suspicious of strangers” and “not suitable as a pet.” Your average Deutscher Jagdterrier is a solid hunter, among the best of the terriers for rooting out badgers and taking down boar. I have seen neither badgers nor boar in my neighborhood, so there you go. At night, however, I can hear Brownie doing battle with local skunks and raccoons; even they don’t push her buttons as I seem to. She, in turn, can hear me getting up to go to the bathroom, and sometimes she will bark once to inform me of this.

Brownie would do well in some allegorical 11th-century middle-European empire-kingdom, as the court hunter-hound of a king who wants to inspire fear or at least serious aggravation wherever he goes. She makes do instead in the garret of my neighbor’s outdoor staircase. I would say that I’d want her for my own guard dog, except I’ve never seen her display as much hostility toward a stranger as she has toward me, and therefore I would not feel very protected.

Like Albee’s Jerry, I tried at first to make peace. Reaching over the fence at my own risk, I once fed Brownie an entire package of Pepperidge Farm Chess Men cookies, which are difficult to share, even with people. She took them right from my hand, one at a time, and ever so delicately devoured them with obvious satisfaction, then quietly dismounted the steps and vanished into her yard. When next we met, she barked and huffed and snarled as usual. She had eaten my cookies and hated me the whole time, the bitch.

When Jerry’s efforts to kill the Dog with kindness failed, he tried to kill it with poison. But he quickly regretted that decision: “I wanted the dog to live so that I could see what our new relationship might come to,” he says. I know what he means. Once, while watering the garden to a soundtrack of Brownie barking, I had the idea to pull the hose out into the driveway and strangle her with it. Or at least to spray water in her face. I haven’t done anything yet, either because I’m afraid of getting caught or because I fear it will ruin our prospects for progress, if they exist. Yet my passive resistance clearly has failed; she has learned that I am a pushover, that I can be bullied.

I have often felt invisible in the world, but never when I’ve wanted to. I am not invisible to the more desperate and predatory homeless people, because they are invisible themselves—and I am never invisible to Brownie. To her, I am hyper-visible. Sometimes, in fact, I think that she can see straight into my soul, and that she recognizes something awful in there. It’s unsettling. Sometimes her barking has a tattletale quality, as if I’ve perpetrated some hideous moral offense of which only she is aware, and she won’t let me get away with it. She makes me feel guilty for something I don’t even understand. Faust had a bothersome black dog too, of course. Goethe described it as a poodle, which isn’t an exact match, and it's a harbinger of Mephistopheles, which might be. Just what kind of a deal is Brownie trying to broker with me?

She has a certain purity of expression that I must admire. There is a fine line between self-discipline and compulsion, but another way Brownie makes me feel guilty is by her dedication.  She’ll stop whatever she is doing at any time to come to the fence and bark at me. Thousands of times since I moved in. If I could do anything with as much regularity, vehemence, and unswerving duty as that, mine would be a focused, successful, and very visible life.

Jerry’s Dog does not die, but the play is still a tragedy. Jerry, who also feels invisible sometimes, does make a kind of progress with the Dog. “We regard each other with a mixture of sadness and suspicion,” he explains, “and then we feign indifference. We walk past each other safely; we have an understanding. It’s very sad, but you’ll have to admit that it’s an understanding. We had made many attempts at contact, and we had failed.”

Brownie and I aren’t there yet, but I’m not so sure we should try to be. “We neither love nor hurt,” Jerry continues, “because we do not try to reach each other.”

I saw Brownie on the street once. She was loose, unleashed and out of context, her owners absent. I don’t know how she got out, but what a sight. She ran up and down the block, aimlessly, with the joy and terror of liberation, her tongue lolling like a Great Dane’s. She didn’t bark at me once, and I wondered if she even recognized me. I took a few steps toward her, but she ran away.

Unlike life, good drama solves its own problems, and that’s partly why it’s useful. Albee’s plays always solve the problems they pose, even when the solutions are unpleasant, as they usually are. “The Story of Jerry and the Dog” is really about Jerry and the Rest of Humanity, and this of course is Albee’s instructive gift. When I first saw the play, The Zoo Story initiated me into theater’s mysteries, and some of life’s. Although I’ve played other Albee characters—with, perhaps, the great nourishing satisfaction of some ungrateful Deutscher Jagdterrier eating Pepperidge Farm Chess Men—I’ve never had a go at Jerry. Perhaps I no longer need to.

—Jonathan Kiefer

Seasonal Inspiration

Director Eric Ting of the Long Wharf set himself a considerable task this holiday season: how to defamiliarize the overly familiar?  It's a Wonderful Life, the seasonal chestnut roasting on televisions all over the U.S. at Christmastime as a cinematic classic from Frank Capra starring wholesome Jimmy Stewart and winsome Donna Reed, has been re-imagined as a radio play by CT writer Joe Landy.  Added to that is a frame in which Alex Moggridge experiences the radio performers as ghosts of Christmases--and an America--past.  He's alone in a dusty old radio station when performers from the WWII era of Capra's film parade into the place; they enlist him to play the part of the story's hero, George Bailey. The story, as "everyone" in America knows, is about a dark night of the soul for George, the long-suffering director of a Building and Loan concern in Bedford Falls, NY; George is a champion of the 99% in constant battle with the local one percenter, the grasping, covetous old curmudgeon and evil banker Mr. Potter.  When his likeable uncle Billy, a business liability if there ever was one, misplaces a considerable sum, George faces ruin at the hands of Potter.  George's neck is on the chopping-block and he's about to end it all when to his rescue arrives a simple-minded angel called Clarence.  The remedy for George's "life isn't worth living" attitude: a glimpse of what the world would be like had he never existed.

As its fans know, a joy of the film is the supporting roles and the character actors who played them, long since having burned their deliveries into our brain cells.  This Life keeps up a running dialogue with the voices we know so well--Dan Domingues's Old Man Potter is a spot-on recreation of Lionel Barrymore's memorable performance, played for laughs this time.  Moggridge has the more daunting task of delivering his lines without echoing or mimicking or mocking Jimmy Stewart, who owns them, and it's to his considerable credit that he manages to do so.  The "play as cast" aspect of his incorporation into the radio play works to his advantage: he doesn't have to play George Bailey so much as play a guy forced to play George--the pre-existence of the role is a given.  It's an interesting way of underlining the "everyman" (or anyman) aspects of George.

And that's what makes the frame conceit and the radio play staging such brilliant touches.  As a radio play, we're watching superb "voice actors" perform a show that radio listeners would only hear--and that's endless fun in itself thanks to the authentic set by Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams, and the radio-era costumes by Jessica Ford, and due particularly to the tirelessly precise and unbelievably busy foley artist (aka, sound effects man) Nathan A. Roberts, an entertaining one-man-show in his own right.  Staging-wise, the show is a lesson in "how do they do that," and simultaneously a "behind-the-scenes" view (what we see onstage) and a successful enactment (what we hear).

But there's a third level: the sights and sounds of the film already implanted in the minds of many in the audience are invoked and distorted by what we see and hear.  No one on stage "is" actually the character they're playing--indeed, it's great fun to see/hear various characterizations, as for instance angel Clarence; Italian bar owner Mr. Martini; an Irish Buildings and Loan boardmember; younger brother Harry Bailey; and a few others, all come from one man: Kevyn Morrow.  Ditto Kate MacCluggage as George's mom, daughter, local goodtime gal Viola, and uncle Billy's bird.

A further spin is provided by Ariel Woodiwriss, as Mary Bailey (née Hatch), the love of George's life; every bit as winsome as Donna Reed, she seems at times to "be"  Mary, in search of her George, who might just be Moggridge.  Indeed, during the segment when George visits a Bedford Falls in which he has never existed, Moggridge is alone on stage, and the voices of the others, and the sound effects, respond to him as though he is haunted by them.  It's a nice Twilight Zone-style touch that makes It's a Wonderful Life become, like the Christmas season itself with its overlay of memories, a space that we might find ourselves inhabiting willy nilly.  The lesson learned there: the richest man is not the one with the most money in the bank but the one with a community behind him.

Warmly nostalgic with a slightly modernist twist, It's a Wonderful Life is enthralling entertainment.

It's a Wonderful Life Stage play by Joe Landy; adapted from the film script by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Jo Swerling, Frank Capra Directed by Eric Ting The Long Wharf Theatre December 7-31, 2011

Russell Hoban.

I’m writing this on the morning of Friday, the 16th of December.  

Yesterday’s New York Times featured two big obituaries that were of note to people in the world of books and letters. George Whitman, the owner of (as people kept saying) the fabled, the legendary, Paris bookstore Shakespeare & Co., died at the age of 98. I never went to Shakespeare & Co. and I really don’t have much to say about the place, though obviously it was a landmark and hugely important. Godspeed to you, Mr. Whitman. But I am bitter and sad about the attention Whitman’s death attracted because the other big obituary I read yesterday affected me much more deeply, and I was surprised that I didn’t read the sad responses to it on Facebook that I had genuinely expected.

Russell Hoban died.

Were you ever a child? When you were little, did you read those books about the little badger named Frances who made up songs about how she didn’t like eggs? Who had a little sister named Gloria who loved Chompo bars? Whose best friend, Albert, was obviously going to grow up to be the only confirmed bachelor badger in town? Who had an awful friend named Thelma who was such a bitch that I cannot imagine ever naming a child of mine Thelma?

Russell Hoban wrote a short but hugely important series of stories about Frances. Bread and Jam for Frances; Bedtime for Frances; A Bargain for Frances; A Birthday for Frances; Best Friends for Frances; A Baby Sister for Frances. They are all absolutely wonderful. The illustrations were by Hoban’s wife, Lillian, except for the one done by the master Garth Williams (I feel bad about this, but have to admit that the one with the Williams illustrations is actually the one where I like the pictures the least -- this is not unlike how the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle book that I like the least, even though it’s wonderful, is illustrated by Maurice Sendak -- I prefer the Hilary Knight illustrations in the other three titles). Hoban wrote many, many other books, including acclaimed works for grownups. But I know nothing about them. I tell you this not in a boastful way, but just to make it clear I am no authority on Russell Hoban.

But I can tell you this: Hoban is a guy whose work was essential to the formation of thousands and thousands and thousands of readers around the world. Maybe not all highbrow readers -- maybe not the sort of people who shopped at Shakespeare and Company in Paris. But they were readers. And they loved those books.

When I was small, I spent a lot of time in the tiny town of Enfield, New Hampshire. There isn’t much happening in Enfield and there was even less happening then, when I was little. But they had a charming public library, which was a Victorian house that had been converted into a library. Every summer I would borrow the same books from that library. These were books I would never have touched the rest of the year, when I was in New Haven -- they were special summertime only books. The Frances books were summertime books. So was Eloise in Paris. Sacred titles, these.

When the Foundry Bookstore was still around, one day, about ten years ago, I very coolly went in and bought all of the Frances books they had -- I think there were four titles in stock. I didn’t need them, strictly speaking, but I thought, “I need to take these home and keep them safe.” I read them once and tucked them away on my shelf, with no intention of doing anything with them except enjoying them now and then.

Now, I have a three year old who adores the Frances books, which I have been reading to her since she was an infant. She loves to eat bread and jam because of Frances. We will always have copies of the Frances books in our house. Because not enough people seem to be taking this seriously, I will be loud when I say Rest in peace, Mr. Hoban. I know I didn’t know all your work, but what I knew, I loved.

A Night at the Theater

We sometimes forget how much Shakespeare was a fantasist.  The ghost in Hamlet, the witches and apparitions in Macbeth have become so familiar as to be normal.  Even odd bits of “grand Guignol” style bloodletting—Gloucester’s eyes, anyone?—rarely meet with the shock we might otherwise experience if not somewhat inured by Shakespeare’s sublime reputation.  If we think about it, we might recall that his plays were considered extremely indecorous by the leading lights of eras much less heteroclite in their tastes than ours.  Thus one of the delights of a Romance like Cymbeline, in current production at the Yale School of Drama, is that it reminds us how bizarre and baroque the Bard can be. Because Cymbeline doesn’t get staged as often as the better-known plays, we can still be surprised by it.  It’s a play with a sprawling cast that keeps us guessing about whose story this really is; it gives us lots of set-ups and exposition that seem to have subtitles saying “wait for it!” as it works out a wondrously interlinked plot with no real center; and it’s a play with moments of either comic or icky—or both—melodrama, like Imogen waking from another one of those Juliet-death-trance potions to find herself, she believes, beside the corpse of her love, Posthumus, only the body is headless, so how’s a girl to be sure? Its very oddity makes it quite a good play for YSD as it presents many instances for the team, led by third-year director Louisa Proske, to create effects as erratic as the play itself.

Start with the visually arresting costumes by Nikki Delhomme: rich and classy for the court figures; they situate the characters in some old European film of easy elegance, like Rules of the Game, for instance, and that’s not a bad comparison for the levels of society we encounter in this play; for there are also the bumpkins (who are really royalty), shirtless and perpetually wrassling, and there’s Imogen looking as though she’s imprisoned by her ballooning skirts—until she dons a traveling-coat, looking like Helena Bonham-Carter in A Room with a View setting off on an adventure.  There are also soldiers about who look sort of WWI era, and there’s the sumptuous jacket of the foolish fop Cloten that could grace Liberace, and, finally, our romantic hero Posthumus’ simple man threads—think Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant when he really has to play self-effacing; and don’t forget the scene in a sauna where the guys—lots of prime male flesh on view in this show—hang about in towels, talk women, make a wager on Iachimo seducing Imogen.

Light (Solomon Weisbard) and sound (Palmer Hefferan and Michaël Attias) are also very busy in this production.  Set on the backstage at the University Theater (Meredith B. Ries, scenic design) the trappings of theatrical spectacle are all about us—and they become a part of the play when the lights scaffolds descend to stage level for lighting effects and to create visual chaos during the war scene.  There are also some great uses of music and sound—sometimes a schmaltzy tune will start up, or little tinkling bells make us feel we’re not quite in the normal world, or unnerving crescendoes of drums and metallic sounds add eerieness and drama.  The play has a lot to get through and in lieu of the usual Shakespearean pleasures—great soul-searching soliloquies, highly romantic badinage, verbal jousts, clownish antics—has to find its magic where it can.  As, for instance, having a first grader (Rachel Miller) play the part of Jupiter, in the totally wigged-out deus ex machina moment that almost tips into Disney.  For macabre contrast, there’s that headless corpse rising feet first into the vault.

In the cast, special mention: Lucas Dixon as the giddy Cloten, a true sop who gets to strut and fret in fine style; Brian Wiles as the cunning Iachimo—his glittering eyes and smug look when tricking Posthumus into believing he seduced Imogen are truly villainous; Miriam A. Hyman, all dressed-up up for evil and deliciously duplicitous as The Queen; Tim Brown, as attendant Cornelius, who gets a great laugh when clarifying a bit of business in the endless denoument; Michael Place as a fussily priggish Pisanio; Robert Grant as the dour and limping Cymbeline, doomed to be a bit clueless when so much is going on when he’s not around; Joshua Bermudez as agile Guiderius, who shrugs off decapitating Cloten as easily as the play does; as the lovers who prove true Adina Verson (Imogen) and Fisher Neal (Posthumus) declaim the super-declamatory verse—there are lots of “you gods!” moments—but provide here and there more subtle touches: Verson taking aim with her needle at Posthumus’s ship fading on the horizon; Neal as a spotlighted captive looking on death as proper justice.

The play finishes up with a recognition scene to end all recognition scenes—here it has the feel of the Shakespearean equivalent of the Marx Brothers’ shipboard cabin scene in A Night at the Opera: “I had a feeling you were going to show up.”  All’s well that ends well, and this Cymbeline certainly does.

William  Shakespeare’s Cymbeline Directed by Louisa Proske Yale School of Drama

December 10 to 16, 2011

New Skin For The Old Ceremony

Wallace Shawn’s A Thought in Three Parts, playing for two more shows at Yale Cabaret, directed by Hallie Cooper-Novack, has the reputation of being unproduceable because many of the acts the script calls for in the second part, “The Youth Hostel,” our society generally deems, if depicted on stage or screen, “pornographic.” To the extent that TTP offers transgression of polite theatrical norms—whatever we might conceive those to be—it’s courageous of the Cabaret to stage it, and for that reason this production and the Artistic Directors of the Cab are to be commended. In the quest for work that might be a bit unsettling or alienating, a play like Shawn’s has a certain cachet (it was only produced once in the States—in Austin in 2007—and its run in London, in 1977, occasioned debate about mores in art and a visit from the Vice Squad).

The play originated in 1976, fittingly, since its sexual politics smack very much of the era of endemic marital discord, pre-AIDS sexual explorations, masculine anxieties and aggressions in the age of feminist assertiveness, post-porn sexual license, and the taken-for-granted freedom that anything that can be thought can be said and shown. But what is the “thought” that gets depicted in these three parts (the other two are “Summer Evening,” and “Mr. Frivolous”)?

The production’s playbill provides some prose from Shawn: “…Sex is an extraordinary meeting place of reality and dream, and it’s also—what is not perhaps exactly the same thing—an extraordinary meeting place of the meaningful and the meaningless.” That’s close enough to a thought: to imply an “extraordinary meeting place” by making sex as ordinary as possible.

How ordinary? In “Evening,” the meeting place is a hotelroom, a bit too cher for the couple uncomfortably inhabiting it. Their dialogue thrives upon non sequitur and ellipsis, abounding in unfinished thoughts, mixed signals and occasional monologues or asides that show us suppressed desires: “I want to be hugged. I want to be bound up. I want to be kissed” David (Chris Henry) says, in Sarah’s absence; “I’d stick a hot poker up my ass if I thought I would like it,” Sarah (Lupita Nyong’o) confides to us. As the night progresses, all the false starts—and morbid talk about Sarah as a dead body—lead finally to contact. Henry and Nyong’o are good at speaking at cross-purposes, and Cooper-Novack’s sense of how they should fill the bedroom and, importantly, bed works well. The idea seems to be that when we want to get laid we don’t think straight, and all the couple say to each other enacts a screen of anxiety that only touch can penetrate.

Masturbation becomes the pivotal act in part two—something that four of the five cast members in “Hostel” are able to do alone even with others present. And even as a competition: the men aim at one of the women to see who can squirt the highest on her person, while the women battle over a dildo to see who can wield the wand most efficiently. As you might imagine, “Hostel” requires some ingenuity to stage properly—there is abundant nudity and sexual simulations that have to be convincing, otherwise the humor of the piece could misfire. The staging is effectively choreographed and the cast (Will Cobbs, Carmen Zilles, Jillian Taylor, Seamus Mulcahy) gamely bare their bodies while spouting the puerile dialogue—riddled with “gosh” and “gee” and forthright banter (“Oh, hi, Dick! Are you jerking off?”; “You’ve really got a good, sticky hole”; “You’re a shithead, Helen”)—with straight faces. As Tom, the husband, apparently, of Judy (Taylor), Josiah Bania’s part seems little more than a nasty surfacing of a reality principle otherwise suppressed in the name of comradely coming: he’s jobless, supported by his mother, and smacks Helen around to keep her in her place.

Finally, Max Roll, as Mr. Frivolous, delivers a short, fantasizing monologue with a musing awkwardness, but it seems to me that a take-off on Shawn’s grimacing sheepishness, à la My Dinner with Andre or Vanya on 42nd Street, would sound the right note of pained reverie to bring down the curtain on what we might imagine has been a supposedly tortured “thought” about sex—the always potential act that Woody Allen describes as “the most fun you can have without laughing.”

Photos by Ethan Heard; courtesty of Yale Cabaret

A Thought in Three Parts Written by Wallace Shawn Directed by Hallie Cooper-Novack The Yale Cabaret November 17-19, 2011

Victim Missives

Walking into the Yale Cabaret last night down Prospect Street from above the Divinity School after 10 p.m. and back after midnight, I didn’t see many pedestrians about. There were, however, numerous police cars—both New Haven and Yale Security—hanging about, keeping an eye on the mostly vacant streets. One could feel a bit paranoid about surveillance, or one could feel secure—protected from the various urban threats lurking out there in the darkness. Does a police presence make you feel more afraid or less? Well, that might depend on what demographic of race, age, gender, and income you fit. And that answer plays into the theme developed in this week’s Yale Cabaret show: keeping the streets around Yale safe means casting a suspicious eye on anyone who doesn’t match the profile of racial privilege that most Yalelies—though not all by any means—meet. Street Scenes, conceived by MFA Yale student and installation artist Maayan Strauss and Colin Mannex, a DFA candidate at YSD, is based upon the all-too-frequent email missives the Yale Community receives from Yale Police Chief Ronnell Higgins.

The missives—a number of them are read verbatim by the company—consist of details about assaults and robberies that take place in the vicinity of Yale. In addition to giving Yalelies the what and where, Higgins asks for anyone with further information to come forward and generally recommends Yalelies not go about alone on foot, but avail themselves of transportation the university provides free of charge. At the very least, Higgins warns, use caution and be streetwise on these streets.

The performance piece Strauss and Mannex have created, aided by co-director Jessica Rizzo, a dramaturgy student at YSD, interrogates the assumptions that these communiques express, even if only implicitly. The dramatization of the confrontations described is highly stylized, with the role of victim and perpetrator distributed equally amongst the multicultural cast of three males and three females. The readings of the missives is flat and unemphatic, and most of the play’s dialogue consists of the earnest natterings of various pairs as they try to express—in self-consciously liberal academese—their unease with the implicit racial subtext of the missives, usually with one of the duo holding forth and the other nodding and uh-huhing.

Intermittently, the company gyrate in place as though automatons trapped in repetitive movements. In the background, projections of a few familiar New Haven street corners play, depicting slow-mo pedestrians while the ambient noise of the streets flows around the audience. It all seems so benign! And yet…

In the final segment, we hear the voices of victims and their responses to what happened to them yanks away, to some extent, the well-meaning sociology-speak of the discussants: we realize that what Higgins reports to the community is an event that was first reported to him. These aren’t simply texts for a course on the semiotics of crime reporting, but little bits of life—and in one case, death—that are happening around us all the time.

And yet, even there, the play grimly suggests, the Yale community remains largely untouched, aware of a certain unease now and then, but nothing major, more inclined to blame the messenger than to understand the real message.

Street Scenes Conceived by Maayan Strauss, Colin Mannex Directed by Colin Mannex, Maayan Strauss, Jessica Rizzo The Yale Cabaret November 10-12

All Are Welcome

Is there anything as polarizing as church?  You either share the faith or you don’t.  We may disagree about politics, food, tastes in entertainment, clothes, but none of those things are absolutes.  And if we visit a friend’s family we already know we won’t belong in quite the same way as relatives do.  But if we visit a friend’s place of worship, we either join in or become an outsider. That choice is evoked by Young Jean Lee’s Church, now playing for two more shows at The Yale Cabaret.  The audience is the congregation and is preached to by the righteous Reverend José, and greeted, with handshakes and hugs, by three beneficently smiling female reverends, and listens to testimonials of how God got involved in the lives of the reverends, and witnesses hymns and dance.

The name of the church we never learn, nor could I say for certain what the tenets of belief are, beyond praise of Jesus and fear of the devil, though charismatic Reverend José (Matthew Gutschick) and his trio do make a few pronouncements that conjure a liberal faith—accepting all races and sexual persuasions and against anti-abortion, and not willing to insist on God’s gender.  The main symptom of moral turpitude, it seems, is “masturbation-rage”—behavior that goes beyond ego-inflated navel-gazing to a more active love affair with the self, in denial of the need for God.

At first, Reverend José is just a voice out of the darkness, crying in a wilderness as it were, and his sermon is of the “tear down the ego” variety designed to inspire penitence.  This is followed, in the bad cop/good cop rhythm of things, by the smiling, humble reverends greeting us, and then Reverend Kate (Kate Attwell) asks the congregation to suggest prayer requests—subjects to pray for—and members of the audience oblige.

At that point theater, to some extent, ends and ritual begins.  Of course, the two have always been related, but when persons in the audience ask for prayers for relatives, or for world peace, or for their work, and we’re asked to pray silently, then, if some are really praying, who’s to say we aren’t in church?  As Jesus said, “wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there am I.”

We don’t hear his name too much, mainly in the beginning and in a Christian rock song to which the reverends leap and dance and twirl, like a cross between bacchantes and cheerleaders, near the end of the piece.  But the sense of worship as giving honor to God is never absent, not even in the somewhat surreal and rambling or bathetic or funny testimonials that the reverends deliver, all straight-faced and without any overt sense of parody.  And what they describe—rising on a fountain of blood, a parable of the lantern-maker who wanted to be a sandal-maker, battles of good and bad angels, behaviorial addictions, a goat that eats from its master’s hand—are different only in degree not in kind from what one finds in any actual testimonial’s mangled version of scripture configured for the modern world.  And Reverend Laura (Laura Gragtmans)’s prayer of thanks for a comfortably useful life at the close seems as sincere and beneficent as any speech to God should be.

What’s the point of the piece, ultimately?  Final things, just as in any church, and how to live while we’re here.  As Jim Morrison, one of the reverends of the church of rock, says, “No one here gets out alive.”  Humbling, frightening, maybe gladdening as it may be, that’s the thought that makes life on earth a life “in church.”  Hallelujah.

Church Written by Young Jean Lee Directed by the Ensemble, with Sunder Ganglani Yale Cabaret November 3-5, 2011

The Way We Were

Watching Amy Herzog’s Belleville is an exercise in having your worst fears about people confirmed. The play offers a fascinating interplay between two narrative arcs: the spiralling down of what might be perceived as a romantic comedy, dressed up with dramatic overtones, and the raising of sinister tensions that, like the denouement of an Ibsen play, lay waste to the comfortable world we began with. The second play of the Yale Repertory Theatre’s 2011-12 Season and a World Premiere, Belleville is a triumph of slowburn technique. It’s the kind of play that, with only four characters, one set and no intermission, provides all its thrills and brilliance by simply placing its characters before us and letting us see them squirm and prevaricate and plead and joke and couple and coo and become gradually, relentlessly unhinged and desperate. The effect is exhilerating, an entertaining skirting of the abyss where the pursuit of normality turns deadly.

Disrupted from our failsafe positions, the play asks, how do we act? In human relations, we might say, rationality is only skin deep, the rest is pathology.

Abby (Maria Dizzia), a somewhat spoiled daddy’s girl, is going to be away from home at Christmas for the first time. That might not be such a big deal, but her sister’s about to have a baby and their mother died not too long ago. She’s in Paris—the “diverse” (though she’s self-conscious about using the word) section from which the play takes its title—offering wifely support to her new husband Zack (Greg Keller), a recent Johns Hopkins Med School grad doing important work on AIDS. Abby is still at the stage where she proudly shows off the wedding album (“I was really happy that day”) and attempts to put a good face on the little gaffes of cohabitation—like walking in on Zack masturbating to porn when he should be at work.

Herzog establishes early a grasp of how newlyweds, away from everyone they know and barely sure they know each other in this new context, have much to grapple with in every exchange—over what to wear, and where to go, and how to placate Abby’s father’s expectations and how to meet the demands of Zack’s job while maintaining a fun, lovers-abroad feeling. Fortunately, the landlord Alioune (Gilbert Owuor) is a personable guy willing to eat Christmas cookies though a Muslim, look at Abby’s photo album, and share a companionable bowl with Zack. Then again, friendship in such cases only goes so far when the rent’s overdue.

Pull on a strand and watch the unfinished tapestry of this young couple’s efforts at married life come unraveled. Anne Kauffman’s production is strong in the subtle touches that keep us guessing at what’s behind certain actions and comments, and in providing the punch of dramatic moments that shatter the congenial tone. The interplay and body language between the two principle characters is particularly effective when they grope for an intimacy they’re having a hard time finding.

Maria Dizzia’s role is complex: Abby is girlish, brittle, vulnerable, wounding, hysterical by turns. A spoiled spoiler but also a centerpiece, the raison d’être of Zack’s world, she is the engine that makes Belleville run. Herzog vents a bit on Abby’s inadequacies, but she also extends understanding to her when necessary.

As Zack, Greg Keller has the most difficult role. We have to like him, but not too much. He plays the ingratiating side of such a character perfectly—we’ve all met someone like him. And when things take a turn for the worse, we realize, with a growing chill and unease, that we truly don’t know what he’s capable of.

As landlord Alioune, Gilbert Owuor seems a bit more wooden than is necessary; understandably aloof, a landlord put in the position of being a friend, his character as played is hard to read. Herzog shows us that male bonding is often built upon deceiving women together, but Owuor could give us a bit more interest in Alioune as Zack’s foil.

As Alioune’s wife Amina, Pascale Armand makes the most of her three brief scenes. Her role is key in showing us a major difference between Abby and Zack and Alioune and Amina. We could reduce it to a cultural difference—the role of the “traditional wife” versus the contemporary version Abby manifests—but more to the point is the strength of character—demanding as it is—of Amina, a woman who, we grasp immediately, has no illusions and little patience for the self-delusions of others. Her presence is an immediate reality check.

A sprawling space with certain important areas we can’t see, the set by Julia C. Lee is an apartment just a bit seedy that, with its interesting ceiling slopes and skylights, its attractive windows and comfortable, lived-in look, presents the perfect locale for a slumming up-and-coming couple. And it is a repeated pleasure watching what different times of day, via Nina Hyun Seung Lee’s lighting, do with the place.

Commissioned by Yale Rep and developed through the Yale Center for New Theatre, Belleville is Amy Herzog’s Yale Rep debut. New Haven is fortunate to get in on the early work of this talented playwright, and she's at work on a newly commissioned play for the Rep.

A convincing study of the uncertainties beneath the identities we construct, Belleville is certainly worth a visit.

Belleville Written by Amy Herzog Directed by Anne Kauffman Yale Repertory Theatre October 21 to November 12, 2011