A Portrait of the Artist as a Boychik

Chaim Potok’s novel  My Name is Asher Lev tells the age-old tale of youthful rebellion in the name of art.  Like James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, Asher is a young man with a vocation to express himself creatively.  His destiny impels him to become a painter, even at the risk of offending his parents and his religious community.  But unlike Stephen, Asher remains within his faith, an orthodox Jew with very unorthodox views on what subject matter is permissible in his art.  Thus, in a sense, Potok gets to have it both ways: rather than telling a story like Joyce tells—in which a religion of art must substitute, in Catholic Ireland, for a lost religious faith—Potok lets Asher articulate his faith in art as an aspect of his larger faith in Man, and in his own people, and in their G*d. And yet, in the end, Asher must still wrestle with his parents’ inability to understand his intentions, and walk the solitary path of the artist driven by his own conscience.

If this sounds like a romantic tale, it should.  Aaron Posner’s adaptation of My Name is Asher Lev, onstage at the Long Wharf, takes place in a world where talent is acknowledged and reaps the admiration of the world—a success story wherein the problem is not a struggle with the goyische world of art critics and buyers, but with the orthodox views that would have Asher stifle such things as his tendency to depict nudes and, even more outrageously for his family and the fictional Ladover Hassidism of which his father is a member, crucifixions.  In other words, struggle is of the essence of art in Potok’s story: if not a struggle to become an artist, than a struggle over subject matter.

The stakes are raised through introduction of the Hassidic concept of “sitra achra”: an expression for any interest that leads away from righteousness to the “other side” of the Almighty, the forbidden areas of life and thought, like the one our first parents explored so memorably in the Bible by partaking of the Tree of Knowledge.

As might be clear from all this exposition, My Name is Asher Lev, as a play, sins against the notion that one should limit exposition in theater.  The entire play is narrated by Asher, and his address to us, explaining himself, is illustrated by enacted scenes to dramatize the conflicts.  And that’s where the value of a theatrical rendering of the story becomes evident.  In contrast to a first-person novel, the play more directly lets us, if we are so inclined, see other characters’ points of view as more valid than Asher’s.  Granted, we have to believe in his sincerity, otherwise he’s simply a willful trouble-maker.  But we might question, at any point, his methods and his motivations.  And that makes for a complex, thinky night of theater.

We might say that director Gordon Edelstein has chosen to the let the conceptual aspects of the material inhere in its themes rather than in its dramatization.  The staging takes place with a cast of three on one versatile set—light and colors and sound (Eugene Lee, set; Chris Akerlid, lighting; John Gromada, sound design) all play an important and effective part in helping us feel the various stages of Asher’s journey.  And while alternations of direct address and illustrative interactions might have made for a lockstep production, Edelstein and his team make wonderful use of tableaux, using the power of retrospect to infuse simple moments—Asher’s mother’s ritual farewell to her oft-traveling husband, the coin an uncle pays for Asher’s first sold drawing, Asher’s mother waiting by the window, Asher’s interview with the Rebbe, and his first meetings with an art agent and with an artist’s model—with talismanic power.  Everything he tells us, Asher tells us for a reason, but it’s left to us to decide what the things Asher tells us show us of his character.

Key to this production is Ari Brand, memorable and marvelous as Asher.  Maintaining a confessional tone of thoughtful and considered declaration, he keeps us in the palm of his hand throughout.  Brand, darkly good-looking, earnest, passionate, is a beguiling guide to Asher’s life, but he also is able to show us the steely and unyielding aspects of Asher, even the obtuseness that makes him at times unfeeling of others.  It’s a portrayal of considerable skill and force, keeping us anchored to the play through the careful unfolding of Asher’s growth.

As Asher’s father, Ari, Mark Nelson is a cautious, serious man, very human in his frustration and disappointment with the path his only son takes, but it is as Asher’s mentor, Jacob Kahn, that he truly shines.  The attitude of the older Jewish painter to his protégé is full of gentle irony and affectionate, but also wary, admiration; it’s a finely nuanced portrayal and the scenes between Asher and his teacher are some of the most appealing in the play, as is Asher’s audience with the Rebbe (also Nelson), an important scene in which we see that Asher need not always struggle against incomprehension.  The Rebbe’s wisdom is a saving grace, but it can’t save Asher from his need to conquer Western art—which means painting nudes and an image of suffering, drawing upon the crucifixion of Christ, that offends his parents deeply.  (Asher’s insistence on figural art is a bit odd, given that this is the era of Abstract Expressionism, a time when, more than ever in the history of art, a painter could follow a proscription against images and thrive).

As Asher’s mother, Riv, Melissa Miller does fine work as well, particularly in a subplot in which Riv loses her beloved brother and then later studies to continue his work.  While accepted in her plans—indeed, the Rebbe helps her implement them—there is a sense in which Riv, like her son, has a tendency to somewhat original behavior.  Miller also adds interest to the show by briefly playing characters who are not patiently maternal and wifely—Anna, the artist’s agent who finds Asher’s art intriguing but his orthodoxy amusing, and the artist’s model who is the first woman to ever disrobe for the boy.

As a carefully delineated portrayal of a particular culture, the play is fascinating.  And in its focus on intergenerational familial struggle, and the struggle between orthodoxy and secular passions, Asher Lev takes on classic themes that, though ostensibly 1950s, feel a bit Turn of the Century.  Stalinism, in full force in this period, is invoked a few times, but not Freudianism—and yet a less pious production might have made something of the fact that, thanks to casting, every male is for Asher a father figure, and every woman, mom.

My Name is Asher Lev By Aaron Posner Adapted from the novel by Chaim Potok Directed by Gordon Edelstein

The Long Wharf Theatre May 2-27, 2012

Trial By Friendship

American Buffalo, first produced in 1975 in Chicago, then on Broadway in 1977, is noted as the play that established playwright David Mamet as the premiere poet of American speech—emphatic, riddled with profanity, full of vague nouns with referents that change according to context, with meaning guided always by inflection.  Mamet’s influence has been so pervasive that it’s hard to say at times whether he simply found the means to convey the way we talk or in fact invented a mannerism we now recognize as our own.  It does seem to be the case that the dialogue in his plays has ceased to be unsettling and become “normal.” Staged in Westville’s Kehler Liddell Gallery, the Elm Shakespeare production of America Buffalo, directed by Mark Zeisler, could be said to offer an immediate contradiction: Mamet’s trio of seedy shop flies in an art gallery?  Could it be that Mamet’s style of visceral, streetwise theater has become a museum piece?   Perhaps, as there’s no denying that the used goods shop that comprises Elizabeth Bolster’s spare but effective set is situated in a setting that is genteely artsy.  It might’ve been interesting to have staged the play in some abandoned New Haven retail space, but, that said, the fictional shop the characters inhabit wouldn’t be out of place on Whalley Avenue, home of the gallery, and so the immediate locale lends a certain aura of authenticity to the production.

The play itself is dialogue driven, so there’s no problem staging it in a confined space, and the closer the audience is to the action, the better.  We hover on the periphery of the card table, small desk and display case of the shop, watching interactions that could be taking place in our midst.  With no great distance to overcome in the staging, this American Buffalo finds its virtues in being intimate and realistic, its scale measured to a confined space we share with its characters.

The cast is uniformly excellent.  As Donny Dubrow, the proprietor of the store, Tracy Griswold looks perfect for the part—lean, experienced, accommodating.  He appears as a small-time businessman, essentially trusting, but also on the lookout for weaknesses in others that may be to his benefit: the kind of man who could strike a hard bargain or choose to be generous, as he sees fit.  His plan to pull off “a score” on an unsuspecting well-heeled guy who visited his shop earlier and paid $90 for an American buffalo nickel is the dramatic focus, and, though criminal in his intentions, Donny is the good heart of the play.  Donny’s effort to remain simpatico with his confreres, even when they lie to him and bully him, is of the essence of Mamet’s vision of the odd sincerities found in the midst of the dog-eat-dog world of daily life, an essence that Griswold’s face is able to express as he listens to the others.

As Bob, an addict who Donny would like to help, by employing him as his errand boy, and who he tries to mentor in a small way, Ryan Barry owns the part.  He’s got the requisite slow speech, seemingly of one not all there, but he also can convey the idea that Bob is sharper than we—and his friends—think he is.  Bob is a man of few words, almost everything he says is pulled out of him by Donny, and Barry is terrific at making Bob’s minimal words carry the weight and ambiguity Mamet requires.  He has a tendency to repeat what’s said to him, a buying-time device that also seems to question everything he’s told, and, often, even what he himself says.  This is important because how the plot “resolves” has to do with when Bob is lying and why.  Zeisler’s actors are able to express a lot about their characters when they are silent as much as when they speak.

As Teach, the friendly nemesis of the slow-talking duo, a garrulous ne’er-do-well with an inflated opinion of himself, James Andreassi is a live wire.  He pitches his voice to achieve what seems always to be a reasonable tone, even when he’s spouting nonsense or berating others for situations he himself creates.  He has the ability to apologize and accuse in the same breath.  In Teach, Mamet creates an important American type: the mastermind of speculative supposition.  Teach has an explanation for everything, a way of creating narratives that suit his turn of mind, usually based on suspicions, irritations, gripes and grudges.  Constantly wiping back his longish hair, throwing his size around, restlessly grabbing chairs, checking himself in the mirror, looking musingly or anxiously out the storefront at the street, Andreassi’s Teach is a man of useless activity, all his energy in service to a fantasy in which he makes a big score or saves the day.  The drama of the play is to watch how his reckless need for control and self-assertion brings everything to a standstill, and, as Donny says, spreads “poison.”

American Buffalo is about small-timers in hard times, grasping at straws.  The bleakness of these characters’ lives comes out slowly, allowing us to sympathize with their criminal plot, if only to see something go right for them.  A working assumption of the play is that when “bad guys” are our “heroes,” someone will have to be worse than bad.   Rather than scaring us with ruthlessness, the method of Zeisler’s production is to make these guys, even Teach, likeable enough and typical enough—and funny enough—to keep us on their side, sort of, to make us relax and accept them, so that their moral lapses and failures of imagination are ours as well.

Local in feel, relentless in pacing, familiar in its hard truths, Elm Shakespeare’s American Buffalo delivers.

American Buffalo By David Mamet Directed by Mark Zeisler, with: Dave Stephen Baker (Sound & Original Music), Elizabeth Bolster (Costume & Set Design), Jamie Burnett (Lighting), Emily DiNardo (Stage Manager), Emmett Cassidy and Liz Cecere (Tech Crew)

The Elm Shakespeare Company May 10-13 and 17-20

The Kehler Liddell Gallery 873 Whalley Avenue, New Haven

For tickets and information: www.elmshakespeare.org / 203.393.1436 / info@elmshakespeare.org

Eureka! Jack Hitt's Bunch of Amateurs

From the press release for the latest book by New Haven resident and author Jack Hitt:

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What is it that drives America’s sharp-eyed bird-watchers, home-brew biologists, rogue paleontologists, backyard astronomers, and garage inventors to pursue their passions with such vigor and gusto? What inspires the amateurs who tinker in garages on their solar-powered cars and space elevators or who set out by canoe to catch a glimpse of a rare ivory-billed woodpecker? In BUNCH OF AMATEURS: A Search for the American Character (Crown, May 15, 2012) acclaimed writer, Peabody Award winner, and frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and This American Life, Jack Hitt argues that amateurs are more than just semi-professionals who are driven by a singular obsession . . . they are what drives the success of America and the identity of its people.

Filled with stories that highlight the ongoing American experience, Hitt’s Bunch of Amateurs is the hitchhiker’s guide to amateurism. Like Malcolm Gladwell on pop psychology, Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan on food, and Bill Simmons on sports, Hitt provides that high-caliber narrative acumen to the world of amateurs. From a heavily tattooed young woman in the Bay Area trying to splice a fish’s glow-in-the-dark gene into common yogurt (all done in her kitchen using salad spinners) to a space obsessive on the brink of developing the next generation of telescopes from his mobile home, Hitt not only tells the stories of people in the grip of a passion but argues that America’s history is bound up in a cycle of amateur surges, like so many trends in this country.

America is a land of fresh starts and second acts. TV shows like America’s Got Talent, Project Runway, and American Idol help to elevate the amateur to the prime-time ranks. Magazines like Popular Science and Make cater to the resurgence of the do-it-yourself impulses in America. Contests summoning amateurs to their workbenches and offering large rewards are sponsored by the Pentagon, NASA, and even Google. All of this, Hitt argues, shows just how deeply the amateur narrative is encoded in our national DNA. Amateur pursuits are always lamented as a world that just passed until a Sergey Brin or Mark Zuckerberg steps out of his garage (or dorm room) with the rare but crucial success story.

Mixing Ben Franklin, T. Rexes, robot clubs, and Clovis Man in a unique and profound way, Hitt’s BUNCH OF AMATEURS shows how America is always pioneering new frontiers that will lead to the newest version of the American dream.

#   #   #   #

Jack Hitt is a contributing editor to the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and public radio’s This American Life. He also writes for Rolling Stone, GQ, Wired, and Garden & Gun. He has won the Peabody Award, as well as the Livingston and Pope Foundation Awards. His stories can be heard on This American Life’s greatest hits CD, Lies, Sissies & Fiascoes, and The Best Crimes and Misdemeanors: Stories from The Moth. He is the author of a solo theater performance, Making Up the Truth.

BUNCH OF AMATEURS by Jack Hitt

Crown Publishers • On sale: May 15, 2012 • Price: $26.00 hardcover • Pages: 288 ISBN: 978-0-307-39375-3

Also available as an ebook and on audio from Random House

Visit www.crownpublishing.com or www.jackhitt.com

Yale Cab Recap

The Yale Cabaret’s Season 44 ended last month and a number of its practitioners will be graduating from the Yale School of Drama this month.  The work the YSD students do at the Cab doesn’t count as part of their work toward graduation—it’s done for love of theater and for the joy of working together on pet projects. And for numerous Cab fans, the productions at the Cab—intimate, avant-garde, inspired, off-the-wall, experimental, outrageous, inviting—are the live wire of the YSD season.  And so it’s time for a “thanks for the memories” moment to take note of the more memorable productions, performances, and displays of artistry that took place in the 2011-12 season (the procedure here: four notables in each category, chronologically by production date, with the fifth-mentioned earning top billing, in my estimation) [note: dates after names indicate prospective year of graduation from YSD]: First, overall Production: the skilled staging of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, produced by Michael Bateman (*13); the comically outrageous first-semester ender, Wallace Shawn’s A Thought in Three Parts, produced by Kate Ivins; the frenetic staging of Adrienne Kennedy’s The Funnyhouse of a Negro, produced by Alyssa Simmons (*14); the moody, musical trip to the underworld, Basement Hades, produced by Kate Ivins; and . . . the crowd-pleasing Victorian Gothic Camp of Mac Wellman’s Dracula, produced by Xaq Webb (*14).

Next comes attention to the technical accomplishments that are often so remarkable in transforming the tiny, unprepossessing space of the Cabaret:

In Set Design: Kristen Robinson (*13) for creating the distinct spaces of Persona; Adam Rigg (*13) and Kate Noll (*14) (aka Daniel Alderman and Olivia Higdon) for the gallery exhibit space of Rey Planta; Reid Thompson (*14) for the creepy and campy locations of Dracula; Brian Dudkiewicz (*14) for the historical and ethnic space of The Yiddish King Lear; and . . . Kate Noll (*14) for the Miss Havisham-like clutter of The Funnyhouse of a Negro.

For work in Costumes: Martin Schnellinger (*13), for the interplay of clothed and unclothed in A Thought in Three Parts; Elivia Bovenzi (*14), for helping create the theatrical layers of The Yiddish King Lear; Kristin Fiebig (*12), for the fantasia of whiteness in The Funnyhouse of a Negro; Nikki Delhomme (*13), for the lively get-ups of Carnival/Invisible; and . . . Seth Bodie (*14), for the uncanny outfitting in Dracula.

For memorable work in Sound Design: Palmer Heffernan (*13), for the roving speakers in Street Scenes; Ken Goodwin (*12), for the atmospheric aura of reWilding; Jacob Riley (*12), for the full scale presence of Dracula; Palmer Heffernan (*13) and Keri Klick (*13) for the soundscape of Basement Hades; and . . . Ken Goodwin (*12), for the wrenching sound effects of The Funnyhouse of a Negro.

For illuminating work in Lighting: Solomon Weisbard (*13), for the psychic landscapes of reWilding; Solomon Weisbard (*13), for the interplay of lights with movement in Clutch Yr Amplified Heart and Pretend; Masha Tsimring (*13), for the moody madhouse of The Funnyhouse of a Negro; Masha Tsimring (*13) and Yi Zhao (*12), for the Underworld of Basement Hades; and . . . Masha Tsimring (*13), for the stylish thrills of Dracula.

For striking use of Visuals: Paul Lieber (*13)’s projections and “home movies” in Persona; Christopher Ash (*14, aka Glenn Isaacs)’s ghostly projections in Rey Planta; Michael Bergman (*14)’s intimate use of visuals in Creation 2011; Michael Bergman (*14)’s atmospheric projections in Dracula; and . . . the rich use of projections in Basement Hades, by Hannah Wasileski (*13), and assistants Michael Bergman (*14), Nick Hussong (*14), and Paul Lieber (*13).

For striking use of Music: the ambiance of Sunder Ganglani (*12) and Ben Sharony’s music-scapes in Slaves; the mood-setting popular songs in Persona; the expressive tunes in Clutch Yr Amplified Heart and Pretend; the accompaniment and sound effects of The Yiddish King Lear, Dana Astman, Music Director; and . . . the beautifully evocative score and performances of Basement Hades, Daniel Schlosberg, Composer, and Schlosberg and company as the instrumentalist Orpheuses.

One of the strengths of the Cabaret is its mix of pre-existing plays with new, often conceptual creations by students in YSD or in other disciplines at Yale.  First, among the published plays offered, the ones I was most pleased to make the acquaintance of: Persona, Ingmar Bergman’s harrowing exploration of the self; Rey Planta (translated by Alexandra Ripp, *13), Manuela Infante’s caustic exploration of manic consciousness; Dracula, Mac Wellman’s comic exploration of vampirism and Victorian mores; The Funnyhouse of a Negro, Adrienne Kennedy’s haunting exploration of racial identity; and . . . Church, Young Jean Lee’s arch and affecting exploration of religious community.

Among the concept pieces this year—and Season 44 was strong in such offerings—the ones I liked best were: Slaves, an enigmatic investigation of theater by Sunder Ganglani (*12)  and the ensemble; Creation 2011, a celebration of awkward theatricality by Sarah Krasnow (*14) and the ensemble; Clutch Yr Amplified Heart and Pretend, a celebration of theatrical movement by the ensemble; Carnivale/Invisible, a questioning of American entertainment by Ben Fainstein (*13) and the ensemble; and . . . the deft interweaving of myth and music in Justin A. Taylor (*13) and the ensemble’s Basement Hades.

And, because most of the shows at the Cab feature strong ensemble work, let’s recognize special merit in ensemble: the entire lubricious cast of A Thought in Three Parts; the large cast of seekers in reWilding; the mad women at the table, and their attendants, in Chamber Music; the actors in the play, in the Purim play within the play, and in the audience in The Yiddish King Lear; and . . . the demonically entertaining cast of Dracula.

With so much concept and ensemble work, it becomes trickier to pick out individual performances, but I’ll follow the industry practice of dividing performances by gender and proceeding as if these actors/actresses can somehow be subtracted from the wholes of which they provided memorable parts, ladies first:

For her expressive, uninhibited performances in Slaves, A Thought in Three Parts, and Clutch Yr Amplified Heart and Pretend, Jillian Taylor (*12); for her roles as the silent actress in Persona, the voice in Rey Planta, and the stridently “sane” Amelia Earhart in Chamber Music, Monique Bernadette Barbee (*13); for her riveting portrayal of the conflicted nurse in Persona, Laura Gragtmans (*12); for her awkward Joan of Arc in Chamber Music, and her deliciously demur and brazen Lucy in Dracula, Marissa Neitling (*13); and . . . for the stand-out performance of Season 44: Miriam Hyman (*12) in The Funnyhouse of a Negro.

For his roles as the blinking, speechless king in Rey Planta, and as the badgering inspector in Christie in Love, Robert Grant (*13); for his intensely realistic character studies in reWilding, Dan O’Brien (*14); for his scene-stealing Van Helsing in Dracula, Brian Wiles (*12); for his kvetching patriarch in The Yiddish King Lear, William DeMeritt (*12); and . . . for his play-as-cast gusto in such roles as the confused husband in Persona, the appalled constable in Christie in Love, the babbling, spider-eating Jonathan Harker in Dracula, and the unforgettable Chicken Man in reWilding, Lucas Dixon (*12)

And for great work in directing: Alex Mihail (*12), for exploring the psychic tensions of Persona; Dustin Wills (*14), for orchestrating the varied misfits in reWilding; Jack Tamburri (*13), for finding the perfect pitch for the vaudevillian creepshow of Dracula; Ethan Heard (*13), for conducting the interplay of music, miming, and monologue in Basement Hades; and . . . Lileana Blain-Cruz (*12), for the inspired tour de force mania of The Funnyhouse of a Negro.

Deep appreciation for all the work and all the fun, and . . . see you next year!

New Plays

This year, the 7th Annual Carlotta Festival at the Yale School of Drama, a showcase developed by Paula Vogel, Pulitzer-winning playwright and Chair of the YSD Playwriting Department, for the school’s graduating playwrights, features three plays that explore the vicissitudes of that oft-misunderstood creature, the human male. In Fox Play, which begins the festival on May 4th, the focus is on how men grieve; in Petty Harbour, opening May 5th, the story is a tale of forgiveness involving a patriarch and his three sons; and The Bachelors, opening May 6th, looks at the possibilities for romance outside the “bromance” of three thirtyish guys, long-time friends and housemates.

For Jake Jeppson, author of Fox Play, the issue is to explore what he calls “the ideal masculinity of an ideal America,” a code of conduct that doesn’t allow grief to be aired easily among men.  His main characters are isolated males who have suffered a loss: Franklin, an elderly shoesalesman, is a widower; Sean, a much younger man, is “an aspiring YouTube personality” who mainly posts videos of the girlfriend that got away.  Both begin hearing voices that lead them into the woods outside Washington D.C. where they live (and where Jeppson grew up). But what they find in the woods departs from their prosaic realities in favor of something akin to magical realism.

For this phase of the play—a two-act boasting 14 characters played by a cast of 9 actors—Jeppson draws upon the art of James Prosek, a Yale grad and Peabody affiliate, who specializes in “unnatural history.”  One of Prosek’s taxidermied fantasias—a winged fox—figures in the play as a talismanic creature.  For Jeppson, Prosek’s idea that “the real myth is the myth of order” opens up possibilities for how imaginative and empathetic interactions outside our usual modes of conduct can lead to release.

But don’t get the idea that a play about grief is a downer.  Jeppson’s play also goes for laughs and a sense of the absurd in its blend of silly and serious.  Like Prosek’s enhanced creatures, Jeppson’s play offers a mash-up in which a historical figure like Grover Cleveland can preside over a forest full of eccentrics, all coping in entertaining ways with what might be called “our national wound.”

For Martyna Majok, from Poland by way of New Jersey and the University of Chicago, taking on an epic two-act on the theme of patriarchy sent her to reference points like King Lear and The Godfather.  She set out to write a play “as linear as anything,” observing the unities of place and time, as it unfolds from evening to early morning.  Three grown, banished sons—Shane, the “golden child,” Nolan, the needy, neglected child, and Dean, the angry, ostensibly successful son—each must find some way back into the life of their father Eamon, who has decided to make a church of the family homestead.

Majok’s plays usually emphasize women and, while the men have center stage this time, two female characters bring new tensions to the situation.  Bett arrives from Southside Chicago in pursuit of Shane, but the other is a more surprising visitor whose entry marks the dramatic close of Act One.

The play’s title, Petty Harbour, refers to the setting, an actual, fairly insular area of Newfoundland, but we might wonder whether “being petty” and “finding safe harbor” are also referenced in the play, which takes place during a storm and explores the storied hurts of family life where “every conversation references all previous conversations.”  Majok found that concentrating on male characters allowed her to discover aspects of patriarchy, especially when considered in relation to God, that are both “complicated and beautiful.”

Caroline McGraw’s The Bachelors also concentrates on three males, but here the drama is not based on familial relations but rather on how hard it is to know oneself within the dynamics of a group.  McGraw first wrote a play at 15, in a workshop in her native Cleveland, and, like Majok, she has also concentrated on female characters, which are usually going through a process of development that features a certain menace.  Here, in what her director Alex Mihail calls “a vicious comedy,” she’s deliberately taking on the kind of “American men behaving badly” plays made famous by the likes of David Mamet and Neil LaBute, but with overtones of a sit-com about guys.

Though no female characters appear on stage, much depends on the effect of offstage women on her characters—all types we’ll recognize, McGraw says, so that we might be surprised at which emerges as the hero or Everyman.

The play also occurs in “real time,” avoiding the leaps in time McGraw usually favors; we live an hour and twenty-five minutes in the lives of these characters, guys who have been friends for a decade, now living together on a frathouse row in a college town.  Laughs abound, but part way through an event occurs that transforms the situation so that “it costs more to laugh.”

A notable rite of passage in the YSD school year, The Carlotta Festival pairs graduating directors—Alexandru Mihail and Lileana Blain-Cruz, director of Fox Play—with the final projects of playwrights in the program.  This year, a graduate of the program, Tea Alagić, 07, returns to direct Majok’s play.  After the opening weekend—Fox Play, 8 p.m., May 4; Petty Harbour, 8 p.m., May 5; The Bachelors, 8 p.m., May 6—the plays continue to run in rotating repertory from the 8th to the 12th.  At the Iseman Theater, New Haven.  For more information: http://drama.yale.edu/carlotta

Just Being Neighborly

Now on stage at the Yale Repertory Theatre, Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses is a funny and sad play that ponders the very real terror we use other people to avoid acknowledging.  The unique strength of the play is that it both builds and batters the kinds of sympathy and companionableness that make human relationships possible.  The effect is ultimately positive because Eno keeps his play within the realm of the humorous—avoiding the kind of Sturm und Drang moments that someone like Edward Albee would go after.  And yet, at any moment in the play’s hour and a half running time, things could get much uglier and/or wilder, and that uncertainty—for the audience and the characters—is what gives the play its edge. Recalling, to me at least, an Albee play that brings together an older couple with a younger, like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but also a play like A Delicate Balance (on stage at the Rep last season) where one couple is suddenly called upon by another because the latter are “afraid,” Eno brings together two couples, both named Jones, one settled, the other new in a vaguely rural town near mountains, and lets them brush up against one another in a succession of brief scenes.  The older couple, Bob (Tracy Letts) and Jennifer (Johanna Day) are working through Bob’s illness, a condition that seems to interfere with his memory and his ability to process normal speech.  The younger couple, John (Glenn Fitzgerald) and Pony (Parker Posey), are the perfect foils for the older couple because their speech is never quite normal.  Instead, they speak in patterns of verbal anomie, disguised as quips or ironic asides: Pony: “Say no more.” Jennifer: “Have you had experience with something like this?” Pony: “I just didn’t want you to say any more.”  The effect at times is like fencing in the dark where, having missed one’s target, one immediately accepts whatever one hits as the target.

This could become very fatiguing, but it’s not because the cast is marvelous: under Sam Gold’s direction, each actor is able to modulate speech that, taken as single lines, would sound like banal chit-chat but that, when placed in the context of Eno’s verbal see-sawing, become epigrams, odd insights, and the kind of comebacks that open or close on vistas of inference.  Eno’s gift is to convince us that all language works this way: almost any statement can be a test, a defense, an experiment, a joke, a mistake, a feint, a plea.  In normal speech, we tend to think we’re pretty adept at deciding if not what we’re hearing than at least how we choose to hear it.  But in speech as the characters in The Realistic Joneses use it, we’re never quite sure how what they say affects, expresses, interacts with what they mean.  The effect is fascinating and generally comic, with the characters often witty despite themselves: Pony: “Sorry.  I wasn’t expecting that. Or I guess I was expecting that there wasn’t going to be that.”

There isn’t so much a plot as there are certain “reveals” that come out in the dialogue.  If you nod, you might miss that someone has said something with plotlike implications, and if you do pay close attention you might still wonder what to make of how the four choose to talk around what’s happening.  Eno works with the plot of couples mirroring each other and then swapping partners, not in the smarmy sense of musical beds, but rather in the effort to “keep up” with what the “other Joneses” are all about.  More important, almost, than what’s happening is what the couples choose to say about it.  A few times, the effort to have someone say something amusingly odd begins to tell, but for the most part remains amusing.

The action takes place on a clever stage design by David Zinn that can be both inside and outside—we’re never inside Bob and Jennifer’s house, but we’re at times both inside and outside John and Pony’s—as well as, for one brief but important scene, a supermarket aisle. The amorphous nature of the set—at one end an outdoors table, at the other end, a cluttered-with-boxes kitchen, and, in between, a sliding glass door—helps to erase the very boundaries that more “realistic” drama strives to render.  The world of the Joneses is full of provisional spaces, spaces in both how they live and how they speak.

It’s also a world where time is a matter of Mark Barton’s realistic lighting (at one point John opines that “death and taxes” is not the phrase to measure verities, but rather “bodies and light”), and fun with props—a dead squirrel, a refrigerator, an old lamp, a ship in a bottle, a screwdriver, a transistor radio—measures our friction with our environment.  There’s a great bit, sort of like waiting for Godot in a backyard, when Bob and John, in the latter’s yard, fool with each other’s groping attempts to find out something without admitting anything, while interacting with a motion-detection light.

The female characters carry much of the gravitas of the play: Jennifer must cope with how difficult living with her husband is becoming—a great bit on that score is the “we’re late for the doctor” scene—while Pony becomes, at least elliptically, a catalyst.  As Jennifer, Johanna Day maintains a muted vitality that makes Jennifer the most sympathetic person on stage, her tone implying the kinds of inner resources we’re glad at least one character possesses, while, as Pony, Parker Posey is the most vulnerable because her familiar and distinctive voice (great to hear live) can make her tone both forthright and oblique at once, giving us the sense that Pony’s not quite sure what in her speech is mannerism and what matter.

As her husband, John is the most troubled character, apt to say things for effect and apt to be saddened or bitter about how little effect what he says has; Glenn Fitzgerald, it seemed to me, could go for a bit more pathos, in the end.  As it is, his John Jones is the most difficult character—interesting, amusing, perhaps even threatening at times, but ultimately cold, or, in Jennifer’s words, “committed to not being sympathetic.”  As Bob Jones, Tracy Letts puts the real in “realistic”: he seems to meld so fully with the character we feel we’re getting to know an actual person, finding in the incremental information we glean a man’s resources in teetering between what he’s always been and what he’s never been—nothing.  Almost every word out of his mouth carries a lifetime’s worth of tired exasperation at how little words accomplish.  It’s wonderful.

When the abyss comes close, Eno suggests, we value our banalities. In showing us that social interaction is largely a matter of taking comfort in, or exception with, something someone else just said, Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses is keeping it real.

The Realistic Joneses By Will Eno Directed by Sam Gold

The Yale Repertory Theatre April 20 to May 12, 2012

The Last Romantic

The Broken Tower, written and directed by James Franco, starring James Franco, with Michael Shannon. The most obvious comment is that Hart Crane deserves better.

A complex poet who tried to combine the ecstatic reach of Whitman with a Shakespearean richness of syntax and verbal excess, while haunted by the modernist search for prevailing myths found in Eliot’s The Waste Land, Crane, born in 1899, also "wrestled the angel” that wouldn’t get full exploration until the era of the Beats: whether or not to express openly a gay sensibility.

In addition to all that, Crane was the scion of a man made rich by crass commercialism—his father invented that symbol of polite social hygiene, the Life Saver mint—with ambitions to be a writer of a more Baudelairean era. He was doomed to be “the last romantic,” a figure living out a version of the tortured artist tale that was a familiar cautionary fable before poets—beginning with the generation after Crane—regularly became tenured professors. Crane’s, then, is a very American story, poised flamboyantly between the wars, looking backward to the Paris spleen of the symbolists, participating in the Paris fads of the expatriates, and looking forward to the Paris squats of the Beats. It’s a story that partakes of an age-old incentive to suffer for art while proclaiming a noble indifference to the demands of the work-a-day world.

Does this story have anything to teach us today? Perhaps it might be the lesson that one man’s rich dilettante is another man’s outcast genius. James Franco, director and star and author and editor and co-producer of The Broken Tower, and currently a grad student in English at Yale, might be said to be resurrecting the ghost of Crane for the sake of his own romantic ambitions: as a celebrity actor, thanks in part to the meaningless but lucrative distinction of playing Harry Osborne, Peter Parker/Spider-Man’s friend/nemesis in a trio of crassly commercial comic-book rip-offs, Franco craves artistic respectability and achievement. He’s an author, an installation artist, a performance artist, a filmmaker, an exploiter/sufferer of his own celebrity—the latest post-ironic subject position in line with what used to be known as being “a poor little rich kid”—and a living, breathing, endlessly replicated image of the artist as PR stunt, or as pop image, surface sans depth, or as a self-perpetuating commodity fetish, perhaps. And, sometimes, he’s just an actor, man.

If this sounds like I’m reviewing Franco more than his film, I can’t help it. Never for a moment watching this film did I believe in Franco as Crane. Franco’s idea of convincing us of his subject’s reality is to have the folks from wardrobe put him in period costume and then let Christina Voros film him, with a sort of YouTube version of cinema verité, walking around parts of New York or Paris or the Cayman Islands or Mexico that don’t feature any anachronistic details. Unfortunately, such visuals don’t immediately transport us to the Jazz Age perambulations of Crane. Nor does watching Crane/Franco—Cranco—chop wood outside a rustic cabin while we hear him earnestly reading from a letter in which the poet voices his grand ambitions give us any real access to the ritual of withdrawal that Crane felt was necessary for his art.

And, typical of most biopics of the artist type, whenever Crane is around people he acts like a fool. He’s insufferable as, I suppose, only the truly gifted can be, but, his little moustache notwithstanding, it’s hard to separate the character Franco portrays this time around from the character he portrayed when he essayed the role of Allen Ginsberg for the film Howl, particularly when Crane sits hashing out his views over wine with a friend, sounding as if he’s waiting for a Charlie Parker sax sound-byte to catch up with him any minute. Impersonating literary mavericks seems to be Franco’s thing (he also plays Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner in short films he made for an installation), but, as an actor, he hasn’t begun to excavate what made these men who they were, rather than simply free-floating signifiers of literary greatness one finds on a college syllabus.

Franco, who began the film as a thesis at the Tisch School of the Arts, cops a bit of cinematic style from Andy Warhol in the early going, enough, particularly with Franco’s even prettier younger brother Dave playing the teen-aged Crane, to make us think fond thoughts of Joey Dallesandro, and if that’s not enough to make us feel we’ve entered a “gay sensibility,” there are quasi-explicit moments of sex with men to register Crane’s lonely candle. And there’s even—naively—Robert Lowell’s poem “Words for Hart Crane” printed on the screen (unattributed) to let us know that everything this film is trying to say, about the poet maudit “wolfing the stray lambs of the Place de la Concorde,” was masterfully said in sonnet form in the late Fifties.

And that brings me to what dismays me most about The Broken Tower: the sense that Franco, dissatisfied, understandably, with the roles Hollywood sends his way, is trying to find his own path by standing on the shoulders of giants. The background most significant to this foray into what is ultimately a vanity project about Hart Crane is Franco’s early role as James Dean. The greatness of Dean as an actor is unplayable by another actor; one can only look foolish trying to “be” James Dean on screen. And yet Franco took on the task. It helps that he resembles Dean at times, and that’s enough to make us think sometimes of Dean while watching The Broken Tower, and that produces an odd Franco-inspired palimpsest that is surely the point of this film—Hart Crane was a rebel without a cause, got it? Dean was doomed to be Dean; Crane, Crane. Franco seems doomed to be a well-intentioned interpreter of an ineffable greatness that eludes him.

The effort is not without its pathos, but it’s the pathos of Franco, rather than of Crane. The closest we get to the latter is when Crane reads “The Marriage of Faustus and Helen” to a stuffy literary salon. Franco reads the poem dutifully, respectful of its sonorities but never relishing them, and we get a shot of what John Berryman called “spelled, all-disappointed ladies,” eyes alight, listening. For a moment we get an idea, with the poet’s words ringing in our ears, of what an unheralded creature young Crane was, overwrought at times but always graceful, at his best “original . . . and pure.” We glimpse his greatness and we see that, like Baudelaire’s albatross, his wingspan will make him an awkward figure in life.

The rest is a montage of clichés in search of a script.

The film opened this weekend at IFC Center, 323 Sixth Avenue, W. 3rd Street, New York; James Franco will be on hand for Q&A following the 7:35 p.m. screening (sold out) and will give an extended introduction to the 10 p.m. screening, on Sat., April 28th; he will also be in person on Sunday, April 29th, for Q&A following the 5:10 p.m. screening and will provide an introduction before the 7:35 p.m. screening.

An Evening with Ann Patchett

The New Haven Free Public Library, in partnership with R.J. Julia Booksellers and First Niagara, is thrilled to welcome Ann Patchett to New Haven. Please join us for two special literary events.

Meet Ms. Patchett at a special, pre-event Audience Appreciation Reception to be held on Tuesday, May 29 from 6:00 to 6:45 in the Ives Main Library Program Room. Spend time with Ms. Patchett before her reading and enjoy dessert as we prepare to be dazzled by her presentation. Tickets are $25.00; all proceeds will benefit the New Haven Free Public Library's adult fiction collection.

Then, stay for a free public reading from 7:00 to 8:00, as Ann reads from her latest work, State of Wonder. Ms. Patchett will sign books at 8:00.

Please follow the link below to purchase tickets to the Appreciation Reception.

Purchase Tickets Now!

Can't make the event? Please support the library: Make a Donation.

Thank you for your support and we look forward to seeing you on May 29.

For further information, p,lease contact: Clare Meade, cmeade@nhfpl.org, 203-946-8130 x314

Hill-Stead Museum Celebrates 20th Anniversary of Sunken Garden Poetry Festival

Farmington, CT (March 12, 2012)     –    Hill-Stead Museum will celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival with a line-up of top tier American poets, including U.S. Poets Laureate/ Pulitzer Prize winners, and publication of an anniversary anthology, Sunken Garden Poetry, 1992-2011. One of the premier poetry events in America, the summer performance series has drawn tens of thousands of poetry lovers to Hill-Stead, each year featuring major poets as well as emerging and student writers, along with a diverse program of live music.  All events are held on the grounds of Hill-Stead Museum, 35 Mountain Road, Farmington, CT.

Summer 2012 Schedule:

Opening Weekend June, 1-3

Poetry readings, featuring Richard Wilbur, live music, Connecticut Young Poets Day, workshops, poet talks, house tours, Poetry on the Trails nature walks (details below)

Wednesday Evening Performances: gates open at 4:30 p.m. for picnicking on the grounds, pre- performance talks at 5:00 p.m., music at 6:15 p.m., and poetry at 7:30 p.m.

Wednesday, June 13

Dana Gioia, poet and former chairman, National Endowment for the Arts, with music by Eight to the Bar

Wednesday, June 27

Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine and 1^st place Sunken Garden Poetry Prize winner, Marilyn Annucci, with music by Liz Queler & Seth Farber

Wednesday, July 11

Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize winning poet, and 2^nd place Sunken Garden Poetry Prize winner, Sue Burton, with music by Rani and Daisy Mayhem

Wednesday, July 25

Donald Hall, former U.S. Poet Laureate, with music by Brass City Brass

Wednesday, August 1

Tony Hoagland, award-winning poet, with music by Ed Fast and Conga Bop

ALSO: July 30-August 1 - Three-day Workshop, Five Powers of Poetry: Reading, Writing, and Teaching Contemporary Poetry, led by Tony Hoagland. Fivepowerspoetry.com.

General festival information/detailed information about all artists available on hillstead.org/activities/poetry or contact us at poetry@hillstead.org or 860-677-4787 x134.

Detailed Schedule of June 1-3 Kick-Off Weekend Activities (see hillstead.org for list of times):

Friday, June 1, 4:00-9:00 p.m.: The opening reading will feature award-winning poet, Suji Kwock Kim.  The evening will also include a reading of Freedom Journeys in Four Voices by poet Bessy Reyna (in collaboration with the New Haven’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas) and the film Poetry of Resilience by Katja Esson, Alison Granucci, and Jan Warner.  Poetry of Resilience is a finalist for the prestigious human rights award, the Cinema and Peace Award for the Most Valuable Documentary of the Year at the Berlin Film Festival.

Saturday, June 2, 8:30 a.m.-8:30 p.m.: Hill-Stead presents Connecticut Young Poets Day, featuring select high school- and college-age readers/winners of eight state writing programs, including: Hill-Stead’s Fresh Voices Competition and Hartford Student Poetry Outreach, Connecticut Poetry Circuit, Poetry Out Loud, Connecticut Young Writers Trust, Connecticut State University Poetry Competition, New Haven Free Public Library Poetry Contest, and ASAP’s Celebration of Young Writers.  The 21-year-old slam poet and international hip hop star, B. Yung, will give a student workshop and a performance in the afternoon, while the evening’s featured poet will be former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, Richard Wilbur.  “Poetry in Perspective” talks will be led by poets Steve Madsen, Dennis Barone, and former festival director, Rennie McQuilkin. The days concerts represent a spectrum of musical genres: Earth Mass, created by the Paul Winter Consort, will be performed by the choirs of Joyful Noise choirs and gospel legend, Theresa Thomason; and MetaFour brings together Andy Wrba from Barefoot Truth and guitar virtuoso Jeff Howard to create one of the best up-and-coming young bands in the state.

Sunday, June 3, 8:30 a.m.-9:00 p.m.: The day includes Ten for Ten, a reading by ten Connecticut poets from the festival’s first decade, featuring Doug Anderson, Robert Cording, Margaret Gibson, Gray Jacobik, Rennie McQuilkin, Marilyn Nelson, Pit Pinegar, Vivian Shipley, Steve Straight, and Sue Ellen Thompson.  Poet/ story teller Minton Sparks brings her wildly original show to the Sunken Garden alongside world-class musician, guitarist John Jackson, followed by poet Toi Derricotte, winner of numerous literary awards and co-founder of the Cave Canem Foundation for African-American writers.  The evening concludes with a community dance on the estate’s west lawn, with music by Ten Penny Bit and caller Jim Gregory.

Anniversary anthology: Hill-Stead’s anthology, Sunken Garden Poetry, 1992-2011, published by Wesleyan University Press and funded by the Connecticut Humanities Council, will be for sale on the opening weekend.

General information

Venue: All performances at Hill-Stead Museum, rain or shine, under tents during inclement weather.

Opening weekend: June 1, gates open at 4:00 pm; June 2 and June 3, gates open at 8:30 am.  See full schedule on website for event times.

Wednesday evenings: Gates open at 4:30 pm. Prelude pre-performance talks are at 5:00 pm; music begins at 6:15 pm; poetry begins at 7:30 pm.

Admission: *Please note changes for 2012* OPENING WEEKEND, June 1–3: $10 per person, per day, or $25 per person for the weekend. Parking is free. WEDNESDAY NIGHTS, June 13 & 27, July 11 & 25, and August 1: $5 per person, children ages 12 and under free. Parking is free.Seating: Bring a lawn chair or blanket for seating in and around the garden.

Food: Al fresco dining is allowed on the grounds  Participants are welcome to bring their own picnic suppers or purchase food/beverages on site from Epicurean Caterers (www.theepicureancaterers.com).

Opening weekend reservations/pre-registration: Registration and payment are required for guided nature walks ($5 members/$8 members-to-be) and writing workshops ($20 members/$25 members-to-be/$15 high school and college students). Please contact Sarah Wadsworth, Poetry Program Coordinator, at 860.677.4787 ext. 134 or poetry@hillstead.org.

Hill-Stead is noted for its 1901 33,000-square-foot house filled with art and antiques. Pioneering female architect Theodate Pope Riddle designed the grand house, set on 152 hilltop acres, to showcase the Impressionist masterpieces amassed by her father, Alfred A. Pope.  Collections include original furnishings, paintings by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, James M. Whistler and Mary Cassatt.  Stately trees, seasonal gardens, meadows, over three miles of stone walls and blazed hiking trails accent the grounds.  A centerpiece of the property is the circa 1920 sunken garden designed by Beatrix Farrand, today the site of the renowned Sunken Garden Poetry Festival.

For more information, contact:

Mimi Madden, Artistic Director, Sunken Garden Poetry Festival

Hill-Stead Museum

35 Mountain Road

Farmington, CT 06032

maddenm@hillstead.org

860.677.4787, ext. 133

www.hillstead.org

The Circus Is In Town

The Yale Cabaret’s 44th Season ends this weekend with Carnival/Invisible.  Written and directed by Benjamin Fainstein and created by the Ensemble, it’s a show in some ways reminiscent of Church, the play by Young Jean Lee that was featured last semester.  Both shows riff on a collective, participatory experience, akin to theater but different from it, as usually practiced, in significant ways. Carnival/Invisible leans upon “Tent Chautauquas”—a traveling means of bringing entertainment and moral uplift to rural communities—the way Church leans upon sermons, homilies, and testimonials.  But Carnival/Invisible also draws upon time-honored tropes of the traveling circus in its more profane variety.  Thus we get harmless miming of carousel rides, and tightrope walking (Emily Reilly), and sword-swallowing, with, at the end, something a bit more sinister: a stab at a collective allegiance that advocates exterminating the children of one’s enemies.

The latter speech, delivered by Barker Masterful Majestic (Merlin Huff, charismatic in the red waistcoat and top hat of the classic circus ringleader), surfaces as a kind of dream fulfillment of the audience’s hopes and wishes, with Barker’s worshipfully submissive love, Dustbowl Diana (Hannah Sorenson) and the other participants voicing their approval.  The sentiments, for all their delivery of rosy uplift, are rather chilling and make one begin to question other bits of business, like the fable of the turtle who came out of his shell to a sad and horrific conclusion, or the jibes between the clowns Popcorn Peter (Chris Bannow) and Cotton Candy Cameron (Tim Brown) that become viciously scurrilous, or “the elixir” of goat’s piss, offered as a cure-all.

Performed on a simple clearing comprised of a dirt-colored figure of the flag reminiscent of one of Jasper John’s works, Carnival/Invisible seems to offer a mindless exploration of goodtime, oldtime America—the costumes by Nikki Delhomme are charming and lively, evoking familiar figures, the Barnum & Bailey clown, the saloon maid, the prairie flower.  And some of the skits are played with the skilled whimsy of Nickelodeon thrills, as when Death (Brandon Curtis) does-in two damsels (Whitney Dibo and Carly Zien), only to restore them to life as his paramours.  Through all the fun and games, though, there’s a kind of double vision, an acknowledgement that “panem and circensus” (bread and circuses) were the means whereby Roman emperors kept the hoi polloi happy with their yoke.  Fainstein’s show, capriciously carnivalesque, keeps us wondering about who gets the last laugh.

The show ends with the chorus of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a spiritual about meeting after death in a heavenly realm.  The final verse, unsung, rings fittingly with the end of a dramatic Season: “One by one their seats were emptied. / One by one they went away. / Now the family is parted. / Will it be complete one day?

See you next year, with Season 45 under Artistic Director Ethan Heard.

Coming soon: my picks for the “best ofs” from Season 44.

Carnival/Invisible Created by The Ensemble (Chris Brannow, Tim Brown, Brandon Curtis, Whitney Dibo, Merlin Huff, Emily Reilly, Hannah Sorenson, Carly Zien) Written and Directed by Benjamin Fainstein

The Yale Cabaret April 12-14, 2012

The Anatomy of Harpo Marx

by Wayne Koestenbaum

UC Press, 2012

336 pages

It's no secret that scholarly books on cinema can be deadening, and any play-by-play of 13 movie comedies sanctioned by a university press might reasonably seem like one to avoid. Not so The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, from the poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum, and published by UC Press, which has the nerve not to be just another impersonal, theory-glazed boredom generator. Instead it's a zesty and deeply literate joy to read.

Just as his previous nonfiction work, Humiliation, seemed like an apotheosis of new literary possibility in the age of overshare, so Koestenbaum's new book reinvigorates film studies. There's no special trick to it, really, just his own eruditely intimate way of seeing in the silent Marx brother a profound physical presence.

"As Andy Warhol filmed a man sleeping, and called it Sleep," Koestenbaum writes, "I want to commit media-heist, to steal a man from his native silence and transplant him into words, if only for the pleasure of taking illusory possession of a physical self-sureness that can never be mine." By casting his project in such confessional terms, Koestenbaum makes a sort of pact with subject and reader alike. He proceeds not just as an insightful scholar but also as a brainy, randy, vulnerable flirt.

Unpacking the famous screen comedian's nonverbal lyricism is of course a worthy academic undertaking, and Koestenbaum's subjective musings neatly disguise his rigor. It's his alertness to "foreshadowings that appear when we view earlier artifacts in hindsight" that allows Koestenbaum to coin the phrase "Kristallnacht Preview" for a given moment of 1933's Duck Soup, in which "Harpo apprehends catastrophe." Later, he writes, "I will lean on the Nazi theme; Harpo leans on it too. Harpo was a comic genius before the Third Reich came along, but the Third Reich gave Harpo's anarchy extra pointedness." And of course those retrospective foreshadowings continue into subsequent epochs; in 1937's A Day at the Races, for instance, "he has the traumatized expression of Jackie Kennedy on Air Force One as LBJ is sworn into the presidency."

Obviously that analysis may be subject to debate; what matters most is the peculiar and palpable force of Koestenbaum's investment -- the "ecstatic clarity" to be had from studying a screen persona through one's own history-sharpened lens. Diaristic and deceptively digressive, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx becomes a secondary celebration of context itself. Yet it never loses sight of the endlessly watchable man, and the endlessly meaningful mannerisms, in all those movies.

If Koestenbaum seems like exactly the right writer for this job, it's as much for the refinement of his appreciation as for his recognition of what makes something appreciation-worthy to begin with. As he rightly puts it, "Harpo beams upward at you, whoever you are."

Racial Rollercoaster Ride

This week’s show at The Yale Cabaret, the penultimate of the 44th Season, features the penultimate directorial offering by Co-Artistic Director Lileana Blain-Cruz before she graduates from the Yale School of Drama this spring. And her last Cab show, like her first Cab show at the end of the 2010 season, is something to behold. The play, Funnyhouse of a Negro, by Adrienne Kennedy, follows in interesting ways from two shows presented recently at the Cab: Arthur Kopit’s Chamber Music, directed by Katie McGerr, and Whitney Dibo and Martha Kaufman’s reworking of Jacob Gordin’s The Yiddish King Lear. Like Kopit’s play about loony ladies in an asylum that represented, in its seclusion, the etiolated potential of women in our general culture, Funnyhouse confronts the “insanity” of minority status, dramatizing the psychic distress that comes with oppression in any form. And like The Yiddish King Lear, the figure to be confronted is the threatening father, though in that play, a comedy, the gender struggle was leavened with a racial dimension that made Jewish patriarchy a role, a certain kind of staging and inflection, recalled for purposes of entertainment.

In Funnyhouse, the masquerade of racial identity is much more harrowing, and very much of the essence of what makes Negro Sarah (Miriam Hyman) sick. While the play has many comic touches, they tend to be of the acid rather than affirmative variety. In Sarah’s mind, her own father was a “black beast” who raped her white mother, giving birth to herself, a “pallid Negro” who worships whiteness and longs to be freed of any remnant of blackness in her appearance and in her being. In appearance, she can’t overcome her head of kinky hair, and in her being, she can’t overcome the dire implications, to her fantasy of selfhood, of what a black father means. A twist at the end, almost a throwaway line, suggests that this story of interracial rape and progeny may itself be a fantasy. In other words, everything is black and white in this play, but never only black and white.

The figures oppressing Sarah seem oddly chosen but maybe that’s the very point: first of all, two regal beings, the Duchess of Hapsburg (Elia Monte-Brown) and Queen Victoria Regina (Prema Cruz), whose ultra-whiteness is beyond question, then her white boyfriend Raymond (Mamoudou Athie)—all played by black actors in whiteface, alluding at once, visually, to Sarah’s inability to imagine herself in a world without blackness, try as she might. Then there’s Jesus (Jabari Brisport), in a loincloth, looking much more primeval than most depictions of him, indicating the extent to which whites themselves have largely created a white fantasy of him, and finally Patrice Lumumba (Paul Pryce), the first Prime Minister of the Congo after its independence from Belgium, seeming to represent political hope for black independence and self-governance; he had been assassinated a few years before the play initially appeared, so he also represents black martyrdom and, we’re told, Sarah’s father hung himself in a New York hotelroom not long after Lumumba’s death.

All these symbolic figures heckle, manhandle, and at times soothe Sarah, creating a fragmented and poetic drama that flirts with mad causalities and associative logic, while laying bare for the audience the fraught self-hatred of the person who pursues an imposed ideal they can never attain.

As is generally the case with Blain-Cruz’s work, the technical skill involved is stellar: Lighting by Masha Tsimring creates the “funhouse” effects that make the show so fascinating, and creepy, to watch; the Scenic Design by Kate Noll, assisted by Carmen Martinez, contributes the cracked sense of décor that reminded me of a kind of Miss Havisham boudoir, New Orleans-style, with a big brass bed, lots of mirrors, old books, draped crepe, muslin curtains; the Costumes by Kristin Fiebig add to this mustiness with hoop skirts for Sarah’s fantasy friends, Sixties-ish suits for the males, and sorta “timeless” black student-wear for Sarah, and, of course, white greasepaint, white powder, latex masks, and wigs. The getup of Prema Cruz as Funnyhouse Lady was a fetching business suit that only underscored how wild and crazy that character is—her look and moves at times created the effect of a thoroughly bleached Tina Turner.   Then there's Ken Goodwin's Sound Design which is nothing short of remarkable, letting hissed whispers crackle and rattling noises off unsettle and adding much of the wildness to the ride.

Great as all those features of the piece are, the car wouldn’t go without Miriam Hyman. She gives an extraordinary performance, unflagging in its self-possession even when she has to go totally ga-ga. Powdering her face, preening, throwing fits on the bed, humping the air sympathetically during the rape, cavorting, shrieking, trembling, and through it all maintaining the confidential tone of the person who inhabits this place and is familiar with its distortions. At one point snapping her head to the side, with bug eyes and slack mouth, mimicking the father’s death by hanging, Hyman makes Sarah’s sense of comedy and misery strongly self-aware, letting the character be, while still a mess, a commentator and a comment.

Sarah’s predicament, in the play, occupies a time before the Black Panthers, before “black is beautiful,” and well before the power of Oprah and Obama to suggest black self-determination and influence. Lest we imagine this play occurs in some historical museum-space, the mourning for Lumumba at one point becomes a mourning for Trayvon Martin. Is it fair to compare an assassinated political figure with an unarmed teen killed in the street by a vigilante? Not really, but it makes the point that outrages done against blacks as blacks is always a current event.

Funnyhouse of a Negro plays for two more shows: tonight at 8 and 11 p.m.

Funnyhouse of a Negro By Adrienne Kennedy Directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz

The Yale Cabaret March 29-31, 2012

The final play of the Cabaret’s 2011-12 Season will be in two weeks: Carnival/Invisible, created by Benjamin Fainstein, recreates the sense of “carnival” (farewell to the flesh) as an element in the traveling circuses and tent shows of American popular entertainment, places people go to “get out of their skins” and to find belonging amidst the improbable and colorful spectacle. April 12th-14th.

Theatrical Extremity

Playing for its second weekend in an unlikely performance space—The Institute Library at 847 Chapel Street—is a stripped-down production of Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe.  Staged by The Young Mechanics Theatre Ensemble, in its inaugural production, the play is both intimate and enigmatic.  Consisting of only three characters—a Director (Jeremy Funke), his Assistant (Kaia Monroe), and a Protagonist (Brian Riley)—the dramatic comedy seems as if it is primarily intended as a meditation upon theater. We see the Assistant lead the Protagonist onto a “plinth” or “pedestal” (actually a chair) in a stage space; he’s gowned in black, looking somewhat priestly, hobbled, drooling.  The Director proceeds to put him through his paces, demanding the Assistant remove clothes, alter his pose, whiten his skin, looking, we suppose, for the right image to express his idea.  We’re clearly in a place where “humanity” (whatever we might conceive that to be) can be compressed into one forlorn figure made to bend or stretch at the autocratic whims of a dictatorial Director.  The Assistant at times hesitates, but gamely makes a note of each alteration the Director calls for.

The handbill informs us that the play is “for Vaclav Havel,” and, since Havel was himself a playwright, the play might read as a wry reflection on how potentially dehumanizing theater can be for its participants.  It’s to the credit of the play’s director (as opposed to the Director in the play) James Leaf that the element of dramatic commentary is never lost sight of.  We’re always aware that what we’re witnessing is not far removed from the grueling rehearsal procedures of theater, to say nothing of the fact that the Protagonist is also always an Actor.  A man who has actually to stand silently on a chair for the play’s duration (a half hour, tops) and endure what must be endured.

And yet, Havel, who died last year, was also an important Czech political leader, imprisoned at the time the play was written.  With this in mind, it’s easy also to read the Protagonist as a man being oppressed by a regime that dictates how he must move, or stand, or comport himself.

As the Director, Jeremy Funke sucks on a cigar, demands a light frequently, is impatient and distracted but not wholly uncommunicative.  He expresses quite well the feeling that this is the Director’s project and his task is to satisfy his audience—his line about having “them all on their feet” suggests he feels he knows best what the audience wants.  His Assistant, Kaia Monroe, pleads a little for her touches—she has the Protagonist in a gown and a hat—but doggedly pursues the Director’s vision, as an Assistant must.  When the Director withdraws for a bit, her frenzy of cleaning his chair, after she had collapsed into it briefly, expresses the emotional toll of her work, and also her status between the silent Protagonist and the demanding Director: she has liberty of movement even if she has to retract most of what she does of her own will.  As the Protagonist, Brian Kiley is superb.  He maintains the right degree of dereliction so common with Beckett’s heroes, and, while looking on at the Assistant at the chair, manages a mute expression of inner revelation that strongly suggests a rapport.  In the end his gaze off into the distance and what we read there carries much of the play’s ultimate meaning.

Beckett is always a wonder in how much he can convey with so little, and Catastrophe is suggestive on many levels.  The title itself can mean, as it generally does, a “disaster,” typically a natural kind, but in its more theatrical meaning it refers to the turn toward a play’s conclusion—the happy outcome of comedy, the disastrous outcome of tragedy.  This relatively late play of Beckett’s is perhaps somewhat unique in seeming to offer a deliberate comic catastrophe, though not unequivocally.  The final action of the Protagonist, in appearing stoical, defiant, or at least self-willed, can be construed as a message of political hope for the fortunes of dissidents like Havel, or it could also, in the manner of Beckettian irony, allude to the comedy of such hopes and assertions in the face of the surrounding conditions.

In other words, it’s the sort of play you have to make up your own mind about, and to do that you have to see it.  And you should:

Performances will be held at 8:00 p.m. at the Institute Library, 847 Chapel Street, March 23, 24, 30, and 31. $5 suggested donation. Because of limited seating, reservations are strongly recommended. To make reservations, please email home@institutelibrary.org and specify the night you wish to attend and the number of people in your party.  Each performance concludes with refreshments and a salon-style discussion.

Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe Directed by James Leaf

Produced by The Young Mechanics Theatre Ensemble: Will Baker, Megan Black, Jeremy Funke, Alice-Anne Harwood, James Leaf, Kaia Monroe, Brian Riley, and Elisabeth Sacks

March 23, 24, 30, 31 The Institute Library 847 Chapel Street, New Haven

A Tale of Two Kingdoms

The strangeness of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, now playing at The Yale Repertory Theatre in a sumptuous and stylish version directed by Liz Diamond, is ultimately its strength.  The plot yokes together elements that seem impossibly disparate, almost a test, from start to finish, of the audience’s ability to suspend its disbelief.  The play is generally called “a romance,” not only to differentiate it from comedy and tragedy, but also to indicate its novelistic elements.  The narrative arc of the play is rather complex, and also surprisingly and amusingly cavalier with audience expectations.

Early in the play, Mamillius (Remsen Welsh), the young son of King Leontes and Queen Hermione of Sicilia, says he will tell his very pregnant mother “a sad tale” because that’s “best for winter.”  He’s ripped away from his mother—object of her husband’s insane jealousy regarding his best friend, King Polixenes of Bohemia (Hoon Lee)—before he can tell it.  We never see the boy again as he dies offstage of health complications that follow his mother’s imprisonment for adultery and treason, but in some ways the story of the play is a tale a child might conceive of, with insane rage, exciting escapes, a man-eating bear, a colorful pickpocket, rousing rustic antics, true love, and magical reconciliations, to say nothing of a leap of about sixteen years in the middle.  It’s fun to trash Aristotle’s unities!

Though he’s offstage for the long middle section of the play, Leontes is key to the play’s success.  Here, Rob Campbell manages superbly to humanize a man suddenly driven to autocratic excess.  Driven by a restless jealousy, he destroys his family, losing a child, imprisoning his wife, and sending his newborn daughter to almost certain death in a remote locality.  In almost constant movement about the stage like a man in search of a comfort he once knew, Campbell’s Leontes is a victim of his own sick fancies to an extent that almost amuses him in a rueful, despondent way.  It’s a powerful performance matched by the noble suffering of his wife Hermione as played by Susannah Schulman.  Her trial scene enacts a dramatic staging of the worst sort of spousal dysfunction, an overt display of male tyranny that draws a passionate outburst from Hermione’s staunch friend Paulina (Felicity Jones) in a great confrontation scene where the outraged meets the outrageous.

Sicilia, in Michael Yeargan’s Scenic Design, consists of high walls that move to form corridors, or withdraw to provide open spaces, against brooding darks and raking light and the effective use of silhouettes in Matt Frey’s Lighting Design.  Together they make the University Theater stage a fascinating space, intimate and forbidding as needed.

The crowd-pleasing second half—after that infamous bear scene gets a notable enactment, together with Thomas Kopache’s soliloquy, as Time, delivered with an audacious flair for absurd necessity—takes place mostly in the kingdom of Bohemia.  Presented here as a rustic land of splendid, multi-colored clothes (Jennifer Moeller, Costumes), music (composer Matthew Suttor’s gypsy-like tunes), dancing (even with buffalo heads in Randy Duncan’s light-hearted choreography), and the love in idleness of Polixenes’ son Florizel (Tim Brown) and a stunning maiden called Perdita (Lupita Nyong’o) who seems to be more regal than her station as a lowly Shepherd’s daughter would suggest.  Both actors do a fine job of conveying both the idyllic nature of the lovers’ wooing and the tensions of their status, especially when Polixenes and his courtier Camillo (Tyrone Mitchell Henderson, excellent in an under-appreciated role) spy on their nuptials in disguise.

The comic turns of Autolycus (Luke Robertson) should be the fun of this section of the play, but his scenes are a bit too broad and blustery, not quite up to the nimble clowning Rep audiences have become used to in Christopher Baye’s riotous productions.  That spirit is more in evidence in the scene where two gentlemen (Francis Jue and Adam O’Byrne) report on the reconciliations in the court of Sicilia with “you had to be there” hilarity.

After such comedy, what conclusion?  The final scene is all it should be: a chastened Leontes finds himself rich beyond his imagining, with nearly all his relations renewed.  The theme of winter, as a time of life, is impressed upon us by the aging royal couple exiting as silhouettes.  Their daughter has become a woman in their absence, and now, beyond the rages and the suffering they have endured, they have only their twilight together.  It’s a bittersweet triumph Shakespeare gives us, the lost time hovering over the happy conclusion like a certain little boy’s absence.

The Winter’s Tale, in this impressive production, receives an almost definitive treatment thanks to Diamond’s ability to render the true colors of the play’s varied palette.

William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale Directed by Liz Diamond

The Yale Repertory Theatre March 16-April 7, 2012

Impious Grief

In Hamlet, the prince is overcome by grief for his dead father.  Everyone in the court, especially his mother, the Queen, and his uncle, the new King, tells him to get a grip.  His grief is called “impious” and “unmanly.”  In Basement Hades: Songs of the Underworld, now playing at the Yale Cabaret, Hades (Dustin Wills) shares this point of view.  Appalled by humanity’s tendency to have issues with death, Hades lectures us in wildly flamboyant fashion about the pointlessness of our grief.  He’s all about people getting on with life—the province of the living—and leaving the dead to him.  We want to hold onto the dead because we’re selfish and unreasonable.  Let them be dead.  We’ll be with them soon enough anyway.  “What’s dead is dead is dead,” he intones.

It would be hard to argue with Hades even if he weren’t so imperious, boasting most of the lines in the play, even those given to his wife Persephone (a hand puppet) who still bemoans an attachment to life.  Though Hades rehearses for us the five stages of grief—Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance—ticking them off as leading inevitably to the latter, Persephone isn’t buying it.  And so, here comes legendary “grief junkie” Orpheus to attempt to rescue his dead wife Eurydice and lead her back to life.  Everyone who has lost someone can easily relate.

But Orpheus, in an interesting twist, is not a character in this show—written by Justin A. Taylor, developed by the Ensemble, and directed by Ethan Heard—but rather a gathering of musicians assigned the task of playing the music that speaks for Orpheus, and that enables him to bypass threats like the boatman Charon and the three-headed dog Cerberus.  The latter encounter, in which the dog is represented by three cast members behind drum-masks that Orpheus soon manages to play to his tune, is striking.  Percussionist Michael Compitello is a stand-out of the evening, able to give aural expression to the Anger phase of things.

And that’s the way the evening goes—Hades belittling Orpheus’ efforts, until the latter begins to overwhelm the voiced objections through music, mime, movement, sing-along, and, now and then, plainspoken narratives of loss addressed to the audience by the collective Orpheus.  Eurydice is visualized quite effectively as a silhouetted projection of a woman (Katie McGerr) dancing, swinging and so forth on double screens (Hannah Wasileski, Projection Designer; Nick Hussong, Paul Lieber, William Gardiner, Assistant Designers; kudos as well to the Lighting Designers—Masha Tsmiring and Yi Zhao—and to Set Designer Edward T. Morris’ fascinating set).

The part at which Orpheus looks back and loses his wife a second time was a little murky to me, though perhaps I missed something (it became increasingly easy to overlook action in favor of concentrating on the music, which features pieces by Gluck, Shostakovich, and Philip Glass).  In any case, the after-effect was stunningly moving: as Hannah Collins played a cello live, in concert with herself playing a viola de gamba in a beautifully filmed projection, the collective Orpheus (Compitello; Anne Lanzilotti, viola; Daniel Schlosberg, keyboard and composer for the piece; and Annie Rosen, voice) poured libations in a large metal bucket to the somber tones of Marin Marais’ “Les Voix Humaines,” which includes the sound of what feels like disembodied voices—led by Rosen’s lovely vocals—mourning.

The simple activity accompanied by Marais’ aching and stately piece said all that needed to be said about the sixth stage of grief, the one that Hades can’t understand: commemoration, the ritual of remembering.  An enactment of those in life recalling those in death, the scene felt to me more profound “than the profoundest pit of hell.”

Basement Hades: Songs of the Underworld Created by the Ensemble Text by Justin A. Taylor Original Music by Daniel Schlosberg Directed by Ethan Heard

Photos by Ethan Heard

The Yale Cabaret March 23-25, 2010

Are You One Of Them?

John van Druten’s Bell, Book & Candle is a play from a time when subtext was anything not acceptable to polite convention.  His characters have class, in a vaguely bohemian milieu (it’s set ostensibly in the 1950s’ Greenwich Village), and they preen and pose with the regulated pauses of the great screen stars of the 1940s.  In such a world, the fact that there are things going on that we can’t talk about (we’ve since learned to call them subcultures) would be still somewhat risqué for the average audience.  Van Druten, with his comic suggestion that a hunt for witches might turn them up “anywhere,” is a bit ahead of the widespread search for Communists and their sympathizers in the McCarthy “witch hunt,” and way ahead of the political self-outing of the gay community.  And yet, in Darko Tresnjak’s production, more respectful than revisionist, those associations are clearly present—to say nothing of any other sub rosa collectivity that might come to mind.

The square to be initiated into it all is Shep Henderson (Robert Eli), a publisher without much imagination who’s all set to marry a Southern harridan we only hear over the phone, until a sort of accidental run-in with his neighbor, the mysterious and grandly available Gilllian Holroyd (Kate MacCluggage), sends him soon enough head-over-heels and all over the floor for her.  Tresnjak makes the couple couple much more quickly than they ever would have in films or plays of the period, but not, one assumes, than they would’ve in wicked old Greenwich.  It’s to the play’s credit that it seems written for adults—it gives one a nice frisson of nostalgia to watch something that might appeal to people who were all grown up in the 1950s, happily unaware of what the various coming cultural revolutions would do to entertainment.  This is romantic comedy before The Pill and Women's Lib.

Case in point: recall the days when a leading man needed only to be a presentable hunk who looks good in a dinner jacket.  Eli does, and his Henderson has the doggedness of a man who isn’t expecting much excitement or surprise from life and then finds both in the form of his neighbor, a woman who, supposedly, he’s barely noticed until her witchcraft changes his tune.  And of course, “witchcraft,” here is synonymous with whatever “feminine wiles” our parents alluded to when they talked about how a gal gets her man.  The fact that Gillian’s wiles are indeed supernatural adds charm rather than menace, but with little of the slapstick spell-casting that was a staple of TV's Bewitched, the Sixties sitcom that recalls some of Van Druten's characters.

Van Druten’s dialogue never sizzles or pops, its sense of the humorous is droll more often than clever, full of charm rather than laugh-filled.  It’s the kind of play that won’t work without a game cast willing to become anachronisms with relish, and Tresnjak has coached his cast to get the feel of lines uttered on a sound-stage and etched on celluloid.  MacCluggage especially—who was last on the Long Wharf stage as a 40s’ radio actress in Eric Ting’s production of It’s a Wonderful Life—has the look, moves, and voice of a screen star of the era.  Always dressed seductively and lit perfectly, she carries herself with feline pleasure in her every move, her voice sensual in its precision, a sympathetic seductress about to be hoist on her own petard: making Shep fall in love with her, she finds that she fulfills “the old wives’ tale” that a witch in love loses her powers, becoming merely human (with a touch of Doris Day).

The play pirouettes on the familiar theme of lovers’ truth: if, in love, we should always be ourselves, why does it always feel so risky to be honest?  What’s more, once a gal’s wiles are seen through, then what?  Be warned, suspense isn’t really a feature of this plot, but that doesn’t matter.  Though two intermissions drag out the playing time, the pleasures of the show come from the exacting pace, Alexander Dodge's wonderfully mod set, from its “womb chair” to its suspended fireplace to its snowflake chandelier, Fabio Toblini's bright and sprightly costumes—particularly Aunt Queenie (Ruth Williamson)’s revamped Andorra (the Agnes Moorehead character in Bewitched) and the jackets and cape sported by Gillian’s teasing brother Nicky (Michael Keyloun, a study in understated camp), and that game cast.

The cast is filled out by Gregor Paslawsky as Sidney Redlitch, a toupee-wearing, booze-swilling “witch expert,” played with the broad panache of a sitcom’s zany neighbor or clueless boss.

Today, vampires and zombies are our chosen avatars of supernatural allegory.  Once upon a time, in a Manhattan of sparkling martinis and swirling mambos, of barefoot femmes fatales clad in capri pants, of songs by Sinatra and Ella evincing the spirit of swagger and swing, witchcraft—which has, in New England at least, real historical antecedents—could stand for all those “practices” not yet relegated to the melting pot.  Bell, Book, and Candle is a fun throwback to a time not so much innocent as blithely indifferent to the changes to come.  And, in Tresnjak’s version, the play ends with a nice touch not in the script, a way of indicating that love without witchcraft is, perhaps, rather Puritan.

Bell, Book & Candle By John Van Druten Directed by Darko Tresnjak

Long Wharf Theatre March 7-April 11

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

Freilichin Purim

The current offering at the Yale Cabaret features a trip into the past: turn of the century Yiddish theater is invoked to create the proper spirit in which to view The Yiddish King Lear.  Rather than a Yiddish language version of Shakespeare, as was created by Jacob Gordin in 1903 and whose work this production draws on, Martha Kaufman and Lauren Dubowski’s adaptation presents the story of Reb Dovidl (William DeMerrit), a patriarch at Purim who wants to engage in some festive drinking with his family and distribute jewels to his lovely daughters: two of whom, Etele (Prema Cruz) and Gitele (Tanya Dean) are married, while the third, his favorite, Taybele (Alex Trow) has a suitor—Yaffe (Chris Bannow) known as the “heretic” and the “unbeliever.”  Thus there are Lear-like tensions in this story right from the start. Like Lear, Reb Dovidl, after smoothing over Taybele’s rebuff when she refuses the costly brooch he would lavish upon her, decides to partition his worldly goods amongst his three children—so he can live the rest of his days, unburdened by care, in Israel.  His eldest daughter, married to the unsympathetic Avrom Harif (Benjamin Fainstein), is only too happy to take over management of the estate, while the second daughter, a bit more conscientious, though married to a partying pseudo-scholar (Mamoudou Athie), goes along.  Only Taybele, Cordelia-like, demurs.  Lest anyone in the audience miss the echoes of Shakespeare, Yaffe tells the old man his unreasoning behavior makes him “the Yiddish King Lear.”  He tells him this first in naturalistic style, and then again in the more operatic style of turn-of-the-century theater. And that’s the nature of the “two worlds at once” fun of this production, directed by Whitney Dibo.

As the master of ceremonies (Paul Lieber) informs us at the start (in something of a come-and-go Yiddish accent), we are going to witness a feat of “naturalism”—the cutting-edge theatrical technique of the time.  With that said, it’s quite entertaining to watch the YSD students give us dated “naturalistic” acting, in quotation marks, as it were.  The power/comedy of the naturalism is underscored by the show’s best feature: audience members who are also part of the show, lending a kind of hilarious hysteria to the proceedings as they “ooh” and “ah” at plot turns and shout advice to the characters (not to the actors, mind you), and, at one particularly distressing point, have to be calmed by Reb Dovidl himself.  On opening night these audience players included Lieber, Kate Tarker, Joshua Safran, who reads between scenes a statement about theater that invokes actors as gods, and Inka Guðjónsdóttir, the most vocal and comically stressed-out of the onlookers.

As contrast to all that naturalism, there’s a play within the play: a stagey enactment of the Purim story whereby Esther (Trow) thwarts the murderous Haman (Fainstein)—he of the famous tri-cornered hat that inspired the shape of hamentaschen (very tasty versions of which are supplied on the tables, courtesy of Westville Kosher Market), so that “nothing bad will ever happen to the Jews again!”  That line, voiced by Trytel (Matt McCollum), Reb Dovidl’s fool, gives a fair idea of the spirit of the show, both respectful and enthusiastic about the sources but also winking at the naïvete of the era.  Entertainingly and affectionately, the production celebrates how important theater was to Jewish immigrants. As Lieber says between scenes: the two sights everyone was immediately taken to see upon arrival in Brooklyn were the Brooklyn bridge, and the Yiddish theater.

Special credit to the set decorator, Brian Dudkiewicz, the musicians providing both musical accompaniment and sound effects—Tess Isaac, Martha Kaufman, Elizabeth Kim—and the spirited cast, especially DeMerritt’s moody paternalism and over-the-top recognition of himself as “the Yiddish King Lear”; Trow’s applause-demanding grandstanding everytime Taybele expresses views about female and male equality or hypes her knowledge as a doctor; McCollum, for Trytel’s grumpy asides and his devotion to Reb Dovidl; and Bannow’s Yaffe in his rationalist raining on the ritual.

The sense of pride and participation in theater, as an art that centers a community and puts on stage the kinds of stories the people recognize as part of their own lives, isn’t a bad goal to have and is one that the Cabaret, for its coterie of enthusiasts, often satisfies.  L’chaim.

The Yiddish King Lear Directed by Whitney Dibo Adapted, Assembled, and Created with Martha Kaufman and Lauren Dubowski Based on Jacob Gordin’s 1903 play

Yale Cabaret March 8-10, 2012

Geoff Dyer: Zoning In

Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room

by Geoff Dyer

Pantheon, 2012

240 pages

Last spring, an interviewer asked the British writer Geoff Dyer which movie he would choose to live inside. In retrospect that seems like a leading question; obviously Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker was the only possible answer.

Stalker is a long, slow, metaphysical Russian film from 1979. (“Andrei Tarkovsky” in Russian means “long, slow, metaphysical, film.”) It involves three men on a trip to a forbidden place, each for private personal reasons. Stalker is the name of the character who leads expeditions to this place -- a Room, inside a Zone -- where the deepest of desires are said to get fulfilled.

Today, what’s so special about the film, aside from it being a great cine-poet’s mesmerizing road movie of the Soviet twilight, is the fact that Geoff Dyer has written a book about it. Dyer is one of those rare geniuses who writes well about everything because he always winds up writing about himself. The navel into which he gazes is the world’s as well as his own. Thus is he, somehow, very possibly the only English-speaking person alive who can hold forth at length on Tarkovsky without boring the hell out of you.

Zona, the newest of Dyer’s nimble nonfiction category-busters, describes itself as “A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room.” It is that, and also an essay on wish fulfillment, the management of time, and the variable likelihood of perception-expanding cinema, among other art forms, to exist in our distraction-addled lives.

“At first there can be a friction between our expectations of time and Tarkovsky time,” Dyer writes, “and this friction is increasing in the twenty-first century as we move further and further away from Tarkovsky time toward moron time in which nothing can last -- and no one can concentrate on anything -- longer than about two seconds. Soon people will not be able to watch films like Stalker or to read Henry James because they will not have the concentration to get from one interminable scene or sentence to the next. The time I might have been able to read late-period Henry James has passed, and because I have not read late-period Henry James I am in no position to say what harm has been done to my sensibility by not having done so. But I do know that if I had not seen Stalker in my early twenties my responsiveness to the world would have been radically diminished.”

In short, Zona is a characteristically digressive memoir of what this one movie has meant to this one man, which turns out to be a lot. (Meanwhile a whole alphabet of other art-house darlings -- Antonioni, Buñuel, the Coen brothers -- come in for parenthetical skewering.) Dyer’s carefully articulated stake in Stalker, one asymptotic quest to comprehend another, proves an invigorating counterforce, if not an antidote, to the very atrophy of attention he laments. The book is not long, but it is one in which several pages may pass with footnotes taking up more surface area than the body of the main text. Dyer sees it as “a catalogue or compendium of proposals for potentially interesting studies,” and he’s right about that, and nobody these days can get away with such a book in quite the way he can. Which is not to say it’s unprecedented. Writing in defense of writers, like himself, who offer commentary “without seeking to disguise the vagaries of their nature, their lapses of taste and the contingency of their own experiences,” Dyer speaks to and for the spirit of the original essayist, Montaigne.

And of course Dyer is to Zona as Tarkovsky is to Stalker: the contriver of a work through which he explores himself. Contriver, that is, as gainfully apart from originator; true, only Dyer could write this book, but not without Tarkovsky’s film, just as only Tarkovsky could make something “synonymous both with cinema’s claims to high art and a test of the viewer’s ability to appreciate it as such,” but not without Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic to inspire him.

“Would we regard this landscape of fields, abandoned cars, tilted telegraph poles and trees as beautiful without Tarkovsky?” Dyer asks. “And could it have been brought into existence by any medium other than film?” There’s a beauty, too, in the asking, and a satisfaction from seeing that beauty brought into existence by this particular asker.

It helps that the intensity of his attention is not attenuating. Tarkovsky’s film is easy to recognize in Dyer’s prose, even for the reader who has never seen it. Here a character “has the knack of imbuing the simplest task with grudge,” there a color scheme exudes “a kind of submonochrome in which the spectrum has been so compressed that it might turn out to be a source of energy, like oil and almost as dark, but with a gold sheen too.” Everywhere, “the most distinctive feature of Tarkovsky’s art: the sense of beauty as force.” And the best way to grasp the movie’s essential slowness is simply to luxuriate in Dyer’s insanely companionable zeal.

In his nonfiction especially, Dyer’s education -- autodidact by way of Oxford -- seems useful; he seems to have seen and read everything, deeply. His habit is to refer unabashedly back to earlier gleanings. “John Updike reckoned that America was a vast conspiracy to make people happy,” Dyer writes, fortifying his own speculations about Soviet unhappiness. Or: “The light, which has been silvery and dank, glows gradually golden and warm, then fades, Turrell-ishly, to dank and silver again.” If you haven’t yet had a go at Stalker, you can look forward to recognizing that highly Tarkovsky-ish moment, here so Dyer-ishly described, the very instant you see it.

The Dyer Name Drop could be a cocktail. It is hard to get right. Even he occasionally flubs the proportions, making his own literacy seem merely like compulsive indexing. Mostly, though, it goes down very smoothly, giving pleasure and encouragement. Rather than torture his references into submission, he lives in them, inviting frequent reader visits. Writing on couture for Vogue, for example, Dyer has handy an observation John Cheever made about Persian carpets. That must be because he did that great piece on Cheever’s journals, the reader thinks, already feeling quite at home and a little tipsy.

Writing on Tarkovsky for the hell of it means bringing on a serious buzz: “Stalker is framed against a green so dark it is almost black -- what Conrad, with his irresistible urge to over-egg any and all puddings, would have called an impenetrable darkness. This darkness makes Stalker’s face and blue eyes burn more brightly as he speaks. With what? With the intensity of his belief, but also -- and it is this which distinguishes him from jihadists and born-again Christians  -- with the intensity of his despair. The Zone is not simply a source of solace, the heart of Marx’s heartless world, it is a source of torment, a system of traps that constantly tests, teases and threatens not just his clients but Stalker himself.”

It’s tempting to keep quoting because here Dyer is only a few sentences away from bringing Werner Herzog into the huddle, but one must learn to pace oneself.

Historically, Stalker was a beleaguered beast, heavily rewritten, reshot, and at one point relocated to just downriver of a chemical plant whose toxicity may later have caused the filmmaker’s fatal cancer. Tarkovsky also had a heart attack during postproduction, and was prone, as Dyer gently puts it, to “megalomaniacal uncertainties.”

Aren’t we all? One of the real joys of reading Zona, thanks to its peculiar candor, is the privilege of picking up on how even Dyer’s most enthused engagement still can feel like fidgety misgiving. Another member of Tarkovsky’s trio is a washed-up writer seeking inspiration. “Maybe by going to the Zone he’ll be rejuvenated,” Dyer writes. “Man, I know how he feels. I could do with a piece of that action myself. I mean, do you think I would be spending my time summarizing the action of a film almost devoid of action -- not frame by frame, perhaps, but certainly take by take -- if I was capable of writing anything else? In my way I am going to the Room -- following these three to the Room -- to save myself.”

Dyer’s own stalkers surely will have noticed Stalker references piling up in his previous writings, and maybe they felt a whole book coming on. But then, who ever knows? He’s flighty. One of Dyer’s earlier books is called Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It. Another, Out of Sheer Rage, is a biography of D.H. Lawrence by an author who couldn’t be bothered to do it. (Of course, in the end, he did. Sort of.) One essay in Dyer’s recent collection, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, extemporized a proto-proposal for yet another book, Great Pastries of the World: A Personal View. Was that just a quip, or a promise?

Ladies' Night

Arthur Kopit’s Chamber Music, the most recent show at The Yale Cabaret, dates from the Sixties and could be called a carnivalization of the women’s movement.  The ‘carnival’ aspects are familiar enough from other counter-cultural works of the time: the characters are inmates in an asylum for the insane, the asylum itself is a cultural microcosm, and the insane are, in some allegorical sense, representative of certain trends that might liberate us all from the asylums to which we, in our insanity, have relegated ourselves.  Kopit’s play takes this a step further: the allegorical meaning of the inmates are worn on their sleeves, like Halloween costumes or superhero alter egos: each member of the cast is a woman with an attribute: Woman with a Notebook (Michelle McGregor), Woman in Armor (Marissa Neitling), Woman with a Gavel (Ashton Heyl), Woman in Aviatrix’s Outfit (Monique Barbee), and so on.  We see emblems, but also, because the women address each other by the names they have assumed, we see alter-egos: Gertrude Stein, Joan of Arc, Susan B. Anthony, Amelia Earhart, respectively. The easy interpretation would be that, though crazy, these women, in identifying with such successful and significant women, are trying to assert possibilities beyond the drab realities to which women generally succumb, and the only way male society—represented by Man in White (Fisher Neal) and his Assistant (Mitchell Winter)—can cope is to lock them up and let them have their carping, chaotic meetings that go nowhere.  That interpretation is certainly present—especially when the men come in to caution the ladies on not getting out of hand, and on keeping the window closed, threatening them with the disbanding of their little sorority if they don’t maintain—and the term is stressed—“decorum.”

Of course, when no policing male gaze is present, the ladies are free to be themselves, though the selves they manifest are silly and childish versions of what they deem the characteristics of the women they mimic: Stein, a writer making notes; Joan a warrior with a large, cumbersome wooden cross, Constanze Mozart (Sophie von Haselberg), a musical appreciator clutching a recording of one of her husband’s treasured works; Susan B. Anthony, a presider and leader; Woman in Gossamer Dress, aka silent film actress Pearl White (Mariko Nakasone), ingratiating and easily upset; Queen Isabella of Spain (Ceci Fernandez), regal and imperious; Amelia Earhart, aggressive in her demeanor and sarcastic toward the idées fixes of her colleagues.  As tensions amongst them mount, and as the Woman in Safari Outfit/Osa Johnson tries to advance a cannibalistic plan on how to defeat the men’s ward that, they are certain, will attack them shortly, the situation requires a sacrifice.  Any guesses who it will be?  No, not Joan.

The play mostly takes place at a table (with placards reminiscent of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party) surrounded by the audience, who may feel somewhat like eavesdroppers on a meeting, with minutes and motions, that is best understood by those participating.  Where our participation is required is in the role of those who—ostensibly sane—can see what these women can’t see: the comic and grotesque aspects of their delusions.  On that score, the cast was mostly equal to the iconic nature of the characters (though Kopit’s version of Stein seemed considerably at odds with my impression of that author, preferring to make her a nitpicking oddity of idiolalia) with special mention going to Barbee, Neitling, Heyl, von Haselberg, and the one in the pith helmet (kudos to Carmen Martinez’s simple but effective costumes).

The comedy—Joan and her cross, Pearl and her insecurities—shifted toward violence and menace inevitably and effectively (the delusions of the mad can be both amusing and chilling), and the “twist” at the end arrived with just enough absurdist malevolence (accent on “male”) to cause the allegory to deepen ever so slightly. Chamber Music might be considered as a score for ten voices, and Katie McGerr’s direction kept the voices in frantic and revealing cross-purposes that felt natural but pointed.

Up next at the Cab—madness in great ones: Yiddish King Lear, based on Jacob Gordin’s 1903 attempt to retell the Shakespeare tale in a Jewish immigrant context.  The play, which hasn’t been performed since 1934, has been adapted for the Cab by Whitney Dibo and Martha Kaufman.  Museum relic or revitalized Americana?  See for yourself, March 8-10.

Chamber Music By Arthur Kopit Directed by Katie McGerr

The Yale Cabaret March 1-3, 2012

Sticking to the Union

Ever since the scope of our “great economic downturn” became clear, comparisons of the late-aughts and the Thirties’ Great Depression have been common.  And, with all those tents decorating the New Haven Green since the fall, it’s also clear that things aren’t improving in any hurry.  What better time—before we meet on the barricades—to stage a classic of the American stage that makes heroes of the underemployed, the unemployed, the working poor, and “the little guy” of all varieties?  Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty (1935) was a hit in its day because its simple message struck a nerve—it dramatized the situation effectively: on the Right, the owners; on the Left, the Unions, supposedly for the working-class, but often corrupt, existing simply to support an intermediate level of bosses between the workers and the owners.  And, beyond the impasse of those “two parties,” the radical solution: in Odets’ day, the Communists, or the radical Left; in our day, the radical Right. It wouldn’t be hard to rewrite some of Lefty to make it even more pertinent to our times, but the production staged by The New Haven Theater Company, directed by Steve Scarpa, is faithful to the text.  As Scarpa points out, his production even adds a scene that was cut by Odets in later versions of the play.  It involves on out-of-work actor trying to talk his way into a stage role; he’s rejected by the fractious producer, but is given a saving grace by the bigwig’s benign secretary: The Communist Manifesto, comrade.

Viewers today may wish there were some easily issued solution that would solve all our problems, and find themselves nostalgic for a time when the formula seemed graspable: read a book, change the world.  In any case, it’s hard not to hear the characters who advocate a strike—the play’s vignettes are framed by a workers’ meeting—as voicing some version of today’s “occupy” movement, and it’s hard not to hear the excuses of the bosses as the same kind of lame rhetoric that always begs best intentions while scraping off the underclass.  The dramatic vignettes of the downtrodden (aka, the 99%) (which includes a surgeon for the poor fired because she’s Jewish—we can reflect that at least the medical profession has learned to look out for itself since Odets’ day!)—are mostly soap opera-ish, but that’s where Odets’ gift lay: he was able to translate the problems of the day into brief emotive exchanges anyone not well-off can relate to, and which almost anyone can act: the couple arguing over rent and food; the technician being asked to do some corporate spying to get ahead; the minority professional getting the axe; the applicant desperate for work facing a brush-off; the young couple who can’t get started in life because they simply don’t have the skills or job prospects needed.  Meanwhile, back at the union meeting, things get ugly, with strike-breakers in their midst, then turn violent.

In the vignettes, the scenes between a man and woman have the most skill: Joe (Brian Willetts) and his wife Edna (Hallie Martenson) establish early the emotional center of the play: these are desperate times and these are ordinary people, grasping at straws: Lefty will help change things; Florrie (Hilary Brown) and Sid (Peter Chenot) are the young couple having to part due to economic constraints, but not before they share a well-played scene involving romantic comedy elements and a sense of thwarted hopes.

The real fire of the play takes place in the meeting with Fatt the Union Leader (George Kulp—he also has fun as Mr. Grady, the theater producer worrying about his dog) attempting to silence the speakers trying to incite action: Joe (Willetts), Keller (Scarpa), and Phillips (Christian Shaboo), who denounces his own brother (Erich Greene) when the latter tries to break the strike.

Special mention also goes to Ben Michalak who covers the scene changes with songs of the times, played on guitar and banjo, giving us the voice of dissent in sing-along form.

Odets’ message: “Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.”  Have times really changed?

Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty Directed by Steve Scarpa The New Haven Theater Company March 1-3, 2012

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