Coping with Crisis

Jackson Moran’s All This Noise, a one-man show at the Yale Cabaret, is a courageous exploration of one family’s hardships, made more gripping by the fact that the family is Moran’s own.  Drawing a straight line on a wall with chalk, Moran proceeds to note key events in a linear series that is truly harrowing: From the early signs of mental instability in Moran’s younger brother Chris, who also suffers from seizures, to a tumor that ends their father’s life prematurely, to Moran’s and his brother’s alcoholism, to Chris’s suicidal tendencies, to a fateful surgical procedure that leaves Chris seriously impaired, to the indignities of cuts in mental healthcare that afflict New Jersey, where Chris is institutionalized. Along the way, Moran offers comments from mental health professionals—about Chris, specifically, from one very sympathetic care-giver at Hagedorn in New Jersey, and about the situation in NJ from someone involved in the politics of Governor Christie’s cuts.  Moran takes on Christie himself in a staged community talk-back in which Christie (Moran gets at the Jersey-swagger of the man) tries to dodge an outright attack from Moran, as the latter grows more insistent about the contradictions in the public stance that says, in the wake of national tragedies like Newtown, “we must do more about mental healthcare,” while yanking the plug on institutions like Hagedorn.  In other words, Moran has an ax to grind and the times we’re living through serve to whet it.

All This Noise is at its most appealing in showing Moran’s concern for his brother—who at one time had ambitions to be an actor—and the latter’s deterioration.  The play is at its most moving in suggesting the human costs of mental illness, both for the patient and those close to him, particularly the young men’s mother.  And Moran is at his most passionate in taking on the shallow political discourse that surrounds events like Newtown and the effort to address healthcare in the U.S.

The play is enlivened by moments such as Moran re-enacting his audition at YSD—a soliloquy from Hamlet, though perhaps the one about bearing “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” would be more apropos—and by jarring moments such as Chris’s breakdown at a Christmas party where a crescendo of voices apprizes us of how nightmarish even mundane social interactions can become.

All This Noise is certainly involving, and it poses many unresolved dramatic moments: in hearing of the trajectory of Chris’ condition, we only learn “the facts,” not much about how anyone, much less Chris himself, actually feels about what has occurred.  Chris, despite photos from his life, remains a mystery at the heart of the play, a collection of catastrophes.  We hear little about the decision to undergo an operation on his amygdala and why the procedure produced the outcome it did.  Moran is not interested in assigning blame for Chris’s state, but rather in drawing-out its dramatic potential and poignancy—at play’s end we hear Chris recite after his brother, line by line, a poem he wrote.  As a slice-of-life, the play is effective in making us sad that a life of potential has come to this pass.  As a statement, the play aims to make us angry that mental healthcare remains such a low priority for many state governments.

Moran is impressively nuanced as an actor, likeable as a narrator, and quite skilled at keeping our attention and at providing glimpses of his life with Chris.  The production is refreshingly free of caricatures and maintains a stripped-down intensity that aids its personal, confessional nature.  All This Noise is a brave and unsettling tightrope walk across the abysses that lurk in real life.

All This Noise Created by Jackson Moran With Ethan Heard, Kate Ivins, and Martha Jane Kaufman

Additional text by Christopher Moran Additional script development with Alyssa K. Howard, Jack Tamburri, and Masha Tsimring

Director: Ethan Heard; Dramaturg: Martha Jane Kaufman; Scenic Designer: Souri Yazdanjou; Costume Designer: Seth Bodie; Lighting Designer: Masha Tsimring; Sound Designer: Matt Otto; Projection Designer: Nicholas Hussong; Stage Manager: Alyssa K. Howard; Producer: Kate Ivins

Yale Cabaret February 21-23, 2013

A Contemporary "Curse." Sam Shepard Comes to the Long Wharf

Potentially one of the most sharply relevant plays in the current season in New Haven is the Long Wharf Theatre’s revival of Sam Shepard’s The Curse of the Starving Class.  Shepard has long been a staple of the American theater but the last time one of his plays was given a professional production here was the Yale Rep’s Curse in 2000.  Bad as those times were, we may have even more to curse about currently. According to the show’s director, Gordon Edelstein, the play is “hard to get right,” and yet is perhaps his personal favorite of Shephard’s plays, a play that is both timeless and “startlingly resonant for the moment.”

As a satiric, at times surreal play, Curse has, Edelstein says, “a very specific style” and its action is both “real and not real.”  While those who know Shepard’s work may find entering that particular space familiar, there is bound to be a certain defamiliarization as well.  One thing audiences might be faced with is determining how recognizable the world of Curse of the Starving Class is.  First produced in the late Seventies, the play was one of Shepard’s first attempts at a full-length, three act play.  Somewhat more traditional in form, the play takes on what could be called the locus classicus of American plays: the family drama.  With a father, Weston, a mother, Ella, a son Wesley, and a daughter, Emma, the doubling in the family romance is explicit, and the sense that the characters we’re viewing are both people and types makes for a shifting focus that is rich and suggestive, if also mercurial.  As a writer, Shepard has a unique gift for both the absurdist comedy of modern American types as well as a sense of, at times, tragic grandeur.  His is a poetic idiom that is rarely literal.

For Edelstein, one main reason for the current Long Wharf production is the occasion of working with a cast equal to the play.  “Shepard demands a company of actors skilled in the specifics of his text,” he notes, while praising, in particular, his chief actors’ “extraordinary ability.”  With Judith Ivey, a two-time Tony winner, as matriarch Ella, the production brings together a notable actress, esteemed for her work at Long Wharf in plays such as Shirley Valentine and The Glass Menagerie, with a part that offers much complexity.  Kevin Tighe (Weston) has also worked with Edelstein before at the Long Wharf, most recently in Mourning Becomes Electra.

The main question for a production of Curse, which Edelstein feels is truly a great play by a playwright able to hold his own with Miller, O’Neill and Williams, is: does the production  find “the pitch of the play, the specific tone of the piece?”  “Shepard is sui generis and nothing else is like him,” Edelstein says, so that finding that tone is a matter of “listening carefully to the play.” As a director, Edelstein sees his task as investigating “the linings of the stomach of each play” to understand what that play requires, to find “an imaginative and interesting way to put it on the stage.”  He finds Shepard, whose work he has staged many times, though this will be his first in his 12 years as Artistic Director of Long Wharf, challenging, but is confident that Curse of the Starving Class is very much a contemporary play that will speak to its audience.

Curse of the Starving Class opens on February 20th and runs until March 10th.  Starring Judith Ivey and Kevin Tighe, the play is a darkly comic depiction of  the struggles of a farming family in California as they cope with economic pressures, alcoholism, and internal tensions that question not only the stability of the American Dream but the viability of the American family.

Eminent Edwardians

Precocious kids have always wondered about sex before their folks are willing to clue them in, we suppose.  But in Edwardian times, apparently, young women could be considered of “marriageable” age and still be utterly clueless about what exactly transpires on the wedding night.  To the rescue: Lytton Strachey composed Ermyntrude and Esmeralda, a little novella in which the eponymous heroines, in a series of breathless letters, try to work it all out.  Transformed into a play by Hunter Kaczorowski at the Yale Cabaret, E & E entertains—and might even make you blush!  (Indeed the novella, written in 1913, didn’t see the light of day till 1969—when the lifting of illegality for same-sex liaisons should have made its enlightened acceptance of homosexual sex acceptable.) Ermyntrude is played by Sophie von Haselberg with a steely practicality in her eye: she’s after the gory details about what she calls “pussy-cats” and “bow-wows”—the genitalia of females and males, respectively—and what happens when they “pout” for one another.  Esmeralda, played with gleeful girlishness by Ceci Fernandez, is more interested in what those pouting pets have to do with love.  And, since no one has quite worked that out to date, E & E is engagingly enlightening.

The back and forth “entre nous” epistles of the duo are illustrated from time to time by shadow puppetry in little framed spaces on the back wall (manipulated by Christopher Ash, Soule Golden, and Carmen Martinez; designed by Kaczorowski).  Depending on where you might be sitting in the packed Cab, you may get the full effect of these little figurines or not—they seem a bit too small to make the kind of visual impression they may be intended to achieve—but they are certainly well-done and evocative of the kind of picture-book politesse that our heroines are endeavoring to delve beneath.  Until, of course, a rather rampant bow-wow vigorously mounts a fulsome feline…

The space (Kate Noll, Scenic) and costumes (Seth Bodie), along with lighting (Solomon Weisbard) and sound/music (Steve Brush) all contribute considerably to the gentility of the evening.  And that’s important to make the quaintness of the young ladies’ questionings seem apropos.  Along the way, E & E espy surprising developments—such as a passionate embrace between Esmeralda’s brother Godfrey and his male instructor (“which buttons were undone?” Ermyntrude presses her), to say nothing of Ermyntrude’s exciting flirtation with the new footman Henry, which leads to ecstatic expressions emoted with an exuberant twinkle by von Haselberg.

As Esmeralda, Ceci Fernandez is inestimable and explosive; she glows and gloats and free associates and turns away one would-be betrothed (the Dean, who cannot countenance her curiosity about Godfrey) only to find another—the dashing Major.  Meanwhile, Ermyntrude, like Godfrey, faces a comeuppance for her pert pursuit of carnal knowledge across class lines.  Heaven forfend!

In the end, as so often happens, the teens may be seen to be following different paths, though we—like them—may wait breathlessly the epistles depicting Ermyntrude’s adventures in sexy-sounding Saxony and Esemeralda’s nuptial discoveries.  All-in-all,  Ermyntrude and Esmeralda is ebullient entertainment.

Ermyntrude & Esmeralda A Naughty Puppet Play Based on the novella by Lytton Strachey Directed and Adapted by Hunter Kaczorowski

Puppet Design: Hunter Kaczorowski; Dramaturgy: Emily Reilly; Scenic Design: Kate Noll; Costume Design: Seth Bodie; Lighting Design: Solomon Weisbard; Sound Design & Original Music: Steve Brush; Stage Manager: Sonja Thorson; Technical Director: Lee O’Reilly; Assistant Technical Director: Joey Moro; Producer: Sarah Williams; Puppetry Captain: Carmen Martinez

The Yale Cabaret February 14-16, 2013

At the Rainbow's End

With a two-person cast that enacts over a dozen characters, Marie Jones’ Stones in His Pockets, at the Yale Rep, directed by Evan Yionoulis, makes us think about the hierarchy of acting.  Typically, in any theatrical production, there are starring roles, minor roles, and extras, and there are character actors and caricatures.  Fred Arsenault and Euan Morton, between them, give us all the parts in the play—as presented by Jake Quinn (Arsenault) and Charlie Conlon (Morton), two likeable locals enlisted as extras on a big Hollywood movie being shot in picturesque County Kerry, Ireland.  There’s Caroline Giovanni (Morton), the campy American female lead; Clem (Morton), the dour British director; Mickey (Arsenault), the crusty veteran extra (he was in John Ford’s The Quiet Man), and other locals, including Sean (Arsenault), persona non grata on the set, and movie people, such as Aisling (Arsenault), the prancing assistant director in charge of the extras.

The comedy of this lively and thoroughly entertaining show derives not only from the clash of locals and Hollywood, but also from poking fun at a certain type of silly film.  Part Two opens with a “gag reel” of attempts by Ms. Giovanni and her leading man (Arsenault) to get their delivery right, and the sequence helps distance the utterly fake world of film from the more realistic world of theater.  No mean feat, since any play in which two men change into a range of characters by changing their speech, accents, and body language, but, mostly, not their costumes, can be called anything but “realistic.”

And that’s the paradox.  The play manages to get at the realities behind the business of staging fake worlds, and it does it with a battery of a more or less stock characters, including that stereotypical “stage Irishman,” the irascible drunk.  Among the characters, then, there’s little you haven’t seen before, but, on the other hand, that very familiarity helps rope us in.  What Jones has in mind is the idea that the only way to intrude reality into predictable Hollywood fare is to focus on “the extras.”  And it’s the perspective of the extras that keeps things real.

Charlie, you see, has a script he wants to have made into a film, but, due to a tragic event that occurs during the making of  the film he's an extra for (Quiet Valley), he decides to shift the focus to a local lad brutalized by insensitive professionals and humiliated in his own town pub.  The scene in which the director tells the novices why Hollywood would never be interested in such a tale (“People don’t go to the movies to get depressed. That’s what the theatre’s for.”) puts the proper critical emphasis on the play we’re watching.  A suicide—drowned with stones in his pockets—is the basis of Charlie’s script.  And that script is our play, which is why it’s left to our two extras to enact the entire show.  Only Charlie and Jake belong to both worlds, so only they can act out the mannerisms of both.  And only a play with a limited cast, it seems, can afford to tell the truth.

Along the way, the fun is in the caricatures Morton and Arsenault put on and off as fast as gold can sheen, and in stage business, such as miming and a “Lord of the Dance” routine from out of nowhere, and in the clash of worlds and accents and expectations—and in an absurdist use of cows.  Arsenault and Morton are wonders of timing and mugging and swishing and falling about the place, and there’s great pleasure in watching them, at play’s end, take bows as each character.  The production also runs its credits on the big screen, and it’s fun to see the production crew and the Rep staff scroll by like names in a Big Budget Production.

Stones in His Pockets ribs the Film Industry as a Land of Cockaigne for otherwise strapped people, able to be bought as background authenticity for a world of fake emotions, fake nostalgia, fake laughs.  And the play mainly has sport with that—until something real happens.  At that point, the interest is in seeing which characters will cease to simply “play as cast” and which will cast the first stone.

Stones in His Pockets By Marie Jones Directed by Evan Yionoulis

Scenic and Projection Designer: Edward T. Morris; Costume Designer: Nikki Delhomme; Lighting Designer: Solomon Weisbard; Sound Designer: Matt Otto; Production Dramaturg: Sarah Krasnow; Dialect Coach: Stephen Gabis; Casting Director: Tara Rubin Casting; Stage Manager: Nicole Marconi

Photos by Joan Marcus, courtesy of Yale Repertory Theatre

Yale Repertory Theatre January 25-February 16, 2013

Taking It to the Streets

The mission: to save New Haven—but how? Gob Squad, a band of four video improvisors, hit the streets of New Haven to find out how, in a show called Super Night Shot.  Brought to New Haven as part of the Yale Rep’s No Boundaries series, Sarah Thom (location), Mat Hand (PR), Berit Stumpf (casting), and Bastian Trost (the hero) tape their experiences, each armed with a 60 minute tape in a handheld camera.

What the audience sees, after giving the group a returning hero’s welcome as they enter from their mission, is what was taped on the cameras, synched and playing simultaneously.  It’s not nearly as chaotic as that might sound, thanks to some skillful planning.  There are moments when each camera records its respective owner doing something in tandem with the rest: a dance routine with an umbrella, for instance, or donning an animal mask.  Then there are the moments when one camera dominates, making the others provide side stories.  What’s key is developing a rhythm of part to whole that Gob Squad has got down cold.

Speaking of cold: it’s not that much fun to be wandering the streets of New Haven on a February night.  The extremities of the situation are real.  Each member of the group must kill the hour doing something that they will relentlessly tape.  And each has a task, stated at the outset: Trost has agreed to kiss a total stranger.  Thom must scout out a location for the event; Stumpf must find a willing participant off the streets; Hand must promote the event, pasting Trost’s face around town and boldly entering commercial establishments (such as Starbucks on High and Chapel) to proclaim the coming of the hero.  Meanwhile, Trost wanders about exuding the “naïve blind faith” that is the collective modus operandi of the group.

Watching the show, the audience only knows one thing: the four members made it back with their recordings.  What they did and how each will align with the others is part of the magic of the spectacle.  The effects—wonderful, comical, eerie, sad—of the overlap is what drives the show.

It helps greatly that the four have mastered the skill to remain on camera without losing direction.  Rather than watch cameras move through the streets, we watch the players move about, interacting at random with other people—a charming incident on Friday night was when Trost told an arguing couple to kiss and they did—or following a solo course that at times made Thom seem as if she were trapped in a Blair Witch Project.

Hand has to be the most outgoing, and his dance, in chicken mask and shiny body suit, in front of Basta is silly in all the right ways.  Trost is the most charming; finding out from a random person that he must free New Haven of politics he persuades a student of political science to agree to leave town.  Stumpf, shyly enthusiastic, manages to find a young woman who agrees to “kiss a rabbit” (“I’d go for it,” her friend advises), and so the night’s shoot ends happily, with Trost, who wears a rabbit mask for the kiss, stripping to his skivvies in honor of the stranger who “has given me everything.”

The best thing about the show, besides the qualities that make each of the four participants engaging, is seeing our town through a stranger’s eyes.  As the four wander about—on Chapel Street from York to the Green, mostly—the familiar sights in the background both estrange us from our environment and make it seem welcoming.  Even the police officers are friendly, Hand finds.  And Stumpf converses with a man waiting for a bus who seems simply to enjoy the conversation without caring about the camera.  Thom curls up on the street near Wave and we watch indifferent New Haveners pass by.  Meanwhile, Trost, after changing into a white suit with bowtie and cummerbund, asks strangers for messages—“take a left” he’s told—and for tasks—“help me find a job as a male escort,” he’s asked.

In the end, the star of the show tends to be the city that hosts the shenanigans.  The show has been done nearly 200 times in distinct locations.  No two shows are the same, but the satisfactions of seeing the foursome pull it off—like some vaguely transgressive but benign social act—is exhilarating and suggests, indeed, that all the world’s a stage.

Super Night Shot By Gob Squad

Devised by: Johanna Freiburg, Sean Patten, Elyce Semenec, Berit Stumpf, Sarah Thom, Bastian Trost, Simon Will On the Streets of New Haven: Mat Hand, Berit Stumpf, Sarah Thom, Bastian Trost Live Sound Mix: Jeff McGrory

Sound Design: Sebastian Bark, Jeff McGrory; Production Management: Eva Hartmann; Touring Management: Mat Hand

Yale Repertory Theatre February 1 & 2, 2013

Prisoners' Pageant

The Island, the second show of the Yale Cabaret’s spring semester, is a powerful two-man play, directed by Kate Attwell and featuring Paul Pryce (John) and Winston Duke (Winston).  The play was written by Athol Fugard in collaboration with the actors—John Kani and Winston Ntshona—who initially played in it. As prisoners in a South African prison known as “the island,” the two men’s crimes, we can assume, are political, and thus their bond is based on the deprivations of their condition.  We meet them as they return to their cell, winded from running, injured, exhausted.  As unlikely as it might seem, much of their interaction will be about their plan to present a performance of Sophocles’ Antigone in a show for the other prisoners.

Staged with the actors on a platform flanked by comissary-style tables and with chairs at the head and foot, the space is intimate and the actors, as they loom above us, seem at times larger-than-life.  It’s an interesting means to create a heroicizing perspective on the two men as they work out their production, which entails Winston, as Antigone, having to don a wig of straw and a bra with tins for cups.  He rebels against the affront to his dignity and must be placated by John, who is determined that Antigone be presented, to lodge the theme of blood ties and honor against the dehumanizing demands of the State.

What carries the play and makes it riveting throughout is the interplay between Pryce and Duke.  Fully immersed in their parts, they establish the sense of familiarity between the men, due to intimate proximity, but also the degree to which they are quite different in their attitudes and expectations. That difference becomes paramount when John learns that he will be released in three months’ time.  Their shared elation swiftly becomes a deeply moving nostalgia for the time they shared together and then, gradually, a sense of dejection and even resentment on Winston’s part, even as John keeps insisting he doesn’t want to think about his release—that it might be all a trick.

What isn’t a trick is the extent to which playacting is a part of the prisoners getting through their ordeal.  Early on John acts out imaginary phone calls to friends back home and to the two men’s wives.  The scene quickly establishes the power and fascination of make believe—the power of suggestion comes out in the playacted phone call, in the reminiscences of the day they were incarcerated together, and in Winston’s projections of what life will be like for John when he returns home.  Fugard makes all this take place in dialogue between two half-naked men, with little in the way of props or theatrical tricks.  The Island demonstrates effectively that the best drama takes place in our heads while listening to characters talk.

The staging of Antigone is a significant change of scene: Pryce as John as King Creon and Duke as Winston as Antigone prowl the walk space behind the tables, moving about as if sizing each other up for a duel to the death.  The fact that John, who has been approved for release, should have the role of the State questioning Winston as the defiant Antigone—who insists on burying her brother, condemned as a traitor, though the law forbids it—makes the playacting reflect a struggle between the two men as well.  John, as the one who initially quizzes Winston on the parts they will play and who seems the more articulate and quick-witted, becomes, by means of the play, a further goad and even persecutor of his cellmate.  Winston, then, as Antigone—the gender roles also are relevant—must give voice to a defiance that stands for the enemies of the State of Apartheid, but also for those oppressed by the constructions placed upon them by others.

The play creates a subtle relation between the two men and Pryce and Duke bring home the passion, power and dignity of these men with great skill.  The show’s design, use of song—via “Singers from Shades”—and lighting combine to create one of those Cab shows that reinvents the space and the audience’s relation to the spectacle a bit as well.  The Island is a commanding production.

The  Island By Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona Directed by Kate Attwell

Assistant Director: Gabriel DeLeon; Scenic Designer: Kristen Robinson; Costume Designer: Seth Bodie; Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason; Sound Designer: Matt Otto; Stage Manager: Louisa Balch; Producer: Lico Whitfield; Singers from the Shades: Carol Crouch, Edwina Kisanga, Dianne Lake, Ian Miller, Naima Sakande

The Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street January 24-26, 2013

The Cab will be dark for two weeks, then return on Valentine's Day weekend with Ermyntrude and Esmeralda, a naughty puppet-play by way of an Edwardian novella by Lytton Strachey.

The Kids Are Alright

Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine is something of a schizophrenic play.  As staged by Margot Bordelon, a third-year director in the YSD program, the show is a wildly entertaining first half yoked to a second half that isn’t nearly so nimble.  The first half is set in 1880, on a colonial outpost in Africa, and laughs abound.  The second half is set in England c. 1980, and … not so much. Maybe it’s just me, and my antipathy for that particular past—the era contemporaneous with the writing of the play—is my problem.  And yet, it’s obviously much easier to imbue the 1880s with charm and fun and a frothy lubricity that makes everyone ready to have sex with someone, than it is to derive much in the way of lasting uplift, drama or entertainment from the people who inhabit the late Seventies/early Eighties.  Too close to home but also dated?  Maybe that’s it.  The cast—and they are extremely well-cast—gives it a game try and there are some notable bits in the show’s second half to make it worthwhile.

Before the show even starts we’re treated to the cast posed as figures in displays in a sort of living museum of natural history.  And the exhibits’ backgrounds remain as the set for the African outpost where rigidly upstanding Brit Clive (Gabe Levey, a comic revelation) lives with his family: his blushingly compliant wife Betty (Timothy Hassler, as winsome as one could want a man in a dress to be), Edward, his goldilocked adolescent son (played with inspired awkwardness by a woman), Maud, his no-nonsense mother-in-law (Hannah Sorenson, a study in gray), his daughter Victoria (a stuffed doll) and the child’s nanny, Ellen (Brenda Meaney, self-effacing), as well as his Man Friday Joshua (Chris Bannow—more later), who has renounced his tribe to be a trusted servant.  Enter into this world of domestic bliss and disrupted white tranquility—the natives, as they say, are restless—a rugged explorer, Harry (Mickey Theis, increasingly profound), and a woman with a tendency to be rather assertive, Mrs. Saunders (Meaney again, anything but self-effacing).

As with any broad farce, one isn’t surprised to find that Betty and Harry have a concealed passion for each other of long-standing.  Nor is it surprising to find that Clive has the hots for Mrs. Saunders as a supplement to his overly demure wife (there’s a fairly outrageous scene of coupling between the two, with Levey and Meaney getting all the humor they can out of it).  But when Edward begins to pant for Harry, and the latter slips away with Joshua for a fuck in the stable, and when Ellen tries to make a move on Betty, and when, after some mixed signals are let slip, Harry comes on to Clive, much to the latter’s outrage, well, let’s just say everyone but Maud is ready to do it with someone (the old lady mainly gets her kicks having one doll bitch-slap another).  You see how it is: Victorian propriety masks a libidinal free-for-all.  In Churchill’s 1880s, no one was standing around waiting for Freud to invent sexual repression.  Everyone is sexually expressive, it’s just that the expression had to be a bit more clandestine than would later be the case.

All of this is very amusing with a cast so equal to the task, and the roles of Clive, Betty, Harry, and Edward, especially, manage to be both caricatures as well as bravura bits of characterization by the respective actors in the roles.  Scenes between Harry and Edward are particularly spirited, as are the scenes when Clive tries to upbraid his wife and son.  But to Bannow, as Joshua, falls one of the more interesting roles.  Indeed, it should be mentioned that Bannow has done an estimable job of playing perfectly the kinds of ancillary roles that matter much to the overall effect.  He did it in both parts of Jack Tamburri’s thesis show, Iphigenia Among the Stars, and he does it again in both parts of Cloud Nine.  Joshua is anything but a caricature; he’s a complex witness to a world that tries desperately to hide its truths from itself, and his “Christmas song” is a plaintive grasp at love from someone denuded of his own identity in favor of an invention.  It’s one of the finest moments in the play.

In the second half, after a curtain painted as a Union Jack has fallen to the floor, we enter the post-punk era of Margaret Thatcher.  It’s a brave new world in which women like Victoria (that doll grown up, we’re meant to assume, despite the leap in time) can leave an earnest, well-meaning and hilariously “progressive” husband (Theis, in a sustained comic role) in favor of, first, Lin, a recently divorced single- mother lesbian (Sorenson, lower class than Vickie), and, later, a sexual ménage à trois with Lin and her own bisexual brother—little Edward (Hessler), now grown into a sensitive cross between his earlier, feminized self and Harry, the manly explorer he adored back there in Part One.  The cavorting about on a picnic blanket by Vickie, Lin and Edward is not only intense, it’s also preceded by an invocation of “the goddess.”  While that sort of thing should invite acerbic parody in our time—aren’t the New Agey trappings of the New Woman of the Seventies as risible as the era’s Sensitive Man?—the trio manages to turn the moment into a liberated expression of collective ecstasy. Almost.

Act Two, then, isn’t all farce but aimed at something like a naturalized representation of people trying to find their way in the minefield of human relationships.  The emotional center is Vickie and she gets a sensitive portrayal, with spirited support from Meaney’s newly divorced Betty, looking like a Thatcher wanna-be and yet displaying the good sense to embrace the moment’s potential, and from Bannow’s feckless but direct Gerry—as Edward’s sometime lover he exudes the kind of low-key sexual know-how that seems never to go out of date.

Where the play loses some of the moorings that helped give power to Part One is in the part of Cathy—Lin’s little girl.  With pigtails and Clive’s handle-bar moustache, in a short velvet frock above manly legs, Levey is let run rampant as a kind of androgynous, butch pixie of the Id.  With prepubescent preening, tantrums, and naughty asides, Levey is so riotously girlish he becomes a one-man drag show, but there’s no room for something Part One had and Part Two needs: the sensitivity with which the child—Edward, in Part One—was allowed to put heart into the play via understated comedy.

In Churchill’s script, the actor playing Clive—the ultra-male bastion of all things British—must become a little girl in Part Two, and Bordelon’s production lets us see how such a transformation is no transformation, really, since, Clive or Cathy, it’s Levey’s role to dominate the scene, as Cathy dominates her well-meaning but somewhat clueless elders.  It’s prescient, certainly, as patriarchy makes way for . . . pueri-archy?

Cloud Nine By Caryl Churchill Directed by Margot Bordelon

Scenic Designer: Kate Noll; Costume Designer: Elivia Bovenzi; Lighting Designer: Masha Tsimring; Sound Designer: Sam Ferguson; Composer: Palmer Hefferan; Production Dramaturgs: Emily Reilly, Alexandra Ripp; Stage Manager: Sonja Thorson

Yale School of Drama January 22-26, 2013

Weighty Issues

When it comes to our looks, almost all of us have issues.  Should we battle those issues and strive to overcome them, or should we work to alter our appearance?  That’s one of the questions asked by Laura Jacqmin’s January Joiner: A Weight Loss Horror Comedy, playing at the Long Wharf Stage II, directed by Eric Ting.  Set in a “fat farm” in Florida, the play focuses on three characters dealing with weight issues.  Terry (Ashlie Atkinson) needs to lose weight for health reasons, and she’s adamant about doing so.  Her sister Myrtle (Meredith Holzman) doesn’t feel her weight is an issue, and takes a more quizzical look at the weight-loss program.  The only other enrollee in this off-period is Darnell, or Big D (Daniel Stewart Sherman), a “fat-proud” Minnesota native who comes back year after year “for the people.”

Staged against a long bank of frosted glass, terminating, at times, in a vending machine, January Joiner is streamlined in appearance and in its script.  We get some backstory for each character—particularly in the story told by the main instructor, Brian (Anthony Bowden), that explains where he comes from and why he’s concerned about his body.  Since most of us are concerned with our bodies in one way or another, the stories the characters tell about themselves carry an element of immediate identification.

The stand-out characterization in the play comes from Tonya Glanz as April, an uptight, relentlessly hyper instructor who has the hots for Brian—thwarted—and who seethes with righteousness about her super-trim—“svelte,” as she would have it—form.  The play doesn’t really have a villain, but April is the character we’re not meant to sympathize with—and Glanz brings a brittle, boyish-girl quality to the role that helps with the humor at the character’s expense.

As Darnell, the character who is meant to evince the most sympathy, Sherman is good at giving us D’s forced brightness, a quality he has clearly learned so as to avoid whining, which would be much easier.  We easily believe that the social interactions at Evolve are more important to him and his self-esteem than his weight is, and that’s why the tragedy that befalls him seems a bit unearned.  The blow to the ego that he suffers is important because it works with the play’s theme that improving our appearances doesn’t necessarily improve us, but it’s hard to believe he would take it so hard.

The key character for the “tragic” aspect of the play is Terry.  Played initially by Atkinson, Terry is likeable, easy-going and giggly; in the second half of the play, after she starts to see results, she is played by Maria-Christina Oliveras.  But the fact that the character Oliveras plays is called “Not-Terry” immediately lets us in on the dynamic involved.  Not-Terry is driven, impatient and cutting.  As she “cuts away the fat”—to use the terms April exhorts them with—she also cuts away a lot of her empathy for others and her willingness to see someone like Darnell as a potential boyfriend.

The linchpin of the plot is Myrtle.  She’s the one who initially is troubled by the demonic vending machine and its ominous tendencies, and she is the one for whom Brian, very unprofessionally—in a good comic sequence—develops “hard feelings,” so to speak.  We could be watching a story of true love in weight loss, where only the one not concerned with her body finds love, but Jacqmin’s plot is a little more complicated than that.  Terry, or rather Not-Terry, has her own designs on Brian, and maybe the sister with the more “svelte” body that will get the guy.

If this sounds like it’s adding up to an einy-meiny-miny-moe for Brian—or maybe it’s a judgment of Paris—choosing amongst thin (April), heavier (Not-Terry) and heaviest (Myrtle), that’s because it is.  So when Darnell shows up at one point with wings, we might be meant to think more of Cupid than an angel.  Which is to say the romantic aspects of the play override both its comedy and horror elements, though both are certainly present.

One of the more jarring aspects of the show is the use of the vending machine: it seems to represent all that is fraught with guilt and unease about the process of dieting, but it also has a homicidal side that matches to the idea that “improving” oneself also means “doing away with” an earlier self.  That theme is what keeps January Joiner interesting.  What keeps it amusing is its ability to show us the attitudes we have about weight and make us laugh at them.  The cast, both thin and plus-sized, is very game in that regard, having to do sit-ups—there’s one very funny sequence with Myrtle spotting for Darnell—and work out as well as cavort about in revealing costumes.

There are good effects throughout, via Set (Narelle Sissons), Lighting (Stephen Strawbridge) and Sound (Leah Gelpe)—the scary machine, and the suggestion of a swimming pool, and the beds/counters that rise from the floor.  Some of the dramatic elements don’t fully jell—for all the fun of the evil vending machine, its contribution has little to do with the plot—but what keeps the play appealing is its appeal to situations we can readily recognize.  Somewhere between Darnell’s fatalistic “it’s all in the genes” and Not-Terry’s steely efforts to cut away, through will power, the part of her she doesn’t want is where most of us reside, trying to look better without necessarily also trying to be better.  January Joiner weighs in on the importance of the latter over the former.

January Joiner A Weight Loss Horror Comedy By Laura Jacqmin Directed by Eric Ting

Set Design: Narelle Sissons; Costume Design: Oana Botez; Lighting Design: Stephen Strawbridge; Sound Design: Leah Gelpe; Casting: James Calleri, CSA; Production Stage Manager: Matthew Melchiorre

Long Wharf Theatre January 9-February 10, 2013

The Teen Scene

All of What You Love and None of What You Hate, the first show of the Yale Cabaret’s spring semester, starts things off with a visceral play that keeps its audience off balance.  What at first might seem to be a satire of online self-presentations, the gap between parents and teens, and the gap between the genders, turns out to be more fraught than that: it’s also about teen pregnancy and the difficult, and scarring, choice of abortion, and the attitudes and mores of the kids in the hood. YSD first year playwright Phillip Howze establishes himself from the get-go as a skilled manipulator of the vernacular—the lines here grasp the peculiarities of personal usage, set within the context of a lingua franca that all the teen characters have internalized.  At least part of the play’s focus is on rendering the kind of “group mind” that teens inhabit in their collective effort to “grow up.”  The situation that Girl A (Zenzi Williams) faces—at fifteen—shows how ill-considered that effort can be.  And yet, the play seems to say, such is a part of life for far too many teens at risk.

We might ask why Girl A doesn’t “know better”: we don’t get definite answers.  Her mother, played with steely prissiness by Prema Cruz, is not entirely unsympathetic, but, with her own efforts to find a man the main thing we know about her (besides the fact that she also has an infant and no husband), we can assume she’s just not there enough to steer her daughter.  Girl B (Tiffany Mack), Girl A’s best friend, is more balanced, seeming to have control over the urges that lead the young astray—but, when it comes down to it, she’s too into herself to be much help to her friend.

That’s not to say that the play is out to point fingers—though the fecklessness of Boy (Cornelius Davidson), the young man who fucks and then wants to forget Girl A, is certainly pointed—but rather to give us a ringing sense of reality.  To that end the voices that act as chorus—coming out of the dark or provided by perambulating figures in hoodies—help us hear how the choices of a Girl A are spun and rung and sung by that “everybody” we’re always aware of, looking over our shoulders, casting stones.

In the end, what are we to make of Girl A?  Played with passive sullenness throughout most of the play, she speaks to us in monologue after the trial by fire of her self-administered abortion: when she says she wanted something but didn’t even know what she wanted, we hear her, in a kind of flashback, tease as a proud young girl enticing a guy, and when she returns to her sadder but wiser voice, Howze and Tarker and Williams give her a stance that makes this girl’s problem our problem.  “You feel me?” she asks.  Yes, we do.

Good work by all in the mostly First Year production, directed by Kate Tarker.  The staging is perhaps a bit too “proscenium” for those who expect more fluid use of space from the Cab, but putting it all on a stage makes what we see a deliberate staging, and that helps us keep our distance.  Lighting, music, scenic design, and projections all add dimension to this dynamic production, full of notable Cab debuts.

All of What You Love and None of What You Hate By Phillip Howze Directed by Kate Tarker

Choreographer: Jabari Brisport; Co-Scenic Designers: Portia Elmer, Mariana Sanchez; Costume Designer: Grier Coleman; Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason; Co-Sound Designers: Pornchanok Kanchanabanca, Sang Ahm; Projection Designer: Paul Lieber; Dramaturg: Helen C. Jaksch; Stage Manager: Rob Chikar; Co-Producers: Stephanie Rolland, Sarah Williams

The Yale Cabaret January 17-19, 2013

Coming Up at The Cabaret

Yale’s spring semester starts this week, so that means not only are the kids back in town but so is the Cab.  The Yale Cabaret has announced its new line-up and the first show of the second half of the season—with ten shows rather than the traditional nine—should be getting ready to go up even as we speak. That show is All of What You Love and None of What You Hate, a play by Phillip Howze as recent as last year, about a teenage girl coming to a major decision about herself with what Artistic Director Ethan Heard describes as “a lot of noise” coming at her from her mother, her boyfriend and a friend.  The play is very fast-paced and contemporary, so contemporary, in fact, that three of its four actors are First Years in the YSD program.  The play is directed by Kate Tarker, a 2nd-year Playwright, who worked in the fall on the Cab’s Cat Club.  January 17-19.

The Island is an early-ish play by Athol Fugard, developed with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, in his Brechtian period, 1972, and set in a prison cell in Robben Island, the South African prison that held Nelson Mandela at the time.  The two men in the cell are rehearsing Antigone, Sophocles’ great play about a clash with the State in the name of mourning, ritual and blood ties.  The play, directed by native South African and 3rd-year dramaturg Kate Attwell, stars Winston Duke and Paul Pryce, both 3rd-Year Actors, recently shown to great effect in Iphigenia Among the Stars.  January 24-26.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day comes Ermyntrude & Esmeralda, a “naughty puppet play” derived from the naughty epistolary novella by Lytton Strachey.  Directed by 2nd-year Costume Designer Hunter Kaczorowski (who recently did such an excellent job on the YSD’s production of Sunday in the Park with George), the play’s titular characters confide in each other about all sorts of things that, we imagine, young Edwardian ladies were not supposed to notice, much less comment upon.  It’s an intimate world of bow-wows and pussycats and whimsical euphemisms. February 14-16.

The first of the two shows this semester not derived from a pre-existing source, All This Noise* is the creation of 3rd-year Actor Jackson Moran, who directed last semester’s tour de force, Cowboy Mouth.  In this one-man show based upon interviews with persons who have had experience with mental illness—as professionals, patients, and relatives—Moran seeks to create some of that “conversation about mental health” that politicians in the media profess an earnest interest in, but which seems to never get started. February 21-23.

The second show originating with YSD students is The Bird Bath, a movement piece created by The Ensemble and directed by 3rd-year Actor Monique Barbee, who shone in last semester’s Sunday in the Park with George and last summer’s K of D, at the Summer Cabaret.  Inspired by the art of the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington*—partner of Max Ernst—this piece uses text from the artist's account of her experiences in a mental institution. February 28-March 2.

Contemporary Irish playwright Enda Walsh’s The Small Things is a chilling play for two actors, directed by 3rd-year dramaturg Emily Reilly.  The characters, a man and a woman, tell stories in a kind of dialect, both to explore the power of speech and to reconstruct occurrences from a devastating past. March 7-9.

Lindbergh’s Flight by Bertolt Brecht was written as a radio play with music by Kurt Weill.  As carried out by an Ensemble that includes Kate Attwell and 3rd-year Actors Brenda Meaney and Gabe Levey, the play, Heard says, is “mischievous fun” with potential for audience participation, and a political dimension to the hero worship of Lindbergh. March 14-16.

Heard’s own project this semester is a production of Arthur Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, or Opus 21.  A moody musical piece involving 21 poems by Belgian poet Albert Giraud, the composition dates from 1913 and is an open-ended working through of Symbolist motifs, most notably the figure of “the sad clown” Pierrot.  The work calls for five instrumentalists and a soprano, but Heard is still deciding how much action will be expected from the musicians and how many actors will be involved.  In any case, the piece seems an even more ambitious combination of music and drama than Basement Hades, the show Heard directed in last year’s Cab.  March 28-30.

The Twins Would Like to Say, by collaborators Seth Bockley and Devon de Mayo, continues the “twinning” that seems a theme this semester.  And like E & E, it involves two girls looking on at their community, and, like The Small Things, it involves the rigors of a private, shared life.  Directed by a duo, Lauren Dubowski and Whitney Dibo, two 2nd-year Dramaturgs, the play is about twin sisters from the Caribbean trying to cope with life in Wales.  The play is usually presented “promenade” style, which means the audience moves around, spending time in one area or another as things happen simultaneously. April 4-6.

The final show of the season is Marius von Mayenberg’s The Ugly One, directed by 2nd-year Director Cole Lewis, who directed the gripping and entertaining show “Ain’t Gonna Make It” in the fall semester.  This four-person play takes place in a slightly futuristic world in which a person who has been deemed the ugliest has undergone plastic surgery to become the most beautiful.  The play is about appearance and substance, we might say, but also about the worship of beauty in our looks-conscious culture. April 11-13.

And that’s that.  See you at the CAB.

The Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven, CT

*Corrections: the original post used the working title Halfway House for the piece entitled All This Noise, and misidentified Leonora Carrington as Dora Carrington, a British artist in the Bloomsbury Group.

Weight Watchers, Watch Out

It’s a new year and traditionally the time of resolutions as people make plans to improve their lives.  One staple of the New Year’s Resolution list is the vow to lose weight, and one of the givens of that vow is that it will be accompanied with a lot of drama.  What should be a simple, private decision to alter one’s diet or undertake an exercise regimen becomes fraught with the dynamics of the game show—can she/he do it?—together with the psychic costs of failing—if not, what’s “wrong” with her/him?  We even have TV shows like The Biggest Loser dedicated to the weight-loss ordeal. January Joiner: A Weight Loss Horror Comedy, the new play by Laura Jacqmin  debuting this week at the Long Wharf Theatre, takes on the high anxiety of self-improvement with comedy, horror elements, and a knowing sense of the absurd.  Set in a “weight-loss boot camp” in Florida, it follows the travails of two sisters, Myrtle (Meredith Holzman) and Terry (Ashlie Atkinson).  Terry, the elder, experienced a recent cardiac incident that has sent her scurrying to Total Xtreme, run by Brian (Anthony Bowden) and April (Tonya Glanz).  Myrtle is along to offer moral support, which means that she is both with the program and looking a little askance at it.  And dedication is clearly an issue since a “January Joiner” is the term for the memberships at health spas that begin with New Year’s resolutions and fade by spring.

According to the script, Myrtle and Terry are overweight young women—5'5" and well over 200 lbs. They are joined by Darnell (Daniel Stewart Sherman), a happy-go-lucky heavy person who tips the scale at over 300 lbs. and keeps coming back to make what little adjustments he can.  Thus, among the three dieters we have desperation—Terry claims she will lose 50 lbs. during her stay—acceptance, and indifference.  Then there are creepier elements—such as Not-Terry and Holy Shit Ghost, both played by Maria-Christina Oliveras—that add a touch of the uncanny to the proceedings.

An undercurrent of the play is certainly the question: why is weight an issue, and what’s the solution?  The question of one’s appearance, in our image-conscious world, is not simply physical.  It comes loaded with moral, personal, psychological, and social implications—the kinds of things that plays thrive on.

But the play, in the view of its director, Eric Ting, is more than just a satire on the effect of social injunctions to be thinner, better-looking, or to have such goals. It’s a play about change. “At its heart it is a play about two sisters growing apart, about becoming so different that they don’t recognize each other,” Ting said.

To change one’s appearance—all the ads say—is to change one’s life.  A “new you.”  But what gets shed and lost with the “old you”?  For Laura Jacqmin, its author, the play asks: “What happens to us when the people who are closest to us change?”  What is the effect on our relationships when we take on roles, tasks or goals that change our relations to others already in our lives?

January Joiner: A Weight Loss Horror Comedy runs from from January 9 through February 10, 2013 on Stage II.  Opening night is Wednesday, January 16, at 7:30 p.m.