A New Theatrical Group Debuts

Ever wonder what students in the Yale School of Drama do in the off-season? One answer is: form new theatrical groups. One such new group, Old Sound Room, was recently formed by two current students, Elia Monte-Brown and Dan O’Brien. The troupe consists of 3 other current students and 7 recent YSD grads. OSR’s inaugural production, Old Sound Room Lear begins this weekend, June 14th, and will run till the 23rd.

According to Adina Verson, a co-founder and a performer in the first show, the idea for OSR grew out of the interest in keeping YSD collaborations going after graduation. Verson also mentioned that some of the recent grads had wanted to work with some of their underclassmen and hadn't had many opportunities during their time at YSD. The creativity and talent of the group is assured, but how did the first production idea come about?

For various reasons, the idea of basing the show on Shakespeare was in the cards from early on, but the approach developed through themes the group wanted to explore, particularly inter-generational obligations of seniors to juniors, and vice versa, in our society. Shakespeare’s King Lear, of course, dramatizes the chaos that ensues when a king retires too soon, little suspecting how irrelevant a man becomes once stripped of his former title and duties. His daughters, who have little sympathy for his plight, take on the burden of reigning while also having to care for Lear in his erratic fancies. Verson and her colleagues sought out tenants of retirement homes who would share their views of the aging process and the challenges faced by those who have, like Lear, given up their occupations and duties in retirement. Fortunately, OSR gained the cooperation of the Lillian Booth Assisted Living Facility, which meant that the interviews were conducted with retired actors, from ages 75 to 90.

For Verson and her colleagues, the issue of “responsibility across generations” guided their discussions, trying to assess the younger generation’s obligation to the elder, and the elder’s duties toward the younger, as all families find themselves dealing with the aging of a generation that is long-lived and, as Baby Boomers, never were ones to give up their youth easily. The material from the interviews is scattered throughout the show, along with dance and expressive movement and musical interludes, to highlight the themes of Lear for our current times. The show should be “both a conversation and a confrontation with the separate worlds” that different generations tend to inhabit. By reaching out to retired or semi-retired actors, OSR pondered their own futures as well as the past of persons like themselves, still living in the light of the work they did, still dreaming of roles they would love to play.

Verson says that an impetus behind the innovative approach to the text was the tendency, as YSD students, to rework classics in a more contemporary theatrical idiom, coupled with the challenge of a young troupe—most of them under thirty—taking on the great canonical play of elderly tragedy. Another criteria for the production is that all members have an equal say in the performance, and, though three of the twelve-member group are unavailable to participate in the inaugural production, the show was arrived at democratically.

Michael McQuilken, the only member of the troupe trained as a director at YSD—his original play Jib, featuring his own songs and score, was his thesis show in 2011—directs OSR Lear, but, according to Verson, the role of Artistic Director means, for McQuilken, that he be an “enabler of all voices” in the group, making sure that all are represented in the final work.

Those who have followed YSD shows of the last few years—including work at the Yale Cabaret—will be familiar with most of the troupe already. Brian Wiles, William DeMerritt, Fisher Neal, and Adina Verson all acted in Louisa Proske’s thesis production of Cymbeline in 2010; Ashton Heyl, Dan O'Brien, Sophie von Haselberg, and Carmen Zilles performed in Ethan Heard’s thesis production of Sunday in the Park with George last fall, and O’Brien and Zilles played the title roles in Romeo and Juliet in the spring; Laura Gragtmans played Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra in 2012, and Elia Monte-Brown acted in Richard II this past spring; Neal, Verson and DeMerritt were also featured in Lileana Blain-Cruz’s thesis production of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights in 2010.

For OSR, this show is only the beginning.  The group raised over $24,000 through Kickstarter to fund a living wage for the actors during the show's run, which will be performed in a donated space.  Future options may include finding a permanent home such as the Yale Cabaret enjoys, or to work within site-specific spaces for different productions.  While the next production is uncertain, what is certain is that OSR Lear promises to be a thoughtful and skillful performance of particular interest to fans of YSD shows.

Old Sound Room Lear June 14th- 23rd, 2013: 14th & 15th @ 8pm 16th @ 2pm & 8pm 20th and 21st @ 8pm 22nd at 2pm & 8pm 23rd @ 2pm

General Seating: $18 Under 30/Over 65: $10

HUB Studios 165 Lenox Ave, btwn 118th and 119th 2/3 train to 116th

www.oldsoundroom.com

Fun with a Fraud

Molière’s Tartuffe, the first play offered in the Yale Summer Cabaret’s Summer of Giants, is the very definition of a rollicking comedy. Molière is the kind of playwright who keeps the action and every character clearly defined without pandering—producing plays that are the basis for almost any kind of farce that came along after his heyday in the late 1600s. The dialogue is in rhymed couplets—in Richard Wilbur’s deft translation—and that keeps the talk bouncing, and adds charm and wit in spades.

As directed by Dustin Wills, the play is a steady stream of comic moments, a sort of “choose your own” of favorite bits. For some, it may be Prema Cruz’s opening dressing-down of the entire household due to their lack of respect for Tartuffe, a fraudulent holy man who has won her allegiance; or it may be Chris Bannow as deluded and domineering Orgon, hiding under a table to overhear the woo pitched at his wife Elmire (Michelle McGregor) by the hypocritical horndog Tartuffe (Mamoudou Athie)—McGregor’s darting, silent-screen-actress eyes as she listens was a high point for me.

For others it will be the droll spat between the lovers earnest Valere (Mitchell Winter) and winsome Mariane (Celeste Arias) after Valere climbs none-too-adroitly through her window to confront her—their scene together is a great instance of the sport Molière likes to have with lovers.

For others, it may be Ashton Heyl as the ever-attendant ladies’ maid Dorine, offering moral support and cutting remarks—and even a deafening vacuum-cleaner to drown out Orgon’s demands that his daughter marry the insufferable Tartuffe; or may be Ato Blankson-Wood as Damis, son of Orgon and Elmire, who hides in a piano at one point and elsewhere doesn’t brandish a blade so much as try to boat it; or perhaps Mickey Theis as Cleante, Elmire’s brother, he of the widened waist coat, a penchant for preachy apothegms, and an addiction to vanilla wafers.

Then there’s the title character: as Tartuffe, Athie is at times a deadpan foil, at others—when his doting host’s back is turned—a churlish manipulator choking on his dastardly desires. The company is rounded out by Ceci Fernandez in several small roles, most notably the be-wigged fop who provides a hilariously inspired deus ex machina moment in praise of the ever-vigilant prince.

The physical comedy is broad and the characterizations broader, but it’s not just in fun. If you think the theme of how fools can be made the dupes of pious frauds who say one thing and do another ever goes out of currency, think again.

Regulars to the Yale Cabaret space are in for a surprise: the Cab’s usually amorphous configuration of tables and playing-space has been redesigned as a deep stage with wings, while the seating includes, in addition to the familiar high and low tables, a riser of seats in the back and a row of “splash seats” on each side of the action. It’s a fitting set-up for a season of “giant” authors, giving plenty of theatrical space for each show. For Tartuffe, Kate Noll’s scenic design has raided the set of the Rep’s Marie Antoinette among others to give us some of the trappings of the era, filled out with backdrops of faces lifted from engravings of the time; Seth Bodie’s colorful costumes play with period stylings while also flaunting modern touches.

Thoroughly entertaining and engagingly delivered, Tartuffe is a big production that kicks-off the summer season with panache and verve. The show closes June 15th.

Yale Summer Cabaret Molière’s Tartuffe Translated by Richard Wilbur Directed by Dustin Wills

Stage Manager: Geoff Boronda; Scenic Designer: Kate Noll; Costume Designer: Seth Bodie; Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason; Composer: Bob Greenfield; Sound Designer: Steve Brush; Production Manager/Technical Director: James Lanius

Yale Summer Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven, CT

There once were two lads from Limerick

Sure, the Irish have the gift of the gab. And that specific gift is much in evidence in A Couple of Blaguards, the two-man show written by the McCourt brothers—Frank and Malachy—starring Howard Platt (Malachy) and Jarlath Conroy (Frank), the first show in the Long Wharf Summer Series. The McCourts, a “couple of blaguards” (or ne’er-do-wells), have a mostly amusing, occasionally poignant, and always lively tale to tell—or rather many tales to tell—and the show is a feast of entertaining storytelling of the memoir variety. Both McCourts, who began in poverty on “the Lane” in Limerick, Ireland, wound up as known names, Frank for his prize-winning memoir Angela’s Ashes (the Pulitzer, among others) and Malachy as a radio and television entertainer, actor in films, and memoirist in his own right. A Couple of Blaguards evolved out of reminscences with which the brothers would amuse friends and relations and retains a very intimate, almost impromptu feel.

Both Platt and Conroy have the look of their respective parts—Platt, the more robust one, Conroy, the leaner—and enter into the range of mimicked persons the brothers put before us with gusto and life-of-the-party verve. Both at times throw shaws about their heads and become at once gossiping local women, or Platt will don a collar and regale the boys—with Conroy uneasy in his seat—about hell and temptation. And both eventually have a time in the States what with doors shut in their faces, trying to “stick with their own,” and get shut of their own.

The first half of the show, regaling us with the rigors of being raised in the Holy Roman, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, while facing grinding poverty with sly wit and a keen joy in social skills, moves more quickly and, if you ever spent time around persons clad in habits or surplices, will jab you with hilarious recognition. If nothing else, the McCourts' ability to give us quick sketches of familiar types and Platt and Conroy’s ability to bring them to life—like the singing Insurance Man—does the job of making Limerick imaginatively real to us as the McCourts lived it and loved it and suffered it and left it and mocked it.

In Part Two, set in the States where they eventually get aboard the gravy train to glory, the odd jobs and bum’s rushes they knock about in, like all good picaresque, could be extended indefinitely. But one of the gifts of these truly gifted gabbers is to to know when to bring it all home to leave us no worse than they found us, and the show ends with recollections of their mother that are not only funny but are touched by the fond regard for where they came from that is one of the strengths of the script.

A Couple of Blaguards is a couple hours of good cheer, with maybe a mild tear, and songs and spirits that would be welcome to rouse any dozing pub. It’s entertaining tale-telling by a couple of warmly irreverent raconteurs. Platt and Conroy make the show their own and keep the crowd in the palm of their collective hand. And that’s no blarney.

A Couple of Blaguards Written by Frank McCourt and Malachy McCourt With Howard Platt and Jarlath Conroy Produced by Steve McGraw

Long Wharf Theatre Stage II May 21-June 2, 2013

Welcome to the Neighborhood

Last year, the final play in the Long Wharf season—My Name is Asher Lev—went onto New York and recently won the Outer Critic’s Circle Award for Best New Off-Broadway Play. This year, the final play has already won a Tony Award and is a highly respected and successful play. In other words, Long Wharf patrons will not be making the kind of discovery that thrilled so many last year, but that’s not a complaint. Clybourne Park is so good it’s a welcome cap to an interesting season that began in the fall with the premiere of Satchmo at the Waldorf. Bruce Norris’ Clybourne Park takes its impetus from Lorraine Hansberry’s famous play A Raisin in the Sun. As you may remember, that play, from 1959, dramatizes the efforts of a black family named Younger to improve their lot in life—an inheritance may permit them to buy a house in Clybourne Park, an all-white neighborhood formerly off-limits. Karl Lindner, a representative of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association, tries to talk the Youngers out of the purchase.

In Part One of his play, Norris shows us what Russ (Daniel Jenkins) and Bev (Alice Ripley), the couple selling the house, are like, and has Lindner (Alex Moggridge) arrive to try to talk them out of selling. Norris further extends the tensions by introducing a handful of other characters: Jim (Jimmy Davis), a well-meaning priest invited by Bev to talk to Russ who seems unable to overcome his grief for Kenneth, their recently deceased son; Francine (Melle Powers), the black housekeeper and her husband Albert (LeRoy McClain) who arrives to pick her up from work and gets drawn into the goings-on in the house; and Betsy (Lucy Owen), Lindner’s deaf wife who provides some comic relief to the situation.

The situation is that Russ has a considerable chip on his shoulder against his neighbors for their treatment of Kenneth upon his return from Korea. As Russ and Lindner face off, the priest comes between them and Bev tries to keep things civil. Francine and Albert, forced into the role of token representatives of their race, can only be made more and more uncomfortable as the argument unfolds. Key to it all is Lindner’s insistence that people should stay with “their own kind.”

Norris—with deft characterization—makes clear to us what is at stake for each character and lets us be the kind of judges who must throw the first stone, or not. Whose side are we on? It’s easy to be sympathetic to Russ, and Jenkin’s performance is naturalism to the nth degree. He simply is Russ and we’re in his house, watching him barely suffer the others until he finally explodes. Ripley’s Bev is brittle and bright the way such women often are, living mostly behind a façade. Davis as the priest is friendly and likeable, but subtly hard to like. Moggridge’s Lindner is first-rate: earnest, overbearing, aggrieved and comically stilted in his effort to be polite: the scene when he keeps speaking about not being allowed to speak is pitch perfect. The situation is so uncomfortable it’s easy to feel like a silent guest amazed at what unfolds.

As the couple in the hot seat simply because of their race, Powers and McClain register well the roles within roles devised for them—first, as hired help who are supposed to feel like friends, but not too familiar; then, as a different race who are supposed to be appreciative of their social betters, without being servile; then, as a couple who have their own differences about how to represent their difference from Bev’s condescension and Lindner’s racism. It may all sound very complex, but Norris is a wiz at getting it all in, and director Eric Ting makes certain his cast gets it all across. We’re with them every step of the way, without ever feeling like the points are being spelled out.

And if the pace of Part One feels about perfect, the pace of Part Two truly is. Norris is good at giving us the mannerisms of 1959—and Jenkins is a tour de force unto himself—but he is truly inspired in giving us “us”: the liberal, educated, well-meaning, self-consciously enlightened persons of 2009. The dialogue and its performance are so spot on, it’s easy to understand why Ting and the Long Wharf wanted to do the play: one imagines that, in a little while, 2009 may begin to fade away. We deserve to see the thirtyish denizens of the early 21st century while they’re still fresh in our minds.

This is great ensemble work and everyone captures the comic potential of their parts. Particularly effective is Owen’s Lindsey, a super-pregnant woman who crouches splay-legged upon chairs as if ready to drop a litter at any moment. Her delivery has the studied “correctness” of the kind of privilege under duress that may well be the distinctive characteristic of her generation. As her well-meaning partner, Steve, Moggridge is a wonder as the voice of reason in the lion’s den. He wants to take exception to his and his wife’s treatment by Lena and Kevin, a black couple who represent Clybourne Park, now an in-demand black neighborhood slated by economic forces for gentrification via white buyers like Lindsey and Steve. And once Steve starts down the path of picking at what he sees as racist assumptions on the part of the black couple—well, it’s obvious there’s not going to be any graceful way out.

Once the race card gets played it stays played—and can only lead to racist and sexist jokes aimed at nothing so much as the pretense of enlightenment. Lindner, in 1959, could feel entitled to speak for a white consensus—even though it annoys Russ and is an affront to Francine and Albert. But in 2009, the notion of consensus quickly dissipates. Even the couples are not united because sexual politics have a way of coming into play just when you thought it was safe to say “we.”

It’s still the case, even in 2009, that the black characters don’t get as much to say as the white characters—but in 2009 they have even more wherewithal to let us feel it. As Lena, Melle Powers keeps the comic pitch high—she knows how to make graciousness snitty. And McClain, as both Albert and Kevin, gets in digs that go a long way to show a certain amused detachment. Kevin’s anger, when it comes, is the unleashing of a street attitude we know he works hard to hide.

As a play about the social abyss underlying our riven culture’s attitudes about race and rights and belonging and getting ahead, Clybourne Park knows whereof it speaks. Everyone is a bit foolish, everyone is a bit out of their depth. As facilitators to the purchase and renovation that the white couple aim at, Tom (Jimmy Davis) and Kathy (Ripley) bring in further gaffes and gripes to keep things zinging. And then there’s Jenkins as Dan, a garrulous worker dude who has made a discovery in the backyard.

That discovery has to do with a further theme in Clybourne Park. Not only is racism, in one form or another, a staple of American life, so is the demand that some part of our society defend our society—which often means attacking other cultures and political entities for reasons not exactly transparent. Kenneth is not a casualty of war, but a casualty of demobbed socialization. Whether in 1959 or 2009, the conflicted feelings about war, like those about race, remain very much relevant, haunting and possibly shattering any provisional peace.

Clybourne Park is a play as real as any town meeting in New Haven, where the issues of who gets what is liable to come up. Don’t miss it. And if you saw it at Playwright’s Horizon a few years ago, don’t miss Eric Ting’s staging, this inspired cast, Frank Alberino’s wonderful set, and your fellow citizen’s reactions at the Long Wharf.

Clybourne Park By Bruce Norris Directed by Eric Ting

Set Design: Frank Alberino; Costume Design: Linda Cho; Lighting Design: Tyler Micoleau; Sound Design: Elizabeth Rhodes; Production Stage Manager: Charles M. Turner III; Assistant Stage Manager: Amy Patricia Stern; Casting: James Calleri, CSA; ASL Consultant: Karen Josephson; Dialect Coach: Stephen Gabis

Long Wharf Theatre May 8-June 2, 2013

Summer of Giants

Voted Best Community Theater in the 2013 “Best of” at the New Haven Advocate, the Yale Cabaret offers compelling theater in a very intimate space. During the summer months, the frenetic pace of the Cab’s three-night stands slows a bit, as the Yale Summer Cabaret takes over the space.  For the last few years, the Summer Cab has offered three plays over two months. In the last two years, the offerings have been presented in repertory style, with overlapping runs. For 2013, Artistic Director Dustin Wills has changed that, going back to earlier versions of the Summer Cabaret, which was founded in 1974. As a student in Austin, Wills worked with Fran Dorn who, he later discovered, was one of the founders of the Summer Cab. When he spoke to her about it, he learned that the initial Summer Cab offered 17 shows in a single summer. (Incidentally, a few of those plays were written by the likes of Wendy Wasserstein and Christopher Durang, students at the time.)

Wills wants the hallmark of this year’s Summer Cab to be “ambition and variety.” The initial ambition of six shows was trimmed to five but, as Wills says, these are “real plays.” Great authors providing great theater—“big plays in a tiny space.” The shows will be offered successively, which means audiences have two weeks to see each play—at 8 p.m. shows only, no matinees or late shows—before it gives way to the next.

With a troupe of eight core actors, plus two guest actors, chosen from 32 auditions, Wills has the basis for what he sees as a “standing circus”—the communal life of ensemble acting, with actors “eating, breathing theater.” Wills, a directing student entering his third year in the Drama School, will direct three of the shows, and Associate Artistic Director Chris Bannow, a third year acting student recently seen as Osric in the Rep’s Hamlet, with Paul Giamatti, will direct two. The cast consists of Celeste Arias (*15), Mamoudou Athie (*14), Ato Blankson-Wood (*15), Prema Cruz (*14), Ceci Fernandez (*14), Ashton Heyl (*14), Gabe Levey (*14), Michelle McGregor (*14), Mickey Theis (*14), Mitchell Winter (*14).

Wills and company have selected the plays carefully for their “Summer of Giants.” The plays represent a variety of eras, places, and countries of origin. Conceived as a “journey in time,” the roster of plays reads like a syllabus for a mini-survey of theater. The program begins in 17th-century France, moves to 19th-century Sweden, then to Spanish folktales turned into a comedy first published in 1930, then to an American play from 1969, set in Tokyo, Japan, and finally to two British one acts from 1987 and 2006, respectively.

Opening with Tartuffe, one of the greatest plays by the French master Molière, lives up to the “Giants” title. Wills directs a play that he says offers “a collision of comedy and severity.” Spoken in rhyming couplets but with modern touches—such as a vacuum cleaner—the Cab staging explores the excess of the period as setting for its theme of love vs. hypocrisy, and of youth vs. deluded elders—themes as relevant to our day of puffed-up charlatans in high places as to the highly mannered era of Louis XIV. With the full troupe. May 30 through June 15.

The second play of the summer is a pas de deux of power. Chris Bannow directs August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, a psychological study of passions, a clash between the sexes set amidst class distinctions. Sweden, a bit ahead of the curve in developing some of the freedoms we now take for granted, is the setting for this confrontation with the abyss of identity that can open when the old order is questioned by turn-of-the-century youngsters at the height of the summer festival. Featuring Ceci Fernandez, Mitchell Winter, and Celeste Arias. June 20 through June 29.

Spanish poet and dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca is not best-known for comedies, but Wills sees the hilarious farce The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife as an opportunity for the Summer Cab to lighten up a bit after the heaviness of Strindberg. It’s also a chance to engage with puppetry and the “expressivity of theater,” as a traveling puppeteer visits a town where the local shoemaker has abandoned his teen-aged, unsatisfied wife. Using song, poems, and folk tales, Lorca creates a timeless tale of the struggle of marriage and the vibrancy of small-town life. Wills directs Prema Cruz, Gabe Levey, Ato Blankson-Wood, Mickey Theis, Mamoudou Athie, Michelle McGregor, Ceci Fernandez, and Chris Bannow. July 11 through July 20.

Tennessee Williams is best-known for his explorations of Southern manners in his plays of the Forties and Fifties (such as A Streetcar Named Desire, which will kick-off the Yale Rep season in the fall). In his 1969 play In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, Williams takes on the trends of modern art—notably expressionism, in the role of Mark, an expat in Japan who is trying to discover new inspiration for his painting. Meanwhile his bored wife is getting predatory with the Japanese barman. Wills sees the play, with its artist figure destroying himself, as autobiographical for Williams. And with its setting of Americans in Japan, the play works within the post-war relations of the formerly adversarial nations. Bannow directs Celeste Arias, Mickey Theis, Mamoudou Athie, and Mitchell Winter. July 25 through August 3.

Caryl Churchill is one of the undisputed masters of the last thirty years of theater and her two short plays, Heart’s Desire and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You combine to showcase what Wills calls “the absolute breakdown of language.” That includes the polite language of everyday speech, as a mother and father, in Heart’s Desire, await the return of their daughter, only to find, as the play repeats and restarts, that anxieties can surface in different ways; and in Drunk, the dialogue of two men becomes a reflection on the tensions between England and the U.S. in a play that dates from the era of Tony Blair and "W." Wills directs Chris Bannow, Ceci Fernandez, Michelle McGregor, Mamoudou Athie, Prema Cruz, Mitchell Winter, Ato Blankson-Wood and Celeste Arias in Heart’s Desire, and Ato Blankson-Wood and Mitchell Winter in Drunk. August 8 through August 18.

Such demanding and challenging plays might require some “down time,” and so the Summer Cab will also host Friday Late Nights. With free admission from 10:30 p.m. to 2 a.m., the Cab’s bar will remain open and special late night events will be taking place—such as dance parties, karaoke, Tom Waits imitators, and a Boy Band sing-along. Which means the Cab, in addition to bringing us great plays by great authors with a young and adventuresome cast and artistic staff, will also be poised to be one of the best late-night hang-outs Fridays during the dog days.

See you at the Cab!

The Yale Summer Cab presents Summer of Giants Dustin Wills, Artistic Director Chris Bannow, Associate Artistic Director Molly Henninghausen, Managing Director Anh Le, Associate Managing Director

May 30 through August 18, 2013

for more information, schedules, and tickets/season passes:

www.summercabaret.org

Yale Cab Recap

The 45th Season of the Yale Cabaret closed last month, and before this month is out the latest version of the Yale Summer Cabaret—titled “A Summer of Giants”—will open. In the meantime, here is my recap of last season, picking my favorite shows and contributors in thirteen categories. In each, plays are listed in order of appearance, except for my top choice which comes last. Play (pre-existing work): Small casts—often only two actors—dominated the choices the Cab presented this year: White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, Nassim Soleimanpour’s interrogation of freedom, artistic purpose, and the value of theater was one of the more challenging nights at the Cab; Cowboy Mouth, Sam Shepard and Patti Smith’s riff on the agonistic love affair with rock’n’roll of two second-generation beat poets boasted great language and expressive movement; The Small Things, Enda Walsh’s speech-driven and static two-character play made almost all its bizarre and frightening action take place in the audience’s minds; Arnold Schoenberg and Alberg Giraud’s musical and poetic extravaganza, Pierrot Lunaire, was a feast for both eyes and ears, a dramatic achievement of the religion of art; and . . . The Island, Athol Fugard’s collaborative play with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, combined the intimate talk of two inmates in South Africa with their chosen roles as Antigone and Creon to create a powerful portrayal of the politics of art under repressive regimes.

Play (original): The plays originating with YSD students ran quite a gamut, the ones I liked best provoked visceral responses hard to ignore: Ain’t Gonna Make It, conceived by Nicholas Hussong, Cole Lewis, Masha Tsimring, Lauren Dubowski, and created by the Ensemble, presented entertaining songs and a stand-up routine about terminal illness early in life; Phillip Howze’s All of What You Love and None of What You Hate is a multi-character drama about teen pregnancy and coping, full of vibrant language and characterizations; Jackson Moran’s All This Noise offered one man’s take on a family tragedy and his personal outrage at mental health treatment in our country; The Bird Bath, created by the Ensemble, was an expressive and harrowing account of an artist’s mental dissolution told via expressive movement and voice-overs; and . . . This., script by Mary Laws, dramatized personal memories about moments of connection and disconnection in the New Haven and Yale communities to telling effect.

Sound: Sound can be a subtle category, sometimes a bit difficult to assess after the fact, and, when most effective, one tends not to notice it; my choices represent strong impressions that stayed with me: the busy soundscape of The Fatal Eggs (Matt Otto and Joel Abbott); the brash echoes on the voices of the poets in Cowboy Mouth (Palmer Hefferan); the aural mosaic of voice-overs, music, cell calls, and sound effects in All of What You Love and None of What You Hate (Pornchanok Kanchanabanca and Sang Ahm); the sound effects, voice-overs, use of music, all with a dated feel in Lindbergh’s Flight (Tyler Kieffer); and . . . the very effective interplay of sound, voice-over, and original music in The Bird Bath (Palmer Hefferan).

Music: Cab 45 was strong in shows involving original compositions, and for use of music as a major ingredient of the show: the songs of life, death, disease and defiance created and performed by the on-stage ensemble—Timothy Hassler, Hansol Jung, MJ Kaufman, Sarah Krasnow, Jenny Schmidt, and Lico Whitfield—in Ain’t Gonna Make It; the music created by Mickey Theis to accompany his character’s rock star posteuring in Cowboy Mouth; the tunefully Terpsichorean offerings—both in writing and playing—by Timothy Hassler and Paul Lieber in Cat Club; the moods of Palmer Hefferan’s original score for The Bird Bath; and . . . the first-rate performance of Schoenberg’s challenging score for Pierrot Lunaire, by Dan Schlosberg, piano; Clare Monfredo, cello; Jacob Ashworth, violin and viola; Ginevra Petrucci, flute and piccolo; Ashley Smith, clarinet and bass clarinet; and Virginia Warnken, soprano.

Lighting: To enjoy a play, you have to be able to see it, of course—but often Lighting goes well beyond mere illumination to become an expressive part of the play; some instances I was particularly struck by: Meredith Reis’s diverse sources of illumination and fun lighting effects in The Fatal Eggs; Oliver Wason’s dramatic lighting of tableaux moments in This.; Masha Tsimring’s evocative illuminations of the tripartite action of The Bird Bath; Joey Moro’s nimble lighting of the wacky subversions of Lindbergh’s Flight; and . . . Oliver Wason’s highly effective visual enhancement of Pierrot Lunaire.

Puppets, projections, props, and special effects: More than a few shows this year indulged in puppetry—shadow puppets and actual puppets—as well as a fair share of projections, videos, and engagement with unusual props; here are some stand-outs: the use of projections and props in All This Noise, Nicholas Hussong, projection designer; the shadow puppet miniatures that illustrated the story of Ermyntrude & Esmeralda, Lee O’Reilly, Technical Director; Joey Moro, Assistant Technical Director; Carmen Martinez, Puppetry Captain; the playful use of shadow puppets to tell one of the wild stories written by the twins in The Twins Would Like to Say, Whitney Dibo and Lauren Dubowski, Co-Directors; the projections and special effects that punctuated the lurid tale of The Ugly One, Nicholas Hussong, Projection Designer, Alex Bergeron, Technical Director; and . . . the evocative projections (Solomon Weisbard and Michael F. Bergmann) and flying puppets (Dustin Wills, with Nicole Bromley and Dan Perez, Technical Directors) that enlivened The Fatal Eggs.

Scenic Design: One of the great joys of the Cab is seeing how, with each new production, the space changes to be made to be what it has to be; some remarkable transformations include: the busy set and shenanigans, like swinging doors, in The Fatal Eggs (Kate Noll and Carmen Martinez); the sprawling Chelsea bohemia of Cowboy Mouth (Meredith Ries); the cartoonish play space of Milk Milk Lemonade (Brian Dudkiewicz, and Samantha Lazar, Assistant Set Designer); the three spaces with three different personalities of The Bird Bath (Mariana Sanchez Hernandez); and . . . the conceptualized prison commissary space with raised stage of The Island (Kristen Robinson).

Costumes: When it comes to transforming a group of actors, the effects are sometimes subtle, sometimes outlandish: the colorful clothing—where the shetl meets vaudeville—of The Fatal Eggs (Nikki Delhomme); the spot-on pre-punkdom, plus lobster suit, of Cowboy Mouth (Jayoung Yoon); the Edwardian filigree of Ermyntrude & Esmeralda (Seth Bodie); the dowdy get-ups and clownish make-up of The Small Things (Nikki Delhomme); and . . . Milk Milk Lemonade (Soule Golden): I’ll never forget Lico in a chicken suit, and whenever penis-pajamas catch on, say you saw them here first.

Ensemble: Just as technical effects are often achieved by collaboration, so are dramatic effects—the Cab thrives on ensemble work and here are some special commendations: the entire cast of The Fatal Eggs—Chris Bannow, Sophie von Haselberg, Dan O’Brien, Ceci Fernandez, Michelle McGregor, Mamoudou Athie, Ilya Khodosh—presenting a bizarre collection of types; the entire cast of This.—Jabari Brisport, Merlin Huff, Ella Monte-Brown, Mariko Nakasone, Hannah Sorenson, Mickey Theis—for superlative interactions and transformations, independent of gender considerations; the entire cast of Milk Milk Lemonade—Xaq Webb, Bonnie Antosh, Melissa Zimmerman, Lico Whitfield, Heidi Liedke—some of whom aren’t YSD students, for their game enactment of this colorful tale; our avatars and others in the audience-participation odyssey, Dilemma—Ben Fainstein, Hugh Farrell, Sarah Krasnow, Rachel Carpman, Zach LeClair, and Dan Perez—for taking us where we told them to go; and . . . Zie Kollektief—Kate Attwell, Gabe Levey, Brenda Meaney, Mitchell Winter—who broke down the Brechtian effort to break down “the walls,” with a vengeance, in Lindbergh’s Flight.

And special mention to the volunteers who bravely enacted, with audience members, White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, script sight-unseen: Sara Holdren, Monique Barbee, John-Michael Marrs, Hugh Farrell, Gabriel Levey, Brian Smallwood.

Actor: We’re always looking for a star, even in the midst of ensemble; for notable individual performances by a male actor: Timothy Hassler, as the terminally ill and memorably entertaining Eric in Ain’t Gonna Make It; Mickey Theis, as Slim, the guitar-wielding shit-kicker turned rocker in Cowboy Mouth; Paul Pryce, as John, the apartheid inmate with a vision of Antigone in The Island; Christopher Geary, as the self-questioning survivor in The Small Things; and . . . Jackson Moran, in All This Noise, for playing, more or less, himself in a one-man show that confronts the drama, sorrow and joys of real life and the realities of mental problems.

Actress: What moves us most in watching acting varies, but we know when an actress makes a part her own: Michelle McGregor, as the poet-groupie-Svengali called Canavale in Cowboy Mouth; Zenzi Willliams, as the teen, passive to the point of persecution in All of What You Love and None of What You Hate; Ceci Fernandez, as the innocent but pining for knowledge Esmeralda in Ermyntrude & Esmeralda; Emily Reilly, as the lonely woman with a tale to tell in The Small Things; and . . . Hannah Sorenson, as the schizophrenic Lenora Carrington—vomiting, bathing, withdrawing, and transcending—in The Bird Bath.

Direction: With so much going on that’s worth watching, who keeps it all together and makes sure it all comes off? The director, we assume; some special mentions: Dustin Wills, for the zany Soviet sci-fi extravaganza of The Fatal Eggs; Kate Attwell, for the gripping anti-apartheid drama of two prisoners learning what they represent in The Island; Monique Barbee, for the three-at-once manifestation of psychic distress and coping in The Bird Bath; Ethan Heard, for the creation of actions to illuminate rich compositions of poetry and music in Pierrot Lunaire; and . . . Margot Bordelon, for the subtle and sensitive enacting of the stories people tell (and don’t tell) about themselves in This.

Production: For overall production, it's no surprise that the favorites in other categories line up at the end; I've already acknowledged the directors of these shows, now it's time for the producers: This., produced by Whitney Dibo, with its strong ensemble work and vivid presentation, gave us insight into one another and ourselves; The Island, produced by Lico Whitfield, with its strong dialogue and innovative set, presented us with a visceral sense of theater’s power; The Bird Bath, produced by Emika Abe, with its mystery and misery, provided a sense of convulsive beauty (a surrealist mantra); Pierrot Lunaire, produced by Anh Le, showed us the sublime possibilities of musical theater; and . . . The Fatal Eggs, produced by Melissa Zimmerman, immersed us in the wild energy, complex staging, and surprise effects possible only at the Yale Cabaret.

That’s it for this year. Our thanks and best wishes to all who participated in the shows of the 45th season, and to all the staff, especially Artistic Director Ethan Heard, who chose the season, and Managing Director Jonathan Wemette, who kept it running so smoothly, and . . . see you next year for season 46: Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, and Kelly Kerwin, a trio of YSD dramaturgs will be, collectively, the Artistic Directors, and Shane D. Hudson will be the Managing Director, a post he filled in last year’s Summer Cabaret. Speaking of the Summer Cabaret, stay tuned for a preview with Artistic Director Dustin Wills of its offerings, which begin May 30th and end August 18th.

The Yale Cabaret 45th Anniversary Season Artistic Director: Ethan Heard Managing Director: Jonathan Wemette Associate Artistic Director: Benjamin Fainstein Associate Artistic Director: Nicholas Hussong

Clybourne Park This Week

When Bruce Norris’ Tony-winning Best Play of 2012 Clybourne Park begins its run at the Long Wharf Theatre this week, the play’s relation to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun won’t only be a matter of the script. LeRoy McClain, who plays the part of Albert in Part One, set in 1959, and the part of Kevin in Part Two, set in 2009, joined the production immediately after playing Walter Lee Younger, the lead character in Hansberry’s beloved play. In Raisin, Walter Lee manages to all but destroy his family’s effort to buy a house in Clybourne Park, a formerly all-white neighborhood in Chicago. Clybourne Park begins with a couple, Bev and Russ, who are trying to sell their home, only to learn that a black family, who turn out to be the Youngers, has made an offer.

McClain, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, was last seen on-stage locally as Boy Willie in the Yale Repertory Theatre production of The Piano Lesson in 2011. There he was quite likeable as the feckless charmer who wants to sell the family’s heirloom piano. McClain thus has background with roles that focus attention on the weight of the past and on the hopes for the future in African-American experience. A focus Norris’ play very much participates in, giving McClain the opportunity to move from the passion of Walter Lee, whose every feeling is made manifest, to roles in Clybourne Park more detached, though very much centered on the same themes.

In Part One of Clybourne Park, McClain plays the relatively minor, though important role, of Albert, husband of Francine, housekeeper for Bev and Russ. Albert’s presence, as McClain points out, is telling for what Norris does in the play: letting us experience the outlook of 1959 on such things as racial and marital relations before jumping much closer to the present. Albert acts a certain role around white people, and the audience can tell, from his reactions, his discomfort with such social facades. McClain notes that, as an actor, no matter how restrictive the part of Albert might seem, he knows he “gets to have his say” in Part Two.

In Raisin, a man named Karl Lindner, a representative of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association, tries to dissuade the Youngers from moving into the neighborhood. In Norris’ play, in 1959, Lindner is a neighbor of Bev and Russ, and he tries to dissuade them from selling. In 2009, the lawyer handling the effort by a white couple to buy a home in the black neighborhood that Clybourne Park has become is Lindner’s daughter. As Kevin, McClain plays the current representative of the CPIA who argues housing codes with a white couple trying to buy a house in Clybourne Park.

One aspect of Clybourne Park that McClain was very aware of, coming to the production fresh from Raisin, is Norris’ ability to give the audience the “earnest realism” of Hansberry’s characters, as we know them in 1959, without treating them to outright parody. Norris lets us inhabit the period, which is important for the contrast with Part Two, which McClain likens to the terse, overlapping dialogue of someone like David Mamet. The difference in pacing between Part One and Part Two, McClain says, “is like using a different set of muscles. As an actor, you get a thorough workout.”

The play, with its treatment of racial issues in both mid-twentieth century and early twenty-first, offers something of a workout for the audience too, and McClain feels the show is an excellent choice for New Haven, where neighborhoods tend not to be integrated even now. The play, in looking at the changed status of Clybourne Park shows that, while the owners may change, the fact of segregated neighborhoods remains. It’s important to the success of the production, McClain feels, that the audience “be aware of a certain irony” present in both parts of the play. McClain is very impressed with director Eric Ting’s ability to capture such nuances, in fact Ting’s participation was a determining factor in McClain taking the role, as he very much wanted to work with Long Wharf’s Associate Artistic Director.

When I spoke to McClain the cast had been in rehearsals for about three weeks and he spoke of the sense of “absolute collaboration” that was present from the start. The cast “all click and get along, hanging out together at Sullivan’s, spending time together, which is not an everyday thing with actors.” The camaraderie of the ensemble is crucial, McClain says, because of the subtlety of the play and because the actors who dominate Part One are different from the actors who dominate Part Two. The different styles and the different setting make for transformations that everyone must be comfortable with.

In early rehearsals, Ting and his cast would vary the order, sometimes rehearsing Part Two before Part One. The two parts of the play speak different languages, and the cast, McClain feels, are very much alive to the uncomfortable humor of Part One and the more direct verbal humor in Part Two. McClain thinks of the play as a “dramedy”—presenting “prickly themes” in a manner that is “subversive, funny, and passionate.”

Previews of Clybourne Park begin on May 8; Opening Night is May 15.

Clybourne Park By Bruce Norris Directed by Eric Ting

The Long Wharf Theatre May 8-June 2, 2013

Femme Fatale

Seeing the names Robert Woodruff and Rainer Werner Fassbinder associated with In a Year with 13 Moons, now playing at the Yale Repertory Theatre, the audience can assume one thing at once: the play will not be an evening of light entertainment. Woodruff has a penchant for staging difficult works, the kind of plays that seem to bask in a pervasive unease. Fassbinder, for his brief span in the Seventies to early Eighties, was the enfant terrible of New German Cinema, was, in fact, its driving force, creating films with certain obsessive themes of urban loneliness, abuse—often with sadomasochistic flair—and romance, all delivered with a love of both melodrama and the demimonde. Fassbinder was also a complex, driven, productive genius with intense relations with both men and women. One of his more long-term lovers, a transexual named Armin Meier, committed suicide after Fassbinder broke with her. Fassbinder’s film In a Year of 13 Moons visits the last days of a character, Elvira, based on Meier; the play, adapted by Woodruff and his star Bill Camp, and translated by Louisa Proske, is not sparing of the mess that Elvira, who began life as Erwin Weishaupt, has made of her life, but is told, tellingly, from her perspective. She is our sympathetic guide to the world Woodruff and his amazing technical team have created.

The glory of this production—whatever one makes of the story—is in its presentation. What Woodruff does in this staging is nothing short of remarkable, fascinating, and gripping. 13 Moons goes beyond Autumn Sonata (Woodruff's adaptation of an Ingmar Bergman film two years ago at the Rep) in the sense that here we have a dialogue—an agon—with cinema that theater may be winning. Which is to say that, in much the same way that one goes to a Fassbinder film to see Fassbinder as much as any particular story, one watches this play to see “what Woodruff does.”

If you know the film, you might wonder how Sister Gudrun’s long monologue, recounting Elvira’s early life, as Erwin, will be staged. In other words, how will the stage suggest a lengthy tracking-shot of a figure walking through the entire grounds of the orphanage Erwin was sent to as a boy? The answer: brilliantly. The logistics of this and many other “multiple set” and “multiple frame” problems are solved with use of cameras and projections (Peter Nigrini) and with a complex scenic design (David Zinn).

The play isn’t set in our present, but it also doesn’t make much effort to be set in 1978; nor is it particularly Germanic in the way that Fassbinder always is, even when he works in English. The play inhabits a time that we might consider a kind of fallen post-World War II world: it’s a defeated world, in many ways, full of the half-lives that have always given the demimonde (of any era) its unique panache and pessimism. The colors of this world—beginning with the set’s mustard yellow walls—are unsettling, though also, at times, reassuringly beautiful. The lighting (Jennifer Tipton and Yi Zhao) and the sound/music (Michaël Attais) of the production are as important as anything in creating this world and our reactions to it. And costuming (David Zinn) is so key it acts like those oddly compelling details one encounters in dreams—exactly right in ways we can’t quite fathom. Like a Martin and Lewis routine that both Fassbinder and Woodruff give to Elvira’s former lover Anton Saitz (I hoped I spelled that right), the choicest bits in this tale are the things we can’t quite explain.

So: why Jerry Lewis, why Sister Gudrun, why the suicidal stranger who babbles Schopenhauer, and who proffers, quite politely, a corkscrew? Why a bedtime story about a brother and sister become a mushroom and a snail; why is Saitz's “A1 password” Bergen-Belsen? If God is in the details, so is the devil; with Saitz we presume a Nazi background, and Martin and Lewis—isn't that just another term for sadomasochism? (Some details, such as the orphanage and the slaughterhouse, come from Meier’s life-story; much of the rest might too. But using life to explain art is generally a weak move.)

At the heart of all this razzle-dazzle staging is Bill Camp. Miked so that we catch the catch in his voice at every turn, Camp’s Elvira is deeply human and really suffering, and offers none of the stock versions of the transexual we may have encountered elsewhere. The preening Queen, the sinister “half-and-half,” the campy ruined beauty, the evil-because-unreal seductress, the pathetic wanna-be—the echoes of such roles ricochet around the edges of Elvira’s persona, but one of the great strengths of Fassbinder as our Vergil to Elvira’s Dante is that he knows this world intimately and does not pass judgment from any “normative” position. While it is true that Erwin, in becoming Elvira, creates a “No Exit” situation from which there is no return, that, we may say, is simply an existential fact, not primarily an “I told you so” delivered preemptorily at a change in sexual identity.  Camp and Woodruff let us grasp the simplicity of this “stagger'd spirit.”

The surprise of her wife and child when Elvira tries again to be Erwin late in the play says it all: Elvira is who she is; Erwin is who she was. The twain don’t really meet because Elvira can't return to Erwin. When she confronts Saitz, Saitz has to take a long moment (and a dance routine) before he can remember either Erwin or Elvira. Who we were is simply not available to any of us.

Camp’s performance is worth being there for. It’s not likely to be forgotten. The other characters tend toward the flattened affect of costumes passing for people: Red Zora (Monica Santana), a topless Tinkerbell in high red boots; a cackling cleaning lady (Joan MacIntosh); Soul-Frieda (Jesse J. Perez), a crazy monologuist whose rap is vintage Seventies (I liked him until he started laughing/crying); Saitz (Christopher Innvar), a tennis-suit-wearing magnate who reminded me of Elliot Gould; Irene (Jacqueline Kim), the oddly prim wife with winsome, Kafka-reading daughter (Mariko Nakasone); the exhausting Sister Gudrun (MacIntosh); mean gays who brutalize Elvira in the violent opening scene; the abusive lover, Christoph (Babs Olusanmokun), who rails and beats and leaves… All of these people are little more than “suggestive of” the life that Elvira leads, but we shouldn’t forget that this is all from her point of view and they are who they are in her head. Except, perhaps, the suicidal stranger (Mickey Solis) who, for that reason, engages her in the play’s best verbal exchange—as first meetings so often are.

The final tableaux-in-motion, in which the main cast, Fellini-fashion, calls upon Elvira’s apartment while she addresses us on both stage and screen is incredible, comical, exhilarating, heartbreaking, tedious and momentous, all at once. And so is In a Year with 13 Moons.

In a Year with 13 Moons Film and Screenplay by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Adapted for the stage by Bill Camp and Robert Woodruff Directed by Robert Woodruff Based on a literal translation by Louisa Proske

Choregrapher: David Neumann; Scenic and Costume Designer: David Zinn; Lighting Designers: Jennifer Tipton and Yi Zhao; Sound Designer and Composer: Michaël Attias; Projection Designer: Peter Nigrini; Vocal Coach: Walton Wilson; Production Dramaturgs: Jessica Rizzo; Catherine Sheehy; Casting Director: Tara Rubin; Stage Manager: Alyssa K. Howard

Photos © Richard Termine; used by permission of Yale Repertory Theatre

Yale Repertory Theatre April 27-May 18, 2013

Upcoming Carlotta Festival

Every year the graduating playwrights of the Yale School of Drama each have a final play produced, much as the graduating directors offer their thesis shows throughout the year.  For the playwrights, the occasion is called the Carlotta Festival of New Plays and it runs for two weeks in May, beginning a week from today.  Each play is directed by a graduating director and features, for the most part, first year acting students.

This year the line-up consists of Amelia Roper’s Lottie in the Late Afternoon, directed by Ethan Heard; Justin Taylor’s House Beast, directed by Jack Tamburri; MJ Kaufman’s Sagittarius Ponderosa, directed by Margot Bordelon.

Amelia Roper, a playwright from Australia, says she likes fiction of the modernist era and has devised a comedy that harkens to the comedies of manners of that period.  In Lottie in the Late Afternoon, the laughs derive from Lottie’s effort to create an ideal vacation for herself and her friends—a plan that goes awry, leading to tense and awkward situations that viewers may find hitting close to home.  In particular, Lottie is a play concentrating on a certain demographic now reaching their late thirties and coming to terms with the status of their relationships, their ambitions, and their pasts.

Taking place in the present during a weekend in the off season at a New England beach house, Roper’s play lets us into the intimate dynamics among a couple—Lottie and her husband Aaron—and two of Lottie’s best friends: Anne (married, but with a husband who chose not to come away for the weekend), and Clara, who has some history with Anne.  Roper says that in some ways the play is “all about the meals,” as the foursome have to sort out the usual tasks and tastes that make for a successful ménage—in the face of the kind of economic instabilities that may well be a defining context for this generation.  Add to that the fact that Lottie has packed a stack of books by the likes of E. M. Forster, Jane Bowles, and Iris Murdoch that purport to be vacation tales, but which help to cast over the proceedings a kind of nostalgia for a past that none of these characters has experienced, though they might like to wish they had.

Roper looks to plays by Will Eno, Sarah Ruhl, and Martin Crimp for inspiration, and sees in comedies such as hers a risk in registering “existential angst” as an aspect of otherwise vital friendships.  The drama in such situations is not found in major conflict, but in the characters’ struggles to get across feelings and insights amidst the disappointments of not connecting.  In other words, the play is as real as your next small social gathering—and maybe as desperate—but bound to be funnier.

Justin Taylor describes his play House Beast as a “comedy when trauma is possible.”  Fair enough, given that the play opens with a prologue set in 1992, during the early teens of two of the three characters—Chris and Matt—as they try to make a DIY horror film in an abandoned house in a fictional Californian suburb called Pleasant Valley.  Unexpectedly on the scene as well is Matt’s older brother Terry, as a wild afternoon ensues involving some creepy occurrences, a flying goat—and something dramatic between Terry and Chris that ends badly.

Skip ahead twenty years and we find Matt and Chris hooking up—or almost—via the “grinder app” that helps gays get together.  In the interim, Matt has moved to LA to be a Hollywood type (or so he hopes), Chris has led a peripatetic life with Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms, and Terry, a married man with two daughters, is a well-liked firefighter with a closeted secret life.  House Beast looks at how past shame and trauma can haunt the present. We enter the dynamics of a triangle where the two possible love objects for Chris are brothers—and he has baggage with both.  The characters are amusing—with the two brothers playing to type and Chris something of a grandiose progressive idealist—though things can get ugly.

Taylor cites Caryl Churchill as a master of the dark comedy he aims for, and says the romantic aspects of the play engage with the timely question of whether happiness is sustainable.  His characters would all like to find a means to change the outcome of their pasts together.  Taylor gives the characters enough room in which to grow and enough rope with which to hang themselves.      

For MJ Kaufman in Sagittarius Ponderosa, the only thing that’s really sustainable is what he calls “the landscape of constant change.”  Set in central Oregon, Kaufman’s native state, in a landscape dominated by Ponderosa pines, the play depicts three generations of a family coming to grips with various kinds of transformation in the dark time of the year ruled by Sagittarius—late November.

For Archer, there are the changes that come with turning thirty on top of a gender transformation his family hasn’t quite accepted; for Archer’s dad, hitting sixty and terminally ill from diabetes, there’s that most permanent of transformations—from life into death; and for Archer’s grandmother, in her 80s, there is the possibility of a late-in-life love, though it’s Archer (Angela, to her) she’s trying to make a match for.  Landscape in the play is not only emotional and familial, it also partakes of the concerns of Oregon where research into controlled burning, as a technique of combating forest fires, brings a researcher named Owen into the family circle and gives resonance to the play’s location.

The play travels a year from Thanksgiving to Thanksgiving, allowing us to see change and development in the characters over time.  The naturalism of the play accommodates devices such as a love potion Grandmother wields, and a ghostly visitation from Archer’s late father as he merges with Peterson, a neighbor in the form of a puppet.  Kaufman’s play began as an assignment from Sarah Ruhl that encouraged him to work with Ovidian metamorphosis.  The work has allowed Kaufman to engage with the kind of archetypal naturalism found in Thornton Wilder, a favorite playwright of his, handling major themes of love and death and identity with a light touch.

Each playwright feels blessed by the director each is working with.  For Roper, Ethan Heard’s sensitivity to characters is perfect for her comedy of relationships; Taylor finds Jack Tamburri’s gutsy energy particularly helpful in creating the exaggerated memory of adolescence the prologue aims for; and Kaufman was inspired by the personal urgency and great visual sense Margot Bordelon has brought to the staging of his play.  All three pairings seem matches made in heaven and we can expect a trio of brave, thoughtful and entertaining plays at this year’s Carlotta Festival.

The Carlotta Festival of New Plays

The Yale School of Drama

May 6-14, 2013

1156 Chapel Street, New Haven

Whose Face Is It, Anyway?

Marius von Mayenburg’s The Ugly One, directed by Cole Lewis, at Yale Cabaret is an absurdist parable, satiric about the cult of beauty that, in one way or another, has always plagued the human species.  Maybe “plagued” isn’t the word; maybe it’s more like “nagged.”  The play, I suppose, wants us to ask ourselves how big a part appearance plays in our estimations of ourselves and others.  Is identity only skin deep?  And how deep is that question?

The best thing here is the cast who are game for the alterations in character they must enact.  Everyone gets two roles except for Mitchell Winter as the main character, Lette, who transforms from an appallingly  ugly inventor of a necessary little gadget to the flawlessly attractive spokesperson for the company that makes the gadget.  We also meet his wife Fanny (Michelle McGregor), who dutifully managed to overlook her husband’s unsightliness; McGregor also plays an aging (though surgically enhanced) groupie who lusts, with avid Germanic creepiness, for Lette post-surgery.  Then there’s Dan O’Brien as Karlmann, initially a better-looking assistant at the company who gets passed-over once Lette looks good; O’Brien is also the creepy German woman’s even creepier son, who also has desires for Lette, and for his mom, and, potentially, just about anyone.  Jabari Brisport rounds out the cast as Scheffler, the unflappable, moisturzing boss at the company and the rather campy surgeon who undertakes the momentous task of altering Lette’s features.  The operation is such a success that the good doctor undertakes the manufacture of the same face for dozens of others who want to look that good.  Soon Karlmann is sporting the same face as Lette, and if identity is only skin deep, why wouldn’t Fanny be just as happy with Karlmann?

If that strikes you as not a particularly compelling question, then you might be less than entertained by The Ugly One through its entire running time.  Which is to say, as farce, it's lively enough, but it’s hard to see the play as anything more than an extended skit.  Maybe the dialogue is better in von Mayenburg’s native German.  As translated by Maja Zade into English, no one says anything very interesting and von Mayenburg’s idea of pointed humor is to have the mom impale her son on a strap-on phallus as he lavishes affection on Lette.  The extended operation sequence, with shadow puppets, like Lette’s suicidal argument between his before-and-after selves in an elevator rushing him to the top of a building, tends to run on longer than is necessary to get the idea across.  But that could be said about much of the hi-jinx here.

One suspects that, in a sense, the actors are too good for the one-dimensional figures they’re asked to play.  McGregor does all she can with both Teutonic vamp and confused wife; O’Brien is aggressively repressed as the son; Brisport’s fawning surgeon put me in mind of Peter Lorre, which spells creepy with a capital C, and Winter keeps the main character in a kind of clueless vacuum.  His best sequence is at the end when he is confronted by the son looking like his own spitting—or rather kissing—image.

As a send-up of our image-conscious society, I’d say von Mayenburg’s satire doesn’t even constitute a flesh wound.

Which is a nice way to segue into a few other announcements.  An evening at the theater is only as good as the play—in my view—and I’m convinced that YSD student playwrights can do better than the last two Cab offerings.  To see if I’m right, get tickets now for the Carlotta festival which runs May 6-14,  and features the final thesis projects of three graduating playwrights: MJ Kaufman, Sagittarius Ponderosa; Amelia Roper, Lottie in the Late Afternoon; Justin Taylor, House Beast (more about the plays soon).

AND… The Yale Summer Cabaret has announced the line-up and schedule of its “Summer of Giants”—which is to say the Cab will be producing plays by great names in the history of theater: Molière, Tartuffe; Strindberg, Miss Julie; Lorca, The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife; Williams, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel; Churchill, Heart's Desire and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You.  With that kind of roster, you can’t go wrong—and seeing how such works come off in the Cab’s intimate space is well worth checking out.  The Artistic Director for the Summer Cabaret is Dustin Wills, who, this past year, brought us the knock-down, fuck-out domestic comic-drama Blueberry Toast (one of the best shows this year, written by YSD playwright Mary Laws), as well as a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland take on Shakespeare’s Richard II.  Expect good things to come.

The Ugly One

By Marius von Mayenburg, translated by Maja Zade

Directed by Cole Lewis

Dramaturg: Sarah Krasnow; Scenic Designer: Reid Thompson; Costume Designer: Soule Golden; Lighting Designer: Benjamin Ehrenreich; Composer: Steve Brush; Sound Designers: Steve Brush; Tyler Kieffer; Projection Designer: Nicholas Hussong; Technical Director: Alex Bergeron; Producer and Stage Manager: Jennifer Lagundino

Yale Cabaret

217 Park Street

April 11-13, 2013

I'm Taking My Sharpie and I'm Drawing a Line: Tessa Hadley and Deborah Eisenberg

Yesterday I had a tiny epiphany when I finally got around to looking at a recent issue of The New Yorker: that after years and years of basically ignoring the fiction in this fine magazine -- to which I have have subscribed religiously since I was 18 years old -- there is, finally, a writer of short stories whose work I actively look for in the table of contents. I can remember the first writer whose work made me pay attention to The New Yorker at all: Deborah Eisenberg. My mother was the person who brought her to my attention. It was the story, “What It Was Like, Seeing Chris.” My mother handed me the magazine one day, after school, and said, “I bet you’d like this.” She was right. The story about Laurel losing her sight, and her weird interactions with this older guy, Chris, who was sort of awful yet kind at the same time, was the most amazing thing I’d read since, I don’t know, the novels of Norma Klein. It was like reading Norma Klein, actually, but more subtle, and compressed, and more realistic, to me. Grittier. I became a huge fan of Deborah Eisenberg’s and when her first collection of stories came out I bought it immediately; I read it so many times the edges of the pages have grown soft.

While I fell in love with other writers after that, and to be honest, fell sort of out of love with Eisenberg’s work (I should just revisit it, though -- I am positive that the fault lies not with her but with me), the fiction in The New Yorker, over time, became something I just had no feeling for. I wish I could put my finger on exactly why. It’s true that my tastes in fiction are extremely limited -- I am the most provincial of readers, only interested in a certain type of writing, set in a certain kind of place -- but it’s also true that the magazine seemed to deliberately become a haven for the exact opposite of what I was looking for. So it was easy for me to glance at the author’s name and dismiss it: Not my kind of thing. I’m not looking to be depressed, or enlightened, or educated, when I read fiction (that’s what non-fiction is for, I guess, is my feeling). The multiculturalism that The New Yorker embraced left me cold -- though I think that, in a larger sense, it was a beneficial shift for the magazine and for readers in general. That it didn’t appeal to me personally wasn’t a problem for me; much of the rest of the magazine still did, after all.

So: All well and good: I was still someone who’d read The New Yorker every week and inevitably think some essay or other was great but completely zip past the fiction.

Until Tessa Hadley.

I remember reading “An Abduction” while sitting at the playground, keeping one eye on my daughter, praying I wouldn’t have to get up and help her so I could finish the story. I finished it and immediately re-read it. I cannot remember the last time I did that.

And yesterday, as I was reading “Valentine,”  it hit me forcefully that what Deborah Eisenberg was doing in the mid-1980s, Tessa Hadley is doing now. And I want to say -- forcefully -- that I do not mean that to sound insulting, or to pooh-pooh what Hadley’s work is about or how it’s done. What I mean is the best possible thing: which is that where Eisenberg left off, or left me off, anyhow, Hadley has picked up, and continued to write about these people with the same kind of eye. There’s a precision about it, capturing the sense of emotional wandering, the “I’m trying to figure this shit out, leave me alone while I figure this shit out, ok?” that every young person has. (Maybe not every young person, but a lot of them, certainly. The ones I liked, anyhow, when I was one of them myself.) Hadley, like Eisenberg, isn’t patronizing toward her young protagonists. She’s not writing pat little stories about teenagers to capture a lost innocence; she’s capturing those precise moments when things are teetering one way or another, and she’s doing it without moralizing -- almost wryly -- and she has a certain economy in her sentences that does so much with so little. The stories about older people, too, have this same quality of precision. To make a fast sloppy comparison: Where T.C. Boyle -- who also often has stories in the magazine -- is an entertaining if pedantic guest at the cocktail party (bombastic and full of pyrotechnics -- the showmanship is completely unavoidable, and it can be fun but it can also be overwhelming), Eisenberg and Hadley are shyer guests. They share this quality, this sense of smart people who’re maybe more shy than is good for them, sitting quietly in the corner, taking notes in shorthand that they expand ever so slightly to build the stories later, after they’ve gotten home from the dreaded cocktail party. And the stories are just as crafted and tight as Boyle’s, but without the baroque flourishes -- more Russel Wright, perhaps, in tone. And it’s easy to overlook Wright, because he’s not gaudy, but the stuff is beautiful nonetheless.

A tiny bit of internet research indicates that both Eisenberg and Hadley are felt to be “unfairly neglected” or underrated writers, and that may be true, but I, for one, esteem them very highly, and the way I once drew lines in my head between the works of one writer to another -- in college, I drew lines from Jane Austen to Edith Wharton to Dorothy Parker, which was very tedious, but that’s college for you -- I am now drawing a big, fat, black line, with a Sharpie, between Deborah Eisenberg and Tessa Hadley. Hadley’s “Valentine” is apparently a portion of a novel she’s planning to publish soon, and let me tell you, I will probably buy that one the moment I see it, in hardcover, just as I did Eisenberg’s Transactions in a Foreign Currency. I cannot wait.

A Tiger by the Tail

I grew up in a household where John F. Kennedy was more or less a sainted martyr, and where Frank Sinatra—when he was with Tommy Dorsey—was looked upon as the soundtrack of my parents’ romantic years.  And where The Godfather was appreciated as a kind of all-American story of every immigrant family’s need to band together in the face of prejudice from the larger community.  My parents weren’t Italian or Irish (ok, a little), but they were Catholic, and so, from the start, I was prepared to be entertained by a play—William Mastrosimone’s Ride the Tiger, now playing at the Long Wharf Theatre, directed by Gordon Edelstein—that brings together JFK, Frankie, and the Mob.  I might also mention that the play begins in the year of my birth. I might also suggest that the play will probably strike a chord even with audiences who don’t have the fond regard for these figures and their era that I inherited—the early, pre-Beatles Sixties got a big spike in popularity after Mad Men debuted, and the romance of the era seems not to have faded quite yet.  Perhaps that’s one of the “tigers” Mastrosimone is intentionally riding.  And you could, y’know, take that more than one way.  As used in the play, the phrase indicates those dangerous pacts we make in order to get somewhere—running the risk of not being able to direct things for long.  This is a play all about deals made and expectations betrayed.  As such, it rides the tiger of a certain romance of America that some of us claim as our birthright.  Can we climb down off that tiger without getting hurt?  And if the tiger we’re riding is our own sense of historical necessity?

The play has much to recommend it: Eugene Lee uses a loose and easily adaptable set that can be the Oval office one minute and a poolside lounge another; there’s a bed to cavort in, a car drives onto the stage, and there are backdrop projections of Vegas, the White House and even a doctored “Mount Rushmore” of presidential portraits (sneaking in “the other Roosevelt,” kinda roguishly).  Jess Goldstein’s costumes are for the most part lounge lizard casual, with Christina Bennett Lind, as Judy (the main female role), boasting the kind of form-fitting dresses that made girdles a necessary evil of the era for many.  The action is episodic—letting us feel like voyeurs, eavesdroppers or bugs able to soak up conversations and encounters that go by terms like “clandestine,” “hush-hush,” “behind the scenes,” and “entre nous.”  The fact that every major character here—except Judy—is (or was) a household name makes it all delicious dirt.

Edelstein trusts the material and lets the talk run the show with little gimmickry.  We’ve got Joe (John Cunningham), very patrician as the Bostonian Irish patriarch trying to launch a political dynasty.  Cunningham is quite adept at registering both the steely convictions of the man as well as the fact that, face it, he’s mostly past his prime.  It’s all riding on second son Jack (Douglas Sills), a war hero and ladies’ man trying hard to do what must be done.  Sills nails some lines with the familiar Kennedy delivery but his character is somewhat underwritten in the early going; he comes off better in the second half where he makes Jack’s rage both frightened and fearsome and lets us see Jack try vainly to be winning via the famed Kennedy wit while being an obvious asshole.

Then there’s Jack’s pal, Frank (Paul Anthony Stewart), the Italian singing sensation from Hoboken who is a key linchpin: he gets Joe cozy with Chicago Cosa Nostra via a political favor involving the Mob’s control of Unions, and he introduces Jack to Judy, the play’s resident femme fatale, who Frankie ditches in a scene Stewart makes redolent of Rat Pack chutzpah.  Things are pretty hunky dory until the main Mob guy, Sam (Jordan Lage), takes a shine to Judy, and, eventually, tires of the high hat he’s handed by Jack and his brother Bobby (aka “the Weasel”) once the White House is gained and favors from unsavory types are best forgotten.  Someone’s cruising for a bruising, and let’s just say no one gets out of this thing unscathed.

The real stunner in this line-up is Lage as Sam: he’s a charming ladies’ man, an unstoppable font of chat, a barrage of little tics and moves, and, when it’s time for the eyes to go icy dead, Lage is your boy.  We’ve all seen (I imagine) this kind of Wise Guy in any number of films about Chicago gangsters, but Lage’s Sam is also very much a creature of this moment: Ol’ Blue Eyes is back, a Catholic boy is gonna be president, and Khrushchev is in for a big surprise.  For Sam, who reads newspapers religiously, the only thing that could make the world sweeter is if Castro would get a fatal calling card.  It’s an entertaining and thrilling portrayal.

Another strength is Lind’s Judy—she harkens to that era when a girl with a head on her shoulders might not get a professional post, but, with enough looks and je ne sais quoi, might manage to position herself in an exciting, and exhausting and, finally, frightening triangle with two extremely powerful and headstrong men.  Judy bounces along from Frank to Jack to Jack and Sam to a paranoid funk, finally losing those can-do “high hopes” so important to an It Girl’s self-esteem.  The best part of the play are the overlaps when Judy goes back and forth between Jack and Sam as the two duel verbally through messages she must deliver.  The late scene of her breakdown seems a bit thin—which is true of her character all along, but you don’t notice so much until she’s given a scene that seems to scream for a revealing statement.  Instead we get revealing nudity.

As a meditation on figures of American romance gazed upon for their history-making status and larger-than-life pretensions—Politicians! Entertainers! Gangsters!—Ride the Tiger mixes up a potent cocktail, though you’ll be stirred more than shaken.  The play is not playing it all for laughs so much as laughing up its sleeve. Mastrosimone cleverly cherry-picks the historical record to slant the action toward its conclusion—which arrives as both a laugh and a shock.  It’s surprising—in its execution—and inevitable in its action, which makes it a satisfying note to end on.  Everyone in this play has a one-way date with destiny and Mastrosimone gets a lot of mileage out of that tiger and this wild ride.

Ride the Tiger By William Mastrosimone Directed by Gordon Edelstein

Set Design: Eugene Lee; Costume Design: Jess Goldstein; Lighting Design: Tyler Micoleau; Original Music and Sound Design: Ryan Rumery; Projection Design: Sven Ortel; Wig Design: Charles Lapointe; Casting: James Calleri, CSA; Production Stage Manager: Lisa Ann Chernoff; Assistant Stage Manager: Amy Patricia Stern

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

Long Wharf Theatre March 27-April 21, 2013

An Elusive Twosome

An extended recreation of a grand folie à deux, The Twins Would Like to Say, by Seth Bockley and Devon de Mayo, at the Yale Cabaret, creates an oddly jangled take on “the silent twins,” June and Jennifer Gibbons, two children who were born in 1963 in Barbados, then, shortly after, moved to Wales with their family. To say the girls never managed to fit in is a gross understatement.  Bullied and taunted, they withdrew into utter silence around anyone but each other, speaking, sister-to-sister, in a language that included mirror-movements and private words. A play about the girls’ ordeal—which eventually develops into an attempt to write and sell fiction, and then, frustrated, to acts of arson—might require a variety of tones, and that seems to be what Bockley and de Mayo’s text, directed by Whitney Dibo and Lauren Dubowski, aims for.  Performed promenade style, the staging invites the audience to move around, choosing individual vantage points on the action.  At some points, more than one scene is playing, but, fortunately, due to the intimate dimensions of the Cab, it’s fairly easy to keep an eye and ear on different things simultaneously.  Except, that is, when a black curtain separates the playing space at the conclusion so that the ending you witness depends on which side you’re on (I ended up with June, the sister who is still alive; Jennifer died, mysteriously, in 1993, at age 30).

The staging keeps things more lively than they might otherwise be (I liked changing my perspective on the action and would like to have that option in more shows), but it also adds a kind of cut-up quality that may or may not be the intention.  In any case, the shifts keep us from the usual comfortable immersion into a story unfolding at one time for us all.  But I have to say I don’t see a great deal of point in the overlapping.  It would make sense if the twins were ever apart, so that the audience would have to follow the experience of one or the other, but in every scene until the conclusion, the twins—played with intense concentration by Chasten Harmon (June) and Sarah Williams (Jennifer)—are inseparable.

The entertainment value of the show is largely a matter of the “shadow twins”—Maura Hooper (June) and Willa Fitzgerald (Jennifer)—who get to act out what the twins keep locked away.  They also enact , as Chloe (Hooper) and Jenny (Fitzgerald), the mean girls of the neighborhood and, joined by Lance (Matt Raich), a local youth friendly to the twins, they also act out the stories the twins write.  Lurid tales such as “Pepsi-Cola Addict” (a tale of teen dysfunction), “The Pugilist” (a sort of horror story told very engagingly with shadow puppets), and “Discomania” (you can imagine), which concludes with a conflagration at a disco—a fate that shortly engulfs the twins’ school.

You might well ask what’s it all leading to.  If we’re meant to see the twins as misunderstood geniuses their fictions suggest otherwise.  If as victims of social stratification, the play suggests that at least some of the Welsh locals try to accept them—Lance is sympathetic, though he has to break off due to unrealistic fantasies from June, and the psychiatrist (Emily Zemba), while offering only silly activities, seems well-meaning.  The twins’ parents (Sheria Irving and Leonard Thomas) simply smile bravely (the mom) or scowl threateningly (the dad) and seem otherwise clueless.  Mr. Nobody (Ilya Khodosh), our master of ceremonies, is great at set-ups, but not much at transitions.

What it leads to, not quite grippingly, is death as a final separation and the odd feeling of a play whose heroines are an oddly silent, unknowable center.  Along the way there are laughs and spirited vignettes, and Brian Dudkiewicz’s set is a lot of fun to move around in, providing key spaces and also good flow, but the play only lets us hear the twins’ voices in a few passages from their journals where they sound like any other glibly self-centered and judgmental teens.  In the end, there seems not much The Twins Would Like to Say has to say.

The Twins Would Like to Say By Seth Bockley and Devon de Mayo Directed by Whitney Dibo and Lauren Dubowski

Dramaturg: Kelly Kerwin; Set Designer: Brian Dudkiewicz; Assistant Set Designer: Samantha Lazar; Costume Designer: Steven M. Rotramel; Lighting Designer: Christopher Ash; Sound Designer: Sam Ferguson; Stage Manager: Molly Hennighausen; Producer: Katie Liberman

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street April 4-6, 2013

Moony Tunes

“Verses are holy crosses / On which poets silently bleed to death.” The Yale Cabaret’s intense and effective production of Pierrot Lunaire—music by Arnold Schoenberg, poems by Alberg Giraud—combines a small chamber combo (Dan Schlosberg, piano; Clare Monfredo, cello; Jacob Ashworth, violin and viola; Ginevra Petrucci, flute and piccolo; Ashley Smith, clarinet and bass clarinet), a soprano (Virginia Warnken) and an actor (James Cusati-Moyer) in the role of Pierrot.  The show, directed by Ethan Heard with an admirable sense of the work’s theatrical dimensions, also used, atmospherically, handwritten titles projected on the walls to give us an aphoristic précis for each new segment.

While there is a narrative arc, of sorts, that leads through the three parts—seven sections each—the sections at times have a snapshot or tableau-like intensity, illustrating a certain moment in the rather symbolic and emotionally fraught life of the quintessential sad clown.  As Pierrot, Cusati-Moyer is phenomenal.  The part requires great resources in mime and movement and in the kinds of body language and facial clues that made for stars of the silent screen.  Cusati-Moyer has all the nuances firmly in hand.

Though antic, this Pierrot is not comic, exactly, nor is he ever campy.  And that alone is worthwhile.  While we should find something familiar in the figure of Pierrot, it’s important that his deep responses to things estrange us from him even as it invites us.  But then that’s exactly what Schoenberg’s music does as well.  In its refusal to use any easy, romantic flights to play upon our emotions, the score of Opus 21 is daunting and demanding, and I’m very grateful to have had the opportunity to hear this music played with such dispatch.  Even more so when the musicians playing it wear half-masks and costumes that make them seem vaguely threatening escapees from a German music conservatory.  The mood of the piece is very much of a modernist Fasching party.

The lighting throughout the show is muted, moody, illuminating only what is necessary.  Pierrot often moves in a spotlight, as does the impressive Warnken.  Her interactions with Pierrot are intense: sometimes chiding him, or bedeviling him with “flecks” of moonlight, or playing a maternal figure, both stoic and longing—her sobbing singing at the end of the segment called “Madonna” is quite expressive.  The musicians get into the act at times as well—I particularly liked Clare Monfredo standing upon a box to create a rain of rose petals for “Columbine.”

I saw the show twice: the first time, Thursday night, in a seat better situated for the tableau-like effects of placement and staging—such as watching Pierrot, a dandy, powder his face and examine each feature in a handheld mirror; on Friday night, I was seated nearer Warnken’s section of the playing area, so I could catch the words more clearly and was perfectly placed, it seemed to me, to hear the interplay of the instruments.  Consequently, I paid less attention to the action.  I don’t mean to say the show demanded an “either/or” attention, but rather that it offered much to both sound and sight, in a spirit that seems to me true to the melancholy and oddity, the glimmerings of joy and sorrow of this richly conceived opus.

Given the highly wrought tension between the score and the action, Pierrot Lunaire is the kind of production that creates rather different responses in different viewers.  Poetic logic more than narrative logic abides, and to that end Giraud draws upon a repertoire of recognizable conceits—being “moondrunk” or “homesick”—and figures, such as Columbine, the Madonna, the Dandy.  Favorite segments for me were "Night," an almost surreal and discordant segment, and "Serenade," featuring very evocative cello.  Elsewhere there are the kind of sacrificial gestures that befit a paschal figure—so much so that staging this work on Easter weekend amounts to a religious solemnity, for those in the “religion of art” camp, that is.  And this is high art indeed.

Pierrot Lunaire Music by Arnold Schoenberg Poems by Albert Giraud; Translation by Otto Erich Hartleben Directed by Ethan Heard

Dramaturg: Rachel Carpman; Dramaturg: Helen Jaksch; Costume Designer: Maria Hooper; Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason; Projection Designer: Shawn Boyle; Stage Manager and Producer: Anh Le; Music Coach: Michael Friedmann

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street March 28-30, 2013

Indifferent Honest

In the playbill for Hamlet at the Yale Repertory, directed by James Bundy and starring Paul Giamatti, dramaturg Dana Tanner-Kennedy quotes the critic Jan Kott: “we can only appraise any Shakespearean production by asking how much there is of Shakespeare in it, and how much of us.” Good question.  And who is “us,” anyway?

One “us” involved here, of course, is the Yale School of Drama—both Bundy and Giamatti are grads and Bundy is its Dean as well as the Artistic Director of the Yale Rep.  A fair number of former students and current students grace this production, so, from that point of view, this Hamlet is “us” in spades.  In fact, it might be hard at times to see this production as not about that particular “us.”  From that point of view, it’s remarkably successful—the show is sold out*.  Kudos, all around.  And particularly to graduating student Meredith Ries for her stunning and fascinating set.

But we must also consider Shakespeare and the other “us”—not simply the audience (i.e. the local citizenry and others who have come here to see a name actor of stage and screen enact one of the premiere roles in all of theater), but also, one assumes, the contemporary world in general.

Hamlet, we might say (and Tanner-Kennedy makes that case in the playbill), is always “modern”—and it’s up to “us” (critics, I suppose) to decide if it’s modern in a way that makes sense for the tenor of the times.  That said, as a critic I tend to sympathize with Harold Bloom who insists that Shakespeare’s plays would work, even if you cut out all the stage business and simply have the actors speak the lines to the best of their abilities.  In fact, Bloom goes further and suggests many a production would be better that way.

The case for “how much Shakespeare,” then, has to do with whether the lines get across.  The lines alone make it about “us”—so, “speak the speech, I pray you, as I spoke it to you” and you cannot then be false to the text, and cannot fail to implicate “us.”  Now, if this come tardy off or something too much, as Hamlet might say, then we run into problems.

If you know the play, you know I’m cribbing in part from Hamlet’s advice to the players.  It’s good advice, and might be extended to other matters the Dane touches not on.  On that score, this is a Hamlet that hews, for the most part, to the “temperance” that “begets a clearness” the Prince himself might applaud.  In other words—and in Hamlet there are always more “words, words, words”—the play is easy to follow and, despite its length, not overlong.  Giamatti is often almost breathless with exertion—you might easily believe he is devoutly wishing for both “rest” and “silence”—and yet he ever finds new modulations in a voice gifted with considerable range.

In the advice scene, Bundy—and it was one of my favorite bits—makes Hamlet’s comments seem windy director’s notes on a performance that hasn’t happened yet.  The actors humor him and basically play him for a fool even as he advises them not to let the fools govern the piece.  His advice is about how much comedy to let into a tragedy, and how much passion.

Bundy’s production errs a little on both.  At times the actors—and Marc Kudisch’s King Claudius is the most remiss in this, though Giamatti would not ‘scape whipping on that score neither—tend to pump up the sobs and tears a bit too much.  Contrast that with Patrick Kerr’s First Player who does the “mobled queen” speech as  though it’s a bit of vaudeville.  Still better and worse, as Gertrude (Lisa Emery) might say.  For comic missteps, the Queen's bottle-swilling undercuts the pathos of her lyrical speech describing Ophelia’s death, though one could argue it suits the "Sopranos Go Elsinore" royal couple.

Other thoughts on support: the scenes between Kudisch’s stiff CEO-like Claudius and Tommy Schrider’s unconvincing Laertes make some of Part Two slow going.  It’s not just that we aren’t getting our Giamatti—what we are getting isn’t pointed enough to make us care.  Jarlath Conroy’s Gravedigger is all he should be and no more; Brooke Parks’ Ophelia is only interesting when she’s gone mad, aided by the great touch of having her robed in her dead father’s bloody button-down; Gerry Ramman’s Polonius uses a masterful sense of timing to give us the comedy embedded in a presumptuous counselor’s demands for dignity; and Austin Durant is perfectly measured as a scholarly and mannerly Horatio.

And what of Giamatti, and “us”?  When, early on, the Prince, wracked with sobs over his dead dad, assumes a fetal position, then starts up like a guilty thing when Horatio and the Watch come upon him, we get a real glimpse into this Hamlet.  An overgrown baby, an ineffective “manchild” of so many films of today, he berates his would-be lover Ophelia while swaddled in a bathrobe, boxers, and socks (the uniform of the clinically depressed).  When he has to lay into his mother on her bed, Giamatti is hunched and pained, often pressing his hands between his legs as though ashamed of himself.  The scenes between Hamlet and his father’s Ghost (Kudisch again, and very commanding in the role) are riveting, thanks in part to Lighting (the most excellent Stephen Strawbridge) and Sound (the wondrous Keri Klick). Giamatti plays the first on his knees and the second, in his mother’s bedroom, as though prostrate with emotion at the realization that he can’t be his dad’s avenger, much less his replacement.  When we see Hamlet don the Player King’s crown I couldn't help thinking of Charles Laughton as Quasimodo crowned as the King of Fools.  This Hamlet is a thing of “shreds and patches.”  A fit of hysteria hiding behind “knavery.”

And what of the knavery?  I’m of the opinion that Hamlet comes close to madness by trying to be too clever by half, talking himself into fits, we might say.  Giamatti’s Hamlet, when at his wit’s end, is likely to mime slitting his throat or to make nutty faces—something for the groundlings.  But Giamatti can also be cutting with voice alone and has the means to manifest the thoughtful Hamlet and the heart-eating one as well—his entrance and first scene make that clear.  What I’d like more of is Hamlet in a battle of wills against himself—and against “us,” the ever-present audience the Prince carries in his own mind.

Likeable, energetic, frustrated, Giamatti is best as the impatient, resourceful Hamlet who, brilliant and lazy, won't suffer fools gladly.  He might, we imagine, be happily playing computer games on the old man’s dime if some ambitious relative hadn’t poisoned the king in his garden.  And when this poor fool of a prince has strutted his three hours upon the stage, the military man Fortinbras (Paul Pryce) comes in to mop up.

I’d say this Hamlet’s got “us” right.  O cursèd spite!

*Note: though the production is sold out, there is a wait list that begins an hour before each performance: 6:30 for evening shows; 12:30 p.m. for matinees.

William Shakespeare’s Hamlet Directed by James Bundy Starring Paul Giamatti

Composer: Sarah Pickett; Scenic Designer: Meredith B. Ries; Costume Designer: Jayoung Yoon; Lighting Designer: Stephen Strawbridge; Sound Designer: Keri Klick; Fight Director: Rick Sordelet; Vocal Coach: Grace Zandarski; Movement Coach: Erica Fae; Production Dramaturg: Dana Tanner-Kennedy; Casting Director: Tara Rubin; Stage Manager: Geoff Boronda

Yale Repertory Theatre March 15-April 13, 2013

Lindy's Lesson

Watching Zie Kollektief (Kate Attwell, Gabe Levey, Brenda Meaney, Mitchell Winter) putting on—in both senses of the phrase—one of Bertolt Brecht’s polemical Lehrstücke (“learning plays”) at the Yale Cabaret this week, I couldn’t help thinking: what is the purpose of theater?  So, yeah, “BB” (as he’s referred to in the Kollektief’s preamble) was up to his old tricks, this time tricked out as improv theater complete with a recurring dose of amateurish giggles. The play, ostensibly, is a radio opera formerly known as Lindbergh’s Flight before BB rewrote it to write Lindbergh out, due to the latter’s politics.  What kept me amused was the way the play tried desperately to make one man’s triumph—flying across the Atlantic Ocean, remember?—the work of “the people.”  If that sort of thing doesn’t inspire hilarity in you, well, then this might not be your cup of tea.

What is my cup of tea, or rather coffee, is watching the work of this group of practiced larkers.  Levey, here wearing a cowboy suit, is always irrepressibly funny; Meaney, this show made me see, has reserves of comic skill her time at YSD has barely scratched; Attwell’s subversive sense of theater, one assumes, in a driving force behind the show; the real surprise is Winter.  His earnest attack of the role of Lindbergh—or “man of no importance,” if you prefer, comrade—is both ironic and invigorating.  But where he really got me was in the early going, as the foursome treated us to a little ditty and a comic discursus explaining what we were about to see.  His piercing glance into the crowd had the effect of turning us into kids trying not to laugh while a teacher or other authority figure is staring us down.

And that sort of sets the tone of the whole thing.  How can you not laugh at this silly, slightly slapstick production, able to mix its contexts as swiftly as you (or the faux Germanic voice on a tape) can say “Spirit of St. Louie.”  It’s a play being played for laughs while the actors seem to think it’s being played for real—you almost expect them to get yelled at for not being serious enough, on more than one occasion.  One of my favorite bits was a kind of old soft shoe with everyone a little off; another was a fantasized under-the-sea sequence; and still another was when Lindy/MONI (Winter in a school desk perched above a floor fan) hit a fog bank—the rest of the cast in sheets.

You get the idea: it’s theater as any schoolroom of kids stuck inside for recess might manage it, trying to show—ja, Herr Lehrer!—they’ve learned the mighty BB’s lessons while also deconstructing them just for the hell of it, or just to see, indeed, how elastic is the concept of theater.  Of course, as is usually the case with not-for-real theater, the tech support magically does what it must to make it work—great help from Lighting (Joey Moro) and Sound (Tyler Kieffer) on that score.

BB had his reasons and his intentions in trying to destroy the division of labor known as performer and audience, but, for the most part, audiences remain content with a spectacle that leaves them alone.  The Kollektief never forgets we’re there and rarely lets us forget it.  And the four are able to be themselves in the midst of what they're pretending to be.

If Lindy needs to come down to earth, the same treatment won’t hurt BB either.  After all, as Brecht said: “To live means to finesse the processes to which one is subjugated.”  And if Brechtian theater is one of the processes to which one is subjugated?  Everyone for oneself, kollektief-ly.

Lindbergh’s Flight By Bertolt Brecht Translated by John Willett

Contributing Artists: Kate Attwell, Gabe Levey, Brenda Meaney, Mitchell Winter; Costume Designer: Martin Schnellinger; Lighting Designer: Joey Moro; Sound Designer: Tyler Kieffer; Stage Manager: Carolynn Richer

The Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street March 14-16, 2013

Telling Tales

A man and a woman, wearing the obvious greasepaint makeup of amateur theatricals, sit in a little triangular room on a makeshift stage, complete with naked-bulb footlights and a painted curtain.  They speak to us with the emphatic and cadenced accents of the Lancashire area of England, in a manner that feels confidential and forthright though also oddly prickly and at times slightly distracted. As the two take us into their confidences—the Man (Christopher Geary) talking about his encounters, as a six year old, with his mother’s breasts, the Woman (Emily Reilly) describing her father’s imposition of “order” and multiplication tables on the household—we might begin to feel they aren’t quite “all there,” particularly as the man keeps worrying an alarm clock and the woman treats her little array of knickknacks as though they are alive.  They have a fondness in their manner that makes them easy to listen to, even if the implications of much of what they say is left to us to interpret—as when they both chortle about “chit-chat, chit-chat, chit-chat” as though the phrase calls up liberating associations.

As the parallel monologues go on, we realize they are reminiscing about events from the same period of their lives—from six, when they first met one another, to about twelve—and that the period is warmly recalled by both, as a time inspired by the strength of their feeling for one another.  It is to Walsh’s credit that he gives such vibrant voices to figures assumed to be elderly, making their recollections create a view of childhood romance that is truly striking.

Gradually, within the same extended recollections, the memories become infused with the horrific and traumatic, having to do with a draconian imposition of conformity by Woman’s father and the Man from the Chip Shop: the two decide who will be silenced by slicing out the tongues of anyone they choose, which leads as well to random killings.

Our entry into this world of past horror follows a unique trajectory—from verbal comedy to an understanding that speech itself can be a crime and, finally, to the sense that only the ability to keep talking about the past, giving words to experience, is what allows humans to maintain a grasp on meaning and identity.

Both performers in the piece are to be commended for letting us into this world. The play, almost static in its staging, must take over our imaginations almost entirely by speech alone—with a few props, an entertaining use of a recorded song Man, as a boy, gave to Woman, as a girl, and a telling use of dramatic percussion and lighting.  At one key moment the duo, bathed in a kind of transcendent light, seem to see one another as Man bids Woman speak of what she remembers.  In that one moment, we might say, he is face-to-face with his past, and with the love of a life that involves a horrible act of betrayal.

Geary is wonderful at remaining in character while also having an eye out for the audience as an element of the play.  He helps us realize that the use of the curtain and footlights and facepaint is meant to give us a feel for the failings of the naturalism of theater, and a sense that the past is something we always to some extent “stage” upon the present.  Reilly is particularly good at creating the fond regard of a doting woman for whom even betrayal and brutality are part of the vitality of her youth.  It’s a performance that stays with you as both endearing and sinister.

While I have caveats about how well thought-out Walsh’s backstory is—it’s best taken as a kind of nightmare of village life, insular and absolute (the age of the children is necessary to the effect)—I have no doubts about the skill, ingenuity, and power of this production.  We owe Reilly, her co-director Hugh Farrell, and company thanks for The Small Things.

The Small Things By Enda Walsh Directed by Emily Reilly and Hugh Farrell

Costume Designer: Nikki Delhomme; Co-Sound Designer: Palmer Hefferan; Co-Sound Designer: Tyler Kieffer; Dramaturg: Hugh Farrell; Percussionist: Victor Caccese; Stage Manager: Rob Chikar; Producer: Eric Gershman

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street March 7-9, 2013

We Three

The Bird Bath, the latest show at the Yale Cabaret, like the show the previous week, was developed entirely by YSD students and treats the theme of mental illness.  Directed by Monique Barbee and created by an ensemble of three women—Chasten Harmon, Hannah Leigh Sorenson, Ariana Venturi—who enact three different aspects of the British-born surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, the play is set, more or less, in an asylum.  The drama is in how the three actresses pantomime the artist’s states of psychic duress. For Carrington, apparently, the trinity explained everything, so the set consists of three separate areas: the one to our left seems neat and methodical, somewhat like a lab, somewhat like a writer’s workroom; the central space consists primarily of a very graceful bathtub and curtain; the area to our right contains a bed with an old metal frame.  Each space is decorated with interesting objets d’art.  White is the predominant non-color.

At left and right, respectively, Venturi and Harmon enter through the windows, climbing in to take up residence shortly after Sorenson, in the center, ceases vomiting into a large bucket.  This opening tableau—a woman crouched on the side of a tub attempting to spit up by drinking quantities of orange blossom water—goes on for a bit, while the actress’s voice-over speaks lines derived from Carrington’s book about her treatment in a mental institution after a breakdown.

In other words, the show establishes early its intent to give us a visceral experience of physical distress, but such discomfort is offset by an enthralling series of tableaux vivants that work because of the rigorous physicality of the actresses and the wonderful set design (Mariana Sanchez Hernandez) and lighting (Masha Tsimring) and music/sound (Palmer).  Each actress is mostly contained in a setting that becomes her entire world, a space, we might suppose, that is an external manifestation of Carrington’s internal state.  The three aspects are distinct enough, if somewhat obvious.

Simply, we can see the left-side figure (Venturi) as Carrington attempting to maintain her intellectual and artistic bearings, often clutching a lab jacket to her throat or at times crushing an egg while the other figures convulse; the right-side figure (Harmon) presents the more animal, bodily passions—Harmon moves often in a crouch and at one point enacts an animal defecating, then nosing its feces, while at other times, with a lemon in her mouth, she grips the bed and shakes like someone undergoing shock treatment; the central figure (Sorenson) bathes and primps, convinced she is Queen Elizabeth, and at other times writhes on the floor.  This figure, we might suppose, is the spirit, or at least the spirit as manifested in the artist’s creativity in combat with her own delusions.  Sorenson does a quite spectacular job of both embodying the kind of feminine principle that a male artist might use to represent beauty or spirit, while also giving us the frantic, quivering flesh of a female artist grappling with her demons.  It’s stunning physical theater.

Carrington, the notes by Dramaturg Sheria Irving, tell us, “was treated with Cardiazol, a drug . . . that induced convulsions and hallucinations.”  Just the thing for a surrealist, we might suppose.  And one of the tensions The Bird Bath seems to want to explore, as did Jackson’s All This Noise last week, to some extent, is the relation between artistic self-conceptions and mental illness.  The idea that madness is a form of creativity is very old, and the idea that truly creative spirits, in their innovation, might be taken for insane is also prevalent at times.  Carrington herself seems to have shared some of those notions—as did other surrealists—and so the play might be said to culminate with each of the three women creating an effigy or bust that might be a way of externalizing her anxieties.

Venturi and Harmon create constructions that could be entered as found objects in a Duchampian display. But Sorenson’s Carrington becomes an effigy herself.  In the best sequence in the play, she puts a latex mask over her head, powders it white and draws a red mouth on the powdered mask over her lips.  “Eyeless in Gaza,” so to speak, she becomes an image of the surrealist muse, perhaps, a figure out of Man Ray, that is also the artist as abject heroine of her own life.

Three, of course, is the number of the Graces, the Fates, and the Furies, in Greek myth.  These three women, together with their director, set-up a tripartite tableau of the mind and soul of a figure sorely tried by her own mind and by a drug that invades her body and causes terrors and trauma.  In the end there’s a glimpse of expressive grace—Sorenson, wet and half naked, leaning out three sets of windows, successively, as though gulping the air of freedom and relief—before the fury resumes again.

We might suppose that’s the best we can hope for.

The Bird Bath Created by Ensemble Directed by Monique Barbee

Dramaturg: Sheria Irving; Scenic Designer: Mariana Sanchez Hernandez; Lighting Designer: Masha Tsimring; Sound Design & Original Music: Palmer; Stage Manager: Alyssa K. Howard; Producer: Emika Abe

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street

February 28-March 2, 2013

The Rural Absurd

The Long Wharf production of Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class, directed by Gordon Edelstein, presents us with a living classic. Shepard’s play dumps us in an America that always seems to be vanishing while remaining still tangible. It’s rural California, beloved of Steinbeck in the Depression Era, and of “back to nature” hippies in the Sixties.  By the late Seventies, when the play was first produced, the region is on its way to becoming strip malls and apartment buildings.

With a stripped-down kitchen surrounded by prairie-like earth, Michael Yeargan’s set speaks of archetypes even before the play begins.  What could be more emblematic of family life than a refrigerator, sitting near center stage?  And what could be more enigmatic than a tall door frame with no door, attached to no wall?  Emblems.  Enigmas.  The theater of Sam Shepard makes the most commonplace things bristle with crazy possibilities.  It’s the nightmare of the everyday.

The first half of the show, while able to keep us off-guard with the oddity of the Tate family, is mainly comic.  Much of the humor derives from Judith Ivey’s delivery as Ella, the mother.  She has mastered an emphatic tone that plays it slow as if considering possible replies, coming out with comments that can be prickly or non-committal.  Ivey’s pitch is perfect, as she transforms from a frumpy housewife into a woman on the make, trying to sell the family property out from under her drunken, abusive husband Weston (Kevin Tighe).  It’s he who broke down the door and, listening to her comments, we might readily take her part in what might seem a play of domestic disturbances.  That is until we meet the smarmy lawyer Taylor (John Procaccino) with whom she may be doing more than business.

Shepard is the poet of the proles—his grasp of the intonations and rhythms of the everyday Americans we find in trailer parks and malls and on ranches and rural hang-outs is as distinct to him as flowery Southern politesse is to Tennessee Williams.  Hearing the lines of the play delivered with a feel for its curious mix of the lyrical and the laconic is reason enough to see this production.  But Shepard is also the kind of playwright who wants the theatrical experience to be off-putting.  And so there’s a live lamb onstage at times, in a pen; there’s urination, nudity, an explosion, an appalling episode of binge eating, and a creepy carnivalesque feeling that makes the Second Part seem a descent into an accursed place indeed.  Edelstein’s production delivers all the unpleasantness with a casual absurdity that benefits from the Long Wharf’s thrust stage.  It’s a fascinating show.

Much of the unsettling nature of the play comes from Wesley (Peter Albrink), the eldest child and only son of the Tates.  Wesley is unpredictable, surly and rather unsettled himself.  A tour de force speech delivered early in the play establishes the kind of dread he feels in relation to his father.  Wesley seems attached to the farm while the others are determined to sell it or leave it or both, but his attachment may be based on neurotic frustrations.  Of all the characters, he is the most enigmatic, and Albrink has a command of the character’s shuffling uncertainty and morose sarcasm.  We might easily take the younger generation’s side against the elders if it weren’t that Wesley is so brooding.  Urinating on his sister’s 4-H posters is the kind of callow act that keep us distanced from him.

As the daughter, Emma, Elvy Yost is tomboyish and pert.  She wears a 4-H outfit at first and seems girlishly forthright—as her mother lectures her about getting her first period—but, later, in a cowboy hat and chaps, she begins to transform into the kind of figure we might assume Shepard wants to pin our hopes on.  She is clear-eyed enough to see through Taylor—Procaccino gives Taylor’s efforts to put her at her ease a nice, slowburn comic tension—and determined enough, perhaps, to get away from the family vacuum.  Yost sounds perhaps a bit too contemporary in her tone, but that only underscores that she, if anyone here, is the future.  Her fate says much about what Shepard thinks about that.

As Weston, the irascible patriarch, Kevin Tighe is commanding.  Our early view of him finds him even more surly than his son.  He has nothing but disdain for his family and their home.  His humor is of the kind that comes close to abuse, and yet he compels a kind of natural respect.  He is the man of the house, regardless.  Later, he sobers up, and Shepard gives the character a great speech about how he got into debt that rings with right-on familiarity in Fiscal Cliff America.  Seeing Tighe cooking breakfast at the stove and lecturing his son and wife takes us close to the “father knows best” America we once grew up with.  Of course it will all go bad.

And don’t forget the lamb.  As a sacrificial victim, scapegoat, what-have-you, the symbolism is a bit too overt, but, in her actual presence, Edie steals her scenes—on Opening Night, she reacted to Ella’s insistence that the creature be removed from the kitchen with a perfectly timed bleat, and seemed to hush up contentedly while the man-of-the-house maundered about, talking to her as to himself.  It made the audience laugh and play to see a lamb on stage, too much perhaps, but I suspect that its antics will be the one heart-warming moment people take away from this harrowing, at times hilarious, at times grotesque production.

Curse of the Starving Class By Sam Shepard Directed by Gordon Edelstein

Set Design: Michael Yeargan; Costume Design: Clint Ramos; Lighting Design: James F. Ingalls; Sound Design: Fitz Patton; Composer: Doug Wieselman; Animals: William Berloni; Stage Manager: Bryce McDonald; Assistant Stage Manager: Amy Patricia Stern; Assistant Stage Manager: Sara Cox Bradley; Casting: James Calleri, CSA

Long Wharf Theatre February 13-March 10, 2013

Poetry. Performance. Party.

Mario Biagini is a man who believes in the power of the word—spoken, recited, sung.  As a performer and director he has brought together 9 performers—musicians, singers, actors—to travel to Yale and New Haven as part of Interdisciplinary Performance Studies at Yale (IPSY).  Biagini’s group, originating in the Open Program of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, pride themselves on a collective approach to performance that aims to include its audience, creating an environment that feels like “a holiday, a relaxation” of our routine responses.

While in New Haven, the troupe will perform a show called Electric Party Songs, twice at Yale’s Calhoun College, Feb. 22 and 23, and, in a more extended version, at BAR, March 3—the latter show is billed as “an experiment in the potentialities of a party as an art form.”  If your winter has been as low on energy as mine, you too might find yourself intrigued by that idea.

The troupe will also perform I Am America at the Whitney Theater in the Whitney Humanities Center, with a set built by children at the Eli Whitney Museum, Feb. 28 and March 1, and will hold a symposium on Poetry as a Practice of Encounter, also at the WHC, on March 2.

The Open Program likes to include the contribution of locals in their shows, using materials found in the streets of the different cities they visit, and at times, as in Italy, have set out to create self-generated festivals in the streets.  Traveling about New Haven by bus, Biagini noted the racial segregation of New Haven where almost all bus riders are black and almost all students at Yale are white.  He told his collaborators: “we should do our show right here on the bus.”  Instead, he does his best to engage people wherever he finds them, offering a kind of contact high from his joy in performance.

The performances consist of an unusual mix: selections from the poems of Allen Ginsberg—the late Beat Guru, Bop Buddist, Singalong Shaman and Clown Prince of Poetry—are turned into songs and are then intermixed with African American spirituals, shouts, and worksongs.  The mix is thoroughly American, as Ginsberg is perhaps the poet of the last 60 years most concerned with trying to live up to “America” in a Whitmanian sense.  Whether or not he succeeded, Ginsberg was astute at assessing the kinds of mash-ups that drive our national psyche.  He was into jazz, rock, folk, blues, as well as dipping into most religions, particularly Judaism via his upbringing and Buddhism via his own searches into mysticism.  He also participated readily in the cults of personality that float so many boats in the media, and could make pop culture read like holy texts.

Some of the best moments in Electric Party Songs come from the performers’ grasp of the essential showmanship at the heart of Ginsberg’s poetry (Lloyd Bricken, looking a bit Waits-like, is particularly effective in his delivery).  Ginsberg’s work is about exposure—of the highest self, of the lowest urges, of the deepest shame and the most inspiring ecstasies.  The troupe does not offer reverential recitals, but rather dynamic musical numbers that bounce off Ginsberg’s lines, making the songs assume a bodily urgency—whether it’s Biagnini recreating an old and infirm poet or Alejandro Tomás Rodriguez writhing about on the floor to the yearnings of love.

Add to that the spirituals—with many rhythmic shout-outs to Jesus—and you have a kind of revival meeting that may make all feel either welcome or uncomfortable.  These lithe and sinuous young men and women sing gracefully a capella (Felicita Marcelli and Agnieszka Kazimierska ) or with the accompaniment of guitars and percussion, and to see them up and swaying to songs from the South is to harken to a kind of cultural trance and transcendence.  How are these predominantly European performers—from Italy, Poland, France and elsewhere, looking like an ad hoc collection of gypsies and free spirits—able to lose themselves so readily in traditional songs?  And what is the principle force behind the vibe they create like a band of charismatics?

Biagini likes to think back to the farm he grew up on in Italy, where a holiday was a true transformation.  People knew the value of letting down their guard, of giving up their daily tasks for a collective enjoyment of the free flow of time.  His group has sometimes staged a “night watch” where the audience and the performers stay together through the night, interacting, singing, playing, sleeping, moving about freely, finding themselves, in the end, not the same as they were when it began.  He believes fervently that letting music and poetry, lyrics and rhythms inhabit one is to liberate—at least for a little—the spirit.

The spirit—that’s the place where the poet Ginsberg meets the songs of faith amidst oppression.   And that’s where Biagini and his troupe try to meet their audience.  It may take a leap of faith to get beyond your New England reticence and intellectual skepticism on a cold February night—but it might just be worth the effort.

Interdisciplinary Performance Studies at Yale presents The Open Program of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards

Electric Party Songs: Feb. 22 & 23: 8pm, Calhoun Cabaret, 189 Elm Street

I Am America: Feb. 28 & March 1: 8pm, Whitney Theater, 53Wall Street

Symposium: Poetry as the Practice of Encounter: March 2: 11 am-4pm, Whitney Theater, 53Wall Street

Electric Party Songs: March 3: 4 pm, BAR, 254 Crown Street

Events are free and open to the public.  Seating is limited.