Life During Wartime: a new program from Cantata Profana

Last spring, I was quite impressed by members of Cantata Profana in performance of the challenging score of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire in a dramatic staging of that work directed by Ethan Heard at Yale Cabaret. This weekend, Cantata Profana is back with a new program, “The Rest of the World at War: Germany—America—1942,” which their press release describes as “both a deep reflection on the War and a comedy show for music nerds.” Artistic Director Jacob Ashworth says that the idea for the program began with the Richard Strauss sextet that opens his last opera Capriccio. Written in 1942, in wartime Berlin, the work is striking, as Ashworth sees it, for its lack of engagement with a world at war. Six characters in a salon debate “which is more important in opera: music or words.” The opera's opening is “decadent and irresponsible,” Ashworth says, “for someone in such a highly influential position.” In his 70s, Strauss seems to have chosen to detach his music from any real world relevance. Praising the work as “stunningly beautiful,” Ashworth wanted to find companion pieces that would help create an artistic and historical context for Strauss’ preference for aesthetic contemplation over engagement with the times.

Last year Cantata Profana performed a program as a centennial celebration for works composed in 1913. Though 1942, as a year, is not as directly related to 2014, Ashworth chose other works from the period when the U.S. entered the war as companion pieces with the Capriccio sextet. Bookending the program is a work by the avant-garde composer Arthur Schoenberg who, in 1942, was 10 years younger than Strauss when he wrote Ode to Napoleon, a work which uses lines from a poem written by Lord Byron in 1814 to characterize the fall of the world-dominating “tyrant,” and references Austria—later, the birthplace of Hitler—while addressing Napoleon in an interesting fashion: “Must she too bend, must she too share / Thy late repentance, long despair, / Thou throneless Homicide?”

Other works chosen for the program offer contrasts to the German romanticism and modernism of Strauss and Schoenberg. Elliott Carter, the long-lived American composer who died recently in 2012, at age 103, was influenced by Stravinsky and created avant-garde works but, Ashworth says, often forgotten are his earlier forays into Copland-like Americana such as The Defense of Corinth, a piece for a speaker, a male chorus and piano, four hands. The choral work is highly comedic, according to Ashworth, in its evocation of the preparations for war by the town of Corinth, as described by Rabelais in the Prologue to Book III of Pantagruel. Carter’s score suggests the sound effects of martial preparations as well as the useless activity of the philosopher Diogenes who joins in the busy activities by engaging in the Sisyphean labor of repeatedly hauling an empty tub up a mountain and letting it clatter down. In 1941, when the piece was written, the U.S. had not yet entered the war and Carter’s piece could be a look askance at the war mania throughout the world or a prescient glance ahead to the war effort that would soon occupy the U.S. after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of that year.

John Cage, the youngest of the composers on the program, was only 30 in 1942 and his Credo in Us was written that year in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Cage approaches his piece in what Ashworth describes as “a very slippery” manner. On the one hand, it is “a love letter” to his partner Merce Cunningham who devised dance to go with portions of the piece, so that “Us” is Cage and Cunningham, but, on the other hand, “Us” is the U.S. and the piece, with its use of classical phonograph recordings, the radio, boogie woogie, percussion including tom toms, could be said to be a microcosm of the soundscapes available at the fatal moment when the war in Europe became truly a “world” war with the East attacking the West.

Founded in 2013 by students at the Yale School of Music and the Institute for Sacred Music, Cantata Profana is an ensemble comprised of a dedicated group of players, with a flexible arrangement for additions and collaborations, "able to combine anything from duos to chamber operas in one evening.” The group has been praised in the New York Times for their ability to encompass a range of musical periods and styles in their performances. Often choosing works that have a strong narrative or descriptive component, Ashworth sees the future of the group as based on greater merging of music and theatrical ventures; one such venture is collaboration with the newly formed Heartbeat Opera company, which involves working with Ethan Heard and Louisa Proske, both alums of the Yale School of Drama, whose work in musical theatricals has been noted here: Pierrot Lunaire and La Voix Humaine. Ashworth and other company members of Cantata Profana will act as “pitband” for Heartbeat in their upcoming workshop presentation of Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins, which, Cantata Profana hopes, “will be the beginning of a long-standing relationship.”

The 1942 program will be performed this Saturday, May 10, at Trinity Lutheran Church on Orange and Wall Streets in New Haven, and on Sunday, May 11, in Brooklyn.

THE REST OF THE WORLD AT WAR: GERMANY - AMERICA – 1942 R. Strauss, Sextet from Capriccio; Elliott Carter, The Defense of Corinth; John Cage, Credo in US; Schoenberg, Ode to Napoleon (featuring John Taylor Ward)

Saturday, May 10, 8:00pm at Trinity Lutheran Church in New Haven Sunday, May 11, 8:00pm at 22 Boerum Place in Brooklyn

Recap: Yale Cab 46

Yale Cabaret Season 46 is now just a memory. So let’s test our memories. Surveying the season, I’ve come up with five top picks in thirteen categories, as I have done for Seasons 45 (’12-’13) and 44 (’11-’12). Picks are listed in order of the show’s appearance, except the last named is my top choice. First up, the category of pre-existing play adapted to the unique opportunities afforded by the ever-intimate Cab space: All of these had something to do with power dynamics and each was a gripping experience: Dutchman, the challenging provocation about erotics and racial profiling by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka; erotomania as a work ethic between sisters in Jean Genet’s The Maids; He Left Quietly, Yaël Farber’s dramatization of the incarceration of an innocent man sentenced to death in apartheid South Africa; YSD alum Tarell Alvin McCraney’s exploration of the bonds and frictions between brothers as archetypes in The Brothers Size; and . . . Edward Bond’s daunting look at a world bereft of goods and memories, Have I None.

New plays inaugurated at the Cab this season, as usual, were a mixed bag, trying out eclectic forms: We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun, by Helen Jaksch (*15), Kelly Kerwin (*15), Emily Zemba (*15) is a drag-show drama with music, comedy, and pathos; The Most Beautiful Thing in the World, conceived by Gabriel Levey (*14) and devised with Kate Tarker (*14), is a performance piece that invites the kinds of pitfalls theater is prone to, and brought the audience into the performance; The Defendant, by Elia Monte-Brown (*14), commands the attitudes and language of its teen characters, while walking a difficult line between comedy and unsettling social reality; The Mystery Boy, adapted by Chris Bannow (*14), is a frenetic theatrical romp as weird and vivid as the mind of a pre-teen; and . . . A New Saint for a New World by Ryan Campbell (*15) is a funny dialogue-driven exploration of faith and defiance through the figure of Joan of Arc.

For Sets, the created space wherein everything happens: the runway by way of Warhol for the camp and glam denizens of We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun, by Christopher Ash (*14); the gritty prison space open to our view to make theater of incarceration for He Left Quietly, by Christopher Thompson (*16); the posters and atmosphere of a bygone theatrical era that lent much visual interest to The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion, by Reid Thompson (*14); the striking combination of modern and ancient ruin that served as backdrop to graffiti art in We Fight We Die, by Jean Kim (*16); and . . . the improbable rooms within a room, meticulously outfitted and wrought for The Maids, by Kate Noll (*14).

For Lighting, that magical aspect of theater that adds so much atmosphere and affect to our viewing experience: Elizabeth Mak (*16) for the highly effective illuminations of the will-of-the-wisp figures in Crave; Oliver Wason (*14) for the use of light and dark to evoke the uncertain occurrences in The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs; Oliver Wason (*14) for the intricate lighting of actual interior space in The Maids; Oliver Wason (*14) for the different lighting for the different worlds—from domestic earth to prison to another planet—in A New Saint for a New World; and . . . Andrew F. Griffin (*16) for playing with light and dark in an almost musical way in The Brothers Size.

For Costumes, that aspect of the experience that helps us suspend our disbelief, and helps actors convince us of their characters’ reality: Hunter Kaczorowski (*14) for the stylish retro outfits of Radio Hour; Elivia Bovenzi (*14) for a cast of regular people and inspired clowns in Derivatives; Asa Benally (*16) for costuming a cavalcade of different plays in a short compass in The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion; Fabian Aguilar (*16) for the varied habiliments of Joan of Arc’s ordeals in A New Saint for a New World—including space-age angels; and . . . Grier Coleman (*15) for the pastiche and aplomb, charm and chutzpa of We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun.

More ethereal even than Lighting is Sound, but a telling aspect of any production in augmenting the action and creating a mental space to support the visual: Joel Abbott (*14) for tying together all the moods and styles of We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun; Tyler Kieffer (*15) for the use of scored moments in the presentation of The Most Beautiful Thing in the World; Brian Hickey (*15) and Steve Brush (*14) for the razzle-dazzle TV-esque documentary and comedy productions of Derivatives; Tyler Kieffer for letting us eavesdrop so effectively in The Maids; and . . . Tyler Kieffer (*15) and Steve Brush (*14) for the radio soundscape and Foley art of Radio Hour.

For some productions, the visual element doesn’t end with Lighting, Sets, and Costumes, but acquires more presence through the use of projections and other special Visual Effects: Christopher Ash (*14) for the enhancement of the performance space of We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun; Nick Hussong (*14) for the various charts and logos and floating backdrops in Derivatives; Kristin Ferguson (*15) for the striking and lyrical use of photographic projections in Bound to Burn; Joey Moro (*15) for the creation of different visual moods so important to Joan of Arc’s odyssey in A New Saint for a New World; and . . . Rasean Devonte Johnson (*16) for the graffitied visuals of We Fight We Die, and for adding to the fluid visual experience of The Brothers Size.

Use of Music is another element that, for some productions, is almost like adding another character or a special effect to color the action or complete it: Steve Brush (*14) for the songs and jingles and accompaniment so crucial to the aural world of Radio Hour; Jenny Schmidt (*14) for adding to the tensions and suggestiveness of The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs; Pornchanok Kanchanabanca (*16) for the enlivening musical asides that fleshed out the variety of The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion; Mike Mills for the percussion that acts as Greek chorus to comment musically on—and even control—the action of The Brothers Size; and . . . Joel Abbott (*14) for the sensitive accompaniment that helped render the range of possible motives and actions in We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun.

Another aspect of the experience of the play’s physical presence is how it moves—sometimes that means actual choreography and the creation of dance, other times it has to do with how much activity and physical interaction takes place in the show; choice examples of how intricate Movement greatly enhances a play are: the choreography of the drag queen sleuths by Kelly Kerwin (*15) for We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun; the fluid use of the entire space and the highly expressive interactions directed by Hansol Jung (*14) in Crave; the dance numbers that told stories with movement and mime, choreographed by Rob Chikar (*14) and Alyssa Simmons (*14), in Bound to Burn; the incredibly active interludes bursting out of The Brothers Size, directed by Luke Harlan (*16); and . . . the prop-happy cast, creating sound effects and a variety of characters in different costumes while constantly on stage, of The Mystery Boy, directed by Chris Bannow (*14) and Helen Jaksch (*15).

In terms of Performance, some roles and actors move beyond the traditional “actor”/”actress” dualism, but as such is still the norm of awards shows, I’ll follow suit; for the xy chromosomes: as the one, the only, the much maligned and deeply mourned Edie La Minx: Seth Bodie (*14) in We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun (*14); as Claire, “the pretty one” that Mistress should have designs on: Mickey Theis (*14) in The Maids; for his show-stopping turn as a Lena Horne impersonator in We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun, and for acting out the gripping ordeal of Duma Kumalo in He Left Quietly, Ato Blankson-Wood (*15); as Ogun, the god of iron in the form of a paternalistic and truly fraternal car-shop owner in The Brothers Size, Jonathan Majors (*16); and . . . as the alleged brother who brings death to his sister in Have I None, and as the manipulative “sister” in The Maids, Chris Bannow (*14).

And in Performance, those actors with xx chromosomes: as Lula, the mercurial provocation on a subway car in Dutchman, Carly Zien (*14); as the introducer forced to provide the presentation, with improvised patter and invited responses, Kate Tarker (*14) in The Most Beautiful Thing in the World; as the curious, distraught and distrustful wife in The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs, Chasten Harmon (*15); as a Joan of Arc forced to be normal and then again extraordinary, Maura Hooper (*15) in A New Saint for a New World; and . . . as a woman at her wits’ end in a world of deprivations, Ceci Fernandez (*14) in Have I None.

For the task of somehow orchestrating all this diverse input and making decisions that create a coherent theatrical experience—for Directing, in other words: Jessica Holt (*15) for the harrowing world, driven by complex language and meaningful actions and silences, of Have I None; Cole Lewis (*14) for the mounting tensions and effective contrapuntal presentation of The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs; Sara Holdren (*15) for keeping a handle on comedy with cosmic dimensions, and drama with unsettling implications in A New Saint for a New World; Luke Harlan (*16) for the combination of movement, music, intense dialogue and strong characterizations in The Brothers Size; and . . . Dustin Wills (*14) for the challenging presentation and darkly comic tone of drama queens seduced by death behind closed doors but bare windows in The Maids.

Finally, for overall Production, which means having the wherewithal to make this thing happen, as enablers and aider-abetters, the producers and dramaturgs of the shows that impressed me most: We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun: Emika Abe (*15), producer, and Helen Jaksch (*15), dramaturg; Have I None: Molly Hennighausen (*15), producer, and Hugh Farrell (*15), dramaturg; A New Saint for A New World: Sally Shen, producer, and Helen Jaksch (*15), dramaturg; The Brothers Size: Alyssa Simmons (*14) and Melissa Zimmerman (*14), producers, and Taylor Barfield (*16), dramaturg; and . . . The Maids: Lauren Wainwright (*14), producer, and Tanya Dean (*14), dramaturg.

Some of those mentioned have completed their time at YSD—best of luck in all you do!—and others have a year or two to go. Thanks to all for their dedication, talent, and spirited engagement with the special performance space that is the Yale Cabaret. And to this year's departing team, Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, Kelly Kerwin, and Shane Hudson, many thanks for a lively season.

Coming soon: a preview of the Yale Summer Cabaret, with Artistic Directors Jessica Holt and Luke Harlan, and Managing Director Gretchen Wright.

See you next year, at the Cab!--with Artistic Directors Hugh Farrell, Tyler Kieffer, Will Rucker, and Managing Director Molly Hennighausen.

Keeping It Real

With their latest offering, Donald Margulies’ Shipwrecked! An Entertainment: The Amazing Adventure of Louis de Rougemont (As Told By Himself), New Haven Theater Company have expanded their range yet again. While they are generally best with shows driven by dialogue and even—as with their entertaining take on Urinetown a few years ago—songs, one doesn’t usually associate them with special effects, and that’s what Shipwrecked! thrives on. The adventures of Rougemont (Christian Shaboo), directed by Peter Chenot, smack of the improbable world of coincidence of the 18th century novel, and, as a narrative, follow an arc of rise and fall very neatly. The story requires quite a number of small parts, lots of movement in different settings, and threats from storms, a giant octopus, Aborigines, and Australian prospectors, to say nothing of the frigid streets of London where immense condescension and adulation comes in waves. Driving all this is Rougemont, played by Shaboo with the earnest good humor of a narrator of fiction—indeed Rougemont speaks almost incessantly, interpreting for the viewer the elements of every scene as well as sharing his emotions and intentions as the story winds on. It’s an exhausting part—both verbally and physically (handstands, cartwheels and somersaults are featured)—and Shaboo keeps it all likeably interesting. We pull for Rougemont even as we suspect he’s pulling our leg.

The show is a theatrical production that never forgets it’s a theatrical production, and that suits NHTC where the means to bring off a piece are conditioned by a certain do-it-yourself ethic. In other words, Margulies’ play seems tailored for just such a company as NHTC. While a big budget production would no doubt be more effective in stimulating the suspension of disbelief that Rougemont’s story begs, it would also, I imagine, lose some of the feel of the “let’s pretend” aspect of the staging. Rougemont’s adventures feel more authentically presented when we see the puppet strings, as it were. And that’s because Rougemont never pretends that the staging is real, only that what he tells us actually happened.

Rougemont was a real person (Henri Louis Grin), his story cobbled together from the adventure stories he loved as a boy and facts about Australasia he found in libraries, but there is a certain mystery to it all as well. For while he was unable, in real life, to convince The Royal Geographic Society, his tale entertained and enthralled many. From those who want their epic adventures based in fact, there was an inevitable backlash. Indeed, Rougemont's fall from grace actually adds a certain believability to his story, so that its inclusion, while less “amazing” brings us back to reality.

Using a small proscenium as a backdrop—primarily as a space to project Drew Grey’s charming transparencies using the old magic lantern technique that would’ve been available to Rougemont—NHTC’s production gives us Rougemont’s story with the finesse of someone who can believe anything he wants his audience to believe. Doubtless seeing stagehands running about with banners to enact an octopus, he in fact sees an octopus. That, we might say, is the whole point of the story.

Shaboo is ably helped by NHTC members and some new recruits to round out the cast. Particularly welcome among the latter are the comic skills of Jesse Gabbard, as Captain Jensen, among other things, and welcome among the former is Mallory Pellegrino who plays an Aborigine maiden—who learns English surprisingly quickly—as charmingly as she played Emily in NHTC’s Our Town. Other highlights are Margaret Mann as Queen Victoria, quite intrigued by the fact that Rougemont rode a turtle, Erich Greene as Rougemont’s faithful hound—I can only imagine how tired his tongue must be after two shows in one day—Trevor Williams as an English prig, and Katelyn Marshall, as an Australian prospector. Everyone mentioned plays many other parts as well in the full meaning of ensemble.

Margulies’ play is an oddity. We could call it a celebration of theater and of make-believe, but it also seems to want Rougemont to be a hero, whether for adventures he didn’t have or for having the temerity of telling them as if he did—or perhaps for simply embodying the very principle of fiction: just because it didn’t happen that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

The New Haven Theater Company’s production of Shipwrecked! is a fun family outing, and good time spent away from screens and computer-generated entertainment—for the sake of entertainment generated by shared imagination. Truly.

New Haven Theater Company presents Shipwrecked! An Entertainment: The Amazing Adventures of Louis De Rougemont (As Told By Himself) By Donald Margulies Directed by Peter Chenot

Featuring: Christian Shaboo as Louis de Rougemont Cast: Jesse Gabbard, Drew Gray, Erich Greene, Katelyn Marshall, Margaret Mann, Mallory Pellegrino Trevor Williams; Projection Design: Drew Gray; Stage Manager: Allyson Kaechele; Light Board Op: Mary Tedford

Thurs, May 1 and Thurs, May 8: 8 pm Fri, May 2 and Fri, May 9: 8 pm Sat, May 3 and Sat, May 10: 5 pm and 8 pm New Haven Theater Company at The English Building Markets 839 Chapel Street, New Haven $20, adults; $12, students, children

Note: The 8pm show on Saturday 5/10 will be a Pay What You Can performance. Secure your admission with a $5 online reservation, and then pay what you can at the door.

For tickets and information:new haven theater company

Carlotta Festival: New Plays Soon to Open

Carlotta is coming! The annual festival of new plays by the three playwrights graduating from Yale School of Drama—this year, Hansol Jung, Mary Laws, Kate Tarker—opens next week, May 9th and continues till May 16th. The plays are directed by the three graduating directors whose thesis shows were staged earlier this school year: Cole Lewis, who directed Dürrenmatt’s The Visit, directs Jung’s Cardboard Piano, Katherine McGerr, who directed Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, directs Laws’ Bird Fire Fly, and Dustin Wills, who directed Barrie’s Peter Pan, directs Tarker’s Thunderbodies.

According to Hansol Jung, the plays for this year’s Carlotta began as “Not-Carlotta Plays”—for their final play to be produced as students at YSD, all three playwrights returned, as chance would have it, to plays written in their second year for a workshop with Sarah Ruhl; at the time, none were consciously writing a play for Carlotta, nor felt the plays would eventually become their Carlotta plays. Working on the plays in such close proximity may have had its effect, however, as all three plays are concerned to some degree with war, and each features a soldier amongst its characters.

The inspiration for Jung’s play came from documentaries she had watched about “The Bang Bang Club”—a group of photographers who placed themselves in harms’ way to take hard-hitting photographs of parts of Africa facing war and famine. Jung also points to the viral online video about Joseph Kony and his depredations, involving child soldiers and other crimes against humanity. At the time when Carlotta proposals were due, Jung “had three plays, in various states of draft, on the table.” Director Lewis and dramaturg Whitney Dibo, Co-Artistic Director of Yale Cabaret 46, as well as faculty advisors, were unanimous in seeing Cardboard Piano as the play Jung should go with.

Jung says the play “gravitates toward trauma”; Cardboard Piano begins on New Year’s Eve, 2000, in a cathedral where two teen-aged girls, one the daughter of missionaries, have gone to unite themselves in marriage, only to be interrupted by child soldiers, hiding out. Part two opens, after an intermission, 14 years later as the girls, women now, return to the scene. For Jung, one challenge in writing the play is its strict adherence to “the unities” of time, place, and duration. Each part occurs in one location and in real time, offering “a day in the life” quality that should also resonate, in the second part, as a recognition scene with “super high stakes.” Large in scope and execution, the play retains something of the stagecraft minimalism that Jung prefers.

Jung worked as a director’s assistant in South Korea before coming to the States, where she received an MFA in Directing at Penn State before embarking on play-writing. She has done extensive work with musicals and always finds a place for song in her plays, but none so far have been musicals—though she is working on a musical side project at present. Her play’s title comes from a story told to calm one of the soldiers, and she finds in the image of a fragile, artful thing that can be destroyed but also restored a figure for the effect her play achieves.

Cardboard Piano plays Fri, 5/9; Mon, 5/12; Thurs, 5/15, at 8 p.m. and Wed, 5/14, at 2 p.m.

Mary Laws’ play Bird Fire Fly departs rather notably from the three unities. A short play in three parts, with a cast of three male actors, Bird Fire Fly’s tripartite title indicates the three distinct segments of the play, the 1st, “Bird,” depicting children, the 2nd, “Fire,” young adults, and “Fly,” soldiers.

“The three character names stay the same,” Laws says, though they are not the same people nor played, from section to section, by the same actor. The choice to avoid even the most basic unity of character identity was spurred by Laws’ interest in creating “a larger landscape less about individuals, and in following the arc of an experience.” The play, in her view, depends more on its poetry, its symbols and metaphors, rather than on static characterization. “There’s a contained story in each part, each a piece of the puzzle” that is the question of the whole play.

Of her plays that might have worked for Carlotta, Laws chose the one she wrote in the same workshop with Sarah Ruhl that spawned the other Carlotta plays this year. Laws finds the play well-suited to the Carlotta format, and is excited by her “last chance” at YSD to work with director Katherine McGerr. The violence in the play—Laws says her theme is “crushed innocence”—is necessary because, Laws says, the play treats “things that scare me and provoke questions I might not know how to ask in real life.” The presence of war in our time is one such frightening aspect of modern life, and Laws aims for a cathartic exploration of her theme, which may leave the audience somewhat troubled. Her second-year play, Blueberry Toast, was violent in a more satiric way, and—as directed by Dustin Wills—went for extremes of behavior.

Key to Bird Fire Fly is its tempo and rhythm, in Laws’ view of her work. And to achieve her ends she’s willing to take risks with the conventions. Educated at Baylor in Texas, her home state, Laws was encouraged by generous teachers to write plays and then worked for three years at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in New York to hone her craft further. She recently had the experience of seeing an early play of hers worked on in a drama class at Baylor and looks forward to the day when one of her plays will be given a full production in Texas, where theater, she says, is an important part of the local culture.

Bird Fire Fly plays Sat, 5/10, and Wed, 5/14, at 8 p.m., and Tues, 5/13, and Fri, 5/16, at 2 p.m.

Kate Tarker calls her play Thunderbodies “a fun play” and “a little war comedy.” Originating in the same workshop class with her Carlotta colleagues, the play received a reading with professional actors and was viewed by everyone as “clearly my breakthrough play.” The anarchic style of the play was nurtured by the Clown class Tarker took with Christopher Bayes, YSD’s master of extremely energetic comedy. At ninety minutes, Thunderbodies is “an epic one act” consisting of separate scenes that “come together at the end.” The approach is satiric, “topsy-turvy,” with “lots of physical comedy, body talk, and lower body energy.”

The play derives from both physical and intellectual inspirations. Written when, in fall of her 2nd year, she broke her foot, the play was influenced by an experience that, Tarker says, made her much more aware of her body and the physics of doing formerly simple tasks. At the same time she was reading M. M. Bakhtin’s study of Rabelais, in which Bakhtin formulates his ideas of the “carnivalesque” as a subversive force and the “grotesque body” as a means of liberating that force. Reading that work, Tarker says, gave her “more permission to create ravenous characters.” And to set her play in what she calls “the medieval now.”

With her background in visual art, Tarker comes to theater from a somewhat different perspective and says she likes to write about “outsiders looking in.” Her “origin story” as a playwright, she says, occurred when she went to an African chimpanzee sanctuary to work on a visual art project. For half of her time there, the art supplies did not arrive and so she spent a lot of time writing detailed journal entries. The act of writing took her toward other interests, such as the varied arts approach the Interlochen Arts Academy, her high school in Michigan, fostered. In addition to play-writing, while at Yale she directed a play by Phillip Howze at the Cabaret and acted in a show, The Most Beautiful Thing in the World, devised with Gabriel Levey, this past fall.

Thunderbodies plays Sun, May 11, Tues, May 13, and Fri, May 16, at 8 p.m., and Thurs, May 15, at 2 p.m.

This year’s Carlotta plays, while having in common, perhaps, a willingness to address the theme of war to provoke rawer or more visceral emotions from the viewer, take three decidedly different approaches to their themes and offer three unique theatrical experiences. The shows, besides adding to the challenging work of the three graduating directors, feature casts of first and second-year actors, many of whom have been seen in thesis shows or at the Cabaret, such as Celeste Arias, Aaron Bartz, James Cusati-Moyer, Melanie Field, Christopher Geary, Jonathan Majors, Julian Elijah Martinez, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Tom Pecinka, Bradley James Tejeda, Shaunette Renée Wilson.

Look forward to interesting offerings this year at the Carlotta Festival of New Plays.

The Carlotta Festival of New Plays Yale School of Drama May 9-May 16, 2014 The Iseman Theater 1156 Chapel Street

[Note: an earlier version of this article erred in the chronology of Kate Tarker's trip to the chimpanzee sanctuary (before college, not after), the location of her high school (Michigan not Colorado), and her studies at Reed (Literature-Theatre, not Visual Arts). Our apologies for any confusion.]

A Change is Gonna Come

Marcus Gardley’s The House That Will Not Stand, now playing at the Yale Rep, directed by Patricia McGregor, runs the audience through a range of emotions as we watch a household divided against itself try to find some common ground. Worked deeply into the texture of the play is a sense of the injustices done to African-Americans and to women in particular, beginning with the transition to “Americans.” Set in New Orleans in 1836, the play takes place about a generation after the Louisiana Purchase gave the U.S. dominion over Louisiana, and that meant that free-born women of color fell considerably in social standing. Gardley’s play treats of the class of women known as placées, who once, though colored mistresses of white men, enjoyed a status closer to equality in the old French New Orleans.

All that is changing with the generation of the young women in the play—Agnès (Tiffany Rachelle Stewart), Maude Lynn (Flor de Liz Perez), Odette (Joniece Abbott-Pratt)—daughters of Beartrice (Lizan Mitchell), a very proud placée whose white paramour, Lazare (Ray Reinhardt) lies in state in the parlor of her house as the play begins. Others in the house are Beartrice’s “crazy” sister Marie Josephine (Petronia Paley) and the strong, sly and eloquent housemaid Makeda (Harriett D. Foy), born a slave and hoping the death of Lazare—and the expected inheritance—will allow Beartrice to buy her freedom, as promised. Meanwhile, Agnès, the eldest daughter, wants nothing more than to become a placée and leave her mother’s house.

The house is key to all this, not only as a structure which the living spirit of the deceased Lazare says he will crush, but in terms of the generations represented by this family. Marie Josephine wants nothing more than to run out to Congo Square and join a perhaps phantasmal drummer who calls for her; likewise, Odette seems likely to run wild if not kept under wraps. And, while Makeda is not above spells and calls to Papa Legba, a god associated with voodoo, Maude Lynn is a fervent Christian who views persecution by her sisters as a Christ-like ordeal. The comedy of the play, broad and lively at the start, creates a sense less of a house divided and more of a house fraught with absurdities.

At the center of the comic elements lies the catty relationship between Beartrice and her neighbor, and former bosom friend, La Veuve (Petronia Paley): the latter had designs on Lazare and now, after his death, has designs on his property. The legal, white wife of Lazare remains resolutely offstage, but La Veuve provides enough of a prickly presence to upset Beartrice’s claims.

Gardley’s busy play gives us set pieces to distinguish each character’s relation to the principle situation—which invites questions of sexual and racial politics. In Beartrice, we see a matriarch who can seem less than sympathetic but whose sense of grievance is great. Lizan Mitchell provides Beartrice with more sand and grit than steel, so that we never forget the shakiness of her status. At times, comic touches—such as her proclamations about her “pie”—seem to misfire as Mitchell is often more shrewish than shrewd. And yet one cannot discount her too easily as her final speech reaches through the ages with a power that puts one in mind of a deposed Lear raining curses. As La Veuve, Paley has the easier role of the grasping and cutting nemesis. Her other role, as Beartrice’s sister who is either mad or more spiritual—in this world, no one is without some belief in the otherworldly—is more amorphous. One senses that Gardley might intend the character to have more gravitas than she finds here.

Among the sisters, Perez comes off best as her role adds outright comedy to the situation; as the one-upping sisters out for a man—the never-seen but longed for Ramon Le Pip—Abbott-Pratt and Stewart never conjure enough mystique to make us choose sides, though Agnès is the more vapid. Both roles seem conveniences more than characters. The play’s strength comes down, ultimately, to Makeda, whose cry for freedom and very knowing view of her “superiors” gives the audience its primary catharsis. Throughout the play Foy’s performance is a focal point, and late in the play her character becomes larger than life and emblematic in a way that makes the climax of The House That Will Not Stand resonate with enough force to bring the house down.

Its mix of tones makes the play worth a second viewing, to grasp better where it’s going and how it gets there. The set (Antje Ellerman) and effects (Russell H. Champa, Lighting; Keith Townsend Obadike, Sound), and especially costumes (Katherine O’Neill), are fine, as ever with shows at Yale Rep, though certain moments, such as the appearance of Lazare’s ghost, lack atmosphere. Lively, vivid, with a host of surprising moments and a sharp eye for the inconsistencies of its time—and ours—on the matters of race, class, and gender, Marcus Gardley’s The House That Will Not Stand is a play that betters its production here, in a show that has traveled from Berkeley Rep, yet McGregor’s production does well at showing us the desperation and delusion beneath the willed charm and vanishing roles of the Old South.

The House That Will Not Stand By Marcus Gardley Directed by Patricia McGregor

Choregrapher: Paloma McGregor; Scenic Designer: Antje Ellermann; Costume Designer: Katherine O’Neill; Lighting Designer: Russell H. Champa; Sound Designer and Original Composition: Keith Townshend Obadike; Vocal Arrangments and Additional Original Composition: Harriet D. Foy; Casting Directors: Tara Rubin, Amy Potozkin; Stage Manager: James Mountcastle

Yale Repertory Theatre April 18-May 10, 2014

Brother's Keeper

The final show of the Yale Cabaret’s 46th season brings it all back home. The play, The Brothers Size, was written by its prize-winning and celebrated author, Tarell Alvin McCraney, while a third-year playwright at YSD, in 2007, and the current production is directed and acted by First Years in the program. The effect is one of demonstrating that the play belongs here, at the Cab. And that’s largely because the three actors in the show—Jonathan Majors, Galen Kane, Julian Elijah Martinez—feel such a strong connection to McCraney’s play. One has the sense that The Brothers Size is a defining text for these actors and they, and director Luke Harlan, do the play all due reverence.

It’s a play of relationships, not only of the two brothers Size—Ogun, the elder (Majors), and Oshoosi (Kane)—and Oshoosi’s former cellmate, Elegba (Martinez), but also of Yoruban gods (Orisha). In the cosmic scheme of things, Ogun and Oshoosi are inseparable brothers, the elder a god of “iron, vehicles, weapons, and war” (according to the playbill by production dramaturg, Taylor Barfield), and the latter a god of hunting. Legba, on the other hand, is that figure common to almost all religions: the trickster, the god of the crossroads, the amorphous figure that has a tendency to mix things up. That’s his role here, too, and one of the interests of the play is how McCraney makes this character—played very seductively by Martinez—both a figure for necessary change but also for danger.

The relation between the brothers is grudging. Majors is very strong in delivering the no-nonsense side of Ogun, who still rides his brother for his two years in prison, and who looks upon him as any boss—Ogun runs a car repair shop—would a feckless, lazy employee. As Oshoosi, Kane has the more difficult role to get across if only because, while we tend to sympathize with the younger brother, we might not trust him either. It helps that Kane gives Oshoosi a true gravitas that makes him seem anything but frivolous and deceitful. Rather than a schemer, he’s a man struggling to figure out what the world might have to offer him. Time inside has given him ambitions that stretch beyond a car shop, even if he might have no idea how to get a start.

Enter Elegba as the kind of character that seems to promise not only an individual worth—praising Oshoosi’s singing voice, for instance—but also the means to shed shackles once and for all. Such freedom takes the shape of, what else, one’s own “ride.” A car to get away in. But in this world—abutting the Gulf of Mexico—“getaway” also means running from the law. Indeed, there’s a great bonding moment among the three men when Elegba characterizes his recent encounter with the local sheriff, a black man who uses his status to condemn just about any other black man he meets. It’s an example of how racism phases into the system to the point that oppression by “the masters” might even extend to one’s own race. In a sense, McCraney is using African archetypes to add dimension to his interrogation of racial stereotypes.

A strength of the latter intention is the music of the play's language and its power as a means of personal expression. All three characters speak in a lyrical manner that owes not a little to August Wilson’s pioneering ability to work everyday speech into a powerful instrument. In McCraney's world, the high and the lowly are on an even playing field and everything is stylized and heightened. The play also boasts a percussion accompaniment by Mike Mills that adds drama and accompanies vigorous set-pieces of movement at strategic moments. Music—specifically Otis Redding’s “(Try a Little) Tenderness”—is used to entertaining effect when the Brothers Size mimic the song like they did as kids. At such times the bond of brothers is strong and it’s that bond that becomes McCraney’s over-riding theme, particularly during Ogun’s aria about his responsibility toward Oshoosi, played with a very affecting sense of assertion, complaint, and pleading by Majors.

The Brothers Size is a play of rich suggestion more than a play of plot. Much of that suggestion comes from the archetypes behind these characters, giving us cause to reflect on their roles in our modern conceptions of ourselves. While these figures are not as familiar in the literary tradition as Greek gods and the like, McCraney makes the case that, for his African-American characters particularly, the brother gods that The Brothers Size recalls have a meaningful ethical dimension.

The play marks a very strong finish for this year’s ambitious Yale Cabaret season, ending not with a whimper, but a bang.

The Brothers Size By Tarell Alvin McCraney Directed by Luke Harlan

Dramaturg: Taylor Barfield; Set: Kevin Klakouski; Lights: Andrew F. Griffin; Sound: Pornchanok (Nok) Kanchanabanca; Costumes: Montana Levi Blanco; Projections: Rasean Davonte Johnson; Associate Projections: Elizabeth Mak; Stage Manager: Anita Shastri; Producers: Alyssa Simmons, Melissa Zimmerman

Yale Cabaret April 24-26, 2014

A Challenging Musical Comes to Long Wharf

For James Sampliner, musical director for Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, which opens previews May 7 at the Long Wharf, directed by Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein, taking on the assignment is “a major milestone.” Sampliner, who will be performing the show eight times a week, conducting from his piano’s keyboard, sees the complicated and varied score as both an immense pleasure and a challenge.

In Sampliner’s view, the show is a test of a musician’s stamina as, among devotees of musical theater, The Last Five Years is known for its demanding piano score. What’s more, the show is a “two-hander,” meaning that there are only two characters on stage throughout, and the entirety of the show consists of the songs each character sings about their relationship. For Cathy (Katie Rose Clarke), the story of her relationship with Jamie (Adam Halpin) is told from their break-up backwards to her first date with him, while for Jamie the sequence follows a chronology of first to last.

The challenges of the show, for a musical director, entail not only the physical task of playing the show each night—which Sampliner views as a good cardiovascular workout—but also reacting sensitively, even intuitively, to the singers/actors as they tell their parallel stories in song. Sampliner has never worked at the Long Wharf before but has worked with Brown on the latter’s Honeymoon in Vegas adaptation, and feels that his grasp of Brown’s music is important to the show’s delicate dynamic.

“Jason’s music is very carefully written,” Sampliner stresses, so that the musical director’s task is not so much interpreting the music as communicating to the other musicians the different emphases of the actors in performance. One begins to see at once what he means by “complicated.”

Drawing on blues, jazz, rock’n’roll, and classical techniques—all the musical forms he and Brown share a love for—the show, Sampliner says, is “one I needed to do.” Rehearsing with Edelstein, Clarke and Halpin, they have been asking lots of questions of the material, finding their unique way of bringing the show to life. “It’s not so much a question of new layers that other productions haven’t discovered, but asking ‘what do you think this is about,’” finding their own answers to the questions that arise.

The play’s structure is “a brilliant idea,” Sampliner finds, with Cathy moving from her lowest point to her highest and Jamie following the opposite trajectory. “They sing together at the middle point between the two extremes,” and each song offers its individual challenges, so that, for Sampliner, it’s not a question of finding the show’s highpoints, as each song has its highpoints and its rewards. “In so many ways,” Sampliner says, “The Last Five Years is Brown’s magnum opus,” the kind of musical that has musical directors “champing at the bit” for a chance to perform it.

When it comes to conducting, Sampliner finds that being able to conduct his ensemble of six players from the keyboard is the kind of skill necessary at a time when theater demands versatility and smaller orchestras. “It’s not uncommon,” he says and rising to the challenge of playing as well as conducting has him very excited by the opportunity to be, as he says, “the bus driver.”

“At the meet-and-greet when rehearsals began, everyone asks one another what they do, and I like to say ‘I’m the bus driver.’” Making sure the show gets where it needs to go and that all parts of this tuneful, challenging, funny, and moving show get there in concert is not unlike the task of steering an unwieldy vehicle to its proper destination, come what may.

Meanwhile, fans of musical theater and of Jason Robert Brown—currently enjoying a hit on Broadway with The Bridges of Madison County, and likened to Stephen Sondheim in his crowd-pleasing grasp of musical theater—should be lining up to take the ride.

The Last Five Years Written and composed by Jason Robert Brown Directed by Gordon Edelstein

The Long Wharf Theatre

May 7-June 1, 2014

Tuesdays and Wednesdays: 7 pm Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays: 8 pm Wednesdays, Saturdays, Sundays: 2 pm

Saints Alive!

Ryan Campbell, a second-year playwright in YSD, is a ballsy writer. A New Saint for a New World, now playing at the Yale Cabaret, begins with the premise of Joan of Arc returned to earth in 2010 to “have fun and hang out,” to make up for the bad shit that happened to her the first time, back in the 15th century, and it ends with a vision of God, in a cameo by the Big Man himself, confessing he’s a bit at loose ends. Campbell’s play, directed by second-year director Sara Holdren, is equal parts audacious comedy and earnest searching. The opening scene between Joan and her boyfriend, Bott (Aaron Bartz, suitably bemused), smacks of those sit-coms where “the wife” has to explain something, such as “I’m really a witch” (Bewitched) or a spy, or what-have-you. Here, the revelation that she’s really that Joan of Arc inspires comic understatement and characterizations of the French aristocracy and Churchmen that would feel natural in The Sopranos. As Joan, Maura Hooper has an appealing way of beseeching her boyfriend’s suspension of disbelief, in the character of her alias, while at the same time becoming more and more emphatically Joan. It’s a great tour de force of the off-hand casualness of today’s speech meeting the inspired dicta of the Age of Faith.

In some ways, the play never quite recovers from that outrageous opening gambit, but each of its scenes—black-out vignettes more than a continuous play, we might say—has something to offer that extends the story beyond that initial comic exploration. Joan, who got returned to earth on the condition that she not stir up any trouble, can’t help herself. Eventually she’s started another Civil War in these formerly United States. The actual terms of the battle go by a bit quickly, but the gist is that Joan, facing interrogation, has fought for the people against the kinds of power mongers who think they “represent God.” She’s being held in Arizona, so draw your own conclusions. Ariana Venturi does a great job as a chilling captor: it’s like facing capital charges at the hands of your Sunday School teacher. A steelier sense of self-righteousness, matched with meek “doing my duty” candor, would be hard to imagine.

That scene does go on a for a bit, but then there’s another explosion of comedy: Christopher Geary as a pissed-off Archangel forced to visit Joan in her holding cell, accompanied by his graphic-novel-reading sidekick (James Cusati-Moyer). Geary manages to spout exposition with the mounting ire of one who finds the situations he’s describing increasingly maddening, including the info that God has decided to go with a new start-up universe he’s just devised. Seems Earth won’t be his favorite toy for much longer.

Which leads to that new world, Kia, where Joan gets to pass some time in anything but bliss. Though we meet—in a very Dr. Who-ish vision and visitation—Okun (Annie Hägg and Elizabeth Mak), one of the oddly serene double-beings that inhabit this world, and who tries to placate Joan with offers of the goods on demand, once a warrior always a warrior, and our Joan is restless to be up to something more than “hanging out and having fun.”

Finally, looking like a coke-dusted film producer or some other Player, Jeremy Funke, in a special guest appearance, shows up to beseech Joan to play his game, offering intensity, sincerity, and a cosmic sense of detachment. It’s definitely a grand payoff.

Well-cast, well-played, with a versatile set (Jean Kim, Izmir Ickbal) that looks like bargain-basement Star Trek and costumes (Fabian Aguilar) of tacky splendor, New Saint is fun to look at as it jabs at our modern lack of belief and hope, giving us a gutsy heroine aching to achieve something in a universe that may be rather less hieratic than it was in the Middle Ages. And, like other after-worldly comedies we could mention, New Saint gets its laughs from the incongruity between our suppositions about the Grand Scheme and the way it actually tends to play out. More of that “we get the afterlife we deserve”—which now includes “after-earth” and other universes—which has been somewhere at the heart of the whole problem of how to live righteously, in principio.

An amusing, irreverent, and relevant little gem for the Easter season.

A New Saint for a New World By Ryan Campbell Directed by Sara Holdren

Dramaturg: Helen Jaksch; Set: Jean Kim, Izmir Ickbal; Lights: Oliver Wason, Caitlin Smith Rapoport; Sound: Sinan Zafar; Costumes: Fabian Aguilar; Projections: Joe Moro; Technical Director: Alix Reynolds; Stage Manager: Sally Shen; Producer: Sally Shen

Yale Cabaret April 17-19, 2014

Shipwrecked! with New Haven Theater Company

Ensconced in their home at the back of the English Markets, the New Haven Theater Company now have the rights—and the right space—for their production of New Haven resident Donald Margulies’ Shipwrecked! An Entertainment: The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (As Told By Himself). Margulies, a Pulitzer-winning playwright and a professor at Yale, first debuted the play in 2008, and there was a Long Wharf production that same year. Among the audience of the latter was Peter Chenot, who will be directing the NHTC production, which opens two weeks from today. For Chenot, the show accentuates the idea of the power of the imagination. With all the mechanics of the theater occurring onstage—including the sound effects of Foley art—the audience is not asked to suspend their disbelief in the usual fashion. Everything that Rougemont (Christian Shaboo) tells us, in his fantastic adventures involving, among other things, an attack by a giant octopus, is portrayed for the audience not as if it’s real but as if it’s an elaborate act of storytelling, happening before our very eyes.

Chenot was drawn to the play—which NHTC was initially slated to produce last spring at the Whitney Arts Center before the rights became unavailable—by the kinds of challenges and rewards it presents. It forces the troupe “to be more creative onstage” as well as “adding improv techniques” to their rehearsals—techniques that are part of the background of Chenot’s involvement with the group, as he’s a veteran of The Funny Stages, the improv comedy group that included Shaboo and Erich Greene, also a featured player in Shipwrecked! Also in the show is Margaret Mann, who directed Almost, Maine in the winter and was in the cast of NHTC’s production of Our Town, as was Mallory Pellegrino, also in Shipwrecked! and Almost, Maine. The NHTC regulars are joined by three debuts with the company: Jesse Gabbard, Katelyn Marshall, and Trevor Williams.

NHTC’s work on Our Town is an appropriate reference point, as Margulies himself references Thornton Wilder’s great play in his intro to Shipwrecked! The concept of theater freed of the effort to replicate realism in favor of imaginative flight unites both. As Chenot says, the stagehands are part of the play and seeing Drew Gray’s projections from an old-time magic lantern, or puppets made from found objects in two big steamer trunks onstage lets us know that the show is partly a matter of a willful redirection of reality. That element is significant for the story of Rougemont, a real person of Victorian England whose memoir chronicling his adventures was celebrated in his day, only to find the public turn against him when doubts about the veracity of his tale began to circulate.

Chenot likens Rougemont’s tale to the Odyssey where, famously, Odysseus tells his own “sea story” of strange lands and fantastic creatures. Uniting both is a love of storytelling for its own sake and the ability of a sailor to spin a yarn for the sake of his own skill. “For the players,” Chenot says, “it doesn’t matter if it’s true.” The troupe becomes “a family of believers in Rougemont” who are interested in the value of a good story and not in duping a gullible public.

NHTC is aiming the show for ages 8 and up, and indeed Shipwrecked! is the kind of show that might be said to be aimed at the child in us all, the one who is willing to be awed by reality’s potential to be more than we expect it to be. Is Rougemont a charlatan? Only if he doesn’t deliver the kind of entertainment we expect of the fabulous and incredible.

As Chenot comments, Shaboo, onstage the entire time as Rougemont, has to keep us enthralled and willing to follow his lead. A bit perhaps like the main character in NHTC’s most recent production, The Magician, Rougemont is trying to convince us that magic is what happens in our own minds, and this time all the sleight-of-hand will be right before our eyes.

Shipwrecked! An Entertainment: The Amazing Adventures of Louis De Rougemont (As Told By Himself) By Donald Margulies Directed by Peter Chenot

Showtimes: Thurs, May 1 and Thurs, May 8: 8 pm Fri, May 2 and Fri, May 9: 8 pm Sat, May 3 and Sat, May 10: 5 pm and 8 pm

New Haven Theater Company At The English Building Markets 839 Chapel Street, New Haven

$20, adults; $12, students, children

For tickets and information:new haven theater company

Library Event: Master Harold...and the Boys Film and Discussion

Mitchell Library, 37 Harrison Street, New Haven Saturday, April 12 @ 2pm

Join us for a film screening of Athold Fugard’s Master Harold… and the Boys, adapted from his play into a television movie in 1985. Directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg and starring Matthew Broderick, Zakes Mokae, and John Kani, Fugard’s play was produced at Yale Repertory Theatre in 1982 prior to its Broadway premiere, where it ran for 344 performances.

Taking place in South Africa during apartheid era, Master Harold shows how institutionalized racism, bigotry or hatred affects those who live under it.

Discussion facilitated by Long Wharf Theater staff will follow screening.

Also: Athol Fugard stars in The Shadow of the Hummingbird at Long Wharf Theater, March 26–April 27. Free tickets are available with your library card (first come, first served) at any New Haven Free Public Library branch

Program is made possible by a grant from the William Caspar Graustein Foundation.

Ecce Puer

Athol Fugard’s The Shadow of the Hummingbird, now in its world premiere at the Long Wharf Theatre, is a short play that enacts a meditation on a number of things that matter: the nature of reality, the nature of the imagination, the ties that bind us to others across generations and the ties that bind us to ourselves across decades, and the “calling” of death.

Fugard, on stage throughout the entire play, plays an aged writer known as Oupa, as his only interlocutor is his ten-year-old grandson, Boba (played by the twins, Aidan and Dermot McMillan). Before Fugard’s play proper, we’re presented an introductory scene, created by Paula Fourie using extracts from Fugard’s unpublished notebooks, in which Oupa, much as does the figure in Krapp’s Last Tape, “replays” his past in his own words, as he searches for a passage about his shadow. The context for the interactions between Oupa and Boba, then, is very much the world as known and encountered by Fugard himself, including his regular attention to birds.

The play could be called a self-portrait, and also a dramatization of the final things, or final lessons. In other words, we are late in Oupa’s life and, while the scenes we witness between the grandfather and his grandson are like any other day, any other visit, there is a finality to them that impresses upon us the point of their interaction.

That point comes from the matter that Oupa discusses with Boba: the question of which is more delightful, the vision of an actual hummingbird, seen outside in the garden, or the vision of the shadow of the hummingbird, hovering on the wall in Oupa’s study. Boba, naturally, prefers the former, but Oupa begs to differ, with recourse to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave from the Republic.

What Fugard and his director Gordon Edelstein stage, then, is not only the very affectionate banter and comic swordplay and rough-housing between a doting grandfather and his grandson, complete with shared cookies and looks askance at Boba’s father for whom Oupa seems to have scant affection, but also a lesson on reality and imagination in which imagination becomes the key figure.

In Plato’s allegory, persons who have lived their entire lives in shackles in a cave, staring at a wall, take the shadows thrown upon that wall—shadows of whatever passes between their backs and a great fire deep in the cave—for real things. They only see the shadows and never what causes the shadows. The question then becomes: what happens if one should escape the cave and get out into the real world of sunlit objects.

Oupa takes Boba along this line—inspired by his memory of Boba, as an infant, trying to pick up a shadow on the floor—to show that the actual hummingbird would be a glorious vision after only subsisting on its shadow. Boba finds the story “not very good,” which irritates the old man. So he has to try again to explain what his own allegorical message might be. With recourse to the words of William Blake, Oupa states his intention: to return to childish wonder, to be like Boba as a child, believing a shadow might be real, to see, as Blake stated the visionary’s gift, “eternity in a grain of sand.”

This is where Fugard would leave us, we might say, trying hard to rediscover “vision.” To see again as children—a prescription for entering “the kingdom of heaven,” in one formulation—but also to regain the sense of a world of mystery and enchantment, a world not “explained” by rationally arrived at properties and given long Latin terms of demarcation.

Oupa himself jokes that this might be a way of interpreting “senile dementia,” when, in Shakespeare’s phrase, “an old man is twice a child,” but by wishing for something else, a moment of belief in the shadow as real, Fugard’s Oupa becomes an apologist for theater and the arts in general, for he would return us to the time when we could believe in fictive things as if they were actual life, maybe more real than life itself, in our imaginations. It is a romantic notion, certainly, but the play, in giving us this disquisition as an elderly man sporting with his attentive grandson, lets us grasp as well how the important lessons of life occur in intimate exchanges, one-on-one.

The sense of the play’s intimacy is one of its strengths. In Eugene Lee’s handsome set, Oupa’s den or study is given a very definite presence, particularly as Oupa spends the introductory scene interacting with its many props—glasses, books, journals, eyeglasses—to create a sense of a man alone at home, performing his personal rituals. The effects of the hummingbird, in the vision that comes to Oupa late in the play, has both the sense of an actual event and of a longed-for fantasy. Such theatrical touches help to make the play live as an actual “day in the life” as well as “in the life of the mind.”

Add to that Fugard’s very natural and reassuring performance as Oupa—in the opening section, it’s as if he might invite us to a seat on the set or stroll into the audience to chat with us. It’s not so much a “breaking of the fourth wall,” as it is a suggestion that this writer feels himself to be always attended by an audience with whom he is on very cordial terms. The McMillan brothers, as Boba, have the grace of youth and clear, distinct voices able to register the kind of patient acceptance that children tend to extend to the very old. Boba, we suspect, is used to his grandfather saying quizzical things, sometimes amusing him, sometimes taking him to task—as here—for not grasping his meaning. What comes across best is the puzzle of existence as Oupa continues to ponder it, trying, late in the day, to impress his vision of it on the youngest mind he can find. Fugard rightly chooses the age of reason—10—to suggest that only the very youngest rational mind might accept without too much question an old man’s fancy.

The Shadow of the Hummingbird is lyrical, wise, and deceptively simple. Not a bad way to go.

The Shadow of the Hummingbird By Athol Fugard Introductory Scene by Paula Fourie with extracts from Athol Fugard’s unpublished notebooks Directed by Gordon Edelstein

Set Design: Eugene Lee; Costume Design: Susan Hilferty; Lighting Design: Michael Chybowski; Sound Design: John Gromada; Production Stage Manager: Jason Kaiser

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

Long Wharf Theatre March 26-April 27, 2014

Hotel California

OMG what an energetic show! The Mystery Boy, currently playing at the Yale Cabaret, is director/actor Chris Bannow’s adaptation of a novel by Jacqueline Weaver, his 11 year-old sister, a show short on logic but long on wildly imaginative interactions and adventures. Staged very cunningly by Bannow and Helen Jakcsch, the show is like a master class in how to put on a play where all characters are onstage all the time and all necessary prop wrangling and costume changes take place before our eyes—though you’ll have to be attentive to catch it all.

The story starts, with all cast members taking round-robin turns in the hot seat to read from the text, with the rom-com possibilities of girlhood and “the boyfriend code,” and quickly shifts from doubts about the “too good to be true” boyfriend to the travails of what is real and what isn’t. Crammed with a host of horrific possibilities, the show becomes a dizzying dash through the psyche of a girl on the edge. Her only constant companion in all this is her smartphone, which seems to never let her down. Justin, the first boyfriend, who almost loses her through his dim sense of how to carry on a text conversation, becomes her stalwart support as well, though he has to be one of the most amorphous characters ever.

The play’s goal seems to be to keep the audience as “confizzled” as its lithe protagonist, Lola (Ashton Heyl), running madly from romantic scene to sinister scene and back again. Along the way are less than comforting run-ins with her mother (Jaksch), her waffle-chomping brother (Ashley Chang), and zips up and down the elevator (she’s staying in a hotel California on a trip, in more ways than one, from Oregon) in search of the elusive thirteenth floor. Oh, and did I mention the sound effects are also performed onstage and seem to act almost as commentary. The “pings” of text messages are particularly effective.

As Lola, Heyl is breathless, wide-eyed, and probably any young girl’s dream of what she’ll look like one day. She keeps the play in focus, for all its leaps, by never losing her Nancy Drewish, this will all make sense in the end gumption. The able support comes from cast members willing to become whatever is necessary. Who can play a romantic interest that becomes a bestie (BFF) that begins to transform, through make-up, dress, and wig, into a best girlfriend (BGF)? Dustin Wills, that’s who, while also setting the record for the number of times one can run upstairs, through the studio and down the backstairs to simulate someone running from Oregon to California. And as “the Mystery Boy” himself, Phillip Howze is hilarious as possible ghost, possible killer, possible threatening romantic attachment, and all CA slacker no matter what.

There are squirt guns, ray guns, the incredible shifting table that does everything but levitate, and any number of laughs, references, and hair-breadth escapes that will likely have you—or the young-at-heart amongst us at least—ROFLMAO. A word on the dialogue: it’s rife with the text-message terms and phrases that are sometimes interpreted and sometimes not, adding a note of authenticity to the entire odyssey because, y’know, if someone texts it, it must be true. If you like B movies and the flutter of first romance, this show’s for you.

And what happens next? Maybe Lola should go online so we can follow her future adventures on Twitter. #girluninterrupted

The Mystery Boy Conceived by Chris Bannow Directed by Chris Bannow and Helen Jaksch

Ensemble: Chris Bannow, Ashley Chang, Ashton Heyl, Phillip Howze, Helen Jaksch, Dustin Wills; Set: Alexander Woodward; Lights: Joey Moro; Sound: Kate Marvin; Costumes: Sophie von Haselberg; Technical Director: Scott Keith; Stage Managers: Ryan M. Davis, Taylor Barfield; Producer: Kee-Yoon Nahm

Yale Cabaret April 3-5, 2014

Fighting City Hall

Timothy J. Guillot’s We Fight We Die, directed by Jiréh Breon Holder, at the Cab this weekend, can be accused of the old “bait and switch.” It begins as what seems to be a mythopoeic rendering of a street artist, Q (Julian Elijah Martinez), complete with a chorus in masks (Isabel Richardson, Andrew Williams, Taylor Barfield, Emily Zemba) sounding assertive couplets, then becomes something much less interesting, though well-intentioned. The best part of the play is that opening as we see Q making epic-scale graffiti art while the cops are closing in, the chorus is commenting, and the projections by Yale School of Art students flash across an eye-catching set (Jean Kim) of mirrors and cinderblocks and painted shapes and slogans.

Guillot’s idea of where to take this tale is straight to clichéville, with Bradley Tejeda doing all he can with Wits, the loveable, doting, simple-minded sidekick patented by Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause, and Chalia La Tour, trying even harder to do something with her role as Evil Bureaucrat, or Mayor. You know before the night is out there will be revelations of domestic violence or some other familiar trope of the hell that inspires the reckless flight of the rare artist, especially the kind that has to shoulder socio-economic grievances. Those grievances should be enough to fuel the anger and art of Q, but, no, we need soap-opera melodrama to top it off.

Along the way you may find yourself wondering about things like: why Q, who very reluctantly accepts a community service art project to stay out of jail, makes it all about Wits, then doesn’t level with the guy; and why Wits, shut out of that place wherein he did find much favor, should go to his bro’s enemy to strike a deal. It all seems an excuse to give the Mayor more speeches as if they actually say something. Q and the others speak in couplets except when they don’t, and it would be great to have a bit more of Q representing. Instead he becomes a sort of conscience-stricken con-man, conning his brother, conning the Mayor, and bringing down tragedy upon himself.

This is one of those Cab shows where, if you can ignore the script, you can still find things to admire. I’ve already mentioned that great set backdrop, and the playing space is spare but effective, with just enough sense of the ruins of a classical past mixing with the ruins of our casuistical present. The art projections (Rasean Davonte Johnson) and the work of Yale School of Art students—Devon Simoyama, Quinn Gorbutt, Jordan Casteel, and Awol Erizku—add much visual interest, as does Joey Moro’s Lighting. Martinez’s performance is well-choreographed, with very expressive body language and voice mannerisms that are ultimately the best part of the role. And Tejeda is nothing if not memorable as Wits, the role that is the heart of the play, which Tejeda plays with a convincing naturalness.

More naturalism and fewer efforts at artful vocabulary would help We Fight We Die, a fantasy about street artists that aims to be a thought-provoking piece about community art, censorship, art’s outsider authority, and other matters to stimulate classroom discussion, but, to my mind, gives short shrift to effective dramatic situations.

We Fight We Die By Timothy J. Guillot Directed by Jiréh Breon Holder

Dramaturg: David Clauson; Set: Jean Kim; Lights: Joey Moro; Sound: Gahyae Ryu; Costumes: Sydney Gallas; Projections: Rasean Davonte Johnson; Technical Director: Samantha Lazar; Stage Manager: Steven Koernig; Producer: Annie Middleton; Yale School of Art Consultant: Jordan Casteel; Featured yale School of Art Muralist: Devan Shimoyama; Featured Yale School of Art Graffiti: Quinn Gorbutt, Jordan Casteel; Artists: Devan Shimoyama; Awol Erizku

Yale Cabaret March 27-29, 2014

Priorities

James Berger’s first book, Prior (BlazeVOX, 2013), is not so much a collection as it is a condensed career. Drawing on decades of poems, Berger compresses his past into a book. We don’t read for a dominant theme but rather to see the different threads revealed. And yet this is also not a “selected,” where the volumes drawn from would be clearly marked. Berger has compiled his poems, we might say, and chosen an arrangement for them. And that’s what we read. That said, we can isolate different versions of Berger the poet, and different interests over time. The book is divided into four sections, linked by recurring short poems entitled, severally, “Prior to Earth,” “Prior to Air,” “Prior to Water,” but the sections seem to blend the kinds of manner to which Berger is prone. There is the abstract poet, pursuing a more disembodied style, where a sense of language is the key pursuit; there is the family man poet, who reacts to a death, to the birth and growth of his children, who reflects on his sisters, and explores the imaginative dimensions of marriage; there is the discontented commentator on culture and, to use the Onion’s phrase, “our dumb century,” a poet who finds little enough to praise and chafes at his status quo; then there is the more profound poet, who sees that the purpose of poetry, after all, is its ability to contain life and thought, the actual existence and the virtual existence. Poetry may be cloying if it tries to be wisdom literature, and Berger is too ironic toward language to endorse gestures too large, but moments of careful reflection surface due to the poet’s willingness to attend to the implications in a turn of phrase, a new shade of the mind.

In the first section, “In the Shape of Breathing,” the dominant mood is the poet’s discontentment with himself and his world. “He asks his father, ‘Am I Oedipal?’” Almost a joke, the question is answered, “Of course not, no one will harm you.” Which, of course, is a tremendous lie. The harm of attachment is interrogated again and again, as the poet tries on alternative lives (“There is always some slim girl”), which seem to include becoming a nature poet, and is haunted by “My sister and her beautiful serious face,” and reflects on, more than anything, the attitude one should wear toward a life that inevitably disappoints.

The section opens with a 10-part poem called “In the Shape of Breathing” (“What have I lost— / the whole fucking deal that’s what—“) that sets a tone anxious and defeated. Toward the end of the first section, “A Place to Start” alerts us to all the things the speaker doesn’t have to do or be: “live forever or be happy”; “I don’t have to be good in bed”; “I don’t have to exude anything.” The idea that “Life might have turned out differently” produces, we might say, mature reflection upon the poet’s task: “seeing it through / all the way / as it is.” Insisting “the imagination has no right / to metamorphosis,” we can see that, “Oedipal” or not, the poet is in a struggle with those who would use poetry as wish fulfillment, or as means to avoid or obscure “the deep, daily commitment to this life’s / limits and needs.”

Section II, “New Resolutions of Memory,” seems to kick back at the notion of a poetry adequate to life as it is lived. The title poem of the section plays with recurring phrases, detached from their referents, seemingly, but still able to be turned to account: “I’ve always found occasional schools / of children living in ruins, / hiding from vehicles. / Everything I’ve loved / will take you away from us.” The entire section is given over to a different sense of poetic possibility—“Word-photons,” “The only thing open is wild / experiment.” And yet a phrase on the first page of the section—“My heart accepts its pitch”—keeps open the sense that discourse on form and on the daily encounters with the assaults of our time (“The Children of Terror”) cannot distract, ultimately, from poetry as operations upon the self: “Tacit” considers as inadequate a theory of writing that has left out of account, till now, the human dimension of a family affliction, and “Epithalamium: The Contraption” has the courage to imagine marriage as a kind of surrealist machine, using all it comes upon in untold and unpredictable ways: “A million parts churn and fidget, we have no idea what’s going on.” Here, the anxious and defeated tone gives way to something more definite, grasped, perhaps, in the final line of “New Resolutions”: “Later, mature, you will enter one.”

Part III, suitably enough, is called “The Enclosure”, and we might say that here we find Berger restlessly at home in his house of poetry, bending his attention on the ways in which the world can still fuck up our best intentions, and having fun at its expense: “There may be a Malthusian problem. / There may be a problem of vaguely defined invasiveness, / It could mean zombies.” “Civilization Credits” even smacks of the truly satiric toward our age of scarcity (for the many) and ludicrous abundance (for the few): “Eternal dominance is the price of comfort. / Amnesia is the prerequisite.”

The main poem of this section is not the title piece, but a 17-part poem called “The Fragilist.” This figure—in some respects an alter-ego—confronts the task of concocting poisons, of registering Jewishness in the figure of Mosiach, of rebounding from imaginative recreations of pregnancy and of making pregnant, of parental injunctions and moments of instruction, of becoming an object: “poured to a shape, / unable to blink; / the same baked function.” Other poems investigate, again, roads not taken (“I could have turned a hundred times”), the burden of family (“I See Where it Leads”), and the “vaguely defined invasiveness” that demands a poetics, a project. Berger hits upon, in place of poetry workshops, the poem makeover TV show, and pronounces his rather more morose goal: “to slog / my mortality in the dried vein / of lyric.”

In Part IV, “I Do Return, I Keep Returning,” we could say the poet has found his way to live up more directly to the injunction about “the deep, daily commitment to this life,” with poems about middle-aged love (“Return”), his daughters’ naming (“The Naming”), a story about, seemingly, ancestors—two sisters (“Sara and Lili”)—and poems that, like “My Goal” and “Only Happiness,” attest to the poet’s struggle to undertake the most quotidian of cares—fatherhood—while retaining a right to his own imagination.

My aim, which is my goal, is to love babblerockthis semblance, ordering of bordering babblerockbatshitdubreturn to the true strophes bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbthat delineate the catastrophe.

(“My Goal”)

The most problematic poem in the final section, wherein Berger seems to become a much more plainspoken poet, is called “The Art of the Future,” for there we find the poet trying as many pirouettes as possible so as to keep up a hope in an inspiration still to come, while returning to formal experiments dating back to W. C. Williams at least:

theWhat makes it theWhainteresting eWhat thmaare the changes. What makes it theWhatare the changes themakesarewhat makes theWhataretheit interesting are thechangeswhat makes the thechanges.whatchanges arethecthe what makes it changesthewhatwhat makes changestheit interesting changesthe changes

Throughout the book, Berger flirts with what used to be called “confessional poetry”—the poetry that assumed an existential continuity between the author and the speaker of the poem, so that everything said reflected on an autobiographical self. Berger, who studied with Kenneth Koch, is too much an ironist and a lover of the self-animated phrase to allow his poems to reduce to one man’s experience. And yet, there is a presence in the poems that we accept as the peculiar in-dwelling of James Berger as he tries to reflect and represent the world as he knows it and the world as he projects it. As “The Art of the Future” warns: “Don’t mistake / my intention / for intention.” Berger reserves the right to elude his own formulations through radical skepticism, perhaps, but, in middle-age, we may see that he was all along a poet of retention, that rather than having lost “the whole fucking deal,” he has kept it—and at it – all along and after all.

One wonders, then, what work this lengthy debut will be “prior” to.

James Berger Prior BlazeVOX [Books] 2013

James Berger, a resident of New Haven and a Senior Lecture in American Studies at Yale, reads with Joel Lewis, Saturday, March 29, 7:30 p.m., at Infinite Well LLC, 123 Court Street, New Haven.

I Has Cheeseburger!

A Review of Mark Lamoureux’s 29 Cheeseburgers + 39 Years Linking experiment to tradition without becoming stodgy, Mark Lamoureux’s 29 Cheeseburgers + 39 Years (Pressed Wafer, 2013) comprises two short Bildungsromans divided into tidy Elliptical poems that explore the self’s relation to consumerism.

The consumerism theme is apparent immediately, for who can glance at that delicious-looking, orange-and-white cover without craving an Orange Julius; who can see the title’s defiantly analytical plus-sign, and not be reminded of Fugazi’s Repeater + 3 Songs? The fast-food of “cheeseburgers,” the fruit-flavored smoothie coloration, and the typography of a post-Hardcore album sold in Hot Topic all bring to mind a shopping mall.

This is the world Lamoureux’s speaker inhabits, with all its empty glitz, and Lamoureux is well-aware of the fact, even as his speaker clings to his kitschy surroundings as models of how he wishes life were: Dualistic, plastic, with Hollywood-endings—in other words, easy.

Specifically, the speaker’s many enumerations of pop-culture references—some referring to actual products and media, others to imagined “properties”—can all be read as adolescent daydreaming. Intrusions from outside voices only carry trauma, as when the prosaic coherence of “Your father’s not coming back” inserts itself into “No. 5 Bernice Burger, Shady Glen Restaurant, Manchester, CT.”

Locating 29 Cheeseburgers’ scenes within the year-in-review poems of 39 Years, then, we realize these intrusions only exacerbate the speaker’s focus on his naively materialistic fantasies, as in “1982”:

            … Zicon*        X-Ray Man^† Cryasor, master of elements Chess Man Blue Swordsman‡ poetry review Red Lance§ Steel Star Knights: Lance, Sword, Axe, poetry review Mace, Bow      Thunderball¶ Utopian god of sound & light New Haven Review The terrific Triton Review of New Poetry, New Haven The changing Vulture…

Yes, much of 29 Cheeseburgers + 39 Years is escapism, but, as any American born after 1950 will recognize, escapism is almost universally a very real facet of our late 20th-century childhoods. Perhaps taking a cue from Carolyn Forché, Lamoureux is ostensibly reporting reality. The difference is that Lamoureux’s speaker is both subject and reporter, allowing for all the complex subjectivity implicit in a report on action nearly exclusively internal. Is, for instance, a “Cryasor” a bad-ass ‘cry(ogenic)-(dino)saur’ the speaker idolizes? Or is it the speaker’s at once humorous and tragic name for himself: ‘cry-a-sor(e)’?

In fact, Lamoureux is ingenious in unaffectedly offering such complex, refracting details, and in the case of the “Cryasor,” he is revealing a momentary flash of misunderstood maturity among the speaker’s thoughts. The “Cryasor” is a powerful idol, a disappointing reality and a terrifying beast all rolled into one, not merely a popgun prop or pun.

As such, this piece of pop-culture bric-a-brac foreshadows greater circumspection: As one of the objects with which the speaker identifies, the “Cryasor” is the ideal self, actual self and animal self—or super-ego, ego and id. It is “master of the elements” in every sense because it semantically unites all three elements of self into one word, one identity. After all, as Lamoureux is subtly telling us, power comes to the child when all aspects of the individual accept they are part of the unity; that is what we call, “adulthood.”

Of course, there is plenty of comic relief too, and much of it comes from the many riotous jabs several poems’ footnotes take at stodgy “literariness,” as when, footnoting “Doctor Doom” in “2000,” Lamoureux directly quotes the referenced comic-book character: “Before I tell you of my plan, let me demonstrate the power of my magnetic brainchildren.” Importantly, Lamoureux doesn’t use the footnote in a traditional way to explain what he’s referencing, nor does he surround the footnote’s text with quotation marks.

The reader unfamiliar with comic books, then, has no point of reference for this particular footnote. And, as Lamoureux is not attributing the quotation or even indicating it is one with punctuation, it becomes part of his speaker’s monologue, rather than authorial material intended to elucidate. In fact, cut off from its context as much any group of words can be, the statement becomes a cheeky aside from the speaker, the poem commenting on itself.

Moreover, this meta-text is a bit of facetious showboating, inserted as it is between the deftly executed mouthful of a pop-culture litany and an equally well-executed explication of that litany’s import. In other words, here we are hearing from a fully confident, adult speaker who has no problem taking the words out of Stan Lee’s mouth, while explaining and executing—at once—one hell of a verbal hat trick. Or, put even more simply, the words in the poem’s opening enumeration are the speaker’s “magnetic brain children,” while the less unmooring text following them is the “plan,” and the speaker is who else but Doctor Doom himself.

What more can we say about such goofy, if often bewildering, prose appendages, except that Lamoureux is obviously being a smartass with them. As with the example given above, every footnote in 29 Cheeseburgers + 39 Years bucks the traditional purpose of footnotes and obscures more than it reveals for any reader unwilling to unpack the text; sometimes, Lamoureux uses the notes to argue with the book’s editors, rebelliously reinserting deleted lines, while at other times he is telling readers to research a reference themselves or fuck off.

But, in any case, as with the “Doctor Doom” footnote and the “Cryasor” reference, there is typically a lot more going on psychologically for the speaker of 29 Cheeseburgers + 39 Years behind every word of its kitschy confusion than might initially come across. Lamoureux’s book simply wants acutely engaged readers willing to break out Google and Wikipedia as they read, and should that really be too much to ask?

Finally, we have the question of how to read this book. As mentioned above, Lamoureux is writing Elliptical poetry that, in some instances, borders on Language poetry. Yet the problem with placing these poems in either the Elliptical or Language categories is that Lamoureux isn’t disregarding syntax and diction or using jarring parataxis merely to be cute, unnerving or gimmicky.

Rather, these mechanisms make his poems cinematic, and the reader would do well to read each word as a frame in a montage: As when watching a movie, our minds must construct the book’s narrative out of pieces that are actually discrete. In this way, Lamoureux’s poems, in their presentation as products of Hollywood, are structurally true to their settings and themes. What results, then, is a melding of method and theme into a totality that would satisfy classical aesthetics while doing so in a way that answers the postmodern call to experimentation and disjunction to a degree of which few poets are capable.

29 Cheeseburgers + 39 Years Mark Lamoureux Pressed Wafer, 2013

Mark Lamoureux, a New Haven resident, reads Saturday, March 29, 8 p.m, at WAVEMACHINE, 1175 Chapel Street #601, New Haven, with poets Ossian Foley and David James Miller.

Hey Claude

Much Ado About Nothing, the comedy by Shakespeare that is the source for These! Paper! Bullets!, a new adaptation—or, in its terms, “modish ripoff”—by playwright Rolin Jones and director Jackson Gray, is somewhat silly, somewhat foolish, somewhat witty, and way too busy. The original play suffers from a surfeit of plots that don’t really add up to much—which is a way of saying their only purpose is to divert—and TPB takes that feature and runs away with it.

What makes TPB bigger than our Will’s conception is the driving force of this lively, tuneful, and sprawling production: pop culture in the form of the Fab Four—The Beatles. TPB takes us back to the days when the boys from Liverpool—not to mention numerous copies, clones, and wannabes—first assailed these shores. 1964, the key year of Beatlemania, found the Beatles riding as high as they would ever ride. “Bigger than Jesus,” John Lennon quipped (to considerable backlash), as does his likeness here: Ben (the firmly tongue-in-cheek David Wilson Barnes), the wittiest of the Quartos, aka Benedict in Much Ado. He wrangles, rom-com fashion, with Bea, otherwise Beatrice (Jeanine Serralles), a fashion maven á la Mary Quant. Meanwhile his mate Claude (Bryan Fenkart, the “cute one”) is speechless with his fancy for Higgy, née Hero (Ariana Venturi), a model whose skill, it seems, is to make questionable couture look desirable.

What Jones and company do so cleverly is mash the familiar tropes of Beatlemania—Liverpool accents, matching suits, moptops, screaming girls, fab gear, media circus, hummable numbers—with the giddy courtship shenanigans of Much Ado. And guess what? The Beatles biz beats the Bard.

Fans of the Beatles—and the Rutles—will find moments that recall some of the best banter of the former and some of the parodic tweaking of the latter. The gag album titles, the pastiche for pastiche’s sake in the projections (Nicholas Hussong) and costumes (Jessica Ford) and tunes (Billie Joe Armstrong) and stagings, including a “Hey Jude” rave-up and a “Get Back” rooftop shutdown, will keep those in the know on their toes. Jones even manages to include the one line that appears in both a Shakespeare play and a Beatles tune (indeed, it’s cribbed from a BBC Shakespeare production in the Beatles song). A good extra credit question for classes attending the show—and no fair Googling it. Even the name of the band—the Quartos—manages to combine the Beatles’ original name—the Quarrymen—with a Shakespearean association.

Indeed, TPB improves on Much Ado, but not quite enough. The Don John subplot—never very compelling—becomes funnier with ribs at Don Best (Adam O’Byrne), the early Quartos drummer who was dumped and bears a grudge, and the best parts of Much Ado—the eavesdropping scenes—are not surprisingly the best parts of the play here. But Much Ado’s Dogberry, here Mr. Berry (Greg Stuhr), still manages to dispense his tedium, opening the play, opening the second act, and getting into an interminable physical bout with his second in command, Mr. Urges (Brad Heberlee), and with the malefactors, Boris the journalist (Andrew Musselman) and Colin, a paparazzo (Brian McManamon), who are generally tedious company in their own right. I doubt even Monty Python could make these clods as comical as they need to be to justify their time onstage. Their only purpose, as ever, is to give the principals a breather. Me, I’d rather be backstage with the band.

Along the way, adaptation-wise, there are some happy inspirations: Jones cheekily (heh) adapts the mistaken identity plot by way of doctored photographs occasioning, quite rightly, a tabloid frenzy about the most eligible Quarto, while “all the world”—in the form of breathless TV reporter Paulina Noble (Liz Wisan) and her cameraman (Brad Heberlee), and even the Queen (Chris Geary, a welcome royal)—looks on. The Quartos themselves are reminiscent of the ersatz Beatles of the Saturday morning cartoon, with Lucas Papaelias nailing perfectly the deadpan adroitness of the George avatar. Meanwhile, Frida (Ceci Fernandez) and Ulcie (Keira Naughton) provide much of the amusement on the ladies’ side. Then there’s Jabari Brisport in Dionne Warwick drag because he can. Unlike The Rutles, Jones doesn’t go near the homosexual undercurrents in The Beatles entourage, as Brian Epstein (and Leggy Mountbatten) has been excised, and a dutiful George Martin type, Anton (James Lloyd Reynolds), runs the show.

Others have commented on how Jones and Gay improve on the sexual politics of Much Ado, with the Foursome getting a comeuppance for their double standard (yawn), but, oddly, the girls don’t fare so well here. Higgy is pretty much incoherent as a character, with the winsomeness of Much Ado’s Hero dropped in favor of party girl dimness—an improvement?—and Serralles’s Bea I could not warm to at all, as something of the role’s soul disappears as Bea is more apt to stuff wedding cake in her gob than appeal to anything more winning. You may find yourself waiting for Yoko. Or maybe Jones should take a cue from that other band of the era and work in someone a bit more Faithfull to the scene.

There’s so much going on in the show, you may easily breeze through without thinking about anything so Old School as character development, and the songs certainly help. There are knock-offs like “I’ll Give It All to You,” and big, rousing numbers like “Regretfully Yours,” that uses Fenkart to good effect, and even Ben trying to lay down a “Hide Your Love Away”-style soul-search, and mustn’t forget Stephen DeRosa’s infectious sing-along to “My Wild Irish Rose” as “impromptu” mugging to mask some scenery shifting. It’s a moment warm with the music hall repertoire that was a ready source for the Lads, and it serves here to reach out to the audience—as do moments like Wisan spotting celebrities in the seats (on opening night Athol Fugard was identified as Winston Churchill and graciously smoked an imaginary cigar on camera).

Full of a little something for anyone with fondness for British humour, or for humoring the Brits, These! Paper! Bullets! mostly hits what it aims at, though somewhere in the whirligig is a romantic-comedy about sex and celebrity in the Sixties—with the Fabs as the feckless flag-bearers—trying to “shed those dowdy feathers and fly, a little bit.”

These! Paper! Bullets! A Modish Ripoff of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing Adapted by Rolin Jones Songs by Billie Joe Armstrong Directed by Jackson Gay

Choreographer: Monica Bill Barnes; Music Director: Julie McBride; Scenic Designer: Michael Yeargan; Costume Designer: Jessica Ford; Lighting Designer: Paul Whitaker; Sound Designer and Incidental Music: Broken Chord; Projection Designer: Nicholas Hussong; Orchestrator and Arranger: Tom Kitt; Dialect Coach: Stephen Gabis; Fight Director: Michael Rossmy; Production Dramaturgs: Ilya Khodosh, Catherine Sheehy; Casting Directors: Tara Rubin, Lindsay Levine; Stage Manager: Robert Chikar

Cast: David Wilson Barnes; Bryan Fenkart; James Barry; Lucas Papaelias; James Lloyd Reynolds; Adam O’Byrne; Jeanine Serralles; Ariana Venturi; Keira Naughton; Ceci Fernandez; Stephen DeRosa; Andrew Musselman; Brian McManamon; Jabari Brisport; Christopher Geary; Brad Heberlee; Liz Wisan; Greg Stuhr; Anthony Manna

Yale Repertory Theatre March 14-April 5, 2014

A Review of These! Paper! Bullets! by a very reluctant theater-goer.

For two or three years now, my husband has been dragging me out of the house every few weeks to go to whatever’s going on at the Yale Rep. I am (to put it nicely) not someone who likes going to the theater, but I do appreciate a night away from the house, so I’m not complaining, really; but I will say, I’d be just as happy going to the movies. And with the Yale Rep -- you know, they like to do experimental stuff, it’s often brainier than I need, and over time I have arrived at this method of summing up my Yale Rep experiences: Is it a one-nap play or a two-nap play? We saw Paul Giamatti (who I love) in Hamlet last year. That, as I recall, was a three-nap play. I slept through the big fight scene.

The funny thing is, my husband (who never naps through any of the productions, and is far more charitably disposed, and loves live theater) often mocks Rep productions for the same reasons I do. What we often think is, The Rep productions are stunningly produced; they are technically amazing to watch, the performances are great. But man, the scripts are uneven. I’d say that each season gives us one or two shows we actually enjoy; but I’ve never gone napless through a Rep production. Until last night.

Friday night we went to see These! Paper! Bullets! and my own prediction was a) that I’d take a nap and b) I’d like it well enough anyway, and c) my husband would find it vaguely amusing without actually enjoying it. I turned out to be so, so wrong. So wrong, that I knew halfway through the evening I was going to have to write about this for the New Haven Review, because, frankly, if I enjoy something this much, I feel morally obligated to do something about it. A review here is pretty much the only thing I can do about it. Anyone who’s reading this and has a chance to see this production: Get yourself down to the Yale Rep. Sell some used books to Book Trader to come up with the money to buy tickets; borrow money; I don’t care. Go see These! Paper! Bullets!

Here’s the thing, folks. This is a situation where, for me as an audience member, there’s a lot going against a night out seeing this show. We have a tired mother, for starters. We have a format I don’t like (live theater). We’ve got a play based on a work I don’t care about at all (Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing). We’ve got a musician I don’t care about (Billie Joe Armstrong from Green Day, a band I never liked). And we’ve got some theater people who -- I’ll be honest -- I just don’t know anything about, but people who know far better than I do think highly of them, so, fine (I glance in the directions of Donald Brown and Chris Arnott; I defer, always, to Chris in matters like these). We have the knowledge that it’s gonna be a Rep show, which usually means, “Jesus, seriously, you’re making me sit through this?” The only thing the play had going for it, in my case, is that I am a serious Beatles fan, and as such was likely to find at least the Beatles references in the show amusing. (In reality: they are more than amusing, they are really good.)

But what this very unlikely combinations of circumstances has led to is a very, very rare beast: a play that I would actually want to see again. Everyone in the cast is amazing; the dialogue is great; the costumes and sets are a pleasure, and there just isn’t enough time in the show to really take it all in. I cannot say enough good things about These! Paper! Bullets! and trust me: this kind of thing may never happen again.

Cafe Rrrwha?

You know the drill: one age’s rebellion is another age’s nostalgia act. That’s in popular culture. In the fine arts, it tends to be: one age’s rebellion is another age’s academic assignment. In the pop world, nothing ages as fast as the parental generation’s youth; in the fine arts, it’s all a bit like the nefarious character played by John Huston in Chinatown (1974) says: “Politicians, old buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” In the fine arts, it’s academic study that confers respectability. Dada, pataphysics, cubists, Theater of the Absurd, Theatre of Cruelty, the Beats—they’re all in museums and on syllabi. And what gets lost, often, is what made it all so exciting in the first place. Enter The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion, the show currently playing at the Yale Cabaret, conceived and directed by dramaturgy student David E. Bruin, an effort to stage early works by María Irene Fornés and Edward Albee—darlings of theater and drama coursework—as though Greenwich Village were still inhabited by bohemians and not pop culture elites. We’re not at the Yale Cab, we’re at Café Ubu (named after Alfred Jarry’s comic-absurdist-tragic figure) and, as the dated posters and portraits on the walls of Reid Thompson's set will tell you, it’s around 1962. JFK hasn’t been assassinated yet and the Beatles are still in Liverpool.

It’s to the credit of Bruin and his cast that they play the material—including the introductory bits that include some squabbling about a petition to stop that freeway extension Robert Moses is planning for the Village—straight, without any hint of ‘beatnik’ send-ups. The point is, one quickly gathers, the drama student of today might well be pining for the days before theatrical fellowships and “courses on X”—the days when the likes of Albee and Fornés hung out in collectivities that were already looking back to ad hoc artist congeries like dada and other manifesto-spouting “movements.” Remember when it wasn’t art if you got paid for it? And it wasn’t for a grade either. Hey, kinda like Yale Cabaret . . .

Crazy Shepherds is an instructive and entertaining evening. Plays like Fornés’ The Successful Life of 3 and Albee’s The Sandbox should resist even blackbox staging. These are plays for a cabaret, a café, a living room, almost. Maybe a playground’s actual sandbox (do those still exist?) for the latter. Bruin and company rightly grasp that to do such work justice you have to be willing to go back to its time to see it as it might have been. Historians of the arts have to do this; theater audiences much less, and it’s great to see knowing dramaturgs and others giving it a shot and taking us along with them.

And you certainly get your money’s worth: not only Successful Life and Sandbox, but also a romp through a truncated take on Jarry’s Ubu roi (with a very spirited Ubu from Brendan Pelsue) and a performance piece featuring bits from Part III of Howl. Annelise Lawson, reciting, is the star of the evening as she also plays a man (who imagines himself as Zorro at one point) in Successful Life, Ubu’s queen in Ubu roi, and, very effectively, the old woman in Sandbox, as well as going into electroshock convulsions for the Howl recital (Howl is dedicated to Allen Ginsberg’s fellow inmate at Columbia Psychiatric Institute, Carl Solomon, who did receive electroshock treatment at Rockland State Hospital).

Elsewhere there’s tasteful violin accompaniment by Eli Epstein-Deutsch and atmospheric vocalizing by Jenelle Chu, who also plays the woman in Successful Life, a ditzy symbol of female emptiness—or is that an empty symbol of feminine ditziness—while Lawson and Pelsue (the latter in a mode reminiscent of Dick York on Bewitched) enact an absurdist’s take on “masculine rivalry” (yes, that was once a buzz term). Chu is also a patient “mommy” to Pelsue’s “daddy” as they wait for granny (Lawson) to give up the ghost in Sandbox. The plays by Fornés and Albee both demonstrate the phase of incipient genius, still. And the evening is best if you can forget you’re watching YSD students playing at their grandparents’ rebellion and imagine you’re watching amateur theatricals reinvent theater.

At the end of the evening, a hat is passed, but, rather than pitching in, the audience is asked to extract fortune-cookie-like one-liners. Many in the audience, no doubt, won’t realize the lines are taken from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” (c. 1790, following the French Revolution); “everything old is new again,” as the song says. And some things are so innovative they can never become conventional.

The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion Conceived and directed by David E. Bruin Featuring: Maria Irene Fornes’ The Successful Life of 3 and Edward Albee’s The Sandbox

Cast: David E. Bruin, Jenelle Chu, Eli Epstein-Deutsch, Annelise Lawson, Brendan Pelsue, Gretchen Wright; Dramaturg: Phillip Howze; Set: Reid Thompson; Lights: Andrew F. Griffin; Composer/Sound: Pornchanok Kanchanabanca; Costumes: Asa Benally; Stage Manager: Will Rucker; Producer: Melissa Zimmerman

Yale Cabaret March 20-22, 2014

The Show Must Go On

Drew Gray’s The Magician, an original play produced by the New Haven Theater Company, possesses the qualities that have made for past successful productions by the group: minimal setting, dialogue-driven scenes, and a feel for the nuance of relationships. The principal characters in the play are Mark Wonderton (George Kulp), a magician on a strip outside Vegas, and his manager, Ronnie (Peter Chenot). The main drama in the play is what, in the course of a whiskey-soaked interim between a matinee show and the evening show, these two friends and verbal-sparring partners will reveal about themselves and, the real suspense, what will happen in the evening show.

The play is risky not only in its minimalism—if we don’t like Mark and Ronnie, no one else is going to show up to relieve them—but especially in its willingness to dramatize that perhaps most pathetic of all performers, the bombing magician. A bombing comic, after all, becomes comical via failure, but how comical can a magician be who no longer wants to make a good impression?

Much of the success of the play depends on the actors finding the right pace for their roles. In the early going the words may fly a bit too fast, a sign, perhaps, that these characters have a private intonation between them that we will gradually become attuned to, but it might also mean that the actors need a little time to naturalize their patter. Have no fear, they do, and we begin to hear very clearly the signals between Mark and Ronnie: what’s off limits, what can be joked about, what is territory they’d rather not explore. There’s a certain air of backstage superstition surrounding it all which suits magic certainly but which also extends to Vegas generally. Don’t bad mouth the Lady is the main injunction. Both Wonderton and Ronnie are not doing badly, or, well, it could be a lot worse.

Because so much is made of the general standing of Wonderton’s act in the first part of the play, as the drinks keep being downed, we may find ourselves skeptical that he’s going to pull off the second part of the play when, mostly alone on stage, he faces . . . us, the audience. One suspects that Wonderton’s inability to produce any magic would meet with a rather more hostile reception in Vegas than the enactment of that inability meets with in The Magician, so that the suspension of disbelief comes not from seeing “magic” performed but in believing a man so incapable of magic would remain on stage.

That’s where the real guts in this play come in. Mark insists on a point that Ronnie disputes: “the box will play.” What he’s referring to, we find, is a box containing, rather than tricks and magical implements, the detritus of his own life. Would revealing the contents of this box “play” for a Vegas audience gathered to see magic? Unlikely. Does it play for an audience gathered to see a play? Uncertain.

Gray’s point seems to be that the sad accumulation of stray bits mirrors anyone’s little pile of keepsakes and that, in the end, these talismanic collections don’t mean a thing. Wonderton, hitting a professional low, is willing to reveal what’s “behind the scenes” or “in the box,” and that plays only so far as what he reveals does indeed reveal something. That’s where I’m not so sure. The collection of things are too generic to sketch for us Wonderton’s individual life, and too minor to inspire in us much identification. We may well find ourselves wondering not only why anyone would keep such things but why he would bother to tell us he did.

More revealing, dramatically, is the relation between Ronnie and Mark. Even after this epic failure on the part of Mark, the give-and-take of manager to performer goes on. There’s a sense that what The Magician aims at is the peculiarities of a life on stage and a life behind the scenes, and the interest in the relation between Ronnie and Mark is in the way they have to remain “in character” with one another no matter what. Gray’s characters are figures “in the life,” in the way that David Mamet’s characters so frequently are, and Chenot is able to give Ronnie both charm and a certain mannered “been-there, done-that” air. Mark is a harder read, and Kulp lets us see some of the cracks in the façade of the seasoned performer, a man for whom “ladies and gentlemen” are forever looking on, and who finds, to his chagrin, he hasn’t let anyone really get “backstage” or into his private life.

Entertaining and risky, The Magician conjures up the tensions between work and life and between public and private, as well as the long-term friendships that, at the end of the day, are the only thing that make it all worthwhile.

The Magician A new play written and directed by Drew Gray The New Haven Theater Company

Mark: George Kulp; Ronnie: Peter Chenot; Samantha: Jessica Donofrio

Design: Drew Gray; Stage Manager/Light Board OP: Mallory Pellegrino; Sound Board OP/Production Assistant: Deena Nicol; Photographs: Susan Kulp

The English Building Markets March 6-8 and 13-15, 2014

Across the Great Divide

Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles is a straightforward family drama, full of a natural empathy for its two main characters, a widow in her 90s and her grandson, a twenty-something newly arrived in New York City after biking all the way from Seattle. After his awkward welcome—he arrives in the wee hours while his grandmother is asleep and she first greets him without her dentures in—Leo settles into life with Vera and both, by play’s end, have come to terms or are coming to terms with change in other relationships in their lives. Key to the play’s charm is its ability to handle relationships with a feel for the complex arrangements of attraction and antagonism that work under the surface between friends and between kin. Herzog is not afraid to make her characters less than admirable at times, but they never wear out their welcome.

One often hears about whether or not male authors can “write women characters”; much less often do we hear about whether female authors can “write men.” Herzog can. Her Leo Joseph-Connell (Micah Stock) has the kind of intense self-regard with efforts at humility and companionability that are hallmarks of the well-intentioned male of his day. Micah Stock plays Leo with the kinds of hesitations and measured responses that speak of the thoughtful male who feels his thoughts should be of general interest. It’s a great, understated performance. Much in this play requires a delicate touch: if the humor is too broad or the characters too stiff, the effect of its natural sympathy will suffer. Eric Ting’s successful rendering of this popular play makes the most of the Long Wharf’s intimate thrust amphitheater to bring us into this home and make us comfortable.

As Vera Joseph, Leo’s welcoming but settled grandma, Zoaunne LeRoy has to provide much of the play’s ultimate feeling. Hard of hearing, hard-headed in some things (such as her judgments on her neighbor and her insistence that Leo’s girlfriend Bec is too plump), at times grasping for the right word, her hands fluttering and gesturing, at times wobbly or wearily surfing her memory banks, at times giddy and a bit girlish, Vera is a subtly written character and LeRoy makes her real. She’s not some generic old lady or someone’s warm or prickly granny. Vera feels like an actual person, with a rather complicated past. A communist, Vera has come through her life with definite principles, the kind that don’t exactly earn her respect from her children’s generation, having to make do with an accepting “Marx is cool” from her grandson. Ting and his cast let silences allow us to imagine the sorts of things Vera might’ve said to her grandson were she younger and the ideas from her long-deceased husband’s lectures fresher in her mind.

As it is, the two find agreeable moments of togetherness—sharing a bowl on the autumn equinox and approaching a level of frankness that, while it happens often enough in plays, here feels merited and plausible. Likewise are Leo’s confrontations with Bec (Leah Karpel), a woman who Herzog shrewdly presents as someone trying to get on with her life without incurring the debts and obligations that a young man’s desires and affections can heap on a young woman. Herzog lets Leo have some of the higher moral ground as he’s still to some degree in shock about and certainly still grieving the bizarre accidental death of his best friend, Micah. A friend that, he feels, Bec praises overmuch. These arguments have the vivid feeling of ongoing discussions in medias res, where we quickly size up the levels of investment that are there to be wounded or repudiated. Most of the scenes in the play take place on the couch, the lack of action requiring that they be very well-written and staged with an easy pacing that is essential to the inviting tone of 4000 Miles.

One possible off-note is Leo’s ill-advised dalliance with Amanda (Teresa Avia Lim), a young Asian-American student from Parsons, an artsy, mostly inebriated character whose mood swings are comical enough as we watch Leo become sympathetic, seductive, chummy, and bored by turns, but one feels that Herzog baulks at creating a caricature for the sake of a laugh (drunk “sluts” are people too), though Amanda’s most pressing reason for being in the play is comic relief (though she’s a little abashed that she doesn’t provide any other relief for such a sweet “mountain man”). The scene isn’t a complete loss: Amanda’s outrage at Vera’s communist allegiances is almost worth the rather pat entry of Vera at exactly the wrong moment, consummation-wise, and the more interesting reason for Amanda’s presence—Leo’s perhaps not solely platonic infatuation with his adopted Chinese sister, Lily—helps to make the scene, as they say, motivated.

The discords of that scene are instructive because they put into relief the fact that, by the time they are preparing a speech for the funeral of Vera’s never seen but intrusive neighbor, Leo and Vera have arrived at the complementarity of real friendship. Vera’s hands waving as she does not speak to say her piece when Bec and Leo part amicably is worth volumes. LeRoy carries the weight of years on Vera well, letting us feel those years when they impart wisdom and resignation as well as frailty and comic lapses. Her dignity in the role does the play proud.

As does Frank J. Alberino’s lived-in looking set, with its couch center-stage, its front door upstage, and its wings for kitchen areas and walk-throughs to the bedrooms, and Matt Frey’s lighting which lets us feel the way daylight and nighttime make moods in even the most familiar spaces. Meanwhile, Ilona Somogyi’s costumes let us register the effectiveness of seeing characters—initially in grimy bikerwear and nightgown, respectively—dressed up and presentable at the play’s close. In its relaxed and unsentimental grasp of these characters and the play's wry humor, The Long Wharf’s 4000 Miles comes close to perfection.

4000 Miles By Amy Herzog Directed by Eric Ting

Set Design: Frank J. Alberino; Costume Design: Ilona Somogyi; Lighting Design: Matt Frey; Sound Design: Matt Tierney; Production Stage Manager: Kathy Snyder; Assistant Stage Manager: Amy Patricia Stern; Casting: Calleri Casting

Long Wharf Theatre February 19-March 16, 2014