God Save the Queens

Review of And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens at Yale Cabaret

First-year Yale School of Drama director Rory Pelsue and first-year actor Patrick Madden offer stunning Yale Cabaret debuts with Tennessee Williams’ one act And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens, a title that riffs off Shakespeare’s Richard II and, by the time it shows up as a line in the play, attempts to add levity. Which is worth noting because, though this is a sad story, it isn’t, finally, a tragedy.

Candy (Patrick Madden) is a drag queen when at home, but when we first meet her, in the midst of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, she is a he, playing host, in a rather “out” manner, to an ostensibly straight sailor, Karl (Jamie Bogyo), who seems ill-at-ease with the implications of fraternizing with Candy, even as he seems transfixed by his host’s charm and charisma.

Jamie Bogyo (Karl), Patrick Madden (Candy)

Madden’s assured performance luxuriates in Candy’s fascination; something of a figment of her own fantasy, she is also very much a familiar figure from Williams’ subsequent plays. It’s long been my contention that Streetcar should be staged with a drag queen or transgender actress as Blanche, and Candy in many ways anticipates such casting, making us see the drag queen at the heart of many of Williams’ female characters. Which is not to say that Williams or Madden or Pelsue are content with “female impersonation.” The subtlety of Candy’s demeanor is the point; it’s a performance of a character whose reality is an achieved performance.

Even when she gets ruthless with an apparently well-meaning gay couple who rent from her, Candy’s bitchiness indicates Williams knowing sense of how someone like Candy survives. Successful as an interior decorator, Candy—in a play written in 1957—is fully cognizant of the influence and fascination of queer culture for straight America, which, she says, would be “barbarian” without queens.

Patrick Madden (Candy)

An indication of her taste is her apartment, which co-scenic designers Lucie Dawkins and Sarah Nietfeld drench in a florid Japonisme that lets us know at once that Candy identifies with aesthetes of the previous century, such as James McNeill Whistler. But the ersatz Japanese theme, c. 1950, would also be perfect for a boudoir intended to lure service-men, like Karl, whose sense of what “decadence” means would come from “the East.” Perhaps it should suffice to say that Japonisme in New Orleans’ French Quarter immediately characterizes Candy as decadence redux.

The question hovering over Candy’s passive-aggressive seduction of Karl is how much of a barbarian is he. And Williams—per usual—gets dramatic mileage out of the punishment that straight society seems all-too-glad to dole out to its “deviants.” Karl, in Bogyo’s nicely laconic performance, is a user and a bully who, occasionally—and Candy wants to believe in it as a saving grace—seems willing to play his role in Candy’s protracted fantasy. The audience looks on aghast, knowing this has to end badly. And Alvin (Steven Lee Johnson) and Jerry (Josh Wilder) from downstairs know so too. As a one-act, the foregone conclusion doesn’t hurt—we’re uncertain how bad it is going to get and can be relieved that things don’t get worse.

The anxiety we feel for Candy is very much the main take-away here, as her previous life with her “husband,” a sheltering “sponsor,” has made her too secure, financially, and too insecure, emotionally, to register fully the threat that lurks in manipulating someone like Karl. In our day, with a public more aware of transgender and of the fatalities, from violence and suicide, that indict straight culture, we might wonder what Williams’ play, had it been produced during the playwright’s very successful run of plays in the 1950s, might have done to create more awareness and understanding. Not much, probably, since the queer themes in Williams’ best-known plays tended to be minimized for mass consumption, such as in Hollywood movies. And that’s why seeing Candy on stage now is both timely and telling. Bravo!

And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens
By Tennessee Williams
Directed by Rory Pelsue

Dramaturg: Catherine María Rodriguez; Co-Scenic Designers: Lucie Dawkins, Sarah Nietfeld; Costume Designer: Cole McCarty; Lighting Designer: Krista Smith; Sound Designer: Frederick Kennedy; Scenic Charge: Dan Cogan; Stage Manager: Sarah Thompson; Co-Producers: Al Heartley, Rachel Shuey

Yale Cabaret
March 3-5, 2016

The Ghost of a Chance

Review of I Hate Hamlet at Playhouse on Park

Paul Rudnick’s I Hate Hamlet, directed by Vince Tycer at Playhouse on Park, reads like an amiable sit-com where the hero, an actor, could easily be a Bob Denver or Michael J. Fox type who finds himself having to undergo “growth”—for the sake of laughs and, ultimately, some theatrical values.

Andrew (Dan Whelton) is a successful TV actor who has recently—all the furniture still has sheets on it—moved into a Tudor-looking apartment in New York, formerly owned by John Barrymore, one of the preeminent Shakespearean actors of his era. This isn’t a selling point for Andrew, but is for his girlfriend Deirdre, a budding actress who adores the Bard. So there you have the two strains of Rudnick’s universe: the Bardolators vs. those who are sick of having Shakespeare rammed down their throats. In fact, if the play were called “I’m Sick of Shakespeare” it might have more to offer: at least there would be the hope that the script would do take-offs on the robustious over-acting and posturing that oftentimes goes by the name of “Shakespearean acting.” But that’s not the target here. Rather, an impromptu séance led by Andrew’s real estate agent, Felicia (Julia Hochner) and including his theatrical agent Lillian (Ruth Neaveill) leads to an appearance—at first for Andrew’s eyes only—of the ghost of Barrymore himself (played with great ease of manner and an air of grand noblesse oblige by Ezra Barnes, in a becoming “suit of solemn black,” with tights, cape and codpiece, by Soule Golden).

Ezra Barnes (John Barrymore)

Barrymore has returned from the dead, you see, tasked with the duty of making Andrew accept and, if possible, shine in the role of Hamlet in the park. But that doesn’t mean this is a primer in how to act Hamlet—Barrymore’s only real advice on that score is Hamlet’s advice to the players, pretty much stolen verbatim—or even on how to use Hamlet as a foil for the actor’s own agenda. Andrew doesn’t really have one of those, except to vacillate like a whiny Hamlet and wish his virginal fiancée would consent to making the beast with two backs. One of the more humorous moments on that score is when he finds out, to his surprise, that the surest way to fan her flame is to fume with “get thee to a nunnery.”

Dan Whelton (Andrew), Susan Slotoroff (Deirdre), David Lanson (Gary)

There’s also tame fun at the expense of an L.A. agent who can’t wait to get Andrew away from the footlights and back before the television cameras—David Lanson plays Gary as an earnest guy for whom the point of show biz is making the most money from the biggest show. There’s not much to be gained, except maybe some grudging respect from drama critics, by humbling oneself live each night as Hamlet outdoors. Maybe when Rudnick’s play opened, back in 1991, L.A. types were fresher as a concept, but as it stands now, the show-biz part of the show is a bit like watching a re-run to catch someone’s early work.

Ezra Barnes (John Barrymore), Ruth Neaveill (Lillian)

So, in lieu of big laughs at the expense of Shakespearean rhetoric or of show-biz neurotics, the high point of the show is a touching moment of middle-aged amour. Lillian, you see, once had a fling with the oft-flinging, iamb-slinging Barrymore and the scene in which their old times hover around them again as a possible present—Barrymore is a substantial ghost and can control who sees him and who doesn’t—is tinged with sweet sincerity. Much more so, on that score, than the amorous jousting of Andrew and Deirdre, even if she does melt once he does his duty—and takes his lumps—trying to talk the talk of the melancholy Dane. And the sword-fight between Barrymore and Andrew is pretty good too.

Ezra Barnes (John Barrymore), Dan Whelton (Andrew)

Then there’s the play’s other high point: Whelton’s growth moment. It’s not that Andrew becomes a Hamlet worthy of Barrymore, nor probably even a Hamlet worthy of Central Park, but that he comes to realize the value of live performance. His speech about seeing the Bard’s words connect with a kid, bored and uneasy a moment before, who suddenly cares whether or not the Prince will decide to be or not, ropes in all us easy marks, ready to be reassured about the meaning and prestige of live theater over the more commercial variety commandeered by clips and edits. Whatever Andrew’s merits as actor (or lover), we see that at least he’s learning what it means to have presence.

And if you should be present for I Hate Hamlet, you’ll find a game cast that earns its applause in this easy-going play.

I Hate Hamlet
By Paul Rudnick
Directed by Vince Tycer

Sound Designer: Joel Abbott; Scenic Designer: Emily Nichols; Lighting Designer: Marcus Abbott; Costume Designer: Soule Golden; Properties Master: Pamela Lang; Photos: Rich Wagner

Cast: Ezra Barnes, Julia Hochner, David Lanson, Ruth Neaveill, Susan Slotoroff, Dan Whelton

Playhouse on Park
February 24-March 13, 2016

Only to Go to Norwalk

Review of Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike at Music Theatre of Connecticut

An academic couple, obsessed with theater in Bucks County, PA, raise a brood they name after Chekhov characters. When we meet them, the progeny are middle-aged and mom and dad are just a memory. Vanya (Jim Schilling) lives with adopted sister Sonia (Cynthia Hannah) in a house supported by sister Masha (Jodi Stevens)—the way Vanya and niece Sonya live on an estate that supports his academic former brother-in-law, her father, in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Masha, divorced five times, is an aging film star, best-known for the many sequels of Sexy Killer, a slasher movie and cash-cow that sustains her career, though she’d rather be playing classic theatrical roles like her parents did—particularly her namesake Masha, the dissatisfied married sister in Chekhov’s Three Sisters.

Vanya (Jim Schilling), Masha (Jodi Stevens), Sonia (Cynthia Hannah)

Every inch a grand diva in her own mind—like Irina, the grande dame in Chekhov’s The Seagull—Masha returns for a visit to the area with her new boy-toy Spike (Christopher DeRosa), who enjoys disrobing in company. She plans to attend a fancy dress party nearby with a theme she expects everyone to sign onto: Snow White and her attendant dwarfs; Sonia’s insistence on playing Maggie Smith playing the Wicked Queen makes for a delightful battle of sisterly wills.

Cynthia Hannah (Sonia)

For additional comedy and complications, we have: Nina (Carissa Massaro), an utterly guileless local teen fan of Masha whom Spike may be taking a shine to and who may become Vanya’s muse, as Nina does for Konstantin in The Seagull, and a cleaning woman named Cassandra (Katie Sparer), who, like her namesake in ancient Greek myth, tends to mouth unheeded warnings. The cast enters into the comic spirit with full sails, with Stevens particularly well cast in a role originated on Broadway by Sigourney Weaver.

Jodi Stevens (Masha), Christopher DeRosa (Spike)

The plot’s thinness makes dialogue drive the play. Durang masters a low-key comedy that winks at the ennui and gloom of the usual Chekhovian drama, while aping ironically the bright zest of sit-com-like patter. Any character is apt at any time to deliver a bathetic bon mot or give a terse existential tweak to someone else’s pleasantry. Directed with perhaps a bit too much respect for the material by Pamela Hill (which means the show runs longer and more slowly than it should), Durang’s play is best when it feels like a modern drama class adopting a modern classic for TV viewers. The laughs come from the incongruity and from the fact that each character is a self-involved cartoon. And in that, it is an apt mirror for our era where “the selfie” replaced the Self.

Carissa Massaro (Nina), Christopher DeRosa (Spike)

Cartoonish and gently satirical, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike won the Tony for Best Play in 2013, recent enough to feel startlingly contemporary, with its sense of the social landscape as influenced by online life, while playing with knowing familiarity on the kind of family dramas that have long been mainstays of theater, from Chekhov to O’Neill and on. Sonia, who Hannah plays as a basically agreeable and sympathetic matron who may be reaching the end of her tether, has a tendency to call the family’s stand of 10 or so cherry trees “a cherry orchard.”

Cynthia Hannah (Sonia), Jodi Stevens (Masha), Jim Schilling (Vanya)

She also tends to watch for a heron by the pond and to claim her kinship with wild turkeys. As the adopted, unnecessary sister, she’s an amusing collection of misgivings, hurt feelings, and resentment, a perfect foil for Vanya, a nebbishy n’er-do-well, who, like his namesake, believes that life has passed him by, even while hoping to achieve something worthwhile before it’s all over. Schilling’s second act harangue has the jocular and despairing delivery of a man giving up on a world that already gave up on him, and feels decidedly apropos for the Norwalk-Westport area as comfortably removed from the action in the City.

Jim Schilling (Vanya)

Durang has written more biting and loopier plays, but this one has the likable oddity of neighbors we try to get on with even while finding them resistant to our sympathies. It’s as if the Chekhovian veneer that sustains much naturalistic drama has been allowed to molder until our irreverent American under-paint shows through. MTC’s production, with its comfortable set and intimate thrust space keeps actors and audience on the same level and makes this living-room comedy feel appreciably lived-in and immediate.

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike
By Christopher Durang
Directed by Pamela Hill

Costume Design: Diane Vanderkroef; Scenic Design: Carl Tallent; Lighting Design: Joshua Scherr; Sound Design: Sarah Pero; Stage Manager: Cameron Nadler

Cast: Christopher DeRosa; Cynthia Hannah; Carissa Massaro; Jim Schilling; Katie Sparer; Jodi Stevens

Music Theatre of Connecticut Mainstage
February 26-March 13, 2016

A Rocky Path for Lovers

Review of Romeo & Juliet at Hartford Stage

Scenic design is an integral part of the theater-viewing experience. It can be transformative; it can be unobtrusive; it can be a distinctively theatrical environment; it can seem like an actual place you could inhabit. The choices made to convey a play to us take on concrete shape with the set’s design and orientation.

Director Darko Tresnjak’s scenic design for the Hartford Stage’s production of Romeo & Juliet chooses to place “Shakespeare’s most popular play” (as the press packet reads) in a post-war Italy influenced by Neorealist filmmakers, such as Pasolini and de Sica, a decision that gives us a very austere setting, with a backdrop of vertical graves as in a mausoleum, with small vases tended now and then by attendants (one great virtue of this R&J is that it has a cast large enough to have extras). Gone is any sense of Italy's sensuality; in its place is a sterile, barren presence that never lets up.

Kaliswa Brewster (Juliet)

Worse, center stage is a pit of gravel. The first time boots tread across the space, accompanied by speech, we become aware of why this wasn’t such a good idea. Do we want our Shakespeare accompanied by noisy rocks and stones and worse than senseless things? After all, these characters aren’t speaking Italian with subtitles, nor are they speaking Fifties-ish lingo. They are speaking Elizabethan poetry, which, generally speaking, we like to hear as clearly as possible, unmarred by unnecessary sound effects. At one point, the pit seems intended as a swimming pool, with Mercutio (Wyatt Fenner) in flippers and bathing suit, and that does add a touch more color, incongruous as it might seem, to the drabness.

Wyatt Fenner (Mercutio), Alex Hanna (Benvolio), Chris Ghaffari (Romeo) and Ensemble

I could say more about the moving slab that becomes a balcony and the rising and lowering slab that becomes a marital bed for the lovers, but let’s just leave it at: unprepossessing. For some viewers these matters might mean less than nothing as they are transported to another world by their wonder at Shakespeare’s language and control of this very deft plot; I’m not of their number.

Kandis Chappell (Nurse), Chris Ghaffari (Romeo), Charles Janasz (Friar Laurence)

And that’s not due to the fact that this is an overly familiar play. Watching it, as with most Shakespeare plays, one is surprised that there’s always more to learn. Here, we learn how very important Friar Laurence (Charles Janasz) and Juliet’s Nurse (Kandis Chappell) are, because they are the two best performances in the show. Indeed, Janasz’s tongue-lashing to Romeo is only bettered by his woeful, at-wit’s-end explanation of what went wrong, addressed to a stern Escalus (Bill Christ) at the play’s close. And Chappell’s reactions, even when silent, speak volumes. Her face when she finally realizes Juliet is mourning more for Romeo than for Tybalt registers an almost frightened acknowledgement of youthful passion. The scene when she counsels giving up on Romeo and marrying Paris (Julien Seredowych) as Capulet (Timothy D. Stickney) commands is also fraught with a dissembling that speaks volumes about her underling status.

The principal roles are spottier. As Romeo, Chris Ghaffari is boyish and energetic, able to climb up to and down from the balcony slab with impressive ease, but any sense of Romeo as morose or lovesick—as he should be when we meet him—never materializes. And he’s much better at banter and challenge than he is at the passionate declarations required in the denouement. Kaliswa Brewster fares better as Juliet, swaying her Nurse with the passion of her love for Romeo and finding depth and tears in the “banished” speech, but she also has a tendency to proclaim earnestly more often than find a register that can carry her from pertness to pathos and back. Together they don’t really ignite, and their best scene has them lying on their sides, their body language expressing the yearning that’s stirring them.

Chris Ghaffari (Romeo), Kaliswa Brewster (Juliet)

And Mercutio? This time he’s more a nerd—with his pedal-pusher braces and bicycle—than a fop (the typical rendition), and Fenner knows how to deliver the poetry of his speech about Queen Mab, and that makes him a welcome addition here. The Montagues don’t have all that much to do, and, as Juliet’s parents, Thomas D. Stickney enacts fed-up anger well and Celeste Ciulla seems the most at home in the Neorealist trappings, looking like a Rosselini heroine, cigarette and all. Robert Hannon Davis, who plays Romeo’s stiff of a dad, makes more of an impression as a truly scary Apothecary, and Alex Hanna’s Benvolio is apt.

The best things about the look of the show are Ilona Somogyi’s costumes—Juliet’s go-to-be-shrived outfit is quite fetching—and Matthew Richards’ lighting design, which makes for some interesting effects against that somber, tomblike backdrop. The notion that Italy’s war dead serve as those fallen to Capulet vs. Montague intrigues is more suggestive than satisfactory, but the set’s sense of gloom does serve to underline all the misgivings and the willingness to die expressed often enough. This is a Romeo & Juliet where the couple’s brief flame of love seems a stray moment in an enduring culture of mourning. Doom’s the word.

William Shakespeare’s
Romeo & Juliet
Directed by Darko Tresnjak

Scenic Design: Darko Tresnjak; Costume Design: Ilona Somogyi; Lighting Design: Matthew Richards; Sound Design: Jane Shaw; Wig Design: Mark Adam Rampmeyer; Associate Scenic Deisgner: Colin McGurk; Dramaturg: Elizabeth Williamson; Fight Choreographer: Steve Rankin; Vocal & Text Coach: Claudia Hill-Sparks; Casting: Binder Casting; Productioin Stage Manager: Robyn M. Zalewski; Assistant Stage Manager: Brae Singleton; Production Manager: Bryan T. Holcombe; Associate Artistic Director: Elizabeth Williamson

Cast: Callie Beaulieu; Kaliswa Brewster; Michael Buckhout; Kandis Chappell; Bill Christ; Celeste Ciulla; Robert Hannon Davis; Jonathan Louis Dent; Wyatt Fenner; Chris Ghaffari; Alex Hanna; Olivia Hoffman; Charles Janasz; Raphael Massie; Stephen Mir; Ella Mora; Stephen James Potter; Jenna Rapisdara; Alex Schneps; Mac Schonher; Julien Seredowych; Timothy D. Stickney

Hartford Stage
February 11-March 20, 2016

The Bounds of Brotherhood

Review of Dutch Masters at Yale Cabaret

Two teens on a New York subway riding up through Harlem in the 1990s. One an aggressively outgoing black kid, Eric (Leland Fowler), the other a timid and anxious white kid, Steve (Edmund Donovan). In the course of the play both will expose a lot about themselves, and they also expose a lot about the nexus of class, race, privilege that defines social boundaries in our times. How close to friendship can these two really be, even though (we learn) that Steve is an enthusiast of black popular culture, such as rap and Richard Pryor and famous black athletes? The divide between them, which is obvious enough from the start, as Steve tries to stay on Eric’s good side, allowing himself to be intimidated into leaving the train to smoke a blunt with his new pal, becomes more marked when we learn of a connection between them in the past.

At that point, with Steve now Eric’s guest, of sorts, new anxieties surface because of the many ways in which Steve might offend his host, who is exposing anxieties of his own. It’s then that this gripping play, full of wonderful back and forth dialogue and resounding portrayals of the young protagonists by Fowler and Donovan, begins to push things a bit for the sake of dramatic effect. It gets manipulative, but retains—in Luke Harlan’s clear directorial grasp—a focus on the possibilities these characters suggest. Though I’d prefer a denouement in which they who could get down to cases without waving weapons around, Keller’s sense of how “the street” makes its presence felt in any meeting between characters like these keeps the shocks plausible. There are inconsistencies, but nothing too damning. Unlike LeRoi Jones’ Dutchman, which it echoes initially, Keller’s play stays within the bounds of naturalism in a situation where one stranger can play a head-trip on another, particularly when one of the two knows a lot more than he tells at first.

Leland Fowler (Eric), Edmund Donovan (Steve); photo by Christopher Thompson

The actors in the show are nothing short of amazing. As the mercurial Eric, Fowler has to run through a vast range of attitudes, putting the audience and Steve on guard and then disarming both. He’s amusing and looking to be amused, but he’s also shrewd, knowing, forthright, and occasionally menacing, if only in fun. He could be a con man or he could be someone trying to establish his credibility. He’s sort of the worst nightmare of any insecure white kid trying to maintain some sense of street cred on black turf, and Donovan has Eric down all the way: slack-mouthed, eager to be (and used to being) liked, curious, seemingly open but really closed-off in ways that his evening with Eric will bring to the fore. His stoned call to his mother’s voice-mail is both comic and sad, and that’s the way much of the interaction plays out here. Until it gets very emotional.

A good case in point about the tone of Keller’s dialogue—that I can cite without giving too much away—is the conversation about Dutch Masters that the boys get into while smoking the powerful blunt Eric rolls using the familiar cigar brand as his rolling papers. He points out, rightly, that the Dutch were “masters” through the slave trade. Steve thinks the name is a reference to Dutch masters of painting, such as Rembrandt, whose painting of the masters of the drapers’ guild graces the packaging. Both concede they might be wrong, but Eric sees the irony in rappers referencing “dutches” as part of their lingo, sort of turning the tables on “the masters.” Inspired by their shared laughter, Steve tells a story of how some black kids struck him when his high school basketball team came to their school. It’s an effort to ingratiate himself—a black kid on his team helps him keep his cool—but falls flat because who is “master” of a situation, such as the conversation itself, is at stake.

Much in the dialogue works that way with signals misread or misdirected and even seemingly genuine emotion “staged” to make the other character react. If either actor were less likable, we might be willing to side with the other, but each keeps us hoping that there will be some way they might find an “us against them” ground of shared fellowship. Occasionally such possibilities flit across their faces, but there’s always some other claim to be made against it. Is it a claim made by pride, by social injustice, by racism, by duty towards their moms or their peers, or by distaste with having to make allowances, or with false feeling? Keller’s script contains a wide range of reasons these two could and should be uncomfortable with each other and plays on hopes that they’ll work it out somehow, and even hopes some might have for a more shattering comeuppance for one character or the other.

The set by Choul Lee, consisting of three main playing spaces—subway, park, and “livingroom”—are spread out in the Cab’s small space and help to underline that these are three distinct areas to be explored. The boys are strangers on the subway, together in the park, and either friends or enemies by the end of their time in the room.  Dutch Masters is a lively play, masterfully staged, and is likely to get people talking.

Dutch Masters
By Greg Keller
Directed by Luke Harlan

Dramaturg: Taylor Barfield; Scenic Designer: Choul Lee; Costume Designer: Edmund Donovan; Lighting Designer: Krista Smith; Co-Sound Designer: Matthew Fischer; Co-Sound Designer: Ian Scot; Stage Manager: Sarah Thompson; Producer: Libby Peterson

Yale Cabaret
February 25-27, 2016

The People's War

Review of Escuela at Yale Repertory Theatre

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to join a cell committed to revolutionary violence, check out Guillermo Calderón’s Escuela, playing for three nights at the Iseman Theater as part of the Yale Repertory Theatre’s No Boundaries series. Calderón both wrote and directs the play, whose title is simply “School” in Spanish, as a means to present a generation of activists in 1980s’ Chile largely ignored now because of their willingness to resort to terrorist violence to overthrow the brutal regime of Augusto Pinochet. The five member cast—two men, three women—enact both the roles of instructors or experts and of students as they move through such topics as correct handgun protocol, how to plant a bomb and light its fuse, how to identify and counteract psychological warfare, and how it is that capitalists control everything.

As the cast wears scarves that mask their faces throughout the play and speak in Spanish with English subtitles, audiences can expect a bit of alienation. Happily, though, the stringent, didactic tone of the lessons is easied by odd, off-beat bits of human curiosity, vanity, naïvete. First of all, there’s something inherently hopeless in the methods—as in knocking out electricity in the slums so that the police won’t come in—and something misguidedly heroic, or laughably uncertain, about key instructions: “how far should we run after lighting the fuse?” “As far as you can.” Or when the handgun expert coolly demonstrates how to kill three adversaries armed with guns firing hundreds of rounds as though choreographing a scene in a Lethal Weapon movie with himself as hero.

But the comedy of what almost seems a support group for folks with revolutionary proclivities only appears fitfully. At other times the songs sung—as in “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh”—and the shared ethos evoked might also create a creeping memory of the era when the Weatherman or the Baader-Meinhof group grabbed headlines by trying to bring down the authorities—aka “the Pigs” (and sure enough one instructor draws a police-pig on the chalkboard)—upon their committed, anarchic activities. Somewhere between those days, in which the radical Left struggled against the mainstream forces of oppression, and events such as the Oklahoma City bombing, or the bomb at the Boston Marathon, the opprobrium upon violent tactics as inherently terrorist, in the name of no matter what cause or gripe, has undermined the romance with revolution that, perhaps, Escuela wants to revisit.

Transposed from Chile, where it should remind some of a past they may have forgotten and instruct the young about what went down, Escuela might easily provoke censure from a civic mind-set that repudiates the ethics of violent overthrow, but, if so, it must be allowed that Calderón is clear about the banality of evil. The characters in his play are clearly not villains, if only because they seem so obvious about their misgivings and off-hand attempts at solidarity.

With a blackboard, a slide projector, a handgun, a bomb prop, and a guitar, the five conspirators seem exemplars of both the basis of revolutionary acts as well as the virtues of basic theater. And as theater, Escuela has its virtues, though its pacing, like a late night class, feels at times a bit pro forma, as if the students themselves are being attentive out of politeness rather than zeal. One would welcome some raised voices of disagreement or more tension caused by fear or by stronger versus lesser opposition, if only for the sake of drama. There are subtle differences among the conspirators but one would be hard-pressed to break through the anonymity they see as a means to escape identification.

And maybe it's true that a theater, like a politics, that relies upon heroes and leaders and self-involved characters is unlikely to ever achieve a breakthrough for the good of all. In Escuela, the lesson, as theater, as politics, is more nostalgic than revolutionary, seeming to belong to what was rather than shaping what may be coming.

Escuela
Written and directed by Guillermo Calderón

Assistant Director: María Paz González; Design and Technician: Loreto Martínez; Musical Arrangements: Felipe Borquez; Tour Manager: Elvira Wielandt

Performers: Camila González Brito; Luis Cerda; Andrea Laura Giadach Cristensen; Carlos Ugarte Díaz; Francisca Lewin

Yale Repertory Theatre
February 24-26, 2016

Drop by the Bus Stop

Preview of Bus Stop, New Haven Theater Company

In the backroom of the English Building Markets, there’s a new diner. Or rather, an old diner. Dating from 1955, to be exact. It’s the set—still under construction—for New Haven Theater Company’s upcoming production of William Inge’s classic play of Americana, Bus Stop, and, boy, does it look authentic. Complete with the spinning stools you might remember from your favorite drugstore soda counter (if you remember those at all), a Beechnut Coffee tin, glass bottles of milk, a Frigidaire, and a radio that looks like it was around to broadcast on VE Day, Grace’s diner, where Bus Stop takes place during a freak blizzard in Kansas in March, has ambiance aplenty.

Director George Kulp expressed his deep gratitude to the Long Wharf Theatre, which generously opened its scenery and costume warehouses for the NHTC’s use. Which makes the show a dream come true for Kulp, who played headstrong cowboy Bo Decker in an exam play staged when he was still a theater student back in 1982. “The part was good to me and got me some attention,” Kulp said, and recently, when the process of picking plays for the NHTC season was taking longer than usual, “the play crossed my mind again.” The first thing Kulp realized was that he has the perfect assortment of actors for the play. Kulp asked his fellow NHTCers to read the play and casting fell into place immediately.

First of all, the play brings back Megan Chenot to the NHTC stage—last seen as the Stage Manager in their production of Our Town two years ago—who is taking time off from her busy performance schedule with her band Mission O. She plays Cherie, a small-time show-girl from the Ozarks and the female love interest of Bo, a cowboy trying to get her to marry him and move to Montana, played here by Trevor Williams who has the kind of youthful energy to pass for early twenties. The youngest part in the production—impressionable teen waitress Elma—goes to Sara Courtmanche, in her NHTC debut.

Other roles are filled by some of the familiar regulars in the NHTC family: Megan’s husband, Peter, a welcome addition to any NHTC show, whether as star or support, plays no-nonsense Sheriff Will Masters; J. Kevin Smith, who has had his share of plum roles with NHTC, as for instance in Glengarry Glen Ross and The Seafarer, plays Dr. Lyman, a pontificating ex-prof, who delights a bit too much in a nip from the bottle, among other vices; Erich Greene, often in the role of comic support, plays Carl, the Bus Driver, who has designs on Grace, the owner of the establishment, played forthright and down-homey by Kulp’s wife Susan (the Kulps played the Webbs in Our Town); John Watson gets the role of Bo’s crusty sidekick and father figure, Virgil.

Trevor Williams, Megan Chenot, John Watson, Sara Courtmanche, J. Kevin Smith, Peter Chenot, Susan Kulp, Erich Greene

“The play is better than I remembered,” Kulp said, and admitted that when he played Bo, “I was only focused on my role and really didn’t see how well the parts fit together. There are a lot of possibilities for us to explore, and a lot of discoveries to make about these characters. And we’re finding the humor.”

Bus Stop, set in a distinct place—a stretch of Kansas on the bus route to Kansas City—and period, is “a really good choice” for the Company, Kulp said. Indeed, NHTC has shown an affinity with classic American theater in its productions of Our Town and Waiting for Lefty. The pacing of naturalist drama suits the NHTC ensemble approach, with everyone contributing to the overall effect. The challenge here is that most of the cast is on stage at the same time, with different configurations taking up the main action. It requires a bit more orchestration than something like Almost, Maine, which the NHTC staged at English Markets in 2013, where the action was parceled out in discrete scenes. Kulp said he finds the challenge exciting, while fans of NHTC who have enjoyed some of their larger cast productions should be pleased by the overlapping interactions.

While Inge might not be a playwright on the tip of everyone’s tongue, there was a revival of his play Picnic on Broadway in 2013, and Kulp feels Bus Stop is just as good, if not better. “Both hail from a more innocent time we can be nostalgic about, but Inge is good at exposing the different layers of his characters.” And, as Smith says, his role, Dr. Lyman, excised from the Hollywood film version of the play (in which Marilyn Monroe played Cherie), lets us hear more of the kind of jaundiced views closer to Inge himself who didn’t set out to write venerable classics.

And what about a blizzard in March? Kulp said the special effects will be convincing, but let’s hope the play’s not prophetic in that regard.

The New Haven Theater Company’s production of Bus Stop opens Thursday, March 3rd and plays March 4th, 5th, 10th, 11th, 12th at 839 Chapel Street.

On With the Cab

The much anticipated and celebrated annual Yale School of Drama Drag Show has come and gone, and this week the Cabaret resumes its regular season, with one more show in February, two in March and two in April. That’s five more chances to check out Season 48 ere it’s o’er.

Next up is Cabaret 14: Dutch Masters, a play by actor/author Greg Keller (who has played on the Yale Rep stage, notably in Belleville a few years back). Proposed by second-year YSD actors Leland Fowler and Edmund Donovan (who both did great work in last year’s Cab season in 50:13 and Quartet, respectively), the show will be directed by Luke Harlan, whose thesis show The Skin of Our Teeth pulled out all the stops in the fall, and who was co-artistic of the Summer Cabaret in 2014, not to mention director and elegant co-host of the recent Drag Show. The play presents a seemingly random encounter between two youths on a Bronx subway train, one white, one black. Though there is a connection we’ll become privy to as we go on, the play also references LeRoi Jones’ Dutchman, an earlier—and somewhat dated—play about racial difference (enacted in the Cab’s 46th season). Set in the 1990s, Keller’s play touches on the problems of race, class, privilege, and cultural authority that roil our current politics. And is also funny. February 25-27

Re-discovering obscure Tennessee Williams plays is always interesting. The Summer Cabaret’s gutsy delving into the uneven In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel in 2013 comes to mind; this time its And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens, a play that was never produced in Williams’ lifetime, possibly because its story of an aging transvestite in New Orleans smitten with a young sailor was too candidly queer for the era. The play’s title knowingly references a famous line from Shakespeare’s Richard II and conjures up consciousness of a role one cannot but choose to play. Proposed by first-year director Rory Pelsue—memorable as one of a pair of duetting sisters in this year’s Drag Show—and featuring first-year actor Patrick Madden as Candy, the project impressed the Cab’s artistic directors when Madden showed up to the interview in drag, performing a scene from the show that made co-artistic director Leora Morris weep. Be prepared to be moved. March 3-5

Third-year director Leora Morris—notable for audacious work such as her thesis show Women Beware Women and love holds a lamp in this little room in last year’s Summer Cab—shares duties on Cab #16, co-directing with Jesse Rasmussen, a second-year director. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is a film by maverick German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder that began life as a play. With a cast of 6 women, the play concentrates on a fashion designer—Petra—her master/slave relationship with a servant, Marlene, and her love for Karin, a female model. Perhaps recalling Jean Genet’s The Maids a bit (which has been staged more than once at the Cab), the play is filled with the kind of psycho-sexual drama Fassbinder handled masterfully (as with In A Year with Thirteen Moons, directed by Robert Woodruff at Yale Rep in 2013). March 31-April 2

Cab #17 goes out on a limb more than a little, featuring a new idea that will stretch the Cab beyond its usual bounds—both physically and artistically. The Satellite Series Festival will be an effort to recreate something like a “fringe festival” experience, orchestrating performances in three different spaces: the Cabaret at 217 Park Street, the neighboring African-American Cultural Center a few steps across the courtyard, and the Annex, the space around the corner on Park used as a rehearsal space and the scene of tech-based projects. How it works: the Cab hosts its usual dinner service then presents a show that runs roughly half an hour, after which the audience would visit the other sites—possibly given a choice between the two or split into two groups to visit the two other spaces alternately. The impetus is to throw some attention to under-represented groups by staging several different short works, and to give a platform to more design-driven work that rarely gets a public showing. The Cab artistic directors will be curating the festival, and more information about the different acts will be forthcoming. April 7-9

Finally, Cab #18 presents Lake Kelsey, a new musical being written by second-year actor Dylan Frederick—who played “Robin” in Catfight, last season’s take-off on the Batman TV series—and directed by Kevin Hourigan, director of the Allen Ginsberg-inspired theater-piece I’m With You in Rockland, last fall. Consisting of scenes and songs, rather than “a tidy musical,” the piece features musings on today’s adolescents in an imaginary neighborhood in Minneapolis. Co-artistic directors David Bruin and Leora Morris likened the songs to Magnetic Fields and Belle & Sebastian, which is to say low key and introspective. April 21-23

Six more shows in which the Cab 48 team—co-artistic directors David Bruin, Julian Elijah Martinez, Leora Morris and managing director Annie Middleton—continue their season of provocative theater with a finger on the pulse of our times. Make the most of it . . . and see you at the Cab.

Yale Cabaret
217 Park Street

How Long Does a Miracle Last?

Review of Cloud Tectonics at Yale Cabaret

One of the most appealing aspects of the Yale Cabaret is the fact that the students of the Yale School of Drama who stage theater there are doing so “on their own dime,” as it were. It’s not for courses or credit; it’s for their own engagement with drama. This means that sometimes students get to work “outside discipline,” trying out aspects of theatrics and tech that are not part of their studies at YSD, thus broadening their skills and finding new approaches. Perhaps even more significantly, the Cabaret offers students a chance to work on projects that otherwise they’d never get a chance to do while at Yale. And such is the case with José Rivera’s Cloud Tectonics.

There aren’t a lot of opportunities in American theater for Latino/a actors and directors to stage their visions of U.S. experience. However, José Rivera’s intensely lyrical Cloud Tectonics was staged at both La Jolla, in San Diego, and Playwrights Horizon, in NYC, and it became a favorite play for three actors currently at the School of Drama: Sebastian Arboleda, who directs the Cab show outside discipline, Bradley Tejeda, a third-year, and Barbaro Guzman, a first-year. Their proposal of the show was in association with the recently formed El Colectivo, YSD’s Latino/a affinity group. Which makes the show an excellent opportunity for the Cab to showcase a little-known play from an under-represented American minority.

But more than that, it’s an excellent opportunity to see Bradley Tejeda—whose debut at the Cab three years ago I remember vividly, and who added comic intensity to the Rep’s version of Arcadia, directed by James Bundy last year—play a part that could have been written for him. Tejeda brings understated charm, aware sensitivity, and a soulful thoughtfulness to the role of Anibal de la Luna, a young Latino transplanted from NYC to LA, who picks up Celistina del Sol (Stephanie Machado), a pregnant woman hitching in a hurricane. We might say that, as a result, his life is changed forever, except that “forever” assumes a given temporal frame that Rivera’s play doesn’t respect. Once Celistina arrives, the clocks in Anibal’s apartment stop and so does time—though not outside in the real world.

While it’s a fact that Rivera studied for a time with Gabriel García Márquez, the grand-master of magical realism in fiction, Rivera’s play is as much Twilight Zone story as magical realist drama—in which, typically, the facts of reality, such as temporal and spatial continuity and the distinctness of states of life and death, can be bent or ignored. In other words, it’s only as “occult” as you feel it needs to be. A pregnant woman hitchhiking in a storm, “rescued” by a well-meaning savior to whom she tells a story from her past that indicates either madness or something even spookier. Then there’s Nelson (Guzman), Anibal’s brother, an earnestly manly soldier who immediately falls in love with Anibal’s guest when he meets her. As a character, Nelson lets Rivera keep one foot of his play in the world of U.S. armed conflicts, where the call of duty is a constant, while the brothers’ interplay grounds us in a world we share with them.

Celestina del Sol (Stephanie Machado), Anibal de la Luna (Bradley James Tejeda), Nelson (Barbaro Guzman)

As written, Celistina del Sol is mostly a walking archetype: not the femme fatale that would typically have two brothers coming to blows over who gets to bed her, but rather a vision of “the Madonna,” an image of suffering and fertile femininity that makes some men open their slobbering hearts. Fortunately, Rivera’s play, and Arboleda’s direction, keep the improbabilities, such as Nelson’s instant affection and Celistina’s belief that she’s been pregnant for two years, within the realm of a kind of poetic naturalism. And it’s as poetry that the play works best. For these are characters who are ultimately reacting to the way love feels, not the way the world works.

As Celistina, Stephanie Machado exudes a kind of knowing sorrow that imbues her erratic statements with believability. Whether or not her experiences make sense to others, Celistina does not aim to deceive, and that may be the aspect that the two men find so haunting. She’s strange, but she means what she says. But there’s also a threat of hysteria under the surface that Machado is able to deliver without making us feel this hapless woman is bonkers.

Key to it all is Tejeda’s Anibal, who deliberates over his own emotions, his brother’s emotions, his guest’s situation with a gravitas that takes its time, and, in a conclusion that is in some ways surprising, in some ways inevitable, he plays an aged Anibal as someone still distantly related to the man he was. It’s a bravura performance.

Another key element is the lyricism of Spanish. Early on, Celistina, before Nelson’s appearance, directs a long speech in Spanish at Anibal who doesn’t understand. Most of the audience won’t either, but Machado’s delivery is so beguiling it seems impossible that Anibal’s heart wouldn’t be stolen away. As it turns out—when we hear the speech again with simultaneous translation—what she says delivers a kind of logic of existential love that gets at the heart of the play and redounds well on a Valentine’s Day weekend. And, along those lines, credit as well the dance sequence and co-choreographers, Nicole Gardner and Jonathan Higginbotham, both outside discipline and the former from outside YSD.

With its very realistic set design by Izmir Ickbal and very realistic special effects of lighting and sound to make a raging L.A. storm feel real on a frigid New Haven night, Cloud Tectonics keeps its feet on the ground while exploring the heavenly provocations del Sol y de la Luna.

Cloud Tectonics
By José Rivera
Directed by Sebastian Arboleda

Co-Choreographers: Nicole Gardner, Jonathan Higginbotham; Co-Dramaturgs: Maria Inês Marques, Nahuel Telleria; Scenic Designer: Izmir Ickbal; Costume Designer: Haydee Zelideth; Lighting Designer: Elizabeth Mak; Sound Designer: Tye Hunt Fitzgerald; Technical Director: Matt Davis; Stage Manager: Caitlin O’Rourke; Producer: Rachel Shuey

Cast: Barbaro Guzman, Stephanie Machado, Bradley James Tejeda

Yale Cabaret
February 11-13

Method and Madness on the Moors

Review of The Moors at Yale Repertory Theatre

Jen Silverman’s The Moors, directed by Jackson Gay, at the Yale Repertory Theatre, is brilliant stuff. The play revisits the familiar tropes of Gothic fiction with a sharp sense of the absurd: the sweet and well-meaning governess summoned to a grand manor house on the desolate moors; the peremptory lady of the house, the mysterious master of the estate—her brother; another sister, who pines after literary fame; the surly menial who no doubt knows more than she says, and who may be “with child” or with typhus, or both. Into such a fraught setting, which might do well as the basis for campy comedy or a revisiting of melodrama, Silverman drops dialogue that feels bracingly contemporary, with traces of Beckett and Stoppard. Which is to say that the lines are acerbic, funny, and tend to ride the play’s quizzical rhythms like a moor-hen on a stiff breeze.

The cast of The Moors

One of the most successful conceits here is a philosophical dog, a morose Mastiff (Jeff Biehl) who eventually becomes fixated on a charming but flighty Moor-Hen (Jessica Love). Pet of the late parson, the sisters’ father, the Mastiff wants to encounter God and takes the Moor-Hen to be an emissary from the supreme being. Their exchanges have a kind of elemental purity that makes us aware of how queasy speech is as a means to arrive at any kind of understanding.  As different species, the Mastiff and Moor-Hen cannot share a world view any more than they can mate. But Silverman makes them emblematic of the more alarming aspects of attachment, particularly the hopeless or domineering variety.

A Moor-Hen (Jessica Love), The Mastiff (Jeff Biehl)

The attachments on display among the humans also depend upon negotiations with certain possibilities in language, and it is attention to language that makes The Moors such a well-crafted delight. Cold and rigorous Agatha (Kelly McAndrew) might be called “manly” in terms of the times, but she’s also a woman who knows her own mind; she tells the simpering governess, Emilie (Miriam Silverman), “you have been handed limitations, which you accepted.” As unlikely as she may be as a mentor, Agatha manages to seduce the governess in part by means of the letters that brought Emilie to the manor, written as though in the hand of master Branwell, Agatha's brother. The two enact a mistress/maid relationship that makes manifest the kind of sexual dynamic that tends to lurk more latent in typical Gothic fiction.

Emilie (Miriam Silverman), Agatha (Kelly McAndrew)

And once that note is sounded, the roles of the other two women become clearer as antagonists to Agatha’s erotic reign, which entails, in lurid Gothic fashion, a scheme of using Branwell as the means for an heir via Emilie, in a kind of incest by proxy. The other sister, Huldey (Birgit Huppuch), styles herself an author, and a famous one at that, because she keeps a journal full of her unimaginative unhappiness, and, in Agatha’s scheme of things, is decidedly de trop.  The maid, Marjory (Hannah Cabell), has other designs and finds Huldey an apt enough dunce for her plans. In essence, then, there are two strong-willed characters, Agatha and Marjory, both played with subtle shadings, and two weaker characters, Huldey, a fulsome comic role, and Emilie, more or less our heroine and avatar in this uncertain situation.

Huldey (Birgit Huppuch), Marjory (Hannah Cabell)

Another nice touch is the character of Marjory. As parlor maid, she is called Mallory and is pregnant, due to the master’s inclinations we assume; as scullery maid, she is called Marjory and suffers from typhus. The blending of both in one, besides a recurring joke, is also a way of attesting to the slippery nature of roles—social, sexual, dramatic.  Eventually we hear Marjory’s voice in her own journalizing only to realize that she is the most interesting of the four.

And what is our heroine’s role? In a brief exchange between the sisters early on, Huldey asks why a governess is needed when “there is nothing to govern,” an assertion that Agatha gently mocks. Is Emilie to be Agatha’s creature, surrogate mother to the heir, a confidante for lonely Huldey, as the latter hopes, or the eventual mistress of the moors?

Along the way, there is the insipidity of Huldey for amusement, the oddly touching amour between Mastiff and Moor-Hen, sudden violence, and a show-stopping murder ballad. There’s also Alexander Woodward’s wonderful set that gives us both a creepy manor house, complete with secret door, and the moody moors, and eventually a half-and-half of the two that creates a visual commentary on how much the effect of the outside is coming inside. Lighting, costumes and sound design and excellent casting all contribute to making the show’s mix of the comic and the creepy work so well.

With its quizzical tone, The Moors establishes a world of shifting possibility—nothing is as it seems, and nothing will change, but everything will be different. Slyly fascinating, The Moors is first-rate entertainment.

The Moors
By Jen Silverman
Directed by Jackson Gay

Scenic Designer: Alexander Woodward; Costume Designer: Fabian Fidel Aguilar; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Sound Designer and Original Music: Daniel Kluger; Fight Director: Rick Sordelet; Production Dramaturg: Maria Inês Marques; Casting Director: Tara Rubin Casting; Stage Manager: Avery Trunko

Cast: Jeff Biehl, Hannah Cabell, Birgit Huppuch, Jessica Love, Kelly McAndrew, Miriam Silverman

Yale Repertory Theatre
January 29-February 20, 2016

A Manic Panic

Review of How We Died of Disease-Related Illness at Yale Cabaret

In the talk-back after the Friday night early show of How We Died of Disease-Related Illness, by Miranda Rose Hall, actor Niall Powderly, who plays Neil, an infected social scientist, characterized the show as “Mel Brooks with a point.” I can’t do any better than that.

As that descriptive phrase should suggest, the show, directed by Elizabeth Dinkova, is wacky and zany, full of a cartoonish sense of human interaction that zigs and zags through antagonism, togetherness, arch absurdity, naked emotion, slapstick, song, and skits “in the manner of….” But the play is also disturbingly relevant. As the playbill notes from co-artistic director David Bruin point out, a new epidemic disease—Zika—is even now gaining a global profile. Hall wrote the play while suffering heebie-jeebies over the Ebola outbreak—which, one recalls, did seem to reach Yale Medical—and, while the suffering caused by infectious and often fatal disease is anything but amusing to those affected, the surrounding reactions, from our media and from “the general public” often look like sit-com material, sans laugh-track. Hall’s play feeds that kind of hysterical thinking—a parody paranoia—back to us on an endless loop: we stand ever-ready to be victimized by our fears and phobias. We push a button and summon a media to push our buttons.

Everyone in How We Died of Disease-Related Illness is working very hard on a very shallow set, with the action spilling out into the aisles, so to speak. There’s Jenelle Chu as Hannah, a seemingly unflappable nurse who spirals through a wide-range of mood swings, while all the time wearing a look of scientific neutrality, almost like a hysterical Spock. As the stricken researcher, Powderly hyperventilates so authentically you begin to hope a real medic is somewhere nearby, and his show-stopping “big production number” about disease—as, more or less, the life-changer we’ve all been waiting for—is hilariously over-the-top. As Bill, a medical assistant who arrives looking for a party and stays for the death sequences, Taylor Barfield maintains an upbeat focus while all hell is breaking loose. Then there’s Lisa (Rachel Shuey), a late-comer to the scene and an interesting wrinkle for the play’s ultimate aims. As a “martyr” and proselytizing rabble-rouser—particulary for CLITS (Cats Living In Tragic Situations)—Lisa brings to the mayhem a touch of media-ized mania. When she faces into the camera with flags waving behind her, she seems the culmination of the play’s many quiz-show inspired questions about the emblems of our nation’s state identities—the birds, mottos, dances, trees, and, yes, muffins. Why not a “state disease,” a “state malaise,” a “state cause”?

Too much can’t be said about Juliana Canfield as the mercurial Trisha. She opens the show as a fresh-faced janitor only too pleased at being paid to clean. Throughout the play she shows up repeatedly as a kind of Chorus—moving along to food prep or calisthenics or the intercom or HR or the clergy or a medical professional about to run for governor—and, in each guise, she adds an air of rational usefulness, the kind of thing we tend to expect from the medical profession. At the same time, however, Canfield’s Trisha retains a gleam in her eye that speaks of the kind of earnest pathology found in conspiracy theorists and reality-TV hosts. She’s us when our “first do no harm” helpfulness is no help at all, when our efforts to defeat fear seem to spawn only dumbed-down bromides and homilies of helplessness. And she also plays a one-eyed murderous cat.

Hall’s ear for the unique mixtures of American inanity are nowhere more evident than in Trisha’s monologues, but the hyper dialogues between Neil and Hannah have their share of odd twists and turns, and Lisa’s “vamping” during Bill’s effort to clean up the carnage takes aim at the saving grace supposedly found in creating unreal situations to comment upon reality, generally called “theater.”

Sound effects from Frederick Kennedy are real enough to make unsettled stomachs queasy, while other “special effects”—such as the excretion of guacamole—are ridiculously inept. At times the show feels like live television, aided by a camera whose projections are shown on screens strategically placed in the Cab space, including comical close-ups of the cast at their most wide-eyed.

Busy, brash and bold, How We Died of Disease-Related Illness is a panic.

How We Died of Disease-Related Illness
By Miranda Rose Hall
Directed by Elizabeth Dinkova

Scenic Designer: Zoe Hurwitz; Costume Designer: Sarah Nietfeld; Lighting Designer: Elizabeth Mak; Sound Design and Original Music: Frederick Kennedy; Projection Designer: Brittany Bland; Technical Director: Stephanie Waaser; Stage Manager: David Clauson; Producer: Ruoran Li (Kathy)

Cast: Taylor Barfield, Juliana Canfield, Jenelle Chu, Niall Powderly, Rachel Shuey

Yale Cabaret
February 4-6, 2016

A Sentimental Education

Review of Women Beware Women at Yale School of Drama

Howard Barker’s re-working of Thomas Middleton’s Jacobean tragedy, Women Beware Women, directed by Leora Morris as her thesis show at the Yale School of Drama, makes considerable demands on viewers and players alike. The drama that Barker more or less maintains through the first half tends to feel like Shakespeare minus the poetic self-analysis but with a veneer of what could be called perverse charm. While the second act, penned by Barker, and given an inspired spin by Morris, kicks ass—simply put.

Baize Buzan, Paul Stillman Cooper, Sean Patrick Higgins, Annie Hagg

In the Middleton act, Morris and her cast play to the camp effects of the material—with, among other modernizing touches, a bawdy lyric from Sordido (Paul Stillman Cooper) delivered as a rap, complete with mouthed beats provided by Ward (Bradley James Tejeda), and a big dance number that serves to get all those very colorful costumes onstage at once. But such touches don’t manage to enliven what is fairly turgid going, in part because the tone feels like a bedroom farce played over a nasty tragedy.

Worse, the play is lacking a hero or heroine, which becomes a significant element in the play’s second act, but in the early going the plots we witness are busy but not compelling. In one plot, Leantio (Sean Patrick Higgins), a lowly man, loses his new wife Bianca (Baize Buzan) to rape or “seduction” by the ever lusty Duke (Galen Kane), while, in another, a ditzy aristocrat Fabritio (Dylan Frederick) tries to marry off his eligible daughter Isabella (Shaunette Renée Wilson) to an even ditzier brat (Tejeda), Ward of the scheming Guardiana (Jenelle Chu). Meanwhile, Isabella’s uncle Hippolito (Niall Powderly) has designs of his own on his niece, which his sister—the very busy bawd Livia (Annie Hägg)—helps along, much as she also helps the Duke to help himself to the charms of Bianca. What both Middleton and Barker have in mind, it seems, is the raging unpleasantness harbored in the hearts of well-born humanity, particularly the libidinal viciousness of women who are “past it.” Unable to enjoy the attentions of the like of the Duke, who boasts he’s never bedded a woman of thirty years, Livia and Guardiana get their jollies by corrupting the innocent.

But even the put-upon under-class, always vulnerable to predatory “masters,” don’t manage to engage sympathy since they seem as full of cupidity as everyone else. In the early going, Hägg and Powderly show off to best effect, since they carry well the decadent gravitas of seedy aristocrats. Wilson does fine as a proud innocent (though it’s not much of a part), and Buzan gets to display mercurial moods as a teen wife beguiled by a glimpse of her worth in a high-born’s bed. As the Count, Kane has a dour charm and as “the widow”—Leantio’s mother—Juliana Canfield keeps up the comic relief. And special mention to Brontë England-Nelson who is superlative as a self-righteous male Cardinal, brother of the Duke.

The second act opens with an eyeful as Leantio and Livia cavort about naked, congratulating each other on their sexual prowess and, with the youthful flesh on view, giving the lie to the notion that Livia is “aged.” No matter, Barker’s language is a feast and all of Middleton’s rather trivial characters come forward in more cunning configurations. For starters, Ward has surprising resources, played by Tejeda with a seething fury, and Sordido, who seemed a simple foil in the early going, becomes an amoral player in the malevolent plans of Leantio and Livia, who aim to enact vengeance upon Bianca, now vain as a Kardashian.

If we think we’re watching a comeuppance of the upper-class—with the dazed Duke losing his latest conquest when just about to marry her—that’s only part of the machinations here. We’re also, in Barker’s view, seeing the dark underside of a “woman’s world,” with Livia standing for the newly achieved (in the 1980s) political power of women “of a certain age,” able to wield boy toys in the cut-throat world of the moneyed. But the play without a hero alters surprisingly in Morris’ hands as Bianca comes forward, after her rape by Sordido, as a modern heroine, as if tried by a walk of shame to see the culpability of all, and the power play at the heart of male sexuality. Which leaves her free to woo the ingenue.

It’s an upbeat ending, complete with falling walls and doors that seem to free the actors from the roles—and deaths—Middleton wrote for them, and from the over-busy projections of the set. What’s particularly successful here is that we don’t seem to be simply witnessing a breaking down of social custom or a familiar hybrid aesthetic, but rather a revolutionary spirit that wants to overturn expectations with something more confounding. The confrontation may be a bit calculated, but if so, that argues for the value of the Middleton section, for we have to be reminded of how jaded entertainment can be before we can feel how jarring.

Women Beware Women
By Howard Barker and Thomas Middleton
Directed by Leora Morris

Choreographer: Gretchen Wright; Scenic Designer: Claire DeLiso; Costume Designer: Alexae Visel; Lighting Designer: Carolina Ortiz Herrera; Composer and Sound Designer: Kate Marvin; Projection Designer: Yana Biryukova; Production Dramaturg: Nahuel Tellería; Stage Manager: Rebekah Heusel

Cast: Baize Buzan, Juliana Canfield, Jenelle Chu, Paul Stillman Cooper, Brontë England-Nelson, Dylan Frederick, Annie Hägg, Rebecca Hampe, Sean Patrick Higgins, Galen Kane, Steven C. Koernig, Niall Powderly, Bradley James Tejeda, Katie Travers, Shaunette Renée Wilson

Yale School of Drama
January 23-29, 2016

Slouching toward Adulthood

Review of Slouch at Yale Cabaret

Room-mates. Living with people one is not related to but with whom one forms a kind of ad hoc intimacy is typical of life in college. And after college? What kind of relationships are established by living a perpetual “post-collegiate” experience? That’s the situation of B. Walker Sampson’s Slouch, staged at Yale Cabaret by co-directors Stella Baker and Matthew Fischer with a good sense of how to create movement and flow in this highly verbal play.

Three roommates, Fletcher (Jake Lozano), Skye (Emily Reeder), and Summer (Marié Botha) have in common an interest in their former college BMOC Gordon. But more than that, they have an almost preternatural ability to narrate each other’s actions and habits and obsessions and anxieties. The laughs in the show depend a lot on the hyper-critical tone the girls direct at the hapless slacker Fletcher—who loses his job basically for daydreaming—and the way in which they try to spin their less than stellar activities as efforts at self-discovery, such as Skye’s decision that, to learn the violin as she has always dreamed, she would have to buy a farm first.

Summer, who seems to have admired Gordon from afar, is certain his upcoming visit—to get back his copy of Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones LP from Fletcher—will entail dinner, which she is keen to prepare. And that sends her on a slapstick visit to the supermarket where the enacted cross-purposes of various narratives are hilarious. Botha plays Summer as kind of hyper-aware ditz, much more insightful about others than she is about herself.

Fletcher, who is lackadaisical about his roommates, as he is about much, tends to fret because Gordon has far exceeded Fletcher’s own meager accomplishments. Lozano’s Fletcher seems used to being none-too-swift, and is put upon by the girls for his mopey, dopey guyness. Eventually Summer seems to soften toward him, showing more sympathy than we would expect from her.

Skye, whose story includes a visit to Nantucket in the rain to meet with Gordon only to be stood up, ends up the eternal onlooker as Fletcher and Summer seem to bond over their need for something outside their own heads to be attentive to. And that’s the main take-away here: growth requires taking other people seriously, not simply as spectral reflections of one’s own agenda. Of the three, Summer seems maybe ready to make a move—if not for the sake of Gordon, then maybe for Fletcher, who could certainly benefit from someone finding him something more than a cipher.

Don Cogan’s scenic design creates lived-in-looking areas for the trio to bat around in, and Fischer’s lighting and Tye Hunt Fitzgerald’s sound design add many nice touches, while Brittany Bland’s projections provide atmospheric art on the window center stage, including raindrops and street scenes that become eloquent in helping create mood for this quickly shifting play.

The main effect of Slouch is of a kind of madcap pinball game of the mind, with words and phrases zinging around inside the heads of characters who occasionally are surprised to say aloud what they hear so insistently inside. It’s as if everyone lives with a constant logorrhea that can spill out into the audible almost involuntarily. Which makes actual dialogue seem like it is always in the middle of a stream of thought—a very apt demonstration of how conversation proceeds in the midst of a barrage of IMs, texting, and scrolling. In its ear for how the distracted generation live and love, Slouch is no slouch of a play.

Slouch
By B. Walker Sampson
Directed by Stella Baker and Matthew Fischer

Dramaturg: Ariel Sibert; Scenic Designer: Dan Cogan; Costume Designer: Jamie Farkas; Lighting Designer: Matthew Fischer; Sound Designer: Tye Hunt Fitzgerald; Projection Designer: Brittany Bland; Stage Manager: Emely Selina Zepeda; Producer: Melissa Rose

Yale Cabaret
January 21-23, 2016

Hold That Pose

Review of The Body of an American at Hartford Stage

Dan O’Brien’s The Body of an American, directed with deft control by Jo Bonney at Hartford Stage, is great storytelling. With a cast of two both acting as narrators and a variety of characters, the telling of the story is a large part of the theatrics here.

Michael Crane (Dan)

Often, we’re not watching scenes occur between characters, but rather the recollection of scenes as Michael Crane, as the playwright Dan, tells us how he got interested in photojournalist Paul Watson (Michael Cumpsty) and then interacted with him—via email—and eventually met with him in the frozen wastes of Canada. And Paul is often recalling his adventures as well—assignments that took him to many hot spots of warfare, such Mogodishu, in 1994, where he took a photo of the desecrated body of U.S. serviceman Sgt. David Cleveland, which won Watson a Pulitzer. While all this collective recollection makes the play rather talky, O’Brien’s cut-up narrative technique gives the show a lot of energy, and Alex Basco Koch’s projections and Richard Hoover’s scenic design keep the visuals interesting.

Michael Crane, Michael Cumpsty

The story unfolds primarily through recited emails between the two men, with Dan hoping to use Paul’s experiences as the basis of a play (with the play we’re watching the result), and Paul letting Dan have glimpses of his nomadic life with its risks and rewards. Key to the first half of the show—which runs for a swift 90 minutes with no intermission—is Paul’s story of how he took the photo of Cleveland, while hearing a voice in his head he felt was Cleveland’s say “If you do this, I will own you forever.” The sense of being haunted by the experience of taking the photo comes through strongly.

The fact that the photo made Watson’s name gives credence to the idea that Watson “owes” Cleveland forever. The basis of the owning and owing floats through the play like a plaintive ghost—bringing in all kinds of associations about what civilians owe the military and to what extent the military “owns” U.S. policy—but, while Watson is willing to be owned by the call of duty to be where the action is, the purposes behind such actions are only glanced at. Still, there’s a fascinating underlying theme of what it means to record real events via cameras and what it means to recount a life’s work via theater that makes The Body of an American worth thinking about.

Michael Cumpsty (Paul)

In O’Brien’s hands, Watson emerges as a driven and ambitious professional who also maintains a somewhat romantic sense of his role in the world and that, Dan seems to think, makes him the stuff of drama. In a sense, it’s a miscalculation, this effort to use theater to reveal a) the personal dynamism and difficulties of one man, Paul Watson, and b) the personal difficulties of the playwright, Dan O'Brien, as filtered through his dealings with Watson. This becomes evident in the second half of the play when the two finally meet and spend time together in the Arctic. These scenes have the feel of the awkwardness and incidental boredom of real life, without any great sense of meaning coming from the meeting. That might not be so bad, except that the first half of the play dazzles us with the kinds of stories Paul can tell at a moment’s notice, having been in places and seen things few others have. The Arctic scenes make only too clear that, when not writing a play, a playwright isn’t very interesting and, while not taking hard-to-believe photos, a photojournalist is just killing time.

Yet the play does have one last ace up its sleeve: the phone call Paul placed to the family—particularly the mother—of Sgt. Cleveland. Paul doesn’t get to talk to her, but gets a brusque call from Cleveland’s brother that becomes increasingly riveting as we see both how much Paul needs to get some kind of response from those who know Cleveland and how much patience and sympathy the sergeant’s brother grudgingly expends in the face of Paul’s desperation. As played by Crane and Cumpsty, the scene finally lets us see the play’s dramatic situation reversed: normally it’s Crane, as Dan, trying to get some kind of concession of feelings from Cumpsty, as Paul. While the phone call may not come off as a great reveal about Paul, it does help to sustain Dan’s notion that his effort to get through Paul's flinty, ironic stance paid off.

The ensemble work between the actors is truly a tour de force, with Crane’s ability to morph into a variety of minor characters greatly entertaining. As Watson, Cumpsty has a craggy, world-weary cheer that helps us believe in the character's lack of illusions, while the clipped give-and-take of most of their exchanges embodies the way even “true stories” are staged, and framed, and suited to a purpose.

The Body of an American
By Dan O’Brien
Directed by Jo Bonney

Scenic Design: Richard Hoover; Costume Design: Ilona Somogyi; Lighting Design: Lap Chi Chu; Sound Design: Darron L. West; Projection Design: Alex Basco Koch; Dialect Coach: Deborah Hecht; Casting: Binder Casting; Dramaturg: Elizabeth Williamson; Production Stage Manager: Lori Ann Zepp; Assistant Stage Manager: Alisa Zeljeznjak

Hartford Stage
January 7-31, 2016

Walking the Lion

Review of The Lion at Long Wharf Theatre

Though you might not think it to look at him, slim, blonde, and boyish singer-songwriter Benjamin Scheuer has suffered, and of that suffering he has made a song cycle, or cabaret-style musical, called The Lion, which debuted at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2014, and earned him the 2015 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, and is now at the Long Wharf Theatre.

On stage, it’s just Scheuer, several guitars (one electric, the rest acoustic), some chairs, and a kind of distressed-looking backdrop that could pass for a room in a worn recording-studio or a low-key folk nightclub. The story he has to tell runs the gamut from childhood inspiration—his father, a mathematician, played guitar and made young Ben a toy banjo from a cookie tin, a necktie, and rubber bands—to familial dysfunction, loss, young love found and lost, a very scary and unpleasant disease—Hodgkin Lymphoma—and, ultimately, personal redemption via music, particularly the guitar.

Benjamin Scheuer in The Lion

As such, the show is about the conditions of its own creation. All the songs and Scheuer’s between-song narrations contribute to the unfolding story of how Scheuer became the author and performer of The Lion. It’s a true story, but like all true stories, it has to be adapted to be made the stuff of art. We tend to believe there is some kind of real experience as the basis for the lyrics of most songs we hear—sometimes that connection between the singer and the song is made explicit, at other times there’s more detachment from what’s being told—but The Lion makes sense only as the story of Benjamin Scheuer, its narrator-protagonist. In that light, but for “Weather the Storm,” a song young Scheuer learns from his dad, and the only one here that could inspire a sing-along, it’s not filled with folk songs but rather the kind of first-person songs that tend to be sung by characters in musicals.

But these are also not the kind of catchy, hummable tunes one associates with musicals; the song of The Lion mostly have to have narrative force, and Scheuer is quite adept at finding a way to sing about upsetting experiences. The songs, though, are not just a bid for sympathy. Scheuer strives to make his personal experience exemplary of the kinds of things that can break up families, the kinds of things that go wrong with overly naïve love affairs, the kinds of things that can afflict our health with little warning, and, particularly, the guilt we feel about how we treated our parents and our ongoing resentment of how they treated us.

If that sounds like song-writing as therapy, it should, because at times that’s what listening to The Lion feels like. While listening, we can wonder where the story’s going—will “Ben” be cured of his illness, will he find true love, will his mom stop being so snippy, will he land a big recording contract and show everybody—but, as with any album of related songs you might care to think of, what we’re mainly doing is experiencing each song as its sung and played for us. The intimacy of a solo performer with a guitar has a certain inherent theatricality, and the songs—which are very well-structured—show the variety of Scheuer as singer/musician as well as the many shades of Ben, the guy who seems to keep groping at getting a handle on his life. Except that the songs are the handle the guy they’re about doesn’t quite get. Yet.

Ultimately, that’s what makes The Lion gripping: its candor. To quote a line from a Dylan song: “I know you’ve suffered much, but in this you are not so unique.” The slings and arrows of Ben’s life may be easily comparable to what many have endured, particularly those who write and sings the blues, to say nothing of those who favor tell-all memoirs, but what is unique is getting up night after night to sing that story for the edification of others. Particularly as the heart of the show has to stand in the uneasy space between the early warm and fuzzy evocation of Dad making that cookie-tin banjo and the effort to connect across time with “Dear Dad,” in a song that tries to assuage what can never really be laid to rest.

You have to respect Scheuer for trying, though, with what talents he has. He’s a better guitarist than singer and better singer than actor, but there’s dramatic interest in his ability to recall to mind versions of himself—or of Ben—that can seem quaint or touching or simply clueless. The line that The Lion walks is between the effort to make us share in the hurts and happiness felt by Ben, and, for Scheuer, to find some kind of transcendence by singing his heart out about himself, his dad, his siblings and mother, his old girlfriend, his illness, his music, each night. While not wise and witty about pop star life (and sexual identity) like a fictional musical memoir such as Hedwig and the Angry Inch, The Lion, in its earnest bid for empathy, does approach hard-won insight about the long, strange trip that is life in general and the mystery of other people.

The show’s title comes from a song that asks “What makes a lion a lion?” One of those imponderables that can also be extended to the show itself. What makes The Lion The Lion? Is it the presence of Scheuer himself, or could his part be taken by someone else? If so, the songs transcend their maker; if not, then the show is really all about what it means to be Benjamin Scheuer.

The Lion
Written and performed by Benjamin Scheuer
Directed by Sean Daniels

Scenic Designer: Neil Patel; Lighting Designer: Ben Stanton; Sound Designer: Leon Rothenberg; Costume Consultant: Jennifer Caprio; Production Designer: Dom Ruggiero; Technical Supervisor: Mind the Gap; General Management: Maximum Entertainment

Long Wharf Theatre
January 6-February 7, 2016

Food for Thought

Review of Salt Pepper Ketchup at Yale Cabaret

Cities change. With major American cities known for being sites of upward mobility, and for “renewals” and renovations, as well as new development and projects, it’s hard to maintain a sense of neighborhood in any given downtown. Philadelphia, however, has long had distinct neighborhoods surrounding its “Center City.” One such area is called Point Breeze, and that’s where Josh Wilder’s new play, a three-act work in progress called Salt Pepper Ketchup, is set. Wilder wants to examine the kinds of tensions that arise when a local business, run by someone not “local,” encounters new neighbors, coming in with gentrification, while trying to remain true to its current customer base. The fact that the business is a Chinese take-out, the existing neighborhood predominantly non-white, and the new residents mostly white lets Wilder use his setting as a microcosm of urban America. When certain areas become “newly desirable,” the developers win, and the locals lose.

In Yale Cabaret’s staging of the first act of the play, we meet embattled John Wu (Eston J. Fung) and his wife Linda (Francesca Fernandez McKenzie), owners and operators of Super Star Chinese Take-Out, a cheap eatery that is also a hangout for Tommy (James Udom) and Boodah (Seta Wainiqolo). In walks newcomer Paul (Steven Lee Johnson) who is aggressively proselytizing for a new food co-op and meeting with, at best, annoyed hostility, from Wu, and amused hostility from Tommy. That is until Paul gets a more welcoming nod from Cece (Mia Antoinette), who seems willing to play ball if only to show she’s more broad-minded than the others. Key to all the give and take here is the contemporary view that food served by the typical “greasy spoon” or fast-food emporium really isn’t what people should be eating. The co-op’s effort to provide alternatives isn’t just a nod to diversity, it’s an attack on the status quo—at least that’s how Tommy interprets it for Wu, who is soon quite anxious about being run out of town or closed down by suddenly vigilant health inspectors.

Wilder and director Al Heartley mostly keep a handle on making the back-and-forth between these characters sound like real folks talking, though everything is delivered with a bit more goosed-up verve than we might expect to discover in an everyday interaction—which is to say that tensions seem to be riding high even before anything happens. Keeping it real is helped by interactions between Tommy and Wu that are full of a begrudging acceptance of one another: Wu’s famous “chicken grease” keeps the locals happy, and Tommy is able to speak with the kind of local authority that makes Wu listen. These two could easily be sparring regulars in a sit-com set in a take-out. The other characters are, in a sense, the extras to their ongoing odd couple routine, with Cece fulfilling the role of loose cannon: she joins the co-op, due in part to Paul’s charm, but when she sees those prices and gets too much attitude from a check-out girl, only to be talked-down-to by not-quite-apologetic-enough Paul, then look out!

To make us aware that this isn’t a sit-com, there will be criminal acts and belligerent police, guns drawn. The latter intrusion is a bit too rushed as executed and feels like an effort simply to clear the stage. As a first act ending, though, the violence re-configures Mr. and Mrs. Wu as the lynch-pins: at first they try to take action guided by Tommy, then begin to see the possibility of renovation via collusion with Paul and his co-opters. At this point, they’re really going to have to decide whose side they’re on.

Wilder gives the couple a good scene in which they argue for staying or leaving, showing that they too are trapped by socio-economic forces, which extend also to Paul as part of the newly graduated cohort, saddled with debt and working jobs that don’t pay them enough to live among their own kind. So we see how “downward mobility” and the desperation it inspires come into play too. Salt Pepper Ketchup keeps a sense of harsh realities in play while entertaining us with characters who are worth our time, and the Cab production makes us wonder what happens next.

Salt Pepper Ketchup
By Josh Wilder
Directed by Al Heartley

Scenic Designer: Fufan Zhang; Costume Designer: An-Lin Dauber; Lighting Designer: Michael Commendatore; Sound Designer: Ien DeNio; Technical Director: Harry Beauregard; Scenic Painter: Dan Cogan; Stage Manager: Caitlin O’Rourke; Fight Director: Julian Elijah Martinez; Producer: Trent Anderson

Cast: Mia Antoinette; Jason de Beer; Eston J. Fung; Sean Boyce Johnson; Steven Lee Johnson; Tanmay Manohar; Francesca Fernandez McKenzie; James Udom; Seta Wainiqolo

Yale Cabaret
January 14-16, 2016

Future Cab Rides

Preview of upcoming shows at Yale Cabaret

It’s a new year and the Yale Cabaret is ready to pick up where it left off, bringing to its beloved but basic basement space at 217 Park Street theatrical experiences that make up in enthusiasm what they lack in slickness. Which is a way of saying that the best thing about the Cabaret—what keeps it real and makes many its devotees—is the fact that it is student-run and the students who run it are driven by passion and dedication to theater, as none of this is for money or even for grades. It’s to bring people together and make something happen, and to try out things for the sake of doing them. And, of course, there’s food and drink too, with a changing menu from chef Anna Belcher.

The first four shows of the 2nd half of the season have been chosen—Cab 10 through 13—which will take us through the second week of February. The shows were described to me by co-artistic directors David Bruin and Elijah Martinez (the third of their number, Leora Morris, is deep in the process of her thesis show, Women Beware Women, which opens on Saturday, January 23rd, at the Iseman Theater, then plays through the Cab’s first dark week of the semester). With two shows in January and two in February, the shows selected strike a balance between new work—written by playwrights at the Yale School of Drama—and pre-existing works not often seen in these parts.

First up, this week, Thursday to Saturday, is Salt Pepper Ketchup, written by first-year playwright Josh Wilder and directed by first-year theater manager Al Heartley.  The cast is comprised of first-year actors—but for Eston Fung, who was showcased last semester in The Commencement of William Tan—so this is an excellent opportunity to have a look at some of the new faces in the program. Author Wilder hails from South Philly, an area long-known as Point Breeze that has recently become the site of much gentrification, to the extent of getting a new name: New Bold (which sounds like a coffee roast). In the context of the ramifications of four-story condos being erected where old two-story townhouses once stood and property taxes hiking sky-high overnight, the play looks at Mr. Wu’s humble Chinese take-out “joint” caught between the resentments of the local regulars and the efforts of the upscale newbies to “change things for the better.” Wilder’s script works evenhandedly with all concerned: the anxiety of long-standing businesses when trying to adapt to the tastes of the vegan generation; the good and bad of the co-op mentality that assumes a certain level of economic parity; the vandalism or other acts of violence that can come from people who feel their backs are against the wall, and, through it all, the kind of racial tensions that have become a mark of our distressed times. Described by Martinez as “The Wire meets Clybourne Park.” January 14-16.

Cab 11 is a play called Slouch. Written by B. Walker Sampson, a Brooklyn-based playwright, and co-directed by Matthew Fischer, a first-year sound intern, and Stella Baker. Described as an existential comedy and a “Waiting for Godot for the facebook generation,” the play offers a light, relaxed tone while also dealing with the kind of angst that emerges from people always comparing themselves with other people (as in ubiquitous social networks). Gordon, for whom three roommates—one male and two females—wait, is a high-rolling, good-looking friend who tends to make things happen. Through much physicality and movement and a fluid sense of time—as well as characters’ ability to “narrate” each other’s thoughts—we arrive at a portrait of youth trying to break out of the stasis of the present. The team for the show met at the School of Drama orientation and bonded on their love for this play. January 21-23.

Some of you may have seen Boris Yeltsin, the closing show of the first half of the Cab season, a sharply satirical re-working of the Oresteia by Mickaël de Oliveira, directed by second-year director Elizabeth Dinkova; or you may have seen last season’s postmodern puppet-show version of Georg Büchner’s Leonce and Lena, also directed by Dinkova; or you may have seen Best Lesbian Erotica of 1995, a studio production of a play by second-year playwright Miranda Ross Hall, directed by Dinkova, which was edgy, funny, ribald, and had a heart. Whether or not you saw any of that, you should come see Cab 13, How We Died of Disease-Related Illness, written by Hall and directed by Dinkova, who have formed a creative partnership out of a kind of like-minded comic urgency. When the ebola outbreak occurred, Hall found herself infected with the paranoia that spreads in a health crisis and began concocting this “zany comedy” to treat the various strains of hysteria that we collectively live with these days. In the play, a social scientist contracts a life-threatening disease in a foreign country, then spreads it at an American hospital. Laughs abound. February 4-6.

Cab 13 offers Cloud Tectonics, perhaps the best-known play by Puerto Rican playwright José Rivera, which debuted at the Humana Festival in 1995. The play has long been a common reference point for Yale School of Drama actors Sebastian Arboleda, Bradley Tejeda, and Bobby Guzman, as members of second-generation immigrant families living in L.A. The latter two are in the cast, joined by Stephanie Machado, while Arboleda—memorable from last year as the king in Leonce and Lena—directs. The team’s enthusiasm for this “dream-like love story” has spread to the Cab, convincing the artistic directors that now is the time for this show. It's not only a tale of immigrant assimilation—always a vexed story in our polymorphous nation—but of migrant experience, in terms of the “east coast” vs. “west coast” mentality. It’s also about the way “past, present and future pull at each other,” so that the tensions of one time speak to the tensions of another. February 11-13.

After these four shows hold the floor, make room for the annual extravaganza that is the Yale Cabaret Drag Show, but more about that later. For now, see you at the Cab!

Yale Cabaret
Season 48

For more info, go here.

One Effing Elf

Review of The SantaLand Diaries at Musical Theatre of Connecticut

Best-selling, Grammy-winning author David Sedaris has come a long way since his stint as an elf in a Macy’s SantaLand, and he’s also come a long way since the humorous essay he wrote about that experience, which has also been shared as a spoken word feature on NPR and This American Life. And yet the story as adapted for the stage by Joe Mantello has taken on a life of its own since its debut in 1996. It’s become a holiday staple for many a theater in the U.S., a one-man show that lets us laugh at the corny traditions that constitute “the Christmas spirit”—a glut of decorations, food consumption, familiar tunes, holiday reruns, and much buying, and sometimes giving, that happens without fail from late in November (or earlier) and runs till December 25th.

Ostensibly all the hoopla has something to do with the birth of Christ, but in fact, in the U.S., it mostly has to do with marketing, as every store in the land, almost, has its Christmas come-on. One of the best-known of all department stores, of course, is Macy’s and one of its ways of celebrating the season and getting people to come in and shop is providing a guy dressed in the traditional garb associated (at least since a very influential Coca-Cola ad campaign anyway) with old St. Nick to meet the kids and listen to Christmas wishes. And it was at Macy’s that Sedaris really did take the job of being one of the helpers of the store’s Santas. The SantaLand Diaries plays as the amusingly jaundiced view of a rather less than inspired elf enduring the fake cheer, the clueless “foreigners,” the pushy and obnoxious parents, the scared or sick or displeased children, and the on-the-job antics of his fellow not-so-bright elves and a variety of Santas.

Matt Densky (Crumpet)

Taking the name Crumpet, our narrator/hero is at his best in recounting the kind of behind-the-scenes stories that play to our curiosity about “show-biz,” even this far down the food chain. As Crumpet says, many of the people who apply for a job in SantaLand—in New York anyway—are unemployed actors looking for some easy money at Christmastime. It helps, in a job like this, to be willing and able to transform oneself to match one’s costume. Green velvet, with striped stockings, pointy shoes and hat. The works. Crumpet’s tongue-in-cheek approach to the job—and, it seems, to life in general—is his best defense against the simple-mindedness of the task, but he’s also not the kind to fool himself with visions of sugarplums. He sees through everyone and almost anyone can be an occasion for an unflattering anecdote or apothegm.

Much of this material, however, pulls its punches. Rarely is Sedaris’s text truly witty and often an anecdote will sort of fizzle without any real zinger. It’s not really something to fault Sedaris on, since he wrote an essay of observational humor, the sort of thing that plays best as a stand-up monologue, seeming to come off the top of one’s head in the moment of telling. Turned into a play, the monologue has to have more zing, requiring a performer up to the task of taking on the raconteur role while also able to act out other characters who get mimicked by Crumpet. Fortunately Matt Densky, directed by Kevin Connors, has the skills needed to make Crumpet vivid, fun, and a little unsettling.

One of Densky’s strengths in the role is his mimicking ability. He does a number of quick “sketches” of the people Crumpet interacts with, and each one is a spot on “take off,” via vocal mannerism, of an immediately recognizable type. You’ve got to be cheerful to be an elf, but you’ve got to be mercurial to make the story of Crumpet work. Denksy’s got it down. A high point is the rendition of “Away in the Manger” in the manner of Liza Minelli.

Alas, there’s not enough of that sort of thing. You soon find yourself thinking that this material needs to be further adapted—enlarged to make room for Densky’s talent. He exults in the snide manner so much so that you don’t for a minute believe that you’re hearing the really juicy stuff. Most of Sedaris’s observations are pretty anodyne, never really going for the jugular. I know, it’s Christmas and all that and we’re supposed to be looking for the good in everyone, but that’s not Crumpet’s approach. He tends to see the worst in people. Not because he’s vicious but because people tend to live up to his worst expectations. And I can’t help thinking there are naughtier and nastier characterizations that were left out of Sedaris’s text in favor of gentler laughs.

Even so, caricaturing others can seem mean, but Crumpet doesn’t come across that way, primarily because the tone Sedaris, Mantello and Densky create is of someone who wants us on his side. We have to see he’s better than “this,” this job of being an elf, as his giddy glimpses of the training sessions and of the less than inspiring Santas shows. And so we’re eager to hear how he managed it—took on this thankless job and maintained his dignity and his sense of humor. By aiming his humor at others, of course, and the laughter we share with him is laughter at how daft the Christmas season is. It’s supposed to be jolly and merry, like Santa, but often it’s a downer or at least disappointing. So, why not liven it up with Crumpet, a refreshingly honest elf, as eager as many of us are to exit the enforced euphoria come December 25th, and get on with business as usual.

The SantaLand Diaries
By David Sedaris
Adapted by Joe Mantello
Directed by Kevin Connors
With Matt Densky

Costume Design: Diane Vanderkroef; Scenic Design: Carl Tallent; Lighting Design: Joshua Scherr; Stage Manager: Jim Schilling

Music Theatre of Connecticut
December 11-20, 2015

Living Myth

Review of The Oresteia at Yale School of Drama

Combining three plays—Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides—into the running time of a single play may be a daunting task, but third-year director Yagil Eliraz’s adaptation of Ted Hughes’ translation of Aeschylus’s The Oresteia presents a cohesive account of the vexed history of the cursed house of Atreus in ancient Argos. The design and staging for the show is nothing short of brilliant, with sets by Fufan Zhang that alternate between a textured wasteland and streamlined modernist spaces and costumes by An-Lin Dauber that display strong classical associations. The only detractions are the oddly off-key comic accouterments for Aegisthus (Sebastian Arboleda) and Apollo (Jonathan Higginbotham), and some of Michael Commendatore’s projections; whereas they generally are superb backdrops, occasionally they take on the quality generally associated with “trip sequences” in films from the Sixties.

Touches such as comedy—such as the clowning in the voting scene during the trial of Orestes (Ricardo Dávila) from Jonathan Majors and Annelise Lawson, who also vamps superbly as Clytemnestra—and cinematic visuals serve to make more contemporary what is otherwise a rather timeless portrayal of an epic play full of fraught drama. Indeed, the show’s dominant tone can be praised for not seeming like a YSD show at all—and that’s said by one who greatly enjoys viewing the trio of thesis shows each season.

In general, thesis shows are showcases for inventive elements in all aspects of the production—the actors, the technical support—and as such can suffer a bit in terms of a comprehensive manner or overall theatrical point. From that standpoint, Eliraz’s directing of his cast—most of whom play in the Chorus as well as taking specific roles—is truly masterful. From the stark opening with Andrew Burnap a lone narrating voice who intones upon a plaintive flute, to the group reactions to the offstage murder of Agememnon (Majors), to the Chorus’s highly effective—and creepy—vocal effects and miming as Furies masked with cow-skull heads, The Oresteia makes pointed use of its cast, making their voices and movements expressive devices that convey a variety of emotions and moods, almost always reacting rather than taking action. And Matthew Suttor’s compositions, worked out with the company, often make the Chorus’s interactions more powerful than the speeches assigned to the named roles.

The Chorus

One of the most striking dramatic moments occurs early in the play. The killing of Iphigenia (Remsen Welsh) as she hangs upside down creates a tableaux of the sacrifice of vulnerable innocence that should be more than enough to condemn Agamemnon who wields the sword for the sake of the war he would wage at Troy. Even so, it’s hard to side entirely with his enraged wife Clytemnestra, who mourns Iphigenia and plots revenge, if only because she’s so clearly marked as a villain. In Aeschylus, the Chorus voices our inability to arrive at ethical clarity in these cases. Which may be a way of saying that, if you really believe a deity involves itself in the acts of mankind, then it may be hard for earthly laws to make a difference to you.

And that’s what Eliraz’s thesis seems to be aiming for: a consideration of a world where the gods can show up on stage and still not get things to go their way. Agamemnon’s trust in the sacrifice of Iphigenia as expiation to Artemis is of no use in saving his life; likewise Orestes’s trust in Apollo’s oracle doesn’t spare him from human justice. And even Athena’s decree that civic law should replace the lex talionis doesn’t seem, in this version’s more chilling conclusion, to carry any weight. Humanity’s butchery of humanity always has its justifications, and sometimes those are “god-given,” but what tribunal can truly adjudicate in matters like war or the violent retaliation of violence?

Though in some ways a Chorus’s show, there is also fine work throughout in the named roles: Sydney Lemmon’s regally detached Athene, with a grand entrance and a white helmet; Jonathan Higginbotham’s decadently detached Apollo, with a bored manner and a towering white wig; Andrew Burnap’s haunted Atreus; Anna Crivelli’s beleaguered Cassandra; Jonathan Majors’ surprisingly sympathetic Agamemnon; Annelise Lawson’s haughty Clytemnestra, and her harrowing scream; Ricardo Dávila’s conflicted Orestes; and Elizabeth Stahlmann’s distraught Elektra as a sorrowing Goth girl—an example of excellent costuming and casting. And special mention for young Remsen Welsh as Iphigenia, who, after her summary execution, returns to haunt the stage in key moments. And for Doug Perry, the percussionist stage right who punctuates and accompanies the action throughout, giving the whole a ritualistic feel that is never lost sight of.

Characters in Greek drama are not “roles” in the usual sense of character parts. One of the best aspects of this version of The Oresteia is that it makes us experience some of the mystery of myth, even as we realize that the great myths are meaningful because their interrogation of necessity, justice, obligation and mercy is both ancient and contemporary and never merely academic.

Aeschylus
The Oresteia
Translated by Ted Hughes
Directed by Yagil Eliraz

Composer: Matthew Suttor; Scenic Designer: Fufan Zhang; Costume Designer: An-Lin Dauber; Lighting Designer: Elizabeth Green; Sound Designer: Pornchanok Kanchanabanca; Projection Designer: Michael Commendatore; Production Dramaturg: Davina Moss; Stage Manager: Helen Irene Muller; Photograph: T. Charles Erickson

Cast: Sebastian Arboleda; Andrew Burnap; Anna Crivelli; Ricardo Dávila; Edmund Donovan; Melanie Field; Jonathan Higginbotham; Annelise Lawson; Sydney Lemmon; Jonathan Majors; Elizabeth Stahlmann; Remsen Welsh

Percussionist: Doug Perry

Yale School of Drama
December 12-18, 2015

Finding the Real

Review of Passing Strange at Playhouse on Park

Playhouse on Park’s production of Passing Strange, by musical and performance artist Stew, directed by Sean Harris, makes full use of the theater’s intimate thrust stage, as the cast move all through the space, accompanied by a four-piece band led by a dynamic narrator/singer/master of ceremonies, Darryl Jovan Williams. With “Narrator” as our guide, we follow the story of  “the Youth” (Eric R. Williams), a young black man from a middle-class suburb of L.A., coming of age in the late Seventies, much like Stew himself. Everyone seems to be having a wonderful time telling this story and the ensemble’s joy—in the music, in movement, in singing, and in acting a variety of characters—will put a smile on your face.

Skyler Volpe, Eric R. Williams, Garrett Turner

One of the more refreshing aspects of the Youth’s story is his self-conscious realization that, in cultural terms, he’s “passing for black.” Sure, he’s black to the white folks he hangs out with—in his hometown, and then in Amsterdam and then in Berlin—but he knows that trying to be “ghetto” so as to gain street cred among the radical “nowhaus” group he hangs with in Germany is a bit absurd, and finally a woman (Karissa Harris) he’s trying to woo calls him on it. The Youth is not quite a playa—only because he was too well brought up by his well-meaning mother (Famecia Ward)—but he’s not above trading on stereotypical notions when it serves his purpose, and some of the best humor of the show comes from our awareness of his awareness of how jive he allows himself to be, at times. A real strength of this production is that Eric R. Williams plays Youth’s self-conscious cool so well; Williams gives the part a likable earnestness that should have wide appeal—to any current or former youths bent on self-discovery, or, as he puts it, “finding the real.”

the cast and drummer of Passing Strange

Stew’s story gets right certain very real elements of Seventies life. First, there’s the widespread social acceptance of drugs: the Youth gets turned on to grass by the closeted gay leader of the church choir (Garrett Turner has fun with the more flamboyant roles in the show), then later has an anxiety-provoking acid trip. Then there’s the fact that many of the victories of the civil rights era seem like second nature. The Youth is already bored about having to genuflect to black cultural leaders—his first act of rebellion, after dropping out of the choir (which he joined because gospel music seemed to him like rock), is to form a punk band that sounds pretty authentic indeed. Elsewhere there’s fun with European art-house cinema, but one suspects that neither cast nor director has spent a lot of time with the genre since that segment feels more like Hollywood melodrama than Godard-inflected disaffect.

Watching the very busy and energetic ensemble transform before our eyes from L.A. kids to hip Dutch to molotov-cocktail-hurling German radicals is one of the delights of the show. There’s also a captivating lyrical moment when the lovely Marianna (Skyler Volpe), an Amsterdam squatter, makes a gift to our vagabond hero of the keys to her flat. Stew and his musical collaborator Heidi Rodewald know how to bring out the lyricism of fleeting romance and Williams and Volpe, et al., do the song full justice. Later, the irony that Berlin radicals, bent upon remaking society, go home for the holidays leaves Youth high and dry, since he’s trying hard to avoid returning to a mother who can’t understand his flight to freedom.

Though he leaves her behind and has to insist, to her importuning phone call before Christmas, that his home is Berlin, not L.A., the bond between mother and son accounts for the emotional uplift the show ends on, though it’s not quite enough. All along we’ve been enjoying the candid depiction of a self-centered, self-serving “talent” who manipulates situations to his ends. In realizing his younger self has been unfairly neglectful of his mother, the Narrator, as Youth grown-up, or Stew, offers Passing Strange as a kind of confession for the sake of atonement. How moving that effort is depends on how much we want our hero to learn a lesson about family ties.

Darryl Jovan Williams (Narrator)

As the story is not big on surprises—its main tensions are of the “I gotta be me” variety typical of stories of artists in popular genres—the change of gear near the close amounts to growth and moral improvement. Soulful enough in the more emotional tunes, like “Work the Wound,” the production really cooks when the cast and band are making the most of the full-throttle raves. While a heartfelt comeuppance to the callowness of Youth—and youth—is inspiring enough, the real passion of the show is in the celebration of music as a form of art that can make up for failures in life. It’s “passing strange”—in a phrase Stew borrows from Othello—how Youth passes through cultural identities and from youth to maturity, but the pay-off is in how well his work lives up to that journey. Passing Strange does—and so does Playhouse on Park’s production.

Passing Strange
Book and lyrics by Stew
Music by Stew and Heidi Rodewald
Created in collaboration with Annie Dorsen
Directed by Sean Harris
Choreography by Darlene Zoller

Cast: Karissa Harris; Garrett Turner; Skyler Volpe; J’Royce; Famecia Ward; Darryl Jovan Williams; Eric R. Williams

Playhouse on Park
December 2-20, 2015