My Idaho Home

Review of Lewiston at Long Wharf Theatre

Family legacy meets national legacy in Samuel D. Hunter’s low-key play Lewiston, now at the Long Wharf Theatre in its world premiere, directed by Eric Ting. Alice (Randy Danson) and Connor (Martin Moran) are old friends, now roommates, who tend a fireworks stand on a stretch of interstate outside the play’s titular town in rural Idaho. The big issue in their world is when to sell Alice’s last remaining plot of land to the developers who are building condos, and for how much—the duo are hoping for a unit by the pool. Into their humdrum lives arrives Marnie (Arielle Goldman), a backpacking traveler who, it turns out, is Alice’s long-lost granddaughter. And she’s here to stay, tent and all.

Alice (Randy Danson) and Connor (Martin Moran)

The best thing about Lewiston is that Hunter’s dialogue plays things close to the everyday, and there are some unique aspects to the relationships revealed as the play goes along. His characters speak with a believable sense of entire lives already lived, so that when exposition is necessary it comes as one character filling another in. For Alice and Marnie, there’s much that has gone missing—the last time Alice saw Marnie was when the girl, now in her mid-twenties, was 8 or so. There’s a lot of water under the bridge, and there’s a lot of land missing from what Marnie remembers as the family spread, including her childhood home. The land has been in the family since Meriwether Lewis, of the famed Lewis and Clark expedition, settled it.

Marnie (Arielle Goldman)

Director Eric Ting’s clear grasp of how these characters should interact means developments take their time: the coolness between Alice and Marnie keeps finding new reasons for sustaining itself. It’s not a question of grudges so much as a question of expectations. We learn piecemeal the story of Alice’s daughter, Marnie’s mother—whose young voice (played by Lucy Owen) we hear on tapes Marnie plays from time to time, recorded when her mother walked the Expedition trail to the Pacific Ocean—and we see why the two women aren’t quite sure what tone to strike with each other. Marnie isn’t so much settling old scores as trying to find a place to start again, arriving at the very moment when Alice is ready to let it all go.

Connor (Martin Moran) and Marnie (Arielle Goldman)

As Connor, Moran’s role is important as an interested witness and sympathetic helper and a surprised host who extends the more effusive welcome to Marnie. The drama of the play is largely about how people can either shut others out or let them in, so that much of the talk isn’t simply about what happened or what will happen, it’s about whether or not characters will confide or find a shared relation. Marnie, played well with understated intensity by Arielle Goldman, had been in Seattle where she devised and sold an urban farm and seems to have been self-sufficient until now. Randy Danson’s Alice is, as Connor says “a bit prickly,” not willing to be knocked off course by a young person’s sudden need for roots. Though for obvious reasons generational differences can be expected to intrude, they do so as contextual details and not simply for cheap laughs.

Then there’s “Mom,” on the tapes. Voiced with an incredible sense of off-the-cuff authenticity by Lucy Owen, the tapes are mostly played in darkness, making their staging a bit disruptive and their desultory commentary more ambient than dramatic. In the end, an experience told on the tape dovetails rather too neatly with the need for some kind of statement to emerge in what seems ready to be a stalemate, though some life-changing decisions are overtaking everyone by the play’s end.

Alice (Randy Danson)

For visual interest, check out the detailed set by Wilson Chin, complemented by Matthew Richards’ lighting and Brandon Walcott’s sound design, while for figural interest there are the fireworks that tend to act as ironic commentary on the lack of excitement and the limited prospects for amusement in this stretch of the interstate. Lewiston is a thoughtful slice-of-life drama that manages to suggest a Chekhovian sense of how time and change leech from us the things we value, unless we do something about it now.

Lewiston
By Samuel D. Hunter
Directed by Eric Ting

Set Design: Wilson Chin; Costume Design: Paloma Young; Lighting Design: Matthew Richards; Sound Design: Brandon Wolcott; Production Stage Manager: Charles M. Turner III; Casting: Calleri Casting

Cast: Randy Danson; Arielle Goldman; Martin Moran; Lucy Owen

Long Wharf Theatre
April 6-May 1, 2016

Orbiting the Yale Cabaret

Review of the Satellite Festival, Yale Cabaret

The first-ever Satellite Festival at Yale Cabaret was a sampling of works-in-progress and some short pieces with very specific focus. Sprawling over three nights in three locations, the Festival events could be accessed in different sequences and required at least two nights to see everything included, since some events were limited to a particular evening. The order in which things were seen may or may not contribute to the effect, and that’s part of the fun and interest of the festival format, making each person’s path through the offerings to some extent unique.

My approach was to see as much as I could in consecutive attendance at three separate locations in a sequence commencing at 9 p.m. Friday night and concluding around 1:30 a.m. Saturday morning. That meant seeing the late show of the main-stage offering, at the Yale Cabaret, which seemed to suit the nature of the events on view.

Andrew Burnap as Chet Baker

Someone to Watch Over Me, created and performed by Andrew Burnap, felt, suitably, like an intimate, after-hours encounter with jazz great Chet Baker—whom Burnap impersonated in speaking, singing, and trumpet-playing. A short presentation, the show revealed something of Baker’s persona, and let Burnap display for us the lyricism of Baker’s playing, the melancholy of his singing, and the coolness of his stage patter. It was a great combo—I particularly liked the comments about the virtues of trumpet and piano unaccompanied by a drummer, the story of the try-out for Charlie Parker, and, of the tunes, “My Funny Valentine” was a highpoint.

Next up was Run Bambi, an exploratory work by Lex Brown of the Yale Art School, supported by performers Kate Ruggeri and Aarica West with lighting by Elizabeth Green. The piece, at its best, evoked impressionistic responses, as Brown’s spoken word and gestural theater riffed on racist and sexist problems in our culture, while also asserting the power of owning one’s own style and presentation. The use of props—white towels, white tires, a ladder—helpedcreate the performance space as an arena for free-form routines. An arena that Brown literally fled at one point to move through the space upstairs and back again.

the cast of Run Bambi: Kate Ruggeri, Lex Brown, Aarica West

All the movement of Run Bambi—dance was key to the show’s expressive sense of joy and defiance—was in marked contrast to the stationary nature of the next show, Christopher Ross-Ewart’s Stop Drop and Shop: Explosions for the 21st Century, a one-man monologue with sound effects. With a comic sense of inadequacy in the face of a world he doesn’t quite understand, Ross-Ewart played “himself,” a white West Coast Canadian trying to come to grips with tensions on the U.S. east coast during Election Year 2016. Ross-Ewart’s breathy, nervous delivery—punctuated by explosions and horn effects—created a sense of the put-upon, well-meaning, would-be liberal conscience of our day and age, with particular reference to that most definitive of American activities: grocery-shopping.

The first two shows benefited greatly from songs and singing; the third show would’ve as well, as Ross-Ewart is a better musician than stand-up comic, but the Festival’s rationale, at least in part, was to give students opportunity to stretch their talents beyond their expected competencies.

I began the evening with Do All Daddies Have Grey Suits?, A Memory Play by Aylin Tekiner, at the Annex, that used a fascinating mixture of puppetry, shadow puppets, and projections/animation to tell a story of mourning. The author’s father, Zeki Tekiner, was the victim of a political assassination in Turkey in 1980. The short theater piece let a child, a stand-in for Aylin voiced by Dora Schwartzman, tell the story with details gleaned from adults and from her own active imagination. The question of her source for the information she imparted, in fact, kept meeting with the oft-iterated phrase, “I don’t know.” As a child, our narrator is uncertain what she knows or how she knows it; as our narrator, the child speaks with full authority. The relation between the two states—knowing and not-knowing (and knowing things you’d rather not know) informed the entire piece. The shadow puppets were creepily perfect for the Grimm’s fairy-tale-like story—complete with an actual underground city below the Castle district of Neveshir, Cappadocia, where Tekiner was killed, in a grocery store. Bracketing the child’s tale were photos of the family as well as film of Tekiner’s funeral, both providing a factual setting in the past that helped to enhance what came to seem a perpetual child’s perspective in a state of stricken arrested development.

Shadi Ghaheri’s فریادا  , the second piece at the Annex, made effective use of the stage as a place where encounter becomes theater. Two young women, intrigued by and perhaps attracted to each other, find that neither can understand a word the other says. The situation is comical and ultimately frustrating—as the piece’s title, “Scream,” indicates—but only the English-language speaker seemed to find it embarrassing. Stella Baker, as the English speaker, acted the sheepish response of the American who can’t quite overcome surprise that the whole world doesn’t speak English, while Ghaheri played a woman with a passionate insistence upon communication. Ultimately, the show demonstrated that such commitment makes for connection: communication is what happens between people who interact, regardless of what they use to do it—eating apples, dancing, screaming.

I ended my evening at the Afro-American Cultural Center where Chiara Klein played an ingratiating female political candidate named Hedda (Gabler). Which is to say: the short piece, developed by Li-Min Lin, Tracy Tserjing Huang, and Pei-Yu Chu, asked us to consider Ibsen’s heroine as a contemporary political candidate, or, put another way, asked us to consider how a certain contemporary political candidate might be like Hedda Gabler. There were a few dropped references to other characters in the play, but it seemed to me the piece could really have pushed the notion of Hedda finding fulfillment as a contested candidate. Certainly, the idea as both a take on Ibsen’s play and on some current views of women in power is intriguing.

Finally, a staged reading of Emely Selina Zepeda’s From Clay and Water, directed by Sebastian Arbodela, with Bianca Hooi as Girl, Bradley James Tejeda as Dad, and Haydee Antunano as Mom. The play looked at her parents’ effects upon a young, impressionable girl, who narrated her recollections and her parents’ interactions. She seemed to grow up questioning what kept her mother in the marriage and expressed a lingering frustration at never having intervened in any significant way. She also recalled moments about her father, such as how his drunk, amateurish guitar-playing and singing showed a vulnerable side not often shown, as he tended to be abusive or unresponsive. More than the dysfunction between the adults, however, what the play highlighted, to me, was how children, even when they become adults themselves, understand so little of the full story of their parents’ lives. The young perspective of the narrator seemed trapped in a kind of emotional solipsism, a perspective that sees the parents themselves as trapped but without realizing how limited her view is. The play worked best as Girl’s effort to overcome the limitations of her own family romance, while acknowledging her debt to her parents.

Unfortunately, I missed other offerings. The best feature of the Festival was getting a sense of the variety of talent and the many different kinds of work being done at YSD. In stretching over three days, the Festival worked best, I imagine, for students and patrons already in the vicinity of Park Street. Piling show upon show, as I did, tended to dilute the primacy of any particular event, but it created an effect a bit like a theater version of the Art School’s Open Studios, where the audience can drop by and see what students are up to, in this case receiving perspectives and approaches that may be more diverse, if less developed, than pooling all resources into one show per week.

As an interesting experiment for the Cab’s season, I wonder if the Satellite Festival will continue to develop in subsequent years.

The Satellite Festival

Someone to Watch Over Me
Created and performed by Andrew Burnap

Run Bambi
Music, words, movement and direction by Lex Brown
Lighting design by Elizabeth Green
Performers: Lex Brown, Kate Ruggeri, Aarica West
Project manager: Cindy Ji Hye Kim

Stop Drop and Shop: Explosions for the 21st Century
Created and performed by Christopher Ross-Ewart

Do All Daddies Have Grey Suits? A Memory Play
Conceptual Artist and Director: Aylin Tekiner
Illustrator Artist & Story Conception Collaborator: Kemal Gökhan Gürses
Artistic Director: Stuart Fishelson
Video Projection: Brittany Bland
Lighting Design: Carolina Ortiz
Sound Design: Ien DeNio
Costume Design: Katie Touart
Set Design: Izmir Ickbal & Zoe Hurwitz
Stage Manager: Francesca McKenzie
Video Composer/Editor: Gülcan Barut & Yusuf Bolat
Mandolin: Ian Scot
Artistic Advisor: Wendall Harrington
Technical Advisors: Larry Reed (Shadow Master) & Caryl Kientz
Graphic Assistant: Jessica Alva
Performers: Stefani Kuo, Li-Min Lin, Jennifeer Schmidt, Zoe Hurwitz, Jae Shin
Narrator: Dora Schwartzman

فریادا
Created by Shadi Ghaheri
Co-Directed by Chalia LaTour & Shadi Ghaheri
Performers: Stella Baker & Shadi Ghaheri
Dramaturg: Lynda Paul
Sound Design: Nok Kanchanabanca
Projection Design: Wladimiro Woyno Rodriguez
Light Design: Elizabeth Mak
Costume Design: Sarah Nietfeld
Technical Design: William Hartley
Stage Manager: Jake Lozano

Hedda, or What Will Gabler’s Daughter Do Next?
Collaboration by Li-Min Lin, Tracy Tserjing Huang, Pei-Yu Chu
Producer: Li-Min Lin
Costume Design: Sarah Nietfeld
Visual Design: Lih-Chyi Lin
Actors: Chiara Klein, Steven Koernig, Chad Kinsman
Special Thanks: Kimberly Jannarone

From Clay and Water
Playwright: Emely Selina Zepeda
Director: Sebastian Arbodela
Actors: Bianca Hooi, Bradley James Tejeda, Haydee Antunano

Yale Cabaret
April 7-9, 2016

Something New at the Cab

Preview of Satellite Festival, Yale Cabaret

With only two weeks left in its season, Yale Cabaret 48—led by its co-artistic directors David Bruin, Elijah Martinez, Leora Morris—has come up with something new. It’s called the Satellite Festival and it entails a series of performances and events at a trio of venues: the Yale Cabaret at 217 Park Street, the Afro-American Cultural Center (across the walkway), and the Annex at 205 Park Street.

The purpose of the new approach is to provide a moveable feast of experiences, many of them arranged by students working in disciplines that rarely get directly showcased. As most Cab patrons are aware, there is considerable behind-the-scenes talent on display at any Cabaret show, to say nothing of every Yale School of Drama show, and the Satellite Festival gives audiences a chance to see some of the work being done by Masters students in various disciplines at YSD, particularly Sound Design, and in other Yale graduate programs, and by visiting artists and fellows at Yale.

The festival works like this: there will be the usual 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. shows Thursday through Saturday, held at the Cab, but supplemented by several other offerings at other times at the other locations.

At the Cabaret, the multi-media and interdisciplinary program will consist of two shows: Run Bambi and Stop, Drop, and Shop: Explosions for the 21st Century. The first is written, composed, and directed by Lex Brown, of the Yale School of Art, “a poem in character sketch, song, rap, and text – a spastic movement about identity and moving through time” that explores “somebodies’ bodies.” The second, created and performed by Chris Ross-Ewart, YSD Sound Design third-year (and a regular contributor to Cab and Summer Cab shows), is a “performed sound design,” “an experimental opera” in workshop that looks at au courant consumerism, “using music, sound effects, audio and computer technology and improvised storytelling.” 8 p.m., Thursday-Saturday; 11 p.m., Friday & Saturday, Yale Cabaret.

Previous to each evening’s Cab show, at 7 and 10 p.m. (10:15 on Saturday), the time during which food and drink is served at the Cab, there will be entertainment in the form of Someone to Watch Over Me, which features third-year YSD actor Andrew Burnap as jazz great Chet Baker, singer, trumpet player, and intense photo subject, once described as "James Dean, Sinatra, and Bix rolled into one." Burnap, who sings and plays trumpet, looks enough like Baker to provide an uncanny return of a star. Yale Cabaret

Armed with a wristband, purchased for $5 above the usual Cab show ticket price, audiences can view all of the following at any showtime.

The Afro-American Cultural Center hosts:

On Thursday at 9 and on Friday at midnight, From Clay and Water, written by Emely Zepeda, YSD third-year Stage Management, and directed by second-year YSD actor Sebastian Arboleda, a story about a family and a daughter trying to cope with the loss of her parents.

On Friday at 9: an audio storybook, The Children are Carried Off, by Ien DeNio, YSD Sound Design Intern, features a return to the abandon of childhood imagination.

On Saturday at 6, 9, and midnight: Prayers of the People / A Rite of Responsibility, created by little ray, Artist in Residence at Yale Institute of Sacred Music, and performed by little ray and Kate Marvin, YSD third-year Sound Design, combines theater and ritual practice to recreate the spiritual power of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, aiming toward “reverent rememberance and principled action.”

The Annex hosts:

On Thursday at 9, on Friday at 9 and midnight, on Saturday at 9 and midnight: two shows together: فریادا  : created by Shadi Ghaheri, YSD first-year director, co-directed by Ghaheri and Chalia La Tour, YSD third-year actor and frequent Cab participant, and performed by Ghaheri and Stella Baker, YSD first-year actor, the show uses movement and media to explore how two women overcome language barriers to communicate with each other. And Do All Daddies Have Grey Suits? A Memory Play conceived and directed by Ummugulsum Aylin Tekiner, YSD Special Research Fellow, about the assassination of Turkish politician Zeki Tekiner in 1980, recreated through family memories as “a multi-disciplinary shadow performance.”

Other events in the Festival include:

Hedda, or What Will Gabler’s Daughter Do Next?, conceived by Li-Min Lin, YSD Special Research Fellow in Theater Management, and co-written with Tracy Tzerjing Huang, Thursday 8:45 p.m., Friday at 8:45 & 11:45 p.m., Afro-American Cultural Center

Vignette of a Recollection, created by Wladimiro A. Woyno R. (YSD Projection Design first-year), a virtual reality experience for audience, one-at-a-time, 2-3 minutes per person, Annex, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday between 6:30 and 8 p.m., and between 10 and 11:30 p.m.

The Chu, created by YSD third-year actor Jenelle Chu, a culinary approach to storytelling, during dinner hour at the Cabaret.

PRAYIN WOMANITS, a collective, open throughout the festival, featuring “lady hungry for institutional critique and the dissolution of the patriarchal status quo.”

So, sample the variety on view and see what avenues of experience open beyond the usual theater set-up. See you at the Cab, and environs.

For more information on each element in the festival: http://yalecabaret.org/48/shows

Buy Tickets

Yale Cabaret
April 7-9, 2016

Beware, Doll, You're Bound to Fall

Review of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Yale Cabaret

Tired of fame, film icon Greta Garbo declared, “I vant to be alone.” Petra von Kant, the heroine of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, is the kind of self-involved diva who can’t bear to be alone. Directed by Leora Morris with Jesse Rasmussen, Fassbinder’s meditation on the vagaries of passionate love is also a character study that plays into considerations of how, for instance, all of a star’s or a director’s relationships are scripted with a central player and a supporting cast.

Played by Sydney Lemmon with a lithe sense of grand dame status, Petra is a successful fashion designer who lords it over her underling Marlene (Anna Crivelli, icily Germanic in a silent role) and holds court in her bedroom. The room, in Christopher Thompson and Claire DeLiso’s lush set, is essentially a large double bed framed by chairs and settees, a table with a typewriter, a turntable with LPs, and the ever-important house-phone on a pedestal. There are diaphanous red drapes that sometimes are drawn or opened by Marlene, who acts as both factotum and voyeur.

Sydney Lemmon as Petra von Kant

What Marlene gazes upon, as do we, is the social and erotic life of Petra. The two sides come together quickly when a visit from her well-set-up cousin Sidonie (Annelise Lawson)—in which the two women share details of happy and unhappy marriages (Petra has had one of each)—results in Petra’s meeting with Sidonie’s young friend Karin (Baize Buzan). For Petra, the meeting seems to be love at first sight, or at least it’s a really hot meet. The next scene, when Karin calls alone upon Petra, who insists she should become a model, is filled with the expectation of seduction. Petra may be changeable and peremptory, but her attachment to Karin while egotistical is also vulnerable. Karin, played with deer-in-the-headlights allure by Buzan, seems ready to become whatever Petra wants her to be.

Then comes the crash, by degrees. Fassbinder’s heart is in this one and Petra’s suffering for her ideal of love is a masochist’s delight. Having made Karin an arbiter of her happiness, she can only be made unhappy by the least sign of her object’s indifference. And Buzan is wonderful at rendering the kind of erotic self-possession that drives Petra wild. And she’s able to do so while also seeming to be much younger than Lemmon, whose probing questions and efforts to manage her lover’s life as she does her own career reminded me of the assured but apprehensive tone often struck by Judy Davis.

Eventually, as Karin’s background comes out—the working-class father who lost his job and killed Karin’s mother in a drunken rage then hanged himself; the estranged husband in Australia—we can see that Petra’s attempts to makeover Karin are going to have more lasting effects on herself than on her protégé. The fact that Karin has not given up men—the more casual, the better—becomes the source of the title’s bitter tears. And of the vicious abuse of the user by the used.

In the birthday scene that follows Karin’s departure to meet her errant husband’s return, we see Petra go to pieces by abusing those still close to her: her young daughter Gabrielle (Leyla Levi), Sidonie, who comes bearing a gift, and Petra’s mother Valerie (Shaunette Renée Wilson). In each case, there’s a sense of the cost of loving someone like Petra, but there’s also a sense—key to the notion of a central player—that all these females depend upon her to some degree. And all are quite able to act out in their subordinate roles: Sidonie with indignation; Gabrielle with earnest need for approval; Valerie with long-suffering attachment.

Masochism, then, is in the nature of love for one’s superiors, however we interpret the latter term, and Fassbinder lets that play out, while Morris and Rasmussen manage to find a tone between melodrama and camp. In the end, Petra’s relatives are used to her, and Karin has not, perhaps, disappeared for good (why abandon a powerful supplicant?), while Petra may learn to give Marlene her due, if not too late.

What we’re left with, I suppose, is a hope that some mutually helpful caring can be reached in a reciprocal fashion, but is that possible when the ups and downs of emotional investment are here as volatile as an unstable stock market?

Mention as well for the excellent use of songs emanating from Petra’s turntable, particularly The Walker Brother’s highly apropos “In My Room,” with its grandiose melancholy. A perfect song for when you vant to be alone with your own bitter tears.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
By Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Translated by Anthony Vivis
Directed by Leora Morris

Associate Director: Jesse Rasmussen; Dramaturg & Producer: Maria Inês Marques; Co-Scenic Designers: Christopher Thompson, Claire DeLiso; Costume Designer: Haydee Zelideth Antunano; Co-Lighting Designers: Andrew F. Griffin Elizabeth Green; Sound Designer & Composition: Frederick Kennedy, Christopher Ross-Ewart; Stage Manager: Avery Trunko; Co-Technical Designers: Mike Best, Mitchell Crammond, Mitch Massaro, Sean Walters

Yale Cabaret, March 31-April 2, 2016

Strange Doings in the Scottish Borders

Preview of The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, Arts & Ideas Festival

Annie Grace, of the National Theatre of Scotland, has performed in The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart more than 400 times, all over the place. The troupe and their signature play are back in New Haven this weekend to kick off the 21st annual Arts & Ideas Festival and to give New Haveners a newer taste of a play that first played here on its first world tour back in 2012.

There are two new cast members this time, filling the essential roles of Prudencia (now played by Jessica Hardwick) and her rival Colin Syme (now played by Paul McCole), and then there’s the supporting cast of three (Grace, Paul MacKay and music director Alasdair Macrae) who play a whirlwind variety of supporting roles and many authentic instruments—Grace plays Scottish Border pipes, whistles, ukulele and the bodhran (a drum), and sings. Her “musical husband” Macrae plays fiddle and guitar and they’ve been collaborators on many projects and performances.

There’s another member of the cast as well: the audience.

As conceived and written by David Grieg, with the original members of the cast and director Wils Wilson, the show is designed to take place in a pub and it’s meant to involve the audience in sundry ways. “The audience is in close contact to the spectacle and becomes part of the show, that’s essential,” says Grace. Last time, Prudencia played in June in the backroom of the Wicked Wolf. This time, it’s found a more suitable locale at Gryphon’s Pub, the hang-out of Yale grad students tucked away off York Street (officially it’s The Graduate and Professional Student Club—or GPSCY—at Yale). Prudencia’s tale of sparring and romancing academics at a winter conference in Kelso in the Scottish Borders region should feel right at home.

The music and story, Grace says, were inspired by border ballads, such as Tam Lin, a tale of metamorphosis at the hands of a fairie queen. There’s also a run-in with the devil and much enchantment, as well as a ribald romp of a bacchanal. As Grace says, Prudencia is a straight-laced, buttoned-up sort, who is “actually a wee bit naughty but doesn’t realize it.” Stuck in a blizzard in the Scottish Borders, she comes to learn that “hell is a bed-and-breakfast in Kelso.”

Paul McCole, Jessica Hardwick, Annie Grace, Paul MacKay, Alasdair Macrae

Grace says Prudencia is a play “that keeps on giving,” an extended work “dear to our hearts because we helped create it.” Initially, Greig showed up with six pages of script and the basic idea. He had been working in site-specific theater for children and was eager to do the same thing for adults. And where do adults become most like children? Why, at a pub of course. The show has gone up in small halls and theaters as well but Grace says it’s not the same ambiance. In fact, a key comic scene takes place in a pub in the play—or a pub within a pub—where the cast gets to do knock-offs of the kind of folk scene one finds in Kelso. This time the tour will end in Kelso itself. One can only imagine the devilry the locals will get up to for that event—since the scenes set in the pub there were inspired by actual local performers that Greig encountered on his “fact-finding” visit to the town. So, instead of the kinds of ancient ballads Prudencia is keen to encounter, you get a laughable bollocks of “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

No matter how many times they play their roles, Grace says, the troupe members are “always finding new things. David Greig is really a genius and the play is so very clever.” Most of the script is in verse and, Grace says, it sometimes takes a while for the audience to realize it. The devil, however, speaks prose and the scenes of satanic encounter strike a different note from the rest. There are also jokes about academia and popular culture and the once cutting-edge combination called “cultural studies.” “Colin is keen to bring folk studies into the twenty-first century,” Grace says, and Prudencia is less than amused by his fast and loose approach to their mutual discipline. Which makes for a lot of fun at the expense of both. Some of the references are starting to date a bit, Grace concedes, “iPods aren’t a new thing any more and are starting to be a bit passé.” Still, it’s not as if we didn’t all live through the early 21st century.

In looking for locales for the show, Grace says, the troupe needs a big room with good sight lines. “The play was conceived as a storytelling show—like 30 people sitting around a fire.” So it’s best with an audience of 120 max and tables and maybe a bit of drinking. In explaining the show and its setting, Grace refers to an old tradition: what it means “to have a song. Like a party piece, the thing you sing” that becomes your trademark, so to speak. Prudencia, she says, “has to find her song.”

And what better place to find a song—that’s also a tall tale, a quest for personal fulfillment, a journey of discovery, a research expedition, a romance, an enchantment, and a deal with the devil—than in the Scottish Borders, in the snow? Or in New Haven, in a pub.

The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart plays tonight, April 1, at 8 p.m., Saturday, April 2, at 3 & 8 p.m., and Sunday, April 3, at 3 p.m.

International Festival of Arts & Ideas presents:
The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart
From the National Theatre of Scotland

Created by David Greig and Wils Wilson

Festival 2016

March 30-April 3, 2016
The Gryphon's Pub
204 York Street
New Haven

Stories that Demand to be Told

Preview of Lewiston at Long Wharf Theatre

Martin Moran is back at the Long Wharf where he has acted before some years ago and also work-shopped one of his own plays. An actor who has appeared in a wide variety of parts in over thirty years in theater, Moran has achieved renown as a memoirist able to recreate personal experience as enthralling monologues on the stage. His first effort, The Tricky Part, based on his prose memoir of the same name, won an Obie Award and two Drama Desk nominations in 2004. It’s a play about a seduction that occurred while he was a youth at a camp and then, years later, his path to confrontation with his abuser, who had been jailed for his sex crimes. Tricky stuff, indeed, but Moran has shown himself capable of finding the human dimension in uncomfortable material. His subsequent play, All the Rage, opened Off-Broadway in 2013 and investigates the problem of anger in a quest to understand his own lack of anger toward his abuser.

Moran first began writing for the stage in his thirties, finding “an imperative to tell certain stories.” His stories tend to draw on themes of forgiveness and redemption that derive their spirit from his Catholic upbringing, while his interest in writing comes from his father, a journalist in Denver where Moran grew up. He was, he says, “always in love with storytelling” and was very conscious of performing as an aspect of storytelling, realizing that “if you can talk it and walk it, you can write it.” Having the confidence that comes with building a successful acting career, Moran found himself able to write parts based on his own experience that he could bring to life on stage. He’s at work now on a commissioned play that, far from being a monologue, has 11 characters, none of which he’s the right age to play.

Martin Moran

At Long Wharf he’s in rehearsals for the world premiere of a new play by MacArthur prize-winning playwright Samuel D. Hunter, perhaps best known for his play The Whale which won a Lucille Lortel Award for Best Play in 2013. Lewiston, Hunter’s new play, is set in Idaho, and Moran says the mid-west setting is one he feels very familiar with. Alice, an older woman, and Connor, her younger male roommate, played by Moran, live on a farm where they run a fireworks stand and are visited by the woman’s grand-daughter. With Alice and Connor willing to sell off their land for a condo in a new development, one of the issues in the play becomes a generational clash over land and the question of how to develop a plot that dates back to Lewis and Clark’s famed expedition.

Moran attended a reading of Hunter’s script in New York and loved it immediately. “Sam is a wonderful writer for the theater,” Moran said, with characters that “are very complex human beings” drawn with “compassion and empathy.” Long Wharf Artistic Director Gorden Edelstein likened Hunter’s work to staples of American theater such as William Inge and Tennessee Williams “in his delicate empathy with all the characters in his stories.”

The cast had been in rehearsals for a week when I spoke to Moran. When I asked if things were going as he expected, he replied that he expected the cast to dig deep into the characters and that’s exactly what they were doing, led by director Eric Ting who “understands the play and its characters so very well.” When I asked about surprises, Moran cited the presence and input of the fire marshal since there is considerable use of fireworks in the show. He also expressed surprise about which lines get laughs. “It’s a very funny play, very human,” but the laughs aren’t easily predictable.

Moran finds the fate of his character Connor “exciting and frightening.” “A day arrives—and everything changes,” he says. And that’s one of the lasting points of plays like Hunter’s that Moran finds so admirable: they let us see how people change.

Drawing upon the changes he has experienced in his changing career as both actor and writer, Moran, now in his mid-fifties, is well poised to portray the kind of change that gives a new lease on life in middle-age. Lewiston is about the kinds of challenges that come from family and from those around us, and about the kinds of challenges the future presents to the legacy of America.

Lewiston
By Samuel D. Hunter
Directed by Eric Ting

Cast: Randy Danson (Alice), Arielle Goldman (Marnie), Martin Moran (Connor), and Lucy Owen (Female Voice). The creative team includes Wilson Chin (sets), Paloma Young (costumes), Matthew Richards (lighting), Brandon Wolcott (sound), and Charles M. Turner III (stage manager). Casting is by Calleri Casting. The production is sponsored by Whitney Center and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The production runs from April 6 to May 1, 2016 on Stage II. Tickets are $26 to $85. Press opening takes place April 13 at 7:30 p.m.

Stopping by the Diner on a Snowy Evening

Review of Bus Stop at New Haven Theater Company

William Inge’s Bus Stop, first staged in 1955, portrays a selection of American types with a “classic” glow—like cars with fins, girls in bobby-sox, and the films of James Dean, or Duke Wayne for that matter. You might say the tone of the play manages to navigate both worlds. Like Dean’s films, there’s a sense that something’s not quite right beneath the surface of an apparently everyday world, something that could become dangerous or at least darkly menacing, while, like most of Wayne’s films, it all comes out alright in the end—because people are people and basically decent.

In the New Haven Theater Company production, directed with appealing energy by George Kulp, the feel of the diner as a space and a presence is key. Thanks to materials NHTC borrowed from the Long Wharf Theatre and from the English Markets, the set has an authenticity that goes a long way to make us believe in Grace’s Diner, the familiar haunt of a few of the characters and, for a gaggle of bus passengers, the new surroundings in which they’re temporarily stranded while a blizzard closes the roads just west of Kansas City.

The diner’s owner, Grace Hoylard, played flinty but sympathetically by Susan Kulp, has a soft spot for two of the other regulars: her young, naïve but intelligent teen employee Elma Duckworth (Sara Courtemanche, in a confident debut), and Carl the bus driver (Erich Greene), a nonchalant man on the make. There’s also Sheriff Will Masters (Peter Chenot) who presides over the others with a level tone that Wayne himself would recognize, I reckon.

Then there are the passengers, most of whom are a bit flighty for the staid tones at Grace’s: Dr. Gerald Lyman (J. Kevin Smith), a seedy professor with a past and the blustering manner of someone used to soliloquizing; Cherie (Megan Chenot), a likable “chanteuse,” none too bright but having to learn to assert herself to withstand the self-involved importuning of Bo Decker (Trevor Williams), a prize-winning cowpoke who seems to think he’s a gift to womankind just by being alive. His sidekick, Virgil Blessing, is played by John Watson with a ruminative air that would do Walter Brennan proud.

The plot essentially serves two purposes: to help Bo and Dr. Lyman grow some awareness, and to make the women, Cherie and Elma, gain stature. The diner, as the arena where this happens, never stops being also a diner, which is to say a slice-of-life setting and a public space, and that means that we’re put in the place, almost, of eavesdroppers watching folks interact in public. Such is Inge’s very capable grasp of how theatrical real life can be, and how a public domain is useful to help a grandstanding cowboy see how he looks to others and snap out of his fantasy of himself, and to make a smooth-talking seducer of young girls consider his prey as a person in a community. Meanwhile, the women—who are not exactly what you’d call passive and easily led—have to see the limits of sympathy and excitement where male egos are concerned.

Finally, Inge also gives us a refreshingly non-anxious look at a grown-up man and woman (Carl and Grace) who agree to convenient liaisons without guilt-tripping about it. The pair are not likely to be anyone’s model couple, but Inge has the wherewithal to let them be themselves, without apology.

Kulp keeps his cast rattling along, playing things forthright without worrying too much about lurking nuances. Lyman never seems too creepy, and Bo never too vicious. Cherie and Elma both get grandstanding moments atop the diner’s counter, with Chenot rocking her chanteuse gown and Courtmanche’s high-school-style Juliet providing some welcome comedy, as does Watson’s many scowling reactions to his pardner’s incessant braggadocio.

New Haven Theater Company renders Bus Stop with a becoming purity, strengthened by Megan Chenot’s grasp of Cherie’s earnest manner, a mix of down-home charm and easy-going allure, and by Courtmanche’s dreamy young girl’s wonder about all the types it takes to make a world. With so much real feeling invested in this tale, this Bus Stop is an entertaining place to get stranded.

Bus Stop
By William Inge
Directed by George Kulp

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

Stage Manager: Margaret Mann; Set Design & Construction: George Kulp; Lighting: Peter Chenot; Board Ops: Deena Nicol-Blifford, Margaret Mann

New Haven Theater Company
March 3-5 & 9-12, 2016

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