Matchmaking Games

Review of Pride and Prejudice, Long Wharf Theatre

Jane Austen’s much admired novel Pride and Prejudice got the Kate Hamill treatment in 2017. Hamill, trained as an actor, starred in new plays she adapted from old properties, allowing her, in the latter years of this decade, to assay three great heroines of British fiction: Marianne Dashwood (Sense & Sensibility), Becky Sharp (Vanity Fair), and Lizzy Bennet (Pride & Prejudice), as reconceived by her comic skills. The latter play, sans Hamill and directed by Jess McLeod, occupies the slot reserved for “a modern adaptation of a classic play” in the Long Wharf Theatre’s current season. In fact it’s a revival of a contemporary play adapted from a classic novel with some of the verve for skewering the 19th century that one finds, for instance, in the first act of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9. (From 1979, Cloud 9 was performed at Yale School of Drama in 2013 and Hartford Stage in 2017.)

Jane Bennet (Octavia Chavez-Richmond), Lizzy Bennet (Aneisa J. Hicks), Charlotte Lucas (Rami Margron) in Pride and Prejudice at Long Wharf Theatre, 2019

I was put in mind of the latter play by P&P’s use of comical casting, or casting against the grain. In Cloud 9, whoever plays the happy Victorian hunter and man of the house in Act One has to play a modern female child in Act Two. There, the doubling is mostly a jab at music hall comedy (men in female clothing having been trusted to raise guffaws for centuries). Here, when a very tall male (Luis Mareno) plays silly aristocrat Bingley as well as Mary, the most ill-favored of the Bennet clan (the third of four girls rather than Austen’s five), the hoary comic trope still lands, determined to inspire cheap laughs.

However, thanks to what Mareno does with the role, the doubling has perhaps something more behind it. Mareno makes Mary a loose cannon of odd asides, sad/funny bids for attention, and the kind of note-taking that family members readily store against others (“you locked me in a closet,” as a multivalent line, cuts more each time Mary says it). Likewise, the fact that whoever plays Mr. Bennet also plays Charlotte, the friend of Lizzy who takes one for the team by marrying unctuous Mr. Collins (Brian Lee Huynh, more later), lends a kind of paternalism to Charlotte and BFF status to Mr. Bennet. Here both roles are played by Rami Margron with notable command of both feminine and masculine registers.

Mary Bennet (Luis Moreno) in Pride and Prejudice at Long Wharf Theatre

The cross-casting is intrinsic to Hamill’s conception, letting the play step nimbly amongst the ruins of gender roles that performativity would have us progress beyond. What might push the theatrical effect a step further? All the cross-gender roles are ancillary. It’s still a story of boy, cast as such, meets girl, cast as such. While there’s no way anyone would mistake this for a faithful rendering of Austen, we don’t get anything really surprising either. At the Long Wharf, Pride and Prejudice is a comedy of manners where the posh British tones of classic Austen have been dismissed as mannered while the nonwhite cast is left to veer among mannerisms. How funny you find that I leave to you.

In my view, who fares best in this production—which is never quite as rollicking as it seems to hope it is (pacing!)—is Brian Lee Huynh. The actor has an always comical grasp of how to exploit the manner of each of his three parts. As the supercilious Miss Bingley—she detests those Bennet girls—Huynh might be a catty male in drag or a catty female past bloom (and dares you to tell the difference); as the caddish but sympathetic Mr. Wickham, he’s part comic villain, part dashing lead, and part ironic commentary on both, and as Mr. Collins, a poseur poised to marry at his patroness’s dictate, he’s divertingly daffy. In each role, both Austen and Hamill are well served. Well played.

Lydia (Dawn Elizabeth Clements), Mr. Wickham (Brian Lee Huynh) in Pride and Prejudice at Long Wharf Theatre

Elsewhere, the effects are more grab-bag, but Act Two lands better than Act One. The latter has not one but two grand balls where the lack of extras makes space itself seem to hang, while at home the fond rapport between Mr. Bennet and Lizzy (a linchpin of the novel) barely registers. Margron’s Mr. B. really comes into his own in Act Two when suitors come thick and fast. Jane Bennet (Octavia Chavez-Richmond), who’s supposed to be “the catch,” seems to be the rather tepid lover Darcy takes her for, early on. Chavez-Richmond has more fun with Miss Anne De Burgh’s neurasthenic quaver and a fantasy of Jane as temptress, both in Act Two. As Mr. Darcy, Biko Eisen-Martin does haughtily awkward well and bursts into pained eloquence in Act Two with force enough to melt even the skepticism of Lizzy, we imagine.  As Lizzy, Aneisa J. Hicks, ever-arrayed in patterned culottes, seems willfully obtuse in Act One, but her passions and bashfulness come to the fore in Act Two (after Darcy does her a service and she gets to see the dude’s sumptuous domicile). And yet the pair’s happy-ever-after kiss is all but spoiled by the bad matches made by Charlotte and by Lydia.

As the youngest (fourteen), Lydia is played by Dawn Elizabeth Clements as a sitcom princess, all cutesy girlish sashay in Act One; in Act Two she reappears as the Mean Girl/Dame, Lady De Burgh, and, while Lydia’s ultimate comeuppance seems way harsh, Clements is at her best in making us register the heart-shaking incomprehension of the child-bride. As Mrs. Bennet, for whom railroading her daughters into the best possible marriages is the key to success, Maria Elena Ramirez is never as vacuous as the role is generally deemed (even by Austen, I daresay). Her gravitas comes from preemptive mourning over her girls’ missed chances, a sort of memento mori for the death-in-life that yawns when marriageability ends.

Lizzy Bennet (Aneisa J. Hicks), Jane Bennet (Octavia Chavez-Richmond), Mrs. Bennet (Maria Elena Remirez), Mary Bennet (Luis Moreno), Lydia Bennet (Dawn Elizabeth Clements), Mr. Bennet (Rami Margron) in Pride and Prejudice at Long Wharf Theatre

Costumes, by Izumi Inaba, are a riot of patterns and overlays on female characters that seem designed not to flatter their wearers (more of that against the grain aesthetic, I assume), though the male costumes generally do. The set by Gerardo Díaz Sánchez features a handsome staircase and ballroom/sitting-room—with a décor like a bordello on acid. Sound Designer/Original Music Composer Megumi Katayama’s boomy rhythms come through loud and clear but the dialogue at times less so amidst all the movement.

The Long Wharf’s Pride and Prejudice takes pride in overcoming any prejudices about who is able to play whom. Fine, but it could be much funnier.

Pride and Prejudice
By Kate Hamill
Adapted from the novel by Jane Austen
Directed by Jess McLeod

Set Design: Gerardo Díaz Sánchez; Costume Design: Izumi Inaba; Lighting Design: Jennifer Fok; Original Music & Sound Design: Megumi Katayama; Choreography: James Beaudry; Hair, Wig & Make Up Design: Samantha Abbott; Production Stage Manager: Kelsey Vivian; Assistant Stage Manager: Amy Patricia Stern; Casting by Calleri Casting

Cast: Octavia Chavez-Richmond, Dawn Elizabeth Clements, Biko Eisen-Martin, Aneisa J. Hicks, Brian Lee Huynh, Rami Margron, Luis Moreno, Maria Elena Remirez

 Long Wharf Theatre
November 27-December 22, 2019

Watch Yourself

Review of Rubberneck, Yale Cabaret

The Yale Cabaret is back for its second weekend in November and won’t return until December 5th. This week Rubberneck by Mattie McGarey, a New York-based choreographer and performer, brings to the Cab its second wordless performance piece of the season. Here, unlike Bodyssey, the third show of the season, narrative trajectory is less marked in favor of vignettes of movement. A cast of six, garbed in becoming outfits with pleasing color coordination (Yunzhu Zeng, costumes), move through a series of routines. Some, like the opening—in which all perform morning routines such as showering, arranging hair, dressing—contain elements of mime. Others, like one that seems to be taking place, judging by the rhythmic music, in a club, makes the six seem like parts of the same collective organism. The overall impression is of six parts of the same machine, located in separate spaces, but answerable to the same directives.

The cast of Rubberneck by Mattie McGarey at Yale Cabaret, November 14-16, 2019

The different arrangements of the six make for changing patterns, and each performer interprets the movements differently. The ad hoc cast, which includes McGarey, is drawn from Yale College, the Yale School of Music, the Yale School of Drama, and from the New Haven community. Rubberneck, the statement by the artistic team reads, “interrogates body language, symbolic gestures, and unspoken social cues as essential ingredients to the expansion and extinction of our society.” With that in mind, the repetitions can be seen as the rote movements we all perform as a means to exist in society (I won’t say simply “exist,” for who knows what that might be like?) and the personal je ne sais quoi each brings to such repetitive movements is the little friction of individuality.

The six performers often enough seem robotic, moving upon mindless tracks. The impression is strengthened by the many times the performers extend a palm in front of their faces, staring into the little screen that now dominates all social spaces. At one point, with the six sitting on chairs, each throws out looks into the social space as if trying both to be seen and to avoid seeing. Or maybe just trying to see who might actually see them. A related sequence found each slipping about on the hard vinyl chairs, trying to find some sweet spot between relaxation and vigilance, some almost falling, some never quite at ease.

There’s a heightened sense throughout the show of what it means to watch others move. If you’re the type of person who can be occupied for hours watching people in parks, train stations, airports and so on, you should find the show very appealing. There’s always new information coming at the viewer even when it works at some subliminal level, the way we—perforce—have to process whatever takes place around us. Here, the show is for our attention and yet it’s the kind of show that makes us attentive to what makes sense, what has significance, in what others do and how they look while doing it. What it means, in other words, to be a spectator is implied in everything we notice in public. “Rubberneck,” of course, refers to the way people acknowledge something untoward happening, most commonly used to describe how an accident suddenly, in the midst of the routine behavior of driving, makes us spectators again, watchers at what has happened to someone else.

Mattie McGarey in Rubberneck at Yale Cabaret, November 14-16, 2019

Several times McGarey detaches from the simpler movements the others perform. It starts with a dramatic movement as if being ejected, in a slide across the floor backwards, while the other five stand in a sort of fortified coffee klatch. At other times, she’s apt to spiral about on the floor, creating movements with more rhythmic fluidity than the group tends to enact. There are also dispersals of the cast in ways that have an obvious symbolic logic, as when the two male performers sit off to the side as if in their own world, leaving the four female performers to work through other routines. Or a variation on musical chairs—all six walk around the line of six chairs and, in sequence, the performers break out of the rhythm to remove their own chairs, one at a time. What are the chairs? A habitation, a comfort, a personal space we each bring and take with us?

The show is greatly aided by Taiga Christie’s lighting and Bailey Trierweiler’s compositions which at times feel trancelike, at times using flurries of more anxious rhythm, at times brandishing silence as perhaps the most awkward of social conditions. Full of suggestion more than statement, the vignettes offer stylized interactions that may or may not seem opaque depending on the viewer. In any case, Rubberneck gives us something to look at even while perhaps making us pause to wonder why are so eager to find things to look at.

Rubberneck
Created, directed, and choreographed by Mattie McGarey

Producer: Sarah Cain; Costume Designer: Yunzhu Zeng; Lighting Designer: Taiga Christie; Composer & Sound Designer: Bailey Trierweiler; Sound Engineer: Anteo Fabris; Stage Manager: Leo Egger

Performers: Faizan Kareem, Xi Luo, Mattie McGarey, Hannah Neves, Adrianne Owings, Arnold Setiadi

Yale Cabaret
November 14-16, 2019

Hair Today . . .

Review of Steel Magnolias, Music Theatre of Connecticut

The first thing to take in about the production of Steel Magnolias at Music Theater of Connecticut is how Jessie Lizotte’s set design has opened up the playing space, creating a beauty salon with several work areas, a reception desk, a waiting area, a hair dryer, and two doors, one inner and one to the outside. The shop is run by Truvy (Raissa Katona Bennett) in what was formerly a carport on her property and it provides an isle of sanity for a coterie of women in the town who drop in regularly to get their hair done and to chat about whatever might be going on in the town of Chinquapin, Louisiana.

Directed by Pamela Hill, this fine ensemble cast captures the rhythms of everyday talk in Robert Harling’s script and the movements about the shop, as side conversations and common discussions join, overlap or conflict, is vividly enacted. Which is a good thing because all the action takes place in the shop and it’s important we feel as at home there as these women do. There’s nothing claustrophobic or phony about Truvy’s. It is an impressive and effective space in which to watch this discursive comedy-drama unfold.

M’Lynn (Kaia Monroe), Annelle (Rachel Rival), Truvy (Raissa Katona Bennett), Shelby (Andrea Lynn Green) in MTC Mainstage production of Steel Magnolias (photo by Heather Hayes)

Taking place in two Acts, each with two scenes, the play’s chattiness provides a context for four key moments in the life of Shelby Eatenton (Andrea Lynn Green), the daughter of M’Lynn (Kaia Monroe) who is one of the mainstays at Truvy’s, along with Clairee Belcher (Cynthia Hannah), widow of the late mayor, and Ouiser Bourdeaux (Kirsti Carnahan), the local curmudgeon. In the first scene, we see preparations for Shelby’s marriage that afternoon and meet, as do the women, Annelle Dupuy-DeSoto, a new hairdresser Truvy hired more from pity than need. The young woman, it emerges, has been abandoned by her husband and is living at a rooming-house. Soon she is welcome as one of group, and changes in her status—from abandoned to engaged to expectant mother—mark the passage of time over the course of the play.

Clairee (Cynthia Hannah), foreground, Annelle (Rachel Rival), Ouiser (Kirsti Carnahan), background in MTC Mainstage production of Steel Magnolias (photo by Heather Hayes)

In that first scene we learn that Shelby has diabetes when she undergoes a hyperglycemic episode, which is dramatic but easily coped with. The main tension seems to be between Shelby’s “get on with life” attitude and her mother’s pricklier concerns. Monroe makes M’Lynn seem something of a wet blanket, more apt to be gently sarcastic rather than merry. The merriest is Clairee, who will do just about anything to get a rise out of Ouiser, her foil. Carnahan and Hannah do a lot to keep things lively. As Truvy, Bennett’s Dolly Parton-style hairdo makes her look brassier than she is; there’s a genuine openness in her dealings with Rachel, who, as played by Rival, is very sweet but not that bright. The main figure is Shelby, and Andrea Lynn Green, who played the cunning Maggie the Cat in MTC’s sharp Cat on a Hot Tin Roof last season, plays her as a young woman with a lot on her mind, clearly used to being the young one doted on by these older ladies. The big reveal at the end of Act One shows us that she will live her own life, even if it kills her.

Shelby (Andrea Lynn Green) in MTC Mainstage production of Steel Magnolias (photo by Heather Hayes)

In Act Two we learn of the consequences of Shelby’s decision to have a child despite her doctor’s warnings and against M’Lynn’s wishes. The first scene of Act Two, a year and a half since the end of Act One, seems to mark life as usual, except that Shelby, as everyone learns to their shock and concern, needs her mother in a very particular way, and that creates a spotlight for M’Lynn as she continues to be essential in her daughter’s life. Green makes Shelby’s exit touching as she manages to think of others while facing major surgery. The final act gives M’Lynn the focus as she has to accept her daughter’s outlook and believe it is for the best. Monroe keeps M’Lynn tightly wound so that her breakdown is the more powerful, the kind of letting go and recovery that only happens with trusted friends.

Truvy (Raissa Katona Bennett), M’Lynn (Kaia Monroe) in MTC Mainstage production of Steel Magnolias (photo by Heather Hayes)

Steel Magnolias is noted, I suspect, for its ability to bring out tears and hankies. Truvy says that one of the best emotions is “laughter through tears” and that’s the feeling the play aims for. While only M’Lynn and Shelby are family, these six women provide a family-like space for each other, a context of wisecracks and pep-talks and shared confidences that allows for both laughter and tears. M’Lynn, who the others think of as tough, can only go so soft; Clairee, the joker, has to find something to make the others laugh; Ouiser, who has “been in a very bad mood for forty years,” can’t go too touchy-feely. It’s a fine line of playing as cast in the little company they have created, with Truvy as the one who, no matter what’s going down, has to help the ladies find a look to meet it with. It’s a play about life, loss, love, and the importance of familiar routine played to perfection with this perfectly chosen cast.

Steel Magnolias
By Robert Harling
Directed by Pamela Hill

Scenic Design: Jessie Lizotte; Lighting Design: RJ Romeo; Costume Design: Diane Vanderkroef; Sound Design: Will Atkin; Prop Design: Merrie Deitch; Hair Design: Peggi De La Cruz; Stage Manager: Jim Schilling

Cast: Raissa Katona Bennett, Kirsti Carnahan, Andrea Lynn Green, Cynthia Hannah, Kaia Monroe, Rachel Rival

Music Theatre of Connecticut
November 8-24, 2019

The Artful Dodger

Review of Don Juan, Westport Country Playhouse

Molière’s version of Don Juan remains, after all this time, somewhat enigmatic. An antihero, Don Juan is an atheistic libertine who prides himself on seducing women and marrying and abandoning them serially. A new translation and adaptation by Brendan Pelsue, directed by David Kennedy at Westport Country Playhouse, inhabits a cartoonish world that almost saps any gravitas from Don Juan’s many interlocutors. For all his glib narcissicism, Don Juan, played by Nick Westrate with cool hauteur, is at least not afraid to acknowledge his own nature. Everyone else seems more or less a clown. Except perhaps that living statue (Paul DeBoy).

Don Louis (Philip Goodwin), Sganarelle (Bhavesh Patel), Don Juan (Nick Westrate) in Don Juan, Westport Country Playhouse (photo by Carol Rosegg)

The key clown, of course, is Sganarelle (Bhavesh Patel), a practiced lackey to Don Juan through whose view, more or less, the action unfolds. He’s always on the scene, he provides much joking commentary, and his reactions recall Bud Costello. As played by Patel, he’s principled, up to a point, and able to accommodate even the most unpleasant requests from his boss with a philosophic acceptance of his lot in life. He’s owed many back-wages and lets us know he has to play along to get his due. In this, he’s any of us who will stick with a status quo, no matter how undignified, in the hopes that it will pay off.

The fact that Sganarelle’s wages, should he ever be paid, are owed for the part he plays in his master’s unsavory way of life might give him pause, and might give us grounds to see that what Sganarelle earns is his just deserts. And yet one can’t help thinking that there’s insufficient high ground here with which to censure the agreeable fellow. Part Two opens with Sganarelle performing a service that one would think is about as low as it goes—except that it could be considered a role played by a parent to a child.

It’s not a groundless thought, since Don Juan tends to be childlike in his inability to, as they say, “commit.” He’s flighty and capricious almost in self-defense, to avoid any world in which he must grow up and mean what he says. Late in the play, his father, Don Louis (Philip Goodwin), pays him two visits to upbraid his wayward son and in both cases gets the short end of the stick, though in the second he thinks his son has reformed. Dona Elvira (Suzy Jane Hunt), Don Juan’s most recent wife whom he lured away from a convent, gets even more humiliating treatment in her two visits. Both characters, who might be taken as examples of the morality Don Juan deplores, are also, in their stock conventions, tiresome company who deserve to be the butt of a joke.

And that’s finally what gives this updated, world premiere adaptation its bite. Pelsue lets Molière’s sense of human foible undermine anyone who might stand above anyone else. Once upon a time, that outlook met with censorship, causing certain parts of the play to be suppressed. Now, we’re familiar, in our carnival democracy, with the notion that an even playing-field means everyone’s the lowest common denominator, and to suggest otherwise, as Don Juan sees, is to be hypocritical.

Beggar (Philip Goodwin), Don Juan (NIck Westrate) in Don Juan, Westport Country Playhouse (photo by Carol Rosegg)

And yet, for all its ironies, the play isn’t cynical. It sets two or three saving graces or higher laws against the naked self-interest of its hero. One is the question of what one owes to one’s God or one’s faith, enacted here by a Beggar (Goodwin) who won’t blaspheme even for the sake of a gold coin Don Juan tempts him with. Another is the question of honor, which comes up in the comic disputation between Don Carlos (Jordan Bellow), whom Don Juan saved from assault, and his brother Don Alonzo (Bobby Roman), who says the brothers must kill Don Juan for his treatment of their sister Dona Elvira. Molière is able to mock such honor codes while also showing how fidelity to them makes things fairer. And the brothers, in their phlegmatic discourse in the midst of a vendetta, are delightful fun.

Don Carlos (Jordan Bellow), Don Alonzo (Bobby Roman) in Don Juan, Westport Country Playhouse (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Finally, there is love. Don Juan seems incapable of it and indifferent to it when it comes to him from another, but there is a sense in which the profligate’s fate is earned by his disdain of those truly concerned for him, like his father and Dona Elvira and even, at least for the sake of his wages, Sganarelle. Don Juan flaunts God, honor and love and goes to his end wondering what all the fuss was about.

Kennedy’s treatment of the material moves quickly and throws several vivid clowns at us. Besides the indefatigable Sganarelle, there’s Carson Elrod as a peasant Pierrot, who is energetically dim, and as the creditor Dimanche who is out of his depth. There’s Ariana Venturi as Charlotte, the suitably dim beloved of Pierrot who lets herself get romanced by Don Juan—and Venturi gets credit for giving the character a sufficient hint of depth to suggest she might just be the jewel in the mud Don Juan pretends he takes her for. As Mathurine, another woman whom Don Juan has promised to marry, Claudia Logan is scrappy and energetic, and, as the Ghost, quite a vision.

Pierrot (Carson Elrod), Charlotte (Ariana Venturi) in Don Juan, Westport Country Playhouse (photo by Carol Rosegg)

The costumes by Katherine Roth and the set designs by Marsha Ginsberg are equally colorful, combining a flair for amusing touches, like Don Juan’s T-shirt with “narcissist,” printed to be read by the shirt’s wearer, and the piles of plastic bags of trash next to a Coke machine in the scene with the peasants, or Don Juan’s gold lamé suit and a background Fragonard in the first scene.

Dona Elvira (Suzy Jane Hunt), Don Juan (Nick Westrate) in Don Juan, Westport Country Playhouse (photo by Carol Rosegg)

The play’s Second Part is shorter and lacks the outright fun of the First Part and that’s where we start to sense that the cavalier tone of the play was a distraction from something more dire. A comeuppance will come. Whether you like him or not, there is a certain sexiness in Don Juan’s insistence that girls just wanna have fun and that he shouldn’t deny himself to any who are so inclined. And, anyway, he’s not nearly as vile as a contemporary libertine like Jeffrey Epstein. Still, the conclusion shows that belittling the claims of others is if no avail at the final judgment.

Don Juan
By Molière
A world premiere translation and adaptation by Brendan Pelsue
Directed by David Kennedy

Scenic Design: Marsha Ginsberg; Costume Design: Katherine Roth; Lighting Design: Matthew Richards; Original Music & Sound Design: Fitz Patton; Fight Director/Intimacy Coach: Michael Rossmy; Associate Scenic Design: Samuel Vawter; Props Supervisor: Karin White; Production Dramaturg: Dana Tanner-Kennedy; Production Stage Manager: Shane Schnetzler

Cast: Jordan Bellow, Paul DeBoy, Carson Elrod, Philip Goodwin, Suzy Jane Hunt, Claudia Logan, Bhavesh Patel, Bobby Roman, Ariana Venturi, Nick Westrate

Westport Country Playhouse
November 5-23, 2019

Frankenstein Revisited

Review of Manual Cinema’s Frankenstein, Yale Repertory Theatre No Boundaries Series

It may be surprising to see Mary Shelley’s cautionary novel about the overweening hubris of those who would play God in a time of scientific advance altered to become a story of the importance of nurturing in a time of anxiety about the future, but that’s what Manual Cinema’s Frankenstein, at Yale’s University Theatre as part of the No Boundaries Series, offers. By linking the death of Clara, the child of Mary (Sarah Fornace)  and Percy Shelley (Leah Casey), after weeks of life, with the reanimation of dead tissue undertaken by Mary’s famed hero, goggle-eyed Victor Frankenstein (Fornace), this version of the Gothic story becomes a sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy of bereavement.

That thematic interest, however, does get lost a bit in the trappings of the familiar horror-story genre that Manual Cinema, an experimental theater troupe from Chicago, also freely borrows from. “The Creature” created by Victor in his lab has become known popularly as “the Frankenstein monster” or simply Frankenstein, and that makes for an expectation of moody castles and grave-digging and callous crimes (all lovingly evoked). In Shelley’s version, the Creature does some horrible things to Victor’s family in revenge for how his “father” treated him; here, the Creature is more sinned-against than sinning and therein lies a key difference—though the fate of the family he encounters, including the requisite friendly blindman, is unclear to me, their house is torched.

Manual Cinema’s Creature, who is misshapen but childlike, is a puppet, a live actor (Kara Davidson) and a shadow puppet. That should indicate the range of what this incredibly inventive and entertainingly creative troupe manages to manifest to our wonderment. Their key technique is creating a film live, using shadow puppets, actual puppets, live actors, and a handful of musicians on the front of the stage playing the score of this silent film/theatrical event live. At one point, shadow puppets give way to actor-shadows in a subtle sleight-of-hand. Visually rich and complex, the show is a compelling hybrid of theater and film.

Leah Casey in Manual Cinema’s Frankenstein (photos by Elly White, Michael Brosilow at Court Theatre, Chicago, from Manual Cinema website)

The audience can concentrate on the projections (which is Rasean Davonte Johnson’s métier) while stealing glances at the group upstage who are making those visuals happen. Camera work can be astounding, with close-ups of the Creature both unsettling and full of pathos, and Furnace’s tendency to press close to the camera becomes an emotive crux much like certain stylized facial expressions in silent films. Indeed, the only language in the film comes from silent-movie placards containing Shelley’s text and the only voice heard is the lovely, ethereal vocals of Leah Casey.

The score, by Ben Kauffman and Kyle Vegter, uses percussion in a mood-creating way and all the musicians, led by Peter Ferry, make percussive sounds as well as playing flutes, clarinets, cello and piano. The texture of the sounds and the texture of the visuals make for a seamless, immersive experience and that, more than story per se, is the most fascinating aspect of the show. The sound design (by the composers) and the visual design (Johnson), including costumes and wigs by Mieka Van Der Ploeg and lighting by Claire Chrzan, with puppetry by Lizi Breit and props by Lara Musard, is remarkable throughout and almost preternatural in effect. To help satisfy your curiosity about how the 90+ minute multimedia epic you’ve just seen was done, the audience is invited up onto the stage after the show to tour the props, puppets, screens, cameras, costumes and instruments.

Peter Ferry in Manual Cinema’s Frankenstein (photos by Elly White, Michael Brosilow at Court Theatre, Chicago, from Manual Cinema website)

Does the show offer a fully satisfying realization of Shelley’s famed creation? The manner of the story is incredibly well-conveyed, with the dark atmosphere and great backgrounds apropos to the Gothic imagination. The prologue—about the birth and loss of Clara and the storied summer in 1816 vacationing on Lake Geneva when the Shelleys, along with Lord Byron and his personal physician, were each challenged to create “a ghost story,” that led to Mary writing Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus—makes for a slow start, though it’s key to the concept by Drew Dir (and the depiction of Byron and Shelley as dudes of our day grabs laughs).

The insistence, in this all female cast, on Victor mirroring Mary makes for a refreshing spin, a way for Mary to appease the ghosts of her dead mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died shortly after Mary’s birth, and her own dead daughter (no mention is made of William, the child born to the Shelleys in 1816). The effort by Romantic studies to possess this material has led to all sorts of conjectures about Mary’s relation to her characters. Manual Cinema’s take seems much in-keeping with the notion of Mary Shelley as the hero of her own story, and thus akin to the mad genius who gave birth to one of the most enduring, mysterious and chilling figures in English literature.

Frankenstein
Adapted from the novel by Mary Shelley
Concept by Drew Dir
Devised by Drew Dir, Sarah Fornace, and Julia Miller
Original music by Ben Kauffman and Kyle Vegter

Storyboards: Drew Dir; Music and Sound Design: Ben Kauffman and Kyle Vegter; Shadow Puppet Design: Drew Dir and Lizi Breit; Projections and Scenic Design: Rasean Davonte Johnson; Costume and Wig Design: Mieka Van Der Ploeg; Lighting Design: Claire Chrzan; 3D Creature Puppet Design: Lizi Breit; Prop Design: Lara Musard; Stage Manager, Video Mixing, and Live Sound Effects: Shelby Glasgow; Assistant Stage Manager: Kate Hardiman; Sound Engineer: Mike Usrey

Cast: Leah Casey, Maren Celest, Kara Davidson, Sarah Fornace, Myra Su

Musicians: Peter Ferry, percussion; Michael Chen, clarinets, aux percussion; Rachael Dobosz: flutes, aux percussion, piano; Lia Kohl: cello, aux percussion, vocals

Yale Repertory Theatre
No Boundaries Series
November 7-9, 2019

As On A Darkling Plain

Review of Retreat from Moscow, New Haven Theater Company

One of the more subtle and satisfying aspects of William Nicholson’s Retreat from Moscow, playing for two more shows tonight and tomorrow at New Haven Theater Company, directed by Margaret Mann and John Watson, is the way this play about a fraying marriage of thirty-three years is filtered through the view of the couple’s thirty-two year-old son, an only child who lives alone. At some point—usually when parents are old enough to see their children as adults—offspring see their parents as the results of decisions made long ago. When the key decision made—to marry—comes into question, then everything is up for grabs.

Because Nicholson and his characters are British, the tone of the play is apt to feel a touch mannered to American audiences. Directors Mann and Watson, with their effectively thoughtful cast, render the tonalities of the couple and son with deft moments of characterization. Kiel Stagno, as Jamie (the son), is quite good at wearing the look of patient attentiveness that his mother, Alice (Susan Kulp), has come to rely on as she sets out one grievance or another. It may be her treatment at the hands of an indifferent serviceperson at a computer store, it may be her husband’s insistence on doing the crossword puzzle when she would rather talk. Alice, who loves to intone classic British poetry, from the Metaphysicals to the Victorians, is what is generally called “high-strung,” which means that, even when she means to be ingratiating she is more likely to be grating.

Edward (George Kulp), Alice (Susan Kulp), Jamie (Kiel Stango) in New Haven Theater Company’s production of The Retreat from Moscow, directed by Margaret Mann & John Watson

Dad is Edward (George Kulp) who seems the epitome of the unassuming spouse, a kind of silent partner to his wife’s expressive sallies, some at his expense. He tends to be apologetic but also can’t see why his behavior is an issue. Alice is the type of woman who simply assumes she knows better—and so her son can’t really not believe in God, and her husband can’t really find soldiers’ journals written during the Napoleonic retreat from Moscow as fascinating as he claims. Of course there’s a God and going to church is a way to entreat his mercy, and of course Edward’s interests are really just a means to avoid doing something she’d rather he do.

The revelation that Edward at first addresses to his son sets up the play’s main device. Jamie is put in the middle, as go-between, as counselor, as put-upon support staff. That he lives a good drive away, in London, and has little interest in visiting “home” with such regularity is simply a fact. He’s a good son, or trying hard to be, and his patience is laudable. As the play goes on, we begin to understand the extent to which this event—his parents’ estrangement—marks him deeply not only because of what he has to learn about them, but also what that teaches him about himself.

Alice (Susan Kulp), Edward (George Kulp) in The Retreat from Moscow, NHTC

Not particularly witty or acerbic, much of the energy of Nicholson’s play comes from Susan Kulp’s portrayal of Alice as a woman desperately trying to make the past contain the future. Twice she moans about what will become of her when she’s old. On one level she’s the embodiment of the idea of marriage as an insurance policy, taken out in youth, that will pay benefits throughout one’s lifetime. Watching her learn to cope is lively—from changing her wardrobe, to getting a dog, called “Eddie,” that she can command, to wielding a sharp knife with devil-may-care casualness. Edward’s role, in its quieter dimensions, is a harder read. George Kulp gives to Edward’s speeches a uniform intensity of guilty reflection punctuated with breathy hope that seems to give the lie to his view that he’s found new meaning. And that makes us wonder till the end if a rapprochement might suddenly emerge.

The lighting of this spare but attractive set adds to the play’s impact. The feeling of domestic spaces as “sets” for private drama complements Jamie’s role as a stand-in for the playwright, a role that we see Stango grow into before our very eyes. We are made aware of how Jamie’s perceptions of this unexpected development in his parents’ lives becomes a means to doing them homage, in all their messy, human inadequacy.

Once again New Haven Theater Company finds a worthwhile domestic drama that suits their intimate playing space and capably naturalistic actors.

The Retreat from Moscow
By William Nicholson
Directed by Margaret Mann & John Watson

Cast: George Kulp, Susan Kulp, Kiel Stango

Stage Manager/Board Op: Stacy Lupo

Special thanks to Wendy Marans as dialect coach and Liz Saylor, costumes

New Haven Theater Company
October 31-November 9, 2019

One Big Happy Family

Review of Cry It Out, Hartford Stage

Human services. What does that phrase make you think of? Care of the sick, disabled, elderly? What about the form of care that is among the most time-consuming and anxiety-ridden: the care of newborn children. Molly Smith Metzler’s Cry It Out, now at Hartford Stage in a delightful production directed by Rachel Alderman, gets the rigors of the latter “service” exactly right, making comic drama of the way we tend to make light of all the potential heartache that comes with being the adults in the room.

The show features my earliest choice in this season of Connecticut theater for outstanding performance: Rachel Spencer Hewitt plays new mom Jessie with a voice pitched perpetually in wonderment at what’s become of her. She’s a  latter-day “angel in the house,” a doting mother who nearly lost her baby pre-birth, a successful lawyer (this could be partnership year) who is learning she might rather remain at home, and sometimes she can let herself go, abetted by the brash, comic, and spot-on support of Evelyn Spahr’s Lina, the next-door new mom. This can-do duo becomes regulars in the backyard playground, a circular arena of scrappy grass beneath silhouettes of townhouses, with a graceful space between, in Kristen Robinson’s handsome set. There these breast-feeding buddies find that, despite their differences in background and paygrade, they can actually talk to each other about the one thing they both really care about: being a mom.

Jessie (Rachel Spencer Hewitt), Lina (Eveylyn Spahr) in Hartford Stage’s production of Cry It Out, directed by Rachel Alderman (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

What makes the play work so well is the way these two gifted performers, under Alderman’s feel for human foible, fully inhabit Smith Metzler’s funny and perceptive script. Jessie and Lina could be caricatures but they are knowing enough to know that, and that gives them a personal irony and exuberance that’s fun and infectious, even when they have to vent about things like Lina’s alcoholic mother-in-law or Jessie’s husband’s sudden need to have a cottage on Montauk next to his parents. The first scene plays out best simply because we’re happy to overhear the way these two outgoing women get on.

Mitchell (Erin Gann) in Hartford Stage’s production of Cry It Out (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The complications come in two forms. One is the need to return to work—Lina’s date is already set—to keep both two-income households running, and that means the days of their joyful routine are numbered. The other is an odd request from the well-heeled neighbor up the hill. Mitchell (Erin Gann), a nice suit in a rush to make a train, barges in on them like a walking explosion of awkwardness, his gesturing hands and glancing eyes moving everywhere at once. His request: could he set up a playdate between his wife, a new mom having trouble coping (despite a support staff), and these two comfortably at-home mommies?

When we finally meet his wife Adrienne (Caroline Kinsolving), she’s the proverbial third wheel. She’s not into anything the others are into, she exudes professional froideur, and she’s exactingly rude and contemptuous. At first we might think this very successful jewelry designer is only there to be a foil, giving Lina someone to mock and Jessie someone to feel sorry about. And she is that, but she’s also going to give the requisite speech that lets us know what makes the mean girl mean. That moment, near the end, is not all it could be—Kinsolving keeps Adrienne cool even when she’s literally throwing eggs—but her speech does offer a cautionary point about stones and living in glasshouses.

Lina (Evelyn Spahr), Jessie (Rachel Spencer Hewitt), Adrienne (Caroline Kinsolving) in Hartford Stage’s production of Cry It Out (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Underneath all the banter and the angst about letting down the child is, perhaps, some idea like Tolstoy’s famed line: “all unhappy families are unique in their unhappiness.” Which is to say that not only do we all fail to be perfect parents, but that the way each of us fails isn’t something that can be fixed by some all-purpose remedy. Like the “cry it out” method of getting an infant to go to sleep, the choices parents make tend to be policed in odd ways by an implied collectivity. In watching parents with their children (or, in this case, hearing discussions of spouses and children), there’s always a detail or two that screams “socialization.” And that’s what keeps us in this game. Whether or not you are a parent, some version(s) of a parent raised you. And you wonder how it might all have gone differently.

And if you are a parent it’s hard to imagine that you won’t find much here to amuse you and maybe choke you up. In particular, Smith Metzler is able to evoke—in Spencer Hewitt’s giddy domestic rapture, self-conscious but pure—what it’s like to spend time with an infant on a daily basis. If you haven’t had that pleasure in a while, be prepared to have your memory renewed. And if you have, maybe even more so.

Jessie (Rachel Spencer Hewitt), Lina (Evelyn Spahr) in Hartford Stage’s production of Cry It Out (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Smith Metzler is also sure enough of her material—and of an audience at child-rearing age—to end with an interrogative. Many plays today try to prod us into thinking about the practices of exclusion and inclusion in our society. Cry It Out takes that question down to a basic formulation: how long should we keep our children to ourselves and how soon should we put them out there with everyone else?

Cry It Out
By Molly Smith Metzler
Directed by Rachel Alderman

Scenic Design: Kristen Robinson; Costume Design: Blair Gulledge; Lighting Design: Matthew Richards; Sound Design: Karin Graybash; Dramaturg: Shaila Schmidt; Casting: Laura Stancyzk, CSA; Production Stage Manager: Kelly Hardy; Assistant Stage Manager: Chandalae Nyswonger; Production Manager: Bryan T. Holcombe

Cast: Evelyn Spahr, Rachel Spencer Hewitt, Erin Gann, Caroline Kinsolving

Hartford Stage
October 24-November 17, 2019

Postwar Reunion

Review of A Shayna Maidel, Playhouse on Park

Every family has its injustices, I suppose. But when historical tragedy becomes a factor, the injustice can be huge. In A Shayna Maidel by Barbara Lebow, now playing at Playhouse on Park directed by Dawn Loveland Navarro, the overt differences between two Jewish sisters has to do with their experiences during the period of the Holocaust. The upshot of it all is how family can endure, but the path to that conclusion is tangled and, in this production, a bit confusing.

After a mostly purposeless prologue showing the birth of Mordechai Weiss in 1876, during a pogrom in Poland, we leap ahead to 1946 and the rather spacious West Side apartment of Rose Weiss (Laura Sudduth). Mordechai (Mitch Greenberg), her 70 year-old father, tells her that her older sister, Lusia Pechenik, is coming to New York at last. The sisters haven’t seen each other since Rose was four, in the 1920s. That’s when Mordechai left his native Poland to seek his fortune in America. He took the baby, but left Lusia behind with Mama (Krista Lucas) because the older girl was sick. Then came the Great Depression, then the rise of Nazism in Germany and the invasion of Poland. Most of the Weiss family became casualties in the Holocaust.

Rose, the “lovely girl” of the title, has little memory of Poland and little interest in her absent sister, apparently. Her reaction to her father’s peremptory commands that she take in Lusia, give her the bedroom, sleep on the couch and learn to keep kosher is a bit of a panic attack, as if she’s going to be visited by a housekeeping critic. As played by Laura Sudduth, Rose lacks any appreciable Jewishness. She has a bit of what might be considered a New York accent and is thoroughly assimilated. Lusia, when she arrives, looks and sounds like we expect a Jewish Polish refugee would. There are some amiable moments of bonding, most notably a picnic on the rug.

Lusia Pechenik (Katharina Schmidt), Rose Weiss (Laura Sudduth), Mordechai Weiss (Mitch Greenberg) in Playhouse on Park’s production of Barbara Lebow’s A Shayna Maidel (photo by Meredith Longo)

Lusia has a little notebook in which the fate of all family members has been dutifully recorded. Mordechai has his notebook as well and makes a notation as Lusia doggedly reads out the litany of who was murdered when and in which place of internment. It’s a revealing moment: Mordechai acts as if the fates of those left behind—while he was getting by in New York, remember—is a bit of historical detail, satisfying a vague curiosity. He and Rose really only react to the specifics of Mama’s demise. Lusia, on the other hand, reads each name and fate—including the uncertainty about the fate of her husband Duvid and the date of their child’s death—as though each is a stake through the heart.

Lusia speaks halting English in New York, and, in flashbacks with Duvid (Alex Rafala) and her girlhood friend Hanna (Julia Tochin), speaks Yiddish that we hear as fluent English. The scenes in the past show us a lively, vibrant young woman; in the scenes in New York we see an anxious, depressed, but forceful mature woman. The best reason for seeing the Playhouse production is Schmidt’s performance. She gives the personality of Lusia a vividness that helps greatly to keep this slow story moving, making it a moving experience, ultimately—particularly when Lusia reads to Rose a letter written to her lost daughter by Mama. A dead mother’s letter to a child is a sure way to break out the hankies.

Lusia Pechenik (Katharina Schmidt), seated, Rose Weiss (Laura Sudduth), standing in A Shayna Maidel at Playhouse on Park (photo by Meredith Longo)

Another strength of the show is Greenberg’s dapper and somewhat feckless Mordechai. He appears to be a survivor who bears little guilt. A late reveal tells us much about his nature; certainly, he couldn’t have predicted the Depression that would make it impossible to pay the fare for his wife and other daughter, and certainly he couldn’t know what was going to become of the Jews in Poland, but, when confronted by Lusia about his refusals to accept monetary help, his manner is to act the aggrieved one. Greenberg delivers perfectly the self-absorbed patriarch, more concerned with his status in the new country than his obligations to the old.

Much of the play—at which Rose is mostly a bystander—seems structured to render Lusia’s life and to enact an ultimate reconciliation with Mordechai. Some sequences, such as a dream of the entire family present for the marriage/reunion of Lusia and Duvid, seem simply a contrived effort to lighten the mood. As Duvid, Alex Rafala, in his third show at Playhouse on Park, renders well the chastened hopes Duvid brings to a late scene.

There’s a discursiveness to Lebow’s scenes that feels a bit like a television script. Navarro’s production, with its blackouts for scene changes and faithful rendering of the play, could have done the material a favor by trimming scenes and finding quicker transitions. The story’s power—as a dramatic rendering of refugee hardships, and of America as a necessary destination for immigrants, and as an important chapter in the trials of a Jewish family—should allow audiences to overlook the production’s defects in favor of its deeply human resonance.

A Shayna Maidel
By Barbara Lebow
Directed by Dawn Loveland Navarro

Scenic Designer: David Lewis; Lighting Designer: Marcus Abbott; Sound Designer: Kirk Ruby; Costume Designer: Lisa Steier; Stage Manager: Mollie Cook; Props Artisan/Set Dresser: Eileen OConnor

Cast: Mitch Greenberg, Krista Lucas, Alex Rafala, Katharina Schmidt, Laura Sudduth, Julia Tolchin

Playhouse on Park
October 30-November 17, 2019

Broken-Promise Land

Review of Pass Over, Collective Consciousness Theatre

Beneath the skyline of New Haven—look, there’s the Connecticut Financial Center and the Knights of Columbus building and some of Yale’s gothic spires—sits an end-of-the-road alley/corner. Here, two homeless African American teens, Moses (Tenisi Davis) and Kitch (Stephen Gritz King) hangout, making the most of each other’s company as, seemingly, the only surviving family either has. The tone of their exchanges is familiar and jokey, full of the banter of brothers. In Pass Over, now playing for one more weekend at Collective Consciousness Theatre at Erector Square, playwright Antoinette Nwandu achieves a poetic language that feels real but that is also stylized in interesting, ear-catching ways. Put simply, the two youths are street poets and listening to them entertain each other is very entertaining.

But there’s a sense of dejection as well. While the occasional burst of a police siren inspires quick postures of defense or concealment, these two live in constant denial of how dire their circumstances are. They like to play a wish-fulfillment game called “Promised Land Top Ten,” an enumerated list of ten comforts that either might hope to find having “passed over” into the promised land.

Directed by Jenny Nelson, Davis and King have a cautious and canny directness, an innocence that is reassuring, given their circumstances, and, deliberately, a hint of the existentialist gallows humor of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Which means that the repetitious routines the duo indulge in are Nwandu’s way of equating the bleak lack of prospects of Beckett’s post-war tramps with two urban outsiders who have survived—so far—a general war upon nonwhite populations. At the same time, the script eschews any sense of deliberate echo (as, for instance, having the two wait for a connection for a job or drugs or a communication) to let us ponder what passing time to no purpose feels like.

At last someone does turn up. Mister (Griffin Kulp) is a gosh and golly caricature of a privileged white, complete with picnic basket, who has strayed into an unfamiliar part of town. The interaction with Mister can feel a bit overly cautious, as if some kind of street cred test is being faced simply by talking to, much less taking food from, such an offensively benign figure. Moses, the one more concerned with his image and—perhaps—a sense of dignity that comes with his name, finds Kitch’s eager and obsequious attitude an affront. And so the scene plays out comically with any possible understanding on either side buried under layers of awkward pretense.

Left to their own devices again, the pay-off is Moses trying to school Kitch in how to sound white. The realization has dawned that their preference for identifying themselves and each other by what Mister euphemistically calls “the n-word” makes them sound suspect. As if to prove this point, a cop called Ossifer (Kulp) shows up and is at first fooled by the boys’ new tone, only to become even more hostile when he sees them as the hapless street kids they are. The scene plays out as (almost) the worst of their nightmares since nothing they can say for themselves can appease a judge who would convict them simply for being themselves.

The play’s conclusion is swift and comes with a shock. The tragedy for Moses and Kitch, Nwandu says, is not simply due to the fact that police mistreat and abuse African Americans, but because the society Mister represents requires a bullying wall between the whites’ complacent abundance and everyone they exclude. The conclusion is fully in-keeping with Nwandu’s gift for emblematic theater.

In essence, Pass Over is a morality play in which a hell-on-earth is contrasted with the promised land of the boys’ imagination and in which the trials of this life—in the form of empowered white men—are figures for temptation: the temptation of assimilation, the temptation of subservience, the temptation of uprising. In the latter case, the act of violence comes from daring to stop waiting for nothing in an effort to pass over to a better future.

Another strong installment in the Collective Consciousness repertoire, Pass Over marks the welcome return of Tenisi Davis, who memorably played the mercurial Booth in 2017’s Topdog/Underdog and of director Jenny Nelson whose bracing staging of Marco Ramirez’s The Royale closed the 2018-19 season. First produced in 2017, Pass Over provides a contemporary play that has much to say to many American cities, like New Haven, where the racial divide runs deep.

Pass Over
By Antoinette Nwandu
Directed by Jenny Nelson

Stage Manager: Ashley Sweet; ASM/Propsmaster: Molly Flanagan; Set Design: David Sepulveda, Jamie Burnett and Amie Zinder; Lighting Design: Jamie Burnett; Costume Design: Carol Koumbaros; Sound Design: Tommy Rosati; Producer: Dexter J. Singleton

Cast: Tenisi Davis, Stephen Gritz King, Griffin Kulp

Collective Consciousness Theatre
October 24-November 10, 2019

Something Wicked

Review of Burn Book, Yale Cabaret

Three boys in boarding school, sharing a dorm room. The new kid arrives. Tensions arise, secrets are discovered, bonding takes place, but also possibilities for conspiracy and betrayal. The plot may sound familiar, but Burn Book, JJ McGlone’s debut play making its debut at Yale Cabaret, takes it to a different register. What makes it different? The boys are girls, which is to say very gay and very out about it. The play is wickedly good fun, directed by Zoe Mann, a third-year actor, in her directing debut.

William (JJ McGlone) claims the four are the only gays at the school (what are the chances?), and we never see them interact with others outside the room of four cots. The play gives us very privileged access to a very insular space. In that space, the four all indulge each other’s uncloseted personae, and the dialogue is fast-paced, arch and very funny. The dynamic among the four runs the gamut of the kinds of getting to know you moments, meltdowns, anxiety attacks and so on, familiar to the teen queen genre. At first, the main concern seems to be pecking order as William, the top Mean Girl, so to speak, immediately insists that newcomer Ty (Gregory Victor Georges) will replace Lewis (Daniel Liu) in the cot righthand side to his own. Ty, from Haiti, has a greater cachet, if only because of his outrageous twerking skills. Meanwhile, Warren (Julian Sanchez) seems the most put-upon and most likely to sulk in his cot.

The foursome engage in venomous commentary about teachers, fellow students, and the school’s straight ethos (we are reminded a few times of how important status and success are here). Of course, each teen has pet peeves and favorite objects of lust. But McGlone has another genre in mind as well: Ty, we learn when William makes the discovery, has a special book secreted away. And so the main dramatic outing is William calling out Ty as a witch—which they all claim to be as well. Now we’re in the midst of a coven and the four take to wearing skirts, as a means to set themselves apart and because nothing in the school’s dress code forbids it.

The four’s rapid-fire interactions—which includes choreographed raves, themed videos by Erin Sullivan (one, a kind of Goth-drag music video on Yale’s Old Campus to the tune of The Smiths’ “How Soon is Now,” is particularly hilarious), and casting spells—are full of a heady immediacy. Director Mann keeps the pace just short of collective hysteria—and the night I attended the audience was incredibly spirited, swept up by a sense of a behind-the-scenes exposure.

The sequence of getting-even hexes the four commit escalates to the point where discomfort and disagreement begins. Ty tries to demur, and William becomes more demanding. McGlone’s William gets a scary gleam in his eye, playing upon the weaknesses in his coven to gain his goal: a jealous blow against the wife of the male instructor he wants for himself. The outcome—after each undergoes a major freak-out—takes place when called before the school’s deans and it arrives as a shocking act of betrayal and a completely unhinged moment. It’s also where an actual witch-hunt and the term’s more metaphoric usages dovetail in a sharply dramatic way.

A “burn book”—as viewers of Mean Girls know—is a kind of collective scrapbook in which defamation and destruction of certain detested objects (mostly fellow-students) are gleefully indulged. The four witches keep such a book and it becomes a testimony against them, not only in the targets of their hexes but also in the truly malevolent spirit they have unleashed among themselves. Of course, with the fate of the witches of New England in mind, a “burn book” is also a document of how certain populations, deliberately “other” to a dominant culture that is straight, patriarchal, Christian and at least somewhat puritanical, have been outlawed, persecuted, and, wherever possible, cancelled by history. Considering such a context, it’s not the first time the slogan of confrontation might well be “burn, baby, burn.”

Burn Book
By JJ McGlone
Directed by Zoe Mann

Producer: Laurie Ortega-Murphy; Scenic Designer: Lily Guerin; Lighting Designer: Emma Deane; Sound and Projection Designer: Erin Sullivan; Costume Designer: David Mitsch; Assistant Costume Designer: April M. Hickman; Sound Engineer: Liam Bellman-Sharpe; Dramaturg: Alex Vermillion; Stage Manager: Kevin Zhu

Cast: Gregory Victor Georges; Daniel Liu; JJ McGlone; Julian Sanchez

Yale Cabaret
October 31-November 2, 2019

Yale Cabaret is dark next weekend, then returns November 14-16 with Rubberneck, proposed and created by Mattie McGarey, a theatrical interrogation of how “habitual movements shape our reality,” that brings “body language, symbolic gesture, and unspoken social cues to the forefront.”

Surviving with the Simpsons

Review of Mr. Burns, a post-electric play, Yale School of Drama

Post-disaster stories—often called ‘post-apocalyptic’—are fairly common these days. Some kind of global catastrophe—which may involve zombies, aliens, superheroes, angels, demons, mutants, environmental mismanagement, war, or what-have-you—destroys the world as we know it and we get to imagine what kind of world will follow. Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, a post-electric play, the first show of the Yale School of Drama’s 2019-20 season, varies the approach with interesting if not always intelligible results. It’s a play less about how humans endure in survivalist mode, and more about how the cultural reference points we may take for granted—like television and theater—will be affected. The play’s effect, in this busy production directed by Kat Yen, is at times funny, at times confusing, and finally beautiful, and its tone seems to be one of reflection with gestures at satire and suspense.

The phrase “post-electric” is key. Without electricity—which has been wiped out somehow and which causes nuclear power plants to fail with calamitous results—people can’t watch anything except each other. The play opens with a small group gathered around a makeshift hearth: a fire in a trash can. Sitting on mismatched chairs, including a sofa, Matt (Anthony Holiday), Maria (Ilia Isorelýs Paulino) and Jenny (Madeline Seidman) are reminiscing about a certain episode of Matt Groening’s celebrated cartoon phenomenon, The Simpsons (the episode that’s a take-off on the film Cape Fear) while Sam (Reed Northrup) patrols the perimeter with a gun. Eventually they are joined by Gibson (Dario Ladani Sanchez), a wanderer who, after being treated at first with fear and suspicion, reports on his travels and what he’s seen of devastated areas, not too far from the theater we’re in.

Jenny (Madeline Seidman), Matt IAnthony Holiday), Maria (Ilia Isorelýs Paulino), Sam (Reed Northrup) in Yale School of Drama’s production of Mr Burns by Anne Washburn, directed by Kat Yen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

What emerges is a vague sense of how the world is fairing after a major meltdown. Most of which we can easily imagine thanks to all those apocalyptic films we’ve seen. Judging by their speech, the group is twentysomething and maintain their relation to the recent past in two ways: by recalling The Simpsons episode as a common reference point—Gibson, who claims he never saw an entire episode of the show, manages some details as well and does a killer Marge impression—and by reading lists of ten names apiece, with ages provided. This rollcall of the most valued dead or missing serves as a kind of memorial. We have a sense of randomness, of survival by sheer chance.

The best aspect of the opening scene—the play is comprised of three scenes in two acts—is the engaging recall of the “Cape Fear episode” (audience members with no knowledge of The Simpsons may find this opaque but entertaining). The comedy of the dialogue doesn’t seem a denial of the direness of the situation but rather the kind of bond that residents of McLuhan’s “global village” would exercise. And that sentiment must sustain us through the other scene of Act 1.

The long second scene is where things get murkier. Now joined by Colleen (Ciara Monique) who acts as director and Quincy (Jessy Yates) who is playing a woman who wants to take a bath as only women in TV commercials can, the group has become a troupe. They enact Simpsons episodes—like “Heretic Homer”—with commercials included. Rival troupes are discussed with a distressed sense of how to improve what we would call the market share. The main avenue to a successful show seems to be not talent or inspiration but budget, for props and effects and to “buy lines.” Apparently, post-electric writers will be those who can recall the lines from shows with accuracy, lines which have a certain talismanic appeal to the audience and players alike.

All this information comes to us through dialogue that also includes a Simpsons scene featuring Homer (played by Matt) and two FBI Agents (played by Colleen and Maria), the bath commercial (which includes Gibson as “Loving Husband,” and comedic efforts at Foley effects), and a spirited dance number by the entire cast that presents an imaginative mix-up of bits of hits with inventive moves (choreography by Michael Raine). All the movement—and the singing, particularly by Paulino, Sanchez, and Yates—is a welcome relief from the backstage chatter that Washburn exploits at length. The scene ends with the kind of climax that seems more gratuitous than dramatic.

Mr Burns (John Evans Reese), background; Homer (Madeline Seidman), Bart (Ciara Monique), Marge (Anthony Holiday), foreground in Yale School of Drama production of Mr. Burns (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

After intermission we get the final scene—75 years into the future—where the descendants of the people we’ve already met, presumably, are staging a musical pageant. It’s Simpsons-themed, of course, and retains elements from the TV-recall of Scene 2. Sideshow Bob, the evil threat in the “Cape Fear episode,” has morphed into Mr. Burns (John Evans Reese), a dastardly villain who, on the show, is Homer’s boss and the owner of a nuclear power plant. The showdown, with swords drawn, plays like Captain Hook vs. his nemesis Peter Pan, here Bart (Monique), with both Reese and Monique excellent in their multilayered roles. The confrontation takes place (as does the climax of the “Cape Fear episode”) on a ship (cleverly designed by scenic designer Bridget Lindsay) after Bart’s hapless family—Marge (Holiday), Lisa (Northrup), Homer (Seidman), and little Maggie (a doll)—have been ruthlessly dispatched.

The songs, accompanied by Liam Bellman-Sharpe, composer, and Bel Ben Mamoun, music director, in gowns with skullcaps, playing large, intricate, makeshift instruments, are a pastiche as well, with an elevated score from Michael Friedman. The irony that TV should “evolve” into Broadway-esque ritual is funny and, depending on your sensibilities, inspiring. Paulino, garbed like a sideshow Lady Liberty, impresses with the range of her vocals and her statuesque bearing. The costume for Mr. Burns is an even more striking fantasia, while the possible antecedents for other costumes (all by Stephen Marks) make for interesting conjecture. What, we may wonder, are the source materials for shows at some future point near the end of our century?

The cast of Mr. Burns works the show’s material as a gifted ensemble should. Presented in the round at the Iseman Theater, the play keeps us involved even when it seems to indulge itself rather than enlighten. The prospect of playing a makeshift troupe suits this young cast and vice versa. To bring off so well a show with so many moving parts and such an amorphous sense of mise en scène is a feat, and the final act—which inspires both gravitas and glee—shows director Yen’s knowing grasp of how theater must often transcend or transform its material. All for the sake of some unnamed quality that may endure even longer than The Simpsons.

Mr. Burns, a post-electric play
By Anne Washburn
Score by Michael Friedman
Lyrics by Anne Washburn
Additional music by Liam Bellman-Sharpe
Directed by Kat Yen

Choreographer: Michael Raine; Music Director: Bel Ben Mamoun; Scenic Designer: Bridget Lindsay; Costume Designer: Stephen Marks; Lighting Designer: Riva Fairhall; Sound Designer: Daniela Hart; Projection Installation Designer: Erin Sullivan; Production Dramaturg: Patrick Denney; Technical Director: Matthew Lewis; Stage Manager: Amanda Luke

Cast: Anthony Holiday, Ciara Monique, Reed Northrup, Ilia Isorelýs Paulino, John Evans Reese, Dario Ladani Sanchez, Madeline Seidman, Jessy Yates

Musicians: Liam Bellman-Sharpe, Bel Ben Mamoun

Yale School of Drama
October 26-November 1, 2019

Riding the Gravy Train

Review of Red Speedo, Yale Cabaret

We’re all familiar with the notion that the driving force in any contest is winning, winning at any cost. We’re also familiar with the ethical notion that “it’s not about winning or losing but how you play the game.” The implications of those two outlooks float upon the reflective surface of Lucas Hnath’s Red Speedo, the fifth show of Yale Cabaret’s current season. Directed by Eli Pauley, a third-year actor at Yale School of Drama, and played by four students in the program, Red Speedo is an in-your-face, tour de force of contested strategies, provocation—as both defense and attack—pleas, bullying, flailing and railing, outright lies, and fights, both verbal and physical. There is the prospect of great success, of scandal, of disgrace, and even of death. And all in the insular world of championship swimming.

Ray (Adam Shaukat) in Yale Cabaret’s production of Lucas Hnath’s Red Speedo, October 24-26, 2019

The red Speedo of the title, and nothing else but a serpent tattoo and a vacant expression, is worn throughout the play by Ray (Adam Shaukat), a swimmer who has climbed the ranks to be in competition for a place on the Olympic team. It’s the day before the final tryout and his times have been good. His brother Peter (Patrick Ball), a lawyer who may be about to give up his day job to be Ray’s manager and agent, full time, is in talks with Speedo about making Ray the company’s new spokesperson. But there’s a snag. As the play opens, Peter is talking a mile a minute, hectoring Ray’s coach (Brandon E. Burton) into seeing the reason for not letting any governing body know about the cooler full of enhancement drugs Coach found in his office. The bad publicity for the club could affect Ray adversely.

And that’s only the first of many ethical problems in this fraught and taut play. And each character, as Ray says late in the play in a moment of clarity, is kinda good and kinda bad. That means we get jerked around a lot in how we respond to what is being said and why. Peter, for all his bullish lack of subtlety (vividly enacted by Ball), seems to have Ray’s best interests at heart. Until we realize how much he has riding on Ray’s success, and, indeed, how little Ray has other than a body that is treated as a prize animal, groomed to perform at its peak. And that involves substances that Ray’s former girlfriend Lydia (Nefesh Cordero Pino), a physical therapist who lost her license thanks to Peter, provided him once upon a time.

The stress of all this is made quite palpable in the Cabaret production. We can see the toll it takes on each character to be called on the tiles, so to speak, to make his or her case. Along the way we see Ray get manipulated by everyone. Cordero Pino makes Lydia seem sympathetic, someone who has gotten out of Ray’s charmed circle the hard way and wants to stay out, but her position is negotiable, we learn. Coach, in a wonderfully varied reading by Burton, can be a source of strength but he’s also desperate in his reliance on what Ray’s success means to him, not just financially but as a badge of achievement.

Eventually Ray learns, to his chagrin, that even his faith in his ability and in his drugs is misplaced. Shaukat renders Ray’s humanity best when he’s most beset by confusion and opposed views, which is often. Ray is not quite as bereft of interiority as we may at first think, and others seem to assume. He’s a cipher on his way to becoming conscious.

There’s a deep abyss at that heart of this play, a sense of how the drive to be the best can be so tragically empty but also how meaningless any effort becomes when it entails a betrayal of every trust and every standard of merit. The grippingly violent struggle between Ray and Peter at the end, choreographed with great realism by Burton, is staggering in its visceral brutality, and, it seems, necessary to the play’s central truth: winner-takes-all means destroying your opponent. To paraphrase Pyrrhus, “Another victory like that and we are ruined.”

Red Speedo
By Lucas Hnath
Directed by Eli Pauley

Producer: Will Gaines; Scenic Designer: Elsa GibsonBraden; Lighting Designer: Evan C. Anderson; Costume Designers: David Mitsch, Yunzhu Zeng; Sound Designer: Emily Duncan Wilson; Dramaturg: Callie Frosburgh; Technical Director: HaoEn Hu; Stage Manager: Julia Bates; Fight Director: Brandon E. Burton

Cast: Patrick Ball, Brandon E. Burton, Nefesh Cordero Pino, Adam Shaukat

Yale Cabaret
October 24-26, 2019

It Seems Society is to Blame

Review of American Son, TheaterWorks

A woman sits alone checking her cellphone in the waiting area of a Miami police station. She’s clearly upset. An officer finally appears and confirms that her missing son’s car has been involved in an incident, with no further information. The woman is black, the officer, a baby-faced newbie, is white. Her efforts to get some definite information—such as her son’s whereabouts—meet with patient, evasive feints and excuses. We can believe the officer simply doesn’t know or that he doesn’t want her to know. She should just wait for the officer in charge.

Scott Connor (J Anthony Crane), Kendra Ellis-Connor (Ami Brabson) in TheaterWorks’ production of American Son (photo by Lanny Nagler)

Who arrives first is her estranged husband, an FBI agent and white, whom—while the woman is away getting a drink of water—the officer mistakes for the awaited Lieutenant and so immediately reveals more than he told the woman and also his discomfort with the aggressive black woman. Contrived? Yes, and what’s more it makes for a fuzziness that the play—American Son by Christopher Demos-Brown, now playing at TheaterWorks, directed by Rob Ruggiero—wants to maintain as a strength. Instead of giving us the officer’s clearly marked preference for speaking to a white father rather than a black mother, we get a deeply dumb mistaken identity.

Despite that and other ham-fisted efforts to push its audience’s buttons, American Son does one thing well: it dramatizes, thanks to Ami Brabson’s performance as Kendra Ellis-Connor, a mother’s mounting frustration at not getting answers, her terror at her worst fears, and her educated contempt for the automatic racist assumptions of by-the-book Officer Larkin (John Ford-Dunker). The anxiety parents feel for teens launching into adult life in these highly violent times is rendered well, and, as we learn more and more about the son’s recent actions, the fear of what might befall a black youth in an expensive car feels like a fait accompli given the times we live in.

And yet Demos-Brown’s script tries hard to place this investigation of racial profiling and police malfeasance in a neutral area where mistakes happen, and all are to blame. It implies that the real fault lies with how this interracial couple failed their son.

Scott Connor (J Anthony Crane), Kendra Ellis-Connor (Ami Brabson) in American Son, TheaterWorks (photo by Lanny Nagler)

Kendra Ellis-Connor is a smart, articulate psychologist. Her profession seems to have been chosen so she can mouth Psych 101 assessments of the difficulties an 18-year-old is having because his white father left his black mother for a white woman. And yet she finds it impossible to speak to the plodding Officer Larkin with anything less then barely suppressed hysteria, or, when asked to describe her son, she veers from rejection of his presumed tats, earrings and gold teeth, to his fondness for Emily Dickinson and “Puff the Magic Dragon.” (Demos-Brown’s idea of how to cut tension is to employ bathos. It’s his go-to tone more than once.)

The father, Scott Connor (J Anthony Crane), not only spells “privileged white” with his look and every word and move (Crane is very well-cast and looks the part), he’s very manly in his plans for his son’s future and in his testosterone-fueled rage at, first, that plodding officer, and, second, the lieutenant on the case, Stokes (Michael Genet), who is black. The tension in the fight scene, no matter how well enacted, feels like an imposition. Much of the escalation in anger has to do with a video clip on a smartphone that we can’t see and can barely hear. Suffice to say, it adds a sense of emergency.

Scott Connor (J Anthony Crane), Officer Paul Larkin (John Ford-Dunker) in American Son, TheaterWorks (photo by Lanny Nagler)

The earlier discussions between Scott and Kendra about their son, Jamal (including a reminiscence about how they disagreed about naming him!), pile up into a sketch of the only black kid at an elite school where he’s forced to be “the face of the race”; he resents his father’s desertion and, in retaliation, has begun to act “ghetto,” including a bumper-sticker on the Lexus his dad bought him that might be deemed incendiary to law officers. He’s a cipher at the center of all this.

As Officer Larkin, Ford-Dunker seems as doughy as the Dunkins he likes to imbibe. One suspects, from the first scene, that there might be a version of this play in which Officer Larkin can be perceived as hostile to or at least uncomfortable with black women, but director Ruggiero seems to steer this version of the play so that the officers are seen as exemplars of dogged patience rather than anything more abrasive. Even Stokes, who explodes at Scott’s provocations, maintains his professionalism, mostly. As Stokes, Genet is good with the man-to-man tone in his effort to calm Connor down, which only infuriates the unruly agent more, and his interactions with Brabson, in a bit of who can out-black whom, have the impatient energy of a decent man tired of being seen as a bad guy.

Kendra Ellis-Connor (Ami Brabson), Lieutenant John Stokes (Michael Genet) in American Son, TheaterWorks (photo by Lanny Nagler)

The end of all this—including an unlikely interlude in which Kendra asks Scott why he spoke to her when they first met—is a foregone conclusion. Still, Demos-Brown seems to pride himself on creating the most implausible, but just possible, scenario as the gotcha moment his play aims toward.

Which may invite one to reflect whether the outrageous injustices and bad choices that occur in real life become anything more than a basis for melodrama when invoked through contrived situations and ill-conceived characters. When awful things happen in life, survivors often remark “it felt like a movie” to underscore its seeming unreality. Rarely, if ever, does one say, if felt like a contrived one-act, but that’s what Demos-Brown provides, turning national tragedies into topical theater.

American Son
By Christopher Demos-Brown
Directed by Rob Ruggiero

Set Design: Brian Prather; Costume Design: Herin Kaputkin; Lighting Design: Matthew Richards; Sound Design: Frederick Kennedy; Fight Director: Michael Rossmy; Production Manager: Bridget Sullivan; Stage Manager: Kate J. Cudworth

Cast: Ami Brabson, J Anthony Crane, John Ford Dunker, Michael Genet

TheaterWorks
October 18-November 23, 2019

New Haven Theater Company Advances on "Retreat from Moscow"

Preview of The Retreat from Moscow, New Haven Theater Company

Edward, a historian, opens the play reading a passage from a soldier’s journal about taking part in Napoleon’s famed retreat from Moscow, and is otherwise engaged in crossword puzzles. Alice, at work on an anthology of love poems, is apt to quote poetry at her family. Jamie, thirty-two, has to drive down from London to be present as his parents celebrate thirty-three years of togetherness. Of course something will go wrong.

William Nicholson’s The Retreat from Moscow has been on New Haven Theater Company’s Margaret Mann’s mind since she played Alice in a production of the play in Oregon in 2009. The play, which first opened in 1999, was seen on Broadway in 2003 with a dream cast of Eileen Atkins, John Lithgow, and Ben Chaplin. Mann thought to pitch it to the Company five years ago but wasn’t then ready to direct it. Now she is, aided by Co-Director John Watson, who she credited with “all the technical stuff that I don’t do”; the duo directed the searching comedy Love Song at NHTC last season. The Retreat from Moscow starts a week from today with a preview on October 31 (“pay what you like” at the door), then shows on November 1 and 2, and again the following week, November 7-9.

When giving an interview while in the Oregon production with the actor playing Edward, Mann was amused to find that she and her colleague both thought their respective character the main figure. “Every character could say the play is about them,” Mann realized, and says “the play is about what happens when communication stops.” Which may be a way of saying that, no matter how familiar family members are with one another, there’s always the possibility of discovering something new. That “something new” may be a change for the better for one, but also an affront or a disaster for another.

Co-Directors Margaret Mann and John Watson

Mann likened directing the play—which features NHTC real-life couple Susan and George Kulp as Alice and Edward—to “choreography,” keeping the three characters in play so that none gets slighted. The Kulps, who played a quirky couple in Love Song last fall, here play an intellectual couple who, after many years of settled life, have to look at each other differently. Susan acted with Mann in Marjorie Prime, a futuristic dysfunctional four-character family drama at NHTC last winter, while George directed NHTC’s energetic production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest last spring. Maybe this time the hard-working couple will be getting into a bit of Liz and Dick territory?

Not to worry. The couple in this play—unlike Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which famously starred real-life couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Mike Nichol’s Oscar-nominated film—is British. That means that things will be drier, though no less acerbic, perhaps. Nicholson, best known for Shadowlands, his play about late romance in the life of author C. S. Lewis, based The Retreat from Moscow on his parents’ marriage, which means that Jaime’s coping mechanisms could be key to what the playwright is getting at.

Kiel Stango (Jamie), George Kulp (Edward), Susan Kulp (Alice) in William Nicholson’s The Retreat from Moscow

Played by Kiel Stango, an art instructor not an NHTC member and a local actor who has worked with Square One, Jamie is caught-up in the altering status quo. His efforts to be supportive to each parent should, Mann said, make him sympathetic. Many in the audience will know what it’s like to be a grown offspring looking on at what happens as parents, aged into what Mann called “the tone deafness of long marriage,” try to cope with change. Jamie’s parents, Mann said, are apt to treat their son, an only child, as “a therapist.” But Mann believes the play strikes “a delicate balance” in not tipping its hand toward one character or another.

The Retreat from Moscow is “beautifully written,” Mann said, and that’s its “main attraction.” With lines of poetry set against metaphors of military disaster, the imagery is apt to be dramatic. For Mann, the play is “about being human” and, to find out more, she said, “you have to see the play.”

To do that, get tickets and more info here.

The Retreat from Moscow
By William Nicholson
Directed by Margaret Mann and John Watson
October 31-November 2; November 7-9, 2019
New Haven Theater Company

Love American Style

Review of On the Grounds of Belonging, Long Wharf Theatre

Maybe love is always dangerous. It risks exposure, it requires commitment—often life-changing—and it alters, sometimes subtly, sometimes outrageously, the status quo. But when the two lovers are men—one white, one black—in 1950s’ Houston, Texas, love comes with heavy threats.

Ricardo Pérez González’s On the Grounds of Belonging, in its world premiere at Long Wharf Theatre through November 3, directed with a great sense of space and energy and intimacy by David Mendizábal, is a rare achievement in its even-handed treatment of same-sex love and interracial love in a time when both were illegal in the U.S. and, worse, could provoke the kind of vicious hatred that has become highly visible in the twenty-first century. The play registers tellingly the tonality of the Jim Crow era without too much anachronism. It is something of a period play, but fired by the conviction of our own moment. And that makes for a vital evening of theater.

Russell MOntgomery (Calvin Leon Smith), Tom Ashton (Jeremiah Clapp) in Long Wharf Theatre’s production of On the Grounds of Belonging (photo T. Charles Erickson)

The opening sets the tone. We meet two regulars of the Red Room, a black gay bar: Russell Montgomery (Calvin Leon Smith) a bookish type often the object of the lust of Henry Stanfield (Blake Anthony Morris), a player with a florid manner. As they’re hanging out after a set by Tanya Starr (Tracey Conyer Lee), the kind of diva forever an inspiration to drag acts, with Hugh Williams (Thomas Silcott), a wonderfully canny onlooker, on the bar, a white woman comes to the door unexpectedly. Turns out the woman—to whom everyone present is obsequiously deferential at once—is Tom Aston (Jeremiah Clapp) in drag. He was set to perform at the Gold Room, the white gay bar across the street, but wants to hideout until a raid in progress there blows over.

Russell Montgomery (Calvin Leon Smith), On the Grounds of Belonging, Long Wharf Theatre (photo T. Charles Erickson)

In that first scene, Pérez González demonstrates a great feel for repartee among familiars and among the same when someone new—and socially different—arrives. The scene is engaging on several levels and Tom’s efforts to flirt with Russell are free of camp as they ratchet up the heat between them. We’re hooked on this budding romance, one that’s abetted by Hugh, but which must be concealed from Henry who, though he only trifles with Russell, would be affronted by his friend having an interracial affair. As Russell, Calvin Leon Smith displays a thoughtful intensity that makes his character an instant focus. This is his story, as we see his love for Tom lead him into new terrain.

Mooney Fitzpatrick (Craig Bockhorn), On the Grounds of Belonging, Long Wharf Theatre (photo T. Charles Erickson)

The dramatic stakes are further inflated by Mooney Fitzpatrick (Craig Bockhorn), owner of both bars and a character who is truly singular: a racist Southern gay man. The portrayal of this figure is a good indication of the quality of the writing and acting here. Mooney could be a one-dimensional bully or simply a foil, instead he has sympathetic moments and, like Hugh, a knowing sense of the mores of the area. He makes clear that, while gay bars may be tolerated, with occasional raids and beatings, interracial amours will bring on a lynching. And the way he sucks the air out of the room, treating all blacks as lackeys, lets us know where and when we are.

Hugh Williams (Thomas Silcott), On the Grounds of Belonging, Long Wharf Theatre (photo T. Charles Erickson)

A standout scene occurs late in the play when Hugh, dallying with a baseball bat, finally confronts Mooney in terms that make no bones about their enmity. It’s a satisfying rendering of how longstanding grievance can inspire succinct confrontation. As Tanya, Tracey Conyer Scott enjoys a moment of assertion as well, a key scene that shows how the indignities we see her face find their outlet in a command of others. Scott’s singing is a great plus as well, especially in a number that helps cut tension as the play transitions from lighter to darker.

Tanya Starr (Tracey Conyer Lee), Henry Stanfield (Blake Anthony Morris), On the Grounds of Belonging, Long Wharf Theatre (photo T. Charles Erickson)

The main set is a comfortable if simple bar with a leafy walkway above. There Tom and Russell have a touching moment of love set against fears of where their romance is taking them. The overtones of other “star-crossed” loves remain in play though without necessarily tending to tragedy. A scene of violence midway through, around a bed that served as the site of Russell and Tom’s first coupling, nicely juxtaposes the two sides of physical interaction—loving and fighting. The conclusion of that scene sets up a plot device that may cause a feeling of being a bit played, in the end. But then again, it’s not the end. Pérez González has said On the Grounds of Belonging is the first installment of a trilogy. Here’s hoping Long Wharf will bring us the next part when it’s ready.

The 2019-20 season finds new Artistic Director Jacob G. Padrón putting his mark on Long Wharf, an enduring theater that began in the mid-1960s (not too long after the period of On the Grounds of Belonging) with its eye on (in Board Chair Laura Pappano’s words) a “social-justice-activism-meets-art-to-spur-conversation vibe.” The breath of new life in the theater was evident on opening night, boding well for the transformation Padrón speaks of in the show’s program, with a season “highlighting an inclusive culture in all its complexities.” The season is off to an inspiring start.

On the Grounds of Belonging
By Ricardo Pérez González
Directed by David Mendizábal

Set Design: Wilson Chin; Costume Design: Ntokozo Fuzunina Kunene; Lighting Design: Cha See; Composition & Sound Design: Mauricio Escamilla; Fight & Intimacy Director: Unkledave’s Fight-House; Production Stage Manager: Bianca A. Hooi; Assistant Stage Manager: Amy Patricia Stern

Cast: Craig Buckhorn, Jeremiah Clapp, Tracey Conyer Lee, Blake Anthony Morris, Thomas Silcott, Calvin Leon Smith

Long Wharf Theatre
October 9-November 3, 2019

The Harm in Surviving

Review of How to Relearn Yourself, Yale Cabaret

Written by Doireann Mac Mahon, a third-year acting student at the Yale School of Drama, How to Relearn Yourself addresses the issue of sexual assault in social settings, and its existential impact on the victim. Like Anna Ziegler’s Actually, Mac Mahon’s play is mostly concerned with the aftermath of a sexual violation that occurs between two college freshmen, a male and a female. But unlike Actually, which puts its emphasis on the psychology of two students who date and move toward sex which takes place after the woman has changed her mind (and the way the school handles the complaint), in Mac Mahon’s play rape is taking advantage of someone unable to consent or refuse. Mac Mahon presents the post-event state of mind of The Girl (played by Mac Mahon) as a traumatic questioning of everything she knows or thought she knew.

The Girl (Doireann Mac Mahon), How to Relearn Yourself, Yale Cabaret, October 10-12, 2019 (Photos by Emily Duncan Wilson)

How to Relearn Yourself is less about the culture of rape and the way teens comport themselves—though it does register some of the surrounding attitudes—and more about violation as a psychic affront. The play is gripping because its central character is so clearly in the grip of emotions that have no public or social outlet—it’s their privacy that makes them real. They belong to her alone.

Directed by Maeli Goren, a second-year director whose previous work at the Cab was the lively children’s mystery The Whale in the Hudson last season, the action takes place in a kind of isolation booth of white gauze that seems to glow from within (set and lighting by Stephanie Bahniuk). The way the audience is placed around the space makes us look a bit like voyeurs, a bit like a panel of judges. Inside there’s a couch, liberally strewn with articles of clothing. There’s also a coffee table. Two roommates, Squirrel (Leyla Levi) and The Girl, share a small flat where, Squirrel tells us, they aren’t too particular about housekeeping. They start out as two friends who try hard to share each other’s tastes and outlooks—and eventually that means going to parties together as backup, and possibly fixing each other up. It’s Squirrel’s idea that The Girl should go on a blind date with good-looking Dragon (Edwin Joseph).

Squirrel (Leyla Levi), The Girl (Doireann Mac Mahon), Dragon (Edwin Joseph) in How to Relearn Yourself, Yale Cabaret, October 10-12, 2019

We get to watch some version of this date, and by this point there has come into the proceedings a voice over, O (Maëlle Puechoultres), who poses questions like an investigator, on one hand, or, on the other, a kind of superego in loco parentis who might be a conscience of sorts. It’s a given that, whenever something untoward happens—particularly among the young—there is no end of second-guessing advice from the more experienced. O seems to stand for an external viewpoint, introjected to some extent, by which the actants are supposed to judge themselves.

For Dragon there’s so little cause for judgment. The blind date, he thinks, went well. What we see is that he’s rather callously full of himself but not in a threatening way. He thinks it’s becoming to talk about “just taking” something if you want it, and he wants to paint The Girl’s portrait, and he’s an up-and-comer, and lots of other bravado. Joseph plays him as obtuse but outgoing. The Girl’s reactions—and Mac Mahon is skilled at minor facial flurries that say so much—show us that he’s not going over nearly so well as he thinks. The Girl tells Squirrel that she really doesn’t want to see him again; he made her uncomfortable. That view seems to count for nothing to her friend.

Next thing we know there’s a party at Dragon’s place and The Girl has to go because—Squirrel says—there’s a guy there she’s interested in and she needs support, though it’s clear she’s also convinced that The Girl should give Dragon another chance. Then there’s lots of alcohol shots and loud music and dancing on couches until, apparently, The Girl passes out. Next thing she knows, she’s in a car and there’s blood, and one version of herself is “out of body” and out of the car, looking on at her powerless body. Here the particulars of what is actually happening get vague—and that’s the point. No one really knows, with unclouded certainty, and yet The Girl’s body does and what it tells her freaks her out.

The Girl (Doireann Mac Mahon), Dragon (Edwin Joseph), Squirrel (Leyla Levi) in How to Relearn Yourself, Yale Cabaret, October 10-12, 2019

Rather than move into the she said/he said terrain of Actually, Mac Mahon moves us into the psyche of The Girl where much is amiss. Squirrel can see—and report to O—that The Girl has changed: things she used to hate to do—like exercise—she now does, and things she used to do—like drink—she now hates. Their friendship suffers and Squirrel is apt to find The Girl seeking solace squirreled up behind the fridge rather than in activities they might share. Meanwhile, Dragon gets on with his life, not sure at all what became of Squirrel and her friend and not in the least concerned.

For The Girl, however, everything has changed, changed utterly. Perhaps because she’s Irish, her effort to present her inner state to Squirrel entertains questions about the reality of Jesus and of the afterlife. There’s even a segment in which fetuses are likened to parasites using the mother’s body as a host. The point is that The Girl is trying to express a state of extreme alienation toward her own physical being, but she’s also relearning her own moral compass. And what it comes down to—with considerable dramatic force—is that good and bad are entirely different, and thus Dragon can’t be both, and, what’s more, surviving is a terrible way to live.

The force of these ideas come from The Girl’s almost Beckettian journey through who or what she is when what she thought she was no longer suffices. Her view and her friend’s diverge so essentially that they truly are alternate realities. In Squirrel’s, Dragon is, if not totally good, at least harmless. In The Girl’s, he’s mean and, to make him even more nasty, conceals it quite well.

Lurking here, unstated but well-staged, is the nagging sense of what we might call intuition, as a capacity to know something simply because we know it. The Girl knows that what she knows isn’t something she can prove—and the burden of that knowledge, among other things, is not to go crazy from it (as for instance, the knowledge that someone “may smile and smile and be a villain”).

Relearning, in this context, is getting on with being who you have to be, though friends and even you to yourself seem like strangers. The implications of the play—as a reflection, for instance, on a certain U.S. Supreme Court justice—suggest that something is rotten in the state, indeed.

How to Relearn Yourself
Written and Proposed by Doireann Mac Mahon
Directed by Maeli Goren

Producers: Samanta Yunuen Cubias, Markie Gray; Scenic & Lighting Designer: Stephanie Bahniuk; Costume Designer: April M. Hickman; Sound Designer: Noel Nichols; Dramaturg: Sophie Greenspan; Associate Director & Choreographer: Eli Pauley; Technical Director: Yaro Yarashevich; Stage Manager: Bekah Brown

Cast: Edwin Joseph, Leyla Levi, Doireann Mac Mahon, Maëlle Puechoultres

Yale Cabaret
October 10-12, 2019

Yale Cabaret is dark this week but returns October 23-26 with Red Speedo, Lucas Hnath’s well-received drama about competitive swimmers, proposed by Patrick Ball, Eli Pauley, and Adam Shaukat, and directed by Pauley.

Little Shop of Pleasures

Review of Little Shop of Horrors, ACT of Connecticut

Halloween comes every year. And it seems like barely a year passes without Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s Little Shop of Horrors playing somewhere in Connecticut, a theater perennial. And why not? The show is tuneful, kooky, creepy, and full of fun nostalgia for the ‘60s. The 1960 original was a Roger Corman quickie flick—and intentionally funny, unusual for Corman—with Jack Nicholson in a small part as an eager dental patient. The musical retains much the same plot and makes the prospect of a man-eating plant an excuse for macabre laughs, songs silly and infectious, and what at first appears to be a rags-to-riches, poor orphan boy makes good and gets the girl story. And that’s part of the attraction of the show: the way it all goes wrong!

Audrey II, Seymour (Robb Sapp), Audrey (Laura Woyasz) in ACT’s production of Little Shop of Horrors

Seymour Krelborn (Robb Sapp) seems to be your typical sad sack nebbish, working in a flower shop that lacks customers while pining for his colleague, Audrey (Laura Woyasz—last seen at ACT in Working), who often shows up for work bearing the marks of her boyfriend’s physical abuse. That element of the show might seem less than funny, but it plays into the characterization of her boyfriend, Orin, a sadistic dentist. The joke draws on childhood (and maybe even adult) fears of visiting the dentist and makes such phobia reasonable. Orin, as enacted with scene-stealing glee by ACT Artistic Director Daniel C. Levine, is creepy and instantly unsettling. Good, given the fate that will befall him.

Chiffon (Kadrea Dawkins), Crystal (Ashley Alexandra Seldon), Orin (Daniel C. Levine), Ronnette (Rachelle Legrand)

Granted, the fate of these characters—including the shop’s boss Mr. Mushnik, ably played with a Gleason-like volume by William Thomas Evans—isn’t pleasant, but that’s also a key aspect of what makes the show fun. Ashman knows that, when watching the Creature Features of the commercial television era, we were often rooting for the monster. Here, the monster begins as a cute little plant Seymour has nurtured, its origins somewhat obscure. It’s such an anomaly, it soon draws sightseers and even some well-heeled customers to the shop. It’s a hit and Seymour gains notoriety as the plant’s handler. Dubbed Audrey II, the plant speaks—at least it does to Seymour—and its voice, provided by Kent Overshown, is richly cartoonish. Even when it’s demanding more and more blood—its necessary nutrient—and growing larger and larger, the plant seems a likeable if fractious pet. And yet, a blood-sucking plant with a mind of its own is not something you want to have to keep under wraps.

The show, with its seedy Skid Row set on a spinning stage that shows both the atmospheric outside and the changeable inside of the shop, has great tech—set by Ryan Howell, lighting by Jack Mehler, Sound by John Salutz and costumes by Ryan Park (my tip of the hat for the poster of Frankenstein vs. the Wolfman). The band kicks loud but doesn’t overwhelm the singers.

Chiffon (Kadrea Dawkins), Audrey (Laura Woyasz), Crystal (Ashley Alexandra Seldon), Ronnette (Rachelle Legrand), second row

The original musical never went to Broadway and ACT’s revival retains all the charm of quality Off-Broadway shows: it’s incredibly intimate, with the actors able to look much of the audience right in the eyes—Seymour even hands a flower to a lady to hold for him till needed. The chorus of backup girls—think The Supremes or Dream Girls, or (the girls’ names) The Chiffons (Kadrea Dawkins), The Ronnettes (Rachelle Legrand), The Crystals (Ashley Alexandra Seldon)—work the crowd as well, acting as the knowing narrators of this cautionary tale (the moral: “don’t feed the plants!”). And Levine, who keeps coming back as one creep after another, feeds off the audience’s energy the way Audrey II feeds off Seymour’s plasma.

Audrey II, Seymour (Robb Sapp), Audrey (Laura Woyasz)

As our unlucky lovers Seymour and Audrey, Robb Sapp and Laura Woyasz are attractive, romantic, and give off the aura of many a sitcom couple. We might almost believe they’ll work it out and make this a little shop of amours. And that’s what keeps viewers engaged, the way director Sparks capitalizes on the play’s varied tone—from romance to horror to comedy, or all at once. There’s even a classic bit of male bonding—“Mushnik and Son”—that comes off as if the start of a story about earning respect and finding one’s place in life. In fact, the show’s real moral might be said to show how outlandish success must generally own a few skeletons in the closet—or corpses in the vegetal maw. If you’ve already seen the show, it’s worth a drive out to Ridgefield to see again. And if you haven’t—don’t miss this chance to see this oft-produced show in such a wonderful theater. ACT has a great space where every seat has good sightlines.

A final word about puppeteer Thomas Bergamo. Audrey II is no electronic gizmo or special effect. He’s animated by Bergamo with a great sense of living presence and personality. Get ready, this invading vegetation is going places. Today Ridgefield, tomorrow—the world!

Little Shop of Horrors
Book and Lyrics by Howard Ashman
Music by Alan Menken
Based on the film by Roger Corman, Screenplay by Charles Griffith
Directed and Choreographed by Jason A. Sparks

Music Supervisor: Bryan Perri; Music Director: P. Jason Yarcho; Scenic Designer: Ryan Howell; Lighting Designer: Jack Mehler; Costume Designer: Ryan Park; Sound Designer: John Salutz; Wig and Hair Designer: Tommy Kurzman; Prop Master: Abigail Bueti; Puppeteer: Thomas Bergamo; Production Manager: Annie Jacobs; Production Stage Manager: Theresa S. Carroll

Band: P. Jason Yarcho, conductor/piano; Isaac Hayward, conductor/piano (10/31-11/3); Tom Cuffari, keyboards; Jeff Carlson, electric & acoustic guitars; Arnold Gottlieb, electric bass; Dennis Arcano, drums & percussion

Cast: Kadrea Dawkins, William Thomas Evans, Rachelle Legrand, Daniel C. Levine, Jaclyn Mercer, Kent Overshown, Robb Sapp, Ashley Alexandra Seldon, Ian Shain, Laura Woyasz

 ACT of Connecticut
October 3-November 3, 2019

Taken to Tusk: Westport's Clunky Mlima's Tale

Review of Mlima’s Tale, Westport Country Playhouse

The best thing to say about Lynn Nottage’s Mlima’s Tale, at Westport Country Playhouse through October 19 directed by Mark Lamos, is that it’s well intentioned. A polemic against the cruel and devastating slaughter of elephants in order to harvest their tusks for the ivory trade, the play is less a satisfying night of theater than a protracted glimpse behind the scenes in the illegal market for ivory. The play is based on an article, “The Ivory Highway” by Damon Tabor, and the show feels like a dogged effort to amplify nonfiction with theatrical touches, most of which lack any particular bite—whether of satire or sentiment.

Mlima (Jermaine Rowe) in Westport Country Playhouse’s production of Mlima’s Tale, directed by Mark Lamos (Photos by Carol Rosegg)

The gripping and memorable opening introduces us to the elephant, Mlima, an “old tusker” (indicating the age and size of his tusks) played with riveting presence by Jermaine Rowe, who speaks of his time-won integration into his environment, one that used to be free of “the acrid stench of men.” Now, though he lives on a protected reserve, he is a prime target for poachers. The brutal death of Mlima ends the first scene and is the last dramatic event to occur in this 90 minute display of short scenes, all comprised of dialogues between two characters, all complicit in the illegal trade for poor Mlima’s much valued tusks.

Most of the scenes play like dialogues of exposition in B-movies, an association that comes to mind because the three actors—Adit Dileep, Jennean Farmer, and Carl Hendrick Louis—affect a variety of accents that are at times more attention-drawing than smoothly natural. Rather than making the scenes feel more real, the effect is to make us aware of how staged it all is, an effect that might be used to create a certain satiric point—about how differences (of ethnicity, nationality, class status) are rather secondary to shared greed, perhaps—but that doesn’t seem the intention. In any case, the dialogue, as delivered, does little to open to us the worlds these people—a poacher, a game warden, a government official, a ship captain, a smuggler, a collector of objets d’art, and a master ivory carver, among others—actually inhabit. We may reflect on Hannah Arendt’s oft-cited line about the “banality of evil,” but scene after scene making the same point—for lack of any other—is dull indeed. And “evil” as such is remote as well. What we see instead is the ingenuity by which humans are able to capitalize on whatever or whomever invites exploitation while lacking in sufficient protection.

Mlima (Jermaine Rowe), Poacher (Jennean Farmer), Official (Carl Hendrick Louis)

The further we get from the act of poaching that resulted in Mlima’s death, the more static the scenes become. Early on, the dialogue between the poacher (Farmer) and a corrupt official (Louis) might create the sense that we’re going to see how the killing of Mlima plays out within Kenya. But that would require staying with one or another set of characters. Instead, Nottage’s conceit is—as Mark Lamos points out in his introductory notes “From the Artistic Director”—to employ Arthur Schnitzler’s technique, in La Ronde, of presenting a series of scenes in which a character introduced in one scene—here, the poacher, for instance—is present in the next scene with a new character, who then has a scene with a new character, who then is in the subsequent scene, and so on. Throughout, Mlima appears as a baleful presence who, as a scene ends, walks up to the newly introduced character and smears them with the white paint which adorns his own body.

A customs officer (Carl Hendrick Louis), a ship captain (Adit Dileep), seated; Mlima (Jermaine Rowe), standing

The set is mainly decorated by Yana Birykova’s projections, which include graphic photos of violence enacted upon an elephant carcass as well as sayings and titles that create a kind of folkloric subtext to the events, as if the drama were going to become a morality tale of sorts. Not all of the text can be seen from all seats, but it doesn’t matter much. Indeed, much of the tech is simply window-dressing, at times—as in a photo of a shop full of Chinese lanterns—distractions more than evocations.

Arguably, the play might do more than an article in a magazine can to get a rise of moral indignation from an audience. And yet the detachment we feel toward these characters only underlines how—once the breath has left Mlima’s body—what becomes of his tusks is immaterial, even if their material—ivory—is the whole point of their market interest. The park warden (Dileep) vows to keep the tusks in Kenya to honor Mlima but that is easier said than done. After that, it’s merely a case of what interest we find in how the tusks get to the carver and then to a collector. Once upon a time, such a play might’ve ended with the ivory gracing the keyboard of a piano upon which a musical genius attained to glory, but we can be said to be safely past those days.

The tragedy of the fate of such great elephants as Mlima is real. Mlima’s Tale, however, feels rather less than tragic. It’s depressing and infuriating, made more so by this uninspiring production.

Mlima’s Tale
By Lynn Nottage
Directed by Mark Lamos

Scenic Design: Claire DeLiso; Costume Design: Fabian Fidel Aguilar; Lighting Design: Isabella Byrd; Composer: Michael Keck; Projection: Yana Birykova; Choreographer: Jeffrey Page; Fight Director/Intimacy Coach: Michael Rossmy; Props Supervisor: Samantha Shoffner; Dialect Coach: Julie Foh; Dramaturg: Liam Lonegan; Production Stage Manager: Chris De Camillis

Cast: Adit Dileep, Jennean Farmer, Carl Hendrick Louis, Jermaine Rowe

Westport Country Playhouse
October 1-19, 2019

Billy Idol: Goodspeed Launches Billy Elliot Run

Review of Billy Elliot, Goodspeed Musicals

The London original of the long-running success Billy Elliot, the Musical closed in 2016, having opened 11 years previous. The show clearly has audience appeal, based largely on the prospect of seeing youngsters dance in a variety of styles, including ballet and tap and boogie. It’s a show that celebrates the urge to self-expression that can lead to a life chasing the footlights, reminding audiences how uplifting—even to onlookers—the discovery of talent can be.

The film directed by Stephen Daldrey, from Lee Hall’s script, from which the musical derives, arrived in 2000 and looked back at the hard-fought and losing struggle by the UK’s National Union of Miners to prevent mine-closings in their doomed industry by staging a massive strike in 1985-86. The effort, which occasioned considerable sacrifice and conflict among the miners, was defeated by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in what became an important victory in the ongoing privatization that dismantled the so-called Welfare State. Billy Elliot, The Musical gives Sir Elton John, Music, the opportunity to fashion a working-class-hero vehicle with Lee Hall’s Book and Lyrics. Certainly one of the effects of the musical is that it’s given thousands of child actors opportunity to take to the stage in dance roles that are both demanding and rewarding.

Billy Elliot (Liam Vincent Hutt) with the cast of Goodspeed Musicals’ Billy Elliot The Musical, now playing at The Goodspeed through November 24. Photo by Diane Sobolewski.

At Goodspeed in East Haddam, directed by Gabriel Barre, with choreography by Marc Kimmelman and musical direction by Michael O’Flaherty, Billy Elliot, the Musical makes the most of its talented young cast, and the many opportunities for the adult cast to move in the aisles, sometimes as riot police opposing strikers, give the show a rowdy energy. Which helps because the songs don’t exactly stick in one’s mind and the show’s dramatic arc feels like something you’ve already seen, even if you missed the Oscar-nominated film. And yet there are pleasures to be found.

Mrs. Wilkinson (Michelle Aravena), Billy Elliot (Liam Vincent Hutt) with the cast of Goodspeed Musicals’ Billy Elliot The Musical. Photo by Diane Sobolewski

A young lad in a mining family minus recently deceased Mum, Billy (Liam Vincent Hutt or Taven Blanke), discovers a talent for ballet he didn’t know he had, encouraged by Mrs. Wilkinson (Michelle Aravena), a wonderfully committed teacher who sees in him a vicarious satisfaction of her own defeated dreams; working-class family struggling (even more than usual because they’re on strike) is not sympathetic to the boy’s means of self-expression, or probably artistic expression in general (Billy takes up dance lessons when he’s supposed to be going to boxing lessons). The subtext is that any boy who wants to dance rather than box must be gay—greatly not ok with this lot. But he’s not—ostensibly. Billy does have a friend, Michael (Jon Martens), complete with Elton John glasses, who fancies him, as does Mrs. Wilkinson’s daughter, Debbie (Erica Parks). Eventually there’s a row when Mrs. W. visits Billy’s home to take the boy to an audition at the Royal Dance Academy and the cat is out of the bag, about ballet. In the second act, after a Christmas pageant in which the miners and their families mock Thatcher in effigy, a touching moment between Dad (Sean Hayden) and son precedes a moment when Dad views Billy in the full flight of dance. Dad eats crow and visits Mrs. W. and even, after the strapped miners all chip in to pay for the trip, accompanies Billy to the audition. But will the boy’s dream come true? By that point, he’s not a weird outsider to his native community but rather a symbol of its hopes. It’s the kind of story a rock star might identify with, as Billy aspires to leave one field of exploited labor (mining) for another (theater). So it goes.

Michael (Jon Martens) and Billy (Liam Vincent Hutt) in Goodspeed Musicals’ Billy Elliot The Musical. Photo by Diane Sobolewski.

Onstage, there’s the somewhat interesting juxtaposition of flashes of glam aesthetic (mostly via Michael, and Jon Martens is a wonderfully engaging young show-person) against a nicely done “angry young man” kitchen-sink set. The best stuff comes mostly in Act 1: “Shine” may be a song with utterly banal lyrics, but it’s fun to see a troupe of game girls (Erica Parks, Margot Anderson-Song, Amy Button, Tess Santarsiero, Camiel Warren-Taylor) practice ballet only to be shown up by Billy; “Grandma’s Song,” very engagingly sung by Barbara Marineau as Billy’s slightly dotty grandma, recalling her days of drinking and dancing as breaks from domestic abuse (the song inspires hopes for more such bits of characterization to come, but they mostly don’t); “Expressing Yourself” led by Michael (whose story might be rather more interesting than Billy’s) with flashy dress-up; “Solidarity” which gets the cops and the miners into it while the ballet girls and Billy are trying to make art in the midst of chaos; finally, Billy’s “Angry Dance,” which shows him expressing himself, indeed, after getting squelched by his dad.

Grandma (Barbara Marineau) reminisces with Billy (Liam Vincent Hutt) in Goodspeed Musicals’ Billy Elliot The Musical. Photo by Diane Sobolewsk

The best bits in Act 2: Sean Hayden’s rendering of “Deep into the Ground,” which becomes an elegy for his dead wife; “Dream Ballet” in which Billy and his older self (Nick Silverio) do a very graceful pas de deux to “Swan Lake,” and Billy’s “Electricity” in which he tries to explain how he feels when he dances. The lyrics, again, are rather bland, but Liam Vincent Hutt does convince us that Billy has transcendent talent. The fearsome puppet of Thatcher at the Act’s opening didn’t seem to spark much mirth the night I saw the show, perhaps because even more vile politicians swarm upon us today, and yet it’s nice to know that the show’s denigration of “the Iron Lady” continues unabated.

“Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher!” The cast of Goodspeed Musicals’ Billy Elliot The Musical. Photo by Diane Sobolewski.

The emotional core of the show, though, isn’t so much the us vs. them of the miners trying to unite—either in striking or in backing Billy—or even in Billy finding himself as a talent, but rather in Dad seeing that his son has something special and taking that as a badge of pride rather than as an affront. To make sure that aspect of the show is as weepy as possible, there’s Dead Mum (Rachel Rhodes-Devey) on hand to provide loving, albeit ghostly, support, with a letter to her son upon his eighteenth birthday that Billy has read prematurely and takes as his own badge of emotional security.

There’s a certain earnestness about the value of childhood dreams, talent, and the belief of those who sacrifice for another’s success that, I suspect, makes Billy Elliot, the Musical an all-ages favorite (despite the authentic profanity of the setting). And yet it’s also—because of the context of Billy’s one-among-thousands selection—a bit of a shrug-off to all those who worked for something other than simply launching a ballet idol. As Tony (Gabriel Sidney Brown), Billy’s self-righteously indignant and somewhat bullying older brother, says, “we can’t all be dancers.” But if just one of “us” is, well, I guess that means it hasn’t all been a bloody waste.

The cast of Goodspeed Musicals’ Billy Elliot The Musical, now playing at The Goodspeed through November 24. Photo by Diane Sobolewski.

Billy Elliot, The Musical
Book and Lyrics by Lee Hall
Music by Elton John
Directed by Gabriel Barre
Musical Direction by Michael O’Flaherty
Choreographed by Marc Kimelman

Scenic Design: Walt Spangler; Costume Design: Jen Caprio; Lighting Design: Jason Kantrowitz; Sound Design: Jay Hilton; Hair & Wig Design: Mark Adam Rampmeyer; Fight Direction: Unkledave’s Fight-House; Dialect Coach: Jennifer Scapetis-Tycer: Assistant Music Director: William J. Thomas; Orchestrations: Dan DeLange; Production Manager: Erica Gilroy; Production Stage Manager: Bradley G. Spachman; General Manager: Rachel J. Tischler; Producer: Donna Lynn Cooper Hilton

Cast: Margot Anderson-Song, Michelle Aravena, Taven Blanke, Gabriel Sidney Brown, Amy Button, Billy Cohen, Richard Costa, Erik Gratton, Sean Hayden, Julia Louise Hosack, Liam Vincent Hutt, Emily Larger, Gerard Lanzerotti, Samantha Littleford, Barbara Marineau, Jon Martens, Connor McRory, Erica Parks, Simon Pearl, Rachel Rhodes-Devey, William Daniel Russell, Tess Santarsiero, Nick Silverio, Bryon St. Cyr, Jesse Swimm, Camiel Warren-Taylor

Musicians: Keyboard 1: William J. Thomas; Keyboard 2: David Kidwell; Trumpet: Pete Roe; Trombone: Matthew Russo; Reed 1: Liz Baker Smith; Reed 2: Mickey Shuster; Guitar: Nick DiFabio; Percussion: Sal Ranniello

Alternates: Keyboard 2: Anthony Pandolfe, Sarah Iadarola; Trumpet: Seth Bailey; Trombone: Andrew Janes, George Sanders; Reed 1: Mickey Schuster, Andrew Studenski; Reed 2: Harrison Kliewe; Percussion: Dave Edricks

Goodspeed
September 13-November 24, 2019

Creatures of Theater

Review of benjisun presents bodyssey, Yale Cabaret

What were you doing last night at 11 p.m.? Whatever it was, could it have used a bit more inspiring beauty, a bit more intriguing mystery? Then you should’ve seen benjisun presents bodyssey, the current show at Yale Cabaret (which has two more showings tonight at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.). That’s what I did.

Devised, directed and performed by Benjamin Benne, a playwright, and Jisun Kim, a dramaturg, both at the Yale School of Drama and known, symbiotically, as benjisun, the show features no spoken language. It’s a staged performance piece in which movement and gesture interact with lighting by Nicole E. Lang and live sound—featuring a looper, a clarinet, and a two-string violin—by Emily Duncan Wilson. The tone, neither heavy nor light, provokes contemplation, as Benne and Kim enact living tableaux that take us on a journey—a body odyssey or bodyssey—from the beginning of life on earth to something quite cosmic.

The show begins with a kind of prelude in which shadow play sets up a visually striking dynamic: we see hands in light, and on the wall shadows that can morph from small to huge as one hand seems poised to engulf the other. Then Kim and Benne, garbed simply but elegantly by Phuong Nguyen, interact with cleaning implements while their shadows create a more lyrical vision. Which do you believe: the prosaic three-dimensional beings or their 2D renderings in light and shadow?

Now that they’ve got us in the mood to access what viewing—an active process as opposed to mere watching—does for us, Benne and Kim proceed to enact, first with hands, then with their entire bodies, the process by which protoplasm became sentient beings having two legs and expressive faces. An interlude under a kind of diaphanous pod, pulsing with light and the kind of movements most easily associated with birth—from an egg or amniotic sac or simply from one form of being to another—leads to two sequences I found utterly enthralling.

benjisun presents bodyssey at Yale Cabaret, October 3-5, 2019 (photos by Blaq Pearl Photography)

The first, in which the duo swim on the floor on their backs is accompanied by Wilson on clarinet and sound loops (and blowing bubbles) to create an aquatic sound that feels like the womb must have felt. So very relaxing, so serenely at ease. As James Joyce once wrote: “before born babe bliss had.” Like that. Featuring slow motion movement both very precise and very fluid, the segment is also quite beautiful to watch.

Next comes that moment when, as we all must, we depart from peaceful sleep, get born, or, y’know, crawl out of the primordial ooze. The sound here is like the sun on a day when you don’t want to wake that early or to so much light, or like being on a beach with no breeze. Wilson scratches those two strings and Kim and Benne try to get from supine to all fours.

Benjamin Benne and Jisun Kim in benjisun presents bodyssey, Yale Cabaret, Oct 3-5, 2019 (Blaq Pearl Photography)

Eventually they’re on two feet, and there comes a delightful segment of finger touching finger, testing the water, so to speak, of what another being feels like. There are also some gracefully portrayed fight or flight moments and, masked and armed with fans, a dance segment where they become a clownish couple. Maturity! The large masks are both comical and oddly expressive, making us see the pair as fully human, their movements fully self-conscious, bound by a certain obtuse presence they can’t escape.

Except . . . they sort of do. Back beneath the veil and out they come, faces alight like stars. Heavenly beings? Space travelers? Glowing sparks of remembered spirits? In any case, they appear as poetic expressions of that part of us we’d like to think isn’t wholly contained by this physical world or planet.

The artistry of the piece is a matter of the way all three—Benne, Kim, Wilson—work together, reacting and responding to each other, and provoking in the viewer responses that can be very individual and yet part of the overall experience.

The kind of theater Yale Cabaret provides can’t really be found anywhere else. An experimental space for student work, yes, but also a place where theater feels more communal, more centered in creative effort than commercial undertaking. And sometimes, like this weekend, it’s quite simply magical, a blend of sound, light, design, movement and physical presence that makes the theatrical seem elemental.

benjisun presents bodyssey
Created, Directed and Performed by Benjamin Benne and Jisun Kim
Live sound by Emily Duncan Wilson

Producers: Sarah Cain, Caitlin Volz; Scenic Designer: Jimmy Stubbs; Sound Designer and Composer: Emily Duncan Wilson; Costume Designer: Phuong Nguyen; Lighting Designer: Nicole E. Lang; Dramaturg: Zachry J. Bailey; Technical Director: Yaro Yarashevich; Stage Manager: Fabiola Feliciano-Batista

Yale Cabaret
October 3-5, 2019