The Passion of a Pet

Review of Sylvia, Music Theatre of Connecticut

It’s Valentine’s Day and if your sense of romance may have stalled somewhat over the years, maybe Sylvia, A.R. Gurney’s romantic comedy now playing at MTC, Norwalk, has the answer: get a dog!

Directed by Kevin Connors, Gurney’s play is affable and light. There may be a sense in which the midlife crisis faced by Greg (Dennis Holland) is symptomatic of something darker, but, in general, the play assumes that long-married couples may find themselves confronted by new tastes or long-suppressed desires or dissatisfactions that could manifest in many ways. Greg and Kate (Carole Dell’Aquila) have been together twenty years and the crisis comes in the form of an affectionate stray that Greg encountered in a park and brings home, expecting Kate to just lie down and roll over, so to speak.

Sylvia (Bethany Fitzgerald) in A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia at MTC (photo by Alex Mongillo)

The dog wears a collar with its name, Sylvia, and she is a bundle of energy and, thanks to the miracle of theater, we are privy to her thoughts. That aspect of the play—the verbalized reactions of a frisky dog—is a crowd-pleaser, however obvious. As played by Bethany Fitzgerald, Sylvia is indeed a charming pet and anyone who might look askance at a woman playing a dog shouldn’t judge until they see it done. She looks upon Greg as “God,” aims to please, gets excited by each new arrival at the apartment, wants nothing more than to stretch out upon furniture, and speaks with an intense immediacy, suitable to an animal that lives in the moment. She’s also funny and lovable and makes the play work. Yes, the dog does indeed wag the tale.

Sylvia (Bethany Fitzgerald), Kate (Carole Dell’Aquila) in A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia at MTC (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Less obvious and somewhat less successful is how to stretch such a slight premise into a two hour play, with intermission. This is not easy to do as Gurney hasn’t given Greg’s wife much of a role. Dell’Aquila manages to seem sensible rather than a wet blanket, mostly. But whether or not she has your sympathy may have something to do with how you feel about dogs, and middle-aged men, and the possibilities in life afforded to post-menopausal women. Early on, it seems we might find fun in her occupation as a high school teacher of Shakespeare, so that when she offers “thus bad begins and worse remains behind,” we might catch ourselves hoping that more Shakespearean lines or tropes will percolate through the play. Not so much; Greg never even manages to play on his wife’s sympathies by intoning “What joy is joy if Silvia be not by?” And yet that is where he’s at, you might say.

Sylvia (Bethany Fitzgerald), Greg (Dennis Holland) in A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia at MTC (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Sylvia, in her unquestioning affection, helps her master deal with his current malaise: a job that has passed him by for younger colleagues with younger ambitions, an empty nest; and a wife who is done with the “the dog phase” of her life, much as she is with the children-raising part, and, almost, the stand-by-your-man part. For her, it’s a time to get on with things she wants to do—like research; for Greg, it’s a time in which companionship of some kind is needed. While we might expect that his new-found infatuation might be a younger woman, the play cleverly assumes that a dog can be more appealing than a new paramour. If there’s a bit of winking at the notion of bestiality in Act Two, it certainly isn’t played up in this production.

Tom (Jim Schilling), Greg (Dennis Holland) in A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia at MTC (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Connors draws upon the comic abilities of MTC regular Jim Schilling to create three different characters who intervene in the hi-jinx. One—Phyllis—is a tony lady friend of Kate’s, played for laughs as a not so surreptitious tippler; another—Leslie—is a counselor of fluid gender who seems to suspect the worst of Greg’s urges for Sylvia and recommends that Kate work up the full revenge-fury of a wronged wife. As Tom, he’s a buddy-buddy bench-warmer at Dog Hill (a park where city-folk can let their canines cavort) with a male dog of his own, and the eventual coupling of Sylvia and Bowser, off-stage, might illicit a variety of comic reactions. Schilling and Holland play it mild, at every point letting us off the hook of having to view Sylvia sexually. And that’s helped by Fitzgerald’s refusal to play Sylvia as, well, kittenish. Sylvia, even when in heat, is matter-of-fact and forthright. When she curses out a cat, she’s foul-mouthed but only then, and it’s hilarious.

And that’s important because Greg is a rather buttoned-up guy and so Sylvia may well be his perfect pet. Eventually, Kate seems to see this and grudgingly allows him to have some quality time with the dog she wants him to give away. In Act Two she devises a plan that should spell the end of the spell, and we face an effectively emotional farewell. At this point, Sylvia does sound like a young woman led on by a philandering married man’s promises of a permanent relationship, but that easy identification doesn’t undermine the feeling of actual regret, which Holland depicts well.

Greg (Dennis Holland), Sylvia (Bethany Fitzgerald) in A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia at MTC (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Taking place in a tasteful living-room, with, on a raised space behind, some benches with an attractive 3-D city skyline as backdrop, MTC’s Sylvia is—like the word of praise for many a mutt—companionable. If it stirs thoughts about the mystery of attachment, all the better. A dog, after all, can never be accused of ulterior motives. She might say, with the author George Sand, “there is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.” And that two random, interspecies strangers should meet and find that is the joy and sorrow of Sylvia. Don’t be afraid to love.

Sylvia (Bethany Fitzgerald) in A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia at MTC (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Sylvia
By A.R. Gurney
Directed by Kevin Connors

Scenic Design: Jessie Lizotte; Lighting Design: RJ Romeo; Costume Design: Diane Vanderkroef; Sound Design: Will Atkin; Prop Design: Merrie Deitch; Fight Staging: Dan O’Driscoll; Stage Manager: Gary Betsworth

Cast: Carole Dell’Aquila, Bethany Fitzgerald, Dennis Holland, Jim Schilling

Music Theatre of Connecticut
February 7-23, 2020

Keeping the Faith

Review of Godspell, ACT of Connecticut

The show opens in a dilapidated church that still has lovely stained glass windows and impressive arches but with construction materials littering the floor, in Reid Thompson’s fascinating set. It’s a down-at-heels sacred building, now the home to a group of squatters, many of them children. They come from the shadows to occupy the space and then go into hiding when a troupe of would-be renovators barges in, all giddy with the place’s possibilities as high-end condos.

The newcomers discover a huddled child, then the other kids and their adult leaders present themselves, and presto! the eight interlopers—Jacob (Jacob Hoffman), Katie (Katie Ladner), Alex (Alex Lugo), Andrew (Andrew Poston), Monica (Monica Ramirez), Phil (Phil Sloves), Morgan (Morgan Billings Smith), and Emma (Emma Tattenbaum-Fine)—are transformed into disciples of Jesus (Trent Saunders) and John the Baptist (Jaime Cepero), who proceeds to give Jesus a sponge-bath.

Jesus (Trent Saunders), seated; kneeling: Andrew Poston, Jaime Cepero, Morgan Billings Smith; standing: Phil Sloves, Monica Ramirez, Alex Lugo, Jacob Hoffman, Emma Tattenbaum-Fine, Katie Ladner in The ACT production of Godspell (photo by Jeff Butchen)

In its original incarnation, Godspell, with music by Stephen Schwartz and book by John-Michael Tebelak, dates from the early 1970s and arrived in the context of the hippie movement and the effort by U.S, churches to reach out to the young (remember the invention of the guitar mass?). Jesus’s teachings—with their communal emphasis and their ethical embrace of the poor rather than the rich and powerful—and his leadership of a band of guys who gave up their day-jobs to follow him certainly had immediate appeal in that period. Which may have something to do with reviving the show now. We would seem to have reached an all-time low for ethical behavior in the U.S. of A.

The show, which acts out stories and parables derived from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, interspersed with songs, mostly of the uplifting variety, has been updated at ACT by Schwartz and director Daniel C. Levine, and that means there are topical references from our day and some new lyrics. An early example, bound to be a favorite bit, features Jesus preaching to “Save the People” while the would-be disciples keep working in comical references to major Broadway shows. Any guesses which ones?

The cast of the ACT production of Godspell, directed by Daniel C. Levine (photo by Jeff Butchen)

What really makes the show at ACT is the spiritedness of the troupe, which manages to shun for the most part the insipid cuteness that may still dog the show from the film version of 1973. Here, the cast is fun and inviting and their professionalism never flags—whether leading the group in the vibrant radio-hit “Day by Day” (Katie), or hitting a pure high note in “All Good Gifts” (Andrew), or belting out “Bless the Lord” (Morgan), or hamming up as fallen goats for “We Beseech Thee” (led by Jacob), or enacting a contrite Magdalene (Monica) in “By My Side,” or demanding we heed the teachings, in “Learn Your Lessons Well,” led by Alex, or putting audience members on the spot as Emma leads off Act II with “Turn Back, O Man.” There are also many nice touches to make the preachiness of all those parables (even a church service is generally limited to a few!) go down easier, including a biblical king (Phil) like Trump by way of Alec Baldwin, and a sleazy judge by the name of Weinstein (Phil), as well as puppetry for the story of the Good Samaritan, interesting use of a painting for a grilling by those pesky Pharisees, some nimble stepping by Jesus and Judas to strobe lights in “All for the Best,” and captivating work with lights in “Light of the World,” led by Phil.

Jesus (Trent Saunders) and Judas (Jaime Cepero) in the ACT production of Godspell (photo by Jeff Butchen)

Throughout Act One, Saunders is a genial and soulful Jesus and casting has wisely eschewed the blond heart-throb type of the most recent New York revival. Saunders is a performer of color and he brings to the role an easy-going gentleness that suits it. In Act Two, when he has to chastise—“Alas For You”—the lyrics get a bit buried by the blasting band, but his passion in the song is convincing. As John the Baptist and Judas, Jaime Cepero is a great asset as well, always commanding attention and playing like a dutiful second lieutenant even when that means a betrayal (which Judas can barely bring himself to do—Jesus kisses him rather than vice versa).

Monica (Monica Ramirez), Jesus (Trent Saunders) in the ACT production of Godspell (photo by Jeff Butchen)

Unlike Jesus Christ Superstar, which visits much of the same hallowed text, the libretto of Godspell stresses the parables of Jesus and avoids presenting his trial before Pilate. The death of Jesus is depicted, and seems a sacrificial gesture by someone whose death is meant to be a good thing. And yet, if you don’t know the story you might be baffled by the mystery of what exactly transpires. The lovely song “Beautiful City” is sung late in the show by Jesus at his most beatific and holds out the hope of “a city of man” rather than a “city of angels” (meant to be a way of saying we need to take responsibility for this world and not expect an otherworldly reward, unless it just means to imply that New York is better than LA).

With its eager effort to make the audience feel themselves in the midst of the action—and the spacious amphitheater at ACT aids greatly in that effect—and its many enthralling effects of light (Jack Mehler) and color and costuming (Brenda Phelps), its engaging cast and its very tight band, this 2020 revival of Godspell is bound to inspire more true believers.

The cast of the ACT production of Godspell, directed by Daniel C. Levine (photo by Jeff Butchen)

Godspell
Conceived and originally directed by John-Michael Tebelak
Music and new lyrics by Stephen Schwartz
ACT production conceived and directed by Daniel C. Levine

Choreography: Sara Brians; Music Supervision: Bryan Perri; Music Direction: Danny White; Scenic Design: Reid Thompson; Lighting Design: Jack Mehler; Costume Design: Brenda Phelps; Sound Design: John Salutz; Props Designer: Abigail Bueti; Production Manager: Tom Swetz; Production Stage Manager: Michael Seelbach

Band: Danny White, conductor, keyboards; Miles Aubrey, electric guitars, acoustic guitars, mandolin; Arnold Gottlieb, electric bass, fretless bass, acoustic guitar; Dennis Arcano, drums & percussion

Cast: Jaime Cepero, Shaylen Harger, Jacob Hoffman, Katie Ladner, Alex Lugo, Cameron Nies, Andrew Poston, Monica Ramirez, Trent Saunders, Phil Sloves, Morgan Billings Smith, Emma Tattenbaum-Fine

Children: Nikki Adorante, Marley Bender, Nate Cohen, Sully Dunn, Adelaide Kellen, Colby Kipnes, Jack Rand, Amélie Simard, Caroline Smith, Dean Trevisani

ACT of Connecticut
February 6-March 8, 2020

What Happens There

Review of The Lifespan of a Fact, TheaterWorks, Hartford

TheaterWorks is back with another play seemingly ripped from the headlines, though these days, in terms of their lifespan, facts could said to be on life support, or even in hospice care.

The story behind the play (what seem the agreed-upon facts): author John D’Agata, an essayist who has issues with the practices of journalism and the concept of nonfiction, wrote an essay inspired by the death of Levi Presley, a teen who jumped from the tower of the Stratosphere Hotel in Las Vegas in 2002. D’Agata’s essay was about Vegas, suicide, and other issues he deemed relevant. Harper’s passed on the essay; The Believer took it on and assigned Jim Fingal to fact-check it. Fingal found numerous inaccuracies and questioned, rigorously, much of D’Agata’s authorial license. In 2010, The Believer published the essay, titled “What Happens There.” In 2012, The Lifespan of a Fact was published, a book that revealed the years of dickering over the essay that went on between D’Agata and Fingal, edited by Jill Bialosky. In 2018, a play by Jeremy Kareken & David Murrell and Gordon Farrell based on the book opened on Broadway with an all-star cast of Daniel Radcliffe, Bobby Cannavale, and Cherry Jones.

John D’Agata (Rufus Collins), Emily Penrose (Tasha Lawrence), Jim Fingal (Nick LaMedica) in The Lifespan of a Fact at TheaterWorks (photo by Lanny Nagler)

The Lifespan of a Fact plays at TheaterWorks through March 8, directed by Tracy Brigden and starring Nick LaMedica as Jim Fingal, Rufus Collins as John D’Agata, and Tasha Lawrence as fictional editor Emily Penrose. The play adds drama by making Fingal a new recruit at a publication where D’Agata’s essay is accepted who wants desperately to please his boss—and he has only a weekend to complete the job of checking D’Agata’s facts. He contacts D’Agata, first by email then by phone and, in a nice theatrical touch, is revealed sleeping on D’Agata’s couch, having gone to Vegas—where D’Agata lives in his recently deceased mother’s home—to check on some facts such as the color of the tower’s bricks and the number of lanes involved in what D’Agata calls a traffic jam at its base. Eventually, against any kind of expectation of how editors work, Penrose shows up too. And the showdown begins: to publish or not to publish, since D’Agata seemingly won’t accept any changes. However farfetched her presence is, Lawrence’s bristly impatience, familiarity with D’Agata’s ways, and archly maternal attitudes are welcome.

Nick LaMedica, a very capable comic actor, keeps the proceedings amusing. The play focuses on his truculent insistence on holding D’Agata to account. It’s not so much a pursuit of truth as an effort to protect the world from the kind of bullshit that passes for poetic license or rhetorical sleight-of-hand and which flows blithely through much reporting, most advertising copy, and many-too-many political speeches and presidential tweets. It’s hard not to be on Fingal’s side even if he is a somewhat manic nerd. And even if D’Agata were less of the pompous ass Collins plays him as. There’s physical humor, double-takes, joking asides, and a rather sitcom sense of character and situation.

Jim Fingal (Nick LaMedica) in The Lifespan of a Fact at TheaterWorks (photo by Lanny Nagler)

Certainly, there’s enough here to wax editorial about. As a book, Lifespan might be an interesting exhibit of how two different minds interpret events and the task of turning events into writing. As a play, the treatment gives more importance and impact to D’Agata’s stunts than they outwardly merit. Some examples—such as D’Agata’s claim that a caller who hung up on him when he worked a Vegas suicide crisis line was Presley—aren’t so much factual deviations as suppositions. Something an editor should decide on the value of, for the essay, and either strike or alter or let stand. D’Agata’s sense of truth assumes that emotions are facts. What he feels he is free to write as his view of the facts. And yet the notion that his inaccuracies might cause emotional distress in others doesn’t faze him in the least. Collins makes us register that there is some issue at work in D’Agata, but the play never comes close to deciding what it might be, other than the loss of his mother.

In any case, what’s at stake isn’t so very much, ultimately. Given the kind of publication D’Agata’s piece would appear in, a writerly persona giving a “take” on the events is more or less assumed. In his own mind D’Agata may be the like of Norman Mailer, a titan of prose able to bend the facts of the world to his literary authority, or maybe a “gonzo journalist” like Hunter S. Thompson who once claimed the only source of objective reporting was a ticker-tape machine. Mostly, one assumes, that any readers who stick with D’Agata’s account from beginning to end do so because they simply love what he “does.” His writing is the kind that treats the world as if in need of an author’s intervention to make any sense at all.

In its delivery, Lifespan is one of those plays where topicality trumps any effort to make things interesting or surprising. Which is a way of saying that perhaps it hues too closely to the facts of D’Agata and Fingal and is in need of more writerly license. And yet the play does entertain and, at 85-90 minutes, does not overstay its welcome. One of its nicest theatrical touches, among several, is having the three discussants sit silently for the alleged timespan that Presley sat on the tower before jumping. It’s a moment where—with no words to describe what they feel or think—the three simply expose themselves to a fact: time passes.

Jim Fingal (Nick LaMedica), Emily Penrose (Tasha Lawrence), John D’Agata (Rufus Collins) in The Lifespan of a Fact, TheaterWorks (photo by Lanny Nagler)

The questions about exactitude that Fingal doggedly pursues are more relevant than ever in an era so given to spin and the finessing of facts. At one point, Fingal beseeches D’Agata to consider that, on the internet, anything can be fact-checked or disputed by the intrusive legions ready to find fault. And yet that argument may be in D’Agata’s favor. Since the world will twist, bend, pull apart and repurpose any statement as it likes, why not at least go on the record with the world according to John. D’Agata knows, after all, that a writer has nothing but his words, and they are only his if he believes in the purpose of each one, regardless of how well that suits someone else’s sense of what happened.

The Lifespan of a Fact
By Jeremy Kareken & David Murrell and Gordon Farrell
Directed by Tracy Brigden

Set Design: Brian Prather; Costume Design: Tracy Christensen; Lighting Design: Brian Bembridge; Sound Design: Obadiah Eaves; Projection Design: Zachary Borovay; Hair Consultant: Mark Adam Rampmeyer; Production Manager: Bridget Sullivan; Stage Manager: Kate J. Cudworth

Cast: Rufus Collins, Nick LaMedica, Tasha Lawrence

TheaterWorks
January 30 through March 8, 2020

Call Me Up in Dreamland

Review of Alice, Yale School of Drama

One of the great attractions of Alice, the third show of the Yale School of Drama 2019-20 season, directed by third-year director Logan Ellis, is the prospect of hearing the songs of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan sung by someone other than Tom Waits. (And I’m someone who loves listening to Tom Waits!)

That aspect of the show is key because the songs in Alice are sung by characters, most of whom bear some resemblance to characters in Lewis Carroll’s classic and incomparable Alice stories, Alice in Wonderland and Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass (one of the few literary sequels better than the original).

Filtering the adventures of Alice through Waits and Brennan’s Beat carnival sensibility provides a curious and delicious oddity not to be missed. Then filter those songs through arrangements by music director Dan Pardo as sung by some fine voices from the Yale School of Drama that lend them the heft and glow of opera and Broadway and that indeed should be attraction enough.

But consider: Alice, the musical, was developed by avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson, and his stamp on the proceedings, with a libretto developed by Paul Schmidt, further twists the familiar if quizzical terrain in other directions, mainly because Wilson/Schmidt are more interested in real life Alice Liddell (inspiration for our Alice) and Charles Dodgson (Carroll’s actual name) than in Carroll’s creation per se. So the space we travel through here is called Dreamland and watching the show recalled to me one of my favorite puns in Finnegans Wake about “we grisly old Sykos who have done our unsmiling bits on alices, when they were yung and easily freudened.” The Liddell/Dodgson relation is, indeed, frighteningly easy to freuden.

And that lends more than a little perfunctory psyching of the pedophiliac psyche—having to do with Dodgson’s proclivity for photographing pre-pubescent girls, sometimes nude—in what Wilson/Schmidt hath wrought. That aspect mainly impinges in the second half as the script reaches for a through-narrative to hang its symptoms upon, all hinging upon Alice solving “the riddle” of Jabberwocky (the poem of monster-decapitation Alice finds in a book) and, perhaps, beating time. That, for those in need of a plot, may serve as well as anything might, but what matters here is what Waits/Brennan did with their part in all this and it is wonderous indeed, brought vividly to phantasmagoric life by Ellis and his astounding team and cast.

The cast of the Yale School of Drama’s production of Alice, by Robert Wilson, Paul Schmidt, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, directed by Logan Ellis, February, 2020 (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

We begin with screens upon screens that replicate images of Alice (Ilia Isorelýs Paulino) to suggest Dodgson’s photographic fetish (Brittany Bland, projections). Dodgson (Sola Fadiran) opens the show with “Alice,” a song of obsession and melancholy that sets the tone at once. And yet the inspired nature of these characters and their eye-popping costumes by Meg Powers works against Dodgson as a pining pedophile bedeviled by whatever we want to imagine him bedeviled by (Dodgson, a deacon, mathematician and logician, is not a surrealist, not even avant le lettre). What the show makes us face is—yes, obsession and the melancholy of unrequited desire, but it’s the kind we’re apt to have for the figures in our dreams, which may include material from websites, films, shows, books, poems, myths, ritual, and anything in our inner grab-bag.

Mad Hatter (Julian Sanchez), Alice (Ilia Isorelýs Paulino) in the Yale School of Drama production of Alice by Robert Wilson, Paul Schmidt, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, directed by Logan Ellis, February 2020 (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Anna Grigo’s scenic design creates an open space where the various encounters—each featuring a song or a poem—take place, some—a torture-chamber-like kitchen—having a certain dimension, others— the boat/shop the Sheep (Daniel Liu) navigates—are free-standing sets in their own right. The changeableness of the set perfectly complements the amorphousness of Alice’s imagination as she moves through Dreamland. Done up like a doll, Alice is a mostly willing witness to whatever she encounters. “We’re All Mad Here,” as a song suggests, and Alice gamely takes a “when in Rome . . .” attitude to her interlocutors. Within that world, Dodgson/Carroll is perhaps the Oz-like Wizard behind it all, or at least the dream-father-figure who might help her find a way out. Since Dodgson is also the White Knight and the White Rabbit, he is a kind of all-in-all stopgap; we can call “foul” for the egotistical artist-teacher-master who must insist on his centrality in his protégé’s imagination, but we’re also encouraged to see how the Waits/Brennan songs Fadiran sings—“Fish and Bird” and “Poor Edward” particularly—give us insight into how Dodgson/Carroll understands his own plight. The first ends Act One with a sort of Never-Neverland tableau and duet with Paulino and reprises at the start of Act Two; the second comes late in Act Two and, in Fadiran’s performance, instills a moving sense of the pathos of a creator plagued by his creation.

Charles Dodgson (Sola Fadiran) in the Yale School of Drama production of Alice by Robert Wilson, Paul Schmidt, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, directed by Logan Ellis, February 2020 (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

It’s remarkable how readily Waits/Brennan find beguiling analogs for Carroll’s characters that extend our sense of their possibilities. In a show-stopping moment in Act One, The Caterpillar (Julian Sanchez, in a baroque fantasy of a costume) proclaims his alter ego “Table Top Joe,” a scatting Vegas act that might be Waits’ alter ego as well. Grigo’s design gives Sanchez a thrust space into the audience, and having the Caterpillar undulate into position while singing creates a visual and visceral feat not easy to top. Indeed, Sanchez is a major asset—he gets to wear two amazing get-ups as Mad Hatter (his work with hand-puppets is impressive)  and, with Liu, enacts a teasing number—“Altar Boys”—that, while not derived from Wonderland characters per se, plays campy fun with the clerical trappings of Dodgson as an Anglican deacon.

Other stand-out moments include the lovely, demented-Disney of “Flower’s Grave,” sung by a family of flowers (Robert Lee Hart, John Evans Reese, Jackeline Torres Cortés, Adrienne Wells); “Fawn,” in which Paulino and Wells vocalize beautifully; “Kommienzuspadt,” wherein Robert Lee Hart as the Cheshire Cat channels Waits wonderfully; “Reeperbahn,” with Jessy Yates as a kind of BDSM king on a throne of a wheelchair, stirring up tales of naughty indulgence enacted by the ensemble; “Barcarolle,” in which Liu too blends into the Dodgson persona, this time as a motherly, androgynous sheep, and finally, and very memorably, Paulino—as the aged Alice on a cane—singing “I’m Still Here” as a statement of endurance but also of immortal presence within the Dreamland that, for all we know, might go on without us. Paulino’s Alice is childlike, capricious, and slyly reactive throughout, the giddy kid we might like to be again. Being an audience to Paulino’s emotive and moving way with a song has been a joy of her time, now in its third year, at the Yale School of Drama, and her “I’m Still Here” caps that wonderfully. 

Humpty Dumpty (Jessy Yates), Alice ((Ilia Isorelýs Paulino) in the Yale School of Drama production of Alice by Robert Wilson, Paul Schmidt, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, directed by Logan Ellis, February 2020 (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

There are a few disappointments: the poems “Jabberwocky” and “You Are Old, Father William,” two of my favorites in the books (and add “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” not referenced here, as a third) sort of get lost in the sauce; the Tweedledee (Cortés)/Tweedledum (Reese) segment, while fun and silly, lacks the manic, violent quality Carroll gives it; and “Lost in the Harbour” is sung by Yates as Humpty Dumpty presented as a projection upon a large, suspended egg. The device seems to limit Humpty Dumpty who, in the book, is a key figure and whose song, here, could use more of the wistful doom found in Waits’ rendition on Alice.

As a musical, the Alice of Wilson, Schmidt, Waits and Brennan, is based on a merging of spectacle and song that creates a world more than a story. Logan Ellis and company fully fulfill that imperative, imaginatively, creatively, and with lasting impressions to spare. “There’s only Alice.”

Alice
Concept by Robert Wilson
Music and Lyrics by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan
Libretto by Paul Schmidt
Directed by Logan Ellis

Music Direction, Arrangements, and Orchestrations: Dan Pardo; Scenic Design: Anna Grigo; Costume Designer: Meg Powers; Lighting Designer: Riva Fairhall; Sound Designer: Dakota Stipp; Projection Designer: Brittany Bland; Production Dramaturg: Evan Hill; Technical Director: HaoEn Hu; Stage Manager: Bekah Brown

Musicians: Jillian Emerson, cello; Nate Huvard, guitar; Dan Pardo, piano; Epongue Ekille, violin; Calvin Kaleel, bass; Jose Key, saxophone; Leonardo Marques Starck von Mutius, trombone

Cast: Sola Fadiran, Robert Lee Hart, Daniel Liu, Ilia Isorelýs Paulino, John Evans Reese, Julian Sanchez, Jackeline Torres Cortés, Adrienne Wells, Jessy Yates

Yale School of Drama
February 1-7, 2020

Long Wharf Theatre Steps Through a Door

Preview of I Am My Own Wife, Long Wharf Theatre

It was an unusual gathering on Long Wharf Theatre’s Stage II last Friday. Assembled to discuss Long Wharf’s production of Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife, which started previews this week and opens next Wednesday, was the entire creative team for the show, led in discussion by Patrick J. Dunn, Executive Director of New Haven Pride Center. In addition to Rebecca Martínez, the show’s director, and its star, Mason Alexander Park, the discussion included set designer Britton Mauk, costume designer Daniel Tyler Mathews, lighting designer Jennifer Fok, sound designer and original music composer Kimberly S. O’Loughlin, assistant director Kevin Paley, and cultural competency consultant Ianne Fields Stewart. It’s not typical by any means to meet the artists who undertake the technical feat of creating theater—most remain behind the scenes for a show’s entire run. What made the event even more unusual is the fact that Long Wharf has set a new standard by bringing together transgender artists to create the world of Wright’s Pulitzer-winning drama. The participants praised Long Wharf and its new artistic director Jacob G. Padrón for achieving a feat almost unprecedented: a play centering on a transgender person finds in this production an almost wholly nonbinary team.

And that’s significant because the version of the play at Long Wharf has been updated to reflect an awareness of trans persons lacking in the original version, which dates to 2003. The play incorporates aspects of the life of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf as revealed in her memoir, Ich bin meine eigene Frau, filtered through Wright’s interviews with Mahlsdorf and his sense of her life. Born Lothar Berfelde in Berlin-Mahlsdorf, Berfelde was imprisoned as a juvenile for the killing of his father, a Nazi who had threatened his son’s life. Released after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Berfelde became Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, residing in East Berlin throughout the era of Germany’s division and curating a museum of everyday objects. She died in 2002. The play, a one-person show, incorporates von Mahlsdorf into a story of Wright’s fascination with her life, in a script that features over thirty characters.

Jacob G. Padrón, Jennifer Fok, Patrick J. Dunn, Rebecca Martínez, Ianne Fields Stewart, Britton Mauk, Kevin Paley, Mason Alexander Park, Daniel Tyler Mathews, Kimberly S. O’Loughlin, at the Long Wharf Theatre, Stage II, January 31, 2020 (photo by Deena Nichol-Blifford)

The intention behind the changes to Wright’s play, undertaken with the author’s consent and encouragement, is to “to look carefully at how the show showcases Charlotte most positively” said Martinez. Park spoke of “two different plays”; in the original, Park said, there was a certain “sensationalism” in one actor—male—playing both male and female roles. In the new version, they said, the goal is a more faithful rendering of a “trans narrative,” to show “Charlotte’s journey and her truth.” Access to the extensive archival interviews with von Mahlsdorf led to “the discovery of Charlotte’s naughtiness,” sparking, the team hopes, “conversation around trans bodies and the sexual aspects of their lives.” Park spoke of how trans stories are “usually stories of tragedy,” and the new version of I Am My Own Wife seeks to replace a sense of “a challenging, dark life” with an experience of “an open, loving person.” The question of how a trans person lived—in Charlotte’s time—is certainly one of the fascinations of the play, and brought Wright to the topic, but the team at Long Wharf is determined that the show should speak of and to trans culture in the 21st century.

To that end, said Mathews, the costuming has become more colorful, drawing upon Charlotte’s tastes and tendencies and eschewing the black outfits adorned with pearls favored by the Broadway production that earned Jefferson Mays a Tony in 2004. There is also a collective effort to create, with sound and lighting and set design, the world of Charlotte, a collector, an antiquarian, a bon vivant, and, as Park said, “a person looking for love like anyone else.” O’Loughlin researched the recordings referenced in the script—von Mahlsburg was a collector of recordings—so that the music could be  “integrated into transitions” which feature “both ‘found’ and composed” music. Fok spoke of lighting designs “inspired by the many location shifts” in the script and an effort to present “how Charlotte sees herself contrasted with how she is seen by others.” Mauk stressed that the new production positions Charlotte “not as an object to be gazed upon, but a story to be shared.”

There has been a sense for some time in the trans community that the play needed to be revisited and the Long Wharf production is pathbreaking in meeting that challenge. Some of the changes are shifts in how the story is told, others, Martínez said, are conscientious toward the vocabulary and attitudes of trans identity today. Paley spoke of the play as not a documentary of Charlotte’s life, but one in which her spirit will be more present than in earlier productions.

Stewart pointed out that it is “not the norm” by any means that “even in shows with queer themes” so many trans artists would be brought in. She spoke of how her role as cultural competency consultant often puts her in the position of having to explain matters that are obtuse to cisgender teams and casts. Here, that’s not the issue, and that’s “refreshing,” as “the erasure of queer bodies onstage” is more typical, in her experience. Wright’s play, in Stewart’s view, can start “uncomfortable conversations,” producing “essential theater that tells stories in ethical, honest ways.”

The team acknowledged that one such conversation that needs to take place is about “the dominance of white cis men” in all aspects of theater, particularly in the technical fields. While it may seem non-controversial to bring in trans artists for a show about trans persons, restricting the expert work of trans artists to such productions relegates them to a special interest aspect of theater. It will be interesting to see if Long Wharf’s production of I Am My Own Wife, which runs from February 5-March 1, will be, as Stewart hopes, “a step through a door that leads to other things.”

Dunn, Fok, Mathews, Stewart, Martínez, Park, Mauk, Paley, O’Loughlin, Long Wharf Theatre Stage II (photo by Deena Nichol-Blifford)

I Am My Own Wife
By Doug Wright
Directed by Rebecca Martínez

Long Wharf Theatre
February 5-March 1, 2020

The Recourse of History

Review of Manahatta, Yale Repertory Theatre

Two vexed histories circulate through Mary Kathryn Nagle’s fascinating Manahatta, now playing at Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Laurie Woolery. In the play’s present, Jane Snake (Lily Gladstone), a descendant of the Lenape tribe that once occupied a major portion of the mid-Atlantic region of what we generally call North America, is working on Wall Street, where she becomes a rising star at Lehman Brothers about the time that it all goes bust—2008. In the past, we see how Jane’s ancestors got euchred out of the island of Manahatta by Dutch traders eager to secure land holdings. The two strains act as background—or analogies—to the other story in the present: Jane’s father, who dies during surgery while Jane is getting hired by Joe (Danforth Comins), leaves to her mother, Bobbie (Carla-Rae), enormous bills and scant means to meet them. The ultimate fate of the family’s home in Oklahoma is the point to be decided; history has already shown us what happened to Manahatta and Lehman Brothers.

Jakob (Danforth Comins), Se-ket-tu-may-qua (Steven Flores), Le-le-wa’-you (Lily Gladstone), Peter Minuit (Jeffrey King), Toosh-ki-pa-kwis-i (Shyla Lefner), Mother (Carla-Rae) in Manahatta at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

And yet. The play’s nimble overlaps urge us to relive these pivotal moments in our nation’s history with at least some consideration of the Lenape’s perspective. Laurie Woolery’s inventive staging of the play does much to help achieve a porous, simultaneous effect. Huge boulders grace Mariana Sanchez’s scenic design in which a sturdy table can anchor scenes separated in space and time. A beautiful backdrop of forests is lit or projected upon to create eye-entrancing spaces that suggest the wonders of our land before development (Emma Deane, lighting; Mark Holthusen, projections), only to become a riot of numbers and digital phrases. An image of Se-ket-tu-may-qua (aka Black Beaver) hovers over the proceedings. In Nagle’s play, this leader of the Lenape in Oklahoma is the descendant of the Native American who rather unwittingly trades away Manahatta when, we suppose, he really thought he was giving hunting permits.

Jane (Lily Gladstone), Dick Fuld (Jeffrey King), Joe (Danforth Comins) in Manahatta at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Scenes in the present quickly shift to the past and back again as every actor plays a character in each time period. The most interesting overlap in that regard is Jeffrey King’s dual role as Peter Minuit, who brokers that major real estate steal, and as Dick Fuld, the man at the helm when Lehman went under. In both roles he’s apt to seal a deal with his own very fine brandy, but it’s as Fuld that he adds considerably to the show’s brio, giving the CEO a kind of devil-may-care grasp of how tenuous being on top can be.

Peter Minuit (Jeffrey King), Jakob (Danforth Comins), Le-le-wa’-you (Lily Gladstone) in Manahatta at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Another strong double role goes to Lily Gladstone as both Jane and Le-le-wa’-you. It’s not a sense of tribal ways or historical injustices that drive her as Jane, but rather her grasp of mathematics (there’s a somewhat fatuous sense that she alone adds math capabilities to a group of guys content merely to compute appreciation). Jane is winning, charming and smart, and seems fully on her way to a Working Girl (1988) moment of showing that under-represented populations can succeed in the white man’s world of cut-throat capitalism. As Jane’s ancestor Le-le-wa’-you, she amazes the Dutch by learning English and being able to trade. In both eras, Gladstone’s character is a comer.

Debra (Shyla Lefner), Bobbie (Carla-Rae), Se-ket-tu-may-qua (Steven Flores) in Manahatta at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

At the heart of the play is Carla-Rae’s Bobbie. She is about as far removed from the world where her daughter succeeds as can be, in part because Bobbie still considers the land as her ancestors understood it—which means past and present center in her as someone who will never see ownership as a matter of contracts and rights and payments. Her supportive but at times head-shaking daughter Debra (Shyla Lefner) is the character most concerned that Lenape language and customs continue in the 21st century. The play’s strong sense of how the Lenape move and speak and gesture (Ty Defoe, movement director), and of how they conduct themselves—whether in trading furs or accepting or giving wampum—adds human interest to the play’s rich theatrical space, as when Le-le-wa’-you extends her foot into a space where Paul James Prendergast’s sound design creates a running brook. Costumes, by Stephanie Bahniuk, brilliantly transition with ease between times and places and cultures.

Some elements of the production don’t fully jive—such as Steven Flores’ performance as Luke, a male admirer of Jane; the pair went to school together and Flores plays Luke as though he’s still in high school while Jane is poised and professional. Flores fares better in the past as Se-ket-tu-may-qua who seems exemplary of the tribe’s dignity, and his ultimate fate foreshadows theirs.

Michael (T. Ryder Smith), Bobbie (Carla-Rae) in Manahatta at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Other aspects of the play jive in a way that feels more than a bit contrived. It’s good to see T. Ryder Smith back at the Rep after his notable performance in Scenes of Court Life (2016) and here he helps bring needed nuance to a role that invites clichés of prejudice. As Michael, he’s both a church warden and a banker—so that we may see how he leeches away Bobbie’s property as well as her spiritual separatism; in the past, he’s Jonas Michaelius, the first clergyman of the Dutch in North America, who set about “saving” the natives’ children. In both cases, he seems to be present mostly to suggest that Christianity and toxic capitalism go hand-in-hand.

Provocative and fast-paced, Manahatta, which debuted at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, does better at bringing together the worlds of Manahatta, in the 17th century, and Manhattan, in the 21st than it does at bridging the Manhattan and Oklahoma of 2008. The history in which Se-ket-tu-may-qua and his descendants figure is but sketchily suggested and there’s a sense that the story of Bobbie and Debra exists to provide a homeland backdrop to the reconquest of Manhattan by Jane. And yet, as a New York story, Manahatta isn’t likely to command much urgent attention from twenty-first-century inhabitants of the place.

Jane Snake (Lily Gladstone) in Manahatta at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manahatta
By Mary Kathryn Nagle
Directed by Laurie Woolery

Movement Director: Ty Defoe; Scenic Designer: Mariana Sanchez; Costume Designer: Stephanie Bahniuk; Lighting Designer: Emma Deane; Composer and Sound Designer: Paul James Prendergast; Projection Designer: Mark Holthusen; Hair and Wig Designer: Matthew Armentrout; Production Dramaturg: Madeline Charne; Technical Director: Yaro Yarashevich; Lenape Cultural Consultant: Joe Baker; Vocal and Dialect Coach: Louis Colaianni; Fight Director: Rick Sordelet; Stage Manager: Julia Bates

Cast: Carla-Rae, Danforth Comins, Steven Flores, Lily Gladstone, Jeffrey King, Shyla Lefner, T. Ryder Smith

Yale Repertory Theatre
January 24-February 15, 2020

Earthless is Worthless

Review of Elon Musk and the Plan to Blow Up Mars The Musical, Yale Cabaret

In Liam Bellman-Sharpe’s sci-fi musical, Elon Musk and the Plan to Blow Up Mars, Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind Tesla, SpaceX, and other tech concerns, is a man with a mission. After commiserating with a group of billionaires—including Jeff Bezos (Eli Pauley)—who confide to us that it’s great to be rich but it’s hard to be rich, Musk (David Mitsch) comes forward with a song describing his love of Mars, a view that seems true of the actual Musk with his dream of a colony there someday.

It comes as a surprise, then, when the crew of a spaceflight to Mars—Captain (Nomè SiDone), Eyes (Madeline Seidman), Hands (Maal Imani West), Navigator (Isuri Wijesundara)—learn that Musk is aboard, that he chartered the flight, and that he has plans to destroy the Earth’s nearest neighbor. Musk’s change of heart—from colonizing Mars to destroying it—comes via “the Voice of the Night Sky,” a kind of burning-bush moment that converts Musk from a proselytizer for humanity’s destiny among the stars to a kind of interplanetary terrorist, willing to obliterate the red planet to save the blue one.

The absurdity of the musical’s plot could be said to be an intentional mirroring of the absurdity of financial titans becoming space-age saviors, but the show also features the kind of daffy shenanigans that have been the basis of grade B sci-fi films for decades. And that makes for some very entertaining bits, such as Patrick Young as a quintessential mad scientist enlisted by Musk to plumb the possibilities of antimatter, which is key to his scheme, and some offbeat satirical science presentations.

In the first, Maal Imani West delivers a “thought experiment” on how scientific breakthroughs, in affording new products, can solve problems that are more lucrative to leave unsolved. Using dentures as her example, and aided by great graphics by projection designers Erin Sullivan and Hannah Tran, West reflects on how a demand for new teeth could lead to plans to undermine tooth and bone to make the general populace dependent on new products to save them from conditions created by the breakthrough itself. Sound familiar?

Bellman-Sharpe’s target in all this isn’t simply the absurd wealth and power of Musk or Bezos but the system that has enriched and empowered them. And if their grasp of capitalist principles weren’t enough, we’re faced with their space manias as a prospect of what the rich may do when they decide they needn’t be stuck on this woefully mismanaged rock with the rest of us. As Educational Host (Isuri Wijesundra) delivers a bouncy science lesson on “slime molds” and their ability to proliferate and form bonds with the complexity “of the interstate system,” Bezos is desperately trying to reach Musk to dissuade him from making Mars extinct. The dovetailing of Bezos’ fear of capitalism imploding and the Host’s upbeat ditty about the wonders of single-cell lifeforms works as an ironic commentary on how far we’ve come—in evolutionary terms—and how far we can fall.

While not quite a full musical in its lack of a big finale musical number, Elon Musk . . . does boast the requisite romantic interlude. Here it’s a wonderfully comic and spirited encounter between Eyes and a being made of Antimatter (Patrick Falcon). The pas de deux and duet (Antimatter’s lovely voice provided by Taylor Hoffman) puts both heart into the show and a spanner in the works of Musk’s plan, as Eyes, now in love with Antimatter, wants to preserve the creature at the cost of not destroying Mars.

The show’s oddity is its saving grace, but its narrative arc tends to be a bit hodgepodge, including a vaudeville routine about speeding in space and a song by a Drag King (Maal Imani West in male drag that smacks a bit of Little Richard, with a sumptuous smoking jacket) about the world not being a place to bring children into. Thanks to West’s great singing voice, the song is a standout even if we might wonder how it fits in, exactly.

All in all, one might say, that whether you’re trying to destroy a planet or to save one, a kitchen-sink approach is best, and one wouldn’t want to underestimate the enormous profits to be made by capitalizing on either project. In Elon Musk and the Plan to Blow Up Mars the Musical, science as a means to get rich and science as a means to save the Earth and/or mankind has reached its tipping point. That timely reflection and the possibilities of a sci-fi musical with big name power players in its dramatis personae certainly gives Bellman-Sharpe’s play remarkable potential. Per aspera ad astra.

Elon Musk and the Plan to Blow Up Mars the Musical
Music, Text, and Direction by Liam Bellman-Sharpe

Choreographer: Mariel Pettee; Set Designer: Alex McGargar; Costume Designer: David Mitsch; Lighting Designer: Noel Nichols; Sound System Designer: James T. McLoughlin; Projections Designer: Erin Sullivan; Associate Projections Designer: Hannah Tran; Associate Stage Manager: Kevin Jinghong Zhu; Dramaturg: Henriette Rietveld; Technical Director: Jonathan Jolly; Producer: Carl Holvick; Stage Manager: Sam Tirrell

Cast: Patrick Ball, Patrick Falcon, David Mitsch, Eli Pauley, Madeline Seidman, Nomè SiDone, Bailey Trierweiler, Maal Imani West, Isuri Wijesundara, Patrick Young

Musicians: Sharon Ahn, keyboards; Roberto Granados, guitar (alternate); Thomas Hagen, drums; Satchel Henneman, guitar; Taylor Hoffman, vocals; Paul Mortilla, violin; Adin Ring, bass

Yale Cabaret
January 23-25, 2020

Living At Risk

Review of Pike Street, Hartford Stage

Character, we might say, is outwardly a question of manner and inwardly a question of one’s openness to others. By such a measure, Nilaja Sun’s Pike Street, at Hartford Stage through February 2, directed by Ron Russell, is full of character.

Nilaja Sun in Pike Street, at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

All of its characters, enacted by Sun, the author and performer of the play, are manners she adopts at will, carrying on vivid dialogues, and Sun’s openness to others is what makes the play work. She is able to inhabit these folk because they aren’t just figments of her imagination: they are people who live a precarious existence on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, an existence made perilous by the imminent arrival of a hurricane. The backstories come to light as necessary to fill us in on the situation, but the main gist is the way the impending crisis brings out the character in these characters.

Evelyn is a Puerto Rican mom, beset by the fact that her daughter Candi, fifteen, has suffered an aneurysm that leaves her confined to a chair and in need of a respirator and a dialysis machine—and, with yet another major storm on the way with its possible attendant loss of electricity, Candi is at risk. The family, which includes Evelyn’s truculent and womanizing father, Poppi, played mainly for laughs, should evacuate to a shelter, says Con Ed, but moving Candi in her chair up and down five flights with no elevator is no picnic, and the kind of callous treatment the girl suffered last time—during Hurricane Sandy—leaves Evelyn loath to endure such indignities. Her solution: a generator in the apartment should they lose power.

Nilaja Sun in Pike Street, at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Other characters come and go to flesh out the proceedings, particularly Evelyn’s brother Manny, just now returned from service in Afghanistan and the source of the income the family manages on. Manny is generally an ingratiating and agreeable sort—except when indeterminate triggers set off his PTSD, making him apt to cause some havoc with local Arab merchants. Neighbors, such as senile Mrs. Appelbaum, Ty, Manny’s pot-smoking chum, and Migdalia, Poppi’s woman-for-hire, add voices and occasions for reactions, as Evelyn tries her best to be staunch and patient like her deceased mother was—a healer who ran a botanica now closed.

Sun’s sure way of conjuring these characters opens their world to us and us to their world. One of the show’s more memorable moments is when a flashback lets us see Candi, as a child, campaigning for class president and sounding like a font of wisdom.

Nilaja Sun in Pike Street at Hartford Stage, photo by T. Charles Erickson

Before the show begins, Sun sits on the set’s lone chair, shelves of candles behind her, as the audience enters, seeming to commune within herself. She opens the show by reaching out to the audience, inviting rhythmic handclaps interspersed with deep breaths, as not only a way of focusing our attention but a way of making us all alert to each other and to the transformative possibilities of her story. Being present is key to the show’s message, showing how important the cohesion of this family—any family—is, while also hitting the audience with a tragedy that comes from the everydayness of bad decisions and bad luck.

The show’s final, indelible image is of the most at-risk character’s resilience, which is also in its way a cry for help. Nilaja Sun’s Pike Street finds its passion and its humor in the trials and joys of living and creates theater that feels—in our storm-stressed times—like a humanitarian effort.

Nilaja Sun in Pike Street, at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Pike Street
Written & performed by Nilaja Sun
Directed by Ron Russell

Scenic Design: Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams; Costume Design: Clint Ramos; Lighting Design: Tyler Micoleau; Sound Design: Ron Russell; Production Stage Manager: Molly Minor Eustis; Assistant Stage Manager: Nicole Wiegert; Production Manager: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy

Hartford Stage
January 9-February 2, 2020

Twins, Man, and a Vengeful God

Review of Is God Is, Yale Cabaret

One way to describe Aleshea Harris’ Is God Is—at Yale Cabaret directed by Christopher D. Betts, a second-year director at Yale School of Drama—is as a revenge play that might have been written by Sam Shepard, if Shepard were a black woman. Harris gleefully enters into Shepard terrain: the myths of the family played out in a world that mixes the underclass with the leisure class and grabs from tropes of the Western—with its willingness to trade on being compelled by fate—the road picture, as the place where paired psyches find bonds and lines of fracture, and the hoary story of how a younger generation must forge its being in some kind of struggle or fulfillment with an older one. The irony and absurdity of Shepard is there too, as well as a gripping sense of a cracked world where all debts must be paid in blood.

But there’s a further irony Harris mines as well. Sometime in the 1960s the phrase “black comedy” became pervasive, not as a racial distinction but rather to signify the notion that some comedy is “dark,” not vanilla, not easy-going and safe. Harris creates a form of black comedy that is deliberately black in a racialized way, making her African American characters take their rightful place in a certain American mythos. It’s as if all the nods to black culture of a Hollywood filmmaker eager to trade in appropriation—like Quentin Tarantino—has finally met a sensibility equal to that incentive. This is black black comedy and its ultimate target is not a culture of exclusion or misappropriation, but of a country—the one we all live in—that is full of deep injustices that can sometimes be entertainingly offset by violent revenge. The violence is almost cartoonish, in a nod to the way action films generally treat these matters, but because this is theater in a small space there is discomfort too.

Twin sisters Racine (Ciara Monique) and Anaia (Tavia Hunt) suffered bad burns as children in a fire set by their father that, they believe, left their mother dead. They were together through a series of foster homes as objects of, at best, pity, Anaia with lasting scars all over her face, Racine with scars covered by clothing. As the play opens, with the twins about 21, they learn by letter that their mother is still alive and living in a care facility in the “dirty south.” They journey to visit her. Known in the playbill as She, their mother (played by Abigail Onwunali) is known by the girls simply as God. Making her directive that they kill the man who tried to kill her a “mission from God.”

In some ways that set up is the best of the play. The interplay between Monique and Hunt is full of a kind of knowing mystery that compels us to figure out this world even as they must. Nothing like incredible childhood trauma to make the present an extension of the past. And Onwunali’s She is scary, funny and incredibly evocative. As the scripture has it: “thy God is a vengeful God,” and the girls accept their mission readily enough even though, as Anaia the “emotional” one says, they aren’t killers. Watching Racine transform into one is a journey in itself, one that Monique accomplishes by going deeper into the character, letting us see her as, indeed, her cold-blooded father’s child.

The first task the girls’ undertake—to worm their father’s whereabouts from Chuck Hall (Matthew Elijah Webb), a former associate of dad’s, now drinking heavily to get up the nerve to pill himself to death—is a classic of miscommunication with plenty of style to spare. Hall is a mess but he’s memorable and the girls are apt to think aloud in tandem in a very amusing way. Next up is dad’s yellow house on a hill, shared with his very bougie family, quite comically rendered by Gloria Majule as Angie, a Real Housewife at her wits’ end, son Riley (Anthony Brown), an arugula fetishist whose final freak out is full of manic energy, and his twin brother Scotch (Seun Soyemi), a would-be poet giddy with inspiration. Once Angie’s out of the way, the girls get mistaken by the boys as strippers and . . . well, the entire scene plays out as a takedown of showdowns and of a certain kind of status lifestyle that maybe needs to be beaten into submission.

Finally, there’s Brandon E. Burton in bad guy getup, complete with black cowboy hat, as Man. He’s well-spoken (aren’t villains always?) until he explodes, and he’s chilling in his utter detachment. The possibilities for rapport between father and offspring are there and might beguile us for a moment—particularly as Burton renders well the fascination of a man beyond the pale who might be capable of anything and who knows it—but we know in our hearts this is a “last one standing” deal.

That the show is so entertaining is a credit to Betts and his cast, all of whom create indelible characters, and his team, which uses the entire Cab playing space to make the action sprawl as it must—shout out particularly for the set design by Stephanie Bahniuk with Marcelo Martínez Garcia, and to Anteo Fabris’ sound design and the work on fights and intimacy of Kelsey Rainwater and Jonathan Jolly (which includes, I imagine, how to play dead body or maybe dead body convincingly in close proximity to the audience).

This version of Is God Is is not a play of fixed locations. It’s a play of legendary spaces we find ourselves in the midst of at key moments. Stage and the wider playing area blend to create the world the twins move through on their mission—which reads as a fate, as an idée fixe, as a plot that makes of parricide a blow against toxic masculinity, and as a final retribution that no doubt creates new scars for the already heavily scarred.

Is God Is
By Aleshea Harris
Directed by Christopher D. Betts

Set Designer: Stephanie Bahniuk; Costume Designer: April M. Hickman; Lighting Designer: Tully Goldrick; Sound Designer/Music Supervisor: Anteo Fabris; Projections Designers: Erin Sullivan and Hannah Tran; Fight and Intimacy Director: Kelsey Rainwater; Associate Set Designer: Marcelo Martínez Garcia; Associate Fight Director: Jonathan Jolly; Scenic Artist: Sarah Karl; Dramaturg: Faith Zamble; Technical Director: Lu Shaoqian; Producer: Dani Barlow; Stage Manager: Edmond O’Neal

Cast: Anthony Brown, Brandon E. Burton, Tavia Hunt, Gloria Majule, Ciara Monique, Abigail Onwunali, Seun Soyemi, Matthew Elijah Webb

Yale Cabaret
January 16-18, 2020

What's Next on the Local Theater Scene

2020 has launched and the Connecticut theater season resumes this week.

New Haven:

Local theater troupe The New Haven Theater Company features a staged reading for three nights this weekend—Thursday, January 16 through Saturday, January 18—at English Markets Building on Chapel Street. The work is a new play in development by NHTC member Christian Shaboo. The Three Wisemen is about a young man facing uncertainty in his romantic life who takes to the road with the titular “wisemen”—his longtime roommates—to confront the ghosts of his past. The reading, directed by Shaboo, features NHTC regulars George Kulp (seen this past fall in Retreat from Moscow) and John Watson (last seen in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest last season), as well as Aleta Staton, who appeared in Doubt in 2015, and newcomers Ny’Asia Davis, Solomon Green, and Eric Rey. For tickets for the limited seating go here.

At New Haven Theater Company this week only!

Tickets are also available for the next full production at NHTC: Steve Scarpa, who directed Our Town, Proof, and Waiting for Lefty and appeared in Middletown, A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay on the Death of Walt Disney, The Seafarer, and Doubt, among others, will direct J. Kevin Smith, who played the title role in Lucas Hnath’s …Death of Walt Disney, and Trevor Williams, who played Randall McMurphy in Cuckoo’s Nest, in Edward Albee’s Zoo Story, for three weekends, February 20-22 and 27-29, and March 5-7. This will be the first rendering of an Albee play by NHTC. (preview)

Yale Cabaret resumes its 52nd season at 217 Park Street this weekend—Thursday, January 16-Saturday, January 18—with a production of Is God Is by Aleshea Harris, directed by third-year Yale School of Drama director Christopher D. Betts. Betts directed the Cab’s season’s bracing opener, Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, formerly known as Southwest Africa, from the German Südwestafrika, between the years 1884-1915 as well as two shows last season. Harris’ play, which was staged at SoHo Rep in 2018, is described as “a modern myth about twin sisters who sojourn from the Dirty South to the California desert to exact righteous revenge against their father in an epic saga” that mixes tropes from “Spaghetti Westerns” and Afropunk culture (review). Next up at the Cab is a brand new musical by third-year sound designer Liam Bellman-Sharpe called Elon Musk and the Plan to Blow Up Mars: The Musical which explores the catchy idea that to prevent the colonization of Mars we must destroy the red planet to save the blue one. Thursday, January 23-Saturday, January 25 (review); for tickets and more information, including dining reservations, go here.

At Yale Cabaret this week only!

The Yale Repertory Theatre returns later this month with its third show of the season: Manahatta, a play by Mary Kathryn Nagle, former Executive Director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. In the play, set in 2008, a female descendant of the Lenape tribe—who were forcefully removed from the island of Manahatta by the Dutch in the 1600s—works on Wall Street during the mortgage crisis that opened questions of land ownership—and capitalist greed—anew. Directed by Laurie Woolery, who directed the play in its world premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2018 and directed El Huracán, the Rep’s inventive season opener of 2018-19. Friday, January 24- Saturday, February 15 (review); in previews until Thursday, January 30; for tickets and more information go here.

The third and last show of the Yale School of Drama season plays in early February: Alice, Robert Wilson’s experimental treatment of Alice in Wonderland, with cabaret-style songs by Tom Waits, will be directed by third-year director Ellis Logan. Saturday, February 1-Friday, February 7 (preview) (review); for tickets and more information go here.

At Long Wharf Theatre, the third show of the season runs through February. Directed by Rebecca Martínez, I Am My Own Wife is Doug Wright’s Pulitzer and Tony-winning one-person play about Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a transgender woman who survives the Nazi and Communist regimes in East Germany. Mason Alexander Park—who has played a variety of genderbending roles such as the Emcee in Cabaret, Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show, and Hedwig in Hedwig and the Angry Inch—plays Charlotte and more than thirty other characters embodied in the role (preview). Wednesday, February 5-Sunday, March 1; in previews until Wednesday, February 12; for tickets and more information go here (review).

Mason Alexander Park

Hartford:

Hartford Stage’s first show of 2020 is in previews and opens this week. Directed by Ron Russell, Pike Street is Obie-winning playwright and actor Nilaja Sun’s solo show in which she plays dozens of roles in a story of struggle, survival and redemption for three generations of a Puerto Rican family on New York’s Lower East Side. In previews since January 9, the show opens on Friday, January 17 and continues through Sunday, February 2 (review); for tickets and more information go here.

Opening night this Friday at Hartford Stage!

Playhouse on Park in West Hartford continues its 11th season with Tenderly: The Rosemary Clooney Musical which features Susan Haefner, who originated the title role, as Rosemary Clooney. The show by James Yates Vogt and Mark Friedman is directed by Kyle Brand, who directed an energetic Avenue Q at Playhouse on Park in 2017, and depicts both the successes and struggles of Clooney’s long career, including such signature hits as “Come On-a My House,” with music direction by Robert James Tomasulo and choreography by MK Lawson. Previews are tonight—January 15—and tomorrow night with the opening reception on Friday, January 17; the show runs until Sunday, February 2; for tickets and more information, go here.

TheaterWorks returns at the end of the month with its second subscription show of the season. The Lifespan of a Fact by Jeremy Karekan & David Murrell and Gordon Farrell is a CT premiere and the play was a NYTimes Critics’ Pick during its Broadway run in 2018. Directed by Tracy Brigden, who directed the delirious Hand to God at TheaterWorks in 2018, the play is a comedic treatment of the “current media tug of war” about so-called “fake news” and the way in which spin affects the status of facts. The three-person cast features actors with CT work in their resumés: Nick LeMedica starred in TheaterWorks’ Hand to God; Tasha Lawrence starred in A Doll’s House, Part 2 at TheaterWorks in 2019 and in The Roommates at Long Wharf in 2018, and Rufus Collins was in Long Wharf’s The Old Masters in 2011. Thursday, January 30 to Sunday, March 8; Press night: Thursday, February 8 (review); Pay-What-You-Can: Thursday, January  30 and Wednesday, February 5; All-Free Student Matinee: Saturday, February 8; for tickets and more information go here.

Love's the Word

Review of Spring Sonnets by Don Yorty

In his sonnets, the poet Don Yorty gives us a piece of his mind and a chunk of his spirit.

Not so much small as compact, that literary miniature known as the sonnet has held pride of place—not just in English—for 500 years. From the oft-quoted creations of Shakespeare and John Donne to Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets, 1964—considered his greatest work—the 14-line stanza, of varying rhyme schemes and assorted structures, has proven a satisfying form. Is it the brevity? Is it the fact that, whether as writer or reader, we know approximately what we’re getting? Is it because this deft instrument seems particularly amenable to certain feeling-states, or to any?

To one writer it’s a nature poem, to another the perfect vehicle for elegy or celebration. For the late Wanda Coleman in her American Sonnets, it’s a vehicle for ex-lover vengeance, bitter wit, and funky reminiscence. This malleability provides a good deal of the sonnet’s allure. You can cover the waterfront of feeling and experience. The poems may look similar but produce all manner of effects.

In the paragraph-length afterword to his Spring Sonnets, New York poet and novelist Don Yorty says he began writing sonnets after not having written a poem for twenty years. The immediate occasion, he explains, was America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. “I think because I opposed the invasion so much,” he writes, “I needed something I could control.” The sonnet was something he’d never attempted. He wrote 180, initially, then culled them to the 90 included here.

Bush’s criminal war may have been the catalyst, but the war and its destruction and the more general predations of imperial policy are rarely mentioned in Spring Sonnets. Rather, war as a constant presence constitutes the psychological and spiritual backdrop to Yorty’s poems, creating a sense of helplessness and existential angst that is our “new normal,” out of which a new awareness, a clearer vision, comes into being and is duly recorded (think Auden in the Thirties). Poem #20 is one of the few that mentions the war(s). Here it is in full:

Just as I write two hawks above the trees
fly fast away. Shadow of a buzzard
passes over my shoulder hopefully.
I was expecting rain, impeded start
but the sun’s come out, made the day open
as a pursued lover turning might smile
and kiss me on the mouth. Surprised I am
chosen I am happy as can be while
everything gets worse. Soldiers still fight
in Afghanistan and Iraq, two wars
I hadn’t wanted, but then who am I?
The wind blows my pages while I write for
those killed in battle. Wind, give me the breath
the word eternal not alive or dead.

The tone, typical throughout this volume, is both personal and direct. The method lets the poet trace out the movement of thought across the mind, notating the places where it happens to land. Anything is game, and any set of circumstances, seemingly, can make this happen. For instance, thought itself becomes subject to examination, as in #28 where Yorty pauses to reflect on language and its relation to consciousness and cognition:

[…] What’s thinking
but flying, following thoughts. Why are they
always words?

They’re not, of course. Thoughts are often simply feelings to which specific sounds have yet to attach. Or, if they are attached, are not words. (Music, for instance, where tonality leads us directly into specific, but undefined, emotional states.) This is an idea that quickly gathers complexity. The poet’s question is rhetorical, necessarily, since to answer it would take us into linguistics and theories of language. Yorty’s sonnet, whether considering the relation of thought to words or of a private citizen to war, is allusive rather than exploratory. Its insights awaken curiosity rather than supply answers.

The poems are intimate, not so much in the “confessional” way wherein contemporary American poetry makes the Catholic church look like a piker, but in the sense of their tone being wholly unguarded. If making decisions, or forming clearer observations, arrives as a result of the various voices in our heads engaging in debate, then on these pages we’re allowed (encouraged?) to eavesdrop. This tone of confident disclosure makes for an engaging and ongoing I-and-thou effect. Reading these puts us in the presence of a mind often astonished at the ordinary because the ordinary rarely is merely that to a mind willing to look further or deeper, or to step back and gain perspective about what it observes. This curiosity and commitment enable the poet to take on just about any subject matter and say something startling or new. 

Yorty does not abuse that freedom by running hither and yon, making us chase after his meaning. He sticks to his ken, and that adds to the power of the performance. Spring Sonnets maps out a world the reader can readily comprehend and stays there. That world consists of two places: the New York City neighborhood where Yorty has lived and worked as a second-language instructor for thirty years, and a rural retreat somewhere in the Pennsylvania mountains. The poems move between these locales. A single season is the time frame, what happened then is the subject matter.

More importantly, the poetic voice leans on experience without making that the point, giving the poems not just a significant tonal difference but determining choices all around: what to notice, what to write about, what to say, finally. The first sentence of Sonnet #31, for instance (“Today for the first time in my life…”) launches a disquisition on technology. The loss of a cell phone becomes a reverie about the telephone. No one ever lost one when it came with a cord plugged into a wall. Moreover, there was a time when if you noticed someone walking down the street alone and talking volubly, the implication was that mental illness was somehow involved. Now we see such behavior all the time and assume a cell phone conversation is taking place. But our reliance on this torqued up communication device means “no one’s alone anymore.” The fact that technology shears away, one by one, the dimensions of privacy, is alarming but inescapable.

[…] Times change. There’s nothing about
it you can do, if you don’t change, you
don’t move and you’re run down by the future.

Whether it’s Cachito the cat, squirrels on a park bench, a butterfly making its way across a pond, whatever the subject these poems are invariably meditations on the immediate, as for instance #41 (“At any moment it’s going to rain…”), wherein a rainstorm effectively stops composition in mid-measure. Add to that the notion that anything is a fit subject for poetry and (thank you, Dr. Williams) what results is a simplicity of expression and gratifying absence of self-conscious literary affect. In poems mentioning war, politics, death, classroom repartee, or describing the woods or milkweed pods, the effectiveness of the level of engagement owes much to the plain-speaking that avoids that recognizably elevated vernacular—poetry!—alerting readers that someone’s trying to say something important. The voice of Spring Sonnets is the same one we use to share our thoughts and observations in everyday conversation. Sonnet #19 (“My hands are numb and yet the sun is bright.”), for instance, observes and records the changes evident in nature as spring manifests. Its subject is the strange, unfolding chaos that ensues when the temperature rises a few degrees and the grip of frost is broken. It’s the suddenness and multifariousness of this process that always surprises, and that effect is replicated in certain details (bird sounds, vanished ice, sudden appearance of white flowers) before shifting to thoughts of how we change as we get older, looking behind to that time of life—youth—when we tended to think only of ourselves.

Though sonnets can be about anything, they gained their preeminent place in English as expressions of love. Love is not just ardor, romance or sexual attraction. The Greeks, for instance, recognized multiple forms of love, including affection, friendship, familial love, universal love (for strangers, nature, or God, known as Agape), practical love and self-love. All emerge in these poems one way or another. The transforming power of love is Yorty’s theme here, I suspect, because, as an older poet “with time to spare but not one hour to waste,” he sees love as an animating force, always present, often concealed:

[…] As I grow
old it seems possible to really love
even the startled snake scared in the leaves […]

That’s not to say the view is all Woodstock. When the poems shift back from the Poconos to the Lower East Side, a certain tension surfaces. Poem #11, for example, fumes at the manner in which a crew of anarchists trashed the local public space, “gerrymandered the park bench to drink, drug / take a long piss when the beer filled them up.” The poet’s willingness to go where emotion takes him—whether pleasant, deep or seriously annoyed—deepens the tone of Spring Sonnets. Mostly, though, Yorty takes the long view, one in which light stands in for our fleeting present and night is the death that’s waiting around the corner.

This being a book of sonnets, it’d be impossible not to weigh in on technical matters. Various rules hold that, for instance, the lines of a sonnet must be ten syllables each, that sonnets are written in iambic pentameter, that they deploy end rhymes in an ABAB CDCD pattern, etc. All that would’ve made for a different kind of book than Spring Sonnets. Here the rhymes, internal and at line ends, are playful rather than constricting or self-conscious. Some, like the poem that got rained out, employ ABBA end rhymes, some AABB. Slant rhymes often suffice and are gestural, even whimsical. Several times, for example, the poet rhymes “a” with “the.” This works both to keep the lines rolling and to acknowledge the five-century provenance of the form. The sonnet, here, turns out to be the mode most appropriate for Don Yorty’s re-entry as a poet. He’s clearly comfortable working it and it works because he knows how to make it work. As Sonnet #158 notes:  “…the music’s always true while it plays.”

Spring Sonnets
By Don Yorty
Indolent Books, 2019
Paperback, 114 pages

The book may be ordered here.

Don Yorty is a poet, educator, and garden activist living in New York City. He is the author of two previous poetry collections, A Few Swimmers Appear and Poet Laundromat (both from Philadelphia Eye & Ear), and he is included in Out of This World, An Anthology of the Poetry of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 1966–1991. His novel What Night Forgets was published by Herodias Press in 2000. He blogs at donyorty.com: an archive of current art, his own writing, and work of other poets.

Jim Cory’s most recent publications are Wipers Float In The Neck Of The Reservoir (The Moron Channel, 2018) and 25 Short Poems (Moonstone Press, 2016). He has edited poetry selections by contemporary American poets including James Broughton (Packing Up for Paradise, Black Sparrow Press, 1998), Jonathan Williams (Jubilant Thicket, Copper Canyon Press, 2005), and, most recently, Have You Seen This Man, the Castro Poems of Karl Tierney (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019).

Putting the Fun in Dysfunction

Review of Fun Home, Yale School of Drama

The Yale School of Drama production of Fun Home, the Tony-winning musical by Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron, based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, is something to behold. A two-story home, with a band in the back on the ground floor and an artist-studio/observation post on the second-floor, graces the stage at the University Theater. The design by Jimmy Stubbs wonderfully foregrounds the notion of “home” that the musical, playing through December 20, interrogates with its story of dysfunction and coping.

The open playing space in front can become the Bechdel family’s museum-like home with its prized antiques, or easily morph into the funeral home that Bruce, the father (JJ McGlone), operates out of the house, or the dorm-room where Middle Alison (Doireann Mac Mahon) discovers the wonders of lesbian love with Joan (Madeline Seidman) or a hotel room where Small Alison anxiously interrogates her dad. A sliding door in a wall gives onto the piano Helen, the mother (Zoe Mann), an actress, practices on and, in one eerie tableau, the space where Bruce works on a naked cadaver (Dario Ladani Sanchez). Key to the appeal of this well-paced production is the way director/choreographer Danilo Gambini makes use of the space, moving the characters through a kind of memory house as Alison (Eli Pauley) tries to come to terms with the enduring influence of her troubled father.

The company of Fun Home with music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, directed by Danilo Gambini. Photo by T. Charles Erickson, Yale School of Drama, 2019

As told, the story of Alison, a comic-book artist, consists of nonlinear scenes, as they seem to occur in Alison’s memory. Always addressing the audience, Alison pitches her appeal to us, making us witnesses to her vexed history. It’s not just the funeral home and her dad’s way of imposing his tastes and his standards (he dismisses comic-book art in favor of serious art). We learn that Bruce pursues young men for sex while remaining the patriarch and, though his wife is aware of his proclivities, that he hides behind a lie of heteronormativity that seems to warp him. And his underage liaisons put the entire family at risk. Then there’s that night in New York when Bruce is willing to leave his kids asleep in a hotel room while he goes out for . . . whatever he goes out for. Alison is upfront about all she doesn’t know about him, and her father’s death—she’s convinced it was suicide—confronts her as a need to weigh both his failings and hers.

The perspective of Alison, as someone who gradually finds the entertainment value of her life, is key to the power of the YSD production. Pauley gives Alison a reflective irony and her presence as onlooker is made manifest by the way Gambini keeps her placed on the periphery of scenes. The effect, aided by visual effects such as Camilla Tassi’s evocative projections of drawings, scribbles and text, and Nicole E. Lang’s varied lighting design, is of a world that is shaping itself into expressive arrangements as Alison gropes to find her own truth.

The songs that make Fun Home a musical have a certain obligatory quality, as if the story of Alison and her family—essentially a tale of estrangement—might be made alright if they can sing about it. The fun songs, like “Come to the Fun Home” and “Raincoat of Love,” show a lively knack for the kinds of family performers—the Jackson Five, the Partridge Family—that Small Alison loves (the latter number features Sanchez as a teenybopper heartthrob and Seidman and Mac Mahon as dead-ringers for Susan Dey in Phuong Nguyen’s costumes). When they appear in tandem, the three Bechdel children—Alison (Taylor Hoffman), Christian (Juliana Aiden Martinez) and John (Laurie Ortega-Murphy)—are fast-moving stick puppets, giving them the infectious charm of the kind of televised entertainment that would appeal to the children. Small Alison, a larger puppet voiced by Hoffman, with puppeteering by Martinez and Ortega-Murphy, maintains an air of melancholy that might be less available to a child actor (puppet design by Anatar Marmol-Gagne).

Middle Alison’s big number of coming out, “Changing My Major,” is thoroughly charming in Doireann Mac Mahon’s rendering—there’s shyness and heat and awkwardness and joy, and Mac Mahon moves about the space as if in a pas de deux with her own sense of wonder. The more emotionally taxing “Days and Days” is a knockout, delivered by Zoe Mann as the one place in the show when Helen comes into her own, finally reaching out to Alison and acknowledging the emotional costs of life with Bruce.

As Bruce, JJ McGlone is perfectly suited to the role. He looks the English teacher—one of Bruce’s occupations—and he plays the doting or disgruntled father well and is able to mood-swing in a way that makes Bruce feel complicated. His striped suit and glances at his reflection while singing “not too bad,” let us know he’s something of a player, but he’s also vulnerable in ways that make him not quite the grown-up Small and Middle Alison assume he is.

Alison (Eli Pauley) and Bruce (JJ McGlone) in Fun Home with music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, directed by Danilo Gambini. Photo by T. Charles Erickson, Yale School of Drama, 2019

The trajectory of Bruce’s character is given two powerful moments late in the play. Gambini places the important car ride between Bruce and Middle Alison (but with Alison taking her place—indeed, the shutting out of Middle Alison behind a sliding wall is very effective) on the edge of the stage. The intimacy that the two almost find is there for us more than for them, and so the scene registers as the tragic lost chance Alison sees it as. Finally, Bruce’s big number, “Edges of the World,” is sung by McGlone from a platform on the second floor, a provisional space from which he tries to survey not only an old house he’s trying to renovate, but also a life that, like the house, may be beyond repair. Like Helen’s “Days and Days,” “Edges” expresses Alison’s sense of her parents’ desperation, which becomes, via song, uplifting and poignant.

Finally, the flying Small Alison—a puppet sustained in midair—is fully buoyed by the merging voices of Hoffman, Pauley and Mac Mahon, affording us a complex moment in which the child contains the elders and the elders share the child’s simple trust in a father who has yet to bully or betray her. Fun Home, in this fully satisfying production, lets the wishful thinking of art’s answer to life hang on that fleeting moment of perfect balance.

Fun Home
Music by Jeanine Tesori
Book and Lyrics by Lisa Kron
Based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel
Directed by Danilo Gambini

Music Director: Jill Brunelle; Scenic Designer: Jimmy Stubbs; Costume Designer: Phuong Nguyen; Lighting Designer: Nicole E. Lang; Sound Designer: Noel Nichols; Projection Designer: Camilla Tassi; Puppet Designer: Anatar Marmol-Gagne; Production Dramaturg: Emily Sorensen; Technical Director: Dominick Pinto; Stage Manager: Edmond O’Neal

Musicians: Jill Brunelle, keyboard 1; Liam Bellman-Sharpe, guitar; Margaret E. Douglas, bass; Frances Pollock, keyboard 2; Jim Stavris, drums; Emily Duncan Wilson, reeds

Cast: Taylor Hoffman, Doireann Mac Mahon, Zoe Mann, Juliana Aiden Martinez, JJ McGlone, Laurie Ortega-Murphy, Eli Pauley, Dario Ladani Sanchez, Madeline Seidman

Yale School of Drama
December 14-20, 2019

Worn-out Whiteness

Review of Two Mile Hollow, Yale Cabaret

“O wad some pow’r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us,” mused Scottish poet Robert Burns in his “To a Louse.” White folk are being gifted by some newly empowered powers, this century, to perhaps see ourselves as others see us, and some might be loath to open the present. In Two Mile Hollow, now playing at Yale Cabaret, Japanese American playwright Leah Nanako Winkler takes aim at the “white people by the water” play, and the particularities of that oft-treated scenario—she draws on Chekhov, Williams, O’Neill, Tracy Letts, to name but a few—means that “we” may feel let off the hook, for the moment. Even a few less than nimble references to Old Blue only go so far in cracking the high culture façade that makes “whiteness”—like capitalism—simply that thing you exist in. As the old Palmolive soap commercial intoned: “Dish-soap? You’re soaking in it.”

Directed by Kat Yen with a nonwhite cast drawn from New York, rather than the Yale School of Drama, the play has a certain manic charm. Its comic sense, with Asians in blonde wigs and a Hampton’s sense of “down home,” is more appropriate to sketch comedy than to a satire of canonical plays, which means we can all laugh at little cost. We’ve all been bored by bad productions of such plays, whether or not we felt ourselves akin to their inhabitants.

Blythe (Cynthia Fernandez), Mary (Diane Chen), Joshua (Vishaal Reddy), Christopher (Vin Kridakorn), Charlotte (Jennifer Tsay) in the Yale Cabaret production of Two Mile Hollow, directed by Kat Yen, December 12-14, 2019

One Mile Hollow indeed shows that you needn’t be white to mock obtuse, affluent, and grandly self-involved characters like Winkler’s Donnellys. The fun had at the expense of the shiftless son, Joshua (Vishaal Reddy), younger son Christopher (Vin Kridakorn), the heir apparent to deceased dad’s film stardom, twice-divorced daughter Mary (Diane Chen), a walking complex of neuroses, and pill-popping hot mom Blythe (Cynthia Fernandez) is keen, with the characters self-importantly aware of their theatrical antecedents. So we get Mary acting like a bird and the family’s collective “Ach!” is instead a “caw!” to honor The Seagull that flits about the periphery of the action. Yen’s set, of kitchen, dining room table, and garden, gives us at a glance the range of domestic space. The stage is set, we see at once, for skeletons in closets, for confessions and accusations, wandering desires, and messy humanness—with laughs. In that, the play doesn’t let us down.

The interloper in this quasi-incestual soup is Charlotte (Jennifer Tsay), Chris’s assistant whom Joshua sees as “the help,” then tries to woo away from his Oscar-nominated brother. Charlotte gets to be not only the focus of a triangle with the brothers, she’s also triangulated in Winkler’s threesome of dramatic arts: theater (the family onstage), movies (the father and son’s careers), and, where Charlotte hopes to find meaning and celebrity, streaming online video. We may laugh at the spiral down from the classic locus of collective catharsis to the individual interface on a device in your palm, but such is where we’re headed as “collective” comes to be yet another exploded myth, like “universal.”

Charlotte turns out alright, though not unironized, in Tsay’s shrugging acceptance of her status outside those bastions she needn’t conquer. She manages because she stops wanting to do things the way those people do, and because she’s able to let herself get bought off, and to resist Blythe’s overtures which might’ve hooked someone more beguiled by privilege.

Joshua (Vishaal Reddy), Christopher (Vin Kridakorn) in Yale Cabaret’s production of Two Mile Hollow, December 12-14, 2019

On the privileged front, Vishaal Reddy gives the most fun, sending up the vocal mannerisms of a host of white boys apt to find their inner worlds precious cargo. The pitch of Mary’s pathos, in Diane Chen’s rendering, has a cartoonishness that makes the occasional quaver into lunacy all the more arresting. Vin Kridakorn has the requisite looks and detachment that make Christopher a desirable property, and his arguments with Joshua are the stuff of spoiled immaturity. As the mother they all fear to offend, Cynthia Fernandez is mercurial and commanding—a caricature that steals from the best and knows how. The show is a constant barrage of mannerisms and allusions and jabs and jibes, so that even if one or another doesn’t land the next one likely will.

The effort to depict a family—any family, and comprised however exclusively or inclusively you like—if genuine, always opens private life to mockery. Time was, the introduction of the “downstairs” view of “upstairs” was enough to assure a certain irony, then it had to be the “kitchen comedy” of the folks at home, insular in their petty familial wars. Here, it’s the masquerade of “the type” itself that is up-for-grabs, aiming to expose white, privileged cliché but without risking a tangible alternative. After all, Charlotte’s big idea is a show that foregrounds the “fat girl” and “Asian chick” caricatures that usually play sidekick in some white girl feature. Will she get to star in her own romcom one day? Maybe, but what’s that got to do with Chekhov?

All in all, life is pretty hollow in Two Mile Hollow, and too many of the laughs, like the lobster dish at the French bistro Blythe no longer frequents, “lack bite.”

Two Mile Hollow
By Leah Nanako Winkler
Proposed & Directed by Kat Yen

Producer: Jason Gray; Scenic Designer: Kat Yen; Costume Co-Designers: Phuong Nguyen, Miguel Urbino; Lighting Co-Designers: Tully Goldrick, Casey Tonnies; Sound Designer & Composer: Daniela Hart; Technical Director: Laura Copenhaver; Dramaturg: Henriette Rietveld; Stage Manager: Zak Rosen; Choreographer: Michael Raine

Cast: Diane Chen, Cynthia Fernandez, Vin Kridakorn, Vishaal Reddy, Jennifer Tsay

Yale Cabaret
December 12-14, 2019

The Art of Interfacing

Review of I=N=T=E=R=F=A=C=E, Yale Cabaret

The terms by which we understand human interaction are fluid, including biological and sociological descriptors (e.g., “mating ritual”) and more abstract or rhetorical ones (e.g., “communicative tropes”) and, for quite some time, technological terms. Such as “interface.” A word for the communication between computing systems, it has become a term for how a complex system (such as “you”) interact with another complex system (such as “me”). What is the means of our “interface”? What “computes,” exactly, in any interaction between us?

I=N=T=E=R=F=A=C=E is the name of the current show at Yale Cabaret (last show tonight at 11 pm), proposed and performed by Dakota Stipp, a third-year sound designer at Yale School of Drama, with contributions from MFA students from the schools of Music and of Art: Kyla Arsadjaja, performer and movement designer, Cam Camden, producer and technical director, Ross Wightman, performer and instrument designer, and Ye Qin Zhu, performer and content designer. The roles of design and performance are indeed interfacing throughout the piece, as the performers interact with various devices, instruments and mechanisms designed to make the performance happen. What they create occurs in a space that is part performance, part art installation.

A still of I=N=T=E=R=F=A=C=E at Yale Cabaret, December 5-7, 2019

What this means for the audience is that we look on at five figures who move about purposely in what seems another world. In most theatrical pieces, that “world” is an imagined one that acts as a facsimile of the one we live in, with actors playing other people who occupy that world. Here, the performers play with props that are works of art while inhabiting a space enhanced by projections on hanging scrims and spoken word and sound effects, lighting effects, and musical sounds. It’s a textured world of “effects,” and what effect that has depends upon the viewers and their capacity as receptors.

For me, the delight of the show is provided by Ross Wightman in a sort of comic relief sidebar. Wearing a voluminous wig, he sits at a table across from a full-size plastic or vinyl skeleton, operating miked plate and cutlery, creating a sound poem of scratches, clanking, feedback, echo and vibration. It’s not mime because sound is its purpose, but it’s not a scene either. It’s an enactment, a making-something-happen that occurs three times in the course of the evening, each time (and from evening to evening) different. The night I saw the show (Friday at 11), Wightman, in the second segment, kissed the hand of the skeleton. In the third, he drew the skeleton in close, both leaning across the table. When he collapsed and released the skeleton, it sat upright. That, to me, seemed a fitting end to the entire show, though there was a bit more to follow.

As theater, Wightman’s segments give us a bit of what we expect: setting, costume, lighting, props, and actions that could be “symbolic”—a figure appearing to eat and drink while an onlooker has died, or perhaps stands in for those who are starving. There’s also the neat reference to the annual enactments of our national fall holidays—the skeleton of Halloween and the ostentatious meal of Thanksgiving. No matter how you take it, though, in the end my admiration was for how Wightman “played” objects as instruments and how Stipp had created a sound stage so that we could appreciate the music of the mundane.

Ye Qin Zhu and Dakota Stipp in I=N=T=E=R=F=A=C=E, Yale Cabaret, December 5-7, 2019

Elsewhere, that sound stage creates other remarkable effects, such as spoken elements that become a texture of sounds and words that can feel as close as a voice in one’s ear at times, or can be made to drop to the status of sound effects through distortion. Phrases float out of the flow and stick in the mind, about parasites, or feasting on a mango, or how bodies become water.

And while the aural stimulation is almost constant, so is the visual. One sequence has the performers carrying onto the playing space wire sculptures. There are lights throwing the objects’ wiry shadows on the scrims, and the pieces, at first separate, are assembled until one grouping resembles a kind of giant monument, the other perhaps a store display. We watch assembly and disassembly, we see the scrims become a ground for flowing images that look like dendrites or that solidify into patterned fabric, or become a view into a plane of bouncing lights.

In a sense, the show is all about patterns—of light, of sound, of texture, of behavior—and where the main focus falls is apt to be a bit like picking out the exact moment when image and sound coalesced with just the right balance. The ingenuity of the show is in its technical features—and that includes the performers/technicians of the event—but its effect is like spending time in a gallery of kinetic artworks. Something with which, you’ll soon realize, you rarely get to interface.

I=N=T=E=R=F=A=C=E
Proposed by Dakota Stipp
Created by Kyla Arsadjaja, Cam Camden, Dakota Stipp, Ross Wightman, Ye Qin Zhu

Performers: Kyla Arsadjaja, Cam Camden, Dakota Stipp, Ross Wightman, Ye Qin Zhu

Production Designer: Dakota Stipp; Technical Director: Cam Camden; Content Designer: Ye Qin Zhu; Movement Designer: Kyla Arsadjaja; Instrument Designer: Ross Wightman

Yale Cabaret
December 5-7, 2019

Next week the Cabaret returns for its last show of 2019: Leah Nanako Winkler’s Two Mile Hollow, directed by third-year director Kat Yen. The director, playwright and 4 out of 5 cast members are Asian as well as members of the creative team, which quite likely hasn’t been the case for  a Yale Cabaret show before. The play, by a Japanese American from Kentucky, satirizes the tendency to represent, in plays and television, “the” American family as middle-class white. December 12-14.

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