Auld Acquaintance

Review of It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play, at Hartford Stage

Hartford Stage’s holiday offering this year takes a break from the annual staging of A Christmas Carol—a Ghost Story in favor of a more streamlined, less effects-laden show. Instead of flying ghosts and bedecked sleighs and the full trappings of a Dickensian Christmas, we have Joe Landry’s adaptation of an American classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, the Frank Capra film from 1946 that centered on how a potential business catastrophe at Christmas cemented the values of the postwar community of Bedford Falls, NY. The film, which is generally playing somewhere on television at Christmastime, showcases James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore and a host of beloved actors who have become indelible figures of a bygone small-town America. Landry’s adaptation is actually set in a radio studio as a live broadcast, so that a town’s worth of characters can be played by five skilled voice actors: Jake Laurents (Gerardo Rodriguez), Freddy Filmore (Michael Preston), Sally Applewhite (Shirine Babb), Lana Sherwood (Jennifer Bareilles) and Harry “Jazzbo” Heywood (Evan Zes), with an onstage Foley—or sound effects—artist (Leer Leary) providing crucial backup. 

The cast of It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen & Rachel Alderman; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Directed by Melia Bensussen and Rachel Alderman, the joys of the play take place on several levels. First, there’s the show-biz aspect: we’re watching ostensible radio actors ham it up for a live audience, complete with an applause sign so that the listeners at home will know we’re there and loving it. Thus, we, the audience, are playing an audience and responding accordingly. Related to that is the fact that the actors—invisible to those fictional listeners—are visible to us, even when they almost miss cues or carry on sotto voce chats in the background or one-up each other with glares and snickers or flirt with body language. And on that score, keep an eye on Lear Leery—he’s not only a one-man sound-board, he’s also an onlooker who knows the show frontwards and backwards and reacts accordingly. Then there’s the story itself, which is heartwarming and corny and quaint and magical, all at once. The radio actors know all that and also that it’s a lot of fun to do. It helps to know the story as well as the actors do (I do) but even if you don’t, you can get caught up in trying to imagine the different characters these quick-change voices bring to life. They’re all there: George and Mary Bailey, Uncle Billy, Ma Bailey, brother Harry Bailey, Old Man Potter, Mr. Gower, Mr. Martini, Violet Bick, the Bailey kids, and of course Ernie and Bert as well as a host of background voices.

Jennifer Bareilles, Shirine Babb, Michael Preston, Evan Zes and Gerardo Rodriguez in It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play; photo by T. Charles Erickson

George Bailey, chief exec at a struggling Building and Loan he inherited from his dad, is suddenly vulnerable to take over and even extortion because his daft Uncle Billy mislaid a sizable deposit that has fallen into the hands of the grasping and covetous town big wig Old Man Potter. George’s night of despair on Christmas eve earns him the intercession of “angel second class” Clarence Oddbody. The two main roles of George and Clarence are enacted by Gerardo Rodriguez as Laurents and Evan Zes as Heywood. The chemistry is good and Rodriguez brings a bit more gravitas to George than is sometimes the case. He’s a take-charge guy who we expect will battle his way out of any difficulty. Zes’s Clarence is less flighty than the original and is more like someone who has entered a movie he was watching and wants to see if his intervention will work or not. And it’s a great treat to see Michael Preston (recently Hartford Stage’s Scrooge) do the hat and voice-switching necessary to enact a heated exchange between Potter and Uncle Billy.

Leer Leary in It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The first two thirds of the play provide the backstory and that’s when the radio show elements are foregrounded. It’s all got a nostalgic tinge—including ads with jingles set to Christmas tunes—and provides a spirited evocation of the effects of radio, the spectacle of live performance, and the fun of mixing both at once. What’s particularly lively in this production are how the personalities of the radio actors inflect the roles they play with their voices so that interesting frictions occur with the actors letting viewers in on their own responses to the roles (especially effective there are Bareilles and Babbs whose Applewhite and Sherwood clearly have some issues).

Evan Zes (Clarence) and Gerardo Rodriguez (George Bailey, back) in It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Director Bensussen and Alderman shift the play’s mise en scene when Clarence enters the story. Trap doors and an upper platform come into use and suddenly we’re aware that we’re watching a play on the Hartford Stage, and that the show’s spatial concept extends beyond the borders of the radio studio. It’s a very effective way to register the difference of a world without George Bailey. The play has moved from being a comic evocation of familiar types and the kind of dramatized moments radio highlights with sound and music to an actual play that borders on a tragedy of lost opportunity. The world with no George in it—fighting the good fight for his community, his family and friends—is a darker, more dangerous place. Unlike the Scrooge story, where the fear of leading a selfish, wasted life shocks an old miser into generosity, the crux of It’s a Wonderful Life is that commitments and obligations are the stuff of life and anyone who has lived has affected other lives in indelible ways. The emotional tone of the play is served well by the closing sing-along of Auld Lang Syne, a tribute to the townfolks’ old acquaintance with one another and ours with them.

Jennifer Bareilles, Gerardo Rodriguez and Evan Zes in It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play; photo by T. Charles Erickson

In 1946, when It’s a Wonderful Life first played in movie theaters, there had been a loss of nearly 300,000 U.S. citizens who didn’t return from the war. As of today, the casualties from Covid-19, in the States alone, is over 800,000. The commemoration that closes the play isn’t just “sentimental hogwash,” as Mr. Potter would claim, but rather a way of saying we’re lucky to be here and we’d like to remember those who aren’t, thanking them all for their wonderful lives.

Shirine Babb in It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play; photo by T. Charles Erickson

It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play
Adapted by Joe Landry
Based on the story, The Greatest Gift by Philip Van Doren Stern
From the screenplay by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra, and Jo Swerling
Directed by Melia Bensussen & Rachel Alderman

Scenic Design: Stephanie Osin Cohen; Costume Design: An-Lin Dauber; Lighting Design: Evan C. Anderson; Sound Design: Frederick Kennedy; Wig & Hair Design: J. Jared Janas; Dramaturg: Zoë Golub-Sass; Production Stage Manager: Kelly Hardy

Cast: Shirine Babb, Jennifer Bareilles, Leer Leary, Michael Preston, Gerardo Rodriguez, Evan Zes

Hartford Stage
November 26-December 26, 2021

Another Miracle

Review of Falsettoland, Music Theatre of Connecticut

Falsettoland, now playing at Music Theatre of Connecticut through November 21, directed by Kevin J. Connors is a quirky, sappy, funny, tear-jerker of a musical. And how many shows can you say that about?

The cast of the Music Theatre of Connecticut production of Falsettoland, directed by Kevin Connors; photo by Alex Mogillo

What’s it about? Well, really it’s about love, but the context for the vicissitudes of love involves gays and straights, Jews and a few non-Jews. The show’s humor is decidedly arch—as for instance in both versions of “the Miracle of Judaism” or in “Baseball Game” or “Everyone Hates Their Parents”—and its play upon our sympathies stems from our acceptance that—to vary Tolstoy—“all dysfunctional relationships are unique in their dysfunction.” For Marvin (Dan Sklar) the dysfunction is starting to double-down. In the first part of Falsettos—Falsettoland is the second half of the longer musical—he left his wife, Trina (Corinne C. Broadbent), for his lover Whizzer (Max Meyers). As Falsettoland opens, Marvin and Whizzer have split up and Trina has taken up with Mendel (Jeff Gurner), Marvin’s former psychiatrist. Then there’s the looming Bar Mitzvah for Jason (Ari Sklar), the son of Marvin and Trina who misses Whizzer and invites him to his baseball game, to the awkwardness of all. For Marvin, some kind of reckoning must be coming, but—as the song “Something Bad is Happening” late in Act One implies—he hasn’t yet seen the worst of it.

The cast of Falsettoland, Music Theatre of Connecticut, left to right: Trina (Corinne C. Broadbent), Mendel (Jeff Gurner), front, Cordelia (Elissa DeMaria), back, Marvin (Dan Sklar), front, Dr. Charlotte (Jessie Janet Richards), back; photo by Alex Mogillo

The cleverness of the show’s book—by James Lapine and William Finn—lies in how its mundane situations spark asides and reflections and confrontations, all of which are sung as dialogue. The music and lyrics by William Finn have a savvy, wry reflectiveness and bounce along with an agreeable forthrightness that seem in-keeping with the “tell it to a psychiatrist” tone. The shrink—played with crusty affability by MTC regular Gurner—is almost like a stand-in for the audience, a bit off to the side and yet emotionally involved. And that would also seem to be the point of the lesbian couple—Dr. Charlotte (Jessie Janet Richards) and her partner Cordelia (Elissa DeMaria), a non-Jew obsessed with Jewish cuisine; they might be the “zany neighbors,” but in fact, like us, they are drawn-in and play audience to the family dysfunction that, at first, seems only to hang on the question of how Marvin will navigate the emotional ties that bind him, and, more crucially, how Jason will manage to have a Bar Mitzvah he can tolerate or maybe even be proud of. But as “Unlikely Lovers,” a highlight of Act Two, makes clear, the scope of the foursome comprised by Dr. Charlotte, Cordelia, Marvin and Whizzer is key to the play’s vision of how new loves form in the space once dominated by family ties.

Whizzer (Max Meyers) and Marvin (Dan Sklar) in the MTC production of Falsettoland; photo by Alex Mogillo

But that’s not to say that more traditional family ties are given short shrift. Key to the tone the play strikes is the role of Trina. She might be more freaked out than she is, she might also be way more resentful of her former husband’s love for a man and her son’s friendship with that man, and she could whine a lot more. The great thing about Corinne C. Broadbent’s rendering of Trina is that she’s not melodramatic nor particularly long-suffering. Her big number in the second act, “Holding to the Ground” (sung while doing her aerobic exercises) lays out her emotional parameters and it’s one of the strongest numbers, matched—or even topped—by Max Meyer’s strong delivery of Whizzer’s “You Gotta Die Sometime.” What these two sung speeches give is not only insight into the difficult terrain these characters are navigating but also show them coping and revealing strengths that take us beyond the play’s tendency to use quirks for laughs.

the cast of Music Theatre of Connecticut’s production of Falsettoland, directed by Kevin Connors; photo by Alex Mogillo

At the heart of it all is Sklar’s Marvin, a likeable guy dealing with a lot; you might even say he’s a bit of a schlemihl trying to be a mensch. His genuine affection for Whizzer wins us over in “What More Can I Say,” and the real nature of the problem facing the couple ratches up the drama and takes us back to very stressful times that the musical aims to revisit as a coping exercise. And so, in good uplifting-ending fashion, the fate of that Bar Mitzvah is to reinforce the growth all the characters have undergone. Amongst all the good work done here—including Lindsay Fuori’s subway car set that adds the right note of urban landscape—special mention should be made of Ari Sklar’s Jason who is such a natural for this part it’s as if it’s a slice of his life. That illusion is helped by the fact that Jason’s father, Marvin, is played by Ari real life dad. Family ties, after all.

Marvin (Dan Sklar), Trina (Corinne C. Broadbent), background; Mendel (Jeff Gurner), Jason (Ari Sklar), foreground; photo by Alex Mogillo

In revisiting those days of something awful in Falsettoland, the MTC production might be said to sound a note of nostalgia. Bad as things got, there was a sense that that they could only get better—in part through visions like Finn and Lapine’s of the everydayness of same-sex couples as part of the same old traditions grown so familiar. One of those miracles of humanitarianism.

The cast of Music Theatre of Connecticut’s production of Falsettoland, directed by Kevin Connors; photo by Alex Mogillo

Falsettoland
Book by William Finn and James Lapine
Music and Lyrics by William Finn
Directed by Kevin J. Connors

Scenic Design: Lindsay Fuori; Lighting Design: RJ Romeo; Costume Design: Diane Vanderkroef; Sound Design: Will Atkin; Prop Design: Sean Sanford; Stage Manager: Jim Schilling; Choreography: Chris McNiff; Musical Direction: David John Madore

Cast: Corinne C. Broadbent, Elissa DeMaria, Jeff Gurner, Max Meyers, Jessie Janet Richards, Ari Sklar, Dan Sklar

Musicians: Piano/Musical Director: David John Madore; Drums: Steve Musitano, Chris McWilliams

Music Theatre of Connecticut
November 5-21, 2021

The Power of Doubt

Review of Doubt: A Parable, Westport Country Playhouse

John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable, the second offering of Westport Country Playhouse’s two-show mini-season runs in-person until November 20, with a streaming version of the play available online from November 11 to November 21. This is the first live production at the venerable venue since the COVID shutdowns and the last until the playhouse’s next full season opens in April 2022 (for information on the latter, see below).

Directed by David Kennedy, WCP’s associate artistic director, the current production of Doubt—which won a Pulitzer and the Tony for Best Play 2005—provides an interesting example of how context can affect a play. Back in 2005, the play was a timely fictionalization of issues that arose out of the Boston Globe’s celebrated 2002 exposure of child-abuse among Catholic priests. The investigations did indeed reveal abuse and cover-ups dating back decades, and yet Shanley’s play, set in 1964, can still feel anachronistic in the way it portrays characters who seem to live with an open secret.

Now, almost twenty years later, Shanley’s “parable” gains by not riding the coattails of a major news story. The questions the play aims to raise—about doubt and certainty—move into a more parabolic realm less concerned with the times and more readily timeless. And that helps to foreground what has always been the play’s greatest strength: that it can be staged to have very different effects without changing a single word. The notion that the play’s final act takes place offstage—in the conversations of its audience members—still holds true. I’ve seen the play staged once before and can say that the take-aways from the two productions were markedly different.

Sister Aloysius (Betsy Aidem) and Father Flynn (Erik Bryant) in the Westport Country Playhouse production of Doubt: A Parable; photo by Carol Rosegg

The story concerns the efforts of Sister Aloysius (Betsy Aidem), principal at a Catholic school in the Bronx, to remove Father Flynn (Eric Bryant) from his position in the parish due to her belief that he has seduced or is attempting to seduce a young boy, Donald Muller, the first and only African American child at the school. To this end, Sister Aloysius enlists the aid of Sister James (Kerstin Anderson) to help make a case to be taken to their superiors. Father Flynn, ambushed in a meeting with the two nuns, later turns to Sister James to give his view of the situation. But a surprising interview between Sister Aloysius and the boy’s mother (Sharina Martin) seems to strengthen the principal’s resolve.

Sister James (Kerstin Anderson) and Sister Aloysius (Betsy Aidem) in the Westport Country Playhouse production of Doubt: A Parable; photo by Carol Rosegg

Sister Aloysius is portrayed as rigidly old guard—down on secular songs in Christmas pageants, on ballpoint pens, on teachers as “friends” to their students, and certainly on the touchy-feely version of mentoring that Father Flynn prefers. There’s not a lot that can be done with her character as she’s not meant to be sympathetic even if we might grant her a certain steely charm. Betsy Aidem’s portrayal captures well the kind of personal authority that those with rigid parameters for what’s allowed and what’s not can steep themselves in. And Kerstin Anderson establishes well the conflicts in Sister James: by temperament, she is sympathetic to Father Flynn; by the hierarchy of her order, she should support Sister Aloysius. Particularly if the elder nun is correct in her assumptions. But if she’s wrong? That doubt makes Sister James somewhat our stand-in, trying to decide between these two opponents, both practiced at getting others to do what they want them to do. For their own good.

It’s in the character of Father Flynn that the play offers the most potential for varied interpretations. He could be more openly arrogant, feeling that he’s above any criticism, he could be genuinely aghast at the suspicions in Sister A’s mind, or he could be a serial abuser trying to cover his tracks. Bryant’s Flynn downplays the arrogance, trying hard for a bid for sympathy from his opponent. How much sympathy he earns from the viewer is for each to decide.

Aloysius is open about her dislike of Flynn and there’s little point in considering ulterior motives: she sees him and his tendencies as pastor—even if he is innocent of abuse—as inimical to her view of how the Church should present itself. But if she’s wrong about Flynn’s infractions, then she’s simply using suspicion to taint his reputation and to drive him out. The power-play aspects of Shanley’s script strike me as its most enduring element. The fact that we can’t really know is the core of what the play offers as its insight into human relations. How do we assess someone else’s character? By what they do, by what they say, but what about what they don’t openly say or do? The value of doubt is that it reminds us human behavior is mostly lacking in absolutes. There’s always a little wiggle room.

At Westport, Kennedy’s production highlights the emotions, with the two central characters breaking down and collapsing to the floor at different moments. While her outburst may make Sister Aloysius more sympathetic in the end, Father Flynn’s outburst has the opposite effect. Arguably, his attempt to play on emotions makes him seem more guilty, or at least seems to indicate he may be culpable even if only for his thoughts or intentions.

Mrs. Muller (Sharina Martin) and Sister Aloysius (Betsy Aidem) in The Westport Country Playhouse production of Doubt: A Parable; photo by Carol Rosegg

A key scene is the discussion of Donald’s situation between Sister Aloysius and Mrs. Muller. In a way, Mrs. Muller’s view—which Sharina Martin registers as a hard truth arrived at through experience—serves best to put the priest’s interest in the boy in a context not as dark as the one Sister Aloysius assumes; in any case, Flynn may help the boy, but, in Sister Aloysius’ view, only at great risk.

Once again director David Kennedy delivers a play in which complex issues and implications are presented through well-orchestrated dialogues. While not having quite the drama of others he’s directed—like The Invisible Hand or Appropriate—or the comedy of The Understudy, Doubt acquires great power from its perfect pacing and by demonstrating that doubt and certainty can be equally unnerving.

Doubt: A Parable
By John Patrick Shanley
Directed by David Kennedy 

Scenic Designer: Charlie Corcoran; Costume Designer: Sarita Fellows; Lighting Designer: Carolina Ortiz Herrera; Sound Designer: Fred Kennedy; Production Dramaturg: Dana Tanner-Kennedy; Production Stage Manager: Shane Schnetzer

Cast: Betsy Aidem; Kerstin Anderson; Erik Bryant; Sharina Martin

Westport Country Playhouse
In person: November 2-20, 2021
Streaming: November 11-21, 2021

On sale now are ticket packages for the 2022 season:

Next to Normal
Music by Tom Kitt
Book and Lyrics by Brian Yorkey
Directed and choreographed by Marcos Santana
The 2009 Tony-winning musical and winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama: musical theater that looks at a family in crisis with introspective songs.
April 5-23, 2002

Straight White Men
By Young Jean Lee
Directed by Mark Lamos
A father and two grown sons “forced to face their own identities” in inventive playwright Young Jean Lee’s 2014 play.
May 24-June 11, 2022

Ain’t Misbehavin’
Conceived by Richard Maltby, Jr. and Murray Horwitz
Directed and choreographed by Camille A. Brown
The 1978 Tony winner—“a dance-filled and reimagined celebration of jazz great Fats Waller,” from Camille A. Brown, recently awarded and nominated for her work on for colored girls.
July 5-23, 2022

4000 Miles
By Amy Herzog
Directed by David Kennedy
An intergenerational comedy from Amy Herzog—in which a 21-year-old visits his 91-year-old grandmother; a wry and wise Pulitzer finalist from 2013.
August 23-September 10, 2022

From the Mississippi Delta
By Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland
An autobiographical play using story, song and memories to dramatize a harrowing and inspiring journey from a childhood in poverty in Mississippi to the civil rights movement and the life of a professor.
October 18-November 5, 2022 

Paradise Enough

Review of Ah, Wilderness!, Hartford Stage

The Hartford Stage production of Ah, Wilderness!, a rare Eugene O’Neill comedy, directed by the theater’s new artistic director Melia Benussen, was initially scheduled for Bensussen’s first season, back in 2019-20. It would’ve been the season’s finale. The COVID pandemic tabled those plans, causing Bensussen’s debut to be pushed back to the 2020-21 season that never was. Now, the production opens the 2021-22 season, a symbol of theater’s endurance and a return to a kind of normality. In any case, it’s a welcome experience: sitting again in the Hartford Stage theater and experiencing a handsomely mounted production of a classic play somewhat revised for our times.

The cast of the Hartford Stage production of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!, directed by Melia Bensussen, 2021

The play itself may seem a somewhat odd choice. But for the references to Yale, New Haven, Waterbury and other Connecticut places that situate the play squarely in our vicinity, we might wonder why this play now. That local aspect—the homefield advantage?—is reassuring in its way. We know how much the recent distress over the pandemic came down to how well discrete municipalities handled the challenge. Connecticut didn’t do as badly as some. Why not a look back at one of the state’s local heroes? The O’Neill family spent summers in New London and their Monte Cristo cottage is the presumed setting for Ah, Wilderness!, set on a Fourth of July weekend early in the twentieth century. The play itself dates from the 1930s, and so the very notion of “dated” is built into its thematics, so to speak.

And that’s because, first of all, this is O’Neill’s somewhat light-hearted and ironic look back at his early years when he felt himself schooled by the likes of such literary luminaries as Ibsen, Shaw and Strindberg. Richard Miller, his alter ego here, is played by Jaevon Williams as somewhat prissy and comically self-important. It’s necessary to the play’s tone that we find his pretentions laughable, even if we might find acclimation to the stodgy standards of the time a let-down in any hero. What saves the play, and what might come as a surprise given the way intergenerational conflict is generally dramatized in O’Neill and others, is how Richard’s parents are depicted. Suffice to say, we’re in the realm of situation comedy of the “father knows best” variety.

The task of representing a sympathetic, generous, patient and amused elder generation is ably handled by Michael Boatman as Nat Miller, the family’s patriarch. In a time when “patriarchal” is not only a dated concept but one roundly denounced, Boatman reminds us of how ably the position could be inhabited. Nat sticks up for his errant son when required—against the censorious father (Joseph Adams) of Richard’s love interest—and knows well enough that youth is a period of trial and error where the errors are part of the project of growing up. It’s a benign play that ends on just the right note of long-standing love, tolerance, and belief in a shared life together: the sort of things we like to think we mean when we talk about “family values.”

The cast of the Hartford Stage production of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!, directed by Melia Bensussen, 2021

Other elements in the play are apt to be problematic, but then they no doubt always were. Key on that score is Sid (McCaleb Burnett), the familiar figure of the drunken Irishman, here bringing in some necessary verbal humor and a personality that doesn’t fit with the respectable face the family wears for social status—Burnett shines in the big “family at the table” set-piece. The sentimental interest in this character—who woos relentlessly Lily (Natascia Diaz), the sister of Mrs. Miller, to earn a by-now inevitable rebuff—likely has shifted. Where the sympathy may once have been with the erring bachelor in need of a good woman to save him, it’s likely we find ourselves sympathizing all the more with a good woman who can’t find any other suitor than this ne’er-do-well and who can’t have any life outside a domestic setting. Such are the times of the play and such are the social strait-jackets that O’Neill delineates while trying—for romantic comedy purposes—to offer a view where “meant for each other” doesn’t equate with “lacking any other options.”

The youngest generation is well-served by Katerina McCrimmon as younger sister Mildred; she squirms about on the couch at one point with the kind of eager-to-break-out-of-it-all energy that makes us wonder what a play focused on her might become. As it is, the play’s tour of the naughty “house of ill repute,” where Richard nearly gets seduced by Belle (Brittany Annika Liu), and then gets into a fight trying to protect her honor, which she finds ridiculous, is never particularly comic or dramatic. Likewise the scene between Richard and his love interest Muriel doesn’t quite connect either. Both Belle and Muriel are played by Liu and she is not really convincing as either the Virgin or the Whore, those two poles by which female behavior was judged at the time. It’s not O’Neill’s intention to lampoon these clichés outright and so we have to accept them in the light of the naturalism he inherited from his literary heroes. And yet . . . it seems that one way to breathe new life into the play is to find a way to make Richard’s scenes with the women riskier or funnier or, indeed, more romantic. Much of the problem lies with Williams’ over-earnest Richard, who even when drunk is so far from dissolute that it all seems little ado over less.

Richard Miller (Jaevon Williams) and Muriel Macomber (Brittany Annika Liu) in the Hartford Stage production of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!, 2021

The lack of strong focus in the young persons’ scenes makes all the more important the older couple’s coping with their errant son. As the matriarch Essie Miller, Antoinette LaVecchia is lively in her fussiness and sense of rightness, and in the play’s close her seconding of her husband shines with a wisdom gained from a lifetime of intimacy. Ah, Wilderness! may be rom-com, but the romance is with family and the enduring couple at its heart, and with the feints and fits and starts by which that desiderata can be achieved. Quaint? Yes, but then, like the play’s fulminations about socialism spreading in the U.S, some attitudes are perennials. Ah, Wilderness! takes its title from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, beloved of Richard, in those famous lines about a book of verses, a jug of wine, a loaf of bread—and thou—that close with “Wilderness were paradise enough.” The upshot is that every successful couple finds paradise in the wilderness, and the wilderness can best be enjoyed together.

Essie Miller (Antoinetta LaVecchia) and Nat Miller (Michael Boatman) in the Hartford Stage production of Ah, Wilderness!, 2021

The play, which is a treat to watch on James Noone’s open, vertical, many-layered set, reminds us forcefully that some things just don’t fit on screens: live, multi-character theater on a grand stage notably. It’s great to be back at Hartford Stage, and it is time well-spent to revisit the past as shaded by the present. With its perfect tech—lighting by Wen-Ling Liao and costumes by Olivera Gajic, with hair, wigs and make-up by J. Jared Janis, and sound by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen—Melia Bensussen brings a neglected O’Neill comedy to life, featuring the very welcome addition of period songs sung by the cast, with live piano provided onstage by Yan Li. The songs keep the times alive but also indicate the commonality that the play—with its multi-ethnic cast—achieves without foregrounding any specific American ethnicity. From each according to ability? Paradise enough.

Ah, Wilderness!
By Eugene O’Neill
Directed by Melia Bensussen

Joseph Adams, Michael Boatman, Annie Jean Buckley, McCaleb Burnett, Natascia Diaz, Antonio Jose Jeffries, Tanner Jones, Antoinette LaVecchia, Brittany Annika Liu, Myles Low, Katerina McCrimmon, Stuart Rider, Jaevon Williams

Scenic Design: Jim Noone; Costume Design: Olivera Gajic; Lighting Design: Wen-Ling Liao; Sound Design: Rob Milburn & Michael Bodeen; Music Director/Pianist: Yan Li; Wig, Hair & Makeup Design: J. Jared Janas; Fight Choreographer: Ted Hewlett

Hartford Stage
October 14-November 7, 2021

Policed to Death

Review of KILL MOVE PARADISE, Playhouse on Park

The play for the Playhouse on Park debut of director Dexter J. Singleton, known in New Haven for his work as Founding Executive Artistic Director at Collective Consciousness Theatre, is well-chosen. At CCT, plays by authors of color are the norm, and dramas that confront issues of social justice even as they entertain and enlighten have been staged with great success. CCT is a black box theater which is why it’s quite a change to see Singleton’s work on an outdoors stage in Bushnell Park, Hartford. The open space and wide stage create an unusual atmosphere for what might otherwise be a somewhat claustrophobic play. James Ijames’ powerful KILL MOVE PARADISE is set in a fantasy afterlife, a “no exit” space seemingly reserved for black men who have died at the hands of police. The play ran live in person for three dates in late June and is available for streaming over the internet through August 1. Go here.

There’s something of a “Waiting for Godot” feel about the piece as the four characters, each arriving separately and at intervals, have to cope with determining their whereabouts and what is going on: Isa (Trevele Morgan), Grif (Oliver Sai Lester), Daz (Christopher Alexander Chukwueke), and Tiny (Quan Chambers), an adolescent. What’s more, this afterlife includes the audience. The idea of “fourth wall” doesn’t really apply as the space the men inhabit is not entirely clear even to them. The back wall is on a slant (a bit like a skateboard ramp) and occasionally one will try to climb it. At one point Daz  goes behind it to retrieve a lawn chair. It’s the only prop in the play other than a printer that emits a constantly increasing list of the wrongfully slain.

The lawn chair is a fitting prop because the audience—visible in shots taken from its viewpoint—is sitting on lawn chairs. The outdoors aspect of the event makes for an interesting friction with the play’s mood. Even as the young men express their discomfort and anxiety, knowing that the “they” watching them is predominantly white (Isa calls it “America”), the audience seems relaxed and nonjudgmental. Admittedly, watching the play streamed on the computer adds a buffer for the viewer. One is able to feel that the audience there on the grass is the “they” the young men refer to, while “we” watch from some more remote location. That’s just one of those things about the presence and non-presence of online theater. Here, it adds a further implication since the “they” that has victimized these men and a host of other black U.S. citizens is always present but rarely acknowledged. It’s all of us, collectively, and none of us, individually as viewers. Determining how much one feels “called out” by what the men say about the audience is part of the play’s work.

The cast of James Ijames’ KILL MOVE PARADISE at Playhouse on Park, directed by Dexter J. Singleton (Photo by Meredith Longo)

The portions of the play in which the men struggle with this sense of how they should react to their situation are its most probing. Isa worries about profiling, Grif sees beauty in the crowd, Daz feels affronted by attitudes that tell him what he should be, and Tiny, the youth, finally confronts the crowd, fake pistol in hand, insisting “it’s not real. I’m real.” Such confrontational moments are almost haphazard, which is another way of saying that one never knows when they will arise.

The dramatic situation of being fatalities together but also still conscious and interacting makes for vivid give-and-take between the characters, though the tone tends to veer about a bit, making it hard to keep a read on who these four are, even to themselves. Add to that Ijames’ technique of keeping the play bouncing along by working in a pastiche format, including sitcoms, a soul-music song and dance, computer-game tagging, and a recital of stuff Daz noted backstage—some of it highly symbolic, some quite random, some a bit too heavily marked as racial baggage. We’re never in one reality for too long as if the sad fact of the four’s current status would be overwhelming, to us and to them, without some theatrical razzamatazz.

Isa (Trevele Morgan), foreground, Daz (Christopher Alexander Chukwueke) in James Ijames’ KILL MOVE PARADISE at Playhouse on Park (Photo by Meredith Longo)

Isa arrives first and is the most easily accommodating, both to his own situation and to dealing with the others. He’s practically a host, apt to read instructions aloud. Grif is more truculent and the one most likely to disrupt the easygoing mood Isa tries to maintain. Daz is the most “street” of the three, with a nickname “Dazzle,” and a “code name,” Daz, and a fondness for the phrase “my n---a.” His litany of what else is backstage where he found the chair seems oddly unfocused as if Daz refuses to endorse most of what he’s saying. At times, the three seem to accept each other, at other times they seem at odds even with the personalities they present.

At one point Isa reads out a list of black citizens who became fatal victims of police actions. The reading becomes a dramatic act of mourning and an overwhelming moment bordering on despair. Though that’s not the main mood of the piece, it’s important that it be registered, otherwise the theatrical aspects of the four’s situation could easily morph into a world where someone’s suffering is someone else’s entertainment.

Tiny (Quan Chambers), foreground, Grif (Oliver Sai Lester), Daz (Christopher Alexander Chukwueke), Isa (Trevele Morgan) in James Ijames’ KILL MOVE PARADISE at Playhouse on Park (photo by Meredith Longo)

The arrival of Tiny, still gripping the toy gun that occasioned his death, is an affront to the others as the most outrageous killing. The boy’s attitude makes for a nice contrast with theirs as he’s smart, sharp, and not easily intimidated. He inspires a certain compassion in the others if only because they enjoyed more life and experience than he did, and their effort to bring him along makes for a dramatic focus in the play’s second half. One could say that the point of the play’s action is for each of the four to understand his own death, to see it in the light of martyrdom or sacrifice or simply a bad break or a result of the systemic racism that each has had to deal with while denying its lethality, until now. An ironically charged moment in the play—acted as a sitcom complete with laugh-track—highlights the unreality of the characters’ situation, as if the enormity of Tiny’s death can only come home to him within a normative, albeit silly, frame.

The tonal shifts in the play can sometimes arrest its flow when it seems that it’s building to more extended considerations. It’s as if Ijames is worried that if he doesn’t keep things lively, he’ll lose our attention. The problem is that the dialogue is very elliptical and requires a lot of physical and verbal shifts, not all of which seem natural to the actors. Singleton makes the most of the wide stage, and the sound effects are very effective even in an outdoor setting The camera work and editing of the video version is excellent, making home-viewers feel they have the best seat in the house while also giving us a bit of a detached view.

In the end, KILL MOVE PARADISE is a nimble play that plays with our sense of dramatic conventions even as it makes us feel the force of its take on the dire situation of race relations in contemporary America.

KILL MOVE PARADISE
By James Ijames
Directed by Dexter J. Singleton

Cast: Quan Chambers, Christopher Alexander Chukwueke, Oliver Sai Lester, Trevele Morgan

Playhouse on Park
July 7-August 1, 2021

A Play For The Moment

Tiny House, at Westport County Playhouse

Happy 4th of July, that testament to the foundational myth of the United States of America. During this year’s Independence Day, Westport County Playhouse returns to active theater with Michael Gotch’s Tiny House, a dramedy set on a 4th of July lived “off the grid.” It’s a nice bit of irony. The show is streaming theater that takes us to the remote mountainous home of a couple—Sam & Nick—who purport to have withdrawn from corporate America and the distractions of internet culture. Which means they wouldn’t be likely to access theater like this.

The play takes its cue from our contemporary moment of crisis in which catastrophe looms and methods of coping have become the order of the day. And that’s apropos, as streaming theater, in which the remote audience attends theatrical content prepared digitally, was a part of many people’s quarantine experience. The fact that as of this week most theatrical restrictions of the pandemic have been lifted (for fully vaccinated companies) by Actors Equity, such as bans on actors occupying the same theater space, makes the Westport production already feel dated, part of last summer’s situational awareness.

And, on that note, just to get it out of the way: the digital green-screen version of this play is an oddly hybrid experience. The actors are all in different spaces trying to keep each other in believable eyelines, and efforts to create the illusion that they are in contact are oddly intrusive, like trying to hide the strings on puppets. Otherwise, there’s a detailed backdrop of a tiny house (you know, those cramped, small-footprint, ingenious boxes in which bourgeois accoutrements are reduced to the dimensions of a cruise ship’s cabin for a life free of excess, clutter, and waste), and very ripe nature shots, like a mountain/valley view aimed to induce vertigo and a forest verdantly ancient as only digital imagery can be. The Westport show is better than Zoom theater but not as satisfying as actors on stage together relayed by video, as at TheaterWorks this season. Even so, there’s considerable interest in contemplating how director Mark Lamos and his team pulled off this virtual theater-space which has its own odd charm. (And cheers to Westport Country Playhouse for continuing on; Tiny Houses opened on June 29, exactly 90 years since WCP first opened its doors, on June 29, 1931, so it certainly has been around for some trying times.)

Sam (Sara Bues) and Nick (Denver Milord) in Westport County Playhouse’s production of Tiny House by Michael Gotch

The play itself is a hodgepodge of the edgy, the erratic and the aiming-at-entertaining. Nick (Denver Milord) and Sam (Sara Bues), the well-intentioned male-female couple hosting, have, of course, their issues, notably with Sam’s recovery from a miscarriage. She’s feeling vulnerable and not up to what is bound to be an abrasive visit from her mother, Billie (Elizabeth Heflin), a divorcee now living with her former brother-in-law, Larry (Lee E. Ernst). Sam’s father has been jailed for perpetrating “the biggest Ponzi scheme since Jesus walked the earth” (it’s a neat line and gets trotted out three times), and there’s lots of bad feelings and traumatic scarring about that.

Larry (Lee E. Ernst) in Westport County Playhouse’s production of Tiny House by Michael Gotch

The “zany neighbor” role is given a switch in presenting the grim and mysterious Bernard (Hassan El-Amin), an armed hunter of marmots who may have been CIA and is concerned with the approaching “zero hour” of some indefinite apocalypse. We might assume this is just gun-nut fantasy, but he’s listening to “chatter” and everyone but Billie voices anxiety over the state of the world—whether climate change or anxiety-inducing news bulletins in general. Bernard helps keep alive the notion that this play is about more than awkward company on a holiday weekend but mainly he just sets up the punch that is the ending note of the play.

Bernard (Hassan El-Amin) in Westport County Playhouse’s production of Tiny House by Michael Gotch

The family sparring gets its most intense when Billie, in youth a bunny at Hef’s Playboy mansion, gets into an escalating aria of jabbering grievance with Nick that is the aural equivalent of speed-scrolling leftist 30something (Nick) and rightist Baby Boomer (Billie) flashpoints simultaneously. Like much in this play, it’s overwrought to little purpose. Early on, Nick has lines that make him a fun take-off of the intensely concerned and focused man-child of our times, so keen to offset the mess elder generations have made of the world. But the elder generation here, but for Billie, are little more than wan comic relief sporting hippier-than-thou wiftiness. Larry, in Ernst’s energetic performance, might add a loose cannon’s surprises but he collapses into the abyss of truly zany neighbors Win (Stephen Pelinski) and Carol (Kathleen Pirkl-Tague) who play on the laughs automatically conjured by Renaissance festivals, Tolkienesque elf-folk and hallucinogen-laced vegan tortes. Sigh.

Win (Stephen Pelinski) and Carol (Kathleen Pirkl-Tague) in Westport County Playhouse’s production of Tiny House by Michael Gotch

When the transmission’s sixty-second intermission arrived I was already wondering if—as with a game’s halftime—there would be a turn-around or if it was already over. In the second part, we get to the payoff of Gotch’s best idea: that the unsustainable civilization bequeathed us by twentieth-century capitalism is the equivalent of a giant Ponzi scheme that has suckered us all. That, to me, was the ideological upshot of Sam’s harangue to her mother about how bad it is to grow up as the besmirched daughter of a con-man and national disgrace. Bues gives the speech her all but it’s not her fault that the lines don’t give her much awareness beyond poor-pitiful-me whining and a self-satisfied jab at Mom (whose own woe-is-me depiction of life after Shamalot we’ve already heard). Both Bues and Heflin almost convince us we’re seeing the kind of self-exposure with consequences that drama sometimes achieves, but the ploy of having Nick overhear a certain statement by Sam feels utterly contrived—and nothing comes of it anyway.

Sam (Sara Bues), Nick (Denver Milord), Billie (Elizabeth Heflin) in Westport County Playhouse’s production of Tiny House by Michael Gotch

And that’s the nature of this particular gathering: some good ideas, agreeable performances, digital sleight-of-hand (some of which works well), in service to the baleful thought that we’re basically fiddling while Rome burns. Maybe so, but more fiddling with the script would not be out of order. As it is, Tiny House aims to be a play of its moment that only manages to be a play for the moment.

Tiny House
By Michael Gotch
Directed by Mark Lamos

Scenic Design: Hugh Landwehr; Digital Scenic Design: Charlie Corcoran; Costume Design: Tricia Barsamian; Original Music and Sound Design: Rob Milburn, Michael Bodeen; Sound Edit, Mix and Additional Sound Design: M. Florian Staab; Editor: Dan Scully; Director of Photography: Lacey Erb; Wig Design: Christal Schanes; Production Stage Manager: Matthew Marholin; Assistant Stage Manager: Ellen Beltramo

Cast: Sara Bues; Hassan El-Amin; Lee E. Ernst; Elizabeth Heflin; Denver Milord; Stephen Pelinski; Kathleen Pirkl-Tague

Westport Country Playhouse
June 29-July 18, 2021
Streaming On Demand

The Only Thing Worse Than Being Talked About

Review of Tru, Music Theatre of Connecticut

In 1975, Truman Capote was a celebrity, someone—as he says in the play Tru now playing both live before audiences and on live streaming at Music Theatre of Connecticut in Norwalk, directed by Kevin Connors—“famous for being famous.” The basis for that fame began with Other Voices, Other Rooms in 1948, but really went mega with his groundbreaking study of a multiple homicide in 1959 Kansas in the best-selling “true crime novel” In Cold Blood (1966), subsequently made into a successful film. An earlier success was the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), made into a popular film by Blake Edwards.

His fame allowed Capote to maintain a jet-set lifestyle among the glitterati—aristocrats, celebrities, and the immensely rich. The immediate setting for Tru is Christmas of 1975, just after the publication in Esquire of excerpts from Answered Prayers, the unfinished manuscript intended to be his magnum opus. In the form now called autofiction, the stories were thinly veiled “fictional” and unflattering treatments of the high-rollers among whom Capote had been passing much of his time. The outrage was great, and Capote, as the play goes along, is still largely in denial of how bad the fallout will be.

All of which is just by way of background, as Capote, who died in 1984, is not quite the household name he used to be, back when his frequent appearance on talk shows, not least Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, kept him in the living rooms and bedrooms of America. The play, while it certainly goes over best for those with some prior awareness of Capote and some of the big names he drops, comes across regardless, due largely to Capote’s considerable charm and way with words (most of which are adapted from Capote’s interviews and writings). Actually, those with no previous opinion of Capote might find the play more entertaining than those for whom the sad fact of Capote’s deterioration as a writer and then as a social butterfly has more sting.

Jeff Gurner as Truman Capote in Tru, Music Theatre of Connecticut, 2021 (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Capote cut a singular figure, with an immediately recognizable voice, wispy, reedy. He was “out” before that was a generally recognized status, with long-term male partners and no effort to appear heterosexual. Capote’s affable and unflappable manner is rendered well by Jeff Gurner, who sounds like him, without parodying the manner, and, at a distance as dressed by Diane Vanderkroef, looks enough like the diminutive author to give us a facsimile of the man. The entire play takes place in Capote’s very tasteful living room in the Turtle Bay area of Manhattan (overlooking United Nations Plaza) as designed by Lindsay Fuori with prop design by Sean Sanford. Lighting design by RJ Romeo adds significant aura to moments of dramatic recollection.

Jeff Gurner as Truman Capote in Tru, Music Theatre of Connecticut, 2021 (photo by Alex Mongillo)

The play opens with Capote offended by the anonymous gift of a poinsettia and concludes when Capote, in his characteristic chapeau, dark shades, and overcoat, exits grandly for a holiday dinner with Ava Gardner and others who haven’t dropped him. Along the way, Gurner treats us to the pathos of a figure still giddy about his success and insecure about his reputation, so he must keep us enthralled by mannerism and self-quotation. At times, we feel like we’ve been summoned to an interview where we don’t get to pose the questions but must simply record the bon mots as they rain upon us.

The monologue to which Capote subjects us includes moments such as his sending telegrams and engaging in telephone conversations. In these moments we sense the public Capote and that lets the tone he directs to the audience—whom he sometimes addresses as though all-too-aware that he is observed at all times—seem more private and off-the-cuff. It’s a nice distinction as Capote comes across as someone for whom life is only significant when it is shared—whether with readers, viewers, friends, hangers-on, reporters, lovers, family, enemies. The key point is that someone attends, and so, if Tru (as he’s generally known) gets bored talking to us, he can pick up a phone and let us overhear him talking to someone else.

Jeff Gurner as Truman Capote in Tru, Music Theatre of Connecticut, 2021 ( photo by Alex Mongillo)

Which of course means that Capote is a good subject for a one-person play as his manner is essentially theatrical. In the second half of the play he even does a dance routine—just to take us by surprise—and is constantly insistent on the fact that, even if he himself is not always appreciated as a performer, he has been in the presence of great performers all his life, including dancing as a child while Louis Armstrong performed and, of course, complimented him.

The point isn’t the truth, for Tru, it’s carrying off his version of things. And now he’s in hot water for not carrying off his portraits of socialites—a classic case of biting the hand that, if it doesn’t exactly feed one, at least feeds one’s vanity. And yet, for the moment, that’s all to the good because it means everyone is talking about those pieces in Esquire. And as Oscar Wilde might well remind him, “the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” There may be something worse, though, as Capote will learn: not being spoken to. The silence that meets his efforts to reach out will drive him to more drink and drugs and more self-parodic stagings of his public persona.

Is there a moral? It’s hard to say, given that any sense of tragedy occurs, as it were, off-stage. In the play’s time-setting, Tru hasn’t yet declined. We might guess that such private theatricality, while tonic for anonymous onlookers, can be costly to the man forever in the spotlight. And yet—the play may convince us—that is Capote’s victory. He has become a character, forever larger than life and more interesting as fiction than as fact. Robert Morse earned a Tony for playing Capote in Tru on Broadway in 1990 and an Emmy for the same role in a televised version in 1992; Phillip Seymour Hoffman earned an Oscar for playing Capote in the film Capote (2005). Capote’s books have become classics and his persona a celebrated role. Perhaps nothing could be truer to Tru.

Jeff Gurner as Truman Capote in Tru, Music Theatre of Connecticut, 2021 (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Tru
Jay Presson Allen
Adapted from the works of Truman Capote
Directed by Kevin Connors

Starring Jeff Gurner as Truman Capote

Sound Design: Will Atkin; Scenic Design: Lindsay Fuori; Prop Design: Sean Sanford; Costume Design: Diane Vanderkroef; Lighting Design: RJ Romeo; Stage Manager: Jim Schilling

Music Theatre of Connecticut
April 23-May 9, 2021

Sound Craft

Review of The Sound Inside, TheaterWorks

Adam Rapp’s tour de force play The Sound Inside is the kind of play that TheaterWorks in Hartford has a knack for. A two-person drama on a slow burn, where revelations come slowly and might be fictions, where much depends on controlling the tone, which is matter-of-fact, and the pacing, with is stately even as the story becomes increasingly wrenching.

Directed by Rob Ruggiero and Pedro Bermúdez and filmed on the stage at TheaterWorks, this rendering  suits very well the airless space of Rapp’s play where everything that occurs is narrated or recalled. As Bermúdez says in the press release: “It's one camera, one shot at a time…we looked at building this world moment by moment – so that the camera itself had to become the audience in a very active way.” Yes, audience and almost a character, particularly in scenes where actors lock the camera with their gaze in direct address. Watching it, you feel pulled in, controlled by that special relationship a camera can have with a close-up.

That mostly happens with the play’s main character, Bella Baird (Maggie Bofill), a creative writing professor at Yale. Baird takes us into her confidence in the way many a memoirist does—by holding up her experience as a worthy subject of her writing and making her writing a way of interesting us in her experience. There’s a riskiness to the strategy and engaging that risk seems Rapp’s whole point: Bella’s manner can cloy and we have to listen to her because the play is essentially a dramatized monologue. The pay-off, for the playwright, is that we have only Bella’s word (and choice of words) for what occurs, mostly. Even when a scene is staged for us, her narratorial intervention can occur at any moment. And what we see/hear is what she tells/shows us.

Bella is a writing instructor, remember. And the hoariest line in all of the teaching of writing is “show, don’t tell.” At certain moments the play shows, but mostly it tells. Indeed, Rapp seems to get a kick out of rubbing against such dicta, as when Bella, after insisting that there’s no reason to describe any character with anything more than a single detail or phrase, goes on to give a thumbnail sketch of her main character (besides herself): Christopher Dunn (Ephraim Burney). Turns out Chris is that walking cliché of every movie/play/story set in a writing program: the truly gifted, troubled, beguiling, infuriating student author of a first novel.

Where we go from there is into a series of fictions that includes a segment of Bella’s only published novel and a synopsis of Chris’s work in progress, each mysterious and gripping in its own way. Meanwhile, the key elements of Bella’s memoir is her growing despair over her physical condition—she’s been diagnosed with stage 2 cancer and is deemed terminal—and her infatuation with Chris. Those two antagonists—death and love?—meet in a very tense scene late in the play.

What makes this theatrical treatment of prosaic situations work is the very emphatic focus on Bella. She’s a great role and Maggie Bofill renders her as an epitome of calculated nuance. Bella weighs her words, and in speaking to us and looking at us—Bofill’s rapport with the camera is phenomenal—she gauges her words’ effect. We are never not in her world as she composes it, so that even Chris’ outbursts and reticence and arrogance and vulnerability come to us as she sees them. This makes Burney’s role as Chris a difficult one. We’re not sure how much he’s deliberately riffing on Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov (the subject of classroom discussion as the class reads Crime and Punishment “for craft”), or how much Bella sees him in that light. In any case, Chris is inspired by Raskolnikov’s violent crime, a moment in the Russian novelist’s tale whose drama—as act, as amoral violation, as artistically achieved scene?—captivates and polarizes the class.

Rapp, with Bella and Chris, is also playing with those themes, and with us. I don’t doubt there are those viewers who will take this play on face value, as a story about a very trying time in a middle-aged author/teacher’s life, an infatuation with a confused but gifted young man, and the way they both reach out to each other in their time of trial. As such, it works, its melodrama tempered by Bella’s thoughtful evocations, all after the fact. But the play is about writing—manifestly—and the story of Chris, in its slippery metamorphoses into his own fiction and into Bella’s, feels as if its groping toward statement, whether imposed by Bella or Rapp, the kind that can only be fully parsed in a creative writing class. My inclination is to let Rapp take the rap.

Strong in presentation, with subtle uses of Billy Bivona’s score and the atmospheric scenic work by Lawrence E. Moten III, lighting by Amith Chandrashaker, and costumes by Alejo Vietti, the collaboration of Ruggiero and Bermúdez is first-rate and not to be missed, especially if you care about the possibilities for streaming theater in our quarantined times. TheaterWorks is showing itself to be a leader in this regard. And this taut and surprising and suspenseful play works beautifully as a showcase of the directors’ method. What we lose in the shared space of theater is matched by a gain in dramatic intimacy that suits the play so well. The craft of The Sound Inside is sound indeed.

The Sound Inside
By Adam Rapp
Directed by Rob Ruggiero and Pedro Bermúdez

Set Design: Lawrence E. Moten III; Costume Design: Alejo Vietti; Lighting Design: Amith Chandrashaker; Original Music Composed & Performed by Billy Bivona; Video Production/Editing: Pedro Bermúdez/Revisionist Films; Audio Mix/Mastering: Matt Bersky/Massive Productions, Inc.; Production Stage Manager: Kate J. Cudworth

Cast: Ephraim Birney; Maggie Bofill

TheaterWorks
April 11-April 30, 2021

Extended to May 9, 2021

Yale Cabaret: From the Room to the Zoom

Yale Cabaret preview, February 27 to May 20

The Yale Cabaret, the branch of the Yale School of Drama run by students and usually housed in the beloved basement theater at 217 Park in New Haven, returned last weekend from Yale’s extended winter break with its first show of 2021, Let’s Go to the Moon. This weekend, In-Between Bitches, their second show of the spring semester, opens.

The great challenge for the theatrical institution, now in its 53rd year, is that theater for the foreseeable future is not what it was. The team’s slogan this year is “Live Online Together” and their solution to the closing off of all theaters on campus is a combination of live and pre-recorded events that are broadcast live. Which means the links to the shows can only be accessed during set times to which viewers commit: Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m., for most of the shows. The intention is to maintain some of the charm of the Cabaret’s sense of participatory community. We may all be stuck in our homes but at least we can attend online events together.

Cabaret 53 Team, clockwise from top right: Managing Director Matthew Sonnenfeld, Co-Artistic Director Nicole Lang, Co-Artistic Director Jisun Kim, Co-Artistic Director Maeli Goren

The leadership team of Cab 53 consists of Co-Artistic Directors Maeli Goren, a third-year directing student; Jisun Kim, a third-year dramaturgy student; Nicole Lang, a third-year student of Lighting Design, and Managing Director Matthew Sonnenfeld, a second-year student in Theater Management. The mission of the team underscores collaboration and a sense of neighborliness in reaching out to “greater Yale”—which means students outside the School of Drama—and to the New Haven community more broadly. And even, with the tenth show of the season, to an international community of artists not present in New Haven or at Yale.

Last week’s show was a good example of the kind of collaborative projects the team hopes to inspire. Originally, Let’s Go to the Moon was a “filler art pitch” for the website, described as “four queer astronauts go to the moon.” The sample pitch developed into an actual pitch and became a collaboration between Kim and Lang, as the hands behind the puppets used for the play, and composers Soomin Kim and Samantha Wolf and lyricist Alana Jacoby for the songs—ten in all—expressly written for the show (in place of the cover songs initially considered).

The production was “hybrid,” in that it was both live and recorded. The audio, which means the dialogue and songs sung by the cast (Shimali De Silva, Mouse; Madeline Seidman Woman from Venus; Maeli Goren, Moon Rock; Sad, Old Rover, Nat Lopez) was pre-recorded; the visuals, however, which involved both 3D and 2D puppets, and two cameras for each, were enacted live by the puppeteers and co-creators of the piece, Jisun Kim and Nicole Lang—the “Astronauts and Chief Administrators,” according to the very creative playbill, available on the Cab website. Thus the show viewers saw was sort of like lip-synching . . . but with puppets and no visible humans.

The tech resources were impressive—if only to consider the switching between cut-out and modeled puppets. Key to the show’s technical polish were two stage managers—Brandon Lovejoy and Charlie Lovejoy—a technical director (Laura Copenhaver), designers for 3D puppets/scenic design (Emmie Finckel and Marcelo Martinez Garcia), designers for sound and incidental music (Emily Duncan Wilson), and for pre-show video (Camilla Tassi); the show was produced by Will Gaines and assistant producer Wendy Davies.

What was it all about? A charming NASA lab-mouse, convinced that an endless supply of cheese can be found on the moon, steals a rocket and sets off. En route she encounters a series of misfits: a Woman from Venus, who has fallen in love with “the woman in the moon” (instead of a man from Mars), a space-borne rock convinced that her origins are the earth’s moon, and, after a journey down a wormhole and a crash-landing on an unknown planet, an Old, Sad Rover who speaks only in the singsong of “Happy Birthday to You,” and whose mission to the moon went awry some time before. Together they undertake a final try at a moon-landing, only to learn that their ad hoc togetherness is enough to constitute a valuable universe in itself. The songs provide both catchy commentary as well as character and situation exposition.

The visuals available in the online medium were the stars of the show, and that sets up a point Sonnenfeld made about the upcoming second half of the season. In the fall, there were many shows that were audio only—including a radio play of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, set in India. It seems the challenge of writing for Zoom has been taken up by the YSD community and so what we’ll be seeing in the months ahead more fully activates the technologies of online theater.

As Sonnenfeld pointed out, the Cabaret’s brief with its participants has been “providing a room,” and the equipment that goes with it, to the students who elect to create shows during a season. In these changed circumstances, the team has had to be much more hands-on, as Goren noted, helping the chosen projects find a way to be realized within current constraints—and new possibilities. As a team, Cab 53 has welcomed proposals as open-ended as possible while also rising to the challenge of the extra foresight needed to make an idea come to life online. It’s a more time-intensive commitment and requires resources of ingenuity beyond those familiar to the 3D stage. Which means this is a good place for a shout-out to the technical advisers of this year’s Cabaret: Technical Supervisors Cameron Waitkun and Nicolás Cy Benavides, both first-year Technical Production and Design candidates. And mention should be made as well of a new position associated with the Cab this season: Rebecca Satzberg, a Technical Sound Intern at YSD, works as the Accessibility Assistant, which entails everything from technical issues for those trying to access video in different environments to close-captioning each performance, to anything that helps create a virtual environment that pushes the limits of what can be made available online.

This weekend’s show, Cab 8, as well as Cab 10 and 11, are cases in point. All were written for Zoom, and so the Cab has gone from providing the room to providing the Zoom—and all the capabilities that come with it. Like Cab 7, Let’s Go to the Moon, these shows will be creations specifically for Zoom Space.

Cab 8: In-Between Bitches, billed as “A Comedy for Zoom,” proposed, written & directed by Abigail C. Onwunali, the show addresses issues of what Goren called “body awareness,” and the ways in which the theater community avoids questions of shame and dysmorphia. Goren also called the show “joyful and hilarious,” featuring an “all womxn team” tackling the stress of image and the ways one particular “in-between bitch” handles it. Two more shows today at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. Content Warning: “Depiction of eating and body dysmorphia disorders, coarse language, moments of loud, high-pitched sound.”

Cab 10: Expats Anonymous is rather unprecedented. The play was written by Rachel Chin who is not a student at Yale, but a theater artist in Singapore who heard of the Cab through colleagues and proposed the piece, which will be the first international collaboration offered as a scheduled part of the Cab season. As a Zoom play, the show not only makes a virtue of the virtual environment—bringing together collaborators on different continents—but dramatizes Zoom as a part of job interviews. Set in Singapore during the current pandemic, the play looks at the situation of unemployed expats vying for a single job that will allow them to remain. May 18-20 at 8 p.m. and May 20 at 5 p.m.

With Cab 11, Love in a Pan Dulcé, we move from business to pleasure. Not only is Zoom part of the arduous process of finding work, it’s also part of the arduous process of finding a date. To put it in the terms of the Cab’s website: “Come laugh, cry, and cringe as Rachel, Joey, Noah, Arnie, Michael, and Daniel navigate the trials and tribulations of dating in 2020.” A play for Zoom, written and proposed by Nomè SiDone. April 16-17

Cab 9 will feature the return of the annual Dragaret—a drag show that, for the last few years, has included a night for New Haven queens and a night for YSD students. The particulars of this year’s offering, in the online environment, have not yet been determined, but tickets for the show are separate from the single membership fee that permits access to all the other shows and to the Cab Gallery. More information about the pricing policy and about the show and its line-up, which should involve both recorded and synchronous performances, will be forthcoming shortly. But mark your calendars now: March 12-13. The show has long been very popular as an entertaining and unpredictable celebration of the non-conformism and fluidity that gender, as a performative element of identity, can give rise to. Particularly among highly gifted and theatrical individuals.

Cab 12 also continues a Cab tradition, though this one of more recent provenance. Cab 51 set up the Rough Draft Festival as a way to bring on work in progress and the kind of work outside of concentration that is one of the Cab’s selling-points. The particulars have still to be determined, though the dates have been set: April 30-May 1. The team is considering potential collaborations extended to students in New Haven area schools. This is the second festival of the season; in December, the very successful Black Theater Festival brought together a highly eclectic offering of plays, performance, and interactive events.

Cab 13, the final show of the season, might be considered a transition back to “normal theater.” At least, the two one-person shows brought together for Remanded Trials might be enacted on a stage—though there may be benefits to the virtual space. Both feature acting students in YSD who have written parts to enact. In “Death Sentence” Matthew Webb will give a Cab debut performance as a man interrogated for serial murders. Called a “darkly humorous mystery” by Lang, the show “meditates in different ways on justice” and whether “character is death?” In “Kitchen of Truth” Madeline Seidman plays Martha Stewart in a dark night of the soul—including a hallucinated final television episode—on the night before she is taken into custody. May 7-8

That’s it for the shows scheduled, but membership in the Cab Season (go here for more details) also includes two Cab Potlucks, which aim to promote a virtual version of the valued face time usually found at the Cab as fans and patrons meet and eat and drink and circulate. The next one is April 24, and the final one is at the close of the season, as a send off and celebration, May 20.

The other perk of membership is entry to the Cab Gallery which features curated exhibits of installations, videos, sound compositions and more.

As Sonnenfeld noted, the upside of the virtual environment, for theater, is that the 70 seat capacity of the Cabaret can be—and frequently has been—doubled or tripled this season. There’s much more ease of access, and though we miss the togetherness of the Cab and mourn the emptiness of the theater at 217 Park Street, the Yale Cabaret as a virtual environment remains a viable and lively space for theatrical experiments and experiences. “See” you “at” the Cab!

Yale Cabaret
Spring Season: February 19-May 20, 2021

Lockdown Lives

We’re approaching the first anniversary of the pandemic lockdown that prematurely ended the theater season of 2019-20 and spawned a variety of coping mechanisms in the form of online theater approximations into 2021. The “watch-when-you-will by following a link” style of online event is the more prevalent and Playhouse on Park in West Hartford is currently offering a zoom playlet in that format. Elyot and Amanda: All Alone could be called a pandemic adaptation of Private Lives, Noël Coward’s popular comedy of mannered, sparring couples, from 1930 (last seen locally at Hartford Stage, directed by Darko Tresnjak, in 2015). Directed by Sean Harris, what Ezra Barnes and Veanne Cox, as Elyot and Amanda, respectively, have devised is a glimpse of a couple walking their wits as they have nothing but one another’s company to sustain them. A situation familiar to so many of us who abide by the restrictions on socializing beyond the most immediate.

Elyot and Amanda: All Alone features only the second act of Coward’s three act—it’s the part where E and A, formerly married to each other, have ditched their respective newer spouses and hole up together in Amanda’s Paris flat to see if they can let the world go by and just abide together. Turns out they can, if by that is meant that they can both stimulate and aggravate each other by turns. All reference to their most recent marriages has been omitted from the current script (with the Coward estate’s appreciated OK) and so we can imagine the couple are in the midst of their original marriage’s long durée. Their dialogue is best as the kind of repartee that many a stressed couple might indulge in: part fond reminisce, part fulsome recrimination, part provocation, part appeasement, sometimes witty, sometimes sad, sometimes not at all sure what it’s getting at beyond simply keeping open the possibility of chat. The allure of such exchanges, among the locked-down, is that they are live and in person, as so little else is.

Elyot (Ezra Barnes) and Amanda (Veanne Cox) in Elyot and Amanda: All Alone, Playhouse on Park

Key to the success of this experiment in repurposed Coward is the way the show is relayed. It’s by camera, but not in a single static perspective. There’s enough movement—from a  high fish-eye shot that takes in almost the entire room to more partial views to a shot very nicely framed in the doorway late in the play—to keep the viewer’s interest. And Barnes and Cox move about as if fully at home in the space (and why not, it’s Barnes’ apartment). Clad in very becoming silk pajamas (Amanda) and a somewhat nebbishy dressing-gown (Elyot), the couple at times seem like people we’re watching surreptitiously because they’ve left their laptop’s camera on. The show feels much more like the invasion of privacy that perhaps Coward intended than any onstage version could likely manage.

There are a number of high points but the one that probably best says it all is when Elyot, feeling amorous, tries to move to second base with Amanda only to be repulsed because “it’s too soon after dinner.” He’s irked, and it’s a good scene showing them as both agreeable and at odds, but what places the exchange in a new age of comedy is the way Barnes immediately grabs the hand sanitizer on the coffee table and sets to cleansing his hands—an automatic act—that is also washing his hands of the failed forward pass. A similar high-spirited moment is when Amanda puts on a record that annoys Elyot and proceeds to step lightly to it, underscoring a blithe spirit lacking in her spouse. When she later breaks the record on his head—after he scratches it—it seems less like violent pique and more like an echo of passionate slapstick. Something we suspect this couple knows a lot about.

Amanda ( Veanne Cox) and Elyot (Ezra Barnes) in Elyot and Amanda: All Alone, Playhouse on Park

Ezra Barnes’ Elyot is blustery when he needs to be, but not really truculent. He seems thoroughly domesticated, even though there are hints of plenty of past exploits. Veanne Cox makes Amanda his easygoing match—she’s more likely to goad for amusement than to draw blood or discomfit. The show has the even tone of the long haul, where even the outbursts can only go so far. And when the couple gets into the same act, as when affecting posh Brit accents, there’s obvious life-of-the-party sparkle left in the old ceremony.

A few songs at the piano create an agreeable musical intermission of sorts and shows how the couple can do it if they want to duet. In the end, after Amanda storms out—not without her mask—and then storms back, the act’s actual denouement (the arrival of those pesky spouses) is dropped in favor of a bit of hanky-panky patty-cake that provides a suitably upbeat sendoff. Elyot and Amanda—like their audience, one hopes—is weathering the storm, outlasting the lockdown, and generally keeping their spirits up in “glorious oblivion.” What more is there?

Elyot (Ezra Barnes) and Amanda (Veanne Cox) in Elyot and Amanda: All Alone, Playhouse on Park

Elyot and Amanda: All Alone
From Noël Coward’s Private Lives
Starring Ezra Barnes and Veanne Cox
Directed by Sean Harris
Playhouse on Park
February 10-28, 2021

NOTE:
Streaming of Elyot and Amanda: All Alone has been extended to March 7.

Seasonal Cheer

Christmas on the Rocks, TheaterWorks

 Merry Covid Christmas! The best meme I’ve seen on the current mood is “Don we now our plague apparel” above masks hung like stockings. Still, it is the holiday season and that means certain tried and true Christmas favorites are available in the online streaming environment.

One such is Rob Ruggiero’s durable Christmas on the Rocks at TheaterWorks. The show works because it assumes that much of the cultural glue of Yuletide, among the TV generations anyway, was provided by the Christmas perennials: the programming that the networks foist upon viewers every year when December rolls around. These are the kind of shows often called ‘beloved,’ but they can also cloy as time goes by, except, maybe, with children still experiencing their buoyant wonder for the first time.

Which is a way of saying that the tone of Christmas on the Rocks—the whole thing takes place in a bar—is for adults, particularly adults who may have soured on ersatz Christmas cheer somewhere around the turn of the millennium. So be prepared for nuttiness, desperation, depression, laughs and, through it all, the kind of warm, fuzzy values that Christmas shows foster to raise the spirits of us fellow humans.

This year, Love Boat regular Ted Lange is back as the bartender just trying to get through his Christmas eve shift, when what to his wondering eyes should appear but … Ralphie (from The Christmas Story), Zuzu (from It’s a Wonderful Life), Herbie the elf/dentist (from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer), Karen (from Frosty the Snowman), Tiny Tim (from A Christmas Carol), Clara (from The Nutcracker), and Charlie Brown (from A Charlie Brown Christmas), who is joined by a special someone. This year Jen Harris again plays all the female guests, Randy Harrison returns as Ralphie and Tiny Tim, Matthew Wilkas plays Herbie, and Harry Bouvy plays Charlie Brown.

The innovation in our distanced days is that this time Lange, who is in California, provides the voice of the Bartender while the camera gives us the latter’s POV on the evening. It’s more static than watching the play onstage, and of course we miss Lange’s non-verbal reactions, but it does make for an even stricter intimacy. We see what the camera shows us and all the visitors are perforce addressing us directly. It’s another example of TheaterWorks’ grasp of the necessary artistry of taping theater for streaming purposes.

The seven cleverly scripted scenes are written by seven playwrights, with Harris and Wilkas teaming up on Scene Four, “My Name is KAREN!”, and Jacques Lamarre authoring two: Scene Two, “It’s a Miserable Life,” and Scene Seven, “Merry Christmas, Blockhead.” The best scenes are those in which Lange has more to do verbally, so that he is actually interacting rather than just passively viewing. It’s best when he’s trying to understand the plight of his customer, as in Scene One—“All Grown Up,” by John Cariani—and Scene Two. Both of those are entertaining because Ralphie and Zuzu are seen as suffering, as grownups, from the long shadow of the heart-warming anecdotes of their childhood. It’s good stuff, in the early going, and it pulls us in.

In Scene Four, the Bartender is gagged and bound as Harris’s Karen interacts with her online fanbase. The streaming POV this year lets us be at times the online audience and at times the Bartender, seamlessly. It’s a wild and over-the-top performance, so manic that we welcome the more modulated and touching Scene Five—“God Bless Us Every One”—in which Lange comes on strong in taking Scrooge’s part against Tiny Tim’s flippant dismissal.

Watching this year, I felt that Harrison’s departure out that door, as a re-inspired Tim giving his trademark sign-off (too bad the kid didn’t copyright that saying!) would be a satisfying and resonant ending. The last two episodes—Harris’s nutty Clara and Bouvy’s dullsville Charlie Brown—tended to dampen my spirits rather than raise them. One might reflect that there’s a reason Charlie Brown never had a solo show—he’s just not funny! Granted, On the Rocks wants to end with its one romantic moment, and it’s never wrong, I guess, to aim for the “date” tie-in (not something that’s going to be a factor for me, frankly). To my mind, it might be time to shake up the formula with a different sequence of scenes. Even some versions of A Christmas Carol, after all, alter the sequence of ghosts.

In any case, ‘tis the season to seek out distractions from the sad state of affairs in our poor beleaguered country, and maybe from the same-o, same-o replays of the too-often viewed and overly familiar paeans of our snuggly past and other reassuring panaceas. In becoming a seasonal staple, Christmas on the Rocks has it both ways, drawing us in by reactivating braincells that have stored these stories for decades, and then giving us something a bit different, like when someone spikes the cookies instead of the eggnog. In the end, it wants us to believe that, even if all those folks in those fairytales didn’t live happily ever after, they can still have a good time. And give us one too, with just enough ho-ho-ho’s to make the season bright . . . or at least less dim.

Christmas on the Rocks
Conceived and Directed by Rob Ruggiero|
Written by: John Cariani, Jenn Harris & Matthew Wilkas, Jeffrey Hatcher, Jacques Lamarre, Theresa Rebeck, Edwin Sánchez

Set Design: Michael Schweikardt; Costume Design: Alejo Vietti; Lighting Design: John Lasiter; Sound Design: Michael Miceli; Wig Design: Mark Adam Rampmeyer; Stage Manager: Kate J. Cudworth

Cast: Harry Bouvy, Jenn Harris, Randy Harrison, Matthew Wilkas, And Ted Lange

TheaterWorks
Streaming December 1-31, 2020

Life With Father

The Who and the What, TheaterWorks

Ayad Akhtar writes plays in which dialogue has a way of being emotional, at times amusing, and often freighted with the weight of ideological themes. His plays Disgraced and The Invisible Hand both had powerful stagings in Connecticut, the latter at Westport Country Playhouse and at TheaterWorks in Hartford. Now TheaterWorks brings us The Who and the What, which dates from 2014.

Before discussing the play, a word about how the production is brought to its audience. Staged at TheaterWorks, directed by Aneesha Kudtarkar, the four-person play has been taped for online viewing with considerable skill. Which means credit for camera director Dan Garee and cinematographers Evan Olson and Ally Lenihan, S.R.’s sound design and the video production of Miceli Productions. If you’ve ever watched plays videotaped for television—which used to be a fairly common event—you’ll find the TheaterWorks production as capable and professional as most you may have seen. Except, instead of a soundstage in a studio, the play uses TheaterWorks’ stage, with set design by Brian Prather (adapted from Michael Schweikardt’s design), costumes by Mika Eubanks, and lighting by Amith Chandrashaker. It looks and sounds like a TheaterWorks show, viewed in one’s own home.

Mahwish (Sanam Laila Hashemi) in The Who and the What, by Ayad Akhtar, directed by Aneesha Kudtarkar, TheaterWorks

The play takes place in a few key locations, mostly domestic interiors and park benches, as Akhtar’s script covers several years in a succinct presentation of what could be called scenic highlights. The details of these characters’ lives could sustain much further explication but Akhtar is a playwright able to make exposition and backstory come out in the course of dialogue. It’s a method that lets each scene portray what is dramatically relevant to the story at hand. And the story has several dramatic cruxes.

To begin with, it’s the story of Afzal, a doting but also domineering Muslim father, played by Rajesh Bose with a wonderfully compelling sense of how bullying is often a matter of both sweetness and implied threat. He has two daughters, Zarina (Jessica Jain), the elder, and Mahwish (Sanam Laila Hashemi). Mahwish already has a fiancé approved by Afzal, so now his task is to find a mate for Zarina so she can marry before her younger sibling does. We later learn that Zarina did have a beau interested in marrying her but he was rejected by Afzal because he was a Christian.

Right there, of course, we’re in a conservative “old world” way of doing things, which we imagine will not sit well with daughters raised in America. Yet what interests Akhtar is how the twin engines of “modern” and “traditional” drive the contemporary Muslim family. The play opens with Afzal meeting with Eli (Stephen Elrod), a blind date for Zarina that Afzal has arranged by pretending to be Zarina in an online dating service! The fact that Eli, who sees this meeting as awkward if not grotesque, manages to deal with this romantic vetting in a way that doesn’t antagonize Afzal means that maybe he’s got son-in-law potential. And Afzal is at his charming best in his man-to-man chats with Eli. The tenor of such talks—after Eli does indeed become his son-in-law—never preclude Afzal’s sense of what is right for the couple and how his daughter needs to be handled so that her willfulness, as a modern woman, is properly “broken.”

Afzal is a widower who has become a success managing a fleet of cabs in Atlanta, and his great ambition is that his daughters start families of their own. His machinations to achieve that end, we might guess, will be the subject of the play as he offends against his daughters’ progressive views. To further that plot line, we hear that Zarina—Harvard educated with an MFA—is working on a book on gender politics. The scene where she has a first date with Eli, as a subservient gesture to her father, runs a potential minefield as Eli is white, a convert to Islam, and possibly more enthusiastic about the faith than Zarina herself. Which leads us to the main plot point: Zarina’s book isn’t simply critical of such practices as arranged marriages and wearing the hijab. It’s a novel in which the prophet Mohammad is viewed as a man with a man’s many imperfections and at times hurtful attitudes toward women.

Eli (Stephen Elrod) and Zarina (Jessica Jain) in Ayad Akhtar’s The Who and the What, directed by Aneesha Kudtarkar, TheaterWorks

The possible tensions between Eli and Zarina increase once he reads her manuscript, and their arguments about the portrayal of the prophet constitute another of the play’s interests: how sacred materials become profane within a secular form like the novel. The contentious nature of this couple is evident from the start and Jain and Elrod are fun to watch as they try to score points off one another. Zarina knows she’s writing fiction but sometimes speaks as though her version of Mohammad is truer than the one received from the traditional and pious anecdotes shared by the faithful. Eli shows himself to be able to reason within a dialectics in which fiction can feel true and received truth may not be fact. Not so Afzal who sees the book as a blasphemous affront, and the play—in Bose’s strong performance—does not shortchange his visceral outrage. That the denigration of the prophet (as he sees it) is also a denigration of the father is the obvious subtext to his rage.

Zarina (Jessica Jain), Mahwish (Sanam Laila Hashemi), Afzal (Rajesh Bose) in Ayad Akhtar’s The Who and the What, TheaterWorks

What holds our attention (admittedly, a deliberately secular “our”) in the play is less the question of how or whether holy figures can be portrayed in speculative ways, and more the question of how these two women navigate the fraught terrain of life with father. The play’s situation certainly feels genuine, keeping in mind clashes of Islamic fundamentalism and Western satire as for instance the much publicized fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie in 1989 for depictions of the prophet Mohammad in The Satanic Verses or the Charlie Hebdo killings in 2015. Afzal’s fear that Zarina will suffer persecution or assault for her novel, if published, certainly are justified. But the play, whose title is the same as Zarina’s book, doesn’t take on the task of showing us media response and cultural backlash, other than in passing reference. Instead, it remains focused on the seismic disturbances in the family unit. Which might make us wonder whether the book itself is something of a McGuffin. It doesn’t really matter except that it brings Zarina’s questions to light for her husband and her father to read and react to. The arguments would likely have come about even without such an overt questioning.

Well-staged, well-played, well-taped, The Who and the What is also well-written in giving us “the who” of these characters and “the what” of the differences in viewpoint, orientation, and expectation that make for family drama across generations and between cultures. The who and the what of the book Zarina writes may carry huge impact or seem much ado about nothing, depending on one’s view of Mohammad and the Muslim faith, but it’s importance could be made more of as something beyond a family matter. What’s more, the episodic nature of the play creates an effect a bit like watching “season highlights” of an ongoing TV serial or sitcom. We get the scenes wherein something major happens, but not the scenes that help to create genuine interest in these characters. The play ends with a punchline, a “joke’s on Afzal” jab that might be easily followed by “tune in next week.”

The Who and the What
By Ayad Akhtar
Directed by Aneesha Kudtarkar

Set Design: Brian Prather (adapted from a design for the stage by Michael Sweikardt); Costume Design: Mika Eubanks; Lighting Design: Amith Chandrashaker; Sound Design: S.R.; Video Production: Miceli Productions; Production Stage Manager: Kate J. Cudworth

 Cast: Rajesh Bose, Stephen Elrod, Sanam Laila Hashemi, Jessica Jain

TheaterWorks
November 15-28, 2020

A Life in Interesting Times

RFK, Music Theatre of Connecticut

It’s interesting that this election season has featured two very similar plays at area theaters. First, Playhouse on Park in West Hartford offered Bobby’s Last Crusade; now, Music Theatre of Connecticut is staging Jack Holmes’ RFK, directed by Kevin Connors. Both plays heroize and humanize the one-term New York senator, former U.S. attorney general, and assassinated Democratic presidential contestant Robert Francis Kennedy, the seventh of nine children and the third of four sons in the celebrated Kennedy clan. RFK was a charismatic, thoughtful and youthful politician—he died at age 42—who fathered eleven children, served in the administration of his elder brother President John Fitzgerald Kennedy where he took on organized crime, in the person of Jimmy Hoffa, and clashed with the F.B.I.’s domineering head, J. Edgar Hoover, and became, for a brief period in 1968, a figure for the hope for change in the Democratic Party which, at that point, had controlled the presidency for seven years and the U.S. Congress for thirteen and was embroiled in an undeclared war in Vietnam.

Chris Manuel as Robert Kennedy in RFK at Music Theatre of Connecticut, directed by Kevin Connors (photo by Alex Mongillo)

The dramatic core of RFK is only indirectly the legacy of Kennedy’s brother and former boss, President Kennedy. It’s a play about how Robert Kennedy found himself more and more convinced that he might be the man of the hour, and that the hour was getting late. His break with the policies of Lyndon Johnson, the sitting president and presumed candidate for reelection, was gradual and his decision to run against Johnson for the nomination came late in the election season. (One can’t help wondering if the return to 1968 in staging these two Kennedy plays is a way to remind us of how, once upon a time, members of the party in power took it upon themselves to run against sitting presidents when events warranted it.) At the end of March, Johnson announced his refusal to run for re-election and a surge of popularity for Kennedy indicated that perhaps a candidate other than one with “his pecker in [Johnson’s] pocket”—as the president put it—might carry the day. Then Kennedy was murdered early in June after winning the California primary.

As Kennedy, Chris Manuel—who has graced the stage in two previous excellent productions at MTC—is better at the more personable side of Kennedy, as when he talks about his reputation for making enemies as his brother’s campaign manager and then attorney general, or when he speaks of his relations with his family, including quips about “Teddy” (Senator Edward Kennedy who went on to serve over 45 years as a Massachusetts senator). The more rousing, public-speaking bits seemed to me lesser, but that may be only in comparison with the focus on the latter in Bobby’s Last Crusade and the way the candidate’s stump speeches were dramatized and contextualized in that play. At certain moments Manuel’s physical manner does recall the Kennedys—he most resembles RFK’s eldest son, Joseph, as a young man.

Chris Manuel as Robert Kennedy in RFK at Music Theatre of Connecticut, directed by Kevin Connors (photo by Alex Mongillo)

In any case, the strength of RFK is not the public Kennedy so much as the man behind the scenes. And here we get some well-chosen vignettes that go a long way to making us feel ourselves Kennedy’s confidantes. The play is staged on a nicely divided set by Jessie Lizotte: on the one side a desk, on the other a comfy chair. Holmes wants to register both the public and private man, but a scene of Kennedy in the armchair while being interviewed and interrupting himself to upbraid and beseech his obstreperous children makes the clash of the two sides more abrasive than amusing.

Most of the first part deals with Kennedy’s political career from 1964—when he found that Johnson would not offer him the VP spot in his bid for election as president—to 1966 and Kennedy’s inspired speech as a U.S. Senator visiting a South African university to give the Day of Affirmation Address. The speech, which closes Part 1, achieves the play’s rhetorical high-point, with its “ripples of hope” line, and with Kennedy saying:

“There is a Chinese curse which says, ‘May he live in interesting times.’ Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind. And everyone here will ultimately be judged—will ultimately judge himself—on the effort he has contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which his ideals and goals have shaped that effort.”

Challenging words to hear at this point in American political history, as they were then. And the second part of the play finds Kennedy trying to live up to the burden of that speech’s incentive.

Chris Manuel as Robert Kennedy in RFK at Music Theatre of Connecticut, directed by Kevin Connors (photo by Alex Mongillo)

In Part 2, Holmes chooses to juxtapose Kennedy’s imagined outbursts at “Johnny” (JFK) with Robert’s decision to run, making the announcement on the heels of a reflective recollection of his brother’s death and funeral. The words attributed to RFK have a groping quality, as if the situation—certainly unique to Kennedy—were being played simply for dramatic effect. The first half of the play, in its focus on Kennedy trying to decide what to do when no longer his brother’s attorney general, let us see Kennedy as a pragmatic political figure, and Bobby’s Last Crusade covers better the turn to becoming a presidential candidate. What RFK tries to give us, in Part Two, is the emotional underpinnings of that decision: we get a powerful story of Kennedy’s growing horror at the realities of poverty in the U.S. of the late 1960s, and stagey outbursts at JFK.

The details of Robert Kennedy’s death are narrated by Kennedy himself, though without directly addressing the fact of the assassination, much as he makes no comment about the cause of his brother’s death. In life, RFK spoke publicly about his belief in the findings of the Warren Commission’s report on the president’s assassination, but some who knew him denied that he accepted it or its methods. Holmes imagines RFK’s reaction to his brother’s death as a wail that it was he and not Jack who was the one “everyone hated.” Such comments, whatever their merit as off-the-cuff suggestions of character, downplay and undermine the drama of contested perspectives on the deaths of both men. There’s a huge area of uncertainty about those murders and it’s hard to say what the play RFK wants them to mean, offering us the drama of tragic loss rather than the drama that leads to tragic loss. The latter—as most great plays in the form show—is more telling.

Chris Manuel as Robert Kennedy in RFK at Music Theatre of Connecticut, directed by Kevin Connors (photo by Alex Mongillo)

What we have instead of a play about the Kennedys that might put their lives and deaths into perspective is a play ostensibly from Robert Kennedy’s perspective that speaks with immediacy of his decisions, his reactions, his losses and victories, and ultimately shapes the major loss—his death—as ours.

RFK
By Jack Holmes
Directed by Kevin Connors

Scenic/Prop Design: Jessie Lizotte; Lighting Design: RJ Romeo; Costume Design: Diane Vanderkroef; Sound Design: Will Atkin; Production Assistant: Jack Parrotta; Stage Managing: Jim Schilling

Cast: Chris Manuel

Music Theatre of Connecticut
October 23-November 8, 2020

Fridays at 8pm, Saturdays at 2pm & 8pm, Sundays at 2pm.
In person performances at MUSIC THEATRE OF CONNECTICUT 
Live streamed performances will be shown online through a link provided to ticket holders an hour before their show time

Adrift

Men on Boats, Connecticut Repertory Theatre

At this point in the pandemic that has altered so greatly the protocols of our daily activities, the idea of theater is in flux. The possibility of permitting audiences to sit in theaters with live actors on the stage is unlikely in the near future (with Broadway in New York projecting re-openings, possibly, some time in 2021). And yet, some kind of theater must go on, particularly for programs in theater, such as that offered at the University of Connecticut, where young talent has to take on the changed circumstances as part of what it means to do theater in 2020.

That challenge is something to bear in mind as one views “Zoom theater.” It’s not what anyone really means by “theater,” and it’s not really what those whose preferred medium is video mean by video. What we get is an odd hybrid. It’s live, in the sense that all the performers, in their individual screens, are doing their parts synchronously with the viewing. And yet it’s also remote. (The alternative is theater that has been taped to watch later, which does away with the synchronous element that is at least one of the traditional aspects of theater that many don’t wish to lose. We can’t be in the same place, but we can be at the same time. Which is appropriate, as this is a time we can’t choose but to inhabit.)

The Connecticut Repertory Theatre production of Men on Boats runs for nine performances October 8-18, each streamed live on a dedicated Zoom platform complete with a handsome background set by David Calamari (which we see in an image of the stage at UConn) and appropriate costuming by Xurui Wang. Directed by Beth Gardiner, the cast consists of two Equity actors, Margaret Ivey and Anaseini Katoa, and eight actors who are a mix of New York-based actors, recent MFA acting alum, and current students at UConn. The play reimagines the true-life adventure story of John Wesley Powell and his commissioned exploration, with four boats, of the Colorado River in 1869. The all-male expedition is recast by playwright Jaclyn Backhaus as women-as-men or as individuals of non-binary gender.

The experience of the play, then, is hybrid in several ways, all potentially interesting, but also potentially frustrating: live/onscreen; male/female; historical/contemporary.

The cast of Men on Boats at Connecticut Repertory Theatre, directed by Beth Gardiner; streamed via Zoom platform, October 8-18, 2020

First, the technical aspects. No doubt, on stage, there would be the fascination of seeing how four boats on rough waters are staged—there are plenty of spills and tense moments of navigation. On screen, such effects are largely a matter of one’s imagination. We see numerous squares with faces in them, mostly (monotonously) in medium shot. The Zoom feature whereby a speaker’s square lights when they speak is helpful for otherwise it would not be easy to see, at any distance from the screen, who is speaking. It can also be hard to keep focused on who is in which boat (initially, there are two boats with three, and two boats with two, and there is some switching about). This makes much of the physical business of the play glide by without much dramatic effect. Though it should be said that the uses of scenery and lighting (Alex Glynn) and sound (Daniel Landry) help, as do creative configurations of the screens onscreen. At one point, late in the play, Powell (Alex Campbell) appears in what amounts to a close-up. It helps wonderfully to bring dramatic focus, so that one wonders if more could have been done with the Zoom feature that lets a speaker fill the screen.

The purpose of the male/female aspects of the play elude me—other than giving male adventurer roles to female actors (which may be reason enough). The notion that masculinity is itself a performative role might be implied, but none of the actors made much effort to create the illusion of masculine characters. Which brings me to what disappointed most about the play—the hybridity of historical/contemporary: whatever the nature of these individuals were—since they are based on actual people—gets lost in favor of a contemporary gloss that does little to make the story exciting or amusing. It all seems to transpire as if communicated by texts between phones.

For some, that may be a strength, as converting the historical record to the terms of our times is a playwright’s purview. For me, it’s a fault that the script favors a contemporary idiom that does little to illuminate or entertain. The prospect of being among the first English-speakers of European descent to behold the Grand Canyon is conveyed by reiterations of “holy shit!” Even if I try to put myself into the mindset of someone for whom the lingua franca onstage is a refreshing level of diction, I can’t say I would be compelled (were I not a reviewer) to follow these explorers to their ultimate destination.

There are some elements that help to keep us onboard. Mostly, a kind of earnest engagement with the material that we expect from capable student actors. The best in that regard is Alex Campbell as John Wesley Powell who comes across as a figure of patience and courage by no means overbearing. Others in the cast provide some cross purposes to the main forward thrust of getting down river, including GraceAnn Brooks as Goodman, a somewhat daffy Brit who does not see the journey through. There is also a meet-up with indigenous inhabitants of the area, played by Margaret Ivey and Anaseini Katoa as smugly superior if reticently agreeable to their white visitors. Whatever the actual encounter might have been, it’s dressed in contemporary irony so as to show an awareness that whatever the whites thought was happening probably wasn’t.

At the end of the play things get a bit interesting but then mysterious with the fact that “fake news” of the expedition’s failure and the explorers’ death stole some of the glory of their accomplishment. Rather than ride that particular bugbear of our moment—media distortion as a way of life—the play ends with a look askance at the historical record itself. Leaving me, at least, wondering what was gained by dramatizing these events in this way.

Men on Boats
By Jaclyn Backhaus
Directed by Beth Gardiner

Scenic Designer: David Calamari; Lighting Designer: Alex Glynn; Costume Designer: Xurui Wang; Sound Designer: Daniel Landry; Technical Director/OBS Consultant: Audrey Ellis; Voice and Text: Julie Foh; Production Stage Manager/OBS Programmer: Tom Kosis; Dramaturgs: Eddie Vitcavage, Ellis Garcia

Cast: Anaseini Kotoa, Margaret Ivey, GraceAnn Brooks, Alex Campbell, Camille Fortin, Emma Joy Hill, April Lichtman, Lily Ling, Pearl Matteson, Jasmine Smith

Connecticut Repertory Theatre
University of Connecticut
October 8-18, 2020

Up Next:
November 12-21, Connecticut Repertory Theatre will produce, for the first time, a radio play. It’s A Wonderful Life, the 1946 film directed by Frank Capra, starring James Stewart in one of his best-known roles, became a Christmas classic on cable television in the 1990s. Adapted by Philip Grecian and directed by UConn Professor of Vocal Training, Jennifer Scapetis-Tycer, “this production will be a pre-recorded performance, with eight opportunities to tune in via zoom. In this production, Director Scapetis-Tycer reimagines (through sound) this heart-warming story featuring a huge cast of characters complete with ‘commercials’ and a Foley sound artist.”

Asking What If and Why Not?

Review of Kennedy: Bobby’s Last Crusade, Playhouse on Park

This election season, fraught as it is with peril—in the form of a pandemic the U.S. has handled badly—chaos—in the form of showdowns between heavily armed squads and protesters enraged by unconscionable and racialized acts of police violence—and a do-or-die aura for our beleaguered electoral system, why not return to a period just as anxious and portentous? Well, except there was no internet then.

In 1968, the Democratic party had a sitting president, Lyndon Johnson, who was becoming increasingly unpopular with many of his constituents, particularly those who wanted the undeclared war in Vietnam to end. That led to divisions within the party that, to a certain extent, never got completely healed. Senator Eugene McCarthy was running against the president on a ticket mainly aimed at young voters who had the most to lose by the war dragging on and who were becoming increasingly vocal. 1968 was the year student unrest closed many campuses during spring session, and May ’68 is well known as the fulcrum moment when protests by French students and workers shut down Paris. It was also the year of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China.

Goaded into running by a sense that history was passing him by, Robert Francis Kennedy, brother of assassinated and much mourned president John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and former attorney general in his brother’s administration, entered the race for the Democratic nomination in March. In June, two months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy was assassinated, having just won the California primary.

David Arrow (Bobby Kennedy) in KENNEDY: BOBBY‘S LAST CRUSADE, filmed for Playhouse on Park. Photos by Russ Rowland

Kennedy: Bobby’s Last Crusade by David Arrow, who plays Kennedy, directed by Eric Nightengale, tours the series of stump speeches Kennedy made in those heady times. Much of the power of the play comes from hearing literate, compassionate speeches that don’t sound like mere rhetoric or designed merely to score points off opponents. We see Kennedy is fond of quoting “his favorite poet” Aeschylus (well, a Kennedy probably should have a tragic view of life), and that he has taken up the war on poverty that was one of the better aspects of the Johnson administration. We hear some of his candid asides on his own performance, see his personable sense of his developing public persona, and live through some touching and, now and then, light-hearted moments. The play documents how in the course of those three months Kennedy, an inheritor of incredible privilege thanks to his father’s wealth and power, transformed himself into a man of the people. It wasn’t an act, and that, if nothing else, is why people still get misty when they talk about “Bobby.”

And that’s mostly the tone of the play, a kind of tempered hagiography, with each successive speech, most in the Midwest, a stop on a kind of Via Crucis. Whatever you may think about the Kennedys, the fact of their brutal and untimely deaths—for political reasons, no matter which account of guilt you believe—makes them at once more sinned-against than sinning. We don’t hear much about what made Kennedy a man with so many enemies, nor do we get much of a sense of Kennedy as the tough and shrewd politician he was. By which I mean to say that he was under no illusions about how nasty it all could get, yet the feeling of the man the play gives us is a bit of a naïf. I don’t doubt he was overwhelmed by the Sinatra-like (or Beatles-like) hysteria he was often greeted with—remarking on how often someone in the crowd stole his shoe—but any chance he had for election meant stirring and feeding and riding just such a reaction. The five years of shock, mourning and disquiet since the death of his brother made the mere presence of a Kennedy an oracular and revelatory moment to his followers. The Kennedy phenomenon was in full swing.

David Arrow (Bobby Kennedy) in KENNEDY: BOBBY‘S LAST CRUSADE, filmed for Playhouse on Park. Photos by Russ Rowland

The two immediate targets of the excerpts we hear from Kennedy’s speeches—McCarthy and Johnson—are men Kennedy respects, though, having been in the JFK administration with Johnson, he has no illusions about the kind of hardball political animal he’s dealing with. Then, in a speech on the eve of April Fool’s Day, just days before King’s assassination, Johnson announced he would not seek or accept his party’s nomination. The ostensible reason (no, not to spend more time with his family) was to put all his efforts into ending the war. Thereby quenching, potentially, the fire of much of the McCarthy and now Kennedy campaigns. If you believed him. Eventually Vice President Hubert Humphrey would take up the mantel of running as the preferred DNC front-runner. And what we witness in the play, as history shows, is that Kennedy, in just three months, was mounting a formidable challenge. Thus engendering one of the great “what-ifs” of party politics for that generation.

And that’s the main effect of the play: inspiring—besides admiration for the articulate, thoughtful, driven Kennedy, who never loses his sense of humor—thoughts of “what if.” And maybe, “what now?” Or “why not?,” recalling the famous tagline, stolen from George Bernard Shaw, with which Kennedy ended many of his speeches during the campaign: “Some men see things as they are and ask why? I dream things that never were and ask why not?”

As Kennedy, David Arrow does a remarkable job. He has the Kennedy quaver at times, and he can drawl out certain Boston inflections well enough to bring back those familiar voices. More keenly, his Kennedy takes us into his confidence, giving a chummy backstage access to the events as he lives them. There’s an immediacy that no documentary portrayal could achieve and that makes the play riveting—which is amazing, considering that most of the time we’re listening to campaign speeches (generally one of the lowest forms of theater). There are videos to show us newspaper headlines, views of crowds, and some of the faces of key figures of the time. The set has the look of the shambles of campaign headquarters after a grueling night.

For those who remember RFK (I was eight when he died, and can still recall getting up for school on June fifth, my brother’s second birthday, with the television proclaiming the news from California of the shooting; Kennedy died in the morning of the sixth), the play helps jog the memory—like the very real unease with the length of Kennedy’s hair in those days when such things were emblems of embracing the dangerous youth culture. For those who didn’t live through those times, the play is bound to feel a bit remote—Kennedy was dead before current presidential candidate Joe Biden was elected to his first term as senator—but it may be just the thing to stir youthful belief in the power of change.

The play is apropos in the way that some of Kennedy’s characterizations of current events describe our own times, but more importantly it reminds us that political leaders can sometimes galvanize the best and brightest hopes. As Kennedy said in his early campaign speech at the University of Kansas: “…hundreds of communities and millions of citizens are looking for their answers, to force and repression and private gun stocks - so that we confront our fellow citizen across impossible barriers of hostility and mistrust and again, I don't believe that we have to accept that.  I don't believe that it's necessary in the United States of America.  I think that we can work together - I don't think that we have to shoot at each other, to beat each other, to curse each other and criticize each other, I think that we can do better in this country.  And that is why I run for President of the United States.”

David Arrow (Bobby Kennedy) in KENNEDY: BOBBY‘S LAST CRUSADE, filmed for Playhouse on Park. Photos by Russ Rowland

The heartbreak of the story—which wouldn’t surprise Aeschylus—is that the gods are cruel.

Notes from Playhouse on Park:

This is a film of the play. This play was originally scheduled to be produced by Playhouse Theatre Group, Inc. live at Playhouse on Park. As a result of guidelines put forth by both Governor Ned Lamont and Actors Equity Association, the play could not be produced in front of a live audience, nor could it be filmed in CT. The play was filmed for Playhouse on Park audiences at the Theatre of St. Clements in NYC. This is the same place it had its world premiere in 2018. The film is available to stream at home between September 16 - October 4 for $20; NOW EXTENDED TO OCTOBER 11.

On Saturday, October 10, Playhouse on Park is bringing the filmed play KENNEDY: BOBBY’S LAST CRUSADE to Edmond Town Hall for The Ingersoll Auto Pop-Up Drive-In. The film will start at 7:30pm (gates open at 7pm). $20 per car. Playwright/Actor David Arrow and Director Eric Nightengale will be in attendance. We are working on a creative way to conduct a Question and Answer Session! Please plan on joining us. For tickets: here

Kennedy: Bobby’s Last Crusade
By David Arrow
Directed by Eric Nightengale
Starring David Arrow as Bobby Kennedy
Filmed for Playhouse on Park
Available for streaming: September 16-October 11, 202

Remote Post

Fully Committed, Music Theatre of Connecticut

When Becky Mode’s comedy Fully Committed was playing on Broadway in 2016, critic Charles Isherwood of the New York Times quibbled about the changed attitude toward the kind of conspicuous consumption displayed at the ultra-exclusive restaurant featured in the play at the time as compared to 1999, when the play first ran at Vineyard Theater. It was a canny reference to how context can change what we laugh at or not in a play that gently ribs a certain stratum of society.

Now, in the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic that closed theaters last spring, the antics of Sam, an actor between roles who works on the reservation desk in the basement of a “world-renowned, ridiculously red-hot Manhattan restaurant,” comes freighted with not a little nostalgia. Once upon a time people gathered in theaters and in restaurants, and you could pack both to capacity. Not so now. Music Theatre of Connecticut is one of very few theaters given the go-ahead by the state of CT and by Actor’s Equity to reopen, and MTC’s in-person seating has been shrunk to 25. Others may view the show live online. Which is how I saw it on opening night.

Matt Densky as Sam in Fully Committed at Music Theatre of Connecticut, directed by Kevin Connors (photo by Alex Mongillo)

The play is a one-person show. Sam, played by Matt Densky, arrives for work in the de rigueur mask of our times, then is able to get on with his job unmasked. The play’s action, without any face-to-face contacts, seems only too apropos. In his post, a sort of remote frontlines, Sam must man all alone multiple phones spread across the space where calls overlap and interrupt. Densky acts out a tour de force of the voices and mannerisms of all the callers, while Sam deals with ricocheting situations and considerable comic crosstalk, and comes out of the whirlwind “with his soul untouched” (as The Boss might say). It’s all enacted by Densky in split-second changes that are likely to make you a bit punchy, and, while more wit in the lines would be welcome, Densky is a versatile comic actor able to score delighted laughs with shifts in voice and attitude.

Matt Denksy in Fully Committed at Music Theatre in Connecticut, directed by Kevin Connors (photo by Alex Mongillo)

There’s the fussy French Maître D, the louche head chef—who sounds suspiciously at times like a certain overbearing political figure of our day—a co-worker calling in with MIA excuses, a wise guy, a big name actress’ manager, and a dizzying array of would-be clientele, some the height of pretentiousness, others the height of cluelessness. And all of it is handled by Sam like a candle burning both ends while he also deals with a few matters on the home-front: his disarmingly sweet dad wants him home for Christmas, his acting friend is having a big break, and Sam is sweating out the wait for a potential callback at Lincoln Center. All within the realm of reality in Manhattan.

And that’s the fun of the play but also—now—its poignancy. We took all this for granted, now look. What’s more, the fact that restaurants are re-opening with much more limited seating makes vying for that one table by the window (or what have you) more anxious than ever. The play, formerly a kind of high energy lark on the madness of multitasking (in the days before ubiquitous cellphones), has been updated a bit, so that Sam’s personal calls are on cell while the landlines are all for work. We see before us a kind of wonderfully choreographed chaos. It’s still high energy, it’s still a lark, but now we’re apt to be more than a bit apprehensive about that man on the flying trapeze, so to speak. Won’t someone give Sam a break—from the calls and in his career? Won’t someone drop a food pellet to the poor creature on his dreadful treadmill?

Matt Densky in Fully Committed at Music Theatre of Connecticut, directed by Kevin Connors (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Our attitude toward the action might take its cue from what we take Sam to be. Is he an actor who has to work a desk, or a worker who wants to be an actor? Unlike on Broadway with a name actor like Jesse Tyler Ferguson giving the show some celebrity box office, here Matt Densky is a native of CT who has done comic wonders at MTC in The SantaLand Diaries and The 39 Steps (and is on pandemic hiatus from the Broadway tour of WICKED) and he makes Sam’s situation feel that much more earned. Directed by Kevin Connors on a wonderfully detailed set by Jessie Lizotte, Densky’s Sam is beleaguered but never quite beside himself. He’s got great turn-on-a-dime timing and plenty of panache. We believe he could become as good an actor as Densky is. In other words, there’s hope for the performer of even the most thankless task—at least in Manhattan. Back then.

Seeing the show online provides its own sense of paradox. What makes a theater like MTC a treat is its intimacy; every seat is close to the action. Online, the show is viewed at a distance that’s a bit like having a Broadway mezzanine seat (which critics are never given!), though the broadcast sound leaves a bit to be desired, as the surrounding space creates more distortion than the direct-feed of computer-to-computer hook-up does on Zoom streams. Perhaps that can be improved, but in any case Fully Committed—which is the catch-phrase for a restaurant totally booked—is a good choice for those of us not yet fully committed to sharing public spaces with our fellow sufferers in the current state of affairs. It’s a play rather light on plot but strong on presence, and that serves to remind us of why live theater helps make life worthwhile. And it’s therapeutic to see someone onstage again! The make-believe of theater can’t always keep chaos at bay, but theater as make-believe chaos can be an apt diversion.

Only commit.

Matt Densky in Fully Committed at Music Theatre of Connecticut, directed by Kevin Connors (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Fully Committed
by Becky Mode
Directed by Kevin Connors
With Matt Densky

Scenic/Prop Design: Jessie Lizotte; Lighting Design: RJ Romeo; Costume Design: Diane Vanderkroef; Sound Design: Will Atkin; Stage Managing: Jim Schilling

Music Theatre of Connecticut
September 11-27, 2020

From the press release:

MTC is thrilled to be reopening its doors as one of three professional theatres in the country to be given permission to host indoor events via the approval of the state of CT and Actor’s Equity Association. Alongside this reopening comes health & safety protocols to assure the safety of the audience, crew, and actors. Some of these protocols include staggered arrival based on seating, no more than 25 audience members in the theatre, and masks required at all times. Until further notice, all performances will not only be presented in person, but through live stream as well, so that the shows may be watched live from the comfort of your home. Both in person and live stream tickets are available. For more information on MTC’s reopening protocols you can go here.

The Shut In Season

Preview, under quarantine

In the poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” W. B. Yeats imagines a golden bird that will sing “to lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past, or passing, or to come.” In these days when the numbers of those contracting the coronavirus and those dying from it are still escalating, there’s a large margin of uncertainty about what is “to come.” And in the midst of so many pronouncements about what is best and what will make things worse, it seems vain, in a sense, to write about the present as anything more than “what is passing.” About “what is past” we can be clear: for theater in CT, any hope of salvaging the remainder of the 2019-20 season is “past.” What’s “passing,” it seems now, are hopes for a return to normality in fall 2020. And to come? Well, for the moment we’ll just content ourselves with what’s available online and what may arrive, in time.

It’s been over a month since I was at a public event. That event, on March 11, was the Long Wharf Theatre’s announcement of its 2020-21 season, covered here by Lucy Gellman at the Arts Paper. On that evening, Long Wharf Artistic Director Jacob Padrón was still optimistic that the theater’s next production of the 2019-20 season, Lloyd Suh’s The Chinese Lady, directed by Ralph B. Peña, would run. Over the next few weeks, as stricter and stricter “shelter in place” directives were given, Broadway theaters shuttered, and restaurants in our area went to take-out and delivery only, the possibilities for theater resuming went from passing to past. Long Wharf cancelled its remaining shows, which included Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap, directed by Madeline Sayet. At Hartford Stage, a fine production of Jane Eyre, directed and adapted by Elizabeth Williamson, closed early, and David Seidler’s The King’s Speech, directed by Michael Wilson, was cancelled. The production of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!, directed by Artistic Director Maria Bensussen, originally scheduled for May, has been moved to the fall, October 22-November 15, and The Complete History of Comedy (Abridged), written and directed by Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor, originally scheduled for June, will take place October 1-11. Thus the last two shows of the 2019-20 season will run in 2020, followed by the annual production of A Christmas Carol (November 27-December 27). The 2020-21 season will then begin in January. Padrón and Bensussen, the respective Artistic Directors of Long Wharf and Hartford Stage, will be talking with longtime theater critic Frank Rizzo tonight about the current situation and their visions as new ADs at vibrant local theaters in challenging times. Go here, for the virtual edition of A Little Harmless Fun, on the website of the Mark Twain House & Museum, at 7 p.m.

The very day of the Long Wharf gathering, Yale Repertory Theatre announced, after Yale University determined it would not resume classes on campus after spring break (which ran until March 22nd), the premature end of its season, thus canceling a revival of A Raisin in the Sun, directed by Carl Cofield, and Testmatch by Kate Atwell, directed by Margot Bordelon; that announcement also meant that the final appearances onstage by students at the Yale School of Drama for spring 2020 had already occurred.

The last theatrical production I saw—Van Gogh Café at Yale Cabaret—marked the last show that will be held in the venerable basement space this season. The Cabaret, however, is not out of commission entirely. This weekend, April 17 & 18, Ain’t No Dead Thing, an original play written and directed by a.k. payne which was slated as one of the last three shows of the season, will air as a radio play, at 8 p.m. both nights. Information for tuning in can be found here. The Cab has devised its own station—KCAB—where a DJ named darealunluckymadman plays music amidst other events. The play, presented in partnership with FOLKS, is set “against the backdrop of one of the largest race massacres in U.S. history” in the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. At a diner called Noa’s Ark, folks gather to envision a future for Blacks in America. The Cab’s site describes a radio play as “a dramatized, acoustic performance that allows listeners to imagine the characters and visual elements of a story through dialogue, music, and sound effects. In this moment of constant communication via Zoom, checking the news, and streaming videos, radio plays give us a break from the screen and ask us to focus on language.”

Westport Country Playhouse, which generally runs its season from spring to late fall, announced on Tuesday that it will not mount any productions until 2021. “We hope our audience will understand and support this very emotional and challenging decision,” said Mark Lamos, Playhouse artistic director, in a statement, “but we, like our sister non-profit theaters and arts organizations world-wide, feel that the predicted future is too unknowable at this point.” The first program in the Playhouse’s virtual series airs on Friday, April 17, at 7 p.m.: “Getting to Know You: A Celebration of Young Artists,” with Tony Award-winning Broadway star Kelli O’Hara, on the Playhouse YouTube channel and Facebook Live. Ten Fairfield County high school students will perform a musical theater selection and chat with O’Hara. More Playhouse-generated online events will be announced soon, here.

Just down the road from Westport, in Norwalk, Music Theater of Connecticut has been assessing the situation in order to find a date for its production of The Buddy Holly Story (if his songs don’t brighten your mood, I don’t know what will!). Originally scheduled for March, then postponed until May, the show, according to MTC’s latest announcement—on the 16th—will run from Friday, July 16, to Sunday, August 1. Kevin Connors, MTC’s Executive Artistic Director, in a release from the theater, adds: “MTC remains engaged through our online initiatives including the weekly MTC LIVE! (a new episode premieres on Facebook and at www.musictheatreofct.com/live every Wednesday at noon), our online MasterClass series this month, and our annual gala fundraiser THE MTC VOICE – ONLINE EDITION – coming up on May 9.” For more info about these and other programs, go here.

The Goodspeed Theater in East Haddam announced that its usual season of three musicals (which typically starts around this time) will be reduced to one in 2020: performances for the revival of South Pacific are scheduled to begin on Friday, September 11. The summer production of the new musical Anne of Green Gables will now move to the 2021 season. In the theater’s press release, dated April 9, Goodspeed Executive Director Michael Gennaro said, “It was heartbreaking for us to make the decision to postpone Anne of Green Gables, but it has become clear that we would not have enough time to build and rehearse the show in time for a summer opening. Our producing staff and the creative team both agree that launching a world-premiere musical takes special attention, which may not be possible until we are well past this crisis.”

The health crisis is of course impacting the economy in a drastic manner. Theaters are having to furlough and lay off employees, cancel events—such as fund-raising galas—and are losing important ticket revenues. Contributions are greatly needed and appreciated and are, in most cases, tax deductible.

On April 14, The International Festival of Arts & Ideas, in New Haven, announced its plans for the 25th season’s virtual programming: “We will celebrate our 25th anniversary with a variety of online artistic experiences, virtual food experiences, cell phone-guided walking tours, and various NEA Big Read activities. The virtual Ideas programming centered on the theme ‘Democracy: We the People’ will feature interactive events and conversations with vital thinkers, including 2012 Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco, award-winning scholar Dr. Khalilah L. Brown-Dean, NEA Big Read Author Stephanie Burt, and renowned writer Anand Giridharadas. All programming will be free.”

The statement further reads: “We are committed to the Festival's mission that arts and ideas bring people together and have a positive economic impact on New Haven. Virtual and physically distanced programming will begin online in the coming weeks on a rolling basis. Details will be announced weekly and will be shared on the Festival’s website.”

Here is a link to the International A&I onscreen announcement featuring Liz Fisher & Tom Griggs, Co-Directors of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas

So, tune into as much theater as you can, from wherever you happen to be. Stay safe, and obey your local government’s health protocols as we try to be a public in private spaces.

A Cafe with a Difference

Review of The Van Gogh Café, Yale Cabaret

FLOWERS, Ka.—For those passing through or living fulltime in the area, Van Gogh Café offers homey décor and comfort food galore. I mean, that Emmie Finckel has done wonders with the place. It’s a downhome oasis with sunny yellow walls, where Formica tables sit beside some with homemade wooden planks, where mismatched chairs of all descriptions abound, where a sturdy counter—presided over by Marc (Mihir Kumar), the proprietor—is apt to be peopled with regulars on a first-name basis, where assorted knick-knacks and bric-a-brac decorate the tables, the bathroom walls are adorned with painted hydrangeas, and the record player intuitively grasps the song you need to hear.

Clara (Shimali De Silva), Marc’s charming ten-year-old daughter, will take your order if you show up in the hour before school starts. With Marc somewhat conflicted about his lot in life, Clara is clearly the VGC’s biggest devotee, an enthusiast who finds every visitor a source of fascination and believes there’s an enduring magic in the walls of the café. Well, why not, the café was once a storied theater and who knows what feats have occurred there. For Clara, who might be nursing a hurt now that her mother has moved to New York, the possibilities of the place are endless, as anything might happen.

She may have a point, or at least that’s my takeaway from a recent visit. There were doings a-plenty. A source of considerable amusement was the way a stray gull had taken up residence on the roof, only to be befriended by Clara’s cat. The lovestruck feline kept snagging articles of clothing from Lon (Faizan Kareem), a hapless regular—a boot, a scarf, a glove—to award to the visiting bird. Eventually, a flock of gulls were hanging out there, only to be dispersed in a providential fashion through the agency of some passers-through, Kelly (Lily Haje) and Jack (Devin Matlock). The lady is an ornithologist, really!

That’s often the way things go around The Van Gogh Café, Clara insists, as, for instance the visit of the Fancy Lady (Jocelyn Knazik Phelps), a stranger who left behind some seeds that magically became gardenias which were, of course, the favorite flower of that aged actor (Danilo Gambini) who visited later, to recall his former glories and to await an old friend.

Events can sometimes be a little disconcerting—like a thunderstorm that knocked out the power and, according to Clara, made the food able to cook itself. Which was a good thing as Marc had a period there where he saw himself as a poet, a passion perhaps inspired by some changes in his romantic outlook. Then there’s the time Maria (Rebecca Kent)—she’s sort of a peremptory type, but really very nice—found herself face to face with her daughter, Ella (Jocelyn Knazik Phelps), who left years ago. And, guess what, she’s pregnant! So Maria gets to be a grandmother after all.

Meanwhile Sue (Lily Haje) and Ray (Nicholas Orvis) occasionally argue over nothing, but it’s worth it just to hear Sue get all agitated with that little piping voice she has. And did I mention the person at the table adjacent to me? A playwright (Taiga Christie) who wrote a lot at every visit—so, who knows, we may all be in a play one day. Kinda like that old Beatles song—“and though she feels as if she’s in a play / She is anyway.”

That’s the feeling at The Van Gogh Café, alright. Watch where you sit because the regulars have some chairs all to themselves, but there’s plenty of seats all around to catch the comings and goings (of which there are a lot!). I won’t say there’s never a dull moment—I mean, this is Kansas, after all—but the cheer is infectious, the locals likeable, the food not bad. (I had the Greek salad as a starter, then the roast turkey with mashed potatoes and green beans—all of which was very satisfying, but I found myself eyeing the fried mozz appetizer and the slab of meat loaf I saw on other plates). Marc, according to the regulars, burns pies more often than not, and there’s a general opinion that the lemon meringue isn’t up to what it was when his wife was on the premises. My slice was fine, though the crust was a bit heavy maybe. I hear that the coffee is much improved, though, and the waitstaff are like people you might see in a real play sometime. Speaking of actors, I’m really glad I got to see that old star’s visit. What a charming guy, so sweet and gracious! You’d never know the career he had, he was so humble. Very touching. That’s the kind of thing I’ll be dining out on for a while. Maybe even on that meat loaf . . .

Oh, and I should mention. The Café is open for dinner at 8 p.m. tonight and Saturday. It also offers a late night snack menu tonight (I guess since it’s a Friday it’s OK for Clara to be up that late.) And on Saturday, a brunch menu at noon. That features a menu and a show that schoolkids should appreciate, especially any that have an interest in theater. Like the Yale Cabaret—which has storied walls in its own right—The Van Gogh Café assumes that the magic of childhood extends into our joy in the arts, no matter how old we might be (I’m not saying—but I did know all the songs from the Sixties that record player played.)

There’s magic in theater, certainly. And there’s magic—theatrical and otherwise—at The Van Gogh Café. Get in on it while you can (like, before you grow up too much).

The Van Gogh Café
Proposed, directed and adapted by Emily Sorensen and Madeline Charne, based on the novel by Cynthia Rylant

Set Designer: Emmie Finckel; Costume Designer: Miguel Urbino; Lighting Designer: Tully Goldrick; Associate Lighting Designer: Matthew Sonnenfeld; Sound Designers: Liam Bellman-Sharpe & Bryan Scharenberg; Technical Director: David Phelps; Producers: Madeline Carey & Sarah Scafidi; Stage Manager: Zak Rosen

Cast: Taiga Christie, Shimali De Silva, Danilo Gambini, Lily Haje, Faizan Kareem, Rebecca Kent, Jocelyn Knazik Phelps, Mihir Kumar, Devin Matlock, Nicholas Orvis

Yale Cabaret
March 5-7, 2020

yalecabaret.org

The Sherlock of Swindon

Review of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, CT Repertory Theatre

Simon Stephens’ Tony-winning stage adaptation of Mark Haddon’s best-selling novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is curious indeed. It’s a story full of dysfunction, including various kinds of abuse and the killing of a dog, that tries to be upbeat and heartwarming. It mainly succeeds due to inventive staging that keeps us apprised of the world according to Christopher, a Brit teen in Swindon who has exceptional math skills and is firmly forthcoming about his issues with most other things—like the colors brown and yellow, and the use of metaphors in speech, and the tendency of most humans to lie or playact—and because Tyler Nowakowski, a third-year actor in the MFA program at UConn, makes Christopher, for all his quirks, an engaging and interesting fellow to spend time with.

Christopher (Tyler Nowakowski), center; ensemble, left to right: Elizabeth Jebran, Matthew Antoci, Mauricio Miranda, Justin Jager, Nicolle Cooper, Alexandra Brokowski, in the Connecticut Repertory Theatre productioin of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

The play keeps us amused by little oddities, such as having the show’s ensemble enact furnishings and appliances in the home Christopher shares with his father Ed (Joe Cassidy), and the projections by Taylor Edelle Stuart keep us impressed as they simulate the tangled signals that Christopher, described as neuroatypical, must process. A trip to London in Act Two is rendered as a near psychic overload, kept benign by the fact that Christopher has written his story for his helpful teacher Siobhan (Thalia Eddy) and she has made it into the play we’re watching. That means that Christopher is at first narrated by Siobhan reading his narrative aloud, and then enacts himself as the hero of his own story, which is a bit of a mystery story and a bit of a domestic drama.

When Wellington, the dog of his neighbor Mrs. Shears, gets impaled by a garden fork, Christopher sets off as a neighborhood sleuth. His encounters with the locals are entertaining due to the way he interacts with others, two factors being his inability to lie or to endure physical contact. He’s played with many of the behavioral tics familiar from Dustin Hoffman’s character in the film Rain Man, though the precise nature of Christopher’s condition is never gone into. As a stage character, Christopher keeps our interest because we’re never sure what he may say or do nor how he will react to others, and that makes the introduction into his view of things very lively.

Christopher (Tyler Nowakowski), Mrs. Shears (Elizabeth Jebran), and ensemble (Matthew Antioci) in the Connecticut Repertory Theatre production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

What’s less lively is his relations with his parents, who are played as mostly patient and considerate. Exempt there’s a backstory of infidelity that Christopher’s questioning brings to light, along with outright lies and a surprising act of violence. The segment of Christopher in London, in Act II, drags because there’s so little in the way of new development, in the plot or in Christopher. At that point the big question is: will he get back to Swindon to sit for his A levels?

The problem is that the parents Ed and Judy (Margot White) are not only not very interesting, they are deliberately flattened, it seems, in an effort to present them as Christopher sees them. And since Christopher’s consciousness of others is his weak point, they mainly stand around looking pained as he acts out his inner turbulence. The encounters with strangers—such as a policeman in London (Matthew Antoci), or some people (Justin Jager and Alexandra Brokowski) waiting for the tube while Christopher hunts the tracks for his pet rat Toby (a very charming puppet by Bart P. Roccoberton, Jr.)—are much more appealing. There’s also a problem with the credibility of Judy—who tells us how hard it is to deal with Christopher—welcoming him with open arms in London, though she’s now living with a guy (Mauricio Miranda) who doesn’t want the kid around. And Cassidy’s Ed never seems troubled enough to do what the plot makes him do.

As a story, the mystery about the dog isn’t much of a dramatic crux and the domestic drama is even less of one (and it’s not really much of a spoiler to say that they are entwined, much as the absence of Mom is explained by the absence of a neighbor). The point is that Christopher, in solving the mystery, learns something about the people around him. Is it a lesson that has much purchase for him? Probably not, and not much for us either. In any case it all pales beside the question of how well he will do on his A level exam and the answer to his favorite mathematical problem. What keeps us involved is Christopher’s perspective and that’s a consistently positive aspect of the show.

Engagingly staged by director Kristin Wold with imaginative choreography well enacted by the ensemble, most of whom are MFA candidates at University of CT’s School of Fine Arts, featuring great command of the role of Christopher by Tyler Nowakowski, supported by able efforts by Equity actors Joe Cassidy and Margot White, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time works. The story of its unlikely hero shows us a that a unique sensibility can find its own way in life and flourish, and that’s not simply a curious fact.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Based on the novel by Mark Haddon
Adapted by Simon Stephens
Directed by Kristin Wold

Scenic Designer: Dennis Akpinar; Lighting Designer: Allison Zerio; Costume Designer: Sofia Perez; Sound Designer: Mack Lynn Gauthier; Technical Director: Aubrey Ellis; Dialect, Voice, & Text: Julie Foh; Movement Directors: Marie Percy & Ryan Winkles; Fight Director: Greg Webster; Projections: Taylor Edelle Stuart; Stage Manager: Tom Kosis; Puppet Designer: Bart P. Roccoberton, Jr.; Dramaturg: Eddie Vitcavage

Cast: Joe Cassidy, Margot White, Tyler Nowakowski, Thalia Eddy, Elizabeth Jebran, Mauricio Miranda, Justin Jager, Matthew Antoci, Alexandra Brokowski, Nicolle Cooper

Connecticut Repertory Theatre
UConn School of Fine Arts
February 27-March 8, 2020

The Choice Bits

Review of Cock, Yale Cabaret

The first thing you probably notice is that the stage set (by Lily Guerin) is a giant cage with four openings, one on each side, and with little seats attached to each corner. The next thing you probably notice is that the Yale Cabaret has new tables for the audience. Instead of round, they are long and rectangular, like the kind you might sit at to pass judgment. The audience is surrounding an arena where some kind of contest may take place. A cockfight, perhaps?

Cock by British playwright Mike Bartlett, directed by second-year director Alex Keegan, and proposed by John Evans Reese, who plays the only named character, John (the others are M, Daniel Liu; W, Zoe Mann; F, Thomas Pang, for Man, Woman, Father), sort of assumes that when you read or hear “cock,” you don’t automatically think of the two-legged, feathered creature. And that’s germane, certainly. But it’s also the case that a phrase like “the cock of the walk”—describing someone who struts around like he owns the place—may be implied. John is “the cock” here and as such he’s the prize to be fought over by his two lovers—M and W. The gist of it is that they discover this cock is something of a dick.

If that were all, that might be enough, but Bartlett seems to have a bit more on his mind, turning up the heat on the awkward dinner party trope and letting his characters get a bit unhinged, verbally, if not physically. The driving idea is sexual ambiguity as instanced when a member of a long-standing couple leaves that couple and opts for a lover that is not the same gender as the former lover. It may be that the locus classicus is a man, married to a woman, who, having already done the family bit, takes up with a man. Here, it’s the flip of that: John is with M; they seem to have hit a snag and John calls it quits, insisting that they are “fundamentally different” in how they approach life. While on his way to work one day, John is approached by W. They’ve noticed each other but haven’t spoken. Dancing and flirting ensues and, for the first time in his life, John confronts the question of whether he could have sex with a woman.

The play, which has been funny in showing us the sparring and at times passionate locutions of John and M—extremely well played by Reese and Lui—gets funnier when it becomes a question of John’s exploration of the—to him—unprecedented organ known by that other “c” word. Zoe Mann is wonderful as a woman being explored “like a science project” while also getting aroused. And John’s cock gets to do its cock of the walk bit as well, thus demonstrating that, for him, arousal isn’t only for gents with gents.

The dickness of John comes in his leaving W in the lurch and going back to M, then being unable to call it off with either M or W. A fact which appalls both of his lovers, since neither is inclined to accept that he might be bi and simply need a little of each (I say “each” because the play only gives him two choices). John vacillates at such a pitch that one might wonder why either M or W stays in the game. Even John wonders and the best he can determine is that it’s because of his eyes.

About that awkward dinner party. It’s offered by M (who does the cooking) as a way to let W down, and is put to W, by John, as an opportunity for a united front to end the thing with M. F, who is M’s dad and who has been invited by M as “backup,” adds to the tension with an aria about how he came to accept M with John as a genetic matter having to do with chemicals in the brain. The chemicals in his own brain seem to cause him to treat W as a manipulator and to look too often at her breasts—in W’s opinion. The outing going on at this point—of masculinist, sexist, “gay” and “straight” assumptions and prejudices—comes thick and fast. It’s mostly fun because, however you feel about these things, someone is bound to say something you’d argue with, were you in that cage.

John at one point disputes old-fashioned usages like “gay” and “straight” as though he’s about to manage a proclamation of sexual freedom. But it never quite comes to that. In fact, it ends up rather badly for John, more or less fetal while M stops just short of singing “who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Bartlett was born in 1980, and the Eighties is when sex became “an identity,” for political purposes, and a genetic predisposition, for normative purposes, and that’s the legacy that Cock wants to engage, to question why either/or is the only thing that makes sense, sexually. As a playwright, he’s of the type for whom a stance—and a nimble tongue—is enough to merit the name “character,” so we don’t ever have to delve into why W thinks being a gay man’s first girl is “the one” for her (though I imagine she’s not alone in that), nor into why John needs M to keep him in thrall or why M needs his whipping boy.

The actors are all wonderful, and the energy crackles. The pacing is rapid-fire, and the interrelations are all vividly realized. The interaction between Liu and Reese is a driving force in the play because so much derives from an implied situation that precedes the initial break. Caustic and lambent, Liu’s M generally pushes John’s buttons in a way that must work for both. And Reese and Mann make John with W seem equally viable, not just as an escape valve, but as a way to be a different person. As the father, Pang sounds sufficiently of a different generation as to be out of place but also—in his view—the voice of normality. Finally, Reese, in Stephanie Bahniuk’s costume and hair, has a certain look and plays so convincingly the charismatic man-child that we can believe he’s the cherished fetish M and W take him for.

In the end Cock made me stand—to applaud.

Cock
By Mike Bartlett
Directed by Alex Keegan

Artistic Consultant: Yura Kordonsky; Set Designer: Lily Guerin; Costume Designer: Stephanie Bahniuk; Lighting Designer: Evan C. Anderson; Sound Designer: Bailey Trierweiler; Co-Dramaturgs: Margaret E. Douglas & Sophie Greenspan; Co-Technical Directors: Yaro Yarashevich & Andrew Reidermann; Producer: Caitlin Volz; Stage Manager: Fabiola Syvel

Cast: Daniel Liu, Zoe Mann, Thomas Pang, John Evans Reese

Yale Cabaret
February 27-29, 2020