Sarah Ruhl Play Next for New Haven Theater Company

Preview of Dear Elizabeth, New Haven Theater Company

The work of poets Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) and Robert Lowell (1917-1977) is often discussed together because of the strong affinities the two writers had for each other and one another’s work. In the era since their deaths—two years apart—Bishop’s work has somewhat eclipsed Lowell’s, though he was a much better-known figure during their lifetimes, from an august Boston Brahmin family that traced its ancestors back to the Mayflower. Both poets won Pulitzers and National Book Awards, and both had great influence on subsequent generations of poets through their publications and teaching. The degree to which their actual personalities inflected their poetic personae is a question of their ongoing interpretation, and both have dedicated fans enamored of the unique musics of their verses.

The two are even more inextricably linked posthumously because of Sarah Ruhl’s play, Dear Elizabeth (first produced at Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Les Waters, in 2012), which will be revived this week and next by the New Haven Theater Company. The play derives from Words in Air, a 2008 volume that collects the complete correspondence—over 450 letters—between Bishop and Lowell, written from 1947 to 1977. Dramatized by two actors playing the poets and speaking lines the poets respectively wrote each other, Bishop and Lowell become eloquent and—in the wide range of their lives—exemplary figures for their literary generation.

J. Kevin Smith, a longtime member of NHTC, directs the play which runs November 7, 8, 9 and 14, 15, 16. Dear Elizabeth, he reminded me, was originally scheduled as a script-in-hand read last year at this time, with two different casts slated to play Bishop and Lowell. Of that run, which was scrapped when one of the participants was unable to perform, Ralph Buonocore has been retained to play Robert Lowell. Ralph had a small but essential role in last NHTC season’s success Webster’s Bitch and was memorable, several seasons ago, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Sandra Rodriquez, a veteran of NHTC having appeared in The Cult, Trevor, and most recently Goldfish, will be playing Elizabeth Bishop. They are joined by Abby Klein, who also played in Webster’s Bitch, as Brigit.

For Smith, the move to a full production for the play, as opposed to a staged reading, comes from a fuller immersion in the play and consideration of the kinds of stage directions Sarah Ruhl works into the text. He mentioned that Ruhl’s Foreword to the play suggests that the play could be done in a very scaled-down version, as for instance “a book club reading.” The Yale Repertory Theatre version was nothing like that, featuring water running on stage and levitating props, and Smith sees much potential for a version of the play somewhere between special effects and no effects.

He sees “magical realism” in what Ruhl writes about what happens onstage and feels the NHTC production will “facilitate the magic of the play,” which is a matter of “mood and how it is created” in a story that spans thirty years and though “platonic is passionate.” Particularly “compelling” for Smith is how Bishop and Lowell “do the dance of their relationship,” which at one point stirs from Lowell a love letter that Ruhl called “one of the most beautiful love letters ever written.” Ruhl, Smith said, became enamored of the correspondence when a friend gave her the book when she was under bed-rest while pregnant with twins. The playwright became convinced that the words in the letters needed to be heard aloud, and wrote a play to dramatize the unique nature of this enduring friendship.

As Ruhl says in her Foreword to the play: “It’s difficult to write about friendship. Our culture is inundated with the story of romantic love. We understand how romantic love begins, how it ends. We don’t understand, in neat narrative fashion, how friendship begins, how it endures. And yet life would be unbearable without friendship.”

Dear Elizabeth is about how friendship made the highly fraught lives of two highly wrought poets more bearable and, in their letters, indelible.

Dear Elizabeth
By Sarah Ruhl
Directed by J. Kevin Smith
New Haven Theater Company
Thursday, November 7 & 14 at 7:30 p.m.
Friday, November 8 & 15 at 8 p.m.
Saturday, November 9 & 16 at 8 p.m.
839 Chapel Street, New Haven

New Haven Theater Company considers the power of words

Preview of Webster’s Bitch, New Haven Theater Company

A live mic picks up a slur spoken by the boss of a dictionary-editing team, setting his office of lexicographers working to define a troubling word, and maybe—when the remark goes “viral”—navigating the damage. Laughs ensue, but also issues about office politics, sexism, cancel culture, the internet, censorship, and who gets to say what we get to say.

Brooks Appelbaum of Connecticut Critics Circle, reviewing the play’s premiere at Playhouse on Park in West Hartford almost a year ago, said that Jacqueline Bircher’s Webster’s Bitch “hits many topical notes in a sharp and entertaining way and introduces us to a world we may know little to nothing about: the world of lexicography, or of keeping dictionaries correct and current.”

For the New Haven Theater Company, Webster’s Bitch is a match made in heaven: a single-location set, a small cast of five that stretches from elders, in their fifties, to juniors, in their thirties, and a lone twentysomething who plays gadfly to her elders. And action that is dialogue-driven, and smart, funny, and relevant, about “issues that interest the company.”

Company member Susan Kulp, who proposed the play to the NHTC, was unable to take part due to the fact that she’s been busy acting in productions all over the state (Beauty and the Beast at Legacy Theater, Grumpy Old Men at Seven Angels Theatre, and currently The Executioner’s Wife at Milford Arts Council). The other Company members who might fit the parts best were also unavailable (most of them had already been involved this year in NHTC’s highly successful, sold-out run of Cry It Out). And so, an occurrence unprecedented in NHTC’s long life: the majority of the cast was secured through auditions.

NHTC member Ralph Buonocore plays Frank, the boss; Buonocore was last seen at NHTC in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as Mancini; the other cast-members are making their debut at NHTC: Lillian Garcia, a regular actor at Square One in Stratford, plays Joyce, Frank’s chief assistant at the office; Abby Klein, an actor newly returned to New Haven and the stage, plays Gwen, a lexicographer also in charge of social media; Gavin Whelan, an actor whose past work mostly took place in Indiana, plays Nick, another lexicographer; and Lisa DeAngelis, who acted recently in Fairview with Collective Consciousness Theatre and in Angels in America at Madison Lyric Stage, plays Ellie, Gwen’s younger sister. A recently departed third lexicographer is never seen but her successful brokering of a published novel is a topic of discussion.

A rehearsal of Webster’s Bitch at New Haven Theater Company (photo by NHTC)

Company stalwarts Margaret Mann and John Watson direct, having joined forces four times before for NHTC, co-directing the productions of The Dumb Waiter, Retreat from Moscow, Love Song and, most recently, Goldfish. One could say that all the plays they’ve worked on together have been focused on intense interrelations, sometimes in a family, or between a couple or, as here, among co-workers, or, in The Dumb Waiter, between hitmen waiting to hear from their boss. The co-directors work well together, Mann said, because their “sensibilities are very different”; Mann who approaches directing from an actor’s perspective, is concerned about “what feels right”; Watson, while building on his training, likes to encounter “new ideas” from collaboration.

Their camaraderie can be easily grasped in how comfortable they are in talking about the play, which they both found fascinating as a treatment of how language evolves and changes, and how individuals react differently to provocative language. Ellie, as a catalyst, has no filter, and Watson suspected that older viewers might find themselves in sympathy with Joyce who has to keep things running smoothly regardless of personal feelings.

Both co-directors felt that the two lexicographers—especially Gwen—set the tone for what the play is getting at, though as Watson pointed out, the play’s conclusion is “open-ended, leaving the audience hanging between competing agendas.” Whether dictionaries or other linguistic authorities should be descriptive—changing as language usage changes—or prescriptive—indicating what is correct and therefore unchanging. Mann said the play makes us “think about how many usages” there can be for any word, and, as Watson added, “where and who uses it.” He noted that those “deeply offended by bad language” may find the script a bit off-putting. “It’s not about vulgarity,” he quickly added, “but about what’s offensive and what’s not and why.”

A matter of taste, or a task for the policing of personal expression?

Webster’s Bitch plays at New Haven Theater Company, 839 Chapel Street, next Thursday, May 9, 7:30 pm, and Friday, May 10, and Saturday, May 11, at 8 pm; those three shows have been listed as Sold Out, as is the show Thursday, May 16, 7:30 pm; tickets are still available for the shows at 8 pm on Friday, May 17, and Saturday, May 18. Go here for tickets.

Cry It Out Comes to New Haven Theater Company

Preview of Cry It Out, New Haven Theater Company

This coming week the New Haven Theater Company returns with a spirited production of Molly Smith Metzler’s popular play, Cry It Out. You might think the title refers directly to the parenting philosophy which advocates leaving a child to “self-soothe” by crying until the child learns to settle into sleep. In fact, the “cry” in “cry it out” has more to do with what Jessie and Lina, two mothers of small children, are feeling as they try to navigate motherhood and working careers.

Marty Tucker has acted with New Haven Theater Company before—most notably in their production of Marjorie Prime in 2019 and in White Rabbit, Red Rabbit last year—but this show will be his debut as a director with NHTC, though he has directed many other shows (mostly Shakespeare). He said that he had been planning to direct a different play for NHTC, but the play required a larger cast than was readily available. In the NHTC method, any member can suggest a play for the company, who then all read it and discuss what might work best. Cry It Out came up for consideration and Tucker immediately loved it.

“I was laughing as I read it,” he said, and felt certain he could find the right actors for the roles.  Besides the two friends—from different backgrounds, with different paygrades in their working lives—there is an additional woman, Adrienne, a neighbor who visits, goaded by her husband, Mitchell, who feels his wife needs a sort of motherhood support group. A four-character play is familiar territory for NHTC, which has also mounted several classic two-handers, such as Zoo Story and The Dumb Waiter.

Marty Tucker directs Jenny Schuck as Jessie and Deena Nicol-Blifford as Lina in Cry It Out at New Haven Theater Company

Tucker knew he wanted NHTC member Deena Nicol-Blifford for Lina, so much so that her participation was key to his taking on the play. Jenny Schuck, who has played in some of NHTC’s larger cast productions, such as Almost, Maine in 2013 and Rumors in 2018, as well as taking on one night of White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, plays Jessie, the principal role. “Jenny as Jessie, Deena as Lina . . . it had to be,” Tucker joked. Melissa Anderson, who played Walt Disney’s daughter in Lucas Hnath’s A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay on the Death of Walt Disney at NHTC in 2017, takes on what Tucker called “the difficult role” of Adrienne, and, in another NHTC debut, Ruben Ortiz, the Artistic Director of New Haven’s A Broken Umbrella Theater, plays Mitchell.

“The cast is so good together,” Tucker enthused, “there is camaraderie, bantering, and they are so very generous.” He also complimented his cast’s work ethic: even though rehearsals have had to be restricted to weekends for the most part, the cast clearly works over material when not together. “Any suggestions I make are already incorporated the next time we meet,” he said with a kind of awe, “there is a lot of rapport and that helps to make the characters likeable. Because if they’re not likeable, you’re in trouble.”

“This one is going to be special,” Tucker said, “I’m thrilled” that the very entertaining play is being fully realized by this talented team. He noted how, when he first read the text, he was still thinking about it three days later. “At some point you go ‘wow,’ and think how awful and poignant” the characters’ situations are. It’s a play that offers much to think about, but with much heart, compassion, and laughter.

In terms of set, the play also works to NHTC strengths: a good all-purpose space that has considerable intimacy. The action takes place in Jessie’s backyard, but, Tucker said, the floorboards of the NHTC stage wouldn’t be convincing. They put down Astroturf only to have a very fake-looking lawn. NHTC member Trevor Williams then painted the turf, giving the set “the look of the kinds of winter lawns you see around here” (or until the recent snow covered them).

A play about parenting that, in NHTC’s words, “takes an honest look at the absurdities of being home with a baby, the power of female friendship, the dilemma of going back to work, and the effect class has on parenthood in America.” Cry It Out is a play about coping, and might help us cope with winter in Connecticut, providing a welcome warmth.

Cry It Out
By Molly Smith Metzler
Directed by Marty Tucker

New Haven Theater Company
February 22, 23, 24, 29 (sold out); March 1 (sold out), March 2
Note: February 22 and 29 at 7:30 p.m.; all other shows at 8 p.m.

For tickets: Cry It Out

The New Haven Theater Company is: Melissa Andersen, Ralph Buonocore, Sara Courtemanche, Drew Gray, Erich Greene, George Kulp, Susan Kulp, Margaret Mann, Deena Nicol-Blifford, Sandra Rodriguez, Steve Scarpa, Jenny Schuck, J. Kevin Smith, Aleta Staton, John Strano, Marty Tucker, John Watson, Jodi Williams, and Trevor Williams

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

Drag Yourself Underground

Review of Dragaret Underground, Yale Cabaret; with photographs by Linda Young

February and drag go together, if only because, in New Haven, February is often a drag, a month where—as our most recent Nobel laureate puts it—“anyone with any sense had already left town.” But at the Yale Cabaret, February is a drag in quite another sense. It’s the month of Dragaret, an annual celebration of drag performance, as, in the words of co-director (and DJ in Village-People-leather-boy retro) Danilo Gambini, an occasion to “bring joy into the conversation of consent and pleasure.” And that can be worth sticking around for. This year the theme was “underground,” as a place, co-director Alex Vermillion said, “to explore and be safe and sexy.” All are welcome to what should be seen as a “queer utopia.”

Danilo Gambini, Gregory St. Georges

Dragaret is in its eighth year and this is the third year in which Friday night’s two shows, at 8 and 11, were reserved for Connecticut queens while Saturday’s three shows, 8, 10, and midnight, were for students in the Yale School of Drama to perform. Patrick Dunn of New Haven Pride hosted the Friday night shows as Kiki Lucia, Dunn’s drag-queen persona, and David Mitsch, a third-year costume designer in YSD, hosted Saturday’s shows as Tipsy Von Tart.

Tipsy Von Tart

Both nights share great costumes, much lip-synching, surprising moves—artful ways to remove clothing seems de rigueur—and an inspired reach into a grab-bag of cultural references, styles, and personae. The main rule—tip your queens—was enthusiastically adhered to at the shows I attended (Friday, 11 p.m. and Saturday, 10 p.m.) but I have no way of knowing if the show’s mantra—“consent is sexy”—yielded its desired results.

Kiki Lucia

The CT queens of Friday night presented two entirely different shows. The show I saw had a crisp, deliberate professionalism that made for a parade of striking presentations, which included pole-dancing, striptease, and comic or emotional elements. All the performers were memorable in their own ways, but those numbers with a somewhat satiric side—such as Lotus Qween’s hilarious takeoff of Hillary (to the tune of, among other things, “Wedding Bell Blues” with its address to “Bill”) and Laiylah Alf Wa Laiylah’s evocation of Randy Rainbow’s sharp send-up of our national embarrassment, “The Don” (to the tune of “Gaston,” from The Beauty and the Beast)—were favorites for me.

Lotus Qween

Laiylah Alf Wa Laiylah

Other acts were notable for their graceful appearances, such as transgender performer Casey Fitzpatrick, and the moves of Rarity Moonchild, Xiomarie LeBeija, and Sparkle Diamond.

Casey Fitzpatrick

Rarity Moonchild

Xiomarie LeBeija

Sparkle Diamond

Frizzie Borden, billed as a bio-diva, is a woman who does drag as a woman, making a case for how diva-dom can be not only an inspiration but also an oppression. One of the more affecting performances on Friday, for me, was Rory Roux-Lay Heart’s deconstruction of her gorgeous femme persona to the tune of Bowie’s “Is There Life on Mars?”

Frizzie Borden

Rory Roux-Lay Heart

Kiki Lucia closed the show with a driven display to Cher’s “Woman’s World” with couture from The Handmaid’s Tale. A gay man dressed as a woman celebrating the power of women felt entirely appropriate, and if it didn’t, YSD night, when many more women took the stage as bio-divas, opened the question of drag as a way of positioning femininity as a performance art.

Kiki Lucia

The performance of maleness was rather less in evidence, with Jaime Hellfyre (Emma Perundi-Moon), on Saturday night, the only female-as-male performer.

Jaime Hellfyre

On Saturday at 10, our gently ironic hostess Tipsy Von Tart quipped that the jokes had already been said at the 8 p.m., implying that she might get in trouble for going off-script. She interacted with the crowd with perfect aplomb and was a welcome presence between numbers.

Tipsy Von Tart quips with “F. Murray Abraham”

Many of the acts worked as performance art, with the element of drag (however we might define that) of minimal import: JJ McGlone dressed as a solstice maiden in his hysterical evocation of Midsommar;

Midsommar Night’s Scream

The Dollar Bells cavorted in cut-offs and showed-off pole-riding skills because they can;

The Dollar Bells

Zardoz Hologram (Meg Powers) evoked Aladdin-Sane-era Bowie in makeup and her silent cyberbots (Madeline Pages and Bryn Scharenberg), while performing to his “TVC15,” complete with projections upon a TV-prop that eventually, as per the lyrics, consumed her.

Zardoz Hologram

You Can’t Be in the Show (Maia Mihanovich, Jackeline Torres Cortes, Daniel Liu, Julian Sanchez) mystified me with the import of their performance but it ended with what seemed an entirely consensual orgiastic oneness.

You Can’t Be in the Show

Stripping off a costume to reveal a decidedly different subtext was the order of the evening for many routines: Prettiest Little Devil (Zak Rosen), the only undergraduate performer, sported red wings under his gown;

Prettiest Little Devil

Georgia O’Queef (Alexandra Maurice) opened her number as a demure lady complete with picnic basket, mouthing a ‘60s torch song, only to transform before our eyes into a bumping-and-grinding diva;

Georgia O’Queef

Lady Lilith (Alex Vermillion) began zir piece as a distressed princess desperately beseeching a bald, bespectacled Dean (Matthias Neckermann) for an MFA, only to strip off all pretense at supplication in order to spank the abased academician on his leather-clad bundy, er, booty;

Lady Lilith and Dean

and Cerebral Pussy (Jessy Yates) came forward as a devotee of Jesus in a wheelchair who, filled with grace or something more carnal, took off her clothes and danced.

Cerebral Pussy

Two routines that earn special mention: the somber and studied manner in which Shabbos Queen (Adam Shaukat) put on clothes to become herself;

Shabbos Queen

and the ladies of El Cibao (Ilia Isorelýs Paulino, Nurilys Cintron, Noemi Paulino, Nefesh Cordero Pino, Jackeline Torres Cortes, Maia Mihanovich, Tyler Cruz) who performed in two different patterns of rhythmic unison and ended by waving flags of different countries.

El Cibao

Finally, our gracious hostess, Tipsy, ended the evening with a rousing performance recalling one of the greatest of all drama queens, Blanche Dubois, who seemed only too glad to depend upon the kindness of a hirsute stranger—an embodiment of the male principle as a rather randy bear (Brandon E. Burton).

Tipsy Von Tart and friend

Credit and accolades to Jimmy Stubbs who designed an impressive catwalk with wings as well as a cage for terpsichorean celebrants; Liam Bellman-Sharpe for sound; Emma Deane and Nicole E. Lang for lights; Hannah Tran for projections, and Kitty Cassetti and Aiden Griffiths for costumes that inspired—and at times left nothing to—the imagination.

Doireann Mac Mahon, Sarah Karl

For the midnight show other acts were added, but this ends my account of Dragaret 02/20. The Yale Cabaret has our permission to do it to us again next year…

Riw Rakkulchon (YSD MFA *19)

Dragaret Underground
Co-directed by Danilo Gambini and Alex Vermillion

Co-Producers: Sarah Cain and Jason Gray; Set Designer: Jimmy Stubbs; Co-Lighting Designers: Emma Deane and Nicole E. Lang; Projection Designers: Hannah Tran; Co-Costume Designers: Kitty Cassetti and Aiden Griffiths; Sound Designer: Liam Bellman-Sharpe; DJ: Danilo Gambini; Dramaturg: Madeline Pages; Technical Director: Libby Stone; Assistant Technical Directors: Doug Kester and Kat McCarthey; Stage Manager: Sam Tirrell; Assistant Stage Managers: Julia Bates and Edmond O’Neal

Hosts: Kiki Lucia, Feb. 21; Tipsy Von Tart, Feb. 22

Performers, Feb. 21: Kiki Lucia, Casey Fitzpatrick, Lotus Qween, Rarity Moonchild, Frizzie Borden, Xiomarie LaBeija, Sparkle Diamond, Laiylah Alf Wa Laiylah, Rory Roux-Lay Heart

Performers, Feb. 22: Christopher D. Betts, Brandon E. Burton, Estefani Castro, Nurilys Cintron, Jackeline Torres Cortes, Tyler Cruz, Danilo Gambini, Sarah Karl, Daniel Liu, Sarah Lyddan, Doireann Mac Mahon, Juliana Martinez, Alexandra Maurice, JJ McGlone, Alex McNamara, Maia Mihanovich, David Mitsch, Ciara Monique, Matthias Neckermann, Reed Northrup, Madeline Pages, Eli Pauley, Ilia Isorelýs Paulino, Noemi Paulino, Emma Pernudi-Moon, Nefesh Cordero Pino, Meg Powers, Zak Rosen, Julian Sanchez, Bryn Scharenberg, Adam Shaukat, Alex Vermillion, Adrienne Wells, Maal Imani West, Devin White, Jessy Yates

Yale Cabaret
February 21-22, 2020

Have You Been to the Zoo?

Preview of The Zoo Story, New Haven Theater Company

Of late, the New Haven Theater Company has been tackling plays that require extensive sets—such as Bus Stop, Rumors, One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest—but this season, George Kulp points out, the troupe has decided to go for more minimalist sets with different configurations of audience and playing space. Kulp is co-directing NHTC’s current production, Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, with Steve Scarpa and the play, in its more stripped-down, small cast virtues, will align with other distinctive NHTC shows, like last fall’s Retreat from Moscow or, several seasons back, Almost, Maine. The NHTC press release for the play describes it as: “Two very different men—a successful family man and an isolated loner—meet in a park, and their disturbing confrontation plays out ‘in real time.’”

The Zoo Story is the play that put Albee on the map, c. 1960. It was updated in 2004 (and first played at Hartford Stage) when the author revisited the play by writing a prequel called Homelife. The Zoo Story is a two-hander with characters named Jerry and Peter. Homelife showed us Peter talking to his wife before going to the park to read a textbook he is proofing. According to J. Kevin Smith, who plays Peter in the NHTC production, Albee adjusted some of the language in The Zoo Story, removing “stilted language” from the Fifties and “took out some obvious on-the-nose things.” Trevor Williams, who plays Jerry, said that his character’s language tends to be “zany and off” and anachronistic “even in the Fifties,” with word choices that can “sound academic or flowery.” As with most of NHTC’s triumphs, The Zoo Story is dialogue-driven. Or, perhaps more properly, monologue-driven. Jerry holds the floor most of the time, trying to interest Peter in various verbal snapshots of his life while Peter mainly stays reactive to what he’s hearing.

J. Kevin Smith and Trevor Williams of New Haven Theater Company

It’s an interesting choice, putting Smith in the reactive, mostly silent role, since Smith has a record of playing blustery, talkative, know-it-all guys, as he did in Bus Stop, as Dr. Gerald Lyman, in Cuckoo’s Nest, as Harding, and perhaps most memorably as the domineering, hectoring and fascinating Walt in Lucas Hnath’s A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney. As Kulp pointed out, Smith still has “plenty to do,” just not with speech. Scarpa, in presenting the play as a possible choice for this season, wanted “to make Peter strong,” and not a passive character. In that sense, Smith is an obviously good choice since passive isn’t his most noticeable theatrical trait. Kulp spoke of Smith’s “immediate and ecstatic acceptance” of the role.

Jerry, Williams said “is a challenge and not just technically.” He cited gratefully Kulp’s patience in helping him get to the character. He sees Jerry as “operating on a different set of rules. He opts not to adhere to the rules of socialization” but that means it’s important to “mine out what” the rules are for Jerry. Williams has become the NHTC’s go-to actor for off-the-wall or beyond-the-norm characters: he played a fantasy of a movie-star chimp in Trevor, the put-upon and marginalized Mechanic in Middletown, a surly hitman in Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, and most recently the cunning and possibly crazy McMurphy in Cuckoo’s Nest, also directed by Kulp. Jerry may be his biggest feat yet.

For Kulp and Scarpa, key to the play is following the play’s through-line, which means following Jerry’s train of thought as he entertains, interests and intimidates Peter. “There’s a charming menace” in Jerry, Kulp said, and he finds this to be a great play for “two very talented guys” to perform.

A simple park bench. An illusion of some parklike surroundings. The audience as close to the set as they can get. A man is reading. Another man approaches him and says, “I’ve been to the zoo.”

The Zoo Story plays for the next three weekends, Thursday through Saturday. This Thursday, February 20, is “pay what you can” for tickets purchased at the door.

The Zoo Story
By Edward Albee
Directed by Steve Scarpa and George Kulp
Featuring NHTC company members J. Kevin Smith and Trevor Williams
February 20-22; February 27-29; March 5-7, 2020

Doors open at 7:30;  all performances start at 8:00 in the NHTC Theater located in the English Market (at the back of EBM Vintage store)
839 Chapel Street
New Haven, CT

Long Wharf Theatre Steps Through a Door

Preview of I Am My Own Wife, Long Wharf Theatre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long Wharf Theatre
February 5-March 1, 2020

What's Next on the Local Theater Scene

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

New Haven:

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

At New Haven Theater Company this week only!

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

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

At Yale Cabaret this week only!

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

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

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

Mason Alexander Park

Hartford:

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

Opening night this Friday at Hartford Stage!

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

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

New Haven Theater Company Advances on "Retreat from Moscow"

Preview of The Retreat from Moscow, New Haven Theater Company

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

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

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

Co-Directors Margaret Mann and John Watson

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

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

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

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

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

To do that, get tickets and more info here.

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

Get In The Act: The Fall Theater Scene in Connecticut

Preview: Fall Theater Season, 2019

Labor Day has come and gone, and “back to school” weather in Connecticut actually felt like early autumn, for a change. And my email inbox’s increase of press releases indicates that the theater season of fall 2019 is tuning up. The “twenty-teens” are coming swiftly to a close, while the next presidential election is barely more than a year away as we start to wonder who is at “20/20” for 2020.

Here is a glance at the upcoming shows on the Connecticut theater scene (touring Broadway shows exempted) for the next four months between now and the beginning of that oddly doubled year—the last one was 1919!

Yale Cabaret, the black box in a basement on Yale campus where theater leaders of tomorrow make extracurricular theater as students at the Yale School of Drama, begins its 52nd season this week (see Lucy Gellman’s coverage at Arts Paper ); the incoming team are Artistic Directors Zachry J. Bailey, a third-year in Stage Management, Brandon Burton, a third-year in Acting, and  Alex Vermilion, a third-year in Dramaturgy & Dramatic Criticism, together with Managing Director Jaime Totti, a fourth-year joint candidate for an MFA in Theater Management at the School of Drama and an MBA at the School of Management. The 2019-20 season kicks off, September 12-14, with We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, from the German Südwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915 by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jackie Sibblies Drury, a lecturer in playwriting at YSD, directed by Christopher Betts (Directing, ’21); the play dramatizes the difficulties of authentic representation in a tale of genocide by staging the play’s rehearsal; next, September 19-21, is Waste \\ Land: Climate Change Theatre Action 2019, an anthology mixing short plays by international playwrights and pieces written by students, the show is curated and directed by members of Beyond Borders, a new affinity group for international students at YSD; then, October 3-5, the Cabaret returns with benjisun presents bodyssey, a movement-and-puppetry piece created by Benjamin Benne (Playwriting ’21) and Jisun Kim (Dramaturgy & Dramatic Criticism ’21); first seen in the TBD festival of rough drafts last season, the expanded version further explores themes of the human body and the world it inhabits (review). For a preview of the shows from October 24 through December, go here.

Goodspeed, the venerable musical theater on the Connecticut River in East Haddam, has had a very successful 2019 season so far: its revival of the classic The Music Man won the CT Critics Circle Award for Best Musical; its new musical Because of Winn Dixie enjoyed an extended run, and now it brings the season to a close with Billy Elliott, Book & Lyrics by Lee Hall, Music by Elton John; an audience choice, the original Broadway show won 10 Tonys, adapting a popular film about a young boy in a tough North England mining town who dreams of becoming a dancer. September 13-November 24 (review).

Originally the first self-supporting summer theater in the country, Ivoryton Playhouse has been running versatile full seasons since 2006 under Executive Director Jacqueline Hubbard; the last two shows of the 2019 season, which began in March, are Sheer Madness by Paul Portner, a lively—and long-running—comedy-mystery in which audience members spot clues, question suspects, and solve the case, complete with improvised topical humor from the cast, September 18-October 6, and Woody Sez – The Life and Music of Woody Guthrie, an involving celebration of the songs of Woody Guthrie, the anti-fascist folk-bard of Depression-era America, devised by David M. Luken, who plays Woody, with Nick Corley, Darcie Deauville, Helen J. Russell, and Andy Tierstein, October 23-November 10.

Like my own reviews of New Haven theater, Playhouse on Park in West Hartford, founded in 2009 by Co-Artistic Directors Sean Harris and Darlene Zoller and Executive Director Tracy Flater, is entering its second decade; the spacious stage in the Playhouse thrust space, which has housed some memorable productions such as The Diary of Anne Frank (2017) and The Scottsboro Boys (2019), will present the “inspired madness” of Dan Goggin’s Nunsense, a spirited musical in which singing nuns raise fun and funds to bury their deceased sisters, September 18-October 13 (review), followed by Barbara Lebow’s A Shayna Maidel; Dawn Loveland Navarro directs the tale of a patriarch and his two daughters—as children, one escaped the Holocaust with him, the other had to survive it—meeting again after many years, an exploration of “family, faith and forgiveness,” October 30-November 17 (review).

Following the departure of its celebrated Artistic Director, Darko Tresnjak, Hartford Stage opens its 56th season, the exciting first season for new Artistic Director Melia Benussen and new Managing Director Cynthia Rider; first up is Quixote Nuevo by Octavio Solis, a contemporary reimagining of Cervantes’ immortal Don Quixote, now set in a Texas border town, directed by KJ Sanchez; the production is in association with Huntington Theatre Company and Alley Theatre, September 19-October 13 (review); the next two shows will be directed by Rachel Alderman, Artistic Associate (and a founding member of New Haven’s innovative Broken Umbrella Theatre): Molly Smith Metzler’s Cry It Out, a recent comedy about four parents negotiating “the power of female friendship, the dilemma of going back to work after being home with a newborn, and the effect social class has on parenthood in America,” October 24-November 17 (review), and the fun, elegant, and ghostly A Christmas Carol, the traditional holiday favorite of spiritual redemption from Charles Dickens by way of Michael Wilson’s inventive adaptation, November 29-December 28.

Originally a dance hall built in the 1920s, later—in the 1970s—a skating rink, and, since the 1990s, a theater, Waterbury’s Seven Angels Theatre in Hamilton Park, boasts a good sound system, great for concert-style shows such as Million Dollar Quartet (2017) and The Who’s Tommy (2018); the 2019-20 Mainstage season opens with Honky Tonk Laundry, by Roger Bean Take, a tuneful tale of two gals running a laundromat, featuring the music of a slew of female Country Music legends, such as Dolly Parton, Patsy Cline, Carrie Underwood, Trisha Yearwood, and Reba McEntire, September 26-October 20; then, November 7-December 1, it’s Matthew Lopez’s hilarious, crowd-pleasing tale of how a straight married guy—a struggling Elvis impersonator—must learn to walk the walk of a stylish drag queen in The Legend of Georgia McBride.

Founded in 1987 as a small, black box equity theater together with a school of the performing arts, Music Theater of Connecticut in Norwalk, just past the Westport border, follows the gripping productions—Jekyll & Hyde: The Musical, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Cabaret—of its strong 2018-19 season with the ambitious musical adapted from E. L. Doctorow’s historical pastiche, Ragtime, with Book by Terence McNally, Lyrics by Lynn Ahern, and Music by Stephen Flaherty, a story of multicultural America, involving African Americans in Harlem, white upper-class suburbanites in New Rochelle, and East European Jewish immigrants, September 27-October 13 (review); then, November 8-24, it’s Robert Harling’s Steel Magnolias, the story of small-town life in Louisiana as lived and learned by a group of women for whom the local beauty salon is a kind of clubhouse beyond the purview of the fellas (review).

At Westport Country Playhouse, Mark Lamos is in his second decade as Artistic Director, continuing to produce an able mix of sumptuously mounted classics, such as Romeo and Juliet (2017) and Camelot (2016), notable new work like Ayad Akhtar’s The Invisible Hand (2016) and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Appropriate (2017), and rousing crowd-pleasers like Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights, which began the 2019 season in April; the season has two more shows: Lamos directs Mlima’s Tale by two-time Pulitzer-winning playwright Lynn Nottage, a fable about a Kenyan elephant, Mlima, a species facing extinction in a world of capitalist greed and economic desperation, October 1-19 (review); and Brendan Pelsue’s new translation and adaptation of Molière’s dark comedy Don Juan about the legendary libertine facing the consequences of his faithless lifestyle, directed by David Kennedy, November 5-23 (review).

ACT (A Contemporary Theatre) of Connecticut opened the doors of its own theater in Ridgefield in June 2018; the stylish, open stage, with amphitheater seating, has so far only five theatrical productions to its credit as founders Katie Diamond, Executive Director, Daniel C. Levine, Artistic Director, and Bryan Perri, Resident Music Supervisor, continue their mission to bring Equity, Broadway-caliber productions to CT’s northwest. The second season opens with Alan Menken and Harold Ashman’s ever-popular and entertaining The Little Shop of Horrors, a macabre musical comedy about a lovable schlemiel, his demanding man-eating pet plant, Audrey II, and the girl he loves, October 3-November 3 (review).

In the northeast part of the state, The Connecticut Repertory Theater is the production component of the Department of Dramatic Arts at the University of Connecticut in Storrs; CRT productions are directed, designed by, and cast with visiting professional artists, mixing Equity actors, faculty members, and UConn’s most advanced theater students. The 2019-20 season of six shows leads off, in the Harriet S. Jorgensen Theater, with Chekhov’s masterpiece The Cherry Orchard, a more apt choice for our times than the playwright’s more oft-produced The Seagull; the production, adapted by Jean-Claude van Itallie and directed by John Miller-Stephany, features Mark Light-Orr as Gayev and Caralyn Kozlowski as Ranevskaya, October 3-13; later in the month, in the Studio Theatre, is Sarah DeLappe’s spirited The Wolves, directed by Julie Foh, in which a girls’ high school soccer team copes with the tensions of coming of age, October 24-November 3; Shakespeare in Love, a stage adaptation of the Oscar-winning romantic comedy film by Tom Stoppard, Lee Hall and Marc Norman, about the young Shakespeare’s writer’s block and inspiring tryst with Viola, a titled woman with an overweening love of theater, plays the Harriet S. Jorgensen theater November 21-December 8, directed by Vincent Tycer, its Equity cast still to be determined.

In New Haven, James Bundy has been the Artistic Director of Yale Repertory Theatre, the theater in residence for the Yale School of Drama, and the Dean of Yale School of Drama since 2002, fostering theatrical talent and showcasing top professionals; the first show of the 2019-20 season is the World Premiere of Girls, the always challenging Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ modern adaptation of Euripides’ The Bacchae, a popular go-to classic of our moment, this time with “a killer DJ, bumping dance music, and live-streaming video,” October 4-26 (review), directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, an inspiring Directing alum of YSD (2012) who teamed with Jacobs-Jenkins for War at Yale Rep in 2014; The Plot, by the always rewarding Will Eno, has its World Premiere November 9-December 21 (review), directed by Oliver Butler, who won the OBIE for directing Eno’s Open House at the Signature Theatre; Eno’s previous play at Yale Rep was The Realistic Joneses (2012).

The first two thesis productions at the Yale School of Drama, in which third-year Directing students work with a cast and technical team comprised of—generally—current YSD students, will run in the closing months of 2019 as well: Kat Yen directs Anne Washburn’s post-apocalyptic Mr. Burns, a post-electric play, in which collective memories of shows on The Simpsons become the basis of an epic myth, October 26-November 1 (preview) (review); and, December 14-20, Danilo Gambini, the Co-Artistic Director of the 2019 Yale Summer Cabaret season, directs Fun Home (preview) (review); Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori’s musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic-novel memoir of her early life, her coming out, and her fraught relationship with her closeted gay father won the Tony Award for Best Musical of 2015.

At New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre, last season was still transitioning after the ousting of longtime Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein in 2018; now the implementation of the vision of new Artistic Director Jacob G. Padrón is underway, “Grounded in the past, leaping into the future,” though the season that will be entirely his own won’t arrive until 2021-22 (read Frank Rizzo’s talk with Padrón at Newhavenbiz). The 2019-20 season opens with the World Premiere of Ricardo Pérez González’s On the Grounds of Belonging, October 9-November 3 (review); directed by David Mendizábal, the story tells of a forbidden love between a white man and a black man in 1950s’ Jim Crow Texas; oft-produced actor-playwright Kate Hamill has become a veritable industry of quirky, third-wave feminist adaptations of the kinds of nineteenth-century classics formerly the stuff of Masterpiece Theater productions; her third effort, and second Austen novel, Pride and Prejudice fills Long Wharf’s second slot, November 27-December 22 (review).

In downtown Hartford at the historic City Arts building on Pearl Street, TheaterWorks has been producing theater since 1985; the 2019-20 season will open in the newly renovated but still very intimate theater space, after staging several of last season’s shows at the Wadsworth Atheneum’s auditorium; the opener is American Son, Christopher Demos-Brown’s topical drama, on Broadway last season, about a mixed race couple’s grim night of truth when their son gets stopped by police, October 18-November 23 (review); the last show of 2019 will be “Hartford’s twisted holiday tradition,” Rob Ruggerio’s Christmas on the Rocks in which a battery of playwrights devise futures for the figures many of us spent far too many Christmases with; so here’s to all those for whom “the holidays” were as much—or more—about repeat-viewing of “holiday classics” as about spending time with loved ones, December 1-29.

I’ll be reviewing many of these shows, so stop back and follow links to the reviews as they come in, and make the most of the rest of 2019 . . .

Join the Club, If You Can

Preview of Latinos Who Look Like Ricky Martin, Yale Summer Cabaret

The final show of the Yale Summer Cabaret’s Verano season opens this week, a new comedy by Emilio Rodriguez in which three college-student members of a Latino Student Union meet to decide how to make their club both inclusive and authentic. This goal quickly leads to having to “out Latino each other” to become the president the club needs.

The question, as the Summer Cabaret’s co-artistic director Jecamiah M. Ybañez, who directs the play, says, is about “how we shape identity and how people respond.” The three students—Xavier, Monica, and Isaac—have different ideas about how to appeal to other students who may or may not identify themselves with the group’s interests. In fact, the trio may have little in common other than a desire to represent Latinx culture, and even that shared interest might be a bit too amorphous for the kind of solidarity that Xavier and Monica—who want to “put the unidad in communidad”—aim at.

The play’s title, Latinos Who Look Like Ricky Martin, is itself a test of sorts. Ricky Martin, born Enrique Martin Morales in San Juan, Puerto Rico, became known as the King of Latin Pop, with a worldwide fan base, beginning in the mid-90s, and a cross-over hit that topped American charts in 1999, “Livin La Vida Loca.” Does his fame and his looks make him an instant spokesperson for Latinos everywhere, or only those who “look like” him—in terms of features or coloring—or sound like him, or who would like to? And what if you’re not even much into a figure who becomes some kind of emblem for “people like you”?

For Ybañez such questions aren’t merely academic. Raised in San Antonio, TX, Ybañez doesn’t speak Spanish and, as a kid in the ‘90s when Ricky Martin’s first fame came, didn’t identify with the Spanish-language hits that made the singer’s name early on. For the director, Martin made a bit more of an impression when he finally came out as gay in 2010. A fact that adds another dimension to Martin’s identity and so complicates the very question of whether anyone can be a normative figure to unite a people’s full diversity.

And that’s the point, for Ybañez, of doing the play. As our social world becomes increasingly polarized and exclusive, with many preferring to communicate only within a bubble that ostracizes other members of the population, comedy can help portray some of the unsavory aspects that come with policing borders—in day-to-day exchanges, or as national policy.

Jecamiah M. Ybañez

The idea that “all people of a particular culture share one particular identity” is one that Ybañez said is not uncommon among advocates for identity politics. Such views can lead to “shaming,” where some members of, for instance, a Latino Student Union, may be “too Latin,” or “not Latin enough,” depending on their genetic and cultural antecedents. To Ybañez, instead of questioning others’ commitment to a given trait or attribute in order to dismiss those who “don’t get to be ‘in,’” such questioning should be “aimed to understand, to get to know” others and their differing backgrounds.

Further, what should the club—or any community based on free association—be? Each of the characters has a slightly different emphasis: the club could be simply “a hangout” for whoever likes Latinx culture—the food, the music, the look; or must it have initiatives to give Latinx culture a voice and an agenda in the larger culture at the school; or should it aim above all to welcome those who might not feel they fit in elsewhere?

The different views of those questions are dramatically relevant to the play, and are handled comically. Only one of the three will get to be the club’s president. Is winning a matter of having a vision and leading? Is it giving the people what they want? Is it making allegiances with allies who can help convince others? While the stakes are small for the dwindling numbers who make up the club, the play’s sense of how deep emotional need can readily escalate to absurd lengths is all-too American.

The cast features Robert Hart as Xavier and Jackeline Torres Cortes as Monica and Dario Ladani Sanchez, who was already seen at the Cab this summer in The Swallow and the Tomcat, as Isaac. Shows are this week, Thursday, Friday, Saturday at 8 p.m. and at 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday; and at 8 p.m. next week on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, with 11 p.m. shows the latter two nights.

For tickets, dining menu and other information, go here.

Latinos Who Look Like Ricky Martin
By Emilio Rodriguez
Directed by Jecamiah M. Ybañez

Yale Summer Cabaret—Veranos
August 8-17, 2019

A Show For All Ages

Preview of The Swallow and the Tomcat, Yale Summer Cabaret

The Yale Summer Cabaret’s Verano season continues this week with a show that’s sure to be a crowd-pleaser. Adapted by Co-Artistic Director Danilo Gambini and dramaturg Emily Sorensen from a new translation of Jorge Amado’s children’s book, The Swallow and the Tomcat, the show is aimed for families, young adults, and audiences of all ages—six and up.

The grumpy Tomcat is seen as a horror and a threat by the animals in the garden, but for some reason the sassy Swallow isn’t afraid and tries to get to know him. Their affection is the talk of the garden and makes life difficult—especially as the Swallow’s parents are convinced she should marry the Nightingale. A story of identity and of the social strictures that make some forms of love “forbidden,” The Swallow and the Tomcat asks, Can enemies learn to love one another, and can that love find acceptance? Showtimes have been adjusted to allow for young audiences, with a Sunday 2 p.m. matinee show, and on both Fridays, special 11 a.m. performances. The show runs approximately 70 minutes.

To call the book upon which the play is based a children’s book is a little misleading, according to director and co-adapter Danilo Gambini. The book, in its original Portuguese, was written solely by Jorge Amado for his infant son and was never meant to be published. Amado is best known in the U.S. as the author of the play Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, which was made in 1976 into a film that was a huge box office success in Brazil and in the States as well. Amado’s son, with his father’s blessing, chose to publish his childhood gift, and found an illustrator, Carybe, who helped create one of the seminal works for children in Brazil. The book “screams for adaptation,” Gambini said, and there have been two approaches that he is familiar with. One is “to play it strictly for children,” much as one would in a storybook session; the other is make it more avant-garde, with a definite allegorical emphasis.

For Gambini, who dislikes the earlier plays adapted from the book, creating a new adaptation was crucial. When Sorensen told him that she was translating a Spanish version of the book into English for a translation class, he knew he’d found his second show of the Verano season. As a director, Gambini is attracted by the levels of storytelling in the play he and his collaborators are creating. “The play lets us investigate which storytelling devices are theatrical, engaging, and fun.”

The Cast of The Swallow and the Tomcat (front: Julian Sanchez, Adrienne Wells, Zoe Mann; rear: Anula Navlekar, Dario Ladani Sanchez, Reed Northrup); Set: Elsa GibsonBraden; Costumes: Stephanie Bahniuk; Lighting: Evan Anderson

There are two layers, he said, to the presentation: a chorus of six animals is telling the story of a swallow and a tomcat who fall in love, and as they tell it, they take on and act out the parts of the story, which involves a host of comical roles, quite in the manner of Disney cartoons. For Gambini, “the theatricality of the play depends upon the virtuosity of the players.” And, of course, there are songs, all of which are original to this production and have been developed by Gambini and Sorensen with recent Yale College graduate Solon Snider, the show’s composer and music director.

The main cast consists of the Cat (Reed Northrup) a loner who finds himself intrigued by the Swallow (Zoe Mann); a Parrot (Julian Sanchez) who has definite ideas about decorum; a rather laconic Cow (Dario Ladani Sanchez), a rather pretentious Toad (Anula Navlekar) and a busybody Owl (Adrienne Wells), with additional roles, such as Swallow’s parents, the Duck family, a Snake, as well as Wind and Morning, taken up by the ensemble as needed.

The attractions of the show, for its director, is that “it’s engaging to see actors play animals,” and that, as a family-oriented play, it will entertain children while also depicting social types and attitudes. It’s “about love and seeing how others react” to the choices we make. For Gambini, there is always the question of what he calls the “five daemons” in creating theater. The first is to have a “marvel” that children can enjoy—such as talking and singing animals; next is a “passion” that appeals to the teens in and among us, wanting theater to be intense and convincing; third is a civic or social or political element that addresses what the young adult finds compelling; for the fully adult, perhaps more detached, there must be intellectual satisfactions, such as artistic virtuosity; finally, for mature audiences, a feeling that the show “lives in the now,” providing something that hasn’t already been overdone. The challenge of a show that accents the first and second “daemon” is how well it can still satisfy the other three.

Gambini’s first show of the Verano season adapted Anne Carson’s recent translation of Euripides’ Bakkhai, a show which foregrounded, perhaps, the fourth daemon while fully engaging with the second and third. It also featured Dionysus, an androgynous god who considers himself a daemon—a daemon that oversees the creation of theater since ancient Greek times. While the emphasis, mood and nature of The Swallow and the Tomcat will be very different from the season’s first show, the need to please the theater-god remains. And that means, for Gambini, addressing, even in a children’s story, important themes such as “living with the consequences of how we live and what we do.”

What kind of consequences? Gambini ended the interview by citing a line from the play, spoken by Wind: “Every morning is a chance to make a little revolution.”

The Swallow and the Tomcat
By Jorge Amado
Translated and Adapted by Danilo Gambini and Emily Sorensen
Directed by Danilo Gambini
Yale Summer Cabaret—Verano
July 18-27, 2019

For more information about the cast and creatives, and for tickets and dining menu and reservations, go here.

Conducting "The Conduct of Life"

Preview of The Conduct of Life, Yale Summer Cabaret

The second show of the Yale Summer Cabaret’s Verano season opens tonight. The Conduct of Life, written by María Irene Fornés, was first produced in 1985. Fornés, who died last year, was one of the foremost avant-garde U.S. playwrights of her time. Jecamiah M. Ybañez, a Co-Artistic Director of this year’s Summer Cabaret and a 2019 MFA of the Yale School of Drama, directs. For Ybañez, who admits being drawn to “gritty material,” one of the attractions of doing the play at this time comes from its poetic handling of political questions. 

As Ybañez sees it, we, as a culture, are “more educated, knowledgeable, and aware” than ever before. We have so much information easily available, but “the question becomes: how do we behave? How do we move forward—do we act on what we know or ignore it? How do we respond to the inequalities in our society?” Fornés play, as the title suggests, is about how we conduct our lives—whether we “blatantly or subversively” take action.

Like Martin Zimmerman’s Seven Spots on the Sun, which was Ybañez’s thesis show at YSD last winter, The Conduct of Life takes place in a “nondescript Latin American country under a military dictator.” At the time the play was written, the events of the play could be in “almost any of a number of Latin American countries,” Ybañez said. Indeed, Fornés’ play, in focusing on the domestic life of a couple whose husband, a military officer, is attempting to rise in political power, recalls a couple in Seven Spots where the brutality of military service during a civil war impacts a soldier’s relation to his wife. Fornés’ play more directly confronts “the obsession with power” on the part of a military man in a corrupt system, Ybañez said. Conduct depicts acts of violence “in a specific context,” where scenes of “child abduction, sexual assault, and interrogation” show the impact of abusive power on “othered bodies.” Ybañez mentioned the audience advisory on the Summer Cab’s website: “This production contains depictions of sexual violence, disturbing and explicit images and audio, coarse language, and simulated gunshots.”

For Ybañez, the attractions of the play are twofold. He sees the play as “a thriller” where “information is withheld.” The audience has to react to the imperfect evidence Fornés provides within a context of political unrest and violence. The typical element of the thriller—that secrets will come to light—is complicated by Fornés’ method. Fornés’ earliest influence as a dramatist was a production of Beckett’s En attendant Godot she saw in Paris. At the time she was a painter who had studied with the abstract theorist and artist Hans Hoffmann. In Conduct, Fornés uses an avant-garde form of nineteen vignettes, some too short to be considered individual scenes, where the narrative connections are not always clear, so that viewers must infer the particular connotations of what they see.

Jecamiah M. Ybañez

The play has a cast of five, all of whom have done memorable work at the term-time Cabaret. Orlando (John Evans Reese) is a ruthless man married to Letitia (Juliana Aiden Martínez), who speaks with some social conscience. Orlando’s friend, Alejo, is played by Devin White and Letitia’s maid, Olimpia, by Nefesh Cordero Pino (the only cast member also seen in Bakkhai, the season opener). Amandla Jahava, who graduated from YSD in May and worked on several projects at the Cabaret last season, returns to play Nena, a child Orlando has kidnapped. Outside the house in which the action takes place, Ybañez said, the government is trying to obtain absolute power over its people.

In working with his cast, Ybañez has been concentrating on the rhythm and the tempo of the vignettes. Each has “a time signature,” he said, and it is necessary to “feel the shift” in a scene. Fornés eschews naturalistic dialogue, preferring to let characters speak in ways that suggest unspoken thoughts. Her theatrical palette includes Theater of the Absurd and the Brechtian effort to alienate audiences from naturalistic comforts for the sake of political effect. Her style and intentions are mercurial and make for challenging theater.

“There’s no neat tie-up,” Ybañez said of the play’s conclusion, but he stressed how the play suggests that even the powerless “have a certain agency,” and that even victims of unjust systems, Fornés indicates through Nena, must decide how “to live each day the best way possible.” The notion that even those who perpetrate criminal violence may be in pain is one that Fornés is able to bring to light through the tensions between her characters. In a time when we find polarized accusations of evil on each side of our political divides, Fornés’ play may have a resonance relevant to how we might conduct ourselves differently.

The Conduct of Life
By María Irene Fornés
Directed by Jecamiah M. Ybañez

Yale Summer Cabaret Verano
June 21-29, 2019

For tickets and information regarding showtimes and dining, go here.

The Theater God is Present

Preview of Bakkhai, Yale Summer Cabaret

Last summer, Danilo Gambini, the Co-Artistic Director of this year’s Yale Summer Cabaret, took a trip to Greece, a longstanding goal from the time of his study of mythology in college and his reading of all the Greek tragedies in 2009. As he sat in the theater of Dionysus in Athens, he began “crying compulsively.” He also had a nosebleed, which may have had to do with the atmosphere and the physical exertion of hiking. In any case, the event was for Gambini an epiphany, which might be an actual manifestation of the god, Dionysus, the guiding spirit of ancient Greek drama, there “where the craft and art” Gambini practices “was born.” Gambini says he “made a pact with Dionysus” that day, a “renewal of vows” as a theater director, that “at the next opportunity I would do a Greek tragedy.”

That opportunity is the opening show of the Yale Summer Cabaret’s Verano season. Euripides’ Bakkhai, in Anne Carson’s recent translation, opens June 6 and plays for sixteen performances through June 15.

His choice of Bakkhai, Gambini said, comes from the fact that Euripides’ audacious play puts Dionysus himself on stage. The play has been getting a variety of revivals of late, including at Brooklyn Academy of Music last season, and Girls, a modern adaptation by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, will open the Yale Repertory Theatre’s next season. Gambini discussed the play’s message for our times with his cast and said the consensus was that “it was clear that the play is about women and female power and the suppressed voice of women finding a release.” He added that Pentheus, the king of Thebes in the play, says things that are “too familiar from Trump.” So, in a way we might say that the current attention to the play is the theatrical equivalent of the 2017 Women’s March in protest over Trump’s election. Gambini quoted a line in the play that describes the women “overjoyed by the sheer absence of men.” Gambini’s six-person cast is comprised of female actors.

For Gambini there’s a deliberate camp element in that choice, which he defines as “having fun with theater.” Pentheus and Dionysus, in Gambini’s staging, are played as “drag kings” by Eli Pauley and Sarah Lyddan respectively, a distancing effect that Gambini spoke of as a deliberate element of current theater’s approach to gender politics. The choice of gender in casting roles, he said, “explores how to tell the story from one side, or extreme, or the other.” He lets his actors have a lot of agency in how they choose to tell the story, including the music of the chorus which was worked out by the actors in ensemble with sound designer and composer Liam Bellman-Sharpe.

There is humor in the play and Gambini finds that Anne Carson’s contemporary language helps the comedy land. Gambini described Carson’s writing as “visual,” a form of “concrete poetry that talks to me and inspires me in seeing the play’s spatial construction.” She writes, he said, “the way I stage.” For Gambini, an attraction of the Cabaret is that its intimate setting, without the usual separation of actors from audience, allows him to explore the kind of theater that is most meaningful to him. In his view, “text is a pretext to create an event” and the “audience is always seeing what they are seeing.” Which means that the idea of theater as an illusion of action happening elsewhere is dropped in favor of treating theater as an event at which both the cast and the audience are concurrently present.

Gambini sees Bakkhai as a play that questions a society’s beliefs, which includes religious faith and the status of the occult. The play was first produced late in Euripides’ career, and is “fully mature,” Gambini says. But with that maturity comes a definite interest in “how to transgress” further. Putting the god on the stage and having him argue for the vanities of the gods indicates, for some, Euripides’ cynicism toward religion, but also shows him addressing the very powerful social force of religious belief.

Danilo Gambini

Gambini says that, originally, tragedy for the ancient Greeks was an “outlet—it enabled them to live what they didn’t want to live.” And he sees the same purpose provided by theater today, as well as TV and film. He stated that the etymology of the word “tragedy” derives from “chant of the goat,” which means that the poetry of tragedy was conceived as the song of the dying animal—a goat—sacrificed in religious ritual. While tragedy, Gambini said, “can be dark and even heartbreaking,” he sees the form as “voluptuous,” celebrating “joy and pleasure” in the physical body.

Greek tragedy, Gambini said, “survived because the plays keep speaking to our times.” The battle between an oppressive government—Pentheus often seems more a bureaucrat than a king—and a wildly inspired populist cult, and the status of faith in capricious gods versus a more reasoned ideal of humanity are themes that, it’s easy to see, have never ceased clashing in human society. At the Yale Summer Cabaret that drama plays out once again—with the added attraction of watching director Danilo Gambini fulfill his pact with Dionysus.

Euripides’ Bakkhai
Translated by Anne Carson
Directed by Danilo Gambini
Yale Summer Cabaret
June 6-15, 2019

For information about the season, season passes, individual tickets, the menu and dining reservations, go here.

New Haven Theater Company Goes Cuckoo

Preview, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, New Haven Theater Company

If you’re a regular at New Haven Theater Company shows, you might remember the time the company built what looked to be a functional luncheonette in their theater space in the back of English Building Markets. That was George Kulp’s set for William Inge’s Bus Stop, which he directed. Last year, there was the set for Neil Simon’s Rumors that turned the space into a two-story living room with numerous doors to slam. That was Kulp’s too.

Beginning this Thursday and running for the next three weekends, the space will be the dayroom at a mental hospital where a host of inmates live placid lives under the purview of a controlling nurse as Kulp directs NHTC’s next offering, Dale Wasserman’s stage adaptation of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Kulp, who says this is “the most ambitious and challenging” play he’s directed yet, seems to like plays with a lot of characters and a very focused set.

If you were around in the 1970s, you no doubt remember the film version of the novel, directed by Milos Forman, which won Oscars for picture, director, actress (Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched), and actor (Jack Nicholson as Randle Patrick McMurphy), and adapted screenplay. Indeed, the role of McMurphy was easily the most famous of Nicholson’s impressive career—until he took an ax to a bathroom door in The Shining.

McMurphy is a boisterous ne’er-do-well who considers a stint in a mental hospital preferable to prison. His fellow inmates are an odd assortments of “lifers” who prefer the hospital to trying to get along in the outside world. And Nurse Ratched is there to make sure everything runs the way she likes. The confrontations between McMurphy and the nurse become a battleground over the quality of life. In the film, you just have to root for McMurphy as Fletcher’s version of the nurse is so inhumanly impersonal.

Kulp is wary of expectations derived from the film. First of all, the film was adapted from the novel, not from Wasserman’s play. And, while the drama’s trajectory runs much the same, the filmed versions of certain characters sometimes aimed for comic caricature. Kulp stresses that his cast is “very careful” to avoid that pitfall, and that means creating useful backstories for the characters to give them fuller dimension. Which might be a way of saying that Kulp is urging them to put some method in the madness.

McMurphy will be played by Trevor Williams who directed NHTC’s previous offering, Marjorie Prime. Williams acted under Kulp’s direction as the naive cowboy, Bo Decker, in Bus Stop and was one of the two hitman in Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter last season, directed by John Watson. McMurphy’s nemesis, the maternal Nurse Ratched, will be played by Suzanne Powers, who worked with Kulp in Rumors.

Other NHTC members on hand include John Watson as Dr. Spivey, who tends to back the authoritarian nurse; Erich Greene, the other hitman in Dumb Waiter, as Cheswick, an anxious patient; and J. Kevin Smith, the obstreperous neighbor in Rumors and the boozing professor in Bus Stop, as Harding, the patient with the most self-control.

That leaves many parts featuring actors who will be appearing in a NHTC production for the first time, though, in most cases, Kulp has worked with each before. They include: Al Bhatt, Tristan Bird, Ralph Buonocore (who appeared in NHTC’s Urinetown), Robert Halliwell, Ash Lago, Empress Makeda, Joseph Mallon, Jodi Rabinowitz, John Strano, and Aaron Volain.

For Kulp, much of the challenge, with so many characters “and so much going on”—including a basketball game—is to keep the play “moving at the right pace.” His approach, he said, is to tell his actors “to go for the moon and then pull back.” The casting is key and his previous experiences with the cast make for a lot of trust.

The play was chosen in part because of its name recognition, its diverse cast, and because, Kulp said, it’s “an entertaining and timely story to tell.” He suggested that the issue of how our society treats mental illness and the play’s convincing sense of “the misuse of authority” are meaningful in our time, as they were when the novel was published in 1963 and when the film version was released in 1975, both key works of the Vietnam era of American culture.

Is it “cuckoo” to place such a largescale play in the New Haven Theater Company’s intimate space? Get your tickets and find out (the play is running for three weekends rather than two because seating is limited).

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
By Dale Wasserman, from the novel by Ken Kesey
Directed by George Kulp
New Haven Theater Company
April 25-27, May 2-4, May 9-11

For tickets and info, go here

See my review here

What's Up and What's Coming

Last week, Yale Repertory Theatre opened Carl Cofield’s lively, hilarious, and hi-tech version of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night which features a very engaging cast. The show is up until April 6th. My review can be found here.

Sir Toby (Chivas Michael), Feste (Erron Crawford), Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Abubakr Ali) in the Yale Repertory Theatre production of Twelfth Night, directed by Carl Cofield

 On Monday, Long Wharf Theatre announced three of the four shows of its 2019-20 season, which will be the theater’s 55th. As the season that precedes 2020-21, which will be the inaugural season of recently hired Artistic Director Jacob G. Padrón, next year was billed as transitional, as Padron spoke of Long Wharf’s will to “lead a revolution that will redefine American theater.” Citing managing director Joshua Borenstein’s comment that “all great movements have local beginnings,” Padrón outlined the three characteristics his team looked for in choosing plays: 1.“Undeniable excellence,” 2. Plays that reflect the demographics of the city of New Haven (which is over 42% white, over 35% black, over 27% Hispanic or Latinx, and over 4% Asian); 3. Plays that are “in conversation with the world.” Padrón said, “the world is on fire,” and he sees theater as “a catalyst for social justice.” In terms of emergent strategies, theater can either be advancing and progressing, or regressing into stagnation. Padrón wants Long Wharf to be known for its inclusiveness, as a theater that welcomes everyone, for its artistic innovation, and for its ability to forge connections with community.

First up, from October 9 to November 3, is On the Grounds of Belonging by Ricardo Pérez González, directed by his longtime collaborator David Mendizábal of the New York-based Sol Project, of which Padrón is founder and artistic director, and which partnered with Yale Repertory Theatre on El Huracán, the opening show of the Rep’s current season. The play is a “breathtaking new story of forbidden love in 1950s’s Jim Crow Texas.”

In the Thanksgiving to Christmas slot is “a modern adaptation of a classic work” (that’s not the title, though sounds as if it might be). The play, yet to be announced, will be one “in conversation with new work,” in a production that “breathes new life” into an important, older work of theater.

The new year begins with I Am My Own Wife, by Doug Wright, a Yale grad, with a director still to be determined. The show is a Pulitzer Prize-winning play “about survival and identity” of a transgender person in East Berlin during and after World War II, with a single actor playing over 40 roles. February 5-March 1, 2020.

Mid-March to mid-April is The Chinese Lady by Lloyd Suh, a member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab. In its third production, the play, “inspired by the true story of America’s first female Chinese immigrant,” will be directed by Ralph B. Peña, a founding member and current artistic director of Ma-Yi Theater. March 18-April 12, 2020.

Work by a female playwright and a female director will by featured in The Great Leap by Lauren Yee, a Yale grad and member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, and directed by Madeline Sayet, a CT native noted for her work incorporating the stories and traditions of the Mohegan tribe. The play is “a thrilling underdog story of basketball and foreign relations in 1980s China.” May 6-31, 2020.

This week the Long Wharf’s current season continues with tonight’s press opening of An Iliad, Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare’s adaptation of Homer’s Iliad (in Robert Fagles’ translation), directed by Brooklyn-based theater person Whitney White. It’s a two-person play with Rachel Christopher as The Poet and Zdenko Martin as The Muse and runs unti April 14. My review can be found here.

Tomorrow night, Yale Cabaret opens its fourth annual Satellite Festival, which runs Thursday, 3/28, through Saturday, 3/30. My preview can be found here.

Tomorrow night, Thursday, March 28, Collective Consciousness Theatre opens its third and final show of the 2018-19 season, Marco Ramirez’s The Royale, directed by CCT’s Jenny Nelson, a play set in the racially segregated world of boxing in the early 20th century. The show runs 3/28-3/30, 4/4-4/6, and 4/11-4/14. For Brian Slattery’s preview go here.

Rasheeda Speaking Starts Tonight

Preview of Rasheeda Speaking, Collective Consciousness Theatre

Collective Consciousness Theatre returns tonight with its second show of the season: Joel Drake Johnson’s comedy-thriller Rasheeda Speaking, which runs Thursday through Saturday for the next three weekends: January 17th-19th, January 24th-26th, and February 1st-3rd, at Erector Square in New Haven, at 8 p.m.

The play was a success Off-Broadway, directed by Cynthia Nixon, with Dianne Wiest and Tonya Pinkins in the main roles of Ileen and Jaclyn, two office assistants working for a surgeon who manages to poison their working relationship. Collective Consciousness Theatre (CCT) is a “community-based theatre dedicated to social change” and calls Rasheeda Speaking “an incisive and shocking dark comedy” that “examines the realities of so-called ‘post-racial’ society.” The production features Susan Kulp, of New Haven Theater Company, as Ileen and, as Jaclyn, Gracy Brown who has appeared in Elm Shakespeare productions in Edgerton Park, most recently Love Labour’s Lost.

Jaclyn (Gracy Brown), Ileen (Susan Kulp), photo courtesy of Collective Consciousness Theatre

Those who saw the first show of CCT’s season, the tense and expansive, character-driven drama Jesus Hopped the A Train will find a surprising transformation in the theater at Erector Square. Gone is any sign of the twin outdoor penitentiary cells of that show’s set. The wizards of CCT—set-designer David Sepulveda and lighting designer Jamie Burnett—have created the bland, placid space of a doctor’s office, complete with wall-paintings I swear I’ve seen on the walls at Yale-New Haven. The space is realistic enough to make you check if you’ve brought your insurance card.

That level of realism is important to this show, which enacts the kind of office shenanigans that have become very familiar from shows like The Office (in both its British and American versions). As Artistic Director Dexter J. Singleton put it, the aim is to be “as professional as possible on a shoestring budget.” In terms of set, the goal has been achieved. And, in light of the previous show at CCT, the set might make you consider if this modern workplace, its twin big desks in an L, is really so different from a prison yard’s adjacent cells.

At the dress rehearsal I attended, the production’s director Elizabeth Nearing, Long Wharf Theatre’s Community Engagement Manager, spoke of the play as geared to address “the indignities of the office place,” particularly the “microaggressions” that soon become their own rationale. The play runs without intermission for about 100 minutes, taking us through four days in which tensions between Ileen and Jaclyn begin and run their harrowing course.

At the beginning of day one, Dr. Williams (Ethan Warner-Crane) confers with Ileen, who he has just made office manager, about her co-worker. Jaclyn has been out on sick leave for five days and is due back that morning. Williams, who’s a bit timid, a surgeon who might not be at his best managing staff, takes the opportunity to let Ileen know that he needs some documentation of dereliction of duty on Jaclyn’s part so that he can convince HR to transfer her elsewhere. He has a great candidate in mind for her job and Jaclyn, he insists, doesn’t really “fit in.” Ileen tries to shrug off his complaints by taking her co-worker’s part, but eventually she’s on his page, cautioned that they must avoid any playing of “the race card.” So, before Jaclyn arrives, we’ve got an “us against them” workplace that could become incendiary. Jaclyn, we soon see, is a no-nonsense type with more than a few complaints of her own—the toxins in the office, the fact that Ileen has neglected the office’s many plants (needed to help with those toxins), and that Ileen—whose desk is something of a mess—has managed to let her work spread to Jaclyn’s desk. The two keep up banter and friendly jousts, but we’re ready to see this get ugly.

For costume designer Carol Koumbaros, who has been with CCT since the production of Topdog/Underdog, the show’s lack of intermission presents an interesting challenge. Ileen and Jaclyn barely leave the stage and yet we have to be given a sense of four distinct days. She has achieved this in subtle differences to basic “uniformlike” outfits, which, she noticed, tend to be the norm at medical offices these days. Indeed, to all appearances—including the sliding window outside of which patient Rose (Debra Walsh) impatiently demands attention—this is a place of tranquil calm. Like most workplaces, appearances can be deceiving. Mismanagement—or what Shakespeare called “misrule”—is the order of our day and here it sets up a heap of ammunition and then sets fire to it.

Who and what will carry the day? The collusion between Ileen and Dr. Williams, or Jaclyn’s self-defense? Head on over to Erector Square one of the next three weekends to find out.

Rasheeda Speaking
By Joel Drake Johnson
Directed by Elizabeth Nearing

Collective Consciousness Theatre
January 17-19, January 24-26, February 1-3, 2019
Erector Square
Building 6 West, 2nd floor, Studio D
319 Peck Street
New Haven

Tickets are $25 Adults, $10 students and available for all performances at: collectiveconsciousnesstheatre.org.

New Haven Theater Company Plays a Love Song

Preview of Love Song, New Haven Theater Company

When it comes to selecting plays, the New Haven Theater Company goes for whatever the entire company approves. The troupe is entirely democratic in its selections, though sometimes a work selected takes a while to get a production. If a play is likely to be done by a bigger theater anywhere in the vicinity, it’s unlikely that the small production capacities at NHTC will get the rights. That’s the case with Love Song, by John Kolvenbach, the first show of their 2018-19 season and the 17th production that the venerable New Haven company has staged at their performance space on Chapel Street. The run begins this Thursday and continues through two weekends.

According to the directors of the show, Margaret Mann and John Watson, the process of choosing a play begins when someone in the company pitches a choice they are willing to direct. And much of the talk at that point, Watson said, is about “our audience, fairly sophisticated people who see a lot of theater and who may also know some of the players.” One feature of that familiarity is that audience members may have ideas for the company. In fact, Love Song was first suggested by a friend of former company member Megan Chenot. Getting the rights caused a delay and now that the time has come, the show goes forward without Megan and her husband Peter, both longtime members of NHTC who have gone west, to the San Francisco area. Never fear, the show, which always seemed a good match for the company, has found suitable casting.

The Chenots weren’t the only couple in the company. The married couple in the production—Harry and Joan—will be played by the Kulps, George and Susan. And Molly, the love interest for Beane, Joan’s brother, will be played by the Kulps’ daughter, Josey, last seen in Urinetown (2012), the only musical the company has done. Beane will be played by Christian Shaboo, who has often taken leading man or love interest roles, as in Proof (2016), Shipwrecked! (2014) and Our Town (2013). George Kulp directed NHTC’s final show of last season, Neil Simon’s farce Rumors, which featured Susan as one of the more memorable characters. George was responsible for the truly impressive set built in the company’s space at the English Markets building, and part of that set will serve as the living room of the home of Joan and Harry in Love Song.

Susan Kulp and George Kulp

The other section of the set is decidedly more derelict, and that’s where Beane lives. The play, which Mann and Watson call, “provocative, funny, sexy,” while eliciting “serious thoughts,” involves the relationship between the siblings and how that plays out when a new person—dubbed a “mystery woman”—comes into Beane’s life. The couple in the play are in a longtime marriage, and their dialogue, Mann said, is “a dance, brittle and amusing.” Watson stressed that the company cannot be held accountable for how playing a couple onstage affects the Kulps as a couple offstage. Both directors praised their cast, actors “with a good grasp of who they are playing” and “how to land it.”

Josey Kulp and Christian Shaboo

Speaking of siblings, fans of NHTC will remember that Watson played a single-man looking for love while more than a bit burdened by a sister in The Last Romance, the mature love story that began the 2016-17 season. Mann played the love interest in that one, a single lady with a dog. Together, the two directed last season’s tersely funny two-hander The Dumb Waiter, by Harold Pinter, featuring Trevor Williams and Erich Greene, who returns in Love Song as (wait for it) a waiter.

For Mann and Watson, collaborating as directors seems to work well, since neither felt entirely sure which did what. Watson said that Mann takes care of the more detailed aspects of the show, “a lot of things I don’t handle,” and that she “covers the bases” while he is more reactive. Mann, however, sees Watson as the one “more plotted out beforehand,” while she “likes to see things up and moving.” What it comes down to, on Love Song at least, is that Watson brings “the vision” of knowing how he wants things to play, while Mann is attentive to what’s missing or what needs encouragement.

In any case, they both see the script, which runs through 11 scenes in a continuous 90 minutes, as “funny as hell” and “dark, but not depressing.” The main question, Watson said, is “can Beane be healed” from the effects of some earlier damage, “and how will that affect others?” As Mann said, “there is baggage all over the place” between the siblings, with Harry acting as a strong support for his brother-in-law. In the end, she said, we don’t necessarily know “what then,” and, in a certain sense, it’s “not over,” but we have grounds to be optimistic.

When asked about how they know a play will work for the company, Mann said, “the goal is something really good that we can do a good job with,” a play, Watson said “that’s not fluff, or a sitcom, something with enough to chew on.” Mann complimented Kolvenbach’s ear for dialogue which she characterized as “idiomatically idiosyncratic.” And dialogue, more than action, is what makes the plays NHTC produces work. The main criteria for a play being done by New Haven Theater Company—a troupe of 11 most of whom also direct—is that it suits their company and their audience. Both have grown and changed over the years, but NHTC has maintained a keen sense of how to keep doing what they do well.

Love Song
By John Kolvenbach
Directed by Margaret Mann and John Watson

New Haven Theater Company
Thursday, Friday, Saturday, November 8-17, 2018

For tickets and more info, go here

Switching Gears in Middle-age: The Roommate opens at Long Wharf

Preview of The Roommate, Long Wharf Theatre

Mike Donahue is a Yale School of Drama graduate back in New Haven to direct Jen Silverman’s The Roommate at Long Wharf Theatre, which begins its run tonight until November 4th. Donahue directed the premiere of the play at the Humana festival in Louisville in 2015. Last season he directed Silverman’s The Moors at Playwrights Realm in New York, and his acclaimed production of Silverman’s Collective Rage: A Play in Five Betties recently closed at MCC, New York. So one could say he is familiar with Silverman’s work and her knack for, as he put it, “setting up expectations, then quietly, delicately subverting them.”

During his time at YSD, Donahue served as the artistic director of the Yale Summer Cabaret for two seasons, a good background for the diverse range of plays Donahue has directed. In style, The Roommate could be called a bit of a bait and switch. Sharon, a middle-aged woman, now divorced and living alone in Iowa, takes in a roommate, Robyn. You’re thinking maybe a female Odd Couple? Or maybe a plot with a mysterious man in it—like the late romance of last season’s Fireflies at Long Wharf? Donahue says the play “seems naturalistic” initially, but tends toward the absurdist style of theater he prefers. One thing that interested Donahue in the play is the fact that it’s about mature women and “not vis à vis men, the characters are not defined by relations to men.”

The play was reworked for its run last year at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, which Donahue also directed. The goal each time, for the director, is to see the work anew, through the process of collaboration. “So much is about the particular chemistry of the two people playing the two characters, finding different layers of who they are.” In the Long Wharf production Tasha Lawrence plays Robyn, the role she originated at Humana, and Sharon is played by Long Wharf veteran Linda Powell (Our Town, A Doll’s House). For Donahue, the play is “about the power of transformation,” what happens when people not alike find something they can share, to find out “how another person sees you.”

While the play is “very, very funny, it goes to places,” Donahue said, “very sharp, with an edge.” Those viewers who saw Silverman’s The Moors at Yale Repertory Theatre in 2016 will remember the play’s surprising comedy, and its dark and rich irony as it subverted a Gothic tale with its wild sense of comic situations. For Donahue, Silverman’s plays have “real heart, and a strong sense of language that is tonally off-kilter,” a quality that attracts him to her work. She’s “incredibly funny and unbelievably talented” and he finds “thrills in the turns her plays take.”

Revisiting the play at Long Wharf’s mainstage takes the play closer to its earliest incarnation at the Actors’ Theatre in Louisville where it was done completely in the round. Each staging “changes the dynamic,” Donahue says, but each new staging has to find the “kind of spark” that makes theater “transcendent and overwhelming.”

Mike Donahue

The Roommate kicks off the Long Wharf 2018-19 season, described as “a comedy about what it takes to re-route your life—and what happens when the wheels come off.”

The Roommate
By Jen Silverman
Directed by Mike Donahue

Long Wharf Theatre
October 10-November 4, 2018

For my review of The Roommate at Long Wharf, go to the New Haven Independent, here.

https://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/long_wharf_finds_a_likable_roommate/

Consider the Nutria of the Swamps

Preview of Rodents of Unusual Size, film screening at Real Art Ways, Hartford

Yo, dude. Got an urge to hunt and kill in large numbers? Then grab your arms and your ammo and get down to the Louisiana bayou where the scourge known locally as “nutria,” from the Spanish for “otter,” but more formally, myocastor coypus, and sometimes “coypu,” is eating its way through any and all vegetation that might give the coastal swampland a chance for survival. These “rodents of unusual size,” as the surprisingly amusing and enheartening documentary by Quinn Costello, Chris Metzler, and Jeff Springer calls them (with a nod to The Princess Bride), can weigh as much as 20 lbs. and are generally 24 inches long, with a tail of a foot or more. They breed like rabbits and they are never dormant. As one spokesman for the local taskforce assigned with exterminating the critters puts it, “they are an invasive species that needs to be deleted.”

How did they get there? Do they have any advocates? Can they be acculturated? What’s the price on nutria tails? How long does it take to skin one? What do they taste like?  All these questions and more are answered in this gritty documentary that—like the local Cajuns, we’re told—is not afraid to get its hands dirty.

The documentary, from Tilapia films, followed by Q & A with Jeff Springer on opening night, will be featured at Real Art Ways, Hartford, from October 5th to 11th.

Thomas Gonzales walks the decimated wetlands of southern Louisiana. (Still photos courtesy of Tilapia Film)

In a nifty animated sequence, the film gives background on the phenomena. Apparently the same family that brought you Tabasco sauce, decided, during the Depression, that these “swamp rats,” imported from Argentina, could sustain a poor-man’s fur industry. With muskrats more scarce and too dear, nutria pelts did become a thing and Louisiana was in the forefront of our national fur industry for decades. But—as the locals tell it—when, in the 1980s and 1990s, animal activists came down on the fur industry, many trappers found their yields much less lucrative and decamped to other resources. And that left the prolific nutria without a predator.

As the film opens, the nutria are fair game and we see the work of local hunters who get $5 per tail through the “bounty incentive.” The tail is the proof of a kill; the Coastwide Nutria Control Program (in place since 2002) doesn’t want the animal carcass. And that leaves the question of whether or not there’s a market for other aspects of nutria.

Thomas Gonzales defending Delacroix Island, Louisiana, from the invasion of nutria.

Through the film, we mostly follow the fortunes of Thomas Gonzales, descendant of the original Spanish-speaking peoples who settled on Delcroix Island, a shrinking landmass way down the bayou. He’s been working the waterways since age 13—crabbing, fishing, trapping, hunting alligators and nutria. Now, more than half-a-century later, he has survived major hurricanes, though his house and property haven’t. He, with his wife and son, are our main guides to the world the nutria has invaded, already a perilous environment. As his wife says, the water is your livelihood, but it’s also your enemy.

Musician Kermit Ruffins frequently BBQs nutria before his shows.

Folk wisdom is on warm display in this film about people who have been formed by an environment and whose fierce identification with the land and water of the place gives them each a unique character. We also meet jazz musician Kermit Ruffins who tells us “cooking is improvisation, just like jazz,” as he tries to make nutria meat palatable to his community at block parties outside a club. The advocates of nutria-based cuisine say it’s “like” rabbit or maybe dark turkey meat, is very lean and, because nutria are vegetarians, very clean. Award-winning chef Susan Spicer says she does what she can to make the meat a treat, likening it to zucchini in its versatility. She also points out, sensibly, that people object to eating rabbit because bunnies are too cute. “No one will ever say that about nutria.” Indeed, most people can’t abide the notion of eating rodent, no matter how cheap its meat.

Then there are those who are trying to bring back the fur industry’s use of nutria. Calling her company Righteous Furs, designer Cree McCree thinks that the opprobrium placed on fur will be lifted when people realize that killing nutria is necessary for conservation, and that harvesting only the tails is a waste of very fine fur. We also meet Tab Pitre, whose family worked in the fur trade when it was an industry in Louisiana and, as a fur dealer, he is one of a dying breed. He knows that the harvesting of pelts won’t happen unless there’s a monetary incentive. Otherwise, the carcasses are left to rot in the marsh.

Cree McCree designs new fashion for Righeous Fur, her organization that is promoting nutria fur as a stylish way to save the wetlands.

There’s lots more—like an interesting discussion of how nutria tear up golf courses in the area, and the way that trappers must negotiate the sensitivities of “the rich folk” who consider exterminating the creatures shameful. There are some who have domesticated nutria—mostly, it seems, for the oddity of it—and others who seem quite willing to adopt the furry critters, with their prominent orange, beaver-like teeth, as mascots and local fauna. As one person says, the nutria have been in the bayou long enough to become honorary Cajuns.

The film saves the most fitting tribute to the last, as Thomas Gonzales admits that, when other forms of sustenance are scarce, you can always count on harvesting nutria. The nutria has been “a good friend” and fellow survivor in this unique environment. “I’m not going anywhere, and neither are they.”

Filmmakers Quinn Costello, Chris Metzler, Jeff Springer

Quinn Costello, Chris Metzler, and Jeff Springer specialize in interesting subcultural documentaries. Rodents of Unusual Size, like Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea, their study of the Salton Sea area of California, a vast salt-flat where once were resorts, and the oddballs who still make it their home, captures the unique feel of a place and its people. Everyday Sunshine, their documentary of the fortunes of the band Fishbone and its fans is celebrated for its grasp of the many facets of show-business life. Rodents of Unusual Size has won documentary awards in a variety of festival venues from Nevada to Alabama, from Mississippi to California. The film’s pacing is exemplary, giving us just enough of each perspective on the nutria situation, and finding lots of quotable moments. My favorite was from a prayer written especially for the bayou community: “Spare us from the tragedies to come.” Amen.

Rodents of Unusual Size
From Tilapia Film
Chris Metzler, co-director, producer
Jeff Springer, co-director, cinematographer
Quinn Costello, co-director, editor
Wendell Pierce, narrator
Music by the Lost Bayou Ramblers

Real Art Ways Cinema
56 Arbor Street
Hartford, CT

October 5-11, 2018