Beating the Drum

Preview of Yale Cabaret season 48

For fans of the Yale Cabaret, this time of year introduces the new season under the venue’s new team. Next week will come the official kick-off to celebrate the opening of season 48. This week, tickets are on sale on the Cab’s website. Last week, I talked with the new co-Artistic Directors—David Bruin, dramaturg, Julian Elijah Martinez, actor, and Leora Morris, director—and the Managing Director Annie Middleton, all commencing their third year in the Yale School of Drama, about what’s in store.

“The Cab” is the basement performance space at 217 Park Street, run by YSD students, presenting shows Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and at 11 Friday and Saturday. The Cab’s kitchen, run by chef Anna Belcher, offers pre-show dining, with beer and wine served, beginning at 6:30 and, for the later shows, small plates and desserts and drinks beginning at 10. The Cab is a unique theatrical experience in its immediacy and, in its rapid turnover of shows, a challenge to keep up with.

rear to front: Julian Elijah Martinez, Annie Middleton, Leora Morris, David Bruin

As is usual, the ADs and MD came to our meeting knowing the first three shows of the season and looking forward to fleshing out the rest of the semester, through January, a bit later this month. First, a few words about the team.

Bruin, Martinez, and Morris have each directed and performed in shows at the Cabaret. Most recently, Morris directed the varied and amorphous theatrical extravaganza love holds a lamp in this little room for the Yale Summer Cabaret 2015. She also performed as one of the four dancer/actors, along with Martinez, in Solo Bach in last season’s Cabaret, and directed the powerful play He Left Quietly in her first year at YSD.

Martinez appeared thrice at the Cabaret in his first year: as a sensitive boyfriend in The Defendant, as a conflicted street artist in We Fight We Die (proposed and co-produced by Middleton) and as one of The Brothers Size in Luke Harlan’s gripping production of Tarrell McCraney’s myth-based play. Last year, in addition to his role in Solo Bach, Martinez directed a production of Touch, starring classmate Jonathan Majors. Between the two term-time Cab seasons, Martinez played in four of the five productions in the Yale Summer Cabaret of 2014.

Last Cab season, Bruin directed the challenging two hander Quartet and acted in a new translation of Korean playwright Geun-Hyung Park’s odd family drama Don’t Be Too Surprised. The previous year, Bruin conceived and directed The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion, an imaginative recreation of the early days of theater greats Edward Albee and María Irene Fornés, and also took part in the topical comedy Derivatives and acted in an adaptation of a Raymond Carver story.

Taken together (to say nothing of time spent in the kitchen), that spells a lot of Cab time, but we might say the team ain’t seen nothing yet in terms of how much dedication to our favorite New Haven venue they’re in for.

Seeing the Cab as “the cultural hub for artistic expression,” this year’s team hopes to expand the Cab’s audience with giveaway tickets, lowered prices, and a mission to “help each show find its audience.”  What the Cab has going for it is “the passion behind the projects.” The students who present work there are doing it on their own time and for their own reasons. “There’s a roughness to the Cab,” as Bruin says, “the space is not pristine,” and that informality gets students “excited to create what they want to create.” As facilitators in this process, Morris says, the Cab team will be holding “office hours”—as sounding boards and a first response team to whatever their colleagues come up with.

When I asked the team if their first impressions of the Cab made it seem “the theater of their dreams” Martinez told how, on his visit as a prospective YSDer, someone got him into YSD night (the performance reserved for students and faculty at the school). The show, Lindbergh’s Flight, and the camaraderie of the audience got him excited about YSD—and his dad, visiting with him, also had a great time. The Cab, in its offbeat offerings, can have that kind of effect, making you wonder why you bother seeing more traditional theater.

For Middleton, who ran the Cab's box office in season 46, the space is “the place of my dreams: theater as a community with everyone welcome and everyone wearing different hats and collaborating.” Everyone who praises the Cab eventually comes back to the fact that it’s a team effort and that the audience is very much part of what makes it work. Compared to many a theater venue, the Cab has a rather young clientele and the team wants to find ways to make the Cab an early theater experience for younger audiences.

The tags for this year’s Cab marry images and ideas to describe the Cab (never easy): a cave, a cauldron, a drum, and a kaleidoscope. We might parse that collection of objects in various ways, but, for the team, each image-idea makes for an association: the Cab is a cave where community gathers, a kaleidoscope in its diversity, a cauldron where the art of cooking up something unusual takes place, and a drum that sends a message and calls us together. So let’s beat the drum. As Martinez says, the first three shows of the season give a good sense of the breadth of the Cabaret, showing “the full range of what can happen” there:

First, a welcome back show with a cast of 10 and a theme that seems appropriate. Charles L. Mee’s Wintertime has been adapted by Bruin and third-year playwright Jiréh Breon Holder as We Are All Here, which means, Bruin says, “we’ve taken a lot of liberties” with the play, but that’s in-keeping with Mee’s desires. The playwright wants his plays to be adaptable and tweakable for a variety of circumstances—professional and amateur and everything else. The play, Bruin says, “embodies the ideals of the Cab: turn it into what you want,” and involves music, dance, “surprise guests” and a plot that takes romantic comedy somewhere else. Two lovers visit a beloved spot only to find others there. Can we all get along? September 17-19

Next, a darker, text-based play, highlighting the virtues of an intimate playing space when viewing a play more confrontational than comedic. Second-year director Jesse Rasmussen’s proposal for Scots author David Harrower’s Knives in Hens stresses the play as “a democratic experience”—with its theme of a woman “learning how to speak in a man’s world”—and Morris stresses the “pleasure in the play’s suspense.” A three-actor love triangle—a ploughman, a miller, a woman—in a rural world becoming industrialized, the show is, the team says, “a contemporary, poetic fable.” September 24-26

Up third is a new, devised piece that will showcase the advantages of the collaborative and more creatively scripted production: “I’m With You in Rockland”—a line from Allen Ginsberg’s landmark poem “Howl”—brings together three participants from each of the three artistic schools at Yale: Drama, Music, Art. Created by Kevin Hourigan and his company of collaborators, the play offers not a bio of Ginsberg but takes his life and work as an inspiration and provocation. The play’s title borrows a repeated phrase in the poem, addressed to Carl Solomon whom Ginsberg met when they were both relegated to “Rockland”—a facility for psychiatric evaluation. Part play, part concert, part installation, the show is “an interdisciplinary inquiry that asks ‘what is the value of the artist today?’” October 8-10

Sometimes, as Morris says, the Cab has been “too cool” in its detachment from reactions to its offerings. The current team asks its colleagues and creators and audience to “not be afraid of being overly passionate” and to not let irony undermine the always positive “value of heart.” The Cab team means to put their hearts and souls into this year’s season. Won’t you join them?

Visit the website to see info about shows, menu, to buy tickets and to make donations. There are a range of sponsorship possibilities that allow the audience to put their money where their mouth is. As Joyce said of Finnegans Wake: “its consumers are they not also its producers?”

Yale Cabaret
48th Season
217 Park Street

Cafe Rrrwha?

You know the drill: one age’s rebellion is another age’s nostalgia act. That’s in popular culture. In the fine arts, it tends to be: one age’s rebellion is another age’s academic assignment. In the pop world, nothing ages as fast as the parental generation’s youth; in the fine arts, it’s all a bit like the nefarious character played by John Huston in Chinatown (1974) says: “Politicians, old buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” In the fine arts, it’s academic study that confers respectability. Dada, pataphysics, cubists, Theater of the Absurd, Theatre of Cruelty, the Beats—they’re all in museums and on syllabi. And what gets lost, often, is what made it all so exciting in the first place. Enter The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion, the show currently playing at the Yale Cabaret, conceived and directed by dramaturgy student David E. Bruin, an effort to stage early works by María Irene Fornés and Edward Albee—darlings of theater and drama coursework—as though Greenwich Village were still inhabited by bohemians and not pop culture elites. We’re not at the Yale Cab, we’re at Café Ubu (named after Alfred Jarry’s comic-absurdist-tragic figure) and, as the dated posters and portraits on the walls of Reid Thompson's set will tell you, it’s around 1962. JFK hasn’t been assassinated yet and the Beatles are still in Liverpool.

It’s to the credit of Bruin and his cast that they play the material—including the introductory bits that include some squabbling about a petition to stop that freeway extension Robert Moses is planning for the Village—straight, without any hint of ‘beatnik’ send-ups. The point is, one quickly gathers, the drama student of today might well be pining for the days before theatrical fellowships and “courses on X”—the days when the likes of Albee and Fornés hung out in collectivities that were already looking back to ad hoc artist congeries like dada and other manifesto-spouting “movements.” Remember when it wasn’t art if you got paid for it? And it wasn’t for a grade either. Hey, kinda like Yale Cabaret . . .

Crazy Shepherds is an instructive and entertaining evening. Plays like Fornés’ The Successful Life of 3 and Albee’s The Sandbox should resist even blackbox staging. These are plays for a cabaret, a café, a living room, almost. Maybe a playground’s actual sandbox (do those still exist?) for the latter. Bruin and company rightly grasp that to do such work justice you have to be willing to go back to its time to see it as it might have been. Historians of the arts have to do this; theater audiences much less, and it’s great to see knowing dramaturgs and others giving it a shot and taking us along with them.

And you certainly get your money’s worth: not only Successful Life and Sandbox, but also a romp through a truncated take on Jarry’s Ubu roi (with a very spirited Ubu from Brendan Pelsue) and a performance piece featuring bits from Part III of Howl. Annelise Lawson, reciting, is the star of the evening as she also plays a man (who imagines himself as Zorro at one point) in Successful Life, Ubu’s queen in Ubu roi, and, very effectively, the old woman in Sandbox, as well as going into electroshock convulsions for the Howl recital (Howl is dedicated to Allen Ginsberg’s fellow inmate at Columbia Psychiatric Institute, Carl Solomon, who did receive electroshock treatment at Rockland State Hospital).

Elsewhere there’s tasteful violin accompaniment by Eli Epstein-Deutsch and atmospheric vocalizing by Jenelle Chu, who also plays the woman in Successful Life, a ditzy symbol of female emptiness—or is that an empty symbol of feminine ditziness—while Lawson and Pelsue (the latter in a mode reminiscent of Dick York on Bewitched) enact an absurdist’s take on “masculine rivalry” (yes, that was once a buzz term). Chu is also a patient “mommy” to Pelsue’s “daddy” as they wait for granny (Lawson) to give up the ghost in Sandbox. The plays by Fornés and Albee both demonstrate the phase of incipient genius, still. And the evening is best if you can forget you’re watching YSD students playing at their grandparents’ rebellion and imagine you’re watching amateur theatricals reinvent theater.

At the end of the evening, a hat is passed, but, rather than pitching in, the audience is asked to extract fortune-cookie-like one-liners. Many in the audience, no doubt, won’t realize the lines are taken from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” (c. 1790, following the French Revolution); “everything old is new again,” as the song says. And some things are so innovative they can never become conventional.

The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion Conceived and directed by David E. Bruin Featuring: Maria Irene Fornes’ The Successful Life of 3 and Edward Albee’s The Sandbox

Cast: David E. Bruin, Jenelle Chu, Eli Epstein-Deutsch, Annelise Lawson, Brendan Pelsue, Gretchen Wright; Dramaturg: Phillip Howze; Set: Reid Thompson; Lights: Andrew F. Griffin; Composer/Sound: Pornchanok Kanchanabanca; Costumes: Asa Benally; Stage Manager: Will Rucker; Producer: Melissa Zimmerman

Yale Cabaret March 20-22, 2014

Poetry. Performance. Party.

Mario Biagini is a man who believes in the power of the word—spoken, recited, sung.  As a performer and director he has brought together 9 performers—musicians, singers, actors—to travel to Yale and New Haven as part of Interdisciplinary Performance Studies at Yale (IPSY).  Biagini’s group, originating in the Open Program of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, pride themselves on a collective approach to performance that aims to include its audience, creating an environment that feels like “a holiday, a relaxation” of our routine responses.

While in New Haven, the troupe will perform a show called Electric Party Songs, twice at Yale’s Calhoun College, Feb. 22 and 23, and, in a more extended version, at BAR, March 3—the latter show is billed as “an experiment in the potentialities of a party as an art form.”  If your winter has been as low on energy as mine, you too might find yourself intrigued by that idea.

The troupe will also perform I Am America at the Whitney Theater in the Whitney Humanities Center, with a set built by children at the Eli Whitney Museum, Feb. 28 and March 1, and will hold a symposium on Poetry as a Practice of Encounter, also at the WHC, on March 2.

The Open Program likes to include the contribution of locals in their shows, using materials found in the streets of the different cities they visit, and at times, as in Italy, have set out to create self-generated festivals in the streets.  Traveling about New Haven by bus, Biagini noted the racial segregation of New Haven where almost all bus riders are black and almost all students at Yale are white.  He told his collaborators: “we should do our show right here on the bus.”  Instead, he does his best to engage people wherever he finds them, offering a kind of contact high from his joy in performance.

The performances consist of an unusual mix: selections from the poems of Allen Ginsberg—the late Beat Guru, Bop Buddist, Singalong Shaman and Clown Prince of Poetry—are turned into songs and are then intermixed with African American spirituals, shouts, and worksongs.  The mix is thoroughly American, as Ginsberg is perhaps the poet of the last 60 years most concerned with trying to live up to “America” in a Whitmanian sense.  Whether or not he succeeded, Ginsberg was astute at assessing the kinds of mash-ups that drive our national psyche.  He was into jazz, rock, folk, blues, as well as dipping into most religions, particularly Judaism via his upbringing and Buddhism via his own searches into mysticism.  He also participated readily in the cults of personality that float so many boats in the media, and could make pop culture read like holy texts.

Some of the best moments in Electric Party Songs come from the performers’ grasp of the essential showmanship at the heart of Ginsberg’s poetry (Lloyd Bricken, looking a bit Waits-like, is particularly effective in his delivery).  Ginsberg’s work is about exposure—of the highest self, of the lowest urges, of the deepest shame and the most inspiring ecstasies.  The troupe does not offer reverential recitals, but rather dynamic musical numbers that bounce off Ginsberg’s lines, making the songs assume a bodily urgency—whether it’s Biagnini recreating an old and infirm poet or Alejandro Tomás Rodriguez writhing about on the floor to the yearnings of love.

Add to that the spirituals—with many rhythmic shout-outs to Jesus—and you have a kind of revival meeting that may make all feel either welcome or uncomfortable.  These lithe and sinuous young men and women sing gracefully a capella (Felicita Marcelli and Agnieszka Kazimierska ) or with the accompaniment of guitars and percussion, and to see them up and swaying to songs from the South is to harken to a kind of cultural trance and transcendence.  How are these predominantly European performers—from Italy, Poland, France and elsewhere, looking like an ad hoc collection of gypsies and free spirits—able to lose themselves so readily in traditional songs?  And what is the principle force behind the vibe they create like a band of charismatics?

Biagini likes to think back to the farm he grew up on in Italy, where a holiday was a true transformation.  People knew the value of letting down their guard, of giving up their daily tasks for a collective enjoyment of the free flow of time.  His group has sometimes staged a “night watch” where the audience and the performers stay together through the night, interacting, singing, playing, sleeping, moving about freely, finding themselves, in the end, not the same as they were when it began.  He believes fervently that letting music and poetry, lyrics and rhythms inhabit one is to liberate—at least for a little—the spirit.

The spirit—that’s the place where the poet Ginsberg meets the songs of faith amidst oppression.   And that’s where Biagini and his troupe try to meet their audience.  It may take a leap of faith to get beyond your New England reticence and intellectual skepticism on a cold February night—but it might just be worth the effort.

Interdisciplinary Performance Studies at Yale presents The Open Program of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards

Electric Party Songs: Feb. 22 & 23: 8pm, Calhoun Cabaret, 189 Elm Street

I Am America: Feb. 28 & March 1: 8pm, Whitney Theater, 53Wall Street

Symposium: Poetry as the Practice of Encounter: March 2: 11 am-4pm, Whitney Theater, 53Wall Street

Electric Party Songs: March 3: 4 pm, BAR, 254 Crown Street

Events are free and open to the public.  Seating is limited.

The Last Romantic

The Broken Tower, written and directed by James Franco, starring James Franco, with Michael Shannon. The most obvious comment is that Hart Crane deserves better.

A complex poet who tried to combine the ecstatic reach of Whitman with a Shakespearean richness of syntax and verbal excess, while haunted by the modernist search for prevailing myths found in Eliot’s The Waste Land, Crane, born in 1899, also "wrestled the angel” that wouldn’t get full exploration until the era of the Beats: whether or not to express openly a gay sensibility.

In addition to all that, Crane was the scion of a man made rich by crass commercialism—his father invented that symbol of polite social hygiene, the Life Saver mint—with ambitions to be a writer of a more Baudelairean era. He was doomed to be “the last romantic,” a figure living out a version of the tortured artist tale that was a familiar cautionary fable before poets—beginning with the generation after Crane—regularly became tenured professors. Crane’s, then, is a very American story, poised flamboyantly between the wars, looking backward to the Paris spleen of the symbolists, participating in the Paris fads of the expatriates, and looking forward to the Paris squats of the Beats. It’s a story that partakes of an age-old incentive to suffer for art while proclaiming a noble indifference to the demands of the work-a-day world.

Does this story have anything to teach us today? Perhaps it might be the lesson that one man’s rich dilettante is another man’s outcast genius. James Franco, director and star and author and editor and co-producer of The Broken Tower, and currently a grad student in English at Yale, might be said to be resurrecting the ghost of Crane for the sake of his own romantic ambitions: as a celebrity actor, thanks in part to the meaningless but lucrative distinction of playing Harry Osborne, Peter Parker/Spider-Man’s friend/nemesis in a trio of crassly commercial comic-book rip-offs, Franco craves artistic respectability and achievement. He’s an author, an installation artist, a performance artist, a filmmaker, an exploiter/sufferer of his own celebrity—the latest post-ironic subject position in line with what used to be known as being “a poor little rich kid”—and a living, breathing, endlessly replicated image of the artist as PR stunt, or as pop image, surface sans depth, or as a self-perpetuating commodity fetish, perhaps. And, sometimes, he’s just an actor, man.

If this sounds like I’m reviewing Franco more than his film, I can’t help it. Never for a moment watching this film did I believe in Franco as Crane. Franco’s idea of convincing us of his subject’s reality is to have the folks from wardrobe put him in period costume and then let Christina Voros film him, with a sort of YouTube version of cinema verité, walking around parts of New York or Paris or the Cayman Islands or Mexico that don’t feature any anachronistic details. Unfortunately, such visuals don’t immediately transport us to the Jazz Age perambulations of Crane. Nor does watching Crane/Franco—Cranco—chop wood outside a rustic cabin while we hear him earnestly reading from a letter in which the poet voices his grand ambitions give us any real access to the ritual of withdrawal that Crane felt was necessary for his art.

And, typical of most biopics of the artist type, whenever Crane is around people he acts like a fool. He’s insufferable as, I suppose, only the truly gifted can be, but, his little moustache notwithstanding, it’s hard to separate the character Franco portrays this time around from the character he portrayed when he essayed the role of Allen Ginsberg for the film Howl, particularly when Crane sits hashing out his views over wine with a friend, sounding as if he’s waiting for a Charlie Parker sax sound-byte to catch up with him any minute. Impersonating literary mavericks seems to be Franco’s thing (he also plays Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner in short films he made for an installation), but, as an actor, he hasn’t begun to excavate what made these men who they were, rather than simply free-floating signifiers of literary greatness one finds on a college syllabus.

Franco, who began the film as a thesis at the Tisch School of the Arts, cops a bit of cinematic style from Andy Warhol in the early going, enough, particularly with Franco’s even prettier younger brother Dave playing the teen-aged Crane, to make us think fond thoughts of Joey Dallesandro, and if that’s not enough to make us feel we’ve entered a “gay sensibility,” there are quasi-explicit moments of sex with men to register Crane’s lonely candle. And there’s even—naively—Robert Lowell’s poem “Words for Hart Crane” printed on the screen (unattributed) to let us know that everything this film is trying to say, about the poet maudit “wolfing the stray lambs of the Place de la Concorde,” was masterfully said in sonnet form in the late Fifties.

And that brings me to what dismays me most about The Broken Tower: the sense that Franco, dissatisfied, understandably, with the roles Hollywood sends his way, is trying to find his own path by standing on the shoulders of giants. The background most significant to this foray into what is ultimately a vanity project about Hart Crane is Franco’s early role as James Dean. The greatness of Dean as an actor is unplayable by another actor; one can only look foolish trying to “be” James Dean on screen. And yet Franco took on the task. It helps that he resembles Dean at times, and that’s enough to make us think sometimes of Dean while watching The Broken Tower, and that produces an odd Franco-inspired palimpsest that is surely the point of this film—Hart Crane was a rebel without a cause, got it? Dean was doomed to be Dean; Crane, Crane. Franco seems doomed to be a well-intentioned interpreter of an ineffable greatness that eludes him.

The effort is not without its pathos, but it’s the pathos of Franco, rather than of Crane. The closest we get to the latter is when Crane reads “The Marriage of Faustus and Helen” to a stuffy literary salon. Franco reads the poem dutifully, respectful of its sonorities but never relishing them, and we get a shot of what John Berryman called “spelled, all-disappointed ladies,” eyes alight, listening. For a moment we get an idea, with the poet’s words ringing in our ears, of what an unheralded creature young Crane was, overwrought at times but always graceful, at his best “original . . . and pure.” We glimpse his greatness and we see that, like Baudelaire’s albatross, his wingspan will make him an awkward figure in life.

The rest is a montage of clichés in search of a script.

The film opened this weekend at IFC Center, 323 Sixth Avenue, W. 3rd Street, New York; James Franco will be on hand for Q&A following the 7:35 p.m. screening (sold out) and will give an extended introduction to the 10 p.m. screening, on Sat., April 28th; he will also be in person on Sunday, April 29th, for Q&A following the 5:10 p.m. screening and will provide an introduction before the 7:35 p.m. screening.