All's Fair in Love and War

Review of Troilus and Cressida, The Public, Free Shakespeare in the Park

There’s testosterone aplenty in The Public’s very successful Troilus and Cressida, directed by Daniel Sullivan with a keen sense of how to make the play timely while keeping its tone, rather quizzical and scurrilous for a tragedy, intact.

Mind you, you’d expect much manliness in a play about the siege of Troy at the hands of the Greeks, as Shakespeare revisits the ground so well developed by Homer. Here, it’s not about taking sides and we’re very much aware—how could we not be?—how self-serving reasons for invading another country or kingdom might be, and how ill-conceived. From the outset, war is for the purpose of vanquishing one’s enemies; any other settlement means giving up on the collective fantasy of victory. More to the point, and the play brings this out abundantly, none of the combatants are fighting precisely for the same thing or with the same will. And much of the drama here concerns things soldiers get up to when not engaged in battle, and plotting and partying and looking for an advantage in status is very much the business at hand.

We all know the basic set-up, but where the Iliad centers on Achilles and Agamemnon’s stand-off over a slave-girl, Shakespeare’s play takes up a love affair on the Trojan side fated to fare badly due to war and its obligations. In other words, a love interest and, importantly, jealousy, infuses all the talk of valor and honor and kills and conquests. Troilus (Andrew Burnap), a Trojan, is emphatically his own man, and that’s important since he’s apt to be further down on a list of famed heroes that includes his brothers Hector (Bill Heck) and Paris (Maurice Jones), and warrior Aeneas (Sanjit de Silva), and, on the Greek side, Achilles (Louis Cancelmi), Agamemnon (John Douglas Thompson), Ulysses (Corey Stoll), Nestor (Edward James Hyland) and Menelaus (Forrest Malloy). Burnap has romantic-lead good-looks, can play passion well, and makes Troilus’s story—which isn’t so central as you might expect—matter to us. He’s a human hero among a bunch of guys who seem to believe their own Homeric PR.

Brothers-in-arms: Troilus (Andrew Burnap), Hector (Bill Heck)

All the many characters here are in supporting roles, which means ensemble play is key, and also that the show is an embarrassment of riches in actors playing somewhat minor important roles, such as John Douglas Thompson as Agamemnon, a part that mainly requires being stuffy and, eventually, a bit drunk. As Ulysses, who is key to much of the plot, Corey Stoll plays it shrewd and aloof, except when the commander’s will to power gets the better of him and he gets worked up. He stalks about in a civilian suit with combat boots and makes us generally uneasy the way any sighting of Dick Cheney always did, back in the lamented reign of W. et al. He’s not above any skullduggery to get things to go as he would like. Along the way, nobler souls will fall—the play might be considered more properly the tragedy of the duty-bound Trojan hero Hector, but for the fact that we feel his fate is so—well—fated.

A key role well-cast is John Glover as Pandarus, the character here who, somewhat comparable to Shylock in Merchant, is both a figure of fun and a figure of surprising pathos. His every effort is to bring together Troilus and his niece, Cressida (Ismenia Mendes), and they do get a wonderfully entertaining courtship scene that Mendes plays with beguiling grace in a very self-aware and contemporary manner. But Pandarus’ thanks is to see it all go to hell because such satisfactions mean nothing in the time of war. Leaning heavily on a cane in his white flannels, Glover’s Pandarus lights up the stage with the tones of a jaded bon vivante, a man entirely out of step with the times. He gets the first and last lines of a play he frames, his hopes turned to rancor.

War-tossed lovers: Cressida (Ismenia Mendes), Troilus (Andrew Burnap) with Pandarus (John Glover)

Other very capable turns include Edward James Hyland’s diplomatic Nestor, Nneka Okafor’s distraught Cassandra, and Zach Appelman strutting his fit form as Diomedes, Troilus’s Greek rival. The scene where Cressida sort of cleaves to Diomedes is fraught with a prowling alley cat ambience that makes the level of arousal very high indeed. It’s a key moment where feminine agency within the stories men tell is seen for what it is: a strategy. Tactics are very much the lesson of the day in this play, and this seduction scene, witnessed by Troilus and Ulysses, is among the best touches Sullivan sets up for us, along with Ulysses as an assassin, and those assault rifles and explosions realistically loud and jarring.

Court gossip: foreground: Paris (Maurice Jones), Helen (Tala Ashe), Pandarus (John Glover)

As Paris and Helen, the other couple we might expect to offer some interest, Maurice Jones plays Paris as princely and rather lacking in soldierly demeanor, while Tala Ashe’s Helen, wineglass in hand, is a treat in her brief scene. Never was the status of trophy mistress more apt to a heroine’s condition, and Helen seems bored by the fatal hullabaloo these heroes are sustaining in her name. It’s as if a personification of “freedom” had to step onto the stage during the Iraq invasion.

Man in the Gap: Ajax (Alex Breaux), Ulysses (Corey Stoll), Diomedes (Zach Appelman), Nestor (Edward James Hyland)

As Ajax, the proud dullard who wants to prove himself, Alex Breaux gets some of the best laughs, at least those that don’t come by way of Max Casella’s Thersites, who seems to have dropped in from one of the boroughs to add a jaundiced touch of hero-puncturing. His irritation at his betters is the perfect foil for Louis Cancelmi’s Achilles, a shrewd sort of lout who knows his worth and cares little for what others think or say; his playfellow Patroclus—Tom Pecinka, a feckless boy-toy—gets some flak for distracting the Greek hero from the battlefield, but at the end of the day it’s Achilles’ lack of interest in the cause that makes him mope. His eventual showdown with Hector undermines the Greeks’ hero to such an extent it’s as if viewed through the eyes of a Trojan news report.

A rogue's war: Thersites (Max Casella)

David Zinn‘s inventive and intriguing set serves well, adapting to the very different spaces quickly, and opening up for action sequences, but also containing enclosed spaces for Achilles’ barracks and for Cressida’s residence among the Greeks. There’s furniture to fling about and manly props and fight sequences, and interesting choices—again by Zinn—of modern costuming.

Sullivan’s cast does justice to the play’s changing focus without letting any segment overstay its welcome. Most importantly, this Troilus and Cressida reveals the play to be Shakespeare at his most proto-modern in eschewing grand tragedy for situations in which characters stick to the roles expected of them and how things turn out has to do with the shifts in emphasis among a collective. There’s no “all for one, one for all,” in this war, and yet the dedication to carnage and the acceptance of wasted life seems to be the price of admission for the kinds of heroics Shakespeare and Sullivan are subtly skewering. So seldom done and here done so well, The Public's Troilus and Cressida should be seen and celebrated.

Troilus and Cressida
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Daniel Sullivan

Scenic and Costume Design: David Zinn; Lighting Design: Robert Wierzel; Sound Design: Mark Menard; Hair and Makeup Design: Cookie Jordan; Original Music: Dan Moses Schreier; Co-Fight Directors: Micheal Rossmy and Rick Sordelet; Voice Coach: Alithea Phillips; Production Stage Manager: James Latus; Photos: Joan Marcus

Cast: Zach Appelman, Tala Ashe, Connor Bond, Alex Breaux, Andrew Burnap, Louis Cancelmi, Max Casella, Andrew Chaffee, Michael Bradley Cohen, Sanjit de Silva, Paul Deo Jr., John Glover, Jin Ha, Bill Heck, Hunter Hoffman, Nicholas Hoge, Edward James Hyland, Keilyn Durrel Jones, Maurice Jones, Forrest Malloy, Ismenia Mendes, Nneka Okafor, Tom Pecinka, Kario Pereira-Bailey, Miguel Perez, Grace Rao, Corey Stoll, John Douglas Thompson

The Public Theater
Free Shakespeare in the Park
Delacorte Theater

July 19-August 14, 2016

Long in the Tooth

Review of The Skin of Our Teeth, Yale School of Drama

Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer-winning play The Skin of Our Teeth, like his better-known Pulitzer-winning Our Town, has its way with the conventions of theater, and both do so in the name of what Wilder views as a focus on the human condition sub specie aeternitatis. To help us understand our condition, it’s important that we get a handle on the many ways we let “play-acting,” at all levels, define us. Like Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth winks at us throughout. Suitable for a tale of life, marriage, death in Everytown, America, perhaps, the twinkle gets more than a bit long in the tooth in a tale that’s supposed to be taking on less “natural” matters such as human extinction, political chicanery, war, and global apocalypse.

In the Yale School of Drama thesis show directed by Luke Harlan, The Skin becomes a factory of creative approaches to theater and a showcase for how malleable and enduring certain conventions remain, perhaps eternally so.

The play begins, as many family-centered dramas do, in sit-com mode. Wilder’s writing style throughout the play recalls burlesque—the characters don’t speak to each other so much as proclaim at each other—and the tone easily adapts to a topsy-turvy “typical” middle-class home during the Ice Age, with dinosaurs as pets (cf. The Flintstones). Harlan’s cast keeps it cartoonish, with Andrew Burnap manic as pater familias George Antrobus, a kid-slapping, bossy caricature of the man-of-the-house c. 1940; he’s also inventing the alphabet and the wheel (though there’s a bicycle onstage at one point). His wife, Maggie (Baize Buzan, perfectly cast), is a can-do homemaker with more resources than we might expect; they have two children: Henry, aka Cain, (Aubie Merrylees) is the potentially violent psycho-in-the-bud with which we have become all-too-familiar in recent years, and Gladys (Juliana Canfield), a daddy’s girl, with all that might suggest, appropriate and otherwise. They had another child, but, thanks to Cain, there’s only the two now.

front: Baize Buzan (Maggie), Andrew Burnap (George), Juliana Canfield (Gladys); rear: Aubie Merrylees (Henry)

In the midst of the family dynamic is the maid Lily Sabina (as in “rape of the Sabine women”), played by Melanie Field with permutations that deserve their own paragraph. She starts as a kind of “everywoman scullery maid” and swiftly becomes a working-girl voice of protest against the play (her soliloquy, ad-libbed into the text, as she smokes a theater cigarette at the Exit door, venting against YSD and New Haven, is the funniest speech in the whole play). Later, she’s a Betty-Booped caricature of a man-eating bombshell, and a Ethel Mermaning Statue of Liberty for the big Atlantic City production number. In the final act, she becomes a female soldier who helps the family pull through. Throughout she remains some version of Lily Sabina, intrepid underling, which is to say that Wilder knows the stage requires stereotypes the way the Unconscious requires archetypes. So reJoyce, for the Twain do meet.

Andrew Burnap (George Antrobus), Melanie Field (Lily Sabina)

From anxious sit-com we go to Broadway glitz and the show-biz of politics, as Antrobus seeks public office—with the ever-recurring leer at marital infidelity the thorn in the side of the upstanding leader—to the bombed-out aftermath of war that recalls Beckett and Brecht and the theater of scarcity, kept light by an intrusion, early in Act III, by the Theater Manager (Harlan) as he tries to deal with cast members fallen ill due to food poisoning (extra credit to Harlan for playing “himself” as distracted director).

Anna Crivelli, Dylan Frederick, Melanie Field, Ricardo Davila, Annelise Lawson

Whatever you make of the play, the production values here are top notch. There’s a big musical number via Christopher Ross-Ewart that plays well after the intermission, while we’re still being entertained, and a haunting song sung by the refugees. Harlan and Scenic Designer Choul Lee use below-stage at the Rep to create an Atlantic City boardwalk effect, and the bombed-out house of Act III has, oddly, more reality than the homey house of Act I. There are numerous cast members that barely get a moment to register in roles as refugees and chair-pushers; it’s as if Wilder wants bodies onstage but doesn’t want to bother with them as characters. At least Harlan and choreographer Gretchen Wright give some—Anna Crivelli, Annelise Lawson, Dylan Frederick, Ricardo Dávila—as dancers something to do, and that helps. An exception to the under-scripting is Paul Stillman Cooper, almost unrecognizable as the prognosticating coin-operated psychic in a box, once a staple on boardwalks on the Eastern shore. Cooper makes an interesting speech about not being able to predict the past that gets under the skin of The Skin of Our Teeth.

Paul Stillman Cooper (Fortune Teller)

Still more profound is the final showdown between George and Henry or the eternal battle between Father and Son. Before anyone had coined the term “generation gap,” the Oedipal drama had become archetypal by way of Sophocles, Shakespeare and Freud, to name a few; Harlan’s production lets us see the struggle—as I read it anyway—as very much a part of the post WW2 world so many things we know date from—like the Bomb, rock’n’roll, and the TV ads Rasean Davonte Johnson’s wonderful wartime ad projections remind us of. Merrylees’s Henry, who is supposed to sound evil and nihilistic (in Wilder’s conception), like Cain, a blow against all the good Wilder, in the midst of the war, wants to believe in, sounds to me like a frantic child born into the Atomic Age and given a gun to play with, like all those daddies had in the war. In other words, Wilder wants us to consider personal resentments and the existential battle against God’s big plan, but times change, even for a play that plays forever, and the YSD show lets us consider Wilder in his time, foretelling our past.

Aubie Merrylees (Henry/Cain)

With references to extinction via a flood, the senseless killing of a black worker, and the needs of refugees at the door of our collective comfortable domicile, The Skin of Our Teeth could bite harder at our current state of the world,  but Wilder wants us to find succor, as George does, in Spinoza, Plato and Genesis, and that, in our era, feels quaint. Rather than the light of humanism shining on, George seems a fuddy-dud who will never get around to reading Maggie’s missive in a bottle.

front: Baize Buzan (Maggie), Juliana Canfield (Gladys); rear: Melanie Field (Lily Sabina)

Yale School of Drama presents
The Skin of Our Teeth
By Thornton Wilder
Directed by Luke Harlan

Choreographer: Gretchen Wright; Scenic Designer: Choul Lee; Costume Designer: Haydee Zelideth; Lighting Designer: Carolina Ortiz-Herrera; Sound Designer/Original Music: Christopher Ross-Ewart; Projection Designer: Rasean Davonte Johnson; Production Dramaturg: David Clauson; Stage Manager: Paula Renee Clarkson

Cast: Andrew Burnap; Baize Buzan; Alex Cadena; Juliana Canfield; Paul Stillman Cooper; Anna Crivelli; Ricardo Dávila; Melanie Field; Dylan Fredercick; Rebecca Hampe; Luke Harlan; Annelise Lawson; Jonathan Majors; Aubie Merrylees; Jennifer Schmidt; Shaunette Renée Wilson

Yale Repertory Theatre
October 20-24, 2015

Country Living

Review of the Yale School of Drama’s The Seagull

Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull is a very busy play, a fact that the current production from the Yale School of Drama, directed by third-year director Jessica Holt, fully embraces. Begin with that very busy set (Jean Kim) running the entire length of the Iseman Theater’s space and including a balcony perch for the musicians who accompany the action with songs. There are chairs, tables, divans, garden seats, trees, paintings, musical instruments, a wooden cut-out of a half-moon, a huge painting of a lake on a curtain, various bric-a-brac, and, at both stage left and right, make-up tables with lighted mirrors—and don’t forget the swing built for two. The Seagull features theater as a theme because two of its main characters, Irina Nikolayevna Arkadina (Maura Hooper) and her son Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplev (Christopher Geary), are involved in theater—she as a respected actress, he as a fledgling (when the show begins) playwright. Holt’s production makes theatricality not only a theme but a modus operandi, finding, more than many productions do, in its sense of theater the comic excess of the play.

Granted, Chekhov called his play a comedy, but that fact seems to elude the general approach to The Seagull, as there are few jokes per se and Chekhov isn’t one to stage-direct farce and slapstick. Holt and company find the comedy by playing many of the interactions broadly and by minimizing the pathos—until, in the final of four acts, it seemingly can’t be helped. Even then, the use of a surprising exit underscores not only the staging, but the staginess of floundering actress Nina (Chasten Harmon)’s bid for profundity. In other words, this version of The Seagull keeps its eye on what makes all these characters laughable to us, but so unamusing to themselves, most of the time.

Consider some of the great casting choices: with Maura Hooper as Irina, there’s no way this production isn’t going to register fully, for our enjoyment, the staginess and vanity of a “great actress,” mouldering away at her brother’s country estate and trying—more deliberately than desperately—to maintain the erotic ardor of her lover while also trying—more casually than carefully—to be a mother to her earnest young son. Hooper has great comic gifts and her Irina, fully convinced that it’s all her show, doesn’t need to “steal” what she so clearly dominates, even without a sexual tryst on a tabletop. As her self-involved lover, the successful (careerist) writer Trigorin, Aaron Bartz sports an impressive wavy forelock and a dapper appearance. He’s quite the coxcomb and, at 55, is still able to have his head turned by Nina’s eager neediness. She so very clearly wants a man of substance like Trigorin and not a headstrong mama’s boy like Konstantin.

As the play’s hero, Geary has a voice that can ignite wood and chop ice. He can be Irina’s pathetic plaything one moment and upbraid her with his deep dissatisfactions the next. He begins earnestly artistic, rebellious against his mother’s generation, and ends surfeited with success but still hungry for what he pined for in youth. He’s a very Russian character, and Geary in particular and the show in general can turn on a dime from slapstick to existential bathos. That skill is nowhere more necessary than in the depiction of Nina, who in Harmon’s rendering goes from radiant, girlish vitality, to worn and disillusioned but also more profound. Her final scene with Konstantin is almost tragic because of their inability to find a shared note to end on. This, we might feel, could also be comic, but Holt’s Seagull takes Nina’s suffering seriously, and Harmon makes us believe in her, at least as much as Konstantin does.

In the end this Seagull is moving—but from the start it moves (the show boasts one of the quicker-seeming first acts I’ve seen at a School of Drama production), and for that to happen you need a lot of capable support to let us in on the lives of the other characters (seven speaking roles) without letting the play get bogged down. It helps to have the likes of Niall Powderly and Shaunette Renée Wilson as the couple Ilya and Paulina Shamrayev, who swell scenes and provide important reactions and, in llya’s case, oddly obsessive tensions. And Paulina provides as well a sullen dalliance for Yevgeny Sergeyevich Dorn (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a country doctor who abounds in feminine interest, and comes across as a likeable observer. In the key role of Masha, the Shamrayev’s airy daughter, Zenzi Williams prisses and preens and shares a charming drinking scene with Trigorin; suffering from Konstantin’s indifference, she marries the earnest school teacher Medvedenko (Andrew Burnap, who also provides some very effective accompaniment on the trumpet), who appears here to have more sense and self-respect than most of these gum-flapping eccentrics. Not least of which is the estate’s owner Pyotr Nikolayevich Sorin (Jonathan Majors), played as a fond, retiring, frail character who, like so many Chekhov characters, means well but achieves nothing. Add as well the servant Yakov (Luke Harlan, leading the other domestics—The Cook (Jennifer Schmidt) and The Maid (Pornchanok Kanchanabanca)—in musical interludes), who maintains the kind of unschooled, fierce intelligence that Russian writers like to ascribe to the serfs.

All in all, a game cast and a very physical, energetic, and enjoyable production. As generally happens in such large-scale plays, we do tend to miss the more engaging characters when they’re offstage, but at least Holt and company’s Seagull gives all the characters lots of room to move about in and lots of variety. Costumes (Asa Benally) run from Masha’s insistent black to Irina’s blazing red taffeta and her eye-popping red violet travel outfit, and include as well the requisite “simple peasant” gear and the traditional “Fiddler on the Roof” style that makes a caricature of Ilya, as well as handsome outfits that make us believe Paulina could turn the dandyish doctor’s head. Clothes make the man, and Konstantin’s final get-up reeks of self-importance, Hamlet-style. Elizabeth Mak’s lighting provides effects that alter time of day, inside/outside, and, in the final act especially, a claustrophobic change of mood, while Kate Marvin’s sound adds, among other things, the rain and a gunshot that will make you jump.

Long and involved The Seagull is, there’s no argument there. The School of Drama production throws as much energy, high spirits and variety at the classic text as one can imagine, finding the entertainment in all that existential ennui. Inspiring.

The Seagull By Anton Chekhov

Translated by Paul Schmidt

Directed by Jessica Holt

Scenic Designer: Jean Kim; Costume Designer: Asa Benally; Lighting Designer: Elizabeth Mak; Sound Designer: Kate Marvin; Production Dramaturg: Kelly Kerwin; Stage Manager: Kelly Montgomery

Yale School of Drama

December 12-18, 2014

Winter Is Us

Review of Rose and the Rime, Yale Cabaret It’s not every day you encounter a new myth for the change of the seasons. One of the oldest, of course, is the story of Persephone in Hades, and you may find yourself thinking of old, elemental tales like that as you watch the plot develop in Rose and the Rime, written by Nathan Allen, Chris Mathews, and Jake Minton of The House Theatre in Chicago and brought to the Yale Cabaret by Kelly Kerwin. This is the kind of story people who spend a lot of time in frozen climes may like to tell themselves. After all, as that cold wind begins to blow and you look forward to months of snow, you may start asking yourself: what did we do to deserve this?

In Rose, we meet a very adorable little girl—played by Chalia La Tour with the kind of feisty charm that makes Shirley Temple look like a rag doll—and her doting uncle (Galen Kane). They live in a place so cold it’s very unwise to be out of doors at all after the sun goes down. Inside, Uncle prepares hot chocolate and tells always the same story about how the fairest, kindest maiden and the best-looking, nicest guy meet and mate and bring back sun and song and dance and eternal good times. It’s just a make-believe story told to keep out the dark and cold, or is it?

As Rose begins to press her Uncle for details about what happened to her parents—“I’m old enough to know,” she announces—a detail pops up: there was a magic coin that could change winter into summer. “No, I want the true story,” Rose insists, feeling her Uncle is still in a fairy tale. But that’s just it. Rose is not in a dystopian story about a desolate winter world, but rather a fairy tale—and so there is a magic coin, and there is a wicked Rime Witch (Lauren Dubowksi, quite malevolent with fearsome fingers, a treated voice, and an evil cackle), and there are perils—like moving trees and wolves—that beset Rose on her quest.

Making Rose’s journey unfold in the Cab’s limited space takes some real ingenuity, and that’s one of the great pleasures of this show. There’s a long runner looking like a water slide down the center of the space and, with the right manipulations, it becomes a swirling, snow-filled wasteland; when Rose has to step across frozen streams, La Tour moves along a path of stools; lights, by Joey Moro, and Sound by Jon Roberts help create the sensations of this winter wilderness adventure, with atmospheric music conjured by Joel Abbott, and a lovely snowfall effect at the end.

The transition to summer—who knew that ice path was also a sand promenade?—features shed clothing, Hawaiian shirts, upbeat tunes, and hot dogs distributed to the crowd, and a dance party fleshed out by happy locals (Steven Reilly, David Clauson, Avery Trunko, Olivia Scicolone). It also features the arrival of Jimmy (Andrew Burnap), as a sweet guy with a gorgeous way with a song—here it’s The Temptations’ “My Girl”—to woo and win our Rose. Along comes marriage, a baby, and, in place of “happily ever after,” a turn of events that suggest not only that winter is in us rather than just an atmospheric condition, but that also put the plot onto its cyclical path, as we soon arrive at another uncle—Charlie (Niall Powderly, Jimmy’s brother, by turns comically clueless, evilly grasping, and sympathetically struggling)—trying to raise another girl-child in a wintery world.

The story’s mix of the archetypal and the childlike make it resonate as the kind of tale told to kids, though the implications of the story make it not so childish after all. At its heart is a story of envy towards those whom fortune favors, and the kind of collective dysfunction that, well, make the birth of a hero necessary and perhaps inevitable—in fairy tales at least.

Rose and the Rime By Nathan Allen, Chris Mathews, and Jake Minton Directed by Kelly Kerwin

Dramaturg: Davina Moss; Sets: Aleander Woodward; Costumes: Benjamin Fainstein; Lights: Joey Moro; Sound: Jon Roberts; Additional Music: Joel Abbott; Stage Manager: Emily DeNardo; Producers: Sarah Williams & Emily Zemba; Production Manager: James Lanius III

Yale Cabaret October 16-18, 2014

Dancing in the Dark

Review of Why Torture is Wrong and the People Who Love Them The first offering of the 2014—40th anniversary—Yale Summer Cabaret stages the work of former YSD student, founding member of the Summer Cabaret, and recent Tony-winning playwright Christopher Durang. Why Torture is Wrong and the People Who Love Them dates from 2009. Not long ago, or is it? What Durang risks, with topical reference points—like French toast being rechristened “Freedom toast”—is that, in a few years, or even now, the times he gleefully skewers will become “quaint” in their own way or even, God help us, the basis for nostalgic revisiting.

If you become misty with memory thinking back to Abu Ghraib, the John Yoo declaration, the heyday of girls go crazy—a Cosmo, anyone?—and hangouts for tacky middle-Americans (remember them?) like Hooters, to say nothing of the “what’s in a name” fun, post 9-11, of ragging on any vaguely Arab-sounding names, then let this play wrench you back to those less than stellar times, if only to laugh at them. Durang’s lively, giddy, and inventive play—directed with absurdist spirit by Co-Artistic Director Jessica Holt—hits its targets in a way that makes cartoonishness a positive aesthetic. U.S. history certainly has a sense of the absurd, and, in the immediate aftermath of W., we were all Looney Tunes. Here, one interrogator suffers from Mel Blanc Tourette syndrome and can’t get out two words without reverting to the voice of a Looney Tunes character (voiced, in their heyday, by Blanc), such as “I say, I say, waterboarding,” as Foghorn Leghorn would deliver the line.

As is often the case with this level of broad playacting, most of the fun is in the set-up, or the First Act. That’s when we meet (almost) everyone who populates this domestic sit-com of the Terrorist Era: first, dubious daughter Felicity (Ariana Venturi, both dreamy and soulful), the barometer of decency here. Will she stop being the sort of generic single girl who objects to her parents without ever reasoning with them, or get involved in trying to do something for the good of all? Then, there’s Zamir (James Cusati-Moyer, hyper and faced with carrying the dual aspects of the play—try being funny and threatening at the same time), who claims he and Felicity were married during a drunken binge (at Hooters!) and expects her parents to support them—if only to stop him from his vaguely illegal activities and from giving his wife a “date-rape drug” to get what he wants when he wants it.

Then there’s Luella (Maura Hooper) and Leonard (Aaron Bartz), the mom and dad. Hooper’s performance is a hilarious barrage of ditzy mannerisms crossed with Kate Hepburn hauteur and Leave It To Beaver unflappable mom syndrome. It’s wildly, remarkably ridiculous, while also giving us some of the show’s bite. Durang wants us to see how the “life as usual” trappings of bourgeois indifference during the protracted obscenities of the Bush Years is simply a form of dementia. Luella’s constant commentaries on “the-ah-ter” are fun and, perhaps, a bit specific for a general audience, though Durang can generally assume that his audience is in the house. Durang bites the hand that feeds him, a bit, but that’s part of the fun of being an American: the ability to laugh at yourself. Dad is also an appealing caricature, an all-male, gun-toting Father Knows Best type, but likeable enough to have a beer with; he’s also up to vigilante “shadow government” undertakings undercover in a special room for “butterfly collecting.”

Rounding out the absurd cast we have Rev. Mike (Aubie Merrylees, sporting CA-inspired threads and speaking with the loud, grooving-on-life voice of a guy who has done too many raves), a porn-making reverend who may be Durang’s best inspiration: after all, Jesus said to love one’s neighbor, and that led the early church toward agape-fests . . . . Not least here is another bravura comic turn by Celeste Arias (if you saw her in Kate Tarker’s Thunderbodies at the Carlotta Festival, you know what I mean) as Hildegaarde, Leonard’s Gal Friday incapable of keeping her underpants up and devoted to the anti-terrorist skullduggery of her hero (though she does get all “weaker sex” when the torture actually starts). Andrew Burnap’s multiple roles include the “agent” suffering (succotash) from Looney Tourette, also the voices in Felicity’s head, and a suave Hooters waiter capable of crooning a sparkling “Dancing in the Dark.”

In the Second Act things turn darker—though with still the same glibness—with Zamir undergoing torture at Leonard's hands (in accord with Yoo’s dicta on legal torture) upstairs as wife and daughter wait, shut out of the blood-letting till bags of removed appendages are brought into the livingroom. At that point, Felicity takes us on a re-sequencing of events that would spare us, the cast, and the U.S. from a collective spin through a dark night of the soul, or at least a consideration of where the logic of “ends justify the means” takes us. Durang may, after all, be not so far removed from the desires of Luella, who goes to the theater to learn what is “normal,” as he ends with a comfortable and comforting idea we might express as “so long as we can still date, there’s hope.”

Holt and company’s Why Torture is Wrong gets it right, with perhaps a bit too much reverence for the recent. No one thinks twice of trimming Shakespeare or Chekhov, but it seems all of Durang's play is necessary for its effect though, by Cab standards, it takes rather long to get where it’s going. The Scenic Design repeats the proscenium-style arrangement of last year’s Summer Cab, and Alexander Woodward’s designs and scene changes are vivid and fun, particularly Dad’s special room. Steven Rotramel's costumes—like Luella’s same dress in many colors, Felicity’s night-out dress, and Hildegaarde’s Republican-red business suit (to say nothing of Rev. Mike’s ensemble)—all do the piece proud. There are enough interludes and changes in mood to give Sound Designer Kate Marvin and Lighting Designer Andrew F. Griffin opportunities to show off their talents, made easier by the fact that this is a play that never wants us to forget it’s a play.

The Yale Summer Cabaret is off to a great start with (in Sylvester’s voice) a slap-happy serving of silly skewerings of shibboleths and sacred cows, satirizing a self-serving and hardly short-lived era in a style that should inspire some soul-searching.

Why Torture is Wrong and the People Who Love Them By Christopher Durang Directed by Jessica Holt

Scenic Designer: Alexander Woodward; Costume Designer: Steven Rotramel; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Sound Designer: Kate Marvin; Stage Manager: Will Rucker; Photographs: Christopher Ash

The Yale Summer Cabaret June 5th-15th, 2014

Next up, opening June 19th and running till June 29th, is Erin Courtney’s A Map of Virtue, described as “part interview, part comedy, part middle-of-the-night, middle-of the-forest horror story,” that is about “the ways we try to understand evil,” directed by Co-Artistic Director, Luke Harlan.

40 Years On: A Preview of Yale Summer Cabaret, 2014

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Yale Summer Cabaret, a theatrical entity separate from Yale Cabaret (or “term time Cabaret”), which began life in 1974.

In tribute to the four decades of its existence, the current Yale Summer Cabaret, led by Artistic Directors Jessica Holt and Luke Harlan, with Managing Director Gretchen Wright and Associate Managing Director Sooyoung Hwang, will be staging plays by living American authors, beginning with Christopher Durang, who was one of the founding members of the Summer Cabaret 40 years ago. Today, of course, he’s celebrated for plays such as his most recent, the Tony Award-winning “Best Play” of 2013, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (which Summer Cab wanted to mount this year but Hartford Stage got there first), but, once upon a time, he was a YSD student working in the Summer Cabaret.

The decision to feature contemporary American playwrights follows nicely on last year’s program, which was a kind of syllabus of world theater, from the neoclassicism of Molière through naturalism, symbolism, and ending with the absurdist and pointed work of contemporary British playwright Caryl Churchill. The note reached at the end of last year’s Summer Cab, with Churchill’s Drunk Enough to Say I Love You looking askance at American dominance since WWII, sets up nicely this year’s program of “voices at the forefront of American theater,” works that encapsulate complex perspectives on our cultural heritage, our place in the world, our self-image, and our values, as a nation.

The shows will, like last year, open sequentially and play for about two weeks each. At midsummer, a break will give the company time to reconfigure the space so that, unlike last year, the seating arrangements will not remain fixed for the entire summer but will alter midway. This, Holt and Harlan feel, gives audiences the best of both worlds: the stage-like setup of last year’s Summer Cab, for two shows, and the more amorphous arrangements typical of term-time Cab for the next two shows. Capping off the two months of contemporary full-length plays will be a four-day program of very recent short plays, all by YSD alums, including the three playwrights currently featured at this year’s Carlotta Festival, Hansol Jung, Mary Laws, Kate Tarker.

The Program

First up, in June, is Christopher Durang’s 2009 absurdist comedy Why Torture is Wrong and the People Who Love Them which Holt, who will direct, describes as a “wildly funny, wacky, and zany” comedy about such laughing matters as torture, terrorism, gun violence, domestic dysfunction, male domination, and the fraught nature of interracial or cross-cultural marriage in America. In Holt’s view, the play is “grappling with what it means to be American,” and so, ultimately, fits the Summer program better than Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike would have.

We meet Felicity (Ariana Venturi), a young woman who has apparently married the unsettling Zamir (James Custati-Moyer) while drunk, so that she seems to be meeting him when we do, as she has no previous recollection of him. Then, of course, we go home to meet the folks: father (Aaron Bartz) and mother (Maura Hooper), with support from Aubie Merrylees as the seedy Reverend Mike, Celeste Arias as Hildegarde, dad’s “colleague,” and Andrew Burnap providing the cartoonish voice over. The play takes on most of the things the news keeps Americans fretting about, as stories of violence and the threat of violence are as American as television. From 5 June to 15 June

Next, still in June, Luke Harlan will direct Erin Courtney’s A Map of Virtue (2012), a New England premiere. Harlan calls the play a “journey into darkness” that mixes genres—romantic comedy, horror story, mystery, docu-drama—to keep the audience guessing. Narrated by a bird statue, the play tweaks expectations at every turn, but is also structurally symmetrical, with 6 scenes leading to a major event and 6 scenes following that key moment. With a cast of 7, the play mainly focuses on Sarah and Nate, a stranger named Mark and a house in the woods. An “exploration of evil,” the play, Holt says, is also “charming, brilliant, and ebulliently written,” and addresses the effect on relationships of traumatic events. From 19 June to 29 June

After 11 days off, including the 4th of July weekend, the Summer Cabaret returns with Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, formerly known as Southwest Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, between the Years 1884-1915. Director Jessica Holt calls the play, which played at SoHo Rep in 2012, directed by Eric Ting of the Long Wharf, a “meta-theatrical inquiry into cultural anthropology” as we watch a theatrical troupe in the process of creating a play about the “first genocide of the twentieth century.” Germany, during the inclusive years in the play’s title, controlled what was then called Deutsch-Südwestafrika, which is today the nation of Namibia, and during that time found cause to destroy the Herero tribe. With a ruthless efficiency that seems the prototype for genocide against Jews and Poles in WWII, German soldiers were put in the position of executioners of a native population. But the only record of what took place can be found in the soldiers’ letters home. In Drury’s play, the actors’ difficulties with imagining and inhabiting the roles dictated by the extreme situations—particularly with gaps in knowledge and motivation—leads to obvious analogies to violence against native and slave populations in the U.S. Holt sees the play within the play as an ingenious device to bring the audience into the situation through the comic and seemingly improvised interactions of rehearsal, inviting the audience to consider the implications of their own presence in the room with the actors. From 11 July to 26 July

The final full-length play is Will Eno’s Middletown, the author’s breakthrough play. Eno has been called, by Charles Isherwood, “the Samuel Beckett of the Jon Stewart generation,” and, while I don’t know that many see themselves as defined generationally by watching Stewart, the notion of unsettling existentialism rubbing up against the self-aware ironies of the American media does strike a chord. Eno’s The Realistic Joneses, currently on Broadway, debuted at the Yale Rep in 2012 and was one of the best new plays to show up there in recent memory. Middletown dates from 2010 and is a kind of Our Town for an edgier era. In director Luke Harlan’s view the play asks, as does Our Town for an earlier time, “what does it mean to be alive right now?” Without romanticizing or dismissing everyday lives, but with real “humor and fear,” Harlan says, Eno’s play looks at normal people living normal lives in an “Anytown U.S.A.” but lets them say things no one says aloud. With a cast of 10 actors playing 20 characters, the show will be an opportunity to sample the excellent ensemble work of YSD and Cabaret shows. From 31 July to 10 August

Finally, the Summer Cabaret closes with Summer Shorts, a four-day festival of new short plays by six playwrights “whose work was first nurtured and developed at the Yale School of Drama.” Divided into Series A and Series B, there will be at least three plays in each Series (or evening), and on the last two days, Saturday and Sunday, August 16th and 17th, all the plays will be staged in two sequences, at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m., respectively, both evenings. The line-up of plays will be previewed here during the Summer Cab’s July interim. This part of the program should be very interesting, seeing what can be done in a short compass by playwrights that Holt and Harlan regard as the future of theater. From 14 August to 17 August

The Team

Jessica Holt, rising third year directing candidate, and Luke Harlan, rising second year directing candidate, met at the meet-and-greet last spring when Harlan visited Yale as a prospective YSD student. They hit it off then, with their belief in new plays that had been fostered by their work in, respectively, the San Francisco and New York theater scenes. By the time Harlan was midway through his first year, the two had begun to plan a proposal for the Summer Cabaret, where Holt put in time working last summer. Their mission statement focused on the virtues of new and challenging works that had enjoyed successful and highly regarded first or, at most, second runs.

Very aware that they are presenting the 40th anniversary season of the beloved experiment that is the Summer Cabaret, the Co-Artistic Directors wanted to provide a provocative line-up of plays that tell stories. Both directed plays in last year’s term-time Cabaret: Holt directed Edward Bond’s darkly comic dystopian play Have I None, a U.S. premiere, and Harlan reached back to The Brothers Size, an early play by YSD alum Tarell Alvin McCraney that gave Yale Cabaret 46 a strong finish. Holt’s and Harlan’s choices showed the commitment to current plays and youngish playwrights demonstrated by the Summer Cab line-up.

For their Managing Director, Holt and Harlan asked around “and heard and observed good things” about Gretchen Wright, whose background in choreography may afford participation beyond the key role of keeping the Cabaret running smoothly. As regular patrons of the Summer Cabaret know, the summer is a different animal from the term-time Cabaret, becoming a welcome oasis in a college town whose median age ratchets up considerably in the summer months. Other entertainments of the “afterhours” variety may be added later.

With its first offering, the 40th anniversary Summer Cabaret will touch base with its origins before taking us on a journey that will demonstrate some of the contemporary values of theater—bending genres, looking at the problem of historical enactment, re-imagining the “domestic quotidian,” and demonstrating the resources of short but powerful recent pieces.

The key terms for the 40th Summer Cabaret, devised by Holt and Harlan, are Community. Excellence. Imagination. Innovation. Investigation. Wonder. Providing excellent theater to the New Haven community through innovative works that investigate our ways of life with a sense of imaginative wonder, the Summer Cabaret will up and running in three and a half weeks.

Prepare to be challenged.

The Yale Summer Cabaret 2014 Voices at the Forefront of American Theater

Photographs by Christopher Ash

Passes and single tickets are available online at summercabaret.org, by phone at (203) 432-1567, by email at summer.cabaret@yale.edu, and in person at the Yale Summer Cabaret box office (217 Park Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06511).

Peek-a-Boo, I See You

Third-year YSD director Dustin Wills will be remembered as the guy who, recently, transformed the viewing experience at the Yale Cabaret. As Co-Artistic Director of the Yale Summer Cabaret 2013, he altered the playing space to create a deep thrust stage, doing away with the tendency to remake the place with every new play. In his production of The Maids, he goes further, creating a room, or rooms, within the room that is the Cabaret. The premise of this production is that the audience are voyeurs and eavesdroppers, positioned outside panes of glass, spying on what happens in someone’s apartment.

Whose apartment? Why, Madame’s. And exactly what are her maids, Solange and Claire, getting up to while their mistress is away? Solange plays Claire and Claire plays Madame. The point of the masquerade is that moment when the two, nearly fainting for a love they dare not give in to, bond in the death of someone—most likely (the real) Madame. Add to this the fact that Solange may or may not want her sister to die (as Madame), or may or may not want to die as her sister (dying with Madame). In other words, the world of The Maids is a world where desire and death (together) are the thrills. All the rest is masquerade.

Wills’ production adds an extra dimension to this dress-up game. Traditionally played with a cast of three female actors, The Maids was conceived by its author, Jean Genet, as enacted by a trio of male actors playing women. In following this intention, Wills’ The Maids becomes a drag show of sorts, with men masquerading as women, but this dimension also makes The Maids an even more complex play because we are watching men playact men who are playacting women. Wills’ cast begins in high camp and I’m sure a few playgoers seeing the play for the first time might assume they are watching a gay sex farce. Chris Bannow (Solange/Claire) and Mickey Theis (Claire/Madame) enact their parts with a kind of personal theatricality that we are encouraged to think is what goes on behind closed doors—and undraped windows—with these two, able to “act out” in private. Privy to this playacting within the play, we can only begin to determine its point as we watch, trying hard to follow the action and the whispers, as the pair, early on glad only in “tighty whities,” move about Kate Noll’s sumptuously tacky interior space.

Bannow and Theis are two of the most accomplished actors in the YSD program, and here they do some of the best work either has done. It’s not easy suggesting the subtle psycho-sexual drama between these two “sisters,” moving through a range of moods—passionate, bitchy, frightened, bullying, beseeching—but that is what this play requires. Bannow’s Solange is who we meet first, performing autoerotic acts solo—the entire play is in some ways a protracted sexual fantasy that is also an examination of power relations between classes and within gender. Much of the struggle here is between Claire and Solange who enact everything from sibling rivalry to lovers’ tiffs to actors’ differences of artistic vision. It’s all in the game. As the prettier one, who should be the object of Madame’s unspoken homoerotic desire, Theis’s performance is something of a revelation, as he finds, as it were, his inner little girl. As Madame, first-year actor Andrew Burnap has a regal height and a distracted air, but doesn’t quite seem the mistress of this threesome.

About the staging: Wills’ decision to enclose the playing space stems from his view that sight-lines in the Cab are always a problem. Certainly there is rarely the full frontal presentation common to most theaters. Here, the Cab’s strongest feature—the fact that the audience and the players occupy the same space—is obviated in striking fashion. Bold, innovative, the design for The Maids makes a drama out of our efforts to see the drama. What you see at the Cab is often dependent on your vantage point but, here, some vantages afford a view of the action on camera, as though watching a surveillance stream.

No more telling staging of how we pry—the idea of our age as one lacking in any sense of privacy is common—could be imagined. The implications about private life and the public imagining of intimacy provide a layer of suggestion to The Maids that goes beyond the old upstairs/downstairs dichotomy that can seem a bit stuffy by now. Inspired and arresting, The Maids is unsavory and seductive, making us all somewhat suspect, like people watching other people watch other people have sex.

The Maids By Jean Genet Directed by Dustin Wills

Dramaturg: Tanya Dean; Set: Kate Noll; Lights: Oliver Wason; Sound: Tyler Kieffer; Costumes: Hunter Kaczorowski; Technical Director: Rose Bochansky; Stage Manager: Molly Henninghausen; Producer: Lauren Wainwright; Creative Consultants: Michelle McGregor, Sophie von Haselberg; Sound Mixer: Sinan Zafar; Carpenters: Nick Vogelpohl, Sean Walters

The Yale Cabaret February 20-22, 2014

Back to the CAB

Last weekend the Yale Cabaret offered its second-ever Yale School of Drag—memorable for many things, including Lupita Nyong’o drag, but if you missed it, then you missed it. And if you saw it, far be it from me to tell you what you saw. This week the Cab is back with the first of the eight shows that continue the second part of the 2013-14 Season. Artistic Directors Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, and Kelly Kerwin have arrived at an interesting mix of shows. Five are pre-existing plays, two are never-before-seen productions, and one is a mixture: a devised setting for known pieces (a bit like Radio Show in the fall).

The first three shows are scheduled beginning this week and for the next two weeks, then a two-week break, three more shows, a week dark, and then the final two. Got it? Here’s what’s coming:

Cab 11 is The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs, proposed by 2nd-year Set Designer Adrian Frausto (whose excellent work on Hedda Gabler closed recently) and directed by 3rd-year Director Cole Lewis, whose varied and unsettling thesis show The Visit was offered in the fall. The play, running for the Valentine's Day weekend, looks at the darker side of romance with a revisiting of the Bluebeard tale of the wealthy man who marries a woman and gives her everything, except . . . she can’t go into that room at the top of the stairs. If your Valentine is the kind who loves a good scare, then this is the place to be. And when was the last time the Cab offered a thriller based on tension and suspense? Written by Canadian playwright Carole Fréchette, the play, Dibo promises, will offer an unusual configuration of the Cab playing space and, with its theme of trust in romance, is perhaps all-too apropos for Valentine’s Day. February 13-15

Next comes Jean Genet’s psychological drama The Maids, proposed by 3rd-year Director Dustin Wills, Co-Artistic Director of Yale Summer Cabaret 2013, whose startlingly unusual Peter Pan played in December. The play, which usually takes place among three women—the mistress and her two maids—will be played by three males, “performing rituals of gender,” according to Dubowski, within a staged space constructed by Kate Noll with sound design by Tyler Kieffer. The idea is to present us with a space full of mirrors and different lines of sight so that the audience is placed in the roles of voyeurs and eavesdroppers, spying on what the maids get-up to behind the scenes. Mainstays of the Summer Cab 2013, Mickey Theis and Chris Bannow, will be joined by first-year actor, Andrew Burnap. February 20-22

The third show before the break is He Left Quietly, proposed by 1st-year Director Leora Morris, a play by Yaël Farber about Duma Kumalo, a man sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit in apartheid South Africa. Kumalo’s story, which involves a stay-of-execution delivered on the day the death sentence was to be carried out, followed by another four years of incarceration for a total of 7 years in prison, is a story of a man’s spirit triumphing over unspeakable deprivations. The show, which features three 2nd-year actors, Ato Blankson-Wood, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Maura Hooper, returns us to the dark realities of apartheid South Africa and a search for justice. February 27-March 1

After two dark weeks, the Cab will return with The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion, a partly devised piece proposed by 1st-year Dramaturg David Bruin. The show will transform the Cab into a Greenwich Village basement in the early 1960s where beatniks and bohemians gather to check out two one-acts by two of their own: Edward Albee and María Irene Fornés. The production takes us back to when these darlings of the theatrical world were still “up-and-coming” and where the surroundings for the play are part of the play in a time of porous conceptions of theater. March 20-22

Cab 15 is We Fight We Die by Long Island-born playwright Timothy J. Guillot and directed by 1st-year playwright Jiréh Breon Holder; the play looks at the fate of the work of graffiti artist Q in his tussle with City Hall, which aims to stamp out his form of art. With a Greek chorus rapping to us about the struggle and original works of art by MFA students in the Yale School of Art, the show provides an interesting collaboration between art forms and media that should be aurally and visually challenging, and, with the recent obliteration of 5Pointz in Long Island City, very timely. March 27-29

Next comes an unusual devised piece from 3rd-year actor and Co-Artistic Director of Summer Cabaret 2013, Chris Bannow. The source material: The Mystery Boy, Bannow’s sister’s original 126-page novel, written two years ago when she was 11. With 2nd-year dramaturg Helen Jaksch (seen in the fall as M in Crave) co-directing, the ensemble cast will be put through their paces with a love triangle, adventures involving the Mafia, vacation romance, and the various pleasures and perils of social media as the lingua franca of our current pre-teen world. April 3-5

2nd-year playwright Ryan Campbell—his Dead Ends was a studio play this past fall—offers his own A New Saint for a New World, directed by 2nd-year director Sara Holdren, who directed Tiny Boyfriend in the fall. The premise: Joan of Arc wants to return to earth; God finally agrees on the condition that she not start any wars or revolutions. Conceived as “a real big play for a small room,” Saint considers the possibilities for faith in 2014 NYC and the frustrations faced by a heroic crusader forbidden to crusade. April 17-19

Cab 18, the last of the season, might be a somewhat obvious choice: The Brothers Size by Tarell Alvin McCraney, the YSD graduate playwright who recently won a Yale Windham-Campbell Writing Prize and a MacArthur “genius” Award in the same year. Three 1st year actors, Jonathan Majors, Julian Elijah Martinez, and Galen Kane proposed the play, written while McCraney was a third-year at YSD, and made their case that it’s a play they have an urgent need to enact due to their personal histories and the unique opportunity offered by the Cab. Directed by Luke Harlan, the play is the story of two brothers—Ogun runs a car-repair shop, the other, Oshoozi, recently released from prison, comes to work for him—and a third man, Elegba, also come from jail, who visits to bring Oshoozi a gift. Set in the bayou country of Louisiana and involving music and African myths, the play should end the Cab’s 46th Season with a strong finish as YSD pays tribute to one of its own. April 24-26

So, that’s what you can look forward to in the weeks ahead. See you at the Cab!

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven, CT

Season 46 Co-Artistic Directors: Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, Kelly Kerwin Managing Director: Shane Hudson