Inappropriate Behavior

Review of Appropriate, Westport Country Playhouse

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Obie-winning play Appropriate lets viewers choose where to place the stress in the title, and it also leaves to viewers how many big dysfunctional family dramas are “appropriate” to name as “appropriated” material. The playbill trots out everything from the most obvious, Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County and Sam Shepherd’s Buried Child, to some a bit of a stretch—Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, and even Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. That kind of “spot the antecedent” game seems to me a bit counter-productive. The play not mentioned that at least would serve some purpose as a thematic comparison is Ibsen’s Ghosts where the true nature of a patriarch and what that means to his offspring is very much to the point.

The patriarch in this case is a once well-heeled Washington lawyer recently deceased after twenty years of decrepitude. His children are gathered to dispose of his plantation in Arkansas, spookily moldering with a hoarder’s trash inside and, outside, separate graveyards for family members and slaves. We watch as estranged son Frank, now Franz (Shawn Fagan)—missing from the family for ten years—climbs in through a window with his free-spirit vegan girlfriend River (Anna Crivelli). Their presence sets off the eldest sibling, Toni (Betsy Aidem), who, as executrix and chief caregiver during their father’s long decline, is quite vocal in her sense of propriety and grievance. The middle sibling is Bo (David Aaron Baker), a typical New York pater with a fussy Jewish wife, Rachael (Diane Davis), and two kids—Cassie (Allison Winn), a thirteen-year-old who claims stridently that she’s “almost an adult,” and a boy, Ainsley (Christian Michael Camporin), who seems content to be a child. Toni’s son, Rhys (Nick Selting), a twenty-something, is also on hand to feel generally put upon by all the middle-aged Sturm und Drang on display among his elders.

Franz (Shawn Fagan), Rachael (Diane Davis), Rhys (Nick Selting), Toni (Betsy Aidem), Bo (David Aaron Baker) (photo: Carol Rosegg)

Andrew Boyce’s scenic design is stunning, letting us experience the space with these visitors and giving director David Kennedy a fully realized world for Jacobs-Jenkins’ characters, who are by terms abrasive, pathetic, amusing, and sympathetic, but never endearing.

River (Anna Crivelli), Franz (Shawn Fagan)

Franz claims to be seeking reconciliation; Toni clings to Rhys and generally undermines everyone else; Bo plays middle-man as if it’s his natural calling. Every role is filled superlatively, with special mention for Aidem’s bull-at-a-garage sale of a domineering but vulnerable sister, and for Baker’s harried decency as Bo. Crivelli plays River as comic but not a caricature, which helps a lot, and Davis does well finding the heart of Rachael, a character who seems determined to be superficial. Fagan’s Franz is almost likeable, though we suspect, as the play goes on, that Toni is not simply spiteful in her view of her little brother’s failings; his character is rewardingly mercurial. And director Kennedy gets perfectly modulated performances of youthful disaffect and awkwardness from Selting's Rhys and Winn's Cassie.

Toni (Betsy Aidem), Rhys (Nick Selting) (photo: Carol Rosegg)

The clarity of exposition is much to the point here and makes staying in place with this family a drama of well-timed revelations. Family dramas owe some of their popularity, no doubt, to the fact that all families have skeletons in the closet and harbor family members who often bring out the worst in each other. We look on with a level of complicity that is determinate for how much we get out of the cast’s exchanges, which can be almost sweet at times, and, at other times, full-bore hostile.

Jacobs-Jenkins, however, has more on his mind than who said what to whom and who neglected whom and who has gone off the rails—there’s drug abuse, alcoholism, seduction of a minor, drug dealing, antisemitism, and divorce, in the past, and job loss and marriage and new parenthood in the prospective future. But that’s all, as it were, window dressing to the big question nagging everyone, perhaps more than would actually be the case: what’s with the photo albums of African-American lynching victims preserved on a book case, and what’s with the jars that contain what seem to be body parts?

Appropriate makes us ask what reaction is appropriate to such discoveries. Much as we might wonder how we ourselves might handle evidence of such virulent racism in a loved one, we also realize that this family is being made to shoulder a legacy it can ill sustain. The script cunningly lets us see each character navigate, badly, the minefield of these artifacts’ existence. And Kennedy, whose direction of The Invisible Hand last season at Westport showed a similar skill with ethical gray areas, keeps things tense and probing. Neither director nor author shy away from showing us how the family dynamic—any family dynamic—is a means to shelter and exclude. Here, the excoriation the characters level at each other serves to highlight a more general social dysfunction that festers where they can’t quite get at it.

Rachael (Diane Davis), Bo (David Aaron Baker) (photo: Carol Rosegg)

Engaging enough thanks to its wonderful cast, set, and direction, Appropriate’s structure can feel a little flabby at times, particularly in a second act that gives the younger cast members stage time and lets the elders take a bit of a rest, but is a bit too relaxed and sit-com-like to maintain the play’s edge. But that weakness is more than made up for by Act Three. With its teasing black-outs—punctuated by deafening cicadas—striking special effects, explosive fight, sustained speeches from all the principle characters, scene-stopping intrusion by Ainsley, and quirky sense of roiling crisis, Appropriate’s finale delivers appropriate theatrical thrills.

Appropriate
By Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Directed by David Kennedy

Scenic Design: Andrew Boyce; Costume Design: Emily Rebholz; Lighting Design: Matthew Richards; Sound Design: Fitz Patton; Fight Director: Michael Rossmy; Props Master: Alixon Mantilla; Production Dramaturg: Dana Tanner-Kennedy; Casting: Tara Rubin Casting, Laura Schutzel, CSA; Production Stage Manager: Geoff Boronda

Cast: Betsy Aidem, David Aaron Baker, Christian Michael Camporin, Anna Crivelli, Diane Davis, Shawn Fagan, Nick Selting, Allison Winn

Westport Country Playhouse
August 15-September 2, 2017

Le Refus Absurde

Review of Débâcles, Yale Cabaret

Third-year Yale School of Drama director Elizabeth Dinkova has a penchant for wildly dark comedy and she may have found her most suitable match yet directing Marion Aubert’s Débâcles, now in its first-ever English language staging, as translated by Erik Butler and Kimberly Jannarone, at Yale Cabaret. The play sends up the French Resistance with the kind of no-holds-barred approach to comedy that might recall Terry Southern and Stanley Kubrick’s caustic satire of prospective world annihilation, Dr. Strangelove. And since Aubert writes in French, the play’s corrosive sense of humanity’s horrendous ability to live with the most appalling circumstances might well recall amusing misanthropes like Céline. It is humor not for the easily offended, and, since it takes to task the situation of occupied France in which, Aubert’s note tells us, only 2% of the population openly resisted the Nazis, it’s a timely enough tale of how folks will get along with anything, so long as there’s food and sex available. Trading one for the other is fairly standard wartime procedure and Aubert is relentless in depicting how dysfunctional all aspects of the world become during wartime.

Simon (Arturo Soria) (photo: Elli Green)

The play aims to affront and to entertain. It’s a neat trick when it does both at the same time. Begin with its hapless hero, Simon (Arturo Soria), a precocious teen who lends considerable credence to the view that only the French truly appreciate Jerry Lewis. Soria hits many of the notes of forthright naïveté that fueled many a Lewis comedic man-child, and almost everything he says is in excruciating—and thus ridiculous (or vice versa)—bad taste. Unlike Lewis’s characters though, Simon is not mawkish but rather a walking attack of hormonal urges. He lusts after everyone. In this he’s not alone, as we also have a matronly woman, Madame Lisa (Rory Pelsue), who is pretty much up for anything, a father, Paul (Matthew Conway), who has had sex with his daughter Camille (Anna Crivelli), and a casually rapacious Nazi SS officer Martynas (Josh Goulding) who rapes a waif Itto (Amandla Jahava) and pursues all he can get from Remy (Jakeem Powell), the father of Camille’s baby. Their homoerotic dalliance is a set-piece designed to signal the loathings and lusts that seem to fire the popular imagination's view of fascism.

Indeed, male sexuality, as more or less a constant state of rut, is figured somewhat talismanically by a photo of Remy’s “crown jewels,” and by an elusive figure called Handsome Blond (Jeremy O. Harris), a British airman who seems to be the ne plus ultra of desirability. Meanwhile, Simon, who, despite his teenage tendency to hyperventilate about everything that passes through his bedeviled brain, may have a heart, is harboring two Jews—or, as the play likes to stress, Jewesses—in his closet: the adventurous and probably romantically smitten Clara (Catherine Rodriguez) and her great-aunt Marie-Ange (Caitlin Crombleholme), who has had her tongue cut out by Nazis. There’s also Martin (Michael Costagliola), brother of Camille, who wants to ingratiate himself with Martynas, and Aurélie (Emily Reeder), mother of Camille and Martin, who opens the play in a state of hyper-hysteria that does much to set the tone. Later she sacrifices her hair for no very clear reason.

Marie-Ange (Caitlin Crumbleholme), Clara (Catherine Rodriguez) (photo: Elli Green)

Annie Dauber’s set makes use of five different playing spaces: Paul and Aurélie’s livingroom; Simon’s bedroom and closet; Madame Lisa’s kitchen; the meeting place of Remy and Martynas; and a raised stage area that is most often used as the banks of a river. There’s much turning this way and that to follow the action and also lively use of the Cab's open space, with much running about and, at one point, Simon crawling surreptitiously through the audience. Projections and subtitles flash to set up the different scenes. And don’t forget the inestimable Gavin Whitehead, dramaturg and percussionist, who adds many wonderful and important touches of apropos sound to the proceedings and who sits at the back of the playing space like a detached but responsive presence.

Madame Lisa (Rory Pelsue), Simon (Arturo Soria) (photo: Elli Green)

Highlights in performance, in addition to Arturo Soria’s overwhelming energy as Simon, are Josh Goulding’s charismatic nastiness as Martynas, Caitlin Crombleholme’s comically grotesque dumbshow as Marie-Ange, Amandla Jahava’s bouncy victim Itto, Rory Pelsue’s tense delivery of Madame Lisa’s erratic stream-of-consciousness (Pelsue notably delivers the masculine French names of characters correctly), and Jeremy O. Harris’ lampoon of a French accent.

Finally, the play’s conclusion features a powerful turn by Anna Crivelli as Camille, pushing baby Charlotte in a stroller, and moving through the ruins of the town while projections of bombs flank their path. Camille sings “The Partisan,” the song Aurélie sang to rock the baby (both Crivelli and Reeder have lovely voices), and the comic bathos of Camille’s asides join with the lyrical heroism of the song to create a telling mix of emotions that ends the play quite powerfully.

Débâcle, or what the author’s notes call “regrettable change,” is a word, in English, for an almost catastrophic failure, usually with piquant notes of good intentions gone awry. It’s the perfect word for what a wartime world puts its people through, and it becomes particularly relevant when they try to think of a future beyond the horrors of their present. We are that future, Aubert knows, mired in our own débâcles.

Débâcles
By Marion Aubert
Translated by Erik Butler, Kimberly Jannarone
Directed by Elizabeth Dinkova

Dramaturg, percussionist: Gavin Whitehead; Set & Costume Designer: Annie Dauber; Assistant Set & Costume Designer: Matthew Malone; Lighting Designer: Krista Smith; Sound Designer: Frederick Kennedy; Technical Director: Lydia Pustell; Associate Technical Director: Rae Powell; Stage Manager: Alexandra Cadena; Producer: Flo Low

Cast: Matthew Conway; Michael Costagliola; Anna Crivelli; Caitlin Crumbleholme; Josh Goulding; Jeremy O. Harris; Amandla Jahava; Rory Pelsue; Jakeem Powell; Catherine Rodriguez; Emily Reeder; Arturo Soria

Yale Cabaret
February 16-18, 2017

A Tale of Two Uprisings

Review of Bulgaria! Revolt!, Yale School of Drama

In Bulgaria! Revolt!, the wildly imaginative thesis show by third-year Yale School of Drama director Elizabeth Dinkova and her co-creator, third-year playwright Miranda Rose Hall, parody might seem the dominant mode. Parody of the traditional musical, certainly, but also of the more avant-garde versions that have come along at various times, including the Brechtian, and, in that vein, parody of the committed political drama. There’s a tongue-in-cheek quality that keeps us amused by a tale that traverses some unsavory aspects of 20th century history. In creating a musical that clearly favors the underdog—here the committed leftist poet Geo Milev, a casualty of a fascist regime, and his wife the actress Mila—Dinkova and Hall see clearly how difficult it would be to play the story with a straight face. Ours is a time best suited to burlesque.

And yet, it would be wrong to see the show as entirely parodic. Rather, Dinkova and Hall, with their composer and sound designer, Michael Costagliola, have concocted a musical that sustains its dramatic intentions while keeping its ironies in play. And that makes for a rather mercurial evening of theater, full of surprising turns and tones. The show incorporates the political history of Bulgaria, a deal with the devil, and the shameful working conditions in the Chicago meat-packing district in the 1920s. Ambitious? Yes, but that’s just another word for having a lot on its mind.

Ostensibly set in the 1920s, the story begins with its rather mild-mannered hero, the poet Geo (Leland Fowler), who is beside himself at the fact that his poem, September, about a recent brutally-suppressed peasant uprising, may cost him his life. His wife Mila (Juliana Canfield) sticks up for his poem’s value, but Geo wishes he could undo it. And, presto!, there to take advantage of his moment of weakness is the devil herself (Elizabeth Stahlmann), who casts them in her own version of a morality tale: As the poet Yanko, Geo will have the chance to undermine his own poem, meanwhile, as Miroslava, Mila will play the very soul of insurrection among the people.

The target of their revolt is now The Butcher (Dylan Frederick), a gleefully dissolute character who has his eye on Miroslava while imposing his whims on a gaggle of workers who seem as if they’ve stepped out of a Marx Brothers version of an Eisenstein classic: the Drunk (Ben Anderson), the Farmer (Sebastian Arboleda), an Old Witch (Marié Botha), the Historian (Anna Crivelli), an Old Priest (Jonathan Higginbotham), a Milkmaid (Courtney Jamison), the Tobacco Lady (Stephanie Machado), and a School Boy (Patrick Madden). Each is amusing in his or her own right while being forged into a collective by Miroslava’s spirited rebellion.

Canfield shines in her song of insurrection, like a rabble-rousing force of nature, and she’s matched by Crivelli’s dance of the many suppressions as the Historian reels off a chronology mind-boggling in its catalog of the many times hope for democratic freedoms has been beaten down in Bulgaria. And those are just some of the strengths of Act 1, which includes Frederick’s big number “The Butcher,” the comic highpoint. He’s attended by Stahlmann, who shape-shifts between brash devil and Toma, a fawning elder.

Yanko, shaken by the forces of violence aimed at The Butcher, takes the devil’s bait and decides to decamp for the U.S. Seemingly a victory for the devil, Act 1 ends with Mila insisting on another round, this time in Chicago, where everyone will be recast in a tale of her recounting.

The notion of America as the land of the free is swiftly given the lie when we’re introduced to a host of immigrants from various lands—Poland, Ireland, South Africa, Italy, Mexico, to name a few—who toil under distressing conditions in the meat factory of Frank’s Famous Franks. Frank (Frederick) is, of course, “The Butcher” under new auspices, aided by his assistant Patty (Stahlmann, as the moral equivalent of a concentration camp commandant). A harrowing situation in Act 2 almost strips aside all the comic burlesque in favor of the most abject horror, and it’s a great tribute to Dinkova’s resources as a director that the show can shift toward the bathetic and recover its humor. In fact, the situation Dinkova and Hall create is a sharp commentary on the dehumanization of capitalist production at its most callous. And the cast—particularly Madden and Arboleda—are emotionally convincing in their grisly discovery.

Act 2 also boasts the most lyrical moment as Geo/Yanko and Mila/Sally sing a touching duet to their love, despite all. Indeed, Act 2 serves to vindicate Mila enough to rally the show into something like an upbeat register.

The scenic design by Emona Stoykova places the show on a platform surrounded by seats, making the action accessible in many directions, with, at one end, a hard-working pickup band being put through its paces and, at the other, an incredibly imposing portal. Lights and costumes and wonderfully involved projections—at times surveillance-style taping of the proceedings—add many lively effects, including childlike paintings that capture the folkloric quality of this varied tale.

Standouts in the show are Fowler’s pleasant singing voice, Canfield’s inspired ardor, Frederick’s zany villain, Crivelli’s rhapsody of history, and Stahlmann’s striking shifts among three characters, but it’s also a great ensemble show, and I’d be remiss not to mention Higginbotham’s brief-exposing pratfalls as the Old Priest and Machado’s Tobacco Lady saddled with a bevy of babies in slings. It’s the sort of show that has so much going on you’re bound to miss some of it in a single viewing.

It's unusual for a thesis show at YSD to be an original work, though it sometimes happens. Michael McQuilken’s Jib, an original musical from 2011 I remember fondly, is currently onstage in Philadelphia. May Bulgaria! Revolt! also find legs for future productions.

Bulgaria! Revolt!
Created by Elizabeth Dinkova and Miranda Rose Hall
Books and lyrics by Miranda Rose Hall
Music by Michael Costagliola
Directed by Elizabeth Dinkova

Choreographer: Christian Probst; Music Director: Scott Etan Feiner; Scenic Designer: Emona Stoykova; Costume Designer: Sarah Nietfeld; Lighting Designer: Krista Smith; Sound Designer: Michael Costagliola; Projection Designer: Wladimiro A. Woyno R.; Production Dramaturg: Maria Inês Marques; Technical Director: Kelly Pursley; Stage Manager: Shelby North

Cast: Ben Anderson, Sebastian Arboleda, Marié Botha, Juliana Canfield, Anna Crivelli, Leland Fowler, Dylan Frederick, Jonathan Higginbotham, Courtney Jamison, Stephanie Machado, Patrick Madden, Elizabeth Stahlmann

The Band: Alexander Casimiro, percussion; Allen Chang, clarinet; Ginna Doyle, violin; Scott Etan Feiner, piano; Jiji Kim, guitar; Adam Matlock, accordian; Ian Scot, bass

“Three Chains a Slave” performed by the Yale Slavic Chorus

Yale School of Drama
December 9-15, 2016

Represent!

Review of Caught, Yale Cabaret

Playwright Christopher Chen’s Caught plays like a behind-the-scenes look at conceptual art, while at the same time positioning itself as an effort to “catch” the current political climate concerning race and art. In formulating that sentence I found myself cutting-off certain possible phrases, in the spirit of Wang Min, the artist played by Ashley Chang, who at one point launches into the rhetoric of calculated intellectual subterfuge: it’s not about “role” or “staging,” it’s not about “story,” and, yes, all stories are lies, or, if you like, possible versions of the truth. Why do we need a conceptual language of pre-digested terms? This isn’t Fox News.

What Caught does best is create what is often called “mise en abyme,” that tricky territory where an image mirrors itself, or a literary work reflects on its own composition, or, as here, scenes which seem to be “happening”—in some fictive version of our world—are actually happening in an actual version of the play we’re watching. Or, more properly, the play and the actors playing its characters are often playing with the level of reality we should engage with. The deliberate disorientation begins with turning—wonderfully successfully—the Cab space into an art gallery, complete with images that capture the alliance of art and commodity, commenting on art’s commercial, “productlike” existence, while also gesturing to one of the big topics of our time: China’s effect on the global economy and on the U.S. dominance of the latter. As such, the show is remarkably timely the very month that the yuan has joined the International Monetary Fund as a reserve currency.

Lin Bo (Eston Fung) (photo: Elizabeth Green)

What’s that have to do with art and theater? Deep in the “process” of this play, we might say, is concern about the artist’s relation to capitalist and media “appropriation,” as well as to the semiotic system that treats racial distinctions as the basis for identity tagging. Lin Bo, the artist/brand enacted by Eston Fung, begins what is billed as a “gallery talk” by talking about his incarceration at the hands of the Chinese authorities. He speaks to us—Americans—as an example of a dissident artist finding, in the land of social and artistic freedom, a kind of new age vindication. He’s instantly a hero, his art a provocation that lets us feel good about ourselves.

No sooner do we accept the horrors of his imprisonment and his gratifying release into an art world eager to receive his conceptual performance pieces that involve the internet in virtual protest gatherings that never take place, then an editor (Steven Lee Johnson) and a writer (Anna Crivelli) at The New Yorker, once disposed to coddle Lin Bo, begin to question his facts, à la, on This American Life, Mike Daisey’s apology for distorted facts in his theater monologue about working conditions at Apple. Armed with the kind of fact check so prevalent in our digital age—for evidence of verbal imagery or details lifted from other sources—the interrogation becomes even more brutal than the questioning Lin Bo told us he received in China. In other words, be a dissident artist all you want and question political reality, racial identity, and conceptual cliché, but don’t fuck with the facts. The scene between Fung, Johnson, and Crivelli is very well-played and structured, and, with the gallery talk, creates an amusing and wry commentary on “the discourse” surrounding the liberal championing of art.

Editor (Steven Lee Johnson), Author (Anna Crivelli), Artist (Eston Fung) (photo: Elizabeth Green)

But Chen’s play—directed with skilled pacing by Lynda Paul—doesn’t stop there. We next enter into a televised talk between an art critic played by Elizabeth Harnett and Wang Min (Ashley Chang). In their increasingly tense discussion, Wang Min, ostensibly the author of the play we just saw, attempts to disabuse her interlocutor of every dearly held expectation about what her art is trying to say and how it should be received. Lots of terms get tossed around in this very funny scene, but one thing Wang Min (and, behind her, Christopher Chen) never gets into is the reason for the focus on facts in the interrogation of Daisey and Lin Bo and other such artist provocateurs: our legal system is based on case histories, and every case has to maintain a strictly conceived regard for the facts, even if we don’t really believe it’s possible to ever “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” “Artistic license” is just a figure of speech; there is no authority capable of issuing or revoking such a license. Here and there, Min’s naivete becomes its own mise en abyme, a mirroring of the role media—and all art is a medium, theater as well—plays in trying to construct plausible versions of things that happened or might happen or could have happened. Mostly to see what it can get away with, in my view.

Interviewer (Elizabeth Harnett), Wang Min (Ashley Chang) (photo: Elizabeth Green)

Eventually we get what might be called a reflection on “process” itself as the practitioners of conceptual art—or theater—might experience it, particularly when the creative partners played here by Fung and Chang were simultaneously—unbeknownst to both—lovers to the same master/mentor. The wryness of this segment opens up the slippery nature of not only emotional relationships, but also the vacillating commitment to one method or another that every artistic career undergoes. The point, for such, is to “capture” what’s happening when it’s happening.

Art partners (Eston Fung, Ashley Chang) (photo: Elizabeth Green)

Chen’s play catches its audience up in what is often called “the problematic” of art itself in its double jeopardy of being “tried” simultaneously in the not dissimilar but not identical courts of fact and fiction, or art and actuality. As a stimulating and entertaining treatment of the conflation, Caught, in this sharp enactment at the Yale Cabaret, catches its moment off-guard.

Caught
By Christopher Chen
Directed by Lynda Paul

Assistant Director: Francesca Fernandez McKenzie; Set Designer: Joo Kim; Costume Designer: Haydee Zelideth Antunano and Sophia Choi; Lighting Designer: Caroline Ortiz; Sound Designer: Fan Zhang; Projections Designer: Adam O’Brien; Stage Manager: Paula R. Clarkson; Technical Directors: Harry Beauregard and Michael Hsu; Producer: Kathy Li

Cast: Ashley Chang, Anna Crivelli, Eston Fung, Elizabeth Harnett, Steven Lee Johnson

Yale Cabaret
October 6-8, 2016

Cab 47 Recap

Season 47 of the Yale Cabaret has ended its run as of April 25th, which must mean it's time for a re-cap of the season. A re-cap wherein I try to recall and celebrate my favorite contributions to the magical basement that is the Yale Cabaret. Ready? Here are a baker's dozen of categories with my five exemplars in each (in chronological order, but for my fave pick), for a total of 65 citations: New Play: This year’s top five never-before-seen, new plays were: Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time, in which Alice in Wonderland—or rather Liddy in Wonderland—meets “Little Miss” beauty pageants, written with verve for a cast of crazies by Emily Zemba; The Zero Scenario, in which every Cleveland in these United States is threatened by the Ticks of Death but for a special plucky band of heroes, written by Ryan Campbell; The Untitled Project, in which a collective of black male YSD’ers create self-portraits in the context of racial profiling, conceived and directed by Ato Blankson-Wood and created by the ensemble; Sister Sandman Please, in which three sisters put it out there for a cowboy, with varying degrees of passion, irony and intention, written by Jessica Rizzo; and ... 50:13, in which an incarcerated black man about to be freed tries to tell it like it is, with candor, wit and a variety of character sketches, to a young prison-mate, written by Jiréh Breon Holder.

Adapted Play: Impressive pre-existing plays adapted for Cab 47 included four translations and an English-language opera: Don’t Be Too Surprised, written by Geun-Hyung Park, translated and directed by Kee-Yoon Nahm, lets us know in no uncertain terms that familial dysfunction can still take surprising forms on stage; MuZeum, translated and directed by Ankur Sharma, tells stories from ancient sources and contemporary headlines, to dramatize powerfully the victimization of women; Quartet by Heinrich Müller, translated by Doug Langworthy, directed by David Bruin, revisits Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons as a wickedly entertaining pas de deux and psychologically fraught cat-and-mouse; The Medium, an opera by Gian Carlo Menotti, directed by Ahn Lê, creates a world of mystery, loss, and deep feeling and gives further credence to the notion that opera is not just for opera houses; and ... Leonce and Lena by Georg Büchner, translated by Gavin Whitehead, directed by Gavin Whitehead and Elizabeth Dinkova, presents a play of aristocratic ennui that torches the well-made play, and this time with puppets!

Set Design: After all, the Cab is a basement with a kitchen, and convincing us we’re in a new space each week takes some doing. Here are some set designs that went beyond all expectation in their achieved artistry: Kurtis Boetcher’s set for Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time made a door where there’s a window and had the coloring and style of a child’s playhouse; Joey Moro’s versatile set for Hotel Nepenthe breathed a seedy charm, like we imagine Hotel Duncan does, or should; Chika Shimuzi and Izmir Ickbal’s stunning set for MuZeum lent aura aplenty and eye-catching beauty to its revue-style presentation; Christopher Thompson’s set for The Zero Scenario seemed to defy space itself in cramming so much busy-ness into the Cab, including a motelroom and a hidden headquarters, and ... Adrian Martinez Frausto’s moody set for The Medium was so fully achieved in its seedy gentility it might be a film set inviting a camera’s scrutiny.

Costumes: Dressing actors for their parts often goes beyond the norm, creating inspired additions to the visual flair of a show. Some of the tops in costumes were: Grier Coleman’s range of captivating dress for ancient characters of India and contemporary folks in MuZeum; Fabian Aguilar and Alexae Visel’s super cool get-ups for the agents protecting us from Tick Apocalypse in The Zero Scenario; Alexae Visel’s authentic mock-ups of the cartoonish costumes of the old Batman series “fit just like my glove” in Episode 21: Catfight; Haydee Zelideth had a field day with modernist Enlightenment-era costuming in Leonce and Lena; and ... Soule Golden and Montana Blanco rendered camp versions of the White Rabbit, Hatter, White Queen, and Tweedledum/dee we won’t soon forget in Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time.

Lighting: It doesn’t just help us see, it also selects and shows and evokes, sometimes making for quite magical effects. Illuminating dancers with lights that added to both movement and music in Solo Bach: Caitlin Smith Rapoport; creating a wealth of visual effects that kept us entranced in MuZeum: Joey Moro; putting on a show and putting-on the trappings of a storybook world in Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time: Joey Moro; using light to complement stories and to add drama in 50:13: Elizabeth Mak; and ... creating an Old World atmosphere both spooky and authentic in The Medium: Andrew Griffin.

Sound: It can be used in striking or surprising ways, or to create an aural texture to accompany the action. Creating a wintery world with bursts of music and broadcasts in Rose and the Rime: Jon Roberts, Joel Abbott; maintaining a sustained eerieness and B-movie aura in Hotel Nepenthe: Sinan Zafar; incorporating music and a range of emotional tones in MuZeum: Tyler Kieffer; bringing together recorded voice, spoken voice, and background music into a collage in The Untitled Project: Tyler Kieffer; and ... merging voices, sound effects, loops and his own music to create a shifting aural space in Sister Sandman Please: Chris Ross-Ewart.

Music and Movement: We don’t always get both, but it can make for entrancing theater when we do: MuZeum featured essential music by Anita Shastri, played on stage by a crew of musicians/actors and interacted with by the actors; The Untitled Project used recorded music tellingly and featured a show-stopping dance sequence by Ato Blankson-Wood; The Medium presented a stirring reduction of Menotti’s score into a solo piano tour de force by Jill Brunelle, expressive miming from José Ramón Sabín Lestayo, and impressive vocals from the cast; Sister Sandman Please benefited from Chris Ross-Ewart’s compositions amidst the aural textures, and delighted with a raucous “O Holy Night” from Ashley Chang; and ... Solo Bach showcased Zou Yu’s amazing solo violin performances, combined with the inventive, cryptic and dramatic choreography by Shayna Keller and her actor/dancers: Paul Cooper, Chalia La Tour, Julian Elijah Martinez, Leora Morris.

Special Effects: An ad hoc category that includes whatever doesn’t fit into other categories, such as: the combination of lights and star chart backdrop to create a sense of wonder in Touch: Joey Moro; the evocative projections-as-scenery in Solo Bach: Rasean Davonte Johnson; the B-movie monster ticks and blood and projections and other effects in The Zero Scenario: Rasean Davonte Johnson, Mike Paddock; the varied creepy puppets, hand-held and string-operated, in Leonce and Lena: Emily Baldasarra; and ... the use of projections and clips to tell stories and create context with images in The Untitled Project: Rasean Davonte Johnson.

Acting (ensemble): Ideally, the acting in a play is a group affair, in which everyone plays a part, of course. Still, it’s worth remarking on when a cast is more than the sum of its parts, as in these shows: Look Up, Speak Nicely and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time, the big kick-off extravaganza of the season featured a gallery of colorful characters by Sarah Williams, Celeste Arias, Aubie Merrylees, Shaunette Renée Wilson, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Melanie Field, Andrej Visky, Libby Peterson; The Zero Scenario, the crowd-pleasing first semester closer, pulled out all the stops with Ariana Venturi, Tom Pecinka, Sara Holdren, Ankur Sharma, Aaron Profumo, Emily Zemba, Ryan Campbell; The Untitled Project, an ensemble-derived show that focused on the subtle distinctions and broad stereotypes of race, was created and enacted by Taylor Barfield, Ato Blankson-Wood, Cornelius Davidson, Leland Fowler, Jiréh Breon Holder, Phillip Howze, Galen Kane; Leonce and Lena, in which actors and puppet-handler/actors interacted to create a zany theatrical world of kingdoms and encounters, with Sebastian Arboleda, Juliana Canfield, David Clauson, Anna Crivelli, Ricardo Dávila, Edmund Donovan, Josh Goulding, Steven C. Koernig, Lynda A.H. Paul, Nahuel Telleria; and ... Hotel Nepenthe, a comic tour de force of changing roles, repeating characters, and linked situations that ran from the creepy to the farcical, all created with manic intensity by Bradley James Tejeda, Annelise Lawson, Emily Reeder, Galen Kane.

Acting (individual): For individual performances, I’m going with some standouts, whether in accomplished ensemble work, or showcased in two-handers, or in the unrelenting spotlight of the solo show. Ladies first: Celeste Arias, hilarious as an unhinged mommie dearest in Look Up, Speak Nicely and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time; Sydney Lemmon, riveting as Mme Merteuil but even more so as Mme Merteuil/Valmont in Quartet; Maura Hooper, chameleonic as a series of characters, including a disaffected nun and a happy hooker, in Shiny Objects; Zenzi Williams, demonstrating a range of attitudes in four characters, from spiritual to demur to quietly confident in Shiny Objects, and ... Tiffany Mack, unforgettable as a heart-wrenching victim of an acid attack in MuZeum.

Acting (individual): And from the men: Jonathan Majors, finding himself in an unbearable situation and quietly going to pieces in Touch; Tom Pecinka as a highly verbal passenger monologuing his anxiety in The Zero Scenario; Edmund Donovan, riveting as Valmont but even more so as Valmont/Mme de Tourvel in Quartet; Ricardo Dávila as the slippery, caustic and fascinating Valerio in Leonce and Lena; and ... Leland Fowler as a stand-up guy feeling the longings of the jailed and acting out a quick lesson in family history and racism in 50:13.

Directing: For the vision behind the whole shebang that makes it all hang together, we celebrate directors: for the all-out campy and creepy charm of Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time: Ato Blankson-Wood; for keeping the hopscotch logic and many shifts in tone of Hotel Nepenthe on point: Rachel Carpman; for creating the interplay of stories, including humor, confrontation, and violence in MuZeum: Ankur Sharma; for showing a dramatic and thoughtful grasp of the resilience of a human spirit trapped in a cage in 50:13: Jonathan Majors; and ... for providing the comic highpoint of the season with wild charm, horror surprises and relentless verve in The Zero Scenario: Sara Holdren.

Production: From the above, it’s obvious which shows seemed tops to me, but to bring them all together for a final nod: Hotel Nepenthe, Sarah Williams, producer, Taylor Barfield, dramaturg, Avery Trunko, stage manager, the kind of shifting and surprising show that keeps me coming back to theater; MuZeum, Anita Shastri, producer, Maria Ines Marques, dramaturg, Emily DeNardo, stage manager, a strong and cathartic import to our shores; The Zero Scenario, Ahn Lê, producer, Helen Jaksch and Nahuel Telleria, dramaturgs, Anita Shastri, stage manager, a crazy sci-fi ride that screams “sequel!”; 50:13, Jason Najjoum, producer, Taylor Barfield, dramaturg, Lauren E. Banks, stage manager, an important and meaningful addition to the one-person play and the "black lives matter" movement; and ... Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time, Kelly Kerwin, producer, Nahuel Telleria, dramaturg, Avery Trunko stage manager, “the gang’s all here” type of theater, presenting a lively riff on the rigors of growing up female in our media-ized Wonderland.

Thanks again to our hosts for 18 weekends—plus a Drag Show: Molly Hennighausen, Will Rucker, Tyler Kieffer, and Hugh Farrell. And ... see you next season, at the Cab!

The Yale Cabaret Season 47 September 18, 2014-April 25, 2015

Hear the Angels' Voices

Review of Sister Sandman Please at Yale Cabaret

With Jessica Rizzo’s Sister Sandman Please, the Yale Cabaret showcases the kind of experimental work that, in many ways, the basement theater does best. While it’s always worthwhile to see small-scale productions of new or lesser known plays, or devised pieces that bring together various aspects of community to tell stories of our times, a play like Sister Sandman uses the space to present a wholly theatrical and relational work. We’re watching a form of playing that plays with how plays—and audiences—are played.

Baize Buzan, Ashley Chang, Sydney Lemmon

The most definite aspect of Sister Sandman Please is how Rizzo and her crew remind us that “setting” and “stage” in a play is not simply the visual, physical space, but is also the aural. And while last week’s show, The Medium, an opera, demonstrated how well music and singing can enhance and expand acting, this week’s show makes a further point: what we hear not only interacts with what we see, but can, through recordings, create alternative features, other presences.

Wiley McDrew (Ben Graham) and A (Ashley Chang)

The “story” centers on three sisters—A (Ashley Chang), B, or Minnie (Sydney Lemmon), C, or Ada (Baize Buzan)—who sit at a breakfast table, passing around different sections of the New York Times. The soundtrack, initially, is a loop of crunching sounds occasionally broken up by comments and mutterings. There is a tension here as of persons who know one another only too well and can “hear” the unspoken things in each others’ minds. At times there are verbal outbursts between the three, and eventually a veritable Marlboro man of a cowboy, Wiley McDrew (Ben Graham), arrives to spark rivalries. “A” immediately flies to his arms and makes out with him passionately, but that, we assume, is just a fantasy. He’s really more interested in C, who he courts in a more laconic fashion, while her sisters wrestle on the floor and Minnie makes goo-goo eyes at him.

Wiley McDrew (Ben Graham) and Ada (Baize Buzan)

The action is accompanied by aural overlays that create textures and moods that are difficult to describe. Sometimes it’s a monologue, as when a voice (Anna Crivelli) starts talking about her tumbleweed business on the internet. Tumbleweeds are used to create a Christmas tree of sorts and “A” dons Christmas lights, answered by a string of lights on Wiley. And yet the match doesn't come off, so she convulses on the floor, and Ada, who walks about stirring a big pot, eventually becomes the sister who is “expecting.” “A” proceeds to drown her sorrows at some length, drinking from a bottle of whiskey while prone on the floor.

Ashley Chang as A

Indeed, Chang nearly runs away with the play as her show-stopping, unhinged belting of “O Holy Night,” while perched on the table top, is funny, visceral, and oddly charming, a Christmas carol as torch song. The others hold their own—Lemmon seems to be the oldest sister, the kind of heroine one might find in a frontier story or in some naturalistic drama set in the Midwest: her prop is a clipboard and a managerial air. Buzan plays up the country lass manner, all-too-ready to be the new mom left behind by that rolling tumbleweed of a man. She wants to know what color crayon she should give their son to color with. Clad in a vampire cape and fangs, Wiley McDrew is given his send-off as though by a trio of moms sending him off to school.

Christopher Ross-Ewart

Accompanying the live action and the recordings is Christopher Ross-Ewart on electric guitar and vocals. His contribution is subtle at first, but by play’s end the swirling sustain of his guitar begins to override the action. The trio sits again at the table, now with suitcases full of newspapers, and the tone is elegiac but also uplifting. What has happened, what have they learned? We might think of three fates or furies or of sisters who always dreamed of Moscow, but, however we regard the return with a difference, the close feels open-ended. At the most basic level, their lives have been changed irrevocably, because a child is on the way, but they are also the same as they were before, living out the repetitive figments of their own existences.

Sydney Lemmon as C

The setting—a country-kitchen table, a floor of linoleum—is spare, the tumbleweed Christmas tree is comical but also an art sculpture, the costumes are “country gal.” Elizabeth Green’s lighting directs our visual attention while loops of sound effects, voices, and other textures create a more impressionistic aura. Sister Sandman Please may sound rather enigmatic when described, but while watching it, one is struck again and again by surprising and intriguing shifts in tone and implication.

Coherence is mannerism; the inchoate occurs.

Baize Buzan as Ada

Sister Sandman Please
Written and directed by Jessica Rizzo

Dramaturg: Ilinca Todorut; Lighting Design: Elizabeth Green; Set Design: Samantha Lazar; Costume Design: Sylvia Zhang; Composiiton/Sound Design: Chris Ross-Ewart; Stage Manager: Sally Shen; Production Manager: Kat Wepler; Producer: Sally Shen; Photos: Joey Moro

Yale Cabaret, April 2-4, 2015

Puppets of Popo and Pipi

Review of Leonce and Lena at Yale Cabaret

Georg Büchner was a genius and also something of an enfant terrible. He died in 1813 at the age of 23, having written a few plays and a novella, works that more or less tore up the terrain. Like Rimbaud in French poetry, Büchner is a figure that, once he became recognized, can lay claim to having originated so much. Steeped in Shakespeare in the age of Goethe, a revolutionary, a Romantic as only the highly ironic German Romantics can be, Büchner, in Leonce and Lena, the latest show at the Yale Cabaret, lampoons aristocracy, court life, melancholy princes, the relation of master to man, and the course of true love. It’s a wild ride made wilder by Emily Baldasarra’s creepy puppets and Haydee Zelideth’s colorful costumes and greasepaint. Written in 1836, Leonce and Lena gives a comeuppance to every notion of comic drama that precedes it and to most that succeed it.

Directed by Elizabeth Dinkova and Gavin Whitehead, who also translated Büchner’s heady text, full of verbal sallies and philosophical silliness, Leonce and Lena is the kind of play that cries out for staging in the Cabaret. This is a show that wants us to see the strings, so to speak, not simply because theater is illusion and all that, but because characters and actors are “puppets” even when they’re flesh and blood. Büchner is the sort of writer who keeps up his sleeve the fact that nothing’s up his sleeve. The play’s pay-off is the happily ever-after of unmasked automatons. When it comes to “holding as ‘twere the mirror up to nature,” Büchner early on sussed that “there’s no there there” and we’re all clad in borrowed robes.

It’s a big cast, with some notable Cab debuts: first of all there’s dramaturg Josh Goulding as Leonce when at court in the kingdom of Popo. Goulding’s natural Brit accent lends a welcome diction to Leonce’s ennui. Addressing himself in the third person, Leonce calls upon himself to deliver—and does—a suitably self-involved soliloquy, a high-point of comic inflation. As Leonce’s man Valerio, Ricardo Dávila shines as an exacting servant, a Pierrot full of asides and commentary, trying to keep his master to some kind of recognizable code of conduct. And Anna Crivelli's Lena, princess of Pipi, kicks against the role of love interest with some imaginative flights of her own, attended by Lynda A. H. Paul as her doting governess.

There are also many Cab encores: to Edmund Donovan falls the less abrasive Leonce of the Italian sojourn, which is to say the Leonce who falls in love with Lena once he hears her voice. Some much appreciated comic bits are served up by cast members with a puppet on each hand—Juliana Canfield provides slow-witted servants and Nahuel Telleria, in a wonderfully energetic segment, two flatfoots trying to decide how to proceed. The stringed puppets are ably manned by Steven C. Koernig (Schoolmaster), Telleria (President and General), and David Clauson (Master of Ceremonies). Last but not least is the dull-minded babble and erratic mutterings of King Peter, another bright comic turn from Sebastian Arboleda, last seen at the Cab as one of Catwoman’s doltish, dancing henchman in Catfight.

In performance, Leonce and Lena loses some of its sparkle during Leonce’s Italian adventures, which may be attributable to the fact that both Goulding and Arboleda are offstage for too long, since they early on give the play its antic tone. Clambering about on boxes to simulate a trek over rough terrain, and coming to terms with the more lyrical side of life are somewhat diverting, but not nearly as rich for satiric send-up as life at court.

The “mistaken identity” ploy of many a romance is served-up here with Leonce and Lena both in flight from their arranged marriage, only to find themselves inevitably drawn to one another, if only because that’s what the plot, or the gods (and that’s the same thing in theater), demand. Büchner’s final flourish is having two automatons wed in the couple’s stead, if only so that Peter’s edict not go unfulfilled. All are pleased when the box-headed creatures turn out to be the lovers who have found themselves amenable to what they had resisted. All’s well that ends well, and our puppets please us best by seeming happy with what we make them do.

Amidst the shenanigans is Büchner worrying the inevitable clash of free will with law in an absolutist state while seeking what might be called full artistic license. Whitehead’s text exults in the verbal flights and his and Dinkova’s puppet show plays up the theme of the arbitrary necessity of dramatic plots. One wonders if, had he lived, Büchner would have stuck with theater. He never managed to finish his best-known work, Woyzeck, which may be a way of saying that sending up, as with Leonce and Lena, “the well-made play” doesn’t help one construct a play according to a different aesthetic. There’s no happy ending for those born before their time.

Leonce and Lena
Written by Georg Büchner
Translated by Gavin Whitehead
Directed by Elizabeth Dinkova and Gavin Whitehead

Scenic Design: William Hartley, Elizabeth Dinkova; Costume Design: Haydee Zelideth; Sound Design: Tom Larkey; Lighting Design: Elizabeth Mak; Puppet Design: Emily Baldasarra; Technical Director: William Hartley; Dramaturg: David Clauson; Production Manager: Lee O’Reilly; Associate Production Manager: Rae Powell; Stage Manager: Avery Trunko; Producer: Adam Frank; Photos: Joey Moro

Yale Cabaret, March 5-8, 2014