Multiplied by Itself

Review of The Square Root of Three Sisters, at International Festival of Arts & Ideas

The International Festival of Arts & Ideas in New Haven ended on Saturday, and I closed out the events with a viewing of The Square Root of Three Sisters, conceived, written, and directed by Dmitry Krymov and created and performed by Dmitry Krymov Lab and the Yale School of Drama. It was not only the end of the show’s run, and of the festival, but a last hurrah—and first post-graduation assignment—for a number of fine actors who graduated this May from the Yale School of Drama.

To begin with: Square Root is not a play in any conventional sense. It’s theater, conceived as an event that takes place with, as Krymov says, “the seams showing.” Before the show even begins, the cast is on hand, organizing cardboard rectangles to create the playing space, all while the Iseman theater’s workroom, with arrays of tools and implements, is on display.

The performers play actors as well as characters in the piece, which uses props and costumes sparingly. The purpose of the approach, it seems to me, is to let us—and that “us” includes actors, director, crew, the Lab, and viewers—look at Chekov’s landmark classic Three Sisters from a variety of perspectives, never forgetting that the process of theater alters and adapts whatever the playwright creates.

So it’s key to the vision of this work that a playwright be present. Krymov imports Kolya Trigorin, the sensitive and avant-garde playwright from Chekov’s The Seagull, to open the show. Aubie Merrylees, who has brilliant comic timing, is well-chosen to play the nervy, breathless Trigorin, eager to get everything just right—including paper rolls to be adorned by the cast with strips of black tape to create white birches. As he literally sets the scene—with cardboard boxes suggesting different places referred to in Three Sisters—and bosses his fellow cast-members, a minor error gets corrected by a painfully loud, distorted and autocratic voice. In that moment, Krymov references the power play of theater. The director calls the shots. The actors—and Chekov himself, to the extent that Trigorin is a figure for him—must submit.

With that said, there’s a further aspect that comes to light as Trigorin, and later, the actors themselves, narrate the backstory of Chekov’s characters. Three Sisters and its world come to seem a real world where fiction has created not characters, but actual people. To deviate from which sister—Olga, the spinster/teacher; Masha, the unhappily married wife; Irina, the youngest who might yet marry—is which, or who the suitors are, would be to alter the unalterable. The characters in Three Sisters seem folkloric in so indelibly stamping the imaginations of generations of theater-goers, especially but not only in Russia.

Annelise Lawson, Annie Hägg

What can we still learn about them? What will Krymov’s approach show us? Many things, indeed. It’s a breath-taking show in its variety and imaginative flights, in its use of technical features—such as the beautiful moment when the cast discovers inside boxes lit from within the military overcoats that are their costumes, each with a character-determining tag—and even “YouTube” videos. And so much depends on the routines each actor performs in turn, routines that establish for us not only a particular Chekovian character but also, to some extent, the actor’s relation to that character.

All begin seated around a large wooden work table, and that table becomes a center, a stage upon the stage, where the incredibly ripe passions of the work display themselves. Early on, in a dialogue both charming and freaky, a teapot moves about in space between would-be lovers, the relentlessly intense Vershinin (Niall Powderly) and dour in black Masha (Annelise Lawson), suggesting not only the force of their attraction but the gentility that keeps such passions at bay. Later, in stalwart Olga’s turn, Shaunette Renée Wilson’s insistent iteration “I don’t need to be loved” alternates with a distracted insistence on the mundane: “this is a fork, this is a cup,” and so on, while constantly shifting the props about on the table with increasing violence. The seething resentment at the heart of Olga, controlled by all the force of her personality, couldn’t be more powerfully rendered. Then there’s Irina (Melanie Field). Hiding beneath the table, she’s lured out by her comically timid suitor Tuzenbach (Bradley James Tejeda) and hen-pecked brother Andrey (Kevin Hourigan) with a promise to sing the songs her mother loved. Soon music begins to play and Irina, like a cat to catnip, emerges to belt out “Someone to Watch Over Me,” with Field evoking the sheer joy of a child in performance.

Every character gets a turn—including Julian Elijah Martinez’s dance like a constricted flame to evince the self-love and self-loathing of Solyony “who thinks he looks like” the poet Lermontov, and Annie Hägg’s table-top flouncing as Natasha, the preening and pathetically insecure wife of Andrey. At times the routines feel like improv, at other times like a physical manifestation of all that words will never convey, and even a bit like an audition for the pleasure of that ultimate watcher.

Late in the show, as a brigade of soldiers cart off all the possessions the Prozorov sisters hold dear, the table becomes a life-raft the sisters cling to and the base for the automaton they become. Along the way, the autocratic voice—which by now has begun to feel like a call to emergency evacuation or of military invasion—demands “give me a new Masha.” There follows a comical scene, nonplussing enough for anyone who hasn’t made the cut, in which Hägg, formerly Natasha, now shrugs her way into the role of the most dramatic of the Prozorov sisters while Lawson, stricken, pouts. Vershinin, however, won’t make the switch and still pines for Lawson as Masha. At this point, it’s not simply a question of how a character is conveyed by a performer, but how a performer takes over a character.

Shaunette Renée Wilson

So, when Wilson is replaced—by “that writer”—as Olga, she resists on the basis of her stature and commitment. Both of which, we sense, is her downfall. The very commitment of actor to character must be undermined. This isn’t about personalities, it’s about art aligning with the mailed fist of history. All are expendable, all are replaceable. And anyone can inhabit our treasured myths of tradition, or join the plaintive voices of the Three Sisters figurine on perpetual exhibit upon its pedestal.

A show for those who love their theater freewheeling and speculative, The Square Root of Three Sisters makes us wonder why we feel the need to have people dress up and pretend to be other, non-existent people—in other words, it makes you wonder a lot about theater and performance. In putting onstage the interplay of concepts of character, of actors as characters, and of actors as individuals, Square Root kicks against the text while scripting dissent and suppression, and manifesting an abundance of some intangible thing we lamely call “theater magic.”

International Festival of Arts & Ideas presents
The Square Root of 3 Sisters
World Premiere
Conceived, written, and directed by Dmitry Krymov, based on plays by Anton Chekov
Created and performed by Dmitry Krymov Lab & Yale School of Drama

Creative Team: Choreographer: Emily Coates; Performance Coach: Maria Smolnikova; Production Designer: Valentina Ostankovich; Sound Designer: Pornchanok (Nok) Kanchanabanca; Lighting Designer: Elizabeth Mak; Projection Designer: Yana Birÿukova; Production Stage Manager: Emely Selina Zepeda

Performers: Melanie Field; Annie Hägg; Kevin Hourigan; Annelise Lawson; Julian Elijah Martinez; Aubie Merrylees; Niall Powderly; Bradley James Tejeda; Shaunette Renée Wilson

Video Performers: Lucy Gardner; Mary Winter Szarabajka; Remsen Welsh

Artistic Staff: Assistant Director: Luke Harlan; Associate Production Designer: An-Lin Dauber; Associate Production Designer: Claire DeLiso; Puppet Designer: Matt Acheson; Fight Director and Dance Captain: Julian Elijah Martinez; Videographer: Lisa Keshisheva; Senior Interpreter to Dmitry Krymov and the Production: Tatyana Khaikin

Iseman Theater
June 21-25, 8 p.m.

Beware, Doll, You're Bound to Fall

Review of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Yale Cabaret

Tired of fame, film icon Greta Garbo declared, “I vant to be alone.” Petra von Kant, the heroine of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, is the kind of self-involved diva who can’t bear to be alone. Directed by Leora Morris with Jesse Rasmussen, Fassbinder’s meditation on the vagaries of passionate love is also a character study that plays into considerations of how, for instance, all of a star’s or a director’s relationships are scripted with a central player and a supporting cast.

Played by Sydney Lemmon with a lithe sense of grand dame status, Petra is a successful fashion designer who lords it over her underling Marlene (Anna Crivelli, icily Germanic in a silent role) and holds court in her bedroom. The room, in Christopher Thompson and Claire DeLiso’s lush set, is essentially a large double bed framed by chairs and settees, a table with a typewriter, a turntable with LPs, and the ever-important house-phone on a pedestal. There are diaphanous red drapes that sometimes are drawn or opened by Marlene, who acts as both factotum and voyeur.

Sydney Lemmon as Petra von Kant

What Marlene gazes upon, as do we, is the social and erotic life of Petra. The two sides come together quickly when a visit from her well-set-up cousin Sidonie (Annelise Lawson)—in which the two women share details of happy and unhappy marriages (Petra has had one of each)—results in Petra’s meeting with Sidonie’s young friend Karin (Baize Buzan). For Petra, the meeting seems to be love at first sight, or at least it’s a really hot meet. The next scene, when Karin calls alone upon Petra, who insists she should become a model, is filled with the expectation of seduction. Petra may be changeable and peremptory, but her attachment to Karin while egotistical is also vulnerable. Karin, played with deer-in-the-headlights allure by Buzan, seems ready to become whatever Petra wants her to be.

Then comes the crash, by degrees. Fassbinder’s heart is in this one and Petra’s suffering for her ideal of love is a masochist’s delight. Having made Karin an arbiter of her happiness, she can only be made unhappy by the least sign of her object’s indifference. And Buzan is wonderful at rendering the kind of erotic self-possession that drives Petra wild. And she’s able to do so while also seeming to be much younger than Lemmon, whose probing questions and efforts to manage her lover’s life as she does her own career reminded me of the assured but apprehensive tone often struck by Judy Davis.

Eventually, as Karin’s background comes out—the working-class father who lost his job and killed Karin’s mother in a drunken rage then hanged himself; the estranged husband in Australia—we can see that Petra’s attempts to makeover Karin are going to have more lasting effects on herself than on her protégé. The fact that Karin has not given up men—the more casual, the better—becomes the source of the title’s bitter tears. And of the vicious abuse of the user by the used.

In the birthday scene that follows Karin’s departure to meet her errant husband’s return, we see Petra go to pieces by abusing those still close to her: her young daughter Gabrielle (Leyla Levi), Sidonie, who comes bearing a gift, and Petra’s mother Valerie (Shaunette Renée Wilson). In each case, there’s a sense of the cost of loving someone like Petra, but there’s also a sense—key to the notion of a central player—that all these females depend upon her to some degree. And all are quite able to act out in their subordinate roles: Sidonie with indignation; Gabrielle with earnest need for approval; Valerie with long-suffering attachment.

Masochism, then, is in the nature of love for one’s superiors, however we interpret the latter term, and Fassbinder lets that play out, while Morris and Rasmussen manage to find a tone between melodrama and camp. In the end, Petra’s relatives are used to her, and Karin has not, perhaps, disappeared for good (why abandon a powerful supplicant?), while Petra may learn to give Marlene her due, if not too late.

What we’re left with, I suppose, is a hope that some mutually helpful caring can be reached in a reciprocal fashion, but is that possible when the ups and downs of emotional investment are here as volatile as an unstable stock market?

Mention as well for the excellent use of songs emanating from Petra’s turntable, particularly The Walker Brother’s highly apropos “In My Room,” with its grandiose melancholy. A perfect song for when you vant to be alone with your own bitter tears.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
By Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Translated by Anthony Vivis
Directed by Leora Morris

Associate Director: Jesse Rasmussen; Dramaturg & Producer: Maria Inês Marques; Co-Scenic Designers: Christopher Thompson, Claire DeLiso; Costume Designer: Haydee Zelideth Antunano; Co-Lighting Designers: Andrew F. Griffin Elizabeth Green; Sound Designer & Composition: Frederick Kennedy, Christopher Ross-Ewart; Stage Manager: Avery Trunko; Co-Technical Designers: Mike Best, Mitchell Crammond, Mitch Massaro, Sean Walters

Yale Cabaret, March 31-April 2, 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

A New Place to Dwell

Review of The Hotel Nepenthe at Yale Cabaret The Yale Cabaret is back this week with a show that certainly puts its cast through its paces. John Kuntz’s The Hotel Nepenthe, directed by Rachel Carpman, is designed to be a daunting show for a small cast to pull off in a small space, giving us numerous vignettes with four actors playing a range of parts. The storylines converge in odd details—a car accident, a missing baby, a hatbox, fairy wings, snatches of song—“Afternoon Delight” anyone?—and references. Kuntz doesn’t offer a story so much as entertain us with possibilities of what Dragnet’s Joe Friday used to refer to as the city’s “million stories.” It’s all just random stuff happening, and so are we.

Kuntz’s skill is in concocting interesting tête à tête exchanges where characters use dialogue to find out who they’re with and what’s going on. It might be the oddly goofy seduction of a hotel worker (Bradley James Tejeda) by a rental car receptionist (Annelise Lawson), or the scheming wife of a presidential candidate (Lawson) who hires an agreeable street-walker (Emily Reeder), or an unsuspecting client (Galen Kane) picked up by a dubious cabbie (Tejeda), or a comforting cab dispatcher (Kane) chatting up an eerily detached woman (Reeder) with a baby. Kuntz’s sense of dialogue—which Carpman’s cast gamely embraces—involves odd non sequitur (some of which add up), intriguing musings, and, often, a surprising reveal, such as the whereabouts of the actual cab-driver, the contents of the hat-box the hotel worker left with the receptionist, and the job for which the hooker is hired.

A lively comic set-piece features variations on a demand for bags to be carried to the honeymoon suite in which Kane and Tejeda run a gamut from screwball comedy to hand-to-hand combat to sexual acts to Twilight Zone noir (complete with trademark theme song). Special mention as well to Reeder’s comic scene of riding cowgirl to climax while taking “getting off on name-dropping” to new heights, and her body-work as a reanimated accident victim is also impressive. To Kane falls some of the more humanly centered roles, like his genial Cosby-like cab dispatcher, while Tejeda finds great “gee-whiz” comedy in a confession of being sexually harassed, at seven, by a female classmate, and Lawson’s daffy rendition of TV theme songs sets the tone from the start.

What’s it all about? Apparently, a take-off on the possibility of life being like the stuff that happens in films, plays, and television, where every encounter has “something to do” with the story. Kuntz’s play depicts a world where strangers tend to act like people in improv skits and where a detail let drop in one scene can be the gestation point for a later scene. Thus it’s a fast-paced leap into a Wonderland view of the postmodern world where everything’s up for pastiche, and where everything has to do with some kind of renegade wish fulfillment. And it’s to the credit of the Cab show’s director, cast, and designers—Joey “The Workhorse” Moro (Sets), Caitlin Smith Rapoport (Lights), Christina King and Sydney Gallas (Costumes), Sinan Zafar (Sound)—that some of that creepy late night feel of a seedy hotel seeps into the proceedings. In addition to classic TV like the Twilight Zone, I was reminded of Jim Jarmusch films like Night on Earth and Mystery Train crossed with David Lynch—and if that sounds appealing to you, you don’t want to miss this.

In the end, Kuntz’s script is a bit too self-satisfied with its name-drops and allusions, and its sense of the wacky and the deadly never becomes nightmarish—as with Lynch—and rarely as helplessly human as Jarmusch. Still, there’s mystery and comedy, and plenty of room at the The Hotel Nepenthe. Why not stay awhile and see what happens?

The Hotel Nepenthe By John Kuntz Directed by Rachel Carpman

Dramaturg: Taylor Barfield; Sets: Joey Moro; Costumes: Christina King, Sydney Gallas; Lights: Caitlin Smith Rapoport; Sound: Sinan Zafar; Stage Manager: Avery Trunko; Production Manager: Lee O’Reilly; Producer: Sarah Williams; Run Crew: Flo Low

Yale Cabaret November 6-8, 2014

Lapsed in Proof

Review of Arcadia at Yale Rep Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, now playing at the Yale Repertory Theatre, is a magnificent play, a comedy of manners set in two very different eras—the early 19th century, aka the Romantic era, and the late 20th century, aka the Scientific era—while all the action occurs in the same drawing room on the estate of Lady Croom in Sidley Park, Derbyshire. The play is a mind-bending disquisition on the place of passion in the rational universe, and the place of volition in the face of chaos theory.

In 1809, we meet Septimus Hodge (Tom Pecinka), tutor to precocious budding teen, Thomasina Coverly (Rebekah Brockman), daughter of Lady Croom. Hodge, who has been seen in flagrante delecto with the very available Mrs. Chater (never seen); Hodge repulses a challenge to a duel by her irate husband, the poetaster Ezra Chater (Jonathan Spivey), by flagrantly flattering his execrable poem The Couch of Eros. Chater chooses not to kill what he believes to be a favorable critical opinion. Very droll, the 19th century scenes also feature asides on the changeover from the rational aesthetic of the Enlightenment to the romantic aesthetic of the Gothic, as a landscape architect, Richard Noakes (Julian Gamble) is on hand to transform the Croom estate into a carefully designed “wilderness” with faux ruins and hermitage sans hermit. Wildean paradoxes and witty sallies abound—such as play with the phrase “carnal embrace”—and interesting motifs begin to emerge, such as Thomasina’s interest not only in what human bodies get up to when in congress, but also her anachronistic sense of how math helps us foresee the future—in thermodynamic terms.

Indeed, Stoppard’s play might be said to take the idea “anachronism” and twist it about so that, by play’s end, we experience a telling scene of synchronicity across the centuries in a very satisfying “dance to the music of time.” Time, we might say, while it flows in one direction, does sometimes snag on certain interesting eddies as Arcadia brings to light.

The play fleshes out our sense of the stakes of the 19th century segments by introducing us, in present day, to two writers: Hannah Jarvis (René Augesen) and Bernard Nightingale (Stephen Barker Turner)—she a best-selling writer of romantic nonfiction, he a scholar of the romantic period out to prove a hunch. She has written a book on Caroline Lamb that Bernard eviscerated, and they both converge on Sidley Park for information—she on the mysterious hermit who lived in the hermitage, he to prove that Byron had visited there, cuckolded Chater, and killed him in a duel. Much of the humor of their exchanges has to do with the oneupmanship of scholarship, the high-handedness of academic debate, and, of course, the shakiness of the grounds of Nightingale’s every leap of faith. History, Stoppard demonstrates deliciously, is hardly an exact science.

Running about this central battle of wits—Augesen plays Hannah with the forthright manner of a woman long since done kowtowing to men in the interest of seduction, and Turner’s Bernard is an over-dressed coxcomb of limited scruples and vaunting ambition—are various Coverleys, most notably Valentine Coverly (Max Gordon Moore), a math grad student in the present day. Moore is indispensable in his grasp of how to make Valentine’s nerdy obsessiveness articulate and interesting; he holds down an important expository role with depth and conviction, giving us the ramifications of Thomasina’s scribbles (she prefigures fractals) and their thermodynamic applications. Valentine is also a possible romantic attachment for Hannah while Chloë Coverly (Annelise Lawson)—a “pert thing” as they say—makes a play for Bernard. The latter day Coverleys, in other words, are all about “carnal embrace,” while Val also tries to apply an algorithm to grouse populations on the estate (the hunting diaries are important) and Chloë wonders if sexual attraction is the important deviation that throws off determinism, if, in other words, eros promotes errors. There is also the “red herring”—if you like—of Gus Coverly (Bradley James Tejeda), the mute (since age 5), younger brother of Val and Chloë, who develops a crush on Hannah, and his doppelgänger in the past (also Tejeda): Augustus, a self-possessed young lord dismissive of his tutor.

As Hodge, Pecinka displays the unflappable hauteur of the underling who is, in many ways, the most masterful figure. In Part Two, the 19th century action moves up a few years to 1812 and the relation between Hodge and his prime pupil threatens to become a conflagration that is made literal—et in Arcadia ego. Brockman plays precocious teen with a feel for Thomasina’s vulnerability and sagacity. A certain stiffness, though, makes the characters’ attraction not as warm or charming as it might be.

And that applies to the production in general: it is superbly mounted on an airy set, with the usual technical efficiency of the Rep and lovely costumes—Felicity Jones as Lady Croom is particularly well-gowned, as is Thomasina in Austenian aplomb, and Bernard’s suits are always attention-grabbing, while a fancy-dress party late in the play gives Moore an occasion to don 19th century waistcoat, tights, and boots, all of which seems to suit Valentine perfectly. But there’s something a bit “technical” about the presentation as well, as though the cast has not yet found the rhythms to make Stoppard’s highly literate script sing. A certain fussiness of diction rather than the pleasure of the text intrudes, though Pecinka and Jones both deliver great parting shots on their way, respectively, out the door, Turner makes academic posturing and diatribe a self-satisfied skill, and Augesen is a strong if not entirely sympathetic Hannah, while Spivey effectively turns on a dime as Chater’s bluster turns to blushing.

There is also fun with a tortoise—called Lightning—and other assorted props that remain in view on the large handsome table, regardless of era, and with a host of questions that must be resolved: was Chater killed? Who was the hermit? What do the missives in the copy of The Couch of Eros in Byron’s possession mean? Is Bernard right about anything? And if you can draw a leaf or predict grouse with an iterated algorithm, can you also plot the as-yet-unlived course of our lives? And can we ever know a past we never saw, as time moves in one direction? Doesn’t it?

Stoppard’s busy, astounding, thought-provoking, and entertaining Arcadia, as directed by James Bundy, is a handsome production, well-cast and well-staged and quite correct, though, in effect, more rational than sublime.

Arcadia By Tom Stoppard Directed by James Bundy

Composer: Matthew Suttor; Choreographer: Emily Coates; Scenic Designer: Adrian Martinez Frausto; Costume Designer: Grier Coleman; Lighting Designer: Caitlin Smith Rapoport; Sound Designer: Tyler Kieffer; Dialect Coach: Stephen Gabis; Production Dramaturg: Rachel Carpman; Casting Director: Tara Rubin Casting; Stage Manager: James Mountcastle; Photos: Joan Marcus

Yale Repertory Theatre October 3-25, 2014

This Island Earth

Review of Will Eno’s Middletown The Yale Summer Cabaret paid tribute to its 40-year existence last night and the festivities included a performance of Will Eno’s Middletown, directed by 2014 Co-Artistic Director Luke Harlan. It’s a very fitting match as the play opens with a welcoming monologue that extends to “everyone,” and certainly feels right as an address to “fellow Middletonians,” including the board members, supporters, founders, patrons, fans, and other friends of the Summer Cab who showed up for the evening. Ato Blankson-Wood’s delivery of the opening greeting invited comparisons to a stand-up comic working the crowd as his pacing had to accommodate bursts of laughter and delight from the audience. It would be hard to imagine a more apropos setting for the opening speech, or a better speech for the occasion.

Middletown certainly puts the Summer Cab on its mettle. It’s a large, sprawling play with 11 cast members, including a young teen (Livia Sarnelli), an ingenious set—complete with trapdoors—graced by Nick Hussong’s animated projections of drawings that outline backdrops—a stop sign, a tree, a house, and, at one point, a NASA control panel—and musical interludes that cover the numerous set-changes with the brio I associate with unspecified-TV show breaks. Eno’s play is also the most easily likeable of the Summer Cab’s offerings this year, full of hominess, wit, and a deep regard for the uncertainties of the human condition. Though there are laughs, there really aren’t jokes. The humor is of the “laughing at ourselves” variety. And though there’s death and dysfunction and an occasional threat of violence, the dramatic stakes don’t seem too daunting. Or rather say the stakes don’t seem heightened for dramatic effect. The stakes of the play are as high and deep as life itself.

A play you might easily have in mind while watching Middletown is Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Both plays use the setting of an “Anytown” as the vehicle for meditations about what makes humanity human, and both want us to contemplate the aeons that preceded our modern burgh’s grasp of its niceties and the vastness that surrounds its little plot of ground. The planet itself is just such a “plot” and Eno’s play nicely brings us back again and again to thoughts of this island earth: a monument propped on a village green, a landscaper planting a tree and digging up rocks (with a wink at Hamlet’s gravedigger), a story about a rock a rather dissolute young man found as a child, recalled by the town’s famous son—Greg, an astronaut—as he orbits earth, looking at the rock that is our world.

Eno’s play is very much a verbal construct. Dialogue and speeches lose their point if presented too naturalistically, and so he throws in odd asides and self-reflections, and, for some characters, occasional awareness of the audience, to keep the audience off-guard. Every character that appears before us—a Cop (Matt Raich), a Librarian (Annelise Lawson), a Tour Guide (Shaunette Renée Wilson), Tourists (Julian Elijah Martinez and Jenelle Chu)—may seem obvious and easily grasped, and yet Eno wants us to feel the friction between the role and the person in that role. At one point the landscaper (Martinez) and the Cop, his brother-in-law, trade quips about “person” as a temporary job. The deep “need” (as the male tourist expresses it) is to find things about life on earth that can please, amuse or inspire us, distracting us from the presence of death that is everywhere around us, much as outer space surrounds our globe.

The spaciness of certain elements of the show are grounded by what seems to be the budding romance—or maybe just strong personal attachment—between newly arrived neglected wife and soon-to-be-mother Mary (Maura Hooper) and vaguely employed handyman and hobbyist John (Aaron Bartz). Played with forthright charm, their meetings are cute and coy with a kind of anxious agreeableness, commiserating on “dark nights” and sleeping troubles and, generally, trying to figure out what living together in the same place at the same time actually means. Thus the play’s many gestures at how we all occupy similar places keep us implicated, as well as letting us consider how “sense of place” is communicated by what is simply “understood” by inhabitants.

Central to Eno’s vision is the character of Mechanic (Aubbie Merrylees, tremulous and troubled) who provides, in his disaffected and direct asides and uneasy friction with the status quo, the soul of the play. Suspected of everything from bashing a mailbox to writing a dirty word on a sign, Mechanic is the loose cannon, remembered by the Librarian for an odd essay he wrote as a child, and currently appearing in costumes to entertain kids at the hospital as part of a plea deal for an unnamed offense. The play opens with the Cop giving him a hard time for sitting on a bench and a demand that he feel “awe” while being strangled with a billy club. Mechanic becomes something of a Greek chorus or audience surrogate—crouching outside windows, eavesdropping, giving us time to think of some reasons he started drinking again—and, after a sudden death scene, his dance and chant while dressed in a Native American costume epitomizes the play’s sense of how the inauthentic can become authentic (enough) when we need it.

In general, the cast works hard at the timing and pitch of Eno’s carefully calibrated dialogue, which shines at its highest gloss in the exchange between Ato Blankson-Wood’s doctor and Maura Hooper’s musing, bemused, and very pregnant Mary. The doctor’s well-meant string of palliatives about how to behave toward an infant are filled with Eno’s sense both of human precariousness and our (so far) successful instinct for survival. Likewise the scene amongst audience members just before the intermission (which knowingly trumps the chitchat at Cab tables) points toward another of Eno’s great themes: how language communicates and miscommunicates simultaneously, so that, as Mary says, we’re all “just making different sounds with [our] mouth[s].”

Playful and profound, Eno’s Middletown throws its arms around the world in a loving embrace while also retaining a sense of the prickly absurdities and inconveniences that rankle our togetherness in our placid orbit. Luke Harlan’s ambitious production, mounted under the constraints of the Summer Cab’s relentless schedule, highlights the tight weave of the social fabric and the warmth of breathing bodies. This is theater that's as alive as you are.

Middletown has three more showings: tonight and tomorrow night at 8, and Sunday night at 7.

Middletown By Will Eno Directed by Luke Harlan

Scenic Designer: Christopher Thompson; Costume Designer: Steven M. Rotramel; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Sound Designer: Kate Marvin; Projection Designer: Nick Hussong; Stage Manager: Avery Trunko

Cast: Aaron Bartz, Ato Blankson-Wood, Jenelle Chu, Maura Hooper, Annelise Lawson, Julian Elijah Martinez, Aubie Merrylees, Matt Raich, Stephanie Rolland, Livia Sarnelli, Shaunette Renée Wilson

Photographs by Christopher Ash

Yale Summer Cabaret July 31-August 10, 2014

No Child Left Behind

Review of A Map of Virtue Erin Courtney’s A Map of Virtue, the second offering of the 40th Anniversary Yale Summer Cabaret this year, is certainly a curiosity. Structured by titled segments—virtues like “Honesty,” “Integrity,” “Love”—that form a symmetrical arrangement around a central section, the play, as directed by Co-Artistic Director Luke Harlan, keeps us guessing about its ultimate ends.

Along the way float much imagery and narrated events and lingering details, which might be red herrings or what Alfred Hitchcock liked to call “MacGuffins,” plot-driving elements that never get a full explanation because they are actually incidental to the story. Mention of Hitchcock and MacGuffins is all-too germane to Courtney’s play, which opens with two characters—Sarah (AnneLise Lawson), an artist and free-spirit, and Mark (Ato Blankson-Wood), an intrigued gay man—describing their first encounter, in a diner where a bird attack straight out of Hitchcock’s The Birds takes place. And, as MacGuffins go, one of the prime examples is the bird statue in The Maltese Falcon. Oh, did I mention that A Map of Virtue is narrated by a little bird statue that Mark stole from the office of the headmaster who abused him and other boys? The statue—enacted by Ariana Venturi—gives us the titles of the segments and also reflects on the action from time to time.

Apart from whatever the play may be saying about the values of virtues, the plot itself has more to say about haphazard events, serendipitous meetings, personal obsessions, and, well, curiosity—which some may regard as a virtue and others if not exactly a vice then—a meaningful word for this play I’d say—a nemesis. Indeed, the multiplying instances of bird imagery and the history of the little statue itself could stand for that ancient concept, as a tendency of fate.

In Courtney’s play, the bird statue comes into Mark’s possession during a traumatic time as a child and he keeps it until, a grown man, he gives it to Sarah, in part because she has birds tattooed on her chest, and in part because of the bird attack and in part because he encounters her, by sheer “chance,” on a cliff in Ireland when he’s considering disposing of the little keepsake. The statue's ultimate fate occurs during a desperate weekend in the country where Mark, Sarah, and her husband Nate are held captive by a creepy couple, June and Ray (the latter often donning a bird mask that might put you in mind of the mask of human flesh in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, if you’re into that kind of thing). The period in the one-room prison, complete with dirty mattress and odd headmistress-like commands from June, might give you the creeps—nothing occurs to lighten the tension—but it plays out like a nightmare that will be over at some point (or a rural “urban story”), and becomes a crucible for the tensions in the play.

The upshot of all this are the changes in the relationship between Mark and his boyfriend Victor and between Sarah and Nate, with Sarah possessed by a new obsession that there were children, or a child, present at the site of their captivity, children who needed to be rescued.

Harlan and company play to the strengths of the Cabaret in putting on this oddly dreamlike morality tale. The space’s intimacy makes us accept the character’s (including the statue’s) direct address easily, bringing us into the events they narrate even when they seem rather unrealistic or off-putting. As Sarah, Lawson gives us a woman who seems believable as an artist-type, driven by hunches and intuition (the latter is a named virtue), but who also seems capable of going off the deep end at some point. Blankson-Wood’s Mark, despite his penchant for encountering creepy headmaster/mistress types, seems much warmer and engaging, though he did slash Sarah’s painting of “his” statue, one of the many acts or statements in this play that seem fit for an airing on a psychiatric couch.

As the creepy couple, Celeste Arias plays June like a somewhat psychotic schoolteacher and Aaron Bartz makes Ray oddly soulful in his interludes of song (his banjo retaining its Deliverance-inspired status as creepy rural instrument par excellence), and his “I’ve Still Got the Goods” might well be a tagline for hen-pecked husbands everywhere. As husband Nate, Aubie Merrylees seems pretty much steadily bemused by life with Sarah and will be remembered for his joyous outburst, “thank God for GPS!” Victor, Mark’s boyfriend, is played as the godsend he is by Julian Elijah Martinez. Finally, as “bird statue,” Ariana Venturi’s flowing garment, regal profile, and air of warm regard for human frailty combine to make her the centerpiece of the play, a MacGuffin who, in my reading of the play, is the figure for Courtney’s sense of agency.

Kate Marvin’s Sound Design is great at making us jump or freaking us out, and the Scenic Design (Christopher Thompson) and Lighting Design (Andrew F. Griffin) make the most of the amorphous Cab space to let us imagine diverse settings, with that room far upstage the kind of space you might find in your darker dreams at some point. Played close to the chest, thus letting viewers make up their own minds about matters of “empathy” (another cited virtue) and identification with the characters, A Map of Virtue is a bit like trying to make sense of someone else’s dream. Elusive, imaginative, and ultimately a matter of one’s trust in patterns and perceptions, this is one you’ll have to talk about.

A Map of Virtue returns tonight and plays until its closing Sunday night.

A Map of Virtue By Erin Courtney Directed by Luke Harlan

Sarah: AnneLise Lawson; Mark: Ato Blankson-Wood; Nate: Aubie Merrylees; Victor: Julian Elijah Martinez; Bird Statue: Ariana Venturi; June: Celeste Arias; Ray: Aaron Bartz

Scenic Designer: Christopher Thompson; Costume Designer: Steven M. Rotramel; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Sound Designer: Kate Marvin; Stage Manager: Avery Trunko; Photography: Christopher Ash

Yale Summer Cabaret June 19-June 29, 2014

Cafe Rrrwha?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yale Cabaret March 20-22, 2014