The Baby Maker

Review of Fuck Her, Yale Cabaret

The premise of Fuck Her, a comic take on the politics of procreation by third-year Yale School of Drama playwright Genne Murphy, is that, in the not-so-distant future, once genetically-designed babies are the norm, a clientele will form for reproducing “the old-fashioned way.” You know, like your parents most likely did.

To provide that exclusive sexual service is The Surrogate (Antoinette Crowe-Legacy), a grand dame of an entrepreneur selling a specialized brand: whatever her client wants her to be. And that means that Costume Designer Beatrice Vena gets to create a dizzying array of looks for Crowe-Legacy, who plays each to type with mercurial savvy. Those more versed in the iconography of music videos will no doubt spot some deliberate allusions.

The Surrogate (Antoinette Crowe-Legacy) (photos by Brittany Bland)

Or perhaps the reference point should be cheesy sci-fi movies because that’s how the cast plays it. I couldn’t help thinking of Plan 9 from Outer Space, the infamous sub-B movie by Ed Wood, because of the numerous times someone or something is called “stupid.”

The Surrogate is aided in her birthing business by two children she genetically engineered to serve her—Sky (Chris Puglisi), the elder, and acting often like a demented maître d’, and Star (Moses Ingram), a suitably attired minion who tends to pout and whine. These kids should be at the infancy stage, but—such are the powers of future technology—they’ve been fast-tracked to teen years. The kids get into sibling rivalry (I suppose the gene for that attribute is beyond science) and, eventually, Star sets about sabotaging what she realizes is a con. Sky is more apt to play along, no matter what, clearly engineered to do well in corporate. Star is into oedipal drama, the female version.

The comedy with the kids is cheeky and quirky because Puglisi and Ingram are having so much fun. The clients are a more mixed bag, if only because one would like to see more ingredients in their theatrical DNA (or, is it fair to expect depth in broad caricature?). For my money, Patrick Young comes off best as an insufferable German artiste called Milo, while Laurie OM gets the best costume as Helen, then there’s Carl Holvick as Chip, who, as the name suggests, is just your basic whitebread, me-first, alpha male.

foreground: The Surrogate (Antoinette Crowe-Legacy); background: Helen (Laurie OM), Milo (Patrick Young), Chip (Carl Holvick)

But wait, you ask, how can one woman be a sex-partner/surrogate mother to produce the child of more than one man or male-identifying person at once? Ha ha, fools! Now you see the dastardly plan. While these self-serving egotists think they’re buying exclusive bragging rights, they are in fact allowing The Surrogate to “pollute” their progeny with her genes of choice, thus “undermining” the eugenics of those who might like to do away with undesirable traits. There may be a bit of “power to the people” ethics in the Surrogate’s imperious “fuck them” to these sleazy elitists, but it’s hard to be on the side of someone who makes Joan Crawford look like Mother of the Year. It is fun to see a pregnancy suit deployed though.

In case we miss how abstruse the science behind social and racial manipulation by biological means is, we have Cody Whetstone, who also directs, on hand as a professor in our day to provide an intro and a Q&A session. During the latter, Whetstone, while downing a banana cream dessert, enacts well the intellectually-superior insouciance of those for whom such matters are mostly an academic question.

The humor is very stagey, with the kind of over-the-top readings one tends to find in zany skit comedy, which may or may not provoke the laughs it intends. During the performance I saw, the raucous laughs of a particular audience member, who also provided a planted question during the Q&A, made me wonder if I was experiencing a “live laugh-track.”

Amidst the laughs is the uneasy question of what happens when those for whom “self-determination” is a sign of freedom from what were once assumed to be biological and cultural norms find they can design the people of tomorrow to realize their wildest fantasies. Kind of like reproducing as your favorite computer avatar. But since, by then, we’ll all mostly be living in virtual reality anyway—freed of the declining world of biodegradable, i.e. mortal, beings and things—it probably won’t matter much. O brave new world that lacks such creatures in it!

It all reminds me of that old radio song in my childhood, “In the Year 2525”: “won’t need no husband, won’t need no wife/you’ll pick your son, pick your daughter too/from the bottom of a long glass tube, whoa whoa.”

Fuck Her
By Genne Murphy
Directed by Cody Whetstone

Co-Producers: Al Heartley & Laurie OM; Dramaturg: Sophie Siegel-Warren; Scenic Designer: Riw Rakkulchon; Costume Designer: Beatrice Vena; Lighting Designer: Krista Smith; Projection Designer: Christopher Evans; Sound Designer: Megumi Katayama; Technical Director: Valerie Tu; Stage Manager: Cate Worthington; Assistant Scenic Designer: Lily Guerin; S.E.X. Commercial by Erin Sullivan and Brittany Bland

Cast: Antoinette Crowe-Legacy; Carl Holvick; Moses Ingram; Laurie OM; Chris Puglisi; Cody Whetstone; Patrick Young

Yale Cabaret
November 16-18, 2017

The Yale Cabaret is dark this coming week—Thanksgiving weekend—but returns November 30-December 2 with (the feels)…kms by second-year playwright Jeremy O. Harris, directed by Ari Rodriguez. “KMS” is acronym-speak for “kill myself,” as in: if I don’t make it to the next Cab show, kms.

Drowning or Dreaming

Review of One Big Breath, Yale Cabaret

The Yale Cabaret returns this week with its first show of the season. A devised piece scripted by third-year playwright Josh Wilder and directed by second-year playwright Jeremy O. Harris, One Big Breath takes a poetic approach to the dire situation of refugees from an unnamed war-torn country. Wilder and his collaborators—including a cast consisting of Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, Patricia Fa’asua, Francesca Fernandez McKenzie, Jakeem Powell, Catherine María Rodríguez—create a play that feels part timeless folk-tale and part contemporary exposé. The different moods of the piece jar at times, but ultimately jell into a memorable Cabaret experience that leaves a lot of latitude for interpretation.

One Big Breath (photos: Brittany Bland)

The piece is served well by a powerful and mesmerizing opening. Behind a curtain, Powell, Crowe-Legacy, Fa’asua and Fernandez McKenzie cast shadow figures that wrestle rhythmically with their plight: a decision to leave their homeland for the “other shore,” wearing flotation vests and roping themselves together for safety. In a stylized version of frogman attire, Rodríguez stalks through the audience with an illuminated diving mask, narrating the action and making eerie noises on a strange percussion instrument. In the course of the play, we will learn the fate of the four lovers who seek to escape death for something better.

Some scenes strike up an endearing comedy, as when Fa’asua plays a beach-goer who discovers Fernandez McKenzie washed up on the beach and attempts to communicate with her. Fa’asua speaks a stylized version of English that could easily catch on as a charming variation of our language, while Fernandez McKenzie wrestles with mimicking foreign sounds while communicating her distress at finding herself alone without her other escapees. Her choice at the scene’s close shreds the complacency of Fa’asua’s acceptance.

Francesca Fernandez McKenzie

Later, Rodríguez plays a refugee called “Eet” who is introduced to a class by a demanding teacher (Fernandez McKenzie) and then barraged with questions by an enthusiastic TV interviewer (Fa’asua) while Powell—who has some great moves throughout the show, particularly in the opening segment—does an excited dance.

The play doesn’t do much to particularize the characters of the hopeful refugees, giving them a sort of collective consciousness that we can only intuit, and it renders their fates, whether in death or life, as an unwelcome alternative to whatever their previous existence was. A scene between Fernandez McKenzie, as a kind of shore patrol standing watch over two of the drowned refugees, and Crowe-Legacy as a photo journalist, doesn’t give us much to go on. The photographer is from Texas, but where in the world the shore is, is anyone’s guess.

Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, Francesca Fernandez McKenzie

Late in the show, a haunting score provides backdrop to a romantic acceptance of death, as a waltz for lovers willing to go down together rather than live under duress. Many of the show’s best effects come from the blending of lighting, sound, movement, voice to create a range of impressions for the viewer. It’s not about story so much as it’s about the way we turn traumatic events into media or into myth.

Near the close, Fernandez McKenzie rehearses the ways in which the human body fights off asphyxiation, or death by drowning. Her speech is rigorously true-to-life but also, in the way it allows for the mind’s ability to dream before the final lights out, opens up the possibility that the refugees aren’t yet drowned, but only dreaming.

Ultimately, One Big Breath, in its technical wizardry and evocative storytelling, is a good example of the strengths of theater at the Cab: inspired, probing, diverse, uneasy. The kind of theater we need these days.

One Big Breath
By Josh Wilder
Directed by Jeremy O. Harris
Produced by Al Heartley

Dramaturgs: Kari Olmon, Amauta Marston-Firmino; Choreographer: Shadi Ghaheri; Scenic Designer: Riw Rakkulchon; Assistant Scenic Designer: Stephanie Bahniuk; Costume Designer: Mika Eubanks; Lighting Designer: Evan Anderson; Sound Designer: Megumi Katayama; Stage Manager: Cate Worthington; Technical Director: LT Gourzong

Cast: Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, Patricia Fa’asua, Francesca Fernandez McKenzie, Jakeem Powell, Catherine María Rodríguez

Yale Cabaret
September 14-16, 2017

For my preview of the upcoming season of Cab 50, go here.

http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/turning_50_yale_cab_/

Woman's Woe

Review of The Trojan Women, Yale Summer Cabaret

Ellen McLaughlin’s adaptation of Euripides’ The Trojan Women, originally aimed as a response to the Balkans war in the mid-nineties, is now given a riveting production at Yale Summer Cabaret, directed by co-artistic director Shadi Ghaheri. In Ghaheri’s version, we’re meant to think of the atrocities currently being perpetrated in Syria, with the production’s research into the war there and the situation of refugees and women sold into slavery acting as a catalyst to the passions and sorrows on view here. The set, by Gerardo Díaz Sánchez, is an eloquent vision of a devastated domestic space, covered in rubble and the dust of destroyed buildings.

The situation: the great city of Troy has fallen, thanks to the ruse of the infamous Trojan horse. The heroes of the Greek army are dividing the captive Trojan women amongst themselves along with any other spoils before destroying the city forever. Onstage, we see only the women. In Euripides, Meneleus, Helen’s estranged husband, gets a scene, but is absent here, and the few male roles—Poseidon (Evelyn Giovine) and Talthybius (Rachel Kenney), a Greek envoy, are played by women. The cast is excellent, and Ghaheri’s direction lets the pacing of movement, speech, emotive song, and several striking tableaux involve us in a world where, with the war ended, time seems to have stopped in a limbo of grief and apprehensive horror.

The Trojan women (Danielle Chaves, Kineta Kunutu, Evelyn Giovine, Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, Sohina Sidhu, Rachel Kenney) (photo: Leandro A. Zaneti)

Indeed, even in Euripides day, nearly 2500 years ago, the play was a response to wartime atrocities and a call for the need to treat the vanquished humanely. The perspective of the women of Troy, once proud aristocrats now become “chattel” in the hands of the killers of their husbands, fathers, and sons, is presented by the Greek text in full tragic register. McLaughlin’s version amplifies the psychology of the women and creates a stunning scene between Hecuba (Antoinette Crowe-Legacy), widow of Priam, king of Troy, and Helen (Sohina Sidhu), the Argive captive whose status as concubine to Hecuba’s son Paris was the cause of the siege.

The primary women here are differentiated by their view of what comes next, and McLaughlin places much dramatic consequence on how the individual women view themselves as they look upon their fates. In her showdown with Hecuba, Helen says she will return to her husband’s kingdom as his recovered queen. And yet, she claims, she feels grief for Troy as, all along, she was divided in her allegiance. It’s a statement that goes a long way to humanizing Helen—generally vilified as a whore or praised as a paragon, with neither view accurate to her condition. Hers is a unique position, and Sidhu’s increasingly agitated rendering of her fall lends force to her claim: she was fated to be who she is by none of her doing. For the Trojan women to blame her—as Hecuba would like—is perversely to give agency to a woman where she in fact has none. In Euripides, the scene plays out as quibbling about Helen’s veracity, but McLaughlin gives her a speech worthy of a modern heroine, one who can see only a tragic view of her beauty.

Hecuba (Antoinette Crowe-Legacy), Andromache (Kineta Kunutu), Cassandra (Danielle Chaves) (photo: Leandro A. Zaneti)

McLaughlin’s speech for Hecuba’s daughter Cassandra (Danielle Chaves), deemed mad but actually a prophetess, becomes a revelation of grief, spite, and a deranged glee that Chaves delivers with fine-tuned force. The widow of the great hero Hector, Andromache (Kineta Kunutu), at first puts all her faith in the fortune of her infant son, Astyanax. She even wonders if, somehow, she could find a way to love a man who had destroyed her home and husband. She represents a kind of survivalist hope that finds in life a reason to live. The blow the Greeks aim at her is wrenching and cruel, but the scene is handled with great tact by Kenney as the bringer of bad news and is made a tour de force for Kunutu to bare the raw nerves of the powerless facing the unbearable.

Andromache (Kineta Kunutu) with Astyanax (photo: Leandro A. Zaneti)

These days, it seems, theater may be entering an era of going for the jugular. The Public’s recent staging of Julius Caesar had protesters rushing on the stage to interfere with the action, and the new stage production of 1984, now in previews in New York, enacts scenes of torture with such fidelity that audience members, during the London run, asked actors to stop. Ghaheri’s production of The Trojan Women is in the spirit of such theatrical confrontation. Here, the misery of these women is made manifest with little in the way of mitigation or uplift. And yet the quality of McLaughlin’s text and its extremely effective staging—with praise for Elizabeth Green’s lighting, and Frederick Kennedy’s sound design and musical accompaniment, and Cole McCarty’s spare but lovely costumes—give us at last a vision of the strength of humanity in even the worst duress.

Much of the play’s ultimate effect lies with the majestic figure of Hecuba as played by Antoinette Crowe-Legacy. Hers is a bearing of great regal hauteur that, when it cracks into sorrow and lament, is all the more powerful. Her eyes seem always to be on something else—the greatness of the past, the favor of the gods—and even when she must ponder the disgrace of her likely condition in the home of Odysseus, she sees and speaks with a force of knowing that is anything but broken. Crowe-Legacy’s Hecuba makes us glimpse not a fallen monarch no longer a master of her fate, but a powerful presence still able to master herself.

The Trojan Women is a play for these days of hostility and hatred, showing that, even in the most vicious defeat, there is reason to live, and that war is always an affront to common humanity. In Ghaheri’s production, which has to be one of the best renderings of McLaughlin’s adaptation (judging by comments on other productions online), viewers will find what I feel sure is one of the most harrowing theatrical experiences in New Haven in some time and for some time.

The Trojan Women
Adapted by Ellen McLaughlin
From the play by Euripides
Directed by Shadi Ghaheri

Dramaturg: Ariel Sibert; Scenic Design: Gerardo Díaz Sánchez; Costume Design: Cole McCarty; Lighting Design: Elizabeth Green; Sound Design: Frederick C. Kennedy; Stage Manager: Christina Fontana

Cast: Danielle Chaves, Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, Evelyn Giovine, Rachel Kenney, Kineta Kunutu, Sohina Sidhu

Yale Summer Cabaret
June 23-July 2, 2017