Sexual Politics

Review of Cloud 9, Hartford Stage

Caryl Churchill’s wildly irreverent and comic play Cloud 9 addresses sexual politics, and how mores change with the times. It also shows how the past—here, the British past, specifically—is always being re-imagined. Act One’s lively burlesque of Victorian erotic relations in the 1870s is paralleled with a rather more naturalistic rendering set in 1979 in Act Two. The play dates from 1979, so Act Two, originally, was very contemporary indeed. The main difficulty now is that we’ve almost gotten to the point at which “the 1970s” may inspire a burlesque spirit similar to what Churchill makes of the 1870s. If played more for laughs—such as its invocation of a New Agey “goddess”—Act Two might have more bite. In any case, its effort to imagine a sort of social utopia of sexual relations and child-rearing may strike some as quaint, others as progressive—even now. Or especially now?

Lin (Sarah Lemp), Victoria (Emily Gunyou Halaas) (photo: T. Charles Erickson)

Which is a way of saying that the past’s social progress can still present a challenge in times of virulent conservatism. In any case, Cloud 9 remains a challenging and amorphous play that provides equal parts entertainment and food for thought. Launched initially as Margaret Thatcher came to power, Cloud 9 may make us oddly nostalgic for the hopes of earlier eras.

Cathy (Mark H. Dold) (photo: T. Charles Erickson)

Casting is key to the success of the production at Hartford Stage, directed by Associate Artistic Director Elizabeth Williamson, in her directorial debut. Because the cast of seven actors must play the 15 characters of both acts—in some cases cross-gender and contrary to age—and because who doubles as whom is established by Churchill, the overall effect depends upon actors who can manage the considerable disparity in roles. Here, Mark H. Dold enacts the most striking transformation, setting the tone for both acts. In Act One, he plays the repressive patriarch Clive, looking and sounding very Victorian indeed, then plays a preening little girl, Cathy, in Act Two; in both cases, Dold’s character lords it over the others. That shift is the most telling in this play of shifting orientations, and Dold carries it off splendidly.

Front: Edward (Mia Dillon), Betty (Tom Pecinka), Joshua (William John Austin); Rear: Ellen (Sarah Lemp), Clive (Mark H. Dold), Maud (Emily Gunyou Halaas) (photo: T. Charles Erickson)

Act One takes us to a colonial outpost in South Africa where Clive resides with his family: demure wife Betty (Tom Pecinka), adolescent son Edward (Mia Dillon), who has a penchant for playing with dolls, baby Vickie (who is a doll), and mother-in-law Maud (Emily Gunyou Halaas); there’s also a manservant Joshua (William John Austin), who has renounced his people through his attachment to Clive; a maid, Ellen (Sarah Lemp), who is very affectionate toward Betty; Mrs. Saunders (Lemp again), a very independent widow; and a very manly explorer, Harry Bagley (Chandler Williams). The amusement is in seeing how a surface “normality” is constantly undermined by the kinds of subversive urges that, time was, would’ve been the subject of considerable repression. Comic moments, such as Ellen’s attempt to seduce Betty, and Harry misreading signals from Clive, are set against bits that are almost poignant, such as Joshua’s song at Christmas, a plaintive love note to his oppressors. Mia Dillon, a veteran actress, is quite remarkable as little Edward, and Tom Pecinka languishes quite ladylike as doleful Betty.

In Act Two, Cathy’s winsome childishness is the best feature, as the play’s treatment of the problem of parenting, as an ongoing chore without nursemaids to take up the slack, hits a contemporary note. Cathy’s mother is Lin (Sarah Lemp), a lesbian with eyes for Victoria (Emily Gunyou Halaas), the doll grown up, we’re to imagine, who has a son we never see and whom she is attempting to raise with help from her novelist husband, Martin (Chandler Williams). Martin is a nice send-up of the "enlightened" male of the period, no less overbearing than Clive, but in a more sensitive way, trying to be supportive and to share parenting duties and the like. His hair and clothes recall aspects of the 1970s most of us would rather forget. Gunyou Halaas, in contrast, wears her retro threads quite well and portrays Victoria as a woman on the verge of change.

Martin (Chandler Williams)

Such is also the case with Betty (Mia Dillon, now playing her own age), who has a deliberate look of Thatcher about her, but is much more liberal. She takes us into her confidence about achieving orgasm manually, fully in the spirit of Our Bodies, Our Selves. Meanwhile, Edward (Tom Pecinka) is a gardener in the local park—where all bring their children to tire themselves out—who is trying to be a “wife” to Gerry (William John Austin), a rather feckless young man who prefers to enjoy a liberated gay lifestyle.

Lin (Sarah Lemp), Victoria (Emily Gunyou Halaas), Edward (Tom Pecinka) (photo: T. Charles Erickson)

The aspect of Act Two that never completely jells is the effort to find some common ground for all these inter-relations. Certain moments, such as the song the entire cast sings, seem almost a parody of togetherness, though Williamson is unwilling to satirize progressiveness the way Act One easily satirizes patriarchy. And yet there’s no escaping the fact that seeing same-sex couples as boring—as couples—as hetero couples often are, while it may help support what must once have been a striking notion—that couples are much the same, regardless of what sort of pairing constitutes them—doesn’t make for intriguing theater. It doesn’t help that in Act Two only Dold is still playing against type. The other actors are in roles they might be cast for in conventional casting. Perhaps it’s time to shake-up casting a bit further.

The reappearance of certain figures from Act One in the play’s conclusion makes for a surprisingly fond return. Without being sentimental in effect, the final note arrives as a kind of détente with previous generations: while no doubt at a loss about how the world would change, they may at least be allowed the dignity of their historical situation. It helps, of course, that Dold’s Clive and Pecinka’s Betty are so charismatic they seem almost archetypal. Or is that just a way of saying that some things never change?

Mrs. Sanders (Sarah Lemp), Clive (Mark H. Dold) (photo: T. Charles Erickson)

Cloud 9
By Caryl Churchill
Directed by Elizabeth Williamson

Scenic Design: Nick Vaughan; Costume Design: Ilona Somogyi; Lighting Design: York Kennedy; Sound Design & Original Composition: Andre Pluess; Wig & Hair Design: Cookie Jordan; Dramaturg: Fiona Kyle; Fight Choreographer: Greg Webster; Vocal Coach: Ben Furey; Production Stage Manager: Denise Cardarelli; Assistant Stage Manager: Ellen Goldberg; Casting: Jack Bowden, CSA, Binder Casting

Cast: William John Austin; Mark H. Dold; Mia Dillon; Emily Gunyou Halaas; Sarah Lemp; Tom Pecinka; Chandler Williams

Hartford Stage
February 23-March 19, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

The Program

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Team

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

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

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

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

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

Prepare to be challenged.

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

Photographs by Christopher Ash

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

Owning Up

Caryl Churchill’s Owners, the second show of the Yale Repertory Theatre season, directed by Evan Yionoulis, is an insidious play. It’s so much fun to watch—with the fabulous scenic design by Carmen Martinez that shifts magically before our eyes—that we might be lulled into forgetting how barbed it is. In Yionoulis’ take on the show, the characters don’t seem to be really appalling—well, except for Marion—and so there is much entertainment value in watching how they cope with straitened circumstances and windfall offers, with marital melt-downs, new babies, and old flames, with skullduggery and borderline thuggery. Everyone keeps the comic timing skimming along, making us chuckle . . . until the ending brings home how lethal it all it is. How callous and shallow the world these characters inhabit . . . and perpetuate.

It’s Britain in the early seventies and the “owners” are taking over, a situation that we might say “resonates” with our times, though the more perceptive attitude, I think, is to see that Churchill is showing us how things began to change for the worse—all the way back then. Marion (Brenda Meaney) is the live-wire here, the rapacious woman Churchill shows us to remind us that, once in power, a woman can be as unreasoning, as blood-thirsty, as fascist as a man. It’s the other side of that great Equality demand the times were fraught with, and, in “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” fashion, indicates that the real problems lie elsewhere.

Marion wears the pants, we might say, except that her husband, Clegg (Anthony Cochrane), a butcher going out of business—and chatting to her employee Worsely (Joby Earle) about how he might do Marion in—when we first meet him, considers himself quite manly. He delivers spot on comments, common enough in those days when the ERA was being bandied about in the States, about how a man controls a woman. His idea of revenge on Alec, Marion’s old flame who he believes is back on the job, is to have sex with Alec’s wife Lisa. It’s all about ownership, you see. “She’s mine; she’s yours,” and so on.

That other couple—Alec (Tommy Schrider) and Lisa (Sarah Manton)—have kids and another on the way. They also are living, with Alec’s mum, in a flat in a building that Marion is taking over. So that precipitates a visit from Worsely to buy them out. It’s the standard practice of taking over a property, ditching the undesired (with rent-controlled leases), and soliciting the interest of the upwardly mobile—like the Arlingtons who eventually move in below. The stakes of this game are pretty clear, but it gets more complicated when Marion and Clegg take on ownership of the other couple’s new baby. It’s not quite clear why Lisa gives her child up except that she’s very distraught and a bit dim. Further complications circle around whether or not Marion can somehow take on ownership of Alec as well. And a running gag is Worsely’s attempts to kill himself, to give up ownership of what he stands up in, as he puts it.

As Clegg, Anthony Cochrane is more or less “the main character” in the sense that his rapport with Marion, from his point of view, is the only business really to be decided—that, and whether or not there will be an heir for “Clegg and Son.” In the end he still loves Marion because of a decision she makes about doing-in Alec. Peachy. Cochrane reminds me a little of Bob Hoskins combined with Jack Warden, which is a way of saying he’s a very likeable guy, in his manner, and if he’s a bully, he’s also a man trying to make do in a Man-and-woman’s World. He was in the army too, so, there you have it. He’s adaptable. And maybe even a little sentimental toward Lisa and her new baby.

As Marion, Brenda Meaney has the toughest role of the play. It’s easy to dislike her and to read all kinds of Iron Lady associations into her, but, on the other hand, she seems really to have feelings about Alec. It’s just that, as she says at the close, “I might be capable of anything. I’m just beginning to find out what is possible.” Why should Lady Macbeth have to stand behind that conscience-stricken fool she married? So then you ask yourself: what would the tragedy of such a woman be? Meaney has the perfect stature and statuesque qualities for this role. She’s commanding and powerful and, chomping chocolate bars or offering to buy Clegg a stripper, she has the same off-hand grace that says, “yes, this is my world. I’ve accepted it, what’s your problem?”

Alec, her problem, is the part that requires the most work. If his lines aren’t spoken with the right kind of Brit diction, Alec could turn into a caricature. Tommy Schrider nails it. His Alec is someone who has opted out, quasi-Bartleby-like. Not only would he rather not, he doesn’t see much point in doing or not doing. If Marion wants him to go to bed with her, he will, but there’s not much behind it. “I don’t keep,” he says. He dispatches his mum, when she’s in a coma, and the play lets you decide if that’s mercy or not. In the second part of the play, he seems to begin to accept that his wife and kids are actually a part of his life. Better late than never, we might say. And then he does something extraordinary, in the end.

Sarah Manton’s Lisa has heart and a grasp of realities, eventually. No caricature either, she could be contemptible in her useableness, but. She comes across as “woman, old school.” She’s nice and gracious to Worsely even when he barges in on her and Alec after their home has been robbed; she’s pregnant, at first, then a mother who has to abandon her baby. She’s confused and apt to cry until Marion gives her one across the face. Lisa is blonde and lithe, willing to have sex with Clegg to further her cause. Women’s wiles, you see.

Joby Earle’s Worsely is as likeable as Eric Idle always is, with that kind of self-effacing sociability that seems passively winning, but then such social graces mask that there’s something deeply wrong with Worsely. He keeps telling us this, and we see the evidence as more and more bandages bedeck his person, but it’s just a macabre gag, isn’t it? That is until we see Churchill’s point that, for every grasping villain like Marion, there are those walking dead, those moral nullities, that will do any bidding, for lack of anything better to do.

To Alex Trow falls two small but important roles: as Mrs. Arlington, she’s the well-heeled and well-meaning forces that stand above Marion. Marion worked hard in a man’s world to get something. Mrs. Arlington’s already got it. And a baby she lets the neighbors look after as she rushes to the theater. Heh. Trow is sweet in the mannered way of betters to lessers. But as Alec’s Mum, she’s a surprise. At first, given the use of mannequins, you might thing she’s one too, sitting in a chair like a piece of furniture. Then she speaks from the depths of her dementia. Then, later, she gets up, gets the kettle, attempts to make tea, all in a tour de force of muscular memory continuing beyond conscious thought. It stays with you.

About Marion and those pants—fortunately she doesn’t really wear them. We might arrive in fear of pants suits, but Seth Bodie’s costumes go for the patterned midis of the times, back when working women wanted to look like women, not business-women, which meant seeming to be on a date with life, in bold colors and big hair. Lisa, meanwhile, looks pretty much like the hippy turned hausfrau that was the outcome of the sexual revolution by the time its style trickled down. The men’s attire is flared where necessary and printed, matching or not, and Worsely, in particular, has the requisite not-quite-placeable seediness that speaks tomes.

The scene changing, on spinning sets, is fun to watch, especially as it is led-up to by “freeze frames” that work with Benjamin Ehrenreich’s lighting to create tableaux, which adds to the fun. Martinez’s sets include a nondescript butcher shop and an upscale one with blazing neon. The difference between the two says it all, as we go from post-war to posh.

See Owners if you can. This one’s really something, I’ll own.

Owners By Caryl Churchill Directed by Evan Yiounoulis

Scenic Designer: Carmen Martinez; Costume Designer: Seth Bodie; Lighting Designer: Benjamin Ehrenreich; Sound Designer: Joel Abbott; Production Dramaturg: Hugh Farrell; Vocal and Dialect Coach: Beth McGuire; Fight Director: Rick Sordelet; Casting Director: Tara Rubin; Stage Manager: Sonja Thorson

Yale Repertory Theatre October 25-November 16, 2013

The Elephant in the Room

The final show in the Yale Summer Cabaret’s “Summer of Giants” combines two plays by contemporary British playwright Caryl Churchill—Heart’s Desire and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You—into an evening of theater that ends the eleven-week season not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a feisty kick-in-the-pants. Churchill, as evidenced by these two plays at least, is that rarest of creatures, an absurd satirist—or is that a satirical absurdist? Heart’s Desire tends more toward the absurd while not completely satirizing the affections of the sitcom lives on view; Drunk Enough tends more toward satire of the make-you-bleed variety, poking sore spots and squeezing out pus with a caustic twinkle in the eye. And don’t forget that both these plays are, at bottom, love stories. As directed by Dustin Wills—who recently received a Princess Grace Award for his final year of study next year—these plays confront the audience with highly theatrical experiences that reflect in significant ways upon the quality of modern life. Churchill leaves naturalism behind in favor of stylized and mannered presentations, commenting not only on the resources of comic theater but on the kinds of empathy we naturally bring to the theater-going experience.

Heart’s Desire takes us into the heart of a family gathered in a sentimental-looking sitting room—very middle-class Brit—where Brian (Chris Bannow), the father, Alice (Ceci Fernandez), the mother, and Maisie (Michelle McGregor), the aunt, are awaiting the return of twenty-five-year-old Susy (Celeste Arias) from Australia. The “backstory” seems to be that Susy’s return marks the end of her first significant departure from the family nest, and so there are feelings of anticipation and apprehension attendant upon her arrival. If this were a play from the “kitchen-sink” era of Brit drama, we’d have lots of honest emotion about how this couple is coping with the recognition that their little girl is grown and all they have now is their marriage, in whatever tattered form it now exists. That play—the naturalistic side of Heart's Desire—is all about the tedium of waiting and the minor revelations that occur when people look forward too much, depending on others to both share a feeling while masking it, swallowing up the momentous in the everyday.

But Churchill isn’t that kind of playwright, so, while she nimbly gives us enough to sink our teeth into, so to speak, she also keeps pulling the carpet out from under this little domestic drama through a variety of skillful, and manic, techniques: carefully manipulated repetitions that underline the tenuous tightrope we walk in our “scripted” dealings with others; fast-forwards that cast life as memory even while its happening; visual non sequiturs that wrench us from the norm with farce, fantasy, horror—as for instance when masked figures enact a quick and darkly comic home invasion, or when a pantomime ostrich suddenly shows up for no apparent reason; and subplots and alternate “takes” that let us glimpse roads not taken and possible spin-offs, as when the family begins to muse about forensics and a body found in the garden, or when the son, Lewis (Mamoudou Athie), bursts in as a punk prole one moment, or a fidgety nerd the next, or a drunken lout (all ostensibly the same character).

Through it all, the main trio hit the same marks again and again, following the same script until it veers off-course, then resets. Sometimes we’re back to the moment before Brian’s entrance, sometimes we’re back to when he begins to get edgy (“you’ve spoilt it!”), sometimes we’re back to when he finally calls his wife “a nasty woman” right before the bell rings to announce their darling’s arrival. In each repetition something new is revealed if only the odd hopscotch logic by which we navigate through what we say and what we feel, and what we acknowledge from others.

As Brian, Chris Bannow is marvelous. I won’t soon forget the manic glee of his speech about letting his mouth gobble up his entire body, bit by bit. It’s either an instance of complete insanity or a deliberate “comic turn” on Brian’s part, and there’s no way to say for certain. Likewise, Michelle McGregor’s Maisie can, one moment, dither on about the attractions of the platypus like someone a bit “dotty,” and at another deliver an affecting rumination on the emotional perils of departure and seeing people off. While, as Alice, Ceci Fernandez maintains that infernal “brightness” so familiar from almost any role Emma Thompson has assayed (“be nice to her, that’s all!”), giving us a tour de force turn as a kind of emotional wind-up toy—now caustic, now gleeful, now imploring, now detached. In a summer of great ensemble work, the paces Wills puts his three main actors through here hits a high point.

The support is also fun—Athie’s comic intrusions and a brief scene with Prema Cruz as a special friend who suddenly shows up in Susy’s stead extend the situation into other possibilities—but in the end every extraneous element only more relentlessly concentrates our attention on the “no exit” space of this couple picking at each other’s scabs. Tensions are brought to high relief by the return of the absent one whose absence makes her more present than ever, and whose imminent presence heightens how abject this home is without her.

Consider Kate Noll’s set in its vivid use of middling detail. Quite marvelous. Now stay through intermission to see it transformed into a seedy lavatory, complete with urinals, graffiti, and a coffee maker. Both sets are wonderfully realized, with Drunk Enough creating a space entirely determined by Wills and his technicians as Churchill gives no guidance about where the play should be set nor how played. Once you realize that, you can only be rather awed by the pas de deux of seduction, sexual interaction, hurt feelings, lovers’ tiffs, and boastful braggadocio that takes place between Sam (Ato Blankson-Wood), “a country,” and Guy (Mitchell Winter), “a man.”

About that “a country”: Sam and Guy speak almost entirely in the terms of U.S. acts of aggression and/or geopolitical dominance. It’s an ideological courtship, we could say, with Sam setting the terms by which Guy must show his love. This includes simulated fellatio, simulated anal sex, and shooting up heroin and snorting coke and, while we might expect Sam to be “the top,” Wills makes Sam play the rather demanding “bottom.” In other words, the sexual politics of this staging rub against—in provocative ways—its geopolitics. The script is almost a history lesson of U.S. foreign policy, but always delivered as half-formed and half-finished statements between two lovers trying to stay on the same page.

Blankson-Wood is suitably mercurial as Sam, at times domineering, at times sneering, at times yielding, at times truly hurt—as in the aftermath of the dreaded phrase “the Towers!” As Guy, Winter has the difficult task of remaining reactive (which isn't the same as reactionary), pulled this way and that by his importunate lover’s demands (for world dominance with good PR). Later in the play Guy starts to question Sam, hitting “below the belt” with questions about environmental effects and a wasteful lifestyle that receive petulant replies that amount to “anyone would do the same thing who could” and, perhaps, a rift not so easy to overcome. Could it be the end of the American century?

The Yale Summer Cabaret has lived up to its ambition this year, giving us two great classics—Tartuffe and Miss Julie—in lively and, in the latter especially, memorable productions, as well as two lesser-known plays by masters—Lorca and Williams respectively—that, while not great plays, were given treatments by the cast, directors and tech that were truly inspired, ending with two challenging plays that confirm the unique strength of small-scale, intimate theater and adventurous choices.

Heart’s Desire and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You By Caryl Churchill Directed by Dustin Wills

Stage Manager: Geoff Boronda; Scenic Designer: Kate Noll; Costume Designer: Seth Bodie; Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason; Sound Designer: Rob Chikar; Projection Designer: James Lanius; Puppet Designer: Dustin Wills; Production Manager/Technical Director: James Lanius; Assistant Technical Director: Joey Moro

Photographs by Christopher Ash, courtesy of Yale Summer Cabaret

Yale Summer Cabaret August 8-August 18, 2013

Summer of Giants

Voted Best Community Theater in the 2013 “Best of” at the New Haven Advocate, the Yale Cabaret offers compelling theater in a very intimate space. During the summer months, the frenetic pace of the Cab’s three-night stands slows a bit, as the Yale Summer Cabaret takes over the space.  For the last few years, the Summer Cab has offered three plays over two months. In the last two years, the offerings have been presented in repertory style, with overlapping runs. For 2013, Artistic Director Dustin Wills has changed that, going back to earlier versions of the Summer Cabaret, which was founded in 1974. As a student in Austin, Wills worked with Fran Dorn who, he later discovered, was one of the founders of the Summer Cab. When he spoke to her about it, he learned that the initial Summer Cab offered 17 shows in a single summer. (Incidentally, a few of those plays were written by the likes of Wendy Wasserstein and Christopher Durang, students at the time.)

Wills wants the hallmark of this year’s Summer Cab to be “ambition and variety.” The initial ambition of six shows was trimmed to five but, as Wills says, these are “real plays.” Great authors providing great theater—“big plays in a tiny space.” The shows will be offered successively, which means audiences have two weeks to see each play—at 8 p.m. shows only, no matinees or late shows—before it gives way to the next.

With a troupe of eight core actors, plus two guest actors, chosen from 32 auditions, Wills has the basis for what he sees as a “standing circus”—the communal life of ensemble acting, with actors “eating, breathing theater.” Wills, a directing student entering his third year in the Drama School, will direct three of the shows, and Associate Artistic Director Chris Bannow, a third year acting student recently seen as Osric in the Rep’s Hamlet, with Paul Giamatti, will direct two. The cast consists of Celeste Arias (*15), Mamoudou Athie (*14), Ato Blankson-Wood (*15), Prema Cruz (*14), Ceci Fernandez (*14), Ashton Heyl (*14), Gabe Levey (*14), Michelle McGregor (*14), Mickey Theis (*14), Mitchell Winter (*14).

Wills and company have selected the plays carefully for their “Summer of Giants.” The plays represent a variety of eras, places, and countries of origin. Conceived as a “journey in time,” the roster of plays reads like a syllabus for a mini-survey of theater. The program begins in 17th-century France, moves to 19th-century Sweden, then to Spanish folktales turned into a comedy first published in 1930, then to an American play from 1969, set in Tokyo, Japan, and finally to two British one acts from 1987 and 2006, respectively.

Opening with Tartuffe, one of the greatest plays by the French master Molière, lives up to the “Giants” title. Wills directs a play that he says offers “a collision of comedy and severity.” Spoken in rhyming couplets but with modern touches—such as a vacuum cleaner—the Cab staging explores the excess of the period as setting for its theme of love vs. hypocrisy, and of youth vs. deluded elders—themes as relevant to our day of puffed-up charlatans in high places as to the highly mannered era of Louis XIV. With the full troupe. May 30 through June 15.

The second play of the summer is a pas de deux of power. Chris Bannow directs August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, a psychological study of passions, a clash between the sexes set amidst class distinctions. Sweden, a bit ahead of the curve in developing some of the freedoms we now take for granted, is the setting for this confrontation with the abyss of identity that can open when the old order is questioned by turn-of-the-century youngsters at the height of the summer festival. Featuring Ceci Fernandez, Mitchell Winter, and Celeste Arias. June 20 through June 29.

Spanish poet and dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca is not best-known for comedies, but Wills sees the hilarious farce The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife as an opportunity for the Summer Cab to lighten up a bit after the heaviness of Strindberg. It’s also a chance to engage with puppetry and the “expressivity of theater,” as a traveling puppeteer visits a town where the local shoemaker has abandoned his teen-aged, unsatisfied wife. Using song, poems, and folk tales, Lorca creates a timeless tale of the struggle of marriage and the vibrancy of small-town life. Wills directs Prema Cruz, Gabe Levey, Ato Blankson-Wood, Mickey Theis, Mamoudou Athie, Michelle McGregor, Ceci Fernandez, and Chris Bannow. July 11 through July 20.

Tennessee Williams is best-known for his explorations of Southern manners in his plays of the Forties and Fifties (such as A Streetcar Named Desire, which will kick-off the Yale Rep season in the fall). In his 1969 play In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, Williams takes on the trends of modern art—notably expressionism, in the role of Mark, an expat in Japan who is trying to discover new inspiration for his painting. Meanwhile his bored wife is getting predatory with the Japanese barman. Wills sees the play, with its artist figure destroying himself, as autobiographical for Williams. And with its setting of Americans in Japan, the play works within the post-war relations of the formerly adversarial nations. Bannow directs Celeste Arias, Mickey Theis, Mamoudou Athie, and Mitchell Winter. July 25 through August 3.

Caryl Churchill is one of the undisputed masters of the last thirty years of theater and her two short plays, Heart’s Desire and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You combine to showcase what Wills calls “the absolute breakdown of language.” That includes the polite language of everyday speech, as a mother and father, in Heart’s Desire, await the return of their daughter, only to find, as the play repeats and restarts, that anxieties can surface in different ways; and in Drunk, the dialogue of two men becomes a reflection on the tensions between England and the U.S. in a play that dates from the era of Tony Blair and "W." Wills directs Chris Bannow, Ceci Fernandez, Michelle McGregor, Mamoudou Athie, Prema Cruz, Mitchell Winter, Ato Blankson-Wood and Celeste Arias in Heart’s Desire, and Ato Blankson-Wood and Mitchell Winter in Drunk. August 8 through August 18.

Such demanding and challenging plays might require some “down time,” and so the Summer Cab will also host Friday Late Nights. With free admission from 10:30 p.m. to 2 a.m., the Cab’s bar will remain open and special late night events will be taking place—such as dance parties, karaoke, Tom Waits imitators, and a Boy Band sing-along. Which means the Cab, in addition to bringing us great plays by great authors with a young and adventuresome cast and artistic staff, will also be poised to be one of the best late-night hang-outs Fridays during the dog days.

See you at the Cab!

The Yale Summer Cab presents Summer of Giants Dustin Wills, Artistic Director Chris Bannow, Associate Artistic Director Molly Henninghausen, Managing Director Anh Le, Associate Managing Director

May 30 through August 18, 2013

for more information, schedules, and tickets/season passes:

www.summercabaret.org

The Kids Are Alright

Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine is something of a schizophrenic play.  As staged by Margot Bordelon, a third-year director in the YSD program, the show is a wildly entertaining first half yoked to a second half that isn’t nearly so nimble.  The first half is set in 1880, on a colonial outpost in Africa, and laughs abound.  The second half is set in England c. 1980, and … not so much. Maybe it’s just me, and my antipathy for that particular past—the era contemporaneous with the writing of the play—is my problem.  And yet, it’s obviously much easier to imbue the 1880s with charm and fun and a frothy lubricity that makes everyone ready to have sex with someone, than it is to derive much in the way of lasting uplift, drama or entertainment from the people who inhabit the late Seventies/early Eighties.  Too close to home but also dated?  Maybe that’s it.  The cast—and they are extremely well-cast—gives it a game try and there are some notable bits in the show’s second half to make it worthwhile.

Before the show even starts we’re treated to the cast posed as figures in displays in a sort of living museum of natural history.  And the exhibits’ backgrounds remain as the set for the African outpost where rigidly upstanding Brit Clive (Gabe Levey, a comic revelation) lives with his family: his blushingly compliant wife Betty (Timothy Hassler, as winsome as one could want a man in a dress to be), Edward, his goldilocked adolescent son (played with inspired awkwardness by a woman), Maud, his no-nonsense mother-in-law (Hannah Sorenson, a study in gray), his daughter Victoria (a stuffed doll) and the child’s nanny, Ellen (Brenda Meaney, self-effacing), as well as his Man Friday Joshua (Chris Bannow—more later), who has renounced his tribe to be a trusted servant.  Enter into this world of domestic bliss and disrupted white tranquility—the natives, as they say, are restless—a rugged explorer, Harry (Mickey Theis, increasingly profound), and a woman with a tendency to be rather assertive, Mrs. Saunders (Meaney again, anything but self-effacing).

As with any broad farce, one isn’t surprised to find that Betty and Harry have a concealed passion for each other of long-standing.  Nor is it surprising to find that Clive has the hots for Mrs. Saunders as a supplement to his overly demure wife (there’s a fairly outrageous scene of coupling between the two, with Levey and Meaney getting all the humor they can out of it).  But when Edward begins to pant for Harry, and the latter slips away with Joshua for a fuck in the stable, and when Ellen tries to make a move on Betty, and when, after some mixed signals are let slip, Harry comes on to Clive, much to the latter’s outrage, well, let’s just say everyone but Maud is ready to do it with someone (the old lady mainly gets her kicks having one doll bitch-slap another).  You see how it is: Victorian propriety masks a libidinal free-for-all.  In Churchill’s 1880s, no one was standing around waiting for Freud to invent sexual repression.  Everyone is sexually expressive, it’s just that the expression had to be a bit more clandestine than would later be the case.

All of this is very amusing with a cast so equal to the task, and the roles of Clive, Betty, Harry, and Edward, especially, manage to be both caricatures as well as bravura bits of characterization by the respective actors in the roles.  Scenes between Harry and Edward are particularly spirited, as are the scenes when Clive tries to upbraid his wife and son.  But to Bannow, as Joshua, falls one of the more interesting roles.  Indeed, it should be mentioned that Bannow has done an estimable job of playing perfectly the kinds of ancillary roles that matter much to the overall effect.  He did it in both parts of Jack Tamburri’s thesis show, Iphigenia Among the Stars, and he does it again in both parts of Cloud Nine.  Joshua is anything but a caricature; he’s a complex witness to a world that tries desperately to hide its truths from itself, and his “Christmas song” is a plaintive grasp at love from someone denuded of his own identity in favor of an invention.  It’s one of the finest moments in the play.

In the second half, after a curtain painted as a Union Jack has fallen to the floor, we enter the post-punk era of Margaret Thatcher.  It’s a brave new world in which women like Victoria (that doll grown up, we’re meant to assume, despite the leap in time) can leave an earnest, well-meaning and hilariously “progressive” husband (Theis, in a sustained comic role) in favor of, first, Lin, a recently divorced single- mother lesbian (Sorenson, lower class than Vickie), and, later, a sexual ménage à trois with Lin and her own bisexual brother—little Edward (Hessler), now grown into a sensitive cross between his earlier, feminized self and Harry, the manly explorer he adored back there in Part One.  The cavorting about on a picnic blanket by Vickie, Lin and Edward is not only intense, it’s also preceded by an invocation of “the goddess.”  While that sort of thing should invite acerbic parody in our time—aren’t the New Agey trappings of the New Woman of the Seventies as risible as the era’s Sensitive Man?—the trio manages to turn the moment into a liberated expression of collective ecstasy. Almost.

Act Two, then, isn’t all farce but aimed at something like a naturalized representation of people trying to find their way in the minefield of human relationships.  The emotional center is Vickie and she gets a sensitive portrayal, with spirited support from Meaney’s newly divorced Betty, looking like a Thatcher wanna-be and yet displaying the good sense to embrace the moment’s potential, and from Bannow’s feckless but direct Gerry—as Edward’s sometime lover he exudes the kind of low-key sexual know-how that seems never to go out of date.

Where the play loses some of the moorings that helped give power to Part One is in the part of Cathy—Lin’s little girl.  With pigtails and Clive’s handle-bar moustache, in a short velvet frock above manly legs, Levey is let run rampant as a kind of androgynous, butch pixie of the Id.  With prepubescent preening, tantrums, and naughty asides, Levey is so riotously girlish he becomes a one-man drag show, but there’s no room for something Part One had and Part Two needs: the sensitivity with which the child—Edward, in Part One—was allowed to put heart into the play via understated comedy.

In Churchill’s script, the actor playing Clive—the ultra-male bastion of all things British—must become a little girl in Part Two, and Bordelon’s production lets us see how such a transformation is no transformation, really, since, Clive or Cathy, it’s Levey’s role to dominate the scene, as Cathy dominates her well-meaning but somewhat clueless elders.  It’s prescient, certainly, as patriarchy makes way for . . . pueri-archy?

Cloud Nine By Caryl Churchill Directed by Margot Bordelon

Scenic Designer: Kate Noll; Costume Designer: Elivia Bovenzi; Lighting Designer: Masha Tsimring; Sound Designer: Sam Ferguson; Composer: Palmer Hefferan; Production Dramaturgs: Emily Reilly, Alexandra Ripp; Stage Manager: Sonja Thorson

Yale School of Drama January 22-26, 2013

Which Side Are You On?

For the second feature in the Yale Cabaret’s 2010-11 Season, Artistic Director Andrew Kelsey, project initiator Louisa Proske, director Flordelino Lagundino, and producer Jennifer Newman offer a truly surprising and striking work, Caryl Churchill’s Far Away (2000), a vision of dystopia whose full horror sneaks up on you, a horror perfectly etched with inspired absurdist control. Churchill’s plays typically explore themes of social and political dysfunction, but unlike some of her work, Far Away does not reference any overtly topical themes.  Instead, Far Away maintains a grasp on the political realm by suggesting how “regularized” or “normative” the most appalling circumstances can become.  The totalitarian state functioning beyond the scenes we see portrayed can only be inferred, and that is what makes the play so lethal: the way references to the status quo always presuppose the logic – and an acceptance – of the situation, whatever it may be.  As we gradually get up to speed – in three scenes taking place over an indeterminate span of years – we find that the world of the play has either gone entirely mad, or is literally comprised of endless war efforts, not only international, but interspecies in scope.

The great strength of this play is how good the dialogue is.  In the first scene, a woman named Harper (Alexandra Henrikson) tries to command her niece Joan (Laura Gragtmans) to return to bed, only to uncover gradually that the niece has witnessed her uncle involved in an act of brutality, an act that Harper denies, then reinterprets for Joan’s benefit so that it seems a benign act, all for the best, though one that must be kept secret.  What we don’t know, for a fact, is whether or not this couple is trafficking in abducted children or is actually helping them escape while brutally punishing traitors, but in either case, the slow burn by which the step-by-step discussion takes place establishes a world where normality is a thin veneer over inhuman acts, whether desperate or depraved.

The second scene is a workplace, a hat-making shop.  But the oddities of the headgear being prepared by Joan (now young adult) and her senior co-worker Todd (Chris Henry) add an element of humor to what soon becomes another appalling situation.  In the midst of their amiable workplace flirtation are little dropped facts like watching televised trials late into the night, or arbitrary problems with the workers’ job security.  We learn that the hats are for parades, and shortly after we witness an example, as limping, zombie-like figures cross the stage, drably attired but for fantastical hats.  It was a stunning moment of theater, implying both a complete loss of human dignity as well as gesturing to what we might think of as totalitarian aesthetics, adding a touch of the circus on the way to the gallows (a tip of the hat to Costume Designer Ana Milosevic for the entertaining chapeaus atop figures from a gulag).

In the final scene, the world is at war, as we learn strictly from the dialogue between Harper and Todd, waiting in Harper’s bland living room for Joan to return, and debating which animals and other creatures have joined forces with which nations.  Churchill pushes the idea that “everything is political” to its logical, absurd conclusion: even the animal kingdom is political.

The revelation for me in this production was Henrikson’s performance – in the first scene she was young and maternal, a bit steely perhaps, but we are not sure at once who is the problem: her or her niece.  As the dialogue unfolds we remain uncertain: is Harper completely duplicitous, making up things to explain away Joan’s fears, or uncertainly initiating the girl into the harsh realities of their world?  And it is that uncertainty about Harper’s character that makes her so intriguing.  In the final scene, Henrikson conjures an older Harper, not bitter so much as run ragged by maintaining a grasp of the world that necessitates knowing, for instance, which side the deer are on.  As she berates Todd for his slips in the party line, her hectoring tone – despite the absurdly wild things she is saying – never slips into comic histrionics.  We see a woman who actually lives in the world she describes, thus making it vivid and real to us as well, and unforgettable.

Far Away has two more performances: tonight, Sat. 25th, at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.

Far Away, written by Caryl Churchill; directed by Flordelino Lagundino

Yale Cabaret, 217 Park Street, New Haven; 203.432.1566; www.yalecabaret.org