Three New Plays Find Readings This Weekend

Preview: Contemporary American Voices Festival, Long Wharf Theatre, October 20-22, 2017

In its third year, the Contemporary American Voices Festival at the Long Wharf Theatre is a growing event and one of the more welcome local theater presentations. It showcases new work, most often plays that haven’t received full productions or which are undergoing further work. The dramatic readings, with each play matched to a director who is often already an admirer of the play, let audiences in on the process of how plays develop.

Long Wharf Literary Manager Christine Scarfuto chooses the plays for presentation and sees the Festival as a helpful event both for playwrights and for the Long Wharf, contributing to the theater’s reputation for new work and giving younger playwrights greater visibility.

“New work is the lifeblood of the theater. It’s what keeps the art form vital and alive. And how better to support new work than to give opportunities to today’s most exciting young writers?” Scarfuto said. She reads 100-150 new plays to find the three that will be presented on Long Wharf’s Stage II, this Friday through Sunday.

In selecting the plays, Scarfuto draws on a network of literary managers and playwrights. Key to her consideration is “where the plays are at.” Some may be programmed for future productions, some may be brand new, with no production yet scheduled, others may have had a production but are in search of an opportunity to revisit the script. Several of the plays featured during the first two festivals have gone onto to award-winning productions. In general, as Scarfuto put it, “the plays are really in good shape, almost ready for production.” The Long Wharf festival gives them an important opportunity to let audiences into the room.

The schedule this year is:

Passage, by Christopher Chen, directed by Saheem Ali, on Friday, October 20, at 7 p.m.

Poor Edward, by Jonathan Payne, directed by Tyne Rafaeli, on Saturday, October 21, at 7 p.m.

All the Roads Home, by Jen Silverman, directed by Lee Sunday Evans, on Sunday, October 22, at 3 p.m.

Christopher Chen, Scarfuto said, is the author of one her favorite newer plays. Caught, which was included in the 2016-17 season at the Yale Cabaret, is a “really smart” play that asks some probing questions about art and politics in the globalized world. In Passage, Chen’s play at this year’s Festival, seven actors take on twelve roles. The play adapts elements of E. M. Forster’s 1924 novel A Passage to India for “a new view of colonialism,” Scarfuto said. Set in “two imagined countries” in order to undermine “preconceived notions,” the play, Scarfuto said “is really about perceptions and prejudice.”

Christopher Chen’s plays include The Hundred Flowers Project (The Glickman Award and Rella Lossy Award), The Late Wedding, Mutt, Caught (The Obie Award and The Barrymore Award) and You Mean To Do Me Harm. Other honors include the Lanford Wilson Award; the Sundance Institute/Time Warner Fellowship; and the Paula Vogel Playwriting Award. A San Francisco native, Chen is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley, and holds an M.F.A. in play-writing from San Francisco State. He is currently resident playwright at Crowded Fire Theatre Company.

Jonathan Payne is a playwright Scarfuto has known for a while through friends. Currently a student at Julliard, Payne works with the homeless as a social worker in New York city. His play at this year’s Festival, Poor Edward, follows the fortunes of Opal and Eddie, two homeless persons who share a hovel in a homeless community that is about to be bull-dozed. Scarfuto described the two-person play as “dark and funny,” combining elements of some of Scarfuto’s favorite playwrights: Suzan-Lori Parks, Edward Albee, and Samuel Beckett. Payne, Scarfuto said, has “a really exciting imagination” and his play adapts a Czech fairytale about a tree root into a story about contemporary social issues.

Jonathan Payne's work has been produced and developed at the Tristan Bates Theatre (UK), Ars Nova, Fringe Festival NYC, The Bushwick Star, and the Fire This Time Festival. He has been a fellow at New Dramatists, Playwrights Realm and The Dramatist Guild, as well as an Ars Nova Play Group member 2014-15. Awards include the Princess Grace Award (2015), Holland New Voices Award (2014), Rosa Parks Award (2011), John Cauble Short Play Award (2002). He holds a BA from the GSA Conservatoire (UK) and an MFA in Playwriting from Tisch School of the Arts, and now attends the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at the Juilliard School.

Jen Silverman’s The Moors, at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2016, showed a striking ear in its dialogue and visited a revisionist sense of the Gothic story on the situation of women across class and education and erotic inclination. All the Roads Home considers the legacy of parent to child across three generations of “headstrong women,” from the 1930s to the present. Scarfuto called the play “moving, poignant, and heart-warming” with the “off-beat comedic tone” that made The Moors so successful. The play, which includes live music with two guitars, addresses sacrifice, the influence of the past, and “fighting for your dreams.”

Jen Silverman’s theater work includes The Moors (Yale Rep premiere, off-Broadway with The Playwrights Realm, Susan Smith Blackburn finalist); The Roommate (Actor’s Theatre of Louisville premiere, produced across the U.S. including South Coast Rep, Williamstown Theatre Festival and upcoming at Steppenwolf); and Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties (Woolly Mammoth premiere). She is a member of New Dramatists, an affiliated artist with the Playwrights Center and SPACE on Ryder Farm, and is a two-time MacDowell fellow, recipient of an NYFA grant, the Helen Merrill Award, the Yale Drama Series Award, and the 2016-2017 Playwrights of New York fellowship. She was educated at Brown, Iowa Playwrights Workshop, and Juilliard.

Tickets are $10 for each play, or all three readings for $25. Reservations can be made by calling 203-787-4282 or visiting longwharf.org.  There will be a happy hour with half-priced drinks an hour before the beginning of each reading, and a Talk Back after each reading, with the respective playwright.

The festival is sponsored by the Burry Fredrik Foundation, Helen Kauder and Barry Nalebuff, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Contemporary American Voices Festival
Long Wharf Theatre
October 20-22, 2017

Represent!

Review of Caught, Yale Cabaret

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caught
By Christopher Chen
Directed by Lynda Paul

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

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

Yale Cabaret
October 6-8, 2016