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Review of The Ugly One, Yale Cabaret

Marius von Mayenburg’s The Ugly One is an extended absurdist sketch about the cult of appearance, or, it could be said, an illustration of the notion “the face makes the man.” So, what if you could wear a face the way you choose to wear certain clothes or cosmetics or hairdos? How good-looking would you have to be? Enough to inspire a following of devoted fans?

The play’s satire is only skin deep, as it gestures to how supply and demand might work in the world of cosmetic surgery, and how a certain brand—one particular physiognomy—might come to dominate. There’s also a few random pokes at psychology, if only to make the case that appearance trumps interiority every time.

In the Yale Cabaret’s current version of the play, directed by Lucie Dawkins, a crackerjack cast keeps the proceedings wacky and disconcerting, aided by Liam Bellman-Sharpe’s slightly offstage sound and Foley art, and Christopher Evans’ projection design. The special effects help create a surgery scene that is a hilarious send up of the “vid it while it’s happening” world we know so well.

Lette (Patrick Madden) (photos: Brittany Bland)

The play’s dark comedy plays out with wonderfully funny performances from the entire cast: Patrick Madden, one of the most consistently subtle actors in the School of Drama, is Lette, a man who discovers, suddenly, that he’s too ugly to hawk his new invention to the public; Steven Johnson plays an underling who gets the PR spot; Danilo Gambini enacts the flippant boss; and Emily Reeder seems sweet and supportive as Lette’s wife. Then—in sometimes quite quick variations—Gambini doubles as the surgeon consulted to replace Lette’s ugliness with something better; Reeder plays as an aged but re-worked chief executive enamored of Lette’s post-surgery looks, and Johnson enacts the executive’s tortured son, a sexual plaything of his “domineering mother.” And Madden doubles as Lette, now an icon of irresistible looks.

As the boss, Gambini spends much of the time peeling and eating various kinds of fruit while also bossing his underlings with manic glee. Then, as the surgeon, he treats Lette’s misgivings with a blithe, offhand indifference that is oddly charming. In both roles, his looniness is infectious.

The surgeon (Danilo Gambini), Lette (Patrick Madden)

Madden gives Lette the kind of stoical common sense that works well as a foil to everyone else’s preposterousness. His frenetic debate with his reflection in an elevator late in the play pits borderline hysterics against savvy sangfroid.

Reeder, as Lette’s wife, is agreeable until she realizes, faced with his sudden good looks, that she has desires too—especially when her husband, now a magnet of female attention, tries to convince her to accept him sharing himself with 25 different women, particularly that oversexed executive. Both women become amorous amazons eager to have sex with beautiful men.

foreground: the son (Steven Johnson); background: Lette (Patrick Madden), the mother (Emily Reeder)

Johnson gets the darker roles, as usual. Kalmann, the assistant, is full of thwarted ambition, while the son is a puerile mess who eventually makes his own play for Lette, once they share the same irresistible looks.

One might say the switches between characters could be better maintained, but the amorphousness of this fast-paced comedy is what makes it work. By the end, it’s hard for the characters themselves to know who they’re dealing with, as more and more people sport Lette’s new face. And Lette wonders what exactly makes him himself.

The projections, cameras, and other effects help create a world of distortions where normative behavior is lacking. The set—a desk/operating table/bed with a much abused angle-poise lamp, surrounded by a low wall on which cast members sit and look on when offstage—makes the action feel improvised and self-enclosed. It’s an anodyne space for a tempest of actions and reactions, of ambitions and envies and lusts and sorrows.

The Ugly One lets us know that, while beauty may be only skin deep, ugliness can be all-encompassing. After seeing the Yale Cabaret production, you may not look at yourself, others, or fruit the same way as before.

The Ugly One
By Marius von Mayenburg
Translated by Maja Zade
Directed by Lucie Dawkins

Producer: Markie Gray; Dramaturg: Gavin Whitehead; Set Designer: Jessie Chen; Costume Designer: Beatrice Vena; Lighting Designer: Nic Vincent; Sound Designer & Foley Artist: Liam Bellman-Sharpe; Projection Designer: Christopher Evans; Technical Director: Dashiell Menard; Stage Manager: Chad Kinsman

Cast: Danilo Gambini, Steven Johnson, Patrick Madden, Emily Reeder

Yale Cabaret
December 7-9, 2017

And that’s it for the first half of Yale Cabaret’s Season 50. The season recommences January 11-13 with For Your Eyes Only.

Disaster Management

Review of Current Location, Yale Cabaret

When you hear a rumor of unusual, threatening occurrences, how do you react? Do you buy into the speaker’s sense of panic? Do you try to distance yourself from the situation, perhaps undermine the report’s veracity?

Japanese playwright Toshiki Okada’s Current Location—translated by Aya Ogawa and directed by Josh Goulding at Yale Cabaret—implies that, in today’s world, we are all under threat in a generalized way: climate change, pollution, military interventions, the testing of weapons and chemicals we know nothing about. We might say that our ability to soldier own, despite our intuited sense of how toxic is our environment—not least the one the media creates—is our lives' main dramatic situation. The phrase used as the play’s title echoes its general use in describing a threat—whether a killer on the loose or a natural disaster. Everyone is concerned about a threat’s “current location,” so as to differentiate those people “there” from us, “here.”

the cast of Current Location (photo: Elizabeth Green)

In Okada’s play, the sense of generic threat we all live with, at some level, becomes real for a group of women in a village where everyone sort of knows everyone else. Which means, ostensibly, there should be some solidarity in how they react to odd events—a glowing blue cloud, a remarkable drop in the lake’s water level, unusual behavior among other villagers—and yet. . . .

As the play goes on we mainly encounter what may be called different coping mechanisms. Cassie (Molly Fitzmaurice) is the most panicky, but then she’s the one who saw that huge, glowing cloud, while out with her boyfriend who, to add to her stress, wanted to view the phenomenon “romantically.” Like Cassie, Hana (Bianca Boragi), also freaking out, comes to two sisters, Irina (Chiara Klein) and Katrina (Emily Reeder) for advice. The sisters are presented as the bedrock dispensers of practical viewpoints. They are not easily swayed to hysterical outbursts, evincing a patient sense of the plausible and the practical, what is usually called, in sci-fi or horror movies, “a logical explanation.” Of the two, Irina seems more sympathetic; Katrina, more imperious and flinty. Eunice (Eunice Amo), another neighbor, expresses her gratitude for the kinds of heart-to-hearts the sisters provide.

Katrina (Emily Reeder), Hana (Bianca Boragi), Irina (Chiara Klein) (photo: Elizabeth Green)

Whether there is an explanation or not is something that Okada keeps us guessing about. And so, as viewers, our sense of implication becomes a matter of how we react to such provocations. Are the sisters so rational we want to scream? Is screaming Cassie or Hana so extreme we want to stifle her? How do we get to the truth? And, even if we know the truth, how should we act on it?

One way to deal with what we don’t understand, Okada suggests, with a sense of satire, is to satirize it. Maya (Amber Koonce) and Audrey (Caitlin Crombleholme) attempt to put on a play that mimics the kind of dread and dread-defeating rationales to which all the characters are susceptible. But it proves too much for Cassie. Art is no refuge, if in fact the entire village and its environs are contaminated. (Okada wrote the play in the wake of the 2011 nuclear reactor crisis in Japan, following the Tohoku earthquake, so that the play within the play is very much apt to the author’s situation in writing Current Location.)

Audrey (Caitlin Crombleholme), Maya (Amber Koonce) (photo: Elizabeth Green)

The Cab’s staging takes place in the round, the set itself consisting of two chairs that face each other as on a talk show. The actors open and close the play seated amidst the audience, which of course has the effect of including us in “the village.” In fact, the way in which the action includes the audience is much to the point here. Goulding’s cast make us feel their discomfort; they aren’t acting so much as reacting, and, it’s implied, how can we remain so detached when lives are at stake? With an all-female cast, the play deliberately avoids the presentation of males in authoritative roles, so that our sense of the crisis is filtered entirely through how these women speak to each other.

In the middle of the play or thereabouts an act of violence perpetrated by Katrina is staged with a kind of matter-of-fact solidarity by the others (except Irina). It’s not a do-or-die moment, where a definite threat must be suppressed, and the act feels almost ritualistic, a kind of group mind enactment we are suddenly complicit with. As with the final imagery of the play, we are asked: are you in or out—on the ship looking back at the deluded fools who remain behind, or, secure in the only world you’ve ever known, looking on at deluded fools who try to escape their own fears?

Current Location is a thought-provoking play, a stab into the complacency of the onlooker, an effort to suggest that catharsis should occur in real life. This production’s immediacy and lack of distancing helps make the play’s point.

Current Location
By Toshiki Okada
Translated by Aya Ogawa
Directed by Josh Goulding

Composer: Molly Joyce; Music Director: Chiara Klein; Dramaturg: Kari Olmon; Set Designer: Joo Hyun Kim; Lighting Designer: Erin Fleming; Costume Designer: Cole McCarty; Sound Designer: Megumi Katayama; Fight Director: Michael Commendatore; Stage Manager: John Carlin; Technical Director: Brian Pacelli; Assistant Technical Director: Jenna Heo; Producer: Chad Dexter Kinsman

Cast: Eunice Amo, Bianca Boragi, Caitlin Crombleholme, Molly Fitzmaurice, Chiara Klein, Amber Koonce, Emily Reeder

Yale Cabaret
October 27-29, 2016

Next up at the Cabaret this week:  Thunder Above, Deeps Below, by Yale School of Drama MFA and celebrated playwright A. Rey Pamatmat, directed by third-year actor Sebastian Arboleda, who also directed last’s season’s intriguing Cloud Tectonics, which also featured elements of magical realism, as does Pamatmat’s play. As the last play this season to be staged before the 2016 election, Thunder Above, Deeps Below asks us to look at the “quintessentially American lives” of characters who are “disenfranchised, queer, trans, or immigrants.” November 3-5.

You Say You Want a Revolution

Review of Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again., Yale Cabaret

Billed as a play not “well behaved,” Alice Birch’s Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. at Yale Cabaret, as directed by Jessica Rizzo with a cast of 12, behaves like a series of skits upon a theme: to revolutionize use of language and situational expectations. Each skit features a confrontation, in which characters—all, whether male or female, played here by women (with one exception)—address, more or less indirectly, a free-floating concept. The concept, we might say, is the unnamed elephant in the room, hovering like the array of pneumatic animals and toys that makes up the set. The elephant can be variously named—sexism, feminism, gender bias—but none of the terms do the amorphous creature full justice. And therein lies both frustration and courage.

The cast of Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. (Photo: Elizabeth Green)

It takes courage to articulate what’s at stake in one’s dissatisfaction, and the problem of trying to compel understanding in others invites frustration. Birch’s dialogues run along lines that could be painfully raw if not for a certain manic undertone that most of the performers share. That’s not to say that all strike the same note, but rather than an overall tone of baring and sharing drives the show forward until it more or less explodes, then subsides in a kind of post-orgasmic clarity and depression.

The tone of a suppressed hilarity rising to the surface begins with the show’s amazing opening dialogue in which Nientara Anderson as, ostensibly, a man, and Mara Valderrama Guerra attempt to articulate the better-left-unspoken language of sex. And therein lies their problem. How do males and females think about sex, what vocabulary is accepted, permitted, arousing, disgusting, and so on? Like good sex, one assumes, it’s all a matter of intuition. Yeah, but. The dialogue plays out with increasing fervor until Anderson is cowering and broken and Guerra blissful in her self-absorption. You can only hope the pair work it out somehow.

Asu Erden, Flo Low (Photo: Elizabeth Green)

In the scenes that follow, two or three speakers try to find some common ground for the sake of communication, and Birch is very keen at showing how people having trouble communicating communicates in a big way. There’s Ariel Sibert who is trying to graciously—and anxiously—articulate her problems with Franci Virgili asking her to be his wife (she’ll become “chattel” or a means to lower his income tax), using a very wry analogy; there’s Asu Erden trying, not so graciously and not at all anxiously, to articulate to her supervisor, Flo Low, why she just doesn’t want to work on Mondays and can’t see a “work bar” as a “real thing”; there’s Ashley Chang and Emily Reeder as vigilant supermarket employees who try to be understanding while nearly going postal at Shadi Ghaheri as a woman who seems to have been masturbating with watermelons in an aisle of the store (Birch likes to keep references to watermelons, potatoes, bluebells, and cheese circulating through the text); and there’s Aneesha Kudtarkar as a mother and grandmother who denies she gave birth or has any descendants while Anderson, as her increasingly distraught offspring, tries to get inside her head while dealing with a daughter (Jiyeon Kim) who can’t seem to function. The open-ended terms in which these scenes can be played and interpreted is much the point. Here, the series begins comical and gets increasingly tense and dysfunctional as we go.

Nientara Anderson (Photo: Elizabeth Green)

The explosion of the entire cast beating on the inflatables while various mini scenarios get sounded—beginning with Guerra stating both proudly and plaintively that porn never arouses her—plays like a psychiatric session that encourages abusing toys as some kind of compensation or release. It’s a satisfying anarchic free-for-all, well choreographed though not well behaved.

Jiyeon Kim, Ariel Sibert (Photo: Elizabeth Green)

At various times in the show, projections of Mao-like slogans blare across the background to exhort changing the terms of work or sex or procreation. Between some of the scenes, composer Kim adds some vocalizing and, during the supermarket scene, a musical track accompanies the prone woman’s rant about trying to be wet and open so as not to be “invaded,” about reducing the border between her body and the world. The music becomes a striking presence, then subsides, leaving Chang to venture “I don’t know what happens now.”

Chang gets the last word at the end of the play as well, speaking up as at least four of the other women begin to plan a feminine utopia. Her comment sounds a deeply pessimistic note that seems to follow on Sibert’s musing that “the thought”—revolution, one supposes—is not enough. Which may be a way of anticipating the criticism that sounding off in plays may not really change anything, whether in the relations between the sexes or in the relations of production or of reproduction, or of viewer to viewed.

The play’s title seems to suggest as much with those definite full-stops. Revolt, followed by revolt again. Repeat as needed.

Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again.
By Alice Birch
Directed by Jessica Rizzo

Composer: Jiyeon Kim; Dramaturg: Ilinca Todorut; Set Designer: An-Lin Dauber; Costume Designer: Mika Eubanks; Lighting Designer: Samuel Chan Kwan Chi; Sound Designer: Christopher Ross-Ewart; Projections Designer: Asad Pervaiz; Stage Manager: Alexandra Cadena; Producers: Rachel Shuey and Caitlin Crombleholme

Cast: Nientara Anderson, Ashley Chang, Asu Erden, Shadi Ghaheri, Mara Valderrama Guerra, Jeremy O. Harris, Jiyeon Kim, Aneesha Kudtarkar, Flo Low, Emily Reeder, Ariel Sibert, Franci Virgili

Yale Cabaret
September 22-24, 2016

May the Farce Be with You

Review of Antarctica! Which is to Say Nowhere, Yale Summer Cabaret

“Only the most oppressive seriousness can find a bond with lawless farce.”—Irving Howe

Howe’s comment about the relation of seriousness and farce might seem apropos while viewing Antarctica! Which is to Say Nowhere, Miranda Rose Hall’s new adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, directed by Elizabeth Dinkova at the Yale Summer Cabaret. The seriousness does indeed become a bit “oppressive” at times, but then the “lawless farce” of our times serves as excuse. Jarry’s chaotic and comic original was a successful effort to “épater les bourgeoisie” in turn-of-the-century Paris, and Hall’s incarnation aims to skewer not so much the things our day holds sacred as the things we should find shameful. Its targets—like climate change and our attachments to heated pools, central air, and personal computers—are apt to be matters that inspire liberal hand-wringing more than laughter, and to keep us at least chuckling is no small feat, in all seriousness.

Briefly (there are nearly 40 distinct scenes): the show introduces Roy (Marié Botha) and his wife Rena (Ricardo Dàvila) as bored but ambitious Americans who want to find new lands to conquer. Antarctica seems promising, so, accompanied by their newly hired “general” Linda (Emily Reeder), aka “General Electric,” they set off so Roy can become “middle management” for the royal family of Emperor Penguins (Yagil Eliraz, Rebecca Sherman Hampe, Steven Lee Johnson) that rule the creatures there. Roy, a blustering idiot with an insatiable appetite, is driven, Lady-Macbeth-style, by his power-mad wife, the brains of the outfit, who also entertains Linda’s desires to shut out Roy and take his place at Reena’s side.

A Penguin Leader (Patrick Foley) (photo: Christopher Thompson)

The blood-thirsty betrayal of the benign Emperor Penguin King (played with oafish aplomb by Eliraz) establishes a coup, but the son, Freddy Prince (Johnson, given to anxious, Hamletian soliloquy), escapes, possibly to wield revenge at a later date. Once in power, the Roys are as insufferable as you would expect, setting up fights to the finish between animals and glutting themselves on whatever comes to hand. As a portrait of American foreign policy, the Roys have all the subtlety of the self-serving Invasion of Iraq; in other words, they have the greed and none of the generosity of textbook versions of American intervention that have been tainted by—take your pick—slavery, the treatment of Native Americans, the war in the Philippines, the Bomb, the war in Vietnam, etc. And, as you’d expect with an American couple and a lifestyle of the rich and fatuous, soon enough there is the threat of civil war as Rena and Linda are imprisoned for insubordination. They escape and visit the North Pole—where an amusingly sleazy Santa (Eliraz) rules—and where Linda insists on enlisting an army of polar bears to overthrow Roy.

Roy (Marie Botha) (photo: Christopher Thompson)

As “subjects” to the self-installed American royalty, the creatures of Antarctica are all hapless and charmingly innocent. A late song in which Roy, very much a feeble Macbeth, tries to enlist his army of snowmen (Eliraz, Hampe) against his wife is a case in point. The song’s martial frenzy is undermined by the timid snowmen’s fear of just about everything. Christopher Ross-Ewart’s songs are entertaining and in the hands of the capable hands of the cast play the role tunes do in Disney cartoons—as moments of lyrical commentary or soliloquy. Rena’s punk trio’s statement of intent upon reaching Antarctica is a high-point, as is his touching duet with Reeder, and Foley's penguin parade is like a demented Dick Van Dyke from Mary Poppins.

Roy (Marie Botha, seated) with walrus henchman (Yagil Eliraz, Patrick Foley, Rebecca Hampe) and silhouettes of Rena (Ricardo Davila) and Linda (Emily Reeder) (photo: Kristian Rasmussen)

The show’s strength derives from the very capable clowning on view from an ensemble (Eliraz, Hampe, Foley) adept at silly voices and inhabiting cut-outs of creatures, and from Dávila’s remarkable Rena, played in non-campy drag, and somehow managing a rather heavy-handed treatise on the best way to abuse class divisions in the democratic process. Botha’s Roy is a fierce portrait of the kind of sociopath always capable of mirroring some portion of the American electorate. By way of characterization, Hall gives him a rambling discourse of disconnected white trash memories and a recurring dream—for him, too horrible to relate—of a french fry drowned in a tsunami of ketchup. As the driven Linda, Reeder seethes with a comic hostility that makes her appear, by the end, more power-mad than her unstable employers.

The transitions between the many, many short scenes—some a bit too similar in tone and pace—undermine the presentation at times, since simple blackouts can’t always suffice to get us from one scene to the next. The cast is game and nimble and to be commended for keeping so many creatures—penguins, seals, whales, etc.—distinct. And for making this varied visit through the unreclaimed id of our national psyche come alive with an oxymoronic sense of epic skit-comedy. Puppets and costumes by Sarah Nietfeld, including the penguin headgear used to surprisingly expressive effect, do much to set the tone, while set (An-Lin Dauber) and lighting (Andrew F. Griffin) work hard to establish—instantaneously—a variety of settings and events. The ending is a frantic case in point, as all levels of story and allegory converge in a moment that aims for the catharsis of being put on the spot.

Deceptively silly, Antarctica! Which is to Say Nowhere is angry as all true satire is, but, as theater, might benefit from a bit of Olympian laughter. But then, the show doesn’t make us laugh at ourselves so much as make us wonder why we’re able to laugh at all.

Antarctica! Which is to Say Nowhere
Based on Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry
By Miranda Rose Hall
Directed by Elizabeth Dinkova

Costume and Puppet Designer: Sarah Nietfeld; Set Designer: An-Lin Dauber; Sound Designer & Composer: Christopher Ross-Ewart; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Production Manager/Technical Director: William Hartley; Stage Manager: Cailin O’Rourke; Production Dramaturg: Gavin Whitehead; Run Crew: Ece Alpergun; Tap Dance Consultant: Leora Morris

Cast: Marié Botha; Ricardo Dàvila; Yagil Eliraz; Patrick Foley; Rebecca Sherman Hampe; Steven Lee Johnson; Emily Reeder

Yale Summer Cabaret
June 30-July 10, 2016

The Sweets of Sin

Preview, Yale Summer Cabaret

Sin. The fascination with sin goes way back, so much so that seven particular sins have traditional status as the “deadly sins” or cardinal sins. Which is to say “fundamental,” because these are sins that originate as thoughts or desires. In other words, you may be guilty of them even if you don’t commit them. And they lead to all kinds of naughtiness and a level of indulgence that . . . well, let’s just say you’ve been warned.

The Seven Deadly Sins, based on the list that Pope Gregory determined in the period often called “the Dark Ages,” are comprised of Sloth, Gluttony, Pride, Greed, Wrath, Envy, and Lust. The Seven Deadly Sins are also the thematic link for the Yale Summer Cabaret’s 2016 season.

To celebrate Sloth—which is a tendency to do nothing or to want to do nothing to a sinful extent—the Yale Summer Cabaret, led by “the Sin Sisters,” Co-Artistic Directors Elizabeth Dinkova and Jesse Rasmussen and Producing Director Emily Reeder, is kicking off this Friday, the 27th, with a party at the Cab space, 217 Park Street, 8 p.m. There will be actors and costumes and activities almost certainly but we might say that the main idea is it’s summer and time to relax and take it easy. Which includes taking in the rest of the season.

The season proper starts off on Thursday, June 2nd, with the opening of Alice in Wonderland, directed by Rasmussen and featuring Sydney Lemmon as Alice, abetted by a cast of actors—Marie Botha, Paul Cooper, Ricardo Davila, Brontë England-Nelson, Patrick Foley—who get to populate the mind-bending world Lewis Carroll created to delight little Alice Liddell ages ago. He wrote the two-part tale as a fabric of brain-teasers, drawing on puns and parodies as well as chess strategies and mathematical formulas. Some of the figures—the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter—and sayings—“Off with their heads!” “Jabberwocky”—have become overly familiar, the stuff of kiddie classics. The basics of the story have served Disney well, both as cartoon and live-action animation, and some version of Carroll’s whimsical, verbal, and at times surreal work has been given who knows how many live and filmed treatments over the decades.

The version Rasmussen and company are mounting comes via Andre Gregory—a maverick theater personage, of My Dinner with Andre fame—and dates from a time when “counter-culture” was all the rage (much like the rage for Bernie now). That’s not to say that Gregory politicized the story (which some believe was fairly politicized already), but rather that a story set in a “Wonderland” sets off allegorical possibilities.

How will the Summer Cab transform this most transformational of tales? You have till June 19th to find out. The sin to be explored: Gluttony—or, Look what happens when you listen to voices saying “eat me, drink me.” The notion that appetite can stand for a capacity to experience much at once, as we say “a glutton for punishment,” helps fill out this particular sin’s applicability to our Alice, the girl who finds things “curiouser and curiouser,” and whose curiosity seems insatiable.

A brief spot of Pride occurs on June 24th when the Summer Cabaret will hold a staged reading of a new play by rising third-year YSD playwright Tori Sampson. The play Cadillac Crew is set in Virginia during the Civil Rights movement, with an all-female cast. Sampson, in plays like This Land Was Made—about the period in which Black Panther Huey Newton was accosted by the cops, with fatalities—and Some Bodies Travel, her collaboration with Jiréh Breon Holder at this year’s Carlotta Festival, has a knack for exploring historical situations with a very contemporary sensitivity to the way the past inflects the issues of our present. One night only, June 24, 8 p.m.

The rest of the summer consists of Antartica! Which Is To Say Nowhere, Miranda Rose Hall's new adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s bizarre Ubu Roi, set in the land way down under now being colonized by greedy Americans, directed by Dinkova, June 30-July 10; Adam Geist, by German playwright Dea Loher, an odyssey of redemption for a young man prone to wrath and yet in some ways an innocent, directed by Dinkova, July 21-30; Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love, directed by Rasmussen, in an update of the classical tale of a stepmother lusting after her women-spurning stepson, August 4-14. And, for an added event, don’t forget the face-off of sound designers/musicians Frederick Kennedy and Christopher Ross-Ewart on July 15 for “Envy: The Concert.”

More on the individual shows as we get closer to their production. In the meantime, take it easy, eat, drink, and be proud of yourself. The team at the Summer Cab is aiming to “shock our audience out of complacency” (which sounds like it might be the biggest sin of all in this fraught US election year). Just remember, pride goeth before destruction . . .

Yale Summer Cabaret
Seven Deadly Sins

Co-Artistic Directors: Elizabeth Dinkova, Jesse Rasmussen
Producing Director: Emily Reeder

Yale Cabaret
217 Park Street
May 27- August 14, 2016

Devising Shakespeare

The Yale Summer Cabaret prepares to launch Midsummer

In the basement of 217 Park Street, home of the Yale Summer Cabaret, transformation is afoot. First, there is the yearly conversion of the space from what it once was to what it will be. That transformation, so far, involves a load of red paint and a lot of elbow grease to eradicate the décor of last season’s Cab.

Then there’s the transformation that is taking place upstairs in the studio space where this summer’s first show has rehearsed for two weeks. That transformation involves remaking A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of Shakespeare’s best-known and oft-produced comedies, into something surprising and never-before-seen. A sea-change into something rich and strange?

That’s the intent of Artistic Director Sara Holdren and Co-Artistic Director Rachel Carpman who have adapted the play into a show, called simply Midsummer, that draws upon virtually every play in the Shakespeare corpus. Holdren, who directs the show, is out to “turn the play inside out,” and “stand it on its head.” MND, if anyone doesn't know, is the play with the court of Athens, represented by Theseus, and the woods, to which the lovers flee and where they get mixed up, and where the fairies frolic whilst their King Oberon and Queen Titania fight over a changeling child, and where “the mechanicals” (workers) rehearse their hamfisted attempt to adapt, for the court’s pleasure, the love story of Pyramus and Thisbe. In far too many handlings of the play, one or another of these realms gets short-shrift, but Midsummer aims to recast the emphasis of the play, finding the mix that will manifest as much Shakespearean magic as possible.

Emily Reeder, Rachel Carpman, Shaunette Renee Wilson, Melanie Field, Sara Holdren, Flo Low, Andrew Griffin

To create the transformative landscape she has in mind for her Rough Magic Company, Holdren has asked two scenic designers, Chris Thompson and Claire Deliso, to collaborate. While this is a new endeavor for both, the old “two heads are better than one” adage seems to be true. Thompson and Deliso find that, at the points where either might be stumped at making a choice, having the other’s input gets them through the impasse more quickly and agreeably. And, with the show opening next Thursday for a three-week run, time is of the essence.

Though, it should be said, not as much as is usual for the Cab, which, in term-time, puts up 18 new shows weekly. In summer, things slow closer to the prep time for the Yale School of Drama shows (all but one cast member are either current YSDers or just graduated). For actors in Summer Cab such as Melanie Field and Shaunette Renée Wilson, the extended rehearsal time seems like an almost embarrassing luxury. Over three weeks for rehearsal while not working, as Wilson says, on “at least five other things?” Magical indeed.

What’s more, Holdren professes the ideal of a theatrical troupe—an ad hoc body that forms and maintains itself over time, treating all its productions to a collaborative spirit. That working ethos attracted Field and Wilson from the very first try-outs. Auditioning actors were asked, unusually, to collaborate in group scenes, and the exercise, Field says, provided the actors with a “sense of the generosity to devise and play and to listen and get in tune,” and that in turn promotes the adventures outside the box that the company is after all summer long.

For Andrew Griffin, lighting designer, part of the incentive to create theater in a basement is his working relationship with the team Holdren has gathered. He and Thompson and sound designer Sinan Zafar all did truly magical work last fall for Holdren’s thesis show, The Master and Margarita. Their task is to make lightning strike twice, and to create some of the same artistry at probably a fraction of the cost. Magic, yes, but “rough magic,” don’t forget. Cabaret shows take place in a basement that is also a restaurant, and audiences have to be willing to enter into the spirit of imaginative make-believe that is key to all theater but particularly true of the Cab.

The Rough Magic Company

One of the aspects of the show that came out of the team’s initial efforts was a decision to focus a bit more on the “changeling” child that Titania and Oberon are dueling over, another was the idea of making the play the mechanicals enact relevant to the story of the lovers lost in the woods. Improve upon the Bard? Purists will object! Such cautions tend to make Holdren a bit truculent.

“Shakespeare, as a living canon that will last long after we’re gone, can certainly hold his own, no matter what is done with him,” she says. Her approach seeks to avoid two pitfalls: not making the dramatic world clear, as though we should all know it already; and treating as necessary what might be only provisional. The important point is whether one sees Shakespeare as contemporary theater able to be transformed by deliberate re-invention, or as a classic text that must be adhered to.

Carpman calls their process “devising Shakespeare,” and Holdren talks of “an exquisite corpse” approach, like the surrealist method of group composition wherein each participant writes a line of a poem without knowing what precedes it or what will follow. In the end, what might seem a chaos of individual lines and voices becomes “a poem” by means of the magic of formal intention. Everyone intended the poem and the collective spirit guides the result. What might A Midsummer Night’s Dream be if our Will felt able to crib freely from himself throughout? And don’t we, as viewers of so many Shakespeare plays, cross-reference and confuse them all anyway?

In Midsummer, it’s not only Bottom—or perhaps not even Bottom—who will be “translated,” but Shakespeare’s text itself will undergo metamorphosis, with an emphasis on the “meta.” The Rough Magic Company are in pursuit of what Holdren calls “the magical heart of the text,” and that can’t be found without surgical intervention.

The Yale Summer Cabaret’s Rough Magic season opens next Thursday, June 4, with Midsummer, an original adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, playing through June 21.

Yale Summer Cabaret
Midsummer
Based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the plays of William Shakespeare
Adapted by Rachel Carpman and Sara Holdren
Directed by Sara Holdren

June 4-21, 2015

Rough Magic Coming Soon

Tickets on sale now for the Yale Summer Cabaret

At the close of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero, a magician and, to many, a stand-in for the playwright, says he will abjure his “rough magic”—right after he cleans up a few loose ends. The Yale Summer Cabaret, which opens June 4th, takes its title from the phrase Prospero uses to characterize what we might call his “process.” To artistic director Sara Holdren the phrase is suggestive of theater as a means to “reawaken wonder.” Her troupe at the Summer Cab this year, called “The Rough Magic Company,” have banded together “around ideas of enchantment,” of finding a way to do theater that keeps alive both parts of the phrase: “rough,” as in worked-out together, as when you “rough out” a design, but also “rough” as in not smoothed into the safe and predictable; “magic,” as that element of unpredictable mystery that makes live theater seem sometimes a feat by magicians.

Holdren, a director who will graduate from the Yale School of Drama this month, will run the Summer Cab with three other women: Associate Director Rachel Carpman, Managing Director Flo Low, and Associate Managing Director Emily Reeder. They will be working with a nine person acting company, mostly of other YSDers, selected from auditions, and two guest directors: Andrej Visky, a director graduating in May, and Leora Morris, a director finishing her second year of study in YSD.

The primary values for this year’s Cab are “joy, collaboration, generosity, invention, and play.” To Holdren, these words capture the method in the magic: the joy of working together, the generosity needed to collaborate effectively, and the invention and playfulness that allow for inspiration and surprise. The aim is to fine the kind of big, crazy productions able to defy the possibilities afforded by the basement space on Park Street that is the Cabaret. The mandate this year is to find new approaches, both with classic texts, such as Shakespeare and Marlowe, as well as original work never before seen. All productions will be created by the respective play’s director and the company.

clockwise from center, top: Sara Holdren, Flo Low, Emily Reeder, Rachel Carpman

One particularly inspiring event for Holdren in generating the kind of collaborative effort she has in mind was a visit in the spring to Yale by Dmitri Krymov, the innovative Russian director. As Holdren says, Krymov’s one week workshop, in which a performance of Three Sisters was generated by performers and designers, put on the table her own ideal of how theater should work. “It was a beautiful coincidence” that her own hopes for the Summer Cab season should be presented in such a timely fashion to her fellow YSDers. Krymov, who was been a visual artist as a well as a scenic designer, has developed methods to involve the entire company in rigorous collaboration, or what Holdren calls “an explosive playground” of invention and innovation, driven not by a given play per se, but by the company. As she says, she wished “everyone skeptical about devised theater could be in the room” during Krymov’s seminar. “Nothing was extraneous,” everything came into play in creating the piece.

Holdren’s ideal will get put into practice this summer with a dream group of designers, who worked with Holdren on her truly impressive thesis show, The Master and Margarita, last fall, and a cast of actors who, in audition, were asked to create pieces together rather than simply present monologues. The tech team consists of: Chris Thompson, Claire DeLiso, Set Design; Joey Moro, Lighting and Set Design; Andrew F. Griffin, Lighting Design; Haydee Zelideth, Costume Design; Kate Marvin, Sinan Refik Zafar, Sound Design; Rasean Davonte Johnson, Projection Design; Lee O'Reilly, Production Manager; Scott Keith, Technical Director; Victoria Whooper, Emily Zepeda, Stage Manager. The acting company features: Chalia La Tour, Melanie Field, Leland Fowler, Niall Powderly, Christopher Ross-Ewart, Elizabeth Stahlmann, Josephine Stewart, Shaunette Renée Wilson.

Such are the makings of the Rough Magic Company. Now for the summer’s offerings.

First up, from June 4 to June 18, is Midsummer, an adaptation, predominantly, of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Holdren, who has directed at least six Shakespeare plays, beginning as an undergrad at Yale, says she has worked with “a whole lot of cut texts” but “never did a full-on adaptation.” Holdren and her co-adaptor Carpman are aiming at something closer to a devised piece, “riffing on” MND, but also working-in lines from other Shakespeare plays to create something entirely new and never before seen.

As Holdren describes it, the worlds of the play are perfect for Rough Magic’s aims: there is the “real world” of Athens, from which the lovers escape into the woods; there is the contrived world that the mechanicals—Bottom and the rest—try to invent via theater; then there is the magical world of the fairies, ruled by Oberon and Titania. Holdren says she chose Shakespeare’s popular and possibly too-often-produced play for the challenge of finding novelty in a play too easily dismissed as trivial. Rough Magic’s Midsummer is “a little darker” than the common view of MND, which, Holdren says, is “so wonderful but often so bad” in performance. Her hope is that the novelty of the Rough Magic approach will “bring in people with a love of Shakespeare as well as people who are skeptical” about the prospect of breathing new life into such a familiar play. The audience should “see something different” than they’ve seen before, and should be “surprised by the play again.” That would be a good example of the kind of re-enchantment Rough Magic has in mind.

The summer’s second play, running from July 9-July 18, is a piece wholly devised for Summer Cabaret by the company, conceived and directed by Leora Morris. Love holds a lamp in this little room, the title, is taken from a poem by the subject of the play: the actress/poet/painter/ Adah Isaacs Menken, a mercurial bohemian spirit of the mid to late 1800s.

Ostensibly raised Christian as a creole of a mixed race union in New Orleans, Menken married several times, and in one of her marriages became a convert to Judaism, her husband’s faith, and a student of the Kabbalah. Having, in other words, a rather fluid identity and a rather unique self-conception, she was most famous for riding a horse nude, or at least in a nude suit, on stage. She was also a lover of Mark Twain and a bit of a femme fatale who composed a suicide note to the public before her failed suicide attempt. Morris’ play is drawn from Menken’s life and work to investigate what Holdren calls “her multiplicity of self,” showing that what might be seen as the vagaries of her life was a means to avoid creative pigeonholes and to celebrity the otherness of identity. Today, Menken would likely be a performance artist. Think of the play as the kind of piece this intriguing and restless figure might write and appear in.

The theme of figures who risk damnation for their activities is always popular because inherently dramatic. It was present in Holdren’s thesis show The Master and Margarita, and it was present in Andrej Visky’s thesis show, Molière’s Don Juan. From July 23-August 1, the Summer Cab will present the granddaddy of all workings of the theme, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, directed by Visky.

What intrigues both Holdren and Visky in such tales is what Holdren calls “an affinity for stories that don’t fit” the usual expectations of theater. Such plays are the expansive and “uncontainable” odd ducks that stretch the boundaries of theater and the limits of the team’s talents. The attraction of Marlowe’s Faustus is that it concerns a hero who is “modernist avant le lettre.” Or at least that’s what will become clear in this new adaptation by Visky and dramaturg Kee-Yoon Nahm, that may create an interplay between Marlowe’s Faustus and Goethe’s Faust, and will use puppets for the more demonic aspects of the tale. One of the attractions of Faustus is the character of Mephistopheles, a “tormented trickster” who, as a necessary evil, draws upon and the furthers the very notion of a stage villain. Holdren calls the play a “rollicking romp” and the press release says audiences will experience “a world gone to hell. And a hand puppet.”

For the final play of the summer, Holdren, who directs, turns to a popular, fairly recent play by Yale School of Drama instructor Sara Ruhl: a theatrical adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s unorthodox novel Orlando, August 6-August 15. The story of a character who lives successively as a man and as a woman, and who exists from Elizabethan times to what was, when the novel was published, the present day of World War II, Orlando presents not only a consideration of what difference, if any, gender makes, but also a mini history of the fortunes of England.

Holdren claims a long-enduring interest in the possibilities of adapting novels for the stage. Her originary moment for the fascination was watching the 9 hour adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby on DVD as a child. Her dream adaptation would be Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. Her amazingly successful presentation of the play derived from Bulgakov’s wildly unorthodox novel The Master and Margarita certainly attests to her commitment to the task. What interests her is the live aspect of storytelling, and the issue of how to involve the narrative voice in the theatrical presentation. Ruhl’s use of Woolf’s voice in Orlando Holdren finds exemplary, particularly when one realizes that there is no dialogue per se in Woolf’s novel. This means that Ruhl had unusual freedom in creating monologues for the characters as well as choric speeches to further the action. And Ruhl’s way with the text gives the director a like freedom to “break down the different roles at will.”

For Holdren, Orlando as the final play takes us back to the Elizabethan worlds of Shakespeare and Marlowe, while its gender-changing hero/ine complements the racial and artistic ambiguity of Adah Isaacs Menken. Holdren’s fellow directors—Leora Morris and Andrej Visky—share a “generous imaginative spirit” and are skilled at “soliciting ideas from the entire company” when working on a play. For Holdren, the Summer Cabaret this year is the perfect black box in which to engage in an artistic process that will yield company-based, collaborative theater, with plays that will shift genre and feature heroes that will shape-shift before our very eyes. All of which will further the “rough magic” of the Cabaret for its fans and followers and new-comers and discoverers alike.

For tickets and more information: summercabaret.org

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