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

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