Peek-a-Boo, I See You

Third-year YSD director Dustin Wills will be remembered as the guy who, recently, transformed the viewing experience at the Yale Cabaret. As Co-Artistic Director of the Yale Summer Cabaret 2013, he altered the playing space to create a deep thrust stage, doing away with the tendency to remake the place with every new play. In his production of The Maids, he goes further, creating a room, or rooms, within the room that is the Cabaret. The premise of this production is that the audience are voyeurs and eavesdroppers, positioned outside panes of glass, spying on what happens in someone’s apartment.

Whose apartment? Why, Madame’s. And exactly what are her maids, Solange and Claire, getting up to while their mistress is away? Solange plays Claire and Claire plays Madame. The point of the masquerade is that moment when the two, nearly fainting for a love they dare not give in to, bond in the death of someone—most likely (the real) Madame. Add to this the fact that Solange may or may not want her sister to die (as Madame), or may or may not want to die as her sister (dying with Madame). In other words, the world of The Maids is a world where desire and death (together) are the thrills. All the rest is masquerade.

Wills’ production adds an extra dimension to this dress-up game. Traditionally played with a cast of three female actors, The Maids was conceived by its author, Jean Genet, as enacted by a trio of male actors playing women. In following this intention, Wills’ The Maids becomes a drag show of sorts, with men masquerading as women, but this dimension also makes The Maids an even more complex play because we are watching men playact men who are playacting women. Wills’ cast begins in high camp and I’m sure a few playgoers seeing the play for the first time might assume they are watching a gay sex farce. Chris Bannow (Solange/Claire) and Mickey Theis (Claire/Madame) enact their parts with a kind of personal theatricality that we are encouraged to think is what goes on behind closed doors—and undraped windows—with these two, able to “act out” in private. Privy to this playacting within the play, we can only begin to determine its point as we watch, trying hard to follow the action and the whispers, as the pair, early on glad only in “tighty whities,” move about Kate Noll’s sumptuously tacky interior space.

Bannow and Theis are two of the most accomplished actors in the YSD program, and here they do some of the best work either has done. It’s not easy suggesting the subtle psycho-sexual drama between these two “sisters,” moving through a range of moods—passionate, bitchy, frightened, bullying, beseeching—but that is what this play requires. Bannow’s Solange is who we meet first, performing autoerotic acts solo—the entire play is in some ways a protracted sexual fantasy that is also an examination of power relations between classes and within gender. Much of the struggle here is between Claire and Solange who enact everything from sibling rivalry to lovers’ tiffs to actors’ differences of artistic vision. It’s all in the game. As the prettier one, who should be the object of Madame’s unspoken homoerotic desire, Theis’s performance is something of a revelation, as he finds, as it were, his inner little girl. As Madame, first-year actor Andrew Burnap has a regal height and a distracted air, but doesn’t quite seem the mistress of this threesome.

About the staging: Wills’ decision to enclose the playing space stems from his view that sight-lines in the Cab are always a problem. Certainly there is rarely the full frontal presentation common to most theaters. Here, the Cab’s strongest feature—the fact that the audience and the players occupy the same space—is obviated in striking fashion. Bold, innovative, the design for The Maids makes a drama out of our efforts to see the drama. What you see at the Cab is often dependent on your vantage point but, here, some vantages afford a view of the action on camera, as though watching a surveillance stream.

No more telling staging of how we pry—the idea of our age as one lacking in any sense of privacy is common—could be imagined. The implications about private life and the public imagining of intimacy provide a layer of suggestion to The Maids that goes beyond the old upstairs/downstairs dichotomy that can seem a bit stuffy by now. Inspired and arresting, The Maids is unsavory and seductive, making us all somewhat suspect, like people watching other people watch other people have sex.

The Maids By Jean Genet Directed by Dustin Wills

Dramaturg: Tanya Dean; Set: Kate Noll; Lights: Oliver Wason; Sound: Tyler Kieffer; Costumes: Hunter Kaczorowski; Technical Director: Rose Bochansky; Stage Manager: Molly Henninghausen; Producer: Lauren Wainwright; Creative Consultants: Michelle McGregor, Sophie von Haselberg; Sound Mixer: Sinan Zafar; Carpenters: Nick Vogelpohl, Sean Walters

The Yale Cabaret February 20-22, 2014

Back to the CAB

Last weekend the Yale Cabaret offered its second-ever Yale School of Drag—memorable for many things, including Lupita Nyong’o drag, but if you missed it, then you missed it. And if you saw it, far be it from me to tell you what you saw. This week the Cab is back with the first of the eight shows that continue the second part of the 2013-14 Season. Artistic Directors Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, and Kelly Kerwin have arrived at an interesting mix of shows. Five are pre-existing plays, two are never-before-seen productions, and one is a mixture: a devised setting for known pieces (a bit like Radio Show in the fall).

The first three shows are scheduled beginning this week and for the next two weeks, then a two-week break, three more shows, a week dark, and then the final two. Got it? Here’s what’s coming:

Cab 11 is The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs, proposed by 2nd-year Set Designer Adrian Frausto (whose excellent work on Hedda Gabler closed recently) and directed by 3rd-year Director Cole Lewis, whose varied and unsettling thesis show The Visit was offered in the fall. The play, running for the Valentine's Day weekend, looks at the darker side of romance with a revisiting of the Bluebeard tale of the wealthy man who marries a woman and gives her everything, except . . . she can’t go into that room at the top of the stairs. If your Valentine is the kind who loves a good scare, then this is the place to be. And when was the last time the Cab offered a thriller based on tension and suspense? Written by Canadian playwright Carole Fréchette, the play, Dibo promises, will offer an unusual configuration of the Cab playing space and, with its theme of trust in romance, is perhaps all-too apropos for Valentine’s Day. February 13-15

Next comes Jean Genet’s psychological drama The Maids, proposed by 3rd-year Director Dustin Wills, Co-Artistic Director of Yale Summer Cabaret 2013, whose startlingly unusual Peter Pan played in December. The play, which usually takes place among three women—the mistress and her two maids—will be played by three males, “performing rituals of gender,” according to Dubowski, within a staged space constructed by Kate Noll with sound design by Tyler Kieffer. The idea is to present us with a space full of mirrors and different lines of sight so that the audience is placed in the roles of voyeurs and eavesdroppers, spying on what the maids get-up to behind the scenes. Mainstays of the Summer Cab 2013, Mickey Theis and Chris Bannow, will be joined by first-year actor, Andrew Burnap. February 20-22

The third show before the break is He Left Quietly, proposed by 1st-year Director Leora Morris, a play by Yaël Farber about Duma Kumalo, a man sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit in apartheid South Africa. Kumalo’s story, which involves a stay-of-execution delivered on the day the death sentence was to be carried out, followed by another four years of incarceration for a total of 7 years in prison, is a story of a man’s spirit triumphing over unspeakable deprivations. The show, which features three 2nd-year actors, Ato Blankson-Wood, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Maura Hooper, returns us to the dark realities of apartheid South Africa and a search for justice. February 27-March 1

After two dark weeks, the Cab will return with The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion, a partly devised piece proposed by 1st-year Dramaturg David Bruin. The show will transform the Cab into a Greenwich Village basement in the early 1960s where beatniks and bohemians gather to check out two one-acts by two of their own: Edward Albee and María Irene Fornés. The production takes us back to when these darlings of the theatrical world were still “up-and-coming” and where the surroundings for the play are part of the play in a time of porous conceptions of theater. March 20-22

Cab 15 is We Fight We Die by Long Island-born playwright Timothy J. Guillot and directed by 1st-year playwright Jiréh Breon Holder; the play looks at the fate of the work of graffiti artist Q in his tussle with City Hall, which aims to stamp out his form of art. With a Greek chorus rapping to us about the struggle and original works of art by MFA students in the Yale School of Art, the show provides an interesting collaboration between art forms and media that should be aurally and visually challenging, and, with the recent obliteration of 5Pointz in Long Island City, very timely. March 27-29

Next comes an unusual devised piece from 3rd-year actor and Co-Artistic Director of Summer Cabaret 2013, Chris Bannow. The source material: The Mystery Boy, Bannow’s sister’s original 126-page novel, written two years ago when she was 11. With 2nd-year dramaturg Helen Jaksch (seen in the fall as M in Crave) co-directing, the ensemble cast will be put through their paces with a love triangle, adventures involving the Mafia, vacation romance, and the various pleasures and perils of social media as the lingua franca of our current pre-teen world. April 3-5

2nd-year playwright Ryan Campbell—his Dead Ends was a studio play this past fall—offers his own A New Saint for a New World, directed by 2nd-year director Sara Holdren, who directed Tiny Boyfriend in the fall. The premise: Joan of Arc wants to return to earth; God finally agrees on the condition that she not start any wars or revolutions. Conceived as “a real big play for a small room,” Saint considers the possibilities for faith in 2014 NYC and the frustrations faced by a heroic crusader forbidden to crusade. April 17-19

Cab 18, the last of the season, might be a somewhat obvious choice: The Brothers Size by Tarell Alvin McCraney, the YSD graduate playwright who recently won a Yale Windham-Campbell Writing Prize and a MacArthur “genius” Award in the same year. Three 1st year actors, Jonathan Majors, Julian Elijah Martinez, and Galen Kane proposed the play, written while McCraney was a third-year at YSD, and made their case that it’s a play they have an urgent need to enact due to their personal histories and the unique opportunity offered by the Cab. Directed by Luke Harlan, the play is the story of two brothers—Ogun runs a car-repair shop, the other, Oshoozi, recently released from prison, comes to work for him—and a third man, Elegba, also come from jail, who visits to bring Oshoozi a gift. Set in the bayou country of Louisiana and involving music and African myths, the play should end the Cab’s 46th Season with a strong finish as YSD pays tribute to one of its own. April 24-26

So, that’s what you can look forward to in the weeks ahead. See you at the Cab!

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven, CT

Season 46 Co-Artistic Directors: Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, Kelly Kerwin Managing Director: Shane Hudson