This Island Earth

Review of Will Eno’s Middletown The Yale Summer Cabaret paid tribute to its 40-year existence last night and the festivities included a performance of Will Eno’s Middletown, directed by 2014 Co-Artistic Director Luke Harlan. It’s a very fitting match as the play opens with a welcoming monologue that extends to “everyone,” and certainly feels right as an address to “fellow Middletonians,” including the board members, supporters, founders, patrons, fans, and other friends of the Summer Cab who showed up for the evening. Ato Blankson-Wood’s delivery of the opening greeting invited comparisons to a stand-up comic working the crowd as his pacing had to accommodate bursts of laughter and delight from the audience. It would be hard to imagine a more apropos setting for the opening speech, or a better speech for the occasion.

Middletown certainly puts the Summer Cab on its mettle. It’s a large, sprawling play with 11 cast members, including a young teen (Livia Sarnelli), an ingenious set—complete with trapdoors—graced by Nick Hussong’s animated projections of drawings that outline backdrops—a stop sign, a tree, a house, and, at one point, a NASA control panel—and musical interludes that cover the numerous set-changes with the brio I associate with unspecified-TV show breaks. Eno’s play is also the most easily likeable of the Summer Cab’s offerings this year, full of hominess, wit, and a deep regard for the uncertainties of the human condition. Though there are laughs, there really aren’t jokes. The humor is of the “laughing at ourselves” variety. And though there’s death and dysfunction and an occasional threat of violence, the dramatic stakes don’t seem too daunting. Or rather say the stakes don’t seem heightened for dramatic effect. The stakes of the play are as high and deep as life itself.

A play you might easily have in mind while watching Middletown is Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Both plays use the setting of an “Anytown” as the vehicle for meditations about what makes humanity human, and both want us to contemplate the aeons that preceded our modern burgh’s grasp of its niceties and the vastness that surrounds its little plot of ground. The planet itself is just such a “plot” and Eno’s play nicely brings us back again and again to thoughts of this island earth: a monument propped on a village green, a landscaper planting a tree and digging up rocks (with a wink at Hamlet’s gravedigger), a story about a rock a rather dissolute young man found as a child, recalled by the town’s famous son—Greg, an astronaut—as he orbits earth, looking at the rock that is our world.

Eno’s play is very much a verbal construct. Dialogue and speeches lose their point if presented too naturalistically, and so he throws in odd asides and self-reflections, and, for some characters, occasional awareness of the audience, to keep the audience off-guard. Every character that appears before us—a Cop (Matt Raich), a Librarian (Annelise Lawson), a Tour Guide (Shaunette Renée Wilson), Tourists (Julian Elijah Martinez and Jenelle Chu)—may seem obvious and easily grasped, and yet Eno wants us to feel the friction between the role and the person in that role. At one point the landscaper (Martinez) and the Cop, his brother-in-law, trade quips about “person” as a temporary job. The deep “need” (as the male tourist expresses it) is to find things about life on earth that can please, amuse or inspire us, distracting us from the presence of death that is everywhere around us, much as outer space surrounds our globe.

The spaciness of certain elements of the show are grounded by what seems to be the budding romance—or maybe just strong personal attachment—between newly arrived neglected wife and soon-to-be-mother Mary (Maura Hooper) and vaguely employed handyman and hobbyist John (Aaron Bartz). Played with forthright charm, their meetings are cute and coy with a kind of anxious agreeableness, commiserating on “dark nights” and sleeping troubles and, generally, trying to figure out what living together in the same place at the same time actually means. Thus the play’s many gestures at how we all occupy similar places keep us implicated, as well as letting us consider how “sense of place” is communicated by what is simply “understood” by inhabitants.

Central to Eno’s vision is the character of Mechanic (Aubbie Merrylees, tremulous and troubled) who provides, in his disaffected and direct asides and uneasy friction with the status quo, the soul of the play. Suspected of everything from bashing a mailbox to writing a dirty word on a sign, Mechanic is the loose cannon, remembered by the Librarian for an odd essay he wrote as a child, and currently appearing in costumes to entertain kids at the hospital as part of a plea deal for an unnamed offense. The play opens with the Cop giving him a hard time for sitting on a bench and a demand that he feel “awe” while being strangled with a billy club. Mechanic becomes something of a Greek chorus or audience surrogate—crouching outside windows, eavesdropping, giving us time to think of some reasons he started drinking again—and, after a sudden death scene, his dance and chant while dressed in a Native American costume epitomizes the play’s sense of how the inauthentic can become authentic (enough) when we need it.

In general, the cast works hard at the timing and pitch of Eno’s carefully calibrated dialogue, which shines at its highest gloss in the exchange between Ato Blankson-Wood’s doctor and Maura Hooper’s musing, bemused, and very pregnant Mary. The doctor’s well-meant string of palliatives about how to behave toward an infant are filled with Eno’s sense both of human precariousness and our (so far) successful instinct for survival. Likewise the scene amongst audience members just before the intermission (which knowingly trumps the chitchat at Cab tables) points toward another of Eno’s great themes: how language communicates and miscommunicates simultaneously, so that, as Mary says, we’re all “just making different sounds with [our] mouth[s].”

Playful and profound, Eno’s Middletown throws its arms around the world in a loving embrace while also retaining a sense of the prickly absurdities and inconveniences that rankle our togetherness in our placid orbit. Luke Harlan’s ambitious production, mounted under the constraints of the Summer Cab’s relentless schedule, highlights the tight weave of the social fabric and the warmth of breathing bodies. This is theater that's as alive as you are.

Middletown has three more showings: tonight and tomorrow night at 8, and Sunday night at 7.

Middletown By Will Eno Directed by Luke Harlan

Scenic Designer: Christopher Thompson; Costume Designer: Steven M. Rotramel; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Sound Designer: Kate Marvin; Projection Designer: Nick Hussong; Stage Manager: Avery Trunko

Cast: Aaron Bartz, Ato Blankson-Wood, Jenelle Chu, Maura Hooper, Annelise Lawson, Julian Elijah Martinez, Aubie Merrylees, Matt Raich, Stephanie Rolland, Livia Sarnelli, Shaunette Renée Wilson

Photographs by Christopher Ash

Yale Summer Cabaret July 31-August 10, 2014

There's No Success Like Failure

Review of We Are Proud to Present... Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, between the Years 1884-1915, the third play in Yale Summer Cabaret’s 40th Anniversary season, isn’t a play so much as a provocation.

As directed by Co-Artistic Director Jessica Holt, the play is willing to demonstrate the way theater can fail, even the way it can fail to get off the ground. We watch a group of actors—designated only by number, Actor 1 through 6, or by generic tags—White Man, Black Man—try to put together a presentation on the genocide of the Herero tribe by colonial Germans in the years designated. When compared to the murderous machinations that the Third Reich perpetrated in Europe, the near-extermination of the Hereros, like the near-extermination of certain Native American tribes, is generally not so well acknowledged by history, in part because, in the African case, the methods and the outcome are not so well documented. All that the cast—and presumably the playwright—has to draw upon are letters home written by German soldiers, strangers in a strange land trying to keep up their spirits by addressing “the girl they left behind” who is figured in the play as one omni-Fraulein, Sarah (Jenelle Chu).

The provocation of the script, then, doesn’t come simply from that fact that, in letting us in on “the process” by which characters are formed and situations created, we have to accept how tenuous all that is, but from the fact that these actors—mostly out of their depth, and led by Actor Six (Shaunette Renée Wilson) as a kind of den mother—confront themes of racism and colonialism and genocide and must find a way to make such matters “portrayable.” And that, as they learn, is nearly impossible.

Which is a way of saying that Drury’s play points out the lack of clothing on almost any emperor you’d care to name, not least the idea of “historical verisimilitude” or “realism.” Every staging is an approximation of something but that “something” is never “what actually happened.” Even the letters back home—the documents, the evidence—say little about what is really going on. Granted, there may be ways to make a documentary on the subject, but that’s not the purpose of theater: theater has to create a representation, it must find a way to make an audience experience something that—in this case—it would probably rather not experience. Why do certain peoples detest and work to destroy certain other peoples? Why are certain peoples viewed as “less than human” by certain other peoples who have decided that they alone meet the criteria for “human”? There are no adequate answers to these questions and yet Drury’s play—and the commendable cast and crew of the Summer Cab production—attempt to grapple with them, for our benefit.

In the early going, there are fertile moments of vaudevillian goofing that let us find some amusement in how theater treats us to amusement. By giving us young actors (a strength of the production is that, as seldom happens, the actors are supposed to be and are twentysomethings) not too versed in history or playwriting as our surrogates, Drury confronts us—with good comic timing from Holt and her cast—with the ignorance that underlies, often, our efforts to “understand” and “empathize;” such ignorance can sometimes become the basis for deliberate acts of violence. Not knowing and not wanting to know are close kin.

The actors want to know just enough to make a show—we can say that, mostly, their hearts are in the right place—but what they mostly show is that they don’t know enough. What they know are what we know: the racist clichés, the racial stereotypes, the bad attempts at accents, the mimicry that can’t help becoming mockery. Early on, an argument about “Cologne” or “Köln” as the name of the German town demonstrates how even place-names and places can be in seen in two ways: by those who live there, and by those who are outsiders. This becomes particularly pertinent when the African-American actors disagree on how to characterize Africans (neither has ever been to Africa, much less Namibia), and even go so far as to imply there is a right and wrong way to “be black.”

A comical, and also very pertinent, moment occurs when Actor 3 (Aaron Bartz—in his third play this summer, demonstrating great versatility and commitment to the Cabaret experience) “becomes” Actor 6’s “grandma” and, while his “mamminess” is a cliché, his improv does get at a truth of the play: you can put on someone else’s shoes, but that doesn't make them your shoes. Ultimately none of the actors (in the play) are able to own their parts or to create the presentation they are aiming for. The presentation we get shows us why they fail.

What makes that “failure” so powerful is that it draws upon the oldest feature of theater—catharsis. And catharsis, as ancient theater teaches, needs a scapegoat. Here the scapegoat is well-chosen: Actor 2 (Ato Blankson-Wood) is the one who is most critical of the others' ill-informed efforts, calling them on their lack of knowledge and their willingness to work with stereotypes. In making Actor 2 the “black victim,” the cast gets uglier and uglier, letting us see not only the logic of domination that can lead to murder, but the group mind that delights in the discomfort of “the Other.” The moment—with its insistent chant, “I’ve been black my whole life” and “ooga booga”—attains both a pinnacle (dramatically) and a nadir (socially). The aftermath is played well by the cast as tantamount to kids lost and self-conscious when the make-believe goes too far then ends abruptly. As the parental dictum would have it: “It’s fun until somebody gets hurt.”

And when it comes to humanity’s anxious policing of its racial and national and ideological boundaries, somebody always gets hurt.

Three of the actors playing actors we have seen before this summer: Aaron Bartz makes Actor 3 a fairly gifted improv actor with good instincts; Ato Blankson-Wood makes Actor 2 rather truculent but also the voice of reason, which, as things go, generally becomes a casualty when “the blood is up”; as Actor 4, Julian Elijah Martinez is primarily a reactor, though we might say, in the end, he’s the conscience of the play; new to the summer season are Matt Raich as Actor 1, the actor least comfortable with what his role—the soldier pining for his homeland or policing newly claimed German territory against its former Herero inhabitants—demands, until he finds a “motivation” in Southern U.S. racism; Jenelle Chu gives Actor 5/Sarah a certain ditzy charm as she “acts out” her cat or pines or breaks into “Edelweiss” or a bad German accent, becoming a kind of Nazi-ish Über-Mutter; and Shaunette Renée Wilson’s Actor 6 is the director with an eye on the ball, whose acknowledgement that she saw in the face of a Herero woman in a magazine her own grandmother forms the personal basis for the entire process. In other words, this isn’t simply an exercise in historical empathy, it’s a question of how to recognize legacy and claim kin when the legacy has been expunged and the kinship is a vague racial recognition.

Jackie Sibblies Drury, Jessica Holt, and the Yale Summer Cabaret team provide a provocation that entertains and discomfits. If I have a criticism it’s at the level of “plot points”—Drury asks actors to be not very good actors so that they break character inappropriately, or “unconsciously” use accents, or act their way into dead ends, to serve her purposes. Such things are part of the process, certainly, and generally that’s behind the scenes; here, much rides on not getting it right in just the right way.

And, as has been the case all summer, the tech team delivers—special mention for Andrew F. Griffin’s Lighting (this is really one where you don’t even notice how much work it takes to make it all seem “natural”), Nick Hussong’s very valuable Projections, and Kate Marvin’s Sound Design which makes you wonder why any production ever uses the sound of blanks when a gunshot is needed.

We Are Proud to Present… plays for two more nights—tonight and tomorrow. See it if you can get in.

We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, formerly known as Southwest Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, between the Years 1884-1915 By Jackie Sibblies Drury Directed by Jessica Holt

Scenic Designer: Christopher Thompson; Costume Designer: Steven M. Rotramel; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Projection Designer: Nick Hussong; Sound Designer: Kate Marvin; Stage Manager: Will Rucker

Yale Summer Cabaret July 11-July 26, 2014

Cafe Rrrwha?

You know the drill: one age’s rebellion is another age’s nostalgia act. That’s in popular culture. In the fine arts, it tends to be: one age’s rebellion is another age’s academic assignment. In the pop world, nothing ages as fast as the parental generation’s youth; in the fine arts, it’s all a bit like the nefarious character played by John Huston in Chinatown (1974) says: “Politicians, old buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” In the fine arts, it’s academic study that confers respectability. Dada, pataphysics, cubists, Theater of the Absurd, Theatre of Cruelty, the Beats—they’re all in museums and on syllabi. And what gets lost, often, is what made it all so exciting in the first place. Enter The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion, the show currently playing at the Yale Cabaret, conceived and directed by dramaturgy student David E. Bruin, an effort to stage early works by María Irene Fornés and Edward Albee—darlings of theater and drama coursework—as though Greenwich Village were still inhabited by bohemians and not pop culture elites. We’re not at the Yale Cab, we’re at Café Ubu (named after Alfred Jarry’s comic-absurdist-tragic figure) and, as the dated posters and portraits on the walls of Reid Thompson's set will tell you, it’s around 1962. JFK hasn’t been assassinated yet and the Beatles are still in Liverpool.

It’s to the credit of Bruin and his cast that they play the material—including the introductory bits that include some squabbling about a petition to stop that freeway extension Robert Moses is planning for the Village—straight, without any hint of ‘beatnik’ send-ups. The point is, one quickly gathers, the drama student of today might well be pining for the days before theatrical fellowships and “courses on X”—the days when the likes of Albee and Fornés hung out in collectivities that were already looking back to ad hoc artist congeries like dada and other manifesto-spouting “movements.” Remember when it wasn’t art if you got paid for it? And it wasn’t for a grade either. Hey, kinda like Yale Cabaret . . .

Crazy Shepherds is an instructive and entertaining evening. Plays like Fornés’ The Successful Life of 3 and Albee’s The Sandbox should resist even blackbox staging. These are plays for a cabaret, a café, a living room, almost. Maybe a playground’s actual sandbox (do those still exist?) for the latter. Bruin and company rightly grasp that to do such work justice you have to be willing to go back to its time to see it as it might have been. Historians of the arts have to do this; theater audiences much less, and it’s great to see knowing dramaturgs and others giving it a shot and taking us along with them.

And you certainly get your money’s worth: not only Successful Life and Sandbox, but also a romp through a truncated take on Jarry’s Ubu roi (with a very spirited Ubu from Brendan Pelsue) and a performance piece featuring bits from Part III of Howl. Annelise Lawson, reciting, is the star of the evening as she also plays a man (who imagines himself as Zorro at one point) in Successful Life, Ubu’s queen in Ubu roi, and, very effectively, the old woman in Sandbox, as well as going into electroshock convulsions for the Howl recital (Howl is dedicated to Allen Ginsberg’s fellow inmate at Columbia Psychiatric Institute, Carl Solomon, who did receive electroshock treatment at Rockland State Hospital).

Elsewhere there’s tasteful violin accompaniment by Eli Epstein-Deutsch and atmospheric vocalizing by Jenelle Chu, who also plays the woman in Successful Life, a ditzy symbol of female emptiness—or is that an empty symbol of feminine ditziness—while Lawson and Pelsue (the latter in a mode reminiscent of Dick York on Bewitched) enact an absurdist’s take on “masculine rivalry” (yes, that was once a buzz term). Chu is also a patient “mommy” to Pelsue’s “daddy” as they wait for granny (Lawson) to give up the ghost in Sandbox. The plays by Fornés and Albee both demonstrate the phase of incipient genius, still. And the evening is best if you can forget you’re watching YSD students playing at their grandparents’ rebellion and imagine you’re watching amateur theatricals reinvent theater.

At the end of the evening, a hat is passed, but, rather than pitching in, the audience is asked to extract fortune-cookie-like one-liners. Many in the audience, no doubt, won’t realize the lines are taken from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” (c. 1790, following the French Revolution); “everything old is new again,” as the song says. And some things are so innovative they can never become conventional.

The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion Conceived and directed by David E. Bruin Featuring: Maria Irene Fornes’ The Successful Life of 3 and Edward Albee’s The Sandbox

Cast: David E. Bruin, Jenelle Chu, Eli Epstein-Deutsch, Annelise Lawson, Brendan Pelsue, Gretchen Wright; Dramaturg: Phillip Howze; Set: Reid Thompson; Lights: Andrew F. Griffin; Composer/Sound: Pornchanok Kanchanabanca; Costumes: Asa Benally; Stage Manager: Will Rucker; Producer: Melissa Zimmerman

Yale Cabaret March 20-22, 2014