Wrestling Chekhov

The final thesis show of the Yale School of Drama’s 2011-12 season finds director Alex Mihail wrestling with Anton Chekhov’s classic comedy The Seagull, much as Jacob wrestled with the Angel: I will not let thee go except thou bless me.  What might Chekhov’s blessing look like?  I found myself wondering about this very question and have to say that waiting for the outcome provided, for me, a good deal of the drama of watching this production. The play itself is one of those signal works of the late 19th century that aimed to confront its audience with changes in the purposes of art, in this case theater.  To call it a comedy, as Chekhov does, is to distort its audience’s expectations somewhat, perhaps leading viewers to find funny what they might not otherwise.  But that designation also lets us know that the author himself does not take his characters too seriously and asks us not to as well. All of which is to say that the tone of the play is elusive, that outright silliness and comic vanity share the stage with poignant evocations of aging and frailty, that ruined expectations and sad resignation occur amidst family farce and romantic misprisions, and suicide.

From its very design, this production establishes its interrogatory tone—instead of an estate with a lake in the distance where young Treplev, aka Kostya (Seamus Mulcahy) puts on his symbolist play for a skeptical audience led by his actress mother, Arkadina (Brenda Meaney), Scenic Designer Kristen Robinson gives us a traditional interior, minus the fourth wall, that also is an exterior when need be, and is situated so that we, the audience, are seated in what should be the lake, while the distance, seen through the door when open and at times above the walls, is comprised of a theater with a long center aisle and rows of empty seats.  On stage, a rather Godot-like tree remains in place throughout both Parts, most of the time hovering above the ground, and across the windows of the interior—which includes an upright piano and a desk—play various projections (Paul Lieber, Projection Design), including a wandering deer, snowfall, and dancing lights.

As we are self-consciously in a theatrical space throughout, one could say the play takes place in a sort of Chekhov set of the mind, asking us to wonder what it is exactly that realist drama symbolizes.  And if that’s the sort of question that young, earnest and possibly deluded Kostya would ask, so be it.  Which is another way of saying that the play feels like it’s very much in the mind of Kostya, that, as a would-be playwright wrestling with the need for “new forms,” he stands-in both as Chekhov’s and his director’s double.  Indeed, Mihail never lets us forget Kostya’s centrality, allowing him to be present throughout the play, even for scenes he’s not scripted to be part of.  Mulcahy brings to the role endless energy: he hovers, he witnesses, he reacts, he mimicks, flies into rages, pouts, and playacts an artist playacting being an artist.  It’s exhausting.

That level of energy extends to the rest of the cast as well—as it must, since Chekhov tends to write sprawling plays in which people walk in and out and never quite come to saying what they mean, and when they do it’s easy to miss it because someone is always interrupting.  The first half, in which the actors establish their roles, can sometimes be slow going, but in the second half our familiarity with them all allows things to sharpen up considerably.  We have to live with these people a while to get anything from them.

As Arkadina, the leading lady, Brenda Meaney is a grande dame all the way, never letting us forget that, for Kostya’s mother (apt to start playing Hamlet’s mother apropos of nothing), she is always the central figure of every scene.  Everyone else should be willingly eclipsed.  Will Cobbs, as her increasingly decrepit brother Sorin, declines with a comic edge that keeps the character mischievous.  Chris Henry plays successful and fatuous author Trigorin with perhaps more winning a personality than one expects; his best scene is with Masha (Carmen Zilles).  As a single woman in love with Kostya, Masha has to spill her guts and keep herself buttoned up at the same time—Zilles does a capable job in a role no one under thirty should be asked to play.  As the man she marries, because he loves her, Josiah Bania’s Medvedenko is a constant figure of fun, always good for a laugh.  In the roles of Masha’s parents, Winston Duke and Sheria Irving flesh out scenes with, from Duke, a boisterous, life of the party feel (his “caught in a crap” anecdote is great fun), and, from Irving, a pointed pining for the ladies’ man Dr. Dorn (Max Roll, as dapper and jaded a country libertine as one could wish).  Finally, Jillian Taylor as Nina, would-be actress, and muse to those dueling writers Kostya and Trigorin, matches Mulcahy in energy and achieves, in her final transformation, something extraordinary.

Which is to say: the blessing comes late, but it does come.  When Nina reprises, at the end of the play, the grandiose speech from Kostya’s play that she delivers early in Part One, she suddenly renders the absurd lines with a passion that the intervening two years of hardship makes both poignant and transcendent.  And then we get the moment I can’t get out of my head, the moment of pure theater: Kostya’s long walk up that central aisle, followed by the rush of a descending curtain.  Bam!

Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull Translated by Paul Schmidt Directed by Alexandru Mihail

Yale School of Drama January 24-28, 2012

Thank You

Gertrude Stein’s Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights began life as a libretto for an opera, never scored.  It’s now a theater-piece that invites avant enthusiasts to try their hand at staging its signal interplays for voice and chorus.  Robert Wilson did it, in 1992, and this week YSD directing student Lileana Blain-Cruz, with a dream cast and production team, has tackled it as her thesis piece. Fitting, since the play itself seems to articulate Stein’s thesis about theater, which is that, as dramaturg Sunder Ganglani quotes in the program, our emotions while watching it are either behind or ahead of the play we are watching.  Our experience, in other words, is ours, and the play has its own experience, and from those two experiences comes the story.  Of course, to say “our” experience is to suggest there is some common experience of art, but that’s exactly what Stein interrogates.

And nothing asks this question better than theater because in no other form are we, the audience, and they, the performers, together in space and time and actively so.

Dr. Faustus, as audiences of Marlowe know, made a pact with the devil—twenty-four years of supernatural power in exchange for loss of his immortal soul—but he also, due to his powers, was able to court Helen, wife of Menelaus, lover of Paris, prize of the Trojan war, and, as readers of Goethe know, seduced and abandoned a girl called both Margarete and Gretchen.

The “Faust myth” has insinuated its themes into literature and entertainment at various levels, from any hubristic use of knowledge, to any purposeful invocation of demonic powers, to various registers of “all is vanity” or “all is transcendence.”  Stein’s Faustus seems to participate in the Promethean view of knowledge: like Edison, he gave us the lightbulb, but at what cost?

Fanciful enough, but Stein’s intention seems also to be a reworking of the myth to give a different status to Faustus’ paramour, here combined to form a figure called Marguerite Ida and Helena Anabel (played, often in tandem, by Adina Verson and Alexandra Trow, two actresses who also played, in tandem and separately, two of the three parts of Salome in Blain-Cruz’s Yale Cabaret version of Wilde’s play last year).  Speaking broadly, one can say that this figure—whatever we may determine her to “represent”—is finally ascendant and Faustus (enacted by William DeMeritt, though voiced at times by the entire company) is eclipsed.

In other words, unlike in Goethe’s Faust, MI+HA isn’t inclined to save him, and, unlike Goethe’s or Marlowe’s version, Faustus seems fully resigned to going to hell.  What the final state of MI+HA is is harder to say, denuded as she is of her grand Statue of Liberty style trappings and, for a time at least, trapped in a kind of lockstep flight-and-fight-and-dance routine with the somewhat enigmatic Man from Overseas (Seamus Mulcahy in a great coat and creepy halfmask).

All of which is to bother about plot and why bother.  The strengths of this production, as must be the case for any production of this play, are in the staging, the music, the voicing.  All along the way the YSD production is a winner.

The choral mouthing of lines creates aural textures—it’s fascinating to try to determine who all is speaking when lines are heard—that bring out wonderfully the epigrammic, nursery rhymey, enigmatic, incantatory, bumper-stickery, poetic, comic, repetitive quality of the text.  An example of all those things in one that bit me in the ear: “What difference does it make to you if you do what you do.”  This said by a Boy (Jillian Taylor) who spoke and comported himself like an androgynous escapee from a Nickelodeon TV studio.

Stein’s gift for contrapuntal verbal explorations is unmatched, and this company makes the most of it.

The music—a range of solemn to robotic to campy to martial to Felliniesque (at one of my favorite parts)—by Adrian Knight adds much to the proceedings, indeed, helps define the action, as do the vocals by Taylor, Verson, DeMeritt and others;

the varied effects with lights—neon, and bulbs, and lazers, and sparklers (Masha Tsimring, Lighting);

the impressive use of levels and grounds in the staging: a stage within a wasteland, including dirt and taxidermied forest fauna (Adam Rigg, Scenic), and two grand cast-iron stairways, one a spiral, that Country Woman with the Sickle (Hallie Cooper-Novack, the other member of the Salome trio) uses to remarkable comic effect;

the syncopated movements and deliveries by Mephisto (Chris Henry and Lupita Nyong’o, both looking suitably devilish in devilish suits—Jayoung Yoon, costumes), and by Little Boy and Girl (Trow and Cooper-Novack, wearing blonde moptops and addressing “Mr. Viper”—whether Faustus or Mephisto is not always clear—as though he were Daddy Warbucks);

and finally, in long, flowing white hair for fur, Fisher Neal as The Dog who always says Thank You, and whose inclusion in the proceedings seems key for whatever the play means to mean.

If the play is the thing the thing is to play and YSD's production plays this play all the way just a little ahead.

Getrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights Directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz

Yale School of Drama October 25-29, 2011

Dead Air

Two local theatrical pieces are presenting the final shows of their brief runs tonight: The New Haven Theatre Company’s production of Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio, at Ultra Radio, across from the Shubert, on 242 College Street, at 8 p.m., and The Yale Cabaret’s Slaves, book and music by Sunder Ganglani, at 8 and 11 p.m, 217 Park Street. Both shows, we might say, know something about the risks of “dead air”: a stretch of no music or talk on a radio broadcast, the phrase can also be used to describe a stretch of no sound or speech in a play.  Radio broadcasters strive to avoid dead air.  Playwrights and performers choose sometimes to manipulate it artfully.

ART IS US

As a theatrical experience, Slaves is all about theatrical experience as artful manipulation.  Sound rather circular?  It is.  The show, which consists of three separate “acts” or segments, takes place where “a play” (dialogue, characters, setting, plot) has become “performance” (a space and performers, in this case three, and, in this case, music).  The “setting” is the Cabaret, and the “characters” are the people performing in the play (Adina Verson, Chris Henry, Lilian Taylor) who aren’t themselves, and us, the audience.  In the early going, as Verson and Henry sit before a long, dark, heavy curtain in insistent light, their promptings and musings have the air of Beckettian characters who have decided to confront their onlookers rather than enact a play.  At one point some noises off are identified by Verson as coming from “an actress” (Taylor) who seems to be a menial at first—handing in props (a large ceramic tortoise) and repeating what she’s told.  Verson and Henry, on the other hand, hector, beseech, and ask for audience members to volunteer words, while assuring us that laughter is ok but not intended, and anything we might do is ok (one person chose to walk out).  What was stunning about the opening is the rigor required for these actors to hold onto “dead air” (there are many pauses and gaps) and invigorate it with their presence, staring back at us staring at them.

The next act, with the curtain pulled back revealing a muted neon triangle, involves more singing and music (the three performers’ voices match well: Verson sounding angelic, Henry more earthy and Taylor somewhere in between), accompanied by somewhat robotic movements that eventually led to Taylor, before the curtain, apologizing, in earnest actress mode, for not performing at her best.

After that, it was time to milk Verson and Henry, via tubes connected to milk jugs down their shirts, into a porcelain receptacle adorned with two white birds.  Earlier Verson had spoken about “waiting” only to falter mid line and make us wait for something more to be said.  To wait for two separate quarts of milk to run out twin I V lines into a birdbath isn’t something you’d probably line up for, but, on the other hand, there’s no way I can tell you what effect sitting through it will have on you (when Henry’s jug, which took longer, finally ran dry there was a small burst of spontaneous applause).  And that’s partly the point: you have to be there, just as the performers do, and wait for the milk to run out.  Real time, like dead air, can be one of the riskiest elements in any performance, but also, oddly, one of the most pregnant.

Fast on the heels of the fluids scene came what seemed a song of ecstatic praise as Verson’s and Henry’s voices became a choir accompanying the whirling, vigorous dance Taylor enacted in non-stop movement for what seemed like ten minutes, illuminated only by the triangle’s neon in full brightness.  An image of the body happy to be body, or as in Eliot’s Four Quartets: “you are music while the music lasts,” this final segment had the feel of culmination but how it “furthered” or “responded” to what preceded it was left to the spectator.

For me, the opening segment commented on the rigors of theater as a participatory spectacle that we might not normally think of that way; the second segment had more to do with the dynamic amongst the performers themselves, attempting to make what they do “work”; the final segment required us, as audience, to lose ourselves in the illusion of a dancer losing herself in dance.  Illusion because the rigor of the movements belies the spontaneity they evoke, and yet . . . is there any more effective image of freely given servitude than a body dancing?

Slaves by Sunder Ganglani with Chris Henry, Jillian Taylor, Adina Verson Additional Music by Ben Sharony The Yale Cabaret September 15-17, 2011 217 Park Street, New Haven, CT

US IS ENTERTAINMENT

Forget the film Oliver Stone made of Bogosian’s Talk Radio; the play which first appeared in 1987, before the murder of “shock jock” Alan Berg and before the rise of Howard Stern, much less Russ Limbaugh.  As performed by the NHTC, the original is not as over-the-top dark as the film, and is even, in comparison to the kinds of wise-mouths and numbskulls who haunt the airwaves today, rather sweet.  As late night caller-based talk show host Barry Champlain, who has progressed from Akron to Cleveland and is poised to go national the very next night, Peter Chenot seems more like a hectoring older brother than a truly malicious razor-tongued cynic.  He berates the stupid—the vast majority of his callers—and is even more uncivil to the bigots and phonies, but he has our sympathy.  It’s a thankless task (though many of his callers worship him)—entertaining people by insulting them, so that they’ll come back for more.

Everyone else in the studio:  Linda (Hilary Brown), his sometime girlfriend and Gal Friday, Stu (Erich Greene) the old buddy and colleague who has got his back (mostly) on the switchboard, and Dan (Steve Scarpa), the Suit who wants the show to be its best for the Big Boys, are all riding the gravy train in good show-biz fashion.  The toll his tirades and tiffs take on Barry is the main plot of the play as we see him veer into an area he rarely gets into—first, the almost phone-sex-like seduction of a lonely mother, and then an actual in-studio meeting with a zonked-out stoner type, Kent (Jack Rogers), whose momentary upstaging of Barry comes as a final straw.

Like the radio show, the play, directed with a great feel for the benefits of the tight, intimate space by Hallie Martenson, is very much Barry’s show and Chenot has the charisma to make it work.  The voice feels right—a gripping, slightly-sharper-than-thou tone that keeps his listeners listening—and, because he’s not just a voice to us, we see how much his performance is also for the benefit of his “handlers,” all mostly silenced while he talks.  They each get their say when Barry is “off” and they reveal nothing very profound, apart from the fact that each seems to feel Barry could crack or go off the deep-end any given night.  Scarpa’s Dan is mostly unflappably pragmatic; he takes credit for inventing “Barry Champlain” and is pleased with how far he’s gone, but knows its just a job, not a calling; Brown’s Linda, in a very winning bid for our sympathy, tells us what it’s like to be seduced by the great Barry Champlain, but also keeps her distance: “nice to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there”; the most telling confidence comes from long-suffering Stu who was with Barry when he made the move to talk radio and has seen plenty of crazy on-air stunts, but now notices a widening rift between them. Greene is great at conveying the tired bonhomie of the background support and the sure eye of the knowing professional, watching from the sidelines.

The supporting cast—including Roger’s disarmingly goofy Kent and Marty Tucker as the voice of the financial advisor in the show preceding Barry, and the voices of the callers—go a long way to making us feel we are watching a real broadcast and not a sit-com version of one.  Bogosian’s lines for the callers often sounded to me far too Saturday Night Live silly—some are hilariously off the wall, like the woman in fear of the trash disposal in her sink—but not as vivid as they might be if the show were written today.  Which is a way of saying that Barry is nicer than today’s shock jocks, in the style of the older advisor/on air shrink, and his callers mostly insomniacs or dopers looking for a little connection.  Barry’s final riff on the ills of society—“your fear, your own lives have become your entertainment”—is certainly prescient enough about where media and “reality” are going, and it’s perhaps nice, in a nostalgic way, to return to an era when they could still be separated.

The dead air that Barry hangs fire through near the end is a respite from his own disgust with his audience, and with himself as the flame attracting these mindless moths, but in Talk Radio it’s the dead air of a big breath, the moment a show hangs upon before the show goes on.  As Beckett says, “I can’t go on I’ll go on.”

Talk Radio by Eric Bogosian Directed by Hallie Martenson Presented by New Haven Theater Company and Ultra Radio September 14-17, 2011 Ultra Radio 242 College Street, New Haven, CT