Play or Poem?

Review of Orlando at Yale Summer Cabaret

Orlando, the final show of the Yale Summer Cabaret season, directed by artistic director Sara Holdren, presents the kind of frenetic, improvisatory work that has been a hallmark of the season. But this time, the only devised aspect is the staging. The script is by Sarah Ruhl, from Virginia Woolf’s novel, untampered with by the Rough Magic Company. Having seen the company have its way with Shakespeare and Marlowe, we might wonder if other takes on Woolf’s text might present themselves, which is a way of asking, I suppose: how successful is Orlando as a play? Prose stylists like Woolf might be said to be best in their own element: on the page.

Joey Moro’s set takes note of that thought by offering us a long scroll upon which the players cavort as though, literally or literarily, on the page. And that’s as it should be since, as the play goes on, we find ourselves wondering what is “real” and what is merely the fantasy of a would-be poet—Orlando (Elizabeth Stahlmann)—an Elizabethan nobleman seated in the garden of his great estate and dreaming the world and the life to come. A life in which, at age 30 (and the dawn of the 19th century), he becomes a woman.

Much of the brio of Woolf’s novel is in the rendering of a fantasy of the English past from the present (the 1920s), viewing the past with the prescience of the future. The conceit makes for an interesting hybrid interplay—between the past we invent and the past as it was—that Ruhl’s play maintains effectively. The difficulty comes from the fact that Woolf never set herself to write “characters” per se (all are “charactered in the brain” of Orlando); Ruhl gets around this by creating a chorus who can alter as necessary, through the scenes and through the ages.

The cast of Orlando: Josephine Stewart, Shaunette Renee Wilson, Niall Powderly, Elizabeth Stahlmann, Chalia La Tour, Melanie Field, Leland Fowler

That makes for much of the fun here as the staging and costume work is comical, inventive, breathless. My favorite moment features Orlando in a kind of Elizabethan fetish costume (the ruff, the rosettes, the pantaloons) twirling about on a hanging hoop (viewers of Holdren’s fascinating thesis show will recall her work with gymnast-actors) with Sasha (Chalia La Tour, one of the most chameleonic actors currently at the Drama School) in a graceful white cape and white fur cap. Sasha is the best secondary character in the play, if only because La Tour makes her as real as Orlando is. She could easily take over the play, since Orlando sees that she’s way more fascinating than he.

The other characters that interact with Orlando seem more brainspun: Melanie Field has fun with a motorized Queen Elizabeth, a dowager who dotes on a fine leg in tights, and gives our hero a bawdy lesson in a courtier’s duties. Niall Powderly does all he can to make a cross-dressing Romanian count/countess as ridiculous as possible, including an outrageous accent that would do Tim Curry proud. Leland Fowler plays the Byronic Shelmerdine pretty much as written—which is to say that we begin to suspect that Woolf might be fantasizing life in an Emily Brontë novel or as Mary Shelley. Till then, the point has been made, it’s much more exciting—in Orlando’s view—to pursue a female than to be pursued as one. Unfortunately, Shelmerdine, though he receives the accolade of making Lady Orlando feel “a real woman,” might be any well-spoken, well-born hero of many a romance novel, though for Woolf, writing under the spell of Vita Sackville-West, the meeting of soul mates requires that both Orlando and Shelmerdine imagine they are in a same-sex relationship.

Front: Elizabeth Stahlmann, Niall Powderly; Back: Melanie Field, Chalia La Tour, Leland Fowler, Shaunette Renee Wilson

Ruhl and Woolf take delight in satirizing the ubiquity of marriage, a target that never seems to go out of date, though—in same sex, soulmate terms—it has taken on, in our time, more possibilities than it had for Woolf in the ‘20s. And that’s what helps make Orlando interesting as theater: even more than on the page, we feel the spin through the years (costumes by Fabian Aguilar and Haydee Zelideth are great aids in the fantasia), and we’re even more aware of how the all-important “present moment” infuses our viewing and our experience.

Ultimately, Ruhl’s Orlando “longs to be only one thing” while Holdren’s production, and the mutable Rough Magic company in general, suggests that playing only one character with one gender is a tired approach to theater. In Orlando, Holdren and company find an ideal text for the transformations they’ve played with all summer. And yet, Orlando strikes me as what used to be called “closet drama”—a play to be read and imagined. We become aware of how hard it is to playact Woolfian fictions. Nimble as the Rough Magic troupe is in bringing the play to life on stage, they can at best only approximate the unfettered flight of the poetical mind, as Ruhl’s Orlando only suggests Woolf’s.

Front: Elizabeth Stahlmann as Orlando; Back: Shaunette Renee Wilson, Josephine Stewart, Chalia La Tour, Leland Fowler

Casting only one actor as Orlando brings home the fact that a story, no matter how variously conceived, must always be the story of someone. Stahlmann plays Orlando as if each moment is a new thought, full of fresh insight into what life can offer. She achieves the gusto of the Keatsean ideal of the poetical character (“it is not itself - it has no self – it is everything and nothing – It has no character […] it lives in gusto”), but that makes for a passive hero always amazed at what is happening, much as we are in dreams.

Finally, though, to this production’s credit, Stahlmann makes us feel, more than fiction can, the cost of such flights from one’s time; her Orlando suffers before our eyes as only intensely imagined characters do. In the end, being one thing means being a thing that will end.

Orlando
By Virginia Woolf / Adapted by Sarah Ruhl
Directed by Sara Holdren

Scenic Design: Joey Moro; Costume Design: Haydee Zelideth & Fabian Aguilar; Lighting Design: Andrew Griffin; Sound Design: Kate Marvin; Projection Design: Joey Moro; Dramaturg: Rachel Carpman; Stage Manager: Emely Zepeda; Photographs: Andrea H. Berman

Ensemble: Orlando: Elizabeth Stahlmann; Chorus: Melanie Field, Leland Fowler, Chalia La Tour, Niall Powderly, Josephine Stewart, Shaunette Renée Wilson

Yale Summer Cabaret
August 6-15, 2015

A Dream's Midsummer Night

Review of Midsummer at Yale Summer Cabaret

One of the plot points of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a “changeling boy” that the fairy realm’s rulers—Oberon and Titania—battle over. The myth of the “changeling” refers, generally, to a fairy child substituted for a human child, so that parents find themselves raising a bizarre being not of their own. What the fairies do with the child they “adopt” is another matter. Doubtless, it becomes something wholly other, a strange hybrid of human and fairy.

Midsummer, the adaptation of Shakespeare’s play by director Sara Holdren and dramaturg Rachel Carpman, now playing at the Yale Summer Cabaret, is itself a hybrid, a strange change upon MND that might be seen as what would happen to the play if the fairies get a hold of it.

Midsummer often seems very much like the familiar play—one of the most oft-performed of Shakespeare’s comedies—and sometimes feels like a fever dream comprised of Shakespearean taglines on a ground of shifting unrealities. And that’s because Midsummer makes free use of Shakespeare’s oeuvre to match the word to the deed. (There’s even a drinking game advertised on the audience’s tables that recommends size of sips in response to recognized lines from various plays.) In short, it’s a trip.

Puck (Shaunette Renee Wilson)

This “Midsummer” begins with Puck (Shaunette Renée Wilson) brooding on how things used to be—the world was a much more enchanted place, once upon a time. A sprite more in sorrow than in spite, she soon decides to amuse herself and us by devising ways to bedevil a troupe of hapless actors gathered in the wood to rehearse a play. That play, it soon develops, will not be Pyramus and Thisbe (as in MND) but the story of the lovers of MND: the erotic travails of Lysander (Christopher Ross-Ewart), Hermia (Josephine Stewart), Demetrius (Leland Fowler), and Helena (Elizabeth Stahlmann). The transition from the hamfisted actors bumbling through their lines to the full enactment of their MND roles is only the first of many magical transformations the night offers.

The usual plot development—that the rivals for Hermia become instead rivals for Helena, while the once simpatico women become bitter enemies—plays out here with more asperity than it often does. And that’s in part because Holdren and Carpman get to cherry-pick Shakespeare to provide dialogue for these fools for love. While the changeableness of male affection is the theme Shakespeare’s text treats of with a certain arch candor, the handling of it here is full of surprisingly distraught energy—in Stewart and Stahlmann—and outrageous wooing and rejecting from Fowler and Ross-Ewart. It’s funny and physical, and lets us know that love hurts. Lurking in the wings, as it were, is every heartbroken teen who loved and missed, and Holdren gets her young cast to milk that for all its worth.

Titania (Melanie Field), Bottom (Andrej Visky)

Meanwhile, there’s the centerpiece event: the enchantment of Bottom—who traditionally is given an ass’s head—and the passion for him created in Titania by “love-in-idleness,” a magical flower. That part of the story feels more allegorical than the rest, in MND, and here it’s almost beside the point. We’re much more beguiled by Titania (Melanie Field) and Oberon (Niall Powderly) facing off with magical bolts and scary voices like wizards in Harry Potter, so that the sport with Titania that Will seems to delight in gets upstaged by a parental stand-off over a child that feels more revealing.

Bottom the weaver, played with mercurial flair by Andrej Visky, is from the first the character most fully infused with the kind of wonderment that theatrical experience can provide. He’s ready to enact every part—including speeches from Hamlet spoken by the players and the prince. To give a sense of the range of this Bottom, I’ll mention that, as he wanders spooked in the woods, he breaks into “My Way,” and when he first discovers the sleeping Titania he says “she’s warm!” echoing Lear holding the recently deceased Cordelia.

The upshot of all this is that Midsummer creates a rich tapestry of Shakespearean verbiage as an overlay on a story of amateur theatricals, befuddled lovers, and spatting fairies. It’s not simply a re-imagining of MND, but a reassigning of Shakespearean lines and moments to create a lively variety that never ceases to surprise and delight. And those not so versed in their Bard needn’t feel left out, as there is a remarkable seamlessness to most of the juggling, except when it’s meant to be noticeable.

Christopher Ross-Ewart, Josephine Stewart, Elizabeth Stahlmann, Melanie Field, Andrej Visky, Niall Powderly

In the midst of the sheer love of Shakespeare’s words—as, as it were, non-character-specific poetry—Midsummer manages to make us aware of the varying levels of acting as entertainment. If Shakespeare’s comedies tend to be much ado about nothing, Midsummer insists that what Hamlet calls “the purpose of playing” is not so much holding a mirror up to nature but rather to play Prospero with what reality provides—and all actors are changelings. The strong suggestion is that we have at last gotten the play of Bottom’s dream, which hath no bottom. At evening’s end the players within the play troop off, considering what to call their play, riffing on Shakespeare, O’Neill, and others.

Finally, a mention of a remarkable set comprised of trees of twisted fabric and of seemingly real stone, wonderful projections that create worlds within the world, sound effects and special effects to give reality to the magical duels and spells, and costumes that let the cast move from clownish workers to lightly garbed youths and painted and fleshy fairies—to say nothing of Puck’s hybrid habiliments that seem more Caliban than Ariel. And Andrew F. Griffin’s lighting design is a poem in itself.

Midsummer plays through Sunday night. If you’ve already seen it, go again, and if you haven’t, do.

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

Scenic Design: Christopher Thompson, Claire De Liso; Costume Design: Fabian Aguilar; Lighting Design: Andrew Griffin; Sound Design: Sinan Refik Zafar; Projection Design: Rasean Davonte Johnson; Dramaturg: Rachel Carpman; Stage Manager: Victoria Whooper

Ensemble: Al the Upholsterer/Titania: Melanie Field; Snout the Tinker/Demetrius: Leland Fowler; Peter Quince/Oberon: Niall Powderly; Flute the Bellows Mender/Lysander: Christopher Ross-Ewart; Snug the Joiner/Helena: Elizabeth Stahlmann; Starveling the Tailor/Hermia: Josephine Stewart; Bottom: Andrej Visky; Puck: Shaunette Renée Wilson

Yale Summer Cabaret

217 Park Street

June 4-June 21, 2015