Call Me Up in Dreamland

Review of Alice, Yale School of Drama

One of the great attractions of Alice, the third show of the Yale School of Drama 2019-20 season, directed by third-year director Logan Ellis, is the prospect of hearing the songs of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan sung by someone other than Tom Waits. (And I’m someone who loves listening to Tom Waits!)

That aspect of the show is key because the songs in Alice are sung by characters, most of whom bear some resemblance to characters in Lewis Carroll’s classic and incomparable Alice stories, Alice in Wonderland and Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass (one of the few literary sequels better than the original).

Filtering the adventures of Alice through Waits and Brennan’s Beat carnival sensibility provides a curious and delicious oddity not to be missed. Then filter those songs through arrangements by music director Dan Pardo as sung by some fine voices from the Yale School of Drama that lend them the heft and glow of opera and Broadway and that indeed should be attraction enough.

But consider: Alice, the musical, was developed by avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson, and his stamp on the proceedings, with a libretto developed by Paul Schmidt, further twists the familiar if quizzical terrain in other directions, mainly because Wilson/Schmidt are more interested in real life Alice Liddell (inspiration for our Alice) and Charles Dodgson (Carroll’s actual name) than in Carroll’s creation per se. So the space we travel through here is called Dreamland and watching the show recalled to me one of my favorite puns in Finnegans Wake about “we grisly old Sykos who have done our unsmiling bits on alices, when they were yung and easily freudened.” The Liddell/Dodgson relation is, indeed, frighteningly easy to freuden.

And that lends more than a little perfunctory psyching of the pedophiliac psyche—having to do with Dodgson’s proclivity for photographing pre-pubescent girls, sometimes nude—in what Wilson/Schmidt hath wrought. That aspect mainly impinges in the second half as the script reaches for a through-narrative to hang its symptoms upon, all hinging upon Alice solving “the riddle” of Jabberwocky (the poem of monster-decapitation Alice finds in a book) and, perhaps, beating time. That, for those in need of a plot, may serve as well as anything might, but what matters here is what Waits/Brennan did with their part in all this and it is wonderous indeed, brought vividly to phantasmagoric life by Ellis and his astounding team and cast.

The cast of the Yale School of Drama’s production of Alice, by Robert Wilson, Paul Schmidt, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, directed by Logan Ellis, February, 2020 (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

We begin with screens upon screens that replicate images of Alice (Ilia Isorelýs Paulino) to suggest Dodgson’s photographic fetish (Brittany Bland, projections). Dodgson (Sola Fadiran) opens the show with “Alice,” a song of obsession and melancholy that sets the tone at once. And yet the inspired nature of these characters and their eye-popping costumes by Meg Powers works against Dodgson as a pining pedophile bedeviled by whatever we want to imagine him bedeviled by (Dodgson, a deacon, mathematician and logician, is not a surrealist, not even avant le lettre). What the show makes us face is—yes, obsession and the melancholy of unrequited desire, but it’s the kind we’re apt to have for the figures in our dreams, which may include material from websites, films, shows, books, poems, myths, ritual, and anything in our inner grab-bag.

Mad Hatter (Julian Sanchez), Alice (Ilia Isorelýs Paulino) in the Yale School of Drama production of Alice by Robert Wilson, Paul Schmidt, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, directed by Logan Ellis, February 2020 (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Anna Grigo’s scenic design creates an open space where the various encounters—each featuring a song or a poem—take place, some—a torture-chamber-like kitchen—having a certain dimension, others— the boat/shop the Sheep (Daniel Liu) navigates—are free-standing sets in their own right. The changeableness of the set perfectly complements the amorphousness of Alice’s imagination as she moves through Dreamland. Done up like a doll, Alice is a mostly willing witness to whatever she encounters. “We’re All Mad Here,” as a song suggests, and Alice gamely takes a “when in Rome . . .” attitude to her interlocutors. Within that world, Dodgson/Carroll is perhaps the Oz-like Wizard behind it all, or at least the dream-father-figure who might help her find a way out. Since Dodgson is also the White Knight and the White Rabbit, he is a kind of all-in-all stopgap; we can call “foul” for the egotistical artist-teacher-master who must insist on his centrality in his protégé’s imagination, but we’re also encouraged to see how the Waits/Brennan songs Fadiran sings—“Fish and Bird” and “Poor Edward” particularly—give us insight into how Dodgson/Carroll understands his own plight. The first ends Act One with a sort of Never-Neverland tableau and duet with Paulino and reprises at the start of Act Two; the second comes late in Act Two and, in Fadiran’s performance, instills a moving sense of the pathos of a creator plagued by his creation.

Charles Dodgson (Sola Fadiran) in the Yale School of Drama production of Alice by Robert Wilson, Paul Schmidt, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, directed by Logan Ellis, February 2020 (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

It’s remarkable how readily Waits/Brennan find beguiling analogs for Carroll’s characters that extend our sense of their possibilities. In a show-stopping moment in Act One, The Caterpillar (Julian Sanchez, in a baroque fantasy of a costume) proclaims his alter ego “Table Top Joe,” a scatting Vegas act that might be Waits’ alter ego as well. Grigo’s design gives Sanchez a thrust space into the audience, and having the Caterpillar undulate into position while singing creates a visual and visceral feat not easy to top. Indeed, Sanchez is a major asset—he gets to wear two amazing get-ups as Mad Hatter (his work with hand-puppets is impressive)  and, with Liu, enacts a teasing number—“Altar Boys”—that, while not derived from Wonderland characters per se, plays campy fun with the clerical trappings of Dodgson as an Anglican deacon.

Other stand-out moments include the lovely, demented-Disney of “Flower’s Grave,” sung by a family of flowers (Robert Lee Hart, John Evans Reese, Jackeline Torres Cortés, Adrienne Wells); “Fawn,” in which Paulino and Wells vocalize beautifully; “Kommienzuspadt,” wherein Robert Lee Hart as the Cheshire Cat channels Waits wonderfully; “Reeperbahn,” with Jessy Yates as a kind of BDSM king on a throne of a wheelchair, stirring up tales of naughty indulgence enacted by the ensemble; “Barcarolle,” in which Liu too blends into the Dodgson persona, this time as a motherly, androgynous sheep, and finally, and very memorably, Paulino—as the aged Alice on a cane—singing “I’m Still Here” as a statement of endurance but also of immortal presence within the Dreamland that, for all we know, might go on without us. Paulino’s Alice is childlike, capricious, and slyly reactive throughout, the giddy kid we might like to be again. Being an audience to Paulino’s emotive and moving way with a song has been a joy of her time, now in its third year, at the Yale School of Drama, and her “I’m Still Here” caps that wonderfully. 

Humpty Dumpty (Jessy Yates), Alice ((Ilia Isorelýs Paulino) in the Yale School of Drama production of Alice by Robert Wilson, Paul Schmidt, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, directed by Logan Ellis, February 2020 (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

There are a few disappointments: the poems “Jabberwocky” and “You Are Old, Father William,” two of my favorites in the books (and add “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” not referenced here, as a third) sort of get lost in the sauce; the Tweedledee (Cortés)/Tweedledum (Reese) segment, while fun and silly, lacks the manic, violent quality Carroll gives it; and “Lost in the Harbour” is sung by Yates as Humpty Dumpty presented as a projection upon a large, suspended egg. The device seems to limit Humpty Dumpty who, in the book, is a key figure and whose song, here, could use more of the wistful doom found in Waits’ rendition on Alice.

As a musical, the Alice of Wilson, Schmidt, Waits and Brennan, is based on a merging of spectacle and song that creates a world more than a story. Logan Ellis and company fully fulfill that imperative, imaginatively, creatively, and with lasting impressions to spare. “There’s only Alice.”

Alice
Concept by Robert Wilson
Music and Lyrics by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan
Libretto by Paul Schmidt
Directed by Logan Ellis

Music Direction, Arrangements, and Orchestrations: Dan Pardo; Scenic Design: Anna Grigo; Costume Designer: Meg Powers; Lighting Designer: Riva Fairhall; Sound Designer: Dakota Stipp; Projection Designer: Brittany Bland; Production Dramaturg: Evan Hill; Technical Director: HaoEn Hu; Stage Manager: Bekah Brown

Musicians: Jillian Emerson, cello; Nate Huvard, guitar; Dan Pardo, piano; Epongue Ekille, violin; Calvin Kaleel, bass; Jose Key, saxophone; Leonardo Marques Starck von Mutius, trombone

Cast: Sola Fadiran, Robert Lee Hart, Daniel Liu, Ilia Isorelýs Paulino, John Evans Reese, Julian Sanchez, Jackeline Torres Cortés, Adrienne Wells, Jessy Yates

Yale School of Drama
February 1-7, 2020

Something Wicked

Review of Burn Book, Yale Cabaret

Three boys in boarding school, sharing a dorm room. The new kid arrives. Tensions arise, secrets are discovered, bonding takes place, but also possibilities for conspiracy and betrayal. The plot may sound familiar, but Burn Book, JJ McGlone’s debut play making its debut at Yale Cabaret, takes it to a different register. What makes it different? The boys are girls, which is to say very gay and very out about it. The play is wickedly good fun, directed by Zoe Mann, a third-year actor, in her directing debut.

William (JJ McGlone) claims the four are the only gays at the school (what are the chances?), and we never see them interact with others outside the room of four cots. The play gives us very privileged access to a very insular space. In that space, the four all indulge each other’s uncloseted personae, and the dialogue is fast-paced, arch and very funny. The dynamic among the four runs the gamut of the kinds of getting to know you moments, meltdowns, anxiety attacks and so on, familiar to the teen queen genre. At first, the main concern seems to be pecking order as William, the top Mean Girl, so to speak, immediately insists that newcomer Ty (Gregory Victor Georges) will replace Lewis (Daniel Liu) in the cot righthand side to his own. Ty, from Haiti, has a greater cachet, if only because of his outrageous twerking skills. Meanwhile, Warren (Julian Sanchez) seems the most put-upon and most likely to sulk in his cot.

The foursome engage in venomous commentary about teachers, fellow students, and the school’s straight ethos (we are reminded a few times of how important status and success are here). Of course, each teen has pet peeves and favorite objects of lust. But McGlone has another genre in mind as well: Ty, we learn when William makes the discovery, has a special book secreted away. And so the main dramatic outing is William calling out Ty as a witch—which they all claim to be as well. Now we’re in the midst of a coven and the four take to wearing skirts, as a means to set themselves apart and because nothing in the school’s dress code forbids it.

The four’s rapid-fire interactions—which includes choreographed raves, themed videos by Erin Sullivan (one, a kind of Goth-drag music video on Yale’s Old Campus to the tune of The Smiths’ “How Soon is Now,” is particularly hilarious), and casting spells—are full of a heady immediacy. Director Mann keeps the pace just short of collective hysteria—and the night I attended the audience was incredibly spirited, swept up by a sense of a behind-the-scenes exposure.

The sequence of getting-even hexes the four commit escalates to the point where discomfort and disagreement begins. Ty tries to demur, and William becomes more demanding. McGlone’s William gets a scary gleam in his eye, playing upon the weaknesses in his coven to gain his goal: a jealous blow against the wife of the male instructor he wants for himself. The outcome—after each undergoes a major freak-out—takes place when called before the school’s deans and it arrives as a shocking act of betrayal and a completely unhinged moment. It’s also where an actual witch-hunt and the term’s more metaphoric usages dovetail in a sharply dramatic way.

A “burn book”—as viewers of Mean Girls know—is a kind of collective scrapbook in which defamation and destruction of certain detested objects (mostly fellow-students) are gleefully indulged. The four witches keep such a book and it becomes a testimony against them, not only in the targets of their hexes but also in the truly malevolent spirit they have unleashed among themselves. Of course, with the fate of the witches of New England in mind, a “burn book” is also a document of how certain populations, deliberately “other” to a dominant culture that is straight, patriarchal, Christian and at least somewhat puritanical, have been outlawed, persecuted, and, wherever possible, cancelled by history. Considering such a context, it’s not the first time the slogan of confrontation might well be “burn, baby, burn.”

Burn Book
By JJ McGlone
Directed by Zoe Mann

Producer: Laurie Ortega-Murphy; Scenic Designer: Lily Guerin; Lighting Designer: Emma Deane; Sound and Projection Designer: Erin Sullivan; Costume Designer: David Mitsch; Assistant Costume Designer: April M. Hickman; Sound Engineer: Liam Bellman-Sharpe; Dramaturg: Alex Vermillion; Stage Manager: Kevin Zhu

Cast: Gregory Victor Georges; Daniel Liu; JJ McGlone; Julian Sanchez

Yale Cabaret
October 31-November 2, 2019

Yale Cabaret is dark next weekend, then returns November 14-16 with Rubberneck, proposed and created by Mattie McGarey, a theatrical interrogation of how “habitual movements shape our reality,” that brings “body language, symbolic gesture, and unspoken social cues to the forefront.”

Birds of a Feather

Review of The Swallow and the Tomcat, Yale Summer Cabaret

Morning (Adrienne Wells) is lazy and doesn’t want to rise. Wind (Dario Ladani Sanchez) tries to persuade her that things can’t get going without her. So they make a deal: first, a love story; then she’ll get up (a bit of bargaining that should be readily familiar to parents and children alike).

In Wind’s story, a group of animals hangout in a playground complete with a white picket fence and a swing and a lovely green lawn (Elsa GibsonBraden, scenic design). Like any human collective, the animals have their “do’s and don’ts” about expected behavior, and they have a love of gossip about anything out of the ordinary. And what could be more out of the ordinary than a haughty Swallow (Zoe Mann) taking an interest in a Tomcat (Reed Northrup), generally considered the scourge of the playground, and vice versa?

In The Swallow and the Tomcat, a story Brazilian novelist and playwright Jorge Amado wrote for his infant son that was later published, playfulness abounds and, as with most stories for children, there is a moral. Here, it arises from the struggle between conservative social customs and headstrong youth which tends to take things as they come. And any child who has encountered playground or classroom dynamics will immediately recognize the way others’ voices often limit our choices.

The ensemble of The Swallow and the Tomcat at Yale Summer Cabaret Verano (Dario Ladani Sanchez, Zoe Mann, Reed Northrup, Anula Navlekar, Julian Sanchez, Adrienne Wells) (Photos by Elsa GibsonBraden)

The play—translated from Amado’s Portuguese text and adapted by director Danilo Gambini, co-artistic director of this season’s Yale Summer Cabaret, and dramaturg Emily Sorensen—is made children-friendly by the colorful costumes (by Stephanie Bahniuk), the charming songs (by Solon Snider with Gambini and Sorensen), and, especially, the ensemble’s full immersion in the world Amado and his adaptors have created. And what makes the show worthwhile for adults are the very same qualities. It’s a joy.

In many ways, the show is a perfect example of what the Yale Cabaret does best: it depends on a concerted effort at make-believe, and, while that can have all kinds of different valence depending on the play, here it’s a question of storytelling as something inherently dramatic—and comic—and romantic—and even, perhaps, subversive. The cast interacts with the audience, drawing us in and making us judge for ourselves about the purpose of the tale they tell.

The ensemble: Anula Navlekar, Dario Ladani Sanchez, Zoe Mann, Julian Sanchez, Reed Northrup, Adrienne Wells

The animals all have distinct personalities and distinguishing voices—a total of 18 roles are handled by six actors—and they all have something to say about the forbidden love brewing in their midst. The joy comes from watching how quickly the actors can switch from one odd exchange to another, as for instance, the rather seedy Priest Parrot (Julian Sanchez) telling bad jokes to amuse Cow (Dario Ladani Sanchez) only to stir Cow’s anxious sense of inadequacy, or the way Daddy Swallow (Anula Navlekar) and Mommy Swallow (Julian Sanchez) bill and coo relentlessly. There’s also much fun with the storytelling itself, with interruptions for backstory and various asides and, at one point, a critical dismissal by Toad (Anula Navlekar) of the Tomcat’s hapless effort at a love poem. Other fun bits come from Freud the Mole (Julian Sanchez), always ready to put teen psychology into a nutshell for us, and Owl (Adrienne Wells), a kind of self-important commentator who sees political potential in the unheard-of mating of a cat and bird.

Swallow (Zoe Mann)

Key to the show’s success are its two titular characters, brought to life by Zoe Mann and Reed Northrup respectively. Mann gives the Swallow an early-teen sense of sophistication and a healthy curiosity about things she wants to know—like why she finds herself so fascinated by watching the Tomcat and takes such delight in dropping twigs on him. Northrup’s Tomcat put me in mind of a beloved cartoon character of my childhood—Top Cat—with his street-wise diction and a knack for self-reflection that comes as a surprise to himself. Their infatuation—which we certainly can’t call “puppy love”—is treated as a defining moment that might help both creatures learn things about themselves they wouldn’t otherwise. Both actors make this unlikely love seem both perfectly natural and perfectly unique—the way love is supposed to be.

Tomcat (Reed Northrup)

There’s also a threat which the rather hypocritical critters are willing to let the brave Tomcat defeat for them, even as they treat him as something less than, well, human. The animals’ are adamant: “Dog with dog / Cat with cat / Bird with bird / And that is that.” Of course, a tale of star-crossed or cross-species love wouldn’t be complete without a beau favored by Swallow’s parents—here it’s a Nightingale (Navlekar) more adept at teaching singing than winning hearts. Will Swallow hold out for the lovelorn Tomcat, or will the forces of biological rectitude prevail?

In the end, the wily Wind helps a dawning idea light up Morning.

The ensemble: Anula Navlekar, Adrienne Wells, Julian Sanchez

After plays about the harshness of fate, in Euripides’ Bakkahi, and the harshness of political and sexual abuse of power, in María Irene Fornés’ The Conduct of Life, Yale Summer Cabaret—Verano—with this, its third play of the season, reaches out to children with a lively story to inspire change.

The Swallow and the Tomcat
By Jorge Amado
Adapted by Danilo Gambini and Emily Sorensen
Directed by Danilo Gambini

Scenic Designer: Elsa GibsonBraden; Costume Designer: Stephanie Bahniuk; Lighting Designer: Evan Anderson; Sound Designer/Music Director: Emily Duncan Wilson; Composer/Music Director: Solon Snider; Dramaturg/Adapter: Emily Sorensen; Stage Manager: Olivia Louise Tree Plath

Ensemble: Zoe Mann, Anula Navlekar, Reed Northrup, Dario Ladani Sanchez, Julian Sanchez, Adrienne Wells

Yale Summer Cabaret—Verano
July 18-27, 2019

A Show For All Ages

Preview of The Swallow and the Tomcat, Yale Summer Cabaret

The Yale Summer Cabaret’s Verano season continues this week with a show that’s sure to be a crowd-pleaser. Adapted by Co-Artistic Director Danilo Gambini and dramaturg Emily Sorensen from a new translation of Jorge Amado’s children’s book, The Swallow and the Tomcat, the show is aimed for families, young adults, and audiences of all ages—six and up.

The grumpy Tomcat is seen as a horror and a threat by the animals in the garden, but for some reason the sassy Swallow isn’t afraid and tries to get to know him. Their affection is the talk of the garden and makes life difficult—especially as the Swallow’s parents are convinced she should marry the Nightingale. A story of identity and of the social strictures that make some forms of love “forbidden,” The Swallow and the Tomcat asks, Can enemies learn to love one another, and can that love find acceptance? Showtimes have been adjusted to allow for young audiences, with a Sunday 2 p.m. matinee show, and on both Fridays, special 11 a.m. performances. The show runs approximately 70 minutes.

To call the book upon which the play is based a children’s book is a little misleading, according to director and co-adapter Danilo Gambini. The book, in its original Portuguese, was written solely by Jorge Amado for his infant son and was never meant to be published. Amado is best known in the U.S. as the author of the play Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, which was made in 1976 into a film that was a huge box office success in Brazil and in the States as well. Amado’s son, with his father’s blessing, chose to publish his childhood gift, and found an illustrator, Carybe, who helped create one of the seminal works for children in Brazil. The book “screams for adaptation,” Gambini said, and there have been two approaches that he is familiar with. One is “to play it strictly for children,” much as one would in a storybook session; the other is make it more avant-garde, with a definite allegorical emphasis.

For Gambini, who dislikes the earlier plays adapted from the book, creating a new adaptation was crucial. When Sorensen told him that she was translating a Spanish version of the book into English for a translation class, he knew he’d found his second show of the Verano season. As a director, Gambini is attracted by the levels of storytelling in the play he and his collaborators are creating. “The play lets us investigate which storytelling devices are theatrical, engaging, and fun.”

The Cast of The Swallow and the Tomcat (front: Julian Sanchez, Adrienne Wells, Zoe Mann; rear: Anula Navlekar, Dario Ladani Sanchez, Reed Northrup); Set: Elsa GibsonBraden; Costumes: Stephanie Bahniuk; Lighting: Evan Anderson

There are two layers, he said, to the presentation: a chorus of six animals is telling the story of a swallow and a tomcat who fall in love, and as they tell it, they take on and act out the parts of the story, which involves a host of comical roles, quite in the manner of Disney cartoons. For Gambini, “the theatricality of the play depends upon the virtuosity of the players.” And, of course, there are songs, all of which are original to this production and have been developed by Gambini and Sorensen with recent Yale College graduate Solon Snider, the show’s composer and music director.

The main cast consists of the Cat (Reed Northrup) a loner who finds himself intrigued by the Swallow (Zoe Mann); a Parrot (Julian Sanchez) who has definite ideas about decorum; a rather laconic Cow (Dario Ladani Sanchez), a rather pretentious Toad (Anula Navlekar) and a busybody Owl (Adrienne Wells), with additional roles, such as Swallow’s parents, the Duck family, a Snake, as well as Wind and Morning, taken up by the ensemble as needed.

The attractions of the show, for its director, is that “it’s engaging to see actors play animals,” and that, as a family-oriented play, it will entertain children while also depicting social types and attitudes. It’s “about love and seeing how others react” to the choices we make. For Gambini, there is always the question of what he calls the “five daemons” in creating theater. The first is to have a “marvel” that children can enjoy—such as talking and singing animals; next is a “passion” that appeals to the teens in and among us, wanting theater to be intense and convincing; third is a civic or social or political element that addresses what the young adult finds compelling; for the fully adult, perhaps more detached, there must be intellectual satisfactions, such as artistic virtuosity; finally, for mature audiences, a feeling that the show “lives in the now,” providing something that hasn’t already been overdone. The challenge of a show that accents the first and second “daemon” is how well it can still satisfy the other three.

Gambini’s first show of the Verano season adapted Anne Carson’s recent translation of Euripides’ Bakkhai, a show which foregrounded, perhaps, the fourth daemon while fully engaging with the second and third. It also featured Dionysus, an androgynous god who considers himself a daemon—a daemon that oversees the creation of theater since ancient Greek times. While the emphasis, mood and nature of The Swallow and the Tomcat will be very different from the season’s first show, the need to please the theater-god remains. And that means, for Gambini, addressing, even in a children’s story, important themes such as “living with the consequences of how we live and what we do.”

What kind of consequences? Gambini ended the interview by citing a line from the play, spoken by Wind: “Every morning is a chance to make a little revolution.”

The Swallow and the Tomcat
By Jorge Amado
Translated and Adapted by Danilo Gambini and Emily Sorensen
Directed by Danilo Gambini
Yale Summer Cabaret—Verano
July 18-27, 2019

For more information about the cast and creatives, and for tickets and dining menu and reservations, go here.

Heroes of Happy Meals

Review of Lenny’s Fast Food Kids Gang, Yale Cabaret

This weekend at Yale Cabaret, it’s the new kids in town, or, more properly, in the Yale School of Drama. The high spirits of first-year playwright Angie Bridgette Jones’ Lenny’s Fast Food Kids Gang is matched by the high spirits of its cast, all first-year actors at the School, and is directed by first-year director Alex Keegan. Most of the tech team marks Cab debuts as well.

The play lends itself to youth—though maybe youth that’s beginning to feel its oats. Lenny’s Fast Food Kids Gang were, in their day, a pack of pubescents working with zest and commercial zeal in a televised version of a fast-food restaurant. Not exactly Reality TV, the show offered a recipe for diversity, and was the kind of sitcom that forever marks those who watched it in their younger and more impressionable years. Of course, being on the show marked the cast for life, to some extent, and the mix of nostalgia, bitter memory, and theatrical cheer that attends one’s best-remembered role is served up with seasonings that have marinated over the years.

We’re generally predisposed to see our past as more innocent than the present—not just because we were but because the world was too, or at least that’s how it seems. So, if the beaming face of Bush II on the wall brings back a flurry of fond memories, then you already share a world with the Kids Gang. Likewise, your frame of reference for the kind of kids’ show Lenny’s FFKG was in its day will date you. Let’s just leave it at “Nickelodeon,” with Lenny, who was played by Kaleb (in a feisty portrayal by Bre Northrup), supposedly the leader. It’s due to Kaleb that this reunion is taking place, after fifteen years, as though he can’t quite get over the time when he was the focus of all that attention.

The others—Jason (Daniel Liu), Jessica (Malia West), Daniella (Madeline Seidman), Walter (Holiday), and Bam Bam (Julian Sanchez), the talking dog—have all moved on, more or less, but some have hopes that a reunion, with press and possibly agents, will revive interest in the show. But let’s not worry overmuch about the plot. What makes Jones’ play work is how the cast navigate their former roles and their current status. It all lands as both tribute and inquest, each wondering how they endured the show and who they are without it.

Bam Bam, for instance, has been a substance-abuser for quite some time. Once you’ve been a talking dog on TV, what’s life got to offer? Walter has a tale of woe as well. On the show, his tag was his endless consumption of burgers. Now he’s got diabetes and his health is in decline. Then there’s the way the Asian-American boy and African-American girl played by Jason and Jessica respectively were simply token parts with no lines or silly ones. And Daniella, though she educated herself beyond her eye-candy white girl role, still feels marked by it. And that leaves Kaleb, the white male of the group, as the only one still uplifted by the show’s part in his life.

Further tensions come to light with a gun, an emergency signal that produces a lockdown, and an anxious wait for some kind of intervention. Along the way, there are various send-ups, put-downs, and very amusing occasions to vent about what was what. Liu and West come across memorably as real life characters that put to shame their televised caricatures. Sanchez’s strung-out dog pouts and whines and rolls about like a live-action cartoon, Seidman gives Daniella a wide-eyed intensity and Holiday’s Walter delivers the tones of the sad sack trying to overcome a minor part. The possibility of an impending moment of truth keeps the action moving with a frenetic sense of incident. Lenny, ever the autocrat, often standing on a chair, gets a comeuppance that would probably have made a good episode of the show.

The set is a reasonable facsimile of a fast-food restaurant, complete with plate-glass windows and doors, little tables for two, a bathroom (where Bam Bam does lines and hides out), and—for a touch of aging nostalgia—a payphone. Liu and Northrup open the show as cheerleaders for Lenny’s Burgers, a  restaurant in Orlando, Florida, as they work the crowd with questions and mimicry and quick, versatile patter. The opening sets the tone of hyperbolic “fun” that nothing apart from actors on a children’s show could possibly live up to. From the start we’re in the world of hyper simulacrum, and the gaps between role and actor sell the Cab show. Kids grow up and learn the world really isn’t fun, while those beloved figures from childhood who helped sell the idea that it is are apt to be sadder than sad to our grownup eyes.

Lenny’s Fast Food Kids Gang
By Angie Bridgette Jones
Directed by Alex Keegan

Producers: Emma Perrin & Madeline Carey; Scenic Designer: Anna Grigo; Lighting Designer: Kyra Murzyn; Sound Designer: Yitong (Amy) Huang; Costume Designer: Phuong Nguyen; Technical Director: Laura Copenhaver; Dramaturg: Sophie Greenspan; Stage Manager: Cate Worthington

Cast: Holiday, Daniel Liu, Bre Northrup, Julian Sanchez, Madeline Seidman, Malia West

Yale Cabaret
February 14-16, 2019