The Carlotta is Coming Soon

Preview of the Carlotta Festival of New Plays, Yale School of Drama

A West African folktale with a Brechtian treatment; a story of inter-generational intimacy set in the great wide open of Alaska; a revisiting of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice from the view of Shylock’s daughter—these are the new offerings to be seen at the 12th annual Carlotta Festival of New Plays, a theatrical tradition of presenting new work from Yale School of Drama students at the end of their three-year stint in the playwriting program. The three playwrights—Tori Sampson, Miranda Rose Hall, Sarah B. Mantell—are paired with graduating directors—Elizabeth Dinkova, Kevin Hourigan, Jesse Rasmussen, respectively—to bring their plays to the stage at the Iseman Theater, featuring casts drawn primarily from first and second-year actors in the program.

Tori Sampson

Tori Sampson’s play, If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka, subtitled “an understanding of a West African folktale,” draws on a story Sampson was first told as a child by an uncle, “The Beautiful Girl and Her Seven Jealous Friends.” The story treats beauty as a determining factor of social standing. Sampson, who was a student of sociology before becoming a playwright, sees the story as a way to speak to women today when some standards may have changed, to some extent, but not for all.

The play could be said to come out of a frustration with double-standards, not only about who can be beautiful in a racist world, but also about what stories get told by the dominant culture. Sampson said she was “frustrated early on” in her studies at the School of Drama because the canonical playwrights were all white and male. One such writer was Bertolt Brecht and Sampson gradually decided to “investigate what I was not drawn to,” finding a certain common currency in the way Brecht’s work incorporated folk tales and what he found useful in other sources. For Sampson, the task of recreating other’s material “leads to a shared knowledge” and a way of interrogating what is known. As artists, Sampson said, drama students have “to allow ourselves to criticize what we study.”

The setting of Sampson’s play is a fictional place, Affreakah-Amirrorkah, a name that suggests a “freaky mirror” of Africa-America, and uses what might be called an Americanized dialect. It’s a poetic language relying on rhythm and sound more than everyday speech does. Last year, Sampson co-authored a Carlotta play with Jiréh Breon Holder, Some Bodies Travel, a very entertaining challenge to black cultural stereotypes, and in the Yale Cabaret season she directed Tarell Alvin McCraney’s reworking of Yoruba folk material, In the Red and Brown Water.

Plays, Sampson said, “are not about solving issues.” The issue of beauty, which our culture treats so seriously, she said “intrigued” her and she sees her play as “adding to the conversation” about what our standards say about us as a culture.

In choosing a play for this year’s Carlotta, Sampson was asked: “What is going to make you most happy?” One thing that gives her joy is making people laugh, and hers is a comic play, with jokes that may be “in your face,” but which should connect with a contemporary audience. Laughter and meaningful themes go hand-in-hand, for Sampson, and working with dramaturg Catherine Maria Rodriguez and director Elizabeth Dinkova, whose work has been marked by both, has been a positive experience for all.

Miranda Rose Hall

The plays by Miranda Rose Hall that have been seen at YSD have tended to be comic, with decidedly satiric elements. But there’s another side to her work—more than two, in fact. Hall’s The Hour of Great Mercy allows her to move into domestic drama, in this case set in remote, rural Alaska, and to examine a key theme for her: “the nature and limits of love”

The play is based on a setting where Hall lived for a time, working in a care-giving facility she was assigned to through “a kind of domestic Peace Corps.” Her task was providing company and solace to people near the end of their lives. Her play allows Hall to look back at a place that, she said, is with her always, with its mix of “sublime environment and human dysfunction,” a combination she just had to write about. Hall’s play creates a situation to examine questions that loom large at the end of life, like “forgiveness, and the ways in which we love each other and suffer with another’s suffering.”

The story occurs five years after a tragic event in the community of Bethlehem, Alaska, where Ed, a Jesuit priest in late middle-age, returns to reconcile with his estranged brother and finds himself falling in love unexpectedly in the isolated wastes. For Hall, the play is “irreducibly Alaskan” because her time there, in which she drank up many stories from the locals, most having to do with “a wild cast of characters in spartan conditions,” caused her to reflect on questions of “survival and the ethos of mortality.” The landscape, she said, made her feel “in the presence of something greater” that was “impossible to ignore.”

Choosing a Jesuit as hero for her play is a testament to the Jesuits who ran the volunteer corps Hall joined, and it also was a way to work with Catholic themes. Though raised Presbyterian, Hall is descended from Italian immigrants, and said she feels “culturally Catholic.” Georgetown, where she received her undergraduate degree, was founded by Jesuits and their stated values of “service, education, and justice” are important to Hall. It’s also important that the play be set during the papacy of a former Jesuit priest: Pope Benedict, who denounced gay marriage.

Though ultimately fictional, the play draws on Hall’s real love for Alaska and the people she met there. Though no one who knew her could quite understand why she was going with a small team of total strangers into one of the remotest and wildest states in the nation, her experience has made her more confident about her ability to find the themes she wants to explore in her art. The characters in The Hour of Great Mercy are not Alaskan natives but have lived there a long time, and reflect for Hall “the heart, humor, and tough defiance” of the people she came to know there. Kevin Hourigan and Gavin Whitehead, Hall’s director and dramaturg, were her first collaborators in her first year project at YSD, so, in a way, she’s come full circle.

Sarah B. Mantell

Kevin Hourigan’s second-year studio show, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, figures as a major catalyst for the third Carlotta play. In viewing that production, Sarah B. Mantell finally saw a play she had always avoided, not wanting to experience a Jewish villain given canonical weight by the greatest writer in the English language. Mantell began writing Everything That Never Happened last summer, making this “the shortest possible process” in bringing a play to the stage. The play, she said, “could only be born at the Yale School of Drama” because she would not have encountered Merchant anywhere else. What’s more, Hourigan’s production, which featured Elizabeth Stahlmann in the key role of Shylock, staged the humiliating conversion scene that the Jewish merchant is condemned to undergo.

And yet Merchant is considered a comedy and Mantell sees the relation of humor to tragedy in the play as “very Jewish,” and that has motivated her to write with Jewish speaking voices, to create, in fact, “everything that never happened” in The Merchant of Venice. Particularly, Mantell’s play dramatizes the story of Shylock’s daughter Jessica, in love with Lorenzo, who realizes she must run away. A key plot point is that she is ethnically ambiguous and can pass as something she’s not—a gentile.

In pursuing her process of “taking Shakespeare’s characters and making them my own,” Mantell had conversations with playwright Sara Ruhl who has adapted classic texts, such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, in her work. Mantell cites as well Paula Vogel’s Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief, a reworking of Othello with a very different emphasis. Mantell has also been working on a play called “Fight Call”—the term for working through all of a play’s fights in sequence for rehearsal—that would be a walk-through of the deaths of many of Shakespeare’s female characters. The key element uniting such reinventions of Shakespeare is considering how the sexist assumptions of his plays can be overturned or dramatized.

Everything That Never Happened wants to take such revisionism a step further. Not only is Jessica a female hero for this reworking of Merchant, but she is also ethnically other than the dominant culture. Working with Jesse Rasmussen, who staged the violent misogyny of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore as her thesis show, has “been tremendous” for Mantell, as “Jesse can do a lot with little,” and her dramaturg, Chad Kinsman, and others she consulted have been incredibly helpful in keeping straight details of the time period and other factors relevant to the adaptation.

Mantell, whose early play, Mrs. Galveston, was one of the most engaging plays at this season’s Yale Cabaret, may find at last the heart of Shakespeare’s always somewhat problematic Merchant.

Three graduating playwrights, three new plays with heart, humor, and new perspectives.

The Carlotta Festival of New Plays
Yale School of Drama

If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka: an understanding of a West African folktale
By Tori Sampson, directed by Elizabeth Dinkova
May 5, 8 pm; May 9, 8 pm; May 11, 2 pm; May 12, 8 pm

The Hour of Great Mercy
By Miranda Rose Hall, directed by Kevin Hourigan
May 6, 8 pm; May 10, 2 pm; May 11, 8 pm; May 13, 2 pm

Everything That Never Happened
By Sarah B. Mantell, directed by Jesse Rasmussen
May 7, 8 pm; May 10, 8 pm; May 12, 2 pm; May 13, 8 pm

It's Complicated

Review of Xander Xyst, Dragon: 1, Yale Cabaret

In Jeremy O. Harris’ Xander Xyst, Dragon: 1, directed by Jesse Rasmussen at Yale Cabaret, Xander (Kevin Hourigan) is an online celebrity, more particularly, he’s a porn star. People sign onto his website and get to watch videos of Xander’s sexual trysts. In this play we simply accept that such access and self-exploitation is something that would earn one a following—and I guess it would. A further question seems implied: what kind of person will shape his life to be known by random access through an online window? That question could probe into much of what passes for life—as virtual life—in our day. But Harris pretty much sticks with Xander’s dilemma: to be a sex hero online or just a dude on a date. Which would you rather be?

Xander (Kevin Hourigan), Michael (Josh Goulding)

The date is what’s taking place as we watch, and it’s awkward and arch the way depictions of people on dates tend to be, with the fun in the mix provided by Josh Goulding’s breezy seducer, Michael. Xander, in his videos, is hetero, and he remarks to Michael that in his imagination the date would be “more gay.” We might wonder what’s driving Xander to explore. It might just be something to do, or it might have something to do with his relation to his younger brother, Matt (Abubakr Ali).

Lena (Sydney Lemmon), Matt (Abubakr Ali)

Matt, a singer/musician/composer, is also on a date, sort of. Ostensibly, he’s trying to find a female singer to collaborate with, and Lena (Sydney Lemmon), in hot pants, form-fitting T, and one helluva wig, shows up to try out. But Matt is the kind of guy who seems rather “closeted” about the fact that he’d like to get laid, and his interactions with Lena have an awkwardness that seems endemic to these brothers. Lena, learning that Matt’s brother is a digital stud, is agog with interest, leading to jumps back and forth between the brothers’ simultaneous encounters, and to very busy projections—including porn footage—of Xander’s website. A live chorus, the Internetz (Amandla Jahava, Jakeem Powell, Ivan Kirwan-Taylor), tends to praise Xander in the hyperbolic terms of his own imagination, or of his most fervid fans, or both.

Lena (Sydney Lemmon)

The “dragon” imagery comes from something the boys shared, a fantasy in which, perhaps, sexual molestation is figured, or maybe it’s just the kind of quest fantasy that occupies the imagination of many at that age. There’s also an overlay of Greek god imagery, to suggest, I suppose, that we’ve always been keen on virtual beings.

 In any case, the brothers have some confronting to do, particularly after Matt stops just short of raping Lena and Xander may have done something much worse to his date—worse even than dismissing him with the ringing line: “Your insignificance has been made manifest.” That may be the put-down of all put-downs when “being known” and being glorified for being known is the height of narcissistic self-enjoyment.

Matt (Abubakr Ali), the Internetz (Amandla Jahava, Jakeem Powell), Xander (Kevin Hourigan)

Both brothers, together with Lena, are good singers, so that helps keep us interested in their self-projections. As performers they tend to be of the self-involved type that doesn’t exactly reach out to the audience. And maybe that’s the kick of the one-way camera of online performing: you know the audience is out there, but you never have to see them. They’re just in your head and you, the performer, are in their personal space—or at least on their personal device. It’s personal, yes, but decidedly detached.

The flesh-and-blood performance elements of the show are carried best by Lemmon’s Lena, who emerges as a supporting character able to redirect the drama away from the principals. “What’s her story?,” we might find ourselves asking, or “I wonder what she’s up to now,” while Xander and Matt pursue their efforts to gaze into one another’s navels. It may be that the main drama is too static in its presentation, or too detached in its characterization, but it brought to mind lines by Leonard Cohen, from “Death of a Lady’s Man”: “So the great affair is over / And whoever would’ve guessed / It would leave us all so vacant / And so deeply unimpressed.”

Lena (Sydney Lemmon)

The projections and the music add considerable elements to the show as an event, making us privy to worlds and possibly feelings that are of our cultural moment. Though deliberate, the staging of the date between Xander and Michael leaves a bit to be desired as it’s rather like trying to watch what’s happening at a table on the far side of the Cab space—unless you happen to be sitting right next to that table—which, I suppose, makes us all eavesdropping voyeurs. How you feel in that space may have a lot to do with how you feel about Xander Xyst, Dragon: 1.

Xander Xyst, Dragon: 1
By Jeremy O. Harris
Directed Jesse Rasmussen

Original Music: Isabella Summers, Jeremy O. Harris, Steven Cablayan; Production Dramaturg: Amauta Marston-Firmino; Set Designer: Ao Li; Costume Designer: Cole McCarty; Lighting Designer: Erin Earle Fleming; Sound Designer & Additional Music Production: Michael Costagliola; Projections Designer: Yaara Bar; Technical Director: LT Gourzong; Stage Manager: Sarah Thompson; Producer: Adam J. Frank

Cast: Abubakr Ali; Josh Goulding; Kevin Hourigan; Amandla Jahava; Ivan Kirwan-Taylor; Sydney Lemmon; Jakeem Powell

Yale Cabaret
March 2-4, 2017

Only Collide!

Review of Collisions, Yale Cabaret

Collisions, a collaboration between music, theater and visual projections now playing at the Yale Cabaret, co-directed by Frederick Kennedy and Kevin Hourigan, is a multimedia extravaganza. No two shows will be exactly the same, as the projections and other effects by a team at a tech board in the center of the space respond to what is happening on stage, and the music played live by a four-man band is improvised. It’s the kind of show for which the Cab is uniquely suited, with a range of meanings and sensations happening almost spontaneously.

Brontë England-Nelson, Sydney Lemmon (photo: Elizabeth Green)

So, the performers are sometimes interpreting music, sometimes being supported by music, sometimes performing a song, and the music is sometimes the main focus, sometimes background, and the projections are sometimes extending or amplifying the stories and sometimes seem to have gone a bit rogue. It’s a wonderful mix of effects and routines and jazz workouts whose effect will be mostly in the eye and ear of the beholder.

The set is a mélange of actual instruments to be played and a kind of electronics dump of obsolete bric-a-brac—a dusty old VHS deck c. 1980 is a treasure. The band—Evan Smith, saxophone and woodwinds, Kevin Patton, guitar, stage right; Frederick Kennedy, drums and percussion, Matt Wigton, bass, stage left—are placed amidst the visual cacophony to create a variety of musical textures that can be at times a hypnotic groove, at other times, celestial sounds, and at times a hot jam.

Baize Buzan, Brontë England-Nelson, Sydney Lemmon (photo: Elizabeth Green)

The performers—Baize Buzan, Brontë England-Nelson, Sydney Lemmon—are clad in different costumes of white. Buzan has the knit cap, England-Nelson, the baseball cap, Lemmon is hatless. At times they narrate what they’re doing, as in Buzan’s “bit at the podium,” a kind of Ted talk to open the piece. Other times, they wordlessly interact with the music—which can mean expressive slow-mo or very physical jousting with chairs, much of it designed to play with the various ways we might experience “collision”: something hitting something else, an idea meeting an obstruction.

Brontë England-Nelson, Sydney Lemmon, Baize Buzan (photo: Elizabeth Green)

Here and there, dialogues sprout up—one, particularly amusing, has Lemmon as a tensely serious art-maker talking about her collage deconstructions as England-Nelson skeptically quizzes their purpose. At one point, Lemmon sings a song and the others join in, breaking up the jazz score with simple melody and, yes, feelings. A favorite segment for me was England-Nelson leading a meditation class more apt to cause anxieties than allay them (“what’s that, is that the water level rising to engulf us all?”), and Lemmon sounding off in a kind of lecture that skewers some of the pretensions of our particular cultural moment (“how can we make violence safe again?”).

Brontë England-Nelson (photo: Elizabeth Green)

There are a lot of meta moves, where the three are commenting on what it is we’re all experiencing—at one point, as they consult their snapchats or tinders, the camera man at the tech board pans the audience to let us appear in a projected cellphone frame. The interaction between the trio never feels portentous, and they can be remarkably eloquent even when—or especially when—they aren’t saying anything.

Frederick Kennedy (photo: Elizabeth Green)

The point of mixing media is in the mixing, generally. Here, one is often struck by the wherewithal to sculpt with sound and image and physical performer. Collisions can be a very immersive or contemplative experience, and, in the best tradition of live performance, it makes you glad you were there.

Collisions
Conceived and written by Frederick Kennedy
Developed in collaboration with the entire company
Co-directed by Kevin Hourigan and Frederick Kennedy
Additional text: Jeremy O. Harris
Additional music: Molly Joyce

Choreography: Jake Ryan Lozano, Emily Lutin, Gretchen Wright; Dramaturgy: Ashley Chang, Jeremy O. Harris; Set Design: Choul Lee, John Bondi-Ernoehazy; Costume Design: Cole McCarty; Lighting Design: Elizabeth Green, Krista Smith; Sound Design: Christopher Ross-Ewart, Frederick Kennedy; Assistant Sound Design: Haley Wolfe; Projection Design: Yana Biryukova, Michael Commendatore; Technical Director: Rae Powell; Stage Manager: Paula R. Clarkson; Producer: Rachel Shuey

Cast: Baize Buzan, Brontë England-Nelson, Sydney Lemmon

Musicians: Frederick Kennedy, drums/percussion; Kevin Patton, guitar, custom interactive system design; Evan Smith, saxophone/woodwinds; Matt Wigton, bass

Yale Cabaret
November 17-19, 2016

Catch the Cab

Preview, Yale Cabaret: shows 7-10

No, it wasn’t a good week, last week. But this week will be better in at least one way: the Yale Cabaret returns, with the three shows before the winter break and the first show of the new year already named.

The Yale Cabaret lets us see theater students early in their career, working on shows they are passionate about, working to give expression to the many complex themes of our current world, and letting us—the audience—participate in vibrant talent and creativity. This year’s Artistic Directors are Ashley Chang, Davina Moss, Kevin Hourigan, the Managing Director is Steven Koernig, and the Associate Managing Directors are Kathy Li and Sam Linden. Here’s a brief preview of the shows chosen for the next four slots.

First up: Cab 7: Collisions. Proposed by sound design student and free jazz percussionist Fred Kennedy, the show will include some elements seen in the Yale Summer Cabaret’s show, “Envy: the Concert,” namely jazz—featuring Kennedy and a group of musicians—as well as performance pieces, co-directed by  Kennedy and Cab co-artistic director Kevin Hourigan, who also worked with Kennedy in last year’s multidisciplinary performance piece “I’m With You in Rockland.” The notion of “collision” comes from trying to “collide” free jazz—which “abandons composition in favor of collective improvisation”—with narrative and theater performance. Playwright Jeremy O. Harris contributes as well, to provide a performance piece where theater, as developed by the entire company, structures the music. The musicians joining Kennedy are Kevin Patton, guitar and interactive systems design; Evan Smith, sax and woodwinds; Matt Wigton, bass; and they’ll be aided and abetted by a trio of actors: Baize Buzan, Brontë England-Nelson, Sydney Lemmon. The show purports to be a collision of music and performance, with a definite narrative aspect. November 17-19

The following week the Cab is dark as we all drift about trying to find something to be thankful for on our national holiday.

Returning, Cab 8 offers Matthew Ward’s translation of Peter Handke’s play Kaspar, which takes its inspiration from the young adult foundling Kaspar Hauser, subject of a well-received film by Werner Herzog in the 1980s. In this production, the Cab’s graphic designer, Ayham Ghraowi directs dramaturg Josh Goulding—who recently directed Current Location and acted in Styx Songs at the Cab—as Kaspar, a man who grew up without human company and suffers estrangement while being integrated into society. The show features elements of vaudeville, slapstick, physical humor, and—according to Ashley Chang, who has a “heavy hand” in the show—“linguistic torture.” The play will be divorced somewhat from its original context. Think “clown figure assaulted by language.” The doctor who studied the actual Kaspar Hauser remarked that he “seemed to hear without understanding, to see without perceiving . . .“ Sound like anyone you know? December 1-3

Cab 9, the last show of 2016, will be Mrs. Galveston, a new play by third-year playwright Sarah B. Mantell, whose play Tiny was produced in last year’s Langston Hughes Studio Series. In this play, Mantell re-works her earliest play, deliberately re-scripting for her actor-collaborators at the Cab, which include George Hampe and Sydney Lemmon. Mrs. Galveston is an aged woman who one day finds herself visited by Jim, a young man who has been assigned to evaluate her health care needs. At the interview, she determines that he should be her caregiver. The play, directed by dramaturg Rachel Carpman, sounds like a bit of a Harold and Maude tale, as a comedy about an unlikely cross-generational relationship. The play entails themes of adult care and the autonomy of our aging Baby Boomer population, and involves a mysterious big white book. December 8-10

When we all return from seasonal holidays and welcoming in the new year in a January that looks to be joyous indeed, Cab 10 proffers a play by Tarell Alvin McCraney, 2007 YSD graduate, 2013 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize winner. In the Red and Brown Water is the second-written play but first in chronology of the Brother/Sister trilogy that includes The Brothers Size (staged at the Cab at the close of the 2013-14 season). Oya is a young woman and a skilled track star under pressure to develop and cash in on her talent, an expectation at odds with her ties to her family and her own romantic interests. As with the others in the series, the play is based on Yoruba myths in which Oya is a goddess of wind and change. The play is directed by third-year playwright Tori Sampson, who co-authored Some Bodies Travel in last year’s Carlotta Festival and wrote This Land was Made for the Langston Hughes Studio Series last year. The production was proposed by Folks, the African-American theater artists collective at the Yale School of Drama. January 12-14

That takes us through Cab 10; the next eight shows will be posted early next year, along with the date of the annual Yale School of Drag show. For a few weeks more, see you at the Cab!

For tickets, passes, donations, menus and show info: www.yalecabaret.org

Yale Cabaret 49
2016-17
217 Park Street

On a Knife Edge

Review of Blood Wedding, Yale School of Drama

Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding receives a gorgeous staging at the Yale School of Drama. The thesis show for third-year director Kevin Hourigan—and the first of the three thesis projects this season—Blood Wedding invites us to consider the elemental force of human passion. Lorca’s three act play is here staged as two acts, an intermission, and a short final act. The division of the material is made eminently sensible given the stark change in mood that follows the close of the play’s second act, here the first part curtain.

The first part has the feel of a folkloric exploration of the mores of an Andalusian village in rural Spain in the 1920s. Cole McCarty’s handsome costumes seem so authentic, we feel ourselves in a naturalistic depiction, while Choul Lee’s scenic design gestures toward the play’s more modernist elements that will come forward in the second part. The set combines a strikingly lit tree and tall, cathedral-like panes of glass, and, in the second part, poetic lighting to suggest the influence of the moon.

Lorca eschews character names (but for Leonardo), and that lets us know that we’re in for something more stylized than naturalistic. Yet director Hourigan presents the mounting drama of the play’s first two acts with strongly delineated characters. Sebastian Arboleda plays The Groom as likeable, if none too exciting, something his Mother (Lauren E. Banks) realizes, trying to persuade him that his proposed marriage to The Bride (Sydney Lemmon) may not be in his best interests. The girl has been tainted by the reciprocal desire between herself and Leonardo (Barbaro Guzman), a horseman and the town’s resident heart-throb; his Wife (Stephanie Machado) is already pregnant with his second child, even as he has begun to suffer jealousy at the prospective marriage of a woman he wants for himself. It’s not a healthy situation, and we feel the entire village—suggested by ensemble parts played by Marié Botha, Patricia Fa’asua, Rebecca Hampe, Francesca Fernandez McKenzie, and Jennifer Schmidt—looking on to see what develops.

In the early going, the play’s tone lets us hope all may work out well. Despite The Mother’s misgivings—and Banks seethes with barely contained emotion—and her mourning for men in her family who have died by the knife over quarrels, The Groom and his Mother pay the requisite visit to the Bride’s Father (Jake Ryan Lozano, benignly patriarchal) and events pass without quarrelsome words. The Groom is encouraged because the Bride seems eager for their coming nuptials, which is reassuring given the fact that she also finds it difficult to resist Leonardo’s importunate visit. These days, it’s easy to think ill of alpha males like Leonardo, but his headstrong passion, and his efforts at self-control, are well-rendered by Guzman, in a very becoming outfit.

Lorca infuses the situation with a brooding sense of fate, as the passions presented seem elements of nature more than of individual character. The play gives rise to qualities that might make us think of a folktale, based in a collective mythos. Songs sung by the Wife and her Maid (Elizabeth Stahlmann), and the Wife’s Mother (McKenzie) create a sense of these women as a Chorus from Greek tragedy. They perceive the sorrow that the unfaithful husband adds to the Wife’s woe, but they also recognize—and this is perhaps the most telling element in Lorca’s play—the inevitability of the town’s most desirable man claiming the town’s most desirable woman. To stand between a couple in such necessary eros, Lorca’s play suggests, is to invite tragedy. Stahlmann’s just so manner as the Maid is particularly effective at conveying a knowing sense of the smoldering undercurrents here.

Key to what transpires in the second part is the unmooring of The Bride. Lemmon, regally tall in her sumptuous black costuming, seems a figure of almost uncanny power, totemic even. The hoofbeats that thunder past at one point—credit to Ian Scot’s original music and sound design—can double as her heart’s resolve overflowing its restraints. And on her wedding day, the Bride’s testiness undermines the fragile sense of unity the wedding was intended to create.

In the second part, three girls (Botha, Hampe, Schmidt) are presented in the image of the three Fates, complete with skein, visited by a mysterious enrobed figure (Banks) who dallies with them over the fait accompli of a double death. Banks’ doubling as The Mother and this more arcane figure suggests how much The Groom’s bride all along was death, to give the Mother another cause for mourning.

Also key to the more phantasmagoric elements of the second part is the monologue by The Moon, played with an affecting sense of lunacy by Lozano. The Moon’s part in all this we might understand as the mythic idea of the evil genius of a place. The Moon creates a situation where men must lose their heads, and violence inevitably results. Lorca gives us a world where moonlight is a knife, and the fact of knives leads to inevitable blood-letting. In the end, whatever sense of justice exists becomes the concern of the women—the Mother, the Wife, the Bride—bereft of their men.

With many subtle effects—not least from Erin Earle Fleming’s lighting—Blood Wedding is a stirring autumnal tale, a chronicle of deaths fore-ordained.

Blood Wedding
By Federico García Lorca
Translated by Nahuel Telleria
Directed by Kevin Hourigan

Scenic Designer: Choul Lee; Costume Designer: Cole McCarty; Lighting Designer: Erin Earle Fleming; Original Music and Sound Design: Ian Scot; Technical Director: Alexandra Reynolds; Production Dramaturg: Josh Goulding; Stage Manager: Caitlin O’Rourke

Cast: Sebastian Arboleda, Lauren E. Banks, Marié Botha, Patricia Fa’asua, Francesca Fernandez McKenzie, Barbaro Guzman, Rebecca Hampe, Sydney Lemmon, Jake Ryan Lozano, Stephanie Machado, Jennifer Schmidt, Elizabeth Stahlmann

Yale School of Drama
October 18-22, 2016

Lorca's Poetic Drama, Next Week

Preview of Blood Wedding, Yale School of Drama

The first Yale School of Drama thesis show of the 2016-17 season goes up next week, October 18-22, with third-year director Kevin Hourigan’s production of Federico Garcia Lorca’s poetic tragedy Blood Wedding, in a new translation by Nahuel Telleria. First performed in 1933, Blood Wedding is a central work in the Spanish author’s canon, mixing folk themes with a surrealist and symbolist sensibility for which Lorca’s drama and poetry are internationally celebrated.

Concerned with a young bride, the groom she jilts for her former lover, and a smoldering family feud, Blood Wedding, the YSD press release reads, “plunges us into a moonlit and mysterious dimension where passion—demonic and sublime—has the power to imprison or liberate.”

Hourigan characterizes the play as “exquisite” and one of the “richest works of poetry” in theater. It’s also, he admits, “a very difficult work” not often performed by professional U.S. companies. In part this may be because, as Hourigan has found in rehearsals, the play demands “total abandon” of its actors and “requires a sense of sacrifice” to render Lorca’s tragic vision. Hourigan sees the play as “transformative” and concerned with “the radical power of desire.” Halfway measures just won’t work.

The task for Hourigan and his cast of 12 is trying “to wrap their heads around” a language that is both poetic and dramatic, and the use of songs that, unlike more traditional musical theater, act as what Hourigan calls “exploded character moments.” Understanding what a song does to the narrative is key to understanding how to present it. There is a basic level of reality in the work, Hourigan points out, so the actors have “plenty of concrete things to do” in order to enact dramatic personae, but, he adds, “an amazing thing we’ve learned is that the poetry extends far beyond the words,” into the very logic of the play. And that means atmosphere dominates action to a degree that it doesn’t in most plays.

Kevin Hourigan (photo: T. Charles Erickson)

For Hourigan, the urge to do Lorca’s play comes from its effort “to investigate the nature of passion,” a theme he finds relevant to those who pursue an art like theater and wonder why they do. Passion, he feels, “offers the most transcendent and awful motivation” for Lorca’s characters, and its true nature is, he says, “the central question of the play.” Clearly, there can be good and bad consequences of following one’s passion.

In mounting Blood Wedding, Hourigan “wanted control over the visual field, and wanted it to be flexible while also restricted to one perspective,” rather than use a thrust or staging in the round. The production will be housed in the Yale Repertory Theater and his technical team have considerable leeway in developing spaces and effects in response to Lorca’s somewhat fanciful stage directions—a room “white like a cathedral,” for instance. The “visual concept must denote the emotional tone,” so that set changes become part of the poetic vocabulary. Because YSD thesis shows have generous budgets and prep times, technical achievement is generally high. Intriguing and exciting, the play also clocks in under two hours, which is unusual for YSD thesis shows.

Hourigan adds that Blood Wedding, while focusing on a female protagonist played by always stellar third-year actress Sydney Lemmon, has been interpreted by some Lorca commentators as the first story the playwright chose to tell about his own sexual nature. A gay man well before that could be expressed openly in public or even in art, Lorca, Hourigan says, “finally gave up” trying to embody himself as a male protagonist and chose “the bride” as his alter-ego.

The play gains poignancy from the fact that Lorca was killed—assassinated for political or sexual reasons, the actual purpose is still contested—four years after writing the play. As someone much beloved and greatly talented who met an unfortunate and premature end, Lorca’s own ghost haunts the text to some extent. “In a world more and more scary” with escalating acts of violence, Blood Wedding, Hourigan feels, shows how human passion can be “inspired and holy.” He agrees that there is a cathartic aspect to the play but “won’t try to ease its mystery” by saying what that might entail. That’s for the audience to find out.

Blood Wedding
By Federico Garcia Lorca
Translated by Nahuel Telleria
Directed by Kevin Hourigan
The Yale School of Drama

Yale Repertory Theatre
October 18-22, 2016

Hailing the Cab

Preview: Yale Cabaret 49 (the first three shows of the season)

“I’ve grown accustomed to her face,” the song goes. But sometimes, just when you’ve grown accustomed, things change. The change in itself becomes a custom.

Each year, the face of the Yale Cabaret changes as new leadership, drawn from current students at the Yale School of Drama, takes over the helm. This year, the Co-Artistic Directors for the 49th season of the venerable New Haven theater-in-a-basement are Ashley Chang, a 2016 MFA in dramaturgy now working on her doctorate, Kevin Hourigan, a third-year director, and Davina Moss, a third-year dramaturg. They are joined by Steven Koernig, a fourth-year working on a joint degree, MFA/MBA in theater management at the School of Drama and the School of Management, as the Managing Director.

Steven Koernig, Ashley Chang, Kevin Hourigan, Davina Moss, the leadership team of Cab 49

In its 48 years (I’ve been a fan since its 42nd year), the Cab has made a virtue of its intimate, “nowhere to hide” size, its extremely limited runs (3 nights only), its convivial ambiance of food-and-drink followed by a show (Anna Belcher’s ever-changing menu is always intriguing), and its ability to showcase “passion projects”—the work that students do because they believe in it, and not just because it goes with earning the degree. In fact, many times at the Cab, the students are doing things that are not directly related to what they study at Yale.

That, the Cabsters say, is something they very much want to encourage. So much so that this year there are “ambassadors” or Cross-Disciplinary Consultants from the other Yale schools taking part as liaisons, as a means to find collaborators for YSDers in proposing and designing shows—the Schools of Architecture, Art, Arts and Sciences, Forestry and Environmental Science, Law, Medicine, Music, Public Health, all have input.

There are three key concepts, Moss says, that the team agreed on in eliciting proposals from the YSD community: “the line of inquiry”—it should be bold, it should be about something that needs to be explored or expressed; “the rigor of production”—though the Cab is open to all kinds of experimental approaches, the best shows give a lot of thought to how they will be staged; with such short rehearsal times and other limitations, this is not a place for making it up as you go; “formal diversity”—the Cab season never repeats itself, which means that the kinds of theater offered will be surprisingly different week after week.

The point, Moss says, is “not to emphasize the Cab’s limitations, but its opportunities.” What can be done there that wouldn’t work anywhere else?

Another key element, as suggested by the cross-disciplinary emphasis, is on collaboration. One of the team’s questions to proposers was “who do you want to collaborate with,” and there has been a lot of positive outcome from that question.

Styx Songs, September 15-17

The first show of the season should give us all a good idea of what the team means by collaboration, as well as inquiry, rigor and formal diversity: Styx Songs, September 15-17, is, according to the team, a “bold experiment” with “high risk,” in the sense of great ambition that may or may not come off completely. The show, described as “drama that transgresses the assumed borders between centuries, civilizations, and disciplines,” presents a collaboration among members of the Schools of Art, Architecture, Drama, and Music. Directed by second-year director Lucie Dawkins with a cast of 15, Styx Songs—which references the mythical river Styx (not the rock band of the same name)—explores the relation between life and death, using texts “spanning two thousand years and four continents.” It also entails stop-motion animation and is conceived as an interactive piece that different audiences will experience differently. “It’s an exploratory, episodic, multimedia piece,” Hourigan says, with dislocations—and continuities—between cultures and temporal spaces, and—since the Styx is the river the dead cross into Hades—between one world and another.

Alice Birch’s Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. plays September 22-24. Responding to the proposition “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” Birch wrote a play that, Chang says, is “funny and brutal,” looking at “the thorny question, how to define feminism” for our times, and “how contradictory” is the concept today. Using a cast of 15, none of whom are in the acting program, director Jessica Rizzo, a dramaturg who wrote and directed the memorable show Sister Sandman Please in Season 47, chose the cast members “for their honesty as people” and their professed struggles with the concept of feminism. The play—“a playful chaos”—seeks to “galvanize” its audience.

Caught, by Christopher Chen, October 6-8, incorporates the Cab’s interdisciplinary interests into the play itself. Journalism, visual art, theater, all are involved in this questioning of how medium/genre alters our perceptions and relays differing truths. A cast of five, including an art gallery curator, enact a play that makes a stage of an art gallery and an art gallery of a stage. There will be an actual art gallery, with captions, in this telling of the story of Lin Bo (Eston Fung), a “radical artist-activist,” whose subversive approach to art led to his incarceration. The play is directed by Lynda Paul, who directed last season’s very successful pop-opera Trouble in Tahiti.

I asked the four members of the new Cab team what attracts them to the Cab most, and what previous work they either viewed or participated in that cemented their sense of the Cab’s potential.

Davina called the Cab “the artistic heart of YSD” and spoke of its role in helping make their colleagues’ creative dreams come true, even if that means, as she remembered, scrubbing a white floor spotless after each ink-ridden show of Knives in Hens, her intro to what working on theater at the Cab can be like. As an audience member she praised The Untitled Project, a multi-media, mulitform work that threw down a challenge this year’s team would like to meet.

Stephen spoke of the “creative collision of artists and staff and audiences,” all “the most engaged you can find,” and spoke proudly of directing the take-off on the Batman TV show—Catfight—and, as audience member, his love of Mystery Boy, a rapid-fire play strong in the joy of storytelling. 

Kevin stressed the team’s job: “to empower our peers” and to tell the stories that aren’t being told; he draws upon his own experience last year with I’m With You in Rockland, a mix of art, poetry, music, film, history, narrative, with some of its tech elements right onstage, as formative to his grasp of the Cab’s possibilities—he wrote, directed, acted and provided elements of set design—and reacted positively to last season’s Dutch Masters “for the quality of the work and the conversation it provoked.”

Ashley said she’s interested in how the Cab can “frame questions and provide a platform” for theatrical inquiries that take risks and “resist the kind of structures” theater often assumes. She pointed to the performance piece Run, Bambi, Run, in Cab 48’s Satellite Festival, because it “made the air different” in bringing into play a “different set of assumptions” about performance.

Ashley Chang, Steven Koernig, Kevin Hourigan, Davina Moss

All four are committed to work that pushes beyond the usual bounds of play-based theater, a view suggested on the Cab’s new website: “The Cab—A Basement Performance Venue.”

In days, it will be time to take in the start of Cab 49. See you there!

Yale Cabaret
217 Park Street
New Haven

For more information and tickets, menus, season passes, donations, go here.

Be Our Geist

Review of Adam Geist, Yale Summer Cabaret

In dramatizing the struggle of its eponymous hero, Adam Geist—in its U.S. premiere, directed by Elizabeth Dinkova from David Tushingham’s translation of Dea Loher’s play—covers a lot of ground. Located mainly in late twentieth-century Austria, Adam, played with impressive range by Julian Elijah Martinez, moves through the modern world as if on a picaresque odyssey. Adam’s restless energy drives the play as he seems to be perpetually in flight from his most recent encounter. Inventive staging, colorful projections, and a varying ensemble put the play across as a series of events that keeps us questioning at every turn.

In his travails, beginning with the loss of his mother and his break with his uneasy and belittling relatives, Adam encounters drug-sellers, druggy Turks, a forthright waif (Shadi Ghaheri), firefighters—including Karl (Kevin Hourigan), who identifies as Sioux—the French Foreign Legion, ultra-right populists, engages in war, and tries to find redemption with cultists of the Virgin. With action that includes a shocking rape, brutal murders, violent attacks, humiliation of prisoners, and questionable choices and rationales, Adam Geist is not a study in its hero’s character so much as a study of the character of modern times, particularly the prevalence of dehumanizing brutality at the bottom of society.

Adam Geist (Julian Elijah Martinez)

With a name like Adam Geist, we can expect allegory right off. Adam, of course, is the “first man,” God-created in a terrestrial paradise; Adam Geist never knew his father, and his mother—who seems to have indulged in a little molestation of pre-adolescent Adam—is dead of skin cancer as the play opens. Rather than a paradise, Adam's life projects him through what may seem circles of Hell, or perhaps Purgatory. Not an afterlife, this hell comes from other people, right enough, and any saving graces generally wind up dead. “Geist” is German for “spirit” or “mind,” the latter written with a capital M when it becomes a matter of the “world-spirit” that Hegel considered the noumenal force driving things in our phenomenal world (that’s “world of phenomena,” not “really great” world). Adam Geist, then, could easily be the requisite “concrete universal” who might reveal the tendency of history, or take away or take on, scapegoat fashion, the sins of the world, or maybe become a violent, victimized, mentally unstable upstart from a “special school,” just trying to get by. In any case, this pilgrim’s progress does arrive at a certain clarity about himself, and it is left to the viewer how much slack you want to give him, or how touching you find his plight, or repellent his nature.

The Summer Cab’s staging wisely lets Sarah Woodham’s careful costuming give us different locations and interlocutors, rather than cumbersome set changes. All the action could easily be imagined to be happening in some timeless past—as it might look from Adam’s viewpoint. What he remembers are the people who make an impression, like Girl (Ghaheri), who he meets in the graveyard where their respective mothers are buried—his encounter with her is at first endearing, then very unsettling, and finally haunting. Similarly, the kindest person he meets, Karl the Native American enthusiast, played with childlike open heart by Hourigan, seems to provide some personal hope for Adam, before that possibility too is wrenched away.

Mourners in Adam Geist: Julian Elijah Martinez, Sean Boyce Johnson, Sebastian Arboleda, Steven Lee Johnson, Kevin Hourigan

And so it goes. Elsewhere there are heroic acts, usually with Adam taking the part of someone more powerless than he, and also acts of murderous rage that he barely acknowledges. Martinez shows us an Adam driven mostly by immediate feeling, whose intellect is a few steps behind his more forceful drives. There’s a wild Id on the loose feel about much of what Adam does and his nature seems primarily reactive.

So it’s important that the cast gives him some colorful figures to react to. Stellar in that regard is Brontë England-Nelson who does much of the heavy lifting in ensemble scenes, convincing us that she’s a nervy aunt, a butch fireman, a rapt stoner, a skinhead ideologue, before stepping forward as the creepy small-hood kingpin Reinberger. Sebastian Arboleda gets to engage in a comic monologue as Sergeant Major, a recruiter proud of outfoxing the wily prairie dog; Steven Lee Johnson gets the more unsavory parts, such as a heckling cousin, an autistic skinhead obsessed with cleanliness, and Erich, a belligerent, Muslim-bating mercenary, while Sean Boyce Johnson gives us glimpses of characters—Adam’s uncle, a drug-using buddy, an old man assaulted by Erich—who might provide some learning experience for Adam. Not all the many characters come across as clearly as they might, but the methods that permit these young actors to focus scenes and mannerisms with such quick changes are truly impressive. A high-point is the firefighters’ speech, one of the few merely comic bits in the show. Tonally, it’s a bit at odds, but it is welcome.

Adam's kin (Sean Boyce Johnson, Bronte England-Nelson, Sebastian Arboleda)

In An-Lin Dauber’s set design, a brilliant use of a large section of chain-link fence acts as prop, symbol and set device, while Johnny Moreno’s projections—with becoming graphic-novel-style colors and images, and evocative use of video—add visual interest and imagery. The use of the Cab’s courtyard, while slightly disruptive in terms of logistics, makes for a very dramatic final scene as the open heavens above provide a suitable background to Adam’s acts and speech.

And now, an editorial thought: On the tables at the Cab are questions probing the audience about their expectations in viewing theater. Some questions address “color blind” casting—the notion that the race of an actor is immaterial to the part being played—which is seen as a progressive move allowing more non-white actors to get major roles. But casting actors to play an ethnicity different from their own can open a firestorm over who gets to play whom. In casting Martinez, a non-white actor, as a product of the Austrian underclass, the Cab’s show adds an allegorical level that’s important, it seems to me, in this first U.S. production of the play. When, in his final speech, Adam makes a selfie video addressed to “Mr. President” most viewers aren’t going to be thinking about the president of Austria; they’re going to see a young African-American male trying to put his case before our president, another African-American male, so that when Adam says “perhaps I’m no longer your concern” those lines resonate beyond Loher’s initial setting to take in the current atmosphere of blacklivesmatter. And Adam’s reflection upon some extraterrestrial hope for justice reaches, as intended, beyond international and even human bounds, but also points damningly at the slim chances for justice here and now.

Adam Geist is not a feel-good play, but it is a powerful play that mirrors a time when criminality and heroism, predators and protectors, are as tellingly intertwined in our weekly news reports as ever. Without distorting the original text, the Cab team—Elizabeth Dinkova and dramaturg Gavin Whitehead, with their lead Julian Elijah Martinez—make Adam Geist a tale for our times.

Adam Geist
By Dea Loher
Translated by David Tushingham
Directed by Elizabeth Dinkova

Set Designer: An-Lin Dauber; Sound Designer: Frederick Kennedy; Projection Designer: Johnny Moreno; Lighting Designer: Krista Smith; Costume Designer: Sarah Woodham; Production Dramaturg: Gavin Whitehead; Production Manager/Technical Director: Alix Reynolds; Stage Manager: Emely Selina Zepeda; Movement & Violence Consultant: Emily Lutin; Production Assistant: Ece Alpergun

Cast: Sebastian Arboleda; Brontë England-Nelson; Shadi Ghaheri; Kevin Hourigan; Sean Boyce Johnson; Steven Lee Johnson; Julian Elijah Martinez

Yale Summer Cabaret
July 21-30, 2016

Multiplied by Itself

Review of The Square Root of Three Sisters, at International Festival of Arts & Ideas

The International Festival of Arts & Ideas in New Haven ended on Saturday, and I closed out the events with a viewing of The Square Root of Three Sisters, conceived, written, and directed by Dmitry Krymov and created and performed by Dmitry Krymov Lab and the Yale School of Drama. It was not only the end of the show’s run, and of the festival, but a last hurrah—and first post-graduation assignment—for a number of fine actors who graduated this May from the Yale School of Drama.

To begin with: Square Root is not a play in any conventional sense. It’s theater, conceived as an event that takes place with, as Krymov says, “the seams showing.” Before the show even begins, the cast is on hand, organizing cardboard rectangles to create the playing space, all while the Iseman theater’s workroom, with arrays of tools and implements, is on display.

The performers play actors as well as characters in the piece, which uses props and costumes sparingly. The purpose of the approach, it seems to me, is to let us—and that “us” includes actors, director, crew, the Lab, and viewers—look at Chekov’s landmark classic Three Sisters from a variety of perspectives, never forgetting that the process of theater alters and adapts whatever the playwright creates.

So it’s key to the vision of this work that a playwright be present. Krymov imports Kolya Trigorin, the sensitive and avant-garde playwright from Chekov’s The Seagull, to open the show. Aubie Merrylees, who has brilliant comic timing, is well-chosen to play the nervy, breathless Trigorin, eager to get everything just right—including paper rolls to be adorned by the cast with strips of black tape to create white birches. As he literally sets the scene—with cardboard boxes suggesting different places referred to in Three Sisters—and bosses his fellow cast-members, a minor error gets corrected by a painfully loud, distorted and autocratic voice. In that moment, Krymov references the power play of theater. The director calls the shots. The actors—and Chekov himself, to the extent that Trigorin is a figure for him—must submit.

With that said, there’s a further aspect that comes to light as Trigorin, and later, the actors themselves, narrate the backstory of Chekov’s characters. Three Sisters and its world come to seem a real world where fiction has created not characters, but actual people. To deviate from which sister—Olga, the spinster/teacher; Masha, the unhappily married wife; Irina, the youngest who might yet marry—is which, or who the suitors are, would be to alter the unalterable. The characters in Three Sisters seem folkloric in so indelibly stamping the imaginations of generations of theater-goers, especially but not only in Russia.

Annelise Lawson, Annie Hägg

What can we still learn about them? What will Krymov’s approach show us? Many things, indeed. It’s a breath-taking show in its variety and imaginative flights, in its use of technical features—such as the beautiful moment when the cast discovers inside boxes lit from within the military overcoats that are their costumes, each with a character-determining tag—and even “YouTube” videos. And so much depends on the routines each actor performs in turn, routines that establish for us not only a particular Chekovian character but also, to some extent, the actor’s relation to that character.

All begin seated around a large wooden work table, and that table becomes a center, a stage upon the stage, where the incredibly ripe passions of the work display themselves. Early on, in a dialogue both charming and freaky, a teapot moves about in space between would-be lovers, the relentlessly intense Vershinin (Niall Powderly) and dour in black Masha (Annelise Lawson), suggesting not only the force of their attraction but the gentility that keeps such passions at bay. Later, in stalwart Olga’s turn, Shaunette Renée Wilson’s insistent iteration “I don’t need to be loved” alternates with a distracted insistence on the mundane: “this is a fork, this is a cup,” and so on, while constantly shifting the props about on the table with increasing violence. The seething resentment at the heart of Olga, controlled by all the force of her personality, couldn’t be more powerfully rendered. Then there’s Irina (Melanie Field). Hiding beneath the table, she’s lured out by her comically timid suitor Tuzenbach (Bradley James Tejeda) and hen-pecked brother Andrey (Kevin Hourigan) with a promise to sing the songs her mother loved. Soon music begins to play and Irina, like a cat to catnip, emerges to belt out “Someone to Watch Over Me,” with Field evoking the sheer joy of a child in performance.

Every character gets a turn—including Julian Elijah Martinez’s dance like a constricted flame to evince the self-love and self-loathing of Solyony “who thinks he looks like” the poet Lermontov, and Annie Hägg’s table-top flouncing as Natasha, the preening and pathetically insecure wife of Andrey. At times the routines feel like improv, at other times like a physical manifestation of all that words will never convey, and even a bit like an audition for the pleasure of that ultimate watcher.

Late in the show, as a brigade of soldiers cart off all the possessions the Prozorov sisters hold dear, the table becomes a life-raft the sisters cling to and the base for the automaton they become. Along the way, the autocratic voice—which by now has begun to feel like a call to emergency evacuation or of military invasion—demands “give me a new Masha.” There follows a comical scene, nonplussing enough for anyone who hasn’t made the cut, in which Hägg, formerly Natasha, now shrugs her way into the role of the most dramatic of the Prozorov sisters while Lawson, stricken, pouts. Vershinin, however, won’t make the switch and still pines for Lawson as Masha. At this point, it’s not simply a question of how a character is conveyed by a performer, but how a performer takes over a character.

Shaunette Renée Wilson

So, when Wilson is replaced—by “that writer”—as Olga, she resists on the basis of her stature and commitment. Both of which, we sense, is her downfall. The very commitment of actor to character must be undermined. This isn’t about personalities, it’s about art aligning with the mailed fist of history. All are expendable, all are replaceable. And anyone can inhabit our treasured myths of tradition, or join the plaintive voices of the Three Sisters figurine on perpetual exhibit upon its pedestal.

A show for those who love their theater freewheeling and speculative, The Square Root of Three Sisters makes us wonder why we feel the need to have people dress up and pretend to be other, non-existent people—in other words, it makes you wonder a lot about theater and performance. In putting onstage the interplay of concepts of character, of actors as characters, and of actors as individuals, Square Root kicks against the text while scripting dissent and suppression, and manifesting an abundance of some intangible thing we lamely call “theater magic.”

International Festival of Arts & Ideas presents
The Square Root of 3 Sisters
World Premiere
Conceived, written, and directed by Dmitry Krymov, based on plays by Anton Chekov
Created and performed by Dmitry Krymov Lab & Yale School of Drama

Creative Team: Choreographer: Emily Coates; Performance Coach: Maria Smolnikova; Production Designer: Valentina Ostankovich; Sound Designer: Pornchanok (Nok) Kanchanabanca; Lighting Designer: Elizabeth Mak; Projection Designer: Yana Birÿukova; Production Stage Manager: Emely Selina Zepeda

Performers: Melanie Field; Annie Hägg; Kevin Hourigan; Annelise Lawson; Julian Elijah Martinez; Aubie Merrylees; Niall Powderly; Bradley James Tejeda; Shaunette Renée Wilson

Video Performers: Lucy Gardner; Mary Winter Szarabajka; Remsen Welsh

Artistic Staff: Assistant Director: Luke Harlan; Associate Production Designer: An-Lin Dauber; Associate Production Designer: Claire DeLiso; Puppet Designer: Matt Acheson; Fight Director and Dance Captain: Julian Elijah Martinez; Videographer: Lisa Keshisheva; Senior Interpreter to Dmitry Krymov and the Production: Tatyana Khaikin

Iseman Theater
June 21-25, 8 p.m.

Smells Like Teen Spirit

Review of Lake Kelsey, Yale Cabaret

The very week that so many eyes turn to Minnesota with the shocking news of the death of one of the stellar musical artists of his generation, the Yale Cabaret takes us to Minnesota and the shores of the fictional Lake Kelsey. Perhaps the late Prince, whose film Purple Rain, in the mid-1980s, created an iconic myth of youth and creative struggle based on his own experiences in the Minneapolis music scene, might be said to be smiling benignly on fellow Minnesotan Dylan Frederick’s Lake Kelsey, a musical exploration of teen angst, gender confusion, and general confusion on the path to identity.

The world of Lake Kelsey, geographically, is dominated by its eponymous lake and by Route 63, the only major roadway in or out. There, a handful of teens do the things that teens stuck in a local rut—which might be Anywhere, U.S.—tend to do: drinking, reviling parents, engaging in furtive sex, working dead-end jobs that yet provide entry into the adult world, and dreaming of escape. Their longings, misgivings and clashes are set to very catchy tunes written by Frederick and played by a skilled pick-up band: Jenny Schmidt, keyboards; Ian Scot, bass and electronics; Frederick Kennedy, percussion, and sung well by all members of the cast.

The main drama here is teens negotiating the predatory landscape that their own hormones lead them into. Elijah Evans (Michael Costagliola) is the kind of laconic bad boy that turns on a dime from easy-going to cruel or from accommodating to pushing his own relentless libido. Apparently, young girls and girly boys of all stripes find themselves helpless to resist. Except for Boygirl (Anna Crivelli), so called because of a bad haircut she had as a kid and the name, as they say, “stuck.” She’s bent upon escape from the region and, possibly, exposure of Elijah’s reign of erotic bullying.

The play we’re shown ends on a bit of a cliff-hanger, but those who have been raised on the concept of sequels will accept that they’ll have to wait “till next time” to find out what becomes of Boygirl—played with an earnest, “I have that within which passeth show” manner by Crivelli, looking a bit like a female Kurt Cobain.

Anna Crivelli, Leland Fowler, Annie Middleton, Rebecca Hampe (photo: Christopher Thompson)

There’s a trio of girl singers: Annie Middleton as Virginia Virginia, the svelte blonde of the bunch with some distinct daddy issues stemming from his embarrassing tendency to want to be one of the kids—her “Daddy Dead” song is one of those numbers that could be a breakout for a musical like this; Rebecca Hampe as Sarah Sarah, a camp follower we’re introduced to at the start with her cloying “Star of the Class” presentation about herself; Leland Fowler as Sachi Sachi, a black girl whose racial difference seems to put her outside the reach of Elijah’s lechery, but “she” can really sing.

Anna Crivelli (Boygirl), Patrick Foley (Thousand); photo: Christopher Thompson

Then there’s Thousand (Patrick Foley) who seems to be Boygirl’s only real friend and possible accomplice on her escape plan, except he’s found out how popular a boy who gives blowjobs can be among working guys, and being popular, as several songs make clear, is what life is all about hereabouts. Frederick’s book and music manages to maintain both an affectionate clarity about the cluelessness of the age group, as well as a certain aggrieved sense of how, for many teens, nothing exists beyond the shared world of the kids they’ve grown up with.

The set by Alexander Woodward is an inspired mash-up of spaces: the heap of detritus that looks like the collective sweepings of a housing development’s worth of rec rooms; the mic stands that belong in a talent show or karaoke night; the desks for the school scenes; the couch for the inevitable trip to Elijah’s basement; and don’t forget the trampoline, an almost magical space that evokes memories of free pre-teen innocence in the midst of guilty teen scenes.

A work in progress, Lake Kelsey, if given a more extended treatment, might benefit from a parental cameo or two and from some onstage exploration of the woods we keep hearing about. The show as it currently stands is primarily about character depiction, with the songs as tuneful exposition, rather than plot, but that could change with more development. Not to be confused with Lake Wobegon “where all children are above average,” Lake Kelsey gives us the kinds of kids whose averageness is their best asset, even as they strive to see what possibilities exist for fun and status before the inevitable descent into adulthood. As someone once said, “whatever, whatever, nevermind.”

Lake Kelsey marks the last show of the Yale Cabaret’s Season 48. Next up, Season 49 (2016-17) to be helmed by Co-Artistic Directors Ashley Chang, Kevin Hourigan, Davina Moss, with Managing Director Steven Koernig. A fond adieu to the Cab 48 team—David Bruin, Julian Elijah Martinez, Leora Morris, and Annie Middleton—and a warm welcome to the new team. Fittingly, the last show of Cab 48 was directed by one of the incoming co-artistic directors, with members of the departing team working as dramaturg and a performer, respectively. How’s that for team work?

Lake Kelsey
Music, Book, and Lyrics by Dylan Frederick
Directed by Kevin Hourigan

Music Director and Arrangements: Samuel Suggs; Dramaturg: Leora Morris; Scenic Designer: Alexander Woodward; Costume Designer: Cole McCarty; Lighting Designer: Carolina Ortiz Herrera; Sound Designer: Frederick Kennedy; Technical Director: Alex McNamara; Sound Mixer: Ien DeNio; Stage Manager: Avery Trunko; Producer: Rachel Shuey

Musicians: Keyboard: Jenny Schmidt; Bass and Electronics: Ian Scot; Percussion: Frederick Kennedy

Cast: Michael Costagliola; Anna Crivelli; Patrick Foley; Leland Fowler; Rebecca Hampe; Annie Middleton

Yale Cabaret
April 21-13, 2016

Beating the Drum

Preview of Yale Cabaret season 48

For fans of the Yale Cabaret, this time of year introduces the new season under the venue’s new team. Next week will come the official kick-off to celebrate the opening of season 48. This week, tickets are on sale on the Cab’s website. Last week, I talked with the new co-Artistic Directors—David Bruin, dramaturg, Julian Elijah Martinez, actor, and Leora Morris, director—and the Managing Director Annie Middleton, all commencing their third year in the Yale School of Drama, about what’s in store.

“The Cab” is the basement performance space at 217 Park Street, run by YSD students, presenting shows Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and at 11 Friday and Saturday. The Cab’s kitchen, run by chef Anna Belcher, offers pre-show dining, with beer and wine served, beginning at 6:30 and, for the later shows, small plates and desserts and drinks beginning at 10. The Cab is a unique theatrical experience in its immediacy and, in its rapid turnover of shows, a challenge to keep up with.

rear to front: Julian Elijah Martinez, Annie Middleton, Leora Morris, David Bruin

As is usual, the ADs and MD came to our meeting knowing the first three shows of the season and looking forward to fleshing out the rest of the semester, through January, a bit later this month. First, a few words about the team.

Bruin, Martinez, and Morris have each directed and performed in shows at the Cabaret. Most recently, Morris directed the varied and amorphous theatrical extravaganza love holds a lamp in this little room for the Yale Summer Cabaret 2015. She also performed as one of the four dancer/actors, along with Martinez, in Solo Bach in last season’s Cabaret, and directed the powerful play He Left Quietly in her first year at YSD.

Martinez appeared thrice at the Cabaret in his first year: as a sensitive boyfriend in The Defendant, as a conflicted street artist in We Fight We Die (proposed and co-produced by Middleton) and as one of The Brothers Size in Luke Harlan’s gripping production of Tarrell McCraney’s myth-based play. Last year, in addition to his role in Solo Bach, Martinez directed a production of Touch, starring classmate Jonathan Majors. Between the two term-time Cab seasons, Martinez played in four of the five productions in the Yale Summer Cabaret of 2014.

Last Cab season, Bruin directed the challenging two hander Quartet and acted in a new translation of Korean playwright Geun-Hyung Park’s odd family drama Don’t Be Too Surprised. The previous year, Bruin conceived and directed The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion, an imaginative recreation of the early days of theater greats Edward Albee and María Irene Fornés, and also took part in the topical comedy Derivatives and acted in an adaptation of a Raymond Carver story.

Taken together (to say nothing of time spent in the kitchen), that spells a lot of Cab time, but we might say the team ain’t seen nothing yet in terms of how much dedication to our favorite New Haven venue they’re in for.

Seeing the Cab as “the cultural hub for artistic expression,” this year’s team hopes to expand the Cab’s audience with giveaway tickets, lowered prices, and a mission to “help each show find its audience.”  What the Cab has going for it is “the passion behind the projects.” The students who present work there are doing it on their own time and for their own reasons. “There’s a roughness to the Cab,” as Bruin says, “the space is not pristine,” and that informality gets students “excited to create what they want to create.” As facilitators in this process, Morris says, the Cab team will be holding “office hours”—as sounding boards and a first response team to whatever their colleagues come up with.

When I asked the team if their first impressions of the Cab made it seem “the theater of their dreams” Martinez told how, on his visit as a prospective YSDer, someone got him into YSD night (the performance reserved for students and faculty at the school). The show, Lindbergh’s Flight, and the camaraderie of the audience got him excited about YSD—and his dad, visiting with him, also had a great time. The Cab, in its offbeat offerings, can have that kind of effect, making you wonder why you bother seeing more traditional theater.

For Middleton, who ran the Cab's box office in season 46, the space is “the place of my dreams: theater as a community with everyone welcome and everyone wearing different hats and collaborating.” Everyone who praises the Cab eventually comes back to the fact that it’s a team effort and that the audience is very much part of what makes it work. Compared to many a theater venue, the Cab has a rather young clientele and the team wants to find ways to make the Cab an early theater experience for younger audiences.

The tags for this year’s Cab marry images and ideas to describe the Cab (never easy): a cave, a cauldron, a drum, and a kaleidoscope. We might parse that collection of objects in various ways, but, for the team, each image-idea makes for an association: the Cab is a cave where community gathers, a kaleidoscope in its diversity, a cauldron where the art of cooking up something unusual takes place, and a drum that sends a message and calls us together. So let’s beat the drum. As Martinez says, the first three shows of the season give a good sense of the breadth of the Cabaret, showing “the full range of what can happen” there:

First, a welcome back show with a cast of 10 and a theme that seems appropriate. Charles L. Mee’s Wintertime has been adapted by Bruin and third-year playwright Jiréh Breon Holder as We Are All Here, which means, Bruin says, “we’ve taken a lot of liberties” with the play, but that’s in-keeping with Mee’s desires. The playwright wants his plays to be adaptable and tweakable for a variety of circumstances—professional and amateur and everything else. The play, Bruin says, “embodies the ideals of the Cab: turn it into what you want,” and involves music, dance, “surprise guests” and a plot that takes romantic comedy somewhere else. Two lovers visit a beloved spot only to find others there. Can we all get along? September 17-19

Next, a darker, text-based play, highlighting the virtues of an intimate playing space when viewing a play more confrontational than comedic. Second-year director Jesse Rasmussen’s proposal for Scots author David Harrower’s Knives in Hens stresses the play as “a democratic experience”—with its theme of a woman “learning how to speak in a man’s world”—and Morris stresses the “pleasure in the play’s suspense.” A three-actor love triangle—a ploughman, a miller, a woman—in a rural world becoming industrialized, the show is, the team says, “a contemporary, poetic fable.” September 24-26

Up third is a new, devised piece that will showcase the advantages of the collaborative and more creatively scripted production: “I’m With You in Rockland”—a line from Allen Ginsberg’s landmark poem “Howl”—brings together three participants from each of the three artistic schools at Yale: Drama, Music, Art. Created by Kevin Hourigan and his company of collaborators, the play offers not a bio of Ginsberg but takes his life and work as an inspiration and provocation. The play’s title borrows a repeated phrase in the poem, addressed to Carl Solomon whom Ginsberg met when they were both relegated to “Rockland”—a facility for psychiatric evaluation. Part play, part concert, part installation, the show is “an interdisciplinary inquiry that asks ‘what is the value of the artist today?’” October 8-10

Sometimes, as Morris says, the Cab has been “too cool” in its detachment from reactions to its offerings. The current team asks its colleagues and creators and audience to “not be afraid of being overly passionate” and to not let irony undermine the always positive “value of heart.” The Cab team means to put their hearts and souls into this year’s season. Won’t you join them?

Visit the website to see info about shows, menu, to buy tickets and to make donations. There are a range of sponsorship possibilities that allow the audience to put their money where their mouth is. As Joyce said of Finnegans Wake: “its consumers are they not also its producers?”

Yale Cabaret
48th Season
217 Park Street

Tales from the Dark Side

Review of American Gothic at the Yale Cabaret American Gothic, the third offering by the Yale Cabaret this season, brings together three tales by renowned short story writers: Raymond Carver’s “Popular Mechanics,” (also known as “The Little Things”), Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” and Jorge Luis Borges’ “El Sur” (“The South”). The show also brings together three creative disciplines: Nahuel Telleria, director and adapter (School of Drama), Sam Vernon (School of Art), and Sam Suggs (School of Music). The presentation, in front of a large curtain-like backdrop that is actually a sculpture by visual artist Vernon, presents a sense of “Gothic” as it comes down to us from Gothic fiction, with the three actors in the play—Kevin Hourigan, Libby Peterson, Jenny Schmidt—arriving gowned in hooded robes and carrying candles. Once revealed, their faces, pale with make-up, sport dark-rimmed eyes, giving a ghoulish cast to the proceedings. Suggs’ musical score is at times a fourth character, providing much of the dominant mood.

But are these stories really “Gothic” in that ghostly sense? Granted, they all three present situations that are tense with threats, with a feel for the darker, perhaps grotesque, aspects of life. But only Borges’ tale, which gets short-shrift, plot-wise, in the proceedings, is an outright “Gothic” tale, in the manner of, for instance, Poe. It’s a story of what may be a deathbed experience that becomes fraught with the kind of peril that may be mind-forged. As the closing tale, “The South,” with dramatic visual effects and voice-overs, segues into the end of the play, wherein the very production itself seems to become a phantasmagoria born of a book.

Sometimes a narrator reads from the book before the actors take over, as in the lengthiest segment, the O’Connor story, and the precise minimalism of the production, with its significant props and moody lighting by Joey Moro, works to set-off the fact that stories, even when played on stage, take place primarily in the audience’s imagination. One could say American Gothic relies on that kind of inner transformation more than most drama does.

The Carver story, because of its simplicity, comes across well as a mimed enactment of the narrative. A brief account of a couple at odds with one another that comes to focus on who will get the child, the story has the feel of a folk tale and, in its grip on a certain desperation, shows us that we’re in the world of “Southern Gothic.” The tale ends cryptically but, we assume, horribly. So move along to one of the stories that defines the genre, O’Connor’s “Good Man.”

With the cast of three taking on the five roles in the family—comprised of a married couple, their two children, and the husband’s mother—acting out the story as it's narrated, the dramatization feels a bit like “storytime.” But what a story. Hourigan, sort of insipid as the father, does a convincing transformation into “The Misfit,” a criminal at large that the family encounters after a freak accident on the road to Florida. The story has long been noted as an example of Southern Gothic with its well-detailed grasp of the persons in a certain milieu—here a somewhat dysfunctional lower middle-class family dynamic—thrown against the kind of malevolence that, real enough, feels like fatalism. O’Connor keeps a knowing grasp of her characters so that there is even grim humor in its horrific conclusion.

The special features of the show—the installation art, the score, the projections (Jon Roberts, James Lanius)—go a long way to make American Gothic an interestingly atmospheric production, though how the three tales hang together—without a Rod Serling figure putting it in a nutshell—is, perhaps fittingly, left to the viewer’s imagination.

American Gothic Conceived by Eli Epstein-Deutsch and Nahuel Telleria Directed by Nahuel Telleria

Dramaturg: David Clauson; Choreographer: Anita Shastri; Installation Artist: Sam Vernon; Costumes: Steven Rotramel; Lights: Joey Moro; Composer: Sam Suggs; Sound: Nok Kanchanabanca, Jon Roberts; Projections: Jon Roberts; Associate Projections: James Lanius; Stage Manager: Anita Shastri; Technical Director: Sam Lazar; Producers: Jason Najjoum, Libby Peterson; Production Manager: James Lanius III

Yale Cabaret October 9-11, 2014