Yale Cab 48 Recap

“There’s no accounting for taste,” the saying goes. Here, at the end of another season at the Yale Cabaret—Season 48, but the 7th I’ve been a witness to—it’s time for my annual recap, which might be described as a way of accounting for my own tastes.

It’s not a competitive environment, the Cab. So many names recur again and again in these lists because there’s very much a “get it done as best you can with who’s available” mode at work much of the time. So, I’ll start off with paying tribute to everyone who took the time to take part in Season 48 at what remains my favorite place for theater in New Haven. Season 48—2015-16—was a tough year for many reasons and it was good to have that little life-raft down the steps at 217 Park Street, maintained by Co-Artistic Directors David Bruin, Julian Elijah Martinez, Leora Morris, and Managing Director Annie Middleton.

David Bruin, Leora Morris, Julian Elijah Martinez, Annie Middleton

Here are, in chronological order, my four best-remembered and, in final position, most treasured contributions to the season in the following categories: New Plays; Existing Plays; Set Design; Costume Design; Lighting Design; Sound Design; Music; Projections and Effects; Ensemble Acting; Actor (male), Actor (female) in supporting role; Actor (male), Actor (female) in main role; Directing; Production.

Here goes.

There weren’t that many New Plays in the season, which began with an adaptation of a preexisting play, and the other eligibles are here as well: We Are All Here, an adaptation of Charles L. Mee’s Wintertime by David Bruin and Jiréh Breon Holder: a large cast enacting complex relationships with a great frenetic use of the Cab space; MoonSong by Sean Patrick Higgins: a touching and gently comic look at a talented family struck by illness; Salt Pepper Ketchup by Josh Wilder: the first part of a topical tale about the tensions surrounding gentrification in food service in Philadelphia’s Point Breeze neighborhood; Lake Kelsey by Dylan Frederick: a contemporary coming of age musical in which the kids are not so alright; and . . . How We Died of Disease-Related Illness by Miranda Rose Hall:, my favorite because I grew up on Monty Python and sketch comedy and this zany, rapid-fire take on current anxieties (don’t get me started on the medical profession) scored with me all the way.

For Existing Plays, there are more to choose from, and my selection is based on the kinds of things I find most fascinating in works I haven’t seen before: Boris Yeltsin by Mickaël de Oliveira, translated by Maria Inês Marques: an update of the story of Agamemnon and Orestes, sharply scripted and sharply acted, with a definite ax to grind; Cloud Tectonics by José Rivera: a lyrical love story exploring archetypal relations in a convincing way; Dutch Masters by Greg Keller: a class-and-race clash, forcing us to delve into the vulnerabilities behind the issues; The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant by Rainer Werner Fassbinder: an intimate glimpse of a diva at home experiencing life-changing love, touched with both cynicism and romanticism; and . . . Knives in Hens by David Harrower: my favorite because of its truly striking ear for the English language, and its cast and setting perfectly captured a world both elemental and deeply suggestive.

For Set Design: The Secretaries (Jean Kim), a finely worked up space able to accommodate very different settings, from bedroom to work place to lumber camp; Trouble in Tahiti (Rae Powell), an amazing cartoon cut-out look that suited the show perfectly; Cloud Tectonics (Izmir Ickbal), a surprisingly real space for this rather unreal tale; And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens (Lucie Dawkins; Sarah Nietfeld), a room can reveal and conceal, and this space did both with more origami cranes than could be counted; and . . . The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (Christopher Thompson; Claire DeLiso), you can’t put a functioning turntable in a set and not get my attention, and this set was not only worthy of Fassbinder it made me want to visit.

For Costumes, the first thing I noticed was that the same person—with different nominal designations on the programs—was responsible for much of the stuff I was most impressed with: The Secretaries (Asa Benally): matching look to type is always helpful in comedy and the various takes—and take-offs—of these ladies had work to do; Boris Yeltsin (Haydee Zelideth): costuming can include use of nudity and how that played into this tale of a bizarre family romance was casual and crafty; How We Died of Disease-Related Illness (Sarah Nietfeld): if only for the transformations of Trisha, and the other quick changes before our eyes; The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (Haydee Zelideth Antunano): clothes make the lady in this tale of a fashion designer, which just wouldn’t work without the semiotics of appearances; and . . .  Trouble in Tahiti (Haydee Antunano; Asa Benally): my favorite because of the look of the vocal trio and the elegant bourgeoisity of the principals.

For Lighting: Knives in Hens (Andrew F. Griffin): the look of this show stayed with me for a long time; The Secretaries (Elizabeth Green): lighting was at times a special effect in the varied moods of this wildly funny show; Trouble in Tahiti (Carolina Oritz): a show with a visual style that fully complemented its music; Cloud Tectonics (Elizabeth Mak): lighting and other subtle effects helped in this play of stopped time; and . . . Roberto Zucco (Andrew F. Griffin): with much of the action occurring behind scrims, the play of light in the show was an expressive and striking element.

For Sound: Knives in Hens (Tom Starkey): many nice aural touches to create a surround of tension; I’m With You in Rockland (Nok Kanchanabanca): balancing jazz, spoken word, and videos into a coherent whole; The Secretaries (Kate Marvin): the range of soundscape added to the exaggerated reality of this sharp satire; Cloud Tectonics (Tye Hunt Fitzgerald): the sound of the storm felt palpable and impressive; and . . . How We Died of Disease-Related Illness (Frederick Kennedy): important use of unsettling sound effects and live and recorded voices made this the most memorable to me.

For Music: I’m With You in Rockland (Ian Gottlieb; Dylan Mattingly): percussion and piano were the stars of the show; The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (Frederick Kennedy; Christopher Ross-Ewart): composed music and songs on the stereo added extra levels of emotion; Someone to Watch Over Me (Andrew Burnap): fine renditions of the voice and trumpet of the great Chet Baker; Lake Kelsey (Dylan Frederick): catchy and incisive exposition through song; and . . . Trouble in Tahiti (Leonard Bernstein; Music Director: Jill Brunelle): a beautiful arrangement of a score with classical lyricism and ethnic inflections,  somewhere between opera and musical theater.

For Projections and Artistic Effects: Roberto Zucco (Rasean Davonte Johnson, projection design): a barrage of effects for the finale of a killer’s bad end; Slouch (Brittany Bland, projection design): moody, collage-like effects added much visual interest to this tale of groping interiorities; How We Died of Disease-Related Illness (Brittany Bland, projection design): video intrusions added to the spectacle of medical chaos; Do All Daddies Have Grey Suits? (Aylin Tekiner, Conceptual Artist; Kemal Gökhan Gürses, Illustrator Artist; Brittany Bland, projection design): a wonderfully involved use of video, shadow puppets, animation to tell a child’s eye view of violence and death; and . . . Trouble in Tahiti (Rasean Davonte Johnson, projection design): the visuals brilliantly created commentary and expanded on the dramatic situations presented.

For Ensemble acting: We Are All Here (Jenelle Chu, Claire DeLiso, Edmund Donovan, Brontë England-Nelson, Christopher Ghaffari, Jonathan Higginbotham, Sean Patrick Higgins, Maria Inês Marques, Victoria Whooper, Ian Williams): a rough and tumble ensemble with everyone adding to the comic tensions; The Secretaries (Jenelle Chu, Annie Hägg, Chalia La Tour, Annelise Lawson, Shaunette Renée Wilson): a ladies only night—and it was irresistible to see five of the six actresses of the class of 2016 tearing it up together; Salt Pepper Ketchup (Mia Antoinette, Jason de Beer, Eston J. Fung, Sean Boyce Johnson, Steven Lee Johnson, Tanmay Manohar, Francesca Fernandez McKenzie, James Udom, Seta Wainiqolo): a sustained sense of community with delicate detentes and violent intrusions; The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (Baize Buzan, Anna Crivelli, Sydney Lemmon, Annelise Lawson, Leyla Levi, Shaunette Renée Wilson): another ladies only play that lets us into an inner circle being destroyed from within; and . . . Roberto Zucco (Juliana Canfield, Paul Cooper, Brontë England-Nelson, Dylan Frederick, Aubie Merrylees, Alyssa Miller, Jacob Osborne): though there’s clearly a central character, there were many mini-cameos of a variety of types in this darkly comic tale.

Even in the midst of great ensemble work, there were roles that lit up with memorable intensity: Actor (female), in supporting role(s): Baize Buzan as the mercurial love object in The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant; Chalia La Tour as the sadistic supervisor in The Secretaries; Brontë England-Nelson as several roles, including an enthralled woman and an old man in Roberto Zucco; Marié Botha for her comic shopping spree in Slouch; and . . . for a hilarious range of commentators, amazingly lucid in each incarnation, Juliana Canfield in How We Died of Disease-Related Illness.

Actor (male), in supporting role(s): Sean Patrick Higgins as the dad with wife, male lover, and nubile daughter troubles in We Are All Here; Paul Cooper as the fascinatingly dark and introspective Miller in Knives in Hens; Julian Elijah Martinez as a boyish Orestes learning to man up in Boris Yeltsin; Eston J. Fung as the harried and scheming fast food joint owner in Salt Pepper Ketchup; and . . . for two roles, equally memorable: the unnervingly patriarchal husband in Knives in Hens, and the wacky sick scientist with a song to sing in How We Died of Disease-Related Illness, Niall Powderly.

For “main role,” I’ve chosen parts that dominate the action or share center stage together: Actor (male): Aubie Merrylees, the killing fool and homicidal lover in Roberto Zucco; Edmund Donovan, the wary white boy getting in too deep in Dutch Masters; Leland Fowler, the seductive, deceiving, amusing and sympathetic black kid in Dutch Masters; Patrick Madden, the accommodating queen of her own fantasy heading for a fall in And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens; and . . . a thoughtful lover missing the cues for a full life but achieving a poetic end, Bradley James Tejeda in Cloud Tectonics.

Actor (female): Mary Higgins, as the mom with a song in her heart and a wry sense of her own frailty in MoonSong; Kelly Hill, as a wife looking for the romantic magic she never knew in Trouble in Tahiti; Stephanie Machado, as the mysterious time-stopping archetypal pregnant madonna in Cloud Tectonics; Sydney Lemmon, as a vital, successful woman with a void in her heart in The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant; and . . . as Woman, on her way to knowledge and, through stylized encounters with male figures, finding her own voice, Elizabeth Stahlmann in Knives in Hens.

For Direction, thanks to everyone who takes on this task, but to single-out productions where the grasp of complex material was very telling: Jesse Rasmussen, for the mysterious, portentous world of Knives in Hens; Christopher Ghaffari, for finding a way to stage at the Cab a truncated Bernard-Marie Koltès play with a sprawling cast of characters, Roberto Zucco; Lynda Paul, for the incorporation of music, voice, acting, visuals, comedy, romance into a Gesamtkunstwerk in Trouble in Tahiti; Leora Morris, with Jesse Rasmussen, for a pacing and tone that revitalizes Fassbinder in The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant; and . . . for going over the top, to the edge of chaos and back in How We Died of Disease-Related Illness, and for a slowburn control of barbed material in Boris Yeltsin, Elizabeth Dinkova.

And for overall Production: Knives in Hens: Adam J. Frank, Producer; Davina Moss, Dramaturg; Rebekah Heusel, Stage Manager; Roberto Zucco: Tanmay Manohar, Gretchen Wright, Producers; Ariel Sibert, Dramaturg; Emely Zepeda, Stage Manager; How We Died of Disease-Related Illness: Kathy Ruoran Li, Producer; David Clauson, Stage Manager; The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant: Maria Inês Marques, Producer & Dramaturg; Avery Trunko, Stage Manager; and . . . (call me sentimental, but I was born at the end of the 1950s) Trouble in Tahiti: Steven Koernig, Producer; Taylor Barfield, Dramaturg; Jennifer Schmidt, Avery Trunko, Co-Stage Managers.

Farewell, Cab 48. Howdy, Cab 49.

Beware, Doll, You're Bound to Fall

Review of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Yale Cabaret

Tired of fame, film icon Greta Garbo declared, “I vant to be alone.” Petra von Kant, the heroine of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, is the kind of self-involved diva who can’t bear to be alone. Directed by Leora Morris with Jesse Rasmussen, Fassbinder’s meditation on the vagaries of passionate love is also a character study that plays into considerations of how, for instance, all of a star’s or a director’s relationships are scripted with a central player and a supporting cast.

Played by Sydney Lemmon with a lithe sense of grand dame status, Petra is a successful fashion designer who lords it over her underling Marlene (Anna Crivelli, icily Germanic in a silent role) and holds court in her bedroom. The room, in Christopher Thompson and Claire DeLiso’s lush set, is essentially a large double bed framed by chairs and settees, a table with a typewriter, a turntable with LPs, and the ever-important house-phone on a pedestal. There are diaphanous red drapes that sometimes are drawn or opened by Marlene, who acts as both factotum and voyeur.

Sydney Lemmon as Petra von Kant

What Marlene gazes upon, as do we, is the social and erotic life of Petra. The two sides come together quickly when a visit from her well-set-up cousin Sidonie (Annelise Lawson)—in which the two women share details of happy and unhappy marriages (Petra has had one of each)—results in Petra’s meeting with Sidonie’s young friend Karin (Baize Buzan). For Petra, the meeting seems to be love at first sight, or at least it’s a really hot meet. The next scene, when Karin calls alone upon Petra, who insists she should become a model, is filled with the expectation of seduction. Petra may be changeable and peremptory, but her attachment to Karin while egotistical is also vulnerable. Karin, played with deer-in-the-headlights allure by Buzan, seems ready to become whatever Petra wants her to be.

Then comes the crash, by degrees. Fassbinder’s heart is in this one and Petra’s suffering for her ideal of love is a masochist’s delight. Having made Karin an arbiter of her happiness, she can only be made unhappy by the least sign of her object’s indifference. And Buzan is wonderful at rendering the kind of erotic self-possession that drives Petra wild. And she’s able to do so while also seeming to be much younger than Lemmon, whose probing questions and efforts to manage her lover’s life as she does her own career reminded me of the assured but apprehensive tone often struck by Judy Davis.

Eventually, as Karin’s background comes out—the working-class father who lost his job and killed Karin’s mother in a drunken rage then hanged himself; the estranged husband in Australia—we can see that Petra’s attempts to makeover Karin are going to have more lasting effects on herself than on her protégé. The fact that Karin has not given up men—the more casual, the better—becomes the source of the title’s bitter tears. And of the vicious abuse of the user by the used.

In the birthday scene that follows Karin’s departure to meet her errant husband’s return, we see Petra go to pieces by abusing those still close to her: her young daughter Gabrielle (Leyla Levi), Sidonie, who comes bearing a gift, and Petra’s mother Valerie (Shaunette Renée Wilson). In each case, there’s a sense of the cost of loving someone like Petra, but there’s also a sense—key to the notion of a central player—that all these females depend upon her to some degree. And all are quite able to act out in their subordinate roles: Sidonie with indignation; Gabrielle with earnest need for approval; Valerie with long-suffering attachment.

Masochism, then, is in the nature of love for one’s superiors, however we interpret the latter term, and Fassbinder lets that play out, while Morris and Rasmussen manage to find a tone between melodrama and camp. In the end, Petra’s relatives are used to her, and Karin has not, perhaps, disappeared for good (why abandon a powerful supplicant?), while Petra may learn to give Marlene her due, if not too late.

What we’re left with, I suppose, is a hope that some mutually helpful caring can be reached in a reciprocal fashion, but is that possible when the ups and downs of emotional investment are here as volatile as an unstable stock market?

Mention as well for the excellent use of songs emanating from Petra’s turntable, particularly The Walker Brother’s highly apropos “In My Room,” with its grandiose melancholy. A perfect song for when you vant to be alone with your own bitter tears.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
By Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Translated by Anthony Vivis
Directed by Leora Morris

Associate Director: Jesse Rasmussen; Dramaturg & Producer: Maria Inês Marques; Co-Scenic Designers: Christopher Thompson, Claire DeLiso; Costume Designer: Haydee Zelideth Antunano; Co-Lighting Designers: Andrew F. Griffin Elizabeth Green; Sound Designer & Composition: Frederick Kennedy, Christopher Ross-Ewart; Stage Manager: Avery Trunko; Co-Technical Designers: Mike Best, Mitchell Crammond, Mitch Massaro, Sean Walters

Yale Cabaret, March 31-April 2, 2016

A Sentimental Education

Review of Women Beware Women at Yale School of Drama

Howard Barker’s re-working of Thomas Middleton’s Jacobean tragedy, Women Beware Women, directed by Leora Morris as her thesis show at the Yale School of Drama, makes considerable demands on viewers and players alike. The drama that Barker more or less maintains through the first half tends to feel like Shakespeare minus the poetic self-analysis but with a veneer of what could be called perverse charm. While the second act, penned by Barker, and given an inspired spin by Morris, kicks ass—simply put.

Baize Buzan, Paul Stillman Cooper, Sean Patrick Higgins, Annie Hagg

In the Middleton act, Morris and her cast play to the camp effects of the material—with, among other modernizing touches, a bawdy lyric from Sordido (Paul Stillman Cooper) delivered as a rap, complete with mouthed beats provided by Ward (Bradley James Tejeda), and a big dance number that serves to get all those very colorful costumes onstage at once. But such touches don’t manage to enliven what is fairly turgid going, in part because the tone feels like a bedroom farce played over a nasty tragedy.

Worse, the play is lacking a hero or heroine, which becomes a significant element in the play’s second act, but in the early going the plots we witness are busy but not compelling. In one plot, Leantio (Sean Patrick Higgins), a lowly man, loses his new wife Bianca (Baize Buzan) to rape or “seduction” by the ever lusty Duke (Galen Kane), while, in another, a ditzy aristocrat Fabritio (Dylan Frederick) tries to marry off his eligible daughter Isabella (Shaunette Renée Wilson) to an even ditzier brat (Tejeda), Ward of the scheming Guardiana (Jenelle Chu). Meanwhile, Isabella’s uncle Hippolito (Niall Powderly) has designs of his own on his niece, which his sister—the very busy bawd Livia (Annie Hägg)—helps along, much as she also helps the Duke to help himself to the charms of Bianca. What both Middleton and Barker have in mind, it seems, is the raging unpleasantness harbored in the hearts of well-born humanity, particularly the libidinal viciousness of women who are “past it.” Unable to enjoy the attentions of the like of the Duke, who boasts he’s never bedded a woman of thirty years, Livia and Guardiana get their jollies by corrupting the innocent.

But even the put-upon under-class, always vulnerable to predatory “masters,” don’t manage to engage sympathy since they seem as full of cupidity as everyone else. In the early going, Hägg and Powderly show off to best effect, since they carry well the decadent gravitas of seedy aristocrats. Wilson does fine as a proud innocent (though it’s not much of a part), and Buzan gets to display mercurial moods as a teen wife beguiled by a glimpse of her worth in a high-born’s bed. As the Count, Kane has a dour charm and as “the widow”—Leantio’s mother—Juliana Canfield keeps up the comic relief. And special mention to Brontë England-Nelson who is superlative as a self-righteous male Cardinal, brother of the Duke.

The second act opens with an eyeful as Leantio and Livia cavort about naked, congratulating each other on their sexual prowess and, with the youthful flesh on view, giving the lie to the notion that Livia is “aged.” No matter, Barker’s language is a feast and all of Middleton’s rather trivial characters come forward in more cunning configurations. For starters, Ward has surprising resources, played by Tejeda with a seething fury, and Sordido, who seemed a simple foil in the early going, becomes an amoral player in the malevolent plans of Leantio and Livia, who aim to enact vengeance upon Bianca, now vain as a Kardashian.

If we think we’re watching a comeuppance of the upper-class—with the dazed Duke losing his latest conquest when just about to marry her—that’s only part of the machinations here. We’re also, in Barker’s view, seeing the dark underside of a “woman’s world,” with Livia standing for the newly achieved (in the 1980s) political power of women “of a certain age,” able to wield boy toys in the cut-throat world of the moneyed. But the play without a hero alters surprisingly in Morris’ hands as Bianca comes forward, after her rape by Sordido, as a modern heroine, as if tried by a walk of shame to see the culpability of all, and the power play at the heart of male sexuality. Which leaves her free to woo the ingenue.

It’s an upbeat ending, complete with falling walls and doors that seem to free the actors from the roles—and deaths—Middleton wrote for them, and from the over-busy projections of the set. What’s particularly successful here is that we don’t seem to be simply witnessing a breaking down of social custom or a familiar hybrid aesthetic, but rather a revolutionary spirit that wants to overturn expectations with something more confounding. The confrontation may be a bit calculated, but if so, that argues for the value of the Middleton section, for we have to be reminded of how jaded entertainment can be before we can feel how jarring.

Women Beware Women
By Howard Barker and Thomas Middleton
Directed by Leora Morris

Choreographer: Gretchen Wright; Scenic Designer: Claire DeLiso; Costume Designer: Alexae Visel; Lighting Designer: Carolina Ortiz Herrera; Composer and Sound Designer: Kate Marvin; Projection Designer: Yana Biryukova; Production Dramaturg: Nahuel Tellería; Stage Manager: Rebekah Heusel

Cast: Baize Buzan, Juliana Canfield, Jenelle Chu, Paul Stillman Cooper, Brontë England-Nelson, Dylan Frederick, Annie Hägg, Rebecca Hampe, Sean Patrick Higgins, Galen Kane, Steven C. Koernig, Niall Powderly, Bradley James Tejeda, Katie Travers, Shaunette Renée Wilson

Yale School of Drama
January 23-29, 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

Celebrity, Devised and Deconstructed

Last weekend, the Yale Summer Cabaret ended its 2015 season with a production of Sarah Ruhl’s Orlando. Earlier this summer, in the season’s second slot, the Summer Cab offered a devised piece called love holds a lamp in this little room. At the time, the NHR site was going through an update and no review appeared. Here, for the record, is the review that didn’t get posted. The play’s director, Leora Morris, has begun her term as one of the co-artistic directors, with David Bruin and Julian Elijah Martinez, of the coming season’s Yale Cabaret. More about that later.—DB

Though it might wear inspiration from Branden Jacob-Jenkin’s entertaining and challenging play An Octoroon a bit too much on its sleeve, love holds a lamp in this little room, at Yale Summer Cabaret, directed by Leora Morris and conceived by the ensemble, is a richly associative work that makes much of its well-wrought visual sense and the inventive interplay of its cast.

The five actors—Melanie Field, Leland Fowler, Christopher Ross-Ewart, Elizabeth Stahlmann, Shaunette Renée Wilson—were set the task of devising vignettes to express or represent or comment on or allude to the varied self-conceptions, works, roles and autobiographical gestures—including a suicide note—of Adah Isaacs Menken, a curious celebrity of nineteenth-century American theater who was notorious for a role in which, playing a man, she allegedly rode nude upon a horse. She actually wore a body stocking, but that’s the kind of distortion and legend-managing that love holds a lamp comments on and, it may be, sustains.

Menken, who professed Judaism at some points and was most likely raised Catholic, also claimed kin with Creoles and, at times, voiced Confederate sympathies. We may assume that, as a person, she had her reasons, but the play isn’t out to explain her or to give her definitive tags. All five cast members “play” Menken, rendering her as a collective fantasy—ours, hers, and theirs.

Leland Fowler, Melanie Field, Shaunette Renee Wilson, Christopher Ross-Ewart, Elizabeth Stahlmann

The show opens with a group striptease, full of knowing smirks and suggestive play, with voice-overs that quote from Menken’s obituaries and notices. Revealing the unisex corsets and leotards worn by all, the playfulness of the opening extends to almost all aspects of the show. Especially served up for hilarity are operatic enactments of the kind of lurid dramas Menken starred in—particularly fun is Stahlmann as Menken as Lucretia Borgia.

But whereas An Octoroon used Boucicault’s play, The Octoroon, as the reference point for its re-imagining of racist motifs and sensationalist theater, love holds a lamp lacks a key structuring reference point. In an aggressively cut-and-paste manner, Morris and company let Menken surface through the words of her writings, of what is written about her, of roles she played. Just when we think we’re going to get a direct account we might get something else—an interlude of expressive coupling, a frenetic bit of vaudeville or clowning, a graveside monologue by a cowboy acquaintance (Ross-Ewart) speaking to a silent figure with a pantomime horse head.

Such descriptions make the play sound more bewildering than it is. Onstage, the routines are effective as a kind of fluidly gestural theater. Everything we see is happening in a pre-digested past that refuses to remain fixed, and the drama is in watching the cast tease out the various strands of Menken’s life. This they do with incredibly deft timing.

Much of the play’s success has to do with how it looks, presenting a pastiche of inventive costumes (Fabian Aguilar) on an oldtime playing space (Christopher Thompson) where the flicker of time itself seems present, thanks to a lighting palette from Joey Moro and projections from Rasean Davonte Johnson that effectively recreate the garish glare and expressionist shadows of gaslight footlights, as well as the shadowy dimness common to the era before electric lights. Here we’re treated to changeable acting styles, grandiloquent nineteenth-century phrasing, contemporary musical interludes, and even a clip from George Cukor’s Heller in Pink Tights with a staging of the horse ride of Mazeppa, featuring Sophia Loren in a blonde wig and a youngish Anthony Quinn scoring heavily in reaction shots.

Along the way, we get glimpses of “the Menken” as the kind of provocation she must have been to her contemporaries. Fowler walking about in white leggings and high-heeled boots, hanging up wardrobe, has a kind of grand resignation; Wilson, in man’s cutaway and top hat, gets shit-faced looking like a boorish carpetbagger, then later accompanies a sing-along on tambourine; Stahlmann, in a wedding dress, chews flowers and belts from a bottle concealed beneath her skirts, then sheds the array for a man’s coat-and-tails, vamping for Mr. Menken (Ross-Ewart), complete with prayer shawl, while the Menken’s views on marriage are heard in voice-over; “Answer Me,” a meditative poem by Menken, gets a lyrical rendering as a song sung by Ross-Ewart and Fowler; again and again the horsehead looms onto the stage, a recurrent reminder of the role Menken couldn’t live down.

The mix of motifs throughout the play—and the hovering question of race relations for a woman of mixed race who could pass as white—receives its most direct presentation in Melanie Field’s blackface enactment of Menken’s ambivalence about her racial identity. Field’s vignette includes partial nudity—part of the tease of Menken’s onstage persona—followed by dressing up in the trappings of stage stereotypes. Her self-aware miming manages to signal the extent to which, paradoxically, role-playing is necessitated by the very notion of stable identity. To Field also falls the delivery of a final speech written by Menken. Sounding like a somewhat skeptical Prospero trying to sum up her vexed relation to the theatricality of spectacle that made her name, Field makes us consider the pathos of the celebrity who becomes an appendage to her own reputation.

We might say that, at last, the show is a meditation on celebrity—the person behind a well-known aura can change, but how that person’s particulars are made to “mean” something audiences can bank on remains constant in the odd process of identification. Many people found “something” they wanted access to in Adah Isaacs Menken, during her life, and love holds a lamp in this little room is at its best in questioning what that might have been, all the while deconstructing its own processes of enactment and identification.

Love holds a lamp in this little room is one of the best devised pieces I’ve seen at the Cabaret and a fine follow-up to Midsummer, the summer season’s pastiche of Shakespearean romance that preceded it.

love holds a lamp in this little room
Based on the life and writings of Adah Isaacs Menken
Created and performed by the Company
Conceived and directed by Leora Morris

Scenic Design: Christopher Thompson; Costume Design: Fabian Aguilar; Lighting Design: Joey Moro; Sound Design: Kate Marvin; Projection Design: Rasean Davonte Johnson; Dramaturg: Kate Marvin; Stage Manager: Emely Zepeda

Ensemble: Melanie Field, Leland Fowler, Christopher Ross-Ewart, Elizabeth Stahlmann, Shaunette Renée Wilson

Yale Summer Cabaret
July 9-July 18, 2015

Revels . . . and Revelations

Last weekend the Yale Summer Cabaret closed its first show, a most various Shakespearean pageant called Midsummer. Now, in the northern hemisphere, is the time of “midsummer,” and the Rough Magic Company will celebrate the season with Moonlight Revels. This Saturday, for one night only, the upstairs and downstairs of 217 Park Street will be transformed into a bower of bliss—or at least it will be the kind of party space where one may pursue one’s bliss. As a fundraiser/party Moonlight Revels asks that you pay what you will, at the door. What you’ll find inside is “music and merriment” in a “forest and fairy”-themed celebration of summer. Sprites galore, no doubt. And there will be “surprise performance pieces” that certainly sound intriguing—sort of Punch Drunk in an Arcadian setting. Beer and wine for sale, and solving a puzzle may win you a prize—and of course there will be door prizes as well.

It’s an excellent opportunity to party with the players and all those behind-the-scenes forces that make the magic—rough and otherwise—happen in that little room below. So whether you be fairy queen or rude mechanical, get in the spirit of the season—dance, drink, and beguile the time most festively.

Moonlight Revels Fundraiser – Party – Spectaculars
Saturday, June 27
8 p.m.-2 a.m. (dance party starts at 11 p.m.)
Open to the public; donation at the door requested
18 and over

Yale Summer Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven

The next play at the Summer Cab, love holds a lamp in this little room, is a show even more devised than Midsummer was. The play itself is a-making as the rehearsals continue.

“Amorphous” is a good word to describe Adah Isaacs Menken, the subject of the play, a heroine who, in her short life of thirty-three years, became a theatrical celebrity, notorious for riding a horse on stage “nude.” Adah, who was friends with literary celebrities like Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, saw herself as a poet (the show’s title is a line in one of her poems), and yet was aware that some of her poetry might be too personal for publication. The practice of advance ticket sales was instituted due to the demand for her appearances. She was one of a kind and entirely sui generis.

Guest director Leora Morris is the main force behind the Summer Cab’s second show of the season. She was led to curiosity about Adah from a book called Women with Biceps, an exploration of how, throughout history, some women have re-drawn the borders between masculine and feminine appearance. Morris was struck by how “subversive” the idea of women with muscles could be, particularly in the time of Adah’s life, 1835-68.

Adah tended to reinvent herself as the situation required, and that fluidity—between genders, races, religions, ethnic background, as well as husbands and means of artistic expression—makes Adah a fascinating figure for Morris. Of Creole background, apparently, Adah was racially mixed and passed as white, so much so that she was willing to wear black-face in performance at times. She married a Jewish man (her second husband, though that wasn’t known at the time) and would sometimes speak as though she were raised Jewish—Judaism certainly interested her enough to study Kabbalah (traditionally, women can't)—while at other times referring to her actual antecedents in Christianity.

Morris is more concerned with how Adah dramatized and even fictionalized herself rather than with the literal particulars of her life. And that may be how Adah would prefer it. When writing autobiographically, including a farewell note for a suicide that didn’t succeed, Adah could be deliberately contradictory about her origins and her allegiances. For instance, while moved to distress by seeing lynched black men from a passing train, she could also go so far as to demand a Confederate flag be hung in her dressing room in Baltimore. Today, commentators would most likely see Adah as “conflicted” about her race, and would try to find the psychological and sociological factors that might contribute to her chameleonic personae. But Morris wants her collaborators to inhabit the theatrical possibilities of Adah’s contradictions and her willful sport with how people define themselves and others. The kind of uncertainties that might make a biographer despair are the very features that make Adah a great heroine for devised theater.

As Walt Whitman, another pal of Adah’s might say, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself.” The theme of a poem like “Song of Myself,” however, is that the poetic soul—and we all have one—“contains multitudes” and can’t be bounded by other people’s assumptions. “America,” Whitman saw, is just a unifying concept floating above vast mutability and diversity. Now, when recent outcries against the Confederate flag are unscoring the question of how unified “America” ever was, Morris and company’s play may be alerting us, in one unique woman’s journey, to the kinds of contradictions we’ve never solved, as a nation. It may also suggest how creative—and outrageous—“contradiction” can be. Think of Rachel Dolezal and the effort to weigh in on what she is and isn’t.

Seeing Adah as “the first real celebrity,” which she defines as someone known to many, many people who feel connected to the private life of a public person, Morris felt herself drawn to Adah for personal reasons: Morris, a native of Toronto, was drawn to dance as a youngster, and studied acting after receiving a BS in biology, with a second major in theater, from McGill. And if that’s not eclectic enough, Morris has ancestors who worked in vaudeville, and the kind of shows Adah appeared in draw from that background. Adah, from all accounts, was a consummate showperson, but was often frustrated—as actresses still are today—with the kinds of roles for which she was cast. Once she achieved fame for her role (with the horse) in Mazeppa, her fans asked little more of her than recreations of that show. So Adah can become a figure not only for the problematics of “identify” and “identifying as” in the varied history of our nation, but also for the tensions between what the public accepts or “demands” and what the artist wants to achieve.

Morris hopes her cast will be “free from the responsibility to depict the facts” of Adah’s notoriously ambiguous life, and “give impressions” rather than actual events. Part of the challenge—for cast and audience alike—is to conceive the constrictions of the time for a woman like Adah, and to realize how creative, and in some senses tragic, was her struggle to fulfill what she saw as her own artistic potential. On the day I visited a rehearsal, the cast was involved with two texts that may find their way into the show, to some degree. One was Adah’s rather rhetorically inflated account of her ancestors—including a mother who seemed to double as the Blessed Mother—and the other was a play about Lucretia Borgia in which Adah had acted. Both gave a sense of the florid theatrics of the time in which Adah thrived, and of the possibilities of imagining the kind of self-referential performance piece Adah might fashion around her various personae were she alive today.

As director, Morris says her role is to be a witness to what the piece becomes. Going into the room with her own sense of Adah and the important aspects of her story, Morris has to be attentive to how her cast—Chris Ross-Ewart, Melanie Field, Leland Fowler, Elizabeth Stahlmann, Shaunette Renée Wilson—find ways to enact and express the poetry, passion and conflicts of this fascinating figure. The first reaction to Morris’s project, for most, is disbelief. “People can’t understand why they never heard of [Adah].” Love holds a lamp in this little room may be an important step in changing that.

love holds a lamp in this little room
Based on the life and writings of Adah Isaacs Menken
Created and performed by the Company
Conceived and directed by Leora Morris
July 9-18, 2015
Yale Summer Cabaret

Rough Magic Coming Soon

Tickets on sale now for the Yale Summer Cabaret

At the close of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero, a magician and, to many, a stand-in for the playwright, says he will abjure his “rough magic”—right after he cleans up a few loose ends. The Yale Summer Cabaret, which opens June 4th, takes its title from the phrase Prospero uses to characterize what we might call his “process.” To artistic director Sara Holdren the phrase is suggestive of theater as a means to “reawaken wonder.” Her troupe at the Summer Cab this year, called “The Rough Magic Company,” have banded together “around ideas of enchantment,” of finding a way to do theater that keeps alive both parts of the phrase: “rough,” as in worked-out together, as when you “rough out” a design, but also “rough” as in not smoothed into the safe and predictable; “magic,” as that element of unpredictable mystery that makes live theater seem sometimes a feat by magicians.

Holdren, a director who will graduate from the Yale School of Drama this month, will run the Summer Cab with three other women: Associate Director Rachel Carpman, Managing Director Flo Low, and Associate Managing Director Emily Reeder. They will be working with a nine person acting company, mostly of other YSDers, selected from auditions, and two guest directors: Andrej Visky, a director graduating in May, and Leora Morris, a director finishing her second year of study in YSD.

The primary values for this year’s Cab are “joy, collaboration, generosity, invention, and play.” To Holdren, these words capture the method in the magic: the joy of working together, the generosity needed to collaborate effectively, and the invention and playfulness that allow for inspiration and surprise. The aim is to fine the kind of big, crazy productions able to defy the possibilities afforded by the basement space on Park Street that is the Cabaret. The mandate this year is to find new approaches, both with classic texts, such as Shakespeare and Marlowe, as well as original work never before seen. All productions will be created by the respective play’s director and the company.

clockwise from center, top: Sara Holdren, Flo Low, Emily Reeder, Rachel Carpman

One particularly inspiring event for Holdren in generating the kind of collaborative effort she has in mind was a visit in the spring to Yale by Dmitri Krymov, the innovative Russian director. As Holdren says, Krymov’s one week workshop, in which a performance of Three Sisters was generated by performers and designers, put on the table her own ideal of how theater should work. “It was a beautiful coincidence” that her own hopes for the Summer Cab season should be presented in such a timely fashion to her fellow YSDers. Krymov, who was been a visual artist as a well as a scenic designer, has developed methods to involve the entire company in rigorous collaboration, or what Holdren calls “an explosive playground” of invention and innovation, driven not by a given play per se, but by the company. As she says, she wished “everyone skeptical about devised theater could be in the room” during Krymov’s seminar. “Nothing was extraneous,” everything came into play in creating the piece.

Holdren’s ideal will get put into practice this summer with a dream group of designers, who worked with Holdren on her truly impressive thesis show, The Master and Margarita, last fall, and a cast of actors who, in audition, were asked to create pieces together rather than simply present monologues. The tech team consists of: Chris Thompson, Claire DeLiso, Set Design; Joey Moro, Lighting and Set Design; Andrew F. Griffin, Lighting Design; Haydee Zelideth, Costume Design; Kate Marvin, Sinan Refik Zafar, Sound Design; Rasean Davonte Johnson, Projection Design; Lee O'Reilly, Production Manager; Scott Keith, Technical Director; Victoria Whooper, Emily Zepeda, Stage Manager. The acting company features: Chalia La Tour, Melanie Field, Leland Fowler, Niall Powderly, Christopher Ross-Ewart, Elizabeth Stahlmann, Josephine Stewart, Shaunette Renée Wilson.

Such are the makings of the Rough Magic Company. Now for the summer’s offerings.

First up, from June 4 to June 18, is Midsummer, an adaptation, predominantly, of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Holdren, who has directed at least six Shakespeare plays, beginning as an undergrad at Yale, says she has worked with “a whole lot of cut texts” but “never did a full-on adaptation.” Holdren and her co-adaptor Carpman are aiming at something closer to a devised piece, “riffing on” MND, but also working-in lines from other Shakespeare plays to create something entirely new and never before seen.

As Holdren describes it, the worlds of the play are perfect for Rough Magic’s aims: there is the “real world” of Athens, from which the lovers escape into the woods; there is the contrived world that the mechanicals—Bottom and the rest—try to invent via theater; then there is the magical world of the fairies, ruled by Oberon and Titania. Holdren says she chose Shakespeare’s popular and possibly too-often-produced play for the challenge of finding novelty in a play too easily dismissed as trivial. Rough Magic’s Midsummer is “a little darker” than the common view of MND, which, Holdren says, is “so wonderful but often so bad” in performance. Her hope is that the novelty of the Rough Magic approach will “bring in people with a love of Shakespeare as well as people who are skeptical” about the prospect of breathing new life into such a familiar play. The audience should “see something different” than they’ve seen before, and should be “surprised by the play again.” That would be a good example of the kind of re-enchantment Rough Magic has in mind.

The summer’s second play, running from July 9-July 18, is a piece wholly devised for Summer Cabaret by the company, conceived and directed by Leora Morris. Love holds a lamp in this little room, the title, is taken from a poem by the subject of the play: the actress/poet/painter/ Adah Isaacs Menken, a mercurial bohemian spirit of the mid to late 1800s.

Ostensibly raised Christian as a creole of a mixed race union in New Orleans, Menken married several times, and in one of her marriages became a convert to Judaism, her husband’s faith, and a student of the Kabbalah. Having, in other words, a rather fluid identity and a rather unique self-conception, she was most famous for riding a horse nude, or at least in a nude suit, on stage. She was also a lover of Mark Twain and a bit of a femme fatale who composed a suicide note to the public before her failed suicide attempt. Morris’ play is drawn from Menken’s life and work to investigate what Holdren calls “her multiplicity of self,” showing that what might be seen as the vagaries of her life was a means to avoid creative pigeonholes and to celebrity the otherness of identity. Today, Menken would likely be a performance artist. Think of the play as the kind of piece this intriguing and restless figure might write and appear in.

The theme of figures who risk damnation for their activities is always popular because inherently dramatic. It was present in Holdren’s thesis show The Master and Margarita, and it was present in Andrej Visky’s thesis show, Molière’s Don Juan. From July 23-August 1, the Summer Cab will present the granddaddy of all workings of the theme, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, directed by Visky.

What intrigues both Holdren and Visky in such tales is what Holdren calls “an affinity for stories that don’t fit” the usual expectations of theater. Such plays are the expansive and “uncontainable” odd ducks that stretch the boundaries of theater and the limits of the team’s talents. The attraction of Marlowe’s Faustus is that it concerns a hero who is “modernist avant le lettre.” Or at least that’s what will become clear in this new adaptation by Visky and dramaturg Kee-Yoon Nahm, that may create an interplay between Marlowe’s Faustus and Goethe’s Faust, and will use puppets for the more demonic aspects of the tale. One of the attractions of Faustus is the character of Mephistopheles, a “tormented trickster” who, as a necessary evil, draws upon and the furthers the very notion of a stage villain. Holdren calls the play a “rollicking romp” and the press release says audiences will experience “a world gone to hell. And a hand puppet.”

For the final play of the summer, Holdren, who directs, turns to a popular, fairly recent play by Yale School of Drama instructor Sara Ruhl: a theatrical adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s unorthodox novel Orlando, August 6-August 15. The story of a character who lives successively as a man and as a woman, and who exists from Elizabethan times to what was, when the novel was published, the present day of World War II, Orlando presents not only a consideration of what difference, if any, gender makes, but also a mini history of the fortunes of England.

Holdren claims a long-enduring interest in the possibilities of adapting novels for the stage. Her originary moment for the fascination was watching the 9 hour adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby on DVD as a child. Her dream adaptation would be Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. Her amazingly successful presentation of the play derived from Bulgakov’s wildly unorthodox novel The Master and Margarita certainly attests to her commitment to the task. What interests her is the live aspect of storytelling, and the issue of how to involve the narrative voice in the theatrical presentation. Ruhl’s use of Woolf’s voice in Orlando Holdren finds exemplary, particularly when one realizes that there is no dialogue per se in Woolf’s novel. This means that Ruhl had unusual freedom in creating monologues for the characters as well as choric speeches to further the action. And Ruhl’s way with the text gives the director a like freedom to “break down the different roles at will.”

For Holdren, Orlando as the final play takes us back to the Elizabethan worlds of Shakespeare and Marlowe, while its gender-changing hero/ine complements the racial and artistic ambiguity of Adah Isaacs Menken. Holdren’s fellow directors—Leora Morris and Andrej Visky—share a “generous imaginative spirit” and are skilled at “soliciting ideas from the entire company” when working on a play. For Holdren, the Summer Cabaret this year is the perfect black box in which to engage in an artistic process that will yield company-based, collaborative theater, with plays that will shift genre and feature heroes that will shape-shift before our very eyes. All of which will further the “rough magic” of the Cabaret for its fans and followers and new-comers and discoverers alike.

For tickets and more information: summercabaret.org

Cab 47 Recap

Season 47 of the Yale Cabaret has ended its run as of April 25th, which must mean it's time for a re-cap of the season. A re-cap wherein I try to recall and celebrate my favorite contributions to the magical basement that is the Yale Cabaret. Ready? Here are a baker's dozen of categories with my five exemplars in each (in chronological order, but for my fave pick), for a total of 65 citations: New Play: This year’s top five never-before-seen, new plays were: Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time, in which Alice in Wonderland—or rather Liddy in Wonderland—meets “Little Miss” beauty pageants, written with verve for a cast of crazies by Emily Zemba; The Zero Scenario, in which every Cleveland in these United States is threatened by the Ticks of Death but for a special plucky band of heroes, written by Ryan Campbell; The Untitled Project, in which a collective of black male YSD’ers create self-portraits in the context of racial profiling, conceived and directed by Ato Blankson-Wood and created by the ensemble; Sister Sandman Please, in which three sisters put it out there for a cowboy, with varying degrees of passion, irony and intention, written by Jessica Rizzo; and ... 50:13, in which an incarcerated black man about to be freed tries to tell it like it is, with candor, wit and a variety of character sketches, to a young prison-mate, written by Jiréh Breon Holder.

Adapted Play: Impressive pre-existing plays adapted for Cab 47 included four translations and an English-language opera: Don’t Be Too Surprised, written by Geun-Hyung Park, translated and directed by Kee-Yoon Nahm, lets us know in no uncertain terms that familial dysfunction can still take surprising forms on stage; MuZeum, translated and directed by Ankur Sharma, tells stories from ancient sources and contemporary headlines, to dramatize powerfully the victimization of women; Quartet by Heinrich Müller, translated by Doug Langworthy, directed by David Bruin, revisits Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons as a wickedly entertaining pas de deux and psychologically fraught cat-and-mouse; The Medium, an opera by Gian Carlo Menotti, directed by Ahn Lê, creates a world of mystery, loss, and deep feeling and gives further credence to the notion that opera is not just for opera houses; and ... Leonce and Lena by Georg Büchner, translated by Gavin Whitehead, directed by Gavin Whitehead and Elizabeth Dinkova, presents a play of aristocratic ennui that torches the well-made play, and this time with puppets!

Set Design: After all, the Cab is a basement with a kitchen, and convincing us we’re in a new space each week takes some doing. Here are some set designs that went beyond all expectation in their achieved artistry: Kurtis Boetcher’s set for Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time made a door where there’s a window and had the coloring and style of a child’s playhouse; Joey Moro’s versatile set for Hotel Nepenthe breathed a seedy charm, like we imagine Hotel Duncan does, or should; Chika Shimuzi and Izmir Ickbal’s stunning set for MuZeum lent aura aplenty and eye-catching beauty to its revue-style presentation; Christopher Thompson’s set for The Zero Scenario seemed to defy space itself in cramming so much busy-ness into the Cab, including a motelroom and a hidden headquarters, and ... Adrian Martinez Frausto’s moody set for The Medium was so fully achieved in its seedy gentility it might be a film set inviting a camera’s scrutiny.

Costumes: Dressing actors for their parts often goes beyond the norm, creating inspired additions to the visual flair of a show. Some of the tops in costumes were: Grier Coleman’s range of captivating dress for ancient characters of India and contemporary folks in MuZeum; Fabian Aguilar and Alexae Visel’s super cool get-ups for the agents protecting us from Tick Apocalypse in The Zero Scenario; Alexae Visel’s authentic mock-ups of the cartoonish costumes of the old Batman series “fit just like my glove” in Episode 21: Catfight; Haydee Zelideth had a field day with modernist Enlightenment-era costuming in Leonce and Lena; and ... Soule Golden and Montana Blanco rendered camp versions of the White Rabbit, Hatter, White Queen, and Tweedledum/dee we won’t soon forget in Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time.

Lighting: It doesn’t just help us see, it also selects and shows and evokes, sometimes making for quite magical effects. Illuminating dancers with lights that added to both movement and music in Solo Bach: Caitlin Smith Rapoport; creating a wealth of visual effects that kept us entranced in MuZeum: Joey Moro; putting on a show and putting-on the trappings of a storybook world in Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time: Joey Moro; using light to complement stories and to add drama in 50:13: Elizabeth Mak; and ... creating an Old World atmosphere both spooky and authentic in The Medium: Andrew Griffin.

Sound: It can be used in striking or surprising ways, or to create an aural texture to accompany the action. Creating a wintery world with bursts of music and broadcasts in Rose and the Rime: Jon Roberts, Joel Abbott; maintaining a sustained eerieness and B-movie aura in Hotel Nepenthe: Sinan Zafar; incorporating music and a range of emotional tones in MuZeum: Tyler Kieffer; bringing together recorded voice, spoken voice, and background music into a collage in The Untitled Project: Tyler Kieffer; and ... merging voices, sound effects, loops and his own music to create a shifting aural space in Sister Sandman Please: Chris Ross-Ewart.

Music and Movement: We don’t always get both, but it can make for entrancing theater when we do: MuZeum featured essential music by Anita Shastri, played on stage by a crew of musicians/actors and interacted with by the actors; The Untitled Project used recorded music tellingly and featured a show-stopping dance sequence by Ato Blankson-Wood; The Medium presented a stirring reduction of Menotti’s score into a solo piano tour de force by Jill Brunelle, expressive miming from José Ramón Sabín Lestayo, and impressive vocals from the cast; Sister Sandman Please benefited from Chris Ross-Ewart’s compositions amidst the aural textures, and delighted with a raucous “O Holy Night” from Ashley Chang; and ... Solo Bach showcased Zou Yu’s amazing solo violin performances, combined with the inventive, cryptic and dramatic choreography by Shayna Keller and her actor/dancers: Paul Cooper, Chalia La Tour, Julian Elijah Martinez, Leora Morris.

Special Effects: An ad hoc category that includes whatever doesn’t fit into other categories, such as: the combination of lights and star chart backdrop to create a sense of wonder in Touch: Joey Moro; the evocative projections-as-scenery in Solo Bach: Rasean Davonte Johnson; the B-movie monster ticks and blood and projections and other effects in The Zero Scenario: Rasean Davonte Johnson, Mike Paddock; the varied creepy puppets, hand-held and string-operated, in Leonce and Lena: Emily Baldasarra; and ... the use of projections and clips to tell stories and create context with images in The Untitled Project: Rasean Davonte Johnson.

Acting (ensemble): Ideally, the acting in a play is a group affair, in which everyone plays a part, of course. Still, it’s worth remarking on when a cast is more than the sum of its parts, as in these shows: Look Up, Speak Nicely and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time, the big kick-off extravaganza of the season featured a gallery of colorful characters by Sarah Williams, Celeste Arias, Aubie Merrylees, Shaunette Renée Wilson, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Melanie Field, Andrej Visky, Libby Peterson; The Zero Scenario, the crowd-pleasing first semester closer, pulled out all the stops with Ariana Venturi, Tom Pecinka, Sara Holdren, Ankur Sharma, Aaron Profumo, Emily Zemba, Ryan Campbell; The Untitled Project, an ensemble-derived show that focused on the subtle distinctions and broad stereotypes of race, was created and enacted by Taylor Barfield, Ato Blankson-Wood, Cornelius Davidson, Leland Fowler, Jiréh Breon Holder, Phillip Howze, Galen Kane; Leonce and Lena, in which actors and puppet-handler/actors interacted to create a zany theatrical world of kingdoms and encounters, with Sebastian Arboleda, Juliana Canfield, David Clauson, Anna Crivelli, Ricardo Dávila, Edmund Donovan, Josh Goulding, Steven C. Koernig, Lynda A.H. Paul, Nahuel Telleria; and ... Hotel Nepenthe, a comic tour de force of changing roles, repeating characters, and linked situations that ran from the creepy to the farcical, all created with manic intensity by Bradley James Tejeda, Annelise Lawson, Emily Reeder, Galen Kane.

Acting (individual): For individual performances, I’m going with some standouts, whether in accomplished ensemble work, or showcased in two-handers, or in the unrelenting spotlight of the solo show. Ladies first: Celeste Arias, hilarious as an unhinged mommie dearest in Look Up, Speak Nicely and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time; Sydney Lemmon, riveting as Mme Merteuil but even more so as Mme Merteuil/Valmont in Quartet; Maura Hooper, chameleonic as a series of characters, including a disaffected nun and a happy hooker, in Shiny Objects; Zenzi Williams, demonstrating a range of attitudes in four characters, from spiritual to demur to quietly confident in Shiny Objects, and ... Tiffany Mack, unforgettable as a heart-wrenching victim of an acid attack in MuZeum.

Acting (individual): And from the men: Jonathan Majors, finding himself in an unbearable situation and quietly going to pieces in Touch; Tom Pecinka as a highly verbal passenger monologuing his anxiety in The Zero Scenario; Edmund Donovan, riveting as Valmont but even more so as Valmont/Mme de Tourvel in Quartet; Ricardo Dávila as the slippery, caustic and fascinating Valerio in Leonce and Lena; and ... Leland Fowler as a stand-up guy feeling the longings of the jailed and acting out a quick lesson in family history and racism in 50:13.

Directing: For the vision behind the whole shebang that makes it all hang together, we celebrate directors: for the all-out campy and creepy charm of Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time: Ato Blankson-Wood; for keeping the hopscotch logic and many shifts in tone of Hotel Nepenthe on point: Rachel Carpman; for creating the interplay of stories, including humor, confrontation, and violence in MuZeum: Ankur Sharma; for showing a dramatic and thoughtful grasp of the resilience of a human spirit trapped in a cage in 50:13: Jonathan Majors; and ... for providing the comic highpoint of the season with wild charm, horror surprises and relentless verve in The Zero Scenario: Sara Holdren.

Production: From the above, it’s obvious which shows seemed tops to me, but to bring them all together for a final nod: Hotel Nepenthe, Sarah Williams, producer, Taylor Barfield, dramaturg, Avery Trunko, stage manager, the kind of shifting and surprising show that keeps me coming back to theater; MuZeum, Anita Shastri, producer, Maria Ines Marques, dramaturg, Emily DeNardo, stage manager, a strong and cathartic import to our shores; The Zero Scenario, Ahn Lê, producer, Helen Jaksch and Nahuel Telleria, dramaturgs, Anita Shastri, stage manager, a crazy sci-fi ride that screams “sequel!”; 50:13, Jason Najjoum, producer, Taylor Barfield, dramaturg, Lauren E. Banks, stage manager, an important and meaningful addition to the one-person play and the "black lives matter" movement; and ... Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time, Kelly Kerwin, producer, Nahuel Telleria, dramaturg, Avery Trunko stage manager, “the gang’s all here” type of theater, presenting a lively riff on the rigors of growing up female in our media-ized Wonderland.

Thanks again to our hosts for 18 weekends—plus a Drag Show: Molly Hennighausen, Will Rucker, Tyler Kieffer, and Hugh Farrell. And ... see you next season, at the Cab!

The Yale Cabaret Season 47 September 18, 2014-April 25, 2015

Back to Bach

Review of Solo Bach at the Yale Cabaret As someone once said—Martin Mull probably—and many have quoted, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” OK, and what about writing about other people dancing to music? That’s got to inspire an even stranger analogy. In any case, it’s a strained relation: words about music, dance about music, words about dance about music.

In the case of Solo Bach, the 8th show of the season at the Yale Cabaret, we’re not dealing with dance, per se, but rather interpretive theater/movement, which, by director/creator Yagil Eliraz’s own urging, is left to the viewer to interpret. So that gives an odd sense to a reviewer of being twice removed: interpreting an interpretation of two musical compositions by J.S. Bach, written for solo violin.

First off, Zou Yu’s solo performance, in which she also has to move about sometimes and is entirely without sheet music, is stunning, amazing, inspiring. The violin in these works by Bach becomes a very complex instrument, capable of great emotion and also great restraint. Polyphonic, the works register different “voices” and, it seems, that element is what inspires Eliraz to assign four actors the task of embodying the music in various ways. The first element to overcome here is one’s sense that Bach—music that feels very internal and spiritual—should have physical manifestations accompanying it. And forget the graceful sarabandes and courtly dances of Bach’s era, Eliraz and choreographer Shayna Keller develop movements that are more theatrical, meaning that there is “story” of a sort, at least sometimes.

The segments that work best for this viewer are the more static segments, giving us the opportunity to look at the figures in the piece as just that, figures. Abstract shapes, particularly as Haydee Antunano’s costumes, in their white regularity, accentuate the dimensions of the bodies of the four performer/creators, Paul Cooper, Chalia La Tour, Julian Elijah Martinez, Leora Morris, letting us reflect on how bodies in space interact with shadows, light, and one another. A particularly successful segment occurs early on when Cooper and La Tour, against a projected backdrop of a tree, enact a kind of slow-mo, organic pas de deux with lots of leaning on one another. Elsewhere things get more lively with tear-away patches removed from clothing, and slapping into the walls and removing wall-papered images, though how that interprets the tensions of the Bach is questionable.

The projections (Rasean Davonte Johnson, design; James Lanius III, engineer) help to create visual mood—at times reminding me of the look of scratched and blotted filmstrip passing through oldtime projectors—and the movements at times entail props, such as a suitcase, used very effectively at the close when the foursome withdraw as a single, train-like entity. Another segment features movements that ape the processes of the work-a-day world, somewhat in the manner of the miming in Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal, but, for the most part, the movements in Solo Bach aren’t mime but rather, we might say, motivated behavior, at times behind white masks. But what motivates it is at times hard to discern.

One might say the music is the motivator, but classical music, for me, is notoriously slippery when one comes to giving it “subject matter”; even pieces written for ballet or for dramatic enactment can easily drop the bodily and move into a purely imaginative space that needn’t visualize anything. Not much help for the theatrically inclined.

I wonder how many in the audience found themselves concentrating more and more on Zou You’s virtuoso performance and less on the efforts of the performers. I found myself reflecting—since the Cab space is ideal for considering things from one’s limited point of view—on purely visual elements as counterpoint to the music and preferred those moments when one could see, as they say, “the whites of their eyes” to add more motivated expressiveness—from La Tour and Martinez particularly, who are always very expressive actors—to the proceedings.

What did Bach have in mind when composing these pieces other than the joy of composition and the way that different voices can be joined into a harmonious whole? I’ve no idea. What Eliraz and company have us behold while attending to Bach’s stately and resonant sonatas leaves each of us to reflect, but at least we must all navigate the dueling presence—at times supportive, at times at odds—of the aural and the visual, the musical and the bodily. If we make it a contest, music wins, since as Walter Pater observed over a century ago: “All art aspires to the condition of music.” And, we might add, no art but music attains it.

Solo Bach Conceived and directed by Yagil Eliraz

Performer/Creators: Paul Cooper, Chalia La Tour, Julian Elijah Martinez, Leora Morris; Violinist: Zou Yu; Choreographer: Shayna Keller; Set Design: Jungah Han; Costume Design: Haydee Antunano; Assistant Costume Design: Christina King; Lighting Design: Caitlin Smith Rapoport; Sound Design: Nok Kanchanabanca; Sound Mixing: Fan Zhang; Projection Design: Rasean Davonte Johnson; Projection Engineer: James Lanius III; Stage Manager: David Clauson; Technical Director: Keny Thomason; Production Manager: James Lanius III; Producer: Sally Shen; Associate Producer: Adam Frank

Yale Cabaret December 4-6, 2014

Ordeal

Since the start of the current semester, the Yale Cabaret has been on a roll. Each week has given audiences another provocative offering. This weekend the play is Yaël Farber’s He Left Quietly, which dramatizes the ordeal of Duma Kumalo, an inmate condemned to death row in apartheid South Africa for an act of mob violence in which he did not participate. Rather, he was arrested and condemned for political rather than criminal reasons. Kumalo served three years, awaiting death and enduring the dehumanizing and humiliating treatment of his captors, only to be reprieved, due to public pressure, from hanging (he had already been measured for the noose and his coffin) less than 24 hours before his time. After another four years he was released, only to experience the stigma of being a former prisoner who was never cleared of the crime. As originally staged, from 2002 until Kumalo’s death in 2006, He Left Quietly featured Kumalo himself. The play was produced as a docu-drama, with Kumalo telling his own scripted story while a professional actor would play “Young Duma,” acting out, mostly in mime, the events Kumalo describes, and a female actor would play “Woman”—a part that at times represents Farber herself, at other times the agents of the government, or a narrative voice. As staged at the Cabaret, directed by Leora Morris, all three parts are played by second-year actors at YSD.

Playing Duma, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II creates a sense of a man who has come through a harrowing ordeal both wiser and humbler. He begins by asking “how many times can a man die” and when the actual moment of death occurs. The main thrust of the show is not, as we might assume, indignity and political outrage, but rather the kind of insight that comes from having faced death and lived. In presenting his experiences as theater, Duma seems to have gained a philosophical detachment that makes him a benign narrative presence recounting what comes to seem a ritual cleansing: stripping away the accoutrements of the everyday—a scene in which Young Duma buys a pair of stylish shoes that, unknown to him at the time, he would wear only once: to be sentenced to death, establishes an “all is vanity” tone that Duma chuckles about; then the humiliations—such as a prison uniform deliberately too small—and the existential reminders, as current inmates wear the uniforms and sleep in the bedclothes, unlaundered, of those already killed; finally, the surrendering even of one’s attachment to life, as Duma says his goodbyes to his father and other loved ones and accepts the unique date with death we all inevitably face. The reprieve comes as almost a taunt, a way of showing that he is indeed a puppet on the strings of the State. Abdul-Mateen maintains such a dignified and knowing air that we see not a man consumed by suffering but rather one ennobled by it.

On a plain wooden stage set with a couple chairs, a primitive toilet, and a pile of shoes, backed with a chain-link face, He Left Quietly makes the most of its ritualistic overtones, even as it gives full drama to Duma’s individual plight. Enacting the range of emotions Duma endures—such as rage at his former lover, wracking sobs at his own fate, and, very movingly, teary solidarity in song for Lucky, a comrade gone to the gallows—Ato Blankson-Wood continues to impress viewers. The final tableau of Blankson-Wood silhouetted against the wall/fence, looking off, acts as a comment on the entire story of Kumalo, as a man who, once imprisoned unjustly then returned to the world of apartheid, must endure years under the shadow of the system that condemned him, while eventually taking control of his story as a tale to be told, and enacted again and again, for audiences. Without Kumalo’s own presence in the play, the play becomes more theater than document, so that we may find in it, as with any play, meanings that go beyond the actual events of Kumalo’s life.

From that point of view, the weakest aspect of the play is the role of Woman. Maura Hooper does a bravura job of playing sympathetic witness, indifferent judge, and other roles, but the part as written comes to seem a bit too contrived, a theatrical touch rather than a direct reflection of Kumalo’s experience—which is never true of Duma’s descriptions or Young Duma’s enactments.

Stark, unsettling, but ultimately redemptive, He Left Quietly makes its audience bear witness to the many unsung songs of political prisoners and unjust executions in our world. It is to Farber and Kumalo’s credit that they can convey both the extraordinary circumstances of Kumalo’s story as well as the more general existential condition we all face, and, most tellingly, the very real threat of political reprisals by the state’s arbitrary violence—never more fearsome and pitiless than when sanctioned by the law of the land.

He Left Quietly By Yaël Farber Directed by Leora Morris

Dramaturg: David Clauson; Set: Christopher Thompson; Lights: Andrew Griffin; Sound: Kate Marvin; Costumes: Fabian Aguilar; Projections: Reid Thompson; Technical Director: Mitchell Cramond, Mitch Massaro; Stage Manager: Sonja Thorson; Producer: Libby Peterson

Yale Cabaret February 27-March 1, 2014

Back to the CAB

Last weekend the Yale Cabaret offered its second-ever Yale School of Drag—memorable for many things, including Lupita Nyong’o drag, but if you missed it, then you missed it. And if you saw it, far be it from me to tell you what you saw. This week the Cab is back with the first of the eight shows that continue the second part of the 2013-14 Season. Artistic Directors Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, and Kelly Kerwin have arrived at an interesting mix of shows. Five are pre-existing plays, two are never-before-seen productions, and one is a mixture: a devised setting for known pieces (a bit like Radio Show in the fall).

The first three shows are scheduled beginning this week and for the next two weeks, then a two-week break, three more shows, a week dark, and then the final two. Got it? Here’s what’s coming:

Cab 11 is The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs, proposed by 2nd-year Set Designer Adrian Frausto (whose excellent work on Hedda Gabler closed recently) and directed by 3rd-year Director Cole Lewis, whose varied and unsettling thesis show The Visit was offered in the fall. The play, running for the Valentine's Day weekend, looks at the darker side of romance with a revisiting of the Bluebeard tale of the wealthy man who marries a woman and gives her everything, except . . . she can’t go into that room at the top of the stairs. If your Valentine is the kind who loves a good scare, then this is the place to be. And when was the last time the Cab offered a thriller based on tension and suspense? Written by Canadian playwright Carole Fréchette, the play, Dibo promises, will offer an unusual configuration of the Cab playing space and, with its theme of trust in romance, is perhaps all-too apropos for Valentine’s Day. February 13-15

Next comes Jean Genet’s psychological drama The Maids, proposed by 3rd-year Director Dustin Wills, Co-Artistic Director of Yale Summer Cabaret 2013, whose startlingly unusual Peter Pan played in December. The play, which usually takes place among three women—the mistress and her two maids—will be played by three males, “performing rituals of gender,” according to Dubowski, within a staged space constructed by Kate Noll with sound design by Tyler Kieffer. The idea is to present us with a space full of mirrors and different lines of sight so that the audience is placed in the roles of voyeurs and eavesdroppers, spying on what the maids get-up to behind the scenes. Mainstays of the Summer Cab 2013, Mickey Theis and Chris Bannow, will be joined by first-year actor, Andrew Burnap. February 20-22

The third show before the break is He Left Quietly, proposed by 1st-year Director Leora Morris, a play by Yaël Farber about Duma Kumalo, a man sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit in apartheid South Africa. Kumalo’s story, which involves a stay-of-execution delivered on the day the death sentence was to be carried out, followed by another four years of incarceration for a total of 7 years in prison, is a story of a man’s spirit triumphing over unspeakable deprivations. The show, which features three 2nd-year actors, Ato Blankson-Wood, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Maura Hooper, returns us to the dark realities of apartheid South Africa and a search for justice. February 27-March 1

After two dark weeks, the Cab will return with The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion, a partly devised piece proposed by 1st-year Dramaturg David Bruin. The show will transform the Cab into a Greenwich Village basement in the early 1960s where beatniks and bohemians gather to check out two one-acts by two of their own: Edward Albee and María Irene Fornés. The production takes us back to when these darlings of the theatrical world were still “up-and-coming” and where the surroundings for the play are part of the play in a time of porous conceptions of theater. March 20-22

Cab 15 is We Fight We Die by Long Island-born playwright Timothy J. Guillot and directed by 1st-year playwright Jiréh Breon Holder; the play looks at the fate of the work of graffiti artist Q in his tussle with City Hall, which aims to stamp out his form of art. With a Greek chorus rapping to us about the struggle and original works of art by MFA students in the Yale School of Art, the show provides an interesting collaboration between art forms and media that should be aurally and visually challenging, and, with the recent obliteration of 5Pointz in Long Island City, very timely. March 27-29

Next comes an unusual devised piece from 3rd-year actor and Co-Artistic Director of Summer Cabaret 2013, Chris Bannow. The source material: The Mystery Boy, Bannow’s sister’s original 126-page novel, written two years ago when she was 11. With 2nd-year dramaturg Helen Jaksch (seen in the fall as M in Crave) co-directing, the ensemble cast will be put through their paces with a love triangle, adventures involving the Mafia, vacation romance, and the various pleasures and perils of social media as the lingua franca of our current pre-teen world. April 3-5

2nd-year playwright Ryan Campbell—his Dead Ends was a studio play this past fall—offers his own A New Saint for a New World, directed by 2nd-year director Sara Holdren, who directed Tiny Boyfriend in the fall. The premise: Joan of Arc wants to return to earth; God finally agrees on the condition that she not start any wars or revolutions. Conceived as “a real big play for a small room,” Saint considers the possibilities for faith in 2014 NYC and the frustrations faced by a heroic crusader forbidden to crusade. April 17-19

Cab 18, the last of the season, might be a somewhat obvious choice: The Brothers Size by Tarell Alvin McCraney, the YSD graduate playwright who recently won a Yale Windham-Campbell Writing Prize and a MacArthur “genius” Award in the same year. Three 1st year actors, Jonathan Majors, Julian Elijah Martinez, and Galen Kane proposed the play, written while McCraney was a third-year at YSD, and made their case that it’s a play they have an urgent need to enact due to their personal histories and the unique opportunity offered by the Cab. Directed by Luke Harlan, the play is the story of two brothers—Ogun runs a car-repair shop, the other, Oshoozi, recently released from prison, comes to work for him—and a third man, Elegba, also come from jail, who visits to bring Oshoozi a gift. Set in the bayou country of Louisiana and involving music and African myths, the play should end the Cab’s 46th Season with a strong finish as YSD pays tribute to one of its own. April 24-26

So, that’s what you can look forward to in the weeks ahead. See you at the Cab!

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven, CT

Season 46 Co-Artistic Directors: Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, Kelly Kerwin Managing Director: Shane Hudson