Yale Cabaret: From the Room to the Zoom

Yale Cabaret preview, February 27 to May 20

The Yale Cabaret, the branch of the Yale School of Drama run by students and usually housed in the beloved basement theater at 217 Park in New Haven, returned last weekend from Yale’s extended winter break with its first show of 2021, Let’s Go to the Moon. This weekend, In-Between Bitches, their second show of the spring semester, opens.

The great challenge for the theatrical institution, now in its 53rd year, is that theater for the foreseeable future is not what it was. The team’s slogan this year is “Live Online Together” and their solution to the closing off of all theaters on campus is a combination of live and pre-recorded events that are broadcast live. Which means the links to the shows can only be accessed during set times to which viewers commit: Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m., for most of the shows. The intention is to maintain some of the charm of the Cabaret’s sense of participatory community. We may all be stuck in our homes but at least we can attend online events together.

Cabaret 53 Team, clockwise from top right: Managing Director Matthew Sonnenfeld, Co-Artistic Director Nicole Lang, Co-Artistic Director Jisun Kim, Co-Artistic Director Maeli Goren

The leadership team of Cab 53 consists of Co-Artistic Directors Maeli Goren, a third-year directing student; Jisun Kim, a third-year dramaturgy student; Nicole Lang, a third-year student of Lighting Design, and Managing Director Matthew Sonnenfeld, a second-year student in Theater Management. The mission of the team underscores collaboration and a sense of neighborliness in reaching out to “greater Yale”—which means students outside the School of Drama—and to the New Haven community more broadly. And even, with the tenth show of the season, to an international community of artists not present in New Haven or at Yale.

Last week’s show was a good example of the kind of collaborative projects the team hopes to inspire. Originally, Let’s Go to the Moon was a “filler art pitch” for the website, described as “four queer astronauts go to the moon.” The sample pitch developed into an actual pitch and became a collaboration between Kim and Lang, as the hands behind the puppets used for the play, and composers Soomin Kim and Samantha Wolf and lyricist Alana Jacoby for the songs—ten in all—expressly written for the show (in place of the cover songs initially considered).

The production was “hybrid,” in that it was both live and recorded. The audio, which means the dialogue and songs sung by the cast (Shimali De Silva, Mouse; Madeline Seidman Woman from Venus; Maeli Goren, Moon Rock; Sad, Old Rover, Nat Lopez) was pre-recorded; the visuals, however, which involved both 3D and 2D puppets, and two cameras for each, were enacted live by the puppeteers and co-creators of the piece, Jisun Kim and Nicole Lang—the “Astronauts and Chief Administrators,” according to the very creative playbill, available on the Cab website. Thus the show viewers saw was sort of like lip-synching . . . but with puppets and no visible humans.

The tech resources were impressive—if only to consider the switching between cut-out and modeled puppets. Key to the show’s technical polish were two stage managers—Brandon Lovejoy and Charlie Lovejoy—a technical director (Laura Copenhaver), designers for 3D puppets/scenic design (Emmie Finckel and Marcelo Martinez Garcia), designers for sound and incidental music (Emily Duncan Wilson), and for pre-show video (Camilla Tassi); the show was produced by Will Gaines and assistant producer Wendy Davies.

What was it all about? A charming NASA lab-mouse, convinced that an endless supply of cheese can be found on the moon, steals a rocket and sets off. En route she encounters a series of misfits: a Woman from Venus, who has fallen in love with “the woman in the moon” (instead of a man from Mars), a space-borne rock convinced that her origins are the earth’s moon, and, after a journey down a wormhole and a crash-landing on an unknown planet, an Old, Sad Rover who speaks only in the singsong of “Happy Birthday to You,” and whose mission to the moon went awry some time before. Together they undertake a final try at a moon-landing, only to learn that their ad hoc togetherness is enough to constitute a valuable universe in itself. The songs provide both catchy commentary as well as character and situation exposition.

The visuals available in the online medium were the stars of the show, and that sets up a point Sonnenfeld made about the upcoming second half of the season. In the fall, there were many shows that were audio only—including a radio play of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, set in India. It seems the challenge of writing for Zoom has been taken up by the YSD community and so what we’ll be seeing in the months ahead more fully activates the technologies of online theater.

As Sonnenfeld pointed out, the Cabaret’s brief with its participants has been “providing a room,” and the equipment that goes with it, to the students who elect to create shows during a season. In these changed circumstances, the team has had to be much more hands-on, as Goren noted, helping the chosen projects find a way to be realized within current constraints—and new possibilities. As a team, Cab 53 has welcomed proposals as open-ended as possible while also rising to the challenge of the extra foresight needed to make an idea come to life online. It’s a more time-intensive commitment and requires resources of ingenuity beyond those familiar to the 3D stage. Which means this is a good place for a shout-out to the technical advisers of this year’s Cabaret: Technical Supervisors Cameron Waitkun and Nicolás Cy Benavides, both first-year Technical Production and Design candidates. And mention should be made as well of a new position associated with the Cab this season: Rebecca Satzberg, a Technical Sound Intern at YSD, works as the Accessibility Assistant, which entails everything from technical issues for those trying to access video in different environments to close-captioning each performance, to anything that helps create a virtual environment that pushes the limits of what can be made available online.

This weekend’s show, Cab 8, as well as Cab 10 and 11, are cases in point. All were written for Zoom, and so the Cab has gone from providing the room to providing the Zoom—and all the capabilities that come with it. Like Cab 7, Let’s Go to the Moon, these shows will be creations specifically for Zoom Space.

Cab 8: In-Between Bitches, billed as “A Comedy for Zoom,” proposed, written & directed by Abigail C. Onwunali, the show addresses issues of what Goren called “body awareness,” and the ways in which the theater community avoids questions of shame and dysmorphia. Goren also called the show “joyful and hilarious,” featuring an “all womxn team” tackling the stress of image and the ways one particular “in-between bitch” handles it. Two more shows today at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. Content Warning: “Depiction of eating and body dysmorphia disorders, coarse language, moments of loud, high-pitched sound.”

Cab 10: Expats Anonymous is rather unprecedented. The play was written by Rachel Chin who is not a student at Yale, but a theater artist in Singapore who heard of the Cab through colleagues and proposed the piece, which will be the first international collaboration offered as a scheduled part of the Cab season. As a Zoom play, the show not only makes a virtue of the virtual environment—bringing together collaborators on different continents—but dramatizes Zoom as a part of job interviews. Set in Singapore during the current pandemic, the play looks at the situation of unemployed expats vying for a single job that will allow them to remain. May 18-20 at 8 p.m. and May 20 at 5 p.m.

With Cab 11, Love in a Pan Dulcé, we move from business to pleasure. Not only is Zoom part of the arduous process of finding work, it’s also part of the arduous process of finding a date. To put it in the terms of the Cab’s website: “Come laugh, cry, and cringe as Rachel, Joey, Noah, Arnie, Michael, and Daniel navigate the trials and tribulations of dating in 2020.” A play for Zoom, written and proposed by Nomè SiDone. April 16-17

Cab 9 will feature the return of the annual Dragaret—a drag show that, for the last few years, has included a night for New Haven queens and a night for YSD students. The particulars of this year’s offering, in the online environment, have not yet been determined, but tickets for the show are separate from the single membership fee that permits access to all the other shows and to the Cab Gallery. More information about the pricing policy and about the show and its line-up, which should involve both recorded and synchronous performances, will be forthcoming shortly. But mark your calendars now: March 12-13. The show has long been very popular as an entertaining and unpredictable celebration of the non-conformism and fluidity that gender, as a performative element of identity, can give rise to. Particularly among highly gifted and theatrical individuals.

Cab 12 also continues a Cab tradition, though this one of more recent provenance. Cab 51 set up the Rough Draft Festival as a way to bring on work in progress and the kind of work outside of concentration that is one of the Cab’s selling-points. The particulars have still to be determined, though the dates have been set: April 30-May 1. The team is considering potential collaborations extended to students in New Haven area schools. This is the second festival of the season; in December, the very successful Black Theater Festival brought together a highly eclectic offering of plays, performance, and interactive events.

Cab 13, the final show of the season, might be considered a transition back to “normal theater.” At least, the two one-person shows brought together for Remanded Trials might be enacted on a stage—though there may be benefits to the virtual space. Both feature acting students in YSD who have written parts to enact. In “Death Sentence” Matthew Webb will give a Cab debut performance as a man interrogated for serial murders. Called a “darkly humorous mystery” by Lang, the show “meditates in different ways on justice” and whether “character is death?” In “Kitchen of Truth” Madeline Seidman plays Martha Stewart in a dark night of the soul—including a hallucinated final television episode—on the night before she is taken into custody. May 7-8

That’s it for the shows scheduled, but membership in the Cab Season (go here for more details) also includes two Cab Potlucks, which aim to promote a virtual version of the valued face time usually found at the Cab as fans and patrons meet and eat and drink and circulate. The next one is April 24, and the final one is at the close of the season, as a send off and celebration, May 20.

The other perk of membership is entry to the Cab Gallery which features curated exhibits of installations, videos, sound compositions and more.

As Sonnenfeld noted, the upside of the virtual environment, for theater, is that the 70 seat capacity of the Cabaret can be—and frequently has been—doubled or tripled this season. There’s much more ease of access, and though we miss the togetherness of the Cab and mourn the emptiness of the theater at 217 Park Street, the Yale Cabaret as a virtual environment remains a viable and lively space for theatrical experiments and experiences. “See” you “at” the Cab!

Yale Cabaret
Spring Season: February 19-May 20, 2021

The Harm in Surviving

Review of How to Relearn Yourself, Yale Cabaret

Written by Doireann Mac Mahon, a third-year acting student at the Yale School of Drama, How to Relearn Yourself addresses the issue of sexual assault in social settings, and its existential impact on the victim. Like Anna Ziegler’s Actually, Mac Mahon’s play is mostly concerned with the aftermath of a sexual violation that occurs between two college freshmen, a male and a female. But unlike Actually, which puts its emphasis on the psychology of two students who date and move toward sex which takes place after the woman has changed her mind (and the way the school handles the complaint), in Mac Mahon’s play rape is taking advantage of someone unable to consent or refuse. Mac Mahon presents the post-event state of mind of The Girl (played by Mac Mahon) as a traumatic questioning of everything she knows or thought she knew.

The Girl (Doireann Mac Mahon), How to Relearn Yourself, Yale Cabaret, October 10-12, 2019 (Photos by Emily Duncan Wilson)

How to Relearn Yourself is less about the culture of rape and the way teens comport themselves—though it does register some of the surrounding attitudes—and more about violation as a psychic affront. The play is gripping because its central character is so clearly in the grip of emotions that have no public or social outlet—it’s their privacy that makes them real. They belong to her alone.

Directed by Maeli Goren, a second-year director whose previous work at the Cab was the lively children’s mystery The Whale in the Hudson last season, the action takes place in a kind of isolation booth of white gauze that seems to glow from within (set and lighting by Stephanie Bahniuk). The way the audience is placed around the space makes us look a bit like voyeurs, a bit like a panel of judges. Inside there’s a couch, liberally strewn with articles of clothing. There’s also a coffee table. Two roommates, Squirrel (Leyla Levi) and The Girl, share a small flat where, Squirrel tells us, they aren’t too particular about housekeeping. They start out as two friends who try hard to share each other’s tastes and outlooks—and eventually that means going to parties together as backup, and possibly fixing each other up. It’s Squirrel’s idea that The Girl should go on a blind date with good-looking Dragon (Edwin Joseph).

Squirrel (Leyla Levi), The Girl (Doireann Mac Mahon), Dragon (Edwin Joseph) in How to Relearn Yourself, Yale Cabaret, October 10-12, 2019

We get to watch some version of this date, and by this point there has come into the proceedings a voice over, O (Maëlle Puechoultres), who poses questions like an investigator, on one hand, or, on the other, a kind of superego in loco parentis who might be a conscience of sorts. It’s a given that, whenever something untoward happens—particularly among the young—there is no end of second-guessing advice from the more experienced. O seems to stand for an external viewpoint, introjected to some extent, by which the actants are supposed to judge themselves.

For Dragon there’s so little cause for judgment. The blind date, he thinks, went well. What we see is that he’s rather callously full of himself but not in a threatening way. He thinks it’s becoming to talk about “just taking” something if you want it, and he wants to paint The Girl’s portrait, and he’s an up-and-comer, and lots of other bravado. Joseph plays him as obtuse but outgoing. The Girl’s reactions—and Mac Mahon is skilled at minor facial flurries that say so much—show us that he’s not going over nearly so well as he thinks. The Girl tells Squirrel that she really doesn’t want to see him again; he made her uncomfortable. That view seems to count for nothing to her friend.

Next thing we know there’s a party at Dragon’s place and The Girl has to go because—Squirrel says—there’s a guy there she’s interested in and she needs support, though it’s clear she’s also convinced that The Girl should give Dragon another chance. Then there’s lots of alcohol shots and loud music and dancing on couches until, apparently, The Girl passes out. Next thing she knows, she’s in a car and there’s blood, and one version of herself is “out of body” and out of the car, looking on at her powerless body. Here the particulars of what is actually happening get vague—and that’s the point. No one really knows, with unclouded certainty, and yet The Girl’s body does and what it tells her freaks her out.

The Girl (Doireann Mac Mahon), Dragon (Edwin Joseph), Squirrel (Leyla Levi) in How to Relearn Yourself, Yale Cabaret, October 10-12, 2019

Rather than move into the she said/he said terrain of Actually, Mac Mahon moves us into the psyche of The Girl where much is amiss. Squirrel can see—and report to O—that The Girl has changed: things she used to hate to do—like exercise—she now does, and things she used to do—like drink—she now hates. Their friendship suffers and Squirrel is apt to find The Girl seeking solace squirreled up behind the fridge rather than in activities they might share. Meanwhile, Dragon gets on with his life, not sure at all what became of Squirrel and her friend and not in the least concerned.

For The Girl, however, everything has changed, changed utterly. Perhaps because she’s Irish, her effort to present her inner state to Squirrel entertains questions about the reality of Jesus and of the afterlife. There’s even a segment in which fetuses are likened to parasites using the mother’s body as a host. The point is that The Girl is trying to express a state of extreme alienation toward her own physical being, but she’s also relearning her own moral compass. And what it comes down to—with considerable dramatic force—is that good and bad are entirely different, and thus Dragon can’t be both, and, what’s more, surviving is a terrible way to live.

The force of these ideas come from The Girl’s almost Beckettian journey through who or what she is when what she thought she was no longer suffices. Her view and her friend’s diverge so essentially that they truly are alternate realities. In Squirrel’s, Dragon is, if not totally good, at least harmless. In The Girl’s, he’s mean and, to make him even more nasty, conceals it quite well.

Lurking here, unstated but well-staged, is the nagging sense of what we might call intuition, as a capacity to know something simply because we know it. The Girl knows that what she knows isn’t something she can prove—and the burden of that knowledge, among other things, is not to go crazy from it (as for instance, the knowledge that someone “may smile and smile and be a villain”).

Relearning, in this context, is getting on with being who you have to be, though friends and even you to yourself seem like strangers. The implications of the play—as a reflection, for instance, on a certain U.S. Supreme Court justice—suggest that something is rotten in the state, indeed.

How to Relearn Yourself
Written and Proposed by Doireann Mac Mahon
Directed by Maeli Goren

Producers: Samanta Yunuen Cubias, Markie Gray; Scenic & Lighting Designer: Stephanie Bahniuk; Costume Designer: April M. Hickman; Sound Designer: Noel Nichols; Dramaturg: Sophie Greenspan; Associate Director & Choreographer: Eli Pauley; Technical Director: Yaro Yarashevich; Stage Manager: Bekah Brown

Cast: Edwin Joseph, Leyla Levi, Doireann Mac Mahon, Maëlle Puechoultres

Yale Cabaret
October 10-12, 2019

Yale Cabaret is dark this week but returns October 23-26 with Red Speedo, Lucas Hnath’s well-received drama about competitive swimmers, proposed by Patrick Ball, Eli Pauley, and Adam Shaukat, and directed by Pauley.

The Mysteries of Life

Review of The Whale in the Hudson, Yale Cabaret

The Yale Cabaret ends the first half of its season with a bittersweet tale of a whale that ventured into the Hudson River, as happened for real in November, 2016, the year the play is set. The fact of the whale’s presence sets off an effort by self-styled sleuth Taylor (Laurie Ortega-Murphy)—aka, on duty, “Warren G. Smugeye”—to uncover the whale’s motives. It should be mentioned that Taylor first hears of the whale in their 4th grade class, from inspiring 4th grade teacher, Miss Melody (Evelyn Giovine). When Miss Melody tells a colleague she may quit, seeing the whale as “a sign” of things going wrong—such as the 2016 election—Taylor feels an even greater urge to risk their credibility as a detective to get to the bottom of things.

The play, which invites audience participation in performing the catchy “whale in the Hudson” jingle with voice and hand-gesture, is at times whimsical, at times absurdist, and even a bit heartbreaking. It’s a potent mix of emotions for a younger audience who will no doubt enjoy watching a play in which kids are more important than adults. Directed by Maeli Goren, The Whale in the Hudson has the feel of an episode in the continuing adventures of Warren G. Smugeye (like Encyclopedia Brown) and, as with any detective yarn, there are odd clues—such as the mysterious use of the number 52—and a series of informants and obstacles. The plot tends to meander around, saving its best bit for last: Evelyn Giovine’s affecting turn as the voice of the whale (called “52”) matched with a truly amazing whale puppet devised by costume designer David Mitsch.

Part of the fun is how Taylor’s peers are depicted. Fellow 4th graders at first seem merely clueless—which makes them try the patience of the budding P.I. Then, in need of expertise, Taylor visits a school club of brainiacs (Maeve Brady, Rob Hayer, Ipsitaa Khullar), complete with thinking caps, who like to dicker about Hume and Kant while presuming themselves to be flawless intellectuals. Again, not much help with the case, despite an amusing sequence with a juggling robotic computer (Giovine). Another lead takes Taylor to the playground madcap known as Poppy Hobnobber (Khullar) who speaks with spellbinding clarity about nonsense the way so many characters do in Alice in Wonderland. And she—eventually—sends him off in search of the notebook of an older boy—a dreaded 8th grader!—adorned with a drawing of a whale and, yes, the number 52. That pursuit brings us to a team of jocks (Brady, Giovine, Hayer) with a penchant for ritual humiliation, and from that stressful encounter Taylor manages to salvage a friend, Douglas (Brady).

With songs accompanied by Bard McKnight Wilson, the playwright, on guitar, The Whale in the Hudson delights in the kinds of weird non-sequitur that kids—who all see themselves as misfits—glory in. In the end—which borrows from the fate of a whale trapped in a bay off Long Island that same year—the kids learn the limits of their ability, but they also learn the value of each other. As Taylor, Laurie Ortega-Murphy is perfect, having a hard-boiled boyishness and a mean way with a juice-box or a lollipop. Maeve Brady’s singing voice is a great asset, as is the inspired goofiness of Rob Hayer and Ipsitaa Khullar. And Evelyn Giovine shines as a beloved teacher and a beloved whale, as well as rather salacious cake frosting.

A whale of a good time, The Whale in the Hudson ends 2018 year with a charming tale of kids learning to connect in contemporary New York.

The Whale in the Hudson
By Brad McKnight Wilson
Directed by Maeli Goren

Co-Producers: Madeline Carey & Oakton Reynolds; Dramaturg: Sunny Jisun Kim; Scenic Designer: Jimmy Stubbs; Lighting Designer: Nicole Lang; Sound Designer: Megumi Katayama; Music Director: Liam Bellman-Sharpe; Costume/Puppet Designer: David Mitsch; Stage Manager: Olivia Plath; Technical Director: William Neuman; Community Connector: Madeline Charne; Accompanist: Brad McKnight Wilson

Cast: Maeve Brady, Evelyn Giovine, Rob Hayer, Ipsitaa Khullar, Laurie Ortega-Murphy

Yale Cabaret
December 6-8, 2018

The Cabaret is dark until the second weekend in January when it returns with School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play, by Jocelyn Bioh, proposed by Christopher Betts, a first-year director, about tensions in a posh school in Ghana around the school’s beauty pageant, January 10-12.