Masterful

Review of The Master and Margarita at Yale School of Drama Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita has to be one of the more mercurial plays I’ve ever seen. And why not? It’s really a novel—and a rather unique one at that—that was adapted for the stage by Edward Kemp. Directed by Sara Holdren, MFA candidate in Directing at YSD, the sprawling production at the Iseman Theater is amusing, sensual, metaphysical, magical, grotesque and beautiful—presenting us with a dark night of the soul in a writer’s life, a situation that involves Faustian parallels, including a bargain with the Devil, and becomes, in the hands of this visually stunning production, a meditation on the intersections of theater and reality.

A Soviet playwright known only as the Master (Ato Blankson-Wood) grapples with staging a work on the trial of Jesus—here called Yeshua (Chasten Harmon)—before Pilate (James Cusati-Moyer). He runs afoul of the Soviet authorities—it’s the era of Stalin—in the form of a smug committee-man named Berlioz (Aaron Bartz) and his lackey Ivan, a proletarian playwright (Christopher Geary), and faces the consequences of his metaphysical speculations. Meanwhile he has encountered a married femme fatale, Margarita (Ariana Venturi), who becomes his lover and muse and his advocate before the devil—who arrives disguised as a German magician called Woland (Aaron Luis Profumo) when he hears Margarita say she would give her soul to save the Master from being “vanished.”

The play’s present tense action occasionally includes the rehearsals of the play Pontius Pilate, but the scenes from the latter—even after the Master burns his manuscript—take on a life of their own, commenting on the action and intertwined with it. At times the Master becomes a double for Yeshua, with the obvious theme of persecution by the State uniting their ordeals. But Pilate also becomes a double for the Master as the Procurate’s efforts to master the situation and to understand the consequences of his acts—for history and for the ultimate meaning of existence—parallel the playwright’s struggles with his materials and with his time. To say nothing of struggling with love of his life and the forces of darkness. Blankson-Wood’s Master seems remarkably clear and self-contained in the midst of this play’s wildness.

As the forces of darkness, Woland and his retinue provide much of that spirit. If God is in the details, then we might say the devil is in the diversions. Everything that humans strive to control—whether it be the Master with his play or the authorities with all forms of interaction—the infernal troupe plays havoc with. As Woland, Profumo exudes “the man of wealth and taste” that Mick Jagger considers the Devil to be, and his chat on a park bench with Berlioz and Ivan is fraught with comic tension. Later, a series of pranks and tricks before a red curtain are played with the zest of a Faustian Walpurgisnacht. The supernatural extremes involve decapitations, an enormous cat called Behemoth (Zenzi Williams in a highly active performance) that terrorizes and pouts alternately, and a rakish chap Koroviev, played by Maura Hooper with perfected sangfroid. Azazello, the demon who attends Margarita, is played by Matt Raich as a sullen and sinister messenger, clad in black leather.

The wild card in all this, of course, is Woman. As the Master’s “Gretchen,” Margarita is no fallen woman sacrificed as in Goethe, but rather a fully cognizant catalyst. She takes “standing by her man” to the point of becoming a satanic consort. Venturi’s Margarita is adamant where the Master, nearly broken, would be swayed from his task. This is a tour de force performance by Venturi who displays the full range of Margarita’s investment in the Master, even to upbraid him late in the play. What’s more, Venturi acts in the nude whenever Margarita becomes “a witch” for the purpose of tempting the Master to the devil’s side, making “the flesh” a feature of this pageant in a very deliberate way. Margarita’s flight to Woland is breathtaking and then, in the company of his retinue, she presides over an eerie ball attended by the wonderfully costumed ghosts—think Day of the Dead—of major killers and evil-doers.

Eventually, the various levels of the play come to reside in the mind of poor Ivan who has been committed to an asylum after seeing Berlioz’s death at Behemoth’s paws, and who finally believes the play to have been hallucinations of which he has been cured. An element of autobiography presents itself as we may imagine Bulgakov both fantasizing an escape from Moscow, such as the Master and Margarita enjoy with the help of the devil, as well as the sad fate of a writer unable to claim his visions, like Ivan. And I haven’t even mentioned all the fun with telegraphs and trains and phones as Bulgakov explores the demonic aspects of technology.

This very ambitious production attempts to do justice to all the riches of this complex play, capturing its comic touches—such as theater-making with the foppish director Styopa (Cornelius Davidson) or Berlioz’s live head brought in on a platter—as well as the weighty emotions of Pilate’s struggle with his fate. As the almost-tragic hero of the Master’s play, Cusati-Moyer registers both Pilate’s hauteur and his helplessness. And as Ivan, Geary runs a gamut of manner, first as a comic treatment of the proponent of social realism who loses it completely when faced with the supernatural, then as a stand-in for the gospeller Matthew, the source of the Master’s play, and finally as the figure who stands for the writer, beset by the contrary demands of the spirit and the State, of the flesh and the fantastic.

The Master and Margarita displays the finesse of its large cast and perhaps even more so the technical talent brought to bear on this lively phantasmagoria: Fabian Fidel Aguilar’s splendid costumes, Andrew F. Griffin’s artful lighting, Sinan Zafar’s effective score and work in sound, the projections by Rasean Davonte Johnson that transform the backdrop into various illustrative settings—Yalta complete with flying geese, or glimpses of Objectivist art become illustrative—and Christopher Thompson’s scenic design creates distinct spaces with both vertical and horizontal interest—such as a rotating stage matched with a hanging hoop—while the use of various points of entrance and exit from above, the sides, and at the back, makes the space team with energy.

The best proof of the method in the madness of Holdren’s faithful adaptation of Bulgakov’s challenging text—kudos as well to dramaturg Helen C. Jaksch—is that the show runs for three hours plus without losing its audience or dragging out its business. While some segments might have been trimmed without loss of effect, the staging of the work’s entirety makes this Master and Margarita a showcase of invention and talent, as it takes great resources of both to pull this off this well.

In a word, amazing.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita Adapted by Edward Kemp Directed by Sara Holdren

Scenic Designer: Christopher Thompson; Costume Designer: Fabian Fidel Aguilar; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Composition and Sound Design: Sinan Zafar; Projection Designer: Rasean Davonte Johnson; Production Dramaturg: Helen C. Jaksch; Stage Manager: Emely Selina Zepeda

Cast: Aaron Bartz; Ato Blankson-Wood; James Cusati-Moyer; Cornelius Davidson; Christopher Geary; Chasten Harmon; Maura Hooper; Tiffany Mack; Aaron Luis Profumo; Matt Raich; Ariana Venturi; Zenzi Williams

Yale School of Drama Iseman Theater October 21-25, 2014

A Devilish Task

YSD First Thesis Show Opens . . . The first Yale School of Drama thesis show of 2014-15 goes up this week. Third-year director Sara Holdren presents Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a mercurial and elusive play, metaphysical, satirical, and challenging, involving the Devil’s visit to Moscow under Stalin, the travails of a writer—called simply “the Master”—under a police state, and his love affair with his muse, Margarita, as well as the Master’s ongoing concerns in attempting to stage, without censorship, his theatrical treatment of Yeshua before Pilate—for a society “officially” atheist.

While “common in Russia,” Holdren says, productions of the play—which was written as a novel by Bulgakov and subsequently adapted for stage—are not easy to come by in the U.S. In part, that has to do with the vexed history of the text itself: having begun the work in 1928, Bulgakov burned the first version in despair of its seeing the light of day, then painstakingly rewrote it beginning in 1931, finishing it, essentially, in 1936, though he was still working on it at his death in 1940. A censored version of the novel was published in 1966-67. A complete version appeared in 1973, and the most authoritative version not until 1989. Stage adaptations have been ongoing since 1971. The YSD production uses the adaptation by Edward Kemp, dating from 2004, for a theatrical festival in the UK.

Directing students in YSD propose two possible thesis shows, then one is selected by the committee. Holdren’s other proposal was a better-known Russian classic, Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Why Russians? I asked. After a second, Holdren gave a ready reply: “because of the combination of humor with the fearlessness of their emotional scale.” Holdren values the combined darkness and absurdist humor in their works, which she likened to Beckett. M&M, she points out, “isn’t afraid of unwieldy ideas and unabashed spectacle.” Bulgakov’s masterpiece references another masterpiece—and a very unwieldy “theatrical” work in itself—Goethe’s Faust, and Holdren found inspiration for her project in Goethe’s “Prologue” to his monumental story of a scholar’s pact with the devil for the sake of unfettered experience and knowledge. In the Prologue, a director, a playwright and a comedian (or actor) debate how best to stage such a work, with the director favoring spectacle, the playwright ideas, and the actor, as mediator, insisting on both. That, for Holdren, is what a production of M&M should strive for as well.

The show does involve spectacle: there is the devil and his uncanny retinue—including a giant, talking cat called Behemoth—as well as segments in an unworldly space, and segments set in the Jerusalem of the Master’s play, and segments occurring in the social and political reality of Bulgakov’s time. Holdren feels her production is blessed in its cast, and combines, in her crew and collaborators, “adventurous talents willing to go anywhere,” able to translate all these worlds, ingeniously present in Kemp’s adaptation, to the stage at the Iseman. Holdren says her collaborators are “all I could ask for” and allow her “to work the way I love to work.” I got a peek at the set—which includes a runway up into the stadium seating—and it involves a rotating “turntable” portion, a spiral staircase, and a very modernistic design—recalling the Russian art movement of the Twenties, Constructivism—that may well be the most striking set I’ve seen at the Iseman.

Holdren finds the themes of the play very relevant to our times, in which ideological differences and faith-based differences, as well as racial and historical divides, continue to bedevil mankind. Bulgakov wrote under fear, without the freedom to give his ideas fullest expression in public. His novel is a brave statement in favor of, in Holdren’s view, “compassion and forgiveness,” and of love, not only as the very real love story between the Master and Margarita (who trades her soul to Satan to save the Master’s life), but of “love as a world-saving force.” For Holdren, the play has a “sad happy ending,” and she admits “every time at the end I cry.” The tears, we might say, are not those of mourning or loss, but of commitment to the vision of human possibility, and to our chances for salvation. Like most great world-spanning works in the Western canon, Bulgakov’s play—along with Dante’s Commedia and Goethe’s Faust and Milton’s Paradise Lost—renders the human condition not as tragedy but as a spectacular comedy of ideas and of love.

The Master and Margarita By Mikhail Bulgakov Adapted by Edward Kemp Directed by Sara Holdren

Dramaturg: Helen C. Jaksch; Set Designer: Christopher Thompson; Costume Designer: Fabian Fidel Aguilar; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Projections Designer: Rasean Davonte Johnson; Sound Designer: Sinan Zafar

Yale School of Drama Iseman Theater October 21-25, 2014

Eggs and Bones

Two former Cab shows to be re-staged in New York this fall. Listen! That sound you hear is the long, withdrawing roar of the summer. And that means the fall theater season is about to begin. Shortly, I’ll be posting a preview of the first three shows of the upcoming Yale Cabaret season, along with other announcements of interest for local theater here in New Haven. But right now, a few words about two shows opening soon in New York.

Fans and supporters of both the Yale Cabaret and Summer Cabaret may be interested to know that two former artistic directors of the Summer Cabaret, Devin Brain (*10) and Dustin Wills (*14), have further developed two shows that began life in the term-time Cabaret—Bones in the Basket and The Fatal Eggs, respectively—and this fall they will both be staged on back-to-back weekends at the Araca Project in New York. The Araca Project is an initiative to foster entrepreneurs from Yale, Syrcause, University of Michigan, Northwestern University, and Florida State. Artists selected are enabled to produce their work in an Off-Broadway venue.

Both shows have online sites for fund-raising. The Fatal Eggs, which has support through a Princess Grace grant, recently met its goal, but there’s always room for more; Bones in the Basket has 3 days left to reach its goal and, last I looked, had just under 60% of goal pledged

About the shows:

Bones in the Basket Devin Brain was co-artistic director, with Chris Mirto, of the Cabaret in the 2009-10 season, which happened to be my first season of attendance at the Cab. And that means I missed the Cab production of Bones, though I did catch a workshop staging of it about a year ago in NY. Brain was also the artistic director of the Summer Cabaret in the 2011 season; titled The Yale Summer Shakespeare Festival, the program featured two Shakespeare plays and The Rose-Mark'd Queen, Brain’s own ambitious and entertaining condensation of four Shakespeare history plays into one gripping show. In addition to Bones, and working as assistant director on a version of the Tempest at La Mama, Brain has a production of Macbeth in the works that will go on tour—beginning at the Guthrie in Minneapolis—and return to NYC in the spring.

Drawn to works with, shall we say, darker-than-average themes, Brain has found in Bones a greatly simpatico project. The show originated when cast member Alexandra Henrikson (*11) brought around a book of folk tales translated from the Russian, stories she was raised with. As with Grimm “fairytales,” these folk tales—many of them animal fables as in Aesop—have elements of the bizarre, the magical, the eerie. But unlike the Grimm tales—particularly in what Brain calls their “cleaned-up versions” familiar from Disney films and the like—the tales in Russian were, Brain says, told in bars for drinks and to entertain the clientele. They were decidedly not conceived as bedtime stories for kiddies. And, in comparison to Aesop, the “morals”—if that’s what they are—of the stories accept a rather harsh universe in which, at best, cleverness is rewarded and stupidity punished. Brain and company found the stories “morbid and dark in a comic, laughing way.” They adapted a selection of the tales into a form well-suited to the experimental space of the Cabaret and produced one of “those shows”—the ones that its audience remembers and its cast hopes to have a chance to do again.

That chance has come—Brain thanks YSD Dean James Bundy for suggesting he apply to Araca—with more money than before, 3 1/2 weeks of rehearsal, and a 140-seat auditorium with proscenium stage. It will be “the fullest set” the company has worked with and, Brain says, the theater has a certain decrepitness that suits Bones’ destitute “on the run” troupe, cadging what they can from whatever audience they can find. A bit like off-off-off Broadway theater. Returning again to the troupe are YSD grads Danny Binstock (*11), Jillian Taylor (*11), Blake Segal (*11), Alex Henrikson (*11), and Stéphanie Hayes (*11)—who has been back to stages in CT twice since she graduated: February House at Long Wharf, and a play also inspired by Russian folktales, last seasons’ The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls at the Rep.

Since the iteration of Bones last year, a new tale has been added and the ending has changed yet again (none of the three versions has ended the same way). Another advantage this year over last year, besides locale and coffers, is the return of Michael McQuilken (*11) of Old Soundroom, as the onstage musician absent last time. He joins the cast of Ringmaster, two divas, and three “roadies” who, as a troupe fallen upon hard times, tell their tales as Russian expats representing, Brain says, “art in need, teaching lessons on loss and how to deal with it.”

It’s not about “happily ever after,” it’s about the unhappy here and now and how to cope. Rather than stories of triumph, Bones showcases stories that give lessons in the mentality needed to survive, stories that in certain circles—such as the Russia of their day—might be considered, Brain says, “treasonous or blasphemous.” With contemporary Russia wading through another dark era, Bones tells us something about the kind of wit and wisdom Slavic culture derives from our existential predicament where a certain general malevolence—in nature, in humanity—is assumed.

And yet the show is not a downer. It’s about the stories humanity tells itself to keep despair at bay.

For more info, tickets, donation: here.

Bones in the Basket October 8-12, 2014 American Theatre of Actors 314 W. 54th Street, New York, NY

***

The Fatal Eggs Mikhail Bulgakov wrote a short story called “The Fatal Eggs” (1925) in order to satirize the political institutions of his day—and the work, as most of what Bulgakov wrote did, immediately ran afoul of authorities in Stalinist Russia. With its attitude toward the people as preyed upon by their government and toward science as sinister—especially when co-opted by the State—“The Fatal Eggs” managed to be a sci-fi tale with bite.

Director Dustin Wills says Bulgakov is “my jam,” and has turned to the writer before when stalled with a project. The first time, he turned to Black Snow which he had first seen in a high school theater competition (Wills' project was The Crucible). The Bulgakov play, about the rigors of the author’s relations with Stalin—who liked some of his work and then kept the writer on a short leash, with little opportunity for publication or staging—lit Wills’ interest. When he needed something to propose for a term-time Cab show his second year at YSD, Wills turned to Bulgakov again, and this time enlisted dramaturg Ilya Khodosh to translate. Their script of The Fatal Eggs is an original dramatic version in English.

As a director, Wills seems to like nothing better than a challenge, and one of the key aspects of the Eggs production at the Cab was how to stage its sci-fi effects—such as a monstrous snake caused by scientific tampering—and how to pack the numerous settings and the dizzying number of characters into the Cab’s minimal space. They did it, after a fashion. But now Eggs, with 7 actors—most former YSD students such as Chris Bannow (*14, co-artistic director of the Summer Cab, with Wills, in 2013), Ceci Fernandez, Michelle McGregor, and Khodosh (all YSD class of 2014 and all in the original production), joined this time by Josiah Bania (*13), Mickey Theis (*14), and two grads of NYU’s Tisch School, Jeanna Phillips and Sathya Sridharan—enacting 56 roles, will get a much fuller staging in a more expansive space. The auditorium for the Araca Project gives Wills a chance to go further into the sometimes extreme effects he’s been noted for in his work at YSD—such as the very physical comedy of Mary Laws’ Blueberry Toast, the outrageous comedy of Kate Tarker’s Thunderbodies, and the ingenious “improv” staging of his dark and endearing thesis show of Peter Pan. This time around, the space should help the narrative of Eggs so that it will be easier to keep the story straight through a use of more distinct settings, with inventive staging by the same creative team Wills worked with the first time around.

As the website describes it, The Fatal Eggs “skewers political incompetence and corruption, misguided faith in technology, a gullible and complacent populace, and a fear-mongering media.” In Bulgakov’s Russia, such skewering meant he would always be a kind of loose cannon whose work would not be staged; in today’s U.S., the play’s targets may seem at times broadly vaudevillian, but bringing together a popular genre like sci-fi with misgivings about the state of our world and of our future is by no means uncommon. Indeed, Bulgakov took his inspiration from H.G. Wells’ Food of the Gods, with its giant chickens and humans, and The War of the Worlds’ manner of disposing of a sci-fi threat. In Bulgakov’s hands, these incidents fuel doubts about the wisdom of “experimenting” with humanity—experiments which may include radical political solutions.

For more info, tickets, donation: here

The Fatal Eggs October 2-5, 2014 American Theatre of Actors 314 W 54th St, New York, NY

For those who have appreciated the student work of these directors, actors, and teams, this is a rare opportunity to see Cab shows expanded and developed further for an audience of New York theater folk and fans, and friends. And the shows complement each other well, though very different in tone: Two darkly comic tales with the macabre trappings of popular genres—the one of sci-fi, the other of folk tales. Both deriving their sense of the human comedy from acerbic Russian sources. Both featuring, in cast and crew, recent graduates of the Yale School of Drama program and directed, respectively, by two former artistic directors responsible for two very successful Summer Cabaret seasons, the one in 2010 and the other in 2013. Two weekends in October, when the thrill of fall should be in the air with the tang of dying leaves. Bones, eggs, so white, and so easily broken.

Get your tickets now!

EGGED ON

The Yale Cabaret’s adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Fatal Eggs definitely has its moments, and most of them are in the first half of the show.  There’s energy and amusement aplenty in the early going, as we follow the tale of Prof. Vladimir Ipatevich Persikov’s surprising discovery of what will soon be touted as a “ray of life.”  As a means of accelerating embryo development that might just be the thing to speed up growth in chicken eggs after a strange outbreak kills off all the People’s Republic’s poultry, the ray is requisitioned by the State. Unfortunately the eggs ultimately treated with the method are not chicken eggs but eggs generally used for experimental purposes—ostrich, crocodile, snake—and thus Russia is soon over-run by Creatures Of Unusual Size.  Persikov, who doesn’t read papers, gets denounced by the press, and the next thing you know the mobs of Moscow are out to get him. Chris Bannow plays Persikov with the earnest goofiness of a Jerry Lewis-esque “Wacky Professor” and is one of the strengths of the production, which is at its best when it’s at its wackiest.  Other comic contributions come from support by Mamoudou Athie, great at funny voices, and Ceci Fernandez as a brazenly unlettered reporter straight out of vaudeville, with the plaid suit to prove it.  Indeed, what makes the early going so much fun is the fast-paced slapstick of it all—including fun with a spinning door and a dim-witted assistant (Dan O’Brien)—and voices and mannerisms that have radio-skit clarity (I kept being reminded of the radio-drama take-offs by recording comedy troupe The Firesign Theater).  Director Dustin Wills keeps it bouncing and the wheelable stage props help to keep things moving.  The Narrator (Ilya Khodosh) adds something of a radio announcer’s amused detachment, and we seem launched toward a laughable version of ‘20s Sci-Fi that Orson Welles and his Mercury Players might appreciate.

And though there are some diversions in the later stages—such as two trembling babushkas dreading the outcome of the chicken outbreak, and a monstrously surly chicken on a leash, to say nothing of a Flying Snake Puppet of Death (Dustin Wills, puppets)—the play, adapted by Khodosh and Wills from Bulgakov’s short story, hits a dead patch when the frenetic stagework pauses to let the plot catch up.  The talky parts—as when Athie, on behalf of the People’s Republic, commandeers the Ray, or when Pyotr Stepanovich Ivanov (Sophie von Haselberg) and Persikov babble bio-jargon at each other—seem to long for interruption, and the figures of fun (O’Brien, Fernandez, Michelle McGregor—with one helluva wail) eventually seem to have already done their best bits.

The Scenic Design (Kate Noll) is quite a spectacle—particularly effective are the backdrops of Russia, complete with suspended sickle moon—and the staging area is surrounded by fascinating clutter.  Solomon Weisbard cooks up some interesting projections—combining your basic Petrie dish swarm with Eisensteinian montage; Meredith Reis’ lighting makes ingenious use of onstage lamps and unobtrusive spots to focus attention where required—and the flashlights from the outdoors mob are a nice touch.  Costumes, by Nikki Delhomme, provide lots of visual interest and complement the comic turns—as in the combined voice and costume of Athie’s Fat man, and in the reporter’s aforementioned duds.

All combined it’s a fun evening that, for me, felt like the Cab doing the kind of thing it does best: sending-up familiar forms of theatricality while contributing its own bits of inspired irreverence. We should be happy to egg them on.

Two more shows: Saturday, 9/22, at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.

The Fatal Eggs by Mikhail Bulgakov Adapted by Dustin Wills and Ilya Khodosh Directed by Dustin Wills

September 20-22

The Yale Cabaret 45th Anniversary Season 217 Park Street 203.432.1566