Unhappy Hedda

The third Yale School of Drama thesis show opens tonight, directed by Katherine McGerr. Hedda Gabler, by Henrik Ibsen, is a masterpiece, a character study that is one of theater’s most fascinating roles. As the playbill by the show’s dramaturg, Jennifer Schmidt, suggests, the play, unlike some of Ibsen’s other famous plays, does not take aim at social problems so as to give meaning to the play’s action. In Hedda Gabler, the problem lies with Hedda herself; her manipulation of others and her ultimate fate would seem to set a moral, though audiences are left to determine what that might be. Is she tragic or does she get what she deserves, is she mean-spirited or high-spirited, is she idealistic or nihilistic?

For McGerr, Hedda Gabler is a play that is meant to shock its audience. “There’s nothing old about it, the play is alive today,” McGerr says, and hopes the audience will be “shocked, but understand it and be shocked by what it means.” One question the production faced was how to remove the play from its period setting—the 1890s—without “updating it” to the present. The show’s striking design (Adrian Martinez Frausto), with the audience literally looking through the glass walls of the home of Jørgen and Hedda Tesman, is somewhat modernist, without being of a definite era. Costumes (Soule Golden) as well are modern, with some of the elegance of art deco, while furnishings show a mixture of modern shapes together with the older mode of life that the Tesmans are trying to move up from. The house is one of the finest in the neighborhood and is the place where Jørgen (Daniel Reece) expects to begin his career as a professor with a young wife and possibly a family—particularly if his doting Aunt Julia (Elia Monte-Brown) has her way.

McGerr says that, in working with her cast, the question they have been asking is “who is [Hedda]?” They see both her cruelty and her frailty. McGerr thinks of her heroine as “ahead of her time and smarter than the others around her, but also frustrated.” It’s that frustration that fuels many of her actions, we might say, and Hedda’s complexity has always fascinated audiences. What interests McGerr and her company is the very question of what draws others to Hedda, what makes them love and trust her. We—the audience—might understand the attraction if we admit we love her too. Much may rely upon whether or not we identify with her.

As Hedda, Ashton Heyl is lively and accommodating, with finely chiseled features and blonde hair bound tightly to her head. Her costumes accentuate the graceful lines of her figure and she indeed looks very much the prize catch of the area that Tesman—and others—take her for. “Others” include Commissioner Brack (Mitchell Winter), a close friend of the Tesmans—Jørgen is literally in his debt—who wants to get closer. The sparring flirtation between Brack and Hedda is one of the show’s strengths, allowing us to see how Hedda handles herself when confronted with another’s machinations. Both seem wary of each other’s strengths while looking for an opening that will be useful. Winter’s Brack seems to be a man forever testing the water, just waiting til it gets comfy.

Reece’s Tesman is so absorbed in his hopes for his career and his elation at winning Hedda, he’s unaware of Brack’s overtures to Hedda, and rather welcomes his friend’s attentions to his wife. Tesman is the comic figure in the cast, to a large extent, and perhaps some of our sympathy for Hedda may come from our growing sense of the obtuseness of the man she married. Even so, Reece’s Tesman is likeable and aims to please. We might expect Hedda to wrap him around her finger, but not so. We’re looking at a domestic unit where the man—especially with the moral and even the financial support of his aunt—sets the tone and Hedda is expected to content herself in the home he has gone into considerable debt to buy for her.

The more dire threat to that contentment, for Tesman, is the sudden reappearance in town of the brilliant but dissolute scholar Eilert Lövborg (Mamoudou Athie). Suddenly Tesman again faces professional competition and, what’s more, we learn that Lövborg had some scenes with Hedda when she was single and living with her father. There’s a back-story there and Lövborg’s recent “reclamation” by the sweetly supportive Thea Elvsted (Tiffany Mack), an earlier flame of Tesman’s, sets up a possible game of mixed couples to offset Brack’s desired threesome. Ibsen was nothing if not canny about the possibilities of romantic affairs in small towns—your basic soap opera learned well from his tendency to hint at desires below the surface that may flare into reality at any moment. The cast is rounded out by Ariana Venturi as long-suffering servant Berte—suffering not only because she’s the only servant the Tesmans can afford, but because her long ears pick up some of the dirt on her mistress. This minor role is amplified a bit to give hints of the kind of “upstairs/downstairs” view in which a servant stands in as witness.

As Lövborg, Athie gives us a vivid sense of instability, but also of the kind of passion that threatens at any moment to overrun the pacing of Hedda’s cat-and-mouse game. Athie’s loose cannon in the midst of a world of bland formalities adds an odd force to the play that other characters seem unable to cope with. As Thea, Mack is lovely and very sensible, perhaps too sympathetic. Hedda’s maliciousness toward her can seem motiveless if we like Thea too much.

Hedda, we see, toys with the possibility of romance but doesn’t truly desire it, so that much of her motivation comes from her attitude toward Thea, who, unhappily married in a manner worse than Hedda, has been Lövborg’s salvation, as well as placing her chaste romantic hopes in him. Backing the now ascendant Lövborg, Thea may actually “win,” you see . . . .

Plot-wise, the over-riding interest is in who will get the upper-hand on whom, and with what consequence. Props—such as Hedda’s old piano, her father’s pistols, Lövborg’s new book and, even more, his brilliant unpublished manuscript, dictated to Thea, written with her in weeks of comradely intimacy—serve well as tangible reference points in a world where dialogue can be a duel, a seduction, and almost always the imposition of one will upon another. Paul Walsh’s translation, in shedding some of the Old World gentility, seems at times to lose some of the finer nuances of motivation as well.

Ibsen was a great playwright. Hedda Gabler is one of his greatest plays. McGerr and company have created a deliciously dark modern comedy in which Heyl’s Hedda—steely, desperate, winning, manipulative, and fine—pits her wits against obtuseness. To what end?

Hedda Gabler By Henrik Ibsen, translated by Paul Walsh Directed by Katherine McGerr

Scenic Designer: Adrian Martinez Frausto; Costume Designer: Soule Golden; Lighting Designer: Caitlin Smith Rapoport; Composer and Sound Designer: Steven Brush; Production Dramaturg: Jennifer Schmidt; Stage Manager: Shannon L. Gaughf

Yale School of Drama University Theater February 1-7, 2014

The Elephant in the Room

The final show in the Yale Summer Cabaret’s “Summer of Giants” combines two plays by contemporary British playwright Caryl Churchill—Heart’s Desire and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You—into an evening of theater that ends the eleven-week season not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a feisty kick-in-the-pants. Churchill, as evidenced by these two plays at least, is that rarest of creatures, an absurd satirist—or is that a satirical absurdist? Heart’s Desire tends more toward the absurd while not completely satirizing the affections of the sitcom lives on view; Drunk Enough tends more toward satire of the make-you-bleed variety, poking sore spots and squeezing out pus with a caustic twinkle in the eye. And don’t forget that both these plays are, at bottom, love stories. As directed by Dustin Wills—who recently received a Princess Grace Award for his final year of study next year—these plays confront the audience with highly theatrical experiences that reflect in significant ways upon the quality of modern life. Churchill leaves naturalism behind in favor of stylized and mannered presentations, commenting not only on the resources of comic theater but on the kinds of empathy we naturally bring to the theater-going experience.

Heart’s Desire takes us into the heart of a family gathered in a sentimental-looking sitting room—very middle-class Brit—where Brian (Chris Bannow), the father, Alice (Ceci Fernandez), the mother, and Maisie (Michelle McGregor), the aunt, are awaiting the return of twenty-five-year-old Susy (Celeste Arias) from Australia. The “backstory” seems to be that Susy’s return marks the end of her first significant departure from the family nest, and so there are feelings of anticipation and apprehension attendant upon her arrival. If this were a play from the “kitchen-sink” era of Brit drama, we’d have lots of honest emotion about how this couple is coping with the recognition that their little girl is grown and all they have now is their marriage, in whatever tattered form it now exists. That play—the naturalistic side of Heart's Desire—is all about the tedium of waiting and the minor revelations that occur when people look forward too much, depending on others to both share a feeling while masking it, swallowing up the momentous in the everyday.

But Churchill isn’t that kind of playwright, so, while she nimbly gives us enough to sink our teeth into, so to speak, she also keeps pulling the carpet out from under this little domestic drama through a variety of skillful, and manic, techniques: carefully manipulated repetitions that underline the tenuous tightrope we walk in our “scripted” dealings with others; fast-forwards that cast life as memory even while its happening; visual non sequiturs that wrench us from the norm with farce, fantasy, horror—as for instance when masked figures enact a quick and darkly comic home invasion, or when a pantomime ostrich suddenly shows up for no apparent reason; and subplots and alternate “takes” that let us glimpse roads not taken and possible spin-offs, as when the family begins to muse about forensics and a body found in the garden, or when the son, Lewis (Mamoudou Athie), bursts in as a punk prole one moment, or a fidgety nerd the next, or a drunken lout (all ostensibly the same character).

Through it all, the main trio hit the same marks again and again, following the same script until it veers off-course, then resets. Sometimes we’re back to the moment before Brian’s entrance, sometimes we’re back to when he begins to get edgy (“you’ve spoilt it!”), sometimes we’re back to when he finally calls his wife “a nasty woman” right before the bell rings to announce their darling’s arrival. In each repetition something new is revealed if only the odd hopscotch logic by which we navigate through what we say and what we feel, and what we acknowledge from others.

As Brian, Chris Bannow is marvelous. I won’t soon forget the manic glee of his speech about letting his mouth gobble up his entire body, bit by bit. It’s either an instance of complete insanity or a deliberate “comic turn” on Brian’s part, and there’s no way to say for certain. Likewise, Michelle McGregor’s Maisie can, one moment, dither on about the attractions of the platypus like someone a bit “dotty,” and at another deliver an affecting rumination on the emotional perils of departure and seeing people off. While, as Alice, Ceci Fernandez maintains that infernal “brightness” so familiar from almost any role Emma Thompson has assayed (“be nice to her, that’s all!”), giving us a tour de force turn as a kind of emotional wind-up toy—now caustic, now gleeful, now imploring, now detached. In a summer of great ensemble work, the paces Wills puts his three main actors through here hits a high point.

The support is also fun—Athie’s comic intrusions and a brief scene with Prema Cruz as a special friend who suddenly shows up in Susy’s stead extend the situation into other possibilities—but in the end every extraneous element only more relentlessly concentrates our attention on the “no exit” space of this couple picking at each other’s scabs. Tensions are brought to high relief by the return of the absent one whose absence makes her more present than ever, and whose imminent presence heightens how abject this home is without her.

Consider Kate Noll’s set in its vivid use of middling detail. Quite marvelous. Now stay through intermission to see it transformed into a seedy lavatory, complete with urinals, graffiti, and a coffee maker. Both sets are wonderfully realized, with Drunk Enough creating a space entirely determined by Wills and his technicians as Churchill gives no guidance about where the play should be set nor how played. Once you realize that, you can only be rather awed by the pas de deux of seduction, sexual interaction, hurt feelings, lovers’ tiffs, and boastful braggadocio that takes place between Sam (Ato Blankson-Wood), “a country,” and Guy (Mitchell Winter), “a man.”

About that “a country”: Sam and Guy speak almost entirely in the terms of U.S. acts of aggression and/or geopolitical dominance. It’s an ideological courtship, we could say, with Sam setting the terms by which Guy must show his love. This includes simulated fellatio, simulated anal sex, and shooting up heroin and snorting coke and, while we might expect Sam to be “the top,” Wills makes Sam play the rather demanding “bottom.” In other words, the sexual politics of this staging rub against—in provocative ways—its geopolitics. The script is almost a history lesson of U.S. foreign policy, but always delivered as half-formed and half-finished statements between two lovers trying to stay on the same page.

Blankson-Wood is suitably mercurial as Sam, at times domineering, at times sneering, at times yielding, at times truly hurt—as in the aftermath of the dreaded phrase “the Towers!” As Guy, Winter has the difficult task of remaining reactive (which isn't the same as reactionary), pulled this way and that by his importunate lover’s demands (for world dominance with good PR). Later in the play Guy starts to question Sam, hitting “below the belt” with questions about environmental effects and a wasteful lifestyle that receive petulant replies that amount to “anyone would do the same thing who could” and, perhaps, a rift not so easy to overcome. Could it be the end of the American century?

The Yale Summer Cabaret has lived up to its ambition this year, giving us two great classics—Tartuffe and Miss Julie—in lively and, in the latter especially, memorable productions, as well as two lesser-known plays by masters—Lorca and Williams respectively—that, while not great plays, were given treatments by the cast, directors and tech that were truly inspired, ending with two challenging plays that confirm the unique strength of small-scale, intimate theater and adventurous choices.

Heart’s Desire and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You By Caryl Churchill Directed by Dustin Wills

Stage Manager: Geoff Boronda; Scenic Designer: Kate Noll; Costume Designer: Seth Bodie; Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason; Sound Designer: Rob Chikar; Projection Designer: James Lanius; Puppet Designer: Dustin Wills; Production Manager/Technical Director: James Lanius; Assistant Technical Director: Joey Moro

Photographs by Christopher Ash, courtesy of Yale Summer Cabaret

Yale Summer Cabaret August 8-August 18, 2013

Odd Couple

Tennessee Williams’ In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel is not one of his better-known plays and it’s easy to guess why. The situation of its leads—he’s an artist of the American Neo-Expressionist variety, she’s a rapacious female of the liberated sex object variety, and they’re abroad in Tokyo in the Sixties, at a hotel where the only other in situ character is a Japanese barman rather nonplussed at their erratic ways—is a bit too specialized perhaps. We know Williams can write good female characters, and Miriam is no exception; it’s a plum role and one would expect top actresses to want to give it a try. The problem is the character of Mark who is having a nervous breakdown and creative difficulties. The imperfections of the male lead, one assumes, is what has kept the play from getting much revival. The production directed by Chris Bannow at the Yale Summer Cabaret, then, is to be applauded for giving it a shot and for succeeding so well. Watching the play, there’s no reason to suspect we’re experiencing a “problem play” and that’s in part because the approach here is to accept the play’s oddities, neither turning them into camp nor trying to smooth them over with earnest naturalism. We have to allow for Miriam’s soliloquies, spoken into a spotlight; we have to accept the staccato deliveries of unfinished lines, the many times a statement is stopped and redirected in mid-flight. One suspects that those who panned the play couldn’t distinguish dialogue where characters cut each other off and leave their thoughts hanging from dialogue where actors flub their lines and forget how a speech ends. It’s risky to be so erratic in speech, but Bannow’s cast manages, for the most part, to make the lurches in communication part of the communication.

The effect of the whole is greatly served by the set (Seth Bodie, Scenic Design)—it exudes the cool rigor of a Japanese restaurant, with plenty of neon and colorful liquor bottles that avoid the seediness Williams often reeks of. With the impeccable barman (Mitchell Winter) in place and the Formica tables all gracefully decorated with a single flower in a thin columnar vase, the bar is more formal than inviting. It’s the kind of place that should help one keep the demons at bay. And that’s why—we imagine—Miriam is hanging out there.

But, as she quickly makes us aware, Miriam is the kind of woman who sees no point to a man unless he wants her. So, her task is to use her wiles to convince the barman he should be interested. The fact that he isn’t, and is even comically put out by her overtures—some simply coy and flirtatious, some outright indecent—is the business that occupies the opening segment, with Winter providing spirited support as the kind of non-character (he never drops his “I’m just a barman” demeanor) so essential to the scene. This part of the play establishes Miriam, in Celeste Arias’s very capable hands, as an entertaining character with full emphasis on the latter term. Miriam is a “character,” a life of the party type only too happy to praise her own vitality and her tendency to “manipulate” male genitals in her free time. In her lime green dress with straight lines out of Mary Quant, her hair and false eyelashes à la Twiggy, Miriam is a creature of the late Sixties that all concerned—Williams, Bannow, Arias, and Kate Noll’s moddish costumes—get exactly right. The voice, the cigarette, the body language bespeak an “It Girl” still looking for “it.”

The play’s problems start when Mark enters the picture, flaunting his paint-daubed suit and so clearly not the kind of man we’d expect Miriam to be mixed up with. An eventual stab at back-story lets us know that she was aroused by his timidity and seduced him. And her utter disparagement of his current work seems to stand upon the fact that he used to be something. In other words, the man she’s with is not the man she married and we meet Miriam around the time that she’s decided to escape one way or another—either by means of a little poison pellet she carries around in a snuffbox or by means of having Mark shipped—sedated on a stretcher—back to the States, leaving her free to pursue that world of hotels and room service she’s been longing for.

All well and good, but what’s the deal with Mark anyway? As played by Mickey Theis, the artist still seems to have plenty of vitality even though he’s a shaking mess unable to walk very far on his own who needs his wife to—literally—pour drinks down his throat. And, while it may seem a bit monomaniacal, a claim to have just “invented color” is not unusual as the kind of hyperbole artists use about their vision—and it’s a cue for this production to achieve some wonderful effects with lights (Oliver Wason) and color, as when Mark bangs a gong and shifts the color scheme dramatically at the end of Act I. (Kudos as well to the interesting shifts in soundscape via James Lanius.  The production values of this show are superb.)

Mark’s a shambles yes, but his dealer—the dapper, gay, and somewhat Southern Leonard who arrives thanks to a summons from Miriam—seems to think Mark’s ravings are par for the course. One suspects that Williams wants Leonard to be a sympathetic character, a man who sees worth where Miriam sees only ravaged delusions, but the production here seems not to back that up. As Leonard, Mamoudou Athie is affected in a way that puts us on our guard. He seems to have no real warmth or regard for the realities Miriam is living with. He finally steps out of his coolness, but only to upbraid Miriam with an anecdote from his childhood that Athie makes both terse and affecting.

So, Mark. I keep returning to my sense that Williams didn’t really know how to write this character. Given the playwright’s penchant for macho brutes—Stanley Kowalski—and dissolute athletes—Brick—we might think that a macho and dissolute Abstract Expressionist—à la Jackson Pollock—shouldn’t be a stretch, and yet…. It’s hard to say what Mark is on about—when he starts raving about needing a long white beard and a step-ladder so as to equal the Michelangelo of the Sistine Chapel, to recreate the creation of the Creation, we know we’re supposed to see the torment of someone trying to be a grand “Creator,” but one can’t help wishing that Williams made Mark one of those sloppy drunks who likes talking about when he was a boy. Something anecdotal would help sell this guy. Theis does his best with the grand ravings, at one point on top of a table, and there’s some well-choreographed wrestling between Mark and Miriam that lets us see what it’s all come to.

In the end Mark as artist figure seems a bit mismatched. Who works in hotel rooms? Writers, not painters. And why Tokyo? We might assume Miriam speaks for her author when she touts the discovery that, to her liking, Japanese men have not much hair on their bodies, so that slumming in Japan might just be one of the things one does as the Sixties come to an end, far from home and lost in translation.

I really wanted Miriam to have her way—ditch the stiff and get on with the grand tour. The end, in which a refusal to mourn morphs into a stripping away of falsity, makes for a borderline mad scene that feels true enough, and lets Arias pull out the stops, but, because her Miriam looks so good, we have to work to imagine her as pathetic as Williams wants her to be. Yes, as she says, at some point she’ll look in the mirror and know it’s all over for her, but “ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends—”

In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel By Tennessee Williams Directed by Chris Bannow

Stage Manager: Rob Chikar; Scenic Designer: Seth Bodie; Costume Designer: Kate Noll; Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason; Sound Designer: James Lanius; Production Manager/Technical Director: James Lanius; Assistant Technical Director: Joey Moro

Photographs by Christopher Ash, courtesy of Yale Summer Cabaret

Yale Summer Cabaret July 25-August 3, 2013

Mistress and Man

August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, the second offering of the Yale Summer Cabaret’s “Summer of Giants,” finds the Cab even more surprisingly naturalistic than in their production of Tartuffe. Kate Noll’s set is a wonder. If you’ve been to the Cab more than once, you know that the space tends to rely on a lot of make-believe in turning the basement space into anything approaching a “real place.” Not so here: the kitchen where all the action happens has the kind of “below stairs” look we’ve all gotten to know from Downton Abbey or (for elders) Masterpiece Theater. And why not? Miss Julie is a masterpiece by a master. Strindberg doesn’t pull any punches and he knows exactly what he’s doing every step of the way. What we might find mystifying, not living in a rigid, class-bound society where a lady dancing with a lackey at a Midsummer’s Festival can cause tongues to wag, his text spells out for us. We get, right off, that Julie (Ceci Fernandez) is young and contemptuous of social niceties. She might even believe in sexual democracy, which is to say that if a guy is good-looking and can dance, does it matter that he’s her father’s bootblack? Well, no, we say, being so egalitarian ourselves and all. Yeah, right, we say, realistic about such things, even in 21st century America.

And that is very much Strindberg’s point. Doesn’t matter when and where you live, hypocrisy is pretty much the stitching in the social fabric. We all pay lip service to ideals we’ll never live by and, when others live by them, we get profoundly uneasy. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”? If even some members of our Supreme Court can’t get with that, than how so the landed gents of 19th century Sweden? Julie is stirring things up—just to stir them up, we might say—and, as the adage says, “play with fire, get burned.”

What she stirs, among other things, is a cauldron of sexual feelings, above-his-station longings, and even tender memories of her childhood in the breast of Jean (Mitchell Winter), a house servant.

And as another adage says “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” Is there really fire between Julie and Jean? That’s where directing and acting choices matter, to let us know whether or not we should believe these two, after coupling, are meant to be a couple. At times they do make sounds that suggest they might actually believe in each other, but…

As director Chris Bannow presents it, our Julie (Ceci Fernandez) is the type who can cry on cue, but also the type who can be genuinely shocked, and even hurt. By giving us a somewhat tender and even desperate Julie, Bannow and company tip the sympathy toward her, even if there is a certain “serves her right” view available, not least because she seduces Jean away beneath the dozing nose of his girl of his own class, Kristin, the cook (Celeste Arias).

The possible ethical and social dimension between the women, we might say—today—is where Strindberg slips a little, and that would be true if the two women were anything like “equals.” But when Julie nearly invites Kristin to run away with her and Jean, it’s not exactly a ménage à trois she has in mind (though such was not unheard of among the free-love types of Strindberg’s day, and he lets us hang fire a bit as to how “scandalous” this modern woman is willing to be). Rather, Julie sees, it seems, a life of togetherness as Mistress, Man, and Menial. The idea even makes her giggle.

Fernandez is a mercurial actress and so she has the requisite skills to render a Julie who, if not a mess of contradictions, is at least charmed by her own headstrongness while also abashed by it, and excited by Jean’s boldness while contemptuous of everything about him that makes him less than her social equal. She fans the fire if only to see how close her fingers can get before they’re burnt.

Much falls upon Mitchell Winter as Jean. He has to be believable as the kind of man a lady-in-making might go slumming for, and he has to have qualities that make us want him to be a class hero. All that comes through wonderfully well, thanks to Winter’s ability to convey Jean’s high opinion of himself. His charm is a weapon, though, and we do well not to forget that he—like any man—might be playing with a woman for kicks or even out of a grudge against the powers that be. Winter never comes across as truly malevolent, but he does convincingly seethe and grovel when he has to confront how unequal he is to the heroism expected of him.

And that’s what makes Miss Julie a more twisting tale of the battle of the sexes than found in an older contemporary like, say, Ibsen. The ending shows a terrible restitution of the powers that be, with Kristin prating about the Lord’s forgiveness and Jean acting the lackey because the lord (of the manor) has returned. That leaves Julie to end it all like any melodramatic “ruined woman” or—and that’s the note this production seemed to strike—to walk out “a better where to find.” Is Julie—to use comparison to Ibsen—a Nora or a Hedda? I’ve always thought the latter, but Bannow’s production—and Fernandez’s show of soul—makes me plump for the former.

In any case, this Miss Julie is riveting from start to finish, and its trio of actors fine at the turns on a dime of Strindberg’s script (even Arias’ Kristin has to get from clueless surprise to righteous superiority pretty quickly). It’s the kind of play where it matters not only what is said, but how it’s said, so…pay attention.

Miss Julie By August Strindberg Directed by Chris Bannow Translated by Kenneth McLeish

Stage Manager: Rob Chikar; Scenic Designer: Kate Noll; Costume Designer: Seth Bodie; Lighting Designer: Solomon Weisbard; Sound Designer: Jacob Riley; Production Manager/Technical Director: James Lanius; Assistant Technical Director: Joey Moro

June 20-29, 2013

The Yale Summer Cabaret 217 Park Street, New Haven

Fun with a Fraud

Molière’s Tartuffe, the first play offered in the Yale Summer Cabaret’s Summer of Giants, is the very definition of a rollicking comedy. Molière is the kind of playwright who keeps the action and every character clearly defined without pandering—producing plays that are the basis for almost any kind of farce that came along after his heyday in the late 1600s. The dialogue is in rhymed couplets—in Richard Wilbur’s deft translation—and that keeps the talk bouncing, and adds charm and wit in spades.

As directed by Dustin Wills, the play is a steady stream of comic moments, a sort of “choose your own” of favorite bits. For some, it may be Prema Cruz’s opening dressing-down of the entire household due to their lack of respect for Tartuffe, a fraudulent holy man who has won her allegiance; or it may be Chris Bannow as deluded and domineering Orgon, hiding under a table to overhear the woo pitched at his wife Elmire (Michelle McGregor) by the hypocritical horndog Tartuffe (Mamoudou Athie)—McGregor’s darting, silent-screen-actress eyes as she listens was a high point for me.

For others it will be the droll spat between the lovers earnest Valere (Mitchell Winter) and winsome Mariane (Celeste Arias) after Valere climbs none-too-adroitly through her window to confront her—their scene together is a great instance of the sport Molière likes to have with lovers.

For others, it may be Ashton Heyl as the ever-attendant ladies’ maid Dorine, offering moral support and cutting remarks—and even a deafening vacuum-cleaner to drown out Orgon’s demands that his daughter marry the insufferable Tartuffe; or may be Ato Blankson-Wood as Damis, son of Orgon and Elmire, who hides in a piano at one point and elsewhere doesn’t brandish a blade so much as try to boat it; or perhaps Mickey Theis as Cleante, Elmire’s brother, he of the widened waist coat, a penchant for preachy apothegms, and an addiction to vanilla wafers.

Then there’s the title character: as Tartuffe, Athie is at times a deadpan foil, at others—when his doting host’s back is turned—a churlish manipulator choking on his dastardly desires. The company is rounded out by Ceci Fernandez in several small roles, most notably the be-wigged fop who provides a hilariously inspired deus ex machina moment in praise of the ever-vigilant prince.

The physical comedy is broad and the characterizations broader, but it’s not just in fun. If you think the theme of how fools can be made the dupes of pious frauds who say one thing and do another ever goes out of currency, think again.

Regulars to the Yale Cabaret space are in for a surprise: the Cab’s usually amorphous configuration of tables and playing-space has been redesigned as a deep stage with wings, while the seating includes, in addition to the familiar high and low tables, a riser of seats in the back and a row of “splash seats” on each side of the action. It’s a fitting set-up for a season of “giant” authors, giving plenty of theatrical space for each show. For Tartuffe, Kate Noll’s scenic design has raided the set of the Rep’s Marie Antoinette among others to give us some of the trappings of the era, filled out with backdrops of faces lifted from engravings of the time; Seth Bodie’s colorful costumes play with period stylings while also flaunting modern touches.

Thoroughly entertaining and engagingly delivered, Tartuffe is a big production that kicks-off the summer season with panache and verve. The show closes June 15th.

Yale Summer Cabaret Molière’s Tartuffe Translated by Richard Wilbur Directed by Dustin Wills

Stage Manager: Geoff Boronda; Scenic Designer: Kate Noll; Costume Designer: Seth Bodie; Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason; Composer: Bob Greenfield; Sound Designer: Steve Brush; Production Manager/Technical Director: James Lanius

Yale Summer Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven, CT

Whose Face Is It, Anyway?

Marius von Mayenburg’s The Ugly One, directed by Cole Lewis, at Yale Cabaret is an absurdist parable, satiric about the cult of beauty that, in one way or another, has always plagued the human species.  Maybe “plagued” isn’t the word; maybe it’s more like “nagged.”  The play, I suppose, wants us to ask ourselves how big a part appearance plays in our estimations of ourselves and others.  Is identity only skin deep?  And how deep is that question?

The best thing here is the cast who are game for the alterations in character they must enact.  Everyone gets two roles except for Mitchell Winter as the main character, Lette, who transforms from an appallingly  ugly inventor of a necessary little gadget to the flawlessly attractive spokesperson for the company that makes the gadget.  We also meet his wife Fanny (Michelle McGregor), who dutifully managed to overlook her husband’s unsightliness; McGregor also plays an aging (though surgically enhanced) groupie who lusts, with avid Germanic creepiness, for Lette post-surgery.  Then there’s Dan O’Brien as Karlmann, initially a better-looking assistant at the company who gets passed-over once Lette looks good; O’Brien is also the creepy German woman’s even creepier son, who also has desires for Lette, and for his mom, and, potentially, just about anyone.  Jabari Brisport rounds out the cast as Scheffler, the unflappable, moisturzing boss at the company and the rather campy surgeon who undertakes the momentous task of altering Lette’s features.  The operation is such a success that the good doctor undertakes the manufacture of the same face for dozens of others who want to look that good.  Soon Karlmann is sporting the same face as Lette, and if identity is only skin deep, why wouldn’t Fanny be just as happy with Karlmann?

If that strikes you as not a particularly compelling question, then you might be less than entertained by The Ugly One through its entire running time.  Which is to say, as farce, it's lively enough, but it’s hard to see the play as anything more than an extended skit.  Maybe the dialogue is better in von Mayenburg’s native German.  As translated by Maja Zade into English, no one says anything very interesting and von Mayenburg’s idea of pointed humor is to have the mom impale her son on a strap-on phallus as he lavishes affection on Lette.  The extended operation sequence, with shadow puppets, like Lette’s suicidal argument between his before-and-after selves in an elevator rushing him to the top of a building, tends to run on longer than is necessary to get the idea across.  But that could be said about much of the hi-jinx here.

One suspects that, in a sense, the actors are too good for the one-dimensional figures they’re asked to play.  McGregor does all she can with both Teutonic vamp and confused wife; O’Brien is aggressively repressed as the son; Brisport’s fawning surgeon put me in mind of Peter Lorre, which spells creepy with a capital C, and Winter keeps the main character in a kind of clueless vacuum.  His best sequence is at the end when he is confronted by the son looking like his own spitting—or rather kissing—image.

As a send-up of our image-conscious society, I’d say von Mayenburg’s satire doesn’t even constitute a flesh wound.

Which is a nice way to segue into a few other announcements.  An evening at the theater is only as good as the play—in my view—and I’m convinced that YSD student playwrights can do better than the last two Cab offerings.  To see if I’m right, get tickets now for the Carlotta festival which runs May 6-14,  and features the final thesis projects of three graduating playwrights: MJ Kaufman, Sagittarius Ponderosa; Amelia Roper, Lottie in the Late Afternoon; Justin Taylor, House Beast (more about the plays soon).

AND… The Yale Summer Cabaret has announced the line-up and schedule of its “Summer of Giants”—which is to say the Cab will be producing plays by great names in the history of theater: Molière, Tartuffe; Strindberg, Miss Julie; Lorca, The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife; Williams, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel; Churchill, Heart's Desire and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You.  With that kind of roster, you can’t go wrong—and seeing how such works come off in the Cab’s intimate space is well worth checking out.  The Artistic Director for the Summer Cabaret is Dustin Wills, who, this past year, brought us the knock-down, fuck-out domestic comic-drama Blueberry Toast (one of the best shows this year, written by YSD playwright Mary Laws), as well as a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland take on Shakespeare’s Richard II.  Expect good things to come.

The Ugly One

By Marius von Mayenburg, translated by Maja Zade

Directed by Cole Lewis

Dramaturg: Sarah Krasnow; Scenic Designer: Reid Thompson; Costume Designer: Soule Golden; Lighting Designer: Benjamin Ehrenreich; Composer: Steve Brush; Sound Designers: Steve Brush; Tyler Kieffer; Projection Designer: Nicholas Hussong; Technical Director: Alex Bergeron; Producer and Stage Manager: Jennifer Lagundino

Yale Cabaret

217 Park Street

April 11-13, 2013

Lindy's Lesson

Watching Zie Kollektief (Kate Attwell, Gabe Levey, Brenda Meaney, Mitchell Winter) putting on—in both senses of the phrase—one of Bertolt Brecht’s polemical Lehrstücke (“learning plays”) at the Yale Cabaret this week, I couldn’t help thinking: what is the purpose of theater?  So, yeah, “BB” (as he’s referred to in the Kollektief’s preamble) was up to his old tricks, this time tricked out as improv theater complete with a recurring dose of amateurish giggles. The play, ostensibly, is a radio opera formerly known as Lindbergh’s Flight before BB rewrote it to write Lindbergh out, due to the latter’s politics.  What kept me amused was the way the play tried desperately to make one man’s triumph—flying across the Atlantic Ocean, remember?—the work of “the people.”  If that sort of thing doesn’t inspire hilarity in you, well, then this might not be your cup of tea.

What is my cup of tea, or rather coffee, is watching the work of this group of practiced larkers.  Levey, here wearing a cowboy suit, is always irrepressibly funny; Meaney, this show made me see, has reserves of comic skill her time at YSD has barely scratched; Attwell’s subversive sense of theater, one assumes, in a driving force behind the show; the real surprise is Winter.  His earnest attack of the role of Lindbergh—or “man of no importance,” if you prefer, comrade—is both ironic and invigorating.  But where he really got me was in the early going, as the foursome treated us to a little ditty and a comic discursus explaining what we were about to see.  His piercing glance into the crowd had the effect of turning us into kids trying not to laugh while a teacher or other authority figure is staring us down.

And that sort of sets the tone of the whole thing.  How can you not laugh at this silly, slightly slapstick production, able to mix its contexts as swiftly as you (or the faux Germanic voice on a tape) can say “Spirit of St. Louie.”  It’s a play being played for laughs while the actors seem to think it’s being played for real—you almost expect them to get yelled at for not being serious enough, on more than one occasion.  One of my favorite bits was a kind of old soft shoe with everyone a little off; another was a fantasized under-the-sea sequence; and still another was when Lindy/MONI (Winter in a school desk perched above a floor fan) hit a fog bank—the rest of the cast in sheets.

You get the idea: it’s theater as any schoolroom of kids stuck inside for recess might manage it, trying to show—ja, Herr Lehrer!—they’ve learned the mighty BB’s lessons while also deconstructing them just for the hell of it, or just to see, indeed, how elastic is the concept of theater.  Of course, as is usually the case with not-for-real theater, the tech support magically does what it must to make it work—great help from Lighting (Joey Moro) and Sound (Tyler Kieffer) on that score.

BB had his reasons and his intentions in trying to destroy the division of labor known as performer and audience, but, for the most part, audiences remain content with a spectacle that leaves them alone.  The Kollektief never forgets we’re there and rarely lets us forget it.  And the four are able to be themselves in the midst of what they're pretending to be.

If Lindy needs to come down to earth, the same treatment won’t hurt BB either.  After all, as Brecht said: “To live means to finesse the processes to which one is subjugated.”  And if Brechtian theater is one of the processes to which one is subjugated?  Everyone for oneself, kollektief-ly.

Lindbergh’s Flight By Bertolt Brecht Translated by John Willett

Contributing Artists: Kate Attwell, Gabe Levey, Brenda Meaney, Mitchell Winter; Costume Designer: Martin Schnellinger; Lighting Designer: Joey Moro; Sound Designer: Tyler Kieffer; Stage Manager: Carolynn Richer

The Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street March 14-16, 2013

Broadway on York with George

Rarely does Broadway come to York Street, but Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George, the thesis show from YSD directing student Ethan Heard, brings to the University Theater a sense of the “big production.”  Heard’s approach, with Scenic Designer Reid Thompson, makes the most of the huge stage space at the UT, letting props rise and fall, letting the wings remain visible throughout, setting the orchestra at the back of the stage, using a raised, tilted platform as “la grande jatte”—the setting for French painter Georges Seurat’s neo-impressionist masterpiece—and staging the scenes in George’s studio at the footlights. Not only does Heard’s production use stage space in all its variety, it uses painterly space in interesting ways: there are empty canvas frames to let us see George (Mitchell Winter) at work, and hanging sketches to show us what he’s  so busily working on.  When one of the sketches explodes into color thanks to some wonderful work with projections (Nicholas Hussong), the visual panache of the show ratchets up a notch.  All in all, the show is a spectacular, from the care with which the costumes (Hunter Kaczorowski) match the figures in Seurat’s painting, to the use of compositional space in arranging the figures, to the effects of color and light (Oliver Watson, Lighting Design) able to suggest the Neo-Impressionist’s approach, to—in Act Two, set in the Eighties—hanging TVs and subtly illuminated canvases, to say nothing of one helluva blue suit.

In the cast, the star of the show is Monique Bernadette Barbee as George’s girlfriend and reluctant model, Dot, and, in Act Two, as Marie, Dot’s daughter who claims George as her father.  Barbee seems simply born to be on a stage, able to find Dot’s roguish nature, her plaintive bid to be George’s main love—she loses out to painting—and her strength in “moving on.”  As Marie, Barbee's delivery of “Children and Art,” hunched in a wheel-chair, is the most affecting segment of Act Two, and her bravura opening song of Act One, “Sunday in the Park with George” is, frankly, a hard act to follow.  The play starts off with its best bit, in other words, and we have to wait awhile before anything as enthralling takes place again.

Along the way, there’s fun with two culture vultures, Jules (Max Roll) and Yvonne (Ashton Heyl), in “No Life,” movement and mood from the entire company in “Gossip” and “Day Off”—Robert Grant handles the physicality of Boatman well, and Marissa Neitling and Mariko Nakasone are chipper and silly as Celeste 1 and Celeste 2—and “Beautiful,” a thoughtful song delivered in a sparkling vocal by a reminiscing Old Lady (Carmen Zilles).  The professional and personal setbacks of George are paralleled to his increasing obsession with his method, and that’s enough to keep the wheels turning within a set that never stays still.

And Act One does deliver a great ending to match the great beginning: the entire Company—and all the tech assistance—is to be commended for making “Sunday” come together.  It’s the sequence in which the pieces of George’s great canvas finally fall into place, and it’s one of those theatrical moments often referred to as a “triumph of the human spirit,” except here it’s actually the triumph of artistic method.  Sunday on the Isle of La Grand Jatte is the painting that showed the full artistic possibilities of Seurat’s method, generally called “pointillism” (after the French word “point” or “dot”), and seeing the composition come together, as George, singing his mantra, moves the quarrelsome and busy-body characters into their defining places, in a burst of color and with the best melody in the play, gives one of those curtains that theater is all about.

The problem is that Sunday in the Park with George has little to offer by way of an Act Two.  Perhaps, in the Eighties, when the play debuted, seeing the Eighties artworld put on stage had a freshly satirical edge, but from our standpoint now, it’s just an excuse to dress up the characters in clothes of yet another “period” (I particularly liked the costumes for George (Winter, as Seurat’s alleged great-grandson), Naomi Elsen (Ashton Heyl, as a stagey video artist), Blair Daniels (Carmen Zilles, as a brittle art critic) Billy Webster (Matt McCollum, in quintessential art connoisseur duds), and Alex (Dan O’Brien, reeking of SoHo).  Indeed, looking the part is pretty much being the part in Act Two, as there is even less in the way of characterization available for these actors.  Again, it’s Barbee, as Marie and Dot, who gets the plum bits, and she delivers; Barbee's rascally Marie upstaging her grandson at his art expo makes her very much Dot's daughter.

As Act One George, Winter does intensity well, making us feel how driven and difficult George can be.  His best song segment is the playful mocking of his models and patrons in the voice of two dogs in “Day Off,” and in duet with Barbee for the quite affecting number “We Do Not Belong Together,” a song that spells out the romantic chasm between the lovers.  In Act Two, Winter and the Company put a lot of energy into “Putting It Together” but there’s something in his manner that makes this George not matter to us.  Ostensibly, the point is to bring present-day George into line with previous century George, but there’s not much pay-off in that happening because there doesn’t seem to be much at stake.

As entertainment, the play’s comedy is a bit wan, having to do mostly with hypocritical French bourgeois and stupid American tourists (Matt McCollum and Carly Zien—we could’ve used more of them) of the 19th century, and preening, pretentious art-world aficionados of the 20th.  Even with its clever opening song, “It’s Hot Up Here,” which matches the discomfort of actors forced to remain motionless with figures frozen on a canvas for all time, Act Two is mostly anti-climax.

The YSD production works as an ambitious staging of a bit of Broadway and its pleasures are not to be missed.  Sondheim and Lapine are best at characterizing that sequence of Sundays in the park, and Heard and company are best at putting all the pieces together.  As the song says, “There are worse things.”

Sunday in the Park with George Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim Book by James Lapine Directed by Ethan Heard

Musical Director, Conductor, Orchestrator: Daniel Schlosberg; Scenic Designer: Reid Thompson; Costume Designer: Hunter Kaczorowski; Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason; Sound Designer: Keri Klick; Projection Designer: Nicholas Hussong; Production Dramaturg: Dana Tanner-Kennedy; Stage Manager: Hannah Sullivan

Yale School of Drama December 14-20, 2012

Photographs by T. Charles Erickson