A Royal Pain

Review of Phaedra’s Love, Yale Summer Cabaret

The Yale Summer Cab Co-Artistic Directors Jesse Rasmussen and Elizabeth Dinkova seem to have a thing for sensationalist modern reworkings of classical sources. In last year’s Cab season, Dinkova directed Rasmussen, among others, in Boris Yeltsin, Mickaël de Oliveira’s Portuguese revamp of Agamemnon, featuring a bored latter-day aristocracy ripe for overthrow; now Rasmussen directs, with Dinkova on hand in a small but important role, Sarah Kane’s slash-and-burn satire on royalty, class, faith, and, mostly, sex, Phaedra’s Love. In both, a mother figure is rather unhealthily concerned with her grown son’s or stepson’s sexuality. In Boris Yeltsin, the infatuation stops short of sexual contact. Not so in Phaedra’s Love.

Phaedra, whether at the hands of Euripides, Seneca, Racine, or Kane, is a woman driven to distraction by her lust for Hippolytus, only son of her husband, King Theseus. Her pursuit of Hippolytus generally leads to her being rejected by him and to the accusation that he raped her, which generally brings about his death through the outrage of Theseus, providentially returned from his mission to the underworld. With larger-than-life heroic figures involved, it’s hard to say where the moral force of the story should be, but the situation of a queenly woman doing bad things for love makes the tale a popular one to revisit. To say nothing of the older woman/younger man mythos.

Hippolytus (Niall Powderly), Phaedra (Elizabeth Stahlmann)

Kane’s Phaedra features a certain manic comic flair which, in Rasmussen’s rendering, mostly seethes below the surface. The Summer Cab version feels more tragic than one might expect, in part because camp, which could be a key factor in a contemporary tale this lurid, is relegated to a few minor touches. That leaves us with the indelible power of the key performances from Niall Powderly as Hippolytus and Elizabeth Stahlmann as Phaedra. The work they do is sizzling.

Powderly delivers Hippolytus, a masturbating, TV-watching, toy-car manipulating schlub in a tub, as every bit a tragic hero worthy of Shakespeare. Hippolytus is repulsively slovenly, but his detachment—from man, God, and woman—becomes at last a matter of moral heroism. It’s possible to see him that way when he accepts, scapegoat fashion, the charge of the rape and his grisly fate at the hands of a blood-thirsty populace, remarking “If there could have been more moments like this.” It’s a wonderful last line and feeds back into the play’s notion—which is what makes Hippolytus and Phaedra, oddly, soul mates—that living means feeling something unexpected, even out-of-bounds. No guts, no glory—which might mean, as here, pretty gory glory. With dead bodies enough to satisfy Shakespearean tragedy.

Kane is rather unsparing of Phaedra, a woman who forces herself upon her stepson and then feels outraged by her treatment at his coldly indifferent hands. Stahlmann, who I’ve seen in a variety of roles in her time at YSD, is revelatory, again. Here, her look speaks volumes as she walks the tightrope of Kane’s truncated lines. Phaedra is a stylish, self-possessed woman gradually becoming a basket-case, and her sense of her own worth is what she seems most eager to dispense with. Some might call her position masochistic, but that would be too extreme for a role that, one senses, we’re meant to see as endemic to the part sexuality reserves for women.

Phaedra (Elizabeth Stahlmann), Strophe (Bronte England-Nelson)

If we doubt that, we’ve only to look at Phaedra’s daughter, Strophe (Brontë England-Nelson, who wins the trifecta for performances this summer with another impressive turn in her third play of the season). Strophe initially seems to be more firmly wrapped than Phaedra until we realize the extent to which she is already wounded. A key reason to see this play is to see the excellent actors on hand—which includes Paul Cooper as a bemused doctor, a pondering priest, and a rather bloodless Theseus.

Kane is a shrewd playwright who knows how comic the bathetic can be, which means that the emotional hi-jinx on display make it seem risky to laugh, or it might even hurt to laugh, and that’s the point. Her heroines are serving themselves up on a spit, but that’s nothing to what their disaffected object of desire will get up to. Attentive viewers will catch the chuckle of naming Phaedra’s daughter Strophe and will notice how things shift to “Antistrophe” and “Catastrophe” as the play moves on—suffice to say, the shift is structured by certain oral acts, the last from a source that might be unexpected enough to satisfy even Hippolytus. Our hero, after all, mainly identifies himself with his guts and his cock, so we can say his end has all kinds of poetic justice.

And what about his mind? Kane gives Hippolytus a skeptic’s jailhouse colloquy with a priest that lets him vent about a life with no beliefs, and he cleverly turns the notion of forgiveness on its head, so that even the priest must concede the clarity of his moral code. That’s when we begin to see that Hippolytus isn’t simply sickened by being royal or by his dysfunctional family or by the depths those who desire him are willing to stoop to, but that, for him, there’s a needling fear of pointlessness forever in sight. And Powderly’s unflinching stare, with all this actor’s froideur and finesse, keeps that big empty elephant in the room, so to speak. Which, come to think of it, may be what makes him so irresistible to his step-mom. She wants to see him feel something. Too bad she’s not there for the end.

Hippolytus (Niall Powderly), Strophe (Bronte England-Nelson)

At a bit over an hour in length, Phaedra’s Love is the quickest of the shows this summer, and the scenes between Hippolytus and Phaedra are over too soon. The look of Phaedra and Strophe as high-toned dames is ably caught by killer dresses and accessories by Sarah Woodham, while the cobweb behind the lurid red curtain, the psychotic graphic swirls adorning walls, and that tub in baleful light center stage  combine for the feel of funhouse horror that Fufan Zhang’s set and Andrew F. Griffin’s lighting conjures, much as Christopher Ross-Ewart’s soundstage of music and transmissions does, all vaguely unsettling.

Long ago, Villiers de L'isle Adam summed up the jaded aristocrat’s view with the line, “Living? Our servants can do that for us.” In Phaedra’s Love, the aristocracy are seen living out a kind of trailer trash version of a life even their servants might despise. And yet, for all the leveling of our crassly democratic age, it’s still rather cathartic to wallow with our betters in their gilded cesspool. And nothing makes that happen like theater. The Summer Cabaret ends its 2016 season with one fucked-up royal family hoist with its own petard.

Phaedra’s Love
By Sarah Kane
Directed by Jesse Rasmussen

Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Composer and Sound Designer: Christopher Ross-Ewart; Costume Designer: Sarah Woodham; Set Designer: Fufan Zhang; Production Dramaturg: David Bruin; Movement and Violence Consultant: Emily Lutin; Production Manager/Technical Director: Alix Reynolds; Stage Manager: Emely Selina Zepeda

Cast: Paul Cooper; Brontë England-Nelson; Niall Powderly; Elizabeth Stahlmann; Ensemble: Elizabeth Dinkova; Sean Boyce Johnson; Kevin Hourigan

Yale Summer Cabaret
August 4-14, 2016

Raising Kane

Preview of Phaedra’s Love, Yale Summer Cabaret

The Yale Summer Cabaret prepares to open its final show of the 2016 season, this Thursday. Co-artistic Jesse Rasmussen, who opened the season with a highly physical adaptation of Alice in Wonderland in June, will close out the season directing renowned playwright Sarah Kane’s “brutal comedy,” Phaedra's Love.

Kane’s plays are known for their uncompromising approach to a world in which humanity is prone to violence and, in her more reflective works, suffers from the anxieties of its condition. The “darker facets” of theater attract Rasmussen, who feels Phaedra's Love is a suitable follow-up to Alice, where “the gently dark elements invited” the “playfulness”—with an edge of psychosis—that marked the Summer Cab’s opener. Rasmussen, who will direct the Jacobean tragedy, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore as her thesis project next spring, says “an interest in violence”  links modern writers like Kane and Edward Bond, whose work she also considered as a summer project, with the Jacobean sense of the dramatic use of extreme violence on stage.

Jesse Rasmussen

Asked why violence should be a necessary element of the plays she directs, Rasmussen said “turn on the news,” and spoke eloquently about how it’s “irresponsible to not connect” theater to the stories of random violence and assault that have made 2016 so stressful. Rasmussen, whose background includes extensive avant-garde work with Four Larks, a theater group that “creates contemporary performance at the intersection of theatre, music, visual art, and dance,” is drawn to work that takes chances and creates a unique theatrical experience.

That said, Kane—whose most divisive work was Blasted—called Phaedra's Love “my comedy,” and, indeed, Rasmussen says, it is the playwright’s most accessible and classical work, having been commissioned as a reworking of Seneca’s Phaedra. So there are familiar elements right off—first, “an intimate family drama that eventually explodes,” and the Greek "myth Kane is riffing on.”  The myth concerns the story of how a curse on Phaedra, wife of King Theseus and step-mother to Hippolytus, causes her to lust after her step-son, bringing about his death and, in some versions, her own suicide. What Kane brings to this situation, in a play originally staged in the 1990s, is her “deep repulsion” at her countrymen’s obsession which the British royal family which, at the time, included Princess Diana.

Part of the challenge Rasmussen sees is in rendering the play’s corrosive sense of monarchy “in a way that will be legible here” in the U.S. Certainly, celebrity worship and what Rasmussen calls “the sort of useless leaders paid to be photographed” are not unfamiliar to us, nor is the gap between rich and poor that, if bad enough in the ‘90s, is likely worse now. What’s more, the recent fulminations for Brexit by those who demand a more insular Britain should give Kane’s attack on privileged crassness plenty of bite.

Rasmussen sees the play as “formally exciting,” in part because the violence, which happens offstage in the Greek play, is “in our faces” in Kane’s version, since the playwright’s aesthetic intent is to make the audience “witnesses to violence.” Thus, another challenge of the play is the logistics of staging violence. Rasmussen and her team have had many conversations about violence and witnessing as aspects of the play, which, Rasmussen says “pulls no punches.” Beginning with “the internal domestic space” of this particular family, Kane includes the populace, so that there is an enlarged sense of representation in the play’s conclusion. As Rasmussen says, “there are lots of ways blood can come out on stage,” and part of the task she has undertaken is “do violence well and real” within the limited, and extremely intimate, Yale Cabaret space. To that end, Rasmussen is again working with choreographer Emily Lutin, who she worked with on her studio project, Macbeth, to incorporate with precision and sensitivity the physical process of violence her cast will enact.

The play’s formal challenges are supported by Kane’s poetic use of language. For Rasmussen, the playwright is “a master of economy” who uses truncated syntax to “cut the fat” from dialogue, which makes her play rich and exciting for actors. Kane’s style, Rasmussen has found, promotes attention to detail so that the difference in pause between a comma and a period can be highly expressive. The play’s protagonist, Hippolytus “is a horrible person,” but ends up being “the most honest.” Played by Niall Powderly—who played the title role in Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus last summer—Hippolytus, in the director’s view, emerges as the “moral compass of the play, unexpectedly.”

In fact, one reason Rasmussen picked this play over others was because she likes “plays with some type of love story” in them. She found herself fascinated by Phaedra: “how could this woman be in the horrifying position” of such inappropriate desire? Phaedra, played by Elizabeth Stahlmann, who played the title role in Sarah Ruhl’s Orlando last summer, harbors a love for her stepson that makes her “lead with her loins.” “Stepmothers aren’t generally liked” in literature, Rasmussen points out, and so the notion of Phaedra as a sympathetic character may well have been what drew Kane to the myth. Our culture is “still terrified at the idea of a transgressive woman,” so that Phaedra’s sexuality, for Rasmussen, can be seen as heroic in its honesty, and “a transforming element” that “lights a fire that burns down the palace, so to speak.” Theseus, played by Paul Cooper, who played the White Knight and White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, is the proverbial absentee husband, setting up a situation where Phaedra decides she “won’t deny herself and live quietly.”

The play, considered Kane’s wittiest, benefits from the detachment that mythic characters possess for contemporary audiences, even if tellingly modernized. And it’s no accident that Rasmussen’s three principles—Powderly, Stahlmann and Cooper—are the three actors who worked with her in David Harrower’s poetic and unsettling play of triangular passion, Knives in Hens, in the Cabaret last fall. “I would only work on this play with actors who I’ve worked with and who I know trust me,” Rasmussen says, “before essentially pushing them off a cliff.”

It’s been a season of sin at the Yale Summer Cabaret, and—after sloth, gluttony, greed, wrath and envy, it’s time for lust—able, here, to “mutine in a matron’s bones,” to borrow Hamlet’s line—to inspire what may be the most challenging play of the four presented this summer. While not a large ensemble of many parts, Phaedra's Love will challenge in a different way: most of the scenes are “two-handers” so that we will be spending time with characters who develop over the course of the evening through specific dramatic pairings.

Sex, violence . . . lust, murder . . . a dysfunctional family in a dysfunctional society. And, yes, laughs.

Phaedra’s Love
By Sarah Kane
Directed by Jesse Rasmussen

Yale Summer Cabaret
August 4-14, 2016

Multiplied by Itself

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

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

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

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

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

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

Annelise Lawson, Annie Hägg

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

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

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

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

Shaunette Renée Wilson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Play or Poem?

Review of Orlando at Yale Summer Cabaret

Orlando, the final show of the Yale Summer Cabaret season, directed by artistic director Sara Holdren, presents the kind of frenetic, improvisatory work that has been a hallmark of the season. But this time, the only devised aspect is the staging. The script is by Sarah Ruhl, from Virginia Woolf’s novel, untampered with by the Rough Magic Company. Having seen the company have its way with Shakespeare and Marlowe, we might wonder if other takes on Woolf’s text might present themselves, which is a way of asking, I suppose: how successful is Orlando as a play? Prose stylists like Woolf might be said to be best in their own element: on the page.

Joey Moro’s set takes note of that thought by offering us a long scroll upon which the players cavort as though, literally or literarily, on the page. And that’s as it should be since, as the play goes on, we find ourselves wondering what is “real” and what is merely the fantasy of a would-be poet—Orlando (Elizabeth Stahlmann)—an Elizabethan nobleman seated in the garden of his great estate and dreaming the world and the life to come. A life in which, at age 30 (and the dawn of the 19th century), he becomes a woman.

Much of the brio of Woolf’s novel is in the rendering of a fantasy of the English past from the present (the 1920s), viewing the past with the prescience of the future. The conceit makes for an interesting hybrid interplay—between the past we invent and the past as it was—that Ruhl’s play maintains effectively. The difficulty comes from the fact that Woolf never set herself to write “characters” per se (all are “charactered in the brain” of Orlando); Ruhl gets around this by creating a chorus who can alter as necessary, through the scenes and through the ages.

The cast of Orlando: Josephine Stewart, Shaunette Renee Wilson, Niall Powderly, Elizabeth Stahlmann, Chalia La Tour, Melanie Field, Leland Fowler

That makes for much of the fun here as the staging and costume work is comical, inventive, breathless. My favorite moment features Orlando in a kind of Elizabethan fetish costume (the ruff, the rosettes, the pantaloons) twirling about on a hanging hoop (viewers of Holdren’s fascinating thesis show will recall her work with gymnast-actors) with Sasha (Chalia La Tour, one of the most chameleonic actors currently at the Drama School) in a graceful white cape and white fur cap. Sasha is the best secondary character in the play, if only because La Tour makes her as real as Orlando is. She could easily take over the play, since Orlando sees that she’s way more fascinating than he.

The other characters that interact with Orlando seem more brainspun: Melanie Field has fun with a motorized Queen Elizabeth, a dowager who dotes on a fine leg in tights, and gives our hero a bawdy lesson in a courtier’s duties. Niall Powderly does all he can to make a cross-dressing Romanian count/countess as ridiculous as possible, including an outrageous accent that would do Tim Curry proud. Leland Fowler plays the Byronic Shelmerdine pretty much as written—which is to say that we begin to suspect that Woolf might be fantasizing life in an Emily Brontë novel or as Mary Shelley. Till then, the point has been made, it’s much more exciting—in Orlando’s view—to pursue a female than to be pursued as one. Unfortunately, Shelmerdine, though he receives the accolade of making Lady Orlando feel “a real woman,” might be any well-spoken, well-born hero of many a romance novel, though for Woolf, writing under the spell of Vita Sackville-West, the meeting of soul mates requires that both Orlando and Shelmerdine imagine they are in a same-sex relationship.

Front: Elizabeth Stahlmann, Niall Powderly; Back: Melanie Field, Chalia La Tour, Leland Fowler, Shaunette Renee Wilson

Ruhl and Woolf take delight in satirizing the ubiquity of marriage, a target that never seems to go out of date, though—in same sex, soulmate terms—it has taken on, in our time, more possibilities than it had for Woolf in the ‘20s. And that’s what helps make Orlando interesting as theater: even more than on the page, we feel the spin through the years (costumes by Fabian Aguilar and Haydee Zelideth are great aids in the fantasia), and we’re even more aware of how the all-important “present moment” infuses our viewing and our experience.

Ultimately, Ruhl’s Orlando “longs to be only one thing” while Holdren’s production, and the mutable Rough Magic company in general, suggests that playing only one character with one gender is a tired approach to theater. In Orlando, Holdren and company find an ideal text for the transformations they’ve played with all summer. And yet, Orlando strikes me as what used to be called “closet drama”—a play to be read and imagined. We become aware of how hard it is to playact Woolfian fictions. Nimble as the Rough Magic troupe is in bringing the play to life on stage, they can at best only approximate the unfettered flight of the poetical mind, as Ruhl’s Orlando only suggests Woolf’s.

Front: Elizabeth Stahlmann as Orlando; Back: Shaunette Renee Wilson, Josephine Stewart, Chalia La Tour, Leland Fowler

Casting only one actor as Orlando brings home the fact that a story, no matter how variously conceived, must always be the story of someone. Stahlmann plays Orlando as if each moment is a new thought, full of fresh insight into what life can offer. She achieves the gusto of the Keatsean ideal of the poetical character (“it is not itself - it has no self – it is everything and nothing – It has no character […] it lives in gusto”), but that makes for a passive hero always amazed at what is happening, much as we are in dreams.

Finally, though, to this production’s credit, Stahlmann makes us feel, more than fiction can, the cost of such flights from one’s time; her Orlando suffers before our eyes as only intensely imagined characters do. In the end, being one thing means being a thing that will end.

Orlando
By Virginia Woolf / Adapted by Sarah Ruhl
Directed by Sara Holdren

Scenic Design: Joey Moro; Costume Design: Haydee Zelideth & Fabian Aguilar; Lighting Design: Andrew Griffin; Sound Design: Kate Marvin; Projection Design: Joey Moro; Dramaturg: Rachel Carpman; Stage Manager: Emely Zepeda; Photographs: Andrea H. Berman

Ensemble: Orlando: Elizabeth Stahlmann; Chorus: Melanie Field, Leland Fowler, Chalia La Tour, Niall Powderly, Josephine Stewart, Shaunette Renée Wilson

Yale Summer Cabaret
August 6-15, 2015

A Dream's Midsummer Night

Review of Midsummer at Yale Summer Cabaret

One of the plot points of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a “changeling boy” that the fairy realm’s rulers—Oberon and Titania—battle over. The myth of the “changeling” refers, generally, to a fairy child substituted for a human child, so that parents find themselves raising a bizarre being not of their own. What the fairies do with the child they “adopt” is another matter. Doubtless, it becomes something wholly other, a strange hybrid of human and fairy.

Midsummer, the adaptation of Shakespeare’s play by director Sara Holdren and dramaturg Rachel Carpman, now playing at the Yale Summer Cabaret, is itself a hybrid, a strange change upon MND that might be seen as what would happen to the play if the fairies get a hold of it.

Midsummer often seems very much like the familiar play—one of the most oft-performed of Shakespeare’s comedies—and sometimes feels like a fever dream comprised of Shakespearean taglines on a ground of shifting unrealities. And that’s because Midsummer makes free use of Shakespeare’s oeuvre to match the word to the deed. (There’s even a drinking game advertised on the audience’s tables that recommends size of sips in response to recognized lines from various plays.) In short, it’s a trip.

Puck (Shaunette Renee Wilson)

This “Midsummer” begins with Puck (Shaunette Renée Wilson) brooding on how things used to be—the world was a much more enchanted place, once upon a time. A sprite more in sorrow than in spite, she soon decides to amuse herself and us by devising ways to bedevil a troupe of hapless actors gathered in the wood to rehearse a play. That play, it soon develops, will not be Pyramus and Thisbe (as in MND) but the story of the lovers of MND: the erotic travails of Lysander (Christopher Ross-Ewart), Hermia (Josephine Stewart), Demetrius (Leland Fowler), and Helena (Elizabeth Stahlmann). The transition from the hamfisted actors bumbling through their lines to the full enactment of their MND roles is only the first of many magical transformations the night offers.

The usual plot development—that the rivals for Hermia become instead rivals for Helena, while the once simpatico women become bitter enemies—plays out here with more asperity than it often does. And that’s in part because Holdren and Carpman get to cherry-pick Shakespeare to provide dialogue for these fools for love. While the changeableness of male affection is the theme Shakespeare’s text treats of with a certain arch candor, the handling of it here is full of surprisingly distraught energy—in Stewart and Stahlmann—and outrageous wooing and rejecting from Fowler and Ross-Ewart. It’s funny and physical, and lets us know that love hurts. Lurking in the wings, as it were, is every heartbroken teen who loved and missed, and Holdren gets her young cast to milk that for all its worth.

Titania (Melanie Field), Bottom (Andrej Visky)

Meanwhile, there’s the centerpiece event: the enchantment of Bottom—who traditionally is given an ass’s head—and the passion for him created in Titania by “love-in-idleness,” a magical flower. That part of the story feels more allegorical than the rest, in MND, and here it’s almost beside the point. We’re much more beguiled by Titania (Melanie Field) and Oberon (Niall Powderly) facing off with magical bolts and scary voices like wizards in Harry Potter, so that the sport with Titania that Will seems to delight in gets upstaged by a parental stand-off over a child that feels more revealing.

Bottom the weaver, played with mercurial flair by Andrej Visky, is from the first the character most fully infused with the kind of wonderment that theatrical experience can provide. He’s ready to enact every part—including speeches from Hamlet spoken by the players and the prince. To give a sense of the range of this Bottom, I’ll mention that, as he wanders spooked in the woods, he breaks into “My Way,” and when he first discovers the sleeping Titania he says “she’s warm!” echoing Lear holding the recently deceased Cordelia.

The upshot of all this is that Midsummer creates a rich tapestry of Shakespearean verbiage as an overlay on a story of amateur theatricals, befuddled lovers, and spatting fairies. It’s not simply a re-imagining of MND, but a reassigning of Shakespearean lines and moments to create a lively variety that never ceases to surprise and delight. And those not so versed in their Bard needn’t feel left out, as there is a remarkable seamlessness to most of the juggling, except when it’s meant to be noticeable.

Christopher Ross-Ewart, Josephine Stewart, Elizabeth Stahlmann, Melanie Field, Andrej Visky, Niall Powderly

In the midst of the sheer love of Shakespeare’s words—as, as it were, non-character-specific poetry—Midsummer manages to make us aware of the varying levels of acting as entertainment. If Shakespeare’s comedies tend to be much ado about nothing, Midsummer insists that what Hamlet calls “the purpose of playing” is not so much holding a mirror up to nature but rather to play Prospero with what reality provides—and all actors are changelings. The strong suggestion is that we have at last gotten the play of Bottom’s dream, which hath no bottom. At evening’s end the players within the play troop off, considering what to call their play, riffing on Shakespeare, O’Neill, and others.

Finally, a mention of a remarkable set comprised of trees of twisted fabric and of seemingly real stone, wonderful projections that create worlds within the world, sound effects and special effects to give reality to the magical duels and spells, and costumes that let the cast move from clownish workers to lightly garbed youths and painted and fleshy fairies—to say nothing of Puck’s hybrid habiliments that seem more Caliban than Ariel. And Andrew F. Griffin’s lighting design is a poem in itself.

Midsummer plays through Sunday night. If you’ve already seen it, go again, and if you haven’t, do.

Midsummer
Based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the plays of William Shakespeare
Adapted by Rachel Carpman and Sara Holdren
Directed by Sara Holdren

Scenic Design: Christopher Thompson, Claire De Liso; Costume Design: Fabian Aguilar; Lighting Design: Andrew Griffin; Sound Design: Sinan Refik Zafar; Projection Design: Rasean Davonte Johnson; Dramaturg: Rachel Carpman; Stage Manager: Victoria Whooper

Ensemble: Al the Upholsterer/Titania: Melanie Field; Snout the Tinker/Demetrius: Leland Fowler; Peter Quince/Oberon: Niall Powderly; Flute the Bellows Mender/Lysander: Christopher Ross-Ewart; Snug the Joiner/Helena: Elizabeth Stahlmann; Starveling the Tailor/Hermia: Josephine Stewart; Bottom: Andrej Visky; Puck: Shaunette Renée Wilson

Yale Summer Cabaret

217 Park Street

June 4-June 21, 2015

Country Living

Review of the Yale School of Drama’s The Seagull

Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull is a very busy play, a fact that the current production from the Yale School of Drama, directed by third-year director Jessica Holt, fully embraces. Begin with that very busy set (Jean Kim) running the entire length of the Iseman Theater’s space and including a balcony perch for the musicians who accompany the action with songs. There are chairs, tables, divans, garden seats, trees, paintings, musical instruments, a wooden cut-out of a half-moon, a huge painting of a lake on a curtain, various bric-a-brac, and, at both stage left and right, make-up tables with lighted mirrors—and don’t forget the swing built for two. The Seagull features theater as a theme because two of its main characters, Irina Nikolayevna Arkadina (Maura Hooper) and her son Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplev (Christopher Geary), are involved in theater—she as a respected actress, he as a fledgling (when the show begins) playwright. Holt’s production makes theatricality not only a theme but a modus operandi, finding, more than many productions do, in its sense of theater the comic excess of the play.

Granted, Chekhov called his play a comedy, but that fact seems to elude the general approach to The Seagull, as there are few jokes per se and Chekhov isn’t one to stage-direct farce and slapstick. Holt and company find the comedy by playing many of the interactions broadly and by minimizing the pathos—until, in the final of four acts, it seemingly can’t be helped. Even then, the use of a surprising exit underscores not only the staging, but the staginess of floundering actress Nina (Chasten Harmon)’s bid for profundity. In other words, this version of The Seagull keeps its eye on what makes all these characters laughable to us, but so unamusing to themselves, most of the time.

Consider some of the great casting choices: with Maura Hooper as Irina, there’s no way this production isn’t going to register fully, for our enjoyment, the staginess and vanity of a “great actress,” mouldering away at her brother’s country estate and trying—more deliberately than desperately—to maintain the erotic ardor of her lover while also trying—more casually than carefully—to be a mother to her earnest young son. Hooper has great comic gifts and her Irina, fully convinced that it’s all her show, doesn’t need to “steal” what she so clearly dominates, even without a sexual tryst on a tabletop. As her self-involved lover, the successful (careerist) writer Trigorin, Aaron Bartz sports an impressive wavy forelock and a dapper appearance. He’s quite the coxcomb and, at 55, is still able to have his head turned by Nina’s eager neediness. She so very clearly wants a man of substance like Trigorin and not a headstrong mama’s boy like Konstantin.

As the play’s hero, Geary has a voice that can ignite wood and chop ice. He can be Irina’s pathetic plaything one moment and upbraid her with his deep dissatisfactions the next. He begins earnestly artistic, rebellious against his mother’s generation, and ends surfeited with success but still hungry for what he pined for in youth. He’s a very Russian character, and Geary in particular and the show in general can turn on a dime from slapstick to existential bathos. That skill is nowhere more necessary than in the depiction of Nina, who in Harmon’s rendering goes from radiant, girlish vitality, to worn and disillusioned but also more profound. Her final scene with Konstantin is almost tragic because of their inability to find a shared note to end on. This, we might feel, could also be comic, but Holt’s Seagull takes Nina’s suffering seriously, and Harmon makes us believe in her, at least as much as Konstantin does.

In the end this Seagull is moving—but from the start it moves (the show boasts one of the quicker-seeming first acts I’ve seen at a School of Drama production), and for that to happen you need a lot of capable support to let us in on the lives of the other characters (seven speaking roles) without letting the play get bogged down. It helps to have the likes of Niall Powderly and Shaunette Renée Wilson as the couple Ilya and Paulina Shamrayev, who swell scenes and provide important reactions and, in llya’s case, oddly obsessive tensions. And Paulina provides as well a sullen dalliance for Yevgeny Sergeyevich Dorn (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a country doctor who abounds in feminine interest, and comes across as a likeable observer. In the key role of Masha, the Shamrayev’s airy daughter, Zenzi Williams prisses and preens and shares a charming drinking scene with Trigorin; suffering from Konstantin’s indifference, she marries the earnest school teacher Medvedenko (Andrew Burnap, who also provides some very effective accompaniment on the trumpet), who appears here to have more sense and self-respect than most of these gum-flapping eccentrics. Not least of which is the estate’s owner Pyotr Nikolayevich Sorin (Jonathan Majors), played as a fond, retiring, frail character who, like so many Chekhov characters, means well but achieves nothing. Add as well the servant Yakov (Luke Harlan, leading the other domestics—The Cook (Jennifer Schmidt) and The Maid (Pornchanok Kanchanabanca)—in musical interludes), who maintains the kind of unschooled, fierce intelligence that Russian writers like to ascribe to the serfs.

All in all, a game cast and a very physical, energetic, and enjoyable production. As generally happens in such large-scale plays, we do tend to miss the more engaging characters when they’re offstage, but at least Holt and company’s Seagull gives all the characters lots of room to move about in and lots of variety. Costumes (Asa Benally) run from Masha’s insistent black to Irina’s blazing red taffeta and her eye-popping red violet travel outfit, and include as well the requisite “simple peasant” gear and the traditional “Fiddler on the Roof” style that makes a caricature of Ilya, as well as handsome outfits that make us believe Paulina could turn the dandyish doctor’s head. Clothes make the man, and Konstantin’s final get-up reeks of self-importance, Hamlet-style. Elizabeth Mak’s lighting provides effects that alter time of day, inside/outside, and, in the final act especially, a claustrophobic change of mood, while Kate Marvin’s sound adds, among other things, the rain and a gunshot that will make you jump.

Long and involved The Seagull is, there’s no argument there. The School of Drama production throws as much energy, high spirits and variety at the classic text as one can imagine, finding the entertainment in all that existential ennui. Inspiring.

The Seagull By Anton Chekhov

Translated by Paul Schmidt

Directed by Jessica Holt

Scenic Designer: Jean Kim; Costume Designer: Asa Benally; Lighting Designer: Elizabeth Mak; Sound Designer: Kate Marvin; Production Dramaturg: Kelly Kerwin; Stage Manager: Kelly Montgomery

Yale School of Drama

December 12-18, 2014

Winter Is Us

Review of Rose and the Rime, Yale Cabaret It’s not every day you encounter a new myth for the change of the seasons. One of the oldest, of course, is the story of Persephone in Hades, and you may find yourself thinking of old, elemental tales like that as you watch the plot develop in Rose and the Rime, written by Nathan Allen, Chris Mathews, and Jake Minton of The House Theatre in Chicago and brought to the Yale Cabaret by Kelly Kerwin. This is the kind of story people who spend a lot of time in frozen climes may like to tell themselves. After all, as that cold wind begins to blow and you look forward to months of snow, you may start asking yourself: what did we do to deserve this?

In Rose, we meet a very adorable little girl—played by Chalia La Tour with the kind of feisty charm that makes Shirley Temple look like a rag doll—and her doting uncle (Galen Kane). They live in a place so cold it’s very unwise to be out of doors at all after the sun goes down. Inside, Uncle prepares hot chocolate and tells always the same story about how the fairest, kindest maiden and the best-looking, nicest guy meet and mate and bring back sun and song and dance and eternal good times. It’s just a make-believe story told to keep out the dark and cold, or is it?

As Rose begins to press her Uncle for details about what happened to her parents—“I’m old enough to know,” she announces—a detail pops up: there was a magic coin that could change winter into summer. “No, I want the true story,” Rose insists, feeling her Uncle is still in a fairy tale. But that’s just it. Rose is not in a dystopian story about a desolate winter world, but rather a fairy tale—and so there is a magic coin, and there is a wicked Rime Witch (Lauren Dubowksi, quite malevolent with fearsome fingers, a treated voice, and an evil cackle), and there are perils—like moving trees and wolves—that beset Rose on her quest.

Making Rose’s journey unfold in the Cab’s limited space takes some real ingenuity, and that’s one of the great pleasures of this show. There’s a long runner looking like a water slide down the center of the space and, with the right manipulations, it becomes a swirling, snow-filled wasteland; when Rose has to step across frozen streams, La Tour moves along a path of stools; lights, by Joey Moro, and Sound by Jon Roberts help create the sensations of this winter wilderness adventure, with atmospheric music conjured by Joel Abbott, and a lovely snowfall effect at the end.

The transition to summer—who knew that ice path was also a sand promenade?—features shed clothing, Hawaiian shirts, upbeat tunes, and hot dogs distributed to the crowd, and a dance party fleshed out by happy locals (Steven Reilly, David Clauson, Avery Trunko, Olivia Scicolone). It also features the arrival of Jimmy (Andrew Burnap), as a sweet guy with a gorgeous way with a song—here it’s The Temptations’ “My Girl”—to woo and win our Rose. Along comes marriage, a baby, and, in place of “happily ever after,” a turn of events that suggest not only that winter is in us rather than just an atmospheric condition, but that also put the plot onto its cyclical path, as we soon arrive at another uncle—Charlie (Niall Powderly, Jimmy’s brother, by turns comically clueless, evilly grasping, and sympathetically struggling)—trying to raise another girl-child in a wintery world.

The story’s mix of the archetypal and the childlike make it resonate as the kind of tale told to kids, though the implications of the story make it not so childish after all. At its heart is a story of envy towards those whom fortune favors, and the kind of collective dysfunction that, well, make the birth of a hero necessary and perhaps inevitable—in fairy tales at least.

Rose and the Rime By Nathan Allen, Chris Mathews, and Jake Minton Directed by Kelly Kerwin

Dramaturg: Davina Moss; Sets: Aleander Woodward; Costumes: Benjamin Fainstein; Lights: Joey Moro; Sound: Jon Roberts; Additional Music: Joel Abbott; Stage Manager: Emily DeNardo; Producers: Sarah Williams & Emily Zemba; Production Manager: James Lanius III

Yale Cabaret October 16-18, 2014