Left to Their Own Devices

Review of A Doll’s House, Part 3, Wesleyan Center for the Arts

Those two video-theater boys are back! Michael (Breslin) and Patrick (Foley)—the duo responsible for This American Wife, a playful video-theater piece that debuted as a short at the Yale Cabaret’s Satellite Festival, then progressed to the Cabaret’s season 50, then made quite a splash at New York Theatre Workshop Next Door last summer—bring their second video-performance piece, A Doll’s House, Part 3, to the Wesleyan Center for the Arts for a one-night-stand. The show is part of a theater program, “Hyperbole in Performance,” hosted by Wesleyan. The play debuted at Ars Nova ANT Fest last June in New York.

Michael Breslin, Patrick Foley

Fans of This American Wife may feel a reassuring familiarity—yes, the show has Michael and Patrick and video cameras, and the show is abetted by their frequent collaborators, Catherine María “Cat” Rodríguez and dramaturg Ariel Sibert. But, unlike Wife, Doll’s House isn’t all about its creators. Michael and Patrick, in pageboy wigs and boyish shorts and bowties, play the two brothers abandoned when Nora Helmer famously walked out on her husband Torvald at the close of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Patrick is Ivar, the brunette, and Michael is Bob, the blonde. Ivar has issues, claiming to identify as Italian due to the month or so the family spent in Tuscany while he was a toddler. Voicing a reassuring mantra—“Feelings are facts”—Bob, after initially dismissing his brother’s difference, validates Ivar’s Italian identity. The argument is delivered with a very amusing—and very catty—invocation of hyper-sensitivity and the always fraught path to making one’s obsessions socially acceptable.

This is the third iteration of M+P’s Doll’s House and, from what I understand, the first and now the third include second-year Yale School of Drama actor Zoe Mann as the brothers’ younger sister, Emmy. The boys, naturally, are theater-struck and spend most of their time enacting choreography—a tarantella routine—they are at pains, with short tempers and abuse bordering on hysteria, to teach to Emmy. Off to one side of the stage at her own camera and laptop, Rodríguez, as Content Kween, operates some of the tech and breaks in from time to time with seemingly freeform reminiscence while applying make-up on camera. Kween’s narrative trades in the dark side of sibling rivalry as she recounts episodes of torture, involving waterboarding, between herself and her sister.

The notion of torture as a family event seems to be the main idea here, as the Helmer children torture themselves and each other with the glaring absence of Mom. Michael and Patrick assure the audience that they haven’t read nor seen Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2 (he’s referred to a few times as “the writer with a ponytail”), but it’s entirely fitting that they should enact the two characters absent from “Part 2.” In the original A Doll’s House, of course, the children are little and if they appear onstage are played by child-actors. In Hnath’s revisiting, only Emmy, as a young adult, appears. The boys, clearly, have been suppressed, and that’s reason enough for Michael and Patrick to use their unique brand of video/performance art to bring Bob and Ivar to life.

The best bits have to do with the unreal world of theater as conceived by the brothers, all the while insisting on “realism.” Ivar lip-synchs on camera with impressive precision to “What’s the Use of Wonderin’” from Carousel and, early on, dominates a microphone to give us a sense of unsettling intimacy, attempting to trigger Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR). Foley plays Ivar as borderline psychotic, the most unstable of the kids and the one who needs things to be a certain way to support his sense of his own stardom.

Breslin’s Bob is a shade more unassuming. He has a knack for enacting a kid utterly caught up in a fantasy world, only to have to shake himself out of it for one of his brother’s tirades or something more mundane. His pet peeve is theater folks, particularly actors, but perhaps authors of new plays even more. His on-camera monologue as a hotel clerk bristling at a theater person trying to check in digs at the pretensions of actors and the kind of careerist moves a writer trying to cash-in on a classic might well indulge in. It’s scary and hilarious.

Near the end, Emmy gets her big moment, an impassioned speech at the camera, addressed to her brothers and, by extension, the sensibility of the two impresarios behind this piece. Mann runs deliberately in and out of character, or rather blends her own voice with her character’s—much as M+P do as well—in service to a wit’s-end protest at the way her character is construed by the play. She works through her ire, coming—with a benign though possibly tongue-in-cheek vision—to an understanding of what’s required of her. She’s forced to be Mom, and that’s a part impossible for her to ever get right. And so she gets to be the whipping-girl forever, unless she learns to dominate the scenario.

Throughout there are digs aplenty at the Yale School of Drama, as the program that has fostered everyone involved with the show, and one of the more beguiling aspects of Doll’s House, Part 3, is the tantalizing glimpse of the fractious world “behind the scenes.” Not only backstage at plays, but in the rehearsal and workshop rooms, the spaces that, as a kind of dollhouse world of make believe, seem to suggest the possibility of remaking the world in one’s own image while being subjected, at each step of the way, to the dominant focus in the room.

As a form of child’s play—acting out to cope with trauma and loss—the piece has its therapeutic gestures; as a form of critique, written to cope with the unnerving path to theatrical success, A Doll’s House, Part 3, is both funny and sad, vicious and vulnerable, a routine and a ritual where tragedy means forever going unseen by the one viewer you want desperately to reach. As dramaturg Ariel Sibert writes in the show’s notes: “All claims to the Real are pleas for redemption.”

A Doll’s House, Part 3
By Michael + Patrick
In collaboration with Catherine María Rodríguez, Zoe Mann, and Ariel Sibert

Producer: Rachel Shuey; Stage Manager: Devin Fletcher; Dramaturg: Ariel Sibert; Costume Design: Cole McCarty; Lighting Design: Krista Smith; Sound Design: Michael Costagliola; Beats: Ashley Jean Vanicek

Cast: Michael Breslin, Patrick Foley, Zoe Mann, Catherine María Rodríguez

Hyberbole in Performance is a collaboration between the Center for the Humanities, the Center for the Arts, and the Theater Department at Wesleyan University

Ring Family Performing Arts Hall
Wesleyan University
February 14, 2019

A Presence in the Process

Review of This American Wife, Yale Cabaret

Cab Enthusiast: Hey, I just saw this interesting play at the Yale Cabaret. It’s called This American Wife and was conceived, written, staged and performed by Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley. It’s about these two gay theater guys who become obsessed with the various “Real Housewives” reality TV shows and it’s like their obsession becomes the only thing they can talk about and it’s how they see themselves and each other and relationships and, um, even theater, I guess.

DB: Yeah, I know, I saw it. It has two more shows tonight at 8 and 11.

Patrick Foley, Michael Breslin (photos by Brittany Bland)

CE: OK, cool, because I wanted to ask you what you thought about being talked about at the end of the show.

DB: You know what Wilde said, “the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”

CE: Hah, yeah. I mean, it’s not just you, they kinda diss some people and even comment on the audience. It’s very real, like no fourth wall at all.

DB: Right, yeah, well, they mention my review of last year’s Satellite Festival, where their portion of the lengthy program got short shrift. My point was, like, if you’re going to bring reality into your show, well, there might be other realities that are more fun or demanding or whatever.

CE: It seemed like it hurt their feelings.

DB: Well, yes, but this is school, and part of the learning process is that it’s not going to be a group hug and a gold star after your every effort. Anyway, much worse gets said about every show only it doesn’t get written down.

CE: True. And it wasn’t in print, just online. Like, who takes the internet seriously?

DB: Right. What year were you born, again?

CE: Never mind. So, you don’t like this kind of reality theater?

DB: Well, it’s reality TV I was dissing initially, like I’m not going to willingly sit through episodes of Real Housewives of New Jersey. I mean, I grew up across the bridge from Jersey. And housewives? C’mon, man, I grew up when it was like a slur on a guy’s manhood if his wife worked. You ain’t gotta tell me, y’know?

But This American Wife has a definite structure. It might seem like it’s just these two guys Michael and Patrick talking on microphones in front of video cameras about one particular show, but its outreach is much more than that. I mean, first of all, it assumes that there’s some analogous level of obsession in almost every life, that participation in “the culture” means you have introjected these almost random bits from the media, and those are the things that help you forge your identity. Living in a simulacrum, all that stuff.

CE: Uh huh.

Patrick Foley, Michael Breslin

DB: So, it starts with this kind of “true confessions” moment with them “coming out” about being obsessed with the show. Like, it’s not the kind of thing you’d tell your elitist friends, the high culture police, if you could help it. But once the kitten leaves the box, then there’s no telling where it will go. At one point Patrick starts talking about amateur porn and then he admits to liking “behind the scenes” porn, which is not quite a performance and not quite reality but is a more “real” version of the scene, and the point is that something very real, like sex, is being treated with varying levels of “reality.” And what the Cab show is about is that specular moment of wanting to be the thing or person or performance or reality you see on the screen. But it’s also about those guilty secrets. Like “let whoever is without sin cast the first stone,” and so the audience is made complicit at that point. And there’s this great moment when Michael is on stage/camera and Patrick asks him about his mother. And we’re just on his eyes and he holds the look and then changes the subject. It’s stuff like that that keeps me coming to the Cab.

CE: Yeah, I remember that part about porn but I wasn’t sure what porn had to do with The Real Housewives franchise, or Kim Kardashian, for that matter.

DB: Yeah, good. She came up late in the play, during the part with the really intense partial closeups. The use of the cameras is both an element of the play and of the tech, it’s something that, theatrically, probably hasn’t been theorized and certainly not codified, yet. You know, you can talk about the camera as a character and as audience at the same time. But that part you mentioned was when Patrick started doing a little historical analysis of reality TV in the wake of the OJ case and the way all these reality stars sprang out of the possibility of just being on camera as a part of life. Way back in the Seventies though, there was An American Family which was a video diary of a family called the Louds. But, y’know, I was a kid then and I didn’t watch that either.

CE: Well that was a long time ago, and you mean “cameras in theater” hasn’t had its moment yet?

Michael Breslin

DB: It’s not exactly a progressive medium. Its biggest names all came before the camera was invented. Early on, Michael Breslin name-checks Brecht, y’know, because it’s like if you’re going to talk about subverting bourgeois normativity, as a theatrical construct, you gotta bring him up, it’s like de rigueur. Which is sweet in a way, you know, the way these old names keep hanging on. But then, it’s Yale. Out in the real world, most people know who Kim Kardashian is but they’ll frown and squint about “Brecht.” Sounds like a supplement or something. “Use Brecht each morning and let reality take over.”

CE: “Plato the Greek or Rin-tin-tin, who’s more famous to the billion million”?

DB: Exactly. The parts I was most impressed with were when the cameras and the videos were used to best effect. Patrick Foley has great presence, even on the small screen. And there’s that sequence of the duo going into “Real Housewives” drag, where it was—almost—as if the wish-fulfillment factory had finally swept them up in its benign embrace. And the “ending,” when they start arguing like the sisters in the limo, where their bond via vicarious pleasure starts to fray. Good stuff. And when they do their voice-overs on the scenes of “the ladies” themselves. Like they’re hijacking the material. I could watch that kind of thing all day. Especially with those edits Michael Breslin imposed on the clips.

CE: Oh really? Why?

DB: Getting back at TV is like my own personal revenge fantasy. Really. I can’t even talk about the things it has done to us. Not even now. But what did you like best?

CE: Yes, I liked the drag part. I always like costumes. The rest of the time they were just in T-shirts. Though they did put on these cool jackets at one point. And Michael Breslin looks great in a blonde wig.

DB: Well, yeah, that part was letting you see them as they are, in another reality. But there’s another idea lurking in that asymmetry. The ladies on the show are stuck with the reality they live, even if it’s a televised reality, but Michael and Patrick are in a different world, adjacent to that one. It could be called commentary or critique, or, hell, theater. The show finally ends “in the green room,” like “back stage with Patrick Foley,” though not “off-camera,” and it’s like the extras on a DVD. The actor crits the critics.

CE: Hermeneutic circle?

DB: You got it. When he says he always feels safe on camera, he demonstrates the axiom in the playbill, from dramaturg Ariel Sibert: “the self needs a medium.” Then again, the self itself is a medium. A construct.

CE: Shall we to the play, for by my fay I cannot reason . . . .

This American Wife
Created and performed by Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley

Dramaturgs: Ariel Sibert, Catherine María Rodríguez; Stage Manager: Olivia Plath; Technical Director: Austin Byrd; Set Designer: Gerardo Díaz Sánchez; Costume Designer: Cole McCarty; Lighting Designer: Nic Vincent; Sound Designer: Michael Costagliola; Projection Designer: Brittany Bland, Wladimiro A. Woyno R.; Director of Photography: Amauta Martson-Firmino; Video Content Creation and Editing: Michael Breslin

Yale Cabaret
October 12-14, 2017

Take Heart

Review of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Yale School of Drama

A play where the most sympathetic figures—Giovanni (Edmund Donovan) and Annabella (Brontë England-Nelson), a brother and sister—are incestuous lovers is taking risks against strong identifications. John Ford’s 17th century drama ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, a Yale School of Drama thesis show for director Jesse Rasmussen, presents a world of battling wills where betrayal and bullying are the order of the day. There are also acts of sensational violence for which the Jacobean period is well known. There are poisonings, duels, eyes put out and throats slit, and a heart impaled on a sword. At the end of the evening the point of it all may have escaped you but the sheer power of it will stay with you for a while.

The set by Ao Li comes by way of unusual decisions, such as the audience seated on the stage in the University Theater arranged at a height that makes the majority of the seats balcony level. Down on the stage is an open playing space where most of the action takes place. But the unadorned stage is augmented by a bridge-like structure above the playing space. And stretched the length of that level is a large screen behind a clear curtain on which show projections of what happens below stage—in the intimacy of Annabella’s bed chamber. The different levels suggest a private, privileged space below the area of public skirmish and struggle on the main stage, and, above, a level where, often, characters look down on the encounters below. It all makes for a very lively staging. Indeed, the swiftness of the first part little prepares us for how much things will go awfully awry in the second part.

The main mood of the first part is of misgivings surrounding a taboo love affair between lyrical and like-minded siblings. Donovan and England-Nelson look enough alike to lend some actuality to their kinship and both play well the seriousness of the incestuous passion. Their scenes together are strong in shared feeling, particularly the scene of avowed love. And Putana (Patricia Fa’asua), Annabella’s servant, seems to take the news of the love affair in stride, suggesting that a lady may avail herself of any gentleman—father, brother, whomsoever—whenever a hot mood strikes. Her rather lusty presence adds a lightheartedness to the early going. Even the Friar (Patrick Foley) in whom Giovanni confides could be called tempered in his displeasure at the youth’s chosen object of desire. There are also somewhat comically hopeless suitors for Annabella’s hand, such as Grimaldi (Ben Anderson), though Soranzo (George Hampe), the one favored by Annabella’s father Florio (Sean Boyce Johnson), has a preening, wheedling quality that could prove troublesome.

Soranzo has troubles of his own though. Hippolita (Lauren E. Banks), whom he has jilted, vows revenge and enlists Vasques (Setareki Wainiqolo), Soranzo’s serving-man, to help her achieve her goal, in return for sexual favors. The character of Vasques is key to both plots as he foils Hippolita’s plan, causing her death instead of Soranzo’s, and also learns, by cozening Putana, of the affair between Giovanni and Annabella and the latter’s pregnancy. Played with steely, scene-stealing charm by Setareki Wainiqolo, Vasques is almost an Iago-figure; though not nearly so malevolent—for malevolence’s sake—he is the most aware of how to gain advantage from the weaknesses of others.

The other malevolent character, Hippolita, is given convincing vicious authority by Lauren E. Banks and her death scene is the most dramatically rendered. Patricia Fa’asua’s Putana, a simple pawn ultimately, gets a memorable scene of degradation that is almost the final judgment of the play: Putana’s complicity could be said to be innocent of any selfishness and her penalty a final outrage. Which is then surpassed by a grandly telling final tableau of Annabella.

As our hero, Giovanni, Edmund Donovan can work up his passions well, and the love scene between him and Annabella, like her death scene, is made almost cinematic by the means that relay these scenes to us. George Hampe’s Soranzo is a mass of nervous energy, a privileged dastard who, as in some ways the main figure linking both fatal plots, is deplorable and fun. Sean Boyce Johnson, Patrick Foley, and Ben Anderson—as a grandly pompous Cardinal—all fill their roles with aplomb. As Annabella, Brontë England-Nelson shines the brighter for how brief is her joy and how inevitable her death—“Love me or kill me, brother,” she tells Giovanni, so of course he does both. Her most poignant moment is a song of heartfelt misery that describes the pathos of any true love in this wickedly cruel society. There are also beautiful songs of high-minded clerical detachment, rendered by the Cardinal’s Man (Christian Probst) in angelic tones.

The music and sound design from Frederick Kennedy are key to the emotional tone here, which, like Sarah Woodham’s costumes, is somewhat subdued, even solemn. Erin Earle Fleming’s lighting design gives all an even tone, but glare on the sheet covering the screen showing John Michael Moreno’s projections creates a distancing effect to frustrate our voyeurism in viewing Annabella’s chamber, which contains as well a pet bird. When not fronting projections, the sheet seems a gore-spattered curtain suitable to Ford’s theatrical world.

Though Rasmussen and dramaturg Davina Moss have arrived at a very playable text, cutting characters and subplots to keep our focus on the sibling lovers, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore still comes across as more sensational than satisfying. Its provocations lack a sense of the savagery of our era, so that it seems a deliberate jolt for the jaded tastes of another day. “All are punished!” the Prince exclaims at the close of Romeo and Juliet, the Shakespeare play to which Ford’s play is most akin, and here that is certainly true as well, though with something more of the scorecard of blood-letting one finds in slasher films.

’Tis Pity She’s a Whore
By John Ford
Directed by Jesse Rasmussen

Choreographer: Emily Lutin; Scenic Designer: Ao Li; Costume Designer: Sarah Woodham; Lighting Designer: Erin Earle Fleming; Sound Designer: Frederick Kennedy; Projection and Video Designer: John Michael Moreno; Production Dramaturg: Davina Moss; Technical Director: Tannis Boyajian; Stage Manager: Sarah Thompson

Cast: Ben Anderson; Lauren E. Banks; Edmund Donovan; Brontë England-Nelson; Patricia Fa’asua; Patrick Foley; Isabella Giovanni; George Hampe; Sean Boyce Johnson; Christian Probst; Setareki Wainiqolo

Yale School of Drama
January 31-February 4, 2017

May the Farce Be with You

Review of Antarctica! Which is to Say Nowhere, Yale Summer Cabaret

“Only the most oppressive seriousness can find a bond with lawless farce.”—Irving Howe

Howe’s comment about the relation of seriousness and farce might seem apropos while viewing Antarctica! Which is to Say Nowhere, Miranda Rose Hall’s new adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, directed by Elizabeth Dinkova at the Yale Summer Cabaret. The seriousness does indeed become a bit “oppressive” at times, but then the “lawless farce” of our times serves as excuse. Jarry’s chaotic and comic original was a successful effort to “épater les bourgeoisie” in turn-of-the-century Paris, and Hall’s incarnation aims to skewer not so much the things our day holds sacred as the things we should find shameful. Its targets—like climate change and our attachments to heated pools, central air, and personal computers—are apt to be matters that inspire liberal hand-wringing more than laughter, and to keep us at least chuckling is no small feat, in all seriousness.

Briefly (there are nearly 40 distinct scenes): the show introduces Roy (Marié Botha) and his wife Rena (Ricardo Dàvila) as bored but ambitious Americans who want to find new lands to conquer. Antarctica seems promising, so, accompanied by their newly hired “general” Linda (Emily Reeder), aka “General Electric,” they set off so Roy can become “middle management” for the royal family of Emperor Penguins (Yagil Eliraz, Rebecca Sherman Hampe, Steven Lee Johnson) that rule the creatures there. Roy, a blustering idiot with an insatiable appetite, is driven, Lady-Macbeth-style, by his power-mad wife, the brains of the outfit, who also entertains Linda’s desires to shut out Roy and take his place at Reena’s side.

A Penguin Leader (Patrick Foley) (photo: Christopher Thompson)

The blood-thirsty betrayal of the benign Emperor Penguin King (played with oafish aplomb by Eliraz) establishes a coup, but the son, Freddy Prince (Johnson, given to anxious, Hamletian soliloquy), escapes, possibly to wield revenge at a later date. Once in power, the Roys are as insufferable as you would expect, setting up fights to the finish between animals and glutting themselves on whatever comes to hand. As a portrait of American foreign policy, the Roys have all the subtlety of the self-serving Invasion of Iraq; in other words, they have the greed and none of the generosity of textbook versions of American intervention that have been tainted by—take your pick—slavery, the treatment of Native Americans, the war in the Philippines, the Bomb, the war in Vietnam, etc. And, as you’d expect with an American couple and a lifestyle of the rich and fatuous, soon enough there is the threat of civil war as Rena and Linda are imprisoned for insubordination. They escape and visit the North Pole—where an amusingly sleazy Santa (Eliraz) rules—and where Linda insists on enlisting an army of polar bears to overthrow Roy.

Roy (Marie Botha) (photo: Christopher Thompson)

As “subjects” to the self-installed American royalty, the creatures of Antarctica are all hapless and charmingly innocent. A late song in which Roy, very much a feeble Macbeth, tries to enlist his army of snowmen (Eliraz, Hampe) against his wife is a case in point. The song’s martial frenzy is undermined by the timid snowmen’s fear of just about everything. Christopher Ross-Ewart’s songs are entertaining and in the hands of the capable hands of the cast play the role tunes do in Disney cartoons—as moments of lyrical commentary or soliloquy. Rena’s punk trio’s statement of intent upon reaching Antarctica is a high-point, as is his touching duet with Reeder, and Foley's penguin parade is like a demented Dick Van Dyke from Mary Poppins.

Roy (Marie Botha, seated) with walrus henchman (Yagil Eliraz, Patrick Foley, Rebecca Hampe) and silhouettes of Rena (Ricardo Davila) and Linda (Emily Reeder) (photo: Kristian Rasmussen)

The show’s strength derives from the very capable clowning on view from an ensemble (Eliraz, Hampe, Foley) adept at silly voices and inhabiting cut-outs of creatures, and from Dávila’s remarkable Rena, played in non-campy drag, and somehow managing a rather heavy-handed treatise on the best way to abuse class divisions in the democratic process. Botha’s Roy is a fierce portrait of the kind of sociopath always capable of mirroring some portion of the American electorate. By way of characterization, Hall gives him a rambling discourse of disconnected white trash memories and a recurring dream—for him, too horrible to relate—of a french fry drowned in a tsunami of ketchup. As the driven Linda, Reeder seethes with a comic hostility that makes her appear, by the end, more power-mad than her unstable employers.

The transitions between the many, many short scenes—some a bit too similar in tone and pace—undermine the presentation at times, since simple blackouts can’t always suffice to get us from one scene to the next. The cast is game and nimble and to be commended for keeping so many creatures—penguins, seals, whales, etc.—distinct. And for making this varied visit through the unreclaimed id of our national psyche come alive with an oxymoronic sense of epic skit-comedy. Puppets and costumes by Sarah Nietfeld, including the penguin headgear used to surprisingly expressive effect, do much to set the tone, while set (An-Lin Dauber) and lighting (Andrew F. Griffin) work hard to establish—instantaneously—a variety of settings and events. The ending is a frantic case in point, as all levels of story and allegory converge in a moment that aims for the catharsis of being put on the spot.

Deceptively silly, Antarctica! Which is to Say Nowhere is angry as all true satire is, but, as theater, might benefit from a bit of Olympian laughter. But then, the show doesn’t make us laugh at ourselves so much as make us wonder why we’re able to laugh at all.

Antarctica! Which is to Say Nowhere
Based on Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry
By Miranda Rose Hall
Directed by Elizabeth Dinkova

Costume and Puppet Designer: Sarah Nietfeld; Set Designer: An-Lin Dauber; Sound Designer & Composer: Christopher Ross-Ewart; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Production Manager/Technical Director: William Hartley; Stage Manager: Cailin O’Rourke; Production Dramaturg: Gavin Whitehead; Run Crew: Ece Alpergun; Tap Dance Consultant: Leora Morris

Cast: Marié Botha; Ricardo Dàvila; Yagil Eliraz; Patrick Foley; Rebecca Sherman Hampe; Steven Lee Johnson; Emily Reeder

Yale Summer Cabaret
June 30-July 10, 2016

Go Ask Alice

Review of Alice in Wonderland, Yale Summer Cabaret

The Yale Summer Cabaret’s summer of Seven Deadly Sins has begun with a two-week run of Alice in Wonderland based on a energetic adaptation by the Manhattan Project.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass were always about coping with childhood. Charles Dodgson composed the tales to amuse a young girl with take-offs on “grown-up” behavior and the kinds of inspired nonsense that delights because it doesn’t try to instruct. As does this show, most adaptations combine elements of both stories—in the first, Alice goes down the rabbit hole after the White Rabbit, in the second, she goes through a mirror. In both, she encounters figures from common nursery rhymes and other characters less explicable. A later age might seek neurosis in Alice’s adventures, but Carroll’s text wreaks havoc with efforts to explicate the whimsy of the imagination.

As re-conceived by theater director Andre Gregory with the Manhattan Project, Alice takes on the tone of the old “the inmates run the asylum” trope, so that anyone supposedly rational, such as Alice, will be bedeviled by the willful inanity of her interlocutors. As adapted for the Yale Summer Cabaret by Co-Artistic Director Jesse Rasmussen, Gregory’s script gets revamped as an Alice facing gleefully playful playground theater. The show is deeply suggestive of the creativity—and the misgivings—that are part and parcel of childhood.

Alice (Sydney Lemmon) and cast members of Alice in Wonderland

As played by willowy Sydney Lemmon, Alice is full of a youthful curiosity and an engaging willingness to be engaged. She wants her oddball playmates to make sense and to be amusing and informative. And most of them—a companionable Rabbit (Paul Cooper), an acerbic Hatter (Ricardo Dávila), a haughty Caterpillar (Marié Botha), an eerie Cheshire Cat (Brontë England-Nelson), a vaporish Humpty Dumpty (Patrick Foley)—try to be. But the further Alice goes into what seems to be a dream-logic version of something she might have read, the less likely it is that anything will make sense to her satisfaction. Her mind plays tricks on her, seeming to make her a younger child again, sometimes tall, sometimes small, and often incapable of reciting rhymes the way she learned them. And some of the other characters might be leading her away from her studied innocence. By show’s end she may be done with make-believe altogether.

Staged with Haydee Antunano’s elegantly simple white costumes and Zoe Hurwitz’s backdrop of books painted white, Rasmussen’s vision of the show incorporates imaginary props—the way children playing often do—and devised moments, such as the Red Queen (Brontë England-Nelson) giving an arch rendering of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.” There’s inventiveness aplenty, and the figures who might have wisdom to impart—such as Botha’s stern (and stoned) Caterpillar, or Foley’s insecure Humpty Dumpty—turn out to be more in need of help than helpful. And that goes double for figures who might be expected to be authoritative, such as the White Queen (England-Nelson, in her most winning role) and the White Knight (Cooper). Led by Dávila’s slippery performance, the Mad Hatter’s tea party, as it should be, plays as the centerpiece with its lesson in how polite norms can be subverted, and how the art of conversation might be nothing more than a gift for entertaining non sequitur.

The show’s pace could pick up in some places and Rasmussen allows or encourages a few too many accents, where a more distinctive and less regional voice would do, but the real delight here is in the physicality of the show. Lemmon bends like a sapling and becomes acrobatic at times in her movement through a space peopled by the other cast members in a balletic frenzy of attitudes that is remarkably changeable.

Paul Cooper keeps his eye on the gravitas in the proceedings. He begins the show as Carroll narrating Alice's initial confusion, then takes part as the White Rabbit and others, to finally end up as the White Knight who tries to interest Alice in his inventions. With a somewhat Shakespearean song that pits odd activities against utterly absurd flights of fancy, the Knight draws from Alice her most emotive response. It’s as if she suddenly sees through the refusal to make sense and discovers how debilitating prolonged childhood can be.

Alice (Sydney Lemmon)

Gregory’s text ends with something like a coda, a cascade of words à la James Joyce (the last word in the coda is “and,” famously the last word of the Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s dream book, and that’s no coincidence I’m sure) that covers here the transition from the rabbit hole world to the book Alice reads. “Wonderland” may be the resources of her own imagination or the inspiration reading brings. In any case, the bizarre journey seems to take Alice to the cusp of young adulthood.

At the Criterion Cinema, Disney’s new version of Through the Looking Glass is playing. A sequel to the travesty of Alice in Wonderland already perpetrated by the world-wide hit the studio unleashed in 2010, the film, I have no doubt, is vastly inferior to the low budget, live action, basement staging at the Summer Cabaret. In this Alice, the special effects are all in our minds—and that’s fitting, for that’s ultimately where Alice lives.

Alice in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll’s classic as adapted by The Manhattan Projection under Andre Gregory
Directed by Jesse Rasmussen

Costume Designer: Haydee Antunano; Set Designer: Zoe Hurwitz; Sound Designer and Original Music: Frederick Kennedy; Lighting Designer: Krista Smith; Production/Technical Director: Alix Reynolds; Stage Manager: Caitlin O’Rourke; Dramaturg: Davina Moss; Choreographer: Emily Lutin

Cast: Marié Botha; Paul Cooper; Ricardo Dávila; Brontë England-Nelson; Patrick Foley; Sydney Lemmon

Yale Summer Cabaret 2016: Seven Deadly Sins

Jesse Rasmussen, Artistic Director; Elizabeth Dinkova, Artistic Director; Emily Reeder, Producing Director; Sam Linden, General Manager; Jordan Graf, Management Associate; Anna Belcher, Chef; Aaron Wegner, Design Associate

June 2-19, 2016