Eggs and Bones

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

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

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

About the shows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more info, tickets, donation: here.

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

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

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

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

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

For more info, tickets, donation: here

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

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

Get your tickets now!

And One to Grow On

Everyone knows that fairy tales are often cautionary stories, told to amuse children and to warn them, in make-believe fashion, about the pitfalls of life. Granted, it’s life with an uncanny edge to it and I suspect that more than one child has grown-up rather disappointed that real life isn’t like that. Meg Miroshnik’s The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls takes us to a world that is like that—but it’s not just any world, it’s specifically 2005 in the former Soviet Socialists Republic of Russia, and that means that while her heroine Annie is trying to go about her business of re-russifying her Russian (it’s “rust” now, she says), she is met both with the folkloric elements of fairy tale—such as the well-known “wicked witch” figure called Baba Yaga who eats little children, cooking them in her big warm oven (of course), and who also suffers the curse of aging a year every time she is asked a question—and the realities of the “fairy tale” of a capitalist Russia. The combination of the two means that this is a weird world, where bears and tsars, to say nothing of whores and high fashion, are just part of the landscape, where the great desiderata is an apartment of one’s own “in the center” and where Prince Charming, for any Cinderella up from the ashes, is apt to be one of Russia’s newly constituted millionaires.

One of the strengths of this magical and compelling show is that we don’t quite know where it’s going. “Happily ever after” is generally the ending of fairy tales, but there’s a lot to get through to get there. And, in the end, you might disappear like you were never here.

What the play is best at—the mix of the contemporary and the fantastic—the staging at the Rep, in Christopher Ash’s bold and imaginative set design and Chad Raines’ varied sound design, brings to the fore, with doors that rise up from the floor, with a basket of potatoes that gets ambulatory, with a bone-crunching sound every time Baba Yaga (Felicity Jones) cringes at a question, with the ability to suggest a Russian disco, a shack in the woods, an entrance way between two apartments with shape-shifting alacrity, and, especially, with the storied and creepy clutter of Baba Yaga’s lair.

That’s where Annie (Emily Walton) stays because the lair is “really” the apartment of Annie’s Aunt Yaroslava, and Annie was sent there by her mother Olga (Jessica Jelliffe, in heavily-accented Russian-American speak) who ran off from Russia in the 1990s to escape antisemitism. Now, Olga sends her daughter back and, by the rules of fairy tale, that must mean there’s a score to settle. Kindly old Aunt Yaroslava, who hates questions, just loves fattening up her wide-eyed American niece . . .

If you’ve ever read fairy tales to children, then you probably know how much fun it is to play the wicked witch or godmother, and here Felicity Jones (always a pleasure) has the choice role of Baba Yaga/Yaroslava. She’s crafty, creepy, full of the unctiousness of the guardian who is looking after her charge with, all the while, that sense of her own agenda that is so obvious and yet so unreal. Jones is actually sympathetic if only because Annie is so trustingly clueless, in the best tradition of Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks. Either that dyevushka better get some sense (or grow some balls) or she deserves her place in auntie’s entrails.

As Annie, Walton does the “gosh and gee willikers” Shirley Temple bit fine but she never quite modulates into a knowing grasp of things, despite a make-over scene that shows off the resources of KJ Kim’s costumes. The what’s-what is left to her posse of grrrls; in director Rachel Chavkin’s hands, they’re like a mash-up of the Spice Girls and Pussy Riot, the punk styling of the latter provided (were there were more!) via composer Chad Raines, with the girls as a band off to the side, Greek chorus style.

Best at making Miroshnik’s tight lines zing is Stéphanie Hayes; she scores as Nastya, the voice of knowing negativity and a whore who, while not having exactly a heart-of-gold, is pressed into service by Annie as a “fairy godmother.” A high point is her telling of one of the Zavyetniye Skazki, or “forbidden folktales” in which a domestic (and patriarchal) “just-so” story becomes, in her hands, a story worthy of the feminist revisionism we should expect. And it’s great to see her pound those drums.

As Katya, Celeste Arias handles the Spice Girls part of the equation. She’s your basic gold-digger, c. 2005, with a cigarette-inflected voice and impossibly long bare legs atop impossibly high shoes, looking like she’s waiting to teeter into a bed owned by whoever has the most bread. It’s her fixation on “the Other Katya,” her sugar daddy’s daughter (Hayes again, with an expression like sweet dessert), that might be her undoing.

Then there’s Masha (Sofiya Akilova) as somewhere in between: she’s basically your put-upon girl-with-a-guy, and she still just wants to have fun, and maybe go to school. She tends to get the unenviable exposition role, but her tale of “Masha and the Bear” opens the show with a convincing sense of how a fairy tale can modulate into just another hard luck story you’re going to hear. And she totally rocks those red thigh-highs.

So, a self-centered Aunt who only appears to be looking out for you; or a friend who is married to a bear of a guy who abuses her and might even kill her; or another friend who is actually having an affair with the father of a girl she has befriended; or a parent who gives her child a task that will either lead to a sense of self-reliance, or make her a victim forever. These are situations that could happen anywhere, and their upshot is that there’s a time, everywhere, when “girls” have to become “adults.”

Miroshnik keeps the juggling between reality and fairy tale nimble and surprising, and Chavkin’s production lets both realms exist in the audience’s imagination, though at times it needs to be a bit more breathless. In the quick change world of The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls, we find that the old stories do indeed work in our contemporary world, and that girls will triumph—over their female elders and males (no real member of either group was actually harmed in the telling of this play)—if only they stick together and face facts, no matter how bizarre or hard to believe, and are willing to study things like cybernetics and mathematics.

As Annie reflects, Dorothy-like, late in the play: “Sometimes adults have to do things that are really effing hard!”

The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls By Meg Miroshnik Directed by Rachel Chavkin

Scenic Designer: Christopher Ash; Costume Designer: KJ Kim; Lighting Designer: Bradley King; Composer, Music Director, Sound Designer: Chad Raines; Vocal and Dialect Coach: Jane Guyer Fujita; Fight Director: Rick Sordelet; Production Dramaturg: Amy Boratko; Casting Director: Tara Rubin; Stage Manager: Hannah Sullivan; Photographs by Joan Marcus, courtesy of Yale Repertory Theatre

Yale Repertory Theatre January 31-February 22, 2014

Life at the Cabaret

The Yale Cabaret 2010-11 Season ended in April, and today a cohort of talents graduated from the Yale School of Drama, where most Cab participants are students, so I’d like to take a moment to commend some highpoints of the Cab's recent season, citing the work of some who have taken their final bow there, and of others who might be back. For best overall productions, four original plays, relying on great ensemble work: Good Words, written by Meg Miroshnik, directed by Andrew Kelsey, a movingly musical valedictory treatment of a long life; Vaska Vaska, Glöm, written by Stéphanie Hayes, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, an odd allegorical play, both endearing and unnerving; Erebus and Terror, developed by the ensemble from an idea by Alexandra Henrikson, directed by Devin Brain, a dark but lively play about doomed lives; and Trannequin!, conceived by the ensemble, with Book by Ethan Heard and Martha Jane Kaufman, directed by Ethan Heard, a clever and engaging gender-bending musical; and a notable ensemble production of an already existing work: Alex Mihail’s kick-ass, raucous version of Anton Chekhov’s The Wedding Reception.

For memorable performances, I have to start by citing Max Gordon Moore’s tour de force one-man show as the librarian with an idée fixe in Under the Lintel

Trai Byers’ affecting performance as an old man revisiting his life at his son’s funeral in Good Words

Babak Gharaeti-Tafti, as a passionate wedding guest in The Wedding Reception, and as a nonconformist in The Other Shore

Lucas Dixon as the hilarious special guest at The Wedding Reception, and Brett Dalton’s comic double roles in Debut Track One.

Of the ladies: Alexandra Henrikson’s edgy Harper in Far Away

Adina Verson for her comic flair in pleasureD, and, for sheer oddity, her performance in a barrel of water in Vaska Vaska, Glöm; Stéphanie Hayes for her frenetic part in pleasureD and as a young male Irish deckhand, in Erebus and Terror

Sarah Sokolovic, swaddled in rags, in Vaska Vaska, Glöm, and giddy and singing in The Wedding Reception; and Alexandra Trow, intelligent and naïve, as Pepper in Debut Track One.

And what about the ingenuity of transforming a basement into whatever the play demands?  Particularly effective work in Sets: Meredith Ries’ cluttered library backroom in Under the Lintel

Julia C. Lee’s doomed ship in Erebus and Terror, aided by Alan C. Edwards’ moody and evocative Lighting

Justin Elie’s visually rich radio studio in The Musicality Radio Hour; Adam Rigg’s dollhouse world for  pleasureD

and, especially, the combined talents of Kristen Robinson, Meredith Ries, Adam Rigg, with Lighting by Hannah Wasileksi and Masha Tsimring, for the fascinatingly ornate aesthetic of Dorian Gray’s puppetshow.

And for transforming students into what is required, some memorable work in Costumes: Aaron P. Mastin for the period sailors in Erebus and Terror; Maria Hooper for the Victorian dress of both people and puppets in Dorian Gray; Summer Lee Jack for the Brecht-meets-Beckett world of Vaska Vaska, Glöm

and for the truly awful threads sported by the ‘80s-era wedding guests in The Wedding Reception.

For Sound: Junghoon Pi for the aural embellishments of The Other Shore; Palmer for the different aural registers of Debut Track One, and Ken Goodwin’s Sound Design and Elizabeth Atkinson’s Foley work in The Musicality Radio Hour.

And for Music: the inspiring vocals provided by Taylor Vaughn-Lasley, Christina Anderson, Sunder Ganglani, and Nehemiah Luckett in Good Words Pierre Bourgeois’s lively shanties in Erebus and Terror; the inspired songs of Trannequin!, by Ethan Heard, Max Roll, Brian Valencia, and Tim Brown; the Zappa-esque musical work of The Elastic Notion Orchestra in The Musicality Radio Hour; and the performative percussionists, Yun-Chu Chiu, John Corkill, Michael McQuilken, Ian Rosenbaum, Adam Rosenblatt in The Perks.

That’s all for this year—stay tuned for info on The Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival, starting next month!

Photos copyright Nick Thigpen, courtesy of Yale Cabaret

The Children's Hour

Once upon a time there were three YSD actresses—a third year (the tall one), a first year (the small one), and a second year (the medium-sized one)—and they lived together in a little room with a sink on one side, a toilet on the other, and a bench in between.  There was also a little door to come and go through and some pictures on the wall. These three actresses were really children and never spoke to one another.  Their time was spent in pantomime and songs.  Each had routines and the routine each had in common was tooth-brushing.  At first it made the tall one weep, but later she did it orgiastically, with liberal lather.  It was not unlike her dance routine upon the toilet, waiting for that liberating splash.  For the small one, the toothbrush was a bullhorn, and brought on a kind of oral/aural seizure.  And for the middle one, the toothbrush was a seductive partner at a dance.

And so the three lived and played and did little tasks—peeling a potato, going to confession, folding laundry—and sang nonsense songs and lip-synched and danced, and mimicked love scenes from Gone With The Wind, From Here to Eternity, and It’s a Wonderful Life.

A big box was delivered to each and contained something important, maybe even something each needed.  For the middle one, the box held a little box she could wear, with clouds inside; for the tall one, the box gave her a light that touched her heart and sent her on wings toward heaven; for the small one, the box held a power drill that got stuck in the wall.

All three actresses have considerable comic skills: the tall one recently played Dogberry in a YSD production of Much Ado About Nothing and was very funny; here she was the sister with the most anxiety and the tears of a clown; the small one had fewer routines but she liked phallic things, like a big, thick dildo and that power drill; the middle one was the most endearing, enacting cute sock puppets making love, or giving out a succession of mouth farts.

Everything they did gave them pleasure or recalled pleasures or, like the cackling baby who was really a vacuum-cleaner, created a sense of the pleasure things have in giving pleasure to humans.  And that’s why the play was called pleasureD.

The Yale Cabaret, where these three actresses performed, will be dark now until March 24-26.  And then there will be a new play and it will be a musical, about a mannequin who might be a boy or might be a girl or might be both, called Trannequin.

pleasureD, conceived, created, and performed by a trio of YSD actresses

The Yale Cabaret, Feb. 17-19

The Ship of Death

Oh build your ship of death, your little arkand furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine for the dark flight down oblivion.--D. H. Lawrence, “The Ship of Death"

How do they do it?  How does the Yale Cabaret take a story of utter desperation—the doomed expedition of the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, under the command of Sir John Franklin, in search of the Northwest Passage in the Arctic Ocean in 1845—and make an entertaining evening of it?

Maybe it’s because director Devin Brain heads to the dark side the way most kids go to their favorite playground, and because the ensemble cast are clearly having so much fun in this dire tale of dwindling hopes.  And maybe it’s because the many tunes in the show, sea shanties like “What do you do with a drunken sailor?” and jigs like “The Rocky Road to Dublin,” are so irrepressibly infectious.

Conceived by Alexandra Henrikson, who is luminous as Franklin’s indefatigable wife back home, resolutely refusing to consider herself his widow, Erebus and Terror is credited to the cast, and that could be why the parts seem so perfect for each actor: Max Gordon Moore, clipped and distinguished as Officer Downing; Ben Horner, swarthy and bawdy as Ferry (his eager pursuit of Lady Death is a high-point, to say nothing of dining upon the deceased Downing); Andrew Kelsey as Oxford, a sympathetic bloke who gives an effective delivery of the seductive speech of Titania to “translated” Bottom in the crew’s impromptu enactment of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Stéphanie Hayes, skittish and fearful as Paddy, a young Irish lad (her shrieks of joy from the crow’s nest have a “top of the world, ma” feel); Dipika Guha, wide-eyed and mesmerized as Fin, a mate going “off his tit,” and Irene Sofia Lucio, as Timmy, or Kid, the youngest and most comical of the swabbies.  Add Pierre Bourgeois’s songs, richly evocative of the world of these seamen, all bound—in a string of distinctive endings—for Davey Jones’ Locker, and you’ve got the main elements for a successfully gripping show, supported by Ken Goodwin’s watery sound effects, by Lighting Designer Alan C. Edwards’ dramatic variations of light and dark that, playing on Aaron P. Mastin’s authentic costumes, put me in mind of Rockwell Kent’s nautical drawings, and, through the exit door that was opened a few times as part of Julia C. Lee’s set, by mounds of snow provided by Nature, making the effort to imagine the frozen wastes surrounding the ship that much easier.

Have you built your ship of death, O have you? O build your ship of death, for you will need it.

Erebus and Terror, Songs of Ghosts and Dreams Conceived by Alexandra Henrikson; Written and Created by the Ensemble January 13-15, 2011; Thurs, 8 p.m.; Fri. & Sat., 8 p.m. & 11 p.m. The Yale Cabaret

Something Fishy

Vaska Vaska, Glöm, the third show of the Yale Cabaret’s season was written by an acting student, Stéphanie Hayes, and directed by second year directing student Lileana Blain-Cruz.  Blain-Cruz directed last year’s Cab show Salome, based on the Oscar Wilde play, and I’m beginning to wonder if she has a thing about fish. In Salome, Seamus Mulcahy swallowed a live goldfish at each performance.  In Vaska, Adina Verson, as Fiska, a girl who lives in a barrel of water, chows down on a whole fish each performance, a fish seemingly raw but actually smoked.  The moment is a bit unsettling: young Fiska strains upward from her barrel, blackened teeth dismembering the meal proffered by her two guardians, Hedda (Mulcahy again, playing a woman this time) and Ulli (Sarah Sokolovic).

The two women live in some remote Scandinavian area, apparently, where they lead a simple peasant existence, washing sheets and engaging in vaguely Beckettian rituals (one involved Ulli watching a video tape of a young woman enjoying a lake, which seems to quiet Ulli’s primal angst).  Hedda clues us in on their lives by commencing a story in which a pregnant woman shows up at their door (which looks like a door on a ship or sub), demands they act as midwives and, after delivery, requests that Hedda and Ulli destroy the child as the woman goes on her way.  The two elders can’t do it, instead they name the child Fiska and put her in a barrel of water where she thrives, except for those unfortunate teeth.

The charmingly odd duo make for doting if simple-minded parents and Fiska is a rather uncanny child, so there’s a likeable and quite watchable rapport on display for this segment of the play (feeding time notwithstanding), until the guardians decide it’s time Fiska found a mate.  And who should appear at the door but Horace, “the only guy in town,” a one-legged fisherman who woos Fiska twice.  The first time he’s got to go away again before he can claim his prize, and by the second time Fiska is starting to fade and can barely remember what happened moments ago.  Nothing deterred, Horace (Fisher Neal) overcomes her misgivings and carries the day.  This segment provides the most drama because the interchanges between Horace and Fiska were appealingly forthright and because, in a tale this strange, a love story gives us familiar rooting interest.

We then return to the rituals of Hedda and Ulli we began with, only now with the difference that we understand their sadness was motivated by the loss of their little fish-gobbling, aquatic charge.  Enter pregnant woman Number Two whom Ulli identifies as the woman from the video tape.  Unfortunately, her child is stillborn and so she takes Fiska’s place in the barrel.  It’s about this point that I found myself thinking of William Blake’s poem “The Mental Traveller” with its repetition and concluding line “and all is done as I have told” – I fully expected the play to end with the repetition with a difference, but not so.

Instead Minna (Hannah Rae Montgomery) launces into what seems a trance-delivered rant, bringing to mind Lucky’s monologue in Godot, which is to say the speech has plenty of non-sequiturs and bits that run on to no appreciable purpose.  Hedda and Ulli sit spellbound until the verbal torrent stops (it seemed about ten minutes) then in unison depart, only to appear on the TV where they enter the lake.

I think I was with it until Minna’s babble began, at which point we’d been in this somewhat grotesque environment for a quite a while and I had a sense of the play groping for an ending.  Further, Mulcahy and Sokolovic were fascinating to watch the first time through but rather less when we came back around to where we started.  And yet, I couldn’t help feeling that we needed to turn the big wheel to get to where we had to go.

If Blain-Cruz’s Salome and Vaska have taught me anything, it’s that this director is not going to let you out the door until you feel somewhat uncomfortable, possibly bored, and almost certainly surprised by something you see, often involving fish.

Vaska Vaska, Glöm; written by Stéphanie Hayes; directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz

Yale Cabaret, Sept. 30-Oct. 2, 2010