Recap of Cab 50

Yale Cabaret’s 50th Season, Some Highlights

The 50th Anniversary season of the Yale Cabaret has been and gone. Much thanks to its artistic directors, Josh Wilder and Francesca Fernandez McKenzie, associate artistic director Rory Pelsue, and its managing director Rachel Shuey for a challenging season.

Josh Wilder, Rachel Shuey, Francesca Fernandez McKenzie, Rory Pelsue

Cabaret 50 offered plenty of off-beat fare, in the sense of plays in which the performers stood in a theatrical space between fiction and fact. We might think that Reality TV is having an impact, likewise we might think that the irreality of our current political climate makes fiction, no matter its intentions, seem a bit escapist. So, even the shows this season that were pre-existing plays seemed to take their tone from the tensions of our time, perhaps to an unusual degree.

Or maybe not. The way we—or each member of the audience—experiences what gets done before our eyes onstage takes its tone from our own conflicts, I expect. It seems to me that the Yale School of Drama students making theater in the basement at 217 Park Street in 2017-18 were particularly aware of the conflicts.

Here’s my own individually chosen favorite bits, in thirteen categories, with shows listed in chronological order but for my top choice, the choices in no way reflective of the views of any existing or imagined demographic.

Speaking of pre-existing plays, here are five I’m glad Cab 50 tackled:
Re:Union by Sean Devine (proposed by Wladimiro A. Woyno R.): Violent protest of the Vietnam War era and the sins of the fathers, including the bland bureaucrat Robert McNamara, is visited upon the next generation
This Sweet Affliction by Blake Hackler (proposed by Stephanie Machado): Treats comically the scary social effects of vying for attention and acting out
The Ugly One by Marius von Mayenburg (proposed by Lucie Dawkins): Plays fast and loose with our desire to be the most desired one in the room
Camille, A Tearjerker by Charles Ludlam (proposed by Michael Breslin and Molly FitzMaurice): Finesses a mix of melodrama and comedy in the name of Ridiculous Theater
and . . . Mud by María Irene Fornés (proposed by Danielle Chaves): A harrowing and uncomfortable allegory of how our bodies betray us

In the new play arena, some unusual offerings that lived up to the Cab’s brief of experiment and exploration:
Fuck Her by Genne Murphy: Call it science-fiction burlesque, a tale of a future where procreation by copulation is a status service
the feels… (kms) by Jeremy O. Harris: A script of inspired self-excoriation and abrasive ideas for ending it all
the light is… by Jake Ryan Lozano: A fascinating combination of poetic words and interpretive movements in atmospheric lighting
The Guadalupes by Noah Diaz: A funny, touching, and awkward remembrance play as real as anything onstage can be
and . . . This American Wife by Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley: The foley à deux of two gay guys who find the meaning of life in the bad behavior of televised housewives as a way of unmasking/masking themselves

Tech. Where would we be without it? These remarkably talented people do surprising work in a basement. Everyone who undertakes that task earns our gratitude. The samples here are simply those I can most readily call to mind.

Scenic Design:
Ao Li, The Apple Tree: Eden as a clean, white, well-lighted place . . . with a curtain
Sarah Nietfeld, This Sweet Affliction: Uniting the Cab space with several locales to up the intimacy
Gerardo Díaz Sánchez, Mud: Creating a simple but memorably derelict space
Emma Weinstein, Camille: Turning the entire Cab into a boudoir with a stage at the center
And . . . Stephanie Osin Cohen, Ni Mi Madre: A beach, a memory space, a museum, a shrine (and, oh, the colors)

Costumes:
Matthew Malone, The Apple Tree: From the white shorts & white first formal of innocence to the red everyday wardrobe of shame, plus one helluva snake suit
Stephanie Bahniuk, For Your Eyes Only: What the creative sex worker wears depends on the task at hand, with much showing and suggesting
April Hickman, Non-Character Player: Avatars dress for success (with props by Alexander McCargar) to add to the ambiance of the virtual world
Alicia Austin, Camille: Dress-up taken to the extremes of a fantasy-world of fashion, both comic and lovely
And … Beatrice Vena, Fuck Her: A future where clothes make the client and the client chooses the look

Lighting Design:
Krista Smith, with Emma Deane, The Apple Tree: A range of effects for this fanciful musical’s trajectory
Erin Earle Fleming, the feels… (kms): When the action is everywhere, even in the audience
Dakota Stipp, the light is… : The light, and the dark, as expressive elements with subtle cues
Emma Deane, Wolf/Alice: Gothic, moody, fascinating
And … Evan Anderson, One Big Breath: From shadow forms to indoors/outdoors spaces to in your face

Video/projections:
Wladimiro A. Woyno R., with Brittany Bland, Re:Union: Many events in the past exist for us as video; in this play, the action of the present took on the “pastness” of video
Erin Sullivan, The Guadalupes: Video here becomes a kind of self-surveillance, in an in-between theatrical space of public/private
Brittany Bland, Sea Witch: Opaque shadow-puppet foregrounds over colorful transparencies to create bewitching visuals
Christopher Evans, Jack Wesson, Non-Character Player: When theater becomes a virtual, digital space, and vice versa
And … Brittany Bland & Wladimiro A. Woyno R.; Michael Breslin; Amauto Marston-Firmino, This American Wife: The edited video from the television show provided context, the video within the performance, expressive device

Sound Design:
Megumi Katayama, One Big Breath: Total environmental theater with a varied soundstage
Frederick Kennedy, Re:Union: An interplay of video and live sound, including historical enactments and interpolations
Kathy Ruvuna, Sea Witch: Foley and musical effects, to create a textured aural backdrop in this wordless narrative
Roxy Jia, Megumi Katayama, Non-Character Player: What’s a digital video game without sound effects?
And … Liam-Bellman Sharpe, The Ugly One: Live Foley as a performance to the side of the main performance, which included onsite video

Music:
Frederick Kennedy, Liam Bellman-Sharpe, Mud: Moody background sounds that worked to focus us on the surprising events in Fornés’ world
Michael Costagliola, Hey Secret Service… A brave stand-up, proto-musical revue that considers the vexed relation between our twit(terer) of a president and the cultures of guns and of theater, and trumps its penciveness with wit and humor
Sylvia D’Eramo, Roxy Jia, Wolf/Alice: The singing by D’Eramo was stunning, the use of music atmospheric and eerie
Liam Bellman-Sharpe, Camille: Bellman-Sharpe is the great in-the-wings performer of Cab 50; here, at the piano, he added immeasurably to the play’s effectiveness
And … Jill Brunelle, music director, with Jenny Schmidt and Emily Sorenson; music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, sung by Erron Crawford, Danilo Gambini, Courtney Jamison, The Apple Tree: I often say I’m not the target audience for musicals, but when they’re directed by Rory Pelsue I change my tune, and Jill Brunelle is the maestro of musical adaptations for the Cab. Bravo!

Choreography:
Shadi Ghaheri, One Big Breath: The season opened with a memorable dance routine done by shadows with Jakeem Powell stealing the show
Ensemble, This Sweet Affliction: A topflight group of actresses as cheerleaders, strutting their stuff
Jake Ryan Lozano, the light is…: The range of emotions that movement and music inspires finds its focus in the many mute gestures of these mini-dramas of dance
Michael Breslin, Arturo Soria, Camille: An orchestration of movement—duels, dances, entrances/exits—very colorful and busy
And…Yasin (Ya-Ya) Fairley, Commissioned Choreographer, with Alex Vermilion and Chelsea Siren, For Your Eyes Only: Choreography, as dance, is only part of it; Vermilion’s show walked a fine line on the wild side, where every move is part of an elaborate fantasy trying to be reality, or vice versa

Acting takes many forms. One of its forms is a well-executed merging of a range of characters that feels as satisfying as a good band that’s got it together . . . Ensembles:
This Sweet Affliction, Stella Baker, Marié Botha, Patricia Fa’asua, Courtney Jamison, Rachel Kenney, Stephanie Machado (directed by Francesca Fernandez McKenzie): A group of girls, plus a few adults, coming apart, coping, not coping in a sharp social satire
the feels… (kms), Abubakr Ali, Michael Breslin, Patricia Fa’asua, Amandla Jahava, Jakeem Powell: A mercurial troupe acting out the different strands of a darkly comic use of theater as coping mechanism
The Ugly One, Danilo Gambini, Steven Johnson, Patrick Madden, Emily Reeder (directed by Lucie Dawkins): A frenetic collective caught up in the before-and-after benefits of radical surgery
Enter Your Sleep, JJ McGlone, Ciara McMillian (directed by Rachel Shuey): A two-hander that puts a pair of actors through their paces in a series of free-associated character turns
And . . . the light is…, Marié Botha, Shadi Ghaheri, Louisa Jacobson, James Udom, Seta Wainiqolo, Curtis Williams: I’m not sure what it was all about but I’d watch this group of actors read from the want-ads; here, they inspired a range of emotions in intricate choreography worked out by the cast and creator Jake Ryan Lozano, with a riveting Cab debut by Williams

Individual performances, because all roles aren’t created equal:

For playing his larger-than-life mother as himself or vice versa: Arturo Soria in Ni Mi Madre
For being both uncomfortably ugly and commandingly attractive, without benefit of make-up in either case: Patrick Madden in The Ugly One
For a scary yet pitiful version of toxic masculinity: Devin White in Mud
For a dream role as a dying diva in this period life: Michael Breslin in Camille
And … for letting us in and letting (some of) us have it, while working the slippery line between truth and appearance: Patrick Foley in This American Wife

For charming the first man, the serpent, and us (her children): Courtney Jamison in The Apple Tree
For hard truths and hard lessons handed down from the fathers: Louisa Jacobson in Re:Union
For a funny and chilling lesson in what happens when a theater person gets rejected (good thing she was an actress, not a dramaturg): Stephanie Machado in This Sweet Affliction
For a dream role as a mercurial and devious diva: Antoinette Crowe-Legacy in Fuck Her
And … for existential truth in its hunger, need, and abject beauty: Danielle Chaves in Mud

Directing, because someone has to be in charge:
Rory Pelsue, The Apple Tree: For a touching and amusing evocation of the pleasures of old-fashioned sexism set to music
Lucie Dawkins, The Ugly One: For finding the tone of absurdist satire for an image-conscious world
Emma Weinstein, The Guadalupes: For showing real life and real death in one life, almost as it happened
Molly FitzMaurice: Camille, A Tearjerker: For unleashing a cross-dressed extravaganza of wild indulgence
And … Patrick Madden, Mud: For rendering one of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking plays of the season

And, for overall production (or, simply, the shows I liked best overall):
The Apple Tree, producer Gwyneth Muller, dramaturg Molly FitzMaurice, Stage Manager Abby Gandy: A relentlessly entertaining and tuneful version of how we went from Eden to domesticity to death
This American Wife, producers Melissa Rose & Lucy Bacqué, dramaturgs Ariel Sibert & Catherine María Rodriguez, stage manager Olivia Plath: Ever-reflective reflection on how we like to imagine ourselves through others
This Sweet Affliction, producer Caitlin Volz, dramaturg Rory Pelsue, stage manager Sarah Thompson: Great fun at the expense of our obsession with belonging to the in-group and becoming more famous than our friends
Camille, A Tearjerker, producer Sophie Siegl-Warren, dramaturg Catherine María Rodriguez, stage manager Madeline Charne: A multivalent gender study and an entertaining exercise in flamboy/girlant acting
And … Mud, producer Leandro Zaneti, dramaturg Nahuel Telleria, stage manager Olivia Plath: A rich and mysterious play, Old School but undimmed

So, fifty years. Let’s see where they go from here…

The team for Cab 51 will be Artistic Directors Molly FitzMaurice and Latiana Gourzong and Managing Director Armando Huipe. There will be no Yale Summer Cabaret for 2018.

Much gratitude to all who took part in Cab 50 and in signature events like the 3rd Satellite Festival and the 5th “Dragaret.”

Yale Cabaret
2017-18

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