The Shut In Season

Preview, under quarantine

In the poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” W. B. Yeats imagines a golden bird that will sing “to lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past, or passing, or to come.” In these days when the numbers of those contracting the coronavirus and those dying from it are still escalating, there’s a large margin of uncertainty about what is “to come.” And in the midst of so many pronouncements about what is best and what will make things worse, it seems vain, in a sense, to write about the present as anything more than “what is passing.” About “what is past” we can be clear: for theater in CT, any hope of salvaging the remainder of the 2019-20 season is “past.” What’s “passing,” it seems now, are hopes for a return to normality in fall 2020. And to come? Well, for the moment we’ll just content ourselves with what’s available online and what may arrive, in time.

It’s been over a month since I was at a public event. That event, on March 11, was the Long Wharf Theatre’s announcement of its 2020-21 season, covered here by Lucy Gellman at the Arts Paper. On that evening, Long Wharf Artistic Director Jacob Padrón was still optimistic that the theater’s next production of the 2019-20 season, Lloyd Suh’s The Chinese Lady, directed by Ralph B. Peña, would run. Over the next few weeks, as stricter and stricter “shelter in place” directives were given, Broadway theaters shuttered, and restaurants in our area went to take-out and delivery only, the possibilities for theater resuming went from passing to past. Long Wharf cancelled its remaining shows, which included Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap, directed by Madeline Sayet. At Hartford Stage, a fine production of Jane Eyre, directed and adapted by Elizabeth Williamson, closed early, and David Seidler’s The King’s Speech, directed by Michael Wilson, was cancelled. The production of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!, directed by Artistic Director Maria Bensussen, originally scheduled for May, has been moved to the fall, October 22-November 15, and The Complete History of Comedy (Abridged), written and directed by Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor, originally scheduled for June, will take place October 1-11. Thus the last two shows of the 2019-20 season will run in 2020, followed by the annual production of A Christmas Carol (November 27-December 27). The 2020-21 season will then begin in January. Padrón and Bensussen, the respective Artistic Directors of Long Wharf and Hartford Stage, will be talking with longtime theater critic Frank Rizzo tonight about the current situation and their visions as new ADs at vibrant local theaters in challenging times. Go here, for the virtual edition of A Little Harmless Fun, on the website of the Mark Twain House & Museum, at 7 p.m.

The very day of the Long Wharf gathering, Yale Repertory Theatre announced, after Yale University determined it would not resume classes on campus after spring break (which ran until March 22nd), the premature end of its season, thus canceling a revival of A Raisin in the Sun, directed by Carl Cofield, and Testmatch by Kate Atwell, directed by Margot Bordelon; that announcement also meant that the final appearances onstage by students at the Yale School of Drama for spring 2020 had already occurred.

The last theatrical production I saw—Van Gogh Café at Yale Cabaret—marked the last show that will be held in the venerable basement space this season. The Cabaret, however, is not out of commission entirely. This weekend, April 17 & 18, Ain’t No Dead Thing, an original play written and directed by a.k. payne which was slated as one of the last three shows of the season, will air as a radio play, at 8 p.m. both nights. Information for tuning in can be found here. The Cab has devised its own station—KCAB—where a DJ named darealunluckymadman plays music amidst other events. The play, presented in partnership with FOLKS, is set “against the backdrop of one of the largest race massacres in U.S. history” in the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. At a diner called Noa’s Ark, folks gather to envision a future for Blacks in America. The Cab’s site describes a radio play as “a dramatized, acoustic performance that allows listeners to imagine the characters and visual elements of a story through dialogue, music, and sound effects. In this moment of constant communication via Zoom, checking the news, and streaming videos, radio plays give us a break from the screen and ask us to focus on language.”

Westport Country Playhouse, which generally runs its season from spring to late fall, announced on Tuesday that it will not mount any productions until 2021. “We hope our audience will understand and support this very emotional and challenging decision,” said Mark Lamos, Playhouse artistic director, in a statement, “but we, like our sister non-profit theaters and arts organizations world-wide, feel that the predicted future is too unknowable at this point.” The first program in the Playhouse’s virtual series airs on Friday, April 17, at 7 p.m.: “Getting to Know You: A Celebration of Young Artists,” with Tony Award-winning Broadway star Kelli O’Hara, on the Playhouse YouTube channel and Facebook Live. Ten Fairfield County high school students will perform a musical theater selection and chat with O’Hara. More Playhouse-generated online events will be announced soon, here.

Just down the road from Westport, in Norwalk, Music Theater of Connecticut has been assessing the situation in order to find a date for its production of The Buddy Holly Story (if his songs don’t brighten your mood, I don’t know what will!). Originally scheduled for March, then postponed until May, the show, according to MTC’s latest announcement—on the 16th—will run from Friday, July 16, to Sunday, August 1. Kevin Connors, MTC’s Executive Artistic Director, in a release from the theater, adds: “MTC remains engaged through our online initiatives including the weekly MTC LIVE! (a new episode premieres on Facebook and at www.musictheatreofct.com/live every Wednesday at noon), our online MasterClass series this month, and our annual gala fundraiser THE MTC VOICE – ONLINE EDITION – coming up on May 9.” For more info about these and other programs, go here.

The Goodspeed Theater in East Haddam announced that its usual season of three musicals (which typically starts around this time) will be reduced to one in 2020: performances for the revival of South Pacific are scheduled to begin on Friday, September 11. The summer production of the new musical Anne of Green Gables will now move to the 2021 season. In the theater’s press release, dated April 9, Goodspeed Executive Director Michael Gennaro said, “It was heartbreaking for us to make the decision to postpone Anne of Green Gables, but it has become clear that we would not have enough time to build and rehearse the show in time for a summer opening. Our producing staff and the creative team both agree that launching a world-premiere musical takes special attention, which may not be possible until we are well past this crisis.”

The health crisis is of course impacting the economy in a drastic manner. Theaters are having to furlough and lay off employees, cancel events—such as fund-raising galas—and are losing important ticket revenues. Contributions are greatly needed and appreciated and are, in most cases, tax deductible.

On April 14, The International Festival of Arts & Ideas, in New Haven, announced its plans for the 25th season’s virtual programming: “We will celebrate our 25th anniversary with a variety of online artistic experiences, virtual food experiences, cell phone-guided walking tours, and various NEA Big Read activities. The virtual Ideas programming centered on the theme ‘Democracy: We the People’ will feature interactive events and conversations with vital thinkers, including 2012 Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco, award-winning scholar Dr. Khalilah L. Brown-Dean, NEA Big Read Author Stephanie Burt, and renowned writer Anand Giridharadas. All programming will be free.”

The statement further reads: “We are committed to the Festival's mission that arts and ideas bring people together and have a positive economic impact on New Haven. Virtual and physically distanced programming will begin online in the coming weeks on a rolling basis. Details will be announced weekly and will be shared on the Festival’s website.”

Here is a link to the International A&I onscreen announcement featuring Liz Fisher & Tom Griggs, Co-Directors of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas

So, tune into as much theater as you can, from wherever you happen to be. Stay safe, and obey your local government’s health protocols as we try to be a public in private spaces.

A Cafe with a Difference

Review of The Van Gogh Café, Yale Cabaret

FLOWERS, Ka.—For those passing through or living fulltime in the area, Van Gogh Café offers homey décor and comfort food galore. I mean, that Emmie Finckel has done wonders with the place. It’s a downhome oasis with sunny yellow walls, where Formica tables sit beside some with homemade wooden planks, where mismatched chairs of all descriptions abound, where a sturdy counter—presided over by Marc (Mihir Kumar), the proprietor—is apt to be peopled with regulars on a first-name basis, where assorted knick-knacks and bric-a-brac decorate the tables, the bathroom walls are adorned with painted hydrangeas, and the record player intuitively grasps the song you need to hear.

Clara (Shimali De Silva), Marc’s charming ten-year-old daughter, will take your order if you show up in the hour before school starts. With Marc somewhat conflicted about his lot in life, Clara is clearly the VGC’s biggest devotee, an enthusiast who finds every visitor a source of fascination and believes there’s an enduring magic in the walls of the café. Well, why not, the café was once a storied theater and who knows what feats have occurred there. For Clara, who might be nursing a hurt now that her mother has moved to New York, the possibilities of the place are endless, as anything might happen.

She may have a point, or at least that’s my takeaway from a recent visit. There were doings a-plenty. A source of considerable amusement was the way a stray gull had taken up residence on the roof, only to be befriended by Clara’s cat. The lovestruck feline kept snagging articles of clothing from Lon (Faizan Kareem), a hapless regular—a boot, a scarf, a glove—to award to the visiting bird. Eventually, a flock of gulls were hanging out there, only to be dispersed in a providential fashion through the agency of some passers-through, Kelly (Lily Haje) and Jack (Devin Matlock). The lady is an ornithologist, really!

That’s often the way things go around The Van Gogh Café, Clara insists, as, for instance the visit of the Fancy Lady (Jocelyn Knazik Phelps), a stranger who left behind some seeds that magically became gardenias which were, of course, the favorite flower of that aged actor (Danilo Gambini) who visited later, to recall his former glories and to await an old friend.

Events can sometimes be a little disconcerting—like a thunderstorm that knocked out the power and, according to Clara, made the food able to cook itself. Which was a good thing as Marc had a period there where he saw himself as a poet, a passion perhaps inspired by some changes in his romantic outlook. Then there’s the time Maria (Rebecca Kent)—she’s sort of a peremptory type, but really very nice—found herself face to face with her daughter, Ella (Jocelyn Knazik Phelps), who left years ago. And, guess what, she’s pregnant! So Maria gets to be a grandmother after all.

Meanwhile Sue (Lily Haje) and Ray (Nicholas Orvis) occasionally argue over nothing, but it’s worth it just to hear Sue get all agitated with that little piping voice she has. And did I mention the person at the table adjacent to me? A playwright (Taiga Christie) who wrote a lot at every visit—so, who knows, we may all be in a play one day. Kinda like that old Beatles song—“and though she feels as if she’s in a play / She is anyway.”

That’s the feeling at The Van Gogh Café, alright. Watch where you sit because the regulars have some chairs all to themselves, but there’s plenty of seats all around to catch the comings and goings (of which there are a lot!). I won’t say there’s never a dull moment—I mean, this is Kansas, after all—but the cheer is infectious, the locals likeable, the food not bad. (I had the Greek salad as a starter, then the roast turkey with mashed potatoes and green beans—all of which was very satisfying, but I found myself eyeing the fried mozz appetizer and the slab of meat loaf I saw on other plates). Marc, according to the regulars, burns pies more often than not, and there’s a general opinion that the lemon meringue isn’t up to what it was when his wife was on the premises. My slice was fine, though the crust was a bit heavy maybe. I hear that the coffee is much improved, though, and the waitstaff are like people you might see in a real play sometime. Speaking of actors, I’m really glad I got to see that old star’s visit. What a charming guy, so sweet and gracious! You’d never know the career he had, he was so humble. Very touching. That’s the kind of thing I’ll be dining out on for a while. Maybe even on that meat loaf . . .

Oh, and I should mention. The Café is open for dinner at 8 p.m. tonight and Saturday. It also offers a late night snack menu tonight (I guess since it’s a Friday it’s OK for Clara to be up that late.) And on Saturday, a brunch menu at noon. That features a menu and a show that schoolkids should appreciate, especially any that have an interest in theater. Like the Yale Cabaret—which has storied walls in its own right—The Van Gogh Café assumes that the magic of childhood extends into our joy in the arts, no matter how old we might be (I’m not saying—but I did know all the songs from the Sixties that record player played.)

There’s magic in theater, certainly. And there’s magic—theatrical and otherwise—at The Van Gogh Café. Get in on it while you can (like, before you grow up too much).

The Van Gogh Café
Proposed, directed and adapted by Emily Sorensen and Madeline Charne, based on the novel by Cynthia Rylant

Set Designer: Emmie Finckel; Costume Designer: Miguel Urbino; Lighting Designer: Tully Goldrick; Associate Lighting Designer: Matthew Sonnenfeld; Sound Designers: Liam Bellman-Sharpe & Bryan Scharenberg; Technical Director: David Phelps; Producers: Madeline Carey & Sarah Scafidi; Stage Manager: Zak Rosen

Cast: Taiga Christie, Shimali De Silva, Danilo Gambini, Lily Haje, Faizan Kareem, Rebecca Kent, Jocelyn Knazik Phelps, Mihir Kumar, Devin Matlock, Nicholas Orvis

Yale Cabaret
March 5-7, 2020

yalecabaret.org

The Choice Bits

Review of Cock, Yale Cabaret

The first thing you probably notice is that the stage set (by Lily Guerin) is a giant cage with four openings, one on each side, and with little seats attached to each corner. The next thing you probably notice is that the Yale Cabaret has new tables for the audience. Instead of round, they are long and rectangular, like the kind you might sit at to pass judgment. The audience is surrounding an arena where some kind of contest may take place. A cockfight, perhaps?

Cock by British playwright Mike Bartlett, directed by second-year director Alex Keegan, and proposed by John Evans Reese, who plays the only named character, John (the others are M, Daniel Liu; W, Zoe Mann; F, Thomas Pang, for Man, Woman, Father), sort of assumes that when you read or hear “cock,” you don’t automatically think of the two-legged, feathered creature. And that’s germane, certainly. But it’s also the case that a phrase like “the cock of the walk”—describing someone who struts around like he owns the place—may be implied. John is “the cock” here and as such he’s the prize to be fought over by his two lovers—M and W. The gist of it is that they discover this cock is something of a dick.

If that were all, that might be enough, but Bartlett seems to have a bit more on his mind, turning up the heat on the awkward dinner party trope and letting his characters get a bit unhinged, verbally, if not physically. The driving idea is sexual ambiguity as instanced when a member of a long-standing couple leaves that couple and opts for a lover that is not the same gender as the former lover. It may be that the locus classicus is a man, married to a woman, who, having already done the family bit, takes up with a man. Here, it’s the flip of that: John is with M; they seem to have hit a snag and John calls it quits, insisting that they are “fundamentally different” in how they approach life. While on his way to work one day, John is approached by W. They’ve noticed each other but haven’t spoken. Dancing and flirting ensues and, for the first time in his life, John confronts the question of whether he could have sex with a woman.

The play, which has been funny in showing us the sparring and at times passionate locutions of John and M—extremely well played by Reese and Lui—gets funnier when it becomes a question of John’s exploration of the—to him—unprecedented organ known by that other “c” word. Zoe Mann is wonderful as a woman being explored “like a science project” while also getting aroused. And John’s cock gets to do its cock of the walk bit as well, thus demonstrating that, for him, arousal isn’t only for gents with gents.

The dickness of John comes in his leaving W in the lurch and going back to M, then being unable to call it off with either M or W. A fact which appalls both of his lovers, since neither is inclined to accept that he might be bi and simply need a little of each (I say “each” because the play only gives him two choices). John vacillates at such a pitch that one might wonder why either M or W stays in the game. Even John wonders and the best he can determine is that it’s because of his eyes.

About that awkward dinner party. It’s offered by M (who does the cooking) as a way to let W down, and is put to W, by John, as an opportunity for a united front to end the thing with M. F, who is M’s dad and who has been invited by M as “backup,” adds to the tension with an aria about how he came to accept M with John as a genetic matter having to do with chemicals in the brain. The chemicals in his own brain seem to cause him to treat W as a manipulator and to look too often at her breasts—in W’s opinion. The outing going on at this point—of masculinist, sexist, “gay” and “straight” assumptions and prejudices—comes thick and fast. It’s mostly fun because, however you feel about these things, someone is bound to say something you’d argue with, were you in that cage.

John at one point disputes old-fashioned usages like “gay” and “straight” as though he’s about to manage a proclamation of sexual freedom. But it never quite comes to that. In fact, it ends up rather badly for John, more or less fetal while M stops just short of singing “who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Bartlett was born in 1980, and the Eighties is when sex became “an identity,” for political purposes, and a genetic predisposition, for normative purposes, and that’s the legacy that Cock wants to engage, to question why either/or is the only thing that makes sense, sexually. As a playwright, he’s of the type for whom a stance—and a nimble tongue—is enough to merit the name “character,” so we don’t ever have to delve into why W thinks being a gay man’s first girl is “the one” for her (though I imagine she’s not alone in that), nor into why John needs M to keep him in thrall or why M needs his whipping boy.

The actors are all wonderful, and the energy crackles. The pacing is rapid-fire, and the interrelations are all vividly realized. The interaction between Liu and Reese is a driving force in the play because so much derives from an implied situation that precedes the initial break. Caustic and lambent, Liu’s M generally pushes John’s buttons in a way that must work for both. And Reese and Mann make John with W seem equally viable, not just as an escape valve, but as a way to be a different person. As the father, Pang sounds sufficiently of a different generation as to be out of place but also—in his view—the voice of normality. Finally, Reese, in Stephanie Bahniuk’s costume and hair, has a certain look and plays so convincingly the charismatic man-child that we can believe he’s the cherished fetish M and W take him for.

In the end Cock made me stand—to applaud.

Cock
By Mike Bartlett
Directed by Alex Keegan

Artistic Consultant: Yura Kordonsky; Set Designer: Lily Guerin; Costume Designer: Stephanie Bahniuk; Lighting Designer: Evan C. Anderson; Sound Designer: Bailey Trierweiler; Co-Dramaturgs: Margaret E. Douglas & Sophie Greenspan; Co-Technical Directors: Yaro Yarashevich & Andrew Reidermann; Producer: Caitlin Volz; Stage Manager: Fabiola Syvel

Cast: Daniel Liu, Zoe Mann, Thomas Pang, John Evans Reese

Yale Cabaret
February 27-29, 2020

Drag Yourself Underground

Review of Dragaret Underground, Yale Cabaret; with photographs by Linda Young

February and drag go together, if only because, in New Haven, February is often a drag, a month where—as our most recent Nobel laureate puts it—“anyone with any sense had already left town.” But at the Yale Cabaret, February is a drag in quite another sense. It’s the month of Dragaret, an annual celebration of drag performance, as, in the words of co-director (and DJ in Village-People-leather-boy retro) Danilo Gambini, an occasion to “bring joy into the conversation of consent and pleasure.” And that can be worth sticking around for. This year the theme was “underground,” as a place, co-director Alex Vermillion said, “to explore and be safe and sexy.” All are welcome to what should be seen as a “queer utopia.”

Danilo Gambini, Gregory St. Georges

Dragaret is in its eighth year and this is the third year in which Friday night’s two shows, at 8 and 11, were reserved for Connecticut queens while Saturday’s three shows, 8, 10, and midnight, were for students in the Yale School of Drama to perform. Patrick Dunn of New Haven Pride hosted the Friday night shows as Kiki Lucia, Dunn’s drag-queen persona, and David Mitsch, a third-year costume designer in YSD, hosted Saturday’s shows as Tipsy Von Tart.

Tipsy Von Tart

Both nights share great costumes, much lip-synching, surprising moves—artful ways to remove clothing seems de rigueur—and an inspired reach into a grab-bag of cultural references, styles, and personae. The main rule—tip your queens—was enthusiastically adhered to at the shows I attended (Friday, 11 p.m. and Saturday, 10 p.m.) but I have no way of knowing if the show’s mantra—“consent is sexy”—yielded its desired results.

Kiki Lucia

The CT queens of Friday night presented two entirely different shows. The show I saw had a crisp, deliberate professionalism that made for a parade of striking presentations, which included pole-dancing, striptease, and comic or emotional elements. All the performers were memorable in their own ways, but those numbers with a somewhat satiric side—such as Lotus Qween’s hilarious takeoff of Hillary (to the tune of, among other things, “Wedding Bell Blues” with its address to “Bill”) and Laiylah Alf Wa Laiylah’s evocation of Randy Rainbow’s sharp send-up of our national embarrassment, “The Don” (to the tune of “Gaston,” from The Beauty and the Beast)—were favorites for me.

Lotus Qween

Laiylah Alf Wa Laiylah

Other acts were notable for their graceful appearances, such as transgender performer Casey Fitzpatrick, and the moves of Rarity Moonchild, Xiomarie LeBeija, and Sparkle Diamond.

Casey Fitzpatrick

Rarity Moonchild

Xiomarie LeBeija

Sparkle Diamond

Frizzie Borden, billed as a bio-diva, is a woman who does drag as a woman, making a case for how diva-dom can be not only an inspiration but also an oppression. One of the more affecting performances on Friday, for me, was Rory Roux-Lay Heart’s deconstruction of her gorgeous femme persona to the tune of Bowie’s “Is There Life on Mars?”

Frizzie Borden

Rory Roux-Lay Heart

Kiki Lucia closed the show with a driven display to Cher’s “Woman’s World” with couture from The Handmaid’s Tale. A gay man dressed as a woman celebrating the power of women felt entirely appropriate, and if it didn’t, YSD night, when many more women took the stage as bio-divas, opened the question of drag as a way of positioning femininity as a performance art.

Kiki Lucia

The performance of maleness was rather less in evidence, with Jaime Hellfyre (Emma Perundi-Moon), on Saturday night, the only female-as-male performer.

Jaime Hellfyre

On Saturday at 10, our gently ironic hostess Tipsy Von Tart quipped that the jokes had already been said at the 8 p.m., implying that she might get in trouble for going off-script. She interacted with the crowd with perfect aplomb and was a welcome presence between numbers.

Tipsy Von Tart quips with “F. Murray Abraham”

Many of the acts worked as performance art, with the element of drag (however we might define that) of minimal import: JJ McGlone dressed as a solstice maiden in his hysterical evocation of Midsommar;

Midsommar Night’s Scream

The Dollar Bells cavorted in cut-offs and showed-off pole-riding skills because they can;

The Dollar Bells

Zardoz Hologram (Meg Powers) evoked Aladdin-Sane-era Bowie in makeup and her silent cyberbots (Madeline Pages and Bryn Scharenberg), while performing to his “TVC15,” complete with projections upon a TV-prop that eventually, as per the lyrics, consumed her.

Zardoz Hologram

You Can’t Be in the Show (Maia Mihanovich, Jackeline Torres Cortes, Daniel Liu, Julian Sanchez) mystified me with the import of their performance but it ended with what seemed an entirely consensual orgiastic oneness.

You Can’t Be in the Show

Stripping off a costume to reveal a decidedly different subtext was the order of the evening for many routines: Prettiest Little Devil (Zak Rosen), the only undergraduate performer, sported red wings under his gown;

Prettiest Little Devil

Georgia O’Queef (Alexandra Maurice) opened her number as a demure lady complete with picnic basket, mouthing a ‘60s torch song, only to transform before our eyes into a bumping-and-grinding diva;

Georgia O’Queef

Lady Lilith (Alex Vermillion) began zir piece as a distressed princess desperately beseeching a bald, bespectacled Dean (Matthias Neckermann) for an MFA, only to strip off all pretense at supplication in order to spank the abased academician on his leather-clad bundy, er, booty;

Lady Lilith and Dean

and Cerebral Pussy (Jessy Yates) came forward as a devotee of Jesus in a wheelchair who, filled with grace or something more carnal, took off her clothes and danced.

Cerebral Pussy

Two routines that earn special mention: the somber and studied manner in which Shabbos Queen (Adam Shaukat) put on clothes to become herself;

Shabbos Queen

and the ladies of El Cibao (Ilia Isorelýs Paulino, Nurilys Cintron, Noemi Paulino, Nefesh Cordero Pino, Jackeline Torres Cortes, Maia Mihanovich, Tyler Cruz) who performed in two different patterns of rhythmic unison and ended by waving flags of different countries.

El Cibao

Finally, our gracious hostess, Tipsy, ended the evening with a rousing performance recalling one of the greatest of all drama queens, Blanche Dubois, who seemed only too glad to depend upon the kindness of a hirsute stranger—an embodiment of the male principle as a rather randy bear (Brandon E. Burton).

Tipsy Von Tart and friend

Credit and accolades to Jimmy Stubbs who designed an impressive catwalk with wings as well as a cage for terpsichorean celebrants; Liam Bellman-Sharpe for sound; Emma Deane and Nicole E. Lang for lights; Hannah Tran for projections, and Kitty Cassetti and Aiden Griffiths for costumes that inspired—and at times left nothing to—the imagination.

Doireann Mac Mahon, Sarah Karl

For the midnight show other acts were added, but this ends my account of Dragaret 02/20. The Yale Cabaret has our permission to do it to us again next year…

Riw Rakkulchon (YSD MFA *19)

Dragaret Underground
Co-directed by Danilo Gambini and Alex Vermillion

Co-Producers: Sarah Cain and Jason Gray; Set Designer: Jimmy Stubbs; Co-Lighting Designers: Emma Deane and Nicole E. Lang; Projection Designers: Hannah Tran; Co-Costume Designers: Kitty Cassetti and Aiden Griffiths; Sound Designer: Liam Bellman-Sharpe; DJ: Danilo Gambini; Dramaturg: Madeline Pages; Technical Director: Libby Stone; Assistant Technical Directors: Doug Kester and Kat McCarthey; Stage Manager: Sam Tirrell; Assistant Stage Managers: Julia Bates and Edmond O’Neal

Hosts: Kiki Lucia, Feb. 21; Tipsy Von Tart, Feb. 22

Performers, Feb. 21: Kiki Lucia, Casey Fitzpatrick, Lotus Qween, Rarity Moonchild, Frizzie Borden, Xiomarie LaBeija, Sparkle Diamond, Laiylah Alf Wa Laiylah, Rory Roux-Lay Heart

Performers, Feb. 22: Christopher D. Betts, Brandon E. Burton, Estefani Castro, Nurilys Cintron, Jackeline Torres Cortes, Tyler Cruz, Danilo Gambini, Sarah Karl, Daniel Liu, Sarah Lyddan, Doireann Mac Mahon, Juliana Martinez, Alexandra Maurice, JJ McGlone, Alex McNamara, Maia Mihanovich, David Mitsch, Ciara Monique, Matthias Neckermann, Reed Northrup, Madeline Pages, Eli Pauley, Ilia Isorelýs Paulino, Noemi Paulino, Emma Pernudi-Moon, Nefesh Cordero Pino, Meg Powers, Zak Rosen, Julian Sanchez, Bryn Scharenberg, Adam Shaukat, Alex Vermillion, Adrienne Wells, Maal Imani West, Devin White, Jessy Yates

Yale Cabaret
February 21-22, 2020

Boys to Men

Review of littleboy/littleman, Yale Cabaret

A  first year playwright at the Yale School of Drama, Rudi Goblen demonstrates, in littleboy/littleman, a captivating exuberance of language. Two half-brothers, Bastian (Dario Ladani Sanchez), the elder, and Fito (Robert Lee Hart) share an apartment together—or rather, Bastian suffers Fito to stay in his apartment, on the couch. The play opens with Fito, alone in the apartment, rehearsing his street performance act, complete with red cones to separate the crowd from the playing space. The audience at the Cab stands in for the one in his head as he coaches us how to respond, urging us to—whether we like the show or not—make some noise.

Fito is making noise, and that’s one of the things Bastian will harangue him about, at length. Fito, able to give as good as he gets, will use any pretext to launch into tirades of his own, whether about a cop—a former bullying classmate of Bastian—who harasses him, or about a (literally) shitty job Bastian insists he take to help defray the costs of inhabiting the apartment (and don’t get him started on having to clean ladies’ lavatories). When he’s not lecturing Fito about not pulling his weight, Bastian can be seen and heard on a headset, either trying to find out about the delay in his petition for a name-change or trying to hoodwink clients for a “donation” to a police program to fight drugs and juvenile crime. Bastian’s impending name-change spurs some comic badinage between the brothers about ridiculous names but also gives Bastian an occasion to lecture his brother about how a Nicaraguan name is a handicap in job applications.

Like Stephen Adly Guirgis, Goblen is a playwright with a good ear for street-speak as Fito employs a mix of hiphop rhythms and Spanish phrases and, like Guirgis, Goblen likes to let his characters talk. In addition to their individual routines, Fito and Bastian share a reminiscence of a home invasion that took their grandmother’s life and left them permanently traumatized. But it’s really the fate of their mother that has unmoored the brothers. When Fito waxes poetic about the sacrifices their late mother endured in smuggling her two young sons and their grandmother into the States from Nicaragua and then raising them on her own, Bastian snaps back about the fact that Fito contributed nothing to their mother’s last days and throws him out.

There follows another street performance from Fito with audience participation (the night I saw the show, Ilia Isorelýs Paulino, recently seen as Alice in Alice, the third show in the Yale School of Drama season, chose between a magic quarter and a piece of paper) and a collection at the close. The piece of paper contains a poem, a litany of situations summed up as “It’s all just a bag of halos and horns,” and offered as “a toast,/to us.”

I thought the show would end there, but we still have Fito’s final confrontation with that bullying police officer and the outcome of Bastian’s name-change to go. Goblen’s play comes packed with incident and overflows with speech. It aims for the company of other notable plays in which two males navigate a fraught relationship colored by street tensions and a variable grasp of how to get along—such as Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog and Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over—though here the status of both brothers as immigrants adds a further timely dimension.

The wealth of material in littleboy/littleman may feel a bit overwhelming in the compass in which its offered. Or perhaps a full-length play has been crammed into the Cab’s shorter running time. In any case, there could be more: it would be good to see Fito somewhere other than the apartment and the street; and with all the evocation of the mother going on, we feel the lack of a scene or two in which we get to see her for ourselves.

What really resonates here is Robert Lee Hart’s full command of Fito. He so inhabits the role that there seems no division between himself and his character, and that makes Fito’s scenes more vivid at times than the play he’s a part of. Dario Ladani Sanchez puts across the way in which Bastian, for all his better grasp of pragmatic realities, is overshadowed by his brother’s spirit. He’s best when he’s on a headset, trying to use his whitest voice to steer some cash his way.

Hart and Sanchez—who played off one another as antagonists in Seven Spots on the Sun in YSD’s 2018-19 season—make the most of Goblen’s way with words and make us believe in their grudging intimacy. Marcelo Martínez García’s set, which includes musicians on a drumkit and a bass guitar (the latter is used to great effect as the other end of a phone conversation Bastian gets caught up in), gives us a ratty apartment that’s also the street, while Emma Deane’s lighting design is—well—spot on. Second-year director Christopher D. Betts—in his third play of the Cabaret’s 52nd season—keeps the action very mobile, showing again his inspired grasp of how to use the Cab’s amorphous space to enhancing effect.

littleboy/littleman
By Rudi Goblen
Directed by Christopher D. Betts

Set Designer: Marcelo Martínez Garcia; Costume Designer: Stephanie Bahniuk; Lighting Designer: Emma Deane; Sound Designer: Anteo Fabris; Technical Director: Cam Camden; Producers: Sami Cubias & Caitlin M. Dutkiewicz; Stage Manager: Leo Egger

Musicians: Margaret E. Douglas, Tyler Cruz

Cast: Robert Lee Hart, Dario Ladani Sanchez

Yale Cabaret
February 13-15, 2020

Earthless is Worthless

Review of Elon Musk and the Plan to Blow Up Mars The Musical, Yale Cabaret

In Liam Bellman-Sharpe’s sci-fi musical, Elon Musk and the Plan to Blow Up Mars, Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind Tesla, SpaceX, and other tech concerns, is a man with a mission. After commiserating with a group of billionaires—including Jeff Bezos (Eli Pauley)—who confide to us that it’s great to be rich but it’s hard to be rich, Musk (David Mitsch) comes forward with a song describing his love of Mars, a view that seems true of the actual Musk with his dream of a colony there someday.

It comes as a surprise, then, when the crew of a spaceflight to Mars—Captain (Nomè SiDone), Eyes (Madeline Seidman), Hands (Maal Imani West), Navigator (Isuri Wijesundara)—learn that Musk is aboard, that he chartered the flight, and that he has plans to destroy the Earth’s nearest neighbor. Musk’s change of heart—from colonizing Mars to destroying it—comes via “the Voice of the Night Sky,” a kind of burning-bush moment that converts Musk from a proselytizer for humanity’s destiny among the stars to a kind of interplanetary terrorist, willing to obliterate the red planet to save the blue one.

The absurdity of the musical’s plot could be said to be an intentional mirroring of the absurdity of financial titans becoming space-age saviors, but the show also features the kind of daffy shenanigans that have been the basis of grade B sci-fi films for decades. And that makes for some very entertaining bits, such as Patrick Young as a quintessential mad scientist enlisted by Musk to plumb the possibilities of antimatter, which is key to his scheme, and some offbeat satirical science presentations.

In the first, Maal Imani West delivers a “thought experiment” on how scientific breakthroughs, in affording new products, can solve problems that are more lucrative to leave unsolved. Using dentures as her example, and aided by great graphics by projection designers Erin Sullivan and Hannah Tran, West reflects on how a demand for new teeth could lead to plans to undermine tooth and bone to make the general populace dependent on new products to save them from conditions created by the breakthrough itself. Sound familiar?

Bellman-Sharpe’s target in all this isn’t simply the absurd wealth and power of Musk or Bezos but the system that has enriched and empowered them. And if their grasp of capitalist principles weren’t enough, we’re faced with their space manias as a prospect of what the rich may do when they decide they needn’t be stuck on this woefully mismanaged rock with the rest of us. As Educational Host (Isuri Wijesundra) delivers a bouncy science lesson on “slime molds” and their ability to proliferate and form bonds with the complexity “of the interstate system,” Bezos is desperately trying to reach Musk to dissuade him from making Mars extinct. The dovetailing of Bezos’ fear of capitalism imploding and the Host’s upbeat ditty about the wonders of single-cell lifeforms works as an ironic commentary on how far we’ve come—in evolutionary terms—and how far we can fall.

While not quite a full musical in its lack of a big finale musical number, Elon Musk . . . does boast the requisite romantic interlude. Here it’s a wonderfully comic and spirited encounter between Eyes and a being made of Antimatter (Patrick Falcon). The pas de deux and duet (Antimatter’s lovely voice provided by Taylor Hoffman) puts both heart into the show and a spanner in the works of Musk’s plan, as Eyes, now in love with Antimatter, wants to preserve the creature at the cost of not destroying Mars.

The show’s oddity is its saving grace, but its narrative arc tends to be a bit hodgepodge, including a vaudeville routine about speeding in space and a song by a Drag King (Maal Imani West in male drag that smacks a bit of Little Richard, with a sumptuous smoking jacket) about the world not being a place to bring children into. Thanks to West’s great singing voice, the song is a standout even if we might wonder how it fits in, exactly.

All in all, one might say, that whether you’re trying to destroy a planet or to save one, a kitchen-sink approach is best, and one wouldn’t want to underestimate the enormous profits to be made by capitalizing on either project. In Elon Musk and the Plan to Blow Up Mars the Musical, science as a means to get rich and science as a means to save the Earth and/or mankind has reached its tipping point. That timely reflection and the possibilities of a sci-fi musical with big name power players in its dramatis personae certainly gives Bellman-Sharpe’s play remarkable potential. Per aspera ad astra.

Elon Musk and the Plan to Blow Up Mars the Musical
Music, Text, and Direction by Liam Bellman-Sharpe

Choreographer: Mariel Pettee; Set Designer: Alex McGargar; Costume Designer: David Mitsch; Lighting Designer: Noel Nichols; Sound System Designer: James T. McLoughlin; Projections Designer: Erin Sullivan; Associate Projections Designer: Hannah Tran; Associate Stage Manager: Kevin Jinghong Zhu; Dramaturg: Henriette Rietveld; Technical Director: Jonathan Jolly; Producer: Carl Holvick; Stage Manager: Sam Tirrell

Cast: Patrick Ball, Patrick Falcon, David Mitsch, Eli Pauley, Madeline Seidman, Nomè SiDone, Bailey Trierweiler, Maal Imani West, Isuri Wijesundara, Patrick Young

Musicians: Sharon Ahn, keyboards; Roberto Granados, guitar (alternate); Thomas Hagen, drums; Satchel Henneman, guitar; Taylor Hoffman, vocals; Paul Mortilla, violin; Adin Ring, bass

Yale Cabaret
January 23-25, 2020

Twins, Man, and a Vengeful God

Review of Is God Is, Yale Cabaret

One way to describe Aleshea Harris’ Is God Is—at Yale Cabaret directed by Christopher D. Betts, a second-year director at Yale School of Drama—is as a revenge play that might have been written by Sam Shepard, if Shepard were a black woman. Harris gleefully enters into Shepard terrain: the myths of the family played out in a world that mixes the underclass with the leisure class and grabs from tropes of the Western—with its willingness to trade on being compelled by fate—the road picture, as the place where paired psyches find bonds and lines of fracture, and the hoary story of how a younger generation must forge its being in some kind of struggle or fulfillment with an older one. The irony and absurdity of Shepard is there too, as well as a gripping sense of a cracked world where all debts must be paid in blood.

But there’s a further irony Harris mines as well. Sometime in the 1960s the phrase “black comedy” became pervasive, not as a racial distinction but rather to signify the notion that some comedy is “dark,” not vanilla, not easy-going and safe. Harris creates a form of black comedy that is deliberately black in a racialized way, making her African American characters take their rightful place in a certain American mythos. It’s as if all the nods to black culture of a Hollywood filmmaker eager to trade in appropriation—like Quentin Tarantino—has finally met a sensibility equal to that incentive. This is black black comedy and its ultimate target is not a culture of exclusion or misappropriation, but of a country—the one we all live in—that is full of deep injustices that can sometimes be entertainingly offset by violent revenge. The violence is almost cartoonish, in a nod to the way action films generally treat these matters, but because this is theater in a small space there is discomfort too.

Twin sisters Racine (Ciara Monique) and Anaia (Tavia Hunt) suffered bad burns as children in a fire set by their father that, they believe, left their mother dead. They were together through a series of foster homes as objects of, at best, pity, Anaia with lasting scars all over her face, Racine with scars covered by clothing. As the play opens, with the twins about 21, they learn by letter that their mother is still alive and living in a care facility in the “dirty south.” They journey to visit her. Known in the playbill as She, their mother (played by Abigail Onwunali) is known by the girls simply as God. Making her directive that they kill the man who tried to kill her a “mission from God.”

In some ways that set up is the best of the play. The interplay between Monique and Hunt is full of a kind of knowing mystery that compels us to figure out this world even as they must. Nothing like incredible childhood trauma to make the present an extension of the past. And Onwunali’s She is scary, funny and incredibly evocative. As the scripture has it: “thy God is a vengeful God,” and the girls accept their mission readily enough even though, as Anaia the “emotional” one says, they aren’t killers. Watching Racine transform into one is a journey in itself, one that Monique accomplishes by going deeper into the character, letting us see her as, indeed, her cold-blooded father’s child.

The first task the girls’ undertake—to worm their father’s whereabouts from Chuck Hall (Matthew Elijah Webb), a former associate of dad’s, now drinking heavily to get up the nerve to pill himself to death—is a classic of miscommunication with plenty of style to spare. Hall is a mess but he’s memorable and the girls are apt to think aloud in tandem in a very amusing way. Next up is dad’s yellow house on a hill, shared with his very bougie family, quite comically rendered by Gloria Majule as Angie, a Real Housewife at her wits’ end, son Riley (Anthony Brown), an arugula fetishist whose final freak out is full of manic energy, and his twin brother Scotch (Seun Soyemi), a would-be poet giddy with inspiration. Once Angie’s out of the way, the girls get mistaken by the boys as strippers and . . . well, the entire scene plays out as a takedown of showdowns and of a certain kind of status lifestyle that maybe needs to be beaten into submission.

Finally, there’s Brandon E. Burton in bad guy getup, complete with black cowboy hat, as Man. He’s well-spoken (aren’t villains always?) until he explodes, and he’s chilling in his utter detachment. The possibilities for rapport between father and offspring are there and might beguile us for a moment—particularly as Burton renders well the fascination of a man beyond the pale who might be capable of anything and who knows it—but we know in our hearts this is a “last one standing” deal.

That the show is so entertaining is a credit to Betts and his cast, all of whom create indelible characters, and his team, which uses the entire Cab playing space to make the action sprawl as it must—shout out particularly for the set design by Stephanie Bahniuk with Marcelo Martínez Garcia, and to Anteo Fabris’ sound design and the work on fights and intimacy of Kelsey Rainwater and Jonathan Jolly (which includes, I imagine, how to play dead body or maybe dead body convincingly in close proximity to the audience).

This version of Is God Is is not a play of fixed locations. It’s a play of legendary spaces we find ourselves in the midst of at key moments. Stage and the wider playing area blend to create the world the twins move through on their mission—which reads as a fate, as an idée fixe, as a plot that makes of parricide a blow against toxic masculinity, and as a final retribution that no doubt creates new scars for the already heavily scarred.

Is God Is
By Aleshea Harris
Directed by Christopher D. Betts

Set Designer: Stephanie Bahniuk; Costume Designer: April M. Hickman; Lighting Designer: Tully Goldrick; Sound Designer/Music Supervisor: Anteo Fabris; Projections Designers: Erin Sullivan and Hannah Tran; Fight and Intimacy Director: Kelsey Rainwater; Associate Set Designer: Marcelo Martínez Garcia; Associate Fight Director: Jonathan Jolly; Scenic Artist: Sarah Karl; Dramaturg: Faith Zamble; Technical Director: Lu Shaoqian; Producer: Dani Barlow; Stage Manager: Edmond O’Neal

Cast: Anthony Brown, Brandon E. Burton, Tavia Hunt, Gloria Majule, Ciara Monique, Abigail Onwunali, Seun Soyemi, Matthew Elijah Webb

Yale Cabaret
January 16-18, 2020

What's Next on the Local Theater Scene

2020 has launched and the Connecticut theater season resumes this week.

New Haven:

Local theater troupe The New Haven Theater Company features a staged reading for three nights this weekend—Thursday, January 16 through Saturday, January 18—at English Markets Building on Chapel Street. The work is a new play in development by NHTC member Christian Shaboo. The Three Wisemen is about a young man facing uncertainty in his romantic life who takes to the road with the titular “wisemen”—his longtime roommates—to confront the ghosts of his past. The reading, directed by Shaboo, features NHTC regulars George Kulp (seen this past fall in Retreat from Moscow) and John Watson (last seen in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest last season), as well as Aleta Staton, who appeared in Doubt in 2015, and newcomers Ny’Asia Davis, Solomon Green, and Eric Rey. For tickets for the limited seating go here.

At New Haven Theater Company this week only!

Tickets are also available for the next full production at NHTC: Steve Scarpa, who directed Our Town, Proof, and Waiting for Lefty and appeared in Middletown, A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay on the Death of Walt Disney, The Seafarer, and Doubt, among others, will direct J. Kevin Smith, who played the title role in Lucas Hnath’s …Death of Walt Disney, and Trevor Williams, who played Randall McMurphy in Cuckoo’s Nest, in Edward Albee’s Zoo Story, for three weekends, February 20-22 and 27-29, and March 5-7. This will be the first rendering of an Albee play by NHTC. (preview)

Yale Cabaret resumes its 52nd season at 217 Park Street this weekend—Thursday, January 16-Saturday, January 18—with a production of Is God Is by Aleshea Harris, directed by third-year Yale School of Drama director Christopher D. Betts. Betts directed the Cab’s season’s bracing opener, Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, formerly known as Southwest Africa, from the German Südwestafrika, between the years 1884-1915 as well as two shows last season. Harris’ play, which was staged at SoHo Rep in 2018, is described as “a modern myth about twin sisters who sojourn from the Dirty South to the California desert to exact righteous revenge against their father in an epic saga” that mixes tropes from “Spaghetti Westerns” and Afropunk culture (review). Next up at the Cab is a brand new musical by third-year sound designer Liam Bellman-Sharpe called Elon Musk and the Plan to Blow Up Mars: The Musical which explores the catchy idea that to prevent the colonization of Mars we must destroy the red planet to save the blue one. Thursday, January 23-Saturday, January 25 (review); for tickets and more information, including dining reservations, go here.

At Yale Cabaret this week only!

The Yale Repertory Theatre returns later this month with its third show of the season: Manahatta, a play by Mary Kathryn Nagle, former Executive Director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. In the play, set in 2008, a female descendant of the Lenape tribe—who were forcefully removed from the island of Manahatta by the Dutch in the 1600s—works on Wall Street during the mortgage crisis that opened questions of land ownership—and capitalist greed—anew. Directed by Laurie Woolery, who directed the play in its world premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2018 and directed El Huracán, the Rep’s inventive season opener of 2018-19. Friday, January 24- Saturday, February 15 (review); in previews until Thursday, January 30; for tickets and more information go here.

The third and last show of the Yale School of Drama season plays in early February: Alice, Robert Wilson’s experimental treatment of Alice in Wonderland, with cabaret-style songs by Tom Waits, will be directed by third-year director Ellis Logan. Saturday, February 1-Friday, February 7 (preview) (review); for tickets and more information go here.

At Long Wharf Theatre, the third show of the season runs through February. Directed by Rebecca Martínez, I Am My Own Wife is Doug Wright’s Pulitzer and Tony-winning one-person play about Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a transgender woman who survives the Nazi and Communist regimes in East Germany. Mason Alexander Park—who has played a variety of genderbending roles such as the Emcee in Cabaret, Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show, and Hedwig in Hedwig and the Angry Inch—plays Charlotte and more than thirty other characters embodied in the role (preview). Wednesday, February 5-Sunday, March 1; in previews until Wednesday, February 12; for tickets and more information go here (review).

Mason Alexander Park

Hartford:

Hartford Stage’s first show of 2020 is in previews and opens this week. Directed by Ron Russell, Pike Street is Obie-winning playwright and actor Nilaja Sun’s solo show in which she plays dozens of roles in a story of struggle, survival and redemption for three generations of a Puerto Rican family on New York’s Lower East Side. In previews since January 9, the show opens on Friday, January 17 and continues through Sunday, February 2 (review); for tickets and more information go here.

Opening night this Friday at Hartford Stage!

Playhouse on Park in West Hartford continues its 11th season with Tenderly: The Rosemary Clooney Musical which features Susan Haefner, who originated the title role, as Rosemary Clooney. The show by James Yates Vogt and Mark Friedman is directed by Kyle Brand, who directed an energetic Avenue Q at Playhouse on Park in 2017, and depicts both the successes and struggles of Clooney’s long career, including such signature hits as “Come On-a My House,” with music direction by Robert James Tomasulo and choreography by MK Lawson. Previews are tonight—January 15—and tomorrow night with the opening reception on Friday, January 17; the show runs until Sunday, February 2; for tickets and more information, go here.

TheaterWorks returns at the end of the month with its second subscription show of the season. The Lifespan of a Fact by Jeremy Karekan & David Murrell and Gordon Farrell is a CT premiere and the play was a NYTimes Critics’ Pick during its Broadway run in 2018. Directed by Tracy Brigden, who directed the delirious Hand to God at TheaterWorks in 2018, the play is a comedic treatment of the “current media tug of war” about so-called “fake news” and the way in which spin affects the status of facts. The three-person cast features actors with CT work in their resumés: Nick LeMedica starred in TheaterWorks’ Hand to God; Tasha Lawrence starred in A Doll’s House, Part 2 at TheaterWorks in 2019 and in The Roommates at Long Wharf in 2018, and Rufus Collins was in Long Wharf’s The Old Masters in 2011. Thursday, January 30 to Sunday, March 8; Press night: Thursday, February 8 (review); Pay-What-You-Can: Thursday, January  30 and Wednesday, February 5; All-Free Student Matinee: Saturday, February 8; for tickets and more information go here.

Worn-out Whiteness

Review of Two Mile Hollow, Yale Cabaret

“O wad some pow’r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us,” mused Scottish poet Robert Burns in his “To a Louse.” White folk are being gifted by some newly empowered powers, this century, to perhaps see ourselves as others see us, and some might be loath to open the present. In Two Mile Hollow, now playing at Yale Cabaret, Japanese American playwright Leah Nanako Winkler takes aim at the “white people by the water” play, and the particularities of that oft-treated scenario—she draws on Chekhov, Williams, O’Neill, Tracy Letts, to name but a few—means that “we” may feel let off the hook, for the moment. Even a few less than nimble references to Old Blue only go so far in cracking the high culture façade that makes “whiteness”—like capitalism—simply that thing you exist in. As the old Palmolive soap commercial intoned: “Dish-soap? You’re soaking in it.”

Directed by Kat Yen with a nonwhite cast drawn from New York, rather than the Yale School of Drama, the play has a certain manic charm. Its comic sense, with Asians in blonde wigs and a Hampton’s sense of “down home,” is more appropriate to sketch comedy than to a satire of canonical plays, which means we can all laugh at little cost. We’ve all been bored by bad productions of such plays, whether or not we felt ourselves akin to their inhabitants.

Blythe (Cynthia Fernandez), Mary (Diane Chen), Joshua (Vishaal Reddy), Christopher (Vin Kridakorn), Charlotte (Jennifer Tsay) in the Yale Cabaret production of Two Mile Hollow, directed by Kat Yen, December 12-14, 2019

One Mile Hollow indeed shows that you needn’t be white to mock obtuse, affluent, and grandly self-involved characters like Winkler’s Donnellys. The fun had at the expense of the shiftless son, Joshua (Vishaal Reddy), younger son Christopher (Vin Kridakorn), the heir apparent to deceased dad’s film stardom, twice-divorced daughter Mary (Diane Chen), a walking complex of neuroses, and pill-popping hot mom Blythe (Cynthia Fernandez) is keen, with the characters self-importantly aware of their theatrical antecedents. So we get Mary acting like a bird and the family’s collective “Ach!” is instead a “caw!” to honor The Seagull that flits about the periphery of the action. Yen’s set, of kitchen, dining room table, and garden, gives us at a glance the range of domestic space. The stage is set, we see at once, for skeletons in closets, for confessions and accusations, wandering desires, and messy humanness—with laughs. In that, the play doesn’t let us down.

The interloper in this quasi-incestual soup is Charlotte (Jennifer Tsay), Chris’s assistant whom Joshua sees as “the help,” then tries to woo away from his Oscar-nominated brother. Charlotte gets to be not only the focus of a triangle with the brothers, she’s also triangulated in Winkler’s threesome of dramatic arts: theater (the family onstage), movies (the father and son’s careers), and, where Charlotte hopes to find meaning and celebrity, streaming online video. We may laugh at the spiral down from the classic locus of collective catharsis to the individual interface on a device in your palm, but such is where we’re headed as “collective” comes to be yet another exploded myth, like “universal.”

Charlotte turns out alright, though not unironized, in Tsay’s shrugging acceptance of her status outside those bastions she needn’t conquer. She manages because she stops wanting to do things the way those people do, and because she’s able to let herself get bought off, and to resist Blythe’s overtures which might’ve hooked someone more beguiled by privilege.

Joshua (Vishaal Reddy), Christopher (Vin Kridakorn) in Yale Cabaret’s production of Two Mile Hollow, December 12-14, 2019

On the privileged front, Vishaal Reddy gives the most fun, sending up the vocal mannerisms of a host of white boys apt to find their inner worlds precious cargo. The pitch of Mary’s pathos, in Diane Chen’s rendering, has a cartoonishness that makes the occasional quaver into lunacy all the more arresting. Vin Kridakorn has the requisite looks and detachment that make Christopher a desirable property, and his arguments with Joshua are the stuff of spoiled immaturity. As the mother they all fear to offend, Cynthia Fernandez is mercurial and commanding—a caricature that steals from the best and knows how. The show is a constant barrage of mannerisms and allusions and jabs and jibes, so that even if one or another doesn’t land the next one likely will.

The effort to depict a family—any family, and comprised however exclusively or inclusively you like—if genuine, always opens private life to mockery. Time was, the introduction of the “downstairs” view of “upstairs” was enough to assure a certain irony, then it had to be the “kitchen comedy” of the folks at home, insular in their petty familial wars. Here, it’s the masquerade of “the type” itself that is up-for-grabs, aiming to expose white, privileged cliché but without risking a tangible alternative. After all, Charlotte’s big idea is a show that foregrounds the “fat girl” and “Asian chick” caricatures that usually play sidekick in some white girl feature. Will she get to star in her own romcom one day? Maybe, but what’s that got to do with Chekhov?

All in all, life is pretty hollow in Two Mile Hollow, and too many of the laughs, like the lobster dish at the French bistro Blythe no longer frequents, “lack bite.”

Two Mile Hollow
By Leah Nanako Winkler
Proposed & Directed by Kat Yen

Producer: Jason Gray; Scenic Designer: Kat Yen; Costume Co-Designers: Phuong Nguyen, Miguel Urbino; Lighting Co-Designers: Tully Goldrick, Casey Tonnies; Sound Designer & Composer: Daniela Hart; Technical Director: Laura Copenhaver; Dramaturg: Henriette Rietveld; Stage Manager: Zak Rosen; Choreographer: Michael Raine

Cast: Diane Chen, Cynthia Fernandez, Vin Kridakorn, Vishaal Reddy, Jennifer Tsay

Yale Cabaret
December 12-14, 2019

The Art of Interfacing

Review of I=N=T=E=R=F=A=C=E, Yale Cabaret

The terms by which we understand human interaction are fluid, including biological and sociological descriptors (e.g., “mating ritual”) and more abstract or rhetorical ones (e.g., “communicative tropes”) and, for quite some time, technological terms. Such as “interface.” A word for the communication between computing systems, it has become a term for how a complex system (such as “you”) interact with another complex system (such as “me”). What is the means of our “interface”? What “computes,” exactly, in any interaction between us?

I=N=T=E=R=F=A=C=E is the name of the current show at Yale Cabaret (last show tonight at 11 pm), proposed and performed by Dakota Stipp, a third-year sound designer at Yale School of Drama, with contributions from MFA students from the schools of Music and of Art: Kyla Arsadjaja, performer and movement designer, Cam Camden, producer and technical director, Ross Wightman, performer and instrument designer, and Ye Qin Zhu, performer and content designer. The roles of design and performance are indeed interfacing throughout the piece, as the performers interact with various devices, instruments and mechanisms designed to make the performance happen. What they create occurs in a space that is part performance, part art installation.

A still of I=N=T=E=R=F=A=C=E at Yale Cabaret, December 5-7, 2019

What this means for the audience is that we look on at five figures who move about purposely in what seems another world. In most theatrical pieces, that “world” is an imagined one that acts as a facsimile of the one we live in, with actors playing other people who occupy that world. Here, the performers play with props that are works of art while inhabiting a space enhanced by projections on hanging scrims and spoken word and sound effects, lighting effects, and musical sounds. It’s a textured world of “effects,” and what effect that has depends upon the viewers and their capacity as receptors.

For me, the delight of the show is provided by Ross Wightman in a sort of comic relief sidebar. Wearing a voluminous wig, he sits at a table across from a full-size plastic or vinyl skeleton, operating miked plate and cutlery, creating a sound poem of scratches, clanking, feedback, echo and vibration. It’s not mime because sound is its purpose, but it’s not a scene either. It’s an enactment, a making-something-happen that occurs three times in the course of the evening, each time (and from evening to evening) different. The night I saw the show (Friday at 11), Wightman, in the second segment, kissed the hand of the skeleton. In the third, he drew the skeleton in close, both leaning across the table. When he collapsed and released the skeleton, it sat upright. That, to me, seemed a fitting end to the entire show, though there was a bit more to follow.

As theater, Wightman’s segments give us a bit of what we expect: setting, costume, lighting, props, and actions that could be “symbolic”—a figure appearing to eat and drink while an onlooker has died, or perhaps stands in for those who are starving. There’s also the neat reference to the annual enactments of our national fall holidays—the skeleton of Halloween and the ostentatious meal of Thanksgiving. No matter how you take it, though, in the end my admiration was for how Wightman “played” objects as instruments and how Stipp had created a sound stage so that we could appreciate the music of the mundane.

Ye Qin Zhu and Dakota Stipp in I=N=T=E=R=F=A=C=E, Yale Cabaret, December 5-7, 2019

Elsewhere, that sound stage creates other remarkable effects, such as spoken elements that become a texture of sounds and words that can feel as close as a voice in one’s ear at times, or can be made to drop to the status of sound effects through distortion. Phrases float out of the flow and stick in the mind, about parasites, or feasting on a mango, or how bodies become water.

And while the aural stimulation is almost constant, so is the visual. One sequence has the performers carrying onto the playing space wire sculptures. There are lights throwing the objects’ wiry shadows on the scrims, and the pieces, at first separate, are assembled until one grouping resembles a kind of giant monument, the other perhaps a store display. We watch assembly and disassembly, we see the scrims become a ground for flowing images that look like dendrites or that solidify into patterned fabric, or become a view into a plane of bouncing lights.

In a sense, the show is all about patterns—of light, of sound, of texture, of behavior—and where the main focus falls is apt to be a bit like picking out the exact moment when image and sound coalesced with just the right balance. The ingenuity of the show is in its technical features—and that includes the performers/technicians of the event—but its effect is like spending time in a gallery of kinetic artworks. Something with which, you’ll soon realize, you rarely get to interface.

I=N=T=E=R=F=A=C=E
Proposed by Dakota Stipp
Created by Kyla Arsadjaja, Cam Camden, Dakota Stipp, Ross Wightman, Ye Qin Zhu

Performers: Kyla Arsadjaja, Cam Camden, Dakota Stipp, Ross Wightman, Ye Qin Zhu

Production Designer: Dakota Stipp; Technical Director: Cam Camden; Content Designer: Ye Qin Zhu; Movement Designer: Kyla Arsadjaja; Instrument Designer: Ross Wightman

Yale Cabaret
December 5-7, 2019

Next week the Cabaret returns for its last show of 2019: Leah Nanako Winkler’s Two Mile Hollow, directed by third-year director Kat Yen. The director, playwright and 4 out of 5 cast members are Asian as well as members of the creative team, which quite likely hasn’t been the case for  a Yale Cabaret show before. The play, by a Japanese American from Kentucky, satirizes the tendency to represent, in plays and television, “the” American family as middle-class white. December 12-14.

Watch Yourself

Review of Rubberneck, Yale Cabaret

The Yale Cabaret is back for its second weekend in November and won’t return until December 5th. This week Rubberneck by Mattie McGarey, a New York-based choreographer and performer, brings to the Cab its second wordless performance piece of the season. Here, unlike Bodyssey, the third show of the season, narrative trajectory is less marked in favor of vignettes of movement. A cast of six, garbed in becoming outfits with pleasing color coordination (Yunzhu Zeng, costumes), move through a series of routines. Some, like the opening—in which all perform morning routines such as showering, arranging hair, dressing—contain elements of mime. Others, like one that seems to be taking place, judging by the rhythmic music, in a club, makes the six seem like parts of the same collective organism. The overall impression is of six parts of the same machine, located in separate spaces, but answerable to the same directives.

The cast of Rubberneck by Mattie McGarey at Yale Cabaret, November 14-16, 2019

The different arrangements of the six make for changing patterns, and each performer interprets the movements differently. The ad hoc cast, which includes McGarey, is drawn from Yale College, the Yale School of Music, the Yale School of Drama, and from the New Haven community. Rubberneck, the statement by the artistic team reads, “interrogates body language, symbolic gestures, and unspoken social cues as essential ingredients to the expansion and extinction of our society.” With that in mind, the repetitions can be seen as the rote movements we all perform as a means to exist in society (I won’t say simply “exist,” for who knows what that might be like?) and the personal je ne sais quoi each brings to such repetitive movements is the little friction of individuality.

The six performers often enough seem robotic, moving upon mindless tracks. The impression is strengthened by the many times the performers extend a palm in front of their faces, staring into the little screen that now dominates all social spaces. At one point, with the six sitting on chairs, each throws out looks into the social space as if trying both to be seen and to avoid seeing. Or maybe just trying to see who might actually see them. A related sequence found each slipping about on the hard vinyl chairs, trying to find some sweet spot between relaxation and vigilance, some almost falling, some never quite at ease.

There’s a heightened sense throughout the show of what it means to watch others move. If you’re the type of person who can be occupied for hours watching people in parks, train stations, airports and so on, you should find the show very appealing. There’s always new information coming at the viewer even when it works at some subliminal level, the way we—perforce—have to process whatever takes place around us. Here, the show is for our attention and yet it’s the kind of show that makes us attentive to what makes sense, what has significance, in what others do and how they look while doing it. What it means, in other words, to be a spectator is implied in everything we notice in public. “Rubberneck,” of course, refers to the way people acknowledge something untoward happening, most commonly used to describe how an accident suddenly, in the midst of the routine behavior of driving, makes us spectators again, watchers at what has happened to someone else.

Mattie McGarey in Rubberneck at Yale Cabaret, November 14-16, 2019

Several times McGarey detaches from the simpler movements the others perform. It starts with a dramatic movement as if being ejected, in a slide across the floor backwards, while the other five stand in a sort of fortified coffee klatch. At other times, she’s apt to spiral about on the floor, creating movements with more rhythmic fluidity than the group tends to enact. There are also dispersals of the cast in ways that have an obvious symbolic logic, as when the two male performers sit off to the side as if in their own world, leaving the four female performers to work through other routines. Or a variation on musical chairs—all six walk around the line of six chairs and, in sequence, the performers break out of the rhythm to remove their own chairs, one at a time. What are the chairs? A habitation, a comfort, a personal space we each bring and take with us?

The show is greatly aided by Taiga Christie’s lighting and Bailey Trierweiler’s compositions which at times feel trancelike, at times using flurries of more anxious rhythm, at times brandishing silence as perhaps the most awkward of social conditions. Full of suggestion more than statement, the vignettes offer stylized interactions that may or may not seem opaque depending on the viewer. In any case, Rubberneck gives us something to look at even while perhaps making us pause to wonder why are so eager to find things to look at.

Rubberneck
Created, directed, and choreographed by Mattie McGarey

Producer: Sarah Cain; Costume Designer: Yunzhu Zeng; Lighting Designer: Taiga Christie; Composer & Sound Designer: Bailey Trierweiler; Sound Engineer: Anteo Fabris; Stage Manager: Leo Egger

Performers: Faizan Kareem, Xi Luo, Mattie McGarey, Hannah Neves, Adrianne Owings, Arnold Setiadi

Yale Cabaret
November 14-16, 2019

Something Wicked

Review of Burn Book, Yale Cabaret

Three boys in boarding school, sharing a dorm room. The new kid arrives. Tensions arise, secrets are discovered, bonding takes place, but also possibilities for conspiracy and betrayal. The plot may sound familiar, but Burn Book, JJ McGlone’s debut play making its debut at Yale Cabaret, takes it to a different register. What makes it different? The boys are girls, which is to say very gay and very out about it. The play is wickedly good fun, directed by Zoe Mann, a third-year actor, in her directing debut.

William (JJ McGlone) claims the four are the only gays at the school (what are the chances?), and we never see them interact with others outside the room of four cots. The play gives us very privileged access to a very insular space. In that space, the four all indulge each other’s uncloseted personae, and the dialogue is fast-paced, arch and very funny. The dynamic among the four runs the gamut of the kinds of getting to know you moments, meltdowns, anxiety attacks and so on, familiar to the teen queen genre. At first, the main concern seems to be pecking order as William, the top Mean Girl, so to speak, immediately insists that newcomer Ty (Gregory Victor Georges) will replace Lewis (Daniel Liu) in the cot righthand side to his own. Ty, from Haiti, has a greater cachet, if only because of his outrageous twerking skills. Meanwhile, Warren (Julian Sanchez) seems the most put-upon and most likely to sulk in his cot.

The foursome engage in venomous commentary about teachers, fellow students, and the school’s straight ethos (we are reminded a few times of how important status and success are here). Of course, each teen has pet peeves and favorite objects of lust. But McGlone has another genre in mind as well: Ty, we learn when William makes the discovery, has a special book secreted away. And so the main dramatic outing is William calling out Ty as a witch—which they all claim to be as well. Now we’re in the midst of a coven and the four take to wearing skirts, as a means to set themselves apart and because nothing in the school’s dress code forbids it.

The four’s rapid-fire interactions—which includes choreographed raves, themed videos by Erin Sullivan (one, a kind of Goth-drag music video on Yale’s Old Campus to the tune of The Smiths’ “How Soon is Now,” is particularly hilarious), and casting spells—are full of a heady immediacy. Director Mann keeps the pace just short of collective hysteria—and the night I attended the audience was incredibly spirited, swept up by a sense of a behind-the-scenes exposure.

The sequence of getting-even hexes the four commit escalates to the point where discomfort and disagreement begins. Ty tries to demur, and William becomes more demanding. McGlone’s William gets a scary gleam in his eye, playing upon the weaknesses in his coven to gain his goal: a jealous blow against the wife of the male instructor he wants for himself. The outcome—after each undergoes a major freak-out—takes place when called before the school’s deans and it arrives as a shocking act of betrayal and a completely unhinged moment. It’s also where an actual witch-hunt and the term’s more metaphoric usages dovetail in a sharply dramatic way.

A “burn book”—as viewers of Mean Girls know—is a kind of collective scrapbook in which defamation and destruction of certain detested objects (mostly fellow-students) are gleefully indulged. The four witches keep such a book and it becomes a testimony against them, not only in the targets of their hexes but also in the truly malevolent spirit they have unleashed among themselves. Of course, with the fate of the witches of New England in mind, a “burn book” is also a document of how certain populations, deliberately “other” to a dominant culture that is straight, patriarchal, Christian and at least somewhat puritanical, have been outlawed, persecuted, and, wherever possible, cancelled by history. Considering such a context, it’s not the first time the slogan of confrontation might well be “burn, baby, burn.”

Burn Book
By JJ McGlone
Directed by Zoe Mann

Producer: Laurie Ortega-Murphy; Scenic Designer: Lily Guerin; Lighting Designer: Emma Deane; Sound and Projection Designer: Erin Sullivan; Costume Designer: David Mitsch; Assistant Costume Designer: April M. Hickman; Sound Engineer: Liam Bellman-Sharpe; Dramaturg: Alex Vermillion; Stage Manager: Kevin Zhu

Cast: Gregory Victor Georges; Daniel Liu; JJ McGlone; Julian Sanchez

Yale Cabaret
October 31-November 2, 2019

Yale Cabaret is dark next weekend, then returns November 14-16 with Rubberneck, proposed and created by Mattie McGarey, a theatrical interrogation of how “habitual movements shape our reality,” that brings “body language, symbolic gesture, and unspoken social cues to the forefront.”

Riding the Gravy Train

Review of Red Speedo, Yale Cabaret

We’re all familiar with the notion that the driving force in any contest is winning, winning at any cost. We’re also familiar with the ethical notion that “it’s not about winning or losing but how you play the game.” The implications of those two outlooks float upon the reflective surface of Lucas Hnath’s Red Speedo, the fifth show of Yale Cabaret’s current season. Directed by Eli Pauley, a third-year actor at Yale School of Drama, and played by four students in the program, Red Speedo is an in-your-face, tour de force of contested strategies, provocation—as both defense and attack—pleas, bullying, flailing and railing, outright lies, and fights, both verbal and physical. There is the prospect of great success, of scandal, of disgrace, and even of death. And all in the insular world of championship swimming.

Ray (Adam Shaukat) in Yale Cabaret’s production of Lucas Hnath’s Red Speedo, October 24-26, 2019

The red Speedo of the title, and nothing else but a serpent tattoo and a vacant expression, is worn throughout the play by Ray (Adam Shaukat), a swimmer who has climbed the ranks to be in competition for a place on the Olympic team. It’s the day before the final tryout and his times have been good. His brother Peter (Patrick Ball), a lawyer who may be about to give up his day job to be Ray’s manager and agent, full time, is in talks with Speedo about making Ray the company’s new spokesperson. But there’s a snag. As the play opens, Peter is talking a mile a minute, hectoring Ray’s coach (Brandon E. Burton) into seeing the reason for not letting any governing body know about the cooler full of enhancement drugs Coach found in his office. The bad publicity for the club could affect Ray adversely.

And that’s only the first of many ethical problems in this fraught and taut play. And each character, as Ray says late in the play in a moment of clarity, is kinda good and kinda bad. That means we get jerked around a lot in how we respond to what is being said and why. Peter, for all his bullish lack of subtlety (vividly enacted by Ball), seems to have Ray’s best interests at heart. Until we realize how much he has riding on Ray’s success, and, indeed, how little Ray has other than a body that is treated as a prize animal, groomed to perform at its peak. And that involves substances that Ray’s former girlfriend Lydia (Nefesh Cordero Pino), a physical therapist who lost her license thanks to Peter, provided him once upon a time.

The stress of all this is made quite palpable in the Cabaret production. We can see the toll it takes on each character to be called on the tiles, so to speak, to make his or her case. Along the way we see Ray get manipulated by everyone. Cordero Pino makes Lydia seem sympathetic, someone who has gotten out of Ray’s charmed circle the hard way and wants to stay out, but her position is negotiable, we learn. Coach, in a wonderfully varied reading by Burton, can be a source of strength but he’s also desperate in his reliance on what Ray’s success means to him, not just financially but as a badge of achievement.

Eventually Ray learns, to his chagrin, that even his faith in his ability and in his drugs is misplaced. Shaukat renders Ray’s humanity best when he’s most beset by confusion and opposed views, which is often. Ray is not quite as bereft of interiority as we may at first think, and others seem to assume. He’s a cipher on his way to becoming conscious.

There’s a deep abyss at that heart of this play, a sense of how the drive to be the best can be so tragically empty but also how meaningless any effort becomes when it entails a betrayal of every trust and every standard of merit. The grippingly violent struggle between Ray and Peter at the end, choreographed with great realism by Burton, is staggering in its visceral brutality, and, it seems, necessary to the play’s central truth: winner-takes-all means destroying your opponent. To paraphrase Pyrrhus, “Another victory like that and we are ruined.”

Red Speedo
By Lucas Hnath
Directed by Eli Pauley

Producer: Will Gaines; Scenic Designer: Elsa GibsonBraden; Lighting Designer: Evan C. Anderson; Costume Designers: David Mitsch, Yunzhu Zeng; Sound Designer: Emily Duncan Wilson; Dramaturg: Callie Frosburgh; Technical Director: HaoEn Hu; Stage Manager: Julia Bates; Fight Director: Brandon E. Burton

Cast: Patrick Ball, Brandon E. Burton, Nefesh Cordero Pino, Adam Shaukat

Yale Cabaret
October 24-26, 2019

The Harm in Surviving

Review of How to Relearn Yourself, Yale Cabaret

Written by Doireann Mac Mahon, a third-year acting student at the Yale School of Drama, How to Relearn Yourself addresses the issue of sexual assault in social settings, and its existential impact on the victim. Like Anna Ziegler’s Actually, Mac Mahon’s play is mostly concerned with the aftermath of a sexual violation that occurs between two college freshmen, a male and a female. But unlike Actually, which puts its emphasis on the psychology of two students who date and move toward sex which takes place after the woman has changed her mind (and the way the school handles the complaint), in Mac Mahon’s play rape is taking advantage of someone unable to consent or refuse. Mac Mahon presents the post-event state of mind of The Girl (played by Mac Mahon) as a traumatic questioning of everything she knows or thought she knew.

The Girl (Doireann Mac Mahon), How to Relearn Yourself, Yale Cabaret, October 10-12, 2019 (Photos by Emily Duncan Wilson)

How to Relearn Yourself is less about the culture of rape and the way teens comport themselves—though it does register some of the surrounding attitudes—and more about violation as a psychic affront. The play is gripping because its central character is so clearly in the grip of emotions that have no public or social outlet—it’s their privacy that makes them real. They belong to her alone.

Directed by Maeli Goren, a second-year director whose previous work at the Cab was the lively children’s mystery The Whale in the Hudson last season, the action takes place in a kind of isolation booth of white gauze that seems to glow from within (set and lighting by Stephanie Bahniuk). The way the audience is placed around the space makes us look a bit like voyeurs, a bit like a panel of judges. Inside there’s a couch, liberally strewn with articles of clothing. There’s also a coffee table. Two roommates, Squirrel (Leyla Levi) and The Girl, share a small flat where, Squirrel tells us, they aren’t too particular about housekeeping. They start out as two friends who try hard to share each other’s tastes and outlooks—and eventually that means going to parties together as backup, and possibly fixing each other up. It’s Squirrel’s idea that The Girl should go on a blind date with good-looking Dragon (Edwin Joseph).

Squirrel (Leyla Levi), The Girl (Doireann Mac Mahon), Dragon (Edwin Joseph) in How to Relearn Yourself, Yale Cabaret, October 10-12, 2019

We get to watch some version of this date, and by this point there has come into the proceedings a voice over, O (Maëlle Puechoultres), who poses questions like an investigator, on one hand, or, on the other, a kind of superego in loco parentis who might be a conscience of sorts. It’s a given that, whenever something untoward happens—particularly among the young—there is no end of second-guessing advice from the more experienced. O seems to stand for an external viewpoint, introjected to some extent, by which the actants are supposed to judge themselves.

For Dragon there’s so little cause for judgment. The blind date, he thinks, went well. What we see is that he’s rather callously full of himself but not in a threatening way. He thinks it’s becoming to talk about “just taking” something if you want it, and he wants to paint The Girl’s portrait, and he’s an up-and-comer, and lots of other bravado. Joseph plays him as obtuse but outgoing. The Girl’s reactions—and Mac Mahon is skilled at minor facial flurries that say so much—show us that he’s not going over nearly so well as he thinks. The Girl tells Squirrel that she really doesn’t want to see him again; he made her uncomfortable. That view seems to count for nothing to her friend.

Next thing we know there’s a party at Dragon’s place and The Girl has to go because—Squirrel says—there’s a guy there she’s interested in and she needs support, though it’s clear she’s also convinced that The Girl should give Dragon another chance. Then there’s lots of alcohol shots and loud music and dancing on couches until, apparently, The Girl passes out. Next thing she knows, she’s in a car and there’s blood, and one version of herself is “out of body” and out of the car, looking on at her powerless body. Here the particulars of what is actually happening get vague—and that’s the point. No one really knows, with unclouded certainty, and yet The Girl’s body does and what it tells her freaks her out.

The Girl (Doireann Mac Mahon), Dragon (Edwin Joseph), Squirrel (Leyla Levi) in How to Relearn Yourself, Yale Cabaret, October 10-12, 2019

Rather than move into the she said/he said terrain of Actually, Mac Mahon moves us into the psyche of The Girl where much is amiss. Squirrel can see—and report to O—that The Girl has changed: things she used to hate to do—like exercise—she now does, and things she used to do—like drink—she now hates. Their friendship suffers and Squirrel is apt to find The Girl seeking solace squirreled up behind the fridge rather than in activities they might share. Meanwhile, Dragon gets on with his life, not sure at all what became of Squirrel and her friend and not in the least concerned.

For The Girl, however, everything has changed, changed utterly. Perhaps because she’s Irish, her effort to present her inner state to Squirrel entertains questions about the reality of Jesus and of the afterlife. There’s even a segment in which fetuses are likened to parasites using the mother’s body as a host. The point is that The Girl is trying to express a state of extreme alienation toward her own physical being, but she’s also relearning her own moral compass. And what it comes down to—with considerable dramatic force—is that good and bad are entirely different, and thus Dragon can’t be both, and, what’s more, surviving is a terrible way to live.

The force of these ideas come from The Girl’s almost Beckettian journey through who or what she is when what she thought she was no longer suffices. Her view and her friend’s diverge so essentially that they truly are alternate realities. In Squirrel’s, Dragon is, if not totally good, at least harmless. In The Girl’s, he’s mean and, to make him even more nasty, conceals it quite well.

Lurking here, unstated but well-staged, is the nagging sense of what we might call intuition, as a capacity to know something simply because we know it. The Girl knows that what she knows isn’t something she can prove—and the burden of that knowledge, among other things, is not to go crazy from it (as for instance, the knowledge that someone “may smile and smile and be a villain”).

Relearning, in this context, is getting on with being who you have to be, though friends and even you to yourself seem like strangers. The implications of the play—as a reflection, for instance, on a certain U.S. Supreme Court justice—suggest that something is rotten in the state, indeed.

How to Relearn Yourself
Written and Proposed by Doireann Mac Mahon
Directed by Maeli Goren

Producers: Samanta Yunuen Cubias, Markie Gray; Scenic & Lighting Designer: Stephanie Bahniuk; Costume Designer: April M. Hickman; Sound Designer: Noel Nichols; Dramaturg: Sophie Greenspan; Associate Director & Choreographer: Eli Pauley; Technical Director: Yaro Yarashevich; Stage Manager: Bekah Brown

Cast: Edwin Joseph, Leyla Levi, Doireann Mac Mahon, Maëlle Puechoultres

Yale Cabaret
October 10-12, 2019

Yale Cabaret is dark this week but returns October 23-26 with Red Speedo, Lucas Hnath’s well-received drama about competitive swimmers, proposed by Patrick Ball, Eli Pauley, and Adam Shaukat, and directed by Pauley.

Creatures of Theater

Review of benjisun presents bodyssey, Yale Cabaret

What were you doing last night at 11 p.m.? Whatever it was, could it have used a bit more inspiring beauty, a bit more intriguing mystery? Then you should’ve seen benjisun presents bodyssey, the current show at Yale Cabaret (which has two more showings tonight at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.). That’s what I did.

Devised, directed and performed by Benjamin Benne, a playwright, and Jisun Kim, a dramaturg, both at the Yale School of Drama and known, symbiotically, as benjisun, the show features no spoken language. It’s a staged performance piece in which movement and gesture interact with lighting by Nicole E. Lang and live sound—featuring a looper, a clarinet, and a two-string violin—by Emily Duncan Wilson. The tone, neither heavy nor light, provokes contemplation, as Benne and Kim enact living tableaux that take us on a journey—a body odyssey or bodyssey—from the beginning of life on earth to something quite cosmic.

The show begins with a kind of prelude in which shadow play sets up a visually striking dynamic: we see hands in light, and on the wall shadows that can morph from small to huge as one hand seems poised to engulf the other. Then Kim and Benne, garbed simply but elegantly by Phuong Nguyen, interact with cleaning implements while their shadows create a more lyrical vision. Which do you believe: the prosaic three-dimensional beings or their 2D renderings in light and shadow?

Now that they’ve got us in the mood to access what viewing—an active process as opposed to mere watching—does for us, Benne and Kim proceed to enact, first with hands, then with their entire bodies, the process by which protoplasm became sentient beings having two legs and expressive faces. An interlude under a kind of diaphanous pod, pulsing with light and the kind of movements most easily associated with birth—from an egg or amniotic sac or simply from one form of being to another—leads to two sequences I found utterly enthralling.

benjisun presents bodyssey at Yale Cabaret, October 3-5, 2019 (photos by Blaq Pearl Photography)

The first, in which the duo swim on the floor on their backs is accompanied by Wilson on clarinet and sound loops (and blowing bubbles) to create an aquatic sound that feels like the womb must have felt. So very relaxing, so serenely at ease. As James Joyce once wrote: “before born babe bliss had.” Like that. Featuring slow motion movement both very precise and very fluid, the segment is also quite beautiful to watch.

Next comes that moment when, as we all must, we depart from peaceful sleep, get born, or, y’know, crawl out of the primordial ooze. The sound here is like the sun on a day when you don’t want to wake that early or to so much light, or like being on a beach with no breeze. Wilson scratches those two strings and Kim and Benne try to get from supine to all fours.

Benjamin Benne and Jisun Kim in benjisun presents bodyssey, Yale Cabaret, Oct 3-5, 2019 (Blaq Pearl Photography)

Eventually they’re on two feet, and there comes a delightful segment of finger touching finger, testing the water, so to speak, of what another being feels like. There are also some gracefully portrayed fight or flight moments and, masked and armed with fans, a dance segment where they become a clownish couple. Maturity! The large masks are both comical and oddly expressive, making us see the pair as fully human, their movements fully self-conscious, bound by a certain obtuse presence they can’t escape.

Except . . . they sort of do. Back beneath the veil and out they come, faces alight like stars. Heavenly beings? Space travelers? Glowing sparks of remembered spirits? In any case, they appear as poetic expressions of that part of us we’d like to think isn’t wholly contained by this physical world or planet.

The artistry of the piece is a matter of the way all three—Benne, Kim, Wilson—work together, reacting and responding to each other, and provoking in the viewer responses that can be very individual and yet part of the overall experience.

The kind of theater Yale Cabaret provides can’t really be found anywhere else. An experimental space for student work, yes, but also a place where theater feels more communal, more centered in creative effort than commercial undertaking. And sometimes, like this weekend, it’s quite simply magical, a blend of sound, light, design, movement and physical presence that makes the theatrical seem elemental.

benjisun presents bodyssey
Created, Directed and Performed by Benjamin Benne and Jisun Kim
Live sound by Emily Duncan Wilson

Producers: Sarah Cain, Caitlin Volz; Scenic Designer: Jimmy Stubbs; Sound Designer and Composer: Emily Duncan Wilson; Costume Designer: Phuong Nguyen; Lighting Designer: Nicole E. Lang; Dramaturg: Zachry J. Bailey; Technical Director: Yaro Yarashevich; Stage Manager: Fabiola Feliciano-Batista

Yale Cabaret
October 3-5, 2019

Show It Like It Was and Tell It Like It Is

The first show of the Yale Cabaret season 52 revisits Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, From the German Südwestafrika, Between the Years 1994-1915. The play was featured in the Yale Summer Cabaret season of 2014 (review) and it’s easy to see that the play’s relevance has only increased in the past five years. The play investigates the problem of accurate presentation of atrocities that were largely expunged from the historical record or which were never acknowledged for what they were. The German-engineered genocide of the Herero population of Namibia has been called “the first modern genocide,” by which is meant, it seems, that it was systematic as opposed to a result of other policies. The difficult topic is the subject of the “presentation,” but the context for that presentation is the play itself. We witness a rehearsal of a play that tries to present, with some degree of humane depiction, a series of events that are unpresentable. All the actors—designated only by number and “white” or “black”—struggle with that problem while working within their skill set in trying to create characters and scenes.

Directed by Christopher Betts, a second-year director at the Yale School of Drama and one of the more dedicated to the Cabaret by number of past productions, We Are Proud to Present . . . builds on the unique magic of the space. Yale Cabaret audiences are often treated to staging that is improvisatory, or seemingly improvisatory. It’s not at all uncommon to find the kind of slippages between the fictive world and the actual world known as ‘breaking the fourth wall.” The Cab is uniquely situated to deal with a play in which actors in their twenties act out acting problems and issues. Finding the right tone for the  “presentation” is a hunt, and here the question of what will satisfy viewers becomes not just a contextual question but one of creative differences and political sensitivity for the actors.

Robert Lee Hart, Doireann Mac Mahon, Manu Kumasi in Yale Cabaret’s production of We Are Proud to Present…, directed by Christopher Betts

Betts’ excellent ensemble cast—including two Cab debuts—captures the play’s necessary immediacy. We feel we’re “in the room,” as they say, taking in the kinds of discussion that are usually behind the scenes. One actor, designated as “Black Woman” (Alexandra Maurice), plays the “Artistic Director” and practices, with the help of index cards, patter addressed to the audience in the early going, just to get us on the page that the company is on. Once things get going with the “rehearsal” Maurice patiently, and searchingly, oversees a certain kind of controlled chaos that at times seems very real, at other times amusing satire on what actors “go through.” As a line in the program says—enumerating the production’s working rules of thumb (or “collaborative agreements”)—“Every voice deserves to be heard, but not all opinions are valid!” Just try putting that into practice.

Alexandra Maurice, Adam Shaukat (standing), Patrick Ball, Robert Lee Hart, Doireann Mac Mahon in the Yale Cabaret production of We Are Proud to Present…, directed by Christopher Betts

In the play, it means that some actors feel more gifted than others, some feel more engaged by their roles than others, and some want to claim a greater intuition into the lives being enacted. For instance, there’s a certain one-upmanship between Actor 4 (Manu Kumasi) and Actor 3 (Adam Shaukat), which becomes relevant in the era of “colorblind casting,” so that it may be up for grabs who gets to be a German and who gets to be a Herero. When Actor 3 tries to demonstrate that he too can play a wise old black woman, Shaukat is funny, offensive, and surprisingly effective by turns. Likewise, Actor 5 (Doireann Mac Mahon) has to play Sarah—a named German woman who becomes every woman that the German soldiers write to (these actual letters are among the few historical documents from the period). Mac Mahon runs a gamut of possibilities in trying to find the character’s motivation, from childlike to maternal to sexual to avant-garde improv. At one point she crawls about the floor as a cat as the cast puts her through her paces. While Actor 5 never quite arrives at a definitive turn as what Sarah might have been like, Mac Mahon displays quite memorably Actor 5’s discomfort with a built-in stereotype formulated by the soldiers’ pining, together with the problem of what the one white female character means for the play. It may just be the case that every actor thinks their role is the most problematic or important but Mac Mahon’s Actor 5 also shows that no role can be taken for granted.

Manu Kumasi, Doireann Mac Mahon, Robert Lee Hart in Yale Cabaret’s production of We Are Proud to Present…, directed by Christopher Betts

Time and again, the task of playing as cast is a matter of perspective. What the play knowingly evokes, with many comic turns, is the problem of who gets to tell whose stories and who gets to enact them. None of the characters in the play own the events, and none can really stand outside history to interpret what happened. While the situations are indefensible, they actually happened; and while enacting them any particular way is defensible, it’s also not definitive. Actor 1 (Patrick Ball) has to find a brutal soldier in himself and in doing so suddenly and shockingly becomes a Southern U.S. racist; Actor 2 (Robert Lee Hart) is the most self-assured and the actor most critical of the easy assumptions and analogies that the not-too-well-informed cast accepts. In the end he becomes the rehearsal’s scapegoat, if only because his sense of verisimilitude demands that the ugly truth of what the “presentation” addresses has to be enacted. It’s a brave performance by Hart who has a ready knack of being both within a role and outside it at the same time.

Robert Lee Hart in Yale Cabaret’s production of We Are Proud to Present…, directed by Christopher Betts

What the play dramatizes goes beyond our discomfort with the subject matter and the struggle to find a suitable tone. Ultimately it situates itself within what has become—with the advent of Black Lives Matter—a crisis in our culture, politically, historically, socially, and artistically. The racism that remains a part of U.S. reality can’t help but rise to the surface. In a country that prides itself on its noble experiment in liberty and wide political franchise, the story of what might be called our “premodern genocide” of the indigenous peoples of this continent and the story of the enslavement of peoples from Africa are not simply embarrassments or contradictions, they are part of an incendiary backstory that Drury keeps always in the periphery. Which is not to say that the uniqueness of the Herero’s slaughter is ignored nor that all historical injustices are the same, simply that when “we” proudly present a story it is already fraught with acts, identifications and justifications that we really aren’t proud of.

Adam Shaukat, Patrick Ball, Doireann Mac Mahon, Robert Lee Hart, Manu Kumasi in Yale Cabaret’s production of We Are Proud to Present…, directed by Christopher Betts

We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, from the German Südwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915
By Jackie Sibblies Drury
Directed by Christopher Betts

Producer: Dani Barlow; Assistant Director: Tiffany Fomby; Scenic Designer: Jenn Doun; Costume Designer: April M. Hickman; Lighting Designer: Graham Zellers; Sound Designer: Noel Nichols; Projections Designer: Christopher Evans; Dramaturg: Alex Vermilion; Fight Choreographer: Mike Rossmy; Intimacy Choreographer: Kelsey Rainwater; Co-Technical Directors: Tatsuya “Tito” Ito, Jonathan Jolly, Rajiv Sha; Stage Manager: Edmund O’Neal

Cast: Patrick Ball, Robert Lee Hart, Manu Kumasi, Doireann Mac Mahon, Alexandra Maurice, Adam Shaukat

Yale Cabaret
September 12-14, 2019

Get In The Act: The Fall Theater Scene in Connecticut

Preview: Fall Theater Season, 2019

Labor Day has come and gone, and “back to school” weather in Connecticut actually felt like early autumn, for a change. And my email inbox’s increase of press releases indicates that the theater season of fall 2019 is tuning up. The “twenty-teens” are coming swiftly to a close, while the next presidential election is barely more than a year away as we start to wonder who is at “20/20” for 2020.

Here is a glance at the upcoming shows on the Connecticut theater scene (touring Broadway shows exempted) for the next four months between now and the beginning of that oddly doubled year—the last one was 1919!

Yale Cabaret, the black box in a basement on Yale campus where theater leaders of tomorrow make extracurricular theater as students at the Yale School of Drama, begins its 52nd season this week (see Lucy Gellman’s coverage at Arts Paper ); the incoming team are Artistic Directors Zachry J. Bailey, a third-year in Stage Management, Brandon Burton, a third-year in Acting, and  Alex Vermilion, a third-year in Dramaturgy & Dramatic Criticism, together with Managing Director Jaime Totti, a fourth-year joint candidate for an MFA in Theater Management at the School of Drama and an MBA at the School of Management. The 2019-20 season kicks off, September 12-14, with We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, from the German Südwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915 by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jackie Sibblies Drury, a lecturer in playwriting at YSD, directed by Christopher Betts (Directing, ’21); the play dramatizes the difficulties of authentic representation in a tale of genocide by staging the play’s rehearsal; next, September 19-21, is Waste \\ Land: Climate Change Theatre Action 2019, an anthology mixing short plays by international playwrights and pieces written by students, the show is curated and directed by members of Beyond Borders, a new affinity group for international students at YSD; then, October 3-5, the Cabaret returns with benjisun presents bodyssey, a movement-and-puppetry piece created by Benjamin Benne (Playwriting ’21) and Jisun Kim (Dramaturgy & Dramatic Criticism ’21); first seen in the TBD festival of rough drafts last season, the expanded version further explores themes of the human body and the world it inhabits (review). For a preview of the shows from October 24 through December, go here.

Goodspeed, the venerable musical theater on the Connecticut River in East Haddam, has had a very successful 2019 season so far: its revival of the classic The Music Man won the CT Critics Circle Award for Best Musical; its new musical Because of Winn Dixie enjoyed an extended run, and now it brings the season to a close with Billy Elliott, Book & Lyrics by Lee Hall, Music by Elton John; an audience choice, the original Broadway show won 10 Tonys, adapting a popular film about a young boy in a tough North England mining town who dreams of becoming a dancer. September 13-November 24 (review).

Originally the first self-supporting summer theater in the country, Ivoryton Playhouse has been running versatile full seasons since 2006 under Executive Director Jacqueline Hubbard; the last two shows of the 2019 season, which began in March, are Sheer Madness by Paul Portner, a lively—and long-running—comedy-mystery in which audience members spot clues, question suspects, and solve the case, complete with improvised topical humor from the cast, September 18-October 6, and Woody Sez – The Life and Music of Woody Guthrie, an involving celebration of the songs of Woody Guthrie, the anti-fascist folk-bard of Depression-era America, devised by David M. Luken, who plays Woody, with Nick Corley, Darcie Deauville, Helen J. Russell, and Andy Tierstein, October 23-November 10.

Like my own reviews of New Haven theater, Playhouse on Park in West Hartford, founded in 2009 by Co-Artistic Directors Sean Harris and Darlene Zoller and Executive Director Tracy Flater, is entering its second decade; the spacious stage in the Playhouse thrust space, which has housed some memorable productions such as The Diary of Anne Frank (2017) and The Scottsboro Boys (2019), will present the “inspired madness” of Dan Goggin’s Nunsense, a spirited musical in which singing nuns raise fun and funds to bury their deceased sisters, September 18-October 13 (review), followed by Barbara Lebow’s A Shayna Maidel; Dawn Loveland Navarro directs the tale of a patriarch and his two daughters—as children, one escaped the Holocaust with him, the other had to survive it—meeting again after many years, an exploration of “family, faith and forgiveness,” October 30-November 17 (review).

Following the departure of its celebrated Artistic Director, Darko Tresnjak, Hartford Stage opens its 56th season, the exciting first season for new Artistic Director Melia Benussen and new Managing Director Cynthia Rider; first up is Quixote Nuevo by Octavio Solis, a contemporary reimagining of Cervantes’ immortal Don Quixote, now set in a Texas border town, directed by KJ Sanchez; the production is in association with Huntington Theatre Company and Alley Theatre, September 19-October 13 (review); the next two shows will be directed by Rachel Alderman, Artistic Associate (and a founding member of New Haven’s innovative Broken Umbrella Theatre): Molly Smith Metzler’s Cry It Out, a recent comedy about four parents negotiating “the power of female friendship, the dilemma of going back to work after being home with a newborn, and the effect social class has on parenthood in America,” October 24-November 17 (review), and the fun, elegant, and ghostly A Christmas Carol, the traditional holiday favorite of spiritual redemption from Charles Dickens by way of Michael Wilson’s inventive adaptation, November 29-December 28.

Originally a dance hall built in the 1920s, later—in the 1970s—a skating rink, and, since the 1990s, a theater, Waterbury’s Seven Angels Theatre in Hamilton Park, boasts a good sound system, great for concert-style shows such as Million Dollar Quartet (2017) and The Who’s Tommy (2018); the 2019-20 Mainstage season opens with Honky Tonk Laundry, by Roger Bean Take, a tuneful tale of two gals running a laundromat, featuring the music of a slew of female Country Music legends, such as Dolly Parton, Patsy Cline, Carrie Underwood, Trisha Yearwood, and Reba McEntire, September 26-October 20; then, November 7-December 1, it’s Matthew Lopez’s hilarious, crowd-pleasing tale of how a straight married guy—a struggling Elvis impersonator—must learn to walk the walk of a stylish drag queen in The Legend of Georgia McBride.

Founded in 1987 as a small, black box equity theater together with a school of the performing arts, Music Theater of Connecticut in Norwalk, just past the Westport border, follows the gripping productions—Jekyll & Hyde: The Musical, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Cabaret—of its strong 2018-19 season with the ambitious musical adapted from E. L. Doctorow’s historical pastiche, Ragtime, with Book by Terence McNally, Lyrics by Lynn Ahern, and Music by Stephen Flaherty, a story of multicultural America, involving African Americans in Harlem, white upper-class suburbanites in New Rochelle, and East European Jewish immigrants, September 27-October 13 (review); then, November 8-24, it’s Robert Harling’s Steel Magnolias, the story of small-town life in Louisiana as lived and learned by a group of women for whom the local beauty salon is a kind of clubhouse beyond the purview of the fellas (review).

At Westport Country Playhouse, Mark Lamos is in his second decade as Artistic Director, continuing to produce an able mix of sumptuously mounted classics, such as Romeo and Juliet (2017) and Camelot (2016), notable new work like Ayad Akhtar’s The Invisible Hand (2016) and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Appropriate (2017), and rousing crowd-pleasers like Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights, which began the 2019 season in April; the season has two more shows: Lamos directs Mlima’s Tale by two-time Pulitzer-winning playwright Lynn Nottage, a fable about a Kenyan elephant, Mlima, a species facing extinction in a world of capitalist greed and economic desperation, October 1-19 (review); and Brendan Pelsue’s new translation and adaptation of Molière’s dark comedy Don Juan about the legendary libertine facing the consequences of his faithless lifestyle, directed by David Kennedy, November 5-23 (review).

ACT (A Contemporary Theatre) of Connecticut opened the doors of its own theater in Ridgefield in June 2018; the stylish, open stage, with amphitheater seating, has so far only five theatrical productions to its credit as founders Katie Diamond, Executive Director, Daniel C. Levine, Artistic Director, and Bryan Perri, Resident Music Supervisor, continue their mission to bring Equity, Broadway-caliber productions to CT’s northwest. The second season opens with Alan Menken and Harold Ashman’s ever-popular and entertaining The Little Shop of Horrors, a macabre musical comedy about a lovable schlemiel, his demanding man-eating pet plant, Audrey II, and the girl he loves, October 3-November 3 (review).

In the northeast part of the state, The Connecticut Repertory Theater is the production component of the Department of Dramatic Arts at the University of Connecticut in Storrs; CRT productions are directed, designed by, and cast with visiting professional artists, mixing Equity actors, faculty members, and UConn’s most advanced theater students. The 2019-20 season of six shows leads off, in the Harriet S. Jorgensen Theater, with Chekhov’s masterpiece The Cherry Orchard, a more apt choice for our times than the playwright’s more oft-produced The Seagull; the production, adapted by Jean-Claude van Itallie and directed by John Miller-Stephany, features Mark Light-Orr as Gayev and Caralyn Kozlowski as Ranevskaya, October 3-13; later in the month, in the Studio Theatre, is Sarah DeLappe’s spirited The Wolves, directed by Julie Foh, in which a girls’ high school soccer team copes with the tensions of coming of age, October 24-November 3; Shakespeare in Love, a stage adaptation of the Oscar-winning romantic comedy film by Tom Stoppard, Lee Hall and Marc Norman, about the young Shakespeare’s writer’s block and inspiring tryst with Viola, a titled woman with an overweening love of theater, plays the Harriet S. Jorgensen theater November 21-December 8, directed by Vincent Tycer, its Equity cast still to be determined.

In New Haven, James Bundy has been the Artistic Director of Yale Repertory Theatre, the theater in residence for the Yale School of Drama, and the Dean of Yale School of Drama since 2002, fostering theatrical talent and showcasing top professionals; the first show of the 2019-20 season is the World Premiere of Girls, the always challenging Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ modern adaptation of Euripides’ The Bacchae, a popular go-to classic of our moment, this time with “a killer DJ, bumping dance music, and live-streaming video,” October 4-26 (review), directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, an inspiring Directing alum of YSD (2012) who teamed with Jacobs-Jenkins for War at Yale Rep in 2014; The Plot, by the always rewarding Will Eno, has its World Premiere November 9-December 21 (review), directed by Oliver Butler, who won the OBIE for directing Eno’s Open House at the Signature Theatre; Eno’s previous play at Yale Rep was The Realistic Joneses (2012).

The first two thesis productions at the Yale School of Drama, in which third-year Directing students work with a cast and technical team comprised of—generally—current YSD students, will run in the closing months of 2019 as well: Kat Yen directs Anne Washburn’s post-apocalyptic Mr. Burns, a post-electric play, in which collective memories of shows on The Simpsons become the basis of an epic myth, October 26-November 1 (preview) (review); and, December 14-20, Danilo Gambini, the Co-Artistic Director of the 2019 Yale Summer Cabaret season, directs Fun Home (preview) (review); Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori’s musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic-novel memoir of her early life, her coming out, and her fraught relationship with her closeted gay father won the Tony Award for Best Musical of 2015.

At New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre, last season was still transitioning after the ousting of longtime Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein in 2018; now the implementation of the vision of new Artistic Director Jacob G. Padrón is underway, “Grounded in the past, leaping into the future,” though the season that will be entirely his own won’t arrive until 2021-22 (read Frank Rizzo’s talk with Padrón at Newhavenbiz). The 2019-20 season opens with the World Premiere of Ricardo Pérez González’s On the Grounds of Belonging, October 9-November 3 (review); directed by David Mendizábal, the story tells of a forbidden love between a white man and a black man in 1950s’ Jim Crow Texas; oft-produced actor-playwright Kate Hamill has become a veritable industry of quirky, third-wave feminist adaptations of the kinds of nineteenth-century classics formerly the stuff of Masterpiece Theater productions; her third effort, and second Austen novel, Pride and Prejudice fills Long Wharf’s second slot, November 27-December 22 (review).

In downtown Hartford at the historic City Arts building on Pearl Street, TheaterWorks has been producing theater since 1985; the 2019-20 season will open in the newly renovated but still very intimate theater space, after staging several of last season’s shows at the Wadsworth Atheneum’s auditorium; the opener is American Son, Christopher Demos-Brown’s topical drama, on Broadway last season, about a mixed race couple’s grim night of truth when their son gets stopped by police, October 18-November 23 (review); the last show of 2019 will be “Hartford’s twisted holiday tradition,” Rob Ruggerio’s Christmas on the Rocks in which a battery of playwrights devise futures for the figures many of us spent far too many Christmases with; so here’s to all those for whom “the holidays” were as much—or more—about repeat-viewing of “holiday classics” as about spending time with loved ones, December 1-29.

I’ll be reviewing many of these shows, so stop back and follow links to the reviews as they come in, and make the most of the rest of 2019 . . .