Cab 47 Recap

Season 47 of the Yale Cabaret has ended its run as of April 25th, which must mean it's time for a re-cap of the season. A re-cap wherein I try to recall and celebrate my favorite contributions to the magical basement that is the Yale Cabaret. Ready? Here are a baker's dozen of categories with my five exemplars in each (in chronological order, but for my fave pick), for a total of 65 citations: New Play: This year’s top five never-before-seen, new plays were: Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time, in which Alice in Wonderland—or rather Liddy in Wonderland—meets “Little Miss” beauty pageants, written with verve for a cast of crazies by Emily Zemba; The Zero Scenario, in which every Cleveland in these United States is threatened by the Ticks of Death but for a special plucky band of heroes, written by Ryan Campbell; The Untitled Project, in which a collective of black male YSD’ers create self-portraits in the context of racial profiling, conceived and directed by Ato Blankson-Wood and created by the ensemble; Sister Sandman Please, in which three sisters put it out there for a cowboy, with varying degrees of passion, irony and intention, written by Jessica Rizzo; and ... 50:13, in which an incarcerated black man about to be freed tries to tell it like it is, with candor, wit and a variety of character sketches, to a young prison-mate, written by Jiréh Breon Holder.

Adapted Play: Impressive pre-existing plays adapted for Cab 47 included four translations and an English-language opera: Don’t Be Too Surprised, written by Geun-Hyung Park, translated and directed by Kee-Yoon Nahm, lets us know in no uncertain terms that familial dysfunction can still take surprising forms on stage; MuZeum, translated and directed by Ankur Sharma, tells stories from ancient sources and contemporary headlines, to dramatize powerfully the victimization of women; Quartet by Heinrich Müller, translated by Doug Langworthy, directed by David Bruin, revisits Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons as a wickedly entertaining pas de deux and psychologically fraught cat-and-mouse; The Medium, an opera by Gian Carlo Menotti, directed by Ahn Lê, creates a world of mystery, loss, and deep feeling and gives further credence to the notion that opera is not just for opera houses; and ... Leonce and Lena by Georg Büchner, translated by Gavin Whitehead, directed by Gavin Whitehead and Elizabeth Dinkova, presents a play of aristocratic ennui that torches the well-made play, and this time with puppets!

Set Design: After all, the Cab is a basement with a kitchen, and convincing us we’re in a new space each week takes some doing. Here are some set designs that went beyond all expectation in their achieved artistry: Kurtis Boetcher’s set for Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time made a door where there’s a window and had the coloring and style of a child’s playhouse; Joey Moro’s versatile set for Hotel Nepenthe breathed a seedy charm, like we imagine Hotel Duncan does, or should; Chika Shimuzi and Izmir Ickbal’s stunning set for MuZeum lent aura aplenty and eye-catching beauty to its revue-style presentation; Christopher Thompson’s set for The Zero Scenario seemed to defy space itself in cramming so much busy-ness into the Cab, including a motelroom and a hidden headquarters, and ... Adrian Martinez Frausto’s moody set for The Medium was so fully achieved in its seedy gentility it might be a film set inviting a camera’s scrutiny.

Costumes: Dressing actors for their parts often goes beyond the norm, creating inspired additions to the visual flair of a show. Some of the tops in costumes were: Grier Coleman’s range of captivating dress for ancient characters of India and contemporary folks in MuZeum; Fabian Aguilar and Alexae Visel’s super cool get-ups for the agents protecting us from Tick Apocalypse in The Zero Scenario; Alexae Visel’s authentic mock-ups of the cartoonish costumes of the old Batman series “fit just like my glove” in Episode 21: Catfight; Haydee Zelideth had a field day with modernist Enlightenment-era costuming in Leonce and Lena; and ... Soule Golden and Montana Blanco rendered camp versions of the White Rabbit, Hatter, White Queen, and Tweedledum/dee we won’t soon forget in Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time.

Lighting: It doesn’t just help us see, it also selects and shows and evokes, sometimes making for quite magical effects. Illuminating dancers with lights that added to both movement and music in Solo Bach: Caitlin Smith Rapoport; creating a wealth of visual effects that kept us entranced in MuZeum: Joey Moro; putting on a show and putting-on the trappings of a storybook world in Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time: Joey Moro; using light to complement stories and to add drama in 50:13: Elizabeth Mak; and ... creating an Old World atmosphere both spooky and authentic in The Medium: Andrew Griffin.

Sound: It can be used in striking or surprising ways, or to create an aural texture to accompany the action. Creating a wintery world with bursts of music and broadcasts in Rose and the Rime: Jon Roberts, Joel Abbott; maintaining a sustained eerieness and B-movie aura in Hotel Nepenthe: Sinan Zafar; incorporating music and a range of emotional tones in MuZeum: Tyler Kieffer; bringing together recorded voice, spoken voice, and background music into a collage in The Untitled Project: Tyler Kieffer; and ... merging voices, sound effects, loops and his own music to create a shifting aural space in Sister Sandman Please: Chris Ross-Ewart.

Music and Movement: We don’t always get both, but it can make for entrancing theater when we do: MuZeum featured essential music by Anita Shastri, played on stage by a crew of musicians/actors and interacted with by the actors; The Untitled Project used recorded music tellingly and featured a show-stopping dance sequence by Ato Blankson-Wood; The Medium presented a stirring reduction of Menotti’s score into a solo piano tour de force by Jill Brunelle, expressive miming from José Ramón Sabín Lestayo, and impressive vocals from the cast; Sister Sandman Please benefited from Chris Ross-Ewart’s compositions amidst the aural textures, and delighted with a raucous “O Holy Night” from Ashley Chang; and ... Solo Bach showcased Zou Yu’s amazing solo violin performances, combined with the inventive, cryptic and dramatic choreography by Shayna Keller and her actor/dancers: Paul Cooper, Chalia La Tour, Julian Elijah Martinez, Leora Morris.

Special Effects: An ad hoc category that includes whatever doesn’t fit into other categories, such as: the combination of lights and star chart backdrop to create a sense of wonder in Touch: Joey Moro; the evocative projections-as-scenery in Solo Bach: Rasean Davonte Johnson; the B-movie monster ticks and blood and projections and other effects in The Zero Scenario: Rasean Davonte Johnson, Mike Paddock; the varied creepy puppets, hand-held and string-operated, in Leonce and Lena: Emily Baldasarra; and ... the use of projections and clips to tell stories and create context with images in The Untitled Project: Rasean Davonte Johnson.

Acting (ensemble): Ideally, the acting in a play is a group affair, in which everyone plays a part, of course. Still, it’s worth remarking on when a cast is more than the sum of its parts, as in these shows: Look Up, Speak Nicely and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time, the big kick-off extravaganza of the season featured a gallery of colorful characters by Sarah Williams, Celeste Arias, Aubie Merrylees, Shaunette Renée Wilson, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Melanie Field, Andrej Visky, Libby Peterson; The Zero Scenario, the crowd-pleasing first semester closer, pulled out all the stops with Ariana Venturi, Tom Pecinka, Sara Holdren, Ankur Sharma, Aaron Profumo, Emily Zemba, Ryan Campbell; The Untitled Project, an ensemble-derived show that focused on the subtle distinctions and broad stereotypes of race, was created and enacted by Taylor Barfield, Ato Blankson-Wood, Cornelius Davidson, Leland Fowler, Jiréh Breon Holder, Phillip Howze, Galen Kane; Leonce and Lena, in which actors and puppet-handler/actors interacted to create a zany theatrical world of kingdoms and encounters, with Sebastian Arboleda, Juliana Canfield, David Clauson, Anna Crivelli, Ricardo Dávila, Edmund Donovan, Josh Goulding, Steven C. Koernig, Lynda A.H. Paul, Nahuel Telleria; and ... Hotel Nepenthe, a comic tour de force of changing roles, repeating characters, and linked situations that ran from the creepy to the farcical, all created with manic intensity by Bradley James Tejeda, Annelise Lawson, Emily Reeder, Galen Kane.

Acting (individual): For individual performances, I’m going with some standouts, whether in accomplished ensemble work, or showcased in two-handers, or in the unrelenting spotlight of the solo show. Ladies first: Celeste Arias, hilarious as an unhinged mommie dearest in Look Up, Speak Nicely and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time; Sydney Lemmon, riveting as Mme Merteuil but even more so as Mme Merteuil/Valmont in Quartet; Maura Hooper, chameleonic as a series of characters, including a disaffected nun and a happy hooker, in Shiny Objects; Zenzi Williams, demonstrating a range of attitudes in four characters, from spiritual to demur to quietly confident in Shiny Objects, and ... Tiffany Mack, unforgettable as a heart-wrenching victim of an acid attack in MuZeum.

Acting (individual): And from the men: Jonathan Majors, finding himself in an unbearable situation and quietly going to pieces in Touch; Tom Pecinka as a highly verbal passenger monologuing his anxiety in The Zero Scenario; Edmund Donovan, riveting as Valmont but even more so as Valmont/Mme de Tourvel in Quartet; Ricardo Dávila as the slippery, caustic and fascinating Valerio in Leonce and Lena; and ... Leland Fowler as a stand-up guy feeling the longings of the jailed and acting out a quick lesson in family history and racism in 50:13.

Directing: For the vision behind the whole shebang that makes it all hang together, we celebrate directors: for the all-out campy and creepy charm of Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time: Ato Blankson-Wood; for keeping the hopscotch logic and many shifts in tone of Hotel Nepenthe on point: Rachel Carpman; for creating the interplay of stories, including humor, confrontation, and violence in MuZeum: Ankur Sharma; for showing a dramatic and thoughtful grasp of the resilience of a human spirit trapped in a cage in 50:13: Jonathan Majors; and ... for providing the comic highpoint of the season with wild charm, horror surprises and relentless verve in The Zero Scenario: Sara Holdren.

Production: From the above, it’s obvious which shows seemed tops to me, but to bring them all together for a final nod: Hotel Nepenthe, Sarah Williams, producer, Taylor Barfield, dramaturg, Avery Trunko, stage manager, the kind of shifting and surprising show that keeps me coming back to theater; MuZeum, Anita Shastri, producer, Maria Ines Marques, dramaturg, Emily DeNardo, stage manager, a strong and cathartic import to our shores; The Zero Scenario, Ahn Lê, producer, Helen Jaksch and Nahuel Telleria, dramaturgs, Anita Shastri, stage manager, a crazy sci-fi ride that screams “sequel!”; 50:13, Jason Najjoum, producer, Taylor Barfield, dramaturg, Lauren E. Banks, stage manager, an important and meaningful addition to the one-person play and the "black lives matter" movement; and ... Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time, Kelly Kerwin, producer, Nahuel Telleria, dramaturg, Avery Trunko stage manager, “the gang’s all here” type of theater, presenting a lively riff on the rigors of growing up female in our media-ized Wonderland.

Thanks again to our hosts for 18 weekends—plus a Drag Show: Molly Hennighausen, Will Rucker, Tyler Kieffer, and Hugh Farrell. And ... see you next season, at the Cab!

The Yale Cabaret Season 47 September 18, 2014-April 25, 2015

We All Shine On

Review of Shiny Objects at Yale Cabaret Shiny Objects, the latest show at the Yale Cabaret, asks us to listen to the stories women tell about themselves. Against our culture’s tendency to objectify women, this devised piece from third-year Yale School of Drama actresses Maura Hooper and Zenzi Wiliams, directed by fellow third-year actor Christopher Geary, attempts to subjectify women. That means getting at how the world looks from the viewpoint of 8 women, the interviewees whose words form the basis of the play.

In staging, verbatim, words taken from interviews, Hooper and Williams inhabit the women’s voices and bodies, making us witness different attitudes and styles of comportment. Mere mimicry is not enough as, in each case, some point of “character” must be manifested to give us a sense of who we’re dealing with. Costume changes help us keep track of who’s who, as we’re presented with bits of each interview and have to keep in play the different lives presented, as Hooper and Williams come and go individually from behind a cascade of metallic-looking yarn that forms a loose curtain.

Assessing the nature of the different characters is not simply a matter of their lucidity or ability to express themselves. People aren’t, by and large, playwrights, so their language, while used for effect, doesn’t have to consider drama or comedy as something external—as “theater.” And that makes the theatricality of Hooper and Williams risky. Trying to find a way into lives with only a person’s own words and mannerisms to steer them requires the wherewithal to make us receptive to this series of confidences. It helps that Hooper and Williams both have great stage presence and know how to charm.

The show, as a play, places the audience in the role of confidantes, hearing how several women shape their lives, how they put themselves across, and how they account for what gives them pride or makes them ashamed. In thinking back on the show, I found that four distinct women impressed themselves on me, which means that another four kind of got lost in the sauce. But isn’t that how life is: what makes you remember or find memorable the people you can easily recall?

In the case of two of the women Maura Hooper plays, the contrast is enough to make them distinctive: one, in a deep red sweater, had been a nun, and she speaks through a clenched face, becoming animated as she tells of an encounter with a psychiatrist who gave her a mantra to live by; the other is a dominatrix, in a furry jacket, who speaks feelingly of the skill required to subjugate submissive men without causing irreparable harm. The contrast might be a bit “easy,” but Hooper keeps us engaged with these women, not as “types” but as two very different people who find aspects of their own lives surprising to themselves.

The two characters played by Zenzi Williams that stayed with me are an islander very emphatic about having to sing your part in the large musical composition of life. It was a simple metaphor that the speaker got a lot of mileage out of, particularly her sense that if one lets oneself be “silenced” (in all senses), then one has missed one’s chance to contribute something individual. Williams’ other standout character was a woman who, while in what some would call a successful marriage, had the strength of purpose to start her life over with someone else, for the sake of personal fulfillment. She gave the play a kind of “follow your bliss” mantra, evoked by having to shoot parental commands and other social constraints off your shoulders.

With minimal use of props—a chair—strategic changes in articles of clothing—scarves, headwraps, glasses, jackets, sweaters and wraps—and great use of lighting and subtle projections, Williams and Hooper and Geary kept the focus on personality as, indeed, the most personal aspect in our lives, the key to character and the element that makes us empathize or zone out. Faced with what could seem a talk-show sense of divulgence, Hooper and Williams and Geary—and  dramaturg Rachel Carpman—found a way, for the most part, to give us the sense that, for every subjectivity, there is a “shiny object”: its own sense of its self, its purpose, its raison d’être.

The final “curtain” pairing of the two actresses shorn of their characters provided a striking moment to reflect on how performative personality is and how nice it might be to doff it and walk off into the wings.

Shiny Objects Proposed by and featuring Maura Hooper and Zenzi Williams Directed by Christopher Geary

Set Designer: Claire DeLiso; Costume Designer: Haydee Antunano; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Sound Designer: Kate Marvin; Projection Designer: Ni Wen; Production Manager: Lee O’Reilly; Techincal Director: Kelly Fayton, Kat Wepler; Dramaturg: Rachel Anna Carpman; Stage Manager: Emily DeNardo; Producer: Sarah Williams; Photographs by Joey Moro

Yale Cabaret February 19-21, 2015

More Cab Fare

Tonight the Yale Cabaret features the limited engagement of its third annual drag show, or Dragaret. Three shows, tonight only, 8 p.m., 10 p.m., 12 p.m. Shows are sold out but there is a wait list. I’ll be there at midnight and will report on what I see. Go here for my review of the Cab’s Catfight, from last week. And here’s my report on the rest of the 2014-15 season at the Cab. Six more shows, stretching to late April. A varied line-up, and none of the shows are of the “straight-forward-staging of preexisting play” variety. Which means that, as of this writing, what will actually transpire is still a bit “to be determined.”

First up, Cab 13, February 19-21, is Shiny Objects, a devised piece proposed by third-year actors Maura Hooper—a recurring star of the Cab—and Zenzi Williams, who hasn’t been back in a while. They will be directed by the always formidable Christopher Geary in a play that draws on interviews with real-life females, aged from 7 to 85. The show finds its inspiration in the third-year actor character studies, a training practice that lets actors perform as “persons” rather than “characters.” While not professing a single, overtly feminist point, the show aims to present female viewpoints, with experiences across generational divides and differences providing themes in conversation with one another.

Cab 14, February 26-28, is known as The Untitled Project, featuring another Cab regular Ato Blankson-Wood who will both direct and perform (Blankson-Wood directed the opening show of the season) in this unique ensemble piece. Using music, text, movement, and certain design elements, the project features a collage of black male voices to attest not only to the fact that “Black Lives Matter” but to discover perspectives not often dramatized or presented.

Georg Büchner is one of the more intriguing playwrights of his time; a Romantic but also something of modernist avant le lettre, his plays can be notoriously hard to pin down. Leonce and Lena, Cab 15, March 5-7, features a challenging new translation by Yale School of Drama student Gavin Whitehead and is directed by first-year director Elizabeth Dinkova. The play—which the Cab blurb calls a “dark and comic romp”—involves the quandary of Prince Leonce: should he be a puppet and marry as is expected of him, remaining bound to the duties of court, or ...  With a production that involves actors and sock puppets, a constructed set and cubist costumes, the show should be a visual extravaganza.

After two weeks dark, the Cab returns with something rather unusual: opera. Cab 16, March 26-28, is The Medium, a chamber opera by Gian Carlo Menotti, best known perhaps for the Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors. Proposed by opera buffs Anh Lê, who has worked on or produced many Cab shows, and third-year set designer Adrian Martinez Frausto, The Medium tells the story of Madame Flora, a bogus medium who conducts séances to bilk clients. This isn’t the first work of classical music to be staged in the Cab, but recent events such as Solo Bach or Pierrot Lunaire didn’t feature actor-singers. That will be part of the draw here.

Cab 17, April 2-4, brings us a new experimental piece in 5 acts written and directed by dramaturg Jessica Rizzo, Sister Sandman Please. Described as “a poetic tête-à-tête between fantasy and disaster,” set in a “prairie of the mind,” the show features 3 women and a cowboy, a tumbleweed farm, and, most importantly, a dynamic soundscape where a cascade of voices explore the theatrical potential of sound to evoke a range of sensory experiences.

Finally, Cab 18, Make Believe the Make Happen, April 23-25, finishes the season with what might be considered a somewhat meta creation. Inverting the current Cab’s slogan—Make Happen the Make Believe—the show purports to be a FUNdraiser for #KIDSDIDIT, an Iowa-based program that incorporates plays written by middle-schoolers into theatrical productions. Combining elements familiar from the School of Drama’s Dwight-Edgewood Project, which works with school children to create theater, and the Cab itself, which remains a working-space for creative ferment that requires community support, the final show of the season may well concern the future of theater, so—“open your hearts and your wallets!”

And by then we’ll know who will continue the ongoing project that is the Yale Cabaret for Season 48. During the dark weeks there may be other offerings in the Cab space, so keep an eye open for such announcements. And, as ever, see you at the Cab!

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven, CT

Artistic Directors: Hugh Farrell, Tyler Kieffer, Will Rucker; Managing Director Molly Hennighausen

Country Living

Review of the Yale School of Drama’s The Seagull

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Seagull By Anton Chekhov

Translated by Paul Schmidt

Directed by Jessica Holt

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

Yale School of Drama

December 12-18, 2014