Putting the Fun in Dysfunction

Review of Fun Home, Yale School of Drama

The Yale School of Drama production of Fun Home, the Tony-winning musical by Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron, based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, is something to behold. A two-story home, with a band in the back on the ground floor and an artist-studio/observation post on the second-floor, graces the stage at the University Theater. The design by Jimmy Stubbs wonderfully foregrounds the notion of “home” that the musical, playing through December 20, interrogates with its story of dysfunction and coping.

The open playing space in front can become the Bechdel family’s museum-like home with its prized antiques, or easily morph into the funeral home that Bruce, the father (JJ McGlone), operates out of the house, or the dorm-room where Middle Alison (Doireann Mac Mahon) discovers the wonders of lesbian love with Joan (Madeline Seidman) or a hotel room where Small Alison anxiously interrogates her dad. A sliding door in a wall gives onto the piano Helen, the mother (Zoe Mann), an actress, practices on and, in one eerie tableau, the space where Bruce works on a naked cadaver (Dario Ladani Sanchez). Key to the appeal of this well-paced production is the way director/choreographer Danilo Gambini makes use of the space, moving the characters through a kind of memory house as Alison (Eli Pauley) tries to come to terms with the enduring influence of her troubled father.

The company of Fun Home with music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, directed by Danilo Gambini. Photo by T. Charles Erickson, Yale School of Drama, 2019

As told, the story of Alison, a comic-book artist, consists of nonlinear scenes, as they seem to occur in Alison’s memory. Always addressing the audience, Alison pitches her appeal to us, making us witnesses to her vexed history. It’s not just the funeral home and her dad’s way of imposing his tastes and his standards (he dismisses comic-book art in favor of serious art). We learn that Bruce pursues young men for sex while remaining the patriarch and, though his wife is aware of his proclivities, that he hides behind a lie of heteronormativity that seems to warp him. And his underage liaisons put the entire family at risk. Then there’s that night in New York when Bruce is willing to leave his kids asleep in a hotel room while he goes out for . . . whatever he goes out for. Alison is upfront about all she doesn’t know about him, and her father’s death—she’s convinced it was suicide—confronts her as a need to weigh both his failings and hers.

The perspective of Alison, as someone who gradually finds the entertainment value of her life, is key to the power of the YSD production. Pauley gives Alison a reflective irony and her presence as onlooker is made manifest by the way Gambini keeps her placed on the periphery of scenes. The effect, aided by visual effects such as Camilla Tassi’s evocative projections of drawings, scribbles and text, and Nicole E. Lang’s varied lighting design, is of a world that is shaping itself into expressive arrangements as Alison gropes to find her own truth.

The songs that make Fun Home a musical have a certain obligatory quality, as if the story of Alison and her family—essentially a tale of estrangement—might be made alright if they can sing about it. The fun songs, like “Come to the Fun Home” and “Raincoat of Love,” show a lively knack for the kinds of family performers—the Jackson Five, the Partridge Family—that Small Alison loves (the latter number features Sanchez as a teenybopper heartthrob and Seidman and Mac Mahon as dead-ringers for Susan Dey in Phuong Nguyen’s costumes). When they appear in tandem, the three Bechdel children—Alison (Taylor Hoffman), Christian (Juliana Aiden Martinez) and John (Laurie Ortega-Murphy)—are fast-moving stick puppets, giving them the infectious charm of the kind of televised entertainment that would appeal to the children. Small Alison, a larger puppet voiced by Hoffman, with puppeteering by Martinez and Ortega-Murphy, maintains an air of melancholy that might be less available to a child actor (puppet design by Anatar Marmol-Gagne).

Middle Alison’s big number of coming out, “Changing My Major,” is thoroughly charming in Doireann Mac Mahon’s rendering—there’s shyness and heat and awkwardness and joy, and Mac Mahon moves about the space as if in a pas de deux with her own sense of wonder. The more emotionally taxing “Days and Days” is a knockout, delivered by Zoe Mann as the one place in the show when Helen comes into her own, finally reaching out to Alison and acknowledging the emotional costs of life with Bruce.

As Bruce, JJ McGlone is perfectly suited to the role. He looks the English teacher—one of Bruce’s occupations—and he plays the doting or disgruntled father well and is able to mood-swing in a way that makes Bruce feel complicated. His striped suit and glances at his reflection while singing “not too bad,” let us know he’s something of a player, but he’s also vulnerable in ways that make him not quite the grown-up Small and Middle Alison assume he is.

Alison (Eli Pauley) and Bruce (JJ McGlone) in Fun Home with music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, directed by Danilo Gambini. Photo by T. Charles Erickson, Yale School of Drama, 2019

The trajectory of Bruce’s character is given two powerful moments late in the play. Gambini places the important car ride between Bruce and Middle Alison (but with Alison taking her place—indeed, the shutting out of Middle Alison behind a sliding wall is very effective) on the edge of the stage. The intimacy that the two almost find is there for us more than for them, and so the scene registers as the tragic lost chance Alison sees it as. Finally, Bruce’s big number, “Edges of the World,” is sung by McGlone from a platform on the second floor, a provisional space from which he tries to survey not only an old house he’s trying to renovate, but also a life that, like the house, may be beyond repair. Like Helen’s “Days and Days,” “Edges” expresses Alison’s sense of her parents’ desperation, which becomes, via song, uplifting and poignant.

Finally, the flying Small Alison—a puppet sustained in midair—is fully buoyed by the merging voices of Hoffman, Pauley and Mac Mahon, affording us a complex moment in which the child contains the elders and the elders share the child’s simple trust in a father who has yet to bully or betray her. Fun Home, in this fully satisfying production, lets the wishful thinking of art’s answer to life hang on that fleeting moment of perfect balance.

Fun Home
Music by Jeanine Tesori
Book and Lyrics by Lisa Kron
Based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel
Directed by Danilo Gambini

Music Director: Jill Brunelle; Scenic Designer: Jimmy Stubbs; Costume Designer: Phuong Nguyen; Lighting Designer: Nicole E. Lang; Sound Designer: Noel Nichols; Projection Designer: Camilla Tassi; Puppet Designer: Anatar Marmol-Gagne; Production Dramaturg: Emily Sorensen; Technical Director: Dominick Pinto; Stage Manager: Edmond O’Neal

Musicians: Jill Brunelle, keyboard 1; Liam Bellman-Sharpe, guitar; Margaret E. Douglas, bass; Frances Pollock, keyboard 2; Jim Stavris, drums; Emily Duncan Wilson, reeds

Cast: Taylor Hoffman, Doireann Mac Mahon, Zoe Mann, Juliana Aiden Martinez, JJ McGlone, Laurie Ortega-Murphy, Eli Pauley, Dario Ladani Sanchez, Madeline Seidman

Yale School of Drama
December 14-20, 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.”

Can History Be Healed?

Review of Seven Spots on the Sun, Yale School of Drama

As this gripping play goes on, Seven Spots on the Sun by Martín Zimmerman, directed by third-year Yale School of Drama directing student Jecamiah M. Ybañez, becomes an instance of folk history, one that derives its force from traumatic events. Designated as “The Town,” figures in a collective ensemble (Brandon E. Burton, Louisa Jacobson, Kineta Kunutu, JJ McGlone, Ilia Isorelýs Paulino, Jakeem Powell) voice a kind of stricken amazement at events that seem the stuff of legend. Zimmerman’s play, in treating the depredations of a civil war, its aftermath, and the effects of a general amnesty for war crimes, has its eye on the tragic course of more than one Latin American country, while the play’s manner lends itself to fable and the sort of retribution we may think of as Fate.

Early on we learn that the town, which is overjoyed when radio transmissions recommence, accords special status to Moisés (Dario Ladani Sánchez), a former medic who has suffered more than most. So when he smashes the radio so as not to hear pronouncements about the newly instituted government, no one confronts him. The story of all he lost is told in parallel with the story of Mónica (Adrienne Wells), who speaks to the audience about her love for Luis (Robert Lee Hart), a miner in Ojona, who becomes a soldier because he expects it will provide more stability and an eventual pension. Wells’ straightforward address does much to give us direct access to life within the town.

Then the civil war comes, creating a horribly fraught world where victims of soldiers can be left to die in San Isidro’s town square while the town, frightened off by the hand-prints in white paint left as a warning, must endure the misery in their midst. As Belén, Moisés’ beloved, Sohina Sidhu’s emotional reaction to the cries of the dying boy (Powell) provides an important crux for the events to come. Whereas most of us have to read or watch news reports to be reminded, in the midst of our comfortable lives, that horrors are occurring elsewhere, Belén is unable to enjoy the mangoes that Moisés traded morphine for. Finally, goaded by her distress, Moisés agrees to take the boy into the clinic.

When soldiers are reported to be coming back to town, it’s understood that whoever has helped the boy will die. Moisés, despite his overt contempt for the cowardly priest Eugenio (José Espinosa), tries to find sanctuary in the church. Eugenio’s narration of what happens then is delivered by Espinosa as a shameful failure but also as if events are beyond his control—a feeling that gains conviction in the second part of the play. Meanwhile, Luis eventually returns from the war to his wife and newborn son, but he’s no longer the man his wife loved and she fears him.

The full details of the punishment visited upon Moisés are not revealed until late. In the play’s present, we see how, despite Moisés’ antipathy, Eugenio must come to him with a plea: there is a plague in the area that is besetting the children, its symptoms painful but sweet-smelling boils that cause death. Moisés reluctantly agrees to examine a child, then withdraws, appalled by his lack of ability and his own indifference. Eugenio comes again to tell him of a miracle: the child was immediately healed.

The parallel course of the play means that we shouldn’t be surprised that the child of Luis and Mónica will need to be healed by Moisés, but when we learn the part that Luis played in what became of Belén, the play creates a situation worthy of Solomon. At the heart of the dramatic situation is the question of atonement and forgiveness, and how wounds to the social body cannot be healed any other way, though it is more typical to expect that whoever has the upper-hand will exact whatever price satisfies the lust for revenge.

The deftness of the play’s plot is much to its advantage. This is not a realistic tale that strains credulity, but rather a fable about war and love, about hatred and desperate need. The four main characters have both a genuine specificity and a generic quality. The male roles are difficult due to the extremes the actors must evince. Hart’s Luis seems an aloof lover who does what he wants and expects his wife to accept his view; his eventual transformation seems not to take as much toll on him as it might. Sánchez’s Moisés is quite effective in his despair, but perhaps less so in his ultimatums. We have to believe in these characters as persons caught up in events beyond their control and then see them as figures of ultimate nemesis. It’s a striking situation, and an admirable effort.

The boxlike set makes the town seem a cell, an interesting comment on how all are imprisoned by past events they can’t overcome. Late in the play, a wall falls as if breaking through a façade and into the dark events that keep the town spellbound. The fascinating ensemble, with expressive choreography by Jake Ryan Lozano, creates the manner of a people struck to the heart by the story it must tell for the sake of its souls, the individual members wearing haunted looks that stay with us beyond the wrenching outcome.

Grim and trying, Seven Spots on the Sun’s sense of humanity is not without redemption, though it firmly presents the horrors of history as a curse upon the present.

Seven Spots on the Sun
By Martín Zimmerman
Directed by Jecamiah M. Ybañez

Choreographer: Jake Ryan Lozano; Scenic Designer: Lily Guerin; Lighting Designer: Evan Christian Anderson; Costume Designer: April M. Hickman; Sound Designer and Composer: Andrew Rovner; Projection and Video Designer: Christopher Evans; Production Dramaturg: Evan Hill; Technical Director: Jenna Heo; Stage Manager: Zachry J. Bailey

Cast: Brandon E. Burton, José Espinosa, Robert Lee Hart, Louisa Jacobson, Kineta Kunutu, JJ McGlone, Ilia Isorelýs Paulino, Jakeem Powell, Dario Ladani Sánchez, Sohina Sidhu, Adrienne Wells

 Yale School of Drama
December 13-18, 2018

Noah's Art

Review of The Guadalupes, Yale Cabaret

Yale Cabaret’s 50th season has featured more than a few new works with a decidedly autobiographical focus. In Arturo Soria’s Ni Mi Madre, Soria, a second-year actor, played his mother. In This American Wife, third-year actor Patrick Foley and second-year dramaturg Michael Breslin played some version of themselves, speaking, at times on video, about their passion for Real Housewives of New Jersey. And in second-year playwright Jeremy O. Harris’ play the feels (kms) the characters spoke at times as some version of the playwright. In the show currently at the Cab, first-year playwright Noah Diaz acts in and comments on his own play, The Guadalupes, with first-year actor JJ McGlone playing Noah and sometimes acting as an onstage videographer of the show. The play’s focus is on Diaz’s relationship to his late grandmother, Guadalupe, who died this past summer, and Diaz’s way of sharing some of the burden of that event.

Noah Diaz in The Guadalupes (photos: Yale Cabaret)

What all these works share, one could say, is a similar concern with the areas where theater—as contrived event—and actual life confound and expound one another. Since all these young artists are in the Yale School of Drama, theater is a constant concern, and we can see how that plays out depends, in part, on their focus. As a playwright, Diaz puts the actual mechanics of writing on the stage at key moments, as for instance typing lines on his laptop that now become part of the play and also having McGlone scroll through notes for earlier drafts of the play. As a performer, he also puts himself forward as a kind of unassuming narrator figure, claiming he didn’t intend to be in the play—which may be true, even though it’s hard to imagine how the play would play without him.

Much is made of the playwright’s problem of making a play out of an experience that is elusive in its meaning. Most of us experience the deaths of our grandparents and eventually the deaths of our parents, and how those events change us is something we might not fully comprehend for quite some time. Diaz, with the experience still fresh, is trying to see what difference such a loss makes. The most powerful part of the show is when Diaz, as his grandmother, sits in an armchair while McGlone asks him a series of yes or no questions while videoing his face in close-up. Certainly an actor could sit in that chair and pretend to be someone’s grandmother, but what the camera finds in Diaz’s face are traces of his own, very individual sense of his own, very individual grandmother. In her short answers, we see “her” (through him) remember the memories he has of her. It’s very moving.

Noah (JJ McGlone), Other Noah (Noah Diaz)

The play makes a virtue of naiveté, with McGlone at one point asking audience members for any photos of their grandmothers they might have on their phones. The off-hand tone plays against the enormity of death, in a sense, but it also treats grand-parental mortality as the common event it is. The relation that bedevils Diaz is the one between the beloved figure who helped to provide an early sense of familial identity and the failing person who meets her end while the grandson has just got his start in life. That dovetailing is part of the text as well, as Diaz makes it clear that his grandmother died while he was writing a play his first summer after acceptance at the Drama School. It’s such a neat interplay of contrived drama (the theater) and actual drama (a loved one’s death) as to be almost irresistible as a subject for a first-person play.

There could be many ways that might go (and Diaz’s notes let us see some ideas), but what The Guadalupes does with the “material” is to make it both a form of wake that evokes with feeling a departed life, and a form of personal and artistic critique—we never doubt that Diaz is struggling with what he can dramatize about his grandmother and how, and that struggle is retained in the drama we watch. There are some interesting moments that play with how we assume the process takes place, as when Diaz objects to a segment he says was cut and McGlone insists on it. The segment has Diaz reading Spanish phrases, as his grandmother, with nothing like a native speaker’s fluency as McGlone, as Noah, replies.

The play takes its name from the stated fact that both Diaz’s grandmother and grandfather were named Guadalupe. This interesting tidbit sets up the name as common in the family and might have been Noah’s name. Early on, McGlone puts cut-out photos of Diaz’s parents on camera to recreate fantasized dialogues from their early romance which leads to their son’s birth. Such bits of autobiographical detail are sprinkled through the play but none land with quite the dramatic power as the close-up video of Diaz as the grandmother in the chair, nor the comic zest of a swift re-enactment of a favorite scene from the disaster film Twister (viewing it together was a shared reference point for grandmother and grandson).

Noah (JJ McGlone)

Often, as McGlone busies himself at the laptop desk with video and microphone, Diaz paints a wall to signal his grandmother’s regular repainting of her rooms. The act becomes a figure for the many different colors certain figures add to our lives but also the problem of coloring-in the gaps in memories—Diaz, both as himself and his grandmother, claims more than once that his “memory isn’t what it used to be.”

Great artistry has gone into this seemingly artless and improvised production, directed by Emma Weinstein. While The Guadalupes shares some themes and approaches with other Cabaret shows this season, it has a stronger sense than most of the workshop/studio ambiance that the Cabaret space sustains so well. And that might be the best possible lead-in to the upcoming Satellite Festival, March 29th-31st, which will feature a variety of short works, many highlighting experimental and technical features of theater.

The Guadalupes
By Noah Diaz
Directed by Emma Weinstein

Co-Producers: Sylvia Xiaomeng Zhang, Kathy Li; Scenic Designer: Stephanie Osin Cohen; Costume Designer: Alicia Austin; Lighting Designer: Emma Deane; Sound Designer: Liam Bellman-Sharpe; Projections Designer: Erin Sullivan; Dramaturg: Michael Breslin; Stage Manager: Samantha Tirrell

Cast: Noah Diaz, JJ McGlone

Yale Cabaret
March 8-10, 2018

When P.K. Met Glory

Review of Enter Your Sleep, Yale Cabaret

Some friendships are amorphous. In Christina Quintana’s Enter Your Sleep, directed by Rachel Shuey at Yale Cabaret, two friends play out configurations of their relationship within a dream-world, where coping with being apart becomes tinged with wish-fulfillment fantasy and brooding nightmare.

P.K. Whylde (JJ McGlone), Glory "Z" Zico (Ciara McMillian) (photos: Brittany Bland)

Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner’s well-known “getting to know you” film When Harry Met Sally… gets deliberately invoked when we hear the famous clip in which Billy Crystal, as Harry, opines that men and women can never be “just friends” because sexual desire inevitably makes itself felt. In the play, P.K. Whylde (JJ McGlone) is a man and Glory “Z” Zico (Ciara McMillian) is a woman who identifies as a lesbian. Does that change the dynamic of Harry’s truism? It’s hard to say for sure, and that’s the point of us seeing “what dreams may come” as the two negotiate a separation that may spell the end of their friendship.

P.K. (JJ McGlone), "Z" (Ciara McMillian)

Z. has made the break with Tulsa, the duo’s hometown, and gone off to seek a path to selfhood in New York. P.K. stays behind, but eventually moves to Austin. That signals that he’s not the homebody Z. took him for, and his decision not to go to New York with her is either a rejection of the Big Apple, or of her, or of both. In the mix of her present anxieties we see how the question of what the two actually are to each other (once they no longer need each other to endure Tulsa) plays out. Protagonists and antagonists in dreams are not fixed and that leads to sequences in which P.K. acts Z.’s mother or Z. plays a gruff father to P.K. Other episodes show how dreams embellish reality with fabulistic colorings, as for instance when P.K. becomes a rather sympathetic version of the gingerbread-housed witch of the Hansel and Gretel story, or when Z. interacts with a P.K. become alarmingly robotic.

For McMillian and McGlone, the play becomes a wonderland of character-actor turns, as they assume differing demeanors and voices and accents. At one point, in another Harry met Sally moment, they reminisce as an aging Jewish couple. The extent to which the play’s dream world is influenced by the film might be a little over-determined, except that one accepts that much of what our unconscious gets up to derives from roles we yearn for or wish would suit us. P.K. and Z. are a contemporary “odd couple,” with a level of co-dependent interaction that seems to fuel their fantasies of being a couple, which they are in a way that they have still to understand.

Much of the dialogue is sweetly childlike, such as recreating story-time in kindergarten or what seems to be the pair’s first playground encounter, but there is also a fun sequence where—again like the archetypal Harry and Sally—they “do it” against their better judgment. Director Shuey has the two actors run in place with a mounting fervor that speaks volumes about the nature of underage sex—all physical exertion with little emotional resonance.

"Z" (Ciara McMillian), P.K. (JJ McGlone)

In as much as they are supposedly in their mid-twenties, the characters’ self-conceptions seem at times anachronistically adolescent, but that also helps to sustain the Harry and Sally parallel. In the film, the couple know each other for years before they—ill-advisedly, seemingly—become lovers. For Z. and P.K., a similar stretch of time finds them each beginning an infatuated curiosity with one another as children. Thus the events of later years can be seen through the perspective of childhood, and vice versa. There’s also a convincing sense of how aping one another’s parents is a way of trying on the guise of maturity without committing to being “grown up.”

Two-handers can sometimes be a little too static, but that's not the case here. Quick-change artists throughout, McGlone and McMillian, both in Cab debuts, tour this actor’s dream of a show, letting us follow the twists and turns of coming-of-age for two characters who desperately want a certain someone along for the ride.

Enter Your Sleep
By Christina Quintana
Directed by Rachel Shuey

Dramaturg: Leandro A. Zaneti; Producer: Melissa Rose; Set Designer: Emona Stoykova; Costume Designer: Sophia Choi; Lighting Designer: Daphne Agosin; Sound Designer: Kathryn Ruvuna; Stage Manager: Fabiola Feliciano Batista; Technical Director: Jessica Hernandez

Cast: JJ McGlone, Ciara McMillian

Yale Cabaret
January 18-20, 2018