The Teen Scene

All of What You Love and None of What You Hate, the first show of the Yale Cabaret’s spring semester, starts things off with a visceral play that keeps its audience off balance.  What at first might seem to be a satire of online self-presentations, the gap between parents and teens, and the gap between the genders, turns out to be more fraught than that: it’s also about teen pregnancy and the difficult, and scarring, choice of abortion, and the attitudes and mores of the kids in the hood. YSD first year playwright Phillip Howze establishes himself from the get-go as a skilled manipulator of the vernacular—the lines here grasp the peculiarities of personal usage, set within the context of a lingua franca that all the teen characters have internalized.  At least part of the play’s focus is on rendering the kind of “group mind” that teens inhabit in their collective effort to “grow up.”  The situation that Girl A (Zenzi Williams) faces—at fifteen—shows how ill-considered that effort can be.  And yet, the play seems to say, such is a part of life for far too many teens at risk.

We might ask why Girl A doesn’t “know better”: we don’t get definite answers.  Her mother, played with steely prissiness by Prema Cruz, is not entirely unsympathetic, but, with her own efforts to find a man the main thing we know about her (besides the fact that she also has an infant and no husband), we can assume she’s just not there enough to steer her daughter.  Girl B (Tiffany Mack), Girl A’s best friend, is more balanced, seeming to have control over the urges that lead the young astray—but, when it comes down to it, she’s too into herself to be much help to her friend.

That’s not to say that the play is out to point fingers—though the fecklessness of Boy (Cornelius Davidson), the young man who fucks and then wants to forget Girl A, is certainly pointed—but rather to give us a ringing sense of reality.  To that end the voices that act as chorus—coming out of the dark or provided by perambulating figures in hoodies—help us hear how the choices of a Girl A are spun and rung and sung by that “everybody” we’re always aware of, looking over our shoulders, casting stones.

In the end, what are we to make of Girl A?  Played with passive sullenness throughout most of the play, she speaks to us in monologue after the trial by fire of her self-administered abortion: when she says she wanted something but didn’t even know what she wanted, we hear her, in a kind of flashback, tease as a proud young girl enticing a guy, and when she returns to her sadder but wiser voice, Howze and Tarker and Williams give her a stance that makes this girl’s problem our problem.  “You feel me?” she asks.  Yes, we do.

Good work by all in the mostly First Year production, directed by Kate Tarker.  The staging is perhaps a bit too “proscenium” for those who expect more fluid use of space from the Cab, but putting it all on a stage makes what we see a deliberate staging, and that helps us keep our distance.  Lighting, music, scenic design, and projections all add dimension to this dynamic production, full of notable Cab debuts.

All of What You Love and None of What You Hate By Phillip Howze Directed by Kate Tarker

Choreographer: Jabari Brisport; Co-Scenic Designers: Portia Elmer, Mariana Sanchez; Costume Designer: Grier Coleman; Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason; Co-Sound Designers: Pornchanok Kanchanabanca, Sang Ahm; Projection Designer: Paul Lieber; Dramaturg: Helen C. Jaksch; Stage Manager: Rob Chikar; Co-Producers: Stephanie Rolland, Sarah Williams

The Yale Cabaret January 17-19, 2013

Coming Up at The Cabaret

Yale’s spring semester starts this week, so that means not only are the kids back in town but so is the Cab.  The Yale Cabaret has announced its new line-up and the first show of the second half of the season—with ten shows rather than the traditional nine—should be getting ready to go up even as we speak. That show is All of What You Love and None of What You Hate, a play by Phillip Howze as recent as last year, about a teenage girl coming to a major decision about herself with what Artistic Director Ethan Heard describes as “a lot of noise” coming at her from her mother, her boyfriend and a friend.  The play is very fast-paced and contemporary, so contemporary, in fact, that three of its four actors are First Years in the YSD program.  The play is directed by Kate Tarker, a 2nd-year Playwright, who worked in the fall on the Cab’s Cat Club.  January 17-19.

The Island is an early-ish play by Athol Fugard, developed with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, in his Brechtian period, 1972, and set in a prison cell in Robben Island, the South African prison that held Nelson Mandela at the time.  The two men in the cell are rehearsing Antigone, Sophocles’ great play about a clash with the State in the name of mourning, ritual and blood ties.  The play, directed by native South African and 3rd-year dramaturg Kate Attwell, stars Winston Duke and Paul Pryce, both 3rd-Year Actors, recently shown to great effect in Iphigenia Among the Stars.  January 24-26.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day comes Ermyntrude & Esmeralda, a “naughty puppet play” derived from the naughty epistolary novella by Lytton Strachey.  Directed by 2nd-year Costume Designer Hunter Kaczorowski (who recently did such an excellent job on the YSD’s production of Sunday in the Park with George), the play’s titular characters confide in each other about all sorts of things that, we imagine, young Edwardian ladies were not supposed to notice, much less comment upon.  It’s an intimate world of bow-wows and pussycats and whimsical euphemisms. February 14-16.

The first of the two shows this semester not derived from a pre-existing source, All This Noise* is the creation of 3rd-year Actor Jackson Moran, who directed last semester’s tour de force, Cowboy Mouth.  In this one-man show based upon interviews with persons who have had experience with mental illness—as professionals, patients, and relatives—Moran seeks to create some of that “conversation about mental health” that politicians in the media profess an earnest interest in, but which seems to never get started. February 21-23.

The second show originating with YSD students is The Bird Bath, a movement piece created by The Ensemble and directed by 3rd-year Actor Monique Barbee, who shone in last semester’s Sunday in the Park with George and last summer’s K of D, at the Summer Cabaret.  Inspired by the art of the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington*—partner of Max Ernst—this piece uses text from the artist's account of her experiences in a mental institution. February 28-March 2.

Contemporary Irish playwright Enda Walsh’s The Small Things is a chilling play for two actors, directed by 3rd-year dramaturg Emily Reilly.  The characters, a man and a woman, tell stories in a kind of dialect, both to explore the power of speech and to reconstruct occurrences from a devastating past. March 7-9.

Lindbergh’s Flight by Bertolt Brecht was written as a radio play with music by Kurt Weill.  As carried out by an Ensemble that includes Kate Attwell and 3rd-year Actors Brenda Meaney and Gabe Levey, the play, Heard says, is “mischievous fun” with potential for audience participation, and a political dimension to the hero worship of Lindbergh. March 14-16.

Heard’s own project this semester is a production of Arthur Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, or Opus 21.  A moody musical piece involving 21 poems by Belgian poet Albert Giraud, the composition dates from 1913 and is an open-ended working through of Symbolist motifs, most notably the figure of “the sad clown” Pierrot.  The work calls for five instrumentalists and a soprano, but Heard is still deciding how much action will be expected from the musicians and how many actors will be involved.  In any case, the piece seems an even more ambitious combination of music and drama than Basement Hades, the show Heard directed in last year’s Cab.  March 28-30.

The Twins Would Like to Say, by collaborators Seth Bockley and Devon de Mayo, continues the “twinning” that seems a theme this semester.  And like E & E, it involves two girls looking on at their community, and, like The Small Things, it involves the rigors of a private, shared life.  Directed by a duo, Lauren Dubowski and Whitney Dibo, two 2nd-year Dramaturgs, the play is about twin sisters from the Caribbean trying to cope with life in Wales.  The play is usually presented “promenade” style, which means the audience moves around, spending time in one area or another as things happen simultaneously. April 4-6.

The final show of the season is Marius von Mayenberg’s The Ugly One, directed by 2nd-year Director Cole Lewis, who directed the gripping and entertaining show “Ain’t Gonna Make It” in the fall semester.  This four-person play takes place in a slightly futuristic world in which a person who has been deemed the ugliest has undergone plastic surgery to become the most beautiful.  The play is about appearance and substance, we might say, but also about the worship of beauty in our looks-conscious culture. April 11-13.

And that’s that.  See you at the CAB.

The Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven, CT

*Corrections: the original post used the working title Halfway House for the piece entitled All This Noise, and misidentified Leonora Carrington as Dora Carrington, a British artist in the Bloomsbury Group.

A Choice Play

With Dilemma! the Yale Cabaret closed the first semester of the 2012-13 season this past weekend.  Conceived by Michael Bateman and created by an ensemble of players and an artistic team mostly working outside their disciplines, Dilemma! is an interactive play that demands audience participation.  Stopping the action with a chiming sound and the word “dilemma,” MC Ben Fainstein puts to the crowd two choices faced by the characters at that moment.  Once a choice is made, the play continues until the next dilemma arises, with the audience gaining a rooting interest as their choices are followed or not. The story takes its cue from a major storm situation like Hurricane Sandy with power outages and scarce resources: two roommates, Hugh (Hugh Farrell) and Sarah (Sarah Krasnow), receive a desperate call from their other roommate, Larry: he’s stuck in an elevator and the water level is rising!  Hugh and Sarah, in comical panic mode, begin to rush about trying to find a map to where he is, a car to get them there, and various implements that they will need to rescue their hapless friend.  Rather than a treasure hunt with clues to find the needed objects, Dilemma! presents the duo with a series of situations involving one or two interlocutors who they must decide how to deal with: do they, for instance, steal a useful shovel from a somewhat daft old woman trying to free her “pussies” from a prison of debris, or should they waste valuable time aiding her? Should they fulfill the condition of a truculent barkeep and car owner—find him a live musical act that can play with no electricity—in order to use his car to drive to Larry’s aid, or simply deck the dude and take the keys?  Such are the decisions before the audience, with the winning vote determining what path our “avatars” will follow.

The mechanism by which deciding votes are cast for one choice or the other varies, which in turn contributes to how things go.  If the whole crowd chooses, you can get a very different outcome than if the choice is left to one table or one argument.  The variety of methods, and Fainstein’s quick choices of how to decide, kept everyone guessing—who is really directing this show?  And where is it going?  What’s more, some of the choices are clearly crucial to the plot—the one about the inhaler (Sarah has asthma), for instance—while others simply force one to make a moral choice—who gets a scarce flashlight, who gets punched out for information—that make little difference to the story’s outcome, but which might affect one’s satisfaction with how our avatars play the game.  At a certain point it became clear that the real point might not simply be rescuing Larry, but how dirty “our” hands would be by that point, and, also, ethics aside, how much fun we would have getting there.  Sometimes the best choice from the view of expediency is not the best choice from the point of view of dramatic or comic interest.

In the end, it’s likely that no one is completely happy with the outcome.  The Cab posted the tallies for each choice on Facebook, though without the flowchart that would be necessary to see which choice followed which.  Certain possibilities were never explored—Larry was always in love with Hugh, not Sarah, for instance—and the final outcomes—Larry is rescued, or a group of strangers, also trapped, is rescued instead—balanced out.

Everyone in the play—Fainstein, Farrell, Krasnow, Rachel Carpman, Zach LeClair, Dan Perez—acquitted themselves well.  Bateman and the Ensemble offer, cleverly, situations in which there are winners and losers, and one’s attitude toward that is often determined by whether or not one feels the right person is winning.  Dilemma! made for an engaging evening of theater that felt almost like a spectator sport. It was quite fun, and more exciting if you felt strongly about one choice or another.   The situations could be silly or sinister; the consequences might be lethal or laughable—along the way we might reflect on how much violence and illegality we’ll accept in the name of an emergency, and, the ultimate dilemma, do we want a play to end happily or unhappily?  And for whom?

Dilemma! Conceived by Michael Bateman Created by Ensemble Director: Michael Bateman; Set/ Projection/Lighting Designer: Christopher Ash; Costume Designer: Seth Bodie; Sound Designer: Matt Otto; Technical Director: James Lanius; Dramaturg: Rachel Carpman; Stage Manager/Producer: Reynaldi Lolong

Yale Cabaret December 6-8, 2012

The Yale Cabaret’s Spring Season will begin on January 17th.

Kitty Skits

The Yale Cabaret is back for two more shows before the semester ends and the holidays begin.  Up now is Cat Club, with two final shows tonight, and next weekend is Dilemma. Cat Club was created by an ensemble group: Paul Lieber, Timothy Hassler, Benjamin Fainstein, Hansol Jung, and Kate Tarker, with Lieber and Hassler in the guise of two cats—cool cats, yes, but also scaredy cats—who host a program rather reminiscent of that show those two dudes in Aurora, IL, got up to in a suburban basement.  Yet there’s no need to harken to the public access days of cable, this is quirky comedy for the YouTube generation: Cat Club takes its name from a DIY program uploaded by Leelu Cutie Special, a little girl with cat ears, on the public site known for spawning viral views of often embarrassingly or riotously amateurish entertainment.

Lieber, Hassler, and Company go for something similar: the show we’re allegedly watching—as the TV audience—features opening and closing songs, a cooking demonstration, and an interview with the duo’s “biggest fan,” a segment that flirts with “dead air” the way some of the ground-breaking TV comedy of Andy Kaufman did, in his stand-up years.  Like great comedy teams of yore—whether that means The Smothers Brothers or Wayne and Garth—Cat (Hassler, in the speckled costume) and his adopted brother Cat (Lieber, in the black and white costume) are often provoking each other, squelching each other, and backing each other up.  They’re also willing to risk prop misfires, audience back-chat, dropped or batted ad-libs, and a scripted power failure, all for the sake of the high-wire of “live TV.”

As scripted, Cat Club gives us three episodes—and that’s where the trouble lies.  Concluding each segment and opening the next takes the wind out of the sails pretty quickly—even with the amusing fake TV commercials in between—and thus the show is never so appealing as in that first episode.  Even the windy pronouncements of the Fan are amusing the first time.  Still, I couldn’t help thinking that the progressive loss of fun was part of the point, as if we were to imagine Kitty Cat Estragon and Kitty Cat Vladimir waiting for the end of the show.  Stranded in live TV-land in cat costumes—could there be anything more absurd?  It’s a question that comes up because Cat Club is willing to let some existential dread waft in from time to time.

Were there more of that, it would be easier to say what the show—as a Cab show—is after.  As it is, the production showcases Lieber and Hassler as likeable comics—Lieber likes to sport with an avocado seed, while Hassler tends to be reactive—and as a songwriting duo.  A different song is played at each opening and closing of the show—doubtless the most compelling reason for the gimmick.  The songs are lively, and as singers the two complement each other well, but one wonders if standing on a mini-stage in cat costumes  is the best of all possible presentations for the material.

Two musicians in search of a variety show?  Perhaps, but if so, Cat Club would benefit from a little more variety.  There are reasons why a single Saturday Night Live skit doesn’t run for an hour.

Cat Club Conceived by, and all music and lyrics by Paul Lieber and Timothy Hassler

Created by Paul Lieber, Timothy Hassler, Benjamin Fainstein, Hansol Jung, and Kate Tarker

Director: Benjamin Fainstein; Set Designer: Solomon Weisbard; Costume Designer: KJ Kim; Lighting Designer: Solomon Weisbard; Sound Designer: Palmer; Asst. Sound Designer/ Mixer: Tyler Kieffer; Video Designer: Michael F. Bergmann; Technical Director: Matthew Groeneveld; Stage Manager: Will Rucker; Producer: Caitie Hannon

The Yale Cabaret November 29-December 1, 2012

Milking It

The Yale Cabaret likes to take chances.  One of its chancier methods, as is the case with Joshua Conkel’s MilkMilkLemonade, is to cast an entire play with non-acting majors, here directed by an actor, Jabari Brisport.  Other students—both in YSD and in other schools at Yale—step out of their area of concentration to take part as well.  Sometimes this approach gives to the proceedings a feel of liberation from the strictures of theater—we have the sense that the play is open to everyone.  But it’s also an approach that works best, it seems to me, with plays that don’t have quite as many lines and as much busyness as MilkMilkLemonade does. It’s the story of Emory (Xaq Webb, winningly fey), a boy who likes to play with his Barbie-like doll, and who has befriended an enormous chicken he calls Linda (Lico Whitfield, in feathers and blonde wig, with his glasses and beard intact), but who also gets bullied by his “Rockin’ Nanna” (Melissa Zimmerman, surly, complete with oxygen mask and walker) for not doing what boys should do, and both bullied and molested by the local tough kid, Elliot (Bonnie Antosh, appealingly androgynous) for being, well, different. There’s also Lady in a Leotard (Heidi Liedke, perky) who helps with exposition and also interprets Linda’s clucks at times, as well as enacting the evil twin that Elliot imagines living inside him.   It all takes place on a chicken farm not too far from thriving Malltown where Emory would like to shop and have Cinnabon everyday.  He also wants to perform his ribbon dance routine on an American-Idol-like show on TV, thus rocketing to fame.

The cast is game, and there are more than a few comic instances—such as some cavorting in nude suits by Webb and Antosh, little sewn-on penises dangling, and Zimmerman’s changeable Nanna, gasping and shaky when it suits her purpose but otherwise—“I’ll outlive you all”—tough as nails, and everything Whitfield does is funny; I particularly liked his routine as a bad stand-up comedian of the Andrew Dice Clay variety.  Liedke is charming as Lady in a Leotard, but I found myself questioning at times Conkel’s choices in breaking up action with asides.  At the heart of it all is not simply “tolerance” of gays, but rather acceptance and understanding, as Emory and Elliot enact a sensitive scene in which they try to come to terms with what’s happening between them, made amusing by their idea of “playing house”: a bit of Tennessee Williamsesque vamping à la Stanley and Blanche.

MilkMilkLemonade has a lot on its plate, and a great, bright, kid-show-like set by Brian Dudkiewicz and Samantha Lazar, and fun costumes by Soule Golden. By its end the play seemed to be groping for what note it wanted to end on—an interlude between Linda and a spiteful spider with a ghetto attitude (Liedke with a recorded voice) seemed extraneous whimsy, and torching the chicken farm, I guess, a stab at liberating the oppressed.  MilkMilkLemonade runs long for the usually quick and dirty Cab, and could do with some trimming, though it does fulfill Andy Warhol’s dictum: “always leave them wanting less.”

Next week, due to unforeseen circumstances, Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs has been cancelled, which means the Cab will be dark for the next two weeks and return on November 29-December 1 with Cat Club, an entertainment act involving songs, cats, and cooking.

MilkMilkLemonade By Joshua Conkel Directed by Jabari Brisport

Set Designer: Brian Dudkiewicz; Assistant Set Designer: Samantha Lazar; Costume Designer: Soule Golden; Lighting Designer: Caitlin Smith Rapoport; Sound Designers: Steve Brush, Matt Otto; Dramaturg: Hugh Farrell; Stage Manager: Kate Ivins; Producer: Shane D. Hudson

Yale Cabaret November 8-10, 2012

Stayin' Up for Days in the Chelsea Hotel

If you missed the early Seventies, for whatever reason, you might not have much grasp of what made the period unique.  The Sixties were over—and that meant an end to a number of things, some of which have become a cliché—but the direction of where things were going, culturally, politically, and in other areas of life, was not yet clear.  It was a lively, hybrid time, in other words.  The Yale Cabaret’s production of Cowboy Mouth, a play co-authored by two obscure but up-and-coming writers named Sam Shepard and Patti Smith in 1971, lets us return to that fabled and fractured time to see a staging of two artistes of the moment—Slim (Mickey Theis) and Cavale (Michelle McGregor)—thrash out a vision. A vision of what?  Well, that’s what makes the play so much fun.  Cavale, the Smith character, knows that religious icons have been replaced, in the collective unconscious of those coming of age in the Sixties and after, by rock icons.  So, what any self-respecting artist must have is a vision of the rock god of tomorrow.  Slim, despite his misgivings, seems to have signed on for a role somewhat like a male Trilby to Cavale’s female Svengali, if only so he can riff off her frantic jabs at poetry.  In the end, we know, it’s Smith, not Shepard, who will become a rock artist.  (But a rock god?  Well, around this time, over in north Jersey—Smith’s from south Jersey—there was this cat named Bruce…)

Life together for Slim and Cavale is a series of provocative assertions, of trying on roles, of taking positions that might be inspiring or might be dispiriting.  Slim wants to hear Cavale tell stories. Cavale wants Slim to get intimate with Raimond, her dead crow.  Slim, restless, pounds a drum kit to punctuate his annoyance, or cranks an electric guitar to reduce Cavale to the postures of an abased groupie.  Cavale plays dead, or slaps the wall, or postures and preens.  And there are many well-choreographed gropes and clutches—body language in this play is a treat, almost a treatise, with director Jackson Moran helping to give it its flair.

And for laughs, there’s Lobster Man, a figure—yes, in a bright red lobster suit—who delivers takeout and returns to become the guinea pig of the duo’s plans.  Fulfilling the inevitable “triangulation” role in a Shepard play, Lobster Man seems to take his cue from the lobster that French 19th-century poet Gérard de Nerval walked in the park on a blue ribbon. Nerval hanged himself on the date of Cavale’s birth (albeit almost a century prior).  That’s the kind of thing that gets Cavale worked up.

As Slim, Theis does the “undiscovered rock god” thing well—he looks good and he knows how to do “stage presence”—but he also knows how to do Shepard’s trademark laconic staccato.  Shepard’s verbal jousting can gesture toward Beat poetry without ever getting lost in its jazzy embellishments.  He’s too “true west” for that.  As Cavale, McGregor’s costume is spot on, and, whereas some of Cavale’s pronouncements could come off as spacey, late hippie-meets-proto punk, McGregor manages to give the role a gravitas that, we might say, can only come from a retrospect on what a female artist of today owes the gutsiness of a female artist of then.  Cavale seems only a little retro, certainly not a throwback.  Both actors are dervishes of movement and play off each other with astute timing and staging.  For my money, both could’ve gone a bit more for the drawl that is so notable in Shepard and Smith, a grasping, searching speech-rhythm that, with Smith especially, is not afraid of going spastic and out of control, ditto her movements.

The look of the show is great—Meredith Ries, Set; Jayoung Joon, Costumes; Masha Tsimring, Lighting—the lines of the play come alive (I particularly liked the echo effects on the mics—Palmer, Sound), and the ending, with The Lobster Man revealed as a female rock god, is apropos.  Drop the notion—dead as of Patti Smith and Chrissie Hynde, if not Grace Slick and Janis—that a rock god can’t be a woman, and lo! Lobster Man stands revealed as the Future of Rock, kinda like glam sans drag.

Jenny said when she was just five years old, There was nothin’ happenin’ at all Everytime she put on the radio, There was nothin’ happenin’ at all Then one fine morning she put on a New York station, She didn’t believe what she heard at all She started dancin’ to that fine, fine music Her life was saved by rock’n’roll —Lou Reed, “Rock’n’Roll” (1970)

Cowboy Mouth By Sam Shepard and Patti Smith Original music composed by Mickey Theis; Lyrics by Sam Shepard and Patti Smith Directed by Jackson Moran Produced by Tanya Dean Yale Cabaret October 25-27, 2012

Drink At Your Own Risk

Spoiler Alert: Don't Read This If You Have Not Seen White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, but might. If you didn’t see the Yale Cabaret’s production of Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit, Red Rabbit last weekend, that’s too bad.  But if you did see it, what did you see?

Each performance was different because it required a different main volunteer (The Actor) to open an envelope and read the script inside, and involved different audience participants.  You may have seen (as I did) directing student Sarah Holdren as The Actor, or Monique Bernadette Barbee, John-Michael Marrs, Hugh Farrell, Gabriel Levey or Brian MacInnis Smallwood.  This person has to enact what the script demands—including playing a cheetah imitating an ostrich—as well as “direct” audience members who, among other things, enact a white rabbit encountering a bear, or maybe it’s a would-be spectator encountering security, or maybe it’s a would-be free agent encountering an agent of the state.  At another point, volunteers play a group of white rabbits doused with ice water while one, and only one, gets to become the red rabbit by grabbing the carrot at the top of a ladder—only to be verbally trashed by The Actor as The Playwright.

As we’re constantly reminded, everything The Actor is told to say and do comes by virtue of The Playwright—and not the playwright in some generalized sense (all scripts originate with a playwright, etc.), but in the very specific sense of Nassim Soleimanpour (who tells you to look him up on facebook and to send him comments at an email address a note-taker is asked to note).  And Soleimanpour, as the absent presence in his play, needles us and nudges us and banters with us, all the while insisting that he can only have any effect upon us via theater—he lives in Iran and can’t leave his homeland, so theater becomes his vicarious form of travel.  And where does he travel to? Why, to our free society, of course, only to impose upon his audience and his volunteers as much as his autocratic imagination can devise, while undermining that relation as much as possible.  We, the audience, have to decide how much we’ll go along with.  We’re free to leave or intervene, or to refuse his commands.

If there’s a gun on stage it has to go off by the end of the play, Chekhov said, more or less.  So if there’s a vial of some substance or other mixed into a glass of water, someone’s going to have to drink it, or at least decide which of two glasses to drink.

Lest we think this is all just a variant on the trust-fall game, we hear of an experiment: Soleimanpour tells us of his uncle’s work with rabbits, how dousing them with water because they aren’t red, or because they didn’t get the carrot, or climb the ladder first, or whatever it is rabbits think they’re getting collectively doused for, makes them attack the rabbit who has been sprayed red and not doused after climbing the ladder and grabbing the carrot.  Uncle keeps this up and sooner or later any rabbit who climbs the ladder, whether he gets a carrot or gets sprayed red or not, gets attacked, even by later rabbits who never saw a carrot nor got doused.  See how rabbits form habits?  Isn’t politely watching a spectacle a habit?  What kind of rabbit are you?  Who do you want to attack?  The hapless playwright?  Or maybe his surrogate—The Actor.  Fine.  Let’s have a sacrifice.

Catharsis is when we collectively accept suffering for our sake: The hero of tragedy, Christ on the cross, and so on.  Though either glass of water may or may not contain some form of poison, The Actor is told—by an audience volunteer who reads the end of the script—to drink one.  Is this psychic distress for our benefit in some way?  How implicated do we feel?  At the show I saw (Thursday night), some members of the audience told The Actor not to drink, someone even suggested overturning the glasses.  Proactive intervention—save The Actor from the play!  You don’t have to risk death for our sakes, we’re satisfied.

I’m assuming The Actor drank in each performance.  Sarah Holdren ad-libbed “for the good of the play” before drinking the glass right down, and you wanted to hug her for it.  It’s for the play, bravo.  Let’s keep us out of this.  And yet we’re all implicated, Soleimanpour is insisting: it’s not him doing this, finally.  And so we should feel something for this puppet in the play, shouldn’t we?

Perhaps, but context is contingent.  The Cab show was sponsored by Director of Theater Safety Bill Reynolds and his wife, and if you think any YSD student is going to drink rat poison “for the good of the play” on Bill’s watch, guess again.  Which is a way of saying that, while I can imagine stagings of the play where I might suspend my disbelief, I don’t know where that might be.  Maybe only in Soleimanpour’s imagination—but his planting the possibility in my imagination is, I guess, enough of a point.

The best thing the play has going for it is that Soleimanpour has found a neat staging of his situation: in writing the play and putting his name to it, he doesn’t know what will happen to him.  In volunteering to be in the play, The Actor doesn’t know what will happen either.  Because of polite conventions in the “free world,” probably nothing bad (the clean glass).  But there are exceptions—ask Salman Rushdie, ask the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three of his staff members who had nothing to do with a crappy film defaming Mohammad that happened to surface on their watch.  Soleimanpour makes theater.  It might prove fatal (the poisoned glass).

How far can we trust polite conventions?  When does disbelief become fatal?  Who would take a bullet for an illusion?  Do we always have a choice?

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit By Nassim Soleimanpour Produced by Nicole Bromley, Tanya Dean Consulting Director: Katherine McGerr Set Designer: Carmen M. Martinez Stage Manager: Geoff Boronda Dramaturgy: Daniel Brooks and Ross Manson

Yale Cabaret Oct. 18-20, 2012

Passion and Purpose

After a brief week's hiatus, the Yale Cabaret resumes this week.  First up is a play about which not much can be said.  White Rabbit, Red Rabbit by Nassim Soleimanpour presents a different actor each night who opens a sealed envelope containing the script and proceeds to enact what he or she finds.  The play, according to Artistic Director Ethan Heard, has taken the Fringe Festival circuit by storm but can’t be performed in the playwright’s native Iran.  Is the play incendiary toward the standards acceptable in Iran?  A blog has been set up to chronicle productions of the play, but don’t peek.  The best way to find out what it’s all about is to attend the show—more than once, as each performance will be different.  October 18-20. Playwright Sam Shepard has won 15 Obie Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize.  Patti Smith, poet and rock artist, has won the National Book Award.  But in the early Seventies they were both largely unknown and were living together as lovers.  During that time they wrote a play called Cowboy Mouth, which they also enacted.  Set in a hotel, the play involves Slim and Cavales, two artistic types trying to workout their differences.  Interestingly, the two actors in the show—Michelle McGregor and Mickey Theis—first undertook a long scene from the play in an acting workshop; meanwhile, designer Masha Tsimring worked on the play for a class assignment in a different class.  The stars aligned, obviously, and the trio united to propose the play, directed by Jack Moran, with Chris Bannow assisting, with aid from dramaturg (and Summer Cabaret Artistic Director) Tanya Dean as producer.  Oct. 25-27.

Cab #6 is a contemporary comedy: Joshua Conkel’s MilkMilkLemonade tells the story of Emory, an 11 year-old boy growing up gay in a generic place called Malltown, U.S.A., where he lives on a farm and has, of course, a pet chicken.  Conkel’s play, which features a cast of six or seven, encourages transgender casting in its account of the imaginative life of a kid who wants to be a star and get out of Malltown, while featuring some amazing ribbon dancing.  Xaq Webb, the Cab’s Associate Managing Director, stars, and the play is directed by second-year acting student Jabari Brisport.  Nov. 8-10.

The Chairs, by Eugene Ionesco, is the fourth (and final) show of the Cab’s fall semester that derives from a pre-existing play.  In this case, Ionesco’s absurdist play of social ceremony—an older male and female couple welcome unseen, but nonetheless characterized, guests to their gathering—has very definite requirements for staging.  YSD play-writing student Justin Taylor directs from his own new translation of the play, and part of the fun will be to see how Ionesco’s vision of the play can be made to work in the Cab’s protean but rather finite space. Nov. 15-17.

Paul Lieber and Tim Hassler have been working on songs together since they met in the Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival in 2011,  while playing, with considerable aplomb, comic relief characters in the Tempest and As You Like It.  Drawing on their repertoire of original songs and their instincts as Cab performers, Lieber and Hassler bring us Cat Club, inspired (perhaps) by a YouTube video of a little girl wearing cat ears and intoning little ditties. Lieber works in projections; Hassler just gave a great musical performance in Cab #3; Ben Fainstein, who brought us last year’s final show Carnivale/Invisible, directs. What’s this show about?  What won’t it be about?  Nov.29-Dec. 1

The developers of Cab #9 have been working all semester to create the rules that will govern the show.  Dilemma is designed to involve the audience, requiring us to make choices—call them moral dilemmas—about how the actors enact the situations they meet with. Conceived by Michael Bateman with help from Reynaldi Lolong, Jack Tamburri, Cole Lewis, and The Ensemble, the show should be utterly unpredictable, depending on you, the audience.  Dec. 6-8.

Artistic Director Ethan Heard said he’s “thrilled so far” at the work submitted for consideration for the Cab’s slots, and some that didn’t make the cut may, with a little work, have a chance for spring.  The key to the shows chosen, he said, are "the passion and purpose of the show and the strength of the team involved."  The line-up purports to showcase the inventiveness and oddity, the rawness and vision that the Cab is known for.  See you at the CAB!

Do Not Go Gentle

The blues make you feel better, but what if you’re dying?  That, we might say, is the test underlying the Yale Cabaret’s latest offering: Ain’t Gonna Make It, conceived by Nicholas Hussong, Cole Lewis, Masha Tsimring, and Lauren Dubowski, directed by Lewis, and created by the Ensemble, which consisted of Eric, the dying man (Timothy Hassler), the dour Balloon Man (Ryan Campbell), and a band: Hansol Jung, Martha Jane Kaufman, Sarah Krasnow, Jenny Schmidt, and Lico Whitfield. The play is presented in true Cabaret style—a man at a microphone, with a guitar, regaling us with songs and anecdotes about how he learned of his condition—colon cancer—and found out that, at the age of 29, his life was over.  It’s Hassler’s show all the way, and he delivers the part with a dynamism that keeps the audience enthralled.  The style is loose enough to make us feel at times he’s actually talking to us, rather than simply acting out a scripted play—and that’s helped by certain moments of audience interaction that not only erase the space between audience and actor, but make us aware of how we’re responding to Eric’s plight.

Addressing an audience member as if on a date in hopes of a “sympathy fuck” (the theme of a rather vehement song moments before), then taking her hand and moving it in a very suggestive way, or kneeling before a male audience member to play on a recorder—sheepishly allowing “I’ve never done this before”—or placing one of his balloons in the arms of “Mom” while trying to tell her of his condition, Hassler creates moments of tension that entertain us but that also keep us uneasy with the dimensions of his story.  It’s a tightrope walk of considerable skill—not only to play a dying character who is spilling his guts, but who is also trying to be an “act” and to get us into the act.  Hassler, lean, fair-haired, ingratiating, has a boy-next-door look that makes his experience seem generalizable. When he reflects on all the things he won’t do, it’s a sobering moment about the kinds of denials for the future that we tend to ask of twenty-somethings.  And if there’s no future?

One of the best bits is a foot-stomping song, mostly a capella, in which Eric exhorts himself to “take the pill”—big medical vials are situated within easy reach as he pill-pops his way through different moods—and Hassler finds the groove to take it on home.  In general the songs show how versatile the blues are as a form, with sadness, anger, horniness, and consolatory clarity giving us various sides of the situation.  One particularly effective number used Sarah Krasnow on keening backing vocals to great effect—a kind of mournful gypsy tune with a lot of soul.

As the baleful Balloon Man, Ryan Campbell’s erratic, silent appearances are unnerving.  Handing over a balloon to Eric, or dropping a load of them on the floor, his acts and the balloons remind us of the cancer cells proliferating in Eric’s system—in one upbeat moment, two nurses (Sarah Krasnow and Jenny Schmidt) tap-dance to lively music and fling balloons out the window.  Yet nothing can deplete all the balloons.

One might think the show—which ends with the loudest balloon burst I’ve ever heard—would be a downer in its one-way path to our hero’s extinction.  It’s not, because the show not only affirms life, it embraces death with gutsy emotion rather than sentimental gestures.  As a form of soliloquy—the one we will all face at some time, alone with our various ends—it makes us contemplate the dignity of the life of an individual, so present for us at one moment, so completely gone the next.

The Yale Cabaret will be dark next week, then return Oct. 18-20 with White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, by Nassim Soleimanpour, in which five actors—one for each performance—open a sealed envelope and enact the script inside.  Audiences and actor discover together what the play is.

More about the rest of the first half of the Cabaret's season 45 to come.

Ain’t Gonna Make It Conceived by Nicholas Hussong, Cole Lewis, Masha Tsimring, and Lauren Dubowski Directed by Cole Lewis Created by The Ensemble

October 4-6, 2012 Yale Cabaret 45th Anniversary Season

It's Like This

The Yale Cabaret’s This. is a fast-paced pastiche of personal events from multiple sources.  Staged by a cast of six—three males, three females—and directed by Margot Bordelon, the script, developed by Mary Laws, derives from interviews and anonymous emails solicited from people from the communities of Yale, the Drama School, and New Haven.  To what end?  To weave the anecdotes of childhood trauma, teenage experiences, and other moments of “loss or fracture” into an entertaining and touching night of theater. The sense of a collective voice is supported by the fact that the gender of a given interviewee is not necessarily retained in the actor chosen to act out that segment.  Thus the six—Jabari Brisport, Merlin Huff, Ella Monte-Brown, Mariko Nakasone, Hannah Leigh Sorenson, Mickey Theis—metamorphose in a very fluid fashion, not bound by consistency of voice or character.  And yet each actor is given opportunities to hold center stage with a story a bit more fleshed out than some of the other quick changes.  Particularly strong is Jaspari Brisport with the material that falls to his lot: he tells us of the vicissitudes of belonging to a band of guys who call themselves the Poochys—his social death arrives via a play-acted same-sex kiss he puts his tongue into, and a stressed-out recital of a speech from Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion; elsewhere Brisport, with a thick voice and a collection of nervous tics, tells of paternal molestation in a hot tub—the story is told in response to a prompt asking about events that caused a major change and the story isn’t over-dramatized, though “the change” is clearly traumatic.  Similar is Nakasone’s tale of a teen-ager who, against her better judgment, lets herself get drunk with a group of boys who proceed to rape her—“the change” is that her father blames her.  While these stories may seem too sad or unpleasant for a friendly interview session, Bordelon and Laws wisely maintain the straight-forward declamation of such confessions.  We hear the stories told by persons who are clearly able to live with these pasts and go on with their lives.

Surprisingly, against such lurid material, the stories of lesser or more comic instances of past misfortune don’t seem trivial, as for instance Merlin Huff in the character of a somewhat garrulous elder—turning 65—who reminisces about the loss of a prized toy.  It’s to the entire cast’s credit that they are able to inhabit the state of mind of children and teens so as to make stories like finding someone to blame the destruction of a statue of the Blessed Mother on seem vivid.  In addition to well-choreographed movement to keep the action fluid and not too talky, the team also employs very effective mixes of lighting (Oliver Wason) and stop-action moments to create tableaux that work to highlight key moments and produce images of emotions easy to identify with.

The action all takes place against set designer Reid Thompson’s impressive backdrop walls where the shelves of a middle-class den meet the large scale box sculptures of Louise Nevelson, a nice mashing of the mundane and the modernist.  The overall effect of This. is a sense of wonder at the stories harbored by anonymous people; we might suppose that the verbatim language of interviews would be a bit too artless for drama, but as presented here, the deliberate eschewing of overly dramatic, poetic or sensational language keeps the situations described within the realm of everyday reality.  And that's the point. We’re all a part of This.

This. Conceived and created by Margot Bordelon, Mary Laws, and Alexandra Ripp Script by Mary Laws Directed by Margot Bordelon Based on interviews conducted in New Haven

Yale Cabaret 45th Anniversary Season

EGGED ON

The Yale Cabaret’s adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Fatal Eggs definitely has its moments, and most of them are in the first half of the show.  There’s energy and amusement aplenty in the early going, as we follow the tale of Prof. Vladimir Ipatevich Persikov’s surprising discovery of what will soon be touted as a “ray of life.”  As a means of accelerating embryo development that might just be the thing to speed up growth in chicken eggs after a strange outbreak kills off all the People’s Republic’s poultry, the ray is requisitioned by the State. Unfortunately the eggs ultimately treated with the method are not chicken eggs but eggs generally used for experimental purposes—ostrich, crocodile, snake—and thus Russia is soon over-run by Creatures Of Unusual Size.  Persikov, who doesn’t read papers, gets denounced by the press, and the next thing you know the mobs of Moscow are out to get him. Chris Bannow plays Persikov with the earnest goofiness of a Jerry Lewis-esque “Wacky Professor” and is one of the strengths of the production, which is at its best when it’s at its wackiest.  Other comic contributions come from support by Mamoudou Athie, great at funny voices, and Ceci Fernandez as a brazenly unlettered reporter straight out of vaudeville, with the plaid suit to prove it.  Indeed, what makes the early going so much fun is the fast-paced slapstick of it all—including fun with a spinning door and a dim-witted assistant (Dan O’Brien)—and voices and mannerisms that have radio-skit clarity (I kept being reminded of the radio-drama take-offs by recording comedy troupe The Firesign Theater).  Director Dustin Wills keeps it bouncing and the wheelable stage props help to keep things moving.  The Narrator (Ilya Khodosh) adds something of a radio announcer’s amused detachment, and we seem launched toward a laughable version of ‘20s Sci-Fi that Orson Welles and his Mercury Players might appreciate.

And though there are some diversions in the later stages—such as two trembling babushkas dreading the outcome of the chicken outbreak, and a monstrously surly chicken on a leash, to say nothing of a Flying Snake Puppet of Death (Dustin Wills, puppets)—the play, adapted by Khodosh and Wills from Bulgakov’s short story, hits a dead patch when the frenetic stagework pauses to let the plot catch up.  The talky parts—as when Athie, on behalf of the People’s Republic, commandeers the Ray, or when Pyotr Stepanovich Ivanov (Sophie von Haselberg) and Persikov babble bio-jargon at each other—seem to long for interruption, and the figures of fun (O’Brien, Fernandez, Michelle McGregor—with one helluva wail) eventually seem to have already done their best bits.

The Scenic Design (Kate Noll) is quite a spectacle—particularly effective are the backdrops of Russia, complete with suspended sickle moon—and the staging area is surrounded by fascinating clutter.  Solomon Weisbard cooks up some interesting projections—combining your basic Petrie dish swarm with Eisensteinian montage; Meredith Reis’ lighting makes ingenious use of onstage lamps and unobtrusive spots to focus attention where required—and the flashlights from the outdoors mob are a nice touch.  Costumes, by Nikki Delhomme, provide lots of visual interest and complement the comic turns—as in the combined voice and costume of Athie’s Fat man, and in the reporter’s aforementioned duds.

All combined it’s a fun evening that, for me, felt like the Cab doing the kind of thing it does best: sending-up familiar forms of theatricality while contributing its own bits of inspired irreverence. We should be happy to egg them on.

Two more shows: Saturday, 9/22, at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.

The Fatal Eggs by Mikhail Bulgakov Adapted by Dustin Wills and Ilya Khodosh Directed by Dustin Wills

September 20-22

The Yale Cabaret 45th Anniversary Season 217 Park Street 203.432.1566

The 45th Time Around

Look around.  School’s back in session.  That means it must be time for the new theater season to get up and running.  Since the close of the Yale Summer Cabaret’s 50 Nights: A Festival of Stories, the space at 217 Park Street has been transformed into readiness for the launch, on September 20, of the 45th season of the Yale Cabaret. With 45 years under its belt, serving up a feast of great theatrical experiences, as well as literal feasts in the form of inventive food service, the Yale Cabaret should be well-known to New Haveners and, indeed, to anyone in the region interested in adventurous theater—and that should certainly include New Yorkers on the lookout for out-of-town talent.  The Cabaret is entirely run by grad students in the Yale School of Drama, and each season provides a satisfying element of surprise, as audiences get to find out first hand what the current YSDers find provocative, exciting, and challenging.  Each play plays for only three nights, five shows—Thursday, twice on Friday, and twice on Saturday—thus the change-overs are fast and furious and the offerings are as varied as possible, making each week a fresh discovery.

Ethan Heard, a third-year director in YSD, is the Artistic Director this year, aided by Managing Director Jonathan Wemette, and by two Associate Artistic Directors, Ben Fainstein and Nicholas Hussong, and Associate Managing Director Xaq Webb.  In the previous two years of the program, Heard was involved in two memorable shows—for 2010-11, he directed and contributed as a writer to the gender-bending comedy musical Trannequin!, and in 2011-12, he directed a rather more brooding music-based theater piece called Basement Hades.  Which is a way of saying that Heard has already paid his dues in showing his commitment to the possibilities of the Cab.

I asked Heard if he could elaborate on what, as the leader of the enterprise, he might consider his vision of the season to be (when we spoke, only three of the first semester’s plays had been chosen, with the process of determining the offerings of the other six weeks to take place shortly).  Heard said he and his team had developed five core values to the Cab as they see it.  Enumerating them should give you a fair idea of the kinds of things the Cab hopes to accomplish this year.

First, “presence”—the “essential component of live theater” as practiced at the Cab, which, in practice means, that whatever you’re watching doesn’t feel removed or remote—it feels like it’s part of the space and the world the audience inhabits.  Next comes “inclusivity” and that has to do with who the audience is.  Heard would like all manner of theater-goers to attend, and so the Cab has established “Ambassadors” appointed to spread the word, to bring together groups to attend, and generally to act as grease to the wheels of publicity—in particular, Heard and company are in hopes that Yalelies, both grad and undergrad, who have a tendency to withdraw into their own circles and fields of study, will want to find out more about this local treasure.  Then there’s “risk”—a key element of the entire enterprise and one that needs stressing: while outreach says everyone should feel welcome to attend, there’s the proviso that a certain amount of risk is involved.  The work the Cab aims at stresses an active audience whose presence is part of the show in subtle ways.  Which leads us to 4: transformation, the idea that a theatrical experience can change you, that you will not leave exactly as you came.  It’s an interesting and challenging idea, perhaps common to performers and audience alike, but how often do we really accept it?  Certainly, we go looking for “something different,” but when we find it do we let it make us be different?  And for the cast and crew to stress transformation, the show can’t be just a resumé-stuffer—it’s got to be the sort of thing where being a part of it matters.  Finally, then, the big one: purpose.  Without getting too meta, we can say that the purpose of theater is to make us think about the purpose of anything and everything.  Why, as social beings, do we do what we do, and what does it mean to gather together to see human behavior—in all its varieties—enacted?

So, what’s ahead?

First up is an adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novella, The Fatal Eggs (1925), translated from the Russian by Ilya Khodosh, and directed by Dustin Wills.  Heard describes Bulgakov as a “slightly livelier Chekhov” and the plot of the play sounds like it would be at home in a Hollywood B-movie of the Fifties: zoologist discovers a means to speed up the development of animal life, and the method is seen as a must-have boon when a dire plague exterminates Russia’s chickens.  The Chicken That Ate Moscow?  Maybe not, but Bulgakov landed in hot water for seeming to send-up the foundational 1917 revolution that gave us so much.  The Cab’s version will feature live music, giant puppets and a cast of seven assaying 62 roles.  And, unless I miss my guess, in the Cab’s hands a satiric, frightening, comic treatment of manipulative media and mass hysteria is bound to feel much closer to home than the U.S.S.R. of the 1920s.

Next up is This., a project developed by director Margot Bordelon, playwright Mary Laws, and dramaturg Alex Ripp from interviews conducted with volunteers from the Yale and the New Haven communities; the 40+ interviews, together with solicited anonymous emails, provided the material of the play, an ensemble piece that pulls together the kinds of stories people don't usually tell about themselves.  Heard said that themes of loss and regret seemed to surface the most, as the participants took stock of their lives and looked back on important decisions and outcomes.  In performance, the play is bound to be a fascinating experience: some in the audience will be seeing their stories turned into drama, others will be seated near the source of some element in the play, and the intimate space of the Cab should make those aspects of the drama very much present and part of the show.  Whose story is it, anyway?

Third will be Ain’t Gonna Make It—ostensibly the phrase that corresponds to the baleful acronym AGMI, which, when inscribed by a doctor on a patient’s chart, spells “finis.”  In this show, developed by Lauren Dubowski, dramaturg, Nicholas Hussong, design, Cole Lewis, directing, and Masha Tsimring, lighting design, Tim Brown is the patient and his confrontation with mortality will involve filmed projections, a band, and sentiments about life delivered via rockabilly and a strong visual presence.

Certainly these shows feature presence and risk and have purpose—the transformative power will be determined by you, the audience, and the Cab would like to make that experience as inclusive as possible.  These are divisive times we live in.  We should welcome the Cab’s ambition to be something we can all experience differently—together.

Theater, 45, youthful, engagement-minded, seeks adventurous audience looking for something different…

The Yale Cabaret 45 Ethan Heard, Artistic Director Jonathan Wemette, Managing Director Ben Fainstein and Nicholas Hussong, Associate Artistic Directors Xaq Webb, Associate Managing Director

The Fatal Eggs, by Mikhail Bulgakov, adapted by Ilya Khodosh and Dustin Wills; directed by Dustin Wills Sept. 20-22

This., conceived and created by Margot Bordelon, Mary Laws, Alex Ripp; script by Mary Laws, directed by Margot Bordelon Sept. 27-29

Ain’t Gonna Make It, conceived by Lauren Dubowski, Nicholas Hussong, Cole Lewis, and Masha Tsimring Oct. 4-6

217 Park Street, New Haven, CT (203) 432-1566 / ysd.cabaret@yale.edu

Yale Cab Recap

The Yale Cabaret’s Season 44 ended last month and a number of its practitioners will be graduating from the Yale School of Drama this month.  The work the YSD students do at the Cab doesn’t count as part of their work toward graduation—it’s done for love of theater and for the joy of working together on pet projects. And for numerous Cab fans, the productions at the Cab—intimate, avant-garde, inspired, off-the-wall, experimental, outrageous, inviting—are the live wire of the YSD season.  And so it’s time for a “thanks for the memories” moment to take note of the more memorable productions, performances, and displays of artistry that took place in the 2011-12 season (the procedure here: four notables in each category, chronologically by production date, with the fifth-mentioned earning top billing, in my estimation) [note: dates after names indicate prospective year of graduation from YSD]: First, overall Production: the skilled staging of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, produced by Michael Bateman (*13); the comically outrageous first-semester ender, Wallace Shawn’s A Thought in Three Parts, produced by Kate Ivins; the frenetic staging of Adrienne Kennedy’s The Funnyhouse of a Negro, produced by Alyssa Simmons (*14); the moody, musical trip to the underworld, Basement Hades, produced by Kate Ivins; and . . . the crowd-pleasing Victorian Gothic Camp of Mac Wellman’s Dracula, produced by Xaq Webb (*14).

Next comes attention to the technical accomplishments that are often so remarkable in transforming the tiny, unprepossessing space of the Cabaret:

In Set Design: Kristen Robinson (*13) for creating the distinct spaces of Persona; Adam Rigg (*13) and Kate Noll (*14) (aka Daniel Alderman and Olivia Higdon) for the gallery exhibit space of Rey Planta; Reid Thompson (*14) for the creepy and campy locations of Dracula; Brian Dudkiewicz (*14) for the historical and ethnic space of The Yiddish King Lear; and . . . Kate Noll (*14) for the Miss Havisham-like clutter of The Funnyhouse of a Negro.

For work in Costumes: Martin Schnellinger (*13), for the interplay of clothed and unclothed in A Thought in Three Parts; Elivia Bovenzi (*14), for helping create the theatrical layers of The Yiddish King Lear; Kristin Fiebig (*12), for the fantasia of whiteness in The Funnyhouse of a Negro; Nikki Delhomme (*13), for the lively get-ups of Carnival/Invisible; and . . . Seth Bodie (*14), for the uncanny outfitting in Dracula.

For memorable work in Sound Design: Palmer Heffernan (*13), for the roving speakers in Street Scenes; Ken Goodwin (*12), for the atmospheric aura of reWilding; Jacob Riley (*12), for the full scale presence of Dracula; Palmer Heffernan (*13) and Keri Klick (*13) for the soundscape of Basement Hades; and . . . Ken Goodwin (*12), for the wrenching sound effects of The Funnyhouse of a Negro.

For illuminating work in Lighting: Solomon Weisbard (*13), for the psychic landscapes of reWilding; Solomon Weisbard (*13), for the interplay of lights with movement in Clutch Yr Amplified Heart and Pretend; Masha Tsimring (*13), for the moody madhouse of The Funnyhouse of a Negro; Masha Tsimring (*13) and Yi Zhao (*12), for the Underworld of Basement Hades; and . . . Masha Tsimring (*13), for the stylish thrills of Dracula.

For striking use of Visuals: Paul Lieber (*13)’s projections and “home movies” in Persona; Christopher Ash (*14, aka Glenn Isaacs)’s ghostly projections in Rey Planta; Michael Bergman (*14)’s intimate use of visuals in Creation 2011; Michael Bergman (*14)’s atmospheric projections in Dracula; and . . . the rich use of projections in Basement Hades, by Hannah Wasileski (*13), and assistants Michael Bergman (*14), Nick Hussong (*14), and Paul Lieber (*13).

For striking use of Music: the ambiance of Sunder Ganglani (*12) and Ben Sharony’s music-scapes in Slaves; the mood-setting popular songs in Persona; the expressive tunes in Clutch Yr Amplified Heart and Pretend; the accompaniment and sound effects of The Yiddish King Lear, Dana Astman, Music Director; and . . . the beautifully evocative score and performances of Basement Hades, Daniel Schlosberg, Composer, and Schlosberg and company as the instrumentalist Orpheuses.

One of the strengths of the Cabaret is its mix of pre-existing plays with new, often conceptual creations by students in YSD or in other disciplines at Yale.  First, among the published plays offered, the ones I was most pleased to make the acquaintance of: Persona, Ingmar Bergman’s harrowing exploration of the self; Rey Planta (translated by Alexandra Ripp, *13), Manuela Infante’s caustic exploration of manic consciousness; Dracula, Mac Wellman’s comic exploration of vampirism and Victorian mores; The Funnyhouse of a Negro, Adrienne Kennedy’s haunting exploration of racial identity; and . . . Church, Young Jean Lee’s arch and affecting exploration of religious community.

Among the concept pieces this year—and Season 44 was strong in such offerings—the ones I liked best were: Slaves, an enigmatic investigation of theater by Sunder Ganglani (*12)  and the ensemble; Creation 2011, a celebration of awkward theatricality by Sarah Krasnow (*14) and the ensemble; Clutch Yr Amplified Heart and Pretend, a celebration of theatrical movement by the ensemble; Carnivale/Invisible, a questioning of American entertainment by Ben Fainstein (*13) and the ensemble; and . . . the deft interweaving of myth and music in Justin A. Taylor (*13) and the ensemble’s Basement Hades.

And, because most of the shows at the Cab feature strong ensemble work, let’s recognize special merit in ensemble: the entire lubricious cast of A Thought in Three Parts; the large cast of seekers in reWilding; the mad women at the table, and their attendants, in Chamber Music; the actors in the play, in the Purim play within the play, and in the audience in The Yiddish King Lear; and . . . the demonically entertaining cast of Dracula.

With so much concept and ensemble work, it becomes trickier to pick out individual performances, but I’ll follow the industry practice of dividing performances by gender and proceeding as if these actors/actresses can somehow be subtracted from the wholes of which they provided memorable parts, ladies first:

For her expressive, uninhibited performances in Slaves, A Thought in Three Parts, and Clutch Yr Amplified Heart and Pretend, Jillian Taylor (*12); for her roles as the silent actress in Persona, the voice in Rey Planta, and the stridently “sane” Amelia Earhart in Chamber Music, Monique Bernadette Barbee (*13); for her riveting portrayal of the conflicted nurse in Persona, Laura Gragtmans (*12); for her awkward Joan of Arc in Chamber Music, and her deliciously demur and brazen Lucy in Dracula, Marissa Neitling (*13); and . . . for the stand-out performance of Season 44: Miriam Hyman (*12) in The Funnyhouse of a Negro.

For his roles as the blinking, speechless king in Rey Planta, and as the badgering inspector in Christie in Love, Robert Grant (*13); for his intensely realistic character studies in reWilding, Dan O’Brien (*14); for his scene-stealing Van Helsing in Dracula, Brian Wiles (*12); for his kvetching patriarch in The Yiddish King Lear, William DeMeritt (*12); and . . . for his play-as-cast gusto in such roles as the confused husband in Persona, the appalled constable in Christie in Love, the babbling, spider-eating Jonathan Harker in Dracula, and the unforgettable Chicken Man in reWilding, Lucas Dixon (*12)

And for great work in directing: Alex Mihail (*12), for exploring the psychic tensions of Persona; Dustin Wills (*14), for orchestrating the varied misfits in reWilding; Jack Tamburri (*13), for finding the perfect pitch for the vaudevillian creepshow of Dracula; Ethan Heard (*13), for conducting the interplay of music, miming, and monologue in Basement Hades; and . . . Lileana Blain-Cruz (*12), for the inspired tour de force mania of The Funnyhouse of a Negro.

Deep appreciation for all the work and all the fun, and . . . see you next year!

The Circus Is In Town

The Yale Cabaret’s 44th Season ends this weekend with Carnival/Invisible.  Written and directed by Benjamin Fainstein and created by the Ensemble, it’s a show in some ways reminiscent of Church, the play by Young Jean Lee that was featured last semester.  Both shows riff on a collective, participatory experience, akin to theater but different from it, as usually practiced, in significant ways. Carnival/Invisible leans upon “Tent Chautauquas”—a traveling means of bringing entertainment and moral uplift to rural communities—the way Church leans upon sermons, homilies, and testimonials.  But Carnival/Invisible also draws upon time-honored tropes of the traveling circus in its more profane variety.  Thus we get harmless miming of carousel rides, and tightrope walking (Emily Reilly), and sword-swallowing, with, at the end, something a bit more sinister: a stab at a collective allegiance that advocates exterminating the children of one’s enemies.

The latter speech, delivered by Barker Masterful Majestic (Merlin Huff, charismatic in the red waistcoat and top hat of the classic circus ringleader), surfaces as a kind of dream fulfillment of the audience’s hopes and wishes, with Barker’s worshipfully submissive love, Dustbowl Diana (Hannah Sorenson) and the other participants voicing their approval.  The sentiments, for all their delivery of rosy uplift, are rather chilling and make one begin to question other bits of business, like the fable of the turtle who came out of his shell to a sad and horrific conclusion, or the jibes between the clowns Popcorn Peter (Chris Bannow) and Cotton Candy Cameron (Tim Brown) that become viciously scurrilous, or “the elixir” of goat’s piss, offered as a cure-all.

Performed on a simple clearing comprised of a dirt-colored figure of the flag reminiscent of one of Jasper John’s works, Carnival/Invisible seems to offer a mindless exploration of goodtime, oldtime America—the costumes by Nikki Delhomme are charming and lively, evoking familiar figures, the Barnum & Bailey clown, the saloon maid, the prairie flower.  And some of the skits are played with the skilled whimsy of Nickelodeon thrills, as when Death (Brandon Curtis) does-in two damsels (Whitney Dibo and Carly Zien), only to restore them to life as his paramours.  Through all the fun and games, though, there’s a kind of double vision, an acknowledgement that “panem and circensus” (bread and circuses) were the means whereby Roman emperors kept the hoi polloi happy with their yoke.  Fainstein’s show, capriciously carnivalesque, keeps us wondering about who gets the last laugh.

The show ends with the chorus of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a spiritual about meeting after death in a heavenly realm.  The final verse, unsung, rings fittingly with the end of a dramatic Season: “One by one their seats were emptied. / One by one they went away. / Now the family is parted. / Will it be complete one day?

See you next year, with Season 45 under Artistic Director Ethan Heard.

Coming soon: my picks for the “best ofs” from Season 44.

Carnival/Invisible Created by The Ensemble (Chris Brannow, Tim Brown, Brandon Curtis, Whitney Dibo, Merlin Huff, Emily Reilly, Hannah Sorenson, Carly Zien) Written and Directed by Benjamin Fainstein

The Yale Cabaret April 12-14, 2012

Racial Rollercoaster Ride

This week’s show at The Yale Cabaret, the penultimate of the 44th Season, features the penultimate directorial offering by Co-Artistic Director Lileana Blain-Cruz before she graduates from the Yale School of Drama this spring. And her last Cab show, like her first Cab show at the end of the 2010 season, is something to behold. The play, Funnyhouse of a Negro, by Adrienne Kennedy, follows in interesting ways from two shows presented recently at the Cab: Arthur Kopit’s Chamber Music, directed by Katie McGerr, and Whitney Dibo and Martha Kaufman’s reworking of Jacob Gordin’s The Yiddish King Lear. Like Kopit’s play about loony ladies in an asylum that represented, in its seclusion, the etiolated potential of women in our general culture, Funnyhouse confronts the “insanity” of minority status, dramatizing the psychic distress that comes with oppression in any form. And like The Yiddish King Lear, the figure to be confronted is the threatening father, though in that play, a comedy, the gender struggle was leavened with a racial dimension that made Jewish patriarchy a role, a certain kind of staging and inflection, recalled for purposes of entertainment.

In Funnyhouse, the masquerade of racial identity is much more harrowing, and very much of the essence of what makes Negro Sarah (Miriam Hyman) sick. While the play has many comic touches, they tend to be of the acid rather than affirmative variety. In Sarah’s mind, her own father was a “black beast” who raped her white mother, giving birth to herself, a “pallid Negro” who worships whiteness and longs to be freed of any remnant of blackness in her appearance and in her being. In appearance, she can’t overcome her head of kinky hair, and in her being, she can’t overcome the dire implications, to her fantasy of selfhood, of what a black father means. A twist at the end, almost a throwaway line, suggests that this story of interracial rape and progeny may itself be a fantasy. In other words, everything is black and white in this play, but never only black and white.

The figures oppressing Sarah seem oddly chosen but maybe that’s the very point: first of all, two regal beings, the Duchess of Hapsburg (Elia Monte-Brown) and Queen Victoria Regina (Prema Cruz), whose ultra-whiteness is beyond question, then her white boyfriend Raymond (Mamoudou Athie)—all played by black actors in whiteface, alluding at once, visually, to Sarah’s inability to imagine herself in a world without blackness, try as she might. Then there’s Jesus (Jabari Brisport), in a loincloth, looking much more primeval than most depictions of him, indicating the extent to which whites themselves have largely created a white fantasy of him, and finally Patrice Lumumba (Paul Pryce), the first Prime Minister of the Congo after its independence from Belgium, seeming to represent political hope for black independence and self-governance; he had been assassinated a few years before the play initially appeared, so he also represents black martyrdom and, we’re told, Sarah’s father hung himself in a New York hotelroom not long after Lumumba’s death.

All these symbolic figures heckle, manhandle, and at times soothe Sarah, creating a fragmented and poetic drama that flirts with mad causalities and associative logic, while laying bare for the audience the fraught self-hatred of the person who pursues an imposed ideal they can never attain.

As is generally the case with Blain-Cruz’s work, the technical skill involved is stellar: Lighting by Masha Tsimring creates the “funhouse” effects that make the show so fascinating, and creepy, to watch; the Scenic Design by Kate Noll, assisted by Carmen Martinez, contributes the cracked sense of décor that reminded me of a kind of Miss Havisham boudoir, New Orleans-style, with a big brass bed, lots of mirrors, old books, draped crepe, muslin curtains; the Costumes by Kristin Fiebig add to this mustiness with hoop skirts for Sarah’s fantasy friends, Sixties-ish suits for the males, and sorta “timeless” black student-wear for Sarah, and, of course, white greasepaint, white powder, latex masks, and wigs. The getup of Prema Cruz as Funnyhouse Lady was a fetching business suit that only underscored how wild and crazy that character is—her look and moves at times created the effect of a thoroughly bleached Tina Turner.   Then there's Ken Goodwin's Sound Design which is nothing short of remarkable, letting hissed whispers crackle and rattling noises off unsettle and adding much of the wildness to the ride.

Great as all those features of the piece are, the car wouldn’t go without Miriam Hyman. She gives an extraordinary performance, unflagging in its self-possession even when she has to go totally ga-ga. Powdering her face, preening, throwing fits on the bed, humping the air sympathetically during the rape, cavorting, shrieking, trembling, and through it all maintaining the confidential tone of the person who inhabits this place and is familiar with its distortions. At one point snapping her head to the side, with bug eyes and slack mouth, mimicking the father’s death by hanging, Hyman makes Sarah’s sense of comedy and misery strongly self-aware, letting the character be, while still a mess, a commentator and a comment.

Sarah’s predicament, in the play, occupies a time before the Black Panthers, before “black is beautiful,” and well before the power of Oprah and Obama to suggest black self-determination and influence. Lest we imagine this play occurs in some historical museum-space, the mourning for Lumumba at one point becomes a mourning for Trayvon Martin. Is it fair to compare an assassinated political figure with an unarmed teen killed in the street by a vigilante? Not really, but it makes the point that outrages done against blacks as blacks is always a current event.

Funnyhouse of a Negro plays for two more shows: tonight at 8 and 11 p.m.

Funnyhouse of a Negro By Adrienne Kennedy Directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz

The Yale Cabaret March 29-31, 2012

The final play of the Cabaret’s 2011-12 Season will be in two weeks: Carnival/Invisible, created by Benjamin Fainstein, recreates the sense of “carnival” (farewell to the flesh) as an element in the traveling circuses and tent shows of American popular entertainment, places people go to “get out of their skins” and to find belonging amidst the improbable and colorful spectacle. April 12th-14th.

Impious Grief

In Hamlet, the prince is overcome by grief for his dead father.  Everyone in the court, especially his mother, the Queen, and his uncle, the new King, tells him to get a grip.  His grief is called “impious” and “unmanly.”  In Basement Hades: Songs of the Underworld, now playing at the Yale Cabaret, Hades (Dustin Wills) shares this point of view.  Appalled by humanity’s tendency to have issues with death, Hades lectures us in wildly flamboyant fashion about the pointlessness of our grief.  He’s all about people getting on with life—the province of the living—and leaving the dead to him.  We want to hold onto the dead because we’re selfish and unreasonable.  Let them be dead.  We’ll be with them soon enough anyway.  “What’s dead is dead is dead,” he intones.

It would be hard to argue with Hades even if he weren’t so imperious, boasting most of the lines in the play, even those given to his wife Persephone (a hand puppet) who still bemoans an attachment to life.  Though Hades rehearses for us the five stages of grief—Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance—ticking them off as leading inevitably to the latter, Persephone isn’t buying it.  And so, here comes legendary “grief junkie” Orpheus to attempt to rescue his dead wife Eurydice and lead her back to life.  Everyone who has lost someone can easily relate.

But Orpheus, in an interesting twist, is not a character in this show—written by Justin A. Taylor, developed by the Ensemble, and directed by Ethan Heard—but rather a gathering of musicians assigned the task of playing the music that speaks for Orpheus, and that enables him to bypass threats like the boatman Charon and the three-headed dog Cerberus.  The latter encounter, in which the dog is represented by three cast members behind drum-masks that Orpheus soon manages to play to his tune, is striking.  Percussionist Michael Compitello is a stand-out of the evening, able to give aural expression to the Anger phase of things.

And that’s the way the evening goes—Hades belittling Orpheus’ efforts, until the latter begins to overwhelm the voiced objections through music, mime, movement, sing-along, and, now and then, plainspoken narratives of loss addressed to the audience by the collective Orpheus.  Eurydice is visualized quite effectively as a silhouetted projection of a woman (Katie McGerr) dancing, swinging and so forth on double screens (Hannah Wasileski, Projection Designer; Nick Hussong, Paul Lieber, William Gardiner, Assistant Designers; kudos as well to the Lighting Designers—Masha Tsmiring and Yi Zhao—and to Set Designer Edward T. Morris’ fascinating set).

The part at which Orpheus looks back and loses his wife a second time was a little murky to me, though perhaps I missed something (it became increasingly easy to overlook action in favor of concentrating on the music, which features pieces by Gluck, Shostakovich, and Philip Glass).  In any case, the after-effect was stunningly moving: as Hannah Collins played a cello live, in concert with herself playing a viola de gamba in a beautifully filmed projection, the collective Orpheus (Compitello; Anne Lanzilotti, viola; Daniel Schlosberg, keyboard and composer for the piece; and Annie Rosen, voice) poured libations in a large metal bucket to the somber tones of Marin Marais’ “Les Voix Humaines,” which includes the sound of what feels like disembodied voices—led by Rosen’s lovely vocals—mourning.

The simple activity accompanied by Marais’ aching and stately piece said all that needed to be said about the sixth stage of grief, the one that Hades can’t understand: commemoration, the ritual of remembering.  An enactment of those in life recalling those in death, the scene felt to me more profound “than the profoundest pit of hell.”

Basement Hades: Songs of the Underworld Created by the Ensemble Text by Justin A. Taylor Original Music by Daniel Schlosberg Directed by Ethan Heard

Photos by Ethan Heard

The Yale Cabaret March 23-25, 2010

Freilichin Purim

The current offering at the Yale Cabaret features a trip into the past: turn of the century Yiddish theater is invoked to create the proper spirit in which to view The Yiddish King Lear.  Rather than a Yiddish language version of Shakespeare, as was created by Jacob Gordin in 1903 and whose work this production draws on, Martha Kaufman and Lauren Dubowski’s adaptation presents the story of Reb Dovidl (William DeMerrit), a patriarch at Purim who wants to engage in some festive drinking with his family and distribute jewels to his lovely daughters: two of whom, Etele (Prema Cruz) and Gitele (Tanya Dean) are married, while the third, his favorite, Taybele (Alex Trow) has a suitor—Yaffe (Chris Bannow) known as the “heretic” and the “unbeliever.”  Thus there are Lear-like tensions in this story right from the start. Like Lear, Reb Dovidl, after smoothing over Taybele’s rebuff when she refuses the costly brooch he would lavish upon her, decides to partition his worldly goods amongst his three children—so he can live the rest of his days, unburdened by care, in Israel.  His eldest daughter, married to the unsympathetic Avrom Harif (Benjamin Fainstein), is only too happy to take over management of the estate, while the second daughter, a bit more conscientious, though married to a partying pseudo-scholar (Mamoudou Athie), goes along.  Only Taybele, Cordelia-like, demurs.  Lest anyone in the audience miss the echoes of Shakespeare, Yaffe tells the old man his unreasoning behavior makes him “the Yiddish King Lear.”  He tells him this first in naturalistic style, and then again in the more operatic style of turn-of-the-century theater. And that’s the nature of the “two worlds at once” fun of this production, directed by Whitney Dibo.

As the master of ceremonies (Paul Lieber) informs us at the start (in something of a come-and-go Yiddish accent), we are going to witness a feat of “naturalism”—the cutting-edge theatrical technique of the time.  With that said, it’s quite entertaining to watch the YSD students give us dated “naturalistic” acting, in quotation marks, as it were.  The power/comedy of the naturalism is underscored by the show’s best feature: audience members who are also part of the show, lending a kind of hilarious hysteria to the proceedings as they “ooh” and “ah” at plot turns and shout advice to the characters (not to the actors, mind you), and, at one particularly distressing point, have to be calmed by Reb Dovidl himself.  On opening night these audience players included Lieber, Kate Tarker, Joshua Safran, who reads between scenes a statement about theater that invokes actors as gods, and Inka Guðjónsdóttir, the most vocal and comically stressed-out of the onlookers.

As contrast to all that naturalism, there’s a play within the play: a stagey enactment of the Purim story whereby Esther (Trow) thwarts the murderous Haman (Fainstein)—he of the famous tri-cornered hat that inspired the shape of hamentaschen (very tasty versions of which are supplied on the tables, courtesy of Westville Kosher Market), so that “nothing bad will ever happen to the Jews again!”  That line, voiced by Trytel (Matt McCollum), Reb Dovidl’s fool, gives a fair idea of the spirit of the show, both respectful and enthusiastic about the sources but also winking at the naïvete of the era.  Entertainingly and affectionately, the production celebrates how important theater was to Jewish immigrants. As Lieber says between scenes: the two sights everyone was immediately taken to see upon arrival in Brooklyn were the Brooklyn bridge, and the Yiddish theater.

Special credit to the set decorator, Brian Dudkiewicz, the musicians providing both musical accompaniment and sound effects—Tess Isaac, Martha Kaufman, Elizabeth Kim—and the spirited cast, especially DeMerritt’s moody paternalism and over-the-top recognition of himself as “the Yiddish King Lear”; Trow’s applause-demanding grandstanding everytime Taybele expresses views about female and male equality or hypes her knowledge as a doctor; McCollum, for Trytel’s grumpy asides and his devotion to Reb Dovidl; and Bannow’s Yaffe in his rationalist raining on the ritual.

The sense of pride and participation in theater, as an art that centers a community and puts on stage the kinds of stories the people recognize as part of their own lives, isn’t a bad goal to have and is one that the Cabaret, for its coterie of enthusiasts, often satisfies.  L’chaim.

The Yiddish King Lear Directed by Whitney Dibo Adapted, Assembled, and Created with Martha Kaufman and Lauren Dubowski Based on Jacob Gordin’s 1903 play

Yale Cabaret March 8-10, 2012

Ladies' Night

Arthur Kopit’s Chamber Music, the most recent show at The Yale Cabaret, dates from the Sixties and could be called a carnivalization of the women’s movement.  The ‘carnival’ aspects are familiar enough from other counter-cultural works of the time: the characters are inmates in an asylum for the insane, the asylum itself is a cultural microcosm, and the insane are, in some allegorical sense, representative of certain trends that might liberate us all from the asylums to which we, in our insanity, have relegated ourselves.  Kopit’s play takes this a step further: the allegorical meaning of the inmates are worn on their sleeves, like Halloween costumes or superhero alter egos: each member of the cast is a woman with an attribute: Woman with a Notebook (Michelle McGregor), Woman in Armor (Marissa Neitling), Woman with a Gavel (Ashton Heyl), Woman in Aviatrix’s Outfit (Monique Barbee), and so on.  We see emblems, but also, because the women address each other by the names they have assumed, we see alter-egos: Gertrude Stein, Joan of Arc, Susan B. Anthony, Amelia Earhart, respectively. The easy interpretation would be that, though crazy, these women, in identifying with such successful and significant women, are trying to assert possibilities beyond the drab realities to which women generally succumb, and the only way male society—represented by Man in White (Fisher Neal) and his Assistant (Mitchell Winter)—can cope is to lock them up and let them have their carping, chaotic meetings that go nowhere.  That interpretation is certainly present—especially when the men come in to caution the ladies on not getting out of hand, and on keeping the window closed, threatening them with the disbanding of their little sorority if they don’t maintain—and the term is stressed—“decorum.”

Of course, when no policing male gaze is present, the ladies are free to be themselves, though the selves they manifest are silly and childish versions of what they deem the characteristics of the women they mimic: Stein, a writer making notes; Joan a warrior with a large, cumbersome wooden cross, Constanze Mozart (Sophie von Haselberg), a musical appreciator clutching a recording of one of her husband’s treasured works; Susan B. Anthony, a presider and leader; Woman in Gossamer Dress, aka silent film actress Pearl White (Mariko Nakasone), ingratiating and easily upset; Queen Isabella of Spain (Ceci Fernandez), regal and imperious; Amelia Earhart, aggressive in her demeanor and sarcastic toward the idées fixes of her colleagues.  As tensions amongst them mount, and as the Woman in Safari Outfit/Osa Johnson tries to advance a cannibalistic plan on how to defeat the men’s ward that, they are certain, will attack them shortly, the situation requires a sacrifice.  Any guesses who it will be?  No, not Joan.

The play mostly takes place at a table (with placards reminiscent of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party) surrounded by the audience, who may feel somewhat like eavesdroppers on a meeting, with minutes and motions, that is best understood by those participating.  Where our participation is required is in the role of those who—ostensibly sane—can see what these women can’t see: the comic and grotesque aspects of their delusions.  On that score, the cast was mostly equal to the iconic nature of the characters (though Kopit’s version of Stein seemed considerably at odds with my impression of that author, preferring to make her a nitpicking oddity of idiolalia) with special mention going to Barbee, Neitling, Heyl, von Haselberg, and the one in the pith helmet (kudos to Carmen Martinez’s simple but effective costumes).

The comedy—Joan and her cross, Pearl and her insecurities—shifted toward violence and menace inevitably and effectively (the delusions of the mad can be both amusing and chilling), and the “twist” at the end arrived with just enough absurdist malevolence (accent on “male”) to cause the allegory to deepen ever so slightly. Chamber Music might be considered as a score for ten voices, and Katie McGerr’s direction kept the voices in frantic and revealing cross-purposes that felt natural but pointed.

Up next at the Cab—madness in great ones: Yiddish King Lear, based on Jacob Gordin’s 1903 attempt to retell the Shakespeare tale in a Jewish immigrant context.  The play, which hasn’t been performed since 1934, has been adapted for the Cab by Whitney Dibo and Martha Kaufman.  Museum relic or revitalized Americana?  See for yourself, March 8-10.

Chamber Music By Arthur Kopit Directed by Katie McGerr

The Yale Cabaret March 1-3, 2012

Mind Your Body

Watching Clutch Yr Amplified Heart Tightly and Pretend, the current offering at the Yale Cabaret, I thought about actors: How are they trained?  How do they do the things they do?  Like: how do they express something dramatically without benefit of characters? That final question is germane, I think, because CYAHTAP is not really “about” anything—there are some amusing skits and lots of vigorous movement—I particularly enjoyed the ensemble’s dance to Arcade Fire’s “Rebellion (Lies)”—but there’s little in the way of dialogue and no characters per se.  And yet it’s an actors show, or rather, an actors-as-dancers show.  The interest is in what the actors, mostly silently, are able to convey as actors in movement—and what they convey is about the dynamics of love and loss, of belonging and fighting, of one body getting to know itself and another.

Which is to say: these aren’t dancers per se and this isn’t only a dance piece. Seeing Michael Place throwing a carefully choreographed bodily fit across the entire length of the Cab’s floorspace is to see something expressed, arguably, within a play, rather than within a dance.  Everyone in the piece is portraying something or at least projecting something.  And that’s what kept me engaged with it.  In fact, the spoken parts tended to detract.

It begins with Merlin Huff’s seemingly off-the-cuff monologue that begins to ramble toward the philosophic, apostrophizing Rene Descartes (I suppose because of that mind/body duality notion he takes the rap for)—and later Huff returns to broach a series of rhetorical philosophical questions that become exceedingly dull to listen to, like maybe listening to a tedious teacher possessed by the Socratic method.  But Huff isn’t a total bore—his frenetic involvement, like a kid watching his favorite show, with the company's Robot dance and his threats to Solomon Weisbard, the Lights technician who cuts them off (only to perform a kind of spastic dance of his own), were nutty enough to be amusing.

Then there was the male-to-male pas de deux by Mickey Theis and Dustin Wills.  It managed to be poetic and ironic and athletic and erotic all at the same time—certainly I’ll hear Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” differently from now on.

There’s also fun with light and dark and projections and space and making faces (special credit to Chris Henry on that score) and miming (Jabari Brisport escaping from a wrecked vehicle was funny) and dancing (especially Jillian Taylor) and filling the time with different kinds of pretending.

Clutch Yr Amplified Heart Tightly and Pretend Yale Cabaret February 23-25, 2012

Thirsty Girls

You know something hardly anyone ever talks about?  Lighting design.  At the Yale Cab’s recent run of Mac Wellman’s Dracula, directed by second-year director Jack Tamburri, Masha Tsimring’s lighting was a joy to behold.  Consider that there were five different areas of the Cab in which actors performed, not to mention wandering areas in between, and consider that they all had to be illuminated in such a way as to serve a variety of dramatic purposes—from creepy to funhouse to vaudevillian.  Tsimring’s skill at doing just that was impressive—the lighting was to a large degree responsible for creating the necessary magic, that intangible something that allows us to believe a YSD student standing a few inches away from the audience is actually existing in an entirely different space, a world where the undead walk and insane inmates eat sparrows and the Victorian era’s “angel of the house” becomes a blood-sucking fiend. I single out Tsmiring’s work because I found myself marveling at it several times in the course of the evening, but a special round of applause should be given to the entire technical team: Seth Bodie (Costume Design—Drac’s sumptuous get-up and the vamping Vampirettes’ lacy nothings, and Simmon’s Mary Poppinsesque lackey, and the oh-so-Masterpiece Theatery duds for the bourgeoisie—Jonathan, Mina, and Seward—and Lucy’s transformation from a good girl’s frilly nightwear to a party girl’s knock ‘em undead one-piece); Reid Thompson (Set Design); Jacob Riley (Sound Design); Michael F. Bergman (Projection Design); Adam Rigg (Puppet Design); Matthew Groenveld (Technical Director); Karen Walcott and Nicole Bromley (Special Effects); Steve Brush (Sound Engineer); Nate Jasunas (Scenic Artist); Keny Thomason (Technical Assistant); Alyssa K. Howard (Stage Manager); Xaq Webb (Producer).  This was a show where the technical aspects of simply putting it on in the Cab’s claustrophic space was remarkable in itself.  As you can tell from that roll-call, much talent and effort was expended and was greatly appreciated.

What was it all in service to?  Mac Wellman’s cut-ups of the oft-adapted tale of Dracula, as stirred up into a boiling-over broth by Jack Tamburri.  You know the drill: Dracula (Inka Guðjónsdóttir), ancient Transylvanian Count, invites Jonathan Harker (Lucas Dixon), a Brit real estate agent, to his home in the Carpathian mountains (aka “the land beyond the forest”) to discuss buying some property in England.  Along the way the latter is spooked by the locals’ superstitions regarding vampires, and then some nasty things happen to him.  In Wellman’s version, Harker becomes a patient at an asylum that happens to be next to the property that Drac bought.  The Count comes to England and proceeds to vampirize the marriageable Lucy Westenra (Marissa Neitling) who has three suitors: Dr. Seward (Jack Moran) of the asylum,  who also courted, in her maidenhood, Harker’s wife, Mina (Hannah Sorenson); the obligatory American Quincey Morris (Justin Taylor); and the vampire expert Prof. Abraham Van Helsing (Brian Wiles).  In the world of Stoker’s original novel, if, to protect her from demonic influence, you’ve been in a young maiden’s room, where she slumbers in a coma in her nightdress, you pretty much have to ask to marry her.  What happens, in most versions, is that Drac is stopped, and everyone emerges sadder but wiser.

Wellman jazzes all this up considerably but is amusingly faithful to much of the narration (lots of it told through letters and journals, so in a kind of direct address even in the novel) and to much of the breathless “I feel so queer” aspects of the original.  Key to the tone is Neitling’s curiouser and curiouser Lucy, a charming girl apt to salivate over males and praise their stalwart natures intermittently, and who finally becomes a fiendish feral creature.  It’s quite a transformation and Neitling is a blast.  Add some great fun from Sorenson, a priggish Maggie Smith understudy as Mina, and Dixon, having the time of his life humping walls and delectating over insects, as well as Moran as a creepy Seward, a character Wellman makes a linchpin of ambivalence in this tale, and Matt Gutshick’s leering cockney attendant, and Brian Wiles giving one of the funniest performances I’ve seen in a while as the daffiest Van Helsing one could imagine.  Then, of course, there’s the quiet dignity and supercilious superiority of Guðjónsdóttir’s Count, all cheekbones and aquiline nose and large, lambent eyes and aristocratic, feline accent.

And if all that’s not enough, there are songs, and puppets, and blood tranfusions while Seward and Mina couple against a wall, and a baby in a bag, and a dog in a dressing gown, and Halloween make-up and high Gothic camp.  To what end?  The Count is coming to America (where he’ll probably open his own nightclub, or maybe a cabaret…), and those thirsty girls Lucy and Mina get a whole new lease on undying life.

This is the most fun the Cab’s been in a while, sexily superior silliness brought off in style.

Mac Wellman’s Dracula Directed by Jack Tamburri

Yale Cabaret February 16-19, 2012