Poets of the Post

There’s no doubt that Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell were two of the most gifted poets of their generation.  And there’s no doubt that theirs was a long-lived relationship of, to some degree, kindred spirits.  Nor is there any surprise in finding that their letters to each other are well worth reading—as glimpses into the working process, into the world of letters in the first exciting decades of post-World War II America, and into the always fraught and dramatic life that seemed de rigueur for any world-conquering poet of the day.  And Dear Elizabeth, the play by Sarah Ruhl adapted from the letters of Bishop and Lowell, and directed by Les Waters, at the Yale Repertory Theatre, dispels any doubt that poets in their prose can make for compelling, moving and satisfying drama. Granted, it helps to be interested in the writing life, and, perhaps, in the relation of these two rare birds, but Dear Elizabeth’s greatest assets are characters who are articulate about their lives, and a time-scheme that roves through the thirty years—from 1947 to 1977—during which the poets corresponded, finding the highlights that make a relationship a story.  The lifelong trade-off began shortly after they first met and continued until Lowell’s death—indeed, Bishop’s last letter to her friend was in the mail when she learned of his fatal heart attack at age 60 (Bishop, six years Lowell’s senior, outlived him by two years).

Creating theater out of the necessarily fragmented view of a relationship contained in letters is no small task, but it’s aided here by the considerable brio with which the letters were written, and by the fact that there was drama enough in the writers’ lives.  During the period covered by the play, Lowell moved from first wife to second to third, and had children with the latter two; Bishop’s partner, architect Lota de Macedo Soares, with whom she began living in Brazil in 1951, committed suicide in 1967.  And, from time to time, Lowell was placed under care for attacks of mania, while both poets had on-and-off affairs with the bottle.  In Ruhl’s version, all interlocutors are left offstage; this is a two-person play illuminating how, for writers (and their readers) what they say to each other in writing is the measure of whatever happens in the mundane world where real lives are led.

Ruhl’s script carefully weaves bits of the correspondence into a love story of sorts.  After years of collegial affection, Lowell (Jefferson Mays) seems ready to make things more intimate, perhaps even permanent—one of the most naked moments in the play is when Lowell looks back on an evening when it seemed possible to imagine Bishop and himself as husband and wife, stating that he nearly took the chance to propose but chose to wait for the right moment.  Whatever she actually felt about such confessions, Bishop (Mary Beth Fisher) plays it close to the chest, neither repudiating her would-be lover nor giving him any encouragement.  And yet, as played on stage, Fisher’s Bishop seems a woman who, initially, might be infatuated with Lowell enough to give him the impression he nearly acted on.  At times, Bishop’s replies to Lowell, as he exults about fatherhood or advertises a new bride, seem brittle with envy if not jealousy.

Lowell, meanwhile, tends to brood, moving into so-called ‘confessional poetry’ as a means to make his life meaningful as art.  The play gets some tension out of a terse and anxious exchange when Lowell, in his late poem “The Dolphin,” chooses to use excerpts—doctored to suit his purpose—from letters his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick wrote.  The strength of Bishop’s condemnation of mixing “fact and fiction” spills over into what we might consider to be the sacred and private bond between correspondents—whether Lowell and Hardwick or Lowell and Bishop—so that Bishop, we might say, is seeing her own confidence violated in Lowell’s betrayal of Hardwick.  Even more to the point, her harangue at Lowell might extend beyond his poem to Dear Elizabeth itself, where words never meant to be dramatized find themselves become a script.  Whatever Bishop’s misgivings might be, we accept Ruhl’s intervention: public lives are always to some extent theatrical, and those who write must be ready to be re-written.

As theatrical experience, Dear Elizabeth uses scenic ingenuity to distract us from the fact that everything this play means is in the writing, in the fascinating signals, suggestions, confessions, comments, poem crits, and corrections that these two gifted persons choose to share with one another.  Les Waters and Scenic Designer Adam Rigg have concocted some technical marvels—waters flood the stage at certain times, either stranding the two poets high and dry or allowing Lowell to pace about like a lecturer wading into the shallows.  Elsewhere, Lowell, in one of his manic phases, hitches a ride on a crescent moon through a door.  And, in a tableau that seems quite eloquent about the poets’ respective reputations after death, Bishop, saying she would like to write from another planet, ascends on a mini-planetarium while Lowell gazes up at her from below.  Such stunts could be said either to distract us unnecessarily from the main matter at hand or to provide some moments of visual stimulation in an otherwise static setting—the basic set is a stunningly accurate early Sixties-ish “brown study,” lit to give us times of day and projected upon to give us a sense of the outdoors that the oft-traveling duo travel through.  Such effects mostly work and add interest, though that’s not to say one couldn’t easily imagine a stripped-down version of the play, without the Rep’s technical resources, dispensing with special effects and letting glowing prose provide all the color.

As Bishop, Fisher ages well into the part, from bright-eyed and young, she becomes bright-voiced and older.  Her sense of Bishop’s steadiness never really flags, not even when the poet is getting a bit sloshed and an able stage-hand (Josiah Bania) has to come in to relieve her of her bottle, nor when she's forced to type one-handed due to an operation.  We can intuit Bishop’s demons, but, in the letters used here, she mostly presents Lowell with a stoic outlook on her own travails and his, and crisp commentary on the same.  And Lowell is recreated in a spot-on interpretation so close to the original it's magical: Mays wields the vaguely distracted air and the intense glare, the voice of bemused befuddlement delivering choice aperçus, and, of course, his Lowell is readier than Bishop to wear his Weltschmerz on his sleeve, but never—here anyway—becoming tedious about it.

Dear Elizabeth is a wonderful evocation of friendship, of the passion for the word that can unite lives that but rarely shared the same space—a few “interludes” presented in dumb-show capture the sometimes awkward, or worse, occasions when these two geniuses found themselves in each other’s presence.  The play is wise and wistful, and delights with its slightly arch attitude toward persons who, in their rather single-minded pursuit of the art they shared in common, led messy lives they were never done commenting upon.  Ruhl and Waters also let us consider that behind or beside the gimmicks of art, the rhetoric of poetry, and the feints of personality is, as Dickinson would say, “where the meanings are.”

Dear Elizabeth By Sarah Ruhl A play in letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and back again Directed by Les Waters

A World Premiere

Scenic Designer: Adam Rigg; Costume Designer: Maria Hooper; Lighting Designer: Russell H. Campa; Sound Designer: Bray Poor; Projection Designer: Hannah Wasileski; Production Dramaturg: Amy Boratko; Casting Director: Tara Rubin Casting; Stage Manager: Kirstin Hodges; Original Music by Bray Poor and Jonathan Bell

Photographs by Joan Marcus, courtesy of The Yale Repertory Theatre

Yale Repertory Theatre November 30-December 22, 2012

Off With Their Heads

Is it possible to write a review of David Adjmi’s Marie Antoinette, now playing at the Yale Rep in a production directed by Rebecca Taichman, without mentioning the 99% or making some comment situating the play within the time of OWS unrest and the like?  Probably not, so I’m glad I got that out of the way. It’s a timely play, then, yes?  Mais oui et non.  Adjmi’s Marie (Marin Ireland) speaks like a contemporary airhead, certainly (and amusingly), but the play follows the timeline of the destruction of the reign of Louis VI closely, and peppers its dialogue with jibes au courant for the 1780s—name-dropping Rousseau, and joking about oaths in tennis courts, and taking potshots at that novel experiment in America: “common people can’t take care of themselves.  Democracy can’t work.”  We might take to heart the fate of a patron saint of the privileged as a send-up of what might befall those too high to fall, but Marie Antoinette isn’t really about cautionary catharsis.  And anyway, among historical moralists, for every leftist railing against the empowered, there’s a rightist reminding us of how chaotic and blood-thirsty the reign of “the people” is.  No morals where none intended, to paraphrase Beckett.

OK, so the play’s not quite political allegory, and it’s not quite historical drama, nor even quite historical fantasy.  It’s far too confectionery to want to give us a sense of lived history, but it does seem to have something on its mind, other than laughs, giddy women (Ireland, Hannah Cabell, Polly Lee) with 3-foot-tall wigs on their heads, a king (Steven Rattazzi) who reminded me of Abbott’s little buddy Costello and who likes to play with clocks, and a queen in a Bo-Peep outfit who converses with a sheep (David Greenspan).  Adjmi seems most interested in how a teenaged twit—Marie was married off by her mother at age 14—became the emblem of aristocratic indifference and noblesse indulge.  In his hands, Marie’s tale is the story of how a fashion queen became a scourge—a bit like how, in our day, every pop diva eventually gets dissed—while remaining, y’know, classic and iconic.

Riccardo Hernandez’s set, initially, is all bright colors and shine, with the characters positioned in it as if sitting ducks in an arcade. There are props to prop-up an illusion of surroundings, but this is a streamlined fantasy of court life as bodies in space, with very precise marks to hit.  Gabriel Berry’s costumes play in a lively space between period fashions and what our era might do with them, and, in the early going, the play has the feel of a lively burlesque of the eighteenth century.  Once Marie begins conscientiously to scrimp a bit on egregious ostentation, things get more straitened—and part of the drama is to watch her go from the absurd wigs to having her actual hair—turned white—shorn from her head by a Guard (Brian Wiles, great at steely contempt).

Such gestures are where most of the drama occurs, along with wonderful touches like an explosion of sound (Matt Hubbs, sound design) and fake dirt that expresses to visceral effect the loss of aristocratic status once the revolution comes, and a very powerful moment of echoing laughter from Louis, Marie and their son (Ashton Woretz) that speaks eloquently about the humanity of even the most detestable tyrant.  Here, the rulers aren’t detestable so much as clueless, which helps to pump some pathos into them, but, in the end, it also flattens them a bit too much into caricatures.  When Marie says, “Sometimes I feel like a game that other people play but without me,” it rings true—in part because the play plays her that way too, kind of like “Gidget Goes Regal.”

The great asset of this show—besides its look and sound—is Marin Ireland: her Marie is so vapidly winning or winningly vapid you hope to protect her from unsettling lessons about reality, and you do begin to feel something for someone who has to live such a relentlessly scrutinized life, even if her whining about it gets old.  Ireland’s performance scores so often on comic timing you’re never quite sure if you’re laughing at her or with her.  And isn’t that how it is with the upper-class: we know we can’t beat ‘em or join ‘em, so let’s be amused by them.  When things turn bleak, we’re not exactly going to embrace the likes of the Sauces (Fred Arsenault and Hannah Cabell), two rustics who grab the Royals on their bid for freedom, nor side much with a Guard who spits in his ex-sovereign’s face. Or are we?

That’s the sticking point of the play, really.  Its vignettes start to feel like the clips in a reality TV show, though instead of a make-over toward beauty, power and prestige, this one is going in the opposite direction—toward state-mandated death.  And we’re along for the ride, deciding at which point to disengage.  As the sheep (and this play could use more David Greenspan) says to Marie in a very chilling moment: “Step carefully.”

And if that tsunami of dirt makes you think of the famous line “aprés moi, le déluge,” often attributed to Louis’s dad, Louis XV, seeing the show soon after Hurricane Sandy might make the play’s “before and after” seem even closer to home.  C’est la vie, ma chérie, it goes to show you never can tell.

Marie Antoinette By David Adjmi Directed by Rebecca Taichman

Choreographer: Karole Armitage; Scenic Designer: Riccardo Hernandez; Costume Designer: Gabriel Berry; Christopher Akerlind: Lighting Designer; Matt Hubbs: Sound Designer; Matt Acheson: Puppet Designer; Jane Guyer Fujita: Voice Coach; J. David Brimmer: Fight Director; Tara Rubin Casting: Casting Director; Amanda Spooner: Stage Manager

Yale Repertory Theatre October 26-November 17, 2012

Photographs by T. Charles Erickson, courtesy of the Yale Repertory Theatre

History Lessens

The line-up of plays at the Yale Repertory Theatre has followed a kind of formula of late: a Shakespeare, a Sarah Ruhl, a new playwright, a classic, and a rollicking comedy.  The latter slot this season is filled by the play currently running: Richard Montoya’s American Night: The Ballad of Juan José, developed by Culture Clash and Jo Bonney and directed by Shana Cooper. The play creates a fast-paced absurdist tale—a dream in the mind of Juan José (René Millán), a Mexican alien in the U.S. who is studying, aided by well-meaning Mormons, for his citizenship test.  The idea that there can be a test for citizenship that is anything more than a trivia exam is central to the play as it proceeds to treat familiar aspects of U.S. history as the clichés and stereotypes they are.  It’s a romp through U.S. bigotry and our political mixed signals that mixes corrosive wit with its good-natured mockery.

The best feature of the show is that the ensemble work, with each cast member but for Juan José—it’s his dream after all—enacting a host of caricatures, feels at times like a student show.  I mean that in a good way (much of the great work  here—in costumes, lighting, projections, scenic design, sound, and dramaturgy is provided by Yale School of Drama students).  American Night isn’t loaded down with grand-standing star turns, grand speeches, or grandiose stage setting.  It’s nimble projections, quick one-liners, madcap costumes, and its best sequence turns a stage show into a Town Meeting and vice versa, with a hand-held camera to add the ever ubiquitous eye that makes everything in our world a YouTube event.  Montoya—part of the game cast—and company ooze the kind of acting brio that has long understood that “portraying” any ethnic type onstage is largely a matter of accent, body language and costuming.  Armed with the ability to “be” anything, no one is anything, particularly.  It’s a melting pot, you see.

Flying by on the circuit are folks like Teddy Roosevelt (Richard Ruiz), recognizable by his glasses, moustache, corpulence and tagline (“speak softly and carry a big schtick”); the white capitalist pig (Gregory Linington) in skivies or KKK regalia; the noble Negro frontier nurse (Deidrie Henry); the whacky Japanese gameshow host to offset the principled Japanese youth, interned during WWII (both James Hiroyuki Liao); Juan’s long-suffering wife, played by Nicole Shalhoub, one of the great assets of the production, who also enacts Sacagawea (or, as Juan would have it, Sacachiuaua) as an awkward teen with braces and neon yellow sneakers, not to mention Joan Baez, in her rainbow dress, matched by Montoya as Bob Dylan, bard of the Great Society, spouting lines like “America sucks—but it swallows!”; the feisty Tea-Partyer (Felicity Jones, looking like Linda McMahon) sounding off about American values at the Town Meeting; and, one of my favorite bits, Austin Durant as a multicultural character able to drawl like a yankee, jive like a brother, and pidgin like a Chinaman.  Then there’s Millán, who mainly plays earnest bewilderment, led around not to learn the errors of his ways, but rather the many ways of error.

It’s all in the name of the tattered liberal banner, ultimately, with most of the digs going toward that 1% that just might be in the audience somewhere—or rather, the percentage of the 1% that might be at Yale simply to make a profit.  The show, while irreverent—check out hippy Christ as a homeless person with no ID—never really goes for the jugular, and, while most of us might feel elbowed in the ribs at one point or another, tends to pat us on our backs for being enlightened.  Montoya and Culture Clash are sharp in assessing that in this time of endlessly replicated “commentary” we might all benefit from laughter about the issues that continue to divide the U.S, and, as with the laws on immigration, can make life hell for those trying to belong here.  The best way to belong is to know what to mock, and when.

American Night is at its best when it surprises or delights with its mash-ups or suddenly makes something trivial seem meaningful—as when the radio announcer in the WWII segment signs off with “good night America and all its ships at sea,” recalling a time when—as nostalgia would have it—there was a palpable commonality in that declaration.  The play is also very much of its moment in reflecting to us a world where all the myths, legends, stereotypes, clichés, and actual facts of America spin and collide and ricochet like free-range particles in the cyclotron of pop culture.  While it’s true of the U.S. that “everyone comes from somewhere,” our “somewhere” also goes everywhere.  American Night replays back to us the lessons of our history that continue to lessen in meaning as they disperse globally.

American Night: The Ballad of Juan José By Richard Montoya Developed by Culture Clash and Jo Bonney Directed by Shana Cooper

Choreographer: Ken Roht; Scenic Designer: Kristen Robinson; Costume Designer: Martin T. Schnellinger; Lighting Designer: Masha Tsimring; Sound Designer: Palmer Heffernan; Projection Designer: Paul Lieber; Production Dramaturg: Lauren Dubowski; Vocal and Dialect Coach: Beth McGuire; Singing Coach: Vicki Shaghoian; Fight Director: Rick Sordelet; Casting Director: Tara Rubin Casting; Stage Manager: James Mountcastle

Yale Repertory Theatre September 21 to October 13, 2012

Just Being Neighborly

Now on stage at the Yale Repertory Theatre, Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses is a funny and sad play that ponders the very real terror we use other people to avoid acknowledging.  The unique strength of the play is that it both builds and batters the kinds of sympathy and companionableness that make human relationships possible.  The effect is ultimately positive because Eno keeps his play within the realm of the humorous—avoiding the kind of Sturm und Drang moments that someone like Edward Albee would go after.  And yet, at any moment in the play’s hour and a half running time, things could get much uglier and/or wilder, and that uncertainty—for the audience and the characters—is what gives the play its edge. Recalling, to me at least, an Albee play that brings together an older couple with a younger, like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but also a play like A Delicate Balance (on stage at the Rep last season) where one couple is suddenly called upon by another because the latter are “afraid,” Eno brings together two couples, both named Jones, one settled, the other new in a vaguely rural town near mountains, and lets them brush up against one another in a succession of brief scenes.  The older couple, Bob (Tracy Letts) and Jennifer (Johanna Day) are working through Bob’s illness, a condition that seems to interfere with his memory and his ability to process normal speech.  The younger couple, John (Glenn Fitzgerald) and Pony (Parker Posey), are the perfect foils for the older couple because their speech is never quite normal.  Instead, they speak in patterns of verbal anomie, disguised as quips or ironic asides: Pony: “Say no more.” Jennifer: “Have you had experience with something like this?” Pony: “I just didn’t want you to say any more.”  The effect at times is like fencing in the dark where, having missed one’s target, one immediately accepts whatever one hits as the target.

This could become very fatiguing, but it’s not because the cast is marvelous: under Sam Gold’s direction, each actor is able to modulate speech that, taken as single lines, would sound like banal chit-chat but that, when placed in the context of Eno’s verbal see-sawing, become epigrams, odd insights, and the kind of comebacks that open or close on vistas of inference.  Eno’s gift is to convince us that all language works this way: almost any statement can be a test, a defense, an experiment, a joke, a mistake, a feint, a plea.  In normal speech, we tend to think we’re pretty adept at deciding if not what we’re hearing than at least how we choose to hear it.  But in speech as the characters in The Realistic Joneses use it, we’re never quite sure how what they say affects, expresses, interacts with what they mean.  The effect is fascinating and generally comic, with the characters often witty despite themselves: Pony: “Sorry.  I wasn’t expecting that. Or I guess I was expecting that there wasn’t going to be that.”

There isn’t so much a plot as there are certain “reveals” that come out in the dialogue.  If you nod, you might miss that someone has said something with plotlike implications, and if you do pay close attention you might still wonder what to make of how the four choose to talk around what’s happening.  Eno works with the plot of couples mirroring each other and then swapping partners, not in the smarmy sense of musical beds, but rather in the effort to “keep up” with what the “other Joneses” are all about.  More important, almost, than what’s happening is what the couples choose to say about it.  A few times, the effort to have someone say something amusingly odd begins to tell, but for the most part remains amusing.

The action takes place on a clever stage design by David Zinn that can be both inside and outside—we’re never inside Bob and Jennifer’s house, but we’re at times both inside and outside John and Pony’s—as well as, for one brief but important scene, a supermarket aisle. The amorphous nature of the set—at one end an outdoors table, at the other end, a cluttered-with-boxes kitchen, and, in between, a sliding glass door—helps to erase the very boundaries that more “realistic” drama strives to render.  The world of the Joneses is full of provisional spaces, spaces in both how they live and how they speak.

It’s also a world where time is a matter of Mark Barton’s realistic lighting (at one point John opines that “death and taxes” is not the phrase to measure verities, but rather “bodies and light”), and fun with props—a dead squirrel, a refrigerator, an old lamp, a ship in a bottle, a screwdriver, a transistor radio—measures our friction with our environment.  There’s a great bit, sort of like waiting for Godot in a backyard, when Bob and John, in the latter’s yard, fool with each other’s groping attempts to find out something without admitting anything, while interacting with a motion-detection light.

The female characters carry much of the gravitas of the play: Jennifer must cope with how difficult living with her husband is becoming—a great bit on that score is the “we’re late for the doctor” scene—while Pony becomes, at least elliptically, a catalyst.  As Jennifer, Johanna Day maintains a muted vitality that makes Jennifer the most sympathetic person on stage, her tone implying the kinds of inner resources we’re glad at least one character possesses, while, as Pony, Parker Posey is the most vulnerable because her familiar and distinctive voice (great to hear live) can make her tone both forthright and oblique at once, giving us the sense that Pony’s not quite sure what in her speech is mannerism and what matter.

As her husband, John is the most troubled character, apt to say things for effect and apt to be saddened or bitter about how little effect what he says has; Glenn Fitzgerald, it seemed to me, could go for a bit more pathos, in the end.  As it is, his John Jones is the most difficult character—interesting, amusing, perhaps even threatening at times, but ultimately cold, or, in Jennifer’s words, “committed to not being sympathetic.”  As Bob Jones, Tracy Letts puts the real in “realistic”: he seems to meld so fully with the character we feel we’re getting to know an actual person, finding in the incremental information we glean a man’s resources in teetering between what he’s always been and what he’s never been—nothing.  Almost every word out of his mouth carries a lifetime’s worth of tired exasperation at how little words accomplish.  It’s wonderful.

When the abyss comes close, Eno suggests, we value our banalities. In showing us that social interaction is largely a matter of taking comfort in, or exception with, something someone else just said, Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses is keeping it real.

The Realistic Joneses By Will Eno Directed by Sam Gold

The Yale Repertory Theatre April 20 to May 12, 2012

A Tale of Two Kingdoms

The strangeness of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, now playing at The Yale Repertory Theatre in a sumptuous and stylish version directed by Liz Diamond, is ultimately its strength.  The plot yokes together elements that seem impossibly disparate, almost a test, from start to finish, of the audience’s ability to suspend its disbelief.  The play is generally called “a romance,” not only to differentiate it from comedy and tragedy, but also to indicate its novelistic elements.  The narrative arc of the play is rather complex, and also surprisingly and amusingly cavalier with audience expectations.

Early in the play, Mamillius (Remsen Welsh), the young son of King Leontes and Queen Hermione of Sicilia, says he will tell his very pregnant mother “a sad tale” because that’s “best for winter.”  He’s ripped away from his mother—object of her husband’s insane jealousy regarding his best friend, King Polixenes of Bohemia (Hoon Lee)—before he can tell it.  We never see the boy again as he dies offstage of health complications that follow his mother’s imprisonment for adultery and treason, but in some ways the story of the play is a tale a child might conceive of, with insane rage, exciting escapes, a man-eating bear, a colorful pickpocket, rousing rustic antics, true love, and magical reconciliations, to say nothing of a leap of about sixteen years in the middle.  It’s fun to trash Aristotle’s unities!

Though he’s offstage for the long middle section of the play, Leontes is key to the play’s success.  Here, Rob Campbell manages superbly to humanize a man suddenly driven to autocratic excess.  Driven by a restless jealousy, he destroys his family, losing a child, imprisoning his wife, and sending his newborn daughter to almost certain death in a remote locality.  In almost constant movement about the stage like a man in search of a comfort he once knew, Campbell’s Leontes is a victim of his own sick fancies to an extent that almost amuses him in a rueful, despondent way.  It’s a powerful performance matched by the noble suffering of his wife Hermione as played by Susannah Schulman.  Her trial scene enacts a dramatic staging of the worst sort of spousal dysfunction, an overt display of male tyranny that draws a passionate outburst from Hermione’s staunch friend Paulina (Felicity Jones) in a great confrontation scene where the outraged meets the outrageous.

Sicilia, in Michael Yeargan’s Scenic Design, consists of high walls that move to form corridors, or withdraw to provide open spaces, against brooding darks and raking light and the effective use of silhouettes in Matt Frey’s Lighting Design.  Together they make the University Theater stage a fascinating space, intimate and forbidding as needed.

The crowd-pleasing second half—after that infamous bear scene gets a notable enactment, together with Thomas Kopache’s soliloquy, as Time, delivered with an audacious flair for absurd necessity—takes place mostly in the kingdom of Bohemia.  Presented here as a rustic land of splendid, multi-colored clothes (Jennifer Moeller, Costumes), music (composer Matthew Suttor’s gypsy-like tunes), dancing (even with buffalo heads in Randy Duncan’s light-hearted choreography), and the love in idleness of Polixenes’ son Florizel (Tim Brown) and a stunning maiden called Perdita (Lupita Nyong’o) who seems to be more regal than her station as a lowly Shepherd’s daughter would suggest.  Both actors do a fine job of conveying both the idyllic nature of the lovers’ wooing and the tensions of their status, especially when Polixenes and his courtier Camillo (Tyrone Mitchell Henderson, excellent in an under-appreciated role) spy on their nuptials in disguise.

The comic turns of Autolycus (Luke Robertson) should be the fun of this section of the play, but his scenes are a bit too broad and blustery, not quite up to the nimble clowning Rep audiences have become used to in Christopher Baye’s riotous productions.  That spirit is more in evidence in the scene where two gentlemen (Francis Jue and Adam O’Byrne) report on the reconciliations in the court of Sicilia with “you had to be there” hilarity.

After such comedy, what conclusion?  The final scene is all it should be: a chastened Leontes finds himself rich beyond his imagining, with nearly all his relations renewed.  The theme of winter, as a time of life, is impressed upon us by the aging royal couple exiting as silhouettes.  Their daughter has become a woman in their absence, and now, beyond the rages and the suffering they have endured, they have only their twilight together.  It’s a bittersweet triumph Shakespeare gives us, the lost time hovering over the happy conclusion like a certain little boy’s absence.

The Winter’s Tale, in this impressive production, receives an almost definitive treatment thanks to Diamond’s ability to render the true colors of the play’s varied palette.

William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale Directed by Liz Diamond

The Yale Repertory Theatre March 16-April 7, 2012

If The Spirit Moves You

Good Goods, new playwright Christina Anderson’s Yale Rep debut currently onstage, is an old-fashioned play, with a plot that turns upon realizations that alter the status quo for each of the five main characters. As such it’s classic drama, and much of its success depends upon the audience making realizations with the characters.  They talk themselves and us into an understanding of what’s at stake in the choices they make. At its heart, with a bravura performance by Angela Lewis, Good Goods explores the theme of possession—of oneself, of one’s goods (in every sense of the term), of one’s past and future—through a comic and cathartic sense of the uncanny. The play works because Anderson’s imagination participates about equally in the naturalistic and fabulistic features of drama.  Set in a mythic Anytown, USA (“a small town/village that doesn’t appear on any map”) in an indeterminate period (“1961 and 1994.  And everything in between.”), the play’s set consists of a hodgepodge General Store called Good Goods, after Mr. Good, the absent patriarch who has skedaddled, leaving behind the family business, now looked after by his faithful factotum Truth (you see at once how symbolic this can get) and his son Stacey, a thirtyish entertainer called home from the comedy circuit where he teams as an act with local gal Patricia, who soon enough turns up to find out what the future of the act will be.

Stacey and Truth are a grudging team maintaining the store, as the play opens, with undercurrents familiar from folktale struggles of a legitimate son and an illegitimate son over a blessing.  Patricia and Stacey were once a team—we might imagine as both a performing and a romantic duo—but there’s triangulation afoot: Patricia’s twin brother Wire (who seems at least five years younger than her in demeanor) has romantic inclinations toward Stacey, who may reciprocate them.  Finally, before you can say “Beloved,” a young, naïve ingenue named Sunny turns up, a winsome pick-up for Patricia, only to undergo a diabolical alteration for a hair-raising curtain at Intermission.

Sunny becomes possessed by the spirit of a man from a local family, the Evanses, noted, thanks to a late-lamented seer amongst them called Ivory, for its history of prophecy and for a high-toned sense of persecution.  The man, Emekah, dies off-stage in an accident at the pencil factory—itself a darkly referred to entity that seems to stand both for economic progress in this rural backwater but also soul-enslaving drudgery.  Both bemused and aroused by finding himself in the body of this fine young thing, Emekah rants and froths and aims to do all kinds of harm.  The forthright foursome must put their heads together to overcome this threat from beyond, which they do with their sense of humor and romantic possibility intact, and with help from the local Hunter Priestess—herself a spirit now inhabiting a likeable fellow named Waymon.

The play manages to keep its folk motifs and magical realism in play without overwhelming its grasp of a plausible sort of everyday reality.  This in itself is no mean feat and indicates, in Anderson, a grasp of drama as not so much a window on the world as it is or was but rather as a realm of possibility where what people really want and are can become accessible through well-chosen devices.

One such device, Scenic Designer James Schuette’s set, is a pleasure to behold in its palpable thereness—and in its usefully divided linear space.  Toni-Leslie James’ costumes help support our uncertainty about “when” we are, and the overall presence of the visual components of the play keep us firmly grounded in a natural-feeling world shared by the likes of August Wilson and Tennessee Williams.  The cast, directed by Tina Landau with relaxed precision, complement well the visual purpose of the play—they all move and look and feel at home, and are able to speak Anderson’s ringing mouthfuls of phrase with, for the most part, suitable dispatch.

To the women go the more commanding roles—Lewis’s Sunny is scene-stealing after Intermission if a bit too cloying at first, and De’Adre Aziza, as Patricia, runs a fun gamut from steely to gleeful to smoldering to maternal and nurturing.  The main male role, for my money, is Truth, if only because the character is a bit inscrutable and, as played by Marc Damon Johnson, bears and speaks the dignity of common wisdom well; Clifton Duncan’s Stacey is a more problematic study; his identities as a black boss and as a gay man looking for love both seem in some sense unresolved, as if Anderson sees the importance of such a character but isn’t quite sure what to make him do or become; that said, the facet of his character I found least believeable was his role as a comedian, even if “a straight man.”  As Wire, Kyle Beltran seemed everyone’s younger brother—an early bit in which he tries to remind Truth that it’s his birthday seemed more suitable for someone proudly turning twenty-one rather than—with no apprehension?—thirty.  Finally, as Waymon, Oberon K. A. Adjepong adds a great stage presence to the Second Part as well as a gripping song of exorcism—with help from Sound Designer Junghoon Pi’s ghostly talking drums.

Good Goods not only makes us suspend our disbelief, it makes us believe in suspending reality, to make good on the potential of the past.

Good Goods by Christina Anderson Directed by Tina Landau

Yale Repertory Theatre February 3 to 25, 2012

The Way We Were

Watching Amy Herzog’s Belleville is an exercise in having your worst fears about people confirmed. The play offers a fascinating interplay between two narrative arcs: the spiralling down of what might be perceived as a romantic comedy, dressed up with dramatic overtones, and the raising of sinister tensions that, like the denouement of an Ibsen play, lay waste to the comfortable world we began with. The second play of the Yale Repertory Theatre’s 2011-12 Season and a World Premiere, Belleville is a triumph of slowburn technique. It’s the kind of play that, with only four characters, one set and no intermission, provides all its thrills and brilliance by simply placing its characters before us and letting us see them squirm and prevaricate and plead and joke and couple and coo and become gradually, relentlessly unhinged and desperate. The effect is exhilerating, an entertaining skirting of the abyss where the pursuit of normality turns deadly.

Disrupted from our failsafe positions, the play asks, how do we act? In human relations, we might say, rationality is only skin deep, the rest is pathology.

Abby (Maria Dizzia), a somewhat spoiled daddy’s girl, is going to be away from home at Christmas for the first time. That might not be such a big deal, but her sister’s about to have a baby and their mother died not too long ago. She’s in Paris—the “diverse” (though she’s self-conscious about using the word) section from which the play takes its title—offering wifely support to her new husband Zack (Greg Keller), a recent Johns Hopkins Med School grad doing important work on AIDS. Abby is still at the stage where she proudly shows off the wedding album (“I was really happy that day”) and attempts to put a good face on the little gaffes of cohabitation—like walking in on Zack masturbating to porn when he should be at work.

Herzog establishes early a grasp of how newlyweds, away from everyone they know and barely sure they know each other in this new context, have much to grapple with in every exchange—over what to wear, and where to go, and how to placate Abby’s father’s expectations and how to meet the demands of Zack’s job while maintaining a fun, lovers-abroad feeling. Fortunately, the landlord Alioune (Gilbert Owuor) is a personable guy willing to eat Christmas cookies though a Muslim, look at Abby’s photo album, and share a companionable bowl with Zack. Then again, friendship in such cases only goes so far when the rent’s overdue.

Pull on a strand and watch the unfinished tapestry of this young couple’s efforts at married life come unraveled. Anne Kauffman’s production is strong in the subtle touches that keep us guessing at what’s behind certain actions and comments, and in providing the punch of dramatic moments that shatter the congenial tone. The interplay and body language between the two principle characters is particularly effective when they grope for an intimacy they’re having a hard time finding.

Maria Dizzia’s role is complex: Abby is girlish, brittle, vulnerable, wounding, hysterical by turns. A spoiled spoiler but also a centerpiece, the raison d’être of Zack’s world, she is the engine that makes Belleville run. Herzog vents a bit on Abby’s inadequacies, but she also extends understanding to her when necessary.

As Zack, Greg Keller has the most difficult role. We have to like him, but not too much. He plays the ingratiating side of such a character perfectly—we’ve all met someone like him. And when things take a turn for the worse, we realize, with a growing chill and unease, that we truly don’t know what he’s capable of.

As landlord Alioune, Gilbert Owuor seems a bit more wooden than is necessary; understandably aloof, a landlord put in the position of being a friend, his character as played is hard to read. Herzog shows us that male bonding is often built upon deceiving women together, but Owuor could give us a bit more interest in Alioune as Zack’s foil.

As Alioune’s wife Amina, Pascale Armand makes the most of her three brief scenes. Her role is key in showing us a major difference between Abby and Zack and Alioune and Amina. We could reduce it to a cultural difference—the role of the “traditional wife” versus the contemporary version Abby manifests—but more to the point is the strength of character—demanding as it is—of Amina, a woman who, we grasp immediately, has no illusions and little patience for the self-delusions of others. Her presence is an immediate reality check.

A sprawling space with certain important areas we can’t see, the set by Julia C. Lee is an apartment just a bit seedy that, with its interesting ceiling slopes and skylights, its attractive windows and comfortable, lived-in look, presents the perfect locale for a slumming up-and-coming couple. And it is a repeated pleasure watching what different times of day, via Nina Hyun Seung Lee’s lighting, do with the place.

Commissioned by Yale Rep and developed through the Yale Center for New Theatre, Belleville is Amy Herzog’s Yale Rep debut. New Haven is fortunate to get in on the early work of this talented playwright, and she's at work on a newly commissioned play for the Rep.

A convincing study of the uncertainties beneath the identities we construct, Belleville is certainly worth a visit.

Belleville Written by Amy Herzog Directed by Anne Kauffman Yale Repertory Theatre October 21 to November 12, 2011

Quiet Desperation

“The mass of men,” wrote Thoreau, “lead lives of quiet desperation.  What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.”  This might well be the signpost hanging over Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, a tale of the Pozorov sisters—Olga, Masha, and Irina—as they pine for a life of excitement in Moscow, their former home, while providing the only diversion for a military regiment garrisoned in a provincial Russian town.  The drama of the play comes from allowing us into these lives long enough to watch everything change for the worse. A depressing prospect, indeed.  Yet what makes it entertaining is Chekhov’s view of life as not essentially tragic, so that touches of humor and tenderness, of awkwardness and passion, and other displays of the pathos of personality, involve us but let us keep ourselves a bit distant.  Chekhov’s sisters are stuck there, but we get to watch them for awhile then leave, and one’s feeling about the experience, in the end, is shaped by that final tableau of the trio clumped at the edge of the stage, so near they might almost step off and be free, joining us in the world we’re trapped in, but instead they remain there to mirror for us stoical resignation (Olga), shattered romance (Masha), and dashed hopes (Irina).

Much rides on the last because, as the youngest, Irina is still too young to be crushed and, in this more brisk than yearning version now playing at the Yale Repertory Theatre, translated by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Les Waters with the Berkeley Rep, she gives us a vision of “the modern woman” forced to make her way herself.  We might well say that the death of the dream of a nostalgia-tinged Moscow that no longer exists, and the desire, in Irina, “to work” and, in Olga, “to know,” and the acceptance, in Masha, “to live,” indicate an improvement in their condition at last.

The best thing about this production is Ruhl’s thoughtful translation which manages to bypass some of the more stilted aspects of translated Chekhov, albeit with liberties—would the doctor really say “shtupping”?—that mostly serve comic purposes.  The feel of the language seems right for the characters, so that even the philosophizing seems character-driven rather than abstract.  Though that’s not to say the production has mastered the play.  The main problem is that there’s too much stage, too much space.  The production has to work hard to create any sense of intimacy on the University Theater stage, and I’ve rarely been so aware, watching a play, of characters as actors standing in place to speak.  This was particularly the case in the final Act outdoors where the set’s huge and uninviting porch simply overwhelmed what the scene needs to express.

Earlier scenes fare better: the best being Act Three in the upstairs bedroom while a fire rages in the town, and the first half keeps the action moving with liveliness between intimate conversations in the foreground and activity at the large diningroom table upstage, and yet, in the opening night show, there was a static quality that seemed to get between us and these people we’ve dropped in on.  The times when we were made to feel like privileged onlookers worked best—Irina being petted by Chebutykin, Vershinin reacting to a message about his wife, the sisters gossiping about their brother Andrei—and one of the marvels of the play is that every character—in a cast of thirteen—gets at least one “moment” to impress a personality upon us.

For that reason, it’s a play where “the support” is extremely important, and much commendation goes to James Carpenter as the fond, drunk, irascible, and perhaps even wise Chebutykin, to Sam Brelin Wright as the dour, mocking and ultimately dangerous Lermontov-wannabe Solyony, to Barbara Oliver, a figure of focused pathos as the used-up servant Anfisa, to Richard Farrell as the servant Ferapont, exhausted by indulging his superiors’ whims, and especially to Emily Kitchens as the repellently selfish Natasha, first Andrei’s fiancée, then wife, whose passive aggressiveness and single-minded conquest of the Pozorov household is both comic and chilling.  A word too for the young soldiers: as the boisterous Fedotik, Brian Wiles knows how to fill a space, and as the more bashful Rode, Josiah Bania made the most of his parting echoes.

In the larger roles, Keith Reddin's Kulygin seems neither comic nor pathetic enough as a cuckolded school master determined to be “content”; Thomas Jay Ryan as Irina’s dutiful beau Baron Tuzenbach gains in stature as the play progresses, his leavetaking from her finding its perfect expression in a request for coffee; as Vershinin, Bruce McKenzie has the bearing of a serious man surprised to find himself still capable of frivolity and affairs of the heart; we sense that we, like the other characters, could never really know him.

Then there are the Pozorovs: Alex Moggridge, as Andrei, seems too often simply awkward, as in Act Three, not giving us any insight into a man who marries a vain woman, unseats his sisters, and nearly gambles away their patrimony; as Irina, Heather Wood takes us from giddy youth to a more weary version quite well, while Wendy Rich Stetson is good both at Olga’s stoicism and her peevishness, together making up the sister most long-suffering but also most secure in herself; as Masha, the linchpin of the play, the sister who should be settled but is anything but, who flirts and wins and loses, Natalia Payne was best at moments of unspoken emotion—as for instance flying to join Vershinin or, with her sisters, staring off into the future at the end—but should be brought up more in the mix: Masha isn’t simply petulant, she’s the throwback to the 19th century novels of adultery—the woman who chose not to make her own way, as Olga and Irina do, but instead married her way into an eternal limbo.  The play, we might say, is only as strong as Masha’s suffering.  In the show on opening night, she was too easily eclipsed, thus slighting the “confirmed desperation” of her love for Vershinin.

On the whole: a well-played and respectful classic needing a bit more fire and movement.

Three Sisters, by Anton Chekhov A new version by Sarah Ruhl, with Elise Thoron, Natalya Paramonova, and Kristin Johnsen-Neshati Directed by Les Waters Yale Repertory Theatre, in a co-production with Berkeley Repertory Theatre

September 16-October 8, 2011

Such Sweet Sorrow

You want to know something? William Shakespeare was a master playwright. That's the immediate observation to be made after seeing Romeo and Juliet at the Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Shana Cooper, a Yale School of Drama grad, with a cast featuring many second and third year actors from the School, as well as a few notable former students. In other words, it’s Old Home Week at the Yale Rep, and nothing says, “Old Home” like a return to a venerable classic by our tongue’s most widely lauded, taught, and re-enacted playwright. The greatest success of Cooper's vision for this production is that it makes one marvel at how Old Bill manages to mix violence (feuding families that, in this modern dress and highly active version—credit Fight Director Rick Sordelet—recall gangland battles, mob hostilities, and, of course, The Sharks and The Jets from West Side Story, which was a variation on R&J to begin with), hilarity (The Nurse is always funny, and Cynthia Mace makes the most of it, adding plenty of Yenta charm, but does anyone talk about how funny Balthasar is? After seeing Blake Segal in the role, you will.), death (five corpses by the end—the death-begat-death structure is well-known, but it seems to me that the death of Countee Paris (Ben Horner, dutiful in a thankless role) isn’t always played, though here it is, and it gives more tooth to Romeo, sometimes seen as a fey ladies’ man, to see him kill a member of each of the other leading families), generational tensions, familial difficulties (the Capulets are given much presence, thanks to Christina Rouner’s affecting portrayal as Juliet’s mother, svelte as hell in a black funeral dress, mixing comic touches and frenetic, modern-mother-at-her-wits’-end gestures with stormy mourning over her possum-playing daughter, and Andy Murray, blunt and muscular, with a Jason Statham look and shades of an East End delivery, as he berates Tybalt (Marcus Henderson, dangerous and seething) as an upstart, and later his daughter for her contrary ways, underscoring that there’s something rotten in the house of Capulet), flights of fancy (boy, that Mercutio (John Patrick Doherty) can talk!, and here he’s as gay as you probably always assumed he was, but Michael Jackson didn’t grab his own crotch as often as Doherty thrusts his), jokes (most coming from Mercutio—to say nothing of some comic butt baring), poetic musings (Friar Laurence (Henry Stram) in a lovely little soliloquy that slows everything down just when it needs to—consummate craftsman, our Will), the best romantic badinage ever written (and placed in the mouths of teens), and all the tragic baggage of “star-cross’d lovers” (a hoary enough conceit even in The Bard’s day), and gets away with it—more, establishes a bar that has never been bettered.

So what about those lovers, eh? I can’t think of Romeo without recalling the Shakespearean actor in a Monty Python skit who recalled he was “frightfully awkward with all that happy prancing” the role requires. Our Romeo (Joseph Parks) is anything but awkward, and prance he does. He also swings from bars and wears an ape costume (with sneakers). In fact, one of the pleasures of this production is watching Parks own the stage; his is a tight, sinewy Romeo, in physical presence, but his delivery has few nuances—it’s all exhortatory cadences, making every speech a song in the same key. I found myself longing for a more varied music. And that extends also to his lady love, Juliet (Irene Sofia Lucio), though for a different reason. Lucio is great as the winsome teen of the first half—she acts the age (not yet fourteen) that Juliet is supposed to be—and rises to splendor in Juliet’s long riff on the word “banished,” managing to make Will’s asides-within-asides jump nimbly to the rising despair she feels. But, as Hamlet says, “something too much of this.” I couldn’t help feeling that this Juliet was out of touch with the world she inhabited—a shambles of warring families and preening coxcombs, where even her Man of the Hour kills in haste and repents at leisure, and quits her bed like the Captain of the Team who just scored the winning goal and has to hit the showers. I found myself longing for the tones of today’s teen queen, more deadpan irony, less fluttery gush.

Finally, as is usually the case at the Rep, the technical stuff is all great: Costume Designer Leon Dobkowski has fun, so you can too; the set (Po-Lin Li) and lighting (Laura J. Eckelman) enhance all that verbal poetry with some of the visual kind: the figures lurking in the shadows were a nice touch, but even better was the odd, background mound, and the upper story gave a sense of a proscenium-within-the-proscenium, especially when that big bed was center stage; and Composer Gina Leishman’s music added commentary—the first half Curtain sounded like a Twin Peaks-style Soap score, archly suggesting bathos and something sinister to come.

The production will be enacted for area high school students through the WILL POWER! program, and should go over well with a young adult audience—for what teen hasn’t envisioned his or her own death as the “serves ‘em right” payback to overbearing parents? As Aristotle would say, that’s catharsis, folks!

The Yale Repertory Theatre presents William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet Directed by Shana Cooper

March 11 to April 2, 2011

Whose Identity Is It, Anyway?

Kirsten Greenidge’s new play, Bossa Nova, now in its world premiere run at the Yale Repertory Theatre, addresses the notion of identity—particularly African-American cultural identity—as a theatrical experience, a matter of roles, costumes, lines, demeanor, comportment, and all the other aspects of theater that lend themselves as metaphors for social expectations.  The play gives us five distinctly mannered characters—four adults and one child—and a protagonist, Dee Paradis (twenty-seven, but seventeen in flashbacks), as the loose cannon, the figure who hasn’t quite accepted any manner as definitively her own. Dee’s mother, Lady Paradis, tries to help her daughter by training her.  As played by Ella Joyce, Lady is self-assured, definite, judgmental, a woman who, by her own admission, has scraped and clawed to escape the taint of her race, the aspects of being “colored” that she wouldn’t let mark her and determine her place.  She spends most of her scenes as an haute bourgeois matron at her dressing-table, putting on her face, choosing her wardrobe and accessories, and exhorting her daughter to find a face she can wear, to make the most of the privileges her parents have gained for her.

In flashbacks to Dee’s school days at a boarding school called St. Ursula’s, we hear of her outcast status among the daughters of the privileged.  The only people to befriend her are her equally misfit roommate Grace Mahoney (Libby Woodbridge) an Irish girl from Southey in Boston, eagerly attempting to discover her “talent,” so as to have a purpose, while sending school-girl crush vibes toward Dee, and Michael Cabot, a history teacher desperately trying to become hip by listening to jazz and by extolling black experience: naturally, he seduces Dee and that’s where the trouble really begins, not only because of the inevitable complications, but because Michael would place a costume on Dee supposedly authentic, as relics from tribal Africa, but as artificial to the girl as her mother’s painted face.

As Michael, Tommy Schrider gets all the comedy he can from the teacher’s gyrations as he rather anachronistically praises bebop jazz as “the future” (in the early Seventies!), and speaks a lingo that suggests Jack Kerouac is not only still alive (he died in 1969) but in his first flush of success.  Where’s this guy been, we wonder, and why the bossa nova (a “new trend” in the early Sixties)—when this should be the era of late Motown and Stevie Wonder?  In other words, either the time-frame of Dee’s school days are askew, partaking of the mid Sixties rather than the early Seventies in which they ostensibly occur, or Michael is a colossal throwback.  Either way, he’s the most fun character in the play.

The other fun thing is director Evan Yionoulis’ staging: very sparsely decorated, Ana M. Milosevic’s scenic design propels furniture and characters about the space for scene changes, and, with Laura J. Eckleman’s lighting design and Michael Vincent Skinner’s sound design, creates wonderfully integrated effects as we move through three different settings, two different periods, and a range of sounds, from old records to barking dogs to a busy paintbrush on canvas.

The other strengths of this production are its two main actresses: Ella Joyce wrings all the fait accompli dignity she can from Lady, with a weathered but musical voice that speaks its owner’s strong will, and, as the mercurial Dee, Francesca Choy-Kee has to act girlish for twenty-seven, and precocious for seventeen (its her essay that first gets Michael’s attention), straight-laced one minute and an Aretha-style “natural woman” the next, and, before the play’s over, call up an outcast’s heart-rending cries.  Hers is an intelligent, wary, and finally emotionally convincing performance in a play that could be, without her and her director’s grasp of the character, somewhat dubious.

Yale Repertory Theatre presents the world premiere of Bossa Nova by Kirsten Greenidge, directed by Evan Yionoulis

November 26 to December 18, 2010

Fear's a Man's Best Friend

Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance first appeared in 1966.   It’s now playing at the Yale Rep, directed by James Bundy. Going in, the main question on my mind was whether or not the play – which says it’s taking place NOW – would feel adequate to today or would seem as though it still had a foot in the pre-Nixon era of its origins. Some references – topless bathing suits, a marijuana cache busted nearby – certainly harken to the old days, but not necessarily. The marijuana reference, at least, has become timely again with a new movement afoot to legalize it. But the aspects of the play that do feel a bit dated are perhaps deceptively so. One is when Julia, daughter of Tobias and Agnes, well-to-do bourgeois of the type that immediately bring to mind the grand tradition of Ibsen and Chekhov, describes the (fourth) husband she has left as someone who is simply opposed to everything. We hear Albee’s lines describing a nascent radical of the Left, back in the day when the young were rife with such.  But, today, could he not be a radical of the Right more easily?

At one point Tobias, newspapers in hand, disparages the Republicans for being as brutal as ever.  It’s a line Albee updated in 1996 to reference Gingrich et al. (the plays seems to be produced only when Democrats are in office).  Tobias and Agnes are clearly meant to be “liberals,” and much of the play’s drama consists of them trying to decide what to do about another couple – their oldest friends, Harry and Edna – who simply turn up one night, claim they became frightened in their own home, and proceed to move in with Tobias and Agnes, while at the same time Julia, often shrill and sulky across the generation gap, has returned home as well.  It’s Julia (played with the requisite petulance by Keira Naughton) who claims her father’s “house is not in order,” and while we know that the Great Society was getting shaky in 1966, with the effort to accommodate everyone’s demands a strain on civility, how much more is that the case in 2010, as new movements attempt not only to undo Clinton and Johnson, but FDR as well?

I’ve mentioned all this at such length because it seems to me that Albee’s play, in Bundy’s recreation of it, has triumphantly entered the 21st century with its nimble allegory intact – “as we get older we become allegorical,” Agnes tells her husband, at times seeming to speak for her author.  In our times, it’s easy enough to imagine the “terror” or “plague,” as Agnes calls it, sweeping over Harry and Edna as tied to seismic economic change instead of to the alterations in mores of the Sixties. Certainly the couple's fear could be existential, but Claire, who seems in many ways the most savvy – “the walking wounded” are often “the least susceptible” to “the plague,” Agnes allows – jibes “I was wondering when it would begin, when it would start.” The statement comes from a perspective balanced precariously above a deluge to come.

All of which is to say the delights of this play tend to be thoughtful ones. Though it’s not a light night of theater, Bundy’s direction does find the surprised laughs, the quick wit, the rueful chuckles in the material, perhaps intruding a bit too much comedy into Edna’s initial annoucement of the couple’s fear. For a second we might think that Edna (Kathleen Butler) is simply immensely silly, but that’s not right. Edna, who is elsewhere rather flinty, has sense enough to deliver at least one of the morals of the story: that social life is always a testing of boundaries, of what is permitted, of what may be requested.

Most of the laughs come by way of Ellen McLaughlin’s Claire – wry, spirited, often performing for her sister and brother-in-law to provoke them from their rather formidable settledness. Stretching out on the floor, upending orange juice on the carpet, tootling an accordian, yodeling, recounting her grim days as a “willful drunk,” sniping at Agnes, who sees her as a knowing observer, Claire first appears in a sort of retro-punk ensemble, with spikey Laurie Anderson-like hair, but later cleans up nicely in a designer outfit. She’s nothing if not mercurial and McLaughlin makes the most of this plum role.

Kathleen Chalfant’s Agnes is much drier in her humor, just as pointed in exchanges, but much more self-reflexive in her speechifying. She has immense dignity and character. Not really likeable, most of the time, her statement of her wifely position in Act Three humanizes her to a surprising degree, allowing her to assert her role as the one on whom nothing can be lost, so that we understand why she opens and closes the play wondering, in very reasonable tones, if she may one day go mad. Her least “liberal” moment is her statement that Harry and Edna’s fear is an infectious disease that may infect them all. Has it already, we wonder.

The great asset of this production is Edward Herrmann as Tobias. Tall, broad-shouldered, with fluent hair and a graying beard, he mutters, constantly makes drinks, and drifts around his well-appointed livingroom, a wonderful Yale-ish space with dark wood and cathedral-like verticality by Chien-Yu Peng. Whereas Agnes says she is the fulcrum upon which all balances, Tobias is the one for whom she balances things. The women of his life are a context of incessant voices but to Tobias are given two of the most memorable speeches, the one about a cat he killed because she no longer liked him, and the other an “aria” or passionate outburst to Harry on the question of whether or not he wants his friend and his wife to stay. Herrmann, so bulkily patrician (he has played FDR, after all), has a great knack for delivering Tobias’ lines so that we can hear Tobias listening to himself, considering the impression his own words make on him, and in the outburst we hear Tobias desperately trying to sound and be sincere, to demand of himself sacrifice, to say that, yes, there is room for all, even if he has to dredge up caring from some forgotten cupboard in his soul.

In the film of this play, directed by Tony Richardson in 1973 for American Film Theater, the two leads are played by Paul Scofield and Katherine Hepburn and, great as those actors are, neither felt quite right to me, Scofield too tragic, Hepburn too tremulous. I found Chalfant’s Elaine Stritch-like clarity much more effective, and, great as Scofield is, think that Herrmann’s Tobias, a tower crumbing, will be the one I remember whenever I read this play.

Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance; directed by James Bundy; Yale Repertory Theatre

October 22 to November 13, 2010

Home Sweet Gloom

Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) celebrates social dysfunction.  Whatever one’s opinion of the oddball Blackwoods – Constance, in her twenties, Mary Katherine (Merrikat), eighteen, and old, wheelchair-bound Uncle Julian – one can’t help feeling that their seclusion from the townsfolk of Bennington, VT, is merited, that something sets the Blackwoods apart from the hoi polloi, and that “something” makes the Blackwoods worth knowing about. The “something,” as so often happens in Gothic fiction, is a dark past, but in this case, it’s not a secret, but rather something everyone knows: Mrs. Blackwood and Mr. Blackwood, the latter the brother of Julian, and Julian’s wife, and Tom, the girls’ younger brother, all died of arsenic consumption six years ago.  The poison, which Constance bought to kill rats, made its way into the sugar, you see, sugar which was used as topping for early raspberries served by Constance at a particularly fateful dinner.  Constance, who never eats sugar, was spared, as was Merrikat, sent to her room without any dinner.  Julian, who sweetened his dessert sparingly, was left an invalid.  Constance, of course, was acquitted of murder, but condemned for the deaths by the townspeople.

Adam Bock and Todd Almond’s musical of the novel, directed by Anne Kauffman, now playing at The Yale Repertory Theatre, opens with Merrikat, played with a sly and wiry girlishness by Alexandra Socha, stepping to the footlights to regale us in song about “We Blackwoods.”  The upshot of Merrikat’s every pronouncement is that insular families, whatever their oddities, are preferable to intrusive neighbors, who should simply butt out.  Certainly that’s the point of Jackson’s novel, where some personally important aspect of the inner life must resist attack by the forces of uninspired and uninspiring conformity, tiresome normality, and aggressive mediocrity.

In the musical, those qualities take the form of a stock cast of locals who like to amuse themselves with catty remarks and provoking jokes at the Blackwoods’ expense.  But the real bearer of a threat comes from within the Blackwood clan itself.  Young cousin Charles (Sean Palmer, with a good voice and engaging dance moves), son of the other Blackwood brother, Arthur, shows up after the death of his destitute father to see what’s doing with the branch of the family that still has at least a large, crumbling property to their name, a name now primarily upheld by retiring, yet charming Constance (Jenn Gambatese), tireless cook and gardener and caretaker of Julian.  Constance, played with a light, maidenly obtuseness by Gambatese, seems content with her twilit spinsterhood, until Charles arrives and makes her think about herself and duets with him (the sprightly “She Didn’t Get Very Far”) and dancing (to a wry little ditty called “The Stomp”) and longing (the evocative “come to me” interlude).

If this were your typical musical, we’d be rooting for Charles to sweep Constance off her feet and rescue her from this premature mausoleum.  But this isn’t that musical, and we aren't.

In part it’s because Merrikat got there first: she sweeps us away with her confidential songs, her winning manner, her knowing certainty that Charles, ultimately, only wants to take away the sisters’ peace without giving anything of value in return.  By the time the townfolk stage an outright siege on the castle – echoing all those horror films where the villagers attack the stronghold of Frankenstein to destroy the monster they can’t understand – Merrikat, who had more or less challenged Charles to a duel, has proven her point.

The stage business in this play is captivating enough to make us want to stay in the castle with the Blackwoods – the American Gothic gloom of David Zinn’s set, Ilona Somogyi’s gorgeous costumes for the ghostly ancestors who mainly keep to the upper story, intoning their musical support of the surviving Blackwoods’ isolation, the at-times sharp, at-times senile comments by Uncle Julian (a usefully comical portrayal in Bill Buell’s show-stealing hands), the musical numbers, directed by Dan Lipton, that are revealing dialogues, and the arch musings of Socha’s irrepressible Merrikat.

The World Premiere of We Have Always Lived in the Castle; Book and Lyrics by Adam Bock; Music and Lyrics by Todd Almond; Based on the novel by Shirley Jackson; Directed by Anne Kauffman

September 17 to October 9, 2010, Yale Repertory Theatre, at the University Theatre, 222 York St.

Out of Africa

Bernard-Marie Koltès' Battle of Black and Dogs (Combat de nègre et de chiens), translated by Michaël Attias, and directed by Robert Woodruff, is the second play this season at the Yale Rep to take us to vague environs in Africa to witness a drama among a small group of people cut off from the world at large.  Like Danai Gurira's Eclipsed, BBD places us in a compound, but this time it's a "construction site run by a foreign company in a West African country, anywhere from Senegal to Nigeria," where the main characters, white and French, are confronted by Alboury (Albert Jones), a member of a local Wolof tribe who wants to retrieve the body of a worker at the site who has recently died or been killed.

At the site, the boss, Horn (Andrew Robinson), primarily drinks and gambles with his underling Cal (Tommy Schrider), an engineer who should be higher on the ladder than Horn, but is not exactly what you'd call management material.  In fact, he killed the Wolof worker for almost hitting his shoe with a gob of spit, then insisted it was an accident, then tried to dispose of the body in various ways before finally flinging it in the sewer.

This interracial workplace drama is further complicated by the fact that Horn has recently returned from a trip to Paris and brought back a woman he hopes will become his wife.  Léone was a chambermaid at the hotel he stayed at who, as he puts it, always answers yes -- particularly to the offer to come with him to Africa, to see the fireworks display he's going to set off before leaving the country for good.

Cal will make a pass at her (or rather will paw her in an unsettling fashion while babbling inanities); she'll fall for Alboury (in an odd courtship in which she speaks German and he speaks Wolof, though he does understand French, her native language; the double estrangement is no doubt meaningful, but rather leaves the audience in the dark about what they are saying to each other -- does the fact that she's reciting the well-known poem "The Erlking" help?).  Things will not end well, though, all things considered, not as badly as they might have.

In such a stylized play, all the emphasis is on performance.  Robinson, resembling the aged Jon Voight and sounding at times like the aged Jack Lemmon, inspires a certain Everyman confidence as Horn, particularly as he's not that virulent a racist, and speaks for the most part sensibly to Alboury, even addressing him as "sir" initially, and though trying to buy him off may be crass, that too is sensible since the body of Nouofia is unrecoverable.

As Alboury, Jones is given a cipher rather than a character, a representation of elemental difference, perhaps; the "nègre" of the French title is no doubt infused with ideas of "négritude," which makes the whole feel a bit dated or at least resolutely Francophone.

But even harder, for me, was reading the character of Léone who, in the girlish, lost little lamb voice Middendorf used, might well have fallen from the moon rather than Paris, despite a remark about Saint-Laurent's Africa boutique.  Her ritual cum guilt cum scarification cum symbolic gesture of blood-letting late in the play was heavy with portent but light on sense or catharsis.

As Cal, Schrider is the live wire in this production and the play's most dynamic character: unpredictable, seething, at times funny in the way that those who speak in earnest rants can be -- at first, a bit of Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now to Boss Kurtz, though way more unstable than Horn.  He also appears in one scene naked and coated in what is -- rather believably -- meant to be shit, and also showers in full view of the audience before donning his sacrificial whites.  It's a demanding part, to say the least.  Whether or not the nudity is gratuitous -- it's Woodruff and not Koltès who insists on it -- it did rather distract from the dialogue.

While there are problems with the play's plot and staging, it should be said that, to give Koltès his due, each character does get at least one fascinating monologue, and it's the talk that mainly sustains our interest.  My favorite speech was Horn's description of a city that would take up only half of France and could house the entire population of the world in 40-story apartment blocks.

The set, designed by Riccardo Hernandez, is interesting, with a big basement room with a cot and cage visible below -- and more naturalistically furnished than -- the spare stage above,the latter dominated by a kind of shack of corrugated slats, a table for the drinking/gambling, little spots of dirt, and some bougainvillea hanging in the cylindrical lights above.   It looks like nowhere on earth, and if we were told it was a construction site on a planet somewhere far, far away, that would be easy enough to believe.

BATTLE OF BLACK AND DOGS, Yale Repertory Theatre, April 16 to May 8, 2010, written by Bernard-Marie Koltès, translated by Michaël Attias, directed by Robert Woodruff; photograph, Joan Marcus

Artful Comedy

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Now sing!
Let’s all be jolly
Banish melancholy
Life is but a party
A never-ending ball
And if you will or if you won’t
And if you do or if you don’t
‘Tis a choice of folly
La la la la
For nitwits are we all.

Thus the opening song, sung by the raucous cast of Carlo Goldoni’s commedia dell’arte masterpiece, The Servant of Two Masters, adapted by Constance Congdon, now playing at the Yale Rep.  The song is an invitation to a celebration of silliness, slapstick, stupidity, and, yes, sincerity -- for true love carries the day on all levels.  En route to betrothed bliss are mistaken identities, disguises, love-lorn histrionics, jealousies, subterfuge, foolery involving food and letters and trunks, banter and sexual innuendo, lovely tableaux, and graceful, lyrical song.

What’s not to like?  It’s a play anyone can enjoy, bursting with vitality and love of stagecraft in all its crowd-pleasing showiness.  The costumes (by Valérie Thérèse Bart) are gorgeous, the use of space, backdrops, and props playful, the timing precise, the comic bits keep coming, and the gears keep shifting.  Just when you think the play is about to settle into a predictable series of convolutions to keep the right innamorati from getting together, something unexpected comes along -- like fish and pots being flung toward the audience to be doggedly snatched from the air by the intrepid Truffaldino, a buffoon in motley, who tries to serve two masters in hopes of doubling his meal ticket.

And when you think, by Intermission, you’ve seen all Steve Epp has to offer in the role, guess again. In the second half, his dialogue with one master -- the preening, effete Florindo (Jesse J. Perez in a role that takes playing ‘broad’ to new lengths and heights) -- becomes an astounding series of non sequiturs and verbal pratfalls. And it’s then that Truffaldino, who has been winking at the audience throughout in asides, seems to become the naively inspired master of ceremonies in a plot that exposes the foolishness undergone in the name of love, pride, hunger, but that also lets us all off the hook. Nitwits we may be, but we know a happy ending when it’s coming.

Particularly memorable, besides Epp and Perez, are Allen Gilmore as Pantalone, father of the bride, a cartoon come to life, with a voice modulating all over the scale, from full-throated rage to unctuous glissandos; and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, of the Yale School of Drama, as his daughter -- petulant, heart-felt, sassy, with but a heartbeat separating her moods. Her duet of longing with her maid Smeraldina (Liz Wisan, also of YSD), smitten by Truffaldino, offers lyric relief from all the comedy, and the sensible Smeraldina gets to deliver with gusto the somewhat dated imprecations about a sexual double standard: how women are held up to scorn for infidelity, while no one says a word about male trespasses (sure, sure, tell that to Tiger Woods).

But, lest you think this show has nothing to say to our modern sensibilities, check out the menu duet -- in which Truffaldino and the master cook Brighella (Liam Craig) ponder a five course dinner with evocative gestures and sound effects for each creature slaughtered for the feast.

In many such moments, director Chris Bayes, Head of Physical Acting at YSD, demonstrates what is meant by that term: the choreography of repetitive gestures, reactions, and vocal registers create a comic thread that runs through the play’s various encounters, making the characters themselves, ably abetted by the trio of musicians on stage, seem part of a vast musical composition, a comic folk opera that recalls the antics of the Marx Brothers, the early Woody Allen, and any good comedy duo or troupe you’d care to name.

For a good time . . .

The Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Goldoni Adapted by Constance Congdon From a translation by Christina Sibul Directed by Christopher Bayes March 12 to April 3, 2010 Yale Repertory Theatre Photographs: © 2010 Richard Termine

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Life During Wartime

OBIE Award winner Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed, playing through Nov. 14 at the Yale Rep, is set in the camp of a rebel Liberian warlord in 2003.  There we meet three women: two are his ‘wives,’ which means: forced into service, sexual and otherwise, for the man they call the C.O.  The third woman, younger, has just arrived, and soon becomes #4 (the women refer to each other by number).  The absent wife, #2, we learn, has joined the rebel forces as a soldier.

The play’s plot mainly concerns what will become of #4, the youngest woman and the only one of the four able to read and write.

If this sounds grim, no doubt it is.  But the play, perhaps surprisingly, isn’t.  The four women are extremely lively company; their personalities make for considerable entertainment, and their situation creates a level of tension that never completely subsides.  Driven by dialogue more than action, Eclipsed demonstrates that interpersonal dynamics are the key to all drama, no matter where we find them.

Before the end of the first act Rita, an educated woman who is one of the “Peace Ladies” endeavoring to persuade warlords to lay down their arms and make peace, arrives, completing the cast.  Rita is also in search of a lost daughter, who may or may not be #4.

While the play can’t escape a certain didacticism, if only because the vast majority of its audience will need to be educated about the plight of Liberia, it is much to Gurira’s credit that the harshness of the situation is set very much in context.  First of all, in the tribal areas these women hail from, polygyny is not uncommon, even in the 21st century; thus the women, in their acquiescence to the situation, are not writing off their selfhood.  What they have dispensed with is having to fend for themselves in a war-torn land, ruled by men with guns, but also, as they are swift to tell #4, they are preserved from camps where women are shared among all the soldiers.  Being at the beck and call of one man is deemed both preferable and more traditional.

Indeed, Gurira establishes these women as types we might identify from tales of slavery in our own country, a fact that makes the play resonate beyond our sympathy for “those poor people over there.” #1, Helena (Stacey Sargeant) is much like the complicit “mammy” in many versions of plantation life in the south: she doesn’t really question the C. O.’s right to lord it over them and make what demands he will.  But this doesn’t make her servile so much as dependable and loyal.  She believes in a pact between herself and the C.O.

#3, Bessie (Pascale Armand) is more or less the comic relief; pregnant and somewhat vain and silly, she is also quick-witted.  Not only does she accept the harem-like conditions, she is determined to do everything to promote her standing in the pecking order. #4, known only as “The Girl” (Adepero Oduye), is the impressionable new-comer, but also, in a sense, the prize.  Will she accept her lot and bond with the mammy-like Helena, or will she seek a greater freedom and autonomy, like #2?

Gurira has said that it was a photograph of rebel women soldiers such as #2, Maima (Zainab Jah), “feminine, glamorous, intimidating, powerful, belligerent, and African,” that inspired her to learn about the conditions of their lives and write the play.  And indeed Maima, who takes the warrior name “Disgruntled,” becomes central to Act II as she tries to indoctrinate The Girl into the way of the warrior.  Tough, savvy, with no illusions, she is the voice of reality in wartime: to carry a gun means strength and autonomy, but, as becomes clear, it also means choosing to oppress rather than be oppressed.

And that is the moral dilemma of armed-insurrection that the play ultimately turns on, with The Girl as the test case.

Focused through the interactions of a group of women who must make do with a situation not of their making, the question of how to cope becomes a personal decision met by each woman individually.  And, though the women can be viewed as types, it is our strong belief in their reality, and in the personal significance of their actions, that drives the play.  One can’t help liking each of them, but for different reasons.

The cast is uniformly excellent.  Eclipsed is a true ensemble piece where no one is ever front and center with the others only offering support.  Speaking a dialect that will be foreign to most listeners, the cast deliver their lines with an emphatic poetry that charms the ears and is always intelligible.  They are so convincing in their roles, one would be stymied to hear the actresses suddenly speak in their normal accents.  The set is naturalistic, spare yet lovely. The lighting effects -- including rain, early morning sun, dappled forest -- very effective.

Perhaps the strongest impression the play leaves us with is not of the struggle for self-determination, but of the basically supportive and companionable aspects of human life, even in the most unpromising circumstances.  And on that front, it is perhaps #1, Helena, who emerges as the play’s key figure, for it is she who has the furthest to go to grasp the new world that comes with the end of the war.

ECLIPSED, directed by Liesl Tommy, features sets by Germán Cárdenas Alaminos, costumes by Elizabeth Barrett Groth, lighting by Marcus Doshi, sound by The Broken Chord Collective, dramaturgy by Walter Byongsok Chon, vocal and dialect coaching by Beth McGuire, and stage management by Karen Hashley

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A Masterful "Master Builder"

Henrik Ibsen’s dramas are classics of the theater, and his best-known plays lay bare the stultifying social mores of the late 19th century: A Doll’s House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler.  The later Ibsen, while still based in the naturalism of his main period, moves toward drama that is more symbolic, perhaps even allegorical -- dramas where the astute student of theater might see possibilities opening up for a new age of stagecraft.

The Yale Repertory’s production of The Master Builder is gloriously evocative of the fresh face of contemporary theater.  If the name of Ibsen brings to mind over-stuffed drawing-rooms with imperious stage-directions where neurasthentic types pine with Norwegian yearning, banish those thoughts at once.  The set design by Timothy Brown is wide open, expressionistic -- the characters stand on a stage that seems to be the side of a house climbing into the heavens upstage -- and allows the actors to make full use of space as they ricochet off one another in an urgent ballet of feeling.

Given the theme of the rapturous climb to great heights -- both literal and figurative -- in the play, the set alerts us at once to the possibility for soaring above the quotidian that master builder Halvard Solness finds in Hilda Wangel, a young visitor from his past.  Swept off her feet as a girl of thirteen when the mighty master builder climbed to the top of a high tower he designed to plant a victory wreath, she also insists he kissed her ‘many times’ when he found her alone later, and claimed he would come carry her off ‘like a troll’ to a kingdom in ten years’ time.  The ten years are up, and Hilda wants her kingdom.

The Halvard Hilda finds is a driven man, but one who is also desperate -- worried about ‘the young’ who will make him step aside (particularly in the form of Ragnar Brovnik, an apprentice architect who Halvard ‘keeps down’ by not giving him any projects of his own), and preying upon youth by beguiling Brovnik’s fiancée, Kaia, so that she will remain in Halvard’s employ, thus giving Ragnar reason to stay.  It’s an untenable situation that is beginning to fray and Halvard knows it, not least because Ragnar’s father, once Halvard’s superior, is near death and wants to see his son amount to something on his own before he dies.

Into this dense situation, Hilda arrives with the force of visionary destiny, suddenly inspiring Halvard with her muse-like presence and youthful attachment to his former grand figure, but also sharing in the confidences of past tragedy and loss in the Solness marriage, as well as learning of Halvard’s great burden of guilt.  Can the master builder put all this aside and rise again to the glory he finds in her eyes?

As Halvard, David Chandler is as mercurial as the part demands -- at times, forthright and earnest, at times cold, unyielding and almost diabolical.  He is tender about his wife, in her absence, but uncomfortable in her presence.  He is direct with the doctor who tries to sound him out on his relation to Kaia, but is also arrogantly superstitious about his ability to control others through his own mind.  Coiled with the exasperation of the man of talent beset by the demands of others, Mr. Chandler flings his expressive body all about the stage with the passion that Hilda brings to the surface.  We see a man struggling, in almost every movement, to determine if his desires can overcome his misgivings.

And as Hilda, Susan Heyward is a thrilling delight.  Girlish, willful, and remarkably quick on the uptake, Hilda, as written, could easily seem more sprite than person, a creature of Halvard’s Id suddenly incarnated in the flesh.  As incorporated in Ms. Heyward, Hilda is nearly ecstatic with the force of her effect on her revered master builder, and plays with him through an intuitive grasp of what they might mean for each other.  And though, as Ibsen not doubt intended, Hilda’s actual psychology remains a mystery, Ms. Heyward gives us every reason to believe in the spell that Halvard falls under in her presence -- a spell predicated on her unshakeable conviction of his greatness.

In the supporting cast, Felicity Jones’ Aline Solness is regal in a gorgeous black gown, displaying, with her mere presence, the sad memories that cling to the marriage, but also giving the dialogue a comic edge as the long-suffering wife all-too-knowing about her husband’s need for young, female devotees.  And Slate Holmgren, as Ragnar, does much with a part that’s easy to overlook, particularly in his scene late in the play with Hilda, where, though she mocks him as a mere upstart, we can see in his self-possession possibly another master builder in the making.

Credit for this version’s success rests most securely, no doubt, on director Evan Yionoulis.  In the “Talk Back” with the audience after the Saturday matinee performance, several in the cast spoke of her ability to ‘calibrate’ their performances to the right nuance -- and much of that nuance itself depends on the translation by Paul Walsh.  The dialogue seems unforced and direct -- even when Solness and Hilda extemporize on Vikings and trolls (figures of baleful power Ibsen felt himself at times to be in league with) -- and sounds modern without straying into contemporary locutions.

And what does the play say to us now, more than a century and a decade after it was written?  Ibsen’s strong presentations -- of a man of power abusing that power, of a man of talent seeking some new inspiration, of a man of years trying to revitalize himself, of a marriage that persists without ever freeing itself of its past, where tragedy, rather than ending the couple, made them what they are, and of a young woman’s seeming power to see the future and be the future -- never become dated.  So, what do you see when the still striving, but slipping, figure climbs that tower in the end -- hubris? inspiration? despair? need?  A struggle against time, against mediocrity, against God?  Or a deluded effort to assert something whose day is done?  Then ask yourself: what does Hilda see?

The Master Builder, by Henrik Ibsen. Translated by PAUL WALSH. Directed by EVAN YIONOULIS. Yale Repertory Theatre: September 18-October 10, 2009. Set design by Timothy Brown, costume design by Katherine Akiko Day, lighting design by Paul Whitaker, with sound design and original music by Scott L. Nielsen.  Photograph© T Charles Erickson