Everybody Hurts

“’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all,” Tennyson said. A nice retrospective reflection, but what about when you’re in the midst of the “losing” part? Bound to Burn, a dance-theater piece at Yale Cabaret, by Rob Chikar and Alyssa Simmons, is an expressive enactment of that part. The show features three couples—Valerie (Elizabeth Mak), the breadwinner, and Tim (David Clauson), her husband; Jessica (Chasten Harmon), a free spirit, and Mark (Daniel Reece), her heart; Ryan (Steven Rotramel), a prostitute, and Braden (Rob Chikar), his hope—who all end badly, couple-wise. The dance routines take us through each couple’s journey—from hopeful coupling to longing separations to suicidal despair—in very lyrical movements that are greatly enhanced by lighting and projections.

Kristen Ferguson’s projections—on three large panels or screens—interact in very evocative ways with the movements, choreographed by Chikar and Simmons, while a variety of all-white costumes by Steven Rotramel also do a lot for visual interest. There are projections of texts, of large close-ups of the dancers, sometimes static, portrait-like, sometimes in motion (I particularly liked the hair movement in a close-up of Mak perfectly synched with the song); there are shadow figures of the dancers, and dancers in front of the panels interacting with dancers behind the panels. The dances, in couples and as solo figures, manage to trace a progress through each number, so that we are following both movement and narrative. Very well thought-out.

The show’s tech is excellent, and all six dancers are expressive as actors as well—especially Harmon and Reece (the couple I thought was going to “work”) as Harmon’s expression of loss is very moving. As Valerie, moving on from her marriage, Mak executes a few balletic moves that add greatly to the sense of release that can come when something’s really “over.” The story between Ryan and Braden, involving the offer of a wedding ring, savvily put the age-old trope of the rejected marriage proposal into the context of gay prostitution, reminding us that the downer of unworkable relations is indifferent to gender. As R.E.M. might say, “everybody hurts.”

And apropos of that musical reference, I have to say that the choice of music for the show surprised me a bit. I found myself thinking about how “mainstream” the music made the show feel, to me. Which is a way of saying that the Cab, here, seems to be exploring the possibilities of a show able to speak to formulas of romance and sentiment found in contemporary popular music—for a wide audience. The music, by the likes of Damien Rice, Jason Walker, Plumb, and SafetySuit, is varied enough to allow for different moods, but mainly conveyed yearnings and chagrin with the restrained gush of emo sensibility. I started (almost) hoping for an ABBA song.

Which led me to this reflection: if the music in Bound to Burn expresses your sense of the possibilities of romance, change the soundtrack!

Bound to Burn Conceived by Rob Chikar, directed with Alyssa Simmons

Choreographers: Rob Chikar, Alyssa Simmons; Producer: Melissa Zimmerman; Scenic Designer: Brian Dudkiewicz; Costume Designer: Steven Rotramel; Lighting Designer: Andrew Griffin; Sound Designer: Rob Chikar; Sound Engineer: Steven Brush; Projection Designer: Kristen Ferguson; Technical Director: Keny Thomason; Stage Manager: Melissa Zimmerman; Photographs by Nick Thigpen

Yale Cabaret December 5-7, 2013

Insourcing

“Derivative” is an interesting word. Its base—“derive”—refers to the act of using some source as the basis for something else. Our language’s ability to make noun forms of verbs gives us the “thing”: “a derivative.” In economics, a derivative is a financial product that is based on some other financial product. Recently, when the housing bubble broke, the credit and holdings derived from faulty mortgages and other bad debt nearly brought banking to its knees. But there are other meanings. When we say a theater-piece is “derived” we mean it doesn’t start with a script but rather ends with a script; it’s worked out as the rehearsals progress. We can also mean that its source is something else: an existing play or some other work. In the case of Derivatives, the Yale Cabaret show conceived by YSD acting student Jabari Brisport and directed by third-year director Cole Lewis, the show is derived from interviews with the regular folk of New Haven. The show’s purpose is to give us, on the one hand, a snapshot of the economic realities in downtown, and, on the other, to take pot-shots at our wider culture of political double-talk, disparity and, the key term, “economic inequality.”

Let’s start with the fun stuff. The show features a number of lively take-offs of the type that Saturday Night Live is famous for: it’s like TV but in some more madcap version where “the truth” actually comes through. So, whether it’s two blonde sistahs (Cornelius Davidson and Brisport) telling you that you too can be like Obama—just use hope—or an earnest cooking-show host (Tanya Dean) telling you how to make Doritos the basis of your cuisine, or a heartfelt paean to the losses incurred by CEOs in the economic slump, the comedy segments—while ‘derivative’ in yet another meaning of the term—had more bite and wit than many things I’ve seen on SNL. Lauren Wainwright as Today’s Woman, peddling self-injected Botox and celebrating multitasking as utter fulfillment was a high-point of cranked-up comedy, worthy of Amy Poehler. With projections of graphics and the use of a variety of “stages,” the show’s visual sense is dynamic.

Interleaved with the send-ups of the downturn were the voices of the people, situated so as to speak from amongst us. It must be said that the interviewers got some candid statements from their subjects, but the harder sell is what a random sample of people tells us about life as it’s lived in New Haven. We meet a street person—very sweetly enacted by Lewis—who feels himself better off than those who go to shelters; a construction worker (also Lewis) with the somewhat libertarian view that the difference between himself and a rich person is “choices they made”; a retail-working SCSU student (Dean) with some vague idea of getting into marketing; members (Brisport) of Yale’s staff, in security and elsewhere, who feel fortunate to work for the city’s big employer and its privileged denizens; a fire-person (Dean) who has seen New Haven in much worse shape than it is now, but who darkly predicts that it’s going back to that; and an East Havener (Wainwright) who tries to give an account of the demographics of neighborhoods on the sliding scale of how impoverished they are, or how unsafe.

All in all, the picture is bleak if measured by the yardstick given to us in a game show about “Jumping a Class,” that indicates where everyone falls, by income and education, in the loosely understood terms of upper-class, upper-middle-class, middle-class, and so on. The friction between people speaking for themselves and letting economists, commentators, TV hosts and well-intentioned sociologists speak for them is where the real drama occurs—some, like Davidson’s homeless man, don’t feel that they even have a “lifestyle” (one of the more privileged coinages we encounter).

Nobly, Derivatives tries to bring the perspective of “the regular people” into the room, though it’s unlikely any of them would ever be in that room. At times, the effort might seem a bit like caricature—though it’s important to note that the actors all mimicked their subjects without irony—within the context of the arch comedy of the rest of the show. The most positive assessment would say the show lets us contemplate “how other people have it”; the least positive assessment would say the show lets us condescend to those who we aren’t ever likely to be.

In the end, Derivatives shows that “economic inequality” and “the 99%” are the buzzwords of the commentating class—shared by those people who mostly showed up at Occupy installations to proclaim that they aren’t getting a good return on their investment in themselves and their careers. If it wasn’t already clear to you before you saw the show, it should be after, that looking for an “us vs. them” in which “they” (the 1%) are against “us” (everyone else) is not going to play too well if only because certain shared assumptions are lacking, depending on who you are and where you come from.

The company of Derivatives is clearly distressed enough to want to do something about the lack of what used to be called “a safety net” for our plummeting economic expectations, and maybe even to find a language to speak about such matters that can engage everyone. To that end, humor is a good test of any hypothesis that invokes one or more of our popular social markers, that trinity of race, class, and gender: at what point do you stop laughing, or, at what point does it hurt to laugh? Unless, of course, you're laughing all the way to the bank.

Derivatives Conceived by Jabari Brisport Directed by Cole Lewis

Dramaturg: David E. Bruin; Set Designer: Reid Thompson; Associate Set Designer: Christopher Thompson; Costume Designer: Elivia Bovenzi; Lighting Designer: Seth Bodie; Projection Designer: Nick Hussong; Co-Sound Designers: Brian Hickey and Steve Brush; Stage Manager: Hannah Sullivan; Producer: Emika Abe; Additional Performances by David E. Bruin, Hansol Jung, Matthew Raich; Photographs by Nick Thigpen

Yale Cabaret November 21-23, 2013

A Victim of Voices

The most recent Yale Cabaret production, Sarah Kane’s Crave, directed by playwright Hansol Jung, is staged as a kind of dark night of the soul of a writer. Sitting at a table with sheaves of paper, M (Helen Jaksch) interacts at first with disembodied voices that seem external but also possibly internal. Soon, the voices take shape as three distinct interlocutors—A (Taylor Barfield), B (David Clauson), and C (Ashley Chang). The trio come at M from all directions, bursting through screens, leaping out from behind curtains, popping up from a big plastic trash can. Their mixture of memory, poetry, confrontation, and exhibition drives the show.

At times there is argument and contestation among the voices, at times there are moments of tenderness or hilarity, and seductive arias and impassioned pleas. It’s a very vocal show but unlike the Cab's recent Radio Hour—another show driven by voices—Crave is anything but static as the four characters move all about the playing space as though the audience just happens to be sitting in their personal playground.

The tech of the show is superlative as lights (Elizabeth Mak) and sounds (Cahyae Ryu) have to create much of the atmosphere—an atmosphere that is nothing if not mercurial. And because the set is a part of our space, and vice versa, the set design (Samantha Lazar and Andrew Freeburg)—like that deconstructable desk or the paper screen of texts or a blanket grabbed up for all four to get behind—counts for a lot. The tale-telling trio are clad in loose white outfits that make them easy to focus on as they dart about amongst the tables like will o’ the wisps.

M, in glasses with sturdy frames and a rather no-nonsense attitude—all things considered—roots the proceedings in a reality not as threatening as it might be. This could be a play of someone losing her mind, coming apart in a schizophrenic meltdown, but as enacted by Jacksch seems rather to be a lengthy, therapeutic exploration. Kane gives us a protracted whine about sex and death and the ineluctable modalities of physical existence and mental distraction—the conditions of inner angst that a writer has only the dwindling resources of imagination and graceful utterance to combat or overcome.

At times we might be in the midst of repressed memories—the kind that come out on the psychiatrist’s couch—at other times we might be in a moment of truth one might reveal to a lover or friend. B is the most petulant, seeming to want something to be resolved, preferably in his favor; A is the most histrionic, at one point mooning us or grabbing a microphone like a game show host looking to entertain with embarrassing factoids; C is generally like some Id-child, storming about, almost hyperventilating, and having “accidents” we associate with childhood. M is often like a patient teacher or older sister, stern but forgiving, until the whirlwind of loose ends begins to take its toll.

Like a kind of verbal Rorschach test, the text of Crave is something that no two audience members will experience the same way, and this staging by a playwright and four dramaturgs brings that text to life in imaginative ways, so whether or not we follow every implied dramatic situation, we still get the kind of visceral pleasures we come to the Cabaret to find. At times moving, at times funny, at times wildly histrionic, Crave is a fascinating “treatment” of a certain kind of modern ailment—the compunction to find words adequate to experience. If only to find the final word we all crave.

Crave By Sarah Kane
Directed by Hansol Jung

Dramaturg: Kee-Yoon Nahm; Producer: Sally Shen; Set Designer: Samantha Lazar; Assistant Set Designer/Tech Consultant: Andrew Freeburg; Costume Designer: Hunter Kaczorowski; Lighting Designer: Elizabeth Mak; Sound Designer: Gahyae Ryu; Projection Designer: Ni Wen; Stage Manager: Emily DeNardo; Assistant Director: Gabrielle Hoyt-Disick; Photographs: Nick Thigpen

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street
November 14-16, 2013

The Art of the Airwaves

Radio Hour, the latest Yale Cabaret offering, was a good choice for Halloween weekend, featuring “Zero Hour,” an eerie sci-fi tale by Ray Bradbury, adapted for radio, and an episode of John Meston’s Gunsmoke. The show, a live “broadcast” in the style of late fifties radio, offers not only the entertainment of experiencing the variety of voices an actor is capable of, but also the opportunity to see the making of all the special sound effects, called Foley.

Conceived by Tyler Kieffer—who gets to do the unmistakeable voice of Sheriff Matt Dillon’s sidekick, Chester, in Gunsmoke—and Steve Brush, who, like Kieffer, performs some of the many sound effects, and directed by Paula Bennett, the show is a straight-forward homage to an era of entertainment that predates most of us in the audience. The best thing about the show is its grasp of the showbiz conventions that made radio programs so indelible for their listeners, and its wonderful evocation, via Hunter Kaczorowski's costumes and the props of Reid Thompson's scenic design, of radio as it was two generations ago.

And yet it's no disservice to say that, while it’s hard not to look at actors and Foley artists performing before one, the entire show might be best enjoyed with one’s eyes closed, letting it all take place in one’s mind, as it did for listeners in the time of classic radio. The show includes genuine commercial breaks, a part of the whole that becomes one of the more entertaining aspects of Radio Hour as nothing says nostalgia like the ads of yesteryear. (I saw the show late Saturday night with my daughter and we were greatly amused to see and hear a rendition of the Choo-Choo Charlie commercial for Good’n’Plenty that, in an animated version on TV, was a part of my childhood that I verbalized for her childhood.)

Anyone watching Radio Hour is bound to have his or her favorite voice moment—Prema Cruz’s laconic Shilo is a voice that immediately creates an image, and her little kid voice is entertainingly vivid, as is Ariana Venturi’s Mink, a bratty kid who turns against her parents in favor of a mysterious playmate called “Dril”; Brendan Pelsue creates a bizarre over-the-top pastiche of accents for the Announcer that amuses and surprises, while Aaron Luis Profumo performs the toffee-voiced tones of a patient dad, as well as the masculine composure of Sheriff Dillon, matched by the coy affection of Ashton Heyl’s Big Kate. Seconding all the vocal talent—and creating footsteps, slamming doors, fist fights, gunshots, dramatic music and jingles—the one for Mr. Clean is bound to stay in your head—are Foley artist/musicians Kieffer, Brush, Jing (Annie) Yin, and David Perry.

The stories selected are easy to follow, and also somewhat didactic: parents learn the price of their condescension to their children’s imaginations in Zero Hour, and a would-be husband learns that even in the patriarchal Old West taking a woman for granted can lead to humiliation, especially with Matt Dillon around to set things right. The cast played well to the audience’s sense of old-time charm, so that the entire evening was a bit like time travel.

It’s interesting that shows which, whether on radio or TV, would strike us as corny or simplistic, can inspire a respect when played with a sense of history and irony for audiences otherwise too sophisticated for such genre fare. Which leads me to wonder if, with shows like Mad Men trading on the “romance” of advertising, it’s not time for a TV show set on an old-time radio program where the interface between what happens on and off the air is where the comedy or drama lies.

For Radio Hour, the entertainment is in the staging even more than in what is staged.

Radio Hour Featuring Ray Bradbury’s Zero Hour and John Meston’s Gunsmoke Conceived by Tyler Kieffer and Steve Brush Directed by Paula Bennett

Dramaturg: Helen Jaksch; Scenic Designer: Reid Thompson; Costume Designer: Hunter Kaczorowski; Lighting Designer: Joey Moro; Sound Designer: Tyler Kieffer; Sound Designer/Composer: Steve Brush; Stage Manager: Kate Pincus; Technical Director: Rose Bochansky; Producer: Melissa Zimmerman; Photographs by Nick Thigpen

Yale Cabaret October 31-November 2, 2013

This week the Cab is dark, then returns November 14-16, with Sarah Kane’s Crave, directed by Hansol Jung, a play that investigates the psychic costs of the creative act with a quartet of actors enacting voices all alive in a writer’s mind.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Carver

Raymond Carver’s short story “Beginners” became his published short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” and therein lies a tale. The published title and story became “Carveresque” in the minds of his admirers, but it turned out that the title, and many other elements in the story, were due to the editorial efforts of Gordon Lish, a writer and editor who nurtured Carver as his mentor and publisher. Was Carver more “Carver” after Lish’s intervention or before? Whose story is it, anyway? This literary question seems to be the matter being dramatized in Phillip Howze’s Beginners by Raymond Carver; or, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love at Yale Cabaret, but, as might be expected, that story-behind-the-story is not so easy to dramatize.

Sitting before the audience are four people around a table, just like in both versions of Carver’s story: Mel/Herb (Aaron Bartz) and Terri (Prema Cruz) are a couple, as are Nick (David E. Bruin) and Laura (Ashley Chang). In the story these four get onto the subject of “love.” In Carver’s “Beginners,” Herb holds forth about his views more than the others, mostly in an effort to offset Terri’s claim that the abusive man, Carl, with whom she had lived before Herb and who eventually took his own life, loved her. “If that’s love, you can have it,” Herb says, more than once. In “What We Talk…” Herb is called Mel, and he says most of the same things. (You can know this by looking up the changed text—The New Yorker printed the original with Lish’s emendations some time after Carver’s death.)

On stage, we get a brief gesture to the name change and maybe the sense that we’re going to be watching an enactment that registers the alterations, so that “the story” will morph according to which version we’re getting. The problem with that approach is the changes are often too subtle to enact. So, Howze and director Andras Viski append to the story happening in front of us voice-overs from Carver’s letters to Lish, read by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, to give a sense of how the story got away from Carver. And yet nothing he says comments on any specific changes. We can only infer what Carver objects to, as he goes from gratefully “taking the changes” to questioning what Lish has done to his story.

As someone who both edits the writing of others and writes, I found this aspect of the play to be the most interesting. I could feel for Carver, and Abdul-Mateen reads the prose in a clear and forceful voice that lets us hear how carefully—and even desperately—Carver was choosing his words, trying to call off the editorial license he had called down upon his tale. But what about the story in front of us and the interplay?

The things Lish struck out of the story float at times behind the players as ghostly text, then as struck-through text. No one reads this text aloud—I suppose because it has been silenced by Lish—so if you read quickly you know what’s happening in “Beginners”; if you don’t you only get “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

The disparity is very important at the story’s close when Mel/Herb, now pretty drunk, starts to flounder around about calling his kids—from whom he is separated by his divorce from his first wife—and then goes off to take a shower before, ostensibly, the two couples go out to eat. In Carver’s original version, there is much more speech from Terri; in the Carver/Lish version, not. Both include the speech by Nick, looking out the window and away from the women—Laura comforting Terri, who is upset—, with which Howze’s play ends. It’s hard to say, at that point, what version of the story we’re getting. Neither Carver’s nor Carver/Lish’s because, most obviously, neither were written as a stage play.

So, what about Howze’s version? The best thing about the play version is Aaron Bartz’s reading of Mel/Herb. While he doesn’t “look” like I imagine a Carver character looking, he is closer to that image than the others and capably delivers the long speeches—particularly the story-within-the-story about the old couple hospitalized after an accident—that describe Mel/Herb’s view of what married love should be. The fact that neither of the couples is enjoying that kind of married love is clear, but, at the same time, we do experience the hopefulness of Laura—Ashley Chang makes the most of the reactions her character is there for—and the neutrality of Nick.

In the story, though, Nick is our narrator, so his neutrality is partly offset by the fact that we get everything through his perspective. Howze doesn’t let us in on that until Nick delivers the final statement of the play, and that has the effect of making his words sort of hang there, even more than they do in the short story.

As Terri, Prema Cruz’s role is crucial because, as the night goes on, we come to realize that much of Mel’s fulmination is directed at her previous love. Mel can forthrightly state that he now hates his former wife, while allowing he must’ve loved her at one time, but Terri’s silence on that point tells us that she won’t say she hates the at-times violent man she previously married. She still feels his love was love because she still loves him (she sat at his side until his death, three days after the self-inflicted gunshot that killed him), and that love makes her current husband increasingly surly. All this is dramatized quite well in Viski’s production, though Cruz seems too detached to be the kind of "open heart" I imagine Carver imagined Terri to be.

What is much more murky is what any of that has to do with the drama between Lish and Carver, and if we’re to read the lines that pass by us too quickly—as the figures at the table turn away from us to read the wall with us—as part of the play or not.

Howze and Viski’s version of the content of “Beginners/What We Talk About…” works because Carver’s story has enough verbal interaction to be stageable. The four-way conversation is interesting and Bartz engaging enough to carry the evening. But what doesn’t get across is the “Carver” element of story-telling: that rather laconic and undemonstrative narrative voice that floats ghostly behind-the-scenes, here, but which is the whole point, in narrative fiction. Instead, we get the drama of those letters, whose reality almost overwhelms the playlet before us. Which may be the point. Or not.

Beginners by Raymond Carver; or, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love Adapted by Phillip Howze Directed by Andras Viski

Dramaturg: Rachel Carpman; Producers: Emika Abe, Libby Peterson; Set Designer: Jean Kim; Costume Designer: Sara Holdren; Lighting Designer: Joey Moro; Sound Designer: Joel Abbott; Projections Consultant: Shawn Boyle; Projections Engineer: Joey Moro; Stage Manager: Kate Pincus; Technical Director: Ted Griffith; Photography: Nick Thigpen

Yale Cabaret October 17-19, 2013

The Cabaret Continues...

The Yale Cabaret is dark this weekend, but the shows for the rest of the semester—and into early January—have been chosen. The upcoming schedule boasts a daunting mix of plays by challenging playwrights—Sarah Kane, Edward Bond—plays adapted from other sources, such as stories by Raymond Carver, Ray Bradbury, and the popular entertainment Gunsmoke, plays originating with YSD actors leagued with YSD directors, and a movement piece developed by two prominent Cabaret theater managers. Here’s the line-up: Up next week is Cab 4: Beginners by Raymond Carver, or What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, October 17-19. Carver was the preeminent American short story writer of the 1980s, but the play is not simply an enactment of one of his stories; rather, the story “What We Talk About…” is famous as one of the best-known stories by Carver that was in fact heavily edited by Gordon Lish before appearing in print. The play, adapted by 2nd-year YSD playwright Phillip Howze and directed by 2nd-year YSD director Andras Viski, dramatizes the writing process as well as the fraught relationships in the story, with a set design intended to suggest both the reality and unreality of fiction.

After a dark week, Cab 5 brings us Radio Hour, a chance to peek behind the scenes at a lost art: telling stories on a live radio broadcast. With ten performers, the show, adapted by Tyler Kieffer and Steve Brush of the YSD sound department and directed by Paula Bennett, stresses “slick not schtick” in its authentic radio effects dramatization of 1950s staples of radio programming, John Meston's Western Gunsmoke (which would go on to be one of the longest-running TV shows ever), and “Zero Hour” (not to be confused with the Rod Serling radio program from the Seventies), a tale from the fertile pen of sci-fi/thriller-writer Ray Bradbury.  Radio Hour will be a fitting show for Halloween weekend—come as a cowboy or an alien. October 31-November 2.

After another dark week, a production of Sarah Kane’s Crave is Cab 6. Directed by 3rd year YSD playwright Hansol Jung, this four-person play explores the voices in the mind of a playwright in the midst of creation. Kane is known for the open-ended, interpretive nature of her plays, in which speakers are often unspecified, leaving much to the creative team to devise.  November 14-16.

Cab 7 takes place the week before Thanksgiving—the American holiday that celebrates getting by. Derivatives, conceived by 3rd-year YSD actor Jabari Brisport and directed by 3rd-year YSD director Cole Lewis, is a devised, multimedia theater piece that explores the increasing distance between the Haves and the Have-nots in this land of ours. The disparity in incomes in the U.S. is greater than it’s been since the 1920s. Political, entertaining, with a real sense of problems and the need for solutions, the play is not afraid to ask the big questions. November 21-23.

The week after Thanksgiving, and the last show of the first semester, is Cab 8, a movement piece called Bound to Burn, developed by Rob Chikar and Alyssa Simmons, two Cab regulars who work behind-the-scenes on many shows, as Stage Manager and Theater Manager, respectively, and who share a penchant for dancing. The show investigates the experience of loss, using bodily rather than verbal expression. December 5-7.

The first two shows of the next semester, following the winter holidays, take place in January: Cab 9 features Have I None, a daunting play by British playwright Edward Bond from 2000. Set in 2077, the play darkly imagines a dystopia in which memory, and therefore history, has been erased. Second-year YSD director Jessica Holt will stage the claustrophobic play—in which going out of one’s room is risky business---with a stress on Bond's sense of the absurd. January 16-18.

Cab 10 features 3rd-year YSD actress Elia Monte-Brown’s original play, The Defendant, about the rigors of public school in New York (where Monte-Brown taught before enrolling at Yale); the play aims to recreate some of the anxieties of today’s student, and to question the values of public education in America, using all 1st year actors in the YSD program. January 23-25.

And that’s the line-up, as the Cab continues its mission of exploring the purpose of theater in our community—as entertainment and provocation, as a questioning of and a response to the world we live in. There’s a little something for everyone—the past, the present, the future; the nowhere space of creation; the problems of education and the economy; the bonds of bodily contact; the voices of our inner demons; the voices on the airwaves. See you at the Cab!

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven

For more information about ticketing and menus:

203.432.1566 www.yalecabaret.org

Be All You Can Be

Who is most affected when a show doesn’t go off as it’s supposed to? The audience? The promoter? The MC? We might suppose that’s one of the questions being posed by Gabe Levey’s The Most Beautiful Thing in the World, at Yale Cabaret. Ostensibly, we’re gathered to “discover the power of the Youniverse” with inspiring motivational speaker Chase Michaels (Dan O’Brien), but what we get is something completely different.

So different that, I suspect, the show will be different for each audience gathered for the event. If mainly literalists of the “see the show” variety are gathered, then that’s what will happen: they’ll see a show of some sort. If more interactive viewers are present, they may well find that they’re helping to make the show they’re seeing. The point of the exercise, then, isn’t simply to entertain but to manifest something inherently precarious about theatrical experience. The “house” has a lot to do with what you get. Which might be a way of saying that, though we each live in our own “youniverse,” we are always also inhabiting other people’s, and, beyond that, the same actual universe. We can’t escape that fact any more than we can escape the fact of “what’s happening in Washington.”

The latter trope—for everything that affects us that we can’t directly control—was present in the version of the show I saw Thursday night. When asked—with searching earnestness by Carol (Kate Tarker), Chase’s John the Baptist supposedly unfit to tie his sandal-strap—“what is your problem?,” members of the audience were willing to volunteer answers such as “Republicans” and “all politicians.” While we might imagine a show in which all the problems mentioned were of the “youniverse” variety (I was thinking of saying “aging,” if asked; someone else told me she would’ve said “uncomfortable shoes”), the fact that part of what might be bringing us down is “the world at large” is instructive, and indicative of the show's implications.

It’s structured like a self-help session that doesn’t quite come off, and yet does. Carol does all she can, and let’s hear it for that plucky presenter, mustering her best “show must go on” gumption and stepping into the breach—nay, the gaping chasm—that occurs when breathless fans of Chase Michaels' every move find themselves confronted with so much less than the answer to everything. Unless the answer to everything is . . . entertaining yourselves? Showmanshipwise, there are spacey projections of the slideshow variety (wielding “the clicker” is a lot like wielding the remote in domestic situations), and a great moment of eerie “out-of-body” vocalizing to ambient sounds that felt like an astral plane version of scream therapy.

As Carol, Tarker is charming. Sporting a vaguely Justin Bieber-like head of hair, wearing a no-nonsense business gal suit, Carol seems as androgynous as she can be. She’s like anyone’s cute younger sister/brother at that guileless age—eight? nine?—before major anxieties set in. As such, she seems equal to the task of mucking through because she has no ego to be destroyed by audience dissatisfaction. She quickly makes herself one of us—let he or she who has never had things go wrong in public cast the first cat-call. When Chase finally does arrive he’s a decided party-pooper. It’s like watching a TV personality intrude on a heart-to-heart between nobodies. He expects the spotlight but his show’s already over.

I suspect that the “plot” element to the show—Carol showing Chase what’s what—may have been a late arrival in the process, if only because the show seems predicated on the idea that drama happens even when nothing happens, when the best-laid plans, as they say, “gang agley.”

Maybe seeing the giftedly glib get their come-uppance is “The Most Beautiful Thing in the World,” or maybe it’s just finding out that your “YOUniverse” includes lots of other “you’s,” enough, even, to be an “us.”

The Most Beautiful Thing in the World Conceived and Directed by Gabe Levey

Scenic Designer: Kurtis Boetcher; Costume Designer: Soule Golden; Sound Designer: Tyler Kieffer; Projection Designer: Gabe Levey; Stage Manager: Anita Shastri; Technical Director: Lee O’Reilly; Producer: Alyssa Simmons; Creative Collaborators: Mickey Theis, Mitchell Winter; Projection Engineer: Nick Hussong; Photography: Nick Thigpen

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street

October 3-5, 2013

Mystery Train

Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman—playing for two more shows at Yale Cabaret—was first written and produced when Baraka was still writing under the name LeRoi Jones, his given name, at a time when the Civil Rights movement in America was finally catching fire. Times have certainly changed since then—a fact that “New Black Math,” a poem performed before the play, apprizes us of with its rapid fire listing of traits we might suppose a “Black Play” to have, or not. The point, I think, is to keep us from seeing Dutchman as stuck in its moment, while at the same time letting us know that—whether we feel progress has been made since the Sixties or not—the very notions of “white” and “black” remain very much with us.

And that’s where the play begins: a subway car in NYC, a black man sits reading—poetry, we learn—and a rather provocative white girl gets on. Something might happen between them, or nothing. The girl, who calls herself Lula, wants something to happen; the man, called Clay, could go either way. Lula acts the part of a vamping temptress only too aware of what she’s doing. Gradually she provokes Clay into moving past his guardedness and his politeness, eventually he has to assert himself—with violence. This, we might say, is what Lula has been aiming for; taunting him, teasing him, treating aspects of his life as stereotypical, using outrageous body language to arouse him.

In a wonderfully self-possessed performance by Carly Zien, Lula comes across as extremely manipulative and aggressive—rather than, say, pathetic or scary. Cornelius Davidson gives us Clay’s patience and diffidence, his coolness with regard to what we call today “racial profiling”—Lula’s belittling of his New Jersey origins and “Uncle Tom” aspects. Dutchman dates from a time when the worse insult you could hurl at a self-respecting black man was that he was, essentially, white.

The poetry of Baraka’s play resounds in the back and forth of these two protagonists. It should be said that not all of Lula’s moves are over-the-top; at times, she seems to want to find a common ground, a way for the two to meet free of the racial past and gender divides. As directed by Katherine McGerr, the play cannily keeps before us not simply the appeal and rejection that occur when strangers try to “hook up,” but also the degree to which these characters are “emblematic,” freighted with their social roles as “white woman” and “black man.”

Jones himself was married to a Jewish woman at the time of Dutchman, and there is much in Clay, the would-be “black Baudelaire,” that feels aimed at the author himself. In part, that means a rejection of the expectations of white audiences for the artistic expression of black consciousness through the Black Arts Movement. In that light, Dutchman is almost a manifesto for rejecting the “temptations”—expressed and voiced by Lula, complete with proffered apple—that the white liberal mainstream would saddle black artists with, while “accepting” their work. Dutchman was once very much a play working toward clarity about its own situation.

A strength of the Cab production is that it doesn’t try to recreate any particular time—Clay has earbuds in, so we know it’s our time, more or less—nor does it go overboard in making the situation archetypal. What it maintains is a certain sense of fluidity, that what takes place between the two could go differently, and that what does happen is because of a flaw in the social fabric. In other words, one won’t get too far trying to treat these characters only as realistic subway riders alive in a specific time. Baraka, more famous as a poet than a playwright, knows how to make language act, and is less concerned with character per se.

For those who want backstory and “what happens next,” there is the question of whether Lula actually knows of Clay or if this is a first encounter, and, even more, what happens at the end. The Cab production, which has no bystanders (other than the audience), seems to make the repetition at the end conceivable as a “re-set” that could lead to a different conclusion, with Lula already on the train when “Clay,” or a different black man much like him, enters. The play as written gives one a stronger sense of Lula as more predatory, in a serial search for either a victim or a date. I liked the Cab’s version because it seems to me that the play aims to gesture to an “eternal” situation, rather than a series of discrete encounters.

For me, the main point of the play today—which makes it extremely timely and a great show to revive—is the speech Clay gives to explain his attempt to get along with white society, after Lula provokes him by trying to affront his “manhood” and then his blackness. What Clay gestures to is the possibility of a world where the black man can rise by playing the white man’s game—and thus come to power over his one-time “masters.” What Baraka gives voice to is the perceived threat that many in our allegedly “post-racial” society find in Barack Obama as president. In other words, the racism Dutchman sees is still very much with us and has taken on a new wrinkle in our time.

A play that once seemed rife with the “threat” of interracial sexual relations—still a hot topic in 1964—now seems to play out as a meditation on cultural strategies. In that view, Lula’s temptress moves smack of the “sex card” played by every pop diva, while her own act of violence becomes more ambiguous: a blow against the oppressive male alive in every man? A gesture toward white supremacy (which sees every black man as a threat)? A turning of the tables, where women cease to be victims? However we take it, it’s clear that the nerve Dutchman touches is still a live one.

Dutchman By Amiri Baraka Directed by Katherine McGerr

Producers: Caitie Hannon, Charles J. Felix; Scenic Designer: Adrian Martinez Frausto; Costume Designer: KJ Kim; Lighting Designer: Joey Moro; Sound Designer: Joel Abbott; Dramaturgs: Jennifer Schmidt, Sarah Krasnow; Technical Director: Emily Erdman; Stage Manager: Rob Chikar; Creative Consultant: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II; Photographs: Nick Thigpen; courtesy of Yale Cabaret

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street

September 26-28, 2013

Queen for a Day

The curtain has gone up on the new Yale Cabaret season—Cab 46—and the debut show is We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun, written by YSD students Helen Jaksch, Kelly Kerwin, and Emily Zemba, and directed by Kerwin. The show has a lot of what makes Cab shows work—a sense of the audience’s proximity, a showy self-consciousness, and a lot of moxy. The play is not so much a whodunit as a howwasit, involving a late, beloved drag queen, Edie (played with show-stopping flair by Seth Bodie), a mummified, gunshot body in her apartment, and a gun. What the hell happened?

Well, of course, the entire subculture of which Edie was a reigning queen has its conjectures, so we meet a variety of possibilities—some plausible, some comically outrageous (my favorite was Edie in full Mae West drag getting the drop on a bandanna-ed bandit)—with all the enacted scenes employing the genre markings of any drama queen’s inner cinema; the bottom line: “he done her wrong.”

The real fire of the show is in the musical performances (original songs, and accompaniment as Charlie the Piano Guy, by Joel Abbott). Bodie/Edie could’ve sung more, for my money, and bravo to Ato Blankson-Wood, looking like a Grace Jones impersonator, for taking the passed baton from Lena Horne’s “The Man I Love” and scoring. Then there are the big, uplift moments, some with lip-synching, that have the audience clapping and cheering. Yes, despite murder and death, this show is a celebration of what Iggy calls “Lust for Life.”

Christopher Ash’s stage set is Warholian with its projections of Edie and it’s glitzy “everybody’s a star” aura; the other queens seem to recall tropes from the 70s and 80s as well—my favorite is the über-slinky Cabaret-like Mistress of Ceremonies played by Tom Pecinka, with her tale of carnations—and there’s a trio of comic turns by James Cusati-Moyer as a blonde ditz, complete with New Yawk squawk, in Daisy Dukes, a leather-skirted conchita hot for fun, and a hilarious Pacino take-off as one of Edie’s more aggressive paramours. Kristen Ferguson works best as the tersely barking flatfoot stumped by this cold case. And Christopher Geary rounds out the cast as a speculative intimate with a place in his bitchy heart for some of the loveable oddities of Edie in her prime.

Apart from all the comedy and song and dance, Bodie really shines in an intimate boudoir moment where Edie takes the entire audience into her confidence—we’ve all been given envelopes containing little icons that she lovingly identifies by the names of the queens they stand for. It’s perhaps the most Warholian moment of all—the idea that, without a historical sense, a scene, a subculture, an art-form, a performance, an identity will be forgotten as if it never was. Well might the other queens rehearse the stories of Edie’s alleged act of violence—she not only had a gun, but a heart and a memory. Viva La Minx!

We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun Written by Helen Jaksch, Kelly Kerwin, Emily Zemba Directed by Kelly Kerwin

Dramaturg: Helen Jaksch; Producer: Emika Abe; Sets, Lights, & Projections: Christopher Ash; Costumes: Grier Coleman; Sound, Original Music: Joel Abbott; Stage Manager: Anita Shastri; Set/Technical Assistant: Samantha Lazar; Tango Consultant: Joel Abbott; Photographs by Nick Thigpen courtesy of Yale Cabaret

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street

September 19-21, 2013

A Cab of Many Colors

Every year the Yale Cabaret enstates new artistic directors—Yale School of Drama students whose vision of and commitment to theater will guide the choices of shows for the coming season. For Cab 46, almost ready to kick-off this month, the people running the show are three dramaturgs—Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, Kelly Kerwin—as co-Artistic Directors, and Shane Hudson, as Managing Director. All have previous background with offerings at the Cab—particularly, for the ADs, The Twins Would Like to Say, the penultimate production of Cab 45. Dibo and Dubowski co-directed the play and Kerwin was the production’s dramaturg. Those who saw the play will remember its use of the entire space of the Cab (there was no “back stage”) and its encouragement that the audience move about during the show, which was staged, at times, in different locations simultaneously. Hudson has already become a familiar face at the front desk of the Cab, particularly during the Yale Summer Cab of 2012.

The tag words for this year’s Cab are “invention – urgency – artistry,” and the three ADs stress “risk” as an element of what they’re looking for in choosing the shows that will be staged this year. Being “allowed to fail” means having the luxury to try out approaches, plays, collaborations that might be something less than a “sure thing.” If everyone only does what they’ve already done and know they’re good at, all sense of exploration, innovation, and challenge goes out the window. As regulars of the Cab know, there’s always a mix of amazingly spot-on shows and shows that reach for something they might not grasp, this time ‘round. There’s also a beguiling sense of not knowing what you’ll get until you arrive and the show starts. The Cab’s mystique is largely predicated on the unexpected and the untried before.

The questions that Dibo, Dubowski and Kerwin—sounding a bit like a law firm or agency when you say it like that—ask of their colleagues, in the application process, apply to time and place. “Why here?” is a question about the use of the specific space and implies a sense of community as well. Why the Cab, both as a uniquely intimate and amorphous space, but also, why the Cab, in the sense of its audience and its larger context within the School of Drama. D,D,K are committed to tapping the unique ability of the Cab to serve their colleagues in YSD as the premiere locus for artistic investigation.

The complimentary question, of course, and one that every theatrical venue should ask when setting up its season is “why now?” The “here and now” of any play is what convinces audiences that they should be present to see this particular show and not some other.The Cab shows, in their short lives (only three nights for each play), arrive with a sense of urgency, a sense that the story to be told is worth all the sweat and toil for such an ephemeral run.

With shows that are completely generated by graduate students—usually in a mix of already existing plays and plays originating before our very eyes—the Cab can’t get us in the door with stars and celebrities. The venue’s allure has to do with the possibility of discovery: what future greats may even now be honing their talents for audiences at a ridiculously low price? (A non-student flex pass of 9 shows makes each show cost $10, which is the standard price for students.) A host of top notch theater people have worked at the Cab in its 46 illustrious years: Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, Paul Giamatti, John Turturro, Christopher Durang, Anna Shapiro, to name but a few. We’ve no doubt that their fellows can be found working with devotion on the “passion projects” at the Cab (no show at the Cab counts toward graduation for any of its participants; these shows are all ends in themselves—unless they go on to future development, as some do).

This year, the ADs have instituted a deviation. Usually the ADs of the Cab reserve a few slots for their own projects. Our three ADs have chosen to waive that perk but have replaced it with a different kind of participation: each approved play will have one of the three ADs assigned to it as Creative Producer. That role will be a vantage from which to offer notes before a show goes up, and, more importantly, to facilitate the show in any way necessary. The role of CP lets D, D, or K have a creative role in how a project shapes up—not that ADs are traditionally hands-off entirely about the shows they accept. The CP role will mean that the ADs are a bit more invested in each show than might sometimes be the case.

As students of dramaturgy—the text-based, historical consciousness of the theatrical community, we might say—Dibo, Dubowski, and Kerwin have paid their dues: both Dibo and Kerwin have worked in Chicago with the famous Steppenwolf Theatre, as well as other innovative companies, and Dubowski has worked with Headlong Dance Theatre in Philadelphia, and at the Yale Rep as dramaturg on last year’s comic satire American Night: The Ballad of Juan José. Dibo and Dubowski also collaborated on Cab 44’s The Yiddish King Lear, and the trio have worked on thesis shows and Carlotta Festival shows at YSD. In other words, D,D,K have run the gamut of the kinds of shows YSD produces as well as having experience with the kind of theater that takes place off-the-beaten-track.

And now the first three shows . . .

Cab 1: September 19-21: We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun by Helen Jaksch, Kelly Kerwin, and Emily Zemba; directed by Kelly Kerwin. Using live music—including a tango—to tell the tale, based on a real story, of a fictional legendary drag queen, Edie La Minx explores “the grit behind the glam.” Edie, it seems, not only has a gun, she also has an unexplained mummified body in a garment bag in her apartment, complete with a gunshot wound to the head. Who is it, and what’s it mean for Edie? Seth Bodie assays the role of Edie (those who braved the biggest blizzard in recent memory last winter to see the First Annual Yale Cab Drag Show may remember Seth’s performance, which may or may not be relevant to the role of Edie). The show purports to have the lively and unpredictable elements so crucial to season kick-offs, and that’s reason enough to see how it plays.

Cab 2: September 26-28: The Dutchman by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka; directed by Katherine McGerr. Jones’ play was incendiary in its time, making free use of “the n word” and exploring the vexed issue of inter-racial attraction and antagonism on a New York subway in 1964—the year after Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. In these “post-racial” days of the Baraka administration, an event like the murder of Trayvon Martin and the trial of George Zimmerman (to say nothing of more distant events such as the O.J. trial in the ‘90s) shows us that, in the U.S., race is never “in the past.” McGerr has done notable work at the Cab in staging already existing plays that featured the grisly (Howard Benton's Christie in Love), the timely (Arthur Kopit's Chamber Music), and the unpredictable (Nassim Soleimanpour's White Rabbit/Red Rabbit).

Cab 3: October 3-5: The Most Beautiful Thing in the World; conceived and directed by Gabe Levey. If you’ve been around YSD in the last few years, you probably know Gabe Levey—his Andy Kaufmannesque one-man show, Brainsongs, in Cab 44, or his comic role as the Shoemaker/Puppet-master in the Summer Cab’s enactment of Lorca’s The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, or perhaps his memorable turn as a young girl in a pinafore in Margot Bordelon’s thesis production of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine last spring. This time he’ll be directing Third-Year playwright Kate Tarker in play that promises one of “the world’s most renowned motivational speakers” and a pitch to put the "you" in “universe.” Levey and Tarker share a penchant for the techniques Christopher Bayes teaches in his clown classes at Yale (Bayes is the comic vision behind such recent Rep hits as The Servant of Two Masters and A Doctor in Spite of Himself), so this show will be nothing if not funny.

Another innovation of Cab 46 will be the use of actual images from the productions in the support materials, such as the playbills at the shows, and a logo that provides grounds for seeing this as “a Cab of many colors.”

The remaining seven shows of the first semester will be previewed here some time in October, and, until then, see you at the Cab!

(photographs by Christopher Ash; courtesy of the Yale Cabaret)

Yale Cab Recap

The 45th Season of the Yale Cabaret closed last month, and before this month is out the latest version of the Yale Summer Cabaret—titled “A Summer of Giants”—will open. In the meantime, here is my recap of last season, picking my favorite shows and contributors in thirteen categories. In each, plays are listed in order of appearance, except for my top choice which comes last. Play (pre-existing work): Small casts—often only two actors—dominated the choices the Cab presented this year: White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, Nassim Soleimanpour’s interrogation of freedom, artistic purpose, and the value of theater was one of the more challenging nights at the Cab; Cowboy Mouth, Sam Shepard and Patti Smith’s riff on the agonistic love affair with rock’n’roll of two second-generation beat poets boasted great language and expressive movement; The Small Things, Enda Walsh’s speech-driven and static two-character play made almost all its bizarre and frightening action take place in the audience’s minds; Arnold Schoenberg and Alberg Giraud’s musical and poetic extravaganza, Pierrot Lunaire, was a feast for both eyes and ears, a dramatic achievement of the religion of art; and . . . The Island, Athol Fugard’s collaborative play with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, combined the intimate talk of two inmates in South Africa with their chosen roles as Antigone and Creon to create a powerful portrayal of the politics of art under repressive regimes.

Play (original): The plays originating with YSD students ran quite a gamut, the ones I liked best provoked visceral responses hard to ignore: Ain’t Gonna Make It, conceived by Nicholas Hussong, Cole Lewis, Masha Tsimring, Lauren Dubowski, and created by the Ensemble, presented entertaining songs and a stand-up routine about terminal illness early in life; Phillip Howze’s All of What You Love and None of What You Hate is a multi-character drama about teen pregnancy and coping, full of vibrant language and characterizations; Jackson Moran’s All This Noise offered one man’s take on a family tragedy and his personal outrage at mental health treatment in our country; The Bird Bath, created by the Ensemble, was an expressive and harrowing account of an artist’s mental dissolution told via expressive movement and voice-overs; and . . . This., script by Mary Laws, dramatized personal memories about moments of connection and disconnection in the New Haven and Yale communities to telling effect.

Sound: Sound can be a subtle category, sometimes a bit difficult to assess after the fact, and, when most effective, one tends not to notice it; my choices represent strong impressions that stayed with me: the busy soundscape of The Fatal Eggs (Matt Otto and Joel Abbott); the brash echoes on the voices of the poets in Cowboy Mouth (Palmer Hefferan); the aural mosaic of voice-overs, music, cell calls, and sound effects in All of What You Love and None of What You Hate (Pornchanok Kanchanabanca and Sang Ahm); the sound effects, voice-overs, use of music, all with a dated feel in Lindbergh’s Flight (Tyler Kieffer); and . . . the very effective interplay of sound, voice-over, and original music in The Bird Bath (Palmer Hefferan).

Music: Cab 45 was strong in shows involving original compositions, and for use of music as a major ingredient of the show: the songs of life, death, disease and defiance created and performed by the on-stage ensemble—Timothy Hassler, Hansol Jung, MJ Kaufman, Sarah Krasnow, Jenny Schmidt, and Lico Whitfield—in Ain’t Gonna Make It; the music created by Mickey Theis to accompany his character’s rock star posteuring in Cowboy Mouth; the tunefully Terpsichorean offerings—both in writing and playing—by Timothy Hassler and Paul Lieber in Cat Club; the moods of Palmer Hefferan’s original score for The Bird Bath; and . . . the first-rate performance of Schoenberg’s challenging score for Pierrot Lunaire, by Dan Schlosberg, piano; Clare Monfredo, cello; Jacob Ashworth, violin and viola; Ginevra Petrucci, flute and piccolo; Ashley Smith, clarinet and bass clarinet; and Virginia Warnken, soprano.

Lighting: To enjoy a play, you have to be able to see it, of course—but often Lighting goes well beyond mere illumination to become an expressive part of the play; some instances I was particularly struck by: Meredith Reis’s diverse sources of illumination and fun lighting effects in The Fatal Eggs; Oliver Wason’s dramatic lighting of tableaux moments in This.; Masha Tsimring’s evocative illuminations of the tripartite action of The Bird Bath; Joey Moro’s nimble lighting of the wacky subversions of Lindbergh’s Flight; and . . . Oliver Wason’s highly effective visual enhancement of Pierrot Lunaire.

Puppets, projections, props, and special effects: More than a few shows this year indulged in puppetry—shadow puppets and actual puppets—as well as a fair share of projections, videos, and engagement with unusual props; here are some stand-outs: the use of projections and props in All This Noise, Nicholas Hussong, projection designer; the shadow puppet miniatures that illustrated the story of Ermyntrude & Esmeralda, Lee O’Reilly, Technical Director; Joey Moro, Assistant Technical Director; Carmen Martinez, Puppetry Captain; the playful use of shadow puppets to tell one of the wild stories written by the twins in The Twins Would Like to Say, Whitney Dibo and Lauren Dubowski, Co-Directors; the projections and special effects that punctuated the lurid tale of The Ugly One, Nicholas Hussong, Projection Designer, Alex Bergeron, Technical Director; and . . . the evocative projections (Solomon Weisbard and Michael F. Bergmann) and flying puppets (Dustin Wills, with Nicole Bromley and Dan Perez, Technical Directors) that enlivened The Fatal Eggs.

Scenic Design: One of the great joys of the Cab is seeing how, with each new production, the space changes to be made to be what it has to be; some remarkable transformations include: the busy set and shenanigans, like swinging doors, in The Fatal Eggs (Kate Noll and Carmen Martinez); the sprawling Chelsea bohemia of Cowboy Mouth (Meredith Ries); the cartoonish play space of Milk Milk Lemonade (Brian Dudkiewicz, and Samantha Lazar, Assistant Set Designer); the three spaces with three different personalities of The Bird Bath (Mariana Sanchez Hernandez); and . . . the conceptualized prison commissary space with raised stage of The Island (Kristen Robinson).

Costumes: When it comes to transforming a group of actors, the effects are sometimes subtle, sometimes outlandish: the colorful clothing—where the shetl meets vaudeville—of The Fatal Eggs (Nikki Delhomme); the spot-on pre-punkdom, plus lobster suit, of Cowboy Mouth (Jayoung Yoon); the Edwardian filigree of Ermyntrude & Esmeralda (Seth Bodie); the dowdy get-ups and clownish make-up of The Small Things (Nikki Delhomme); and . . . Milk Milk Lemonade (Soule Golden): I’ll never forget Lico in a chicken suit, and whenever penis-pajamas catch on, say you saw them here first.

Ensemble: Just as technical effects are often achieved by collaboration, so are dramatic effects—the Cab thrives on ensemble work and here are some special commendations: the entire cast of The Fatal Eggs—Chris Bannow, Sophie von Haselberg, Dan O’Brien, Ceci Fernandez, Michelle McGregor, Mamoudou Athie, Ilya Khodosh—presenting a bizarre collection of types; the entire cast of This.—Jabari Brisport, Merlin Huff, Ella Monte-Brown, Mariko Nakasone, Hannah Sorenson, Mickey Theis—for superlative interactions and transformations, independent of gender considerations; the entire cast of Milk Milk Lemonade—Xaq Webb, Bonnie Antosh, Melissa Zimmerman, Lico Whitfield, Heidi Liedke—some of whom aren’t YSD students, for their game enactment of this colorful tale; our avatars and others in the audience-participation odyssey, Dilemma—Ben Fainstein, Hugh Farrell, Sarah Krasnow, Rachel Carpman, Zach LeClair, and Dan Perez—for taking us where we told them to go; and . . . Zie Kollektief—Kate Attwell, Gabe Levey, Brenda Meaney, Mitchell Winter—who broke down the Brechtian effort to break down “the walls,” with a vengeance, in Lindbergh’s Flight.

And special mention to the volunteers who bravely enacted, with audience members, White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, script sight-unseen: Sara Holdren, Monique Barbee, John-Michael Marrs, Hugh Farrell, Gabriel Levey, Brian Smallwood.

Actor: We’re always looking for a star, even in the midst of ensemble; for notable individual performances by a male actor: Timothy Hassler, as the terminally ill and memorably entertaining Eric in Ain’t Gonna Make It; Mickey Theis, as Slim, the guitar-wielding shit-kicker turned rocker in Cowboy Mouth; Paul Pryce, as John, the apartheid inmate with a vision of Antigone in The Island; Christopher Geary, as the self-questioning survivor in The Small Things; and . . . Jackson Moran, in All This Noise, for playing, more or less, himself in a one-man show that confronts the drama, sorrow and joys of real life and the realities of mental problems.

Actress: What moves us most in watching acting varies, but we know when an actress makes a part her own: Michelle McGregor, as the poet-groupie-Svengali called Canavale in Cowboy Mouth; Zenzi Willliams, as the teen, passive to the point of persecution in All of What You Love and None of What You Hate; Ceci Fernandez, as the innocent but pining for knowledge Esmeralda in Ermyntrude & Esmeralda; Emily Reilly, as the lonely woman with a tale to tell in The Small Things; and . . . Hannah Sorenson, as the schizophrenic Lenora Carrington—vomiting, bathing, withdrawing, and transcending—in The Bird Bath.

Direction: With so much going on that’s worth watching, who keeps it all together and makes sure it all comes off? The director, we assume; some special mentions: Dustin Wills, for the zany Soviet sci-fi extravaganza of The Fatal Eggs; Kate Attwell, for the gripping anti-apartheid drama of two prisoners learning what they represent in The Island; Monique Barbee, for the three-at-once manifestation of psychic distress and coping in The Bird Bath; Ethan Heard, for the creation of actions to illuminate rich compositions of poetry and music in Pierrot Lunaire; and . . . Margot Bordelon, for the subtle and sensitive enacting of the stories people tell (and don’t tell) about themselves in This.

Production: For overall production, it's no surprise that the favorites in other categories line up at the end; I've already acknowledged the directors of these shows, now it's time for the producers: This., produced by Whitney Dibo, with its strong ensemble work and vivid presentation, gave us insight into one another and ourselves; The Island, produced by Lico Whitfield, with its strong dialogue and innovative set, presented us with a visceral sense of theater’s power; The Bird Bath, produced by Emika Abe, with its mystery and misery, provided a sense of convulsive beauty (a surrealist mantra); Pierrot Lunaire, produced by Anh Le, showed us the sublime possibilities of musical theater; and . . . The Fatal Eggs, produced by Melissa Zimmerman, immersed us in the wild energy, complex staging, and surprise effects possible only at the Yale Cabaret.

That’s it for this year. Our thanks and best wishes to all who participated in the shows of the 45th season, and to all the staff, especially Artistic Director Ethan Heard, who chose the season, and Managing Director Jonathan Wemette, who kept it running so smoothly, and . . . see you next year for season 46: Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, and Kelly Kerwin, a trio of YSD dramaturgs will be, collectively, the Artistic Directors, and Shane D. Hudson will be the Managing Director, a post he filled in last year’s Summer Cabaret. Speaking of the Summer Cabaret, stay tuned for a preview with Artistic Director Dustin Wills of its offerings, which begin May 30th and end August 18th.

The Yale Cabaret 45th Anniversary Season Artistic Director: Ethan Heard Managing Director: Jonathan Wemette Associate Artistic Director: Benjamin Fainstein Associate Artistic Director: Nicholas Hussong

Whose Face Is It, Anyway?

Marius von Mayenburg’s The Ugly One, directed by Cole Lewis, at Yale Cabaret is an absurdist parable, satiric about the cult of beauty that, in one way or another, has always plagued the human species.  Maybe “plagued” isn’t the word; maybe it’s more like “nagged.”  The play, I suppose, wants us to ask ourselves how big a part appearance plays in our estimations of ourselves and others.  Is identity only skin deep?  And how deep is that question?

The best thing here is the cast who are game for the alterations in character they must enact.  Everyone gets two roles except for Mitchell Winter as the main character, Lette, who transforms from an appallingly  ugly inventor of a necessary little gadget to the flawlessly attractive spokesperson for the company that makes the gadget.  We also meet his wife Fanny (Michelle McGregor), who dutifully managed to overlook her husband’s unsightliness; McGregor also plays an aging (though surgically enhanced) groupie who lusts, with avid Germanic creepiness, for Lette post-surgery.  Then there’s Dan O’Brien as Karlmann, initially a better-looking assistant at the company who gets passed-over once Lette looks good; O’Brien is also the creepy German woman’s even creepier son, who also has desires for Lette, and for his mom, and, potentially, just about anyone.  Jabari Brisport rounds out the cast as Scheffler, the unflappable, moisturzing boss at the company and the rather campy surgeon who undertakes the momentous task of altering Lette’s features.  The operation is such a success that the good doctor undertakes the manufacture of the same face for dozens of others who want to look that good.  Soon Karlmann is sporting the same face as Lette, and if identity is only skin deep, why wouldn’t Fanny be just as happy with Karlmann?

If that strikes you as not a particularly compelling question, then you might be less than entertained by The Ugly One through its entire running time.  Which is to say, as farce, it's lively enough, but it’s hard to see the play as anything more than an extended skit.  Maybe the dialogue is better in von Mayenburg’s native German.  As translated by Maja Zade into English, no one says anything very interesting and von Mayenburg’s idea of pointed humor is to have the mom impale her son on a strap-on phallus as he lavishes affection on Lette.  The extended operation sequence, with shadow puppets, like Lette’s suicidal argument between his before-and-after selves in an elevator rushing him to the top of a building, tends to run on longer than is necessary to get the idea across.  But that could be said about much of the hi-jinx here.

One suspects that, in a sense, the actors are too good for the one-dimensional figures they’re asked to play.  McGregor does all she can with both Teutonic vamp and confused wife; O’Brien is aggressively repressed as the son; Brisport’s fawning surgeon put me in mind of Peter Lorre, which spells creepy with a capital C, and Winter keeps the main character in a kind of clueless vacuum.  His best sequence is at the end when he is confronted by the son looking like his own spitting—or rather kissing—image.

As a send-up of our image-conscious society, I’d say von Mayenburg’s satire doesn’t even constitute a flesh wound.

Which is a nice way to segue into a few other announcements.  An evening at the theater is only as good as the play—in my view—and I’m convinced that YSD student playwrights can do better than the last two Cab offerings.  To see if I’m right, get tickets now for the Carlotta festival which runs May 6-14,  and features the final thesis projects of three graduating playwrights: MJ Kaufman, Sagittarius Ponderosa; Amelia Roper, Lottie in the Late Afternoon; Justin Taylor, House Beast (more about the plays soon).

AND… The Yale Summer Cabaret has announced the line-up and schedule of its “Summer of Giants”—which is to say the Cab will be producing plays by great names in the history of theater: Molière, Tartuffe; Strindberg, Miss Julie; Lorca, The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife; Williams, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel; Churchill, Heart's Desire and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You.  With that kind of roster, you can’t go wrong—and seeing how such works come off in the Cab’s intimate space is well worth checking out.  The Artistic Director for the Summer Cabaret is Dustin Wills, who, this past year, brought us the knock-down, fuck-out domestic comic-drama Blueberry Toast (one of the best shows this year, written by YSD playwright Mary Laws), as well as a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland take on Shakespeare’s Richard II.  Expect good things to come.

The Ugly One

By Marius von Mayenburg, translated by Maja Zade

Directed by Cole Lewis

Dramaturg: Sarah Krasnow; Scenic Designer: Reid Thompson; Costume Designer: Soule Golden; Lighting Designer: Benjamin Ehrenreich; Composer: Steve Brush; Sound Designers: Steve Brush; Tyler Kieffer; Projection Designer: Nicholas Hussong; Technical Director: Alex Bergeron; Producer and Stage Manager: Jennifer Lagundino

Yale Cabaret

217 Park Street

April 11-13, 2013

An Elusive Twosome

An extended recreation of a grand folie à deux, The Twins Would Like to Say, by Seth Bockley and Devon de Mayo, at the Yale Cabaret, creates an oddly jangled take on “the silent twins,” June and Jennifer Gibbons, two children who were born in 1963 in Barbados, then, shortly after, moved to Wales with their family. To say the girls never managed to fit in is a gross understatement.  Bullied and taunted, they withdrew into utter silence around anyone but each other, speaking, sister-to-sister, in a language that included mirror-movements and private words. A play about the girls’ ordeal—which eventually develops into an attempt to write and sell fiction, and then, frustrated, to acts of arson—might require a variety of tones, and that seems to be what Bockley and de Mayo’s text, directed by Whitney Dibo and Lauren Dubowski, aims for.  Performed promenade style, the staging invites the audience to move around, choosing individual vantage points on the action.  At some points, more than one scene is playing, but, fortunately, due to the intimate dimensions of the Cab, it’s fairly easy to keep an eye and ear on different things simultaneously.  Except, that is, when a black curtain separates the playing space at the conclusion so that the ending you witness depends on which side you’re on (I ended up with June, the sister who is still alive; Jennifer died, mysteriously, in 1993, at age 30).

The staging keeps things more lively than they might otherwise be (I liked changing my perspective on the action and would like to have that option in more shows), but it also adds a kind of cut-up quality that may or may not be the intention.  In any case, the shifts keep us from the usual comfortable immersion into a story unfolding at one time for us all.  But I have to say I don’t see a great deal of point in the overlapping.  It would make sense if the twins were ever apart, so that the audience would have to follow the experience of one or the other, but in every scene until the conclusion, the twins—played with intense concentration by Chasten Harmon (June) and Sarah Williams (Jennifer)—are inseparable.

The entertainment value of the show is largely a matter of the “shadow twins”—Maura Hooper (June) and Willa Fitzgerald (Jennifer)—who get to act out what the twins keep locked away.  They also enact , as Chloe (Hooper) and Jenny (Fitzgerald), the mean girls of the neighborhood and, joined by Lance (Matt Raich), a local youth friendly to the twins, they also act out the stories the twins write.  Lurid tales such as “Pepsi-Cola Addict” (a tale of teen dysfunction), “The Pugilist” (a sort of horror story told very engagingly with shadow puppets), and “Discomania” (you can imagine), which concludes with a conflagration at a disco—a fate that shortly engulfs the twins’ school.

You might well ask what’s it all leading to.  If we’re meant to see the twins as misunderstood geniuses their fictions suggest otherwise.  If as victims of social stratification, the play suggests that at least some of the Welsh locals try to accept them—Lance is sympathetic, though he has to break off due to unrealistic fantasies from June, and the psychiatrist (Emily Zemba), while offering only silly activities, seems well-meaning.  The twins’ parents (Sheria Irving and Leonard Thomas) simply smile bravely (the mom) or scowl threateningly (the dad) and seem otherwise clueless.  Mr. Nobody (Ilya Khodosh), our master of ceremonies, is great at set-ups, but not much at transitions.

What it leads to, not quite grippingly, is death as a final separation and the odd feeling of a play whose heroines are an oddly silent, unknowable center.  Along the way there are laughs and spirited vignettes, and Brian Dudkiewicz’s set is a lot of fun to move around in, providing key spaces and also good flow, but the play only lets us hear the twins’ voices in a few passages from their journals where they sound like any other glibly self-centered and judgmental teens.  In the end, there seems not much The Twins Would Like to Say has to say.

The Twins Would Like to Say By Seth Bockley and Devon de Mayo Directed by Whitney Dibo and Lauren Dubowski

Dramaturg: Kelly Kerwin; Set Designer: Brian Dudkiewicz; Assistant Set Designer: Samantha Lazar; Costume Designer: Steven M. Rotramel; Lighting Designer: Christopher Ash; Sound Designer: Sam Ferguson; Stage Manager: Molly Hennighausen; Producer: Katie Liberman

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street April 4-6, 2013

Moony Tunes

“Verses are holy crosses / On which poets silently bleed to death.” The Yale Cabaret’s intense and effective production of Pierrot Lunaire—music by Arnold Schoenberg, poems by Alberg Giraud—combines a small chamber combo (Dan Schlosberg, piano; Clare Monfredo, cello; Jacob Ashworth, violin and viola; Ginevra Petrucci, flute and piccolo; Ashley Smith, clarinet and bass clarinet), a soprano (Virginia Warnken) and an actor (James Cusati-Moyer) in the role of Pierrot.  The show, directed by Ethan Heard with an admirable sense of the work’s theatrical dimensions, also used, atmospherically, handwritten titles projected on the walls to give us an aphoristic précis for each new segment.

While there is a narrative arc, of sorts, that leads through the three parts—seven sections each—the sections at times have a snapshot or tableau-like intensity, illustrating a certain moment in the rather symbolic and emotionally fraught life of the quintessential sad clown.  As Pierrot, Cusati-Moyer is phenomenal.  The part requires great resources in mime and movement and in the kinds of body language and facial clues that made for stars of the silent screen.  Cusati-Moyer has all the nuances firmly in hand.

Though antic, this Pierrot is not comic, exactly, nor is he ever campy.  And that alone is worthwhile.  While we should find something familiar in the figure of Pierrot, it’s important that his deep responses to things estrange us from him even as it invites us.  But then that’s exactly what Schoenberg’s music does as well.  In its refusal to use any easy, romantic flights to play upon our emotions, the score of Opus 21 is daunting and demanding, and I’m very grateful to have had the opportunity to hear this music played with such dispatch.  Even more so when the musicians playing it wear half-masks and costumes that make them seem vaguely threatening escapees from a German music conservatory.  The mood of the piece is very much of a modernist Fasching party.

The lighting throughout the show is muted, moody, illuminating only what is necessary.  Pierrot often moves in a spotlight, as does the impressive Warnken.  Her interactions with Pierrot are intense: sometimes chiding him, or bedeviling him with “flecks” of moonlight, or playing a maternal figure, both stoic and longing—her sobbing singing at the end of the segment called “Madonna” is quite expressive.  The musicians get into the act at times as well—I particularly liked Clare Monfredo standing upon a box to create a rain of rose petals for “Columbine.”

I saw the show twice: the first time, Thursday night, in a seat better situated for the tableau-like effects of placement and staging—such as watching Pierrot, a dandy, powder his face and examine each feature in a handheld mirror; on Friday night, I was seated nearer Warnken’s section of the playing area, so I could catch the words more clearly and was perfectly placed, it seemed to me, to hear the interplay of the instruments.  Consequently, I paid less attention to the action.  I don’t mean to say the show demanded an “either/or” attention, but rather that it offered much to both sound and sight, in a spirit that seems to me true to the melancholy and oddity, the glimmerings of joy and sorrow of this richly conceived opus.

Given the highly wrought tension between the score and the action, Pierrot Lunaire is the kind of production that creates rather different responses in different viewers.  Poetic logic more than narrative logic abides, and to that end Giraud draws upon a repertoire of recognizable conceits—being “moondrunk” or “homesick”—and figures, such as Columbine, the Madonna, the Dandy.  Favorite segments for me were "Night," an almost surreal and discordant segment, and "Serenade," featuring very evocative cello.  Elsewhere there are the kind of sacrificial gestures that befit a paschal figure—so much so that staging this work on Easter weekend amounts to a religious solemnity, for those in the “religion of art” camp, that is.  And this is high art indeed.

Pierrot Lunaire Music by Arnold Schoenberg Poems by Albert Giraud; Translation by Otto Erich Hartleben Directed by Ethan Heard

Dramaturg: Rachel Carpman; Dramaturg: Helen Jaksch; Costume Designer: Maria Hooper; Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason; Projection Designer: Shawn Boyle; Stage Manager and Producer: Anh Le; Music Coach: Michael Friedmann

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street March 28-30, 2013

Lindy's Lesson

Watching Zie Kollektief (Kate Attwell, Gabe Levey, Brenda Meaney, Mitchell Winter) putting on—in both senses of the phrase—one of Bertolt Brecht’s polemical Lehrstücke (“learning plays”) at the Yale Cabaret this week, I couldn’t help thinking: what is the purpose of theater?  So, yeah, “BB” (as he’s referred to in the Kollektief’s preamble) was up to his old tricks, this time tricked out as improv theater complete with a recurring dose of amateurish giggles. The play, ostensibly, is a radio opera formerly known as Lindbergh’s Flight before BB rewrote it to write Lindbergh out, due to the latter’s politics.  What kept me amused was the way the play tried desperately to make one man’s triumph—flying across the Atlantic Ocean, remember?—the work of “the people.”  If that sort of thing doesn’t inspire hilarity in you, well, then this might not be your cup of tea.

What is my cup of tea, or rather coffee, is watching the work of this group of practiced larkers.  Levey, here wearing a cowboy suit, is always irrepressibly funny; Meaney, this show made me see, has reserves of comic skill her time at YSD has barely scratched; Attwell’s subversive sense of theater, one assumes, in a driving force behind the show; the real surprise is Winter.  His earnest attack of the role of Lindbergh—or “man of no importance,” if you prefer, comrade—is both ironic and invigorating.  But where he really got me was in the early going, as the foursome treated us to a little ditty and a comic discursus explaining what we were about to see.  His piercing glance into the crowd had the effect of turning us into kids trying not to laugh while a teacher or other authority figure is staring us down.

And that sort of sets the tone of the whole thing.  How can you not laugh at this silly, slightly slapstick production, able to mix its contexts as swiftly as you (or the faux Germanic voice on a tape) can say “Spirit of St. Louie.”  It’s a play being played for laughs while the actors seem to think it’s being played for real—you almost expect them to get yelled at for not being serious enough, on more than one occasion.  One of my favorite bits was a kind of old soft shoe with everyone a little off; another was a fantasized under-the-sea sequence; and still another was when Lindy/MONI (Winter in a school desk perched above a floor fan) hit a fog bank—the rest of the cast in sheets.

You get the idea: it’s theater as any schoolroom of kids stuck inside for recess might manage it, trying to show—ja, Herr Lehrer!—they’ve learned the mighty BB’s lessons while also deconstructing them just for the hell of it, or just to see, indeed, how elastic is the concept of theater.  Of course, as is usually the case with not-for-real theater, the tech support magically does what it must to make it work—great help from Lighting (Joey Moro) and Sound (Tyler Kieffer) on that score.

BB had his reasons and his intentions in trying to destroy the division of labor known as performer and audience, but, for the most part, audiences remain content with a spectacle that leaves them alone.  The Kollektief never forgets we’re there and rarely lets us forget it.  And the four are able to be themselves in the midst of what they're pretending to be.

If Lindy needs to come down to earth, the same treatment won’t hurt BB either.  After all, as Brecht said: “To live means to finesse the processes to which one is subjugated.”  And if Brechtian theater is one of the processes to which one is subjugated?  Everyone for oneself, kollektief-ly.

Lindbergh’s Flight By Bertolt Brecht Translated by John Willett

Contributing Artists: Kate Attwell, Gabe Levey, Brenda Meaney, Mitchell Winter; Costume Designer: Martin Schnellinger; Lighting Designer: Joey Moro; Sound Designer: Tyler Kieffer; Stage Manager: Carolynn Richer

The Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street March 14-16, 2013

Telling Tales

A man and a woman, wearing the obvious greasepaint makeup of amateur theatricals, sit in a little triangular room on a makeshift stage, complete with naked-bulb footlights and a painted curtain.  They speak to us with the emphatic and cadenced accents of the Lancashire area of England, in a manner that feels confidential and forthright though also oddly prickly and at times slightly distracted. As the two take us into their confidences—the Man (Christopher Geary) talking about his encounters, as a six year old, with his mother’s breasts, the Woman (Emily Reilly) describing her father’s imposition of “order” and multiplication tables on the household—we might begin to feel they aren’t quite “all there,” particularly as the man keeps worrying an alarm clock and the woman treats her little array of knickknacks as though they are alive.  They have a fondness in their manner that makes them easy to listen to, even if the implications of much of what they say is left to us to interpret—as when they both chortle about “chit-chat, chit-chat, chit-chat” as though the phrase calls up liberating associations.

As the parallel monologues go on, we realize they are reminiscing about events from the same period of their lives—from six, when they first met one another, to about twelve—and that the period is warmly recalled by both, as a time inspired by the strength of their feeling for one another.  It is to Walsh’s credit that he gives such vibrant voices to figures assumed to be elderly, making their recollections create a view of childhood romance that is truly striking.

Gradually, within the same extended recollections, the memories become infused with the horrific and traumatic, having to do with a draconian imposition of conformity by Woman’s father and the Man from the Chip Shop: the two decide who will be silenced by slicing out the tongues of anyone they choose, which leads as well to random killings.

Our entry into this world of past horror follows a unique trajectory—from verbal comedy to an understanding that speech itself can be a crime and, finally, to the sense that only the ability to keep talking about the past, giving words to experience, is what allows humans to maintain a grasp on meaning and identity.

Both performers in the piece are to be commended for letting us into this world. The play, almost static in its staging, must take over our imaginations almost entirely by speech alone—with a few props, an entertaining use of a recorded song Man, as a boy, gave to Woman, as a girl, and a telling use of dramatic percussion and lighting.  At one key moment the duo, bathed in a kind of transcendent light, seem to see one another as Man bids Woman speak of what she remembers.  In that one moment, we might say, he is face-to-face with his past, and with the love of a life that involves a horrible act of betrayal.

Geary is wonderful at remaining in character while also having an eye out for the audience as an element of the play.  He helps us realize that the use of the curtain and footlights and facepaint is meant to give us a feel for the failings of the naturalism of theater, and a sense that the past is something we always to some extent “stage” upon the present.  Reilly is particularly good at creating the fond regard of a doting woman for whom even betrayal and brutality are part of the vitality of her youth.  It’s a performance that stays with you as both endearing and sinister.

While I have caveats about how well thought-out Walsh’s backstory is—it’s best taken as a kind of nightmare of village life, insular and absolute (the age of the children is necessary to the effect)—I have no doubts about the skill, ingenuity, and power of this production.  We owe Reilly, her co-director Hugh Farrell, and company thanks for The Small Things.

The Small Things By Enda Walsh Directed by Emily Reilly and Hugh Farrell

Costume Designer: Nikki Delhomme; Co-Sound Designer: Palmer Hefferan; Co-Sound Designer: Tyler Kieffer; Dramaturg: Hugh Farrell; Percussionist: Victor Caccese; Stage Manager: Rob Chikar; Producer: Eric Gershman

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street March 7-9, 2013

We Three

The Bird Bath, the latest show at the Yale Cabaret, like the show the previous week, was developed entirely by YSD students and treats the theme of mental illness.  Directed by Monique Barbee and created by an ensemble of three women—Chasten Harmon, Hannah Leigh Sorenson, Ariana Venturi—who enact three different aspects of the British-born surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, the play is set, more or less, in an asylum.  The drama is in how the three actresses pantomime the artist’s states of psychic duress. For Carrington, apparently, the trinity explained everything, so the set consists of three separate areas: the one to our left seems neat and methodical, somewhat like a lab, somewhat like a writer’s workroom; the central space consists primarily of a very graceful bathtub and curtain; the area to our right contains a bed with an old metal frame.  Each space is decorated with interesting objets d’art.  White is the predominant non-color.

At left and right, respectively, Venturi and Harmon enter through the windows, climbing in to take up residence shortly after Sorenson, in the center, ceases vomiting into a large bucket.  This opening tableau—a woman crouched on the side of a tub attempting to spit up by drinking quantities of orange blossom water—goes on for a bit, while the actress’s voice-over speaks lines derived from Carrington’s book about her treatment in a mental institution after a breakdown.

In other words, the show establishes early its intent to give us a visceral experience of physical distress, but such discomfort is offset by an enthralling series of tableaux vivants that work because of the rigorous physicality of the actresses and the wonderful set design (Mariana Sanchez Hernandez) and lighting (Masha Tsimring) and music/sound (Palmer).  Each actress is mostly contained in a setting that becomes her entire world, a space, we might suppose, that is an external manifestation of Carrington’s internal state.  The three aspects are distinct enough, if somewhat obvious.

Simply, we can see the left-side figure (Venturi) as Carrington attempting to maintain her intellectual and artistic bearings, often clutching a lab jacket to her throat or at times crushing an egg while the other figures convulse; the right-side figure (Harmon) presents the more animal, bodily passions—Harmon moves often in a crouch and at one point enacts an animal defecating, then nosing its feces, while at other times, with a lemon in her mouth, she grips the bed and shakes like someone undergoing shock treatment; the central figure (Sorenson) bathes and primps, convinced she is Queen Elizabeth, and at other times writhes on the floor.  This figure, we might suppose, is the spirit, or at least the spirit as manifested in the artist’s creativity in combat with her own delusions.  Sorenson does a quite spectacular job of both embodying the kind of feminine principle that a male artist might use to represent beauty or spirit, while also giving us the frantic, quivering flesh of a female artist grappling with her demons.  It’s stunning physical theater.

Carrington, the notes by Dramaturg Sheria Irving, tell us, “was treated with Cardiazol, a drug . . . that induced convulsions and hallucinations.”  Just the thing for a surrealist, we might suppose.  And one of the tensions The Bird Bath seems to want to explore, as did Jackson’s All This Noise last week, to some extent, is the relation between artistic self-conceptions and mental illness.  The idea that madness is a form of creativity is very old, and the idea that truly creative spirits, in their innovation, might be taken for insane is also prevalent at times.  Carrington herself seems to have shared some of those notions—as did other surrealists—and so the play might be said to culminate with each of the three women creating an effigy or bust that might be a way of externalizing her anxieties.

Venturi and Harmon create constructions that could be entered as found objects in a Duchampian display. But Sorenson’s Carrington becomes an effigy herself.  In the best sequence in the play, she puts a latex mask over her head, powders it white and draws a red mouth on the powdered mask over her lips.  “Eyeless in Gaza,” so to speak, she becomes an image of the surrealist muse, perhaps, a figure out of Man Ray, that is also the artist as abject heroine of her own life.

Three, of course, is the number of the Graces, the Fates, and the Furies, in Greek myth.  These three women, together with their director, set-up a tripartite tableau of the mind and soul of a figure sorely tried by her own mind and by a drug that invades her body and causes terrors and trauma.  In the end there’s a glimpse of expressive grace—Sorenson, wet and half naked, leaning out three sets of windows, successively, as though gulping the air of freedom and relief—before the fury resumes again.

We might suppose that’s the best we can hope for.

The Bird Bath Created by Ensemble Directed by Monique Barbee

Dramaturg: Sheria Irving; Scenic Designer: Mariana Sanchez Hernandez; Lighting Designer: Masha Tsimring; Sound Design & Original Music: Palmer; Stage Manager: Alyssa K. Howard; Producer: Emika Abe

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street

February 28-March 2, 2013

Coping with Crisis

Jackson Moran’s All This Noise, a one-man show at the Yale Cabaret, is a courageous exploration of one family’s hardships, made more gripping by the fact that the family is Moran’s own.  Drawing a straight line on a wall with chalk, Moran proceeds to note key events in a linear series that is truly harrowing: From the early signs of mental instability in Moran’s younger brother Chris, who also suffers from seizures, to a tumor that ends their father’s life prematurely, to Moran’s and his brother’s alcoholism, to Chris’s suicidal tendencies, to a fateful surgical procedure that leaves Chris seriously impaired, to the indignities of cuts in mental healthcare that afflict New Jersey, where Chris is institutionalized. Along the way, Moran offers comments from mental health professionals—about Chris, specifically, from one very sympathetic care-giver at Hagedorn in New Jersey, and about the situation in NJ from someone involved in the politics of Governor Christie’s cuts.  Moran takes on Christie himself in a staged community talk-back in which Christie (Moran gets at the Jersey-swagger of the man) tries to dodge an outright attack from Moran, as the latter grows more insistent about the contradictions in the public stance that says, in the wake of national tragedies like Newtown, “we must do more about mental healthcare,” while yanking the plug on institutions like Hagedorn.  In other words, Moran has an ax to grind and the times we’re living through serve to whet it.

All This Noise is at its most appealing in showing Moran’s concern for his brother—who at one time had ambitions to be an actor—and the latter’s deterioration.  The play is at its most moving in suggesting the human costs of mental illness, both for the patient and those close to him, particularly the young men’s mother.  And Moran is at his most passionate in taking on the shallow political discourse that surrounds events like Newtown and the effort to address healthcare in the U.S.

The play is enlivened by moments such as Moran re-enacting his audition at YSD—a soliloquy from Hamlet, though perhaps the one about bearing “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” would be more apropos—and by jarring moments such as Chris’s breakdown at a Christmas party where a crescendo of voices apprizes us of how nightmarish even mundane social interactions can become.

All This Noise is certainly involving, and it poses many unresolved dramatic moments: in hearing of the trajectory of Chris’ condition, we only learn “the facts,” not much about how anyone, much less Chris himself, actually feels about what has occurred.  Chris, despite photos from his life, remains a mystery at the heart of the play, a collection of catastrophes.  We hear little about the decision to undergo an operation on his amygdala and why the procedure produced the outcome it did.  Moran is not interested in assigning blame for Chris’s state, but rather in drawing-out its dramatic potential and poignancy—at play’s end we hear Chris recite after his brother, line by line, a poem he wrote.  As a slice-of-life, the play is effective in making us sad that a life of potential has come to this pass.  As a statement, the play aims to make us angry that mental healthcare remains such a low priority for many state governments.

Moran is impressively nuanced as an actor, likeable as a narrator, and quite skilled at keeping our attention and at providing glimpses of his life with Chris.  The production is refreshingly free of caricatures and maintains a stripped-down intensity that aids its personal, confessional nature.  All This Noise is a brave and unsettling tightrope walk across the abysses that lurk in real life.

All This Noise Created by Jackson Moran With Ethan Heard, Kate Ivins, and Martha Jane Kaufman

Additional text by Christopher Moran Additional script development with Alyssa K. Howard, Jack Tamburri, and Masha Tsimring

Director: Ethan Heard; Dramaturg: Martha Jane Kaufman; Scenic Designer: Souri Yazdanjou; Costume Designer: Seth Bodie; Lighting Designer: Masha Tsimring; Sound Designer: Matt Otto; Projection Designer: Nicholas Hussong; Stage Manager: Alyssa K. Howard; Producer: Kate Ivins

Yale Cabaret February 21-23, 2013

Eminent Edwardians

Precocious kids have always wondered about sex before their folks are willing to clue them in, we suppose.  But in Edwardian times, apparently, young women could be considered of “marriageable” age and still be utterly clueless about what exactly transpires on the wedding night.  To the rescue: Lytton Strachey composed Ermyntrude and Esmeralda, a little novella in which the eponymous heroines, in a series of breathless letters, try to work it all out.  Transformed into a play by Hunter Kaczorowski at the Yale Cabaret, E & E entertains—and might even make you blush!  (Indeed the novella, written in 1913, didn’t see the light of day till 1969—when the lifting of illegality for same-sex liaisons should have made its enlightened acceptance of homosexual sex acceptable.) Ermyntrude is played by Sophie von Haselberg with a steely practicality in her eye: she’s after the gory details about what she calls “pussy-cats” and “bow-wows”—the genitalia of females and males, respectively—and what happens when they “pout” for one another.  Esmeralda, played with gleeful girlishness by Ceci Fernandez, is more interested in what those pouting pets have to do with love.  And, since no one has quite worked that out to date, E & E is engagingly enlightening.

The back and forth “entre nous” epistles of the duo are illustrated from time to time by shadow puppetry in little framed spaces on the back wall (manipulated by Christopher Ash, Soule Golden, and Carmen Martinez; designed by Kaczorowski).  Depending on where you might be sitting in the packed Cab, you may get the full effect of these little figurines or not—they seem a bit too small to make the kind of visual impression they may be intended to achieve—but they are certainly well-done and evocative of the kind of picture-book politesse that our heroines are endeavoring to delve beneath.  Until, of course, a rather rampant bow-wow vigorously mounts a fulsome feline…

The space (Kate Noll, Scenic) and costumes (Seth Bodie), along with lighting (Solomon Weisbard) and sound/music (Steve Brush) all contribute considerably to the gentility of the evening.  And that’s important to make the quaintness of the young ladies’ questionings seem apropos.  Along the way, E & E espy surprising developments—such as a passionate embrace between Esmeralda’s brother Godfrey and his male instructor (“which buttons were undone?” Ermyntrude presses her), to say nothing of Ermyntrude’s exciting flirtation with the new footman Henry, which leads to ecstatic expressions emoted with an exuberant twinkle by von Haselberg.

As Esmeralda, Ceci Fernandez is inestimable and explosive; she glows and gloats and free associates and turns away one would-be betrothed (the Dean, who cannot countenance her curiosity about Godfrey) only to find another—the dashing Major.  Meanwhile, Ermyntrude, like Godfrey, faces a comeuppance for her pert pursuit of carnal knowledge across class lines.  Heaven forfend!

In the end, as so often happens, the teens may be seen to be following different paths, though we—like them—may wait breathlessly the epistles depicting Ermyntrude’s adventures in sexy-sounding Saxony and Esemeralda’s nuptial discoveries.  All-in-all,  Ermyntrude and Esmeralda is ebullient entertainment.

Ermyntrude & Esmeralda A Naughty Puppet Play Based on the novella by Lytton Strachey Directed and Adapted by Hunter Kaczorowski

Puppet Design: Hunter Kaczorowski; Dramaturgy: Emily Reilly; Scenic Design: Kate Noll; Costume Design: Seth Bodie; Lighting Design: Solomon Weisbard; Sound Design & Original Music: Steve Brush; Stage Manager: Sonja Thorson; Technical Director: Lee O’Reilly; Assistant Technical Director: Joey Moro; Producer: Sarah Williams; Puppetry Captain: Carmen Martinez

The Yale Cabaret February 14-16, 2013

Prisoners' Pageant

The Island, the second show of the Yale Cabaret’s spring semester, is a powerful two-man play, directed by Kate Attwell and featuring Paul Pryce (John) and Winston Duke (Winston).  The play was written by Athol Fugard in collaboration with the actors—John Kani and Winston Ntshona—who initially played in it. As prisoners in a South African prison known as “the island,” the two men’s crimes, we can assume, are political, and thus their bond is based on the deprivations of their condition.  We meet them as they return to their cell, winded from running, injured, exhausted.  As unlikely as it might seem, much of their interaction will be about their plan to present a performance of Sophocles’ Antigone in a show for the other prisoners.

Staged with the actors on a platform flanked by comissary-style tables and with chairs at the head and foot, the space is intimate and the actors, as they loom above us, seem at times larger-than-life.  It’s an interesting means to create a heroicizing perspective on the two men as they work out their production, which entails Winston, as Antigone, having to don a wig of straw and a bra with tins for cups.  He rebels against the affront to his dignity and must be placated by John, who is determined that Antigone be presented, to lodge the theme of blood ties and honor against the dehumanizing demands of the State.

What carries the play and makes it riveting throughout is the interplay between Pryce and Duke.  Fully immersed in their parts, they establish the sense of familiarity between the men, due to intimate proximity, but also the degree to which they are quite different in their attitudes and expectations. That difference becomes paramount when John learns that he will be released in three months’ time.  Their shared elation swiftly becomes a deeply moving nostalgia for the time they shared together and then, gradually, a sense of dejection and even resentment on Winston’s part, even as John keeps insisting he doesn’t want to think about his release—that it might be all a trick.

What isn’t a trick is the extent to which playacting is a part of the prisoners getting through their ordeal.  Early on John acts out imaginary phone calls to friends back home and to the two men’s wives.  The scene quickly establishes the power and fascination of make believe—the power of suggestion comes out in the playacted phone call, in the reminiscences of the day they were incarcerated together, and in Winston’s projections of what life will be like for John when he returns home.  Fugard makes all this take place in dialogue between two half-naked men, with little in the way of props or theatrical tricks.  The Island demonstrates effectively that the best drama takes place in our heads while listening to characters talk.

The staging of Antigone is a significant change of scene: Pryce as John as King Creon and Duke as Winston as Antigone prowl the walk space behind the tables, moving about as if sizing each other up for a duel to the death.  The fact that John, who has been approved for release, should have the role of the State questioning Winston as the defiant Antigone—who insists on burying her brother, condemned as a traitor, though the law forbids it—makes the playacting reflect a struggle between the two men as well.  John, as the one who initially quizzes Winston on the parts they will play and who seems the more articulate and quick-witted, becomes, by means of the play, a further goad and even persecutor of his cellmate.  Winston, then, as Antigone—the gender roles also are relevant—must give voice to a defiance that stands for the enemies of the State of Apartheid, but also for those oppressed by the constructions placed upon them by others.

The play creates a subtle relation between the two men and Pryce and Duke bring home the passion, power and dignity of these men with great skill.  The show’s design, use of song—via “Singers from Shades”—and lighting combine to create one of those Cab shows that reinvents the space and the audience’s relation to the spectacle a bit as well.  The Island is a commanding production.

The  Island By Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona Directed by Kate Attwell

Assistant Director: Gabriel DeLeon; Scenic Designer: Kristen Robinson; Costume Designer: Seth Bodie; Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason; Sound Designer: Matt Otto; Stage Manager: Louisa Balch; Producer: Lico Whitfield; Singers from the Shades: Carol Crouch, Edwina Kisanga, Dianne Lake, Ian Miller, Naima Sakande

The Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street January 24-26, 2013

The Cab will be dark for two weeks, then return on Valentine's Day weekend with Ermyntrude and Esmeralda, a naughty puppet-play by way of an Edwardian novella by Lytton Strachey.