Making Magic

The New Haven Theater Company has had a run of revivals, with the two most recent—Our Town and Almost, Maine—staged at the English Markets. Next month—actually, next week—finds them going for something the company, in its twenty year history, has never done: an original play. The Magician, written by NHTC member Drew Gray, was given a staged reading last August and is now ready for a full premiere.

The story of a magician, Mark Wonderton, working “the big time” in a casino on the outskirts of Las Vegas, the play is one of a trio of plays that Gray has written about three brothers—one a thief, one a magician, one a gambler—and, for The Magician, was drawn to the idea of a play that would portray a performer onstage. Thus the staging of Act II—when Wonderton is onstage—entails the interesting doubling that takes place when a play’s audience doubles as the audience to a show in the play. To that end, NHTC has had to find a few tricks up its sleeve in order to pull off some actual magic tricks.

“Some will fail,” Gray says, but the audience should have a sense of Wonderton as “a polished performer having a bad night,” rather than, say, a middling magician. One of the reasons for Wonderton’s lackluster performance of his routine has to do with his own crisis, another has to do with news of one of his brothers. In the reading in August, Gray says, most of the audience emerged from the experience feeling “the emphasis of the play” was on Wonderton’s reaction to his brother’s fate. For Gray, the story to be told uses that event as “an instigating act,” the catalyst that causes the magician’s state of mind, but not the dominant feature of the play or of Wonderton’s situation.

“There’s a different ending entirely” now, Gray says, thought the emphasis is still on Mark Wonderton as a guy onstage having to go on with the show though his heart isn’t in it. It’s a situation with interesting dramatic parallels to the situation of acting. Gray, who is also directing the play and is responsible for scenic design as well, does everything—we can say—but act. The Magician explores the plight of the showman stuck in his show, no matter what.

Much of the play’s success, Gray feels, depends on “educating the audience in the first ten minutes about what is possible and potential with Mark.” Act I is mostly backstage, a dialogue between Wonderton and his voluble manager, Ronnie. Gray has cast two of the more versatile actors of the company, with George Kulp as Mark and Peter Chenot as Ronnie. Much relies on Kulp’s ability to balance the unhinged qualities that Wonderton develops as the show goes on with the more staid and steadfast character that Kulp is a natural at rendering. The NHTC has a thing for dialogue-driven plays—the plays of David Mamet are a key inspiration—and The Magician is right up their alley in that regard with Mark and Ronnie trading off insults, wise-cracks, and comments on the state of the act and the state of their working relationship.

From an audience perspective, we may find ourselves hoping that Wonderton will succeed—after all, no one wants to see a performer bomb, not even if an actor is doing a good job of playing just that. Gray looks to “the unique experience of live theater” to provide “a true and interesting experience,” so that such tensions add to the play’s realism. The audience, like Wonderton himself, have to find out that “disappointment is acceptable.”

The Magician plays for the first two weekends in March at the English Markets on Chapel Street.

The New Haven Theater Company The Magician By Drew Gray Directed by Drew Gray

March 6-8 and 13-15 The English Markets 839 Chapel Street, New Haven

New Haven Maine-stays

The New Haven Theater Company’s production of Almost, Maine makes a virtue of its minimalist set to create a kind of fantasy space where all the action takes place. That’s fitting because Almost, Maine almost takes place in a real place, but John Cariani’s script likes to interject little fabulistic touches that let characters be symptoms as much as people. Which is a way of saying that the point of each of the nine vignettes that comprise the play is that love makes everything different. We might think we’re normal people in normal situations, but when love gets involved, magical or bizarre or at least unusual things happen, and the way we talk about what we’re going through has to make use of metaphors and imagery. So if Glory (Jenny Schuck) is carrying a broken heart, or a man (Erich Greene) has been reduced by the loss of hope, well, Cariani’s play is going to treat such things literally. Which means you may be like Phil (Steve Scarpa) and Marci (Anna Klein), who have come to the end of their relationship—waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The NHTC has the knack of playing things with a straight-forward gusto that lets us in on the joke while also being as forthright as these characters need to be. It’s fun to watch pratfalls of emotion (fall in love, get it?) overtake two beer-drinking buddies, Randy (Peter Chenot) and Lendall (Christian Shaboo) because the guy-ness of these guys is so vivid. It’s fun to watch Steve, a guy who can’t feel pain (Scarpa) get hit with an ironing board by someone else’s wife (Deena Nicol) who has just the right air of annoyed woman doing laundry on a Friday night. Scarpa takes a page from Dustin Hoffman’s autistic fellow in Rain Man to make us feel both sympathy and amusement.

And that’s the key note of the evening. Every one of these characters is suffering in some way—I particularly liked Chenot as Jimmy, the sad sack behind a wall of downed Buds who cheerily confronts Sandrine (Anna Klein) who ditched him months ago and is now on the way back to her bachelorette party (ouch!)—and yet the comedy is always there too. So whether it’s a couple (Mallory Pellegrino and Christian Shaboo) whose bags full of love seem rather wildly disproportionate or two snow-sports friends (Jenny Schuck and Peter Chenot) who suddenly discover there are such things as indoors sports, there is usually an outcome that seems for the best.

Directors Megan Chenot and Margaret Mann should be happy with the pacing of their evening, and the Chenots’ incidental music adds very appropriate touches to backgrounds and transitions—I particularly liked the banjo that adds a jauntiness to the proceedings. Nothing goes on too long, though some scenes are more developed than others—Scarpa and Klein’s scene felt the most real—and not all the scenes end with love triumphant: Greene’s Man gets the most biting lines in the play about how leaving someone with just a little hope can be like stealing their oxygen bit by bit, and Deena Nichol dragging a wheelie suitcase away while saying “yes, yes” stabs as well.

NHTC have found another dialogue-driven entertainment that showcases their grasp of regular folks in irregular circumstances—a strength of their Our Town as well. Added to the regulars of the company are newcomers who add a lot, replacing some who have left our town for other horizons.

Almost, Maine plays again tonight at 8 p.m. and next Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. at the English Building Markets on Chapel Street.

Almost, Maine Written by John Cariani Directed by Megan Chenot and Margaret Mann

Peter Chenot, Erich Greene, Anna Klein, Deena Nicol, Mallory Pellegrino, Steve Scarpa, Christian Shaboo, Jenny Schuck

Original music written and performed by Megan and Peter Chenot Technical production: George Kulp and Drew Gray

New Haven Theater Company at English Building Markets 839 Chapel Street

Almost, Maine is Almost Here

The latest offering from the New Haven Theater Company goes up this Thursday night and plays for the next two weekends. Following on the warm, fuzzy feeling that their production of Our Town inspired in the fall, the folks at NHTC have jumped into a more contemporary play about a fictitious town: Almost, Maine, by John Cariani. Co-directed by Megan Chenot (the Stage Manager in Our Town) and Margaret Mann (Mrs. Soames in Our Town), Almost, Maine finds NHTC returning to the same space—in the back of the English Building Markets on Chapel—where they staged Our Town, to take us to another “almost” town. Mann says the troupe really “bonded like a family” during the Our Town run, and remarks that she’s never been part of a theatrical group where “the entire company gets along” so well, all committed to making “the best production possible.” The group wanted to find a new vehicle quickly while still riding the good vibes from Our Town, both among the company and from the NHTC’s fans and supporters. Megan Chenot knew of the popular winter play Almost, Maine, having staged it with high school students during her time at Cheshire Academy. It’s a family friendly play, language-wise, and Mann calls it “funny and refreshing.” And it’s one of the most staged plays in our nation’s high schools since its first successful run—in Portland, Maine—in 2004. The play was recently staged at TheatreWorks in Hartford.

Set in a small town in Maine, the play brings together 8 different vignettes, 4 in each act, framed by a prologue, interlogue, and epilogue. Each of the segments presents a couple finding love, losing love or grappling with love in some way, and all are happening more or less simultaneously on a winter’s night around 9 p.m. Mann characterizes the dialogue as “charming and real,” and Chenot—who is also a member of the musical duo Mission O—has written incidental music to help with the transitions.

Mann volunteered to work with Chenot when the latter proposed the play but didn’t want to direct it solo. Mann has found that the process of working with her NHTC colleagues in this capacity has let her “direct the way I would like to be directed.” Which is a way of saying that she doesn’t see this as a production she controls but rather one where collaboration is the method. It’s all about “encouragement, and trying things.” Chenot praises her co-director for being “patient, kind, and so observant of every important nuance.”

NHTC has developed a great feel for ensemble work as the same dedicated players appear again and again in their productions. Almost, Maine will feature 8 actors playing 17 characters, which means everyone gets at least two roles. That element of the staging—seeing actors change roles before your eyes—adds to the entertainment in such an intimate space as the English Building Markets. The scenic design is fairly minimal—with some of the props for sale in the Market itself—but there will be a scrim for an important special effect: the Aurora Borealis.  And, of course, snow.

According to Mann, the play is very definitely set in Maine—way up in Maine. Maybe to the point where our sense of “north” becomes somewhat mythic. In any case, it’s a play that seems to strike a chord with contemporary Americans, especially—perhaps—those who know what cold is. And those are the people who might enjoy a warm night of theater with the friendly faces of the New Haven Theater Company.

To add to the warmth: NHTC invites its audience to bring new or gently used winter clothing, to be donated to a local charity, as well as unopened cat food and clean blankets and towels, to be donated to the Purr Project of New Haven.

Almost, Maine by John Cariani Directed by Megan Chenot and Margaret Mann

The English Building Markets 839 Chapel Street, New Haven

November 14-16 and 21-23 at 8pm Tickets are $20 For more information, visit www.newhaventheatercompany.com

The Changing Same

Like more than a few of us, I suspect, I had never seen a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. It’s one of those classic texts that it’s easy to be pretty sure we know all about without bothering to see it. I do recall reading it aloud, round-robin style, in English class in 11th grade. A budding literary sophisticate, I scorned much of it, and I can still remember my main objections: its normative assumptions about what makes for “regular folks” in the good ol’ U.S. of A. seemed to me not only dated but insufferably corny. If you went to school any time after 1964, it was simply too hard to accept a town that’s all-white, and where the “other” is signified by Polish Catholics across the train tracks. Sure, the actual setting of the play is the end of the 19th century to the eve of World War I (and it was first produced in the era of fascist sympathies pre-WWII), and Wilder is quite aware that the world he is depicting was already history. Still, for any child of the Sixties, the play was simply too retrograde, its fond evocation of how parents repeat themselves in offspring just, y’know, Squaresville, man. And that’s one of the things about Our Town—it tends to, and is intended to, inspire thoughts about how time passes and about the changes and the sames of ye olde status quo. There’s a priceless moment where the elderly presider over the local soda fountain reminisces about how it was once possible for a dog to take a nap in the middle of Main Street in the middle of the afternoon, undisturbed. Ah, the good old days—now there’s horses and carriages everywhere and even those encroaching horseless carriages! While no one in a contemporary audience would remember anything like that, we all have similar recollections that date us. Who still remembers milk delivered to the door? Newspapers routes? Wilder wrote the play not to preserve the past, conservatively, but to show that whatever we know as “normal” is going to go the way of all flesh right into the graveyard, eventually.

Which is a way of saying: Don’t judge a play by its first Act. Sure, Our Town starts homey enough to fit squarely in some kind of Will Rogers-type recollection about what life was like when everyone in town knew everyone else’s ancestors, but by the end it has let in the space of the beyond. Back before outer space was the answer to our striving beyond the quotidian earth, it was possible to let “eternity” be the common Unknown looming over us all, and Wilder does a good job of bringing the time beyond time into the play—by making it just as homely and familiar, but with a key difference. The dead know what we don’t know, and what they know reveals at last what has been implicit all along: the perspective of the Stage Manager is “from beyond the grave”—like poets and saints, seeing the length of an individual human life as the speck in the span of the ages that it is.

The New Haven Theater Company’s production, directed by Steven Scarpa, in a spare playing space in a big, high-ceiling room at the English Building Market, its set consisting of two groups of three chairs and a quartet of black monoliths that look like pillars holding up the sky and like monuments to the dead, gives us a straight-forward rendering of Wilder’s script that lets us appreciate how much specificity there is in the play’s seemingly generic approach. Grover’s Mill is a town with an identity, and it's great the way the NHTC production lets us imagine the town the way the play wants us to.

Helping greatly with that task is our Stage Manager (Megan Chenot). Rather than the usual benign old codger who is supposed to keep us apprized of the whos and whats of the town, Chenot has the fresh forthrightness of those tour guides you might see leading a bunch of prospectives, their families, and random shutterbugs around Yale’s campus. She’s got the skinny on everything and delivers it all with the kind of amused forbearance we expect from grade school teachers. It’s like the whole town is her “class” (us too) and she wants to lead them along the path to greater knowledge, no matter how painful it may be. Chenot creates a very warming, reassuring effect, and that helps, particularly as there’s likely to be much sniffling and wiping of eyes by the time Act Three ends.

Other reflection on this well-cast show—special mention of the perfect match of Mallory Pellegrino for the role of Emily Webb. The heart of the play comes in Act Two when Emily and George Gibbs, the boy next-door, finally realize what their lives have been leading to. Pellegrino shows just the right mix of bashfulness and smart-girl knowingness not only to win over George—the town’s top athlete, bound for agricultural college—but everyone else as well. It’s a moment that seems so sincere and intimate it justifies everything the Stage Manager is trying to show us.

Other fine touches from this familiar ensemble: Margaret Mann’s comic turns as a professor eager to take us back to the Pleistocene in explaining the town’s interest, and as everyone’s maiden aunt in the wedding scene, gushing with the kind of fulsomeness that makes cliché both comical and real; Christian Shaboo, as George, seems young enough to be as unselfconscious as George is; George Kulp and Susan Kulp play the Webbs with a familiarity that seems as if we’re actually in their home, and the awkward, prenuptial visit of George to his future father-in-law is comic, and almost lets in lots of things best left unsaid; as Doc Gibbs and his wife, J. Kevin Smith and Deena Nicol have a more weary hominess than the Webbs—with the Doctor having to make housecalls (who remembers that ancient custom?), and his wife fantasizing about a trip to Paris as though it were on the other side of the earth; the families’ breakdown at the graveyard feels genuine rather than stagey, a big plus; Peter Chenot, as deliveryman-about-town Howie Newsome, is as real as the imaginary (to us) carthorse he leads around.

Perhaps the most forward-looking aspect of Wilder’s play is when George and Emily, in their respective bedrooms in their respective parents’ next-door houses, try to set up a means of surreptitious communication, if only to study together. Do we need look any further for an early version of the urge to text and share files? And when the Stage Manager comments on the fact that most people end their lives married, it’s a rather obvious reflection that—in these parts, anyway—more people than ever, even those who eschew heterosexual coupling, have that opportunity.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, I reckon.

Our Town By Thornton Wilder Directed by Steven Scarpa Produced by George Kulp Production Design by Drew Gray Stage Management by Mary Tedford

Cast (in order of appearance): Megan Chenot; J. Kevin Smith; Sam Taubl; Peter Chenot; Deena Nicol; Susan Kulp; Christian Shaboo; Josie Kulp; Spenser Long; Mallory Pellegrino: Margaret Mann; George Kulp; Donna E. Glen; Erich Greene; Jim Lones; Rick Beebe; Jesse Jo Toth

English Building Market 839 Chapel Street

2013, September 19, 20, 21; 26, 27, 28 8 p.m.

We're All Townies

As Steve Scarpa, of the New Haven Theater Company, sees it, Thornton Wilder is “our own.” And if that’s so, his town is our town. That play, one of the truly iconic American plays, is the latest project of the NHTC. Scarpa, who directed the play before in Shelton, finds himself now, five years later, reflecting on how the play’s big theme is the “idea of memory.” And, on that note, it’s worth remembering that Wilder is buried in his family plot in Mt. Carmel Cemetery, marked only by a little plaque, that he graduated from Yale in the class of 1920, that he lived for several decades in our environs (Hamden), and that he was a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and that his classic play, which treats American small-town life sub specie aeternitatis, is, this year, 75 years old.

That’s kind of hard to believe, since the play, in some ways, seems like it should date back much further—to the Twenties, at least, even to the previous century—but, in fact, Our Town represents ideas that Wilder was picking up from that era—the period of late Modernism—including the style of Gertrude Stein’s cubist masterpiece The Making of Americans, and the meditation on the changing same that is James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, then known as “Work in Progress.” Wilder was an early enthusiast of Joyce’s work and penned an essay about it. The idea of evoking a place—for Joyce, Dublin, for Wilder, Grover’s Corner, New Hampshire—through a historied sense of time is a common feature that shows the modernist influence in Wilder’s best-known work.

In staging the play, Scarpa finds himself more than ever aware of how New Haven, where he was born, has changed in his own lifetime, making Our Town’s sense of both a place’s permanence and impermanence very much a hometown concern. As Scarpa sees it, Wilder’s play is about a place that could be any place, but that doesn’t make the town a generic Anytown, U.S.A. Rather it’s a universal place, and reminds us that, no matter where we hail from, we remember a place through a particular sense of time.

For the New Haven Theater Company, that sense of time and place is also important. The close-knit group has lived and worked together for some time now—more than one married couple can be found in the cast, and, in the case of the Kulps, their daughter is also involved. That means the generational sense so important to the play is not only thematic, it’s also an element of the company. That feature of NHTC is important to Scarpa, for, though this production does include non-members who auditioned for parts, the company’s ensemble sensibility—that sense of short-hand between actors who know each other well—makes his job easier and more fun. Fun that extends to the audience—many the friends, families, and co-workers of the NHTC actors, in their regular lives—who can look forward to seeing who so-and-so is this time.

One interesting element of the casting: The Stage Manager—the part Wilder himself played and which is perhaps best known as a vehicle for Hal Holbrook—will be played by a woman: Megan Chenot. Scarpa finds that the change in gender gives the play a different tone—more engaging and personable—but that it also makes the Stage Manager’s managing of Emily’s marriage a more nuanced occasion. The play, Scarpa stresses, isn’t as sentimental as maybe our own memories—many of us read it or saw it produced in high school—make it out to be, and that means adapting the play to our time may well be in order.

Scarpa hit upon the idea of doing the play while researching Wilder’s papers in the Beinecke for an article about New Haven turning 150. That piece provoked another, in the Arts Paper, about Wilder, and the idea of re-staging the play came from there. The New Haven Theater Company tends to be a shape-shifting affair without a permanent performing space, and finding the right spot can be a chore. This time they’ve been able to use a big, empty room at the back of English Building Market, next to the Institute Library, on Chapel Street, a location that is not only a bit of New Haven history but which, by virtue of the antiques and heirlooms it sells, offers a serendipitous step into memories of other times.

Drew Gray, relative new-comer to NHTC, is responsible for transforming the room into a stage-set. Gray expected an easy task as the play famously asks for “no design” and is meant to be a theatrical space, such as would be found in any real theater. Not being in a theater, per se, means “something needs to be there,” Gray says, and he hit upon the idea of musical notes. Music is directly referenced in the play, such as the hymn “Blessed Be the Tie that Binds,” and Gray set out to create “abstract shapes to sculpt the space” so as to recall music.

Gray has also incorporated ideas he first encountered in Super Studio, a conceptual design studio in the 1970s. Their idea of “life without objects” is one that Gray finds serviceable in his design concept where most of the setting takes place in the mind, not in actual furniture and props. He has introduced two ten-foot columns or pillars to break up the space and, with changes in lighting, create shadows for effect. It’s a case of making “the scenery disappear into the scenery” Gray says, and that sounds high concept enough to serve both the modernism of Wilder’s vision as well as its timeless sense of classical civilization.

Both Scarpa and Gray stress that Wilder was about more than just making a feel-good paean to Americana. The play, Scarpa says, is “both funnier and sadder” than many viewers might expect, and that the NHTC’s effort is to “make something beautiful” that will live up to Wilder’s intention to add America’s “moral, decent” values to what Wilder saw as the long march through history to civilized behavior.

Given that Wilder first staged the play 75 years ago—in 1938—with the world on the bring of World War II, it’s worthwhile to reflect on how far along we are on that march, now.

Our Town by Thornton Wilder Directed by Steve Scarpa

English Building Market, 839 Chapel Street September 19, 20, 21, 26, 27, 28 8 p.m.

Theater News: Keeping Company

The New Haven Theater Company has built up a local reputation for their staging of economic and effective productions of well-known plays—Urinetown, in 2012, is still a high-point, as well as some grab-ya-by-yer-lapels Mamet plays like Glengarry Glen Ross and Speed-the-Plow, not to mention slices of vintage Americana like Waiting for Lefty. Rarely, it seems, do they show off brand new plays. But tonight, thanks to newish member Drew Gray, a product of Bard College, key players in the NHTC family—George Kulp, Peter Chenot, Megan Chenot, Steve Scarpa, Hallie Martenson—will give staged readings of two brand-new plays written by Gray and being work-shopped by NHTC for eventual production. The reading is free, open to all, and takes place at The Luck & Levity Brewshop at 118 Court Street at 8 p.m., preceded by a reception at 7:30.

The new full-length play is “The Magician,” about a less-than-stellar magician on the less-than-five-star Vegas circuit. It’s after another lackluster performance and Mark Wonderton is shooting the shit with his manager Ronnie when he receives news that, as they say, "changes everything," leading to a new performance ethic that might just knock ’em dead. Billed as being akin to “two Mamet characters stuck in a Beckett play,” “The Magician” sounds like the kind of pithy little confrontational drama NHTC can really rock.

The play is paired with a short called “A Tall Hill… …A Warm Day,” in which a somewhat sad-sack character mourns a lost love, a sort of poetic coming to terms with the one that got away.

Both plays will have brief talk-backs with the playwright.

And, in case you’re worried that NHTC will shun their task of giving us grassroots theatrical evenings of American classics, how’s Our Town in the fall strike you? Thornton Wilder’s text has bedeviled many a high school English class to say nothing of all the high school stages it has graced with its winsome, wholesome charm. And yet. Wilder was something of a modernist who did things like read Finnegans Wake in his free time (or “Work in Progress,” as it was known then), so maybe NHTC will bring out the avant-gardey hi-jinx rather than the cuddly Grandpop Walton aura. Wilder attended Yale and ended his days in Hamden, and the play is 75 years young this year. All good reasons—coupled with NHTC’s way of doing this kind of thing, as directed by Steve Scarpa, who directed Clifford Odets’ Lefty in the midst of the OWS winter—to roast this chestnut yet again.

Manic Mamet

The Yale Cabaret is unexpectedly dark this weekend, so what’s a fan of New Haven theater to do? Answer: go see The New Haven Theater Company’s production of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, delivered in quick and dirty fashion by director George Kulp at UpCrown Creative Studios on Crown Street. The play builds upon triads to create a dilemma: three characters, three scenes, and a choice: which of two films to “green light.” For recently promoted movie producer Bobby Gould (J. Kevin Smith, anxiously expansive), it’s not simply a choice about which film would do better or make more money, it’s also a choice about loyalties, about love and lust, about—yes, even in Hollywood—responsibility. The situation also carries implications of sexual politics and office politics. With the Petraeus scandal currently running amok in the press, the NHTC has yet again pulled out of its hat a play that speaks to its moment.

Of the two films, one is a sure-fire blockbuster—a buddy prison picture that would be a vehicle for Doug Brown, a big-name star—while the other is a do-gooder: a film about “the end of the world” through a nuclear disaster (think: The Morning After). The first film is pitched by Charlie Fox (Steve Scarpa, aggressive and fast-talking).  Sweaty and dying for a coffee, Charlie is a friend and colleague of Bobby’s from way back, who now is poised to deliver the coup that will make them both rich men and set them on to bigger and better things. The Brown film is the proverbial pot of gold the rainbow’s end always promised.

When Charlie enters, Bobby is giving a “courtesy read” to the nuclear disaster novel and scorning it. The idea of making it into a film is poised to be a joke until. . . . Male sexual one-upmanship rears it head when the two men bet on Bobby’s ability to seduce his pretty, temporary secretary, Karen (Megan Keith Chenot, lithe and blithe), who seems to know nothing about the film business and not much about being a secretary. Seemingly guileless, in other words. And, in Charlie’s view, not slutty enough to sleep with Bobby “just because,” and also not ambitious enough to sleep with him just to get ahead. So, the wager: if Bobby can get her into bed, it will have to be on the basis of his own charms.

The play’s middle scene, then, is the seduction scene at Bobby’s place, and the final scene is the fall-out, so to speak, on the morning after (10 a.m., time for the do-or-die meeting with Ross, the man upstairs whose OK is needed for the Doug Brown project). Bobby is only going to pitch one film and his new “change of heart” (if we can call it that) is leaning toward the disaster picture. What about friendship?

The strength of this production is that it moves at a fast and furious pace—Scarp and Smith are gangbusters at delivering the rapid-fire speech Mamet is famous for, talking over each other, responding to cues before the other has finished speaking. The technique creates a believable social friction between two colleagues, also friends, who know each other’s moves and are happy to be on the same page. Things slow down a bit with Karen, who at first, seen through the men’s eyes, seems like the kind of prize that goes with being newly made kings. Chenot plays Karen with detached intelligence: she doesn’t fawn over the men nor try to entice, but in the scene at Bobby’s place, all comfy on the couch, we see that her matter-of-factness about the quid pro quo seduction surprises Bobby, who still thinks you have to use subterfuge in these matters.

It’s the sort of thing you don’t expect to find in Mamet: the scene is almost sweet and is gently comical. It also shows how easily the manipulator becomes the manipulated. Karen, you see, believes passionately in the nuclear disaster picture, called The Bridge. And that passion, now shared suddenly by Bobby, becomes the bridge between them.  This part of the play would benefit from Smith switching gears a little more to convince us Bobby is convinced.

The play’s outcome can be read various ways, and one of the demands of Speed-the-Plow is that the production has to decide which way it’s going to go. Are we meant to side with Charlie or with Karen? Which film is in the “best interests” of Bobby, and what exactly are those interests and when should personal interest in a project be set aside for some other criteria, more neutral or more noble, as the case may be?

Is The Bridge part of a temptation best set aside, or is it the path to salvation?

Kulp's direction goes for the pragmatism of the play, which makes sense since it's hard to see a moral high-ground in Mamet's vision. The final scene climaxes with gripping precision: Scarpa explodes without making a mess and Smith manages to salvage Bobby’s dignity even as we see that he has ceased being his own man.

This is entertaining Mamet, and the NHTC keeps its eye on the ball throughout, delivering a speedy Speed-the-Plow.  It goes by fast, and you might have to lean forward a little to catch it all.

The play shows for two more nights, three performances: Friday, 7 p.m.; Saturday, 4 & 7 p.m.

Speed-the-Plow By David Mamet Directed by George Kulp Produced by Drew Gray

Stage Manager: Erich Greene; Lighting Technician: Tom DeChello

New Haven Theater Company at UpCrown Creative Studios 216 Crown Street, New Haven

November 14, 16, 17, 2012

Mamet Revisited

Next Wednesday, November 14, The New Haven Theater Company kicks off its four show run of David Mamet’s edgy and entertaining play, Speed-the-Plow.  The director, George Kulp, and two of the three cast members were involved in the troupe’s production of the playwright’s Glengarry Glen Ross in 2010.  It’s good to see a return to Mamet as his dialogue-driven dramas bring out the strengths of the Company, letting them show off their ability with close ensemble work.  The key to good Mamet is pacing, and Kulp feels that his actors—J. Kevin Smith as Bobby Gould, a recently risen movie studio bigwig, Steve Scarpa as Charlie Fox, a lower-level associate but friend of long-standing, certain that he has a property that will be his big break, and Megan Keith Chenot as Karen, a temporary secretary new to the world of movie-making who might represent other values, or who might be a hustling go-getter—are finding new and interesting aspects of the play.

The NHTC’s recent productions have offered a certain degree of timeliness in this uncertain era of economic downturn.  I remember seeing their Glengarry Glen Ross on a night when the stock market hit a new low and the desperation of real estate salesmen in the play could easily extend to Wall Street traders.  Smith played the loquacious Ricky Roma, Scarpa was Williamson the less-than-savvy office manager, and Kulp played Shelly “Machine” Levine, the hinge for much of the pathos in the play.  All three actors were also involved in Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty, which Scarpa directed with a relevant sense of solidarity and struggle at a time when there were OWS tents on the New Haven Green.  Then came their big production of Urinetown, the musical by Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis, a show with a theme of straitened circumstances and the tensions between haves and have-nots.  Kulp played Caldwell B. Cladwell, the resident big-wig, and Chenot played his daughter, Hope, who falls in love with Bobby Strong, a rabble rouser.  Scarpa played Officer Barrell, a bullying cop who had more than a buddy’s affection for his partner Officer Lockstock.

Scarpa, a big fan of Mamet, initially proposed that the group tackle another of the playwright’s works, known for their bristling dialogue, earthy vocabulary, fast, overlapping exchanges and arresting non sequiturs.  Kulp offered to direct when he saw that Scarpa and Smith and Chenot were perfect for the roles.  “It’s great when we can find a play that matches us and what we do,” Kulp said, “I think people who have seen Kevin, Steve, and Megan in other plays will be impressed to see them stretch themselves as actors, as they do in this play.  I’m very honored to be working with them.”

The play will be staged at Upcrown on Crown Street, a new space for NHTC, but one with, Kulp says, an upscale classiness that makes it suitable for the slick office of a Hollywood movie producer.  Because NHTC doesn’t have a permanent theatrical space and makes do with what’s available, or what best suits (as in their staging of Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio at Ultra Radio station on College Street), plays like Mamet’s, which don’t demand elaborate sets and can be produced almost anywhere, are ideal.

What might the play—which Kulp describes as a drama about one’s priorities and the decisions that make one question one’s loyalties—have to say to us following so closely on the heels of a major election?  The idea that someone might have second thoughts about a sure way to make money, in favor of a goal more worthwhile, could have some relevance.  Though Kulp and company are doing the play in the present day, Speed-the-Plow initially appeared in the Eighties, at a time when Hollywood was in search of bigger and bigger blockbusters.  One of the plot points is that Gould asks Karen to read a novel about the end of the world and then report on it—at his place. It’s a seduction ploy on his part, but he ends up swayed by her enthusiasm for the project.  Certainly, today, apocalyptic film scenarios are a dime-a-dozen and we might have reasons to question Karen’s sincerity; then again, the real concern isn’t the topics of the films pitched by Charlie and Karen, but rather the stakes of the “old boy” camaraderie between Bobby and Charlie and the more intangible and probably less enduring sex appeal between Bobby and Karen.  Still, at a time when more women are directors and producers and in politics than was the case in the Eighties, it will be interesting to see how Mamet’s power struggle plays out. What carries the day, in the end?  What, if anything, is Gould committed to?

The New Haven Theater Company is back, and they’re doing Mamet.  God speed the play.

David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow Directed by George Kulp

Upcrown Creative Studios 216 Crown Street, 2nd Floor November 14 & 16 at 7 p.m. November 17 at 4 p.m. &  7 p.m.

For tickets and info visit: New Haven Theater Company

Imminent Theater

Beginning this weekend and running for the next two, A Broken Umbrella Theatre brings its latest fall project to the Ives Main Library in New Haven.  If you know the work of ABUT, you know that they concoct new theatrical pieces as site-specific works in various historical New Haven locations.  The current work, entitled simply The Library Project, was commissioned by the New Haven Free Public Library Foundation to mark the 125th anniversary of the library, a fixture upon the green since 1887.

The audience will tour three floors of the library, moving from room to room in different groups, finding in their travels seven original works—involving song, dance, puppets, spectacle—staged in suitable areas of the building.  For instance, the story of “RIP” involves a muralist going between different times the way Rip Van Winkle does—and that segment is set in the basement of the library where the WPA murals featuring Rip are located.  All the segments feature some aspect of the history and function of the library, and are produced by the team of ABUT in collaboration with others—ABUT’s ranks for this production, their grandest yet, have been expanded to over 60 participants, all volunteer, including the Executive Director of the New Haven Free Public Library, Christopher Korenowsky, and Will Baker, Executive Director of the Institute Library (which predates the NHFPL).

If earlier ABUT projects are any indication, the show will be entertaining, lively, and fun for viewers age 8 and up.

A Broken Umbrella Theatre is committed to making theater accessible to all, so the pricing for the shows is “pay what you can.”  Reservations are strongly recommended: www.abrokenumbrella.org.  Box office opens one hour prior to the show at Ives Main Library, 133 Elm Street, New Haven.  And before the show begins, you can avail yourself of beer or wine in the lobby and chat about the facts behind the fiction with ABUT’s Artistic Directory Ian Alderman and historian Colin Caplan.

A Broken Umbrella Theatre The Library Project October 20–21, 27–28; November 3–4 Saturdays at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. Sundays at 4:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. Later in November, New Haven’s other local theater group, New Haven Theater Company, will be mounting David Mamet’s Speed the Plow, another intense, confrontational play from the master of late 20th-century speak.  Directed by company member George Kulp, the show includes two members of last year’s ambitious NHTC project, Urinetown: Megan Keith Chenot as Karen, and Steve Scarpa, who directed last year’s rousing Waiting for Lefty, as Fox; J. Kevin Smith, memorable as Ricky Roma in the NHTC production of Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, plays Gould.

Mamet is the go-to guy for small theater companies like NHTC, as his dramas have small casts, don’t require much scenery, and offer commanding showcases for character interaction.  NHTC has already been noted for their grasp of Mametry with Glengarry Glen Ross, and Speed the Plow which, yes, actually features a woman in its cast, should give them ample opportunity to sling speech in this satire of movie industry insiders.  Gould is the new Head of Production at a major Hollywood studio, and Fox, his friend for 11 years, brings him a project: a film that should be a blockbuster and make them both rich.  Karen, an office temp, questions the value of the film, opening up Gould and Fox to considerations of their priorities.

New Haven Theater Company David Mamet's Speed the Plow UpCrown Studios, 216 Crown Street, New Haven

Wednesday, Nov. 14, 7 p.m. Friday, November 16, 7 p.m. Saturday, November 17, 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. Tickets are $20 and go on sale Tuesday, October 23.

http://www.newhaventheatercompany.com/

Power To The Peeple

Prognosticators sometimes write about the future threat of world-wide drought.  But how often does anyone speculate about the fate of private toilet facilities in such a world?  Urinetown, Book and Lyrics by Greg Kotis, Music and Lyrics by Mark Hollmann, dramatizes, in comic, cartoonish fashion, that very situation.  In the world it depicts, human waste elimination is permitted only in public facilities, run by a ruthless corporation, UGC, and everyone must pay for the privilege to pee.  Then along comes trouble, trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for . . . pee. As staged by the New Haven Theater Company in their performance space on Court Street, the Tony-Award-winning Urinetown is lively grassroots theater, a showcase that allows the entire company—expanded with some new recruits to achieve a cast of 17—to show off singing voices and dance moves and comic timing we didn’t even know they had.  The company has always shown a strong propensity for ensemble work, but what they’ve achieved this time may surprise—and should certainly delight—their audience.

The musical itself, which has been popular since its Off-Broadway debut in 2001, around the time of 9/11, isn’t just romantic silliness, as so many musicals are, but has points to score, in rather broad fashion, against unsustainable lifestyles, corporate malfeasance, political chicanery, greed, totalitarian laws, and even the limits of heroism.  In other words, it’s a play that, like NHTC’s Waiting for Lefty last winter, has the kind of timeliness that should only add to its popularity.

Another strength of the play itself is its ability to provide songs that have immediate access as “show tunes.”  Hollmann and Kotis have created a great pastiche, recalling any number of other musicals and commenting upon the very business of musical theater, and of self-conscious, avant-garde touches, through the use of one of those stock narrators (Jeremy Funke) familiar from such small-time theater chestnuts as Our Town.  (Indeed, the title “Urinetown” could be taken as a play on the latter title: from our town, to your town, to “your in town”—a play on the identity of Urinetown as a place).  Funke, as Officer Lockstock (of course his partner, played by producer Steve Scarpa, is named Officer Barrel), keeps us apprised of the storyline, often interacting with Little Sally (Hilary Brown), a forthright young thing dutifully collecting coins to pay for a pee, and often questioning the underlying logic of the production.

Some stand-out bits: the performance of “It’s a Privilege to Pee” by Off-Broadway veteran Sabrina Kershaw, as Penelope Pennywise, the no-nonsense enforcer of regulations about urination; the songs introducing us to the Bad Guy Big Wig, Mr. Caldwell B. Cladwell (George Kulp, exuding the greasy charm one expects from small-town potentates, and not above a little hoofing), and “Cop Song,” giving us the viewpoint of the Law with fast-paced choreography;

the song in which our hero, Bobby Strong (Peter Chenot), a civic servant at Public Amenity #9, develops a conscience, finding himself smitten with Cladwell’s winsome daughter Hope (Megan Keith Chenot, also musical director) who tells him “Follow Your Heart,” and the song in which Bobby gives hope to the poor (before literally giving Hope to the poor): “Look at the Sky,” a rousing paean to peeing freely; and my favorite number, “Don’t Be the Bunny,” in which Cladwell and his staff (including very watchable comic turns by Ralph Buonocore, as Mr. McQueen—the name says it all—and Josie Kulp as Miss Millennium) spell out how to crush the rabble.

In Act II, the rebellion that closes out the first Act risks violent confrontation; Bobby rallies the rabble with “Run, Freedom, Run!”,

a jaunty gospel-tinged song that sounded to me like it would’ve been right at home in one of those old Elvis movies, and there’s also a touching number (“Tell Her I Love Her”) due to some bad news.  Without spoiling the ending, I’ll just say that another strength of Urinetown is that it has the courage of its convictions, avoiding the kind of neat happy ending that is the trademark of most musicals in favor of something much darker.  Suffice to say, just because you’re pissed off, doesn’t mean you have a plan. 

The guys do fine—Chenot, Kulp, Funke, Erich Greene, all manage to belt their songs with enough force to overcome the fact that acoustics are not the space’s strong suit—but the real treat is listening to the ladies—Kershaw, Chenot, Brown, all able to give great uplift to their musical numbers.

Special mention as well to the indispensable musicians who make the spare arrangements work—the whole score is played on drums and keyboard by David Keith (drums) of Mission O and The Chrissy Gardner Band and Jeremy Hutchins (keyboard) of the Eastern Connecticut Symphony and St. John’s Church.

Urinetown tells the tale—with songs, clowning, and speeches—of a world reduced to dire restrictions.  NHTC, under director Hallie Martenson, has created a stripped-down, bare bones production that matches the show’s singing and dancing on the edge of the apocalypse feel.  Like a latter day Moses, Bobby Strong says, “let my people go,” but the right to relieve oneself at will comes with a price.  For all its silliness, Urinetown has a lot on its mind, and NHTC’s production does the show proud.

The folks of NHTC choose shows well to show off their strengths, but with Urinetown they show that their strengths are greater than imagined.  Go, while you still can: four more shows: May 16-19, 8 p.m.

www.newhaventheatercompany.com

New Haven Theater Company presents

Urinetown: The Musical Book and Lyrics by Greg Kotis; Music and Lyrics by Mark Hollmann Directed by Hallie Martenson

May 11-19, 2012

Sticking to the Union

Ever since the scope of our “great economic downturn” became clear, comparisons of the late-aughts and the Thirties’ Great Depression have been common.  And, with all those tents decorating the New Haven Green since the fall, it’s also clear that things aren’t improving in any hurry.  What better time—before we meet on the barricades—to stage a classic of the American stage that makes heroes of the underemployed, the unemployed, the working poor, and “the little guy” of all varieties?  Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty (1935) was a hit in its day because its simple message struck a nerve—it dramatized the situation effectively: on the Right, the owners; on the Left, the Unions, supposedly for the working-class, but often corrupt, existing simply to support an intermediate level of bosses between the workers and the owners.  And, beyond the impasse of those “two parties,” the radical solution: in Odets’ day, the Communists, or the radical Left; in our day, the radical Right. It wouldn’t be hard to rewrite some of Lefty to make it even more pertinent to our times, but the production staged by The New Haven Theater Company, directed by Steve Scarpa, is faithful to the text.  As Scarpa points out, his production even adds a scene that was cut by Odets in later versions of the play.  It involves on out-of-work actor trying to talk his way into a stage role; he’s rejected by the fractious producer, but is given a saving grace by the bigwig’s benign secretary: The Communist Manifesto, comrade.

Viewers today may wish there were some easily issued solution that would solve all our problems, and find themselves nostalgic for a time when the formula seemed graspable: read a book, change the world.  In any case, it’s hard not to hear the characters who advocate a strike—the play’s vignettes are framed by a workers’ meeting—as voicing some version of today’s “occupy” movement, and it’s hard not to hear the excuses of the bosses as the same kind of lame rhetoric that always begs best intentions while scraping off the underclass.  The dramatic vignettes of the downtrodden (aka, the 99%) (which includes a surgeon for the poor fired because she’s Jewish—we can reflect that at least the medical profession has learned to look out for itself since Odets’ day!)—are mostly soap opera-ish, but that’s where Odets’ gift lay: he was able to translate the problems of the day into brief emotive exchanges anyone not well-off can relate to, and which almost anyone can act: the couple arguing over rent and food; the technician being asked to do some corporate spying to get ahead; the minority professional getting the axe; the applicant desperate for work facing a brush-off; the young couple who can’t get started in life because they simply don’t have the skills or job prospects needed.  Meanwhile, back at the union meeting, things get ugly, with strike-breakers in their midst, then turn violent.

In the vignettes, the scenes between a man and woman have the most skill: Joe (Brian Willetts) and his wife Edna (Hallie Martenson) establish early the emotional center of the play: these are desperate times and these are ordinary people, grasping at straws: Lefty will help change things; Florrie (Hilary Brown) and Sid (Peter Chenot) are the young couple having to part due to economic constraints, but not before they share a well-played scene involving romantic comedy elements and a sense of thwarted hopes.

The real fire of the play takes place in the meeting with Fatt the Union Leader (George Kulp—he also has fun as Mr. Grady, the theater producer worrying about his dog) attempting to silence the speakers trying to incite action: Joe (Willetts), Keller (Scarpa), and Phillips (Christian Shaboo), who denounces his own brother (Erich Greene) when the latter tries to break the strike.

Special mention also goes to Ben Michalak who covers the scene changes with songs of the times, played on guitar and banjo, giving us the voice of dissent in sing-along form.

Odets’ message: “Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.”  Have times really changed?

Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty Directed by Steve Scarpa The New Haven Theater Company March 1-3, 2012

118 Court Street New Haven, CT nhtcboxoffice@gmail.com

Theater News

New Haven is a great town for theater.  If you have any doubts on that score, check out the following:

Thursday, 10/20 till Saturday, 10/22, The Yale Cabaret offers a student-generated theater piece, Creation 2011, that asks its performers to revisit and re-enact events or experiences that inspired their desire to work in theater.  Co-Artistic Director Michael Place assures us the show will be "sweet and engaging on a personal level," but will also entertainingly visit some tropes of academia--certainly we can all recognize the inherent comedy of a powerpoint presentation.  Yale Cabaret, 217 Park Street, New Haven.

Arts Council Award-Winning local theater group Broken Umbrella debuts its first play of the season this weekend, Friday, 10/21 through Sunday, 10/23,  with Play with Matches, developed by the company with playwright Jason Patrick Wells and director Ian Alderman, the play "tells the story of quirky New Haven inventor Ebenezer Beecher" (euphonious name!), who developed matches at a factory that once stood where Westville's Mitchell Library now stands.   The show continues for the next two weekends: 10/28-10/30 and 11/4-11/6.  Tickets on sale now for all shows.  Broken Umbrella.  The Smokestack, 446A Blake Street, New Haven.

New Haven Theater Company, another local conclave of thespians, is now selling tickets to its second show of the season, Conor McPherson's The Seafarer, set in Dublin and featuring a card game that may cost someone his soul.  NHTC’s Talk Radio was a strong showing this fall, and this show, directed by Hilary Brown, like the latter will feature the group's trademark ensemble acting.  11/10-12 and 11/17-19, 8 p.m., The New Haven Theater Company, 118 Court Street, New Haven.

At the Long Wharf, the Tony-Award-Winning musical Ain’t Misbehavin’ is getting up and running and purports to be a lively show, tickets on sale now for shows running from 10/26 to 11/20.  And, also at the Long Wharf, tickets have gone on sale this week for what should be a hot show: respected actor of stage and screen Brian Dennehy delivers the memory-ridden monologue of Samuel Beckett’s caustically funny and generally existential play Krapp’s Last Tape, which will run on Long Wharf's Stage II, 11/29 to 12/18.  Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargeant Drive, New Haven.

And, at The Yale Repertory, the world premiere of new playwright Amy Herzog’s Belleville, about a contemporary Parisian couple newly immersed in 21st century malaise, begins previews on 10/21, with its official opening on the 27th.   The Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel Street, New Haven.  And coming up shortly, 10/25-10/29, provocative YSD director Lileana Blain-Cruz’s thesis show: a rendering of Gertrude Stein’s Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights, which should give us a memorable sense of how modernism plays a hundred years on.  Yale School of Drama, Iseman Theater, 1156 Chapel Street, New Haven. 

A great season is shaping up!  Check back for reviews of these shows as they open.    And for more theater news and reviews, check out Chris Arnott's site.

Dead Air

Two local theatrical pieces are presenting the final shows of their brief runs tonight: The New Haven Theatre Company’s production of Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio, at Ultra Radio, across from the Shubert, on 242 College Street, at 8 p.m., and The Yale Cabaret’s Slaves, book and music by Sunder Ganglani, at 8 and 11 p.m, 217 Park Street. Both shows, we might say, know something about the risks of “dead air”: a stretch of no music or talk on a radio broadcast, the phrase can also be used to describe a stretch of no sound or speech in a play.  Radio broadcasters strive to avoid dead air.  Playwrights and performers choose sometimes to manipulate it artfully.

ART IS US

As a theatrical experience, Slaves is all about theatrical experience as artful manipulation.  Sound rather circular?  It is.  The show, which consists of three separate “acts” or segments, takes place where “a play” (dialogue, characters, setting, plot) has become “performance” (a space and performers, in this case three, and, in this case, music).  The “setting” is the Cabaret, and the “characters” are the people performing in the play (Adina Verson, Chris Henry, Lilian Taylor) who aren’t themselves, and us, the audience.  In the early going, as Verson and Henry sit before a long, dark, heavy curtain in insistent light, their promptings and musings have the air of Beckettian characters who have decided to confront their onlookers rather than enact a play.  At one point some noises off are identified by Verson as coming from “an actress” (Taylor) who seems to be a menial at first—handing in props (a large ceramic tortoise) and repeating what she’s told.  Verson and Henry, on the other hand, hector, beseech, and ask for audience members to volunteer words, while assuring us that laughter is ok but not intended, and anything we might do is ok (one person chose to walk out).  What was stunning about the opening is the rigor required for these actors to hold onto “dead air” (there are many pauses and gaps) and invigorate it with their presence, staring back at us staring at them.

The next act, with the curtain pulled back revealing a muted neon triangle, involves more singing and music (the three performers’ voices match well: Verson sounding angelic, Henry more earthy and Taylor somewhere in between), accompanied by somewhat robotic movements that eventually led to Taylor, before the curtain, apologizing, in earnest actress mode, for not performing at her best.

After that, it was time to milk Verson and Henry, via tubes connected to milk jugs down their shirts, into a porcelain receptacle adorned with two white birds.  Earlier Verson had spoken about “waiting” only to falter mid line and make us wait for something more to be said.  To wait for two separate quarts of milk to run out twin I V lines into a birdbath isn’t something you’d probably line up for, but, on the other hand, there’s no way I can tell you what effect sitting through it will have on you (when Henry’s jug, which took longer, finally ran dry there was a small burst of spontaneous applause).  And that’s partly the point: you have to be there, just as the performers do, and wait for the milk to run out.  Real time, like dead air, can be one of the riskiest elements in any performance, but also, oddly, one of the most pregnant.

Fast on the heels of the fluids scene came what seemed a song of ecstatic praise as Verson’s and Henry’s voices became a choir accompanying the whirling, vigorous dance Taylor enacted in non-stop movement for what seemed like ten minutes, illuminated only by the triangle’s neon in full brightness.  An image of the body happy to be body, or as in Eliot’s Four Quartets: “you are music while the music lasts,” this final segment had the feel of culmination but how it “furthered” or “responded” to what preceded it was left to the spectator.

For me, the opening segment commented on the rigors of theater as a participatory spectacle that we might not normally think of that way; the second segment had more to do with the dynamic amongst the performers themselves, attempting to make what they do “work”; the final segment required us, as audience, to lose ourselves in the illusion of a dancer losing herself in dance.  Illusion because the rigor of the movements belies the spontaneity they evoke, and yet . . . is there any more effective image of freely given servitude than a body dancing?

Slaves by Sunder Ganglani with Chris Henry, Jillian Taylor, Adina Verson Additional Music by Ben Sharony The Yale Cabaret September 15-17, 2011 217 Park Street, New Haven, CT

US IS ENTERTAINMENT

Forget the film Oliver Stone made of Bogosian’s Talk Radio; the play which first appeared in 1987, before the murder of “shock jock” Alan Berg and before the rise of Howard Stern, much less Russ Limbaugh.  As performed by the NHTC, the original is not as over-the-top dark as the film, and is even, in comparison to the kinds of wise-mouths and numbskulls who haunt the airwaves today, rather sweet.  As late night caller-based talk show host Barry Champlain, who has progressed from Akron to Cleveland and is poised to go national the very next night, Peter Chenot seems more like a hectoring older brother than a truly malicious razor-tongued cynic.  He berates the stupid—the vast majority of his callers—and is even more uncivil to the bigots and phonies, but he has our sympathy.  It’s a thankless task (though many of his callers worship him)—entertaining people by insulting them, so that they’ll come back for more.

Everyone else in the studio:  Linda (Hilary Brown), his sometime girlfriend and Gal Friday, Stu (Erich Greene) the old buddy and colleague who has got his back (mostly) on the switchboard, and Dan (Steve Scarpa), the Suit who wants the show to be its best for the Big Boys, are all riding the gravy train in good show-biz fashion.  The toll his tirades and tiffs take on Barry is the main plot of the play as we see him veer into an area he rarely gets into—first, the almost phone-sex-like seduction of a lonely mother, and then an actual in-studio meeting with a zonked-out stoner type, Kent (Jack Rogers), whose momentary upstaging of Barry comes as a final straw.

Like the radio show, the play, directed with a great feel for the benefits of the tight, intimate space by Hallie Martenson, is very much Barry’s show and Chenot has the charisma to make it work.  The voice feels right—a gripping, slightly-sharper-than-thou tone that keeps his listeners listening—and, because he’s not just a voice to us, we see how much his performance is also for the benefit of his “handlers,” all mostly silenced while he talks.  They each get their say when Barry is “off” and they reveal nothing very profound, apart from the fact that each seems to feel Barry could crack or go off the deep-end any given night.  Scarpa’s Dan is mostly unflappably pragmatic; he takes credit for inventing “Barry Champlain” and is pleased with how far he’s gone, but knows its just a job, not a calling; Brown’s Linda, in a very winning bid for our sympathy, tells us what it’s like to be seduced by the great Barry Champlain, but also keeps her distance: “nice to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there”; the most telling confidence comes from long-suffering Stu who was with Barry when he made the move to talk radio and has seen plenty of crazy on-air stunts, but now notices a widening rift between them. Greene is great at conveying the tired bonhomie of the background support and the sure eye of the knowing professional, watching from the sidelines.

The supporting cast—including Roger’s disarmingly goofy Kent and Marty Tucker as the voice of the financial advisor in the show preceding Barry, and the voices of the callers—go a long way to making us feel we are watching a real broadcast and not a sit-com version of one.  Bogosian’s lines for the callers often sounded to me far too Saturday Night Live silly—some are hilariously off the wall, like the woman in fear of the trash disposal in her sink—but not as vivid as they might be if the show were written today.  Which is a way of saying that Barry is nicer than today’s shock jocks, in the style of the older advisor/on air shrink, and his callers mostly insomniacs or dopers looking for a little connection.  Barry’s final riff on the ills of society—“your fear, your own lives have become your entertainment”—is certainly prescient enough about where media and “reality” are going, and it’s perhaps nice, in a nostalgic way, to return to an era when they could still be separated.

The dead air that Barry hangs fire through near the end is a respite from his own disgust with his audience, and with himself as the flame attracting these mindless moths, but in Talk Radio it’s the dead air of a big breath, the moment a show hangs upon before the show goes on.  As Beckett says, “I can’t go on I’ll go on.”

Talk Radio by Eric Bogosian Directed by Hallie Martenson Presented by New Haven Theater Company and Ultra Radio September 14-17, 2011 Ultra Radio 242 College Street, New Haven, CT

Our Friends in the New Haven Theater Company

New Haven Theater Company is hosting its first annual benefit Saturday, Feb. 5 at 8 p.m. the High Lane Club, located at 40 High Lane, North Haven. The event, called “Fall in Love with NHTC” will features songs and sketches with your favorite NHTC actors, comedy performed by the The Funny Stages, the group’s improv troupe, decadent desserts, and the musical stylings of the Keith and Mazer Trio. Tickets are $25. To purchase tickets, go to www.newhaventheatercompany.com.

The company is entering an exciting period of transition. T. Paul Lowry had set the NHTC’s direction for several years, creating children’s theatre, improv comedy and culturally relevant plays since 2005. However, Lowry moved out of state to pursue a job opportunity in the entertainment industry and the remaining company members were forced to make a decision: should the company fold or should it reconstitute and think of a slightly different way to move forward?

United by friendship, mutual respect and a common artistic ethos, a group of NHTC actors decided to soldier on. To fill Lowry’s role, the group voted to form a board comprised of Megan Keith Chenot (president), Hilary Brown (vice-president), Hallie Martenson (secretary) and Erich Greene (treasurer) to provide guidance and leadership. “It's thrilling to be working with people who all feel such joy at the prospect of creating theater together. We all share a love of storytelling as well as a love for the city of New Haven. There's a palpable sense that we are building something together that we can be proud to share with our city,” Megan Chenot said.

In addition to the board, the company is comprised of Ian Alderman, Rachel Shapiro Alderman, Peter Chenot, Jeremy Funke, George Kulp, Steve Scarpa, Jenny Schuck, Christian Shaboo, J. Kevin Smith, and Mike Smith. All of the company members have significant experience in a variety of capacities with NHTC, primarily in the company’s critically acclaimed productions of Glengarry Glen Ross, A Civil War Christmas and Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me.

New Haven Theater Company’s current mission is to celebrate the power of storytelling by providing New Haven with awesome theater experiences that are relevant and accessible to all members of our community. “We're excited to be working together to bring the city a fresh take on community theater,” Megan Chenot said.

The group is committed to continuing many of Lowry’s initiatives, including the Funny Stages improv comedy, the Listen Here short story reading series and Reel New Haven, the company’s yearly film festival. In addition, the company is currently in the midst of selecting its first play of 2011. An announcement will be made soon.

For more information about New Haven Theater Company, contact Megan Chenot via e-mail at NHTCpress@gmail.com.