Coming to Yale Cabaret . . .

Now previewing Yale Cabaret shows for the rest of the semester and into January—Cab 4 through 10. The Artistic Directors Hugh Farrell, Tyler Kieffer, Will Rucker, and Managing Director Molly Hennighausen have joined forces, reviewed the applicants, and determined upon the following, an eclectic mix of the new, the untried, the recent, the experimental—even, perhaps, the confrontational. Here we go: Cab 4: Rose and the Rime, a play by Nathan Allen, Chris Mathews, Jake Minton; directed by Kelly Kerwin, a third-year dramaturg. Kerwin was an Artistic Director at last year’s Cab, and a director and developer of the very popular We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun, and this time she’s directing and choreographing a show that features dance, song—with the vocal talents of Andrew Burnap, whose singing graced Why Torture is Wrong . . . in the first show of the last Summer Cab—and original music. The show, which was first developed in the House Theatre of Chicago, features a cast of 9 to tell this modern myth in which a plucky young girl (Chalia La Tour, who is on a roll this semester) sets off on a quest to free the town of Radio Falls, Michigan, from a permanent blizzard visited upon it by the Rime Witch. Because the eternal winter trope graces “The Snow Queen” fairytale, the show is open to comparisons with the most successful animated film of all time, Disney’s Frozen. OK, fine, so come on and see what’s different. October 16-18.

Cab 5: Touch, a play by Toni Press-Coffman; directed by Elijah Martinez, a second-year actor. Newish playwright Press-Coffman brings us a tale about loss and bereavement, couched in cosmic terms. It’s also a play with a four-person cast that starts with a mammoth monologue that will be fielded by second-year actor Jonathan Majors, a major factor in the success of The Brothers Size at the close of last year’s Cab season. The script riffs on Keats and the stars and the infinite expanse that pretty much identifies as “the Romantic Sublime.” Directed by Martinez, who was also an asset in The Brothers Size and a strong presence in the most recent Summer Cabaret. October 23-25.

Cab 6: Hotel Nepenthe, a play by John Kuntz; directed by Rachel Carpman, a third-year dramaturg. Poe fans no doubt recognize “nepenthe” as the stuff the speaker of “The Raven” is supposed to “quaff” so as to “forget the lost Lenore.” Keep that in mind, because Kuntz’s play, which debuted at the Huntington Theater in Boston in 2012, is about a “nebulous hotel” where lots of things are going on and—as was said by Scatman Crothers’ character in The Shining—“not all of them was good.” Four actors play four characters each in this feast of off-beat characterization that, the press release says, is a “hilariously horrific play” “where strangers tangle themselves” in mysteries and “wind up covered in whipped cream.” November 6-8.

Cab 7: MuZeum, a play by Raskia and Sumedh; translated and directed by Ankur Sharma, a special research fellow in directing. The horrendous rape and murder of a woman on a bus in South Delhi, India, in 2012, inspires this play, a journey through the history of the treatment of women in India, from the celebrated goddesses of myth, to the colorful heroines of Bollywood extravaganzas, to street victims of mutilation and rape. Co-Artistic Director Hugh Farrell says this is the show he’s “probably most excited about in [his] entire life,” as it captures the realities of India in ways not generally seen in the West or acknowledged by India itself. A Brechtian theater-piece based on contemporary incidents with a cast of 3 female actors as the women speaking their own truth. November 13-15.

Cab 8: Solo Bach, conceived and directed by Yagil Eliraz, a second-year director. Violinist Zou Yu of the Yale School of Music undertakes to play live two Bach pieces for violin each show; before our eyes these pieces are interpreted by 4 performers—2 male, 2 female—who “represent” the different voices of the violin through patterns of movement. Featuring a startling set with use of scrims, this unique production should be a feast for eyes and ears, as the visual and the aural work together in concert to the sublime measures of Johann Sebastian Bach. December 4-6.

Cab 9: The Zero Scenario, a play by third-year playwright Ryan Campbell; directed by Sara Holdren, a third-year director. In last year’s Cabaret, they brought us the outrageous tale of Joan of Arc in the Space Age in A New Saint for a New World, and this time Ryan Campbell and Sara Holdren are back with a “sci-fi comedy” that features 6-ft. field tics, a boyfriend along on a mysterious roadtrip his girlfriend instigates, and the question “can you terrify people in the theater”? Starring Ariana Venturi, who shone in the first two shows of the Yale Summer Cabaret. December 11-13.

Cab 10: 50:13, a play by Jireh Holder, a second-year director; directed by Jonathan Majors, a second-year actor. What does that title mean? It’s a ratio. 13% of males in the U.S. are African-American; 50% of males in U.S. prisons are. This important theater-piece looks at that disparity through the eyes of the incarcerated, using oral histories to tell the story of Dae Brown who, in three days, tries to impart all he knows about being a man to a teen inmate serving an adult sentence. January 15-17.

That's what's on the way.  See you at the Cab!

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street For more information and tickets and menus: Yale Cab

Tales from the Dark Side

Review of American Gothic at the Yale Cabaret American Gothic, the third offering by the Yale Cabaret this season, brings together three tales by renowned short story writers: Raymond Carver’s “Popular Mechanics,” (also known as “The Little Things”), Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” and Jorge Luis Borges’ “El Sur” (“The South”). The show also brings together three creative disciplines: Nahuel Telleria, director and adapter (School of Drama), Sam Vernon (School of Art), and Sam Suggs (School of Music). The presentation, in front of a large curtain-like backdrop that is actually a sculpture by visual artist Vernon, presents a sense of “Gothic” as it comes down to us from Gothic fiction, with the three actors in the play—Kevin Hourigan, Libby Peterson, Jenny Schmidt—arriving gowned in hooded robes and carrying candles. Once revealed, their faces, pale with make-up, sport dark-rimmed eyes, giving a ghoulish cast to the proceedings. Suggs’ musical score is at times a fourth character, providing much of the dominant mood.

But are these stories really “Gothic” in that ghostly sense? Granted, they all three present situations that are tense with threats, with a feel for the darker, perhaps grotesque, aspects of life. But only Borges’ tale, which gets short-shrift, plot-wise, in the proceedings, is an outright “Gothic” tale, in the manner of, for instance, Poe. It’s a story of what may be a deathbed experience that becomes fraught with the kind of peril that may be mind-forged. As the closing tale, “The South,” with dramatic visual effects and voice-overs, segues into the end of the play, wherein the very production itself seems to become a phantasmagoria born of a book.

Sometimes a narrator reads from the book before the actors take over, as in the lengthiest segment, the O’Connor story, and the precise minimalism of the production, with its significant props and moody lighting by Joey Moro, works to set-off the fact that stories, even when played on stage, take place primarily in the audience’s imagination. One could say American Gothic relies on that kind of inner transformation more than most drama does.

The Carver story, because of its simplicity, comes across well as a mimed enactment of the narrative. A brief account of a couple at odds with one another that comes to focus on who will get the child, the story has the feel of a folk tale and, in its grip on a certain desperation, shows us that we’re in the world of “Southern Gothic.” The tale ends cryptically but, we assume, horribly. So move along to one of the stories that defines the genre, O’Connor’s “Good Man.”

With the cast of three taking on the five roles in the family—comprised of a married couple, their two children, and the husband’s mother—acting out the story as it's narrated, the dramatization feels a bit like “storytime.” But what a story. Hourigan, sort of insipid as the father, does a convincing transformation into “The Misfit,” a criminal at large that the family encounters after a freak accident on the road to Florida. The story has long been noted as an example of Southern Gothic with its well-detailed grasp of the persons in a certain milieu—here a somewhat dysfunctional lower middle-class family dynamic—thrown against the kind of malevolence that, real enough, feels like fatalism. O’Connor keeps a knowing grasp of her characters so that there is even grim humor in its horrific conclusion.

The special features of the show—the installation art, the score, the projections (Jon Roberts, James Lanius)—go a long way to make American Gothic an interestingly atmospheric production, though how the three tales hang together—without a Rod Serling figure putting it in a nutshell—is, perhaps fittingly, left to the viewer’s imagination.

American Gothic Conceived by Eli Epstein-Deutsch and Nahuel Telleria Directed by Nahuel Telleria

Dramaturg: David Clauson; Choreographer: Anita Shastri; Installation Artist: Sam Vernon; Costumes: Steven Rotramel; Lights: Joey Moro; Composer: Sam Suggs; Sound: Nok Kanchanabanca, Jon Roberts; Projections: Jon Roberts; Associate Projections: James Lanius; Stage Manager: Anita Shastri; Technical Director: Sam Lazar; Producers: Jason Najjoum, Libby Peterson; Production Manager: James Lanius III

Yale Cabaret October 9-11, 2014

All in the Family

Review of Don't Be Too Surprised, Yale Cabaret This weekend the Yale Cabaret is dark. Last weekend, Cab 2 offered Don’t Be Too Surprised by Korean actor and playwright Geun-Hyung Park, translated and directed by Kee-Youn Nahm, a YSD dramaturg. As a production, the show was indicative of the ad hoc approach the Cab often boasts, as none of the performers in the play were actually actors and two were non-YSD students. A chance to work outside discipline is one of the attractions of the Cab for YSD students and others, so we shouldn’t be too surprised.

The show’s menu featured the names of all dishes in both English and Korean and that gave immediate indication of the kind of hybridity the play sported. Finding a Korean equivalent for “lemon madeleines” might be as interesting as finding English equivalents for the dynamics of Park’s offbeat play, as filtered through Nahm’s translation. At times we might wonder how what we’re seeing would sound and feel in its native language, where the odd family dynamic featured in the play might be embraced as obvious satire or maybe even as tragi-comic melodrama. The playbill statement from the Artistic Directors and Managing Director asserts that “this production tackles a cultural translation—one that offers a fresh perspective on the absurdity of our everyday.”

Indeed, the humor of absurd theater keeps the play unpredictable and enigmatic, where Father (Helen Jaksch) seems to be in low-key mourning for a colleague who recently committed suicide and then, to the surprise (though not too much) of his Second Son (David Clauson), hangs himself in the bathroom. That might not seem the least bit amusing but for the fact that he continues to hang in plain view of the audience every time the door to the bathroom is open—as it frequently is due to Second Son’s constipated but determined attempts to void his bowels. Clauson crouched on the commode grunting beneath his dead father’s more or less sympathetic eye becomes a regular “gag,” if you will—one that might have, depending on how you view such things, considerable symbolic meaning for anything from customs of potty-training to customs of burial and commemoration. Or it might just be a protracted bathroom joke.

The other members of this dysfunctional family include First Son, played by David E. Bruin as a self-involved filmmaker who barely notes in passing late in the play that his wife (Caitlin S. Griffin) gave their child up for adoption. The child, as his wife reveals, also in passing, had a blood type that indicated the child could not have been her husband’s. Other shenanigans: in addition to Second Son’s constipation he is also unwilling or unable to leave the house; the wife seems to occupy the role of waitress/exotic dancer/escort at a local bar, a position she says her husband urged her to take. And why not, her fees for her services there—including bringing home a client (Justin Meadows)—seem to be the household’s only real income.

The latter might seem a minor point, but as the play goes on the “absurdity” of its situation seems to teeter more to a kind of “toilet seat realism” where the throes of this family hitting rock bottom is buoyed only by their rather odd and amusing detachment from what they’re going through. A situation which might seem potent with plenty of O’Neill-like psychic misery and verbal breast-beating is instead delivered with a zest only a few notches lower than a sit-com. We could even say that its sit-com nature predominates when—as occurs several times—characters enact karaoke routines that appear, sometimes, on their living room console (in Ni Wen’s colorful projections) and also on flatscreens strategically placed in the theater. Griffin in particular does a great job of presenting the at-times brutally direct speech of the play with engagingly forthright delivery. Similarly, Meadows as the rather nonplussed “gentleman caller” in one little scenario is hilariously off-hand when meeting his escort’s husband, brother, and the corpse of her father-in-law. In perfect he-handyman fashion, he offers to fix the fan in the bathroom to help with the stench.

In the midst of all this are moments, gestures, speeches that may cause us to contemplate the precariousness of family relations, the difficult accommodations that any of us might have to make with our place and time, and even fable-like tales of an octopus and a crab, as well as talismanic memories—for Second Son, of his mother—that create a kind of post-Freudian (in the West anyway) fabric of potential symptoms, regressions and repressions. While that might sound heady, the play’s language is so precise in its casual rhythms we don’t really feel confronted, though we may well be uncomfortable.

The costumes and set by Chika Shimizu combine to form what we might call an aesthetic of the second-hand. The TV console is an ungraceful embarrassment that might be salvageable as a kitschy keepsake. And the same applies to the vaguely hipsterish look of First Son’s jacket and pants and the economy-store eroticism of his wife’s costume. As an elderly man with a certain dignity in his depression, Jaksch does most to remind us that these characters were written as modern day Koreans. That aspect of the play—its relation to a where and when that Park might have in mind—becomes tenuous as we progress, despite kowtows by First Son and Second Son to their father’s hovering corpse—or is that to the toilet bowl?

Don’t Be Too Surprised is an oddly engaging and amusing play that keeps us guessing about its intentions long after we’ve seen it.

A week from this Thursday, the Cab returns with American Gothic, a newly derived work combining short stories by three exemplars of the form: Jorge Luis Borges, Flannery O’Connor, and Raymond Carver.

Don’t Be Too Surprised Written by Geun-Hyung Park Translated and directed by Kee-Yoon Nahm

Dramaturg: Helen Jaksch; Costumes: Chika Shimizu; Set: Chika Shimizu; Lights: Carolina Ortiz; Sound: Kate Marvin; Projections: Ni Wen; Stage Manager: Emily DeNardo; Technical Director: Kate Newman; Producer: Sally Shen

Yale Cabaret September 25-27, 2014

Mommie Dearest

The Yale Cabaret is back, kicking off their new season this weekend with Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time, a new play by Emily Zemba, third-year playwright in YSD, and directed by Ato Blankson-Wood, a third-year actor. The play places Liddy (Sarah Williams)—younger sister of Alice (Libby Peterson)—in the snares of a beauty pageant for children when her older sister, according to their mother (Celeste Arias), fell down a hole and “isn’t coming back.” Liddy, with misgivings, is game—anything to please Mom. The majority of the play depicts for her, and us, just what she has let herself in for.

It’s campy, zany fun rife with cultural references that zing and swirl as we, with Liddy, try to get our bearings. We (I’m assuming) have the benefit of knowing something about Alice in Wonderland, so we’re not as out of our depth as Liddy is when confronting new characterizations of Lewis Carroll’s characters: Aubie Merrylees’ White Rabbit is hilariously manic with verbal tics, odd voices—some reminiscent of Jeremy in Yellow Submarine (Merrylees speaks to an invisible “Jeremy” over his headset)—and a cute little cottontail on his white hot-pants; Shaunette Reneé Wilson’s Tweddle-dee/dum is an aggressive schizo who has maybe been in just a few too many pageants; Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s MC Hattah looks like he could be Captain Hook and moves like he wants to be James Brown, and also manifests as a preacher and as a creepy befriender to befuddled Liddy; Andrej Visky’s Caterpillar Custodian does a softshoe mime routine with a broom (reminding me of the Lorenzo TV show but there’s no way this cast could know that, is there?)—and actually tries to be helpful, in a “there’s no place like home” fashion, to Liddy. Then there’s Mom as a Red Queen who has a few schizoid tendencies herself, one minute a beseeching Blanche Dubois, the next ready to belt like Ethel Merman as Gypsy Rose Lee, all while remaining a Southern Lady who only wants—desperately—what’s best for her beloved daughter—and the higher the heels, the better. And as the White Queen Melanie Field preens and pouts, representing the truly psychotic aspect of these mothers living vicariously through the cosmeticized beauty and poise of their little pre-teens. Or even pre-double digits. Oddly, the parts of the sisters seem a bit underwritten, with Williams suitably childish and Peterson a bit peremptory (as perhaps only older siblings can be). Her little aria about the demonic qualities of the looking-glass are accompanied by a very suitable soundtrack.

The set is a minor miracle in its own right as it creates a stage door where there is no door. The layout of the Cab generally only affords two exits/entrances—both of which are also fire exits—but Kurt Boetcher’s set for Look Up… has the cast coming in and out through a great curtained area at one end as well as a cartoonish set of stairs that takes them in and out of what is actually a window. Though I’m familiar with the Cab layout, it took some time for that fact to sink in. That’s part of the charm of the topsy-turvy world of Look Up… and costumes that combine the talents of Soule Golden and Montana Blanco will keep you entertained.

But it’s not all for laughs. The cult of glam and youth that causes mothers to make dress-up dolls of their children is in poor taste, if nothing else, and Zemba’s play is at its most barbed in depicting the toxic relation between these Queen Mothers and their hapless offspring; the more baleful side—wherein pre-pubscent girls are tricked out as miniature Lolitas—is underscored by the creatures of Lewis Carroll’s imaginary: Carroll, in his own person as Charles Dodgson, has been presumed by some a borderline pedophile with a penchant for pretty little girls—such as 11-year-old Alice Liddell, the model for his fictional Alice. MC Hattah’s brief “Billy Jean” inspired moonwalk might put us in mind of other “harmless” friendships between those too young to consent and those old enough to know better.

Yet it would be wrong to see the play as polemical or predominantly satirical. It’s primarily a fantasia, much as Carroll’s endlessly entertaining Alice books are, and that means an occasion to indulge imaginative sallies about childhood, motherhood, dressing up (in all it’s theatrical aspects, including drag), playacting, and those mysterious “judges” out there in the shadowy areas off-stage who ultimately determine who wins and who loses in show-biz.

Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time Written by Emily Zemba Directed by Ato Blankson-Wood

Dramaturg: Nahuel Telleria; Set: Kurt Boetcher; Lights: Joey Moro; Sound: Kate Marvin; Costumes: Soule Golden, Montana Blanco; Projections: Kristen Ferguson; Stage Manager: Avery Trunko; Producer: Kelly Kerwin

Yale Cabaret September 18-20, 2014

Yale Cabaret Season 47: Down the Stairs We Go

Next weekend the Yale Cabaret returns—Cab 47—helmed by Artistic Directors, Hugh Farrell, a dramaturg, Will Rucker, a stage manager, Tyler Kieffer, a sound designer (who have participated in 19 shows at the Cab and/or Summer Cab amongst them), and Managing Director Molly Hennighausen, who ably managed the Summer Cabaret of 2013.

The Cab is the go-to spot for the unusual, the off-the-wall, the below-stairs (it’s literally in a basement, which this year’s logo capitalizes on, creating the look of a movie ad from the Sixties where a trip down the stairs may lead to unimagined things). It’s a place of creative ferment, where students see what they can do—often in areas they aren’t being officially trained in—and what they can get away with. The audience can be a mix—as Molly Hennighausen says—of many first-timers, drawn by the word-of-mouth of a specific show, and many dedicated regulars, who come no matter what’s on offer.

It’s also a convivial place to dine, thanks to Anna Belcher’s kitchen skills, with a changing menu that always offers 3 entrees, a number of small plates, a salad, a soup, and a choice of desserts, not to mention a fairly varied wine-list and a selection of beers. All the dining business is over before the show begins, with tables cleared, generally, so there’s little of the distraction of plates and forks while the play’s playing.

If you like your theater up-close and personal, with, as it were, the strings showing, then the Cab is a dream. And, if you come more than once, you’re likely to see the people who, one week, put on the show doing the service and such another week. It’s a “we all muck in together” entity, even more so now that Work Study support has been withdrawn. Previously, Work Study picked up half the wage of the Cab’s workers, so now the Cab, to stay on budget, will lean upon generous donors and sponsors—and full houses—more than before. The Cab’s site lists the different levels of patronage available, including the popular “show sponsor”—an innovation begun by Managing Director Jonathan Wemette in the 45th anniversary season, 2011-12. Check back here to get a brief preview of the shows when they’re announced, then hand over a check for the show you want to back. And if that’s too big a commitment, smaller donations—as Enthusiast, Friend, and even “Starving Artist” level—are available. The Cab is a unique institution, well worthy of support.

The site claims two mantras for this season: Make Happen the Make Believe—a good imperative for any creative endeavor—and Now or Never, which certainly puts an emphasis on timeliness and limited time. Theater, more than any other creative work, requires presence in the here and now.

The first three shows of the season have been announced, and the new décor—which features a classically appointed entranceway/lobby that will be complete with tech features, such as piped-in music or live audio feeds from inside the theater—is developing. The team—Hugh, Will, Tyler, and Molly—stress an “open door” policy and their accessibility as a team to audience input, and likewise to the students who may have ideas for proposals. They looked at 7 proposals for the first 3 slots and take a supportive, enabling role in all projects they accept, and can help teams get together for resubmitting proposals not successful at first. The teamwork of the projected work is key.

Hugh says the proposal by the Cab 47 team focused on “community and collaboration”—the community of YSD, certainly, but also the community that the theater serves, with “collaboration” a broad term that extends from the various talents of the people involved in the show—from those who build the sets and make the costumes to those who research and write and act and direct and keep the place running—to those who provide attention and feedback as audience. Will stresses “generosity without expectation” which is a way of saying “just show-up, ready for whatever.” It’s different each week and what you get should be something other than what you expected. The team wants to make a season “full of that Cab show”—the one everyone talks about and remembers. And that’s not necessarily to say it’s all about love and praise. Making people grapple with what they’ve seen, or offer personal insights, is part of the Cab experience.

First up is Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time—a new play by third-year playwright Emily Zemba, who collaborated on last year’s crowd-pleasing season opener, We Know Edie LaMinx Had a Gun. Look Up will feature a “sort of mash-up” of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with Toddlers and Tiaras. Directed by third-year actor Ato Blankson-Wood, who’s been turning in worthwhile Cab performances since the Summer Cab of 2013, and featuring Celeste Arias, ditto, the play follows Liddy, a young girl coping with the pressures of a child beauty pageant while encountering a series of characters right out of Lewis Carroll by way of whatever cultural associations the team tosses in. September 18-20

Cab 2 is a new translation by Kee-Yoon Nahm of Geun-Hyung Park’s Don’t Be Too Surprised. Nahm, trained as a dramaturg at YSD, also directs the cast, which will not include YSD actors, in “a really dark comedy” from 2009. Park is a prolific Korean actor—on screen, TV and stage—who also writes, and his play is about a fraught relationship between father and grown son, that features karaoke and an on-stage suicide. September 25-27

The third of the first three shows is American Gothic—no, not the painting by Grant Wood, nor the novel by William Gaddis, but an ambitious combining of three stories: Jorge Luis Borges’ “The South,” Raymond Carver’s “Popular Mechanics,” and Flannery O’Connor’s oft-anthologized and taught, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”—which puts the “Southern” in Southern Gothic. Proposed by two dramaturgy students, Eli Epstein-Deutsch and Nahuel Telleria, and directed by Telleria, the play represents a collaboration by students in YSD, the Yale School of Music, and the Yale School of Art, and features an “installation-like set” by Sam Vernon. October 9-11

When speaking about the Cab 47 team’s leadership and guidance in soliciting, aiding, and choosing proposals, Molly stresses how “safe” the Cab is: in the sense that almost anything can get a try-out there. Its small size means the house is frequently sold out, and that creates an exciting environment for both audience and performers. As a “safe house” for theatrical experiment, the Cab is truly a New Haven treasure.

It’s now or never: help make happen the make believe. Your eyes and ears are required.

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven, CT

Eggs and Bones

Two former Cab shows to be re-staged in New York this fall. Listen! That sound you hear is the long, withdrawing roar of the summer. And that means the fall theater season is about to begin. Shortly, I’ll be posting a preview of the first three shows of the upcoming Yale Cabaret season, along with other announcements of interest for local theater here in New Haven. But right now, a few words about two shows opening soon in New York.

Fans and supporters of both the Yale Cabaret and Summer Cabaret may be interested to know that two former artistic directors of the Summer Cabaret, Devin Brain (*10) and Dustin Wills (*14), have further developed two shows that began life in the term-time Cabaret—Bones in the Basket and The Fatal Eggs, respectively—and this fall they will both be staged on back-to-back weekends at the Araca Project in New York. The Araca Project is an initiative to foster entrepreneurs from Yale, Syrcause, University of Michigan, Northwestern University, and Florida State. Artists selected are enabled to produce their work in an Off-Broadway venue.

Both shows have online sites for fund-raising. The Fatal Eggs, which has support through a Princess Grace grant, recently met its goal, but there’s always room for more; Bones in the Basket has 3 days left to reach its goal and, last I looked, had just under 60% of goal pledged

About the shows:

Bones in the Basket Devin Brain was co-artistic director, with Chris Mirto, of the Cabaret in the 2009-10 season, which happened to be my first season of attendance at the Cab. And that means I missed the Cab production of Bones, though I did catch a workshop staging of it about a year ago in NY. Brain was also the artistic director of the Summer Cabaret in the 2011 season; titled The Yale Summer Shakespeare Festival, the program featured two Shakespeare plays and The Rose-Mark'd Queen, Brain’s own ambitious and entertaining condensation of four Shakespeare history plays into one gripping show. In addition to Bones, and working as assistant director on a version of the Tempest at La Mama, Brain has a production of Macbeth in the works that will go on tour—beginning at the Guthrie in Minneapolis—and return to NYC in the spring.

Drawn to works with, shall we say, darker-than-average themes, Brain has found in Bones a greatly simpatico project. The show originated when cast member Alexandra Henrikson (*11) brought around a book of folk tales translated from the Russian, stories she was raised with. As with Grimm “fairytales,” these folk tales—many of them animal fables as in Aesop—have elements of the bizarre, the magical, the eerie. But unlike the Grimm tales—particularly in what Brain calls their “cleaned-up versions” familiar from Disney films and the like—the tales in Russian were, Brain says, told in bars for drinks and to entertain the clientele. They were decidedly not conceived as bedtime stories for kiddies. And, in comparison to Aesop, the “morals”—if that’s what they are—of the stories accept a rather harsh universe in which, at best, cleverness is rewarded and stupidity punished. Brain and company found the stories “morbid and dark in a comic, laughing way.” They adapted a selection of the tales into a form well-suited to the experimental space of the Cabaret and produced one of “those shows”—the ones that its audience remembers and its cast hopes to have a chance to do again.

That chance has come—Brain thanks YSD Dean James Bundy for suggesting he apply to Araca—with more money than before, 3 1/2 weeks of rehearsal, and a 140-seat auditorium with proscenium stage. It will be “the fullest set” the company has worked with and, Brain says, the theater has a certain decrepitness that suits Bones’ destitute “on the run” troupe, cadging what they can from whatever audience they can find. A bit like off-off-off Broadway theater. Returning again to the troupe are YSD grads Danny Binstock (*11), Jillian Taylor (*11), Blake Segal (*11), Alex Henrikson (*11), and Stéphanie Hayes (*11)—who has been back to stages in CT twice since she graduated: February House at Long Wharf, and a play also inspired by Russian folktales, last seasons’ The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls at the Rep.

Since the iteration of Bones last year, a new tale has been added and the ending has changed yet again (none of the three versions has ended the same way). Another advantage this year over last year, besides locale and coffers, is the return of Michael McQuilken (*11) of Old Soundroom, as the onstage musician absent last time. He joins the cast of Ringmaster, two divas, and three “roadies” who, as a troupe fallen upon hard times, tell their tales as Russian expats representing, Brain says, “art in need, teaching lessons on loss and how to deal with it.”

It’s not about “happily ever after,” it’s about the unhappy here and now and how to cope. Rather than stories of triumph, Bones showcases stories that give lessons in the mentality needed to survive, stories that in certain circles—such as the Russia of their day—might be considered, Brain says, “treasonous or blasphemous.” With contemporary Russia wading through another dark era, Bones tells us something about the kind of wit and wisdom Slavic culture derives from our existential predicament where a certain general malevolence—in nature, in humanity—is assumed.

And yet the show is not a downer. It’s about the stories humanity tells itself to keep despair at bay.

For more info, tickets, donation: here.

Bones in the Basket October 8-12, 2014 American Theatre of Actors 314 W. 54th Street, New York, NY

***

The Fatal Eggs Mikhail Bulgakov wrote a short story called “The Fatal Eggs” (1925) in order to satirize the political institutions of his day—and the work, as most of what Bulgakov wrote did, immediately ran afoul of authorities in Stalinist Russia. With its attitude toward the people as preyed upon by their government and toward science as sinister—especially when co-opted by the State—“The Fatal Eggs” managed to be a sci-fi tale with bite.

Director Dustin Wills says Bulgakov is “my jam,” and has turned to the writer before when stalled with a project. The first time, he turned to Black Snow which he had first seen in a high school theater competition (Wills' project was The Crucible). The Bulgakov play, about the rigors of the author’s relations with Stalin—who liked some of his work and then kept the writer on a short leash, with little opportunity for publication or staging—lit Wills’ interest. When he needed something to propose for a term-time Cab show his second year at YSD, Wills turned to Bulgakov again, and this time enlisted dramaturg Ilya Khodosh to translate. Their script of The Fatal Eggs is an original dramatic version in English.

As a director, Wills seems to like nothing better than a challenge, and one of the key aspects of the Eggs production at the Cab was how to stage its sci-fi effects—such as a monstrous snake caused by scientific tampering—and how to pack the numerous settings and the dizzying number of characters into the Cab’s minimal space. They did it, after a fashion. But now Eggs, with 7 actors—most former YSD students such as Chris Bannow (*14, co-artistic director of the Summer Cab, with Wills, in 2013), Ceci Fernandez, Michelle McGregor, and Khodosh (all YSD class of 2014 and all in the original production), joined this time by Josiah Bania (*13), Mickey Theis (*14), and two grads of NYU’s Tisch School, Jeanna Phillips and Sathya Sridharan—enacting 56 roles, will get a much fuller staging in a more expansive space. The auditorium for the Araca Project gives Wills a chance to go further into the sometimes extreme effects he’s been noted for in his work at YSD—such as the very physical comedy of Mary Laws’ Blueberry Toast, the outrageous comedy of Kate Tarker’s Thunderbodies, and the ingenious “improv” staging of his dark and endearing thesis show of Peter Pan. This time around, the space should help the narrative of Eggs so that it will be easier to keep the story straight through a use of more distinct settings, with inventive staging by the same creative team Wills worked with the first time around.

As the website describes it, The Fatal Eggs “skewers political incompetence and corruption, misguided faith in technology, a gullible and complacent populace, and a fear-mongering media.” In Bulgakov’s Russia, such skewering meant he would always be a kind of loose cannon whose work would not be staged; in today’s U.S., the play’s targets may seem at times broadly vaudevillian, but bringing together a popular genre like sci-fi with misgivings about the state of our world and of our future is by no means uncommon. Indeed, Bulgakov took his inspiration from H.G. Wells’ Food of the Gods, with its giant chickens and humans, and The War of the Worlds’ manner of disposing of a sci-fi threat. In Bulgakov’s hands, these incidents fuel doubts about the wisdom of “experimenting” with humanity—experiments which may include radical political solutions.

For more info, tickets, donation: here

The Fatal Eggs October 2-5, 2014 American Theatre of Actors 314 W 54th St, New York, NY

For those who have appreciated the student work of these directors, actors, and teams, this is a rare opportunity to see Cab shows expanded and developed further for an audience of New York theater folk and fans, and friends. And the shows complement each other well, though very different in tone: Two darkly comic tales with the macabre trappings of popular genres—the one of sci-fi, the other of folk tales. Both deriving their sense of the human comedy from acerbic Russian sources. Both featuring, in cast and crew, recent graduates of the Yale School of Drama program and directed, respectively, by two former artistic directors responsible for two very successful Summer Cabaret seasons, the one in 2010 and the other in 2013. Two weekends in October, when the thrill of fall should be in the air with the tang of dying leaves. Bones, eggs, so white, and so easily broken.

Get your tickets now!

Recap: Yale Cab 46

Yale Cabaret Season 46 is now just a memory. So let’s test our memories. Surveying the season, I’ve come up with five top picks in thirteen categories, as I have done for Seasons 45 (’12-’13) and 44 (’11-’12). Picks are listed in order of the show’s appearance, except the last named is my top choice. First up, the category of pre-existing play adapted to the unique opportunities afforded by the ever-intimate Cab space: All of these had something to do with power dynamics and each was a gripping experience: Dutchman, the challenging provocation about erotics and racial profiling by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka; erotomania as a work ethic between sisters in Jean Genet’s The Maids; He Left Quietly, Yaël Farber’s dramatization of the incarceration of an innocent man sentenced to death in apartheid South Africa; YSD alum Tarell Alvin McCraney’s exploration of the bonds and frictions between brothers as archetypes in The Brothers Size; and . . . Edward Bond’s daunting look at a world bereft of goods and memories, Have I None.

New plays inaugurated at the Cab this season, as usual, were a mixed bag, trying out eclectic forms: We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun, by Helen Jaksch (*15), Kelly Kerwin (*15), Emily Zemba (*15) is a drag-show drama with music, comedy, and pathos; The Most Beautiful Thing in the World, conceived by Gabriel Levey (*14) and devised with Kate Tarker (*14), is a performance piece that invites the kinds of pitfalls theater is prone to, and brought the audience into the performance; The Defendant, by Elia Monte-Brown (*14), commands the attitudes and language of its teen characters, while walking a difficult line between comedy and unsettling social reality; The Mystery Boy, adapted by Chris Bannow (*14), is a frenetic theatrical romp as weird and vivid as the mind of a pre-teen; and . . . A New Saint for a New World by Ryan Campbell (*15) is a funny dialogue-driven exploration of faith and defiance through the figure of Joan of Arc.

For Sets, the created space wherein everything happens: the runway by way of Warhol for the camp and glam denizens of We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun, by Christopher Ash (*14); the gritty prison space open to our view to make theater of incarceration for He Left Quietly, by Christopher Thompson (*16); the posters and atmosphere of a bygone theatrical era that lent much visual interest to The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion, by Reid Thompson (*14); the striking combination of modern and ancient ruin that served as backdrop to graffiti art in We Fight We Die, by Jean Kim (*16); and . . . the improbable rooms within a room, meticulously outfitted and wrought for The Maids, by Kate Noll (*14).

For Lighting, that magical aspect of theater that adds so much atmosphere and affect to our viewing experience: Elizabeth Mak (*16) for the highly effective illuminations of the will-of-the-wisp figures in Crave; Oliver Wason (*14) for the use of light and dark to evoke the uncertain occurrences in The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs; Oliver Wason (*14) for the intricate lighting of actual interior space in The Maids; Oliver Wason (*14) for the different lighting for the different worlds—from domestic earth to prison to another planet—in A New Saint for a New World; and . . . Andrew F. Griffin (*16) for playing with light and dark in an almost musical way in The Brothers Size.

For Costumes, that aspect of the experience that helps us suspend our disbelief, and helps actors convince us of their characters’ reality: Hunter Kaczorowski (*14) for the stylish retro outfits of Radio Hour; Elivia Bovenzi (*14) for a cast of regular people and inspired clowns in Derivatives; Asa Benally (*16) for costuming a cavalcade of different plays in a short compass in The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion; Fabian Aguilar (*16) for the varied habiliments of Joan of Arc’s ordeals in A New Saint for a New World—including space-age angels; and . . . Grier Coleman (*15) for the pastiche and aplomb, charm and chutzpa of We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun.

More ethereal even than Lighting is Sound, but a telling aspect of any production in augmenting the action and creating a mental space to support the visual: Joel Abbott (*14) for tying together all the moods and styles of We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun; Tyler Kieffer (*15) for the use of scored moments in the presentation of The Most Beautiful Thing in the World; Brian Hickey (*15) and Steve Brush (*14) for the razzle-dazzle TV-esque documentary and comedy productions of Derivatives; Tyler Kieffer for letting us eavesdrop so effectively in The Maids; and . . . Tyler Kieffer (*15) and Steve Brush (*14) for the radio soundscape and Foley art of Radio Hour.

For some productions, the visual element doesn’t end with Lighting, Sets, and Costumes, but acquires more presence through the use of projections and other special Visual Effects: Christopher Ash (*14) for the enhancement of the performance space of We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun; Nick Hussong (*14) for the various charts and logos and floating backdrops in Derivatives; Kristin Ferguson (*15) for the striking and lyrical use of photographic projections in Bound to Burn; Joey Moro (*15) for the creation of different visual moods so important to Joan of Arc’s odyssey in A New Saint for a New World; and . . . Rasean Devonte Johnson (*16) for the graffitied visuals of We Fight We Die, and for adding to the fluid visual experience of The Brothers Size.

Use of Music is another element that, for some productions, is almost like adding another character or a special effect to color the action or complete it: Steve Brush (*14) for the songs and jingles and accompaniment so crucial to the aural world of Radio Hour; Jenny Schmidt (*14) for adding to the tensions and suggestiveness of The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs; Pornchanok Kanchanabanca (*16) for the enlivening musical asides that fleshed out the variety of The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion; Mike Mills for the percussion that acts as Greek chorus to comment musically on—and even control—the action of The Brothers Size; and . . . Joel Abbott (*14) for the sensitive accompaniment that helped render the range of possible motives and actions in We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun.

Another aspect of the experience of the play’s physical presence is how it moves—sometimes that means actual choreography and the creation of dance, other times it has to do with how much activity and physical interaction takes place in the show; choice examples of how intricate Movement greatly enhances a play are: the choreography of the drag queen sleuths by Kelly Kerwin (*15) for We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun; the fluid use of the entire space and the highly expressive interactions directed by Hansol Jung (*14) in Crave; the dance numbers that told stories with movement and mime, choreographed by Rob Chikar (*14) and Alyssa Simmons (*14), in Bound to Burn; the incredibly active interludes bursting out of The Brothers Size, directed by Luke Harlan (*16); and . . . the prop-happy cast, creating sound effects and a variety of characters in different costumes while constantly on stage, of The Mystery Boy, directed by Chris Bannow (*14) and Helen Jaksch (*15).

In terms of Performance, some roles and actors move beyond the traditional “actor”/”actress” dualism, but as such is still the norm of awards shows, I’ll follow suit; for the xy chromosomes: as the one, the only, the much maligned and deeply mourned Edie La Minx: Seth Bodie (*14) in We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun (*14); as Claire, “the pretty one” that Mistress should have designs on: Mickey Theis (*14) in The Maids; for his show-stopping turn as a Lena Horne impersonator in We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun, and for acting out the gripping ordeal of Duma Kumalo in He Left Quietly, Ato Blankson-Wood (*15); as Ogun, the god of iron in the form of a paternalistic and truly fraternal car-shop owner in The Brothers Size, Jonathan Majors (*16); and . . . as the alleged brother who brings death to his sister in Have I None, and as the manipulative “sister” in The Maids, Chris Bannow (*14).

And in Performance, those actors with xx chromosomes: as Lula, the mercurial provocation on a subway car in Dutchman, Carly Zien (*14); as the introducer forced to provide the presentation, with improvised patter and invited responses, Kate Tarker (*14) in The Most Beautiful Thing in the World; as the curious, distraught and distrustful wife in The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs, Chasten Harmon (*15); as a Joan of Arc forced to be normal and then again extraordinary, Maura Hooper (*15) in A New Saint for a New World; and . . . as a woman at her wits’ end in a world of deprivations, Ceci Fernandez (*14) in Have I None.

For the task of somehow orchestrating all this diverse input and making decisions that create a coherent theatrical experience—for Directing, in other words: Jessica Holt (*15) for the harrowing world, driven by complex language and meaningful actions and silences, of Have I None; Cole Lewis (*14) for the mounting tensions and effective contrapuntal presentation of The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs; Sara Holdren (*15) for keeping a handle on comedy with cosmic dimensions, and drama with unsettling implications in A New Saint for a New World; Luke Harlan (*16) for the combination of movement, music, intense dialogue and strong characterizations in The Brothers Size; and . . . Dustin Wills (*14) for the challenging presentation and darkly comic tone of drama queens seduced by death behind closed doors but bare windows in The Maids.

Finally, for overall Production, which means having the wherewithal to make this thing happen, as enablers and aider-abetters, the producers and dramaturgs of the shows that impressed me most: We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun: Emika Abe (*15), producer, and Helen Jaksch (*15), dramaturg; Have I None: Molly Hennighausen (*15), producer, and Hugh Farrell (*15), dramaturg; A New Saint for A New World: Sally Shen, producer, and Helen Jaksch (*15), dramaturg; The Brothers Size: Alyssa Simmons (*14) and Melissa Zimmerman (*14), producers, and Taylor Barfield (*16), dramaturg; and . . . The Maids: Lauren Wainwright (*14), producer, and Tanya Dean (*14), dramaturg.

Some of those mentioned have completed their time at YSD—best of luck in all you do!—and others have a year or two to go. Thanks to all for their dedication, talent, and spirited engagement with the special performance space that is the Yale Cabaret. And to this year's departing team, Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, Kelly Kerwin, and Shane Hudson, many thanks for a lively season.

Coming soon: a preview of the Yale Summer Cabaret, with Artistic Directors Jessica Holt and Luke Harlan, and Managing Director Gretchen Wright.

See you next year, at the Cab!--with Artistic Directors Hugh Farrell, Tyler Kieffer, Will Rucker, and Managing Director Molly Hennighausen.

Brother's Keeper

The final show of the Yale Cabaret’s 46th season brings it all back home. The play, The Brothers Size, was written by its prize-winning and celebrated author, Tarell Alvin McCraney, while a third-year playwright at YSD, in 2007, and the current production is directed and acted by First Years in the program. The effect is one of demonstrating that the play belongs here, at the Cab. And that’s largely because the three actors in the show—Jonathan Majors, Galen Kane, Julian Elijah Martinez—feel such a strong connection to McCraney’s play. One has the sense that The Brothers Size is a defining text for these actors and they, and director Luke Harlan, do the play all due reverence.

It’s a play of relationships, not only of the two brothers Size—Ogun, the elder (Majors), and Oshoosi (Kane)—and Oshoosi’s former cellmate, Elegba (Martinez), but also of Yoruban gods (Orisha). In the cosmic scheme of things, Ogun and Oshoosi are inseparable brothers, the elder a god of “iron, vehicles, weapons, and war” (according to the playbill by production dramaturg, Taylor Barfield), and the latter a god of hunting. Legba, on the other hand, is that figure common to almost all religions: the trickster, the god of the crossroads, the amorphous figure that has a tendency to mix things up. That’s his role here, too, and one of the interests of the play is how McCraney makes this character—played very seductively by Martinez—both a figure for necessary change but also for danger.

The relation between the brothers is grudging. Majors is very strong in delivering the no-nonsense side of Ogun, who still rides his brother for his two years in prison, and who looks upon him as any boss—Ogun runs a car repair shop—would a feckless, lazy employee. As Oshoosi, Kane has the more difficult role to get across if only because, while we tend to sympathize with the younger brother, we might not trust him either. It helps that Kane gives Oshoosi a true gravitas that makes him seem anything but frivolous and deceitful. Rather than a schemer, he’s a man struggling to figure out what the world might have to offer him. Time inside has given him ambitions that stretch beyond a car shop, even if he might have no idea how to get a start.

Enter Elegba as the kind of character that seems to promise not only an individual worth—praising Oshoosi’s singing voice, for instance—but also the means to shed shackles once and for all. Such freedom takes the shape of, what else, one’s own “ride.” A car to get away in. But in this world—abutting the Gulf of Mexico—“getaway” also means running from the law. Indeed, there’s a great bonding moment among the three men when Elegba characterizes his recent encounter with the local sheriff, a black man who uses his status to condemn just about any other black man he meets. It’s an example of how racism phases into the system to the point that oppression by “the masters” might even extend to one’s own race. In a sense, McCraney is using African archetypes to add dimension to his interrogation of racial stereotypes.

A strength of the latter intention is the music of the play's language and its power as a means of personal expression. All three characters speak in a lyrical manner that owes not a little to August Wilson’s pioneering ability to work everyday speech into a powerful instrument. In McCraney's world, the high and the lowly are on an even playing field and everything is stylized and heightened. The play also boasts a percussion accompaniment by Mike Mills that adds drama and accompanies vigorous set-pieces of movement at strategic moments. Music—specifically Otis Redding’s “(Try a Little) Tenderness”—is used to entertaining effect when the Brothers Size mimic the song like they did as kids. At such times the bond of brothers is strong and it’s that bond that becomes McCraney’s over-riding theme, particularly during Ogun’s aria about his responsibility toward Oshoosi, played with a very affecting sense of assertion, complaint, and pleading by Majors.

The Brothers Size is a play of rich suggestion more than a play of plot. Much of that suggestion comes from the archetypes behind these characters, giving us cause to reflect on their roles in our modern conceptions of ourselves. While these figures are not as familiar in the literary tradition as Greek gods and the like, McCraney makes the case that, for his African-American characters particularly, the brother gods that The Brothers Size recalls have a meaningful ethical dimension.

The play marks a very strong finish for this year’s ambitious Yale Cabaret season, ending not with a whimper, but a bang.

The Brothers Size By Tarell Alvin McCraney Directed by Luke Harlan

Dramaturg: Taylor Barfield; Set: Kevin Klakouski; Lights: Andrew F. Griffin; Sound: Pornchanok (Nok) Kanchanabanca; Costumes: Montana Levi Blanco; Projections: Rasean Davonte Johnson; Associate Projections: Elizabeth Mak; Stage Manager: Anita Shastri; Producers: Alyssa Simmons, Melissa Zimmerman

Yale Cabaret April 24-26, 2014

Saints Alive!

Ryan Campbell, a second-year playwright in YSD, is a ballsy writer. A New Saint for a New World, now playing at the Yale Cabaret, begins with the premise of Joan of Arc returned to earth in 2010 to “have fun and hang out,” to make up for the bad shit that happened to her the first time, back in the 15th century, and it ends with a vision of God, in a cameo by the Big Man himself, confessing he’s a bit at loose ends. Campbell’s play, directed by second-year director Sara Holdren, is equal parts audacious comedy and earnest searching. The opening scene between Joan and her boyfriend, Bott (Aaron Bartz, suitably bemused), smacks of those sit-coms where “the wife” has to explain something, such as “I’m really a witch” (Bewitched) or a spy, or what-have-you. Here, the revelation that she’s really that Joan of Arc inspires comic understatement and characterizations of the French aristocracy and Churchmen that would feel natural in The Sopranos. As Joan, Maura Hooper has an appealing way of beseeching her boyfriend’s suspension of disbelief, in the character of her alias, while at the same time becoming more and more emphatically Joan. It’s a great tour de force of the off-hand casualness of today’s speech meeting the inspired dicta of the Age of Faith.

In some ways, the play never quite recovers from that outrageous opening gambit, but each of its scenes—black-out vignettes more than a continuous play, we might say—has something to offer that extends the story beyond that initial comic exploration. Joan, who got returned to earth on the condition that she not stir up any trouble, can’t help herself. Eventually she’s started another Civil War in these formerly United States. The actual terms of the battle go by a bit quickly, but the gist is that Joan, facing interrogation, has fought for the people against the kinds of power mongers who think they “represent God.” She’s being held in Arizona, so draw your own conclusions. Ariana Venturi does a great job as a chilling captor: it’s like facing capital charges at the hands of your Sunday School teacher. A steelier sense of self-righteousness, matched with meek “doing my duty” candor, would be hard to imagine.

That scene does go on a for a bit, but then there’s another explosion of comedy: Christopher Geary as a pissed-off Archangel forced to visit Joan in her holding cell, accompanied by his graphic-novel-reading sidekick (James Cusati-Moyer). Geary manages to spout exposition with the mounting ire of one who finds the situations he’s describing increasingly maddening, including the info that God has decided to go with a new start-up universe he’s just devised. Seems Earth won’t be his favorite toy for much longer.

Which leads to that new world, Kia, where Joan gets to pass some time in anything but bliss. Though we meet—in a very Dr. Who-ish vision and visitation—Okun (Annie Hägg and Elizabeth Mak), one of the oddly serene double-beings that inhabit this world, and who tries to placate Joan with offers of the goods on demand, once a warrior always a warrior, and our Joan is restless to be up to something more than “hanging out and having fun.”

Finally, looking like a coke-dusted film producer or some other Player, Jeremy Funke, in a special guest appearance, shows up to beseech Joan to play his game, offering intensity, sincerity, and a cosmic sense of detachment. It’s definitely a grand payoff.

Well-cast, well-played, with a versatile set (Jean Kim, Izmir Ickbal) that looks like bargain-basement Star Trek and costumes (Fabian Aguilar) of tacky splendor, New Saint is fun to look at as it jabs at our modern lack of belief and hope, giving us a gutsy heroine aching to achieve something in a universe that may be rather less hieratic than it was in the Middle Ages. And, like other after-worldly comedies we could mention, New Saint gets its laughs from the incongruity between our suppositions about the Grand Scheme and the way it actually tends to play out. More of that “we get the afterlife we deserve”—which now includes “after-earth” and other universes—which has been somewhere at the heart of the whole problem of how to live righteously, in principio.

An amusing, irreverent, and relevant little gem for the Easter season.

A New Saint for a New World By Ryan Campbell Directed by Sara Holdren

Dramaturg: Helen Jaksch; Set: Jean Kim, Izmir Ickbal; Lights: Oliver Wason, Caitlin Smith Rapoport; Sound: Sinan Zafar; Costumes: Fabian Aguilar; Projections: Joe Moro; Technical Director: Alix Reynolds; Stage Manager: Sally Shen; Producer: Sally Shen

Yale Cabaret April 17-19, 2014

Hotel California

OMG what an energetic show! The Mystery Boy, currently playing at the Yale Cabaret, is director/actor Chris Bannow’s adaptation of a novel by Jacqueline Weaver, his 11 year-old sister, a show short on logic but long on wildly imaginative interactions and adventures. Staged very cunningly by Bannow and Helen Jakcsch, the show is like a master class in how to put on a play where all characters are onstage all the time and all necessary prop wrangling and costume changes take place before our eyes—though you’ll have to be attentive to catch it all.

The story starts, with all cast members taking round-robin turns in the hot seat to read from the text, with the rom-com possibilities of girlhood and “the boyfriend code,” and quickly shifts from doubts about the “too good to be true” boyfriend to the travails of what is real and what isn’t. Crammed with a host of horrific possibilities, the show becomes a dizzying dash through the psyche of a girl on the edge. Her only constant companion in all this is her smartphone, which seems to never let her down. Justin, the first boyfriend, who almost loses her through his dim sense of how to carry on a text conversation, becomes her stalwart support as well, though he has to be one of the most amorphous characters ever.

The play’s goal seems to be to keep the audience as “confizzled” as its lithe protagonist, Lola (Ashton Heyl), running madly from romantic scene to sinister scene and back again. Along the way are less than comforting run-ins with her mother (Jaksch), her waffle-chomping brother (Ashley Chang), and zips up and down the elevator (she’s staying in a hotel California on a trip, in more ways than one, from Oregon) in search of the elusive thirteenth floor. Oh, and did I mention the sound effects are also performed onstage and seem to act almost as commentary. The “pings” of text messages are particularly effective.

As Lola, Heyl is breathless, wide-eyed, and probably any young girl’s dream of what she’ll look like one day. She keeps the play in focus, for all its leaps, by never losing her Nancy Drewish, this will all make sense in the end gumption. The able support comes from cast members willing to become whatever is necessary. Who can play a romantic interest that becomes a bestie (BFF) that begins to transform, through make-up, dress, and wig, into a best girlfriend (BGF)? Dustin Wills, that’s who, while also setting the record for the number of times one can run upstairs, through the studio and down the backstairs to simulate someone running from Oregon to California. And as “the Mystery Boy” himself, Phillip Howze is hilarious as possible ghost, possible killer, possible threatening romantic attachment, and all CA slacker no matter what.

There are squirt guns, ray guns, the incredible shifting table that does everything but levitate, and any number of laughs, references, and hair-breadth escapes that will likely have you—or the young-at-heart amongst us at least—ROFLMAO. A word on the dialogue: it’s rife with the text-message terms and phrases that are sometimes interpreted and sometimes not, adding a note of authenticity to the entire odyssey because, y’know, if someone texts it, it must be true. If you like B movies and the flutter of first romance, this show’s for you.

And what happens next? Maybe Lola should go online so we can follow her future adventures on Twitter. #girluninterrupted

The Mystery Boy Conceived by Chris Bannow Directed by Chris Bannow and Helen Jaksch

Ensemble: Chris Bannow, Ashley Chang, Ashton Heyl, Phillip Howze, Helen Jaksch, Dustin Wills; Set: Alexander Woodward; Lights: Joey Moro; Sound: Kate Marvin; Costumes: Sophie von Haselberg; Technical Director: Scott Keith; Stage Managers: Ryan M. Davis, Taylor Barfield; Producer: Kee-Yoon Nahm

Yale Cabaret April 3-5, 2014

Fighting City Hall

Timothy J. Guillot’s We Fight We Die, directed by Jiréh Breon Holder, at the Cab this weekend, can be accused of the old “bait and switch.” It begins as what seems to be a mythopoeic rendering of a street artist, Q (Julian Elijah Martinez), complete with a chorus in masks (Isabel Richardson, Andrew Williams, Taylor Barfield, Emily Zemba) sounding assertive couplets, then becomes something much less interesting, though well-intentioned. The best part of the play is that opening as we see Q making epic-scale graffiti art while the cops are closing in, the chorus is commenting, and the projections by Yale School of Art students flash across an eye-catching set (Jean Kim) of mirrors and cinderblocks and painted shapes and slogans.

Guillot’s idea of where to take this tale is straight to clichéville, with Bradley Tejeda doing all he can with Wits, the loveable, doting, simple-minded sidekick patented by Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause, and Chalia La Tour, trying even harder to do something with her role as Evil Bureaucrat, or Mayor. You know before the night is out there will be revelations of domestic violence or some other familiar trope of the hell that inspires the reckless flight of the rare artist, especially the kind that has to shoulder socio-economic grievances. Those grievances should be enough to fuel the anger and art of Q, but, no, we need soap-opera melodrama to top it off.

Along the way you may find yourself wondering about things like: why Q, who very reluctantly accepts a community service art project to stay out of jail, makes it all about Wits, then doesn’t level with the guy; and why Wits, shut out of that place wherein he did find much favor, should go to his bro’s enemy to strike a deal. It all seems an excuse to give the Mayor more speeches as if they actually say something. Q and the others speak in couplets except when they don’t, and it would be great to have a bit more of Q representing. Instead he becomes a sort of conscience-stricken con-man, conning his brother, conning the Mayor, and bringing down tragedy upon himself.

This is one of those Cab shows where, if you can ignore the script, you can still find things to admire. I’ve already mentioned that great set backdrop, and the playing space is spare but effective, with just enough sense of the ruins of a classical past mixing with the ruins of our casuistical present. The art projections (Rasean Davonte Johnson) and the work of Yale School of Art students—Devon Simoyama, Quinn Gorbutt, Jordan Casteel, and Awol Erizku—add much visual interest, as does Joey Moro’s Lighting. Martinez’s performance is well-choreographed, with very expressive body language and voice mannerisms that are ultimately the best part of the role. And Tejeda is nothing if not memorable as Wits, the role that is the heart of the play, which Tejeda plays with a convincing naturalness.

More naturalism and fewer efforts at artful vocabulary would help We Fight We Die, a fantasy about street artists that aims to be a thought-provoking piece about community art, censorship, art’s outsider authority, and other matters to stimulate classroom discussion, but, to my mind, gives short shrift to effective dramatic situations.

We Fight We Die By Timothy J. Guillot Directed by Jiréh Breon Holder

Dramaturg: David Clauson; Set: Jean Kim; Lights: Joey Moro; Sound: Gahyae Ryu; Costumes: Sydney Gallas; Projections: Rasean Davonte Johnson; Technical Director: Samantha Lazar; Stage Manager: Steven Koernig; Producer: Annie Middleton; Yale School of Art Consultant: Jordan Casteel; Featured yale School of Art Muralist: Devan Shimoyama; Featured Yale School of Art Graffiti: Quinn Gorbutt, Jordan Casteel; Artists: Devan Shimoyama; Awol Erizku

Yale Cabaret March 27-29, 2014

Cafe Rrrwha?

You know the drill: one age’s rebellion is another age’s nostalgia act. That’s in popular culture. In the fine arts, it tends to be: one age’s rebellion is another age’s academic assignment. In the pop world, nothing ages as fast as the parental generation’s youth; in the fine arts, it’s all a bit like the nefarious character played by John Huston in Chinatown (1974) says: “Politicians, old buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” In the fine arts, it’s academic study that confers respectability. Dada, pataphysics, cubists, Theater of the Absurd, Theatre of Cruelty, the Beats—they’re all in museums and on syllabi. And what gets lost, often, is what made it all so exciting in the first place. Enter The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion, the show currently playing at the Yale Cabaret, conceived and directed by dramaturgy student David E. Bruin, an effort to stage early works by María Irene Fornés and Edward Albee—darlings of theater and drama coursework—as though Greenwich Village were still inhabited by bohemians and not pop culture elites. We’re not at the Yale Cab, we’re at Café Ubu (named after Alfred Jarry’s comic-absurdist-tragic figure) and, as the dated posters and portraits on the walls of Reid Thompson's set will tell you, it’s around 1962. JFK hasn’t been assassinated yet and the Beatles are still in Liverpool.

It’s to the credit of Bruin and his cast that they play the material—including the introductory bits that include some squabbling about a petition to stop that freeway extension Robert Moses is planning for the Village—straight, without any hint of ‘beatnik’ send-ups. The point is, one quickly gathers, the drama student of today might well be pining for the days before theatrical fellowships and “courses on X”—the days when the likes of Albee and Fornés hung out in collectivities that were already looking back to ad hoc artist congeries like dada and other manifesto-spouting “movements.” Remember when it wasn’t art if you got paid for it? And it wasn’t for a grade either. Hey, kinda like Yale Cabaret . . .

Crazy Shepherds is an instructive and entertaining evening. Plays like Fornés’ The Successful Life of 3 and Albee’s The Sandbox should resist even blackbox staging. These are plays for a cabaret, a café, a living room, almost. Maybe a playground’s actual sandbox (do those still exist?) for the latter. Bruin and company rightly grasp that to do such work justice you have to be willing to go back to its time to see it as it might have been. Historians of the arts have to do this; theater audiences much less, and it’s great to see knowing dramaturgs and others giving it a shot and taking us along with them.

And you certainly get your money’s worth: not only Successful Life and Sandbox, but also a romp through a truncated take on Jarry’s Ubu roi (with a very spirited Ubu from Brendan Pelsue) and a performance piece featuring bits from Part III of Howl. Annelise Lawson, reciting, is the star of the evening as she also plays a man (who imagines himself as Zorro at one point) in Successful Life, Ubu’s queen in Ubu roi, and, very effectively, the old woman in Sandbox, as well as going into electroshock convulsions for the Howl recital (Howl is dedicated to Allen Ginsberg’s fellow inmate at Columbia Psychiatric Institute, Carl Solomon, who did receive electroshock treatment at Rockland State Hospital).

Elsewhere there’s tasteful violin accompaniment by Eli Epstein-Deutsch and atmospheric vocalizing by Jenelle Chu, who also plays the woman in Successful Life, a ditzy symbol of female emptiness—or is that an empty symbol of feminine ditziness—while Lawson and Pelsue (the latter in a mode reminiscent of Dick York on Bewitched) enact an absurdist’s take on “masculine rivalry” (yes, that was once a buzz term). Chu is also a patient “mommy” to Pelsue’s “daddy” as they wait for granny (Lawson) to give up the ghost in Sandbox. The plays by Fornés and Albee both demonstrate the phase of incipient genius, still. And the evening is best if you can forget you’re watching YSD students playing at their grandparents’ rebellion and imagine you’re watching amateur theatricals reinvent theater.

At the end of the evening, a hat is passed, but, rather than pitching in, the audience is asked to extract fortune-cookie-like one-liners. Many in the audience, no doubt, won’t realize the lines are taken from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” (c. 1790, following the French Revolution); “everything old is new again,” as the song says. And some things are so innovative they can never become conventional.

The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion Conceived and directed by David E. Bruin Featuring: Maria Irene Fornes’ The Successful Life of 3 and Edward Albee’s The Sandbox

Cast: David E. Bruin, Jenelle Chu, Eli Epstein-Deutsch, Annelise Lawson, Brendan Pelsue, Gretchen Wright; Dramaturg: Phillip Howze; Set: Reid Thompson; Lights: Andrew F. Griffin; Composer/Sound: Pornchanok Kanchanabanca; Costumes: Asa Benally; Stage Manager: Will Rucker; Producer: Melissa Zimmerman

Yale Cabaret March 20-22, 2014

Ordeal

Since the start of the current semester, the Yale Cabaret has been on a roll. Each week has given audiences another provocative offering. This weekend the play is Yaël Farber’s He Left Quietly, which dramatizes the ordeal of Duma Kumalo, an inmate condemned to death row in apartheid South Africa for an act of mob violence in which he did not participate. Rather, he was arrested and condemned for political rather than criminal reasons. Kumalo served three years, awaiting death and enduring the dehumanizing and humiliating treatment of his captors, only to be reprieved, due to public pressure, from hanging (he had already been measured for the noose and his coffin) less than 24 hours before his time. After another four years he was released, only to experience the stigma of being a former prisoner who was never cleared of the crime. As originally staged, from 2002 until Kumalo’s death in 2006, He Left Quietly featured Kumalo himself. The play was produced as a docu-drama, with Kumalo telling his own scripted story while a professional actor would play “Young Duma,” acting out, mostly in mime, the events Kumalo describes, and a female actor would play “Woman”—a part that at times represents Farber herself, at other times the agents of the government, or a narrative voice. As staged at the Cabaret, directed by Leora Morris, all three parts are played by second-year actors at YSD.

Playing Duma, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II creates a sense of a man who has come through a harrowing ordeal both wiser and humbler. He begins by asking “how many times can a man die” and when the actual moment of death occurs. The main thrust of the show is not, as we might assume, indignity and political outrage, but rather the kind of insight that comes from having faced death and lived. In presenting his experiences as theater, Duma seems to have gained a philosophical detachment that makes him a benign narrative presence recounting what comes to seem a ritual cleansing: stripping away the accoutrements of the everyday—a scene in which Young Duma buys a pair of stylish shoes that, unknown to him at the time, he would wear only once: to be sentenced to death, establishes an “all is vanity” tone that Duma chuckles about; then the humiliations—such as a prison uniform deliberately too small—and the existential reminders, as current inmates wear the uniforms and sleep in the bedclothes, unlaundered, of those already killed; finally, the surrendering even of one’s attachment to life, as Duma says his goodbyes to his father and other loved ones and accepts the unique date with death we all inevitably face. The reprieve comes as almost a taunt, a way of showing that he is indeed a puppet on the strings of the State. Abdul-Mateen maintains such a dignified and knowing air that we see not a man consumed by suffering but rather one ennobled by it.

On a plain wooden stage set with a couple chairs, a primitive toilet, and a pile of shoes, backed with a chain-link face, He Left Quietly makes the most of its ritualistic overtones, even as it gives full drama to Duma’s individual plight. Enacting the range of emotions Duma endures—such as rage at his former lover, wracking sobs at his own fate, and, very movingly, teary solidarity in song for Lucky, a comrade gone to the gallows—Ato Blankson-Wood continues to impress viewers. The final tableau of Blankson-Wood silhouetted against the wall/fence, looking off, acts as a comment on the entire story of Kumalo, as a man who, once imprisoned unjustly then returned to the world of apartheid, must endure years under the shadow of the system that condemned him, while eventually taking control of his story as a tale to be told, and enacted again and again, for audiences. Without Kumalo’s own presence in the play, the play becomes more theater than document, so that we may find in it, as with any play, meanings that go beyond the actual events of Kumalo’s life.

From that point of view, the weakest aspect of the play is the role of Woman. Maura Hooper does a bravura job of playing sympathetic witness, indifferent judge, and other roles, but the part as written comes to seem a bit too contrived, a theatrical touch rather than a direct reflection of Kumalo’s experience—which is never true of Duma’s descriptions or Young Duma’s enactments.

Stark, unsettling, but ultimately redemptive, He Left Quietly makes its audience bear witness to the many unsung songs of political prisoners and unjust executions in our world. It is to Farber and Kumalo’s credit that they can convey both the extraordinary circumstances of Kumalo’s story as well as the more general existential condition we all face, and, most tellingly, the very real threat of political reprisals by the state’s arbitrary violence—never more fearsome and pitiless than when sanctioned by the law of the land.

He Left Quietly By Yaël Farber Directed by Leora Morris

Dramaturg: David Clauson; Set: Christopher Thompson; Lights: Andrew Griffin; Sound: Kate Marvin; Costumes: Fabian Aguilar; Projections: Reid Thompson; Technical Director: Mitchell Cramond, Mitch Massaro; Stage Manager: Sonja Thorson; Producer: Libby Peterson

Yale Cabaret February 27-March 1, 2014

Peek-a-Boo, I See You

Third-year YSD director Dustin Wills will be remembered as the guy who, recently, transformed the viewing experience at the Yale Cabaret. As Co-Artistic Director of the Yale Summer Cabaret 2013, he altered the playing space to create a deep thrust stage, doing away with the tendency to remake the place with every new play. In his production of The Maids, he goes further, creating a room, or rooms, within the room that is the Cabaret. The premise of this production is that the audience are voyeurs and eavesdroppers, positioned outside panes of glass, spying on what happens in someone’s apartment.

Whose apartment? Why, Madame’s. And exactly what are her maids, Solange and Claire, getting up to while their mistress is away? Solange plays Claire and Claire plays Madame. The point of the masquerade is that moment when the two, nearly fainting for a love they dare not give in to, bond in the death of someone—most likely (the real) Madame. Add to this the fact that Solange may or may not want her sister to die (as Madame), or may or may not want to die as her sister (dying with Madame). In other words, the world of The Maids is a world where desire and death (together) are the thrills. All the rest is masquerade.

Wills’ production adds an extra dimension to this dress-up game. Traditionally played with a cast of three female actors, The Maids was conceived by its author, Jean Genet, as enacted by a trio of male actors playing women. In following this intention, Wills’ The Maids becomes a drag show of sorts, with men masquerading as women, but this dimension also makes The Maids an even more complex play because we are watching men playact men who are playacting women. Wills’ cast begins in high camp and I’m sure a few playgoers seeing the play for the first time might assume they are watching a gay sex farce. Chris Bannow (Solange/Claire) and Mickey Theis (Claire/Madame) enact their parts with a kind of personal theatricality that we are encouraged to think is what goes on behind closed doors—and undraped windows—with these two, able to “act out” in private. Privy to this playacting within the play, we can only begin to determine its point as we watch, trying hard to follow the action and the whispers, as the pair, early on glad only in “tighty whities,” move about Kate Noll’s sumptuously tacky interior space.

Bannow and Theis are two of the most accomplished actors in the YSD program, and here they do some of the best work either has done. It’s not easy suggesting the subtle psycho-sexual drama between these two “sisters,” moving through a range of moods—passionate, bitchy, frightened, bullying, beseeching—but that is what this play requires. Bannow’s Solange is who we meet first, performing autoerotic acts solo—the entire play is in some ways a protracted sexual fantasy that is also an examination of power relations between classes and within gender. Much of the struggle here is between Claire and Solange who enact everything from sibling rivalry to lovers’ tiffs to actors’ differences of artistic vision. It’s all in the game. As the prettier one, who should be the object of Madame’s unspoken homoerotic desire, Theis’s performance is something of a revelation, as he finds, as it were, his inner little girl. As Madame, first-year actor Andrew Burnap has a regal height and a distracted air, but doesn’t quite seem the mistress of this threesome.

About the staging: Wills’ decision to enclose the playing space stems from his view that sight-lines in the Cab are always a problem. Certainly there is rarely the full frontal presentation common to most theaters. Here, the Cab’s strongest feature—the fact that the audience and the players occupy the same space—is obviated in striking fashion. Bold, innovative, the design for The Maids makes a drama out of our efforts to see the drama. What you see at the Cab is often dependent on your vantage point but, here, some vantages afford a view of the action on camera, as though watching a surveillance stream.

No more telling staging of how we pry—the idea of our age as one lacking in any sense of privacy is common—could be imagined. The implications about private life and the public imagining of intimacy provide a layer of suggestion to The Maids that goes beyond the old upstairs/downstairs dichotomy that can seem a bit stuffy by now. Inspired and arresting, The Maids is unsavory and seductive, making us all somewhat suspect, like people watching other people watch other people have sex.

The Maids By Jean Genet Directed by Dustin Wills

Dramaturg: Tanya Dean; Set: Kate Noll; Lights: Oliver Wason; Sound: Tyler Kieffer; Costumes: Hunter Kaczorowski; Technical Director: Rose Bochansky; Stage Manager: Molly Henninghausen; Producer: Lauren Wainwright; Creative Consultants: Michelle McGregor, Sophie von Haselberg; Sound Mixer: Sinan Zafar; Carpenters: Nick Vogelpohl, Sean Walters

The Yale Cabaret February 20-22, 2014

A Room of One's Husband's Own

Carole Fréchette’s The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs, directed by Cole Lewis and currently playing at the Yale Cabaret, plays upon not only the audience’s likening the play’s situation to the tale of Bluebeard but upon its characters doing so as well. While having free reign of a thirty-plus room mansion, Grace (Chasten Harmon) knows that her rich husband’s request that she never enter the little room up the hidden stairs recalls the story of Bluebeard. Her husband, Henry (Ryan Campbell), knows this as well and is disposed to joke about it, while remaining adamant about forbidding her entry to that one little room. In other words, Fréchette asks us to consider that, just because something is like something we read, that doesn’t mean it’s not really happening. But what is really happening? That may not be so easy to determine. Our entry into this world is through Grace, who Lewis and set designer Adrian Martinez Frausto place in the center of the playing space on a raised platform, as she acts out for us her temptation and her misgivings. Along each side of this platform are long banquet tables beneath chandeliers, very reminiscent of a kind of “Beauty and the Beast” set, so that we may expect some dark secret or special charm or horrible truth lurking in that little room (staged as a trapdoor in the ceiling).

At the head and foot of each banquet table, at which the audience members sit, are placed the other principals of the play. At one end sits Grace’s sister Anne (Elia Monte-Brown), a rather self-righteous worker against the ills of the world who belittles Grace’s materialistic marriage; at the other end sits Henry. On the other table, Jenny (Mariko Parker), Henry’s faithful housemaid sits, and, at the other end, Joyce (Elivia Bovenzi), mother of Anne and Grace, who is beside herself with delight at Grace’s marriage. Thus we have a very interesting and suggestive game of diagonals crossing at the heart of the space where Grace goes through her dark nights of the soul.

In Grace’s mind play conversations with Joyce, telling her to obey Henry and to not look a gift horse in the mouth, much less into a secret chamber; and with Anne, who mainly berates her for becoming yet another possession of a man she barely knows. Indeed, Henry is a rather unknowable character, the kind of symbol of masculinity that one minute showers her with kisses and flowers and the next stamps his foot and raises his voice (or brandishes an ax) when she gives too much attention to that one room.

The situation of the play is artfully staged in this production, and the mounting tension works well as each entry by Grace into the forbidden room becomes more harrowing, with effective use of darkness, sound effects, music, and dirt—the latter leaving a physical trace of Grace’s every trespass. What does she find in the room? The answer to that question is not so easy to give and that’s what keeps our interest—that, and what Henry will do when he finds out. For though Grace describes her experiences in the room, we don’t see any of what she claims to find. The fact that one of the rooms of the house is decorated “Vienna, 1900,” is a wry comment on the kinds of Freudian spaces we might expect Grace to be investigating.

So, yes, there is a psychological dimension to all this—what drives someone to do the one thing some patriarchal figure or other forbids. We can think of Eve as the figure for such trespass, but there’s also the fact that those “voices” of mother and sister are the very crutches apt to undermine that “cleaving to one’s partner” that marriage expects. In other words, Grace doesn’t only disobey Henry, she also betrays him by seeking help from others outside the marriage—this includes, astonishingly, the housekeeper, who of course betrays her to the Master (perhaps Grace needs to see next week’s Cab show The Maids to have a better feel for what she might expect from her maid when it comes to loyalty).

Questions—apt enough for a Valentine’s Day weekend show—about trust in relationships and the moral ambiguity of “one’s own space” is certainly sounded in all this (comparable matters like passwords to email and other accounts might flit through the audience’s mind at such moments, to say nothing of ‘girl’s’ or ‘guy’s’ nights out), but Fréchette has other things in mind that might be said to have more to do with Jane Eyre than with Bluebeard or The Beast and his Beauty. The “madwoman in the attic” of Rochester’s house was the figure that brought the house down, with, in Jean Rhys’ hands, the implication of colonial misdeeds in the backstory. The misdeeds figured in the attic of Fréchette’s house have much to do with Anne’s critique of her sister’s lifestyle, so that Henry, however blameless he is in the Bluebeard scenario, will never be blameless in Anne’s view of the world we live in.

The idea that Grace is not blameless either is figured largely by the somewhat cliché manner with which she courts Jenny, giving her jewelry and paying compliments about her skin. In fact, the Jenny subplot (if it can be called that) relies heavily on a Victorian sense of mistress-master-and-maid, while Joyce is a caricature of a social-climbing mother living vicariously through her daughter. Which is a way of saying that three of the four figures surrounding Grace’s central drama of conscience are very minor and barely articulated.

The real struggle is between Anne and Grace, and Elia Monte-Brown gives Anne a natural, easy-going moral superiority that only occasionally becomes strident and holier-than-thou; as Grace, Chasten Harmon delves deep to pull up the kind of cathartic power that convinces us her character’s mental and spiritual health is at stake. Center stage in this show is a woman wrestling with her demons and Harmon delivers—would that the playwright had delved a bit deeper to make those demons more distinctive.

The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs By Carole Fréchette Directed by Cole Lewis

Composer/Musician: Jenny Schmidt; Stage Manager: Avery Trunko; Dramaturg: Dana Tanner-Kennedy; Producer: Charles Felix; Set: Adrian Martinez Frausto; Costumes: KJ Kim; Lights: Oliver Wason; Technical Director: Lee O’Reilly

Yale Cabaret February 13-15, 2014

Back to the CAB

Last weekend the Yale Cabaret offered its second-ever Yale School of Drag—memorable for many things, including Lupita Nyong’o drag, but if you missed it, then you missed it. And if you saw it, far be it from me to tell you what you saw. This week the Cab is back with the first of the eight shows that continue the second part of the 2013-14 Season. Artistic Directors Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, and Kelly Kerwin have arrived at an interesting mix of shows. Five are pre-existing plays, two are never-before-seen productions, and one is a mixture: a devised setting for known pieces (a bit like Radio Show in the fall).

The first three shows are scheduled beginning this week and for the next two weeks, then a two-week break, three more shows, a week dark, and then the final two. Got it? Here’s what’s coming:

Cab 11 is The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs, proposed by 2nd-year Set Designer Adrian Frausto (whose excellent work on Hedda Gabler closed recently) and directed by 3rd-year Director Cole Lewis, whose varied and unsettling thesis show The Visit was offered in the fall. The play, running for the Valentine's Day weekend, looks at the darker side of romance with a revisiting of the Bluebeard tale of the wealthy man who marries a woman and gives her everything, except . . . she can’t go into that room at the top of the stairs. If your Valentine is the kind who loves a good scare, then this is the place to be. And when was the last time the Cab offered a thriller based on tension and suspense? Written by Canadian playwright Carole Fréchette, the play, Dibo promises, will offer an unusual configuration of the Cab playing space and, with its theme of trust in romance, is perhaps all-too apropos for Valentine’s Day. February 13-15

Next comes Jean Genet’s psychological drama The Maids, proposed by 3rd-year Director Dustin Wills, Co-Artistic Director of Yale Summer Cabaret 2013, whose startlingly unusual Peter Pan played in December. The play, which usually takes place among three women—the mistress and her two maids—will be played by three males, “performing rituals of gender,” according to Dubowski, within a staged space constructed by Kate Noll with sound design by Tyler Kieffer. The idea is to present us with a space full of mirrors and different lines of sight so that the audience is placed in the roles of voyeurs and eavesdroppers, spying on what the maids get-up to behind the scenes. Mainstays of the Summer Cab 2013, Mickey Theis and Chris Bannow, will be joined by first-year actor, Andrew Burnap. February 20-22

The third show before the break is He Left Quietly, proposed by 1st-year Director Leora Morris, a play by Yaël Farber about Duma Kumalo, a man sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit in apartheid South Africa. Kumalo’s story, which involves a stay-of-execution delivered on the day the death sentence was to be carried out, followed by another four years of incarceration for a total of 7 years in prison, is a story of a man’s spirit triumphing over unspeakable deprivations. The show, which features three 2nd-year actors, Ato Blankson-Wood, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Maura Hooper, returns us to the dark realities of apartheid South Africa and a search for justice. February 27-March 1

After two dark weeks, the Cab will return with The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion, a partly devised piece proposed by 1st-year Dramaturg David Bruin. The show will transform the Cab into a Greenwich Village basement in the early 1960s where beatniks and bohemians gather to check out two one-acts by two of their own: Edward Albee and María Irene Fornés. The production takes us back to when these darlings of the theatrical world were still “up-and-coming” and where the surroundings for the play are part of the play in a time of porous conceptions of theater. March 20-22

Cab 15 is We Fight We Die by Long Island-born playwright Timothy J. Guillot and directed by 1st-year playwright Jiréh Breon Holder; the play looks at the fate of the work of graffiti artist Q in his tussle with City Hall, which aims to stamp out his form of art. With a Greek chorus rapping to us about the struggle and original works of art by MFA students in the Yale School of Art, the show provides an interesting collaboration between art forms and media that should be aurally and visually challenging, and, with the recent obliteration of 5Pointz in Long Island City, very timely. March 27-29

Next comes an unusual devised piece from 3rd-year actor and Co-Artistic Director of Summer Cabaret 2013, Chris Bannow. The source material: The Mystery Boy, Bannow’s sister’s original 126-page novel, written two years ago when she was 11. With 2nd-year dramaturg Helen Jaksch (seen in the fall as M in Crave) co-directing, the ensemble cast will be put through their paces with a love triangle, adventures involving the Mafia, vacation romance, and the various pleasures and perils of social media as the lingua franca of our current pre-teen world. April 3-5

2nd-year playwright Ryan Campbell—his Dead Ends was a studio play this past fall—offers his own A New Saint for a New World, directed by 2nd-year director Sara Holdren, who directed Tiny Boyfriend in the fall. The premise: Joan of Arc wants to return to earth; God finally agrees on the condition that she not start any wars or revolutions. Conceived as “a real big play for a small room,” Saint considers the possibilities for faith in 2014 NYC and the frustrations faced by a heroic crusader forbidden to crusade. April 17-19

Cab 18, the last of the season, might be a somewhat obvious choice: The Brothers Size by Tarell Alvin McCraney, the YSD graduate playwright who recently won a Yale Windham-Campbell Writing Prize and a MacArthur “genius” Award in the same year. Three 1st year actors, Jonathan Majors, Julian Elijah Martinez, and Galen Kane proposed the play, written while McCraney was a third-year at YSD, and made their case that it’s a play they have an urgent need to enact due to their personal histories and the unique opportunity offered by the Cab. Directed by Luke Harlan, the play is the story of two brothers—Ogun runs a car-repair shop, the other, Oshoozi, recently released from prison, comes to work for him—and a third man, Elegba, also come from jail, who visits to bring Oshoozi a gift. Set in the bayou country of Louisiana and involving music and African myths, the play should end the Cab’s 46th Season with a strong finish as YSD pays tribute to one of its own. April 24-26

So, that’s what you can look forward to in the weeks ahead. See you at the Cab!

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven, CT

Season 46 Co-Artistic Directors: Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, Kelly Kerwin Managing Director: Shane Hudson

Just Girls

The new play opening tomorrow night at the Yale Repertory Theatre, The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls, was written by Meg Miroshnik who graduated from Yale School of Drama in 2011. The production is not a world premiere because Miroshnik’s first stop after leaving Yale was Atlanta where, as a recipient of the Alliance/Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Award, she was a resident for a year, during which time The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls was staged at the Alliance Theatre in 2012. Miroshnik had actually written the play before her final project at YSD, The Tall Girls, which was featured in the Carlotta Festival here in 2011, and that play will receive a professional staging at the Alliance this March, as part of the 10th anniversary celebration of the Kendeda Award. Both plays Miroshnik describes as “coming of age” stories, and both have in common—with “girls” in their titles—a focus on young women. Tall Girls, about a high school girls basketball team, has a single male role and Russian Girls has an all-female cast.

The story concerns a Russian girl, Annie, who returns to Moscow—from LA—in 2005, to brush-up on her language skills. She finds a Russia transformed by the trappings of capitalism (this is before the global economic downturn) where young women dominate. Miroshnik says that, at the time, life expectancy for Russian males was age 57, so that her perception (Russian Girls derives from time Miroshnik spent in Moscow in that period) was of a city overrun by “hyper-feminine women, considering themselves as commodities in the booming consumer culture.”

Against this boom backdrop, Russian Girls looks at the way fairytales contribute to female identity, exploring “character archetypes” as well as “comedy stereotypes.” Situations such as encountering a girl-eating witch or having a boyfriend who is a bear are part of the matters on hand. Miroshnik’s intention is to begin with an opening that is “80% real, 20% fairytale” then switching it so that fairytale dominates reality about 80%-20%. This transformation involves highly theatrical elements that clearly are out of this world as well as absurdist details from newspapers that audiences may be surprised to learn are actually true. In other words, Russian Girls suggests that reality is never quite as obvious as we like to think it is.

But what of the reality of the Russians depicted? An interesting development that took place between the play’s initial workshop reading in Paula Vogel’s playwriting class at YSD and its first staging at Alliance was the opportunity to see the play given a studio presentation—in Moscow, in Russian! In 2010, Miroshnik went back to Moscow and the show was translated and, she says, greatly altered for use by a Russian company. Seeing the show in Russian, Miroshnik began doing “edits for speed” and was able to test her vision of Russian girls against real Russian audiences.

And will this staging be different than the one at Alliance? Quite a bit, Miroshnik says: director Rachel Chavkin, two-time OBIE-Award-winner who directed the premiere of Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, has “a radically different vision of the play,” and, for starters, the Russian girls are now members of a punk band. Enter Chad Raines, YSD grad, rock-band mainstay (for his own band The Simple Pleasures and, for much of 2012-13, as guitar and synthesizer on world tour with Amanda Palmer) and Critics Circle Award-winning sound design man, to concoct songs for the group and to do that voodoo that he do so well. The Rep’s Russian Girls is bound to rock.

Whether in workshop, at Alliance, in Russian, or in rock, Miroshnik’s play seems to be showing both endurance and a certain useful malleability. While the Rep staging will no doubt be a technical marvel in many ways, the play itself seems adaptable to many kinds of spaces. Miroshnik mentions that her mentor, Paula Vogel, would point at the “third production” of a play as the point at which the playwright relinquishes it and lets it have fully a life of its own. Miroshink laughs pleasantly when I suggest that perhaps in the not-to-distant future her play will be staged by YSD students—the Yale Cab’s new season ends with a play by celebrated YSD playwriting grad Tarell Alvin McCraney. Writing plays strong in roles for women, as Miroshnik does, seems not a bad strategy for revivals.

And what’s next? Miroshnik wouldn’t give too many details about her current projects, except to say that she has been at work on a play that’s more of a character study and less an ensemble piece as both the Girls plays are, and to say that each of her plays requires “a different engine”—such as basketball or fairytales—to drive the action. Like Vogel, Miroshnik is a firm believer in “stretching or exercising a different muscle with each new play.”

In any case, it’s not too much of a stretch to expect that The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls will be a fascinating and entertaining debut of Meg Miroshnik’s work at the Yale Rep.

The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls By Meg Miroshnik Directed by Rachel Chavkin

Yale Repertory Theatre January 31-February 22, 2014

Classroom Self-Defense

The latest Yale Cabaret offering, The Defendant, addresses the quality of life of the underprivileged—in this case, students our educational system is failing. The play, by third-year YSD actress Elia Monte-Brown, is based on the playwright’s experiences as a teacher in the New York school system, a background that injects a realism into the play, even as the play moves a bit tendentiously from Welcome Back, Kotter-style classroom hi-jinx to something much more dramatic. The play begins with charges against “the defendant”—Idea (Chalia La Tour)—that almost drop into the background, but for dark reminders along the way that set-up the devastating finale. The cast, consisting of first year YSD students making their Cabaret debuts, fully enters into their roles of spirited youths trapped in a low expectation school, facing yet another substitute teacher. Serena (Melanie Field) is a bit out of her element in trying to fill in for a recently departed biology teacher—Mrs. Brown—who called one student a sociopath and then fled. But Serena has her heart in the right place and is struggling to do right by her charmingly dysfunctional charges.

Idea is the most promising student, a dynamo of personality who strives to over-achieve. As her boyfriend Ruben (Julian Elijah Martinez) reminds us, over-achieving is easy in a school that asks for little more than busy work, and yet Serena still hopes to affect the students’ futures. Her tirade when Idea is arrested for a provoked assault that ends in the death of Dean Knowls grips us with the anger that Monte-Brown infuses into the speech. Serena’s boyfriend, a lawyer (Aubie Merrylees), injects a sense of legal practicality into the scene, which lets the question of violence and retribution hang unresolved. We eventually see the scene in which the predatory Dean (Merrylees), demanding the favors Idea once gave, meets with death; her act of violence is set-up by several stories in which Idea, the victim of domestic rape early in her life, flips out to the shock of her peers.

Idea’s justification is clear enough, and the enormity of her act is tragic. This is what overwhelms Serena and Ruben, and plunges the other students into despondency. The situation is almost too much for the play to bear, as most of the time it is a comical exploration of classroom types. As directed by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, the play is very indulgent toward its actors: several are given brief monologues to introduce themselves and provide commentary on the other characters, creating moments of confidence with the audience that do much to make the characters likeable—particularly Jonathan Majors as Kyle, and Shaunette Renée Wilson as Idea’s BFF Diandra, and, very memorably, as Grandma Rose.

More context for the lives of the students would be welcome, as, collectively, they seem to be school-bound personalities even willing to come to class on a Saturday. Teaching biology quickly goes out the window, and Serena has them enacting plays, at some length, and parsing poems, but it’s the lessons that take place between the students that are more interesting—such as the sweetly teen-aged coupling of Idea and Ruben—and Monte-Brown’s ear for the street lingo of her characters provides both amusement and the kinds of wise asides that keep these kids interesting.

Seth Bodie’s set—created wholly of schoolroom chairs—is both sculptural and imposing, effectively lit by Joey Moro to give the whole a sense of a claustrophobic maze these students might never escape from, unless, as with Idea, it is into even more dire incarceration. Fast-moving and played with feeling, The Defendant works hard in a brief compass to amuse, inform and anger its audience, and mostly succeeds.

The Defendant By Elia Monte-Brown Directed by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II

Stage Manager: Carolynn Richer; Dramaturg: Taylor Barfield; Producer: Jabari Brisport; Set: Seth Bodie; Costumes: Montana Blanco; Sound: Tyler Kieffer; Lights: Joey Moro; Technical Director: Matt Groeneveld

Yale Cabaret January 23-25, 2014

Whence is That Knocking?

The Yale Cabaret is back. It opened this weekend with the U.S. premiere of Have I None, a taut, difficult, and entertaining play by Britain’s Edward Bond, directed by Jessica Holt. With a cast of three in a shabby, barely furnished room, the play manages, through dialogue and interactions alone, to create a sense of claustrophobia, dystopia, and lots of other phobias. It’s a play about a grim future in which the government has stepped in to save people from themselves—which translates into our society of luxury being replaced with a society of austerity and “resettlement.” To attain this state of ultimate parsimony, apparently, one of the luxuries dispensed with is the luxury of having a past. Photographs and pictures are not allowed, that much we gather from the dialogue. That’s not to say that the backstory ever becomes completely clear; this isn’t a sci-fi tale of future shock and how the world got that way—Bond seems only interested in giving us the bare bones of this bare-bones world. What he does explore is the effect on humans of whatever status quo they find themselves coping with.

It’s 2077 and a couple, Jams (Aaron Bartz) and Sara (Ceci Fernandez), live, under considerable tension, in their government-issued rooms, with their government-issued table and two chairs (“authority discourages furniture,” it’s said). Jams works on a patrol that goes about “the ruins” to make sure all is as it should be; he witnesses things like an old woman struggling to hang up a picture—strictly forbidden—and, in Reading, a mass “suicide outbreak” during which the residents all walked through the streets holding knives at arms' length before them, until they began to stab and cut themselves mercilessly. Sara, who we meet first, is plagued by sporadic knocking at the door, and no one there when she opens it.

Into this spare domestic space comes Grit (Chris Bannow) who claims he is Sara’s brother. He has walked “months” from the “other side” where there was a suicide outbreak—people throwing themselves off buildings and bridges. He carries a picture he claims shows Sara (whom he calls Sally) and himself when they were children. She denies knowing him. And of course photos are forbidden, so Grit is not only a potential reminder of a past best forgotten, he is also, in traveling with a photo and without a travel document, a sort of renegade. But his most immediate disruption to the life of Jams and Sara is that he sits, severally, in each of their chairs.

The comedy of the play is in the minutia of these domestic tussles over space and possession. Sara says she keeps a diary (though one imagines that too would be forbidden) to note events such as the time she heard her chair scrape—proof that Jams had been sitting in it and got out of it when she came in. Other infractions include the time Sara left the tap running and the time she left her shoes where Jams might trip on them and break his neck. With these exchanges—engagingly vehement and both shocking and absurd—Bond shows us the quality of life under such austerity. If it echoes of life during wartime—with rations and the threat of the Blitz—that’s no doubt because Bond was a child in WWII and the horrors of the future he imagines recall the horrors of a past when death came knocking regularly, in the midst of life as usual.

Holt’s production maintains a firm grip on the play’s tension, and her cast is quite adept at the kind of humor, dark and very British, on view here. It’s a fine line. Bannow’s Grit, for instance, is someone whose life has come apart but who somehow manages to be a forthright fellow. What his aim is, in trying to claim kin, is never stated outright—to Jams he’s a “sick ghost with a disease”—but his presence there occasions a hallucinated scene with Sara, gowned in a cape of spoons that becomes a cape of bones, who tells him she remembers when he had fever as a child and, to her mind, died, though their parents and the doctor were unaware of this. This scene, with Sara crouching beside the sleeping Grit, presents the only tenderness on view in the play—that is until Grit helps the dying Sara to leave the house after she deliberately consumes poisoned soup meant for him.

The strength of the play is in its pacing, letting things settle upon us during lulls, broken-up at any time by shouting fits. In the histrionics we might occasionally lose a key line—Bond’s dialogue is very precise and, though the cast very gamely creates suitable British accents, at times the tonality is a bit off. This seemed to me particularly the case for Jams. Aaron Bartz does an amazing job in a part that provides the forward thrust of almost every scene, full of the verbal energy of a man who will talk aloud to himself and to anyone in earshot, but his Jams seems to me too sensitive. I believe Bond intends a character much more in-keeping with the stereotypical “bobby” or British Constable, so that much of the comic intent depends on this figure’s fetish for control and fear of getting “chopped” for infractions against the code of conduct—he even uses the phase “conduct unbecoming” when refusing to help his dying wife leave the house.

Fernandez gives much dignity and pathos to the role of Sara, her very expressive eyes and hands creating a sense of a woman capable of living a much different sort of life, and her wandering in the ruins attests that her dissatisfaction goes beyond use of her chair behind her back; we should see that Sara’s fierce defense of her rights in the house comes from years under the same roof with Jams—regardless, almost, of what’s going on “out there.” Grit, in bringing with him a phantom past and creating an occasion for poisoning, gives Sara her out, which may be the start of another “outbreak” as Jams looks out the door after her departure and moans “O God it’s worse than Reading.”

A final note, about that title: the playbill quotes a line from Acts 3:6, “Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have I give thee,” but I find another relevant reference in the old riddle that begins “Brothers and sisters have I none…”

Have I None By Edward Bond Directed by Jessica Holt

Stage Manager: Will Rucker; Dramaturg: Hugh Farrell; Producer: Molly Hennighausen; Set: Alexander Woodward; Costumes: Grier Coleman; Sound: Joel Abbott; Lights: Caitlin Smith Rapoport; Technical Director: Justin Bennett

Yale Cabaret January 16-18, 2013

Theater News

This week the Long Wharf’s world premiere of Heidi Schreck’s The Consultant opens officially on Wednesday, January 15. See our preview here. This week as well the Yale Cabaret resumes its 46th season with 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. Jessica Holt, 2nd-year YSD director and Artistic Director for the Yale Summer Cabaret, 2014, will stage the claustrophobic play with stress on Bond's sense of the absurd. January 16-18.

Next week, on January 23, from 5:30 to 8:30, celebrated local theater troupe A Broken Umbrella Theatre will host a fundraiser at the Eli Whitney Museum and unveil details about their latest venture. As usual, the project is an original play based on historical figures, facts, and locales of New Haven. If You Build It, the new play, focuses on inventor A. C. Gilbert to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his most famous creation: the Erector Set. Director Ruben Ortiz, playwright Charlie Alexander, and cast members will present an excerpt of the work in progress.

The build up of the production will be complemented by an evening of treats and toys: Small Kitchen Big Taste will be serving “architectural food,” including slider and mashed potato stations to build-your-own-cupcakes, Thimble Island Brewery will feature locally crafted beers, and ABU's Chrissy Gardner and the Moody Food Trio will provide musical accompaniment. Guests are invited to try their hand at the engineering feat of Erector Set construction along with ABU’s crew of welders, carpenters and electricians.

A Broken Umbrella Theatre has presented site specific works in New Haven for the last five years and enjoyed perhaps their greatest triumph at last year’s Arts and Ideas Festival with Freewheelers. Come out, sneak a peak at their next production, become a patron, and have fun.

For more information, please visit www.abrokenumbrella.org, or contact Rachel Alderman at: 203.823.7988 or rachel@abrokenumbrella.org

Next week as well will see the 10th show of the season at the Yale Cabaret: 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); 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 on the last week of the month, January 31st, previews begin for the Yale Repertory Theatre’s next production: The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls, a world premiere from Whiting-Award winning playwright, and recent YSD graduate, Meg Miroshnik. Miroshnik's play, directed by two-time OBIE-Award-winning director Rachel Chavkin, who previously directed an Off-Broadway production of the celebrated musical Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, is set in 2005 as a twenty-year-old girl named Annie returns to her native Russia. Underneath the glamor of a Post-Soviet Moscow bedecked with high ticket consumer goods, Annie discovers a land of enchantment straight out of a fairytale, with evil stepmothers, wicked witches, and ravenous bears.

The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls opens officially on February 7, and runs til February 22.