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Review of Lewiston at Long Wharf Theatre

Family legacy meets national legacy in Samuel D. Hunter’s low-key play Lewiston, now at the Long Wharf Theatre in its world premiere, directed by Eric Ting. Alice (Randy Danson) and Connor (Martin Moran) are old friends, now roommates, who tend a fireworks stand on a stretch of interstate outside the play’s titular town in rural Idaho. The big issue in their world is when to sell Alice’s last remaining plot of land to the developers who are building condos, and for how much—the duo are hoping for a unit by the pool. Into their humdrum lives arrives Marnie (Arielle Goldman), a backpacking traveler who, it turns out, is Alice’s long-lost granddaughter. And she’s here to stay, tent and all.

Alice (Randy Danson) and Connor (Martin Moran)

The best thing about Lewiston is that Hunter’s dialogue plays things close to the everyday, and there are some unique aspects to the relationships revealed as the play goes along. His characters speak with a believable sense of entire lives already lived, so that when exposition is necessary it comes as one character filling another in. For Alice and Marnie, there’s much that has gone missing—the last time Alice saw Marnie was when the girl, now in her mid-twenties, was 8 or so. There’s a lot of water under the bridge, and there’s a lot of land missing from what Marnie remembers as the family spread, including her childhood home. The land has been in the family since Meriwether Lewis, of the famed Lewis and Clark expedition, settled it.

Marnie (Arielle Goldman)

Director Eric Ting’s clear grasp of how these characters should interact means developments take their time: the coolness between Alice and Marnie keeps finding new reasons for sustaining itself. It’s not a question of grudges so much as a question of expectations. We learn piecemeal the story of Alice’s daughter, Marnie’s mother—whose young voice (played by Lucy Owen) we hear on tapes Marnie plays from time to time, recorded when her mother walked the Expedition trail to the Pacific Ocean—and we see why the two women aren’t quite sure what tone to strike with each other. Marnie isn’t so much settling old scores as trying to find a place to start again, arriving at the very moment when Alice is ready to let it all go.

Connor (Martin Moran) and Marnie (Arielle Goldman)

As Connor, Moran’s role is important as an interested witness and sympathetic helper and a surprised host who extends the more effusive welcome to Marnie. The drama of the play is largely about how people can either shut others out or let them in, so that much of the talk isn’t simply about what happened or what will happen, it’s about whether or not characters will confide or find a shared relation. Marnie, played well with understated intensity by Arielle Goldman, had been in Seattle where she devised and sold an urban farm and seems to have been self-sufficient until now. Randy Danson’s Alice is, as Connor says “a bit prickly,” not willing to be knocked off course by a young person’s sudden need for roots. Though for obvious reasons generational differences can be expected to intrude, they do so as contextual details and not simply for cheap laughs.

Then there’s “Mom,” on the tapes. Voiced with an incredible sense of off-the-cuff authenticity by Lucy Owen, the tapes are mostly played in darkness, making their staging a bit disruptive and their desultory commentary more ambient than dramatic. In the end, an experience told on the tape dovetails rather too neatly with the need for some kind of statement to emerge in what seems ready to be a stalemate, though some life-changing decisions are overtaking everyone by the play’s end.

Alice (Randy Danson)

For visual interest, check out the detailed set by Wilson Chin, complemented by Matthew Richards’ lighting and Brandon Walcott’s sound design, while for figural interest there are the fireworks that tend to act as ironic commentary on the lack of excitement and the limited prospects for amusement in this stretch of the interstate. Lewiston is a thoughtful slice-of-life drama that manages to suggest a Chekhovian sense of how time and change leech from us the things we value, unless we do something about it now.

Lewiston
By Samuel D. Hunter
Directed by Eric Ting

Set Design: Wilson Chin; Costume Design: Paloma Young; Lighting Design: Matthew Richards; Sound Design: Brandon Wolcott; Production Stage Manager: Charles M. Turner III; Casting: Calleri Casting

Cast: Randy Danson; Arielle Goldman; Martin Moran; Lucy Owen

Long Wharf Theatre
April 6-May 1, 2016

Walking the Lion

Review of The Lion at Long Wharf Theatre

Though you might not think it to look at him, slim, blonde, and boyish singer-songwriter Benjamin Scheuer has suffered, and of that suffering he has made a song cycle, or cabaret-style musical, called The Lion, which debuted at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2014, and earned him the 2015 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, and is now at the Long Wharf Theatre.

On stage, it’s just Scheuer, several guitars (one electric, the rest acoustic), some chairs, and a kind of distressed-looking backdrop that could pass for a room in a worn recording-studio or a low-key folk nightclub. The story he has to tell runs the gamut from childhood inspiration—his father, a mathematician, played guitar and made young Ben a toy banjo from a cookie tin, a necktie, and rubber bands—to familial dysfunction, loss, young love found and lost, a very scary and unpleasant disease—Hodgkin Lymphoma—and, ultimately, personal redemption via music, particularly the guitar.

Benjamin Scheuer in The Lion

As such, the show is about the conditions of its own creation. All the songs and Scheuer’s between-song narrations contribute to the unfolding story of how Scheuer became the author and performer of The Lion. It’s a true story, but like all true stories, it has to be adapted to be made the stuff of art. We tend to believe there is some kind of real experience as the basis for the lyrics of most songs we hear—sometimes that connection between the singer and the song is made explicit, at other times there’s more detachment from what’s being told—but The Lion makes sense only as the story of Benjamin Scheuer, its narrator-protagonist. In that light, but for “Weather the Storm,” a song young Scheuer learns from his dad, and the only one here that could inspire a sing-along, it’s not filled with folk songs but rather the kind of first-person songs that tend to be sung by characters in musicals.

But these are also not the kind of catchy, hummable tunes one associates with musicals; the song of The Lion mostly have to have narrative force, and Scheuer is quite adept at finding a way to sing about upsetting experiences. The songs, though, are not just a bid for sympathy. Scheuer strives to make his personal experience exemplary of the kinds of things that can break up families, the kinds of things that go wrong with overly naïve love affairs, the kinds of things that can afflict our health with little warning, and, particularly, the guilt we feel about how we treated our parents and our ongoing resentment of how they treated us.

If that sounds like song-writing as therapy, it should, because at times that’s what listening to The Lion feels like. While listening, we can wonder where the story’s going—will “Ben” be cured of his illness, will he find true love, will his mom stop being so snippy, will he land a big recording contract and show everybody—but, as with any album of related songs you might care to think of, what we’re mainly doing is experiencing each song as its sung and played for us. The intimacy of a solo performer with a guitar has a certain inherent theatricality, and the songs—which are very well-structured—show the variety of Scheuer as singer/musician as well as the many shades of Ben, the guy who seems to keep groping at getting a handle on his life. Except that the songs are the handle the guy they’re about doesn’t quite get. Yet.

Ultimately, that’s what makes The Lion gripping: its candor. To quote a line from a Dylan song: “I know you’ve suffered much, but in this you are not so unique.” The slings and arrows of Ben’s life may be easily comparable to what many have endured, particularly those who write and sings the blues, to say nothing of those who favor tell-all memoirs, but what is unique is getting up night after night to sing that story for the edification of others. Particularly as the heart of the show has to stand in the uneasy space between the early warm and fuzzy evocation of Dad making that cookie-tin banjo and the effort to connect across time with “Dear Dad,” in a song that tries to assuage what can never really be laid to rest.

You have to respect Scheuer for trying, though, with what talents he has. He’s a better guitarist than singer and better singer than actor, but there’s dramatic interest in his ability to recall to mind versions of himself—or of Ben—that can seem quaint or touching or simply clueless. The line that The Lion walks is between the effort to make us share in the hurts and happiness felt by Ben, and, for Scheuer, to find some kind of transcendence by singing his heart out about himself, his dad, his siblings and mother, his old girlfriend, his illness, his music, each night. While not wise and witty about pop star life (and sexual identity) like a fictional musical memoir such as Hedwig and the Angry Inch, The Lion, in its earnest bid for empathy, does approach hard-won insight about the long, strange trip that is life in general and the mystery of other people.

The show’s title comes from a song that asks “What makes a lion a lion?” One of those imponderables that can also be extended to the show itself. What makes The Lion The Lion? Is it the presence of Scheuer himself, or could his part be taken by someone else? If so, the songs transcend their maker; if not, then the show is really all about what it means to be Benjamin Scheuer.

The Lion
Written and performed by Benjamin Scheuer
Directed by Sean Daniels

Scenic Designer: Neil Patel; Lighting Designer: Ben Stanton; Sound Designer: Leon Rothenberg; Costume Consultant: Jennifer Caprio; Production Designer: Dom Ruggiero; Technical Supervisor: Mind the Gap; General Management: Maximum Entertainment

Long Wharf Theatre
January 6-February 7, 2016

Taking the Measure of Shakespeare

The Fiasco Theater’s Measure for Measure begins previews this week at the Long Wharf Theatre’s Claire Tow Stage in the C. Newton Schenck III Theater. First performed by Fiasco in 2013, the Long Wharf production will be the company’s first revival of this play, often considered a bit of a slog in its tale of corruption, strict moral codes, and deus ex machina Duke. On the contrary, Fiasco’s version has been called “charming.”

Fiasco's Noah Brody

Noah Brody, one of the founding members of Fiasco, which formed in 2009 and launched its inaugural production of Cymbeline in 2010, is “honestly thrilled” to be able to remount Measure for Measure for the Long Wharf’s intimate thrust-style theater. When played previously, the show was done in a standard proscenium setting and that means the new version will have to adapt, a challenge that is part of the governing aesthetic of Fiasco. Brody sees this as an opportunity to “reach out” to the audience, stressing that both players and viewers “are in the same place, breathing the same air.”

A cast of six actors plays all the parts in Measure for Measure, with a set that mainly consists of six doors and some benches. It’s a minimalist approach, perhaps, but as Brody says, “when there’s not a lot of money, you concentrate on what you really need,” and that promotes inventiveness, to use everything at one’s disposal and to make the most of it.

As all the members of Fiasco were trained as actors in the MFA program at Brown/Trinity, a key term for their approach is “actor-driven” stagings. What this means, Brody says, is that every production is achieved by the ensemble, and every decision comes from the ensemble. Decision-making is “not hierarchical.” The director—for the Long Wharf production, Brody and Ben Steinfeld are co-directing—“is responsible for leading the conversation,” but does not dictate the approach. And that means the troupe gets to completely rethink their previous decisions about every aspect of Measure for Measure, not only for changes in design determined by the changed space, but also the differences due to the times and the situations that apply to the creative process. “We’ll say, ‘last time we did this: why did we do that? Do we still want to do it that way?’” The “this” could be anything from costumes to blocking to the delivery of a line to cuts and edits in the material.

Since “fun” is not always associated with Measure, often deemed Shakespeare’s darkest, least likable comedy, I had to ask why it was the play they chose. Brody cited the play’s language, its “great scenes” with “wonderful parts to play” for a “uni-generational cast.” Its content—which he characterized as “how to rule a just state”—is thoughtful, particularly in tensions “between the spiritual and secular life.” In his view, much of the darkness of the play comes from productions not seeing how “playful” the text is, whereas Fiasco highlights the “seriousness in the comic relief and the ironies in the serious parts.” “There’s great comedy and seriousness at all times in the same scene and in the same line,” Brody says. Bringing out those nuances, finding the fun in the whole, is one of the aims of the Fiasco approach.

Brody says the Fiasco team didn’t graduate from the acting program with intentions to form their own company. As actors, they’re used to being hired as “a small cog in a large machine.” “You hope to bring something to the vision of a play,” but are rarely in control of what parts you get or the style of the production. And most actors accept that they have “to sink or swim as an individual,” competing for the best parts available. To form a troupe of actors, able to devise and implement their own productions, is a “dream come true,” and moving the show to Long Wharf a “great opportunity” to revisit the production for a new audience, with possibilities for new, surprising events.

Fiasco is far enough along in their development to have learned that putting on new productions and devising new productions are hard to do simultaneously. After this season—which consists of an acclaimed Two Gentlemen of Verona last spring and now Measure in the fall—they will be at work on planning the brand new productions they will be offering in 2016 through 2018. The team’s “core passion,” Brody says, is in classical theater—so far, Shakespeare—and musicals, such as their production of Into the Woods, which won the Lucille Lortel Award for Best Revival of 2015, so they are certainly looking at “more Shakespeare and more musicals” that fit their requirements, and “we’re also looking at Restoration plays,” and are planning their “first original piece” as well as considering stage adaptations of novels.

Whatever the new productions will be, they will be devised by a troupe of actors with no fixed theatrical abode, but driven by a commitment to making theater together, benefiting from the troupe’s familiarity with one another, and to finding their own unique way into a play, providing audiences with memorable productions full of a love of the challenge of discovery.

Measure for Measure, by the Fiasco Theater, begins in previews at the Long Wharf Theatre Wednesday, November 25, and opens Wednesday December 1.

Guilt by Association

Review of Disgraced at Long Wharf Theatre

In the U.S., everyone’s people came from somewhere else. Somewhere back there, whether recently or many generations ago, there lies a place where outsiders were treated as “others”: a “they” who don’t dress, eat, speak, worship, or behave as “we” do. In the U.S., for some, strong identification continues with those in the “old country”; some even bring to this country many of the same customs and they flourish here, putting down “hyphenated American” roots, and celebrating an identity that isn’t simply, generically, “American.” For others, their background is an embarrassment or an association they have tried hard to leave behind, in an effort to “americanize” and assimilate. Sometimes, the civil nature of our generalized American identity suffers major shocks from what most Americans consider “them” “out there”: those other countries and cultures some of us still identify with and that are still an “us.” Then look out.

Ayad Akhtar’s sharply written Disgraced, now playing at the Long Wharf Theatre, directed with great sureness of pacing and staging by Gordon Edelstein, very cunningly makes contentious drama out of the inevitable, American clash between “us” and “them.” Here, the clash isn’t on a battlefield; it occurs in that staple of American drama, the living room, and it’s amongst people who work together, are very articulate and quick-witted, and generally capable of putting differences aside for the sake of a convivial evening. Before we get to that Götterdammerung of a dinner party, there is an important prelude.

Rajesh Bose (Amir), Nicole Lawrence (Emily)

We meet successful New York lawyer Amir (Rajesh Bose) and his wife Emily (Nicole Lawrence), a visual artist, as she sketches him standing in an expensive shirt and jacket and his skivvies in their swanky apartment. She’s been inspired to do his portrait in the manner of Velasquez’s portrait of his assistant, a former slave. That should raise eyebrows right there, but the possible domestic issues in that comparison are smoothed over by the couple’s obvious chemistry. She’s doing it, you see, because Amir was “profiled” in a certain way at a restaurant and impressed her with how he handled it. The doorbell rings and before you can say “Allah,” Amir is being profiled by his nephew, Abe (Mohit Gautam)—formerly Hussein—as someone who should help an imam, imprisoned for allegedly raising funds for the Taliban, because they are both Muslim.

And here’s where Amir—who changed his name to Kapoor (it was Abdullah) and makes the most of the fact that his father was born in India before that region became Pakistan—tries to disavow his background while his wife, who has commenced a series of paintings based on the art of Islam, tries to assert, with the secular detachment of intellectuals, that he should value Islam as she does, as a culture that, like Greece and Rome, can be added to the grab-bag of Western influences. Amir sees it differently, but ultimately, in the interest of family ties or domestic tranquility, does attend the imam’s hearing, though not as counsel. Still, he is quoted in support of the imam in the New York Times, no doubt because he alone, of the battery of attorneys present, “looks like” the imam. His support thus quoted, Amir fears, might raise hackles with the Jewish partners of the firm where he has worked for twenty years and hopes to make partner.

All this is played out with the natural rhythm of a give-and-take where all that seems to be at issue is the right to say “no.” As audience, we tend to sympathize with the put-upon and profiled Amir, and that identification will be tested by what follows.

Mohit Gautam (Abe/Hussein), Nicole Lawrence (Emily), Rajesh Bose (Amir)

Without going into plot points and revelations that come about during a dinner that almost comes to blows on an evening that ends in violence, it is clear that Amir’s conviction that he is not one of “them”—a Muslim, much less an anti-American terrorist or “Islamo-fascist”—becomes harder to sustain in the light of his attempt to protest to his wife and guests—Jory (Shirine Babb), a colleague at the firm, and her husband Isaac (Benim Foster), a curator at the Whitney Museum who has taken on Emily’s work—that the Koran and its teachings are inimical to the cultural smorgasbord they believe in. What begins, on Amir’s part, as an effort to disabuse their naïveté with a hectoring lecture becomes a calling-out, particularly when author Akhtar piles up the indiginities Amir must suffer, coming from both workplace and home (Bose’s balanced performance makes Amir not always likeable but at least understandable).

While some of the blows to Amir’s sense of worth seem, in retrospect, a bit contrived, it’s important to stress how effectively it all works in the moment. And that’s because plot developments come to light though characters playing their respective hands with perfectly structured timing, and because reactions are quick and definite. The play might feel talky but rarely does; instead, it feels like we’re spectators of a verbal sporting event that suddenly gets far too personal. Sooner or later, you’re going to take sides.

Shirine Babbs (Jory), Rajesh Bose (Amir), Nicole Lawrence (Emily), Benim Foster (Isaac)

The cast is uniformly excellent in carrying off Akhtar’s dialogue, with its very sharp transitions from friendly chatter to spousal joshing to personal slurs with a great feel for how to make clear the stakes and to keep it entertaining. Disgraced joins other recent top-notch Long Wharf productions of successful plays—Clybourne Park, Bad Jews—that specialize in uncomfortable confrontations that can arise when people, here with the aid of much alcohol, begin to say what they really think, or try to make distinctions or demand agreement on ethical or ethnic grounds. Akhtar’s play gets at the underside of America’s lip-service to accepting everyone and at the particular tensions that might surface in mixed race gatherings (Isaac is Jewish; Jory, black; Emily, white and blonde) whenever an issue raises its ugly head.

With its handsome set and costumes and its rigorous grasp of how to use every minute of its under 90-minute running time, Disgraced is a gripping night of theater that has much on its mind. Ultimately the play is about how one decides which “us” to remain true to. To be an American is to be a mutt, and the world is dog eat dog.

Shirine Babb (Jory), Benim Foster (Isaac), Nicole Lawrence (Emily), Rajesh Bose (Amir)

Disgraced
By Ayad Akhtar
Directed by Gordon Edelstein

Set Design: Lee Savage; Costume Design: Ilona Somogyi; Lighting Design: Eric Southern; Sound Design: David Van Tieghem; Fight Director: Rick Sordelet; Hair & Wig Design: Charles LePointe; Production Stage Manager: Jeff Brancato; Assistant Stage Managers: Amy Patricia Stern, Michelle Tuite; Casting by Calleri Casting; Photographs: T. Charles Erickson

Cast: Rajesh Bose; Nicole Lawrence; Mohit Gautam; Benim Foster; Shirine Babb

Long Wharf Theatre
October 14-November 8, 2015

The Singing Detective . . . and Suspects

Review of Murder for Two at Long Wharf Theatre

The key insight underlying Murder for Two, now playing at Long Wharf Main Stage in a touring production, is that the characters in your typical whodunit are generally a cast of caricatures, only present to fill out the list of suspects. In this high energy musical production, imbued with the spirit of rapid-fire vaudevillian schtick, one actor (Kyle Branzel) plays all the suspects and the other (Ian Lowe) plays Marcus, a cop intent on crime scene protocol as a means to move up the ladder to detective. The murder of famous novelist Arthur Whitney, at a surprise birthday party in his home, is the occasion for Marcus to make the most of his nascent detective chops.

Ian Lowe as Officer Marcus

The suspects include Dahlia, Whitney’s wife, and Dr. Griff, the local psychiatrist, who, it turns out, was not only Whitney’s confidante but also saw, professionally, pretty much everyone at the party, not to mention Marcus himself, still haunted by an on-the-job romance that went awry. There’s also a ballet star Whitney was sweet on, a bickering couple—the husband believes his wife is the culprit in every killing—Whitney’s niece Steph (a would-be criminology student), three members of a boy’s choir, and, rewardingly silly, an Irish fireman with his hose. The key plot point is that all the guests appeared as characters in Whitney’s books: the motive of any one of them might be the shame or anger his portrayal inspired. And what about All Them Bananas, the book Whitney was preparing for publication at the time of his death?

Some of the parts—signaled by Branzel mostly by body language and voice—come off better than others and the ones that don’t—the couple, for instance—bring down the fun a notch. Scott Schwartz’s direction aims for speed over clarity and the scripting of what each suspect adds to the mystery could be better worked-out, since not all are funny enough to justify their presence for the sake of comedy. Best in that light is Mrs. Whitney, a southern belle with wild mood swings, the imperious ballet dancer, Ms. Lewis—Branzel’s high split each time he turns into her is a nice grace note—and the endearing and inquisitive Steph, dotingly eager to become Marcus’s new partner. Meanwhile, the shrink demands to sing a song about friendship and Mrs. Whitney wants to regale us with her big number from back when she walked the boards. Which is where the music comes in.

Ian Lowe and Kyle Branzel (as Dahlia Whitney)

A piano is the main prop here, as Branzel and Lowe keep up spirited musical patter to match the scripted shenanigans. Sometimes one accompanies the other’s vocal, sometimes they engage in comic oneupmanship at the keys. The songs tend to be music hall versions of Broadway numbers, which means they give us character notes—not always as clever as we might like—so we know something about the different suspects. Marcus’s ditty about crime scenes takes its tone from Gilbert and Sullivan, while Steph’s big number, “He Needs a Partner,” throbs with an ingenue’s musical pining. Both Branzel and Lowe are readily likeable and make the most of the best the show—written by Joe Kinosian and Kellen Blair—has to offer. It helps greatly that Branzel is so good at playing ditzy females. He grabs the role as if he were born to play it, making the most of his long legs, lanky frame, and ability to contort Jerry Lewis-style and play dumbshow à la Harpo.

Kyle Branzel (as Dr Griff), Ian Lowe (Officer Marcus)

If you’re not the type to seek out Lewis and Martin or the Marx Brothers in re-runs on cable or in your Netflix cue, there’s still something to be said for watching physical and musical comedy performed live and, as it were, in your face. Murder for Two proffers a kind of mash-up that should have great audience appeal—and seems to, given the show's tours and awards—of the murder mystery and the musical, as well as the small cast/many characters turn of crowd-pleasers like The Mystery of Irma Vep and The 39 Steps.

The illusion of setting is pretty much dispensed with in Murder, given the piano, the proscenium with doors for other spaces, and the actors’ attention to the audience—to demand applause, scold for ringing phones, and entreat a volunteer to play a corpse. There’s a zany “anything for a laugh” quality to the show—including visual references to the board game Clue and the cartoon Scooby-Doo—that adds surprises to help distract from the show’s static elements. In the end, it’s all about performance, and with the irrepressibly manic Kyle Branzel as the suspects and Ian Lowe, an able abettor as straight man and ambitious if questionable sleuth, Murder for Two keeps the ball rolling, though sometimes giving us the feeling that we’ve been treated to a few too many parlor tricks.

Second Stage Theatre presents
Murder for Two, a New Musical Comedy
Book and Music by Joe Kinosian
Book and Lyrics by Kellen Blair
Directed by Scott Schwartz

Starring Kyle Branzel and Ian Lowe

Scenic Design: Beowulf Boritt; Costume Design: Andrea Lauer; Lighting Design: Jason Lyons; Sound Design: Jill BC Du Boff; Music Director: David Caldwell; Choreographer: Wendy Seyb; Casting: Calleri Casting; Production Stage Manager: Katrina Olson; Production Supervisor: Production Core; Associate Producer: Tom Casserly

Long Wharf Theatre Mainstage
August 19-30, 2015

Theater News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Decade of Dedication

Gordon Edelstein’s ten years as Artistic Director of the Long Wharf Theater were celebrated last week with an outpouring of tributes, reminiscences, send-ups, and eloquent testimonies to one man’s inspiring journey in theater, from early days in acting classes to directing landmark productions of such classics as The Glass Menagerie and Uncle Vanya, to becoming, as the world-renowned playwright himself stated in the “Script for the Evening,” Athol Fugard’s “Zorba”—“because Gordon, like Kazantzakis’s magnificent Greek, is a man of appetites—for life, for love and most of all, for all the beautiful unmanageable paradoxes and ambiguities of the human heart.” The premieres of new plays by Fugard—such as last season’s The Train Driver—have become staples of Long Wharf’s reputation.

Highpoints of the evening, which began with a reception in the Long Wharf lobby with notable attendees such as seasoned actress Lois Smith, young actor Josh Charles of The Good Wife, James Bundy, artistic director of the Yale Rep, Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater, and Yale’s Pulitzer-winning playwright Paula Vogel, as well as many other habituees of the New Haven theater scene, included a very knowing reminiscence by Paula Vogel; a dazzling oration by Pulitzer-winning playwright Donald Margulies; a tribute to Edelstein’s keen sense of casting, by members of his production of The Glass Menagerie, who comically switched parts to show that, indeed, the best line-up was Judith Ivey as Amanda, Keira Keeley as Laura, and Patch Darragh as Tom; heartfelt thanks from the young playwright Judith Cho and lovely actress Karen Kandel, and a warmly resonant rendition of a song from the new musical Table by composer David Shire.

Edelstein, when he spoke at the evening’s end, presented himself as honored, humbled, and determined, despite the difficulties of the current economic climate, to continue bringing to the New Haven area quality theater with the dedication he has shown for the last decade. One such opportunity will be the premiere of Sophie’s Choice, a play directed by Edelstein and adapted from the well-known film, starring Meryl Streep, from 1982, and the novel by William Stryon, 1979. The challenging new production will cap the current season in April.

As a night celebrating the love and regard for one man’s role in keeping theater vital, a fine time was had by all. Cheers, Gordon!

This week at the Long Wharf ends the run, October 16, of Molly Sweeney, Brian Friel’s monologue-driven story of personal struggle, ambition and good intentions, boasting a trio of nuanced performances, led by Simone Kirby as the unflappable Molly.

And up next, beginning October 26, the Long Wharf welcomes a production of Ain’t Misbehavin’, the tuneful celebration of Fats Waller and the jazz of the Harlem Renaissance era, returning the Tony-winning musical to its cabaret-style roots, with the original 1978 production team.

Without a Hurt the Heart is Hollow

The FantasticksLong Wharf Theatre, October 7 to November 1

I was first introduced to The Fantasticks, of all places, by the Guinness Book of World Records.  Even then, some thirty years ago, it held the record as the longest continuously performing play amid the less effulgent lights of New York's off-Broadway Sullivan Street Theatre.  A few years later, my father did me the courtesy of taking me to see this old standby and, what is perhaps strangest of all in the microhistory that exists between The Fantasticks and myself is my not having had the pleasure of seeing it again since then.

This is no small matter when considering a play with this kind of pedigree.  Any proper New Yorker knows that up until The Fantasticks' closing on January 13, 2002, some 17,000 performances later, a trip down to the Sullivan Theatre, adolescent in hand, was a rite of passage for parents seeking to bestow upon their kinder the kind of cosmopolitanism that Broadway show attendance bequeaths.  Unlike today's overproduced albeit entertaining extravaganzas for children and teens—from The Lion King to Wicked—The Fantasticks recalls a quieter time, a more intimate encounter, and, yes, a far, far more sophisticated experience than any childhood viewing can properly take in.

Long Wharf's current production of The Fantasticks' recognizes this all-too-literary quality of the play.  This production features a distinct set of innovations in the dramatic interpretation: the play's narrator El Gallo is recast as an illusionist; the environ is Rocky Point, an actual amusement park in Warwick, Rhode Island, that has been closed for over a decade; the thematic thrust is the carny atmosphere  (recalling weirdly enough Carousel, of all things!).  But all seems almost superfluous for a play that is so obviously about theatre and its illusions.  This is not a criticism of director Amanda Dehnart's decision to relocate the play's traditional pair of homes with gardens separated by a wall through which the separated lovers whisper their sweet nothings to one another.  The conceit of moving the action into Rocky Point is a sound one, , despite the strange geographic dynamic of the self-same wall and gardens  sitting somewhere within or nearby the lonely amusement park. Indeed, one feels the abandonment of the park in the play's set design.

But it is a strange location for other reasons because the very weirdness of the arrangement underscores what is so fascinating about The Fantasticks as a play.  When it first opened on May 3, 1960, reviews were mixed at best and despite poor initial attendance, the production stayed on eventually building itself up into—what exactly?  This is the question that couldn't help but nag as I compared my middle-aged experience of the more than solid performance delivered by cast and musicians, director and set designer, with that of my dimly remembered early teen years.  In watching, I recalled the frankly disturbing character of the play, its illusion-shattering comparison between the happy ending of the first act and the far more hardened sentiments of its second act, musically expressed with alliterative harshness: "Without a hurt the heart is hollow."

But watching The Fantasticks this time around opened up an entirely new vista for me, one leavened not only by personal experiences of pain and disillusionment, but a much expanded knowledge of arts traditions.  The Fantasticks is notable for how much it turns to classical Western literature for its moorings: there are references to Greek and Roman mythology and history, Dante Alighieri, Washington Irving, and James Barrie.  But the stage belongs to Shakespeare, and not just any stage.  No, notwithstanding references to Othello, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, the play that really stands behind The Fantasticks—but receives nary a mention--is The Tempest, which delivered the now hackneyed but in the case of The Fantasticks all-too-applicable revelation "that all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

Tom Jones' libretto, as a consequence, is really part of another strand of Western culture.  While it makes pretense, perhaps a little too presumptuously, to be a part of the tradition of great playwriting—The Fantasticks is, in fact, far more than another Kiss Me Kate—there is no arguing that, as musicals go, the philosophical sights it sets are enormously high.  By stripping down as musical from the Broadway marquee hits it was trying in some ways to emulate—the Long Wharf production features eight actors, one piano, and one harp, and a simple set design, making it one of the easiest plays to stage regionally –Jones' libretto can focus on the very theatricality of theatre.  The experience is distinctly of a piece with Brecht's alienation effects, from the narrator's proleptic announcements to the highly stylized acting ("See, see, we're acting!" this production, like every other version of it, screams).

As a result of this minimalism, The Fantasticks can't help but be a distinctly postmodern play, a label I assign in the most intense and complimentary of senses.  Behind El Gallo's sleights of hand and the washed-up Arthur's comic manglings of Shakespeare, young Matt's sunny effusions and even younger Louisa's starry-eyed exclamations, and their fathers' soft-shoe, shuffling duets (excellently rendered in this production), the worm of literary deconstruction eats away at the play's philosophical foundations.  The easy reading is that the pretend happy ending of the first half is an illusion of moonlight and our penchant for story-telling, an illusion that the harsh glare of the sun and life itself dissolves.  But this thesis is so theatrically presented, and The Fantasticks is, if anything, utterly self-conscious of it play-ness, that it is impossible to see how life can be anything other than actors strutting the stage.  It is in that sense a remarkable play, a Worm Ouroboros, that eats its own tail endlessly  The Fantasticks strives to escape its own theatricalism through philosophy—that there is such a thing as "real life," which delivers real hurts from which we gain an "true" education and deeper understanding of love—but never really can, offering us either empty slogans about real life or, dare I suggest, a more "Matrix"-like understanding of the epistemological nut that Kant and his phenomenological successors have still failed to crack.  Namely, what we perceive is life and it may all be an illusion, but swim on we must.  And that reason alone is enough to see The Fantasticks.