Life With Father

The Who and the What, TheaterWorks

Ayad Akhtar writes plays in which dialogue has a way of being emotional, at times amusing, and often freighted with the weight of ideological themes. His plays Disgraced and The Invisible Hand both had powerful stagings in Connecticut, the latter at Westport Country Playhouse and at TheaterWorks in Hartford. Now TheaterWorks brings us The Who and the What, which dates from 2014.

Before discussing the play, a word about how the production is brought to its audience. Staged at TheaterWorks, directed by Aneesha Kudtarkar, the four-person play has been taped for online viewing with considerable skill. Which means credit for camera director Dan Garee and cinematographers Evan Olson and Ally Lenihan, S.R.’s sound design and the video production of Miceli Productions. If you’ve ever watched plays videotaped for television—which used to be a fairly common event—you’ll find the TheaterWorks production as capable and professional as most you may have seen. Except, instead of a soundstage in a studio, the play uses TheaterWorks’ stage, with set design by Brian Prather (adapted from Michael Schweikardt’s design), costumes by Mika Eubanks, and lighting by Amith Chandrashaker. It looks and sounds like a TheaterWorks show, viewed in one’s own home.

Mahwish (Sanam Laila Hashemi) in The Who and the What, by Ayad Akhtar, directed by Aneesha Kudtarkar, TheaterWorks

The play takes place in a few key locations, mostly domestic interiors and park benches, as Akhtar’s script covers several years in a succinct presentation of what could be called scenic highlights. The details of these characters’ lives could sustain much further explication but Akhtar is a playwright able to make exposition and backstory come out in the course of dialogue. It’s a method that lets each scene portray what is dramatically relevant to the story at hand. And the story has several dramatic cruxes.

To begin with, it’s the story of Afzal, a doting but also domineering Muslim father, played by Rajesh Bose with a wonderfully compelling sense of how bullying is often a matter of both sweetness and implied threat. He has two daughters, Zarina (Jessica Jain), the elder, and Mahwish (Sanam Laila Hashemi). Mahwish already has a fiancé approved by Afzal, so now his task is to find a mate for Zarina so she can marry before her younger sibling does. We later learn that Zarina did have a beau interested in marrying her but he was rejected by Afzal because he was a Christian.

Right there, of course, we’re in a conservative “old world” way of doing things, which we imagine will not sit well with daughters raised in America. Yet what interests Akhtar is how the twin engines of “modern” and “traditional” drive the contemporary Muslim family. The play opens with Afzal meeting with Eli (Stephen Elrod), a blind date for Zarina that Afzal has arranged by pretending to be Zarina in an online dating service! The fact that Eli, who sees this meeting as awkward if not grotesque, manages to deal with this romantic vetting in a way that doesn’t antagonize Afzal means that maybe he’s got son-in-law potential. And Afzal is at his charming best in his man-to-man chats with Eli. The tenor of such talks—after Eli does indeed become his son-in-law—never preclude Afzal’s sense of what is right for the couple and how his daughter needs to be handled so that her willfulness, as a modern woman, is properly “broken.”

Afzal is a widower who has become a success managing a fleet of cabs in Atlanta, and his great ambition is that his daughters start families of their own. His machinations to achieve that end, we might guess, will be the subject of the play as he offends against his daughters’ progressive views. To further that plot line, we hear that Zarina—Harvard educated with an MFA—is working on a book on gender politics. The scene where she has a first date with Eli, as a subservient gesture to her father, runs a potential minefield as Eli is white, a convert to Islam, and possibly more enthusiastic about the faith than Zarina herself. Which leads us to the main plot point: Zarina’s book isn’t simply critical of such practices as arranged marriages and wearing the hijab. It’s a novel in which the prophet Mohammad is viewed as a man with a man’s many imperfections and at times hurtful attitudes toward women.

Eli (Stephen Elrod) and Zarina (Jessica Jain) in Ayad Akhtar’s The Who and the What, directed by Aneesha Kudtarkar, TheaterWorks

The possible tensions between Eli and Zarina increase once he reads her manuscript, and their arguments about the portrayal of the prophet constitute another of the play’s interests: how sacred materials become profane within a secular form like the novel. The contentious nature of this couple is evident from the start and Jain and Elrod are fun to watch as they try to score points off one another. Zarina knows she’s writing fiction but sometimes speaks as though her version of Mohammad is truer than the one received from the traditional and pious anecdotes shared by the faithful. Eli shows himself to be able to reason within a dialectics in which fiction can feel true and received truth may not be fact. Not so Afzal who sees the book as a blasphemous affront, and the play—in Bose’s strong performance—does not shortchange his visceral outrage. That the denigration of the prophet (as he sees it) is also a denigration of the father is the obvious subtext to his rage.

Zarina (Jessica Jain), Mahwish (Sanam Laila Hashemi), Afzal (Rajesh Bose) in Ayad Akhtar’s The Who and the What, TheaterWorks

What holds our attention (admittedly, a deliberately secular “our”) in the play is less the question of how or whether holy figures can be portrayed in speculative ways, and more the question of how these two women navigate the fraught terrain of life with father. The play’s situation certainly feels genuine, keeping in mind clashes of Islamic fundamentalism and Western satire as for instance the much publicized fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie in 1989 for depictions of the prophet Mohammad in The Satanic Verses or the Charlie Hebdo killings in 2015. Afzal’s fear that Zarina will suffer persecution or assault for her novel, if published, certainly are justified. But the play, whose title is the same as Zarina’s book, doesn’t take on the task of showing us media response and cultural backlash, other than in passing reference. Instead, it remains focused on the seismic disturbances in the family unit. Which might make us wonder whether the book itself is something of a McGuffin. It doesn’t really matter except that it brings Zarina’s questions to light for her husband and her father to read and react to. The arguments would likely have come about even without such an overt questioning.

Well-staged, well-played, well-taped, The Who and the What is also well-written in giving us “the who” of these characters and “the what” of the differences in viewpoint, orientation, and expectation that make for family drama across generations and between cultures. The who and the what of the book Zarina writes may carry huge impact or seem much ado about nothing, depending on one’s view of Mohammad and the Muslim faith, but it’s importance could be made more of as something beyond a family matter. What’s more, the episodic nature of the play creates an effect a bit like watching “season highlights” of an ongoing TV serial or sitcom. We get the scenes wherein something major happens, but not the scenes that help to create genuine interest in these characters. The play ends with a punchline, a “joke’s on Afzal” jab that might be easily followed by “tune in next week.”

The Who and the What
By Ayad Akhtar
Directed by Aneesha Kudtarkar

Set Design: Brian Prather (adapted from a design for the stage by Michael Sweikardt); Costume Design: Mika Eubanks; Lighting Design: Amith Chandrashaker; Sound Design: S.R.; Video Production: Miceli Productions; Production Stage Manager: Kate J. Cudworth

 Cast: Rajesh Bose, Stephen Elrod, Sanam Laila Hashemi, Jessica Jain

TheaterWorks
November 15-28, 2020

Asking What If and Why Not?

Review of Kennedy: Bobby’s Last Crusade, Playhouse on Park

This election season, fraught as it is with peril—in the form of a pandemic the U.S. has handled badly—chaos—in the form of showdowns between heavily armed squads and protesters enraged by unconscionable and racialized acts of police violence—and a do-or-die aura for our beleaguered electoral system, why not return to a period just as anxious and portentous? Well, except there was no internet then.

In 1968, the Democratic party had a sitting president, Lyndon Johnson, who was becoming increasingly unpopular with many of his constituents, particularly those who wanted the undeclared war in Vietnam to end. That led to divisions within the party that, to a certain extent, never got completely healed. Senator Eugene McCarthy was running against the president on a ticket mainly aimed at young voters who had the most to lose by the war dragging on and who were becoming increasingly vocal. 1968 was the year student unrest closed many campuses during spring session, and May ’68 is well known as the fulcrum moment when protests by French students and workers shut down Paris. It was also the year of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China.

Goaded into running by a sense that history was passing him by, Robert Francis Kennedy, brother of assassinated and much mourned president John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and former attorney general in his brother’s administration, entered the race for the Democratic nomination in March. In June, two months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy was assassinated, having just won the California primary.

David Arrow (Bobby Kennedy) in KENNEDY: BOBBY‘S LAST CRUSADE, filmed for Playhouse on Park. Photos by Russ Rowland

Kennedy: Bobby’s Last Crusade by David Arrow, who plays Kennedy, directed by Eric Nightengale, tours the series of stump speeches Kennedy made in those heady times. Much of the power of the play comes from hearing literate, compassionate speeches that don’t sound like mere rhetoric or designed merely to score points off opponents. We see Kennedy is fond of quoting “his favorite poet” Aeschylus (well, a Kennedy probably should have a tragic view of life), and that he has taken up the war on poverty that was one of the better aspects of the Johnson administration. We hear some of his candid asides on his own performance, see his personable sense of his developing public persona, and live through some touching and, now and then, light-hearted moments. The play documents how in the course of those three months Kennedy, an inheritor of incredible privilege thanks to his father’s wealth and power, transformed himself into a man of the people. It wasn’t an act, and that, if nothing else, is why people still get misty when they talk about “Bobby.”

And that’s mostly the tone of the play, a kind of tempered hagiography, with each successive speech, most in the Midwest, a stop on a kind of Via Crucis. Whatever you may think about the Kennedys, the fact of their brutal and untimely deaths—for political reasons, no matter which account of guilt you believe—makes them at once more sinned-against than sinning. We don’t hear much about what made Kennedy a man with so many enemies, nor do we get much of a sense of Kennedy as the tough and shrewd politician he was. By which I mean to say that he was under no illusions about how nasty it all could get, yet the feeling of the man the play gives us is a bit of a naïf. I don’t doubt he was overwhelmed by the Sinatra-like (or Beatles-like) hysteria he was often greeted with—remarking on how often someone in the crowd stole his shoe—but any chance he had for election meant stirring and feeding and riding just such a reaction. The five years of shock, mourning and disquiet since the death of his brother made the mere presence of a Kennedy an oracular and revelatory moment to his followers. The Kennedy phenomenon was in full swing.

David Arrow (Bobby Kennedy) in KENNEDY: BOBBY‘S LAST CRUSADE, filmed for Playhouse on Park. Photos by Russ Rowland

The two immediate targets of the excerpts we hear from Kennedy’s speeches—McCarthy and Johnson—are men Kennedy respects, though, having been in the JFK administration with Johnson, he has no illusions about the kind of hardball political animal he’s dealing with. Then, in a speech on the eve of April Fool’s Day, just days before King’s assassination, Johnson announced he would not seek or accept his party’s nomination. The ostensible reason (no, not to spend more time with his family) was to put all his efforts into ending the war. Thereby quenching, potentially, the fire of much of the McCarthy and now Kennedy campaigns. If you believed him. Eventually Vice President Hubert Humphrey would take up the mantel of running as the preferred DNC front-runner. And what we witness in the play, as history shows, is that Kennedy, in just three months, was mounting a formidable challenge. Thus engendering one of the great “what-ifs” of party politics for that generation.

And that’s the main effect of the play: inspiring—besides admiration for the articulate, thoughtful, driven Kennedy, who never loses his sense of humor—thoughts of “what if.” And maybe, “what now?” Or “why not?,” recalling the famous tagline, stolen from George Bernard Shaw, with which Kennedy ended many of his speeches during the campaign: “Some men see things as they are and ask why? I dream things that never were and ask why not?”

As Kennedy, David Arrow does a remarkable job. He has the Kennedy quaver at times, and he can drawl out certain Boston inflections well enough to bring back those familiar voices. More keenly, his Kennedy takes us into his confidence, giving a chummy backstage access to the events as he lives them. There’s an immediacy that no documentary portrayal could achieve and that makes the play riveting—which is amazing, considering that most of the time we’re listening to campaign speeches (generally one of the lowest forms of theater). There are videos to show us newspaper headlines, views of crowds, and some of the faces of key figures of the time. The set has the look of the shambles of campaign headquarters after a grueling night.

For those who remember RFK (I was eight when he died, and can still recall getting up for school on June fifth, my brother’s second birthday, with the television proclaiming the news from California of the shooting; Kennedy died in the morning of the sixth), the play helps jog the memory—like the very real unease with the length of Kennedy’s hair in those days when such things were emblems of embracing the dangerous youth culture. For those who didn’t live through those times, the play is bound to feel a bit remote—Kennedy was dead before current presidential candidate Joe Biden was elected to his first term as senator—but it may be just the thing to stir youthful belief in the power of change.

The play is apropos in the way that some of Kennedy’s characterizations of current events describe our own times, but more importantly it reminds us that political leaders can sometimes galvanize the best and brightest hopes. As Kennedy said in his early campaign speech at the University of Kansas: “…hundreds of communities and millions of citizens are looking for their answers, to force and repression and private gun stocks - so that we confront our fellow citizen across impossible barriers of hostility and mistrust and again, I don't believe that we have to accept that.  I don't believe that it's necessary in the United States of America.  I think that we can work together - I don't think that we have to shoot at each other, to beat each other, to curse each other and criticize each other, I think that we can do better in this country.  And that is why I run for President of the United States.”

David Arrow (Bobby Kennedy) in KENNEDY: BOBBY‘S LAST CRUSADE, filmed for Playhouse on Park. Photos by Russ Rowland

The heartbreak of the story—which wouldn’t surprise Aeschylus—is that the gods are cruel.

Notes from Playhouse on Park:

This is a film of the play. This play was originally scheduled to be produced by Playhouse Theatre Group, Inc. live at Playhouse on Park. As a result of guidelines put forth by both Governor Ned Lamont and Actors Equity Association, the play could not be produced in front of a live audience, nor could it be filmed in CT. The play was filmed for Playhouse on Park audiences at the Theatre of St. Clements in NYC. This is the same place it had its world premiere in 2018. The film is available to stream at home between September 16 - October 4 for $20; NOW EXTENDED TO OCTOBER 11.

On Saturday, October 10, Playhouse on Park is bringing the filmed play KENNEDY: BOBBY’S LAST CRUSADE to Edmond Town Hall for The Ingersoll Auto Pop-Up Drive-In. The film will start at 7:30pm (gates open at 7pm). $20 per car. Playwright/Actor David Arrow and Director Eric Nightengale will be in attendance. We are working on a creative way to conduct a Question and Answer Session! Please plan on joining us. For tickets: here

Kennedy: Bobby’s Last Crusade
By David Arrow
Directed by Eric Nightengale
Starring David Arrow as Bobby Kennedy
Filmed for Playhouse on Park
Available for streaming: September 16-October 11, 202

A Cafe with a Difference

Review of The Van Gogh Café, Yale Cabaret

FLOWERS, Ka.—For those passing through or living fulltime in the area, Van Gogh Café offers homey décor and comfort food galore. I mean, that Emmie Finckel has done wonders with the place. It’s a downhome oasis with sunny yellow walls, where Formica tables sit beside some with homemade wooden planks, where mismatched chairs of all descriptions abound, where a sturdy counter—presided over by Marc (Mihir Kumar), the proprietor—is apt to be peopled with regulars on a first-name basis, where assorted knick-knacks and bric-a-brac decorate the tables, the bathroom walls are adorned with painted hydrangeas, and the record player intuitively grasps the song you need to hear.

Clara (Shimali De Silva), Marc’s charming ten-year-old daughter, will take your order if you show up in the hour before school starts. With Marc somewhat conflicted about his lot in life, Clara is clearly the VGC’s biggest devotee, an enthusiast who finds every visitor a source of fascination and believes there’s an enduring magic in the walls of the café. Well, why not, the café was once a storied theater and who knows what feats have occurred there. For Clara, who might be nursing a hurt now that her mother has moved to New York, the possibilities of the place are endless, as anything might happen.

She may have a point, or at least that’s my takeaway from a recent visit. There were doings a-plenty. A source of considerable amusement was the way a stray gull had taken up residence on the roof, only to be befriended by Clara’s cat. The lovestruck feline kept snagging articles of clothing from Lon (Faizan Kareem), a hapless regular—a boot, a scarf, a glove—to award to the visiting bird. Eventually, a flock of gulls were hanging out there, only to be dispersed in a providential fashion through the agency of some passers-through, Kelly (Lily Haje) and Jack (Devin Matlock). The lady is an ornithologist, really!

That’s often the way things go around The Van Gogh Café, Clara insists, as, for instance the visit of the Fancy Lady (Jocelyn Knazik Phelps), a stranger who left behind some seeds that magically became gardenias which were, of course, the favorite flower of that aged actor (Danilo Gambini) who visited later, to recall his former glories and to await an old friend.

Events can sometimes be a little disconcerting—like a thunderstorm that knocked out the power and, according to Clara, made the food able to cook itself. Which was a good thing as Marc had a period there where he saw himself as a poet, a passion perhaps inspired by some changes in his romantic outlook. Then there’s the time Maria (Rebecca Kent)—she’s sort of a peremptory type, but really very nice—found herself face to face with her daughter, Ella (Jocelyn Knazik Phelps), who left years ago. And, guess what, she’s pregnant! So Maria gets to be a grandmother after all.

Meanwhile Sue (Lily Haje) and Ray (Nicholas Orvis) occasionally argue over nothing, but it’s worth it just to hear Sue get all agitated with that little piping voice she has. And did I mention the person at the table adjacent to me? A playwright (Taiga Christie) who wrote a lot at every visit—so, who knows, we may all be in a play one day. Kinda like that old Beatles song—“and though she feels as if she’s in a play / She is anyway.”

That’s the feeling at The Van Gogh Café, alright. Watch where you sit because the regulars have some chairs all to themselves, but there’s plenty of seats all around to catch the comings and goings (of which there are a lot!). I won’t say there’s never a dull moment—I mean, this is Kansas, after all—but the cheer is infectious, the locals likeable, the food not bad. (I had the Greek salad as a starter, then the roast turkey with mashed potatoes and green beans—all of which was very satisfying, but I found myself eyeing the fried mozz appetizer and the slab of meat loaf I saw on other plates). Marc, according to the regulars, burns pies more often than not, and there’s a general opinion that the lemon meringue isn’t up to what it was when his wife was on the premises. My slice was fine, though the crust was a bit heavy maybe. I hear that the coffee is much improved, though, and the waitstaff are like people you might see in a real play sometime. Speaking of actors, I’m really glad I got to see that old star’s visit. What a charming guy, so sweet and gracious! You’d never know the career he had, he was so humble. Very touching. That’s the kind of thing I’ll be dining out on for a while. Maybe even on that meat loaf . . .

Oh, and I should mention. The Café is open for dinner at 8 p.m. tonight and Saturday. It also offers a late night snack menu tonight (I guess since it’s a Friday it’s OK for Clara to be up that late.) And on Saturday, a brunch menu at noon. That features a menu and a show that schoolkids should appreciate, especially any that have an interest in theater. Like the Yale Cabaret—which has storied walls in its own right—The Van Gogh Café assumes that the magic of childhood extends into our joy in the arts, no matter how old we might be (I’m not saying—but I did know all the songs from the Sixties that record player played.)

There’s magic in theater, certainly. And there’s magic—theatrical and otherwise—at The Van Gogh Café. Get in on it while you can (like, before you grow up too much).

The Van Gogh Café
Proposed, directed and adapted by Emily Sorensen and Madeline Charne, based on the novel by Cynthia Rylant

Set Designer: Emmie Finckel; Costume Designer: Miguel Urbino; Lighting Designer: Tully Goldrick; Associate Lighting Designer: Matthew Sonnenfeld; Sound Designers: Liam Bellman-Sharpe & Bryan Scharenberg; Technical Director: David Phelps; Producers: Madeline Carey & Sarah Scafidi; Stage Manager: Zak Rosen

Cast: Taiga Christie, Shimali De Silva, Danilo Gambini, Lily Haje, Faizan Kareem, Rebecca Kent, Jocelyn Knazik Phelps, Mihir Kumar, Devin Matlock, Nicholas Orvis

Yale Cabaret
March 5-7, 2020

yalecabaret.org

The Sherlock of Swindon

Review of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, CT Repertory Theatre

Simon Stephens’ Tony-winning stage adaptation of Mark Haddon’s best-selling novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is curious indeed. It’s a story full of dysfunction, including various kinds of abuse and the killing of a dog, that tries to be upbeat and heartwarming. It mainly succeeds due to inventive staging that keeps us apprised of the world according to Christopher, a Brit teen in Swindon who has exceptional math skills and is firmly forthcoming about his issues with most other things—like the colors brown and yellow, and the use of metaphors in speech, and the tendency of most humans to lie or playact—and because Tyler Nowakowski, a third-year actor in the MFA program at UConn, makes Christopher, for all his quirks, an engaging and interesting fellow to spend time with.

Christopher (Tyler Nowakowski), center; ensemble, left to right: Elizabeth Jebran, Matthew Antoci, Mauricio Miranda, Justin Jager, Nicolle Cooper, Alexandra Brokowski, in the Connecticut Repertory Theatre productioin of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

The play keeps us amused by little oddities, such as having the show’s ensemble enact furnishings and appliances in the home Christopher shares with his father Ed (Joe Cassidy), and the projections by Taylor Edelle Stuart keep us impressed as they simulate the tangled signals that Christopher, described as neuroatypical, must process. A trip to London in Act Two is rendered as a near psychic overload, kept benign by the fact that Christopher has written his story for his helpful teacher Siobhan (Thalia Eddy) and she has made it into the play we’re watching. That means that Christopher is at first narrated by Siobhan reading his narrative aloud, and then enacts himself as the hero of his own story, which is a bit of a mystery story and a bit of a domestic drama.

When Wellington, the dog of his neighbor Mrs. Shears, gets impaled by a garden fork, Christopher sets off as a neighborhood sleuth. His encounters with the locals are entertaining due to the way he interacts with others, two factors being his inability to lie or to endure physical contact. He’s played with many of the behavioral tics familiar from Dustin Hoffman’s character in the film Rain Man, though the precise nature of Christopher’s condition is never gone into. As a stage character, Christopher keeps our interest because we’re never sure what he may say or do nor how he will react to others, and that makes the introduction into his view of things very lively.

Christopher (Tyler Nowakowski), Mrs. Shears (Elizabeth Jebran), and ensemble (Matthew Antioci) in the Connecticut Repertory Theatre production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

What’s less lively is his relations with his parents, who are played as mostly patient and considerate. Exempt there’s a backstory of infidelity that Christopher’s questioning brings to light, along with outright lies and a surprising act of violence. The segment of Christopher in London, in Act II, drags because there’s so little in the way of new development, in the plot or in Christopher. At that point the big question is: will he get back to Swindon to sit for his A levels?

The problem is that the parents Ed and Judy (Margot White) are not only not very interesting, they are deliberately flattened, it seems, in an effort to present them as Christopher sees them. And since Christopher’s consciousness of others is his weak point, they mainly stand around looking pained as he acts out his inner turbulence. The encounters with strangers—such as a policeman in London (Matthew Antoci), or some people (Justin Jager and Alexandra Brokowski) waiting for the tube while Christopher hunts the tracks for his pet rat Toby (a very charming puppet by Bart P. Roccoberton, Jr.)—are much more appealing. There’s also a problem with the credibility of Judy—who tells us how hard it is to deal with Christopher—welcoming him with open arms in London, though she’s now living with a guy (Mauricio Miranda) who doesn’t want the kid around. And Cassidy’s Ed never seems troubled enough to do what the plot makes him do.

As a story, the mystery about the dog isn’t much of a dramatic crux and the domestic drama is even less of one (and it’s not really much of a spoiler to say that they are entwined, much as the absence of Mom is explained by the absence of a neighbor). The point is that Christopher, in solving the mystery, learns something about the people around him. Is it a lesson that has much purchase for him? Probably not, and not much for us either. In any case it all pales beside the question of how well he will do on his A level exam and the answer to his favorite mathematical problem. What keeps us involved is Christopher’s perspective and that’s a consistently positive aspect of the show.

Engagingly staged by director Kristin Wold with imaginative choreography well enacted by the ensemble, most of whom are MFA candidates at University of CT’s School of Fine Arts, featuring great command of the role of Christopher by Tyler Nowakowski, supported by able efforts by Equity actors Joe Cassidy and Margot White, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time works. The story of its unlikely hero shows us a that a unique sensibility can find its own way in life and flourish, and that’s not simply a curious fact.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Based on the novel by Mark Haddon
Adapted by Simon Stephens
Directed by Kristin Wold

Scenic Designer: Dennis Akpinar; Lighting Designer: Allison Zerio; Costume Designer: Sofia Perez; Sound Designer: Mack Lynn Gauthier; Technical Director: Aubrey Ellis; Dialect, Voice, & Text: Julie Foh; Movement Directors: Marie Percy & Ryan Winkles; Fight Director: Greg Webster; Projections: Taylor Edelle Stuart; Stage Manager: Tom Kosis; Puppet Designer: Bart P. Roccoberton, Jr.; Dramaturg: Eddie Vitcavage

Cast: Joe Cassidy, Margot White, Tyler Nowakowski, Thalia Eddy, Elizabeth Jebran, Mauricio Miranda, Justin Jager, Matthew Antoci, Alexandra Brokowski, Nicolle Cooper

Connecticut Repertory Theatre
UConn School of Fine Arts
February 27-March 8, 2020

The Choice Bits

Review of Cock, Yale Cabaret

The first thing you probably notice is that the stage set (by Lily Guerin) is a giant cage with four openings, one on each side, and with little seats attached to each corner. The next thing you probably notice is that the Yale Cabaret has new tables for the audience. Instead of round, they are long and rectangular, like the kind you might sit at to pass judgment. The audience is surrounding an arena where some kind of contest may take place. A cockfight, perhaps?

Cock by British playwright Mike Bartlett, directed by second-year director Alex Keegan, and proposed by John Evans Reese, who plays the only named character, John (the others are M, Daniel Liu; W, Zoe Mann; F, Thomas Pang, for Man, Woman, Father), sort of assumes that when you read or hear “cock,” you don’t automatically think of the two-legged, feathered creature. And that’s germane, certainly. But it’s also the case that a phrase like “the cock of the walk”—describing someone who struts around like he owns the place—may be implied. John is “the cock” here and as such he’s the prize to be fought over by his two lovers—M and W. The gist of it is that they discover this cock is something of a dick.

If that were all, that might be enough, but Bartlett seems to have a bit more on his mind, turning up the heat on the awkward dinner party trope and letting his characters get a bit unhinged, verbally, if not physically. The driving idea is sexual ambiguity as instanced when a member of a long-standing couple leaves that couple and opts for a lover that is not the same gender as the former lover. It may be that the locus classicus is a man, married to a woman, who, having already done the family bit, takes up with a man. Here, it’s the flip of that: John is with M; they seem to have hit a snag and John calls it quits, insisting that they are “fundamentally different” in how they approach life. While on his way to work one day, John is approached by W. They’ve noticed each other but haven’t spoken. Dancing and flirting ensues and, for the first time in his life, John confronts the question of whether he could have sex with a woman.

The play, which has been funny in showing us the sparring and at times passionate locutions of John and M—extremely well played by Reese and Lui—gets funnier when it becomes a question of John’s exploration of the—to him—unprecedented organ known by that other “c” word. Zoe Mann is wonderful as a woman being explored “like a science project” while also getting aroused. And John’s cock gets to do its cock of the walk bit as well, thus demonstrating that, for him, arousal isn’t only for gents with gents.

The dickness of John comes in his leaving W in the lurch and going back to M, then being unable to call it off with either M or W. A fact which appalls both of his lovers, since neither is inclined to accept that he might be bi and simply need a little of each (I say “each” because the play only gives him two choices). John vacillates at such a pitch that one might wonder why either M or W stays in the game. Even John wonders and the best he can determine is that it’s because of his eyes.

About that awkward dinner party. It’s offered by M (who does the cooking) as a way to let W down, and is put to W, by John, as an opportunity for a united front to end the thing with M. F, who is M’s dad and who has been invited by M as “backup,” adds to the tension with an aria about how he came to accept M with John as a genetic matter having to do with chemicals in the brain. The chemicals in his own brain seem to cause him to treat W as a manipulator and to look too often at her breasts—in W’s opinion. The outing going on at this point—of masculinist, sexist, “gay” and “straight” assumptions and prejudices—comes thick and fast. It’s mostly fun because, however you feel about these things, someone is bound to say something you’d argue with, were you in that cage.

John at one point disputes old-fashioned usages like “gay” and “straight” as though he’s about to manage a proclamation of sexual freedom. But it never quite comes to that. In fact, it ends up rather badly for John, more or less fetal while M stops just short of singing “who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Bartlett was born in 1980, and the Eighties is when sex became “an identity,” for political purposes, and a genetic predisposition, for normative purposes, and that’s the legacy that Cock wants to engage, to question why either/or is the only thing that makes sense, sexually. As a playwright, he’s of the type for whom a stance—and a nimble tongue—is enough to merit the name “character,” so we don’t ever have to delve into why W thinks being a gay man’s first girl is “the one” for her (though I imagine she’s not alone in that), nor into why John needs M to keep him in thrall or why M needs his whipping boy.

The actors are all wonderful, and the energy crackles. The pacing is rapid-fire, and the interrelations are all vividly realized. The interaction between Liu and Reese is a driving force in the play because so much derives from an implied situation that precedes the initial break. Caustic and lambent, Liu’s M generally pushes John’s buttons in a way that must work for both. And Reese and Mann make John with W seem equally viable, not just as an escape valve, but as a way to be a different person. As the father, Pang sounds sufficiently of a different generation as to be out of place but also—in his view—the voice of normality. Finally, Reese, in Stephanie Bahniuk’s costume and hair, has a certain look and plays so convincingly the charismatic man-child that we can believe he’s the cherished fetish M and W take him for.

In the end Cock made me stand—to applaud.

Cock
By Mike Bartlett
Directed by Alex Keegan

Artistic Consultant: Yura Kordonsky; Set Designer: Lily Guerin; Costume Designer: Stephanie Bahniuk; Lighting Designer: Evan C. Anderson; Sound Designer: Bailey Trierweiler; Co-Dramaturgs: Margaret E. Douglas & Sophie Greenspan; Co-Technical Directors: Yaro Yarashevich & Andrew Reidermann; Producer: Caitlin Volz; Stage Manager: Fabiola Syvel

Cast: Daniel Liu, Zoe Mann, Thomas Pang, John Evans Reese

Yale Cabaret
February 27-29, 2020

Where Better to Make a Beginning

Review of The Zoo Story, New Haven Theater Company

How do you feel when approached by a stranger? No doubt there may be a wide variety of answers to that question, depending on who you are, where you are, and the appearance and demeanor of the stranger. Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story explores several possibilities—including uncomfortable, companionable, amused, bemused, and contentious—and drives toward a surprising conclusion.

The play’s original text dates from 1958 but was updated in 2004 and consists wholly of the encounter between Peter (J. Kevin Smith), a comfortably off middle-aged gent who works in publishing and who is seated on a public park bench in New York city, reading a textbook his company published, and Jerry (Trevor Williams), a self-professed “permanent transient” who wanders up and gets Peter’s attention, in a somewhat peremptory manner. Jerry’s appearance in the New Haven Theater Production, co-directed by Steve Scarpa and George Kulp, with his long mane of blonde hair pulled back and very casual clothing, might give some pause; then again, his early mention of some little-known fact about Freud shows the kind of verbal assurance that tends to put others at ease. He seems friendly, interested in Peter, and no more invasive than any random person you might chat with on a bus or in a bar or, indeed, on a park bench.

Jerry (Trevor Willilams), Peter (J. Kevin Smith) in The Zoo Story, New Haven Theater Company

The play is a finely tuned little machine centered on the nuances of a give-and-take where any number of social codes may be in play, where any statement becomes the material of the exchange. Jerry initially announces he has been to the zoo; he says he’s been walking north—or northerly; he says, more than once, that sometimes he “has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.” The early emphasis on Peter—his job, his marriage, his two daughters with their two cats and two parakeets, and the fact that no more children will be forthcoming—swiftly is elided to concentrate on Jerry, who shares information about his parents and his sex life and the rooming-house where he resides, way up on the upper-upper West side.

The running time of The Zoo Story, called “a play in one scene,” is about an hour, and yet it can be seen as a very compressed three act. The first act is the set-up of us getting to know a bit about Peter and understanding that he, like us, is becoming interested in Jerry, largely because of how he expresses himself. The second act is Jerry’s detailed account of his relationship to a dog owned by his landlady, a dog that regularly threatens him each time he returns to the house. The third act, with Jerry finally sharing the bench with Peter, would seem to be concerned with what happened at the zoo, a story that Jerry seemed poised to tell all along. But then doesn’t. Instead, there’s the question of the bench.

As Peter, J. Kevin Smith displays a certain patient tolerance, the feeling that most liberal city-dwellers pride themselves on perhaps. He also stays in the game by reacting to Jerry’s lengthy speeches. Jerry is emphatically not someone talking to himself. He’s speaking to Peter and Peter’s attention is of paramount importance. He’s a stand-in for the theater-goer, certainly, but he’s also a character in his own right, with his own grasp of how what Jerry says affects him. And when he finally gets riled, the play might for a moment morph into something in Neil Simon territory—The Prisoner of Second Avenue, for instance. It then takes a decisive turn away from simply needling the comic upset of a prosperous New Yorker.

Jerry (Trevor Williams), Peter (J. Kevin Smith) in The Zoo Story, New Haven Theater Company

What keeps the play in a different register throughout is Jerry. In Trevor Williams’ bravura turn, he’s a very engaging fellow, the kind of person who takes pleasure in thinking aloud and does so in an appealing way. And yet Williams, in subtle glances off or thoughtful pauses, gives us the idea that Jerry has something in mind, a point or argument that he’s building, and when he gets confrontational we’re not entirely sure it’s not a joke—or was this a territorial grab all along?

The stories Jerry tells and the persons who people them let Peter have a glimpse of a level of existence he would likely never encounter directly. That, we might think, is Albee’s point: to make a self-satisfied bourgeois meet—fleetingly but in such a way as to change their lives forever—a member of an underclass who possesses the interpersonal aplomb of a born raconteur, and maybe a steely—malevolence? Determination?

But there’s more, lots more.

The play is almost parable-like, an effect helped by the way the NHTC production, in Kulp’s set with Adam Lobelson’s lighting, surrounds the simple bench and walkway with hanging curtains and thrust seating. The everyday and the theatrical are in immediate relation. And what ultimately transpires there has a lot to do with such matters as what separates humans from animals, what constitutes connection between creatures, and what is the value and benefit of what Jerry calls “the teaching moment.” In the end, he seems sincerely grateful for what Peter has done for him. And we should also be grateful for what Jerry has given us.

The Zoo Story, as one of the simplest of stories, is also one of the deepest New Haven Theater Company has enacted. This collaboration between longtime members Kulp, Scarpa and Smith with “newer” member Williams (this is only his tenth production!) showcases the troupe’s grasp of how dialogue and interaction are what matter most in great drama. Albee’s text gives the actors playing Jerry and Peter a lot of leeway in how to make the play work—whether more naturalistic, more absurdist, and with differing degrees of subtext. What makes NHTC’s production work so well is the way Williams and Smith are both willing to play what might be some version of themselves, and then to take that where it has to go. Inevitable, but surprising. And even if you know the outcome, seeing the play get there—to watch it go a long way to come back a short distance—is the fascination of “the zoo story.”

The Zoo Story
By Edward Albee
Co-directed by George Kulp & Steve Scarpa

Stage Manager & Board: Stacy Lupo; Set Design: George Kulp; Lighting Design: Adam Lobelson; Sound Design: Tom Curley

Cast: J. Kevin Smith, Trevor Williams

New Haven Theater Company
February 20-22, February 27-29, March 5-7, 2020

Hartford Stage Takes to the Eyre

Review of Jane Eyre, Hartford Stage

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre has the distinction of being one of the first great first-person narratives in British fiction and probably the earliest great first-person narrative by a female author. Most other early examples of a woman narrating her own story—Moll Flanders comes to mind—were written by a man in character as a woman. Brontë’s Jane tells her own story and addresses her “dear Reader” directly. The intimacy is key to the story. It’s a confession, of sorts, but a confession in which the point is how one becomes who one is. Jane, come from obscurity with only harmful relatives (she believes), makes her way in the world with gumption, an enduring sense of her own dignity, a passionate sense of right and wrong, a perhaps revolutionary sense of woman’s due, and an admirable way with a story.

John Reed (Grayson DeJesus), Child Jane (Meghan Pratt) in Elizabeth Williamson’s adaptation of Jane Eyre at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Adapted the novel has been before, often. Many film versions—I’ve seen at least three—and no doubt stagings. At Hartford Stage, Associate Artistic Director Elizabeth Williamson directs her own adaptation and, in this era when Kate Hamill has engendered a cottage industry of comic adaptations of the kind of British—and even American—classics formerly the stuff of Masterpiece Theater (her Pride and Prejudice has been produced twice this theater season in Connecticut), it’s important to say what Jane Eyre isn’t. It’s not a light-hearted rewrite in the arch tones of contemporary feminism. It’s very faithful to our beloved Jane—and it wisely leaves out the years at the grim Lowood school, a sequence which, though based on real experience, might seem too Dickensian.

And, despite its lack of big whizbang effects (for that famed fire at Thornfield or for moody moors and encounters with a rearing horse), this Jane Eyre works. And that’s because Helen Sadler, as Jane, and Chandler Williams, as Mr. Rochester, are doing very fine work. Certainly, it’s the best romantic pairing of the season.

Mr. Rochester (Chandler Williams), Jane Eyre (Helen Sadler) in Elizabeth Williamson’s adaptation of Jane Eyre at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Rochester, for starters, is a figure so familiar in his gnomic oddity as to be easily lampooned or sent-up. All the trappings of the Gothic—the peremptory Master of a mansion who has a mysterious past, the hapless but helpful governess who arrives and must somehow set things right, the knowing but not-forthcoming servants, the forbidding clime—are here, and Williamson manages to keep them in play without making them clichés. And that’s because Jane, in her forthright effort to show things as she lived them, isn’t the kind to overdramatize or satirize. Getting her tone is essential, and Williamson’s script does.

Jane (Helen Sadler), Mr. Rochester (Chandler Williams) in Elizabeth Williamson’s adaptation of Jane Eyre at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Jane is right in what she thinks and says, and Sadler looks and sounds right as Jane. When she misreads something, we see her error and can watch her come to terms. Her outbursts carry a force that never gets teary or—that great Victorian affliction—overwrought. Her interactions are never too good to be true because Jane’s sense of others is apt to be realistic, for our benefit. She is cautious but not captious. And she’s stirred by her belief that Rochester might actually be her match.

And Williamson’s grasp of Brontë’s tone means that Chandler gets to render an enduring Rochester, a figure who feels like what a female author enamored of Byron and Shakespeare would fashion. He’s mercurial in temper, given to having his way, and, of course, wonderingly struck by a kind of woman he hasn’t encountered before. Chandler lets his body language and an entertaining array of vocal mannerisms create a Rochester as fascinating as Jane feels him to be.

Jane (Helen Sadler), Mrs. Fairfax (Felicity Jones Latta) in Elizabeth Williamson’s adaptation of Jane Eyre at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

All the other characters are ancillary but that doesn’t mean there isn’t still real pleasure, as always, in seeing two veterans of various Connecticut stages—Felicity Jones Latta and Steve Routman—play a variety of roles. Latta is all the elder women in Jane’s life, which makes for an interesting alignment of Mrs. Fairfax, the helpful housekeeper who hired Jane; Aunt Reed, the vindictive relation who dismissed her and who on her deathbed still rejects her; Lady Ingram, the snooty mother of a belle out to snare Rochester; and Bertha, the madwoman in the attic. Routman gets to move through the distinct ranks of British society, the peasant, the military man, the aristocrat, and the cleric. Grayson DeJesus enacts two important potentially spoiler roles, quite different in effect, as Mason, the man who knows of Rochester’s past, and as St. John Rivers, the man who may have a future for Jane. Marie-France Arcilla plays Jane’s rival, her kindly nursemaid when a girl, and a servant with a secret Jane needs to know. Megan Gwyn is primarily Jane’s honorary sister in a family who helps her, and Meghan Pratt is both the child Jane, mistreated and outspoken, and little Adèle, Jane’s French-speaking charge at Thornfield Hall.

The cast of Jane Eyre in Elizabeth Williamson’s adaptation of Jane Eyre at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The Hall itself is suggested, in Nick Vaughn’s set, by a handsome array of sliding partitions that can open at times to suggest a house beyond, but that can also withdraw to present a stand of trees. There are some nicely done effects with silhouettes and with a turning stage that allows Jane’s narrative to move people on and off as needed. As with Hartford Stage’s popular adaptation of A Christmas Carol, scenery is kept to a minimum and the story moves through an amorphous space that leaves much to our imaginations.

Old-fashioned? Certainly. Jane Eyre is a classic revisited for the satisfactions this intricate and involving story can still deliver and, in Elizabeth Williamson’s succinct and affecting adaptation at Hartford Stage, deliver them it does.

Jane Eyre (Helen Sadler) in Elizabeth Williamson’s adaptation of Jane Eyre at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Jane Eyre
Adapted from Charlotte Brontë’s novel and directed by Elizabeth Williamson

Scenic Design: Nick Vaughn; Costume Design: Ilona Somogyi; Lighting Design: Isabella Byrd; Sound Design: Matt Hubbs; Original Music: Christian Frederickson; Wig & Hair Design: Jason Allen; Dialect Coach: Claudia Hill-Sparks; Fight Choreographer: Greg Webster; Dramaturg: Fiona Kyle; Production Stage Manager: Hannah Woodward; Assistant Stage Manager: Kelly Hardy; Production Manager: Bryan T. Holcombe

Cast: Marie-France Arcilla, Grayson DeJesus, Megan Gwyn, Felicity Jones Latta, Meghan Pratt, Steve Routman, Helen Sadler, Chandler Williams

Hartford Stage
February 13-March 14, 2020

The Dating Game

Review of Pride and Prejudice, Playhouse on Park

The production of Pride and Prejudice currently running at Playhouse on Park in West Hartford does Kate Hamill proud. Adapting one of Jane Austen’s best-known novels, Hamill casts a contemporary screwball eye on the Bennet family and their efforts to wed—or not—and takes these familiar characters through their paces with a renewed sense of how wryly comical “the game” of match-making is, at all times, and how fraught with peril it can be when one’s entire livelihood depends upon it, as it does here.

Directed by Jason O’Connell, who not only played the surly Mr. Darcy to Hamill’s Lizzy Bennet in the first two productions of the play, but is married to the author, this version gets the zaniness right. A defect of the recent Long Wharf production of the same play was less zest in rendering Hamill’s brand of comedy, which sees a virtue in silliness. Here, with bathroom jokes and disco dance moves added to the gender-bending that the script calls for, the show has an irreverent and irrepressible spirit. And that’s all to the good—because this Pride and Prejudice is much more fun than most rom-coms of recent memory.

Jane (Nadezhda Amé), Lydia (Kelly Letourneau), Mrs. Bennet (Maia Guest), Charlotte Lucas (Sophie Sorensen), Lizzy (Kimberly Chatterjee) in the Playhouse on Park production of Pride and Prejudice by Kate Hamill (photo by Meredith Longo)

Once upon a time there were four young ladies named Bennet: Jane (Nadezhda Amé), the eldest and acknowledged looker; Lizzy (Kimberly Chatterjee), the bookish and ironic one; Mary (Jane Bradley), the unappealing one (though why, particularly, is never made clear, which in itself is a joke that arrives in a variety of ways); and Lydia (Kelly Letourneau), the lusty youngest. Mrs. Bennet (Maia Guest), their mother, is a nervous wreck in trying to marry them off despite the taciturn indifference of her husband (Sophie Sorensen) and the fluctuating feelings of the young ladies themselves.

The problem, of course, is the lack of beaux. And that’s where the story finds its rom-com dimensions, for we will find that everyone—except Mary—may find a someone. And that includes Lizzy’s bestie, Charlotte Lucas (Sophie Sorensen) whom Mrs. B is afraid will scarf up one of the few eligible bachelors about, before her daughters can. Bachelor #1 is Mr. Bingley (Jane Bradley) who is something of a frisky pup of a fellow, and whom his snooty sister (Matthew Krob) will keep out of the Bennet clutches no matter what. Bachelor #2 is Mr. Darcy (Nicholas Ortiz), whom Lizzy deems insufferable because of the way he dissed them at a ball. Bachelor #3 is the seemingly dashing Mr. Wickham (Matthew Krob) who has had his own run-in with the ever-unpleasant Darcy. Bachelor #4 is the hilariously unctuous Mr. Collins (Krob, yet again) who has his eye on whichever Bennet girl might not turn him down. He, a Bennet cousin, is to inherit the Bennet property when Mr. Bennet dies, due to patriarchal rules of descent. The girls, without a staunch male at their respective sides, are doomed to penury, or at least to a level of life quite below their present rank.

Jane (Nadezhda Amé), Lizzy (Kimberly Chatterjee), Charlotte Lucas (Sophie Sorensen) in the Playhouse on Park production of Pride and Prejudice by Kate Hamill (photo by Meredith Longo)

Thus it’s all a very middle-class ladies affair in which one either marries up or level or down, but no one can simply stay where they are. The bachelors—except for Wickham who is, alas, merely a lieutenant—all have anything from comfortable to extravagant fortunes. And so there are some upper-class ladies in the game as well. Miss Bingley might have an eye out for Darcy, as does Miss DeBourgh (Nadezhda Amé), daughter of Mr. Collins’ grand patron Lady Catherine DeBurgh (Kelly Letourneau) and a rather fearsome—and quite comical—wraithlike figure.

What makes Austen’s novel run is the way in which pairing off is fraught with misgivings, misunderstanding, and, sometimes, misinformation. The comedy here is to take these familiar types and tweak them toward the contemporary. So that when, for instance, Mary takes to the piano forte and sings, it will be a very emo affair. Or when the dancers hit the floor they will do The Hustle (and to see Mr. Bennet giving it his rendition is no small comic matter). There are broadly played types—such as Krob’s phrase-making Mr. Collins—and more subtle types, such as the superciliousness both female and male Krob brings to Miss Bingley and Mr. Wickham respectively. Guest’s Mrs. Bennet is fully in the spirit of both Austen’s and Hamill’s sense of a relentless woman who uses all her wits to live within the strictures set upon her—she’s seemingly a born manipulator and gossip, and is apt to love best whichever daughter marries best.

Lydia (Kelly Letourneau), Mrs. Bennet (Maia Guest), Mr. Bennet (Sophie Sorensen), Mary (Jane Bradley), Jane (Nadezhda Amé) in the Playhouse on Park production of Pride and Prejudice by Kate Hamill (photo by Meredith Longo)

Sorensen brings a twinkling irony to Mr. Bennet, and Ortiz makes Darcy a bit of a conundrum even to himself. His attempt at romance falls like a stone, and his grand comeuppance—and deliverance—arrives with a wonderful bodily tremor that fully captures a man overcome by conflicting emotions. For we must keep sight of—to render Austen faithfully—the class-bound strictures that might, at any turn, prevent a happily ever after. That’s most clear in what becomes of poor Lydia, who is kept just dim enough to not be fully cognizant of how, in “winning,” she has lost.

In the most rewarding—and demanding—double role, Bradley makes Mary not only a figure of fun but also of a kind of darkly pointed distaste, and, as Bingley, gives a very different comical turn. Dressed sometimes as both characters—or, rather, half and half—Bradley is the potentially loose cannon in every scene, and a late transition between the two roles earns a delighted burst of applause.

Miss Bingley (Matthew Krob), Mr. Bingley (Jane Bradley) in the Playhouse on Park production of Pride and Prejudice by Kate Hamill (photo by Meredith Longo)

Kimberley Chatterjee’s Lizzy, who is our heroine however much she might find that beneath her, sticks to her guns as we might well hope she will, and when she wavers does so with a forthright appraisal of herself that is a fine dramatic turn. For the only truly worthless people—in both Austen and Hamill—are those who can’t improve.

The show is well-served by an open playing space that helps to keep things lively, and by a wall of period-appropriate doors in Randall Parsons’ capable set. We have just enough suggestion of the level of comfort enjoyed at the different estates where the action takes place, and the costumes by Raven Ong have the requisite plainness—for the Bennets—with the necessary ostentation where required for the others, as for instance the ever-superlatively-announced Lady Catherine DeBourgh.

This Pride and Prejudice has laughs aplenty and an earned sense of all’s well that ends well.

Pride and Prejudice
By Kate Hamill
Adapted from the novel by Jane Austen
Directed by Jason O’Connell

Scenic Designer: Randall Parsons; Costume Designer: Raven Ong; Sound Designer: Kirk Ruby; Lighting Designer: Johann Fitzpatrick; Choreographer: Joey Beltre; Dialect Coach: Jen Scapetis-Tycer; Stage Manager: Mollie Cook; Props Master/Set Dresser: Eileen OConnor

Cast: Nadezhda Amé, Jane Bradley, Kimberly Chatterjee, Maia Guest, Matthew Krob, Kelly Letourneau, Nicholas Ortiz, Sophie Sorensen

Playhouse on Park
February 19-March 8, 2020

Boys to Men

Review of littleboy/littleman, Yale Cabaret

A  first year playwright at the Yale School of Drama, Rudi Goblen demonstrates, in littleboy/littleman, a captivating exuberance of language. Two half-brothers, Bastian (Dario Ladani Sanchez), the elder, and Fito (Robert Lee Hart) share an apartment together—or rather, Bastian suffers Fito to stay in his apartment, on the couch. The play opens with Fito, alone in the apartment, rehearsing his street performance act, complete with red cones to separate the crowd from the playing space. The audience at the Cab stands in for the one in his head as he coaches us how to respond, urging us to—whether we like the show or not—make some noise.

Fito is making noise, and that’s one of the things Bastian will harangue him about, at length. Fito, able to give as good as he gets, will use any pretext to launch into tirades of his own, whether about a cop—a former bullying classmate of Bastian—who harasses him, or about a (literally) shitty job Bastian insists he take to help defray the costs of inhabiting the apartment (and don’t get him started on having to clean ladies’ lavatories). When he’s not lecturing Fito about not pulling his weight, Bastian can be seen and heard on a headset, either trying to find out about the delay in his petition for a name-change or trying to hoodwink clients for a “donation” to a police program to fight drugs and juvenile crime. Bastian’s impending name-change spurs some comic badinage between the brothers about ridiculous names but also gives Bastian an occasion to lecture his brother about how a Nicaraguan name is a handicap in job applications.

Like Stephen Adly Guirgis, Goblen is a playwright with a good ear for street-speak as Fito employs a mix of hiphop rhythms and Spanish phrases and, like Guirgis, Goblen likes to let his characters talk. In addition to their individual routines, Fito and Bastian share a reminiscence of a home invasion that took their grandmother’s life and left them permanently traumatized. But it’s really the fate of their mother that has unmoored the brothers. When Fito waxes poetic about the sacrifices their late mother endured in smuggling her two young sons and their grandmother into the States from Nicaragua and then raising them on her own, Bastian snaps back about the fact that Fito contributed nothing to their mother’s last days and throws him out.

There follows another street performance from Fito with audience participation (the night I saw the show, Ilia Isorelýs Paulino, recently seen as Alice in Alice, the third show in the Yale School of Drama season, chose between a magic quarter and a piece of paper) and a collection at the close. The piece of paper contains a poem, a litany of situations summed up as “It’s all just a bag of halos and horns,” and offered as “a toast,/to us.”

I thought the show would end there, but we still have Fito’s final confrontation with that bullying police officer and the outcome of Bastian’s name-change to go. Goblen’s play comes packed with incident and overflows with speech. It aims for the company of other notable plays in which two males navigate a fraught relationship colored by street tensions and a variable grasp of how to get along—such as Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog and Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over—though here the status of both brothers as immigrants adds a further timely dimension.

The wealth of material in littleboy/littleman may feel a bit overwhelming in the compass in which its offered. Or perhaps a full-length play has been crammed into the Cab’s shorter running time. In any case, there could be more: it would be good to see Fito somewhere other than the apartment and the street; and with all the evocation of the mother going on, we feel the lack of a scene or two in which we get to see her for ourselves.

What really resonates here is Robert Lee Hart’s full command of Fito. He so inhabits the role that there seems no division between himself and his character, and that makes Fito’s scenes more vivid at times than the play he’s a part of. Dario Ladani Sanchez puts across the way in which Bastian, for all his better grasp of pragmatic realities, is overshadowed by his brother’s spirit. He’s best when he’s on a headset, trying to use his whitest voice to steer some cash his way.

Hart and Sanchez—who played off one another as antagonists in Seven Spots on the Sun in YSD’s 2018-19 season—make the most of Goblen’s way with words and make us believe in their grudging intimacy. Marcelo Martínez García’s set, which includes musicians on a drumkit and a bass guitar (the latter is used to great effect as the other end of a phone conversation Bastian gets caught up in), gives us a ratty apartment that’s also the street, while Emma Deane’s lighting design is—well—spot on. Second-year director Christopher D. Betts—in his third play of the Cabaret’s 52nd season—keeps the action very mobile, showing again his inspired grasp of how to use the Cab’s amorphous space to enhancing effect.

littleboy/littleman
By Rudi Goblen
Directed by Christopher D. Betts

Set Designer: Marcelo Martínez Garcia; Costume Designer: Stephanie Bahniuk; Lighting Designer: Emma Deane; Sound Designer: Anteo Fabris; Technical Director: Cam Camden; Producers: Sami Cubias & Caitlin M. Dutkiewicz; Stage Manager: Leo Egger

Musicians: Margaret E. Douglas, Tyler Cruz

Cast: Robert Lee Hart, Dario Ladani Sanchez

Yale Cabaret
February 13-15, 2020

The Passion of a Pet

Review of Sylvia, Music Theatre of Connecticut

It’s Valentine’s Day and if your sense of romance may have stalled somewhat over the years, maybe Sylvia, A.R. Gurney’s romantic comedy now playing at MTC, Norwalk, has the answer: get a dog!

Directed by Kevin Connors, Gurney’s play is affable and light. There may be a sense in which the midlife crisis faced by Greg (Dennis Holland) is symptomatic of something darker, but, in general, the play assumes that long-married couples may find themselves confronted by new tastes or long-suppressed desires or dissatisfactions that could manifest in many ways. Greg and Kate (Carole Dell’Aquila) have been together twenty years and the crisis comes in the form of an affectionate stray that Greg encountered in a park and brings home, expecting Kate to just lie down and roll over, so to speak.

Sylvia (Bethany Fitzgerald) in A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia at MTC (photo by Alex Mongillo)

The dog wears a collar with its name, Sylvia, and she is a bundle of energy and, thanks to the miracle of theater, we are privy to her thoughts. That aspect of the play—the verbalized reactions of a frisky dog—is a crowd-pleaser, however obvious. As played by Bethany Fitzgerald, Sylvia is indeed a charming pet and anyone who might look askance at a woman playing a dog shouldn’t judge until they see it done. She looks upon Greg as “God,” aims to please, gets excited by each new arrival at the apartment, wants nothing more than to stretch out upon furniture, and speaks with an intense immediacy, suitable to an animal that lives in the moment. She’s also funny and lovable and makes the play work. Yes, the dog does indeed wag the tale.

Sylvia (Bethany Fitzgerald), Kate (Carole Dell’Aquila) in A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia at MTC (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Less obvious and somewhat less successful is how to stretch such a slight premise into a two hour play, with intermission. This is not easy to do as Gurney hasn’t given Greg’s wife much of a role. Dell’Aquila manages to seem sensible rather than a wet blanket, mostly. But whether or not she has your sympathy may have something to do with how you feel about dogs, and middle-aged men, and the possibilities in life afforded to post-menopausal women. Early on, it seems we might find fun in her occupation as a high school teacher of Shakespeare, so that when she offers “thus bad begins and worse remains behind,” we might catch ourselves hoping that more Shakespearean lines or tropes will percolate through the play. Not so much; Greg never even manages to play on his wife’s sympathies by intoning “What joy is joy if Silvia be not by?” And yet that is where he’s at, you might say.

Sylvia (Bethany Fitzgerald), Greg (Dennis Holland) in A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia at MTC (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Sylvia, in her unquestioning affection, helps her master deal with his current malaise: a job that has passed him by for younger colleagues with younger ambitions, an empty nest; and a wife who is done with the “the dog phase” of her life, much as she is with the children-raising part, and, almost, the stand-by-your-man part. For her, it’s a time to get on with things she wants to do—like research; for Greg, it’s a time in which companionship of some kind is needed. While we might expect that his new-found infatuation might be a younger woman, the play cleverly assumes that a dog can be more appealing than a new paramour. If there’s a bit of winking at the notion of bestiality in Act Two, it certainly isn’t played up in this production.

Tom (Jim Schilling), Greg (Dennis Holland) in A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia at MTC (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Connors draws upon the comic abilities of MTC regular Jim Schilling to create three different characters who intervene in the hi-jinx. One—Phyllis—is a tony lady friend of Kate’s, played for laughs as a not so surreptitious tippler; another—Leslie—is a counselor of fluid gender who seems to suspect the worst of Greg’s urges for Sylvia and recommends that Kate work up the full revenge-fury of a wronged wife. As Tom, he’s a buddy-buddy bench-warmer at Dog Hill (a park where city-folk can let their canines cavort) with a male dog of his own, and the eventual coupling of Sylvia and Bowser, off-stage, might illicit a variety of comic reactions. Schilling and Holland play it mild, at every point letting us off the hook of having to view Sylvia sexually. And that’s helped by Fitzgerald’s refusal to play Sylvia as, well, kittenish. Sylvia, even when in heat, is matter-of-fact and forthright. When she curses out a cat, she’s foul-mouthed but only then, and it’s hilarious.

And that’s important because Greg is a rather buttoned-up guy and so Sylvia may well be his perfect pet. Eventually, Kate seems to see this and grudgingly allows him to have some quality time with the dog she wants him to give away. In Act Two she devises a plan that should spell the end of the spell, and we face an effectively emotional farewell. At this point, Sylvia does sound like a young woman led on by a philandering married man’s promises of a permanent relationship, but that easy identification doesn’t undermine the feeling of actual regret, which Holland depicts well.

Greg (Dennis Holland), Sylvia (Bethany Fitzgerald) in A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia at MTC (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Taking place in a tasteful living-room, with, on a raised space behind, some benches with an attractive 3-D city skyline as backdrop, MTC’s Sylvia is—like the word of praise for many a mutt—companionable. If it stirs thoughts about the mystery of attachment, all the better. A dog, after all, can never be accused of ulterior motives. She might say, with the author George Sand, “there is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.” And that two random, interspecies strangers should meet and find that is the joy and sorrow of Sylvia. Don’t be afraid to love.

Sylvia (Bethany Fitzgerald) in A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia at MTC (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Sylvia
By A.R. Gurney
Directed by Kevin Connors

Scenic Design: Jessie Lizotte; Lighting Design: RJ Romeo; Costume Design: Diane Vanderkroef; Sound Design: Will Atkin; Prop Design: Merrie Deitch; Fight Staging: Dan O’Driscoll; Stage Manager: Gary Betsworth

Cast: Carole Dell’Aquila, Bethany Fitzgerald, Dennis Holland, Jim Schilling

Music Theatre of Connecticut
February 7-23, 2020

Keeping the Faith

Review of Godspell, ACT of Connecticut

The show opens in a dilapidated church that still has lovely stained glass windows and impressive arches but with construction materials littering the floor, in Reid Thompson’s fascinating set. It’s a down-at-heels sacred building, now the home to a group of squatters, many of them children. They come from the shadows to occupy the space and then go into hiding when a troupe of would-be renovators barges in, all giddy with the place’s possibilities as high-end condos.

The newcomers discover a huddled child, then the other kids and their adult leaders present themselves, and presto! the eight interlopers—Jacob (Jacob Hoffman), Katie (Katie Ladner), Alex (Alex Lugo), Andrew (Andrew Poston), Monica (Monica Ramirez), Phil (Phil Sloves), Morgan (Morgan Billings Smith), and Emma (Emma Tattenbaum-Fine)—are transformed into disciples of Jesus (Trent Saunders) and John the Baptist (Jaime Cepero), who proceeds to give Jesus a sponge-bath.

Jesus (Trent Saunders), seated; kneeling: Andrew Poston, Jaime Cepero, Morgan Billings Smith; standing: Phil Sloves, Monica Ramirez, Alex Lugo, Jacob Hoffman, Emma Tattenbaum-Fine, Katie Ladner in The ACT production of Godspell (photo by Jeff Butchen)

In its original incarnation, Godspell, with music by Stephen Schwartz and book by John-Michael Tebelak, dates from the early 1970s and arrived in the context of the hippie movement and the effort by U.S, churches to reach out to the young (remember the invention of the guitar mass?). Jesus’s teachings—with their communal emphasis and their ethical embrace of the poor rather than the rich and powerful—and his leadership of a band of guys who gave up their day-jobs to follow him certainly had immediate appeal in that period. Which may have something to do with reviving the show now. We would seem to have reached an all-time low for ethical behavior in the U.S. of A.

The show, which acts out stories and parables derived from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, interspersed with songs, mostly of the uplifting variety, has been updated at ACT by Schwartz and director Daniel C. Levine, and that means there are topical references from our day and some new lyrics. An early example, bound to be a favorite bit, features Jesus preaching to “Save the People” while the would-be disciples keep working in comical references to major Broadway shows. Any guesses which ones?

The cast of the ACT production of Godspell, directed by Daniel C. Levine (photo by Jeff Butchen)

What really makes the show at ACT is the spiritedness of the troupe, which manages to shun for the most part the insipid cuteness that may still dog the show from the film version of 1973. Here, the cast is fun and inviting and their professionalism never flags—whether leading the group in the vibrant radio-hit “Day by Day” (Katie), or hitting a pure high note in “All Good Gifts” (Andrew), or belting out “Bless the Lord” (Morgan), or hamming up as fallen goats for “We Beseech Thee” (led by Jacob), or enacting a contrite Magdalene (Monica) in “By My Side,” or demanding we heed the teachings, in “Learn Your Lessons Well,” led by Alex, or putting audience members on the spot as Emma leads off Act II with “Turn Back, O Man.” There are also many nice touches to make the preachiness of all those parables (even a church service is generally limited to a few!) go down easier, including a biblical king (Phil) like Trump by way of Alec Baldwin, and a sleazy judge by the name of Weinstein (Phil), as well as puppetry for the story of the Good Samaritan, interesting use of a painting for a grilling by those pesky Pharisees, some nimble stepping by Jesus and Judas to strobe lights in “All for the Best,” and captivating work with lights in “Light of the World,” led by Phil.

Jesus (Trent Saunders) and Judas (Jaime Cepero) in the ACT production of Godspell (photo by Jeff Butchen)

Throughout Act One, Saunders is a genial and soulful Jesus and casting has wisely eschewed the blond heart-throb type of the most recent New York revival. Saunders is a performer of color and he brings to the role an easy-going gentleness that suits it. In Act Two, when he has to chastise—“Alas For You”—the lyrics get a bit buried by the blasting band, but his passion in the song is convincing. As John the Baptist and Judas, Jaime Cepero is a great asset as well, always commanding attention and playing like a dutiful second lieutenant even when that means a betrayal (which Judas can barely bring himself to do—Jesus kisses him rather than vice versa).

Monica (Monica Ramirez), Jesus (Trent Saunders) in the ACT production of Godspell (photo by Jeff Butchen)

Unlike Jesus Christ Superstar, which visits much of the same hallowed text, the libretto of Godspell stresses the parables of Jesus and avoids presenting his trial before Pilate. The death of Jesus is depicted, and seems a sacrificial gesture by someone whose death is meant to be a good thing. And yet, if you don’t know the story you might be baffled by the mystery of what exactly transpires. The lovely song “Beautiful City” is sung late in the show by Jesus at his most beatific and holds out the hope of “a city of man” rather than a “city of angels” (meant to be a way of saying we need to take responsibility for this world and not expect an otherworldly reward, unless it just means to imply that New York is better than LA).

With its eager effort to make the audience feel themselves in the midst of the action—and the spacious amphitheater at ACT aids greatly in that effect—and its many enthralling effects of light (Jack Mehler) and color and costuming (Brenda Phelps), its engaging cast and its very tight band, this 2020 revival of Godspell is bound to inspire more true believers.

The cast of the ACT production of Godspell, directed by Daniel C. Levine (photo by Jeff Butchen)

Godspell
Conceived and originally directed by John-Michael Tebelak
Music and new lyrics by Stephen Schwartz
ACT production conceived and directed by Daniel C. Levine

Choreography: Sara Brians; Music Supervision: Bryan Perri; Music Direction: Danny White; Scenic Design: Reid Thompson; Lighting Design: Jack Mehler; Costume Design: Brenda Phelps; Sound Design: John Salutz; Props Designer: Abigail Bueti; Production Manager: Tom Swetz; Production Stage Manager: Michael Seelbach

Band: Danny White, conductor, keyboards; Miles Aubrey, electric guitars, acoustic guitars, mandolin; Arnold Gottlieb, electric bass, fretless bass, acoustic guitar; Dennis Arcano, drums & percussion

Cast: Jaime Cepero, Shaylen Harger, Jacob Hoffman, Katie Ladner, Alex Lugo, Cameron Nies, Andrew Poston, Monica Ramirez, Trent Saunders, Phil Sloves, Morgan Billings Smith, Emma Tattenbaum-Fine

Children: Nikki Adorante, Marley Bender, Nate Cohen, Sully Dunn, Adelaide Kellen, Colby Kipnes, Jack Rand, Amélie Simard, Caroline Smith, Dean Trevisani

ACT of Connecticut
February 6-March 8, 2020

What Happens There

Review of The Lifespan of a Fact, TheaterWorks, Hartford

TheaterWorks is back with another play seemingly ripped from the headlines, though these days, in terms of their lifespan, facts could said to be on life support, or even in hospice care.

The story behind the play (what seem the agreed-upon facts): author John D’Agata, an essayist who has issues with the practices of journalism and the concept of nonfiction, wrote an essay inspired by the death of Levi Presley, a teen who jumped from the tower of the Stratosphere Hotel in Las Vegas in 2002. D’Agata’s essay was about Vegas, suicide, and other issues he deemed relevant. Harper’s passed on the essay; The Believer took it on and assigned Jim Fingal to fact-check it. Fingal found numerous inaccuracies and questioned, rigorously, much of D’Agata’s authorial license. In 2010, The Believer published the essay, titled “What Happens There.” In 2012, The Lifespan of a Fact was published, a book that revealed the years of dickering over the essay that went on between D’Agata and Fingal, edited by Jill Bialosky. In 2018, a play by Jeremy Kareken & David Murrell and Gordon Farrell based on the book opened on Broadway with an all-star cast of Daniel Radcliffe, Bobby Cannavale, and Cherry Jones.

John D’Agata (Rufus Collins), Emily Penrose (Tasha Lawrence), Jim Fingal (Nick LaMedica) in The Lifespan of a Fact at TheaterWorks (photo by Lanny Nagler)

The Lifespan of a Fact plays at TheaterWorks through March 8, directed by Tracy Brigden and starring Nick LaMedica as Jim Fingal, Rufus Collins as John D’Agata, and Tasha Lawrence as fictional editor Emily Penrose. The play adds drama by making Fingal a new recruit at a publication where D’Agata’s essay is accepted who wants desperately to please his boss—and he has only a weekend to complete the job of checking D’Agata’s facts. He contacts D’Agata, first by email then by phone and, in a nice theatrical touch, is revealed sleeping on D’Agata’s couch, having gone to Vegas—where D’Agata lives in his recently deceased mother’s home—to check on some facts such as the color of the tower’s bricks and the number of lanes involved in what D’Agata calls a traffic jam at its base. Eventually, against any kind of expectation of how editors work, Penrose shows up too. And the showdown begins: to publish or not to publish, since D’Agata seemingly won’t accept any changes. However farfetched her presence is, Lawrence’s bristly impatience, familiarity with D’Agata’s ways, and archly maternal attitudes are welcome.

Nick LaMedica, a very capable comic actor, keeps the proceedings amusing. The play focuses on his truculent insistence on holding D’Agata to account. It’s not so much a pursuit of truth as an effort to protect the world from the kind of bullshit that passes for poetic license or rhetorical sleight-of-hand and which flows blithely through much reporting, most advertising copy, and many-too-many political speeches and presidential tweets. It’s hard not to be on Fingal’s side even if he is a somewhat manic nerd. And even if D’Agata were less of the pompous ass Collins plays him as. There’s physical humor, double-takes, joking asides, and a rather sitcom sense of character and situation.

Jim Fingal (Nick LaMedica) in The Lifespan of a Fact at TheaterWorks (photo by Lanny Nagler)

Certainly, there’s enough here to wax editorial about. As a book, Lifespan might be an interesting exhibit of how two different minds interpret events and the task of turning events into writing. As a play, the treatment gives more importance and impact to D’Agata’s stunts than they outwardly merit. Some examples—such as D’Agata’s claim that a caller who hung up on him when he worked a Vegas suicide crisis line was Presley—aren’t so much factual deviations as suppositions. Something an editor should decide on the value of, for the essay, and either strike or alter or let stand. D’Agata’s sense of truth assumes that emotions are facts. What he feels he is free to write as his view of the facts. And yet the notion that his inaccuracies might cause emotional distress in others doesn’t faze him in the least. Collins makes us register that there is some issue at work in D’Agata, but the play never comes close to deciding what it might be, other than the loss of his mother.

In any case, what’s at stake isn’t so very much, ultimately. Given the kind of publication D’Agata’s piece would appear in, a writerly persona giving a “take” on the events is more or less assumed. In his own mind D’Agata may be the like of Norman Mailer, a titan of prose able to bend the facts of the world to his literary authority, or maybe a “gonzo journalist” like Hunter S. Thompson who once claimed the only source of objective reporting was a ticker-tape machine. Mostly, one assumes, that any readers who stick with D’Agata’s account from beginning to end do so because they simply love what he “does.” His writing is the kind that treats the world as if in need of an author’s intervention to make any sense at all.

In its delivery, Lifespan is one of those plays where topicality trumps any effort to make things interesting or surprising. Which is a way of saying that perhaps it hues too closely to the facts of D’Agata and Fingal and is in need of more writerly license. And yet the play does entertain and, at 85-90 minutes, does not overstay its welcome. One of its nicest theatrical touches, among several, is having the three discussants sit silently for the alleged timespan that Presley sat on the tower before jumping. It’s a moment where—with no words to describe what they feel or think—the three simply expose themselves to a fact: time passes.

Jim Fingal (Nick LaMedica), Emily Penrose (Tasha Lawrence), John D’Agata (Rufus Collins) in The Lifespan of a Fact, TheaterWorks (photo by Lanny Nagler)

The questions about exactitude that Fingal doggedly pursues are more relevant than ever in an era so given to spin and the finessing of facts. At one point, Fingal beseeches D’Agata to consider that, on the internet, anything can be fact-checked or disputed by the intrusive legions ready to find fault. And yet that argument may be in D’Agata’s favor. Since the world will twist, bend, pull apart and repurpose any statement as it likes, why not at least go on the record with the world according to John. D’Agata knows, after all, that a writer has nothing but his words, and they are only his if he believes in the purpose of each one, regardless of how well that suits someone else’s sense of what happened.

The Lifespan of a Fact
By Jeremy Kareken & David Murrell and Gordon Farrell
Directed by Tracy Brigden

Set Design: Brian Prather; Costume Design: Tracy Christensen; Lighting Design: Brian Bembridge; Sound Design: Obadiah Eaves; Projection Design: Zachary Borovay; Hair Consultant: Mark Adam Rampmeyer; Production Manager: Bridget Sullivan; Stage Manager: Kate J. Cudworth

Cast: Rufus Collins, Nick LaMedica, Tasha Lawrence

TheaterWorks
January 30 through March 8, 2020

Call Me Up in Dreamland

Review of Alice, Yale School of Drama

One of the great attractions of Alice, the third show of the Yale School of Drama 2019-20 season, directed by third-year director Logan Ellis, is the prospect of hearing the songs of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan sung by someone other than Tom Waits. (And I’m someone who loves listening to Tom Waits!)

That aspect of the show is key because the songs in Alice are sung by characters, most of whom bear some resemblance to characters in Lewis Carroll’s classic and incomparable Alice stories, Alice in Wonderland and Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass (one of the few literary sequels better than the original).

Filtering the adventures of Alice through Waits and Brennan’s Beat carnival sensibility provides a curious and delicious oddity not to be missed. Then filter those songs through arrangements by music director Dan Pardo as sung by some fine voices from the Yale School of Drama that lend them the heft and glow of opera and Broadway and that indeed should be attraction enough.

But consider: Alice, the musical, was developed by avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson, and his stamp on the proceedings, with a libretto developed by Paul Schmidt, further twists the familiar if quizzical terrain in other directions, mainly because Wilson/Schmidt are more interested in real life Alice Liddell (inspiration for our Alice) and Charles Dodgson (Carroll’s actual name) than in Carroll’s creation per se. So the space we travel through here is called Dreamland and watching the show recalled to me one of my favorite puns in Finnegans Wake about “we grisly old Sykos who have done our unsmiling bits on alices, when they were yung and easily freudened.” The Liddell/Dodgson relation is, indeed, frighteningly easy to freuden.

And that lends more than a little perfunctory psyching of the pedophiliac psyche—having to do with Dodgson’s proclivity for photographing pre-pubescent girls, sometimes nude—in what Wilson/Schmidt hath wrought. That aspect mainly impinges in the second half as the script reaches for a through-narrative to hang its symptoms upon, all hinging upon Alice solving “the riddle” of Jabberwocky (the poem of monster-decapitation Alice finds in a book) and, perhaps, beating time. That, for those in need of a plot, may serve as well as anything might, but what matters here is what Waits/Brennan did with their part in all this and it is wonderous indeed, brought vividly to phantasmagoric life by Ellis and his astounding team and cast.

The cast of the Yale School of Drama’s production of Alice, by Robert Wilson, Paul Schmidt, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, directed by Logan Ellis, February, 2020 (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

We begin with screens upon screens that replicate images of Alice (Ilia Isorelýs Paulino) to suggest Dodgson’s photographic fetish (Brittany Bland, projections). Dodgson (Sola Fadiran) opens the show with “Alice,” a song of obsession and melancholy that sets the tone at once. And yet the inspired nature of these characters and their eye-popping costumes by Meg Powers works against Dodgson as a pining pedophile bedeviled by whatever we want to imagine him bedeviled by (Dodgson, a deacon, mathematician and logician, is not a surrealist, not even avant le lettre). What the show makes us face is—yes, obsession and the melancholy of unrequited desire, but it’s the kind we’re apt to have for the figures in our dreams, which may include material from websites, films, shows, books, poems, myths, ritual, and anything in our inner grab-bag.

Mad Hatter (Julian Sanchez), Alice (Ilia Isorelýs Paulino) in the Yale School of Drama production of Alice by Robert Wilson, Paul Schmidt, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, directed by Logan Ellis, February 2020 (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Anna Grigo’s scenic design creates an open space where the various encounters—each featuring a song or a poem—take place, some—a torture-chamber-like kitchen—having a certain dimension, others— the boat/shop the Sheep (Daniel Liu) navigates—are free-standing sets in their own right. The changeableness of the set perfectly complements the amorphousness of Alice’s imagination as she moves through Dreamland. Done up like a doll, Alice is a mostly willing witness to whatever she encounters. “We’re All Mad Here,” as a song suggests, and Alice gamely takes a “when in Rome . . .” attitude to her interlocutors. Within that world, Dodgson/Carroll is perhaps the Oz-like Wizard behind it all, or at least the dream-father-figure who might help her find a way out. Since Dodgson is also the White Knight and the White Rabbit, he is a kind of all-in-all stopgap; we can call “foul” for the egotistical artist-teacher-master who must insist on his centrality in his protégé’s imagination, but we’re also encouraged to see how the Waits/Brennan songs Fadiran sings—“Fish and Bird” and “Poor Edward” particularly—give us insight into how Dodgson/Carroll understands his own plight. The first ends Act One with a sort of Never-Neverland tableau and duet with Paulino and reprises at the start of Act Two; the second comes late in Act Two and, in Fadiran’s performance, instills a moving sense of the pathos of a creator plagued by his creation.

Charles Dodgson (Sola Fadiran) in the Yale School of Drama production of Alice by Robert Wilson, Paul Schmidt, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, directed by Logan Ellis, February 2020 (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

It’s remarkable how readily Waits/Brennan find beguiling analogs for Carroll’s characters that extend our sense of their possibilities. In a show-stopping moment in Act One, The Caterpillar (Julian Sanchez, in a baroque fantasy of a costume) proclaims his alter ego “Table Top Joe,” a scatting Vegas act that might be Waits’ alter ego as well. Grigo’s design gives Sanchez a thrust space into the audience, and having the Caterpillar undulate into position while singing creates a visual and visceral feat not easy to top. Indeed, Sanchez is a major asset—he gets to wear two amazing get-ups as Mad Hatter (his work with hand-puppets is impressive)  and, with Liu, enacts a teasing number—“Altar Boys”—that, while not derived from Wonderland characters per se, plays campy fun with the clerical trappings of Dodgson as an Anglican deacon.

Other stand-out moments include the lovely, demented-Disney of “Flower’s Grave,” sung by a family of flowers (Robert Lee Hart, John Evans Reese, Jackeline Torres Cortés, Adrienne Wells); “Fawn,” in which Paulino and Wells vocalize beautifully; “Kommienzuspadt,” wherein Robert Lee Hart as the Cheshire Cat channels Waits wonderfully; “Reeperbahn,” with Jessy Yates as a kind of BDSM king on a throne of a wheelchair, stirring up tales of naughty indulgence enacted by the ensemble; “Barcarolle,” in which Liu too blends into the Dodgson persona, this time as a motherly, androgynous sheep, and finally, and very memorably, Paulino—as the aged Alice on a cane—singing “I’m Still Here” as a statement of endurance but also of immortal presence within the Dreamland that, for all we know, might go on without us. Paulino’s Alice is childlike, capricious, and slyly reactive throughout, the giddy kid we might like to be again. Being an audience to Paulino’s emotive and moving way with a song has been a joy of her time, now in its third year, at the Yale School of Drama, and her “I’m Still Here” caps that wonderfully. 

Humpty Dumpty (Jessy Yates), Alice ((Ilia Isorelýs Paulino) in the Yale School of Drama production of Alice by Robert Wilson, Paul Schmidt, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, directed by Logan Ellis, February 2020 (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

There are a few disappointments: the poems “Jabberwocky” and “You Are Old, Father William,” two of my favorites in the books (and add “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” not referenced here, as a third) sort of get lost in the sauce; the Tweedledee (Cortés)/Tweedledum (Reese) segment, while fun and silly, lacks the manic, violent quality Carroll gives it; and “Lost in the Harbour” is sung by Yates as Humpty Dumpty presented as a projection upon a large, suspended egg. The device seems to limit Humpty Dumpty who, in the book, is a key figure and whose song, here, could use more of the wistful doom found in Waits’ rendition on Alice.

As a musical, the Alice of Wilson, Schmidt, Waits and Brennan, is based on a merging of spectacle and song that creates a world more than a story. Logan Ellis and company fully fulfill that imperative, imaginatively, creatively, and with lasting impressions to spare. “There’s only Alice.”

Alice
Concept by Robert Wilson
Music and Lyrics by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan
Libretto by Paul Schmidt
Directed by Logan Ellis

Music Direction, Arrangements, and Orchestrations: Dan Pardo; Scenic Design: Anna Grigo; Costume Designer: Meg Powers; Lighting Designer: Riva Fairhall; Sound Designer: Dakota Stipp; Projection Designer: Brittany Bland; Production Dramaturg: Evan Hill; Technical Director: HaoEn Hu; Stage Manager: Bekah Brown

Musicians: Jillian Emerson, cello; Nate Huvard, guitar; Dan Pardo, piano; Epongue Ekille, violin; Calvin Kaleel, bass; Jose Key, saxophone; Leonardo Marques Starck von Mutius, trombone

Cast: Sola Fadiran, Robert Lee Hart, Daniel Liu, Ilia Isorelýs Paulino, John Evans Reese, Julian Sanchez, Jackeline Torres Cortés, Adrienne Wells, Jessy Yates

Yale School of Drama
February 1-7, 2020

Living At Risk

Review of Pike Street, Hartford Stage

Character, we might say, is outwardly a question of manner and inwardly a question of one’s openness to others. By such a measure, Nilaja Sun’s Pike Street, at Hartford Stage through February 2, directed by Ron Russell, is full of character.

Nilaja Sun in Pike Street, at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

All of its characters, enacted by Sun, the author and performer of the play, are manners she adopts at will, carrying on vivid dialogues, and Sun’s openness to others is what makes the play work. She is able to inhabit these folk because they aren’t just figments of her imagination: they are people who live a precarious existence on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, an existence made perilous by the imminent arrival of a hurricane. The backstories come to light as necessary to fill us in on the situation, but the main gist is the way the impending crisis brings out the character in these characters.

Evelyn is a Puerto Rican mom, beset by the fact that her daughter Candi, fifteen, has suffered an aneurysm that leaves her confined to a chair and in need of a respirator and a dialysis machine—and, with yet another major storm on the way with its possible attendant loss of electricity, Candi is at risk. The family, which includes Evelyn’s truculent and womanizing father, Poppi, played mainly for laughs, should evacuate to a shelter, says Con Ed, but moving Candi in her chair up and down five flights with no elevator is no picnic, and the kind of callous treatment the girl suffered last time—during Hurricane Sandy—leaves Evelyn loath to endure such indignities. Her solution: a generator in the apartment should they lose power.

Nilaja Sun in Pike Street, at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Other characters come and go to flesh out the proceedings, particularly Evelyn’s brother Manny, just now returned from service in Afghanistan and the source of the income the family manages on. Manny is generally an ingratiating and agreeable sort—except when indeterminate triggers set off his PTSD, making him apt to cause some havoc with local Arab merchants. Neighbors, such as senile Mrs. Appelbaum, Ty, Manny’s pot-smoking chum, and Migdalia, Poppi’s woman-for-hire, add voices and occasions for reactions, as Evelyn tries her best to be staunch and patient like her deceased mother was—a healer who ran a botanica now closed.

Sun’s sure way of conjuring these characters opens their world to us and us to their world. One of the show’s more memorable moments is when a flashback lets us see Candi, as a child, campaigning for class president and sounding like a font of wisdom.

Nilaja Sun in Pike Street at Hartford Stage, photo by T. Charles Erickson

Before the show begins, Sun sits on the set’s lone chair, shelves of candles behind her, as the audience enters, seeming to commune within herself. She opens the show by reaching out to the audience, inviting rhythmic handclaps interspersed with deep breaths, as not only a way of focusing our attention but a way of making us all alert to each other and to the transformative possibilities of her story. Being present is key to the show’s message, showing how important the cohesion of this family—any family—is, while also hitting the audience with a tragedy that comes from the everydayness of bad decisions and bad luck.

The show’s final, indelible image is of the most at-risk character’s resilience, which is also in its way a cry for help. Nilaja Sun’s Pike Street finds its passion and its humor in the trials and joys of living and creates theater that feels—in our storm-stressed times—like a humanitarian effort.

Nilaja Sun in Pike Street, at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Pike Street
Written & performed by Nilaja Sun
Directed by Ron Russell

Scenic Design: Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams; Costume Design: Clint Ramos; Lighting Design: Tyler Micoleau; Sound Design: Ron Russell; Production Stage Manager: Molly Minor Eustis; Assistant Stage Manager: Nicole Wiegert; Production Manager: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy

Hartford Stage
January 9-February 2, 2020

Twins, Man, and a Vengeful God

Review of Is God Is, Yale Cabaret

One way to describe Aleshea Harris’ Is God Is—at Yale Cabaret directed by Christopher D. Betts, a second-year director at Yale School of Drama—is as a revenge play that might have been written by Sam Shepard, if Shepard were a black woman. Harris gleefully enters into Shepard terrain: the myths of the family played out in a world that mixes the underclass with the leisure class and grabs from tropes of the Western—with its willingness to trade on being compelled by fate—the road picture, as the place where paired psyches find bonds and lines of fracture, and the hoary story of how a younger generation must forge its being in some kind of struggle or fulfillment with an older one. The irony and absurdity of Shepard is there too, as well as a gripping sense of a cracked world where all debts must be paid in blood.

But there’s a further irony Harris mines as well. Sometime in the 1960s the phrase “black comedy” became pervasive, not as a racial distinction but rather to signify the notion that some comedy is “dark,” not vanilla, not easy-going and safe. Harris creates a form of black comedy that is deliberately black in a racialized way, making her African American characters take their rightful place in a certain American mythos. It’s as if all the nods to black culture of a Hollywood filmmaker eager to trade in appropriation—like Quentin Tarantino—has finally met a sensibility equal to that incentive. This is black black comedy and its ultimate target is not a culture of exclusion or misappropriation, but of a country—the one we all live in—that is full of deep injustices that can sometimes be entertainingly offset by violent revenge. The violence is almost cartoonish, in a nod to the way action films generally treat these matters, but because this is theater in a small space there is discomfort too.

Twin sisters Racine (Ciara Monique) and Anaia (Tavia Hunt) suffered bad burns as children in a fire set by their father that, they believe, left their mother dead. They were together through a series of foster homes as objects of, at best, pity, Anaia with lasting scars all over her face, Racine with scars covered by clothing. As the play opens, with the twins about 21, they learn by letter that their mother is still alive and living in a care facility in the “dirty south.” They journey to visit her. Known in the playbill as She, their mother (played by Abigail Onwunali) is known by the girls simply as God. Making her directive that they kill the man who tried to kill her a “mission from God.”

In some ways that set up is the best of the play. The interplay between Monique and Hunt is full of a kind of knowing mystery that compels us to figure out this world even as they must. Nothing like incredible childhood trauma to make the present an extension of the past. And Onwunali’s She is scary, funny and incredibly evocative. As the scripture has it: “thy God is a vengeful God,” and the girls accept their mission readily enough even though, as Anaia the “emotional” one says, they aren’t killers. Watching Racine transform into one is a journey in itself, one that Monique accomplishes by going deeper into the character, letting us see her as, indeed, her cold-blooded father’s child.

The first task the girls’ undertake—to worm their father’s whereabouts from Chuck Hall (Matthew Elijah Webb), a former associate of dad’s, now drinking heavily to get up the nerve to pill himself to death—is a classic of miscommunication with plenty of style to spare. Hall is a mess but he’s memorable and the girls are apt to think aloud in tandem in a very amusing way. Next up is dad’s yellow house on a hill, shared with his very bougie family, quite comically rendered by Gloria Majule as Angie, a Real Housewife at her wits’ end, son Riley (Anthony Brown), an arugula fetishist whose final freak out is full of manic energy, and his twin brother Scotch (Seun Soyemi), a would-be poet giddy with inspiration. Once Angie’s out of the way, the girls get mistaken by the boys as strippers and . . . well, the entire scene plays out as a takedown of showdowns and of a certain kind of status lifestyle that maybe needs to be beaten into submission.

Finally, there’s Brandon E. Burton in bad guy getup, complete with black cowboy hat, as Man. He’s well-spoken (aren’t villains always?) until he explodes, and he’s chilling in his utter detachment. The possibilities for rapport between father and offspring are there and might beguile us for a moment—particularly as Burton renders well the fascination of a man beyond the pale who might be capable of anything and who knows it—but we know in our hearts this is a “last one standing” deal.

That the show is so entertaining is a credit to Betts and his cast, all of whom create indelible characters, and his team, which uses the entire Cab playing space to make the action sprawl as it must—shout out particularly for the set design by Stephanie Bahniuk with Marcelo Martínez Garcia, and to Anteo Fabris’ sound design and the work on fights and intimacy of Kelsey Rainwater and Jonathan Jolly (which includes, I imagine, how to play dead body or maybe dead body convincingly in close proximity to the audience).

This version of Is God Is is not a play of fixed locations. It’s a play of legendary spaces we find ourselves in the midst of at key moments. Stage and the wider playing area blend to create the world the twins move through on their mission—which reads as a fate, as an idée fixe, as a plot that makes of parricide a blow against toxic masculinity, and as a final retribution that no doubt creates new scars for the already heavily scarred.

Is God Is
By Aleshea Harris
Directed by Christopher D. Betts

Set Designer: Stephanie Bahniuk; Costume Designer: April M. Hickman; Lighting Designer: Tully Goldrick; Sound Designer/Music Supervisor: Anteo Fabris; Projections Designers: Erin Sullivan and Hannah Tran; Fight and Intimacy Director: Kelsey Rainwater; Associate Set Designer: Marcelo Martínez Garcia; Associate Fight Director: Jonathan Jolly; Scenic Artist: Sarah Karl; Dramaturg: Faith Zamble; Technical Director: Lu Shaoqian; Producer: Dani Barlow; Stage Manager: Edmond O’Neal

Cast: Anthony Brown, Brandon E. Burton, Tavia Hunt, Gloria Majule, Ciara Monique, Abigail Onwunali, Seun Soyemi, Matthew Elijah Webb

Yale Cabaret
January 16-18, 2020

Putting the Fun in Dysfunction

Review of Fun Home, Yale School of Drama

The Yale School of Drama production of Fun Home, the Tony-winning musical by Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron, based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, is something to behold. A two-story home, with a band in the back on the ground floor and an artist-studio/observation post on the second-floor, graces the stage at the University Theater. The design by Jimmy Stubbs wonderfully foregrounds the notion of “home” that the musical, playing through December 20, interrogates with its story of dysfunction and coping.

The open playing space in front can become the Bechdel family’s museum-like home with its prized antiques, or easily morph into the funeral home that Bruce, the father (JJ McGlone), operates out of the house, or the dorm-room where Middle Alison (Doireann Mac Mahon) discovers the wonders of lesbian love with Joan (Madeline Seidman) or a hotel room where Small Alison anxiously interrogates her dad. A sliding door in a wall gives onto the piano Helen, the mother (Zoe Mann), an actress, practices on and, in one eerie tableau, the space where Bruce works on a naked cadaver (Dario Ladani Sanchez). Key to the appeal of this well-paced production is the way director/choreographer Danilo Gambini makes use of the space, moving the characters through a kind of memory house as Alison (Eli Pauley) tries to come to terms with the enduring influence of her troubled father.

The company of Fun Home with music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, directed by Danilo Gambini. Photo by T. Charles Erickson, Yale School of Drama, 2019

As told, the story of Alison, a comic-book artist, consists of nonlinear scenes, as they seem to occur in Alison’s memory. Always addressing the audience, Alison pitches her appeal to us, making us witnesses to her vexed history. It’s not just the funeral home and her dad’s way of imposing his tastes and his standards (he dismisses comic-book art in favor of serious art). We learn that Bruce pursues young men for sex while remaining the patriarch and, though his wife is aware of his proclivities, that he hides behind a lie of heteronormativity that seems to warp him. And his underage liaisons put the entire family at risk. Then there’s that night in New York when Bruce is willing to leave his kids asleep in a hotel room while he goes out for . . . whatever he goes out for. Alison is upfront about all she doesn’t know about him, and her father’s death—she’s convinced it was suicide—confronts her as a need to weigh both his failings and hers.

The perspective of Alison, as someone who gradually finds the entertainment value of her life, is key to the power of the YSD production. Pauley gives Alison a reflective irony and her presence as onlooker is made manifest by the way Gambini keeps her placed on the periphery of scenes. The effect, aided by visual effects such as Camilla Tassi’s evocative projections of drawings, scribbles and text, and Nicole E. Lang’s varied lighting design, is of a world that is shaping itself into expressive arrangements as Alison gropes to find her own truth.

The songs that make Fun Home a musical have a certain obligatory quality, as if the story of Alison and her family—essentially a tale of estrangement—might be made alright if they can sing about it. The fun songs, like “Come to the Fun Home” and “Raincoat of Love,” show a lively knack for the kinds of family performers—the Jackson Five, the Partridge Family—that Small Alison loves (the latter number features Sanchez as a teenybopper heartthrob and Seidman and Mac Mahon as dead-ringers for Susan Dey in Phuong Nguyen’s costumes). When they appear in tandem, the three Bechdel children—Alison (Taylor Hoffman), Christian (Juliana Aiden Martinez) and John (Laurie Ortega-Murphy)—are fast-moving stick puppets, giving them the infectious charm of the kind of televised entertainment that would appeal to the children. Small Alison, a larger puppet voiced by Hoffman, with puppeteering by Martinez and Ortega-Murphy, maintains an air of melancholy that might be less available to a child actor (puppet design by Anatar Marmol-Gagne).

Middle Alison’s big number of coming out, “Changing My Major,” is thoroughly charming in Doireann Mac Mahon’s rendering—there’s shyness and heat and awkwardness and joy, and Mac Mahon moves about the space as if in a pas de deux with her own sense of wonder. The more emotionally taxing “Days and Days” is a knockout, delivered by Zoe Mann as the one place in the show when Helen comes into her own, finally reaching out to Alison and acknowledging the emotional costs of life with Bruce.

As Bruce, JJ McGlone is perfectly suited to the role. He looks the English teacher—one of Bruce’s occupations—and he plays the doting or disgruntled father well and is able to mood-swing in a way that makes Bruce feel complicated. His striped suit and glances at his reflection while singing “not too bad,” let us know he’s something of a player, but he’s also vulnerable in ways that make him not quite the grown-up Small and Middle Alison assume he is.

Alison (Eli Pauley) and Bruce (JJ McGlone) in Fun Home with music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, directed by Danilo Gambini. Photo by T. Charles Erickson, Yale School of Drama, 2019

The trajectory of Bruce’s character is given two powerful moments late in the play. Gambini places the important car ride between Bruce and Middle Alison (but with Alison taking her place—indeed, the shutting out of Middle Alison behind a sliding wall is very effective) on the edge of the stage. The intimacy that the two almost find is there for us more than for them, and so the scene registers as the tragic lost chance Alison sees it as. Finally, Bruce’s big number, “Edges of the World,” is sung by McGlone from a platform on the second floor, a provisional space from which he tries to survey not only an old house he’s trying to renovate, but also a life that, like the house, may be beyond repair. Like Helen’s “Days and Days,” “Edges” expresses Alison’s sense of her parents’ desperation, which becomes, via song, uplifting and poignant.

Finally, the flying Small Alison—a puppet sustained in midair—is fully buoyed by the merging voices of Hoffman, Pauley and Mac Mahon, affording us a complex moment in which the child contains the elders and the elders share the child’s simple trust in a father who has yet to bully or betray her. Fun Home, in this fully satisfying production, lets the wishful thinking of art’s answer to life hang on that fleeting moment of perfect balance.

Fun Home
Music by Jeanine Tesori
Book and Lyrics by Lisa Kron
Based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel
Directed by Danilo Gambini

Music Director: Jill Brunelle; Scenic Designer: Jimmy Stubbs; Costume Designer: Phuong Nguyen; Lighting Designer: Nicole E. Lang; Sound Designer: Noel Nichols; Projection Designer: Camilla Tassi; Puppet Designer: Anatar Marmol-Gagne; Production Dramaturg: Emily Sorensen; Technical Director: Dominick Pinto; Stage Manager: Edmond O’Neal

Musicians: Jill Brunelle, keyboard 1; Liam Bellman-Sharpe, guitar; Margaret E. Douglas, bass; Frances Pollock, keyboard 2; Jim Stavris, drums; Emily Duncan Wilson, reeds

Cast: Taylor Hoffman, Doireann Mac Mahon, Zoe Mann, Juliana Aiden Martinez, JJ McGlone, Laurie Ortega-Murphy, Eli Pauley, Dario Ladani Sanchez, Madeline Seidman

Yale School of Drama
December 14-20, 2019

Worn-out Whiteness

Review of Two Mile Hollow, Yale Cabaret

“O wad some pow’r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us,” mused Scottish poet Robert Burns in his “To a Louse.” White folk are being gifted by some newly empowered powers, this century, to perhaps see ourselves as others see us, and some might be loath to open the present. In Two Mile Hollow, now playing at Yale Cabaret, Japanese American playwright Leah Nanako Winkler takes aim at the “white people by the water” play, and the particularities of that oft-treated scenario—she draws on Chekhov, Williams, O’Neill, Tracy Letts, to name but a few—means that “we” may feel let off the hook, for the moment. Even a few less than nimble references to Old Blue only go so far in cracking the high culture façade that makes “whiteness”—like capitalism—simply that thing you exist in. As the old Palmolive soap commercial intoned: “Dish-soap? You’re soaking in it.”

Directed by Kat Yen with a nonwhite cast drawn from New York, rather than the Yale School of Drama, the play has a certain manic charm. Its comic sense, with Asians in blonde wigs and a Hampton’s sense of “down home,” is more appropriate to sketch comedy than to a satire of canonical plays, which means we can all laugh at little cost. We’ve all been bored by bad productions of such plays, whether or not we felt ourselves akin to their inhabitants.

Blythe (Cynthia Fernandez), Mary (Diane Chen), Joshua (Vishaal Reddy), Christopher (Vin Kridakorn), Charlotte (Jennifer Tsay) in the Yale Cabaret production of Two Mile Hollow, directed by Kat Yen, December 12-14, 2019

One Mile Hollow indeed shows that you needn’t be white to mock obtuse, affluent, and grandly self-involved characters like Winkler’s Donnellys. The fun had at the expense of the shiftless son, Joshua (Vishaal Reddy), younger son Christopher (Vin Kridakorn), the heir apparent to deceased dad’s film stardom, twice-divorced daughter Mary (Diane Chen), a walking complex of neuroses, and pill-popping hot mom Blythe (Cynthia Fernandez) is keen, with the characters self-importantly aware of their theatrical antecedents. So we get Mary acting like a bird and the family’s collective “Ach!” is instead a “caw!” to honor The Seagull that flits about the periphery of the action. Yen’s set, of kitchen, dining room table, and garden, gives us at a glance the range of domestic space. The stage is set, we see at once, for skeletons in closets, for confessions and accusations, wandering desires, and messy humanness—with laughs. In that, the play doesn’t let us down.

The interloper in this quasi-incestual soup is Charlotte (Jennifer Tsay), Chris’s assistant whom Joshua sees as “the help,” then tries to woo away from his Oscar-nominated brother. Charlotte gets to be not only the focus of a triangle with the brothers, she’s also triangulated in Winkler’s threesome of dramatic arts: theater (the family onstage), movies (the father and son’s careers), and, where Charlotte hopes to find meaning and celebrity, streaming online video. We may laugh at the spiral down from the classic locus of collective catharsis to the individual interface on a device in your palm, but such is where we’re headed as “collective” comes to be yet another exploded myth, like “universal.”

Charlotte turns out alright, though not unironized, in Tsay’s shrugging acceptance of her status outside those bastions she needn’t conquer. She manages because she stops wanting to do things the way those people do, and because she’s able to let herself get bought off, and to resist Blythe’s overtures which might’ve hooked someone more beguiled by privilege.

Joshua (Vishaal Reddy), Christopher (Vin Kridakorn) in Yale Cabaret’s production of Two Mile Hollow, December 12-14, 2019

On the privileged front, Vishaal Reddy gives the most fun, sending up the vocal mannerisms of a host of white boys apt to find their inner worlds precious cargo. The pitch of Mary’s pathos, in Diane Chen’s rendering, has a cartoonishness that makes the occasional quaver into lunacy all the more arresting. Vin Kridakorn has the requisite looks and detachment that make Christopher a desirable property, and his arguments with Joshua are the stuff of spoiled immaturity. As the mother they all fear to offend, Cynthia Fernandez is mercurial and commanding—a caricature that steals from the best and knows how. The show is a constant barrage of mannerisms and allusions and jabs and jibes, so that even if one or another doesn’t land the next one likely will.

The effort to depict a family—any family, and comprised however exclusively or inclusively you like—if genuine, always opens private life to mockery. Time was, the introduction of the “downstairs” view of “upstairs” was enough to assure a certain irony, then it had to be the “kitchen comedy” of the folks at home, insular in their petty familial wars. Here, it’s the masquerade of “the type” itself that is up-for-grabs, aiming to expose white, privileged cliché but without risking a tangible alternative. After all, Charlotte’s big idea is a show that foregrounds the “fat girl” and “Asian chick” caricatures that usually play sidekick in some white girl feature. Will she get to star in her own romcom one day? Maybe, but what’s that got to do with Chekhov?

All in all, life is pretty hollow in Two Mile Hollow, and too many of the laughs, like the lobster dish at the French bistro Blythe no longer frequents, “lack bite.”

Two Mile Hollow
By Leah Nanako Winkler
Proposed & Directed by Kat Yen

Producer: Jason Gray; Scenic Designer: Kat Yen; Costume Co-Designers: Phuong Nguyen, Miguel Urbino; Lighting Co-Designers: Tully Goldrick, Casey Tonnies; Sound Designer & Composer: Daniela Hart; Technical Director: Laura Copenhaver; Dramaturg: Henriette Rietveld; Stage Manager: Zak Rosen; Choreographer: Michael Raine

Cast: Diane Chen, Cynthia Fernandez, Vin Kridakorn, Vishaal Reddy, Jennifer Tsay

Yale Cabaret
December 12-14, 2019

The Art of Interfacing

Review of I=N=T=E=R=F=A=C=E, Yale Cabaret

The terms by which we understand human interaction are fluid, including biological and sociological descriptors (e.g., “mating ritual”) and more abstract or rhetorical ones (e.g., “communicative tropes”) and, for quite some time, technological terms. Such as “interface.” A word for the communication between computing systems, it has become a term for how a complex system (such as “you”) interact with another complex system (such as “me”). What is the means of our “interface”? What “computes,” exactly, in any interaction between us?

I=N=T=E=R=F=A=C=E is the name of the current show at Yale Cabaret (last show tonight at 11 pm), proposed and performed by Dakota Stipp, a third-year sound designer at Yale School of Drama, with contributions from MFA students from the schools of Music and of Art: Kyla Arsadjaja, performer and movement designer, Cam Camden, producer and technical director, Ross Wightman, performer and instrument designer, and Ye Qin Zhu, performer and content designer. The roles of design and performance are indeed interfacing throughout the piece, as the performers interact with various devices, instruments and mechanisms designed to make the performance happen. What they create occurs in a space that is part performance, part art installation.

A still of I=N=T=E=R=F=A=C=E at Yale Cabaret, December 5-7, 2019

What this means for the audience is that we look on at five figures who move about purposely in what seems another world. In most theatrical pieces, that “world” is an imagined one that acts as a facsimile of the one we live in, with actors playing other people who occupy that world. Here, the performers play with props that are works of art while inhabiting a space enhanced by projections on hanging scrims and spoken word and sound effects, lighting effects, and musical sounds. It’s a textured world of “effects,” and what effect that has depends upon the viewers and their capacity as receptors.

For me, the delight of the show is provided by Ross Wightman in a sort of comic relief sidebar. Wearing a voluminous wig, he sits at a table across from a full-size plastic or vinyl skeleton, operating miked plate and cutlery, creating a sound poem of scratches, clanking, feedback, echo and vibration. It’s not mime because sound is its purpose, but it’s not a scene either. It’s an enactment, a making-something-happen that occurs three times in the course of the evening, each time (and from evening to evening) different. The night I saw the show (Friday at 11), Wightman, in the second segment, kissed the hand of the skeleton. In the third, he drew the skeleton in close, both leaning across the table. When he collapsed and released the skeleton, it sat upright. That, to me, seemed a fitting end to the entire show, though there was a bit more to follow.

As theater, Wightman’s segments give us a bit of what we expect: setting, costume, lighting, props, and actions that could be “symbolic”—a figure appearing to eat and drink while an onlooker has died, or perhaps stands in for those who are starving. There’s also the neat reference to the annual enactments of our national fall holidays—the skeleton of Halloween and the ostentatious meal of Thanksgiving. No matter how you take it, though, in the end my admiration was for how Wightman “played” objects as instruments and how Stipp had created a sound stage so that we could appreciate the music of the mundane.

Ye Qin Zhu and Dakota Stipp in I=N=T=E=R=F=A=C=E, Yale Cabaret, December 5-7, 2019

Elsewhere, that sound stage creates other remarkable effects, such as spoken elements that become a texture of sounds and words that can feel as close as a voice in one’s ear at times, or can be made to drop to the status of sound effects through distortion. Phrases float out of the flow and stick in the mind, about parasites, or feasting on a mango, or how bodies become water.

And while the aural stimulation is almost constant, so is the visual. One sequence has the performers carrying onto the playing space wire sculptures. There are lights throwing the objects’ wiry shadows on the scrims, and the pieces, at first separate, are assembled until one grouping resembles a kind of giant monument, the other perhaps a store display. We watch assembly and disassembly, we see the scrims become a ground for flowing images that look like dendrites or that solidify into patterned fabric, or become a view into a plane of bouncing lights.

In a sense, the show is all about patterns—of light, of sound, of texture, of behavior—and where the main focus falls is apt to be a bit like picking out the exact moment when image and sound coalesced with just the right balance. The ingenuity of the show is in its technical features—and that includes the performers/technicians of the event—but its effect is like spending time in a gallery of kinetic artworks. Something with which, you’ll soon realize, you rarely get to interface.

I=N=T=E=R=F=A=C=E
Proposed by Dakota Stipp
Created by Kyla Arsadjaja, Cam Camden, Dakota Stipp, Ross Wightman, Ye Qin Zhu

Performers: Kyla Arsadjaja, Cam Camden, Dakota Stipp, Ross Wightman, Ye Qin Zhu

Production Designer: Dakota Stipp; Technical Director: Cam Camden; Content Designer: Ye Qin Zhu; Movement Designer: Kyla Arsadjaja; Instrument Designer: Ross Wightman

Yale Cabaret
December 5-7, 2019

Next week the Cabaret returns for its last show of 2019: Leah Nanako Winkler’s Two Mile Hollow, directed by third-year director Kat Yen. The director, playwright and 4 out of 5 cast members are Asian as well as members of the creative team, which quite likely hasn’t been the case for  a Yale Cabaret show before. The play, by a Japanese American from Kentucky, satirizes the tendency to represent, in plays and television, “the” American family as middle-class white. December 12-14.

Matchmaking Games

Review of Pride and Prejudice, Long Wharf Theatre

Jane Austen’s much admired novel Pride and Prejudice got the Kate Hamill treatment in 2017. Hamill, trained as an actor, starred in new plays she adapted from old properties, allowing her, in the latter years of this decade, to assay three great heroines of British fiction: Marianne Dashwood (Sense & Sensibility), Becky Sharp (Vanity Fair), and Lizzy Bennet (Pride & Prejudice), as reconceived by her comic skills. The latter play, sans Hamill and directed by Jess McLeod, occupies the slot reserved for “a modern adaptation of a classic play” in the Long Wharf Theatre’s current season. In fact it’s a revival of a contemporary play adapted from a classic novel with some of the verve for skewering the 19th century that one finds, for instance, in the first act of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9. (From 1979, Cloud 9 was performed at Yale School of Drama in 2013 and Hartford Stage in 2017.)

Jane Bennet (Octavia Chavez-Richmond), Lizzy Bennet (Aneisa J. Hicks), Charlotte Lucas (Rami Margron) in Pride and Prejudice at Long Wharf Theatre, 2019

I was put in mind of the latter play by P&P’s use of comical casting, or casting against the grain. In Cloud 9, whoever plays the happy Victorian hunter and man of the house in Act One has to play a modern female child in Act Two. There, the doubling is mostly a jab at music hall comedy (men in female clothing having been trusted to raise guffaws for centuries). Here, when a very tall male (Luis Mareno) plays silly aristocrat Bingley as well as Mary, the most ill-favored of the Bennet clan (the third of four girls rather than Austen’s five), the hoary comic trope still lands, determined to inspire cheap laughs.

However, thanks to what Mareno does with the role, the doubling has perhaps something more behind it. Mareno makes Mary a loose cannon of odd asides, sad/funny bids for attention, and the kind of note-taking that family members readily store against others (“you locked me in a closet,” as a multivalent line, cuts more each time Mary says it). Likewise, the fact that whoever plays Mr. Bennet also plays Charlotte, the friend of Lizzy who takes one for the team by marrying unctuous Mr. Collins (Brian Lee Huynh, more later), lends a kind of paternalism to Charlotte and BFF status to Mr. Bennet. Here both roles are played by Rami Margron with notable command of both feminine and masculine registers.

Mary Bennet (Luis Moreno) in Pride and Prejudice at Long Wharf Theatre

The cross-casting is intrinsic to Hamill’s conception, letting the play step nimbly amongst the ruins of gender roles that performativity would have us progress beyond. What might push the theatrical effect a step further? All the cross-gender roles are ancillary. It’s still a story of boy, cast as such, meets girl, cast as such. While there’s no way anyone would mistake this for a faithful rendering of Austen, we don’t get anything really surprising either. At the Long Wharf, Pride and Prejudice is a comedy of manners where the posh British tones of classic Austen have been dismissed as mannered while the nonwhite cast is left to veer among mannerisms. How funny you find that I leave to you.

In my view, who fares best in this production—which is never quite as rollicking as it seems to hope it is (pacing!)—is Brian Lee Huynh. The actor has an always comical grasp of how to exploit the manner of each of his three parts. As the supercilious Miss Bingley—she detests those Bennet girls—Huynh might be a catty male in drag or a catty female past bloom (and dares you to tell the difference); as the caddish but sympathetic Mr. Wickham, he’s part comic villain, part dashing lead, and part ironic commentary on both, and as Mr. Collins, a poseur poised to marry at his patroness’s dictate, he’s divertingly daffy. In each role, both Austen and Hamill are well served. Well played.

Lydia (Dawn Elizabeth Clements), Mr. Wickham (Brian Lee Huynh) in Pride and Prejudice at Long Wharf Theatre

Elsewhere, the effects are more grab-bag, but Act Two lands better than Act One. The latter has not one but two grand balls where the lack of extras makes space itself seem to hang, while at home the fond rapport between Mr. Bennet and Lizzy (a linchpin of the novel) barely registers. Margron’s Mr. B. really comes into his own in Act Two when suitors come thick and fast. Jane Bennet (Octavia Chavez-Richmond), who’s supposed to be “the catch,” seems to be the rather tepid lover Darcy takes her for, early on. Chavez-Richmond has more fun with Miss Anne De Burgh’s neurasthenic quaver and a fantasy of Jane as temptress, both in Act Two. As Mr. Darcy, Biko Eisen-Martin does haughtily awkward well and bursts into pained eloquence in Act Two with force enough to melt even the skepticism of Lizzy, we imagine.  As Lizzy, Aneisa J. Hicks, ever-arrayed in patterned culottes, seems willfully obtuse in Act One, but her passions and bashfulness come to the fore in Act Two (after Darcy does her a service and she gets to see the dude’s sumptuous domicile). And yet the pair’s happy-ever-after kiss is all but spoiled by the bad matches made by Charlotte and by Lydia.

As the youngest (fourteen), Lydia is played by Dawn Elizabeth Clements as a sitcom princess, all cutesy girlish sashay in Act One; in Act Two she reappears as the Mean Girl/Dame, Lady De Burgh, and, while Lydia’s ultimate comeuppance seems way harsh, Clements is at her best in making us register the heart-shaking incomprehension of the child-bride. As Mrs. Bennet, for whom railroading her daughters into the best possible marriages is the key to success, Maria Elena Ramirez is never as vacuous as the role is generally deemed (even by Austen, I daresay). Her gravitas comes from preemptive mourning over her girls’ missed chances, a sort of memento mori for the death-in-life that yawns when marriageability ends.

Lizzy Bennet (Aneisa J. Hicks), Jane Bennet (Octavia Chavez-Richmond), Mrs. Bennet (Maria Elena Remirez), Mary Bennet (Luis Moreno), Lydia Bennet (Dawn Elizabeth Clements), Mr. Bennet (Rami Margron) in Pride and Prejudice at Long Wharf Theatre

Costumes, by Izumi Inaba, are a riot of patterns and overlays on female characters that seem designed not to flatter their wearers (more of that against the grain aesthetic, I assume), though the male costumes generally do. The set by Gerardo Díaz Sánchez features a handsome staircase and ballroom/sitting-room—with a décor like a bordello on acid. Sound Designer/Original Music Composer Megumi Katayama’s boomy rhythms come through loud and clear but the dialogue at times less so amidst all the movement.

The Long Wharf’s Pride and Prejudice takes pride in overcoming any prejudices about who is able to play whom. Fine, but it could be much funnier.

Pride and Prejudice
By Kate Hamill
Adapted from the novel by Jane Austen
Directed by Jess McLeod

Set Design: Gerardo Díaz Sánchez; Costume Design: Izumi Inaba; Lighting Design: Jennifer Fok; Original Music & Sound Design: Megumi Katayama; Choreography: James Beaudry; Hair, Wig & Make Up Design: Samantha Abbott; Production Stage Manager: Kelsey Vivian; Assistant Stage Manager: Amy Patricia Stern; Casting by Calleri Casting

Cast: Octavia Chavez-Richmond, Dawn Elizabeth Clements, Biko Eisen-Martin, Aneisa J. Hicks, Brian Lee Huynh, Rami Margron, Luis Moreno, Maria Elena Remirez

 Long Wharf Theatre
November 27-December 22, 2019

Watch Yourself

Review of Rubberneck, Yale Cabaret

The Yale Cabaret is back for its second weekend in November and won’t return until December 5th. This week Rubberneck by Mattie McGarey, a New York-based choreographer and performer, brings to the Cab its second wordless performance piece of the season. Here, unlike Bodyssey, the third show of the season, narrative trajectory is less marked in favor of vignettes of movement. A cast of six, garbed in becoming outfits with pleasing color coordination (Yunzhu Zeng, costumes), move through a series of routines. Some, like the opening—in which all perform morning routines such as showering, arranging hair, dressing—contain elements of mime. Others, like one that seems to be taking place, judging by the rhythmic music, in a club, makes the six seem like parts of the same collective organism. The overall impression is of six parts of the same machine, located in separate spaces, but answerable to the same directives.

The cast of Rubberneck by Mattie McGarey at Yale Cabaret, November 14-16, 2019

The different arrangements of the six make for changing patterns, and each performer interprets the movements differently. The ad hoc cast, which includes McGarey, is drawn from Yale College, the Yale School of Music, the Yale School of Drama, and from the New Haven community. Rubberneck, the statement by the artistic team reads, “interrogates body language, symbolic gestures, and unspoken social cues as essential ingredients to the expansion and extinction of our society.” With that in mind, the repetitions can be seen as the rote movements we all perform as a means to exist in society (I won’t say simply “exist,” for who knows what that might be like?) and the personal je ne sais quoi each brings to such repetitive movements is the little friction of individuality.

The six performers often enough seem robotic, moving upon mindless tracks. The impression is strengthened by the many times the performers extend a palm in front of their faces, staring into the little screen that now dominates all social spaces. At one point, with the six sitting on chairs, each throws out looks into the social space as if trying both to be seen and to avoid seeing. Or maybe just trying to see who might actually see them. A related sequence found each slipping about on the hard vinyl chairs, trying to find some sweet spot between relaxation and vigilance, some almost falling, some never quite at ease.

There’s a heightened sense throughout the show of what it means to watch others move. If you’re the type of person who can be occupied for hours watching people in parks, train stations, airports and so on, you should find the show very appealing. There’s always new information coming at the viewer even when it works at some subliminal level, the way we—perforce—have to process whatever takes place around us. Here, the show is for our attention and yet it’s the kind of show that makes us attentive to what makes sense, what has significance, in what others do and how they look while doing it. What it means, in other words, to be a spectator is implied in everything we notice in public. “Rubberneck,” of course, refers to the way people acknowledge something untoward happening, most commonly used to describe how an accident suddenly, in the midst of the routine behavior of driving, makes us spectators again, watchers at what has happened to someone else.

Mattie McGarey in Rubberneck at Yale Cabaret, November 14-16, 2019

Several times McGarey detaches from the simpler movements the others perform. It starts with a dramatic movement as if being ejected, in a slide across the floor backwards, while the other five stand in a sort of fortified coffee klatch. At other times, she’s apt to spiral about on the floor, creating movements with more rhythmic fluidity than the group tends to enact. There are also dispersals of the cast in ways that have an obvious symbolic logic, as when the two male performers sit off to the side as if in their own world, leaving the four female performers to work through other routines. Or a variation on musical chairs—all six walk around the line of six chairs and, in sequence, the performers break out of the rhythm to remove their own chairs, one at a time. What are the chairs? A habitation, a comfort, a personal space we each bring and take with us?

The show is greatly aided by Taiga Christie’s lighting and Bailey Trierweiler’s compositions which at times feel trancelike, at times using flurries of more anxious rhythm, at times brandishing silence as perhaps the most awkward of social conditions. Full of suggestion more than statement, the vignettes offer stylized interactions that may or may not seem opaque depending on the viewer. In any case, Rubberneck gives us something to look at even while perhaps making us pause to wonder why are so eager to find things to look at.

Rubberneck
Created, directed, and choreographed by Mattie McGarey

Producer: Sarah Cain; Costume Designer: Yunzhu Zeng; Lighting Designer: Taiga Christie; Composer & Sound Designer: Bailey Trierweiler; Sound Engineer: Anteo Fabris; Stage Manager: Leo Egger

Performers: Faizan Kareem, Xi Luo, Mattie McGarey, Hannah Neves, Adrianne Owings, Arnold Setiadi

Yale Cabaret
November 14-16, 2019