Yale Cabaret: From the Room to the Zoom

Yale Cabaret preview, February 27 to May 20

The Yale Cabaret, the branch of the Yale School of Drama run by students and usually housed in the beloved basement theater at 217 Park in New Haven, returned last weekend from Yale’s extended winter break with its first show of 2021, Let’s Go to the Moon. This weekend, In-Between Bitches, their second show of the spring semester, opens.

The great challenge for the theatrical institution, now in its 53rd year, is that theater for the foreseeable future is not what it was. The team’s slogan this year is “Live Online Together” and their solution to the closing off of all theaters on campus is a combination of live and pre-recorded events that are broadcast live. Which means the links to the shows can only be accessed during set times to which viewers commit: Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m., for most of the shows. The intention is to maintain some of the charm of the Cabaret’s sense of participatory community. We may all be stuck in our homes but at least we can attend online events together.

Cabaret 53 Team, clockwise from top right: Managing Director Matthew Sonnenfeld, Co-Artistic Director Nicole Lang, Co-Artistic Director Jisun Kim, Co-Artistic Director Maeli Goren

The leadership team of Cab 53 consists of Co-Artistic Directors Maeli Goren, a third-year directing student; Jisun Kim, a third-year dramaturgy student; Nicole Lang, a third-year student of Lighting Design, and Managing Director Matthew Sonnenfeld, a second-year student in Theater Management. The mission of the team underscores collaboration and a sense of neighborliness in reaching out to “greater Yale”—which means students outside the School of Drama—and to the New Haven community more broadly. And even, with the tenth show of the season, to an international community of artists not present in New Haven or at Yale.

Last week’s show was a good example of the kind of collaborative projects the team hopes to inspire. Originally, Let’s Go to the Moon was a “filler art pitch” for the website, described as “four queer astronauts go to the moon.” The sample pitch developed into an actual pitch and became a collaboration between Kim and Lang, as the hands behind the puppets used for the play, and composers Soomin Kim and Samantha Wolf and lyricist Alana Jacoby for the songs—ten in all—expressly written for the show (in place of the cover songs initially considered).

The production was “hybrid,” in that it was both live and recorded. The audio, which means the dialogue and songs sung by the cast (Shimali De Silva, Mouse; Madeline Seidman Woman from Venus; Maeli Goren, Moon Rock; Sad, Old Rover, Nat Lopez) was pre-recorded; the visuals, however, which involved both 3D and 2D puppets, and two cameras for each, were enacted live by the puppeteers and co-creators of the piece, Jisun Kim and Nicole Lang—the “Astronauts and Chief Administrators,” according to the very creative playbill, available on the Cab website. Thus the show viewers saw was sort of like lip-synching . . . but with puppets and no visible humans.

The tech resources were impressive—if only to consider the switching between cut-out and modeled puppets. Key to the show’s technical polish were two stage managers—Brandon Lovejoy and Charlie Lovejoy—a technical director (Laura Copenhaver), designers for 3D puppets/scenic design (Emmie Finckel and Marcelo Martinez Garcia), designers for sound and incidental music (Emily Duncan Wilson), and for pre-show video (Camilla Tassi); the show was produced by Will Gaines and assistant producer Wendy Davies.

What was it all about? A charming NASA lab-mouse, convinced that an endless supply of cheese can be found on the moon, steals a rocket and sets off. En route she encounters a series of misfits: a Woman from Venus, who has fallen in love with “the woman in the moon” (instead of a man from Mars), a space-borne rock convinced that her origins are the earth’s moon, and, after a journey down a wormhole and a crash-landing on an unknown planet, an Old, Sad Rover who speaks only in the singsong of “Happy Birthday to You,” and whose mission to the moon went awry some time before. Together they undertake a final try at a moon-landing, only to learn that their ad hoc togetherness is enough to constitute a valuable universe in itself. The songs provide both catchy commentary as well as character and situation exposition.

The visuals available in the online medium were the stars of the show, and that sets up a point Sonnenfeld made about the upcoming second half of the season. In the fall, there were many shows that were audio only—including a radio play of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, set in India. It seems the challenge of writing for Zoom has been taken up by the YSD community and so what we’ll be seeing in the months ahead more fully activates the technologies of online theater.

As Sonnenfeld pointed out, the Cabaret’s brief with its participants has been “providing a room,” and the equipment that goes with it, to the students who elect to create shows during a season. In these changed circumstances, the team has had to be much more hands-on, as Goren noted, helping the chosen projects find a way to be realized within current constraints—and new possibilities. As a team, Cab 53 has welcomed proposals as open-ended as possible while also rising to the challenge of the extra foresight needed to make an idea come to life online. It’s a more time-intensive commitment and requires resources of ingenuity beyond those familiar to the 3D stage. Which means this is a good place for a shout-out to the technical advisers of this year’s Cabaret: Technical Supervisors Cameron Waitkun and Nicolás Cy Benavides, both first-year Technical Production and Design candidates. And mention should be made as well of a new position associated with the Cab this season: Rebecca Satzberg, a Technical Sound Intern at YSD, works as the Accessibility Assistant, which entails everything from technical issues for those trying to access video in different environments to close-captioning each performance, to anything that helps create a virtual environment that pushes the limits of what can be made available online.

This weekend’s show, Cab 8, as well as Cab 10 and 11, are cases in point. All were written for Zoom, and so the Cab has gone from providing the room to providing the Zoom—and all the capabilities that come with it. Like Cab 7, Let’s Go to the Moon, these shows will be creations specifically for Zoom Space.

Cab 8: In-Between Bitches, billed as “A Comedy for Zoom,” proposed, written & directed by Abigail C. Onwunali, the show addresses issues of what Goren called “body awareness,” and the ways in which the theater community avoids questions of shame and dysmorphia. Goren also called the show “joyful and hilarious,” featuring an “all womxn team” tackling the stress of image and the ways one particular “in-between bitch” handles it. Two more shows today at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. Content Warning: “Depiction of eating and body dysmorphia disorders, coarse language, moments of loud, high-pitched sound.”

Cab 10: Expats Anonymous is rather unprecedented. The play was written by Rachel Chin who is not a student at Yale, but a theater artist in Singapore who heard of the Cab through colleagues and proposed the piece, which will be the first international collaboration offered as a scheduled part of the Cab season. As a Zoom play, the show not only makes a virtue of the virtual environment—bringing together collaborators on different continents—but dramatizes Zoom as a part of job interviews. Set in Singapore during the current pandemic, the play looks at the situation of unemployed expats vying for a single job that will allow them to remain. May 18-20 at 8 p.m. and May 20 at 5 p.m.

With Cab 11, Love in a Pan Dulcé, we move from business to pleasure. Not only is Zoom part of the arduous process of finding work, it’s also part of the arduous process of finding a date. To put it in the terms of the Cab’s website: “Come laugh, cry, and cringe as Rachel, Joey, Noah, Arnie, Michael, and Daniel navigate the trials and tribulations of dating in 2020.” A play for Zoom, written and proposed by Nomè SiDone. April 16-17

Cab 9 will feature the return of the annual Dragaret—a drag show that, for the last few years, has included a night for New Haven queens and a night for YSD students. The particulars of this year’s offering, in the online environment, have not yet been determined, but tickets for the show are separate from the single membership fee that permits access to all the other shows and to the Cab Gallery. More information about the pricing policy and about the show and its line-up, which should involve both recorded and synchronous performances, will be forthcoming shortly. But mark your calendars now: March 12-13. The show has long been very popular as an entertaining and unpredictable celebration of the non-conformism and fluidity that gender, as a performative element of identity, can give rise to. Particularly among highly gifted and theatrical individuals.

Cab 12 also continues a Cab tradition, though this one of more recent provenance. Cab 51 set up the Rough Draft Festival as a way to bring on work in progress and the kind of work outside of concentration that is one of the Cab’s selling-points. The particulars have still to be determined, though the dates have been set: April 30-May 1. The team is considering potential collaborations extended to students in New Haven area schools. This is the second festival of the season; in December, the very successful Black Theater Festival brought together a highly eclectic offering of plays, performance, and interactive events.

Cab 13, the final show of the season, might be considered a transition back to “normal theater.” At least, the two one-person shows brought together for Remanded Trials might be enacted on a stage—though there may be benefits to the virtual space. Both feature acting students in YSD who have written parts to enact. In “Death Sentence” Matthew Webb will give a Cab debut performance as a man interrogated for serial murders. Called a “darkly humorous mystery” by Lang, the show “meditates in different ways on justice” and whether “character is death?” In “Kitchen of Truth” Madeline Seidman plays Martha Stewart in a dark night of the soul—including a hallucinated final television episode—on the night before she is taken into custody. May 7-8

That’s it for the shows scheduled, but membership in the Cab Season (go here for more details) also includes two Cab Potlucks, which aim to promote a virtual version of the valued face time usually found at the Cab as fans and patrons meet and eat and drink and circulate. The next one is April 24, and the final one is at the close of the season, as a send off and celebration, May 20.

The other perk of membership is entry to the Cab Gallery which features curated exhibits of installations, videos, sound compositions and more.

As Sonnenfeld noted, the upside of the virtual environment, for theater, is that the 70 seat capacity of the Cabaret can be—and frequently has been—doubled or tripled this season. There’s much more ease of access, and though we miss the togetherness of the Cab and mourn the emptiness of the theater at 217 Park Street, the Yale Cabaret as a virtual environment remains a viable and lively space for theatrical experiments and experiences. “See” you “at” the Cab!

Yale Cabaret
Spring Season: February 19-May 20, 2021

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