Home of the Brave

Review of Alma, Yale Cabaret

The final show of Yale Cabaret 51, Alma, by first-year playwright Benjamin Benne, directed by Cat Rodriguez, intervenes subtly into the national discourse about immigration. On the surface, it’s about a mother and daughter experiencing crossed purposes and escalating anxieties about the daughter, Angel (Ciara Monique McMillian), scoring high enough on her SATs to get into USC, but that’s not the whole story. It’s also about Alma (Ilia Isorelýs Paulino) worrying about whether or not she will be deported when her daughter turns 21. The context of these concerns—as we are alerted by what seems a haunted TV demonically tuned to FOX and a certain blustering, bigoted presidential candidate—is the U.S. government’s efforts to deport the undocumented.

Benne’s play—a bit like Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls earlier this season—takes what might simply be a charming genre piece about teen life and layers it with the meanings that political reality imposes on normal lives. Every teen, we might say, has enough to worry about when trying to get into college, but here a “catch-22” situation ratchets up the tension: when she turns 21, Angel will be old enough to sponsor Alma, but when Angel turns 21 she will no longer need a parent or guardian, by the rationale of the courts.

The way these issues come to light is handled subtly, and often comically, as the fractiousness of the two women is placed front and center. In a small, homey apartment that graces the Cab stage, Alma treats her daughter both solicitously and domineeringly. She arrives while Angel is out and there’s a dodging of certain issues—where has Angel been, and has she been studying or drinking?—and even an outburst in which Alma wields a flipflop the way some parents wield belts. Paulino, who can be very imposing with a voice that commands attention, delivers as well Paulino’s fragile side, and, notably, her willingness to manipulate her daughter through every emotion possible. She’s a livewire, at times incandescent.

Angel, for her part, gives as good as she gets. She has not been eating well or wisely and at one point barely makes it to the bathroom before she begins puking. She’s then willing to work the pathetic sickie for all its worth, sucking on a frozen pop. Later, after incurring sufficient wrath for the dreaded la chancla, she brings out a plush elephant to curry favor. McMillian has been the angel of the Cab this year with three remarkable performances, beginning with The Purple Flower at the start of the season and concluding with back-to-back shows in weeks seventeen and eighteen.

The play’s dramatic peak arrives with a sudden spike in alarm. While Trump blusters in increasing volume, Alma wails with a power some might reserve for watching an execution. The lights go out and a knock comes upon the door that feels like it has the full force of the most malevolent of ICE agents behind it. To live in fear of that knock is never to experience the “land of the free.” But watching Alma and Angel we are certainly in the home of the brave.

Benne knows how to serve up the sweet, the savory and the bitter, blending the flavors of real family life well to give us a full meal, depicting the bond of love under duress.

Director Rodríguez, who has been a vocal supporter of the anti-deportation defense of Nelson Pinos—living in sanctuary at New Haven’s First and Summerfield Methodist Church since November 2017—hopes the play can be restaged after Nelson’s day in court in Minneapolis in May. For information about Pinos, go here, and for helping with his legal defense costs, go here.

With this production, its eighteenth, Yale Cabaret 51 ends, concluding a season of engaged theater—“cultivating surprise, embracing divergence, and practicing compassion.” Congratulations to Co-Artistic Directors Molly FitzMaurice and Latiana “LT” Gourzong and Managing Director Armando Huipe for an inspiring season well done. The team for Yale Cabaret 52 was announced at the shows last week and will consist of Co-Artistic Directors Zachry J. Bailey, Brandon Burton, and Alex Vermillion, with Managing Director Jaime Totti.

Alma
By Benjamin Benne
Directed by Catherine María Rodríguez

Producer: Eliza Orleans; Scenic Designer: Elsa GibsonBraden; Costume Designer: Phuong Nguyen; Lighting & Projection Designer: Samuel Kwan Chi Chan; Sound Designer: Marisa Areliano; Technical Director: Jenna Hoo; Stage Manager: Zachry J. Bailey

Cast: Ciara Monique McMillian, Ilia Isorelýs Paulino

Yale Cabaret
April 25-27, 2019

Incendiary Situations

Review of Fireflies, Yale Cabaret

“Behind every great man,” the saying goes, “there is a woman.” Donja R. Love’s Fireflies—at Yale Cabaret, directed by Christopher D. Betts, for two more shows tonight—might be said to alter that adage: “in front of every great woman is a man.” Love shows us a couple where the man, Charles (Manu Kumasi in a Cabaret debut), is an analog for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the woman, Olivia (Ciara Monique McMillian), his long-suffering wife.

Olivia cooks her husband’s food and waits patiently—or not so patiently—at home while he, “the face of the [Civil Rights] movement,” is on the road preaching and uplifting spirits. She’s also carrying his child, and, in fulsome reminiscence, he says he knew she would bear his child from way back when they were children themselves working in tobacco fields. When did she know? When she realized she was pregnant. Olivia rarely plays into her husband’s efforts to script her responses.

In the not-so-distant background of the difficulties faced by Olivia and Charles is the bombing of a church in Alabama that took innocent lives. Charles has been called upon to deliver a eulogy. Olivia is plagued by the sound of bombs—a premonition of some disaster still to come?

On his return home, Charles is flirty and horny, using techniques that likely work with other women; he is met by a range of emotions from Olivia who, though not playing hard to get, is hard for her husband to understand. Ciara Monique McMillian’s Olivia is a delight, even in the portrayal’s darker moods and rousing speeches. McMillian gets out all the nuance there is in this strong role. Charles is far from one note as well, and Kumasi lets us see many sides of the man, not least as a minor tyrant trying to dictate how his wife should feel and the kind of life they should lead. Love writes their interactions well and Betts gets fully engaged performances from his actors.

Eventually we learn that Olivia not only writes the speeches that have earned Charles such a following, she also coaches his delivery of her words. And that’s not all. Olivia, we discover through letters she wrote and never sent, has a sweetheart: a woman named Ruby. This emerges after the FBI thoughtfully sends Olivia a package containing a tape recording, complete with tape player, of Charles getting it on with one of his women of the road. Charles, whom Olivia accuses of always playing tit for tat, uses the letters as a way of worming out of guilt about his infidelities. The story of her attachment to Ruby, plaintive as it may be, gives Olivia the backbone to assert her decision to leave Charles. The upshot is that Olivia—who resented being pregnant—is now determined to terminate the pregnancy.

As Claudius might say, “when sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.” Love’s technique is to pile on racial injustice, spousal mistreatment, a sleazy doctor, dramatic foreboding, and not one but two speeches addressed to God as, seemingly, the author of the couple’s plight. There are also snatches of Charles’ way with Olivia’s speeches, and, in the end, a moving sermon by Olivia that brings into play the notion of fireflies as the spirits of the slain finding their way to heaven. The play could be said to pack a few too many complications into its 90 minute running time, so that the ultimate fate of Charles seems yet another dramatic shift.

At the Cabaret, the set by Anna Grigo packs verisimilitude aplenty, from the GE icebox to the Formica table to the range and sink, a true “kitchen-sink” style presentation. Mika H. Eubanks’ costumes—as ever—strike becoming and appropriate notes, greatly aided by Earon Nealey’s hair. Both actors look so much their parts we feel transported to another era at once. The straight-forward set is magically enhanced by Nicole E. Lang’s projection design, which combines the smoke of explosions with fleecy clouds in a blue sky and fire-streaked clouds that creep at times across the entire set. Riva Fairhall’s lighting helps cue us to the play’s many mood changes, not least the fireflies effect at the end, and the sound design by Kathy Ruvuna makes Olivia’s imaginary bombs viscerally real.

With Yale students and residents taking to the streets this past week to protest police shooting at two local African Americans charged with no crime, the lines in Fireflies that speak to the social straight-jacket imposed on nonwhite lives in America resonate, as intended, from the Jim Crow era of the play, set in 1963, to today. The conviction of the Yale Cabaret production is formidable and its skilled presentation convincingly apropos.

Fireflies
By Donja R. Love
Directed by Christopher D. Betts

Dramaturg: Sophie Greenspan; Producer: Dani Barlow; Scenic Designer: Anna Grigo; Costume Designer: Mika H. Eubanks; Projection Designer: Nicole E. Lang; Sound Designer: Kathy Ruvuna; Lighting Designer: Riva Fairhall; Technical Directors: Chimmy Anne Gunn & Frnacesca DeCicco; Stage Manager: Zachry J. Bailey; Fight Choreographer: Michael Rossmy; Hair: Earon Nealey

Cast: Manu Kumasi, Ciara Monique McMillian

Yale Cabaret
April 18-20, 2019