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.

Remake the Rules

Review of The Rules, Yale Cabaret

Playwright Charles Mee’s “The (Re)Making Project” invites theater groups to take the scripts on his website and “use them freely as a resource for your own work: that is to say, don't just make some cuts or rewrite a few passages or re-arrange them or put in a few texts that you like better, but pillage the plays . . .”  The latest offering at the Yale Cabaret is a remaking or “pillaging” of Mee’s play The Rules, which began life with the title “The Constitutional Convention: A Sequel.” With that in mind, the Cab’s version, adapted by Dakota Stipp, Zachry J. Bailey, Alex Vermillion, and Evan Hill, begins with some of the text of the Constitution, cut-up and overlapped in a busy voice-over that becomes a hallmark of this funny, unsettling, and exhilarating show.

Mee’s lines have a certain delirium. They tend to be stream-of-consciousness even when there’s dialogue because everyone in The Rules seems to be contemplating or recalling or trying—arguably, in Mee’s words—"to arrive at a new set of conventions to live by, now that the old ones are gone.” But what conventions, exactly? Conventions of social intercourse? Conventions of gender, of genre? Conventions of the artifice called theatrical representation?

All of the above, as I read it. Three actors—Adrienne Wells as Susan, David Mitsch as Arthur, and Robert Hart as David—enact scenes that amount to performance art pieces, for the most part. Seated fully clothed in a bathtub, Susan might be talking about an exercise regimen while David enacts the trainer as a kind of stock figure of guttural humor. Or Arthur might be remembering the first Thanksgiving as a a macabre feast upon the dead with Susan vaguely questioning his accuracy.

While Susan is fairly consistent in her airy tones, David—in Hart’s hands—is an assault of mercurial voices, including the yuk-yuk tones of a stand-up comic of the old school, and a carefully paced rap about racial profiling that feels all-too-contemporary. Meanwhile, Arthur, who begins the evening looking fairly butch in his cowboy hat and distressed jeans, eventually finds himself sporting red high-heels, and later comes onstage in full drag, wearing an amazing get-up of a gown (April Hickman & Yunzhu Zeng, costumes). His in-out-and-all-around-the-tub performance, lip-synching with passionate abandon to 4 Non-Blondes’ early ‘90s hit “What’s Up?”, is the kind of tour de force show-stopper one sometimes encounters at the Cab. It’s so over-the-top it pushes the entire show to another level.

But that’s not to overlook other aspects of the show—such as a strange monologue by Susan, quite amused, about how she “came into her own,” or a video of a woman engaging in what we’re supposed to take as cannibalism while the cast disputes the etiquette for eating one’s own species. There’s also a more phrenetic speech by Susan, as she wanders the stage as though on a catwalk, considering where the selling of oneself enters an area forbidden by “the rules”—selling one’s body for sex, selling one’s body parts for someone else’s use?

From the later 1990s, The Rules feels very much of the moment in this bracing production. Mee’s script, in giving us speakers isolated in their self-regard, easily updates into the era of the selfie and the choice of one’s phone as preferred amusement, interlocutor, and chronicler. Here, the characters are monologues aware they’re overheard, set on a spare white stage with the feel of an austere boudoir, enhanced by lights and projections to become a space where we regard these embodied voices as significant things. As Susan says, dreamily, “Life is more complicated now than it used to be. People have relationships these days with their objects, and sometimes just with pictures of their objects.”

Throughout the show, there is much interesting use of sound—Dakota Stipp, sound design and composer. The overlapping of voices and a wide-range of sound effects and electronics—including the sounds from the phones of patrons who texted to a prescribed number—make the show a multi-media onslaught, never dull, often quizzical. If we feel implicated in what we’re watching it’s because of the many ways we’ve all learned to navigate identity as an aspect of the internet and other media. We don’t necessarily know “the rules” for the many versions of virtual community, but their protocols bleed into the world we take up space in. And—what’s even more to the point I think—we don’t know what it is precisely that “rules” the worlds we access and populate. If “late capitalism” was what we lived through at the end of the twentieth century, where the hell are we now?

The Rules
By Charles Mee
Adapted by Dakota Stipp, Zachry J. Bailey, Alex Vermillion, Evan Hill
Directed by Zachry J. Bailey

Producers: Caitlin Crombleholme & Eliza Orleans; Dramaturgs: Evan Hill & Alex Vermillion; Scenic Designer: Sarah Karl; Lighting Designer: Evan Christian Anderson; Sound Designer & Composer: Dakota Stipp; Costume Designers: April Hickman & Yunzhu Zeng; Projection Designers: Camilla Tassi & Elena Tilli; Stage Manager: Sam Tirrell; Technical Director: Mike VanAartsen

Cast: Robert Hart, David Mitsch, Adrienne Wells

Yale Cabaret
January 17-19, 2019

The Yale Cabaret will be dark the last weekend of January, then returns February 1 & 2 with its popular drag show; Friday, February 1, showcases drag performers local to the area; Saturday, February 2, is for drag performers in the Yale School of Drama.