Earthless is Worthless

Review of Elon Musk and the Plan to Blow Up Mars The Musical, Yale Cabaret

In Liam Bellman-Sharpe’s sci-fi musical, Elon Musk and the Plan to Blow Up Mars, Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind Tesla, SpaceX, and other tech concerns, is a man with a mission. After commiserating with a group of billionaires—including Jeff Bezos (Eli Pauley)—who confide to us that it’s great to be rich but it’s hard to be rich, Musk (David Mitsch) comes forward with a song describing his love of Mars, a view that seems true of the actual Musk with his dream of a colony there someday.

It comes as a surprise, then, when the crew of a spaceflight to Mars—Captain (Nomè SiDone), Eyes (Madeline Seidman), Hands (Maal Imani West), Navigator (Isuri Wijesundara)—learn that Musk is aboard, that he chartered the flight, and that he has plans to destroy the Earth’s nearest neighbor. Musk’s change of heart—from colonizing Mars to destroying it—comes via “the Voice of the Night Sky,” a kind of burning-bush moment that converts Musk from a proselytizer for humanity’s destiny among the stars to a kind of interplanetary terrorist, willing to obliterate the red planet to save the blue one.

The absurdity of the musical’s plot could be said to be an intentional mirroring of the absurdity of financial titans becoming space-age saviors, but the show also features the kind of daffy shenanigans that have been the basis of grade B sci-fi films for decades. And that makes for some very entertaining bits, such as Patrick Young as a quintessential mad scientist enlisted by Musk to plumb the possibilities of antimatter, which is key to his scheme, and some offbeat satirical science presentations.

In the first, Maal Imani West delivers a “thought experiment” on how scientific breakthroughs, in affording new products, can solve problems that are more lucrative to leave unsolved. Using dentures as her example, and aided by great graphics by projection designers Erin Sullivan and Hannah Tran, West reflects on how a demand for new teeth could lead to plans to undermine tooth and bone to make the general populace dependent on new products to save them from conditions created by the breakthrough itself. Sound familiar?

Bellman-Sharpe’s target in all this isn’t simply the absurd wealth and power of Musk or Bezos but the system that has enriched and empowered them. And if their grasp of capitalist principles weren’t enough, we’re faced with their space manias as a prospect of what the rich may do when they decide they needn’t be stuck on this woefully mismanaged rock with the rest of us. As Educational Host (Isuri Wijesundra) delivers a bouncy science lesson on “slime molds” and their ability to proliferate and form bonds with the complexity “of the interstate system,” Bezos is desperately trying to reach Musk to dissuade him from making Mars extinct. The dovetailing of Bezos’ fear of capitalism imploding and the Host’s upbeat ditty about the wonders of single-cell lifeforms works as an ironic commentary on how far we’ve come—in evolutionary terms—and how far we can fall.

While not quite a full musical in its lack of a big finale musical number, Elon Musk . . . does boast the requisite romantic interlude. Here it’s a wonderfully comic and spirited encounter between Eyes and a being made of Antimatter (Patrick Falcon). The pas de deux and duet (Antimatter’s lovely voice provided by Taylor Hoffman) puts both heart into the show and a spanner in the works of Musk’s plan, as Eyes, now in love with Antimatter, wants to preserve the creature at the cost of not destroying Mars.

The show’s oddity is its saving grace, but its narrative arc tends to be a bit hodgepodge, including a vaudeville routine about speeding in space and a song by a Drag King (Maal Imani West in male drag that smacks a bit of Little Richard, with a sumptuous smoking jacket) about the world not being a place to bring children into. Thanks to West’s great singing voice, the song is a standout even if we might wonder how it fits in, exactly.

All in all, one might say, that whether you’re trying to destroy a planet or to save one, a kitchen-sink approach is best, and one wouldn’t want to underestimate the enormous profits to be made by capitalizing on either project. In Elon Musk and the Plan to Blow Up Mars the Musical, science as a means to get rich and science as a means to save the Earth and/or mankind has reached its tipping point. That timely reflection and the possibilities of a sci-fi musical with big name power players in its dramatis personae certainly gives Bellman-Sharpe’s play remarkable potential. Per aspera ad astra.

Elon Musk and the Plan to Blow Up Mars the Musical
Music, Text, and Direction by Liam Bellman-Sharpe

Choreographer: Mariel Pettee; Set Designer: Alex McGargar; Costume Designer: David Mitsch; Lighting Designer: Noel Nichols; Sound System Designer: James T. McLoughlin; Projections Designer: Erin Sullivan; Associate Projections Designer: Hannah Tran; Associate Stage Manager: Kevin Jinghong Zhu; Dramaturg: Henriette Rietveld; Technical Director: Jonathan Jolly; Producer: Carl Holvick; Stage Manager: Sam Tirrell

Cast: Patrick Ball, Patrick Falcon, David Mitsch, Eli Pauley, Madeline Seidman, Nomè SiDone, Bailey Trierweiler, Maal Imani West, Isuri Wijesundara, Patrick Young

Musicians: Sharon Ahn, keyboards; Roberto Granados, guitar (alternate); Thomas Hagen, drums; Satchel Henneman, guitar; Taylor Hoffman, vocals; Paul Mortilla, violin; Adin Ring, bass

Yale Cabaret
January 23-25, 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

Riding the Gravy Train

Review of Red Speedo, Yale Cabaret

We’re all familiar with the notion that the driving force in any contest is winning, winning at any cost. We’re also familiar with the ethical notion that “it’s not about winning or losing but how you play the game.” The implications of those two outlooks float upon the reflective surface of Lucas Hnath’s Red Speedo, the fifth show of Yale Cabaret’s current season. Directed by Eli Pauley, a third-year actor at Yale School of Drama, and played by four students in the program, Red Speedo is an in-your-face, tour de force of contested strategies, provocation—as both defense and attack—pleas, bullying, flailing and railing, outright lies, and fights, both verbal and physical. There is the prospect of great success, of scandal, of disgrace, and even of death. And all in the insular world of championship swimming.

Ray (Adam Shaukat) in Yale Cabaret’s production of Lucas Hnath’s Red Speedo, October 24-26, 2019

The red Speedo of the title, and nothing else but a serpent tattoo and a vacant expression, is worn throughout the play by Ray (Adam Shaukat), a swimmer who has climbed the ranks to be in competition for a place on the Olympic team. It’s the day before the final tryout and his times have been good. His brother Peter (Patrick Ball), a lawyer who may be about to give up his day job to be Ray’s manager and agent, full time, is in talks with Speedo about making Ray the company’s new spokesperson. But there’s a snag. As the play opens, Peter is talking a mile a minute, hectoring Ray’s coach (Brandon E. Burton) into seeing the reason for not letting any governing body know about the cooler full of enhancement drugs Coach found in his office. The bad publicity for the club could affect Ray adversely.

And that’s only the first of many ethical problems in this fraught and taut play. And each character, as Ray says late in the play in a moment of clarity, is kinda good and kinda bad. That means we get jerked around a lot in how we respond to what is being said and why. Peter, for all his bullish lack of subtlety (vividly enacted by Ball), seems to have Ray’s best interests at heart. Until we realize how much he has riding on Ray’s success, and, indeed, how little Ray has other than a body that is treated as a prize animal, groomed to perform at its peak. And that involves substances that Ray’s former girlfriend Lydia (Nefesh Cordero Pino), a physical therapist who lost her license thanks to Peter, provided him once upon a time.

The stress of all this is made quite palpable in the Cabaret production. We can see the toll it takes on each character to be called on the tiles, so to speak, to make his or her case. Along the way we see Ray get manipulated by everyone. Cordero Pino makes Lydia seem sympathetic, someone who has gotten out of Ray’s charmed circle the hard way and wants to stay out, but her position is negotiable, we learn. Coach, in a wonderfully varied reading by Burton, can be a source of strength but he’s also desperate in his reliance on what Ray’s success means to him, not just financially but as a badge of achievement.

Eventually Ray learns, to his chagrin, that even his faith in his ability and in his drugs is misplaced. Shaukat renders Ray’s humanity best when he’s most beset by confusion and opposed views, which is often. Ray is not quite as bereft of interiority as we may at first think, and others seem to assume. He’s a cipher on his way to becoming conscious.

There’s a deep abyss at that heart of this play, a sense of how the drive to be the best can be so tragically empty but also how meaningless any effort becomes when it entails a betrayal of every trust and every standard of merit. The grippingly violent struggle between Ray and Peter at the end, choreographed with great realism by Burton, is staggering in its visceral brutality, and, it seems, necessary to the play’s central truth: winner-takes-all means destroying your opponent. To paraphrase Pyrrhus, “Another victory like that and we are ruined.”

Red Speedo
By Lucas Hnath
Directed by Eli Pauley

Producer: Will Gaines; Scenic Designer: Elsa GibsonBraden; Lighting Designer: Evan C. Anderson; Costume Designers: David Mitsch, Yunzhu Zeng; Sound Designer: Emily Duncan Wilson; Dramaturg: Callie Frosburgh; Technical Director: HaoEn Hu; Stage Manager: Julia Bates; Fight Director: Brandon E. Burton

Cast: Patrick Ball, Brandon E. Burton, Nefesh Cordero Pino, Adam Shaukat

Yale Cabaret
October 24-26, 2019

Sport for the Gods

Review of Bakkhai, Yale Summer Cabaret

The first show of Yale Summer Cabaret’s Verano season has come and gone. The Summer Cab’s Co-Artistic Director Danilo Gambini, with a cast of six female actors, delivered a sexy and scary and funny and unsettling version of Euripides’ ancient Greek tragedy Bakkhai as translated by preeminent poet Anne Carson. As a kickoff to the Summer Cab season one might say the play puts us on alert that theater’s seductions come at a peril. 

Dionysos (Sarah Lyddan) and the Bakkhai (top to bottom: Zoe Mann, Nefesh Cordero Pino, Anula Navlekar) (Photos courtesy of Danilo Gambini)

The play has the temerity to put the god—or is that pseudo-god?—Dionysos (Sarah Lyddan) onstage and lets him get quizzed and dismissed by Thebes’ king Pentheus (Eli Pauley, in the getup of a military dictator) with the kind of disdain a police chief might aim at a local troublemaker. And Dionysus does make trouble. The women of Thebes—Malia West, Nefesh Cordero Pino, Anula Navlekar and Zoe Mann as an aroused chorus in negligees—are only too ready to worship him and are clearly doing so in a tranced and decadent way. What’s a ruler burdened with maintaining order to do?

Pentheus (Eli Pauley), front; background: Teiresias (Anula Navlekar), Kadmos (Zoe Mann)

We might feel we are watching a comedy in which each side—law and order vs. libidinous license—is going to get a big comeuppance, especially when we see two old-timers, Kadmos (Mann) and Teiresias (Navlekar) jumping on the bandwagon, off to take part in the Bacchic rites in clownish drag. Kadmos is Dionysus’ grandfather. The story is that Semele, Kadmos’ daughter by the goddess Harmonia, was impregnated by Zeus in the form of a lightning bolt—which incinerated Semele, so that Zeus had to rescue the unborn child, sewing him into his own immortal thigh from which Dionysos was born. Born of Zeus via a female half-mortal and half-immortal, Dionysos has no doubts that he’s a true god. And yet. Carson’s translation maintains use of the term daimon or daemon (from which we get “demon”) for what Dionysos claims to be, and that invites all sorts of colorations—especially in our Christianized world—about half-man/half-god hybrids who shake up the status quo with secret rites.

Dionysos (Sarah Lyddan) with Bakkhai (Malia West, left; Eli Pauley, right)

In any case, demonic is exactly how Lyddan plays Dionysos, an androgynous figure with the eyes, ringed in black, of one who regularly imbibes hallucinogens and a voice of clearest diction that runs from guttural to angelic to searing. Her Dionysos is a trip and a treat and not to be trusted. And that’s where the tragic dimension comes in, in the midst of all the seductive humor and high spirits. Lyddan keeps so resolutely her eyes on the prize, so to speak, to let us know that Dionysos sees all our human hubbub as barely worth his notice. Love him, hate him—in any case, woe unto you. He’s malevolent to anyone who crosses him—which Pentheus’ mother, Agave (Semele’s older sister), did when she dismissed the claim that Zeus was her sister’s lover. So Pentheus has to follow suit—only to be beguiled by the idea of spying on those secret rites . . .

The songs the chorus sings—developed by the ensemble and sound designer/composer Liam Bellman-Sharpe—are ably abetted by the voices of Malia West, who also spellbinds as a Herdsman, and Zoe Mann. The set—by Lily Guerin—occupies a diagonal corner of the space, with grand pillars and black tiles and a section lit bloodred (Riva Fairhall, lighting) when Agave (a fierce Cordero Pino) arrives with her son’s head, which she herself tore from his body, thinking him—thanks to Dionysos—a lion-cub.

Agave (Nefesh Cordero Pino) with the head of Pentheus

As with many Greek tragedies, there’s a somber “joke’s on you” quality to where we end up, if only because these plays were meant to demonstrate to the populace that the gods toy with us for their sport, so don’t get your hopes up about life ending well. A lesson that somewhere—in all the humanizing centuries since—we seem to have lost a clear sense of. Bakkhai is meant to put the fear back into theater.

And, ultimately, it does. Though I would’ve preferred a bit more breathless shock and awe in the Servant (Navlekar)’s delivery of what befell the hapless Pentheus, the image that stays with me is of Mann as grandfather Kadmos, bowed, rotund, particolored, with powdered face, tears streaming as he awakes from a dream, in which gods and mortals can be held to the same account, to the nightmare—called reality—in which only mortals suffer. Eventually, the ages would supply us with a god who suffers and dies for us . . . but that’s another story.

Bakkhai (Anula Navlekar, Nefesh Cordero Pino, Malia West)

Bakkhai
By Euripides
A new translation by Anne Carson
Directed by Danilo Gambini

Scenic Designer: Lily Guerin; Costume Designer: Alicia J. Austin; Lighting Designer: Riva Fairhall; Sound Designer & Composer: Liam Bellman-Sharpe; Projections Designer: Christopher Evans; Dramaturg: Emily Sorensen; Stage Manager: Alexus Cone 

Ensemble: Nefesh Cordero Pino, Sarah Lyddan, Zoe Mann, Anula Navlekar, Eli Pauley, Malia West

Yale Summer Cabaret
June 6-15, 2019

The opening of the Yale Summer Cabaret’s next show, María Irene Fornés’ The Conduct of Life, directed by Jecamiah M. Ybañez, has been postponed from tonight, June 20, to tomorrow night, June 21. Shows at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.

The Theater God is Present

Preview of Bakkhai, Yale Summer Cabaret

Last summer, Danilo Gambini, the Co-Artistic Director of this year’s Yale Summer Cabaret, took a trip to Greece, a longstanding goal from the time of his study of mythology in college and his reading of all the Greek tragedies in 2009. As he sat in the theater of Dionysus in Athens, he began “crying compulsively.” He also had a nosebleed, which may have had to do with the atmosphere and the physical exertion of hiking. In any case, the event was for Gambini an epiphany, which might be an actual manifestation of the god, Dionysus, the guiding spirit of ancient Greek drama, there “where the craft and art” Gambini practices “was born.” Gambini says he “made a pact with Dionysus” that day, a “renewal of vows” as a theater director, that “at the next opportunity I would do a Greek tragedy.”

That opportunity is the opening show of the Yale Summer Cabaret’s Verano season. Euripides’ Bakkhai, in Anne Carson’s recent translation, opens June 6 and plays for sixteen performances through June 15.

His choice of Bakkhai, Gambini said, comes from the fact that Euripides’ audacious play puts Dionysus himself on stage. The play has been getting a variety of revivals of late, including at Brooklyn Academy of Music last season, and Girls, a modern adaptation by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, will open the Yale Repertory Theatre’s next season. Gambini discussed the play’s message for our times with his cast and said the consensus was that “it was clear that the play is about women and female power and the suppressed voice of women finding a release.” He added that Pentheus, the king of Thebes in the play, says things that are “too familiar from Trump.” So, in a way we might say that the current attention to the play is the theatrical equivalent of the 2017 Women’s March in protest over Trump’s election. Gambini quoted a line in the play that describes the women “overjoyed by the sheer absence of men.” Gambini’s six-person cast is comprised of female actors.

For Gambini there’s a deliberate camp element in that choice, which he defines as “having fun with theater.” Pentheus and Dionysus, in Gambini’s staging, are played as “drag kings” by Eli Pauley and Sarah Lyddan respectively, a distancing effect that Gambini spoke of as a deliberate element of current theater’s approach to gender politics. The choice of gender in casting roles, he said, “explores how to tell the story from one side, or extreme, or the other.” He lets his actors have a lot of agency in how they choose to tell the story, including the music of the chorus which was worked out by the actors in ensemble with sound designer and composer Liam Bellman-Sharpe.

There is humor in the play and Gambini finds that Anne Carson’s contemporary language helps the comedy land. Gambini described Carson’s writing as “visual,” a form of “concrete poetry that talks to me and inspires me in seeing the play’s spatial construction.” She writes, he said, “the way I stage.” For Gambini, an attraction of the Cabaret is that its intimate setting, without the usual separation of actors from audience, allows him to explore the kind of theater that is most meaningful to him. In his view, “text is a pretext to create an event” and the “audience is always seeing what they are seeing.” Which means that the idea of theater as an illusion of action happening elsewhere is dropped in favor of treating theater as an event at which both the cast and the audience are concurrently present.

Gambini sees Bakkhai as a play that questions a society’s beliefs, which includes religious faith and the status of the occult. The play was first produced late in Euripides’ career, and is “fully mature,” Gambini says. But with that maturity comes a definite interest in “how to transgress” further. Putting the god on the stage and having him argue for the vanities of the gods indicates, for some, Euripides’ cynicism toward religion, but also shows him addressing the very powerful social force of religious belief.

Danilo Gambini

Gambini says that, originally, tragedy for the ancient Greeks was an “outlet—it enabled them to live what they didn’t want to live.” And he sees the same purpose provided by theater today, as well as TV and film. He stated that the etymology of the word “tragedy” derives from “chant of the goat,” which means that the poetry of tragedy was conceived as the song of the dying animal—a goat—sacrificed in religious ritual. While tragedy, Gambini said, “can be dark and even heartbreaking,” he sees the form as “voluptuous,” celebrating “joy and pleasure” in the physical body.

Greek tragedy, Gambini said, “survived because the plays keep speaking to our times.” The battle between an oppressive government—Pentheus often seems more a bureaucrat than a king—and a wildly inspired populist cult, and the status of faith in capricious gods versus a more reasoned ideal of humanity are themes that, it’s easy to see, have never ceased clashing in human society. At the Yale Summer Cabaret that drama plays out once again—with the added attraction of watching director Danilo Gambini fulfill his pact with Dionysus.

Euripides’ Bakkhai
Translated by Anne Carson
Directed by Danilo Gambini
Yale Summer Cabaret
June 6-15, 2019

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