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

Surviving with the Simpsons

Review of Mr. Burns, a post-electric play, Yale School of Drama

Post-disaster stories—often called ‘post-apocalyptic’—are fairly common these days. Some kind of global catastrophe—which may involve zombies, aliens, superheroes, angels, demons, mutants, environmental mismanagement, war, or what-have-you—destroys the world as we know it and we get to imagine what kind of world will follow. Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, a post-electric play, the first show of the Yale School of Drama’s 2019-20 season, varies the approach with interesting if not always intelligible results. It’s a play less about how humans endure in survivalist mode, and more about how the cultural reference points we may take for granted—like television and theater—will be affected. The play’s effect, in this busy production directed by Kat Yen, is at times funny, at times confusing, and finally beautiful, and its tone seems to be one of reflection with gestures at satire and suspense.

The phrase “post-electric” is key. Without electricity—which has been wiped out somehow and which causes nuclear power plants to fail with calamitous results—people can’t watch anything except each other. The play opens with a small group gathered around a makeshift hearth: a fire in a trash can. Sitting on mismatched chairs, including a sofa, Matt (Anthony Holiday), Maria (Ilia Isorelýs Paulino) and Jenny (Madeline Seidman) are reminiscing about a certain episode of Matt Groening’s celebrated cartoon phenomenon, The Simpsons (the episode that’s a take-off on the film Cape Fear) while Sam (Reed Northrup) patrols the perimeter with a gun. Eventually they are joined by Gibson (Dario Ladani Sanchez), a wanderer who, after being treated at first with fear and suspicion, reports on his travels and what he’s seen of devastated areas, not too far from the theater we’re in.

Jenny (Madeline Seidman), Matt IAnthony Holiday), Maria (Ilia Isorelýs Paulino), Sam (Reed Northrup) in Yale School of Drama’s production of Mr Burns by Anne Washburn, directed by Kat Yen (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

What emerges is a vague sense of how the world is fairing after a major meltdown. Most of which we can easily imagine thanks to all those apocalyptic films we’ve seen. Judging by their speech, the group is twentysomething and maintain their relation to the recent past in two ways: by recalling The Simpsons episode as a common reference point—Gibson, who claims he never saw an entire episode of the show, manages some details as well and does a killer Marge impression—and by reading lists of ten names apiece, with ages provided. This rollcall of the most valued dead or missing serves as a kind of memorial. We have a sense of randomness, of survival by sheer chance.

The best aspect of the opening scene—the play is comprised of three scenes in two acts—is the engaging recall of the “Cape Fear episode” (audience members with no knowledge of The Simpsons may find this opaque but entertaining). The comedy of the dialogue doesn’t seem a denial of the direness of the situation but rather the kind of bond that residents of McLuhan’s “global village” would exercise. And that sentiment must sustain us through the other scene of Act 1.

The long second scene is where things get murkier. Now joined by Colleen (Ciara Monique) who acts as director and Quincy (Jessy Yates) who is playing a woman who wants to take a bath as only women in TV commercials can, the group has become a troupe. They enact Simpsons episodes—like “Heretic Homer”—with commercials included. Rival troupes are discussed with a distressed sense of how to improve what we would call the market share. The main avenue to a successful show seems to be not talent or inspiration but budget, for props and effects and to “buy lines.” Apparently, post-electric writers will be those who can recall the lines from shows with accuracy, lines which have a certain talismanic appeal to the audience and players alike.

All this information comes to us through dialogue that also includes a Simpsons scene featuring Homer (played by Matt) and two FBI Agents (played by Colleen and Maria), the bath commercial (which includes Gibson as “Loving Husband,” and comedic efforts at Foley effects), and a spirited dance number by the entire cast that presents an imaginative mix-up of bits of hits with inventive moves (choreography by Michael Raine). All the movement—and the singing, particularly by Paulino, Sanchez, and Yates—is a welcome relief from the backstage chatter that Washburn exploits at length. The scene ends with the kind of climax that seems more gratuitous than dramatic.

Mr Burns (John Evans Reese), background; Homer (Madeline Seidman), Bart (Ciara Monique), Marge (Anthony Holiday), foreground in Yale School of Drama production of Mr. Burns (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

After intermission we get the final scene—75 years into the future—where the descendants of the people we’ve already met, presumably, are staging a musical pageant. It’s Simpsons-themed, of course, and retains elements from the TV-recall of Scene 2. Sideshow Bob, the evil threat in the “Cape Fear episode,” has morphed into Mr. Burns (John Evans Reese), a dastardly villain who, on the show, is Homer’s boss and the owner of a nuclear power plant. The showdown, with swords drawn, plays like Captain Hook vs. his nemesis Peter Pan, here Bart (Monique), with both Reese and Monique excellent in their multilayered roles. The confrontation takes place (as does the climax of the “Cape Fear episode”) on a ship (cleverly designed by scenic designer Bridget Lindsay) after Bart’s hapless family—Marge (Holiday), Lisa (Northrup), Homer (Seidman), and little Maggie (a doll)—have been ruthlessly dispatched.

The songs, accompanied by Liam Bellman-Sharpe, composer, and Bel Ben Mamoun, music director, in gowns with skullcaps, playing large, intricate, makeshift instruments, are a pastiche as well, with an elevated score from Michael Friedman. The irony that TV should “evolve” into Broadway-esque ritual is funny and, depending on your sensibilities, inspiring. Paulino, garbed like a sideshow Lady Liberty, impresses with the range of her vocals and her statuesque bearing. The costume for Mr. Burns is an even more striking fantasia, while the possible antecedents for other costumes (all by Stephen Marks) make for interesting conjecture. What, we may wonder, are the source materials for shows at some future point near the end of our century?

The cast of Mr. Burns works the show’s material as a gifted ensemble should. Presented in the round at the Iseman Theater, the play keeps us involved even when it seems to indulge itself rather than enlighten. The prospect of playing a makeshift troupe suits this young cast and vice versa. To bring off so well a show with so many moving parts and such an amorphous sense of mise en scène is a feat, and the final act—which inspires both gravitas and glee—shows director Yen’s knowing grasp of how theater must often transcend or transform its material. All for the sake of some unnamed quality that may endure even longer than The Simpsons.

Mr. Burns, a post-electric play
By Anne Washburn
Score by Michael Friedman
Lyrics by Anne Washburn
Additional music by Liam Bellman-Sharpe
Directed by Kat Yen

Choreographer: Michael Raine; Music Director: Bel Ben Mamoun; Scenic Designer: Bridget Lindsay; Costume Designer: Stephen Marks; Lighting Designer: Riva Fairhall; Sound Designer: Daniela Hart; Projection Installation Designer: Erin Sullivan; Production Dramaturg: Patrick Denney; Technical Director: Matthew Lewis; Stage Manager: Amanda Luke

Cast: Anthony Holiday, Ciara Monique, Reed Northrup, Ilia Isorelýs Paulino, John Evans Reese, Dario Ladani Sanchez, Madeline Seidman, Jessy Yates

Musicians: Liam Bellman-Sharpe, Bel Ben Mamoun

Yale School of Drama
October 26-November 1, 2019

The Cab of the Cab

Review of The Satellite Festival, Yale Cabaret

Billed as “a weekend of new works across multiple venues and genres,” this year’s Satellite Festival at Yale Cabaret—the fourth—was a curated collection of musical performances, solo shows, looped electronics, and a play in a truck. What follows are impressions from attending five shows in quick succession on the festival’s opening night, Thursday, March 28.

The evening began in the Cabaret space at 8 p.m. with Exit Interview, featuring playwright Christopher Gabriel Núñez in his persona Anonymous (And.On.I.Must), a rapper with a very frenetic style and a warm intensity. Earning whoops and cheers from a rapt audience, and much encouragement from the YSD students working the kitchen, Núñez paced and swooped through a range of material, one hand holding a mic, the other vigorously beating the air. While most of the songs were fast and aggressive, giving off an angry urban vibe, a few were more lyrical, including one that Núñez introduced as a “love song for the ‘90s.”  Hooks were plentiful, and Núñez’s singing voice, those times when he vocalized, has a husky, soulful intensity. My favorite part was the final number when the artist was joined by an impromptu collection of students and audience members, including one old enough to be a grandfather to some of the others, who proceeded to groove with the most upbeat and infectious song of the night.

Christopher Gabriel Núñez, “Exit Interview”

Upstairs in the rehearsal space, second-year sound designer Liam Bellman-Sharpe and dancer/choreographer Sarah Xiao collaborated in Untitled semi-improvised dance/music piece, an atmospheric work that seemed to pit the musical direction of the piece against the physical component. At first, Bellman-Sharpe, with a prop forearm swaying, played guitar riffs with his back to Xiao. In a nude leotard wearing face-paint and a blonde wig, Xiao, in striking lighting, crept about the floor, holding poses and moving in slow motion. Later, Bellman-Sharpe, also wearing a nude leotard with face-paint and a head-wrap, faced Xiao and played arpeggios while counting aloud, at intervals, through a sequence of numbers. Eventually, the numbers seemed to meet with no response and went off on unpredictable sequences, with Xiao ignoring or interpreting the direction (if that’s what it was) as she chose. The guitar parts Bellman-Sharpe played had a crisply fluid sound, never too abrasive or strident, while breaking once or twice into a rhythmic number. Xiao’s movements were always spell-binding, executed with a flair for precision and contortion as when, early on, she bent over backwards while emitting a breathy flutter. As the piece wound down, Bellman-Sharpe produced a cellphone to Skype with his mother in Australia while Xiao arranged him in fetal position on the floor.

Sarah Xiao, Liam Bellman-Sharpe, “Untitled semi-improvised dance/music piece”

Back downstairs in the Cab, first-year actor Malia West’s black girl burning: an open letter addressed white culture in general as “you,” giving you to understand the mix of defiance, grievance, and pride felt by a black girl growing up in a society that under-appreciates and stigmatizes her race. Citing black female cultural heroines such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Ntosake Shange, Maya Angelou and others, West gave her audience—many of whom snapped fingers in response to a particularly pithy line—a clear sense of the tradition empowering her. A funny and spirited set-piece, which might be called “no you can’t touch my hair,” worked through a series of possible responses to the off-putting request to touch a black person’s hair. West worked rhyme and sing-song rhythms into the piece, but generally kept to a measured spoken word cadence she has clearly mastered. The different voices of the piece—called “a poem, a plea, a panic attack, a prayer…and some praise”—took us through a variety of emotional states, from anger to love to doubt to inspiration, and finally to simple admiration of West’s strength of conviction.

Malia West, “black girl burning: an open letter”

Upstairs again to hear second-year director Kat Yen, in This is Not Art, It’s Just Asian, give voice to her many frustrations with theater’s treatment of Asian Americans. Yen’s spoken piece was very much in her own person, telling of her experiences in a direct and disarming way. When she applied to the Yale School of Drama, Yen told us, she insisted that she was not interested in staging Asian American plays. Now, concluding her second year, her view has changed, but there aren’t enough actors of Asian descent to stage an Asian American play at YSD. The change in her view, it seemed, came from a heightened sense of individual cultural identity currently much in vogue in the School, which, in her view, caused her to be pulled off projects that required a certain ethnic authenticity, thus restricting her still more. The most telling grievance—at least as a set-piece—was Yen’s story of visiting the home of her white fiancé’s parents and being told by her future mother-in-law that her bedroom was decorated in the tropes of “Asian Ladies of the Night.” The story worked as an awkward and painful indication of how Asian women are perceived by a culture with a strong tendency to identify them with exotic sex workers. Yen also opened the question—as she read from author Frank Chin’s take-down of author David Henry Hwang—of how a fragmented and disparate Asian American culture can find a clear sense of political voice.

Kat Yen, “This is Not Art, It’s Just Asian”

The evening ended—in the usual late night 11 p.m. time-slot—with third-year theater manager Sam Linden’s UNAMUSED: a feminist musical fantasia adapted from an essay that was based on a true story about a play that was based on a true story—a work adapted from Alexandra Petri’s story, “We Are Not A Muse,” about having to attend a writing workshop where an ex-boyfriend, Dave, uses their breakup as material for a story. Taylor Hoffman played Alexandra as more perky than bitter, seeing the humor of her situation while mining it for laughs. A Greek Chorus added their takes on the dynamic, in which a “he said/she said” exchange escalates into “what he said about what she said” and vice versa. The songs are mostly light and jaunty with some ready wit in capturing the kinds of vanities that get ruffled whenever someone puts one’s business out there. In one song, Dave (Dario Ladani Sánchez) wandered a bit off-key, drawing shared looks from the Chorus. Whether deliberate or not, the effect created was along the lines of “he’s a guy, he’ll get by.” And that attitude did indeed underscore the resentment aimed at Dave, who, oblivious to any viewpoint not his own, sailed blithely along with his self-involved account. Linden’s play has the wherewithal to include a meta-moment in which Alexandra reflects that she made Dave the fodder for her presentation just as he had done to her. And that view gamely takes us back to the fact that, when it comes to breakups, even if we get both sides of the story, we never do get the whole story.

Charlie Romano, foreground at piano; Dario Ladani Sánchez, Taylor Hoffman, background, “UNAMUSED”

And, on Friday night only, in a workspace at 149 York Street, two Alexas, the voice-activated electronic assistant developed by Amazon, were locked into an exchange of lines from Samuel Beckett’s seminal play of absurdist situations and gnomic communications, Waiting for Godot. The play’s very repetitive structure was perfect for the robotic interactions between the two machines as created by Elliot G. Mitchell. Listening for about ten or fifteen minutes, I was tickled each time Alexa 1 and 2 reached this exchange: A1: “Let’s go” A2: “We can’t” A1: “Why not?” A2: “We’re waiting for Godot.” After that line, A1 might come back with different responses from different points in the play. But each time the “why not” was in the exact same inflection, as though the question were being asked for the very first time. At times, the “happy path” by which one Alexa responded to the other would produce a shorter loop, coming back to repeat the same material, as for instance the bit about the willow tree (“no more weeping”). The part about Gogo and Didi possibly hanging themselves was included as well—which could only make one sympathetic to the two poor machines with less means of accomplishing the task than Beckett’s characters. The series of insults was particularly amusing in the affectless voices of Alexa 1 and 2.

A range of experience, certainly, containing much anger and distress, but also mystery, poetry, and the celebration of creativity. The festival atmosphere, as opposed to the one show per weekend format, lets one encounter different audiences throughout the night which can become a factor in how one experiences a particular show. Co-Artistic Director Molly FitzMaurice called the Satellite Festival “the Cab of the Cab,” as a weekend of pieces in progress or not full-show length or simply less like plays and more like cabaret performances. As ever, the Satellite Festival is a various occasion to sample more of the talent passing through the Yale School of Drama.

The Festival’s creative teams:

Alexa, wait for Godot
Created by Elliot G. Mitchell
Projection Design: Camilla Tassi

black girl burning: an open letter
Written and performed by Malia West
Dramaturg: Gloria Majule; Lighting Design: Riva Fairhall; Sound Design: Bailey Trierweiler; Voiceover: Adrienne Wells

dot the jay
Performed by Robert Lee Hart and Dario Ladani Sánchez

Exit Interview
By Christopher Gabriel Núñez aka Anonymous (And.On.I.Must)
Beats by The Brainius

This is Not Art, It’s Just Asian
Written & performed by Kat Yen

Truck II
Written by Margaret E. Douglas
Directed by Danilo Gambini
Dramaturg: Madeline Charne; Truck Design: Sarah Karl; Sound Design: Emily Duncan Wilson; Costume Design: Alicia Austin; Technical Director: Alex McNamara

Cast: Margaret E. Douglas, Sarah Lyddan, Juliana Martínez

UNAMUSED: a feminist musical fantasia…
Adapted from “We Are Not A Muse” from A Field Guide to Awkward Silences by Alexandra Petri
Book, Music & Lyrics by Sam Linden
Directed by Kat Yen
Music Director: Charlie Romano
Producer: Yuhan Zhang
Dramaturg: Henriëtte Rietveld

Cast: Taylor Hoffman, Ipsitaa Khullar, Edmund O’Neal, Zak Rosen, Dario Ladani Sánchez, Jessy Yates

Untitled semi-improvised dance/music piece
Created and performed by Sarah Xiao and Liam Bellman-Sharpe
Costume Design: Alicia Austin

Satellite Festival
Yale Cabaret
March 28-30

The Yale Cabaret will be dark for the next two weekends, then returns April 18-20 with Fireflies by Donja R. Love, an Afro-queer playwright, poet and filmmaker from Philadelphia, directed by first-year director Christopher Betts, who directed School Girls; or the African Mean Girls Play earlier this season.

Office Politics

Review of Fade, Yale Cabaret

What is a community? Is it people who live in the same place, people who work in the same place or have the same job or pursue the same activities? Is it anyone of the same ethnicity, or who speaks the same language or worships the same God or values the same things? The term can apply to a number of situations, not all of which are commensurate. And the question of who belongs to the community and who doesn’t can be a contested matter.

In Fade, a play by Tanya Saracho at the Yale Cabaret, directed by Kat Yen, the question of whether or not the two characters belong to a community is key to the drama. Lucia (Juliana Aiden Martínez) is a new “token hire” on a team of writers developing a television show. Everyone else is white and male, and Lucia, as a female of color, feels both excitement at the opportunity and dismay at the racist perceptions of her colleagues. She reaches out to Abel (Dario Ladani Sánchez), a custodian, because they “look the same” as nonwhite workers.

Abel (Dario Ladani Sanchez), Lucia (Juliana Aiden Martinez) (photos courtesy of Yale Cabaret)

Abel knows all-too-well that, whether or not he and Lucia share a community—through Mexican heritage, the Spanish language, or by being nonwhite in a white man’s world—they are not colleagues. Her job station is well above his, and yet she’s willing to use a range of appeals—helpless female to capable male, companionable co-worker, fellow underappreciated employee of color, and possibly even sympathetic friend—to win him over. We see Abel, played quite effectively by Sánchez with wary charm, overcome his misgivings and resentment to be on Lucia’s side. While not a romantic comedy, there are certain elements that suggest we could be headed that way. In an earlier era, a story about a woman on her way up would find a possible love interest/nemesis in a man, manly in a traditional way, who makes her question why she puts her job before her heart. This isn’t that era.

In this era, a woman such as Lucia never has a thought that isn’t all about herself. She is a nonstop font of information about what’s happening in her world. A published novelist who should be working on her second novel, she has taken a job that she feels is beneath her—hence, perhaps, the ease with which she claims kinship with Abel—and is trying to cope. The play works so well at the Cabaret because of Martínez’s wonderful performance, mercurial and various while always seeming to be utterly genuine. Abel, who shows up every night to clean the offices, never knows what he’ll find—Lucia working late on an assignment, or brooding over slights at a meeting, or waiting to take a late night call from her boss in another time-zone, or going into deep angst after finally besting her main rival on the team. Each time, playful, distressed, or beseeching, she manages to draw him into her situation.

Lucia (Juliana Aiden Martinez)

Along the way, Abel parcels out bits of information about himself, but he’s not the kind to openly confide. When he finally does render a very dramatic evocation of an event from his past, he worries that he has given away too much. He has cause for concern.

What makes the play more than simply a drama of how difficult mismatched friendship can be is the context of the world Saracho is presenting. It’s a world where something that might unite people—a shared cultural background, a first-language in common—can also be divisive if such markers, often used to ghettoize people, are feared as efforts to pigeonhole or label. Lucia and Abel did not originate in the same neighborhoods, and the differences play not only into what they can assume about each other culturally but who they are at work. No one, we might believe, is wholly defined by their occupation, but neither can a workplace friendship ever lose sight of what it means to be on the job. Saracho applies such pressure points usefully throughout without ever making the story feel too manipulated.

Set in an office space that looks like an open cage, Fade knowingly evokes the workplace as both a source of security and a place of anxious efforts to be oneself and to better oneself. The only real risk for Abel is to be caught slacking off (though he does have a secret he shouldn’t divulge); the risk for Lucia is that her attempts to assert herself creatively may backfire. In that she shares her precarious position with other communities—women in the workplace, persons of color expected to be “representative” of a poorly understood demographic—and as such we’re on her side, up to a point. That point is reached, dramatically, in a way that any member of yet another community—writers—might well recognize, with different views. Does anyone own the copyright on their own experience?

Well-paced by director Kat Yen, Fade lets tension and entertainment support one another as we learn more about these characters on their paths of support and exposure. In the end, Saracho leaves us with the realization that betrayal may simply be part of a writer’s job.

Fade
By Tanya Saracho
Directed by Kat Yen
Proposed by Juliana Aiden Martínez

Producer: Laurie Ortega-Murphy; Stage Manager: Zachry J. Bailey; Dramaturg: Nahuel Telleria; Set Designer: Stephanie Osin Cohen; Costume Designer: April M. Hickman; Lighting Designer: Evan Christian Anderson; Sound Designer: Kat Yen; Technical Director: Yara Yarashevich

Cast: Juliana Aiden Martínez, Dario Ladani Sánchez

Yale Cabaret
September 20-22, 2018