Entre Nous

Review of Dear Elizabeth, New Haven Theater Company

Sarah Ruhl’s Dear Elizabeth, now playing at New Haven Theater Company for four more performances—tonight and next Thursday through Saturday—has an unusual remit: to present the story of the friendship between Robert Lowell (Ralph Buonocore) and Elizabeth Bishop (Sandra E. Rodriguez) using only excerpts from the published correspondence between the two famous poets as text to be spoken by the actors playing them. The sense of this restriction is that it lets us hear the voices of these two inestimable writers as pitched to one another, an ongoing verbal pas de deux that lasted thirty years. Indeed, the last letter Bishop wrote Lowell was en route to him in New York when he died of a heart-attack in a cab in 1977. Bishop died two years later.

The premiere production of Dear Elizabeth, at Yale Repertory Theatre in 2012 directed by Les Waters, had a wealth of interesting visual aids to hold our attention. At New Haven Theater Company, director J. Kevin Smith provides a much more intimate approach that has its own very choice theatricality. Set up with seating on all four sides, the play happens before us as an imagined space, one that Lowell and Bishop seemingly enter into readily. Their letters—usually written when considerable distance separates them in life—provide a particular intimacy that each strove to maintain, in different ways at different times. There are dramatized moments—such as their mimed meetings when we don’t get to hear them speak because what they said was not recorded—and moments of whimsy as when one or the other climbs a step latter as though to move above and beyond the quotidian bounds of life.

Elizabeth Bishop (Sandra E. Rodriguez), Robert Lowell (Ralph Buonocore) in Dear Elizabeth; photo by New Haven Theater Company

Moving chronologically through this literary acquaintance that becomes a lifelong friendship, we see how the two began, early on, with belief in one another as readers of and commentators on each other’s work. An aspect that never flags, with each dedicating poems to one another, and, late in Lowell’s career, arguing good naturedly but pointedly over Lowell’s use of doctored versions of his former (second) wife’s correspondence in his long poem “The Dolphin.” The “mixing of fact and fiction” is what Bishop objects to, so we can imagine that she would not censure Ruhl’s use of the poets’ correspondence since—though the play does not show us all that was said—the playwright uses only what was actually written. (Though on the question of tampering with written materials—which Bishop also faulted Lowell for—I will offer one cavil: to quote at length from Lowell’s famous poem “Skunk Hour,” dedicated to Bishop, without including the lines about the skunk not only truncates a powerful poem, but leaves those unfamiliar with the poem uncertain about what Lowell means when he said, in a letter, that he had become a skunk.)

Robert Lowell (Ralph Buonocore) in Dear Elizabeth; photo by New Haven Theater Company

The notion of the correspondence as a drama is supported by the way the two seem to require one another as audience to lives that move along with much travel and, for Lowell, three wives and two children, and, for Bishop, much time alone and then a long-term relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares, living together in Brazil, that ended tragically. The friendship between Lowell and Bishop had its more intense phase before Lowell met wife number two, Elizabeth Hardwick, author, critic and one of the founders of the New York Review of Books. Indeed, a powerful letter later in the play shows Lowell giving vent to reminiscence over the early possibility of a marriage to Bishop, whom he met before he met Hardwick. The possibility may have been only in his mind, but as depicted by the play, the earlier moment, when Lowell writes of meeting Hardwick and soon enough is enacting a marriage, finds Bishop sitting at her desk blowing bubbles and seeming to ignore his epistles. Was there ever a chance for these two to live as a settled couple? Doubtful, but, the play suggests, not unimaginable.

How we see this relationship owes much to how it’s staged. The strictures of the play make the audience seem to be reading the words of the poets over the shoulder of the playwright. Ruhl chooses what to include and what to exclude and provides terse statements of fact in a voice-over so that we will know things the letters don’t spell out. In addition, a silent factotum, called Brigit (Abby Klein, wonderfully focused) moves on and offstage, bringing in and removing props, aiding and abetting the dramatic business in a manner that seems to comment ironically on the fact that Lowell and Bishop have gone from living confidantes and career poets—each winning many important prizes—to figures in a play.

Elizabeth Bishop (Sandra E. Rodriguez) in Dear Elizabeth, photo by New Haven Theater Company

As characters, Rodriguez’s Bishop is the more winning of the two. Rodriguez infuses Bishop with a vital circumspection, a way of approaching life as though it’s happening to someone else. So those moments when she breaks down are all the more powerful as we see at once with what strength of purpose she pursued her very individual life. As Lowell, Buonocore never quite gets across the manic quality in Lowell, which he references in his letters—having not only to take medications but sometimes being relegated to sanitariums. In Lowell’s words one detects a performative quality that does lend itself well to those passages where Buonocore’s Lowell comments drily on others.

The main strength of the play is that it makes us aware of how any attempt to present oneself in a verbal medium begs a certain indulgence from the audience. An audience of one—the person addressed—has now become “the ages,” leaving us to make of these lives what we will. There’s a very successful moment late in the play when Lowell and Bishop circle one another reciting the various salutations and closings they had used with one another in the course of thirty years of letters. The lines compose a poem with very specific referents and contexts, full of affection, self-aware humor and a very, very personal touch, such as only real friends can appreciate between each other.

Dear Elizabeth
A play in letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and back again
By Sarah Ruhl
Directed by J. Kevin Smith

Producer: Margaret Mann; Production Stage Manager: Stacy Lupo; Lighting Designer: Adam Lobelson; Sound Effects: Tom Curley

Cast: Ralph Buonocore, Abby Klein, Sandra E. Rodriguez

New Haven Theater Company
November 7, 8, 9, 14, 15, 16, 2024

Sarah Ruhl Play Next for New Haven Theater Company

Preview of Dear Elizabeth, New Haven Theater Company

The work of poets Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) and Robert Lowell (1917-1977) is often discussed together because of the strong affinities the two writers had for each other and one another’s work. In the era since their deaths—two years apart—Bishop’s work has somewhat eclipsed Lowell’s, though he was a much better-known figure during their lifetimes, from an august Boston Brahmin family that traced its ancestors back to the Mayflower. Both poets won Pulitzers and National Book Awards, and both had great influence on subsequent generations of poets through their publications and teaching. The degree to which their actual personalities inflected their poetic personae is a question of their ongoing interpretation, and both have dedicated fans enamored of the unique musics of their verses.

The two are even more inextricably linked posthumously because of Sarah Ruhl’s play, Dear Elizabeth (first produced at Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Les Waters, in 2012), which will be revived this week and next by the New Haven Theater Company. The play derives from Words in Air, a 2008 volume that collects the complete correspondence—over 450 letters—between Bishop and Lowell, written from 1947 to 1977. Dramatized by two actors playing the poets and speaking lines the poets respectively wrote each other, Bishop and Lowell become eloquent and—in the wide range of their lives—exemplary figures for their literary generation.

J. Kevin Smith, a longtime member of NHTC, directs the play which runs November 7, 8, 9 and 14, 15, 16. Dear Elizabeth, he reminded me, was originally scheduled as a script-in-hand read last year at this time, with two different casts slated to play Bishop and Lowell. Of that run, which was scrapped when one of the participants was unable to perform, Ralph Buonocore has been retained to play Robert Lowell. Ralph had a small but essential role in last NHTC season’s success Webster’s Bitch and was memorable, several seasons ago, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Sandra Rodriquez, a veteran of NHTC having appeared in The Cult, Trevor, and most recently Goldfish, will be playing Elizabeth Bishop. They are joined by Abby Klein, who also played in Webster’s Bitch, as Brigit.

For Smith, the move to a full production for the play, as opposed to a staged reading, comes from a fuller immersion in the play and consideration of the kinds of stage directions Sarah Ruhl works into the text. He mentioned that Ruhl’s Foreword to the play suggests that the play could be done in a very scaled-down version, as for instance “a book club reading.” The Yale Repertory Theatre version was nothing like that, featuring water running on stage and levitating props, and Smith sees much potential for a version of the play somewhere between special effects and no effects.

He sees “magical realism” in what Ruhl writes about what happens onstage and feels the NHTC production will “facilitate the magic of the play,” which is a matter of “mood and how it is created” in a story that spans thirty years and though “platonic is passionate.” Particularly “compelling” for Smith is how Bishop and Lowell “do the dance of their relationship,” which at one point stirs from Lowell a love letter that Ruhl called “one of the most beautiful love letters ever written.” Ruhl, Smith said, became enamored of the correspondence when a friend gave her the book when she was under bed-rest while pregnant with twins. The playwright became convinced that the words in the letters needed to be heard aloud, and wrote a play to dramatize the unique nature of this enduring friendship.

As Ruhl says in her Foreword to the play: “It’s difficult to write about friendship. Our culture is inundated with the story of romantic love. We understand how romantic love begins, how it ends. We don’t understand, in neat narrative fashion, how friendship begins, how it endures. And yet life would be unbearable without friendship.”

Dear Elizabeth is about how friendship made the highly fraught lives of two highly wrought poets more bearable and, in their letters, indelible.

Dear Elizabeth
By Sarah Ruhl
Directed by J. Kevin Smith
New Haven Theater Company
Thursday, November 7 & 14 at 7:30 p.m.
Friday, November 8 & 15 at 8 p.m.
Saturday, November 9 & 16 at 8 p.m.
839 Chapel Street, New Haven

New Haven Theater Company considers the power of words

Preview of Webster’s Bitch, New Haven Theater Company

A live mic picks up a slur spoken by the boss of a dictionary-editing team, setting his office of lexicographers working to define a troubling word, and maybe—when the remark goes “viral”—navigating the damage. Laughs ensue, but also issues about office politics, sexism, cancel culture, the internet, censorship, and who gets to say what we get to say.

Brooks Appelbaum of Connecticut Critics Circle, reviewing the play’s premiere at Playhouse on Park in West Hartford almost a year ago, said that Jacqueline Bircher’s Webster’s Bitch “hits many topical notes in a sharp and entertaining way and introduces us to a world we may know little to nothing about: the world of lexicography, or of keeping dictionaries correct and current.”

For the New Haven Theater Company, Webster’s Bitch is a match made in heaven: a single-location set, a small cast of five that stretches from elders, in their fifties, to juniors, in their thirties, and a lone twentysomething who plays gadfly to her elders. And action that is dialogue-driven, and smart, funny, and relevant, about “issues that interest the company.”

Company member Susan Kulp, who proposed the play to the NHTC, was unable to take part due to the fact that she’s been busy acting in productions all over the state (Beauty and the Beast at Legacy Theater, Grumpy Old Men at Seven Angels Theatre, and currently The Executioner’s Wife at Milford Arts Council). The other Company members who might fit the parts best were also unavailable (most of them had already been involved this year in NHTC’s highly successful, sold-out run of Cry It Out). And so, an occurrence unprecedented in NHTC’s long life: the majority of the cast was secured through auditions.

NHTC member Ralph Buonocore plays Frank, the boss; Buonocore was last seen at NHTC in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as Mancini; the other cast-members are making their debut at NHTC: Lillian Garcia, a regular actor at Square One in Stratford, plays Joyce, Frank’s chief assistant at the office; Abby Klein, an actor newly returned to New Haven and the stage, plays Gwen, a lexicographer also in charge of social media; Gavin Whelan, an actor whose past work mostly took place in Indiana, plays Nick, another lexicographer; and Lisa DeAngelis, who acted recently in Fairview with Collective Consciousness Theatre and in Angels in America at Madison Lyric Stage, plays Ellie, Gwen’s younger sister. A recently departed third lexicographer is never seen but her successful brokering of a published novel is a topic of discussion.

A rehearsal of Webster’s Bitch at New Haven Theater Company (photo by NHTC)

Company stalwarts Margaret Mann and John Watson direct, having joined forces four times before for NHTC, co-directing the productions of The Dumb Waiter, Retreat from Moscow, Love Song and, most recently, Goldfish. One could say that all the plays they’ve worked on together have been focused on intense interrelations, sometimes in a family, or between a couple or, as here, among co-workers, or, in The Dumb Waiter, between hitmen waiting to hear from their boss. The co-directors work well together, Mann said, because their “sensibilities are very different”; Mann who approaches directing from an actor’s perspective, is concerned about “what feels right”; Watson, while building on his training, likes to encounter “new ideas” from collaboration.

Their camaraderie can be easily grasped in how comfortable they are in talking about the play, which they both found fascinating as a treatment of how language evolves and changes, and how individuals react differently to provocative language. Ellie, as a catalyst, has no filter, and Watson suspected that older viewers might find themselves in sympathy with Joyce who has to keep things running smoothly regardless of personal feelings.

Both co-directors felt that the two lexicographers—especially Gwen—set the tone for what the play is getting at, though as Watson pointed out, the play’s conclusion is “open-ended, leaving the audience hanging between competing agendas.” Whether dictionaries or other linguistic authorities should be descriptive—changing as language usage changes—or prescriptive—indicating what is correct and therefore unchanging. Mann said the play makes us “think about how many usages” there can be for any word, and, as Watson added, “where and who uses it.” He noted that those “deeply offended by bad language” may find the script a bit off-putting. “It’s not about vulgarity,” he quickly added, “but about what’s offensive and what’s not and why.”

A matter of taste, or a task for the policing of personal expression?

Webster’s Bitch plays at New Haven Theater Company, 839 Chapel Street, next Thursday, May 9, 7:30 pm, and Friday, May 10, and Saturday, May 11, at 8 pm; those three shows have been listed as Sold Out, as is the show Thursday, May 16, 7:30 pm; tickets are still available for the shows at 8 pm on Friday, May 17, and Saturday, May 18. Go here for tickets.

Cry It Out Comes to New Haven Theater Company

Preview of Cry It Out, New Haven Theater Company

This coming week the New Haven Theater Company returns with a spirited production of Molly Smith Metzler’s popular play, Cry It Out. You might think the title refers directly to the parenting philosophy which advocates leaving a child to “self-soothe” by crying until the child learns to settle into sleep. In fact, the “cry” in “cry it out” has more to do with what Jessie and Lina, two mothers of small children, are feeling as they try to navigate motherhood and working careers.

Marty Tucker has acted with New Haven Theater Company before—most notably in their production of Marjorie Prime in 2019 and in White Rabbit, Red Rabbit last year—but this show will be his debut as a director with NHTC, though he has directed many other shows (mostly Shakespeare). He said that he had been planning to direct a different play for NHTC, but the play required a larger cast than was readily available. In the NHTC method, any member can suggest a play for the company, who then all read it and discuss what might work best. Cry It Out came up for consideration and Tucker immediately loved it.

“I was laughing as I read it,” he said, and felt certain he could find the right actors for the roles.  Besides the two friends—from different backgrounds, with different paygrades in their working lives—there is an additional woman, Adrienne, a neighbor who visits, goaded by her husband, Mitchell, who feels his wife needs a sort of motherhood support group. A four-character play is familiar territory for NHTC, which has also mounted several classic two-handers, such as Zoo Story and The Dumb Waiter.

Marty Tucker directs Jenny Schuck as Jessie and Deena Nicol-Blifford as Lina in Cry It Out at New Haven Theater Company

Tucker knew he wanted NHTC member Deena Nicol-Blifford for Lina, so much so that her participation was key to his taking on the play. Jenny Schuck, who has played in some of NHTC’s larger cast productions, such as Almost, Maine in 2013 and Rumors in 2018, as well as taking on one night of White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, plays Jessie, the principal role. “Jenny as Jessie, Deena as Lina . . . it had to be,” Tucker joked. Melissa Anderson, who played Walt Disney’s daughter in Lucas Hnath’s A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay on the Death of Walt Disney at NHTC in 2017, takes on what Tucker called “the difficult role” of Adrienne, and, in another NHTC debut, Ruben Ortiz, the Artistic Director of New Haven’s A Broken Umbrella Theater, plays Mitchell.

“The cast is so good together,” Tucker enthused, “there is camaraderie, bantering, and they are so very generous.” He also complimented his cast’s work ethic: even though rehearsals have had to be restricted to weekends for the most part, the cast clearly works over material when not together. “Any suggestions I make are already incorporated the next time we meet,” he said with a kind of awe, “there is a lot of rapport and that helps to make the characters likeable. Because if they’re not likeable, you’re in trouble.”

“This one is going to be special,” Tucker said, “I’m thrilled” that the very entertaining play is being fully realized by this talented team. He noted how, when he first read the text, he was still thinking about it three days later. “At some point you go ‘wow,’ and think how awful and poignant” the characters’ situations are. It’s a play that offers much to think about, but with much heart, compassion, and laughter.

In terms of set, the play also works to NHTC strengths: a good all-purpose space that has considerable intimacy. The action takes place in Jessie’s backyard, but, Tucker said, the floorboards of the NHTC stage wouldn’t be convincing. They put down Astroturf only to have a very fake-looking lawn. NHTC member Trevor Williams then painted the turf, giving the set “the look of the kinds of winter lawns you see around here” (or until the recent snow covered them).

A play about parenting that, in NHTC’s words, “takes an honest look at the absurdities of being home with a baby, the power of female friendship, the dilemma of going back to work, and the effect class has on parenthood in America.” Cry It Out is a play about coping, and might help us cope with winter in Connecticut, providing a welcome warmth.

Cry It Out
By Molly Smith Metzler
Directed by Marty Tucker

New Haven Theater Company
February 22, 23, 24, 29 (sold out); March 1 (sold out), March 2
Note: February 22 and 29 at 7:30 p.m.; all other shows at 8 p.m.

For tickets: Cry It Out

The New Haven Theater Company is: Melissa Andersen, Ralph Buonocore, Sara Courtemanche, Drew Gray, Erich Greene, George Kulp, Susan Kulp, Margaret Mann, Deena Nicol-Blifford, Sandra Rodriguez, Steve Scarpa, Jenny Schuck, J. Kevin Smith, Aleta Staton, John Strano, Marty Tucker, John Watson, Jodi Williams, and Trevor Williams

Getting to Be a Rabbit With Me

Review of White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, New Haven Theater Company

Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit, Red Rabbit isn’t a play so much as a theatrical event, one that requires a new actor each night who has not seen the script or read about the play. It also requires audience participation, and, with no director, the show is apt to be enacted quite differently each time it’s done. There’s suspense, laughs, and the kind of unexpected turns that only live theater can provide.

New Haven Theater Company has elected to put on the play for six performances this month. The first three—with Marty Tucker, Jenny Schuck, Steve Scarpa, respectively—have already played. The remaining three—with Deena Nicol-Blifford, Trevor Williams, George Kulp, respectively—are next weekend. Note, the Thursday performance, on the 18th at 7:30, is sold out. For tickets for the 19th or 20th, go here.

Audiences can expect to be more interactive than is the norm, and there’s a lot of uncertainty, as the Actor has to just go with what the script asks, reading it aloud totally cold. Much of the interest comes from the quirkiness of Soleimanpour, who speaks in the script in his own voice, describing his situation (in 2010) when he could not leave Iran because he refused to perform military service. His play traveled the globe in his stead. What’s more, the problem of how to reach distant audiences is answered, sort of, by making them interact with his play. And so much of his play is about the theatrics themselves, making the space we inhabit during the play potentially very lively.

Themes do surface, such as: who’s in charge here? Is it incumbent upon the audience to do whatever the Actor voicing the script asks? Does the Actor have to do whatever the script says? Are participants allowed to ad lib? Soleimanpour gives out his email address during the play and wants the audience to keep their phones on (though not to take calls!) so that they can send him updates if they choose.

Much of what concerns the play has to do with the element of risk in theater, but also a further contextual risk that Soleimanpour feels as a citizen without full freedom of movement or speech. Soleimanpour spends a lot of time telling us about experiments in which white rabbits come to accept the convention of attacking, first, a rabbit who gets dyed red for climbing a ladder to get a carrot, and, later, any rabbit that climbs the ladder.

Soleimanpour, we see, spends a lot of time thinking about who gets singled out for attack.

He also spends time thinking about how a play can be like a gun, aimed to bring about a certain outcome, by coercion, by threat, but also a prop you can play Russian Roulette with. And that’s an important element in the play’s conclusion.

That much is safe to say, but to go into any more particulars about the play I’d have to put in a Spoiler Alert. Mind you, there’s no particular reason why you (as potential audience member) should know as little about the play as the Actor does, but it does make for a more interesting evening. I can say that because I saw a production of the play at Yale Cabaret over a decade ago, when the play was new, and seeing it again, with New Haven Theater Company, I didn’t feel the same uneasy “where is this going?” feeling that is perhaps key to what makes this such an interesting night of theater. If you know where it’s going and what questions it turns on, it’s much easier to just sit back and watch what happens.

But the play, with all its unpredictable audience participation, works to generate a feeling that what is happening is happening right now and might not happen again. At least not with the particular Actor (who might just die!) and the particular audience (which may or may not find that daring) of any particular performance.

Steve Scarpa, the night I saw the show, was a good-natured stand-in for us. That’s how I felt about it. Like we were all in this together: he had the task of reading the script to us and doing some daffy things, and also bringing members of the audience up and getting them to do some minimal or questionable things, and we had the task of cheering him on. And some of us were asked to do certain things on cue. (I liked the guy with a cane who seemed to be ready to just ad lib the thing away from Scarpa’s patient master of ceremonies.) I have to admit, too, that I took over the role of the final “red rabbit” who reads the script aloud after the Actor is told to relinquish it. That part, I should think, will play very differently each night, depending on how the Actor reacts to what’s asked of him or her at the end.

When I saw it before, in an atmosphere fostered by late night theater among a lot of students, the feeling was lighter, with the audience glad to have opportunities to intervene. At NHTC on Saturday night, that interventionist element was absent and there was a much more casual feeling, at least until  Scarpa’s very serious demeanor after he went “off book.” At that point the silence of the Actor is striking as he becomes what some audience members have been at times: someone asked to do something on cue. Each Actor will have to play the last scene in their own way.

What will it be like with the remaining three Actors? Head down to New Haven Theater Company and get in the act.

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit
By Nassim Soleimanpour
New Haven Theater Company
May 11-20, 2023

New Haven Theater Company Presents Goldfish

On Chapel Street, in the New Haven Theater Company’s black box theater behind the English Market store, John Watson is at work bringing to life the local troupe’s first full production since Annapurna, which Watson also directed. For both shows, he also designed the complicated sets. 

The new play is Goldfish by Jonathan Kolvenbach, and it opens tonight, playing Thursday through Saturday this weekend and next, March 2-11. 

“If you’d asked me five years ago,” Watson reflected, “I wouldn’t’ve said I prefer directing to acting. But I’ve begun to.” To some extent that’s because, past a certain age, it’s hard to find roles that are worth doing, but it also must have something to do with the ability to chose plays that play to the strengths of the long-lived company. And those strengths are considerable; Watson, who has long experience in theater, stresses “the high IQ of the Company, the best I’ve ever worked with.” Annapurna showcased longtime Company members Susan Kulp and J. Kevin Smith in a provocative, gripping play about exes. Now Watson directs a cast of four, all relatively new to the Company or to working with Watson, in a “terrific take on young love” finding itself in the midst of parental misguiding. 

As Watson points out, this is the second play by Kolvenbach that NHTC has assayed. Love Song, which featured the couple Susan and George Kulp and their daughter Jo, along with Company regular Christian Shaboo, was co-directed by Watson and NHTC regular Margaret Mann in 2018. It was a play of interesting characters fueled by good dialogue. And those are some of the key ingredients NHTC—where agreement on a play chosen to be produced must be unanimous—look for. When Watson and Mann began searching for plays to suggest to the Company, they naturally turned to scripts by authors whose plays had worked in the past. Goldfish—a four hander—had, Watson said, “the right energy, and we felt it would be good to do coming out of hiatus.” It’s also a chance for NHTC to “find new legs with new members.” 

The entire cast of Goldfish are relative newcomers to New Haven Theater Company, which has existed since the late 2000s with a core group dating back many years, and now has nine new members. That in itself is a good sign. For the current show, three new members—Sara Courtemanche, Sandra Rodriguez, John Strano—are in the cast, joined by guest player Nick Fetherston, and three others are working in the show’s tech. It’s a busy show of twelve scenes played without intermission over 80-90 minutes on a set with two distinct sides and a black flat in the middle. 

The conflict in the show is intergenerational and that means it’s a good play for both younger and more mature roles. The main question of the play, Watson says, is “whether the trauma of the parents (who are both now single) messes up” the college-aged lovers. The pleasure in the script, for Watson, is that these are “all smart people, the dialogue is enjoyable, funny, witty, and that all the characters have a way with words.”

There’s also what Watson sees as the meaning of the play, or what makes it all hang together. As the show’s director, Watson says, he’s read the play 50-60 times. He continues to see new things in how well the play is crafted, in drawing its parallels between characters and in how it shows that “love, although it can be disastrous, is the only thing that makes life work." 

Loving theater is a requisite of making it work as well, and the latest production to be offered by the New Haven Theater Company has the promise of fitting in well with its history of showcasing well-written plays with engaging characters in complex situations. In attending the show, let’s say, you won’t just be fishing for gold.

Goldfish
By Jonathan Kolvenbach
Directed by John Watson

New Haven Theater Company
English Building Market
839 Chapel Street
New Haven

March 2, 3, 4, 10, 11: 8 pm
March 9: 7:30 pm

new haven theater company

Where Better to Make a Beginning

Review of The Zoo Story, New Haven Theater Company

How do you feel when approached by a stranger? No doubt there may be a wide variety of answers to that question, depending on who you are, where you are, and the appearance and demeanor of the stranger. Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story explores several possibilities—including uncomfortable, companionable, amused, bemused, and contentious—and drives toward a surprising conclusion.

The play’s original text dates from 1958 but was updated in 2004 and consists wholly of the encounter between Peter (J. Kevin Smith), a comfortably off middle-aged gent who works in publishing and who is seated on a public park bench in New York city, reading a textbook his company published, and Jerry (Trevor Williams), a self-professed “permanent transient” who wanders up and gets Peter’s attention, in a somewhat peremptory manner. Jerry’s appearance in the New Haven Theater Production, co-directed by Steve Scarpa and George Kulp, with his long mane of blonde hair pulled back and very casual clothing, might give some pause; then again, his early mention of some little-known fact about Freud shows the kind of verbal assurance that tends to put others at ease. He seems friendly, interested in Peter, and no more invasive than any random person you might chat with on a bus or in a bar or, indeed, on a park bench.

Jerry (Trevor Willilams), Peter (J. Kevin Smith) in The Zoo Story, New Haven Theater Company

The play is a finely tuned little machine centered on the nuances of a give-and-take where any number of social codes may be in play, where any statement becomes the material of the exchange. Jerry initially announces he has been to the zoo; he says he’s been walking north—or northerly; he says, more than once, that sometimes he “has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.” The early emphasis on Peter—his job, his marriage, his two daughters with their two cats and two parakeets, and the fact that no more children will be forthcoming—swiftly is elided to concentrate on Jerry, who shares information about his parents and his sex life and the rooming-house where he resides, way up on the upper-upper West side.

The running time of The Zoo Story, called “a play in one scene,” is about an hour, and yet it can be seen as a very compressed three act. The first act is the set-up of us getting to know a bit about Peter and understanding that he, like us, is becoming interested in Jerry, largely because of how he expresses himself. The second act is Jerry’s detailed account of his relationship to a dog owned by his landlady, a dog that regularly threatens him each time he returns to the house. The third act, with Jerry finally sharing the bench with Peter, would seem to be concerned with what happened at the zoo, a story that Jerry seemed poised to tell all along. But then doesn’t. Instead, there’s the question of the bench.

As Peter, J. Kevin Smith displays a certain patient tolerance, the feeling that most liberal city-dwellers pride themselves on perhaps. He also stays in the game by reacting to Jerry’s lengthy speeches. Jerry is emphatically not someone talking to himself. He’s speaking to Peter and Peter’s attention is of paramount importance. He’s a stand-in for the theater-goer, certainly, but he’s also a character in his own right, with his own grasp of how what Jerry says affects him. And when he finally gets riled, the play might for a moment morph into something in Neil Simon territory—The Prisoner of Second Avenue, for instance. It then takes a decisive turn away from simply needling the comic upset of a prosperous New Yorker.

Jerry (Trevor Williams), Peter (J. Kevin Smith) in The Zoo Story, New Haven Theater Company

What keeps the play in a different register throughout is Jerry. In Trevor Williams’ bravura turn, he’s a very engaging fellow, the kind of person who takes pleasure in thinking aloud and does so in an appealing way. And yet Williams, in subtle glances off or thoughtful pauses, gives us the idea that Jerry has something in mind, a point or argument that he’s building, and when he gets confrontational we’re not entirely sure it’s not a joke—or was this a territorial grab all along?

The stories Jerry tells and the persons who people them let Peter have a glimpse of a level of existence he would likely never encounter directly. That, we might think, is Albee’s point: to make a self-satisfied bourgeois meet—fleetingly but in such a way as to change their lives forever—a member of an underclass who possesses the interpersonal aplomb of a born raconteur, and maybe a steely—malevolence? Determination?

But there’s more, lots more.

The play is almost parable-like, an effect helped by the way the NHTC production, in Kulp’s set with Adam Lobelson’s lighting, surrounds the simple bench and walkway with hanging curtains and thrust seating. The everyday and the theatrical are in immediate relation. And what ultimately transpires there has a lot to do with such matters as what separates humans from animals, what constitutes connection between creatures, and what is the value and benefit of what Jerry calls “the teaching moment.” In the end, he seems sincerely grateful for what Peter has done for him. And we should also be grateful for what Jerry has given us.

The Zoo Story, as one of the simplest of stories, is also one of the deepest New Haven Theater Company has enacted. This collaboration between longtime members Kulp, Scarpa and Smith with “newer” member Williams (this is only his tenth production!) showcases the troupe’s grasp of how dialogue and interaction are what matter most in great drama. Albee’s text gives the actors playing Jerry and Peter a lot of leeway in how to make the play work—whether more naturalistic, more absurdist, and with differing degrees of subtext. What makes NHTC’s production work so well is the way Williams and Smith are both willing to play what might be some version of themselves, and then to take that where it has to go. Inevitable, but surprising. And even if you know the outcome, seeing the play get there—to watch it go a long way to come back a short distance—is the fascination of “the zoo story.”

The Zoo Story
By Edward Albee
Co-directed by George Kulp & Steve Scarpa

Stage Manager & Board: Stacy Lupo; Set Design: George Kulp; Lighting Design: Adam Lobelson; Sound Design: Tom Curley

Cast: J. Kevin Smith, Trevor Williams

New Haven Theater Company
February 20-22, February 27-29, March 5-7, 2020

Have You Been to the Zoo?

Preview of The Zoo Story, New Haven Theater Company

Of late, the New Haven Theater Company has been tackling plays that require extensive sets—such as Bus Stop, Rumors, One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest—but this season, George Kulp points out, the troupe has decided to go for more minimalist sets with different configurations of audience and playing space. Kulp is co-directing NHTC’s current production, Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, with Steve Scarpa and the play, in its more stripped-down, small cast virtues, will align with other distinctive NHTC shows, like last fall’s Retreat from Moscow or, several seasons back, Almost, Maine. The NHTC press release for the play describes it as: “Two very different men—a successful family man and an isolated loner—meet in a park, and their disturbing confrontation plays out ‘in real time.’”

The Zoo Story is the play that put Albee on the map, c. 1960. It was updated in 2004 (and first played at Hartford Stage) when the author revisited the play by writing a prequel called Homelife. The Zoo Story is a two-hander with characters named Jerry and Peter. Homelife showed us Peter talking to his wife before going to the park to read a textbook he is proofing. According to J. Kevin Smith, who plays Peter in the NHTC production, Albee adjusted some of the language in The Zoo Story, removing “stilted language” from the Fifties and “took out some obvious on-the-nose things.” Trevor Williams, who plays Jerry, said that his character’s language tends to be “zany and off” and anachronistic “even in the Fifties,” with word choices that can “sound academic or flowery.” As with most of NHTC’s triumphs, The Zoo Story is dialogue-driven. Or, perhaps more properly, monologue-driven. Jerry holds the floor most of the time, trying to interest Peter in various verbal snapshots of his life while Peter mainly stays reactive to what he’s hearing.

J. Kevin Smith and Trevor Williams of New Haven Theater Company

It’s an interesting choice, putting Smith in the reactive, mostly silent role, since Smith has a record of playing blustery, talkative, know-it-all guys, as he did in Bus Stop, as Dr. Gerald Lyman, in Cuckoo’s Nest, as Harding, and perhaps most memorably as the domineering, hectoring and fascinating Walt in Lucas Hnath’s A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney. As Kulp pointed out, Smith still has “plenty to do,” just not with speech. Scarpa, in presenting the play as a possible choice for this season, wanted “to make Peter strong,” and not a passive character. In that sense, Smith is an obviously good choice since passive isn’t his most noticeable theatrical trait. Kulp spoke of Smith’s “immediate and ecstatic acceptance” of the role.

Jerry, Williams said “is a challenge and not just technically.” He cited gratefully Kulp’s patience in helping him get to the character. He sees Jerry as “operating on a different set of rules. He opts not to adhere to the rules of socialization” but that means it’s important to “mine out what” the rules are for Jerry. Williams has become the NHTC’s go-to actor for off-the-wall or beyond-the-norm characters: he played a fantasy of a movie-star chimp in Trevor, the put-upon and marginalized Mechanic in Middletown, a surly hitman in Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, and most recently the cunning and possibly crazy McMurphy in Cuckoo’s Nest, also directed by Kulp. Jerry may be his biggest feat yet.

For Kulp and Scarpa, key to the play is following the play’s through-line, which means following Jerry’s train of thought as he entertains, interests and intimidates Peter. “There’s a charming menace” in Jerry, Kulp said, and he finds this to be a great play for “two very talented guys” to perform.

A simple park bench. An illusion of some parklike surroundings. The audience as close to the set as they can get. A man is reading. Another man approaches him and says, “I’ve been to the zoo.”

The Zoo Story plays for the next three weekends, Thursday through Saturday. This Thursday, February 20, is “pay what you can” for tickets purchased at the door.

The Zoo Story
By Edward Albee
Directed by Steve Scarpa and George Kulp
Featuring NHTC company members J. Kevin Smith and Trevor Williams
February 20-22; February 27-29; March 5-7, 2020

Doors open at 7:30;  all performances start at 8:00 in the NHTC Theater located in the English Market (at the back of EBM Vintage store)
839 Chapel Street
New Haven, CT

What's Next on the Local Theater Scene

2020 has launched and the Connecticut theater season resumes this week.

New Haven:

Local theater troupe The New Haven Theater Company features a staged reading for three nights this weekend—Thursday, January 16 through Saturday, January 18—at English Markets Building on Chapel Street. The work is a new play in development by NHTC member Christian Shaboo. The Three Wisemen is about a young man facing uncertainty in his romantic life who takes to the road with the titular “wisemen”—his longtime roommates—to confront the ghosts of his past. The reading, directed by Shaboo, features NHTC regulars George Kulp (seen this past fall in Retreat from Moscow) and John Watson (last seen in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest last season), as well as Aleta Staton, who appeared in Doubt in 2015, and newcomers Ny’Asia Davis, Solomon Green, and Eric Rey. For tickets for the limited seating go here.

At New Haven Theater Company this week only!

Tickets are also available for the next full production at NHTC: Steve Scarpa, who directed Our Town, Proof, and Waiting for Lefty and appeared in Middletown, A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay on the Death of Walt Disney, The Seafarer, and Doubt, among others, will direct J. Kevin Smith, who played the title role in Lucas Hnath’s …Death of Walt Disney, and Trevor Williams, who played Randall McMurphy in Cuckoo’s Nest, in Edward Albee’s Zoo Story, for three weekends, February 20-22 and 27-29, and March 5-7. This will be the first rendering of an Albee play by NHTC. (preview)

Yale Cabaret resumes its 52nd season at 217 Park Street this weekend—Thursday, January 16-Saturday, January 18—with a production of Is God Is by Aleshea Harris, directed by third-year Yale School of Drama director Christopher D. Betts. Betts directed the Cab’s season’s bracing opener, Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, formerly known as Southwest Africa, from the German Südwestafrika, between the years 1884-1915 as well as two shows last season. Harris’ play, which was staged at SoHo Rep in 2018, is described as “a modern myth about twin sisters who sojourn from the Dirty South to the California desert to exact righteous revenge against their father in an epic saga” that mixes tropes from “Spaghetti Westerns” and Afropunk culture (review). Next up at the Cab is a brand new musical by third-year sound designer Liam Bellman-Sharpe called Elon Musk and the Plan to Blow Up Mars: The Musical which explores the catchy idea that to prevent the colonization of Mars we must destroy the red planet to save the blue one. Thursday, January 23-Saturday, January 25 (review); for tickets and more information, including dining reservations, go here.

At Yale Cabaret this week only!

The Yale Repertory Theatre returns later this month with its third show of the season: Manahatta, a play by Mary Kathryn Nagle, former Executive Director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. In the play, set in 2008, a female descendant of the Lenape tribe—who were forcefully removed from the island of Manahatta by the Dutch in the 1600s—works on Wall Street during the mortgage crisis that opened questions of land ownership—and capitalist greed—anew. Directed by Laurie Woolery, who directed the play in its world premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2018 and directed El Huracán, the Rep’s inventive season opener of 2018-19. Friday, January 24- Saturday, February 15 (review); in previews until Thursday, January 30; for tickets and more information go here.

The third and last show of the Yale School of Drama season plays in early February: Alice, Robert Wilson’s experimental treatment of Alice in Wonderland, with cabaret-style songs by Tom Waits, will be directed by third-year director Ellis Logan. Saturday, February 1-Friday, February 7 (preview) (review); for tickets and more information go here.

At Long Wharf Theatre, the third show of the season runs through February. Directed by Rebecca Martínez, I Am My Own Wife is Doug Wright’s Pulitzer and Tony-winning one-person play about Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a transgender woman who survives the Nazi and Communist regimes in East Germany. Mason Alexander Park—who has played a variety of genderbending roles such as the Emcee in Cabaret, Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show, and Hedwig in Hedwig and the Angry Inch—plays Charlotte and more than thirty other characters embodied in the role (preview). Wednesday, February 5-Sunday, March 1; in previews until Wednesday, February 12; for tickets and more information go here (review).

Mason Alexander Park

Hartford:

Hartford Stage’s first show of 2020 is in previews and opens this week. Directed by Ron Russell, Pike Street is Obie-winning playwright and actor Nilaja Sun’s solo show in which she plays dozens of roles in a story of struggle, survival and redemption for three generations of a Puerto Rican family on New York’s Lower East Side. In previews since January 9, the show opens on Friday, January 17 and continues through Sunday, February 2 (review); for tickets and more information go here.

Opening night this Friday at Hartford Stage!

Playhouse on Park in West Hartford continues its 11th season with Tenderly: The Rosemary Clooney Musical which features Susan Haefner, who originated the title role, as Rosemary Clooney. The show by James Yates Vogt and Mark Friedman is directed by Kyle Brand, who directed an energetic Avenue Q at Playhouse on Park in 2017, and depicts both the successes and struggles of Clooney’s long career, including such signature hits as “Come On-a My House,” with music direction by Robert James Tomasulo and choreography by MK Lawson. Previews are tonight—January 15—and tomorrow night with the opening reception on Friday, January 17; the show runs until Sunday, February 2; for tickets and more information, go here.

TheaterWorks returns at the end of the month with its second subscription show of the season. The Lifespan of a Fact by Jeremy Karekan & David Murrell and Gordon Farrell is a CT premiere and the play was a NYTimes Critics’ Pick during its Broadway run in 2018. Directed by Tracy Brigden, who directed the delirious Hand to God at TheaterWorks in 2018, the play is a comedic treatment of the “current media tug of war” about so-called “fake news” and the way in which spin affects the status of facts. The three-person cast features actors with CT work in their resumés: Nick LeMedica starred in TheaterWorks’ Hand to God; Tasha Lawrence starred in A Doll’s House, Part 2 at TheaterWorks in 2019 and in The Roommates at Long Wharf in 2018, and Rufus Collins was in Long Wharf’s The Old Masters in 2011. Thursday, January 30 to Sunday, March 8; Press night: Thursday, February 8 (review); Pay-What-You-Can: Thursday, January  30 and Wednesday, February 5; All-Free Student Matinee: Saturday, February 8; for tickets and more information go here.

As On A Darkling Plain

Review of Retreat from Moscow, New Haven Theater Company

One of the more subtle and satisfying aspects of William Nicholson’s Retreat from Moscow, playing for two more shows tonight and tomorrow at New Haven Theater Company, directed by Margaret Mann and John Watson, is the way this play about a fraying marriage of thirty-three years is filtered through the view of the couple’s thirty-two year-old son, an only child who lives alone. At some point—usually when parents are old enough to see their children as adults—offspring see their parents as the results of decisions made long ago. When the key decision made—to marry—comes into question, then everything is up for grabs.

Because Nicholson and his characters are British, the tone of the play is apt to feel a touch mannered to American audiences. Directors Mann and Watson, with their effectively thoughtful cast, render the tonalities of the couple and son with deft moments of characterization. Kiel Stagno, as Jamie (the son), is quite good at wearing the look of patient attentiveness that his mother, Alice (Susan Kulp), has come to rely on as she sets out one grievance or another. It may be her treatment at the hands of an indifferent serviceperson at a computer store, it may be her husband’s insistence on doing the crossword puzzle when she would rather talk. Alice, who loves to intone classic British poetry, from the Metaphysicals to the Victorians, is what is generally called “high-strung,” which means that, even when she means to be ingratiating she is more likely to be grating.

Edward (George Kulp), Alice (Susan Kulp), Jamie (Kiel Stango) in New Haven Theater Company’s production of The Retreat from Moscow, directed by Margaret Mann & John Watson

Dad is Edward (George Kulp) who seems the epitome of the unassuming spouse, a kind of silent partner to his wife’s expressive sallies, some at his expense. He tends to be apologetic but also can’t see why his behavior is an issue. Alice is the type of woman who simply assumes she knows better—and so her son can’t really not believe in God, and her husband can’t really find soldiers’ journals written during the Napoleonic retreat from Moscow as fascinating as he claims. Of course there’s a God and going to church is a way to entreat his mercy, and of course Edward’s interests are really just a means to avoid doing something she’d rather he do.

The revelation that Edward at first addresses to his son sets up the play’s main device. Jamie is put in the middle, as go-between, as counselor, as put-upon support staff. That he lives a good drive away, in London, and has little interest in visiting “home” with such regularity is simply a fact. He’s a good son, or trying hard to be, and his patience is laudable. As the play goes on, we begin to understand the extent to which this event—his parents’ estrangement—marks him deeply not only because of what he has to learn about them, but also what that teaches him about himself.

Alice (Susan Kulp), Edward (George Kulp) in The Retreat from Moscow, NHTC

Not particularly witty or acerbic, much of the energy of Nicholson’s play comes from Susan Kulp’s portrayal of Alice as a woman desperately trying to make the past contain the future. Twice she moans about what will become of her when she’s old. On one level she’s the embodiment of the idea of marriage as an insurance policy, taken out in youth, that will pay benefits throughout one’s lifetime. Watching her learn to cope is lively—from changing her wardrobe, to getting a dog, called “Eddie,” that she can command, to wielding a sharp knife with devil-may-care casualness. Edward’s role, in its quieter dimensions, is a harder read. George Kulp gives to Edward’s speeches a uniform intensity of guilty reflection punctuated with breathy hope that seems to give the lie to his view that he’s found new meaning. And that makes us wonder till the end if a rapprochement might suddenly emerge.

The lighting of this spare but attractive set adds to the play’s impact. The feeling of domestic spaces as “sets” for private drama complements Jamie’s role as a stand-in for the playwright, a role that we see Stango grow into before our very eyes. We are made aware of how Jamie’s perceptions of this unexpected development in his parents’ lives becomes a means to doing them homage, in all their messy, human inadequacy.

Once again New Haven Theater Company finds a worthwhile domestic drama that suits their intimate playing space and capably naturalistic actors.

The Retreat from Moscow
By William Nicholson
Directed by Margaret Mann & John Watson

Cast: George Kulp, Susan Kulp, Kiel Stango

Stage Manager/Board Op: Stacy Lupo

Special thanks to Wendy Marans as dialect coach and Liz Saylor, costumes

New Haven Theater Company
October 31-November 9, 2019

New Haven Theater Company Advances on "Retreat from Moscow"

Preview of The Retreat from Moscow, New Haven Theater Company

Edward, a historian, opens the play reading a passage from a soldier’s journal about taking part in Napoleon’s famed retreat from Moscow, and is otherwise engaged in crossword puzzles. Alice, at work on an anthology of love poems, is apt to quote poetry at her family. Jamie, thirty-two, has to drive down from London to be present as his parents celebrate thirty-three years of togetherness. Of course something will go wrong.

William Nicholson’s The Retreat from Moscow has been on New Haven Theater Company’s Margaret Mann’s mind since she played Alice in a production of the play in Oregon in 2009. The play, which first opened in 1999, was seen on Broadway in 2003 with a dream cast of Eileen Atkins, John Lithgow, and Ben Chaplin. Mann thought to pitch it to the Company five years ago but wasn’t then ready to direct it. Now she is, aided by Co-Director John Watson, who she credited with “all the technical stuff that I don’t do”; the duo directed the searching comedy Love Song at NHTC last season. The Retreat from Moscow starts a week from today with a preview on October 31 (“pay what you like” at the door), then shows on November 1 and 2, and again the following week, November 7-9.

When giving an interview while in the Oregon production with the actor playing Edward, Mann was amused to find that she and her colleague both thought their respective character the main figure. “Every character could say the play is about them,” Mann realized, and says “the play is about what happens when communication stops.” Which may be a way of saying that, no matter how familiar family members are with one another, there’s always the possibility of discovering something new. That “something new” may be a change for the better for one, but also an affront or a disaster for another.

Co-Directors Margaret Mann and John Watson

Mann likened directing the play—which features NHTC real-life couple Susan and George Kulp as Alice and Edward—to “choreography,” keeping the three characters in play so that none gets slighted. The Kulps, who played a quirky couple in Love Song last fall, here play an intellectual couple who, after many years of settled life, have to look at each other differently. Susan acted with Mann in Marjorie Prime, a futuristic dysfunctional four-character family drama at NHTC last winter, while George directed NHTC’s energetic production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest last spring. Maybe this time the hard-working couple will be getting into a bit of Liz and Dick territory?

Not to worry. The couple in this play—unlike Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which famously starred real-life couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Mike Nichol’s Oscar-nominated film—is British. That means that things will be drier, though no less acerbic, perhaps. Nicholson, best known for Shadowlands, his play about late romance in the life of author C. S. Lewis, based The Retreat from Moscow on his parents’ marriage, which means that Jaime’s coping mechanisms could be key to what the playwright is getting at.

Kiel Stango (Jamie), George Kulp (Edward), Susan Kulp (Alice) in William Nicholson’s The Retreat from Moscow

Played by Kiel Stango, an art instructor not an NHTC member and a local actor who has worked with Square One, Jamie is caught-up in the altering status quo. His efforts to be supportive to each parent should, Mann said, make him sympathetic. Many in the audience will know what it’s like to be a grown offspring looking on at what happens as parents, aged into what Mann called “the tone deafness of long marriage,” try to cope with change. Jamie’s parents, Mann said, are apt to treat their son, an only child, as “a therapist.” But Mann believes the play strikes “a delicate balance” in not tipping its hand toward one character or another.

The Retreat from Moscow is “beautifully written,” Mann said, and that’s its “main attraction.” With lines of poetry set against metaphors of military disaster, the imagery is apt to be dramatic. For Mann, the play is “about being human” and, to find out more, she said, “you have to see the play.”

To do that, get tickets and more info here.

The Retreat from Moscow
By William Nicholson
Directed by Margaret Mann and John Watson
October 31-November 2; November 7-9, 2019
New Haven Theater Company

New Haven Theater Company Goes Cuckoo

Preview, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, New Haven Theater Company

If you’re a regular at New Haven Theater Company shows, you might remember the time the company built what looked to be a functional luncheonette in their theater space in the back of English Building Markets. That was George Kulp’s set for William Inge’s Bus Stop, which he directed. Last year, there was the set for Neil Simon’s Rumors that turned the space into a two-story living room with numerous doors to slam. That was Kulp’s too.

Beginning this Thursday and running for the next three weekends, the space will be the dayroom at a mental hospital where a host of inmates live placid lives under the purview of a controlling nurse as Kulp directs NHTC’s next offering, Dale Wasserman’s stage adaptation of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Kulp, who says this is “the most ambitious and challenging” play he’s directed yet, seems to like plays with a lot of characters and a very focused set.

If you were around in the 1970s, you no doubt remember the film version of the novel, directed by Milos Forman, which won Oscars for picture, director, actress (Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched), and actor (Jack Nicholson as Randle Patrick McMurphy), and adapted screenplay. Indeed, the role of McMurphy was easily the most famous of Nicholson’s impressive career—until he took an ax to a bathroom door in The Shining.

McMurphy is a boisterous ne’er-do-well who considers a stint in a mental hospital preferable to prison. His fellow inmates are an odd assortments of “lifers” who prefer the hospital to trying to get along in the outside world. And Nurse Ratched is there to make sure everything runs the way she likes. The confrontations between McMurphy and the nurse become a battleground over the quality of life. In the film, you just have to root for McMurphy as Fletcher’s version of the nurse is so inhumanly impersonal.

Kulp is wary of expectations derived from the film. First of all, the film was adapted from the novel, not from Wasserman’s play. And, while the drama’s trajectory runs much the same, the filmed versions of certain characters sometimes aimed for comic caricature. Kulp stresses that his cast is “very careful” to avoid that pitfall, and that means creating useful backstories for the characters to give them fuller dimension. Which might be a way of saying that Kulp is urging them to put some method in the madness.

McMurphy will be played by Trevor Williams who directed NHTC’s previous offering, Marjorie Prime. Williams acted under Kulp’s direction as the naive cowboy, Bo Decker, in Bus Stop and was one of the two hitman in Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter last season, directed by John Watson. McMurphy’s nemesis, the maternal Nurse Ratched, will be played by Suzanne Powers, who worked with Kulp in Rumors.

Other NHTC members on hand include John Watson as Dr. Spivey, who tends to back the authoritarian nurse; Erich Greene, the other hitman in Dumb Waiter, as Cheswick, an anxious patient; and J. Kevin Smith, the obstreperous neighbor in Rumors and the boozing professor in Bus Stop, as Harding, the patient with the most self-control.

That leaves many parts featuring actors who will be appearing in a NHTC production for the first time, though, in most cases, Kulp has worked with each before. They include: Al Bhatt, Tristan Bird, Ralph Buonocore (who appeared in NHTC’s Urinetown), Robert Halliwell, Ash Lago, Empress Makeda, Joseph Mallon, Jodi Rabinowitz, John Strano, and Aaron Volain.

For Kulp, much of the challenge, with so many characters “and so much going on”—including a basketball game—is to keep the play “moving at the right pace.” His approach, he said, is to tell his actors “to go for the moon and then pull back.” The casting is key and his previous experiences with the cast make for a lot of trust.

The play was chosen in part because of its name recognition, its diverse cast, and because, Kulp said, it’s “an entertaining and timely story to tell.” He suggested that the issue of how our society treats mental illness and the play’s convincing sense of “the misuse of authority” are meaningful in our time, as they were when the novel was published in 1963 and when the film version was released in 1975, both key works of the Vietnam era of American culture.

Is it “cuckoo” to place such a largescale play in the New Haven Theater Company’s intimate space? Get your tickets and find out (the play is running for three weekends rather than two because seating is limited).

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
By Dale Wasserman, from the novel by Ken Kesey
Directed by George Kulp
New Haven Theater Company
April 25-27, May 2-4, May 9-11

For tickets and info, go here

See my review here

Prime Time

Review of Marjorie Prime, New Haven Theater Company

“We have all the time in the world” is a phrase used by “primes,” synthetic humanoid entities that act as companions and consolations to humans in the, perhaps, not so distant future of Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime, playing through Saturday at New Haven Theater Company. In the play, the first prime we meet is a replica of Marjorie’s husband, Walter (Ryan Hendrickson). Marjorie (Margaret Mann) is in her ‘80s and her husband died some time ago, but his replica has a thirtyish appearance that makes him look younger than Tess (Susan Kulp), Marjorie’s only living child, a middle-aged woman married to Jon (Marty Tucker).

The disparate ages might make for the stuff of futuristic comedy, but that’s not what Harrison is going for. Though there is amusement here, it tends to come from a certain deadpan humor in the face of unpleasant truths. Marjorie is losing her memory and most of her interest in life, and she may be sliding toward dementia. Walter is an aid in trying to keep her focused on events in her life, to maintain the fragile sense of identity that memory gives us. In the care facility where Marjorie resides, conversation with Walter is encouraged. Primes store what they are told and can converse about a past they never lived, based solely on memories imported or inputted from others.

Tess finds it all off-putting. Not only that she’s faced with a father-replica younger than herself, but, worse, that Marjorie may be trusting and confiding in Walter Prime more than her own flesh-and-blood family. Much of the play has to do with the effort to find common ground in lived experience; the way, for instance, that Marjorie, when younger and more herself, disapproved of Jon as a husband for Tess, though now she has warmed to him; or the way the family dog and its replacement—Tony and Tony 2—are remembered; or the way that Tess still feels embattled by her view of her mother, even if that woman is no longer fully present.

As the play goes on, there will be additional primes, each a bit more surprising than the last. And there’s a traumatic story about Damien, the son Marjorie and Walter lost, that comes up early and returns late in the play. The way little bits of information circulate is key to the effect here, letting us reflect on how we store up facts about others in our lives, and how we trot out stories of favors and slights we received as though they add up to a life. They don’t, and Tess is finding herself up against it: wondering if any of it matters, and what purpose sociability and chatter serve other than as distractions.

Watching her mother’s decline unmoors Tess more and more, and Susan Kulp plays her with grim and pinched features and an irritation that moves toward despair. Her transformation to a selfless serenity, late in the play, without benefit of makeup or costume change, is striking. Margaret Mann gives Marjorie a feisty charm that sets the tone we come to expect from the play, which is why the second act is so unsettling. We see how far a cry a prime is from the being it tries to replicate. In the third act, we might almost begin to believe in primes as substitutes for the troublesome humans we have lost. A factor that comments on the way we tend to sanitize our memories of the deceased.

Jon, played by Marty Tucker with a staunch affability that crumbles effectively in a story of a fateful visit to Madagascar, at one point says that, if he died before her, he would want Tess to find someone new. The possibility of new people never quite intrudes into this somewhat claustrophobic play where characters seem to want only what they’ve already known. Through interaction with humans, the primes strive to become more imbued with their assigned identity. Humans, on the other hand, can only look forward to loss of identity and death. Meant to be consolations and company, primes in Marjorie Prime come to seem an affable memento mori.

As Walter, Ryan Hendrickson has perhaps the toughest role. As the only character we see only as a prime, Hendrickson’s Ryan comes to seem the most “natural,” a way of being unfinished and full of potential that, while true of humans as well, makes the primes seem eternally hopeful beings. In the last scene, aided by significant lighting effects, we might feel that all we are, or were, is fated to end up in an animatronic display case for all time. Is that better or worse than a portrait gallery? Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime lets you make up your own mind about that, and Trevor Williams’ tight production at New Haven Theater Company doesn’t tip its hand, one way or another.

The primes have all the time in the world, to learn facts and to deepen their responses. Our time to determine who we are and achieve it is much more limited, and there’s no way to be sure what will survive, nor even what constitutes who we were in the minds of others. One thing’s for sure: living on as a memory in a mortal being is no way to achieve immortality. The primes may be just what we need as eternal witnesses of trivial existence, as if all our photos of pets and meals and travels and events could exist forever in a searchable database tagged with our individual DNA. Well, why not?

Marjorie Prime
By Jordan Harrison
Directed by Trevor Williams

Cast: Ryan Hendrickson, Susan Kulp, Margaret Mann, Marty Tucker

Stage Manager/Board Op: Stacy Lupo

New Haven Theater Company
February 28-March 2 & March 7-9, 2019

Prime Mover: New Haven Theater Company opens Marjorie Prime

Preview of Marjorie Prime, New Haven Theater Company

New Haven Theater Company returns this week with Jordan Harrison’s thought-provoking play Marjorie Prime. Set in an indeterminate point in the future, the play engages with the ways, in the 21st century, technology has become an increasingly intimate part of our lives. The play premiered in Los Angeles in 2014, won the Horton Foote Prize for Outstanding New American Play in 2016 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Marjorie, played by NHTC member Margaret Mann, is a widow in her 80s, plagued with failing health and lapses of memory. Her daughter Tess, played by NHTC member Susan Kulp, and son-in-law Jon, played by guest actor Marty Tucker, have enlisted a “prime,” a synthetic humanoid entity, to be Marjorie’s companion. The prime (played by guest actor Ryan Hendrickson) wears the appearance of Marjorie’s deceased husband Walter as he was in his thirties. He serves to focus Marjorie’s memory and help with her grief, though Tess fears an over-reliance on a relationship that isn’t real.

Marjorie Prime runs at the NHTC stage in the English Markets Building, February 28-March 2, and March 7-9, at 8 p.m.

For director Trevor Williams, the play is “very human and sometimes chillingly inhuman.” Williams confesses to be “drawn to nonhuman roles” and that may be the reason directing the play for NHTC fell to him. He was the brains behind “the baby console” in the company’s production of Smudge, and he played the showboating chimp Oscar in NHTC’s production of Trevor. The possibilities of putting onstage characters who aren’t quite people intrigues him. As does Marjorie Prime and the previous NHTC offering, fall 2018’s Love Song, both of those plays featured a sense of a domestic normality made darker and somewhat alarming by the ways the people in the plays cope with what Williams called “some kind of lack: a child, a spouse, memory, sanity.” In each case some potentially workable but also potentially dysfunctional solution is found and made dramatically interesting.

The primes in the play, Williams says, serve “as companionship and as consolations: they interact with their employers and store up memories.” Tell a prime a story from your childhood or from—as in Marjorie’s case—about some events from your marriage and the prime will accept the story as gospel, recalling forever those exact details.

Much of the play revolves around how humans interact with this new class of beings. The misgivings about having one’s life stored in synthetic memory banks—as with our online lives—certainly plays into Harrison’s concerns. That’s the chillingly inhuman aspect that Williams spoke of. But there’s also much attention to how the tales we tell form our identities for ourselves and others. What survives us in the minds of others? What happens when we forget our loved ones, or when contrary recollections are in conflict? At one point Tess, exasperated with Jon, says she might need a “reprogrammable spouse.” That’s the very human side of the story, where the frustrations of mortality and the shelf-life of our memories undermine even our most enduring relationships. There’s also the question of manufactured memories—versions of an event that we pretend to have to avoid recalling the truth.

For Williams, the play “shows us what happens when we choose what facts to record, in our digital lives or in the stories we tell each other. Now, when truth and what it means to be human are all becoming so mutable, for better or worse, this story compels us to reflect on the choices we’ve made and, perhaps, those we’ve yet to make.”

The play, in three acts with an epilogue, runs for approximately 80 minutes and has been given a thrust space unusual for NHTC productions, increasing the sense of intimacy in the company’s black box, which has recently been expanded to include a backstage area.

Marjorie Prime is bound to affect viewers differently depending where they are in their own lifetimes. For some of the cast, the story is almost dystopian, showing us a less-human future that undermines ideas of each individual’s irreplaceable uniqueness. Others stuck up for the optimism of the play, its sense that maintaining human memory through art, through recordings, through artificial intelligence is a positive aspect of the human instinct for survival, making the future more human, whatever we take that to mean.

Tickets can be purchased at the New Haven Theater Company site, here.

New Haven Theater Company includes Erich Greene, George Kulp, Susan Kulp, Margaret Mann, Deena Nicol-Blifford, Suzanne Powers, Steve Scarpa, Christian Shaboo, J. Kevin Smith, John Watson, and Trevor Williams

Marjorie Prime
By Jordan Harrison
Directed by Trevor Williams
February 28-March 2, March 7-9, 2019

The Greatest Thing You'll Ever Learn

Review of Love Song, New Haven Theater Company

The bond between siblings gets an interesting and amusing rendering in John Kolvenbach’s Love Song, in a production by New Haven Theater Company, co-directed by Margaret Mann and John Watson. Beane (Christian Shaboo) seems bipolar, leading a lonely existence in a shabby room. His successful sister, Joan (Susan Kulp), likes sounding off to her husband Harry (George Kulp) about “nincompoops” and incompetent interns at the office, while swilling large wine pours. Harry has a detached complacency, playing devil’s advocate against his wife’s peremptory judgments because “that’s what conversation is.” Beane suddenly appears in their elegant living room and agrees to subject himself to some kind of psychological evaluation Harry pulled, Joan claims, from Cosmo or the like. Soon, the way Beane’s mind works becomes a source of considerable amusement for the audience and a matter of some consternation between the fractious couple.

Beane’s encounter with Molly (Jo Kulp) turns his world upside down. His manic side becomes very much evident as he nearly hyperventilates over a turkey sandwich while at lunch with Joan and engages his waiter (a bemused Erich Greene) with varied queries. The highpoint—a peak for both the play and Beane—arrives when Beane sings the praises of sex and Molly, inspiring a bout of amorous cooing between Joan and Harry. Shaboo—who once played a would-be cult leader in Drew Grey’s The Cult at NHTC—capably takes the energy up a notch and becomes almost rapturous. It’s here that Love Song lives up to its title, with Kolvenbach creating a truly lyrical language for Beane’s flight.

Molly (Jo Kulp) and Beane (Christian Shaboo) in New Haven Theater Company’s production of Love Song

We expect a crash and, sure enough, it comes, but not before we get a wonderful scene of middle-aged lovers rediscovering the spark through playing hooky, role-playing, and becoming enamored with being in love. The Kulps do a fine job of transforming Joan from a workaholic to a borderline alcoholic to a sex kitten, while Harry shows off his knack for fun while also retaining his essential Harryness. It’s a centerpiece matched by a scene between Molly and Beane that takes off in a somewhat different direction, a shared fantasy of meeting naked in the pond in a park, that—perhaps—tries a bit too hard to become poetic but which Shaboo and Kulp orchestrate with spellbinding rhythms.

A late scene between Beane and Joan lets us see what’s been at stake all along. Describing the scene would no doubt make it sound creepier than it is, but Joan’s monologue to Beane takes stock of the arc we’ve traveled. Joan and Beane—neither of whom might be fully wound—share a kind of symbiotic relation that works because Joan keeps Beane in reality just enough, while Beane helps Joan feel the thrill of what lies beyond the safe boundaries. As Molly said earlier, in a toast with Beane, “here’s to the end of literalisms.” A cup, in other words, isn’t just a cup.

Kolvenbach wants to imagine a world where love and passion can illuminate mundane lives with the feeling of flight and freedom. The catalyst might be a glimpse of someone different, or it may involve a sustained fantasy of the ideal soul mate who knows what you could never say. As Molly, Jo Kulp provides much of the spirit here; she’s as demanding in her way as Joan, but also full of an outsider’s sense of purpose, even at times dangerous. Her contempt for the sentimental closets where most people have squirreled away their keepsakes of identity and for the pretensions of minimalists are darkly pointed. When her vision infuses itself into Beane’s naïve outlook it remakes the world for him, and that in turn stretches his sister’s—and perhaps the viewer’s—sense of possibility.

With its set divided between Joan’s and Harry’s comfortable living room and Beane’s derelict room, Love Story even looks bipolar. The soundtrack of musical selections is apt and enjoyable, and the light/sound cue that creates a significant oppression in Beane’s room is handled quite effectively. All in all, there’s a lot to love about Love Song, not least the company’s way with the lyricism and bite of Kolvenbach’s script, the Kulp family’s engaging spirit, and Shaboo’s haunted disconnect from the normality we prize even as it kills us slowly with boredom.

Love Song
By John Kolvenbach
Directed by Margaret Mann and John Watson

Cast: Erich Greene, George Kulp, Jo Kulp, Susan Kulp, Christian Shaboo

New Haven Theater Company
November 8-10 & 15-17, 2018

New Haven Theater Company Plays a Love Song

Preview of Love Song, New Haven Theater Company

When it comes to selecting plays, the New Haven Theater Company goes for whatever the entire company approves. The troupe is entirely democratic in its selections, though sometimes a work selected takes a while to get a production. If a play is likely to be done by a bigger theater anywhere in the vicinity, it’s unlikely that the small production capacities at NHTC will get the rights. That’s the case with Love Song, by John Kolvenbach, the first show of their 2018-19 season and the 17th production that the venerable New Haven company has staged at their performance space on Chapel Street. The run begins this Thursday and continues through two weekends.

According to the directors of the show, Margaret Mann and John Watson, the process of choosing a play begins when someone in the company pitches a choice they are willing to direct. And much of the talk at that point, Watson said, is about “our audience, fairly sophisticated people who see a lot of theater and who may also know some of the players.” One feature of that familiarity is that audience members may have ideas for the company. In fact, Love Song was first suggested by a friend of former company member Megan Chenot. Getting the rights caused a delay and now that the time has come, the show goes forward without Megan and her husband Peter, both longtime members of NHTC who have gone west, to the San Francisco area. Never fear, the show, which always seemed a good match for the company, has found suitable casting.

The Chenots weren’t the only couple in the company. The married couple in the production—Harry and Joan—will be played by the Kulps, George and Susan. And Molly, the love interest for Beane, Joan’s brother, will be played by the Kulps’ daughter, Josey, last seen in Urinetown (2012), the only musical the company has done. Beane will be played by Christian Shaboo, who has often taken leading man or love interest roles, as in Proof (2016), Shipwrecked! (2014) and Our Town (2013). George Kulp directed NHTC’s final show of last season, Neil Simon’s farce Rumors, which featured Susan as one of the more memorable characters. George was responsible for the truly impressive set built in the company’s space at the English Markets building, and part of that set will serve as the living room of the home of Joan and Harry in Love Song.

Susan Kulp and George Kulp

The other section of the set is decidedly more derelict, and that’s where Beane lives. The play, which Mann and Watson call, “provocative, funny, sexy,” while eliciting “serious thoughts,” involves the relationship between the siblings and how that plays out when a new person—dubbed a “mystery woman”—comes into Beane’s life. The couple in the play are in a longtime marriage, and their dialogue, Mann said, is “a dance, brittle and amusing.” Watson stressed that the company cannot be held accountable for how playing a couple onstage affects the Kulps as a couple offstage. Both directors praised their cast, actors “with a good grasp of who they are playing” and “how to land it.”

Josey Kulp and Christian Shaboo

Speaking of siblings, fans of NHTC will remember that Watson played a single-man looking for love while more than a bit burdened by a sister in The Last Romance, the mature love story that began the 2016-17 season. Mann played the love interest in that one, a single lady with a dog. Together, the two directed last season’s tersely funny two-hander The Dumb Waiter, by Harold Pinter, featuring Trevor Williams and Erich Greene, who returns in Love Song as (wait for it) a waiter.

For Mann and Watson, collaborating as directors seems to work well, since neither felt entirely sure which did what. Watson said that Mann takes care of the more detailed aspects of the show, “a lot of things I don’t handle,” and that she “covers the bases” while he is more reactive. Mann, however, sees Watson as the one “more plotted out beforehand,” while she “likes to see things up and moving.” What it comes down to, on Love Song at least, is that Watson brings “the vision” of knowing how he wants things to play, while Mann is attentive to what’s missing or what needs encouragement.

In any case, they both see the script, which runs through 11 scenes in a continuous 90 minutes, as “funny as hell” and “dark, but not depressing.” The main question, Watson said, is “can Beane be healed” from the effects of some earlier damage, “and how will that affect others?” As Mann said, “there is baggage all over the place” between the siblings, with Harry acting as a strong support for his brother-in-law. In the end, she said, we don’t necessarily know “what then,” and, in a certain sense, it’s “not over,” but we have grounds to be optimistic.

When asked about how they know a play will work for the company, Mann said, “the goal is something really good that we can do a good job with,” a play, Watson said “that’s not fluff, or a sitcom, something with enough to chew on.” Mann complimented Kolvenbach’s ear for dialogue which she characterized as “idiomatically idiosyncratic.” And dialogue, more than action, is what makes the plays NHTC produces work. The main criteria for a play being done by New Haven Theater Company—a troupe of 11 most of whom also direct—is that it suits their company and their audience. Both have grown and changed over the years, but NHTC has maintained a keen sense of how to keep doing what they do well.

Love Song
By John Kolvenbach
Directed by Margaret Mann and John Watson

New Haven Theater Company
Thursday, Friday, Saturday, November 8-17, 2018

For tickets and more info, go here

Hiding the Host

Review of Rumors, New Haven Theater Company

Neil Simon’s farce Rumors gives the New Haven Theater Company an occasion for formal attire, though it seems a case of all-dressed-up with nowhere to go. Don’t get me wrong: Rumors is a comedy of mature couples and that makes the play a good match for New Haven’s preeminent local acting troupe. Many longtime members find appropriate roles and some former collaborators return to add to the mirth. It’s just a shame that Rumors is far from the sharpest comedy Simon ever wrote.

Everyone is dressed up for a 10th wedding anniversary celebration at the comfortably elegant home of Charlie and Myra Brock. The play calls for a two-story set with stairs to run up and down and several doors to slam. The set itself is a striking assemblage in the NHTC space in the English Building Markets, and it’s not only a prerequisite for the action but almost the star of the show. At any rate, there are no real central characters in the play. It’s an ensemble of dim bulbs circled around an absent host and hostess.

George Kulp's set design for Rumors at New Haven Theater Company

The situations are farcical, but the ‘rumors’ never really fly. The laughs here revolve around bits like well-heeled characters having to make their own dinner and mix their own drinks; a downstairs bathroom too-often occupied; a deaf gag that never gets silly or surprising enough. We’re asked to accept the premise that damage to someone’s BMW promotes hilarity (well, maybe if it were updated to a Range Rover…). And that’s a sign of the low level of wit Simon foists on us, as references to Trivial Pursuit, to uncertainty about the nationality of Asian help, and loose asides about tarnished gentility mark the play as occupying the flaccid late ‘80s where the boorishness and boredom of these characters might pass muster as “clever fun.”

So what can NHTC do with this? They can all look marvelous, play the thing as though they are in fact old friends (they are), and indulge their celebrated ability to orchestrate busy scenes with lots of overlapped chat. The material doesn’t quite match their capacity to be surprising, as each character mainly just seems to test the others’ patience. I kept hoping that Peter Chenot, who plays Ken Gorman, the guy with the hearing problem, was going to get to do more than react. And J. Kevin Smith, as Lenny Ganz, the man with the busted-up BMW, seems more nonplussed at some of his lines than at the bag of pretzels he can’t open.

The women tend to fare better, if only because they don’t have to bluster so much. Susan Kulp, as Lenny’s wife Claire, gets across plenty of long-suffering bonhomie, and her silent reactions can be devastating. And Jenny Shuck, as Ken’s wife, Chris, plays well the kind of once-bright-eyed-bride who has begun to wilt from her husband’s witlessness. A bit where she repeats him word for word after he gets lost in mid-rant is a high point. Then there’s Margaret Mann, in one helluva outfit, as Cookie Cusack, host of a televised cooking show, who is among the more stalwart, letting her doting husband, Ernie (John Watson), coo at her about her back spasms. Suzanne Powers plays Cassie Cooper, the loose cannon here who, finally fed-up by the philandering of her husband Glenn (Jim Lones), is testing just how testy she can be in public.

There’s plenty of rapid fire gossip early on with Smith playing Lenny as an oafish boor who can’t get over someone belonging to the tennis club simply to have lunch there. Yeah. One has the sense that Simon’s friends acted as models for each of these characters and that they might be tickled to see themselves made fun of. Or not. The “reality check” comes from the idea that, since the host seems to have injured himself, slightly, with a gun, there may have been a suicide attempt and no one wants to have to answer questions from the police, least of all Glenn, who is running for the senate—“state senate,” his wife caustically reminds him lest he start living large.

As Glenn, Jim Lones has the furtive patience and glib charm of a local politician. And John Watson’s Ernie regards the company mostly with tongue firmly in cheek. They can afford to be passive; neither of them are part of the cover-up that fails, and they don’t try to make sense of the silliness the way Ken and Lenny are forced to do.

It’s all harmless light entertainment, but, as a farce, one might sensibly expect there to be some cats let out of the bag and some dirt swept under the carpet. Not really. No one here has much to be ashamed of, and no one even ends up behind any of the doors in a compromising position. The second half devolves into the parlor game called “what do we tell the police” with Donna E. Glen as a cop having fun at getting some respect from these evasive people who work above her pay grade. But Rumors isn’t a comic whodunit, it’s more of a meandering who-done-what.

Director George Kulp keeps it moving—and there’s a lot of movement and a lot of talk—but if it could go faster we would think about it less, and that would help. The big theatrical pay-off comes in Lenny’s 11th hour, up-against-the-wall, tour de force narrative, pulled out of thin air and hanging together like cobwebs. It’s sketchy and shaky but it’s the best he can do under the circumstances. And I guess this was the best Rumors’ author could do at the time.

Rumours
By Neil Simon
Directed by George Kulp

Cast: Peter Chenot, Donna E. Glen, Matthew Kling, Susan Kulp, Jim Lones, Margaret Mann, Suzanne Powers, Jenny Schuck, J. Kevin Smith, John Watson

Crew: Set Design: George Kulp; Lighting Design: Ian Dunn; Stage Manager: Matthew Kling; Board Ops: David Stagg, Erich Greene

New Haven Theater Company
NHTC Stage @ EBM
839 Chapel Street, New Haven
May 10-12, & 16-19, 2018

Glum Waiters

Review of The Dumb Waiter, New Haven Theater Company

Meet Gus (Erich Greene) and Ben (Trevor Williams), two guys hanging out in a basement room, bare but for two cots, that looks like a holding tank. There is a door to a kitchen, and sometimes Gus meanders down the hall to confront the not-quite-adequate range and the task of making tea. Meanwhile, Ben, rather truculent, reads the newspaper, his eye caught by any gory story he can share as an outrage to all good sense. They are waiting for their orders sort of the way that Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for Godot. Eventually we catch on: they are flunky hit-men and their next target should be arriving any time now.

Harold Pinter’s early career abounded in testy confrontations that are funny, in a deadpan, absurdist, almost realist way. Remember the chitchat of the hit-men (played by John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson) in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and the kinds of critical praise it earned? That kind of thing is a page out of Pinter’s playbook. Except that, in The Dumb Waiter, directed by New Haven Theater Company’s John Watson, we’re not in a work of “pulp,” per se. Nor Pop. We’re in a theatrical tradition that goes back to vaudeville and the English music hall, pitting feckless Anymen, somewhat down but not out, against the affronts to dignity that every clown who ever trod the boards has had to endure (think: Laurel and Hardy). But Ben and Gus also inhabit a recent tradition—Godot was only two years old, in English, when The Dumb Waiter appeared—of dark absurdism and the sense that any system—even one that is violent and pointless and tedious and dumb—is better than nothing. Gus and Ben aren’t exactly “stiff upper lip” material, though they do take pride in their efficiency, and that’s something.

With a playing time of under an hour, Pinter’s script lets its cast take its time. The pacing by Watson and company has a respect for the calculated pauses, drops, and musing boredom that comprises most of this duo’s time on the job. The junior partner though he appears older, Gus is played by Erich Greene as a kind of annoying little brother. Having him on hand means putting up with a ponderous case of the fidgets, emblematized by his first actions: putting on his shoes, laboriously, only to find, repeatedly, that something has gotten into one or the other and must be removed. The sequence sets the tone. These two aren’t too swift, but, after their fashion, they are thorough.

This becomes more and more oddly the case as we see them wrack their brains to deal with a series of messages—orders for food—that get delivered by the play’s titular device. The dumb waiter’s presence makes Ben—who likes to speak with authority whether or not he knows what he’s talking about—assert that this locale was once some sort of café and someone upstairs still thinks it is active. The range of foods requested—Greek dishes, noodles and water chestnuts, Scampi—could almost be seen as cryptic messages, but the pair simply offer what Gus has got in his sack. Their servile aim to please is endearing, and yet there’s a keen menace behind it all—at least, we’re not sure there’s not, and so tension mixes with the silliness.

And that’s the key note of the show. Laughs are always a little uneasy when there are guns on hand. Both Gus and Ben, we see early on, have revolvers and stand ready to use them. Meanwhile there’s the question of how to kill time and what to do with the food orders and, in a mysterious segment, how to react to an envelope of matches that gets slid under the door. The obvious meaning in the packet’s arrival is that it has been supplied by their unseen boss, Wilson, and that the matches are for lighting the range to make tea, but the fact that the gas isn’t working makes the gesture pointless if not a deliberate joke on the hapless duo.

The jokes we’re sure of here are like that, basking in a rich sense of how “things in general” play tricks on us, sometimes quite awful ones, like the newspaper story of a gent who took shelter under a lorry only to have it run over him. We might suspect that there’s a lurking lorry here somewhere, ready to take our heroes unawares—whether in the form of the target, or the boss, or the gas range, or, maybe, Ben’s temper as he berates Gus about the aptness of the expressions “light the gas” and “light the kettle.” It’s enough to make a cat laugh, as Gus says at one point.

In any case, here is a nice kettle of fish to be pickled in. In Gus, Greene has a character that lets him exploit a sad-sack resilience; ill-kempt and beleaguered, his Gus might be more sympathetic if he weren’t so dim. Meanwhile, Williams’ Ben maintains a slow-burn testiness that always threatens to explode, like Abbott at Costello. It's good to see NHTC tackle something dialogue-driven but without the manic tempo of Mamet. The best thing about Pinter’s dialogue is how artfully artless it is, and Greene and Williams deliver it in an invented accent that fluctuates but keeps up the necessary estrangement. These two mates seem mated, for better or worse, and till death do they part.

The Dumb Waiter
By Harold Pinter
Directed by John Watson

Stage Manager/Assistant Director: Margaret Mann; Lights: Peter Chenot; Sound: Drew Gray; Board Op: Ian Dunn

Cast: Erich Greene, Trevor Williams

New Haven Theater Company
839 Chapel Street
February 1-3 & 8-10, 2018

No Request Is Too Extreme

Review of A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney, New Haven Theater Company

New Haven Theater Company’s current offering is the kind of play that intrigues almost as much as it amuses. Why Walt Disney?, we might ask. The answer seems to be that he’s larger than life—or at least his legacy is—and everyone knows his name, whether or not they know anything else about him. And name recognition is the name of the game, in show-biz.

It’s also the case that author Lucas Hnath includes some choice bits from the rumors circulating about “Uncle Walt.” Like that bit about the lemmings being catapulted off a cliff by turntables for a nature documentary. Or his interest in the ability of cryogenics to freeze a human head and resuscitate it after a synthetic body could be created for its use. Or the way he treated his brother Roy, or daughter Diane and her husband Ron. Or the problem of the tree that had to remain on the site of Disney World.

In A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney, Disney is a colorful character, to say the least, and, as enacted by J. Kevin Smith, he’s a hoot. Not a figure of fun so much as a figure for something we might imagine to be indicative of American tastes and interests. He’s a wry example of our need to be the best at something, and to make our achievements seem important and unprecedented.

Walt Disney (J. Kevin Smith)

In Hnath’s play, directed by Drew Gray, Walt is a successful man who is remarkably insecure, a family man who is remarkably alone, a creative person who feels that his trademark works—that famous mouse, for instance—aren’t really serious or enduring, a creator of films known for their emotion and humor who often seems unfeeling and lacking in any sense of humor. He’s complex and a spout of words and attitudes, and Smith’s rendering is a high-water mark in this actor’s work with NHTC. Smith often plays a bristly type and here he gets to take that as far as it can go. Smoking, drinking, pill-popping, pacing, Smith’s Disney is a wreck waiting to happen.

The play isn’t really about finding out what makes Walt tick so much as it’s about seeing how Walt winds down bit by bit, his health failing and his will to go on causing him to flail about, seizing upon his staunchly stoical brother Roy (Steve Scarpa, mostly poker-faced or pained) or his servile son-in-law Ron (Trevor Williams, a cipher trying to be whatever Walt wants him to be). Of course, Disney’s insistence on a male heir apparent means he passes over his daughter (Melissa Smith, tensely tried by her ties to the old man). Her refusal to name any of her sons—she has three—after her father pretty much says it all, but then there’s her reasoning about it, which liberally rubs salt into the wound. We could say she has some issues with her dad, but it’s more like being his daughter is simply a test, always.

Daughter (Melissa Smith), Ron (Trevor Williams), Walt (J. Kevin Smith)

We might, reasonably, wonder why we should care about a man so long gone. His brand went on without him, hit the skids a bit and then revived to, basically, conquer all of entertainment in our time. Besides owning all those lucrative properties originated by Disney and his studios and affiliates, the company now also owns the Star Wars franchise and the Marvel Comics franchise. Which means that the company Disney founded generally commands the top three, or more, of the top grossing films in just about any year.

And that may be Hnath’s point: we can’t escape him, if we care at all about American filmed entertainment, and so there must be some way to cut him down to size, to humanize him, to get his blood—literally, as we see him cough mouthfuls into hankies—and guts on the stage. Disney comes across as a relentless striver, driven to do what only he can do. His list of who watches his films includes the all-American actress Doris Day and fascist enemies like Mussolini and Hitler. He’s proud of it all. It’s not about Right or Left, or right or wrong, it’s about global reach.

The conceit that we’re watching a reading of a screenplay means that, first of all, everyone is still “on book,” ostensibly, and it also means that there’s plenty of use of phrases like “cut to”—not a stage direction but a screenplay direction. And yet the “cuts” aren’t really cuts and the film that may or may not be in Walt’s head rarely resorts to visual language. There are a few moments, most notably the close, where the screenplay idea works best. Otherwise, it just seems an odd tic of the dialogue; at best, a way of helping the actors keep the pace, at worst a gimmick.

Daughter (Melissa Smith), Roy (Steve Scarpa), Walt (J. Kevin Smith)

Smith and Scarpa get the rhythmic patter dead on, a kind of snappy overlapping of verbal cues and reactions where the comment of one often gets finished or deflected by the other. With the younger generation, Smith’s Disney is more contentious because more determined to have his way. As Disney’s daughter, Melissa Smith gives as good as she gets, seeming to be a sore spot for her father and able to use that to advantage. Williams’ Ron seems mostly to be trying to keep his head above water, finding himself primed for the job of studio head when Walt needs to use Roy as a fall guy.

Somewhere in all the give-and-take, we may suppose a lesson about the carnage that lurks behind even the most beloved accomplishments. And yet the play isn’t a character assassination of Disney, it’s more like a cartoon treatment, comparable to his early creations. Disney is as irascible as Donald Duck, as flighty as Goofy, and as challenged as Mickey’s generally chagrined efforts at control. In other words, Disney gets the Disney treatment and, to quote the creation of a rival studio, “th-th-that’s all, folks!”

The play has four more showings, this Wednesday through Saturday. Wednesday's show is "pay what you can."

A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney
By Lucas Hnath
Directed and designed by Drew Gray

Cast: Steve Scarpa, J. Kevin Smith, Melissa Smith, Trevor Williams

New Haven Theater Company
NHTC Stage @ EBM 839 Chapel Street, New Haven
November 8, 9, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18, 2017

Exhuming Walt Disney

Preview of A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney, New Haven Theater Company

What does the name “Walt Disney” make you think of?  Cute little animated figures? The Mickey Mouse Club? The founder of a vast entertainment conglomerate? An affable old gent on Sunday night television? Architect of state of the art amusement parks? Eccentric who wanted to freeze his corpse for eventual resurrection? A cipher behind a brand?

To J. Kevin Smith, playing a guy most people call “Walt,” in the New Haven Theater Company’s latest production, Lucas Hnath’s A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney, brings to mind the phrase “creative genius.” Walt, for Smith as for most of us, is the figure behind “beautiful animation, classic films, and also a fatherly figure” on The Wonderful World of Disney, which ran for decades but, if you were alive before Disney’s death in 1966, chances are you saw Walt himself on the show.

That kindly view of Disney is one Smith shares with most people; he fondly mentioned the Mouseketeers and those great theme parks. But Smith, who for years in the 1980s worked as a sales rep/manager/director handling video-cassette distribution, the Disney company stands for a very “aggressive” approach to protecting copyrights and maintaining “the image of the brand.” “And for good reason,” Smith pointed out, “Disney lost the rights to some of his early cartoon shorts,” so the need to protect his intellectual property from theft by his studio’s many competitors was quite real.

For Smith, though, it’s important to see how that level of commitment “permeated his creative life, and caused fall out with his family,” making Disney “not always the most likeable guy.” Smith sees him in the company of other of our favorite “driven” success stories, men like Steve Jobs, Nicholas Tesla.

J. Kevin Smith as Walt Disney

Lucas Hnath, an up-and-coming playwright who won an Obie award for his best-known play Red Speedo, grew up minutes from Disney World in Orlando, Florida. His play gives us a comic take on a family drama in which Disney gathers relations together to prepare them for his death. “In a sense,” Smith says, “the play is about Disney, as written and performed by others, and it’s also a script as if written by Disney for his family.” The cast consists of Smith as Disney, Steve Scarpa as Walt’s brother Roy, Melissa Smith as Walt’s daughter, and Trevor Williams as her husband Ron Miller.

The script, Smith said, is “mostly dialogue in which characters speak back and forth and past each other in short bursts.” The challenge, he said, is “to get and keep the rhythm, to figure out how to make the stylized speech natural to [the characters] and keep it consistent.” The conceit of the play is that Disney is actually reading the script with his family, but the audience may not be sure when something is in the alleged script or not.

The play is directed by the NHTC’s resident playwright Drew Gray who did a great job directing Trevor, the troupe’s most off-beat offering thus far, last spring. The kinds of plays that attract NHTC can’t really be pigeon-holed. They’ve had great success with classics like William Inge’s Bus Stop, with more contemporary plays like Will Eno’s Middletown and Rachel Axler’s Smudge, and with small-cast plays like Proof and Doubt and Speed the Plow. They’ve also succeeded with big cast plays like Our Town and Urinetown. Last fall, the troupe gave a special staged reading of Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy, an aptly chosen offering. Now, they are back with another “reading” of sorts. The focus on a rich, successful man, something of a megalomaniac, may seem all too apt as well.

Disney, as Smith reminded me, “named names” to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 and expressed his view that the union that tried to mount a strike at Disney Studios was organized by Communists. Smith called Disney “a complicated guy,” and said the play shows “the downside” of his success “but does not limit its view to that.” Smith mentioned that “things included in the script are not necessarily factual” but derive “from the folklore” of “Uncle Walt.”

Smith said his performance is not a mimicry of Disney and that he’s eager to have a lead role in a production, which hasn’t been the case since his performance as the satanic stranger in Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer. Steve Scarpa read Hnath’s play two years ago and said it was “like nothing I’ve ever seen before” and “something we could do really well.”

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work they go.

A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney
By Lucas Hnath
Directed by Drew Gray
New Haven Theater Company
November 8th, 9th, 11th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th
The NHTC stage @ English Building Markets, 839 Chapel Street