Boys to Men

Review of littleboy/littleman, Yale Cabaret

A  first year playwright at the Yale School of Drama, Rudi Goblen demonstrates, in littleboy/littleman, a captivating exuberance of language. Two half-brothers, Bastian (Dario Ladani Sanchez), the elder, and Fito (Robert Lee Hart) share an apartment together—or rather, Bastian suffers Fito to stay in his apartment, on the couch. The play opens with Fito, alone in the apartment, rehearsing his street performance act, complete with red cones to separate the crowd from the playing space. The audience at the Cab stands in for the one in his head as he coaches us how to respond, urging us to—whether we like the show or not—make some noise.

Fito is making noise, and that’s one of the things Bastian will harangue him about, at length. Fito, able to give as good as he gets, will use any pretext to launch into tirades of his own, whether about a cop—a former bullying classmate of Bastian—who harasses him, or about a (literally) shitty job Bastian insists he take to help defray the costs of inhabiting the apartment (and don’t get him started on having to clean ladies’ lavatories). When he’s not lecturing Fito about not pulling his weight, Bastian can be seen and heard on a headset, either trying to find out about the delay in his petition for a name-change or trying to hoodwink clients for a “donation” to a police program to fight drugs and juvenile crime. Bastian’s impending name-change spurs some comic badinage between the brothers about ridiculous names but also gives Bastian an occasion to lecture his brother about how a Nicaraguan name is a handicap in job applications.

Like Stephen Adly Guirgis, Goblen is a playwright with a good ear for street-speak as Fito employs a mix of hiphop rhythms and Spanish phrases and, like Guirgis, Goblen likes to let his characters talk. In addition to their individual routines, Fito and Bastian share a reminiscence of a home invasion that took their grandmother’s life and left them permanently traumatized. But it’s really the fate of their mother that has unmoored the brothers. When Fito waxes poetic about the sacrifices their late mother endured in smuggling her two young sons and their grandmother into the States from Nicaragua and then raising them on her own, Bastian snaps back about the fact that Fito contributed nothing to their mother’s last days and throws him out.

There follows another street performance from Fito with audience participation (the night I saw the show, Ilia Isorelýs Paulino, recently seen as Alice in Alice, the third show in the Yale School of Drama season, chose between a magic quarter and a piece of paper) and a collection at the close. The piece of paper contains a poem, a litany of situations summed up as “It’s all just a bag of halos and horns,” and offered as “a toast,/to us.”

I thought the show would end there, but we still have Fito’s final confrontation with that bullying police officer and the outcome of Bastian’s name-change to go. Goblen’s play comes packed with incident and overflows with speech. It aims for the company of other notable plays in which two males navigate a fraught relationship colored by street tensions and a variable grasp of how to get along—such as Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog and Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over—though here the status of both brothers as immigrants adds a further timely dimension.

The wealth of material in littleboy/littleman may feel a bit overwhelming in the compass in which its offered. Or perhaps a full-length play has been crammed into the Cab’s shorter running time. In any case, there could be more: it would be good to see Fito somewhere other than the apartment and the street; and with all the evocation of the mother going on, we feel the lack of a scene or two in which we get to see her for ourselves.

What really resonates here is Robert Lee Hart’s full command of Fito. He so inhabits the role that there seems no division between himself and his character, and that makes Fito’s scenes more vivid at times than the play he’s a part of. Dario Ladani Sanchez puts across the way in which Bastian, for all his better grasp of pragmatic realities, is overshadowed by his brother’s spirit. He’s best when he’s on a headset, trying to use his whitest voice to steer some cash his way.

Hart and Sanchez—who played off one another as antagonists in Seven Spots on the Sun in YSD’s 2018-19 season—make the most of Goblen’s way with words and make us believe in their grudging intimacy. Marcelo Martínez García’s set, which includes musicians on a drumkit and a bass guitar (the latter is used to great effect as the other end of a phone conversation Bastian gets caught up in), gives us a ratty apartment that’s also the street, while Emma Deane’s lighting design is—well—spot on. Second-year director Christopher D. Betts—in his third play of the Cabaret’s 52nd season—keeps the action very mobile, showing again his inspired grasp of how to use the Cab’s amorphous space to enhancing effect.

littleboy/littleman
By Rudi Goblen
Directed by Christopher D. Betts

Set Designer: Marcelo Martínez Garcia; Costume Designer: Stephanie Bahniuk; Lighting Designer: Emma Deane; Sound Designer: Anteo Fabris; Technical Director: Cam Camden; Producers: Sami Cubias & Caitlin M. Dutkiewicz; Stage Manager: Leo Egger

Musicians: Margaret E. Douglas, Tyler Cruz

Cast: Robert Lee Hart, Dario Ladani Sanchez

Yale Cabaret
February 13-15, 2020

Call Me Up in Dreamland

Review of Alice, Yale School of Drama

One of the great attractions of Alice, the third show of the Yale School of Drama 2019-20 season, directed by third-year director Logan Ellis, is the prospect of hearing the songs of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan sung by someone other than Tom Waits. (And I’m someone who loves listening to Tom Waits!)

That aspect of the show is key because the songs in Alice are sung by characters, most of whom bear some resemblance to characters in Lewis Carroll’s classic and incomparable Alice stories, Alice in Wonderland and Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass (one of the few literary sequels better than the original).

Filtering the adventures of Alice through Waits and Brennan’s Beat carnival sensibility provides a curious and delicious oddity not to be missed. Then filter those songs through arrangements by music director Dan Pardo as sung by some fine voices from the Yale School of Drama that lend them the heft and glow of opera and Broadway and that indeed should be attraction enough.

But consider: Alice, the musical, was developed by avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson, and his stamp on the proceedings, with a libretto developed by Paul Schmidt, further twists the familiar if quizzical terrain in other directions, mainly because Wilson/Schmidt are more interested in real life Alice Liddell (inspiration for our Alice) and Charles Dodgson (Carroll’s actual name) than in Carroll’s creation per se. So the space we travel through here is called Dreamland and watching the show recalled to me one of my favorite puns in Finnegans Wake about “we grisly old Sykos who have done our unsmiling bits on alices, when they were yung and easily freudened.” The Liddell/Dodgson relation is, indeed, frighteningly easy to freuden.

And that lends more than a little perfunctory psyching of the pedophiliac psyche—having to do with Dodgson’s proclivity for photographing pre-pubescent girls, sometimes nude—in what Wilson/Schmidt hath wrought. That aspect mainly impinges in the second half as the script reaches for a through-narrative to hang its symptoms upon, all hinging upon Alice solving “the riddle” of Jabberwocky (the poem of monster-decapitation Alice finds in a book) and, perhaps, beating time. That, for those in need of a plot, may serve as well as anything might, but what matters here is what Waits/Brennan did with their part in all this and it is wonderous indeed, brought vividly to phantasmagoric life by Ellis and his astounding team and cast.

The cast of the Yale School of Drama’s production of Alice, by Robert Wilson, Paul Schmidt, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, directed by Logan Ellis, February, 2020 (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

We begin with screens upon screens that replicate images of Alice (Ilia Isorelýs Paulino) to suggest Dodgson’s photographic fetish (Brittany Bland, projections). Dodgson (Sola Fadiran) opens the show with “Alice,” a song of obsession and melancholy that sets the tone at once. And yet the inspired nature of these characters and their eye-popping costumes by Meg Powers works against Dodgson as a pining pedophile bedeviled by whatever we want to imagine him bedeviled by (Dodgson, a deacon, mathematician and logician, is not a surrealist, not even avant le lettre). What the show makes us face is—yes, obsession and the melancholy of unrequited desire, but it’s the kind we’re apt to have for the figures in our dreams, which may include material from websites, films, shows, books, poems, myths, ritual, and anything in our inner grab-bag.

Mad Hatter (Julian Sanchez), Alice (Ilia Isorelýs Paulino) in the Yale School of Drama production of Alice by Robert Wilson, Paul Schmidt, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, directed by Logan Ellis, February 2020 (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Anna Grigo’s scenic design creates an open space where the various encounters—each featuring a song or a poem—take place, some—a torture-chamber-like kitchen—having a certain dimension, others— the boat/shop the Sheep (Daniel Liu) navigates—are free-standing sets in their own right. The changeableness of the set perfectly complements the amorphousness of Alice’s imagination as she moves through Dreamland. Done up like a doll, Alice is a mostly willing witness to whatever she encounters. “We’re All Mad Here,” as a song suggests, and Alice gamely takes a “when in Rome . . .” attitude to her interlocutors. Within that world, Dodgson/Carroll is perhaps the Oz-like Wizard behind it all, or at least the dream-father-figure who might help her find a way out. Since Dodgson is also the White Knight and the White Rabbit, he is a kind of all-in-all stopgap; we can call “foul” for the egotistical artist-teacher-master who must insist on his centrality in his protégé’s imagination, but we’re also encouraged to see how the Waits/Brennan songs Fadiran sings—“Fish and Bird” and “Poor Edward” particularly—give us insight into how Dodgson/Carroll understands his own plight. The first ends Act One with a sort of Never-Neverland tableau and duet with Paulino and reprises at the start of Act Two; the second comes late in Act Two and, in Fadiran’s performance, instills a moving sense of the pathos of a creator plagued by his creation.

Charles Dodgson (Sola Fadiran) in the Yale School of Drama production of Alice by Robert Wilson, Paul Schmidt, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, directed by Logan Ellis, February 2020 (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

It’s remarkable how readily Waits/Brennan find beguiling analogs for Carroll’s characters that extend our sense of their possibilities. In a show-stopping moment in Act One, The Caterpillar (Julian Sanchez, in a baroque fantasy of a costume) proclaims his alter ego “Table Top Joe,” a scatting Vegas act that might be Waits’ alter ego as well. Grigo’s design gives Sanchez a thrust space into the audience, and having the Caterpillar undulate into position while singing creates a visual and visceral feat not easy to top. Indeed, Sanchez is a major asset—he gets to wear two amazing get-ups as Mad Hatter (his work with hand-puppets is impressive)  and, with Liu, enacts a teasing number—“Altar Boys”—that, while not derived from Wonderland characters per se, plays campy fun with the clerical trappings of Dodgson as an Anglican deacon.

Other stand-out moments include the lovely, demented-Disney of “Flower’s Grave,” sung by a family of flowers (Robert Lee Hart, John Evans Reese, Jackeline Torres Cortés, Adrienne Wells); “Fawn,” in which Paulino and Wells vocalize beautifully; “Kommienzuspadt,” wherein Robert Lee Hart as the Cheshire Cat channels Waits wonderfully; “Reeperbahn,” with Jessy Yates as a kind of BDSM king on a throne of a wheelchair, stirring up tales of naughty indulgence enacted by the ensemble; “Barcarolle,” in which Liu too blends into the Dodgson persona, this time as a motherly, androgynous sheep, and finally, and very memorably, Paulino—as the aged Alice on a cane—singing “I’m Still Here” as a statement of endurance but also of immortal presence within the Dreamland that, for all we know, might go on without us. Paulino’s Alice is childlike, capricious, and slyly reactive throughout, the giddy kid we might like to be again. Being an audience to Paulino’s emotive and moving way with a song has been a joy of her time, now in its third year, at the Yale School of Drama, and her “I’m Still Here” caps that wonderfully. 

Humpty Dumpty (Jessy Yates), Alice ((Ilia Isorelýs Paulino) in the Yale School of Drama production of Alice by Robert Wilson, Paul Schmidt, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, directed by Logan Ellis, February 2020 (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

There are a few disappointments: the poems “Jabberwocky” and “You Are Old, Father William,” two of my favorites in the books (and add “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” not referenced here, as a third) sort of get lost in the sauce; the Tweedledee (Cortés)/Tweedledum (Reese) segment, while fun and silly, lacks the manic, violent quality Carroll gives it; and “Lost in the Harbour” is sung by Yates as Humpty Dumpty presented as a projection upon a large, suspended egg. The device seems to limit Humpty Dumpty who, in the book, is a key figure and whose song, here, could use more of the wistful doom found in Waits’ rendition on Alice.

As a musical, the Alice of Wilson, Schmidt, Waits and Brennan, is based on a merging of spectacle and song that creates a world more than a story. Logan Ellis and company fully fulfill that imperative, imaginatively, creatively, and with lasting impressions to spare. “There’s only Alice.”

Alice
Concept by Robert Wilson
Music and Lyrics by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan
Libretto by Paul Schmidt
Directed by Logan Ellis

Music Direction, Arrangements, and Orchestrations: Dan Pardo; Scenic Design: Anna Grigo; Costume Designer: Meg Powers; Lighting Designer: Riva Fairhall; Sound Designer: Dakota Stipp; Projection Designer: Brittany Bland; Production Dramaturg: Evan Hill; Technical Director: HaoEn Hu; Stage Manager: Bekah Brown

Musicians: Jillian Emerson, cello; Nate Huvard, guitar; Dan Pardo, piano; Epongue Ekille, violin; Calvin Kaleel, bass; Jose Key, saxophone; Leonardo Marques Starck von Mutius, trombone

Cast: Sola Fadiran, Robert Lee Hart, Daniel Liu, Ilia Isorelýs Paulino, John Evans Reese, Julian Sanchez, Jackeline Torres Cortés, Adrienne Wells, Jessy Yates

Yale School of Drama
February 1-7, 2020

Show It Like It Was and Tell It Like It Is

The first show of the Yale Cabaret season 52 revisits Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, From the German Südwestafrika, Between the Years 1994-1915. The play was featured in the Yale Summer Cabaret season of 2014 (review) and it’s easy to see that the play’s relevance has only increased in the past five years. The play investigates the problem of accurate presentation of atrocities that were largely expunged from the historical record or which were never acknowledged for what they were. The German-engineered genocide of the Herero population of Namibia has been called “the first modern genocide,” by which is meant, it seems, that it was systematic as opposed to a result of other policies. The difficult topic is the subject of the “presentation,” but the context for that presentation is the play itself. We witness a rehearsal of a play that tries to present, with some degree of humane depiction, a series of events that are unpresentable. All the actors—designated only by number and “white” or “black”—struggle with that problem while working within their skill set in trying to create characters and scenes.

Directed by Christopher Betts, a second-year director at the Yale School of Drama and one of the more dedicated to the Cabaret by number of past productions, We Are Proud to Present . . . builds on the unique magic of the space. Yale Cabaret audiences are often treated to staging that is improvisatory, or seemingly improvisatory. It’s not at all uncommon to find the kind of slippages between the fictive world and the actual world known as ‘breaking the fourth wall.” The Cab is uniquely situated to deal with a play in which actors in their twenties act out acting problems and issues. Finding the right tone for the  “presentation” is a hunt, and here the question of what will satisfy viewers becomes not just a contextual question but one of creative differences and political sensitivity for the actors.

Robert Lee Hart, Doireann Mac Mahon, Manu Kumasi in Yale Cabaret’s production of We Are Proud to Present…, directed by Christopher Betts

Betts’ excellent ensemble cast—including two Cab debuts—captures the play’s necessary immediacy. We feel we’re “in the room,” as they say, taking in the kinds of discussion that are usually behind the scenes. One actor, designated as “Black Woman” (Alexandra Maurice), plays the “Artistic Director” and practices, with the help of index cards, patter addressed to the audience in the early going, just to get us on the page that the company is on. Once things get going with the “rehearsal” Maurice patiently, and searchingly, oversees a certain kind of controlled chaos that at times seems very real, at other times amusing satire on what actors “go through.” As a line in the program says—enumerating the production’s working rules of thumb (or “collaborative agreements”)—“Every voice deserves to be heard, but not all opinions are valid!” Just try putting that into practice.

Alexandra Maurice, Adam Shaukat (standing), Patrick Ball, Robert Lee Hart, Doireann Mac Mahon in the Yale Cabaret production of We Are Proud to Present…, directed by Christopher Betts

In the play, it means that some actors feel more gifted than others, some feel more engaged by their roles than others, and some want to claim a greater intuition into the lives being enacted. For instance, there’s a certain one-upmanship between Actor 4 (Manu Kumasi) and Actor 3 (Adam Shaukat), which becomes relevant in the era of “colorblind casting,” so that it may be up for grabs who gets to be a German and who gets to be a Herero. When Actor 3 tries to demonstrate that he too can play a wise old black woman, Shaukat is funny, offensive, and surprisingly effective by turns. Likewise, Actor 5 (Doireann Mac Mahon) has to play Sarah—a named German woman who becomes every woman that the German soldiers write to (these actual letters are among the few historical documents from the period). Mac Mahon runs a gamut of possibilities in trying to find the character’s motivation, from childlike to maternal to sexual to avant-garde improv. At one point she crawls about the floor as a cat as the cast puts her through her paces. While Actor 5 never quite arrives at a definitive turn as what Sarah might have been like, Mac Mahon displays quite memorably Actor 5’s discomfort with a built-in stereotype formulated by the soldiers’ pining, together with the problem of what the one white female character means for the play. It may just be the case that every actor thinks their role is the most problematic or important but Mac Mahon’s Actor 5 also shows that no role can be taken for granted.

Manu Kumasi, Doireann Mac Mahon, Robert Lee Hart in Yale Cabaret’s production of We Are Proud to Present…, directed by Christopher Betts

Time and again, the task of playing as cast is a matter of perspective. What the play knowingly evokes, with many comic turns, is the problem of who gets to tell whose stories and who gets to enact them. None of the characters in the play own the events, and none can really stand outside history to interpret what happened. While the situations are indefensible, they actually happened; and while enacting them any particular way is defensible, it’s also not definitive. Actor 1 (Patrick Ball) has to find a brutal soldier in himself and in doing so suddenly and shockingly becomes a Southern U.S. racist; Actor 2 (Robert Lee Hart) is the most self-assured and the actor most critical of the easy assumptions and analogies that the not-too-well-informed cast accepts. In the end he becomes the rehearsal’s scapegoat, if only because his sense of verisimilitude demands that the ugly truth of what the “presentation” addresses has to be enacted. It’s a brave performance by Hart who has a ready knack of being both within a role and outside it at the same time.

Robert Lee Hart in Yale Cabaret’s production of We Are Proud to Present…, directed by Christopher Betts

What the play dramatizes goes beyond our discomfort with the subject matter and the struggle to find a suitable tone. Ultimately it situates itself within what has become—with the advent of Black Lives Matter—a crisis in our culture, politically, historically, socially, and artistically. The racism that remains a part of U.S. reality can’t help but rise to the surface. In a country that prides itself on its noble experiment in liberty and wide political franchise, the story of what might be called our “premodern genocide” of the indigenous peoples of this continent and the story of the enslavement of peoples from Africa are not simply embarrassments or contradictions, they are part of an incendiary backstory that Drury keeps always in the periphery. Which is not to say that the uniqueness of the Herero’s slaughter is ignored nor that all historical injustices are the same, simply that when “we” proudly present a story it is already fraught with acts, identifications and justifications that we really aren’t proud of.

Adam Shaukat, Patrick Ball, Doireann Mac Mahon, Robert Lee Hart, Manu Kumasi in Yale Cabaret’s production of We Are Proud to Present…, directed by Christopher Betts

We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, from the German Südwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915
By Jackie Sibblies Drury
Directed by Christopher Betts

Producer: Dani Barlow; Assistant Director: Tiffany Fomby; Scenic Designer: Jenn Doun; Costume Designer: April M. Hickman; Lighting Designer: Graham Zellers; Sound Designer: Noel Nichols; Projections Designer: Christopher Evans; Dramaturg: Alex Vermilion; Fight Choreographer: Mike Rossmy; Intimacy Choreographer: Kelsey Rainwater; Co-Technical Directors: Tatsuya “Tito” Ito, Jonathan Jolly, Rajiv Sha; Stage Manager: Edmund O’Neal

Cast: Patrick Ball, Robert Lee Hart, Manu Kumasi, Doireann Mac Mahon, Alexandra Maurice, Adam Shaukat

Yale Cabaret
September 12-14, 2019

Identify the Differences

Review: Latinos Who Look Like Ricky Martin, Yale Summer Cabaret

Xavier (Robert Lee Hart) likes to get to the meetings early. He has to set up the space, arrange the chairs and pens, erase the whiteboard and put up his huge yellow sticky-notes. Monica (Jackeline Torres Cortés) arrives on time. Together, they are the Latino Student Union at a college, after the graduation of the seniors who officiated last year. They need to figure out ways to pull in other students, and they need to decide who will lead them as their new president. And—a newly pressing matter—they must decide how to react to a racist slur—in Spanish—someone spray-painted in red on school property, clearly aimed at Latino students. Note: it’s the same slur U.S. President Donald J. Trump, in tweetspeak, flung at four non-white U.S. Congresswomen, all U.S. citizens.

Emilio Rodriguez’s Latinos Who Look Like Ricky Martin, directed by Jecamiah M. Ybañez, is the final play of the Yale Summer Cabaret’s Verano Season, which aimed to explore and expand and explode notions of Latinx culture. Rodriguez’s engaging and entertaining play seems made to order. While it could brood and wring its hands about burgeoning racism in the U.S., the play instead is very knowingly tongue-in-cheek about the earnest intentions of those who police the borders of identity. To adapt Pogo-cartoonist Walt Kelly’s familiar saying about “the enemy”: We have met the racists and they are us.

What could be the problem, you ask. Certainly only bona fide Latinos would want to be part of the Latino Student Union, right? Sure, but how will they know each other? Skin color, mother tongue, favorite foods and music and celebrity icon, the country or region of their ancestral origin? Xavier, who has a best-kept secret about his own upbringing, looks the part, but can’t speak Spanish. Isaac (Dario Ladani Sanchez), a newcomer, is from Puerto Rico, speaks Spanish but looks white—and doesn’t see why empanadas are automatically preferable to quesadillas or nachos as identity foods. Monica, who looks, speaks and dresses the part of colorful Latinx party girl, has her issues with Xavier’s overbearing efforts and the boys’ club atmosphere furnished by his heir-apparent relationship to outgoing president Oscar.

Monica (Jackeline Torres Cortés), Xavier (Robert Lee Hart), Isaac (Dario Ladani Sanchez) in Latinos Who Look Like Ricky Martin, Yale Summer Cabaret

There are reasons enough for grievances aplenty, and it all plays out with the lively tones of sitcom comedy—full of an ironic sparkle de rigueur for youths who know that they are always mouthing received images and ideas coming at them from their ever-present phones. Before we even get to the actual difficulties they face communicating and commiserating with each other, there’s a sharp sense of hyper-awareness registered by Ybañez and his cast that suits perfectly today’s collegiate. They know everything because everything is just a quick search away, and, what’s more, they know the whole world is potentially watching for anything inflammatory that anyone might share digitally.

And yet it is to Rodriguez’s credit that his characters aren’t simply caricatures. They play with our expectations and their own, and each is capable of pulling a surprise out of the hat—or tote, as the case may be. My one criticism of the plot’s trajectory is that Monica’s big reveal gets played out twice—once for Isaac and once for Xavier—when it would feel more dramatically surprising if we learned it when Xavier did (since the two have known each other longest and have a very appealing way of one-upping and supporting each other). Isaac’s own reveal comes across more as a weak plot point rather than a necessary factor in the situation—we might be happier with him as outsider than surprise insider. Such matters, by inviting some overthinking, can make the play feel more contrived than it needs to be.

Isaac (Dario Ladani Sanchez), Xavier (Robert Lee Hart)

What makes it work, in the Cab’s tight space with a wonderfully generic-appropriate meeting space complete with frosted-glass hall window by Elsa GibsonBraden, is the vividness of these three actors. Hart’s Xavier has so much attitude it fairly drips from all his comments and reactions, and, in one tense moment with Isaac, his pain is palpable. Yet Xavier is also terrifically funny in his obtuse single-mindedness. His identity is the Club in a way that can be at least a little off-putting to anyone who wants to “belong” in the room with him.

Monica (Jackeline Torres Cortés)

Cortés’ Monica is the life of the play, and her laughter is unpredictable and genuine. Monica likes to have fun and make fun, and her somewhat perverse strategy for drumming-up unity makes us take a second look at her. She may be the most politically astute—or at least she’s not taking Psychology (for the third time) for nothing. Sanchez plays Isaac with a certain canny vagueness; he’s the one we expect to have some ulterior motive because the other two aren’t sure about him, yet he seems so immediately likable and forthright we hope he will be the sensible one without the earnest investments of Xavier and Monica. His greater maturity is key to what he’s doing here—wearing, appropriately, what almost looks like a referee’s shirt.

In the end it seems that leading the Latino Club—like winning the presidency in the U.S.—is a zero-sum game, a fact that puts to flight any notion of “unity in community,” or “unidad in communidad,” or indeed unitedness among our 50 states to say nothing of between political parties. Rodriguez wants us to laugh at how ego-driven and shortsighted much of our need to be “in” is, as the tendency makes many aspects of life into popularity contests. And yet, trivial as that may seem, the wrong use of power—however attained—can leave those on the outside weaker and more desperate. The solidarity of others can be scary.

Xavier (Robert Lee Hart), Monica (Jackeline Torres Cortés), Isaac (Dario Ladani Sanchez)

Latinos Who Look Like Ricky Martin
By Emilio Rodriguez
Directed by Jecamiah M. Ybañez

Scenic Designer: Elsa GibsonBraden; Costume Designer: Stephanie Bahniuk; Lighting Designer: Evan Anderson; Sound Designer: Noel Nichols; Stage Manager: Edmond O’Neal

Ensemble: Jackeline Torres Cortés, Robert Lee Hart, Dario Ladani Sanchez

Yale Summer Cabaret Verano
August 8-17, 2019

Can History Be Healed?

Review of Seven Spots on the Sun, Yale School of Drama

As this gripping play goes on, Seven Spots on the Sun by Martín Zimmerman, directed by third-year Yale School of Drama directing student Jecamiah M. Ybañez, becomes an instance of folk history, one that derives its force from traumatic events. Designated as “The Town,” figures in a collective ensemble (Brandon E. Burton, Louisa Jacobson, Kineta Kunutu, JJ McGlone, Ilia Isorelýs Paulino, Jakeem Powell) voice a kind of stricken amazement at events that seem the stuff of legend. Zimmerman’s play, in treating the depredations of a civil war, its aftermath, and the effects of a general amnesty for war crimes, has its eye on the tragic course of more than one Latin American country, while the play’s manner lends itself to fable and the sort of retribution we may think of as Fate.

Early on we learn that the town, which is overjoyed when radio transmissions recommence, accords special status to Moisés (Dario Ladani Sánchez), a former medic who has suffered more than most. So when he smashes the radio so as not to hear pronouncements about the newly instituted government, no one confronts him. The story of all he lost is told in parallel with the story of Mónica (Adrienne Wells), who speaks to the audience about her love for Luis (Robert Lee Hart), a miner in Ojona, who becomes a soldier because he expects it will provide more stability and an eventual pension. Wells’ straightforward address does much to give us direct access to life within the town.

Then the civil war comes, creating a horribly fraught world where victims of soldiers can be left to die in San Isidro’s town square while the town, frightened off by the hand-prints in white paint left as a warning, must endure the misery in their midst. As Belén, Moisés’ beloved, Sohina Sidhu’s emotional reaction to the cries of the dying boy (Powell) provides an important crux for the events to come. Whereas most of us have to read or watch news reports to be reminded, in the midst of our comfortable lives, that horrors are occurring elsewhere, Belén is unable to enjoy the mangoes that Moisés traded morphine for. Finally, goaded by her distress, Moisés agrees to take the boy into the clinic.

When soldiers are reported to be coming back to town, it’s understood that whoever has helped the boy will die. Moisés, despite his overt contempt for the cowardly priest Eugenio (José Espinosa), tries to find sanctuary in the church. Eugenio’s narration of what happens then is delivered by Espinosa as a shameful failure but also as if events are beyond his control—a feeling that gains conviction in the second part of the play. Meanwhile, Luis eventually returns from the war to his wife and newborn son, but he’s no longer the man his wife loved and she fears him.

The full details of the punishment visited upon Moisés are not revealed until late. In the play’s present, we see how, despite Moisés’ antipathy, Eugenio must come to him with a plea: there is a plague in the area that is besetting the children, its symptoms painful but sweet-smelling boils that cause death. Moisés reluctantly agrees to examine a child, then withdraws, appalled by his lack of ability and his own indifference. Eugenio comes again to tell him of a miracle: the child was immediately healed.

The parallel course of the play means that we shouldn’t be surprised that the child of Luis and Mónica will need to be healed by Moisés, but when we learn the part that Luis played in what became of Belén, the play creates a situation worthy of Solomon. At the heart of the dramatic situation is the question of atonement and forgiveness, and how wounds to the social body cannot be healed any other way, though it is more typical to expect that whoever has the upper-hand will exact whatever price satisfies the lust for revenge.

The deftness of the play’s plot is much to its advantage. This is not a realistic tale that strains credulity, but rather a fable about war and love, about hatred and desperate need. The four main characters have both a genuine specificity and a generic quality. The male roles are difficult due to the extremes the actors must evince. Hart’s Luis seems an aloof lover who does what he wants and expects his wife to accept his view; his eventual transformation seems not to take as much toll on him as it might. Sánchez’s Moisés is quite effective in his despair, but perhaps less so in his ultimatums. We have to believe in these characters as persons caught up in events beyond their control and then see them as figures of ultimate nemesis. It’s a striking situation, and an admirable effort.

The boxlike set makes the town seem a cell, an interesting comment on how all are imprisoned by past events they can’t overcome. Late in the play, a wall falls as if breaking through a façade and into the dark events that keep the town spellbound. The fascinating ensemble, with expressive choreography by Jake Ryan Lozano, creates the manner of a people struck to the heart by the story it must tell for the sake of its souls, the individual members wearing haunted looks that stay with us beyond the wrenching outcome.

Grim and trying, Seven Spots on the Sun’s sense of humanity is not without redemption, though it firmly presents the horrors of history as a curse upon the present.

Seven Spots on the Sun
By Martín Zimmerman
Directed by Jecamiah M. Ybañez

Choreographer: Jake Ryan Lozano; Scenic Designer: Lily Guerin; Lighting Designer: Evan Christian Anderson; Costume Designer: April M. Hickman; Sound Designer and Composer: Andrew Rovner; Projection and Video Designer: Christopher Evans; Production Dramaturg: Evan Hill; Technical Director: Jenna Heo; Stage Manager: Zachry J. Bailey

Cast: Brandon E. Burton, José Espinosa, Robert Lee Hart, Louisa Jacobson, Kineta Kunutu, JJ McGlone, Ilia Isorelýs Paulino, Jakeem Powell, Dario Ladani Sánchez, Sohina Sidhu, Adrienne Wells

 Yale School of Drama
December 13-18, 2018