Kitchen Heat

Review of Novios: part one, Yale Cabaret

Arturo Luis Soria III, a third-year actor at the Yale School of Drama, steps up fully as a playwright with part one of his two part play, Novios (“boyfriends”), playing for two more shows tonight at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m., directed by third-year actors Sohina Sidhu and Amandla Jahava. Soria, besides being a graceful presence in the Yale Repertory Theatre’s production of El Huracan at the start of this season, played a theatricalized version of his mother last season at the Cabaret in his original play Ni Mi Madre. There, he mostly stuck to English; with Novios, he lets many of his characters speak in their native Spanish, with subtitles on screens in the corners. The effect can be a little awkward, since these characters speak very rapidly, often in four-way conversations, and yet even those whose Spanish is almost nonexistent (like me) shouldn’t have any trouble following the dialogue.

And the dialogue gains greatly by being heard in its native tongue. Four members of the kitchen staff at a Manhattan restaurant, though of different national origins, speak Spanish as a lingua franca closer to home than English—Gallo (Nefesh Cordero Pino), Dominicano (Raul Díaz), Micki (Christopher Gabriel Nuñez), and Luis (Jecamiah M. Ybañez). Then there’s a Russian, Vlad (Devin White), a white Chef (John Evans Reese), and the newcomer, Antoine (Gregory Saint Georges), a Haitian hired as dishwasher. The use of Spanish establishes a core bond among the four, even as they often argue and deal in putdowns and points of honor. In one scene, Gallo goes off into a fantasy addressed to an absent love, and her words are pure poetry. Cordero Pino also plays L’Azteka, a fierce spirit in a striking gown decorated with Aztec motifs. L’Azteka seems to exist primarily in the dream mind of Luis, who emerges as the main figure here.

The play’s plot develops with a sense of inevitability, but, all the while, the liveliness of the characters, of their full engagement with the worlds they’ve left and the places their trying to get to, keeps us fully in the action, and keeps subplots percolating. There are impromptu dance routines to music the workers bicker over, there are shared blunts with smoke blown (for real) out the window, there is male coupling on top of a kitchen cart (to the cheers of the audience), and there’s Chef being condescending to his sous-chef Gallo, and short-tempered on the phone to his partner. And there’s Vlad, a character who plays as a bit of a loose cannon and who gets in a nice diatribe against “the home of the free” rhetoric that keeps bringing naïve immigrants to America.

The characters’ status in the country where they are making a home for themselves vary and that fact contributes to their general demeanor. Dominicano and Antoine seem the most easygoing; Micki has a short temper; Vlad is slightly sinister; Luis, put upon because he’s so often late (he may not have an actual home-base), is the one with attitude about why he deserves better than a job as kitchen help; Gallo at times plays at den mother to the boys, but clearly has a backstory of her own. Part 1’s main focus is showing a relationship develop between conflicted Luis (in a very affecting performance by Ybañez, a third-year director at YSD) and Gregory Saint Georges’ confident and likeable Antoine. The other characters, we sense, will move forward too, as the play moves into Part 2, and we’re left looking forward to when we’ll have the opportunity to watch the entire play.

Gerardo Díaz Sánchez’s set, a central kitchen space, is very effective, and Nic Vincent’s Lighting Design makes for a visually interesting show. The movement of so many bodies—dancing, cooking, pounding meat, and even creating an insistent percussion routine—is greatly facilitated by Jake Ryan Lozano’s choreography, including passionate physical outbursts and sexual expression.

While still a work in progress, Novios has passion aplenty, a strong sense of the people it represents, and the kind of mystery and poetry that makes for exciting and involved theater. Don’t miss a chance to see its first half early on, brought to life by the actorly empathy and instincts of directors Jahava and Sidhu in the Cab’s intimate and efficient space.

Novios: part one
By Arturo Luis Soria III
Directed by Amandla Jahava & Sohina Sidhu

Producer: Estefani Castro; Choreographer & Intimacy Coach: Jake Ryan Lozano; Dramaturg: Nahuel Telleria; Scenic Designer: Gerardo Díaz Sánchez; Costume Designer: Matthew Malone: Lighting Designer: Nic Vincent: Projection Designer: Sean Preston; Sound Designer: Andrew Rovner: Technical Director: Martin Montaner V.; Stage Manager: Fabiola Feliciano-Batista

Cast: Nefesh Cordero Pino, Raul Díaz, Christopher Gabriel Nuñez, John Evans Reese, Gregory Saint Georges, Devin White, Jecamiah M. Ybañez

Yale Cabaret
February 21-23, 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

Life-Saving Stories

Review of Death of Yazdgerd, Yale School of Drama

A corpse lies in state in a ruin of a mill in a desert town of the Sasanian empire. Discovered by troops in pursuit of their king, Shah Yazdgerd III, the body, arrayed in the habiliments of the shah, including his gleaming face-mask, with a bag of treasures nearby, has clearly been murdered. The miller (James Udom), his wife (Francesca Fernandez McKenzie), and their teenage daughter (Sohina Sidhu) are accused of the shah’s assassination by a commander (Sean Boyce Johnson), a captain (Curtis Williams), and a priest (Setareki Wainiqolo). The three commoners plead for their lives, asserting their innocence, and regale their captors with numerous variations on a tale of how the man died. Meanwhile, a soldier (José Espinosa) prepares a gibbet upon which to hang the guilty miller.

Death of Yazdgerd by Bahram Beyzai, translated from Persian by Manuchehr Anvar, has been given a stunning thesis production by Shadi Ghaheri in the Yale School of Drama. The play is cunning in both its drama and its humor, involving the viewer in an exfoliating story that seems to have no end. By acting out stories, the miller and his family keep their punishment at bay while leading their questioners through a thicket of doubts and revelations.

The cast of Death of Yazdgerd (photos: T. Charles Erickson)

The production uses a variety of techniques to transport viewers into an ancient world that is full of portents and suggestion. Muralist Iman Raad has created, as backdrop, a tapestry-like drawing that depicts all the main events of the story, and projection designer Yaara Bar uses animation and projection and lighting to make elements of the mural come alive in response to narrative details. The effect, often ghostly or magical, conjures the ancient Iranian storytelling method in which a Naqqal (or storyteller) would act out his story in front of a tapestry, pointing to the relevant visuals as he went along.

Significant as well to the production’s aura is the way music accompanies much of the narrated drama. Live musicians Yahya Alkhasana and composer Mohsen Namjoo create textures of sound that enhance and punctuate the text and add an eerie overlay that makes the entire play feel mythic, even ritualistic.

And that’s key, too. We are watching a trial, at times, but we are also watching a funerary rite as the priest prays over the body, and we are watching oneiromancy, as the woman at one point enacts a dream of the shah’s that the priest is eager to interpret. At another point, the girl raises the shah from the dead by giving his corpse a voice. And all the while, as the stories become more and more revealing of the tensions among the miller’s family, and of issues such as whether or not the miller tried to protect his daughter’s chastity and whether the shah seduced the woman, the soldier keeps breaking in with updates on gibbet-building and prisoner-interrogating, and the three inquirers find themselves more and more befuddled.

They are unable to arrive at a clear story—as the play goes on, the miller, woman and girl move from denying they knew that the man, dressed as a beggar, was the shah, to nearly convincing their interrogators that the body is in fact not the shah, but the miller. Which gives the miller the role of being the shah in hiding. The switching of identity has to do not only with the fact that no one has dared to look upon the shah up close, but also with Beyzai’s insistence that class differences cannot be used to adjudicate truth in these matters. The miller and his family are so skilled in storytelling that they can make their listeners believe almost anything. Confusion among the family seems to flow from their own failure to decide what they believe and to stick to it. They enact a fascinating and theatrical sort of stream-of-consciousness where any interpretation immediately gains a voice and presentation.

The ensemble’s work with the play’s stylized speech and grand manners is thoroughly enthralling. Sean Boyce Johnson gives us a sober commander who knows too well his own failings of judgment and so wants to be fair. Setareki Wainiqolo’s priest is the most learned, but also the one most willing to accept, or even to expect, uncanny elements to play a part in the death of the shah. As a sort of foil, Curtis Williams is the captain who discovered the body and who wants to defer to the other two, if only their judgment makes sense. All three look their parts well thanks to Mika Eubank’s glorious costumes.

James Udom as the miller as shah

All three actors playing the miller’s family are superlative. Their roles call for quick-changes in voice, demeanor and emotional tone, sometimes even interrupting a key moment in the narrating monologue with an aside out of character to one of the others. Sohina Sidhu plays the girl as, initially, giddy and childlike, but as the play goes on she becomes a strong force, accusing her mother and mourning her father. James Udom’s miller has the sturdy gravitas of a man facing a death sentence and trying to be convincing. He is able to enact his murder of the shah and deny it in the next breath. It’s in many ways an unfathomable role and Udom masters it.

Then there’s Francesca Fernandez McKenzie as the woman, a role that comes to dominate, not only because the woman is fierce in upbraiding her husband and daughter and the interrogators, but because she enacts a kind of sorcery of storytelling. McKenzie’s intensity is unflagging as she turns the tables several times, speaking with the authority of mercurial emotions, and, during one particularly balletic enactment, behind the shah’s gold mask.

the woman (Francesca Fernandez McKenzie) and the girl (Sohina Sidhu)

Aided by John Bondi-Ernoehazy’s impressive circular set, with atmospheric lighting effects by Samuel Kwan Chi Chan, director Ghaheri has created a memorable production of an enigmatic play—both gripping and entertaining—that might be considered an elaborate shaggy dog story about an era-changing historical event. We get any number of possibilities about how the dead man met his fate, and a few possibilities about his identity. In a sense, the entire play is only a diversion to delay or defeat the verdict of death for the miller and his family: an exercise in storytelling as a matter of life and death. In the end, the enemy army—which Yazdgerd was apparently fleeing—overruns the shah’s troops, and to the victors go the spoils.

Death of Yazdgerd
By Bahram Beyzai
Translated by Manuchehr Anvar
Directed by Shadi Ghaheri

Music Director and Sound Designer: Michael Costagliola; Composer: Mohsen Namjoo; Scenic Designer: John Bondi-Ernoehazy; Costume Designer: Mika H. Eubanks; Lighting Designer: Samuel Kwan Chi Chan; Projection Designer: Yaara Bar; Visual Artist and Muralist: Iman Raad; Production Dramaturg: Ariel Sibert; Technical Director: Kevin Belcher; Stage Manager: John Carlin

Cast: José Espinosa, Sean Boyce Johnson, Francesca Fernandez McKenzie, Sohina Sidhu, James Udom, Setareki Wainiqolo, Curtis Williams

Musicians: Yahya Alkhasana, Mohsen Namjoo

Yale School of Drama
December 5-9, 2017

The Goddess Within

Review of The Red Tent, Yale Cabaret

If you want to see theater in New Haven that isn’t simply a play, you’ve got to go to shows brought to the Yale Repertory Theatre as part of No Boundaries, or you’ve got to go to the Yale Cabaret. The Red Tent, conceived and directed by Sohina Sidhu and playing at the Cab for two more shows tonight, explores certain bodily themes with minimal dialogue and much movement. More pointedly, one could say: The Red Tent returns theater to ritual.

Theater, it’s mostly agreed, began as ritual, even in the West. The Red Tent keeps open lines of communication to cultures where ritual and performance mingle. And ritual here manages to invoke the presence of “the Goddess” without propelling us to thoughts of New Agey ashrams in California. Maybe one or two of the voice-overs does, but the space created by Annie Dauber, with its enfolding red drapes, the moody lighting by Nic Vincent, and the spacey projections by Yaara Bar put us in a receptive state for a ritualized process choreographed by the company. The show presents an enactment of how women create community in celebrating one of the most elemental aspects of being female: menarche and the recurrent bodily rhythm of fertility it announces.

Some aspects of the body, polite society would have us think, should be kept private, but The Red Tent arrives fully informed by the view that the private is political, if only because women, in becoming equals with men before the law, still have to find a way to make the specific condition of being female not a special, lesser status. The “affliction”—as it is often called—of menstruation, to say nothing of the demands of child-birth, are simply some of the facts of life, and yet, tampon commercials notwithstanding, menstruation still seems an unacknowledged truth in most stories about women in film and television and fiction. While no one who is a woman or has ever lived intimately with one can have any doubts about the significance of the monthly event, our culture generally ignores it as if it never happens (though, of course, it’s big news if it doesn’t).

The Red Tent kicks off dramatically with a young woman (Amandla Jahava) beside herself at having her first period and being sent to a tent so as to be isolated in her “unclean” state. She’s freaking out, and into her abject state arrive emissaries of a more benign tradition, women who initiate her into a shared condition of being.

Air (Amandla Jahava) (photo: Elli Green)

As an unascribed quotation in the production’s playbill has it: “Then she had an epiphany: ‘Menstruation is not a taboo, but a power for women.’” The power, in The Red Tent, comes from the mother goddess, and slide projections alert us to stages in the process by which a woman becomes a goddess. It’s not a question of divinity so much as a matter of aligning oneself with the forces of the natural world. In a world—ours—in which the natural forces are increasingly out of whack, the notion that there might be a more geocentric way to understand our place in it is welcome. Such won’t be achieved, Sidhu’s play helps us see, by women proving they can be “just like” men, but perhaps by understanding better what being a woman means.

The five women in the piece are given elemental roles: Water (Alex Cadena), Earth (Danielle Chaves), Air (Amandla Jahava), Fire (Kineta Kunutu), Cosmic (Sohina Sidhu). I confess that the distinctions were a bit lost on me, but that’s perhaps because I wasn’t looking for them. Or that might be due to the fact that the women, all gowned very suitably in white robes with tasteful accessories, are not differentiated in an overtly archetypal manner. As portrayed, the women did have distinct attitudes, with Air the acolyte and Water with a suitable mutability, and Fire seeming the warmest. At one point, two of the elements war with knives—a segment handled well by Fight Coordinator Jonathan Higginbotham—and at another point, all the goddesses sat about articulating the nature of their goddessness in a scene both comic and poetic.

The notion of the three phases of the goddess (which I remember from my Robert Graves)—youth, maturity, and senescence—are invoked by the phases of the show, with the latter stage evoked very memorably by a song, begun suitably enough by Earth, about “the weight of me” breaking a rocking chair. The song is a lament that becomes, as all the women join in, the kind of strong identification with the inevitable and the elemental that one finds too seldom in our secular and commercial culture.

The Red Tent presents theater as something that happens to an audience, not simply as something we watch. With carefully modulated musical and visual accompaniment, the show is technically accomplished and, with the mutable physicality of its performers, fascinating to see. The final procession of the five achieves the emphatic grace and uplift that many a religious ceremony would be glad of inspiring.

The Red Tent
Conceived and directed by Sohina Sidhu

Choreography: the Company; Sound: Megumi Katayama, Kathy Ruvuna; Lighting: Nic Vincent; Costumes: Rachel Gregory; Scenic Design: Annie Dauber; Projections: Yaara Bar; Technical Direction: LT Gourzong; Dramaturgs: Michael Breslin, Ashley Chang; Fight Director: Jonathan Higginbotham; Stage Manager: Laura Cornwall; Producer: Lisa D. Richardson

The company: Alex Cadena; Danielle Chaves; Amandla Jahava; Kineta Kunutu; Sohina Sidhu

Yale Cabaret
March 23-25, 2017