Theater News

This week the Long Wharf’s world premiere of Heidi Schreck’s The Consultant opens officially on Wednesday, January 15. See our preview here. This week as well the Yale Cabaret resumes its 46th season with Have I None, a daunting play by British playwright Edward Bond from 2000. Set in 2077, the play darkly imagines a dystopia in which memory, and therefore history, has been erased. Jessica Holt, 2nd-year YSD director and Artistic Director for the Yale Summer Cabaret, 2014, will stage the claustrophobic play with stress on Bond's sense of the absurd. January 16-18.

Next week, on January 23, from 5:30 to 8:30, celebrated local theater troupe A Broken Umbrella Theatre will host a fundraiser at the Eli Whitney Museum and unveil details about their latest venture. As usual, the project is an original play based on historical figures, facts, and locales of New Haven. If You Build It, the new play, focuses on inventor A. C. Gilbert to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his most famous creation: the Erector Set. Director Ruben Ortiz, playwright Charlie Alexander, and cast members will present an excerpt of the work in progress.

The build up of the production will be complemented by an evening of treats and toys: Small Kitchen Big Taste will be serving “architectural food,” including slider and mashed potato stations to build-your-own-cupcakes, Thimble Island Brewery will feature locally crafted beers, and ABU's Chrissy Gardner and the Moody Food Trio will provide musical accompaniment. Guests are invited to try their hand at the engineering feat of Erector Set construction along with ABU’s crew of welders, carpenters and electricians.

A Broken Umbrella Theatre has presented site specific works in New Haven for the last five years and enjoyed perhaps their greatest triumph at last year’s Arts and Ideas Festival with Freewheelers. Come out, sneak a peak at their next production, become a patron, and have fun.

For more information, please visit www.abrokenumbrella.org, or contact Rachel Alderman at: 203.823.7988 or rachel@abrokenumbrella.org

Next week as well will see the 10th show of the season at the Yale Cabaret: 3rd-year YSD actress Elia Monte-Brown’s original play, The Defendant, about the rigors of public school in New York (where Monte-Brown taught); the play aims to recreate some of the anxieties of today’s student, and to question the values of public education in America, using all 1st year actors in the YSD program. January 23-25.

And on the last week of the month, January 31st, previews begin for the Yale Repertory Theatre’s next production: The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls, a world premiere from Whiting-Award winning playwright, and recent YSD graduate, Meg Miroshnik. Miroshnik's play, directed by two-time OBIE-Award-winning director Rachel Chavkin, who previously directed an Off-Broadway production of the celebrated musical Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, is set in 2005 as a twenty-year-old girl named Annie returns to her native Russia. Underneath the glamor of a Post-Soviet Moscow bedecked with high ticket consumer goods, Annie discovers a land of enchantment straight out of a fairytale, with evil stepmothers, wicked witches, and ravenous bears.

The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls opens officially on February 7, and runs til February 22.

Right Author, Wrong Book

Doris Lessing died last year. It got me thinking again about another one of my ongoing small problems as a reader, which I can explain very nicely with two writers as examples. The problem is: You love a writer, but for the wrong book. Another way to put it: The weird situation where you love a writer, but exclusively for the "lesser" works. When a writer gets famous, or develops a reputation for being particularly good at some thing or other, you’re supposed to gush over That Thing. Let me take as examples Doris Lessing (famous for her novel The Golden Notebook, embraced by feminists around the world; her political novel The Good Terrorist, and her sci-fi/fantasy novels) and Shirley Jackson, about whom I’ve written elsewhere for the New Haven Review. Shirley Jackson is known today mostly for her creepy fiction, novels such as We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Hangsaman, among many others.

Here is my problem: I have spent most of my life really admiring both of these writers, and regarding them with awe and wonder, and counting myself, really, truly, as an ardent fan, without having read any of these landmark titles.

Instead, I base my adoration of these writers on books that I think most critics would view as fluffy side projects. In the case of Doris Lessing, my love is based entirely -- entirely -- on a really skinny, scary-as-hell novel called The Fifth Child, which came out in 1988. (It’s actually a very Shirley Jacksonesque work, about a happy family that has four children, and then a fifth baby arrives, and Everything Changes and Not For the Better.) In the case of Shirley Jackson, my love is based on Life Among the Savages, which is just a collection of fictionalized essays about domestic life. (The connections here are fun to think about, aren’t they?)

And I have no plans to read We Have Always Lived in the Castle, or Hangsaman, or whatever else.

Now, in the case of Doris Lessing, I’ve long felt bad that this book, The Fifth Child, was the one that made such a big impression on me. I suppose it was bound to; I was never someone who liked small children, and always found them scary. The idea of ever being a mother was completely abhorrent to me: Never! Never! (Never mind that I am, in fact, a mother now.) It was a short novel (my favorite kind) that was taut and made me feel that my sense about children was not unfounded. And it was, you know, well-written, had a literary pedigree, was published by a fancy house, etc. etc. I think I read that book once a year for ages. I remember that it was one of the books I took with me when I went away to college. I wasn’t at all ashamed of my love for The Fifth Child, but I definitely felt guilty that none of Lessing’s other books held any interest for me. I thought it didn’t speak well of me that The Fifth Child was the Lessing book I knew and loved so well, and more to the point, I always felt like I was the only person who felt this way, who’d had this experience. (I acknowledge this, though: Perhaps I just wasn’t the right age for most of her books. There are definitely some writers where if you don’t read them at just the right phase of your life, there’s no point. My mother gave me copies of numerous Lessing books when I was a teenager, which I glanced at and then set aside, because I thought, “oh, who cares.” At the same time, though, I’ve never gotten rid of them. Maybe the time is now, and in 2014 I should put them on my list. I’ve actually begun to read Anna Karenina, recently, for the first time; this, if nothing else, proves that anything is possible, because I’ve been avoiding reading that for decades, now, in spite of the fact that I own two copies of it.)

I thought that The Fifth Child as the only Lessing book I knew and loved so well showed me to be a weak reader, somehow. More to the point, I always felt like I was the only person who felt this way, who’d had this experience. And then a couple days ago I finally got around to reading the issue of the New York Times Magazine that they do every December, the Lives They Lived issue, where writers and photographers do little pieces about the noteworthy and interesting people who died during the year. Of all people, of all books, Steve Almond wrote about Doris Lessing, and god bless him for making me see so clearly that I am not alone. His essay, which is a pleasure to read by the way, begins with this:

“My interest in Doris Lessing -- Nobel Prize winner and one of the most celebrated writers on earth -- derives from a single book, the 1988 novel The Fifth Child, which has haunted me for more than 20 years.”

I always knew I liked that Steve Almond. I don’t care about his fiction at all, by the way, but boy do I love that book Candy Freak.

Consulting Heidi Schreck

The new year has begun, and snow and cold have come to New Haven. But have no fear: The theater season resumes this week with the world premiere of The Consultant at the Long Wharf Theatre, the third full-length play by Heidi Schreck. Long Wharf patrons who saw the production of The Old Masters in 2011 may remember Heidi Schreck as Nicky Mariano. Schreck, an Obie Award-winning actress, has divided her time between acting and playwrighting since her days acting in her own plays at the Seattle Theatre Company. That’s where she got to know Gordon Edelstein and his welcome support of her projects, so that coming to the Long Wharf with a new play is much “like coming home”; The Consultant is directed by Schreck’s husband and former colleague at the Seattle Theatre Company, Kip Fagan.

Outside of theater, Schreck has held a number of positions that have played into her work. A stint as a journalist in Russia fueled her play There Are No More Secrets, and, after moving to New York with Fagen in 2003, a job as an ESL teacher and a coach for persons making business presentations became the basis for The Consultant. In the play, Amelia finds herself with the task of helping Jun Suk, a talented but insecure designer, present his designs at a New York pharmaceuticals company. She learns he has reasons for his insecurity as no one at Sutton, Feingold, and McGrath is quite sanguine about their future. Though Schreck’s experience in the corporate world predates a bit the attrition of the Great Recession, the sense of paranoia and pressure in her play certainly resonates with our times of high unemployment and jobs that are apt to disappear at a moment’s notice.

To Schreck, Amelia “is a lot like I was,” a bit detached from the corporate world, encountering people like Tania, an office assistant “over-educated for her job,” who seems to use the job simply to make ends meet, rather than pursuing a career. As a consultant, Schreck found that a lot of people “just want to talk, and are looking for a good listener” as a way to reflect on what’s happening with them. Amelia doesn’t play therapist, but is rather “our entry into this workplace,” as we begin to grasp its dynamic, perhaps with more clarity than she does. Amelia is only “looking for an opportunity to use her skills,” but, as Schreck sees it, “disaster”—like losing a job—“can sometimes be the opening to other opportunities.”

Watching the talented cast at the Long Wharf—Schreck says everyone is “exactly right” for their parts—Schreck has come to see a struggle in the play: “who’s play is it?” There are back stories to the male parts—Jun Suk (Nelson Lee) and Mark (Darren Goldstein)—that only come out bit by bit, and a certain recklessness in the air at times, particularly for Tania (Cassie Beck). Jun Suk is going through an awful time that has nothing to do with his job, but which has impact on his performance at work. Each character’s situation changes in the course of the play, and perhaps it’s Tania who changes the most, leading us to see that Amelia (Clare Barron) may be more witness than catalyst.

Rather than look to the kind of popular office comedies that have been on TV for decades—particulary the kinds of satire found in The Office—Schreck looks to the work of María Irene Fornés, finding inspiration in her off-beat, avant-garde productions that showcase the challenges women face in male environments. Schreck says she’s not interested in the absurdity of the workplace but rather in “the strange and surprising forms of tenderness” that can arise between workers facing similar challenges. No one is really at home in the work environment of The Consultant and all are coping in different ways. Part of the challenge of coping has to do with the possibilities of “self-invention and of finding one’s true values.”

The Consultant gets much of its comedy from the loose ends and unfinished business we sense in Schreck's characters. They are people not yet completely formed, not quite willing to be only what their jobs make of them, but also not really focused on what else to do with themselves. From her first play, Creature, about the medieval memoirist Margery Kempe’s decision to become “a saint” by living a spiritual life despite her bourgeois background, to her next play about work in a soup kitchen in the Bronx, Schreck continues to explore the question of faith, including “faith in other people.” She sees all her plays as asking questions about “figuring out how to live”—both at the level of how to get by, when one’s interests might be more spiritual or creative than most day jobs expect workers to be, and at the level of how best to live up to one’s potential and to do what is best for all in the kinds of imperiled environments we all cope with.

The Consultant premieres on Wednesday, January 8, with an official opening the following Wednesday, January 15, and runs til February 9.

Long Wharf Theatre 222 Sargent Drive, New Haven

203.787.4282 or longwharf.org