Mean Streets

Review of Brownsville Song (b-side for Tray) at Long Wharf Theatre

Kimber Lee’s Brownsville Song (b-side for Tray), at the Long Wharf Theatre, directed by Eric Ting, begins and ends with strong speeches that bookend the action of the play. At the outset, Lena (Catrina Ganey), a grandmother, refuses to begin the story—“this doesn’t begin with me,” she insists—while, at the end, Tray (Curtiss Cook Jr.), her grandson, finishes his reading of his college application essay with “this is the beginning.” Between those two speeches, which occur in reverse temporal order, we learn the hopeful and heartbreaking tale of Tray, an enterprising and engaging black boy in Brownsville, an area of Brooklyn known for its high crime rates, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Lena (Catrina Ganey)

We can infer at once that something bad will happen, since Lena’s speech amounts to a protest against the kind of news stories that note the killing of a young black male as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Lena insists that turning Tray into a statistic does additional violence—to his memory and to the facts of his young life.

Devine (Kaatje Welsh) and Tray (Curtiss Cook, Jr.)

The Tray we meet in the story is a dedicated Golden Gloves boxer, a doting older brother, a sassy but loving grandson, a dogged student trying to figure out how to write an application essay that doesn’t sound like everyone else. To that end, his coach enlists a tutor. And that tutor, Merrell (Sung Yun Cho), happens to be an Asian woman who had been married to Tray’s dad and gave birth to Devine (Kaatje Welsh), Tray’s half-sister. Tray’s father was also the victim of street violence and Merrell became a drug addict. Unable to cope with her husband’s death or to care for her daughter, Merrell has lost all ties to the family until now.

The structural problems with the storytelling in Brownsville Song come into play there. Tray’s story, segments of which are acted out for us, are almost a ‘back story’; add to that the back story of Tray’s father and Merrell, and the play sags a bit with the weight of the past and of some events we only hear about. That effect doesn’t harm the story of Tray, his grandmother and half-sister, because the scenes among them are lively and warm, despite the weight of the sad past and the even sadder future we are moving toward as a fait accompli. But in the case of Merrell, that back story feels unearned. She returns to Tray’s life as if desiring and deserving a second chance, but her earlier failures exist only as comments from Tray and his grandmother, and nothing in Merrell’s demeanor bespeaks the kind of life she has, ostensibly, lived. An attempt to make her likeable by showing her barely managing as a Starbucks’ cashier, a job Tray, a Starbucks manager, gives her, lightens things up a bit but doesn’t do much to help the thinness of the character.

Customer (Anthony Martinez-Briggs), Tray (Curtiss Cook, Jr.), Merrell (Sung Yun Cho)

Sung Yun Cho’s removed presence is an odd effect when everything else in the play is so vivid. The character of the strict but warm grandma may be a bit of a domestic cliché, but Ganey infuses the role with such vivacity we’re glad to be in her company throughout, including a very touching moment when she concedes that, after all, Tray was a better person that she. As Devine, young Kaatje Welsh shines in her performance of a dance routine that Tray coaxes out of her, and is able to be withdrawn without appearing sulky; we see that her relation with her brother has to do with keeping him focused on what matters—summed up in the simple slogan “hugs not thugs” with which Tray teases his grandma.

Junior (Anthony Martinez-Briggs) and Lena (Catrina Ganey)

The play makes clear the fine line Tray, played with affecting naturalness by Cook, walks between the world he’s trying to hold together for the sake of his own future and his family’s well-being and the world of the streets, which is never without threat. Tray’s buddy, Junior (Anthony Martinez-Briggs) brings those tensions into focus when he tries to account to Lena about what happened to her grandson. It’s a dialogue that feels genuine because the boy wants to assert himself while also sparing the feelings of a woman who knew him as a child. Lena’s tough love toward a self-styled street kid feels very much to the point. The gap between the domestic space of caring and comfort and the unpredictable dangers and pressures of gangland is very real.

Scott Bradley’s set cleverly shows us the kitchen and bedroom of a Brownsville apartment as well as the surrounding streets and alleys, and even a Starbucks, creating an open playing space able to shift time frames as events are recalled and presented. The core of it all is the kitchen table where Lena holds court; in the periphery are the streets where sirens sound and headlights flash, where Tray tries to entertain a dejected Devine, and agrees, warily but sympathetically, to let Merrell back into his life.

Curtiss Cook, Jr., as Tray

The construction of the play is such as to elicit cheers for a young man’s hopes and purpose, even as we know that “the beginning” of which he speaks, in a stirring evaluation of his family and himself, is followed, tragically, by a swift and senseless end. Lee and Ting make us feel the loss but also the positive effects of a life brutally short but never hopeless or pointless. In that sense, Brownsville Song (b-side for Tray) lives up to its intention to pay tribute without flinching from the hard truth at its heart.

Brownsville Song (b-side for Tray)
By Kimber Lee
Directed by Eric Ting

Set Design: Scott Bradley; Costume Design: Toni-Leslie James; Lighting Design: Russell H. Champa; Sound Design: Ryan Rumery; Production Stage Manager: Kathy Snyder; Assistant Stage Manager: Amy Patricia Stern, Theresa Stark

Long Wharf Theatre, March 25-April 19, 2015

Hear the Angels' Voices

Review of Sister Sandman Please at Yale Cabaret

With Jessica Rizzo’s Sister Sandman Please, the Yale Cabaret showcases the kind of experimental work that, in many ways, the basement theater does best. While it’s always worthwhile to see small-scale productions of new or lesser known plays, or devised pieces that bring together various aspects of community to tell stories of our times, a play like Sister Sandman uses the space to present a wholly theatrical and relational work. We’re watching a form of playing that plays with how plays—and audiences—are played.

Baize Buzan, Ashley Chang, Sydney Lemmon

The most definite aspect of Sister Sandman Please is how Rizzo and her crew remind us that “setting” and “stage” in a play is not simply the visual, physical space, but is also the aural. And while last week’s show, The Medium, an opera, demonstrated how well music and singing can enhance and expand acting, this week’s show makes a further point: what we hear not only interacts with what we see, but can, through recordings, create alternative features, other presences.

Wiley McDrew (Ben Graham) and A (Ashley Chang)

The “story” centers on three sisters—A (Ashley Chang), B, or Minnie (Sydney Lemmon), C, or Ada (Baize Buzan)—who sit at a breakfast table, passing around different sections of the New York Times. The soundtrack, initially, is a loop of crunching sounds occasionally broken up by comments and mutterings. There is a tension here as of persons who know one another only too well and can “hear” the unspoken things in each others’ minds. At times there are verbal outbursts between the three, and eventually a veritable Marlboro man of a cowboy, Wiley McDrew (Ben Graham), arrives to spark rivalries. “A” immediately flies to his arms and makes out with him passionately, but that, we assume, is just a fantasy. He’s really more interested in C, who he courts in a more laconic fashion, while her sisters wrestle on the floor and Minnie makes goo-goo eyes at him.

Wiley McDrew (Ben Graham) and Ada (Baize Buzan)

The action is accompanied by aural overlays that create textures and moods that are difficult to describe. Sometimes it’s a monologue, as when a voice (Anna Crivelli) starts talking about her tumbleweed business on the internet. Tumbleweeds are used to create a Christmas tree of sorts and “A” dons Christmas lights, answered by a string of lights on Wiley. And yet the match doesn't come off, so she convulses on the floor, and Ada, who walks about stirring a big pot, eventually becomes the sister who is “expecting.” “A” proceeds to drown her sorrows at some length, drinking from a bottle of whiskey while prone on the floor.

Ashley Chang as A

Indeed, Chang nearly runs away with the play as her show-stopping, unhinged belting of “O Holy Night,” while perched on the table top, is funny, visceral, and oddly charming, a Christmas carol as torch song. The others hold their own—Lemmon seems to be the oldest sister, the kind of heroine one might find in a frontier story or in some naturalistic drama set in the Midwest: her prop is a clipboard and a managerial air. Buzan plays up the country lass manner, all-too-ready to be the new mom left behind by that rolling tumbleweed of a man. She wants to know what color crayon she should give their son to color with. Clad in a vampire cape and fangs, Wiley McDrew is given his send-off as though by a trio of moms sending him off to school.

Christopher Ross-Ewart

Accompanying the live action and the recordings is Christopher Ross-Ewart on electric guitar and vocals. His contribution is subtle at first, but by play’s end the swirling sustain of his guitar begins to override the action. The trio sits again at the table, now with suitcases full of newspapers, and the tone is elegiac but also uplifting. What has happened, what have they learned? We might think of three fates or furies or of sisters who always dreamed of Moscow, but, however we regard the return with a difference, the close feels open-ended. At the most basic level, their lives have been changed irrevocably, because a child is on the way, but they are also the same as they were before, living out the repetitive figments of their own existences.

Sydney Lemmon as C

The setting—a country-kitchen table, a floor of linoleum—is spare, the tumbleweed Christmas tree is comical but also an art sculpture, the costumes are “country gal.” Elizabeth Green’s lighting directs our visual attention while loops of sound effects, voices, and other textures create a more impressionistic aura. Sister Sandman Please may sound rather enigmatic when described, but while watching it, one is struck again and again by surprising and intriguing shifts in tone and implication.

Coherence is mannerism; the inchoate occurs.

Baize Buzan as Ada

Sister Sandman Please
Written and directed by Jessica Rizzo

Dramaturg: Ilinca Todorut; Lighting Design: Elizabeth Green; Set Design: Samantha Lazar; Costume Design: Sylvia Zhang; Composiiton/Sound Design: Chris Ross-Ewart; Stage Manager: Sally Shen; Production Manager: Kat Wepler; Producer: Sally Shen; Photos: Joey Moro

Yale Cabaret, April 2-4, 2015

Honor Thy Mother

Review of The Pianist of Willesden Lane at Hartford Stage

We could all probably tell stories of sacrifices our parents made for us, but, for most, the particulars would be rather mundane. The story of sacrifice behind The Pianist of Willesden Lane, now playing at Hartford Stage, is anything but.

Mona Golabek in The Pianist of Willesden Lane

Piano virtuoso Mona Golabek plays her mother Lisa Jura, the eponymous heroine of the play, who recounts her adventures as a child, during the rise of Naziism in Austria, her escape to London, and her eventual success as a concert pianist. Jura’s parents placed her upon the Kindertransport—a train that carried over 10,000 Jewish children from persecution in Nazi-occupied Europe to freedom in England—not knowing if she would arrive safely and having to choose her over her two sisters as the family could only afford one seat on the train.

The sisters, it turns out, did escape by other means, though the parents did not. With that kind of dire incentive, Jura, whose mother, Malka, urged her to depend upon music for help in dark times, went on to study classical piano and, in turn, taught her daughter. The bond between Lisa Jura and Mona Golabek is the spiritual tie that animates this straight-forward and inspiring tale, and that bond is based on music and the piano. Golabek, who speaks directly to the audience and recounts vignettes from her memoir of her mother, The Children of Willesden Lane: Beyond the Kindertransport: A Memoir of Music, Love, and Survival, lets the music of Grieg, Beethoven, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and Scriabin establish the world that all three women—Malka, Lisa, and Mona—shared. We hear in Golabek’s expressive live playing the passion Lisa brought to the keyboard, so that Golabek’s musical performance pays tribute to her mother’s own development as a musician, using music to tell the story of how playing piano created both an identity and a consolation for Lisa.

The story opens with a very dramatic moment: Lisa, on her way to her piano lesson in Vienna in 1938, encounters a brusque Nazi soldier, then her teacher, after greeting her ashamedly, tells her he is now forbidden to teach Jewish students. The fact that she can no longer study music, it seems, is what determines the choice of Lisa as the child who will go to England. The departure itself is not over-dramatized, with Golabek and director Hershey Felder staying true to the nature of a memory play. We know from the start that our teller lives to have a successful career and to raise an adult child. As a survivor’s tale, The Pianist of Willesden Lane keeps before us the luck and determination needed to succeed, both of which Lisa Jura had, and of course talent. We see her resourcefulness when the family she was intended to stay with can’t house her, and she leaves the home they place her in, where her piano playing is not deemed “a skill,” to find a much more nurturing home on Willesden Lane. Later, her wartime stint in a piano bar playing Gershwin and show-tunes for soldiers earns her not a few admirers. One follows her to America, where Lisa goes to continue her career, and eventually marries her, becoming Mona’s father.

The storytelling is abetted by large screens disguised as period gilt mirrors hanging above the handsome Steinway piano onstage. The screens show family photos and clips from the streets of Vienna and London, and of the D-day invasion, helping to sketch the world that acts as backdrop to Lisa’s upbeat story. Golabek says her mother would tell her stories of wartime while teaching her the piano, and the play, as a dramatization of the daughter’s memoir, lets audiences experience the interplay of music and memory much as Golabek herself must. Particularly effective in this regard is the scene when Lisa auditions for the Royal Academy and a voice offstage instructs her when to switch between the pieces she has learned with much painstaking aid from her other inmates at Willesden Lane. The well-known bits of Beethoven, Chopin and others are both showpieces and a learned language between mother and daughter.

Felder and Golabek strike a nice balance: the music is Romantic, the storytelling is restrained. The veracity of the tale is aided by Golabek’s lack of staginess or pretension. Mimicking accents and mannerisms when the story calls for it, she is a rather self-effacing and untheatrical story-teller, letting musicianship, each time she steps to the piano, shine as the true hero of the tale. Without music her mother might not have survived or at least might have had little to live for, and without music she would not have an enduring connection to her mother and the grandmother she never knew.

The emotional tide of surviving surges up at the end when the play pays tribute to those who were able to make such difficult decisions for the sake of their children over themselves. We realize that The Pianist of Willesden Lane is an extended form of keeping the Commandment to honor thy father and mother. The production at Hartford Stage, with its very elegant staging on the semi-circular playing space, makes the show seem more like “a talk” with music rather than “a show” and that’s all to the good, establishing the bona fides of this direct and fascinating tale of destruction, hope, love, talent, and music.

Mona Golabek in The Pianist of Willesden Lane
Based on the book The Children of Willesden Lane by Mona Golabek and Lee Cohen
Adapted and Directed by Hershey Felder

Scenic Design: Trevor Hay, Hershey Felder; Costume Design: Jaclyn Maduff; Lighting Designer: Jason Bieber; Original Lighting Design: Christopher Rynne; Sound Design: Erik Cartensen; Projection Design: Andrew Wilder, Greg Sowizdrzal; Dramaturg: Cynthia Caywood, PhD; Associate Direction: Trevor Hay; Production Manager: Erik Cartensen; Production Stage Manager: Kaitlin Lavella Kelly; Scenic Decoration: Meghan Maiya, Emma Hay, Jordan Hay; Hartford Stage Production Manager: Bryan T. Holcombe; Associate Artistic Director: Elizabeth Williamson

Hartford Stage, March 26-April 26, 2015

Won't You Join the Trance?

Review of The Medium at Yale Cabaret

Opera and cabaret? Aren’t those forms mutually exclusive? We expect opera to be performed in posh, decorative halls, the kind that cater to a certain upscale clientele. While cabaret is traditionally ad hoc, low rent, luring those with a taste for the demimonde. Yale Cabaret, of course, is not, strictly speaking, a cabaret in that sense. It’s a small-scale performance space which, this weekend, hosted performances of Gian Carlo Menotti’s “chamber opera” The Medium, directed by Anh Lê of the Yale School of Drama and featuring an eclectic cast drawn from YSD, the Yale School of Music, and elsewhere. Lê is adamant that opera needn’t be a blue-haired special, but is as vital as any form of theater, that it can get down and dirty, and can get its passion and power across even without full instrumentation.

And Lê is right. With Menotti’s full score skillfully reduced by music director Jill Brunelle for her own solo piano, the Cab’s version of The Medium emphasized the strength of the acting. And the intimacy of the Cabaret is perfect for this particular opera, which presents the vicissitudes of fake medium Madame Flora (Janna Baty), who lords it over her winsome daughter Monica (Lynda A. H. Paul) and her factotum Toby (José Ramón Sabín Lestayo), a mute Gypsy boy she took in off the streets. We first meet Monica and Toby as they play dress-up, with Toby an imagined prince and Monica a princess. We feel the shabbiness of their dreams, even as the music lets us thrill to them. The strength of the story-telling is abetted by Adrian Martinez Frausto’s lovingly crafted set, full of a down-at-heels Old World charm that lets us know the streets are never too far away for this trio.

Lynda A. H. Paul (Monica), Janna Baty (Madame Flora), José Ramón Sabín Lestayo (Toby)

The way to make money, for Madame Flora, is via a different kind of make-believe: she succors heartbroken parents of deceased children—or, to put it less kindly, she fleeces them. Two such are Mr. and Mrs. Gobineau (Sterling Liška and Kelly Hill), who fill us in on the nature of their bereavement by imparting their story to a newcomer, Mrs. Nolan (Rae Powell). The naturalness of the “dialogue” amongst this trio attests to Menotti’s command of setting straight-forward English to music. The score, with its full panoply of strings and woodwinds, would, I’m sure, give a much greater rhapsody to these plaintive tales of lost children, and yet much of the essential spirit comes through in Hill's sensitive vocal. Liška, particularly, is welcome as the only male voice in the piece, giving an extra gravitas to this most respectable couple who lost their son when he was only two, via a terrible accident. They come to Madame Flora so she can conjure up the little boy’s playful laugh, a sign that he is happy beyond the grave.

Mrs. Nolan (Rae Powell), Madame Flora (Janna Baty), Mrs. and Mr. Gobineau (Kelly Hill, Sterling Liška)

The laugh, and the apparition of, supposedly, Mrs. Nolan’s sixteen-year-old daughter’s ghost are provided by Monica, and, indeed Monica is intrinsic to both Madame Flora’s “show” and Menotti’s. Paul sings most of the melody lines that remain with you after the show, including the haunting line—for Mrs. Nolan’s benefit—“Mother, Mother, are you there?” Later, high-spirits are worked off with a delightful segment in which she sings “Monica, Monica…” while dancing a waltz-time spin with Toby.

But all is not well. Madame Flora, in the midst of her pretend trance, feels a hand go for her throat. Naturally, she blames Toby because she pretty much always blames Toby. But she’s uncertain and unnerved. The aria in which Flora sings of all the sad and awful things she’s seen, without blinking an eye, only to be undone by this phantasmal hand, is full of a musing pride and sorrow to which Baty does full justice. Elsewhere, Flora is less sympathetic as she manhandles Toby while the piano seems to work as a demonic goad.

The solo instrument and the singers’ voices create a fascinating interplay throughout the evening, often manifesting a somber effect greatly aided by Andrew Griffin’s lighting design—which recreates period illumination—coupled with Frausto’s heavy drapes and distressed plaster, while Hayden Zelideth’s costumes, particularly the gypsy-like get-up Flora hangs out in and the gown she wears for séances, add to the overall illusion of genteel Bohemia.

With Lestayo’s very expressive eyes seeming to see things we can’t (as Flora says), and the music expressing more than anyone says, there’s a sense in which “the medium” of art evokes the limits of imaginative rapport and the limits of human truth. When Flora tries to expose her tricks to get rid of her clients, they don’t believe her. Mr. Gobineau suggests she only thought she was tricking them but that the reality is more than she can know. Menotti, it seems, shares this view to some extent and that uncertainty works. If there’s more here than meets the eye, it’s because what fills our ears makes us susceptible to other flights of fancy. Like the inaudible voice of Toby that Monica claims is the most beautiful, the invisible hand—of guilt? of truth? of the dead?—may be the most powerful.

Haunting, magical, and richly rewarding, The Medium establishes a new high standard for music and theater—in short, opera—at the Cab.

The Medium
An Opera by Gian Carlo Menotti
Directed by Anh Lê

Assistant Director and Dramaturg: Rachel Carpman; Music Director and Pianist: Jill Brunelle; Scenic Designer: Adrian Martinez Frausto; Costume Designer: Haydee Zelideth; Lighting Designer: Andrew Griffin; Sound Designer: Jon Roberts; Stage Manager: Anita Shastri; Production Manager: Alyssa Best, Rae Powell; Fight Choreographers: Emily DeNardo, Anita Shastri; Producer: Rebekah Heusel

Yale Cabaret, March 26-28, 2015

Casting Doubt

Review of Doubt, New Haven Theater Company

John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, staged by the New Haven Theater Company, directed by George Kulp, is a play about suspicion, rather than “doubt,” and from that a lot follows. The famous play, set at a Catholic school in the Bronx, concerns a priest, Father Flynn (Steve Scarpa), a school principal, Sister Aloysius (Margaret Mann), and a school teacher, Sister James (Mallory Pellegrino), and the title might invite the idea that the play is about doubting one’s vocation within the clergy, or perhaps about faith in general. But Shanley wants to probe touchier topics than that. So he concocts a play in which a priest is suspected by a tough nun of molesting a young student, a black boy we never see. My doubts aren't about the characters but rather about the play.

Since the play was written and first staged after proof of priests’ sexual misconduct and molestation of their students became a scandal and an outrage, the “automatic” assumption for its audience is that Father Flynn, with his longer-than-usual fingernails and tendency to sugar his tea (he must be decadent!), has tried to seduce Donald Muller, a boy who Sister James observed acting “strange” after a private conference with Flynn. She also smelled wine on the boy’s breath.

“Doubt,” as a theme, comes in right there. Do we agree with the unflinching, unbending, humorless and ever-vigilant Sister Aloysius who is certain Flynn is—to use the term of the time of the play’s setting (1964), though the word is never used—a deviant? Or do we doubt it? That is the situation, and, as such, would seem to be a question of evidence rather than conscience. How do we make up our minds about behavior we have not observed? How do we read a person’s character? What do we use as evidence? Can we ever overcome “reasonable doubt”?

I have to confess that much of my doubt, with regard to Shanley’s play, comes from my sense that, in 1964, a nun of Sister Aloysius’s age would not be so likely to jump to such conclusions with such a flimsy pretext. What Shanley banks on is that his audience, in a very different time, won’t find a problem with the way she puts the scant evidence together, and he goes so far as to stack the deck further by providing the boy with a mother (Aleta Staton) all-too-willing to tell a principal and nun that her boy is “that way.” He's twelve years old!

But enough about my problems with what Shanley hath wrought in his Pulitzer and Tony winning play. What about the NHTC production? Since the play is dialogue-driven, with clearly marked situations, Kulp and his actors make the most of the straight-forward nature of the characters, with no attempt to slant us one way or another. Key to that neutral approach is Father Flynn. If he looks a bit guilty, if he acts a bit “questionable,” then we can decide accordingly.

Steve Scarpa as Father Flynn

Scarpa’s Flynn seems more outraged at insubordination and a nun’s meddling with his attempt to help a minority child, than he is at the allegations. Scarpa, in other words, plays Flynn “straight,” in all meanings of the term. He comes across as what his words suggest: a man who wants priests to be friends to their flocks rather than stern wardens. Would he give a boy wine to calm him? Possibly. Would he touch a boy in a manner that might be deemed (particularly by Sister Aloysius) too intimate—if only to wipe away the pain of the beatings given the boy by his dad? Possibly. Such possibilities float before us, and Shanley wants to use the politics of a later time when same-sex acts were no longer illegal as they were in 1964 to color our perception of the past. But Flynn's best line, that certainty is just an emotion, sounds a bit sophistic when offered in self-defense.

As Sister Aloysius, Mann is particularly well cast. She has a steely gaze able to scan the distance, looking upon the crash of civilization and all that is holy if students write with ballpoints rather than fountain pens or sing “Frosty the Snowman” at Christmas pageants. We have no doubt that, regardless of Shanley’s use of a topical theme, the good Sister would be doing her utmost to bring down her lax and condescending superior, if only because he represents a disturbing trend. She knows what’s best, and that’s that.

At the heart of Doubt—and that’s what makes it good theater—is the clash of wills. Mann’s Aloysius is the kind of quite correct Catholic that gives the others a bad name—and is happy to do so. But for her “evil” assumptions, Sister Aloysius is fully of her time, and not entirely unsympathetic. In her we hear the voice of every elder we’ve ever encountered who believes standards are declining. What's more, given that she truly believes what she assumes about Father Flynn, she must act.

Sister James is also well-conceived by Shanley. She’s the sweet, pretty nun, the kind whose very existence was being revolutionized by the Broadway smash (1959) and subsequent film, The Sound of Music (1965), so that being full of feeling and enthusiasm was deemed the best way to reach children raised with television. Aloysius is against all that, of course, and Pellegrino does a good job of getting across how Sister James’ meekness wars with her ambition. She wants to be a beloved teacher, but she doesn’t want to flaunt the edicts of her superior. Pellegrino’s very busy eyes say a lot when they’re avoiding all eye contact.

Margaret Mann (Sister Aloysius), Mallory Pellegrino (Sister James)

Doubt gets right the tensions within the hierarchy of power that make this battle one in which viewers might be tempted to break along gender lines, as priests and nuns follow different orders and the power of the priest is considerable. A telling moment is when Flynn, asked to come to Sister Aloysius' office, sits at her desk to preside over the meeting.

The role of Mrs. Muller, in her private conference with Sister Aloysius, is given a wise “I’ve heard it all before” reading by Aleta Staton, though I find the role as written a bit hard to grasp. What mother volunteers to someone like Sister Aloysius (and can anyone have doubts about her?) that her twelve-year-old son might “want to be caught” by a man like Father Flynn? None would, if she wants to keep the boy in the school. Maybe a mother a bit more dim or desperate might help sell Shanley’s improbable scene.

In the end, as “a parable,” Doubt wants to prod viewers to make up their own minds about the situation and its resolution. It could be said that neither Father Flynn nor Sister Aloysius gets the result desired. You may be pleased with the outcome, but I doubt it.

Doubt (a parable)
By John Patrick Shanley
Directed by George Kulp

Cast: Margaret Mann; Mallory Pellegrino; Steve Scarpa; Aleta Staton; Stage Manager: Erich Greene; Board Operator: Ally Kaechele

The New Haven Theater Company, March 5-7 & 12-14, 2015

Strangers in the Night

Review of Reverberation at Hartford Stage

Reverberation, the new play by Matthew Lopez now playing at Hartford Stage, directed by Maxwell Williams, presents a story of coping with trauma. It’s been a year since a terrible thing happened in the life of Jonathan (Luke Macfarlane), an illustrator of condolence cards, who has been living in the same apartment building in Astoria for 15 years. In fact, he lived for all but the last year with his partner Gabriel in the apartment above his current domicile. The change in apartments was his first act in trying to cope.

Claire (Aya Cash),  Jonathan (Luke Macfarlane)

We learn this before the end of the Act I, but when we first meet him, Jonathan seems merely a withdrawn loner. He hates leaving his apartment after dark and his only contact with others comes via down-and-dirty hook-ups via Grindr (an app for males prowling for other males). The play opens in medias res—in the midst of intense coupling between Jonathan and a younger man, Wes (Carl Lundstedt). Wes is more or less blown away by the sex and actually tries to be sincere about it afterwards. Jonathan just wants him out of there.

Wes (Carl Lundstedt) and Jonathan (Luke Macfarlane)

Next, Jonathan similarly blows off his upstairs neighbor, Claire (Aya Cash), a female gadabout in her late twenties. Claire, who rightly claims she’s “barely domesticated,” leads what seems a party-girl lifestyle. About the only things she owns are an inflatable mattress, a tube TV, a camp chair and, most importantly, a clothes-rack full of designer stuff—and when she really needs something high end, she “borrows” it from the department store where she works. A need for help with a zipper on one such to-die-for dress is what first sends her to Jonathan’s apartment where she doesn’t attempt to seduce him so much as attempt to induce sex. It gets awkward fast and soon she’s out the door and Jonathan is onto his next anonymous coupling.

Of course, this is going to be about how getting to know the girl next door turns things around for this guy, at least for that lonely time of year, from pre-Thanksgiving to just before Christmas, that occupies the play. By the end of Act I, after he spills to her the horrible hate-crime killing of his lover Gabriel, Jonathan and Claire are actually sleeping together—just sleeping. It’s sweet, and that’s what Claire thinks Jonathan is. He knows better, and tries to warn her. The question hanging in the air at the end of Act I is: is this a play about redemption through connection, as a gay man learns to overcome a traumatic event that cost him the love of his life, or is it about how the dark side can destroy even the best of provisional buddies?

Claire (Aya Cash) and Jonathan (Luke Macfarlane)

When Act II opens we feel like we’re in some zippy rom-com where Jonathan becomes more or less a mothering “girlfriend” to mostly friendless Claire—her only contacts apart from Jonathan, despite her age, appearance, and keen fashion sense, are married men who take her out and then expect to bed her. Life for these urban anyones is all about quid pro quo sex acts until Claire and Jonathan begin to care for each other because they get to know each other—and a dreamy Christmas in a cabin in Vermont is, no lie, what they have in mind for a getaway. And we may be hoping that’s where Lopez wants to take us, showing how “two lonely people, strangers in the night” can share a dance and a kiss and flirt with the notion that they can be in love with each other and not be lovers. Sure.

Jonathan (Luke Macfarlane) and Claire (Aya Cash)

Off-stage is a “Real Real Boy” who seems the kind of Gentleman Caller our Claire has been awaiting all this time, though we might suspect she’s also been dodging such in her knocking about with dealers—cards in Vegas, drugs in L.A.—as well as time in Paris and London, to say nothing of “way too long” in Orlando. In other words, Claire keeps on the move, and when she stands up Real Real Boy, it echoes the story Wes, who returns to Jonathan, fatefully, to try once more, tells about the reason he was on Grindr in the first place: he got stood up by friends on his birthday. Lopez’s characters are the people romantic comedies are never about. They’re the people who know that relationships don’t work out or that, when they do, someone comes along and bashes it.

Luke Macfarlane as Jonathan in Reverberation

I’ve stressed the importance of trauma in the character of Jonathan because it’s easy to be fooled by his coping mechanisms. And everything he does is a coping mechanism. Somewhere underneath it all—the hiding and the warmth—is a very, very raw nerve ready to snap. Macfarlane plays Jonathan quite believably as the sort of guy who is wrapped so tightly he’s a mystery even to himself. Early on, a clichéd phonecall from Mom and Dad, anxious about whether he’s coming home for Thanksgiving, could have been used to give us something more than irked refusals to share, but, even so, Macfarlane lets body language and very neutral tones tell us a lot more than his words do, as we spy upon this man.

And looking on as voyeurs is key to the theatrical experience here. Andromache Chalfant’s amazingly detailed set creates two completely different spaces: the Spartan look of Claire’s contrasts the lived-in clutter—complete with huge paintings by the late Gabriel on every available wall—of Jonathan’s space. And Matthew Richards’ lighting acts almost like another character or at least a narrator. We see how eerie the dark spaces can be at night, as Jonathan’s nightmares make him call into uncertain shadows in his own apartment and the darkness above in Claire’s, while morning light makes everything feel homey and communal. The stairs outside the apartments' doors also plays its part, not simply as connection between two floors and, initially, two worlds, but also as a space of impromptu encounters. Williams’ direction and the set design make great use of open and closed doors.

Claire (Aya Cash) and Jonathan (Luke Macfarlane)

As Claire, Aya Cash doesn’t play to the Holly Golightly or Sally Bowles comparisons one might be tempted to make; she’s not a loveable kook nor a sly charmer. She’s just an average youngish woman who considers herself too ordinary to expect anything extraordinary from life. Lopez wisely keeps her from ever becoming a succoring figure in the relationship, a fact that’s important to the play’s ending. And as Wes, Carl Lundstedt plays with perfect pitch the hardest scene of all: a smitten lover trying to be real rather than charming or clever or sexy.

Wes (Carl Lundstedt), Jonathan (Luke Macfarlane)

Reverberation is a sensitive and provocative play, often entertaining in its speech rhythms and interactions, fun to watch in its use of movement and space and light, and full of the cadences of people dropping their façades and picking them up again. Even the lines that don’t quite work—there’s a particularly egregious use of the “sympathy card” idea at a key point—are within the realm of what these characters might attempt for a laugh or a stab at depth or as avoidance. Elements such as the right song at the wrong time may seem heavy as “triggers,” and the play’s dramatic outcome too sudden, but the final tableau takes us and Jonathan back to where he’s been all along.

Reverberation
By Matthew Lopez
Directed by Maxwell Williams

Set Design: Andromache Chalfont; Costume Design: Linda Cho; Lighting Design: Matthew Richards; Sound Design: Tei Blow; Dramaturg: Elizabeth Williamson; Stage Manager: Marisa Levy; Assistant Stage Manager: Arielle Goldstein; Assistant Director: Sarah Hartman; Production Assistant: Chandalae Nyswonger

Hartford Stage, February 19-March 15, 2015

Puppets of Popo and Pipi

Review of Leonce and Lena at Yale Cabaret

Georg Büchner was a genius and also something of an enfant terrible. He died in 1813 at the age of 23, having written a few plays and a novella, works that more or less tore up the terrain. Like Rimbaud in French poetry, Büchner is a figure that, once he became recognized, can lay claim to having originated so much. Steeped in Shakespeare in the age of Goethe, a revolutionary, a Romantic as only the highly ironic German Romantics can be, Büchner, in Leonce and Lena, the latest show at the Yale Cabaret, lampoons aristocracy, court life, melancholy princes, the relation of master to man, and the course of true love. It’s a wild ride made wilder by Emily Baldasarra’s creepy puppets and Haydee Zelideth’s colorful costumes and greasepaint. Written in 1836, Leonce and Lena gives a comeuppance to every notion of comic drama that precedes it and to most that succeed it.

Directed by Elizabeth Dinkova and Gavin Whitehead, who also translated Büchner’s heady text, full of verbal sallies and philosophical silliness, Leonce and Lena is the kind of play that cries out for staging in the Cabaret. This is a show that wants us to see the strings, so to speak, not simply because theater is illusion and all that, but because characters and actors are “puppets” even when they’re flesh and blood. Büchner is the sort of writer who keeps up his sleeve the fact that nothing’s up his sleeve. The play’s pay-off is the happily ever-after of unmasked automatons. When it comes to “holding as ‘twere the mirror up to nature,” Büchner early on sussed that “there’s no there there” and we’re all clad in borrowed robes.

It’s a big cast, with some notable Cab debuts: first of all there’s dramaturg Josh Goulding as Leonce when at court in the kingdom of Popo. Goulding’s natural Brit accent lends a welcome diction to Leonce’s ennui. Addressing himself in the third person, Leonce calls upon himself to deliver—and does—a suitably self-involved soliloquy, a high-point of comic inflation. As Leonce’s man Valerio, Ricardo Dávila shines as an exacting servant, a Pierrot full of asides and commentary, trying to keep his master to some kind of recognizable code of conduct. And Anna Crivelli's Lena, princess of Pipi, kicks against the role of love interest with some imaginative flights of her own, attended by Lynda A. H. Paul as her doting governess.

There are also many Cab encores: to Edmund Donovan falls the less abrasive Leonce of the Italian sojourn, which is to say the Leonce who falls in love with Lena once he hears her voice. Some much appreciated comic bits are served up by cast members with a puppet on each hand—Juliana Canfield provides slow-witted servants and Nahuel Telleria, in a wonderfully energetic segment, two flatfoots trying to decide how to proceed. The stringed puppets are ably manned by Steven C. Koernig (Schoolmaster), Telleria (President and General), and David Clauson (Master of Ceremonies). Last but not least is the dull-minded babble and erratic mutterings of King Peter, another bright comic turn from Sebastian Arboleda, last seen at the Cab as one of Catwoman’s doltish, dancing henchman in Catfight.

In performance, Leonce and Lena loses some of its sparkle during Leonce’s Italian adventures, which may be attributable to the fact that both Goulding and Arboleda are offstage for too long, since they early on give the play its antic tone. Clambering about on boxes to simulate a trek over rough terrain, and coming to terms with the more lyrical side of life are somewhat diverting, but not nearly as rich for satiric send-up as life at court.

The “mistaken identity” ploy of many a romance is served-up here with Leonce and Lena both in flight from their arranged marriage, only to find themselves inevitably drawn to one another, if only because that’s what the plot, or the gods (and that’s the same thing in theater), demand. Büchner’s final flourish is having two automatons wed in the couple’s stead, if only so that Peter’s edict not go unfulfilled. All are pleased when the box-headed creatures turn out to be the lovers who have found themselves amenable to what they had resisted. All’s well that ends well, and our puppets please us best by seeming happy with what we make them do.

Amidst the shenanigans is Büchner worrying the inevitable clash of free will with law in an absolutist state while seeking what might be called full artistic license. Whitehead’s text exults in the verbal flights and his and Dinkova’s puppet show plays up the theme of the arbitrary necessity of dramatic plots. One wonders if, had he lived, Büchner would have stuck with theater. He never managed to finish his best-known work, Woyzeck, which may be a way of saying that sending up, as with Leonce and Lena, “the well-made play” doesn’t help one construct a play according to a different aesthetic. There’s no happy ending for those born before their time.

Leonce and Lena
Written by Georg Büchner
Translated by Gavin Whitehead
Directed by Elizabeth Dinkova and Gavin Whitehead

Scenic Design: William Hartley, Elizabeth Dinkova; Costume Design: Haydee Zelideth; Sound Design: Tom Larkey; Lighting Design: Elizabeth Mak; Puppet Design: Emily Baldasarra; Technical Director: William Hartley; Dramaturg: David Clauson; Production Manager: Lee O’Reilly; Associate Production Manager: Rae Powell; Stage Manager: Avery Trunko; Producer: Adam Frank; Photos: Joey Moro

Yale Cabaret, March 5-8, 2014

Kvetching Cousins

Review of Bad Jews at Long Wharf Theatre Joshua Harmon’s Bad Jews, directed by Oliver Butler, brings to the Long Wharf the sharpest comedy I’ve seen there. This is comedy that draws blood, where the situations, so far from smacking of sit-com chuckles or of Woody Allenesque irony, are fraught with the awkward and the unpleasant. Like the stuff that really happens when families get together.

At the basis of Bad Jews is what Jewishness is supposed to mean to the current crop of twenty-somethings. Poppy, the patriarch who survived the Holocaust and kept his father’s heirloom chai pendant—a combination of two Hebrew letters that signifies “life”—beneath his tongue for two years in the death camps, has just passed away. At his daughter’s Upper West Side apartment they’re sitting shiva, but the play takes place in an efficiency the family keeps for guests—in this case, two sons home from college who can’t stay in their parents’ apartment because the bedroom of the younger, Jonah (Max Michael Miller), has become a home office, while the room of Liam (Michael Steinmetz), the older, is hosting a visiting aunt and uncle; also staying in the efficiency is the daughter of the latter couple, Daphna, née Diana (Keilly McQuail), the boys’ cousin. The efficiency, located in the same building as the parental spread, is equipped with a pull-out sofa and two inflatable air mattresses, slumber-party style. And it’s here that a comic drama of blood and guts and laughs unfolds.

When she wants to ingratiate herself, as she does with her video-game-playing, boxers-wearing cousin Jonah, Daphna is gooey and persistent. He seems an easy going sort and no match for her stated intent to have Poppy’s chai for herself, as she, in her hyper-awareness of Jewishness, feels she so clearly deserves. We can assume this isn’t going to go over so well with older cousin Liam, who soon arrives, accompanied by his shiksa girlfriend Melody (Christy Escobar), both fresh from the slopes of Aspen, cutting short a ski trip to pay respects, but not in time for the funeral.

Served up in short order are two amazing dressing-downs: Liam delivers to Melody and Jonah, while Daphna is in the bathroom sullenly brushing her hair, a frantic annihilation of Daphna’s character and pretensions, an avalanche of animosity and aggravation that buries all fellow feeling. It’s both horrible and hilarious. And that’s before he even learns of his cousin’s designs on the chai pendant. The other screed is delivered by Daphna to her cousins, while Melody inhabits the bathroom, tearing apart Liam for everything from studying other cultures—he’s in graduate study on Japan—rather than his own, to his choice of non-Jewish girls who are clearly inferior to him. In the hands of director Butler, who directed Will Eno’s sharp as tacks domestic comedy Open House last year at Roundabout in New York, Harmon’s play gets at the flowing loathing that only people who have resented each other from childhood can level at one another. It’s lethal, and cathartic as only bilious comedy can be.

At the heart of the play—its pained heart actually—is the difficult burden of Jewishness, an ethnic identity that is also ethical, that both imposes and succors. For some, it’s something to be flipped off—as Liam does in the story Daphna tells of him boasting he’s a “bad Jew”—and for others something to be claimed at all cost, as Daphna tries to do, even if it means denying her efforts—revealed by Liam—to identify with Princess Di as a child. In other words, no one holds your follies hostage like your kin, and when one needs ammunition, growing up together will always provide it.

Most of the interactions turn on Daphna’s commitment to outrage—and McQuail is exquisite at registering it: outrage not only at the indignities that have been visited upon the Jewish race since time immemorial, but particularly—pointedly—relentlessly—the indignities perpetrated by the uncaring assimilationists and cultural relativists among the Jews of her generation. Hers is an indignation that bristles in every pore. And the symbol not only of Jewishness as she conceives it—as family, tradition and respect for the ages—but also of the indifference to all of that by her superior and financially better-off elder cousin is Poppy’s talismanic chai. It’s also the pendant penniless Poppy used to propose to his bride; Liam insists he has received both Poppy’s chai and his blessing for his own proposal to Melody. Thus, the actual meaning of the chai gets further complicated. Is it meant to represent the past and all those murdered Jews, and to be handed down now as a keepsake of commemoration? Or, is it meant to represent the future, an heirloom for the eldest among Poppy’s grandchildren as he begins a family—even if with a woman who says her people have “always” been in Delaware and has a hard time imagining the meaning of ancestors?

Bad Jews makes us consider these themes as they surface in the give-and-take of these somewhat spoiled cousins. As Jonah, the quiet one who wants to stay out of the squabbling, Max Michael Miller offers a range of pained reactions and non-reactions and, in the end, more intensity than one would suspect of him. As Melody, blithe and polite, who happens unwittingly into this upper West Side minefield, Christy Escobar plays up Melody’s fecklessness but has the guts to silence headstrong Liam when necessary; she also gets a show-stopping turn doing a good job of singing badly “Summertime,” from Porgy and Bess (a moment full of comic implications). As Liam, Michael Steinmetz, besides investing his diatribe against Daphna with all the agitated scorn it requires, is often at his best when silent. He hears out Daphna’s harangue with the stoical superiority that seems his birthright in a family that has both suffered and prospered, and his dogged gathering of his and his fiancée’s things, after she proves something more of a princess than he perhaps thought, speaks volumes. Good as all that is, it’s Keilly McQuail’s show all the way. Her Daphna is a constant barrage of mannerisms—preening, undulating, striking poses, hanging fire with one of the most exaggerated glares conceivable. Impossible to live with as she is, Daphna also manifests the impossibility of living up to a past that her generation has only a tenuous relation to through elders who, as Liam says, will forever only be part of the fuzzy feelings of childhood.

It may be that Harmon’s play is a bit insular for a general audience, but the force of the personalities on view here place such spectators in the place of Melody, well-meaning and aghast at how vicious spinning the truth can be. Bad Jews writhes with galvanic comedy, full of the flash of wit and the clash of wills. It zings and bites and goes for the throat—and has a lot of fun doing it.

[Full disclosure: I’m from Delaware, and am the product of the kind of northern European mix that Melody eventually claims, but I also spent a fair amount of time, for a time, around the Wilmington JJC, on Garden of Eden Road, and I was gripped, and in stitches, throughout this serious comedy.]

Bad Jews By Joshua Harmon Directed by Oliver Butler

Set Design: Antje Ellermann; Costume Design: Paul Carey; Lighting Design: Stephen Strawbridge; Sound Design: M. L. Dogg; Hair & Makeup Design: Dave Bova; Fight Director: Tim Acito; Production Stage Manager: Lindsey Turteltaub; Photography: T. Charles Erickson

Long Wharf Theatre Februrary 18-March 22, 2015

We All Shine On

Review of Shiny Objects at Yale Cabaret Shiny Objects, the latest show at the Yale Cabaret, asks us to listen to the stories women tell about themselves. Against our culture’s tendency to objectify women, this devised piece from third-year Yale School of Drama actresses Maura Hooper and Zenzi Wiliams, directed by fellow third-year actor Christopher Geary, attempts to subjectify women. That means getting at how the world looks from the viewpoint of 8 women, the interviewees whose words form the basis of the play.

In staging, verbatim, words taken from interviews, Hooper and Williams inhabit the women’s voices and bodies, making us witness different attitudes and styles of comportment. Mere mimicry is not enough as, in each case, some point of “character” must be manifested to give us a sense of who we’re dealing with. Costume changes help us keep track of who’s who, as we’re presented with bits of each interview and have to keep in play the different lives presented, as Hooper and Williams come and go individually from behind a cascade of metallic-looking yarn that forms a loose curtain.

Assessing the nature of the different characters is not simply a matter of their lucidity or ability to express themselves. People aren’t, by and large, playwrights, so their language, while used for effect, doesn’t have to consider drama or comedy as something external—as “theater.” And that makes the theatricality of Hooper and Williams risky. Trying to find a way into lives with only a person’s own words and mannerisms to steer them requires the wherewithal to make us receptive to this series of confidences. It helps that Hooper and Williams both have great stage presence and know how to charm.

The show, as a play, places the audience in the role of confidantes, hearing how several women shape their lives, how they put themselves across, and how they account for what gives them pride or makes them ashamed. In thinking back on the show, I found that four distinct women impressed themselves on me, which means that another four kind of got lost in the sauce. But isn’t that how life is: what makes you remember or find memorable the people you can easily recall?

In the case of two of the women Maura Hooper plays, the contrast is enough to make them distinctive: one, in a deep red sweater, had been a nun, and she speaks through a clenched face, becoming animated as she tells of an encounter with a psychiatrist who gave her a mantra to live by; the other is a dominatrix, in a furry jacket, who speaks feelingly of the skill required to subjugate submissive men without causing irreparable harm. The contrast might be a bit “easy,” but Hooper keeps us engaged with these women, not as “types” but as two very different people who find aspects of their own lives surprising to themselves.

The two characters played by Zenzi Williams that stayed with me are an islander very emphatic about having to sing your part in the large musical composition of life. It was a simple metaphor that the speaker got a lot of mileage out of, particularly her sense that if one lets oneself be “silenced” (in all senses), then one has missed one’s chance to contribute something individual. Williams’ other standout character was a woman who, while in what some would call a successful marriage, had the strength of purpose to start her life over with someone else, for the sake of personal fulfillment. She gave the play a kind of “follow your bliss” mantra, evoked by having to shoot parental commands and other social constraints off your shoulders.

With minimal use of props—a chair—strategic changes in articles of clothing—scarves, headwraps, glasses, jackets, sweaters and wraps—and great use of lighting and subtle projections, Williams and Hooper and Geary kept the focus on personality as, indeed, the most personal aspect in our lives, the key to character and the element that makes us empathize or zone out. Faced with what could seem a talk-show sense of divulgence, Hooper and Williams and Geary—and  dramaturg Rachel Carpman—found a way, for the most part, to give us the sense that, for every subjectivity, there is a “shiny object”: its own sense of its self, its purpose, its raison d’être.

The final “curtain” pairing of the two actresses shorn of their characters provided a striking moment to reflect on how performative personality is and how nice it might be to doff it and walk off into the wings.

Shiny Objects Proposed by and featuring Maura Hooper and Zenzi Williams Directed by Christopher Geary

Set Designer: Claire DeLiso; Costume Designer: Haydee Antunano; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Sound Designer: Kate Marvin; Projection Designer: Ni Wen; Production Manager: Lee O’Reilly; Techincal Director: Kelly Fayton, Kat Wepler; Dramaturg: Rachel Anna Carpman; Stage Manager: Emily DeNardo; Producer: Sarah Williams; Photographs by Joey Moro

Yale Cabaret February 19-21, 2015

Walk on the Wild Side

For the third February in a row, the Yale Cabaret became, for one night only, the “Yale School of Drag.” The annual event lets Yale School of Drama students transform themselves from one gender to the other, or to somewhere in between. Most of the numbers, in the manner of many drag performances, are lip-synched to well-known songs, songs that help create interesting tensions between the actual performer of the song—on the recording—and the flamboyant appearance of the performer before us. “Us,” is an audience that, for the most part, are friends and familiars of the performers, shouting, hooting, stretching out yearning hands to proffer dollar bills at whichever figure most stirs our fancy. The show gets three performances—8 p.m, 10 p.m., midnight—with the final show, this year, occurring in the first hour of Valentine’s Day, which, perhaps, added a bit more eros to the proceedings. In any case, as one habitué put it, the midnight show is “always drunker and sloppier,” and that’s the one I attended.

More raucous too, maybe, which means that sometimes, even with the performers miked—which is not usually the case at the Cabaret—it was easy to miss some of the banter. Our hostesses, James Cusati-Moyer and Ato Blankson-Wood, as “flawless” (Beyoncé), super hot “bad girls” (M.I.A.), sported a series of dazzling changes of costumes, wigs, make up, establishing a standard of glamour that spoke for itself and that future productions will be hard-pressed to match. The guys-as-girls were joined by two girls-as-guys: Emily Zemba and Kelly Kerwin sported male drag that resembled the cool, cute-guy regalia of doo-wop groups. The staging of the show boasted a low catwalk that, it was pointed out, resembled a phallus, and an overhead light array pulsed and shimmered and exploded in orgasmic arrays of color.

“Dragaret,” as it was dubbed, offers an opportunity for as many students as possible to strut their stuff as cross-dressers, but the point of the strutting is to try on a variety of “gender styles” abroad in our culture—and, as with a real drag show, to curry favor with the audience. In a sense, each new act is a come-on, an invitation to be caught up in the charms of a particularly effective self-styling. Some of the pop culture reference points were clearly chosen for maximum familiarity and fetishizing: Fabian Aguilar won many hearts as Ursula from Disney’s The Little Mermaid, complete with raised tentacles, putting it out there to April Smith’s “Terrible Things”; Sara Holdren strode out of many a childhood fantasy as David Bowie’s character in Labyrinth, rocking “Magic Dance.”

Sometimes the choices were deliberately laughable: The Cab’s Artistic Directors, Hugh, Tyler, Will, and Managing Director, Molly, as with any Cab show, welcomed the audience and presented the fire speech, but arrayed as queens of comedy, TV’s Golden Girls. In other cases, there were mixed emotions, as in a bearded and page-boyed Ben Fainstein vamping to Patsy Kline’s heartfelt “Three Cigarettes in an Ashtray,” complete with giant-size ashtray and cigarettes, or Kristen Ferguson’s show-stopping striptease—denuding herself of an oversize beard, huge fright wig, falsies, gown, and boots—to Radiohead’s popular song “Creep,” with its grand heart-on-a-sleeve gestures, “I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo / What the hell am I doing here?” In its effective matching of music, visuals and emotion, Ferguson’s number was a highpoint of the show.

Other memorable moments? I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention four male dramaturgs—Taylor Barfield, David Bruin, David Clauson, Nahuel Telleria—in stylish female drag, accompanied by a female dramaturg, Ashley Chang, as a giant plush penis, pulsing to “Lady Marmalade,” or Helen Jaksch’s very effective solo number, “Le Jazz Hot,” with half of her in male drag and half in female drag, or Jean Kim, accompanied by her posse, Rasean Davonte Johnson and Sean Walters, wowing the crowd with crisp Psy moves to the Korean YouTube hit “Gangnam Style.” The one song of the night actually sung, with Farrell in Joni Mitchell mode on acoustic guitar joining Kerwin and Zemba as “Kenni and the Z notes” on vocals, was Laura Marling’s “Night After Night,” a morose love song a bit lost amidst an audience at times more vocal than the performers. A spoken portion of the program, styled after the TV show Laugh-In, offered jokes that worked when risqué, but preferred to risk the corniness of Rowan and Martin (“Why couldn’t Mozart find his music teacher?” “He was hidin’.”)

The Yale School of Drag originated three years ago when Ethan Heard, the Artistic Director of Yale Cabaret for 2012-13, proposed a night of drag. That year the show happened to coincide with a record-breaking blizzard. The weather was kinder this year, merely bitingly cold. Since the School of Drama is a three-year program, this year marks the last appearance of some who were there at the start. Hosts Blankson-Wood, Cusati-Moyer, Kerwin, and Zemba—all third years—brought it on home for the class of 2015 in style.

As a night to show-off costumes, make up, and the considerable technical skill required for 15 different acts and at least 30 performers, Yale School of Drag continues to gain in extravagance. The guiding idea seems to be that gender is a question of appearance and effect, and, in some ways, always a performance. These spirited performers, some so very clearly at home in their guises, dismiss the notion of the sexes as “opposites” and create a very playful sense of the theatrical possibilities of the in-between.

Yale Cabaret February 13, 2015

More Cab Fare

Tonight the Yale Cabaret features the limited engagement of its third annual drag show, or Dragaret. Three shows, tonight only, 8 p.m., 10 p.m., 12 p.m. Shows are sold out but there is a wait list. I’ll be there at midnight and will report on what I see. Go here for my review of the Cab’s Catfight, from last week. And here’s my report on the rest of the 2014-15 season at the Cab. Six more shows, stretching to late April. A varied line-up, and none of the shows are of the “straight-forward-staging of preexisting play” variety. Which means that, as of this writing, what will actually transpire is still a bit “to be determined.”

First up, Cab 13, February 19-21, is Shiny Objects, a devised piece proposed by third-year actors Maura Hooper—a recurring star of the Cab—and Zenzi Williams, who hasn’t been back in a while. They will be directed by the always formidable Christopher Geary in a play that draws on interviews with real-life females, aged from 7 to 85. The show finds its inspiration in the third-year actor character studies, a training practice that lets actors perform as “persons” rather than “characters.” While not professing a single, overtly feminist point, the show aims to present female viewpoints, with experiences across generational divides and differences providing themes in conversation with one another.

Cab 14, February 26-28, is known as The Untitled Project, featuring another Cab regular Ato Blankson-Wood who will both direct and perform (Blankson-Wood directed the opening show of the season) in this unique ensemble piece. Using music, text, movement, and certain design elements, the project features a collage of black male voices to attest not only to the fact that “Black Lives Matter” but to discover perspectives not often dramatized or presented.

Georg Büchner is one of the more intriguing playwrights of his time; a Romantic but also something of modernist avant le lettre, his plays can be notoriously hard to pin down. Leonce and Lena, Cab 15, March 5-7, features a challenging new translation by Yale School of Drama student Gavin Whitehead and is directed by first-year director Elizabeth Dinkova. The play—which the Cab blurb calls a “dark and comic romp”—involves the quandary of Prince Leonce: should he be a puppet and marry as is expected of him, remaining bound to the duties of court, or ...  With a production that involves actors and sock puppets, a constructed set and cubist costumes, the show should be a visual extravaganza.

After two weeks dark, the Cab returns with something rather unusual: opera. Cab 16, March 26-28, is The Medium, a chamber opera by Gian Carlo Menotti, best known perhaps for the Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors. Proposed by opera buffs Anh Lê, who has worked on or produced many Cab shows, and third-year set designer Adrian Martinez Frausto, The Medium tells the story of Madame Flora, a bogus medium who conducts séances to bilk clients. This isn’t the first work of classical music to be staged in the Cab, but recent events such as Solo Bach or Pierrot Lunaire didn’t feature actor-singers. That will be part of the draw here.

Cab 17, April 2-4, brings us a new experimental piece in 5 acts written and directed by dramaturg Jessica Rizzo, Sister Sandman Please. Described as “a poetic tête-à-tête between fantasy and disaster,” set in a “prairie of the mind,” the show features 3 women and a cowboy, a tumbleweed farm, and, most importantly, a dynamic soundscape where a cascade of voices explore the theatrical potential of sound to evoke a range of sensory experiences.

Finally, Cab 18, Make Believe the Make Happen, April 23-25, finishes the season with what might be considered a somewhat meta creation. Inverting the current Cab’s slogan—Make Happen the Make Believe—the show purports to be a FUNdraiser for #KIDSDIDIT, an Iowa-based program that incorporates plays written by middle-schoolers into theatrical productions. Combining elements familiar from the School of Drama’s Dwight-Edgewood Project, which works with school children to create theater, and the Cab itself, which remains a working-space for creative ferment that requires community support, the final show of the season may well concern the future of theater, so—“open your hearts and your wallets!”

And by then we’ll know who will continue the ongoing project that is the Yale Cabaret for Season 48. During the dark weeks there may be other offerings in the Cab space, so keep an eye open for such announcements. And, as ever, see you at the Cab!

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven, CT

Artistic Directors: Hugh Farrell, Tyler Kieffer, Will Rucker; Managing Director Molly Hennighausen

Family Ties

Review of Familiar at Yale Repertory Theatre A funny, fun, and intense play about family, Danai Gurira’s Familiar, at the Yale Repertory Theatre, takes place on a lovely set replete with the comforts of home, and then proceeds to question the nature of home.

Directed by Rebecca Taichman, who last directed David Adjmi’s Marie Antoinette at the Rep, and written by Gurira, whose last Rep-produced play was Eclipsed, Familiar keeps before us elements that made those two plays work: clearly delineated characters, speech that does something, and, more than anything, the stakes of “keeping it together.” Any family, we might say, has undercurrents that can become unpleasant, that can pull it in different directions. Familiar takes us into the pleasant suburban Minnesota home of Marvelous and Donald Chinyaramwira, where we find at first the low-key family of so many sit-coms, featuring minor household struggles such as whether a modish portrait of Zimbabwe’s president Mugabe should hang on the wall, or, in its place, a dignified representation of a dog.

We soon learn there are wedding preparations afoot for eldest daughter, Tendikayi, who is marrying “White Guy,” as Nyasha, the younger daughter calls him, herself back from a life-changing visit to “Zim” (Zimbabwe) from which her parents hail, as does Margaret Munyewa, the aunt they invited, and Annie, the aunt who still lives in Zimbabwe and invited herself. The latter, who arrives as a comic blast from the past, full of self-importance about “tradition” and so on, brings as well a moment of truth that creates a kind of recognition scene not generally found in family comedies.

And that’s because, all along, Familiar has been working a subtle bait and switch. We think, for awhile, that this is all about assimilation to America and bad feelings about being reminded of “the Old Country.” Well-meaning youngsters may want to take on the latter’s trappings as lip service to “other ways” while enjoying their vantage of privilege—Tendikayi (Cherise Boothe) and her fiance Chris (Ross Marquand) kowtow to Aunt Annie (Kimberly Scott) and agree to a roora, a marriage preparation ritual that involves go-betweens, negotiation and something to do with cows. All of which is diverting enough, but that light-hearted play would let us feel as condescending as the elder generation here seems to be right from the start, and as bemused. Marvelous (Saidah Arrika Ekulona) and Donald (Harvy Blanks) are highly educated, articulate, full of conviction, but also defensively upper-middle-class Americans, as only people who know there is an abyss under things can be.

Gurira has scripted the kind of play where whoever holds the floor says something worth hearing, and key scenes simply entail others hearing it said. Annie gets a commanding speech that gives full weight to her view of what is being lost in the assimilative ways of her sisters. She speaks from an authoritative identity her two sisters know they no longer possess. This becomes even more dramatically the case when Donald explains his own feelings. Suddenly home is not where you are but where you must go.

And yet this is not a play about a triumphal finding of oneself again in the place one has left behind. None of us can really “go back.” We can travel in space but not in time and the picture of Mugabe, with its stylings from the 1980s, when he was the up-and-coming savior of his country, makes that clear. Nothing is so indicative of the passing of time as yesterday’s liberal, seeking power, becoming today’s conservative grasping to keep it at any cost.

The excellent cast make certain we believe in the past these characters have experienced. We have dropped in on them during a time when families are most vulnerable, letting in a stranger through marriage, and having to decide on the meaning of their past. Everyone here has an individual version of what family ties may assume and require, and everyone says what they have to say within a familial space. Even Chris’s younger brother, Brad (Joe Tippett), called in hurriedly to act as go-between in the roora, grasps at once that family bonds are at stake and becomes comically and dramatically important in a delightful Act I curtain.

Gurira’s script and Taichman’s direction are generous to these characters, giving everyone “a moment.” Aunt Margaret (Patrice Johnson Chevannes) plays the important witness character; wine-glass in hand, she is lesser than Marvelous as mother, as professional success, as personal force, but for that reason may still change; Boothe, as the would-be bride and success Marvelous would have her be, gets a funny bout of hysteria that registers the almost slapstick quality that dramatic changes can visit upon the unprepared; Marquand plays the well-intentioned, essentially passive “white guy” to a fault but even he steps up once his pants are undone, so to speak. As Nyasha, Shyko Amos is musical, forceful, a catalyst. She’s the free spirit still finding herself but she’s also not easily swayed by her sister’s relentless sense of purpose.

As the couple who try to live with hope for the future after a devastating event in the past, Marvelous and Donald convince us that there is too much water under the bridge to brook speaking of—until, with all cards on the table, it becomes time for the truth of where they are, right now. Ekulona gives Marvelous plenty of insistent command, but also thoughtfulness, and Blanks brings to Donald many small comic gestures that say much about his role in the house. As Annie, the embodiment of Zimbabwe, Scott is a force of nature sitting in her sister’s tasteful living room, a living reminder that there is very much a world “back there” that doesn’t go away simply because expats stop thinking about it.

And it’s there that the play becomes most fully of its moment—as the playbill proclaims, “a higher percentage of African immigrants have a college degree than any other immigrant group.” Thus “American Africans” experience a different America than do African-Americans, and, indeed, most other immigrants. That difference has to do with the bifurcated nature of living in two lands at once, to some degree, but it also speaks to the American effort to claim kin with our non-American source country while never going there.

To varying degrees, and particularly for those for whom assimilation meant losing a language, and an entire way of being weakly contained in the word “customs,” we are all haunted by somewhere else. That’s what makes the situation of the characters in Gurira’s strong and satisfying play so familiar.

Familiar By Danai Gurira Directed by Rebecca Taichman

Composers: Somi and Toru Dodo; Scenic Designer: Matt Saunders; Costume Designer: Toni-Leslie James; Lighting Designer: Joey Moro; Sound Designer: Brian Hickey; Dialect and Vocal Coach: Beth McGuire; Production Dramaturg: Carrie Hughes; Casting Director: Tara Rubin Casting; Stage Manager: Anita Shastri

Yale Reperatory Theattre January 30-February 21, 2015

Donned If You Do . . .

Review of Don Juan at Yale School of Drama In Don Juan, the life and times of a cad, Molière sought to skewer some of the pieties of his time, presenting Don Juan as a heartless seducer who doesn’t hide behind hypocrisy. He lies to women to lure them into bed, marrying and separating from his duped spouses with alarming alacrity, but he’s true to his principles. Life is a farce, so why not have some fun with it?

Molière’s Don Juan, the third Yale School of Drama thesis show this season, directed by Andrej Visky as an adaptation, with dramaturg Samantha Lazar and playwright Brian Pelsue, from Pelsue’s translation, benefits greatly from its transposition into a period much like ours. The comedy of the early going—up through its biggest laughs in Acts II and III—derives from a light comic touch that makes Don Juan, who enters with a towel around his waist and a turban towel atop his head, a laughable figure. As played by James Cusati-Moyer, Don Juan is a roguish libertine, more jaded than seductive. His servant Sganarelle (Aubie Merrylees) is a cartoonish accomplice who clues us in on his master’s proclivities while both envying him and looking on aghast.

The best idea here is the presentation of the “Jersey Shore” region where Don Juan, on a boat to lure a damsel into his clutches, gets capsized, nearly drowns, and is rescued by, literally, a clown. Pierrot (Bradley James Tejeda) wears a Ronald McDonald bozo wig, a red squeezie nose, and the motley of the carny clown. His vacillating girl, Charlotte (Ann Katherine Hägg), is clad in the red and white uniform of a burger-joint waitress and pants for a glimpse of the aristocratic bearing of Don Juan. Striding onstage in the black cloak and distressed black jeans of a rocker, thick locks aswirl, Don Juan seems a sex-drugs-and rock’n’roll fantasy in the flesh. Think of how a rock star like Freddie Mercury could milk a sensual androgyny that kept both males and females fascinated. As Sganarelle lets us know early on, the Don fucks anything that moves.

So when Don Juan saves the life of Don Carlos (Aaron Luis Profumo), the brother of Elvira (Jenelle Chu), the latest woman Don Juan has wronged, and Carlos hesitates about avenging his sister’s honor and his father’s death (the Don offed the General in a duel), Don Alonzo (Tejeda), his more vehement brother, accuses Carlos of being in love with Juan. It’s that kind of world. Don Juan wraps 'em all around his finger. The broad comedy of the play’s dealings with family honor and the Don’s efforts to court two girls at once—the wide-eyed Charlotte as well as tough-cookie Mathilde (Ariana Venturi, remarkably skanky)—opens the possibility that the play is peopled with clowns, so that themes like seduction, thwarted love, and vengeance can all be played for laughs. In such a world, no one can be deserving of any response but derision.

This Don Juan comes close to that vision, but a different tone comes into play in the later acts, after a high-spirited visit to a mausoleum, where the General is interred beneath a statue, leads to a date with destiny: the statue of the General will dine with Don Juan who must then, in turn, be the guest of the General. We move then to Juan’s palatial estate—made somber by, on its high walls, huge “paintings” that are actually ghostly videos of, it seems, some of the many women Don Juan has seduced and abandoned. Here we see Don Juan squirm his way out of a lawsuit, deride the good intentions of Elvira, and, in a visit from his pious father (Julian Elijah Martinez), face his dad’s wrath and disinheritance.

The darker shadings of the later acts reveal the extent to which Molière’s comic touch is not up to creating the requisite pathos we must feel for Don Juan to care what becomes of him. Our hero is given a notable speech in which he defends himself—“a fashionable vice is as good as a virtue”—in terms that might be agreeable enough to our own amoral age with its “Wolf of Wall Street” protagonists, but it’s not easy to put ourselves in Don Juan’s place. Flouncing about in a serpentine silk gown that shadows in gaudy eddies his every flamboyant gesture, Don Juan, clad otherwise in rather gladiatorial black briefs, with a torso even more so, is an epicene epigone of the philosophes, swilling cognac and spitting malevolent bon mots.

The play’s end seems to give us a question mark in place of a resolution. Is this a Don Juan who has taken upon himself the sins of our self-serving era? Is he a child again, returned to the darkness that precedes birth and follows death? We’re left to make sense of what we see, as the play is wordless after Don Juan, nothing loathe, follows the General’s statue, which has become a fetching sprite-like female (Venturi). One thing is certain: Don Juan isn’t so smug any more.

Along the way, there’s great support work, particularly from Merrylees as a grab-bag of reactions, second-thoughts, doubletakes, narrative asides, and, at one point, a speech of riotous “reasoning” that makes Daffy Duck seem a paragon of profundity. Profumo’s Don Carlos by way of a lower-order DeNiro is spot on, matched by Tejeda’s more Pescian brother, complete with meth beard, a Hell’s Angel to Juan’s sympathy for the devil; then there’s the already mentioned comic abilities of Hägg and Venturi as dim, richly imagined “babes” you wish would stay longer, and Chu’s Elvira, in her first appearance, all wild hair, bleeding mascara and virginal white gown matched with black leather jacket and boots, is a sight to be seen as she dresses down our hero in terms worthy of a steely heroine, only to show up far too much later in the nun-like apparel of a bleeding-heart doormat. Martinez, as a prayerful, pan-handling beggar, and a bike messenger, gets a lot of mileage out of minor bits and, as Juan’s overbearing father, has no choice but to play it straight. Indeed, the succession of “straight men” in the later going makes us long for more comical hi-jinx from Juan. Instead, we get a brief glimpse of a marked change of tact as Juan seems to repent, spooked by that talking statue at his table.

Memorably costumed, agreeably staged—with lots of open space for Cusati-Moyer’s stage-prowling stride—with a good grasp of how to keep things moving, Visky’s Don Juan benefits from Pelsue’s ear for comic speech, fleshed out with occasional taglines from movies, the lingua franca of our day that makes us all Don Juanna-bes.

Don Juan By Molière Translaed by Brendan Pelsue Adapted by Andrej Visky, Brendan Pelsue, and Samantha Lazar Directed by Andrej Visky

Scenic Designer: Alexander Woodward; Costume Designer: Sydney Gallas; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Composer and Sound Designer: Jing (Annie) Yin; Projection Designer: Yana Biryukova; Production Dramaturg: Samantha Lazar; Stage Manager: Avery Trunko

Yale School of Drama January 27-31, 2015

Meet the New Don

The third and final Yale School of Drama thesis show opens this week. Andrej Visky, a third-year director from Romania, directs Molière’s Don Juan, a prose tragi-comedy that tells the famous story of Don Juan, or Don Giovanni, a free-thinking libertine who believes that the pleasures of life—particularly women—are meant to be enjoyed, a view that leads ultimately to his downfall. Molière incorporates commedia dell’arte aspects into the play, so that there is a decidedly comic cast to the tale, and that is one of the qualities that attracted Visky to the project. “The play is a great intersection of tragedy and comedy,” he says, allowing him to “approach weighty thought through laughter.” Molière, as Visky sees it, is interested in an overview of society to create a comedy of manners that includes beggars and the high-born, and, as he says, “the supernatural makes an appearance” as well. When I pointed out that both Don Juan and the first thesis show this year, The Master and Margarita, feature the threat of damnation, Visky pointed out that his Don Juan “ends ambiguously,” leaving the audience to decide if Don Juan’s fate is “damnation or liberation.”

An atheist in a Catholic culture, Don Juan flaunts the moral edicts of his day—a factor that could make him seem, in a Romantic reading, akin to the kind of artist who lives only to express himself, or, as Visky sees him, a possible revolutionary figure, “a seeker of meaning.” The Don’s sidekick, the servant Sganarelle, is on hand to offer asides on his master’s self-serving proclivities; while attracted to his master’s lifestyle, Sganarelle also represents a deflationary, common-sense outlook. And there is, for Visky, an aspect of the play that is entirely relevant to our day and age: namely, the “cost of freedom.” Are we free to do as we please or do we have obligations to others, and to the future?

With a cast of eight players, Don Juan, like the other thesis shows this year, will feature many of the fine young actors in the Yale program, including Ariana Venturi, James Cusati-Moyer, and Aaron Profumo, all featured in Master and Margarita, and Bradley Tejeda, who appeared in the Yale Repertory's production of Arcadia last fall. Visky, who trained and worked as an actor himself in his homeland, feels that he “understands the actor’s process, the means, and what it takes” to create a character. For him, theater is a means “to touch the soul” and to break through the everyday numbness of life, but, at the same time, he recognizes that, in “the age of television,” compared to Molière’s day, it is much harder to keep the audience’s attention. “There are so many demands on our time.”

Don Juan is the only thesis show this year to use the full proscenium stage at the University Theater. Visky feels his show’s “operatic dimension” requires it. Central to his staging is “a huge box” that will support the play’s many transitions and scenic changes. Act II, for instance, recalls a “broken-down boardwalk culture” as one might find it on a seedy Jersey shore. Indeed, Visky knew from the start that he wanted his thesis project to be an adaptation. Working with third-year dramaturg Samantha Lazar and a new translation by Yale School of Drama second-year playwright Brendan Pelsue, Visky has aimed to bring Don Juan into our day, with “comedy surprises” that connect very much to our world.

Visky feels drawn to “comedy with a serious spin.” “I don’t believe in a theater that’s comfortable,” he says and likens the process of creating theater to giving birth—as opposed to, for instance, a factory. What comes out is intimately connected to all who take part, we might say, and for Visky the purpose is a “fight for ideas that will be important to others and that get people interested.” Part and parcel of that purpose is the notion that even a classic—as Romanian theater understood in the Stalinist period—can carry a social or political meaning relevant to a much later period. Born three years before the Romanian Revolution and the ousting of Ceauşescu in 1989, Visky still can draw on a cultural memory of theater that incorporated coded messages in classic works of earlier times and places. That tendency should serve him in good stead in creating, with his collaborators and cast, a “fresh feel for the sexual politics” of this tale of the most famous womanizer in literature, his name synonymous with anything from a playboy to a lecher to a kind of Faustian lover of the flesh, in defiance of spiritual or ethical concerns.

“We are all Don Juans,” Visky says, encouraged by consumer society to seek out new sensations, new products, as though our lives’ meaning depends on it. Perhaps live theater, in the era of screens and simulacra, might be a way of finding new meaning in old affinities.

Don Juan By Molière Translated by Brendan Pelsue Adapted by Andrej Visky, Brendan Pelsue, and Samantha Lazar Directed by Andrej Visky

Scenic Design: Alexander Woodward; Costume Design: Sydney Gallas; Lighting Design: Andrew F. Griffin; Sound Design: Jing Yin; Projection Design: Yana Birÿkova; Dramaturgy: Samantha Lazar; Stage Management: Avery Trunko

Yale School of Drama University Theater January 27-31, 2015

Les intentions cruelles

Review of Quartet at the Yale Cabaret

Heiner Müller’s Quartet, an adaptation of Laclos’s Les liaisons dangereuses, as staged at the Yale Cabaret, directed by David E. Bruin using Doug Langworthy’s translation, makes fancy-dress role play of the nefarious seductions indulged in by the Marquise de Merteuil and her favorite play-fellow the Vicomte de Valmont. Famously paired libertines who engage in sexual relations with others as a sort of blood sport—comparing conquests and challenging one another with tests of their mettle—Merteuil and Valmont pride themselves on being able to inspire and command passion without ever really surrendering their emotions. Cold-blooded sex machines, they are sophisticated epitomes of the “player” ethic.

Sydney Lemmon as Merteuil

With a hanging chandelier, low-wattage lights, and dark walls, the Cab has been transformed into a suitable “den of iniquity” as we gather around a handsome dining table of dark wood, a single chair on each side, to witness the elegant pas de deux of this entrancing duo. As the mercurial Merteuil, Sydney Lemmon enters first, delivering the lines of a missive to Valmont (Laclos’ original is an epistolary novel), chiding him, enflaming him, belittling him, all from behind a forbidding hauteur. At last Edmund Donovan enters and at once the terms of the relation change. Valmont’s characteristic attitude is an almost unreadable sang-froid, though full of fulsome sallies that keep both Merteuil and the audience guessing about his true nature.

Edmund Donovan as Valmont

Bandied about in their exchanges are possible apt conquests to come. Merteuil would have Valmont seduce her virginal niece; Valmont prefers the game of inspiring passion in a staid married woman, Mme de Tourvel. There’s quite a flurry of wits in describing which sample of “the flesh” should be more appetizing to Valmont’s tastes.

The height of the play occurs in a scene in which Merteuil, in male drag as Valmont, attempts to seduce Valmont, in drag as Mme de Tourvel. In a sense, we’re simply watching actors trade roles as Lemmon plays Valmont—with remarkable flourishes—and Donovan plays Mme de Tourvel, with even more hauteur than Lemmon’s Merteuil commands. But in a more telling sense we’re watching Merteuil as Valmont and Valmont as Tourvel. The exchanges are fraught with a delicious double-vision: Merteuil’s contempt for Valmont—or, indeed, of the easy lust of men—adds to Lemmon’s seductiveness as Valmont. Meanwhile, Donovan’s rendering of Valmont’s interpretation of femininity exposes, to some degree, what leads the rake on the chase: a feminine sense of completeness quite indifferent to male desire. Arch and verbally acrobatic, the scene also plays as a true seduction, albeit with self-conscious staginess, such as Valmont’s tearful gushing and Tourval’s defiant surrender.

Songs—on the soundtrack, as it were—often add considerably to the stakes. The use of the Velvet Underground’s haunting “Candy Says” after this scene helps to underline the more tragic aspects of such erotic wrangling (“Candy says I’ve come to hate my body and all that it requires in this life”). In the pause after the seduction of Tourvel, we’re left to reflect on how denial of the body adds a deeper meaning when a seduction succeeds. The victory is on the side of the flesh itself, not simply the cunning of a seducer. Inevitably, there must come a reminder that even the most dedicated debaucher must surrender his body, and all lovers of the flesh will be at some point thwarted. At the hour of death.

The final tableau of the play, with Merteuil clinging to the lifeless Valmont, lets the pendulum of froideur swing to the masculine side as Valmont, dead, is beyond vanity and desire. On the way to that dramatic conclusion, the far more straight-forward—and less satisfying on every score—seduction of the niece/Merteuil (Lemmon) by Valmont (Donovan) forces both Merteuil and Valmont to play against type. Though we’re free to imagine, if we like, that somewhere in the cat-and-mouse exchanges resides the heart of cruelty, I miss in Müller’s version the affront to Merteuil of Valmont’s actual love for Tourvel, which, in the original, spoils the bet by which Valmont might possess Merteuil.

Sydney Lemmon as Merteuil/Valmont

Still, the “drag scene” seduction adds layers of suggestion, lacking when everyone keeps to the predetermined gender roles. Bruin and his cast do a commendable job of minimizing camp, letting these two supreme sexual predators strut their stuff and flaunt their feathers—the costumes by Fabian Aguilar maintain a flair of minimal flamboyance: dark, period tailoring spiced with white wigs.

It’s been awhile since the Cab has offered a play with such a literate, dialogue-dense script. Kudos to Bruin for his grasp of the play and to Lemmon and Donovan, first-year actors in the Yale School of Drama, for their enactment of such riveting turns.

Quartet
Written by Heiner Müller
Translated by Doug Langworthy
Directed by David E. Bruin
Adapted from the novel Dangerous Liaisons

Set Designer: Mariana Sanchez; Costume Designer: Fabian Aguilar; Lighting Designer: Caitlin Smith Rapoport; Sound Designer: Kate Marvin; Technical Director: Kate Newman; Dramaturg: Paul Cooper; Stage Manager: Kelly Montgomery; Producer: Anh Le

Yale Cabaret, January 22-24, 2015

The Cabaret is dark next week before returning February 5th (see our preview here). The remaining six shows will be previewed soon. For my review of 50:13, last week's opener of the second half of the season, go here.

The Second Time Around

Review of Private Lives at Hartford Stage One of the most successful aspects of Darko Tresnjak’s production of Noël Coward’s Private Lives, now showing at the Hartford Stage, is how well cast it is. Ken Barnett and Rachel Pickup play Elyot Chase and Amanda Prynne, a former couple married to others as the play opens. In the roles originally written for Coward and his wife Gertrude Lawrence, Barnett and Pickup display tons of smooth aplomb, looking every inch as sophisticated as, I’m sure, the originals did.

Coward’s comedy depends upon the tensions that arise when sophistication meets farce. Even the interwar years among the privileged elite must meet with put-downs and comeuppances—here, the belligerent and bored maid Louise (Carine Montbertrand) at Amanda’s flat in France has to stand for all the surliness directed at these posh couples by the underclass. And crowd pleasing she is, though, in this play, most of the deflation and rough patches come, fittingly, from private life: the mismatch of a couple, and the struggle of wills over what tone should prevail, what kind of union a marriage should be.

On an elegant terrace among other elegant terraces on the Riviera, we first meet Elyot with his new, blonde bride Sybil (Jenni Barber). It isn’t that they seem ill-matched, only that Sybil will be going on about Elyot’s former wife. No matter how archly Elyot fields her questions, an undercurrent of unease can’t quite be smoothed away and he begins to bristle. Some things are best not discussed between newlyweds. The couple withdraws and who should appear on the adjacent terrace but Amanda and her new husband Victor Prynne (Henry Clarke). While not suffering from quite the degree of second-spouse anxiety as Sybil, Victor clearly feels he has to dispense with any notion that he’s the runner-up. The comedy in the early going is all in the attempts at bonhomie by these not so tranquil couples.

We feel both Elyot and Amanda’s relief at not having to be their old selves, embraced by the excitement of new loves, yet it is obvious that something is lacking. When, alone on their respective terraces, Elyot and Amanda meet again, their “meant for each other” status is only too apparent. Barnett and Pickup simply match: their voices, their mannerisms, their use of language—both verbal and body—mesh and seem to demand a re-union despite whatever reason may dictate, which would bend to notions of wedlock and new vows. Barnett is dapper without seeming effeminate, contained, cool, dry, wearing a tuxedo as if he’s always lived in one. Pickup, wearing a period gown with great panache, makes the most of long, expressive arms that turn her every gesture into a grace note. In some ways, the play never quite recovers from the close of Act I. Seeing the former Mr. and Mrs. Chase reunite behind the backs of their more average and earnest current spouses satisfies with the snap of a well-mixed martini. What more is there?

Act II and III take place at Amanda’s flat, a rather delightfully garish mélange of patterns and hyper-modernist design. Here Elyot and Amanda, in flight from their current marriages, take their ease and pick holes in one another’s attitudes as only each can. It’s diverting, the slings and arrows of this well-matched sparring, with plenty of flinging about in appealing attitudes on various furnishings. Tresnjak makes the most of the physical grace of his actors as they fully own the space with the kind of theatrical ease that seems bred into these characters, with Barnett, in a dressing-gown throughout Act II, pounding away on a piano with much expressiveness, and Pickup, in a fit of pique, cracking a gramophone record against his head with finesse. Act II ends, as both the audience and the characters fully expect, with the arrival of Sybil and Victor, looking like well-meaning travelers seeking asylum in a madhouse.

Act III primarily affords a pleasure rarely encountered. With Elyot and Amanda, we are able to witness exes making a partnership, a match in its way as passionate as their own. As Sybil, Barber has at times the whine of a flighty child that she uses well to importune, while Clarke, as Victor, is brash and physical, looking to get into a fight with Elyot to prove his manliness. Everyone is pitch perfect, and wonderfully styled and costumed.

Beautiful to look at, swift in running-time, sumptuously staged, Private Lives delivers a fluffy divertissement with the quaint crackle of old-style Hollywood comedy. It’s a world where the British are still the height of style and the globe-trotters of a world they’ve colonized and thus feel blithely at home in. Coward lets us look in on these private lives with a certainty about the fascination that the masses still find in the contemplation of the rich and classy. Tresnjak and company manage to make a period piece come alive with the satisfying theatricality of the “private” made public, exulting in the kind of dialogue that seems to know it’s in a play because, well, aren’t we all, darling?

Private Lives By Noël Coward Directed by Darko Tresnjak

Scenic Design: Alexander Dodge; Costume Design: Joshua Pearson; Lighting Design: York Kennedy; Sound Design: Michael Miceli; Wig Design: Mark Adam Rampmeyer; Casting: Binder Casting, Jack Bowdan, CSA; Dialect Coach: Gillian Lane-Plescia; Fight Director: J. Allen Suddeth; Production Stage Manager: Robyn M. Zalewski; Assistant Stage Manager: Brae Singleton; Dramaturg: Elizabeth Williamson; Production Manager: Bryan T. Holcombe; Associate Artistic Director: Maxwell Williams

Hartford Stage January 8-February 8, 2015

Yale Cab Redux

This week the Yale Cabaret returns. The first three shows of the second half of the season have been announced with the others soon to follow. Artistic Directors Hugh Farrell, Tyler Kieffer, Will Rucker, and Managing Director Molly Hennighausen continue in their estimable efforts to bring the unusual, the challenging, the amusing, the exciting to 217 Park Street in New Haven. The Cab’s slogan this year is “Make Happen the Make Believe,” and the variety in the next three shows should give some idea of how variable “the Make Believe” can be.

First up is 50:13, written by second-year playwright at Yale School of Drama Jiréh Breon Holder, directed by second-year actor Jonathan Majors and featuring Leland Fowler, a first-year actor. Taking its title from a ratio, the percentage of black men in the U.S. prison population compared to the percentage of black men in the U.S. population, 50:13 takes us to a prison cell where Dae Brown, with only three days left to serve, tries to pass along his wisdom and knowledge to his much younger cell-mate, who has only begun serving his sentence. Based on oral histories from prisoners, Holder’s play seeks to provide a human and dramatic look at the lived realities “inside.” Cab 10: January 15-17.

Cab 11 features a play by East German author Heiner Müller, a sort of Brecht meets Beckett figure best known in the U.S. for Hamletmachine. In Quartet, directed by second-year dramaturg David Bruin and featuring first-year actors Edmund Donovan and Sydney Lemmon, Müller adapts Laclos’s well-known (and oft adapted) 18th-century story of seduction and subterfuge, Les liaisons dangereuses. Müller’s adaptation foregrounds, we might say, the reality principle over the pleasure principle in depicting the erotic machinations of Valmont and Mertueil. Cab 11: January 22-24.

For Cab 12 we’re back to the kind of campy undertakings at which the Cab oft excels. Episode #121: Catfight, by husband and wife team Tori Keenan-Zelt and Steven Koernig, directed by Koernig, a second-year theater manager, takes its cue from the 1966-68 Batman series, beloved, in some quarters anyway, as the height of oddball Sixties TV. Needless to say, if you find Christian Bale to be your Caped Crusader for all time, you need to expand your horizons and check this out. If you remember (I do) or rediscovered the old TV show, then you’ll understand why I have to quote the Cab’s blurb for this one in its entirety: “As the graceful gals of our fair city prepare to compete in the hallowed Lady Gotham pageant scholarship competition, felonious feline fugitive Catwoman sinks her claws into a plan that could unravel the whole ball of string. Can Batman and Robin make this cat stray, or will mischief and mayhem purr-vail? Tune in to find out. Same Cab-time. Same Cab-channel.” Cab 12: February 5-7.

It’s a new year in New Haven. See you at the Cab!

Winter Party 2015: New Haven Review at the Institute Library

New Haven Review Subscription Party 2015

Our annual winter party approaches -- and we're hoping to see you at the Institute Library, so save the date:

Saturday, February 7, 2015

7:00 PM to 9:00 PM

The Institute Library

847 Chapel Street

New Haven, CT 06510

Order Tickets!

There will be food, drink, story reading, music, and lots of interesting folks who love all things literary.

Three kinds of tickets are available:

$20, includes with a year-long subscription to the New Haven Review

$25, includes an annual Apprentice membership to the Institute Library

OR

$40, includes both a year-long subscription to the New Haven Review and an annual library Apprentice membership

This event sells out quickly, so please buy your tickets online here or in-person at the library today.

See you then!

Team New Haven Review

Ghost Dance

Review of Forever at Long Wharf Theatre Forever, the latest play by playwright/performer Dael Orlandersmith, invites its audience to consider what happens when a born storyteller undertakes what she calls “the ‘dreaded first person,’” shaping theater from her own experience. In the playbill, Orlandersmith points out that the play “is not verbatim; it is a memoir play versus an autobiographical play,” a way of cautioning us against taking everything said as “fact,” but also a way of highlighting how subjective a young person’s perspective is, how tied to impressions that can never pretend to omniscience.

Onto a handsome wooden stage, flanked on three sides by photos of her family and her young self, the imposing and riveting performer enters in an offhand manner, to the strains of Marianne Faithful’s version of Patti Smith’s “Ghost Dance,” its incantatory vocal insisting “we shall live again.” Setting the scene, Orlandersmith invites us to famed Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where she, like so many others, finds herself on a pilgrimage to the graves of the many greats buried there. She claims kin with many of the interred artists and writers—Edith Piaf, Richard Wright, Chopin, Colette, Proust, Apollinaire—and gravitates to the auratic burial place of The Doors’ charismatic leader Jim Morrison, whose music inspired her in her girlhood in a Harlem ghetto. With that gesture to her formative years, Orlandersmith opens her monologue to the unquiet ghost that haunts Forever: Beula Camradora Smith, the playwright’s abusive, manipulative, alcoholic mother.

What ensues in this well-paced memory play is a form of psychic wrestling. Orlandersmith evokes the ghosts of her past to grapple with them before us. So close to the bone is her narrative, it’s easy to imagine she’s telling the story as she goes, verbalizing events as she recalls them. Orlandersmith’s ease on the stage lets us know this has all been worked out beforehand but her manner—confiding, considering, pondering, reliving—makes the script feel spontaneous and open-ended. As with any social encounter that takes its direction from the personal and anecdotal, Forever uses reminiscence to give the audience a sense of who this character is, as we piece together the events that shaped her.

One such event is a harrowing rape, recounted with a dramatic shift of lighting and register, that not only attests to the narrator’s personal strength in overcoming such trauma, but also creates a fully re-imagined world of vulnerability and innocence as the young girl fixes upon a kind and sympathetic Irish policeman as a sort of knight of saving grace. Ultimately, even such an appalling crime, an affront to both mother and child, is grist for the struggle with the mother’s memory, found wanting at each new stage. As the play goes on, we begin to sense a subtle shift from the perspective of a girl or a young woman as Orlandersmith, in her mid-fifties, moves toward a mature consideration of her mother, dead for 20 years.

The turning point arrives through a series of richly imagined scenes; the mother holding court sweetly to “surrogate daughters,” her nurses at the hospital, while unable to stop herself belittling her actual daughter, leads to a scene with the mother’s corpse in the morgue, where the attendant’s line “the dead can’t hurt you” sets up the long untangling of how one comes to terms with the ghosts of one’s past. Ultimately, the living are the victors, and, as author, Orlandersmith is able to shape a past that puts the mother’s dramas and untold stories into the context of the daughter’s self-invention. And yet Orlandersmith, in the play’s close, seems conflicted enough to let us know that even an entire work devoted to a major relationship isn’t enough to say all that was unsaid in life or to lay to rest all that still perplexes and discomfits.

A tour de force of the art of monologue, Forever is a brave memory play that presents sad facts, harsh truths, and joyful inspirations with a keen grasp of how malleable such things become in the remembering and in the telling. With her penetrating gaze and captivating manner, Orlandersmith plays thoughtful hostess to some formidable objects of her inner landscape, offering the insights that come with clear-eyed self-appraisal. Orlandersmith’s work has long found favor with the Long Wharf Theatre, and it’s fitting that this most personal of her works should be staged as part of the 50th anniversary of the theater, attesting to the value of the living presence of theater in so direct a way.

Forever By Dael Orlandersmith Directed by Neel Keller

Set Design: Takeshi Kata; Costume Design: Kaye Voyce; Lighting Design: Mary Louise Geiger; Sound Design: Adam Phalen; Dramaturg: Joy Meads; Production Stage Manager: Lloyd Davis, Jr.

Long Wharf Theatre January 1-February 2, 2015

The Anchor.

You can make a lot of observations, none very happy, about the abrupt closing of the Anchor, the best dive bar that I ever knew in New Haven. You can complain about how abruptly it closed, how the landlords are jerks for making this happen. You can mourn the dead. You can also hope that it isn't really over. The space is still the Anchor, as I type this: the sign is not lit, but it is still hanging. The blue banquettes are still there. The jukebox, oh, the jukebox, is still there. But it doesn't look good.

Last night, Sunday, January 4th, almost everyone I knew in New Haven was in a sharply pained state as the news got around that the 4th would be the Anchor's last night of operation. I myself changed my plans for  the night so that I could get there for one last drink. I'd planned to feed my daughter dinner and put her to bed in her flannel owl pajamas, read her a bedtime story, maybe watch a movie with my husband. But I said to him, "I will read the bedtime story and then I'm going downtown." He  said, "I'll do bedtime. Just go." So I went downtown. It was raining. I left the house at 8.24 and arrived at 8.57 to find the Anchor's doors locked. I stood there confused. Locked? It wasn't even nine o'clock. The bells were ringing on the Green just then. A reporter stood at the door, talking to some girls in their twenties who smiled and told him how much they loved the place. "I led Bible study groups here," one of them said.

I remembered a lot of nights at the Anchor, and quite a few afternoons. I wondered if I should just turn around and go home. I said to my friend M., who was standing there almost teary-eyed, "I don't know what to do," and I listened to the others standing around: "Should we go to Rudy's? Three Sheets?" It was morbid to talk about going to another bar, under the circumstances, but at the same time, turning around and going home seemed unthinkable.

M. and I went to Cafe 9, where a band was playing and the saxophone was too loud. We could barely hear each other when we spoke. One of the things I loved about the Anchor was that you could have a real conversation there. Personally, I used to go and bring a book with me and read while I drank. The Anchor was a gross place, and it was a beautiful place, and it was, for a lot of people, an essential third place.

When Mark Oppenheimer -- the founder of the New Haven Review -- came back to New Haven to take over the job of editing the New Haven Advocate, he and I crossed paths his first week on the job. We were, you could say, acquainted with one another, tenuously. It seemed clear (to me; I can't speak for him) that we were going to be in each other's lives, at least for a while, and that we should get to know each other a little better. I suggested we have a drink. The obvious place to go was the Anchor.

I hope it can be resuscitated, because if it cannot be, I'm really not sure I can find a replacement. There is no other obvious choice, not for me.