Rolin Jones

A Season in Miniature

The 40th anniversary Summer Cabaret closed this past weekend with a four-day festival of short plays. “Summer Shorts” offered two series of four plays each, all by former YSD students, including recent graduates Hansol Jung, Mary Laws, Kate Tarker (all class of 2014), Rolin Jones—most recently celebrated for These! Paper! Bullets! last season at the Yale Rep—MJ Kaufman, and A. Rey Pamatmat. In general, the Festival turned the Summer Cab—after a summer of mostly lengthy plays—back to the brevity for which the term-time Cab is justly celebrated. What the usual 50-70 minute running time of the Cabaret displays is that much can be done in a short time. Of the plays in the festival, only Hansol Jung’s Undesirables—with music by last year’s Co-Artistic Director Chris Bannow—is an excerpt from a longer work. The others are self-contained plays—from 10 minutes to over 30—that mostly showcase a comically dramatic situation (Rolin Jones’ Ron Bobby Had Too Big a Heart) and/or comic and bizarre exchanges between a small cast (Jones’ Another in a Long Line of Idiot Children; Mary Laws’ All Saints; MJ Kaufman’s Your Living Room is Full of Ghosts, and Jones’ The Mercury and the Magic). Kate Tarker’s M.A.H. [A Museum Play] is more developed, with a plot that unfolds using six chararcters, and a key setting—the Museum of the National Tragedy. A. Rey Pamatmat’s We Have Cookies, though a two-person play, has more of a developmental arc than the other plays with a cast of two or three. And Undesirables—with 8 cast members—is an introduction to a musical with themes of immigration, assimilation, and alienation in the U.S. The two series were well-balanced with perhaps Series A’s larger cast plays edging out Series B in memorability.

The overall effect of the Festival was like seeing a Cabaret semester—which usually consists of 8 or 9 plays—in miniature. So, let’s take each Series as a unit:

Series A

Kicking off the Festival, Ron Bobby Had Too Big a Heart (Rolin Jones, directed by Luke Harlan) is a quick study of two murderous Southern would-be prom queens (Annelise Lawson, Shaunette Renée Wilson) out to avenge their shattered dreams on a local rival (Jenelle Chu); Jones’ verbiage is sort of slang Southern Gothic and crackles with comic intensity. Little more than a bite-size bit of satire on the guns-not-hugs rationale of contemporary America, the play jump-started the festival with a jolt.

M.A.H. [A Museum Play] (Kate Tarker, directed by Jessica Holt) offers a bizarre cast of misfits with Maia, a Mexican woman (Jenelle Chu, from airy to fiery) and Heiner, a German journalist (Matt Raich, awkwardly precise, as only a German can be) waiting to see someone at the Museum of the National Tragedy where nerdish Ellen (Aaron Bartz) presides over a private institution seeking to commemorate “national tragedy” in both a specific and generic sense. As Ellen, Bartz turns in his funniest performance of the summer as the sort of person one once encountered on late-night local or cable television, a huckster of indifferent skill, smarts, and resources making the best of his personal obsessions. He’s served by Shelby (Ato Blankson-Wood, as flappable office drone) and is interviewed by Monika (Annelise Lawson, one-part femme fatale and two-parts Kommendant). Meanwhile, the highly affecting Pearl (Shaunette Renée Wilson, in gleeful Southern Gothic mode) lurks behind the scenes and has her own intimate manner of determining Maia’s suitability for the job. Tied into the theme of our national manner of exploiting our tragedies are themes of racial stereotypes and gay—particularly lesbian—bashing. More than a bit confusing at times, the production felt close to the slap-dash quality of the term-time Cab where student-generated works still finding their feet are common.

Then it’s back to Rolin Jones for more inspired words in a very static tableau, Another in a Long Line of Idiot Children (directed by Jessica Holt): Mother (Maura Hooper, flamboyantly drunk as a sort of bottle-blonde Morticia) chugs half liters of wine while waxing confidential—about family, fortunes, fate and the ghastly nature of life—to her brooding son (Matt Raich, seemingly bound in a beach chair and mostly non-committal), while Father (Julian Elijah Martinez, with hilariously frightening tremors and a vague air of acceptance) listens in whilst playing Solitaire. One assumes Jones knows well the targets he’s aiming for—venom enough is levied at them—but the play, essentially a long, rambling tour de force monologue, seems a mere exercise in characterization by caricature.

Finally, Excerpt from Undesirables (Book/Lyrics by Hansol Jung, music by Chris Bannow; directed by Luke Harlan), takes us back to Ellis Island where, arguably, most of us have ancestors who passed through on their way to becoming Americans for our sakes. In “The Layout” and “In America,” Jung and Bannow have their cast revisit the traditional tale of America’s welcoming arms by apprizing us of the situations of the unwelcome “undesirables” who met with rebuff, particularly immigrants from Asia who were not welcome at all, as well as those “deviates”—homosexuals, prostitutes, and others of the European demimonde—who might bring their “undesirable” habits to the New Land. With the brio of the “it’s not so bad if you can sing about it” logic that seems to underpin every musical addressing hardship themes, Undesirables intimates an interesting tale about its unusual inmates. The excerpt ended Series A on a high note with the entire Festival cast present on stage.

Series B

“Playing possum” generally equates with pretending to be dead or inert, but in Rolin Jones’ The Mercury and the Magic (directed by Jessica Holt), two opossums, Joe (Ato Blankson-Wood) and Mike (Julian Elijah Martinez) are anything but passive. They “own the road” and assert themselves by running out when cars come by, frightening the drivers (Matt Raich). Meanwhile, Joe is questioning the nature of opossum-hood, as, indeed, any mammal might. The skit has the feel of the kind of thing Saturday Night Live is famous for—comical “what-ifs” that kill time before something else happens.

What happens next is A. Rey Pamatmat’s We Have Cookies. Directed by Jessica Holt, the play is the centerpiece of Series B, its themes more sharply delineated than most of Series A. Iris (Jenelle Chu) is benign and gracious, only too happy to welcome Blink (Annelise Lawson) into a community that does, indeed, have cookies. The cookies, a fairly impressive pile, are in the center of the table that separates the two women. The repetitive ‘cookie monster’ noise that occurs every time one of them—usually Blink—takes a cookie gets a bit old, but its almost percussive punctuation serves the task of bringing us back again and again to the central matter: Blink’s attempt to come to terms with simple facts of life: some people have cookies and other people don’t; cookies do not grow on trees but must be extracted from those who are capable of making cookies though without the wherewithal to enjoy them; cookies, once you become fond of them and take them for granted, seem to justify activities that will cement one’s advantage—such as, eventually, physical struggles between Iris and Blink themselves. Part allegory, part blackout sketch, We Have Cookies puts its actors through their paces as they have to work in quick, structured segments and go from rational and meek to aggressive and, in Lawson’s case, autocratic and demanding, and childishly gluttonous. While perhaps a bit too obvious in its intentions, Pamatmat’s play offers a quick study of how resources—particularly luxuries—become defining and defensible for any privileged population.

MJ Kaufman’s Your Living Room is Full of Ghosts, directed by Luke Harlan, begins with an absurd premise: Mom (Ato Blankson-Wood) has taken to living in Ikea showrooms; her daughter (Shaunette Renée Wilson) visits and tries to get at what’s going on. Ostensibly a send-up of the model lives that the middle class try desperately to live (here, the black protagonists might add a further racial dimension to the dry aspiration to live surrounded by the simplicity of Scandinavian design), the play yokes in other aspects of dysfunction, as between mother and daughter and between mother and neighbor. The pay-off seems a bit flat and the real pleasure of the exchange is in watching Blankson-Wood’s cool and pragmatic mother, who may be mad, and Wilson’s irritable reactions, jumping on a couch or settling with deep suspicion into a big armchair.

Dysfunction of a much more hysterical register animates Mary Laws’ All Saints, directed by Luke Harlan. Here, a couple, Thomas (Aaron Bartz) and Joan (Maura Hooper), already settled into bed and about to set the alarm for the morrow, must come to grips with Joan’s announcement: she is an alligator. The meeting of domestic drama and absurdist comedy goes as far as it can go, with Hooper’s reasonableness gradually becoming more fierce and animalistic. As with Jones’ Idiot Children, the play requires a comic tour de force from Hooper, crawling the floor in her jammies and reaching, nonplussed, for straws as her patient husband—constantly underlining how “sturdy” Joan is—defeats each of her points. Could she be an alien? A glass of water? Anything but a human woman! Laws’ script toys with the kinds of transformations that magic realism—and, indeed, saints’ lives—hold to be possible, and moves toward a conclusion that’s willing to let symbol or enigma stand for resolution.

Summer Shorts: A Festival of New Voices ended the season with themes that find common cause with the full-length plays presented during the summer, where the banality of domestic life, the oddity of relationships, the efforts to remember and invent, and to live meaningful and authentic lives were handled with effects that come from satire, vaudeville, classic naturalism, thrillers and improv. As eclectic as such approaches may be, the Summer Cabaret cast rose to an impressive variety of roles and situations, making the case that “voices at the forefront of American theater” are nothing if not conscious of the tensions of our times. And kudos to the tech people—especially Scenic Design by Kevin Bret Klakouski and Costumes by Steven M. Rotramel—for the wherewithal to compress so many different shows into such a short compass.

Up soon: a preview of the first three shows of term-time Cabaret, led by Hugh Farrell, Tyler Kieffer, Will Rucker and Molly Hennighausen. For now, a fond farewell to the team of the Yale Summer Cabaret 2014, led by Co-Artistic Directors Jessica Holt and Luke Harlan, and Managing Directors Gretchen Wright and Sooyoung Hwang.

 

Yale Summer Cabaret Summer Shorts: A Festival of New Voices

Written by Rolin Jones; Hansol Jung and Chris Bannow; MJ Kaufman; Mary Laws; A Rey Pamatmat; Kate Tarker Directed by Luke Harlan; Jessica Holt

Cast: Aaron Bartz; Ato Blankson-Wood; Jenelle Chu; Maura Hooper; AnneLise Lawson; Julian Elijah Martinez; Matt Raich; Shaunette Renée Wilson

Production Team: Associate Scenic Designer: Kevin Bret Klakouski; Costume Designer: Steven M. Rotramel; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Sound Designer: Kate Marvin; Stage Manager/Series A: Will Rucker; Stage Manager/Series B: Avery Trunko; Photography: Christopher Ash

August 14-17, 2014

Yale Summer Cabaret: Summer Shorts Festival

Tonight the Yale Summer Cabaret resumed with Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, formerly known as Southwest Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, between the Years 1884-1915, directed by Jessica Holt, which runs until July 26. It will be followed by Will Eno’s Middletown, directed by Luke Harlan. The first is, at first, a “laugh riot,” Harlan says, that gradually becomes a very moving experience that boldly examines questions of race in America. In returning, the Cab space has been partially reconfigured from the set-up of the first two plays of the season, with the main difference being the placement of the audience: both in and around the action. Actors may be seated at tables with the viewers.

Then the space will be completely changed for Middletown, involving a cast of 11, with the action set up in a different location and most likely using a higher stage platform than has generally been used at the Cab. After Middletown’s run from 31 July to 10 August, including a special 40th Anniversary celebration dinner by invitation, the final slot in the season is occupied by a festival of short plays.

Both Co-Artistic Directors Holt and Harlan have considerable previous experience with festivals of short plays and are enthusiastic about what a shorter playing time affords. “Short plays are often more challenging,” Harlan said, “less safe, and more willing to move beyond boundaries.” A full-length play requires a complete investment in an idea, one able to be fleshed out into a full show. Short plays can make their points more quickly, with greater concentration, and sometimes greater risks.

The intention all along has been to invite plays from alums of the Yale School of Drama. Everyone Holt and Harlan approached was interested. In two cases, with plays by A. Rey Pamatmat and MJ Kaufman, the plays were written expressly for the festival. Others are plays that pre-existed, and one play, by Hansol Jung, is an excerpt from a musical that had been proposed for last year’s term time Cabaret.

Here are the plays, none of which has been previously staged:

Rolin Jones, much lauded for his mash-up of Shakespeare and The Beatles in the Yale Rep show, These! Paper! Bullets!, provides three short plays, each about 10 minutes: Ron Bobby Had Too Big a Heart; Sovereignty; The Mercury and the Magic.

Hansol Jung, whose play Cardboard Piano was at the Carlotta Festival here in the spring, offers an excerpt from a musical, The Undesirables.

MJ Kaufman, winner of the 2013 ASCAP Cole Porter Prize in Playwriting, whose Sagittarius Ponderosa was featured in Carlotta 2013, presents Your Living Room is Full of Ghosts, which is set in an IKEA.

Mary Laws, whose Bird Fire Fly played in Carlotta 2014, returns with All Saints.

A. Rey Pamatmat, recipient of the 2012-13 Hodder Fellowship in Playwriting at Princeton, wrote We Have Cookies specifically for the Festival.

Kate Tarker, author of Thunderbodies, which appeared in Carlotta 2014, offers M.A.H. (A Museum Play).

The plays will be presented in two sets of three plays each, Series A on Thursday, August 14, Series B on Friday, August 15, and both Series on Saturday and Sunday, to close out the Summer Cabaret Season with a marathon of short plays. The plays inclusive to each Series TBA later.

According to Harlan, the playwrights were asked to submit plays less than 30 minutes in length, though one or two may be a bit longer. The entire running time for a Series is 90-100 minutes. Harlan says the majority of the plays are comedies, though comedies that risk violence and, in some cases, look at unpleasant aspects of America. The playwrights were also informed about the actors available for the Festival. There will be 8 actors, all of whom will have been seen during the course of the Summer Season. Two of the short plays feature larger casts, while some require 3 or 4 actors, and there are a few 2 handers as well.

Holt and Harlan will trade-off directing duties, so that each will be involved more or less to the same degree in staging the plays. The strong collaboration that has been shown so far in this year’s Summer Cabaret should be even more on view in this final effort.

Regulars of the Cab know that a surprisingly effective theatrical experience can be provided by short plays, and with the varied casts, playwrights, and running times, the Summer Short Festival offers an excellent opportunity to see the kinds of things the Cab does best.

With only three opportunities to see each Series, spread over four days, secure your tickets early for the Summer Shorts Festival. The end of summer is sooner than you think.

Yale Summer Cabaret 40th Anniversary Season Summer Shorts Festival, August 14-17, 2014

For more information: Summercabaret.org

Hey Claude

Much Ado About Nothing, the comedy by Shakespeare that is the source for These! Paper! Bullets!, a new adaptation—or, in its terms, “modish ripoff”—by playwright Rolin Jones and director Jackson Gray, is somewhat silly, somewhat foolish, somewhat witty, and way too busy. The original play suffers from a surfeit of plots that don’t really add up to much—which is a way of saying their only purpose is to divert—and TPB takes that feature and runs away with it.

What makes TPB bigger than our Will’s conception is the driving force of this lively, tuneful, and sprawling production: pop culture in the form of the Fab Four—The Beatles. TPB takes us back to the days when the boys from Liverpool—not to mention numerous copies, clones, and wannabes—first assailed these shores. 1964, the key year of Beatlemania, found the Beatles riding as high as they would ever ride. “Bigger than Jesus,” John Lennon quipped (to considerable backlash), as does his likeness here: Ben (the firmly tongue-in-cheek David Wilson Barnes), the wittiest of the Quartos, aka Benedict in Much Ado. He wrangles, rom-com fashion, with Bea, otherwise Beatrice (Jeanine Serralles), a fashion maven á la Mary Quant. Meanwhile his mate Claude (Bryan Fenkart, the “cute one”) is speechless with his fancy for Higgy, née Hero (Ariana Venturi), a model whose skill, it seems, is to make questionable couture look desirable.

What Jones and company do so cleverly is mash the familiar tropes of Beatlemania—Liverpool accents, matching suits, moptops, screaming girls, fab gear, media circus, hummable numbers—with the giddy courtship shenanigans of Much Ado. And guess what? The Beatles biz beats the Bard.

Fans of the Beatles—and the Rutles—will find moments that recall some of the best banter of the former and some of the parodic tweaking of the latter. The gag album titles, the pastiche for pastiche’s sake in the projections (Nicholas Hussong) and costumes (Jessica Ford) and tunes (Billie Joe Armstrong) and stagings, including a “Hey Jude” rave-up and a “Get Back” rooftop shutdown, will keep those in the know on their toes. Jones even manages to include the one line that appears in both a Shakespeare play and a Beatles tune (indeed, it’s cribbed from a BBC Shakespeare production in the Beatles song). A good extra credit question for classes attending the show—and no fair Googling it. Even the name of the band—the Quartos—manages to combine the Beatles’ original name—the Quarrymen—with a Shakespearean association.

Indeed, TPB improves on Much Ado, but not quite enough. The Don John subplot—never very compelling—becomes funnier with ribs at Don Best (Adam O’Byrne), the early Quartos drummer who was dumped and bears a grudge, and the best parts of Much Ado—the eavesdropping scenes—are not surprisingly the best parts of the play here. But Much Ado’s Dogberry, here Mr. Berry (Greg Stuhr), still manages to dispense his tedium, opening the play, opening the second act, and getting into an interminable physical bout with his second in command, Mr. Urges (Brad Heberlee), and with the malefactors, Boris the journalist (Andrew Musselman) and Colin, a paparazzo (Brian McManamon), who are generally tedious company in their own right. I doubt even Monty Python could make these clods as comical as they need to be to justify their time onstage. Their only purpose, as ever, is to give the principals a breather. Me, I’d rather be backstage with the band.

Along the way, adaptation-wise, there are some happy inspirations: Jones cheekily (heh) adapts the mistaken identity plot by way of doctored photographs occasioning, quite rightly, a tabloid frenzy about the most eligible Quarto, while “all the world”—in the form of breathless TV reporter Paulina Noble (Liz Wisan) and her cameraman (Brad Heberlee), and even the Queen (Chris Geary, a welcome royal)—looks on. The Quartos themselves are reminiscent of the ersatz Beatles of the Saturday morning cartoon, with Lucas Papaelias nailing perfectly the deadpan adroitness of the George avatar. Meanwhile, Frida (Ceci Fernandez) and Ulcie (Keira Naughton) provide much of the amusement on the ladies’ side. Then there’s Jabari Brisport in Dionne Warwick drag because he can. Unlike The Rutles, Jones doesn’t go near the homosexual undercurrents in The Beatles entourage, as Brian Epstein (and Leggy Mountbatten) has been excised, and a dutiful George Martin type, Anton (James Lloyd Reynolds), runs the show.

Others have commented on how Jones and Gay improve on the sexual politics of Much Ado, with the Foursome getting a comeuppance for their double standard (yawn), but, oddly, the girls don’t fare so well here. Higgy is pretty much incoherent as a character, with the winsomeness of Much Ado’s Hero dropped in favor of party girl dimness—an improvement?—and Serralles’s Bea I could not warm to at all, as something of the role’s soul disappears as Bea is more apt to stuff wedding cake in her gob than appeal to anything more winning. You may find yourself waiting for Yoko. Or maybe Jones should take a cue from that other band of the era and work in someone a bit more Faithfull to the scene.

There’s so much going on in the show, you may easily breeze through without thinking about anything so Old School as character development, and the songs certainly help. There are knock-offs like “I’ll Give It All to You,” and big, rousing numbers like “Regretfully Yours,” that uses Fenkart to good effect, and even Ben trying to lay down a “Hide Your Love Away”-style soul-search, and mustn’t forget Stephen DeRosa’s infectious sing-along to “My Wild Irish Rose” as “impromptu” mugging to mask some scenery shifting. It’s a moment warm with the music hall repertoire that was a ready source for the Lads, and it serves here to reach out to the audience—as do moments like Wisan spotting celebrities in the seats (on opening night Athol Fugard was identified as Winston Churchill and graciously smoked an imaginary cigar on camera).

Full of a little something for anyone with fondness for British humour, or for humoring the Brits, These! Paper! Bullets! mostly hits what it aims at, though somewhere in the whirligig is a romantic-comedy about sex and celebrity in the Sixties—with the Fabs as the feckless flag-bearers—trying to “shed those dowdy feathers and fly, a little bit.”

 

These! Paper! Bullets! A Modish Ripoff of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing Adapted by Rolin Jones Songs by Billie Joe Armstrong Directed by Jackson Gay

Choreographer: Monica Bill Barnes; Music Director: Julie McBride; Scenic Designer: Michael Yeargan; Costume Designer: Jessica Ford; Lighting Designer: Paul Whitaker; Sound Designer and Incidental Music: Broken Chord; Projection Designer: Nicholas Hussong; Orchestrator and Arranger: Tom Kitt; Dialect Coach: Stephen Gabis; Fight Director: Michael Rossmy; Production Dramaturgs: Ilya Khodosh, Catherine Sheehy; Casting Directors: Tara Rubin, Lindsay Levine; Stage Manager: Robert Chikar

Cast: David Wilson Barnes; Bryan Fenkart; James Barry; Lucas Papaelias; James Lloyd Reynolds; Adam O’Byrne; Jeanine Serralles; Ariana Venturi; Keira Naughton; Ceci Fernandez; Stephen DeRosa; Andrew Musselman; Brian McManamon; Jabari Brisport; Christopher Geary; Brad Heberlee; Liz Wisan; Greg Stuhr; Anthony Manna

Yale Repertory Theatre March 14-April 5, 2014