Auld Acquaintance

Review of It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play, at Hartford Stage

Hartford Stage’s holiday offering this year takes a break from the annual staging of A Christmas Carol—a Ghost Story in favor of a more streamlined, less effects-laden show. Instead of flying ghosts and bedecked sleighs and the full trappings of a Dickensian Christmas, we have Joe Landry’s adaptation of an American classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, the Frank Capra film from 1946 that centered on how a potential business catastrophe at Christmas cemented the values of the postwar community of Bedford Falls, NY. The film, which is generally playing somewhere on television at Christmastime, showcases James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore and a host of beloved actors who have become indelible figures of a bygone small-town America. Landry’s adaptation is actually set in a radio studio as a live broadcast, so that a town’s worth of characters can be played by five skilled voice actors: Jake Laurents (Gerardo Rodriguez), Freddy Filmore (Michael Preston), Sally Applewhite (Shirine Babb), Lana Sherwood (Jennifer Bareilles) and Harry “Jazzbo” Heywood (Evan Zes), with an onstage Foley—or sound effects—artist (Leer Leary) providing crucial backup. 

The cast of It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen & Rachel Alderman; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Directed by Melia Bensussen and Rachel Alderman, the joys of the play take place on several levels. First, there’s the show-biz aspect: we’re watching ostensible radio actors ham it up for a live audience, complete with an applause sign so that the listeners at home will know we’re there and loving it. Thus, we, the audience, are playing an audience and responding accordingly. Related to that is the fact that the actors—invisible to those fictional listeners—are visible to us, even when they almost miss cues or carry on sotto voce chats in the background or one-up each other with glares and snickers or flirt with body language. And on that score, keep an eye on Lear Leery—he’s not only a one-man sound-board, he’s also an onlooker who knows the show frontwards and backwards and reacts accordingly. Then there’s the story itself, which is heartwarming and corny and quaint and magical, all at once. The radio actors know all that and also that it’s a lot of fun to do. It helps to know the story as well as the actors do (I do) but even if you don’t, you can get caught up in trying to imagine the different characters these quick-change voices bring to life. They’re all there: George and Mary Bailey, Uncle Billy, Ma Bailey, brother Harry Bailey, Old Man Potter, Mr. Gower, Mr. Martini, Violet Bick, the Bailey kids, and of course Ernie and Bert as well as a host of background voices.

Jennifer Bareilles, Shirine Babb, Michael Preston, Evan Zes and Gerardo Rodriguez in It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play; photo by T. Charles Erickson

George Bailey, chief exec at a struggling Building and Loan he inherited from his dad, is suddenly vulnerable to take over and even extortion because his daft Uncle Billy mislaid a sizable deposit that has fallen into the hands of the grasping and covetous town big wig Old Man Potter. George’s night of despair on Christmas eve earns him the intercession of “angel second class” Clarence Oddbody. The two main roles of George and Clarence are enacted by Gerardo Rodriguez as Laurents and Evan Zes as Heywood. The chemistry is good and Rodriguez brings a bit more gravitas to George than is sometimes the case. He’s a take-charge guy who we expect will battle his way out of any difficulty. Zes’s Clarence is less flighty than the original and is more like someone who has entered a movie he was watching and wants to see if his intervention will work or not. And it’s a great treat to see Michael Preston (recently Hartford Stage’s Scrooge) do the hat and voice-switching necessary to enact a heated exchange between Potter and Uncle Billy.

Leer Leary in It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The first two thirds of the play provide the backstory and that’s when the radio show elements are foregrounded. It’s all got a nostalgic tinge—including ads with jingles set to Christmas tunes—and provides a spirited evocation of the effects of radio, the spectacle of live performance, and the fun of mixing both at once. What’s particularly lively in this production are how the personalities of the radio actors inflect the roles they play with their voices so that interesting frictions occur with the actors letting viewers in on their own responses to the roles (especially effective there are Bareilles and Babbs whose Applewhite and Sherwood clearly have some issues).

Evan Zes (Clarence) and Gerardo Rodriguez (George Bailey, back) in It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Director Bensussen and Alderman shift the play’s mise en scene when Clarence enters the story. Trap doors and an upper platform come into use and suddenly we’re aware that we’re watching a play on the Hartford Stage, and that the show’s spatial concept extends beyond the borders of the radio studio. It’s a very effective way to register the difference of a world without George Bailey. The play has moved from being a comic evocation of familiar types and the kind of dramatized moments radio highlights with sound and music to an actual play that borders on a tragedy of lost opportunity. The world with no George in it—fighting the good fight for his community, his family and friends—is a darker, more dangerous place. Unlike the Scrooge story, where the fear of leading a selfish, wasted life shocks an old miser into generosity, the crux of It’s a Wonderful Life is that commitments and obligations are the stuff of life and anyone who has lived has affected other lives in indelible ways. The emotional tone of the play is served well by the closing sing-along of Auld Lang Syne, a tribute to the townfolks’ old acquaintance with one another and ours with them.

Jennifer Bareilles, Gerardo Rodriguez and Evan Zes in It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play; photo by T. Charles Erickson

In 1946, when It’s a Wonderful Life first played in movie theaters, there had been a loss of nearly 300,000 U.S. citizens who didn’t return from the war. As of today, the casualties from Covid-19, in the States alone, is over 800,000. The commemoration that closes the play isn’t just “sentimental hogwash,” as Mr. Potter would claim, but rather a way of saying we’re lucky to be here and we’d like to remember those who aren’t, thanking them all for their wonderful lives.

Shirine Babb in It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play; photo by T. Charles Erickson

It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play
Adapted by Joe Landry
Based on the story, The Greatest Gift by Philip Van Doren Stern
From the screenplay by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra, and Jo Swerling
Directed by Melia Bensussen & Rachel Alderman

Scenic Design: Stephanie Osin Cohen; Costume Design: An-Lin Dauber; Lighting Design: Evan C. Anderson; Sound Design: Frederick Kennedy; Wig & Hair Design: J. Jared Janas; Dramaturg: Zoë Golub-Sass; Production Stage Manager: Kelly Hardy

Cast: Shirine Babb, Jennifer Bareilles, Leer Leary, Michael Preston, Gerardo Rodriguez, Evan Zes

Hartford Stage
November 26-December 26, 2021

Another Miracle

Review of Falsettoland, Music Theatre of Connecticut

Falsettoland, now playing at Music Theatre of Connecticut through November 21, directed by Kevin J. Connors is a quirky, sappy, funny, tear-jerker of a musical. And how many shows can you say that about?

The cast of the Music Theatre of Connecticut production of Falsettoland, directed by Kevin Connors; photo by Alex Mogillo

What’s it about? Well, really it’s about love, but the context for the vicissitudes of love involves gays and straights, Jews and a few non-Jews. The show’s humor is decidedly arch—as for instance in both versions of “the Miracle of Judaism” or in “Baseball Game” or “Everyone Hates Their Parents”—and its play upon our sympathies stems from our acceptance that—to vary Tolstoy—“all dysfunctional relationships are unique in their dysfunction.” For Marvin (Dan Sklar) the dysfunction is starting to double-down. In the first part of Falsettos—Falsettoland is the second half of the longer musical—he left his wife, Trina (Corinne C. Broadbent), for his lover Whizzer (Max Meyers). As Falsettoland opens, Marvin and Whizzer have split up and Trina has taken up with Mendel (Jeff Gurner), Marvin’s former psychiatrist. Then there’s the looming Bar Mitzvah for Jason (Ari Sklar), the son of Marvin and Trina who misses Whizzer and invites him to his baseball game, to the awkwardness of all. For Marvin, some kind of reckoning must be coming, but—as the song “Something Bad is Happening” late in Act One implies—he hasn’t yet seen the worst of it.

The cast of Falsettoland, Music Theatre of Connecticut, left to right: Trina (Corinne C. Broadbent), Mendel (Jeff Gurner), front, Cordelia (Elissa DeMaria), back, Marvin (Dan Sklar), front, Dr. Charlotte (Jessie Janet Richards), back; photo by Alex Mogillo

The cleverness of the show’s book—by James Lapine and William Finn—lies in how its mundane situations spark asides and reflections and confrontations, all of which are sung as dialogue. The music and lyrics by William Finn have a savvy, wry reflectiveness and bounce along with an agreeable forthrightness that seem in-keeping with the “tell it to a psychiatrist” tone. The shrink—played with crusty affability by MTC regular Gurner—is almost like a stand-in for the audience, a bit off to the side and yet emotionally involved. And that would also seem to be the point of the lesbian couple—Dr. Charlotte (Jessie Janet Richards) and her partner Cordelia (Elissa DeMaria), a non-Jew obsessed with Jewish cuisine; they might be the “zany neighbors,” but in fact, like us, they are drawn-in and play audience to the family dysfunction that, at first, seems only to hang on the question of how Marvin will navigate the emotional ties that bind him, and, more crucially, how Jason will manage to have a Bar Mitzvah he can tolerate or maybe even be proud of. But as “Unlikely Lovers,” a highlight of Act Two, makes clear, the scope of the foursome comprised by Dr. Charlotte, Cordelia, Marvin and Whizzer is key to the play’s vision of how new loves form in the space once dominated by family ties.

Whizzer (Max Meyers) and Marvin (Dan Sklar) in the MTC production of Falsettoland; photo by Alex Mogillo

But that’s not to say that more traditional family ties are given short shrift. Key to the tone the play strikes is the role of Trina. She might be more freaked out than she is, she might also be way more resentful of her former husband’s love for a man and her son’s friendship with that man, and she could whine a lot more. The great thing about Corinne C. Broadbent’s rendering of Trina is that she’s not melodramatic nor particularly long-suffering. Her big number in the second act, “Holding to the Ground” (sung while doing her aerobic exercises) lays out her emotional parameters and it’s one of the strongest numbers, matched—or even topped—by Max Meyer’s strong delivery of Whizzer’s “You Gotta Die Sometime.” What these two sung speeches give is not only insight into the difficult terrain these characters are navigating but also show them coping and revealing strengths that take us beyond the play’s tendency to use quirks for laughs.

the cast of Music Theatre of Connecticut’s production of Falsettoland, directed by Kevin Connors; photo by Alex Mogillo

At the heart of it all is Sklar’s Marvin, a likeable guy dealing with a lot; you might even say he’s a bit of a schlemihl trying to be a mensch. His genuine affection for Whizzer wins us over in “What More Can I Say,” and the real nature of the problem facing the couple ratches up the drama and takes us back to very stressful times that the musical aims to revisit as a coping exercise. And so, in good uplifting-ending fashion, the fate of that Bar Mitzvah is to reinforce the growth all the characters have undergone. Amongst all the good work done here—including Lindsay Fuori’s subway car set that adds the right note of urban landscape—special mention should be made of Ari Sklar’s Jason who is such a natural for this part it’s as if it’s a slice of his life. That illusion is helped by the fact that Jason’s father, Marvin, is played by Ari real life dad. Family ties, after all.

Marvin (Dan Sklar), Trina (Corinne C. Broadbent), background; Mendel (Jeff Gurner), Jason (Ari Sklar), foreground; photo by Alex Mogillo

In revisiting those days of something awful in Falsettoland, the MTC production might be said to sound a note of nostalgia. Bad as things got, there was a sense that that they could only get better—in part through visions like Finn and Lapine’s of the everydayness of same-sex couples as part of the same old traditions grown so familiar. One of those miracles of humanitarianism.

The cast of Music Theatre of Connecticut’s production of Falsettoland, directed by Kevin Connors; photo by Alex Mogillo

Falsettoland
Book by William Finn and James Lapine
Music and Lyrics by William Finn
Directed by Kevin J. Connors

Scenic Design: Lindsay Fuori; Lighting Design: RJ Romeo; Costume Design: Diane Vanderkroef; Sound Design: Will Atkin; Prop Design: Sean Sanford; Stage Manager: Jim Schilling; Choreography: Chris McNiff; Musical Direction: David John Madore

Cast: Corinne C. Broadbent, Elissa DeMaria, Jeff Gurner, Max Meyers, Jessie Janet Richards, Ari Sklar, Dan Sklar

Musicians: Piano/Musical Director: David John Madore; Drums: Steve Musitano, Chris McWilliams

Music Theatre of Connecticut
November 5-21, 2021

The Power of Doubt

Review of Doubt: A Parable, Westport Country Playhouse

John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable, the second offering of Westport Country Playhouse’s two-show mini-season runs in-person until November 20, with a streaming version of the play available online from November 11 to November 21. This is the first live production at the venerable venue since the COVID shutdowns and the last until the playhouse’s next full season opens in April 2022 (for information on the latter, see below).

Directed by David Kennedy, WCP’s associate artistic director, the current production of Doubt—which won a Pulitzer and the Tony for Best Play 2005—provides an interesting example of how context can affect a play. Back in 2005, the play was a timely fictionalization of issues that arose out of the Boston Globe’s celebrated 2002 exposure of child-abuse among Catholic priests. The investigations did indeed reveal abuse and cover-ups dating back decades, and yet Shanley’s play, set in 1964, can still feel anachronistic in the way it portrays characters who seem to live with an open secret.

Now, almost twenty years later, Shanley’s “parable” gains by not riding the coattails of a major news story. The questions the play aims to raise—about doubt and certainty—move into a more parabolic realm less concerned with the times and more readily timeless. And that helps to foreground what has always been the play’s greatest strength: that it can be staged to have very different effects without changing a single word. The notion that the play’s final act takes place offstage—in the conversations of its audience members—still holds true. I’ve seen the play staged once before and can say that the take-aways from the two productions were markedly different.

Sister Aloysius (Betsy Aidem) and Father Flynn (Erik Bryant) in the Westport Country Playhouse production of Doubt: A Parable; photo by Carol Rosegg

The story concerns the efforts of Sister Aloysius (Betsy Aidem), principal at a Catholic school in the Bronx, to remove Father Flynn (Eric Bryant) from his position in the parish due to her belief that he has seduced or is attempting to seduce a young boy, Donald Muller, the first and only African American child at the school. To this end, Sister Aloysius enlists the aid of Sister James (Kerstin Anderson) to help make a case to be taken to their superiors. Father Flynn, ambushed in a meeting with the two nuns, later turns to Sister James to give his view of the situation. But a surprising interview between Sister Aloysius and the boy’s mother (Sharina Martin) seems to strengthen the principal’s resolve.

Sister James (Kerstin Anderson) and Sister Aloysius (Betsy Aidem) in the Westport Country Playhouse production of Doubt: A Parable; photo by Carol Rosegg

Sister Aloysius is portrayed as rigidly old guard—down on secular songs in Christmas pageants, on ballpoint pens, on teachers as “friends” to their students, and certainly on the touchy-feely version of mentoring that Father Flynn prefers. There’s not a lot that can be done with her character as she’s not meant to be sympathetic even if we might grant her a certain steely charm. Betsy Aidem’s portrayal captures well the kind of personal authority that those with rigid parameters for what’s allowed and what’s not can steep themselves in. And Kerstin Anderson establishes well the conflicts in Sister James: by temperament, she is sympathetic to Father Flynn; by the hierarchy of her order, she should support Sister Aloysius. Particularly if the elder nun is correct in her assumptions. But if she’s wrong? That doubt makes Sister James somewhat our stand-in, trying to decide between these two opponents, both practiced at getting others to do what they want them to do. For their own good.

It’s in the character of Father Flynn that the play offers the most potential for varied interpretations. He could be more openly arrogant, feeling that he’s above any criticism, he could be genuinely aghast at the suspicions in Sister A’s mind, or he could be a serial abuser trying to cover his tracks. Bryant’s Flynn downplays the arrogance, trying hard for a bid for sympathy from his opponent. How much sympathy he earns from the viewer is for each to decide.

Aloysius is open about her dislike of Flynn and there’s little point in considering ulterior motives: she sees him and his tendencies as pastor—even if he is innocent of abuse—as inimical to her view of how the Church should present itself. But if she’s wrong about Flynn’s infractions, then she’s simply using suspicion to taint his reputation and to drive him out. The power-play aspects of Shanley’s script strike me as its most enduring element. The fact that we can’t really know is the core of what the play offers as its insight into human relations. How do we assess someone else’s character? By what they do, by what they say, but what about what they don’t openly say or do? The value of doubt is that it reminds us human behavior is mostly lacking in absolutes. There’s always a little wiggle room.

At Westport, Kennedy’s production highlights the emotions, with the two central characters breaking down and collapsing to the floor at different moments. While her outburst may make Sister Aloysius more sympathetic in the end, Father Flynn’s outburst has the opposite effect. Arguably, his attempt to play on emotions makes him seem more guilty, or at least seems to indicate he may be culpable even if only for his thoughts or intentions.

Mrs. Muller (Sharina Martin) and Sister Aloysius (Betsy Aidem) in The Westport Country Playhouse production of Doubt: A Parable; photo by Carol Rosegg

A key scene is the discussion of Donald’s situation between Sister Aloysius and Mrs. Muller. In a way, Mrs. Muller’s view—which Sharina Martin registers as a hard truth arrived at through experience—serves best to put the priest’s interest in the boy in a context not as dark as the one Sister Aloysius assumes; in any case, Flynn may help the boy, but, in Sister Aloysius’ view, only at great risk.

Once again director David Kennedy delivers a play in which complex issues and implications are presented through well-orchestrated dialogues. While not having quite the drama of others he’s directed—like The Invisible Hand or Appropriate—or the comedy of The Understudy, Doubt acquires great power from its perfect pacing and by demonstrating that doubt and certainty can be equally unnerving.

Doubt: A Parable
By John Patrick Shanley
Directed by David Kennedy 

Scenic Designer: Charlie Corcoran; Costume Designer: Sarita Fellows; Lighting Designer: Carolina Ortiz Herrera; Sound Designer: Fred Kennedy; Production Dramaturg: Dana Tanner-Kennedy; Production Stage Manager: Shane Schnetzer

Cast: Betsy Aidem; Kerstin Anderson; Erik Bryant; Sharina Martin

Westport Country Playhouse
In person: November 2-20, 2021
Streaming: November 11-21, 2021

On sale now are ticket packages for the 2022 season:

Next to Normal
Music by Tom Kitt
Book and Lyrics by Brian Yorkey
Directed and choreographed by Marcos Santana
The 2009 Tony-winning musical and winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama: musical theater that looks at a family in crisis with introspective songs.
April 5-23, 2002

Straight White Men
By Young Jean Lee
Directed by Mark Lamos
A father and two grown sons “forced to face their own identities” in inventive playwright Young Jean Lee’s 2014 play.
May 24-June 11, 2022

Ain’t Misbehavin’
Conceived by Richard Maltby, Jr. and Murray Horwitz
Directed and choreographed by Camille A. Brown
The 1978 Tony winner—“a dance-filled and reimagined celebration of jazz great Fats Waller,” from Camille A. Brown, recently awarded and nominated for her work on for colored girls.
July 5-23, 2022

4000 Miles
By Amy Herzog
Directed by David Kennedy
An intergenerational comedy from Amy Herzog—in which a 21-year-old visits his 91-year-old grandmother; a wry and wise Pulitzer finalist from 2013.
August 23-September 10, 2022

From the Mississippi Delta
By Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland
An autobiographical play using story, song and memories to dramatize a harrowing and inspiring journey from a childhood in poverty in Mississippi to the civil rights movement and the life of a professor.
October 18-November 5, 2022 

Paradise Enough

Review of Ah, Wilderness!, Hartford Stage

The Hartford Stage production of Ah, Wilderness!, a rare Eugene O’Neill comedy, directed by the theater’s new artistic director Melia Benussen, was initially scheduled for Bensussen’s first season, back in 2019-20. It would’ve been the season’s finale. The COVID pandemic tabled those plans, causing Bensussen’s debut to be pushed back to the 2020-21 season that never was. Now, the production opens the 2021-22 season, a symbol of theater’s endurance and a return to a kind of normality. In any case, it’s a welcome experience: sitting again in the Hartford Stage theater and experiencing a handsomely mounted production of a classic play somewhat revised for our times.

The cast of the Hartford Stage production of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!, directed by Melia Bensussen, 2021

The play itself may seem a somewhat odd choice. But for the references to Yale, New Haven, Waterbury and other Connecticut places that situate the play squarely in our vicinity, we might wonder why this play now. That local aspect—the homefield advantage?—is reassuring in its way. We know how much the recent distress over the pandemic came down to how well discrete municipalities handled the challenge. Connecticut didn’t do as badly as some. Why not a look back at one of the state’s local heroes? The O’Neill family spent summers in New London and their Monte Cristo cottage is the presumed setting for Ah, Wilderness!, set on a Fourth of July weekend early in the twentieth century. The play itself dates from the 1930s, and so the very notion of “dated” is built into its thematics, so to speak.

And that’s because, first of all, this is O’Neill’s somewhat light-hearted and ironic look back at his early years when he felt himself schooled by the likes of such literary luminaries as Ibsen, Shaw and Strindberg. Richard Miller, his alter ego here, is played by Jaevon Williams as somewhat prissy and comically self-important. It’s necessary to the play’s tone that we find his pretentions laughable, even if we might find acclimation to the stodgy standards of the time a let-down in any hero. What saves the play, and what might come as a surprise given the way intergenerational conflict is generally dramatized in O’Neill and others, is how Richard’s parents are depicted. Suffice to say, we’re in the realm of situation comedy of the “father knows best” variety.

The task of representing a sympathetic, generous, patient and amused elder generation is ably handled by Michael Boatman as Nat Miller, the family’s patriarch. In a time when “patriarchal” is not only a dated concept but one roundly denounced, Boatman reminds us of how ably the position could be inhabited. Nat sticks up for his errant son when required—against the censorious father (Joseph Adams) of Richard’s love interest—and knows well enough that youth is a period of trial and error where the errors are part of the project of growing up. It’s a benign play that ends on just the right note of long-standing love, tolerance, and belief in a shared life together: the sort of things we like to think we mean when we talk about “family values.”

The cast of the Hartford Stage production of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!, directed by Melia Bensussen, 2021

Other elements in the play are apt to be problematic, but then they no doubt always were. Key on that score is Sid (McCaleb Burnett), the familiar figure of the drunken Irishman, here bringing in some necessary verbal humor and a personality that doesn’t fit with the respectable face the family wears for social status—Burnett shines in the big “family at the table” set-piece. The sentimental interest in this character—who woos relentlessly Lily (Natascia Diaz), the sister of Mrs. Miller, to earn a by-now inevitable rebuff—likely has shifted. Where the sympathy may once have been with the erring bachelor in need of a good woman to save him, it’s likely we find ourselves sympathizing all the more with a good woman who can’t find any other suitor than this ne’er-do-well and who can’t have any life outside a domestic setting. Such are the times of the play and such are the social strait-jackets that O’Neill delineates while trying—for romantic comedy purposes—to offer a view where “meant for each other” doesn’t equate with “lacking any other options.”

The youngest generation is well-served by Katerina McCrimmon as younger sister Mildred; she squirms about on the couch at one point with the kind of eager-to-break-out-of-it-all energy that makes us wonder what a play focused on her might become. As it is, the play’s tour of the naughty “house of ill repute,” where Richard nearly gets seduced by Belle (Brittany Annika Liu), and then gets into a fight trying to protect her honor, which she finds ridiculous, is never particularly comic or dramatic. Likewise the scene between Richard and his love interest Muriel doesn’t quite connect either. Both Belle and Muriel are played by Liu and she is not really convincing as either the Virgin or the Whore, those two poles by which female behavior was judged at the time. It’s not O’Neill’s intention to lampoon these clichés outright and so we have to accept them in the light of the naturalism he inherited from his literary heroes. And yet . . . it seems that one way to breathe new life into the play is to find a way to make Richard’s scenes with the women riskier or funnier or, indeed, more romantic. Much of the problem lies with Williams’ over-earnest Richard, who even when drunk is so far from dissolute that it all seems little ado over less.

Richard Miller (Jaevon Williams) and Muriel Macomber (Brittany Annika Liu) in the Hartford Stage production of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!, 2021

The lack of strong focus in the young persons’ scenes makes all the more important the older couple’s coping with their errant son. As the matriarch Essie Miller, Antoinette LaVecchia is lively in her fussiness and sense of rightness, and in the play’s close her seconding of her husband shines with a wisdom gained from a lifetime of intimacy. Ah, Wilderness! may be rom-com, but the romance is with family and the enduring couple at its heart, and with the feints and fits and starts by which that desiderata can be achieved. Quaint? Yes, but then, like the play’s fulminations about socialism spreading in the U.S, some attitudes are perennials. Ah, Wilderness! takes its title from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, beloved of Richard, in those famous lines about a book of verses, a jug of wine, a loaf of bread—and thou—that close with “Wilderness were paradise enough.” The upshot is that every successful couple finds paradise in the wilderness, and the wilderness can best be enjoyed together.

Essie Miller (Antoinetta LaVecchia) and Nat Miller (Michael Boatman) in the Hartford Stage production of Ah, Wilderness!, 2021

The play, which is a treat to watch on James Noone’s open, vertical, many-layered set, reminds us forcefully that some things just don’t fit on screens: live, multi-character theater on a grand stage notably. It’s great to be back at Hartford Stage, and it is time well-spent to revisit the past as shaded by the present. With its perfect tech—lighting by Wen-Ling Liao and costumes by Olivera Gajic, with hair, wigs and make-up by J. Jared Janis, and sound by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen—Melia Bensussen brings a neglected O’Neill comedy to life, featuring the very welcome addition of period songs sung by the cast, with live piano provided onstage by Yan Li. The songs keep the times alive but also indicate the commonality that the play—with its multi-ethnic cast—achieves without foregrounding any specific American ethnicity. From each according to ability? Paradise enough.

Ah, Wilderness!
By Eugene O’Neill
Directed by Melia Bensussen

Joseph Adams, Michael Boatman, Annie Jean Buckley, McCaleb Burnett, Natascia Diaz, Antonio Jose Jeffries, Tanner Jones, Antoinette LaVecchia, Brittany Annika Liu, Myles Low, Katerina McCrimmon, Stuart Rider, Jaevon Williams

Scenic Design: Jim Noone; Costume Design: Olivera Gajic; Lighting Design: Wen-Ling Liao; Sound Design: Rob Milburn & Michael Bodeen; Music Director/Pianist: Yan Li; Wig, Hair & Makeup Design: J. Jared Janas; Fight Choreographer: Ted Hewlett

Hartford Stage
October 14-November 7, 2021

Policed to Death

Review of KILL MOVE PARADISE, Playhouse on Park

The play for the Playhouse on Park debut of director Dexter J. Singleton, known in New Haven for his work as Founding Executive Artistic Director at Collective Consciousness Theatre, is well-chosen. At CCT, plays by authors of color are the norm, and dramas that confront issues of social justice even as they entertain and enlighten have been staged with great success. CCT is a black box theater which is why it’s quite a change to see Singleton’s work on an outdoors stage in Bushnell Park, Hartford. The open space and wide stage create an unusual atmosphere for what might otherwise be a somewhat claustrophobic play. James Ijames’ powerful KILL MOVE PARADISE is set in a fantasy afterlife, a “no exit” space seemingly reserved for black men who have died at the hands of police. The play ran live in person for three dates in late June and is available for streaming over the internet through August 1. Go here.

There’s something of a “Waiting for Godot” feel about the piece as the four characters, each arriving separately and at intervals, have to cope with determining their whereabouts and what is going on: Isa (Trevele Morgan), Grif (Oliver Sai Lester), Daz (Christopher Alexander Chukwueke), and Tiny (Quan Chambers), an adolescent. What’s more, this afterlife includes the audience. The idea of “fourth wall” doesn’t really apply as the space the men inhabit is not entirely clear even to them. The back wall is on a slant (a bit like a skateboard ramp) and occasionally one will try to climb it. At one point Daz  goes behind it to retrieve a lawn chair. It’s the only prop in the play other than a printer that emits a constantly increasing list of the wrongfully slain.

The lawn chair is a fitting prop because the audience—visible in shots taken from its viewpoint—is sitting on lawn chairs. The outdoors aspect of the event makes for an interesting friction with the play’s mood. Even as the young men express their discomfort and anxiety, knowing that the “they” watching them is predominantly white (Isa calls it “America”), the audience seems relaxed and nonjudgmental. Admittedly, watching the play streamed on the computer adds a buffer for the viewer. One is able to feel that the audience there on the grass is the “they” the young men refer to, while “we” watch from some more remote location. That’s just one of those things about the presence and non-presence of online theater. Here, it adds a further implication since the “they” that has victimized these men and a host of other black U.S. citizens is always present but rarely acknowledged. It’s all of us, collectively, and none of us, individually as viewers. Determining how much one feels “called out” by what the men say about the audience is part of the play’s work.

The cast of James Ijames’ KILL MOVE PARADISE at Playhouse on Park, directed by Dexter J. Singleton (Photo by Meredith Longo)

The portions of the play in which the men struggle with this sense of how they should react to their situation are its most probing. Isa worries about profiling, Grif sees beauty in the crowd, Daz feels affronted by attitudes that tell him what he should be, and Tiny, the youth, finally confronts the crowd, fake pistol in hand, insisting “it’s not real. I’m real.” Such confrontational moments are almost haphazard, which is another way of saying that one never knows when they will arise.

The dramatic situation of being fatalities together but also still conscious and interacting makes for vivid give-and-take between the characters, though the tone tends to veer about a bit, making it hard to keep a read on who these four are, even to themselves. Add to that Ijames’ technique of keeping the play bouncing along by working in a pastiche format, including sitcoms, a soul-music song and dance, computer-game tagging, and a recital of stuff Daz noted backstage—some of it highly symbolic, some quite random, some a bit too heavily marked as racial baggage. We’re never in one reality for too long as if the sad fact of the four’s current status would be overwhelming, to us and to them, without some theatrical razzamatazz.

Isa (Trevele Morgan), foreground, Daz (Christopher Alexander Chukwueke) in James Ijames’ KILL MOVE PARADISE at Playhouse on Park (Photo by Meredith Longo)

Isa arrives first and is the most easily accommodating, both to his own situation and to dealing with the others. He’s practically a host, apt to read instructions aloud. Grif is more truculent and the one most likely to disrupt the easygoing mood Isa tries to maintain. Daz is the most “street” of the three, with a nickname “Dazzle,” and a “code name,” Daz, and a fondness for the phrase “my n---a.” His litany of what else is backstage where he found the chair seems oddly unfocused as if Daz refuses to endorse most of what he’s saying. At times, the three seem to accept each other, at other times they seem at odds even with the personalities they present.

At one point Isa reads out a list of black citizens who became fatal victims of police actions. The reading becomes a dramatic act of mourning and an overwhelming moment bordering on despair. Though that’s not the main mood of the piece, it’s important that it be registered, otherwise the theatrical aspects of the four’s situation could easily morph into a world where someone’s suffering is someone else’s entertainment.

Tiny (Quan Chambers), foreground, Grif (Oliver Sai Lester), Daz (Christopher Alexander Chukwueke), Isa (Trevele Morgan) in James Ijames’ KILL MOVE PARADISE at Playhouse on Park (photo by Meredith Longo)

The arrival of Tiny, still gripping the toy gun that occasioned his death, is an affront to the others as the most outrageous killing. The boy’s attitude makes for a nice contrast with theirs as he’s smart, sharp, and not easily intimidated. He inspires a certain compassion in the others if only because they enjoyed more life and experience than he did, and their effort to bring him along makes for a dramatic focus in the play’s second half. One could say that the point of the play’s action is for each of the four to understand his own death, to see it in the light of martyrdom or sacrifice or simply a bad break or a result of the systemic racism that each has had to deal with while denying its lethality, until now. An ironically charged moment in the play—acted as a sitcom complete with laugh-track—highlights the unreality of the characters’ situation, as if the enormity of Tiny’s death can only come home to him within a normative, albeit silly, frame.

The tonal shifts in the play can sometimes arrest its flow when it seems that it’s building to more extended considerations. It’s as if Ijames is worried that if he doesn’t keep things lively, he’ll lose our attention. The problem is that the dialogue is very elliptical and requires a lot of physical and verbal shifts, not all of which seem natural to the actors. Singleton makes the most of the wide stage, and the sound effects are very effective even in an outdoor setting The camera work and editing of the video version is excellent, making home-viewers feel they have the best seat in the house while also giving us a bit of a detached view.

In the end, KILL MOVE PARADISE is a nimble play that plays with our sense of dramatic conventions even as it makes us feel the force of its take on the dire situation of race relations in contemporary America.

KILL MOVE PARADISE
By James Ijames
Directed by Dexter J. Singleton

Cast: Quan Chambers, Christopher Alexander Chukwueke, Oliver Sai Lester, Trevele Morgan

Playhouse on Park
July 7-August 1, 2021

A Play For The Moment

Tiny House, at Westport County Playhouse

Happy 4th of July, that testament to the foundational myth of the United States of America. During this year’s Independence Day, Westport County Playhouse returns to active theater with Michael Gotch’s Tiny House, a dramedy set on a 4th of July lived “off the grid.” It’s a nice bit of irony. The show is streaming theater that takes us to the remote mountainous home of a couple—Sam & Nick—who purport to have withdrawn from corporate America and the distractions of internet culture. Which means they wouldn’t be likely to access theater like this.

The play takes its cue from our contemporary moment of crisis in which catastrophe looms and methods of coping have become the order of the day. And that’s apropos, as streaming theater, in which the remote audience attends theatrical content prepared digitally, was a part of many people’s quarantine experience. The fact that as of this week most theatrical restrictions of the pandemic have been lifted (for fully vaccinated companies) by Actors Equity, such as bans on actors occupying the same theater space, makes the Westport production already feel dated, part of last summer’s situational awareness.

And, on that note, just to get it out of the way: the digital green-screen version of this play is an oddly hybrid experience. The actors are all in different spaces trying to keep each other in believable eyelines, and efforts to create the illusion that they are in contact are oddly intrusive, like trying to hide the strings on puppets. Otherwise, there’s a detailed backdrop of a tiny house (you know, those cramped, small-footprint, ingenious boxes in which bourgeois accoutrements are reduced to the dimensions of a cruise ship’s cabin for a life free of excess, clutter, and waste), and very ripe nature shots, like a mountain/valley view aimed to induce vertigo and a forest verdantly ancient as only digital imagery can be. The Westport show is better than Zoom theater but not as satisfying as actors on stage together relayed by video, as at TheaterWorks this season. Even so, there’s considerable interest in contemplating how director Mark Lamos and his team pulled off this virtual theater-space which has its own odd charm. (And cheers to Westport Country Playhouse for continuing on; Tiny Houses opened on June 29, exactly 90 years since WCP first opened its doors, on June 29, 1931, so it certainly has been around for some trying times.)

Sam (Sara Bues) and Nick (Denver Milord) in Westport County Playhouse’s production of Tiny House by Michael Gotch

The play itself is a hodgepodge of the edgy, the erratic and the aiming-at-entertaining. Nick (Denver Milord) and Sam (Sara Bues), the well-intentioned male-female couple hosting, have, of course, their issues, notably with Sam’s recovery from a miscarriage. She’s feeling vulnerable and not up to what is bound to be an abrasive visit from her mother, Billie (Elizabeth Heflin), a divorcee now living with her former brother-in-law, Larry (Lee E. Ernst). Sam’s father has been jailed for perpetrating “the biggest Ponzi scheme since Jesus walked the earth” (it’s a neat line and gets trotted out three times), and there’s lots of bad feelings and traumatic scarring about that.

Larry (Lee E. Ernst) in Westport County Playhouse’s production of Tiny House by Michael Gotch

The “zany neighbor” role is given a switch in presenting the grim and mysterious Bernard (Hassan El-Amin), an armed hunter of marmots who may have been CIA and is concerned with the approaching “zero hour” of some indefinite apocalypse. We might assume this is just gun-nut fantasy, but he’s listening to “chatter” and everyone but Billie voices anxiety over the state of the world—whether climate change or anxiety-inducing news bulletins in general. Bernard helps keep alive the notion that this play is about more than awkward company on a holiday weekend but mainly he just sets up the punch that is the ending note of the play.

Bernard (Hassan El-Amin) in Westport County Playhouse’s production of Tiny House by Michael Gotch

The family sparring gets its most intense when Billie, in youth a bunny at Hef’s Playboy mansion, gets into an escalating aria of jabbering grievance with Nick that is the aural equivalent of speed-scrolling leftist 30something (Nick) and rightist Baby Boomer (Billie) flashpoints simultaneously. Like much in this play, it’s overwrought to little purpose. Early on, Nick has lines that make him a fun take-off of the intensely concerned and focused man-child of our times, so keen to offset the mess elder generations have made of the world. But the elder generation here, but for Billie, are little more than wan comic relief sporting hippier-than-thou wiftiness. Larry, in Ernst’s energetic performance, might add a loose cannon’s surprises but he collapses into the abyss of truly zany neighbors Win (Stephen Pelinski) and Carol (Kathleen Pirkl-Tague) who play on the laughs automatically conjured by Renaissance festivals, Tolkienesque elf-folk and hallucinogen-laced vegan tortes. Sigh.

Win (Stephen Pelinski) and Carol (Kathleen Pirkl-Tague) in Westport County Playhouse’s production of Tiny House by Michael Gotch

When the transmission’s sixty-second intermission arrived I was already wondering if—as with a game’s halftime—there would be a turn-around or if it was already over. In the second part, we get to the payoff of Gotch’s best idea: that the unsustainable civilization bequeathed us by twentieth-century capitalism is the equivalent of a giant Ponzi scheme that has suckered us all. That, to me, was the ideological upshot of Sam’s harangue to her mother about how bad it is to grow up as the besmirched daughter of a con-man and national disgrace. Bues gives the speech her all but it’s not her fault that the lines don’t give her much awareness beyond poor-pitiful-me whining and a self-satisfied jab at Mom (whose own woe-is-me depiction of life after Shamalot we’ve already heard). Both Bues and Heflin almost convince us we’re seeing the kind of self-exposure with consequences that drama sometimes achieves, but the ploy of having Nick overhear a certain statement by Sam feels utterly contrived—and nothing comes of it anyway.

Sam (Sara Bues), Nick (Denver Milord), Billie (Elizabeth Heflin) in Westport County Playhouse’s production of Tiny House by Michael Gotch

And that’s the nature of this particular gathering: some good ideas, agreeable performances, digital sleight-of-hand (some of which works well), in service to the baleful thought that we’re basically fiddling while Rome burns. Maybe so, but more fiddling with the script would not be out of order. As it is, Tiny House aims to be a play of its moment that only manages to be a play for the moment.

Tiny House
By Michael Gotch
Directed by Mark Lamos

Scenic Design: Hugh Landwehr; Digital Scenic Design: Charlie Corcoran; Costume Design: Tricia Barsamian; Original Music and Sound Design: Rob Milburn, Michael Bodeen; Sound Edit, Mix and Additional Sound Design: M. Florian Staab; Editor: Dan Scully; Director of Photography: Lacey Erb; Wig Design: Christal Schanes; Production Stage Manager: Matthew Marholin; Assistant Stage Manager: Ellen Beltramo

Cast: Sara Bues; Hassan El-Amin; Lee E. Ernst; Elizabeth Heflin; Denver Milord; Stephen Pelinski; Kathleen Pirkl-Tague

Westport Country Playhouse
June 29-July 18, 2021
Streaming On Demand

The Only Thing Worse Than Being Talked About

Review of Tru, Music Theatre of Connecticut

In 1975, Truman Capote was a celebrity, someone—as he says in the play Tru now playing both live before audiences and on live streaming at Music Theatre of Connecticut in Norwalk, directed by Kevin Connors—“famous for being famous.” The basis for that fame began with Other Voices, Other Rooms in 1948, but really went mega with his groundbreaking study of a multiple homicide in 1959 Kansas in the best-selling “true crime novel” In Cold Blood (1966), subsequently made into a successful film. An earlier success was the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), made into a popular film by Blake Edwards.

His fame allowed Capote to maintain a jet-set lifestyle among the glitterati—aristocrats, celebrities, and the immensely rich. The immediate setting for Tru is Christmas of 1975, just after the publication in Esquire of excerpts from Answered Prayers, the unfinished manuscript intended to be his magnum opus. In the form now called autofiction, the stories were thinly veiled “fictional” and unflattering treatments of the high-rollers among whom Capote had been passing much of his time. The outrage was great, and Capote, as the play goes along, is still largely in denial of how bad the fallout will be.

All of which is just by way of background, as Capote, who died in 1984, is not quite the household name he used to be, back when his frequent appearance on talk shows, not least Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, kept him in the living rooms and bedrooms of America. The play, while it certainly goes over best for those with some prior awareness of Capote and some of the big names he drops, comes across regardless, due largely to Capote’s considerable charm and way with words (most of which are adapted from Capote’s interviews and writings). Actually, those with no previous opinion of Capote might find the play more entertaining than those for whom the sad fact of Capote’s deterioration as a writer and then as a social butterfly has more sting.

Jeff Gurner as Truman Capote in Tru, Music Theatre of Connecticut, 2021 (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Capote cut a singular figure, with an immediately recognizable voice, wispy, reedy. He was “out” before that was a generally recognized status, with long-term male partners and no effort to appear heterosexual. Capote’s affable and unflappable manner is rendered well by Jeff Gurner, who sounds like him, without parodying the manner, and, at a distance as dressed by Diane Vanderkroef, looks enough like the diminutive author to give us a facsimile of the man. The entire play takes place in Capote’s very tasteful living room in the Turtle Bay area of Manhattan (overlooking United Nations Plaza) as designed by Lindsay Fuori with prop design by Sean Sanford. Lighting design by RJ Romeo adds significant aura to moments of dramatic recollection.

Jeff Gurner as Truman Capote in Tru, Music Theatre of Connecticut, 2021 (photo by Alex Mongillo)

The play opens with Capote offended by the anonymous gift of a poinsettia and concludes when Capote, in his characteristic chapeau, dark shades, and overcoat, exits grandly for a holiday dinner with Ava Gardner and others who haven’t dropped him. Along the way, Gurner treats us to the pathos of a figure still giddy about his success and insecure about his reputation, so he must keep us enthralled by mannerism and self-quotation. At times, we feel like we’ve been summoned to an interview where we don’t get to pose the questions but must simply record the bon mots as they rain upon us.

The monologue to which Capote subjects us includes moments such as his sending telegrams and engaging in telephone conversations. In these moments we sense the public Capote and that lets the tone he directs to the audience—whom he sometimes addresses as though all-too-aware that he is observed at all times—seem more private and off-the-cuff. It’s a nice distinction as Capote comes across as someone for whom life is only significant when it is shared—whether with readers, viewers, friends, hangers-on, reporters, lovers, family, enemies. The key point is that someone attends, and so, if Tru (as he’s generally known) gets bored talking to us, he can pick up a phone and let us overhear him talking to someone else.

Jeff Gurner as Truman Capote in Tru, Music Theatre of Connecticut, 2021 ( photo by Alex Mongillo)

Which of course means that Capote is a good subject for a one-person play as his manner is essentially theatrical. In the second half of the play he even does a dance routine—just to take us by surprise—and is constantly insistent on the fact that, even if he himself is not always appreciated as a performer, he has been in the presence of great performers all his life, including dancing as a child while Louis Armstrong performed and, of course, complimented him.

The point isn’t the truth, for Tru, it’s carrying off his version of things. And now he’s in hot water for not carrying off his portraits of socialites—a classic case of biting the hand that, if it doesn’t exactly feed one, at least feeds one’s vanity. And yet, for the moment, that’s all to the good because it means everyone is talking about those pieces in Esquire. And as Oscar Wilde might well remind him, “the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” There may be something worse, though, as Capote will learn: not being spoken to. The silence that meets his efforts to reach out will drive him to more drink and drugs and more self-parodic stagings of his public persona.

Is there a moral? It’s hard to say, given that any sense of tragedy occurs, as it were, off-stage. In the play’s time-setting, Tru hasn’t yet declined. We might guess that such private theatricality, while tonic for anonymous onlookers, can be costly to the man forever in the spotlight. And yet—the play may convince us—that is Capote’s victory. He has become a character, forever larger than life and more interesting as fiction than as fact. Robert Morse earned a Tony for playing Capote in Tru on Broadway in 1990 and an Emmy for the same role in a televised version in 1992; Phillip Seymour Hoffman earned an Oscar for playing Capote in the film Capote (2005). Capote’s books have become classics and his persona a celebrated role. Perhaps nothing could be truer to Tru.

Jeff Gurner as Truman Capote in Tru, Music Theatre of Connecticut, 2021 (photo by Alex Mongillo)

Tru
Jay Presson Allen
Adapted from the works of Truman Capote
Directed by Kevin Connors

Starring Jeff Gurner as Truman Capote

Sound Design: Will Atkin; Scenic Design: Lindsay Fuori; Prop Design: Sean Sanford; Costume Design: Diane Vanderkroef; Lighting Design: RJ Romeo; Stage Manager: Jim Schilling

Music Theatre of Connecticut
April 23-May 9, 2021

Sound Craft

Review of The Sound Inside, TheaterWorks

Adam Rapp’s tour de force play The Sound Inside is the kind of play that TheaterWorks in Hartford has a knack for. A two-person drama on a slow burn, where revelations come slowly and might be fictions, where much depends on controlling the tone, which is matter-of-fact, and the pacing, with is stately even as the story becomes increasingly wrenching.

Directed by Rob Ruggiero and Pedro Bermúdez and filmed on the stage at TheaterWorks, this rendering  suits very well the airless space of Rapp’s play where everything that occurs is narrated or recalled. As Bermúdez says in the press release: “It's one camera, one shot at a time…we looked at building this world moment by moment – so that the camera itself had to become the audience in a very active way.” Yes, audience and almost a character, particularly in scenes where actors lock the camera with their gaze in direct address. Watching it, you feel pulled in, controlled by that special relationship a camera can have with a close-up.

That mostly happens with the play’s main character, Bella Baird (Maggie Bofill), a creative writing professor at Yale. Baird takes us into her confidence in the way many a memoirist does—by holding up her experience as a worthy subject of her writing and making her writing a way of interesting us in her experience. There’s a riskiness to the strategy and engaging that risk seems Rapp’s whole point: Bella’s manner can cloy and we have to listen to her because the play is essentially a dramatized monologue. The pay-off, for the playwright, is that we have only Bella’s word (and choice of words) for what occurs, mostly. Even when a scene is staged for us, her narratorial intervention can occur at any moment. And what we see/hear is what she tells/shows us.

Bella is a writing instructor, remember. And the hoariest line in all of the teaching of writing is “show, don’t tell.” At certain moments the play shows, but mostly it tells. Indeed, Rapp seems to get a kick out of rubbing against such dicta, as when Bella, after insisting that there’s no reason to describe any character with anything more than a single detail or phrase, goes on to give a thumbnail sketch of her main character (besides herself): Christopher Dunn (Ephraim Burney). Turns out Chris is that walking cliché of every movie/play/story set in a writing program: the truly gifted, troubled, beguiling, infuriating student author of a first novel.

Where we go from there is into a series of fictions that includes a segment of Bella’s only published novel and a synopsis of Chris’s work in progress, each mysterious and gripping in its own way. Meanwhile, the key elements of Bella’s memoir is her growing despair over her physical condition—she’s been diagnosed with stage 2 cancer and is deemed terminal—and her infatuation with Chris. Those two antagonists—death and love?—meet in a very tense scene late in the play.

What makes this theatrical treatment of prosaic situations work is the very emphatic focus on Bella. She’s a great role and Maggie Bofill renders her as an epitome of calculated nuance. Bella weighs her words, and in speaking to us and looking at us—Bofill’s rapport with the camera is phenomenal—she gauges her words’ effect. We are never not in her world as she composes it, so that even Chris’ outbursts and reticence and arrogance and vulnerability come to us as she sees them. This makes Burney’s role as Chris a difficult one. We’re not sure how much he’s deliberately riffing on Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov (the subject of classroom discussion as the class reads Crime and Punishment “for craft”), or how much Bella sees him in that light. In any case, Chris is inspired by Raskolnikov’s violent crime, a moment in the Russian novelist’s tale whose drama—as act, as amoral violation, as artistically achieved scene?—captivates and polarizes the class.

Rapp, with Bella and Chris, is also playing with those themes, and with us. I don’t doubt there are those viewers who will take this play on face value, as a story about a very trying time in a middle-aged author/teacher’s life, an infatuation with a confused but gifted young man, and the way they both reach out to each other in their time of trial. As such, it works, its melodrama tempered by Bella’s thoughtful evocations, all after the fact. But the play is about writing—manifestly—and the story of Chris, in its slippery metamorphoses into his own fiction and into Bella’s, feels as if its groping toward statement, whether imposed by Bella or Rapp, the kind that can only be fully parsed in a creative writing class. My inclination is to let Rapp take the rap.

Strong in presentation, with subtle uses of Billy Bivona’s score and the atmospheric scenic work by Lawrence E. Moten III, lighting by Amith Chandrashaker, and costumes by Alejo Vietti, the collaboration of Ruggiero and Bermúdez is first-rate and not to be missed, especially if you care about the possibilities for streaming theater in our quarantined times. TheaterWorks is showing itself to be a leader in this regard. And this taut and surprising and suspenseful play works beautifully as a showcase of the directors’ method. What we lose in the shared space of theater is matched by a gain in dramatic intimacy that suits the play so well. The craft of The Sound Inside is sound indeed.

The Sound Inside
By Adam Rapp
Directed by Rob Ruggiero and Pedro Bermúdez

Set Design: Lawrence E. Moten III; Costume Design: Alejo Vietti; Lighting Design: Amith Chandrashaker; Original Music Composed & Performed by Billy Bivona; Video Production/Editing: Pedro Bermúdez/Revisionist Films; Audio Mix/Mastering: Matt Bersky/Massive Productions, Inc.; Production Stage Manager: Kate J. Cudworth

Cast: Ephraim Birney; Maggie Bofill

TheaterWorks
April 11-April 30, 2021

Extended to May 9, 2021

Yale Cabaret: From the Room to the Zoom

Yale Cabaret preview, February 27 to May 20

The Yale Cabaret, the branch of the Yale School of Drama run by students and usually housed in the beloved basement theater at 217 Park in New Haven, returned last weekend from Yale’s extended winter break with its first show of 2021, Let’s Go to the Moon. This weekend, In-Between Bitches, their second show of the spring semester, opens.

The great challenge for the theatrical institution, now in its 53rd year, is that theater for the foreseeable future is not what it was. The team’s slogan this year is “Live Online Together” and their solution to the closing off of all theaters on campus is a combination of live and pre-recorded events that are broadcast live. Which means the links to the shows can only be accessed during set times to which viewers commit: Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m., for most of the shows. The intention is to maintain some of the charm of the Cabaret’s sense of participatory community. We may all be stuck in our homes but at least we can attend online events together.

Cabaret 53 Team, clockwise from top right: Managing Director Matthew Sonnenfeld, Co-Artistic Director Nicole Lang, Co-Artistic Director Jisun Kim, Co-Artistic Director Maeli Goren

The leadership team of Cab 53 consists of Co-Artistic Directors Maeli Goren, a third-year directing student; Jisun Kim, a third-year dramaturgy student; Nicole Lang, a third-year student of Lighting Design, and Managing Director Matthew Sonnenfeld, a second-year student in Theater Management. The mission of the team underscores collaboration and a sense of neighborliness in reaching out to “greater Yale”—which means students outside the School of Drama—and to the New Haven community more broadly. And even, with the tenth show of the season, to an international community of artists not present in New Haven or at Yale.

Last week’s show was a good example of the kind of collaborative projects the team hopes to inspire. Originally, Let’s Go to the Moon was a “filler art pitch” for the website, described as “four queer astronauts go to the moon.” The sample pitch developed into an actual pitch and became a collaboration between Kim and Lang, as the hands behind the puppets used for the play, and composers Soomin Kim and Samantha Wolf and lyricist Alana Jacoby for the songs—ten in all—expressly written for the show (in place of the cover songs initially considered).

The production was “hybrid,” in that it was both live and recorded. The audio, which means the dialogue and songs sung by the cast (Shimali De Silva, Mouse; Madeline Seidman Woman from Venus; Maeli Goren, Moon Rock; Sad, Old Rover, Nat Lopez) was pre-recorded; the visuals, however, which involved both 3D and 2D puppets, and two cameras for each, were enacted live by the puppeteers and co-creators of the piece, Jisun Kim and Nicole Lang—the “Astronauts and Chief Administrators,” according to the very creative playbill, available on the Cab website. Thus the show viewers saw was sort of like lip-synching . . . but with puppets and no visible humans.

The tech resources were impressive—if only to consider the switching between cut-out and modeled puppets. Key to the show’s technical polish were two stage managers—Brandon Lovejoy and Charlie Lovejoy—a technical director (Laura Copenhaver), designers for 3D puppets/scenic design (Emmie Finckel and Marcelo Martinez Garcia), designers for sound and incidental music (Emily Duncan Wilson), and for pre-show video (Camilla Tassi); the show was produced by Will Gaines and assistant producer Wendy Davies.

What was it all about? A charming NASA lab-mouse, convinced that an endless supply of cheese can be found on the moon, steals a rocket and sets off. En route she encounters a series of misfits: a Woman from Venus, who has fallen in love with “the woman in the moon” (instead of a man from Mars), a space-borne rock convinced that her origins are the earth’s moon, and, after a journey down a wormhole and a crash-landing on an unknown planet, an Old, Sad Rover who speaks only in the singsong of “Happy Birthday to You,” and whose mission to the moon went awry some time before. Together they undertake a final try at a moon-landing, only to learn that their ad hoc togetherness is enough to constitute a valuable universe in itself. The songs provide both catchy commentary as well as character and situation exposition.

The visuals available in the online medium were the stars of the show, and that sets up a point Sonnenfeld made about the upcoming second half of the season. In the fall, there were many shows that were audio only—including a radio play of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, set in India. It seems the challenge of writing for Zoom has been taken up by the YSD community and so what we’ll be seeing in the months ahead more fully activates the technologies of online theater.

As Sonnenfeld pointed out, the Cabaret’s brief with its participants has been “providing a room,” and the equipment that goes with it, to the students who elect to create shows during a season. In these changed circumstances, the team has had to be much more hands-on, as Goren noted, helping the chosen projects find a way to be realized within current constraints—and new possibilities. As a team, Cab 53 has welcomed proposals as open-ended as possible while also rising to the challenge of the extra foresight needed to make an idea come to life online. It’s a more time-intensive commitment and requires resources of ingenuity beyond those familiar to the 3D stage. Which means this is a good place for a shout-out to the technical advisers of this year’s Cabaret: Technical Supervisors Cameron Waitkun and Nicolás Cy Benavides, both first-year Technical Production and Design candidates. And mention should be made as well of a new position associated with the Cab this season: Rebecca Satzberg, a Technical Sound Intern at YSD, works as the Accessibility Assistant, which entails everything from technical issues for those trying to access video in different environments to close-captioning each performance, to anything that helps create a virtual environment that pushes the limits of what can be made available online.

This weekend’s show, Cab 8, as well as Cab 10 and 11, are cases in point. All were written for Zoom, and so the Cab has gone from providing the room to providing the Zoom—and all the capabilities that come with it. Like Cab 7, Let’s Go to the Moon, these shows will be creations specifically for Zoom Space.

Cab 8: In-Between Bitches, billed as “A Comedy for Zoom,” proposed, written & directed by Abigail C. Onwunali, the show addresses issues of what Goren called “body awareness,” and the ways in which the theater community avoids questions of shame and dysmorphia. Goren also called the show “joyful and hilarious,” featuring an “all womxn team” tackling the stress of image and the ways one particular “in-between bitch” handles it. Two more shows today at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. Content Warning: “Depiction of eating and body dysmorphia disorders, coarse language, moments of loud, high-pitched sound.”

Cab 10: Expats Anonymous is rather unprecedented. The play was written by Rachel Chin who is not a student at Yale, but a theater artist in Singapore who heard of the Cab through colleagues and proposed the piece, which will be the first international collaboration offered as a scheduled part of the Cab season. As a Zoom play, the show not only makes a virtue of the virtual environment—bringing together collaborators on different continents—but dramatizes Zoom as a part of job interviews. Set in Singapore during the current pandemic, the play looks at the situation of unemployed expats vying for a single job that will allow them to remain. May 18-20 at 8 p.m. and May 20 at 5 p.m.

With Cab 11, Love in a Pan Dulcé, we move from business to pleasure. Not only is Zoom part of the arduous process of finding work, it’s also part of the arduous process of finding a date. To put it in the terms of the Cab’s website: “Come laugh, cry, and cringe as Rachel, Joey, Noah, Arnie, Michael, and Daniel navigate the trials and tribulations of dating in 2020.” A play for Zoom, written and proposed by Nomè SiDone. April 16-17

Cab 9 will feature the return of the annual Dragaret—a drag show that, for the last few years, has included a night for New Haven queens and a night for YSD students. The particulars of this year’s offering, in the online environment, have not yet been determined, but tickets for the show are separate from the single membership fee that permits access to all the other shows and to the Cab Gallery. More information about the pricing policy and about the show and its line-up, which should involve both recorded and synchronous performances, will be forthcoming shortly. But mark your calendars now: March 12-13. The show has long been very popular as an entertaining and unpredictable celebration of the non-conformism and fluidity that gender, as a performative element of identity, can give rise to. Particularly among highly gifted and theatrical individuals.

Cab 12 also continues a Cab tradition, though this one of more recent provenance. Cab 51 set up the Rough Draft Festival as a way to bring on work in progress and the kind of work outside of concentration that is one of the Cab’s selling-points. The particulars have still to be determined, though the dates have been set: April 30-May 1. The team is considering potential collaborations extended to students in New Haven area schools. This is the second festival of the season; in December, the very successful Black Theater Festival brought together a highly eclectic offering of plays, performance, and interactive events.

Cab 13, the final show of the season, might be considered a transition back to “normal theater.” At least, the two one-person shows brought together for Remanded Trials might be enacted on a stage—though there may be benefits to the virtual space. Both feature acting students in YSD who have written parts to enact. In “Death Sentence” Matthew Webb will give a Cab debut performance as a man interrogated for serial murders. Called a “darkly humorous mystery” by Lang, the show “meditates in different ways on justice” and whether “character is death?” In “Kitchen of Truth” Madeline Seidman plays Martha Stewart in a dark night of the soul—including a hallucinated final television episode—on the night before she is taken into custody. May 7-8

That’s it for the shows scheduled, but membership in the Cab Season (go here for more details) also includes two Cab Potlucks, which aim to promote a virtual version of the valued face time usually found at the Cab as fans and patrons meet and eat and drink and circulate. The next one is April 24, and the final one is at the close of the season, as a send off and celebration, May 20.

The other perk of membership is entry to the Cab Gallery which features curated exhibits of installations, videos, sound compositions and more.

As Sonnenfeld noted, the upside of the virtual environment, for theater, is that the 70 seat capacity of the Cabaret can be—and frequently has been—doubled or tripled this season. There’s much more ease of access, and though we miss the togetherness of the Cab and mourn the emptiness of the theater at 217 Park Street, the Yale Cabaret as a virtual environment remains a viable and lively space for theatrical experiments and experiences. “See” you “at” the Cab!

Yale Cabaret
Spring Season: February 19-May 20, 2021

Lockdown Lives

We’re approaching the first anniversary of the pandemic lockdown that prematurely ended the theater season of 2019-20 and spawned a variety of coping mechanisms in the form of online theater approximations into 2021. The “watch-when-you-will by following a link” style of online event is the more prevalent and Playhouse on Park in West Hartford is currently offering a zoom playlet in that format. Elyot and Amanda: All Alone could be called a pandemic adaptation of Private Lives, Noël Coward’s popular comedy of mannered, sparring couples, from 1930 (last seen locally at Hartford Stage, directed by Darko Tresnjak, in 2015). Directed by Sean Harris, what Ezra Barnes and Veanne Cox, as Elyot and Amanda, respectively, have devised is a glimpse of a couple walking their wits as they have nothing but one another’s company to sustain them. A situation familiar to so many of us who abide by the restrictions on socializing beyond the most immediate.

Elyot and Amanda: All Alone features only the second act of Coward’s three act—it’s the part where E and A, formerly married to each other, have ditched their respective newer spouses and hole up together in Amanda’s Paris flat to see if they can let the world go by and just abide together. Turns out they can, if by that is meant that they can both stimulate and aggravate each other by turns. All reference to their most recent marriages has been omitted from the current script (with the Coward estate’s appreciated OK) and so we can imagine the couple are in the midst of their original marriage’s long durée. Their dialogue is best as the kind of repartee that many a stressed couple might indulge in: part fond reminisce, part fulsome recrimination, part provocation, part appeasement, sometimes witty, sometimes sad, sometimes not at all sure what it’s getting at beyond simply keeping open the possibility of chat. The allure of such exchanges, among the locked-down, is that they are live and in person, as so little else is.

Elyot (Ezra Barnes) and Amanda (Veanne Cox) in Elyot and Amanda: All Alone, Playhouse on Park

Key to the success of this experiment in repurposed Coward is the way the show is relayed. It’s by camera, but not in a single static perspective. There’s enough movement—from a  high fish-eye shot that takes in almost the entire room to more partial views to a shot very nicely framed in the doorway late in the play—to keep the viewer’s interest. And Barnes and Cox move about as if fully at home in the space (and why not, it’s Barnes’ apartment). Clad in very becoming silk pajamas (Amanda) and a somewhat nebbishy dressing-gown (Elyot), the couple at times seem like people we’re watching surreptitiously because they’ve left their laptop’s camera on. The show feels much more like the invasion of privacy that perhaps Coward intended than any onstage version could likely manage.

There are a number of high points but the one that probably best says it all is when Elyot, feeling amorous, tries to move to second base with Amanda only to be repulsed because “it’s too soon after dinner.” He’s irked, and it’s a good scene showing them as both agreeable and at odds, but what places the exchange in a new age of comedy is the way Barnes immediately grabs the hand sanitizer on the coffee table and sets to cleansing his hands—an automatic act—that is also washing his hands of the failed forward pass. A similar high-spirited moment is when Amanda puts on a record that annoys Elyot and proceeds to step lightly to it, underscoring a blithe spirit lacking in her spouse. When she later breaks the record on his head—after he scratches it—it seems less like violent pique and more like an echo of passionate slapstick. Something we suspect this couple knows a lot about.

Amanda ( Veanne Cox) and Elyot (Ezra Barnes) in Elyot and Amanda: All Alone, Playhouse on Park

Ezra Barnes’ Elyot is blustery when he needs to be, but not really truculent. He seems thoroughly domesticated, even though there are hints of plenty of past exploits. Veanne Cox makes Amanda his easygoing match—she’s more likely to goad for amusement than to draw blood or discomfit. The show has the even tone of the long haul, where even the outbursts can only go so far. And when the couple gets into the same act, as when affecting posh Brit accents, there’s obvious life-of-the-party sparkle left in the old ceremony.

A few songs at the piano create an agreeable musical intermission of sorts and shows how the couple can do it if they want to duet. In the end, after Amanda storms out—not without her mask—and then storms back, the act’s actual denouement (the arrival of those pesky spouses) is dropped in favor of a bit of hanky-panky patty-cake that provides a suitably upbeat sendoff. Elyot and Amanda—like their audience, one hopes—is weathering the storm, outlasting the lockdown, and generally keeping their spirits up in “glorious oblivion.” What more is there?

Elyot (Ezra Barnes) and Amanda (Veanne Cox) in Elyot and Amanda: All Alone, Playhouse on Park

Elyot and Amanda: All Alone
From Noël Coward’s Private Lives
Starring Ezra Barnes and Veanne Cox
Directed by Sean Harris
Playhouse on Park
February 10-28, 2021

NOTE:
Streaming of Elyot and Amanda: All Alone has been extended to March 7.