Eric Ting’s Macbeth 1969, now playing at the Long Wharf, boldly adapts Shakespeare’s text for a new setting—a Veteran’s hospital during the heyday of the U.S. war in Vietnam—and distributes the various parts amongst a cast of three men and three women. Here, Macbeth/Soldier 1 (McKinley Belcher III) is a traumatized soldier returned from war; he visits a severely wounded fellow soldier—Banquo/Soldier 2 (Barret O’Brien)—at the hospital where his own wife (Shirine Babb) is a nurse. The nurses—1/Matron (Socorro Santiago), 2 (Babb), and 3 (Jackie Chung, pregnant and the wife of MacDuff/Civilian (O’Brien)—a draft deserter)—are also the “weird sisters.” It’s an interesting notion to make nurses—who are often both needed and reviled in their service—“witches” to a soldier not quite in his right mind.

Jackie Chung and Socorro Santiago

Duncan, the benign king Macbeth kills in Shakespeare’s play, is here a wooden politician (George Kulp) who visits the wounded soldier as a campaign stunt and stays to party with the nurses (it’s Christmas), and it’s a compelling idea to imply that a deranged soldier might take it into his head to kill a politician, blaming him for the carnage of the war. Good Soldier 2 finds this treason insupportable, and so Soldier 1 plots to get rid of him too. And for good measure, thanks to dire hallucinations Soldier 1 experiences while undergoing electro-shock, the wife of MacDuff gets put to the sword too. In the end the draft dodger husband returns from exile and offs the culprit. Which I guess suggests that war wins out over other scruples. If there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no pacifists in a fight to the death either.

"Something wicked this way comes": Chung, Belcher, Santiago, Babb

For Ting’s Macbeth to work, we have to ignore the fact that the text is speaking of thanes and kings and potions and the English army and a moving wood, but, even if we do, that doesn’t mean we’ll enter this new timeframe easily. The show doesn’t recreate the Vietnam War era to me—not even The Archies and The Guess Who on the radio, nor the suggestion that “the insane root” is a joint. What’s more, we have to be willing to indulge oddities: like the “dagger of the mind” speech transposed from preceding the killing of Duncan to preceding the death of Banquo and interlarded with lines about Macbeth’s misgivings about Banquo, or the mad scene of Lady Macbeth witnessed by Nurse 1 and MacDuff, who then learns of his wife’s death from his enemy’s wife. If you know the play well (and I do), it’s best to forget what you know, but there’s a certain amusement that comes from the cut-up quality of the text—so that Nurse 1, before being smothered under a pillow, spouts lines that belong to Malcolm, otherwise not a character in this version.

Mimi Lien’s set is remarkable—it looks and feels like a hospital, and that’s enough right there to estrange one from Shakespeare’s play, so that when Lady Macbeth scrubs the floor rather than her hands (“yet here’s a spot”) it seems perfectly in keeping with the spic-and-span nature of hospitals. Elsewhere incongruity adds entertainment: it’s funny to have Macbeth “spoil the feast”—a tin of hospital food—and to have Banquo “ride” for the hours before dinner in his wheelchair.

In the cast, O’Brien, Chung, and Babbs are best at the naturalized delivery of the lines, making us almost believe at times that we’re hearing normal speech, and Chung—as a drunken expectant mother (it’s the Sixties, y’know)—has some fun with the Porter’s speech. As Macbeth, Belcher is more clueless than conniving, more shrill and anxious than tragic. It seems that Ting, in asking his actors to play the modern setting, lets them fly quickly over lines packed with the play’s actual import—that Macbeth is in fact a tragic figure at war with himself, and not simply a soldier strung out in nightmare hospital.

McKinley Belcher III as Macbeth

Macbeth 1969 is earnest in its efforts to make modern warfare and its traumas relevant to Shakespeare’s play, and it partly succeeds, but it’s much less successful at making Shakespeare’s play meaningful in the context of the Vietnam conflict.

Macbeth 1969
A World Premiere Adaptation by Eric Ting
The Long Wharf Theatre

January 18-February 12, 2012

The play itself is one of those signal works of the late 19th century that aimed to confront its audience with changes in the purposes of art, in this case theater.  To call it a comedy, as Chekhov does, is to distort its audience’s expectations somewhat, perhaps leading viewers to find funny what they might not otherwise.  But that designation also lets us know that the author himself does not take his characters too seriously and asks us not to as well. All of which is to say that the tone of the play is elusive, that outright silliness and comic vanity share the stage with poignant evocations of aging and frailty, that ruined expectations and sad resignation occur amidst family farce and romantic misprisions, and suicide.

From its very design, this production establishes its interrogatory tone—instead of an estate with a lake in the distance where young Treplev, aka Kostya (Seamus Mulcahy) puts on his symbolist play for a skeptical audience led by his actress mother, Arkadina (Brenda Meaney), Scenic Designer Kristen Robinson gives us a traditional interior, minus the fourth wall, that also is an exterior when need be, and is situated so that we, the audience, are seated in what should be the lake, while the distance, seen through the door when open and at times above the walls, is comprised of a theater with a long center aisle and rows of empty seats.  On stage, a rather Godot-like tree remains in place throughout both Parts, most of the time hovering above the ground, and across the windows of the interior—which includes an upright piano and a desk—play various projections (Paul Lieber, Projection Design), including a wandering deer, snowfall, and dancing lights.

As we are self-consciously in a theatrical space throughout, one could say the play takes place in a sort of Chekhov set of the mind, asking us to wonder what it is exactly that realist drama symbolizes.  And if that’s the sort of question that young, earnest and possibly deluded Kostya would ask, so be it.  Which is another way of saying that the play feels like it’s very much in the mind of Kostya, that, as a would-be playwright wrestling with the need for “new forms,” he stands-in both as Chekhov’s and his director’s double.  Indeed, Mihail never lets us forget Kostya’s centrality, allowing him to be present throughout the play, even for scenes he’s not scripted to be part of.  Mulcahy brings to the role endless energy: he hovers, he witnesses, he reacts, he mimicks, flies into rages, pouts, and playacts an artist playacting being an artist.  It’s exhausting.

That level of energy extends to the rest of the cast as well—as it must, since Chekhov tends to write sprawling plays in which people walk in and out and never quite come to saying what they mean, and when they do it’s easy to miss it because someone is always interrupting.  The first half, in which the actors establish their roles, can sometimes be slow going, but in the second half our familiarity with them all allows things to sharpen up considerably.  We have to live with these people a while to get anything from them.

As Arkadina, the leading lady, Brenda Meaney is a grande dame all the way, never letting us forget that, for Kostya’s mother (apt to start playing Hamlet’s mother apropos of nothing), she is always the central figure of every scene.  Everyone else should be willingly eclipsed.  Will Cobbs, as her increasingly decrepit brother Sorin, declines with a comic edge that keeps the character mischievous.  Chris Henry plays successful and fatuous author Trigorin with perhaps more winning a personality than one expects; his best scene is with Masha (Carmen Zilles).  As a single woman in love with Kostya, Masha has to spill her guts and keep herself buttoned up at the same time—Zilles does a capable job in a role no one under thirty should be asked to play.  As the man she marries, because he loves her, Josiah Bania’s Medvedenko is a constant figure of fun, always good for a laugh.  In the roles of Masha’s parents, Winston Duke and Sheria Irving flesh out scenes with, from Duke, a boisterous, life of the party feel (his “caught in a crap” anecdote is great fun), and, from Irving, a pointed pining for the ladies’ man Dr. Dorn (Max Roll, as dapper and jaded a country libertine as one could wish).  Finally, Jillian Taylor as Nina, would-be actress, and muse to those dueling writers Kostya and Trigorin, matches Mulcahy in energy and achieves, in her final transformation, something extraordinary.

Which is to say: the blessing comes late, but it does come.  When Nina reprises, at the end of the play, the grandiose speech from Kostya’s play that she delivers early in Part One, she suddenly renders the absurd lines with a passion that the intervening two years of hardship makes both poignant and transcendent.  And then we get the moment I can’t get out of my head, the moment of pure theater: Kostya’s long walk up that central aisle, followed by the rush of a descending curtain.  Bam!

Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull
Translated by Paul Schmidt
Directed by Alexandru Mihail

Yale School of Drama
January 24-28, 2012

So, when I heard that Mangum was back in public, that he’d performed as part of All Tomorrow’s Parties, and in Zuccoti Park for OWS, and then announced a mini-tour that would commence at the Shubert in New Haven, January 18, 2012, there was no way I was going to miss it.  And it seemed that everyone who attended had the same feeling I did: this dude is just too original to miss.  What’s more, I had the impression that the nearly sold-out venue was filled with other listeners who had, for one reason or another, pretty much committed every note of that album, and maybe more or less all of its predecessor—1996’s On Avery Island—to memory.  We weren’t just fans or consumers.  We were a kind of faithful who believed in what Mangum had given us—a gift that, like the best gifts, you didn’t know you needed till someone gave it to you.

What he gave us on Wednesday night was an almost solo walk-through of most of his recorded output (he was accompanied on musical saw on a few tunes, and the final song of the show proper was the unnamed instrumental that follows “Ghost,” in which he was abetted by The Music Tapes, the Athens band that opened the show with a set featuring a seven-foot metronome, “Static, the Magical TV,” stories of Roumanian circus acts, and a banjo played with a violin bow).  Of course, a cruise through the best of the recorded work is pretty much what anyone expects when going to see a concert, and most artists with a small output tend to play everything they’ve got.  But in Mangum’s case the songs, on the records, are enhanced by flugelhorns and percussion and instrumentation somewhat unusual for a “rock album.”  Solo, on a simple chair surrounded by four guitars, with two bottles of water and a music stand, it was all a matter of voice and guitar.  What was so stunningly impressive is that the songs never needed more than that.

The songs, on record, also have an elusive, DIY quality that makes them oddly compelling, delivered in a strident voice that seems always close to dissolution in shrieks, or ever-ready to go off in almost manic ‘dee-dee-dees’ that make Mangum sound like some kind of musical idiot savant.  On Wednesday, Mangum played through it all as though it cost him no great effort, as if, indeed, he is a professional singer-songwriter, with a distinctive musical style and impressive vocal control, when one had perhaps conceived of him as something both more and less: some rare and fabled beast from the Id, wailing songs thick with odd changes, with lyrics bristling with strangely neurotic images of the family romance, of a two-headed boy, a piano full of flames, of falls from fourteen-story buildings, of things to do “when you realize you’re dead,” of semen-coated mountain tops, and ghosts, and brains falling out through teeth.  Wednesday Mangum even offered a song he introduced as one he “rarely plays”: called “Little Birds,” it had, like most Mangum songs, gently devastating lyrics that also sound a bit like demented nursery rhymes.

What are his songs about?  I have no idea.  And I also find it hard to say what the overwhelming emotion is while listening to this music.  My daughter told me of a friend who put Aeroplane on while making dinner and felt like he should start crying by the time it was done.  The album is plaintive, hallucinogenic, nakedly alive, at times uncomfortably so—as in the acapella drone of “I love you, Jesus Christ / Jesus Christ, I love you” in “The King of Carrot Flowers, 2”—but also thrilling, which makes it rather memorably uplifting.  And that was the main feeling I got from every song Wednesday night: joy.

At one point, Mangum, who fielded the shouted song requests—the best was, “play a song of your own choosing”—and the shouts of adoration with a benign, amused cool, asked “Is everyone happy?”  Yes, happy to see and hear him do those songs, regardless of whether or not the music is “happy.”  Then again, I can never hear these lines from “In the Aeroplane over the Sea” (the encore and last song of the night), “And one day we will die / and our ashes will fly / from the aeroplane over the sea / but for now we are young / let us lay in the sun / and count every beautiful thing we can see,” without feeling elated.  It’s not the words themselves so much, but rather the way they ride the emotion of Mangum’s voice, which seems to arrive at the benediction with a slap of being—sort of like the slap on a newborn’s butt to make it cry, or sing.

Majok asks, “What if you lose it? What if you chose the wrong thing? What if you realize you never had it?  What if you simply perceive a lack, if you don’t know even the name of what you’re seeking?”  Probing questions in this time of social unrest, volatile professions, of unemployment, of lost savings and property.  If it’s not exactly easy to imagine alternatives to the world we live in, we have perhaps better reason than ever to ask our artists to imagine other possibilities for us.

Majok’s play is in itself a mixed bag: an eclectic assortment of rural types tell stories to us and to each other, and interact along, mostly, trajectories of reveal and conceal.  This is not an open, easy-going community, it’s one fraught with psychic wreckage, with tensions that only fitfully rise to the surface—as for instance in Julian’s (Tim Brown) monologue about disappearing children—but elsewhere—as for instance when Eddie’s (Dan O’Brien) tale of how a pick-up he spent the night with was found dead is punctuated by testy comments from his girlfriend (Amanda Bermudez)—the full scope of these lives is only hinted at.

In a mix like this, almost everyone will find their stand-out character or performance. The play, directed by Dustin Wills with a good feel for the space, is a good match for the Cab since it’s always a treat to see so many students—it’s a cast of twelve—get a chance to try out well-written monologues and dialogues.  Majok’s prose is at times insistently poetic, but never gratuitously so.  It’s a play that’s a pleasure at times to listen to—as when Eddie tells, while changing lug nuts, a grippingly compressed story of a rather existential fishing-trip with his dad and brother.  At other times there’s the fascination in how much can be communicated without many words—as in the awkward courtship rituals Quinn (Chris Bannow) directs at Adam (Mickey Theis), or in the rather baleful welcome that Agnes (Margot Bordelon) gives Eda (Ashton Heyl).  Then there’s all-too brief comic grotesquerie when Chicken Man (Lucas Dixon) regales us with exploding, pill-popping chickens at the “disco-tecky.”

The set, also by Wills, is stark, almost maze-like with doors that serve as plank-bridges and lots of interesting detritus in the ceiling, evoking a kind of subterranean space, a junkyard of misdirections.  Maybe somewhere in there is the “it” you lost, or the “it” you’ll find.

reWilding
by Martyna Majok
Directed by Dustin Wills

Yale Cabaret
January 12-14, 2012

The story, as "everyone" in America knows, is about a dark night of the soul for George, the long-suffering director of a Building and Loan concern in Bedford Falls, NY; George is a champion of the 99% in constant battle with the local one percenter, the grasping, covetous old curmudgeon and evil banker Mr. Potter.  When his likeable uncle Billy, a business liability if there ever was one, misplaces a considerable sum, George faces ruin at the hands of Potter.  George's neck is on the chopping-block and he's about to end it all when to his rescue arrives a simple-minded angel called Clarence.  The remedy for George's "life isn't worth living" attitude: a glimpse of what the world would be like had he never existed.

As its fans know, a joy of the film is the supporting roles and the character actors who played them, long since having burned their deliveries into our brain cells.  This Life keeps up a running dialogue with the voices we know so well--Dan Domingues's Old Man Potter is a spot-on recreation of Lionel Barrymore's memorable performance, played for laughs this time.  Moggridge has the more daunting task of delivering his lines without echoing or mimicking or mocking Jimmy Stewart, who owns them, and it's to his considerable credit that he manages to do so.  The "play as cast" aspect of his incorporation into the radio play works to his advantage: he doesn't have to play George Bailey so much as play a guy forced to play George--the pre-existence of the role is a given.  It's an interesting way of underlining the "everyman" (or anyman) aspects of George.

Alex Moggridge as George Bailey

And that's what makes the frame conceit and the radio play staging such brilliant touches.  As a radio play, we're watching superb "voice actors" perform a show that radio listeners would only hear--and that's endless fun in itself thanks to the authentic set by Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams, and the radio-era costumes by Jessica Ford, and due particularly to the tirelessly precise and unbelievably busy foley artist (aka, sound effects man) Nathan A. Roberts, an entertaining one-man-show in his own right.  Staging-wise, the show is a lesson in "how do they do that," and simultaneously a "behind-the-scenes" view (what we see onstage) and a successful enactment (what we hear).

sound work: Nathan A. Roberts

But there's a third level: the sights and sounds of the film already implanted in the minds of many in the audience are invoked and distorted by what we see and hear.  No one on stage "is" actually the character they're playing--indeed, it's great fun to see/hear various characterizations, as for instance angel Clarence; Italian bar owner Mr. Martini; an Irish Buildings and Loan boardmember; younger brother Harry Bailey; and a few others, all come from one man: Kevyn Morrow.  Ditto Kate MacCluggage as George's mom, daughter, local goodtime gal Viola, and uncle Billy's bird.

Domingues, Morrow, Woodiwriss, MacCluggage

A further spin is provided by Ariel Woodiwriss, as Mary Bailey (née Hatch), the love of George's life; every bit as winsome as Donna Reed, she seems at times to "be"  Mary, in search of her George, who might just be Moggridge.  Indeed, during the segment when George visits a Bedford Falls in which he has never existed, Moggridge is alone on stage, and the voices of the others, and the sound effects, respond to him as though he is haunted by them.  It's a nice Twilight Zone-style touch that makes It's a Wonderful Life become, like the Christmas season itself with its overlay of memories, a space that we might find ourselves inhabiting willy nilly.  The lesson learned there: the richest man is not the one with the most money in the bank but the one with a community behind him.

Warmly nostalgic with a slightly modernist twist, It's a Wonderful Life is enthralling entertainment.

It's a Wonderful Life
Stage play by Joe Landy; adapted from the film script by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Jo Swerling, Frank Capra
Directed by Eric Ting
The Long Wharf Theatre
December 7-31, 2011

Because Cymbeline doesn’t get staged as often as the better-known plays, we can still be surprised by it.  It’s a play with a sprawling cast that keeps us guessing about whose story this really is; it gives us lots of set-ups and exposition that seem to have subtitles saying “wait for it!” as it works out a wondrously interlinked plot with no real center; and it’s a play with moments of either comic or icky—or both—melodrama, like Imogen waking from another one of those Juliet-death-trance potions to find herself, she believes, beside the corpse of her love, Posthumus, only the body is headless, so how’s a girl to be sure? Its very oddity makes it quite a good play for YSD as it presents many instances for the team, led by third-year director Louisa Proske, to create effects as erratic as the play itself.

Start with the visually arresting costumes by Nikki Delhomme: rich and classy for the court figures; they situate the characters in some old European film of easy elegance, like Rules of the Game, for instance, and that’s not a bad comparison for the levels of society we encounter in this play; for there are also the bumpkins (who are really royalty), shirtless and perpetually wrassling, and there’s Imogen looking as though she’s imprisoned by her ballooning skirts—until she dons a traveling-coat, looking like Helena Bonham-Carter in A Room with a View setting off on an adventure.  There are also soldiers about who look sort of WWI era, and there’s the sumptuous jacket of the foolish fop Cloten that could grace Liberace, and, finally, our romantic hero Posthumus’ simple man threads—think Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant when he really has to play self-effacing; and don’t forget the scene in a sauna where the guys—lots of prime male flesh on view in this show—hang about in towels, talk women, make a wager on Iachimo seducing Imogen.

Light (Solomon Weisbard) and sound (Palmer Hefferan and Michaël Attias) are also very busy in this production.  Set on the backstage at the University Theater (Meredith B. Ries, scenic design) the trappings of theatrical spectacle are all about us—and they become a part of the play when the lights scaffolds descend to stage level for lighting effects and to create visual chaos during the war scene.  There are also some great uses of music and sound—sometimes a schmaltzy tune will start up, or little tinkling bells make us feel we’re not quite in the normal world, or unnerving crescendoes of drums and metallic sounds add eerieness and drama.  The play has a lot to get through and in lieu of the usual Shakespearean pleasures—great soul-searching soliloquies, highly romantic badinage, verbal jousts, clownish antics—has to find its magic where it can.  As, for instance, having a first grader (Rachel Miller) play the part of Jupiter, in the totally wigged-out deus ex machina moment that almost tips into Disney.  For macabre contrast, there’s that headless corpse rising feet first into the vault.

In the cast, special mention: Lucas Dixon as the giddy Cloten, a true sop who gets to strut and fret in fine style; Brian Wiles as the cunning Iachimo—his glittering eyes and smug look when tricking Posthumus into believing he seduced Imogen are truly villainous; Miriam A. Hyman, all dressed-up up for evil and deliciously duplicitous as The Queen; Tim Brown, as attendant Cornelius, who gets a great laugh when clarifying a bit of business in the endless denoument; Michael Place as a fussily priggish Pisanio; Robert Grant as the dour and limping Cymbeline, doomed to be a bit clueless when so much is going on when he’s not around; Joshua Bermudez as agile Guiderius, who shrugs off decapitating Cloten as easily as the play does; as the lovers who prove true Adina Verson (Imogen) and Fisher Neal (Posthumus) declaim the super-declamatory verse—there are lots of “you gods!” moments—but provide here and there more subtle touches: Verson taking aim with her needle at Posthumus’s ship fading on the horizon; Neal as a spotlighted captive looking on death as proper justice.

The play finishes up with a recognition scene to end all recognition scenes—here it has the feel of the Shakespearean equivalent of the Marx Brothers’ shipboard cabin scene in A Night at the Opera: “I had a feeling you were going to show up.”  All’s well that ends well, and this Cymbeline certainly does.

William  Shakespeare’s Cymbeline
Directed by Louisa Proske
Yale School of Drama

December 10 to 16, 2011

Jillian Taylor, Seamus Mulcahy in "The Youth Hostel"

The play originated in 1976, fittingly, since its sexual politics smack very much of the era of endemic marital discord, pre-AIDS sexual explorations, masculine anxieties and aggressions in the age of feminist assertiveness, post-porn sexual license, and the taken-for-granted freedom that anything that can be thought can be said and shown. But what is the “thought” that gets depicted in these three parts (the other two are “Summer Evening,” and “Mr. Frivolous”)?

The production’s playbill provides some prose from Shawn: “…Sex is an extraordinary meeting place of reality and dream, and it’s also—what is not perhaps exactly the same thing—an extraordinary meeting place of the meaningful and the meaningless.” That’s close enough to a thought: to imply an “extraordinary meeting place” by making sex as ordinary as possible.

How ordinary? In “Evening,” the meeting place is a hotelroom, a bit too cher for the couple uncomfortably inhabiting it. Their dialogue thrives upon non sequitur and ellipsis, abounding in unfinished thoughts, mixed signals and occasional monologues or asides that show us suppressed desires: “I want to be hugged. I want to be bound up. I want to be kissed” David (Chris Henry) says, in Sarah’s absence; “I’d stick a hot poker up my ass if I thought I would like it,” Sarah (Lupita Nyong’o) confides to us. As the night progresses, all the false starts—and morbid talk about Sarah as a dead body—lead finally to contact. Henry and Nyong’o are good at speaking at cross-purposes, and Cooper-Novack’s sense of how they should fill the bedroom and, importantly, bed works well. The idea seems to be that when we want to get laid we don’t think straight, and all the couple say to each other enacts a screen of anxiety that only touch can penetrate.

Masturbation becomes the pivotal act in part two—something that four of the five cast members in “Hostel” are able to do alone even with others present. And even as a competition: the men aim at one of the women to see who can squirt the highest on her person, while the women battle over a dildo to see who can wield the wand most efficiently. As you might imagine, “Hostel” requires some ingenuity to stage properly—there is abundant nudity and sexual simulations that have to be convincing, otherwise the humor of the piece could misfire. The staging is effectively choreographed and the cast (Will Cobbs, Carmen Zilles, Jillian Taylor, Seamus Mulcahy) gamely bare their bodies while spouting the puerile dialogue—riddled with “gosh” and “gee” and forthright banter (“Oh, hi, Dick! Are you jerking off?”; “You’ve really got a good, sticky hole”; “You’re a shithead, Helen”)—with straight faces. As Tom, the husband, apparently, of Judy (Taylor), Josiah Bania’s part seems little more than a nasty surfacing of a reality principle otherwise suppressed in the name of comradely coming: he’s jobless, supported by his mother, and smacks Helen around to keep her in her place.

"comradely coming": Mulcahy, Taylor

Finally, Max Roll, as Mr. Frivolous, delivers a short, fantasizing monologue with a musing awkwardness, but it seems to me that a take-off on Shawn’s grimacing sheepishness, à la My Dinner with Andre or Vanya on 42nd Street, would sound the right note of pained reverie to bring down the curtain on what we might imagine has been a supposedly tortured “thought” about sex—the always potential act that Woody Allen describes as “the most fun you can have without laughing.”

Photos by Ethan Heard; courtesty of Yale Cabaret

A Thought in Three Parts
Written by Wallace Shawn
Directed by Hallie Cooper-Novack
The Yale Cabaret
November 17-19, 2011

Does a police presence make you feel more afraid or less? Well, that might depend on what demographic of race, age, gender, and income you fit. And that answer plays into the theme developed in this week’s Yale Cabaret show: keeping the streets around Yale safe means casting a suspicious eye on anyone who doesn’t match the profile of racial privilege that most Yalelies—though not all by any means—meet. Street Scenes, conceived by MFA Yale student and installation artist Maayan Strauss and Colin Mannex, a DFA candidate at YSD, is based upon the all-too-frequent email missives the Yale Community receives from Yale Police Chief Ronnell Higgins.

The missives—a number of them are read verbatim by the company—consist of details about assaults and robberies that take place in the vicinity of Yale. In addition to giving Yalelies the what and where, Higgins asks for anyone with further information to come forward and generally recommends Yalelies not go about alone on foot, but avail themselves of transportation the university provides free of charge. At the very least, Higgins warns, use caution and be streetwise on these streets.

The performance piece Strauss and Mannex have created, aided by co-director Jessica Rizzo, a dramaturgy student at YSD, interrogates the assumptions that these communiques express, even if only implicitly. The dramatization of the confrontations described is highly stylized, with the role of victim and perpetrator distributed equally amongst the multicultural cast of three males and three females. The readings of the missives is flat and unemphatic, and most of the play’s dialogue consists of the earnest natterings of various pairs as they try to express—in self-consciously liberal academese—their unease with the implicit racial subtext of the missives, usually with one of the duo holding forth and the other nodding and uh-huhing.

Intermittently, the company gyrate in place as though automatons trapped in repetitive movements. In the background, projections of a few familiar New Haven street corners play, depicting slow-mo pedestrians while the ambient noise of the streets flows around the audience. It all seems so benign! And yet…

In the final segment, we hear the voices of victims and their responses to what happened to them yanks away, to some extent, the well-meaning sociology-speak of the discussants: we realize that what Higgins reports to the community is an event that was first reported to him. These aren’t simply texts for a course on the semiotics of crime reporting, but little bits of life—and in one case, death—that are happening around us all the time.

And yet, even there, the play grimly suggests, the Yale community remains largely untouched, aware of a certain unease now and then, but nothing major, more inclined to blame the messenger than to understand the real message.

Street Scenes
Conceived by Maayan Strauss, Colin Mannex
Directed by Colin Mannex, Maayan Strauss, Jessica Rizzo
The Yale Cabaret
November 10-12

That choice is evoked by Young Jean Lee’s Church, now playing for two more shows at The Yale Cabaret.  The audience is the congregation and is preached to by the righteous Reverend José, and greeted, with handshakes and hugs, by three beneficently smiling female reverends, and listens to testimonials of how God got involved in the lives of the reverends, and witnesses hymns and dance.

The name of the church we never learn, nor could I say for certain what the tenets of belief are, beyond praise of Jesus and fear of the devil, though charismatic Reverend José (Matthew Gutschick) and his trio do make a few pronouncements that conjure a liberal faith—accepting all races and sexual persuasions and against anti-abortion, and not willing to insist on God’s gender.  The main symptom of moral turpitude, it seems, is “masturbation-rage”—behavior that goes beyond ego-inflated navel-gazing to a more active love affair with the self, in denial of the need for God.

At first, Reverend José is just a voice out of the darkness, crying in a wilderness as it were, and his sermon is of the “tear down the ego” variety designed to inspire penitence.  This is followed, in the bad cop/good cop rhythm of things, by the smiling, humble reverends greeting us, and then Reverend Kate (Kate Attwell) asks the congregation to suggest prayer requests—subjects to pray for—and members of the audience oblige.

At that point theater, to some extent, ends and ritual begins.  Of course, the two have always been related, but when persons in the audience ask for prayers for relatives, or for world peace, or for their work, and we’re asked to pray silently, then, if some are really praying, who’s to say we aren’t in church?  As Jesus said, “wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there am I.”

We don’t hear his name too much, mainly in the beginning and in a Christian rock song to which the reverends leap and dance and twirl, like a cross between bacchantes and cheerleaders, near the end of the piece.  But the sense of worship as giving honor to God is never absent, not even in the somewhat surreal and rambling or bathetic or funny testimonials that the reverends deliver, all straight-faced and without any overt sense of parody.  And what they describe—rising on a fountain of blood, a parable of the lantern-maker who wanted to be a sandal-maker, battles of good and bad angels, behaviorial addictions, a goat that eats from its master’s hand—are different only in degree not in kind from what one finds in any actual testimonial’s mangled version of scripture configured for the modern world.  And Reverend Laura (Laura Gragtmans)’s prayer of thanks for a comfortably useful life at the close seems as sincere and beneficent as any speech to God should be.

What’s the point of the piece, ultimately?  Final things, just as in any church, and how to live while we’re here.  As Jim Morrison, one of the reverends of the church of rock, says, “No one here gets out alive.”  Humbling, frightening, maybe gladdening as it may be, that’s the thought that makes life on earth a life “in church.”  Hallelujah.

Church
Written by Young Jean Lee
Directed by the Ensemble, with Sunder Ganglani
Yale Cabaret
November 3-5, 2011

The second play of the Yale Repertory Theatre’s 2011-12 Season and a World Premiere, Belleville is a triumph of slowburn technique. It’s the kind of play that, with only four characters, one set and no intermission, provides all its thrills and brilliance by simply placing its characters before us and letting us see them squirm and prevaricate and plead and joke and couple and coo and become gradually, relentlessly unhinged and desperate. The effect is exhilerating, an entertaining skirting of the abyss where the pursuit of normality turns deadly.

Greg Keller and Maria Dizzia, Belleville

Disrupted from our failsafe positions, the play asks, how do we act? In human relations, we might say, rationality is only skin deep, the rest is pathology.

Abby (Maria Dizzia), a somewhat spoiled daddy’s girl, is going to be away from home at Christmas for the first time. That might not be such a big deal, but her sister’s about to have a baby and their mother died not too long ago. She’s in Paris—the “diverse” (though she’s self-conscious about using the word) section from which the play takes its title—offering wifely support to her new husband Zack (Greg Keller), a recent Johns Hopkins Med School grad doing important work on AIDS. Abby is still at the stage where she proudly shows off the wedding album (“I was really happy that day”) and attempts to put a good face on the little gaffes of cohabitation—like walking in on Zack masturbating to porn when he should be at work.

Herzog establishes early a grasp of how newlyweds, away from everyone they know and barely sure they know each other in this new context, have much to grapple with in every exchange—over what to wear, and where to go, and how to placate Abby’s father’s expectations and how to meet the demands of Zack’s job while maintaining a fun, lovers-abroad feeling. Fortunately, the landlord Alioune (Gilbert Owuor) is a personable guy willing to eat Christmas cookies though a Muslim, look at Abby’s photo album, and share a companionable bowl with Zack. Then again, friendship in such cases only goes so far when the rent’s overdue.

a tense moment

Pull on a strand and watch the unfinished tapestry of this young couple’s efforts at married life come unraveled. Anne Kauffman’s production is strong in the subtle touches that keep us guessing at what’s behind certain actions and comments, and in providing the punch of dramatic moments that shatter the congenial tone. The interplay and body language between the two principle characters is particularly effective when they grope for an intimacy they’re having a hard time finding.

bright and beautiful; Maria Dizzia as Abby

Maria Dizzia’s role is complex: Abby is girlish, brittle, vulnerable, wounding, hysterical by turns. A spoiled spoiler but also a centerpiece, the raison d’être of Zack’s world, she is the engine that makes Belleville run. Herzog vents a bit on Abby’s inadequacies, but she also extends understanding to her when necessary.

As Zack, Greg Keller has the most difficult role. We have to like him, but not too much. He plays the ingratiating side of such a character perfectly—we’ve all met someone like him. And when things take a turn for the worse, we realize, with a growing chill and unease, that we truly don’t know what he’s capable of.

As landlord Alioune, Gilbert Owuor seems a bit more wooden than is necessary; understandably aloof, a landlord put in the position of being a friend, his character as played is hard to read. Herzog shows us that male bonding is often built upon deceiving women together, but Owuor could give us a bit more interest in Alioune as Zack’s foil.

As Alioune’s wife Amina, Pascale Armand makes the most of her three brief scenes. Her role is key in showing us a major difference between Abby and Zack and Alioune and Amina. We could reduce it to a cultural difference—the role of the “traditional wife” versus the contemporary version Abby manifests—but more to the point is the strength of character—demanding as it is—of Amina, a woman who, we grasp immediately, has no illusions and little patience for the self-delusions of others. Her presence is an immediate reality check.

A sprawling space with certain important areas we can’t see, the set by Julia C. Lee is an apartment just a bit seedy that, with its interesting ceiling slopes and skylights, its attractive windows and comfortable, lived-in look, presents the perfect locale for a slumming up-and-coming couple. And it is a repeated pleasure watching what different times of day, via Nina Hyun Seung Lee’s lighting, do with the place.

pondering the future; Greg Keller as Zack

Commissioned by Yale Rep and developed through the Yale Center for New Theatre, Belleville is Amy Herzog’s Yale Rep debut. New Haven is fortunate to get in on the early work of this talented playwright, and she's at work on a newly commissioned play for the Rep.

A convincing study of the uncertainties beneath the identities we construct, Belleville is certainly worth a visit.

Belleville
Written by Amy Herzog
Directed by Anne Kauffman
Yale Repertory Theatre
October 21 to November 12, 2011