The Yale Cabaret’s 44th Season ends this weekend with Carnival/Invisible. Written and directed by Benjamin Fainstein and created by the Ensemble, it’s a show in some ways reminiscent of Church, the play by Young Jean Lee that was featured last semester. Both shows riff on a collective, participatory experience, akin to theater but different from [...]
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by Wayne Koestenbaum UC Press, 2012 336 pages
It's no secret that scholarly books on cinema can be deadening, and any play-by-play of 13 movie comedies sanctioned by a university press might reasonably seem like one to avoid. Not so The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, from the poet and cultural critic [...]
Continue Reading →This week’s show at The Yale Cabaret, the penultimate of the 44th Season, features the penultimate directorial offering by Co-Artistic Director Lileana Blain-Cruz before she graduates from the Yale School of Drama this spring. And her last Cab show, like her first Cab show at the end of the 2010 season, is something to behold.
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Continue Reading →Playing for its second weekend in an unlikely performance space—The Institute Library at 847 Chapel Street—is a stripped-down production of Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe. Staged by The Young Mechanics Theatre Ensemble, in its inaugural production, the play is both intimate and enigmatic. Consisting of only three characters—a Director (Jeremy Funke), his Assistant (Kaia Monroe), and a [...]
Continue Reading →The strangeness of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, now playing at The Yale Repertory Theatre in a sumptuous and stylish version directed by Liz Diamond, is ultimately its strength. The plot yokes together elements that seem impossibly disparate, almost a test, from start to finish, of the audience’s ability to suspend its disbelief. The play is [...]
Continue Reading →In Hamlet, the prince is overcome by grief for his dead father. Everyone in the court, especially his mother, the Queen, and his uncle, the new King, tells him to get a grip. His grief is called “impious” and “unmanly.” In Basement Hades: Songs of the Underworld, now playing at the Yale Cabaret, Hades (Dustin [...]
Continue Reading →John van Druten’s Bell, Book & Candle is a play from a time when subtext was anything not acceptable to polite convention. His characters have class, in a vaguely bohemian milieu (it’s set ostensibly in the 1950s’ Greenwich Village), and they preen and pose with the regulated pauses of the great screen stars of the [...]
Continue Reading →The current offering at the Yale Cabaret features a trip into the past: turn of the century Yiddish theater is invoked to create the proper spirit in which to view The Yiddish King Lear. Rather than a Yiddish language version of Shakespeare, as was created by Jacob Gordin in 1903 and whose work this production [...]
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Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room by Geoff Dyer Pantheon, 2012 240 pages
Last spring, an interviewer asked the British writer Geoff Dyer which movie he would choose to live inside. In retrospect that seems like a leading question; obviously Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker was the [...]
Continue Reading →Arthur Kopit’s Chamber Music, the most recent show at The Yale Cabaret, dates from the Sixties and could be called a carnivalization of the woman’s movement. The ‘carnival’ aspects are familiar enough from other counter-cultural works of the time: the characters are inmates in an asylum for the insane, the asylum itself is a cultural [...]
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