Thursday, 10/20 till Saturday, 10/22, The Yale Cabaret offers a student-generated theater piece, Creation 2011, that asks its performers to revisit and re-enact events or experiences that inspired their desire to work in [...]]]> New Haven is a great town for theater.  If you have any doubts on that score, check out the following:

Thursday, 10/20 till Saturday, 10/22, The Yale Cabaret offers a student-generated theater piece, Creation 2011, that asks its performers to revisit and re-enact events or experiences that inspired their desire to work in theater.  Co-Artistic Director Michael Place assures us the show will be "sweet and engaging on a personal level," but will also entertainingly visit some tropes of academia--certainly we can all recognize the inherent comedy of a powerpoint presentation.  Yale Cabaret, 217 Park Street, New Haven.

Arts Council Award-Winning local theater group Broken Umbrella debuts its first play of the season this weekend, Friday, 10/21 through Sunday, 10/23,  with Play with Matches, developed by the company with playwright Jason Patrick Wells and director Ian Alderman, the play "tells the story of quirky New Haven inventor Ebenezer Beecher" (euphonious name!), who developed matches at a factory that once stood where Westville's Mitchell Library now stands.   The show continues for the next two weekends: 10/28-10/30 and 11/4-11/6.  Tickets on sale now for all shows.  Broken Umbrella.  The Smokestack, 446A Blake Street, New Haven.

Play With Matches, photo: Dana Astmann

New Haven Theater Company, another local conclave of thespians, is now selling tickets to its second show of the season, Conor McPherson's The Seafarer, set in Dublin and featuring a card game that may cost someone his soul.  NHTC’s Talk Radio was a strong showing this fall, and this show, directed by Hilary Brown, like the latter will feature the group's trademark ensemble acting.  11/10-12 and 11/17-19, 8 p.m., The New Haven Theater Company, 118 Court Street, New Haven.

l to r: George Kulp, John Watson, J. Kevin Smith, Robert Osborne, Peter Chenot

At the Long Wharf, the Tony-Award-Winning musical Ain’t Misbehavin’ is getting up and running and purports to be a lively show, tickets on sale now for shows running from 10/26 to 11/20.  And, also at the Long Wharf, tickets have gone on sale this week for what should be a hot show: respected actor of stage and screen Brian Dennehy delivers the memory-ridden monologue of Samuel Beckett’s caustically funny and generally existential play Krapp’s Last Tape, which will run on Long Wharf's Stage II, 11/29 to 12/18.  Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargeant Drive, New Haven.

 

Dennehy as Krapp, photo by Richard Hein

And, at The Yale Repertory, the world premiere of new playwright Amy Herzog’s Belleville, about a contemporary Parisian couple newly immersed in 21st century malaise, begins previews on 10/21, with its official opening on the 27th.   The Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel Street, New Haven.  And coming up shortly, 10/25-10/29, provocative YSD director Lileana Blain-Cruz’s thesis show: a rendering of Gertrude Stein’s Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights, which should give us a memorable sense of how modernism plays a hundred years on.  Yale School of Drama, Iseman Theater, 1156 Chapel Street, New Haven. 

 

 

A great season is shaping up!  Check back for reviews of these shows as they open.    And for more theater news and reviews, check out Chris Arnott's site.

The Yale Cabaret is back after a week [...]]]> Robert Pinsky, former US Poet Laureate, and a highly accomplished poet reads this week at the Whitney Humanities Center, New Haven, at 4 p.m., introduced by Langdon Hammer of the Yale English Department.  See our own Donald Brown’s review of Pinsky’s recently published Selected Poems, here.

The Yale Cabaret is back after a week off, showcasing Alex Mihail’s staging of Ingmar Bergman’s psychodrama, Persona, one of the existential Swede’s best films, showing at 8 p.m. Thursday, 8 and 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 10/6-10/8.  See our preview of the first three shows of the Cab season, here.

Through October 8, The Yale Rep continues its run of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, a sprawling play of sacrifice and yearning, with many fine supporting performances, reviewed on our site, here.

The Irish Repertory Theatre’s production of Brian Friel’s engaging Molly Sweeney continues at the Long Wharf, with a stellar performance by Simone Kirby as Molly, and fascinating monologues by Ciarán O’Reilly and Jonathan Hogan, through October 16; reviewed by our own Donald Brown for The New Haven Advocate, here.

Thursday night the Yale Cabaret will open its doors for its new season.  Regulars will find, even before they get through the doors into the performance space, that the aura of the Cab has changed once again.  The box office and waiting area now feels like a somewhat seedy, somewhat creepy hotel (it immediately [...]]]>  

Thursday night the Yale Cabaret will open its doors for its new season.  Regulars will find, even before they get through the doors into the performance space, that the aura of the Cab has changed once again.  The box office and waiting area now feels like a somewhat seedy, somewhat creepy hotel (it immediately put me in mind of the McKittrick Hotel from Sleep No More), a fitting enough indication that what’s on offer through the doors will surprise, delight, and discomfit.

Since its inception in 1968, the Yale Cabaret has been a special space for students in the Yale School of Drama: it’s where they can work on what motivates them, things they might not be able to do in the work that satisfies grad school requirements, but thanks to the resources of the school the Cab’s theater artists can work out ideas in conjunction with a large, supportive network of colleagues representing all the disciplines of theater.  As the Cab’s new website states: “Nowhere else in the world are there more than 200 theater artists living in a four-block radius – the possibilities are endless.”  Indeed they are, given the extreme restrictions of the space itself and the fact that the budget for every show is about $300 and that, incredibly, shows go up and play for a total of five performances before changing over to the next feature.  It’s a frenetic pace, but once you get “the Cab Habit” you’ll be back each weekend to see what’s on offer.

This year the leadership of the Cab, in something of a departure from recent years, will feature, like some of the best shows that have been presented there, an ensemble: four Artistic Directors: three third years—Lileana Blain-Cruz (director), Sunder Ganglani (dramaturg), Michael Place (actor)—and a second year, Kate Attwell (dramaturg); they are joined by theater manager Matt Gutshick to create a team that is fully interdisciplinary within the world of theater.  When I spoke to them this week they had yet to vet the proposals for the shows that will fill out the season, but if there’s any underlying theme, it’s the belief that a theater like the Cab exists to promote experiment, the kind that involves risk and vulnerability, not only for the company and the technical support, but for the audience as well.

All four of the artistic directors are united in their view that theater’s importance as art, and its primary attraction as entertainment, is due to the unpredicable interaction that takes place between audience and spectacle.  What makes one person guffaw makes someone else sad or uneasy.  The proximity of audience to event is a factor that informs each piece—there’s nowhere to hide from a Cab show, for the audience.  And for the performers, the audience can’t be ignored either.  The audience completes the work, and the viewers’ individual and collective reactions help reveal what the work means.

The first show of the new season looks directly at the interactive dynamic of performers and audience.  Entitled Slaves, it’s a musical piece for three actors—actors who, for the duration of the performance, are enslaved to one another, and to the music, and to the audience. The piece, according to Sunder Ganglani, who wrote the book and primary music, explores the theatrical experience as an imposition upon the performers who must in some way take upon themselves emotions and ideas not their own and find a way to express them to an audience.  Slaves uses musical cues to switch gears and to bring on certain behaviors, but does that make the work the master of the cast?  Or, because it’s for us, does that make the audience the master?  Or is it rather theater that masters us all, enslaved to the interaction between our imaginations and a performance?  With three risk-taking performers like Chris Henry, Jillian Taylor and Adina Verson in the cast, the show should be memorable.  Sept. 15th, 8 p.m., Sept. 16th & 17th, 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.

The following week, fellow Artistic Director Kate Attwell launches the hundredyearspacetrip, developed with Nina Segal, of We Buy Gold, and the ensemble.  The show, which involves communication between the earth and a manned spacecraft hurtling 39,900,000,000,000 km to Alpha Centauri, is a meditation on time—as aging, as the lapse between one event and another, as passage from one age or state to another, as for instance pregnancy to childbirth, and of course youth to death on a journey to a star system far, far away.  Attwell says the show is surprisingly funny because of the interactions among the characters, bringing to life a situation that is literally out of this world.  Featuring Brenda Meaney and Ryan Davis.  Sept. 22nd, 8 p.m., Sept. 23rd & 24th, 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.

The third in the initial run of shows will be a staging of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, adapted and directed by Alexandru Mihail.  With the death of Swedish master filmmaker Bergman a few years back, there have been several notable efforts to stage his films, most recently Robert Woodruff’s version of Autumn Sonata at the Yale Rep last spring, and Cries and Whispers will be coming to the Brooklyn Academy of Music this fall.  Persona though is vintage Bergman, before he used color, and is a film limited primarily to two main characters: an actress who suddenly cannot perform and will not speak, and the nurse hired to attend her—on a secluded Scandinavian island.

The film is a high point in the major phase of Bergman’s career, when Liv Ullmann was his acting muse, and, more than the other films so far brought to the stage, incorporates the problem of performing as it relates to theater and to the theater of identity that is social life.  Mihail has always found the film compelling but recently read the script—which was published after the film but which differs from the film in certain important ways.  The point of the show, then, is not to recreate Bergman’s “European cinematic experience,” but to do with theater something not “already done” in film.  With Laura Gragtmans, Monique Barbee, Lucas Dixon, Emily Reilly. Oct. 6th, 8 p.m., Oct 7th & 8th, 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.

Those are the shows lined up thus far, each provocative and thought-provoking in its own way, each a unique theatrical experience.  The Artistic Directors of the Cab see the space as a laboratory where we’re all part of the experiment.

See you at the Labaret . . . the Caboratory.  The Cab.

The Yale Cabaret
Artistic Directors: Kate Atwell, Lileana Blain-Cruz, Sunder Ganglani, Michael Place
Managing Director: Matthew Gutshick

217 Park Street, New Haven, CT: 202.432.1566; http://www.yalecabaret.org/

But soft! All’s not lost.  For [...]]]> Late in Shakespeare’s Tempest, Prospero, having dazzled Ferdinand, his daughter’s suitor, with a phantasmal pageant in which goddesses bless the couple’s imminent nuptials, insists that the spectacle was transitory as life itself and, the lines strongly suggest, as is theater, which all-too quickly “melts into air, into thin air.”

But soft! All’s not lost.  For look you: The Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival has not yet wrung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.  There are two weeks yet—18 performances—in which to catch-as-catch-can the miraculous transformations of the basement space at 217 Park Street into Prospero’s isle, and into the Forest of Arden, and into a contentious arena for the bloody feuds of Britain’s royalty (yes, that’s three different sets and sometimes two shows a day—can ambition be made of sterner stuff?).

The three shows are The Tempest, As You Like It, and a right witty concentration of Henry V, Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, 3, and Richard III into a blood-and-guts psycho drama called Rose Mark’d Queen.  And the shows boast a concentrated cast that have been playing their parts all summer, becoming one with their characters’ antic dispositions, their sighs and fleers and jests, their studied mummery, festive songs, passionate proclamations, yea, their wanton romps, clownish conceits, and vaulting ambitions.  And before each production there is most excellent meat in the form of short presentations, much to the point, on aspects of Shakespearean theater: on sets, pre-The Tempest; on the language, pre-As You Like It; on the use and abuse of history, pre-Rose Mark’d Queen.

Having seen all three shows twice, at opening and at a little past mid-point, I can observe that the vision of Shakespeare on view at the Cab is of malleable texts in service to the joys of playing.  While respectful of the poetry of the plays, these productions are not servile flatterers of the Bard’s big rep nor timid courters of the audience’s clemency.  Each show grabs for what it wants to wrest from the play, and each has the guts and gusto and gonads to make it work, mostly.

The Tempest (directed by Jack Tamburri) is largely played for laughs, suborning its romance elements and the tensions about legitimate and illegitimate power to a broader conception of general folly.  The part of Prospero is shared among the company and this adds a lively sense of make believe to the entire proceedings.  Off-putting, perhaps, if you’d rather have some fledgling McKellan imposing his magic on the hapless visitors to his island kingdom, but, as the play rolls along, the odd overlaps as each actor takes turns with the cloak and book begin to wield a life of their own.  As a device it’s nimble enough to invite reflections on who lords it over whom—even Miranda and Caliban get to “be” Prospero at times—and as theater it’s a challenge to our efforts to “enter into” the play, though a form of “magic” in its own right.  Some highpoints for me: the comic timing of the cast in the mutterings of the stranded aristocracy—King Alonso, his brother Sebastian, Duke Antonio, and Gonzalo (it’s rare to want to spend more time with these characters)—and Ariel’s songs as voiced by Adina Verson, in a get-up that put me in mind of a Dr. Seuss creation.

As You Like It (directed by Louisa Proske) presents a likeably fast-paced first act outside in the courtyard, complete with a wrestling contest and some agreeable love-at-first sight importunings between Adina Verson’s breathless Rosalind and Marcus Henderson’s open-book Orlando.  Inside, things get mellow with a sojourn in the forest of Arden that’s perhaps a bit too long on songs.  The cast plays and sings right well, but one begins to realize that the best parts of the play happen when Rosalind’s on stage, for its her native intelligence and wit, her skill at directing and counterfeiting (like The Beatles’ song says: “and though she feels as if she’s in a play, she is anyway”), and her experience of all roles (pined for and pining after, male and female, fool and critic) that create the intellectual content of the play.  This production aims for and mostly achieves a feel for touching comedy spiced with the absurd spirit of contemporary Rom-Coms.  Highpoints: Rosalind’s dialogues with her confidante Celia/Aliena and her repartee with Orlando; the brothers Duke, both given a comic kick-in-the-pants by Brenda Meaney in wildly different tonsorial and sartorial style; Babak Tafti as the put-upon fool Touchstone burdened with his Lady’s luggage, and in his lust-above-love courtship of game Audrey (Jillian Taylor); Tim Brown’s lovesick swain and Tara Kayton’s fiery Phebe; Matt Biagini’s mercurial satire of melancholic Jaques.

Rose Mark’d Queen (directed by Devin Brain) serves up a fast-paced interpretation of a handful of Shakespeare’s histories, centered by strong characters—King Henry VI (Marcus Henderson, gaining in pathos and stature as the play proceeds) and his Queen Margaret (Jillian Taylor in a demanding role in which she is lover, chider, schemer, fiend and grief-stricken mother by turns)—with more than able support provided by Babak Tafti, as several figures in the House of York, providing now fierce, now more bemused opposition to the King and his supporters, Matt Biagini in a number of supporting roles pretty much destined for death, and Andrew Kelsey, who shines bright as Suffolk, the Queen’s power-hungry lover, and then, as Richard, becomes a lethal attack dog off the leash.  The first half is razor sharp, moving from a scene of kids playacting battle and martial pomp to acts of murderous treason; the second half dallies a bit more, with a comic courtship scene (of an inflated doll) presumably to lighten things up though it also seems to lengthen the proceedings more than is needful.  High-points: when a sword is held at the throat of an audience member to force a capitulation; when representatives of York and Lancaster go amongst the audience, trying to enlist supporters by drawing upon them either a white or red mark (even your selection of a wine for the evening might be a political gesture!—stick with beer and support Jack Cade); the use of light and sound and those big armoires at either end of the space.  It’s a play that keeps you guessing and, of the three, was the one that impressed me most, if only because Brain has somehow managed to underscore how these histories are proto-versions of many more familiar moments in Shakespearean tragedy.

What’s gratifying, for a returning spectator, is to watch the audience get caught up in the pressures of the plays, waiting to see the knots come undone—two of the plays do end happily—and to marvel at how inviting and interactive Shakespeare can be.  These aren’t pious productions stuffed with pretty pomp set up on a stage leagues away.  This is an in-your-face—maybe even on-your-lap—Festival, with characters beseeching their audience to take a side, share a dilemma, lend an ear.  If you think you know the plays, I guarantee you you don’t quite know them like you’ll find them here.

And that’s all to the good.  For what are plays anyway?  Certainly they are texts, but if you want a scholarly Shakespeare, stay at home and read a book.  If you want to hear Shakespeare alive and lived, given shape by young talent and shared as though a communal feast, then stay not, unresolved, unpregnant of your cause (to go or not to go) but exeunt omnes and severally and head for the Yale Summer Cabaret’s Shakespeare Festival.

The Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival
August 2-14
Artistic Director, Devin Brain; Producer, Tara Kayton

203-432-1567; or summercabaret.org