Getting Through the Door

The Yale Cabaret keeps you guessing.  When you enter the downstairs space at 217 Park Street, you never know what to expect.  Last week was no exception, and the show I saw was sold out.  There’s nothing quite like experiencing odd theater with a full house.  It means reactions are everywhere, a situation the Cab thrives on. The feature was a series of one acts given the collective title Future Oprah Lovesong, but consisting of three plays written by Justin Taylor: “The Future, Gone Out of Business,” directed by Ethan Heard, featured a young boy and his doting dad, dismayed to learn that the portal to the future is closed because it’s “out of business”; “Oprah-Ganesh,” directed by Jack Tamburri, in which a young woman wants to pass through a different portal (this time a door decorated with a huge replica of a human vagina), only to discover that she first has to get in touch with her inner Oprah, or maybe her inner Ganesh (the Indian elephant-headed god) – masks/wigs provided – to do so; and “Lovesong,” directed by Heard, a two-person play in which the same lines are delivered in a variety of contexts – lovers in love, lovers fighting, mother and son, and, my favorite, woman and her dog.

The main fun of a night at the Cab – not knowing where it’s going – was entertainingly sustained by the production.  The first play seemed like it might be a bittersweet coming-of-age comedy/drama – especially with the child’s (Martha Jane Kaufman) tricycle, balloon, cap and gleeful expletives, and the father’s bond with his child, both amusing and touching.  But when the father (Will Cobbs) ends up dead for refusing to cease and desist in his insistence that the future be opened back up, and the child takes matters into his own hands, the play has suddenly veered into areas more unsettling.

And that’s where we stayed, with “Oprah-Ganesh.”  Though played for laughs, a play in which a burly Mask Technician (Ryan Hales) sports at his crotch a phallic squirt bottle that dispenses a milky fluid – which the Playwright (Hannah Rae Montgomery) is encouraged, by prompts to the audience, to drink – is bound to be a bit off-putting to some.  Or maybe not.  Certainly the need to get through the portal became more allegorical as we went – initiation into sex, birth canal, recognition of feminine power as Oprah herself might encourage?  Perhaps a vagina sculpture can be all things to all people.  Seeing Montgomery, a small white woman, imitate, in Ganesh mask and Oprah wig, Oprah’s gushy manner was certainly amusing, and the trio of uncredited participants, called upon to interact lasciviously with the pudendal portal, was also diverting.

In “Lovesong,” the portal remained, sans its distinctive decoration, and allowed one or the other of the duo (Miriam Hyman and Will Cobbs) to come and go, each time setting off a new riff on the interchange, involving words of apology, desire, forgiveness and love, that, come to think of it, are pretty much the standard tropes of any love song you’d care to name.  This inventive piece, with immense talent displayed by Hyman and Cobbs, got the biggest hand of the night.

As sometimes happens with theater that pushes in various directions at once, the star of the evening could be said to be the audience that gathered to help the Cab do its thing.

Next up, a re-invention of Chekhov’s one-act The Wedding Reception, transposed to an Eastern European disco of the 1980s.

Future Oprah Lovesong; written by Justin A. Taylor; directed by Ethan Heard and Jack Tamburri; October 14-15, 2010

Yale Cabaret, 217 Park Street, New Haven.  203.432.1566. www.yalecabaret.org

Starting Thursday at 8 p.m.: The Wedding Reception; written by Anton Chekhov; translated by Paul Schmidt; directed by Alex Mihail; October 21-23.

Poetry a la Yale UP

We don't write often about Yale University Press.  Hey, it has its own publicity department so it doesn't really need our help. But then again when a personal request comes our way and the event is local, we do now and again feel the obligation.

The occasion for this obligation is a reading by acclaimed French writer, Hédi Kaddour, whose poetry collection Treason, translated by Marilyn Hacker, was issued by Yale University Press in spring 2010.

Ah, but you ask: who is this Monsieur Kaddour? We quote the omniscient Wikipedia:

Il est né d'un père tunisien et d'une mère française. Agrégé de lettres modernes, il est traducteur de l'anglais, l'allemand et l'arabe. Il a enseigné la littérature française et la dramaturgie à l'École normale supérieure de Fontenay/Saint-Cloud/Lyon et l'écriture journalistique au Centre de formation des journalistes (CFJ). Il est aujourd'hui professeur de littérature française à la New York University in France et à l'Ecole des métiers de l'information (EMI-CFD) où il est responsable de l'atelier d'écriture.

What?  You don't read French.  OK, we'll take a feeble stab at it.

Born of a Tunisian father and French mother.  An editor of contemporary literature, he is a translator of English, German and Arabic.  He has taught French literature and drama at the Ecole Normale Superieure (etc.) and journalism at the Centre de formation des journalistes (CFJ). He is presently a professor of French literature at NYU in France and at l'Ecole des métiers de l'information (EMI-CFD) where he is responsible for the writing workshop.

Mr. Kaddour will be reading (in English) at the Whitney Humanities Center here at Yale, located at 53 Wall Street, New Haven, on Wednesday, October 27th from from 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.  Check it out.

Who Thought Murder in Westville Could Be So Much Fun?

EXTRA! EXTRA! A BROKEN UMBRELLA THEATRE PRESENTS THE ALMOST ENTIRELY TRUE STORY OF A  WESTVILLE MURDER!

(New Haven, CT – October 5, 2010) Cops and criminals. Headlines and handcuffs. Villains and vaudeville. Extra! Extra! From the team that transformed the tunnel in Edgewood Park into a pirate’s lair with their sold out 2009 spectacle Thunderbolt, comes A Broken Umbrella Theatre’s newest creation VaudeVillain. This fall, the line between fact and fiction thins to a blur when the audience is lead on a “who done it?” psychological, Halloween adventure traveling through every room in Lyric Hall Antiques & Conservation, 827 Whalley Avenue, on October 23, 24, 30 and 31.

Ripped from the actual New Haven newspaper headlines of 1913, mystery and mayhem abound as we follow the trail of a suspected murderer, William Allen, from song to scene to sensational dream. The past meets the present during a surreal finale in the beautifully restored and ghostly West Rock Vaudeville Theatre, newly renamed The Showroom at Lyric Hall. An eerie and festive Halloween experience awaits you!

Performances of VaudeVillain will be on Saturday, October 23 at 7pm and 9pm and Sunday, October 24 at 2pm and 6pm. During Halloween Weekend, performances will be on Saturday, October 30 and Sunday, October 31 at 2pm, 6pm and 8pm. Limited reservations are available for $15 per ticket at www.facebook.com/brokenumbrella, on sale starting Friday, October 8. Day-of-show ticket distribution is available one hour prior to the start of each performance on a first come, first serve basis at the box office located at Lyric Hall Antiques & Conservation, 827 Whalley Avenue, New Haven. Day-of-show tickets are Pay-What-You-Can. Not recommended for ages 10 and below. On street parking is available in the Westville neighborhood of New Haven as well as the lot in Edgewood Park off of West Rock Avenue. For more information about additional Halloween activities for all ages in the vibrant Westville neighborhood, please visit www.westvillect.org.

Conceived and developed by A Broken Umbrella Theatre, VaudeVillain features a cast and crew of local New Haven artists as well as additional professionals hailing from New York, New Jersey and Hawaii.  Words: Ken Baldino. Script: The Ensemble. Music and Lyrics: Rob Shapiro. Direction: Ian Alderman. Historian: Colin Caplan. Production Team: Jes Mack, Brandon Fuller, Jen McClure, Denise Santisteban, Ryan Gardner, Jason Wells, Ian Alderman, Rachel Alderman and John Caveliere. Choreography: Robin Levine. Musical Director: Dana Astmann. Graphic design by Vaxa Creative. A Broken Umbrella Theatre is supported by a Mayor’s Arts Grant from the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of New Haven.

A Broken Umbrella Theatre aspires to enhance the vitality of our community through compelling storytelling, mined from history, with a commitment to aesthetic rigor. For more information please visit www.facebook.com/brokenumbrella

For more information on VaudeVillain or to learn more about A Broken Umbrella Theatre contact:

Rachel Alderman at rachel @ abrokenumbrella.org

Which Side Are You On?

For the second feature in the Yale Cabaret’s 2010-11 Season, Artistic Director Andrew Kelsey, project initiator Louisa Proske, director Flordelino Lagundino, and producer Jennifer Newman offer a truly surprising and striking work, Caryl Churchill’s Far Away (2000), a vision of dystopia whose full horror sneaks up on you, a horror perfectly etched with inspired absurdist control. Churchill’s plays typically explore themes of social and political dysfunction, but unlike some of her work, Far Away does not reference any overtly topical themes.  Instead, Far Away maintains a grasp on the political realm by suggesting how “regularized” or “normative” the most appalling circumstances can become.  The totalitarian state functioning beyond the scenes we see portrayed can only be inferred, and that is what makes the play so lethal: the way references to the status quo always presuppose the logic – and an acceptance – of the situation, whatever it may be.  As we gradually get up to speed – in three scenes taking place over an indeterminate span of years – we find that the world of the play has either gone entirely mad, or is literally comprised of endless war efforts, not only international, but interspecies in scope.

The great strength of this play is how good the dialogue is.  In the first scene, a woman named Harper (Alexandra Henrikson) tries to command her niece Joan (Laura Gragtmans) to return to bed, only to uncover gradually that the niece has witnessed her uncle involved in an act of brutality, an act that Harper denies, then reinterprets for Joan’s benefit so that it seems a benign act, all for the best, though one that must be kept secret.  What we don’t know, for a fact, is whether or not this couple is trafficking in abducted children or is actually helping them escape while brutally punishing traitors, but in either case, the slow burn by which the step-by-step discussion takes place establishes a world where normality is a thin veneer over inhuman acts, whether desperate or depraved.

The second scene is a workplace, a hat-making shop.  But the oddities of the headgear being prepared by Joan (now young adult) and her senior co-worker Todd (Chris Henry) add an element of humor to what soon becomes another appalling situation.  In the midst of their amiable workplace flirtation are little dropped facts like watching televised trials late into the night, or arbitrary problems with the workers’ job security.  We learn that the hats are for parades, and shortly after we witness an example, as limping, zombie-like figures cross the stage, drably attired but for fantastical hats.  It was a stunning moment of theater, implying both a complete loss of human dignity as well as gesturing to what we might think of as totalitarian aesthetics, adding a touch of the circus on the way to the gallows (a tip of the hat to Costume Designer Ana Milosevic for the entertaining chapeaus atop figures from a gulag).

In the final scene, the world is at war, as we learn strictly from the dialogue between Harper and Todd, waiting in Harper’s bland living room for Joan to return, and debating which animals and other creatures have joined forces with which nations.  Churchill pushes the idea that “everything is political” to its logical, absurd conclusion: even the animal kingdom is political.

The revelation for me in this production was Henrikson’s performance – in the first scene she was young and maternal, a bit steely perhaps, but we are not sure at once who is the problem: her or her niece.  As the dialogue unfolds we remain uncertain: is Harper completely duplicitous, making up things to explain away Joan’s fears, or uncertainly initiating the girl into the harsh realities of their world?  And it is that uncertainty about Harper’s character that makes her so intriguing.  In the final scene, Henrikson conjures an older Harper, not bitter so much as run ragged by maintaining a grasp of the world that necessitates knowing, for instance, which side the deer are on.  As she berates Todd for his slips in the party line, her hectoring tone – despite the absurdly wild things she is saying – never slips into comic histrionics.  We see a woman who actually lives in the world she describes, thus making it vivid and real to us as well, and unforgettable.

Far Away has two more performances: tonight, Sat. 25th, at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.

Far Away, written by Caryl Churchill; directed by Flordelino Lagundino

Yale Cabaret, 217 Park Street, New Haven; 203.432.1566; www.yalecabaret.org

So we beat on . . .

muse, the final show of the Yale Summer Cabaret 2010 season, is an original dance-theater piece, a two-character drama that presents the story of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald from the point of view of the afterlife. Brenna Palughi conceived the idea, scripted it in collaboration with her production team, Danny Binstock, Walter Chon, and Adina Verson, directs and choreographed the show, and stars as Zelda.  She finds in the story of these literary icons the kind of vivid fascination that, these days, attaches to the likes of Brangelina.  Scott and Zelda lived lives that were not only passionate and artistic, but were also emblems of their era, the Roaring Twenties, forever associated with them, both because of Scott's works, such as The Great Gatsby (1925), and the couple's lifestyle.

To present the reality of the couple, Palughi's script uses only the duo's actual words -- mainly from their considerably articulate correspondence.  But rather than try to recreate the events of the couple's life, Palughi cannily creates a retrospective fantasy, a kind of Satrean "no exit" space where the couple have to face eternity by trying to make sense of what they were to each other and why it went so wrong.

One of the most unforgettable moments, as a glimpse into the abyss the public couple tried to skirt, derives from a transcript of a session at the Fitzgeralds' home with a  psychologist (voice of Joby Earle) in attendance to act as arbitrator.  Zelda, who had wanted to be a dancer, published a novel, thus treading on her husband's territory.  Worse, she was now working on a novel based on events Scott was trying for years to draft as material for what would eventually become Tender is the Night (1934).  To hear Scott baldly declare the conditions under which his wife must live, in order to continue being his wife, is rather appalling to anyone who expects something closer to mutuality in marriage.  On the other hand, the position Scott speaks from is not really one of bullying strength, no matter how his words sound.  He is in need of Zelda, hence the title of the piece: muse.  Without Zelda's participation in his life, Scott seems to fear a loss of his bearings, but at the same time, any act she might take in her own interest would be considered a complete betrayal.

As Scott, Binstock enacts vividly Scott's nature via dance and dialogue.  He displays graceful self-control in a lengthy dance piece with Palughi that narrates the couple's entire story with considerable economy and aplomb, but we see the pressures he faces take actual physical toll on his movements.  And in his spoken protests and pleas Binstock shows us a Scott verging on a loss of control that, if it were to occur, might have been a saving grace.  Instead, we always feel Scott's grasp of himself, so thoroughly buttoned up in his lovely suits, no less tenacious for being tentative and vulnerable.  Only when he dances do we see some of the "light fantastic" that makes the prose so golden, so self-assured.

In a segment where word and movement are particularly well matched and powerful, Zelda kneels on the stage reading a letter from Scott comprised of nothing but hurtful, insistent, resentful, relentless questions while behind her Scott performs a marionette's series of jerks, slaps, and contortions.  Here we see the perfect visual realization of something almost inhumanly mechanical -- the way his concept of himself as a writer controlled Scott just as fiercely as his need to control Zelda.

As Zelda, Palughi's dancing is able to express an openness and abandon that seems, from all accounts, to have been part of Zelda's fascination.  But it's also fascinating to hear how lucid she could be, even when threatened with an asylum.  Palughi's voice at times gets strident but never veers into the kind of hysteria we might expect.  Her Zelda is verbally in control, even if her expression at times becomes a doll-like fixity, the mournful gaze of a spirit trapped forever in her husband's vision of her.

For all the tensions and darkness of this marriage, Palughi's sense of the material highlights its romantic potential.  Elizabeth Groth's costumes are lovely; her set is a world literally papered with words; the music -- Gershwin for instance -- breathes with rapture and jaunty melancholy; Sarah Lasley's newsreel-like projections add the necessary touch of the mediated reality that encroached on these lives, making them famous and a part of our nation's permanent record.

In the afterlife, "hell is other people," but if the people were truly a couple -- overriding even "til death do us part" -- it may be possible to see that the feeling "to be young then was very heaven" might also override all-too-human failings with the heady thrill of being "beautiful and damned" for all time.

muse;  conceived and directed by Brenna Palughi

July 29-August 14, 8 p.m.; August 7, 2 p.m.

Yale Summer Cabaret: 203.432.1567; SummerCabaret.org

Strange Love in NYC

When it debuted in Yale Cabaret's 2009/10 Season, Janyia Antrum's campy sci-fi musical Strange Love in Outer Space was the success story of The Dwight/Edgewood Project (see my review here).  Now its success continues with the play's debut in New York in the eclectic and exciting New York Fringe Festival, Aug. 14, 17, 19, 21, and 23, including a mention in the New York Times. The Dwight/Edgewood Project is held every July under the auspices of Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theater.  It's a four week program that introduces New Haven area kids to the elements of theater, from playwrighting and design to acting and directing, with classes staffed by Yale School of Drama students.  For the last two years, August Lewis Troup Middle School and Wexler-Grant Community School have been partners in the project.

Janyia wrote the first part of Strange Love in summer 2009, at the age of twelve.  When she got home after the project ended, she felt the urge to continue the story and wrote a second part.  The Yale Cabaret commissioned a third act and then produced the play.  Jorge Rodriguez, who has worked with Janyia as a producer from the beginning, comments: Janyia "wrote a play that was incredibly well structured, with outstanding character development and incredibly funny."  The play impressed her fellow students at D/EP and the staff "was stunned by her sense of comedic timing.  The zany, campy humor that distinguishes this play were of her own creation and a result, as she often joked about, of years of watching TV sitcoms like The Nanny."

Christopher Mirto, who directed the D/EP production and the Yale Cab production, is at the helm again for the Fringe production.  He also plays the memorable role of Mr. Grumis, a fish-like alien who courts the statuesque Splontusia.  For Mirto, the play works for a lot of reasons:

"Janyia's story is actually really moving and has a strong leading female character. It's campy fun but very serious and imaginative and comes from such a genuine place. It's surprisingly smart, has great comic timing, [and] the songs move the plot forward; the characters are crazy, but have very clear desires. The Fringe is a good fit because it's an unusual show in style, form, characters, design. It doesn't have a big or complicated design, so it's easy to transfer. Kind of like Pixar films, it appeals to adults and children."

The Fringe version features some of the same cast as the Cabaret version -- Mirto, and his longtime associate Brian Valencia, who also mentored Janyia in D/EP, as the dastardly Dr. Tuscanunin -- but also presents some changes, with Caitlin Clouthier, from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, in the central role of multi-eyed Splontusia, and recent YSD graduate Aja Naomi King as B'Quisha Star Jones, the dog/pirate queen.  The new production also boasts a new song.

The Fringe is a huge, sprawling drama festival that Mirto calls "a total crapshoot."  The sublime and the ridiculous rub shoulders and you go in not quite knowing what you're going to get.  Strange Love has already proven itself capable of mixing it up with the challenging and off-the-wall offerings of the Cab, and now it will run side-by-side with the off-off-Broadway shows of the West Village.

Mirto's excited by the challenge and comments, "There is this really nice non-jaded aspect of Janyia that is refreshing for me: she reminds me that it should be fun, it should entertain, and it should be simple; and that imagination goes a long way!"

It's an imagination that has created a play that's out of this world, a play that has already gone a long way from an afterschool project to a New York city debut.

Strange Love in Outer Space, A Musical Traumedy

Book and Lyrics by Janyia Antrum; Music by Nick Morgan; Directed by Christopher Mirto

The Cherry Pit (venue #14), 155 Bank Street, New York, NY (West & Washington Street)

Sat. Aug. 14, 2:15 p.m.; Tues. Aug. 17, 10:30 p.m.; Thurs. Aug. 19, 8 p.m.; Sat. Aug. 21, 5:30 p.m.; Mon. Aug. 23, 4 p.m; Tickets $15-$18; for tickets: www.FringeNYC.org

Presented by The New York International Fringe Festival; A Production of The Present Company

True, too True

Dino Buzzati once began a story: “A strange thing has just happened to me – an extraordinary thing – I haven’t decided whether or not to tell my editor.” That’s a chilling but accurate glimpse into the soul of the freelance writer. For the better part of the last twenty years, whenever anything strange or extraordinary has happened to me, I’ve immediately wondered whether to tell it to Alison True, the editor of the Chicago Reader. I got lost on the way to the airport – a perfect little anecdote for the Reader. I contracted a rare eye disease – during the treatment, I was taking notes for the eventual feature story in the Reader. A man sitting next to me on the subway dropped dead of a heart attack – and I began musing, “Write this up for Alison, collect a couple of hundred bucks … hey, this is turning out to be a pretty good day.” The Reader is one of the most successful and longest-lived alt-weeklies in America. Alison started there in 1984, just out of college – her first job was in the mail room – and she was named editor in 1995. She’s spent her entire career staying out of the limelight. If you Google her – or anyway if you did up until a couple of weeks ago – the only hits are in generic articles called things like “Fifty Women in Chicago Publishing.” No controversial interviews, no grand pronouncements on the future of journalism. Her byline has rarely appeared in the Reader itself; in most issues, the only place her name turns up is on the masthead. But the paper has been, week after week, a continual demonstration of her skill and taste as an editor. Many people who’ve worked there over the years have thought of it as Alison’s high-pressure boot camp in old-school journalism.

Mostly the Reader has specialized in local affairs – which given that the locality is Chicago has meant a certain preoccupation with the corrupt and the bizarrely violent, the sorts of hot-button issues that the local mainstream papers are too complacent to touch (there were two decades of stories about police torturing confessions from suspects – the ringleader was recently convicted in a federal court). But Alison has also encouraged writers to wander and experiment. I spent many years, with Alison’s encouragement, pushing at the boundaries of long-form journalism. 30,000 words about American memories of World War 2. 35,000 words about my father-in-law, a Russian émigré who grew up in China. 45,000 words about the history of my family house in small-town Illinois. Each time I’d tell Alison that I’d finally come up with an idea for a story she’d never be able to use. “Try it anyway,” she’d say. “I love a challenge.”

Alison has also put her pervasive but unobtrusive stamp on the Reader’s internal culture. Its original crew of editors practiced a management style I’d call “hippie machismo.” They weren’t a touchy-feely crowd, those guys (and they were all guys). I told one of them that I’d been writing for the Reader for years and still had no idea whether they even liked my work, because they’d never said a word to me about it. “We publish you,” he answered. “That ought to be praise enough.” Alison changed all that. She’s regularly complimented people on good work (the first time she did it with me, I thought she was being sarcastic). The Reader’s copy editors became unfailingly nice, even when they were persecuting your first draft with mosquito-swarms of nitpicks. Alison got to be an adept at the dark art of coaxing writers into revisions. One time when I was dawdling over a story, she called me near midnight and said she couldn’t go home until I turned in the revised copy. I parried by suggesting that we both get some sleep and I’d send it to her first thing in the morning. She sighed. “That’s okay, I understand,” she said. “You get some sleep. I’ll just stay here and catch up on my paperwork.”

I knew she was bluffing. But I capitulated anyway – because I also knew (and she knew I knew) that she was eight and a half months pregnant.

Alison cajoled, and nagged, and bribed, and badgered; she put up with all kinds of tantrums (my wife says she once passed by my study and heard me yelling into the phone, “I am speechless with rage!”); I ultimately wrote around a quarter of a million words for her – and I wasn’t even one of the Reader’s most prolific contributors. Some of it is among the best writing I ever expect to do. But the highest compliment I can pay to Alison as an editor is that I think the Reader got better after I stopped writing for it.

The Reader was a comfortably profitable business for three decades, and then almost overnight began hemorrhaging money (the advent of Craig's List wiped out its gigantic weekly section of classified ads). Since then, there’s been wave after wave of budget cuts, staff firings and layoffs, and the inexorable shrinking of editorial space down to almost nothing. My long-form stories were among the first casualties. There were no hard feelings (I’ve gone on to an even longer form known as “books”) and Alison has still tried to get in a couple of little pieces of mine into the paper every year or so. But meanwhile, with a ghost-town office and a skeleton staff, she’s rallied and been printing some of the finest journalism in the Reader’s history. The Reader has been running stories about Chicago’s hidden world of financial chicanery that in a just world would have earned a Pulitzer. But then, if there really was any justice, people would be talking about Alison’s run at the Reader as the alt-weekly equivalent of William Shawn’s glory days at The New Yorker.

In the last few weeks, as the news spread that Alison was suddenly gone from the Reader, I’ve been getting emails from some of the old crew asking me how she’s doing and what the real story of her departure is. I love gossip as much as anybody, but the answers are disappointing. She’s not bad, considering; and there isn’t much of a real story. The Reader’s newest owners have a new business plan (it involves “pushing at” the firewall between editorial and advertising) and Alison doesn’t fit in. Nothing personal. There’s just for a lot of us around town the soundless gut-punch awareness of her absence. It’s a strange, even extraordinary feeling. I keep thinking I should write it up for her. It’ll take me a while to get used to the idea that I can’t.

Lee Sandlin is the author of Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild, to be published in October by Pantheon.

Do You Believe in Magic?

Director Devin Brain and the cast of the current Yale Summer Cabaret show, The Phoenix, have given themselves quite a task: to render a situation that could be either fantasy or reality, when either is potentially alienating.  Based on a haunting story by best-selling Australian author Isobelle Carmody, the play has been derived by the cast via an improvisational process of discovery, which means that the presentation is not scripted so much as agreed upon through trial and error during a long period of gestation.

If that sounds daunting, it should.  But it also may be the best way to approach a story like this which relies so much on shared fantasy among its characters.  The logic seems to be: if the actors are making things up together to make the play exist in the first place, they'll be all the more convincing as the fantasizing characters they portray.

William (Ben Horner), we're told, is the "local feral child" -- an amusing appellation, but one that means his character will be hard to read.  He addresses Ragnar (Shannon Sullivan) as a princess -- and not figuratively.  He actually seems to believe they are foundlings from another world, left to wander a beach deserted but for a wounded gull Ragnar names Greedy.  In addition to using a bird puppet, the play fleshes out the bird via William Demeritt, complete with feathers at his temples, a brace, and a crutch, appearing at times like a guardian spirit fallen on hard times as he manipulates dolls that emulate the scenes the actors play out.

Though the dark backstories of Ragnar and William are a bit sketchily thrown at us before we have much idea of what's going on, Horner and Sullivan fascinate us with the strange mix of desperation, denial, and happy inspirations that unite the duo.  One device I particularly liked was Sullivan showing us, mutely, a series of photographs while looking at us with facial expressions that telegraphed exactly how Ragnar felt about each image and how we should read them.  That didn't mean we necessarily grasped the narrative, but the effort to communicate it was palpable.

But when Torvald (Joby Earle), a charismatic boy from a different class and school, enters the scene, things really begin to click.  Before that we're just trying to follow the logic of a folie à deux that seems harmless if unsettling; once the third character is introduced we have a conflict.  Will he enter -- as he seems to -- the rather grand, Dungeons and Dragons-like world the other two mentally inhabit, or repudiate it?  And if he does enter it, is he sincere or after something?

At this point in the story, the three principals act out their interactions via the dolls, and suddenly a feeling of truly being transported to those fabled lands of childhood playtime comes to life.  And once Brain and company has us entertaining how wonderfully trusting and expressive and vulnerable that world of shared make believe can be, they've got us primed for where they want to take us.  It becomes an uncompromising and tragic play about the unwritten laws we intuit and then either respect or betray when entering into private, personal bonds with one another.

As ever at the Cabaret, it's the unexpected touches that impress us as theater: the song William makes up, seemingly on the spot; Ragnar's bike helmet; Torvald's inspired use of an overhead projector; moody musical tones, particularly an expressive acoustic guitar part, that surrounds the action, provided by musical director Nathan Roberts; and, finally, that frail craft -- a boat upon a boat -- that gives us poetry as closure.

The Phoenix, from the story by Isobelle Carmody; adapted by Devin Brain and the cast; directed by Devin Brain

July 1-17, 8 p.m.; additional 2 p.m. show on the 10th; Yale Summer Cabaret, 203.432.1567

Strange Bedfellows

David Rabe, Girl By The Road At Night, NY: Simon and Schuster, 228 pgs. One could say that David Rabe is obsessed with the Vietnam War.  Best known for a trio of award-winning plays in the '70s that deal with that conflict and its effect on those who fought in it, Rabe has more recently turned from theater and taken up fiction-writing and now, with his latest novel, returns to the war that made him famous.  We could say that he does so because he knows he can write about it well -- Rabe served in Vietnam in the mid-'60s -- and because, perhaps, it's a part of our history that never goes away.

I found myself questioning that last supposition in the early going of this poetically spare, episodic novel.  Is Vietnam a national obsession still, or is it Rabe's more than ours?  Perhaps more to the point -- regardless of what you think of the war and its era -- is the question: is there anything more to be done with it?

It may be an unfair question, but when you see the novel's rather taciturn and self-involved protagonist Joseph Whitaker, on the eve of his depature into the army, hanging around in DC hoping to get laid by a war-protesting flowerchild, you might be excused for thinking it all a bit too familiar.  But when Whitaker drops in on his former girlfriend, now involved with a new guy, he begins to come alive a bit more, taking on dimension due to a feeling of unfinished emotional business that could lead him to more interesting experiences.

Rabe alternates the chapters depicting Pfc. Whitaker's misgivings about service in the war and his general lot in life with chapters that introduce us to Quach Ngoc Lan, a Vietnamese prostitute plying her trade at Madame Lieu's, where GIs can get their jeeps washed and their junk moved simultaneously.  Rabe is very effective at rendering how the GIs view these locals, but there aren't many surprises here amidst the general racism and, occasionally, grudging appreciation of what would've been thought of as "oriental mystery."  But gradually the interiority of Lan, attenuated as it may be by lack of education and a rather elemental sense of life, becomes louder and louder for the reader as her pidgin English -- where Rabe gets to show his command of dialogue -- comes to seem not a limitation so much as a unique form of communication.  Her motives and her actions are often glimpsed through the viewpoint of others, but Rabe's greatest achievement is making us feel not that we know Lan but that we would very much like to.

Is Lan the all-too-familiar whore with a heart of gold, and Whitaker the GI who tries to save her from a world they never made?  Frankly, Rabe's tale is not as far from that soapy terrain as some readers might like, or, alternately, doesn't wallow in it to the degree that others might wish.  There is a connection between the two and it might mean something, but Rabe keeps us furnished with enough sense of the grim realities of the setting to prevent us from expecting any improvement for either of them.

But what the interest of Girl hinges on is not its depiction of prostitution and the war -- as forms of exploitation that put both Whitaker and Lan in something of the same position as expendable vassals -- but in its willingness to look unsentimentally at the power that even a minimum of communication and connection can provide between people who are strangers to one another and, to some extent, the situation in which they find themselves and each other.

"Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows" Shakespeare said, and the journalist Charles Dudley Warner famously stated that "politics makes strange bedfellows"  Rabe's novel takes for granted that the politics of the war and the misery it gives rise to create a condition that might throw together unlikely bedfellows, and the novel's best effect is making us believe they might have something to offer each other.

David Rabe reads at RJ Julia Booksellers, Wed. June 23, 7 p.m., $5, which may be used toward purchase of the book; 768 Boston Post Road, Madison, CT; www.rjjulia.com

We Party Down...and Up...and Down Some More!

Saturday night, June 12, and the stars were out, gathered at the Whitneyville home of business writer Bruce Tulgan and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Debby Applegate, both trustees of the New Haven Review. Present was National Book Award winner Edward "Slaves in the Family" Ball, standing just out of reach on the other side of the bar. (I never did make it over to talk with him, alas.) There, happy tippling, was Hartford bon vivant Nathan Frank, offering sneak previews of his brother Thomas "What's the Matter with Kansas?" Frank's upcoming Wall Street Journal column. Here was Hamden novella master Gregory "Distinguished Gray" Feeley; there memoirist (and trustee) Natasha Pang-Mei "Bound Feet and Western Dress" Chang, now bicoastal, dividing her time between New York and New Haven (and occasionally Russia).It was the third annual New Haven Review soirée, this one celebrating issue #6. Catering by Anna, martini drinking by me. Goatee by novelist and editor Brian Francis "Liberation" Slattery. Republican-party defense by attorney and litterateur Mark Shiffrin. Democratic offense by Joshua "Culture Vulture" Safran.

Voodoo consultation by Liza McAlister. Victorian motherhood by Nicole Fluhr. Medical records by Matthew Higbee. Financial advice by Andrew "UBS" Boone.

Counter-intuitive discursus by Barry "Why Not?" Nalebuff. Curatorial eye by Helen Kauder. Curatorial gimlet eye by Jonathan Weinberg.

Southern flavor by Marc "The Bonfire" Wortman. A touch of class by Steven "Harper's Contributor" Stoll. Doctor on premises: Sydney Spiesel.

I left at half past midnight, but I hear many were still there for breakfast.

See you next year?

And now for some pictures, all courtesy of the official photographer for the event, Tom Stratford.

Rock'n'Roll Diva

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The Yale Summer Cabaret debuted its 2010 season with cult favorite Hedwig and The Angry Inch, text by John Cameron Mitchell, songs by Stephen Trask.  Directed by Jesse Jou, artistic director of the Cab this summer, the working conceit of the piece is that we aren't watching theater but rather a rock band, The Angry Inch, led by Hedwig, perform in some dive.  Between musical numbers, Hedwig regales us with tales of her life in an ongoing monologue -- and colorful, kinky, comical, disheartening and inspiring it is.

Hedwig began life as a boy named Hansel living in East Germany before the Wall fell.  An American soldier named Luther falls in love with the "girlyboy" and in order for them to marry, Hansel, who adopts his mother's name and passport, also agrees to have a sex change operation to become female in fact.  The operation is botched and Hedwig is left genitally indeterminate -- neither male nor female, a perfect character to explore the in-between manner of transgenders.

As Hedwig, Chad Raines is phenomenal.  His Hedwig is slyly insinuating, an introvert who has become an extrovert in self-defense.  The special condition of Hedwig's sexuality is both a trial by error that makes her grimly ironic about fate, but also a badge of honor that gives credit to her tale.  For this to work, Hedwig can't seem campy -- simply a guy in drag -- and Raines brings it off admirably.  He gives Hedwig an aloof Dietrich air that can veer into Janis-like vocal lacerations at will.

The latter are fueled by the vulnerability of Hedwig's romantic attachment to Tommy Gnosis, a bigtime rock star whom she had an affair with in their youth (when Tommy was a repressed Christian in a Bible Belt trailer park), and whom she now trails about the country as he enacts musical self-celebration in huge arenas, performing songs Hedwig wrote with and/or for him.  According to Hedwig, Tommy is her missing other half, separated from her à la  Aristophanes' story in Plato's  Symposium.  The double whammy -- thwarted romance, thwarted career -- makes Hedwig a true rock diva, showing us the scars on her heart.

But our Hedwig is also cruel (the East German accent helps with that, ja) to herself and to her smitten assistant Yitzhak (Adina Verson), a one-time drag queen whom Hedwig insists wear butch clothing -- in this production, vintage Grunge.  Yitzhak gets no spoken lines -- except for two 'unprintable' epithets directed at her lover/boss -- but Verson's eyes speak plenty as Yitzhak shares the limelight with Hedwig, providing powerful vocal backup, or cringes somewhere in the background as Hedwig confides -- or performs confiding -- in the audience.

The backing band kicks ass and theater-goers who aren't used to musicals that really rock may be somewhat taken aback.  This is not a rock musical with songs cleaned up for the stage in Broadway's neutered idea of what rock sounds like. The Cab space is, appealingly, just the sort of basement venue Hedwig might be playing in the play's reality, and it's easy enough to feel like a spectator in a club, fascinated by a performer who lets it all hang out, even throwing tantrums at the band that may be real or may be staged, or both.

At the heart of it all is the girlyboy with the brittle wit, the belting voice, and an array of costumes -- the Ziggy Stardust get-up was a dead ringer -- that, like the songs, trigger glam memories and rock'n'roll dreams.

As the song by Spoon says: "when you don't believe, it shows, they tear out your soul / when you believe, they call it rock'n'roll."

I call this rock'n'roll.

Yale Summer Cabaret presents Hedwig and the Angry Inch; text by John Cameron Mitchell; music and lyrics by Stephen Trask; directed by Jesse Jou; music directed by Nathan A. Roberts; photo: Nick Thigpen

June 4th-19th 2010, 8 pm. (No performances on Sunday or Monday evenings.) Additional performance, June 12th, 11 p.m.  To purchase tickets and for more information, please visit summercabaret.org or call (203) 432 1567

Playing the Players

Steven Dietz's Private Eyes is a playful play.  We're never quite sure what we're watching.  Sure, it's a play, and we accept that plays are supposed to be a likeness of reality.  A stage with a desk and a round table and a few chairs can be a space where a woman (Rebecka Jones) tries out for a part with a man (Philip M. Gardiner) who seems to be a director; when later the woman, Lisa, working as a waitress, finds the director, Matthew, at her table, we accept, for the sake of make believe, that the action has moved to a restaurant.  And that's what lets Dietz produce his "gotcha" effect: they both are still on stage, we find, and both scenes, the try out and the restaurant, are part of a rehearsal, and the two are married, and in a play being directed by Adrian (Robert Resnikoff). Scenes that seem like they're happening in real life -- Lisa and Adrian debate how to reveal to Matthew that they have been having an affair -- turn out to be a narrative Matthew is telling to his therapist Frank (Jackie Sidle).  At any moment what is real, what is staged, what is fantasized is in question and sometimes the switches from one "level" to another and back are lightning fast and quite comical.  For instance, Adrian and Lisa are cuddling in bed when suddenly Adrian speaks offstage to Matthew telling him that's how he'd like him to play the bed scene -- the bed is literally on stage of course but at that moment we realize it's actually on stage and that Matthew has walked into the scene.

It might sound like the play is about play acting, about how to represent plausible reality on stage and how to keep breaking through the fourth wall, playing on the audience's willing acceptance of staged activity as actual behavior.  But the play has more to offer than that.  The theatrical sleights of hand keep us off-guard and laughing; meanwhile, we're witnessing how staging scenes -- of seduction, of concealment, of confrontation, of confession -- is a part of the theatricality of everyday life.

Like sociologist Erving Goffman's study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Dietz's play accepts that human interactions always contain an element of performance.  In a sense, we never get to the bottom of these characters because they, like us, are always in a play.

The performance style of contemporary theater is key to making the shifting levels effective:  roles requiring minimal costume change, staged with minimal props and sets, vocal deliveries that stress a declamatory approach to speech -- as if people don't converse so much as aim monologues at each other or try to use verbal cues as a means to assert themselves -- all add up to an open-ended performance that is "like" life only because we accept such theatrical conventions as true to reality, which of course they aren't.

In a way, it seems that Dietz's play is questioning those conventions, but if so, not in any very critical way.  As played by Theatre 4, the play was mainly good fun -- Gardiner in particular made the most of his character's comical state of knowing and not knowing what was going on.  And Mariah Sage, as supposedly a detective tailing Adrian at his wife's request, added some unexpected and racy fun to Matthew's life.  Jones had the task of generating sympathy for a cheater and managed it by suggesting the dramatic thrill of secrecy and the fact that, in theater and in life, we mainly want something to happen.

Steven Dietz's Private Eyes, directed by Janie Tomarkin for Theatre 4, plays June 4 & 5 at Oddfellows Playhouse in Middletown, 203.654.7111, $20 suggested price; and June 10-13, at The Kate in Old Saybrook, 877.503.1286, tickets $32.  For more information: www.t4ct.com.

Listen Here This Week: William Faulkner and Louise Erdrich

The Listen Here! Short Story Reading Series rolls into its 12th week with readings at Manjares Fine Pastries, this Tuesday, 838 Whalley Avenue (on West Rock Avenue), May 25, 7 p.m. Our Theme? “Romeos & Juliets”

Our Stories? Louise Erdrich’s “The Plague of Doves” and William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”

Why these? Ah, Louise, again. We just couldn’t help ourselves, and besides, this story fits the theme so well. “A Plague of Doves” is a wonderfully touching story of young love, too young to grasp fully the story it finds itself engaged in. This, too, we discovered while waiting in an airport and perusing The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford. The story first appeared in The New Yorker.

William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is a classic of the southern Gothic tradition. Spinster, possibly wandering lover, gossipy townsfolk—it’s all there, and Faulkner manages to bring it together with the same Southern polish he gives much of his short fiction.

Our First Reading Experiment

Evelineby James Joyce read by Bennett Lovett-Graff [Click title to download]

Digital sound recorder in hand, we consider this the first of, we hope, several experiments in sound recordings of the written word by and from the New Haven Review.

In this case, attached as an MP3, and thus playable on your computer or downloadable to your iPod or the MP3 of your choosing is James Joyce's short short story, "Eveline," appreared in 1914 as part of his short story collection Dubliners. We think hardly more need be said.

Listen Here This Week: Louise Erdrich and David Sedaris

The Listen Here! Short Story Reading Series rolls into its 11th week with readings at Bru Cafe, 141 Orange, Street, this Tuesday, May 18, 7 p.m. Our Theme? “Brothers”

Our Stories? Louise Erdrich’s “The Red Convertible” and David Sedaris’s “You Can’t Kill the Rooster”

Why these?

Louis Erdrich is one of our best-known Native American writers (she is part Ojibwa on her mother’s side) and is a prolific novelist. She’s also a helluva a short story writer, and “The Red Convertible” nicely illustrates this aspect of her storytelling talent. This tale addresses the impact of the Vietnam War--and the then emergent understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder--on the American Indian community of the early 1970s. The story originally appeared in Mississippi Valley Review in 1981 and was collected in Love Medicine in 1984. Its blend of pathos and pain are a reminder of the terrible price of war paid by the families who stay behind.

David Sedaris became universally known for his display of caustic wit on This American Life with his reading of the “Santaland Diaries.” But “You Can’t Kill the Rooster” is equally one of the funniest stories he has ever written, with the added blessing of being probably the most vulgar that Listen Here! has presented to date. (In other words, you ain’t gonna ever hear this one on NPR!) We found this in the edited collection Brothers, put together by New Haven Review subscriber Andrew Blauner, a really wonderful collection of stories on just that topic.

Hello Dolly!

The Long Wharf Theatre production of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House managed a surprising feat: it made the play more entertaining without significantly altering it.  If you're a purist who wants to see Ibsen played straight, it does that; but if you think that a play like ADH, with its winsome wifey who gets into some hot water due to an "innocent" forgery, then gets out of it only to slam the door on her happy-ever-after home, is a bit dated and could use some kind of make-over, well, this show does that too.

And that's what I found surprising: first, that one could perch Ibsen on the terrain of a sitcom or a soap; second, that I found myself thinking, well, isn't ADH simply a more revered soap?  After all, the plot of the story is pure soap opera, and there's nothing in the dialogue that aims beyond the play's basic premise, which is something like: happiness is only skin deep.  Scratch it, and it bleeds.  So why not give us an A Doll's House (1879) that resonates in a world of McMansions where -- as is only too timely -- a bit of financial chicanery might bring the whole cloud castle down on a bank manager's ears.

Gordon Edelstein, who did the adaptation and directed, deserves great credit for mining the comic potential in the material.  It mainly seemed to be a matter of emphasis.  The dialogue, a bit modernized, was close to any version of the play we might already be familiar with, but this production included laughs that might be in Ibsen's script but which a less enterprising director might overlook.  There was a breeziness to it that kept it from taking itself too seriously, a breeziness derived from the giddy fun of looking into our neighbors' glass house.

What's important, for a modern production, is that we not be laughing at Nora, the little bluebird, squirrel, chipmunk, as though she were simply in over her airhead and deserving of a little domestic contretemps for our amusement.  Ana Reeder made the most of making Nora likeable, cannily dim rather than actually so.  She managed the protean shifts that are necessary -- the play makes us see -- to be the "perfect wife": temptress, adoring partner, household manager, confidante to friends both male and female, defender of the threatened nest, even sacrificial victim (the latter a melodramatic touch that can't help seeming a bit 19th century).  When, in the end, she does what she's got to do, the shifts from comically desperate to happily saved to proudly determined occur a bit too fast for realism, but Reeder "kept it real," as they say, helped by the change to casual jeans and sweatshirt after the hiked skirt, hose and low neckline of her belle of the ball costume as a dancing peasant girl.  The "street clothes" underscored that her role in the household had been a command performance all along, and it was time for a curtain call.

In the supporting cast, special mention goes to Tim Hopper as Dr. Peter Rank, the ailing best friend of Nora's husband Torvald who carries a torch for her himself.  Their scenes had enough heat to make up for the rather lukewarm affections of Torvald, and Hopper's doomed departure, in cowboy costume with a big cigar going, deserved an ovation.  As Torvald, Adam Trese kept a part that could easily be a caricature sympathetic, even up to his panicked outburst at Nora for exposing him to his enemies.  I liked him best at the end as he babbled about how he forgave her, sitting in his big papa chair, and his attempts to defeat her logic resonate so well, even 21st century males might easily hear Ibsen laughing at us.

As the villain in the piece, Mark Nelson's Nils Krogstad had a kind of shaky petulance that worked well enough in confronting Nora with her wrongdoings, and in his pleas to be reinstated at the bank, but made it hard to see what her friend Christine Linde (Linda Powell) could see in him.  He seemed more eager to end it all rather than able to blackmail a boss's wife or rekindle an old romance.

Michael Yeargan's set was a wonderfully detailed doll's house, its fakery part of its appeal, with plenty of floorspace for Ibsen's and Edelstein's playthings to move about and grope toward some satisfactory vision of the future.

And what of the kids?  It may be much easier for today's male to accept without much soul-searching Nora's claim that she needs to educate herself and find a place in the world; but does today's woman find it any easier to pursue that goal at the sacrifice of her ties to her children than women would in Ibsen's day?  "You've come a long way, baby," since Ibsen's Nora first walked out -- but, Edelstein's production seems to ask, "how far would you go?"

LONG WHARF THEATRE, Gordon Edelstein, Artistic Director; Ray Cullom, Managing Director

presents:

A DOLL'S HOUSE by Henrik Ibsen, Adapted and Directed by Gordon Edelstein, Set Design by Michael Yeargan

through May 23, 2010

Listen Here This Week: Jhumpa Lahiri and Lydia Peele

The Listen Here! Short Story Reading Series rolls into its 9th week with readings at Willoughby’s “Coffee & Tea, 194 York Street, this Tuesday, May 4, 7 p.m. Our Theme?

“Lovesick” Our Stories?

Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter” and Lydia Peele’s “Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing”

Why these?

Jhumpa Lahiri is best known for her novel The Namesake (almost inevitable when these things make it to the silver screen.)  Before then, however, she was a highly regarded short story writer. In fact, her collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000. “A Temporary Matter” comes from this 1999 collection and, we will freely admit, upon first reading in the airport as we were scrounging around for stories, this one brought us to tears.  The tale really does manage one of those few amazing feats of a great short story: it delivers an O Henry-like twist ending—the bane of most modern short story writers who take the craft “seriously”—with a deeply moving tale that is rich in ideas and possibilities.  In brief, it is more than its ending, and yet its ending really is everything, begging an entire re-thinking of the story title itself.

Lydia Peele is not so well known.  Translation: there is no Wikipedia article on her.   She is, however, the winner of a 2009 Pushcart Prize, one  of our sources for  stories by lesser-known talents who deserve greater recognition.  “Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing” is a quirky story: it’s about love, it’s about reptiles, it’s about evolution.  It asks questions without necessarily answering them, suggesting almost in its form (as you’ll hear) something textbook-ish about how the world is or could be and notwithstanding that textbook-ishness, meaning inheres in our experience of love and loss, parting and reuniting.

Out of Africa

Bernard-Marie Koltès' Battle of Black and Dogs (Combat de nègre et de chiens), translated by Michaël Attias, and directed by Robert Woodruff, is the second play this season at the Yale Rep to take us to vague environs in Africa to witness a drama among a small group of people cut off from the world at large.  Like Danai Gurira's Eclipsed, BBD places us in a compound, but this time it's a "construction site run by a foreign company in a West African country, anywhere from Senegal to Nigeria," where the main characters, white and French, are confronted by Alboury (Albert Jones), a member of a local Wolof tribe who wants to retrieve the body of a worker at the site who has recently died or been killed.

At the site, the boss, Horn (Andrew Robinson), primarily drinks and gambles with his underling Cal (Tommy Schrider), an engineer who should be higher on the ladder than Horn, but is not exactly what you'd call management material.  In fact, he killed the Wolof worker for almost hitting his shoe with a gob of spit, then insisted it was an accident, then tried to dispose of the body in various ways before finally flinging it in the sewer.

This interracial workplace drama is further complicated by the fact that Horn has recently returned from a trip to Paris and brought back a woman he hopes will become his wife.  Léone was a chambermaid at the hotel he stayed at who, as he puts it, always answers yes -- particularly to the offer to come with him to Africa, to see the fireworks display he's going to set off before leaving the country for good.

Cal will make a pass at her (or rather will paw her in an unsettling fashion while babbling inanities); she'll fall for Alboury (in an odd courtship in which she speaks German and he speaks Wolof, though he does understand French, her native language; the double estrangement is no doubt meaningful, but rather leaves the audience in the dark about what they are saying to each other -- does the fact that she's reciting the well-known poem "The Erlking" help?).  Things will not end well, though, all things considered, not as badly as they might have.

In such a stylized play, all the emphasis is on performance.  Robinson, resembling the aged Jon Voight and sounding at times like the aged Jack Lemmon, inspires a certain Everyman confidence as Horn, particularly as he's not that virulent a racist, and speaks for the most part sensibly to Alboury, even addressing him as "sir" initially, and though trying to buy him off may be crass, that too is sensible since the body of Nouofia is unrecoverable.

As Alboury, Jones is given a cipher rather than a character, a representation of elemental difference, perhaps; the "nègre" of the French title is no doubt infused with ideas of "négritude," which makes the whole feel a bit dated or at least resolutely Francophone.

But even harder, for me, was reading the character of Léone who, in the girlish, lost little lamb voice Middendorf used, might well have fallen from the moon rather than Paris, despite a remark about Saint-Laurent's Africa boutique.  Her ritual cum guilt cum scarification cum symbolic gesture of blood-letting late in the play was heavy with portent but light on sense or catharsis.

As Cal, Schrider is the live wire in this production and the play's most dynamic character: unpredictable, seething, at times funny in the way that those who speak in earnest rants can be -- at first, a bit of Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now to Boss Kurtz, though way more unstable than Horn.  He also appears in one scene naked and coated in what is -- rather believably -- meant to be shit, and also showers in full view of the audience before donning his sacrificial whites.  It's a demanding part, to say the least.  Whether or not the nudity is gratuitous -- it's Woodruff and not Koltès who insists on it -- it did rather distract from the dialogue.

While there are problems with the play's plot and staging, it should be said that, to give Koltès his due, each character does get at least one fascinating monologue, and it's the talk that mainly sustains our interest.  My favorite speech was Horn's description of a city that would take up only half of France and could house the entire population of the world in 40-story apartment blocks.

The set, designed by Riccardo Hernandez, is interesting, with a big basement room with a cot and cage visible below -- and more naturalistically furnished than -- the spare stage above,the latter dominated by a kind of shack of corrugated slats, a table for the drinking/gambling, little spots of dirt, and some bougainvillea hanging in the cylindrical lights above.   It looks like nowhere on earth, and if we were told it was a construction site on a planet somewhere far, far away, that would be easy enough to believe.

BATTLE OF BLACK AND DOGS, Yale Repertory Theatre, April 16 to May 8, 2010, written by Bernard-Marie Koltès, translated by Michaël Attias, directed by Robert Woodruff; photograph, Joan Marcus

Listen Here This Week: Antonya Nelson and Toni Cade Bambera

The Listen Here! Short Story Reading Series rolls into its 8th week with readings at Manjares Fine Pastries, 838 Whalley Avenue (on West Rock Avenue), this Tuesday, April 27, 7 p.m. Our Theme?

“For Shame” Our Stories?

Antonya Nelson’s “Control Group” and Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson”

Why these?

We didn't know so much about Antonya Nelson, but we should have.   Nelson is a short story writer and novelist, and chair of creative writing at the University of Houston. , and has the laurels to prove it.  This story was brought to our attention by one of our assistant editors, who knew it from a classroom assignment while she was attending  Southern Connecticut State University.   “Control Group” nicely renders the confusions of childhood and the striving for acceptance—the ethical compromises we make for that acceptance—every child seeks. Like any tale of shame that involves children, it deftly illustrates the pains to which adults go—and the missteps they may make—in trying to break the young of the habits of a "flexible" morality that in the end only serves to break them in an adult world.

In “The Lesson,” by Toni Cade Bambara, one of our favorite writers, that breaking is vividly rendered in the protagonist’s tale of a visit to a toy store.  This story is told in the voice of a child whose own selfishness and cruelty have been clearly shaped by poverty and racism.  And, yet, Bambara is utterly merciless in her refusal to permit these twin demons to justify her protagonist's unexamined insolence.  The narrator’s creeping realization that there are possibilities of liberation beyond her “acting out” the stereotypes that circumstance has foisted upon her is what makes “The Lesson” a classic tale of the African-American experience.

Listen Here This Week: Isidoro Blaistein and John Cheever

The Listen Here! Short Story Reading Series rolls into its 7th week with readings at Bru Cafe, 141 Orange, Street, this Tuesday, April 20, at 7 p.m. Our Theme? “L’Etranger”

Our Stories? Isidoro Blaisten’s “Uncle Facundo” and John Cheever’s “The Swimmer”

Why these? Let’s start with a more important question.  Who the hell is Isidoro Blaisten?!  According to Wikipedia, not much.  Just look at the article on him. He was from Argentina.  He wrote stories, essays, novels, and poetry. We discovered him in a lovely little book by editor extraordinaire Alberto Manguel, who included Blaisten’s "Uncle Facundo" in his edited collection Dark Arrows: Chronicles of Revenge.  Strangely enough, most of the stories collected ended up weak candidates for Listen Here (although there is a whopper of a tale in William Trevor’s “Torridge”), but Blaisten’s stood out not only for its darkly comic sensibility but for its thematic depth (most revenge tales tend to be slim pickings in the deep statement department) and originality in literary style and narrative mode (think magic realism). If his other tales are as good as this, Blaisten deserves better in the United States.

John Cheever always speaks for himself.  Perhaps one of the best short story writers in American letters—his prose is crystalline, his pacing is excellent, his diction is aptly nuanced, and his tales are often refreshingly original and insightful.  "The Swimmer" is perhaps best known for the movie that came of it, with Burt Lancaster in the starring role and cameos by Kim Hunter and Joan Rivers!  Like “The Enormous Radio,” it stays well within in Cheever’s comfort zone as criticism of America classism and serves as a fitting nod to the encroachment of literary surrealism in American writing.