Seeing is Believing

Like Circa, the acrobatic-dance-theater troupe that visited last year’s Arts & Ideas Festival, Sequence 8 is all about defying the limitations we normally expect the human body to obey. Unlike Circa, Sequence 8, by Les 7 doigts de la main ("seven fingers on one hand")  is more purely entertaining, much less interpretive. Indeed, with Colin Davis acting as comic MC, the show winks at symbolic significance and the interpretive buzz of on-the-air commentary, as when Davis “interviews” Eric Bates, a wonder of dexterity and timing, about his “new book.” Davis has great audience rapport and adds to the show a nice flair for deflating pretensions. The skills on display are truly astounding and there are many visceral thrills at seeing what this talented and rigorously trained group are able to do. The show begins with acrobatic dancing on a bare stage and, though relatively tame in terms of daring, the expressive power of seeing spot-on tumbling and flying leaps in the midst of choreographed movement provides an immense charge. The show starts in a joyous manner and proceeds to inspire and amaze.

Each viewer will walk away with a different favorite sequence, I expect. But there’s no way not to be awed by Devin Henderson. Like some comic-book film super-hero, he seems able to fly, swoop, leap and land with no sense of strain or even of weight. Watch him ascend a pole as though he had reversed the pull of gravity. Watch him leap through hoops in a variety of approaches and configurations—it’s hard to explain why seeing this done so fluidly and effectively is so damn satisfying. One might like to give it a symbolic meaning beyond its sheer skill and bravado, and I suppose it amounts to seeing the will and the body so fully one in such a split second of impressive precision.

Or check out the astounding Alexandra Royer who gets the gasps going early in the show with her stunts on the Russian bar, leaping high, higher, flipping, turning and landing at the exact spot she started. Much later in the show, she works with a hoop and rope way above the stage, lit dramatically. Her work, and the beautifully choreographed trapeze work by Maxim Laurin—which involves interaction with the rest of the troupe as a sea of hands and bodies—are the more poetic moments in the show, but most routines have a kind of subtext that makes them more than stunts. A good example is Laurin and Ugo Dario using a teeter-totter to send each other catapulting high above the stage. To step back from the sheer brilliance of their skill is to see an image of, as they say, the cause-and-effect, give-and-take action and reaction of any kind of human interaction.

Then there’s Bates and his boxes. Or as he says, his routine is inside the box you’ve got to think outside of. Working with precise movements and exact timing, his dance with gravity takes the form of juggling a trio of boxes, making them seem alive rather than inert, yet finding them always exactly where he wants them to be. As with a magic trick, one would like to see his routine replayed in slow motion to “get” fully what he’s doing. In real time, we watch a melding of mind and matter that is enthralling.

As well, every stunt demonstrates the necessity of working together and the great benefits of finding a supportive group. At various times in the show I found myself musing on how such unusual talents would be wasted without the right setting. Davis refers to this aspect in his amusing opening monologue: without an audience there’s no show, and without a show what would we get from looking at an empty stage. Sequence 8 gives the audience plenty to see, and there’s an engaging sense that the troupe is watching us too, to see how we react and to gauge what impresses us most.

There’s one more show this afternoon. Go see it, and be prepared to be made giddy with the high spirits of the high-flying and talent-flaunting troupe that is Les  7 Doigts de la Main.

International Festival of Arts & Ideas presents

Sequence 8 Les 7 doigts de la main

Production and artistic direction: Shana Carroll, Isabelle Chassé, Patrick Léonard, Gypsy Snider, Sébastien Soldevilla, Samuel Tétreault

Direction: Shana Carroll & Sébastien Soldevilla

Cast: Eric Bates, Ugo Dario, Colin Davis, Devin Henderson, Alexander Royer, Maxim Laurin, Camille Legris, Tristan Nielsen

June 27 & 28 at 8pm June 29 at 2pm Shubert Theater

Of Thee I Sing: Laurie Colwin, Geraldine Coleshares, and 20 Feet from Stardom

Forgive me, dear readers, for returning once again to Laurie Colwin. But it's unavoidable right now. A couple of weeks ago I became aware of a movie, a documentary, about rock and roll backup singers. It's titled "20 Feet from Stardom," and there was a review of it in the New York Times that knocked my socks off. I read the review almost without breathing and kept waiting for the article to refer to Laurie Colwin's Goodbye Without Leaving, which is probably the best novel ever written about rock and roll backup singers (not that I can name another one). But no such reference ever appeared. I thought, "Well, that is an oversight."

The movie focuses on singers like Merry Clayton and Darlene Love -- voices you know, even if you don't know that you know them -- and it does seem to be the case, as Colwin's character Geraldine says, that not everybody in rock and roll wants to be a star. One of the stars of the movie, Lisa Fischer, was interviewed and the Times quotes her as saying:

“I reject the notion that the job you excel at is somehow not enough to aspire to, that there has to be something more,” Ms. Fischer explained, speaking with her eyes closed, as she tends to do. “I love supporting other artists.”

She continued: “I guess it came down to not letting other people decide what was right for me. Everyone’s needs are unique. My happy is different from your happy.”

The upshot: Ms. Fischer has paradoxically emerged as a star partly because of her decision not to seek stardom." http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/movies/the-voice-behind-mick-and-others.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Colwin's reluctant heroine, Geraldine Coleshares, seems to be cut from the same cloth. In a scene where an old rock and roll scenester, Spider Joe, interviews Geraldine, seeking awesome stories about the good old days, and how climbing the ladder to stardom was the best thing ever, Geraldine disappoints Spider Joe:

"...The fact was, I loved to sing, but it was my heart's desire to be a backup, not a singer. I said this to Spider Joe.

"You lie, babe. Everybody wanted to be a star." "Actually, everybody did not want to be a star." " (Goodbye Without Leaving, p. 137.)

Spider Joe tells Geraldine she's a drag and leaves, off to find someone more fun to interview.

20 Feet from Stardom is playing at the Criterion downtown right now. I know it's unlikely that there will be an act of God to allow me to go see it in a theater, but I wish I could. I will settle for watching it at home some day, some day soon. I wish that Laurie Colwin were around to see it, though; I bet she'd've gotten a real kick out of it. I know I will, when I finally get to watch... and listen....

UPDATED, June 30: Having written this piece I decided it would be a huge mistake to wait to watch the movie at home, because I'd never be able to hear the voices properly. So I did some juggling and made it to a Saturday matinee screening. This movie is WAY worth seeing. It will be at the Criterion at least through this coming Thursday, and I urge anyone who has even a fleeting interest in seeing the flick to go see it in a theatre and not wait to watch it at home, no matter how good your "home theater" is, I don't want to hear about it. If I could, I would arrange for a private screening for all former staffers at Cutler's Records.

A Bike of One's Own

Freewheelers, the new production by A Broken Umbrella Theatre featured in the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, takes place in a renovated space at 300 State Street, a large room entered, via a subterranean passageway—and a grand old elevator—from Chapel Street, where Horowitz Brothers once stood. The work done simply to make the space available was considerable and the little trip to the playing space lets one reflect on the layers of history that ABUT projects tend to excavate. Since 2009, the diverse troupe has embraced the past of New Haven as inspiration for shows that create a sense of community while making entertaining use of facts about our city. The current show is not quite so grand as the Library Project last fall, but what it lacks in range it makes up for in focused story. The story of Anne (Lisa Daly), a factory worker with a yen to cycle on the exciting new invention the bicycle (patented in New Haven in 1866), is paralleled with the story of Elizabeth (Robin Levine), wife of Isaac the factory owner, who has some health issues that cause her to faint at times. What does the modern doctor (Lou Mangini) prescribe, to the consternation of conservative Isaac? Why, cycling! It does wonders for the constitution, of course, but…

But this is the 1800s and women mustn’t do anything unseemly—especially not in public! To make matters worse that factory Isaac runs happens to be rather new-fangled itself: it’s the first factory to manufacture woman’s most necessary accessory—the corset! Mr. Isaac Adler (played with measured if questionable authority by Ian Alderman) isn’t likely to embrace the idea of his wife cycling, nor is he amused when Anne shows up for work in male attire, the only way to cycle comfortably, you see. . .

As you might expect, the women may have to come to an understanding. Along the way, there are lovely songs to set the mood, factory routine that smacks of Metropolis, Levine’s dance routine with a chair—we all know Flashdance, sure, but here the pas de deux with a Chippendale actually serves a thematic purpose and is quite expressive—and some verbal fun via overlap when Isaac and Bigelow, his 2nd in Command (Mangini), plot how to make “boning” more flexible (no jokes, please, this is a kid-friendly production) while the women get flexible on their wheels. The men are referring, of course, to whalebone, the stiffening ingredient in the torso-confining strait jacket known as the corset.

As Anne, Daly is fresh-faced and earnest—not subversive, just common-sensical. As the more “vaporish” Elizabeth, Levine has the right waxen look for a wife being discussed in the third person by her husband and her doctor, and her reaction to Anne’s response to her inadvertent humor gets a big laugh. As Amelia, one of the children employable at a factory in this benighted time, Remsen Welsh is charmingly wise beyond her years. Mangini is deferential as the doctor, dedicated as Bigelow, and slightly conflicted as the bicycle store owner selling to a young woman a tool in her liberation. As the factory workers, Megan Black, Cynthia Miller, and Malenky Welsh do simulated sewing in synch and let their tongues wag with the resentment of exploited labor. Adler’s got a lot of headaches ahead of him…maybe there’s the possibility of a sequel as we follow the course of the corset from its heyday through its decline and onto the pages of Victoria’s Secrets.

Freewheelers, with its effective score and songs by Chrissy Gardner, does a fine job of combining the troupe’s historical interests with a contemporary vibe to arrive at a little machine as efficient as a well-oiled bike.

International Festival of Arts & Ideas presents

Freewheelers Conceived and created by A Broken Umbrella Theatre

Story Development Team: Rachel Alderman, Ian Alderman, Dana Astmann, Jacy Barber, Lisa Daly, Brandon Fuller, Chrissy Gardner, Robin Levine, Jes Mack, Lou Mangini, Michelle Ortiz, Ruben Ortiz, Jason Wells

Director & Playwright: Rachel Alderman; Composer, Lyricist, Musical Director: Chrissy Gardner; Movement Director: Robin Levine; Set Designer: Brandon Fuller; Costume Designer: Jacy Barber; Lighting Designer: Trui Malten; Sound Designer: Dave Baker; Production Manager: Janie Alexander; Stage Manager: Katrina Lewonczyk

June 15, 16, 22, 23, 29 at 3pm June 16, 23 at 7pm June 15, 19, 22, 26, 29 at 8pm

No Exit

The idea that the story of a take-out Chinese delivery man trapped in an elevator in Brooklyn for 81 hours could be the basis of a play may not seem too big a stretch, but the basis of a quasi-operatic musical? Stuck Elevator—music by Byron Au Yong, libretto by Aaron Jafferis, directed by Chay Yew—is an inventive, amusing, affecting, and thoughtful show that takes us into a slice of life few of us may have first-hand knowledge of, but that anyone can enter imaginatively. Certainly, anyone would be interested in how someone would cope with such a situation, but what Stuck Elevator dramatizes is the entire context that would keep a man from summoning emergency help from the authorities, and that context, of course, is immigration issues in the U.S. Guang (Julius Ahn) speaks little English and is an illegal alien and knows that a police rescue would involve a pro forma request for an ID he doesn’t have.

Once we know that, we find there’s much more to learn—about his wife Míng (Marie-France Arcilla) and son, Wáng Yuè (Raymond Lee) back home, about his exploitative boss’s wife, about the chiding of his co-worker Marco (Joel Perez), about his fears—including the threat of pissing his pants after hours become days with no rescue—and even an elaborate fantasy involving a Pro Wrestling confrontation between Guang as Delivery Man vs. Elevator Monster (Francis Jue). And all this is presented in musical numbers that let us enter easily into the spirit of Guang’s trials and show us, in quick strokes, the characters who people his world.

The musical settings are many and varied and nothing stays too long to wear out its welcome. There are Guang’s melancholic “is this the end?” ruminations, charming turns from his family, fast-speed raps from Marco (very entertaining), and a host of threatening characters, including a mugger, guards, an agent of Homeland Security, and Snakehead (Lee), to whom Guang owes money. Jafferis’ libretto ranges through a battery of injuries added to the insult of being trapped in an elevator while also being trapped in the “no exit” space of an illegal alien. It’s to the show’s credit that its themes all arise naturally as the fever dreams of a man trapped with no means of communication with the outside world—Guang sold his cellphone to Marco. Feelings of guilt and shame surface as Guang finds he has no means to help himself and no one else he can turn to.

While it may sound like a somewhat polemical play, Chay Yew’s direction accentuates entertainment and the show’s actors/singers are all skilled with a comic touch—particularly Perez and Jue, whose parts in the ensemble tend toward comic relief. To Ahn, Arcilla and Lee fall the more affecting scenes, including the latter’s role of a nephew who died en route to America, smuggled in a cargo hold, and one of the more lifelike aspects of the play is the variety of turns Arcilla undergoes as Guang’s wife, a figure loved, feared, pitied and pined for.

At the heart of it all is Ahn’s Guang as a man able to burst into song about orange beef, hot sauce, and every aspect of his stranded anxieties, in a rich tenor. He is depicted as a man of resources, but simple in spirit, driven by the need to make money as quickly as possible for the sake of his family.

Stuck Elevator boasts a stripped-down, elegant set and lighting, and colorful and engaging costumes. It’s ready to go on tour (this is its second staging after a premiere in San Francisco) and it would be interesting to see how the show plays in parts of the country remote from big cities like NYC and SF, where the kind of subcultural associations that are simply givens of the situation might be a little opaque. And of course the show should be seen across the country as the question of immigrant rights and struggles are part of the social fabric at present. The show does a service in dramatizing a true story in terms that ring true as a look at the cartoon that is our contemporary, multicultural world.

International Festival of Arts & Ideas presents

Stuck Elevator Presented in association with Long Wharf Theatre

Music: Byron Au Yong Libretto: Aaron Jafferis Director: Chay Yew

Cast: Julius Ahn, Marie-France Arcilla, Francis Jue, Raymond Lee, Joel Perez

Musicians: Byron Au Yong, piano; Lee Caron, percussion; Shenghua Hu, violin; Frederick Alden Terry, cello

Daniel Ostling, Scenic Designer; Mikhail Fiksel, Sound Designer; Myung Hee Cho, Costume Designer; Frederick Alden Terry, Music Director; Ted Boyce-Smith, Associate Lighting Designer; Alexandra Friedman, Associate Scenic Designer; Naya Chang, Assistant Director; Philip Rudy, Production Stage Manager; Victoria Nidweski, Assistant Stage Manager

Producers: ArKtype / Thomas O. Kriegsmann Associate Producer: Alexandra Rosenberg

June 20-22, 25-29, 8pm June 22-23, 26, 29, 2pm Long Wharf Theatre, Stage II

Perchance to Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play that rarely works its magic on me. It’s hard not to find the lovers insipid, the gods arbitrary and vain, and the mechanicals—Bottom, Quince, and the rest—grossly condescended to. Any production that disabuses me of these views is all to the good. The best way is to make the lovers actually funny, but that rarely happens. And as for the humor of the mechanicals-as-thespians, well . . . can it ever be too broad? The production by the Bristol Old Vic, in association with Handspring Puppet Company, brought to New Haven as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas has the distinction of creating a workshop atmosphere in which the mechanicals dominate. Before the play even begins, Titania (Saskia Portway) stands on stage hammering away.  The stage set (Fred Stacey, Andy Scrivens, Cliff Thorne) has great openness but also a dusty backstage feel that suits the production. We feel like we’re in the props room of a modern version of Athenian drama and that adds dimension to the play-within-a-play of Piramus and Thisbe that Quince (Colin Michael Carmichael) and company put on.

That aspect of the play—a farcical performance that nearly gets out of control—is quite inventive, with “Moonshine” (Jon Trenchard) perched on a ladder with a lit candle on his hat, and “Wall” (David Emmings) careening about the stage due to the top-heavy bricks affixed to his.

The intention of the Old Vic/Handspring production is to make puppetry intrinsic to the vision of the play. At times, this makes for striking effects—as when wood planks become musical instruments or a living forest or a walkway in space—and adds to liveliness when Quince starts handing out roles for the mechanicals’ play and Bottom (Miltos Yerolemou) disports with a large wooden beam, moving it about with a fluidity that is almost a special effect. And when he is “translated” into an ass, well…no spoilers from me, but it must be seen to be believed and, once seen, will always be remembered. Suffice to say he helms an amazing device that is both funny and grotesque.

Other puppetry moments produce more confusion than wonder. Why are the lovers puppets at times and at other times not? If that’s a too literal question, so be it. The program invites the audience to “suspend their disbelief”—something we do anyway when faced with a play featuring gods, Athenians, fairies, and nincompoops putting on a play, but when we also have to allow for puppets gripped like mini-me’s to this or that pining lover, it’s not so much a question of disbelief as of the meaning of the staging.

Such moments don’t intrude too much, and it’s easier to experience the enlivening aspect of puppetry when we see the fairies as an interesting collection of toys, found objects and moveable parts. Or when the gods disport giant heads and that fascinating big hand Oberon (David Ricardo Pearce) wields.

Among the lovers, Alex Felton as Lysander is the most amusing in his drastic change from adoring Hermia (Akiya Henry) to adoring Helena (Naomi Cranston), though Henry gets to bristle and make the most of her smaller stature (called for in the play) in lively physical comedy. Cranston’s Helena adopts the breathless delivery that is often the preferred manner of Brits doing the Bard. I would’ve appreciated more diction, less effusion in her speech to Hermia about their girlhood.

The best actor in the show is Yerolemou, who, besides hamming broadly as Bottom ("ham" and "bottom" being the key terms here), also gives greatly appreciated clarity to Egeus, Hermia’s fuming father. The disruption between Oberon and Titania (Saskia Portway) never felt particularly dramatic, but the interaction between the same two actors as Theseus and Hippolyta had much more feeling to recommend it.

The best aspect of the show are the visuals—set, lighting (Philip Gladwell) and the attention to movement (Andrew Dawson, Movement Director)—as well as the fascinating puppetry that could use a little tweaking to blend more seamlessly with Shakespeare’s somewhat hodgepodge play.

International Festival of Arts & Ideas presents

William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream A Bristol Old Vic production In associations with Handspring Puppet Company

Directed by Tom Morris Puppet Design, Fabrication, and Direction: Handspring Pupptet Company

Vicki Mortimer: Designer; Philip Gladwell: Lighting Designer; Dave Price: Composer; Christopher Shutt: Sound Designer; Andrew Dawson: Movement Director; Laurel Swift: Choreographer; James Bonas: Associate Director; Molly Einchcomb: Associate Designer; Katerina Hicken: Costume Supervisor; Joseph Wallace: Puppetry Associate

Performers; Saikat Ahamed, Colin Michael Carmichael, Naomi Cranston, David Emmings, Alex Felton, Fionn Gill, Akiya Henry, Kyle Lima, Saskia Portway, David Ricardo Pearce, Jon Trenchard, Miltos Yerolemou

June 15 & 18-22 at 8pm June 15, 16, 19, 22 & 23 at 2pm University Theatre Yale University

A New Theatrical Group Debuts

Ever wonder what students in the Yale School of Drama do in the off-season? One answer is: form new theatrical groups. One such new group, Old Sound Room, was recently formed by two current students, Elia Monte-Brown and Dan O’Brien. The troupe consists of 3 other current students and 7 recent YSD grads. OSR’s inaugural production, Old Sound Room Lear begins this weekend, June 14th, and will run till the 23rd.

According to Adina Verson, a co-founder and a performer in the first show, the idea for OSR grew out of the interest in keeping YSD collaborations going after graduation. Verson also mentioned that some of the recent grads had wanted to work with some of their underclassmen and hadn't had many opportunities during their time at YSD. The creativity and talent of the group is assured, but how did the first production idea come about?

For various reasons, the idea of basing the show on Shakespeare was in the cards from early on, but the approach developed through themes the group wanted to explore, particularly inter-generational obligations of seniors to juniors, and vice versa, in our society. Shakespeare’s King Lear, of course, dramatizes the chaos that ensues when a king retires too soon, little suspecting how irrelevant a man becomes once stripped of his former title and duties. His daughters, who have little sympathy for his plight, take on the burden of reigning while also having to care for Lear in his erratic fancies. Verson and her colleagues sought out tenants of retirement homes who would share their views of the aging process and the challenges faced by those who have, like Lear, given up their occupations and duties in retirement. Fortunately, OSR gained the cooperation of the Lillian Booth Assisted Living Facility, which meant that the interviews were conducted with retired actors, from ages 75 to 90.

For Verson and her colleagues, the issue of “responsibility across generations” guided their discussions, trying to assess the younger generation’s obligation to the elder, and the elder’s duties toward the younger, as all families find themselves dealing with the aging of a generation that is long-lived and, as Baby Boomers, never were ones to give up their youth easily. The material from the interviews is scattered throughout the show, along with dance and expressive movement and musical interludes, to highlight the themes of Lear for our current times. The show should be “both a conversation and a confrontation with the separate worlds” that different generations tend to inhabit. By reaching out to retired or semi-retired actors, OSR pondered their own futures as well as the past of persons like themselves, still living in the light of the work they did, still dreaming of roles they would love to play.

Verson says that an impetus behind the innovative approach to the text was the tendency, as YSD students, to rework classics in a more contemporary theatrical idiom, coupled with the challenge of a young troupe—most of them under thirty—taking on the great canonical play of elderly tragedy. Another criteria for the production is that all members have an equal say in the performance, and, though three of the twelve-member group are unavailable to participate in the inaugural production, the show was arrived at democratically.

Michael McQuilken, the only member of the troupe trained as a director at YSD—his original play Jib, featuring his own songs and score, was his thesis show in 2011—directs OSR Lear, but, according to Verson, the role of Artistic Director means, for McQuilken, that he be an “enabler of all voices” in the group, making sure that all are represented in the final work.

Those who have followed YSD shows of the last few years—including work at the Yale Cabaret—will be familiar with most of the troupe already. Brian Wiles, William DeMerritt, Fisher Neal, and Adina Verson all acted in Louisa Proske’s thesis production of Cymbeline in 2010; Ashton Heyl, Dan O'Brien, Sophie von Haselberg, and Carmen Zilles performed in Ethan Heard’s thesis production of Sunday in the Park with George last fall, and O’Brien and Zilles played the title roles in Romeo and Juliet in the spring; Laura Gragtmans played Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra in 2012, and Elia Monte-Brown acted in Richard II this past spring; Neal, Verson and DeMerritt were also featured in Lileana Blain-Cruz’s thesis production of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights in 2010.

For OSR, this show is only the beginning.  The group raised over $24,000 through Kickstarter to fund a living wage for the actors during the show's run, which will be performed in a donated space.  Future options may include finding a permanent home such as the Yale Cabaret enjoys, or to work within site-specific spaces for different productions.  While the next production is uncertain, what is certain is that OSR Lear promises to be a thoughtful and skillful performance of particular interest to fans of YSD shows.

Old Sound Room Lear June 14th- 23rd, 2013: 14th & 15th @ 8pm 16th @ 2pm & 8pm 20th and 21st @ 8pm 22nd at 2pm & 8pm 23rd @ 2pm

General Seating: $18 Under 30/Over 65: $10

HUB Studios 165 Lenox Ave, btwn 118th and 119th 2/3 train to 116th

www.oldsoundroom.com

Summer of Giants

Voted Best Community Theater in the 2013 “Best of” at the New Haven Advocate, the Yale Cabaret offers compelling theater in a very intimate space. During the summer months, the frenetic pace of the Cab’s three-night stands slows a bit, as the Yale Summer Cabaret takes over the space.  For the last few years, the Summer Cab has offered three plays over two months. In the last two years, the offerings have been presented in repertory style, with overlapping runs. For 2013, Artistic Director Dustin Wills has changed that, going back to earlier versions of the Summer Cabaret, which was founded in 1974. As a student in Austin, Wills worked with Fran Dorn who, he later discovered, was one of the founders of the Summer Cab. When he spoke to her about it, he learned that the initial Summer Cab offered 17 shows in a single summer. (Incidentally, a few of those plays were written by the likes of Wendy Wasserstein and Christopher Durang, students at the time.)

Wills wants the hallmark of this year’s Summer Cab to be “ambition and variety.” The initial ambition of six shows was trimmed to five but, as Wills says, these are “real plays.” Great authors providing great theater—“big plays in a tiny space.” The shows will be offered successively, which means audiences have two weeks to see each play—at 8 p.m. shows only, no matinees or late shows—before it gives way to the next.

With a troupe of eight core actors, plus two guest actors, chosen from 32 auditions, Wills has the basis for what he sees as a “standing circus”—the communal life of ensemble acting, with actors “eating, breathing theater.” Wills, a directing student entering his third year in the Drama School, will direct three of the shows, and Associate Artistic Director Chris Bannow, a third year acting student recently seen as Osric in the Rep’s Hamlet, with Paul Giamatti, will direct two. The cast consists of Celeste Arias (*15), Mamoudou Athie (*14), Ato Blankson-Wood (*15), Prema Cruz (*14), Ceci Fernandez (*14), Ashton Heyl (*14), Gabe Levey (*14), Michelle McGregor (*14), Mickey Theis (*14), Mitchell Winter (*14).

Wills and company have selected the plays carefully for their “Summer of Giants.” The plays represent a variety of eras, places, and countries of origin. Conceived as a “journey in time,” the roster of plays reads like a syllabus for a mini-survey of theater. The program begins in 17th-century France, moves to 19th-century Sweden, then to Spanish folktales turned into a comedy first published in 1930, then to an American play from 1969, set in Tokyo, Japan, and finally to two British one acts from 1987 and 2006, respectively.

Opening with Tartuffe, one of the greatest plays by the French master Molière, lives up to the “Giants” title. Wills directs a play that he says offers “a collision of comedy and severity.” Spoken in rhyming couplets but with modern touches—such as a vacuum cleaner—the Cab staging explores the excess of the period as setting for its theme of love vs. hypocrisy, and of youth vs. deluded elders—themes as relevant to our day of puffed-up charlatans in high places as to the highly mannered era of Louis XIV. With the full troupe. May 30 through June 15.

The second play of the summer is a pas de deux of power. Chris Bannow directs August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, a psychological study of passions, a clash between the sexes set amidst class distinctions. Sweden, a bit ahead of the curve in developing some of the freedoms we now take for granted, is the setting for this confrontation with the abyss of identity that can open when the old order is questioned by turn-of-the-century youngsters at the height of the summer festival. Featuring Ceci Fernandez, Mitchell Winter, and Celeste Arias. June 20 through June 29.

Spanish poet and dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca is not best-known for comedies, but Wills sees the hilarious farce The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife as an opportunity for the Summer Cab to lighten up a bit after the heaviness of Strindberg. It’s also a chance to engage with puppetry and the “expressivity of theater,” as a traveling puppeteer visits a town where the local shoemaker has abandoned his teen-aged, unsatisfied wife. Using song, poems, and folk tales, Lorca creates a timeless tale of the struggle of marriage and the vibrancy of small-town life. Wills directs Prema Cruz, Gabe Levey, Ato Blankson-Wood, Mickey Theis, Mamoudou Athie, Michelle McGregor, Ceci Fernandez, and Chris Bannow. July 11 through July 20.

Tennessee Williams is best-known for his explorations of Southern manners in his plays of the Forties and Fifties (such as A Streetcar Named Desire, which will kick-off the Yale Rep season in the fall). In his 1969 play In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, Williams takes on the trends of modern art—notably expressionism, in the role of Mark, an expat in Japan who is trying to discover new inspiration for his painting. Meanwhile his bored wife is getting predatory with the Japanese barman. Wills sees the play, with its artist figure destroying himself, as autobiographical for Williams. And with its setting of Americans in Japan, the play works within the post-war relations of the formerly adversarial nations. Bannow directs Celeste Arias, Mickey Theis, Mamoudou Athie, and Mitchell Winter. July 25 through August 3.

Caryl Churchill is one of the undisputed masters of the last thirty years of theater and her two short plays, Heart’s Desire and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You combine to showcase what Wills calls “the absolute breakdown of language.” That includes the polite language of everyday speech, as a mother and father, in Heart’s Desire, await the return of their daughter, only to find, as the play repeats and restarts, that anxieties can surface in different ways; and in Drunk, the dialogue of two men becomes a reflection on the tensions between England and the U.S. in a play that dates from the era of Tony Blair and "W." Wills directs Chris Bannow, Ceci Fernandez, Michelle McGregor, Mamoudou Athie, Prema Cruz, Mitchell Winter, Ato Blankson-Wood and Celeste Arias in Heart’s Desire, and Ato Blankson-Wood and Mitchell Winter in Drunk. August 8 through August 18.

Such demanding and challenging plays might require some “down time,” and so the Summer Cab will also host Friday Late Nights. With free admission from 10:30 p.m. to 2 a.m., the Cab’s bar will remain open and special late night events will be taking place—such as dance parties, karaoke, Tom Waits imitators, and a Boy Band sing-along. Which means the Cab, in addition to bringing us great plays by great authors with a young and adventuresome cast and artistic staff, will also be poised to be one of the best late-night hang-outs Fridays during the dog days.

See you at the Cab!

The Yale Summer Cab presents Summer of Giants Dustin Wills, Artistic Director Chris Bannow, Associate Artistic Director Molly Henninghausen, Managing Director Anh Le, Associate Managing Director

May 30 through August 18, 2013

for more information, schedules, and tickets/season passes:

www.summercabaret.org

Clybourne Park This Week

When Bruce Norris’ Tony-winning Best Play of 2012 Clybourne Park begins its run at the Long Wharf Theatre this week, the play’s relation to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun won’t only be a matter of the script. LeRoy McClain, who plays the part of Albert in Part One, set in 1959, and the part of Kevin in Part Two, set in 2009, joined the production immediately after playing Walter Lee Younger, the lead character in Hansberry’s beloved play. In Raisin, Walter Lee manages to all but destroy his family’s effort to buy a house in Clybourne Park, a formerly all-white neighborhood in Chicago. Clybourne Park begins with a couple, Bev and Russ, who are trying to sell their home, only to learn that a black family, who turn out to be the Youngers, has made an offer.

McClain, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, was last seen on-stage locally as Boy Willie in the Yale Repertory Theatre production of The Piano Lesson in 2011. There he was quite likeable as the feckless charmer who wants to sell the family’s heirloom piano. McClain thus has background with roles that focus attention on the weight of the past and on the hopes for the future in African-American experience. A focus Norris’ play very much participates in, giving McClain the opportunity to move from the passion of Walter Lee, whose every feeling is made manifest, to roles in Clybourne Park more detached, though very much centered on the same themes.

In Part One of Clybourne Park, McClain plays the relatively minor, though important role, of Albert, husband of Francine, housekeeper for Bev and Russ. Albert’s presence, as McClain points out, is telling for what Norris does in the play: letting us experience the outlook of 1959 on such things as racial and marital relations before jumping much closer to the present. Albert acts a certain role around white people, and the audience can tell, from his reactions, his discomfort with such social facades. McClain notes that, as an actor, no matter how restrictive the part of Albert might seem, he knows he “gets to have his say” in Part Two.

In Raisin, a man named Karl Lindner, a representative of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association, tries to dissuade the Youngers from moving into the neighborhood. In Norris’ play, in 1959, Lindner is a neighbor of Bev and Russ, and he tries to dissuade them from selling. In 2009, the lawyer handling the effort by a white couple to buy a home in the black neighborhood that Clybourne Park has become is Lindner’s daughter. As Kevin, McClain plays the current representative of the CPIA who argues housing codes with a white couple trying to buy a house in Clybourne Park.

One aspect of Clybourne Park that McClain was very aware of, coming to the production fresh from Raisin, is Norris’ ability to give the audience the “earnest realism” of Hansberry’s characters, as we know them in 1959, without treating them to outright parody. Norris lets us inhabit the period, which is important for the contrast with Part Two, which McClain likens to the terse, overlapping dialogue of someone like David Mamet. The difference in pacing between Part One and Part Two, McClain says, “is like using a different set of muscles. As an actor, you get a thorough workout.”

The play, with its treatment of racial issues in both mid-twentieth century and early twenty-first, offers something of a workout for the audience too, and McClain feels the show is an excellent choice for New Haven, where neighborhoods tend not to be integrated even now. The play, in looking at the changed status of Clybourne Park shows that, while the owners may change, the fact of segregated neighborhoods remains. It’s important to the success of the production, McClain feels, that the audience “be aware of a certain irony” present in both parts of the play. McClain is very impressed with director Eric Ting’s ability to capture such nuances, in fact Ting’s participation was a determining factor in McClain taking the role, as he very much wanted to work with Long Wharf’s Associate Artistic Director.

When I spoke to McClain the cast had been in rehearsals for about three weeks and he spoke of the sense of “absolute collaboration” that was present from the start. The cast “all click and get along, hanging out together at Sullivan’s, spending time together, which is not an everyday thing with actors.” The camaraderie of the ensemble is crucial, McClain says, because of the subtlety of the play and because the actors who dominate Part One are different from the actors who dominate Part Two. The different styles and the different setting make for transformations that everyone must be comfortable with.

In early rehearsals, Ting and his cast would vary the order, sometimes rehearsing Part Two before Part One. The two parts of the play speak different languages, and the cast, McClain feels, are very much alive to the uncomfortable humor of Part One and the more direct verbal humor in Part Two. McClain thinks of the play as a “dramedy”—presenting “prickly themes” in a manner that is “subversive, funny, and passionate.”

Previews of Clybourne Park begin on May 8; Opening Night is May 15.

Clybourne Park By Bruce Norris Directed by Eric Ting

The Long Wharf Theatre May 8-June 2, 2013

Upcoming Carlotta Festival

Every year the graduating playwrights of the Yale School of Drama each have a final play produced, much as the graduating directors offer their thesis shows throughout the year.  For the playwrights, the occasion is called the Carlotta Festival of New Plays and it runs for two weeks in May, beginning a week from today.  Each play is directed by a graduating director and features, for the most part, first year acting students.

This year the line-up consists of Amelia Roper’s Lottie in the Late Afternoon, directed by Ethan Heard; Justin Taylor’s House Beast, directed by Jack Tamburri; MJ Kaufman’s Sagittarius Ponderosa, directed by Margot Bordelon.

Amelia Roper, a playwright from Australia, says she likes fiction of the modernist era and has devised a comedy that harkens to the comedies of manners of that period.  In Lottie in the Late Afternoon, the laughs derive from Lottie’s effort to create an ideal vacation for herself and her friends—a plan that goes awry, leading to tense and awkward situations that viewers may find hitting close to home.  In particular, Lottie is a play concentrating on a certain demographic now reaching their late thirties and coming to terms with the status of their relationships, their ambitions, and their pasts.

Taking place in the present during a weekend in the off season at a New England beach house, Roper’s play lets us into the intimate dynamics among a couple—Lottie and her husband Aaron—and two of Lottie’s best friends: Anne (married, but with a husband who chose not to come away for the weekend), and Clara, who has some history with Anne.  Roper says that in some ways the play is “all about the meals,” as the foursome have to sort out the usual tasks and tastes that make for a successful ménage—in the face of the kind of economic instabilities that may well be a defining context for this generation.  Add to that the fact that Lottie has packed a stack of books by the likes of E. M. Forster, Jane Bowles, and Iris Murdoch that purport to be vacation tales, but which help to cast over the proceedings a kind of nostalgia for a past that none of these characters has experienced, though they might like to wish they had.

Roper looks to plays by Will Eno, Sarah Ruhl, and Martin Crimp for inspiration, and sees in comedies such as hers a risk in registering “existential angst” as an aspect of otherwise vital friendships.  The drama in such situations is not found in major conflict, but in the characters’ struggles to get across feelings and insights amidst the disappointments of not connecting.  In other words, the play is as real as your next small social gathering—and maybe as desperate—but bound to be funnier.

Justin Taylor describes his play House Beast as a “comedy when trauma is possible.”  Fair enough, given that the play opens with a prologue set in 1992, during the early teens of two of the three characters—Chris and Matt—as they try to make a DIY horror film in an abandoned house in a fictional Californian suburb called Pleasant Valley.  Unexpectedly on the scene as well is Matt’s older brother Terry, as a wild afternoon ensues involving some creepy occurrences, a flying goat—and something dramatic between Terry and Chris that ends badly.

Skip ahead twenty years and we find Matt and Chris hooking up—or almost—via the “grinder app” that helps gays get together.  In the interim, Matt has moved to LA to be a Hollywood type (or so he hopes), Chris has led a peripatetic life with Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms, and Terry, a married man with two daughters, is a well-liked firefighter with a closeted secret life.  House Beast looks at how past shame and trauma can haunt the present. We enter the dynamics of a triangle where the two possible love objects for Chris are brothers—and he has baggage with both.  The characters are amusing—with the two brothers playing to type and Chris something of a grandiose progressive idealist—though things can get ugly.

Taylor cites Caryl Churchill as a master of the dark comedy he aims for, and says the romantic aspects of the play engage with the timely question of whether happiness is sustainable.  His characters would all like to find a means to change the outcome of their pasts together.  Taylor gives the characters enough room in which to grow and enough rope with which to hang themselves.      

For MJ Kaufman in Sagittarius Ponderosa, the only thing that’s really sustainable is what he calls “the landscape of constant change.”  Set in central Oregon, Kaufman’s native state, in a landscape dominated by Ponderosa pines, the play depicts three generations of a family coming to grips with various kinds of transformation in the dark time of the year ruled by Sagittarius—late November.

For Archer, there are the changes that come with turning thirty on top of a gender transformation his family hasn’t quite accepted; for Archer’s dad, hitting sixty and terminally ill from diabetes, there’s that most permanent of transformations—from life into death; and for Archer’s grandmother, in her 80s, there is the possibility of a late-in-life love, though it’s Archer (Angela, to her) she’s trying to make a match for.  Landscape in the play is not only emotional and familial, it also partakes of the concerns of Oregon where research into controlled burning, as a technique of combating forest fires, brings a researcher named Owen into the family circle and gives resonance to the play’s location.

The play travels a year from Thanksgiving to Thanksgiving, allowing us to see change and development in the characters over time.  The naturalism of the play accommodates devices such as a love potion Grandmother wields, and a ghostly visitation from Archer’s late father as he merges with Peterson, a neighbor in the form of a puppet.  Kaufman’s play began as an assignment from Sarah Ruhl that encouraged him to work with Ovidian metamorphosis.  The work has allowed Kaufman to engage with the kind of archetypal naturalism found in Thornton Wilder, a favorite playwright of his, handling major themes of love and death and identity with a light touch.

Each playwright feels blessed by the director each is working with.  For Roper, Ethan Heard’s sensitivity to characters is perfect for her comedy of relationships; Taylor finds Jack Tamburri’s gutsy energy particularly helpful in creating the exaggerated memory of adolescence the prologue aims for; and Kaufman was inspired by the personal urgency and great visual sense Margot Bordelon has brought to the staging of his play.  All three pairings seem matches made in heaven and we can expect a trio of brave, thoughtful and entertaining plays at this year’s Carlotta Festival.

The Carlotta Festival of New Plays

The Yale School of Drama

May 6-14, 2013

1156 Chapel Street, New Haven

Poetry. Performance. Party.

Mario Biagini is a man who believes in the power of the word—spoken, recited, sung.  As a performer and director he has brought together 9 performers—musicians, singers, actors—to travel to Yale and New Haven as part of Interdisciplinary Performance Studies at Yale (IPSY).  Biagini’s group, originating in the Open Program of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, pride themselves on a collective approach to performance that aims to include its audience, creating an environment that feels like “a holiday, a relaxation” of our routine responses.

While in New Haven, the troupe will perform a show called Electric Party Songs, twice at Yale’s Calhoun College, Feb. 22 and 23, and, in a more extended version, at BAR, March 3—the latter show is billed as “an experiment in the potentialities of a party as an art form.”  If your winter has been as low on energy as mine, you too might find yourself intrigued by that idea.

The troupe will also perform I Am America at the Whitney Theater in the Whitney Humanities Center, with a set built by children at the Eli Whitney Museum, Feb. 28 and March 1, and will hold a symposium on Poetry as a Practice of Encounter, also at the WHC, on March 2.

The Open Program likes to include the contribution of locals in their shows, using materials found in the streets of the different cities they visit, and at times, as in Italy, have set out to create self-generated festivals in the streets.  Traveling about New Haven by bus, Biagini noted the racial segregation of New Haven where almost all bus riders are black and almost all students at Yale are white.  He told his collaborators: “we should do our show right here on the bus.”  Instead, he does his best to engage people wherever he finds them, offering a kind of contact high from his joy in performance.

The performances consist of an unusual mix: selections from the poems of Allen Ginsberg—the late Beat Guru, Bop Buddist, Singalong Shaman and Clown Prince of Poetry—are turned into songs and are then intermixed with African American spirituals, shouts, and worksongs.  The mix is thoroughly American, as Ginsberg is perhaps the poet of the last 60 years most concerned with trying to live up to “America” in a Whitmanian sense.  Whether or not he succeeded, Ginsberg was astute at assessing the kinds of mash-ups that drive our national psyche.  He was into jazz, rock, folk, blues, as well as dipping into most religions, particularly Judaism via his upbringing and Buddhism via his own searches into mysticism.  He also participated readily in the cults of personality that float so many boats in the media, and could make pop culture read like holy texts.

Some of the best moments in Electric Party Songs come from the performers’ grasp of the essential showmanship at the heart of Ginsberg’s poetry (Lloyd Bricken, looking a bit Waits-like, is particularly effective in his delivery).  Ginsberg’s work is about exposure—of the highest self, of the lowest urges, of the deepest shame and the most inspiring ecstasies.  The troupe does not offer reverential recitals, but rather dynamic musical numbers that bounce off Ginsberg’s lines, making the songs assume a bodily urgency—whether it’s Biagnini recreating an old and infirm poet or Alejandro Tomás Rodriguez writhing about on the floor to the yearnings of love.

Add to that the spirituals—with many rhythmic shout-outs to Jesus—and you have a kind of revival meeting that may make all feel either welcome or uncomfortable.  These lithe and sinuous young men and women sing gracefully a capella (Felicita Marcelli and Agnieszka Kazimierska ) or with the accompaniment of guitars and percussion, and to see them up and swaying to songs from the South is to harken to a kind of cultural trance and transcendence.  How are these predominantly European performers—from Italy, Poland, France and elsewhere, looking like an ad hoc collection of gypsies and free spirits—able to lose themselves so readily in traditional songs?  And what is the principle force behind the vibe they create like a band of charismatics?

Biagini likes to think back to the farm he grew up on in Italy, where a holiday was a true transformation.  People knew the value of letting down their guard, of giving up their daily tasks for a collective enjoyment of the free flow of time.  His group has sometimes staged a “night watch” where the audience and the performers stay together through the night, interacting, singing, playing, sleeping, moving about freely, finding themselves, in the end, not the same as they were when it began.  He believes fervently that letting music and poetry, lyrics and rhythms inhabit one is to liberate—at least for a little—the spirit.

The spirit—that’s the place where the poet Ginsberg meets the songs of faith amidst oppression.   And that’s where Biagini and his troupe try to meet their audience.  It may take a leap of faith to get beyond your New England reticence and intellectual skepticism on a cold February night—but it might just be worth the effort.

Interdisciplinary Performance Studies at Yale presents The Open Program of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards

Electric Party Songs: Feb. 22 & 23: 8pm, Calhoun Cabaret, 189 Elm Street

I Am America: Feb. 28 & March 1: 8pm, Whitney Theater, 53Wall Street

Symposium: Poetry as the Practice of Encounter: March 2: 11 am-4pm, Whitney Theater, 53Wall Street

Electric Party Songs: March 3: 4 pm, BAR, 254 Crown Street

Events are free and open to the public.  Seating is limited.

A Contemporary "Curse." Sam Shepard Comes to the Long Wharf

Potentially one of the most sharply relevant plays in the current season in New Haven is the Long Wharf Theatre’s revival of Sam Shepard’s The Curse of the Starving Class.  Shepard has long been a staple of the American theater but the last time one of his plays was given a professional production here was the Yale Rep’s Curse in 2000.  Bad as those times were, we may have even more to curse about currently. According to the show’s director, Gordon Edelstein, the play is “hard to get right,” and yet is perhaps his personal favorite of Shephard’s plays, a play that is both timeless and “startlingly resonant for the moment.”

As a satiric, at times surreal play, Curse has, Edelstein says, “a very specific style” and its action is both “real and not real.”  While those who know Shepard’s work may find entering that particular space familiar, there is bound to be a certain defamiliarization as well.  One thing audiences might be faced with is determining how recognizable the world of Curse of the Starving Class is.  First produced in the late Seventies, the play was one of Shepard’s first attempts at a full-length, three act play.  Somewhat more traditional in form, the play takes on what could be called the locus classicus of American plays: the family drama.  With a father, Weston, a mother, Ella, a son Wesley, and a daughter, Emma, the doubling in the family romance is explicit, and the sense that the characters we’re viewing are both people and types makes for a shifting focus that is rich and suggestive, if also mercurial.  As a writer, Shepard has a unique gift for both the absurdist comedy of modern American types as well as a sense of, at times, tragic grandeur.  His is a poetic idiom that is rarely literal.

For Edelstein, one main reason for the current Long Wharf production is the occasion of working with a cast equal to the play.  “Shepard demands a company of actors skilled in the specifics of his text,” he notes, while praising, in particular, his chief actors’ “extraordinary ability.”  With Judith Ivey, a two-time Tony winner, as matriarch Ella, the production brings together a notable actress, esteemed for her work at Long Wharf in plays such as Shirley Valentine and The Glass Menagerie, with a part that offers much complexity.  Kevin Tighe (Weston) has also worked with Edelstein before at the Long Wharf, most recently in Mourning Becomes Electra.

The main question for a production of Curse, which Edelstein feels is truly a great play by a playwright able to hold his own with Miller, O’Neill and Williams, is: does the production  find “the pitch of the play, the specific tone of the piece?”  “Shepard is sui generis and nothing else is like him,” Edelstein says, so that finding that tone is a matter of “listening carefully to the play.” As a director, Edelstein sees his task as investigating “the linings of the stomach of each play” to understand what that play requires, to find “an imaginative and interesting way to put it on the stage.”  He finds Shepard, whose work he has staged many times, though this will be his first in his 12 years as Artistic Director of Long Wharf, challenging, but is confident that Curse of the Starving Class is very much a contemporary play that will speak to its audience.

Curse of the Starving Class opens on February 20th and runs until March 10th.  Starring Judith Ivey and Kevin Tighe, the play is a darkly comic depiction of  the struggles of a farming family in California as they cope with economic pressures, alcoholism, and internal tensions that question not only the stability of the American Dream but the viability of the American family.

Coming Up at The Cabaret

Yale’s spring semester starts this week, so that means not only are the kids back in town but so is the Cab.  The Yale Cabaret has announced its new line-up and the first show of the second half of the season—with ten shows rather than the traditional nine—should be getting ready to go up even as we speak. That show is All of What You Love and None of What You Hate, a play by Phillip Howze as recent as last year, about a teenage girl coming to a major decision about herself with what Artistic Director Ethan Heard describes as “a lot of noise” coming at her from her mother, her boyfriend and a friend.  The play is very fast-paced and contemporary, so contemporary, in fact, that three of its four actors are First Years in the YSD program.  The play is directed by Kate Tarker, a 2nd-year Playwright, who worked in the fall on the Cab’s Cat Club.  January 17-19.

The Island is an early-ish play by Athol Fugard, developed with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, in his Brechtian period, 1972, and set in a prison cell in Robben Island, the South African prison that held Nelson Mandela at the time.  The two men in the cell are rehearsing Antigone, Sophocles’ great play about a clash with the State in the name of mourning, ritual and blood ties.  The play, directed by native South African and 3rd-year dramaturg Kate Attwell, stars Winston Duke and Paul Pryce, both 3rd-Year Actors, recently shown to great effect in Iphigenia Among the Stars.  January 24-26.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day comes Ermyntrude & Esmeralda, a “naughty puppet play” derived from the naughty epistolary novella by Lytton Strachey.  Directed by 2nd-year Costume Designer Hunter Kaczorowski (who recently did such an excellent job on the YSD’s production of Sunday in the Park with George), the play’s titular characters confide in each other about all sorts of things that, we imagine, young Edwardian ladies were not supposed to notice, much less comment upon.  It’s an intimate world of bow-wows and pussycats and whimsical euphemisms. February 14-16.

The first of the two shows this semester not derived from a pre-existing source, All This Noise* is the creation of 3rd-year Actor Jackson Moran, who directed last semester’s tour de force, Cowboy Mouth.  In this one-man show based upon interviews with persons who have had experience with mental illness—as professionals, patients, and relatives—Moran seeks to create some of that “conversation about mental health” that politicians in the media profess an earnest interest in, but which seems to never get started. February 21-23.

The second show originating with YSD students is The Bird Bath, a movement piece created by The Ensemble and directed by 3rd-year Actor Monique Barbee, who shone in last semester’s Sunday in the Park with George and last summer’s K of D, at the Summer Cabaret.  Inspired by the art of the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington*—partner of Max Ernst—this piece uses text from the artist's account of her experiences in a mental institution. February 28-March 2.

Contemporary Irish playwright Enda Walsh’s The Small Things is a chilling play for two actors, directed by 3rd-year dramaturg Emily Reilly.  The characters, a man and a woman, tell stories in a kind of dialect, both to explore the power of speech and to reconstruct occurrences from a devastating past. March 7-9.

Lindbergh’s Flight by Bertolt Brecht was written as a radio play with music by Kurt Weill.  As carried out by an Ensemble that includes Kate Attwell and 3rd-year Actors Brenda Meaney and Gabe Levey, the play, Heard says, is “mischievous fun” with potential for audience participation, and a political dimension to the hero worship of Lindbergh. March 14-16.

Heard’s own project this semester is a production of Arthur Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, or Opus 21.  A moody musical piece involving 21 poems by Belgian poet Albert Giraud, the composition dates from 1913 and is an open-ended working through of Symbolist motifs, most notably the figure of “the sad clown” Pierrot.  The work calls for five instrumentalists and a soprano, but Heard is still deciding how much action will be expected from the musicians and how many actors will be involved.  In any case, the piece seems an even more ambitious combination of music and drama than Basement Hades, the show Heard directed in last year’s Cab.  March 28-30.

The Twins Would Like to Say, by collaborators Seth Bockley and Devon de Mayo, continues the “twinning” that seems a theme this semester.  And like E & E, it involves two girls looking on at their community, and, like The Small Things, it involves the rigors of a private, shared life.  Directed by a duo, Lauren Dubowski and Whitney Dibo, two 2nd-year Dramaturgs, the play is about twin sisters from the Caribbean trying to cope with life in Wales.  The play is usually presented “promenade” style, which means the audience moves around, spending time in one area or another as things happen simultaneously. April 4-6.

The final show of the season is Marius von Mayenberg’s The Ugly One, directed by 2nd-year Director Cole Lewis, who directed the gripping and entertaining show “Ain’t Gonna Make It” in the fall semester.  This four-person play takes place in a slightly futuristic world in which a person who has been deemed the ugliest has undergone plastic surgery to become the most beautiful.  The play is about appearance and substance, we might say, but also about the worship of beauty in our looks-conscious culture. April 11-13.

And that’s that.  See you at the CAB.

The Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven, CT

*Corrections: the original post used the working title Halfway House for the piece entitled All This Noise, and misidentified Leonora Carrington as Dora Carrington, a British artist in the Bloomsbury Group.

Weight Watchers, Watch Out

It’s a new year and traditionally the time of resolutions as people make plans to improve their lives.  One staple of the New Year’s Resolution list is the vow to lose weight, and one of the givens of that vow is that it will be accompanied with a lot of drama.  What should be a simple, private decision to alter one’s diet or undertake an exercise regimen becomes fraught with the dynamics of the game show—can she/he do it?—together with the psychic costs of failing—if not, what’s “wrong” with her/him?  We even have TV shows like The Biggest Loser dedicated to the weight-loss ordeal. January Joiner: A Weight Loss Horror Comedy, the new play by Laura Jacqmin  debuting this week at the Long Wharf Theatre, takes on the high anxiety of self-improvement with comedy, horror elements, and a knowing sense of the absurd.  Set in a “weight-loss boot camp” in Florida, it follows the travails of two sisters, Myrtle (Meredith Holzman) and Terry (Ashlie Atkinson).  Terry, the elder, experienced a recent cardiac incident that has sent her scurrying to Total Xtreme, run by Brian (Anthony Bowden) and April (Tonya Glanz).  Myrtle is along to offer moral support, which means that she is both with the program and looking a little askance at it.  And dedication is clearly an issue since a “January Joiner” is the term for the memberships at health spas that begin with New Year’s resolutions and fade by spring.

According to the script, Myrtle and Terry are overweight young women—5'5" and well over 200 lbs. They are joined by Darnell (Daniel Stewart Sherman), a happy-go-lucky heavy person who tips the scale at over 300 lbs. and keeps coming back to make what little adjustments he can.  Thus, among the three dieters we have desperation—Terry claims she will lose 50 lbs. during her stay—acceptance, and indifference.  Then there are creepier elements—such as Not-Terry and Holy Shit Ghost, both played by Maria-Christina Oliveras—that add a touch of the uncanny to the proceedings.

An undercurrent of the play is certainly the question: why is weight an issue, and what’s the solution?  The question of one’s appearance, in our image-conscious world, is not simply physical.  It comes loaded with moral, personal, psychological, and social implications—the kinds of things that plays thrive on.

But the play, in the view of its director, Eric Ting, is more than just a satire on the effect of social injunctions to be thinner, better-looking, or to have such goals. It’s a play about change. “At its heart it is a play about two sisters growing apart, about becoming so different that they don’t recognize each other,” Ting said.

To change one’s appearance—all the ads say—is to change one’s life.  A “new you.”  But what gets shed and lost with the “old you”?  For Laura Jacqmin, its author, the play asks: “What happens to us when the people who are closest to us change?”  What is the effect on our relationships when we take on roles, tasks or goals that change our relations to others already in our lives?

January Joiner: A Weight Loss Horror Comedy runs from from January 9 through February 10, 2013 on Stage II.  Opening night is Wednesday, January 16, at 7:30 p.m.

Setting Up a Sunday in the Park

Opening December 14th on the University Theater stage is a revival of Sunday in the Park with George, the Pulitzer-winning musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine.  The show will be the thesis production of Ethan Heard, third-year directing student at the Yale School of Drama and currently the Artistic Director of the Yale Cabaret.  It’s by no means a regular thing for a YSD thesis show to be a big, popular Broadway musical, but, Heard says, he’s found there are many “closeted musical theater lovers” at the Drama School, and his fellow colleagues have rallied to the production, which has been in rehearsals since early November.

Heard says he favors “big-hearted shows that move me, nourish me, and teach me.”  Sondheim “is a genius, and Sunday is one of the most important pieces of theater in the last fifty years.”  Heard has seen three professional productions and sees the work as a fully satisfying, “wildy theatrical” project.  When he proposed the musical for his directing project, Heard found that Victoria Nolan, Deputy Dean of YSD, also loves Sondheim and that, as Acting Instructor Ron Van Lieu points out, it’s not uncommon for YSD alums to find themselves in musicals.  Indeed, Heard feels fortunate that the School currently boasts sufficient vocal talent to bring off the ambitious project, which features a cast of about fourteen, and that “pretty much every one has been in a musical.”

As Heard has learned in the rehearsals thus far, directing such a spectacle requires skills in “traffic control.”  At an early rehearsal I attended, there was considerable satisfaction in watching the finale of Act One find its pace: the complex composition that is La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat comes together to the tune of “Sunday.”  It’s a moment that is both lyrical and epic in establishing the relation between two kinds of composition: the painterly kind which yields the tableaux we see forming before our eyes, a bourgeois slice of life from late nineteenth-century Paris, and the writerly kind that consists of the words and music of Sondheim and Lapine, giving expression to the ambiance surrounding the painting.  Seeing students who are still discovering their parts find their places in the great oeuvre was fascinating.

The kind of acting Sunday requires is a departure from the kind of “kitchen-sink dramas” more common on the contemporary stage, Heard says.  Musicals are stylized and, unlike works in the public domain, there are few liberties that can be taken with the material.  The score makes its demands and finding room for interpretation might be said to be one of the challenges.  For Heard, much of the dramatic value of a musical is in the “thrill of singing,” with the songs producing “tour de force moments” that, like speeches in Shakespeare, create a poetry that interprets the characters’ feelings, allowing them to be larger than life.

Heard believes that, from our current perspective, what Sunday says about making art is instructive.  The play juxtaposes the artistic life in the 1880s—as emblematized by Georges Seurat, a loner who sacrificed love and a possible family for art—with the 1980s, where we see Seurat’s ficitional great-grandson, also called Georges, trying to cope with the demands of the self-contained art-world during one of its great “boom” periods.  Heard suggests that he and his contemporaries in the Drama School can find much to identify with: “Artists between 25 and 32, like the two Georges in the play, are trying to make a mark by creating a legacy that will realize their vision and voice in the world.  But there’s always the problem of balancing art and private life.”

Getting the balance right is not only a theme of the play, but a challenge of the production itself: balancing music and words, static tableaux with carefully choreographed action, the demands of art against the demands of romance, the obligations to personal vision and to collective concerns, and the desire to find an overarching aesthetic responsive and rigorous enough to celebrate the richness found in the twin demands of art and life.  Heard and his very talented and capable company, including his musical director, Daniel Schlosberg, of the Yale Music School, are working on it, by George.

The show will run from December 14-20 at the Yale University Theatre, 222 York Street.

Photographs by Nicholas Hussong

Mamet Revisited

Next Wednesday, November 14, The New Haven Theater Company kicks off its four show run of David Mamet’s edgy and entertaining play, Speed-the-Plow.  The director, George Kulp, and two of the three cast members were involved in the troupe’s production of the playwright’s Glengarry Glen Ross in 2010.  It’s good to see a return to Mamet as his dialogue-driven dramas bring out the strengths of the Company, letting them show off their ability with close ensemble work.  The key to good Mamet is pacing, and Kulp feels that his actors—J. Kevin Smith as Bobby Gould, a recently risen movie studio bigwig, Steve Scarpa as Charlie Fox, a lower-level associate but friend of long-standing, certain that he has a property that will be his big break, and Megan Keith Chenot as Karen, a temporary secretary new to the world of movie-making who might represent other values, or who might be a hustling go-getter—are finding new and interesting aspects of the play.

The NHTC’s recent productions have offered a certain degree of timeliness in this uncertain era of economic downturn.  I remember seeing their Glengarry Glen Ross on a night when the stock market hit a new low and the desperation of real estate salesmen in the play could easily extend to Wall Street traders.  Smith played the loquacious Ricky Roma, Scarpa was Williamson the less-than-savvy office manager, and Kulp played Shelly “Machine” Levine, the hinge for much of the pathos in the play.  All three actors were also involved in Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty, which Scarpa directed with a relevant sense of solidarity and struggle at a time when there were OWS tents on the New Haven Green.  Then came their big production of Urinetown, the musical by Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis, a show with a theme of straitened circumstances and the tensions between haves and have-nots.  Kulp played Caldwell B. Cladwell, the resident big-wig, and Chenot played his daughter, Hope, who falls in love with Bobby Strong, a rabble rouser.  Scarpa played Officer Barrell, a bullying cop who had more than a buddy’s affection for his partner Officer Lockstock.

Scarpa, a big fan of Mamet, initially proposed that the group tackle another of the playwright’s works, known for their bristling dialogue, earthy vocabulary, fast, overlapping exchanges and arresting non sequiturs.  Kulp offered to direct when he saw that Scarpa and Smith and Chenot were perfect for the roles.  “It’s great when we can find a play that matches us and what we do,” Kulp said, “I think people who have seen Kevin, Steve, and Megan in other plays will be impressed to see them stretch themselves as actors, as they do in this play.  I’m very honored to be working with them.”

The play will be staged at Upcrown on Crown Street, a new space for NHTC, but one with, Kulp says, an upscale classiness that makes it suitable for the slick office of a Hollywood movie producer.  Because NHTC doesn’t have a permanent theatrical space and makes do with what’s available, or what best suits (as in their staging of Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio at Ultra Radio station on College Street), plays like Mamet’s, which don’t demand elaborate sets and can be produced almost anywhere, are ideal.

What might the play—which Kulp describes as a drama about one’s priorities and the decisions that make one question one’s loyalties—have to say to us following so closely on the heels of a major election?  The idea that someone might have second thoughts about a sure way to make money, in favor of a goal more worthwhile, could have some relevance.  Though Kulp and company are doing the play in the present day, Speed-the-Plow initially appeared in the Eighties, at a time when Hollywood was in search of bigger and bigger blockbusters.  One of the plot points is that Gould asks Karen to read a novel about the end of the world and then report on it—at his place. It’s a seduction ploy on his part, but he ends up swayed by her enthusiasm for the project.  Certainly, today, apocalyptic film scenarios are a dime-a-dozen and we might have reasons to question Karen’s sincerity; then again, the real concern isn’t the topics of the films pitched by Charlie and Karen, but rather the stakes of the “old boy” camaraderie between Bobby and Charlie and the more intangible and probably less enduring sex appeal between Bobby and Karen.  Still, at a time when more women are directors and producers and in politics than was the case in the Eighties, it will be interesting to see how Mamet’s power struggle plays out. What carries the day, in the end?  What, if anything, is Gould committed to?

The New Haven Theater Company is back, and they’re doing Mamet.  God speed the play.

David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow Directed by George Kulp

Upcrown Creative Studios 216 Crown Street, 2nd Floor November 14 & 16 at 7 p.m. November 17 at 4 p.m. &  7 p.m.

For tickets and info visit: New Haven Theater Company

The Show Must Go On

Sandy notwithstanding, theatrical offerings are plentiful as this week of hurricane hysteria draws to its close. Local theater group A Broken Umbrella Theater offers the third of its three-weekend run of The Library Project, Nov. 3-4, with four more performances. Developed to coincide with the celebration of the New Haven Free Public Library’s 125 years of existence, the play requires its audience to move about through the historic building facing the Green, led by charming escorts with glowing umbrellas. After introductory pieces in the entranceway and main hall that give a bit of the historical circumstances that gave rise, back in the 1880s, to the Public Library, featuring dialogue between its architect, Cass Gilbert (Matthew Gafney) and its patron, Mary Ives (Mary Jane Smith), the audience divides into groups determined by a star on each program that denotes which of the five pieces will be encountered first.

Moving through the library in a group brings back memories of ye olde class trip—which may or may not be fond memories, depending—and, indeed, the tour has the air of a compelled itinerary as no one breaks ranks or moves about freely. It’s all rather impressively organized so that there is never much waiting, once everyone has seated themselves in a new area, before the site-specific performance begins. Because of differences in where each group begins, the experience differs from group to group, but the sequence is the same. My group began with “RIP” and concluded with “Balance a Dime”—an instructive bracketing, as these two pieces manage to look a bit askance at the history of the Ives Branch Library.

In “RIP,” directed by Ian Alderman and developed by the Ensemble, Salvatore DeMaio (Ruben Ortiz) is a muralist of the WPA era, who painted the Library’s murals depicting the story of Rip Van Winkle—in the play he’s going about his business, only to find himself a ghost haunting, unbeknownst to them, the conservators (Charlie Alexander and Halle Martenson) trying to restore his murals. The tension between their effort—with lack of funds and, apparently, a lack of will by the powers that be—and his shock at what has become of his work creates a somewhat critical air regarding the stewardship of the building we had seen so nobly celebrated in the hall upstairs. And, at the close, “Balance a Dime,” also directed by Alderman, and written by Jason Patrick Wells, features a kind of dueling libraries account of the events by which the NHFPL wound up with funds originally earmarked for The Institute Library. With the latter represented by its Executive Director, Will Baker, or its Outreach Coordinator Megan Black, and the NHFPL represented by its Executive Director, Christopher Korenowsky, and the City of New Haven enacted by Lou Mangini, the playlet airs the bad blood between the two libraries which “turns on the dime,” as it were, of the wording in the will of Mr. Merritt, who left the $60,000 start-up fund for a library in New Haven.

Between these two pieces filled with the tensions of funding, managing, and conserving a civic landmark are lighter pieces that conjure up the romance of the library. Whether it’s dancing patrons “In Circulation” (Robin Levine, choreography), or the songs in the mouths of friends Noah Webster (Kenneth Murray) and Samuel Morse (Peter Chenot) as they, in “Noah & Sam” (directed by Rachel Alderman, with Book, Music & Lyrics by Rob Shapiro) discuss the challenges and opportunities of technology in “the Information Age,” or, in my favorite segment, the very charming children (Kaatje Welsh and Remsen Welsh) and their musical mentor (Josie Kulp) who, in “Branching Out” (written and directed by Rachel Alderman), inhabit the children’s wing as though it were truly a fabled place promised in fairy tales, these interludes aim to enchant with the sense of the library’s magic, and mostly succeed.

With over 70 people providing their talents and expertise, and with the Library allowing free run of its impressive building, The Library Project marks the most ambitious ABUT offering yet, and is effective in rallying pride and surprise as it deepens its viewers’ sense of the library’s place and purpose in the community.

Tonight (postponed from last night) sees the opening of Iphigenia Among the Stars, the thesis show for Jack Tamburri, third year directing MFA at the Yale School of Drama, which takes two tragedies by Euripides, centered on Agamemnon’s daughter, the ill-fated Iphigenia, and, as adapted by Ben Fainstein, mashes them with the Mighty Marvel Comics-style of Jack “King” Kirby to create something that should entertain and instruct, we assume. Oct. 31-Nov. 1, Iseman Theater, 1156 Chapel Street.

On Friday, the Argentinian theater group Las chicas de blanco (The Girls in White) presents La edad de la ciruela (The Age of the Plum), an interpretive piece that renders conflicting feelings about home and place in light of the central metaphor of a rooted plum tree. The play, which premiered in 2010, represented Buenos Aires in the 2011 National Drama Festival. Las chicas de blanco explore theater through expressive dramaturgy and the humor of an ironic female perspective. The performing duo involve work from “The Subway Lives,” a program that uses unusual spaces, such as subways, for artistic performances, and are the originators of “Women Take Up Art,” an all-female group that promotes the possibilities for cultural transformation through theater.

Free and open to the public, the performance is in Spanish and is aimed to provide access to Spanish language productions for Yale and New Haven communities. At Yale’s Off-Broadway Theater, 41 Broadway, New Haven, Nov. 2, 2 p.m.

Persistent Beauty

“all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty.”—Robert Adams, artist statement, The New West, 1974

Persistent beauty could be said to be the theme of the Robert Adams retrospective which closes this Sunday at the Yale University Art Gallery.  This is a wonderfully comprehensive show of the photography projects that Adams, a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient in 1994, has undertaken since 1968/70.  Sprawling across the first and fourth floors of the Gallery, “The Place We Live” offers numerous opportunities for contemplation and reflection.  Adams is not only a meticulous craftsman and a thorough master of his art, he is also an artist committed to preserving images of our nation—particularly the very land of our nation—that speak eloquently about who we really are.  The amazing paradox is that even when what he shows us is not “a pretty picture”—the tract housing, the prefab corridors of business, the glut of tacky products, the clear-cutting of huge swathes of primary growth forests—each image still has considerable aesthetic fascination.

Adams sets his work in that cultural space where natural beauty meets the beauty of form in the artist’s keen eye to create the man-made beauty of his photographs.  “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is an old adage, and Adams gives it new spirit, teaching us to see how he sees.  Every image shows a lot; in the jargon of our times, we might say “contains a lot of information.”  But in Adams’ images, information is not the guiding principle.  Certainly, we learn something about Denver  or Eden, CO, in looking at these pictures, and about areas of CA and even a sad and striking memorial for U.S. war casualties, but Adams’ work is not simply about clueing us in or letting us know.  His photographs combine a formal, compositional clarity with an unflinching sharpness that makes us think about seeing, about how we choose to look at things or not.

I toured the first floor exhibit last Saturday with my friend Rob Slifkin, an assistant professor of Art History at NYU, and we spent almost two hours examining each photograph closely, rarely flagging in our admiration of Adams’ art.  The earliest pictures here—so stark and yet so formally appealing, landscapes with an unerring sense of how to make us feel the contrast between the wide spaces of the west and the cramped, miminalist possibilities of the man-made objects and habitations of the time (early 1970s)—captured much of our attention, forming a canon by which to judge Adams’ subsequent work.  The famous photograph of a silhouette framed in the picture window of a modest, Sixties tract-dwelling speaks with the eloquence of the perfect shot: both emblem for an entire way of life, but also an aesthetic statement about surfaces, shading, light.

In shot after shot, in his earliest period, Adams performs wonders in making the mundane and unprepossessing reveal its beauty to the eye.  A street at night, where the streetlights create huge dark mounds of trees and a brightly enticing far horizon; a gutter near an undeveloped area where the asphalt road, concrete gutter, and swathe of gravel and dirt create a triptych of surfaces, each with a particular texture but also a particular reference; a baby in a car seat sitting on a stoop outside a closed screen door—a gesture toward the ephemeral made monumental, as if the child’s entire life could be summed up in the framing of that instant.  We found ourselves making comparisons to Cézanne, an artist whose grasp of the formal principles of his art created new ways of seeing, looking and showing, and whose works, like Adams’ photographs, give the eye much to take in, a fascinating interplay of foreground and background and shapes and planes, voids and solids.

As we went on, it became clear that Adams’ intentions were changing.  There was a period where his work became almost “Victorian” in its willingness to court “pretty” images—but with a sense of the fragility of a copse of trees, or of a place that would be done away with due to urban sprawl.  By the time we were looking at the trash and detritus, the building sites and big department stores of the late Seventies and early Eighties, it became clear that Adams’ art is also socially conscious to a degree that many artists like to pretend they are.  Without lecturing us, or at least by leaving the editorializing to titles and wall text, the exhibit turns a corner and begins to consider how hard it can be to find “persistent beauty” in the utter lack of taste and aesthetic sense in much of what America happily produces and consumes—and discards.

If you lived through the periods Adams is depicting, you might find yourself wincing with a terrible recognition of how “material progress” not only despoils our land, it substitutes one environment for another: one is pleasing to the eye and fully sensual in its engagement with our senses, but also, perhaps, sublime in its existence beyond us; the other is ours—indifferent to our natural preference for the irregular, the unplanned, the untouched, it simply replicates our endless search for greater ease and comfort, for more stuff, and our worship of gimcracks and commodities for the sake of novelty.  Adams doesn’t need to write manifestos on the wall-cards.  His images speak for themselves.

At the end of the first floor exhibit, we stood before a wall of images depicting people—actual figures in Adams’ work to this point had not been plentiful but were always meaningful.  Here, we saw people of the early Eighties in shopping mall parking lots, on small town streets, in suburbs that could be anywhere in the U.S.  We had already moved from considering how Adams had gone from existentialist and minimalist in his approach—showing us the “thereness” of unadorned human habitations and businesses in a vast, indifferent space—to social and editorial—showing us a way of life and its depredations.  And yet the images could still yield affectionate responses and could show us “us” in no uncertain terms.  In the end, we were back to formal considerations, but with a difference: to see how Adams’ artful configurations of space, shadow, figures create subliminal messages about our mortality.  Rob cited Susan Sontag from “On Photography”: “Every photograph is a memento mori.”  The power of these shots—and the artfulness of their seemingly artless presentation—is in how Adams makes us aware of what Sontag means when she says: “To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.”  What this leaves us with, then, is the effort to understand the terms and values of our “participation.”  For we too are mortal, vulnerable, and mutable.  And these pictures make us feel that.

Rob went off to another engagement, and I toured the fourth floor on my own.  I have to confess, I took it a bit more speedily.  The sheer number of photographs was becoming overwhelming.  And perhaps, in the reflections above, I’d already traced a path to my moment; to the place in time and the time of the place where I was doomed to be.  Or something.  In any case, the upper floor is more emphatic in its outrage.  Here, Adams brings his camera’s clarity to the tragic dimensions of our time: lives lost to war and landscape shorn of ancient trees both speak of phenomenal levels of waste, and, as photographs—as with shots of the northwest coast and pleasure-seekers, or a descending plane frozen, entering the open sky above a river, or of fragile plants posed almost as decorative motifs—make a strong claim on our attention.  We are looking at how we live, and Adams wants us to reflect on what we see, and what that says about who we are and what we’re willing to live with.

This is a powerful and important show by an American treasure: an artist of superb skills and worthwhile convictions.  Robert Adams, The Place We Live, is not to be missed.  Its beauty persists.

Robert Adams The Place We Live A Retrospective Selection of Photographs Yale University Art Gallery New Haven, Connecticut August 3–October 28, 2012

http://artgallery.yale.edu

8 and the Marriage Debate

We all love courtroom drama, right?  It’s so American.  It’s the place where the goodies and the baddies get to have their say, or, literally “their day in court.”  It’s the place where justice gets to prove itself impartial, or maybe deaf, dumb, and blind.  It’s the place where, we hope, wrongs are righted and rights are upheld.  Watching that happen thrills us with the virtues of the American way. 8, a play by Dustin Lance Black (Academy Award-winner for his screenplay for Milk), condenses the transcript of the Federal District Court trial, Perry vs. Schwarzenegger, from August 2010—twelve days of procedure—into 90 minutes of courtroom drama.  That was the trial that resulted in the decision that overturned the effects of Proposition 8.  Proposition 8 was a ballot proposal in California that added, by public vote, a state constitutional amendment that insisted that only male-female marriage would be legally recognized, thus invalidating a CA Supreme Court decision from May 2008 that permitted same-sex marriage.  The trial in 2010, since upheld as Perry vs. Brown in February 2012, declared the amendment unconstitutional.

That’s simply looking at the back and forth of law in terms of its effects and outcomes.  The trial proceedings give us a chance to look at the back and forth of law as the story of people with different views and different goals pitted against one another in a civic arena.  And that’s where theater comes in.

8 is being produced by the Yale School of Drama, with licensing from the American Foundation for Equal Rights and Broadway Impact, which have been involved in previous stagings of the trial—including an all-star version in L.A. in 2012 (Brad Pitt as a District Court judge?).  With a similar injunction against same-sex marriage in New York recently over-ruled, the politics of the case are still very much with us, particularly as the CA case may go to the U.S. Supreme Court.  All the more reason to get a sense of how the deal went down in CA.

The production at Yale—one night only, Monday, October 22—will be a staged reading, directed by Sonja Berggren of the theater group Panndora Productions, in Santa Ana, CA, who is at Yale as a Special Research Fellow this semester.  Berggren is ideal for the task because she was actually a lawyer in CA for years and so has a feel for the realities of courtroom procedure.  YSD students Lico Whitfield, Jabari Brisport, and Chris Bannow were instrumental in getting the licensing to stage the piece and in helping to put together the team that's putting on the show—via an e-blast for volunteers.  The team includes administration, faculty, students, and staff of YSD—playing all the principals involved in the proceedings, including, as Berggren points out, two attorneys, Ted Olson and David Boies, famous as opposing counsel in Bush v. Gore, who joined forces for the plaintiffs against Proposition 8.

The trial was supposed to be broadcast but at the last minute there was a ruling that prohibited it.  That outraged a lot of people and, while it’s not as exciting following a trial with an outcome already decided, it does justify the interest in seeing the trial acted out.  For YSD fans, the interest will also be provided by Berggren’s creation of a trial-like atmosphere—complete with milling witnesses—and by the familiar YSD figures who will be participating, such as Director of Theater Safety Bill Reynolds, by benefit of his judicious mein, playing presiding judge Vaughn Walker, and Victoria Nolan, Deputy Dean of YSD and Managing Director of Yale Rep, as well as many students, including Ethan Heard, Artistic Director of the Yale Cabaret, and Managing Director Jonathan Wemette.

Following the play there will be a talk-back discussion, moderated by Joan Channick, Associate Dean of YSD, with participants from Yale Law School, Yale Divinity School, and the School of Drama.  The event is free and open to the public and invites public discussion of this important social issue, so far being decided state by state.

What: A staged reading of “8,” the courtroom play based on the landmark marriage equality decision in CA

Who: Yale School of Drama Students, Faculty, and Staff

When: Monday October 22, 2012 @ 7PM

Where: University Theatre, 222 York Street, New Haven, CT 06511

How Much: Free

Imminent Theater

Beginning this weekend and running for the next two, A Broken Umbrella Theatre brings its latest fall project to the Ives Main Library in New Haven.  If you know the work of ABUT, you know that they concoct new theatrical pieces as site-specific works in various historical New Haven locations.  The current work, entitled simply The Library Project, was commissioned by the New Haven Free Public Library Foundation to mark the 125th anniversary of the library, a fixture upon the green since 1887.

The audience will tour three floors of the library, moving from room to room in different groups, finding in their travels seven original works—involving song, dance, puppets, spectacle—staged in suitable areas of the building.  For instance, the story of “RIP” involves a muralist going between different times the way Rip Van Winkle does—and that segment is set in the basement of the library where the WPA murals featuring Rip are located.  All the segments feature some aspect of the history and function of the library, and are produced by the team of ABUT in collaboration with others—ABUT’s ranks for this production, their grandest yet, have been expanded to over 60 participants, all volunteer, including the Executive Director of the New Haven Free Public Library, Christopher Korenowsky, and Will Baker, Executive Director of the Institute Library (which predates the NHFPL).

If earlier ABUT projects are any indication, the show will be entertaining, lively, and fun for viewers age 8 and up.

A Broken Umbrella Theatre is committed to making theater accessible to all, so the pricing for the shows is “pay what you can.”  Reservations are strongly recommended: www.abrokenumbrella.org.  Box office opens one hour prior to the show at Ives Main Library, 133 Elm Street, New Haven.  And before the show begins, you can avail yourself of beer or wine in the lobby and chat about the facts behind the fiction with ABUT’s Artistic Directory Ian Alderman and historian Colin Caplan.

A Broken Umbrella Theatre The Library Project October 20–21, 27–28; November 3–4 Saturdays at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. Sundays at 4:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. Later in November, New Haven’s other local theater group, New Haven Theater Company, will be mounting David Mamet’s Speed the Plow, another intense, confrontational play from the master of late 20th-century speak.  Directed by company member George Kulp, the show includes two members of last year’s ambitious NHTC project, Urinetown: Megan Keith Chenot as Karen, and Steve Scarpa, who directed last year’s rousing Waiting for Lefty, as Fox; J. Kevin Smith, memorable as Ricky Roma in the NHTC production of Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, plays Gould.

Mamet is the go-to guy for small theater companies like NHTC, as his dramas have small casts, don’t require much scenery, and offer commanding showcases for character interaction.  NHTC has already been noted for their grasp of Mametry with Glengarry Glen Ross, and Speed the Plow which, yes, actually features a woman in its cast, should give them ample opportunity to sling speech in this satire of movie industry insiders.  Gould is the new Head of Production at a major Hollywood studio, and Fox, his friend for 11 years, brings him a project: a film that should be a blockbuster and make them both rich.  Karen, an office temp, questions the value of the film, opening up Gould and Fox to considerations of their priorities.

New Haven Theater Company David Mamet's Speed the Plow UpCrown Studios, 216 Crown Street, New Haven

Wednesday, Nov. 14, 7 p.m. Friday, November 16, 7 p.m. Saturday, November 17, 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. Tickets are $20 and go on sale Tuesday, October 23.

http://www.newhaventheatercompany.com/

Passion and Purpose

After a brief week's hiatus, the Yale Cabaret resumes this week.  First up is a play about which not much can be said.  White Rabbit, Red Rabbit by Nassim Soleimanpour presents a different actor each night who opens a sealed envelope containing the script and proceeds to enact what he or she finds.  The play, according to Artistic Director Ethan Heard, has taken the Fringe Festival circuit by storm but can’t be performed in the playwright’s native Iran.  Is the play incendiary toward the standards acceptable in Iran?  A blog has been set up to chronicle productions of the play, but don’t peek.  The best way to find out what it’s all about is to attend the show—more than once, as each performance will be different.  October 18-20. Playwright Sam Shepard has won 15 Obie Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize.  Patti Smith, poet and rock artist, has won the National Book Award.  But in the early Seventies they were both largely unknown and were living together as lovers.  During that time they wrote a play called Cowboy Mouth, which they also enacted.  Set in a hotel, the play involves Slim and Cavales, two artistic types trying to workout their differences.  Interestingly, the two actors in the show—Michelle McGregor and Mickey Theis—first undertook a long scene from the play in an acting workshop; meanwhile, designer Masha Tsimring worked on the play for a class assignment in a different class.  The stars aligned, obviously, and the trio united to propose the play, directed by Jack Moran, with Chris Bannow assisting, with aid from dramaturg (and Summer Cabaret Artistic Director) Tanya Dean as producer.  Oct. 25-27.

Cab #6 is a contemporary comedy: Joshua Conkel’s MilkMilkLemonade tells the story of Emory, an 11 year-old boy growing up gay in a generic place called Malltown, U.S.A., where he lives on a farm and has, of course, a pet chicken.  Conkel’s play, which features a cast of six or seven, encourages transgender casting in its account of the imaginative life of a kid who wants to be a star and get out of Malltown, while featuring some amazing ribbon dancing.  Xaq Webb, the Cab’s Associate Managing Director, stars, and the play is directed by second-year acting student Jabari Brisport.  Nov. 8-10.

The Chairs, by Eugene Ionesco, is the fourth (and final) show of the Cab’s fall semester that derives from a pre-existing play.  In this case, Ionesco’s absurdist play of social ceremony—an older male and female couple welcome unseen, but nonetheless characterized, guests to their gathering—has very definite requirements for staging.  YSD play-writing student Justin Taylor directs from his own new translation of the play, and part of the fun will be to see how Ionesco’s vision of the play can be made to work in the Cab’s protean but rather finite space. Nov. 15-17.

Paul Lieber and Tim Hassler have been working on songs together since they met in the Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival in 2011,  while playing, with considerable aplomb, comic relief characters in the Tempest and As You Like It.  Drawing on their repertoire of original songs and their instincts as Cab performers, Lieber and Hassler bring us Cat Club, inspired (perhaps) by a YouTube video of a little girl wearing cat ears and intoning little ditties. Lieber works in projections; Hassler just gave a great musical performance in Cab #3; Ben Fainstein, who brought us last year’s final show Carnivale/Invisible, directs. What’s this show about?  What won’t it be about?  Nov.29-Dec. 1

The developers of Cab #9 have been working all semester to create the rules that will govern the show.  Dilemma is designed to involve the audience, requiring us to make choices—call them moral dilemmas—about how the actors enact the situations they meet with. Conceived by Michael Bateman with help from Reynaldi Lolong, Jack Tamburri, Cole Lewis, and The Ensemble, the show should be utterly unpredictable, depending on you, the audience.  Dec. 6-8.

Artistic Director Ethan Heard said he’s “thrilled so far” at the work submitted for consideration for the Cab’s slots, and some that didn’t make the cut may, with a little work, have a chance for spring.  The key to the shows chosen, he said, are "the passion and purpose of the show and the strength of the team involved."  The line-up purports to showcase the inventiveness and oddity, the rawness and vision that the Cab is known for.  See you at the CAB!