Prisoners' Pageant

The Island, the second show of the Yale Cabaret’s spring semester, is a powerful two-man play, directed by Kate Attwell and featuring Paul Pryce (John) and Winston Duke (Winston).  The play was written by Athol Fugard in collaboration with the actors—John Kani and Winston Ntshona—who initially played in it. As prisoners in a South African prison known as “the island,” the two men’s crimes, we can assume, are political, and thus their bond is based on the deprivations of their condition.  We meet them as they return to their cell, winded from running, injured, exhausted.  As unlikely as it might seem, much of their interaction will be about their plan to present a performance of Sophocles’ Antigone in a show for the other prisoners.

Staged with the actors on a platform flanked by comissary-style tables and with chairs at the head and foot, the space is intimate and the actors, as they loom above us, seem at times larger-than-life.  It’s an interesting means to create a heroicizing perspective on the two men as they work out their production, which entails Winston, as Antigone, having to don a wig of straw and a bra with tins for cups.  He rebels against the affront to his dignity and must be placated by John, who is determined that Antigone be presented, to lodge the theme of blood ties and honor against the dehumanizing demands of the State.

What carries the play and makes it riveting throughout is the interplay between Pryce and Duke.  Fully immersed in their parts, they establish the sense of familiarity between the men, due to intimate proximity, but also the degree to which they are quite different in their attitudes and expectations. That difference becomes paramount when John learns that he will be released in three months’ time.  Their shared elation swiftly becomes a deeply moving nostalgia for the time they shared together and then, gradually, a sense of dejection and even resentment on Winston’s part, even as John keeps insisting he doesn’t want to think about his release—that it might be all a trick.

What isn’t a trick is the extent to which playacting is a part of the prisoners getting through their ordeal.  Early on John acts out imaginary phone calls to friends back home and to the two men’s wives.  The scene quickly establishes the power and fascination of make believe—the power of suggestion comes out in the playacted phone call, in the reminiscences of the day they were incarcerated together, and in Winston’s projections of what life will be like for John when he returns home.  Fugard makes all this take place in dialogue between two half-naked men, with little in the way of props or theatrical tricks.  The Island demonstrates effectively that the best drama takes place in our heads while listening to characters talk.

The staging of Antigone is a significant change of scene: Pryce as John as King Creon and Duke as Winston as Antigone prowl the walk space behind the tables, moving about as if sizing each other up for a duel to the death.  The fact that John, who has been approved for release, should have the role of the State questioning Winston as the defiant Antigone—who insists on burying her brother, condemned as a traitor, though the law forbids it—makes the playacting reflect a struggle between the two men as well.  John, as the one who initially quizzes Winston on the parts they will play and who seems the more articulate and quick-witted, becomes, by means of the play, a further goad and even persecutor of his cellmate.  Winston, then, as Antigone—the gender roles also are relevant—must give voice to a defiance that stands for the enemies of the State of Apartheid, but also for those oppressed by the constructions placed upon them by others.

The play creates a subtle relation between the two men and Pryce and Duke bring home the passion, power and dignity of these men with great skill.  The show’s design, use of song—via “Singers from Shades”—and lighting combine to create one of those Cab shows that reinvents the space and the audience’s relation to the spectacle a bit as well.  The Island is a commanding production.

The  Island By Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona Directed by Kate Attwell

Assistant Director: Gabriel DeLeon; Scenic Designer: Kristen Robinson; Costume Designer: Seth Bodie; Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason; Sound Designer: Matt Otto; Stage Manager: Louisa Balch; Producer: Lico Whitfield; Singers from the Shades: Carol Crouch, Edwina Kisanga, Dianne Lake, Ian Miller, Naima Sakande

The Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street January 24-26, 2013

The Cab will be dark for two weeks, then return on Valentine's Day weekend with Ermyntrude and Esmeralda, a naughty puppet-play by way of an Edwardian novella by Lytton Strachey.

The Kids Are Alright

Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine is something of a schizophrenic play.  As staged by Margot Bordelon, a third-year director in the YSD program, the show is a wildly entertaining first half yoked to a second half that isn’t nearly so nimble.  The first half is set in 1880, on a colonial outpost in Africa, and laughs abound.  The second half is set in England c. 1980, and … not so much. Maybe it’s just me, and my antipathy for that particular past—the era contemporaneous with the writing of the play—is my problem.  And yet, it’s obviously much easier to imbue the 1880s with charm and fun and a frothy lubricity that makes everyone ready to have sex with someone, than it is to derive much in the way of lasting uplift, drama or entertainment from the people who inhabit the late Seventies/early Eighties.  Too close to home but also dated?  Maybe that’s it.  The cast—and they are extremely well-cast—gives it a game try and there are some notable bits in the show’s second half to make it worthwhile.

Before the show even starts we’re treated to the cast posed as figures in displays in a sort of living museum of natural history.  And the exhibits’ backgrounds remain as the set for the African outpost where rigidly upstanding Brit Clive (Gabe Levey, a comic revelation) lives with his family: his blushingly compliant wife Betty (Timothy Hassler, as winsome as one could want a man in a dress to be), Edward, his goldilocked adolescent son (played with inspired awkwardness by a woman), Maud, his no-nonsense mother-in-law (Hannah Sorenson, a study in gray), his daughter Victoria (a stuffed doll) and the child’s nanny, Ellen (Brenda Meaney, self-effacing), as well as his Man Friday Joshua (Chris Bannow—more later), who has renounced his tribe to be a trusted servant.  Enter into this world of domestic bliss and disrupted white tranquility—the natives, as they say, are restless—a rugged explorer, Harry (Mickey Theis, increasingly profound), and a woman with a tendency to be rather assertive, Mrs. Saunders (Meaney again, anything but self-effacing).

As with any broad farce, one isn’t surprised to find that Betty and Harry have a concealed passion for each other of long-standing.  Nor is it surprising to find that Clive has the hots for Mrs. Saunders as a supplement to his overly demure wife (there’s a fairly outrageous scene of coupling between the two, with Levey and Meaney getting all the humor they can out of it).  But when Edward begins to pant for Harry, and the latter slips away with Joshua for a fuck in the stable, and when Ellen tries to make a move on Betty, and when, after some mixed signals are let slip, Harry comes on to Clive, much to the latter’s outrage, well, let’s just say everyone but Maud is ready to do it with someone (the old lady mainly gets her kicks having one doll bitch-slap another).  You see how it is: Victorian propriety masks a libidinal free-for-all.  In Churchill’s 1880s, no one was standing around waiting for Freud to invent sexual repression.  Everyone is sexually expressive, it’s just that the expression had to be a bit more clandestine than would later be the case.

All of this is very amusing with a cast so equal to the task, and the roles of Clive, Betty, Harry, and Edward, especially, manage to be both caricatures as well as bravura bits of characterization by the respective actors in the roles.  Scenes between Harry and Edward are particularly spirited, as are the scenes when Clive tries to upbraid his wife and son.  But to Bannow, as Joshua, falls one of the more interesting roles.  Indeed, it should be mentioned that Bannow has done an estimable job of playing perfectly the kinds of ancillary roles that matter much to the overall effect.  He did it in both parts of Jack Tamburri’s thesis show, Iphigenia Among the Stars, and he does it again in both parts of Cloud Nine.  Joshua is anything but a caricature; he’s a complex witness to a world that tries desperately to hide its truths from itself, and his “Christmas song” is a plaintive grasp at love from someone denuded of his own identity in favor of an invention.  It’s one of the finest moments in the play.

In the second half, after a curtain painted as a Union Jack has fallen to the floor, we enter the post-punk era of Margaret Thatcher.  It’s a brave new world in which women like Victoria (that doll grown up, we’re meant to assume, despite the leap in time) can leave an earnest, well-meaning and hilariously “progressive” husband (Theis, in a sustained comic role) in favor of, first, Lin, a recently divorced single- mother lesbian (Sorenson, lower class than Vickie), and, later, a sexual ménage à trois with Lin and her own bisexual brother—little Edward (Hessler), now grown into a sensitive cross between his earlier, feminized self and Harry, the manly explorer he adored back there in Part One.  The cavorting about on a picnic blanket by Vickie, Lin and Edward is not only intense, it’s also preceded by an invocation of “the goddess.”  While that sort of thing should invite acerbic parody in our time—aren’t the New Agey trappings of the New Woman of the Seventies as risible as the era’s Sensitive Man?—the trio manages to turn the moment into a liberated expression of collective ecstasy. Almost.

Act Two, then, isn’t all farce but aimed at something like a naturalized representation of people trying to find their way in the minefield of human relationships.  The emotional center is Vickie and she gets a sensitive portrayal, with spirited support from Meaney’s newly divorced Betty, looking like a Thatcher wanna-be and yet displaying the good sense to embrace the moment’s potential, and from Bannow’s feckless but direct Gerry—as Edward’s sometime lover he exudes the kind of low-key sexual know-how that seems never to go out of date.

Where the play loses some of the moorings that helped give power to Part One is in the part of Cathy—Lin’s little girl.  With pigtails and Clive’s handle-bar moustache, in a short velvet frock above manly legs, Levey is let run rampant as a kind of androgynous, butch pixie of the Id.  With prepubescent preening, tantrums, and naughty asides, Levey is so riotously girlish he becomes a one-man drag show, but there’s no room for something Part One had and Part Two needs: the sensitivity with which the child—Edward, in Part One—was allowed to put heart into the play via understated comedy.

In Churchill’s script, the actor playing Clive—the ultra-male bastion of all things British—must become a little girl in Part Two, and Bordelon’s production lets us see how such a transformation is no transformation, really, since, Clive or Cathy, it’s Levey’s role to dominate the scene, as Cathy dominates her well-meaning but somewhat clueless elders.  It’s prescient, certainly, as patriarchy makes way for . . . pueri-archy?

Cloud Nine By Caryl Churchill Directed by Margot Bordelon

Scenic Designer: Kate Noll; Costume Designer: Elivia Bovenzi; Lighting Designer: Masha Tsimring; Sound Designer: Sam Ferguson; Composer: Palmer Hefferan; Production Dramaturgs: Emily Reilly, Alexandra Ripp; Stage Manager: Sonja Thorson

Yale School of Drama January 22-26, 2013

Weighty Issues

When it comes to our looks, almost all of us have issues.  Should we battle those issues and strive to overcome them, or should we work to alter our appearance?  That’s one of the questions asked by Laura Jacqmin’s January Joiner: A Weight Loss Horror Comedy, playing at the Long Wharf Stage II, directed by Eric Ting.  Set in a “fat farm” in Florida, the play focuses on three characters dealing with weight issues.  Terry (Ashlie Atkinson) needs to lose weight for health reasons, and she’s adamant about doing so.  Her sister Myrtle (Meredith Holzman) doesn’t feel her weight is an issue, and takes a more quizzical look at the weight-loss program.  The only other enrollee in this off-period is Darnell, or Big D (Daniel Stewart Sherman), a “fat-proud” Minnesota native who comes back year after year “for the people.”

Staged against a long bank of frosted glass, terminating, at times, in a vending machine, January Joiner is streamlined in appearance and in its script.  We get some backstory for each character—particularly in the story told by the main instructor, Brian (Anthony Bowden), that explains where he comes from and why he’s concerned about his body.  Since most of us are concerned with our bodies in one way or another, the stories the characters tell about themselves carry an element of immediate identification.

The stand-out characterization in the play comes from Tonya Glanz as April, an uptight, relentlessly hyper instructor who has the hots for Brian—thwarted—and who seethes with righteousness about her super-trim—“svelte,” as she would have it—form.  The play doesn’t really have a villain, but April is the character we’re not meant to sympathize with—and Glanz brings a brittle, boyish-girl quality to the role that helps with the humor at the character’s expense.

As Darnell, the character who is meant to evince the most sympathy, Sherman is good at giving us D’s forced brightness, a quality he has clearly learned so as to avoid whining, which would be much easier.  We easily believe that the social interactions at Evolve are more important to him and his self-esteem than his weight is, and that’s why the tragedy that befalls him seems a bit unearned.  The blow to the ego that he suffers is important because it works with the play’s theme that improving our appearances doesn’t necessarily improve us, but it’s hard to believe he would take it so hard.

The key character for the “tragic” aspect of the play is Terry.  Played initially by Atkinson, Terry is likeable, easy-going and giggly; in the second half of the play, after she starts to see results, she is played by Maria-Christina Oliveras.  But the fact that the character Oliveras plays is called “Not-Terry” immediately lets us in on the dynamic involved.  Not-Terry is driven, impatient and cutting.  As she “cuts away the fat”—to use the terms April exhorts them with—she also cuts away a lot of her empathy for others and her willingness to see someone like Darnell as a potential boyfriend.

The linchpin of the plot is Myrtle.  She’s the one who initially is troubled by the demonic vending machine and its ominous tendencies, and she is the one for whom Brian, very unprofessionally—in a good comic sequence—develops “hard feelings,” so to speak.  We could be watching a story of true love in weight loss, where only the one not concerned with her body finds love, but Jacqmin’s plot is a little more complicated than that.  Terry, or rather Not-Terry, has her own designs on Brian, and maybe the sister with the more “svelte” body that will get the guy.

If this sounds like it’s adding up to an einy-meiny-miny-moe for Brian—or maybe it’s a judgment of Paris—choosing amongst thin (April), heavier (Not-Terry) and heaviest (Myrtle), that’s because it is.  So when Darnell shows up at one point with wings, we might be meant to think more of Cupid than an angel.  Which is to say the romantic aspects of the play override both its comedy and horror elements, though both are certainly present.

One of the more jarring aspects of the show is the use of the vending machine: it seems to represent all that is fraught with guilt and unease about the process of dieting, but it also has a homicidal side that matches to the idea that “improving” oneself also means “doing away with” an earlier self.  That theme is what keeps January Joiner interesting.  What keeps it amusing is its ability to show us the attitudes we have about weight and make us laugh at them.  The cast, both thin and plus-sized, is very game in that regard, having to do sit-ups—there’s one very funny sequence with Myrtle spotting for Darnell—and work out as well as cavort about in revealing costumes.

There are good effects throughout, via Set (Narelle Sissons), Lighting (Stephen Strawbridge) and Sound (Leah Gelpe)—the scary machine, and the suggestion of a swimming pool, and the beds/counters that rise from the floor.  Some of the dramatic elements don’t fully jell—for all the fun of the evil vending machine, its contribution has little to do with the plot—but what keeps the play appealing is its appeal to situations we can readily recognize.  Somewhere between Darnell’s fatalistic “it’s all in the genes” and Not-Terry’s steely efforts to cut away, through will power, the part of her she doesn’t want is where most of us reside, trying to look better without necessarily also trying to be better.  January Joiner weighs in on the importance of the latter over the former.

January Joiner A Weight Loss Horror Comedy By Laura Jacqmin Directed by Eric Ting

Set Design: Narelle Sissons; Costume Design: Oana Botez; Lighting Design: Stephen Strawbridge; Sound Design: Leah Gelpe; Casting: James Calleri, CSA; Production Stage Manager: Matthew Melchiorre

Long Wharf Theatre January 9-February 10, 2013

The Teen Scene

All of What You Love and None of What You Hate, the first show of the Yale Cabaret’s spring semester, starts things off with a visceral play that keeps its audience off balance.  What at first might seem to be a satire of online self-presentations, the gap between parents and teens, and the gap between the genders, turns out to be more fraught than that: it’s also about teen pregnancy and the difficult, and scarring, choice of abortion, and the attitudes and mores of the kids in the hood. YSD first year playwright Phillip Howze establishes himself from the get-go as a skilled manipulator of the vernacular—the lines here grasp the peculiarities of personal usage, set within the context of a lingua franca that all the teen characters have internalized.  At least part of the play’s focus is on rendering the kind of “group mind” that teens inhabit in their collective effort to “grow up.”  The situation that Girl A (Zenzi Williams) faces—at fifteen—shows how ill-considered that effort can be.  And yet, the play seems to say, such is a part of life for far too many teens at risk.

We might ask why Girl A doesn’t “know better”: we don’t get definite answers.  Her mother, played with steely prissiness by Prema Cruz, is not entirely unsympathetic, but, with her own efforts to find a man the main thing we know about her (besides the fact that she also has an infant and no husband), we can assume she’s just not there enough to steer her daughter.  Girl B (Tiffany Mack), Girl A’s best friend, is more balanced, seeming to have control over the urges that lead the young astray—but, when it comes down to it, she’s too into herself to be much help to her friend.

That’s not to say that the play is out to point fingers—though the fecklessness of Boy (Cornelius Davidson), the young man who fucks and then wants to forget Girl A, is certainly pointed—but rather to give us a ringing sense of reality.  To that end the voices that act as chorus—coming out of the dark or provided by perambulating figures in hoodies—help us hear how the choices of a Girl A are spun and rung and sung by that “everybody” we’re always aware of, looking over our shoulders, casting stones.

In the end, what are we to make of Girl A?  Played with passive sullenness throughout most of the play, she speaks to us in monologue after the trial by fire of her self-administered abortion: when she says she wanted something but didn’t even know what she wanted, we hear her, in a kind of flashback, tease as a proud young girl enticing a guy, and when she returns to her sadder but wiser voice, Howze and Tarker and Williams give her a stance that makes this girl’s problem our problem.  “You feel me?” she asks.  Yes, we do.

Good work by all in the mostly First Year production, directed by Kate Tarker.  The staging is perhaps a bit too “proscenium” for those who expect more fluid use of space from the Cab, but putting it all on a stage makes what we see a deliberate staging, and that helps us keep our distance.  Lighting, music, scenic design, and projections all add dimension to this dynamic production, full of notable Cab debuts.

All of What You Love and None of What You Hate By Phillip Howze Directed by Kate Tarker

Choreographer: Jabari Brisport; Co-Scenic Designers: Portia Elmer, Mariana Sanchez; Costume Designer: Grier Coleman; Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason; Co-Sound Designers: Pornchanok Kanchanabanca, Sang Ahm; Projection Designer: Paul Lieber; Dramaturg: Helen C. Jaksch; Stage Manager: Rob Chikar; Co-Producers: Stephanie Rolland, Sarah Williams

The Yale Cabaret January 17-19, 2013

Broadway on York with George

Rarely does Broadway come to York Street, but Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George, the thesis show from YSD directing student Ethan Heard, brings to the University Theater a sense of the “big production.”  Heard’s approach, with Scenic Designer Reid Thompson, makes the most of the huge stage space at the UT, letting props rise and fall, letting the wings remain visible throughout, setting the orchestra at the back of the stage, using a raised, tilted platform as “la grande jatte”—the setting for French painter Georges Seurat’s neo-impressionist masterpiece—and staging the scenes in George’s studio at the footlights. Not only does Heard’s production use stage space in all its variety, it uses painterly space in interesting ways: there are empty canvas frames to let us see George (Mitchell Winter) at work, and hanging sketches to show us what he’s  so busily working on.  When one of the sketches explodes into color thanks to some wonderful work with projections (Nicholas Hussong), the visual panache of the show ratchets up a notch.  All in all, the show is a spectacular, from the care with which the costumes (Hunter Kaczorowski) match the figures in Seurat’s painting, to the use of compositional space in arranging the figures, to the effects of color and light (Oliver Watson, Lighting Design) able to suggest the Neo-Impressionist’s approach, to—in Act Two, set in the Eighties—hanging TVs and subtly illuminated canvases, to say nothing of one helluva blue suit.

In the cast, the star of the show is Monique Bernadette Barbee as George’s girlfriend and reluctant model, Dot, and, in Act Two, as Marie, Dot’s daughter who claims George as her father.  Barbee seems simply born to be on a stage, able to find Dot’s roguish nature, her plaintive bid to be George’s main love—she loses out to painting—and her strength in “moving on.”  As Marie, Barbee's delivery of “Children and Art,” hunched in a wheel-chair, is the most affecting segment of Act Two, and her bravura opening song of Act One, “Sunday in the Park with George” is, frankly, a hard act to follow.  The play starts off with its best bit, in other words, and we have to wait awhile before anything as enthralling takes place again.

Along the way, there’s fun with two culture vultures, Jules (Max Roll) and Yvonne (Ashton Heyl), in “No Life,” movement and mood from the entire company in “Gossip” and “Day Off”—Robert Grant handles the physicality of Boatman well, and Marissa Neitling and Mariko Nakasone are chipper and silly as Celeste 1 and Celeste 2—and “Beautiful,” a thoughtful song delivered in a sparkling vocal by a reminiscing Old Lady (Carmen Zilles).  The professional and personal setbacks of George are paralleled to his increasing obsession with his method, and that’s enough to keep the wheels turning within a set that never stays still.

And Act One does deliver a great ending to match the great beginning: the entire Company—and all the tech assistance—is to be commended for making “Sunday” come together.  It’s the sequence in which the pieces of George’s great canvas finally fall into place, and it’s one of those theatrical moments often referred to as a “triumph of the human spirit,” except here it’s actually the triumph of artistic method.  Sunday on the Isle of La Grand Jatte is the painting that showed the full artistic possibilities of Seurat’s method, generally called “pointillism” (after the French word “point” or “dot”), and seeing the composition come together, as George, singing his mantra, moves the quarrelsome and busy-body characters into their defining places, in a burst of color and with the best melody in the play, gives one of those curtains that theater is all about.

The problem is that Sunday in the Park with George has little to offer by way of an Act Two.  Perhaps, in the Eighties, when the play debuted, seeing the Eighties artworld put on stage had a freshly satirical edge, but from our standpoint now, it’s just an excuse to dress up the characters in clothes of yet another “period” (I particularly liked the costumes for George (Winter, as Seurat’s alleged great-grandson), Naomi Elsen (Ashton Heyl, as a stagey video artist), Blair Daniels (Carmen Zilles, as a brittle art critic) Billy Webster (Matt McCollum, in quintessential art connoisseur duds), and Alex (Dan O’Brien, reeking of SoHo).  Indeed, looking the part is pretty much being the part in Act Two, as there is even less in the way of characterization available for these actors.  Again, it’s Barbee, as Marie and Dot, who gets the plum bits, and she delivers; Barbee's rascally Marie upstaging her grandson at his art expo makes her very much Dot's daughter.

As Act One George, Winter does intensity well, making us feel how driven and difficult George can be.  His best song segment is the playful mocking of his models and patrons in the voice of two dogs in “Day Off,” and in duet with Barbee for the quite affecting number “We Do Not Belong Together,” a song that spells out the romantic chasm between the lovers.  In Act Two, Winter and the Company put a lot of energy into “Putting It Together” but there’s something in his manner that makes this George not matter to us.  Ostensibly, the point is to bring present-day George into line with previous century George, but there’s not much pay-off in that happening because there doesn’t seem to be much at stake.

As entertainment, the play’s comedy is a bit wan, having to do mostly with hypocritical French bourgeois and stupid American tourists (Matt McCollum and Carly Zien—we could’ve used more of them) of the 19th century, and preening, pretentious art-world aficionados of the 20th.  Even with its clever opening song, “It’s Hot Up Here,” which matches the discomfort of actors forced to remain motionless with figures frozen on a canvas for all time, Act Two is mostly anti-climax.

The YSD production works as an ambitious staging of a bit of Broadway and its pleasures are not to be missed.  Sondheim and Lapine are best at characterizing that sequence of Sundays in the park, and Heard and company are best at putting all the pieces together.  As the song says, “There are worse things.”

Sunday in the Park with George Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim Book by James Lapine Directed by Ethan Heard

Musical Director, Conductor, Orchestrator: Daniel Schlosberg; Scenic Designer: Reid Thompson; Costume Designer: Hunter Kaczorowski; Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason; Sound Designer: Keri Klick; Projection Designer: Nicholas Hussong; Production Dramaturg: Dana Tanner-Kennedy; Stage Manager: Hannah Sullivan

Yale School of Drama December 14-20, 2012

Photographs by T. Charles Erickson

The Star's Turn

The renovated Long Wharf Theatre has debuted with The Killing of Sister George, featuring a star turn by Kathleen Turner.  The play seems a curious choice: an all-female play that recreates a somewhat dated view of lesbian relationships from the England of 1964.  The original play, by Frank Marcus, has been adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher to lend a bit more nuance to the characters, but without altering its most troublesome fact: it’s set in a Britain still enamoured of its wireless broadcasts, which were full of sentimental evocations of a world where Sister George—the character Turner’s June Buckridge plays on a BBC Radio Programme—is a beacon of good works and selfless behaviour in a rural village.  The humour of the play—which does not really aim at camp—relies upon a wry dryness in evoking British quirks that simply doesn’t translate well to an all-American cast in our day.  Consequently, the play, as directed by Turner, feels a bit compromised, as if in search of a new unifying perspective that eludes it.

The point of the play, though, still manages to come through, once we get past the faux British mannerisms, and that point has to do with a tough-as-nails, matronly star getting her comeuppance from the BBC for fractious behavior and, what’s worse, losing her role as the beloved Sister George simply because the powers that be insist upon a change.  The arbitrariness of fortune afflicts everyone, even prized actors—a lesson that may have attracted Turner to the part.  Her version of June is brash and barking.  Some of the best bits are delivered with the cutting swagger of Alan Bates at his most truculent, and the strength of the role is in the fact that June never drops her caustic assessment of the weaknesses of those around her.  Despite the mawkishness of Sister George, the character that has been her claim to fame, June has no tolerance for the bathetic in day-to-day life.

The play is built upon the tension of liking someone we’d rather dislike—though the role never quite gets to the “love to hate” level, if only because Turner is so deft at exposing June’s insecurities.  Her flat-mate and paramour, Alice, aka Childie (Clea Alsip), is a case in point: she’s a child-woman much older than she seems, preferring a somewhat anxious life as June’s whipping-girl and factotum to life fending for herself.  The conceit that Marcus/Hatcher explore is that co-dependence is a compromise that will eventually suck away one’s life (Alice) or leave one exposed to an emotional comeuppance (June).  The two play off each other well, with Alsip’s Childie obviously cannier than June gives her credit for; blinded by Childie’s willingness to be an abused “bottom” to her own bullying “top,” June little suspects her paramour may outgrow her.

The most affecting moment from the point of view of the love story between June and Childie is when the two, decked out for a fancy dress ball, cavort in the guise of Laurel and Hardy.  We glimpse not only archetypes for their love-hate relationship, but also the camaraderie of their life together.  Of course, it’s shortly after this that things take a turn for the worse.

The villain in the piece, from June’s point of view, is Mrs. Mercy Croft (Betsy Aidem, making the most of it), a hatchet-woman of the BBC—and also a radio personality in her own right for her broadcast bromides—whose clipped politesse is anathema to June, and who manages to woo Childie with flattery of her literary gifts.  One suspects that Marcus has seen this sort of thing enough—a younger prize up for grabs between wheedling elders—to give it the right tone of arch inevitability.  The satisfaction of the play, in the end, is in seeing June not cave-in.  Turner—as director and actress—has the guts to let the play maintain the principles of June’s scorn.

The set and costumes—as is generally the case when Long Wharf goes for ‘period’—are quite good.  June and Childie live in a kind of over-stuffed world where the older woman’s trophies and plaques vie for space with the younger woman’s collection of Victorian dolls (June likes to threaten horrible fates for one called Emmeline whenever Childie gets out of line).  Costuming for Turner is particularly appropriate, as she sets off twinges of memory recalling Simone Signoret in the Sixties.

The Long Wharf continues to develop its penchant for middling comedies that might be spinnable into something more.  Here, the sadomasochistic touches are neither campy nor creepy enough to give us much purchase on what Marcus had in mind.  The Killing of Sister George is not entirely bloodless—there’s a great speech from Mercy, late in the play, about the BBC’s wisdom in choosing its sacrificial victims, and one imagines that anyone whose career is not immune to the whims of management will identify with June’s final utterances. Bracing and brash, and never bathetic, Turner’s Sister George is worth catching.

The Killing of Sister George has made a “killing” in selling more tickets on one day (November 26th, Cyber Monday) than at any time in the Long Wharf’s history.  A star gracing the stage at the Long Wharf's newly renovated C. Newton Schenck Theatre is reason enough, perhaps, for the flood of interest.  The seating is greatly improved and the lobby and façade are more graceful, but Stage II also hit a new record with Satchmo at the Waldorf in the fall.  Unlike certain larger venues in the vicinity, the Long Wharf is more than ever the place—on both stages—to see great acting up close and comfortably.

Kathleen Turner in The Killing of Sister George By Frank Marcus Adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher Directed by Kathleen Turner

Set Design: Allen Moyer; Costume Design: Jane Greenwood; Lighting Design: John Lasiter; Sound Design/Composer: John Gromada; Miss Turner Wig Design: Paul Huntley; Dialect Coach: Deborah Hecht; Stage Manager: Bryce McDonald; Assistant Stage Manager: Amy Patricia Stern; Casting: Pat McCorkle Casting, Ltd.

Photographs by T. Charles Erickson, courtesy of Long Wharf Theatre

Long Wharf Theatre November 28-December 23, 2012

Poets of the Post

There’s no doubt that Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell were two of the most gifted poets of their generation.  And there’s no doubt that theirs was a long-lived relationship of, to some degree, kindred spirits.  Nor is there any surprise in finding that their letters to each other are well worth reading—as glimpses into the working process, into the world of letters in the first exciting decades of post-World War II America, and into the always fraught and dramatic life that seemed de rigueur for any world-conquering poet of the day.  And Dear Elizabeth, the play by Sarah Ruhl adapted from the letters of Bishop and Lowell, and directed by Les Waters, at the Yale Repertory Theatre, dispels any doubt that poets in their prose can make for compelling, moving and satisfying drama. Granted, it helps to be interested in the writing life, and, perhaps, in the relation of these two rare birds, but Dear Elizabeth’s greatest assets are characters who are articulate about their lives, and a time-scheme that roves through the thirty years—from 1947 to 1977—during which the poets corresponded, finding the highlights that make a relationship a story.  The lifelong trade-off began shortly after they first met and continued until Lowell’s death—indeed, Bishop’s last letter to her friend was in the mail when she learned of his fatal heart attack at age 60 (Bishop, six years Lowell’s senior, outlived him by two years).

Creating theater out of the necessarily fragmented view of a relationship contained in letters is no small task, but it’s aided here by the considerable brio with which the letters were written, and by the fact that there was drama enough in the writers’ lives.  During the period covered by the play, Lowell moved from first wife to second to third, and had children with the latter two; Bishop’s partner, architect Lota de Macedo Soares, with whom she began living in Brazil in 1951, committed suicide in 1967.  And, from time to time, Lowell was placed under care for attacks of mania, while both poets had on-and-off affairs with the bottle.  In Ruhl’s version, all interlocutors are left offstage; this is a two-person play illuminating how, for writers (and their readers) what they say to each other in writing is the measure of whatever happens in the mundane world where real lives are led.

Ruhl’s script carefully weaves bits of the correspondence into a love story of sorts.  After years of collegial affection, Lowell (Jefferson Mays) seems ready to make things more intimate, perhaps even permanent—one of the most naked moments in the play is when Lowell looks back on an evening when it seemed possible to imagine Bishop and himself as husband and wife, stating that he nearly took the chance to propose but chose to wait for the right moment.  Whatever she actually felt about such confessions, Bishop (Mary Beth Fisher) plays it close to the chest, neither repudiating her would-be lover nor giving him any encouragement.  And yet, as played on stage, Fisher’s Bishop seems a woman who, initially, might be infatuated with Lowell enough to give him the impression he nearly acted on.  At times, Bishop’s replies to Lowell, as he exults about fatherhood or advertises a new bride, seem brittle with envy if not jealousy.

Lowell, meanwhile, tends to brood, moving into so-called ‘confessional poetry’ as a means to make his life meaningful as art.  The play gets some tension out of a terse and anxious exchange when Lowell, in his late poem “The Dolphin,” chooses to use excerpts—doctored to suit his purpose—from letters his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick wrote.  The strength of Bishop’s condemnation of mixing “fact and fiction” spills over into what we might consider to be the sacred and private bond between correspondents—whether Lowell and Hardwick or Lowell and Bishop—so that Bishop, we might say, is seeing her own confidence violated in Lowell’s betrayal of Hardwick.  Even more to the point, her harangue at Lowell might extend beyond his poem to Dear Elizabeth itself, where words never meant to be dramatized find themselves become a script.  Whatever Bishop’s misgivings might be, we accept Ruhl’s intervention: public lives are always to some extent theatrical, and those who write must be ready to be re-written.

As theatrical experience, Dear Elizabeth uses scenic ingenuity to distract us from the fact that everything this play means is in the writing, in the fascinating signals, suggestions, confessions, comments, poem crits, and corrections that these two gifted persons choose to share with one another.  Les Waters and Scenic Designer Adam Rigg have concocted some technical marvels—waters flood the stage at certain times, either stranding the two poets high and dry or allowing Lowell to pace about like a lecturer wading into the shallows.  Elsewhere, Lowell, in one of his manic phases, hitches a ride on a crescent moon through a door.  And, in a tableau that seems quite eloquent about the poets’ respective reputations after death, Bishop, saying she would like to write from another planet, ascends on a mini-planetarium while Lowell gazes up at her from below.  Such stunts could be said either to distract us unnecessarily from the main matter at hand or to provide some moments of visual stimulation in an otherwise static setting—the basic set is a stunningly accurate early Sixties-ish “brown study,” lit to give us times of day and projected upon to give us a sense of the outdoors that the oft-traveling duo travel through.  Such effects mostly work and add interest, though that’s not to say one couldn’t easily imagine a stripped-down version of the play, without the Rep’s technical resources, dispensing with special effects and letting glowing prose provide all the color.

As Bishop, Fisher ages well into the part, from bright-eyed and young, she becomes bright-voiced and older.  Her sense of Bishop’s steadiness never really flags, not even when the poet is getting a bit sloshed and an able stage-hand (Josiah Bania) has to come in to relieve her of her bottle, nor when she's forced to type one-handed due to an operation.  We can intuit Bishop’s demons, but, in the letters used here, she mostly presents Lowell with a stoic outlook on her own travails and his, and crisp commentary on the same.  And Lowell is recreated in a spot-on interpretation so close to the original it's magical: Mays wields the vaguely distracted air and the intense glare, the voice of bemused befuddlement delivering choice aperçus, and, of course, his Lowell is readier than Bishop to wear his Weltschmerz on his sleeve, but never—here anyway—becoming tedious about it.

Dear Elizabeth is a wonderful evocation of friendship, of the passion for the word that can unite lives that but rarely shared the same space—a few “interludes” presented in dumb-show capture the sometimes awkward, or worse, occasions when these two geniuses found themselves in each other’s presence.  The play is wise and wistful, and delights with its slightly arch attitude toward persons who, in their rather single-minded pursuit of the art they shared in common, led messy lives they were never done commenting upon.  Ruhl and Waters also let us consider that behind or beside the gimmicks of art, the rhetoric of poetry, and the feints of personality is, as Dickinson would say, “where the meanings are.”

Dear Elizabeth By Sarah Ruhl A play in letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and back again Directed by Les Waters

A World Premiere

Scenic Designer: Adam Rigg; Costume Designer: Maria Hooper; Lighting Designer: Russell H. Campa; Sound Designer: Bray Poor; Projection Designer: Hannah Wasileski; Production Dramaturg: Amy Boratko; Casting Director: Tara Rubin Casting; Stage Manager: Kirstin Hodges; Original Music by Bray Poor and Jonathan Bell

Photographs by Joan Marcus, courtesy of The Yale Repertory Theatre

Yale Repertory Theatre November 30-December 22, 2012

A Choice Play

With Dilemma! the Yale Cabaret closed the first semester of the 2012-13 season this past weekend.  Conceived by Michael Bateman and created by an ensemble of players and an artistic team mostly working outside their disciplines, Dilemma! is an interactive play that demands audience participation.  Stopping the action with a chiming sound and the word “dilemma,” MC Ben Fainstein puts to the crowd two choices faced by the characters at that moment.  Once a choice is made, the play continues until the next dilemma arises, with the audience gaining a rooting interest as their choices are followed or not. The story takes its cue from a major storm situation like Hurricane Sandy with power outages and scarce resources: two roommates, Hugh (Hugh Farrell) and Sarah (Sarah Krasnow), receive a desperate call from their other roommate, Larry: he’s stuck in an elevator and the water level is rising!  Hugh and Sarah, in comical panic mode, begin to rush about trying to find a map to where he is, a car to get them there, and various implements that they will need to rescue their hapless friend.  Rather than a treasure hunt with clues to find the needed objects, Dilemma! presents the duo with a series of situations involving one or two interlocutors who they must decide how to deal with: do they, for instance, steal a useful shovel from a somewhat daft old woman trying to free her “pussies” from a prison of debris, or should they waste valuable time aiding her? Should they fulfill the condition of a truculent barkeep and car owner—find him a live musical act that can play with no electricity—in order to use his car to drive to Larry’s aid, or simply deck the dude and take the keys?  Such are the decisions before the audience, with the winning vote determining what path our “avatars” will follow.

The mechanism by which deciding votes are cast for one choice or the other varies, which in turn contributes to how things go.  If the whole crowd chooses, you can get a very different outcome than if the choice is left to one table or one argument.  The variety of methods, and Fainstein’s quick choices of how to decide, kept everyone guessing—who is really directing this show?  And where is it going?  What’s more, some of the choices are clearly crucial to the plot—the one about the inhaler (Sarah has asthma), for instance—while others simply force one to make a moral choice—who gets a scarce flashlight, who gets punched out for information—that make little difference to the story’s outcome, but which might affect one’s satisfaction with how our avatars play the game.  At a certain point it became clear that the real point might not simply be rescuing Larry, but how dirty “our” hands would be by that point, and, also, ethics aside, how much fun we would have getting there.  Sometimes the best choice from the view of expediency is not the best choice from the point of view of dramatic or comic interest.

In the end, it’s likely that no one is completely happy with the outcome.  The Cab posted the tallies for each choice on Facebook, though without the flowchart that would be necessary to see which choice followed which.  Certain possibilities were never explored—Larry was always in love with Hugh, not Sarah, for instance—and the final outcomes—Larry is rescued, or a group of strangers, also trapped, is rescued instead—balanced out.

Everyone in the play—Fainstein, Farrell, Krasnow, Rachel Carpman, Zach LeClair, Dan Perez—acquitted themselves well.  Bateman and the Ensemble offer, cleverly, situations in which there are winners and losers, and one’s attitude toward that is often determined by whether or not one feels the right person is winning.  Dilemma! made for an engaging evening of theater that felt almost like a spectator sport. It was quite fun, and more exciting if you felt strongly about one choice or another.   The situations could be silly or sinister; the consequences might be lethal or laughable—along the way we might reflect on how much violence and illegality we’ll accept in the name of an emergency, and, the ultimate dilemma, do we want a play to end happily or unhappily?  And for whom?

Dilemma! Conceived by Michael Bateman Created by Ensemble Director: Michael Bateman; Set/ Projection/Lighting Designer: Christopher Ash; Costume Designer: Seth Bodie; Sound Designer: Matt Otto; Technical Director: James Lanius; Dramaturg: Rachel Carpman; Stage Manager/Producer: Reynaldi Lolong

Yale Cabaret December 6-8, 2012

The Yale Cabaret’s Spring Season will begin on January 17th.

Kitty Skits

The Yale Cabaret is back for two more shows before the semester ends and the holidays begin.  Up now is Cat Club, with two final shows tonight, and next weekend is Dilemma. Cat Club was created by an ensemble group: Paul Lieber, Timothy Hassler, Benjamin Fainstein, Hansol Jung, and Kate Tarker, with Lieber and Hassler in the guise of two cats—cool cats, yes, but also scaredy cats—who host a program rather reminiscent of that show those two dudes in Aurora, IL, got up to in a suburban basement.  Yet there’s no need to harken to the public access days of cable, this is quirky comedy for the YouTube generation: Cat Club takes its name from a DIY program uploaded by Leelu Cutie Special, a little girl with cat ears, on the public site known for spawning viral views of often embarrassingly or riotously amateurish entertainment.

Lieber, Hassler, and Company go for something similar: the show we’re allegedly watching—as the TV audience—features opening and closing songs, a cooking demonstration, and an interview with the duo’s “biggest fan,” a segment that flirts with “dead air” the way some of the ground-breaking TV comedy of Andy Kaufman did, in his stand-up years.  Like great comedy teams of yore—whether that means The Smothers Brothers or Wayne and Garth—Cat (Hassler, in the speckled costume) and his adopted brother Cat (Lieber, in the black and white costume) are often provoking each other, squelching each other, and backing each other up.  They’re also willing to risk prop misfires, audience back-chat, dropped or batted ad-libs, and a scripted power failure, all for the sake of the high-wire of “live TV.”

As scripted, Cat Club gives us three episodes—and that’s where the trouble lies.  Concluding each segment and opening the next takes the wind out of the sails pretty quickly—even with the amusing fake TV commercials in between—and thus the show is never so appealing as in that first episode.  Even the windy pronouncements of the Fan are amusing the first time.  Still, I couldn’t help thinking that the progressive loss of fun was part of the point, as if we were to imagine Kitty Cat Estragon and Kitty Cat Vladimir waiting for the end of the show.  Stranded in live TV-land in cat costumes—could there be anything more absurd?  It’s a question that comes up because Cat Club is willing to let some existential dread waft in from time to time.

Were there more of that, it would be easier to say what the show—as a Cab show—is after.  As it is, the production showcases Lieber and Hassler as likeable comics—Lieber likes to sport with an avocado seed, while Hassler tends to be reactive—and as a songwriting duo.  A different song is played at each opening and closing of the show—doubtless the most compelling reason for the gimmick.  The songs are lively, and as singers the two complement each other well, but one wonders if standing on a mini-stage in cat costumes  is the best of all possible presentations for the material.

Two musicians in search of a variety show?  Perhaps, but if so, Cat Club would benefit from a little more variety.  There are reasons why a single Saturday Night Live skit doesn’t run for an hour.

Cat Club Conceived by, and all music and lyrics by Paul Lieber and Timothy Hassler

Created by Paul Lieber, Timothy Hassler, Benjamin Fainstein, Hansol Jung, and Kate Tarker

Director: Benjamin Fainstein; Set Designer: Solomon Weisbard; Costume Designer: KJ Kim; Lighting Designer: Solomon Weisbard; Sound Designer: Palmer; Asst. Sound Designer/ Mixer: Tyler Kieffer; Video Designer: Michael F. Bergmann; Technical Director: Matthew Groeneveld; Stage Manager: Will Rucker; Producer: Caitie Hannon

The Yale Cabaret November 29-December 1, 2012

The Mexican Fantastic

Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the FantasticEduardo Jiménez Mayo and Chris N. Brown, eds. (Small Beer Press, 2011)

From where I'm standing, Latin American literature in the United States is still more or less defined by magical realism, and the more colorful, soap-opera edge of magical realism at that, even as—as should be pretty obvious after a couple seconds' thought—the literature itself is much more diverse than that, and even though the countermovements to magical realism are at least a decade old. (Part of the problem, I think, is that fewer non-magical realist works are translated into English, because somebody thinks that English-speaking North Americans don't want to read about Latin America unless it also involves a thousand butterflies flying out of someone's mouth. Are they right?)

As the title implies, Three Messages and a Warning doesn't break realist writers for a American audience. It does, however, show that, even within the realm of the fantastic, literature written in Spanish has more going on than just magical realism. It also makes a compelling case for considering the works to be distinctly Mexican. Writers of the fantastic from other Spanish-speaking countries aren't represented in the book—and I'm not well-read enough to make the comparison myself—but the volume, taken as a whole, points to an aesthetic that the writers seem to share. A certain tone is struck, a certain taste runs through everything; it isn't quite like anything else I've read before, and it's on every page, even as the stories themselves are remarkably diverse.

There are stories of personal anxiety, touched with both humor and horror. In Amparo Dávila's "The Guest"—a cousin of Julio Cortázar's famous story "House Taken Over"—a stranger moves into a house and terrorizes the women living there, while the man of the house doesn't seem to care. In Alberto Chimal's "Variations on a Theme of Coleridge," a man gets a cell phone call, and then a visit, from himself. Guillermo Samperio's "Mr. Strogoff" is constructed as a breathless excerpt of a much longer story, of crime, betrayal, love, and corruption. In Óscar de la Borbolla's "Wittgenstein's Umbrella," seemingly everything that is possible happens to you—the story is written in the second person—in an astonishing four pages. Then there are stories of societal disarray, or straight-up apocalypse, though unlike the usual American version of it—it's zombies! It's a nuclear war!—the causes are stranger, more complicated, more difficult to understand or sort out. A city is overrun by lions ("Lions," by Bernardo Fernández, perhaps my favorite story in the book); a village is overrun by wolves ("Wolves," by José Luis Zárate). In "The Hour of the Fireflies," the country has been plagued by terrorism and a "war among the corporations," which leads the government (or someone) to justify a series of Tuskeegee-like experiments in a certain city. In what can be read as a pretty biting commentary on foreigners' (i.e., us) appreciation of magical realism and not much else from Latin America, the experiments, as a by-product, produce a flood of electrically charged fireflies that swarm the city every evening. The fireflies become a tourist attraction—"visitors from all over the globe pay exorbitant premiums to rent views of the street"—though the fireflies themselves are deadly, the charge from one of them enough to kill three people, which means no one who lives there can go out. Mauricio Montiel Figuerias' "Photophobia" and Liliana V. Blum's "Pink Lemonade" are both much grittier versions of society in total collapse, again from a confluence of several factors, taken from today's headlines. Finally, there are the metastories, which feel most familiar to people who've read, say, Borges and Cortazar: Agustín Cadena's "Murillo Park," in which a man has a friendship with an old woman whom he may or may not have dreamed; Carmen Rioja's "The Nahual Offering," in which the narrator dreams a character who may be dreaming her; Gabriela Damián Miravete's "Future Nereid," in which a woman reading an obscure book discovers that she might a character in it.

See what I mean about diversity? There's more where that came from, too. But about the commonality: What each of the stories share with the other is the overwhelming feeling that there is a much, much bigger story out there, beyond the ability of the narrator or the characters to comprehend, and that story is tinged not just with wonder and tragedy, but with outright menace, toward the narrator, toward society, toward the reader. It's this uniquely eerie sense of threat, just around the corner, just out of sight, that's tempting to label as Mexican—what the editors in the introduction describe as "a multicultural, media-drunk, post-postmodern society" whose "literary culture still enjoys mass appreciation of the importance of verse, where large crowds gather in public plazas to hear poets read their work" while it's simultaneously "plugged into the mediated networks that dominate our global perceptions"—even though the editors also point out that the "stories come from a culture that itself would probably never collect these authors in a single volume."

The sense of threat has some resonance in contemporary current events in Mexico: the persistent questions regarding just how much control the government really has over the place; the constant allegations of corruption; the increasingly unsettling sense that large-scale drug traffickers operate with impunity; the wave of murders in Ciudad Juarez, in which hundreds of women have been killed and nobody still seems to know who's doing it or why. (Roberto Bolaño barely fictionalizes these killings in the fourth, and, in my and apparently most people's opinions, best part of 2666, "The Part About the Crimes.") But it also resonates here, in our own insecurities and sense that things are getting a little out of control. U.S. culture is seeing its own wave of popularity of weird and postapocalyptic stuff; if this strain of pop culture is here to stay in the United States, then these writers on the other side of the border offer a way for it to move forward.

Manic Mamet

The Yale Cabaret is unexpectedly dark this weekend, so what’s a fan of New Haven theater to do? Answer: go see The New Haven Theater Company’s production of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, delivered in quick and dirty fashion by director George Kulp at UpCrown Creative Studios on Crown Street. The play builds upon triads to create a dilemma: three characters, three scenes, and a choice: which of two films to “green light.” For recently promoted movie producer Bobby Gould (J. Kevin Smith, anxiously expansive), it’s not simply a choice about which film would do better or make more money, it’s also a choice about loyalties, about love and lust, about—yes, even in Hollywood—responsibility. The situation also carries implications of sexual politics and office politics. With the Petraeus scandal currently running amok in the press, the NHTC has yet again pulled out of its hat a play that speaks to its moment.

Of the two films, one is a sure-fire blockbuster—a buddy prison picture that would be a vehicle for Doug Brown, a big-name star—while the other is a do-gooder: a film about “the end of the world” through a nuclear disaster (think: The Morning After). The first film is pitched by Charlie Fox (Steve Scarpa, aggressive and fast-talking).  Sweaty and dying for a coffee, Charlie is a friend and colleague of Bobby’s from way back, who now is poised to deliver the coup that will make them both rich men and set them on to bigger and better things. The Brown film is the proverbial pot of gold the rainbow’s end always promised.

When Charlie enters, Bobby is giving a “courtesy read” to the nuclear disaster novel and scorning it. The idea of making it into a film is poised to be a joke until. . . . Male sexual one-upmanship rears it head when the two men bet on Bobby’s ability to seduce his pretty, temporary secretary, Karen (Megan Keith Chenot, lithe and blithe), who seems to know nothing about the film business and not much about being a secretary. Seemingly guileless, in other words. And, in Charlie’s view, not slutty enough to sleep with Bobby “just because,” and also not ambitious enough to sleep with him just to get ahead. So, the wager: if Bobby can get her into bed, it will have to be on the basis of his own charms.

The play’s middle scene, then, is the seduction scene at Bobby’s place, and the final scene is the fall-out, so to speak, on the morning after (10 a.m., time for the do-or-die meeting with Ross, the man upstairs whose OK is needed for the Doug Brown project). Bobby is only going to pitch one film and his new “change of heart” (if we can call it that) is leaning toward the disaster picture. What about friendship?

The strength of this production is that it moves at a fast and furious pace—Scarp and Smith are gangbusters at delivering the rapid-fire speech Mamet is famous for, talking over each other, responding to cues before the other has finished speaking. The technique creates a believable social friction between two colleagues, also friends, who know each other’s moves and are happy to be on the same page. Things slow down a bit with Karen, who at first, seen through the men’s eyes, seems like the kind of prize that goes with being newly made kings. Chenot plays Karen with detached intelligence: she doesn’t fawn over the men nor try to entice, but in the scene at Bobby’s place, all comfy on the couch, we see that her matter-of-factness about the quid pro quo seduction surprises Bobby, who still thinks you have to use subterfuge in these matters.

It’s the sort of thing you don’t expect to find in Mamet: the scene is almost sweet and is gently comical. It also shows how easily the manipulator becomes the manipulated. Karen, you see, believes passionately in the nuclear disaster picture, called The Bridge. And that passion, now shared suddenly by Bobby, becomes the bridge between them.  This part of the play would benefit from Smith switching gears a little more to convince us Bobby is convinced.

The play’s outcome can be read various ways, and one of the demands of Speed-the-Plow is that the production has to decide which way it’s going to go. Are we meant to side with Charlie or with Karen? Which film is in the “best interests” of Bobby, and what exactly are those interests and when should personal interest in a project be set aside for some other criteria, more neutral or more noble, as the case may be?

Is The Bridge part of a temptation best set aside, or is it the path to salvation?

Kulp's direction goes for the pragmatism of the play, which makes sense since it's hard to see a moral high-ground in Mamet's vision. The final scene climaxes with gripping precision: Scarpa explodes without making a mess and Smith manages to salvage Bobby’s dignity even as we see that he has ceased being his own man.

This is entertaining Mamet, and the NHTC keeps its eye on the ball throughout, delivering a speedy Speed-the-Plow.  It goes by fast, and you might have to lean forward a little to catch it all.

The play shows for two more nights, three performances: Friday, 7 p.m.; Saturday, 4 & 7 p.m.

Speed-the-Plow By David Mamet Directed by George Kulp Produced by Drew Gray

Stage Manager: Erich Greene; Lighting Technician: Tom DeChello

New Haven Theater Company at UpCrown Creative Studios 216 Crown Street, New Haven

November 14, 16, 17, 2012

Milking It

The Yale Cabaret likes to take chances.  One of its chancier methods, as is the case with Joshua Conkel’s MilkMilkLemonade, is to cast an entire play with non-acting majors, here directed by an actor, Jabari Brisport.  Other students—both in YSD and in other schools at Yale—step out of their area of concentration to take part as well.  Sometimes this approach gives to the proceedings a feel of liberation from the strictures of theater—we have the sense that the play is open to everyone.  But it’s also an approach that works best, it seems to me, with plays that don’t have quite as many lines and as much busyness as MilkMilkLemonade does. It’s the story of Emory (Xaq Webb, winningly fey), a boy who likes to play with his Barbie-like doll, and who has befriended an enormous chicken he calls Linda (Lico Whitfield, in feathers and blonde wig, with his glasses and beard intact), but who also gets bullied by his “Rockin’ Nanna” (Melissa Zimmerman, surly, complete with oxygen mask and walker) for not doing what boys should do, and both bullied and molested by the local tough kid, Elliot (Bonnie Antosh, appealingly androgynous) for being, well, different. There’s also Lady in a Leotard (Heidi Liedke, perky) who helps with exposition and also interprets Linda’s clucks at times, as well as enacting the evil twin that Elliot imagines living inside him.   It all takes place on a chicken farm not too far from thriving Malltown where Emory would like to shop and have Cinnabon everyday.  He also wants to perform his ribbon dance routine on an American-Idol-like show on TV, thus rocketing to fame.

The cast is game, and there are more than a few comic instances—such as some cavorting in nude suits by Webb and Antosh, little sewn-on penises dangling, and Zimmerman’s changeable Nanna, gasping and shaky when it suits her purpose but otherwise—“I’ll outlive you all”—tough as nails, and everything Whitfield does is funny; I particularly liked his routine as a bad stand-up comedian of the Andrew Dice Clay variety.  Liedke is charming as Lady in a Leotard, but I found myself questioning at times Conkel’s choices in breaking up action with asides.  At the heart of it all is not simply “tolerance” of gays, but rather acceptance and understanding, as Emory and Elliot enact a sensitive scene in which they try to come to terms with what’s happening between them, made amusing by their idea of “playing house”: a bit of Tennessee Williamsesque vamping à la Stanley and Blanche.

MilkMilkLemonade has a lot on its plate, and a great, bright, kid-show-like set by Brian Dudkiewicz and Samantha Lazar, and fun costumes by Soule Golden. By its end the play seemed to be groping for what note it wanted to end on—an interlude between Linda and a spiteful spider with a ghetto attitude (Liedke with a recorded voice) seemed extraneous whimsy, and torching the chicken farm, I guess, a stab at liberating the oppressed.  MilkMilkLemonade runs long for the usually quick and dirty Cab, and could do with some trimming, though it does fulfill Andy Warhol’s dictum: “always leave them wanting less.”

Next week, due to unforeseen circumstances, Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs has been cancelled, which means the Cab will be dark for the next two weeks and return on November 29-December 1 with Cat Club, an entertainment act involving songs, cats, and cooking.

MilkMilkLemonade By Joshua Conkel Directed by Jabari Brisport

Set Designer: Brian Dudkiewicz; Assistant Set Designer: Samantha Lazar; Costume Designer: Soule Golden; Lighting Designer: Caitlin Smith Rapoport; Sound Designers: Steve Brush, Matt Otto; Dramaturg: Hugh Farrell; Stage Manager: Kate Ivins; Producer: Shane D. Hudson

Yale Cabaret November 8-10, 2012

Off With Their Heads

Is it possible to write a review of David Adjmi’s Marie Antoinette, now playing at the Yale Rep in a production directed by Rebecca Taichman, without mentioning the 99% or making some comment situating the play within the time of OWS unrest and the like?  Probably not, so I’m glad I got that out of the way. It’s a timely play, then, yes?  Mais oui et non.  Adjmi’s Marie (Marin Ireland) speaks like a contemporary airhead, certainly (and amusingly), but the play follows the timeline of the destruction of the reign of Louis VI closely, and peppers its dialogue with jibes au courant for the 1780s—name-dropping Rousseau, and joking about oaths in tennis courts, and taking potshots at that novel experiment in America: “common people can’t take care of themselves.  Democracy can’t work.”  We might take to heart the fate of a patron saint of the privileged as a send-up of what might befall those too high to fall, but Marie Antoinette isn’t really about cautionary catharsis.  And anyway, among historical moralists, for every leftist railing against the empowered, there’s a rightist reminding us of how chaotic and blood-thirsty the reign of “the people” is.  No morals where none intended, to paraphrase Beckett.

OK, so the play’s not quite political allegory, and it’s not quite historical drama, nor even quite historical fantasy.  It’s far too confectionery to want to give us a sense of lived history, but it does seem to have something on its mind, other than laughs, giddy women (Ireland, Hannah Cabell, Polly Lee) with 3-foot-tall wigs on their heads, a king (Steven Rattazzi) who reminded me of Abbott’s little buddy Costello and who likes to play with clocks, and a queen in a Bo-Peep outfit who converses with a sheep (David Greenspan).  Adjmi seems most interested in how a teenaged twit—Marie was married off by her mother at age 14—became the emblem of aristocratic indifference and noblesse indulge.  In his hands, Marie’s tale is the story of how a fashion queen became a scourge—a bit like how, in our day, every pop diva eventually gets dissed—while remaining, y’know, classic and iconic.

Riccardo Hernandez’s set, initially, is all bright colors and shine, with the characters positioned in it as if sitting ducks in an arcade. There are props to prop-up an illusion of surroundings, but this is a streamlined fantasy of court life as bodies in space, with very precise marks to hit.  Gabriel Berry’s costumes play in a lively space between period fashions and what our era might do with them, and, in the early going, the play has the feel of a lively burlesque of the eighteenth century.  Once Marie begins conscientiously to scrimp a bit on egregious ostentation, things get more straitened—and part of the drama is to watch her go from the absurd wigs to having her actual hair—turned white—shorn from her head by a Guard (Brian Wiles, great at steely contempt).

Such gestures are where most of the drama occurs, along with wonderful touches like an explosion of sound (Matt Hubbs, sound design) and fake dirt that expresses to visceral effect the loss of aristocratic status once the revolution comes, and a very powerful moment of echoing laughter from Louis, Marie and their son (Ashton Woretz) that speaks eloquently about the humanity of even the most detestable tyrant.  Here, the rulers aren’t detestable so much as clueless, which helps to pump some pathos into them, but, in the end, it also flattens them a bit too much into caricatures.  When Marie says, “Sometimes I feel like a game that other people play but without me,” it rings true—in part because the play plays her that way too, kind of like “Gidget Goes Regal.”

The great asset of this show—besides its look and sound—is Marin Ireland: her Marie is so vapidly winning or winningly vapid you hope to protect her from unsettling lessons about reality, and you do begin to feel something for someone who has to live such a relentlessly scrutinized life, even if her whining about it gets old.  Ireland’s performance scores so often on comic timing you’re never quite sure if you’re laughing at her or with her.  And isn’t that how it is with the upper-class: we know we can’t beat ‘em or join ‘em, so let’s be amused by them.  When things turn bleak, we’re not exactly going to embrace the likes of the Sauces (Fred Arsenault and Hannah Cabell), two rustics who grab the Royals on their bid for freedom, nor side much with a Guard who spits in his ex-sovereign’s face. Or are we?

That’s the sticking point of the play, really.  Its vignettes start to feel like the clips in a reality TV show, though instead of a make-over toward beauty, power and prestige, this one is going in the opposite direction—toward state-mandated death.  And we’re along for the ride, deciding at which point to disengage.  As the sheep (and this play could use more David Greenspan) says to Marie in a very chilling moment: “Step carefully.”

And if that tsunami of dirt makes you think of the famous line “aprés moi, le déluge,” often attributed to Louis’s dad, Louis XV, seeing the show soon after Hurricane Sandy might make the play’s “before and after” seem even closer to home.  C’est la vie, ma chérie, it goes to show you never can tell.

Marie Antoinette By David Adjmi Directed by Rebecca Taichman

Choreographer: Karole Armitage; Scenic Designer: Riccardo Hernandez; Costume Designer: Gabriel Berry; Christopher Akerlind: Lighting Designer; Matt Hubbs: Sound Designer; Matt Acheson: Puppet Designer; Jane Guyer Fujita: Voice Coach; J. David Brimmer: Fight Director; Tara Rubin Casting: Casting Director; Amanda Spooner: Stage Manager

Yale Repertory Theatre October 26-November 17, 2012

Photographs by T. Charles Erickson, courtesy of the Yale Repertory Theatre

Apotheosis, Anyone?

About fate they were never wrong, the ancient Greeks. In Euripides’ two plays centered on Agamemnon’s ill-fated daughter Iphigenia, as adapted into Iphigenia Among the Stars by Jack Tamburri and Ben Fainstein of Yale School of Drama and now playing at the Iseman Theater, fate decrees, first, that Iphigenia must be sacrificed so that the Greek fleets may depart Aulis for Troy, then that Iphigenia should, in Tauris, serve Artemis, the goddess who, in some versions of the story, spared the girl’s life.  Certainly, we might say that human life is at the mercy of the gods, but, in the Greek system of things, even the gods must bow to necessity (or ananke).

The problem with ancient Greek drama, generally, is that it seems so…ancient.  Its view of human affairs is not much encountered in our contemporary world—except in the Space Operas popular in science-fiction and fantasy films, and in comic books. Only in outlandish “other worlds” can characters—with a straight-face, as it were—speak of their own existence with the pomposity of personages who, in the Greek view of drama, were truly above and beyond the common run of mankind. The happy high concept of Tamburri’s Iphigenia is that it marries a telling grasp of the plays to staging, costuming, and set-design right out of Star Trek by way of the Marvel Comics Universe.

That may sound like a cue for campy take-offs of B-movie matinees featuring the likes of Steve Reeves or some other muscle-bound clod (like that Austrian weight-lifter turned actor turned governor), but that’s not the way Tamburri and company play it.  And the production wisely places Iphigenia at Tauris before Iphigenia at Aulis—so we get a more comic Act One before a heavier Act Two—thus allowing Iphigenia Among the Stars to end, more or less, with Iphigenia’s show-stopping speech in which the heroine (Sheria Irving, truly transported beyond this instant) concedes the need for her own death.

The plot is indeed served by this interesting arrangement of parts, but let’s talk about the design.  This is one you have to see for yourself.  The set and costumes go a long way to transport us to the feel of a Star Trek episode (the original series, in the Sixties)—the be-glittered Chorus (Ashton Heyl, Marissa Neitling, Carly Zien) seem like they should open with “when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars”—an effect helped by references to “the Oraculons.”  And when we finally meet Thoas, the King of Tauris (Winston Duke), we see a creature that seems to move like an animatronic illustration.  The Marvel Comics aesthetic is well-served not only by the colors (I don’t know what to call the blue worn by Orestes (Mamoudou Athie) and Pylades (Paul Pryce) but the Comix-lover in me loved it) but especially by an arch above the stage upon which projections (Michael F. Bergman) recreate at times the “background panels” of comics.  The projections also add a comic Comix touch to the moment when Achilles (Athie again, in successively more absurd—impressively so—costumes) thumps the ground with his fist, sparking some “clobberin’ time” animation.  And when shestalks into her temple at the end of Act One, Artemis (Ceci Fernandez) looks a bit like that big Destroyer thing Loki sent to earth to beat-up Thor, and sounds like a goddess on steroids.

And that’s just some of the fun on view. Did I mention how much I loved the capes worn by Agamemnon (Pryce) and Menelaus (Duke)?  OK, now I did.  And check out the canary yellow gown with black accents on Clytemnestra (Fernandez).  Then there’s the language itself—Thoas’ mannered utterances pleased me to no end, as did Chris Bannow, both as a Herdsman beside himself with TMI, and as an Old Slave more charming than The Robot on Lost in Space who has to “compute” the contrary and counterfactual messages he must deliver.  A real high point, in Act One, is the trenchant stichomythia between Iphigenia and Orestes leading to a truly affecting recognition scene.  Tamburri makes sure his cast makes the most of such question-and-answer exchanges—a comical instance takes place later in Act One between Thoas and Iphigenia, when the latter is stealing away with the temple icon.

As Iphigenia, Irving takes us through many changes—from the no-nonsense priestess ready to sacrifice prisoners for Tauris, to the softened sister of Orestes, ready to risk death to free him and Pylades and steal away with them, to a virginal girl, expecting to be married to great warrior Achilles, to a sacrificial figure herself, beseeching her own father for mercy, and, finally, the willing victim who, by that act, becomes something else: Heroic? Mythic? The Embodied Will of Ananke? A chick with super-powers?  How about all of the above?

As Artemis, Ceci Fernandez gets to end Act One with a bang and plays future regicide Clytemnestra with the mien of a haughty Westchester County matron—she’s fun!  Mamoudou Athie, as Orestes, has a long-suffering air and, in the recognition scene, a precision that helps sell it; as Achilles, he postures and pivots in skin-tight briefs, and speaks as if the famed warrior is also a self-involved asshole—much sport is had at the hero’s expense.  Winston Duke, as Menelaus, is also very much into having his way, and, as Thoas, is a real treat.  Paul Pryce plays good support as Pylades, and as the much-tried Agamemnon put me in mind of a certain leader of our day who has often to face a shit storm with equanimity.

In fact, the overtones of the play, for our times, seem to be about each person recognizing their own duty in the design of things.  To that end, a great feature was the use of the Chorus who, at the start of Act Two, clothes in shreds and faces sooty, have to cope with their fall from the sky and from the favor of the goddess, and their return to the past to see what they can see of a different future.  They, like us, look on to see how alignment with one’s fate turns on a dime, from fighting it to “the readiness is all.”  And that means that we, like them, have to learn what it is what we see means.

In bringing new spin to an ancient tale, Iphigenia Among the Stars is stellar.

Iphigenia Among the Stars

Adapted from Euripides by Benjamin Fainstein

Conceived and directed by Jack Tamburri

Jabari Brisport: choreographer; Christopher Ash: scenic designer; KJ Kim: costume designer; Benjamin Ehrenreich: lighting designer; Steven Brush: composer and sound designer; Michael F. Bergmann: projection designer; Benjamin Fainstein: production dramaturg; Robert Chikar: stage manager

Yale School of Drama

October 31-November 3, 2012

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.

Stayin' Up for Days in the Chelsea Hotel

If you missed the early Seventies, for whatever reason, you might not have much grasp of what made the period unique.  The Sixties were over—and that meant an end to a number of things, some of which have become a cliché—but the direction of where things were going, culturally, politically, and in other areas of life, was not yet clear.  It was a lively, hybrid time, in other words.  The Yale Cabaret’s production of Cowboy Mouth, a play co-authored by two obscure but up-and-coming writers named Sam Shepard and Patti Smith in 1971, lets us return to that fabled and fractured time to see a staging of two artistes of the moment—Slim (Mickey Theis) and Cavale (Michelle McGregor)—thrash out a vision. A vision of what?  Well, that’s what makes the play so much fun.  Cavale, the Smith character, knows that religious icons have been replaced, in the collective unconscious of those coming of age in the Sixties and after, by rock icons.  So, what any self-respecting artist must have is a vision of the rock god of tomorrow.  Slim, despite his misgivings, seems to have signed on for a role somewhat like a male Trilby to Cavale’s female Svengali, if only so he can riff off her frantic jabs at poetry.  In the end, we know, it’s Smith, not Shepard, who will become a rock artist.  (But a rock god?  Well, around this time, over in north Jersey—Smith’s from south Jersey—there was this cat named Bruce…)

Life together for Slim and Cavale is a series of provocative assertions, of trying on roles, of taking positions that might be inspiring or might be dispiriting.  Slim wants to hear Cavale tell stories. Cavale wants Slim to get intimate with Raimond, her dead crow.  Slim, restless, pounds a drum kit to punctuate his annoyance, or cranks an electric guitar to reduce Cavale to the postures of an abased groupie.  Cavale plays dead, or slaps the wall, or postures and preens.  And there are many well-choreographed gropes and clutches—body language in this play is a treat, almost a treatise, with director Jackson Moran helping to give it its flair.

And for laughs, there’s Lobster Man, a figure—yes, in a bright red lobster suit—who delivers takeout and returns to become the guinea pig of the duo’s plans.  Fulfilling the inevitable “triangulation” role in a Shepard play, Lobster Man seems to take his cue from the lobster that French 19th-century poet Gérard de Nerval walked in the park on a blue ribbon. Nerval hanged himself on the date of Cavale’s birth (albeit almost a century prior).  That’s the kind of thing that gets Cavale worked up.

As Slim, Theis does the “undiscovered rock god” thing well—he looks good and he knows how to do “stage presence”—but he also knows how to do Shepard’s trademark laconic staccato.  Shepard’s verbal jousting can gesture toward Beat poetry without ever getting lost in its jazzy embellishments.  He’s too “true west” for that.  As Cavale, McGregor’s costume is spot on, and, whereas some of Cavale’s pronouncements could come off as spacey, late hippie-meets-proto punk, McGregor manages to give the role a gravitas that, we might say, can only come from a retrospect on what a female artist of today owes the gutsiness of a female artist of then.  Cavale seems only a little retro, certainly not a throwback.  Both actors are dervishes of movement and play off each other with astute timing and staging.  For my money, both could’ve gone a bit more for the drawl that is so notable in Shepard and Smith, a grasping, searching speech-rhythm that, with Smith especially, is not afraid of going spastic and out of control, ditto her movements.

The look of the show is great—Meredith Ries, Set; Jayoung Joon, Costumes; Masha Tsimring, Lighting—the lines of the play come alive (I particularly liked the echo effects on the mics—Palmer, Sound), and the ending, with The Lobster Man revealed as a female rock god, is apropos.  Drop the notion—dead as of Patti Smith and Chrissie Hynde, if not Grace Slick and Janis—that a rock god can’t be a woman, and lo! Lobster Man stands revealed as the Future of Rock, kinda like glam sans drag.

Jenny said when she was just five years old, There was nothin’ happenin’ at all Everytime she put on the radio, There was nothin’ happenin’ at all Then one fine morning she put on a New York station, She didn’t believe what she heard at all She started dancin’ to that fine, fine music Her life was saved by rock’n’roll —Lou Reed, “Rock’n’Roll” (1970)

Cowboy Mouth By Sam Shepard and Patti Smith Original music composed by Mickey Theis; Lyrics by Sam Shepard and Patti Smith Directed by Jackson Moran Produced by Tanya Dean Yale Cabaret October 25-27, 2012

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

Drink At Your Own Risk

Spoiler Alert: Don't Read This If You Have Not Seen White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, but might. If you didn’t see the Yale Cabaret’s production of Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit, Red Rabbit last weekend, that’s too bad.  But if you did see it, what did you see?

Each performance was different because it required a different main volunteer (The Actor) to open an envelope and read the script inside, and involved different audience participants.  You may have seen (as I did) directing student Sarah Holdren as The Actor, or Monique Bernadette Barbee, John-Michael Marrs, Hugh Farrell, Gabriel Levey or Brian MacInnis Smallwood.  This person has to enact what the script demands—including playing a cheetah imitating an ostrich—as well as “direct” audience members who, among other things, enact a white rabbit encountering a bear, or maybe it’s a would-be spectator encountering security, or maybe it’s a would-be free agent encountering an agent of the state.  At another point, volunteers play a group of white rabbits doused with ice water while one, and only one, gets to become the red rabbit by grabbing the carrot at the top of a ladder—only to be verbally trashed by The Actor as The Playwright.

As we’re constantly reminded, everything The Actor is told to say and do comes by virtue of The Playwright—and not the playwright in some generalized sense (all scripts originate with a playwright, etc.), but in the very specific sense of Nassim Soleimanpour (who tells you to look him up on facebook and to send him comments at an email address a note-taker is asked to note).  And Soleimanpour, as the absent presence in his play, needles us and nudges us and banters with us, all the while insisting that he can only have any effect upon us via theater—he lives in Iran and can’t leave his homeland, so theater becomes his vicarious form of travel.  And where does he travel to? Why, to our free society, of course, only to impose upon his audience and his volunteers as much as his autocratic imagination can devise, while undermining that relation as much as possible.  We, the audience, have to decide how much we’ll go along with.  We’re free to leave or intervene, or to refuse his commands.

If there’s a gun on stage it has to go off by the end of the play, Chekhov said, more or less.  So if there’s a vial of some substance or other mixed into a glass of water, someone’s going to have to drink it, or at least decide which of two glasses to drink.

Lest we think this is all just a variant on the trust-fall game, we hear of an experiment: Soleimanpour tells us of his uncle’s work with rabbits, how dousing them with water because they aren’t red, or because they didn’t get the carrot, or climb the ladder first, or whatever it is rabbits think they’re getting collectively doused for, makes them attack the rabbit who has been sprayed red and not doused after climbing the ladder and grabbing the carrot.  Uncle keeps this up and sooner or later any rabbit who climbs the ladder, whether he gets a carrot or gets sprayed red or not, gets attacked, even by later rabbits who never saw a carrot nor got doused.  See how rabbits form habits?  Isn’t politely watching a spectacle a habit?  What kind of rabbit are you?  Who do you want to attack?  The hapless playwright?  Or maybe his surrogate—The Actor.  Fine.  Let’s have a sacrifice.

Catharsis is when we collectively accept suffering for our sake: The hero of tragedy, Christ on the cross, and so on.  Though either glass of water may or may not contain some form of poison, The Actor is told—by an audience volunteer who reads the end of the script—to drink one.  Is this psychic distress for our benefit in some way?  How implicated do we feel?  At the show I saw (Thursday night), some members of the audience told The Actor not to drink, someone even suggested overturning the glasses.  Proactive intervention—save The Actor from the play!  You don’t have to risk death for our sakes, we’re satisfied.

I’m assuming The Actor drank in each performance.  Sarah Holdren ad-libbed “for the good of the play” before drinking the glass right down, and you wanted to hug her for it.  It’s for the play, bravo.  Let’s keep us out of this.  And yet we’re all implicated, Soleimanpour is insisting: it’s not him doing this, finally.  And so we should feel something for this puppet in the play, shouldn’t we?

Perhaps, but context is contingent.  The Cab show was sponsored by Director of Theater Safety Bill Reynolds and his wife, and if you think any YSD student is going to drink rat poison “for the good of the play” on Bill’s watch, guess again.  Which is a way of saying that, while I can imagine stagings of the play where I might suspend my disbelief, I don’t know where that might be.  Maybe only in Soleimanpour’s imagination—but his planting the possibility in my imagination is, I guess, enough of a point.

The best thing the play has going for it is that Soleimanpour has found a neat staging of his situation: in writing the play and putting his name to it, he doesn’t know what will happen to him.  In volunteering to be in the play, The Actor doesn’t know what will happen either.  Because of polite conventions in the “free world,” probably nothing bad (the clean glass).  But there are exceptions—ask Salman Rushdie, ask the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three of his staff members who had nothing to do with a crappy film defaming Mohammad that happened to surface on their watch.  Soleimanpour makes theater.  It might prove fatal (the poisoned glass).

How far can we trust polite conventions?  When does disbelief become fatal?  Who would take a bullet for an illusion?  Do we always have a choice?

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit By Nassim Soleimanpour Produced by Nicole Bromley, Tanya Dean Consulting Director: Katherine McGerr Set Designer: Carmen M. Martinez Stage Manager: Geoff Boronda Dramaturgy: Daniel Brooks and Ross Manson

Yale Cabaret Oct. 18-20, 2012

Satchmo at the Long Wharf

The open door, upstage right, sends raking light into a backstage dressing-room, revealing an oxygen tank with mask, situated beside a small couch downstage left. He enters through the door, horn in hand, stooped, shaky, and hurries to the tank and inhales deeply. When he has caught his breath, he addresses the audience, telling us that he shit his pants earlier that day while in an elevator with his wife—here, at the Waldorf Astoria of all places! “He” is Louis Armstrong, a performing legend, an icon for jazz music and of successful blacks in show-biz, and he has just played a concert. Now, with a tape machine and microphone nearby, he sets out to describe his career, and to get on record his dealings with his lifelong manager, the deceased Joe Glaser. It’s a relationship that has all the classic traits of benevolence and betrayal, of closeness and crassness, of a shared passion for success and a regretful sense of not sharing enough.

He is John Douglas Thompson giving a bravura performance as both Armstrong and Glaser—with a couple notable asides in the voice and manner of a priggish Miles Davis—negotiating, with nimble shifts, the very different styles of speech and personal mannerisms of both characters. There’s no doubt, of course, that we will sympathize with Louis—his manner is so forthright, his humor so ingratiating, his sense of himself both humble and proud; what’s more remarkable is that we sympathize with Glaser too—which Louis might accept but which would also provoke him—because Glaser, a fast-talking Jew with a firm grasp of his place in the universe, is also a pawn of gangsters, of men who find the weak point in one’s armor and use it to their advantage. In other words, there is a major grievance that Louis lobs at Joe and it does stick, but there are extenuating circumstances.

Armstrong is no emotional weakling. He has gotten old, but he has also gotten rich, or way richer than he began, in any case, and he knows he’s had a great deal of luck on his side, and a great good fortune in choosing his manager wisely. He also knows that he owes a lot to Glaser, but that can’t distract him from what he owes Louis Armstrong, the famous name who, he believes, deserves better, deserves to be Glaser’s equal.

And that’s where this play, Satchmo at the Waldorf, by Terry Teachout, author of Pops, a biography of Louis Armstrong, now playing at the Long Wharf Stage II, really delivers the goods. Ultimately, this is a searching play, not simply about loyalties and the inevitable dissatisfaction at the end of the day, aired by two men who have been more than associates and less than bosom buddies, but also about a career that stepped over the “color barrier,” though not as a fully respected achievement. That’s where Davis’ jibes about Satchmo as an “Uncle Tom” come in, and are necessary to triangulate the story a bit. Armstrong relied on a Jew to smooth his way into the Big Time, and it worked, but, by Louis’s own admission, he allowed himself to become Glaser’s “nigger.” It’s to Teachout’s credit that he is able—without becoming didactic—to give the audience some sense of the dimensions of that term. Not simply a word of disdain, it becomes, in Satchmo’s mouth, a recognition of himself as a certain kind of creation: a black person who will be acceptable to, indeed loved by, devoted white audiences—a great aside on this theme occurs when Louis gestures to the mostly white audience at the Long Wharf to underscore his view that “white folks” never tire of him, while his “own people” lost interest in him long ago.

The difficulty of a black performer “crossing-over” to a white audience on his own terms—in the times Louis Armstrong lived through—gives the play much of its punch, and it also shows up the callousness of Miles Davis’s privileged sneer. Davis was too cool to kowtow to white tastes, but then, he didn’t have to. Times had changed, and, indeed, Armstrong’s comments show him to be not only knowledgeable about race in America but also about class amongst blacks.

In Teachout’s Armstrong we see a cursing, earthy, funny, human, likeable, approachable star—a man who made his way by making people feel good. If some of what makes white folks feel good is being excited about a black man, well, Louis was willing to be that black man—as he says, almost every white person has one black person “they crazy about.” The play sees Armstrong for what he is—a crowd-pleaser in a time when the crowd that mattered was mostly white—but also shows what he sees: that his own race’s condescension toward him implies a denial of their own history, and of the importance of figures like himself in being ambassadors of race in the special world of show-biz: a person with enough clout to give President Eisenhower a dressing-down over Little Rock that stuck.

Satchmo at the Waldorf is also quite adept at making us feel the presence of the many special interests outside the cozy dressing-room where Louis decompresses between performing and going to his supportive and cherished wife, Lucille. Those interests include mob bosses, and it’s no negative reflection upon Armstrong that he rose to prominence upon such associations—rather, it’s to Teachout’s credit that he keeps that aspect of early twentieth-century show-biz in play. Hearing Glaser’s voice adds immeasurably to our grasp of not only the dynamic between these two men, but of the world Glaser inhabited and, mostly, conquered. We’re looking at two of the winners, and the fact that there are real compromises, real costs, and real conviction behind their mutual affection for and dissatisfaction with each other shows us, by implication, the harsh realities that underlie “making it.”

John Douglas Thompson seems ideal for the part: more athletic-looking than Armstrong in real life, he is yet able to inhabit the man, giving us a compelling sense of a great performer who is confiding in us, and who is dropping his guard, at times, for the sake of clarifying his own raw emotions. It is a performance full of energy and reflection, pleasure and pathos—it gives depth to a man who, on stage, was willing to seem as untroubled as a ray of sunshine. And to see Thompson become a calculating, calculated Jew is a transformation that goes beyond comic relief—by having Glaser play “straight man” to Armstrong’s monologue, Thompson and director Gordon Edelstein avoid caricature and let Glaser be the voice of reality, of the smarts necessary to make the deals that make the duo prosper.

If you’re thinking this one man show might have the bare stage and stream-of-conscious styling of some one-person shows, guess again. This is a play you can settle into as Louis settles into his reminiscences on a stage set that feels so authentic, you fully believe he will be spending the night in another room in the famed hotel, and that we are simply privy to the largesse of a personal reception between the public performance onstage and the private life he exits to join. Satchmo at the Waldorf may well set a new standard for the character-driven celebrity monologue. One begins to imagine many other backstage passes to an audience with a garrulous great we might hope to be given by future playwrights. It certainly helps to know your star well before he starts talking. Teachout certainly does and he compresses much of what he knows into drama that is forthright and effective, never bogged down with exposition or too elliptical to be entertaining. Teachout, Thompson, Edelstein and Long Wharf give us a star setting us straight, an uncensored charmer who’s got what it takes to tell it like it is.

John Douglas Thompson in Satchmo at the Waldorf By Terry Teachout Directed by Gordon Edelstein

Set Design: Lee Savage; Costume Design: Ilona Somogyi; Lighting Design: Stephen Strawbridge; Sound Design: John Gromada; Production Stage Manager: Hope Rose Kelly

Oct 3-Nov 4, 2012

Long Wharf Theatre, Stage II

Photos by T. Charles Erickson

Do Not Go Gentle

The blues make you feel better, but what if you’re dying?  That, we might say, is the test underlying the Yale Cabaret’s latest offering: Ain’t Gonna Make It, conceived by Nicholas Hussong, Cole Lewis, Masha Tsimring, and Lauren Dubowski, directed by Lewis, and created by the Ensemble, which consisted of Eric, the dying man (Timothy Hassler), the dour Balloon Man (Ryan Campbell), and a band: Hansol Jung, Martha Jane Kaufman, Sarah Krasnow, Jenny Schmidt, and Lico Whitfield. The play is presented in true Cabaret style—a man at a microphone, with a guitar, regaling us with songs and anecdotes about how he learned of his condition—colon cancer—and found out that, at the age of 29, his life was over.  It’s Hassler’s show all the way, and he delivers the part with a dynamism that keeps the audience enthralled.  The style is loose enough to make us feel at times he’s actually talking to us, rather than simply acting out a scripted play—and that’s helped by certain moments of audience interaction that not only erase the space between audience and actor, but make us aware of how we’re responding to Eric’s plight.

Addressing an audience member as if on a date in hopes of a “sympathy fuck” (the theme of a rather vehement song moments before), then taking her hand and moving it in a very suggestive way, or kneeling before a male audience member to play on a recorder—sheepishly allowing “I’ve never done this before”—or placing one of his balloons in the arms of “Mom” while trying to tell her of his condition, Hassler creates moments of tension that entertain us but that also keep us uneasy with the dimensions of his story.  It’s a tightrope walk of considerable skill—not only to play a dying character who is spilling his guts, but who is also trying to be an “act” and to get us into the act.  Hassler, lean, fair-haired, ingratiating, has a boy-next-door look that makes his experience seem generalizable. When he reflects on all the things he won’t do, it’s a sobering moment about the kinds of denials for the future that we tend to ask of twenty-somethings.  And if there’s no future?

One of the best bits is a foot-stomping song, mostly a capella, in which Eric exhorts himself to “take the pill”—big medical vials are situated within easy reach as he pill-pops his way through different moods—and Hassler finds the groove to take it on home.  In general the songs show how versatile the blues are as a form, with sadness, anger, horniness, and consolatory clarity giving us various sides of the situation.  One particularly effective number used Sarah Krasnow on keening backing vocals to great effect—a kind of mournful gypsy tune with a lot of soul.

As the baleful Balloon Man, Ryan Campbell’s erratic, silent appearances are unnerving.  Handing over a balloon to Eric, or dropping a load of them on the floor, his acts and the balloons remind us of the cancer cells proliferating in Eric’s system—in one upbeat moment, two nurses (Sarah Krasnow and Jenny Schmidt) tap-dance to lively music and fling balloons out the window.  Yet nothing can deplete all the balloons.

One might think the show—which ends with the loudest balloon burst I’ve ever heard—would be a downer in its one-way path to our hero’s extinction.  It’s not, because the show not only affirms life, it embraces death with gutsy emotion rather than sentimental gestures.  As a form of soliloquy—the one we will all face at some time, alone with our various ends—it makes us contemplate the dignity of the life of an individual, so present for us at one moment, so completely gone the next.

The Yale Cabaret will be dark next week, then return Oct. 18-20 with White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, by Nassim Soleimanpour, in which five actors—one for each performance—open a sealed envelope and enact the script inside.  Audiences and actor discover together what the play is.

More about the rest of the first half of the Cabaret's season 45 to come.

Ain’t Gonna Make It Conceived by Nicholas Hussong, Cole Lewis, Masha Tsimring, and Lauren Dubowski Directed by Cole Lewis Created by The Ensemble

October 4-6, 2012 Yale Cabaret 45th Anniversary Season