Long in the Tooth

Review of The Skin of Our Teeth, Yale School of Drama

Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer-winning play The Skin of Our Teeth, like his better-known Pulitzer-winning Our Town, has its way with the conventions of theater, and both do so in the name of what Wilder views as a focus on the human condition sub specie aeternitatis. To help us understand our condition, it’s important that we get a handle on the many ways we let “play-acting,” at all levels, define us. Like Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth winks at us throughout. Suitable for a tale of life, marriage, death in Everytown, America, perhaps, the twinkle gets more than a bit long in the tooth in a tale that’s supposed to be taking on less “natural” matters such as human extinction, political chicanery, war, and global apocalypse.

In the Yale School of Drama thesis show directed by Luke Harlan, The Skin becomes a factory of creative approaches to theater and a showcase for how malleable and enduring certain conventions remain, perhaps eternally so.

The play begins, as many family-centered dramas do, in sit-com mode. Wilder’s writing style throughout the play recalls burlesque—the characters don’t speak to each other so much as proclaim at each other—and the tone easily adapts to a topsy-turvy “typical” middle-class home during the Ice Age, with dinosaurs as pets (cf. The Flintstones). Harlan’s cast keeps it cartoonish, with Andrew Burnap manic as pater familias George Antrobus, a kid-slapping, bossy caricature of the man-of-the-house c. 1940; he’s also inventing the alphabet and the wheel (though there’s a bicycle onstage at one point). His wife, Maggie (Baize Buzan, perfectly cast), is a can-do homemaker with more resources than we might expect; they have two children: Henry, aka Cain, (Aubie Merrylees) is the potentially violent psycho-in-the-bud with which we have become all-too-familiar in recent years, and Gladys (Juliana Canfield), a daddy’s girl, with all that might suggest, appropriate and otherwise. They had another child, but, thanks to Cain, there’s only the two now.

front: Baize Buzan (Maggie), Andrew Burnap (George), Juliana Canfield (Gladys); rear: Aubie Merrylees (Henry)

In the midst of the family dynamic is the maid Lily Sabina (as in “rape of the Sabine women”), played by Melanie Field with permutations that deserve their own paragraph. She starts as a kind of “everywoman scullery maid” and swiftly becomes a working-girl voice of protest against the play (her soliloquy, ad-libbed into the text, as she smokes a theater cigarette at the Exit door, venting against YSD and New Haven, is the funniest speech in the whole play). Later, she’s a Betty-Booped caricature of a man-eating bombshell, and a Ethel Mermaning Statue of Liberty for the big Atlantic City production number. In the final act, she becomes a female soldier who helps the family pull through. Throughout she remains some version of Lily Sabina, intrepid underling, which is to say that Wilder knows the stage requires stereotypes the way the Unconscious requires archetypes. So reJoyce, for the Twain do meet.

Andrew Burnap (George Antrobus), Melanie Field (Lily Sabina)

From anxious sit-com we go to Broadway glitz and the show-biz of politics, as Antrobus seeks public office—with the ever-recurring leer at marital infidelity the thorn in the side of the upstanding leader—to the bombed-out aftermath of war that recalls Beckett and Brecht and the theater of scarcity, kept light by an intrusion, early in Act III, by the Theater Manager (Harlan) as he tries to deal with cast members fallen ill due to food poisoning (extra credit to Harlan for playing “himself” as distracted director).

Anna Crivelli, Dylan Frederick, Melanie Field, Ricardo Davila, Annelise Lawson

Whatever you make of the play, the production values here are top notch. There’s a big musical number via Christopher Ross-Ewart that plays well after the intermission, while we’re still being entertained, and a haunting song sung by the refugees. Harlan and Scenic Designer Choul Lee use below-stage at the Rep to create an Atlantic City boardwalk effect, and the bombed-out house of Act III has, oddly, more reality than the homey house of Act I. There are numerous cast members that barely get a moment to register in roles as refugees and chair-pushers; it’s as if Wilder wants bodies onstage but doesn’t want to bother with them as characters. At least Harlan and choreographer Gretchen Wright give some—Anna Crivelli, Annelise Lawson, Dylan Frederick, Ricardo Dávila—as dancers something to do, and that helps. An exception to the under-scripting is Paul Stillman Cooper, almost unrecognizable as the prognosticating coin-operated psychic in a box, once a staple on boardwalks on the Eastern shore. Cooper makes an interesting speech about not being able to predict the past that gets under the skin of The Skin of Our Teeth.

Paul Stillman Cooper (Fortune Teller)

Still more profound is the final showdown between George and Henry or the eternal battle between Father and Son. Before anyone had coined the term “generation gap,” the Oedipal drama had become archetypal by way of Sophocles, Shakespeare and Freud, to name a few; Harlan’s production lets us see the struggle—as I read it anyway—as very much a part of the post WW2 world so many things we know date from—like the Bomb, rock’n’roll, and the TV ads Rasean Davonte Johnson’s wonderful wartime ad projections remind us of. Merrylees’s Henry, who is supposed to sound evil and nihilistic (in Wilder’s conception), like Cain, a blow against all the good Wilder, in the midst of the war, wants to believe in, sounds to me like a frantic child born into the Atomic Age and given a gun to play with, like all those daddies had in the war. In other words, Wilder wants us to consider personal resentments and the existential battle against God’s big plan, but times change, even for a play that plays forever, and the YSD show lets us consider Wilder in his time, foretelling our past.

Aubie Merrylees (Henry/Cain)

With references to extinction via a flood, the senseless killing of a black worker, and the needs of refugees at the door of our collective comfortable domicile, The Skin of Our Teeth could bite harder at our current state of the world,  but Wilder wants us to find succor, as George does, in Spinoza, Plato and Genesis, and that, in our era, feels quaint. Rather than the light of humanism shining on, George seems a fuddy-dud who will never get around to reading Maggie’s missive in a bottle.

front: Baize Buzan (Maggie), Juliana Canfield (Gladys); rear: Melanie Field (Lily Sabina)

Yale School of Drama presents
The Skin of Our Teeth
By Thornton Wilder
Directed by Luke Harlan

Choreographer: Gretchen Wright; Scenic Designer: Choul Lee; Costume Designer: Haydee Zelideth; Lighting Designer: Carolina Ortiz-Herrera; Sound Designer/Original Music: Christopher Ross-Ewart; Projection Designer: Rasean Davonte Johnson; Production Dramaturg: David Clauson; Stage Manager: Paula Renee Clarkson

Cast: Andrew Burnap; Baize Buzan; Alex Cadena; Juliana Canfield; Paul Stillman Cooper; Anna Crivelli; Ricardo Dávila; Melanie Field; Dylan Fredercick; Rebecca Hampe; Luke Harlan; Annelise Lawson; Jonathan Majors; Aubie Merrylees; Jennifer Schmidt; Shaunette Renée Wilson

Yale Repertory Theatre
October 20-24, 2015

A Play for All Periods

Preview of The Skin of Our Teeth at Yale School of Drama

The first of this season’s thesis shows at the Yale School of Drama opens tonight. Third-year director Luke Harlan directs Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, an unconventional play that caused some dismay with audiences when it opened, at the Shubert in New Haven, during World War 2. A view of the ages through the centering experience of an American family called the Antrobuses, the play, in good modernist fashion, toys with the conventions of theater while at the same time aiming for a theatrical experience that can be, in Harlan’s view, truly epic. It’s theme is no less than the survival of mankind on this distracted globe.

But, importantly for Harlan, it’s also very funny. Harlan cites some lines from Wilder that he came across in the Beinecke Library, which houses Wilder’s papers.

It is hard to imagine a man who occasionally does not suddenly see himself as both All men and The First Man. The two points of view are expressed for us by myths: at his marriage he may be reminded of Adam; when he goes about his house shutting windows against a rainstorm he is Noah; when he goes hunting, he calls himself Nimrod. The play tries to put this idea in dramatic form; and since it deals with both the individual Man and the Type Man, and deals with them in great trouble, isn’t it right that it should be fulll of anachronisms, indifferent to the smaller credibilities, be in all periods, and that it should be full of interruptions and accidents; and since Man is brave and enduring, isn’t it right that every now and then it should be gay?

From that brief summary, it’s clear that Wilder is thinking of biblical stories as the basis for our understanding of ourselves. In the sense of a palimpsest of personalities occurring throughout time, Wilder, who was a Yalelie, lived in Hamden, and hung out at the old Anchor bar across from the Shubert on College Street, was inspired by James Joyce’s “Work in Progress,” published in 1939 as Finnegans Wake. Wilder, like his master, takes a comic view of life, seeing mankind’s life as a human comedy in which Man plays many parts.

Luke Harlan

Harlan shares his playwright’s view of the value of comedy. He cites a contemporary entertainment like Jon Stewart’s Daily Show as an instance of how he sees the confluence of laughter and important issues. “We have to laugh at things to talk about them,” he says. Wilder’s play was written in a time of crisis when the outcome of the war was anything but certain, and before Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. into the conflict. Then, In the post-war world, after the dropping of the two atomic bombs against Japan, Wilder’s play, with its post-apocalyptic Act III, seemed prescient.

For Harlan, who was looking for a thesis project that would be “epic” and “allow comment on current issues,” and “engage with discourse right now in the world,” one of the “anachronisms” that Wilder mentions could well be the issue of global warning. Even though Wilder is recalling the biblical flood, Harlan says, “it’s impossible for us not to think of” our threatened environment.

Asked what has changed in his conception of the play since he began working on it, Harlan says he’s become more aware of the importance of the family unit as represented in the play. The “70 year gap between Wilder and us” means that much has changed “in the gender dynamic.” The play is obviously focused on the father, as head of the family of 1940, but Harlan has come to realize the degree to which Mrs. Antrobus is the “rock of the family.” He believes that the amorphous quality of the play can allow for the differing family dynamics of 2015 without appearing too dated.  Harlan does allow that “some of the language” and the reliance on “an early 20th-century framework” makes the play a bit quaint but insists that that effect is deliberate in Act I as Wilder seeks to establish “the old days.” By Act III and what Harlan calls “the postmodern world,” the language “doesn’t feel dated at all.”

In fact, he found, as he rehearsed and worked with his actors—a large cast of 13, including himself—that Wilder, as evidenced in his immensely popular play Our Town, is capable of “a simplicity that’s universal” with a use of language that “gets to the essential.”

And the thought of Our Town is apropos. One of Harlan’s best successes while a student at the Drama School was in directing Will Eno’s Middletown for the Yale Summer Cabaret 2014, for which he was co-Artistic Director. That play took a very contemporary tone toward the small-town virtues of our mythic American life, with both humor and poignancy. He also directed, in the Shakespeare studio projects, A Winter’s Tale with a shifting and vivid palette of humor and pathos. The Skin of Our Teeth—the title is from the Book of Job—sounds like a timely project with the right ingredients for something wilder.

The Yale School of Drama presents
The Skin of Our Teeth
By Thornton Wilder
Directed by Luke Harlan

Scenic Designer: Choul Lee; Costume Designer: Haydee Zelideth; Lighting Designer: Carolina Ortiz Herrera; Sound Designer: Christopher Ross-Ewart; Projection Designer: Rasean Davonte Johnson; Dramaturg: David Clauson; Stage Manager: Paula R. Clarkson

Cast: Andrew Burnap; Baize Buzan; Juliana Canfield; Paul Stillman Cooper; Anna Crivelli; Ricardo Dávila; Melanie Field; Dylan Frederick; Luke Harlan; Annelise Lawson; Jonathan Majors; Aubie Merrylees; Shaunette Renée Wilson

Yale Repertory Theatre
October 20-24, 2015

Country Living

Review of the Yale School of Drama’s The Seagull

Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull is a very busy play, a fact that the current production from the Yale School of Drama, directed by third-year director Jessica Holt, fully embraces. Begin with that very busy set (Jean Kim) running the entire length of the Iseman Theater’s space and including a balcony perch for the musicians who accompany the action with songs. There are chairs, tables, divans, garden seats, trees, paintings, musical instruments, a wooden cut-out of a half-moon, a huge painting of a lake on a curtain, various bric-a-brac, and, at both stage left and right, make-up tables with lighted mirrors—and don’t forget the swing built for two. The Seagull features theater as a theme because two of its main characters, Irina Nikolayevna Arkadina (Maura Hooper) and her son Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplev (Christopher Geary), are involved in theater—she as a respected actress, he as a fledgling (when the show begins) playwright. Holt’s production makes theatricality not only a theme but a modus operandi, finding, more than many productions do, in its sense of theater the comic excess of the play.

Granted, Chekhov called his play a comedy, but that fact seems to elude the general approach to The Seagull, as there are few jokes per se and Chekhov isn’t one to stage-direct farce and slapstick. Holt and company find the comedy by playing many of the interactions broadly and by minimizing the pathos—until, in the final of four acts, it seemingly can’t be helped. Even then, the use of a surprising exit underscores not only the staging, but the staginess of floundering actress Nina (Chasten Harmon)’s bid for profundity. In other words, this version of The Seagull keeps its eye on what makes all these characters laughable to us, but so unamusing to themselves, most of the time.

Consider some of the great casting choices: with Maura Hooper as Irina, there’s no way this production isn’t going to register fully, for our enjoyment, the staginess and vanity of a “great actress,” mouldering away at her brother’s country estate and trying—more deliberately than desperately—to maintain the erotic ardor of her lover while also trying—more casually than carefully—to be a mother to her earnest young son. Hooper has great comic gifts and her Irina, fully convinced that it’s all her show, doesn’t need to “steal” what she so clearly dominates, even without a sexual tryst on a tabletop. As her self-involved lover, the successful (careerist) writer Trigorin, Aaron Bartz sports an impressive wavy forelock and a dapper appearance. He’s quite the coxcomb and, at 55, is still able to have his head turned by Nina’s eager neediness. She so very clearly wants a man of substance like Trigorin and not a headstrong mama’s boy like Konstantin.

As the play’s hero, Geary has a voice that can ignite wood and chop ice. He can be Irina’s pathetic plaything one moment and upbraid her with his deep dissatisfactions the next. He begins earnestly artistic, rebellious against his mother’s generation, and ends surfeited with success but still hungry for what he pined for in youth. He’s a very Russian character, and Geary in particular and the show in general can turn on a dime from slapstick to existential bathos. That skill is nowhere more necessary than in the depiction of Nina, who in Harmon’s rendering goes from radiant, girlish vitality, to worn and disillusioned but also more profound. Her final scene with Konstantin is almost tragic because of their inability to find a shared note to end on. This, we might feel, could also be comic, but Holt’s Seagull takes Nina’s suffering seriously, and Harmon makes us believe in her, at least as much as Konstantin does.

In the end this Seagull is moving—but from the start it moves (the show boasts one of the quicker-seeming first acts I’ve seen at a School of Drama production), and for that to happen you need a lot of capable support to let us in on the lives of the other characters (seven speaking roles) without letting the play get bogged down. It helps to have the likes of Niall Powderly and Shaunette Renée Wilson as the couple Ilya and Paulina Shamrayev, who swell scenes and provide important reactions and, in llya’s case, oddly obsessive tensions. And Paulina provides as well a sullen dalliance for Yevgeny Sergeyevich Dorn (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a country doctor who abounds in feminine interest, and comes across as a likeable observer. In the key role of Masha, the Shamrayev’s airy daughter, Zenzi Williams prisses and preens and shares a charming drinking scene with Trigorin; suffering from Konstantin’s indifference, she marries the earnest school teacher Medvedenko (Andrew Burnap, who also provides some very effective accompaniment on the trumpet), who appears here to have more sense and self-respect than most of these gum-flapping eccentrics. Not least of which is the estate’s owner Pyotr Nikolayevich Sorin (Jonathan Majors), played as a fond, retiring, frail character who, like so many Chekhov characters, means well but achieves nothing. Add as well the servant Yakov (Luke Harlan, leading the other domestics—The Cook (Jennifer Schmidt) and The Maid (Pornchanok Kanchanabanca)—in musical interludes), who maintains the kind of unschooled, fierce intelligence that Russian writers like to ascribe to the serfs.

All in all, a game cast and a very physical, energetic, and enjoyable production. As generally happens in such large-scale plays, we do tend to miss the more engaging characters when they’re offstage, but at least Holt and company’s Seagull gives all the characters lots of room to move about in and lots of variety. Costumes (Asa Benally) run from Masha’s insistent black to Irina’s blazing red taffeta and her eye-popping red violet travel outfit, and include as well the requisite “simple peasant” gear and the traditional “Fiddler on the Roof” style that makes a caricature of Ilya, as well as handsome outfits that make us believe Paulina could turn the dandyish doctor’s head. Clothes make the man, and Konstantin’s final get-up reeks of self-importance, Hamlet-style. Elizabeth Mak’s lighting provides effects that alter time of day, inside/outside, and, in the final act especially, a claustrophobic change of mood, while Kate Marvin’s sound adds, among other things, the rain and a gunshot that will make you jump.

Long and involved The Seagull is, there’s no argument there. The School of Drama production throws as much energy, high spirits and variety at the classic text as one can imagine, finding the entertainment in all that existential ennui. Inspiring.

The Seagull By Anton Chekhov

Translated by Paul Schmidt

Directed by Jessica Holt

Scenic Designer: Jean Kim; Costume Designer: Asa Benally; Lighting Designer: Elizabeth Mak; Sound Designer: Kate Marvin; Production Dramaturg: Kelly Kerwin; Stage Manager: Kelly Montgomery

Yale School of Drama

December 12-18, 2014

A Season in Miniature

The 40th anniversary Summer Cabaret closed this past weekend with a four-day festival of short plays. “Summer Shorts” offered two series of four plays each, all by former YSD students, including recent graduates Hansol Jung, Mary Laws, Kate Tarker (all class of 2014), Rolin Jones—most recently celebrated for These! Paper! Bullets! last season at the Yale Rep—MJ Kaufman, and A. Rey Pamatmat. In general, the Festival turned the Summer Cab—after a summer of mostly lengthy plays—back to the brevity for which the term-time Cab is justly celebrated. What the usual 50-70 minute running time of the Cabaret displays is that much can be done in a short time. Of the plays in the festival, only Hansol Jung’s Undesirables—with music by last year’s Co-Artistic Director Chris Bannow—is an excerpt from a longer work. The others are self-contained plays—from 10 minutes to over 30—that mostly showcase a comically dramatic situation (Rolin Jones’ Ron Bobby Had Too Big a Heart) and/or comic and bizarre exchanges between a small cast (Jones’ Another in a Long Line of Idiot Children; Mary Laws’ All Saints; MJ Kaufman’s Your Living Room is Full of Ghosts, and Jones’ The Mercury and the Magic). Kate Tarker’s M.A.H. [A Museum Play] is more developed, with a plot that unfolds using six chararcters, and a key setting—the Museum of the National Tragedy. A. Rey Pamatmat’s We Have Cookies, though a two-person play, has more of a developmental arc than the other plays with a cast of two or three. And Undesirables—with 8 cast members—is an introduction to a musical with themes of immigration, assimilation, and alienation in the U.S. The two series were well-balanced with perhaps Series A’s larger cast plays edging out Series B in memorability.

The overall effect of the Festival was like seeing a Cabaret semester—which usually consists of 8 or 9 plays—in miniature. So, let’s take each Series as a unit:

Series A

Kicking off the Festival, Ron Bobby Had Too Big a Heart (Rolin Jones, directed by Luke Harlan) is a quick study of two murderous Southern would-be prom queens (Annelise Lawson, Shaunette Renée Wilson) out to avenge their shattered dreams on a local rival (Jenelle Chu); Jones’ verbiage is sort of slang Southern Gothic and crackles with comic intensity. Little more than a bite-size bit of satire on the guns-not-hugs rationale of contemporary America, the play jump-started the festival with a jolt.

M.A.H. [A Museum Play] (Kate Tarker, directed by Jessica Holt) offers a bizarre cast of misfits with Maia, a Mexican woman (Jenelle Chu, from airy to fiery) and Heiner, a German journalist (Matt Raich, awkwardly precise, as only a German can be) waiting to see someone at the Museum of the National Tragedy where nerdish Ellen (Aaron Bartz) presides over a private institution seeking to commemorate “national tragedy” in both a specific and generic sense. As Ellen, Bartz turns in his funniest performance of the summer as the sort of person one once encountered on late-night local or cable television, a huckster of indifferent skill, smarts, and resources making the best of his personal obsessions. He’s served by Shelby (Ato Blankson-Wood, as flappable office drone) and is interviewed by Monika (Annelise Lawson, one-part femme fatale and two-parts Kommendant). Meanwhile, the highly affecting Pearl (Shaunette Renée Wilson, in gleeful Southern Gothic mode) lurks behind the scenes and has her own intimate manner of determining Maia’s suitability for the job. Tied into the theme of our national manner of exploiting our tragedies are themes of racial stereotypes and gay—particularly lesbian—bashing. More than a bit confusing at times, the production felt close to the slap-dash quality of the term-time Cab where student-generated works still finding their feet are common.

Then it’s back to Rolin Jones for more inspired words in a very static tableau, Another in a Long Line of Idiot Children (directed by Jessica Holt): Mother (Maura Hooper, flamboyantly drunk as a sort of bottle-blonde Morticia) chugs half liters of wine while waxing confidential—about family, fortunes, fate and the ghastly nature of life—to her brooding son (Matt Raich, seemingly bound in a beach chair and mostly non-committal), while Father (Julian Elijah Martinez, with hilariously frightening tremors and a vague air of acceptance) listens in whilst playing Solitaire. One assumes Jones knows well the targets he’s aiming for—venom enough is levied at them—but the play, essentially a long, rambling tour de force monologue, seems a mere exercise in characterization by caricature.

Finally, Excerpt from Undesirables (Book/Lyrics by Hansol Jung, music by Chris Bannow; directed by Luke Harlan), takes us back to Ellis Island where, arguably, most of us have ancestors who passed through on their way to becoming Americans for our sakes. In “The Layout” and “In America,” Jung and Bannow have their cast revisit the traditional tale of America’s welcoming arms by apprizing us of the situations of the unwelcome “undesirables” who met with rebuff, particularly immigrants from Asia who were not welcome at all, as well as those “deviates”—homosexuals, prostitutes, and others of the European demimonde—who might bring their “undesirable” habits to the New Land. With the brio of the “it’s not so bad if you can sing about it” logic that seems to underpin every musical addressing hardship themes, Undesirables intimates an interesting tale about its unusual inmates. The excerpt ended Series A on a high note with the entire Festival cast present on stage.

Series B

“Playing possum” generally equates with pretending to be dead or inert, but in Rolin Jones’ The Mercury and the Magic (directed by Jessica Holt), two opossums, Joe (Ato Blankson-Wood) and Mike (Julian Elijah Martinez) are anything but passive. They “own the road” and assert themselves by running out when cars come by, frightening the drivers (Matt Raich). Meanwhile, Joe is questioning the nature of opossum-hood, as, indeed, any mammal might. The skit has the feel of the kind of thing Saturday Night Live is famous for—comical “what-ifs” that kill time before something else happens.

What happens next is A. Rey Pamatmat’s We Have Cookies. Directed by Jessica Holt, the play is the centerpiece of Series B, its themes more sharply delineated than most of Series A. Iris (Jenelle Chu) is benign and gracious, only too happy to welcome Blink (Annelise Lawson) into a community that does, indeed, have cookies. The cookies, a fairly impressive pile, are in the center of the table that separates the two women. The repetitive ‘cookie monster’ noise that occurs every time one of them—usually Blink—takes a cookie gets a bit old, but its almost percussive punctuation serves the task of bringing us back again and again to the central matter: Blink’s attempt to come to terms with simple facts of life: some people have cookies and other people don’t; cookies do not grow on trees but must be extracted from those who are capable of making cookies though without the wherewithal to enjoy them; cookies, once you become fond of them and take them for granted, seem to justify activities that will cement one’s advantage—such as, eventually, physical struggles between Iris and Blink themselves. Part allegory, part blackout sketch, We Have Cookies puts its actors through their paces as they have to work in quick, structured segments and go from rational and meek to aggressive and, in Lawson’s case, autocratic and demanding, and childishly gluttonous. While perhaps a bit too obvious in its intentions, Pamatmat’s play offers a quick study of how resources—particularly luxuries—become defining and defensible for any privileged population.

MJ Kaufman’s Your Living Room is Full of Ghosts, directed by Luke Harlan, begins with an absurd premise: Mom (Ato Blankson-Wood) has taken to living in Ikea showrooms; her daughter (Shaunette Renée Wilson) visits and tries to get at what’s going on. Ostensibly a send-up of the model lives that the middle class try desperately to live (here, the black protagonists might add a further racial dimension to the dry aspiration to live surrounded by the simplicity of Scandinavian design), the play yokes in other aspects of dysfunction, as between mother and daughter and between mother and neighbor. The pay-off seems a bit flat and the real pleasure of the exchange is in watching Blankson-Wood’s cool and pragmatic mother, who may be mad, and Wilson’s irritable reactions, jumping on a couch or settling with deep suspicion into a big armchair.

Dysfunction of a much more hysterical register animates Mary Laws’ All Saints, directed by Luke Harlan. Here, a couple, Thomas (Aaron Bartz) and Joan (Maura Hooper), already settled into bed and about to set the alarm for the morrow, must come to grips with Joan’s announcement: she is an alligator. The meeting of domestic drama and absurdist comedy goes as far as it can go, with Hooper’s reasonableness gradually becoming more fierce and animalistic. As with Jones’ Idiot Children, the play requires a comic tour de force from Hooper, crawling the floor in her jammies and reaching, nonplussed, for straws as her patient husband—constantly underlining how “sturdy” Joan is—defeats each of her points. Could she be an alien? A glass of water? Anything but a human woman! Laws’ script toys with the kinds of transformations that magic realism—and, indeed, saints’ lives—hold to be possible, and moves toward a conclusion that’s willing to let symbol or enigma stand for resolution.

Summer Shorts: A Festival of New Voices ended the season with themes that find common cause with the full-length plays presented during the summer, where the banality of domestic life, the oddity of relationships, the efforts to remember and invent, and to live meaningful and authentic lives were handled with effects that come from satire, vaudeville, classic naturalism, thrillers and improv. As eclectic as such approaches may be, the Summer Cabaret cast rose to an impressive variety of roles and situations, making the case that “voices at the forefront of American theater” are nothing if not conscious of the tensions of our times. And kudos to the tech people—especially Scenic Design by Kevin Bret Klakouski and Costumes by Steven M. Rotramel—for the wherewithal to compress so many different shows into such a short compass.

Up soon: a preview of the first three shows of term-time Cabaret, led by Hugh Farrell, Tyler Kieffer, Will Rucker and Molly Hennighausen. For now, a fond farewell to the team of the Yale Summer Cabaret 2014, led by Co-Artistic Directors Jessica Holt and Luke Harlan, and Managing Directors Gretchen Wright and Sooyoung Hwang.

Yale Summer Cabaret Summer Shorts: A Festival of New Voices

Written by Rolin Jones; Hansol Jung and Chris Bannow; MJ Kaufman; Mary Laws; A Rey Pamatmat; Kate Tarker Directed by Luke Harlan; Jessica Holt

Cast: Aaron Bartz; Ato Blankson-Wood; Jenelle Chu; Maura Hooper; AnneLise Lawson; Julian Elijah Martinez; Matt Raich; Shaunette Renée Wilson

Production Team: Associate Scenic Designer: Kevin Bret Klakouski; Costume Designer: Steven M. Rotramel; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Sound Designer: Kate Marvin; Stage Manager/Series A: Will Rucker; Stage Manager/Series B: Avery Trunko; Photography: Christopher Ash

August 14-17, 2014

This Island Earth

Review of Will Eno’s Middletown The Yale Summer Cabaret paid tribute to its 40-year existence last night and the festivities included a performance of Will Eno’s Middletown, directed by 2014 Co-Artistic Director Luke Harlan. It’s a very fitting match as the play opens with a welcoming monologue that extends to “everyone,” and certainly feels right as an address to “fellow Middletonians,” including the board members, supporters, founders, patrons, fans, and other friends of the Summer Cab who showed up for the evening. Ato Blankson-Wood’s delivery of the opening greeting invited comparisons to a stand-up comic working the crowd as his pacing had to accommodate bursts of laughter and delight from the audience. It would be hard to imagine a more apropos setting for the opening speech, or a better speech for the occasion.

Middletown certainly puts the Summer Cab on its mettle. It’s a large, sprawling play with 11 cast members, including a young teen (Livia Sarnelli), an ingenious set—complete with trapdoors—graced by Nick Hussong’s animated projections of drawings that outline backdrops—a stop sign, a tree, a house, and, at one point, a NASA control panel—and musical interludes that cover the numerous set-changes with the brio I associate with unspecified-TV show breaks. Eno’s play is also the most easily likeable of the Summer Cab’s offerings this year, full of hominess, wit, and a deep regard for the uncertainties of the human condition. Though there are laughs, there really aren’t jokes. The humor is of the “laughing at ourselves” variety. And though there’s death and dysfunction and an occasional threat of violence, the dramatic stakes don’t seem too daunting. Or rather say the stakes don’t seem heightened for dramatic effect. The stakes of the play are as high and deep as life itself.

A play you might easily have in mind while watching Middletown is Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Both plays use the setting of an “Anytown” as the vehicle for meditations about what makes humanity human, and both want us to contemplate the aeons that preceded our modern burgh’s grasp of its niceties and the vastness that surrounds its little plot of ground. The planet itself is just such a “plot” and Eno’s play nicely brings us back again and again to thoughts of this island earth: a monument propped on a village green, a landscaper planting a tree and digging up rocks (with a wink at Hamlet’s gravedigger), a story about a rock a rather dissolute young man found as a child, recalled by the town’s famous son—Greg, an astronaut—as he orbits earth, looking at the rock that is our world.

Eno’s play is very much a verbal construct. Dialogue and speeches lose their point if presented too naturalistically, and so he throws in odd asides and self-reflections, and, for some characters, occasional awareness of the audience, to keep the audience off-guard. Every character that appears before us—a Cop (Matt Raich), a Librarian (Annelise Lawson), a Tour Guide (Shaunette Renée Wilson), Tourists (Julian Elijah Martinez and Jenelle Chu)—may seem obvious and easily grasped, and yet Eno wants us to feel the friction between the role and the person in that role. At one point the landscaper (Martinez) and the Cop, his brother-in-law, trade quips about “person” as a temporary job. The deep “need” (as the male tourist expresses it) is to find things about life on earth that can please, amuse or inspire us, distracting us from the presence of death that is everywhere around us, much as outer space surrounds our globe.

The spaciness of certain elements of the show are grounded by what seems to be the budding romance—or maybe just strong personal attachment—between newly arrived neglected wife and soon-to-be-mother Mary (Maura Hooper) and vaguely employed handyman and hobbyist John (Aaron Bartz). Played with forthright charm, their meetings are cute and coy with a kind of anxious agreeableness, commiserating on “dark nights” and sleeping troubles and, generally, trying to figure out what living together in the same place at the same time actually means. Thus the play’s many gestures at how we all occupy similar places keep us implicated, as well as letting us consider how “sense of place” is communicated by what is simply “understood” by inhabitants.

Central to Eno’s vision is the character of Mechanic (Aubbie Merrylees, tremulous and troubled) who provides, in his disaffected and direct asides and uneasy friction with the status quo, the soul of the play. Suspected of everything from bashing a mailbox to writing a dirty word on a sign, Mechanic is the loose cannon, remembered by the Librarian for an odd essay he wrote as a child, and currently appearing in costumes to entertain kids at the hospital as part of a plea deal for an unnamed offense. The play opens with the Cop giving him a hard time for sitting on a bench and a demand that he feel “awe” while being strangled with a billy club. Mechanic becomes something of a Greek chorus or audience surrogate—crouching outside windows, eavesdropping, giving us time to think of some reasons he started drinking again—and, after a sudden death scene, his dance and chant while dressed in a Native American costume epitomizes the play’s sense of how the inauthentic can become authentic (enough) when we need it.

In general, the cast works hard at the timing and pitch of Eno’s carefully calibrated dialogue, which shines at its highest gloss in the exchange between Ato Blankson-Wood’s doctor and Maura Hooper’s musing, bemused, and very pregnant Mary. The doctor’s well-meant string of palliatives about how to behave toward an infant are filled with Eno’s sense both of human precariousness and our (so far) successful instinct for survival. Likewise the scene amongst audience members just before the intermission (which knowingly trumps the chitchat at Cab tables) points toward another of Eno’s great themes: how language communicates and miscommunicates simultaneously, so that, as Mary says, we’re all “just making different sounds with [our] mouth[s].”

Playful and profound, Eno’s Middletown throws its arms around the world in a loving embrace while also retaining a sense of the prickly absurdities and inconveniences that rankle our togetherness in our placid orbit. Luke Harlan’s ambitious production, mounted under the constraints of the Summer Cab’s relentless schedule, highlights the tight weave of the social fabric and the warmth of breathing bodies. This is theater that's as alive as you are.

Middletown has three more showings: tonight and tomorrow night at 8, and Sunday night at 7.

Middletown By Will Eno Directed by Luke Harlan

Scenic Designer: Christopher Thompson; Costume Designer: Steven M. Rotramel; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Sound Designer: Kate Marvin; Projection Designer: Nick Hussong; Stage Manager: Avery Trunko

Cast: Aaron Bartz, Ato Blankson-Wood, Jenelle Chu, Maura Hooper, Annelise Lawson, Julian Elijah Martinez, Aubie Merrylees, Matt Raich, Stephanie Rolland, Livia Sarnelli, Shaunette Renée Wilson

Photographs by Christopher Ash

Yale Summer Cabaret July 31-August 10, 2014

Yale Summer Cabaret: Summer Shorts Festival

Tonight the Yale Summer Cabaret resumed with Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, formerly known as Southwest Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, between the Years 1884-1915, directed by Jessica Holt, which runs until July 26. It will be followed by Will Eno’s Middletown, directed by Luke Harlan. The first is, at first, a “laugh riot,” Harlan says, that gradually becomes a very moving experience that boldly examines questions of race in America. In returning, the Cab space has been partially reconfigured from the set-up of the first two plays of the season, with the main difference being the placement of the audience: both in and around the action. Actors may be seated at tables with the viewers.

Then the space will be completely changed for Middletown, involving a cast of 11, with the action set up in a different location and most likely using a higher stage platform than has generally been used at the Cab. After Middletown’s run from 31 July to 10 August, including a special 40th Anniversary celebration dinner by invitation, the final slot in the season is occupied by a festival of short plays.

Both Co-Artistic Directors Holt and Harlan have considerable previous experience with festivals of short plays and are enthusiastic about what a shorter playing time affords. “Short plays are often more challenging,” Harlan said, “less safe, and more willing to move beyond boundaries.” A full-length play requires a complete investment in an idea, one able to be fleshed out into a full show. Short plays can make their points more quickly, with greater concentration, and sometimes greater risks.

The intention all along has been to invite plays from alums of the Yale School of Drama. Everyone Holt and Harlan approached was interested. In two cases, with plays by A. Rey Pamatmat and MJ Kaufman, the plays were written expressly for the festival. Others are plays that pre-existed, and one play, by Hansol Jung, is an excerpt from a musical that had been proposed for last year’s term time Cabaret.

Here are the plays, none of which has been previously staged:

Rolin Jones, much lauded for his mash-up of Shakespeare and The Beatles in the Yale Rep show, These! Paper! Bullets!, provides three short plays, each about 10 minutes: Ron Bobby Had Too Big a Heart; Sovereignty; The Mercury and the Magic.

Hansol Jung, whose play Cardboard Piano was at the Carlotta Festival here in the spring, offers an excerpt from a musical, The Undesirables.

MJ Kaufman, winner of the 2013 ASCAP Cole Porter Prize in Playwriting, whose Sagittarius Ponderosa was featured in Carlotta 2013, presents Your Living Room is Full of Ghosts, which is set in an IKEA.

Mary Laws, whose Bird Fire Fly played in Carlotta 2014, returns with All Saints.

A. Rey Pamatmat, recipient of the 2012-13 Hodder Fellowship in Playwriting at Princeton, wrote We Have Cookies specifically for the Festival.

Kate Tarker, author of Thunderbodies, which appeared in Carlotta 2014, offers M.A.H. (A Museum Play).

The plays will be presented in two sets of three plays each, Series A on Thursday, August 14, Series B on Friday, August 15, and both Series on Saturday and Sunday, to close out the Summer Cabaret Season with a marathon of short plays. The plays inclusive to each Series TBA later.

According to Harlan, the playwrights were asked to submit plays less than 30 minutes in length, though one or two may be a bit longer. The entire running time for a Series is 90-100 minutes. Harlan says the majority of the plays are comedies, though comedies that risk violence and, in some cases, look at unpleasant aspects of America. The playwrights were also informed about the actors available for the Festival. There will be 8 actors, all of whom will have been seen during the course of the Summer Season. Two of the short plays feature larger casts, while some require 3 or 4 actors, and there are a few 2 handers as well.

Holt and Harlan will trade-off directing duties, so that each will be involved more or less to the same degree in staging the plays. The strong collaboration that has been shown so far in this year’s Summer Cabaret should be even more on view in this final effort.

Regulars of the Cab know that a surprisingly effective theatrical experience can be provided by short plays, and with the varied casts, playwrights, and running times, the Summer Short Festival offers an excellent opportunity to see the kinds of things the Cab does best.

With only three opportunities to see each Series, spread over four days, secure your tickets early for the Summer Shorts Festival. The end of summer is sooner than you think.

Yale Summer Cabaret 40th Anniversary Season Summer Shorts Festival, August 14-17, 2014

For more information: Summercabaret.org

No Child Left Behind

Review of A Map of Virtue Erin Courtney’s A Map of Virtue, the second offering of the 40th Anniversary Yale Summer Cabaret this year, is certainly a curiosity. Structured by titled segments—virtues like “Honesty,” “Integrity,” “Love”—that form a symmetrical arrangement around a central section, the play, as directed by Co-Artistic Director Luke Harlan, keeps us guessing about its ultimate ends.

Along the way float much imagery and narrated events and lingering details, which might be red herrings or what Alfred Hitchcock liked to call “MacGuffins,” plot-driving elements that never get a full explanation because they are actually incidental to the story. Mention of Hitchcock and MacGuffins is all-too germane to Courtney’s play, which opens with two characters—Sarah (AnneLise Lawson), an artist and free-spirit, and Mark (Ato Blankson-Wood), an intrigued gay man—describing their first encounter, in a diner where a bird attack straight out of Hitchcock’s The Birds takes place. And, as MacGuffins go, one of the prime examples is the bird statue in The Maltese Falcon. Oh, did I mention that A Map of Virtue is narrated by a little bird statue that Mark stole from the office of the headmaster who abused him and other boys? The statue—enacted by Ariana Venturi—gives us the titles of the segments and also reflects on the action from time to time.

Apart from whatever the play may be saying about the values of virtues, the plot itself has more to say about haphazard events, serendipitous meetings, personal obsessions, and, well, curiosity—which some may regard as a virtue and others if not exactly a vice then—a meaningful word for this play I’d say—a nemesis. Indeed, the multiplying instances of bird imagery and the history of the little statue itself could stand for that ancient concept, as a tendency of fate.

In Courtney’s play, the bird statue comes into Mark’s possession during a traumatic time as a child and he keeps it until, a grown man, he gives it to Sarah, in part because she has birds tattooed on her chest, and in part because of the bird attack and in part because he encounters her, by sheer “chance,” on a cliff in Ireland when he’s considering disposing of the little keepsake. The statue's ultimate fate occurs during a desperate weekend in the country where Mark, Sarah, and her husband Nate are held captive by a creepy couple, June and Ray (the latter often donning a bird mask that might put you in mind of the mask of human flesh in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, if you’re into that kind of thing). The period in the one-room prison, complete with dirty mattress and odd headmistress-like commands from June, might give you the creeps—nothing occurs to lighten the tension—but it plays out like a nightmare that will be over at some point (or a rural “urban story”), and becomes a crucible for the tensions in the play.

The upshot of all this are the changes in the relationship between Mark and his boyfriend Victor and between Sarah and Nate, with Sarah possessed by a new obsession that there were children, or a child, present at the site of their captivity, children who needed to be rescued.

Harlan and company play to the strengths of the Cabaret in putting on this oddly dreamlike morality tale. The space’s intimacy makes us accept the character’s (including the statue’s) direct address easily, bringing us into the events they narrate even when they seem rather unrealistic or off-putting. As Sarah, Lawson gives us a woman who seems believable as an artist-type, driven by hunches and intuition (the latter is a named virtue), but who also seems capable of going off the deep end at some point. Blankson-Wood’s Mark, despite his penchant for encountering creepy headmaster/mistress types, seems much warmer and engaging, though he did slash Sarah’s painting of “his” statue, one of the many acts or statements in this play that seem fit for an airing on a psychiatric couch.

As the creepy couple, Celeste Arias plays June like a somewhat psychotic schoolteacher and Aaron Bartz makes Ray oddly soulful in his interludes of song (his banjo retaining its Deliverance-inspired status as creepy rural instrument par excellence), and his “I’ve Still Got the Goods” might well be a tagline for hen-pecked husbands everywhere. As husband Nate, Aubie Merrylees seems pretty much steadily bemused by life with Sarah and will be remembered for his joyous outburst, “thank God for GPS!” Victor, Mark’s boyfriend, is played as the godsend he is by Julian Elijah Martinez. Finally, as “bird statue,” Ariana Venturi’s flowing garment, regal profile, and air of warm regard for human frailty combine to make her the centerpiece of the play, a MacGuffin who, in my reading of the play, is the figure for Courtney’s sense of agency.

Kate Marvin’s Sound Design is great at making us jump or freaking us out, and the Scenic Design (Christopher Thompson) and Lighting Design (Andrew F. Griffin) make the most of the amorphous Cab space to let us imagine diverse settings, with that room far upstage the kind of space you might find in your darker dreams at some point. Played close to the chest, thus letting viewers make up their own minds about matters of “empathy” (another cited virtue) and identification with the characters, A Map of Virtue is a bit like trying to make sense of someone else’s dream. Elusive, imaginative, and ultimately a matter of one’s trust in patterns and perceptions, this is one you’ll have to talk about.

A Map of Virtue returns tonight and plays until its closing Sunday night.

A Map of Virtue By Erin Courtney Directed by Luke Harlan

Sarah: AnneLise Lawson; Mark: Ato Blankson-Wood; Nate: Aubie Merrylees; Victor: Julian Elijah Martinez; Bird Statue: Ariana Venturi; June: Celeste Arias; Ray: Aaron Bartz

Scenic Designer: Christopher Thompson; Costume Designer: Steven M. Rotramel; Lighting Designer: Andrew F. Griffin; Sound Designer: Kate Marvin; Stage Manager: Avery Trunko; Photography: Christopher Ash

Yale Summer Cabaret June 19-June 29, 2014

40 Years On: A Preview of Yale Summer Cabaret, 2014

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Yale Summer Cabaret, a theatrical entity separate from Yale Cabaret (or “term time Cabaret”), which began life in 1974.

In tribute to the four decades of its existence, the current Yale Summer Cabaret, led by Artistic Directors Jessica Holt and Luke Harlan, with Managing Director Gretchen Wright and Associate Managing Director Sooyoung Hwang, will be staging plays by living American authors, beginning with Christopher Durang, who was one of the founding members of the Summer Cabaret 40 years ago. Today, of course, he’s celebrated for plays such as his most recent, the Tony Award-winning “Best Play” of 2013, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (which Summer Cab wanted to mount this year but Hartford Stage got there first), but, once upon a time, he was a YSD student working in the Summer Cabaret.

The decision to feature contemporary American playwrights follows nicely on last year’s program, which was a kind of syllabus of world theater, from the neoclassicism of Molière through naturalism, symbolism, and ending with the absurdist and pointed work of contemporary British playwright Caryl Churchill. The note reached at the end of last year’s Summer Cab, with Churchill’s Drunk Enough to Say I Love You looking askance at American dominance since WWII, sets up nicely this year’s program of “voices at the forefront of American theater,” works that encapsulate complex perspectives on our cultural heritage, our place in the world, our self-image, and our values, as a nation.

The shows will, like last year, open sequentially and play for about two weeks each. At midsummer, a break will give the company time to reconfigure the space so that, unlike last year, the seating arrangements will not remain fixed for the entire summer but will alter midway. This, Holt and Harlan feel, gives audiences the best of both worlds: the stage-like setup of last year’s Summer Cab, for two shows, and the more amorphous arrangements typical of term-time Cab for the next two shows. Capping off the two months of contemporary full-length plays will be a four-day program of very recent short plays, all by YSD alums, including the three playwrights currently featured at this year’s Carlotta Festival, Hansol Jung, Mary Laws, Kate Tarker.

The Program

First up, in June, is Christopher Durang’s 2009 absurdist comedy Why Torture is Wrong and the People Who Love Them which Holt, who will direct, describes as a “wildly funny, wacky, and zany” comedy about such laughing matters as torture, terrorism, gun violence, domestic dysfunction, male domination, and the fraught nature of interracial or cross-cultural marriage in America. In Holt’s view, the play is “grappling with what it means to be American,” and so, ultimately, fits the Summer program better than Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike would have.

We meet Felicity (Ariana Venturi), a young woman who has apparently married the unsettling Zamir (James Custati-Moyer) while drunk, so that she seems to be meeting him when we do, as she has no previous recollection of him. Then, of course, we go home to meet the folks: father (Aaron Bartz) and mother (Maura Hooper), with support from Aubie Merrylees as the seedy Reverend Mike, Celeste Arias as Hildegarde, dad’s “colleague,” and Andrew Burnap providing the cartoonish voice over. The play takes on most of the things the news keeps Americans fretting about, as stories of violence and the threat of violence are as American as television. From 5 June to 15 June

Next, still in June, Luke Harlan will direct Erin Courtney’s A Map of Virtue (2012), a New England premiere. Harlan calls the play a “journey into darkness” that mixes genres—romantic comedy, horror story, mystery, docu-drama—to keep the audience guessing. Narrated by a bird statue, the play tweaks expectations at every turn, but is also structurally symmetrical, with 6 scenes leading to a major event and 6 scenes following that key moment. With a cast of 7, the play mainly focuses on Sarah and Nate, a stranger named Mark and a house in the woods. An “exploration of evil,” the play, Holt says, is also “charming, brilliant, and ebulliently written,” and addresses the effect on relationships of traumatic events. From 19 June to 29 June

After 11 days off, including the 4th of July weekend, the Summer Cabaret returns with Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, formerly known as Southwest Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, between the Years 1884-1915. Director Jessica Holt calls the play, which played at SoHo Rep in 2012, directed by Eric Ting of the Long Wharf, a “meta-theatrical inquiry into cultural anthropology” as we watch a theatrical troupe in the process of creating a play about the “first genocide of the twentieth century.” Germany, during the inclusive years in the play’s title, controlled what was then called Deutsch-Südwestafrika, which is today the nation of Namibia, and during that time found cause to destroy the Herero tribe. With a ruthless efficiency that seems the prototype for genocide against Jews and Poles in WWII, German soldiers were put in the position of executioners of a native population. But the only record of what took place can be found in the soldiers’ letters home. In Drury’s play, the actors’ difficulties with imagining and inhabiting the roles dictated by the extreme situations—particularly with gaps in knowledge and motivation—leads to obvious analogies to violence against native and slave populations in the U.S. Holt sees the play within the play as an ingenious device to bring the audience into the situation through the comic and seemingly improvised interactions of rehearsal, inviting the audience to consider the implications of their own presence in the room with the actors. From 11 July to 26 July

The final full-length play is Will Eno’s Middletown, the author’s breakthrough play. Eno has been called, by Charles Isherwood, “the Samuel Beckett of the Jon Stewart generation,” and, while I don’t know that many see themselves as defined generationally by watching Stewart, the notion of unsettling existentialism rubbing up against the self-aware ironies of the American media does strike a chord. Eno’s The Realistic Joneses, currently on Broadway, debuted at the Yale Rep in 2012 and was one of the best new plays to show up there in recent memory. Middletown dates from 2010 and is a kind of Our Town for an edgier era. In director Luke Harlan’s view the play asks, as does Our Town for an earlier time, “what does it mean to be alive right now?” Without romanticizing or dismissing everyday lives, but with real “humor and fear,” Harlan says, Eno’s play looks at normal people living normal lives in an “Anytown U.S.A.” but lets them say things no one says aloud. With a cast of 10 actors playing 20 characters, the show will be an opportunity to sample the excellent ensemble work of YSD and Cabaret shows. From 31 July to 10 August

Finally, the Summer Cabaret closes with Summer Shorts, a four-day festival of new short plays by six playwrights “whose work was first nurtured and developed at the Yale School of Drama.” Divided into Series A and Series B, there will be at least three plays in each Series (or evening), and on the last two days, Saturday and Sunday, August 16th and 17th, all the plays will be staged in two sequences, at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m., respectively, both evenings. The line-up of plays will be previewed here during the Summer Cab’s July interim. This part of the program should be very interesting, seeing what can be done in a short compass by playwrights that Holt and Harlan regard as the future of theater. From 14 August to 17 August

The Team

Jessica Holt, rising third year directing candidate, and Luke Harlan, rising second year directing candidate, met at the meet-and-greet last spring when Harlan visited Yale as a prospective YSD student. They hit it off then, with their belief in new plays that had been fostered by their work in, respectively, the San Francisco and New York theater scenes. By the time Harlan was midway through his first year, the two had begun to plan a proposal for the Summer Cabaret, where Holt put in time working last summer. Their mission statement focused on the virtues of new and challenging works that had enjoyed successful and highly regarded first or, at most, second runs.

Very aware that they are presenting the 40th anniversary season of the beloved experiment that is the Summer Cabaret, the Co-Artistic Directors wanted to provide a provocative line-up of plays that tell stories. Both directed plays in last year’s term-time Cabaret: Holt directed Edward Bond’s darkly comic dystopian play Have I None, a U.S. premiere, and Harlan reached back to The Brothers Size, an early play by YSD alum Tarell Alvin McCraney that gave Yale Cabaret 46 a strong finish. Holt’s and Harlan’s choices showed the commitment to current plays and youngish playwrights demonstrated by the Summer Cab line-up.

For their Managing Director, Holt and Harlan asked around “and heard and observed good things” about Gretchen Wright, whose background in choreography may afford participation beyond the key role of keeping the Cabaret running smoothly. As regular patrons of the Summer Cabaret know, the summer is a different animal from the term-time Cabaret, becoming a welcome oasis in a college town whose median age ratchets up considerably in the summer months. Other entertainments of the “afterhours” variety may be added later.

With its first offering, the 40th anniversary Summer Cabaret will touch base with its origins before taking us on a journey that will demonstrate some of the contemporary values of theater—bending genres, looking at the problem of historical enactment, re-imagining the “domestic quotidian,” and demonstrating the resources of short but powerful recent pieces.

The key terms for the 40th Summer Cabaret, devised by Holt and Harlan, are Community. Excellence. Imagination. Innovation. Investigation. Wonder. Providing excellent theater to the New Haven community through innovative works that investigate our ways of life with a sense of imaginative wonder, the Summer Cabaret will up and running in three and a half weeks.

Prepare to be challenged.

The Yale Summer Cabaret 2014 Voices at the Forefront of American Theater

Photographs by Christopher Ash

Passes and single tickets are available online at summercabaret.org, by phone at (203) 432-1567, by email at summer.cabaret@yale.edu, and in person at the Yale Summer Cabaret box office (217 Park Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06511).

Recap: Yale Cab 46

Yale Cabaret Season 46 is now just a memory. So let’s test our memories. Surveying the season, I’ve come up with five top picks in thirteen categories, as I have done for Seasons 45 (’12-’13) and 44 (’11-’12). Picks are listed in order of the show’s appearance, except the last named is my top choice. First up, the category of pre-existing play adapted to the unique opportunities afforded by the ever-intimate Cab space: All of these had something to do with power dynamics and each was a gripping experience: Dutchman, the challenging provocation about erotics and racial profiling by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka; erotomania as a work ethic between sisters in Jean Genet’s The Maids; He Left Quietly, Yaël Farber’s dramatization of the incarceration of an innocent man sentenced to death in apartheid South Africa; YSD alum Tarell Alvin McCraney’s exploration of the bonds and frictions between brothers as archetypes in The Brothers Size; and . . . Edward Bond’s daunting look at a world bereft of goods and memories, Have I None.

New plays inaugurated at the Cab this season, as usual, were a mixed bag, trying out eclectic forms: We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun, by Helen Jaksch (*15), Kelly Kerwin (*15), Emily Zemba (*15) is a drag-show drama with music, comedy, and pathos; The Most Beautiful Thing in the World, conceived by Gabriel Levey (*14) and devised with Kate Tarker (*14), is a performance piece that invites the kinds of pitfalls theater is prone to, and brought the audience into the performance; The Defendant, by Elia Monte-Brown (*14), commands the attitudes and language of its teen characters, while walking a difficult line between comedy and unsettling social reality; The Mystery Boy, adapted by Chris Bannow (*14), is a frenetic theatrical romp as weird and vivid as the mind of a pre-teen; and . . . A New Saint for a New World by Ryan Campbell (*15) is a funny dialogue-driven exploration of faith and defiance through the figure of Joan of Arc.

For Sets, the created space wherein everything happens: the runway by way of Warhol for the camp and glam denizens of We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun, by Christopher Ash (*14); the gritty prison space open to our view to make theater of incarceration for He Left Quietly, by Christopher Thompson (*16); the posters and atmosphere of a bygone theatrical era that lent much visual interest to The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion, by Reid Thompson (*14); the striking combination of modern and ancient ruin that served as backdrop to graffiti art in We Fight We Die, by Jean Kim (*16); and . . . the improbable rooms within a room, meticulously outfitted and wrought for The Maids, by Kate Noll (*14).

For Lighting, that magical aspect of theater that adds so much atmosphere and affect to our viewing experience: Elizabeth Mak (*16) for the highly effective illuminations of the will-of-the-wisp figures in Crave; Oliver Wason (*14) for the use of light and dark to evoke the uncertain occurrences in The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs; Oliver Wason (*14) for the intricate lighting of actual interior space in The Maids; Oliver Wason (*14) for the different lighting for the different worlds—from domestic earth to prison to another planet—in A New Saint for a New World; and . . . Andrew F. Griffin (*16) for playing with light and dark in an almost musical way in The Brothers Size.

For Costumes, that aspect of the experience that helps us suspend our disbelief, and helps actors convince us of their characters’ reality: Hunter Kaczorowski (*14) for the stylish retro outfits of Radio Hour; Elivia Bovenzi (*14) for a cast of regular people and inspired clowns in Derivatives; Asa Benally (*16) for costuming a cavalcade of different plays in a short compass in The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion; Fabian Aguilar (*16) for the varied habiliments of Joan of Arc’s ordeals in A New Saint for a New World—including space-age angels; and . . . Grier Coleman (*15) for the pastiche and aplomb, charm and chutzpa of We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun.

More ethereal even than Lighting is Sound, but a telling aspect of any production in augmenting the action and creating a mental space to support the visual: Joel Abbott (*14) for tying together all the moods and styles of We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun; Tyler Kieffer (*15) for the use of scored moments in the presentation of The Most Beautiful Thing in the World; Brian Hickey (*15) and Steve Brush (*14) for the razzle-dazzle TV-esque documentary and comedy productions of Derivatives; Tyler Kieffer for letting us eavesdrop so effectively in The Maids; and . . . Tyler Kieffer (*15) and Steve Brush (*14) for the radio soundscape and Foley art of Radio Hour.

For some productions, the visual element doesn’t end with Lighting, Sets, and Costumes, but acquires more presence through the use of projections and other special Visual Effects: Christopher Ash (*14) for the enhancement of the performance space of We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun; Nick Hussong (*14) for the various charts and logos and floating backdrops in Derivatives; Kristin Ferguson (*15) for the striking and lyrical use of photographic projections in Bound to Burn; Joey Moro (*15) for the creation of different visual moods so important to Joan of Arc’s odyssey in A New Saint for a New World; and . . . Rasean Devonte Johnson (*16) for the graffitied visuals of We Fight We Die, and for adding to the fluid visual experience of The Brothers Size.

Use of Music is another element that, for some productions, is almost like adding another character or a special effect to color the action or complete it: Steve Brush (*14) for the songs and jingles and accompaniment so crucial to the aural world of Radio Hour; Jenny Schmidt (*14) for adding to the tensions and suggestiveness of The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs; Pornchanok Kanchanabanca (*16) for the enlivening musical asides that fleshed out the variety of The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion; Mike Mills for the percussion that acts as Greek chorus to comment musically on—and even control—the action of The Brothers Size; and . . . Joel Abbott (*14) for the sensitive accompaniment that helped render the range of possible motives and actions in We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun.

Another aspect of the experience of the play’s physical presence is how it moves—sometimes that means actual choreography and the creation of dance, other times it has to do with how much activity and physical interaction takes place in the show; choice examples of how intricate Movement greatly enhances a play are: the choreography of the drag queen sleuths by Kelly Kerwin (*15) for We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun; the fluid use of the entire space and the highly expressive interactions directed by Hansol Jung (*14) in Crave; the dance numbers that told stories with movement and mime, choreographed by Rob Chikar (*14) and Alyssa Simmons (*14), in Bound to Burn; the incredibly active interludes bursting out of The Brothers Size, directed by Luke Harlan (*16); and . . . the prop-happy cast, creating sound effects and a variety of characters in different costumes while constantly on stage, of The Mystery Boy, directed by Chris Bannow (*14) and Helen Jaksch (*15).

In terms of Performance, some roles and actors move beyond the traditional “actor”/”actress” dualism, but as such is still the norm of awards shows, I’ll follow suit; for the xy chromosomes: as the one, the only, the much maligned and deeply mourned Edie La Minx: Seth Bodie (*14) in We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun (*14); as Claire, “the pretty one” that Mistress should have designs on: Mickey Theis (*14) in The Maids; for his show-stopping turn as a Lena Horne impersonator in We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun, and for acting out the gripping ordeal of Duma Kumalo in He Left Quietly, Ato Blankson-Wood (*15); as Ogun, the god of iron in the form of a paternalistic and truly fraternal car-shop owner in The Brothers Size, Jonathan Majors (*16); and . . . as the alleged brother who brings death to his sister in Have I None, and as the manipulative “sister” in The Maids, Chris Bannow (*14).

And in Performance, those actors with xx chromosomes: as Lula, the mercurial provocation on a subway car in Dutchman, Carly Zien (*14); as the introducer forced to provide the presentation, with improvised patter and invited responses, Kate Tarker (*14) in The Most Beautiful Thing in the World; as the curious, distraught and distrustful wife in The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs, Chasten Harmon (*15); as a Joan of Arc forced to be normal and then again extraordinary, Maura Hooper (*15) in A New Saint for a New World; and . . . as a woman at her wits’ end in a world of deprivations, Ceci Fernandez (*14) in Have I None.

For the task of somehow orchestrating all this diverse input and making decisions that create a coherent theatrical experience—for Directing, in other words: Jessica Holt (*15) for the harrowing world, driven by complex language and meaningful actions and silences, of Have I None; Cole Lewis (*14) for the mounting tensions and effective contrapuntal presentation of The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs; Sara Holdren (*15) for keeping a handle on comedy with cosmic dimensions, and drama with unsettling implications in A New Saint for a New World; Luke Harlan (*16) for the combination of movement, music, intense dialogue and strong characterizations in The Brothers Size; and . . . Dustin Wills (*14) for the challenging presentation and darkly comic tone of drama queens seduced by death behind closed doors but bare windows in The Maids.

Finally, for overall Production, which means having the wherewithal to make this thing happen, as enablers and aider-abetters, the producers and dramaturgs of the shows that impressed me most: We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun: Emika Abe (*15), producer, and Helen Jaksch (*15), dramaturg; Have I None: Molly Hennighausen (*15), producer, and Hugh Farrell (*15), dramaturg; A New Saint for A New World: Sally Shen, producer, and Helen Jaksch (*15), dramaturg; The Brothers Size: Alyssa Simmons (*14) and Melissa Zimmerman (*14), producers, and Taylor Barfield (*16), dramaturg; and . . . The Maids: Lauren Wainwright (*14), producer, and Tanya Dean (*14), dramaturg.

Some of those mentioned have completed their time at YSD—best of luck in all you do!—and others have a year or two to go. Thanks to all for their dedication, talent, and spirited engagement with the special performance space that is the Yale Cabaret. And to this year's departing team, Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, Kelly Kerwin, and Shane Hudson, many thanks for a lively season.

Coming soon: a preview of the Yale Summer Cabaret, with Artistic Directors Jessica Holt and Luke Harlan, and Managing Director Gretchen Wright.

See you next year, at the Cab!--with Artistic Directors Hugh Farrell, Tyler Kieffer, Will Rucker, and Managing Director Molly Hennighausen.

Brother's Keeper

The final show of the Yale Cabaret’s 46th season brings it all back home. The play, The Brothers Size, was written by its prize-winning and celebrated author, Tarell Alvin McCraney, while a third-year playwright at YSD, in 2007, and the current production is directed and acted by First Years in the program. The effect is one of demonstrating that the play belongs here, at the Cab. And that’s largely because the three actors in the show—Jonathan Majors, Galen Kane, Julian Elijah Martinez—feel such a strong connection to McCraney’s play. One has the sense that The Brothers Size is a defining text for these actors and they, and director Luke Harlan, do the play all due reverence.

It’s a play of relationships, not only of the two brothers Size—Ogun, the elder (Majors), and Oshoosi (Kane)—and Oshoosi’s former cellmate, Elegba (Martinez), but also of Yoruban gods (Orisha). In the cosmic scheme of things, Ogun and Oshoosi are inseparable brothers, the elder a god of “iron, vehicles, weapons, and war” (according to the playbill by production dramaturg, Taylor Barfield), and the latter a god of hunting. Legba, on the other hand, is that figure common to almost all religions: the trickster, the god of the crossroads, the amorphous figure that has a tendency to mix things up. That’s his role here, too, and one of the interests of the play is how McCraney makes this character—played very seductively by Martinez—both a figure for necessary change but also for danger.

The relation between the brothers is grudging. Majors is very strong in delivering the no-nonsense side of Ogun, who still rides his brother for his two years in prison, and who looks upon him as any boss—Ogun runs a car repair shop—would a feckless, lazy employee. As Oshoosi, Kane has the more difficult role to get across if only because, while we tend to sympathize with the younger brother, we might not trust him either. It helps that Kane gives Oshoosi a true gravitas that makes him seem anything but frivolous and deceitful. Rather than a schemer, he’s a man struggling to figure out what the world might have to offer him. Time inside has given him ambitions that stretch beyond a car shop, even if he might have no idea how to get a start.

Enter Elegba as the kind of character that seems to promise not only an individual worth—praising Oshoosi’s singing voice, for instance—but also the means to shed shackles once and for all. Such freedom takes the shape of, what else, one’s own “ride.” A car to get away in. But in this world—abutting the Gulf of Mexico—“getaway” also means running from the law. Indeed, there’s a great bonding moment among the three men when Elegba characterizes his recent encounter with the local sheriff, a black man who uses his status to condemn just about any other black man he meets. It’s an example of how racism phases into the system to the point that oppression by “the masters” might even extend to one’s own race. In a sense, McCraney is using African archetypes to add dimension to his interrogation of racial stereotypes.

A strength of the latter intention is the music of the play's language and its power as a means of personal expression. All three characters speak in a lyrical manner that owes not a little to August Wilson’s pioneering ability to work everyday speech into a powerful instrument. In McCraney's world, the high and the lowly are on an even playing field and everything is stylized and heightened. The play also boasts a percussion accompaniment by Mike Mills that adds drama and accompanies vigorous set-pieces of movement at strategic moments. Music—specifically Otis Redding’s “(Try a Little) Tenderness”—is used to entertaining effect when the Brothers Size mimic the song like they did as kids. At such times the bond of brothers is strong and it’s that bond that becomes McCraney’s over-riding theme, particularly during Ogun’s aria about his responsibility toward Oshoosi, played with a very affecting sense of assertion, complaint, and pleading by Majors.

The Brothers Size is a play of rich suggestion more than a play of plot. Much of that suggestion comes from the archetypes behind these characters, giving us cause to reflect on their roles in our modern conceptions of ourselves. While these figures are not as familiar in the literary tradition as Greek gods and the like, McCraney makes the case that, for his African-American characters particularly, the brother gods that The Brothers Size recalls have a meaningful ethical dimension.

The play marks a very strong finish for this year’s ambitious Yale Cabaret season, ending not with a whimper, but a bang.

The Brothers Size By Tarell Alvin McCraney Directed by Luke Harlan

Dramaturg: Taylor Barfield; Set: Kevin Klakouski; Lights: Andrew F. Griffin; Sound: Pornchanok (Nok) Kanchanabanca; Costumes: Montana Levi Blanco; Projections: Rasean Davonte Johnson; Associate Projections: Elizabeth Mak; Stage Manager: Anita Shastri; Producers: Alyssa Simmons, Melissa Zimmerman

Yale Cabaret April 24-26, 2014

Back to the CAB

Last weekend the Yale Cabaret offered its second-ever Yale School of Drag—memorable for many things, including Lupita Nyong’o drag, but if you missed it, then you missed it. And if you saw it, far be it from me to tell you what you saw. This week the Cab is back with the first of the eight shows that continue the second part of the 2013-14 Season. Artistic Directors Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, and Kelly Kerwin have arrived at an interesting mix of shows. Five are pre-existing plays, two are never-before-seen productions, and one is a mixture: a devised setting for known pieces (a bit like Radio Show in the fall).

The first three shows are scheduled beginning this week and for the next two weeks, then a two-week break, three more shows, a week dark, and then the final two. Got it? Here’s what’s coming:

Cab 11 is The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs, proposed by 2nd-year Set Designer Adrian Frausto (whose excellent work on Hedda Gabler closed recently) and directed by 3rd-year Director Cole Lewis, whose varied and unsettling thesis show The Visit was offered in the fall. The play, running for the Valentine's Day weekend, looks at the darker side of romance with a revisiting of the Bluebeard tale of the wealthy man who marries a woman and gives her everything, except . . . she can’t go into that room at the top of the stairs. If your Valentine is the kind who loves a good scare, then this is the place to be. And when was the last time the Cab offered a thriller based on tension and suspense? Written by Canadian playwright Carole Fréchette, the play, Dibo promises, will offer an unusual configuration of the Cab playing space and, with its theme of trust in romance, is perhaps all-too apropos for Valentine’s Day. February 13-15

Next comes Jean Genet’s psychological drama The Maids, proposed by 3rd-year Director Dustin Wills, Co-Artistic Director of Yale Summer Cabaret 2013, whose startlingly unusual Peter Pan played in December. The play, which usually takes place among three women—the mistress and her two maids—will be played by three males, “performing rituals of gender,” according to Dubowski, within a staged space constructed by Kate Noll with sound design by Tyler Kieffer. The idea is to present us with a space full of mirrors and different lines of sight so that the audience is placed in the roles of voyeurs and eavesdroppers, spying on what the maids get-up to behind the scenes. Mainstays of the Summer Cab 2013, Mickey Theis and Chris Bannow, will be joined by first-year actor, Andrew Burnap. February 20-22

The third show before the break is He Left Quietly, proposed by 1st-year Director Leora Morris, a play by Yaël Farber about Duma Kumalo, a man sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit in apartheid South Africa. Kumalo’s story, which involves a stay-of-execution delivered on the day the death sentence was to be carried out, followed by another four years of incarceration for a total of 7 years in prison, is a story of a man’s spirit triumphing over unspeakable deprivations. The show, which features three 2nd-year actors, Ato Blankson-Wood, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Maura Hooper, returns us to the dark realities of apartheid South Africa and a search for justice. February 27-March 1

After two dark weeks, the Cab will return with The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion, a partly devised piece proposed by 1st-year Dramaturg David Bruin. The show will transform the Cab into a Greenwich Village basement in the early 1960s where beatniks and bohemians gather to check out two one-acts by two of their own: Edward Albee and María Irene Fornés. The production takes us back to when these darlings of the theatrical world were still “up-and-coming” and where the surroundings for the play are part of the play in a time of porous conceptions of theater. March 20-22

Cab 15 is We Fight We Die by Long Island-born playwright Timothy J. Guillot and directed by 1st-year playwright Jiréh Breon Holder; the play looks at the fate of the work of graffiti artist Q in his tussle with City Hall, which aims to stamp out his form of art. With a Greek chorus rapping to us about the struggle and original works of art by MFA students in the Yale School of Art, the show provides an interesting collaboration between art forms and media that should be aurally and visually challenging, and, with the recent obliteration of 5Pointz in Long Island City, very timely. March 27-29

Next comes an unusual devised piece from 3rd-year actor and Co-Artistic Director of Summer Cabaret 2013, Chris Bannow. The source material: The Mystery Boy, Bannow’s sister’s original 126-page novel, written two years ago when she was 11. With 2nd-year dramaturg Helen Jaksch (seen in the fall as M in Crave) co-directing, the ensemble cast will be put through their paces with a love triangle, adventures involving the Mafia, vacation romance, and the various pleasures and perils of social media as the lingua franca of our current pre-teen world. April 3-5

2nd-year playwright Ryan Campbell—his Dead Ends was a studio play this past fall—offers his own A New Saint for a New World, directed by 2nd-year director Sara Holdren, who directed Tiny Boyfriend in the fall. The premise: Joan of Arc wants to return to earth; God finally agrees on the condition that she not start any wars or revolutions. Conceived as “a real big play for a small room,” Saint considers the possibilities for faith in 2014 NYC and the frustrations faced by a heroic crusader forbidden to crusade. April 17-19

Cab 18, the last of the season, might be a somewhat obvious choice: The Brothers Size by Tarell Alvin McCraney, the YSD graduate playwright who recently won a Yale Windham-Campbell Writing Prize and a MacArthur “genius” Award in the same year. Three 1st year actors, Jonathan Majors, Julian Elijah Martinez, and Galen Kane proposed the play, written while McCraney was a third-year at YSD, and made their case that it’s a play they have an urgent need to enact due to their personal histories and the unique opportunity offered by the Cab. Directed by Luke Harlan, the play is the story of two brothers—Ogun runs a car-repair shop, the other, Oshoozi, recently released from prison, comes to work for him—and a third man, Elegba, also come from jail, who visits to bring Oshoozi a gift. Set in the bayou country of Louisiana and involving music and African myths, the play should end the Cab’s 46th Season with a strong finish as YSD pays tribute to one of its own. April 24-26

So, that’s what you can look forward to in the weeks ahead. See you at the Cab!

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven, CT

Season 46 Co-Artistic Directors: Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, Kelly Kerwin Managing Director: Shane Hudson