Author Archives: Helen Rouner

Inside the Yale Cabaret’s little black box theater, boundaries are slippery.

A crown jewel sits unassuming among missionaries’ journal entries, aging photographs, handwritten letters to mid-level political officials, and books neither particularly old nor rare: one of the hundred volumes of the Lhasa Kangyur, a translation of the Buddha’s Teachings, that comprises half of the Tibetan Buddhist canon.

Having burst out into a joyous refrain of “Die when you die,” the ensemble suddenly froze, and one performer stepped forward, announcing matter-of-factly, “America is having a nervous breakdown.”