Coming to the Cabaret for the First Time

February 6, 2015 3:34 am Leave a Comment

Sitting in the theater during last night’s performance of “Cabaret,” which runs this weekend and next, I heard a boy behind me declare proudly to his friends that he was a “Cabaret virgin.” I felt an instant connection with him because I was one too. Well, you know what people say about the first time — it can be painful, enlightening or even, for the lucky few, enjoyable. But rarely can people say they experience it all. “Cabaret” provided just that.

Unlike the classic interpretation of Cabaret, director Noam Shapiro’s ’15 version features a play within a play. The characters are in fact performing the show in the German Theresienstadt concentration camp during the Holocaust. Nazis seated at tables in front of the stage watch the performers, and even the audience, as an authoritative and suffocating presence. Meanwhile, the “classic” play within depicts the tumultuous relationship between an American writer and a British cabaret performer in a Germany on the verge of Nazi control.

Shapiro’s version recaptures the solace and pain that has often been lost in other stagings of the musical. We cannot lose ourselves in the glitz and glam of the cabaret without remembering that all of the beauty is tainted by the presence of the Nazis. Shapiro will not allow the audience to escape from the truth or live in a fantasy world even from the beginning. The set, the labored movements of the actors and the racial slurs disguised as jokes remind the audience of the impending genocide.

Some moments in the play are so jarringly overwhelming and yet so subtle that they leave the audience stunned. In a well-choreographed dance number, “If You Could Only See Her,” the Emcee sings about his love, with whom he cannot in public because of political tensions and racial prejudices. His lover is dressed in a mouse mask, alluding to Hitler’s characterization of the Jews as vermin as well as the acclaimed graphic novel MAUS. Only in the final line does the Emcee reveal that his lover is a Jew. We’re so taken in by the bestial farce that the revelation of the metaphor’s meaning throws us entirely off, and leaves the audience breathless. For a moment no one knew whether to applaud or not at this song, which has as put us in the position of potential collaborator.

Nathaniel Dolquist ’15 owned the daunting role of Emcee. He inhabited his character, a comfortable and natural storyteller who mesmerizes the audience. He injects the show with color, pizzazz and much-needed comic relief. He stands as an everyman, the lone figure who absorbs everyone’s grief and embodies the Zeitgeist. Dolquist’s speech is unstudied and his physical comedy Chaplinesque in its combination of crisp execution and raw emotion. (He also does some pretty mind-boggling magic tricks.) At the culmination of the play, the Emcee is the last one to leave the stage, a shattered world where even the ultimate comedian has lost all sense of humor.

But Fräulein Schneider (Sarah Chapin ’17) and Herr Schultz (Dan Rubins ’16) steal the show. A spinster and a widower, they fall in love when they’ve come to think love is a young man’s game. They convey a subtle and endearing tenderness in a world full of promiscuity and flashiness. The two actors play roles four times their age effortlessly and develop a raw romance that the audience feels it’s intruding upon.

I left “Cabaret” feeling torn. I had just witnessed a hilarious and moving piece of theater. At the same time, the musical reminds me that every day we try to live our lives erasing what evils humanity has already perpetrated. It was like reopening a hidden wound of guilt and pain that I did not realize existed. Shapiro will not let us rest easy thinking we can forget and allow the Holocaust to be obscured by the glitz and glamour of Broadway. Part of me is scared no future “Cabaret” performance will live up to the ecstasy and the pain of this revelatory production. As they say, you never forget your first time.

A Night at the Hotel Nepenthe

November 7, 2014 4:15 am Leave a Comment

“The Hotel Nepenthe” was first performed in 2011, in a small abandoned thrift store in Somerville, Massachusetts. A subsequent larger production with the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston recreated that thrift store on stage. The Yale Cabaret makes no such move. The stage is dressed with a large gray office desk at its center; a couch and coffee table sit off to its right, and two chairs to its left. Mismatched books line the shelves along the walls, and the center of the back wall above the desk is covered in overlapping, peeling pieces of paper, each covered in type and scribbles. From the start, one can sense the stories the walls would tell if they could speak.

The cast is made up of four players — Bradley James Tejeda DRA ’16, Annelise Lawson DRA ’16, Emily Reeder DRA ’17 and Galen Kane DRA ’16. They all play at least four different roles, which they shift between with costume changes that are not deliberately concealed. The performances are all strong, and the characters distinct. Yet the reincarnation of Lawson as a mother worrying about her children, a conniving senator’s wife and the girl working the desk at a rental car company inevitably draws a connection between these characters — especially as the audience strives to draw connections between scenes that, at first glance, are wildly disparate. One of the characters, a dispatcher at a taxi station (Kane), expresses this idea in the middle of the play. He believes that there are “parallel universes,” in which “everything is backward … where all the same people exist, only different things happen … endless possibilities.”

Following the scene with the dispatcher, two players walk on stage as a bride and groom. The groom speaks to a bellhop, asking to be shown to the honeymoon suite. Their six-line exchange is then repeated again and again, each variation separated by a shrill noise made by the fourth player, dressed as a maid. What begins as a polite, unexceptionable interaction becomes a dialogue from a noir film, a musical number, a swashbuckling fight and a passionate love scene.

By the last variation, the two players have switched positions on stage, and each takes on the other’s original role — the groom speaking the lines of the bellhop and the bellhop those of the groom. The scene explicitly lays out the endless possibility inherent in two people sharing a single moment. Though grounded by this theme previously expressed by the dispatcher, the scene is utterly bewildering to watch. One of the exchanges takes place entirely in Italian; in another, the remaining players spray whipped cream into the speakers’ mouths. It makes no sense. It also makes complete sense.

Playwright John Kuntz called the play a “schizophrenic noir.” His plays, he said, “tend to be kind of non-linear and surreal. And kind of dreamlike — I write from dreams a lot.” Indeed, the prevailing sense in my stay at the Hotel Nepenthe was that of being in a dream, the sort in which people and scenes shift unquestionably. They reappear at random, and something seems familiar — vaguely so, only graspable for a brief, intensely satifying moment before the next startling shift occurs. Another character voices a line that hits upon that sense: “I wish that my life mattered, somehow. That this pervading sense that this is all just a bunch of random stuff happening would dissipate. And through all the chaos, everything would somehow make sense.”

Motivational speech, without the speaker

October 4, 2013 3:19 am Leave a Comment

Chase Michaels is nowhere to be found. For the first 10 minutes of the “The Most Beautiful Thing in the World,” written by Gabe Levey DRA ’14, Carol, an obsessive fan, scrambles around frantically looking for Michaels, the motivational speaker who is supposed to headline the show. She searches for him onstage, heads backstage, treads through the entire room and then walks outside, shouting his name. Following this maddening first “scene,” full of are-we-supposed-to-laugh? moments, she reappears on stage and dejectedly announces, “Chase Michaels isn’t here.”

The lights go down, and Carol starts Chase’s presentation in his place.

You should have seen it coming. The show’s program, plastered with images of Michaels smiling charmingly, contains quotes like “Look around; you’re already here!” allegedly from a book entitled “YOU Are the Only YOU in Your YOUniverse.” The Yale Cabaret website advertises Michaels as “one of the world’s most renowned motivational speakers.” But when you Google “Chase Michaels,” your first result will be the Facebook page of Chase Michaels, a male bodybuilder and pole dancer. The motivational speaker doesn’t exist, but now you wallow in disappointment and you fantasize about sitting in front of the pole dancer instead of the awkward girl shaking all over the stage.

Carol, played by Kate Tarker DRA ’14, does a terrible job presenting, which of course means that Tarker is doing her job phenomenally. Although the search drags on for a bit too long — a nearby audience member said, “We should’ve ordered more wine” — for the remainder of the show, Carol is wildly entertaining. She is insecure, fidgety, sweaty and incapable of carrying a proper conversation with the audience.

These moments of Carol-audience interaction are the show’s most hilarious. Midway through the show, Carol begins to engage the audience in what she believes to be Michaels’s “seventh?” step to self-improvement. Her PowerPoint arrives at a slide that reads “The Problem.” Unsure of how this relates to the previous slide, Carol turns to a woman in the middle of the audience and asks, “What’s your problem right now?”

“Republicans” the woman answers, sending the theatre into a minute-long fit of laughter and snaps of approval. Carol goes down the line, and other responses include “college students,” “airlines,” “politicians,” and “I’m worried that Chase Michaels will show up.” Take the last one how you will.

For the remainder of the show, Carol gradually gains confidence and is able to speak slightly more fluidly with the people sitting nearby. For every response that she gets, she bellows, “YES! GREAT! EXACTLY” Eventually, you and the rest of the audience find yourselves shouting praise alongside her and also — oddly — for her.

Although “Beautiful” is mostly a one-woman show, the irony is that it relies so heavily on interactions with and among audience members. This is also why the show succeeds. After you leave the Cabaret, you’ll feel like you were part of a team that consisted of Carol, the audience, the crew and any other people involved with the show. (In many instances, Carol speaks directly to Anita, the woman working the control booth.) Everyone watches the show together, applauds together, and most importantly, roots for Carol as she grows into her role as the “seminar leader.” At the end of the play, the audience literally shouts in approval as Carol shoots down one of her biggest and most surprising demons.

It’s probable that all of this raucous, jovial behavior had something to do with the casual set up of the Cabaret and its extensive list of alcoholic offerings. But the positive and overwhelming audience support is also definitely a result of Levey writing a truly unique theatre experience. When talking about the show, the word “motivational” is thrown around a lot, though that’s not the best descriptor. “Infectious” and “uplifting” are more accurate. If Carol did it, so can you.

A Modern Love Story at the Cabaret

September 27, 2013 2:47 am Leave a Comment

I wonder what they’d make of “Dutchman” in Brooklyn.

Playing this weekend at the Yale Cabaret, Amiri Baraka’s play makes mincemeat of the ironies we coyly use to talk about race. And fierce direction by Katherine McGerr DRA ’14 touches a modern nerve. It’s hard to imagine the 1964 script wasn’t intended to shatter the false securities of our ambivalently post-racial era, when it’s cool to subvert the last few decades’ political correctness so gingerly through our hipster ironies. But “Dutchman” is also far from PC—it rails precisely against mealy-mouthed racial niceties of any kind.

On a sparely set metro that the play never leaves, a black man sits reading a book. Smartly dressed, with khakis, a white dress shirt and tie, he looks up at a white Lolita in a skimpy summer dress and bug-eyed sunglasses strutting into view. She cuts a flirty figure, clearly, and in due time she’ll cast herself as the fast-talking-stripper-smartass to his baby fat and twinkle. Double bookkeeping the evening, always narrating her near future, the woman leads the man to wonder: Is she a television actress? “I told you no,” she says, “but I also told you I always lie.” Primadonna seductress, Lula—“say it twice,” she orders, “Lula Lula”— will play the race card like kabuki, manically mixing the stranger’s chocolate to her vanilla, but with enough sprinklings of racial epithet to eventually make him crack.

She rubs against him, setting her supersize imagination loose: “You ain’t no nigger…You just a dirty white man.” And that’s when he erupts. In that way, this otherwise compelling play hews close to a stale theatrical formula about racial tension: it simmers until it explodes. It really does.

And that, too, is extraordinary in this play where all is role-play until—snap—it isn’t.

Lula had wondered if is his name is Lloyd, Norman or Leroy—“one of those hopeless Black names coming out of New Jersey.” But it’s Clay, he says, and he playfully let her guess if his last name if Jackson, Johnson or Williams. (It’s Williams.) During the first half of the play, Clay cooperates with the irreverent racial scrimmage. Lula whispers enough sweet words to deceive him that she sees past the color line. Like a puppy, he answers to her barks of “boy.” Later on she’ll call him an Uncle Tom and, ever the actress, hobble around the stage like one.

Keywords of racism clutter the script, but the actors don’t let them pile up into a laundry list. Cornelius Davidson DRA ’15, as Clay, and Carly Zien DRA ’14, as Lula, act with the surgical precision of cruise missile strikes. Not a single cheap emotion crosses their faces. As composed as rocks struck by lightning, Zien and Davidson—especially Davidson—convey the gravity of the situation. Their deep focus belies the fact that “Dutchman” can come across as a morality play.

Sparks fly -— there’s too much romantic chemistry for the two to just plain hate. Davidson plays the part too adorably, too earnestly, to ever be mistaken for the stereotypic Angry Black Man. And Zien’s too complicated, troubled maybe, to just be a Frigid White Bitch.

At times it feels like “Dutchman” served as an echo chamber for Amiri Baraka’s righteous anger, and the script divides the play into two parts: her rant and his. She taunts him for the first half; he strikes back in the second. It’s a call and response effect. And at the rare moment when wit rears its head, it’s ugly. Lula asks Clay if the other white passengers on the train scare him, “because you’re an escaped nigger, you crawled through the wire.”

“You must be Jewish,” he responds. “All you talk about is wire.”

That’s a queasy line to take from Baraka, the poet-playwright who would achieve near-universal infamy with his 9/11 conspiracy theories in the poem “Somebody Blew Up America”: “Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed. /

Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the twin towers/

To stay at home that day.”

In a way, “Dutchman” was the watershed in Amiri Baraka’s career that pushed him to write like that. Ultimately, the play’s an argument against the pretense of politesse in a climate of anger. “If Betsy Smith had killed some white people she wouldn’t have made her music,” Clay says. Charlie Parker “would have played not a note of music if he killed some white people.” Here, Baraka argued that Black art muffled Black politics. Art compromised politics.

And yet, the Yale Cabaret didn’t let politics compromise their art.

Barking Up the Wrong Tree, Thanks to ‘Inspector Hound’

March 1, 2013 3:31 am Leave a Comment

Directed by Alexi Sargeant ’15 and playing in the Calhoun Cabaret this weekend, “The Real Inspector Hound” presents a formally daring challenge. The script, written by Tom Stoppard (who earned fame for his witty rewrite of “Hamlet” in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”), stuffs both a play within a play — the story of a murder in Muldoon Manor — and commentary on that play by a pair of critics into a single act. Initially, the critics merely remark on the action, but, as the plot zips forward, their reality blurs into that of the characters onstage. I won’t tell you how or why, but, by the end of the play, everyone becomes involved in both plots.

In an early scene, Mrs. Drudge, Caitlin Miller ’16, listens to a police report on the sighting of a madman in the nearby moors and then comments on how isolated Muldoon Manor is. The joke relies on your knowledge that nearly every British murder mystery takes place in a manor house cut off from the world. In fact, “Hound” works through the genre’s standard tropes one by one — from a confrontation over tea to a game of bridge played with an increasingly ridiculous and inscrutable set of rules (so pretty much any game of bridge). At times this lampooning becomes extreme, when the characters make several references in a row to “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” for instance. The humor lands if you know what it’s sending up, but those who think of Sherlock Holmes as just another Robert Downey Jr. action hero will find little to latch onto. And while lovers of Victorian mysteries might laugh, they, most likely, will not.

Of course, the two critics at the back of the stage tell the audience this opinion during the play, among their other quips. Birdfoot, Alexander Oki ’13, takes an old-fashioned perspective to his job. He is carrying on an affair with one actress, and, halfway through the play, he falls in love with the other. Moon, Connor Lounsbury ’14, on the other hand, is more serious. The second-string reviewer for his local paper, he dreams of one day taking the lead — at one point, he even considers murder in a speech that Lounsbury delivers with maniacal glee. But the script also places the critics in the position of audience stand-ins. Once during the performance, they both looked into their programs for an actor’s name, and I realized that I was doing the same thing. Later, when the plot puts the critics in mortal danger, I began to feel highly uncomfortable, as I had spent so much time following their read on the plot. Critics and audience members, as Stoppard points out, really don’t think for themselves.

“Inspector Hound” ends with a big reveal, and, without spoiling anything, it works. That is not to say that the play has an emotional core — the actors play each character as a caricature, complete with a varying array of near-British accents — but that the conceit makes sense. By the time the curtain falls, a murder has been solved. The most satisfying part of any whodunit is the intellectual challenge, the way it keeps you on your feet until the end of the play. And, like every part of a good mystery, Stoppard’s extra layer of commentary provides yet another satisfying way of pointing in the wrong direction.

Barking Up the Wrong Tree, Thanks to “Inspector Hound”

1:53 am Leave a Comment

At one point in “The Real Inspector Hound,” the play’s five central characters realize that there may be a murderer in their midst and they all rush to grab improvised weapons — the maid gets a rope, the ex-soldier in a wheelchair clutches a bent pipe and a young socialite fiercely wields a candlestick. This far into the play, audience members who know the board game “Clue” have felt this reference coming from a long way away (with the characters in color-coded outfits, it’s a surprise that the girl in red isn’t actually named “Miss Scarlett”). But this is part of the point. “Hound” purposefully revels in recycled dialogue, and send-ups of character types any reader of Agatha Christie already knows far too well, because it also features two critics who sit behind the stage. “Derivative,” says one. “I know who did it!” shouts the other.
Directed by Alexi Sargeant ’15 and playing in the Calhoun Cabaret this weekend, “The Real Inspector Hound” presents a formally daring challenge. The script, written by Tom Stoppard (who earned fame for his witty rewrite of “Hamlet” in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”), stuffs both a play within a play — the story of a murder in Muldoon Manor — and commentary on that play by a pair of critics into a single act. Initially, the critics merely remark on the action, but, as the plot zips forward, their reality blurs into that of the characters onstage. I won’t tell you how or why, but, by the end of the play, everyone becomes involved in both plots.
In an early scene, Mrs. Drudge, Caitlin Miller ’16, listens to a police report on the sighting of a madman in the nearby moors and then comments on how isolated Muldoon Manor is. The joke relies on your knowledge that nearly every British murder mystery takes place in a manor house cut off from the world. In fact, “Hound” works through the genre’s standard tropes one by one — from a confrontation over tea, to a game of bridge played with an increasingly ridiculous and inscrutable set of rules (so pretty much any game of bridge). At times this lampooning becomes extreme, when the characters make several references in a row to “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” for instance. The humor lands if you know what it’s sending up, but those who think of Sherlock Holmes as just another Robert Downey Jr. action hero will find little to latch onto. And while lovers of Victorian mysteries might laugh, they, most likely, will not.
Of course, the two critics at the back of the stage tell the audience this opinion during the play, among their other quips. Birdfoot, Alexander Oki ’13, takes an old-fashioned perspective to his job. He is carrying on an affair with one actress, and, halfway through the play, he falls in love with the other. Moon, Connor Lounsbury ’14, on the other hand, is more serious. The second-string reviewer for his local paper, he dreams of one day taking the lead — at one point, he even considers murder in a speech that Lounsbury delivers with maniacal glee. But the script also places the critics in the position of audience stand-ins. Once during the performance, they both looked into their programs for an actor’s name, and I realized that I was doing the same thing. Later, when the plot puts the critics in mortal danger, I began to feel very uncomfortable as I had spent so much time following their read on the plot. Critics and audience members, as Stoppard points out, really don’t think for themselves.
“Inspector Hound” ends with a big reveal, and, without spoiling anything, it works. That is not to say that the play has an emotional core — the actors play each character as a caricature, complete with a varying array of near-British accents — but that the conceit makes sense. By the time the curtain falls, a murder has been solved. The most satisfying part of any whodunit is the intellectual challenge, the way it keeps you on your feet until the end of the play. And, like every part of a good mystery, Stoppard’s extra layer of commentary provides yet another satisfying way of pointing in the wrong direction.

When pussycats and bow-wows pout

February 15, 2013 5:23 am 1 Comment

“Haven’t you ever seen a ding-a-ling?”

Waiting for the coveted monkey bars, I stared doe-eyed at my fifth-grade suitor. No, I hadn’t (turns out, it’s not a delicious Hostess product.) At age 11, amidst the cesspool of public school recess, I was introduced to the racy concept of sexual innuendo.

That idea is all too present in the Yale Cabaret’s latest production, “Ermyntrude and Esmeralda,” adapted and directed by Hunter Kaczorowski DRA ’14. But don’t be fooled by the title’s Elizabethan echoes. More fitting, I think, is the play’s self-styled moniker: “naughty puppet show.”

The titular characters converse through a series of monologues, as they share their written correspondences with the audience. The conversation is aggressively relatable, a Victorian display of “Dawson’s Creek” soapiness. Esmeralda (Ceci Fernandez DRA ’14) gossips with insatiable adolescent energy about potential husbands. Ermyntrude (Sophie von Haselberg DRA ’14) dishes about her star-crossed-lover attraction to Henry, the dashing footman.

The two pen pals stumble to crack the code of silence surrounding S-E-X. With endearing naiveté, the two form their own sexual vernacular. Ermyntrude relates how her “pussycat” purrs for Henry. Esmeralda, eyes wide and mouth agape, wonders about the inner workings of each man’s “bow-wow.”

The stage, small and simple, mirrors the organic nature of the show’s dialogue. Esmeralda and Ermyntrude each sit at a desk, writing from their respective households, sometimes standing to gaze out at the audience. It’s as if we’re eavesdropping on a split-screen phone conversation, and the characters’ physical closeness on stage fits the intimacy of their relationship.

Shadow puppets periodically emerge in the background, with black figures dancing about in eight scattered picture frames. These scenes have a medieval simplicity to them, serving as natural complements to the dialogue.

With each appearance of shadow-pussycats and shadow-bow-wows, the sexual tension heightens, as when one cat silhouette spawns out of the lap of Ermyntrude’s puppet self. The puppetry adds an extra layer of nuance and insight into the character’s imaginations, directed with a precise amount of humor and economy.

It’s easy to attribute the show’s sexiness to its understatement. The staging and the wardrobe, so British in its formality, successfully underlines the forbidden nature of the dialogue.

“Ermyntrude and Esmeralda” entertains with witty wordplay and well-delivered innuendo, but it is more than mere ramblings à la “Sex and the City.” Read the script literally and the show dips into the prosaic pot of romantic conundrums — is love compatible with marriage? Why should it matter who we love.

Occasionally the characters slump into this predictability, though usually only for a line or two (as when Esmeralda vacuously asks, in contemplating her romantic life, “Have I finally discovered what I’m looking for?”). But at times, the play hints at larger societal issues, as the girls unwittingly question contemporary moral conventions about love through their innocence and idealism. When Esmeralda discovers two men in the act of lovemaking, she fails to understand her father’s repulsion toward this socially unacceptable behavior.

The narrative format compensates for any tiredness in the show’s message. The production is billed as a “Come Celebrate Valentine’s Day” affair, a day that thrives on the imitation of Baz Luhrmann-worthy flamboyance. It’s a holiday — and I say this with the least cynicism possible — of pomp over substance. “Ermyntrude and Esmeralda” succeeds in resisting that empty flashiness. Of course, our inquisitive heroines sacrifice no sense of theatricality in the process (Fernandez sometimes edges perilously close to melodrama in her imitation of teenage wonder). At its heart, the production challenges the gratuitous explicitness of modern expressions of romance.

In each sexual suggestion, in every shadow puppet scene, the show typifies the characters’ emotional curiosities in the most comedic way. Even as Esmeralda and Ermyntrude edge toward their prescribed fates, they still desperately want to understand the simplest concepts regarding sex. The Cabaret’s adaptation does not oversimplify this plot, but instead provides a masterful representation of the dilemmas weighing on the protagonists’ shoulders. The answers to their questions, it seems, are as hazy as the shadows projected on the stage.

An 'Island' Near and Far

January 25, 2013 5:30 am Leave a Comment

Sometimes closeness is the best reminder of distance. At the beginning of Yale Cabaret’s “The Island,” Athol Fugard’s Tony Award-winning 1973 apartheid-era drama, the political prisoner Winston (Winston Duke DRA ’13) douses himself with a bucket of water, and then lies heaving on the wooden stage. He is near enough that the rivulets trickling down his forehead seem tidal in proportion, and yet the loudness of his keening prevents us from forgetting that his character is beyond touching, beyond our help.

The production is a study in proximity. “The Island” takes place on Robben Island, a political prison in South Africa for violators of apartheid law. The action, confined to a small wooden stage around which the audience sits, is at once tangible — if you extend your arm, you might brush the actors’ skin — and tantalizingly beyond reach.

John (Paul Pryce DRA ’13) is attempting to convince a less-than-enthusiastic Winston, his cellmate, to play Antigone in a two-man rendition of the play for the other inmates. Although their preparations bring them closer, news that John’s island sentence has been reduced from 10 years to three months threatens to wrench them apart. Despite the characters’ physical nearness to each other, they are suddenly a world removed, separated not only by inches but the leagues between freedom and confinement.

There are only two characters in “The Island,” but the actors’ eyes are practically a third and fourth. To stare into Mr. Pryce’s eyes, ravished by hope from the news of his sentence reduction, is to be completely captivated.

The intellectual John, portrayed with earnest fervor by Mr. Pryce, insists that the reluctant Winston grasp “Antigone”’s significance and relevance to their plight. Just as Antigone is imprisoned for acting in accordance with her honor, so, too, are the island prisoners held captive for their beliefs — we learn later that Winston is jailed for burning his passbook before a police officer.

But Winston is not so easily convinced. In the masterful hands of Mr. Duke, he is someone who has lost his ideals in the plodding reality of the island. “I know why I am here, and it is history, not legends. … This is child’s play,” he says derisively of “Antigone.” Mr. Duke’s Winston is both a source of comic relief and a cold reminder that, in the abyss of his confinement, his bumbling humor is all he has left.

At the conclusion of the play, their friendship on the mend, they stage “Antigone,” with John as King Creon and the once-reluctant Winston playing the eponymous heroine. Wearing a braided straw wig for hair, crudely crafted necklace and long skirt, the statuesque Mr. Duke nevertheless projects a palpable masculinity.

In one of the play’s most compelling scenes, John lifts a copper cup from the stage floor, brings it tenderly to his ear, and speaks into it as though it were a telephone. He recounts the details of his days at the prison, growing somber when he asks to pass on news to his wife. Finally, he puts down the cup, twirling it helplessly between his fingers, but continues to speak into the ether: “Tell her … it’s getting cold, and the worst is yet to come.” Given the desperate truth of his acting, that he is only pretending comes as a surprise.

Winston will spend the rest of his life on the island, but his gaze contains a defiant universe. That is what this staging of “The Island” does so well — it cramps its miniscule stage with the boundless feeling of its actors. Foreign is their predicament, but familiar is the human condition.

“The Island” runs through Jan. 26 at the Yale Cabaret.

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