There is risk in attempting to put everyday life on the stage. Make it too realistic, and quite frankly, there’d be nothing to watch. Take one step too far, and you’ve transported your audience into another mindset. Lily Shoretz ’16, in her direction of “Ordinary Days,” somehow gets the balance just right. It’s life, but with all the charm of a New York fairy tale.
“Ordinary Days,” a one-act play by Adam Gwon, is almost entirely sung. The inspiring lyrics and multifarious melodies are juxtaposed with day-to-day routine, making the mundane seem rather exceptional. Each of the four characters is easy to connect with — no one character dominates, nor does one slip into the background. For 90 minutes, these are the only four people worth noting in the city of New York.
The honesty of the story is reflected in its minimalistic set, placing focus on the characters and their relationships with each other, as opposed to the city. The empty frames present a striking symbolism, echoing the idea of a life waiting to be filled. The characters, who cross paths at the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, yearn for the freedom that art represents. Despite the Nick Chapel Theater’s small size, the production manages to capture the ample diversity of New York’s urban geography.
Skyler Ross ’16, also the producer of the show, plays Warren — a fresh-faced character who captivates the audience with his optimistic naiveté and charming awkwardness. Ross plays him with such sensitivity and honesty that his sheer presence on stage will warm your heart. Ari Fernandez ’15 plays Warren’s stark opposite: Deb, a cynical grad student. It is clear that she has been disappointed by the bright lights of the big city, and the narrative arc of her character shows the harsh reality that life isn’t always what we want it to be post-graduation. Yet, Fernandez’s humorous portrayal ensures that the audience does not linger on her scornfulness. Her sarcasm is perfectly timed to make Deb funny, and the ease with which she sings her quick lines is particularly impressive. Deb and Warren’s chance encounter forms the story of an unlikely pair who transforms each other’s perspectives for the better. It’s a cliché, but it doesn’t make you cringe — you learn to believe again in the power of friendship, however unlikely the cause may be.
But “Ordinary Days” is not solely the story of Warren and Deb. In an unrelated plane, Jason and Claire (Zachary Elkind ’17 and Zina Ellis ’15) play a couple in midst of moving into a more mature stage in their relationship. This shift occurs with no small amount of awkwardness, as Jason and Claire grapple with their different approaches to the change. And, while I find it hard to believe that they are madly in love, maybe that it is the point. Their relationship is not a Hollywood romance that we would fervently idolize. It is practical, tender and considerate. Elkind, like much of the cast, comes into his stride in the second half of the play, when Jason’s songs turn to emotive ballads. His rendition of “Hundred Story City” demonstrates his ability to portray intricate and subtle emotions in a way that is truly moving, as opposed to exaggerated. And while each of the cast put on incredible performances, Ellis steals the show with “I’ll Be Here.” While she is flawless throughout, this song elevates her performance to an entirely different level of professionalism. I was at a loss for words and full of awe as she reached her final note, crooning, “but I’m ready to start.” I barely noticed that I was looking at her through tear-filled eyes.
Without a doubt though, the most powerful moments of the play occur when the paths of all four characters collide, if only for a second. The play’s visually enchanting climax shows that the acts of a stranger do have the power to inform your decisions and change the way you view things. It does not matter if you are in the largest city in the world, or if you are just four people — we are all somehow interconnected.
“Ordinary Days” encapsulates the endless possibilities of life without romanticizing the impossible dreams of our childhoods. The play teaches us to consider reality as an option, to hold on to our relationships and not lose sight of what makes life worth living. It conveys the tension between what we think we’re expected to do, and what our real desires are. “Ordinary Days” fills its audience with hope that there is beauty amid the concrete, and it challenges each of us to see life in its multicolored splendor. Hold out for the second half — the musical themes become less repetitive and the honest and inspiring characters will make you smile, in spite of your urge to cry. The songs may stick in your head for weeks, but the play’s insight into the ordinary will remain with you for much longer.
“Beginners by Raymond Carver; Or, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is a long title for a short drama. Based on Raymond Carver’s eponymous short story, the play was adapted by Phillip Howze and directed by András Visky, blending together elements of biography, theater and criticism. It’s both a play and a commentary on the machinery of editing.
Most of the piece is an adaptation of Carver’s short story about two couples who talk love over drinks. The conversation escalates when the older woman, Terri, talks about an old flame who nearly killed her for love. Arguments over the nature of love ensue. Carver’s short story is composed largely of dialogue, which explains its immediate appeal to a playwright. It’s easy material to convert, and it’s good material. His prose is shimmering, smooth, easy, and it captures the American idiom and rhythm of speech. It’s almost written like a screenplay — dialogue with brief pauses to describe gestures, lighting and movement. But a nearly word-for-word adaptation is a double-edged sword. You get the ease and fluidity of Carver’s dialogue, but a question arises: Does the adaptation do anything the short story doesn’t?
It does, of course, but its innovations only work some of the time. Spliced into the plot of the story are extended voiceovers, in which an unseen actor reads from correspondence Carver had with his editor, Gordon Lish. Carver defends the story as he wrote it, tells Lish he loves him, begs that nothing be changed and so on. Meanwhile text from the story is projected onto the back wall; little carrot-marks and cross-outs show the editing process at work. Unfortunately, the text swirling about can be difficult to see or process before more text replaces it. Nor is this move particularly original. It’s a rather literal demonstration of editing.
The direction does better when it explores editing through subtler means. For instance, characters occasionally step into the limelight, leaving the rest in the dark, embarking on monologues that Carver eventually cut from the final version of his story. We see blocks of crossed-out text behind the actors. Indeed, we see that Carver was right to excise these soliloquies, mostly poetic excurses on cattle and snow that have little to do with his minimalist and everyday style. The director sheds light on Carver’s maturation as a writer without breaking the rhythm of the play.
Elsewhere, the rhythm feels off. The adaptation tries too hard to shoehorn Carver’s smooth and understated prose into the standard forms of performance — monologue, banter and retort, rejoinder. Actors rush their delivery to swell a scene or raise their voices to show they’re agitated. The quiet, subdued rhythms of Carver’s prose are replaced with those of the capital-T Theater. The “human noise” made by Carver’s characters, ambiguous and rich, is forced to fit the confines of dramatic performance. The lines of dialogue in Carver’s story are so bare, so unmediated by narration. They could be caustic, gentle, tragic or humorous. Onstage every line has a too-specific intonation — sarcastic, or ironic, or effusive.
The play asks good questions, but does so imperfectly. The interruption of the plot with voiceovers, though jarring, raises interesting concerns about character. When the characters all freeze in the darkness and we hear Carver talking about them to his editor, we become acutely aware of the fraught power dynamics between a writer and his work. The excised monologues and material we’re shown on the screen reveal just how much Carver’s characters live and breathe in his consciousness. We see how almost maniacally possessive Carver is of his creation. We wonder whether he’s fully in control of his characters, or whether they’ve slipped out of his grasp. It’s painful to see entire pages of text pared down to a couple words, to see parts of characters pruned away, maimed by their author and his editor.
At the end of the play, the actors stare at a screen whose text describes their own movements. In moments like these, the play rises to the level of thought-provoking, textual self-consciousness. While this move isn’t new, it is interesting for its integration of biographical and historical context. But often this effort at incorporation is forced, or imperfectly executed. Despite the bold staging, the play’s directorial gambles don’t quite pay off.
In one of many tense moments in this rendition of Richard III, Queen Margaret (Nora Stewart ’13) curses the titular Richard (Cambrian Thomas-Adams ’13) with many plagues of heaven “beyond what (she) can drum up” as a prophetess. She accuses him of being a “destroyer of the world’s peace,” a title he certainly deserves after he executes a series of bloody murders in an attempt to gain the throne he sees as rightfully his. However, despite his prolific use of staves, daggers, hired hands and asphyxiation as violent tools to gain the upper hand, Richard’s real strength lies in his seductive rhetoric in this gritty version of Shakespeare’s classic.
As is often the case with productions of Richard III, Shakespeare’s second-longest play behind Hamlet, students and staff of professor Joseph Roach (who also directed the show) and postdoctoral associate Lynda Paul’s English/Theater Studies seminar edited the original script to highlight the show’s portrayal of the influence of sexuality in the struggle for political power. The plot centers on Richard’s bloody usurpation of the British throne during the 15th century Wars of the Roses, but Roach and company’s version moved beyond history to focus on universal rhetorical and sexual power dynamics, stripping down Richard III to its barest self.
And strip down they did: in lieu of “women in farthingales and men in pumpkin pants,” as mentioned in the director’s note in the program, the actors instead stalked around the minimalist stage scantily clad in almost entirely black clothing. In a blatant underscoring of the show’s sexual themes, the actors frequently appeared in various levels of nudity, dominatrix-style outfits, and accessorized with BDSM-esque gags or collars. Thomas-Adams and Stewart themselves (whose performances doubled as senior projects) strutted around the stage wearing a long black leather coat and boots and a skin-tight black leather bodysuit, respectively.
All this imagery combined would, in any other setting, offend one’s sense of propriety and common social decency, especially when only cast in the harsh light of a couple overheads. But it doesn’t, because, in this show, the production design serves as a brazen accent on the sexual-political power plays its characters utilize – and it does so brilliantly.
But the bold costuming and masterful staging would be nothing without the support of the actors themselves. In tackling a script that merely bores in many a high school English class, each and every member of the cast manages to mesmerize an entire audience and keep them captivated for the all of the show’s two and a half hours. As put by director Roach: “Shakespeare was never meant to be read.” The characters seem to effortlessly rattle off one complex cadence after another, all while switching between passionately shouting and whispering shakily with repressed emotion.
Though choosing one actor to applaud above the others is about as impossible as picking the cutest puppy of the litter, Thomas-Adams deserves particular credit for his portrayal of the title character. To see evidence of his complete and utter surrender to his performance as Richard, one need not look any further than his eyes: they are the perfect embodiment of “crazy eyes.” They shift and glare and overwhelm other characters without communicating any sign of remorse in his actions or the belief that drives them. They are downright seductive – hypnotizing, threatening, and betraying when Richard’s quest to gain the throne requires it – and they, along with the rest of the cast and production, will seduce any audience member into rapt attention from the opening music to the shocking twist ending.”
Richard III” opened April 5 and has two more performances April 12 and 13 at 8 PM in the Whitney Humanities Center.
Correction: April 17
A previous version of this article mistakenly stated that only theater studies and English professor Joseph Roach is teaching a production seminar on Shakespeare’s “Richard III.” In fact, the seminar is being co-taught by Roach and postdoctoral associate Lynda Paul.
“Abyss”… How can I even begin to describe “Abyss?” “Abyss” is almost flawless. It has two Fendi purses and a silver Lexus.
Just kidding.
But what “Abyss” is is this semester’s most creative show — it has no script. Directed by Charlie Polinger ’13 and with music directed and conceptualized by Stephen Feigenbaum ’12 MUS ’13, the production features actors and musicians — some people holding both roles — and also an elaborate set which innovatively utilizes projections, shadows and light. Here, theater meets classical music: It’s like the YSO Halloween Show meets SIC InC. And a theater production. And a YD show. And James Franco’s masturbatory projections fantasies of 2011 — remember those?
In “Abyss,” a loving couple is suddenly torn apart when the girl (Gracie White ’16) is taken by the government without warning during the night from the man (Gabe Greenspan ’14). Through a journey at sea, encounters with cults and manipulation of drugs, “Abyss” tells the desperate, emotional story of his journey to find her.
At first glance, the plotline itself seems slightly trite (think “The Odyssey,” but with stilts) and most of the acting is slightly over the top. Yet these two elements are necessary for the same reason that all silent film acting is anything but subtle: The only way to tell a story without words is to make it as obvious as possible. Polinger was handed this difficult task — to direct a group of actors into telling a story with no script — and fully delivered.
That said, the acting of Greenspan and Charlotte McCurdy ’13 stole the show when they were on stage. Greenspan’s training in circus and acrobatics are evident; his lifts are gracefully and effortlessly executed. At one point, Greenspan’s character’s desperation to find the girl is so tangible that his character begins to cry — a heartbreaking lapse in the bravado and determination of the man’s persona. Greenspan’s honest, raw emotions were met with McCurdy’s deceptive acting — she played a boy for part of the show to escape sex slavery after being captured by drug lords. McCurdy, unlike other actors, speaks with her face rather than dramatic gestures, the look in her eyes tensing and relaxing to the swell of the orchestra.
But the depth in acting would be incomplete without the richness of sound in Feigenbaum’s music — a brilliantly composed score that brings the viewers through the elaborate show. In one scene, Feigenbaum’s compositions feature a heavy bass, pounding and loud as if amplifying the drug-laced blood beating through the hearts of the characters, who have gathered to inhale fumes from an oxygen mask. Fittingly, Feigenbaum plays a god during the scene — the musical mastermind behind the production. Feigenbaum’s keyboard provides the template upon which the other instruments paint a rich narrative. The acting, set, lighting and directing are excellent in their own right, but Feigenbaum’s score is the thread that brings them all together. Without his vision, “Abyss” would have not existed, and Yale owes him for bringing this refreshing show to our campus.
The entire production unfolds on one of the most delicately crafted sets on Yale’s campus: The staging of “Abyss” is nothing short of incredibly impressive. Producer Kathleen Addison ’14 and set designer Brian Dudkiewicz DRA ’14 picked and transformed a venue — an off-campus house — to create the perfect blend of creepy and dazzling. The stage is vast and black, painted with piping, complete with ribbons hanging from the ceiling on which actors such as White performed acrobatics.
Ultimately, it’s easy for many productions to look and feel the same at Yale. “Abyss” stands out, in part because of its content and unorthodox structure, but also because of the fantastic production value. This is the future of great theater. Combining the skills and talents of those behind the scenes with those on the stage is rarely as visible as it is this weekend at 278 Park St.
Is it surprising, then — or troublingly unsurprising — that the device of a knife (long, stainless steel, serrated edge) acts as the central support of “January Joiner,” the self-styled “weight loss horror comedy” now playing at the Long Wharf Theatre?
“We’re going to help you wield a knife,” snarls a Barbie-doll fitness trainer to her cadet class of oversize trainees. Her words of wisdom: Visualize yourselves, you fatties. Now, carve away the fat.
As advice for satirists, that ain’t bad. Wield a knife; the humor should be stinging, sharp. Avoid excess. Cut deep. Aim for the jugular.
So the play’s knife metaphor would be cheekily self-regarding if it actually contributed to the satire. But, at most, I’m left with a paper cut.
Set at a fitness resort on the Florida beachfront, “January Joiner” brings together a small cast of heavyset characters eager to slim down. Shaken by a heart attack — “an event,” as she pooh-poohs it — Terry vows to die another day and lose 50 pounds. Decked out in sun hat and bumbling over enthusiasm, Terry is defined by a Heartland naiveté and a simple, wholesome desire to lose weight. It’s the right thing to do. Myrtle, her slightly thinner and classier sister, tags along to the resort, ostensibly to support Terry. But when no one’s looking, Myrtle tightens the belt on her spa robe. No doubt her body image is victim to the expectations of professional life in waistline-obsessed New York.
The fitness formula? Nibble, avoid meat. Or, for the upstart high priests of the body cult, assume the shape of meatheads.
The play’s narrative formula, on the other hand, cleaves to “Trading Places”: expectations are upset, personalities inverted and crisscrossed. In a tour-de-force monologue delivered as poetry — but tightly, without artifice — Terry (played by the talented Ashlie Atkinson) comes back from a swim in the ocean, stung by a passerby’s barb about “whale-watching.”
So she vows to lose 100 pounds, not 50. And just like that, sneaking in through the back door of a strong monologue, Terry gives in to insecurity. Along with her elephant skin, she sheds her coherent personality as cultivated by dialogue to that point. What happened to the Terry who revels in fat jokes? The one who enjoyed comments like “Your mom is so fat she looks at the scale and it says, ‘To be continued …’”
But personalities in this play aren’t “to be continued.”
They jerk; they swerve. Terry becomes a fitness nut, losing so much weight that a new actress has to replace Atkinson in the second act of the play. But the new Terry, dubbed Not-Terry in the playbill, diverges so much from the old’s character that she’s borderline unrecognizable; actress Maria-Christina Oliveras ’01 is so made up, her face so hard and unforgiving, that we have to side with a suddenly hysterical — jealous? — Myrtle in accusing her of not being Terry. But what’s interesting in a stage drama if we’ve already settled it?
That encapsulates the logic of “January Joiner”: locally punchy, at home in the tumbling consciousness of dialogue, but unconvincing on a larger scale. Playwright Laura Jacqmin’s’04 Russian dolls are not built to size. Sure, Terry wants to wear bras in the first four letters of the alphabet. That’s funny. But why is that what she wants?
Verbal slapstick orders the screenplay. Darnell, the third trainee at the fitness resort, offers yet another caricature of heartland America. A big baby, he pines for his turtle and crushes on Terry, albeit to little avail. “Sometimes I say things and I can’t stop saying them,” he mumbles at one point, in a crystallization of his comic role. As an unrepentant veteran of the weight-loss program, he comes to Florida to chew the proverbial fat: The fitness center is his social center (though, from the looks of it, he chews more than enough animal fat, too.)
The paragon of defiant consistency — a keen foil to the fitness trainers’ insistence on performance and self-betterment — Darnell starkly strays from his role at the climax, as if to conveniently shake up the drama.
It’s a plot twist that’s unpredictable. And yet a narrative technique that is anything but.
To Jacqmin’s credit, tools multiply in her toolbox; her craft is studied, if a bit too eager. An animated vending machine plays totem and confession box to the hungering dieters, but its moments of psychological manipulation punctuate the narrative without complementing it. Along with the occasional mute zombie that creeps up on the characters to elicit a brief, unresolved scream, the vending machine inspires horror and little else.
Our imagined selves, our body image fantasies, can certainly be scary. But if the body image issue is to command our moral attention, why does the play demonize the fitness trainer who suffers from her own insecurities? Shouldn’t the last scene see her released from a cage, rather than punitively trapped in the vending machine?
Un-transcended, the driving fable of “January Joiner” ushers into enlightenment some apostates of fitness, that great American religion. At the same time, it tracks initiated meatheads replacing their emotional intelligence with dead beef.
And yet — forgive the metaphor — “January Joiner” feels much like the experience of slicing away at the rotisserie meat — gyro, shawarma, what have you — only to throw all the Grade-A away. What a waste! “There are starving artists in Brooklyn,” my mother always chided me at the dinner table.
Never play with knives, she also said.
As social commentary, “January Joiner” succeeds only in playing with knives. Sorry, but we came to eat some meat. Isn’t the point of a play, of any art, to taste its argumentation? (So chewy, so juicy!)
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.
A hitchhiker (Klara Wojtkowska GRD ’13) thumbs for a ride on the highway. A heroin addict (Lila Ann Millberry Dodge GRD ’14) shoots up, screams profanities and coos with pleasure. A male soldier (Cosima Cabrera ’14) raves about killing men, women and children in Iraq.
All of this, within the first seven minutes.
What is “the river don’t flow by itself no more”? It consists of a continuous stream of stories from different people who — for better or for worse — interact with an unspecified part of the Mexican-American border. In the midst of these wandering humans is Coyote (Ari Fernandez ’15), a guardian who waits for the mythical Desert Prophets to save the land.
I admit that the play’s nonsensical start led me to think that I was about to watch one of those shows that is so caught up in its artsy-ness that it forgets to say anything meaningful. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that wasn’t the case here. Wojtkowska, also the director and playwright, is a large reason for why this potential mess makes sense. She constructs the dialogue with spoken-word sensibility; her characters shout onomatopoeia, conjure vivid stories, ramble with their world-weary philosophy and mix real life with symbolism. At first, all of this craziness will go through your ears like boiling hot water. But soon you’ll find that each word works to create a layered commentary on humans and the borders — both external and internal — that we make.
The strip of highway that dominates the stage is the barrier that separates countries and people. In the course of the play, actors playing multiple characters — a common theatrical device made into a thematic one here — demonstrate the ineffectiveness of borders. For example, Ronald Apuzzo’s character becomes, among many things, a border patrol officer and a giggling schizophrenic. And Luz Lopez ’16 jumps the gender line by playing a male ex-Mormon who has sex with strippers and smuggles immigrants. Bit by bit, the personal borders dissolve until the characters’ stories collapse into collective loneliness, fearfulness and insanity.
The play’s bizarreness easily lends itself to ironic humor, even though the humor is more successful at highlighting human absurdities than producing laughter. In one instance, the murderous soldier insists that “hitchhiking is illegal in this country” and that he “is a law-abiding citizen.” The oddness translates into set pieces that aren’t extravagant, but rather simple and effective in conjuring up a Mexican-American border marked by bareness and a history of violence. Vacant shoes nearly blot out the river — blue chalk outlines drawn onto the stage — as if the disappeared and the dead haunt the water itself.
In the midst of this surreal world, Fernandez stands out as Coyote. She may not be overly expressive, but her optimistic eyes and her attempts to connect with people through her lollipop, her colorful chalk and her smile really make her endearing. It’s sad, then, when we notice how she witnesses more and more of the human madness and pain.
“the river don’t flow by itself no more” is a play of effective mixtures: of the strange and the familiar, of the political and the personal. Within the screaming, random musical numbers and simple characters lies an understanding of human yearning. It is also, as Wojtkowska states in the program and manifesto, an anti-play. But even as it avoids coherent narration or even a satisfactory conclusion in its crackpot space, it never forgets the turmoil of the real world. It becomes that turmoil.
Oftentimes we are driven by ideals that we don’t believe in. We all know who we want to be and what we want to stand for, but we might forget why we wanted these things in the first place. “The Altruists” is a confrontation and a parody of this superficial way of living.
The play tells the story of young New Yorkers who devote themselves to liberalism and would probably write the word on their foreheads if they weren’t too drunk to do it. They chant, they rally for the sake of rallying and they smoke a lot of pot (sometimes while chanting and rallying). But of course, they need to do all of these things. They must drink and debate. Then, they must wake up with hangovers and protest for the Hispanic gays, the black lesbians and the rest of the disenfranchised. They must scream and shout against AIDS cutbacks, school cutbacks, arms funding, and this and that — I couldn’t keep track of their reasons for protest and sometimes they couldn’t remember them either.
“The Altruists” is a strong and playful performance achieved through the notable set designs of Autumn Von Plinsky ’13. The show opens with three separate apartments. Each apartment has a window with a skyline that reminds us that we are in the Big Apple. However, when it comes to this show, the city and its noise are mostly hushed. The skylines are painted in a fuzzy and monotone style, directing the focus instead on the stories that are about to unfold. The characters have lost themselves in their radical ideals and seem to fit right in at the rallies on the streets, but their phony ways are exposed behind closed doors. The rest of the set includes only a couple of chairs facing the audience. Overall, this aptly understated design, with minimal sound effects, creates an environment that is reminiscent of improv comedy shows. Wilfredo Ramos’s ’15 directorial choices create a cohesive story: the characters freeze like mannequins as the play moves from one apartment to another. Then, as we focus on the conversations between characters, we see all the different storylines come together.
Sydney (Leyla Levi ’16) is a successful soap opera actress who leads a glamorous life. She has a designer apartment, a car, expensive clothing, loads of fan mail, and also a freeloading, radical liberal boyfriend named Ethan (Kenneth Fang ’14). He uses her money on booze and stink bombs, hosts parties in her apartment and introduces her as “just an actress.” But she loves him, she thinks. It’s no wonder that Sydney is constantly on the verge of a melodramatic monologue. Levi skillfully plays this neurotic girlfriend with her refined fidgeting, whiny voice and shrill cries. You will laugh, but you will also sympathize with her as she interacts with Ethan, of whom she has become tired over time. His sex-crazed behavior and condescending attitude are important aspects of his character, but they are overplayed. Perhaps an honest hug sans groping or a line in a less despairing tone would make Ethan a bit less dull as a character.
Ronald (Daniel Dangaran ’15) is a gay social worker looking for love or just another person he can save from suffering. He has devoted so much of his life to helping others that he has become a bit obsessed with changing lives (for good, of course). With a convincingly calm and endearing demeanor, Dangaran’s character is pivotal in the show’s moments of chaos. David Gore ’15 plays Lance, Ronald’s new lover, who is undecided about what he wants. Gore’s believably casual and cool character is a strong foil to boyish Ronald.
Finally, Cybil (Natalie Tai ’13) is a lesbian who frequently dallies with other men. When confronted with this contradiction by her peers, she says that she is, in fact, a lesbian, but only “politically.” Cybil further embodies the protest-crazy liberal and carries out an ongoing gag throughout the play as the funny, scatterbrained friend. However, Tai’s parody of a hypocritical liberal is also the most honest and shaming.
The mantra of these youngsters is “Fuck the pigs,” but they fail to realize that they have been a bit piggish themselves, only disguised as altruists. “The Altruists” is a comparative examination of our two selves: the real and the ideal.
The show will be playing through Jan. 28 at the Off-Broadway Theater.
It’s 10:30 on a Thursday morning, and Mr. McAfee’s juniors are warming up for class.
“Head voice!” he calls out, then “Chest voice!” and the row of students whooeep and heeay and hiiii, shaking from side to side before they’re told to inhale. “Now say your names, say, ‘Hi, my name is,’ and then the name of your character,” he continues. “It has to be big and full and vibrating, so everyone in the space can hear it without even trying.”
“Hi, my name is Polonius.”
“Hi, my name is Claudius.”
McAfee stops a girl in a blue sweatshirt who he doesn’t think has spoken loudly enough, and asks her to try again.
“HI, MY NAME IS OPHELIA,” she shouts.
“See you’re going to hurt your voice that way, you can’t be hurting your voice,” McAfee tells her. “You can be that loud without straining yourself. You have a lot of lines so I want to make sure everyone hears them, because you’re doing some great stuff.”
There’s a collective “awwwwww” from the other students standing on stage, and after a couple of giggles the group carries on.
“Hi, my name is Hamlet.”
“Hi, my name is Rosencrantz.”
* * *
These students are putting on “Hamlet” as a class as part of their work at the Theater Department at the Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School in downtown New Haven (known as the Co-op). The school is located less than two blocks from Old Campus, on the corner of College and Crown streets.
While 65 percent of students at Co-op live in New Haven, 35 percent come from outside the city. The Interdistrict Magnet Schools system provides free bus transportation to students, including those from towns such as Guilford and North Branford, and travel can take as much as an hour each way.
Like all of the 18 New Haven Magnet Schools, the only way to get into the Co-op is by a lottery which takes place in February of each year. Though no one can audition or submit a writing portfolio, students must select one of the school’s five arts departments to apply to: creative writing, visual arts, music, dance and theater.
Infinity Jean, a junior at the school, said that she was so set on working on theater that Co-op was the only school to which she applied. “It’s a good thing I got in,” she added. “Or I would have gone to Hillhouse [her neighborhood public school in New Haven].”
Jean was luckier than a lot of students: for each spot in its freshman class, the school is forced to turn away many more students than it accepts. With a total enrollment of 650, Co-op consistently has the longest waiting list each year of any school in the magnet system, according to Arts Director Suzannah Holsenbeck ’05.
A passion for the arts is not the only reason some apply to Co-op. Theater teacher Robert Esposito said that he always begins with a new group of students by asking, “Why are you here?” And for some students, the answer is simply “because my mom doesn’t want me to go to Hillhouse.
Esposito can sympathize with the parents: Co-op, he said, has a kinder environment than some surrounding neighborhood schools. On top of the Co-op’s strong academic reputation and sparkling new facilities, Esposito said students are less likely to be bullied there. The school is heavily female, and has a large openly gay community.
“I know for me, I have an 11-year-old daughter. I would love for her to come to Co-op,” Esposito said. “I think that says a lot — I totally understand why parents force their kids to come here.”
* * *
While the Co-op offers a standard, college preparatory academic track, students spend an hour and a half on their chosen arts every day — a full 25 percent of their total instructional time, and the largest concentration in any subject matter that they have.
For the first two years the theater curriculum strives to expose students to the widest possible range of aspects of theater, with freshmen focusing on ensemble building and sophomores on scene study. In these two years they’ll study everything from the Stanislavski method of acting to technical theater, read “Oedipus Rex” and learn techniques for auditioning. As juniors they’ll split off into technical and acting tracks based on students’ interests, and study Shakespeare before moving into modern drama their senior year.
Senior Frankie Douglass said that while she has always liked theater, before coming to Co-op she didn’t consider herself an artist. The Co-op school was her second choice after the Educational Center for the Arts (ECA), also located in downtown New Haven — which selects students through a merit-based, competitive application process. “It was my first time auditioning for anything,” she said. “I messed it up.”
After three and a half years at Co-op, she has realized that not only does she belong among the arts, she needs them. “I feel like we all look at the world differently now,” Douglass said. “Now situations, tragedies we go through, we can take all that and we have somewhere to put it.”
Despite representing a similar economic demographic as other area public schools, the Co-op can boast significantly higher test scores, and rates of college attendance. Of all the students who graduated from the Theater Department last year, Esposito said that maybe all but two are now in college, while noting that funding can remain an obstacle for many students from low-income families.
“When you’re dealing with any kind of at-risk population you have to give students a reason to come to school,” he said. “When they realize they have a show in a month and people are depending on [them], they’re gonna go to school. The largest step is getting them in the building.”
Senior Lyanne Segui thinks having arts every day helps their academics by giving them something to do that requires focus but still gives them a break.
Co-op students’ enthusiasm for the arts is palpable. During a break between classes, a girl asks her friend about the student dance show that took place the weekend before while fixing her hair in the bathroom mirror. Later, two boys talk about a visual arts student’s capstone project presented earlier in the day on their way to lunch. One girl in McAfee’s class actually complained that the school had closed the day before, “for just like, two inches of snow,” making the group miss a day of rehearsal for “Hamlet.”
* * *
Because of the lottery system, the students who come to Co-op each year come from very diverse backgrounds, theater teacher Christi Sargent explained: some come from arts magnet middle schools, others have little experience, or interest, in the arts at all. While this range of experience can pose a challenge to instructors, Esposito said that he wouldn’t necessarily change the system.
“There would be so many kids we’d miss out on because they wouldn’t have the confidence or savvy to come and audition,” he said. “When I look back, all the kids I think were most special and got the most out of it would never have had the guts to audition, would have had no clue they had any talent.”
And Sargent maintains that with enough hard work and focus, everyone can succeed in the theater program. One of her main tasks is simply helping those who don’t come in with a high level of confidence in themselves to grow comfortable with the kind of risk-taking theater requires.
“The people you meet in theater class are not people you’re going to meet in creative writing,” senior Yasmari Collazo said. “They’re out there, they don’t care, that weirdness rubs off on you.” Simone Ngongi, a junior, said the Co-op theater program has helped her get used to stepping out of her comfort zone.
Esposito said that the Co-op is not immune from problems that plague lower-income schools, such as students who come in with low reading levels, and with a correspondingly low level of faith in their own abilities. Nevertheless, teaching at Co-op is “easy” compared to the Fair Haven Middle School where he began working as a teacher.
The main task for Esposito is to focus on what students do well and build from that, no matter how small the victories may seem at first. He recalled one past student who, when first asked to do a presentation as a freshman, simply lost her breath and ran out of the room. But by her senior year, he said, she was the lead in the class mainstage.
Sargent said one of her current freshman initially broke down in tears when asked to participate in class, and she had to work in small increments to overcome her fears. “Every day I gave her new goals to accomplish,” Sargent said, “Tomorrow she’s going to be in her first play.”
* * *
Sargent does not push her kids to go into theater professionally, and doesn’t see that as the purpose of the program. “I want to show students how this can change their lives in terms of confidence,” she said. “These skills transition to all aspects of life, whether you want to be a nurse or a secretary.”
When it comes to the future, students themselves are largely pragmatic. According to Segui, most of her classmates don’t plan to pursue theater because they want to be financially stable, not because they don’t enjoy it. Douglass said that she plans to be a culinary nutritionist in college, and perhaps someday later she will go back to acting, perhaps even attend a conservatory.
But though Segui is very aware of the uncertainty involved in a career in theater, she is certain that she wants to pursue it nevertheless.
“There’s just never been anything else I’ve found as interesting,” she said.
Collazo, who recently finished her college applications, said that she used to dream of growing up to be a famous actress and starring in movies, but that over the years her perspective has gotten a dose of reality.
“I realized I need a game plan,” she laughed. But while Collazo said acting isn’t the main thing she wants to focus on in college, she was equally apprehensive about quitting it altogether. “How do you let go of something you do every day?” she said. “This school takes the arts and really shoves them into our personalities.”
Dairy Queen was no longer human. Played by Cosima Cabrera ’14, she had transformed into a mute cow grazing in the fields, where Andrew (Derek Dimartini ’13) found her unable to reciprocate his love. He decides to kill himself by poisoning his DQ Blizzard, the drink they used to share in their rosy days of love.
A rapid series of 18 vignettes, “Moonshine & Lion Presents: A Night of Excellent Theatre” at the Davenport Auditorium is a wild pastiche of bizarre episodes. As the final products of the students of THST 321a, “Production Seminar: Playwriting,” the scenes had little in common but an emphasis on dialogue and absurdity — including strange circumstances (an anxious tomato that possesses a teenage girl after she eats it), or ordinary situations that become absurd as the plot unfolds (an everyday domestic dispute over eggs involves a ghostly Oprah).
As a staged reading — a type of theatre without sets, full costume or much stage movement — the performance emphasized the script itself (fitting for a playwriting class). It is a pedagogical tool for the writers themselves, who must focus on dialogue and pace. Hearing only voice required me to imagine elements of the plot and characters that aren’t on stage, and I felt a more intuitive sense of the characters than I’ve had watching fully staged productions. Certainly this was a result of the actors’ strong dialogue and incredible voice-acting abilities — Cabrera played both a bossy porno star director and a blonde with a husky voice — and also of the minimalist approach itself.
Characters both ordinary and inanimate took the stage. In one scene, a cucumber (Andrew Sotiriou ’13) disagrees with a tomato’s (Calista Small ’14) anxiety over his impending death on the cutting board; in the funniest skit, a man’s marriage depends on two moths (Ryan Bowers ’14, Nicole Davis ’13) chewing holes in his cashmere sweater.
You are thrown into the five-minute scenes immediately — often in a disorienting way such that plot details unfold only as the characters reveal them in their speech. In the tenth skit, Mike, played by Bowers and Dan (Gabe Greenspan ’14) open with Mike saying he “will be fine.” The audience realizes that he’s talking about his kidney stone. But Dan thought Mike had been rejected from the medical profession (Hospital? Medical school?), leading Mike to reveal that he had indeed received a rejection letter. He can no longer pursue urology, and now the fates have played the ultimate joke on him with the kidney stone. The sequential development of the plot gives the skits the pace of improv comedy, with jokes building on given situations.
Actors sometimes stumbled as they read off the script — they had not memorized the lines — and often laughed off mistakes in ways that interrupted the skits. They switched between roles in the vignettes that ultimately had no unifying theme, which lost me at times, and it moved too quickly to allow me to process the material. One skit had the characters talk about hiding a waterfall, with the waterfall emerging from upstairs to take its revenge on his captors. Perhaps that was intentional, or possibly comprehensible with more time to perform it before cutting to the next skit. But in spite of the hiccups, they successfully jumped into each character, which served to showcase their talents as performers.
“Moonshine & Lion Presents: A Night of Excellent Theatre” isn’t a clean, coherent production with a unified theme. But it is full of inventiveness and unleashed creativity, which “Moonlight & Lion” delivered with hilarity, fast pace and strong characterization.
Correction: Jan. 20
A previous version of this article misidentified Cosima Cabrera ’14 as Olivia Scicolone ’15.
When praising Elizabeth Bishop, the poet James Merrill wrote, “… The unpretentiousness of her form is very appealing… The way her whole oeuvre is on the scale of a human life; there is no oracular amplification, she doesn’t go about on stilts to make her vision wider. She doesn’t need that. She’s wise and humane enough as it is.” This praise is equally true of Sarah Ruhl, one of today’s most celebrated and strikingly original playwrights, and it is especially applicable to her newest work, “Dear Elizabeth,” which is currently in its world premiere at the Yale Repertory Theater through December 22. The brief summary provided on the poster states that “Dear Elizabeth” is “a play in letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and back again.” Which is also to say: “Dear Elizabeth” is the story of the sympathetic and lively connection of two of this century’s greatest poetic minds. WKND corresponded with Ruhl, alas by phone not post, as she took the train into New Haven to attend the play’s afternoon rehearsal.
—
Q.It’s clear that Bishop and Lowell’s correspondence is unique — both in volume and for the level of lyrical excitement they are able to maintain, even when composing casual, quotidian prose. But among all the letters in the world, what drew you to Bishop and Lowell’s correspondence in particular? Did you already know you wanted to write a play about letters, or was the content of their letters your initial inspiration?
A. Someone gave me [their collected letters] while I was on bedrest … I had ambitions about reading much more lofty things while I was on bedrest, but I was so anxious about my baby that I couldn’t focus on anything. For some reason, “Words in Air” — their complete correspondence, had, for me, a real narrative drive. I was so attached to these two people, and I just wanted to stay with them. And I just wonder[ed] what it would be like for actors to read some of this out loud because I felt — they were poets, there was something very oral about the letters and, [something] in a way, performative. I think I never would have set myself the task formally because it’s such an impossible task to write a play without dialogue, but it was more just [about] spending more time with those two people.
Q.Was the fact that they present a lot of similarities as people — both being such incredible stylists, full of wit and restraint, both being upper-class, both having had troubled childhoods and ill mental health at various stages throughout their life — at all difficult when it came to distinguishing between them as characters?
A. It’s funny that you ask that because for me they’re so different. I mean, they’re both obviously witty and smart and literary and have that in common, but Bishop is so reserved and her wit is so dry, and Lowell is so expansive and so big and larger than life in his persona and in his writing. I don’t think restraint interested him terribly, even though form interested him. And his sense of humor is more expansive and less dry than Bishop’s.
Q.When you began to arrange the letters, did you always know you wanted to stick to their recitation, or did you ever consider formatting them as dialogue, as if the two were talking?
A. Well, it’s hard for me to remember because before I started the writing process, I had to inquire into the rights from the Lowell estate and the Bishop estate, and they were quite strict about not meddling with the letters. So I think it would have been my impulse anyway to stay quite faithful to what they’ve written, but it was also the estate that felt strongly about that.
Q.You were talking about how putting letters on stage is already a difficult formal task. Moreover, these letters are about poetry and the poetic process, if not small works of poetry themselves. As a lot of your plays often take what might seem like an ordinary moments and imbue them with a sublime poeticism, was it at all a challenge to work with material that was already so inherently poetic and crafted in its nature?
A. Well, I think part of the experiment was, “Can I write a play with no dialogue?” and “What is the status of poetry on stage right now?” That’s something I think a lot about when I watch other people’s plays.
When Lowell was alive he would read in the Boston Common, and all of these people would listen to him, so he was a little bit like a rock star. And I thought when Lowell and Bishop read these poems onstage like set pieces, how will that function in an age where poetry’s not the culture in a broad way? I think about how much poetry is in Shakespeare’s work and how it’s sort of celebrated in and of itself, and I was just interested to look at it as an experiment. For me, I also find it very pleasurable to hear those poems read out loud. So for selfish reasons, I enjoy it.
Q.And in terms of the status of poetry, I’m more familiar with Bishop’s work so I’m curious about the sense of the theatrical and scene-setting in her poetry. She seems to create all these kinds of surfaces that are also always sort of breaking. Has this play changed the way you think about the relationship between poetry and playwriting? Has it changed or complicated your own relationship to the two media, and perhaps the way you might approach future work?
A. I started out writing poetry, and then started writing plays when I was in my 20s, but the relationship between the two forms really fascinated me — thinking about how much poetry you can slide by with onstage. It might affect my next play, who knows? And I think it also interests me with every play, in terms of pushing the limits a little bit, I’m wondering if each play is actually a play.
Q.Having never read the letters before, I was struck by how witty they were without being snarky or smug. The way they were talking to each other seemed like a sort of necessary, even ethical, irony. So I’m wondering if there was a specific formal element to the way they were talking that the audience was supposed to latch on to as the play’s central constitutive element, or was everything fair game in terms of being a point of access? In other words, is it right to feel that these little things matter and count? Because it sometimes seemed as though the most “human” or relatable moments were in these ironized asides, if that makes sense?
A. Completely … I think “ethical irony” is quite beautiful and accurate for both of them. Because they gossip a lot, but they aren’t snarky. And in terms of the level of detail, there’s something I love so much about Bishop’s “smallness” and how you can learn as much about her thoughts from something small as from a deeper confession. I think there’s something affirming about her work. I think it’s rather different from Lowell’s work because he goes head-on to a larger extent with these sort of large themes. I always felt an affinity for Bishop and came later to Lowell’s poetry, which I first learned about from the letters.
Q.In terms of a pleasurable smallness, this play is kind of quieter in a lot of respects than “Passion Play” or “Eurydice.”
A. You said quieter, right? This train is so loud. Yes, it is much quieter, and I will confess to you that that is hard for me, because I am not used to it, but I also think it’s good for me to trust it and see what it’s like to write a quieter play … The form and the content sort of dictate that quietude. In a way, a new level of attention is required of the audience. They really have to come to it, they have to throw their full selves at it, at the silences, and at the scenes where they don’t know what’s happening.
Q.I guess that also connects to thinking about the status of poetry or about testing that limit between theater and recitation. Like poetry that cultivates in the reader a new sort of attention. The audience has to really be a part of it and immediately engage. There aren’t any pyrotechnics.
A. Yeah, and I think that might be part of why the status of poetry is an activity of mine and it also takes a quiet, both in the world and in your consciousness, to receive poems. So in a way, it’s redefining the quality of attention that you’re asking for. And I confess to you that I find it deeply uncomfortable asking that much of the audience, but when they are all watching it together, I also find it quite beautiful.
Q.What’s your favorite Bishop poem, if you have one?
A. “One Art.” Always. It’s always been “One Art.”
Q.Have you seen that edition with all of her different drafts and versions?
A. Yeah, it’s so incredible.
Q.Yeah, and just the fact that she’d hang poems on her wall with words missing and wait until the right word came to her, sometimes for months, to fill them in.
A. I love some of her new poems in the new book of uncollected poems that she didn’t want published in her lifetime. And I think that some of them are personal and quite lovely. “Edgar Allen Poe & the Juke-Box.”
Q.Is there anything else you’d like to add about the production?
A. I think it’s a very unusual love story to be able to tell, and I feel very humble about being able to tell [it.] It’s kind of a difficult romantic comedy. It is about friendship, and it is about how life comes in eventually. There is a structure of art that we want to look at tightly and orderly, but suddenly someone commits suicide or someone has a heart attack. For me, it’s the opportunity to show a theatrical structure that is more similar to what I think the shape of life actually looks like, but I think it can be a stretch for an audience because it’s not the structure we normally see on stage.
Q.What do you think is the status of plays that are more about friendship in theater or art right now? Or a love that isn’t consummated?
A. I think they are very untold. Count the great narratives about friendship that you know.
Q.Yeah. Not many.
A. There are not many friendships between men and women actually enduring. You could argue that in terms of evolutionary biology, we’re not wired to even accept that as a narrative. People want to have sex and procreate — that’s like the whole thing. Have sex or die. So it’s very moving to show the shape of a life and the shape of a mind over time, as it’s not a story we normally get access to.
