Elizabeth Green Photos
A still from فریادا.
Posed against a backdrop of newspapers too small for the audience to read, Shadi Ghaheri was trying to introduce herself to Stella Baker. A jumble of words flowed from her mouth into the space between them, where they languished in the silence that followed. Baker was trying to do the same, taking on a bouncy, bell-like tone as she presented her name like an offering, and waited for Ghaheri to acknowledge receipt of it.
But something wasn’t syncing up. Ghaheri was speaking Farsi, fast-paced and fluid. Baker was speaking an almost tweenage English, jubilant yet punctuated with funny starts and stops. The two couldn’t understand a single word of the other’s native tongue.
That’s par for the course in فریادا, a new work running at Yale’s Park Street Annex through late Saturday night. Created by Ghaheri and co-directed by Ghaheri and Chalia LaTour, it comes as part of the Yale Cabaret’s inaugural Satellite Festival a look at the new, experimental and cross-disciplinary theater that is happening in Yale’s graduate programs. After a strong opening Thursday night, the festival closes around 1 a.m. this Sunday morning. Plays run between the Yale Cabaret, Annex, and Afro-American Cultural Center on Park Street; a full schedule is available here.
From the get go and much to its credit, فریادا explores more than cultural assimilation and linguistic difference. For that, it’s a lot more interesting — although less polished — than something like Familiar at the Yale Rep last year. Instead, it uses the idea of language, spoken and written alike, to expose the gulf that can exist between two people. It’s a profound but navigable one: Over the course of just 20 minutes, the women grow giddy, then frustrated, then determined, by the breakdown of communication that follows an initial spoken exchange.
There are moments of tension, lots of belly laughs, and a few screams to the soundtrack, but Ghaheri and Baker push through, looking to the body’s other means of communication — movement, sometimes wild and sometimes tempered — to connect. It’s this that turns the work into a thoughtful meditation on the compassion one may find in themselves for another human being, even when so much must be left unsaid.
From “Run, Bambi, Run.”
As فریادا blooms from conflict into resolution, it embodies the very spirit of the Satellite Festival: breaking down, by any and all means possible, barriers between audience and actor, theater purist and avant-garde performance. Inspired by multidisciplinary festivals happening across Europe that meld dance, audio design, visual art, directing, theatrical performance, and more, the Yale Cabaret’s co-artistic directors David Bruin, Julian Elijah Martinez and Leora Morris put out a call for proposals in mid-January, finalizing participants for the festival in the first week of March. The hope, Bruin said in an interview Wednesday, is to expand how Yale students and faculty and New Haveners alike are thinking about theater and how permeable its boundaries actually are.
“There are a wide variety of practices right now under the rubric of performance, some of which coincide with our understanding of theater, some of which don’t,” said Bruin. “What we wanted to do was find a platform for that at the Cab, but we have a limited amount we can do with productions. It’s a great tool with some limitations. This expands the possibilities of work that we could produce.”
“It’s helpful to have a school of art, music, drama, divinity — but the lines between these things are really thin,” he added. “We want people to see that. We want to offer a way for people to expand the definition of who a theatre artist is.”
Still from “Stop, Drop and Shop.”
The performances do just that. They don’t break down the fourth wall, exactly — many of the performances begin with the assumption that the wall has long been razed. In one vignette, Run, Bambi, Run, voice, visual art, histories of vernacular performance, and Disney mythology come together to explore the difficulties of being a woman of color in New Haven and the world. In another called Stop, Drop and Shop, sound designer Christopher Ross-Ewart promises the audience an opera about grocery shopping, then delivers something astounding instead, where Brechtian practice meets standup, only to yield to an exquisite and affecting audio collage at the end.
Per Bruin’s hope, there are also pieces that completely challenge and change the notion of what and whom a performer can be. In research fellow Aylin Tekiner’s outstanding Do All Daddies Have Grey Suits?: A Memory Play, narration guides the audience through some of Tekiner’s earliest memories, all surrounding the 1980 assassination of her father, Turkish parliamentary representative Zeki Tekiner, in Nevsehir, Cappadocia, when she was two years old. The memories, all operating in that fog of childhood, are deeply moving on their own, but it’s Tekiner’s medium — shadow puppetry, performed at human scale, that takes the work from creative aural history to something that begs for a stage of its own.
A scene from “Do All Daddies Have Grey Suits?”
That diversity — and there are so many works not described here that are worth the trip downtown — is also what the festival is about, Bruin said before opening night. In the questions they raise, and the questions they will continue to raise after they close Saturday night, he’s hoping that community members will start a conversation that only evolves with the Cab itself.
“A lot of the works still have major question marks,” he said. “Certainly that comes with an element of risk. But it’s a chance to test the producing model. That’s why we as a team have embraced the idea … it’s really a chance for the institution to see what it can do, and how can it serve its community. That’s where the biggest question mark is.”