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Brian Slattery |
Feb 20, 2018 8:46 am
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Pettway and Riggins.
Damon is a drug dealer and a robber, but a scholar too. He reads academic treatises in his spare time, it turns out. It’s enough to surprise former revolutionary Kenyatta Shakur. First they trade street talk. Then they trade ideas. Shakur has been out of the fight for decades. “We need soldiers like you out here now,” Damon says.
Then they start talking about Nina. Kenyatta’s estranged daughter. Damon’s girlfriend. Nina has letters that Kenyatta and her mother Ashanti wrote to each other while Kenyatta was in prison, letters that a lot of academics want to get their hands on now that Ashanti has passed. Letters that Kenyatta wants even more than they do. Problem is, he needs to somehow reconnect with Nina to get them, and there’s a lot of hurt in the past to get through first.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 8, 2018 8:59 am
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Yale Opera is putting on a production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Shubert Theater from Feb. 16 to 18. The music will be unchanged. It will be sung in the original German. It’s just that almost everyone in the cast will be robots.
Last year, when Yale Rep plucked the composer’s Assassins from mothballs, audiences couldn’t help but feel a contemporary edge to the 1990 musical, considering the political hostility of the moment and that show features figures remembered in infamy. Indeed, during a talk by Sondheim at the theater shortly before opening, an audience member remarked that the timing of the musical’s re-staging seemed eerie. It was a touchy moment, but Sondheim handled it well, taking a deep breath, before defusing the topic.
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Jason Fitzgerald |
Feb 5, 2018 1:22 pm
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The cast of Field Guide.
In the opening scene of Field Guide — at the Yale Repertory Theatre now until Feb. 17 — a young woman delivers a series of awkward jokes in a standup routine that is more of a meta routine. Among the “jokes” is the announcement that she owns no property and is about to lose both her health insurance and her income stream.
In light of this revelation, her mock standup, and much of the performance that follows it, resembles an exercise in playful cynicism. Hannah speaks for a generation that has become adult in an America uninterested in protecting its former children, for whom an adaptive strategy is to hurl droll comedy into the void.
A trial lawyer with experience investigating sexual misconduct claims will help Long Wharf Theatre figure out how an alleged sexual predator and harasser was able to run the joint for so long.
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Donald Brown |
Jan 31, 2018 8:41 am
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Passion, the musical by Stephen Sondheim with book by James Lapine, has the distinction of having had the shortest Broadway run of any Tony-winning musical. It’s been seen as Sondheim’s most personal piece, and, in the view of third-year director Rory Pelsue, who is directing a production as his thesis show at Yale School of Drama, the work is “utterly unique.” It evokes the Gothic and the Romantic, both with capital letters, and “can make you feel alive in a cynical, dissolute time.”
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Jason Fitzgerald |
Jan 30, 2018 1:18 pm
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Office Hour opens with a short scene that primes the audience to anticipate a terrifying event — a shooting at a university — and then delays that event as long as possible. In playwright Julia Cho’s astute hands, though, that delay becomes the point: It is the trauma we bring to the play, not the fear it invents, that she is asking us to examine.
The scene: At a regional theater, a sexual misconduct scandal has just exploded. The artistic director, handsy and foul-mouthed, has exited the stage for good, and the steady, behind-the-scenes manager finds himself trying to hold up his life’s passion from the fallout. As the curtain rises, all the stage’s lights shine on one man, emerging from the wings, stepping, deliberately, toward the expectant audience.
Long Wharf Theatre produces a lot of social-issues dramas like that on its stages. On Wednesday the drama was playing out in real life on Sargent Drive, as Joshua Borenstein stepped into the spotlight. It was time to draw on all he’d been learning.
As of Wednesday afternoon, Albertus Magnus College no longer officially honors Gordon Edelstein, who as of Tuesday evening no longer serves as artistic director of Long Wharf Theatre.
Board chair Pappano (at left): Switching roles. Edelstein (at right): On leave for alleged sexual misconduct.
New Haven’s arts world had its Harvey Weinstein moment Monday — and a woman steeped in combatting the “second-class status” of women was called on to take charge.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 10, 2018 1:21 pm
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On Tuesday night, actors Kerry Warren, Jackie Chung, and Jeremy Kahn sat in the atrium of the Wilson branch of the New Haven Free Public Library on Washington Avenue, talking about a kid who scared them.
It wasn’t just the menace in his creative writing. It wasn’t that he wasn’t doing well in his classes either. It was that they couldn’t connect to him. They were worried the student might shoot them. Kahn was worried that he might be first.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 4, 2018 4:20 pm
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Fussiner.
Two men, Tommy and Petesy, stand on a stage. They’re side by side, but an ocean apart. Tommy’s a boxer in New Haven who’s taken a couple punches. Petesy is a tall man whose life in Belfast, Northern Ireland has made him smaller. They’re cousins who grew up seeing each other now and again. But they’re writing each other now because they’ve both lost a son to violence, and neither of them knows exactly how to go on.
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Roya Hakakian |
Dec 13, 2017 2:11 pm
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Francesca Fernandez MacKenzie and Sohina Sidhu in “Death of Yazdgerd.”
T. CHARLES ERICKSON PHOTO
Shadi Ghaheri, who directed the production.
I went to see Death of Yazdgerd at the Yale School of Drama in the same way I’ve gone to see all other artistic productions by Iranian expats in the last thirty years – for support, not inspiration. For us, exiles, going to such events is a form of community service. More than anything else, we go to allay the pangs of nostalgia, not to experience art.
So imagine my surprise when, after nearly two hours, I walked out of the theatre positively energized and perfectly inspired. Rather than engage in some form of charitable act, I had seen a genuine work of beauty.
Haynes, at center in photo, in a scene from Native Son.
Jerod Haynes lost some of his friends to the streets of Chicago. He reflected on that when reprising the lead role of Bigger in a revival of Richard Wright’s Native Son, which is currently playing — and sparking raw conversation and reflection — at Yale Repertory Theatre.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 4, 2017 1:21 pm
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The cast of Native Son.
Just minutes into Yale Repertory Theatre’s kinetic production of Native Son — adapted by Nambi E. Kelley from the novel by Richard Wright — a woman has been smothered in her bed and a man is on the run. And he never stops running.
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Donald Brown |
Nov 30, 2017 8:49 am
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Shadi Ghaheri, a third-year director at the Yale School of Drama, once told me she doesn’t like to direct “new plays.” I reminded her of that comment when talking to her about her thesis project, Death of Yazdgerd, by Bahram Beyzai, which runs Dec. 5 – 9 at the Iseman Theater on Chapel Street. The play dates from 1979, so could be called “new” compared to a classic. Beyzai’s play, Ghaheri pointed out, “is a masterpiece and is the equivalent, at least in its themes, of something like King Lear.” So, while the play is relatively new, the story is very old.
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Cara McDonough |
Nov 16, 2017 2:10 pm
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Terreace Riggins and Tenisi Davis Rehearsal for Topdog/Underdog.
The room in Erector Square on Peck Street that houses Collective Consciousness Theater seats 60 at the most, and that’s pushing the limit. Its small size means that during a show audience members — sitting on folding chairs, with the front row just a few feet from the stage — are incredibly close to the actors. And each other.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 15, 2017 1:10 pm
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Actor George Guidall had grown up receiving his Jewish education from a melamed. He had deeply religious family members. So he knew a lot about the background of the rabbi he plays in Long Wharf Theatre’s upcoming production of The Chosen, which runs Nov. 22 to Dec. 17.
But he also found himself in tension with that character — and possibly, in doing so, practicing his culture and his faith.
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Donald Brown |
Oct 31, 2017 7:43 am
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Burnett, Nelson, and Singleton.
On a recent rainy night, I arrived at the packed parking lot at Erector Square, then waited outside a glass door to be admitted to hallways and stairs. Two people led me to a double door on the second floor, and the rehearsal and performance space of Collective Consciousness Theatre. My guides were Production Stage Manager Brionna Ingraham and Assistant Stage Manager Eddie Chase. I entered and walked into a down-at-heels bedroom. Cracked plaster, a bed, a mirror, some wall art. A big chair. Jamie Burnett was on a ladder, hanging lights.
It was David Sepulveda’s set for the first CCT production of the new season: Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog, a play described as “two brothers in a room.” It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002, making Parks the first African-American author to win that award.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 26, 2017 12:21 pm
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Arndt and Alexander.
Eleanor Bannister and Abel Brown are at odds again. Abel says he’s looking for work, but has also made it pretty clear that his interest in Eleanor goes beyond the professional. Eleanor can’t decide if he’s a con man or just a man with a complicated life, and can’t deny the feelings she has for him, too. They’re both too smart, and a little too stubborn, to just let it go. Abel makes a last pitch to help Eleanor fix up the rundown cottage at the back of her property, which they both know also means they’ll be seeing a lot more of each other. Or, he says, in a moment of counterfactual argument, he could just burn the old cottage down and be on his way.
“If that’s what you want,” Abel says.
Eleanor lets her guard down. “I don’t know what I want, Abel,” she says.
Abel thinks about this. “Seems right to tell you, Eleanor, that those are exactly the words every con man wants to hear.”
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Allan Appel |
Oct 24, 2017 5:18 pm
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Victoria Johnson as Truvy cuts the hair of Lauryn Darden, as Clairee, in rehearsal.
The male director didn’t know much about the culture of beauty parlors in general, and even less about black women’s salons and their hairstyles and how you use hot tools to achieve those big hairdos popular in the distant past of the 1980s.
The actors — all teenagers — had never operated such an ancient device as a rotary telephone and honestly didn’t know which button to push to send the call. Most also had never seen an old-fashioned coffee table ashtray.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 16, 2017 12:20 pm
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The bystander stood admiring one of the creations of artist Marcus Schaeffer, aka Markus Surrealius — an insect-like creature the height of a small child with bulging eyes and a long proboscis.
“Is it a bee?”
“The body is a cow skull,” Schaeffer said. “This one’s called LB17. It’s its own thing.”
