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Brian Slattery |
Oct 13, 2017 7:57 am
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Joan Marcus Photos
Colantoni and Rogers.
Early in the first act of the Yale Repertory’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, Dr. Thomas Stockmann (Reg Rogers) has just had a confrontation with his brother, Peter Stockmann (Enrico Colantoni), who happens to be the mayor of the town where they both live. The mayor has asked his brother to keep an unpleasant discovery under wraps. The doctor agonizes over what to do, then settles on defiance.
“I’ll never bow my neck under their yoke,” he says. He will not be silent.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 11, 2017 1:52 pm
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Before finishing Fireflies — which has its world premiere at Long Wharf Theatre Wednesday night — playwright Matthew Barber first took a road trip to southern Texas in 2010 to meet an 80-year-old retired schoolteacher named Annette Sanford, who had written a story Barber couldn’t get out of his head.
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Lucy Gellman |
Oct 5, 2017 12:38 pm
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Lisa Daly Photo
Yale-China Fellow Onnie Chan recording her story.
National Parks Service Photo
The original Boardman Building.
A fledgling experiment after the Civil War. A voice, clear as a bell, on the other end of the line. A heartbeat of current and wire. A signal that the only way was onward, through person-to-person communication.
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Andrew Koenig |
Oct 2, 2017 2:54 pm
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Andrew Koenig Photo
Breeden.
The dress forms outside of Civvies, a vintage clothing boutique at 845 Chapel St., change almost daily. In this respect, Civvies is not unlike the block it sits on between Orange and Church, where storefronts can turn over frequently.
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Donald Brown |
Oct 2, 2017 12:07 pm
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Promotional art for Pentecost.
To produce British playwright David Edgar’s Pentecost, the team at the Yale School of Drama talked with a violist who played in damaged churches in war-torn Sarajevo. They involved clergy from multiple religions. So it makes sense that the Yale Repetory’s building — formerly a church itself — is central to the staging, said Lucie Dawkins, third-year director at the school, and Stephanie Cohen, her scenic designer.
The play, which had its U.S. premiere at Yale Rep in 1995, is set in a Romanesque church dating from the late 12th century, and the Rep production “built a church within the church,” Dawkins said. Likewise, Dawkins and Cohen have decided to use the contours of the existing church building as the basis for their design, so that the audience is “also in the church” where the action takes place.
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Karen Ponzio |
Sep 15, 2017 8:10 am
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It was Peter Lehndorff’s first set at Best Video’s new Second Wednesday Open Mic.
“It’s my first time here, and I live in Hamden. And it’s my first time in Hamden,” he said.
Some confusion spread out through the audience before Lehndorff reported that he was from a town called Hampden in Massachusetts. The crowd of performers and patrons responded with laughter and welcomed their new “neighbor” — one example of the congenial tone and community fostered at the beloved video store turned cultural center on Wednesday evening.
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Donald Brown |
Sep 14, 2017 8:22 am
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Courtney Jamison Photo
Josh Wilder, Rachel Shuey, Francesca Fernandez McKenzie, Rory Pelsue (l. to r.)
The 2017 – 18 season is the 50th for Yale Cabaret, the adventurous theater in a basement at 217 Park St. run entirely by students in the Yale School of Drama. Many great names of theater and performance have passed through as students in those 50 years, from Meryl Streep to Lupita Nyong’o, from Christopher Durang to Tarell Alvin McCraney.
And yet the Cab is not about big names. It’s about student-created projects that are not part of the curriculum. These are the shows that School of Drama students feel driven to create.
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Donald Brown |
Sep 12, 2017 1:03 pm
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T. Charles Erickson Photos
The cast of Small Mouth Sounds
In Bess Wohl’s Small Mouth Sounds, six people go to a weekend-long silent spiritual retreat, looking for a chance to change. The idea is that new habits — like not speaking and learning to interact without chatter — will help them foster a different approach to their lives. Their teacher (Orville Mendoza) instructs them by voice-over; his first speech states the rules that will govern the exercise. One participant, Alicia (Brenna Palughi), arrives late and misses out on the instructions. Another, Ned (Ben Beckley), wants desperately to ask for a writing utensil but doesn’t dare.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 23, 2017 11:48 am
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Ben Arons Photography
The cast (l. to r.): Brenna Palughi, Connor Barrett, Cherene Snow, Edward Chin-Lyn, Ben Beckley, and Socorro Santiago.
Ned, a 39-year-old man who works for a nonprofit, has suffered a series of calamities, from prolonged hospitalization to marital infidelity to rampant alcoholism, and has joined a weekend-long, mostly silent spiritual retreat in the hope that it will help him put himself back together. He’s sitting in a session with a match in his hand.
“The teacher starts to play the recorder,” playwright Bess Wohl writes. “Ned has no idea what he’s supposed to do. He’s slightly worried that he’s supposed to set himself on fire. He half raises his hand, wanting to ask another question. The music stops.”
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 17, 2017 12:19 pm
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Mike Franzmann Photos
On Tuesday afternoon last week, a funeral was taking place in Edgerton Park.
It was for Juliet (Courtney Jamison), who was a part of the procession until she lay down on a bed prepared for her. As musicians played in the background, Juliet’s mother Lady Capulet (Samantha Dena Smith) covered her in a white sheet, then joined the tableau of grief-stricken characters onstage. Director Raphael Massie surveyed the proceedings with approval, making only minor adjustments.
“Sam,” Massie said, “can you have a moment after you put the sheet on her? Something with your daughter.”
They ran the scene again, and this time, Smith knelt down and placed a small kiss on Juliet’s shrouded head. It worked. It made Lady Capulet more human, not simply a noblewoman in a Shakespeare play, but a mother grieving for her child.
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Lucy Gellman |
Jul 21, 2017 7:42 am
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Lucy Gellman
The ensemble.
Scene: The city and the forest, once a single village, have been divided by a railroad that cuts through the land.
Scene: The two halves are now two municipalities. No trade flows between them. Families, then friends, lose touch. The city moves to protect itself with high walls.
Scene: All the trees are dying, one by one. The walls have severed their roots.
by
Lucy Gellman |
Jul 17, 2017 8:02 am
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Lucy Gellman Photo
Kiki Lucia at this weekend’s “Dragapalooza” fundraiser.
Climbing the 168 York Street stage, Kiki Lucia pulled at a noose hanging low around her neck, looking out at the audience with long-lashed, saucer-sized doe eyes. She jerked backward. The noose loosened, and she broke free.
Kiki Lucia ripped open her blouse, exposing a heaving chest and two bright, sweat-slicked nipples, along with a message written in black: Trans rights now.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 16, 2017 7:32 am
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Christopher Duggan Photo
Black Girl.
Black Girl: Linguistic Play — running for one more night at the University Theater on York Street as part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas — began Thursday with the bass, just Robin Bramlett and her instrument, laying down big notes. Pianist Scott Patterson joined her, laying down sweeping cascades of melody.
A lone dancer appeared on stage, exuding childhood, the sense of freedom, of not being sure what to do with her limbs and not caring. She tapped in her sneakers. She did the running man. And at last, she began kicking up chalk dust. It rose around her, still dust, but in the light, it looked a little like steam, too, or like smoke.
For just a minute, it seemed as though the dancer was tapping across the surface of a hot skillet. Like if she stopped moving, she’d be cooked. So the dancer’s exuberance had danger in it. Her joy was an end in itself. But maybe it was necessary for her survival, too.
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Christopher Peak |
Jun 15, 2017 3:57 pm
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Christopher Peak Photo
Students imitate Diana Ross’s “Stop! In the Name of Love,” with the cast.
Becoming a professional theater actor is not all laughing, singing and dancing in the street, according to the performer who played the Vandellas’ lead singer Martha Reeves in the traveling tour of Motown: The Musical.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 15, 2017 7:36 am
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Brian Slattery Photo
Washington and the cast of (Be)longing in rehearsal.
On a recent evening, the cast of (Be)longing — an oratorio about the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings that draws from hip hop and opera and runs at Long Wharf Theatre as part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas this Saturday and Sunday — was assembled in a rehearsal space in Hendrie Hall on Elm Street. Over a series of long pitches held by a group of singers, Hanifa Washington, assuming the role of mediator, maybe therapist, was asking the people in the room what freaks them out.
“Confrontation!” said one cast member. “Confrontation freaks me out,” the chorus sang in unison, in four ascending notes.
An increasingly poorly kept secret is the growing prowess of its long-standing Shakespeare reading groups, which have led to The Mauro-Sheridan Shakespeare players’ annual production of a Bard play.
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Lucy Gellman |
Jun 6, 2017 4:36 pm
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Elizabeth Green Photos
The battle of the … sexes?
At the Yale Cabaret’s tiny basement theater on Park Street, something mystical was unfolding. A scarved, glitter-clad and turbaned soothsayer worked their hands around a glowing glass globe, looking into the future. In wide fishnets, shiny booty shorts and a pink tank top, Charmian begged for her fortune.
“Good now, some excellent fortune! Let me be married / to three kings in a forenoon, and widow them all: / let me have a child at fifty, to whom Herod of Jewry / may do homage: find me to marry me with Octavius / Caesar, and companion me with my mistress,” she cackled.
“You shall outlive the lady whom you serve,” said the soothsayer in a singsong, wispy voice.
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Donald Brown |
Jun 1, 2017 10:16 am
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seated: Artistic Directors Rory Pelsue and Shadi Ghaheri; standing (l to r): Trent Anderson, General Manager; Dashiell Menard, Production Manager; Leandro Zanetti, Managing Director
“A classic,” Mark Twain once said, “is something that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” We assume we already know what the work says and don’t want to bother with it. But in the theater, a classic work simply won’t go away. It gets done again and again, in a kind of afterlife of endless revival. But why?
Rory Pelsue and Shadi Ghaheri, the artistic directors of this year’s Yale Summer Cabaret and both rising third-year directors at the Yale School of Drama, have devised a summer season that examines the status of theater classics. The season runs from June 2 to August 13 and is called “Canon Balle.” It celebrates classics, but may also be considered an offensive against those who want their classics untouched by contemporary interests. Think, for starters, Antony and Cleopatra in drag.
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Allan Appel |
May 19, 2017 2:16 pm
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Allan Appel Photo
Artist Stewart outside her studio.
Sarah Stewart turns out oil-on-linen paintings in the factory complex that once turned out erector sets for the nation — and now New Haven’s zoning rules are catching up with the economic transformation there.
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Brian Slattery |
May 18, 2017 3:01 pm
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T. Charles Erickson Photo
The cast.
On the way home from seeing The Most Beautiful Room in New York, my wife Steph actually said this: “As a lifelong lover of musicals, I resented this. It is everything that people who hate musicals say they hate about musicals.”
What happens in a good production of a musical when the musical itself isn’t good? Beautiful Room gave us a chance to find out.
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Brian Slattery |
May 14, 2017 2:43 pm
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A steady rain couldn’t keep people away from ArtWalk, held in Westville Saturday afternoon. Though the neighborhood’s central streets were missing the usual crowds during the annual event, Edgewood Park stayed lively, and indoor activities in the artists’ studios in West River Arts and Lyric Hall on Whalley Avenue ensured ArtWalk kept its tradition of celebrating the arts — for 20 years and running — alive.
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Donald Brown |
May 10, 2017 12:06 pm
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Joan Marcus Photo
Donohoe and Chalfant.
If someone says a play is “risky,” what does that mean? That it handles a taboo subject, that it goes against political orthodoxy, or that its staging is avant-garde in some way? Amy Herzog’s new play, Mary Jane — at the Yale Repertory Theatre through May 20 and directed by Anne Kauffman — is risky without any of those things being true. It’s risky in its willingness to be unsentimental, unsensational, and sharply observed while dealing with childhood illness and single-mom parenting. The risk is in how straightforward and untheatrical it is, and the satisfaction is in how clearly it fulfills its purpose.
