Actors Davis, Kulp, Warner-Crane, Singleton, as German soldiers, shouting “More resources for everyone!”
When the fast-rising, Yale-educated playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury was casting about for material that grabbed her, she came across a record of one of the earliest genocides of the murderous 20th century: the extermination of the Herero tribe of Namibia by the occupying Germans around 1915.
Yet the conventional play she wrote was, by her own determination, awful.
Yet she didn’t give up. She turned that experience into a new play whose structure is a play within a play: a play about how difficult, impossible, mind-bending, and even hysterically funny it can be to write a play about race, culture, and genocide.
by
Donald Brown |
Nov 3, 2015 8:24 am
|
Comments
(0)
In the dark backroom of the English Markets Building, a play was being born. I ventured out to the theater on Chapel Street and was greeted there by a shadowy figure who led me inside. There, a developing set had been laid out for the New Haven Theater Company’s latest offering, Smudge. The play, which first played in New York in 2010, is a contemporary look at parenthood and its problems, with a rather unusual take.
by
Lucy Gellman |
Nov 2, 2015 1:12 pm
|
Comments
(0)
Ashley Hamel stepped up to the mic, her ukelele pressed tightly to her torso. She smiled out into the audience, drawing cheers from the back of the cavernous room.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, addressing the crowd in a low, drawl-kissed voice. “We are the most powerful beings on this earth, with the power of insight, the power of love, the power of intuition, the power of insight, and the power of … smell.”
by
David Sepulveda |
Oct 30, 2015 7:08 am
|
Comments
(1)
The entrance to the large ceramics studio at the rear of Erector Square’s building 8 — where City Wide Open Studios held its final weekend — is shared with Bregamos Community Theater. Last weekend, the sound of Latin jazz drew me to “Imagine My Space,” a pop-up exhibit featuring the work of artist Michael Alan Roman. A photographer who is new to painting, Roman said he first picked up the brush less than a year ago and has been creating his ethereal, otherworldly landscapes since.
“I don’t know where they come from,” he said, “I pick up the brush and go.”
by
Christopher Arnott |
Oct 28, 2015 12:09 pm
|
Comments
(0)
T. CHARLES ERICKSON PHOTO
The Pulitzer-winning Disgraced raced to the top of the “most produced plays at regional theaters nationwide” list for this season after rousing successes in Chicago in 2012 and Broadway in 2014. The Long Wharf Theatre didn’t used to be part of the pack of theaters that produce the latest hot things — it was, and still is, in the rarified realm of regionals that frequently creates those new hot things that other theaters glom onto a year or two later.
But in recent Long Wharf seasons we’ve had Clybourne Park,Bad Jews,brownsville song (b‑side for tray) and now Disgraced — and that is not necessarily a bad thing.
by
David Sepulveda |
Oct 16, 2015 2:21 pm
|
Comments
(1)
OEG Photography
Clark, center, with statuette; Jemar Phoenix, center right with hat, was the play’s lead.
The cast of Legends of the Forgotten Borough, a play written and directed by New Haven’s Sharece M. Sellem and produced at Bregamos Community Theater, returned home this week from a triumphant staging at the Atlanta Black Theater Festival (ABTF) Columbus Day weekend, garnering a gleaming Festival Favorite Award statuette for best supporting actor.
by
Lucy Gellman |
Oct 16, 2015 12:42 pm
|
Comments
(0)
“Hello, would you like to change religions and have a free book written by Jesus?” Elder Cunningham (Conner Peirson) asked from center stage, his pressed white shirt glowing under a spotlight. He grinned widely at an imaginary couple through a similarly imaginary doorway, utterly chuffed with himself, until a voice came over the loudspeaker to tell him he’d done it wrong.
by
Christopher Arnott |
Oct 15, 2015 3:46 pm
|
Comments
(0)
In the spring of 2000, for her thesis project at the Yale School of Drama, a student named Rebecca Taichman created The People vs. The God of Vengeance. The show was a riveting courtroom drama about an internationally renowned Sholem Asch play which had — in its Broadway debut following engagements at other New York theaters and a triumphant European tour — been put on trial, charged with obscenity. Asch’s drama was about a man who runs a brothel and keeps his daughter in the dark about the nature of his work, only to have her fall in love with one of the prostitutes. A New York rabbi thought the play misrepresented the Jewish community and brought the charges against it. The show’s defenders argued that realistic plays about modern morality were what the Jewish people needed in order to grow.
When Thornton Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth opened at the Shubert in 1941, cabbies lined up outside at 9 p.m., an hour into the show, to catch the fares fleeing the theater. Though well-received critically — it won the Pulitzer — Wilder’s experimental play, which toys with expressionism and creates a palimpsest of different times and places, asked a bit too much of its initial audience.
On Oct. 20, we have a chance to learn whether audiences have caught up.
by
Lucy Gellman |
Oct 9, 2015 12:52 pm
|
Comments
(0)
Christopher Thompson Photo
Gumby in “Rockland,” which runs through Saturday night.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, Allen Ginsberg’s clipped and certain tenor boomed through a loudspeaker. Starving hysterical naked/dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn.
The first lines of Ginsberg’s famous poem filled the still, slightly warm air. A glass of wine clinked in the audience.Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry/ dynamo in the machinery of light .
There is a fact playwright and performer Sharece Sellem likes to share with people the first time she meets them: In the 1980’s, a group of teens formed a sound that no one had ever heard, and a brotherhood that couldn’t be broken.
She likes to follow it up with a question: do they know that their story can be performed right here, in New Haven?
“In acting, it’s not what you say but what you choose not to say” that creates the tension and dramatic momentum.
That’s his opinion — and his central challenge — said Benim Foster, the engaging young actor who plays one of the lead roles in the talky and controversial Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar.
Christopher Shinn is an award-winning Connecticut-born playwright whose new play An Opening in Time premiered at the Hartford Stage on Friday, September 17th. In this new play, an older woman returns to her Connecticut hometown in hopes of reconnecting with a former love. In an interview on WNHH radio’s “In The Moment,” Shinn told me more about the play, the creative work of production, and his thoughts on writing about the inner struggles of older adults.
Rafael Ramos had a big family growing up. His mother, father, siblings, and some extended members he rarely saw: John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and Malcolm X.
by
Allan Appel |
Aug 20, 2015 12:30 pm
|
Comments
(0)
Allan Appel Photo
Hewlett, Andreassi, and Jacom Heimer as Feste.
One is a “violence designer,” concerned with the safety of both actors and audience. The other knows how to purchase pronto a genuine 19th-century violin case on eBay, for only $30
Emily Wilson, in mask, as Calypso with Julia Raucci in Odysseus’s white coat.
Not all journeys home have to involve ten years of hardship and imprisonment, fighting a cyclops, or fending off angry gods.
Extricating yourself from a toxic relationship, emerging from a nasty bullying episode, or just moving out of the nest into college can be journeys as daunting as traveling from the siege of Troy home to Ithaca.
by
David Sepulveda |
Aug 4, 2015 3:51 pm
|
Comments
(0)
DAVID SEPULVEDA PHOTO
From the make-do space of Bregamos Community Theater (BCT), located at the end of a sunken industrial parking lot behind Fair Haven’s Erector Square, a new play has emerged to take its place among the pantheon of theatrical works being presented at a major theater festival.
by
Donald Brown |
Jul 28, 2015 11:43 am
|
Comments
(0)
Andrea H. Berman Photos
Dr. Faustus is famous for his deal with the devil. For ages he’s been synonymous with reaching beyond natural bounds to achieve something unprecedented, but at a great cost.
“I think I’m excited by every atom of it. It’s so very different to do a show that’s our project, our adaptation, our play, our writing. I get so connected to it,” said Andrej Visky, director of the Yale Cabaret‘s upcoming production of Faustus, as he described how what had begun as a long-term love affair with Christopher Marlowe’s play was now near completion. “I really hope that we are able to trick the audience the same way Mephistopheles tricks Faustus.”
by
Christopher Arnott |
Jul 14, 2015 4:28 pm
|
Comments
(0)
ANDREA H. BERMAN PHOTO
Don’t let anybody tell you that Adah Isaacs Menken is obscure. She was one of the top-paid performers of her time, her popularity buoyed by scandals and rumors. She appeared nude — or appeared to appear nude — onstage, had numerous love affairs, and was of unusual ethnic heritage for a mainstream stage star in the late 19th century. (There were various claims that she was of Cuban, French, or Creole descent.) Her poetry collection Infelicia is still in print, and major biographies of her tend to come out every decade or so. She has more books written about her than a lot of U.S. presidents. The only thing that might make her more popular these days would be if she were still performing — which would be sensational indeed, since she died in 1868 at the age of 33. Just like John Belushi, Sam Cooke, Carole Lombard, Chris Farley, Eva Peron, Eva Braun, Bon Scott of AC/DC, and Jesus Christ.
by
Allan Appel |
Jul 10, 2015 1:35 pm
|
Comments
(0)
Allan Appel Photo
“I want to improve the lives of my subjects,” declared the king, also known as eighth-grader Matt Levin.
He was reading lines from A Stone In The Road, a kids’ morality tale about a king who puts a giant rock in the street and then hides as he evaluates the kindness, or lack thereof, of his various subjects who wander by and react to the obstacle.
“You’re doing an awesome job,” replied his acting teacher, Jennifer Nelson. “You need to limp a little more and you could also use a cape.”
