by | May 13, 2024 8:40 am | Comments (0)
Klein and DeAngelis.
“Hell is other people.” That famous line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit might be altered, for Jacqueline Bircher’s play Webster’s Bitch, to “hell is the other people you have to work with.”
by | May 7, 2024 11:05 am | Comments (0)
Dexter Singleton and Austin Dean Ashford.
It was just a read-through of a scene, without a costume or stage blocking, but the switches in writer and actor Austin Dean Ashford’s tone of voice were more than enough to convey switches in character: a wistful, optimistic young teacher, and an older, weathered but hopeful mentor. Later on in the reading, a harried school principal, and four students with whom that young teacher was going to have to prove himself. Director Dexter Singleton listened intently, and took notes.
by | May 6, 2024 7:43 am | Comments (1)
T. Charles Erickson Photos
Zheng and Shih.
“Sometimes the memory is more sad than the forgetting.” Gee (David Shih) is an ailing man, plagued by forgetting, when he says this to a pregnant woman named Yuen (Joyce Meimei Zheng) in Lloyd Suh’s The Far Country, playing through May 18 at Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Ralph B. Peña.
The scene is 1930s San Francisco, and Yuen is married to Moon Gyet (Hao Feng), who Gee brought from Hoisan, their native county in China, claiming him as his son for immigration — and exploitation — purposes. The textures of memory and forgetting suggest the vast scope of the hardships, fears, lies, and hopes for the future of Chinese immigrants to the U.S. from 1909 to 1930 in Suh’s ambitious, episodic play.
by | May 1, 2024 8:10 am | Comments (0)
Orpheus is smitten with Eurydice before they even speak. Hermes, Orpheus’s wingman, helps him work up his courage to ask her out. “Orpheus,” he warns, “don’t come on too strong.”
Orpheus extends his hand to Eurydice, offers flowers. “Come home with me,” he says, to audience laughter. “Who are you?” Eurydice responds. “The man who’s gonna marry you. I’m Orpheus,” he says.
Continue reading ‘"Hadestown" Keeps Up The Fight At The Shubert’
by | Apr 30, 2024 12:24 pm | Comments (0)
Stagger.
A photographer encountering the supernatural. Forty days of rain after the loss of a son. A six-decade love note to Hong Kong. According to playwright Danielle Stagger, the Carlotta Festival of New Plays 2024 — running May 2 to May 10 at the Iseman Theatre on Chapel Street — features three “funky plays” that are “not what you might imagine coming from Yale playwriting.”
Continue reading ‘Carlotta Festival Takes On Love, Grief, And Ghosts’
by | Apr 30, 2024 8:28 am | Comments (0)
Eva Skewes Photo
Stacey Strange, Dani Bobbi Lee, Nicholas Strange.
Exploring the malaise of being caught in travel limbo. Examining the foibles of other people and yourself, and the way they can begin to grate. Satisfying the desire to keep learning and growing as circus performers. All these factors went into Layovers, the latest show from Air Temple Arts, which will appear for two shows on May 4 at the ACES ECA Arts Hall. “Though really,” said Stacey Strange, Air Temple Arts’ founder and creative director, “it was the suitcases.”
by | Apr 26, 2024 8:45 am | Comments (0)
Goodheart, Tassi, Morosco, Power (clockwise from top left).
Theater artist Terri Power discovered Shakespeare in high school, finding Lady Macbeth “extraordinarily powerful and sexual,” she said. Their teacher asked the class to memorize passages to perform in class. Power dressed in a long black turtleneck and sweater and skirt and delivered a monologue in which Lady Macbeth taunts her spouse: “I have given suck, and know / How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me. / I would, while it was smiling in my face, / Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums / And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn / As you have done to this.”
Her teacher sent Power to the principal’s office, where he then argued to the principal that she should be suspended for “revealing her breast.” The principal, looking at Power’s wardrobe, wondered exactly how Power would have done this. The teacher dialed it back: “She said things,” he said.
Continue reading ‘Elm Shakespeare Opens "Brave New Theater"’
by | Mar 29, 2024 9:18 am | Comments (5)
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Jazz vocalist Samara Joy, an A&I headliner this year.
Shakespeare in circus, choral fusion, climate activism and optimism talks, making your own empanadas: this eclectic mix of events and more is part of this summer’s International Festival of Arts and Ideas, which is returning with a full schedule of programming that covers just about anything an arts and culture lover would have a taste for — and maybe something they have never tasted before.
by | Mar 15, 2024 10:10 am | Comments (1)
Joan Marcus Photos
Rosato, Shipley, Wolf, Borsay in the new play at Yale Rep.
A group of women are talking together in a garden, under the shade of a tree. In the patterns of their speech, their ability to finish one another’s sentences, it’s clear they’ve been friends for years. But their conversation is about nothing serious. It’s just a way to spend an afternoon. Suddenly there’s a piercing sound, a blinding light, and the stage is plunged in darkness, the tree suddenly a stark silhouette against a roiling background. From one of the women, we get a report of calamity, of mass death, utter mayhem. The lights blind again, and we return to the sunlit garden, the four women still just talking as though nothing has changed. But something has changed.
Continue reading ‘Yale Rep's "Escaped Alone" Lets Everyone Understand’
by | Mar 6, 2024 9:30 am | Comments (0)
June Lanpher, Zara Baden-Eversman, Erin Palmer.
Ariel keeps disobeying her father, Triton, king of the ocean, who tells her not to try to explore the world above the waves. But she can’t resist. She sees the passing ships, collects the artifacts they drop in the water, clambers onto rocks to gaze at the land beyond. And in time, she sees a prince — and the prince hears her singing — and suddenly both feel a tug, binding them together, that no injunctions from parents can dislodge.
by | Feb 23, 2024 9:20 am | Comments (0)
Nicol-Blifford, Schuck, and Andersen.
New Haven Theater Company’s production of Cry It Out, by Molly Smith Metzler, is a finely tuned performance of a play about early motherhood that starts light and ends with surprising, affecting depth. It runs Feb. 23, 24, 29, and March 1, 8, and 9 at the company’s space inside EBM Vintage, 839 Chapel St.
by | Feb 20, 2024 11:09 am | Comments (5)
Curtis Brown Photography
Long Wharf Theatre’s current production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge — running now through March 10 — marks not only a return to the “old neighborhood,” but also a return to a classic American play by a master of realist drama.
by | Feb 15, 2024 12:40 pm | Comments (3)
A plan to build affordable housing for veterans has been discharged due to a bad parking design.
by | Feb 14, 2024 9:07 am | Comments (0)
Guevara, Stamm, and Ouf.
The 56th season of the Yale Cabaret, the audacious theater in the basement of 217 Park Street on Yale’s campus, is called “Sandbox.” The Cab’s team for the 2023 – 24 season — co-artistic directors Doaa Ouf, a projection designer, and Kyle Stamm, a lighting designer, both in their second year at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, and managing director Annabel Guevara, now completing her fourth year in theater management at DGSD — said “the mission of Cab 56 is to create theater that invokes a sense of curiosity and playfulness, giving artists permission to dig and unearth treasures within themselves.”
by | Feb 9, 2024 9:07 am | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photo
Suzu Sakai on the Shubert set she designed.
A member of the stage crew was doing some last-minute cleanup of the set at the Shubert, in preparation for a rehearsal of Yale Opera’s The Rake’s Progress, the opera by Igor Stravinsky set to run at the venerable College Street theatre Feb. 17 and 18. At first glance, it may have looked like he was vacuuming a vast Persian rug. A second glance, however, might show the design on the floor for what it really is: the back of an enormous playing card. More than just an arresting visual pattern, the scintillating floor is part of a set design decision that, for the opera’s director, was the key to opening up Stravinsky’s work to better connect with audiences.
Continue reading ‘Yale Opera Plays Its Cards Right At Shubert’
by | Jan 25, 2024 4:21 pm | Comments (0)
Contributed Photo
Sarah Kane.
The plays of British playwright Sarah Kane (1971 – 99) are notoriously difficult — for staging, and for what they put an audience through. The warning distributed by the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, for the production of Cleansed, running through Jan. 26 at the University Theater, reads: “Cleansed contains nudity; graphic simulations of sexual and physical violence, sexual intimacy, suicide, incest, death, and drug use; as well as coarse language. These actions are enacted by and on Black people. This production also contains loud sounds, extended gunfire, live flame, fog, bright lights, and strobe lighting effects.”
by | Jan 15, 2024 11:57 am | Comments (10)
Thomas Breen Photo
Aric Isaacs and Ian Alderman inside the space at 280 Blake St. to be developed into a black box theater.
A local theater troupe is setting the stage to bring a black box theater to Blake Street.
Continue reading ‘Broken Umbrella Pushes Black Box For Blake’
by | Dec 14, 2023 8:54 am | Comments (0)
T. Charles Erickson Photo
Samuel Douglas as Uncle Vanya and Rebeca Robles as Sonya.
The David Geffen School of Drama at Yale’s production of Anton Chekhov’s masterpiece Uncle Vanya — running now at the Iseman Theater on Chapel St. through Dec. 15 — is played before the theater’s usual stadium seating, but the viewers positioned on risers in the wings of the stage will feel themselves more pointedly in the midst of the action. The play, directed by fourth-year directing MFA candidate Sammy Zeisel, was adapted by the much-awarded playwright Annie Baker and experimental director Sam Gold to be staged, at Soho Rep in 2012, with a “you are there in the midst of the action” arrangement, where some spectators sat on the floor or makeshift seats, and the cast was surrounded by the audience.
Continue reading ‘School Of Drama Stages An Energetic Classic’
by | Dec 12, 2023 8:59 am | Comments (2)
Brian Slattery Photos
Elm Shakespeare Teen Troupe's production of Henry V.
Cast members of Elm Shakespeare Teen Troupe’s production of Henry V burst onto the stage in a rush of sound and energy. “O, for a muse of fire that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention! / A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, / And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!” they cried out together.
The famous introduction to probably Shakespeare’s most famous war play, the players reminded those seated in the risers at Educational Center for Arts’ theater, isn’t about war; it’s about imagination, creativity, and the collective act of actors, crew, and audience creating a world together inside a theater.
Continue reading ‘First Youth Shakespeare Fest Marks Dramatic Success’
by | Dec 1, 2023 8:59 am | Comments (0)
Joan Marcus Photos
Taylor A. Blackman
When we first meet Boseman Salvage Junior (Taylor A. Blackman), he’s shoveling snow, and turns it into a dance. The labor he’s doing can’t take away from the grace with which he’s doing it. As he continues to move, in more abstract ways, the dance becomes a strong expression of character, a portrait of a young man with more within him than he knows how to contain. In that context, his act of shoveling becomes meaningful, given the mountain of snow that hovers in the background for his dance — and for the entire play. No matter how much he shovels in that moment, can he make a dent in it? But he works, and dances, anyway.
by | Nov 16, 2023 8:34 am | Comments (0)
T. Charles Erickson Photo
Kathleen Chalfant as Joan Didion.
“This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won’t when it happens to you. And it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you. That’s what I’m here to tell you.” In the first lines of The Year of Magical Thinking — currently staged by Long Wharf Theatre at various locations in and near New Haven through Dec. 10 — the lone actor on stage establishes herself. She’s a reporter, drawing power from facts. Her voice matches the unblinking eye and mind implicit in her words. But that voice, with its mix of sharpness and vulnerability, also flags what’s ahead: that the coming waves of shock and grief will tip over some facts, wash away some logic. If facts and logic have been your guiding lights, how do you navigate the next days, months, years, without them? And where are you at the end of it?
by | Nov 10, 2023 9:00 am | Comments (2)
Contributed photo
From the Shubert production of Come From Away.
A bus driver has brought a busload full of stranded airline passengers to a camp in Newfoundland, in the middle of the night. The passengers don’t really know why they’re there, and many of them are scared. When they arrive at the camp, the first passengers in line don’t want to get off the bus, and they don’t speak English. The bus driver doesn’t know how to get through to them. Then he notices that one of them is holding a Bible, and he knows his Bible. He flips the pages to Philippians 4:6: “Be anxious for nothing,” the verse begins. He points to the page. The passengers read it, and understand.
“And that’s how we started speaking the same language,” the actors address the audience.
by | Nov 9, 2023 1:54 pm | Comments (0)
Lisa Reisman photo
Sheila Carmon, Dr. Chaka Felder-McEntire (second from left), and Higher Heights high school students at Links annual gala.
The crowd listened, rapt, as Diane X Brown told her story.
The scene was a lavish Saturday-night black-tie affair in the ballroom of Hamden’s Cascade Fine Catering to celebrate the 51st anniversary of the New Haven Chapter of The Links, a historic Black female advocacy organization rooted in community service and philanthropy.
by | Nov 2, 2023 8:41 am | Comments (0)
Jamie Guite, Marie R. Altenor, Kendall Driffin, Joshua Eaddy.
There’s a moment rather early in Fairview when a family is dancing together, performing steps and singing a song that they all remember. It’s an expression of joy, the strengthening of a familial bond. It’s silly and easy to like. But then Keisha, the youngest family member, steps away from her family and into a spotlight. She’s not having fun. She’s troubled. “My future just looks so big and bright, I can’t wait for it to hurry up and Get Here. I want to know all there is to know and be all there is to be,” she says. “But. But I feel like something is keeping me from all that. Something.… Yes, something is keeping me from what I could be. And that something. It thinks that it has made me who I am. It’s.… It’s just so confusing.”
Something’s off. Something’s wrong. And we’re just getting started.
Continue reading ‘Collective Consciousness Takes The Sharpest View’
by | Nov 1, 2023 8:16 am | Comments (1)
In Ty Scurry’s advanced drama class …
…and Carissa Kee's dance class, at New Haven Academy.
In a dim and costume-filled drama classroom at New Haven Academy, time slowed down as an alien ran away from two space cadets looking to capture it.
Time then sped up, and back down again, as theater educator Tyheed Scurry gave the student actors a lesson in tempo.
Continue reading ‘Student Artists Run Like Aliens & Bankhead Bounce’