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Brian Slattery |
Aug 12, 2024 9:20 am
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Magnolia Theatre Company photos
Ocean O’Connor Rosenberg is tearing up the stage with her friends, forming them into a human pyramid. She’s belting out an uptempo song at the top of her lungs. She’s gotten all her friends to support her — literally — but the song she’s singing, if you listen carefully to the lyrics ricocheting by, is actually about how much better she is than they are. Is it fair? Is it mean? Is it even true?
The answers are probably no, yes, and no. But on the other hand, can we really blame O’Connor Rosenberg for wanting to come out on top? She’s literally singing for her life.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jul 29, 2024 9:25 am
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Eleanor Polak photo
TJ and Antony Sellitto-Budney with puppets.
What do felt, paper, string, feathers, eggs, and odd socks have in common? They can all be made into puppets, and they all came alive on Friday night during the Pinned & Sewtured Puppet Cabaret, hosted at Witch Bitch Thrift.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 24, 2024 9:21 am
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Contributed photo
The 7 Fingers in "Dual Reality."
The 7 Fingers, an acrobatic and theatrical company, was about to begin its performance of Arts & Ideas’ Duel Reality, a circus-like retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, when a fight appeared to break out in the audience.
The ushers had split the crowd down the middle and given half the attendees a red wristband while the other half received blue. The problem: two audience members noticed that a third “audience member” was seated in the wrong section, wearing a blue wristband in the red half. They asked him to move. He resisted. Just as the audience started to get nervous that a real physical altercation was occurring, all would-be combatants ran up onto the stage. The show had already begun.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jun 17, 2024 9:11 am
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Shin Kurokawa Photos
Compagnia de’ Colombari's King Lear.
Compagnia de’ Colombari’s production of King Lear at University Theatre — whose first performance was part of Friday night’s big kickoff for the International Festival of Arts and Ideas — doesn’t start, so much as the audience blinks and then it’s happening.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 6, 2024 9:15 am
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Curtis Brown Photography
The photo is of Adil Mansoor when he was a child, in Pakistan. The scene was a family celebration, and a relative, on a lark, dressed the boy in a fine women’s gown. The adult Mansoor regards the picture from a few feet — and a few decades — away.
He notes the irony that this photograph perhaps best represents the fullness of who he is, as a queer South Asian man, proud of who he is and where he’s from. The irony lies in the fact that he has perhaps never been able to fully be who he is since that moment. Especially for his mother.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 4, 2024 9:11 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
On Monday night, members of A Broken Umbrella Theatre gathered in the theater company’s rehearsal and performance space in Westville to roll the clock back to 1929, close to the origins of New Haven’s apizza culture.
In the scene they rehearsed, Pete Jr. (Otto Fuller) wants to introduce his friend Charles (Jonah Alderman) to the rest of his family: mother Lucrezia (Susan Kulp), Cousin Mike (Matt Gaffney), and Uncle Jimmy (Lou Mangini). Mike and Jimmy, behind the counter, roll out dough and slide apizza in and out of a brick oven. Charles isn’t there just to make friends; he wants a job.
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Donald Brown |
May 13, 2024 8:40 am
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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.”
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Brian Slattery |
May 7, 2024 11:05 am
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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.
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Donald Brown |
May 6, 2024 7:43 am
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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.
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Brian Slattery |
May 1, 2024 8:10 am
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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.
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Donald Brown |
Apr 30, 2024 12:24 pm
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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.”
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 30, 2024 8:28 am
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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 ACESECA Arts Hall. “Though really,” said Stacey Strange, Air Temple Arts’ founder and creative director, “it was the suitcases.”
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 26, 2024 8:45 am
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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.
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Karen Ponzio |
Mar 29, 2024 9:18 am
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artidea.org
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.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 15, 2024 10:10 am
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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.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 6, 2024 9:30 am
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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.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 23, 2024 9:20 am
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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.
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Donald Brown |
Feb 20, 2024 11:09 am
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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.
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Donald Brown |
Feb 14, 2024 9:07 am
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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.”
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 9, 2024 9:07 am
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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.
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Donald Brown |
Jan 25, 2024 4:21 pm
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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.”
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Donald Brown |
Dec 14, 2023 8:54 am
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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.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 12, 2023 8:59 am
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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.
