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Brian Slattery |
Mar 15, 2024 10:10 am
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 1, 2023 8:59 am
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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.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 16, 2023 8:34 am
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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?
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 10, 2023 9:00 am
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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.
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Lisa Reisman |
Nov 9, 2023 1:54 pm
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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.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 2, 2023 8:41 am
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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.
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Donald Brown |
Oct 24, 2023 8:53 am
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Advertisement outside University Theater.
“A small town in a small country in the middle of nowhere,” where abortionists are tolerated but forced to wear clothes that reveal the scarlet A seared to their flesh, where there are more people in prison than aren’t, where sex workers can sell exclusive rights to their persons to the highest or most powerful bidder, where hunters run down anyone accused of anything and submit them to vicious forms of torture, for money and amusement. Is this fiction or simply a slight exaggeration of current tendencies?
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 17, 2023 8:49 am
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Jeremiah McCullough, Christopher Samuels, Azaad Mamoon.
All through the play Paradise Blue by Dominique Morisseau — running at New Haven Academy from Oct. 19 to Oct.21 — trumpeter Blue struggles with his music. He’s trying to play just the right note. Some days he gets close. Some days he’s a million miles away. But he’s starting to think he’s never going to get it. It’s an encapsulation of the conditions of his life, the way everything he has is starting to slip away from him. And it’s driving him a little crazy.
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Donald Brown |
Oct 16, 2023 8:40 am
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Vaneh Assadourian, Ava Lalezarzadeh, Anita Abdinezhad, Bahar Beihaghi, and Shadee Vossoughi.
Five female friends prepare for the wedding of one of them. High-spirited, vivacious, thoroughly at home with one another. They are Iranian, in Karaj, Iran, and it’s 1978, just before the monumental change that occurred when the Shah fled Iran and the country was taken over by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a Muslim fundamentalist, in 1979. Much of the poignancy of Sanaz Toossi’s Wish You Were Here — now playing at Yale Repertory Theatre through Oct. 28, directed by Sivan Battat — stems from that introductory scene. We won’t see these five together again, and none of them will ever again be this light, vain, frivolous, raunchy, and comfortable with one another. It’s a scene that becomes, in hindsight, more and more rich in possibility the further the play goes into these women’s occluded futures, eventually reaching 1991.
Did any of you, dear readers, catch the appearance of Ron DeSantis just before opening night of the Shakespeare comedy, “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” at Edgerton Park?
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 22, 2023 8:46 am
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Edmund B*Wak Comfort: "God left me just enough to get by."
New Haven artist and designer Edmund B*Wak Comfort faced a harrowing health crisis in the spring that saw him lose both of his legs below the knee as well as a few of his fingers. Now home from the hospital, he has found family and friends rallying to help him, including a performance from the Regicides improv comedy group this Saturday, Aug. 26 that will double as a fundraiser to help him meet living expenses while he recuperates.
“After the incident, I really appreciate being here,” Comfort said. “I realize how precious it is, all the things I took for granted. It is amazing that I still get an opportunity to be here.” He thinks of friends and family who have passed. “I was on the verge of being one of them,” he said, “missing all the beautiful things that life has to offer.”
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Eleanor Polak |
Aug 18, 2023 7:23 am
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Detail from promotional art for Merry Wives of Windsor.
“Here will be an old abusing of God’s patience and the King’s English,” says Mistress Quickly, played with cheeky humor by Martine Fleurisma in Elm Shakespeare Company’s production of one of the bard’s lesser-known works, The Merry Wives of Windsor. The production plays fast and loose with the audience’s expectations, but it never betrays their patience or wastes their time. Instead, The Merry Wives of Windsor — running now through Sept. 3 at Edgerton Park — provides exactly what it promises: wit, wiles, wanton scoundrels, and scheming wives. Most of all, it supplies the audience with over two hours of good, old-fashioned fun.
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Karen Ponzio |
Aug 14, 2023 10:21 am
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Karen Ponzio
This photo says it all.
Under a Saturday night sky swelling with the threat of thunderstorms, The Regicides performed to a rapt and enthusiastic audience at A Broken Umbrella Theatre’s current location on Blake Street with a bonus: they were treated to a preview of the theater’s new performance space in the making, and a pitch for assistance to help it come to fruition — all while eating, drinking, and making merry in the truest laugh-a-minute fashion.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 10, 2023 9:03 am
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Aric Isaacs and Ian Alderman inside the space at 280 Blake St. to be developed into a black box theater.
A Broken Umbrella Theatre has big plans for the property at 280 Blake St. in Beaver Hills. If they come to fruition, in a couple years the property will house a roughly 90-seat black box theater as well as a cabaret complete with restaurant and bar. According to Ian Alderman, Broken Umbrella’s executive director, the project will likely cost somewhere between $1.5 million and $2 million. Thanks to a $500,000 grant from the state’s Good to Great Program, they’re on their way. To realize their vision in its entirety, they have faith in the strength of the New Haven arts community and its desire to have a space where the arts can be.
