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Donald Brown |
Oct 17, 2022 9:08 am
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Emma Pfitzer Price, Nate Janis, René Augesen, and Dan Donohue.
Edward Albee’s 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a classic of American theater. Its depiction of a middle-aged academic couple at a New England university joined by a younger couple for a night of nonstop drinking seems tailor-made for Yale, where James Bundy, the dean of the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre, directs a revival both respectful and gripping, through Oct. 29. It’s a play full of shifts in sympathy and understanding, as we realize — somewhat uncomfortably — that unlikeable people may have earned their manner from deep hurts and sorrows.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 4, 2022 8:30 am
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Rawling.
In preparing for the latest production from Madame Thalia — the Prohibition-era vaudeville show that music and theater mastermind Zohra Rawling is bringing back to Cafe Nine on Oct. 9 — Rawling thought of the last time she got to stage it in the club on State and Crown, in 2019. She ended a particular segment on a complete cliffhanger. “Tune in next time,” she recalled intoning to the crowd, only to have a member of the audience interrupt, yelling back “you monster!”; the cliffhanger was apparently too much anticipation for them to take. “I’ve done my job,” Rawling recalled thinking. “That was the best compliment I’ve ever received on stage.”
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 15, 2022 9:44 am
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Iridessa Søul LaFlare performs for PRIDE.
Host Maddelynn Hatter broke in the crowd at Gotham Citi Cafe on Orange Street Wednesday night by establishing a few guidelines regarding drag shows.
“If you ever know any drag queens, you know the most important rule — other than to be able to paint your face — is to be kind,” she said. “All of the queens have passed the test. They are very kind. Which is good, because I am an awful person.”
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 22, 2022 8:55 am
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Stacey Strange Photo
L. Peter Callender as Prospero and Sarah Bowles as Ariel.
The play has just begun, and it’s as if the set is already being torn apart. There’s the sound of wind and thunder, the sight of sails fluttering in high wind as sailors struggle to maintain them. The people at the wheel of the ship are shouting to each other and to the crew. They don’t know what’s going to happen to them. But the man in the front and center of the stage does. Standing silent and serene, he’s controlling the storm, controlling the boat and the people on it. In the beginning, he controls everything.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 10, 2022 9:15 am
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A woman holding bolts of fabric approached the checkout counter set up in the lobby of Long Wharf Theatre. She had plans, she said, to make clothes for her relatives.
“In my generation, everybody knitted or sewed,” she said.
Now, she continued, “when a shirt loses a button, they take it to the dry cleaners.”
Making clothes yourself is a “lost art,” a Long Wharf employee agreed. But with the help of Dock Deals — a series of sales of stock Long Wharf is holding as it clears out its space on Sargent Drive — the woman would find it again.
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Olivia Gross |
Aug 3, 2022 8:50 am
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The Theater Group
Percy Jackson is coming to town with all the charm and pacing of a chapter book – onstage at a summer program that keeps kids returning each year and bonding through the arts.
As men in dark blue uniforms marched with muskets through Grove Street Cemetery, Calvin Alexander Ramsey took a headstone tour, revived the memory of a Revolutionary War soldier named John Epps — and spoke of plans to bring his own history of Black patriotism to a city stage.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 27, 2022 9:45 am
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For its concluding day on Sunday, the International Festival of Arts and Ideas hosted or facilitated a slew of activities on the New Haven Green that kept people there from morning to night, beginning with circuses and magicians, continuing through jerk chicken and dancing, and ending with a drag show about the need to reconnect with a sense of pride.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 22, 2022 9:56 am
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At the start of Parable of the Sower — playing against Wednesday evening at the Shubert Theatre as part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas — Toshi Reagon asks the audience two questions: whether they have been taking care of those around them, and whether they have been taking care of themselves. She pulls the theater move of being disappointed by a first, lackluster response, and then makes people respond again, more affirmingly, more enthusiastically. But what sounds like a self-help session takes a sharp turn when she adds that both are maybe “the only way we’re going to survive” — the next five, 10, 15, 20 years.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 17, 2022 9:12 am
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“The genius of a lot of Octavia’s work,” said Toshi Reagon about visionary science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, is that the circumstances she describes in her books are “applicable to anyone at any time.” Reading Butler’s work, she said, the reader may think, “that could happen to me.” Or: “I hope that never happens.” Or: “I can imagine myself there.”
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 14, 2022 9:34 am
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Facebook// Babz Rawls-Ivy
On Monday night, the Big Tent Party, a gala fundraiser for Long Wharf Theatre, saw the regional theater institution begin its slow turn away from its Sargent Drive home and into a more nomadic future, as patrons gathered for an evening of food, drink, and entertainment that began and ended outside.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 13, 2022 3:29 pm
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Early in Felon: An American Washi Tale, poet and lawyer Reginald Dwayne Betts talks about how, as a prisoner serving time for a carjacking, he heard his fellow prisoners calling to each other in the dark, looking for something to read. “Yo, send me a book!” they called out, and in the dark, he heard the paper slide across the cell block floor. It took him a while to muster the courage to ask for himself — “Yo, send me a book!” The poetry anthology that slipped under his door set him on the path to his freedom.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 7, 2022 8:52 am
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Stephen Julien and cast.
The band room at Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School was full of students getting into their costumes, changing into sailors and spirits, monsters and magicians. They donned robes and fixed their crowns of flowers, then congregated onstage.
“How does everyone feel in their costumes?” asked co-director Justin Pesce.
“Good,” said one student. “Hot,” said another. If they were all still wearing masks due to Covid concerns, it was a detail; what mattered was that, after two years, Mauro Sheridan was mounting its 2022 production of The Tempest, in collaboration with Elm Shakespare Company, in person.
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Brian Slattery |
May 26, 2022 9:25 am
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Ingui.
“So did you hear? We’re moving,” said Kit Ingui, managing director of Long Wharf Theatre, to appreciative laughter Wednesday evening at the Stetson branch library in Q House on Dixwell Avenue. Ingui, Long Wharf Artistic Director Jacob Padrón, Mayor Justin Elicker, branch manager Diane X Brown, and Arts & Ideas Executive Director Shelley Quiala were there to announce Long Wharf’s plans for its 2022 – 23 season, as it moves out of the space it has occupied on Sargent Drive for years and moves into an itinerant model, bringing theater directly into New Haven’s communities.
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Donald Brown |
May 23, 2022 8:21 am
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T. Charles Erickson
“We gonna talk about war and genocide and PTSD and molestation. So it’s OK to laugh,” says Larry (Justin Gauthier), the amiable host of Between Two Knees, now playing at Yale Repertory Theatre through June 4. He reappears in a variety of guises and his deadpan commentary is one of the best things in the show. He enters the stage on a lift through a trapdoor, looking like an icon of Native American tribal lore, and he ends the show in a kind of glam Native American spacesuit, a way of saying that the people who were the earliest human inhabitants of the American continent will always be here, no matter what the future holds.
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Brian Slattery |
May 20, 2022 9:35 am
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Bob Martin as Ezell.
Bob Martin, playing Ezell, the titular character in Ezell: Ballad of a Land Man, stands in the mud of an outdoor set that is part nature run amok, full of huge, twisting tree trunks, and part industrial drilling site, with metal poles driven into the ground and chains connected to them. In this moment, he embodies a sense of desperate defiance, as he enunciates a key sentence twice: Ain’t nobody gonna tell me this isn’t my place to be. As Ezell proceeds with its story, the audience movingly learns just how fraught and fragile that ground beneath that assertion is.
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Brian Slattery |
May 19, 2022 8:41 am
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Jeremy Daniel Photos
Srinivasan and Janssen.
Researchers Sanam Shah and Ariel Spiegel are presenting the findings of a project that may, once and for, stick it to the man. Their advisor is watching with eagerness as Spiegel turns on the fire, cutting straight to the chase about how they’ve uncovered evidence, real evidence, of corporate wrongdoing, creating active ecological harm. She’s flush with her commitment. That’s when Shah gets worried. Isn’t her presentation maybe a little too subjective? Her advisor disagrees; if anything, he suggests, Spiegel should lay it on thicker. After all, the passion is backed up by hard data. Isn’t it?
That’s when Shah suddenly looks worried. She’s found an anomaly. But she can fix it. She knows she can. In that moment, it’s hard to tell whether she’s reassuring them or herself.
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Donald Brown |
May 10, 2022 8:38 am
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Courtesy New Haven Theater Company
After a long pandemic-induced hiatus, the New Haven Theater Company has returned to its digs in the back of EBM Vintage on Chapel Street, with its first full-scale production in two years, as John Watson directs fellow members J. Kevin Smith and Susan Kulp in Sharr White’s Annapurna, which run Thursday through Saturday, May 12 to 14 and 19 to 21.
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Brian Slattery |
May 6, 2022 8:10 am
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The cast of BKLYN at Hillhouse.
“It’s good to be back. Today is very special for us because two and a half year ago, today was our last day,” said Ty Scurry, who runs the Academic Theater Company, the drama club based out of Hillhouse High School, as the cast prepared to do a full run-through of its upcoming production, BKLYN, which will run at the school’s auditorium from May 12 to May 14.
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Brian Slattery |
May 4, 2022 8:57 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
When sibling rivalry becomes a little too hostile. When a puppeteer’s puppet refuses to cooperate. When a threesome collides with the cheerful aesthetic of a Disney movie. These and many other wonderfully absurd scenarios were mined for laughter by The Regicides on Tuesday evening, kicking off a week of ArtWalk programming in Westville.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 12, 2022 9:12 am
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Jafferis.
Aaron, a White playwright, needs his new play to work out for the sake of his career. Tone, an Inca of the Latin Kings, is serving a prison sentence for conspiracy to sell drugs; he has a story to tell about his conversations with the man in the next cell over — Justin Volpe, the NYPD cop imprisoned for attacking and sexually assaulting Abner Louima in an station house bathroom in 1997. What follows is a power struggle that actually contains several power struggles.
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Donald Brown |
Apr 12, 2022 8:58 am
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Joan Marcus Photo
There’s an odd discordance in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Choir Boy, running now at the Yale Repertory Theatre through April 23 in a sumptuous production directed by Christopher D. Betts, an MFA candidate at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, and featuring Israel Erron Ford, a recent graduate of the former Yale School of Drama.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 6, 2022 1:03 pm
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McDonald: Ready for the digital age.
With a new team and vision in place, Anthony McDonald begins his second year running New Haven’s historic Shubert Theatre with an eye fixed on the future as more people venture back out to public events.
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Karen Ponzio |
Mar 23, 2022 9:01 am
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Hoops, silks, and poles — and artists using them all to perform fantastical feats — are all part of Air Temple Takes New Haven, the latest show from New Haven-based aerial dance, circus and movement studio Air Temple Arts, running at Educational Center for the Arts on Audubon Street this Saturday and Sunday. The all-ages circus themed event is special for a few reasons. One is that it is the studio’s first in-person indoor show in 34 months.
Another is that it is the first one that features all of the Woodbridge studio’s staff. And they are thrilled for both.
