Ricardo Pérez González describes himself “a queer Latinx writer with bacalao on his lips and salsa on his hips.” His first play, In Fields Where They Lay, got a rave from The New York Times. He has written a drag ball musical, Neon Baby, and a transgender family drama, La casa de Ocaso. He just finished writing for the third season of Netflix’s Designated Survivor. And his latest play, On the Grounds of Belonging, is enjoying its world premiere this week — at Long Wharf Theatre.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 7, 2019 7:57 am
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“Necessary Diva” Jackson, who performed a moving one-way biographical show Sunday night.
Dr. Tiffany Jackson began with her parents. Her mother was born in Alabama to sharecroppers who had “a lot of kids,” Jackson said, and raised them in a shotgun shack. Jackson recalled asking her mother why it was called that.
“If you stood in front, and you aimed a shotgun,” her mother told her, “it would go clear through the back door.”
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 2, 2019 7:32 am
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Artist Jules Larson stood in the lobby of the Shubert with Anthony Lupinacci, the theater’s director of public relations, and Lew Michaels, the theater’s director of operations. Together they were taking a long look at the art adorning the walls of the theater’s lobby, big canvases of swirling, vivid color that were enlivening the space even as the lights were off while the lobby was closed.
Lupinacci thought he saw the comedy-tragedy masks in Larson’s design. Had she intended to put them there?
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 27, 2019 7:54 am
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Oppenheimer.
Singing in church — very badly. Crying in Target. Starting an international incident over a bad joke. Going viral. Recovering from trauma.
These were among the five stories told to a packed house at College Street Music Hall Thursday night as part of The Moth — a storytelling organization now 20 years old that puts together events around the country and for NPR.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 30, 2019 7:24 am
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Lisa Keating
Kuzma.
Two months ago, musician and conductor Marika Kuzma hadn’t even moved to the New Haven area yet. Today she finds herself having organized an upcoming event at United Church on the Green featuring acclaimed musician Paul Winter, a member of indie-rock darlings the Hold Steady, and a chamber ensemble, amid a host of speakers, all in the name of doing something about climate change.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 22, 2019 7:58 am
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Ortiz and Elliott.
The members of the Regicides, the improv comedy arm of A Broken Umbrella theater, were lined up like a firing squad on the stage of the State House on Wednesday evening. De facto MC Ruben Ortiz rubbed his hands together and smiled at the audience.
“We’re going to start off hot and fast,” he said. “What’s your favorite candy?”
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 19, 2019 7:27 am
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Christopher Seiler, Kaia Monroe, Terra Chaney.
A twin named Dromio is yelling at his twin brother, also named Dromio. The Dromio outside wants to be let in the house. The Dromio inside the house doesn’t want to let him in. They don’t believe each other’s stories. As hatches in the door fly open and closed, the entire misunderstanding could be cleared up, if they ever made eye contact, got a good look at each other. But fate and some tight choreography prevent that from happening. The misunderstandings grow — and get funnier.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 14, 2019 11:52 am
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Max Loignon of the Right Offs sat on a stool in Sara Scranton’s kitchen, strumming out a song that was already recognizable before Daniel Eugene started singing.
It was one of the musical numbers set to appear in the second production of the State House Cabaret — playing this weekend at the State House on State Street on Saturday, Aug. 17, and Sunday, Aug. 18. The music swelled and filled the room as the cast assembled there joined in, giving the classic “Crimson and Clover” their own sense of yearning and beauty.
At the end, Scranton ran over and gave Eugene a hug.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 28, 2019 7:21 am
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Two suitors vie for the attention of a woman who approaches one, then the other, and then rises into the air, borne aloft on a bolt of fabric. She dances as if seemingly weightless while the suitors admire — or maybe lie in wait. When she returns to earth, they carry her off. Is it adulation or possession? Something’s off. Something doesn’t feel quite right.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 26, 2019 7:40 am
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Diana Martinez and Mark P. Griffin.
Diana is a worker from Fellowship Place, which offers support to people with mental illness. Mark is a homeless man, everything he owns in a garbage bag at his feet. She offers him a cup of coffee, a sandwich, maybe a place to stay, maybe some help, and Mark doesn’t know how to take any of it.
“I’ve been using,” he says. He’s scared. He’s exasperated. “Is your program going to help or what?”
Diana listens and sits next to him. She’s undeterred. She suggests that Mark call 2 – 1‑1.
“I don’t have a phone,” he said. “I don’t have anything.” So Diana gives him her phone to use.
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Donald Brown |
Jun 20, 2019 3:05 pm
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There’s new construction happening at Yale’s University Theater on York Street. This act of construction is as fascinating to watch as any episode of your favorite home-makeover program on reality TV, except this one is live, with no time lapse. You watch a two-story interior get established before your eyes — with some intriguing sleight-of-hand — and then inhabited by a very busy cast of seven, eventually joined by as many audience members and ancillary personnel as they manage to entice onstage.
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Donald Brown |
Jun 5, 2019 7:53 am
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Front: Martin Montaner V. (Director of Production); Jecamiah M. Ybañez (Artistic Director)
Center: Estefani Castro (Producing Director)
Rear: Oakton Reynolds (Managing Director); Danilo Gambini (Artistic Director).
When you hear the word “Latinx” what do you imagine? What specific characteristics come to mind? For Co-Artistic Directors Danilo Gambini and Jecamiah M. Ybañez and Producing Director Estefani Castro, the team behind “Verano,” the Yale Summer Cabaret season for 2019, the word applies to each of them but differently.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 3, 2019 11:57 am
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Luna Candelario, Luciana Campoverde, and Charles Jefferey.
On the stage Saturday afternoon at Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School — in preparation for the school’s performance of Hamlet on Tuesday, June 4, at 6 p.m. — Luna Candelario, as Hamlet, was getting some advice from co-directors Sarah Bowles and Michael Hinton on the best way to stab a man behind a curtain.
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Donald Brown |
May 10, 2019 7:10 am
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Jorge Cordova and Maggie Bofill.
Start with that set. It looks Scandinavian, maybe, with all those wooden planks for walls and floor, sort of an overgrown sauna. And there are plants hanging from above and a thin, curving tree downstage. We will hear birds and bugs and a cuckoo clock. And then there’s that single big armchair, on its side. We’re not sure if we’re inside the house or looking at a porch on the front of it. There’s a sliding door at the back that resembles a barn door.
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Donald Brown |
Apr 30, 2019 7:42 am
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A group of asylum inmates pretend to watch a World Series game on a blank television. They’ve been forbidden to see the game because its airtime conflicts with the established time for TV viewing in the ward’s dayroom. Their feigned group hallucination is an act of boisterous solidarity. For a brief moment, these disparate misfits are united in giving the finger to Nurse Ratched (Suzanne Powers), their controlling overseer. Thus ends Act 1 of Dale Wasserman’s adaptation of Ken Kesey’s 1963 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, with a joyous blow aimed at the powers that be.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 3, 2019 12:08 pm
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At rehearsal for Edgewood School’s upcomimg production of the play Madagascar, the students knew their lines, knew the songs, knew where they were supposed to be on stage. They had the dance routines together, the choreographed moments, even an effect that gave the impression of large shipping crates sliding from side to side in the hold of a boat tilting in the ocean — because an animal was now at the wheel.
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Donald Brown |
Mar 29, 2019 7:37 am
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T. Charles Erickson Photos
Christopher.
According to tradition the Iliad — the first epic poem attributed to Homer — was the source of Greek drama, which is the source of all European theater and everything that derives from it. At Long Wharf Theatre through April 14, An Iliad, directed by Whitney White and adapted by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare from Robert Fagles’ translation of the poem, puts that idea into action on stage.
We watch a poem for one voice become a play with two actors — which was, according to Aristotle, the great innovation of Athenian drama, c. 460 BC, or about two centuries after Homer’s oral poem was first transcribed. It’s a rousing revisiting of theater in the making.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 27, 2019 12:05 pm
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Bethune and Lester.
Two men are in the ring, jabbing, swinging, and dodging, trading taunts while they trade blows. One is a stronger fighter, and he lets the other one know it. The stronger fighter wears his opponent down both physically and psychologically. He wins because he gets into his opponent’s head. After the fight, the winner calls the loser into his room, not to taunt him some more, but to hire him to be a sparring partner. Because the winner — Jay “The Sport” Jackson — has his eyes on a bigger prize. He wants to be the heavyweight champion of the world. That means beating the current champion, and this being the turn of the last century, it also means breaking some color barriers.
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Donald Brown |
Mar 26, 2019 7:45 am
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Conceived as a theater festival that “orbits” the Yale Cabaret, The Satellite Festival celebrates its fourth year this Thursday. As Molly FitzMaurice, the Cabaret’s co-artistic director and the co-producer, with first-year dramaturg Rebecca Adelsheim, of this year’s festival puts it, “the Satellite Festival is the Cab of the Cab.” It is to the Cabaret what the Cabaret is to the Yale School of Drama — “an alternative outlet” for student work and for talents that may go untapped by official assignments and projects.
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Donald Brown |
Mar 25, 2019 7:45 am
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William DeMeritt in Twelfth Night.
“Lord,” Ophelia says in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “we know what we are but not what we may be.”
Many theatergoers feel certain they know what Shakespeare’s plays are, but that doesn’t mean they know what they may be. First of all, they may be fun — and very funny — as shown in the current production of Twelfth Night, directed by Carl Cofield, at Yale Repertory Theatre through April 6. The show is not to be missed, if you have any interest in classic plays reimagined for the 21st century. Cofield’s vision almost makes a new play of his source material with its wonderful treatments, showing how to break bad on the Bard.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 19, 2019 12:18 pm
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Usnavi runs a bodega in his neighborhood. He keeps giving free coffee to Vanessa, the woman he has a crush on and can’t bring himself to ask out. Everyone in the neighborhood buys lottery tickets at his spot. One day he realizes someone in the neighborhood has bought a winning ticket. He looks up the amount. How much could it be for? $1,000? $2,000?
He stops short. It’s for $96,000, the kind of money that goes a long way. It can change the course of someone’s life. Who won the money? And what are they going to do with it?
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 1, 2019 8:26 am
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It’s another Sunday in church, which means another day for the nuns to rip it up.
The pews fill in front and around them as the musicians start up the beat. The nuns burst into song and dance, habits billowing. The smiles on their faces are radiant.
And then, just for a moment, they leave the ground and take flight.
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Emmett McMullan |
Mar 1, 2019 8:25 am
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NHTC Photos
It is sometime in the 2050s. Marjorie and her companion — a facsimile of her late husband Walter as a young man, share a conversation in which Walter is appealing, charismatic, showmanly, obsequious, and just a bit off. When Tess and Jon introduce themselves later, visiting Marjorie and taking care of her, Walter withdraws. He sits pleasantly and unobtrusively in teal light, watching the other players with rapt attention as he, the machine intended to learn how to be the man he has replaced, absorbs every word, memory, affect, and behavior of the people he was provided to comfort.
