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Donald Brown |
Jan 18, 2019 8:46 am
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T. Charles Erickson Photos
Benja Kay Thomas, Jacob Perkins, Leah Karpel, Roderick Hill.
When you hear the term “Southern Gothic,” what do you think of? Racism, incest, misogyny, patriarchy, madness, suicide, a crumbling old house in which, at some level of symbolism, the white supremacist evils of the Confederacy eat away at the foundations of civilized society? Boo Killebrew’s Miller, Mississippi has it all, served up with a persistent backdrop of newscasts — from 1960 to 1994 — to help us keep track.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 15, 2019 8:44 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Brown and Kulp .
We’re maybe a third of the way into Rasheeda Speaking, and Ileen is treating Jaclyn badly. She’s sniping and casually cruel, and going a little nuts, and for much of the time so far, it has worked on Jaclyn, who at first doesn’t understand what exactly is going on.
Then there is a moment where she gets it. She sees the forces aligned against her. They threaten her livelihood. They threaten her dignity. And in retaliation, in a moment when Ileen isn’t looking, Jaclyn seizes the chance to open the drawers of Ileen’s desk and rearrange everything in them, so Ileen, who prizes order, can’t find anything.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 2, 2019 8:31 am
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Liz Antle-O’Donnell Photos
Pizza making at Rawa as part of “Let’s Play.”
From its art galleries to its warren of studio spaces to its live music and theater venue at Lyric Hall, “Westville is seen as an arts center in New Haven,” said Elizabeth Antle‑O’Donnell. An initiative she’s helping to build is making sure it stays that way, and grows.
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Donald Brown |
Dec 11, 2018 8:19 am
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T. Charles Erickson Photo
Ybañez.
It’s five or six years after a devastating civil war in San Isidro, a fictional town in an unnamed Latin American country. In Seven Spots on the Sun, playwright Martín Zimmerman tells the epic story of a people trying to forge a collective memory of a highly fraught past.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 10, 2018 8:39 am
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Luciana Q. McClure Photos
AwardeesMelton, Slomba, Downing, DeLauro, Hameen, and Washington.
The Arts Council of Greater New Haven’s 38th annual awards ceremony, held Friday during a luncheon at the New Haven Lawn Club, began with a protest. As patrons were seating themselves in the Lawn Club’s expansive ballroom, a troop of young women marched in file toward the stage, chanting and holding aloft signs about stopping domestic and sexual violence, about women’s suffrage, about curing breast cancer.
The women were dancers from Premier Dance Company, headed by Hanan Hameen, one of the afternoon’s award recipients. They took the stage to a blast of music from the speakers, moving from funk to pop to hip hop, as patrons finished sitting down — a fitting nod to the theme of the arts awards this year, of phenomenal women.
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Donald Brown |
Dec 4, 2018 8:28 am
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Gourzong, FitzMaurice, and Huipe.
There have been some surprises this season at the Yale Cabaret, the black box theater in the basement at 217 Park St. But surprises shouldn’t be surprising, since one of the four main values chosen by the 2018 – 19 team, according to its mission statement, is to “cultivate surprise,” seeking to “nurture the new and the nascent, the fragile and unfinished, the risky, the experimental, and curious.”
When John Cavaliere bought a decrepit building on Whalley Avenue in Westville Village in 2006, he saw an opportunity to practice his craft as a restorer of antiques on a grand scale by bringing back to life the century-old edifice. He ended up doing that, and much more.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 29, 2018 1:11 pm
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T. Charles Erickson Photos
Stephen Tyrone Williams.
A man in a blue suit stands alone on a stage in a small club and begins to play the trumpet. His talent isn’t in question. He has a gift for the instrument. But the sound he makes speaks of frustration too, of running up against limitations, about wrestling with inner turmoil. There is a sense of the player reaching for something and not getting there, and knowing he’s not getting there. What is he going to do about it?
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Donald Brown |
Nov 14, 2018 8:55 am
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Joan Marcus Photos
Hiran Abeysekera.
The Prisoner, an original production with text and stage direction by Peter Brook and Marie-Héléne Estienne, makes a somewhat belated — and engrossing — debut at Yale Repertory Theatre.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 9, 2018 8:16 am
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Jo Kulp and Christian Shaboo.
Early in John Kolvenbach’s Love Song — running at the New Haven Theater Company on Chapel Street through Nov. 17 — Beane (Christian Shaboo) is subjected to a personality test by Harry (George Kulp). It’s the type of test that Joan (Susan Kulp), Beane’s sister and Harry’s wife, thinks is silly. The sort of thing, she says, that a bored intern writes to fill space in a magazine, and that everyone else takes too seriously. First question: Someone gives you a wrapped present for your birthday. It’s a box. What do you want to be inside of it — a puppy, a songbird, a bunny, or a baby?
That’s where things go horribly, hilariously wrong.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 24, 2018 7:41 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Delossantos and McCarthy.
Angel Cruz is on his knees, trying to get through an Our Father. He’s in a prison cell and it looks like it might be his first night. He’s shaky. He’s scared.
“Our Father,” he starts, “who art in Heaven.”
That’s when the obscenities start, telling him to quiet down as he tried to stammer through the rest of the prayer. It’s funny and tense, all the same time — setting the stage, thematically and tonally, for everything that is to come in Collective Consciousness Theater‘s fleet, entertaining, and excoriating production of Jesus Hopped the A Train, running Oct. 25 to Nov. 11.
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Donald Brown |
Oct 22, 2018 7:42 am
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In Shakespeare’s celebrated comedy As You Like It, the forest of Arden is often conceived as a utopian space, a place where the rigors of the court are set aside for a more freewheeling style of life, and where erotic love flourishes. In exile there you can really figure things out and find that certain someone. And what if the court is cisgendered, while Arden is not bound by old-fashioned gender binaries?
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Donald Brown |
Oct 19, 2018 7:41 am
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Tasha Lawrence (l) and Linda Powell (r).
A spacious kitchen and dining area with an attached living-room/porch, Dane Laffrey’s set stretches across the Long Wharf thrust space on a diagonal. We see a facsimile of a settled domestic space that looks realistic, though also entirely theatrical. That both-at-once quality is key to Jen Silverman’s The Roommate, a play about making new connections in middle age that uses unexpected turns and a subversive edge to unsettle its theme of the fraught path to friendship. We might feel we’re on comfortable, homey ground, but that might just be a façade.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 5, 2018 11:52 am
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T. Charles Erickson Photos
Jennifer Paredes and Maria-Christina Oliveras.
About midway through El Huracán by Charise Castro Smith, the play’s two central characters, Miranda (Irene Sofia Lucio) and Ximena (Maria-Christina Oliveras), undergo a radical transformation even as they lay themselves bare.
As they both shed their costumes, Miranda takes us through almost three decades of guilt for a single hasty decision, and Ximena through the anger she can’t let go of. As they excoriate themselves, a small crew helps them change, first putting on pads that fill out their bodies, then clothes over those pads. What we might have thought was natural hair were wigs all along, that are changed.
At the end of their monologues, both Miranda and Ximena have aged, 27 years in the span of a few minutes, and we understand why.
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Thomas Breen |
Oct 3, 2018 7:24 am
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Thomas Breen photo
The Shubert Theatre’s new digital marquee on College Street.
An historic early 20th century theater took a step into the 21st century with a new digital marquee that advertises upcoming plays with text, images, and videos displayed above the venue’s College Street entrance.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 1, 2018 11:59 am
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Lawrence.
There’s a moment in Jen Silverman’s The Roommate when Sharon, a woman in her fifties putting her life together after a divorce, and Robyn, her new housemate, have already gotten to know each other a bit. They know about each others’ kids. Robyn knows about Sharon’s dissatisfaction with her marriage. Sharon knows Robyn knows how to grow weed. They’ve even shared a joint together. But then Sharon discovers that she doesn’t know the half of what’s going on with Robyn, and she’s scared by what she finds. She’s not sure she even knows Robyn’s real name anymore.
“But what were you born as?” Sharon asks her. And Robyn answers: “I was born as a malleable, changeable template.”
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David Sepulveda |
Sep 27, 2018 1:41 pm
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DAVID SEPULVEDA PHOTO
FOCUS team member Haley Moller performs community service at Bregamos Community Theater.
Amid the throngs of Yalies filling downtown streets is a growing force of students who make it a priority to venture beyond the university bubble for active engagement and community service across the Elm City.
As the crowd gathered outside College Street Music Hall on Tuesday night, two drivers from New York approached and asked what the “big deal” was. A brief rundown of the answer: performing that night was Aziz Ansari, well-known comedian and actor from the sitcom Parks and Recreation, and creator of the Netflix comedy Master of None, who got caught up in #MeToo when a date he had ended poorly. According to the date’s account, he repeatedly ignored verbal and physical cues.
Long Wharf’s Joshua Borenstein, College Street Music Hall’s Keith Mahler pitch the Parking Authority.
Who will bring more people to downtown New Haven? Who has the sounder business plan, and the deeper pockets? And who will better complement the entertainment district’s current mix of restaurants, theaters, clubs, concert venues, schools, and other community arts groups?
Those were some of the many questions asked Monday night during a New Haven Parking Authority meeting dedicated almost entirely to discussing who will next occupy the vacant commercial space on the ground floor of the Crown Street Garage.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 20, 2018 8:03 am
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A handful of people in a scrappy Alcoholics Anonymous group, struggling to get sober and help everyone else stay sober, one day at a time. Two cops in Cleveland, and what happens when one of them pulls the trigger. A family in Uganda, each person in it just trying to make their way.
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Karen Ponzio |
Sep 17, 2018 8:01 am
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Josh Levinson Photo
The cast of Inferior Planet
This past Friday night I went out to play two roles. One was arts reporter for the New Haven Independent. The other role: Sinister KP.
Since June 2018 I have been involved in a production titled Inferior Planet written, directed, and produced by Ken Carlson and held at Koffee? on Audubon St the second Friday of each month. It’s a story not unlike my own, where fictional and real life worlds meet for a short time
Top: Rendering of one proposal. Bottom: Shubert team’s Fisher & Verrasatro; Music Hall’s Mahler and Nussbaum.
Newly obtained documents show College Street Music Hall and a consortium of Long Wharf Theatre / Shubert Theatre / Albertus Magnus College presenting two competing visions for downtown’s next entertainment venue.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 23, 2018 1:13 pm
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Mike Franzman Photo
Kingston Farady and Betzabeth Castro.
A half-hour before Elm Shakespeare Company’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost is set to start in Edgerton Park, several of the cast members strut onstage with instruments — a guitar, a banjo, a bass, a trumpet, a sax, a drum — to explain that they’re going to warm up the crowd. And warm the crowd they do, with take after enthusiastic take on early jazz, with a few more modern flourishes thrown in. It’s the kind of music that makes the audience tap their feet and chuckle spontaneously. It’s also a great encapsulation of Elm Shakespeare’s approach to this not-often-performed Shakespeare play. This Love’s Labour’s Lost is smart, lighthearted, full of energy, and a lot of fun.
