by | Feb 8, 2019 4:58 pm | Comments (3)
Carol Rosegg Photos
René Augesen and Laura Heisler.
At the end of Good Faith, three firefighters and a lawyer stand on stage.
“We fight the fire,” they tell the audience, one after the other.
By then the fire is a metaphor, the play moving from the concrete to the abstract. “Who will save you? Who will you save?”
by | Feb 8, 2019 1:37 pm | Comments (15)
David Yaffe-Bellany, Carol Rosegg Photos
Frank Ricci; “Frank Ricci” (Ian Bedford).
Carol Rosegg Photo
“Tyrone Ewing” (Rob Demery), “Michael Briscoe” (Billy Eugene Jones) in Good Faith, which opened Thursday night.
Frank Ricci looked up to watch himself onstage — and found a big bald-shaven guy speaking with a Brooklyn accent.
by | Jan 31, 2019 1:25 pm | Comments (2)
Costume sketches by Beatrice Vena; File Photos
Top: Sketches for Yale Rep Good Faith characters based on city firefighters (bottom, from left) Michael Briscoe, Frank Ricci, Tyrone Ewing.
Lou Daprile Photo
Karen Hartman, whose script hits stage Thursday night.
Liberal elite New Haven theater-goers beware: If you attend the new play inspired by the landmark Ricci v. DeStefano case, you won’t get to feel superior to the working-class white people who convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to change the rules for affirmative action.
by | Jan 28, 2019 8:30 am | Comments (0)
Kudtarkar.
Alice Childress’ best-known play, Trouble in Mind, — a hard-hitting study of racism in American theater, being put on by the Yale School of Drama at the University Theater from Feb. 2 to Feb. 8 — debuted in 1955. The play’s critical success made Childress the first African American woman to win an Obie as a playwright. Originally produced Off Broadway in Greenwich Village, the play was Broadway bound, until Childress became dissatisfied about changes she was asked to make in her play. The play remains as Childress originally wrote it, and also remains woefully underproduced. Aneesha Kudtarkar, a third-year director in the Yale School of Drama, sees irony in the way the play’s history relates to its subject matter.
by | Jan 22, 2019 3:31 pm | Comments (0)
Long Wharf Properties Manager Brian Fagan was in the theater’s kitchen, turning watermelon into steak.
“The actors actually like it,” he said. “They keep talking about how good it is.”
But why turn watermelon into steak at all?
by | Jan 18, 2019 8:46 am | Comments (0)
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.
by | Jan 15, 2019 8:44 am | Comments (1)
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.
Continue reading ‘Collective Consciousness Lets Rasheeda Speak’
by | Jan 2, 2019 8:31 am | Comments (2)
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.
Continue reading ‘Behind-Scenes Effort Guides Westville Art Scene Into 2019’
by | Dec 11, 2018 8:19 am | Comments (0)
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.
by | Dec 10, 2018 8:39 am | Comments (2)
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.
by | Dec 4, 2018 8:28 am | Comments (0)
Yale Cabaret Photo
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.”
by | Nov 29, 2018 4:12 pm | Comments (15)
Steve Hamm photo
John Cavaliere.
lyrichallnewhaven.com
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.
by | Nov 29, 2018 1:11 pm | Comments (0)
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?
by | Nov 14, 2018 8:55 am | Comments (0)
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.
by | Nov 9, 2018 8:16 am | Comments (0)
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.
Continue reading ‘New Haven Theater Company Sings A Love Song’
by | Nov 8, 2018 4:51 pm | Comments (0)
Long Wharf Theatre
Long Wharf Theatre’s new artistic director said he aims to restore the historic theater company’s soul with a bit more sol.
by | Oct 24, 2018 7:41 am | Comments (0)
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.
by | Oct 23, 2018 7:58 am | Comments (21)
Thomas Breen photo
Selection committee members Avi Szapiro and Jackie Buster and committee staff Steve Fontana at Monday’s meeting.
Proposals from two finalists lived to fight another day to win the right to run downtown’s next cultural hotspot .
by | Oct 22, 2018 7:42 am | Comments (0)
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?
by | Oct 19, 2018 7:41 am | Comments (0)
T. Charles Erickson Photos
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.
by | Oct 5, 2018 11:52 am | Comments (0)
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.
by | Oct 3, 2018 7:24 am | Comments (0)
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.
by | Oct 1, 2018 11:59 am | Comments (0)
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.”
by | Sep 27, 2018 1:41 pm | Comments (2)
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.
by | Sep 27, 2018 7:52 am | Comments (3)
Atrossity Photography / Creative Commons
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.
“Oh,” one of the drivers said, “#MeToo?”