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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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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.
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.
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Donald Brown |
Jan 28, 2019 8:30 am
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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.
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Donald Brown |
Jan 18, 2019 8:46 am
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
