Lucy Gellman Photos
“I just couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard of someone who appeared to be the female forefather of the theater and I got so intrigued by the fact that no one knows the real facts about her … she just seemed to contain so many selves,” said Leora Morris on a recent afternoon, her hands whizzing through the air as she spoke.
“I knew when I found her that there would have to be a thing. I got so excited about the theatrical possibilities.”
She was referring to 19th-century actress, artist, and writer Adah Isaacs Menken, the subject of her heavily devised work love holds a lamp in this little room at the 2015 Yale Summer Cabaret. The second play in the Summer Cab’s five-show lineup, the work will depart from Midsummer in a big way and take the season’s theme of “Rough Magic” in a whole other direction, exploring Menken’s “many selves … a never ending set of contradictions” that pulled Morris into the project. The world premiere of the play begins this Thursday and will run through Saturday July 18.
Morris’ run-in with Menken began as a sort of accident when she lifted Venus With Biceps: A Pictorial History of Muscular Women from the shelf for other research. From there, she voraciously unspooled Menken’s history, drawn in deeper with each vignette. A deeply complex portrait emerged: a figure who thrilled and seduced audiences as she rode a horse nude across the stage in a revision of Lord Byron’s Mazeppa. A quiet poet whose first and only book appeared two years after her untimely death. A mixed-race actress whose act of passing as white instilled in her a love for Judaism. The list went on. She was a cultural antecedent — and then some — to Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, Lady Gaga, and even Taylor Mac. And yet, she was completely unknown.
That much, Morris decided, would change if she had anything to do with it. Maybe she found Adah, or maybe Adah found her, but the Yale School of Drama graduate student and director of Theatre Hetaerae — with the support and theatrical curiosity of YSC Artistic Director Sarah Holdren — was determined to make a lasting and meaningful piece of work on the actress.
Fast forward to a week before the performance, and Morris was knee-deep in the project with several members of the Summer Cab’s indefatigable company. Because love holds a lamp is an entirely devised work, that means starting from the ground up, and grinding hard until something concrete, baffling, and hopefully beautiful has emerged. After 10 rehearsals working with Menken’s material, pulled largely from press coverage and biographical writings, Morris could see the outline of a play she now calls “a series of performance haikus.” It wasn’t quite done yet, and that was very okay; it would be by opening night. Motioning to notes that lined the wall’s of the Summer Cabaret’s Park Street performance space, she opened up about the process.
“We could have gone down four different paths, even just with the stuff we generated. We spent a day as a company getting to know her life, and then we spent nine rehearsals just generating material. I went away for our day off and culled and structured … and then we tested that yesterday and learned a lot. We’re still missing a huge something and we don’t know what it is … but there’s just so much and the performance modes are so many. It’s touching Adah, but it’s this kind of in the moment experience that’s not period, not anything like that.” Morris said.
From a creative vantage point, audiences can expect a show that will fuse lyrical and poetic movement, song, and text to reveal not only who Menken was, but how she relates to the Cab’s actors and audience members as complex and conflicted human beings. She was, after all, both the watching and the watched: during the performance, they will be too. And while the timing — a summer that has seen both Rachel Dolezal’s epic act of cultural appropriation and Misty Copeland’s long overdue promotion at American Ballet Theater, both against an ugly backdrop of systemic racism — isn’t something that Morris foresaw when she began working on the play, she hopes that it will become an integral part of the audience’s understanding by the end of the two-week run.
“I am most excited to see if and how the way Adah, and the way our investigation of Adah, complicates gender, race and celebrity. To sort of see if that illuminates something about now,” Morris said. “I think that there are some parts that are very specifically … trying to touch what she was playing on. And other parts where she just says: Why are you here? She herself opens that up.”
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