Artistic Managing Director Sarah Machiko Haber.
The life and death of viral celebrity. Keeping the stories of ancestors alive. Death and rebirth.
The mythological phoenix is famed for rising reborn from its own ashes. Chosen as the title for Yale Cabaret’s 2024 – 25 season, the name is fitting — not only for the themes running through what the Cab is producing this year, but because the Cab is a student-run theater that has “died” and been reborn 55 times before. Each season has new artistic directors and managing directors who, in a manner of speaking, rise from the ashes of their predecessors.
The team this season are all in their third year in the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, which has returned to the traditional three-year time-to-degree of the pre-pandemic years. Sarah Machiko Haber, the artistic managing director, is working on a degree in theater management, and the three co-artistic directors are all working on theater degrees: Minjae Kim, who was a co-artistic director for the 2024 Yale Summer Cabaret, in sound; ML Roberts in playwriting; and Lauren F. Walker in acting. With such a diverse range of concentrations, the team brings wide expertise to their roles at the Cab, and as third years they’ve been around long enough to see the transitions the school has gone through in rebuilding after the pandemic shutdowns.
The team stresses the Cab as “a beacon of inspiration,” producing work that is “innovative and inspiring” and lets students at DGSDY “step outside their comfort zones and learn new skills,” sustaining a “culture of love as action” — which entails “extending yourself for someone else, to see from someone else’s perspective” for community growth. It’s a heady mix of values that supports a season of 15 shows — including the annual Dragaret, a celebration of cross-gender performance — and, for the first time, an Ignite Festival, which will support the production of two new plays generated from proposals submitted in September.
Minjae Kim.
The proposals were welcome from anyone at Yale or in the surrounding New Haven community, specifically for two plays from writers “at any stage in their career to create a new work that speaks to moments of social unrest, political provocation, revolution, and/or turmoil, and who are seeking collaboration with artists in a learning environment.” The recipients received $1,000, development support, and a full production of their plays in March 2025.
Season 57 kicked off quite successfully on Sept. 12 with a very contemporary comedy, Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner, a two-person — and multiple-tweeter — play. Written by Jasmine Lee-Jones, an awardee of the Windham-Campbell prize in 2023, the play was up during the festivities for this year’s prize. Last year, Walker and Cindy De La Cruz were tapped to enact a scene from the play at the prize’s evening of excerpts from awardee’s works. The duo, both actors in their second year then, became committed to doing the entire play at the earliest convenience. Enter Jasmine Brooks, a director in the program who was asked to help and who just happened to use Lee-Jones’s play as her application project into the program. Of course she directed the Cab’s production. Such is the serendipity of bringing together the young and talented at DGSDY. The play, relentlessly verbal with acronyms aplenty, highlights lightning fast responses, highly charged language, and a scrappy sense of how identity has become more virtual without becoming more just.
ML Roberts.
Walker played Cleo, a young Black graduate student fed up with the titular viral celebrity’s wealth and appropriation of cultural markers not her own. Cleo starts tweeting ways she’d like to see Jenner die, sparking a deluge of comments, witticisms, non sequiturs, and put-downs, all thrown onto screens so we can witness each emoji, hashtag, GIF and meme (Doaa Ouf, projections). Cleo’s bestie Kara (De La Cruz), patience tried by Cleo’s stream-of-consciousness ability to wrap every slight she has received in her life into a narrative that must be writ large in virtual space, starts chipping away at her friend’s façade, as does the Twittersphere. Eventually Cleo rises to a denunciation of racist assumptions and tags that have been encoded into Western culture for as long as anyone can remember. The ending’s very theatrical moment showed me again why the Cab was and is my favorite theater venue.
Next up, Oct. 3 – 5, is Baksa, an inventive and creative collaboration by two second-year actors in the program, Amrith Jayan and Darius Sakui. Walker described Baksa as “psychological thriller meets clown show,” while Haber called it “a classic Cab show.” Which means, among other things, that this is a very physical theater piece, and, even more unusual, has no spoken text. In a kind of Matrix-like setting (perhaps), a “specimen” becomes aware of its status and must work out how to escape the facility it’s trapped in. The play shares its name with a district in India, which may or may not be relevant. What’s it all mean? The Cab site hints that we’ll be watching “an exploration of the futility of human labor.” The show’s producer is Kavya Shetty, a co-artistic director of Yale Summer Cabaret 2024.
Lauren F. Walker
The Cab’s third show, Oct. 10 – 12, is Herencia (“Inheritance”), a challenging collaboration among the members of El Colectivo, the Latine/x affinity group at DGSDY, and “a multilingual community that embraces the full spectrum of Latinidad, centering the diversity of the Latine/x experience while fostering connections across a large and complex diaspora.” The very diversity of that collectivity is addressed in Herencia, which poses the question of how to carry forward the story of ancestors. Directed by Juliana Morales Carreño, a third-year directing student in the program, the play is a devised, documentary-style piece that interrogates the concept of honor and how it is challenged, using stories shared by a 10-person cast and recreating aspects of their heritage and the stories of their ancestors that still live on.
The fourth and last show so far announced is Brenda Withers’s razor-sharp Dindin, a play that uses the familiar setting of the dinner party to interrogate aspects of privileged existence, including what we kill, what we eat, and what we make. Directed by Mikayla Stanley, a producer and artistic director at Hit the Lights! Theater Company, in her third year as a student of theater management at DGSDY, the cast includes Adam Foster, a co-artistic director of Yale Cab’s Season 56, and a third-year student of stage management. The play, I’m told, considers different meanings of “appetite,” which can become “ferocious,” while having “creepy, weird, and spooky” connotations that may be suitable as we move closer to Halloween.
Each weekend of the Cab’s demanding season presents a new show Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m., and at 11 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. These time-honored timeslots eschew the matinee shows of the last few seasons, helping to maintain the Cab’s aura of a local nightspot. Full dinners are served beginning at 6:30 for the 8 p.m. shows, including wine, beer and prefab cocktails, and at the later shows, a selection of drinks and snacks. Chef Kendall Thigpen, whose career in New Haven has touched down at some premiere spots, including The Heirloom at The Study, Firehouse 12, Ordinary, and Mecha, before becoming head chef at The Anchor Spa, returns with his delectable and creatively curated menu.
“Rising from the ashes” is the right figure for what theaters all across the country have had to do, post-2020. And we’re fortunate, in New Haven, that the Yale Cabaret’s 57th team — Sarah Michiko Haber, Minjae Kim, ML Roberts, and Lauren F. Walker — sharing “a united purpose and a common compatibility,” is rising to “the challenge to speak the truth.”
For tickets, dates, showtimes, and more information about the Yale Cabaret, visit its website.