Guevara, Stamm, and Ouf.
The 56th season of the Yale Cabaret, the audacious theater in the basement of 217 Park Street on Yale’s campus, is called “Sandbox.” The Cab’s team for the 2023 – 24 season — co-artistic directors Doaa Ouf, a projection designer, and Kyle Stamm, a lighting designer, both in their second year at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, and managing director Annabel Guevara, now completing her fourth year in theater management at DGSD — said “the mission of Cab 56 is to create theater that invokes a sense of curiosity and playfulness, giving artists permission to dig and unearth treasures within themselves.”
Given that there were 20 proposals for the remaining three slots in the season — the next show, The Royale, runs Feb. 22 to 24 — it’s safe to say that the school of drama’s theater-makers have again embraced the unique possibilities of theater at Yale Cabaret. In describing the competitive selection process, Doaa Ouf stressed that Cab 56’s season so far showcased variety and featured “all the kinds of theatre we’d like to see more of, and our next shows” continue “to do just that.”
The season began with a comical mock game show, involving video assignments, called We Fucked Up, where no two shows were exactly the same. It moved into an expressive Indian-American dance odyssey through the emotions called The Rasa Jar. It then brought comedic improv to a Shakespeare classic with Romeo and You-liet, featuring Yale’s premiere sketch comedy troupe Red Hot Poker. Following that was an affecting one-person show of monologue and personal history, Moonie. The year 2023 ended with Theatre Camp, a festival that celebrated performance of all varieties, including short plays, slam poetry, and musical theater. The new year led off with the ensemble piece And the Beetle Hums, a poetic evocation of the kinds of stories our dreams tell us, followed by Can the Peruvian Speak?, an ensemble play with eight performers in “a testimonial romcom” portraying gay interracial dating in the contemporary U.S. Finally, this past weekend the Cab staged its raucous and raunchy Dragaret, a celebration of gendered morphing now in its 11th year, with both a community night featuring locally-based queens as well as a night for DGSD students in performance.
So far, all the work presented was original to the theater artists, an indication of how well the Cab inspires the creation of new work. But, coming up, the team is “excited to feature our first published scripts,” Ouf said, as well as continuing “to amplify the original work of artists in our community.”
Marco Ramiriez’s The Royale may be familiar to some New Haveners due to the excellent production the play received in 2019 at Collective Consciousness Theater, directed by Jenny Nelson. Proposed by two second-year actors at DGSD, Marlon Alexander Vargas and Messiah Hagood-Barnes, the Cab’s production will be directed by second-year acting student Lauren F. Walker and features a cast of first, second, and third-year actors. Set in the racially segregated boxing world of 1905, the play follows Jay “The Sport” Jackson’s dream to become the heavyweight champion of the world, but his only chance to fight the reigning white champion comes via a crooked boxing promoter. It runs Feb. 22 to 24.
The added slot lands just before Yale’s break and so will not have Saturday shows, running instead from Wednesday, March 6 through Friday, March 8. Arlington is another dark, dystopian tale from Enda Walsh, whose The Small Things received a memorable Cab production in 2013. Proposed and directed by graduating director Bobbin Ramsey — director of the recent DGSD production of Suzan-Lori Parks’ gripping Fucking A — the play offers “a collision of poetry, video, theatre, and dance” in a high-tech production that explores “the possibility of love in the bleakest of worlds.”
Back from break, the Cab returns March 21 to 23 with a production — title TBD — presented by The Collective in collaboration with Theater Mu from St. Paul, MN. The Collective consists of Sarah Machiko Haber, Adrian Hernandez, Maya Louise Shed, and Mikayla Stanley, all DGSD Theater Management ’25, who ran the Yale Summer Cabaret 2023 season. According to its website, Theater Mu (pronounced “moo”) is named for “the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese character for the shaman-artist-warrior who connects the heavens and the earth through the tree of life.” Theater Mu aims to promote “insight into and empathy for Asian American culture and heritage,” and the upcoming production marks an intriguing reach beyond the immediate New Haven-New York theater community.
The remaining two plays appear in April, leading with Pride of Doves by graduating DGSD playwright Doug Robinson. Pride was Robinson’s entry for admission into the Yale program and so is a way to come full circle. Directed by first-year director Jasmine Brooks, the production also shows the collaboration across cohorts that is a key goal of the Cab. A post-apocalyptic tale, the play is described as “an absurdist exploration of inaction, apathy, distraction and violence” that involves a puppet show and flying grenades. It runs April 11 to 13.
Finally, Doaa Ouf will be directing the last show of the Sandbox: S’mores, written by graduating acting student Augustine Lorrie Alexandrite, who wrote and co-directed last season’s Four Meddling Kids and One Dumb Dog, based on the cartoon of Scooby-Doo (played by Alexandrite). S’mores is set in the pines of the Sierra Nevada, where a night at a glacial lake for two strangers solo camping becomes “a transformative exploration of love, grief, and the ineffable bond between two Queer souls longing for connection.” That’s April 18 to 20.
A playground sandbox conjures collaborative and imaginative play over ephemeral constructions. This Yale Cab season has already mounted and struck six individual shows, plus a three-day festival and two different line-ups of drag performance. The coming five shows will be here and gone quickly. And the Cab shows this season have been selling out quickly, indicating that the venerable theater — which offers prix fixe dining and dining à la carte from Chef Kendall Thigpen of the Anchor Spa at the evening shows, as well as snacks and beverages for the Saturday matinee — is bringing in interested audiences wiling to be challenged by new theatrical works. As Managing Director Annabel Guevara said, “our audiences have come back to Yale Cabaret and we couldn’t be more proud to welcome them with a bold, innovative, and boundary-breaking spring season.”
For tickets and more information, visit the Yale Cabaret’s website.