What’s your favorite sin? Or, to put it another way, what’s the sin you find hardest to resist?
This year’s Yale Summer Cabaret team — Elizabeth Dinkova and Jesse Rasmussen, co-artistic directors, and Emily Reeder, producing director — has enlisted all seven deadly sins in the Summer Cab’s schedule.
Tickets for the summer season’s four shows plus added events are available now.
The first show, Andre Gregory’s Manhattan Project adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, opens on June 2. Before that, there’s a kick-off party on May 27 at 8 p.m., celebrating Sloth (Sin 1), the chief temptation of procrastinators and do-nothings. The party will take place in the Cab space and will feature “a lounge style environment” conducive to luxury and acedia. The Alice cast will work the party, which may include a tarot reading and the opportunity to write on the walls. If we think of the seven sins as a seven-course meal, then the Sloth party is the hors d’oeuvres.
Because of her familiar encounters with food and drink, labeled “eat me” and “drink me,” Alice represents Gluttony (Sin 2), a sin not out of place in the Cab, which offers food — provided by chef Anna Belcher — and drink, alcoholic and otherwise, served from 90 minutes before each show.
A cast of six, led by rising third-year actress Sydney Lemmon as Alice, “respond playfully” to the familiar figures from Carroll’s story, such as the Red and White Queens, the Caterpillar, the White Knight, the March Hare, and the Mad Hatter, in a kind of “game of Alice in Wonderland.” Gregory’s version, according to the production team, is even more “episodic and fractured” than other versions, underscoring the “hellish and illogical labyrinth” that Alice finds down the rabbit hole. But Rasmussen, who directs the first and last shows of the season, is quick to point out that there is “a positive aspect” to Alice’s effort to feed her head, as in “hunger for knowledge.” Alice has to experiment with excess to learn a proper sense of proportion. The show runs till June 19.
For Pride (Sin 3), the Cab has a little palette cleanser in the form of a staged reading of a new play by rising third-year playwright Tori Sampson, whose Some Bodies Travel, co-authored with Jiréh Breon Holder, was the most challenging of the three plays at the recent Carlotta Festival. Cadillac Crew, like much of Sampson’s work, takes us to a point in African-American history — in this case the 1960s and the Civil Rights movement in Virginia — with an all-female cast. The reading takes place one night only: June 24.
A new play by rising third-year playwright Miranda Rose Hall in a “first draft production” fills the bill for Greed (Sin 4). Antartica!, Which Is to Say Nowhere is an adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s dadaesque play Ubu Roi and Dinkova, who directs, will employ gender-bending casting so that Marie Botha plays Ubu and Ricardo Davila his queen. The couple set out to colonize Antartica, which means slaughtering many kinds of animals, penguins not least. Dinkova, who directed Hall’s slapstick satire of health risk paranoia How We Died of Disease-Related Illness at the Cab last spring, said she is drawn to “weird, absurd, contemporary tragedy comedies.” Antartica!, she said, is both “fun and ugly” as it explores how the ambition to have more can bring about the end of everything. Dinkova likes the challenge of the incongruity of the Cab’s small space and “an action-packed epic” with song and dance numbers, puppets, special effects, and a strategic coup de théâtre. It’s also one of the few plays she knows that incorporates climate change as a real issue and not as manipulative pandering to a hot topic. Antartica! runs from June 30 to July 10.
For Envy (Sin 5), there will be another single-night special event on July 15: a face-off competition between sound designers Frederick Kennedy — the inventive drummer in the Cab’s production of I’m With You In Rockland — and Christopher Ross-Ewart, whose one-man show Stop, Shop, and Drop was featured in the Cab’s Satellite Festival.
Dea Loher’s play Adam Geist, in the North American premiere of David Tushingham’s translation from the German, represents Wrath (Sin 6), as the play’s hero undertakes a picaresque journey through a contemporary city. Dinkova, who directs, said Adam keeps “anger deep inside” while often showing only innocent naivete in his monologues that bid for our sympathy after he commits crimes. With seven cast members playing many roles, including choruses of drug users, firefighters, prophet-children, skinheads, and witnesses, Adam Geist is a “sort of religious pilgrimage” that asks if evil is inherent in the individual or in society. Adam, who loses his mother early and is lied to about it, finds himself “through many sins in search of redemption.” It run July 21 to 30.
Finally, Sin 7 (you knew it had to be): Lust. And for that we have one of the great unrequited lust situations in all of literature: the story of horny Phaedra, driven to distraction by the hots for her stepson Hippolytus, who lives chaste due to hatred of women. The curse of the gods means that it will end badly for all, and in Sarah Kane’s telling of the story in Phaedra’s Love, directed by Rasmussen, the nastiness of it all is heightened by Hippolytus’ slacker qualities, lust for his step-sister Strophe, and the rage of his father Theseus. Is there an upside to the play? “Absolutely!” said Rasmussen. The play finds transformation in the opposing qualities of love and truth, so that the “seismic violence in Kane’s version is revelatory.” Would it be in bad taste to say that everyone gets their just dessert? It runs Aug. 4 to 14.
So why sin as the throughline for the season? Dinkova and Rasmussen found inspiration in Brecht’s ballet chanté The Seven Deadly Sins, which assigns sins to American cities. Looking for “the widest playground” for their characteristic choices of “dark and disturbing plays,” they found sin a suitably “fun idea” that could be “both serious and subversive.” The notion of sin is so pervasive that it’s not hard to find it at work even in plays not especially moral, and the iconic quality of the sins themselves certainly don’t hurt. See, for instance, where company members admit to their vices and their favorite sins. It’s so hard to pick just one.