Front: Martin Montaner V. (Director of Production); Jecamiah M. Ybañez (Artistic Director) Center: Estefani Castro (Producing Director) Rear: Oakton Reynolds (Managing Director); Danilo Gambini (Artistic Director).
When you hear the word “Latinx” what do you imagine? What specific characteristics come to mind? For Co-Artistic Directors Danilo Gambini and Jecamiah M. Ybañez and Producing Director Estefani Castro, the team behind “Verano,” the Yale Summer Cabaret season for 2019, the word applies to each of them but differently.
Gambini is of Italian descent and is from Brazil, where Portuguese is the primary language. His training is in classical theater in his home country. Ybañez is a Tejano from Poteet, Texas, where his family has lived for generations, and he doesn’t speak Spanish. He grew up eating Thai food and his first theatrical productions were the marching band performances he staged. Castro, from Southern California, is the founding producing partner of the UCR Latina/o/x Play Project, a student ensemble bringing Latino theater and film to the Inland Empire. In choosing the four plays that would make up the season, the team vowed to “examine, expand, and explode” the notion of Latinx theater.
If Latinx theater is any theatrical performance made by artists with a viable connection to Latin American culture, then it should include works that originate in that culture, works from the United States that engage with Latin American culture, and works from the classical Western canon with a Latin American spin.
“Verano” — which launches on June 6 and runs through August 17 at the Yale Cabaret on Park Street — will be all that and more. The team has chosen four plays that draw upon their different experiences and will impress audiences with the diversity of Latinx theater.
“We asked ourselves,” said Gambini, “where we can go for the roots” of Latinx theater. His answer: back to the classics, the ancient Greek theater that is the basis for all Western art. His production of Euripides’ Bakkhai, in Anne Carson’s new translation, opens the season, June 6 through June 15. Gambini aims to look at the play, in which “the struggle for power and influence clashes with the desire for pleasure and indulgence,” in a global context. The play, about the banning of the wild ritual celebrations of Dionysus, seems to be having its moment. It was revived at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last season with Dionysus played as a “nasty woman,” and Girls, a modern adaptation by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, opens Yale Repertory Theatre’s next season. How will the play look from a Latinx perspective? Gambini is excited at the prospect.
The second show of the season is by the celebrated Cuban-American playwright María Irene Fornés, an avant-garde theater pioneer in the U.S. who died last October. Directed by Ybañez, The Conduct of Life, which won the Obie award in 1985, is set in an unnamed Latin American city under a military government. The image of many Latin American countries as having to deal with volatile political struggles is implicated in the play, in which “a series of cinematic vignettes” show “how state violence can invade the home.” The play runs from June 20 to 29.
For a play that originates in Latin America, the co-artistic directors chose The Swallow and the Tomcat by Jorge Amado, an adaptation by Gambini of a “beloved Brazilian children’s novel.” The show will be family friendly, but it’s not a Disney-style adventure featuring anthropomorphic animals. The novel is about difference and acceptance, and about social strictures that limit personal freedoms. As Ybañez points out, the story shows how Latin American artists working under censorship would “use gestures and tropes to talk about what they might not be able to express outright,” so that allegory becomes a favored method under dictatorship. “Something,” Ybañez added, “artists in the U.S. might have to become familiar with.” The show is up from July 18 to 27.
Finally, for a work that capitalizes on popular U.S. images of Latinx culture, Emilio Rodriguez’s Latinos Who Look Like Ricky Martin, directed by Ybañez, finishes the season. The play, the co-ADs say, is about the very question their season will raise: who and what be called “culturally representative” of a diverse community? In a Latinx affinity group at a university, members vie for the title of “most Latino-Latino.” Gambini joked that the three Summer Cab team members could easily fit the roles in this three actor play, making the season’s final offering a direct comment upon the process by which choices are made to express or encapsulate or popularize Latinx culture. The play runs from August 8 to 17.
Ybañez, who directs the second and fourth plays, received his MFA in directing from the Yale School of Drama in May. His thesis show, Seven Spots on the Sun by Martín Zimmerman, was a powerful look at the legacy of civil war in a Latin American town. In this past Yale Cabaret season, Ybañez played a passionate chef in Arturo Soria’s Novios, Pt. 1. Gambini directs the first and third plays of the season and is a rising third-year student at the School of Drama. This past year at the school he directed a highly artistic version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and last year at the Cabaret directed Newton Moreno’s Agreste (Drylands), a fascinating exploration of sexual identity in a folkloric style.
The Yale Summer Cabaret was on hiatus last summer for physical improvements — to the all-important air-conditioning system — and to deal with complaints about its board’s selection process. Gambini and Ybañez stress that, with its return, the Summer Cabaret’s “doors are really open to all,” and that the work they will do there is about “sharing and connecting through conversations.” The Summer Cabaret will continue the Yale Cabaret’s collaboration with Dana Cesnik Doyle of Queen of Tarts Catering as the chef in the kitchen and plans to offer fare with Latin American antecedents. Dinner service begins 90 minutes before showtime and service closes before the show begins. Each play runs for seven nights starting at 8 p.m., with 11 p.m. shows added on Friday and Saturday nights.
The welcome presence of this venerable theater in New Haven in summer cannot be overstated. Ybañez and Gambini look for audiences “with a sense of adventure” who will be “present and open” to the artistry on view. In a time when negative cultural stereotypes have returned to the national conversation in the U.S., Ybañez acclaimed the role of theater in letting us “celebrate and fall in love with each other’s differences.”
The Yale Summer Cabaret’s season runs from June 6 to August 17 at 217 Park St. Visit the theater’s website for tickets and more information.