Joan Marcus Photos
There’s a rave in a lush, green setting as the locals flock to the Club to gyrate to the tunes provided by Deon’s playlist.
Deon is a personable young androgyne with a complicated haircut and something to prove. He’s the illegitimate son of The Weatherman and a woman who was shot in the face while pregnant with him. He was saved; she was lost. Among the many folks who will gather at his party are his mother’s father — Dada — and Dada’s surviving daughters, especially Gaga, mother of Theo, a gun enthusiast who addresses his fans on a live feed from his room, decrying the loud music that can be heard from the Club, and now and then voicing his hopes for how the world will improve when men become men again.
Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins has given Euripides’ The Bacchae a very contemporary gloss in Girls, his adaptation playing at Yale Repertory Theatre through Oct. 26, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, with choreography by Raja Feather Kelly. Jacobs-Jenkins, Blain-Cruz, and Kelly worked on the play in its earlier incarnation, Gurls, as a commissioned piece at Princeton. The version at Yale Rep is Girls’ world premiere.
From the fifth century BC, The Bacchae is having its moment in revivals recently — at the Classical Theatre of Harlem in 2019 and Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2018, among others. The story of a cult of female worshippers of Dionysus engaging in revels on a mountain and the tragic events that ensue when Pentheus, the stickler for law and order in Thebes, tries to crash the party — in drag — seems to strike a chord these days. It might have to do with the “nasty woman” epithet leveled at the Democratic presidential candidate of 2016, or the political engagement signaled by the Women’s March that same year. Such a reading of the play would be likely to render favorably the ritualistic gathering by the women of Thebes, including Pentheus’ own mother, Agave. And yet Dionysus is known as something of a trickster god, as well as being the god of intoxication and theater. The people of Thebes — including Cadmus, the father of Dionysus’s mother Semele — don’t buy the divinity bit. And that makes the play confront the question of doubters and believers when it comes to what is real and what consequences such beliefs have.
Deon, our Dionysus figure played with easygoing charm by Nicholas L. Ashe, opens the play setting up his speakers and a folding table for his computer, from which his curated playlist throbs throughout most of the 90-minute show. The Club, a “dense thicket of woods in a public park,” is a striking set concocted by Adam Rigg to resemble a diorama, complete with mirrors at the back. Deon insists he’s a curator and not a DJ (“what discs?”) or, worse, “an influencer.” His sounds draw a motley assemblage of partiers and curiosity seekers. All of the energy and interest in the play is in their artfully choreographed movements, an ongoing dance number of many moving parts and wildly imaginative costumes. Thanks to Kelly, Rigg, costume designer Montana Levi Blanco, lighting designer Yi Zhao, projection designer David Bengali, hair and makeup designer Cookie Jordan, and sound designer Palmer Hefferan, and the many bodies onstage — eight of them current students at the Yale School of Drama — the show’s look and sound is fabulous.
The partiers are all more than willing to stop their gyrations at any point and announce to us their rationales and phobias and hopes and anything else that our silent attention might call forth. It’s another installment of theater as declamation, a tendency that seems to have captured our contemporary playwrights. Dialogue, as the art of depicting how certain persons speak to one another, has fled in favor of depicting how someone talks to anyone — loudly, earnestly, and not necessarily with a sense of why we might want to know what they’re telling us. The epitome of the tendency comes — and it’s the best speech in the play — when one (played by Ayesha Jordan) of the 14 characters designated as “Girl” describes her struggles to find a chair to sit in at work that does not cause her pain. The tirade is full of details that recreate the reality of the job environment, delivered with the flair for characterizing oneself and others that every born raconteur can marshal. It’s visceral, real, and has nothing to do with any ostensible plot.
Most of the plot-related dialogue that happens occurs on the big screen hovering over the greenery. There, Theo (Will Seefried), the Pentheus character, interacts with two comical old men: his grandfather (Tom Nelis, looking like a relic of many a “festival” of the past) and Rere (Haynes Thigpen), a blind seer who thinks a “live feed” involves animals. Theo is also visited by his dad — once a sheriff, now a cowherd (or is that “coward”), also played by Thigpen, who hyperventilates about how his beloved cows and he were handled by those crazy women on the mountain (the cows are played by lovely Warholesque inflated balloons). Thigpen also enacts the current sheriff who tries to get Theo to lighten up and embrace the new era by learning to talk to the folks out there in the Club.
As an audience all too familiar with gun-toting misanthropes who take it in their heads to annihilate those they hate (who are unarmed and unassuming), we will likely be entertained when Theo, led by Deon, dons striking drag to visit the party in hopes of getting his mother to leave. His mother, however, played with mounting frenzy by Jeanine Serralles, may not prove so docile. Someone slipped her a tab of something and she is, we all know, armed, and believes she should be the sheriff. It’s not going to go well.
Catharsis may come when a foolish, overweening character is hoist upon his own petard and comes to a bad end. It may also be a fulfillment of a collective death ideation we aim at certain villains we are tired of dealing with. At one point, one of the girls (Jeena Yi) pauses while telling us how she might feel better if she killed two people who had wronged her. That pause gets a nervous laugh, its implied look at the killing happening in her minds’ eye. The ending of Girls gives us a similar pause, though perhaps without the laugh.
Girls runs at the Yale Rep at University Theatre, 222 York St. Visit the Yale Rep’s website for tickets and more information.