Conceived as a theater festival that “orbits” the Yale Cabaret, The Satellite Festival celebrates its fourth year this Thursday. As Molly FitzMaurice, the Cabaret’s co-artistic director and the co-producer, with first-year dramaturg Rebecca Adelsheim, of this year’s festival puts it, “the Satellite Festival is the Cab of the Cab.” It is to the Cabaret what the Cabaret is to the Yale School of Drama — “an alternative outlet” for student work and for talents that may go untapped by official assignments and projects.
The Yale Cabaret offers YSD students the space to experiment and try out passion projects while sometimes working in areas outside their chosen disciplines. So far this year, the Cabaret has featured plays written by actors, a dance musical developed by a stage manager, and — as is often the case — plays directed by non-directing majors and performances by non-acting majors. The Satellite Festival, which runs from March 28 to March 30 this year, features shorter works and pieces that showcase technical elements, such as sound, visuals, or dance.
Eight pieces. Four locations. Unlike last year’s festival, which was a bit more sprawling, this year the majority of works can be seen in the building at 217 Park St., in either the Cabaret itself or the studio rehearsal space upstairs. Two additional pieces take place at 149 York St., at the School of Drama’s rehearsal and tech studios. One ticket ($25, $15 for students and Yale faculty) gets you in to the entire festival, so you may see as many shows as you like, whenever you like. (Though seating is first-come, first-served, with no guarantees for a particular performance excepting if you make dinner reservations for the 8 p.m. shows each night).
The exception to the location rule is Truck II, playwright Margaret E. Douglas’s follow-up to last year’s Truck. The play again takes place in a truck on the loading dock at 149 York. This time it’s 2145 and the family’s beloved truck has been “retrofitted for interplanetary space travel.” As you might guess, seating for Truck II is very limited, with only six seats per performance. Showtimes are at 8 p.m., 9:30 p.m., and 11 p.m. on Friday, March 29, and Saturday, March 30. (Call or email the box office to reserve a specific performance; 2 guests max per reservation.)
This year, FitzMaurice said, several pieces use musical concert formats, as opposed to the kind of “text or narrative-based works” that tend to be common at the Cab. There is, however, a dramatic musical in the line-up: Theater Management major Sam Linden’s work-in-progress called UNAMUSED, a feminist musical fantasia. The show is adapted from “We Are Not A Muse” from A Field Guide to Awkward Silences by Alexandra Petri, in which a woman taking a playwriting class has to contend with an ex-boyfriend in the same class writing a play about their breakup. Audiences will see “the first ever public reading” of the musical and have an opportunity to give the author feedback, at 11 p.m., March 28 and March 29, and 8 p.m. on Saturday, March 30.
Performance-based musical pieces include Exit Interview by third-year playwright Christopher Gabriel Núñez, in his rap persona Anonymous (And.On.I.Must), combining “genres as seemingly disparate as trap, punk rock, and cumbia,” in pursuit of “sweaty catharsis and destruction,” 8 p.m., March 28, and 11 p.m., March 30. An hour of “folksy jazzy bluesy creamy dreamy” music called dot the jay features actors Robert Lee Hart and Dario Ladani Sánchez (who played contentious enemies in Seven Spots on the Sun, this season’s second Yale School of Drama thesis show), 8 p.m., March 29, and 11 p.m., March 30.
Two dramatic solo performance pieces are in the line-up: first-year actor Malia West offers Black Girl Burning, described as “a poem, a plea, a panic attack, a prayer … and some praise,” at 10 p.m., March 28, March 29, and March 30, and second-year director Kat Yen attempts to “start a conversation about how Asian Americans are seen” in the American theater in This Is Not Art, It’s Just Asian, 10:30 p.m., March 28 and March 30.
On the more improvisational side, there’s second-year sound designer Liam Bellman-Sharpe with composer/guitarist and collaborator Sarah Xiao, a dancer/choreographer from outside YSD, who will present an untitled “semi-improvised dance/music piece” and create “a collage” that combines “pre-composed and improvised vocabularies” that encourage “a playful and meditative game of free association,” 9:15 p.m., March 28, March 29, and March 30. And on the more technical side, there’s Alexa, Wait for Godot by Elliot G. Mitchell, a data scientist from Columbia University, whom FitzMaurice called the festival’s “most outsider artist” with a work that brings into play interesting new trends in non-human performance. “Two Alexa devices talk in circles, patiently waiting for someone who may never arrive. What does it all mean? Nothing, really.” The piece is an installation in YSD’s Leeds Studio at 149 York, and will run on Friday, March 29, from 8:00 p.m. until 11:45 p.m. Audiences are encouraged to come at their convenience.
Festivals, said Adelsheim, “offer a very different energy” from the usual theatrical event, even in the case of experimental theater. The festival format fosters “the excitement of collaboration” with a variety of different performers and styles. Audiences may find themselves “awash in experiences based on collaborative risks,” and the best attitude for access may well simply be curiosity, to see what’s going on, while it’s happening. For the fourth year in a row, Yale Cabaret’s Satellite Festival boldly goes beyond.
The Satellite Festival runs March 28 to March 30. For tickets and further details, visit the festival’s website.