Katherine McGerr
Carlotta Festival: New Plays Soon to Open
Carlotta is coming! The annual festival of new plays by the three playwrights graduating from Yale School of Drama—this year, Hansol Jung, Mary Laws, Kate Tarker—opens next week, May 9th and continues till May 16th. The plays are directed by the three graduating directors whose thesis shows were staged earlier this school year: Cole Lewis, who directed Dürrenmatt's The Visit, directs Jung's Cardboard Piano, Katherine McGerr, who directed Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, directs Laws' Bird Fire Fly, and Dustin Wills, who directed Barrie's Peter Pan, directs Tarker's Thunderbodies.
According to Hansol Jung, the plays for this year's Carlotta began as "Not-Carlotta Plays"—for their final play to be produced as students at YSD, all three playwrights returned, as chance would have it, to plays written in their second year for a workshop with Sarah Ruhl; at the time, none were consciously writing a play for Carlotta, nor felt the plays would eventually become their Carlotta plays. Working on the plays in such close proximity may have had its effect, however, as all three plays are concerned to some degree with war, and each features a soldier amongst its characters.
The inspiration for Jung's play came from documentaries she had watched about "The Bang Bang Club"—a group of photographers who placed themselves in harms' way to take hard-hitting photographs of parts of Africa facing war and famine. Jung also points to the viral online video about Joseph Kony and his depredations, involving child soldiers and other crimes against humanity. At the time when Carlotta proposals were due, Jung "had three plays, in various states of draft, on the table." Director Lewis and dramaturg Whitney Dibo, Co-Artistic Director of Yale Cabaret 46, as well as faculty advisors, were unanimous in seeing Cardboard Piano as the play Jung should go with.
Jung says the play "gravitates toward trauma"; Cardboard Piano begins on New Year's Eve, 2000, in a cathedral where two teen-aged girls, one the daughter of missionaries, have gone to unite themselves in marriage, only to be interrupted by child soldiers, hiding out. Part two opens, after an intermission, 14 years later as the girls, women now, return to the scene. For Jung, one challenge in writing the play is its strict adherence to "the unities" of time, place, and duration. Each part occurs in one location and in real time, offering "a day in the life" quality that should also resonate, in the second part, as a recognition scene with "super high stakes." Large in scope and execution, the play retains something of the stagecraft minimalism that Jung prefers.
Jung worked as a director's assistant in South Korea before coming to the States, where she received an MFA in Directing at Penn State before embarking on play-writing. She has done extensive work with musicals and always finds a place for song in her plays, but none so far have been musicals—though she is working on a musical side project at present. Her play's title comes from a story told to calm one of the soldiers, and she finds in the image of a fragile, artful thing that can be destroyed but also restored a figure for the effect her play achieves.
Cardboard Piano plays Fri, 5/9; Mon, 5/12; Thurs, 5/15, at 8 p.m. and Wed, 5/14, at 2 p.m.
Mary Laws' play Bird Fire Fly departs rather notably from the three unities. A short play in three parts, with a cast of three male actors, Bird Fire Fly's tripartite title indicates the three distinct segments of the play, the 1st, "Bird," depicting children, the 2nd, "Fire," young adults, and "Fly," soldiers.
"The three character names stay the same," Laws says, though they are not the same people nor played, from section to section, by the same actor. The choice to avoid even the most basic unity of character identity was spurred by Laws' interest in creating "a larger landscape less about individuals, and in following the arc of an experience." The play, in her view, depends more on its poetry, its symbols and metaphors, rather than on static characterization. "There's a contained story in each part, each a piece of the puzzle" that is the question of the whole play.
Of her plays that might have worked for Carlotta, Laws chose the one she wrote in the same workshop with Sarah Ruhl that spawned the other Carlotta plays this year. Laws finds the play well-suited to the Carlotta format, and is excited by her "last chance" at YSD to work with director Katherine McGerr. The violence in the play—Laws says her theme is "crushed innocence"—is necessary because, Laws says, the play treats "things that scare me and provoke questions I might not know how to ask in real life." The presence of war in our time is one such frightening aspect of modern life, and Laws aims for a cathartic exploration of her theme, which may leave the audience somewhat troubled. Her second-year play, Blueberry Toast, was violent in a more satiric way, and—as directed by Dustin Wills—went for extremes of behavior.
Key to Bird Fire Fly is its tempo and rhythm, in Laws' view of her work. And to achieve her ends she's willing to take risks with the conventions. Educated at Baylor in Texas, her home state, Laws was encouraged by generous teachers to write plays and then worked for three years at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in New York to hone her craft further. She recently had the experience of seeing an early play of hers worked on in a drama class at Baylor and looks forward to the day when one of her plays will be given a full production in Texas, where theater, she says, is an important part of the local culture.
Bird Fire Fly plays Sat, 5/10, and Wed, 5/14, at 8 p.m., and Tues, 5/13, and Fri, 5/16, at 2 p.m.
Kate Tarker calls her play Thunderbodies "a fun play" and "a little war comedy." Originating in the same workshop class with her Carlotta colleagues, the play received a reading with professional actors and was viewed by everyone as "clearly my breakthrough play." The anarchic style of the play was nurtured by the Clown class Tarker took with Christopher Bayes, YSD's master of extremely energetic comedy. At ninety minutes, Thunderbodies is "an epic one act" consisting of separate scenes that "come together at the end." The approach is satiric, "topsy-turvy," with "lots of physical comedy, body talk, and lower body energy."
The play derives from both physical and intellectual inspirations. Written when, in fall of her 2nd year, she broke her foot, the play was influenced by an experience that, Tarker says, made her much more aware of her body and the physics of doing formerly simple tasks. At the same time she was reading M. M. Bakhtin's study of Rabelais, in which Bakhtin formulates his ideas of the "carnivalesque" as a subversive force and the "grotesque body" as a means of liberating that force. Reading that work, Tarker says, gave her "more permission to create ravenous characters." And to set her play in what she calls "the medieval now."
With her background in visual art, Tarker comes to theater from a somewhat different perspective and says she likes to write about "outsiders looking in." Her "origin story" as a playwright, she says, occurred when she went to an African chimpanzee sanctuary to work on a visual art project. For half of her time there, the art supplies did not arrive and so she spent a lot of time writing detailed journal entries. The act of writing took her toward other interests, such as the varied arts approach the Interlochen Arts Academy, her high school in Michigan, fostered. In addition to play-writing, while at Yale she directed a play by Phillip Howze at the Cabaret and acted in a show, The Most Beautiful Thing in the World, devised with Gabriel Levey, this past fall.
Thunderbodies plays Sun, May 11, Tues, May 13, and Fri, May 16, at 8 p.m., and Thurs, May 15, at 2 p.m.
This year's Carlotta plays, while having in common, perhaps, a willingness to address the theme of war to provoke rawer or more visceral emotions from the viewer, take three decidedly different approaches to their themes and offer three unique theatrical experiences. The shows, besides adding to the challenging work of the three graduating directors, feature casts of first and second-year actors, many of whom have been seen in thesis shows or at the Cabaret, such as Celeste Arias, Aaron Bartz, James Cusati-Moyer, Melanie Field, Christopher Geary, Jonathan Majors, Julian Elijah Martinez, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Tom Pecinka, Bradley James Tejeda, Shaunette Renée Wilson.
Look forward to interesting offerings this year at the Carlotta Festival of New Plays.
The Carlotta Festival of New Plays Yale School of Drama May 9-May 16, 2014 The Iseman Theater 1156 Chapel Street
[Note: an earlier version of this article erred in the chronology of Kate Tarker's trip to the chimpanzee sanctuary (before college, not after), the location of her high school (Michigan not Colorado), and her studies at Reed (Literature-Theatre, not Visual Arts). Our apologies for any confusion.]
Tagged: Bird Fire Fly, Cardboard Piano, Carlotta Festival, Cole Lewis, Dustin Wills, Hansol Jung, Kate Tarker, Katherine McGerr, Mary Laws, theater, Thunderbodies
Unhappy Hedda
The third Yale School of Drama thesis show opens tonight, directed by Katherine McGerr. Hedda Gabler, by Henrik Ibsen, is a masterpiece, a character study that is one of theater's most fascinating roles. As the playbill by the show's dramaturg, Jennifer Schmidt, suggests, the play, unlike some of Ibsen's other famous plays, does not take aim at social problems so as to give meaning to the play's action. In Hedda Gabler, the problem lies with Hedda herself; her manipulation of others and her ultimate fate would seem to set a moral, though audiences are left to determine what that might be. Is she tragic or does she get what she deserves, is she mean-spirited or high-spirited, is she idealistic or nihilistic?
For McGerr, Hedda Gabler is a play that is meant to shock its audience. "There's nothing old about it, the play is alive today," McGerr says, and hopes the audience will be "shocked, but understand it and be shocked by what it means." One question the production faced was how to remove the play from its period setting—the 1890s—without "updating it" to the present. The show's striking design (Adrian Martinez Frausto), with the audience literally looking through the glass walls of the home of Jørgen and Hedda Tesman, is somewhat modernist, without being of a definite era. Costumes (Soule Golden) as well are modern, with some of the elegance of art deco, while furnishings show a mixture of modern shapes together with the older mode of life that the Tesmans are trying to move up from. The house is one of the finest in the neighborhood and is the place where Jørgen (Daniel Reece) expects to begin his career as a professor with a young wife and possibly a family—particularly if his doting Aunt Julia (Elia Monte-Brown) has her way.
McGerr says that, in working with her cast, the question they have been asking is "who is [Hedda]?" They see both her cruelty and her frailty. McGerr thinks of her heroine as "ahead of her time and smarter than the others around her, but also frustrated." It's that frustration that fuels many of her actions, we might say, and Hedda's complexity has always fascinated audiences. What interests McGerr and her company is the very question of what draws others to Hedda, what makes them love and trust her. We—the audience—might understand the attraction if we admit we love her too. Much may rely upon whether or not we identify with her.
As Hedda, Ashton Heyl is lively and accommodating, with finely chiseled features and blonde hair bound tightly to her head. Her costumes accentuate the graceful lines of her figure and she indeed looks very much the prize catch of the area that Tesman—and others—take her for. "Others" include Commissioner Brack (Mitchell Winter), a close friend of the Tesmans—Jørgen is literally in his debt—who wants to get closer. The sparring flirtation between Brack and Hedda is one of the show's strengths, allowing us to see how Hedda handles herself when confronted with another's machinations. Both seem wary of each other's strengths while looking for an opening that will be useful. Winter's Brack seems to be a man forever testing the water, just waiting til it gets comfy.
Reece's Tesman is so absorbed in his hopes for his career and his elation at winning Hedda, he's unaware of Brack's overtures to Hedda, and rather welcomes his friend's attentions to his wife. Tesman is the comic figure in the cast, to a large extent, and perhaps some of our sympathy for Hedda may come from our growing sense of the obtuseness of the man she married. Even so, Reece's Tesman is likeable and aims to please. We might expect Hedda to wrap him around her finger, but not so. We're looking at a domestic unit where the man—especially with the moral and even the financial support of his aunt—sets the tone and Hedda is expected to content herself in the home he has gone into considerable debt to buy for her.
The more dire threat to that contentment, for Tesman, is the sudden reappearance in town of the brilliant but dissolute scholar Eilert Lövborg (Mamoudou Athie). Suddenly Tesman again faces professional competition and, what's more, we learn that Lövborg had some scenes with Hedda when she was single and living with her father. There's a back-story there and Lövborg's recent "reclamation" by the sweetly supportive Thea Elvsted (Tiffany Mack), an earlier flame of Tesman's, sets up a possible game of mixed couples to offset Brack's desired threesome. Ibsen was nothing if not canny about the possibilities of romantic affairs in small towns—your basic soap opera learned well from his tendency to hint at desires below the surface that may flare into reality at any moment. The cast is rounded out by Ariana Venturi as long-suffering servant Berte—suffering not only because she's the only servant the Tesmans can afford, but because her long ears pick up some of the dirt on her mistress. This minor role is amplified a bit to give hints of the kind of "upstairs/downstairs" view in which a servant stands in as witness.
As Lövborg, Athie gives us a vivid sense of instability, but also of the kind of passion that threatens at any moment to overrun the pacing of Hedda's cat-and-mouse game. Athie's loose cannon in the midst of a world of bland formalities adds an odd force to the play that other characters seem unable to cope with. As Thea, Mack is lovely and very sensible, perhaps too sympathetic. Hedda's maliciousness toward her can seem motiveless if we like Thea too much.
Hedda, we see, toys with the possibility of romance but doesn't truly desire it, so that much of her motivation comes from her attitude toward Thea, who, unhappily married in a manner worse than Hedda, has been Lövborg's salvation, as well as placing her chaste romantic hopes in him. Backing the now ascendant Lövborg, Thea may actually "win," you see . . . .
Plot-wise, the over-riding interest is in who will get the upper-hand on whom, and with what consequence. Props—such as Hedda's old piano, her father's pistols, Lövborg's new book and, even more, his brilliant unpublished manuscript, dictated to Thea, written with her in weeks of comradely intimacy—serve well as tangible reference points in a world where dialogue can be a duel, a seduction, and almost always the imposition of one will upon another. Paul Walsh's translation, in shedding some of the Old World gentility, seems at times to lose some of the finer nuances of motivation as well.
Ibsen was a great playwright. Hedda Gabler is one of his greatest plays. McGerr and company have created a deliciously dark modern comedy in which Heyl's Hedda—steely, desperate, winning, manipulative, and fine—pits her wits against obtuseness. To what end?
Hedda Gabler By Henrik Ibsen, translated by Paul Walsh Directed by Katherine McGerr
Scenic Designer: Adrian Martinez Frausto; Costume Designer: Soule Golden; Lighting Designer: Caitlin Smith Rapoport; Composer and Sound Designer: Steven Brush; Production Dramaturg: Jennifer Schmidt; Stage Manager: Shannon L. Gaughf
Yale School of Drama University Theater February 1-7, 2014
Tagged: Adrian Martinez Frausto, Ariana Venturi, Ashton Heyl, Daniel Reece, Elia Monte-Brown, Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen, Jennifer Schmidt, Katherine McGerr, Mamoudou Athie, Mitchell Winter, Soule Golden, theater, Theater Reviews, Tiffany Mack, Yale School of Drama
Amiri Baraka's Dutchman—playing for two more shows at Yale Cabaret—was first written and produced when Baraka was still writing under the name LeRoi Jones, his given name, at a time when the Civil Rights movement in America was finally catching fire. Times have certainly changed since then—a fact that "New Black Math," a poem performed before the play, apprizes us of with its rapid fire listing of traits we might suppose a "Black Play" to have, or not. The point, I think, is to keep us from seeing Dutchman as stuck in its moment, while at the same time letting us know that—whether we feel progress has been made since the Sixties or not—the very notions of "white" and "black" remain very much with us.
And that's where the play begins: a subway car in NYC, a black man sits reading—poetry, we learn—and a rather provocative white girl gets on. Something might happen between them, or nothing. The girl, who calls herself Lula, wants something to happen; the man, called Clay, could go either way. Lula acts the part of a vamping temptress only too aware of what she's doing. Gradually she provokes Clay into moving past his guardedness and his politeness, eventually he has to assert himself—with violence. This, we might say, is what Lula has been aiming for; taunting him, teasing him, treating aspects of his life as stereotypical, using outrageous body language to arouse him.
In a wonderfully self-possessed performance by Carly Zien, Lula comes across as extremely manipulative and aggressive—rather than, say, pathetic or scary. Cornelius Davidson gives us Clay's patience and diffidence, his coolness with regard to what we call today "racial profiling"—Lula's belittling of his New Jersey origins and "Uncle Tom" aspects. Dutchman dates from a time when the worse insult you could hurl at a self-respecting black man was that he was, essentially, white.
The poetry of Baraka's play resounds in the back and forth of these two protagonists. It should be said that not all of Lula's moves are over-the-top; at times, she seems to want to find a common ground, a way for the two to meet free of the racial past and gender divides. As directed by Katherine McGerr, the play cannily keeps before us not simply the appeal and rejection that occur when strangers try to "hook up," but also the degree to which these characters are "emblematic," freighted with their social roles as "white woman" and "black man."
Jones himself was married to a Jewish woman at the time of Dutchman, and there is much in Clay, the would-be "black Baudelaire," that feels aimed at the author himself. In part, that means a rejection of the expectations of white audiences for the artistic expression of black consciousness through the Black Arts Movement. In that light, Dutchman is almost a manifesto for rejecting the "temptations"—expressed and voiced by Lula, complete with proffered apple—that the white liberal mainstream would saddle black artists with, while "accepting" their work. Dutchman was once very much a play working toward clarity about its own situation.
A strength of the Cab production is that it doesn't try to recreate any particular time—Clay has earbuds in, so we know it's our time, more or less—nor does it go overboard in making the situation archetypal. What it maintains is a certain sense of fluidity, that what takes place between the two could go differently, and that what does happen is because of a flaw in the social fabric. In other words, one won't get too far trying to treat these characters only as realistic subway riders alive in a specific time. Baraka, more famous as a poet than a playwright, knows how to make language act, and is less concerned with character per se.
For those who want backstory and "what happens next," there is the question of whether Lula actually knows of Clay or if this is a first encounter, and, even more, what happens at the end. The Cab production, which has no bystanders (other than the audience), seems to make the repetition at the end conceivable as a "re-set" that could lead to a different conclusion, with Lula already on the train when "Clay," or a different black man much like him, enters. The play as written gives one a stronger sense of Lula as more predatory, in a serial search for either a victim or a date. I liked the Cab's version because it seems to me that the play aims to gesture to an "eternal" situation, rather than a series of discrete encounters.
For me, the main point of the play today—which makes it extremely timely and a great show to revive—is the speech Clay gives to explain his attempt to get along with white society, after Lula provokes him by trying to affront his "manhood" and then his blackness. What Clay gestures to is the possibility of a world where the black man can rise by playing the white man's game—and thus come to power over his one-time "masters." What Baraka gives voice to is the perceived threat that many in our allegedly "post-racial" society find in Barack Obama as president. In other words, the racism Dutchman sees is still very much with us and has taken on a new wrinkle in our time.
A play that once seemed rife with the "threat" of interracial sexual relations—still a hot topic in 1964—now seems to play out as a meditation on cultural strategies. In that view, Lula's temptress moves smack of the "sex card" played by every pop diva, while her own act of violence becomes more ambiguous: a blow against the oppressive male alive in every man? A gesture toward white supremacy (which sees every black man as a threat)? A turning of the tables, where women cease to be victims? However we take it, it's clear that the nerve Dutchman touches is still a live one.
Dutchman By Amiri Baraka Directed by Katherine McGerr
Producers: Caitie Hannon, Charles J. Felix; Scenic Designer: Adrian Martinez Frausto; Costume Designer: KJ Kim; Lighting Designer: Joey Moro; Sound Designer: Joel Abbott; Dramaturgs: Jennifer Schmidt, Sarah Krasnow; Technical Director: Emily Erdman; Stage Manager: Rob Chikar; Creative Consultant: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II; Photographs: Nick Thigpen; courtesy of Yale Cabaret
Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street
Tagged: Amiri Baraka, Carly Zien, Cornelius Davidson, Dutchman, Katherine McGerr, LeRoi Jones, Theater Reviews, Yale Cabaret
A Cab of Many Colors
Every year the Yale Cabaret enstates new artistic directors—Yale School of Drama students whose vision of and commitment to theater will guide the choices of shows for the coming season. For Cab 46, almost ready to kick-off this month, the people running the show are three dramaturgs—Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, Kelly Kerwin—as co-Artistic Directors, and Shane Hudson, as Managing Director. All have previous background with offerings at the Cab—particularly, for the ADs, The Twins Would Like to Say, the penultimate production of Cab 45. Dibo and Dubowski co-directed the play and Kerwin was the production's dramaturg. Those who saw the play will remember its use of the entire space of the Cab (there was no "back stage") and its encouragement that the audience move about during the show, which was staged, at times, in different locations simultaneously. Hudson has already become a familiar face at the front desk of the Cab, particularly during the Yale Summer Cab of 2012.
The tag words for this year's Cab are "invention – urgency – artistry," and the three ADs stress "risk" as an element of what they're looking for in choosing the shows that will be staged this year. Being "allowed to fail" means having the luxury to try out approaches, plays, collaborations that might be something less than a "sure thing." If everyone only does what they've already done and know they're good at, all sense of exploration, innovation, and challenge goes out the window. As regulars of the Cab know, there's always a mix of amazingly spot-on shows and shows that reach for something they might not grasp, this time 'round. There's also a beguiling sense of not knowing what you'll get until you arrive and the show starts. The Cab's mystique is largely predicated on the unexpected and the untried before.
The questions that Dibo, Dubowski and Kerwin—sounding a bit like a law firm or agency when you say it like that—ask of their colleagues, in the application process, apply to time and place. "Why here?" is a question about the use of the specific space and implies a sense of community as well. Why the Cab, both as a uniquely intimate and amorphous space, but also, why the Cab, in the sense of its audience and its larger context within the School of Drama. D,D,K are committed to tapping the unique ability of the Cab to serve their colleagues in YSD as the premiere locus for artistic investigation.
The complimentary question, of course, and one that every theatrical venue should ask when setting up its season is "why now?" The "here and now" of any play is what convinces audiences that they should be present to see this particular show and not some other.The Cab shows, in their short lives (only three nights for each play), arrive with a sense of urgency, a sense that the story to be told is worth all the sweat and toil for such an ephemeral run.
With shows that are completely generated by graduate students—usually in a mix of already existing plays and plays originating before our very eyes—the Cab can't get us in the door with stars and celebrities. The venue's allure has to do with the possibility of discovery: what future greats may even now be honing their talents for audiences at a ridiculously low price? (A non-student flex pass of 9 shows makes each show cost $10, which is the standard price for students.) A host of top notch theater people have worked at the Cab in its 46 illustrious years: Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, Paul Giamatti, John Turturro, Christopher Durang, Anna Shapiro, to name but a few. We've no doubt that their fellows can be found working with devotion on the "passion projects" at the Cab (no show at the Cab counts toward graduation for any of its participants; these shows are all ends in themselves—unless they go on to future development, as some do).
This year, the ADs have instituted a deviation. Usually the ADs of the Cab reserve a few slots for their own projects. Our three ADs have chosen to waive that perk but have replaced it with a different kind of participation: each approved play will have one of the three ADs assigned to it as Creative Producer. That role will be a vantage from which to offer notes before a show goes up, and, more importantly, to facilitate the show in any way necessary. The role of CP lets D, D, or K have a creative role in how a project shapes up—not that ADs are traditionally hands-off entirely about the shows they accept. The CP role will mean that the ADs are a bit more invested in each show than might sometimes be the case.
As students of dramaturgy—the text-based, historical consciousness of the theatrical community, we might say—Dibo, Dubowski, and Kerwin have paid their dues: both Dibo and Kerwin have worked in Chicago with the famous Steppenwolf Theatre, as well as other innovative companies, and Dubowski has worked with Headlong Dance Theatre in Philadelphia, and at the Yale Rep as dramaturg on last year's comic satire American Night: The Ballad of Juan José. Dibo and Dubowski also collaborated on Cab 44's The Yiddish King Lear, and the trio have worked on thesis shows and Carlotta Festival shows at YSD. In other words, D,D,K have run the gamut of the kinds of shows YSD produces as well as having experience with the kind of theater that takes place off-the-beaten-track.
And now the first three shows . . .
Cab 1: September 19-21: We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun by Helen Jaksch, Kelly Kerwin, and Emily Zemba; directed by Kelly Kerwin. Using live music—including a tango—to tell the tale, based on a real story, of a fictional legendary drag queen, Edie La Minx explores "the grit behind the glam." Edie, it seems, not only has a gun, she also has an unexplained mummified body in a garment bag in her apartment, complete with a gunshot wound to the head. Who is it, and what's it mean for Edie? Seth Bodie assays the role of Edie (those who braved the biggest blizzard in recent memory last winter to see the First Annual Yale Cab Drag Show may remember Seth's performance, which may or may not be relevant to the role of Edie). The show purports to have the lively and unpredictable elements so crucial to season kick-offs, and that's reason enough to see how it plays.
Cab 2: September 26-28: The Dutchman by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka; directed by Katherine McGerr. Jones' play was incendiary in its time, making free use of "the n word" and exploring the vexed issue of inter-racial attraction and antagonism on a New York subway in 1964—the year after Dr. King's "I have a dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial. In these "post-racial" days of the Baraka administration, an event like the murder of Trayvon Martin and the trial of George Zimmerman (to say nothing of more distant events such as the O.J. trial in the '90s) shows us that, in the U.S., race is never "in the past." McGerr has done notable work at the Cab in staging already existing plays that featured the grisly (Howard Benton's Christie in Love), the timely (Arthur Kopit's Chamber Music), and the unpredictable (Nassim Soleimanpour's White Rabbit/Red Rabbit).
Cab 3: October 3-5: The Most Beautiful Thing in the World; conceived and directed by Gabe Levey. If you've been around YSD in the last few years, you probably know Gabe Levey—his Andy Kaufmannesque one-man show, Brainsongs, in Cab 44, or his comic role as the Shoemaker/Puppet-master in the Summer Cab's enactment of Lorca's The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife, or perhaps his memorable turn as a young girl in a pinafore in Margot Bordelon's thesis production of Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine last spring. This time he'll be directing Third-Year playwright Kate Tarker in play that promises one of "the world's most renowned motivational speakers" and a pitch to put the "you" in "universe." Levey and Tarker share a penchant for the techniques Christopher Bayes teaches in his clown classes at Yale (Bayes is the comic vision behind such recent Rep hits as The Servant of Two Masters and A Doctor in Spite of Himself), so this show will be nothing if not funny.
Another innovation of Cab 46 will be the use of actual images from the productions in the support materials, such as the playbills at the shows, and a logo that provides grounds for seeing this as "a Cab of many colors."
The remaining seven shows of the first semester will be previewed here some time in October, and, until then, see you at the Cab!
(photographs by Christopher Ash; courtesy of the Yale Cabaret)
Tagged: Amiri Baraka, Brainsongs, chamber music, Christie in Love, Christopher Bayes, Cloud Nine, Emily Zemba, Gabriel Levey, Helen Jaksch, Kate Tarker, Katherine McGerr, Kelly Kerwin, Lauren Dubowski, LeRoi Jones, Seth Bodie, Shane Hudson, The Dutchman, The Most Beautiful Thing in the World, The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife, The Twins Would Like to Say, theater, We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun, White Rabbit/Red Rabbit, Whitney Dibo, Yale Cabaret, Yale Repertory Theater, Yale School of Drama