Performance | August 11, 2008

Immigrants Celebrated in Fair Haven Cantata

by Allan Appel | August 11, 2008 2:00 PM | Permalink

"It made us feel proud, it was beautifully performed, and it was true." Such was the dream review that Luz Santiago (left), Delia Vega and 15 other residents of Casa Otonal gave to "Migrants," a bilingual cantata celebrating the Puerto Rican and Latino experience in America.

They were among 60 people whom the Bregamos Theater Company and the city drew to Fair Haven's theater-by-the-sea, otherwise known as Quinnipiac River Park, on a serene late Sunday afternoon.

The young actors of Pregones Theater, a New York-based company, brought their acclaimed "Cantata a los Emigrantes" to New Haven because Bregamos's Rafael Ramos met them in Holland in the spring, where both companies were appearing at an international festival for community theater groups.

"Go figger," said Ramos, who described himself and Bregamos, New Haven's grassroots Latino theater, as hosts for the event." We had to go Rotterdam to meet a great Puerto Rican theater group from the Bronx!"

Using minimal props -- such as these scarves that double both as the capes of Ponce de Leon and his conquistadors as well as the shackles applied to the hands of the exploited undocumented Guatemalans picked up in the Agriprocess raid in Postville Iowa in 2008 --- the cantata moves in and out of past and present. With sweet and varied musical forms, the cantata presents themes considerably more ambitious than, for example, the feel-good nostrums of West Side Story.

Exploited labor, the frustrated desire for independence, being in a state of perpetual transit, and even satirical jabs at the odd condescension of well-meaning Yankee schoolteachers and Upper West Side Liberals are among the issues taken on by this troup of sweet-voiced 20-somethings: Rosal Colon, Omar Perez. Sol Crespo, Ricardo Gonzales, and Yaritza Pizarro

The play, in the repertoire of Pregones since the mid-1980s, was revised, according to director Jorge Merced, by these young actors based on historical research and their own life experiences. "Migration is an issue as old as time," said Merced. "As young people figure out who they are, the way they talk, what they aspire to, this is a tribute to those who went through it before."

Why did a proud Rafael Ramos and introducer Kica Matos, the city's community services director, bring Migrants to New Haven this summer? "We're a sanctuary city," said Ramos "We think it's really important that Latino-born citizens and non-citizens both see this piece."

"This city, and especially Fair Haven," said Matos, "has always been a port of entry. The play, with beautiful songs and music, tells a story of human transit, displacement, and, mot importantly, of hope, from one generation to another."

Towards the end of the cantata, in a scene that evokes a funeral, the recitation goes like this: "I am an immigrant, and migration is not a crime... I thought what I was doing was voluntary exile ... How did I know it would end like this ... Did I really make a choice, or was it made for me?"

Among the sponsors of this summer theater event were La Voz Hispana, the New Haven Office of Cultural Affairs, Neighborworks, and Empower New Haven. Pregones, which this summer toured Migrants in some dozen performances in New York, New Jersey, and culminating in Fair Haven, has been touring for 29 years. The group's site is pregones.org.

Performance | June 25, 2008

Dear, Dirty Dublin

by christopher grobe | June 25, 2008 2:01 AM | Permalink

Early in The Pride of Parnell Street -- a gorgeous new monologue-play by Irish playwright Sebastian Barry brought to New Haven courtesy of the Festival of Arts & Ideas -- a lower-class Dublin woman tells about those heady days during the 1990 World Cup. Ireland's national soccer team strung together a series of unexpected victories and came as close to the championship as they've ever come. Dublin went mad, "happy mayhem" ruled, and this depressed, terror-wracked, still-developing nation felt something rare. Janet -- that's this storyteller's name -- doesn't try to shoehorn this oceanic feeling into one word, but surely the nearest word would be "pride."

Oddly enough, the rapturous, irrational pride of the sports fan proves the perfect place to begin this exploration of Janet's decayed marriage and its path to redemption. What is this overwhelming feeling of identification that a fan feels? How do the displays of grit and grace by 11 men become not only emblematic of a nation, but deeply personal for thousands of that nation's citizens? And how did this improbable string of victories manage to create or revive a sense of national unity and identity?

These are not questions the play poses outright, but they suggest the complexity of the feeling that Barry is trying to illuminate. How does a feeling like this manage to sweep away reality and cast even the grittiest Dublin life in the golden light of mythological, world-historical grandeur. And how does this swelling pride in "our boys" relate to the similar feeling that accompanies love? How does pride in one's conflict-torn nation relate to love in an abusive marriage?

In an interwoven series of monologues, delivered by Janet Brady and her husband Joe, we hear not only about historical events spanning a decade of Irish history, we also hear the story of how the Brady marriage was destroyed by domestic violence and gradually, painfully redeemed by that irrational sensation of love--of pride in the ones we love.

The script is simply stunning. Barry began his career as a poet, and his plays display has the poet's knack for subtly weaving repeated imagery through the fabric of completely naturalistic story. This almost-unconscious poeticism is, again and again, matched by an ear for the perfect, startling image. For example, when Joe tries to explain the absurdity of Irish politicians' attempts to "clean up" Dublin -- mostly by clearing out the likes of him--he blurts out that they wanted Dublin so clean that salmon would jump out of the Liffey and frolic in the streets of dear, dirty Dublin.

Beyond these verbal pyrotechnics, though, Barry's greatest strength is his ability to capture the zeitgeist of an entire historical period in the stories of a few individuals. Barry is best known for historical dramas that reach further back into Ireland's past (and his own family tree), but he manages to bring that same subtle connection of the personal and the historical to this more contemporary subject. When Janet and Joe make offhand comments about the re-development of Dublin, the influx of African and Eastern European immigrants, and the establishment of this former third-world capital as "one of the richest cities in Europe," we get a vivid picture of the forces of globalization that shaped the 1990s worldwide -- amplified to the extreme in Ireland's late-blooming economy.

This production, directed by Jim Culleton of Dublin's Fishamble theater company, does justice to Sebastian Barry's excellent script -- and then some. A faint, tasteful sound design (by Denis Clohessy) adds depth to the play's richest moments, and a semi-abstract set (by Sabine Dargent) heightens the poetic qualities of the script. Rusted panels and a rain-washed window remind us of the urban underbelly of Dublin while amplifying the images of water that crop up insistently in the script.

Director Jim Culleton's staging suggests that each monologuist has his or her own, private space within this abstract set, while also showing the interpenetration of these intimate spaces. The sheer spareness of the play's staging lends each movement toward or away from each other, each retreat from or advance on the audience, a palpable symbolic effect.

Culleton's two performers -- Mary Murray as Janet and Karl Shiels as Joe -- wield Barry's language beautifully and prove themselves to be master storytellers. Ms. Murray fills Janet with nervous energy and stiff humor that make this character simply riveting, and Mr. Shiels uses Joe's elliptical speech-patterns, punctuated with the empty coughs of a fatal illness, to create a complex and deeply contradictory character that richly rewards our finest attention. What makes these performers most engaging, though, is their exploration of that fine line between retelling history and reliving it. How appropriate for a bittersweet play in part about nostalgia--for a ruined marriage, for pre-globalized Dublin, etc.--that we should constantly feel as though the characters were swooning in and out of the past, as if they were hovering between sleep and waking life.

However invested this play may be in Irish culture and Irish history, it ultimately explores something of truly universal significance. Early in the play, Janet muses, "See, love between a man and a woman, it's ... private. It happens where you never do see it. In rooms." But Barry also suggests that there's a kind of continuity between this private love and the more diffuse, more public feelings that bind a community of individuals together -- and I don't mean merely the communitas following another World Cup win.

Joe may think of Janet as his "Pride of Parnell Street," but Janet applies the label to someone else: to Patty Duffy, a woman who ran a shop in Parnell Street when, on May 17th, 1974, a car-bomb ripped through that street's storefronts during the evening rush-hour. Janet recalls with gut-wrenching detail having witnessed this atrocity. As she tore her eyes away from the carnage, Janet saw Patty Duffy there, tending to a severely wounded stranger as if he were her own child.

The grace, the sheer human goodness of a community -- united by the violence meant to divide them -- emanates from this climactic story in particular, but it shines behind all of The Pride of Parnell Street. The play entrances because Barry and Culleton, Murray and Shiels (without fussiness and without undue sentimentality) plumb the depths of this feeling--call it "pride," a sensation of grace -- and its ability to transcend the violence that separates a country or a marriage.

Performance | June 23, 2008

Sacred Dance on the Solstice

by Melinda Tuhus | June 23, 2008 6:58 PM | Permalink

“Interplay in the Spirit” was the name of a sacred dance performed in the Edgerton Park Community Garden as dusk fell on the day of the Summer Solstice. It was part of the “613 Radical Acts of Prayer” that are being performed by the Liz Lerman Company throughout the Arts & Ideas festival.

Group improvisations were led by choreographer Lisa Laing (the woman standing on the left in photo above) and danced by Mary Barnett, L’Ana Burton, Becky Cline, Karen Josephson, Caitlin Richards and Dorothy Finnigan.

But since audience participation was encouraged, more dancers were involved.

The other-worldly music was provided by this digeridoo …

… and this gong.

Performance | June 19, 2008

Revisiting Sophocles

by christopher grobe | June 19, 2008 8:40 AM | Permalink

The typical praise for a production of a classical play like Sophocles's Antigone is that it makes the play seem "shockingly up-to-date." That usually means the director and actors have successfully paddled out into the strongest currents of contemporary culture -- usually political culture -- without capsizing. For better or worse, The Burial at Thebes, a new version of Antigone adapted by Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney and brought to New Haven's Festival of Arts & Ideas by the Nottingham Playhouse Theatre Company (UK), seems to be looking for this sort of accolade.

This classical Greek tragedy concerns the collision between two forms of law: legal and moral, human and divine. Antigone's brother, Polyneices, has died in a rebellious attack on his homeland, Thebes. Seeking to make an example of Polyneices, Antigone's uncle Creon, King of Thebes, forbids anyone to bury or honor the body. As the corpse lies rotting in the field, however, Antigone decides to respectfully dispose of her brother's body, thus setting herself up as a proponent of "the law of the gods," against her uncle -- a representative of "the law of men." Through a series of debates and discussions, the play explores the complexity of moral judgment and the dangers of self-righteousness and blind dogmatism.

For a play promoting healthy skepticism and humble circumspection, though, The Burial at Thebes comes across as strangely doctrinaire, to the point of hypocrisy. This is not a contradiction inherent in Sophocles's tragedy, but one created by Heaney and emphasized by director Lucy Pitman-Wallace. In this version of Antigone, Creon is a glad-handing politician with a bitterly misogynistic outlook and the emotional maturity of a 3-year-old. Antigone, by contrast, is a pure, proto-feminist ingénue with all the stoical determination of a martyred saint. These black-and-white characterizations blur the finer nuances of the play, reducing it too quickly to a lament over the repression of the Obvious Heroine by Oblivious Tyrant.

This reductive outlook is exacerbated by a misguided attempt to be "shockingly up-to-date." With outsized emphasis on such phrases as "patriotic duty" and on accusations of being "anti-Theban," The Burial at Thebes blatantly (almost embarrassingly) injects the rhetoric of the so-called War on Terror into this ancient Greek tale. I almost expected a messenger to arrive in the climactic moment of the tragedy to inform Creon that his approval rating had dipped to 29 percent; that's how blatant the wink and the nudge were. Unfortunately, this brings the worst of contemporary polarization and polemic to Sophocles's ancient tale. There has to be a middle ground between the cautiously apolitical interpretations that Sophocles typically receives and the propagandistic tinge given to this Antigone.

Beyond this basic misstep, the translation is solid and engaging. Heaney manages to find a compact, colloquial tone for the play's many debate-scenes. Particularly fresh is his version of the scene where Haeman delicately attempts to criticize his headstrong father, Creon. In this scene, Heaney's talent for deft psychological portraits is undeniable. However, amid all this prosaic dialogue, Heaney allows far too little of his famously rough-edged poetry to emerge.

One unqualified success, in both poetic and dramatic terms, is the role of Tiresias, performed with just the right mixture of mythological grandness and cranky exasperation by Richard Evans. Tiresias's long monologue detailing the spread of pestilence (literal and figurative) from the rotting corpse of Antigone's brother, Polyneices, showcases Heaney's signature blend of soaring lyricism and earthy detail to great effect.

If only the translation and production had practiced the anti-dogmatism it preaches, this could have been a great and though-provoking version of a familiar classic.

Performance | May 30, 2008

Call It A Hip-"Hopera"

by Paul Bass | May 30, 2008 7:53 AM | Permalink

Full story here.

Performance | May 28, 2008

Jones & Company: Actor Hosts Groove, Give and Get Benefit

by Staff | May 28, 2008 10:05 PM | Permalink

By Tony Phillips
The "Groove, Give and Get" benefit for The Senator Chuck Allen III Scholarship Fund takes place on June 11 from 6pm-8pm at NHarlem, 114 West 116th Street. Allen, a New Haven political legend, passed away in March. Previous Independent stories can be found here and here.

It traces back to the days before theaters were air-conditioned, but the rich theatrical tradition of actors cycling down their workload for the summer continues to this day. Not so New York theater stalwart Cornelius Jones, Jr. On June 11, Jones will host "Groove, Give and Get" at the NHarlem boutique. The month after that, he'll roll out his one-man show "Flagboy" at The Midtown International Theater Festival. By the end of the summer, he'll have biked 275 miles across three states for "Braking the Cycle," a benefit for Manhattan's Gay and Lesbian Center, and he's already two-thirds of the way to his pledge goal.

So how does the busy Richmond native, who cut his teeth opposite Harry Connick on the Broadway musical "Thou Shalt Not," as well as national tours of "Smokey Joe's Café," "A Chorus Line" and "The Wiz," make time for all of this activity? "I always feel like there is something I forgot to do," Jones admits, but if that something is giving back through charitable work, he's got it covered.

On June 11th, you'll be up at the NHarlem boutique hosting Groove, Give and Get, a benefit for The Senator Chuck Allen III Scholarship Fund. How did you get involved?

My friend Kirk Shannon-Butts referred me to event organizer Tod Roulette. Kirk and I met about three years ago, at jury duty. We've been friends since. He's a filmmaker and we worked briefly during the casting of his indie-film Blueprint. We both have been looking out for each other, and it's great to have honest people in your life. I actually did not know Senator Chuck. However, I support his memory and the great thing that his surviving partner Tod Roulette is doing.

You also performed at the White House. Tell me about that.
Ok, so I was a baby when I performed at the White House. However, I remember it just like it was this morning! I was a tenth grader at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. I performed at The White House with The Ellington ShowChoir (the same choir I mention in FlagBoy). Bill Clinton was in office and there was this huge dinner gala. We performed on the lawn as the President and his guests entered. There were so many famous politicians and entertainers. It was the most fun experience. I had no nerves at all. And when Mrs. Leontyne Price entered, looking like the diva in her red headwrap, we showed our asses! We were very well educated on the divas of opera who paved the way for us young ones.

I know a lot of artists who hail from Richmond--Richard Move and Kevin Aviance to name just a few. Do you feel part of any Richmond ex-pat community here in New York?
Wow, I didn't know Kevin Aviance was from Richmond! And Richard Move? Love the name, but I'm not familiar with him. I would love to actually meet these guys and start a Richmond-NY transplant networking community. Can you introduce us? This is great inspiration. Hmm...let me Google Richard.

He's the Martha Graham drag queen. Tell me a little bit about "Flagboy." If you had to elevator pitch it, what would you say?
"Flagboy" is an honest look into the early childhood and teen years of Cornelius Jones, Jr. It's funny, thought-provoking, it'll make you cry, it'll make you smile, it'll make you dance. It breaks down some stereotypes and stigmas you may have had about yourself or others. It's about one boy who continues to find his way, in the midst of adversity, and the people who helped him along the way.

It seems like it's the nature of one-man shows for the artist to kind of do everything. What has been the biggest challenge in getting this show off the ground?
Wow. I would say this biggest challenge was having the courage to share my story. It's autobiographical, it's personal, it's scary. I present a lot of personal issues that a lot of gay people -- and just people in general -- face. So the main challenge was finding the strength within to say this my story and it's the only story I know, and I'm comfortable enough, now, to share it.

Oh, and self-producing is a bitch. I feel like I'm doing everything and I get overwhelmed because I always feel like there is something I forgot to do. Just like that recent moment on Grey's Anatomy with the Miranda Bailey character. The moment she realized they forgot to give the patient blood, when the young boy who was being freed after being enclosed in the toxic cement. She went into panic mode for a second. That's how I feel sometimes.

Your website--http://www.corneliusjonesjr.com/--seems equals parts paid jobs and charity. Do you think that's unusual for an emerging actor and how do you strike a balance?
I don't know how I strike that balance, it just happens. I do make a conscious decision as to when I will do things though. It also helps when the different organizations are flexible with my schedule.

Are you happy with where your career is right now? And where do you see yourself ten years down the road?
I am very happy with where my career is. I can say, oh I want a blockbuster film and about ten national commercials, but then I look back on all that I have achieved, and I'm so happy with what I have, because I know there's more coming.

Ten years from now, I plan to see "Flagboy" as a full stage play and transferred to the big screen. I also plan to have my teaching artist business off the ground, while implementing a few artistic outreach programs overseas. I'm working on building my skills and resources for that now. I would also like to have my adopted son or daughter by then.

How do you deal with the almost daily rejection that's part and parcel of the actor's life?
Rejection is part of the game, but only part of the game. It comes in the life of any type of artist: visual artist, dancer, musician, writer. And in the beginning it's a difficult pill to swallow. You'll notice after numerous rejections, they'll come that one acceptance which outweighs it all. I also use some of my rejections to fuel me creatively. It's also a part of growing up and being human. After a while it just becomes second nature like brushing your teeth. Then again, like Jill Scott says, "Everything ain't for everybody." I am so thankful when there are jobs or offers that I didn't get it because everything ain't for me, and it's ok because I know an audition, interview or phone call later something better will happen.

Most actors write their own shows when they're unhappy with the quality of scripts they're being offered. Is that your case? And do you think being a black actor compounds that or does every actor basically have to slog through the majority of crap that's out there?

Wow, now that would be hot to have my inbox and mailbox filled with script offers: quality or non-quality. Not my case. I'm not your A nor B list actor, yet. I wrote "FlagBoy" out of my desire to stretch creatively as an artist and entrepreneur. I wanted to create a piece of work that I understood, felt deeply passionate about and believed in: a piece that will eventually provide me the freedom to perform or not, create more employment for black actors and not only entertain but educate our community. I have too many actor friends of color who are waiting for that "moment." If you look at what's out there in Hollywood and the commercial theater, there are normally one or maybe two major roles for black actors. These roles mainly go to the A or B list actors. I worked with George Faison on a regional production of "The Wiz" and he taught me one valuable lesson during our time together. He said, "You have to create your own work, because no else is going to do it." No one else knows what you like and what you're really capable of but you. If you don't know yourself, go on a retreat and come back with some stories.

On a whole other front, you own your own t-shirt company. Tell me about that.
My t-shirt company is a small online t-shirt store for dogs. It's called Boogiee Tees--www.boogieetees.com--and was inspired by and named after my two-and-a-half-year-old mini-schnauzer Boogie. From the day Boogie came to live with me, he inspired me to do some out of the box creative things. I began dressing him in little t-shirts and then I started writing little doggy inspired statements, and next thing you know they ended up on t-shirts, and now I have small online business. Never would have known my little dog would have given me the idea.

You also work with theater kids through Rosie O'Donnell's program. What advice would you have for a kid that's considering a career on the boards?
My advice for any kid starting a business in the arts is to seek out a mentor" someone who is older and knows the business. Use your mentor as resource and a career counselor. And ask lots of questions. It will help as you age and realize that you really want to pursue this professionally. Everyone needs to be skilled on the business aspect and how to live in between gigs. Also, don't ever stop being creative in all arts disciplines. Your skills will take you a long way. Read, read, read and write, write, write. Stay culturally diverse. It will click better as you make it to your mid-late twenties.

* * * *

Editor's Note: The "Groove, Give and Get" benefit for The Senator Chuck Allen III Scholarship Fund takes place on June 11 from 6pm-8pm at NHarlem, 114 West 116th Street. Suggested donation is $25 and there is more information can be found here.

"Flagboy" opens at The Midtown International Theater Festival on July 14 and plays three performances at the Where Eagles Dare Theater, 347 W. 36th St., Ground Floor. Tickets are $18 and available at ticketcentral.com.

Performance | May 15, 2008

A (Carousel) Horse of a Different Color

by christopher grobe | May 15, 2008 1:12 PM | Permalink

It's the classic story: boy meets girl, boy hits girl, but girl (bless her sweet little heart) hardly feels a thing, girl gets knocked up, boy kills self, boy must redeem soul by doing one good thing before passing through the pearly gates. You know, that old yarn -- otherwise known as Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel.

Based on a 1940s Hungarian tragedy, with just barely enough of an optimistic twist to make it palatable to mid-century American audiences, Carousel was once a daring experiment. The seamless integration of song and scene, the gritty setting in industrialized New England, the blunt sexual undertones of so many of the lyrics -- not to mention the musical's bizarre supernatural twist -- all combined to make Carousel a piece of self-conscious experimentation.

No wonder, then, that it caught the eye of revisionist director Charles Newell. Long Wharf has imported this production from Newell's Court Theatre in Chicago, a company known primarily for its explorations of classical works, but one that has recently begun dedicating one slot a year to re-examining the American musical. Newell replaces the standard candy-colored sets and saccharine-sweet crowd numbers with a pared-down production that focuses our attention on the emotional and economic stuntedness of Rodgers and Hammerstein's characters.

John Culbert's bare set sets the tone for the evening, operating more on the principle of suggestion than representation. A rickety collection of warped wood platforms with a patch of dirty, coastal sand peeking out up front suggests a slightly decrepit port town while remaining flexible enough to represent a variety of settings with the addition of telltale props. (This loosely symbolic sense of space is one way that Newell brings the Court's classical sensibility fruitfully to bear on musical theater.)

Music director Douglas Peck has matched the spareness of Culbert's set with reduced orchestrations that sometimes fall away almost completely, letting the raw voices stand alone. Together with an emphasis on less polished, more talky kinds of singing, Peck succeeds in bringing a distinctly modern sound to Carousel while still doing justice to Rodgers's rich score.

This controlled aesthetic falls apart, though, when Newell attempts to extend it to the actors and their characterizations. For instance, as Billy Bigelow (the boy in "boy hits girl"), Nicholas Belton tries for something between a brooding Brando and a frantic Leguizamo. In the early scenes of the play, this jagged style succeeds in jarring us out of our tragically misguided first impressions of the character -- as a smooth-talking womanizer, as a romantic lead who just needs taming, etc. Indeed, this almost manic-depressive interpretation of Billy reveals a few stunning moments -- e.g., an intimate and spontaneous rendition of "Soliloquy," where Billy muses on his future as a father, first with joy and then with growing terror -- but when Belton's Billy veers toward borderline-psychosis, as it too often does, it seems to cheapen the complex emotions that drive this character.

Johanna McKenzie Miller, as Billy's belle Julie Jordan, does a better job of balancing a fresh style with a well-worn script. Her Julie Jordan starts as an enigmatic character, disarmingly blunt in her pursuit of Billy, yet with a deeply private--almost shy -- demeanor. As the plot progresses and as Julie Jordan's troubles mount, Miller's performance grows simpler and more direct.

The freshest performance, however, comes from Jessie Mueller as Julie's friend Carrie Pipperidge. Her vocal style ranges from a rough-and-ready speaking on pitch to beautiful melodic lines -- and everything in between. It is compelling, direct, and a faithful extension of Rodgers and Hammerstein's desire to meld script and score into one seamless dramatic unit. She also manages to make Carrie's irrational love for the eccentric Enoch Snow (whose most memorable line must surely be "I'm gonna get rich on sardines!") not only believable but downright touching: no easy task.

Newell's grittier take on the show hits a brick wall, though, when it reaches Carousel's perennially clunky final 20 minutes. The melodrama of Billy's death scene clashes with the rest of the production, Culbert's set fails to capture anything awe-inspiring about the afterlife, and Peck's orchestrations start to sound downright thin during the rousing finale. It's then that you realize how much Newell and his solid cast of singer-actors have been cutting against the grain of this play.

Performance | April 21, 2008

"For Colored Girls"... A Chance to Shine

by Melinda Tuhus | April 21, 2008 4:16 AM | Permalink

Seven New Haven teens were praised for their poise and chutzpah as they brought new life to a 1970s play about the struggles of black women.

The seven actresses, none of whom is professional, performed "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf" at the Little Theatre over the weekend.

The play is Ntozake Shange's 1979 poetic ode to the struggles of black women with black men and the women's loyalty to each other.

It was Barbara Tinney's idea to put on the play. Tinney (pictured) is executive director of the New Haven Family Alliance, and said many teen girls are struggling with issues of friendship, romantic relationships, and violence, all of which are depicted through snappy monologues with a kind of Greek chorus response from the other players. She goes so far as to say she thinks the issues are even more urgent than when Shange confronted them in the late 1970s.

"The issues she dealt with are timeless issues and we know we have young girls who are struggling with relationship violence, who are challenged by friendships and boyfriends and self-discovery, so it just seemed timely."

"My hope was to engage some of the young girls we're working with through the Street Outreach Worker program, so that's where we started," Tinney said. "A number of them expressed an interest but they weren't able to follow through" with the rigorous four-day-a-week rehearsal schedule.

The Family Alliance is home to the Street Outreach Team, a group of men and women who have put their own run-ins with the criminal justice system behind them and are reaching out to the city's most at-risk youth. (Click here for a story on that.)

So the actresses who did wind up in the play "found us," she said. Two of them, Theodora Spencer, 16, and her sister, Oddie Spencer, 19 (pictured in blue and tan in the photo above), have a decade of theater experience with the Alliance Children's Theater. Brittney Graham (in yellow) also has some acting under her belt, but for the others in the ensemble (Angie Liana Laluz (in red), Arkayla Williams (in purple), Keyonna Crocett (in green) and Shanaire Saunders (in orange), the play was their acting debut.

One, Angie Liana Laluz, 16 (on left in photo) is the daughter of Kyisha Velazquez (on the right), a staffer at the Family Alliance and project coordinator for the Juvenile Review Board. When Velazquez was called up on stage at the end of the performance, the girls greeted her with wild applause and obvious affection.

It's that kind of relationship with adults that Tinney says is so critical. "It's a realization of possibilities. We believed in these young people, they believed in themselves, and the result was four wonderful performances."

Laluz ("Lady in Red") performed the most wrenching vignette of the play. She had engaged the audience so completely that when tragedy struck, a loud collective gasp escaped from dozens of lips. Asked afterward if that scene was hard to do over and over, she said, "Yeah, it was, because it's very touching and I'm a very emotional person, so, for me to come out and be strong through that part is really hard, 'cause people are still living through those situations." Click here to hear more.

Director Edi Jackson (pictured with the flowers she and all the girls were given after the performance) has been acting and directing youth theater for many years in New Haven. In the program booklet she wrote, "The youth are one of America's greatest natural resources. If we continue to ignore their voices and poison their minds, we will most definitely destroy the future of our country."

The audience was made up mostly of black women of all ages. While some said they had trouble hearing or understanding all the monologues (and perhaps were put off by some of the strong language), New Havener Beverly James (pictured) was impressed. She had seen the original play on Broadway and said when she heard it was being produced in New Haven, she had to come.

"It's an excellent play that unites women regardless of their age," she said, "because it does identify the struggles. I find myself watching it and reciting [the lines] because I have the book, I have the album, I have the poster, from 1979."

One young man in the audience, Jarod Greene, said he wasn't put off by the mostly negative light in which black men are portrayed in the play. "Bringing the issues to consciousness is important," he said, "whether they make us comfortable or not."

This quartet of women (left to right, Laura Lawrence, Carlah Esdaile-Bragg, Ramona Bryant and Kaye Harvey, with Barbara Tinney in the back) was part of the adult contingent that helped bring the play to fruition and support the teens' efforts.

Despite the acting chops on display, the young thespians have not set their sights on acting as a career. One, Shanaire Saunders (Lady in Orange), 15, wrote "she is looking forward to doing more acting." The others, according to the program notes, hope to pursue careers as "probation officer, doctor, community activist and poet, nurse, social worker, and teacher." Given their talent and passion, New Haven would benefit from many more opportunities to see these young women in action, as amateurs if not professionals.

Performance | April 4, 2008

Morrison's Parable Comes to the Stage

by christopher grobe | April 4, 2008 9:04 AM | Permalink

The stage, once veiled with layer upon layer of gossamer fabric, has been stripped down to its skeletal basics. The floorboards, once dusty and dry, are covered with rainwater; they show more clearly than ever the image of groomed, white, middle-class girlishness painted on them in candied colors. A young black girl kicks up water as she dances frantically -- a dance that was lovely 90 minutes ago, when the houselights had just dimmed, when we didn't yet know its source.

This is the final, striking image in Long Wharf's production of The Bluest Eye, a stage adaptation of Nobel laureate Toni Morrison's debut novel. The girl is Pecola Breedlove, a troubled and abused soul who longs for blue eyes -- and for all the social and spiritual benefits she thinks they will bring.

Both novel and play begin, "Quiet as it's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father's baby that the marigolds did not grow." The narrator warns us to observe the "how" and not the "why" of Pecola's tragic story, but it is clear that the "why" most interests Morrison. Over the course of the novel, Morrison weaves back and forth through memories of this year, quietly chronicling the state of American culture two full decades before "Black is Beautiful."

Morrison has said she was aiming for a particularly "speakerly" style in this novel, and it shows. The words sound right at home in the mouths of actors. Lydia Diamond's script faithfully transposes Morrison's novel from page to stage -- perhaps too faithfully at times. The compression of a 200-plus-page novel into a 90-minute performance leaves us feeling, at times, as if we are watching The Greatest Hits of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye." The play sweeps us from one fraught event to another, but there never seems to be enough of a valley between these peaks for lush characterizations to take root. As a result, what should be a devastatingly tragic ending feels instead ... merely sad.

Also, presumably eager to preserve large swaths of Morrison's hauntingly beautiful prose, Ms. Diamond locks the actors into drawn-out passages of narration and commentary that threaten to overwhelm the dramatic action.

One performer, though, simply shines in delivering these narrative speeches. Adepero Oduye, the actress playing Pecola, gives as enchanting a performance as any I have seen this year. She captures Pecola's guileless youth without condescending to it. She delivers narrative commentary with an energy and specificity that blur the line between retelling and re-experiencing.

One unequivocal benefit of the stage lies in the rich soundscape created by director Eric Ting and composers/sound designers Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen. Of Pecola's father, Morrison writes, "The pieces of Cholly's life could become coherent only in the head of a musician." It is clear that this production of The Bluest Eye also cohered in the mind of a musician. Period songs and original music lend a poetic depth to the stage that rivals that of Morrison's language. The play's most striking moments occur when non-verbal action and swelling song join together to show what only the stage can add to as rich a novel as The Bluest Eye.

Ultimately, the play has the feel, for better or for worse, of parable. It is the story of a girl who longs for white beauty -- a story told largely from the perspective of another girl who ritually dismembers the blonde, blue-eyed dolls that everyone tells her are so lovely. Social commentary and human drama blend in suitable measure, but like much parable, this adaptation sometimes sacrifices the clarity of the personal to the aurora of the poetic.

Performance | April 3, 2008

Genre-Bender Run Wilde

by christopher grobe | April 3, 2008 9:54 AM | Permalink

In the languorous aftermath of a heavy meal -- lamps aglow against the darkening night, French windows open to evening breezes -- women lounge and discuss the divide between the sexes. One boasts that women "have always been picturesque protests against the mere existence of common sense." And after she has continued in this vein for a few minutes, her elderly hostess exclaims, with an awe-struck tone of approval, "How clever you are, my dear! You never mean a single word you say."

The trilling, ironic tone of British wit, however, is suddenly cut short by the flat accent and plain earnestness of an American voice. And, as the foreigner begins passionately to denounce the British aristocracy and its values, a veiled figure, a woman dressed all in black, materializes out of the gathering gloom outside. In this ominous moment, the polished veneer of British society begins to show its cracks, and the play begins in earnest.

These events occur during the second scene of Oscar Wilde's A Woman of No Importance, which runs at the Yale Repertory Theatre through April 12th. This moment, one of the most beautifully and sensitively realized in the production, triggers the play's transformation from a typically Wildean comedy of manners to something much darker and stranger. The American heiress who scolds her British hosts sounds more like a character from a play by George Bernard Shaw, and the eerie woman in black feels like a sudden injection of Victorian melodrama into Wilde's more high-brow stage-world. Together, these two women drag their more polished peers down from the rarified heights of drawing room chatter--and turn this play into Wilde's thorniest.

The basic scenario is this: Lord Illingworth, a charming if morally repugnant politician, has accepted a local country lad, Gerald Arbuthnot, as his private secretary. Eager to deserve the attentions of a visiting heiress (the moralizing American described above), Gerald jumps at this chance at social advancement, but a dirty secret in his mother's past threatens to destroy his budding ambitions--just as a dirty secret in Lord Illingworth's past might turn Gerald permanently away from his boss and idol.

If I give any further plot summary, the play will surely be spoiled, but suffice it to say that the play quickly becomes one of Wilde's most schizophrenic, weaving together low-brow melodrama, middle-brow moral argument, and high-brow banter as it wends its way toward a fraught conclusion. It is a fascinatingly complex play, one where the bluntly puritanical American gets as fair a hearing as the stylishly naughty Brit, and one that will leave audiences with plenty to chew on.

The Yale Rep's production, under the direction of James Bundy, excellently captures the moral complexity of the play, thanks in large part to a solid cast that relishes the contradictions in Wilde's characters. Geordie Johnson, as Lord Illingworth, is particularly adept at balancing his character's cruelty, charm, and vulnerability. Bryce Pinkham, though, puts forward the most intriguing performance as Gerald Arbuthnot. With his odd physicality and naively transparent emotions, Mr. Pinkham leaves us scoffing at Gerald one minute and aching for him the next.

Kate Forbes and Erica Sullivan (as Mrs. Arbuthnot and Miss Worsley, the American heiress) meet with less success. They seem somehow uncomfortable or embarrassed delivering these women's most raw or sentimental speeches.

Not all of this is their fault. The play, as noted above, is schizophrenic. Miss Worsley's stentorian tones ("You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh at the simple and the pure") and Mrs. Arbuthnot's brimming sentiment ("Leave me the little vineyard of my life ... the ewe-lamb God sent me, in pity or in wrath, oh! leave me that") contrast wildly with the texture of the surrounding dialogue at times.

More crucially, though, director James Bundy seems to have directed his cast away from the play's stylistic rifts -- a move which leaves his actors less able to deal with the extremes of some of Wilde's dialogue. Indeed, great part of the play's interest lies in its wild swings from snark to sentimentality, from sentimentality to steeliness, and back, but this production retreats into a more cautious style than the play requires. Thus, the wit is less sparkling, the melodrama less fraught, the argument less sharp -- all, seemingly, in service of greater fluidity. I'm not asking for pure frothy opulence on the one hand, nor for mustache-twirling melodrama on the other, but this production doesn't seem to relish the stylistic quirks that make the play so interesting.

The visual design of the show also comes up a bit short. The cramped middle-class sitting room that Lauren Rockman has designed for the fourth act of the play, which takes place at the Arbuthnot home, is wonderfully tacky -- I only wish the rest of the settings had such specificity and character.

Ultimately, though, this is a solid production of an underappreciated play. Early in the play, Lord Illingworth quips, "One should never take sides in anything, Mr. Kelvil. Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore." After seeing this knotty play, I can assure you -- by Illingworth's calculus -- you will be a perfect bore in no time at all. Enjoy!