A play about what happens when two married men — one an architect, the other his assistant (whose wife is pregnant) — realize they are in love. A play about middle-aged siblings having to tell their sister, institutionalized with Down syndrome, about the death of their last remaining parent. A play that looks at how black lives matter at three points in history: a slave plantation in 1822, a classroom in 2016, and a spaceship in 2300.
Each year at the Carlotta Festival, the Yale School of Drama features its three graduating playwrights, showcasing their works for a week in repertory format. This year features New Domestic Architecture by Brendan Pelsue, Amy and the Orphans by Lindsay Ferrentino, and Some Bodies Travel by Jiréh Breon Holder and Tori Sampson.
It runs from Friday through May 14 at the Iseman Theater on Chapel Street.
Some Bodies Travel breaks with Carlotta tradition a bit in two ways. Generally, the graduating directors in the program each direct one of the plays, but Some Bodies Travel will be directed by Margot Bordelon, who graduated from the program in 2013 and recently directed Peerless at the Yale Repertory Theatre this season. The play is also unique in being a collaborative work between Holder, a third-year in the program, and Sampson, a second-year playwright.
Courtesy Carlotta Festival
Holder and Sampson.
Holder’s and Sampson’s collaboration came about because they worked together last summer on a play that, in Holder’s view, was the best of the plays he considered for the festival.
“We just seemed to fit together,” Holder said, “and it made sense to keep working on the play,” which, both agreed, neither would have written without input from the other. They began writing almost a year ago in the immediate wake of the killings at Emmanuel Church in Charleston, S.C., and both felt that the rate of such incidents “had become overwhelming,” requiring a play with a huge scope to tell the story of race in the United States.
A cast of six gather to tell the story as we watch, experimenting with situations “to create a journey for the audience,” Holder said. He has worked with collaborators before — and Sampson, who has generally written alone until now, wanted a certain amount of devised content in the play, and left blank spots in the script to be filled in by their actors. Holder and Sampson said Some Bodies takes its cue from other recent plays hailed for their investigation of historical material with contemporary staging and contexts: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon and Paula Vogel’s Indecent (which opened the current Yale Rep season).
The “telling is all over the place and takes you into the moment” when the play is being staged, Holder said. The subject matter of Some Bodies parallels our moment, where Charleston was the site of racist murders, with 1822, when former slave Denmark Visey attempted to arrange a mass uprising of slaves in Charleston. The insurrection didn’t happen, but Some Bodies, the authors say, is concerned with “what ifs.”
Researching Some Bodies involved historians at Drake University and a Somali consultant, as well as work on the uses of ritual, a key theme of the play. The staging challenge, Holder said, lay in “how to switch gears” between the different settings, requiring their cast to be able to manifest “super swift changes in tone. The play is a little avant-garde, in the sense of being interesting.” The takeaway? “It’s less about the characters and more about the kind of world we want to live in.”
Both Sampson and Holder want their plays to pose questions, so that audiences will join them in thinking about the what ifs of our time in dialogue with possibilities in the past and the future.
Ferrentino.
Lindsay Ferrentino’s play Ugly Lies the Bone, starring Mammie Gummer as a wounded vet returning to civilian life, sold out its run at the Roundabout Theater in New York and has just been nominated for an Outer Critics Circle’s John Gassner award. Her play at Carlotta, Amy and the Orphans, Ferrentino said, shares a quality that unites her work: “personal points of view within a national narrative with a political subject.” With Amy and the Orphans, the subject matter is disability and not only how it affects the lives of the family in the play, but how it is handled by society.
Key to the play’s success is the participation of Jamie Brewer, a professional actor with Down syndrome, best-known for her work on FX’s American Horror Story. Having a professional actor at Carlotta is unusual and Ferrentino is grateful to the support the School of Drama has given her in making this happen. With a cast of five — three second-year actors and two first years — in addition to Brewer, the play is set in contemporary times but also features a flashback to the 1970s when Amy’s parents must make a decision about what to do with her. Ferrentino had an aunt with Down syndrome who died a year ago in her 50s after living in an institution — the typical fate at the time for children born with the syndrome. While “there are no crazy surprises” in Amy and the Orphans, Ferrentino said the play works for “change in perceptions for the characters and audience alike through a challenge to expectations.” Amy’s siblings, who spend the early part of the play on a road trip to visit her on Thanksgiving weekend, will have to learn to see the life that Amy has made for herself.
Of her time at YSD, Ferrentino said that a major change to her approach is to “put it all into the dialogue,” minimizing stage direction and letting audiences pick up important details through what characters say to each other. In the end, it’s about “seeing that no one is all good or all bad” so that audiences experience seeing complicated situations from all sides.
Pelsue.
Brendan Pelsue’s journey toward his play New Domestic Architecture began the summer after his first year at YSD when in Rome. He dodged out of the rain into a Vatican bookstore and found himself reading about homosexuality in the Catholic Church. From that experience came the seed for what he called “a love story gone slightly awry” in which an architect and his wife, a former nun, are working on building a “neo-Benedictine monastic retreat” for spiritual growth, though without a definite profession of faith.
Pelsue’s second-year play Riverbank included elements of Noh theater to offset what he sees as “the dominance of psychological drama in Western theater.” He likes his characters to have “encounters with fleeting wisdom,” as the son in that play had to deal with his mother’s mind fragmenting with dementia.
In New Domestic Architecture, it’s important that the two men, who find themselves attracted to each other, share a common profession as “working together brings them into relation — and their work may be either brilliant or harebrained.” Architecture, which has interested Pelsue since reading guidebooks as a kid, made sense as a way to explore “new building, both physically and emotionally, and the notion of a self as having both exterior and interior dimensions.”
While not necessarily a comic writer, Pelsue likes to use humor as a guidepost and has been learning to include “more plot and jokes” in his writing. The play lets characters speak stage directions and thoughts as a way to get at Pelsue’s abiding interest in “where decisions come from.” Pelsue finds himself drawn to dramatic moments “when you don’t know what’s in you” and the situation brings that out. In the end, his characters may not be happy where they are at that moment, but there are positive effects to difficult change.
All three plays offer a great last chance to see student work by progressive playwrights, visionary directors, and first-rate technical teams, and performances by actors who continue in the program for another year or two.
The Carlotta Festival runs May 6 to May 14 at the Iseman Theater, 1156 Chapel Street. Click here for more information and specific show times.
