nothin Sunday In The Park With Doron | New Haven Independent

Sunday In The Park With Doron

There was brilliance backstage. One-man acrobatics on the grass. And a non-shrinking Violet thumping the bass on a main stage.

That was one man’s journey, at least, on the first Sunday of the 15-day International Festival of Arts & Ideas this past weekend — spanning the worlds of theater, acrobatics, and music, each with a surprise accent.

Follow along to three stops:

Yale Institute for Music Theatre’s Open Rehearsal Reading” at Off-Broadway Theater: The first notable thing about Yale’s open rehearsals is its lack of staging, props and scenery.

It’s easy to root for the performers as you take in just the words, the pace, the music of a performance with only a modicum of the pageantry. It’s like a backstage pass. You have been trusted with something delicate, unshelled. The actors barely strut or fret their hour across the stage. It’s all sound and fury, flat footed and facing forward. Sunday afternoon’s performance was a musical called Mrs. Hughes.

This stylized account of the tumultuous marriage of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath doesn’t play on heartstrings so much as it drags scissors across them. It demonstrates the weight of fame and its devastating effects on the home. Hughes’ monumental literary successes constantly overshadow his wife’s efforts. While she hacks at the penumbra with her writing, Plath contends with loneliness, motherhood, depression, abandonment and a phalanx of groupies gagging after her husband.

The stripped-bare production exemplifies singularity of vision from book to music. The songs are immediate telepathy with the characters. Composer Sharon Kenney even included dissonant tones when an actor sings a passage that is false. Sylvia has most of these, in particular when her leads are reprised, trying to convince herself things are not spinning out of control. The parts sound like mistakes if you don’t listen closely to the orchestra playing the same off notes.

It’s brilliant. Though it may be a story you know, the intimate supernatural fatalism of this performance keeps it engaging and freshly painful.

L’Homme Cirque on the Green: L’Homme Cirque is another skeletal powerhouse for the eyes. What Mrs. Hughes lacks in props and fanfare, Cirque lacks in human bodies. In his one-man show, David Dimitri is the clown, the pony trickster, the acrobat and the orchestra.

With a head of white hair to betray his age, the spark plug launches into feats of balance and strength to mock a Crossfit trainer.

Using familiar visual tropes like treadmills and the comedy rule of threes, Dimitri flew through enough rimshot-worthy acts to make a toddler in the front row exclaim, What’s he gonna do next?” to the delight of the patrons inside the tiny tent.

Mainstage Concert: Dmitiri’s accordion solo was washed away a bit by the rock trio outside called Like Violet. The rare combination of female bassist/singer, female drummer and male guitarist tore through poppy, punky tracks and drew more than a respectable crowd. The Milford-based rockers moved almost seamlessly from track to track, except when singer Carly Kalafus admitted they were calling the set list in the air. Reminiscent of Cassandra, bassist/singer/muse of Wayne’s World, her rock chops led no one to complain. Keep an eye out for this crew on their Facebook page, Like Violet Music.

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