Allan Appel Photo
Jabari Brisport had a crisis at the end of his second year as a graduate acting student: Why pursue an arts career when his talents might more tangibly be used to help heal the world so badly riven by the vast gap between rich and poor and all its consequences?
Thus was born a play called Derivatives.
The multi-media review runs at the Yale Cabaret on Park Street Thursday through Saturday, with shows at 8 and 11 p.m.
He won’t know if he’s solved his problem until he sees how many people leaving the play sign up to make the world a little better.
Some audience members will sit in throne-like booths, others in the folding chairs of the poor.
The play at its heart derives from the interview-based docudramas pioneered by people like Anna Deavere Smith, where a single or handful of actors recreate characters they have met in interviews focused on a theme.
Smith started the documentary theater movement with Fires in the Mirror, where she played dozens of characters associated with the Crown Heights Riots in New York City back in 1991. Derivatives’ four actors play about a dozen characters.
Click on the play arrow to hear actor/director Cole Lewis read from a monologue by one of the characters, Tone, a 30-year-old construction worker.
Brisport led his team of fellow Yale School of Drama students in interviewing professors, students, construction workers, homeless people, a librarian, a non-profit official, a security guard.
Each was asked a series of questions, with the answers recorded verbatim: What does rich mean? Poor? How do you notice the gap between? What are your hobbies?
Director Lewis with Brisport.
You’d be surprised at the difference in hobbies between a professor and someone struggling to survive on the street, Brisport said during a conversation before a technical rehearsal at the cabaret.
The collected material developed into a narrative that Brisport counterbalanced with comic sketches in the spirit of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.
The show also contains a touch of the seminar explaining derivatives and economic theory and a kind of game show that Brisport uses to involve the audience. It’s called “Class Wars, the Game of Economic Mobility”; most players are not going to do very well, he said.
He estimates the show will run 45 minutes, with a Q and A to follow, and, then, most importantly for the playwright, an opportunity for audience members to sign up with Kiva, an organization that gives micro-loans to entrepreneurs around the world.
During his undergraduate years at NYU, Brisport did sketch comedy all around New York exploring a wide range of issues. He did the same in the two years between NYU and his admission to the Yale School of Drama, with a group he founded called Political Subversities.
“I wanted us to do one show,” to focus on one topic to drill down on, he said.
Also just talking and getting people fired up is not enough, he said. “There has to be an action step.”
Neither Brisport nor Lewis claims the play will transform the world. They are also keenly aware of the contradictions in their play and their livesetting: a rich Yale University, where out the window of Pierson College on Park Street students see the homeless line up for hot lunches every week.
Some of the homeless at St. Thomas Moore Center’s weekly hot lunch have their stories told in Derivatives.
That discussion of economic disparity, which was front and center during the Occupy movement, has faded. Brisport said even the wildcat strikes of fast food workers to increase the minimum wage have not gained traction.
That subject, as well as endemic unemployment, are off the country’s political radar, but not his.
Can theater make a difference? “For a small moment we’re a community, a coming togetherl we’re actively listening. Our role is asking hard questions,” said Lewis.
Others in the all-student Yale School of Drama production include: Cornelius Davidson, Tanya Dean, Lauren Wainwright, with additional performances by David Bruin, Hansol Jung, and Matthew Raich.
Nice idea and I'm sure it makes good art, but I don't think its going to reach the people who really need this information. THey need something more visceral than intellectual. Or, they at least need to see the art. They will never see it on a Yale stage. Bring it into the street!