“Howl” Howls Afresh

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, Allen Ginsberg’s clipped and certain tenor boomed through a loudspeaker. Starving hysterical naked/dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn.

The first lines of Ginsberg’s famous poem filled the still, slightly warm air. A glass of wine clinked in the audience.Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry/ dynamo in the machinery of light . 

Several television sets hanging over the stage snapped into action, a smoky, static filter rising over slow-moving, security-like footage of a young Ginsberg off stage right. Before him, four other Ginsbergs, distinguishable by their balding heads and long, strapped-on beards, began to move to the poem, breaking from synchronized choreography to wild movement as stage-Ginsberg picked up a microphone, and began reciting the poem ​“Howl” himself, a tightened belt hanging from his left arm.

This was creativity, in all of its drug-induced glory, just as it was intended to be, on the stage of the Yale Cabaret. 

From the opening moments, I’m With You in Rockland, the third play in the Cabaret’s 2015 – 16 season, is a delicious brain-bender of a show. The show opened Thursday night and runs through Saturday.

Written by Yale School of Drama student Kevin Hourigan with the Cab’s company, and set on a deceptively clean backdrop that is half Ginsbergian psyche, half public art seminar, the show follows Ginsberg pre- and post-Howl, probing a question along the way: what does it mean to be a progenitor, producer and consumer of art, and how far can the medium’s boundaries be pushed?

Pushed into the realm of experimental theater and condensed into a 58-minute work, this line of inquiry is rife for missteps, and I’m With You makes many of them. The presence of a narrator over the loudspeaker, splitting the work into parts and introducing historical tidbits throughout, threatens to undo the play entirely, turning an intriguing reading of Howl — or rather, its genesis — into Ginsberg lite for an audience that can handle the real thing. Certain internal conversations — Ginsberg to Ginsberg, Ginsberg to Lucien Carr, Ginsberg to William Blake, Ginsberg past to Ginsberg present — don’t stick entirely, too conceptually far-flung for actors to make a believable leap. And a loaded but decontextualized reference to Karl Stockhausen’s post‑9/11 comments, while totally in line with the Hourigan’s original concept, doesn’t clear the necessary hurdles, bypassing events that have more successfully championed, vilified, and interrogated works of performed, public, or semi-public art: Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 literary trial, Masson vs. the New Yorker, the legal battles surrounding Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc or Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ.

Perhaps this corner-cutting is meant to be meta, the plight of a writer who must so drastically condense the work of another, but it doesn’t quite get there.

More interesting, however, are the sections of the play that work. Because when they do, they really work, the company and audience stumbling through the same bright, ecstatic and devastating haze in which Ginsberg wrote the poem. Owing largely to a collaboration between Yale’s schools of Art, Drama, and Music, several scenes yield to layers of complex movement underlaid with music or exercises in painting that link the Ginsbergs of 2015 to those of 1954. Instrumentalists Dylan Mattingly (MUS ​‘16), Ian Gottlieb (MUS ​‘15), and Fred Kennedy (DRA ​‘18) (pictured above) become invaluable characters, participating in Ginsberg’s inevitable unraveling as they trade drumsticks for empty water bottles and crumpled papers, musical acumen for plunky, childlike sensibilities. So too does Alteronce Gumby (ART ​‘16), whose hours analyzing prints by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jacob Lawrence in the Yale University Art Gallery’s print room seem to have primed him for the role.

A nod, also, to an ambitious and near-perfect set design that channels previous performances — last summer’s Faustus especially — while presenting new models for integrated technology, light work, and audience engagement. It is this backdrop, unassuming but indispensable, that ultimately allows the ever-evolving Ginsbergs to find themselves. 

It gives audience members a chance to, too. They may not get to every question Hourigan intended, and that’s okay. It’s better than okay, actually. This is a genuine and novel return to the Ginsberg — the howl, the holy, the wandering, brow-beaten artist — in all of us, the pint-sized dissenters that live in our minds included. In these moments of critical interrogation, of searching for the boundaries in our own art, we become strange to ourselves. We question everything. We take second looks, long and hard.

And then, of course, the only thing to do is to keep going.