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It’s All About The Clutter
by Paul Bass | Aug 11, 2006 10:16 am
(1) Comment | Commenting has been closed | E-mail the Author
Posted to: Arts
Just as the action slows down, the pace picks up in the final show the Yale Summer Cabaret season.
The Summer Cabaret is staging Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist The New Tenant through Saturday night. The play is about a lot of furniture filling up an apartment.
In the end, it qualifies as a veritable action drama.
It succeeds partly because of where it’s staged—in the Cabaret’s cozy basement space. Ionesco aims to create a sense of claustrophobia. Amid a sold-out crowd like Thursday night’s, the audience indeed feels it’s crammed right there in the apartment, not looking in from afar.
The play begins with an extended, manic monologue by the restless, pacing caretaker (Tiffany Rachelle Stewart) of the apartment into which a tenant (Michael Braum, top photo) is moving. Despite all that energy, the performance slogs after a while. You wonder when the play will move on.
Then two furniture movers (Jeff Rogers and Joseph P. Cermatori, pictured) arrive. At the brusque direction of the tenant, with balletic symmetry, they carry in chairs, paintings, bureaus (though no bed or plates or silverware), enough heavy furniture to fill a Hallock’s warehouse. They keep hauling it in, for the remainder of the show. They say little. They never speed up. Yet the action somehow does, lifting the performance from the bounds of time. The stage evolves into a bizarre, disturbing, yet fascinating work of art.
As the stage grows denser and denser, you’re left to ponder all sorts of questions, which presumably is Ionesco’s intention. Big Questions such as: Why do the furniture movers continue obeying the tenant’s increasingly unreasonable, tiring, then dangerous orders? How does the tenant retain his power? How do illegitimate rulers retain their power? Why do we obey them?
Other Big Questions: Will the tenant truly find peace amid the clutter? How do we find peace amid the clutter of modern life?
Ultimately, though, the more interesting questions are the practical ones. How much more furniture will fit on stage? And: How long will it take for the Cabaret’s staff to remove it, and where will they store it?
Post a Comment
Comment
posted by: Teale Caliendo on August 14, 2006 11:08am
I hadn’t seen Ionesco since the sixties and I loved it. I saw it as comment on how we are isolating ourselves from one another in our own small worlds. The timing was a great and I really laughed. With all that’s happening in today’s world…this piece provided a wonderful break.
