Grease 2 to Reagan-era rage. Love taboos to iPhones.
To plan this year’s Satellite Festival for the Yale Cabaret, playwright Jeremy O. Harris and dramaturg Amauta Marston-Firmino — both in their second year at the Yale School of Drama — dived first into the Cab’s 50-year history.
For the last three years, Yale Cabaret, the adventurous theater in a basement on Yale’s campus at 217 Park St., has presented The Satellite Festival, a selection of diverse theatrical events and experiments. This year the festival happens over three nights, in seven locations, and comprises 19 performances, between March 29 and March 31.
Andre Wagner Photo
Harris.
And since this is also the 50th anniversary of the Yale Cabaret, Harris and Marston-Firmino decided to break down the different eras of Cabaret productions into four distinct themes to organize those 19 performances. In a three-way phone conversation, they told me how they arrived at a grasp of the venue’s past by consulting the Cabaret’s archives, looking at playbills and posters and emails and other paraphernalia of its five decades.
The Yale School of Drama, Marston-Firmino said, “has a very short memory,” and he and Harris found it “astonishing how little history of the Cab is known.” Among the records from the time of the 40th anniversary, the curators found an attempt to make a list of all the previous artistic directors — which change with each new season, helping keep the Cab fresh while also undermining its continuity.
Marston-Firmino.
According to Harris and Marston-Firmino, the turnover for a new zeitgeist in the school happens every five to seven years, as influences such as the political climate, the hot shows in the theater world, and charismatic teachers and students within the school alter the tone of productions. As they see it, the Cabaret’s offerings show “the kind of conversation the institution has been having with itself for 50 years.”
The archives showed that, for the years 1968 to 1982, the venue adhered fairly closely to a traditional cabaret format, with plenty of musical revues, skit comedy and improv. “There were few productions of full plays,” and those offered “tended to be things like a collection of Beckett shorts.” The Cab’s target audience was predominantly the YSD community, with the venue functioning as a kind of performance annex to the drama school, fostering camaraderie among the students.
From 1983 to 1993, work by avant-garde playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, María Irene Fornès, and Marc Wellman were featured, and much of the work was marked by “the rage of the Reagan era,” a period of conservative hegemony in which theater became more confrontational. The curators gave that era the title “Punk Rock, Hip Hop, and the War on Drugs” to indicate some of the subcultural concerns of the day, which included more students of color at the school, such as playwright Lynn Nottage, the first woman to win the Pulitzer for Drama twice.
“Gen X and the Internets” is the title of the next theme, covering 1994 to 2009, when works tended to “large gestures.” There were several full-scale musical productions, such as both Grease and Grease 2, as well as original musicals such as Tim Acito’s Zanna, Don’t!, meant to recall Xanadu and set in a fictional world in which homosexual love is the norm and heterosexual love taboo. It was also a period marked by a greater professionalization of marketing and logos. One might say the love-hate relationship with popular theater was by then fully entrenched.
In the current era — since 2010 — Harris and Marston-Firmino noted a new prevalence of technology in theater. Not only more multimedia performances, using digital video, but also an acceptance of the iPhone as “a storytelling tool” that moved from “a device of communication to one of creative production. Students see their phones as handheld studios.”
It’s also an era, the curators said, in which the students are “looking for new grounds to build on.” The “postmodern remix” of the traditional canon still goes on, but the drama school has been attracting and admitting a much more diverse student body in recent years, and that has led to “inclusion of disenfranchised bodies and artists” and “new texts” into the mix.
“The school itself is struggling with changes, working to respond to an aging, changing field,” said Marston-Firmino, and that has meant “that pedagogy founded on canonical texts is less useful to students” than formerly.
One intention behind the Festival this year is to aid that sense of new possibilities and directions. As Harris pointed out, the work that appears at the Cabaret comes from proposals submitted by members of the Yale School of Drama. “Only the Satellite Festival allows proposals from outside YSD,” he said. Inspired by the recent Dragaret at the Cab, which featured, for the first time, local drag performers, the curators have reached out to other groups. An undergraduate performance group, the E.X.I.T. Players, will be featured in the Festival this year. So will The Bad Romantics, a Yale College drag troupe. At the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, undergrad art major Victoria Blume, “a proud member of the selfie generation,” offers “me, myself, and iPhone.”
The 19 productions, most well under an hour, have been chosen to correspond to one of the four themes corresponding to the Cabaret’s history, which will be highlighted in a booklet available at the festival. The format of the festival, Harris said, will “engage with ephemerality. Festivals don’t work well with rigidity.” That has inspired a looser schedule than in previous years, where downtime between acts has been a problem. This year there will be more overlap in performance times, with each theme given a “core show” that will play each night.
There will be musical presentations, such as celebrated cabaret singer Anne Tofflemire, accompanied by Miles Walter, a composer and musician recently admitted to the Yale School of Music. There will also be Luciano Berio’s sequences for solo instruments performed by Matthew Woodward. To correspond to the angrier ‘80s, there will be a new musical by Michael Costagliola about the prospective assassination of Trump. Lacet Lennon’s multimedia on Prince Harry’s engagement piece also revisits a 1997 interview with Lil’ Kim about accusations of “sexualizing our children.” Lucie Dawkins’s “Wolf/Alice” draws from the fiction of Angela Carter, the British fantasy literature novelist best known in the 1990s for redefining feminist possibilities.
Several pieces engage with new attitudes toward feminism and gender issues. Antoinette Crowe-Legacy’s “She x God” addresses the disparity in feminism between white women and women of color. Shadi Ghaheri’s “Post Scream & Terror” is a “theatrical experiment about Love, Sex and Beauty inspired by known and unknown female artists of our time.” “Sea Witch,” a play by YSD playwright Genne Murphy, will be adapted by Brittany Bland, using projections and shadow puppetry. “Truck,” by Margaret Douglas, is “an examination of the limits and possibilities of love in a digital world” — and will take place in a truck.
Multimedia experiences include “Echo Chamber,” a video diary of a breakup by Khushbu Shah; “Blended Realities” by Tevin Mickens, “an immersive virtual experience”; Erin Sullivan’s “Phosphene,” five unique performance pieces using movement, light and sound; Molly FitzMaurice’s “Blubrd,” an interactive game conceived as “a mashup of the mythoi of Bluebeard and The Bachelor”; and Christopher Gabriel Núñez’s “LOCUSTS,” described as “one part domestic brunch drama, one part ballet choreographed to a death metal symphony, one part urgent dialectic about prison abolitionism,” and “the loudest shit you’ll see this season.”
The Satellite Festival 2018 looks to be primed to live up to its theme: “New Works, Networks and a New World,” wherein the young theater artists of tomorrow attempt “to define ‘American Theater’ for the 21st century.”
For more information about the Satellite Festival and tickets, visit the Yale Cabaret’s website.
