Yale Cabaret Lands The Parachute

Blood-spattered limbs. Wigs and heels. A marriage in trouble. Angels and demons, birds and fish. All of these and more are part of the Yale Cabaret’s current season, as it has returned to in-person dining and theater under an inspired and historic artistic team pursuing the venerable old goal of delivering the shock of the new.

The Yale Cabaret, located in a basement at 217 Park St., has been through some changes of late. Founded in 1968 as a location for experimental theater and run by students at the then-Yale School of Drama, the Cab, as it is generally known, had to close its doors in March 2020 when the pandemic prevented Yale students from returning to school from spring break. Like many theaters in the area, the Cab had to find ways to cope — including online productions in 2020, and in 2021, productions mostly created on campus but streamed to an audience. Into 2022, masked attendance was allowed in the Cab space with masked performers. Then, toward the end of last season, the performers were allowed to be mask-free. Today, the audience must still mask while the show is on.

The Cab, which had long established its reputation as a place for offbeat theater together with convivial food and drink, was unable to reopen its kitchen until the current season. Which means that, as of fall 2022, the Cab returned to what many old-timers remember it as — which hasn’t been the case since March 2020. A long time, as student populations go.

Another major change occurred in 2021 when media mogul and philanthropist David Geffen donated $150 million to the Yale School of Drama, since then rechristened The David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. The donated funds allow the school to offer tuition-free admissions. To cope with pandemic interruptions to normal instruction and scheduled productions, enrolled students were permitted an extra year for what is typically a three-year program.

Which means that the current graduating class of 2023 are the previously unusual fourth-years, admitted in 2019. As such, they’re the last group to remember the school before the pandemic, while the current first-years are the first this decade to experience a fully functioning Cab right from the start. 

Now, if ever, is the time to pass the torch.

The artistic and managing directors of the Cab’s 2022 – 23 season — Jason Gray, Kayodè Soyemi, and Ashley M. Thomas — are all fourth-years in the school and the first all-Black leadership team ever in the Cab’s 55 years. When the team realized they would be expected to reopen the Cab’s kitchen, they brought in the enthusiastic participation of Kendall Thigpen, the head chef at one of New Haven’s Black-owned restaurants, the Anchor Spa. Chef Kendall’s offerings have been a hit, but the restriction that all food and beverages are consumed by curtain time puts a burden on the staff. Shows tend to start 20 – 30 minutes beyond the scheduled time. Eat faster, friends!

All these factors make Cab 55 a unique event in its own right, a brave creative venture worthy of the success it is enjoying. The Cab 55 team has proven itself resourceful, resilient and deservedly proud of its unprecedented place in the vital theatrical history of the Yale Cabaret. 

Meet The Team

Jason Gray, the current executive artistic director, served the Yale Summer Cabaret 2020 as co-managing director. He will receive an MFA from the DGSD and an MBA from the Yale School of Management in 2023, and has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania. He has worked as an actor in New York and elsewhere and was a founding program director of the Black Arts Institute at the Billie Holiday Theatre in Brooklyn. For him, the Cab 55 season makes him feel ​“like a proud papa,” learning what it means to ​“give birth to something and be responsible for it.”

Kayodè Soyemi, producing artistic director, is a first-generation Nigerian-American actor, writer, producer and interdisciplinary artist. Soyemi ​“writes impossible pieces that use language, pop-culture, and world history to investigate charged topics.” He graduated from the HSPVA Cobb County Center for Excellence in Performing Arts and has a BFA from Southern Methodist University. He will receive his MFA in acting this spring at Yale. The Cab experience has been a great opportunity to ​“see behind the scenes,” he said. As an actor, he plays ​“one role, a body onstage,” but the Cab has caused him to ​“learn all the moving parts” and to ​“see all aspects of the process.”

Ashley M. Thomas, producing artistic director, hails from Harlem and explores ​“the intersections of culture, politics, and Beyoncé through a Black feminist lens.” She’s an MFA candidate studying dramaturgy and dramatic criticism and expects to graduate in May 2023. Her background includes dramaturgy at Rattlestick in New York, Utah Shakespeare Festival, and Yale Rep. She has a bachelor’s degree in social work from University of Wisconsin-Madison and has done arts administration work at Roundabout and Classical Theatre of Harlem, among others. For her, the Cab demonstrates ​“why community is so important. It’s a question of who will show up for you,” she said. In March 2020, she was collaborating with Gray on staging Ain’t No Dead Thing by a.k. payne, when Covid interrupted; the show went up as a radio play instead. Theater nurtures relationships, and Thomas stressed that the Cab requires and inspires a communal feeling for those who ​“love and care for it.”

The Cab 55 team is called Parachute, which they see as a ​“soft umbrella,” ​“a space for trial and error” where there is ​“only risk and commitment. No assignments only invitations.” A place, as Gray said, where theater-makers may ​“dare greatly.” The parachute, he added, is bound to face ​“some turbulence in our Covid-afflicted times.”

The Season So Far

Last weekend the Cab continued its roll for the season. The year opened with a appropriately melodramatic and blood-soaked evening of Grand Guignol. The Cab then staged a high-spirited Dragaret early this month (a Drama School tradition 10 years running). and a Black queer take on Sondheim’s ​“Marry Me a Little” the previous weekend. 

Udo — Igbo for ​“peace” — is a new play written by the two actors who played in it: Abigail C. Onwunali and Nomè SiDone (both Acting ​’23), directed by Bobbin Ramsey (Directing ​’24). Amarchi (Onwunali) and Kelechi (SiDone) are a Nigerian immigrant couple, still childless. Kelechi is working on a doctorate; Amarchi works in a hospital. In the midst of their overworked lives, Amarchi wants passionately to rejuvenate the marriage. She dons a skimpy baby doll dress, reads Playgirl for tips, indulges in expensive perfume, and struts her stuff with reckless abandon. Kelechi isn’t unresponsive, but much of the entertainment in their attempts at coupling comes from our voyeuristic view of how easily a departure from routine becomes a chore, how embarrassing a failure at connection can be. The scenes are funny, awkward, sexy and, increasingly, desperate. A phone call brings news that will have a dramatic effect, so that a simple failure to connect through sex opens into areas of betrayal and guilt, prayer and despair, anger and cold fury.

The two actors presented this couple’s night of truth with charged grace and great feeling for the dignities and indignities of intimacy. The show’s dramatic effect was strengthened by the Cab’s characteristic closeness, where every seat seemed to be located in the couple’s single-room flat. There was nowhere to hide in KimKim Juhee’s scenic design. And Bryn Scharenberg achieved certain effects of sound design that added an almost surreal touch, a deep hum and echo to make us feel as though we’d entered a chasm, a hellish space where this hopeful and likable couple might descend to a despair they had never known before.

Coming Up

Next weekend, Mar. 2 to 4, the Cab presents Dr. Ride’s American Beach House, by Liza Birkenmeier, proposed and directed by Rebeca Robles (Acting ​’24), with a cast of third- and fourth-year actors. On a rooftop in St. Louis, 1983, four female friends are having a casual book club gathering while the radio apprizes them of Dr. Sally Ride’s historic journey as the first American woman in space. Come see how ​“queer anti-heroines” of that long ago time negotiate the norms of sex, power, and success in this comedy first staged at Ars Nova in 2019. 

Mar. 30 to Apr. 1, the Cab returns with Every Brilliant Thing by British playwright Duncan Macmillan, proposed by Malachi Dre Beasley (Acting ​’23) and Alexis Woodard (Directing ​’25), in which two fourth-year actors are directed by a first-year director. In a comedy that addresses suicidal depression, a seven-year-old boy tries to list ​“everything that’s brilliant about the world, everything worth living for” to cheer up his hospitalized mother, with some help from the audience. 

Cab 55’s final show, running Apr. 20 to 22, will be a 19th-century French symbolist puppet play adapted by Lily Haje (Dramaturgy & Dramatic Criticism ​’23). Tobie, by Maurice Bouchor, is already an adaptation of the Biblical story of Tobias, a hero who tries to find true love in a world of angels, demons, birds that harm, and fish that help. Proposed and directed by Haje, who also acts in the show with two other fourth-years in dramaturgy, Tobie is bound to be a play unlike most you’ve seen. 

The Yale Cabaret is a local treasure getting back to what it does best — bringing people together — after a few fraught years spent exploring a more dispersed sense of theater’s possibility. More than ever, we know how tenuous our treasures may be. Visit Cab 55 and catch that parachute before it flies.

Tickets can be purchased online or in person/via phone (203 – 432-1566) at the Yale Cab box office, Tuesday to Friday, 3 to 5:30 p.m. Come early and enjoy dinner, a cocktail, and a sweet treat from The Anchor Spa. Dine with The Cab before all 8:00 p.m. shows; service starts promptly at 6:30 p.m. Full menu, weekly hours, and reservations can be found online.