Reopened Yale Rep Speaks To The Present

Yale Repertory Theatre, which has been shut down since March 2020, is back.

The theater’s intention to return with an abbreviated three-play season beginning January 2022 was complicated by Omicron variant, as Yale University, understandably, took precautions, limiting access to the theater to fully vaccinated persons with Yale IDs. 

This past week, however, the insistence on Yale IDs was lifted. Now, the general public — with proof of full vaccination, including boosters and a picture ID, and the requisite caliber of mask (provided by the theater when necessary) — can attend in person the last week of Susan Soon He Stanton’s Today Is My Birthday, directed by Mina Morita, which runs through February 19. The production begins streaming online on February 20.

There’s a certain irony to this play as the Rep’s first in-person play in almost two years. The premise of Today is My Birthday is that its heroine, Emily Chang (Jeena Yi), a would-be journalist newly returned home to Hawai’i from New York where she struck out professionally and lived through a traumatic breakup, engages other people mostly through technology. Other people (enacted by a cast of five quick-change actors) include her mother, her father, her best friend — a mother of two who suspects her husband of reading her diary — her ex-boyfriend, a potential boyfriend, a previous ex-boyfriend, her boss at a temp job where she edits dull technical prose, and, crucially, the hosts of a morning-commute radio show.

The radio gig (unpaid) comes about as a favor to a friend: Emily takes on the role of Iris, a single woman who calls into the station because the voice of the show’s hunk of the week has stirred her to bold action. The joke’s on Emily, though, because she actually spends time trying to meet the other actor in person, which makes for both romantic interest and, ultimately, a bit of credulity-straining coincidence.

Meanwhile, Emily learns that her parents’ marriage is on the skids, and we see how Emily’s efforts to reach out to others tend to be limited to voicemail or hurried phone calls. Originally produced at New York’s Page 73 in 2017, the play feels even more timely now, as the pandemic lockdown has forced many to navigate relationships, jobs, study, dating, news, leisure and entertainment through the portals of phones and screens. 

And yet maybe now, for that very reason, the lack of actual contact onstage becomes wearying. Any scenes in which Emily and someone else are in the same physical space — at restaurants, at work, at a gala, in bed, and in the apartment she shares for a time with her father — are not enacted. Instead, it’s all phone-tag as a kind of therapy, in which one sleuths after a sense of self from the piecemeal replies one receives.

Along the way there are some telling interactions, and they aren’t necessarily the ones you’d think. Two come by way of Francis Jue. As Emily’s dad, he gives her a little lecture on the music of Charles Ives that provides one of the best reasons for being present in the theater: it’s aurally and visually striking (Noel Nichols, sound design; Nicole E. Lang, lighting design), and Ives’ methods say something about Stanton’s use of short dialogue ​“bits” or ​“bytes” to create the verbal fabric of her script. Then, as Bill Tapia — the world’s oldest living musical performer — Jue gives an affecting aloha on a ukulele that is the closest thing to a shared emotional moment in the play. It comes after we’ve watched this man, in his hundreds, lose his way in speech while talking about his love for his deceased wife. In that, it also comments on what seems the play’s rather discursive treatment of what is happening between Emily’s parents.

My attention to the elders in the play might be a personal predilection, but it also has to do with how lacking in gravitas the other characters are. Emily’s married-with-children friend Halima (Astra Asdou) is perhaps comically neurotic, but her way of handling her problem ceases to be funny without ever quite becoming serious. Which is how Emily’s own vacillations struck me for the most part. We hear how she was mistreated in middle school and how her long-term romantic relations came to ends in ways that had to do with Emily’s own deep misgivings about her own nature, which seem to keep growing wherever she is. Jeena Yi is quite creditable as Emily, who has a way of trying to make a claim in every speech. Her calls are plays for sympathy, or flirtations, or an effort to undo a misunderstanding, or a search for answers — a call to an early ex-boyfriend, Troy (Chivas Michael), is this play’s best use of this chameleonic actor (and Rep veteran), who finally engages Emily in what could be called mature conversation. By contrast, all the characters that Gabriel Brown plays — boss, love interest, friend — seem to fall under the category of ​“generic male.”

Late in the play Emily plans a move to San Francisco then ends up making a distressed phone call from a sketchy part of town for reasons that are contrived at best. Some of that contrivance is added by this particular production, which is burdened with a bit too much typical Rep tech. The moving stage, the fast set-ups to signal different spaces, even the car headlights into the audience — a prop used for Cadillac Crew that also featured the stranded-on-the-road trope (indeed, scenic designer Bridget Lindsay, a fourth year candidate at the David Geffen School of Drama, worked on both shows), all seem stage busy-ness to help fill the Rep’s large space. On the other hand, the costumes by David Mitsch, also a fourth-year at the School, are quite effective in their quick studies on the more than 20 characters depicted — particularly effective are the getups for Emily Kuroda, a veteran of the play, who plays Mom and several other middle-aged women; some help Emily, some don’t, but all have a kind of relatedness set off by their very different presentations.

I have the feeling that playwright Stanton knows whereof she speaks in the character of Emily, and the setting of Hawai’i is significant as a U.S. state in which whites were already a minority upon admission to the Union. But in the end I think the play has the feel of — to borrow James Joyce’s phrase — ​“almosting it.” The radio personalities are not nearly as funny or extreme as they might be. The minor comic fillips — like a character insisting on oat milk or the tone of receptionists — land without ever risking real satire. And some jokes, in that short span from 2017 to now, feel already of another time or more pointed as New York theater.

That said, the play does perhaps make us rethink how willing we once were to live by phone, as if hearing a voice or leaving a message could ever equate with looking someone in the eyes.

Today Is My Birthday runs at Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel St., through Feb. 19. For tickets and more information, visit the Rep’s website.