seated: Artistic Directors Rory Pelsue and Shadi Ghaheri; standing (l to r): Trent Anderson, General Manager; Dashiell Menard, Production Manager; Leandro Zanetti, Managing Director
“A classic,” Mark Twain once said, “is something that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” We assume we already know what the work says and don’t want to bother with it. But in the theater, a classic work simply won’t go away. It gets done again and again, in a kind of afterlife of endless revival. But why?
Rory Pelsue and Shadi Ghaheri, the artistic directors of this year’s Yale Summer Cabaret and both rising third-year directors at the Yale School of Drama, have devised a summer season that examines the status of theater classics. The season runs from June 2 to August 13 and is called “Canon Balle.” It celebrates classics, but may also be considered an offensive against those who want their classics untouched by contemporary interests. Think, for starters, Antony and Cleopatra in drag.
Each of the Yale Cab’s summer shows will offer a provocative take on plays that have been around for quite some time. In the first half, the plays are revamped by the presentation. There’s an all-male, and much shortened, version of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, directed by Pelsue, June 2 – 11. Next is an all-female production of Euripides’ The Trojan Woman, directed by Ghaheri, as filtered through a translation by Ellen McLaughlin from the 1990s, which runs June 23 to July 2.
Then things become even more interpretive: Yaël Farber’s adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, called Mies Julie, set in post-apartheid South Africa, involves an interracial affair between persons of different statuses, directed by Pelsue and running from July 14 to July 23. Finally there’s Young Jean Lee’s Lear, an absurdist reimagining of the situation of King Lear from the perspective of the younger generation, directed by Ghaheri, which runs August 4 to August 13.
Pelsue and Ghaheri say the selection of plays came together quite easily. They were attracted to their name recognition and the possibility of playing with audience expectations. Key to the season, Managing Director Leandro A. Zaneti said, was the “excitement of revival” and the questions of what is new in these plays and what can still be discovered.
“Revival can be shocking,” Ghaheri said, and sees adaptation as “a playground for directors that is both creative and interpretive.” The team characterized their choices as both “delicious” and “dangerous.”
For Pelsue, the idea of an all-male Antony and Cleopatra is something he’s been considering for about a year, but, at Yale, only the Summer Cabaret offers the right venue. The term-time Yale Cabaret shows tend to run no more than 60 minutes and are restricted to a single weekend. The Summer Cabaret’s shows — in the same basement space at 217 Park Street, with dinner offerings before the show — are closer to 90 minutes and each is given about 10 performances. A Shakespeare play still requires “radical cuts” to fit the time, Pelsue said. And, while his approach is “rigorously textual,” Pelsue wants to open the question of how female impersonation informs the play. In Shakespeare’s day, of course, all female parts would have been played by young men. For Pelsue, the play’s text makes much of such ambiguous gender constructions.
In choosing the play, Pelsue was compelled by “a huge desire for queer artists to do what they love to do.” And that means not simply revisiting an outmoded performance restriction, but approaching the play with a drag show sensibility. The main “propeller,” Pelsue said “is the discrepancy between performer and role.”
The Trojan Woman, in modern times, has often been revived to comment on the atrocities of war. McLaughlin’s translation was aimed to raise awareness of the slaughter of children and refugees in war-torn Bosnia, but Ghaheri initially thought she would not use a specific setting. However, with research, she felt touched by “the day-to-day lives very much in pain” in Syria, and decided the design elements of the show would make deliberate reference to the dire situation there. Artistically, Ghaheri characterized her approach as “not in love with text.” She is always willing to make cuts in favor of expressive movement. For her, the process of creating a contemporary drama from an ancient play is key.
“We wouldn’t go to those places without process,” she said. “We don’t always see ourselves in [classic] plays.” She wants the audience “to see contemporary people in the play,” who, like the Trojan women, are “waiting for new masters” in a world entirely shaped by power.
The idea of doing Mies Julie came to the directors from the rising-third year actors who will play Julie (Marié Botha) and John (James Udom). The actors convinced the directors to do the play and Pelsue and Ghaheri debated who would take it on. The play suited Pelsue, who sees his two shows as dealing with the theme of “toxic love,” or, as he put it, the question “is the orgasm worth the death scene?”
Julie and John, like Antony and Cleopatra, pursue their desire for one another despite — or perhaps because of — the extreme tensions that surround their love affairs. Pelsue is interested in how the move to South Africa helps to restore the initial drama of forbidden love that infused Strindberg’s play in the 1880s but which has been harder for contemporary audiences to feel. There is also a stronger “sense of intergenerational pain” as the character who, in Strindberg’s play, was John’s fiancée is replaced by his mother in Mies Julie. Her memories of apartheid-era hostilities add a further political dimension to the story, which Pelsue sees as illuminating the “oppressions and privileges of who and how we are.”
For Ghaheri, Young Jean Lee’s Lear has been a provocation since School of Drama faculty member Robert Woodruff introduced the text in a director’s class. Both Ghaheri and Lee love Shakespeare’s play, which Lee worked on as a dissertation topic. But for Ghaheri, the play doesn’t insist the audience be familiar with King Lear the way, for instance, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead insists on the audience knowing Hamlet. She sees the characters in Lear as “crazy” in the way — like younger people in our “tech-heavy” world — they “jump from one topic to another” as though scrolling through a range of interests and obsessions. For her, the two plays she is directing have “nothing in common,” and yet it’s interesting that, in Trojan Women, the male heroes are dead and, in Lear, the two towering father figures, Lear and Gloucester, are off-stage. It may be a way of saying that these dramas focus on “the question of the responsibility of existence,” not only the privileges and oppressions Pelsue mentions, but also the way people in our world can be marginalized or empowered by our cultural choices and appropriations.
Four old plays given new life; four new visions of how the theater can be both classic and timely. Yale Summer Cabaret looks to have a “balle” with the canon.
