Theater Community Comes Together For Halloween

A play by a coalition of theater professionals, based on a Brazilian legend, is arriving just in time to make sure Oct. 31 feels like Halloween.

The play is taking place in the East Rock neighborhood. People can make appointments to see it in small, socially distant settings.

Early in the fall, while talking to one of the neighborhood children about Halloween, Addie Gorlin of East Rock saw her young friend’s face fall. I thought of how let down she looked,” Gorlin said, when the five-year-old girl realized that trick-or-treating was not likely this year.

The Connecticut Department of Public Health advocates organizing and participating in fun, lower or moderate risk alternatives” to going door to door in costume for free candy. Fortunately, Gorlin has worked in theater for grades K‑12 — and in drama for all ages — and began to think of ways that theater could remedy the situation.” Gorlin’s husband studies at the Yale School of Medicine, so awareness of medically sanctioned precautions was uppermost. Could there be safe, socially distanced theater for Halloween?” she asked.

Gorlin.

Gorlin met up with friend and theater collaborator An-Lin Dauber, a recent Yale School of Drama alum in set design. The plan was to create a theatrical telling of a tale suitable for children but with an interest, as Gorlin noted, in expanding the canon.” The best-known fairytales and fables in the U.S. are of European provenance. East Rock tends to be an internationally diverse neighborhood. The team consulted with Brazilian theater artist Ludmila Brito, who worked on staff at this year’s virtual International Festival of Arts & Ideas, and she brought in Danilo Gambini, also from Brazil and a YSD grad who translated, adapted, and directed a contemporary Brazilian tale for children at the 2019 Yale Summer Cabaret. Together they came up with a story indigenous to Brazil that, as Brito put it, is not traumatic, but scary enough” for kid-friendly Halloween fare. Even better, the fable has a civic-minded, environmentally savvy slant.

The story: For kids in Brazil, Brito and Gambini told me, the story of the Boitatá needs no introduction. It’s a story from the Tupi-Guarani peoples of Brazil and there are numerous versions across the country, in different languages and dialects. In the version that will be staged, fires from loggers cutting the rainforest cause a dense blackness of environmental disaster. In the murk, a giant serpent feeds on the eyeballs of the animals that died from the smoke. The eyeballs contain the dying animals’ vision and hope for a better future and their light causes the serpent to become a fire serpent (“mboi” means snake” and tata” fire”). The bursting light from the serpent reanimates the forest. The folkloric legend part is that the Boitatá returns any time the natural environment is seriously endangered. It’s clearly a story with relevance for the American West this past summer.

Brito.

Brito said she had always wanted to see the Boitatá story done as theater. To tell it under the strict guidelines for social interactions in Connecticut at this time, the team has come up with an ingenious method that not only provides four different stage settings — in four East Rock garages — to enact different parts of the story, but also involves the audience in mini-Halloween parades as they make the circuit of the garages. It’s not quite like going door to door for candy, but it’s at least akin.

Musician-guides with costumes and Chinese lanterns will lead the audience on the path between each act. As Gambini pointed out, the notion of the illuminated eyeballs is related to what Brazilians call togo-fa’ tuo,” which we know as will o’ the wisps.” Sometimes explained as vegetative matter that spontaneously combusts in certain climates, in many traditions, the lights are seen as sprites or fairies that lead to occult occurrences. Here, the lanterns will play that role.

The audience, in three or four family unit groups (depending on unit size), will stand in clearly marked spaces the requisite six feet apart at each garage; masks are required, of course. Each garage displays a different scene from the story. For the displays themselves, Gorlin said, think of Macy’s and other department store windows at Christmas.” At this time, Gorlin said, theatrical artists must find new ways to work together” and the idea is for horizontal collaboration.” Each mini-team is responsible for one part of the four-part story.

Gambini.

For the first part, Orlando Hernandez, a tap dancer and theater artist based in Rhode Island, orchestrates dance and shadow-play with projections. Gorlin and her collaborators handle the second part — featuring the giant eyeballs — using hand puppets and the techniques of children’s theater. The third part, directed by Gambini, involves drag performance as the snake transforms into Boitatá. Finally, Rachel Alderman, of New Haven’s beloved Broken Umbrella Theatre and Hartford Stage, has enlisted Isaac Bloodworth of UConn’s award-winning puppetry program to create giant tube balloons for the ritualized finale.

There are 10 different viewing times to sign up for (though when I spoke to the team, many of the time slots had wait lists). The distances between sites are short enough that the entire circuit can be done in an hour, with a total of 20 minutes of story time. All locations are in the vicinity of the Hooker School. Most of the viewers will likely be inhabitants of East Rock, but for those coming by car, there is parking available at Elm City Wellness at 774 Orange Street.

As theater, Boitatá will be a welcome live event. As a Halloween event, it has mystery and fun and costumes and drama. The members of the team I spoke to — Brito, Gambini and Gorlin — all look to children’s theater as a way to offer entertainment for the whole family. As Gambini said, it is important that children’s theater also interest the adults who bring the kids.

And the event is also a significant collaboration, derived from the wide-ranging theatrical community centered in New Haven. It’s international and local, drawing on talent from area Ivies like Yale and Brown, state programs like UConn, and on the local geniuses of site-specific theater, Broken Umbrella. It shows the will to develop theater and to celebrate Halloween. But it’s also an effort to raise awareness in the new generation about indigenous peoples, vulnerable to the pandemic and to the systematic attack to their lands, to their rights and to their lives” that has left such devastation in areas like the Amazon. That’s the kind of community-mindedness that can get us through.

Boitatá runs every 20 minutes from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Oct. 31. Visit the production’s website to sign up for its waitlist.

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