The 50th Anniversary season of the Yale Cabaret has been and gone. Much thanks to its artistic directors, Josh Wilder and Francesca Fernandez McKenzie, associate artistic director Rory Pelsue, and its managing director Rachel Shuey for a challenging season. Cabaret 50 offered plenty of off-beat fare, in the sense of plays in which the performers stood in a theatrical space between fiction and fact. We might think that Reality TV is having an impact, likewise we might think that the irreality of our current political climate makes fiction, no matter its intentions, seem a bit escapist.
So, even the shows this season that were pre-existing plays seemed to take their tone from the tensions of our time, perhaps to an unusual degree. Or maybe not. The way weβor each member of the audienceβexperiences what gets done before our eyes onstage takes its tone from our own conflicts, I expect. It seems to me that the Yale School of Drama students making theater in the basement at Park Street in were particularly aware of the conflicts.
Woyno R. Harris: A script of inspired self-excoriation and abrasive ideas for ending it all the light is⦠by Jake Ryan Lozano: A fascinating combination of poetic words and interpretive movements in atmospheric lighting The Guadalupes by Noah Diaz: A funny, touching, and awkward remembrance play as real as anything onstage can be and. Where would we be without it?
These remarkably talented people do surprising work in a basement. Everyone who undertakes that task earns our gratitude. The samples here are simply those I can most readily call to mind. Acting takes many forms. For playing his larger-than-life mother as himself or vice versa: Arturo Soria in Ni Mi Madre For being both uncomfortably ugly and commandingly attractive, without benefit of make-up in either case: Patrick Madden in The Ugly One For a scary yet pitiful version of toxic masculinity: Devin White in Mud For a dream role as a dying diva in this period life: Michael Breslin in Camille And β¦ for letting us in and letting some of us have it, while working the slippery line between truth and appearance: Patrick Foley in This American Wife.
For charming the first man, the serpent, and us her children : Courtney Jamison in The Apple Tree For hard truths and hard lessons handed down from the fathers: Louisa Jacobson in Re:Union For a funny and chilling lesson in what happens when a theater person gets rejected good thing she was an actress, not a dramaturg : Stephanie Machado in This Sweet Affliction For a dream role as a mercurial and devious diva: Antoinette Crowe-Legacy in Fuck Her And β¦ for existential truth in its hunger, need, and abject beauty: Danielle Chaves in Mud.
