Ouch!? Darius DeHaas in Twelfth Night at Westport Country Playhouse. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

All I know is what they said in a press release issued late this afternoon:
Due to a serious injury to an actor, Westport Country Playhouse has canceled tonight’s performance (Friday, October 14th) of Twelfth Night, or What You Will. Patrons holding tickets are asked to please contact the Playhouse Box Office at 203-227-4177 to exchange tickets into another Twelfth Night performance, running through November 5. The Playhouse apologizes for any inconvenience and appreciates its audience’s continued support.

But Playbill.com suspects the injured party is Darius De Haas, who plays Feste in the Mark Lamos-directed production. Feste’s a wandering fool, ripe for potential injuries.
I’m seeing the show Sunday afternoon, to review it for the Fairfield County Weekly, so I’ll apprise you of any cast changes then.

Here’s the previously announced cast list:
MALVOLIO – David Adkins
SIR ANDREW AGUCHEEK – Jordan Coughtry
OLIVIA ATTENDANT – Nakeisha Daniel
FESTE – Darius de Haas
CAPTAIN/PRIEST – Rick Ford
MARIA – Donnetta Lavinia Grays
ORSINO – Lucas Hall
VIOLA – Mahira Kakkar
FABIAN/VALENTINE – Justin Kruger
ORSINO ATTENDANT/SAILOR – Myron Lee
OLIVIA ATTENDANT – Kimberly Maresca
ORSINO ATTENDANT/SAILOR – Chris Ryan
SEBASTIAN – Rachid Sabitri
SIR TOBY BELCH – David Schramm
ANTONIO – Paul Anthony Stewart
OLIVIA – Susan Kelechi Watson

Brian Dennehy as Krapp, as he appeared the last time he played Krapp's Last Tape, at the Goodman Theater in Chicago three years ago. Photo by Richard Hein.

Long Wharf subscribers, don’t get complacent. Krapp’s Last Tape isn’t part of the regular subscription season. Subscribers do get special offers and discounts, but don’t just expect the tix to turn up in the mail. For the general public, all seats for this multimedia minimalist classic are 70 bucks.

Dick Decareau

Alex Viola

Beth McVey, who was in We Have Always Lived in the Castle at the Yale Rep last year.

They’ve announced the cast of the Tin Pan Alley revue Hello! My Baby at Goodspeed’s Norma Terris Theatre.

So…
Hello! Justin Bowen (playing Mickey McKee)!
Hello! Stephanie Koenig (Nelly Gold/Ned O’Reilly)
Hello! Kelly McCormick (Frances Gold)
Hello! Junior Tierney (Dick Decareau)
Hello! Beth McVey (Ethel Coots)
Hello! Frank Root (Bert Coots)
Hello! Alex Viola (Violet Gold)
Hello! Ensemble!: Jessica Azenberg, Matthew A. Bauman (Albie Coots), Catherine Blades (Alice) Zak Edwards, Michael Mendez (Kid Vicious), Clinton Roane (Noble T. Jones), Allie Schauer (Marie), Jeremy Sevelovitz (Johnny), Ashley Wallace, and Michael Warrell (Dickie the Duck).

As previously announced, the show’s directed by Ray Roderick, who did a bang-up job on Strike Up the Band at the Goodspeed earlier this season. The book and concept come from Cheri Steinkellner, writer/producer of TV’s Cheers and Teacher’s Pet and librettist of the Broadway version of Sister Act. New music, and new arrangements of the old music, are by Georgia Stitt.

There are certainly some ragtime gals in there. And you aren’t you dying to know what Dickie the Duck does?

Here’s the Freedom Theatre’s mission statement, from the company’s website.

Through its work, The Freedom Theatre aims to:
• Raise the quality of performing arts and cinema in the area.
• Offer a space in which children and youth can act, create and express themselves freely, imagining new realities and challenging existing social and cultural barriers.
• Empower the young generation to use the arts to promote positive change in their community.
• Break the cultural isolation that separates Jenin from the wider Palestinian and global communities.

In order to fulfill these aims, the following strategies are employed:
• Offering professional training in theatre and cinema for youth and young adults.
• Staging regular theatre productions which explore new and increasingly advanced artistic and technical trends.
• Raising awareness among its participants and audiences on important issues in the community and the role of arts in bringing about social change.
• Providing a wide range of drama and cinema activities for children and youth in Jenin Refugee Camp, Jenin City and surrounding villages.
• Hosting performances by theatre and performing arts groups from other parts of Palestine and abroad.
• Engaging its participants in international exchanges and building up a wide network of partners and supporters worldwide through effective advocacy and public relations work.
The Freedom Theatre has staged productions ranging from Waiting for Godot and the original devised work Sho Kman to adaptations of Animal Farm, Alice in Wonderland and Crime and Punishment.
At Yale, members of the Freedom Theatre company will present a “theatrical introduction to the theatre’s work,” screen a video of highlights from past productions, and discuss the life and work of Juliano Mer-Khamis. The New Haven stop is part of an extensive U.S. visit by the company, which recently has toured in Europe.
The 90-minute Yale presentation begins at 4:30 p.m. in the downstairs lounge of the Yale Repertory Theatre at the corner of Chapel and York streets. It’s a free event, open to the public. More info here.

An image from the Freedom Theatre's recent production of Waiting for Godot. The actor in the photo, Rami Hwayel, is one of several students from the Palestinean theater troupe to have allegedly been taken captive by the Israeli Army.

Spectral Scriabin, a collaboration of piano and lights performed by Eteri Andjaparidze and designed by Yale's own Jennifer Tipton, comes to the university's No Boundaries series in February. Photo by Chris Lee.

The series’ 2011-12 slate was announced last week. It represents a rare and longrunning collaboration between the undergraduate Yale Theater Studies program’s World Performance Project and the Yale School of Drama graduate program. No Boundaries presents three visiting theater or dance companies a year. Beyond the performances, there are usually related workshops and seminars. The series tends to go for artists that are pushing the bound…—let’s just say envelope this time—of language and established theatrical formats.
No Boundaries has offered an exhilarating range of good to bad, with indifference never an option.

Here they come, boundarying in:
• Nov. 3-5: The American premiere of Engagement Feminin: An Evening of West African Contemporary Dance with the Burkina Faso-based company Art’Dev/Compagnie Auguste-Bienvenue. Art’Dev is a truncation of Association Artistique Développement. The directors are Auguste Ouedraogo and Bienvenue Bazie, both of whom are in their early 30s; they founded Art’Dev in 2000. While Ouedraogo and Bazie are male, they are conscious of the lack of dances by and about women in West Africa. The hour-long Engagement Feminin piece, in which dancers “explore the everyday choices the women of their communities make,” is part of that outreach.

• Feb. 10-11: Spectral Scriabin, a solo piano concert by Eteri Andjaparidze enhanced by “illumination” of renowned stage lighting designer Jennifer Tipton.
The Russian-born but now New York-based, Andjaparidze was at Yale just last year, doing Schumann duets with Boris Berman for the School of Music’s Horowitz Piano Series. Jennifer Tipton is a leading light ‘round these parts: the 2008 MacArthur fellow teaches at the Yale School of Drama and her recent theater lighting designs include The Glass Menagerie at Long Wharf and Autumn Sonata at Yale Rep.
Such “illuminated” concerts were a huge deal on the festival circuit a few years ago—lightshow enhancements for those who’d grown up on Pink Floyd laser shows and who’d learned to sit still for classical music. Tipton’s the top artist you could hope to get for such an endeavor, and compose Scriabin himself would likely have approved of the format: he experimented with various linkings of sound, light and color, and may have had the neurological condition synesthesia, which heightens one’s sensitivity to sound to the point where it’s similar to taste or vision. The hour-long event contains excerpts from the composer’s Poeme Languide in B Major, Feuillet d’Album in F Sharp Major and Opus Posthumous.
Spectral Scriabin was performed last October at New York’s Baryshknikov Arts Center and has a California gig shortly after this Yale one.

• March 23 & 24: Neva, written and directed by Chilean political theater artist Guillermo Calderón and performed by his ensemble Teatro en el Blanco.
The Yale Rep (Three Sisters) and the Yale School of Drama (The Seagull) are both checking into Chekhov, so why not No Boundaries? Guillermo Calderon’s Neva, performed in Spanish with supertitles, is an original work set in 1905, after Chekhov’s death. On a darkly lit rehearsal stage in 1905 , the playwright’s widow Olga Knipper laments his passing, and also the passing of a way of life and a way of performing.
I was in Los Angeles this past summer, where Neva was a hit attraction at the Radar L.A. festival. One of my esteemed colleagues at the Engine28 website project, Kerry Lengel, reviewed the show, here. Another Engine28er, Ben Waterhouse, posed a technical question to Calderon—how come he staged this ostensibly historical drama around a modern space-heater appliance? Answer here.

Guillermo Calderon's Neva. Photo by Pepe Murrieta.

For Boundaries details, go here, and don’t forget about all the related symposia, talkbacks and workshops. This is an especially interactive and multi-faceted series, befitting the fresh and sometimes challenging concepts No Boundaries brings to town.

The workshops were a success, and some of the folks involved in them travelled to Nicaragua later in the summer, practicing the Forum Theatre principles devised by political performance theorist Augusto Boal.

Now comes the local presentation of A Peasant of El Salvador, directed by Rob Esposito (of Co-op High School’s theater department) at the black box theater in Fair Haven School (164 Grand Ave., New Haven). Performances are Oct. 6 at 8 p.m. (a pay-what-you-can preview), Oct. 7 at 8 p.m,, a matinee Oct. 8 at 3 p.m. and Oct. 13 & 14 at 8 p.m. Tickets are available by calling (866) 631-8880 or visiting www.bregamos.org.

The run of the show, which has dialogue in both English and Spanish, was timed for National Hispanic Heritage Month. A Peasant of El Salvador is presented by the Fair Haven-based Bregamos Community Theater in conjunction with the New Haven/Leon Sister City Project.

Jill Abramson.

The award goes to Abramson this year, and was bestowed upon Women for Women International founder Zainab Salbi last year, but every year it honors the late Jean Handley, a cool and down-to-earth civic leader who served on a zillion boards and committees and was a founding director of Arts & Ideas. Money raised at the awards luncheon goes to the Jean M. Handley Fund for the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, which supports festival stuff which Handley would have especially appreciated.

Jean Handley.