Mallory Pellegrino and Christian Shaboo as Emily and George in the New Haven Theater Company production of Our Town, at English Building Market through September 28.

Our Town

Presented by New Haven Theater Company through September 28 at English Building Market (back room), 839 Chapel Street, New Haven. Remaining performances September 20, 21, 26, 27 & 28 at 8 p.m. www.newhaventheatercompany.com

By Thornton Wilder. Directed by Steve Scarpa. Produced by George Kulp. Production design by Drew Gray. Stage Manager: Mary Tedford. Performed by Megan Chenot (Stage Manager), Peter Chenot (Howie Newsome), Donna E. Glen (Mrs. Carter), Erich Greene (Belligerent Man and Joe Stoddard), George Kulp (Mr. Webb),  Josie Kulp (Rebecca Gibbs), Susan Kulp (Mrs. Webb), Jim Lones (Simon Stimson), Spenser Long (Wally Webb), Margaret Mann (Professor Willard, Mrs. Soames), Deena Nicol (Mrs. Gibbs), Mallory Pellegrino (Emily Webb), Christian Shaboo (George Gibbs), J. Kevin Smith (Dr. Gibbs), Sam Taubl (Joe Crowell Jr. and Si Crowell) and Jesse Jo Toth (Sam Craig).

Much has been made of the casting of a young woman, Megan Chenot, to play the Stage Manager in this community-based production of that community-building American theater classic Our Town. That’s because, as you’ll see when you visit Our Town in the back room of English Building Market, the ramifications of having an attractive young women in a modern-style sweater and blue jeans go well beyond  that single character.  If your narrator is a free-spirited blonde pixie who waves her arms wildly and claps with excitement and chirps good-naturedly through her introductions to the denizens of this small New Hampshire town—rather than the stuffy old gents who customarily take on the role—then there simply isn’t the same need for overplayed comic relief elsewhere. Upbeat puckishness is taken care of. The other characters can be themselves. The scene-stealing old granny who coos about what a grand wedding it is in Act Two (Margaret Mann, who doubles deliciously as the overeducated Professor Willard in Act One) remains unavoidably over-the-top, especially in the sharp spotlight she’s afforded in the dark windowless playing area. But moderately amusing characters, like the red-face choirmaster Simon Stimson (Jim Lones) and two separate doomed teens surnamed Crowell (Sam Taubl, a regular in the summer youth theater Shake It Up Shakespeare shows at Long Wharf Stage II) can evade one-dimensional obligations (i.e. town drunk and chipper youth) and offer more layered performances.

The real casting coup here is that one of the married couples in the play—Mr. Webb the newspaper editor and his wife—are played by a real-life married couple, George and Susan Kulp, whose daughter Josie portrays Rebecca Gibbs, the bratty sister of their future son-in-law George Gibbs. The Webbs’ daughter, ill-fated heroine Emily, is sweetly inhabited by Mallory Pellegrino, who has a dazzling array of warm smiles and twinkling eyes. The way the Kulps beam at Pellegrino is similar to how they beam when sitting on the sidelines and watching their actual offspring Josie in her short scenes.

There’s a love and charm and realness to this production that helps you deal with the usual hazards of Our Town—that’s you’ve likely heard it all before, and there’s not much to look at. This is generally a traditional production. Of course, few have ever truly gone out on a limb when staging this play; it’s simply not one which invites deviation. I recall a Yale School of Drama rendition some years ago where the students were sorely disappointed that they hadn’t found a worthwhile way to modify or modernize the work, and were stuck doing it as written. The truth here is that Our Town is a whole lot more modern than it appears. In the way he announces itself as a play, the way it provides a new dramatic framework for comprehending life and death, and the way it uses cheap comedy to trigger emotional discomfort and despair, Wilder’s as provocative as Pirandello, Sartre or Beckett.

Director Steve Scarpa allows for an acceptable, expected amount of staginess. Some of the full-cast scenes are more choreographed than blocked, and turn into grand tableaux. There’s the accepted bare-stage miming of things like mowing the lawn and setting the table, but also a few props, such as school books and a baseball glove.

I learn something new from Our Town every time I see it. This time was personal, since I haven’t seen a live production of the show since becoming a father 11 years ago, so half a dozen family-life scenes resonated for me in ways they never have. I was watching the sort of grieving I never hope to have to do. The show’s cast with actors my own age, some of them with families themselves. Nearly everyone onstage has worked together before. When Megan Chenot grins beatifically and gushes about the residents of Grover’s Mill, you believe that she’s chattering so gaily about her friends and neighbors, and she is.

That sort of comfort and familiarity is something that community theaters accomplish regularly and regional theaters can only dream of. Our Town is a special play in almost any circumstance, whether it has an all-star cast (hello, Westport Country Playhouse) or is being done at a multi-cultural high school in Compton, California (the subject of the fascinating 2002 documentary OT: Our Town). This one is special not just because the Stage Manager’s a woman. It’s because everyone in it is so human.

The cast of The Specials at Whitney Arts Center through September 28. From left: James Leaf, Mariah Sage,Irina Kaplan and Daniel White.

The Specials

Through September 22 at the Whitney Arts Center, 591 Whitney Avenue, New Haven. Performances are Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. (203) 676-9685, 4thespecials@gmail.com or jackdawpike.wordpress.com

By Steve Bellwood. Directed by James Leaf. Produced and Assistant Directed by David Pilot. Co-Produced by Leaf, Bellwood, Margaret Carl and Annia Bu. Stage  Manager: Beatrix Roeller. Costume Designer and Assistant Stage Manager: Lisette Lux.

I’ve been a great admirer of the plays and monologues of Steve Bellwood for over 20 years now. I think I’ve written more about his work than any other critic. Bellwood’s versatility matches his prolificity. I’ve seen literally dozens of his plays, everything from Shakespeare-themed children’s-theater vaudeville shows to a deft adaptation of Capek’s The Insect Play to a riotously funny pastiche of various overblown holiday entertainments to dark dramas of homelessness and solitude and violence to a pun-filled parody of Casablanca. At one point an entire community-based theater company committed itself exclusively to the staging of Bellwood scripts. Their most popular effort was a series of historical dramas performed in front of famous paintings at the Yale Art Gallery.

Many of the Bellwood productions I’ve seen, however, have been done with minimal resources, before too-small audiences—too small to gather momentum for the laughs his comedies deserve, or to agitate en masse at the prickly subjects he brings to the fore of his controversial dramas. Sometimes these scripts cry out for spectacle, or at least special lighting effects, and few of the small companies that have done his works have had the resources for large sets and serious sound or lighting design.

I like to think that Bellwood’s wondrous wordplay and intriguing character developments shine through even the most amateurish or low-rent stagings, but I’ve long hoped I’d get a chance someday to test another theory:  how his shows might thrive with the proper care and expense put behind them.

The current production of The Specials at Whitney Arts Center (not to confused with Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center downtown; the WAC is in East Rock, at 591 Whitney Avenue near Cold Spring Street) is a step in that direction. The venue isn’t ideal: it has to subsist on natural lighting. But it’s a real hall with good acoustics and a playing area where actors can exit through real doors. There’s room for good-sized audiences, and the company has really worked hard at luring them.

There are other ways that this Steve Bellwood done up in a way he usually isn’t. He’s not directing himself (which he prefers not to do, but has often had to do by default). He’s not being overly deferred to. He’s not having to settle for whoever’s able to act in his script. He’s even been asked to leave the room on occasion so that others might process his work.

Producer David Pilot and director/actor James Leaf simply saw great potential in an old script of Bellwood’s (originally titled Collateral Damage) and have worked hard to give it a production it deserves. They assembled a worthy cast up for the creative journey. Along the way, there has been extensive editing and other changes. The script’s old title, Collateral Damage, for instance, has largely been rendered moot by a revised ending which Pilot and Leaf suggested. By his own admission, Bellwood has rolled with these changes grudgingly at times, but has also been impressed with how well some of them work. Collaborations on new works are seldom easy. This appears to be a particularly open-minded company where everyone has strong opinions. But it may be one of the best development situations that a Steve Bellwood script has ever seen.

[This is the point in the article where I note that this is in no way a review. The performance of The Specials I saw on Sept. 21 was billed as a preview, and that changed ending had been added just a few hours earlier. The audience that night was largely an invited one consisting of those who’d donated money or set pieces or props, who stayed for an animated talkback session afterwards. After they all left, I chatted candidly with Bellwood and Pilot. So, not a distanced review, this. I’m an avowed Steve Bellwod supporter, intrigued by a production process. That’s where I’m coming from.

The Specials has been carefully dramaturged right down to its subtitle. It’s being billed as “A New American Play,” to stress the allegorical and metaphorical aspects of the play. The play posits an academically inclined unmarried couple (Diane’s a professor, Tom’s a high school teacher) on a road trip against an earthier, newly married couple (Ivan’s in a special military service and deployed to Afghanistan a lot; Ruth’s an ex-stripper).

You could shorthand The Specials by comparing it to two Edward Albee plays. It’s got the feuding-lovers aspect of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and the lingering-menace feel of The Zoo Story. The couples barely know each other when Tom and Diane arrive to stay over at Ivan and Ruth’s house. Soon enough, they know each other a little too well. (Bellwood denies any conscious influence of Albee’s work on his own.)

The script goes “meta” in how it depicts an encroaching violent behavior, moral breakdown, reckless passions and desperate desire for stability among its characters. It’s very much a 21^st century play about scattered dreams and dashed hopes and uncertain futures and defensive posturing.

Here, it’s been wisely cast so one couple is not appreciably older or more attractive than the other. Other than the physically imposing bluster the bulky, bald-headed Daniel White brings to Ivan, you can imagine the actors being almost interchangeable, though the roles aren’t. Diane (Mariah Sage, of the Theater Four ensemble) is poised and imperious. Ruth (New York actor Irina Kaplan) is loose and needy. Tom (James Leaf) is like a somber Woody Allen, commenting wryly on events which nonetheless are terrifying to him. And White’s Ivan is the lumbering wild card at the center of the piece. Does being a war veteran make him a stoic realist, or just psychotic? Does he have a disciplined, caring program in place for dealing with Ruth’s emotional problems (and his own), or is this domestic abuse? “You’ve been dealt a good hand, Ruthie,” the poker-playing Ivan decrees. “Stick with it.”

The play has four characters, but most of the scenes involve just two people at a time, in various combinations. Sparks fly, but not from the directions you think they will. The action is kept lively with Halloween masks, brandished firearms, a mystery object Ruthie keeps in the kitchen, and—big reveal at the end of the first act—a whole second set piece, just when you think the whole show is confined to Ruthie and Ivan’s living room.

This harrowing, yet regularly amusing and entertaining, drama takes a special balance of talents, and this production has been able to assemble them. The actors have worked hard to find the rhythms in Bellwood’s play, which ranges from frequent cursing to a languid explication of Edward Lear’s nonsense verse The Jumblies. The direction and design opens up what could be a claustrophic piece and allows it not just to breathe but to express grander themes.

The company also continues to probe and rewrite and rehearse and investigate, in hopes that The Specials can move on to other productions. It fully deserves to. For now, it most deeply requires the support of New Haven theatergoers. This is a theater troupe that is bravely trying something new and challenging. They also are craving input. There are three opportunities left to catch this special staging of The Specials. Make a special effort.

The Specials playwright Steve Bellwood.

New Haven Theater Company has just announced that they’re doing a playreading—two plays, actually, one full-length and one one-act—of new work by company member Drew Gray, 8 p.m. August 8 at Luck & Levity Brewshop, 118 Court Street.

If that address sounds familiar, before the site was leased to the brewshop, NHTC staged several full productions at 118 Court, over the course of several years. That includes Waiting for Lefty, Urinetown and Picasso in the Lapin Agile.

The reading, which has no admission charge, no reservations required and even a free pre-show reception at 7:30 p.m., includes The Magician (performed by Megan Chenot, Peter Chenot and George Kulp) and the short play A Tall Hill… …A Warm Day (performed by Hallie Martenson and Steven Scarpa).

According to a press release, “The Magician tells the story of Mark Wonderton, a jaded professional magician who performs at the dingy Four Movements Casino on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Following a forgettable matinee on a forgettable afternoon, Mark and his young hotheaded manager, Ronnie, go through their traditional routine of drinking whiskey and reminiscing. When Mark receives some unexpected news, he is lead to question the nature of his life and work, culminating in the performance of a lifetime during his evening show.” A Tall Hill… is described thus: “a character sits alone in a dimly-lit room communing with the ghost of a lost love. Reliving dreams, heartbreaks and now dashed hopes, this poetic piece is a meditation on love, loss and coming to terms with the things left unsaid.”

I’ve been a fan of New Haven Theater Company for years, and even directed a show for the company in one of its earlier incarnations back in the late 1990s at BAR. Some of the current members—in fact everyone involved in these readings, with the exception of George Kulp—have performed at the Get to the Point! spoken word series I host monthly at Café Nine. (The photo above shows George Kulp, Peter Chenot and Drew Gray, from left to right, creatively cropped from a publicity shot for an aborted NHTC production of Donald Margulies’ Shipwrecked).

Hard not to applaud new work being shown in a comfortable downtown space.  For details, see http://www.newhaventheatercompany.com/

The Yale Summer Cabaret is halfway through its neatly balanced five-show season, which is presented in old-school fashion by a troupe of actors  and designers who’ve signed up for the whole summer, switching roles and styles with abandon and aplomb. The repertory format diverges from recent Summer Cabaret seasons where there weren’t as many shows, the themes and styles weren’t as varied, and the casts and crews were more distinct. The current Summer Cabaret company also came roaring out of the gate in early June, enduring an exceptionally brief rehearsal period for the opening production so that they could get out ahead of competing summer-theater entities such as the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.

Ticket sales for the Summer Cabaret offerings so far this summer have exceeded expectations, with numerous sold-out performances. Audience members have been full of praise not just for specific productions but for the endeavor as a whole.

The season began with the 17^th century French comedy Tartuffe by Moliere, followed by Strindberg’s late-19^th century doomed-romance Miss Julie. Yet to come are the 1969 Tennessee Williams rarity In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (July 25 through August 3) and a double-bill of cutting-edge Caryl Churchill one-acts, Heart’s Desire and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You (August 8-18).

But right now, opening Thursday at the underground 217 Park Street space run by vacationing Yale School of Drama students is The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, written by the estimable Spanish dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca in 1930. The playwright only died in 1936 at the age of 38, presumed assassinated by Spain’s Nationalist government for his expressing liberal sentiments during the Spanish Civil War.

Because when you’ve devised a summer repertory season of farce, tragedy, realism and sociopolitical drama, what else can you stick in the middle of it besides good old-fashioned surrealism?

Knowing that the play, titled La zapatera prodigiosa in its original Spanish and alternately translated as The Shoemaker’s Wonderful Wife, might need a little more explaining than some of the other scripts and authors in this eclectic SumCab season, director Dustin Wills was cornered with questioned about why he chose such a distinctive piece, how he hopes to stage it with the resources of the Cabaret, and why he’s changed its setting from Spain to an expanse of desert in West Texas.

The answer to the last query is simple: Wills (who’s also the artistic director of the whole summer season; besides Shoemaker’s Wife, he directed Tartuffe and will also direct the Churchill plays) is a native Texan who first discovered Garcia Lorca as an actor in a student production at the University of Texas. Wills finds spiritual, geographical and language connections between the Western states and Garcia Lorca’s Spain which he thinks will help make the play more palatable for American audiences. When he describes the production’s aesthetic, he notes the live music score created with electric guitar and loop pedals by actor/musician Mickey Theis, which Wills likens to Ry Cooder’s loping soundtrack to the Wim Wenders film Paris, Texas.

The Summer Cabaret’s chef, Anna Belcher of Anna’s on Orange Street, has even prepared a special menu of Latin-American cuisine to further enhance the aesthetic.

“The storyline is simple,” Wills says, laying out the story of a relationship torn asunder by the expectations and opinions of outsiders. Fantasy elements intervene, but this is essentially the story of a woman who has to make it on her own. “My first reading of it, I read it as a farce,” Wills says, “about this woman who’s berating her husband. Then I came to realize how dire this situation was. There’s this one monologue, a fantasy tirade. Staging the fantasies, it all comes to life.”

Wills and the production’s seven-member cast have worked together to create a style where the play’s fantasy elements (which he describes as more psychological than storybook) enhance the reality ones and vice versa.  He muses “Where does the art become authentic and where the authenticity become art?” The story is told with live actors as well as puppets, some of them shadow-type puppets behind a projection screen. The use of puppets is specified by Garcia Lorca (who has the play’s titular shoemaker disguise himself as a puppeteer) but Wills says this production’s approach can not be considered “traditional” in terms of the script’s intentions. “All these little parts pop in and out and different themes start appearing,” he says. The challenge he and the cast faced was in finding new techniques and new relevance for those elements. “There are so many labels of women’s psychology [the Shoemaker’s Wife] is struggling with,” Wills says, labels which didn’t exist in Garcia Lorca’s time.

“There’s so much to mine here,” the director says. And Texas, it seems is a good place for mining.

Miss Julie

Through June 29 at the Yale Summer Cabaret, 217 Park Street, New Haven. (203) 432-1567. http://summercab-tickets.yale.edu/single/PSDetail.aspx?psn=10117

By August Strindberg. Adapted by Kenneth McLeish. Directed by Chris Bannow. Scenic Designer: Kate Noll. Costume Designer: Seth Bodie. Lighting Designer: Solomon Weisbard. Sound Design: Jacob Riley. Performed by Ceci Fernandez (Julie), Mitchell Winter (Jean) and Celeste Arias (Kristin).

I was a massive Strindberg fan when I was in high school. Before there were Goth bands like Bauhaus and Siouxsie & the Banshees, some of us depressive black-clad teens got our bleak life-is-overrated affirmations from Swedish naturalist drama. The fact that August Strindberg, a pioneering modernist mope of the late 19th century, transformed himself from a no-nonsense realist writer into a leading expressionist (Ghost Sonata, Dream Play) made him an even bigger rock star in my eyes.

I’ve seen Miss Julie performed lots of times, mainly at colleges. Even though the characters in the play are relatively mature, settled into their lives and jobs and cultures (they even go to church!), this simple three-character  debate about love, class and social responsibility resonates deeply with young adults. It asks questions about personal values, family heritage, cultural hierarchies, love, lust and loyalty, issues which many people explore and confront when they’re first starting to make their own way in the world.

In Strindberg’s scenario, the conversation comes out of desperate “what do we do now?” hysterics following a hook-up between the young lady of a wealthy household and one of the lordly family’s lowly serfs.

Miss Julie’s set in midsummertime, at a servants’ party of the grounds of where Miss Julie lives. But I can’t recall ever seeing this show actually produced at this time of year. The Yale Summer Cabaret has in some respects put together a traditional summer-stock season with scripts by well-known playwrights and a balance of comedy, fantasy and heavy drama. But not many stock repertory companies would give Strindberg a tumble in June.

Chris Bannow’s sharp, brisk, intense and disarmingly entertaining production makes you reconsider Strindberg’s position as a booking possibility for the dark months only. The production is enhanced by a rich, detailed kitchen set (designed by Kate Noll) that not onlyu gives the actors plenty of props to play with but underscores the much-commented-upon unseemliness of Miss Julie descending into her servants’ work area.

Strindberg’s script—not unlike the previous Summer Cabaret show of this season, Moliere’s Tartuffe—is loaded with sexist stereotypes and old-world scenarios that are hard to build credible scandal-ridden drama around in this day and age. Not even Kenneth McLeish’s softening of some of the harder edges of this relationship showdown, or presenting (as happened in Tartuffe) the class distinctions accessibly by delivering the dialogue here in an essentially British tone and manner, can mask the dated moments. But Strindberg’s genius is his focus on panic, lust and other irrational behaviors. The abrasive attitudes seem believable because of the vulnerable, unsteady, jousting that goes on. The characters prod and provoke and intentionally outrage each other. Bannows understands that, as the director, physically some of the exchanges to the point where Julie spends a good amount of time on her knees atop a large wooden table as her servant lover Jean dashes back and forth about the kitchen like the caged animal he has become.

Ceci Fernandez, whom I’ve admired in a number of shows she’s done at the Yale School of Drama, is an ideal actress for the demanding role of Miss Julie. Fernandez carries herself like a lady. Silks drape well over her curves. Her elaborate hairstyle stays immaculately in place until it’s time to get it mussed. But when she breaks, as Bob Dylan once said, it’s like a little girl. Fernandez’s sparkling eyes betray not just her superior-born vanity but an inner earthiness which exactly fits Strindberg’s descriptions of Julie. As her paramour Jean, Mitchell Winter is convincing as a manservant who’s proud of doing his job well yet itching for the chance to be in charge of other people for a change. The third member of the cast, Celeste Arias, has a slight, frail figure, used to great advantage when she turns out to be the strongest and most level-headed character by the play’s end.

Miss Julie is such a straightforward, economically told story that there are certain parts of it which stand out by how directors and designers choose to interpret them. Is the interlude during which Julie and Jean go onstage to quell their passions seen as festive or fraught? Is their discussion deeply personal or more theoretical? How important is Julie’s pet bird? Chris Bannow makes strong clear choices throughout this production, and his vision is well served by a powerful and most capable cast.

This Miss Julie doesn’t need chilling before serving. It’s works nicely a balmy summer basement.

The Long Wharf Theatre has a tour of Smokey Joe’s Café coming July 10-28. Pretty active summer for the Long Wharf, which just hosted a tour of the McCourt Bros. two-hander A Couple of Blaguards (while the mainstage season was concluding with Clybourne Park), has their annual gala—anchored by a performance of Mandy Patinkin’s one-man show Dress Casual—on June 7, and is once again being used as a key stage in the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, for the East Coast premiere of the new musical theater piece Stuck Elevator by New Haven-based playwright Aaron Jafferis and composer Byron Au Yong.

The Smokey Joe’s Café tour is produced by Supreme Talent International which seems to specialize in jazz, jive and gospel musicals. Currently on the company’s roster: Sophisticated Ladies, Ain’t Misbehavin’, Your Arms Too Short to Box With God, Five Guys Named Moe and this Lieber-Stoller revue, not to mention “Anomal—World’s Greatest Mentalist Ehud Segev,” the girl-group pastiche Broadway Dolls and various tribute acts, some of which (such as Bruce in the U.S.A.) have played at the Downtown Cabaret Theatre in Bridgeport.

If you read the autobiography of Jerry Lieber (who died just a couple of years ago at the age of 78), Smokey Joe’s Café comes off a sort of validation for decades during which Lieber and his songwriting partner Mike Stoller sought to be taken seriously in legit theater circles. The men were of course revered as pioneers of rock & roll, having written “Hound Dog” and “Stand by Me” and hundreds of other hits. They’d kept up with pop trends admirably, shifting from roots-rock to the girl-group harmonies of the Shangri-Las and the morbid Peggy Lee hit “Is That All There Is?” But they’d had several disappointments in the theater realm, including a musical adaptation of Mordechai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz which was thwarted by a weak book.

Smokey Joe’s Café, an ensemble revue strung together from dozens of Lieber/Stoller hits, was a major international success. Though it’s not so different in format, it seems to have been much more influential than Ain’t Misbehavin’ in inspiring other pop “jukebox” shows. It’s become a community theater staple and it seems like there never hasn’t been a tour out there. With the deaths of many of the performers who made these songs famous, it’s nice to have a place where audiences can still seek out these tunes live.

Smokey Joe’s Café plays at the Long Wharf Theatre July 10-28. Tickets are $59. Performances are Wednesday through Sunday at 8 p.m. with 3 p.m. matinees on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, and extra evening shows at 8 p.m. Sunday July 14 and Tuesday July 16. 222 Sargent Drive, New Haven. (203) 787-4282, https://www.longwharf.org

Lindbergh’s Flight

By Bertolt Brecht. Presented by Kate Attwell, Gabe Levey, Brenda Meaney and Mitchell Winter.

Through March 16 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., New Haven. Remaining performances are Friday and Saturday at 8 & 11 p.m. $15, $10 students. (203) 432-1566. http://yalecabaret.org

In its time, Lindbergh’s Flight marked a turning point in the theater writings of Bertolt Brecht. It was in some ways the start of the “didactic” style which colored his works for decades afterwards. It was a contemporary “learning play, or Lehrstück, based on a major news event of the time in which it was written: Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 flight across the Atlantic Ocean. The script was presented on radio in 1929, then revised in concert form as a cantata for orchestra, chorus and solo vocalists. It got good reviews and further productions, and Brecht himself thought enough of it to continue revising and rethinking the piece decades after its premiere.

The essential plot concerns the flyer of an airplane describing his preparations for flying acorss the Atlantic Ocean, while some rivals mention their attempt to make the trip first and thwart the flier of his glory. The play’s themes, which extend to the very medium in which it was first broadcast, involve technological innovation and international one-upmanship.

The Yale Cabaret is refueling Lindbergh’s Flight this weekend, in a fresh reinterpretation by Kate Attwell, Gabe Levey, Brenda Meaney and Mitchell Winter. It opened last night and runs through Saturday March 16. (I’ll be seeing the show late tonight, and posting a review here tomorrow.)

Levey, Meaney and Winter are students in the acting program at the Yale School of Drama. Attwell is in the school’s dramaturgy program but has distinguished herself at the Cabaret as a director, most recently with her triumphant production of Athol Fugard’s The Island. For this production, they’re eschewing titles like “director” and pushing for an ensemble, collaborative outlook.

The team all worked on one of the YSD’s in-class “Drama 50” shows together, and “wanted to work together again in the style we’d created.”

Did that style happen to be didactic mid-20^th century German radio opera? Not at all, but when the students went looking for interesting scripts to apply their newfound communal experimental skills to, “somehow the idea of Brecht came up,” Attwell says. I interviewed her and Levey earlier this month at Book Trader about the project. “We started looking at the lesser-known ones, and stumbled across Lindbergh.

“Brecht went through this period of writing short plays about people who are performing the plays while learning about their subjects.” This so-called “learning play for children,” the first in a subset of Brecht’s work dubbed “didactic plays,” was a good fit for their own social/political/theatrical explorations.

With some scripts, when you hear they’ve been reworked from top to bottom, you worry. With Brecht, who wrote about very topical subjects happening in a very specific place in a very specific style at a very specific time of history for a very specific audience, some measure of reinterpretation is always required. “It’s safe to say,” says Gabe Levey, “that we’ve been irreverently reverent.” They were encouraged in their rewrites by the fact that Brecht himself reworked his script a number of times to keep up with changing views about its purported hero and the culture’s sense of how the world could be brought closer together—or dominated—by the power of radio waves and transcontinental transportation. “The number of rewrites that this poor little play went through…,” Levey sympathizes, regarding Brecht’s original manuscript. “And yet there’s only one published text,” of 19 pages in length.

Another key element which changed over time was how Lindbergh is portrayed in Lindbergh’s Flight. At first, Brecht made him a stand-alone character. Then, as world events exposed the aviator’s Nazi-sympathizer side, Brecht revised the play so that the title character’s voice and image  were diluted and no longer represented by a single actor. (The title of the play was also changed from Der Lindberghflug to Der Ozeanflug.) “We have been grappling with the narrative of Lindbergh,” Attwell says. “The history of the play is that it goes from one Lindbergh to eight Lindberghs to no Lindbergh at all.” In this rendition, the character is played by “one person, sometimes, most of the time.”

Another wrinkle, adds Levey: “We’re not opera singers. We don’t even know if we could get the rights to perform the Weill music.” During Brecht’s work on it, the play’s musical score by Paul Hindemith (whose outstanding career as a composer and music theorist included decades of influential teachings at Yale) was augmented with tunes by Brecht’s frequent collaborator Kurt Weill. None of this music figures in the Yale Cabaret production.

Oh, and… “[Lindbergh’s Flight] is not even meant to be performed.” Live onstage, that is. It’s a opera written for radio. “The text is lyrics, not dialogue. There are problems we’ve had to solve dramatically.” Adds Levey, with Brechtian portentousness: “All of our devising and aesthetics, all our history, are coming to bear on this.” Some of the solutions come through sound design, dance movement and original music. Cast-wise, the show’s cast and chorus has been modified to a four-person ensemble. “We thought about video, but left that behind.” The show isn’t overtly technical, Levey explains: “All the technical elements you can see in what’s actually being done onstage. It’s like ‘Welcome to our room.’”

Ultimately, though, the show seeks to honor Brecht’s intention, not ironicize or overrun them. As Gabe Levey puts it, choosing his words carefully, “When Lindbergh’s Flight is performed within our show, it is Lindbergh’s Flight.”

That carefully parsed explanation is followed by this: “But Lindbergh’s Flight does not a full theater performance make.” The show as written clocks in at well under half an hour, and even Brecht paired it with another piece to make for a fuller evening. In this case, the length and the nature of the piece invite the addition of other presentational elements which can acclimate it to modern times and performance methods.

Some of the alterations in tone and concept come from the very act of trying to stage the piece at the Cabaret. “There’s inherent humor in it,” Levey says, because of the operatic lyrics, transformed, with fairly with fairly didactic content. There’s that idealism. Brecht writes this in the 1920s. Ninety years later, the ideas are pretty complicated now. We wanted to figure out how to make this work now. How can we be fun and open and communicating with the audience?” They found some understanding just in the attempt. Levey and Attwell quote one of their collaborators and castmates on the project, Brenda Meaney, as saying, “Being in a room with strangers, being totally vulnerable, is a way of being that is totally a political statement.” To which Levey adds, “We’re tickling the idea of actors acting.” The process of creating the show—a fairly lengthy process for a Cabaret project, due to its collaborative nature—was kept upbeat and exploratory. When approaching designers, Attwell and Levey say, they weren’t looking for technicians but for “playmates” whose imagination could help further the collective vision.

Levey has never done a Brecht show before, as an actor or otherwise. Levey was involved in a production of Caucasian Chalk Circle when she was younger. Brecht does get intensively studied at the Yale School of Drama, however, so the Lindbergh’s Flight team feels they’re on firm footing (or walking in the clouds, if you’d rather).

Astute Cabaret-goers can relate the themes of disorienting air travel and finding one’s place in the universe found in Lindbergh’s Flight to original works by Attwell and Levey which played at the Cabaret space in the 2011-12 season. hundredyearspacetrip, a collaborative piece created by the We Buy Gold theater troupe which Attwell co-founded with Nina Segal, was a meditation on life paths not taken, wrapped up in a parable of space exploration. Levey’s solo show Brainsongs, or the play about the dinosaur farm, was, in part, about slowing the world down so it can be appreciated and managed. Both shows blended high comedy with abstractions. Both examined technology, with overt placement of microphones or lip-synching interludes.

The team’s special relationship as classmates and scholars and artists promises a thought-provoking reworking of a rarely-seen yet undeniably important Brecht one-act.

“We’re really excited to put it out there,” Gabe Levey exults. “And meet this weirdo text head-on.”

The International Festival of Arts & Ideas announced three of the “cornerstone” events of its 2013 season today. A&I has been intriguingly inconsistent over the years in how it ballyhoos its big events. This year, apparently, they’re going with press-release teasers. This one quotes the festival’s Executive Director Mary Lou Aleskie as saying “We are so excited about these events that we just couldn’t wait until the spring to share them.” All right then .

One of the three, in any case, was leaked months ago by Frank Rizzo in the Hartford Courant, with confirmation from the festival. It’s a new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream created by Handspring Puppet Company (the troupe that brought you the international hit stage version of The War Horse) in collaboration with The Bristol Old Vic theater, which premieres the show in February/March. Before it hits New Haven, the show (directed by War Horse co-director Tom Morris) will play another major American arts festival, Spoleto, in May. Arts & Ideas will have it for 12 performances, June 15-23, beginning on the opening weekend of the festival.

Arts & Ideas has commissioned a new piece from South Indian Kuychipudi dancer Shantala Shivalingappa. It’s in a great tradition of A&I offerings which mingle classical performance styles of other countries with American influences. According to the press release, “The piece will explore Shivalingappa’s wide-ranging influences as a classical Indian dancer working in the West, from her Kuchipudi traditions to experiences working with a wide range of contemporary artists.  The performance will include live music from four Indian musicians.” (That “wide range” of collaborators, by the way, included Pina Bausch.) The June 26-28 performances at Co-op High School will mark the U.S. premiere of this “new Kuchipudi solo.”

The third of the three early-announced events concerns one of the great gifts the festival provides every year: free high-class concerts on New Haven Green. One of the few ways A&I could outdo one of last year’s big outdoor shows, the Bang on a Can spin-off Asphalt Orchestra—not to mention Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project the year before— in terms of neo-classical street cred, is to book Kronos Quartet. Which they have, for the middle weekend of the festival. The quartet, celebrating its 40^th anniversary and as avant as ever, is bringing along Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man (who, as it happens, also frequently plays out with the Silk Road Project). The line-up of the Kronos Quartet has changed over the years but the current one—founding violinist David Harrington, violinist John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Jeffrey Zeigler—has been the same since 2005. (In 40 years, there have been only ten members of the Kronos Quartet, an excellent record.)

More Arts & Ideas announcements are due in springtime. If you’re wondering how the festival will overcome the state budget cuts which have already removed tens of thousands from A&I’s coffers (with more likely to come when the state legislature dickers about more cuts soon), well, that’s next year’s problem, on account of Arts & Ideas summer schedule and years of planning and development. These acts are coming this summer. Savor them.

Kathleen Turner in the new version of The Killing of Sister George, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher from the 1964 script by Frank Marcus. Through Dec. 23 at the Long Wharf Theatre.

The Killing of Sister George ends this week at the Long Wharf Theatre. It’s a noble attempt to reinvigorate and restage a well-known, if misunderstood comedy from the turbulent 1960s London theater era. The play, by a British playwright of German/Jewish parentage known for his stageworthy culture-hopping adaptations of works by Schnitzler, Molnar, Hauptmann and Kaiser, has now itself been adapted for new audiences. The Killing of Sister, about a self-involved actress, her submissive young flatmate/lover and her alternately empathetic and no-nonsense employer, retains its 1960s sensibilities but creates its own pace and mood, geared to the still-gravelly voice and aggression of this production’s star and director Kathleen Turner

But Turner’s not the only one twisting the dials on this not-as-dark-as-you-think comedy’s recalibrator.

While the show was still in previews, I had a phone interview with Jeffrey Hatcher, whom Turner had enlisted to revise Frank Marcus’ original script. I’ve long admired Hatcher for his uncanny theatrical instincts. Whether with his original plays or with his many adaptations of classic works from other media, Jeffrey Hatcher finds intriguing new structures and tones in his projects that make them naturally playable. His works are embraced by college theaters (I fondly recall a Yale Summer Cabaret production of his three-actor Turn of the Screw), mainstream community theaters (he did the stage version of Tuesday With Morrie), and especially regional theaters. When I ask him which theaters he can comfortably call up and offer new projects to, he reels off half a dozen without pause—the Guthrie, Arizona Theatre Company, Cincinatti Playhouse, Cleveland Playhouse, Milwaukee Rep and several others.

A Hatcher script was done at Long Wharf just a couple of seasons ago; the framing scenes he provided for the biomusical Ella, strengthening a production which had begun at Hartford’s TheaterWorks with a different script but a similar set of Ella Fitzgerald song standards. Hatcher downplays his Ella efforts as “expectations which I hope were met,” and says it was difficult to build a convincing first-person drama around “somebody who was so famously reticent.”

The guy who got Jeffrey Hatcher to start adapting works of other writers was none other than Greg Leaming, the former Literary Manager at Hartford Stage and the Director of Artistic Programming at the Long Wharf Theater, who leapt into the breech as the Long Wharf’s Acting Artistic Director for a season when Doug Hughes abruptly left in 2001.

“It was Turn of the Screw,” Hatcher says. “I hadn’t done adaptations before, and it was not a straight-up adaptation.” He’s since done many, none of them straight-up, including a Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde in which four members of the six-person cast gets a chance to be Hyde, stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins, Herman Melville’s novel Pierre and reworkings of plays by Shaw, Goldoni and Anouilh.

The new version of The Killing of Sister George was done with the blessing of the late Frank Marcus’ family and estate. Unlike, say, Grease or The Graduate, this is not a stage revision beholden to a well-liked film adaptation of the source material. The 1968 movie version of The Killing of Sister George is notorious for its wrongheaded  emphasis on swinging London environments and sexual themes which in Marcus’ play are more atmospheric and not to overwhelm the plot and characters. But the play itself had developed its own problems. “There was a London revival,” Hatcher explains, “and it didn’t do well.” That was just in 2011, at the Arts Theatre in the West End, starring Meera Syal and directed by Iqbal Khan. “It has had American revivals, but they’ve tended to be further off the beaten track. Nothing with the status of Long Wharf, or with New York aspirations.

“I’d never seen it onstage. I read it a long time ago—I have that old paperback copy with the red lipstick on the cover. The movie is famously disliked by everyone—the performances are all outsized, except Coral Browne. You can’t imagine Beryl Reid playing it that way onstage.”

Hatcher joined this attempt to realign the play after director/star Kathleen Turner had already held a reading of it and realized its shortcomings. “I thought the original energy came from the ‘Oh, my god, they’re lesbians’ element,” Hatcher ruminates. “It struck me that it might need a little more plot. There wasn’t not any shock value you could use to gin it up anymore.

To that end, the adapter says, “we ramped up the radio element.” The plot of  Killing of Sister George, in which a beloved actress is abruptly kicked off a popular radio show, relates to a real-life broadcast scandal when the BBC did away with a key character, Grace Archer, on its popular soap opera The Archers, reportedly to jack up ratings and withstand competition from the just-launching ITV network. The situation by which Sister George is “killed” in The Killing of Sister George is somewhat different, and more entertaining: the actress playing the good-hearted character in the show-within-a-play, June, is a foul-mouthed loose cannon and a mountain of insecurities, whose public behavior has earned her disciplinary action from an executive at Broadcasting House, the BBC Radio headquarters. Hatcher compares it to Maclean Stevenson leaving M*A*S*H and the producers having his character die in a helicopter crash to make clear that he was never being invited back on the show, or Charlie Sheen’s imbroglio with Two and a Half Men.

Hatcher feels that Frank Marcus’ original script telegraphed the play’s ending way in advance, so his version maintains some suspense. Ultimately, he feels he had a comfortable amount of leeway in revising The Killing of Sister George because while the title is familiar enough to provoke interest, it’s really “something the audience kind of thinks they know.” But they don’t know it so well that they’ll notice Hatcher’s hand in it. He likens it to an adaptation he did of  The Inspector General, where he knows which are his jokes and which are Gogol’s, but most viewers won’t.

The success of The Killing of Sister at Long Wharf ultimately rises or falls due to the work of its director/star Kathleen Turner, who clearly sees the role of June/George as a grand stage character around which the rest of the show revolves. But even if it’s about explosions and chewed scenery, somebody’s got to be minding the details, and you’re in good hands if that person is Jeffrey Hatcher.

The Killing of Sister George continues at the Long Wharf Theatre through December 23. 222 Sargent Dr., New Haven. (203) 787-4282, http://www.longwharf.org/

But there are other directorial prophesies to ponder. For instance, there are only six actors in Ting’s version, versus more than 20 in the most traditional stagings of Shakespeare’s.

For a few answers (and without wanting to indulge in any egregious spoilers), I had coffee at Book Trader with Barret O’Brien. He’s the only member of the cast who has two distinct characters—MacDuff and Banquo. The other players take multiple parts—porter, witches, whatever—and roll them into a single seamless character. The most consistent character is Macbeth, played by McKinley Belcher III, a recent graduate of the University of Southern California MFA Acting program whose credits include Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird at Bay Street Theatre and, notably, Dale Jackson in an another play about Vietnam vets, Tom Cole’s Medal of Honor Rag (at Shadowland Theatre in the Catskills).

Barret O'Brien (center, in red) as Dionysus bathing Pentheus in wine and honey in Michael Donahue's 2007 Yale Summer Cabaret production of Euripides' The Bacchae. Photo by Sarah Scranton.

I was a fan of O’Brien’s work throughout his time at the Yale School of Drama, between 2007 and 2009. So, apparently, was Eric Ting. “I think he had seen me in The Bacchae,” the actor recalls. O’Brien played Dionysus in Michael Donahue’s Yale Summer Cabaret production of the Euripides tragedy, and later reteamed with Donahue to play the title role in Ibsen’s epic Peer Gynt. “We met socially after he’d seen my work,” O’Brien says. “We started talking about working together sometime. When the workshop for this came along, he asked me.”

Since he last spent time in New Haven, O’Brien has co-starred in a national tour of Ken Ludwig’s crossdressing farce Leading Ladies (produced by Montana Rep), had one of his own plays (Eating Round the Bruise) produced by the Annex Theatre in Seattle, and spent serious time writing his first novel. He also married his YSD classmate Erica Sullivan, known to Long Wharf subscribers as the title canine in Eric Ting’s production of A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia, and to Yale Rep subscribers as Hester in Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance, directed by James Bundy. The couple has a nine-month-old daughter. Following O’Brien’s Long Wharf stint, Sullivan is scheduled to play Rosalind in As You Like It for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Barret O'Brien (in yellow gown) as Jack in the Montana Rep tour of Ken Ludwig's The Leading Ladies.

Macbeth 1969 is the first Shakespeare play that Barret O’Brien has done since his Yale days, where verse drama takes up an entire year of the acting program.

There were a lot of logistics to work out in paring down Shakespeare’s Macbeth to a modern framework and such a small cast. “It’s like Eric took the all the text and cut and pasted it like a collage. It’s so much more complicated, getting the impressions straight in our minds,” O’Brien says. Ting, he explains, “is still changing things now, but the workshops were so major, and this time we just have the month of rehearsals. We’re able to give our input, but not like in the workshops. The script is really in a solid place. It’s like, let’s make the text we have work now.”

The actors have responded differently, and complementarily, to the demands of the adaptation. “Shirine [Babb, who assumes Lady Macbeth] has a strong classical background. She’s the ‘line guard’—it’s good to have someone in the room who’s a purist, who’s true to the text.”

Then there’s question of whether the Shakespeare plot, involving murders, witchcraft, disturbing visions and complex battle strategies, are happening in the reality of this production’s snowed-in hospital patients and nurses, or whether they’re perchance dreams.

“From my vantage point,” O’Brien says of his characters, “the things that are occurring are occurring. It’s a very realist design. It’s like a Middle American hospital in lockdown has appeared over there on Sargent Drive. There’s no musical score.”

“Shakespeare wrote this play before there were words like ‘shellshocked,’ but he understood what that meant. We’re not shying away from blood onstage. There are hints of a horror movie in this—people trapped in a hospital, snowed in, with a murder happening. It’s entertaining, not knowing what’s going to happen.”

At the same time, O’Brien insists the production is being very careful to uphold a heroic image of the American war veteran and not cheapen or stereotype it for the sake of fictional drama. “Not having served myself,” O’Brien says, “I feel a responsibility to not be glib. Theater can be glorious fun to do. To take on big topics can be very important, but also dangerous. It would be easier for us to just do the play Macbeth and set it vaguely in the ‘60s.”

There is a real-life veteran elsewhere in the cast—George Kulp, who’s playing the King role from Shakespeare’s play, rethought here as a prominent politician.

One of O’Brien’s roles, Banquo, is portrayed as a war veteran, as is his fellow soldier Macbeth. In Macbeth 1969, Banquo has “served in a firefight,” O’Brien says. “He’s suffered burns. He’s as deeply scarred physically as Macbeth is emotionally.” Macduff on the other hand, is portrayed as “not military at all. He’s a draft dodger.”

“This is a war play,” the actor concludes, “but we are trying to avoid making a statement about the war itself. If we’re making any statement, it’s that with war there are not innocents. We’re trying to reflect what Shakespeare wrote about veterans coming back from the war, and bring those elements to the forefront.”

Macbeth 1969 runs Jan. 18 through Feb. 12 at the Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Dr., New Haven.