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.”

Just a decade ago in Nepal, a crown prince (presumably miffed at his mother’ s opinion of his fiancee) slew both his parents and most of the rest of the royal family, then finished the job by shooting himself. The suicide was handled more sloppily than the murders, placing the terrorist prince in a three-day coma before he died—during which time he was duly sworn in as king of Nepal.
This incredible real- life tragedy, and its attendant unbelievable example of how far a country will go to uphold a monarchy, seems organic grist for a frenzied political theater piece along the lines of Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Yet Rey Planta is more like one of the measured, text-driven monologues of Fo’s wife Franca Rame.
Manuela Infante’s perversely reserved, calmy provocative play is receiving an overdue US premiere at the Yale Cabaret in a brand new translation by Yale school of Drama dramaturgy student Alexandra Ripp. The staging by Michael Place is so decidedly anti-sensational that it risks being static and sterile. The glory of the translation, direction, performances and design are that they keep your eyes attracted to a show where the leading performer seldom does more than quiver.

The piece is played out as if the King-in-a-coma was on exhibition in an art gallery. A security guard sits in a corner reading the newspaper and occasionally wanders through the gallery, and a cleaning woman also makes an appearance, but that’s the entirety of the action. — is front and center onstage, but he doesn’t go out of body and start animatedly narrating the circumstances of his demise, or flashing back to livelier times, la Sunset Boulevard. He doesn’t talk. He stares deadly ahead, sometimes pitches forward, drools a little. As carefully modulated by Robert Grant, none of this coma composure is overdone or in poor taste; it fits the calm and elegant art gallery backdrop.
While his body rests, the King’s mind is active, alert and extremely loquacious. His articulate, philosophical, uncommonly self-reflective and contemplative expressions are voiced through an offstage microphone by the unseen Monique Bernadatte. Last week, Bernadette was the largely mute yet physically vital presence in Alexandru Mihail’s Cabaret adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. She’s really got this voice/body disconnect thing down. Her interpretation of “The King’s Thought” is smooth, even-tempered, unflappable yet still passionate and resonant and rhythmic and musical, like something out of a Robert Ashley opera.

Manuela Infante is skillful at articulating the social changes of Nepal and the personal turmoil of its out-of-touch rulers. The real-life story of the country had a happy aftermath—the machinations of the man who eventually took power (the uncle of the young coma-king portrayed in Rey Planta) led to a people’s uprising which dethroned the monarch and gave way to a new democratic system of government. This play, first presented in 2006, doesn’t go there. It’s more of a reflection on how bad things had become. The fact that they’re better now seems inevitable.

While you know where the playwright’s sympathies lie, this is not a polemic. It’s a portrait of a vulnerable human whose family oversaw a vulnerable country.
Yet while keeping the tone reserved and formal, Rey Planta is nonetheless able to make royalty seem ridiculous. The Cabaret production captures all the subtleties of Infante’s carefully wrought monologue. Robert Grant looks both laughable and pitiable in his tall red scraggly crown. He is a portrait out of place with the others on the wall, yet his is by far the most fascinating.

I’m really sorry that the Yale Cabaret didn’t have photos of this immaculate, beautifully composed production that I could share with you. Given the tight, shallow confines of the stage (necessary to validate the art-gallery conceit), the clarity of Glenn Isaacs projection design and the (uncredited) lighting design adds depth, light, grandeur and layers of additional meaning to this spare, single-voiced script. The show can be slowgoing to be sure, but they couldn’t have dressed this up any finer if they were doing it in a Nepalese castle. The challenges of this unusually structured and visualized piece are clear, and just as clearly the Cabaret is up to that challenge.
In this week of international protests and open questioning of ruling capitalist powers, Rey Planta shows us that there’s more to revolution than shooting and shouting.

Laura Gragtmans (the nurse) and Monique Bernadette (the actress) in the Yale Cabaret's stage adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's Persona. Photo by Yi Zhao.

Persona

Through Oct. 8 at the Yale Cabaret. Based on the film by Ingmar Bergman. Director: Alexandru Mihail. Dramaturg: Emily Reilly. Set: Kristen Robinson. Projections: Paul Lieber. Assistant ProjectionsL: Connor Lynch. Lights: Masha Tsimring. Sound: Solomon Weisbard. Sound Design Advisor: Ken Goodwin. Costumes: Seth Bodie. Stage Manager: Sonja Thorson. Technical Director: Jackie Young. Producer: Michael Bateman. Cast: Monique Bernadette (Elizabeth Vogler), Laura Gragtmans (Sister Alma), Emily Reilly (The Doctor), Lucas Dixon (Mr. Vogler), Carmen Zilles, (Radio Actress), Xander Martin (The Child).

The Yale Repertory Theatre did a new stage version of Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata last spring, directed by Robert Woodruff. Now the Yale Cabaret’s adapted Bergman’s Persona. There is no purpose in comparing these two shows, except to scream this loudly from the fjords: MORE PEOPLE SHOULD BE ADAPTING INGMAR BERGMAN’S FILMS AS PLAYS! These are sturdy, well-structured scripts which invite fresh interpretations. Woody Allen should stop trying to rewrite Bergman and just revive his scripts. There should be Bergman Theater Festivals and competing Bergman translations and Bergman scene studies. The writer/director’s brilliance as a filmmaker, especially with works such as the exquisitely edited and close-upped Persona, can distract you from the basic glories of his dialogue and plotting.

Alexandru Mihail, who laid an insane table for Chekhov’s The Wedding Reception at the Cabaret last year, goes still and immaculate for this gently told yet not at all tender tale of female bonding, one-sided confession and stressed solipsism. As Monique, an actress who’s had a sort of breakdown that renders her silent, a watcher instead the watched, Monique Bernadette is tended by Alma (Laura Gragtmans), who doesn’t realize she’s being drawn in to a drama

The effect of Bergman’s words, on a wide open stage that spans the length of the Cabaret space, played by humans who touch and spit at each other without distancing camera angles, is mesmerizing, lulling, transfixing. The concept of remoteness is handled with translucent curtains and, well, projection screens, but in a subtle manner that suits a mood also imbued by ’60s pop music, home movies and sensitive lighting. Supporting characters have weight and reality. Lines are cleanly spoken. Every nuance of Monique’s silence is profound. No supertitles.

Bergman being Bergman, wherever he lies.

http://blog.amandapalmer.net

They even used the School of Drama’s recording studio at 205 Park Street to record a cover of the Nirvana song “Polly” for a Nevermind tribute album included with the August issue of SPIN magazine. You can download that album here:

http://www.spin.com/articles/free-album-spin-tribute-nirvanas-nevermind

Long before Chad Raines and Michael McQuilken came to campus, the Yale Cabaret had a notable hit with a blending of Chekhov’s early play Ivanov and the Nirvana saga, cleverly titled Nirvanov.
Everything old is new again. And Chad Raines is still one of the simple pleasures of our existence.

hundredyearspaceship last weekend at Yale Cabaret. Photo by Paul Lieber.

hundredyearspacetrip. Closed; played Sept. 22-24 at the Yale Cabaret. Created by We Buy Gold and the acting ensemble. Performed by Kate Attwell, Ryan Davis, Brenda Meaney, Nina Segal and others. Lighting design by Yi Zhao. Sound design by Brandon Curtis.

Yale Cabaret productions are shortlived by design—six performances in three days, and that’s it. It’s my intention to review this season’s offerings on this site so that they’re still up to see for a performance or two when the review runs. With a bunch of other openings around town, that wasn’t possible last week. I didn’t get to hundredyearspacetrip until its final performance on Saturday night at 11 p.m.
…which turned out to be appropriate, since hundredyearspacetrip was a musing on missed opportunities, procrastination, delayed gratification, apathy and the wish to evade making concrete life choices.
These weren’t original themes to plumb—especially at the Yale Cabaret, where the students running the joint can be flummoxed with career options and encouragements, and confounded by conflicting desires.
There was something deep and special in how this five-person cast dealt visually and spatially with the feelings of inactivity, overwhelmth and complacence.
Two female astronauts sat at one side of the stage, zoning out. Two other young women, in old-fashioned dresses and Katherine Hepburn attitudes, pranced and flung envelopes around a kitchen table, center stage but pushed back a ways. In another corner, a postman climbed a stepladder to a hanging microphone into which he recited sheets of correspondence he tucked up behind pipes in the ceiling.
The show began with long bursts of silence as the performers settled into their repetitive duties. Then the play got increasingly textual, yet still with a presentational pomp, as the players balanced and splayed and reclined themselves. As they got uncomfortable, they expressed frustrations and hesitations and justifications and regrets.
The odd, angular staging evolved into more naturalistic expression, and hundredyearspacetrip ended with reading of pre-show surveys about what audience members decided they would remember from that day. Conceptually, this was not far different from the finale of The Naked Gun, which Austin, Texas experimentalists Rude Mechs brought to Yale last year. The exercise had the same comforting effect of a shared vibe between audience and performers, that we were all listening to each other.
Space exploration was a convenient metaphor for both the at-sea nature of the insecure characters and the presumed pettiness of some of their concerns. There were astrological factoids, night-sky projections and an underscoring of pop songs such as Elton John’s “Rocket Man” (though Harry Nilsson’s “Spaceman” or Bowie’s “Space Odyssey” might’ve fit the mood better).
Hundredyearspacetrip was long for a Cabaret endeavor, but in a lovely, lulling, numbing way, darkly lit and seldom jarring. It was unpredictable right up to the finish, and also gave the useful sense of unfinished business.
No easy answers here, but a convincing depiction of quiet mental anguish, with plenty of good humor and charm. I was smitten by the lackadaisical expression of one of the two astronauts, Kate Attwell. She and her fellow space traveler, Nina Segal, are part of the troupe We Buy Gold, which are credited with a “presented by” credit on this production. Attwell’s manner paced the whole show for me. She and Segal were fun to watch even when they were playing bored and adrift. That’s a neat trick, and one worth getting out of the house for.

Kate Attwell (left) and Nina Segal of We Buy Gold space out in their hundredyearspaceship at Yale Cabaret. Photo by Paul Lieber.

No Yale Cabaret show this weekend. The remaining six shows of this semester have been finalized:

• Oct. 6-8: The previously announced adaptation of Bergman’s Persona, directed by Alexandru Mihail.
• Oct. 13-15: Chilean playwright Manuel Infante’s drama Rey Planta.
• Oct. 20-22: “Creation 2011,” which Cabaret co-Artistic Director Sunder Ganglani described to Saturday audience as “music and embarrassment.”
• Oct. 27-29: Howard Brenton’s Christie in Love, about 1940s British serial killer John Christie, directed by Katie McDerr.
• Nov. 3-5: Paul and Tim Fight a Bear.
• Nov. 10-12: Street Scenes
• Nov. 17-19: Wallace Shawn’s controversial (at least in 1970s London) and sexually charged A Thought in Three Parts.

Some of those titles need more explaining. I’m sitting down with Cabaret team later this week for just such an overview. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, you can arrange reservations, etc. here.

Slaves

Through Sept. 24 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., New Haven. (203) 432-1566.

By Sunder Ganglani. Performed by Chris Henry, Jillian Taylor and Adina Verson.

I wrestle constantly with the changing nature and definition of modern theater performance. So does the Yale Cabaret. Whatever you make of Slaves, SunderGanglani’s season-opening sensory soul-search bodes well for an extension of the genre-bending experiments the Cabaret arranged last year.

You’re going to hear the dreaded i-word from the haters about this show, but I’d argue that accusations of Indulgence are unwarranted. This is a carefully structured, well-argued dialogue in which the audience is often a key, if unwilling participant. There are also long periods of meditative silence, which a lot of theatergoers generally can’t handle. I think it works here, especially in the ethereal calm of the Cabaret’s 11 p.m. late slot.

There are declamatory sensibilities in common with Peter Handke’s classic Offending the Audience, except that Slaves is the attitudinal opposite of Handke’s openly antagonistic piece. You could call this one Befriending the Audience. We are graciously and leisurely indoctrinated into the casual values of the piece by actors Chris Henry and Adina Verson, who sit calmly in folding chairs front of curtain (A curtain! At the Cabaret!), comfortable despite the noticeable bulges in the backs of their shirts, leading us through a harmless set of casual exchanges and insecure ideas. Those back bulges spout later on.

Slaves is a neat blend of technical precision and raw languor. That long curtain blocks sightlines from the Cabaret’s built-in sound booth, so the tech staff sits instead a long table stageside. The play’s unpredictability is countered by its rituals, just as its preparedness is surrounded by casualness.

It’s a play of pronouncements—“I am a power point, so you don’t need one.” A charting of powers and gifts. Then it’s a play of music and dancing. Then you pay for your meal and glide home under the stars.

Sept. 15-17: Slaves, a musical performance featuring three actors, “each of which is a slave to the other… put to work in the theater, for us…” The two female performers, Adina Verson and Jillian Taylor, both did exceptional work in the Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival season that just ended—Verson as Ariel in the Tempest and Rosalind in As You Like It, Taylor in the title role of the history-play conglomeration Rose-Mark’d Queen. Their Slaves castmate Chris Henry distinguished himself in the ensemble cast of Romeo & Juliet at the Yale Rep last season. All three were in the original musical Jib at the Yale School of Drama last winter. Slaves’ script and music are by Yale dramaturgy student Sunder Gangliani, with “additional text” by Paul Celan and Ariana Reines” and “additional music” by Ben Sharony.

Sept. 22-24: HUNDREDYEARSPACETRIP. Another original, form-bending piece, this one devised for players who create “an uncompromising piece of entertainment that investigates the connections between human ambition in art, in science and in family.” Co-creators Kate Attwell (like Slaves’ Sunder Gangliani, a YSD dramaturgy student) and Nina Segal work under the collective title We Buy Gold, joined by Brenda Meaney (Caliban in the Summer Cabaret’s Tempest, various Dukes in As You Like It) and Ryan Davis.

Following the century-long rocket voyage, there’s a weekend off. Then…

Oct. 6-8: Persona, a fresh adaptation of the Ingmar Bergman film by Alexandru Mihail. Mihail was responsible for the extraordinary environmental/interactive Cabaret production of Chekhov’s The Wedding last spring, and is slated slated to direct Chekhov’s The Seagull as his thesis project at the Yale School of Drama next semester. Bergman’s Autumn Sonata, of course, was given a lavish stage reinterpretation at the end of the Yale Rep’s 2010-11 season by Robert Woodruff. Mihail was the Assistant Director for the new musica that opened that same Rep season, We Have Always Lived in the Castle.Persona, an extremely intimate, personality-morphing drama about a disabled actress and her caretaker, stars Laura Gragtmans, Monique Barbee, Lucas Dixon and Emily Reilly.

This is the 44th season of the Yale Cabaret, which began (in the same underground space where it still is now) during the Robert Brustein years of the School of Drama. Shows get five public performances Thursday at 8 p.m. and Friday & Saturday at 8 & 11 p.m. (plus a late Thursday one for classmates only). Food and drinks are served before shows. Details here.

April 1 4-16 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., New Haven. 8 & 11 p.m. Directed by Michael McQuilken and “created by artists from the Yale Schools of Music, Art and Drama.” Performed, designed and executed by Samuel Adams (bass), Sunder Gangliani (actor, viola), Yun-Chu Chiu (percussion), John Corkill (percussion), Marcus Henderson (actor), Adrian Knight (keyboards/composer/video), Michael McQuilken (percussion), Jennifer Harrison Newman (dancer/choreographer/co-producer), Lupita Nyong’o (actor), Palmer Hefferan (actor/sound design), Ian Rosenbaum (percussion), Adam Rosenblatt (percussion) and Jon Wu (actor), Lico Whitfield (co-producer), Alan Edwards (lighting design) and  Martha Burson (stage manager).

So this is how the 2010-11 Yale Cabaret season ends with a bang, a percussion-based multi-media concert conceived by Michael McQuilken, who brought you the Yale School of Drama rock drama Jib.

But I’ve gotta say, I’ll remember this Cabaret season for its whimpering sounds as well.

All Cabaret seasons are packed with surprises, but this one was notable for its meditative slant, its quiet spiritual moments. Its stated desire was to rethink the common definition of what constituted a Cabaret show, and by extension what “theater” was in general. I saw the majority of the fall offerings and only a few in the spring semester, so I certainly missed some key examples. But from what I saw, the most compelling experiments in this highly entertaining and enlightening season were probably the audience-interactive fairy-tale pastiche Crumbs (conceived and directed by Sonia Finley and Anne Seiwerath, back in early October) and the largely visual puppets-and-projections adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, with lots of pictures but retitled simply Dorian Gray (conceived and directed by Adam Rigg just over a week ago, April 7-9). The only  slightly more conventionally theatrical production of Chekhov’s The Wedding Reception—a bawdy and riotous sensurround experience in which the audience sat at the wedding table which the drunken partiers in the play danced upon—will live with me forever, almost as memorable as my own wedding.

The Perks—A Rite of Spring, which closes the 18-show 2010-11 Yale Cabaret season with its final two performances tonight (Saturday the 16^th), strives to be loose but not random. It has a theme—springtime reawakenings. It forges connections between varied artists from the Yale School of Music and Yale School of Art as well as the expected Yale School of Drama students, but creates a fluid format for them.

The tones, textures and beat come from places as likely as a full rock drum kit, vibraphones and rachets, and from such unaccustomed percussive climes as melting ice dripping through a grate into a metal washbucket, three giant Donnie Darko-esque rabbits doing a lengthy and complicated hang-banging routine, and a lively vibes/coconuts/rhythm-sticks trio which is simultaneously reminiscent of a Terry Riley composition and Ernie Kovacs’ Nairobi Trio. Wooden shoes are worn. Vegan spring vegetable soup is lovingly prepared. The final scene, a dizzying panorama of the sort of frantic visual images which might got through your head when confronted with a Yale Percussion Ensemble concert, nails this elaborate cohesion of visual art, music, theater and vibrant life. Rites of Spring attempts to illustrate a time of warmth, youth and hopefulness, and does it best by refusing to restrain it.

There’s much in the way of improvisation and variation and found sounds, but the specific musical works being played merit mention here for their inspirational qualities. I’ll be seeking out recordings of many of them, if they exist in that form:

“Mary’s Waltz” by Adrian Knight (performed here by its composer)

“Table Music” by Thierry de Mey

“Rebonds a” and “Rebonds b” by Iannis Xen

“Gavotte II” from J.S. Bach’s Fifth Cello Suite

“Hop 2” from Paul Lansky’s Three Moves for Marimba

and an except from “Dressur” b Mauricio Kagel

If you’re able to attend the final perfs tonight, make sure to spend time with the artworks on the walls and in the lobby, by Kit Yi (who’s stitched a rack full of fashion garments out of surgical masks), Costance Armellino, Abigail DeVille, Peter Moran, Nontsikeleleo Mutiti and Natalie Westbrook.

A spring sensory feast, The Perks reminds me of an old ‘80s/’90s Yale Cabaret tradition of filling in parts of the season with music concerts which were only lightly dramatized or otherwise specially conditioned for the space. But The Perks takes it to a whole new plateau. This is unmistakably a concert, but really avails itself of the considerable resources at the Cabaret disposal—not to mention other graduate schools at Yale—to expand consciousness, increase focus on the rhythms and rituals which fuel the music, and generally provide a knock-out night at the Cabaret.

The Yale Cabaret season’s over, but it will be echoing and reverberating for a long time to come.