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.

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.

Marcus Henderson, Jillian Taylor and Andrew Z. Kelsey in the Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival production of Rose Mark'd Queen. Photo courtesy of Yale Summer Cabaret.

The genesis for the show began when Brain was in his second year as a directing student at the Yale School of Drama (from which he graduated this past May). The students are expected to do a “verse project,” usually Shakespeare. He ultimately went with Macbeth for the school project, but not before toying with “these ideas I had for doing cuttings of all the scenes with Margaret. Especially the scenes with [William, Earl of] Suffolk. Those are the only mentions of love in these plays.”

Brain mentions a dainty exchange in Act 5, Scene Henry VI Part I, when Suffolk makes a Freudian slip of personal affection, and Margaret catches it. He’s brokering her marriage to King Henry and says:
I’ll undertake to make thee Henry’s queen,
To put a golden sceptre in thy hand
And set a precious crown upon thy head,
If thou wilt condescend to be my—

MARGARET: What?
SUFFOLK: His love.
MARGARET: I am unworthy to be Henry’s wife.

Jillian Taylor as Margaret in Rose Mark'd Queen. Photo courtesy of Yale Summer Cabaret.

Elliott Quick, who assisted in the dramaturgy and directing of Rose Mark’d Queen and who, like Devin Brain, leads pre-show “Immersion Series” and post-shos “Talkback” discussions of the production for interested audience members—says that “tracking the violence in these plays is what brought us to the childhood framework.

Brain and Quick chart how, in these vast, corpse-strewn works, “the deaths get increasingly personal.” That may be where Rose Mark’d Queen really gets its shape and propulsive plot. Early in the show, we see Margaret idly standing by while the boys play their war games. Later on, she’s stabbing a guy herself. “It’s rare for a Shakespearean woman to wield a weapon,” Brain and Quick agree. “Not even Lady Macbeth, at least not onstage.”

Quick joined the project early enough to observe the cutting and piecing together of the Shakespeare scripts. A lot of the subsequent shaping of Rose Mark’d Queen was done in rehearsals with the active participation of the cast. “I knew I wanted a tight group—most of the actors were people I’d worked with more than once. And I just liked Jill”—that’s sole female cast member Jillian Taylor, who anchors the show as Margaret. “It was amorphous, how far we were going to go with the idea of children playing. We didn’t want to mock children—we wanted to show that complete belief they have in what they’re doing.”

Babak Tafti and Jillian Taylor in Rose Mark'd Queen. Photo courtesy of Yale Summer Cabaret.

“Fun toys for any occasion,” Brain jokes. “We conceptualized it with overtheatricality and toys, going from toys to real weapons.” Brain adds that “this production was geared for the Cabaret space.” If he does it again elsewhere, the violence would climb past bloody stabbing and “throttling” to realistic gunfire. Alas, “you can’t fire live rounds in the Cabaret.

The Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival repertory format, which had all three shows debuting within weeks of each other, then running jointly for over a month, is a wonderful opportunity for the actors—most of whom were drawn from the Yale School of Drama acting program—to experience a show that can evolve over time. Most School of Drama production have less than a week of performances. School-year Yale Cabaret offering get six performances, but in the space of a single weekend. It’s hard to believe, but the Yale Summer Cabaret only just hit its halfway point on Friday, with another month of performances still to happen. “It’s an opportunity we don’t get as students,” Devin Brain exults. “The actors get more comfortable. All three shows are at a point where they’re deepening.”
To which Elliot Quick adds, “You get to keep it fresh. Keep it alive.”
Even as scores of toy soldiers die.

Marcus Henderson in Rose Mark'd Queen. Photo courtesy of Yale Summer Cabaret.

This show is the jewel in the crown that is the Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival. You knew it would be, right? However groovy The Tempest, however whimsical As You Like It, Rose Mark’d Queen promised novelty, mystery, bloodthirst. According to YSCSF producer Tara Kayton’s program notes, artistic director Devin Brain’s “idea to adapt Shakespeare’s histories into one story focusing on the character of Margaret” served as the impetus for the SumCab’s whole three-play repertory season in the first place.

Rose-Mark’d Queen opens with a bunch of boys playing with toy soldiers. You might have suspected it would be like that, mightn’t you? I know I did. There are only two workable metaphors when dealing with military history: sports and war toys. I’m happy that Brain didn’t go the sports route, though his cast is certainly athletic enough. The audience is exhorted to take sides at one point, getting marked up with red or white chalk, but the childhood images are sounder, especially when they extend to Nathan A. Roberts’ poignant toy piano musical score.

One more thought-it-would: We get a familiar opening line, one that puts us at ease for what we understand is a grab-bag of scenes from a host of long plays:

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend

And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

At this point all expectations cease, and you are just plain in the thrall of a show that’s got so much going for it that it may leave you as breathless as its many deposed, disabled, dissembled or dismembered characters. Talk about your bright invention!

Rose Mark’d Queen, which Brain has cobbled together from Henry V, the three parts Henry VI and Richard III, is clever throughout, swift-moving and full of creative problem-solving when dealing with such sweeps of history in such a tight space with a mere five-member cast. It uses toys both kiddy and grown-up—from cloth dolls to an inflatable sex doll, from glittering gowns to fake blood—to keep the action both light and fraught. What mischief these playmates can get up to! Swearing, fighting, hostage-taking, torture!

The four-kings-and-a-queen ensemble (Matt Biagini, Marcus Henderson, A.Z. Kelsey, Babak Tafti, Jillian Taylor) are the tightest, most psychically connected cast of any of the three in the SumCabShakes festival (even though all but Kelsey also appear together in As You Like It). The mindmeld and shared pacing leads to some extraordinarily natural dialogue, considering how artificially pithy and pompous some of Shakespeare’s political pronouncements can be. As he does as Jacques in As You Like It, Matt Biagini has a natural talent for letting scanned verse trip off his tongue as if he’s informally chatting with an old friend. Babak Tafti nails an overblown, posturing wisecrack like “These words will cost ten thousand lives this day” by saying it to Margaret (Jillian Taylor) as if he’s pleased for having thought to phrase it that way. Likewise, A.Z. Kelsey spits “Ere sunset I’ll make thee curse the deed” (as Richard, to Clifford, with Henry VI and Margaret looking on, from the third act of Henry VI Part 3) as if he’s a mortal, not a swaggering cartoon. Marcus Henderson, who’s already proven his deftness at blending physical power with emotional vulnerability as Orlando in the YSCSF’s As You Like It,, not only fights well but leaves a good-looking corpse.
Jillian Taylor never for an instant makes Margaret a trophy wife—she’s whipsmart and gives abuse as good as she gets it—but also acknowledges that she wouldn’t have survived without sensuality and glamor. Though the whole night swirls around her, Taylor’s never above it but right in the thick of it. One of the wonders of Brain’s adaptation is how Queen Margaret is the play’s central figure without the other characters having to constantly acknowledge her. We get the main gritty male showdowns from all the plays, and then we’re reminded that Margaret was around too and had a stake in all these disputes. This is a continuity note that eluded Shakespeare, and which gives Rose Mark’d Queen its own strong personality and tone—one that’s refreshingly not based on chronological events in European history but on a single strong maturing character.

I’d fill you in more on who plays which king and why, if I thought it really mattered. There’s a royal family tree spanning 1327-1377 in the Rose Mark’d Queen program for those who need a scorecard, but honestly, don’t expect to be any clearer about British history than you would if you were plowing breakneck through a history book or BBC documentary. That’s the point of Rose Mark’d Queen. The point is how Shakespeare described power struggles, how he used flowing, poetic language to articulate vulgar impulses like warfare, how he captured sharp intimate exhanges amid the tumult of centuries of wild world history.
Rose Mark’d Queen is playful in every sense. It’s full of plays, obviously. But it doesn’t overburden itself. Just when one character starts to seem too prominent, the whole show shifts to fresh terrain. The show not only appreciate the kidlike impulses of world leaders, it respects short attention spans. The cast also appear amused by their own pell-mell playing style, amiably engaging the audience directly. They even improvise, mostly sotto voce away from the front lines of the Shakespeare verse. “You guys!,” they might cajole. Or scream “Mine!” when recapturing a dropped prop. “Oh man, I’m so dead,” was one interpolation on opening night (Saturday, July 9).
This purposely impertinent pageant of the past, fueled by both youthful fervor and intellectual precocity, deserves to have a future. Anyone who can collapse five of Shakespeare’s history plays into 150 minutes or so, with only five actors, deserves to have regional theaters beating a path to his door. As much as I love this original cast, I’d love to see other actors enter this playground. Rose Mark’d Queen is a tremendous achievement in knocking all those history plays together into an accessible whole, and I hope it gets a chance to move on up from the underground Cabaret space and make a little history of its own.

As You Like It
Part of the Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival, playing in repertory with The Tempest and Rose Mark’d Queen through August 13. Directed by Louis Proske. Scenic designer: Kristen Robinson. Costume designer: Kristin Fiebig. Lighting designer: Alan C. Edwards. Sound designer/composer: Nathan A. Roberts. Dramaturg/Associate Artistic Director: Elliot B. Quick. Artistic Director: Devin Brain. At the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., New Haven. (203) 432-1567.

Somebody at Yale should write a thesis on how the Yale summer theater’s production of the Tempest features a Prospero so diffuse that his lines (arguably the second greatest powerful-old-man role in Shakespeare, behind King Lear) are divvied up amongst all the members of the ensemble, while each young character in As You Like It is carefully and thoughtfully brought to life as a passionate individual.

The two plays are currently playing in repertory at the Cabaret’s underground (and in the case of As You Like It, also outdoor) space at 217 Park St., New Haven. They’re joined later this week by the Margaret amalgamation Rose-Mark’d Queen. The shows all have different sets, directors and concepts. Most members of the acting ensemble appear in two of the three plays; of the six performers in The Tempest four are also among the ten-person cast of As You Like It.

Last time I saw a production of As You Like It done by Yale students, at the school’s Iseman black-box space in 2003, it had a swinging ‘60s theme and the entire play had been renamed “Can You Dig It?”

The previous time I liked As You Like It at Yale was in 1994, when the School of Drama’s then-Dean Stan Wojowodski directed an all-student production featuring Paul Giamatti as Jacques and Lance Reddick as one of the Dukes. That one was done as a vivid, pastel-colored cartoon which had the characters luxuriating and meditating on rolling green lawns.

I’ve seen the play done successfully several times by young casts at other colleges and community theaters. I even saw the 1974 American tour of the National Theatre’s fabulous all-young-male production, and it was every bit as legendary as you may have heard it was.

On the other hand, nearly every “adult” production I’ve ever seen of the show (including some star-studded endeavors at major Shakes festivals) has sucked. The required crossdressing was played for superficial laughs, the wrestling and foraging lacked credible determination. An As You Like It directed by John
I think As You Like It has special appeal for smart youth just beginning to make their way into careers and creative fulfillments, wanting to proclaim and define their gender identities, wanting to explore possibilities. If the muse of the memorable “Can You Dig It?” (directed by Brendan Hughes) was free love, the undercurrent of this one (directed by Louisa Proske) is free thought. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is recited (and surreptitiously quoted in the program—“And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels”—on the back of a poster touting

There are plenty of commendable staging and design concepts here: a full-audience trip outside to the Cabaret courtyard, where you see cast members loitering, in character, on the pathways and where a wrestling ring is constructed before your very eyes. When the crowd is summoned back indoors, the forest of Arden has magically appeared. The tree’s leaves are crumbled bits of paper, a shady foreshadowing of Orlando’s plastering of the trunks with love poems about Rosalind.

Yet the greatest pleasures in this full-bodied production are to be had from its human transformations, not the scenic ones. Seeing Adina Verson return to the male drag—virtually the same outfit!—she donned as Yitzak in last year’s summer cabaret production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch—is heaven for the many fans of that gender-bent rock show. Currently stuffing her crotch as a hermaphroditic Ariel in the SumCab’s Tempest, Verson does a much fuller masculine impersonation as Ganymede, aka Rosalind in disguise. In fact, since his Ganymede is more deeply played than the Rosalind which begets him, Verson goes well beyond playful disguises; she makes us ask basic questions about sexual attraction and male bonding.

Again, as a special treat for those of us aware of Cabaret shows BSF (Before Shakespeare Festival), seeing Tara Kayton—Managing Director of the 2010-11 school-year Yale Cabaret season, and producer of this summer season—as a deadpan gun-toting guardsman is a ripe jest: who better than a theater manager to order patrons around and get them back into their seats? When Kayton returns as the smitten shepherdess Phebe, we see a warmer, whimsical side—and again, who better to herd sheep than a theatrical producer?

As with The Tempest, the Cabaret ensemble has to change hats and jackets so often to effect the smaller roles that an overall sense of pace and tone is lost. Disbelief is not suspended. But what’s lost in consistency is gained in focused scenework performed by the best available actors. Ensemble players like Matt Biagini and Paul Lieber look ideal for the authoritarian cads they play in the opening scenes of this city-to-country traverse. In most productions, that’s all they’d get to do. Yet Lieber’s singing and guitar-playing (essentially the role of Amiens in Shakespeare’s script, but generalized here as “Forest Lord”) anchors the forest scenes, and Biagini as Jacques does the most natural, extemporaneous-sounding “All the world’s a stage” oration I’ve ever heard.

Brenda Meaney (who plays both of the battling Dukes, making Duke Senior a gladhanding politician and Duke Frederick a trippy bearded Falstaff type) go for improv-comedy gusto, while others delicately underplay. Babak Tafti does both, going for the obvious old-man voice and cane as Adam in the play’s early scene, then boldly underplaying the court jester Touchstone.

Here, Rosalind and Celia—the young women whose journey from safe high-born upbringings into the dark forest beyond the duchy provides the play with its central sexual-awakening metaphor—seem more amused at Touchstone’s openness and charm than they are at his creaky jokes. This fey, finetuned take on Touchstone (even when wooing Jillian Taylor’s sexually overcharged Audrey) adds volumes to the production’s air of longing, desire, experimentation, social awareness and class (in all its definitions). What’s not to like?

Through August 12 at the Yale Summer Cabaret. Performed in repertory with As You Like (which begins previews July 1) and Rose-Mark’d Queen (begins previews July 7).

It’s not always clear who’s wearing the pants in Yale Summer Cabaret’s season-opening traipse through The Tempest. But everybody gets to wears Prospero’s robe, and read his books.

Knocking Shakespeare’s island-bound romantic revenge drama down to eleven characters, essayed by six actors, is both fraught and freeing. What you lose in fluidity you gain in transparency. Character work is not as strong, but the construction of the play gets a fresh clarity. With each of the actors covering two roles each, plus a part of Prospero, Jack Tamburri’s production becomes one quick style experiment after another. Which works just fine with a script which, just to mention its film versions, has inspired such radically diverse visions as Paul Mazursky’s, Julie Taymor’s and Forbidden Planet.

In trying to explain the plot of The Tempest to my daughter the other day, I found myself saying “he’s angry at his family, so he goes off and discovers his own island and does whatever he wants there—the way a lot of people might want to.” I’d never considered Prospero as having an urge that could be called common until I expressed it that way. This Tempest, however, is all about Prospero’s impulses being understandable and universal. He’s not the imperious individual we usually see him as. He represents emotional choices, often extreme ones, that a lot of us might dream about: removing ourselves far from our problems, magically forcing people to fall in love (or fall asleep), curling up with a good book for eternity. His slave and lightside-personality-extension Ariel comes off as more practical than whimsical here.
In a land where actors change character simply by donning a different hat—or casually acknowledge the audience, despite being stranded on a remote island—the supernatural, mood-changing mood of Shakespeare’s script is diffused. Everything here is potentially transformative. A sorceress is just a trickster with some personal hang-ups.

This is not one of those slimmed down Shakespeares which builds itself around a single strong concept. It plays freely with a lot of different ideas. Romantic scenes are played for laughs. The servant scenes are played for laughs upon laughs upon laughs. Class conflicts get downplayed when the servants are such endless buffoons, but gender roles here are openly explored: Adina Verson plays Ariel just as gender-bendy as Verson was when being Yitzhak in Hedwig and the Angry Inch at the Yale Summer Cabaret last year. Caliban is played by a woman (Brenda Meaney, the girliest of The Tall Girls at the Carlotta Festival of New Plays this past May); to some is a departure, though when I look back at all the Tempests I’ve seen at Yale over the years, I think I’ve seen more female mooncalves than male.

With actors switching parts with such alacrity, scenes of imminent death don’t come off as all that dangerous. Suspense is lacking. The acting styles clash constantly. Some roles are believably portrayed while others are shallow wallows of surface and artifice. In the very first scene of the show, I worried that the cast’s initial air of good-natured goofiness—The Tempest done as Godspell—would pervade the whole production. But the forced buoyancy soon breaks up.

This Tempest is best approached as a scenework exercise, where key exchanges exist in the moment and don’t necessarily propel later scenes. In a land ruled by an amorphous presence with a passion for books and storytelling, such roleplaying is appropriate. When the actress playing Miranda takes a turn in the golden robe that denotes that she’s now playing Prospero, she rips pages and pages out of one of the self-exiled intellectual’s favorite tomes. The volume turns out to be a Collected Works of William Shakespeare.

Fun couple Bruce Tulgan and Debbie Applegate (he the founder of RainmakerThinking, she the Pulitzer-winning biographer of Henry Ward Beecher) are diehard board members of the Yale Summer Cabaret, and held a bash at their house Sunday, April 12, to officially announce the SumCab’s 2011 season. The slate had already been posted on a few websites and talked about in the halls of the Yale School of Drama, but details emerged.

Under the slogan “Love, Blood and Fools,” the Summer Cabaret has been renamed The Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival, with three productions (or seven, depending on how you count—read, on Macduff!) running in repertory.

That’s several big changes in how the SumCab usually does things—there’ve been overall tones (Tea Alagic’s pomo Germanic summer of 2005 springs to mind), but nothing as consistent as a single playwright for the whole season. There’ve been plenty of dedicated ensembles which, like traditional summer-stock companies, handle all the roles in all the shows, but the Cabaret has not (at least in the 20+ seasons I’ve been covering it) gone the repertory route of overlapping the runs of the separate shows and alternating performances of them throughout the season.

The nitty gritty: The season requires three directors and ten actors. Devin Brain, who co-ran the school-term Cabaret in 2009-10 (and whose directing thesis project was Anouilh’s Eurydice), is artistic director, and Tara Kayton (who was Managing Director of the just-ended Yale Cabaret 2010-11 season) serves as producer. Each of the ten actors will appear in at least two of the three shows. The Tempest, to be directed by Jack Tamburri, will have a cast of six, but only a couple of very minor roles have been cut, and Tamburri told me that the design will not be sparse. I don’t really know anything about As You Like It yet. Rose Mark’d Queen is an original adaptation of Henry V, Henry VI (all three parts) and Richard III, focusing on the recurring character of Queen Margaret. Rose Mark’d Queen is to be directed by Brain himself; the adaptation is largely done, but he intends to refine it in rehearsal with constant input from the cast. In that same interactive spirit, all the shows are augmented by an “Immersion Series” of workshops to help the audience get a grasp, held before every performance and covering such issues as stage design, the intricacies of Shakespearean text and speech, and the history behind the playwright’s history plays.

Other theaters have attempted various combinations of Shakespeare’s history plays relating to the War of the Roses. One of the many distinctions of this project is how it hopes to find a throughline through the five Roses plays and also, by running that Condensed Cream of Henry alongside a romance and a  comedy but the same hallowed Stratfordian, gives a full-blown dip into the well-rounded Shakespeare world.