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.

My father imagined himself in the tradition of the great old British actor/managers of yore—he was English, and for decades he ran summer stock theaters where he regularly directed, acted and consulted on everything from design to promotion.

That actor/manager model seems ancient now, at least in the professional theater. But they were still firmaments in the West End theatrical landscape when my father was a child.

The end of that era is chronicled in the grandiose, generously melodramatic comical-drama series The Bretts, has gotten a full-blown 6-CD box set treatment from Acorn Media. No bonus features, but they’re not required; theater history books exist in other media, and the glories of series co-creator Rosemary Anne Sisson (writer of Upstairs, Downstairs and many, many British mystery shows in the 1970s and ‘80s) have been sung elsewhere. As an artistic entity, The Bretts is as self-contained as the multi-faceted theater family it’s about.

Charles Brett is an actor/entrepreneur who has spent a lifetime burnishing his own legend. He owns a London theater and is scion of what has become a famous theater family. He’s played Norman Rodway, an actor now in his 80s but who got a lot of press last year for the director’s-cut reissue of Barry Hershey’s 1995 film A. Hitler, in which Rodway plays the title role. While Charles Brett is not a fascist dictator, he unleashes a mean scowl when his ego is bruised. This occurs multiple times an episode, since even he can see that his small empire is crumbling due to fickle audiences, the new medium of motion pictures, and other constrant threats to his livelihood. (More than one adventure concerns someone on the theater staff absconding with funds, and there’s a non-stop disdain for critics and reporters.)

Charles’ wife is the company’s diva Lydia Brett (Barbara Murray, who as a movie starlet in the 1950s and ‘60s appeared in Passport to Pimlico and a couple of the Dirk Bogarde Doctor in the House films; she was on TV steadily from the ‘60s through the ‘90s, including The Power Game and The Pallisers). Lydia’s concerned about aging but also cognizant that by having such an illustrious career she has become a national treasure. (We see her opening the London production of Strike Up the Band and being courted by Broadway, radio and the movies). When not acting, Lydia frets about her children, three of whom haven’t flown far from the nest: Edwin, a middling leading-man type actor (David Yelland); Martha (Belinda Lang, who went on to several other British TV series), an actress with genuine star quality who applies a risk-taking approach to both her onstage and frolicsome offstage activities; and Thomas (George Winter) , a young playwright whose radical, non-commercial dramas challenge the theater traditions exemplified by his parents.

There is a revelation about Thomas early in the series, and quite a lot of violence and tragedy delivered upon The Bretts’ chauffeur, butler and kitchen staff. But it’s all secondary to the changes in British society during the 1920s and ‘30s. We see the rise of silent movies (in which Edwin becomes a bigger celebrity than his father) and the rise of Socialism. Martha dates a conservative politician. A relative of the chauffeur Hegarty (Billy Boyle, who joins the cast in episode two when the Bretts decide to purchase a motorcar) gets targeted by the IRA.

In the late ‘80s, The Bretts was derided by TV critics as too obvious a knock-off of Upstairs, Downstairs, since both shows involved writer Rosemary Anne Sisson and both contrasted the activities of the upper-class inhabitants of a London house with the decidedly different pursuits and perspectives of their servants. It also didn’t help that both shows were featured in the U.S. as part of PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre. But if comparisons insist on being drawn, The Bretts makes much better use of its multi-class, multi-media elements than Upstairs, Downstairs. It needs all its elements because it’s about more than daily living in changing times. It plunges its characters into new industries, new movements and new ways of thinking. Its reach is global—there are obnoxious Americans in numerous episodes, and in one of my favorites, Thomas goes to Berlin where he meets Bertolt Brecht, hooks up with a dubious example of faded European royalty and is presumed homosexual.

There are the sort of contrivances you expect from shows that play dramatic fiction in front of historical backdrops. But a lot of the connections are subtle, or told with empathy rather than sensationalist stereotyping. The characters range from extreme traditional to extremely radical to extreme criminal to extremely naïve, but they’re not played extreme. Since the world in which The Bretts dwell is so outwardly theatrical, there’s a special effort made to make them—and their servants, colleagues, lovers, hangers-on…—seem human.

As far as the theater history aspect of the show is concerned, it’s as useful as any textbook on British theater in the first half of the 20th century. We’re shown how performing styles clashed, how censorship restrictions loosened, how social issues were finding a place in contemporary mainstream dramas well before the 1950s. We see The Bretts stage an old-fashioned musical theater holiday panto, and we see them acclimate to radio drama and silent pictures. We also get a sense of what it was like to run a theater business at the turn of the 20th century, and how much that business changed with the advent of mass media.

I haven’t seen The Bretts since it first aired a quarter-century ago, when my father and I would look forward to watching it together. Rediscovering it through Acorn Media’s much-welcome box set (an earlier, less prettily packaged 5-disk set came out from another company in 2003, but quickly disappeared), I was surprised at how many episodes there were: 13 in season one, another six in season two. I see from the PBS website
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/archive/91/91.html that there were only eight weeks of Season One of The Bretts on Masterpiece Theatre; were some of those double-length slots, or did some episodes never air in the U.S.? No matter; all 19 are here now, smartly cleaned up and looking much crisper than a lot of ‘TV transfers of this vintage.

I blew through this whole set gleefully in a matter of days, and intend to rewatch it in full very soon. It holds up a lot better than some of those tiresome plays-within-teleplays it stages. Though it’s not afraid to show the sexism, violene, corruption and other horrors of its era, everything about The Bretts is theater-savvy, in-jokey and entertaining. It not only mocks those heavy-handed old stage melodramas, it learns from them.

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

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

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

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

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

Guillermo Calderon's Neva. Photo by Pepe Murrieta.

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

Wesleyan Center for the Arts in Middletown is premiering a new play by Ron Jenkins tonight. The reading is held at 7 p.m. tonight, Sept. 28, in the center’s CFA Hall, for free.

Must be cool to go to school where Ron Jenkins teaches.

I never studied with him, but I followed Jenkins for years in his non-academic roles of translator, director, playwright and clown. He’s worked with friends of mine and I’ve learned from his books and scholarship, much of which has to do with European clowning traditions.

But where he most stood out for me is onstage, as live translator and interpreter for the great Italian playwright and satirist Dario Fo. I first glimpsed Jenkins’ special talents in this regard back in the mid-1980s, when Fo was allowed to make one of his rare trips to the United States, where he and his wife  Franca Rame performed at Harvard and Yale. The couple’ s visa weren’t accepted again for another couple of decades; by this time Jenkins was ensconced at Wesleyan, so that’s where Fo and Rame played.

If all he was good for was bringing Dario Fo and Franca Rame to Connecticut every once in a while, and translating their brilliant writings, and writing his own books about them, I’d think Ron Jenkins was just great. But there’s more. Jenkins is a teacher and scholar with a bent for political, topical and socially conscious stagework. That could seem deadly to some, except that his other passion is clowning. Even the most serious and severe Jenkins projects don’t forget to entertain.

He’s a great fit for Wesleyan, where multiculturalism and progressive thought are classroom tools as frequently utilized as pen and paper.

All this is preface to a special Ron Jenkins event on the Wesleyan campus Sept. 28. It’s a reading of a new Ron Jenkins play, Recycling Pain. The project grew out of Jenkins’ ongoing collaborative theater work with incarcerated and recently incarcerated men and women, not just in the United States but in Italy and Indonesia.

It’s Jenkins’ desire as an artist to counter social stereotypes associated with prisons, which is interesting enough for any theater project. But the play also has a major environmental theme. Here’s the description from the Wesleyan press release:

Recycling Pain is based on Mr. Jenkins’s work over the past four years, including interviews with incarcerated men and women in Italy, Indonesia and the United States who were inspired by the poetry of Dante’s Divine Comedy to reflect on the consequences of wasting energy. Their observations are reminders that the importance of conserving and recycling the human resources in our jails is no less important than the challenge of conserving and recycling the natural resources of the planet. Recycling Pain was also compiled from the Department of Justice Report on the Federal Prison Industry’s electronic recycling program. 

Recycling Pain was commissioned by the Wesleyan Center for the Arts for its annual environmental-consciousness program Feet to the Fire. More info on that is here.

Saundra Duncan, Lynda Gardner and Deborah Ranger are in the cast and Ala Faller provides music.

The Norman Conquests. 3-DVD set from Acorn Media.

The common labeling of Alan Ayckbourn as “the British Neil Simon” isn’t entirely unfair. Both Ayckbourn and Simon are astoundingly prolific. I thought that Ayckbourn’s output had dropped off in the 21st century, but I find that he’s continued to premiere a new show every year. He also runs his own theater and directs regularly. Which puts in a whole other world than Neil Simon, who may have a Broadway venue named for him but who originally came out of television, and who did as much work in movies as he did on the stage, from the mid-‘60s onwards. Ayckbourn remains much more a man of the theater.

Yet Ayckbourn has had his TV and movie moments as well—happily for his American fans, who don’t have nearly the opportunity to follow his work that the British do. Late last year, Acorn Media released a 3-DVD set of the TV version of Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests, broadcast on PBS in the 1977 and not seen since.

As with Neil Simon or Woody Allen, Ayckbourn gets his pick of top comedy acting talent for his film projects. This one stars Tom Conti, who was kind of the British Elliot Gould, in the title role of Norman, and features Good Neighbors sitcom co-stars Richard Briers (also renowned for Doctor in the House and other series) and Penelope Keith (also famed for To the Manor Born) in supporting role, with the estimable Penelope Wilton, Fiona Walker and David Troughton also on hand. They’re all meaty roles, since Conquests consists of three interlocking plays which play out virtually simultaneously and take place in different areas of a British country house. When a character walks through a door out of one scene, he’s often walking into a scene in a separate play.

Ayckbourn had great commercial and critical success with this maze-like gambit and used it again when he wrote House and Garden in 1999. (Where The Norman Conquests’ trilogy simply correspond to each other, and are generally performed on alternate nights with the same cast in the same theater, House and Garden’s two parts are actually designed to be performed at the same time, before two different audiences).

You can quibble about how well he accomplishes the multi-platform idea but dismissing it as a gimmick would be ridiculous. Being able to convincingly shift dramatic perspectives is an aspiration of all playwrights; it’s the basis of Greek choruses and Shakespearean soliloquies. Ayckbourn merely allows set designers and continuity-conscious dramaturgs and stage managers to be a part of that process.

You’re aware of the device, but not so much that it distracts from the characters or dialogue. You know that the playwright has set himself a writing challenge, and you don’t mind watching him work out this puzzle.

I only wish that, besides giving his blessing to the TV version (of which Penelope Keith is the only cast member who was in the original stage production), the Ayckbourn had directed it. Herbert Wise is an accomplished TV director —with two Derek Jacoby series on his resume, I Claudius and Cadfael—and is especially adept at directing his wife, Fiona Walker, who plays Ruth. But it’s a TV sensibility rather than a theater one, with conventional shot-reverse-shots and close-ups which confine a series of plays distinctive for their interactive openess. With The Norman Conquests so seldom done due to its threefold logistics, a “stagier” version would be much more instructive to theater jerks such as myself.
What we have here instead is simply an extremely entertaining comedy. Ayckbourn is bolder and bawdier than sitcoms. He makes fun of adultery, marriage, family needs and just about every other intimate social interaction. His characters range from the insanely self-involved to the utterly clueless. This is a colorful, breezy production with the added oomph of naughtier subject on par with American soap operas.
Where The Norman Conquests does get deliriously theatrical is in its characters outsized reactions to each other in scenes where they are hiding secrets or withholding opinions. They go into laughing fits, or get falling-down drunk. It’s also not a dated or simplistic series, not a TV show in play form. I have quite sharp memories of seeing it over 30 years ago—watching Ayckbourn for three nights in a row on public television was quite an event—and it holds up wonderfully.
Now somebody revive the plays already. They’re ripe for reinterpretation.

Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly and Other New Adventures of the Great Detective

By Donald Thomas (Pegasus Books, New York). Thomas is such an accomplished hand at writing Sherlock Holmes yarns that he overwrites and overindulgesd, lulling you into complete credulity. When he writes at length about a late-19^th century actor-manager named Caradoc Price, he provides such extensive tangential detail that I had to stop reading to go Google the character and see if he actually existed. Thomas is exceeding good at scene-setting. A whole chunk of this new collection of his original Holmes novellas and short stories bears the title “Sherlock Holmes the Actor,” and Thomas not only provides a ripping adventure set in the Victorian theater realm but a 12-page introduction to that story labeled “A Fragment of Biography” which elaborates on Sherlock Holmes’ brief career as a professional actor before he began dabbling in crime detection. He (or rather the usual narrative presence of Dr. John H. Watson) describes roles Holmes played and posits that, based just on the costumed improvisations he developed in his detective work, “he would have encountered little competition on the London stage—except perhaps from Irving and possibly from Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. But that was all.”

It doesn’t have the sheer theatrical splendor of an earlier Sherlock Holmes pastiche, Nicholas Meyer’s The West End Horror, but Thomas adds a scholarly severity which is hard to shake.

Casting hasn’t been announced yet, but the directors this year should provide their own surge of interest. This has been a particularly creative, experimentally minded clas, as evidenced by the works these directors have done at the Yale Cabaret in recent semesters.

Here’s the line-up:

Oct. 25-29: Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. Actually the libretto for an uncomposed opera, Stein’s 1938 script is generally presented as a stand-alone play. Connecticut was special place for Stein: her Four Saints in Three Acts had a spectacular world premiere at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford; her good friend Thornton Wilder lived in Hamden; and (encouraged by Wilder and by the novelist/critic Carl Van Vechten) donated her papers to Yale in the 1940s.

Lileana Blain-Cruz is the ensemble-friendly director behind one of my favorite Yale Cabaret shows of the past few seasons, a multi-media deconstruction of Oscar Wilde’s Salome.

Dec. 10-16: Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, directed by Louisa Proske. How often do you get to see a Cymbeline? Proske did a better-known, and funnier, though no less romantic, play of the bard’s—As You Like It—this past summer for the Yale Summer Cabaret.

Jan. 24-28: Chekhov’s The Seagull, directed by Alexandru Mihail. Again, Yale Cabaret audiences have already gotten a taste of what they might expect from a Yale School of Drama production. Mihail did the extraordinary, audience-interactive expansion of Chekhov’s one-act The Wedding Reception at the Cabaret last spring. As with The Wedding Reception, for his Seagull Mihail’s using a translation by the late great Paul Schmidt, who not channeled the voice of Chekhov like few others ever could, but had his own history of working with open-minded experimental companies and directors.

The Drama School’s had Chekhovs aplenty, but no Seagull is like another, and with all the play’s theater in-jokes, students flock to it like, well, birds.

Tickets for the Yale School of Drama shows are already on sale at drama.yale.edu, or at (203) 432-1234, and even at the Yale Rep box office.

An image from Dewey Dell's a elle vide. Photo by Paolo Rapalino.

Had a fun ‘phone chat the other day with several members of Dewey Dell. The brash young Italian movement troupe has been at Wesleyan University in Middletown for the past week leading student workshops and performing the U.S. premieres of two of their distinctively colorful, kinetic and techno-pulsed movement theater pieces. The 20-minute two-character work a elle vide was performed last weekend, while the grander Cinquanta Urlanti Quaranta Ruggenti Sessanta Stridenti—the title has been translated as Furious Fifties, Roaring Forties, Shrieking Sixties—will be done TONIGHT (Friday, Sept. 16) at 8 p.m. in Wesleyan’s CFA Theater.

The company members are still college-age themselves. Dewey Dell formed just four years ago out of a school project, and one of the troupe’s goals at Wesleyan is to use the students in their workshops to begin devising larger ensemble works.

Here’s a 13-minute YouTube excerpt from Cinquanta Urlanti Quaranta Ruggenti Sessanta Stridenti:

Three of the four founders of Dewey Dell—Agata, Demetrio and Teodora Castellucci—are siblings, offspring of the renowned Italian director Romeo Castellucci, known here in Connecticut for the mindblowing, inner-throat examining adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar which Castellucci’s Societas Raffaello Sanzio company brought to the Stamford Center for the Arts as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in 2000. That Julius Caesar was one of the intellectually hippest art events happening that summer (I remember meeting Susan Sontag in the lobby), just as Dewey Dell’s appearance—the first U.S. appearance of a company that’s barely toured—is a real coup for Wesleyan.

While the troupe wants to maintain their independence from Castellucci and his work, there are strong connections. The Societas Raffaello Sanzio runs a school, Stoa, based on methods and philosophies about rhythm and movement developed by Claudia Castellucci—Romeo’s sister, the aunt of Teodora, Agata and Demetrio.

Dewey Dell has the precocity and open-minded ensemble sense of a rock band, with the sort of name a smart band might pick. Dewey Dell named themselves for a character in William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying, explains Eugenia Resta, the sole Dewey Dell co-founder not surnamed Castellucci. “We wanted a female name for our company. And everybody had read this novel,” Resta said in halting English.

Touring, Resta says, “wasn’t the first idea. We did a little performance in a school, exposed some little works we prepared during the year.” Their work got noticed and won a choreography award, which led to “a lot of little festivals,” where their shorter, 25-minute pieces could play alongside other acts. Besides the two established works they’ve brought to Wesleyan, Dewey Dell is developing a new piece while on campus. “We decided to work with students from the workshop,” Resta says. We are thinking to continue this work, involving a group of ten people”—Dewey Dell’s grandest work yet.

The company develops its works communally, with attention paid to the sort of space in which they’ll ultimately be performed. According to Demetrio Castellucci, who provides the musical elements, “There isn’t anything that’s first or second in this process. Sometimes I create a musical skeleton, and the [dancers] build on that. Sometimes the percussion is adjusted for the movements. Sometimes the music is first, then at the last minute things change.” The composer—who does ultimately record his score and play it from the sound booth rather than play live—is always asking himself “How will the room sound? In our second work, we were in this neoclassical hall, in front of a very clear space, so I worked on a reverberating sound.” Currently he’s working on “very quiet sounds. The purpose is to make very low sounds that sound like loud sounds coming from a great distance. It’s a dramatic question. I’m very interested in moving the sound into the space.”

Castellucci speaks of creating an “onomatopoeia to movement,” and is fascinated with cultures where music and dance are inextricably linked. “The Swahili word for drum means both dance movement and music. I like how in Africa, music is just a part of the whole.” Demetrio calls Dewey Dell “a very linked union.”

“Working with family, of course, is a very special thing. Some aspects are good, and there are the other sides. It’s good because we don’t need to talk much because we understand what we mean.”

Some of you might be wondering whatever became of Aoife Spillane-Hinks. I’ve known Aoife since she was a tot, dashing around auditoriums following the grueling grown-up productions which her mother, theater critic for the New Haven Independent (the long-defunct 1980s print one, not the current online one) would bravely bring her to. Aoife attended the Educational Center for the Arts here in New Haven, then studied theater at Harvard. Whereupon she moved to Ireland. We’ve occasionally been in touch (I availed of Aoife to check out a Dublin-based production of The Bacchae for us because it used a translation wrought by my father), and she’s been very busy over the years with a host of theater projects.

The latest is a fringe show, a new adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper starring the award-winning actress Maeve Fitzgerald.

But surely the Edinburgh Fringe is over. Yes, this is Dublin’s own Absolut Fringe, Sept. 10-25.

Thank you for the reminder, Aoife, that we have been negligent in our international fringe homework. And break a leg, whilst suffering a draconian late-19^th century medical treatment.