Clutch Yr Amplified Heart Tightly and Pretend
Through Feb. 25 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., New Haven. Created and performed by Chris Henry, Jillian Taylor, Jabari Brisport, Hallie Cooper-Novack, Merlin Huff, Michael Place, Mickey Theis, Solomon Weisbard and Dustin Wills. Set by Kristin Robinson. Lights by Solomon Weisbard. Costumes by Hunter Kaczorowski. Sound by Matt Otto. Producer: Kate Ivins. Stage Manager: Geoff Boronda.
You could see one of the last two performances of Clutch Yr Amplified Heart Tightly and Pretend tonight (at 8 &11 p.m.), where Yale School of Drama students gyrate wildly to slick European dance music (Junior Senior’s “Catch My Breath,” anybody?), then indulge in moments of stark romance (to the soundtrack of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon”) and antic mime.
Or, you could stay home and hope there’s a Les Jeunes de Paris skit on Saturday Night Live.
No, that’s totally unfair. Clutch Yr Amplified Heart Tightly and Pretend may be loose and goofy and giddy and uncentered, but it’s a celebration of live entertainment and raw theatrical impulse. It’s comically fast-paced and undeniably entertaining. It exhorts its audiences to dance, and gets them to, as assuredly as did the Yale Rep’s much more clockwork comedy The Doctor in Spite of Himself last fall.
Clutch Yr Amplified Heart Tightly and Pretend is also practically Artaudian in its energy, eroticism and excess.
It’s literally dark—some scenes are lit only by the moonlight shining through the small windows on one of the Cabaret’s basement walls. A jaunty silent-movie-style car trip routine ends in a terrible cataclysm.
The show’s long introduction may be its most daring part. It starts before you know it has, erupting from a small pre-show conversation in the audience. It becomes an anxious, near-maniacal word-association exercise. It envelops the traditional Cabaret “in case of fire” speech. It rambles to a close, then is followed by a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong spell of silence. “Something’s going to happen soon,” we’re told, and wish.
The man who spouted the intentionally awkward and offputting introduction later returns to take place in a full-cast robot dance. (The Cabaret doesn’t offer photos of many of its productions. I thought this “Gil” comic strip by Norm Feuti, which I subscribe to on www.dailyink.com, would illustrate such youthful abandon nicely.)
This is just the latest of several recent Yale Cabaret offerings which come off as open-ended, quasi-improvisational, partially unformed. I actually look forward to such things, as look as the danger elements aren’t fake. I like to see where good performers’ bodies and minds will take them when their guards are down.
I like how, in this Clutch concoction, a guy is introduced as the lighting designer, and he is really is the lighting designer, and he later comes out and does his own lighting-designer-attempting-to-dance-like-the-actors routine. I like the ironic mime. I like the whole scary-cool mood. I was practically the only guy who the show was NOT able to get up to dance, however. My own push-back in the fascinating aesthetics of awkwardness and open experimental exuberance.