Dilemma!
Through Dec. 8 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., New Haven. (203) 432-1566, www.yalecabaret.org
Conceived and directed by Michael Bateman. Created by The Ensemble. Set, projection, and lighting design: Christopher Ash. Costume designer: Seth Bodie. Sound designer: Matt Otto. Technical Director: James Lanius. Dramaturgs: Rachel Carpman. Stage Manager/Producer: Reynaldi Lolong. Moral Guidance: Daniel Putnam. Production Consultants: Joel Abbott, Samantha Lazar, Cole Lewis and Jack Tamburri. Performed by Benjamin Fainstein (MC), Hugh Farrell and Sarah Krasnow (Avatars) and “Non-Player Characters” Rachel Carpman, Zach LeClair and Dan Perez.
You’ll notice “Moral Guidance” in the credits list of Dilemma! On the surface, the play fits in with what has been a distinctly and disarmingly playful and improvisatory semester at the Yale Cabaret. (Dilemma! is the last Cab event of the calendar year; a slate of ten fresh events, their titles not yet announced, will commence in January.) None of these shows—I would list This., Cat Club and White Rabbit Red Rabbit among them—were devoid of dark moments, and some were defined by grief and loss, but they all cruised on informality and high spirits.
Benjamin Fainstein, one of two Associate Artistic Directors working with Artistic Dirctor Ethan Heard this academic year at the Yale Cabaret, was also a part of last week’s improv-fueled audience-acknowledging, concept-tripping goof The Cat Club. For Dilemma!, he’s not the director (Michael Bateman is) but might as well be, since he’s the guy who explains this multi-directional drama at its outset, then sticks around to shot “Dilemma!” and lead the audience through the choices which determine what the play becomes.
It’s an engaging concept, literally, and—as Fainstein declares in his introduction—is inspired as much by the old psychological/ethical conundrum The Trolley Problem (if you could switch the tracks for an out-of-control streetcar so that it kills one person instead of five, would you do it?) than it is by those “You Make the Adventure!” young-adult novels (“If you choose to jump across the lake, turn to page 98…”).
Ultimately, though, Dilemma! is more about theater than ethics. Many audience members seemed to making choices based on what would deliver a more entertaining story—fetching a street musician to help out a clubowner whose car the avatars needed to borrow, rather than just swiping the keys and ending the scene there, for instance. The fact that the actor playing the club owner couldn’t keep his mustache adhered to his face might have added to the desire to keep him around a bit longer, and is not an example typically cited in situational ethics classes.
As an audience member and as a keen reader of books such as Ethics Without God by Kai Nielsen, Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer and various novels by Aldous Huxley, I was distressed by how violent and hostile most of the situations were in this play, and how repetitive those scenarios became. If there was a higher point to this (was I meant to become desensitized?), I didn’t feel it. Essentially these were cliffhangers in the old movie-serial Perils of Pauline style, yet on a more frequent basis than even, say, Clive Cussler would allow. Adding ethical dilemma to the mix merely turns the results into post-modern melodrama, and certainly doesn’t make it any less melodramatic. Which was just fine with the audience I saw it with late Friday night; they were there to hoot and laugh and throw ideas against the wall.
I left Dilemma! confused, ultimately. At the performance I saw, the Trolley Problem was virtually dramatized at the play’s climax, with the exception that there was no clear rule stating that the imperiled single person (previously announced as the lover of the main “avatars”) and the imperiled many people (strangers) were both completely doomed—we’d been already seen a scenario where a choice had been made which worked out happily for all involved Yet the strangers, portrayed by audience members, simply accepted that they were dead, even though they hadn’t been told that expressly. I suggest that in tonight’s remaining performances, if that situation repeats itself, that the crowd improvise a Monty Python & the Holy Grail moment and scream “I’m not dead yet” and see what happens.