Here’s who’s playing all those Irish townsfolk and Hollywood cretins in the Yale Rep production of Marie Jones’ Stones in His Pockets which runs Jan.25 through Feb. 16 at the Yale Repertory Theatre:
• Fred Arsenault.
• Euan Morton.
That’s it. As is the playwright’s wont, all the dozen-plus roles are played by two male actors.
Arsenault you know from the recent Yale Rep premiere of David Adjmi’s Marie Antoinette, in which he played Joseph and Mr. Sauce. He’s clearly got a thing for the name Marie.
Euan Morton might have been seen at the Rep in the title role of the Tony Kushner/Maurice Sendak rewrite of the operetta Brundibar—he created the role at the Berkeley Rep, and also played it in New York), but in New Haven the part was played by then-Drama School student Joe Gallagher. Morton starred on Broadway in the Boy George biomusical Taboo and was in the Roundabout production of Patrick Marber’s play Howard Katz in 2007. His regional credits are voluminous.
Evan Yionoulis directs. She is of course a professor in the Department of Acting at the Yale School of Drama as well as a resident director at the Yale Rep, where her most recent shows were Kirsten Greenidge’s Bossa Nova, Ibsen’s The Master Builder and Shakespeare’s Richard II—time for a comedy!
All the designers are current students at the Yale School of Drama—Edward T. Morris for sets and projections, Nikki Delhomme for costumes, Solomon Weisbard for lighting and Matt Otto for sound. They, and the show’s stage manager Nicole Marconi, are all third-year students, while Production Dramatur Sarah Krasnow (a Yale Cabaret instigator of the conceptually rich shows Creation 2011, Ain’t Gonna Make It and Dilemma!) is a second-year.
Personally, I’m looking forward to what Yionoulis and company might do with this admittedly mainstream piece, which was a fringe and Broadway hit in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s and frequently gets done now by community theaters. It’s a darker show than you’d at first think, given its quick-change shenanigans.