The Bird Bath
Through March 2 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., New Haven. (203) 432-1566, www.yalecabaret.org
Created and performed by Chasten Harmon, Hannah Leigh Sorenson and Ariana Venturi. Directed by Monique Barbee. Dramaturg: Sheria Irving. Scenic Designer: Mariana Sanchez Hernandez. Lighting Designer: Masha Tsimring. Sound Design and Original Music: Palmer. Stage Manager: Alyssa K. Howard. Producer: Emika Abe. Production Assistant: Janyia Antrum.
Mental illness has been a recurring theme at the Yale Cabaret, not just this month or this season but throughout the venue’s existence. It’s a popular topic in theater in general, its appeal perhaps deriving from the multiple identities and reinterpreted realities actors cope with on a constant basis.
To its immense credit, the Yale Cabaret has seldom if ever fallen into stereotypes of the form. The Cabaret an intimate space, and clichés of loud ranting madness simply aren’t right. You can suggest more with long bouts of silence or a flicker of an eyelid.
The Bird Bath is an exceptional meditation on madness, human yet also wonderfully theatrical.
Director Monique Barbee, who as an actress at Yale has done all manners of anxiety—from still to jittery to Bergmanesque—leads a brazen and engaging cast through a variety of remote yet engaging, largely wordless vignettes inspired by the autobiography of surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. The performance has nothing to do with the long career and many literary and artistic accomplishments of Carrington (who published several other books and died in 2011). It hones in on a period in 1940 when she was in an asylum in Spain , hallucinating and moodswinging in response to a drug regimen of Cardiazol.
Carrington is played by three women at once, who serve more as a triptych of living paintings than as a dramatic narrative. Their movements often contradict each other, but they are conform at times, with precise choreography and the beautiful, painterly touch of having the women dress themselves in similar brightly colored gowns.
The natural language for insanity onstage is Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty methods, most famously unleashed in Peter Brook’s 1960s stage and film versions of Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade. The characters in that piece don’t relate to each other much, and are left to their own devices. The Bird Bath tries something trickier—a layered, multiple-perspective view of mental disorder, exquisitely choreographed and paced, with a modicum of narrative assistance. There are voiceovers drawn from Carrington’s book Down Below, about her ordeal in Spain, but the play doesn’t use the book to impose a plot or structure. This is not a descent into madness but a portrait of being in the midst.
The Bird Bath has as many “danger” elements in its presentation as does Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class at the Long Wharf across town. There’s nudity, a water-filled tub, broken eggs, (nearly) induced vomiting, entrances through outdoor windows and mouthfuls of citrus fruit. Yet The Bird Bath doesn’t go wild. Nor does it overplay its Surrealism card and lay on odd juxtapositions for no good reason. It’s an ordered, refined yet irrepressible burst of conflicted and barely contained emotions.
The show’s as harrowing to see as it must have been for Leonora Carrington (who survived the Cardiazol ordeal gracefully and lived to be 94) to live, and must be frightfully intense to perform, especially when each actress must be so aware of the others around her. The periods of calm are as eerie as the frantic leaps and struts.
I don’t think I’ve ever been more relieved to an actor smile peacefully and thankfully at a curtain call.