The Ugly One
Through April 13 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park Street, New Haven. (203) 432-1566, www.yalecabaret.org
By Marius von Mayenburg. Translated by Maja Zade. Director: Cole Lewis. Dramaturg: Sarah Krasnow. Scenic Designer: Reid Thompson. Costume Designer: Soule Golden. Lighting Designer: Benjamin Ehrenreich. Composer: Steve Brush. Sound Designers: Steve Brush and Tyler Kiefer. Projection Designer: Nicholas Hussong. Technical Director: Alex Bergeron. Producer & Stage Manager: Jennifer Lagundino. Cast: Mitchell Winter (Lette), Michelle McGregor (Fanny), Jabari Brisport (Scheffler), Dan O’Brien (Karlmann).
The Onion Book of Known Knowledge defines “Serling, Rod” as:
Neurotic creator and host of The Twilight Zone, a weekly anthology series that enabled Serling to work through his fears of flying, being alone, his neighbors, dying in his sleep, getting sucked into dreams or works of art, being locked in a bank vault during a nuclear attack, dead grandmas calling on toy phones, being the only human-looking person in a fascist world of pig-snouted people, fictional towns called Willoughby, being harassed by small people in spaceships, and being shot by Elizabeth Montgomery
The Ugly One, by German playwright Marius von Mayenburg, takes a Serling trope—the power of attractiveness—and gives it an Onion-esque spin, taking a superficial concept about a superficial trait and deepening it by taking it to comical extremes.
It’s an entirely appropriate final show for a season which continually explored values of normalcy, sanity and beauty. But it’s also a divine showcase for the values of the Yale Cabaret. Like the Brecht script Lindbergh’s Flight, which was done at the Cabaret earlier this year, The Ugly One holds itself to a four-person ensemble in which only one actor (Mitchell Winter) consistently maintains a lead role while the other change characters with blistering speed around him. There’s no presumption of costume changes, and none of the actors ever leaves the stage. As with Lindbergh, there’s a loose and arch comic style which puts the actors at risk of cracking each other up and dropping character(s). But the transformations—which are not quickchanges, just a ball to keep up with—set a tone and pace and comic strip clamor for The Ugly One which telegraphs to audiences in its very first moments that it’s OK to laugh uproariously.
The Ugly One’s Friday 11 p.m. audience was keen to guffaw, and von Mayenburg’s play—an influential hit at London’s Royal Court theater in 2007-08—keeps giving them license. It starts with a neat theatrical premise: that lead character Lette (Mitchell Winter, who explored aspects of truth and beauty as the Georges in a Yale School of Drama production of Sunday in the Park with George earlier this school year) is unspeakably ugly, though he’s never realized this fact which is universally acknowledged by everyone around him. The audience hasn’t realized it either, since there’s no attempt (through make-up, masks or otherwise) to convey that the actor’s face is any different than that of his co-stars. When Lette is changed by a doctor (Jabari Brisport, who delivers some exceptional comic moments just through his voice inflections) into a paragon of male beauty, he succumbs to all the greediness and feelings of superiority which come with it. He torments his wife (Michelle McGregor, a sexual dynamo whose bright lipstick becomes its own character once it attaches itself to Winter’s bemused face) with his adulteries, becomes a spokesperson for the company he develops phallic-metaphor tools for (to the chagrin of his co-worker played with sublime boyish boorishness by Dan O’Brien), and otherwise exploits his good lucks and good fortune so extravagantly that a crass comedown is inevitable. When von Mayerburg delivers this denouement, however, he doesn’t succumb to the simpering sentimentality of many an Adam Sandler movie; he dollops on extra sex, extra sass, extra power struggles. The Ugly One remains riotous to its last moment, so much so that the cast is entirely justified when they turn their curtain call into a frenetic jazz dance.
Like a Rod Serling piece, The Ugly One deals with extraordinary insecurities. But even though it uses some of the same bombastic music or dramatic gasps (parodically, granted) to make its points, it’s so much greater than a Twilight Zone episode. Von Mayenburg has taken a theme which is very close to the hearts of theater people—how we look and act, how we gain importance through through popular ideals of handsomeness, and how easily those traits can be coopted, copied and taken from us. He’s spun it into a cautionary tale which ranks with great German and Russian Expressionist comedy of a century or so ago. It plays like a dream, and also like a kind of Saturday Night Live sketch, so you’re not afraid of it or intimidated by it.
Here’s the Cabaret, taking one last crack at issues of self-worth, places in society, mental stability and what constitutes importance. The Ugly One is a colorful shocker of a consciousness-raiser, and ends the Cabaret’s 2012-13 season on a pretty high note.