Some folks flock to the International Festival of Arts & Ideas for the big names who play on New Haven Green, but the festival has become just as well known for its audacious programming and its progressive next-wave outlook.
Theaterwise, yes, this is the festival that once brought over the mediocre present-day D’Oyly Carte Opera Company from London, and made a big show of booking such companies as the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theater. But Arts & Ideas was on the earliest tip of such now robust genres as circus theater, bringing in Cirque Baroque twice in the late ‘90s with that companies antic acrobatic adaptations of Voltaire’s Candide and the life of Yukio Mishima. Arts & Ideas hosted the U.S. premiere of Michael Frayn’s intricate mathematical drama Copenhagen, with the original British cast over a year before its Broadway debut. There’s a good number of performance artists and solo performers who made their first big splash at the festival, leading to national tours and wider recognition.
Look at this year’s musical theater offerings: An alliance with the Yale Institute of Musical Theater meant that Arts & Ideas audiences could be present at workshop readings of two new musicals which flaunt many conventions of the form. The Last Queen of Canaan, but Jacob Yandura and Rebekah Greer Melocik, has as its lead character a former slave woman in her late 70s, surrounded by ghosts from her pre-Reconstruction past and by a nattering younger generation that can’t comprehend the level of her bitterness concerning humanity. The other YIMT musical, Mrs. Hughes, is about the two suicidal lovers of the poet Ted Hughes—Sylvia Plath and Assia Gutmann. Both shows were well aware of the challenges of their subject matters and source materials, and used the workshop opportunities to their utmost. The scene on the lawn outside Yale’s Off Broadway Theater before and after the Saturday presentations were imbued with a desire to embrace such bracing new work. (Mrs. Hughes and The Last Queen of Canaan have their final YIMT workshop performances today at 1 & 5 p.m. respectively.)
Arts & Ideas has two other musical theater works-in-development on its main indoor stages this week and next. Stuck Elevator was actually developed at YIMT three summers back. The program’s director, Mark Brokaw, spoke warmly of Stuck Elevator’s co-creators when they were in the audience of Last Queen of Canaan on Saturday afternoon. There’s the added excitement of Aaron Jafferis being a hometown boy, who performed some of his hip-hop poetry at a festival event years ago and has been active in political theater locally since his high school days. Stuck Elevator had its world-premiere full production at ACT in San Francisco just a couple of months ago. It had grown much larger in cast-size and scope since its early days. The show is being reworked again, so that it might tour, and Arts & Ideas is hosting that new version June 20-29. (The Thursday, June 20 performance is a preview; reviews should start appearing after Friday’s show.)
On June 19 & 20, Arts & Ideas presents preview performances of a new work by internationally acclaimed Yale-based artists Martin Bresnick, J.D. McClatchy and David Chambers. My Friend’s Story, adapted from the Chekhov short story “Terror.
All Arts & Ideas info is at www.artidea.org