Closed. April 9 at the Long Wharf Theatre mainstage. Directed by Maryna Harrison. Musical Director/Technical Director/Production Manager: Lydia Pustell. Set/Props: Katrina Frances. Costumes: Caitlin Headley. Lighting: Samuel Hewett. Sound: Nicole Rheaume. Stage manager: Alex Hajjar. Dramaturg: Mallory Morris. Graphics: Claire Zoghb. Music advisor: Carol Taubl. Performed by Sam Taubl (First Kid), Rick Bean (Uncle Celery), Jesse Gabbard (Tiger 1), Jenna Lex (Second Kid), Matt Cornish (Homeless Man, Oppenheimer, Moon Rock), Nicole Rodriguez (Tiger 2) and Taneisha Duggan (Tiger 3).
For years now, The Long Wharf Theatre has been turning its interns, associates and valued behind-the-scenesters loose on special annual projects, typically cast with New Haven community talent. The participants tend to be young adults, so the shows have the feel of better-than-average college student shows (and I speak, as my faithful readers will now, as an avid fan of collegiate theater).
In recent seasons this project, dubbed Next Stage, has skewed even younger, at least in the audience, offering family-friendly fare and even busing in school groups on weekdays. Last year LWT associate artistic director Eric Ting directed a fresh adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince. This year’s Next Stage (which played a mere two public performances last Saturday, plus a couple of school group gigs earlier in the week) was tigertigertiger, the only children’s theater piece thus far written by prolific alt-theater icon Mac Wellman.
Children’s theater is so often done on the fly (again, I’m not a snob about that, but as with all theater, practicality and second-guessing the audiences’ expectations can skew artists’ best intentions) that seeing a fully designed and diligently rehearsed piece like this was a treat. For one thing, Tigertigertiger is practically an oratorio, with a complex harmonic vocal score by Michael Roth, the eclectic composer of several dozen theater scores (particularly for the La Jolla Playhouse) and the orchestrator/arranger for several Randy Newman projects. Scenic designer Katrina Frances (who works in the LWT props shop and directed a Mac Wellman play herself while a student at UMass Amherst) concocted a set with a wide, high-up stage area accessible by a winding staircase half a dozen platform-sized steps. You’d think that with the complicated musical and stage arrangements, the cast might have clung to the central set, but director Maryna Harrison had them whisking into all corners of the theater, into the audience, up and down the voms and at the mezzanine railings.
Well, they do call it Next Stage. More importantly, this was a play about an odyssey, and the peripatetic staging made it feel like one. Yes, this was a thoughtful and careful production. The only weak link? Surprisingly, the script. Mac Wellman’s writing is usually so concise, so prepared, that it’s a shock to see not only a script of his that requires a cast of seven (large for just about any theater genre these days) but seems so unwieldy in length and scope. I saw more than a few kids’ eyes glaze over. The real issue is not the hour-plus running time but too many fresh starts and abrupt changes in the scenes, so that you really don’t see an end in sight. When the piece—about conquering one’s fears, knowing one’s self and respecting others, among other common kids-show insights—finally ends, it’s with this over-their-heads climactic confession: “It was a Freudian slip!”
But disappointment with the script, from the guy who wrote what I think is one of the greatest plays of the late 20th century (Sincerity Forever) and a bunch of other cool cutting-edge stuff, should not diminish the success of the Next Stage cast and creative team. Like last year’s The Happy Prince, this was a lush, full-blown ensemble experience, as inspiring and uplifting to its young audiences as it must have been to the Next Stage company’s Long Wharf colleagues.