Ain’t Gonna Make It

Through Oct. 6 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park Street, New Haven. (203) 432-1566, www.yalecabaret.org

Conceived by Nicholas Hussong, Cole Lewis, Masha Tsimring and Lauren Dubowski. Created with The Ensemble. Director: Cole Lewis. Producer: Kate Ivins. Technical Director: Kaitlyn Anderson. Costume Designer: Kate Noll. Sound Designer: Steve Brush. Dramaturg: Lauren Dubowski.

Ain’t Gonna Make It is, true to its title, most interesting for how it was made. It’s a conversational blues/rock/folk concert piece with a narrative about imminent death from cancer. The ending is inevitable, and abrupt. The choices made along the way, both scriptwise and stagingwise, is what truly makes Ain’t Gonna Make It.

The format is a small club rock show, with a five piece band of intriguing instrumentation (keyboards, cell, stand-up bass, violin and two acoustic guitars) and a set list duly taped to the floor of the stage. But the casual set-up is deceptive, since this is an ingenious and fully thought-through theater piece about a dire subject, which makes the most of its sparse surroundings.

Props are kept to a minimum, and much of the show is a monologue—with frequent musical interludes—delivered by Timothy Hassler. Unlike a lot of shows in this vein, Hassler did not script his own words, though his performance really has a lived-in feel, or more appropriately a died-in one. The character discusses his diagnosis of Stage 3 colon cancer. We observe his mental state, which seldom involves anger but often concerns sexual longings and disorientation.

This is not a dramatic musical monologue in the manner of, say, Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The songs and set-pieces (many of which involve members of the audience) flow like a story. The tunes are mostly basic four-chord rock & roll, conveying simple truths (“I’m feeling good/I need a pity fuck”), but some have a lilting Jacques Brel style, or the earthy dynamism of Brecht/Weill, and one even borrows the melody of “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”

Much of the show is very funny. In taking a concert framework, it also assumes that showbiz momentum of acknowledging the audience and making sure they’re involved and amused. This is hardly a self-pitying piece. It’s got jokes. Cancer is represented by party balloons. It has an ingratiating narrative—cancer treatment sucks, then you die.

The clarity and vulnerability of the staging add immeasurably to the impact of Ain’t Gonna Make It. The supporting band members have a constant effect on the proceedings, nudging the plot along by bringing hypodermic needles (improvised by the sharp pointed stand of a cello) and pill containers (which become a neat percussion device).

Call it Passing Away Strange. And call it another noble bit of theater experimentation at the Yale Cabaret that finds balance and hope amid some challenging subject matter.

I cull two extraordinary syndicated-comic-strip sites, http://www.gocomics.com and http://dailyink.com/, regularly for theater-themed comics. As always, I highly recommend subscribing to these superb sites.

Here are five Shakespeare-specific strips: Paul Johnson’ Fort Knox, Bassett & Harrell’s Adam@Home, Jan Eliot’s Stone Soup, The Lost Bear by Bradley Trevor Greive and the inimitable Shannon Wheeler’s Too Much Coffee Man. (I once had the pleasure of running Wheeler’s strips in the New Haven Advocate when I was an editor there, and met him in person at a comics conference at Southern Connecticut State University. Alas, the subject of Richard III on the toilet did not arise.)

David Lang’s love fail, written for the vocal ensemble Anonymous 4, had its world premiere at the 2012 International Festival of Arts & Ideas.

Where are they now? Some of the key acts from the International Festival of Arts & Ideas are still in the country, making other stops on the culture-fest circuit.

TheNational Theatre of Scotland’s pub-set Prudentia Hart is in Chicago.

The Carolina Chocolate Drops played Fairfield University last week. Another of the big Green attractions, Roseanne Cash, is playing the Johnny Cash Music Festival, named for her father, in Jonesboro Arizona on October 5. The triple-headliner Sing the Truth! tour ended with the Arts & Ideas gig in June—Dianne Reeves, Angelique Kidjo and Lizz Wright have fanned out solo around the world, with only Wright touching down anywhere near the  East Coast in the next many months, performing a free outdoor Sept. 29 show in Boston backed by Sing the Truth bandleader Terri Lyne Carrington’s Mosaic Project.

David Lang’s love fail, which had its world premiere at Arts & Ideas,  will be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Dec. 6-8. love fail was one of the true marvels of A&I 2012, ideally suited to the unique environment of the Yale Repertory Theatre, an old church building which morphed into a modernist performance space. Not that you can ever recapture the thrill of a world premiere, but if you happened to miss love fail at A&I, you owe it to your heart to catch this work of cutting-edge emotional ethereality in Brooklyn.

Some Arts & Ideas shows have not resurfaced. One of the culminating events of A&I 2012, the Contemporary Legend Theatre’s downsizing of King Lear to one actor, a few musicians and a bunch of gigantic boulders, has vanished in the cheek-cracking winds. (CLT’s King Lear already had its big U.S. showcase five years ago, at New York’s Lincoln Center Festival.)

As for Arts & Ideas itself, the 2013 schedule will be officially announced in the springtime. But there’s been a slew of other info about the festival in recent days.

At the end of September, the latest Arts & Ideas podcast was put up on iTunes. It’s a taping of a lecture from last summer, British Council Director of Arts Graham Sheffield holding forth on “From Soft Power to Global Connectivity—The International Birds-Eye View of Arts & Culture.” Arts & Ideas posts a podcast every couple of months. There are about 30 of them on their iTunes menu.

On October 1, Arts & Ideas announced that it would present its third annual Visionary Leadership Award to Charlayne Hunter-Gault, the journalist and documentarian who’s been a foreign correspondent for NPR, CNN and PBS. The award luncheon will be held November 14 at the Omni New Haven Hotel at Yale.

On October 2, A&I told its email list that “we met the challenge!,” namely a matching-grant fundraising push, and had amassed “$100,000 in 100 days.” The challenge was mentioned frequently in introductory and closing speeches at June’s A&I events. The festival was actually matching two separate grants: $25,000 from the Newman’s Own Foundation and a similar amount from the Association of Performing Arts Presenters/MetLife Foundation All-In Grant Program.

Then Frank Rizzo at the Hartford Courant broke the news that a key event of A&I 2013 will be a adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream  created by South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company, the folks who brought you the international stage sensation War Horse. New Haven is one of only two places the show will play in the United States in 2013. The other is the Spoleto Festival in South Carolina.

Tracy Letts (right) in The Realistic Joneses

Tracy Letts (right) in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

New Haven audiences saw Tracy Letts as the intransigent, debilitated husband in the world premiere of Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses at the Yale Repertory Theatre last spring. For Letts, that role followed stints as a middle-aged married man of decidedly different temperament, namely George in a revival of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. The production played in 2010 in Lett’s theatrical homebase, Chicago’s Steppenwolf Thatre. It was later seen at Arena Stage in Washington in 2011.

Letts is of course also a playwright. His Pulitzer-winning August: Osage County premiered at the Steppenwolf in 2007 and ran on Broadway from late 2007 to mid-2009. The national tour visited the Bushnell in Hartford.

Tracy Letts and the rest of the original Chicago cast of the Virginia Woolf revival—Amy Morton as Martha, Carrie Coon as Honey and Madison Dirks as Nick—bring the production to Broadway’s Booth Theater, with previews beginning this Thursday, September 27. Opening night, Saturday Oct. 13, has been timed to coincide with the 50^th anniversary of the original New York premiere in 1962.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is directed by Pam MacKinnon. It’s kind of a crime that Pam MacKinnon hasn’t directed anything in New Haven. She’s directed Bruce Norris’ The Unmentionables at Washington’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre; the play later done at the Yale Rep but directed by Anna Shapiro. MacKinnon directed Albee’s A Delicate Balance at Arena Stage around the same time that it was also at the Rep, but directed there by James Bundy. MacKinnon’s most famous credit is as the director of both New York productions of Norris’ Clybourne Park, at Playwrights Horizon in 2010 and the one which closed earlier this month at Broadway’s Walter Kerr Theatre. The Long Wharf is doing its own production of Clybourne Park next spring, directed by Eric Ting.

Offstage, Pam MacKinnon been in a relationship for years with John Proccacino, a favorite Long Wharf Theater actor who starred in the theater’s productions of Syliva, Italian-American Moon Reconciliation, A Moon for the Misbegotten and We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay!

As for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, one of the most talked-about productions of the play in the 1990s was in Connecticut: it was at Hartford Stage, directed by Paul Weidner and starring Marlo Thomas, Robert Foxworth, Heather Ehlers and Burke Moses. For his part, Albee has regularly spoken at Yale and was the inaugural judge of the Yale Drama Series Award.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is began on Broadway and became a major motion picture starring Hollywood royalty Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. But the play has really belonged to the regional theater movement for decades now, and it’s fitting that a 50^th anniversary revival has come out of Chicago.

The Firebugs by Max Frisch, as staged at Yale Cabaret in 2006. (Taken from the website of set designer Nick Rastenis.)

I have attended literally hundreds of performances at the Yale Cabaret over the past quarter century, so that’s how many times I’ve heard the venue’s famous “fire speech.”

Here, I can do it by heart:
In the unlikely event of a fire, you have three options. You can go (in an orderly fashion) out this exit, up the stairs and onto the path of safety. You can go this way, out the exit, through the garden up the stairs and onto the path of safety. Or you can go down the corridor to the right to the area of refuge, where an attractive New Haven firefighter will rescue you.”

With minor variations, that’s been the basic fire speech for at least 15 years now. I’ve lived with it long enough to remember when the “path of safety” was, as will strike as incredibly obvious now I reveal it to you, “the path to safety.” I wish I’d noted when that little game-of-Telephone-like slip actually entered the weekly ritual, but of course I had no idea that the admittedly more dramatic concept of “the Path of Safety” would still be enshrined in the text well in the 21^st century. However pompous “Path of Safety” may sound, it solves the delicate textual of the irritatingly repetitive “to” in the phrase “onto the path to…”

At the time of the “of,” in any case, the Fire Speech had bigger issues. For years, it was delivered with such determination and resolve that nobody noticed that it wasn’t very helpful. Instead of listing “options,” the Fire Speech orators would specifically direct whole sectors of the audience toward the nearest exit, as in “This half of the room can proceed in an orderly fashion out this door…” It took a visiting member of the New Haven Fire Department to point out that fires don’t always begin in the centers of theaters, yet the Cabaret was instructing the audience to fan out as if such an arrangement was a certainty—and had been doing so for years.

Then came a period when the Fire Speech became a freely interpreted text. A think a turning point was when a graduate student playwright (whose name I have sadly forgotten—William something?) delivered a comic, Robert Benchley-esque monologue in which it was posited that the “In Case of Fire” notice in a hotel room was a fragment of a lost Tennessee Williams manuscript. Not long after that (sometime in the mid-1990s), the Fire Speech briefly evolved into a comic tradition as entrenched as the short “York Street” curtain-raisers which preceded Cabaret shows at performances where the audience was largely made up of School of Drama classmates.

The master of Fire Speech mockery was Preston Lane, who ran the Yale Summer Cabaret for a record three summers, and is now known as the co-founder and Artistic Director of Triad Stage in Greensboro, North Carolina. Lane would rework the Fire Speech to fit the mood of the show he was presenting, from Shakespearean to gritty, from rhyming to modernist.

Meanwhile, the school-year Cabaret Fire Speeches got more and more audacious. A personal favorite was when Shane Rettig did a Cabaret show which was basically a set of his own rock songs (Cabaret concerts were looser in those days). He opened the show with a rewrite of Hendrix’s “Let Me Stand Next to Your Fire” as “That’s What You Do in Case of Fire.

Audience members occasionally got into the act. I remember one old gent, about a decade ago, blustering his way into being allowed to deliver the speech, which he did rapid-fire in a comic accent. Unbeknownst to him, that evening’s show was a tragic drama, completely unsuited to the man’s sped-up incendiary send-up.

At some point, the Yale Cabaret officially wised up and began taking the fire speech as seriously as sleep-derived thespians could. The “attractive New Haven firefighter” line (originally “fireman” and adjusted over time to erase any gender bias) is as far as the Fire Speechers let themselves go humor-wise. Presentationally, it is frequently divided into parts and spoken by several different people, but in straightforward fashion.

Which is fine. It’s a tidy little speech, in line with the “unwrap your candies” tropes at every theater anywhere ever. Like Cabaret shows in general, it should strive for concision, balance and quality, and send a clear message when possible, right onto the path of safety.

In any case, as far as I know, there’s never been an actual fire at the Yale Cabaret. A fire marshall visits just before every show, and I’ve heard tales of last-minute trimmings of too-high backdrops or frantic fireproofings of flimsy fabrics. But the show has always gone on. When The Station nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island had its unspeakable tragedy in 2003, it affected fire codes throughout the East Coast, and the Yale Cabaret’s seating capacity shrank by a few dozen chairs so there was no question about the audience egressing in an orderly fashion, no matter which of the three options they chose. And no need to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater.

Playwright Lisa Loomer.

Playwright Amy Herzog. (Photo taken by Rachel Levy.)

Still catching up on season announcements and such. (Not to mention the theater calendar page—patience, folks, patience!) One of the more intriguing small-theater slates in the offing comes from the nearly quarter-century-old Square One Theatre Company in Stratford.

The company’s had good luck with mysteries in the past, and is leading off its 23^rd season Nov. 2-17 with British playwright David Foley’s redundantly titled Deadly Murder. The three-character thriller is indeed a humorous piece amid its gunplay and double-crosses. Reviews on Foley’s website call it “madcap” and “witty,” with “crackling tension.”

March 1-16 brings a rare Connecticut production of a work by popular contemporary West Coast playwright Lisa Loomer. Distracted, a comedy about attention deficit disorder, premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 2007 and was done a couple of years later at the Roundabout Theater Company in New York. Loomer was one of the many contributors to Motherhood Out Loud, which was staged at Hartford Stage in 2010 and later moved to Off Broadway.

The third and final show of the Square One Season is another small-cast drama by a contemporary female playwright, Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles. Herzog attended the Yale School of Drama, where her play for the annual Carlotta Festival was anything but small-cast: The Wendy Play had nearly two dozen actors in it, half of them high school students. Herzog has since become accomplished at more intimate dialogues, including the successful suspense/romance Belleville last season at the Yale Repertory Theatre. 4000 Miles, which Square One will present May 17 through June 1, had a successful Off Broadway premiere at New York’s Duke theater in 2010, then moved to Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre last year. The setting of the play is based on Herzog’s grandmother’s apartment on West 10^th Street in Greenwich Village.

Cool season, and Square One has always had a surfeit of strong actresses of certain ages to accomodate all those striking female roles.

Square One operates out of the Stratford Theatre, 2422 Main Street, Stratford. (203) 375-8778. Tickets are $20 and—whoo! Discount!—$19 for students and seniors. http://squareonetheatre.com/

BBC Radio Four’s Today Show described last night’s Presidential debate in terms of “the body language, the appearance, the theater…,” and of course I’m inclined to agree. I’m also inclined to think that anyone who fell for Mitt Romney’s wily-eyed Jack Lemmon impersonation is a sucker. Romney’s performance was straight out of one of those 1930s handbooks on how to give an effective pep talk. And he wasn’t even convincing, since he couldn’t hide that hideous smirk of his. He was the dapper villain from a melodrama who couldn’t

Meanwhile, Obama gets lambasted by suckered pundits for being—what? Realistic? Presidential? Obama had a more relaxed posture. He didn’t speak in punchlines. His ad libs sounded genuine, as when he told Romney that the Republican’s dubious vow of bipartisanism was a dream if he planned to kill Obamacare on his first day in office. (The President also interjected that he’d ‘become fond’ of the term Obamacare. What a delightful character note.)

That’s a theater critic’s opinion, and, honestly, there’s nobody who doesn’t accept these debates as mere theater exercises. Otherwise, the candidates would have white boards and pointers for their presentations, and the TV networks would be dressing up the coverage with learned scholarship rather than tweets from celebrities.

What makes these debates more than just a vaudevillian double act is the fact that no casting director in their right mind would line up these performers against each other on the same stage. That’s what makes it a debate and not a Neil Simon revival—these two squabblers are actually different people with different styles.

and last night’s was one of the most substantial any two political candidates have had on the national level in years. Pity that so many couldn’t disconnect from the dramatic aspects. Guess it takes a guy who goes to theater for a living to do that.

Romney won on artifice. If the Kennedy/Nixon debate was about grooming and the Biden/Palin debate was about situation comedy (see the sparks fly when this laughable pair square off on national TV!), this one was about contrasting styles of acting.

What it reminded me of most was the misbegotten film version of Guys and Dolls. Romney was being the snappy, pushy Sky Masterson as essayed by Marlon Brando. Obama was Frank Sinatra’s laidback Nathan Detroit. Not a show I need revived. But I’m eager to see Obama engage in another four-year run, while Romney gets relegated to the straw hat circuit.

This., at the Yale Cabaret.

This.

Through September 29 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park Street, New Haven. (203) 432-1566, www.yalecabaret.org.

Conceived and created by Margot Bordelon, Mary Laws and Alexandra Ripp. Script by Mary Laws. Director: Margot Bordelon. Playwright: Mary Laws. Dramaturg: Alexandra Ripp. Producer: Whitney Dibo. Stage Manager: Kristin Hodges. Set Designer: Reid Thompson. Costume Designer: Hunter Kaczorowski. Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason. Sound Designer: Joel abbott. Projection Designer: Solomon Weisbard. Advising Associate Projection Designer: Michael F. Bergmann. RTechnical Director: Nora Hyland.

This flurry of first-person confessions and musings is “based on interviews conducted in New Haven.” I was one of those interviews, back in May, so can speak a bit as to what it feels like to have one’s memories plucked, processed and distilled for a public performance by others.

It feels OK. This.’s creators could scarcely have been more solicitious, more gracious, more understanding and more cautious about their curating of the memories they sought to elicit from a wide scope of classmates and community members.

In many cases, director Bordelon and playwright Mary Laws and dramaturg Alexandra Ripp told me, names or genders or specific details were altered to preserve anonymity. In my particular case, that was not true, but then my own hour-long interview boiled down (as I’d suspected) to just two sentences of dialogue amid a swirl of remembrances drawn from over 50 people and hundreds of transcribed pages.

It’s that swirl which This. chose to dramatize. This is not a show for egos, for folks who feel they have deeper problems than others or more amusing anecdotes to relate. This. finds a throughline among hundreds of thoughts and reflections, cataloguing them and physicalizing them.

When asked about loss and regret, apparently, people tend to gravitate towards images of death and moral failure. There are many stories in This. about relatives who’ve died, and about getting away with something which brought pain to someone else.

This (as distinct from This.) is where such confessional shows render themselves critic-proof. Who would deign to dismiss a real person’s actual traumas and epiphanies as derivative or common? This. does not exploit its subjects—it doesn’t everything in its power to avoid such a charge—but it nevertheless treads a very thin line between honoring its subjects’ memories and turning them into statistics.

There’s a lot of repetition in This. There’s a lot of repetition because of the nature of the questions asked, and because of how people tend to open up in certain situations. But the show also believes that certain experiences are more sacrosanct—in this temple, that means more dramatic—than others. Articulate monologues about the deaths of a loved ones are a theater staple going back to the form’s Greek origins. They anchor much of the structure here as well. Material objects are prized for their symbolism, for their impermanence, and for how much mental stress these object can command.

What’s much more interesting to me about This. than its source material is its choice of presentational style. A cast of three women and three men, all School of Drama students and all around the same age, narrate and act out the stories in a grand manner. They reenact fights and taunts and dances and lovemaking. There was a conscious attempt, Bordelon and Laws and Ripp told me, not to replicate the speech patterns, attitudes or cultural gestures of the storytellers, to the point where the actors were not given anything but the transcribed text from which to develop their own characterizations. The playing can be rather broad. The scenes in which these 20somethings portray children smack of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Man. Overall, there’s that sense that there’s already a theatrical language in place for telling stories of loss, death and regret. This. accesses that theater tradition, and does not practice the same level of naturalism that it did in its initial factgathering.

The tone is somewhat balanced by the constant intrusion of projected text that frame the action, setting up the conversations and revelations. Also by the gray three-dimensional backdrop constructed by set designer Reid Thompson, an assemblage of shelfs with objects (similar to ones being talked about by the actors, though I’d love to hear the story behind the nondescript laundry detergent bottle on one of the shelves), all painted gray in an acknowledged stylistic nod to sculptor Louise Nevelson. Generally, this is a lively show, unwilling to get too dark or dismal or, strangely, reflective.

On the other hand, the physicalized antics give This. an entertainment value it would otherwise not have had. It deflects the depth and woe and isolation of many of the stories. It is an exercise in sharing, and to that end This. is a communal pleasure. It also shows how far the Yale Cabaret has come in recent years: from pristine pet projects that often defied attempts at intense collaboration, to openly experimental and improvised ensemble pieces. There’s a lot to be said for the heavily controlled auteurish shows as well, but in terms of making the most of School of Drama resources and engaging a larger community of theater lovers, I applaud the effort needed to nail all these ensemble creations.

The show openly discusses the process through which it was composed. It opens and closes conversationally, with the voices of the interviewers joining that of the interviewees. At one point, a character begins to relate a story which he says he has only told to one other person. Then he has second thoughts, and asks that the story not be used in the show. Then… we don’t hear the story, and the show moves on. At another point, a storyteller becomes obsessed with how his story will be staged.

That’s the gist of This.—the sharing of stories, but also the consciousness of how those stories are altered by being shared. They speak to the very nature of theater.

And yet, magically, for all its artifice, This. maintains that air of friendly, open conversation.

“Come in,” they ask nicely. “Sit down.” There’s the promise of interesting tales about to be told. And the promise is fulfilled.

Richard Ruiz (center) croons Neil Diamond’s “America” at the manic conclusion of American Night—The Ballad of Juan Jose, through Oct. 13 at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

American Night—The Ballad of Juan Jose

Through October 13. Presented by the Yale Repertory Theatre at the Yale University Theater, 222 York St., New Haven. (203) 432-1234, www.yalerep.org

By Richard Montoya. Developed by Culture Clash and Jo Bonney. Directed by Shana Cooper. Choreographer: Ken Roht. Scenic Designer: Kristen Robinson. Costume Designer: Martin T. Schnellinger. Lighting Designer: Masha Tsimring. Sound Designer: Palmer Hefferan. Projection Designer: Paul Lieber. Production Dramaturg: Lauren Dubowski. Vocal and Dialect Coach: Beth McGuire. Singing Coach: Vicki Shaghoian. Fight Director: Rick Sordelet. Casting Director: Tara Rubin Casting. Stage Manager: James Mountcastle.

American Night is a societal nightmare play in the chaotic tradition of The Adding Machine and Beggar on Horseback. Such self-pitying silliness really sells in times of economic uncertainty. Or maybe people just like it because it’s fast, furious and very funny.

Juan Jose is a Mexican everyman who has come to America but feels incomplete with just a green card. “Alien” still means alien, he laments. So he’s in the workroom at his job studying for his U.S. Citizenship exam. He crams until he’s weak, rests his head for a moment on a table, then BAM! POW! He’s asleep! It’s the least restful dream in theater history, a fever-dream on par with Dorothy’s twister-swept visions in The Wizard of Oz.

It’s funny to say this, but playwright Richard Montoya should be commended for NOT making his characters deep and human. Everybody’s a caricature, everybody’s mocked with gross stereotypes, everybody but the guy playing Juan Jose, Rene Millan, plays multiple roles. Everybody speaks in absurd Southern, Hispanic, Asian or WASP accents. When in doubt, the actors dance, masterfully choreographed for the ensemble’s varied abilities by Ken Roht. (If you’re a producer planning a revival of The Full Monty or Stepping Out, hey, hire Ken Roht.)

For her part, director Shana Cooper must do a very different thing than she did when she was last at Yale Rep. A couple of seasons ago, Cooper found a new youthful style to fit student actors who both jump from balconies and scan Shakespeare metrically like pros. This time, she is in obeisance to an existing style of controlled chaos favored by playwright Richard Montoya and developed by the legendary theater troupe he co-founded, Culture Clash. Jo Bonney, who directed earlier productions of this play at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and in California at the La Jolla Playhouse and Culver City’s Kirk Douglas Theater, shares a “developed by” credit with Culture Clash, and a second Culture Clash founding member, Hector Siguenza appeared in roles now done at Yale by Richard Ruiz. Cooper and a game cast–the perfectly cast Ruiz, the multitalented Nicole Shalhoub and two especially sturdy supporting cast members with serious Yale Rep cred—Felicity Jones, who appeared at the Rep in Master Builder, A Woman of No Importance, Lulu and Ladies of the Camelias, and recent Yale School of Drama grad (and Yale Summer Cabaret stand-out) Austin Durant. To find a cast that is so uniformly brassy and fearless is a trick, even if some of the trashier routines are beneath their talents.

Playwright/performer Richard Montoya as Bob Dylan, Rene Millan as the title character and Nicole Shalhoub in American Night—The Ballad of Juan Jose at the Yale Rep. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

The style is a colorful, cartoony one, not a raw frolic such as The Fatal Eggs, which the Yale Cabaret admirably began their fall season with last weekend. It’s a more composed, calculated, brightly illuminated form of comedy. The actors fan out carefully about the stage, and seldom clump. They declaim their jokes like opera singers. Behind them is an everchanging backdrop of projected photographs, from nature scenes to montages of social unrest in the 1960s. Befitting the word “ballad” in its title, the show stops cold a couple a times for some beautiful musical interludes.

American Night has a larger cast than most Culture Clash shows. When the essential troupe, a trio, appeared at Yale a decade or so ago in their signature work, Culture Clash in AmeriCCa, they augmented that plotless, sketch-based evening with fresh material commenting on culture divides here in New Haven. The added material really took over, since the cast directly impersonated and parodied local celebrities and politicians.

The decidedly more plotbound American Night doesn’t have the same splash of local content, but as the general election approaches there are plenty of Romney (Mormon), Obama(-care), 47%, 99% and similar references to make the show seem more current than it really. A lot of the lampooning, sadly, concerns classic historical themes which haven’t changed much over the centuries: white settlers oppressing native cultures and minorities, immigration struggles, the injustice of internment camps.

The humor, and the drama, is excessive and heavy-handed. But you can’t say it’s not consistent. Right out of the gate, in the pre-show “turn off your cell phones” announcement, we’re told that violators “will be deported to East Haven.” Later, we get KKK-sheeted bigots, Jesus Christ himself being hassled by border police, and the entire cast in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vests dancing to the old rap novelty “Ice Ice Baby.” Luckily, we also get more subtle laughs such as the observation “Why do Mexican-Americans love Morrisey?” or that a disgruntled hippie is “going back to Greenwich,” or a union leader’s crack about “student labor” when the backstage crew (indeed composed partly of Drama School students) engineer a trapdoor effect, and even a bizarre reference to the Christina Ricci opus Black Snake Moan.

Is there a point to get across here? Yes, and at one point it’s articulated thus: “America Sucks—but it swallows.” American Night is about the anxiety of craving freedom in a place universally known for spreading yet, but which is just as likely to deprive you of it. It’s a nightmare that many can’t avoid, and one well worth considering. The fact that we can laugh at such spectacular insensitivity means there may be hope for us all. Let’s hope this dream is a wake-up call.

Rene Millan as Juan Jose and Nicole Shalhoub as a braces-sporting teenaged Sacagawea in American Night—The Ballad of Juan Jose at Yale Repertory Theatre. T. Charles Erickson photo.

The Goodspeed Opera House’s production of Carousel closes this week—the final performance of the Rodgers & Hammerstein hit is September 29. I regret that I didn’t get a chance to review the show. I did get a chance to SEE it, but at a preview performance so early in the run that it would have been unprofessional to publish my opinions at that time (even though I loved the show). The summer really got away from me, and I didn’t get out to half the things I wanted to, let alone find a way to see things a second time.

The third and final show of Goodspeed’s mainstage season is a welcome professional revival of the mystery musical Something’s Afoot by James McDonald, David Vos and Robert Gerlach, directed by Casey Hushion with choreography by Vince Pesce. The Goodspeed’s second stage, the Norma Terris Theatre in Chester,  has a stage adaptation of Julie Andrews’ theater-themed children’s book The Great American Mousical (co-written with her daughter Emma), with Andrews herself directing, opening November 8. (After months without word, the closing date of the show is now known: December 2).

I may not have a show to write about here yet, but I can rave about many constant attractions of the Goodspeed, which is one of the state’s great tourist attractions regardless of what it puts on its stage, and is situated in one of the most beautiful parts of Connecticut.

This year the Goodspeed has improved one of my favorite traditions: drinking during intermission.

One of the great pleasures of attending the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam is ordering a drink pre-show and finding it waiting for you on a little shelf in the lobby at intermission. Abroad, in London’s West End, arranging your mid-event drinking needs before the show is a commonplace exercise practiced by dozens of audience members at every theater. The Goodspeed is one of the only American theaters that takes this ritual seriously.

And now they’ve expanded upon it. The bar now offers a clear plastic “souvenir cup” with the Goodspeed logo emblazoned on it, plus a sturdy blue lids with a hole for a straw in it.

The receptacle may not have the allure of, say, a martini glass, but it has a conspicuous advantage—you’re allowed to take it into the theater with you and drink it there.

Many theaters have created double standards around the prospect of drinking in the auditorium. Often, patrons aren’t allowed to bring drinks in for theater performances, but the rules change when the venue’s hosting a pop concert. The Goodspeed’s found the middle ground here—a safely capped vessel branded with the theater’s name is deemed acceptable, the drinker gets to keep the cup afterwards, and everyone’s happy.

Especially when you’re watching shows with bucolic community picnics and poisoned-drink whodunits.