Ari Brand's name is Asher Lev in My Name is Asher Lev at the Long Wharf Theatre through May 27. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

My Name is Asher Lev

Through May 27 at the Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Dr., New Haven. (203) 787-4282, www.longwharf.org.

By Aaron Posner, adapted from the novel by Chaim Potok. Directed by Gordon Edelstein. Set design: Eugene Lee. Costume design: Ilona Somogyi. Lighting design: Chris Akerlind. Sound design: John Gromada. Stage manager: Bonnie Brady. Performed by Ari Brand (Asher Lev), Melissa Miller (Riv and others) and Mark Nelson (Ari and others).

The opening lines of the play My Name is Asher Lev are the same as the opening lines of Chaim Potok’s book My Name is Asher Lev.

Namely, “My name is Asher Lev.” The introduction is a fuller one than, say, “Call me Ishmael” from Moby Dick. The declaration becomes a sort of mantra, uttered at junctures in the play when the protagonist’s identity is beginning to form, or is challenged, or is in doubt.

The wonder of Potok’s book is how it shows a young man jostled by the need to follow his family’s faith and traditions while exploring whole other beliefs and value systems. Self-awareness and integrity must guide him through every tough life choice. Posner’s adaptation illustrates how Asher’s desires run parallel to each other without ever quite touching. The way that’s conveyed dramatically, in a script that’s has enough work to do just telling Potok’s expansive decades-long story without layering any special interpretations atop it, is to have the title character continually remind us of his name.

At first, it’s an indentifier:

My name is Asher Lev.

The Asher Lev.

The “notorious” and “legendary” Lev, the painter of the

Brooklyn Crucifixions.

In an early scene, when Asher is age six (“and three quarters”), dealing with a doting uncle who’s recognized Asher’s prodigious drawing talent and deems him “A little Picasso. A little Chagall,” the response is “No. My name is Asher Lev.”

Ari Brand as Asher Lev and Melissa Miller as his mother Riv, in My Name is Asher Lev at the Long Wharf Theatre. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

The phrase is repeated when Asher meets his artistic mentor Jacob Kahn, halfway through the play. “My name is Asher Lev” comes up one last time near the end when his controversial paintings have been not only praised and savaged in the press but jolted his religious community and his family. In this final instance, as in the play’s similarly self-expressive opening, Asher starts itemizing all the aspects of his identity. Emphases have shifted. Other names come into play. We’re aware of the relationships and influences which have now shaped Asher Lev’s individuality.

You’ve got to admire the economy and reliable structure of Aaron Posner’s adaptation. He doesn’t try to take Potok’s story into new territory. He simply tries to relate it in theatrical terms—a different sort of artistry than Potok uses, or which he writes about. Asher Lev’s artwork, the script insists, should not be shown, just suggested with blank sketchpapers and canvases so that the viewer (like Potok’s readers) can use their imaginations to fill in the pictures. Not that a title like Brooklyn Crucifixions, and Asher’s carefully spoken description of the paintings, doesn’t convey plenty, but it’s best not to clutter the plot with personal taste. This isn’t a story of great art, but of the artist and how he made it.

Gordon Edelstein, who chose to produce and direct My Name is Asher Lev when a previously announced adaptation of another classic Jewish-themed novel, Sophie Choice, fell through, is well matched to this material. Edelstein likes spare stages and large expanses of verbiage. He likes his dramas deep and his characters weighty. He’s interested in spatial relationships as well as emotional ones, and on the large yet bare stage area here (designed by Eugene Lee, master of scenic urban realism). The actors circle each other warily while they’re talking, or they touch fleetingly to underscore a connection. They lounge about the floor, or they have a stilted conversation at a table, the lack of movement mirroring the superficial conversation that’s loaded with things unsaid.

When the action really gets going—when passions are animatedly displayed or rage must be physically contained—the limitations of such a text-heavy, plotbound script are evident. Ari Brand, as Asher Lev, is able to keep a balance, smoldering and internalizing in a manner which suits both his narrator duties and his played-out exchanges with his parents and mentors. As the all-purpose supporting cast, Melissa Miller and Mark Nelson don’t have the same opportunity to even out their time onstage. Miller and Nelson each have some characters who hover in the background, subordinate to Asher and his ascension, and others (his mother, his art teacher) who dominate and inspire him. Some characters who get much more attention in the book have to be enlivened in just a few lines onstage. Sometimes, the characters (a nude model, a schoolteacher) are reduced to little more than props, fuelling the central coming-of-age story. You can excuse the actors for chewing the scenery at times; the opportunities are infrequent, and the audience loves the distraction from the textbound narrative. Mark Nelson’s brash, lunatic portrayal of Asher’s art teacher Jacob Kahn is a particular delight.

Smatterings of unevenness in the performances notwithstanding, the stage version My Name is Asher Lev is full of canny overlaps and intersections, joing the lead player’s religious beliefs to his burgeoning artistic ones. When Jacob Kahn blurts out “Do not lie!” when criticizing one of Asher’s canvases, it’s delivered with the same conviction as the teachings Asher receives from his parents and rabbi.

Mark Nelson as Jacob Kahn and Ari Brand as Asher Lev in My Name is Asher Lev at the Long Wharf Theatre. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

In some scenes, the differences between the calls of Asher’s faith and his art are made into a joke.

KAHN. Good. It is my nature to be blunt. You are entering the

world of the goyim, Asher Lev. Do you know that?

ASHER. Yes.

KAHN. Not only goyim, Christian goyim.

ASHER. Yes.

KAHN. Better you should be a laborer. Better you should be a

lawyer. (No answer.)

In most respects, though, Posner’s adaptation—Edelstein’s direction—delivers exactly the right blend. It doesn’t just show how a young man’s world is rocked when he tries to reconcile his artistic temperament with the observance of his Jewish heritage. It shows how, given the conviction Asher Lev brings to both these parts of himself, how the combining of these spiritual urges isn’t bizarre—it’s essential to a character who’s clearly shown us his honesty and integrity and dedication.

This is a modest show about a great inner struggle. The restraint is admirable, and the grand message still gets across.

Josh Borenstein, Jerry Meyer and Gordon Edelstein at the Long Wharf 2012-13 season announcement festivities Monday night.

The Long Wharf had their big 2012-13 season announcement last night at a pizza-studded press conference/subscriber event in the theater’s Stage II space.

Long Wharf was the last major theater in the state to unveil its 2012-13 slate. Seems like there was some last-minute scheduling involved, but the LWT also reports that subscription renewals were going great so far without the boost of subscribers actually knowing what shows they’d be seeing. So there was no great hurry to announce. Taking their time has one happy result: Look! No TBA slots on the schedule!

The attendees were tipped to all six titles in the season—two world premieres, one “near-premiere,” two recent well-known New York hits and the first Long Wharf production of a writer who’s been a regional theater staple elsewhere for several decades now.

Star names were dangled: Judith Ivey and John Douglas Thompson.

We also know who’s directing all but one of the six plays in the 2012-13 season. Long Wharf Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein is directing three of them and Eric Ting is directing two. Edelstein and Ting assured me that neither of them would be directing the other one, God of Carnage—give someone else a shot!

Here’s the season, with my own annotations plus quotes from last night’s live announcements. The Long Wharf’s own descriptions are here: http://www.longwharf.org/2012-2013-season

Oct. through Nov. 4: While renovations are being finished on the Long Wharf mainstage, the season opens in Stage II with the one-man, two-character show Satchmo at the Waldorf, a new play by Louis Armstrong biographer and Wall Street Journal theater critic Terry Teachout.

Satchmo at the Waldorf sounds like it’s in line with recent Long Wharf offerings such as Ella and Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill. But two big things make it different: Satchmo at the Waterfront is a world premiere, and it doesn’t have a live band onstage. Yes, it’s a biographical portrait of Louis Armstrong, but the trick is not that it’s a one-man show, with the same actor playing both Louis Armstrong and his white, Jewish manager Joe Glaser. The show stars John Douglas Thompson, now a well-known New York actor (Flavius opposite Denzel Washington’s Brutus in Julius Caesar, LeBret opposite Kevin Kline’s Cyrano, opposite Kate Mulgrew in Antony and Cleopatra, the title roles in Othello and The Emperor Jones) but one who came up through East Coast regional theater stints with Trinity Rep, the ART and Shakespeare and Company.

In announcing the show, Edelstein mentioned that Terry Teachout “had to recuse himself from reviewing us for a while,” an interesting ethical aside to the critic’s newfound interest in playwriting. Satchmo at the Waldorf is drawn from Teachout’s book Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, published in 2009. It’s the writer’s first play, though he has done a couple of opera libretti previously.

Nov. 28-Dec. 23: The first mainstage show of the season is Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage, a rare example of a play coming to the Long Wharf less than five years after its Broadway success. The Long Wharf prefers to have plays go in the other direction—introduced in New Haven then sent to New York—but this year has included TWO recent New York hits on its sched. Hartford’s TheaterWorks, which (being 50 miles further from NYC) commonly does Connecticut premieres of noteworthy New York hits, did God of Carnage two years ago. Edelstein also noted last night that God of Carnage was “recently made into a film that I hope none of you saw.” Certainly it’s a show which should resonate with Long Wharf subscribers—it’s about defensive, bickering parents standing up for their kids and infantilizing themselves in the process. It’s the first Yasmina Reza play to be done at the Long Wharf, but the theater has a history with her regular translator, Christopher Hampton, who’s quite the playwright himself. Gordon Edelstein did a brilliant production of Hampton’s The Philanthropist at Long Wharf in 1992.

Jan. 9 through Feb. 10, 2013: Just last week I noticed that Laura Jacqmin’s bio blurb regarding the upcoming reading of her script Two Lakes, Two Rivers at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre’s National Playwrights Conference in July mentioned that “her work has been produced and developed by Long Wharf Theatre. Well, that made me go “Huh?,” since I wasn’t aware of that connection, though I had just seen Jacqmin’s Hero Dad done as one of the Ten Minute Plays at the 2012 Humana Festival in Kentucky. She also turns out to be a Yale grad.

January Joiner is what that blurb is talking about. It was workshopped in New York last month, and the cast from that workshop presented a scene from this so-called “Weight Loss Horror Comedy” last night. It consisted of three overweight characters working out at a health club in Florida, wondering why there were so few clients there, and why a vending machine was spewing out knives, and why anybody would ever choose to live in Florida anyway.

Dan Sherman and Liliane Klein present a scene from January Joiner.

When Gordon Edelstein announced that January Joiner would be “next year’s global health play,” it got a big laugh, which led him to add “I didn’t mean that as a joke.” Every year, the theater holds a science- or medicine-based panel discussion/seminar around the themes of one of the plays that season, and this year it’s January Joiner. I guess it was either that or a forced chat about Ritalin in reference to God of Carnage, or the nutritional aspects of raw sheep meat in…

Feb. 13-March 10, 2013: Curse of the Starving Class. Gordon Edelstein tells me he’s directed Sam Shepard plays before (though not this one). But Long Wharf is virginal territory for the famous Off Broadway playwright. Not that New Haveners are unaccustomed: Yale Rep did Curse of the Starving Class in 2000, Buried Child in 1979 and Suicide in B-Flat in 1976.

There’s even a rich history of UNproduced Shepard productions at Yale: the Yale Cabaret scuttled a planned 1970s staging of Operation: Sidewinder when student unrest over its themes became threatening, and a ready-to-go Cabaret production of The Tooth of Crime a few years ago was shut down because the rights had been granted for a New York revival.

Curse of the Starving Class has a wilder local connection than that Yale Rep production. The play had its world premiere overseas, at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1977. In its cast was Ray Hassett, then a steadily working stage and film actor and now the New Haven Police Lieutenant in charge of the substation at the corner of Edgewood Avenue and Day Street. The Village Voice gave Curse of the Starving Class an Obie Award as Best New Play despite the judges having only read it and not having seen it staged yet. The play, a tragicomedy about the new underclass created by farm failures in the mid-20^th century heartlands, has never failed to excite strong passions, not least for the script’s requirement that a live sheep appear onstage. (It’s a requirement which Edelstein says he intends to honor. Baaaaaaaa!) Also in the cast: Judith Ivey, a Long Wharf superstar after her star turns in Glass Menagerie and Shirley Valentine, both directed by Edelstein.

March 27-April 21, 2013: Ride the Tiger is a new history-based drama by William Mastrosimone, a regional theater stalwart whose hits include Extremities and The Woolgatherer. Long Wharf did his Shivaree in 1984. Mastrosimone himself explained last night that he wrote Ride the Tiger because, while he was writing the screenplay for the miniseries Sinatra, Frank Sinatra himself told the playwright that “the JFK assassination was a mob hit.” The miniseries producers were skittish when threatened with a lawsuit, and minimized the accusation. So Mastrosimone held onto the material, waiting for “the right moment at the right place with the right director.” Edelstein dubs the Long Wharf production a “near premiere,” since an earlier version of the script was staged under a different title. (That would be Dirty Business, done at Florida Stage in 2008.) Mastrosimone described the plot as “basically a Faustian bargain soil on American soil,” and then read a breezy, bristling, exposition-filled scene between mobster Sam Giancana and Sinatra in which the singer tries to swing covert organized-crime support for struggling Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy.

William Mastrosimone reads from Ride the Tiger.

May 8-June 2: The final play of Long Wharf’s 2012-13 season is an even more recent hit than God of Carnage. Bruce Norris’ race-based Chicago drama is currently nominated for a Best Play Tony Award and has already won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. (The play’s New York premiere was in early 2010 at Playwrights Horizons.) “Ordinarily, as you know,” Gordon Edelstein explained last night, “we tend not to do the shows running in New York. We consider outselves kind of a regional theater, kind of an Off Broadway theater. … But we believe in this play. It pertains to this community. It’s a play about race, it’s a play about real estate and it’s a play about neighborhoods, ladies and gentlemen.” The concept seems to be that Long Wharf is bringing you Clybourne Park not because its comfortable and popular but because it’s confrontational and close-to-home. All right then.

Clybourne Park was inspired in part by Bruce Norris’ reaction to the classic play A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry. That play, serendipitously, will be part of the current season at Westport Country Playhouse, playing Oct. 9-Nov. 3. The theaters are planning cross-promotional events linking the dramas.

Monday’s press conference had several other elements, not least of them the scads of post-event pizza cooked fresh in the Long Wharf parking lot by the Big Green Pizza Truck.

Prior to the season announcement, the Long Wharf presented its annual Founders Awards, which really gave the event a family feel. Among the honorees were two of the theater’s longest-serving employees, accountant Jerome Percoraro, set-painter Keith Hyatte, “live event technologists” HB Group and longtime Long Wharf board member Jerome Meyer.

Hyatte, who joined the Long Wharf in 1976 and became its “scenic charge artist” in 1982, confessed “I came to Long Wharf Theatre straight out of college. I didn’t even know Yale was here.”

Keith Hyatte accepts a Founders Award.

Percoraro, the Long Wharf’s longest-serving full-time staff member, admitted “I seriously had no idea of staying this long,” but “where else in the accounting world can you ever discuss soap operas with Arthur Miller?” A representative from HB Group, which has been helping the theater with technical equipment and projection apparatus (not just for shows such as Agnes Under the Big Top but in the Long Wharf lobby) seemed daunted to be honored alongside such entrenched employees. The final honoree, Jerry Meyer, was his usual selfless self, spending his entire time at the podium praising the work of Hyatte and Percoraro.

A new award, the Claire Tow Emerging Artist Award (named for the same generous Long Wharf patron and past board member after whom the theater’s mainstage has just been named) was presented to Gabriel Kahane, who couldn’t attend the ceremonies—last year at this same event, Kahane presented solo renditions of tunes from February House, the musical he co-wrote with Seth Bockley.

Others who’d been expected at the festivities but couldn’t come: Satchmo playwright Terry Teachout, whose mother passed away last weekend, and Judith Ivey, who’d hoped to present a reading from Curse of the Starving Class.

There was also a happy business announcement: Managing Director Joshua Borenstein noted that the theater had raised 80 percent of its goal for the already-begun mainstage renovations.

The season announcement event has become a important part of the late end of the Long Wharf season, especially for those who can’t afford to attend the theater’s annual gala celebrations. This one had tastes of new scripts and a real theater-family feel, capped off, as Gordon Edelstein suggested, with something no family gathering should be without: a feast.

This information should be plenty to fill you up and hold you until the fall.

A superficial reading of a complex Sondheim lyric (see last panel), perhaps, but you know what school superintendents are like.

Johanna Day and Glenn Fitzgerald in The Realistic Joneses, the current attraction at the Yale Repertory Theatre and the latest play to receive developmental support from the university's Center for New Theatre. Photo by Joan Marcus.

The Yale School of Drama and the Yale Repertory Theatre were given a ton of money last week by the Robina Foundation for doing what the Rep has always done best: developing new work and supporting emerging theater artists.

The bounty is a whopping $18 million, given to the four-year-old Yale Center for New Theatre. The center will heretofore be known as the Binger Center for New Theatre in honor of the late James H. Binger, the Yale College grad (class of ’38) who  helped steer the McKnight Foundation towards arts grants, and who got into the theater business himself as head of the Jujamcyn Theatres, a director of the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, an Executive Committee member of the League of American Theatres and a board member of the Guthrie Theater.

Given those affiliations, and the fact the Robina Foundation which Binger founded has its offices in Minnesota presumably means that Yale might have had some serious competition regarding Binger’s largesse. But though he certainly got around, Binger’s alma mater was never far from his mind. He founded the Robina in order to directly fund and support “transformative projects of its four institutional partners”.” Two of those partners are in Minnesota: Abbott Northwestern Hospital and the University of Minnesota Law School. One is the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. The other is Yale.

The $18 mill is the largest gift in the School of Drama’s history to be given for a program (rather than for, say, a building). The program it supports is one that already exists, but wouldn’t have happened without an earlier grant of nearly $3 million from the same Robina Foundation. The Center for New Theatre has been commissioning, funding and premiering new plays for several years now, starting with the Bill Camp/Robert Woodruff adaptation of Dostoevesky’s Notes from Underground. Yale also started a separate Institute for Music Theatre a few years ago, charged with developing new musicals by writers fresh out of college. The Institute of Music Theatre will now fall under the same administrative umbrella as the Center for New Theatre, though the YIMT will continue to have its own artistic director (currently Mark Brokaw) and guidelines.

The history of new-play development at Yale, of course, stretches right through the entire history of the School of Drama—and for most of the century before that, via the Yale undergraduate Theater Studies Department.

It’s become a truism of present-day regional theater development that new plays are where the money is, grantswise. Yale, which has always been at the forefront of new-works development, has proven that a millionfold by getting this extraordinary gift. Three million dollars of the new Robina money will go directly to current projects of the Center for New Theatre (which doesn’t anticipate any major changes in how its program is operated), continuing along the existing funding needs. The rest will become an endowment which should allow the Center to continue developing new plays until the end of time.

Michael McGrath, right, with Marla Schaffel and Mark Lotito In They All Laughed at the Goodspeed Opera House in 2001.

The Tony Awards did not even exist during George Gershwin’s lifetime. This year, shows he co-wrote are nominated for a combined 21 of ‘em. It’s the composer’s best showing since Crazy for You won Best Musical in 1992.

One of those shows had its rewritten revival roots in a Connecticut production in 2001.

How many Connecticut theaters have been touched by today’s newly anointed crop of Tony nominees?

On the straight play side, Jon Robin Baitz  had his best-known play The Substance of Fire workshop at Long Wharf Theatre in 1990. David Ives’ popular one-act revue All in the Timing had an expanded version at the Long Wharf Theatre, which was also poised to present the East Coast premiere of Ives’ Polish Joke in 2002 until it fell apart over scheduling problems.

The Unmentionables, the play Bruce Norris wrote before his now-nominated  Clybourne Park (which has already won the Pulitzer) was done at the Yale Rep in 2007.

Joe DiPietro, who created the new book for Nice Work If You Can Get It, based on the existing Gershwin musical Oh, Kay!, wrote the book & lyrics to I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, which had its pre-New York try-out at the Long Wharf Theatre. DiPietro’s Over the River and Through the Woods has had successful runs at numerous small Connecticut theaters, including Seven Angels.

Nice Work If You Can Get It itself had its world premiere at the Goodspeed Opera House 11 years ago, with a different title—They All Laughed—but with the same comic actor, Michael McGrath, playing Cookie McGee. I haven’t seen the Broadway version yet, but recall howling at McGrath’s Pietro-penned expostulation “Has anyone seen my finger bandage?” at Goodspeed all those years ago.

Frank Wildhorn has frequently been produced on Broadway, but less frequently been nominated for Tonys. His best-known show, Jekyll & Hyde, had a pre-Broadway shakedown at the Shubert, and the first national tour of J&H began at the Oakdale in Wallingford. Wildhorn’s The Civil War had an old-fashioned out-of-town try-out at the Shubert pre-Broadway as well.

Douglas Carter Beane, author of Best Book of a Musical for Lysistrata Jones, had his play The Country Club at the Long Wharf during the Doug Hughes regime. I met Beane in the Long Wharf lobby, and his being amused at my being a critic who wore a button with bad-guy Reggie from the Archie comic books on my hat.

The productions may be profoundly different, but the scripts in the Best Revivals categories should all be pretty familiar to Connecticut theatergoers. Death of a Salesman had an all-African-American reworking at the Yale Rep just a few seasons ago, and Arthur Miller was of course a longtime resident of Roxbury, Connecticut. Gore Vidal’s The Best Man is a perennial of election years, and has been seen at community-based theaters such as Square One; the Broadway revival’s directed by Michael Wilson, who until this year was the artistic director of Hartford Stage. Master Class came to New Haven’s Shubert on its infamous national tour starring Faye Dunaway. Margaret Edson’s Wit may not have world-premiered at Long Wharf, but it was the Long Wharf’s East Coast premiere production (starring Kathleen Chalfant) which moved to New York and spurred the play’s Pulitzer win. On the musical side, three of the four nominated revivals—Evita, Porgy & Bess (in its original version) and Jesus Christ Superstar have all had more national tours than they’ve had Broadway revivals, and have been seen at the Bushnell, Shubert, Waterbury Palace and elsewhere.

There are nominated actors, directors and designers whose regional resumes far outstrip their New York ones. And let’s not even get started on the talent which came out of Yale, from William Ivey Long to John Lee Beatty to David Alan Grier.

Feel a little more in touch now, devoted regional theater subscribers? It’s a fact—you live on the cutting edge of American theater history.

Through May 12 at the Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel St., New Haven. (203) 432-1234, www.yalerep.org.

The Realistic Joneses, through May 12 at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Photo by Joan Marcus.

By Will Eno. Directed by Sam Gold. Scenic and Costume Desinger: Mark Barton. Sound Designer: Ken Goodwin. Projection Designer: Paul Lieber. Production Dramaturgs: Amy Boratko and Anne Seiwerath. Stage Manager: Jenna Woods. Performed by Johanna Day (Jennifer Jones), Glenn Fitzgerald (John Jones), Tracy Letts (Bob Jones), Parker Posey (Pony Jones).

There’s a point mid-way through The Realistic Joneses where the akilter character John Jones (Glenn Fitzgerald) recites a haiku to his neighbor Jennifer Jones (Johanna Day.) She answers “I don’t know if a haiku is the best way to end a conversation.” Then John rattles off a string of short syllables—“Yeah, you’re probably right….”—which jolted me into this thought: Was that casual flurry of smalltalk a haiku too? I spent the next few seconds wondering if it scanned properly.

I checked the script later, and it doesn’t, but that’s how The Realistic Joneses makes you think. You think the writing is so clever that it’s even cleverer than you think, and you go looking for even more complex wordplay.

But don’t think too long, because moments after one precious exchange has commanded your attention, another is hard upon it. John’s “Yeah, you’re probably right” ends that scene (set in a grocery store), and seconds later we’re directed to another part of the stage, to John’s kitchen, where his wife Pony Jones is commenting on a smell in the refrigerator. “Sweetie, yuck. It still smells like something.” John answers “Everything smells like something,” and Pony sums up “It should just smell like cold air and plastic.”

Which sets the viewers mind toward cold, clinical, scientific olfactory pursuits. But really, it’s small talk, which bursts when John simply says “Is something bothering you?” and Pony simply agrees “I’m probably just thirsty, I’m not that complicated.”

Which may be the biggest understatement of this whole play. Every line of The Realistic Joneses seems carefully crafted and full of deeper meanings. Yet the crux of the whole play is that such banter—idle comments answered with idler ones, needless probings of the literal meanings of clichés—is often empty. Eno creates a surface of complacency, studded with wacky wordplay and hilarious comebacks, then invites you to delve under it at your own volition. The playwright doesn’t provide a road map to these characters’ hidden feelings, but he talks you through the descent in coded humor.

The Realistic Joneses has the sort of writing and directing which some theatergoers deride as filmic, with dialogue that you want to pause and rewind and sharp blackouts which abruptly move the action to whole new environments. Director Sam Gold and scenic designer David Zinn accomplish the rapid scene-shifts by laying all the main locations in the play out of the stage at the same time—an indoor kitchen abuts a patio, for instance. I can imagine other productions going for higher realism. But despite the numerous changes of location, not a lot happens in The Realistic Joneses, and in fact the most momentous physical acts of the show happen offstage, or precede the play entirely.

The point of the shifting dialogue is not, I think, just to keep the pace hopping and the action diverse but to show that the humdrum happens anywhere and everywhere, that most of us drift through our lives having one inane or unimportant conversation after another. Even when crucial issues are at stake—physical health, emotional balance, soulsearching—words are lacking, or hard topics are reflected.

Will Eno tips his hand rather heavily themewise by having one of his four characters, Bob Jones (Tracy Letts, who nails this role as if he wrote it himself) be affected with a medical condition (Harriman Leavey Syndrome) that affects his attention span, his focus and his patience. Eno inflicts another character with a brain-and-body-addling event later on. But the standard spousal interplay which consumes most of The Realistic Joneses is damning enough.

It’s a tough job, writing a play about stagnancy and complacency and the inability to communicate. Harder still to act it, yet this cast is well up to the challenge. Glenn Fitzgerald is a bundle of uncomfortably restrained energy, the very model of the prematurely settled and frustrated homebody, stammering out awkward conversation-starters. Tracy Letts is the older, wiser, wizened and retiring type, falling into comfortable old behaviors while bristling at any remark which touches on his weakening body and mind. Johanna Day is, as she was in the Yale Rep’s world premiere of David Adjmi’s The Evildoers in 2008 and in the Broadway production of Tracy Lett’s August: Osage County, remains the consummate small-ensemble player. Charged with reacting to her castmates both comically and tragically, she maintains an even tone which enhances the whole production. Parker Posey, whose participation will undoubtedly boost ticket sales thanks to her indie-film star status, is much more than star-casting. Posey’s proven herself on the legit stage umpteen times. Here, she takes the closest thing the play has to an underwritten role and creates someone as full-bodied and intriguingly unpredictable as any of the others. As Pony, Posey could have gone down the easy road of ditziness and cluelessness, but she opts for a more mature, more openly curious and involved portrayal.

Tracy Letts and Parker Posey in The Realistic Joneses by Will Eno at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Photo by Joan Marcus.

This is a show that keeps you guessing right up to its faux-tranquil ending. In the best tradition of Beckett, Ionesco and Seinfeld, The Realistic Joneses is about nothing yet signifies everything. What Will Eno does is that’s warmly and loudly appreciated by audiences is make the proceedings funny rather than downbeat. The laughs are steady and, as I’ve suggested, finely wrought. The tricky humor provides a special momentum that a more melodramatic treatment of the old two-couple breakdown can’t match. At a trim 90-minutes with minimal downtime and loads of of chatter, The Realistic Joneses is something worth keeping up with. It values both your time and your intelligence.

One of many Archie stories in which judicious heckling inspires an otherwise lackluster stand-up comedy set from prankster-turned-comedian Reggie Mantle. One of the more fanciful live-performance cliches perpetrated in the Archie comics.

Salvage

Presented by Theatre 4 through May 6 at The Gallery at Upcrown Entertainment, 216 Crown St., New Haven. (203) 654-7711, www.t4ct.org.

By George Brant. Directed by Maryna Harrison. Set design by Daniel Nischan. Lighting design by Christopher Hoyt. Sound design by Darlene Richardson. Costume Coordination by Caitlin Headley. Production Stage Manager: Sarah Iannarone. Production Manager: AJ Bilotta. Technical Director: Melissa Mielert. Scenic Painter: Amanda Scott. Performed by Mariah Sage (Kelly), Janie Tamarkin (Roberta) and Rebecka Jones (Amanda).

Theatre 4 has truly created theater 4 itself, commissioning a new play from established Midwestern playwright George Brant that’s tailored to the specific gifts of three of the company’s founding members.

Convincingly set in a present-day “suburban basement” replete with battered old water heater, beaded curtain and stacks of near-molding storage boxes, Salvage is about salvaging reputations, salvaging lives that have stagnated, and salvaging self-respect. The basement is being picked through because a heavy storm is coming (metaphor alert) and because its main occupant—Danny, a 40-year-old record shop employee whose life was seemingly ruined when his high school girlfriend left him—has died in a car accident. Danny’s mother Roberta (Janie Tamarkin, finding the fine line between justifiable high dudgeon and comically overprotective parenting) and sister Kelly (Mariah Sage, charged with demonstrating how Danny’s decades of apathy and despair also shaped the life courses of those around him) are picking through his old record collection and other remnants of his shattered existence when that despised old girlfriend Amanda (Rebecka Jones, whose coolly calculating character neatly offsets the hominess conveyed by Tamarkin and Sage) suddenly turns up.

Amanda, we learn, didn’t just break up with Danny and head off to college. She analyzed the relationship in a bestselling, Oprah-endorsed roman a clef that granted her a decade of West Coast fame and fortune while driving the final blow to Danny’s self-esteem. It appears that there’s an ulterior motive for her return on the day of her long-ago lover’s funeral. It also appears that there are some embittered monologues that Roberta has been waiting half a lifetime to spout, and some unfinished friendship business involving poor, sensitive Kelly.

The machinations of the plot and the endless accusations and recriminations build up to unreal levels, but not enough to scuttle the tender naturalism of the play. This is a drama of turning points and roads not taken, of dwelling in hard emotional places and denying oneself escape

I could see Salvage being played a number of different ways. As directed by Maryna Harrison (who did the vibrant and technically awesome Next Stage production of Mac Wellman’s tigertigertiger at Long Wharf Theatre last year), the piece veers credibly from anguish to amour, from implosions to playfulness. One of the key emotional epiphanies in the play, a physical confrontation between Amanda and Kelly, engenders bursts of laughter that aren’t just of the nervous variety. Likewise, some over-the-top dialogue—Roberta describes Amanda as “a 16-year-old apocalypse” who “ruined my boy,” and likens herself to “a clueless, benevolent prison warden,” yet the delivery and direction mutes such mutterings into something you might actually hear in that realistically mussed-up and lived-in basement.

Salvage ultimately gets too caught up in resolving its plot, the fine points of which are unnecessarily contrived and convoluted. You get tripped up by some weird choices—Kelly sure picked an interesting day, that of her brother’s funeral, to not take her meds; Amanda has a perverse view of what will establish her literary legacy; and it’s hard to tell what Roberta nurses better, her children or the grudges which blame their childhood friends for all their adult problems.

Yet there’s a spark of life is this tale of stunted maturity and fleeting glimpses of salvation. There’s a neat symmetry among the three actors—gentle Mariah Sage, brittle Janie Tamarkin and chilly Rebecka Jones—that has worked similarly well in past Theatre 4 outings. Commissioning a drama for themselves has been a worthwhile and rewarding exercise. The fact that this production is also christening a new downtown performance space—a white-walled, ornate black-box of sorts on the second floor of the LoRicco building on Crown Street—speaks to Theatre 4’s progressive, trailblazing nature. This is an ensemble that knows itself and serves itself well by challenging itself.

Love the blending of the dramatic and musical arts.
The 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama went to a writer previously best known for writing the book to a musical, and who studied Music Composition as an undergraduate before shifting to playwriting as her graduate study.
The 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Music went to an opera.
Both winners have Yale connections.
Quiara Alegria Hudes won the Drama prize for Water by the Spoonful, which was staged at Hartford Stage last fall. She got her B.A. in Music Composition from Yale, then studied playwriting at Brown, and now teaches in the Theater department at Wesleyan University in Middletown. Wesleyan was the birthplace of In the Heights, which Hudes helped restructure for its hit Off Broadway and Broadway productions.
The Pulitzer for Music went to Kevin Puts, a 1996 graduate of the Yale School of Music, for his opera score Silent Night. The multilingual libretto is by Mark Campbell, based on the 2005 English-made movie Joyeux Noel, about an impromptu ceasefire on a World War 1 battlefield.

Did another Play in a Day yesterday, Calderon’s The Lady Phantom. It’s the first time we’ve tried a Spanish epic.

I’ve posted the production (all 10 minutes of it) on the New Haven Theater Jerk Play in a Day page is here.

It’s actually a taping of a dress rehearsal, since two cast members bowed out before the actual performance. An awful lot can happen in three hours.

Above is a 13-second rehearsal snippet filmed by my daughter Sally.