The Yale School of Drama has announced the titles and directors for its 2012 Carlotta Festival of New Plays.

Who the playwrights would be was never in doubt. As ever, they’re the graduating class from the YSD’s playwriting program. In this case, they’re the last to leave the Department of Playwriting before it welcomes its new chair, Jeanie O’Hare, whose term begins July 1. When this group joined the school, Paula Vogel chaired the department. (Vogel is still involved with the YSD in a different position.)

Anyhow, the festival. It features full productions of full-length scripts, written and staged and designed almost exclusively by current Yale of School students.

The big exception to that rule this time around is one of the directors, Tea Alagic, who graduated from Yale seven years ago. Alagic did a new play of her own devising, Zero Hour, as her own thesis project when she was in the directing program. She also helmed the Yale Summer for its noteworthy expressionist season of 2005. Upon graduating, she directed classmate Tarrell McCraney’s The Brothers Size at New York’s Public Theater and later in Washington DC for The Studio Theater.

For the Carlotta Festival, Alagic is directing Martyna Majok’s Petty Harbour, a Newfoundland coastal riff on King Lear about a fisherman who, unbeknownst to his sons, has turned the family home into a church.

The other Carlotta plays are Jake Jeppson’s Fox Play, about unlikely partners on a mystical odyssey, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz (the ace new works director and current co-artistic director of the Yale Cabaret; her thesis project was Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights) and Caroline V. McGraw’s The Bachelors, set at a seasoned party house on Frat Row on a pledge night. The Bachelors is directed by Alexandru Mihail, who did The Seagull as his big YSD project and memorable productions of Chekhov’s The Wedding Reception and Bergman’s Persona at Yale Cabaret.

I’ll be doing more Carlotta coverage as the festival nears. The plays run in repertory May 4-12 at the Iseman Theater, 1156 Chapel Street. Tix and info here.

From a pint-sized Riverdale parody of a certain urban romantic musical, as documented in the story “Flip Side Story” from Little Archie Digest Magazine #8 (August 1992). The saga is scripted and pencilled by Dan Parent, inked by Jon D’Agostino.

The “Maria” gag is inspired, don’tcha think?

Rest assured, the story opens with the joke every West Side Story is obligated to include:
“We’re tough, no doubt about it!”
“We’re tougher, and to prove it...
“We’ll dance around like whimsical idiots!”

For instance, now my focus involves very little: a lecture on music. My music. But it is not a lecture, nor is it music. It is, of necessity, theater. What else? if I choose as I do music, I get theater, that, that is I get that too. Not just this, the two.

—John Cage, from Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage. The extract also figures in, appropriately enough, a music piece just added to the Tiny Desk Concert series streamed by NPR. I’ve embedded the video above.

So Percussion, the Yale-rooted percussion quartet, weaved Cage’s words into the original work “24 x 24,” which celebrates the composer on the centennial of his birth.

I’ve followed So Percussion since before they were So. The group grew out of a subset of students in the Yale Percussion Ensemble that were especially into minimalist and modernist composers. The students took  a lead role in an awestriking tribute to Steve Reich (with the composer in attendance), then banded together as So Percussion and commissioning works from, among others, David Lang of Bang on a Can.

Lang himself has a new theater/music piece, love fail, at New Haven’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas June 29 & 30. Details here.

So, too, has always had a theatrical edge. They’ve always gone in for interesting spatial arrangements, such as when they used the John Slade Ely House on Trumbull Street to perform a piece involving a microphone pendulum revolving above a giant speaker cabinet. They’re also props-savvy. When they bang on boards, the boards don’t look like they’ve been buffed and prepared for orchestral exactitude; they look like boards from a production of Tobacco Road. For the NPR set, they involve site-specific elements relevant to the desk environment: a small potted cactus, a coffee mug, and (according to the NPR write-up of the event) “an empty padded envelope autographed by Tiny Desk alum, Wilco member and frequent So collaborator Glenn Kotche.”

The NPR page for the So video, which adds an option to download the 13-minute concert as an audio file, is here.

Long Wharf Theatre is one of three finalists for $10.000 from the National Coporate Theatre Fund, to be used towards theater education programs.

The process involved getting supporters of the theater to vote for Long Wharf’s contest entry. The theater inserted a flier about the NCTF challenge into its programs for its recent productions of February House and Bell, Book and Candle.

The public voting ended Monday. The next phase of judging is the actual “winner selection process” undertaken by NCTF, and will take the rest of the month, with the winner decided on April 30.

The Facebook page for the contest is at:

http://www.facebook.com/NationalCorporateTheatreFund/app_95936962634

Strone’s a darned good actor,” Isaac Bell told Archie.

“Actor? What do you mean?”

“Ten-to-one he’s British Military Intelligence.”

Archie Abbott looked more closely.

“And twenty-to-one,” Bell added, “he’s not retired.”

Archie, who himself would have become an actor if his mother had not forbidden such a leap from society’s bosom, nodded agreement. “No bet.”

—From Clive Cussler & Justin Scott’s latest action-paclked Isaac Bell adventure, The Thief. The series is set at the derring-do-inundated dawn of the 20^th century. This episode concerns the invention of a device that could bring sound to motion pictures. It references Humanova Troupes, accompanists who added not just sound effects and musical scores but extensive dialogue (whether scripted or improvised) to “silent” movie screenings.

Ari Brand as he appeared in The Diary of Anne Frank at Westport Country Playhouse. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

The Long Wharf Theatre has the whole three-person cast set for its season-ending production of My Name is Asher Lev. I posted a few weeks ago ago the welcome news that Mark Nelson is on board as the multi-purpose character known in Aaron Posner as “Man.”

Mark Nelson as he appeared in Gordon Edelstein's production of A Doll's House at Long Wharf. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

There’s also “Woman,” to be played by Melissa Miller, who was in the reading of Sinan Unel’s Pathetique at Hartford Stage recently; Hartford Stage artistic director Darko Tresnjak directed Miller in the national tour of The Merchant of Venice starring Murray Abraham produced by Theatre for a New Audience. Seth Bockley, who scripted the new musical February House which just had its world premiere at Long Wharf, directed Miller in Jason Grote’s Civilization at Clubbed Thumb in New York.

Melissa Miller.

As for who’s playing the title role: His name is Ari Brand, who played Peter Van Daan last year in The Diary of Anne Frank at Westport Country Playhouse. That theater’s artistic director, Mark Lamos, directed Brand in the world premiere of A.R. Gurney’s Black Tie at Primary Stages this past January.

He’s also in this Target commercial:

Asher Lev’s being directed by Gordon Edelstein, who chose the project after the announced Long Wharf premiere of a stage version of Sophie’s Choice was deemed unready for the May mainstage slot. I talked with Edelstein a couple of months ago about the issue, and he said, “When I realized we were in trouble, I didn’t want to announce [the cancellation] without a replacement. I had to find a play that fulfilled both the cconomic and the the thematic criteria.” That is, Edelstein would have to draw the same audience and balance the overall season in the same way. A different classic 20th century Jewish novel about the consequences of difficult decisions regarding faith and culture seemed ideal. Especially since Posner’s script been getting swell reviews and a growing number of regional theater production in the couple of years it had been around.

Edelstein has not seen any of those previous productions (which include one  at the Williamstown Theatre Festival). He told me he had been rereading the novel and has his own ideas for the staging. The set design will be by Long Wharf veteran and Yale alum Eugene Lee (Hughie, Krapp’s Last Tape, Athol Fugard’s The Train Driver and Coming Home, etc. etc.). Ilona Somogyi is doing the costumes, Chris Akerlind the lights, prolific stage composer John Gromada (an associate artist at Hartford Stage, where he scored many of Michael Wilson’s greatest triumphs) is the sound designer and Bonnie Brady’s the stage manager.

Peter Schumann, the grizzled godfather of modern grass-roots political puppetry, is doing his famous Fiddle Talk at Wesleyan University next Monday—7 p.m. on April 9 at the school’s Center for the Arts CFA Hall. Details here.

It’s a rare chance to see Schumann speak in Connecticut. The progressive theater legend has been based in Northern Vermont since 1970 with the Bread & Puppet collective he began a decade earlier in New York City.

Rare, but not unprecedented. Schumann did the Fiddle Talk—his unique solo distillation of the Bread & Puppet aesthetic, with little of the pageantry but all of the charm—at the very first International Festival of Arts & Ideas in 1996. His very appearance at the fest, which also involved a Bread & Puppet performance on New Haven Green, was extremely meaningful to the arts-savvy and suggested that Arts & Ideas was operating on the highest levels it could reach. That first A&I festival featured a host of important artists from around the world, and Schumann (who might have travelled the least to get to New Haven) was the one they flocked to see. I remember sitting near the director and erstwhile puppeteer Peter Sellars (a onetime festival director himself, of the L.A. Festival) and seeing him just enthralled by Schumann.

The point being, both then in New Haven and next week at Wesleyan, that booking Bread & Puppet is incredibly cool, but getting Peter Schumann himself is ineffably cooler.

The man is one of the great theater thinkers of the last century. There’s very little street theater or political puppetry around today that’s not in his debt. As a performer, he’s low-key, but as an artist and agitator he’s monumental.

My father, Peter Arnott, performed Greek tragedy with marionettes and toured Vermont regularly, which brought him into contact with Peter Schumann and Bread & Puppet. The company would put my father up at their farm in Glover, Vt.—an invitation he never declined, though their back-to-the-land ways ruffled his British gourmet sensibilities. I think my father would have greatly enjoyed a chance to see Peter Schumann perform in a tidy, well-kept hall like the CFA rather than in Bread & Puppet’s charmingly scruffy barn or field venues. You should too. In fact, you should never miss a chance to see Schumann anywhere, anytime.

The Duncan Sheik episode of the new BYUtv series The Song That Changed My Life is viewable here.

What’s BYUtv? The media outlet of Brigham Young University. There’s no direct connection here—Brigham Young is a Mormon institution and Sheik is a Buddhist who studied Semiotics at Brown University.

I was a Duncan Sheik fan from when I first received an advance copy of his first album back in my Arts Editor days, before “Barely Breathing” broke big nationally. I knew who Sheik’s Spring Awakening collaborator was years before that 2007 show happened because Sater’d done lyrics for Sheik’s album Phantom Moon. (The pair did several theater pieces before Spring Awakening, and continue to work together.)

Little-remembered fact about Spring Awaking: a pre-Broadway tryout of the show was announced for New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre, and a couple of songs were even performed at a season-announcement event. Then the musical was pulled from the slate. The official explanation was that director Michael Mayer had a scheduling conflict, but the theater later confessed that the project’s budget was a concern.

In the BYUtv show, which documents a recording session and ranges from his ‘90s and early 2000s pop hits to his recent album of ‘80s rock covers, Duncan Sheik refers to his first album as a “pretty arty affair,” the bulk of the songs differing notably from the stand-out hit single “Barely Breathing.” Sheik admits “I knew it was going to create a certain amount of cognitive dissonance” for those who wanted all the songs to sound like the hit. He discusses theater music as songs which exist for characters other than himself to sing.

Sheik mentions his theater pursuits (and film soundtracks, for that matter) throughout the 24-minute show. He talks about Whisper House—the stage musical, distinct from the Sheik album of the same title (which contains some of the same songs). The show premiered at the Old Globe in San Francisco two years ago.

Nothing’s said about Sheik’s supposedly all-electronic score for the musical version of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, or about the tour he cancelled last summer due to an “alcohol related addiction.” Granted, neither seem right for a show produced by Brigham Young University.

The Song That Changed My Life only has three episodes so far, and two of them are theater-related. Besides the Duncan Sheik show, there’s one about Lea Salonga, noted Disney princess and the Broadway star of Miss Saigon, Les Mis and the 2002 revival of Flower Drum Song.

I’ve had several entreaties, wondering when the next of my quirky Play in a Day children’s theater projects will happen.

They tend to happen during school holidays, and there was no such animal in March, so I’ve decided that in April we’ll have two Plays in a Days.

The first will be this Friday (Good Friday), April 6.

The second will be the Tuesday of Spring vacation, April 17.

Same Play-time, same Play-Place as ever: 2 p.m. to 5:15 p.m. at Neverending Books, 810 State St., New Haven.

The fee per child is $5 for the three-hour session. All kids welcome—we’ve had as young as 3 and as old as 12. Parents are welcome to stay, but most don’t.

The children arrive, I explain the plot of a famous old dramatic work, and in the course of three hours we devise and rehearse the thing. I never decide which play we’re doing until I see who turns up.

When the parents come to pick up their kids, they see the show.

Videos of past productions are on this site’s Play in a Day page, here. Above is a one-minute snippet from the rehearsal period for our most recent production, Karel Capek’s The Insect Play.

Just in case you were wondering how rigid and disciplined these things are.

What sort of dodgy acting instruction texts are they selling over there at the Riverdale Book Nook? An extract from Jughead’s Double Digest #24 (Jan. 1996).