It’s a regular psychodrama film festival live onstage this theater season.
First Persona at the Yale Cabaret. Then It’s a Wonderful Life at the Long Wharf. And now David and Lisa, tonight and Friday at 7 p.m. in the Arts Hall of the Educational Center for the Arts, 55 Audubon Street in New Haven.

David and Lisa was a fictionalized case study by psychiatrist Theodore Isaac Rubin before it was a 1962 film directed by Frank Perry. But it’s the screenplay, by Eleanor Perry (Frank’s wife, who packed a Masters degree in psychiatric social work herself) which most deeply informed James Reach’s 1967 stage version.
One thing the play keeps from the film is its massive supporting cast. There are roles for at least 22 actors. Which makes it a long shot for a major professional revival but ideal for school groups.
The students at the ECA, the arts magnet high school at the corner of Audubon and Orange streets in New Haven’s so-called “arts district,” have been working on David and Lisa since the project was first announced and cast last spring. I met with them and their instructor/director Joan McAfee during a rehearsal earlier this month.

One of the challenges of doing David and Lisa now is making the plot—about a young man who has a thing for clocks and a fear of being touched who befriends a young woman with a split personality—palatable for audiences who now have a deeper understanding of psychology and personality disorders. Aspects of the script seem sorely dated, and some of the disorders dramatized in the play which barely had names in the 1960s are commonplace now.

To flesh out what is essentially a romance in an unusual setting, a residential treatment center for children with mental issues, the ECA students hit the psych texts. They read the original Theodore Isaac Rubin book. They researched “anything on mental illness that interested them,” McAfee says. They created backstories for their characters, some of whom barely exist in Reach’s script but now have active onstage lives of their own. One student, Chelsea Evered, created a silent character, Sandra, who suffers from bulimorexia.

Max Kruger-Dull, who plays Mr. Clemens in the play, has a mother who’s a real-life psychiatrist, and she came to speak with the cast.

The actors assuming the title roles—Henry Ayres-Brown as David and Jenny Grober as Lisa—did netutral mask exercises and such, but also a lot of academically minded prep. Ayres-Brown says “I read the[Rubin’s] book, a lot about David. How he goes so quickly to extremes. Grober says she watched the multiple-personality melodrama Sybil, read David and its sequel David Today, and “scoured my psych book and the Internet.”

The others found their footing with audacious improvs, one of which involved a streetpole in Leeney Plaza outside their rehearsal space and some bemused passersby. Tyler Roberts, whose patient character is Robert, says “We really got into it. It really helped define what we do on stage.” Bridget Johnson, who plays Josette, adds “It was like having different entities. We got so into it, we forgot we were ourselves.”

The teens go on and on about the process of “Letting down you filter,” how “we all have a little of these disorders in us,” how they’re looking to do more “theater for social change,” how they can relate the stigma some of the patients in the play feel to their own lives, and how they learned to “separate someone from their mental illness.”
Says Erika Conte, who plays Kate, “We want to bring these characters justice.”

The students playing therapists and parents in the show felt no less strongly. Some created backstories where their characters realized they were in the wrong profession. Mara Rothman believes that her character, Barbara, “is very intelligent but doesn’t understand what she’s trying to do.” Leah Rosofsky, who plays Maureen Hart, says she had to “figure out what a therapist can and can’t do.” In the interest of dramatic balance, Rosofsky found Maureen becoming “more comic relief.”

Ah, the wonders of a focused drama program and a months-long ensemble rehearsal period! Given the amount of work that’s gone into it, it’s tragic that David and Lisa has a mere two-evening run at the ECA Arts Hall. Then the theater students move on to the spring project, Carlo Gozzi’s commedia touchstone The Green Bird.

The students have a lot to bring away from this extensively researched fleeting performance experience, however, the sort of shadings and nuances which actors who must be hustled into the roles for productions without such luxurious rehearsal time might never discover.

Mara Rothman suggest that “the most relateable line in the show” is one spoken by Jennifer Grober as Lisa. One of Lisa’s split personalities can only speak in rhyme, and when asks what she’s feeling remarks:
“Not sad. Mad. Not bad.”

The students of the Educational Center for the Arts can illuminate that for you.

Reggie is apparently not familiar with the work of Edgar Bergen, Charlie McCarthy & Mortimer Snerd.

And by the way, if they’re inside the Red Barn theatre, what’s that other barn outside for?  Summer stock frolics indeed.

(Reggie & Me comics magazine, Oct. 1975)

Cymbeline

Through December 16 at the Yale University Theatre, 222 York Street, New Haven.

By William Shakespeare. Directed by Louisa Proske. Scenic Designer: Meredith B. Ries. Costume Designer: Nikki Delhomm.  Solomon Weisbard. Composer and musician: Michaël Attias. Sound composer: Palmer Heffran. Dramaturg: Kee-Yoon Nahm. Stage Manager: Nicole Marconi. Performed by Adina Verson (Imogen), Fisher Neal (Posthumus), Robert Grant (Cymbeline), Lucas Dixon (Cloten, others), Miriam A. Hyman (The Queen), Michael Place (Pisanio), Paul Pryce (Belarius, others), William DeMeritt (Aviragus, others), Joshua Bermudez (Guiderius, others), Tim Brown (Cornelius, others), Jack Moran (Caius Lucius, others), and Brian Wiles (Iachimo).

You might think that A Winter’s Tale or Twelfth Night might be more appropriate to the time of year, but no, ‘tis the season of Cymbeline. There’s been a big-deal production of Shakespeare’s ungainly tragedy/romance in New York, and now director Louisa Proske has chosen it for her thesis project at the Yale School of Drama.

Despite a ghoulish beheading and an unconscionably cruel attempt to win a bet, the play is not unwelcome in the holiday season. It carries distinct elements of both Winter’s Tale (challenges to a woman’s chastity) and Twelfth Night (deceptive correspondence). It also has a fake-death drug a la Romeo and Juliet and bloodthirsty battles a la most of the other tragedies. A friend just described it to me as “Shakespeare’s greatest hits.”

The biggest question is why the play is named Cymbeline. Yes, he’s the king, and makes the big decisions which bring about closure at the end of the play and avoid a few more needless beheadings. But that’s like titling Twelfth Night after the Duke. Cymbeline is really about Imogen and Postumus and how, by falling out with friends and family, they find much stronger bonds with relatives and friends they didn’t even know about.

On the local front, Cymbeline plays like a continuation of this past summer’s Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival. Proske directed As You Like It for that three-show repertory season. Cymbeline is played on a long, shallow black floor (along the unadorned backstage of the Yale University Theatre; the audience sits on bleachers on the actual stage area.) This is not unlike when the semi-arena center-aisle set-up the Cabaret commonly uses. Plus Idina Verson is in this, in drag, as she was in The Tempest and As You Like It over the summer. Verson also had an ingénue-esque turn in this semester’s other director’s thesis project, Lileana Blain-Cruz’s production of Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. She’s ideal for such parts, since she’s neither dainty not blunt but can play genuinely androgynous. (Verson was also Ytzak in the Yale Summer Cabaret’s memorable rendition of Hedwig and the Angry Inch a couple summers ago). When called upon to coo or be childlike, Verson comes off as annoying in an entirely appropriate way; she clearly balks at others’ expectations of her.

Cymbeline is one of those Shakespeares that doesn’t get done very often, but not for the usual reasons that some Shakespeares don’t get done very often. It’s not incomprehensible. It’s not dependent on an understanding of British history. It’s not absurdly violent. It’s just not as good as the other Shakespeare plays it resembles. It’s also wonderfully weird in its own special way. There are some stunning quirky one-liners amid the earnest dialogue, such as “I am merrier to die than you are to live” and “Who is it can read a woman?” The moral ends up being “Live, and deal with others better.”

Cymbeline is a loose, crazy script, hard to play straight at times. Director Proske and her game cast totally get this. They utter the lines casually and colloquially, loosening the Shakespearespeak so it matches the modern staging techniques. Silence plays a big role in this show. So does the music score, which alternates between classical pomp and experimental jazz.

The play ends with a string of ridiculous and hokey revelations that have all the finesse of the long explanations at the end of a Murder, She Wrote episode. You may find yourself laughing, but with the cast and not at them—the staging drives home the bard’s desperation to wrap the whole thing up neatly, and the actors seem to be breathing a sigh of relief that the exposition is nearly over. At the same time, individual scenes and characters more than justify the decision to stage this admittedly minor and derivative work. The whole play is an extraordinary blend of slapdash and fascinating.

Stereotypes abound. Cymbeline’s wife, for instance, doesn’t even have a name. She’s just The Queen, in the age-old fairy tale Wicked Queen mold. Miriam A. Hyman, is a bright red gown, plays The Queen’s villainy but gives her a vulnerable, human edge as well. Lucas Dixon goofs amiably as The Queen’s son Cloten, turning a vengeful cretin into a comical upper-class creep. But, with all due respect to Robert Grant’s austere Cymbeline (who sits alone onstage while the audience shuffles in, to the far-away yet nonetheless loud wails of Michael Attias’s mournful post-modern saxophone), the play belongs to Verson’s Imogen and her beloved Posthumus. In that tortured role,  Fisher Neal makes the most of the costume designs of Nikki Delhomme, who cloaks this dizzying tragedy in vaguely Edwardian styles that put the play not just in Freudian psychological territory but also give it some neat noir-ish touches.

It’s rare enough to get a chance to see Cymbeline, even given this year’s unexpected glut of productions. It’s especially rare to see one that’s so accessible, so energetic, so youthful and progressive. A derivative drama has become distinguished. It’s as Cymbeline as that.

A late evening in the future, through Dec. 18 at Long Wharf Stage II. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Krapp’s Last Tape

Through Dec. 18 at Long Wharf Stage II. By Samuel Beckett. Directed by Jennifer Tarver. Performed by Brian Dennehy. Set & Costume Design: Eugene Lee. Lighting Design: Stephen Strawbridge. Sound Design: Richard Woodbury. Stage Manager: Katrina Lynn Olson.

Krapp’s den. Front center a small table, just a few feet from the front row of the audience.

A wearish man enters. He receives applause, because he is Brian Dennehy.

Black roomy trousers with tan tennis shoes. Wide black vest like late-era Buster Keaton. Workshirt. Red blushy cheeks. White hair. Unshaven.

You’ll notice a few digressions from Beckett’s stage directions there. No big boots. No “White face. Purple nose. Disordered grey hair.”

Dennehy takes the banana joke, the  opening routine and guiding metaphor of Beckett’s play and Krapp’s existence—that life is a joke, that we slip on banana peels—and makes sure that the joke is nonetheless funny. This requires some unexpected physical humor, neatly spaced and timed and appropriate for a elderly man (Dennehy is 73, his Krapp character 69), and as genuinely funny in its way as any of the antic shtick occurring across town at the Yale Rep in A Doctor in Spite of Himself.

Krapp reaches for his trusty reels. They are in square cookie tins, which make for a nice clatter later on; this production doesn’t miss a trick. Dennehy turns the machine on and off expertly in time with the pre-recorded computerized sound of his Krapp as a younger man. The younger voice is broadcast with such pristine clarity that it doesn’t sound at all like it could come out of a decades-old tape machine. Which is either a design oversight or a deliberate directorial choice to make Krapp’s past seem rosier and more present than it really is.

In any case, it’s easy to take in.

The words are clear, the journey easy to follow. Dennehy’s Krapp takes breaks, walks into the set’s back room, switches lights on and off. Another joke: the sound of a bottle pouring. The pouring lasts longer each time Krapp needs a drink.

We are motionless, staring. The tape runs on. There is nothing much to say. There is no applause, because the audience is overcome. Or perhaps they just don’t know if Krapp is finished.  A final joke is a production that looks for and finds the balance of humor and sadness in Beckett’s classic play.

A wearish old man. Very near-sighted (but unspectacled). Hard of hearing.

Take any opportunity to see Krapp’s Last Tape that you can. It will inform your life. It will inform your impending death. It will let you appreciate tragedians as comedians and vice versa. Seeing Brian Dennehy, who’s performed this piece twice before in recent years at much differently shaped theaters, may make you want to go to BAM this month and see its ballyhooed production starring John Hurt. Perhaps Hurt and Dennehy should hold a DJ battle in some neutral turf (New Jersey?), battling Krapps spinning memories at different speeds.

There is a myth of Beckett being difficult. There is a sense of his writing being so precise, and his estate being so protective of the purity of his intent, that stagings of his plays can be nothing but clinical, overliterary, hard to humanize. This is poppycock. Yell back at those academic cranks the way Krapp giggles at his tapes. Beckett understands how theater works. Brian Dennehy and director Jennifer Tarver understand how Beckett works. Sit back and let the tape unspool. You’re in good banana-slippery hands.

Steven Epp, Allen Gilmore and Justine Williams in the Yale Repertory Theatre production of Moliere's A Doctor in Spite of Himself, which ends Dec 17. Photo by Carol Rosegg.

A Doctor in Spite of Himself

By Moliere. Adapted by Christopher Bayes and Steven Epp. Directed by Bayes. Through Dec. 17 at the Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven. Music direction and original compositions by Aaron Halva. Scenic design: Matt Saunders. Costumes: Kristin Fiebig. Lighting by Yi Zhao. Sound design by Ken Goodwin. Dramaturg: Benjamin Fainstein. Vocal coach: Walton Wilson. Performed by Julie Briskman (Jacqueline), Liam Craig (Lucas/Thibault), Steven Epp (Sganarelle), Renata Friedman (Lucinde/Puppeteer), Allen Gilmore (M. Robert, Geronte), Chivas Michael (Leandre, Old Man), Jacob Ming Trent (Valere, Cherub) and Justine Williams (Martine, Perrin). Live music performed by Brandon Curtis. Greg Powers and Robertson Witmer.

When Christopher Bayes and Steven Epp last assaulted the Yale Rep with a semi-masked, double-quick joke-at-any-cost comedy, Goldoni’s A Servant of Two Masters just a year and a half ago, I noted that their approach, while garnering great reviews, was potentially fraught, without-a-net affair.

This was just a twinge, a critical muscle that didn’t need to be exercised. A Servant of Two Masters flew along brashly and blithely and boisterously that its lack of a center—something stable to push against—never became a serious problem. Everybody was funny, and that was that.

With A Doctor in Spite of Himself, that twinge twinges again, and this time it must be scratched.

Simply put (and Bayes/Epp shows are nothing if not simply put), there’s no straight man.

While ferociously, feverishly funny from start to finish based on the sheer mass of gags being hurled, the show lacks any Zeppo Marx or Margaret Dumont, no Allan Jones or Kitty Carlisle, no anybody who might take  themselves seriously even for an instant. There is a gruff father figure, but he has no qualms about switching from that dour countenance into a mad comic dance or a vocal burst of street jive. There is a lovestruck couple, but her lethargy is elaborated into a full Goth-girl attitude (replete with costume and makeup), while he is doing an over-earnest poetic lout straight out of Black Adder.

A Doctor in Spite of Himself wants to be A Servant of Two Masters 2, and in fact shows advanced signs of sequelitis, trying to up the ante on a familiar style by being even faster, louder and grander. To this end, Epp and Bayes have eschewed the services of translator Connie Congdon, who provided the base script for Servant, and done the Doctor adaptation themselves. Without a firmer template, and without anyone to argue in favor of structure, they build joke upon joke upon joke upon joke until the plot becomes meaningless. It’s not the most meaningful plot to begin with, granted—man is mistaken for doctor and furthers the deception so he can bring young lovers together—but at least it’s something to propel the action. In Epp and Bayes’ hand, the action is propelled entirely by physical comedy shtick. Nothing is sacred, especially the lines the characters are speaking. The production becomes a parody of A Doctor in Spite of Himself rather than a performance of it.

I wasn’t exactly expecting high respect here, but I honestly think that conflict is the key to comedy, and this play doesn’t have any conflict. Any character, at any time, can change their attitude at the drop of a plumed dance and do a silly dance. The musical soundtrack, by a shabbily dressed trio who resemble the British Brechtian cabaret masters The Tiger Lilies in both musicality and swagger, is similarly askew and open to constant interruptions and deprecations. Hard to find the melody in either case.

Such unstoppable, unfettered frivolity can begin to grate, however entrancing the actual mechanics of the show. There are beautifully timed routines with hand puppets, fearless grabbings and pinchings and slappings and lustful advances, exquisite shuffles and slow burns—especially from Liam Craig, who as Lucas is the Tweedledum to the Tweedledee of Jacob Ming Trent’s Valere.

I’m not a fan of the best-known Moliere translator, Richard Wilbur, whom I think misses a lot of obvious stage jokes because he’s too flowery and poetic in his verbiage. But Epp & Bayes are venturing off too far in the other extreme. You lose the sense of this as an anti-authoritarian play, with the underclass outsmarting the lords of the manor. Everybody’s equally insensible.

When, at the play’s end, a moment of calm and beauty is required to remind you that these characters had some quest in mind, Moliere’s own maguffins have long been left mangled by the roadside. What the cast and crew conjure up is a starry delight, a beautiful harmonious tableau that really isn’t supported by the script but which is pretty much the only way you can end such a exhausting bout of manic hooting.

The jokes, by the way, allow for modern-day references as well as the ancient archetypes (nagging wife, listless daughter, idiot savant hero) which fuel Moliere’s ensemble-friendly scenarios. Some of these are as current as a Lady Gaga tune, or Steven Epps (who plays the title role) asking “Is James Franco in there?” where peering down a woman’s prodigious bosom. Others aren’t that “current” at all: an Abba “Dancing Queen” quote, for instance. The volume of the jokes matters more than the quality here.

They say that in long journeys, the fun is all in how you get there. That’s the concept here. Colorful and clownish and captivating in its own way, it’s more of a modern dance gloss on Moliere than it is a sincere appreciation of his own fine multi-faceted comic values.

Enjoy the trip. It’s one long pratfall.

A rare shot of the cast of A Doctor in Spite of Himself when they are not a mad blur. Photo by Carol Rosegg.

Striking 12 Overture (2007) – in HD from BigFan007 on Vimeo.

“It’s a concert with a story where the actors are the band,” explains Ben Milburn, the actor/pianist in that band.
That’s the main thing you need to know to prepare for Striking 12, which plays two shows (4 p.m. & 7 p.m.) at Westport Country Playhouse on Saturday, Dec. 10. Don’t worry about how creepy the show’s inspiration, The Little Match Girl, is; the band has already done the worrying for you, and channelled it into a peppy holiday show about rebirth and renewal in dark times.

Striking 12 is the children’s show that asks the musical question (as Milburn puts it): “How can anybody think this would be a story for children?” The energetic, economical, multi-faceted musical has an audacity and skeptical streak that befits its source material, a dire tale from that master of misfortune Hans Christian Andersen.

Striking 12 takes a new attitude towards Andersen’s dark tale of a freezing child, retelling it while analyzing it, creating a mild modern corollary with the encounter between a mild-mannered man who needs a date for New Year’s Eve and the environmentalist who turns up at his doorstep selling eco-friendly light bulbs.

Groovelily used to play 150 shows a year—“mostly on the folk circuit. We peaked in 2002,” Milburn says, without the band ever being able to make a steady living.
Electric violinist Valerie Vigoda, who’s married to bandmate Milburn, got a regular gig touring with Cyndi Lauper, which helped make ends meet.

“We were writing songs together before we were dating,” Milburn says of his relationship with Vigoda. They met in 1994, and got married in ’98. What really changed things for the couple was when they became parents. Groovelily’s other member, Gene Lewin is also a family man.

A light went off in their heads when, Valerie went on the road with the Tran-Siberian Orchestra, the prog-rock ensemble whose reputation rests on its bombastic Christmas concerts. Groovelily set out to write their own seasonal show.

Milburn had gone to grad school at NYU in order to learn how to write musicals, and Groovelily had gotten used to being told their club material “sounds Broadway” and always admitted that “there are songs of ours with way too many words in them.” So a shift toward theater shows seemed only natural.

The met up with playwright Rachel Sheinkin, who was then “just a struggling graduate student like me,” Milburn says, and was still a couple years away from her Broadway success with the award-winning The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

“Rachel heard Valerie’s song “Little Light” and said “That reminds me of The Little Match Girl,” Milburn explains. “So we went back to it, and were shocked by how relentlessly depressing that story is.” They merely took this as a challenge, noting how layered and meaningful and riveting the story also was. Becoming parents themselves gave them all the right filters for developing a family-friendly show that met their own standards of intelligence and depth.

“Having kids made us better songwriters,” Milburn says, but also made them less inclined to tour year-round. “Being in a van for what amounts to 200 days a year is very attractive when you’re 25 years old. I’m not 25 anymore,” Milburn says.

Striking 12 opened up whole new directions for Groovelily. The band’s done a slew of songs for Disney’s Tinkerbell cartoon film features. It’s also stayed in the theater realm; their latest stage work, Wheelhouse will premiere this spring at TheatreWorks of Silicon Valley, directed by the great Lisa Peterson.

Striking 12, meanwhile, has taken on a life of its own. It has been adapted so it can be performed by others—in some cases separating the music from the acting and allowing for a cast of up to a dozen. “We’re all for it,” Milburn says. “Some theaters are doing it every year now.” But Groovelily still takes the show out every year themselves. For the band, this is the time of year that they get together most often, so it’s always a fun holiday reunion.Their own rendition has changed a bit over the years, with songs added and subtracted. It’s been set for some time now. but still has a live spontaneity.
The trio has struck 12 in clubs and small theaters, but given the piece’s complexity and popularity, have come to prefer legit theater venues. Westport seems ideal for the show—the playhouse has a homey, traditional feel, and the stage isn’t so large that an audience would feel cheated by the work’s intentionally sparse staging.

“Because it doesn’t have very many props or much scenery, it leaves room for a lot of interpretation,” Milburn says. “It’s mostly theaters we do now, but there are times when it’s perfect for clubs, since, you know, it’s a three-piece rock band.”

I’ve been making random lists of Occupy-friendly pop songs over at the main www.scribblers.us site, here and here. Realized how many musical theater ditties apply as well. (For our readers outside Connecticut, be it known that Occupy New Haven still occupies dozens of tents on New Haven Green and is one of the longest lasting and healthiest of the Occupy settlements.)

• “Solidarity”, Billy Elliot. Elton John may be among the one-est of the one percent—not just one of the most successful pop stars in history but also the writer of several long-running international music theater hits. So how’d he nail this mainstream underclass revolt anthem so deftly? By broadening its meaning beyond unions and demands. The song’s about conflict, fear and community, wrapped into a virtual reprise of the pre-rumble mash-up in West Side Story.

• “Capital Gains” from Subways Are For Sleeping. Despite some content regarding homelessness and mental illness which seem rather insensitive these days, this 1950s musical has several numbers which apply to empowerment, individuality, social revolution and urban anxiety.

• “Hooverville” from Annie. Next to the anti-apartheid shantytown protests of the 1980s, the tent cities set up by the homeless during the Roosevelt administration is the closest equivalent to what Occupy has done. In the musical, Little Orphan Annie sees both a Hooverville and the White House, and inspires FDR to broker his New Deal.

• “Alone in the Universe” from Seussical the Musical:
There are secrets on a leaf, in the water, in the air
Hidden planets, tiny worlds, all invincible
Not a person seems to know, not a person seems to care
There is no one who believes a thing I say
Well, I’m fairly certain that at one time or other
Great thinkers all feel this way

• “How to” from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Interesting that when all his business schemes fail and he’s about to fall straight back down the ladder he’s climbed so quickly to the success prophesied in the show’s title, J. Pierrepont Finch gets out of the jam by proclaiming that there’s an all-forgiving universal “Brotherhood of Man.”

• “One,” A Chorus Line. This anthem of exceptionalism could easily be turned into a satire on the 1 percent. The basis of so much of A Chorus Line, after all, is hard-working downtrodden folks dancing to the whims of a quixotic overlord.

Regular NHTJ readers recognize that I am something of a Faustus freak. BBC Radio 4 is rerunning the network’s uproarious 2008 tongue-in-cheek revision of various Faust dramas, adapted by Martin Jenkin and celebrated fringe-circuit playwright and Red Shift Theatre founder Jonathan Holloway.

The five part series gives rather more attention to Mephistopheles (Mark Gatiss) than it does to Doctor Faustus (Julian Rhind-Tutt)—and realizes how much comedy you can pack into the story of a man selling his soul to the devil. One running (or rather sitting) gag is that the devil can’t sit in chairs with backs because of his wings and tail. There’s lots of gross-out humor as well; when Faustus asks about the ink with which he is signing his soul away, he’s told not to ask but persists. “One word,” says Mephistopheles. “Hemorrhoids.”
Faustus has been mined for comedy many times before, most notably by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in Bedazzled but also by untold vaudevilleans and puppeteers who reworked the tragedy into a moralistic laugh riot.
Broadcast in five short bits that add up to little more than an hour, Jenkin & Holloway’s Faust is fast and loose, the satanic sitcom that’s bursting beneath every rendition back to Christopher Marlowe’s.

Listen here.

I way overthink lazy theater metaphors in news stories. I’ve been mulling over this one for weeks:

The interim government’s spokesman billed it as the “final act of the Libyan drama.” But there would be no closing soliloquoy from the lead player, scion of the dynasty that Muammar Gaddafi, self-styled “king of kings, had once hoped might rule Africa.

—From a Reuters story, “The Capture of Gaddafi’s Son,” Nov. 20, 2011.

Do we really expect closing sililoquoys from supporting cast members related to the “show”’s villain? Not usually. There might be an example or two in Shakespeare. Yes, I did see that Yale Cabaret production of Manuela Infante’s Rey Planta in October; it’s the monologue of a young prince who has slaughtered the rest of the royal family and placed himself in a coma, yet has assumed the throne. But I’d say shows like that are the exception rather than the rule, wouldn’t you?

The tale of the tape: Brian Dennehy in Krapp's Last Tape at the Long Wharf Theatre through Dec. 18. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

My Krapp’s Last Tape review has been postponed due to technical difficulties.

One of the show’s central voices emanates from a reel-to-reel tape machine. The backstage wizardry guiding the disembodied voice of that antiquated onstage device malfunctioned last night about a third of the way through the show. The performance had to be stopped, and there was a confusing and disorienting ten-minute break before it could resume.

Unfortunately for the Long Wharf Theatre, which is presenting the Samuel Beckett one-act through Dec. 18, last night was opening night. The computer glitch has been corrected, and Long Wharf has graciously invited the many theater critics there last night to attend future, uninterrupted, performances.

I would caution you to read between the lines of any reviews which do result from that glitched Thursday show. The sole human actor in the piece, Brian Dennehy, got back into Krapp’s rhythms swiftly and expertly. but Beckett plays are fragile, and an unplanned break can’t be smoothed over in a viewer’s mind very easily. Considering that Krapp’s Last Tape only takes 50 minutes to perform, a 10-minute delay can have a seismic impact.

This was no mere broken prop item or skipped passage of dialogue. This was a computerized sound breakdown which (from what I could tell) foisted the wrong bit of recorded tape on Dennehy, who had no choice but to stop the show. It’s not like there was another live actor he could gingerly guide back into the dialogue.

“OK, folks, we’ve got a problem here, “ Dennehy casually announced. “This has nothing to do with Beckett. It has to do with Thomas Alva Edison.” After some public chatting and gesturing with the techies in the sound booth, Dennehy calmly declared that “I’m going to leave the stage now.”

Then came a houselights-still-down, what-the-heck interlude where the theater’s artistic director and managing director left their seats to see what was wrong, each returned, then left their seats again. One was overheard saying “We’ll have to start the show over again.”

Finally, Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein declared that “a computer problem” was the source of this long non-Beckettian pause, and that the show would resume shortly, backed up to an earlier point. It restarted in fact at the first taped moment, “39 today.” There were no more technological surprises after that, except for the ones in the script.

Samuel Beckett maps out the movements and relationships in his plays with intense precision. When directors and actors make too much of the playwright’s economy and exactitude, the shows can become tedious and mechanical. That’s certainly not the case with this production, which is directed by Jennifer Tarver and which Brian Dennehy has been performed at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and the Goodman Theatre prior to this Long Wharf stint. It’s warm and human and funny and tender. So it’s ironic that the machine would upstage the man.

Interestingly, the last one-person, hour-long Beckett piece to play on Long Wharf’s Stage II stage was the Gare St. Lazare Players’ adaptation of the story First Love, a production similarly noted for its humor, humanity and vulnerability. First Love’s performer Conor Lovett distinguishes himself from most Beckett performers by acknowledging the audience and exhibiting an awareness of the stage environment. If someone in the audience sneezes, Lovett says “Bless you.” If a fly buzzes about him, he swats at it.

Which is just how Brian Dennehy behaved last night. With remarkable and admirable restraint, he simply noted the insurmountable difficulty he was encountering, stayed onstage in hopes that it could be fixed quickly, then did the professional thing of gracefully egressing so the issue could be resolved. If this were a less ambulatory Beckett piece, such as Happy Days or Endgame or Play, the leading actors might literally be stuck—in a hill of rubble, or a garbage can.

The question remains, how long could have he chosen to go without mentioning the problem? I’m sure that the tape screw-up could have been much, much worse before most of the audience would have realized something was wrong. This is a Beckett play, after all, with repetitions and abrupt turns and abstract intrusions, defying and mocking expectations. Even Beckett enthusiasts such as myself find it easy to lose their place when seeing his plays in performance, luxuriating in simply hearing these oft-read scripts actually spoken and staged.

In any case, expect a full review of Krapp’s Last Tape here at NHTJ later in the run. And reuminate on the fact that analyzing, overcoming and laughing at past missteps and indiscretions is part of what this wonderful play is all about.