The International Festival of Arts & Ideas has manifested itself many ways, including the ways it documents itself while it’s happening. The festival has always offered helpful programs for its theater events. Usually, there’s been one big program which encompasses the whole festival—the way the Shubert in New Haven and other “presentation houses” in the area have had programs which cover several separate shows in one booklet.

These programs provide the usual information—cast, creative team, maybe the running time or a description of the setting of the piece. But when it came to background info on the artists, that stuff has usually been cribbed from standard press releases and bios you could already find online at the artists’ websites.

This year, that changed. Arts & Ideas has devised a program book which actually has fresh, lengthy articles about several of the key shows in the festival. These may well have been previously published, but are of a different complexion than press bios. The program is now less like the Shuberts and more like what dramaturgs put together for shows at the Long Wharf or Yale Rep.

The five-page interview with the creators of Stuck Elevator, in fact, was conducted by the Long Wharf’s former Literary Manager Beatrice Basso. Basso is now Artistic Associate at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, where Stuck Elevator premiered earlier this year. The A&I program article was distilled from a piece that ran in ACT’s study guide Words on Plays.

Other stories in the program concern the Bristol Old Vic/Handspring Puppet Company production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the circus theater event Sequence 8. There are lots of short bits explaining various aspects of the festival, from community opportunities, to “what you can do to help” with environmental sustainability and recycling regarding the festival,  to the Jean Handley Fund named in honor of one of A&I’s founders.

It seems like such a small thing, the theater program, but for most theatergoers it’s the only tangible souvenir they have of a performance. A more informative program means more lasting memories. Nice job.

The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center knows who will be in the seven plays of its National Playwrights Conference, which runs July 3-27.

The playwrights and plays— David Auburn (Lost Lake), Jeff Augustin (Little Children Dream of God), Bekah Brunstetter (The Oregon Trail), Michael Yates Crowley (Evanston: A Rare Comedy), Samuel D. Hunter (A Great Wilderness), Jen Silverman (All the Roads Home), Lauren Yee (Samsara) and Martin Zimmerman (The Solid Sand Below)—were announced weeks back.

Here are the actors:

Damian Bailey (Little Children Dream of God)

Duane Boutte (Little Children Dream of God)

Ashley Bryant (Little Children Dream of God)

Tina Benko (Little Children Dream of God)

Hannah Cabell (All the Roads Home)

Eisa Davis (Lost Lake)

Mike Doyle (Sansara)

Daiva Deupree (Sansara)

Jon DeVries (A Great Wilderness)

Scott Drummond (Solid Sand Below)

Christine Estabrook (A Great Wilderness)

Mateo Gomez (Little Children Dream of God)

Aaron Simon Gross (A Great Wilderness)

Anna Margaret Hollyman (Evanston: A Rare Comedy)

Eva Kaminsky (Evanston: A Rare Comedy)

Ryan King (Solid Sand Below)

Tasha Lawrence (A Great Wilderness)

Ronete Levenson (The Oregon Trail and Evanston: A Rare Comedy)

Bhavesh Patel (Sansara)

Emily Louise Perkins (The Oregon Trail)

Crystal Lucas-Perry (Evanston: A Rare Comedy)

Kate McCluggage (Evanston: A Rare Comedy)

Christy Pusz (All the Roads Home)

Brian Quijada (Solid Sand Below)

Laura Ramadei (The Oregon Trail)

James Lloyd Reynolds (The Oregon Trail and Evanston: A Rare Comedy)

Will Rogers (Evanston: A Rare Comedy)

Lipica Shah (Sansara)

Alec Shaw (The Oregon Trail)

Shayna Small (The Oregon Trail)

Terrell Donnell Sledge (Solid Sand Below)

Felix Solis (Solid Sand Below)

Makela Spielman (All the Roads Home)

Phillip Taratula (Sansara)

Joe Tippett (All the Roads Home)

Two shows, A Great Wilderness and Lost Lake, have some roles yet to be filled. And Jeff Augustin’s Little Children Dream of God isn’t mentioned at all in the press release about the casting.

Nice list. A few folks I recall fondly from their Yale School of Drama days and beyond—Ryan King (who was in Rolin Jones’ The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow both at the Yale Rep and Off Broadway) and James Lloyd Reynolds (in photo abovel; he was in Mame and 42^nd Street at the Goodspeed), for starters. Kate McCluggage was in Bell, Book and Candle last year at the Long Wharf and Hartford Stage, and in It’s a Wonderful Life at the Long Wharf before that. I could go on.

Here are the performance dates for the shows:

The Solid Sand Below (directed by Kent Thompson): July 3 & 4 at 8:15 p.m.

Samsara: July 5 at 7:15 p.m. and July 6 at 8:15 p.m.

A Great Wilderness (directed by Braden Abraham): July 10 & 11 at 8:15 p.m.

Little Children Dream of God (directed by Giovanna Sardelli): July 12 at 7:15 p.m. & July 13 at 8:15 p.m.

The Oregon Trail (directed by Geordie Broadwater): July 18 at 8:15 p.m., July 19 at 7:15 p.m.

All the Roads Home (directed by Adam Greenfield): July 19 at 7:15 p.m., July 20 At 3:15 p.m.

Evanston: A Rare Comedy (directed by Michael Rau): July 24 & 25 at 8:15 p.m.

Lost Lake (directed by Wendy C. Goldberg): July 26 at 7:15 p.m., July 27 at 8:15 p.m.

Is there a need to remind you that these are script-in-hand readings of works-in-progress? Didn’t think so. This is summer in Connecticut, and O’Neill rules. For descriptions of the shows and other stuff, head here.

Last weekend Connecticut theatergoers could choose between the culminating public performances of the National Puppetry Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford and the opening weekend of the Handspring Puppet Company/Bristol Old Vic production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (in photo above) at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.

If that’s not enough puppet action for you—and in Connecticut, home of the UConn Puppetry program, the historic Stony Creek Puppet Theatre and troupes such as Flock Theatre and Puppetsweat, why would it be?—tune in online to England’s BBC Radio 4, which is rerunning the network’s 2008 documentary Mr. Punch Says That’s the Way to Do It. Martin Reeve, an actor who’s made a serious academic study of Punch & Judy shows, interviews a host of experts on this centuries-old entertainment staple. Reeve starts the show by visiting a festival where dozens of “professors” (the accepted name for P&J puppeteers) are milling about with hand-puppets babies and crocodiles and hangmen.

New Haven’s Arts & Ideas has puppetry pretty deep in its make-up. The first couple of festivals featured the New York-based political puppetry troupe Great Small Works (whose founder John Bell now runs the Ballard Institute & Museum of Puppetry at UConn), who did a comedic puppet-based production of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. There were at least a couple of Punch & Judy shows among the early festival fare back in the ‘90s, including one by Preston Foerder.

The half-hour Mr. Punch Says That’s the Way to Do It is playable on demand through Sunday at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00xlw1c

Spent an hour this afternoon behind a microphone in the lobby of The Study hotel on Chapel Street, as one of six special guests of the Colin McEnroe show on WNPR. The topic was the International Festival of Arts & Ideas which is consuming downtown through June 29.

The others on the show were: composer Martin Bresnick and director David Chambers, talking about the A&I premiere of their chamber opera My Friend’s Story (drawn from Chekhov’s short story Terror); Akiya Henry, who plays Hermia in the U.S premiere of Handspring Puppet Company/Bristol Old Vic production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Aaron Jafferis, librettist for the new musical Stuck Elevator; and Arts & Ideas executive director Mary Lou Aleskie.

The show aired live at 1p.m. today (June 18), but presumably will grace the archives of The Colin McEnroe Show shortly.

One of my more florid remarks, “This state is not stupid when it comes to puppets,” was tweeted with alacrity by someone else in the lobby—WNPR newsman John Dankosky.

Some folks flock to the International Festival of Arts & Ideas for the big names who play on New Haven Green, but the festival has become just as well known for its audacious programming and its progressive next-wave outlook.

Theaterwise, yes, this is the festival that once brought over the mediocre present-day D’Oyly Carte Opera Company from London, and made a big show of booking such companies as the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theater. But Arts & Ideas was on the earliest tip of such now robust genres as circus theater, bringing in Cirque Baroque twice in the late ‘90s with that companies antic acrobatic adaptations of Voltaire’s Candide and the life of Yukio Mishima. Arts & Ideas hosted the U.S. premiere of Michael Frayn’s intricate mathematical drama Copenhagen, with the original British cast over a year before its Broadway debut. There’s a good number of performance artists and solo performers who made their first big splash at the festival, leading to national tours and wider recognition.

Look at this year’s musical theater offerings: An alliance with the Yale Institute of Musical Theater meant that Arts & Ideas audiences could be present at workshop readings of two new musicals which flaunt many conventions of the form. The Last Queen of Canaan, but Jacob Yandura and Rebekah Greer Melocik, has as its lead character a former slave woman in her late 70s, surrounded by ghosts from her pre-Reconstruction past and by a nattering younger generation that can’t comprehend the level of her bitterness concerning humanity. The other YIMT musical, Mrs. Hughes, is about the two suicidal lovers of the poet Ted Hughes—Sylvia Plath and Assia Gutmann. Both shows were well aware of the challenges of their subject matters and source materials, and used the workshop opportunities to their utmost. The scene on the lawn outside Yale’s Off Broadway Theater before and after the Saturday presentations were imbued with a desire to embrace such bracing new work. (Mrs. Hughes and The Last Queen of Canaan have their final YIMT workshop performances today at 1 & 5 p.m. respectively.)

Arts & Ideas has two other musical theater works-in-development on its main indoor stages  this week and next. Stuck Elevator was actually developed at YIMT three summers back. The program’s director, Mark Brokaw, spoke warmly of Stuck Elevator’s co-creators when they were in the audience of Last Queen of Canaan on Saturday afternoon. There’s the added excitement of Aaron Jafferis being a hometown boy, who performed some of his hip-hop poetry at a festival event years ago and has been active in political theater locally since his high school days. Stuck Elevator had its world-premiere full production at ACT in San Francisco just a couple of months ago. It had grown much larger in cast-size and scope since its early days. The show is being reworked again, so that it might tour, and Arts & Ideas is hosting that new version June 20-29. (The Thursday, June 20 performance is a preview; reviews should start appearing after Friday’s show.)

On June 19 & 20, Arts & Ideas presents preview performances of a new work by internationally acclaimed Yale-based artists Martin Bresnick, J.D. McClatchy and David Chambers. My Friend’s Story, adapted from the Chekhov short story “Terror.

All Arts & Ideas info is at www.artidea.org

The Yale Repertory Theatre  knows who’ll be screaming “Stella” on its stage in September.

Joe Manganiello—werewolf Alcide Herveaux from the toothy romance HBO True Blood—will be Stanley in Mark Rucker’s production of the Tennessee Williams classic A Streetcar Named Desire at the Rep Sept. 20 through Oct. 12. That casting coup has been reported by the Hollywood press for the last week or so.

Blanche will be 1996 Yale School of Drama grad René Augesen. She’s worked with Rucker (who graduated from YSD himself in the early ’92) several times, including a production of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit last year at the California Shakespeare Theater. Augesen’s home base has been the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, where she was a core acting company member for over a decade and where Rucker serves as Associate Artistic Director. (ACT is the theater which premiered the new musical Stuck Elevator, which is coming to New Haven’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas later this month.) Augesen’s ACT collaborations with Rucker have ranged from the melodrama The Rainmaker to the George S. Kaufman comedy Once in a Lifetime. (Rucker did a brilliant production of another Kaufman work, Stage Door, as his YSD directing thesis project 21 years ago.)

As for Joe Manganiello, it’s noteworthy that he’s done Streetcar before, at the West Virginia Public Theatre. He’s also worked with maverick director Trip Cullman, whom longtime New Haven theatergoers will recall did A Streetcar Named Desire as his thesis project at the Yale School of Drama in 2002. The Yale Rep press release is saying that this is the theater’s “first-ever production” of the play, which is true enough, but Cullman’s student production was indeed staged in the Rep space.

Streetcar has a massive connection to New Haven. The landmark first production of the play, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, had its pre-Broadway try-out at New Haven’s Shubert Theater in 1947. In 1998, Michael Wilson began his reign as Artistic Director of Hartford Stage by announcing a multi-year Tennessee Williams marathon and making Streetcar his inaugural production at the theater.

Mark Rucker’s directed a Tennessee Williams show at Yale before—The Kingdom of Earth (aka Seven Descents of Myrtle), which was the first Yale Rep production to grace what is now known as the Iseman Theater at 1156 Chapel Street.

I’m speculating that, despite its smoldering male star and a Blanche with excellent classical theater training and experience, Rucker will be sure to find whatever humor and modern panache is in the play (which can be a considerable amount). Now we know the two leads, can’t wait to hear about do-stars and designers.

(Edit note: An earlier version of this post erroneously stated that René Augesen graduated from the Yale School of Drama in 1993. It was in fact her sister Roxanne who graduated that year. René is YSD class of ’96. Sorry about that.)

Here’s a photo of how the Yale Repertory Theatre looked last August.

Here’s a photo of how it looks this week.

In between, of course, the Yale Rep hosted an entire season of plays and special performance events, not least of them Paul Giamatti as Hamlet.

The building is like some freakish cocoon which opens up during the theater season, then gets shrouded again in blue until the theater bug emerges again.

Or it’s just that it takes time for expert masons to repoint old church exteriors.

I’ve sucked so much at blogging regularly here in the last few months, blowing off dozens of potential preview stories, that local readers have every right to be annoyed that I’ve jumped in to mention a show happening in Los Angeles California by some Yale School of Drama alums who graduated three or four years ago.

But screw it, this sounds cool.

The Last Days of Mary Stuart, is a world-premiere “Electro-opera” running June 21 through July 20 at Son of Semele, 3301 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles. The show was workshopped at the same venue last year. It emanates from Tilted Field Productions, the company co-founded by former YSD classmates Becca Wolff and Jacob Padron. Both are California natives. When in New Haven, they did cool things at the Yale Cabaret. Wolff’s thesis project was Friedrich Schiller’s The Robbers. A previous Tilted Field production featured yet another Yalie of that era, Alex Knox of Eye fame. Knox also appears in Mary Stuart as “Judges #2” and “Badge Man.” The title role is played by Marianne Thompson, and Laila Ayad is Queen Elizabeth.

This is how Tilted Fields describes The Last Days of Mary Stuart:

The charismatic Mary Queen of Scots comes to England and her followers rise up to challenge the power of Queen Elizabeth I. This classic story resonates in our times, as a divided nation attempts to unite in a globalizing world where political and religious differences continually tear it apart. The electro-sound, thoughtful lyrics and dynamic staging make visceral this drama of the eternal struggle between reason and emotion.

Info at:

http://www.tiltedfield.com

http://www.sonofsemele.org/

Tartuffe

Through June 15 at the Yale Summer Cabaret, 217 Park Street, New Haven. (203) 432-1566, www.yalecabaret.org.

By Moliere. Translated by Richard Wilbur. Directed by Dustin Wills. Scenic Designer: Kate Noll. Costume Designer: Seth Bodie. Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason. Composer: Rob Greenfield. Sound Designer: Steve Brush. Production Manager/Technical Director: James Lanius. Stage Manager: Geoff Boronda. Performed by: Mamoudou Athie (Tartuffe), Chris Bannow (Orgon), Michelle McGregor (Elmire), Ashton Heyl (Dorine), Mickey Theis (Cleante), Mitchell Winter (Valere), Celeste Arias (Mariane), Ato Blankson-Wood (Damis), Prema Cruz (Madame Pernelle), Ceci Fernandez (Flipote, others).

Moliere’s Tartuffe is the opening  blast in a Yale Summer Cabaret season that appears so “conventional” it’s positively unheard of. Not that Yale School of Drama student-run theater projects haven’t done Moliere before–or Tennessee Williams or Caryl Churchill or Federico Garcia Lorca or August Strindberg, the other playwrights on this summer’s slate–but you have to go back quite a few years to find an entire SumCab season of playwrights which average theatergoers have heard of. (I’m not counting the all-Shakespeare season of 2011). Not to mention an acting ensemble which is so efficiently utilized as a full-blown repertory company.

Nine of the ten members of that ensemble appear in Tartuffe. Those in the smaller roles are assured of grander opportunities later in the summer. When not in a given show, the actors will act as waitstaff during the Cabaret dinner-serving hour.

As a summer stock veteran myself (from age 3 to 8, with the Ledges Playhouse in Grand Ledge, Michigan, back in the mid 1960s), I could wax eloquently about the pleasures of a true repertory stock season. But let’s praise instead that rarer, more precious thing: an even-handed, balanced, well-thought-through, riotous yet dramatic, wild yet not completely over-the-top Tartuffe.

Tartuffe’s plot is simple—Tartuffe cons the wealthy Orgon, to the dismay of Orgon’s wife Elmire, their children (including a daughter whom Orgon is willing to betroth to Tartuffe rather than let her marry her true love Valere) and others who hang around the mansion which defines what’s really at stake here.

Yet Tartuffe is the kind of comedy which, due to changing and more enlightened times, can’t ever again be funny in the way it originally was. What was first found offensive about it—the idea that religion can be exploited by charlatans, a concept once considered heretical—no longer bothers us, while its attitudes toward women and children can now shock well beyond the bounds of exaggerated farce.

What has challenged directors in recent centuries, as with Taming of the Shrew, is the high level of sexism and domestic abuse that must not just be tolerated in the play but turned into comic hijinks. One critical subplot involves Orgon forbidding his daughter to marry the man she loves and instead betrothing her to Tartuffe. Another has Tartuffe lusting after Orgon’ s wife Elmire to the point where he attempts to have sexual relations with her forcibly against her will.

My father wrote books on Moliere and staged and translated many of his plays. I’ve seen oodles of Tartuffes over the years, including recent ones in Connecticut at the Yale Rep in 2007 and Westport Country Playhouse just a couple of years ago. I’ve seen the play done as virtual tragedy and as oblivious cartoon cut- ups. The show’ s large cast needs can often lead to an inconsistency of acting styles, and the play is written in such a way that, depending on the perspective, you’re not sure which leading character might be considered the starring role. The title character doesn’t appear until the third act. The level- headed wife Elmire, another latecomer to the action, rises neatly to the stature of heroine in some productions. The maid Dorine, like so many menial servants in comedies of this period, gets moist of the best lines. The vituperative elderly mom Miss Pernelle dominates the opening scene of the play, then disappears for a very long time. There’s also a weepy lovestruck daughter, a hothead son, a good-natured quasi-rational in-law.

With so many people jockeying for attention, an untethered production of Tartuffe can be a free-for-all.

Director Dustin Wills hews close to plot here, doesn’t mess with relationships beyond the accepted stereotypes, and simply allows the cast a lot of room to move about. For such a small underground black-box space, the Summer Cabaret has assembled a thrust stage that nearly rivals that of a “regular” theater. That thrust will apparently be used for the entire summer season, augmenting the “traditional” aura of the season and the repertory ensemble model.

So how trad is the acting? The style here is what you might call comic metaclassical. Costume designer Seth Bodie has put a note in the program explaining that his concept is a blend of upper class affectations of various eras and not confined to the ruffles and plumage of Moliere’s era. This method seems to fit Dustin Wills’ directorial take precisely.

As it happens, most of the prevailing cultural connectors in this approach are not French but British. The set is more drawing-room than mansion. The dialogue, thanks to Richard Wilbur’s tyrannic verse, is clipped and enunciated. Mickey Theis, a versatile young actor who normally would be cast in lean, hungry, angry roles, comports himself (as Orgon’ s brother and confidante) in fat suit and vest in a manner suggesting Terry Jones of the Monty Python troupe.

I could assess in detail the various performers here (and actually do a bit of that in my review of the show for www.ct.com, here). But it’s far more complimentary in this instance to discuss how well they work together as an ensemble. Moliere wrote his plays for a troupe of colleagues who fell easily into the stereotypical roles assigned them. For this groups of Yale School of Drama classmates to so quickly grasp a consistent communal comic tone for Tartuffe, with minimal rehearsal time and knowing that in future weeks they’d be shifting to Strindberg, Tennessee Wiliams, Federico Garcia Lorca and Caryl Churchill modes.

There’s a lot that’s refreshing about this Yale Summer Cabaret experience, from the chocolate mousse on the dessert menu to the “want some licorice?” line from the Moliere script which takes on a whole new meaning when growled by Mamoudou Athie as Tartuffe.

The plot holds. So does the fantasy of the play’s ending. The physical shtick doesn’t distract from the verse translation. The dreaded seduction scene succeeds. All is well in funny old faux France, and in summery New Haven.