Lucky Me

By Sachi Parker and Frederick Stroppel. Directed by Douglas Moser. Produced by Joanna Keylock. Production design by Andrew Rubenoff. Costumes by Deighna DeRiu. Through June 9 at the Off Broadway Theatre at Yale, New Haven. (203) 305-7762.

Certainly I’ve had many friends and acquaintances who feel they had difficult childhoods due to domineering or distant or self-centered parents.  Such feelings  can be universal, and have fueled numerous powerful stage dramas, from the works of Eugene O’Neill to Nicky Silver’s recent triumph The Lyons. Whether this mood can sustain an autobiographical one-woman show such as Lucky Me is open to debate.

Lucky Me is a stage variation of the memoirs published earlier this year by Sachi Parker, daughter of Shirley MacLaine. Parker’s father also figures in the narrative, and seems just as dysfunctional a parent as MacLaine is made out to be, yet since he’s not a celebrity gets off kind of easy.

Parker plays herself—and, in some uncanny impersonations, her mother—in the show. The production benefits from a full set meant to evoke Parker’s childhood years in Japan, its paper screens providing a convenient place for the star to dip behind and make quick costume changes. She dons a cowboy hat when  describing how she became a sheep rancher in Australia, for example.

Parker tantalizes the audience with secrets about her mother and a whole lot of namedropping from her own days as an actress in Hollywood. But the show is rather uncomfortably built around her overstated belief that she was cheated out of a better life and a better career by a shitty mom.

MacLaine doesn’ get a clear introduction. It’s assumed that you know who she is, and what she’s done. This is surely to expected for much of the show’s potential audience, yet being stingy with MacLaine’s biographical details and public persona robs Parker’s memoir of some structural underpinnings and empathetic elements it dearly needs. MacLaine is berated regularly as a bad mother—neglectful, self-centered, oblivious. It would help if more were made of her as a personality, and how such a personality does not fit a conventional mold of motherhood in the late 20^th century. MacLaine is an actress who has seldom been described without the words “madcap,” “spitfire,” “pixieish” or “free-spirited” nearby. In enumerating her many maternal transgressions, a “What did you expect?” attitude would be easier to stomach than a litany of her failures.

While excoriating her mother in no uncertain terms for being competitive, Parker drops a few obfuscated hints that she might be harboring the same unattractive qualities. At Wednesday’s performance, a story in which she was led to believe she had won a role in Closing the Ring, playing the daughter of a character played by Shirley MacLaine, Parker punctuated the story by saying Neve Campbell had ultimately been the given the part instead, then noted that the film “went straight to video” and gave what seemed to be an improvised fist-pump of sweet revenge. Closing the Ring may not have done well at the box office or with many critics, but it did do better than most of the films on Parker’s lamentable resume, and screened at the Toronto and London film festivals. Parker acts cheated and resentful, but as she tells it, the story doesn’t quite add up: the part only exists for her in the first place because her mother suggested it for her. The evidence that the same woman eventually appears to have had it taken away from her is delivered in confusing conversations between mother and daughter. Sachi plays herself as level and controlled, and Shirley as insufferably short-tempered, yet daughter confront Mom with some pretty major stuff. This is one of those stranger-than-fiction narratives which exists because it was lived and internalized, but would never work if you made it up and tried to dramatize it.

Parker does a mean Shirley MacLaine impression (at one point wearing a wig that conjures up an eerie physical resemblance as well), but doesn’t distinguish herself as the sort of equivalent talent that would justify the constant kvetching about a thwarted show business career. During Wednesday’s performance she fought a losing battle with the water bottle she needed to occasionally whet her whistle during this 90 minute monologue. A Poland Spring bottle is certainly an acceptable prop in shows like this, but at various points Parker misplaced it, mentioned it in mid-sentence, kicked it over and nearly tripped on it. All the while, she argued that she’s a good actress being kept down by her mother’s spiteful and vindictive nature. Yet MacLaine herself did not exactly gain fame through ideal circumstances, and proved herself as a great dancer and comedienne as well as an actress.

The picture Parker paints is of a normal child living in incredible circumstances. The vision isn’t convincingly portrayed, because of the random starstruck nature of the stories—Sinatra! Charlie Sheen!—although her uncle Warren Beatty isn’t mentioned once.  A confessional quality is lost, and we’re left with disillusionment and diatribe.

The publisher’s description of the book Lucky Me, on which this show is based, gives it a much more useful framework than we get in the stage version:

“Shirley MacLaine’s only child shares shocking stories from her out-of-this-world childhood with the famously eccentric actress.” Those phrases “only child,” “out-of-this-world” and “famously eccentric” are inspired choices, ideal for an understanding of what Lucky Me could be. Without such signposts, and without a script that allows for a more charitable view of what challenges might have been present in the unfortunate situations described, or how others might have been feeling, this show can’t help but come off as a child’s one-sided revenge on Mom.

New Haven-based Pulitzer-winning playwright Donald Margulies is the featured guest on the latest “AT OffScript” podcast produced by American Theatre magazine. The series marks a milestone in the magazine’s history: 150 complete play scripts have been published in American Theatre since it was founded in 1983. Two of those 150 scripts are by Margulies, which he jokingly calls “a dubious achievement” during this interview with American Theatre editorial assistant Diep Tran.

“Offscript,” which is just four episodes old, doesn’t yet have a consistent host/interviewer or a consistent interviewing style. Tran’s done too of them, and is the most cordial; she throws Margulies for a loop simply by asking him “How are you doing?,” followed by “How often do you come to the city?”

Part of his response: “I live in New Haven, and have done so for most of the past 30 years.” Not only is the playwright a resident, but Sight Unseen had a mainstage production at Long Wharf Theatre in 1993 and Last Tuesday world-premiered at the same theater in 2003 (on a double bill with an earlier one-act, “July 7, 1994” under the collective title Two Days).

The chat with Margulies, at 25 minutes, is by far the longest OffScript interview to date. He’s able to spin fairly long anecdotes and provide clear descriptions of the processes by which Sight Unseen and Last Tuesday were written, workshopped, produced and published.

The earlier episodes of AT OffScript, all available for free at the iTunes store, feature Richard Foreman, David Lindsay-Abaire and Young Jean Lee. None could be considered in-depth, especially since they stick very closely to the specific plays by these authors which were published in American Theatre. Each short interview contains at least one question which lays flat and goes nowhere. (Young Jean Lee is asked what she thinks about other companies’ productions of her works; turns out she’s barely seen any.) Overall, the short interviews which run in the magazine as prefaces to the plays contain more information and insight. And Foreman fans would be better off listening to the more comprehensive talk with him posted last week on the New York Public Theater’s own Public Forum podcast.

Still, American Theatre’s achievement of publishing 150 plays in such an accessible form deserves to be celebrated, and this breezy podcast is an easily accessible way in which to do it.

Long Wharf Theatre Associate Director Eric Ting who directed the theater’s current production of Clybourne Park as well as the world premiere of Laura Jacqmin’s January Joiner in Long Wharf Stage II back in January, has won an Obie Award for one of his non-Long Wharf projects, Jackie Sibblies Drury’s drama We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915.

The play was done at Soho Rep in New York City last November. Ting (shown above walking his dog Henry in downtown New Haven) also directed We Are Proud to Present a Presentation… in the spring of 2012 at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago.

Other 2013 Obie winners which might resonate with New Haven audiences included Ruben Santiago-Hudson (whose autobiographical one-man show Lackawanna Blues was at Long Wharf in 2002) for his revival of Yale Rep icon August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson; David Byrne, who’ll be playing New Haven’s Shubert in June, for his musical with Fatboy Slim, Here Lies Love), Lois Smith (who starred in Lil’s 90^th by Darci Picoult at Long Wharf Stage II in 2010); and John Rando (who has the distinct honor of having been announced as director of two regional theater shows in Connecticut that never happened: David Ives’ Polish Joke, which fell off the Long Wharf Theatre schedule in 2002, and Christopher Durang’s Beyond Therapy at Westport Country Playhouse, which ended up being directed by David Kennedy instead) for Ives’ All in the Timing.

The other Obie winners: David Levine and Marsha Ginsberg,  Dave Malloy and Rachel Chavkin, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Ayad Akhtar,Annie Baker, Eisa Davis, Brandon J. Dirden, Shuler Hensley, Matthew Maher, Paul Thureen, Fulcrum Theater, Half Straddle, David Byrne & Fatboy Slim, Clubbed Thumb, Lois Smith, Frances Sternhagen, Lear deBessonet, Laura Jellinek, Clint Ramos and the plays Detroit and Grimly Handsome.

The Obie Awards (the title is from “O.B.” for Off Broadway) began in the 1950s to honor the new breed of theater happening in New York City beyond the commercial confines of Broadway. The awards were created by the Village Voice, which helped further the Off Broadway movement by reviewing shows which critics for the major New York daily newspapers weren’t at. The

On May 17, the Village Voice let go several of its longtime staffers, including Michael Feingold, the Yale School of Drama grad and long-ago Yale Rep literary manager who had been writing about theater for the paper since 1970. Feingold chaired the committee which presented the Obies, and was apparently the center of attention at the awards ceremony Monday due his unceremonious dismissal from the Voice last week.

The New York reported today that Feingold’s contract with the Voice expires Tuesday, and that he “is now talking to the Voice about writing freelance reviews and continuing as chairman of the committee of judges for the Obies.”

The Voice’s coverage of Off Broadway has already shrunken alarmingly over the years. Not that others haven’t picked up the slack; the Times and other dailies have covered Off Broadway pretty handily for decades now, and thanks to the internet the days are now long gone when a story or ad in the Voice were the only way non-New Yorkers could find out about a hot new small theater. But out-of-the-way theater reviews was one of the major alternative elements which distinguished the Voice when it first began in 1955.

The Voice’s coverage of its own 2013 Obie Awards is underwhelming. There are 63 uncaptioned photos of attendees (Eric Ting’s in number 21 of the “Photo Booth Fun” shots) and a couple of other slideshows illustrating the ceremony, but the only real analysis of the awards is the the pre-ceremony announcement piece filed by Feingold. I don’t like it when the Times covers Voice things better than the Voice does.

The Obies will never be the same. Thank goodness Eric Ting got his now.

Good luck getting a ticket, but it’s worth noting that The Greater Middletown Chorus’ world premiere of the “dramatic oratorio” Letter from Italy, 1944 is this weekend at Middletown High School’s Performing Arts Center (220 Larosa Lane, Middletown).

The show’s sole regular performance, April 28 at 4 p.m., has been sold out for weeks. A “preview performance” was added for tonight (Friday, April 26) at 7:30 p.m., but you can imagine that demand for that is high as well.

The show—performed by the 18-person chorale, five featured soloists and several dozen musicians—is based on the writings of Dr. John K. Meneely Jr., specifically the letters he wrote to his family when he was stationed in Italy as an army medic during World War II.

The correspondence has been turned into an oratorio by Meneely’s daughters Nancy Fitz-Hugh Meneely (a poet, living in Guilford, whose libretto version of Letter from Italy has been published and is available here) and Sarah Meneely-Kyder (a composer, based in Old Lyme, whose works have been performed by the New Haven Symphony, City Singers of Hartford, American Music/Theater Group and others). The stage direction for the premiere is by the Greater Middletown Chorale’s resident director Sheila Hickey Garvey, a longtime Professor of Theater at Southern Connecticut State University who’s contributed to books on Jason Robards and Eugene O’Neill.

A review of an earlier version of Letters from Italy, 1944, performed in 2003, calls the text “Walt Whitman-ish” and deems the musical setting “trenchantly dramatic, eerie, frightening and warmly lyrical as the text requires.”

The GMC has set up a special website to promote this premiere production, replete with bios, info on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (which Dr. Meneely appeared to have suffered from, though the disorder wasn’t known by that name in his day), blogs by director Garvey and others; an Honor Roll of military veterans “honored by family and friends as part of Letter from Italy, 1944”; and a three minute video preview of the show

The oratorio has received a number of grants to assist in its development, including on the state level from the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development and the Connecticut Humanities Council.

Given the excitement over this one, and the fact that many will be shut out from seeing it, here’s hoping for further renditions of Letter from Italy, 1944.

I’m doing another of my “Play in a Day” children’s theater activities Tuesday, April 16 from 2-5 p.m. at Never Ending Books, 810 State Street, New Haven. In the space of three hours, we adapt a classic piece of theater, rehearse it, and (when parents come to pick up the kids) perform it.

The usual format: Parents drop off their kids at Neverending Books (810 State Street, New Haven), then return three hours later to see a show and, if they like, stick around and chat. The fee is $5 per child. Parents are welcome to stay if they wish. Children of all ages welcome—we’ve had as young as four and as old at 13.
Previous Play in a Day shows can be viewed at http://scribblers.us/nhtj/?page_id=1500
Contact Christopher Arnott at chris@scribblers.us for more details.

Haven’t done one of these in months. Looking forward to it. Will almost definitely do a comedy.

The end of a Yale Cabaret season—20 shows, now all done!—means that one team of artistic and managing directors is moving on (and in most cases are als0 graduating for the Yale School of Drama) and next year’s team has been anointed.

This weekend, in the chatty “fire speech” period before performances of the season-closing social satire The Ugly One (see review below), the Yale Cabaret has been passing the torch. Outgoing Artistic Director Ethan Heard and Managing Director Jonathan Wemette have been announcing the names of their successors.

The Managing Director for the 2013-2014 school-year Cabaret season will be Shane Hudson, who was was an associate producer of last summer’s story-based Yale Summer Cabaret season and the producer of Milk Milk Lemonade at Yale Cabaret last fall, to name a couple of credits.

For the artistic directorship, the Cabaret is changing models from a single person to a team of three. This is not the first time this method has been used, but it’s notable this time that all three co-artistic directors—Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski and Kelly Kerwin—are from the Yale School of Drama’s dramaturgy program. It’s not a given that this post tends to go to directing students, but that’s certainly been common. Having an artistic team that’s as devoted to the nuances of text as to those of staging will doubtless lead to some provocative and thoughtful programming choices.

Kerwin was the dramaturg for, and Dibo and Dubowkski were the co-directors of, the “promenade play” The Twins Would Like to Say at the Cabaret earlier this month. All three women have extensive Cabaret and Yale School of Drama credits, collectively ranging from the revival of The Yiddish King Lear to the Yale Rep show American Night—The Ballad of Juan Jose. There’s just the right mix of experience here, from down-and-dirty low-rent shows to pristine artistic displays. I’m excited already for whatever they come up with for next semester.

The Ugly One

Through April 13 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park Street, New Haven. (203) 432-1566, www.yalecabaret.org

By Marius von Mayenburg. Translated by Maja Zade. Director: Cole Lewis. Dramaturg: Sarah Krasnow. Scenic Designer: Reid Thompson. Costume Designer: Soule Golden. Lighting Designer: Benjamin Ehrenreich. Composer: Steve Brush. Sound Designers: Steve Brush and Tyler Kiefer. Projection Designer: Nicholas Hussong. Technical Director: Alex Bergeron. Producer & Stage Manager: Jennifer Lagundino. Cast: Mitchell Winter (Lette), Michelle McGregor (Fanny), Jabari Brisport (Scheffler), Dan O’Brien (Karlmann).

The Onion Book of Known Knowledge defines “Serling, Rod” as:

Neurotic creator and host of The Twilight Zone, a weekly anthology series that enabled Serling to work through his fears of flying, being alone, his neighbors, dying in his sleep, getting sucked into dreams or works of art, being locked in a bank vault during a nuclear attack, dead grandmas calling on toy phones, being the only human-looking person in a fascist world of pig-snouted people, fictional towns called Willoughby, being harassed by small people in spaceships, and being shot by Elizabeth Montgomery

The Ugly One, by German playwright Marius von Mayenburg, takes a Serling trope—the power of attractiveness—and gives it an Onion-esque spin, taking a superficial concept about a superficial trait and deepening it by taking it to comical extremes.

It’s an entirely appropriate final show for a season which continually explored values of normalcy, sanity and beauty. But it’s also a divine showcase for the values of the Yale Cabaret. Like the Brecht script Lindbergh’s Flight, which was done at the Cabaret earlier this year, The Ugly One holds itself to a four-person ensemble in which only one actor (Mitchell Winter) consistently maintains a lead role while the other change characters with blistering speed around him. There’s no presumption of costume changes, and none of the actors ever leaves the stage. As with Lindbergh, there’s a loose and arch comic style which puts the actors at risk of cracking each other up and dropping character(s). But the transformations—which are not quickchanges, just a ball to keep up with—set a tone and pace and comic strip clamor for The Ugly One which telegraphs to audiences in its very first moments that it’s OK to laugh uproariously.

The Ugly One’s Friday 11 p.m. audience was keen to guffaw, and von Mayenburg’s play—an influential hit at London’s Royal Court theater in 2007-08—keeps giving them license. It starts with a neat theatrical premise: that lead character Lette (Mitchell Winter, who explored aspects of truth and beauty as the Georges in a Yale School of Drama production of Sunday in the Park with George earlier this school year) is unspeakably ugly, though he’s never realized this fact which is universally acknowledged by everyone around him. The audience hasn’t realized it either, since there’s no attempt (through make-up, masks or otherwise) to convey that the actor’s face is any different than that of his co-stars. When Lette is changed by a doctor (Jabari Brisport, who delivers some exceptional comic moments just through his voice inflections) into a paragon of male beauty, he succumbs to all the greediness and feelings of superiority which come with it. He torments his wife (Michelle McGregor, a sexual dynamo whose bright lipstick becomes its own character once it attaches itself to Winter’s bemused face) with his adulteries, becomes a spokesperson for the company he develops phallic-metaphor tools for (to the chagrin of his co-worker played with sublime boyish boorishness by Dan O’Brien), and otherwise exploits his good lucks and good fortune so extravagantly that a crass comedown is inevitable. When von Mayerburg delivers this denouement, however, he doesn’t succumb to the simpering sentimentality of many an Adam Sandler movie; he dollops on extra sex, extra sass, extra power struggles. The Ugly One remains riotous to its last moment, so much so that the cast is entirely justified when they turn their curtain call into a frenetic jazz dance.

Like a Rod Serling piece, The Ugly One deals with extraordinary insecurities. But even though it uses some of the same bombastic music or dramatic gasps (parodically, granted) to make its points, it’s so much greater than a Twilight Zone episode. Von Mayenburg has taken a theme which is very close to the hearts of theater people—how we look and act, how we gain importance through through popular ideals of handsomeness, and how easily those traits can be coopted, copied and taken from us. He’s spun it into a cautionary tale which ranks with great German and Russian Expressionist comedy of a century or so ago. It plays like a dream, and also like a kind of Saturday Night Live sketch, so you’re not afraid of it or intimidated by it.

Here’s the Cabaret, taking one last crack at issues of self-worth, places in society, mental stability and what constitutes importance. The Ugly One is a colorful shocker of a consciousness-raiser, and ends the Cabaret’s 2012-13 season on a pretty high note.