All of What You Love and None of What You Hate

Through Jan. 19 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., New Haven. 8 p.m. & 11 p.m. (Both performances are sold out.) (203) 432-1565, www.yalecabaret.org.

By Phillip Howze. Directed by Kate Tarker. Choreographer: Jabari Brisport. Scenic Designers: Portia Elmer, Mariana Sanchez. Costume Designer: Grier Coleman. Lighting Designer: Oliver Wason. Sound Designers: Pornchanok, Kanchanabanca, Sang Ahn. Production Designer: Paul Lieber. Projection Designer: Paul Lieber. Dramaturg: Helen C. Jaksch. Stage Manager: Rob Chikar. Producers: Stephanie Rolland, Sarah Williams. Performed by Zenzi Williams (Girl A), Tiffany Mack (Girl B), Prema Cruz (Mother) and Cornelius Davidson (Boy).

Hey, I just witnessed a good old-fashioned “promising debut.” The voice belongs to Phillip Howze, a first-year playwright at the Yale School of Drama. He’s taken a subjects which are not uncommon fodder for young playwrights—urban youth issues, generation gaps and teen pregnancies—and

Howze has devised—and director Kate Tarker and a vividly physicalized cast have beautifully implemented—a playing style where extended bouts of gossiping or nagging deteriorate into literal bursts of “blah blah blah.” Similarly, body gestures such as finger- pointing and tsk-tsking overwhelm the characters until they marvel at their own lack of control, staring at their limbs as if they’d just experienced a bizarre spastic impulse. These bursts of abstraction aren’t distracting. They underly the characters’ cruel realities, internal agonies and distressing failures to communicate.

This is a play that processes a lot of emotions—anger, despair, resignation, obliviousness, betrayal, annoyance, virtually everything but joy—in a rather brief period of time. The central urban-teen characters are believably wrought by Howze and brought to life by Zenzi Williams (as a sullen girl who turns out to be holding in a big problem), Tiffany Mack (as a sort of Greek chorus of high-energy hip-hop commentary) and Cornelius Davidson (as a self-described “hustler” who gets Girl A in trouble). These youngsters dance with abandon, rap furiously, text and chat incessantly, but also strike sullen and mean and scared poses. Their range, as individuals and as an ensemble, is exhausting. When challenged by each other, they respond with defensive anger that is all the more believable (and entertaining) for how over-the-top it is. As the harried (and largely oblivious) mom of a pregnant teen, Prema Cruz is equally credible (no small trick in a cast where actors in the 20s are playing teens and 30somethings. Howze has given the mother depth, and her own priorities that both communicate and explain her relationship with her daughter.

The performances nail the words, but All of What You Love and None of What You Hate also benefits from a realistic main set (cleverly deep, with a  bathroom situated behind a bedroom) and a useful, amusing projections that have the characters introduce themselves through social networking pages and dating websites.

Their tones and topics are very different, but as I watched All of What You Love and None of What You Hate, I kept flashing to Laura Jacqmin’s new play January Joiner, which I saw earlier this week at Long Wharf Stage II. For one thing, both plays invoke the exact same “Your mama is so fat…”jokes. More interesting is the way both Howze and Jacqmin find novel ways to present their subjects through several distinct perspectives. They also both convey a sense of societal menace, worlds where the pressures and opinions proffered by other people can be among the greatest dangers to the sanity of the protagonists.

Howze, having worked up such complex characters, can be excused for heading off on a few tangents and exploring what-if scenarios which ultimately confuse the drama. There’s some serious speechifying at the end which helps conclude the piece but doesn’t quite provide closure. But the rewards here are not in plot and structure. They’re in the emotional journey, which is  written in a fascinating and intriguing fashion, and some incendiary performances.

I am in need of actors/orators willing to read fairly lengthy excerpts from classic prose works—Greek mythology, turn-of-the-century European decadent works, etc.—for the January 7 “volume” of the new monthly storytelling/spoken word series I’m hosting at Café Nine. And if you’re not around January 7, then maybe Feb. 4, March 4, April 8 and beyond.

I have aleready invited some performers from local theater troupes whose work I know well to read for me. That’s working great. But I thought I really ought to open it to the theater community at large, so I can meet more local actors.

I’ve already selected some readings I’d like to see (hear) done on Monday. Just need the right people to put them across live.

There’s no money in it, alas—maybe I could buy you a drink? But it’s a really interesting stage on which to perform, and the crowd (it really was a crowd) at the inaugural edition last month was a terrific audience—appreciative and upbeat and up for anything.

If you’re interested in reciting something I’ve chosen for the Jan. 7 edition of Get to the Point! (8 to 10:30 p.m. at Café Nine, 250 State St., New Haven) or for a future edition (always the first Monday of the month), you can contact me directly at chris@scribblers.us

Capping a holiday season political spectacle that featured enough high and low notes for a Broadway musical, the GOP-run House voted final approval for the measure by 257-167 late Tuesday.

—Associated Press, 2 Jan. 2012

Wrong theater metaphor, AP.

If our elected senators and congresspeople gave more funding, or paid more attention to, the arts, they would realize that cliffhanger melodrama plots went out of style nearly a century ago.

These last-minute saves when old men stay up until 2 a.m. so that the country can all go “Wheewww” are old hat. They don’t even work in blockbuster movies anymore. The only major criticisms I heard of this year’s Batman and James Bond flicks was their last-second timebomb-countdown moments. Too over-the-top. Unnecessary. Let’s rave about all the naturalism and emotional content in those films instead.

The tax negotiations that ended last night were, and started so many news cycles ago that it became ridiculous, were such an obvious cliffhanger-waiting(-and-waiting-and-waiting)-to-happen that it even had “cliff” in its title. The other melodrama vocabulary word bandied about while teetering precipitously on the fiscal cliff: brinksmanship. Only we don’t get a sword duel on the edge of a chasm. We get stubborn oafs up who have to stay past their bedtime because they haven’t finished their homework.

If these elected officials were to plan their worklife wisely, stay home with their families for the holidays, go to the office in the daytimes and make sure that any potential hang-ups in any deals were dealt with safely ahead of time, they might have time to go out to the theater.

There, they would learn that twirly-mustached villains—who’ll drive up costs for poor middle-class families and send starving waifs out onto the streets because they can’t afford the tax hikes—have long gone out of style. They could see things like Clybourne Park (coming this spring to the Long Wharf), which among other things is about urban housing concerns and a changing America. They could see revivals of A Raisin in the Sun (like the one which just happened at Westport Country Playhouse), which dramatizes the hopes and dreams of the hardworking  and disenfranchised—a play which changed the face of drama, and melodrama, in the 1950s by creating new archetypal characters to replace those overused peril-laden paupers of yore. They could see historical dramas like David Adjmi’s Marie Antoinette (in its Yale Rep/ART world premiere production just a few months ago) which questions the very nature of government, and shows that people’s uprisings can be more articulate and sensible than the self-protective posturings of the ruling class.

The President of the United States has a nickname dating back to his earliest political campaigns: “No Drama Obama.” But even he sees that the theatricality of these moments are too tempting for those which more pronounced dramatic urges.

In a speech last night, after the House of Representatives finally approved a bill that could have been decided with much less bleariness days or weeks or months or even years ago, No Drama Obama became a theater director for a moment, giving notes to an cast that lost the plot of the piece and had descended into crass overacting.

The president/dramaturg suggested “seeing if we can put a package like this together with a little bit less drama, a little less brinksmanship (and) not scare the heck out of folks quite as much.”

Rehearsal photo from January Joiner, world-premiering this month at the Long Wharf Theatre.

I’ve begun posting some of the more press-release-based theater news items I write on www.ct.com rather than here. ct.com is the site for the New Haven Advocate and other papers in the New Mass Media chain of alt-weeklies. (The chain has been owned since the mid-1990s by the Hartford Courant, which used to use the ct.com web address for its own purposes. It’s been the New Mass Media domain for over a year now.)The New Haven Advocate has published my theater writings regularly for over 20 years, and I’ve also occasionally reviewed shows for its sister papers The Fairfield County Weekly and the Hartford Advocate. If they want to run more of my theater jottings online, more power to them.

But I don’t like to repeat (or reprint) myself, so there’s no guarantee that some of those items will also appear here at NHTJ.

I wrestle sometimes with how much of a “news and notes” blog New Haven Theater Jerk should be. As New Year’s resolutions for 2013, I hope to at least get back to maintaining a useful Connecticut theater calendar on this site, post extensive reviews of local shows which are different from the reviews I might publish elsewhere (including in the Advocate papers) and devising more of the humorous lists and uncommon theater thought-pieces which I so loved doing when I started this blog a couple of years ago.

But I’ve never seen the point of putting all my eggs in one basket, or blog. I write about Connecticut theater, when appropriate, for the Daily Nutmeg (www.dailynutmeg.com), the new Hartford Courant-run magazine New Haven Living, once or twice a year for Yale Alumni Magazine, and of course the Advocate papers. Plus whatever other publications come down the pike and need a theater critic in a pinch.

So, another resolution: I’ll simply try to alert readers of this blog to the theater stuff I publish elsewhere. How about that? (I’d been doing non-theater-related Arnott Archive Updates on my other blog, www.scribblers.us for a chunk of last year, and will really have to be more regular about that too.)

Here are links to some of my more recent ct.com items:

A preview of January Joiner at the Long Wharf, here.

Another January Joiner item, about an upcoming discussion of the play at RJ Julia Booksellers in Madison, with a few notes on related fitness-oriented and theatrical talks/readings at RJ Julia, here.

The casting announcement for Breath & Imagination at Hartford Stage, here.

You can find these and other theater notes at the the ct.com’s designated New Haven Advocate “Stage” page, here.

Oh, and Happy New Year!

In Jack Klugman’s memoirs, he expresses incredulity that Tony Randall could have passed away before he did. It does seem unlikely. Klugman had battled throat cancer, was a dedicated smoker and gambler and appeared to have depressive tendencies. Randall was the puckish workhorse who seemed to live on TV talk show stages when not running (and tirelessly fundraising for) his ambitious National Actors Theater operation. But Randall died nearly eight years ago at the age of 84 and Klugman just a few days ago at 90.

Garry Marshall, who directed and produced the TV version of The Odd Couple, has a bizarre memory of how Klugman joined the show, one he recounts in his book My Happy Days in Hollywood:

The studio pitched Jerry and me some possible combinations: Martin Balsam and Eddie Bracken, and Dean Martin and Mickey Rooney. But no combination seemed up to snuff compared to Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, who had done the movie. We needed to get closer to Matthau and Lemmon. I remembered an actor I had seen opposite Ethel Merman in the Broadway production of Gypsy. He played the stage manager, and basically for two hours Merman sang loudly and sprayed saliva on him while he faced her with his back to the audience. At the end of the show people in the audience were in love with him. I had never seen such stage presence before, nor a more expressive, regular-kind-of-guy face. I asked the casting department at Paramount to find Jack Klugman, and they sent me a man named Jack Kruschen, who had a mustache.

While Klugman and Kruschen are similar names, the appeal didn’t compare and only one had a mustache. So when Klugman finally came into my office, I knew I had my Oscar.

A few sentences later, Marshall writes, “Tony and Jack were reluctant to step into Matthau’s and Lemmon’s shoes, though. Who wouldn’t be?”

You might wonder what I find bizarre about that. A director has a casting idea in his head and seeks out an actor nobody else had thought of, who is brought in to audition, then worries about following another actor in the role.

Understandable… except that Klugman had been playing Oscar Madison on stage for five years before Marshall’s TV series premiered. He’d already followed Matthau in the role, on Broadway, and then opened the London production. As far as I can tell, he’d played the role more times than Matthau had. How could Garry Marshall not have known (or admitted) this? His book is not filled with vanity; he does not claim to have “discovered” anyone (except perhaps his own sister Penny).

But Marshall was right in that Jack Klugman was born to the role of Oscar Madison. I saw him play it live once, in the original Neil Simon version, on Oct. 28, 2001, at the Shubert in New Haven. It was a staged reading put together as a benefit for the Shakespeare Theater Project—a brief partnership between Louis Burke and Dandelion Productions, raising funds to reopen the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford. (Burke and Dandelion soon became competitors rather than partners. Neither got to reopen the place.)

It was billed as a staged reading, but Klugman was off-book for the entire performance, and Randall for most of it. They had their scriptbound castmates racing to keep up. And this was some accomplished cast: consummate character actor Bob Dishy as Murray, Electric Company’s Judy Graubart and Randall’s wife Heather Randall as the Pigeon Sisters, Rik Colitti as Roy, Edward Malin as Vinnie and Tyler Bunch (then a little-known actor who studied with Burke, now a Sesame Street muppeteer) as Speed. Dan Lauria, the local celebrity who attended Southern Connecticut State University and grew up to play the dad in The Wonder Years, had been asked to participate, but thought he had a scheduling conflict, and ended up in the audience instead, and was hounded by autograph-hunters at intermission.

There was a proper set—Oscar’s apartment, into which Felix moves in—but because of the whole script-in-hand thing there were no props, except for the disinfectant spray and vacuum cleaner bits when the lead characters first become roommates.

That reading could have been a shambles, a slog through a script which the stars could understandably have been irate to have typecast in. Instead, it was both a marvelous stunt—I have expected Klugman to do his lines while standing on his head—and a solid, easy to follow, emotional and involving production of the play. Neil Simon’s comedy of divorce and male-bonding has an existential underpinning as sharp as Sartre’s somewhat similar play No Exit, and it holds up splendidly under the darnedest circumstances.

Especially when Jack Klugman was in it.

It’s become common in recent years to try new casting concepts for The Odd Couple, and I’m all for that. Oscar has been played by Nathan Lane, Craig Ferguson, John Larroquette and others. I saw Jamie Farr be Oscar in a national tour (opposite his M*A*S*H castmate William Christopher) which stopped at Southern Connecticut State University in the late ‘90s. Even back in the mid-70s and early 80s, within a few years of the Klugman/Randall series going off the air, Oscar was portrayed in further TV versions by Demond Wilson and a cartoon dog.

But it’s hard to imagine an actor more comfortable in a role than Jack Klugman appeared to be as Oscar Madison. More comfortable than Walter Matthau, who showed his discomfort in the 1998 film sequel Odd Couple II he did with Jack Lemmon. More comfortable than Klugman seemed in other roles, such as Quincy. Watch a few old Odd Couple episodes and marvel at his timing, his natural expressions, even when faced with hackneyed plots and an overacting supporting cast.

We lost Jack Klugman this week, but we also a legendary interpretation of one of the great theater characters of the 20^th century. Klugman’s Oscar should be up there with Joseph Jefferson’s Rip Van Winkle or James O’Neill’s Count of Monte Cristo or Carol Channing’s Dolly. I hope, as with Jefferson, somebody names an acting award after him someday.

Now that The Killing of Sister George has vacated the Long Wharf mainstage, where do you go to get your fix of the sort of British radio drama of the type which fuels that drama?

The show lampooned in The Killing of Sister George as Applehurst (in which the play’s blowzy protagonist, June Buckridge, portrays the supporting role of a caring nurse) is The Archers. The daily radio soap opera had been running for nearly 15 years when Frank Marcus wrote his play, and it’s still running now.

I’ve been a regular Archers listener since the late 1990s, when I made several visits to England to visit my grandmother. Back in the states, I found I was first able to pick up the show via the BBC internet stream. Back then, I had to catch The Archers when it aired, plus factor in the time difference, then tell my officemates to shut up for 15 minutes while I listened.

Things got a whole lot easier in 2007, when The Archers finally became a downloadable podcast. The BBC also has a “Listen Again” function where shows are available for a week after they first air. I haven’t missed an episode now in over five years.

The Archers has been one of the most popular shows on the BBC practically since it debuted in 1950. The Killing of Sister George takes an actual scandal from when The Archers was around five years old and twists it to its own nefarious purposes.

In the play, a character on Applehurst is reprimanded for an embarrassing incident in her personal life. She worries that the producers of the show will kill off the beloved yet apparently expendable character she plays, Sister George.

On the Archers in 1955, a beloved and central character, Grace Archer, met a sudden death on the show. It was widely believed that the producers had cooked up the storyline in order to keep listeners from checking out ITV, a new commercial network that was launching that same week and promised to be some serious competition for the publicly funded BBC.

Since Grace Archer was an original cast member on the show, her demise was hard felt, and became as iconic of serial-drama excess as when Rosalind Shays fell down an elevator shaft on L.A. Law or Pam dreamt an entire season of Dallas in which Bobby was dead.

Did the Archers learn its lesson? Well, this revival of The Killing of Sister George (as well as a production of the play in London in 2011) could be considered freshly timely, since The Archers used the occasion of its 60^th anniversary, on New Year’s Day 2011, to kill off a key character. Nigel Pargetter, husband of Helen Archer—fell off the roof of the country estate the couple managed, Lower Loxley Hall, and was proclaimed dead the next day. Nigel Pargetter had been a regular on the show for something like 27 years, over five times as long as Grace Archer had. As with the killing of Grace Archer, and the killing of Sister George in The Killing of Sister George, there were disgruntled cast members and fans to contend with after the fall of Nigel aired.

Just this week, the Archers had a quieter, gentler death. Robert Pullen, the oldest citizen of Ambridge (the small village in which the show is set) expired with such little fanfare that the actor playing him was not required to show up—and, in fact, hasn’t really been needed for several years. Mostly, he’s been talked about, a penny-pinching eccentric who’d assert himself in a squabble then retreat to isolation.

The Pullen character was now in his nineties. It speaks to the relative paucity of deaths on this soap opera that there are now numerous Ambridge residents in their seventies, eighties and nineties.

It is my personal opinion, as a longtime Archers fan, that the Kathleen Turner production of The Killing of Sister George didn’t begin to do justice to The Archers. Excerpts of the show Applehurst were heard, and they sounded rankly amateurish next to the professional care and reasoned storylines which go into The Archers. (The show is known for its lack of sensationalism. Though there are adulteries and robberies and family in-fightings, other recent multi-day storylines involved a young farmer straightening out his account books and an elderly man losing his dentures.) A deeper understanding of the show might have led to a more resonant production. I still wonder what the Long Wharf’s two main directors, Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein and Associate Artistic Director Eric Ting—both of them detail-oriented and dramaturgically intense—might have done with this material.

I’ll never know. But I’ll continue to enjoy The Archers—both the original (which airs six 15-minute episodes a week on BBC Radio 4) and its still newish spin-off Ambridge Extra (which appears in short bursts a couple of times a year, at the rate of two episodes a week for 13 weeks; it centers on supporting characters in the Ambridge universe, especially those in their teens and 20s).  Ambridge Extra had an episode this week that was simultaneously a monument to the power of radio drama and an over-the-top parody of it, in which a long drawn-out take-down of a criminal was dramatized almost wordlessly, punctuated mainly by the screams of his intended victims and the barking of a dog.

The dog, by the way, was nearly killed in a previous episode, but survived.

Holidays are a good time for catching up with folks you’ve lost touch with. I followed Mattie Brickman’s playwriting activites avidly when she was a graduate student at the Yale School of Drama, but lost track of her work after she graduated. She’d been part of a class of playwrights who were distinguished by their absurdist sense and dark-comic instincts. Her contribution to the Carlotta Festival of New Plays in 2009 was American Catnip, set in a roller rink, but her best work on campus might have been the short-form pieces she did at the Yale Cabaret.
Got an email from Ms. Brickman this week. She’s created a new web series, Ro, which now has two eight-minute episodes plus a 15-minute “behind-the-scenes” mini-doc (in which Brickman herself appears), posted on YouTube.
Brickman’s Yale work tended towards arch relationship comedies, and Ro is a tightly staged string of dialogues set at a speed-dating even, fertile ground for the playwright.
The series is produced by WIGS, which describes itself as “the #1 channel for scripted drama on YouTube,” delivering “high-end, original series, short films, and documentaries, all starring female leads.” Ro’s directed by Patricia Cardoso, and the cast includes such known actors as Melonie Diaz, Jonathan Tucker and William Mapother. It’s a mystery serial of sorts, concerning the self-protective and often ridiculous disguises we don in public, whether in order to present ourselves in a better light or to move on from a difficult past.
Nice to have Mattie Brickman back on my radar. I have fond memories of that YSD playwriting class of ’09: Brickman, Matt Moses and Gonzalo Ridriguez Risco. Ro really brought me back.

The pastor of United Church on the Green, the church my family has attended faithfully for the past seven years, has been known to sneak theater references into his sermons. One of the first times I heard him preach, he interpolated a few lines of a showtune. One memorable Sunday, he invited the cast of the national tour of Altar Boyz (while it was playing at the Long Wharf Theatre) to do a few songs for the UCotG congregation, while he pontificated on comedy in organized religion.
This past Sunday, Rev. Gage opened his sermon with an appreciation for the longrunning Off Broadway and nationally touring Greater Tuna series of multi-character comedies co-written and performed by Jaston Williams and Joe Sears. The minister refers to Greater Tuna’s quick-change Texas townfull of characters, portrayed by just those two actors, as “a miracle to behold.” But he has other miracles on his mind as well.
From an odd opening—a Greater Tuna Christmas joke at the expense of both censorship-minded fundamentalists and Catholics—the sermon quickly gets deep and wide-ranging. He discusses how some Protestant faiths back away from dealing with the virgin-birth aspects of the nativity, and with Mary in general. He evinces great respect for Mary’s practical response to the angel’s pronouncement of her becoming pregnant with the son of God: “How can this be?” He turns that question into one that corresponds to the shock, disbelief and confusion which met the horrible news of the Sandy Hook school tragedy just over a week ago.

He may have been referencing Greater Tuna, but Rev. Gage’s remarks were as profound, socially conscious and real-world relevant as, say, Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play or the angel scenes of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.

Rev. Gage wisely presented a variation on that same sermon (entitled “Saying Yes, Saying No”) tonight, on Christmas Eve, during the Meditation segment of the Lessons & Carols service, amid some glorious Ralph Vaughan Williams tunes featuring guest flautists and oboeists. The sermon deserved a larger audience. Often the Christmas sermon has gently chided all the once-or-twice-a-year church attendees for not coming more often. This one shows them what they’re missing.

Happy Christmas to all our readers. We got snow on Christmas Eve, a bit of divine scenic design. Now let us work on the peace, calm and community.

We did 15 of these in a year’s span, then took a few months off. Now that it’s school vacation, it’s time to bring back Play in a Day, my singular children’s theater project.

I began doing Play in a Day at the behest of my daughters Mabel and Sally, with the strong and constant encouragement of Neverending Books stalwarts Roger Uihlein, Shula Weinstein and their son Avi.

The intention was to have fun and actually produce plays and not do all the warm-ups and memorizing and production-quality stuff which can bog down the process.

Here’s how it works:

Kids show up. (It’s been any number from three to over 20, with eight or ten the average.)

I size them up and decide which great dramatic work from the annals of classic world theater we might be able to pull off in an afternoon. I explain the play to them, then we quickly brainstorm our way through it and assign the roles.

Less than three hours later, we have a five- or ten-minute approximation of the play. When the parents turn up to pick up their kids, they see the play. (Parents are also welcome to stay and help, but we don’t insist.)

We’ve staged variations on works by Aristophanes, Chekhov, Gogol, Calderon and many others. There’s a designated Play in a Day page on this site, featuring videos of most of our productions, here.

Above is a couple of minutes of rehearsal from the January presentation of Augustin Daly’s famous melodrama Under the Gaslight.

As you can tell, the point is to have fun above all else, and let the kids be kids.

Play in a Day

Thursday, Dec. 27 from 2 to 5:15 p.m.

at Neverending Books, 810 State St., New Haven.

Fee for the whole afternoon is $5 per child.

For details, contact Christopher Arnott at chris@scribblers.us