Steve Scarpa (left), Megan Chenot and J. Kevin Smith in the New Haven Theater Company production of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, directed by George Kulp.

Speed-the-Plow, David Mamet’s snappy episode of ruthlessness and immorality in a Hollywood producer’s office, opens tonight at UpCrown Studios on Crown Street. It’s a new venue for New Haven Theater Company, the nearly 20-year-old community troupe which was borne at the BAR nightclub and has had several distinct regimes. UpCrown, part of the LoRicco Tower empire on Crown between Temple and College, was christened as a theater space just last summer by Theater Four, with their commissioned work Salvage by George Brent.

Speed-the-Plow is one NHTC’s one-weekend-only indulgences, one of those labor-of-love affairs where company members get to rally around each other’s passion for certain scripts and authors. (Last year’s example would be Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio, site-specifically staged in the CT Ultra Radio studios on College Street.) This time the adoration is especially widely shared. One of the breakthrough shows for this current line-up of New Haven Theater Company was a production of Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, staged in a bank building on Church Street. Two of the performers from that show, Steve Scarpa and J. Kevin Smith, reunite for this one. A third veteran from GGR, George Kulp, is directing S-t-P. The only newcomer is Megan Chenot, who shone as the heroine of NHTC recent staging of Urinetown and now plays the attractive secretary who becomes a gamepiece in a bout of one-upmanship between two unscrupulous powermongers.

I spoke to Kulp about how the company came back to Mamet. Kulp, who’s done a lot of television acting and memorably played the King of Scotland as a gladhanding American politician in Eric Ting (& Shakespeare)’s Macbeth 1969 at Long Wharf last year, had never performed in a Mamet show  before Glengarry. Steve Scarpa, who’ll play Charlie Fox, knew the play, and also suggested Smith to play wheeler-dealer Bobby Gould.

“This is the same kind of razor-sharp dialogue” as Glengary Glen Ross, Kulp exults. It had to be a good fit for the collective-styled company. “When we get together as a company, we throw things about which are good for the company,” the director explains.

NHTC’s Glengarry Glen Ross was notable for bringing out a lighter side of the play which is often buried in its mordant, bitter, characterizations of end-of-the-line real estate salesmen. The production opened with an original motif—a silent montage of office pranks and hi-jinks, setting the scene and lightening what would swiftly become a pitch-black mood. Speed-the-Plow is more funny on the face of it, though perhaps no less dire or despicable. “It’s a black comedy,” Kulp says. “But we’re discovering a lot of humor. It’s written right into the dialogue.”

The new space took some adjustment, since NHTC had become accustomed to the empty storefront on Court Street where they’d staged Urinetown, Odets’ Waiting for Lefty and Steve Martin’s Picasso in the Lapin Agile. When Theater Four used the space for Salvage, they had to cover windows and chose to create a central stage area with bleachers on the sides. For Speed-the-Plow, New Haven Theater Company is going with a more conventional set-up, and are using the space largely as is. “The play doesn’t require a set,” Kulp says. “We wouldn’t want to do an elaborate set.” The movie-office ambience will be set by a soundtrack of movie-related music and posters of Hollywood classics.

Despite the disreputable characters and overt sexism and sarcasm of the play, George Kulp says the process of directing Speed-the-Plow for NHTC has been “just a pleasure.” The new location and the continuance of the company feel comprises “a step up for us,” he says. Godspeed.

Speed-the-Plow plays Nov. 14, 16 & 17 at 7 p.m. at 216 Crown Street, New Haven. Tickets available at  www.newhaventheatercompany.com

The Yale Cabaret was dark last weekend as scheduled, will present Joshua Conkel’s MilkMilkLemonade Nov. 8-10, again as scheduled. Then the schedule fails. The production of Ionesco’s The Chairs planned for the Nov. 15-17 slot has been cancelled, and back-up plans came to nought, so that will be another dark weekend at 217 Park Street.

Fortunately, the Cab will make up for the loss by adding an extra show to its yet-to-be-announced Spring season, maintaining the student-run theater’s accustomed quota of 18 main attractions per school year.

If you absolutely MUST see a production of the chairs this month, I recommend this concise, four-minute long, personalized animated adaptation by Joseph Ferreira: http://vimeo.com/3796647

and this full production by the Hai-Po theater of Israel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvYbBnuvBG4&feature=plcp

No two productions of any Ionesco play are ever remotely the same, so we’ll never be able to guess what the Yale Cabaret might have done with The Chairs. On the other hand, it’s nice to dream.

I did an interview with John Waters last week that’s running in the Nov. 8 issue of the New Haven Advocate, in advance of the esteemed director coming to New London with his one-man show This Filthy World. Waters’ appearance is a benefit for the local AIDS/HIV support organization Alliance for Living.

While I had him on the phone, I asked the esteem bad-taste aesthete if he had any memories to share about Mark O’Donnell, who wrote (with Thomas Meehan) the book for the Broadway musical Hairspray based on Waters’ 1988 film original. O’Donnell died suddenly this past August after collapsing in his New York apartment.

Waters remembers O’Donnell fondly. “He didn’t let things throw him” is one of his many friendly observations about the man.

I had gotten to know O’Donnell a little myself over the years. I first met him when he gave a reading at Yale one summer in the mid-‘90s, but I had first encountered his work some 20 years earlier when he wrote for the Harvard Lampoon. (I was a suburban high schooler at the time, and would but the Lampoon at the newsstands in Cambridge.) He later contributed to Spy Magazine and the New Yorker, and though he professed that none of the skits he wrote ever aired, he was a staff writer at Saturday Night Live at a most interesting time, when Michael O’Donoghue had returned to the fold and brought such esoteric talents as the legendary Terry Southern with him.

In 1997, O’Donnell concocted an original rhyming prologue for the Long Wharf Theatre’s production of Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. The prologue was commissioned  by the show’s director, Doug Hughes, and the production opened Hughes’ first season as the Long Wharf’s artistic director.

I remember a wonderful chat with O’Donnell, sitting next to him on opening night of Dan Hurlin’s The Shoulder at Long Wharf. I told him, somewhat nervously, that I’d introduced dozens of people to his Freudian-slip one-act “Marred Bliss” via a playreading gang I ran at Rudy’s bar, he was thrilled and had lots of questions about how my humble gang chose its scripts.

O’Donnell taught a seminar in humor writing for Yale undergraduates. We were both non-drivers, so would often run into each other on downtown New Haven sidewalks.

The first time I interviewed him “officially,” as theater columnist for the New Haven Advocate, it was when Hairspray’s first national tour came to the Oakdale Theater. I wasn’t sure how Hairspray had changed his life, and was pleased to find him as down-to-earth as ever, happy to be getting offers from those who appreciated him. Among those was the adaptation of another Waters film, Crybaby.

Mark O’Donnell’s air of level-headed levity was confirmed for me by John Waters’ brief and thoughtful remarks when I spoke to him last week.

“There were a lot of people whose lives were changed by Hairspray,” Waters told me. “They made money. They bought things. With Mark, there was no visible change. He still lived in a little apartment in the village. He was unchanged.”

O’Donnell, Waters continued, was “a great guy to work with.” Waters professes to have been as pleased with the adaptation of Crybaby as he was with Hairspray. “I loved Crybaby,” he says, and expresses disappointment that it didn’t do better. He feels that as “the sexiest family musical on Broadway,” it was a hard sell.

In case you were wondering, John Waters has no new theatrical projects in the works, though he does encounter live audiences regularly through his speaking tours and odd one-night events like the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s “Hairspray in Concert,” which he will narrate.

So, for the time being, John Waters’ Broadway voice is also the late Mark O’Donnell’s Broadway voice.

Happy Daylight Savings Time Day. I once went a whole day without realizing that the clocks had been set back, and turned up over an hour early for a show at the Shubert Theater. I wandered the empty lobby thinking “Wow, what a bomb. The theater is going to take a bath on this one.” I was knocked back into the proper time zone when an usher rushed past me, busily adjusting his black tie and jacket—like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland only early instead of late.

Here are a few plays concerning time, or the lack thereof:

1. J.B. Priestley’s “Time Plays.” The playwright been greatly affected by the book An Experiment with Time by J.W. Dunne, which popularized the concept of simultaneous time streams. The most overt, and best-known of the many Time Plays is An Inspector Calls, in which clues to a murder appear before the murder does. The other well-known one is Time and the Conways. Others include Dangerous Corner and I Have Been Here Before.
2. Dear Brutus by J.M. Barrie. He played with concepts of time in Peter Pan, where Wendy grows up but Peter does not, but in Dear Brutus J.M. Barrie uses an enchanted woodland area behind a manor house to rewind and reset the lives of nearly a dozen different people. There was an exquisite production of the play, directed by Gregory Boyd, at Westport Country Playhouse in 2005.
3. Time Stands Still by Donald Margulies. Time does not actually stand still in this relationship drama involving a photojournalist newly returned to Brooklyn after being injured on assignment in Iraq. I mention it because many of Donald Margulies play with the concept of time, and it often does stand still in a way so that a moment can be crystallized, analyzed and thought about deeply. His 9/11-themed one-act “Last Tuesday,” which had its premiere at the Long Wharf in 2003, had a particularly profound time-stopping moment when choirboys burst into song on a dreamlike Metro-North commuter ride.

4. I came across a video of an intriguing time-themed puppetry piece staged earlier this year by a new company, Collapsing Horse, at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin, Ireland. Monster/Clock: A Play on Time concerns “Toby, a castigated monster and apprentice watchmaker.”

5. It’s a Wonderful Life. All about the bank deadlines, and inescapable this time of year. For that matter, A Christmas Carol is all about turning back the clock, with Scrooge zipping into the past and future and even commenting on the efficiency of the spirits working their magic in a single night.

6. Rip Van Winkle. Joseph Jefferson’s adaptation of Washington Irving’s short story, in which Jefferson also starred, was one of the most successful theater productions of the 19th century, with Jefferson himself playing the character for tens of thousands of performances over a period of 40 years. His son took over the role in the 20th century, and recordings and films were made of both Jeffersons as Rip. (Joseph Jefferson, of course, is the guy for whom the prestigious Joseph Jefferson Awards for outstanding Chicago theater are named.) Here’s a two-minute bit of a scene in which the celebrated napper reunites with his family.

7. Time and Again. The 2001 musical version of the film version of the Jack Finney novel about being about a century late for a very important date.

8. Forever Plaid. The apotheosis of the one-final-concert type of show. The musical Buddy extends Buddy Holly’s Clear Lake concert, the night of his death, into a whole, but Forever Plaid does it one better by letting a deceased fictional group perform their final gig posthumously.

9. Molnar’s Liliom and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel. How important is it that time stands still in Heaven, or Purgatory for that matter? You can freeze in age at the time you are apparently most handsome and upstanding, when planning a visit to your now-teenaged daughter.

10. Theater done in real time. These were all the rage in the 1980s. I once saw a show at the experimental theater Mobius in Boston which was set in a kitchen. A cast member put a chicken in the oven, then left the room. As an audience, we had to decide whether to hang around and wait for the hours it would take for the chicken to be cooked, not knowing when exactly the dialogue portion of the play would resume.

In the previous post, I mentioned my father, Peter D. Arnott. As it happens, today is the 22^nd anniversary of his death, from stomach cancer in 1990. Had he lived, he would be turning 81 a few weeks from now on November 21^st.

My father was born in Ipswich, England, and in his teen years devised a portable marionette theater with which he singlehandedly performed such classic plays as Doctor Faustus, Scapin, Oedipus Rex and The Clouds. He continued to adapt great dramas for his marionette theater for the rest of his career, touring internationally.

He was the first person in his family to go to college. He attended Oxford University and got his PhD at the University of Wales, which is where he met my mother. Since my parents were looking to settle in the United States, my father joined the Classics department at the University of Iowa. There, he directed a production of Aristophanes’ The Frogs that was so impressive he was asked to move over to the Theater department. During this time (when I was aged three to seven), my father became a partner in the Ledges Playhouse, a summer stock theater in Grand Ledge Michigan. The acting ensemble there included William Hurt, Mary Beth Supinger (later Mary Beth Hurt), Dennis Lipscomb and a host of other performers who would later become stars.

In 1969 my father was offered a position at Tufts University, where he taught for the next three decades, serving as chairman of the Drama Department for seven of those years. He taught several classes each semester, directed at least one student production a year and oversaw the professional company which presented summer seasons at the Tufts Arena Theater. Students at Tufts during his time included Oliver Platt, Hank Azaria, Jonathan Hadary, the founders of the avant-garde Double Edge Theatre and a face familiar to present-day New Haven theatergoers, James Andreassi of Elm Shakespeare Company. I have run into literally dozens (perhaps even hundreds) of students of my father’s over the years who have maintained steady careers in the professional theater—a remarkable percentage for any undergraduate theater program.

My father toured internationally with his puppets and directed some dazzling productions with live actors, but left an even greater legacy as a writer. He penned influential books on puppetry (Plays Without People), ancient civilizations (Introduction to the Greek World, The Byzantines and Their World, etc. etc.), and the history of theater in Japan, France, Greece, Rome and elsewhere. He penned a novel about Moliere. He wrote the standard textbook The Theater in Its Time and  co-edited (with Otto Reinert) the respected anthologies Thirteen Plays and Twenty-Three Plays.

Oh, and he did about a billion other noteworthy things. He had a model railroad lay-out that filled the third floor of our house and is now ensconced in a museum in Wenham, Massachusetts. (When other universities, including Yale, tried to coax him away from Tufts, the sticking point was always that moving would mean having to dismantle the model railroad.) He was a fine photographer. He spoke seven languages. He loved to take our dogs on long walks. He would indulge my sisters and I in our countless hobbies, from stargazing and birdwatching to exploring cemeteries to sailing and horseback riding.

When I developed my own interests in theater, I deliberately chose criticism and arts journalism as my main endeavors so that I wouldn’t have to compete with my father on his own turf. I attended Tufts and audited countless theater courses and seminars but majored in English to give me some distance. As it was, there was one year where I directed a production of the Kaufman & Connelly comedy Beggar on Horseback and he directed Sartre’s No Exit. We both got into scandals over how we publicized our respective shows, and were jointly given a joke prize, the “Like Son, Like Father Award” by the student drama society. He was upset to be given second billing.

When people think of me as a harsh theater critic, my personal consolation is that my father was far harsher. He did not suffer fools, or bad theater, gladly. He saw no point in translations which were painstakingly accurate textwise at the expense of good jokes or strong dramatic effects, and was equally contemptuous of directors who piled needless concepts on perfectly workable scripts. I was the rebellious, American-born son in the thrall of post-modernism and the regional theater experimental revolutions of the late 20^th century. We would argue endlessly about the merits of Robert Wilson or Peter Sellars.

As distinct as my tastes became, and as independent as I could pretend to be in my writing and researching, my father nonetheless had an enormous impact on how I perceived culture in general. He accepted that there could be high artistry in all fields, and could be as enamored of a great Bugs Bunny cartoon as he was of Moliere or Oscar Wilde. He would tell me about favorite radio shows and music hall acts from his childhood—The serialized Quatermass Experiment or the comedians Nosmo King or Arthur Askey—and make them seem as important as the most renowned classical works. He made me a lifelong fan of The Marx Brothers, Apuleius, The Goon Show, Alfred Jarry, Gilbert & Sullivan, Wagner, Rod Serling, Christopher Marlowe, Leslie Charteris’ Saint mysteries and the medieval mystery plays.

I’ve maintained the open-mindedness he encouraged in me throughout my life, and now try to instill it in my own children. My father and I could spend a night in Boston at a Brecht play or a Monteverdi opera, then hurry home to catch Benny Hill or You Bet Your Life reruns on Channel 56. He didn’t share many of my diverse musical tastes, but understood the need for authenticity in shows he was directing, and would ask me to mix soundtracks of raucous ‘20s jazz for a production of Anouilh’s Ring Round the Moon and delved in Devo when he once considered staging Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine. He’d hear odd sounds emanating from my room and, months later ask “What was that awful music you were playing? I might be able to use that in…”

My father’s death hit me hard, coming at a time of uncertainty, depression and failure in my own life. It took me about a year of disoriented remorse and grieving before I was fully functional again. November was once the happiest of months for me—my father and I both had birthdays, and we had a long tradition of celebrating by going out to Boston seafood restaurants and then to an opera. His dying in November changed the month for me forevermore.

You might discern from the above that my respect for my father bordered on hero worship. It took decades of aging on my part for me to start appreciating him as a fellow human being. He died at the age of 59, and I am now in my early 50s, so my perspective of him has lately changed a great deal. People who’ve known both of us will comment on the physical resemblance between us, but other than that my father and I developed striking different personalities. He was loud and theatrical and outspoken and supremely self-confident; I am softspoken and was an extremely shy and awkward child. He was a great actor; I’m a lousy one. He had an extraordinary memory; I need to take a lot of notes. He had prejudices and political opinions which I find distasteful in the extreme, and probably vice versa. We both drank and smoked a lot, but I gave it up at a younger age than he did, and blame him for making those vices seem attractive at all. The main things we had in common: we both wrote fast, with little need for a second draft; and we didn’t mind living in squalor. We spent a couple of summers living together while my mother and sisters were elsewhere, and it was like a production of the Odd Couple with two Oscar Madisons. My father once used the oven to dry out some tiny clay seagulls he’d molded for his railroad, and forgot to turn the oven off for three days.

We could enrage each other, and sometimes could simply not comprehend each other, which was most maddening of all. But we always got along, and could always get out of a bad argument by clearing the air with a hideously bad joke. My father had the loudest laugh of any human being ever, and if you caught him offguard with a snappy comeback, it was like setting off fireworks. I once whispered something to him during a silent-film screening in a graduate seminar that had him howling until he wept—and the professor teaching the class couldn’t dare eject the chairman of the department from the room, which to me made it even funnier.

It was fitting this year to mark the anniversary of my father’s death by seeing an adaptation of Euripides by a student director. On my walk home, I could imagine the entire conversation we’d have ab0ut it if he’d gone with me. He’s still very much a presence in my life. When, a couple of months ago, I was interviewed for the Yale Cabaret production This., an oral history project largely about loss and grieving, one of the questions was about items of great significance to me. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a set of battered orange “worry beads” my father bought himself on one of his many trips to Greece. When he died, I inherited the beads—a cheap airport souvenir item which I have now kept close at hand for over two decades. When I take them out of my bedroom drawer every morning, I greet him with a chipper “Hi, Pete!”

We even continue to be occasional collaborators, me in the mortal realm and him in manuscript form. I am in possession of numerous translations he did for stage productions—three Euripideses, three Molieres, a Racine and more—which were never published. I’ve been editing and updating them for hopeful publication, working them over in the same way I used to as a teenager when he needed to infuse a script with contemporary slang, or needed a chapter in one of his theater history books to reflect theories of the generation after him.

I thus celebrate my father’s life daily—with keepsakes and through efforts like this blog, which he truly would have dug. I am finally deeply at peace with his untimely death. He was a man of enormous appetites, all of which impacted on his health, so while it was a shock and injustice to have him die at 59, it’s impossible to think of him making it into his 80s, as he would be now. He also was representative of a British post-war era grounded in The Goon Show, Beyond the Fringe, Richard Burton, Olivier/Gielgud/Richardson, James Bond novels and a diehard classical canon. Not sure how much he’d want to be teaching in this era.

So what I miss is the dog walks and the trips to model train exhibitions and all those November opera-and-dinner dates and constant debates about theater. Rest in peace.

Iphigenia Among the Stars

Through November 3 at the Iseman Theater, 1156 Chapel Street, New Haven. (203) 432-1234, http://drama.yale.edu/onstage/production/iphigenia-among-stars

Based on works by Euripides. Adapter and Production Dramaturg: Benjamin Fainstein. Conceived and directed by Jack Tamburri. Scenic Designer: Christopher Ash. Costume Designer: KJ Kim. Lighting Designer: Benjamin Ehrenreich. Composer and Sound Designer: Steven Brush. Projection Designer: Michael F. Bergmann. Performed by Sheria Irving (Iphigenia), Paul Pryce (Pylades, Agamemnon), Ceci Fernandez (Artemis, Clytemnestra), Mamoudou Athie (Orestes, Achilles), Winston Duke (Thoas, Menelaus), Chris Bannow (Herdsman, Old Slave) and Chorus members Marissa Neitling, Ashton Heyl and Carly Zien.

According to promotional postcard you can find in a stack on the counter of Alternate Universe, the comic book shop just down the street from where Iphigenia Among the Stars is playing at the Iseman Theater, the production is “inspired by the electrifying imagery of comic book legend Jack Kirby.”

I’m quite familiar with the works of both Euripides (my father was a classicist and theater scholar who translated and performed scads of Greek and Roman dramas) and Jack Kirby (especially his most myth-oriented series, the Fourth World and New Gods adventures he developed for DC Comics in the 1970s), and am not altogether surprised to find that these two great epic styles don’t jibe.

Euripides is all about humanizing gods and heroes by finding their tragic and vulnerable points. Kirby , conversely, is creating new gods for a world that doesn’t believe in them anymore, creating action-packed power struggles of galactic proportions. The myths are structured differently, and go in completely different directions psychologically.

There’s common ground to be explored—Kirby, with writer/editor Stan Lee, was a pioneer of the Marvel age of vulnerable superheroes with mundane everyday concerns, while Euripides found tragedy in conflicts where individuals and families are forced to make horrible choices in order to save their countries during out-of-control conflicts. But humanity is not the problem here. Superheroism is. The actors have clearly been instructed to pose imperiously, with angular arm-thrusts and grand head-cocking and other imposing gestures. But there’s no action in the piece. These survivors of wars and slaughtered siblings and global tumult stand around talking, in shiny outfits that seem like they’ve never been worn before, let alone been through long journeys or battles. There’s considerably less action in this production than you’d find in most other productions of Greek tragedies, whether ancient or modern. Granted, very little actual warfare is shown in Euripides’ war-themed plays, but the feeling of life during wartime should be constant, and it’s simply not evoked clearly here. The vague science-fiction, among-the-stars spaciness of the unanchored scenic design has something to do with that.

Director Jack Tamburri gets credit for not descending to campiness and superhero nonsense, but he doesn’t take advantage the physicality and colorfulness his chosen style affords him. The script, adapted by Benjamin Fainstein from Iphigenia Among the Taurians and Iphigenia at Aulis, uses a loping, multisyllabic, poetic style that futher hampers the exercise. Jack Kirby was an expressive artist, but he was also a fine comic-book writer who wrote with staccato percussion and crisp directness. (“I am ready for battle, Mother Box! Now find that invisible beam!”) Iphigenia Among the Stars needs more Kirby succinctness and less lines like “How will you live if you are ensconced in grief?” or “We are railing against an inescapable conclusion.”

Euripides’ Iphigenia plays are presented here as two parts of a whole, each taking half of the long three-hour evening. The events of Tauris comes first in this telling, and play lighter than the Aulis part mainly because it’s a less tragic story and the audience is still acclimating to the style. Both halves play inconsistently, with jokes jutting out from the text and upsetting the natural rhythms, or occasional over-the-top proclamations and lamentations from the actors. A large archway which doubles as a projection screen promises some visual excitement but disappoints, never becoming more than a distracting lava lamp of blurry light. Set and lighting designs clash with each other, as do acting styles. Things are either muted or bold, without an obvious rationale. Some otherwise strong performers are undercut by the confusion. Casting some of the players in more than one leading role doesn’t help: Mamoudou Athie plays Orestes in the Tauris half and Achilles in the Aulis part, an overdose of heroic chutzpah, while Ceci Fernandez must essay both Artemis and Clytemnestra. Athie and Fernandez are in fact among the most assured performers, but they’re stranded much of the time against co-stars who seem to exist in a different universe. A three-woman Greek chorus (Marissa Neitling, Ashton Heyl and Carly Zien) sings and emotes in an inconsistent member which lurches from sweet and clear and choral to anxious and excitable and ambulatory.

Iphigenia Among the Stars lacks the courage of its comic-book convictions and strangely distrusts the most surefire Greek theatrical conventions. For a production based on grand graphic statements of superheroic purpose, it lacks pomp and ceremony. What could have been a provocative musing on how we view and wield power is instead merely a talkative Halloween costume party.

Ten more theater-themed comics for your reading delight.

As ever, I am indebted to my favorite websites, gocomics.com and dailyink.com for the extraordinary variety of comic strips they provide. You should be a member of each. (They run lots of comics about other stuff too.)

Cowboy Mouth

Through October 27 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park Street, New Haven. (203) 432-1566, www.yalecabaret.org

Director: Jackson Moran. Producer and Dramaturg: Tanya Dean. Set Designer: Meredith Ries. Costume Designer: Jayoung Yoon. Lighting Designer: Masha Tsimring. Sound Designer: Palmer. Stage Manager: Shannon L. Gaughf. Original Music: Mickey Theis. Performed by Michelle McGregor and Mickey Theis.

I’ve lived my whole life in college towns, so naturally I’ve seen more Cowboy Mouths than a Montana dentist. The play first crucified its rock & roll Jesus Off Broadway, in a heralded production co-starring its co-authors Patti Smith and Sam Shepard. Since then, however, the bedroom-bound raw romance has been a rite of passage for a certain type of student actor, the kind who embraces live loud rock–based realism because they can’t find that urgency in their theater history studies. (Usually it’s because they haven’t gotten to Artaud in the textbooks yet.)

It’s also not surprising that Cowboy Mouth has become the name of a popular rock band from New Orleans. (For the New Haven Theater Jerk list of “Bands Which Share Names With Sam Shepard Plays, go here.)

Cowboy Mouth is fast and loose and musical and hallucinogenic, but it is definitely a play, one that falls, structure- and style-wise, in between Harold Pinter’s intense one-act The Lover and Michael McClure’s outlaw/celebrity showdown The Beard. But it’s a play that only works if it has a lived-in quality that exists between its scripted lines. You have to fully believe, for instance, that the lead male character Slim expresses his inner feelings most deeply through his guitar playing (whether he plays the instrument well or not). Likewise, you have to believe that the female lead Cavale has absorbed the works of Baudelaire.

Above all, the highly physicalized passions of the piece can’t be faked. The actors have to fuck rather than writhe and smack each other rather than do an angry dance. Audiences need to be turned into voyeurs, lulled into the manic dialogue so that when the drama lurches from crappy apartment into dramatic absurdism, the shift is both natural and shocking.

This production (directed by Jackson Moran, so surehandedly that the shows seems not so much staged as set loose) is a deft mix of professionalism and devil-may-care. Meredith Ries’ set, an unkempt apartment, is kept at floor level, the better to capture the animalistic movements of the actors. Single-named sound designer Palmer offers atmospheric street-noise effects which flow in and out of the action. Masha Tsimring’s lighting designer stays away from stark or dark, and finds the shadows in the fast-moving action.

The designs ground, but can thankfully not contain or restrain, the show’s central performers. Michelle McGregor nails the pseudo-intellectualized lust of Cavale, idealizing her downtrodden existence and musing about her options in life. Mickey Theis strums his electric guitar and bashes his drum kit with rough glory, in a manner neither too punky nor too refined. He’s also written fresh music (as most productions of Cowboy Mouth do) to Smith & Shepard’s lyrics, a score that miraculously matches the stylistic matches the playwrights themselves exhibited in their respective bands (Smith as the vocalist for the Patti Smith Group, Shepard as a drummer with the Holy Modal Rounders). When Theis and McGregor duet late in the show, the tune is given a poppy Mickey & Sylvia ‘60s feel that evokes what the Patti Smith Group did with garage standards such as “Gloria” and “Land of a Thousand Dances.”

Best of all, the actors pound and stroke and lick and scrape and point and scream at each other without reservation, without pause, without distance. They just go at it, as they should.

So many Cowboy Mouths are vanity productions, ways for sullen 20somethings to scream at their parents about how they’re living in desperation and liking it. It’s amazing to find one that actually gets down and dirty while understanding the text, which grasps the spiritual and psychological aspects of this corrosive exercise in codependence.

Another treat for Cowboy Mouth connoisseurs: the Yale Cabaret’s version  takes a new slant on a certain crustacean incursion that finishes the play. As with so many elements in this fine, frenzied production, the choice is both respectful and surprising. This Cowboy Mouth knows what it’s talking about.

Last week I attended the grand reopening of Fellowship Place, “A Supportive Community Fostering Mental Health” which has its headquarters just down the street from my house in New Haven’s Dwight/Edgewood neighborhoods. I known some of the Fellowship clients and staff for as long as 25 years. On top of the fine work Fellowship Place has done by giving those with mental health issues a place to congregate, socialize and improve their job prospects, the institution has also fostered many artists. Several painters in particular have gone on to critical acclaim and prestigious gallery exhibitions.

Maurice Hansen, who died in 2000 at the age of 59, was one of Fellowship Place’s exceptional talents. He was perhaps most famous at Fellowship for a mural painted on dozens of ceiling tiles which spanned an entire room of the facility.

I was heartened, when attending a reception there last week, to see that a Shakespeare-themed mural which Maurice Hansen painted years ago has been given a place of pride in a Fellowship Place conference room. I snapped several photos of it; I was more clever, I could join them up for you, but I’ll show it here in installments instead.

Last year, Yale University exhibited dozens of paintings with Shakespeare themes, throughout several gallery spaces, as part of the schoolwide Shakespeare at Yale celebration. Here’s a painting that has delighted countless people in the city for many years. I’m so happy that it’s appreciated and has been so carefully kept up.

The lovely renovated Fellowship Place facility, by the way, sponsors a new theater program. It also has a great new art studio space.

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit

Through Oct. 20 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park Street, New Haven. (203) 432-1566, www.yalecabaret.org.

Produced by Nicole Bromley and Tanya Dean. Consulting Director: Katherine McGerr. Set Designer: Carmen M. Martinez. Stage Manager: Geoff Boronda. Performed by Sara Holdren (Oct. 18, 8 p.m.), Brian MacInnis Smallwood (Oct. 18, 11 p.m.), Monique Bernadette Barbee (Oct. 19, 8 p.m.), John-Michael Marrs (Oct. 19, 11 p.m.), Hugh Farrell (Oct. 20, 8 p.m.), Gabriel Levey (Oct. 20, 11 p.m.)

This season, the Cabaret has already done several shows dealing with themes of the unknown, sudden loss and likely consequences of doing certain things in certain groups or culture. Shows with unusual structures and unpredictable outcomes.

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit is another one of those. But, to maintain the necessary mystery, I am obliged not to tell you anything about it. I agree with the Yale Cabaret overseers that there is nothing to be gained by spoiling the show for those who have yet to see it at it two remaining performing tonight.

I can wholeheartedly recommend that you go see it if there are tickets remaining.

There is nothing stopping you from Googling the title and playwright and learning a great deal about the show. There’s a detailed article ab0ut what it’s like to perform the piece here.  But where’s the fun in that?

I will let you know my own thoughts on White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, as well as some notes I sent on the playwright, later in the week, after this run has closed.