Culture & Community | Arts & Culture | Theater | Yale Summer Cabaret
Andrew Rincón, Emily Breeze and Matthew Chong. Lucy Gellman Photo.
A fevered effort to save a Southern dive bar, stitched with laughter from its first lines to its potty-mouthed protagonists. An absurdist look into unemployment in South Africa, with enough red tape and crumbling social infrastructure to leave Eugène Ionesco feeling tickled. A duo of one-acts set in the apocalypse—or something like it—that turns heartbreak into the literal end of the world. A festival that has playwrights racing against the clock, with works so freshly baked they may still feel warm to the touch.
All of those are par for the course at the Yale Summer Cabaret, back for its 51st season with a focus on new work, expansive co-creation and budding community partnerships. Titled “Petri Dish,” it is co-artistic directed by Emily Breeze, Matthew Chong, and Andrew Rincón, all graduate students in the playwriting program at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. All three are going into their third and final year at the school.
It marks the first time in several years that playwrights have helmed the summer season. Plays run July 10 through August 17, with work by Ida Cuttler and Georgia Petersen, Rethabile Headbush, Andrew Rincón, and Max Sheldon. Six playwriting teams for a 24-hour festival, which will double as the culmination of the season, have yet to be announced.
Tickets and more information are available here. The Yale Summer Cabaret is located at 217 Park St. in downtown New Haven.
“It’s been really joyous to give people this dingy basement in a weird experimental way,” Rincón said. “I really love this term we came up with—I think Emily did—of ‘Be strange, not a stranger.’ I feel like that really captures our aesthetics of being weird and [making] new work and not caring about the product, but just caring about the process.”
The summer season has been months in the making. Last year, Breeze, Chong and Rincón all participated in Yale’s annual Langston Hughes Festival of New Work, a tradition among second-year graduate students to present new plays with pared-down, fairly minimal technical direction or design elements. That stripped-away feel is “so that you can just see the play,” Breeze said.
All three were excited by the work that came out of the festival, so much so that they talked about it long after it had ended. There simply aren’t that many places to workshop and present new work, Breeze explained—particularly for artists new to the discipline. “Petri Dish” grew out of those conversations.
They also loved that the Summer Cab, unlike the Yale Cabaret during the academic year, brought in a much more diverse and multigenerational audience, from high school students to adult, non-Yalie New Haveners looking for a night out. Chong, whose play The Aughts went up at the Summer Cabaret last year, called it one of the best experiences in his career at Yale.
As they built a season, the trio—with a creative team of dramatic multi-hyphenates—sought to create the same sort of busy, bright Petri Dish, covered in ideas, after which they had named the season. In June, they announced an “incubator month,” dedicated to new work from members of the greater New Haven community.
They were delighted, Breeze said, when Rev. Ellison Scott reached out to take them up on that offer. Scott, the pastor at First Presbyterian Church in New Haven, is working on a show about James Barry, a British Military Surgeon who lived as a trans man—and under his late brother’s surname—for decades without being outed.
The Petri Dish team was able to offer Scott a series of workshops with students from the School of Drama, after which their play was in a fundamentally different place.
That’s part of the goal, Breeze added: to share some of the resources that Yale has, and doesn’t always share with the community. All summer, the Summer Cab plans to work with Sanctuary Kitchen at CitySeed as its food vendor, with an eye toward the immigrant and refugee chefs, all of them women, that power the nonprofit. This year, the team has also done away with student ticket prices, making tickets $10 for all attendees.
As in some years past, each show also features a community partnership, meant to break down some of the walls between town and gown. This week, the team is working with Best Video Film and Cultural Center (BVFCC) on Save The Cave, which comes from Cuttler and Petersen. On The Interview, the second show of the season, the Summer Cab will work with the New Haven Free Public Library to share some of the job resources that are core to the library’s work. For its third show, it intends to have a partnership with a not-yet-announced bookstore.
This week, the season hits the ground running with Save The Cave, written and performed by School of Drama duo Cuttler and Petersen. Set in the American South, it follows a former showgirl’s quest to save a dive bar from financial ruin and environmental catastrophe, and the choices that she must make when a rich benefactor—who is also running from the cops, because this is theater—steps forward to keep it afloat.
If it sounds topical, it is: it’s no longer unthinkable that a tornado, or flash flooding, or failing infrastructure, or a global pandemic, or razor-thin fiscal margins could shutter a bar, because that’s the story of so many small businesses across the country. But it’s meant to be funny, Breeze said—a “goldilocks play that wasn’t too done, and yet not too underbaked.”
And indeed, it doesn’t ever take itself too seriously: the main characters are named Pissy Hardling and Dame Eleanor Poop. It may still strike a chord in New Haven, where Richter’s Tavern and the old Anchor Bar are worth grieving on those nights when a sticky floor and burnt popcorn will do.
During and after performances, BVFCC plans to share not only information about the Cab’s summer season (and vice versa), but also to put together a list of relevant films. Rai Bruton, executive director at the nonprofit, said she was thrilled when Breeze initially reached out earlier this summer.
“It just means a lot to me that people are keeping Best Video in mind,” Bruton said in a phone call Monday. “Even though we’re small and not a lot of people know about us, the people that do know about us are trying to get our name out there. That means everything.”
That momentum continues in The Interview, an absurdist take on gainful employment—or lack thereof—in 2020s South Africa. Written by Headbush and co-devised by Thando Mangcu, the play tears away the rosy glow of post-Apartheid appearances to reveal a still-racist, hierarchical, discriminatory underbelly underneath. Both creators hail from South Africa, and both drew on personal experiences as they were doing research and writing the show.
Because the play revolves around the slippery, sometimes fickle nature of employment, the NHFPL—where people can and do go for dozens of job-seeking resources—felt like a logical partner for the group. As the show goes up later this month, the library plans to share a reading list based on topics in the play, as well as a professional resource guide. Those resources will be available at all five branches of the NHFPL.
When a community partner steps forward, “it’s always a good thing,” said Rory Martorana, public services administrator for the NHFPL. “I get especially excited when theaters or other creative organizations reach out to us,” because New Haven is such a cultural hub in the state.
The summer season continues with It’s not you, it’s the end of the world: A Night in Two One Acts, with work from playwrights Rincón and Max Sheldon. Using humor as a balm, Sheldon takes narrative scaffolding of a breakup—which can often feel like the end of the world—and turns it into the inciting event for the apocalypse, or the actual end of the world.
Rincón, meanwhile—who also holds fast to the value of a good laugh, or many—makes the idea of the apocalypse both bookish and surreal, with a queer character who speaks only in literary and celebrity quotes and another who is here for his friend, watching the sun explode.
“They’re such good companion pieces,” Chong said, noting that he delighted in seeing Sheldon jump into the process, nerves and all, and totally master his first script. “Just having these two plays back to back, there’s something very exciting to me about that. Audiences are gonna walk in and not know what to expect in a great way.”
The season concludes August 17 with a 24-hour playwriting festival, the creative minds behind which have yet to be announced. In its current iteration, the festival will consist of six playwriting teams who have a day to write, rehearse, direct and stage a work.
“That’s something that’s really beautiful about all of our shows,” Rincón added. “Most ofthem, all of them, had either no script, very small [script], like a few pages or just an idea. And we’re seeing them now grow into the fully fleshed things that we’re gonna put up. And that’s been really impressive and beautiful to help them do that hard work.”
He, with Breeze and Chong, added that the season gives playwrights an increasingly rare permission to fail if they want to try something new or different or risky. During the year, “we really can’t fail,” Chong said—there’s the sense that there’s too much resting on playwriting students, particularly in cross-departmental events like the Carlotta Festival.
Meanwhile, the number of places that help develop new work—The Lark, the Sundance Theatre Program, SPACE on Ryder Farm and others—are starting to disappear.
“There just aren’t as many opportunities for playwrights to develop new work,” Chong said. “So even allowing a space that does that, to me, feels important and like we’re —”
“Getting something on its feet,” Rincón jumped in.
“I just personally feel like a lot of the worst theater is made out of a fear of making bad art,” Breeze added. “And so it’s developed to the point where nobody can be upset by it. Which to me is a flattening of culture … I would love to see more joy in trying things that could go wrong.”
The Yale Summer Cab kicks off a season of performances this Thursday, July 10, with Save The Cave. Plays run July 10 through August 17; tickets and more information available here.