New Haven Theater Company Flips The Script

Marty Tucker, Jenny Schuck, Steve Scarpa, and J Kevin Smith at EBM Vintage Sunday evening. While White Rabbit Red Rabbit does not have rehearsals, actors are flexing their cold reading muscles with works from NHTC's Listen Here series. Lucy Gellman Photo.

Lights up. On stage, an actor accepts an envelope. They take a breath, and begin to open its contents. It’s a script, the pages bright white and new in their hands. They look over the first line, and start to read. In the audience, it’s quiet enough to hear a pin drop.   

They haven’t rehearsed. In fact, they haven’t even seen the script. There’s no director for them to have worked with. And other than the name of the playwright, they are going in completely blind.

It is routine—and, in fact, expected—in Nassim Soleimanpour’s absurdist White Rabbit Red Rabbit, running at New Haven Theater Company (NHTC) May 11, 12, 13, 18, 19, and 20 in downtown New Haven. Twelve years after the show first premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the performance will showcase both new and returning members of the company for the final performance of their season. 

It has no director, no rehearsals, and a different actor every night. None of the actors have seen or heard the script, or read about the show. All performances take place in the back room of EBM Vintage at 839 Chapel St. Tickets and more information are available here. 

“It’s given us the chance to have everyone who is a new company member and wanted to be on stage this year be on stage this year,” said NHTC President J Kevin Smith Sunday evening, in an interview at EBM. “It's a very different kind of theatrical experience—not only for the audience, but also for the actors.” 

As it comes to the stage this week, it is a case study in both trust building (at NHTC, every show is decided by unanimous company consensus) and the company’s roots in improv and experimentation. Years ago, founding NHTC member Steve Scarpa first heard about White Rabbit Red Rabbit when it premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe. At the time, Scarpa was still working at Long Wharf Theatre, and some of the actors passing through the space had been in productions of the play. 

He was curious about the show, he said in an interview at EBM Sunday. But because Soleimanpour’s work relies on actors going in blind, he never read the script. Meanwhile, life happened: he directed and acted in plays at the theater company, changed jobs, and stepped back temporarily from NHTC when his daughter was born four years ago.

Then last year, as NHTC started to build out its 2022-2023 season, he started talking about it with Smith and fellow company member Drew Gray. The two, who sit on the production end of things, read the script. Then they read it again. By the time they brought it to the company, they knew that it could be a good fit. It turned out they were on to something: “There was a lot of energy around it,” Smith recalled. 

In part, it caught on because it was unlike anything that the company—which has not shied away from hard-hitting, macabre, complicated or avant-garde shows—had ever done before. It also gave many new and returning members the chance to be on stage. In the past year, NHTC has taken on eight new company members, bringing its overall number from under a dozen to roughly 20. 

Each performance of the show features a different actor, meaning that six actors have a chance to play a single character before the end of the run. In order of performance, they include Marty Tucker, Jenny Schuck, Steve Scarpa, Deena Nicol-Blifford, Trevor Williams, and George Kulp. 

What does that mean for the actors involved? Tucker, who last joined NHTC for a performance of Marjorie Prime in 2019, said he’s excited to get back to the stage. In an interview Sunday, he credited his background in improv, which has given him the skills to go in cold, say yes to a given task (in this case, reading a whole script that he has never seen before) and jump in with both feet. Tucker will open the run on Thursday, May 11. 

“I’ve been on that trapeze before, where you’re just there, you don’t have anything to have rehearsed,” he said. “So it’s taken the fear away and just left me with the excitement. I can’t wait to do it.”  

Both Scarpa and Jenny Schuck, the latter of whom is returning after years away, agreed that they are grateful for the chance to flex their acting muscles, get back to the company, and try something totally new in the process. Earlier this year, Schuck directed a staged reading of Going to a Place Where You Already Are as the first production of the 2022-2023 season. This work allows her to step out from the director’s chair, and back onto the stage. 

“It’s like taking the script and putting it into your body, and putting a character on that’s being given to you on paper,” she said. “It’s a very playful experience. I really like it. It brings me back to the play aspect of acting.” 

“It feels great to come back,” she added. “This is like coming home.” 

With the performances, the company also enters a layered dialogue around censorship, risk, and the reach of the written word. After objecting to military service—conscription is mandatory in Iran—Soleimanpour was denied a passport, meaning that he cannot leave the country. While he lives in Tehran, the play has since been translated into over two dozen languages and effectively traveled the world in his place. 

Its impact is far ranging, from nearby New York City to the West Coast of the U.S. to Latin America to Pakistan. On March 13 2021—the first anniversary of the Covid-19 shutdowns that brought theaters to a halt—performers from across the globe mounted over 100 productions of the play. With a New Haven run that stretches over two weekends, NHTC now becomes part of that thick dramatic webbing that is Soleimanpour’s global journey. 

This year especially, that impact feels timely. In January, Douglas Anderson School of the Arts in Florida canceled a high school production of Paula Vogel’s 2015 Indecent, itself a work about historical censorship that features a lesbian relationship and onstage kiss. Then in February, Ohio’s Cardinal High School canceled a performance of the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee after parents complained about a song that references an erection. The district’s Board of Education later reversed the decision after outcry from the original Broadway cast of the show. 

Across the country, meanwhile, schools and libraries have seen bans on literature from Jerry Craft’s New Kid to Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer to books, articles, and podcasts under the 1619 Project umbrella. Connecticut hasn’t been immune: the past year has included a growing number of proposed book bans in the state, as well as new calls from “Parents’ Rights” groups to control public school curricula. 

In the midst of that, Schuck said, this piece of theater can be a conversation starter.

“They [NHTC members] do different things like this, experimental pieces, pieces that might talk about or be written by a playwright who has been censored,” Schuck said. “Things that aren't easily gonna sell tickets, but that are kind of jumping points for people to discuss and think about things in our society."

In the absence of rehearsals, actors have picked up old texts from the company’s long-dormant Listen Here series, which performed stories at cafes, bookstores, and several times at the Institute Library downtown. Tucker said that it allows them to exercise the same muscle that they will have to use when they get onstage with White Rabbit Red Rabbit.

 “The difference between that and what I presume this is gonna be—because again, I don’t really know—is that [Listen Here] is literally a reading, and so you’re using only your voice to conduct the action,” he said. “And here, you’re hopefully going to be using your body to also tell the story. So I’m sort of excited by that.” 

“When I haven’t been in this back room for a while, I come back in, and I’m like, ‘This is great,’” Scarpa chimed in. “The room is great, the vibe is great, the people are great. And it’s artistically fulfilling. And it has been for a very long time. Because it continues to be that, lots of us find our way back.” 

White Rabbit Red Rabbit runs at EBM Vintage at 839 Chapel St. on May 11, 12 and 13 and 18, 19 and 20. Performers (in order) include Marty Tucker, Jenny Schuck, Steve Scarpa, Deena Nicol-Blifford, Trevor Williams, and George Kulp. Tickets and more information are available here.