Arts & Culture | Theater | Yale Summer Cabaret | Playwriting
Ida Cuttler and Georgia Petersen in Save The Cave! Richard Lee Photos.
A woman in a green silk robe sits at a rickety bar, speaking in a thick Southern drawl. She is in the middle of an argument with a very different woman—high heels, British accent, eye patch—when she lets out a confession.
“I don’t know how to deal with being both hot and smart!” she cries. The crowd erupts into laughter.
That scene played out in Ida Cuttler and Georgia Petersen’s original play, Save the Cave!, which ran for four performances last weekend as part of the Yale Summer Cabaret’s 51st season, “Petri Dish.” The play follows Pissy Hardling, a former Vegas showgirl, facing down the closure of her bar, The Cave. When Dame Eleanor Poop seeks refuge from the British authorities at the Cave, the two join forces to overcome their respective threats.
Cuttler and Peterson played Hardling and Poop. Jokes ensued, as did a nervous breakdown, two dance numbers, and one original song. Throughout, they blatantly toyed with the tradition of the scrappy-underdog story, allowing Pissy and Dame Poop to be both heroic and incompetent or ethically dubious.
Save the Cave! was born from a list of “bad ideas” on Petersen’s phone that contained the names of the two characters. The script evolved from there, expanding to become its fullest, maximalist self.
“Our references and inspirations were a mix of things ... Showgirls, Peewee Herman, the story of the Regicides in Judges Cave,” said Cuttler in a joint interview with Petersen. “But mostly just one another and making each other laugh.”
The diverse range of inspiration and playful spirit of the authors was clearly evident in the production. The show contained at least one reference to The Crucible, but also its fair share of absurd humor—including a recurring bit involving spray bottles—giving viewers plenty of avenues through which to connect to the material. As conflict and jokes piled up, the audience got swept up in the experience of the performance.
“To have a story that’s irreverent, that doesn’t land on a message but is instead about the performance itself and what it’s like to watch it,” said Petersen. “That’s what we hope people take away.”
Ida Cuttler and Georgia Petersen in Save The Cave! Richard Lee Photos.
In their program note titled “The Power of Now?” production dramaturg Cristal Connors laid out the contours of “the liberatory potential” of new work in a “call for presence ,” “an expansion of presence which becomes more spatial than temporal.”
The sense of an immersive present permeated the whole production. As soon as audience members walked in, they were greeted with an immersive bar design. Chalk on the walls of the cabaret space announced the bar’s specials. Cuttler spent the pre-show working the functioning bar. Much of the action took place in a space in the middle of the audience, which doubled as a catwalk.
“Now” it turns out, could also have described the process of putting together the play. The Cabaret is an entirely student-run organization led by graduate students at Yale’s David Geffen School of Drama. The theater hosts small-scale, often new, productions that are accompanied by an optional pre-show dinner. The season is titled “Petri Dish,” appropriate for its commitment to experimentation.
For Save the Cave!, this meant that Cuttler and Petersen did not finalize the script until a week before performances started. In the weeks leading up to opening, they would each tackle a scene per week from an outline they wrote with the guidance of their director, Emily Breeze. Even then, the script kept evolving with the team’s experimentation.
The final performance was rooted in this flexibility. Cuttler, for example, had to learn her dance sequence via video after a stage manager had to go away to San Francisco. A tight budget meant that the team settled on what Petersen calls an aesthetic of being “as cheap or trashy as possible.”
Set designer Richard Lee and costume designer Sveta Morozova then conjured up a world of plastic dummies, eye patches, and belt-on horses that stayed true to both Cuttler and Petersen’s script and the confines of the Summer Cabaret space and timeline.
Through a sense of improvisation and play, the team of Save the Cave! arrived at a production that delivered the irreverence Cuttler and Petersen set out to achieve. Their collaboration, with each other, as well as with the other artists on the team, created a space for audiences to share their creation of a vivid present moment.
Save the Cave! allowed for all that exploration, and an evening of laughter too.