Yale Cabaret
Artistic Director, 35th Season (2002-2003)
From: ysd.cabaret@yale.edu
Subject: moooooon bitch at the Cabaret
Date: October 23, 2002 10:31:32 PM EDT
Friends, Willy Lomans, Month-in-the-Countrymen,
Hughes here with a special announcement. This weekend's show is a world premiere by a Yale School of Drama playwright, the incomparable Marcus Gardley. It's called moon bitch and it's inspired by the poetry of Yeats, and traces of Beckett have been found in the connective tissue. Please come and continue to support your theatrical home away from home. Kara-Lynn Vaeni directs and some fantastic talent fills out the acting and design elements. Stop at nothing to be here, loved ones.
And speaking of being here, our Thursday nights have been fabulous extravaganzas of glee. This week, we must continue to bring the gate down at our fire code capacity limit, so please arrive early (doors open at 10 pm) Don't forget, you can come to any one of our shows Thursday, Friday or Saturday. Just make a reservation, your membership works anytime.
Stage managers, if you are running shows that go to 11 and have people who want to come to the late Cabaret on Thursday, please send in a head-count of people interested under your show's name and we will hold that many spaces until exactly 11:10 pm, after which we'll release them to a waiting list. This only applies to shows in tech or performance.
Thanks a million!
Brendan
From: ysd.cabaret@yale.edu
Subject: This week at the Cabaret
Date: November 12, 2002 5:30:08 PM EST
Greetings friends and fiends of the Cabaret. I write you with the exciting news that the dramaturgs are running the asylum this week. Opening Thursday: The Pins and Needles Project- a modern look at the funniest pro-union musical ever to hit Broadway. Deep in the current labor disputes at Yale, our intrepid dramaturgs have not other option but to burst into song about it and will do so Thursday night. Quoth the New Haven Advocate about our current season, "Not since Mac Wellman's 7 Blowjobs has the Yale Cabaret brought current events so courageously, and so comically, into their underground space...The cabaret is typically cutting edge, but somehow this year it looks sharper..." Come be part of the revolution. Only at the Cabaret.
From: ysd.cabaret@yale.edu
Subject: Proposals for the Spring Cabaret Season
Date: November 12, 2002 5:42:41 PM EST
It's that time. Now that you've seen what the Cabaret is capable of, it's time to take it into the stratosphere of daring. By the end of the week, proposal forms will be in your boxes (they will look very similar to this semesters forms, so you can start preparing now). Think, dream, daaaaaare yourselves. There are 11 slots available for the spring season. The deadline will be Tuesday, December 3. Find your collaborators. Muse upon the possibilities and propose. PROPOSE! Why sip from the Thursday late night cup when you can DRINK from the sleep deprived river?
And those of you interested in directing who can't put your finger on the right project, the Cabaret often receives scripts from playwrights interested in having their work performed here. If you would like to peruse some of these potential projects please let me know. Also, a benefactor of the Cabaret is interested in sponsoring any show that uses the internet in an interactive way, so if that fits into your proposal, there's some loot that may help you achieve your vision. Thanks!!!
Brendan
From: ysd.cabaret@yale.edu
Subject: Ye Potential Proposers
Date: November 19, 2002 5:29:33 PM EST
Dirty dirties. Hughes here with some miscellany surrounding the proposal process for next semester. I'm thrilled to welcome the first year actors into the acting fold for next semester! You can now become part of what Roberto calls the Cabaret's "unbroken chain". I have three things to shout about.
Thing 1-Dare yourselves
Thing 2-Proposal Mixer mixed dangerously with this Thursday's late show
Thing 3-our preference for how you give us the scripts in your proposals, and a hint about what we're looking for in the language of your proposals
Thing 1-Dare yourselves!!!
As the inimitable Alice Moore discussed in our all school meeting on the first full day of school, there are AT LEAST seven types of shows that have happened in the space in the past and I encourage you to take inspiration from this list or ADD to it, discovering a new form of theatre never invented--(like labor meeting verite meets agit-prop musical comedy, as we saw with this last weeks very successful Pins and Needles Project).
You can...
• Find a great script, cast it, staff it, and put on the sucker
• Form a collaborative project to address a pressing social issue like last year's September 12th Project
• You can write or adapt something yourself and produce its world premiere in the Cabaret (moon bitch by Marcus Gardley)
• You can collide elements of pop culture (Cabarets past have included Nirvanov, a Chekhovian eulogy to Kurt Cobain; Oedipussy, in which James Bond kills his father and marries his mother (007 was played by a woman in that show, to further spice up the collision); there once was a Cabaret which imagined the Maria from the Sound of Music being the same Maria from West Side Story, in which there was a knife fight between the Sharks and the Nuns; there was one Cabaret called I'm Not Meryl Streep, I'm not sure what happened here that night, but I think it was by the same playwriting student who wrote Oedipussy; there was Big Trouble in Little Hazzard two years ago, which seems to have been an episode of the Dukes of Hazzard, Casey Reitz played Cooter -you can ask him all about it). I've thought of some others to kick off the grey matter for you--how about: The Buena Witch Social Project?, or Liz Estrada--Greek comedy meets CHiPs? Run Lolita Run? Come up with your own!
• Share your cultural perspective of theatre: last year Izumi produced an experimental Greek/Noh evening called Medusa.
• Push the Art form, like Pins and Needles, last year's Sour Thunder, 24 Hour theatre (which you'll see on December 5-7), and the Cabaret Challenge game show. Back in 1992, Liz Diamond directed a Dada Cabaret which included a maelstrom of letters between Stan, the former dean, and the Producers of the show--a battle waged over the fire aisle that blew up to accusation of censorship levels, wherein the ACLU was a threat on the producers lips and finally ended in a letter >from the Stan to the school describing having lobotomized the Producers with his EVN key. The beauty of course being that Liz wrote all the letters, including the ones from Stan as part of the Dada performance. A staged War-of-the-Worlds emergency! Brilliant! Apparently in the Dada show itself, someone ballroom danced with a turkey carcass.
• You can never go wrong with all TD&P musicals. I'm just saying...
Many playwrights have sent their scripts to the Cabaret in the hopes they'll be discovered. If any of you intrepid directors wants to have a look at this stack of potential, let me know.
Thing 2-Proposal Mixer mixed dangerously with this Thursday's late show
This Thursday's Cabaret, The Water Engine, a radio play by David Mamet, directed by the delicious Elaine Bonifeld, will be the last one before proposals are due for next semester. If you have a proposal, or would like to offer your services to work on someone else's, come at 10 pm and we'll have a proposal mixer. You can mix and mingle and talk about what you'd like to do and find designers, actors, directors, stage managers, dramaturgs, etc. to work on your show!
Thing 3-our preference for how you give us the scripts in your proposals, and a hint about what we're looking for in the language of your proposals
I'd like to give you all a leg up now that we've been through one round of this. First of all, we'd love it if, when you turn in the 8 copies of the scripts, they be three hole punched but NOT BOUND. Just clip them at the top with one of those aligator clippy things. Please put a copy of both the proposal form and the proposal with EACH script. Then put them all in a big manilla envelope or rubber band and put them in the box i the UT green room. These are PREFERENCES, not requirements and none of this will affect your proposal in any way, it would just be great, because I'm a Virgo and therefore anal.
Secondly, in your proposals, "Why here why us why now" is vital. We are really curious about your passion for doing your piece, what sets your heart racing about it, and why you'd burst if you couldn't do it. Please anticipate any questions that we might come up with, particularly if you are doing a radical take on something, and answer them up front in as detailed a way as possible. If you feel constrained by one page, we understand, you can use more if you need to. It is not necessary to list casting ideas as part of your proposal, particularly because Cabaret casting tends to change suddenly and regularly.
Light our fire, baby. Jazz us up about it. We know you can, you're an artist, dig? So get those typewriters humming and plunk out a proposal. We can't wait to get them.
See you this Thursday!!!,
Brendan
From: ysd.cabaret@yale.edu
Subject: One week to go!!!
Date: November 26, 2002 3:33:08 PM EST
Woodland Creatures. Hughes here with a final pre-thanx dispatch from the Cabaret field office.
2 things:
1 (housekeeping) item: we had a little confusion in the kitchen this last weekend wherein some YSD students were trying to buy drinks in the kitchen on Friday and Saturday nights and were shooed away. I'm terribly sorry for the mix up on this, here is the story:
Late Thursday is the only show where the kitchen is like a bar where anyone can go in and get drinks. For the rest of the shows (early Thursdays, all shows Fridays and Saturdays), when you get your drink ticket, just sit at a table and one of the wait staff will come over and get a drink for you (WE STOP SERVING FOOD AT 8 AND DRINKS AT 8:15). Forgive our expeditious tone when ye intrepid theatre goers have been scurried out of the cocina, it's a dangerous place with all the hot hash we sling and we don't want to hurt you. Also, we're usually in the weeds between 8 and 8:30. Thanks for your understanding on this. We love you, almost inappropriately so.
Item 2: THERE IS ONE MORE WEEK TO DREAM BIG ABOUT THE CALAMITY YOU CAN SHOEHORN INTO THE DASTARDLY RED BASEMENT. YOU REMEMBER THAT LIGHTNING STORM THAT TRIED TO STOP US THE NIGHT BEFORE THE CABARET MEETING, THAT'S HOW DANGEROUS WE ARE! WE ARE ON MOTHER NATURE'S SHIT LIST!!! GET TO WORK!!!
A final factoid, when the Puritans arrived in Boston to celebrate their escape from religious persecution in England by persecuting everything they came in contact with, the people they really couldn't stand were the Pilgrims of Plymoth, because they were so, to quote Cotton Mather, "friggin' weird". The Quakers, who also drove them crazy, use to streak naked through their hardtack and swill church services, trying to get them to lighten up. The Puritans would have hated the Cabaret. I'll be giving thanks for all the battles the Puritans lost.
Love and Tryptophan,
Brendan Hughes
http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/chemistry/bio/aminoacid/trp_en.html
From: ysd.cabaret@yale.edu
Subject: This week at the Cabaret
Date: February 6, 2003 2:35:03 AM EST
Greetings friends!
The Cabaret is back in full swing with a fantastic offering!
The Colored Museum by George C. Wolfe
Directed by 3rd year actor Billy Eugene Jones
February 6-8, 2003
The Colored Museum is a detailed examination of black American culture that is at times hilarious and disparaging. Structured into eleven vignettes of myth and madness, the core of the play is about baggage, the burdens of pain, anger and struggle that the legacy of slavery has brought to bear on the African American identity. This trip to the “museum” will not just tickle your funny bone but pull it from its socket.
Make a trip to the Museum.
This weekend, only at the Yale Cabaret.
From: ysd.cabaret@yale.edu
Subject: This week at the Cabaret
Date: February 11, 2003 4:43:32 PM EST
Greetings you possessors of throbbing hearts. It is soon the day of love tokens. The day the children in the elementary schools will tape brown paper bags to the sides of their desks and methodically deliver love greetings (or sports greetings) to all their classmates. Some will say, "see you afterschool by the bike racks for b-ball" others will bear shakily written love missives amid very harsh cross-outs asking young Natalie if she would please just please meet her secret admirer at the roller rink on Friday night. You lovers and lusters of the Cabaret, on the other hand, can exchange deep love with the cast of our outlandish musical "Once More with Feeling" based on the popular TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Come flutter onto the same branch with your own lovebird as you watch the town of Sunnydale burst into song.
From: ysd.cabaret@yale.edu
Subject: This week at the Cabaret
Date: February 19, 2003 8:52:50 PM EST
Greetings Earthlings.
This week at the Cabaret you can witness a new kind of theatre, invented by Nate Schenkkan and Mike Wighton. Many may remember Nate as the smartest (and youngest) kid in Theory class last year, who would have Elinor Fuchs exclaiming with joy at his insights on the weekly. He has since graduated and now lives in New York, telling Richard Foreman what's what regularly. Mike is a regular on the waitstaff and at the computers in the drama library and is possessed of a cheek-pinching sincerity (until he turns into a dynamo on stage).
Nate and Mike have unlocked a fascinating and mysterious connection between the life of Elektra as she cared for her brother while he descended into madness, and Neitzche's sister as she did the same. Combining the frames of half mask greek theatre with a mock Sorbonne lecture during the Mai '68 riots, they have created a theatrical event that pushes on the bruises of sibling devotion and obsession, and the nature of good and evil. I watched a run through last night and found their commitment to these unique explorations spellbinding, and the piece itself walking the tightrope between fascinating and terrifying. Run, don't walk, to this masterpiece.
From: ysd.cabaret@yale.edu
Subject: This week at the Yale Cabaret
Date: March 25, 2003 11:46:59 PM EST
Dear hearts,
Brendan here to personally invite you back to the Cabaret. This week, it's You've Never Done Anything Unforgivable, which Matt Humphreys and I have been adapting with Alice Moore. It presents three stories, three monologues of three very strange men. It's based on the writing of George Saunders, who's one of my favorite fiction writers and a regular contributor to the New Yorker and This American Life. Below is a link to an interview with him that appeared in the Atlantic in May of 2000. Last summer I googled him and have since struck up an email correspondence. He's a super great guy and may come to the show.
Saunders presents his unique vision of America in the near future as a landscape littered by gutted Wal-Marts and condemned Arbys. Saunders' astoundingly naive characters encounter high-tech absurdity and savage cruelty. This world premiere one-man show blessed by Saunders himself will give voice to his funny, sad, bleak, weird and toxic visions of the America that is right around the corner.
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/ba2000-05-17.htm
From: ysd.cabaret@yale.edu
Subject: The First Years are running the asylum!
Date: April 10, 2003 10:50:18 PM EDT
Beloved Keepers of the Theatrical Light,
Prepare to beam. They are geniuses. This week the first years have taken over, everyone from light board op Chris Sanderson to dramaturg Roweena Mackay to stage manager Anne Michelson to director Steven Fried to all the designers and all the actors--Everyone--including the ghost of Joe Orton himself (complete with hammer, god rest his soul), are first year students at the Yale School of Drama. You can smell the love for the project when you walk into the room, I sure did. And it is scathingly funny and wicked.
The press has been using verbs like "exhume" and "resurrect" when discussing our producing of this rarely produced gem (which is newspaper-ese for box office gold), and which makes it all the more a must see. The talent serves up Orton's wacked out writing with aplomb and glorious lust for its inherent ferocity.
Come cheer them on and be secretly intimidated. You'll pee.
Onward,
The Hughes not Carrie
P.S. I must place an official moratorium on dropping out of Cabarets. You can see the ulcers bulging out of the upcoming directors persons. Help 'em out, friends, they need us. That's Johnny Saline, Alice Moore and Moore, Emmy of the WiseGrin, and the ever-dancin' Carlos T. If they look stressed out in the coming weeks, or start bumping into walls, approach them and say, "I'll be in your Cabaret". Oh, but as per the first sentence of this postscript, then you have to. But it's fun! I promise. I'll make it fun. I'll massage you.
From: ysd.cabaret@yale.edu
Subject: Come back to the five and dime...
Date: April 17, 2003 12:43:20 AM EDT
To the fiendishly talented metropolis,
Come home. We've missed you. In a very strange twist of fate, we have had some empty seats at our last few late Thursday shows. It's been strange days for us. I know the sound of my latest emails may have given the impression that we had a capacity of negative zero, however it is untrue! We will rise above the new world order of Thursday Rep openings, and the recent turniquette squeeze on our capacity. It took us a few shows to figure it out, but we have our capacity back up within the vicinity of where it used to be, so come one come all!!! Even with our tiny capacities for the last two shows, we still didn't sell out until 11:05-11:10 for Mayakovsky, and we had 5 empty seats for Funeral Games. So don't assume you won't get in! Come! We've only got three shows left, so let's go out with a BANG! (Actually, thanks to Carlos, we WILL go out with "A Bang..."). And so, onto this week...
Shrew's director Mark Lamos commissioned the original production of Sueno at the Hartford stage a couple of years ago. Budries did the sound and Yeargan the set. It's a brilliant retelling of the Spanish Golden Age classic La Vida es Sueno ("Life is a Dream") by Calderon reworked by the unstoppably brilliant Jose Rivera, who wrote Marisol. Rivera masterfully maintains the Golden Age's unique fusion of passion and drama with irony and wit (kinda like the Great Magician). Rey Pena makes his Cabaret debut! Directed by Johnny Salinas, managing director extraordinaire.
Come celebrate the finish of Yale's Chicano Week with a little Segismundo!
See you soon.
Brendan
Friends, get down here!
This week's delightful entry into the repertoire features two world premieres. Jami O'Brien's Painting with the Cousin, about a wedding gift favor gone horribly awry and the bubbling over of frothy family vitriol. The O'Brien incisors are out and tearing through some seriously snappy dialogue. It's directed by Emmy Grinwis, who also emerges as a playwrighting talent with Middleton, directed by Alice Moore, the story of the devolution of civilization at a girls boarding school that would put Lord of the Flies to shame.
I have the Conch!
Brendan
From: ysd.cabaret@yale.edu
Subject: Final week at the Cabaret-Final dispatch from this guy
Date: April 29, 2003 7:31:06 PM EDT
Soul-fondling artistes,
This week at the Cabaret, Carlos M. Tesoro has tickled 17 people into shaking their money-makers right in front of your thirsty thirsty eyes. Get ready for the smooth groovinest, fantasmagorical shazzumflip this side of the 2nd dimension. When I'm around Carlos, I can't make my feet behave. And you will neither. This crazy dance-stravaganza will ease us out of the 35th season of the Yale Cabaret, which has been filled with beauty and difficulty, grace and stammer, ferocity and fanta grape, love, life and passion. Do you remember the night before the first day of school, when the world's loudest lightning and thunder storm woke us all up and made us wonder what this year would be like? The wild electric arcs that ripped through the sky above the city of elms, the city of a dozen stories that we call home, those arcs were describing the Cabaret season, and whispered to our pajama'd selves, kneeling on our couches, "toss a saddle on a volt, you'll never be the same."
Thank you for making this year an incredible mechanical-bull ride on the dastardly red basement's lightning bolt-like thrill ride. I love you.
Please come this Thursday late night for a ceremonial final goodbye. At this performance I will announce my successor.
Also, on a sad note, the Yale Cabaret lost a beloved alum last week: Lyric Benson, who played the title role of Jackie Onassis in last year's Jackie: An American Life, lost her life. She was a brilliant comedienne. Beautiful and extremely talented. She had a light that surrounded her. I was reading a couple of undergrads for the role, and she walked in with a high silk shirt and rhinestones--approximating Jackie's glamour, she told me--and had the part instantly. For professionalism's sake, I read a scene with her, the scene where JFK and Jackie meet, but only got as far as her first laugh line and could not go on, I was breaking up too much. Anyone who knew her can tell you she lit up a room and when you talked to her, you felt like you were the only person in the world. Our thoughts and prayers go out to Lyric's family and friends in this incomprehensibly sad time.
See you Thursday,
Brendan
