Under the leadership of Artistic Director Kristina Mendicino and Associate Artistic Director Tea Alagic, Summer Cabaret (at Yale) is pleased to announce its 31 st season. Four productions—Woyzeck; a double bill of Piano Plays and Self-Accusation; Pre-Paradise, Sorry Now; and Baal— will be presented during Summer Cabaret’s eight-week summer season (June 15-August 6) at 217 Park Street in New Haven, Connecticut. Tea Alagic—an international artist, actress, emerging director, and Yale School of Drama MFA candidate known for her work with Robert LePage and Richard Foreman—will direct all four productions. Single tickets are $15-$22 and subscriptions are $36-$58. Groups of ten or more can purchase tickets for $15 per individual. Tickets can be reserved ahead of time by calling (203) 432-1567 and can be purchased at the door prior to performances (subject to availability).
All productions are performed at 217 Park Street , New Haven , Connecticut with performances taking place at 8PM Wednesday through Saturday of the first week of each production’s run and Tuesday through Saturday of the second week of each production’s run.
Summer Cabaret offers the finest young artists at Yale School of Drama opportunities to burst out of their academic confines. Each summer, Summer Cabaret holds within it the next generation of the country’s finest theatre artists—actors, directors, designers, playwrights, and theatre technicians. The 2005 Summer Cabaret season opens with Georg Buckner’s Woyzeck (June 15-25), followed by a double bill of Frederike Roth’s Piano Plays and Peter Hanke’s Self-Accusation (both plays run June 29-July 9). The second half of the season begins with the seductive and darkly humorous Pre-Paradise, Sorry Now (July 13-23), by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Bertolt Brecht’s famous Baal (July 26-August 6) will be the season’s final production.
Tea Alagic’s production of Woyzeck (June 15-25) promises to be a work that is not to be missed. Alagic is a master of imagery. She is able to draw beautiful essentials out of her texts while pointing to tragic complexities. Woyzeck tells the story of a soldier as he encounters colleagues, medical professionals who think he is crazy, the woman he loves and kills, and the man that his “common law wife” lusts after. This story of unraveling and loss of control will be told through Alagic’s striking imagery and a new translation by Artistic Director Kristina Mendicino. Past interpretations of Woyzeck have ranged from the large-scale Robert Wilson production at Brooklyn Academy of Music (2002) to a recent, small-scaled, small-cast version in Croatia . As a native of Bosnia , Alagic’s conception of the piece will be informed by images from the production in Croatia as will the sensibility of Sarah Kane, a young playwright who, following her suicide in 1999, has posthumously become popular in theaters across Europe and the United States . Concerned with issues of psychology, violence, and war, Woyzeck is both relevant to today’s political climate and the oldest work amongst season’s offerings.
Piano Plays (June 29-July 9), presented on a double-bill in the second production of the season, will be a United States premiere of a work that has attracted attention in Germany for its linguistic elegance and its exploration of the feminine in the twenty-first century. With an unusually lyrical and accessible text, the play delves into the issue of male and female relationships within a culture that perpetuates images linking sex, violence, and women. The work has an opera-commercial-cabaret singer main character, “She” and a married, piano-playing partner. “She” is pinned to her identity as a performer that makes her incapable of viewing her “true” self. Her customers say her lifestyle will “ruin her voice” as they are destroying her. “She” is trapped within her objectified and consumable body as well as in a world that endlessly wants to consume her rather than offer her a means of survival. In true cabaret fashion, contemporary music and media images form the background of this woman’s collapse within a male dominated culture.
Self-Accusation (June 29-July 9), a work that shares a double bill with Piano Plays, is a brief, spare play by famed Wings of Desire co-author Peter Handke. A perfect companion piece to Piano Plays, Self-Accusation will utilize the same actors playing the “She” and “He” in Piano Plays. “She” and “He” will share a single “I” role in Self-Accusation. The play is a confessional style account of life experience. Self-Accusation is extraordinary in its ability to map the modern drama of humanity’s cool complacency and the relentless guilt experienced by the figure “I”, who learns language, discovers its power as a tool, creates, destroys, and degrades. The production will draw from media projections of current political crisis at home and abroad.
Pre-Paradise, Sorry Now (July 13-23), the third Summer Cabaret production of the season, is a brilliant piece of work by the late star director and leader of the New German Cinema, Robert Werner Fassbinder. A fast-moving journey that has all of the elements of a racy film-noir, the play explores the dynamic of racial hatred and xenophobia. In a thrilling world, reminiscent of a gangster film, main characters Ian and Myra descend into criminality and cruelty while a linguistic tour de force reveals an arc of theatre artists’ history. The play is based upon the famous English moor murders, committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Pre-Paradise, Sorry Now— a modern, post-war world of sensational news and crime stories—is a counterpoint to the pre-war environment explored in Woyzeck.
Baal (July 27-August 6) will bring Summer Cabaret 2005 to a poetic close by presenting a break through work of a young Brecht—a play about which a Berlin reviewer wrote, “At 24 the writer Brecht has changed Germany’s literary complexion overnight.” Similarly, Baal will provide one last opportunity in the season for Summer Cabaret’s artists to leave their own mark upon New Haven ’s theatrical and literary world, the landscape in which they find themselves, the same landscape that has created them. With its mix of song and poetry, Baal traces the title character’s disintegration as he (a poet) retreats from a society that is prepared to consume him—the same society in which the rock star-like Brecht found himself. The play is comprised of short scenes and Brecht returned to it throughout his career considering it a critique of fin de siecle decadence that bred the wars of the early and mid-twentieth century.
Kristina Mendicino, Artistic Director of Summer Cabaret 2005 , is a first-year student in the Dramaturgy Program at Yale School of Drama. During her undergraduate years at Dartmouth College she served as the dramaturg for play such as Laughing Wild , by Christopher Durang; The Apple Tree by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick; and Dona Rosita, The Spinster , by Frederico Garcia Lorca. Currently, Mendicino is dramaturg for Hedda Gabler , by Henrik Ibsen; and Alone , a new work by Terrell McCraney (MFA candidate, Yale School of Drama, 2007). In the fall of 2005, Mendicino collaborated with Summer Cabaret Associate Artistic Director Tea Alagic and created a work based on Alex DeTocquville’s Democracy in America and The Bill of Rights .
Tea Alagic, Associate Artistic Director, and Resident Director, of Summer Cabaret 2005, has worked with cutting edge multi-media artist and director Robert LePage, as well as with the famous New York City avant-gardist Richard Foreman. Her numerous acting credits have taken her all over the world (including Edinburgh’s International Fringe Festival; Royal National Theatre, London; Brooklyn Academy of Music, United States; Salzberg Festpiele, Austria), and in 1997 Alagic founded her own New York City-based theatre company, Stateless (dedicated to new work, international artists, and multi-media). Alagic is currently a first-year MFA candidate in Directing at Yale School of Drama and her recent directing debut at the term-time Cabaret was noted in the Yale Daily News as being exceptionally strong in its directing.
Advanced Season Tickets(Subscriptions) for Summer Cabaret are now on sale through the Box Office reservation number, (203) 432-1567 or at the door prior to performances (subject to availability). Subscriptions are $36-$58 (four plays for $58 full price; $48 for seniors; and $36 for students). Individual tickets and group tickets can be reserved by calling (203) 432-1567 or at the door prior to performances (subject to availability). Individual tickets for Summer Cabaret are $15-$22 ($15 students; $18.50 seniors; $22 full price). All productions are performed at 217 Park Street, New Haven, Connecticut with performances taking place at 8PM Wednesday through Saturday of the first week of each production’s run and Tuesday through Saturday of the second week of each production’s run.
Summer Cabaret was founded in 1974. It is dedicated to providing emerging professionals with the opportunity to explore innovative artistic and/or managerial concepts in theatrical production. In addition to its on-stage productions, Summer Cabaret aims to provide library lectures that help establish and maintain deeper, richer community relations in New Haven while increasing awareness of the arts. Summer cabaret gratefully acknowledges the support of The New Haven Advocate, Ideal Printing, and The Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism.
Contact:
Emily Gresh, Managing Director,
Summer Cabaret at Yale Office: 203.432.2585
Email: Emily.Gresh@yale.edu