Yale Cabaret: a drama student's dream

BY JULIE O'CONNOR

HYURA CHOI/YH

This Cabaret isn't for everybody. According to Artistic Director Trip Cullman, TC '97, DRA '02, it's for audiences who are "much more interested in seeing edgier, riskier material. That's the appeal. It's an underground basement creativity cooker, whereas the Rep is a much more established institution." Outside the Drama school, the Cabaret's reputation is largely word of mouth, but it has attracted some regulars among Yale's swarming undergraduate thespian population. They come for the beer, they come for the dinner, and, most of all, for the intimacy of a small theater and the variety of inexpensive plays. Lately, the Cabaret has been reaching out to persuade more Yale undergraduates to sample its experimental theatrical and culinary creations.

Yale Rep renegades

In the beginning, there was only the Yale Repertory Theatre. Founded in 1965, for two years the Yale Rep reigned as the central Drama school performance space, and the students were kept behind the scenes. The idea was to attract professional actors to the School of Drama and to provide students with an opportunity to work with and observe them. As Cullman describes it, "In the heyday of the Rep, when Lloyd Richard was Dean of the Drama school, the drama students were serving as worker bees in support of the Yale Rep."

Three years after the Rep was born, discontented thespians staged an uprising: the Yale Cabaret was created by students as a space in which they could exercise free reign over their own productions and have complete artistic freedom outside the structured exercises of their classrooms. During the last 10 years, though, the Drama school has been more accomodating of student productions than in the past. Dean Stan Wojewodski's policies awarded students more generous budgets and better spaces for their shows. Still, the Cabaret stands as the only outlet where drama students claim 100 percent freedom. Christopher Baker, DRA '01, the Cabaret's managing director, calls the space a "living laboratory" where students choose their own productions and often act in shows that other students have written. For reasons like this, he says, "the Cabaret is closer to the hearts of the alumni."

Balancing Shakespeare and `South Park'

Although there is some overlap, Baker says that when it comes to audiences, the Repertory Theatre and the Yale Cabaret don't seem to be competitors. For one thing, the Cabaret audience consists mostly of Drama school students. These are people who appreciate productions such as Mac Wellman's stream-of-consciousness piece Whirligig, or Cannibal, written by the notoriously perverted creators of South Park. According to Baker, Cannibal "was much more of an inside joke. But we balance that with Tennessee Williams or Shakespeare or Sam Shepard," who are more likely to appease the New Haven community as a whole.

Robert McGinnis, ES '01, has worked as a waiter at the Cabaret for a year after hearing about the job opportunity through a friend and gets to see the shows for free. He described the Cabaret productions as "dynamic and unexpected." The shows can be very avant-garde, and there are occasionally productions with onstage nudity: "There was one show that involved a dildo. I mean, live sex acts." The Cabaret audience is also largely made up of senior citizens from the New Haven community. McGinnis laughed, "they keep coming anyway."

Within the drama school, the Rep and the Cabaret serve very different purposes. The Repertory Theatre is intended to be a kind of training center for the students; the Cabaret is their playpen. Actors who serve as understudies to professionals at the Repertory Theatre star on the Cabaret stage: the Drama school advertises the Cabaret as a "strictly extracurricular outlet for the exploration of a wide range of material: serious, absurdist, improvisational, and musical."

Baby Rep grows up

The process of selecting 20 Cabaret productions for the year begins when the student body returns to the Drama school after summer vacation and starts submitting proposals. A board of students elects an artistic director, who makes the final decisions on the season. A new artistic director is elected every year, so each season is entirely different. Baker compares the Cabaret's administration to the Rep's, but in miniature.

The season at the Rep, on the other hand, is the prerogative of the current Dean, who selects the shows every year during his decade-long tenure. Therefore, the Dean's artistic style greatly influences the direction of the Repertory theater for quite a long time. According to many professors and students of the Drama school, Wojewodski, who is currently retiring as Dean, brought much more experimental theater to the Rep than did his predecessor. "Stan's tenure was breaking out—from Geography to Peter and Wendy, it's a great range of work. The Dean before him was more into bringing professional, Broadway-quality theater, like August Wilson," Baker said.

Experimentation dominates the Cabaret lineup. Of course, the audience is always a consideration. "We're not idiots. We know that everyone likes a recognizable name. We're closing our season this year with Hair. A big, slashing musical is always fun, and it's a Cabaret tradition at this point," Cullman said. All the shows run an hour and 15 minutes with no intermission, and full-length plays are cut to make one-acts.

On Thurs., Jan. 4, the Cabaret announced the 12 shows chosen for its spring season, which will range from August Strindberg's Miss Julie and Georg Buchner's Woyzeck to a student-written musical Zanna Don't!, in which "everything is gay and everything gay is fabulous!" Three of the shows are student-written pieces, two are literature classics, four are contemporary classics, and there are also a few foreign plays, such as The Coffin is Too Big for the Whole by Singapore playwright Kuo Pan Kun. An evening in April called Double Exposure will juxtapose two "experiments in theater" by playwrights Sam Shepard and Tom Stoppard.

Wine, drama, atmosphere

This year the Cabaret is attempting to appeal more to Yale's undergraduate population for audiences. In mid-December, the Cab-aret sent an offer to the Deans of each residential college advertising a special group rate that would allow a college to buy out the Cabaret for an exclusive performance. It was a package deal: for the students it offered some theater, free soft drinks, and snacks; for the Cabaret, a little audience recruitment. As of yet, the Cabaret has received no replies from residential colleges. However, the School of Management, which was sent a similar offer, has purchased an evening in April for its students, who will receive a free show and dinner.

Cullman first heard about the Cabaret himself through word-of-mouth when he attended Yale as an undergraduate four years ago. Cullman purchased a subscription to the Yale Repertory Theatre, decided it wasn't for him, and instead became a regular at the Cabaret. He said that his experiences at the Cabaret became the deciding factor in his decision to attend the Yale School of Drama.

Jeff Little, PC '02, head of the Dramat, had a similar experience. He stopped subscribing to the Repertory Theatre after his freshman year and instead began attending plays at the Cabaret, which he heard about from a teaching assistant in the theater studies department. Little returns to the Cabaret because of its atmosphere, which he finds great for dates—the tables are set right up against the stage and you can order a glass of wine with your meal. "It's hit or miss, always interesting if not fantastically pulled off. It's unique," he said. "So many Yale students don't know it's there—they're missing out."

Graphic by Hyura Choi.

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