Altering the face of the art establishment

Can a wave of new artists swim against the mainstream—and stay afloat?

BY JOSH DRIMMER

Want to get a sense of just how eclectic and unpredictable the Yale arts scene can be? Take this coming weekend as an example. On Friday, you could see a performance of five new pieces by the year-old Yale College Composers Group, along with an old modernist standard performed by 24 people playing 12 radios, and something written "for two percussionists and a referee." Saturday night has its share of theater, but if you happen to be looking for a drama based on the gospels, including a dialogue between the two thieves on the crosses beside Jesus Christ, there's Three Men of Golgotha, written and directed by Michael Lew, JE '03. Sunday afternoon there's the Dramat's first-ever Playwriting Festival, readings of four new one-acts, all by Yale students. Even for Yale, long known as a creatively fertile place, the flux of new plays, new groups, and new magazines is remarkable.

Want to get a sense of just how difficult it is to create something with staying power in the Yale arts scene? Ask Matt Fogel, ES '02, one of the founders of Lineup, a magazine now in financial limbo despite its popularity. Ask Meredith Angelson, CC '03, who sustained the Yale Outdoor Dramatic Association (YODA) through its second year when both of its founders left, and still isn't sure if the group has a real future. At Yale, where deeply entrenched groups such as the Dramat are about to turn 101 years old, it may be easy to find funding for a play, but creating an establishment is nearly impossible.

FOR EVERY BRAND-NEW ORGANIZATION LOOKING TO BECOME a true establishment, there are many that simply won't make it, usually for reasons far removed from art itself. For example, when YODA founders Joshua Kriegman, CC '03, and Daniel Squadron, CC '02, left school to start a bar in New York, Meredith Angelson, CC '03, didn't know exactly what it would take to keep their vision going back on campus. "It was really exciting the first year," Angelson said, "because it was new and innovative and [our first production] By The Skin of Our Teeth was really visceral for all of us, because we worked so hard and long together through so much bureaucracy and cold weather. But I didn't realize how much...bullshit I had to get involved with."

Stage-managing Skin of Our Teeth couldn't have possibly prepared Angelson for what she would face in YODA's second year. Money wasn't a problem, with Branford Sudler funds, leftover revenue from the first-year advertising push, and Undergraduate Organization Funding Committee (UOFC) funds. And Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the second-year spring production, brought in big audiences. But when Kriegman and Squadron left, YODA "basically had to start from scratch," according to Angelson, with an almost entirely new group of actors and stagehands. "Ideally, it shouldn't be this sort of one-year turnover thing at all," she said, "but it's really grueling because this is not like the Dramat, where we have our own permanent space, all the money, and a board."

After two years at the helm of the organization, Angelson is ready to relinquish the group, though she wants it to continue on without her. One fundamental problem with YODA, unfortunately, was part of what made it special: "While part of the goal might have been to get non-theater people involved in theater, it's the theater people who would be willing to sit on a YODA board and make a commitment. There's a reason that people not in the theater scene aren't in the theater scene. That is a fundamental paradox of the group. There isn't anyone who just wants to make [YODA] their time at Yale, and that's what it would take to really establish it."

"I would really like it to keep going, and I think it's important for new types of theater to keep going at Yale, where so many things are well ingrained," Angelson said, but understandably she's had enough of the "fairly thankless" work of production. She leaves YODA, and theater as a whole, with good memories, but whether or not the group will continue is beyond her control now. Yet, should YODA fade away, there are a number of newer projects whose founders share Angelson's desire to bring innovative groups and ideas to Yale's artistic establishment.

"I THINK IT'S SO EXCITING TO BE ON A COLLEGE CAMPUS WHERE you can get a Sudler and do what you want with it," Sarah Wright, TC '03, said. She compared the Yale theater scene favorably to her experiences reading new scripts this summer as an intern at the New York Theater Workshop. "After reading all these scripts, some of which were great, you realize that it's not that there's a lack of great stuff out there, it's just so difficult to make it commercially viable." With her own playreading group, Nathan Kitada's, BR '05, Playwrights' League at Yale (PLAY), and the Dramat Playwriting Festival among the new groups starting this year, Wright says this semester could be "the renaissance of the playwright at Yale." It may not be an overstatement.

Michael Lew's Three Men of Golgotha is one piece of this renaissance, a play of 11 loosely connected scenes exploring religious issues through a clutch of overlooked New Testament characters. Lew wrote and directed this play not as "a museum piece" or Christian propaganda, but rather with the idea that "anyone from any other religion, from any range of beliefs—atheist to hardcore Christian—would be able to come in and see this, and have it primarily as a dramatic experience; enjoy it as a drama, and after that, formulate an opinion."

Directing his own material for the first time since high school, Lew said, hasn't been a challenge, as he delegated power over script changes to his assistant director, Stephanie Wu, JE '03, and his cast. "I knew if I were doing it myself, every word would be something I loved," Lew said. "And I wouldn't see it objectively." Lew is a collaborative director who dislikes controlling actors or text, which is why he calls the success of Three Men thus far "a testament to the joy of collaboration."

Collaboration is also key for two new additions to the drama scene. Both the Dramat Playwriting Festival and PLAY hope to make life for a long tradition of Yale playwrights a little easier. "The playwrights and the directors here have really had the chance to talk about the play, the characters, potential revisions, and just form a relationship," Dramat special events coordinator Adam Chanzit, TD '03, said. "One of the main goals of the festival is to form these relationships—to put directors and playwrights together who wouldn't have necessarily met and worked together otherwise."

A pairing of four directors and four playwrights whose material was selected from a pool of 23 submissions, the festival's aim is not only to entertain, but also to provide its "talkbacks," where the audience gives the playwrights and directors feedback after the readings. "When you're writing a play, you don't have that actual feedback, so to have the audience talking to you immediately afterwards is very cool." Chanzit believes this first festival could become its own institution. "It's really important to get it to go well this first time," Chanzit said, "because we're establishing what will hopefully become a tradition. It's almost a reality."

YODA founders Josh Kriegman, CC '03, and Dan Squadron, CC '02. CATE PUSHKAREVA/YH

Where the festival ends, PLAY begins. At an introductory meeting of the Dramat, Kitada—who is also an assistant producer of the festival—met some freshman playwrights and found that a common question was how to produce one's own show at Yale. For despite the ready availability of college funds for the theater arts, a support structure for writers was simply non-existent. "Everyone told us about the Sudler," Kitada recalled, "but there didn't seem to be any group that would support you if you were a playwright and wanted to get your plays put on."

PLAY, which Kitada admits still needs more than just freshman playwrights to survive, aims to become a weekly roundtable for play readings. "In developing plays, it's really helpful to see them performed and even to talk those ideas out," Kitada said. "Having a forum for people to get their ideas out, even to write for, could really help." Kitada also hopes to make the group an all-around resource to playwrights, producing original plays and bound anthologies of the group's work, and perhaps even bringing playwrights to speak on campus.

The playreading group Wright, Stephanie Brown, MC '03, and Colette Robert, DC '03, plan to kick off with a gala of staged readings, talks, and performances is an attempt to explore material both old and new while creating a real theatrical community.

Wright feels that play readings can be satisfying unto themselves as entertainment and as an investigation of a text. And because a reading doesn't have the same pressures as a full production, Wright sees the group as "a chance to bring together all sorts of theater organizations and theater people in a way that isn't pressured or combative, but a fun, social group that could really unify [theater people]."

THE YALE COLLEGE COMPOSERS GROUP, TOO, IS AS much a community as a performance organization. Yvonne Wu, MUS '03, organizes the group's concerts and finds the process rewarding, regardless of audience size. "There are already so few people going to classical music concerts, and the most modern music has always had audience problems, not just at Yale," Wu said. The group, formed a year ago out of a composition seminar, functions as a place to discuss works in progress informally, "to keep the creativity going and give us a group to write for."

But though pieces like Mark Dancinger's, TD '03, "Three Short Minimalist Pieces for Electric Guitar and Cello or Exercises in Preparation for getting Blown Out of the Backside of a Zebra Fish" might not appeal to the staunch sorts that come to classical concerts, Wu says there will always be a desire to increase the group's exposure. "As with any art, there are people working hard for this, and it takes a long time to compose three minutes of music, so of course, we want to share it," Wu said. "Some of my fellow officers even say that we can be just like a cappella groups: `They charge for concerts and they have CDs, and tons of people pay for them.' Yet, we're not an a cappella group, and we never will be."

A photograph from Jane Yakowtiz's, SM '02, joy-themed film project. COURTESY JANE YAKOWITZ

Still, the Composers' upcoming concert features two known pieces that may be just as entertaining, and a lot more mind-blowing, than anything the Whiffs can come up with. The first, John Cage's "Imaginary Landscape No. 4," is a piece requiring 24 players on 12 radios, one person on each radio's tuner, the other on volume. The piece is time-specific and place-specific, and because what is on the radio controls what the piece is, "Imaginary Landscape" allows anything to happen, something rare in the overformalized world of compositional music.

The second, School of Music professor Jack Vees' "Players," is to music what Iron Chef is to cooking. In a race through modual scales, composers Lainie Fefferman, SM '04, and Eric Johnson, MUS '01, will face off on their individualized percussion sets with a referee listening on, and calling fouls when players fail to keep up: first player to five fouls loses and ends the piece. They may never be the Whiffs, but somehow when the Composers are involved, modern music just sounds like more fun than another rendition of "On Broadway." And if the audience doesn't have as much fun as they do? "Whatever happens, we feel good about what we do," Wu said. "We're contemporary composers, and some disinterest is what we may always deal with, but it's always nice to have a big audience."

Jane Yakowitz, SM '02, on the other hand, never really saw herself making a film, but as she found a simple theme to explore in her photography—joy—a film idea formed, and with it, she found an opportunity to bring musicians and a writer into the fold. Inspired by the Yale Cabaret performance of a new score to La Jette, a film comprised entirely of still images and text, Yak-owitz wanted to make a still image film of her own, "but where the images come before the text."

With joy in mind, Yak-owitz recruited a group of her musician friends, including Dan Sobo, SM '03, Eliot Rose, SM '03, and Sam Grossman, DC '03, to compose "one cohesive, coherent score based mainly on adjectives I gave them." Zachary Weinman, CC '02, will write the text to the film once Yakowitz completes a set of about 30 images for the 10-minute film, but she herself is trying not to project a plot upon her work.

The film will debut, likely with a live performance of the score, at Maya's Room in Silliman in December, and if it succeeds, it will be in breaking from the norm of Yale photography. "I get tired of [class] sometimes, because in every photography critique, the pictures end up being so heavy that we have to think about why we're actually looking at them," Yakowitz said. "With this, I want to free the audience from having to think about what they are looking at. It's less about understanding the motive, and what it `means', with a capital `M,' and more about feeling it."

FOR FOGEL AND PRUDENCE PFEIFFER, JE '02, THE founders of Lineup, the issue of continuing their independent artistic endeavor is a little more complicated than matters of desire or audience: they want nothing more than to keep the magazine going, and their last issue, in May 2001, was their most popular. None of this, however, may make any difference. "Trying to get a publication off the ground here is almost impossible," Fogel said without a note of overstatement.

Unlike plays or funded projects such as Yakowitz's, which have no need to earn back Sudler money through ticket sales, student publications must financially sustain their own runs. With the Council of Masters' Sudler Committee's ad hoc decision to no longer fund campus-wide publications due to a dramatic rise in student proposals, even the sort of seed money that helped start Lineup will no longer be available to magazines that aren't officially tied to residential colleges. As Fogel put it, "Yale's stand on publications just doesn't make any sense. People who are putting up a play, they don't have to put up a musical about Jonathan Edwards College. It's just a play."

With its main sponsor, contentville.com, no longer in existence, Sudler money no longer coming in, and most local businesses shutting their doors to the young magazine due to its irregular publishing schedule, Lineup finds itself in what Fogel describes as a catch-22. "We don't have the advertising because we can't print enough issues, and we can't print enough issues because we don't have the advertising," Fogel said. "In a weird way, student interest in the magazine does not affect your success at all. Going into a store and saying, `Kids really like this, but we only print 2,000 copies,' doesn't work." Thus, Fogel and Pfeiffer's dream magazine, a combination of humor, topical stories, and in-depth reporting just hitting its stride, floats in financial limbo.

For aspiring Yale editors, Fogel offers this advice: "Can you start a magazine at Yale? Yes. Is it going to thrive? No. Is it worth it? Absolutely." Regardless of whether people attend their concerts, plays, and films, read their magazines, or support their groups, Yale's new artists probably couldn't agree more. Whether a new establishment is created or not, the art, and the act of creating it, justifies itself. Graphic by Gene Smilansky and Erin I. Lewis.

Golgotha flyer courtesy Michael Lew; John Cage photo courtesy Susan Schwartzenberg; Lineup courtesy

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