A NOTE FROM THE CAB LEADERSHIP
Welcome back to Yale Cabaret for Arlington by Enda Walsh. We are grateful for your support that allows us to produce an additional production as part of our season. We’re lucky to be in community with you all for yet another boundary-pushing week of theatre here at Yale Cabaret.
This play was proposed as a “multimedia play”. Its fusion of dance, acting, and extensive technology aligns well with our mission to experiment, and expand our learning here at the school. This show highlights the humanity that exists in even the bleakest of places. It’s an ode to those who help us weather storms and escape hardships. It’s an ode to love, the one thing that finds its way into even the darkest of situations.
We hope you will continue to join us as we build a season of exploration, experimentation, and pushing boundaries at Yale Cabaret. Out of the box and into our Sandbox!
— Doaa, Kyle, & AnnabelA NOTE FROM THE DRAMATURG
Enda Walsh’s Arlington introduces a city filled with “only towers and nothing else,” as the character Isla says. Identical towers that might conjure the image of graves in Arlington National Cemetery marching on towards the horizon. Unseen powers have authorized this systemic human sacrifice, justifying it with narratives of the greater good. Senseless, endless, nameless loss abstracted until it is digestible to the human mind.
As an audience, all we see of the towers is one sparse cell, with a window six feet high. Instead, we rely on the characters’ words to understand this city of concrete, glass, and people waiting in identical rooms for salvation that never comes. Inside this particular room, we see bodies and whole worlds created out of the imagination.
Around the edges of Arlington is the aftermath of environmental catastrophe. Seagulls are the only sign of life outside the tower windows, and even in childhood memories, ducks live in dried up lakes. And in order for those in the towers to keep manufacturing narratives of the natural world, they are kept from the truth and from each other. The cycle of human exploitation continues under the guise of preventing more devastation.
Here, in the tiny cell, we meet three storytellers on the edge. Those in power dole out hope in controlled doses, surveillance is constant, and speech becomes suspect when it doesn’t match sensory reality. What does that mean if words themselves are proven meaningless? What happens if someone tunes into their body for hope instead? Inside a room where all external stimulus is controlled, from where else can resistance come but inside the human body and relationships built with each other?
But wait, there’s one final thing. The full title is Arlington (a love story).
— Hannah GellmanSPECIAL THANKS
CONTENT GUIDANCE
This production contains strobe lighting, loud sounds, discussion of suicide and suicidal ideation, depictions of torture and physical harm, use of stage blood.
PRODUCTION TEAM
Director Bobbin Ramsey
Choreographer Shyama Iyer
Dramaturg
Hannah Fennell Gellman
Producer
Roman Sanchez
Lighting & Co-Scenic Designer Kyle Stamm
Costume Designer
Caroline Tyson
Technical Director
Miguel Angel Lopez
Intimacy Choreographer Kelsey Rainwater
Projection & Co-Scenic Designer Doaa Ouf
Sound Designer
Colleen Rooney
Assistant Technical Director Shannon Dodson*
Isla Stefani Kuo .
Stage Manager
Josie Cooper
Sound Consultant
Minjae Kim Voice Roman
The Young Man Samuel Douglas
The Young Woman Shyama Iyer
SHOW SPONSORS
Matthew Sonnenfeld and Donald & Mary Brown
MISSION STATEMENT
Sandbox by definition, is “a shallow box in the ground partly filled with sand for children to play in”. We hope to create a similar sense of curiosity and playfulness, allowing artists to access creativity only possible when given the opportunity to dig and unearth treasures within themselves. Our season will focus on performance arts as a whole, not just script-based plays or musicals, it’s open to ALL. We aim to look at collaborators as they are, without limiting them to the role they hold within the DGSD community. We believe in a theater without labels, where artists are not limited by the hats they wear, but by the experience they bring into the room with them. As a collective, we will create theater that continues to reshape our ever-changing view on the world.
OUR SANDBOX IS...
A Celebration of Ideas: A place where no ideas are bad ideas
Experimental: A space to try, fail, learn, and grow as a community
A Resource: A pool of combined knowledge and artistry
An Outlet: Magnifying unheard voices and underrepresented stories
A Continuum: An application of skills learned
Our Sandbox is a place where you can make your wildest dreams come true.
LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The state of Connecticut and Yale University occupy the traditional, ancestral, and unceded lands of the Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, Quinnipiac, and other Algonquian speaking peoples. We honor and respect their continued relationship with and stewardship of this land, and we acknowledge that Yale University, Yale Cabaret, and those affiliated have benefited from the oppression of these Nations.
LABOR ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Yale University does not exist independently from the centuries of forced labor and economic extraction of enslaved people, primarily of African descent, on which this country was built. We are indebted to their labor and their unwilling sacrifice, and we must acknowledge the ongoing violence inflicted on Black and brown people and the resulting impact and generational trauma still felt today.
Co-Artistic Director
Doaa Ouf
Written
