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YALE CABARET, 2016

DRAMATURGY: Catherine María Rodríguez

SCENIC DESIGN: Sarah Nietfeld & Lucie Dawkins

COSTUME DESIGN: Cole McCarty

SOUND DESIGN Fred Kennedy

LIGHTING DESIGN: Krista Smith

STAGE MANAGER: Sarah Thompson

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CAST:

Jamie Bogyo, Steven Lee Johnson,

Patric Madden, Joshua Wilder

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REVIEW HIGHLIGHTS:

First-year Yale School of Drama director Rory Pelsue and first-year actor Patrick Madden offer stunning Yale Cabaret debuts with Tennessee Williams’ one act And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens... seeing Candy on stage now is both timely and telling. Bravo!

-Donald Brown, New Haven Review

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When the lights come up on And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens — which is playing at the Yale Cabaret now through Saturday night— something transformative is already taking place....There is something exquisite and unsettling about the whole [performance]…In a massive win for first-year director and cab debut Rory Pelsue, Williams’ little-known work takes on a sort of fabulous posterity, walking the tightrope between mid-century gay New Orleans and 21st century America, where it seems impossible that the same systems of sexual oppression, violence and want are still taking place.... In Williams’ world, it is the late 1950s, and New Orleans’ French Quarter is pulsating with a vibrant and not-so-clandestine culture of drag, wildly popular in the city from the 1930s onward. Our main character, Candy, is a queen to rule all queens — or so she would have us believe — who has built up a small fortune through her work as an interior decorator. But Pelsue and an extraordinary Candy (first-year Yale Drama student Patrick Madden) don’t stop there. Tying a stunning, pristine set and perfectly contained script to current events, Pelsue captures in Williams’ words, now over half a century old, what it means to grapple with gender, cultural appropriation, and otherness. 

-Lucy Gellman, New Haven Independent

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