Promotional Photo

Will Connelly in Yale Cab’s Day in Dig Nation.

For Parents’ Weekend at Yale, the Dramat chose a suitable play, performed by freshmen and sophomores, to enact before parents who might be wondering what their progeny have been up to.

Tony Kushner’s The Illusion (a 1990 adaptation of a Corneille classic) concerns a father who journeys to a sorceror’s cave in search of news of the son he banished from home 15 years before. There, he is magically presented with three displays in which his son, always with a different name and differing style of attire, is involved in romantic situations — always involving a beloved, her maid, and a rival. The situations change, involving elements of bad faith, betrayal, murder, imprisonment, sacrifice and farce, but the characters remain more or less consistent.

When his son is stabbed by a prince he had cuckolded, the old man mourns with what seem to be the first tears he’s ever shed. The sorceror seizes the drops, saying they are his true payment. He then informs the father that his son is not really dead, apologizing if he took the scenes for reality. The son is an actor in Paris, and we’ve just seen some of his roles. The old man, a lawyer, seems none too happy about his son’s actual fate.

What better way to demonstrate both the power and danger of theater as seductive illusion?

And how many parents, hearing of their children choosing to be show people, might not take the play as a cautionary fable?

Three players were noteworthy in conveying the necessary illusion of good acting: Charlotte McCurdy as the maid ably rendered the neo-classical theater’s tendency to give the best lines to the help; Peter Lewis as Matamore uttered his pompous howlers with an enlivening blithe egomania; and Alex Klein as Amaneuensis, the sorceror’s assistant, delivered an intense speech about the sorrows of acting, but really stole the show as Geronte, collapsing in woe when his daughter leaves him for her lover.

Near the end, the sorceror proclaims, “The art of illusion is the art of love,” and it gives theater a major role in understanding love. But after we have witnessed how characters play at love, how deceit, passion, and even parenthood are roles, we can see too how the words might be reversed.

Meanwhile, at the Yale Cabaret, Michael McQuilken’s production of A Day In Dig Nation, a play he wrote with Willy Smith, supports the idea of theater as a bag of tricks conjured by a sorceror: A single character, Rex, stands in front of a screen where images alter as fast as his imagination. All interaction is accomplished by incredibly accurate sound effects and a cast of voices like in old radio shows. It’s illusionistic in a way that the more stagey scenes at Dramat weren’t.

Rex is a dead-in-life slacker whose entire life consists of illusions — or, as we say these days, simulacra. His most involving past-time is playing a video game, “Starving Artist” — in which he faces obstacles like getting out of bed, making the neighbor turn down his stereo, or, one of the most amusing segments, fielding problematic customers as a waiter eager to score points.

But there’s a scary side to Rex. He often drifts into a fantasy (as real as anything in this world of illusions) of a post-apocalyptic world where he lives in a bunker wearing a gas mask, trying to connect — or not — with a female survivor.

As Rex, Will Connelly gives an engagingly frenetic performance, a protean display of mannerisms from goo-goo-eyed infant to crooning torch singer to self-conscious savior of a woman and child in an accident.

That major action — which seems at first another fantasy — intrudes reality into this wasted life, but seems so unreal it leaves us wondering, if, like the father in The Illusion, we would know reality if we saw it, and, if we saw it, would we want it.

Donald Brown is a regular contributor to The New Haven Review (newhavenreview.com).