Many angles to this Angel

Pornographic Angel
Through July 14 at the Summer Cabaret at Yale, 217 Park St., New Haven. (203) 432-1567, summercabaret.org.

The Summer Cabaret at Yale has asserted that its production of Pornographic Angel is not to be reviewed by theater critics. It's a workshop of a piece that has been developed over a long period of time, by Tantrum Theater—which despite the company name clearly doesn't like to rush things or make a lot of unnecessary noise.

This New Haven visit is, in fact, the first time Tantrum has performed Pornographic Angel before an audience. The proper world premiere won't come until September, at the Ohio Theatre in New York City. You can read reviews then.

I'm fine with that. I've seen overeager critics shortchange works-in-progress plenty of times—I've even done it a few times myself. I've seen Pornographic Angel, as I've unproddedly seen nearly every Summer Cabaret show of the past 20 years, and am happy to sit this one out and pass no judgement whatsoever.

Besides, this is a show about the infinite mysteries of human nature, so a little suspense and suspicion should come naturally to it.

If you want to know what the show's about, you need only peruse the piles of newspaper columns, plays, novels and other writings by Nelson Rodrigues. "Pornographic angel" is how Rodrigues referred to himself, and Tantrum Theatre (which has produced stage versions of other Rodrigues writings, as well as works by Federico García Lorca, Gabriel García Márquez and its own ensemble) has culled eight of his short, sharp stories into one 75-minute evening. I won't say more, except that, true to the poster image, there are balloons and sad women. Oh, it's also multi-media, with projections and film and dance and such.

If you're familiar with the works of Ben Hecht beyond The Front Page and Twentieth Century, namely the reams of short life-in-all-its-gory-splendor columns he wrote for newspapers like the Chicago Daily News and New York's PM, then you might call Rodrigues a Brazilian Ben Hecht. He has the same fervor to walk the streets and uncover gritty day-to-day stories about why people end up being so nasty to one another.

Tantrum Theatre, which officially formed in 2006 but grew from longstanding collaborations between some of its members, has the requisite New York City cred for such multi-media, multicultural, avant-garde and literary work, but a couple of Connecticut connections as well. Pornographic Angel's director, and the first performer you see in it, is Claudia Nascimento, who teaches theater at Wesleyan University in Middletown. One of her students there, Sara Bremen, graduated in 2005 and is now part of the Tantrum ensemble. The other core members, each of whom essays numerous roles throughout Angels, are Jeff Morrison, Tom Rabstenek, Paul de Sousa and Perri Yaniv.

This isn't the first time the Yale Summer Cabaret has kept critics at bay. Just last summer the space's previous management (it changes administrative hands annually, with rare exceptions) presented a workshop of Tea Alagic's autobiographical Bosnian refugee drama Zero Hour. It's true that unreviewable workshops tend to be on the dark, experimental side. Pornographic Angel, I can report, is also on the hot side, presented not in the Cabaret's accustomed basement space (though that's where you still eat dinner before this show) but upstairs in an area usually used as a rehearsal but which is outfitted with a sweet little proscenium stage. More air conditioning is definitely needed up there, especially when the show is playing to large audiences—the non-opening night I attended was full, and the July 11 performance is already sold out.

carnott@newhavenadvocate.com