Kayode Soyemi

The Light

Yale Cabaret

Tobie

Every Brilliant Thing

Dr. Ride's American Beach House

Udo

Marry Me a Little

DRAGARET

Hot and Cold Showers

The International Collaborations Festival

Four Meddling Kids and One Dumb Dog

Tempo & The Master's Tools

There is a Thing at the End of the Loop

PRODUCER

Yale Cabaret Season 55: Parachute

Jason Gray, Executive Artistic Producer
Kayodè Soyemi, Producing Artistic Director
Ashley M. Thomas, Producing Artistic Director

Yale Cabaret 55 is a transition; a space to place your art and watch it transform. We do not suggest that your art begins or ends with us, but it will change with us. We invite our community to take risks with us. Failure is not an option; it is an illusion. Like Pantone Color of the Year: Very Peri, we know that “as we emerge from an intense period of isolation, our notions and standards are changing, and our physical and digital lives have merged in new ways.” We seek to be a holding space to explore these changes. Cabaret 55 is a shared experiment of what it means to come back to theater.

In 1968, David Geffen School of Drama at Yale students established a basement performance venue in the former home of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity at 217 Park Street. Envisioned as an alternative outlet for drama school students’ creativity and experimentation, Yale Cabaret became a forum for our expanded New Haven communities, whom we invite to gather around food, drink, conversation, fellowship, and artistry.

Since its founding, the Cabaret has remained in continuous operation, producing hundreds of plays, old and new, alongside musicals and musical revues, comedy shows, dance, performance art, and genre-defying performance. Artists who spent the early days of their careers at Yale Cabaret include Meryl Streep, Angela Bassett, Wendy Wasserstein, Sigourney Weaver, Christopher Durang, John Turturro, Lynn Nottage, Anna D. Shapiro, Henry Winkler, David Alan Grier, Tony Shalhoub, Paul Giamatti, Liev Schreiber, Trip Cullman, Melissa James Gibson, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Lupita Nyong’o, and many hundreds more. Each generation of School of Drama students renews the Cabaret with their talent and energy.

Every year, a new student leadership team curates its season from School of Drama student proposals—uplifting peers’ passions, impulses, and curiosities. With evening and late night performances on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, our basement offers ever-changing, ever-surprising experiences to all who enter.

"Notable among their many accomplishments were the reintroduction of food and beverage service, the championing of community building activities, dynamic fundraising, and, most of all, the curation of an adventurous and provocative season of 11 shows in what remains a deeply challenging environment for theatrical production. Their consistently resourceful and optimistic approaches to their work and their audiences were precious gifts to us all." - Dean James Bundy

yalecabaret.org

Next to Normal

there is a thing at the end of the loop

burnbabyburn: an American dream

Pass Over

Kayodè Soyemi & Austin Sasser. Photos by Andrew Greto

By Antoinette Nwandu
Directed by Christina Franklin

Chester Theatre Company

Queen Chevy (Stage Manager), Nadir Bey (Scenic Designer), Madeleine Hebert (Lighting Designer), Kelsey Rainwater (Fight and Intimacy Director), Sarafina Bush (Costume Designer), James McNamara (Sound Designer), Andrew Greto (Photos)

Kayodè Soyemi (Moses), Austin B. Sasser (Kitch), James Barry (Mister/Ossifer)

“Soyemi and Sasser are perfectly matched as two young Black men whose survival depends on their friendship and bond of trust.” -Jeffrey Borack, Berkshire Eagle

“For all the strength and savvy displayed by Soyemi’s Moses and Sasser’s Kitch, there is an endearing innocence and vulnerability in their game-playing, their tussling.” -Jeffrey Borack, Berkshire Eagle

“The most stimulating, challenging and heartbreaking play I’ve seen this year” -Chris Rohmann, Valley Advocate

“Both actors did a good job sounding so real and the dialogue never felt forced. It was all as real as the profanity-laced rants they both throw out. No reason to sugarcoat this shitty life.” -Max Hartshorne, ReadUpOnIt

“Austin B. Sasser is the more wide-eyed, optimistic of the pair and his hopefulness makes you wish for the best while Kayodè Soyemi seems to know the price required to enter the Promised Land and watching him puts you on edge for the reckoning. The two have a blast playing off each other and fill the house with joy early in the play which makes the trip the play takes us on that much more profound.” -Patrick White, Nippertown

“Kayodè Soyemi is brilliant as Moses. Given the name of a leader of his people, Soyemi runs away with the play, leading the excellent Austin B. Sasser through the adventures on a street corner that both characters live through.” -J. Peter Bergman, Berkshire Edge