Biz Re-Blossoms

one I cared about,” he said. “I think that pushed me. A big part of it is also my faith, to serve others like Jesus did.”

“Whew,” Walton, 63, was saying during a short lull. “From now on, it’s going to be simple, one bucket of flowers, real simple. Mondays, because their girlfriend or someone is mad at them, they’re going to need a flower, but not everyday. I’m old now. I’m too old. Back in the day, I’m flexible. I could move. Everything going to be sore tomorrow.”

“It’ll be a nice sore,” said Seraina Berger, who introduced herself as another of Miss Annette’s friends, along with her husband Andreas Berger, a post-doc at the Divinity School.

“You good?” Walton asked her. “How’s your leg?”

“I’m good,” Berger said. “Glad you’re back.”

At that moment, Jennifer Klein, a professor of history, alighted from HQ, greeting Walton.

“She always asks about family,” she said. “She wants to know how your kids are doing. She really thinks about other people, and I think she sees herself as part of the Yale community, which I think she is.” lence in Performing Arts and has a BFA from Southern Methodist University. He will receive his MFA in acting this spring at Yale. The Cab experience has been a great opportunity to “see behind the scenes,” he said. As an actor, he plays “one role, a body onstage,” but the Cab has caused him to “learn all the moving parts” and to “see all aspects of the process.” is “only risk and commitment. No assignments only invitations.” A place, as Gray said, where theater-makers may “dare greatly.” The parachute, he added, is bound to face “some turbulence in our Covid-afflicted times.”

Black-owned restaurants, the Anchor Spa. Chef Kendall’s offerings have been a hit, but the restriction that all food and beverages are consumed by curtain time puts a burden on the staff. Shows tend to start 20 – 30 minutes beyond the scheduled time. Eat faster, friends!

All these factors make Cab 55 a unique event in its own right, a brave creative venture worthy of the success it is enjoying. The Cab 55 team has proven itself resourceful, resilient and deservedly proud of its unprecedented place in the vital theatrical history of the Yale Cabaret.

The Season So Far

Kayode Soyemi, Ashley Thomas, Jason Gray. Blood-spattered limbs. Wigs and heels. A marriage in trouble. Angels and demons, birds and fish. All of these and more are part of the Yale Cabaret’s current season, as it has returned to in-person dining and theater under an inspired and historic artistic team pursuing the venerable old goal of delivering the shock of the new.

That familiarity might explain the outpouring of support in the effort to help Walton secure a license to sell her flowers.

Which means that the current graduating class of 2023 are the previously unusual fourth-years, admitted in 2019. As such, they’re the last group to remember the school before the pandemic, while the current first-years are the first this decade to experience a fully functioning Cab right from the start.

Now, if ever, is the time to pass the torch. The artistic and managing directors of the Cab’s 2022 – 23 season — Jason Gray, Kayodè Soyemi, and Ashley M. Thomas — are all fourth-years in the school and the first all-Black leadership team ever in the Cab’s 55 years. When the team realized they would be expected to reopen the Cab’s kitchen, they brought in the enthusiastic participation of Kendall Thigpen, the head chef at one of New Haven’s

Meet The Team

Jason Gray, the current executive artistic director, served the Yale Summer Cabaret 2020 as co-managing director. He will receive an MFA from the DGSD and an MBA from the Yale School of Management in 2023, and has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania. He has worked as an actor in New York and elsewhere and was a founding program director of the Black Arts Institute at the Billie Holiday Theatre in Brooklyn. For him, the Cab 55 season makes him feel “like a proud papa,” learning what it means to “give birth to something and be responsible for it.”

Kayodè Soyemi, producing artistic director, is a first-generation NigerianAmerican actor, writer, producer and interdisciplinary artist. Soyemi “writes impossible pieces that use language, popculture, and world history to investigate charged topics.” He graduated from the HSPVA Cobb County Center for Excel-

Ashley M. Thomas, producing artistic director, hails from Harlem and explores “the intersections of culture, politics, and Beyoncé through a Black feminist lens.” She’s an MFA candidate studying dramaturgy and dramatic criticism and expects to graduate in May 2023. Her background includes dramaturgy at Rattlestick in New York, Utah Shakespeare Festival, and Yale Rep. She has a bachelor’s degree in social work from University ofWisconsin-Madison and has done arts administration work at Roundabout and Classical Theatre of Harlem, among others. For her, the Cab demonstrates “why community is so important. It’s a question of who will show up for you,” she said. In March 2020, she was collaborating with Gray on staging Ain’t No Dead Thing by a.k. payne, when Covid interrupted; the show went up as a radio play instead. Theater nurtures relationships, and Thomas stressed that the Cab requires and inspires a communal feeling for those who “love and care for it.”

Last weekend the Cab continued its roll for the season. The year opened with a appropriately melodramatic and bloodsoaked evening of Grand Guignol. The Cab then staged a high-spirited Dragaret early this month (a Drama School tradition 10 years running). and a Black queer take on Sondheim’s “Marry Me a Little” the previous weekend.

The Yale Cabaret, located in a basement at 217 Park St., has been through some changes of late. Founded in 1968 as a location for experimental theater and run by students at the then-Yale School of Drama, the Cab, as it is generally known, had to close its doors in March 2020 when the pandemic

Nacht, Zhang said, helped “work out the logistics of going to City Hall, filling out the forms, applying for licenses, going back and forth with the ward.” Others assisted in setting up a bank account, and with understanding regulations and other financial matters.

“People kept coming forward,” he said, as the flower lady wrestled with the bouquet of balloons.

“They’re not cooperating,” she said, finally freeing a heart-shaped one.

The Cab 55 team is called Parachute, which they see as a “soft umbrella,” “a space for trial and error” where there

Udo — Igbo for “peace” — is a new play written by the two actors who played in it: Abigail C. Onwunali and Nomè SiDone (both Acting ’23), directed by Bobbin Ramsey (Directing ’24). Amarchi (Onwunali) and Kelechi (SiDone) are a Nigerian immigrant couple, still childless. Kelechi is working on a doctorate; Amarchi works in a hospital. In the midst of their overworked lives, Amarchi wants passionately to rejuvenate the marriage. She dons a skimpy baby doll dress, reads Playgirl for tips, indulges in expensive perfume, and struts her stuff with reckless abandon. Kelechi isn’t unresponsive, but much of the entertainment in their attempts at coupling comes from our voyeuristic view of how easily a departure from routine becomes a chore, how embarrassing a failure at connection can be. The scenes are funny, awkward, sexy and, increasingly, desperate. A phone call brings news that

“Keep the change,” said student Nick Aldana.

“At a certain point we were very discouraged,” Zhang recalled. “The city was not letting her vend downtown and the weather was getting colder and colder. Annette was frustrated too.”

“You back again?” Walton was saying. “How many girlfriends you have?”

After “a lot of back and forth with City Hall and the local government,” as Zhang put it, the license came through in midJanuary. They decided to wait until Valentine’s Day.

“That was Adam’s brilliant idea,” said Nacht. He looked at the queue of smiling faces.

“This really warms my heart. She’s making a lot of people happy, it’s a gorgeous day, and you couldn’t ask for much more.”