A Note from the Cab Team

For our last show of the year, we end back to the beginning of what theater is truly about. We go back to simpler, more innocent times when our we suspended our imagination for the sake of play as children. We start our last show with puppets—an innocent inanimate object that takes on whatever look or shape or perspective we prescribe it. It becomes shaped by whatever kind of storytelling captures us in the moment. As we reflect on our season, it’s only fitting that we gather around closely and allow ourselves to believe, imagine, and dare I say, “sniff” our way back to a kind of intimacy that theater is all about.

For our last show of the year, we thank you. We thank all our artists and collaborators and supporters and the community for continuing to show up for us. This year, we lovingly named ourselves Parachute: A Soft Landing. As promised, the ride has not always been smooth, but the views have been breathtaking. We couldn’t have asked for a better year. And now, that we’ve launched, it’s time for our arrival—please enjoy this playful touchdown, Tobie, which is representative of the softest landing we could have imagined.

-Jason, Kayodè

A Note from the Translator/Director

& Ashley

To be perfectly honest, I can’t quite believe we are all here. I met Tobie in Fall 2021, a semester full of uncertainty and skepticism, while taking Paul Walsh’s Translation class. Initially, I approached the task of translating this play with a lot of doubts, mostly about my own abilities.

But Tobie has no time for doubt. It is a play in which magic is unequivocally real and the impossible happens every day. It has an elegantly declamatory angel and a crudely hilarious demon, slapstick humor and reverent expressions of faith. Without an English translation available, each page I translated of Maurice Bouchor’s 1889 Symbolist adaptation of the Book of Tobit (an apocryphal Old Testament text) brought giggles of confusion, cackles of delight, and head-scratching discoveries:

The fish did WHAT? The feast description is how many pages? Shakespeare gets a mention? What is happening?!

Without doubt, Tobie is a really weird play. It is also a rather simple story. At its heart is Tobie, our easily overwhelmed hero, who just wants to be a good son and a good man. Buffeted back and forth by divine and demonic forces, he is trying to do his best, to make his family proud, and to be brave enough for love.

I have loved working on this play. From the first pages we aloud in class, through the year of jokingly—and then not so jokingly— imagining staging it here at the Cab, to these last few weeks of working with this incredible team and experimenting with puppets, it has brought me enormous joy.