Imagine you are in a large auditorium, with a diversity of other people, and a complete stranger looks you right in the face and asks you if you have a Problem what might you say? If your name is Julia Masli, a clown from Estonia, you might not allow the stranger to be mute and not reply, You’d better come up with a “problem”pronto. Hopefully it’s a difficulty that can be solved in seventy interesting moments at that, especially if you are at the Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven and the evening is entitled “Ha, Ha, Ha,Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha” until February 7.
Julia appears as a Geisha personality, a soft spoken clown clad in a royal blue gown with an abundance of arms and legs, part psychologist , part entertainer, part conversationalist. When she walks, bells ring. She cares about people and what makes them tick and ticks them off. If she can solve their problems, all the better. If a member of the audience is cold, Julia will seek to warm them up by encouraging neighboring patrons to share their coats, scarves and sweaters. If she takes your chair, she promptly breaks it into pieces and then challenges you to put it back together.
If you are feeling sorry for yourself and missing your mother Mindy in Chicago, she will conveniently find a phone and treat you to a friendly phone call. It is even funnier when mom isn’t home and has to call you back. At least one graduate student in theater is plagued with money trouble, while another is hungry. A large pizza magically falls from the sky to feed the masses. Two sisters switch identities while a whole family tries to solve disagreements in a peaceful manner. A young man who experiences writer’s block is encouraged to sit at a desk on stage and contemplate a change of study. He needs to research a topic more intriguing than statistics.
While the man hammering his chair back together is annoyingly noisy, a debate rages on about colonialism and capitalism and how best to rebuild a broken world by giving things away. One tired girl is tucked into a toasty bed and told to take a restful nap while an evil man is sent to the showers to cleanse his soul. He is a symbol of the bad things we are to let go of tonight along with our stress and our worries. If you can spare one sock, Julia would like you to donate it to her cause and she proceeds to burn it. The engineer then reviews all the “problems” of the evening to show how successful Julia is with her tasks, in solving all she tackled. Clearly the world is not without its needs and if we work together so much can be accomplished. Kim Noble directs this unusual form of entertainment presented by A Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company Touring Production.
For tickets ($15-65 limited availability), call the Yale Rep, 1120 Chapel Street, New Haven at 203-432-1234 or online at yalerep.org. Friday 8 p.m. and Saturday 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. are virtually sold out.
Let Julia Masli invite you to enter her world of improvisation and examine your personal problems with the hope of making your individual world a better place to live and to play.
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