In her internationally acclaimed one-woman show “Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha,” Julia Masli transforms a crowd into an interactive immersive and hyperphysical art event. The results can seem alternately astounding and amateurish.
The show, directed by Kim Noble, was a hit at the Ediburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland in 2023, played New York and other cities last year and is now on a sort of regional theater tour that has taken Masli to the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington D.C. (the producers of the tour), to the Pasadena Playhouse in California and now New Haven, where she’ll be performing “Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha” at the Yale Repertory Theatre through Feb. 7.
Masli is billed as an Estonian clown, but she’s not exactly a clown even in the modern performance art sense. In the contemporary circus theater context, she’s more of a ringmaster or an emcee, coaxing others to make art or share feelings or just take care of themselves in public. In a social, psychological context, Masli is a facilitator, a quirky social worker with a golden leg for an arm, an upswept hairstyle that’s half hair and half hat, a makeshift blue gown that might’ve once been a blanket and a soft-spoken soothing presence.
Her quiet, helpful, good-listener attitude is a bit of a fake-out since Masli gets in and stays in audience members’ faces, convincing them to share personal thoughts, contribute theories on the current state of the world and even take off their socks for a ritualistic burning ceremony scheduled for Feb. 2.
At times, “Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha” uncomfortably resembles one of those spiritualist medium shows where a vague, generalized utterance is spun into something that’s meant to seem miraculous. But Masli is not professing to read minds, she is offering to solve problems and bond people through art.
She dives into the audience with her microphone and confronts theatergoers directly. “Problem?,” she inquires. One person says their seat is uncomfortable, so she puts them to work, on the stage, reassembling a chair she’d smashed to bits in the first few minutes of the show. Someone says they’re feeling tired, so Masli rolls a bed out onto the stage and has the tired person get under the sheets, fitted with a sleep mask and noise-masking headphones. The slumberer stays bedridden for the entire performance. An audience member says they’re achey from a long day’s work, and another audience member is enlisted to give them a massage, onstage, on cushions donated from audience members who had been sitting on them.
At least that’s what happened at the opening night performance of “Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha,” which followed two previews. The Jan. 22 show was skewed by the fact that the auditorium was full of students and faculty from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, the school with which Yale Rep is affiliated. With so many actors, teachers and those who are comfortable in a theater community in the room, articulate, confident and exhibitionist volunteers are easy to find, but results on other nights will undoubtedly vary widely. As for Masli herself, she has strong interactive ad lib skills and easily raises big laughs from an audience that is largely in her thrall. There are also some finely tuned physical comedy bits that go over very well, especially when the mood has gotten unexpectedly dark and a break is needed.
If you would rather observe a performance than actively participate in it, it’s advised that you don’t book an aisle seat, or one in front rows, or one in the middle of the auditorium, or virtually anywhere except the very back. Masli covers a lot of ground in search of people with problems. In my case, my fear that I would be plucked to join in led me to approach an usher before “Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha” began and express my concerns that I didn’t want to be involved. I was told that I should keep the aisle seat, that Masli was considerate and gracious and that I should simply not “make eye contact.” I am experienced from childhood shyness in the art of not making eye contact, but “Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha” made it very hard not to look at Masli as she swept up the aisles with her golden mannequin leg and microphone, and one of her urgings in my general direction caused me to mouth “Not me!”
“Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha” is a theatrical, technical, communal, psychosocial, electric and unsettling event. It blurs the lines between performer and audience, individuality and shared experience, skilled artistry and awkward improvisation and random occurrence. Masli incorporates a lot of danger elements into her performance. There are props that can break or splat. She lets some of the people she interviews talk at great length. It’s not all riveting. Quite a bit of it can get boring. Ultimately all the onstage antics, animated chats, streams of consciousness and special effects cohere into a dreamscape. There’s a surprise element toward the end of the show that neatly wraps all the disparate spoken segments together.
The whole experience can either be mind-blowing or overwhelming depending on your state of mind and whether you’ve experienced anything like “Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha” before. It’s funny to think of a seemingly unique stage event like this as part of a genre, but there truly is a continuum of shared theatrical experiences that bear some similarity to this one that you can trace back to the Happenings of the 1960s, the experimental theater movement of the ‘70s, performance art of the ‘80s, multimedia music/theater meldings of the ‘90s and beyond.
Masli, who is assisted in real time by a live sound designer and other astute, attuned technical designers, sets out to achieve a lot. In 75 minutes, using only herself and a couple hundred audience members, she hopes to construct a peaceful, aware, openly communicative environment where art triumphs over harsh realities of the world. She hopes to solve problems individual and global. You’re kind of watching her perform but you’re mainly watching her work, just like you’re watching somebody fix a chair or receive a back massage. “Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha” is not a joke. It’s an effort, a shared one and you get out of it what you bring to it.
“Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha,” created and performed by Julia Masli and directed by Kim Noble, runs through Feb. 7 at the Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel St., New Haven. Performances are Tuesday through Friday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m. with an added Wednesday matinee at 2 p.m. on Jan. 27. $15-$65. yalerep.org.