Lindbergh’s Flight

By Bertolt Brecht. Presented by Kate Attwell, Gabe Levey, Brenda Meaney and Mitchell Winter.

Through March 16 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., New Haven. Remaining performances are Friday and Saturday at 8 & 11 p.m. $15, $10 students. (203) 432-1566. http://yalecabaret.org

In its time, Lindbergh’s Flight marked a turning point in the theater writings of Bertolt Brecht. It was in some ways the start of the “didactic” style which colored his works for decades afterwards. It was a contemporary “learning play, or Lehrstück, based on a major news event of the time in which it was written: Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 flight across the Atlantic Ocean. The script was presented on radio in 1929, then revised in concert form as a cantata for orchestra, chorus and solo vocalists. It got good reviews and further productions, and Brecht himself thought enough of it to continue revising and rethinking the piece decades after its premiere.

The essential plot concerns the flyer of an airplane describing his preparations for flying acorss the Atlantic Ocean, while some rivals mention their attempt to make the trip first and thwart the flier of his glory. The play’s themes, which extend to the very medium in which it was first broadcast, involve technological innovation and international one-upmanship.

The Yale Cabaret is refueling Lindbergh’s Flight this weekend, in a fresh reinterpretation by Kate Attwell, Gabe Levey, Brenda Meaney and Mitchell Winter. It opened last night and runs through Saturday March 16. (I’ll be seeing the show late tonight, and posting a review here tomorrow.)

Levey, Meaney and Winter are students in the acting program at the Yale School of Drama. Attwell is in the school’s dramaturgy program but has distinguished herself at the Cabaret as a director, most recently with her triumphant production of Athol Fugard’s The Island. For this production, they’re eschewing titles like “director” and pushing for an ensemble, collaborative outlook.

The team all worked on one of the YSD’s in-class “Drama 50” shows together, and “wanted to work together again in the style we’d created.”

Did that style happen to be didactic mid-20^th century German radio opera? Not at all, but when the students went looking for interesting scripts to apply their newfound communal experimental skills to, “somehow the idea of Brecht came up,” Attwell says. I interviewed her and Levey earlier this month at Book Trader about the project. “We started looking at the lesser-known ones, and stumbled across Lindbergh.

“Brecht went through this period of writing short plays about people who are performing the plays while learning about their subjects.” This so-called “learning play for children,” the first in a subset of Brecht’s work dubbed “didactic plays,” was a good fit for their own social/political/theatrical explorations.

With some scripts, when you hear they’ve been reworked from top to bottom, you worry. With Brecht, who wrote about very topical subjects happening in a very specific place in a very specific style at a very specific time of history for a very specific audience, some measure of reinterpretation is always required. “It’s safe to say,” says Gabe Levey, “that we’ve been irreverently reverent.” They were encouraged in their rewrites by the fact that Brecht himself reworked his script a number of times to keep up with changing views about its purported hero and the culture’s sense of how the world could be brought closer together—or dominated—by the power of radio waves and transcontinental transportation. “The number of rewrites that this poor little play went through…,” Levey sympathizes, regarding Brecht’s original manuscript. “And yet there’s only one published text,” of 19 pages in length.

Another key element which changed over time was how Lindbergh is portrayed in Lindbergh’s Flight. At first, Brecht made him a stand-alone character. Then, as world events exposed the aviator’s Nazi-sympathizer side, Brecht revised the play so that the title character’s voice and image  were diluted and no longer represented by a single actor. (The title of the play was also changed from Der Lindberghflug to Der Ozeanflug.) “We have been grappling with the narrative of Lindbergh,” Attwell says. “The history of the play is that it goes from one Lindbergh to eight Lindberghs to no Lindbergh at all.” In this rendition, the character is played by “one person, sometimes, most of the time.”

Another wrinkle, adds Levey: “We’re not opera singers. We don’t even know if we could get the rights to perform the Weill music.” During Brecht’s work on it, the play’s musical score by Paul Hindemith (whose outstanding career as a composer and music theorist included decades of influential teachings at Yale) was augmented with tunes by Brecht’s frequent collaborator Kurt Weill. None of this music figures in the Yale Cabaret production.

Oh, and… “[Lindbergh’s Flight] is not even meant to be performed.” Live onstage, that is. It’s a opera written for radio. “The text is lyrics, not dialogue. There are problems we’ve had to solve dramatically.” Adds Levey, with Brechtian portentousness: “All of our devising and aesthetics, all our history, are coming to bear on this.” Some of the solutions come through sound design, dance movement and original music. Cast-wise, the show’s cast and chorus has been modified to a four-person ensemble. “We thought about video, but left that behind.” The show isn’t overtly technical, Levey explains: “All the technical elements you can see in what’s actually being done onstage. It’s like ‘Welcome to our room.’”

Ultimately, though, the show seeks to honor Brecht’s intention, not ironicize or overrun them. As Gabe Levey puts it, choosing his words carefully, “When Lindbergh’s Flight is performed within our show, it is Lindbergh’s Flight.”

That carefully parsed explanation is followed by this: “But Lindbergh’s Flight does not a full theater performance make.” The show as written clocks in at well under half an hour, and even Brecht paired it with another piece to make for a fuller evening. In this case, the length and the nature of the piece invite the addition of other presentational elements which can acclimate it to modern times and performance methods.

Some of the alterations in tone and concept come from the very act of trying to stage the piece at the Cabaret. “There’s inherent humor in it,” Levey says, because of the operatic lyrics, transformed, with fairly with fairly didactic content. There’s that idealism. Brecht writes this in the 1920s. Ninety years later, the ideas are pretty complicated now. We wanted to figure out how to make this work now. How can we be fun and open and communicating with the audience?” They found some understanding just in the attempt. Levey and Attwell quote one of their collaborators and castmates on the project, Brenda Meaney, as saying, “Being in a room with strangers, being totally vulnerable, is a way of being that is totally a political statement.” To which Levey adds, “We’re tickling the idea of actors acting.” The process of creating the show—a fairly lengthy process for a Cabaret project, due to its collaborative nature—was kept upbeat and exploratory. When approaching designers, Attwell and Levey say, they weren’t looking for technicians but for “playmates” whose imagination could help further the collective vision.

Levey has never done a Brecht show before, as an actor or otherwise. Levey was involved in a production of Caucasian Chalk Circle when she was younger. Brecht does get intensively studied at the Yale School of Drama, however, so the Lindbergh’s Flight team feels they’re on firm footing (or walking in the clouds, if you’d rather).

Astute Cabaret-goers can relate the themes of disorienting air travel and finding one’s place in the universe found in Lindbergh’s Flight to original works by Attwell and Levey which played at the Cabaret space in the 2011-12 season. hundredyearspacetrip, a collaborative piece created by the We Buy Gold theater troupe which Attwell co-founded with Nina Segal, was a meditation on life paths not taken, wrapped up in a parable of space exploration. Levey’s solo show Brainsongs, or the play about the dinosaur farm, was, in part, about slowing the world down so it can be appreciated and managed. Both shows blended high comedy with abstractions. Both examined technology, with overt placement of microphones or lip-synching interludes.

The team’s special relationship as classmates and scholars and artists promises a thought-provoking reworking of a rarely-seen yet undeniably important Brecht one-act.

“We’re really excited to put it out there,” Gabe Levey exults. “And meet this weirdo text head-on.”

http://blog.amandapalmer.net

They even used the School of Drama’s recording studio at 205 Park Street to record a cover of the Nirvana song “Polly” for a Nevermind tribute album included with the August issue of SPIN magazine. You can download that album here:

http://www.spin.com/articles/free-album-spin-tribute-nirvanas-nevermind

Long before Chad Raines and Michael McQuilken came to campus, the Yale Cabaret had a notable hit with a blending of Chekhov’s early play Ivanov and the Nirvana saga, cleverly titled Nirvanov.
Everything old is new again. And Chad Raines is still one of the simple pleasures of our existence.

Spectral Scriabin, a collaboration of piano and lights performed by Eteri Andjaparidze and designed by Yale's own Jennifer Tipton, comes to the university's No Boundaries series in February. Photo by Chris Lee.

The series’ 2011-12 slate was announced last week. It represents a rare and longrunning collaboration between the undergraduate Yale Theater Studies program’s World Performance Project and the Yale School of Drama graduate program. No Boundaries presents three visiting theater or dance companies a year. Beyond the performances, there are usually related workshops and seminars. The series tends to go for artists that are pushing the bound…—let’s just say envelope this time—of language and established theatrical formats.
No Boundaries has offered an exhilarating range of good to bad, with indifference never an option.

Here they come, boundarying in:
• Nov. 3-5: The American premiere of Engagement Feminin: An Evening of West African Contemporary Dance with the Burkina Faso-based company Art’Dev/Compagnie Auguste-Bienvenue. Art’Dev is a truncation of Association Artistique Développement. The directors are Auguste Ouedraogo and Bienvenue Bazie, both of whom are in their early 30s; they founded Art’Dev in 2000. While Ouedraogo and Bazie are male, they are conscious of the lack of dances by and about women in West Africa. The hour-long Engagement Feminin piece, in which dancers “explore the everyday choices the women of their communities make,” is part of that outreach.

• Feb. 10-11: Spectral Scriabin, a solo piano concert by Eteri Andjaparidze enhanced by “illumination” of renowned stage lighting designer Jennifer Tipton.
The Russian-born but now New York-based, Andjaparidze was at Yale just last year, doing Schumann duets with Boris Berman for the School of Music’s Horowitz Piano Series. Jennifer Tipton is a leading light ‘round these parts: the 2008 MacArthur fellow teaches at the Yale School of Drama and her recent theater lighting designs include The Glass Menagerie at Long Wharf and Autumn Sonata at Yale Rep.
Such “illuminated” concerts were a huge deal on the festival circuit a few years ago—lightshow enhancements for those who’d grown up on Pink Floyd laser shows and who’d learned to sit still for classical music. Tipton’s the top artist you could hope to get for such an endeavor, and compose Scriabin himself would likely have approved of the format: he experimented with various linkings of sound, light and color, and may have had the neurological condition synesthesia, which heightens one’s sensitivity to sound to the point where it’s similar to taste or vision. The hour-long event contains excerpts from the composer’s Poeme Languide in B Major, Feuillet d’Album in F Sharp Major and Opus Posthumous.
Spectral Scriabin was performed last October at New York’s Baryshknikov Arts Center and has a California gig shortly after this Yale one.

• March 23 & 24: Neva, written and directed by Chilean political theater artist Guillermo Calderón and performed by his ensemble Teatro en el Blanco.
The Yale Rep (Three Sisters) and the Yale School of Drama (The Seagull) are both checking into Chekhov, so why not No Boundaries? Guillermo Calderon’s Neva, performed in Spanish with supertitles, is an original work set in 1905, after Chekhov’s death. On a darkly lit rehearsal stage in 1905 , the playwright’s widow Olga Knipper laments his passing, and also the passing of a way of life and a way of performing.
I was in Los Angeles this past summer, where Neva was a hit attraction at the Radar L.A. festival. One of my esteemed colleagues at the Engine28 website project, Kerry Lengel, reviewed the show, here. Another Engine28er, Ben Waterhouse, posed a technical question to Calderon—how come he staged this ostensibly historical drama around a modern space-heater appliance? Answer here.

Guillermo Calderon's Neva. Photo by Pepe Murrieta.

For Boundaries details, go here, and don’t forget about all the related symposia, talkbacks and workshops. This is an especially interactive and multi-faceted series, befitting the fresh and sometimes challenging concepts No Boundaries brings to town.

Casting hasn’t been announced yet, but the directors this year should provide their own surge of interest. This has been a particularly creative, experimentally minded clas, as evidenced by the works these directors have done at the Yale Cabaret in recent semesters.

Here’s the line-up:

Oct. 25-29: Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. Actually the libretto for an uncomposed opera, Stein’s 1938 script is generally presented as a stand-alone play. Connecticut was special place for Stein: her Four Saints in Three Acts had a spectacular world premiere at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford; her good friend Thornton Wilder lived in Hamden; and (encouraged by Wilder and by the novelist/critic Carl Van Vechten) donated her papers to Yale in the 1940s.

Lileana Blain-Cruz is the ensemble-friendly director behind one of my favorite Yale Cabaret shows of the past few seasons, a multi-media deconstruction of Oscar Wilde’s Salome.

Dec. 10-16: Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, directed by Louisa Proske. How often do you get to see a Cymbeline? Proske did a better-known, and funnier, though no less romantic, play of the bard’s—As You Like It—this past summer for the Yale Summer Cabaret.

Jan. 24-28: Chekhov’s The Seagull, directed by Alexandru Mihail. Again, Yale Cabaret audiences have already gotten a taste of what they might expect from a Yale School of Drama production. Mihail did the extraordinary, audience-interactive expansion of Chekhov’s one-act The Wedding Reception at the Cabaret last spring. As with The Wedding Reception, for his Seagull Mihail’s using a translation by the late great Paul Schmidt, who not channeled the voice of Chekhov like few others ever could, but had his own history of working with open-minded experimental companies and directors.

The Drama School’s had Chekhovs aplenty, but no Seagull is like another, and with all the play’s theater in-jokes, students flock to it like, well, birds.

Tickets for the Yale School of Drama shows are already on sale at drama.yale.edu, or at (203) 432-1234, and even at the Yale Rep box office.

Lovely time at the Yale Drama Series reading last night. Even with all the swearing, cat-antagonizing and murdering in Shannon Murdoch’s play, the annual event remained a most civilized affair. The series’ new judge, John Guare, was right there in the front row while Murdoch, who’d flown from Australia for the occasion, chose to sit in the back of the auditorium. Director Jackson Gay sat somewhere in the middle.

As at previous readings in the series, there was a chance to see recent Yale School of Drama grads return to campus for a special worknight. Emily Dorsch, a 2007 grad who previously returned to town to play the cheated-upon wife in Bossa Nova at the Yale Rep last season, was in New Light Shine, with her erstwhile classmate Alec Beard (whose student years included small roles in the Yale Rep productions of Lulu and The Cherry Orchard) played Dorsch’s boyfriend.

Sarah Sokolovic, who graduated just months ago (she was Jib in Michael McQuilken’s original music/theater piece Jib last winter) and already has a New York musical theater credit, as Betty in The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World. The cast was rounded out by Tobias Segal, whose stage and film roles range from James Keller in last year’s Broadway revival of The Miracle Worker to “Robert’s Friend” in Rocky Balboa. YSD dramaturgy student read the economical stage directions.

To me, the Yale Drama Series marks the real beginning of the Yale theater season. The Yale Cabaret season kicks in this weekend, the Rep next week, and the first rash of undergrad student shows isn’t far behind.

With the well-managed provocations of the Yale Drama Series, the university’s off to a fine start.

Tonight (Monday Sept. 12) marks the reading of the latest winner of the Yale Drama Series. The play is New Light Shine by Shannon Murdoch and is described as a drama in which “four small-town lives are linked through a violent crime.” The reading is directed by Jackson Gay, whose work I was regularly entranced with when she was a frequent director and occasional actor at the Yale Cabaret around a decade ago. I last saw Jackson Gay when she directed a reading of Romanian playwright Saviana Stanescu’s For a Barbarian Woman for the International Festival of Arts & Ideas’ Global Scenes series in 2008.

Nice to see a deserving writer applauded, and a creative director given an opportunity to revisit her alma mater. There’s another name to note at this point: John Guare, He’s the new Yale Drama Series judge. When the eminent playwright of Six Degrees of Separation, Bosoms and Neglect and House of Blue Leaves thinks you’ve written a fine new play about  how people relate in the world nowadays, that’s about as high a commendation as you can get.

Guare’s participation is the latest plum for the prize sponsors, since his predecessors as judges for the Yale Drama Series were Edward Albee and David Hare.

Tonight’s reading of New Light Shine is apparently sold out, though you can still try for waiting-list seats if you show up at 7 p.m. in the lobby of the Iseman Theater at 1156 Chapel St., where the reading will be held at 7:30 p.m.

New Light Shine’s sold-out status might make you wonder whether you’ll ever get a chance to experience this script again. After all, for a lot of prize-winning plays, the reading is the biggest exposure you can expect—especially for “literary” or “political” plays, which the Yale Prize winners often have been.

Such trepidation is not warranted with this particular prize, however. For starters, the Yale Drama Series awards its winners not just with a high-powered reading but with eventual publication of the script by the Yale University Press. (There’s also a $10,000 cash prize, thanks to the David Charles Horn Foundation which co-sponsors the series.)

I’ve attended most of these readings and own several of the published plays. High standards of presentation are evident in both enterprises. There’s also an impressive amount of cross-over: Yale Press editors can be seen in the audience at the readings, while the famed playwrights who’ve selected the works have provided forewords for the print editions.

As for the prospect of more (and fuller) productions, if you go to Walkerspace 46 Walker Street in New York City between Sept. 15 and Oct. 15, you can catch a performance of the 2009 Yale Drama Series winner, Francesca Ya-Chu Cowhig. Presented by Page 73. This New York premiere of Lidless is directed by Tea Alagic, herself a Yale graduate (class of ’07) well-remembered for her autobiographical project Zero Hour (which had a workshop production at the Yale Summer Cabaret before the much more lavish Yale School of Drama production which served as her thesis project). Alagic also helmed the Germanic, Expressionism-heavy Yale Summer Cabaret season of 2005.

Lidless concerns the unlikely reunion, in present-day Texas, of a female Army veteran and a man whom she interrogated/tortured while stationed at Guatanamo.

More Lidless info here.

It has never been my place, or my intention, to “review,” “critique,” or otherwise “assess” the works staged as part of The Carlotta Festival of New Plays. I have dutifully and eagerly covered the festival for its entire existence.

Yes, it could be argued that these are public performances, that they are written by seasoned Yale School of Drama writers who are mere days away from graduation, and (especially this year)  a coterie of industry professionals have been brought to New Haven to see them. (Schedule, tickets and other details can be found here.)

But I buy into the grander argument: they don’t need some tiresome local critic mucking up their fun.

I come to praise Carlotta, not to worry it. There is much more to write about than the ups and downs of specific productions.

The Carlotta festival, which stages three full productions of new plays every spring, is a wondrous learning experience for the participants, a wondrous community experience for Yale at large, a one-stop-shopping trip for theater agents and managers and producers, and—as I can personally scream from the rooftops—a terrific theatergoing experience for townies too.

The plays are by soon-to-graduate students from the Yale School of Drama graduate program. The plays are put on their feet by the writers’ classmates in the directing and design programs. The plays are profoundly better for being so given such respect and attention. They’re also better just for being staged at all; I can’t imagine how differently I might react if my first experience of these scripts were as unadorned readings. I’ve read some of them, and have seen how my instincts fail (and I think my instincts are pretty good) when envisioning how much grander a show can be with complete sets, costumes, lights, sounds and projections. They can be pretty damn grand.

One thing that’s bowled me over with all three Carlotta Plays this year is how impressive the sound design is. Three different challenges, all creatively met.  One designer, Jennifer Lynn Jackson, had to build a sonic environment already attuned to the loud bouncing of old leatherbound basketballs (for Meg Miroshnik’s Tall Girls). Another, Elizabeth Atkinson (billed as “sound composer”) created realistic background noise for an urban street scene which could be modulated for the varied tones and timeframes of each scene while staying true to that random environment of blaring car radios and far-off murmurings. The third, Michael Vincent Skinner (sound designer for Dipika Guha’s Passing) had to find an ethereal link between diverse cultures in exotic locations, a dreamscape with menacing undertones.

I could describe the challenge all the members of the respective Carlotta plays’ creative teams—staging, costume, set, lights, and the latest addition to the YSD design programs, projections—enhanced these productions. For jaded old theatergoers, it’s exciting to see collaborative work where

It’s like classical opera, where high standards are expected in all areas, and you feel let down if, say, the sets are rented or a performer’s doing a part by rote.

The YSD casts and creative teams have dressed the Iseman to impress. To impress the industry types who’ll be gathered to see them for the Carlotta-culminating “professional weekend,” of course. But also to impress each other, inspire each other and have a final creative fling with each other before some of them graduate and others go on summer break. It’s a community of mutual respect and high objectives. It’s also a party, with refreshments laid out after every performance.

My father was the chairman of a college theater department (a good, active one, at Tufts University in the 1970s and ‘80s) and I know what graduate students crave more than anything else: resources, intelligent feedback and respect.

I can’t describe how heartening it is to see a theater program click on so many levels—for proud overseer Paula Vogel (head of the School of Drama playwriting program, who’s built upon the Carlotta festival format she inherited from her predecessor in the department, Richard Nelson); for the students (there is creative delirium going on in there—delirium!) and for audiences, who have no stakes in the academic aspects of the exercise and have simply come to see good plays.

I caught this year’s Carlottas in a whirlwind back-to-back-to-back schedule with Tall Girls (that’s the basketball one, but don’t all the titles sound like they could be about basketball?) on Wednesday night, Blacktop Sky at a Thursday matinee and Passing on Thursday night. I admit to being overwhelmed. But I wish Yale would double the size of the department so I could savor this theater-exalting  voices-of-the-future feeling for a whole week.

Tonight marks the start of the sixth annual Carlotta Festival of New Plays at the Yale School of Drama.

I had coffee this morning at Willoughby’s on York Street with the three playwrights for whom the festival marks the end of their three years in the School of Drama program. No tech-week anxiety or opening-night jitters in evidence. That’s what an Ivy League education can get you. We had a thoughtful discussion about process, education and personal goals.

This is the first group of playwriting students who’ve gone through all three years of the program with department chair Paula Vogel, who took the gig in 2009.

All three are in the thrall of Vogel, and more than one of them admits that she’d have applied to Brown (where Vogel taught for over 20 years) had the Pulitzer-winning playwright and revered teacher still been there and not joined the Yale faculty three years ago.

For Christina Anderson, whose Blacktop Sky concerns a homeless man living in the courtyard of a housing project, coming to Yale was about “working with Paula and having time to write. I had been working as a paralegal, and assuming that I’d be able to write while doing 100-hour work weeks. I had lots of first drafts. It was time to write.”

“I would echo that,” says Dipika Guha, author of Passing, a drama which deals with concepts of loss, memory and survival.

“Paula builds this amazing community,” adds Meg Miroshkin, whose sports-themed smalltown adventure The Tall Girls is the third of the three Carlotta Plays to premiere this weekend. “This was an opportunity to enter that community.”

Vogel’s reputation as a teacher is exalted, and well deserved. Yet her coming to New Haven augmented, rather than jumpstarted, an already strong Yale playwriting program.

Case in point: The Carlotta Festival. Founded with a bequest from Eugene O’Neill’s widow Carlotta Monterey, it’s an ideal forum for Vogel’s stated goals of giving students a real showcase for their work. But the festival was the brainchild of Vogel’s predecessor, Richard Nelson. Like Vogel, Nelson is a prolific, oft-produced, internationally renowned playwright able to impart not just writing tips but real-world experience in the sometimes treacherous world of commercial theater. In the six years since the new-play festival was founded, many of the student playwrights have said that the existence of the Carlotta Festival was what clinched their decision to apply to Yale.

The Carlotta lets playwrights experience full productions rather than readings of their work, and lets them work closely with directors and designers, exhibiting the results before large “real” audiences. It offers a collaborative process and an opportunity for feedback on a scale much grander which the students have experienced through class projects and more limited school productions of their work. This year’s three full-length Carlotta shows play in repertory May 6-8 and 10-14, each getting seen four times.

This year, the Carlotta Festival is more of a conscious showcase than ever. The final two days of the the 10-day festival have been designated “Professionals Weekend.” Producers, managers, agents and other industry types have always been represented in Carlotta audiences, but this is the first time they’ve been so actively courted and accommodated.

“Definitely, the Carlotta is the only opportunity to work with so many of the other departments” at the School of Drama, says Christina Anderson, whose Blacktop Sky opens the fest tonight. “It’s the one time we get that in this program.” But, she stresses, “there are so many opportunities here—tutorials, labs, different levels of productions.” All three writers availed themselves of the extracurricular Yale Cabaret—which presented an earlier version of Guha’s Passing in March of 2010, Anderson’s Hollow Roots this past January, and two different works by Miroshnik (A Portrait of the Woman as a Young Artist in April 2009 and Good Words in Sept. 2010).

Despite all the showcase trappings, both the School of Drama and its level-headed students want to assure that the scope and hype of the Carlotta Festival doesn’t restrict its value as a place to explore and experiment. It’s a telling point that all three of this year’s Carlotta plays came out of a Paula Vogel classroom exercise—her renowned “bake-offs,” where students are given a textual jumping-off point (a fable or myth, perhaps) or other simple ingredients (an aesthetic style, maybe an emotional state) and are instructed to bash out a basic script with the space of two days. Vogel can conduct two or three bake-offs a year.

The pace of the assignment means “the sensor part  of your brain just shuts down,” Miroshnik explains. “You shut down the inner critic, and the work just flows.”

While Guha’s Passing didn’t come directly from a bake-off, it was a later response to a theme she encountered in the classwork. She agrees that the quick-thinking process helps filter out distractions and discourages “overthinking.”

This is also a chance to use Yale and community resources to their fullest. The playwrights could write with specific performers in mind, or with the sense that certain technical demands could be met.

Anderson, Guha and Miroshnik all say they’ve gained from the open collaborative process which guides the Carlotta Festival. It’s something of a whirlwind experience—they didn’t have to make a final decision about which of the scripts they’ve been working on would be their Carlotta show until last December. Directors from the graduating class of School of Drama’s directing program were assigned (namely Devin Brain for Blacktop Sky and Charlotte Braithwaite for Passing, with recent alumnus Mike Donahue stepping in to direct The Tall Girls since the other graduating student director, Michael McQuilken is involved in a show in New York). Casting was done in January. Designers and other collaborators cleared their decks of other school obligations within the last couple of months. The Yale Cabaret learned a few seasons ago to change when they end their seasons so that they’re done by Carlotta time. The festival consumes the entire drama school, and provides an exceptional send-off for classmates who’ve formed strong bonds through the dozens of theater projects they’ve done in their three years of graduate study.

“For me personally,” Anderson says, “the Carlotta is more sentimental than anything. It’s the last time I’ll see some of these people. Surprisingly, it’s turned into a really fancy goodbye.”

All the playwrights happily attended rehearsals and rewrote their plays as needed. “I actually haven’t stopped rewriting,” Miroshnik laughs, two days before the May 8 debut of her Tall Girls. “Part of the rewriting I did was to cover a transition”—a problem she didn’t notice on the page but could see clearly when actors enlivened it. Miroshnik’s play, about female basketball players in the 1930s, also has some built-in variable that lead to improvisation: “The balls don’t always do what’s expected. Something new always happens.”

Anderson says she hasn’t had to do much rewriting due to a productive week of “table work”—when the actors first get together to read and discuss the script—at the beginning of the rehearsal process. “I don’t do well with actor talk,” she confesses, and tends to have director Devin Brain “translate” the actor’s needs. Still, it’s “a really open room,” she smiles. “People in my rehearsals are not afraid to say ‘I don’t know.’”

Guha also says she “didn’t do much rewriting.” The rehearsal process, she says, “raises a lot of questions. They’re not all questions we want to answer, but it’s the correct evocation of those questions.”

Anderson, Guha and Miroshnik have all had plays produced professionally elsewhere,  and feel that they’ve had plenty of good and open exchanges with directors and actors where they felt their opinions were respected.

As Christina Anderson puts it, “my priority is to learn with every assignment. I chose this play based on whether it was ready for a workshop. I wanted to see it on its feet.”

“You get to work on something,” Meg Miroshkin says, “that you’re excited to invite someone into.”

While it doesn’t exactly stream light into the room after so many dark, downbeat shows over the last couple of seasons, the slate promises much amusement—of the introspective, culture-satire variety. For hardcore, longtime Repgoers, some of the choices bring back fond memories. There’s also appeal for those who only know the theater from the past season or two.

The five:
THREE SISTERS
(September 16 through October 8, 2011)
The Chekhov classis has been freshly adapted by Sarah Ruhl and directed by Les Waters; this will be a co-production with the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Ruhl’s had three plays at the Rep in recent years, one of which (Eurydice) was directed by Waters. (The others were the sublime Clean House and the ambitious Passion Plays). She’s also been well represented with productions at the Yale School of Drama (Orlando) and the Yale Cabaret (Late: A Cowboy Song). Ruhl was a visiting lecturer this year at Wesleyan (where her Melancholy Play was performed) and is one of the most celebrated alumnae of the Brown University playwriting program, where she studied with Paula Vogel (now head of playwriting at the Yale School of Drama).
Three Sisters was the play which served as the Yale School of Drama thesis project for then-student director James Bundy back in 1995 (starring Sanaa Lathan as Irina). Then as now, the trad-proscenium Yale University Theater, rather than the newer-fangled Yale Rep, is the preferred venue to stage Three Sisters.

BELLEVILLE
(October 21 through November 12, 2011)
World premiere of a new work by 2007 Yale School of Drama playwriting grad Amy Herzog. New York success arrived for Herzog arrived last year with her sociopolitical drama After the Revolution. Herzog is still well remembered here in New Haven for her ambitious The Wendy Play at the YSD’s 2007 Carlotta Festival; that Shakespeare-tinged summer-camp spectacle featured a dozen students from New Haven’s Educational Center for the Arts magnet high school in a 20-strong cast. This script’s smaller-scale (at least in the size of its cast), concerning upheaval in the seemingly idyllic life of American couple living in Paris. Anne Kaufman, who helmed the tricky musical We Have Always Lived in the Castle for the Rep this season, is one of the go-to directors for works by new young playwrights these days.

A DOCTOR IN SPITE OF HIMSELF
(Novemeber 25 through December 17)
Moliere’s 1666 Le Medecin malgre lui, doctored by physical-comedy physicians Christopher Bayes and Steven Epp, respectively the director and star of Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters at the Rep two seasons ago. Servant’s saucy adaptress, Constance Congdon, is missing from this new equation—Epps and Bayes and reworking the script themselves this time. But Moliere tends to provide a more solid foundation for frolic than does the looser Goldoni. And there’s a grand tradition of riotous Moliere at the Rep, from a host of directors: Mark Rucker directed James Magruder’s adaptation of The Imaginary Invalid, Liz Diamond did both School for Wives and The Bourgeois Avant-Garde (Charles Ludlam’s update of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) in the mid-1990s, Andrei Belgrader’s production of The Miser (translated by Miles Malleson) in 1988 starred Lewis Stadlen Jr. and Oliver Platt. Plus there’ve been a couple of Tartuffes. (My disdain for the most recent one, which largely eschewed clowning in favor of post-modern trickery, has not abated.) The Rep’s devotion to Moliere goes all the way back to the theater’s founder, Robert Brustein, and his landmark productions of Don Juan and the collection of one-acts Sganarelle: An Evening of Moliere Farces.

TO BE ANNOUNCED
(February 3-25, 2012)
And yet we do now something, since the Rep press released specifies that this is “a new play to be announced,” and further elaborates that more info will come as soon as “later this spring.” So probably more about confirming contracts and schedules than about picking the project, then. Lots of new this year. Good thing.

THE WINTER’S TALE
(March 16 through April 7, 2012)
A Winter’s Tale was once done at the Rep during the tail end of the Lloyd Richards regime, in 1989. That was a chilly, bleak and modernistic production redeemed by the overbearing (as in “pursued by bear”) presence of Ben Halley Jr. Liz Diamond, who joined the Rep faculty just a couple of years later, is slated to direct this one. Productions by faculty members often get less attention from the local press than do the New York “names,” but I’m more excited at the prospect of a Diamond-studded Winter’s Tale than I am by most of the flashier stuff on the Rep 2011-12 sched. Well known nationally as a shaper of new works (by such talents as Suzan Lori-Parks, Lisa Loomer and Marcus Gardley ), Liz Diamond is just as confident and creative with classics, as Yale Repgoers have seen with her bracing productions of Brecht’s St. Joan of the Stockyards, Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Seamus Heaney’s Cure at Troy (an adaptation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes), Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Out Teeth, not to mention her aforementioned Molieres. I don’t think she’s done Shakespeare before at the Rep, though as the head of the School of Drama’s directing program, she’s guided dozens of student directors through their mandatory second-year “verse projects,” which almost always are by the bard. In 1992, while she was still getting started in her faculty gig at Yale, Diamond co-directed (with Doug Hughes, later to become, and unbecome, artistic director of the Long Wharf Theatre) what sounds like a fascinating stripped-down version of Julius Caesar at the Seattle Repertory Theatre in Washington state.
You might think of The Winter’s Tale as seldom done, but not only has this very Yale Rep done it previously (albeit over 20 years ago), the local Elm Shakespeare Company put it on in Edgerton Park just last summer, with Yale Rep veteran Mark Zeisler as Leontes.

THE REALISTIC JONESES
(April 20 through May 12)
Finally, another new-play-by-hot-contemporary-talent coup for the Rep: a world premiere from ace reality-based abstractionist Will Eno of Thom Pain (based on nothing) and Middletown fame. Sam Gold, who has squired many a young playwright to sustainable commercial success, directs. The Realistic Joneses concerns two neighboring suburban Jones families “who have more in common than their identical homes.”