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.