Belleville, Population Four

The spirit of Sarah Ruhl will still rule the Yale Rep, even after her season-opening adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters ends its run.

The Rep’s just announced the cast of the second Rep show of the 2011-12 season, Belleville by Amy Herzog. The central role of Abby will be played by Maria Dizzia, whose last stint at the Rep was as Eurydice in Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice. Before that, she was in the 2002 Yale Rep production of Iphigenia at Aulis—directed by Rebecca Taichman, whose own Sarah Ruhl connection is that she directed the world premiere of Dead Man’s Cell Phone.

Belleville, about a young couple in crisis, has a cast of four. The last Amy Herzog play to be seen at Yale—The Wendy Play,  presented as part of the Carlotta Festival just before Herzog graduated from the School of Drama in 2007—had a cast nearly five times that size. (Herzog’s big recent New York hit, After the Revolution, had a multi-generational cast of nine.) Besides Maria Dizzia, Belleville stars Greg Keller (playwright, member of The Bat Theater Company, part of the ensemble that originated Moises Kaufman’s 33 Variations and Maria Dizzia’s co-star once previously, in Daniel Goldfarb’s Cradle and All at the Manhattan Theatre Club), Pascale Armand (a recent Rep vet of Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed in 2009) and Gilbert Owuor (like playwright Herzog a 2007 grad of the School of Drama; his previous time on the Rep stage was in the partying ensemble of Strindberg’s Miss Julie).

Belleville’s to be directed by Anne Kauffman, the eminent New York director who came to Yale Rep just a year ago to develop the new musical We Have Always Lived in the Castle.