The news: Jeanie O’Hare has just been appointed the new chair of the Playwriting Department at the Yale School of Drama.
The context:
Off the top of my head, here are four of the playwrights who’ve graduated from the School of Drama playwriting program in recent years include:
Tarrell Alvin McCraney, author of the epic Brother/Sister trilogy.
Amy Herzog, whose Belleville just premiered at the Rep last fall and whose After the Revolution is getting its second New York production at Lincoln Center this spring.
Rolin Jones, whose The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow was a Pulitzer-nominated Off Broadway hit, and who has become a sought-after TV writer/producer (from Weeds to the much-hyped new theater-oriented series Smash).
Kim Rosenstock, who had shows at two major regional theaters in the San Francisco Bay area this past summer: one a family drama, the other a romantic musical set during the New York black-out.
That’s quite a range right there, which might be the legacy of the playwrighting department: an extraordinary range of voices and styles, all of whom found Yale and New Haven a comfortable place in which to write and learn.
There’s still a tendency to associate the School of Drama playwriting program with two of its earliest successes, the 1970s comic writers Wendy Wasserstein and Christopher Durang. If you read Julie Salamon’s new biography of Wasserstein, the School of Drama from those days (under Dean Robert Brustein) has virtually no relation to the ones since.
Of all the departments at the Yale School of Drama, the playwriting program would appear to have had the most abrupt transitions in leadership, and in styles of leadership. Which makes a lot of sense, since theater trends tend to be led by progressive scripts, and many of the folks creating those texts are studying at Yale.
Here’s the recent history of the School of Drama playwriting program. For about a decade, from the early ‘90s until James Bundy took over as dean from Stan Wojewodski, the program was run by Mark Bly, a champion of the then still-newish academic field of theater dramaturgy. Mark Bly was into public readings as a way of testing the strength of student works. Working with Playwrights Horizons and elsewhere, he arranged YSD playwriting thesis projects to be read by professional actors, before real audiences and with useful discussions afterwards.
He also, as Associate Artistic Director of the Yale Rep, arranged major American premieres of such important new works as David Edgar’s Pentacost. Since leaving Yale, Bly has been best known as a dramaturg, serving as Senior Dramaturg at Arena Stage and, since 2008, at the Alley Theatre in Houston.
Shortly after James Bundy took over in 2002, Mark Bly left and the playwriting program was given to an actual working playwright, Richard Nelson, whose dozens of original works include Two Shakespearean Actors, Sweet and Sad and The Hopey Changey Thing. He’s also renowned for his adaptations, of scripts by everybody from Moliere to Strindberg, (It was Nelson’s version of Miss Julie which the Yale Rep staged in 2005). Nelson took a practical approach to his teaching, preparing students for the actual work of sustaining a career as a professional playwriting by inviting agents, producers and other professionals to come and talk to them. (I was the token critic in this exercise for a few years.)
Like Bly, he has a strong background in dramaturgy and research. His sense of how best to develop a new play, however, went beyond readings. Nelson believed in full productions before appropriate audiences. He didn’t think students should instantly be rewarded with slots on the Yale Rep main season, however—a supportive environment was key—so he and James Bundy created the The Carlotta Festival of New Plays.
The Carlotta is still happening, continued by Paula Vogel after Nelson left the department a few years ago. Yale snagged Vogel, of Baltimore Waltz and A Civil War Christmas and How I Learned to Drive fame, from her longtime teaching post at Brown University. She’s the best known playwriting teacher in the country; Sarah Ruhl is just one of Vogel’s legion of students and protégés. Vogel shared Nelson’s desire for staging full-blown student projects, but also added a new element of improvisation and abrupt inspiration to the program with her famous “Bake-off” exercise and her advice that students should write constantly.
Vogel left the department chair post last year, though she continues to work with Yale students in a less structured academic relationship. The current teaching staff in the playwriting program includes Vogel, Associate Chair of the department Kenneth Prestininzi (Chaste), opera and musical librettist Michael Korie (Harvey Milk, Grey Gardens), Lisa Kron (2.5 Minute Ride), Lynn Nottage (Ruined), Frank Pugliese (Aven’u Boys), Sarah Ruhl (The Clean House), Rachel Sheinkin (25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) and Deborah Stein (God Save Gertrude).
Following such a singular teacher and writer as Vogel, Jeanie O’Hare seems yet another inspired left-field choice to keep the playwriting department fresh and facing forward. O’Hare has distinguished herself not as a playwright herself but as a visionary dramaturg and literary manager. Her passion for new work added greatly to the reputation of the Royal Shakespeare Company as a place that doesn’t just present, you know, royal Shakespeare. O’Hare was instrumental is setting up the team that created one of the biggest critical and commercial successful in London’s West End this year—Matilda, the musical based on Roald Dahl’s book about a telepathic school girl.
In the video above, O’Hare talks about the range of new works introduced by the now half-century-old RSC.
You can get a greater sense of O’Hare’s passion for theater, and her opinions about the real world, from her Twitter feed.
First, there’s her charming Twitter self-description: “The RSC is a contemporary theatre company with Shakespeare at its heart. I look after the writers. These are my views.” Then there are drama-laced political tweets such as “If [British Labour Party leader] Ed Miliband was a play he’d be a 1st draft. He’s speaking the subtext rather than creating the drama itself.”
Welcome to New Haven, Jeanie O’Hare. Please look after writers here. And don’t feel you have to behave as your Playwriting predecessors did. That’s the Yale way.
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