The Yale School of Drama has announced the titles and directors for its 2012 Carlotta Festival of New Plays.
Who the playwrights would be was never in doubt. As ever, they’re the graduating class from the YSD’s playwriting program. In this case, they’re the last to leave the Department of Playwriting before it welcomes its new chair, Jeanie O’Hare, whose term begins July 1. When this group joined the school, Paula Vogel chaired the department. (Vogel is still involved with the YSD in a different position.)
Anyhow, the festival. It features full productions of full-length scripts, written and staged and designed almost exclusively by current Yale of School students.
The big exception to that rule this time around is one of the directors, Tea Alagic, who graduated from Yale seven years ago. Alagic did a new play of her own devising, Zero Hour, as her own thesis project when she was in the directing program. She also helmed the Yale Summer for its noteworthy expressionist season of 2005. Upon graduating, she directed classmate Tarrell McCraney’s The Brothers Size at New York’s Public Theater and later in Washington DC for The Studio Theater.
For the Carlotta Festival, Alagic is directing Martyna Majok’s Petty Harbour, a Newfoundland coastal riff on King Lear about a fisherman who, unbeknownst to his sons, has turned the family home into a church.
The other Carlotta plays are Jake Jeppson’s Fox Play, about unlikely partners on a mystical odyssey, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz (the ace new works director and current co-artistic director of the Yale Cabaret; her thesis project was Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights) and Caroline V. McGraw’s The Bachelors, set at a seasoned party house on Frat Row on a pledge night. The Bachelors is directed by Alexandru Mihail, who did The Seagull as his big YSD project and memorable productions of Chekhov’s The Wedding Reception and Bergman’s Persona at Yale Cabaret.
I’ll be doing more Carlotta coverage as the festival nears. The plays run in repertory May 4-12 at the Iseman Theater, 1156 Chapel Street. Tix and info here.
I would comparable to thnkx for the efforts you have put in letters this blog. I’m hoping the unchanged high-grade website send from you in the forthcoming as fine. Popular piece of evidence your creative letters skills has encouraged me to get my peculiar tangle place at the present. In truth the blogging is spreading its wings suddenly. Your write up is a fantastic example of it.