Johanna Day and Glenn Fitzgerald in The Realistic Joneses, the current attraction at the Yale Repertory Theatre and the latest play to receive developmental support from the university's Center for New Theatre. Photo by Joan Marcus.
The Yale School of Drama and the Yale Repertory Theatre were given a ton of money last week by the Robina Foundation for doing what the Rep has always done best: developing new work and supporting emerging theater artists.
The bounty is a whopping $18 million, given to the four-year-old Yale Center for New Theatre. The center will heretofore be known as the Binger Center for New Theatre in honor of the late James H. Binger, the Yale College grad (class of ’38) who helped steer the McKnight Foundation towards arts grants, and who got into the theater business himself as head of the Jujamcyn Theatres, a director of the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, an Executive Committee member of the League of American Theatres and a board member of the Guthrie Theater.
Given those affiliations, and the fact the Robina Foundation which Binger founded has its offices in Minnesota presumably means that Yale might have had some serious competition regarding Binger’s largesse. But though he certainly got around, Binger’s alma mater was never far from his mind. He founded the Robina in order to directly fund and support “transformative projects of its four institutional partners”.” Two of those partners are in Minnesota: Abbott Northwestern Hospital and the University of Minnesota Law School. One is the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. The other is Yale.
The $18 mill is the largest gift in the School of Drama’s history to be given for a program (rather than for, say, a building). The program it supports is one that already exists, but wouldn’t have happened without an earlier grant of nearly $3 million from the same Robina Foundation. The Center for New Theatre has been commissioning, funding and premiering new plays for several years now, starting with the Bill Camp/Robert Woodruff adaptation of Dostoevesky’s Notes from Underground. Yale also started a separate Institute for Music Theatre a few years ago, charged with developing new musicals by writers fresh out of college. The Institute of Music Theatre will now fall under the same administrative umbrella as the Center for New Theatre, though the YIMT will continue to have its own artistic director (currently Mark Brokaw) and guidelines.
The history of new-play development at Yale, of course, stretches right through the entire history of the School of Drama—and for most of the century before that, via the Yale undergraduate Theater Studies Department.
It’s become a truism of present-day regional theater development that new plays are where the money is, grantswise. Yale, which has always been at the forefront of new-works development, has proven that a millionfold by getting this extraordinary gift. Three million dollars of the new Robina money will go directly to current projects of the Center for New Theatre (which doesn’t anticipate any major changes in how its program is operated), continuing along the existing funding needs. The rest will become an endowment which should allow the Center to continue developing new plays until the end of time.