This site is still brand new, so there’s some catching up to do. Back on March 10, the Yale Rep announced five-sixths of its 2011-2012 season:
While it doesn’t exactly stream light into the room after so many dark, downbeat shows over the last couple of seasons, the slate promises much amusement—of the introspective, culture-satire variety. For hardcore, longtime Repgoers, some of the choices bring back fond memories. There’s also appeal for those who only know the theater from the past season or two.
The five:
THREE SISTERS
(September 16 through October 8, 2011)
The Chekhov classis has been freshly adapted by Sarah Ruhl and directed by Les Waters; this will be a co-production with the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Ruhl’s had three plays at the Rep in recent years, one of which (Eurydice) was directed by Waters. (The others were the sublime Clean House and the ambitious Passion Plays). She’s also been well represented with productions at the Yale School of Drama (Orlando) and the Yale Cabaret (Late: A Cowboy Song). Ruhl was a visiting lecturer this year at Wesleyan (where her Melancholy Play was performed) and is one of the most celebrated alumnae of the Brown University playwriting program, where she studied with Paula Vogel (now head of playwriting at the Yale School of Drama).
Three Sisters was the play which served as the Yale School of Drama thesis project for then-student director James Bundy back in 1995 (starring Sanaa Lathan as Irina). Then as now, the trad-proscenium Yale University Theater, rather than the newer-fangled Yale Rep, is the preferred venue to stage Three Sisters.
BELLEVILLE
(October 21 through November 12, 2011)
World premiere of a new work by 2007 Yale School of Drama playwriting grad Amy Herzog. New York success arrived for Herzog arrived last year with her sociopolitical drama After the Revolution. Herzog is still well remembered here in New Haven for her ambitious The Wendy Play at the YSD’s 2007 Carlotta Festival; that Shakespeare-tinged summer-camp spectacle featured a dozen students from New Haven’s Educational Center for the Arts magnet high school in a 20-strong cast. This script’s smaller-scale (at least in the size of its cast), concerning upheaval in the seemingly idyllic life of American couple living in Paris. Anne Kaufman, who helmed the tricky musical We Have Always Lived in the Castle for the Rep this season, is one of the go-to directors for works by new young playwrights these days.
A DOCTOR IN SPITE OF HIMSELF
(Novemeber 25 through December 17)
Moliere’s 1666 Le Medecin malgre lui, doctored by physical-comedy physicians Christopher Bayes and Steven Epp, respectively the director and star of Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters at the Rep two seasons ago. Servant’s saucy adaptress, Constance Congdon, is missing from this new equation—Epps and Bayes and reworking the script themselves this time. But Moliere tends to provide a more solid foundation for frolic than does the looser Goldoni. And there’s a grand tradition of riotous Moliere at the Rep, from a host of directors: Mark Rucker directed James Magruder’s adaptation of The Imaginary Invalid, Liz Diamond did both School for Wives and The Bourgeois Avant-Garde (Charles Ludlam’s update of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) in the mid-1990s, Andrei Belgrader’s production of The Miser (translated by Miles Malleson) in 1988 starred Lewis Stadlen Jr. and Oliver Platt. Plus there’ve been a couple of Tartuffes. (My disdain for the most recent one, which largely eschewed clowning in favor of post-modern trickery, has not abated.) The Rep’s devotion to Moliere goes all the way back to the theater’s founder, Robert Brustein, and his landmark productions of Don Juan and the collection of one-acts Sganarelle: An Evening of Moliere Farces.
TO BE ANNOUNCED
(February 3-25, 2012)
And yet we do now something, since the Rep press released specifies that this is “a new play to be announced,” and further elaborates that more info will come as soon as “later this spring.” So probably more about confirming contracts and schedules than about picking the project, then. Lots of new this year. Good thing.
THE WINTER’S TALE
(March 16 through April 7, 2012)
A Winter’s Tale was once done at the Rep during the tail end of the Lloyd Richards regime, in 1989. That was a chilly, bleak and modernistic production redeemed by the overbearing (as in “pursued by bear”) presence of Ben Halley Jr. Liz Diamond, who joined the Rep faculty just a couple of years later, is slated to direct this one. Productions by faculty members often get less attention from the local press than do the New York “names,” but I’m more excited at the prospect of a Diamond-studded Winter’s Tale than I am by most of the flashier stuff on the Rep 2011-12 sched. Well known nationally as a shaper of new works (by such talents as Suzan Lori-Parks, Lisa Loomer and Marcus Gardley ), Liz Diamond is just as confident and creative with classics, as Yale Repgoers have seen with her bracing productions of Brecht’s St. Joan of the Stockyards, Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Seamus Heaney’s Cure at Troy (an adaptation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes), Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Out Teeth, not to mention her aforementioned Molieres. I don’t think she’s done Shakespeare before at the Rep, though as the head of the School of Drama’s directing program, she’s guided dozens of student directors through their mandatory second-year “verse projects,” which almost always are by the bard. In 1992, while she was still getting started in her faculty gig at Yale, Diamond co-directed (with Doug Hughes, later to become, and unbecome, artistic director of the Long Wharf Theatre) what sounds like a fascinating stripped-down version of Julius Caesar at the Seattle Repertory Theatre in Washington state.
You might think of The Winter’s Tale as seldom done, but not only has this very Yale Rep done it previously (albeit over 20 years ago), the local Elm Shakespeare Company put it on in Edgerton Park just last summer, with Yale Rep veteran Mark Zeisler as Leontes.
THE REALISTIC JONESES
(April 20 through May 12)
Finally, another new-play-by-hot-contemporary-talent coup for the Rep: a world premiere from ace reality-based abstractionist Will Eno of Thom Pain (based on nothing) and Middletown fame. Sam Gold, who has squired many a young playwright to sustainable commercial success, directs. The Realistic Joneses concerns two neighboring suburban Jones families “who have more in common than their identical homes.”