Nice profile of puppeteer extraordinaire Basil Twist in the new (April 15) issue of the New Yorker. The magazine did a “Talk of the Town” bit on Twist just a couple of years ago, but this is a full-blown article by Joan Acocella. Its hook is not a New York-based show Twist is working on but a production based on Stravinky’s ballet “Rite of Spring” the puppeteer is preparing for the Carolina Performing Arts Festival in Chapel Hill, N.C.

Twist has received impressive grants and support, and is one of the most acclaimed and influential artists in his field. He could presumably work whenever and wherever he wants. It’s noteworthy that throughout his career he’s balanced his New York work (Symphonie Fantastique, for instance) with projects he’s done out of town.

Here in Connecticut, for instance, Twist designed the puppets for the Long Wharf Theatre 2004 production of Paula Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home (a co-production with Trinity Rep). This wasn’t a premiere, or a tour, or New York-bound. It was just a good, ambitious production which wanted the best life-sized puppets imaginable, so they asked Basil Twist and he said yes.

Twist’s work was also on view at the Yale Rep in 2010 for the world premiere of Rinne Groff’s Compulsion. The play is about novelist Meyer Levin attempting to adapt The Diary of Anne Frank for the stage. Anne Frank appears in Levin’s dreams in puppet form. The play is referenced in Acocella’s New Yorker article, not as a Rep show but from when it played at New York’s Public Theater.

Basil Twists also designed the puppets for the Mabou Mines show Peter & Wendy, which had a weeks-long run at the Yale Rep in 2007, and the Broadway musical The Addams Family, which just played the Shubert in New Haven.

I met Twist when he was in New Haven working on The Long Christmas Ride Home. Our interview was going OK, nothing spectacular, and he was clearly treating me like the sort of writer who probably couldn’t grasp the intricacies of what he does. So I made a point of mentioning that my father was a puppeteer who performed Greek tragedies with marionettes. At which point Twist’s entire demeanor changed, and he accepted me as a playmate. “Wanna see the puppets!?,” he beamed, and of course I did. He was so much more energized when showing off the puppets than he was just talking about them. I’ll never forget that twinkle in his eye; it almost distracted me from his skill in animated those gorgeous puppets.

Members of New Haven Theater Company celebrating the announcement of their May production of Shipwrecked! From left: Hallie Martenson, Christian Shaboo (barechested), Drew Gray (with bottle), Margaret Mann, Hilary Brown, Steve Scarpa (in green plaid shirt), Erich Greene, Peter Chenot (in ski hat) and George Kulp (in tattered shirt).

I ran into playwright Donald Margulies at a Long Wharf Theatre opening night on Tuesday. I was just back from the Humana Festival of New Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville (in Kentucky) and was happy to inform Margulies that his play Dinner With Friends was still among the top two plays immediately mentioned when Humana conversations inevitably turn to well-known works which the festival staged before anyone else. Dinner With Friends was done at Humana in 1998, and is one of three premieres there which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Margulies smiled at the news that his name is still on everyone’s lips at Humana, then told me that a New York revival of Dinner With Friends is in the works, directed by Pam McKinnon, the currently reigning queen of shouty relationship plays (Clybourne Park, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf).

Same night, I got the official word that another Margulies work is being staged here in New Haven shortly.

The New Haven Theater Company, many of whose members work behind-the-scenes at the Long Wharf in marketing and box office positions, is presenting Margulies’ comic drama Shipwrecked! An Entertainment—The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (as Told by Himself) on May 12, 18 & 19 (with two performances each day, at 4 & 7 p.m.) at the Whitney Arts Center, 591 Whitney Avenue.

Shipwrecked was produced at Long Wharf Stage II in the spring of 2008, after having had its world premiere at South Coast Repertory Theatre six months earlier. Those, and most other, productions of the play have used a three-person cast, with one male actor playing the hero and two supporting players (one male, one female) playing everybody else. The script doesn’t actually specify that the cast be a threesome, so NHTC is expanding it to a quintet. Christian Shaboo plays Louis, the real-life late-19th-century protagonist of the piece, who’s gotten worldwide publicity for an adventure in which he’d communed with hostile aboroginal tribes and ridden sea turtles. Hilary Brown, Erich Greene, Margaret Mann and Hallie Martenson are the ensemble. Peter Chenot directs, with a production design by Drew Gray. All these folks are stalwart NHTC veterans.

New Haven Theater Company has something in common with the washed-ashore hero of Shipwrecked. The space they used most often in the past few years, a storefront on Court Street, was rented out to a bar and left the company at sea, venue-wise. The Whitney Arts Center is their salvation.

For more info on NHTC, see http://www.newhaventheatercompany.com/

The Twins Would Like to Say

Through April 6 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park Street, New Haven. Final performances tonight at 8:30 and 11 p.m. www.yalecabaret.org

By Seth Bockley and Devon de Mayo. Co-Directors: Whitney Dibo and Lauren Dubowski. Dramaturg: Kelly Kerwin. Set Designer: Brian Dudkiewicz. Assistant Set Designer: Samantha Lazar. Costume Designer: Steven M. Rotramel. Lighting Designer: Christopher Ash. Sound Designer: Sam Ferguson. Stage Manager: Molly Hennighausen. Producer: Katie Liberman. Cast: Chasten Harmon (June Gibbons), Sarah Williams (Jennifer Gibbons), Sheria Irving (Gloria Gibbons), Leonard Thomas (Aubrey Gibbons), Emily Zemba (Betsy Ronson), Maura Hooper (Chloe, Shadow Jennifer), Willa Fitzgerald (Jenny, Shadow June), Matt Raich (Lance), Ilya Khodosh (Mr. Nobody).

With one play yet to go in its 20-show school-year season, the Yale Cabaret once again touches upon mental illness (or at least psychological disorder). It once again does mirror-image stagings of fraught imaginings of artistic women. It once again… oh, never mind. This one ends up being wonderfully original, and is uniquely suited to the Cabaret space. If you didn’t know that this work was created and first presented by Chicago’s Dog & Pony troupe at the Steppenwolf Theatre (where it was directed by its co-writers), you’d think it was created expressly for the Cabaret’s intimate quarters and open-minded audiences.

The play by Seth Bockley (librettist of the musical February House, which premiered at Long Wharf Theatre last year) and Devon de Mayo is about real-life Welsh twins who jointly chose never to speak, and made several other pacts which are gradually revealed in this drama. The girls have active imaginations which they unleash in bursts of fiction.

The script is very clever in how it uses the imagery of twins. There are comedy-of-errors moments. There are distorted-prism moments. The are moments of identicalness and moments of differentness. There is also a twin image for the twins as a unit: a couple of “shadow twins,” light-skinned with long blonde hair to contrast Jennifer and June’s darker complexions. There’s also a fantasy narrator named Mr. Nobody, perfect for a piece that actively questions notions of identity and conformity.

In dramatizing the twins’ fiction-writing, Bockley and de Mayo turn the people closest to the girls in their real lives—their parents, their psychologist, the neighbor boy they lust after—into an ensemble company which acts out the stories. This is done in a way that sidesteps the sort of lazy literalization one finds in so many plays and films (from Sunday in the Park With George to Becoming Jane Austen) where it’s presumed that all fictional ideas come from real-life interactions. Everything in this piece is a little off from the start, and you move through it with a sense of unreality from the start.

When I say “you move through it,” that’s a literal statement. The audience, upon entering the performance space, is invited to sit on set pieces—a bed, armchairs, steps, wherever. If performers need the area, the audience members are tapped on the shoulder and expected to move to a different location.

I stayed put in an area where I could scribble notes in piece, and survey the flow of traffic. While some folks shifted uncertainly, as if they were afraid they were losing a game of musical chairs, others rose to the invitation of wandering about, following certain characters doggedly.

Such “promenade” staging fits beautifully with one of the writer’s structural conceits—several scenes have “A” and “B” sections which are played simultaneously. Often, one contains the exposition while the other is more  imagistic. This heighten all the twinniness of the show, and it’s a reward to the audience members who choose to dash from one corner of the Cabaret to the other in pursuit of more drama.

I learned, from my perch on a tall stool at a table near the sound booth (where I was never tapped or otherwise persuaded to move) that you could hear everything happening in the room well enough to piece together just about everything you needed to know. That is, until the very end, when (as the script insists) a curtain divides the audience in half and two different, simultaneous final scenes are performed. You need to compare notes with fellow audience members to grasp the whole picture.

The diverse cast for this challenging piece has modulated themselves so that they can emerge from or blend into the crowd at will. Particularly suited to the exercise is Matt Raich as the aforementioned boy next door. Raich’s character Lance, who becomes the hero of the girl’s fiction, looks like a young Gerrit Graham, and is more a caricature of a smoldering young James Dean/Brando type than the real thing. He is to the teen fantasy stereotype what Paul Giamatti is to Hamlet (playing just a block away from the Cabaret). There’s a wonderful looseness and informality to the cheery Emily Zemba’s portrayal the girl’s psychologist, while their parents (Sheria Irving and Leonard Thomas) wisely go with a more intense, actorly stance. As the narrator Mr. Nobody, Ilya Khodosh behaves as if he were the young Woody Allen acting as a jittery tour guide. He has every right to be nervous, since the audience is milling about at his invitation.

The Twins Would Like to Say appears to be loaded with gimmicks. But it turns out they’re not gimmicks at all. They underline major themes in the play. Not least is the sense of community and communication required for such a production to remain civilized. As we learn, there were things the Goodwin girls needed to learn about playing well with others.

Two performances remaining: April 6 at 2 & 8 p.m. in the Yale Repertory Theatre, corner of York and Chapel streets, New Haven.

By Sarah Ruhl. Directed by Stephen Kaliski. Produced by Jonathan Lian for the Yale Dramatic Association. Set Designer: Jason Sherwood. Lighting Designer: Jessica Greenberg. Sound Designer/Composer: Matt Sherwin. Costume Designer: Summer Lee Jack. Hair & Makeup Designer: Molly Weinreb. Performers: Calista Small (Catherine Givings), Tim Creavin (Dr. Givings), Marina Horiates (Sabrina Daldry), Christine Shaw (Annie), Paul Hinkes (Leo Irving), Zina Ellis (Elizabeth) and Kyle Yoder (Mr. Daldry).

Having just seen Sarah Ruhl in a panel discussion at the Humana Festival in Louisville, Kentucky, and having just read her ten-minute play which will premiere at Humana tonight, and having discussed Ruhl extensively last weekend with her teacher Paula Vogel and her frequent collaborator Les Waters (both interviews can be found at www.engine31.org), I was pleased to return home to find the Yale Dramat doing one of Ruhl’s most popular works.

Vibrator Play was not one of the several Ruhl plays which has received its world or East Coast premieres at the Yale Rep. It has, however, had numerous college and small theater productions in Connecticut, and that’s the circuit where I think it’s best appreciated. A show like this is catnip for college students. It deals with repression, sexual openness, the strictures of clinical science and the passions of the empowered mind.

In the Next Room is probably Sarah Ruhl’s least abstract, least “imaginative” play. It literally takes place in an early 20th century drawing room and the next room, the home office of a doctor in private practice. The story—about sexual frustration misdiagnosed as hysteria; about the happy erosion old-world morals and standards and the liberation of art, science and personal communications—unrolls as if it were Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, electrified. It can be performed without archness or irony, and that’s pretty much how the Dramat does it. Good thing, too: the audience provides plenty of loud laughs and whoops and gasps, which would get over-the-top if the actors were overplaying. There’s a steadiness and evenness to the enterprise, which makes the second half of the show play longer than the first (total running time is over two and a half hours) but which serves the script nicely. There’s plenty of humor emanating from stuffy sideburned men and chattering, flushed-faced women, but the central gravity of the show is not lost. This is a drama of awkward confessions and stifled feelings and corseted bodies. I was most impressed by how some of the actors—Zina Ellis as the nursemaid Elizabeth, Calista Small as the anguished Catherine Givings (wife of the doctor, played by Tim Creavin, who’s administering health cures with a vibrating electric metal phallus) and Marina Horiates (as friend/patient Sabrina Daldry)—maintained decorum in the parlor-room scenes. At one point in last night’s performance, Horiates spilled a cup of tea on her elaborate Victorian dress. She and Small covered the gaffe masterfully, so that it almost felt intentional—wet sheets and breast milk feature heavily elsewhere in the play.

It’s not until the very end of the show that In the Next Room expands its consciousness and distorts its environs, a Sarah Ruhl trademark. It’s interesting to compare this older work with Ruhl’s recent romances—her new version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters and her epistolary historical near-romance Dear Elizabeth, both produced by the Yale Rep in recent years. Most Sarah Ruhl plays, including her early hits The Clean House and Eurydice, dramatize difficult romantic choices. The Vibrator Play, true to its name, goes a bit further and actually explores the mechanics of sex.

As is their usual method, the undergraduate student-run organization has enlisted a professional director (New York-based Stephen Kaliski) and designers. It gives the cast a firm foundation on which to work. The show doesn’t feel exactly lived-in: These are college students taking on roles which would be greatly enhanced if they had actual intimate knowledge of marriage and childbirth. But they do bring the energy and exasperation and idealism which are the main tools for any Sarah Ruhl play. This is a solid, worthwhile, funny and poignant production, a fine choice for the Dramat and a neat introduction for those still unfamiliar with the extraordinary Sarah Ruhl.

The Yale School of Drama’s nifty youth-serving Yale Institute for Music Theatre has chosen the two shows it will develop this summer. Candidates are chosen from young composers currently in, or recently graduated from, university programs in various music theater skills. YIMT gets support from the deepest pockets in new-works development found anywhere in the American theater realm, the Binger Center for New Theatre.

The shows are workshopped privately on the Yale campus, then given two readings each before up-for-anything audiences at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. This year the readings, also billed as open rehearsals, are set for June 15 & 16.

The 2013 Yale Institute for Music Theatre selections:

• The Last Queen of Canaan, with music by Jacob Yandura and book & lyrics by Rebeckah Greer Melocik, concerns a WPA-funded writer during the Depression years gathering slave narratives in Canaan, Virginia. There’s apparently a gospel element to Yandura’s score. Both he and Rebeckah Greer attended the Music Theatre Writing program at NYU, and they have another project they’ve collaborated on, The Disillusionist.

• Mrs. Hughes, with music & lyrics by New Jersey singer/songwriter Sharon Kenny and book by New York Theatre Workshop Playwriting Fellow Janine Nabers. The Mrs. Hughes of the title refers to two women: Sylvia Plath, who was married to the established poet Ted Hughes while trying to make it as a writer herself, and Hughes’ mistress Assia Wevill who wanted to be more of a wife to Hughes than she thought Plath was. The traumatic relationship of Hughes and Plath has been plumbed at the Yale School of Drama before, in fictionalized non-musical form for the Yale Rep staging of Amy Freed’s The Psychic Life of Savages in 2003. The YIMT press release promises “an intricate contemporary score… [which] explores one of the most sensational—and tragic—literary love triangles in history.”

Expect more details about the shows when the Arts & Ideas Festival announces its schedule a few days from now.

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The Long Wharf Theatre, which holds its mainstage season from fall through spring,  has tried a lot of different things to use its space in the summertime: workshops, Arts & Ideas festival offerings, touring shows, small-cast comedy staples involving nuns and neurotics…

Last summer was all about a multi-million dollar renovation of the mainstage, auditorium, main lobby and other parts of the theater. But this year Long Wharf is apparently back in the summer programming game. The theater just announced a May 21 through June 2 engagement of Frank & Malachy McCourt’s popular Irish melodrama A Couple of Blaguards. The two-man show is directed by Howard Platt (“Hoppy” from TV’s Sanford & Sons and a seasoned theater director), who co-stars in it with Jarlath Conroy (Bill McDermott in George Romero’s film Day of the Dead, The Gravedigger to Paul Giamatti’s Hamlet currently at Yale Rep).

The play became popular in the wake of Fairfield County resident Frank McCourt’s bestselling memoir Angela’s Ashes, but was actually created long before that book. It’s a collection of first-person stories derived from Frank’s years as a schoolteacher and Malachy’s as a bartender.

It has toured through the state and remains popular in community theater circles. Malachy McCourt, who’s written a few books himself, acted in numerous productions of the show. (Both McCourt brothers are now in their 80s.) The Platt/Conroy rendition is an established touring production which you can read about at http://www.acoupleofblaguards.com/ It’s up to the Long Wharf how complex a set it wants to provide for this talky show. (Shown above is how it looked in a Chicago theater.) Essential set pieces are a table, a podium and a coat rack. Some settings have been pub-oriented.

A Couple of Blaguards plays at Long Wharf’s Stage II space (222 Sargent Drive, New Haven; 203-787-4282, www.longwharf.org) May 21 through June 2. Tickets are $40.

The Long Wharf’s press release for this show suggests that other summer-season announcements are forthcoming.

Hartford Stage has figured out its 2013-14 season, one which both brings back familiar faces from the theater’s illustrious past and updates the repertory-company form with which it was associated for much of its history.

The first two shows on the slate—the second complete season programmed by the theater’s new artistic director Darko Tresnjak—have exactly the same cast members, a nod to Hartford Stage’s legacy as a repertory ensemble for the first couple of decades of its existence, as well as a creative opportunity to explore very different styles with the same acting resources. La Dispute is a mid-18^th century comedy about adultery and attraction by Pierre de Marivaux, best known for The Triumph of Love (which has been staged locally both as a straight play and a musical over the years. Macbeth is an early 17^th century tragedy about bloodthirsty power by William Shakespeare, most recently performed at a major regional theater in Connecticut when Eric Ting set it in a Vietnam-era American veterans hospital a couple of seasons ago at Long Wharf. Tresnjak’s rendition, which co-stars Kate Forbes as Lady Macbeth, may be more traditional. La Dispute and Macbeth play in repertory September 12 through November 10.

The next two shows will also be familiar to longtime Long Wharf subscribers. Steve Martin’s The Underpants (January 9 through February 2) is actually a co-production with the Long Wharf, which will also be presenting it this season. (No other part of the Long Wharf 2013-14 season has yet been announced, so consider Hartford Stage’s announcement a sneak preview.) The comedy is adapted from Die Hose, a 1910 play by Expressionist German writer Carl Sternheim, Martin’s adaptation was first produced in New York in 2002 and has since become a college and community theater staple. Long Wharf artistic director Gordon Edelstein directs this co-production.

Noel Coward’s A Song at Twilight is recalled hereabouts as one of the swansong productions of Long Wharf’s longest serving artistic director, Arvin Brown. The Hartford Stage staging, February 20 through March 16, is another co-production, this time with Westport Country Playhouse, whose artistic director Mark Lamos directs it. The play, originally presented in the mid-1960s as one-third of Suite in Three Keys (a trilogy of full-length works all set in the same hotel suite), was also a swansong for Coward, who made it one of the last plays he wrote for himself to act in.  It’s a prescient-for-its-time romantic drama about a closeted gay writer confronted by a woman he dated years earlier.

Matthew Lopez, whose The Whipping Man was the most produced play of the last regional theater season (and was seen at Hartford Stage in the spring of 2012), wrote Somewhere, getting its East Coast premiere at Hartford Stage April 3-27 (2014). Somewhere is about West Side Story serving as an inspiration for a starstruck Latina mother. Giovanni Sardelli directs, and Priscilla Lopez has already been cast in the lead role of Inez Candelaria, a role she created in the world premiere production in 2011 at the Old Globe in San Diego. The L.A. Times called Somewhere “both a sprawling family drama and a coming-of-age story.”

The main season ends with the May 22 through June 15 (2014) run of Love and Other Fables, a world-premiere musical from Jay Jeffries and John McMahon. John Rando (who did Urinetown, The Wedding Singer and A Christmas Story in New York, and is also active in regional theater new-musical workshops) directs. According to McMahon, Love and Other Fables is drawn from Aesop’s Fables, but not the way you may thin. “It’s not actually based on Aesop’s Fables but about what we know to be his life. We see Aesop relate the fables, use them to manipulate people, reach people and a couple of times, save his own life, but mostly it’s about his early life as a slave  to the philosopher Xanthus and how he came to be a member of King Croesus’ court in Lydia, which is today modern Turkey. The style the show closest resembles is Boys From Syracuse.” [Note: McMahon's comments here came from an email clarification of the original posting of this article. I am thankful for the corrections, and regret earlier misstatements.]

Hartford Stage is not forsaking its annual staging of A Christmas Carol—A Ghost Story of Christmas, which has been at the theater since Michael Wilson became artistic director there in the mid-1990s. The piece is now credited as “Adapted and originally directed by Michael Wilson; directed by Maxwell Williams.” The running dates for A Christmas Carol—A Ghost Story of Christmas have not yet been released.

Hartford Stage subscriptions went on sale Friday, March 22. Single tickets to the shows won’t be available until July. For more details, see http://www.hartfordstage.org

Lindbergh’s Flight

By Bertolt Brecht. Translated by John Willett. Contributing Artists (Zie Kollektief): Kate Attwell, Gabe Levey, Brenda Meaney, Mitchell Winter. Costume Designer: Martin Schnellinger. Lighting Designer: Joey Moro. Sound Designer: Tyler Kieffer. Stage Manager: Carolynn Richer. Performed by Zie Kollektief (Scraps, Sass, Cowboy, Austria).

If this rare, often ridiculous, revision of Brecht’s lehrstück about the impact of flight, radio broadcasting and other airborne communication innovations of the early 20^th century, has anything to add to Brecht’s legacy, it’s this:

The formalization of corpsing.

For actors to freely acknowledge and regularly give in to the impulse to burst into laughter in the middle of a performance is disorienting. That they have connected these breakdowns to Brecht’s own desire to blend natural human reactions with stage artifice is brilliant.

When one of the four members of the “Kollektief” attempting to perform Lindbergh’s Flight—which, in this show, becomes a play-within-a-play in a larger, longer bout of social satire—loses it and starts giggling, they immediately turn to the upstage wall, place their head or hands against the wall, and let the other Kollektief members continue without them. The show becomes based around the rhythms and energies of the actors struggling to be actors and not convulsive laughers. The Kollektief are credible enough as performers that you can’t always divine when these intriguing interruptions are real or if they’re being sustained for their own comic qualities.

This hiccupy process consumes the entire show, which boldly takes apart Brecht’s Lindbergh’s Flight, which was originally staged in 1929, as an opera for radio, and puts it back together using clichés of movie melodrama that the audience can presumably relate to more handily than the operatic and epic-myth tropes of Brecht’s simple “learning play.” Brecht’s concept of an American hero colonizing the world’s imagination with his supposed goodness and majesty is metaphorically met here with a clip of one of the old ads where Sally Struthers pleaded for relief for starving orphans overseas.

The plot of Lindbergh’s Flight is simple: an aviator takes a momentous trip, which he both humanizes and technologizes by explaining at length the equipment he is taking with him. He makes the trip, which a chorus expands upon psychologically with lines such as “He has found his destination in us.”

The framing device of the self-important and naïve Kollectief leading us through this simple-seeming yet complex work (when not cracking each other up) is helpful when explaining that Brecht went back to this play several times and thoroughly rethought it. We’re given a sense of the script as a representative of the time in which it was written, as representative of the time in which it was rewritten, and as a living document which will never see its original form again, reinterpreted at will by successive generations of performers. For a piece about the pros and cons of mass communication, this is swell.

The Kollektief gamely deconstructs the play, and when they can’t do that, they mock it. The results will likely remind some people of the Austin-based theater troupe Rude Mechanicals, especially that audacious company’s performance-examining piece The Method Gun. Like the Kollectief here, Rude Mechs used hilarity, social embarrassment and other self-aware elements to probe the very concept of collective theater projects. The Method Gun transcended to a much higher plane of understanding than Lindbergh’s Flight does (or can); Rude Mechs can disarm you with humor, then mesmerize you with deeper meaning.

Lindbergh’s Flights plummets precariously to the dark notes which end this otherwise airy and amusing attempt to keep aloft a noble little Brecht work that’s been flying under the radar for 85 years. Unlike Method Gun (or an earlier “funny or what?” show of the current Yale Cabaret season, The Cat Club), Lindbergh’s Flight’s lurch into heaviosity is abrupt and expected. But given the looseness of the entire enterprise and the stop-start fun this Kollectief is having with it, it’s kind of a wonder that the piece lands at all.

The Yale Rep has announced its 2013-14, choosing the day of the first performance of one of the biggest hits the theater has experienced perhaps ever—Paul Giamatti in Hamlet—to make the announcement.

No Giamatti next season, but many other familiar faces from the Rep’s own past.

The season opens with director Mark Rucker, who graduated from the Yale School of Drama just a year or two before Giamatti, returning to the site of many directorial triumphs (Rough Crossing, Twelfth Night, Landscape of the Body… right back to his student thesis show Stage Door) helming a new production of A Streetcar Named Desire, Sept. 20 through Oct. 12. There have been several student productions of Tennessee Williams’ classic at Yale over the years, but not at the Rep. Rucker did a tricky late-career Williams drama, Kingdom of Earth, for the Rep in 2001. (It was the first Rep show to be staged in what is now called the Iseman Theatre at 1146 Chapel Street.) He showed he could navigate the highs and lows of Williams’ precarious playwriting. One suspects that there’s a casting surprise or two to come with this one, but I’m excited already.

The second show of the season (Oct. 25-Nov. 16) is Owners, Caryl Churchill’s 1972 satirical drama about property-owning and powermongering. Churchill is a goddess to college drama departments. There was a Yale School of Drama production of her best-known work, Cloud Nine, this past semester, and her shows turn up regularly at the Yale Cabaret and in undergraduate Yale productions. Evan Yionoulis, who teaches in the YSD Acting program, directs. Her range of Rep shows might be even broader than Rucker’s—everything from a slapstick King Stag and George F. Walker’s tragicomic Heaven to Ibsen’s Master Builder and Shakespeare’s Richard II to the premiere of Kirsten Greenidge’s Bossa Nova. Yionoulis is responsible for this past season’s production of Marie Jones’ Stones in His Pockets.

Some will greet the return of Steven Epps and Christopher Bayes with huzzahs. The actor/director/co-adaptor team brought their studious clowning overlays to Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters in 2010 and followed it with a stylistically similar romp through Moliere’s A Doctor in Spite of Himself a couple of seasons later. This time (Nov. 30-Dec. 21) they’re tackling a much more modern farce, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, by a writer who was very near and dear to the Yale Rep’s heart in the 1980s. Dario Fo, the political comedy titan who’s celebrating his 87^th birthday later this month, performed at Yale with his wife Franca Rame in 1986 on their first U.S. tour. The Rep staged Fo’s Almost by Chance a Woman: Elizabeth (starring Joe Morton) in 1987. Dario Fo is beloved at universities and regional theaters throughout Connecticut: one of the playwright’s great champions and translators, Ron Jenkins, teaches at Wesleyan, and the Long Wharf Theater did Fo’s We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay! in 2004.

If you’re thinking that at this point the Rep season is crying out for a play that’s less than 40 years old, the second half of the season is a one-two-three punch of new works by alums of the Yale School of Drama playwriting program. All three shows were developed through the largesse of Yale’s Binger Center for New Theatre, founded in 2008 with the largest grant ever given to any theater for the development of new works.

Recent grad Meg Miroshnik, whose basketball drama Tall Girls was part of the YSD’s 2011 Carlotta Festival of New Plays (and was later further developed at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference in Waterford) has her The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls happening Jan. 31-Feb. 22, followed March 14-April 5 by These Paper Bullets, Rolin Jones’ fresh update of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, with new songs by Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong. Jones’ The Intelligent Design of Jennie Chow premiered at the Rep, went on to a long run Off-Broadway and was shortlisted for a Pulitzer. Jones distinguished himself in television with writing or producing credits on such shows as Weeds, Friday Night Lights and the first season of Smash. Jackson Gay, who directed Jennie Chow both at Yale and in New York, and recently reunited with Jones for an Off-Broadway production of The Jammer, another script from his and her Yale days, will direct These Paper Bullets.

The season ends April 18-May 10 with the poetic drama The House that will not Stand, by another mid-2000s YSD grad, Marcus Gardley. The Rep did Gardley’s dance of the holy ghosts in 2006, and he was also well produced at the Yale Cabaret while he was a student. The House that will not Stand is to be directed by Patricia McGregor, well-remembered for her rousing rethinking of the musical Jelly’s Last Jam, her thesis project in the YSD directing program in 2009. Gardley is known for history-based African-American dramas, but this one is inspired by the classic Federico Garcia Lorca novel The House of Bernarda Alba.

Wow. Not a single To-Be-Announced on the list, all the directors in place, and the biggest star name announced so far (Billie Joe Armstrong) behind the scenes as a songwriter. This is a sizzling schedule of new directions, renewed relationships, sentiment, satire and sass. Some season.

For season subscription packages, contact the Rep box office at (203) 432-1234 or http://www.yalerep.org/