Yale Rep has announced its 2014-15 season. Just five titles instead of the accustomed six. Three shows being presented as part of the No Boundaries international performance series have yet to be announced.

Not that we know casts or designers yet, but I’ll go ahead and brand this a director’s season. Some strong conceptual thinkers are behind the scenes here.

Two of those directors are entrenched in the Yale School of Drama: the school’s dean (and Rep artistic director) James Bundy, who’s doing the season-opening production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia; and Liz Diamond, who’s the chair of the directing department and is moving back into her darker mode for Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle. The last shows both Bundy and Diamond directed at the Rep were Shakespeares—he did the Paul Giamatti Hamlet while she did a light, fluid Winter’s Tale.

Those two faculty incursions are the only classic plays on view next season (and interestingly, Arcadia and Chalk Circle are both being presented in Yale’s oldest theater space, the Yale University Theatre on York Stret). Everything else is a world premiere.

War, by the fast-rising young talent Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, is directed by recent Yale School of Drama grad Lileana Blain-Cruz, whose school productions of  Wilde’s Salome and Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights showed a real talent for working with ensemble casts.

I saw the world premiere of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ dysfunctional family drama Appropriate last year at the Humana Festival in Kentucky. He’s perhaps best known for Neighbors, which the New York Public Theater did in 2010. His plays are caustic and abrasive and concerned with issues of class, race and social struggles. But he’s not just a provocateur; he’s strong on character and plot. War is about siblings squabbling as their visit their comatose mother in hospital. There’s a revelation about an incident in their grandfather’s past.

Danai Gurira, whose previous Rep credits are as an actor/co-writer of In the Continuum and as the author of the Liberian political drama Eclipsed in 2009, returns to the Rep for the first time since achieving national fame as Michonne on the TV series Walking Dead. Her new play is Familiar, about a young woman who wants to include a “traditional Zimbabwean wedding ritual” in her upcoming nuptials. It’s directed by Rebecca Taichman, who graduated from the Yale School of Drama in 2001 and has returned regularly to direct at the Rep, where her triumphs include the David Adjmi plays The Evildoers and Marie Antoinette.

The final world premiere is of Sheila Callaghan’s Elevada, which the Rep describes as “a warm, witty, and wise romantic comedy about the fear of being alone—and the fear of not being alone.” It has something to do with dating and social networking in the modern world. Sheila Callaghan established herself in New York’s downtown experimental theater scene of the ‘90s and has recently shone as a screenwriter for such cable shows as Shameless and United States of Tara.Elevada’s directed by Jackson Gay, currently represented at the Rep with Rolin Jones’ Mersey Shakespeare mash-up These Paper Bullets. Gay’s Rep production of Jones’ The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow moved to a successful run Off Broadway in 2005.

Even before it received oodles of money to develop the Binger Center for New Theater, the Yale Rep under James Bundy was known for its development of new works. The 2012-13 was evenly split between new plays and older ones (assuming you count the Shakespeare adaptation These Paper Bullets as new, which you should). With only five on the slate this year, the balance has tipped towards the new. The other distinction is how the Rep has been bringing back recent grads of the YSD directing program, for projects which these emerging might not have gotten a crack at doing elsewhere. (If recent tradition holds, you’ll see a recognize a lot of Yale-trained actors in the casts of these shows too).

I wish I could say more, but one of the drawbacks of new plays is that you don’t know anything more about them than the one-paragraph synopses in the press release.

Here are some completely random predictions, based on nothing other than my own instincts:

• Arcadia will have a cool cast. Shows that Bundy directs tend to have noteworthy, established actors in ‘em. The play may well blow minds in New Haven. Stoppard’s hardly underproduced around here (the Rep’s done Rough Crossing, and the Long Wharf’s had Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Travesties), but Arcadia, which was written 20 years ago, has never had a professional production in Connecticut, only undergrad ones at various colleges (including Yale).

• Caucasian Chalk Circle will be mesmerizing. Diamond did a production of Brecht’s St. Joan of the Stockyards at the Rep in the early ‘90s which remains one of the best Brecht stagings I’ve ever seen, period. This is a similarly shaped ensemble piece, and I can’t wait for it.

• The description of Elevada (“Ramona’s going on lots of first dates but is intentionally sabotaging her chances for a second. Khalil, a social media superstar, is about to close a huge deal that will take him completely off the market. They’ll do anything to float above their own lives, even as fate tries to pull them both back down to earth”) makes it seem lightweight. But it’s a Sheila Callaghan play, so expect it to be more challenging than expected.

• Every Rep season has a show that flat-out polarizes audiences. No prize for thinking that in the 2014-2015 season the love-it-or-hate-it champ will be Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ War. Especially when this provocative playwright is linked with an equally fearless director such as Lileana Blain-Cruz.

• Of these five plays, two were written by women, four are directed by women, and all five appear to have strong female protagonists.

• The fact that the as-yet-unannounced No Boundaries series is mentioned prominently in the Rep’s season-touting press release makes me think that those shows might be a bigger deal than usual.

In a nutshell, then:

Oct. 3 through 25, 2014: Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, directed by James Bundy.

Nov. 21 through Dec. 13: War by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz

Jan. 30 through Feb. 21, 2015: Familiar by Danai Gurira, directed by Rebecca Taichman.

March 20 through April 11, 2015: The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht, directed by Liz Diamond.

April 24 through May 16, 2015: Elevada by Sheila Callaghan, directed by Jackson Gay.

Mark your calendars, and leave room for notes in the margins as casting and other details are released in coming months.