News from the Yale School of Drama
who are Earle’s only grandchildren. I told them that Grandpa Earle was a great man, and when you grow up, people are going to say to you: Are you Earle Gister’s grandchildren? And you’ll say yes. And they’ll respect you for that. And they’ll love you for that, because of who he was for them and what he was in his life.” Earle Gister died at his home in New Haven. He was 77.
Playwriting Teacher Howard Stein Howard Stein (Former Faculty), a man devoted to plays and especially to playwrights, died on October 14 at his home in Stamford, CT. Howard was born on July 4, 1922 in Chester, PA, and served in the 394th Infantry of the 99th Division of the US Army during World War II. Upon graduation from Swarthmore College, he attended Columbia University and the University of Iowa, where he spent seven years as the head of the Playwriting Program and received a PhD in English in 1965. From 1967 to 1978, Howard was associate dean and supervisor of the Playwriting Program at Yale School of Drama. After short periods at the University of Texas in Austin and the State University of New York in Purchase, he spent ten years at Columbia University as the first permanent chair of the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies and supervisor of the Playwriting Program. He retired from Columbia in 1992. Howard had a profound and lasting impression on many of his playwriting students, including Ralph Arzoomanian, Robert Auletta ’69, Christopher Durang ’74, Albert Innaurato ’74, Allan Knee ’69, Ted Talley ’77, and Wendy Wasserstein ’76. David Milch yc ’66, who established the Howard Stein Scholarship at YSD to honor his great friend, said of him, “Howard Stein was a great teacher and a great soul. Like so many of his students and friends, my life was changed for having known him.” Although most famous as a teacher of playwriting—and a fivetime winner of the Samuel French Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Playwriting—Howard also had a distinguished career as a playwright, essayist, and editor. His plays appeared in The Best One-Act Plays of 1951–52 and The Best Short Plays of 1959–60. In addition to the essays he published on dramatic criticism, dramatic literature, theatre history, and dramaturgy, he was the co-editor with Glenn Young ’79 of The Best American Short Plays series and author of A Time to Speak. Upon learning of Howard’s passing, Robert Brustein ’51, hon ’66, (Former Dean) wrote: “He was everybody’s friend and he will be dreadfully missed, and deeply mourned, not least of all by me. He was a man of total integrity and devotion.” Howard is survived by Marianne, his wife of 58 years, and by his sons David, Ted, and Joshua, and grandchildren Ben, Alexandra, Gillian, James, and Madeleine.
Satirist Peter Bergman A founding member of the surrealist comedy troupe Firesign Theater, whose albums became cult favorites among college students in the late 1960s and 70s, Peter Bergman ’65, yc ’61, died in Santa Monica, CA. He was born in Cleveland, where his parents co-hosted a radio show, “Breakfast with the Bergmans.” His father also worked as the men’s fashion editor for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. An oft-told story about his youth has Peter as an announcer on his high school radio system, warning the student body that the Chinese communists had taken over the school and that a “mandatory voluntary assembly was to take place immediately.” Peter was fired from his announcing job by the principal, who lived on as the inspiration for the Principal Poop character on the Firesign album Don’t Crush That Dwarf. Peter graduated from Yale, where he then taught as a Carnegie Fellow. A more natural fit was his subsequent attendance at Yale School of Drama on a Eugene O’Neill playwriting fellowship. It was in New Haven that Peter met Phil Proctor yc ’62, who would eventually become one of his collaborators at Firesign. After graduation, Peter moved to Los Angeles in hopes of establishing himself as a professional writer. One of his first jobs was in 1966 as the host of an all-night radio call-in show on KPFK. The free-wheeling, wildly associative conversations on a show known as Radio Free Oz were a precursor of what would become the Firesign sensibility. Phil Austin was the producer and David Ossman the director of the show, and Phil Proctor, Peter’s friend from Yale, was a frequent guest. They were an informal group of friends who stayed up all night, taking phone calls on the air from people who were also up all night. The show attracted the attention of Columbia Records, and Firesign Theater (as the four men called themselves) made its first album in 1968: Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, followed the next year by How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All? During the next few years they developed their stream-of-consciousness, often surrealist style, filled with wordplay, references to psychedelic drugs, movies, radio, TV, and political figures, intermingled with sound effects and bits of music. Their work influenced contemporary comedy, from Saturday Night Live to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Peter also wrote and produced on his own, including the 1986 monologue “Help Me Out of This Head,” about his childhood in Cleveland. He was also fascinated with interactive games and wrote a CD-ROM parody of the popular adventure video game MYST. Peter died on March 9. He is survived by a daughter, Lily Oscar Bergman, and his sister, Wendy Kleckner. Peter was 72 years old.
YSD 2012–13
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