YSD Annual Magazine 2008

Annual Magazine of Yale School of Drama December 2008

Yale school of Drama

Life is a Cabaret, Old Chum: Forty Years in Yale’s Most Inspiring Basement After the Annex: The Living Legacy of YSD Designers From Playwriting to Book Reviewing: An Unlikely Journey An Interview with Richard Foreman

Dear Alumni, But reading this magazine in proofs has given me A year spent doing something that you love can go by hope. I have been inspired by the range of work that quickly. When you have spent ten years in a place, as I engages our alumni—by the diversity of ideas and have now done as a student and then faculty member at the School of Drama, the tenth year seems to go by expression for which you stand, and by the enduring somewhat more quickly than the ninth, and a lot more imagination of this vast artistic community as evidenced quickly than the first. Aging has a way of speeding up by your individual and collective achievements. the relative passage of time. So no year in my experience Throughout the generations of stories in these pages, has gone by faster than this one, with its heady political there is an imaginative pulse and a sense of surprising excitement and unsettling financial turmoil sounding in outcomes, usually delightful. How happy I am to vivid counterpoint to the strains of new and classic plays remember that none of us here knows the paths our in rehearsal and performance here at Yale. current students will take, and that it is our job to In spite of the pace and the hullabaloo, I have had prepare them for a lifetime of invention. many chances this year to catch up with alumni around Such creativity will be a powerful source of renewal the country and here in New Haven. for the American theatre. While many of our current Many of you have passed through to students are excited by the prospects of working in the work at the Rep or Long Wharf, to see commercial theatre or resident theatre movement, many a show at the Rep or the Cabaret, to others are impassioned critics of those sectors, who see teach or to visit a class; many more of the most exciting opportunities in ensemble generated you—almost 1000—have attended a work, or international collaborations. Still others will ysd reception in the past year.

When you involve yourselves I have been inspired by in the life of the School in these the range of work that engages our alumni ways, I feel a buoyant sense of our past supporting our future: — by the diversity of ideas and expression the qualities of your experience for which you stand, and by the enduring and wisdom inform our work at imagination of this vast artistic the School with both your direct input and the indirect example community as evidenced by your individual of your creative pursuits. and collective achievements.

Even amid the excitement and great promise of our historic national election, the economic uncertainty that discover, as many of you have done, paths that you did marks the fall of 2008 threatens us with an increasingly not foresee when you imagined a life in the theatre.

The severe temporal and financial challenges we marginal role for art in our nation. The professional face—of real estate management, deleveraging, and a theatre is undermined by a mix of undercapitalization and political temerity that has led our country to crisis in consumer confidence, to name just a few—will disinvest in education, health care, and the individual be all of ours to work on in the months and years to artist. It is daunting to imagine how, in an economic come. This magazine reminds me that the artistry and downturn, large institutional theatres can maintain a professionalism to which our alumni and students healthy balance between those resources required to are so committed will be the enduringly powerful sustain facilities and administrative staffs and those tools we have to offer our nation and the world in the required to support the artists who are the creative advancement of our art form and our culture, and it drivers of our theatre. That smaller ensembles have makes me excited about the future of both! less to lose in economic shocks is meager consolation.

Thank you for sharing your lives and work with us.

Diminishing wealth and work threatens the security of Sincerely yours, artists to support themselves in day jobs, too.

James Bundy

Dedication Pierre-André Salim ’09 September 17, 1981–November 18, 2007

On Tuesday, November 20th, 2007, the Yale School of Drama/ Yale Repertory Theatre community gathered in the University Theatre to mourn the loss and celebrate the life of Pierre-André Salim ’09, who was killed in a tragic accident on the morning of November 18th during the load-in of Tartuffe. The opening of Tartuffe was delayed for a week to allow for the memorial service. Salim was born and raised in Jakarta, Indonesia. Before coming to Yale, he earned a degree in computer science from the National University of Singapore, where he first discovered the theatre. He remained in Singapore after graduation and worked as a production and stage manager for several theatre companies, including Checkpoint Theatre, Wild Rice, Theatre Practice, and Toy Factory. Salim’s death devastated communities across two continents, as his colleagues in the United States and in Singapore felt the loss of not only a friend but an artist of great potential.

He had planned to return to Singapore after graduating, so that his training could benefit the artists and colleagues to whom he was so committed. Pierre is survived by his parents, his brother and sister, and his maternal grandmother.

The following are excerpts from eulogies delivered at Pierre’s memorial, collected to honor the memory of a beloved artist and friend.

He was smarter than us, and more passionate, harder working yet hugely humble. He had a quiet determination to learn, to improve himself, not for the simple sake of his own career, but for the sake of improving the artistic community as a whole.

Huzir Sulaiman Yale World Fellow; Joint Artistic Director, Checkpoint Theatre

There was a moment in our recollections when a fellow student recalled Pierre saying resolutely that a technical manager must be feared.

We shared a moment of absolute silence, and then the room erupted into laughter. “Who would fear Pierre?” How, indeed, would anyone fear someone whose very demeanor invited trust?

Ben Sammler ’74 Chair, Technical Design and Production Department As I begin many of the classes my classmates and I take together, I find myself counting to 10. I count to 10 because when we started this program there were 10 of us, and I want to make sure we are all present before the class begins. This morning as we began our first class without Pierre, I knew in my heart and soul that we are still 10.

We are still 10 because each of us will take Pierre with us as we continue forward with our lives. We are 10 because we take Pierre’s beautiful smile with us each day. We are 10 because we take Pierre’s strength, wisdom, and courage to help us and guide us.

Thomas Delgado ’09 Technical Design & Production To honor Pierre’s life and work, Yale School of Drama has established the Pierre-André Salim Memorial Scholarship, covering full tuition and living expenses for one entering student each year for the duration of his/her program. The award gives first priority to students from Southeast Asia and second priority to students from elsewhere in Asia, with an overall preference for students in technical theatre and design. In addition, to pay further tribute to Pierre’s legacy, the Pierre-André Salim Memorial Prize will be awarded each year to a graduating student who shows distinct promise of raising the standard of practice in the field.

Dear Alumni and Friends, This issue of the Annual Magazine is dedicated to Pierre Andre Salim ’09, a talented young technical manager and student who died tragically last year. Although I knew Pierre only by passing him in the hallway outside Ben Sammler’s office, I was always greeted by his warm and emblematic smile. Pierre, like so many of you, loved this school and he loved the chance to practice his craft in an environment that encouraged his many talents. If you did not have the opportunity to meet Pierre yourself, the words of tribute at the beginning of the magazine suggest how deeply and devotedly Pierre was loved by those who knew him, here and elsewhere.

It is the passion and achievement that Pierre embodied that drives Yale School of Drama on a daily basis. The alumni, students, faculty and staff of YSD all contribute to the School’s vibrant creative energy—an energy that I hope you see reflected in these pages. Reading the Magazine is only one of many doorways through which you continue to enter into the life of the School. When you attend Alumni Weekend in New Haven, are present at our events in New York and LA, host a reception, volunteer as a Class Agent, and give to the Drama Alumni Fund you add so much to this very special community.

As part of our commitment to serving all our community members better, we will soon be writing to ask you to participate in a survey. We will be seeking your feedback on how you would like to best remain connected to the School and to your fellow YSD graduates. Whether that be through a stronger and more effective online presence, alumni career opportunities, an active on-line bulletin board, mentoring opportunities, the organizing of local events, or a combination of these and other initiatives, we want to do everything we can to keep you involved and to stay in touch.

Thank you for the many ways you support YSD. I am looking forward to another year of meeting you and hearing from our alumni. As we honor Pierre, I also want to pay tribute to all of you.

annual MAGAZINE YALE SCHOOL OF DRAMA

December 2008, Vol. LIII

Deborah S. Berman Editor Mark Blankenship ’05 Contributing Editor Debbie A. Ellinghaus Managing Editor Jason Fitzgerald ’08 dfa Candidate Associate Editor Scott Dougan ’09 Art Editor Jennifer Nelson Copy Editor

Editorial Staff Luis Abril ’10 Susan Clark Susan Kim ’11 Ann M.K. McLaughlin ’03 Christopher Mirto ’10 Laura Torino Larsson Youngberg

Contributors Michael Barker ’09 Sarah Bishop-Stone ’10 Maya Cantu ’10 Joseph P. Cermatori ’08 dfa Candidate Matt Cornish ’09 Miriam Felton-Dansky ’09 Jacob Gallagher-Ross ’09 Christopher Lehmann-Haupt ’59 Quincy Long ’86 Elizabeth Norment ’79 Rebecca Phillips ’09 Jorge Rodríguez ’10 Jennifer L. Shaw ’09 Devon Smith ’09 Krista Corcoran Williams ’09

Design Jack Design, jackdesignstudio.com

On the Cover

Richard Gallagher ’06 in Electronic City at Yale Cabaret, 2006. Photo

by Paul Gelinas ’09.

Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theatre James Bundy ’95 Dean, Artistic Director Victoria Nolan Deputy Dean/Managing Director

Yale School of Drama Leadership Council Neil A. Mazzella ’78, Council Chair Amy Aquino ’86 John Badham ’63, ’61 yc John Lee Beatty ’73 John B. Beinecke ’69 yc Kate Burton ’82 Patricia Clarkson ’85 Tony Converse ’57 yc Sue Ann Gilfillan Converse ’55 Peggy Cowles ’65 Trip M. Cullman III ’02, ’97 yc Scott Delman ’82 yc Michael Diamond ’90 Polly Draper ’80, ’77 yc Charles S. Dutton ’83 Sasha Emerson ’84 Heidi Ettinger ’76 Marc Flanagan ’70 Donald P. Granger, Jr. ’85 yc David Marshall Grant ’78 Ruth Hendel Asaad Kelada ’64 Mark Linn-Baker ’79, ’76 yc Sarah Long ’92, ’85 yc Catherine MacNeil Hollinger ’86 Elizabeth Margid ’91, ’82 yc Drew McCoy David Milch ’66 yc Chris Noth ’85 Carol Ostrow ’80 Amy Povich ’92 Liev Schreiber ’92 Tony Shalhoub ’80 Michael Sheehan ’76 Jeremy Smith ’76 Ed Trach ’58 Courtney B. Vance ’86 Henry Winkler ’70, Co-Chair, Drama Alumni Fund

Yale School of Drama Alumni Association Asaad Kelada ’64 Co-Chair Jane Kaczmarek ’82 Co-Chair, Drama Alumni Fund Elizabeth Margid ’91, ’82 yc Co-Chair

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YSD 2008

Contents

December 2008

24 Departments On York Street

4 Not Just Break and Schedule:

12

The Art of Stage Management

5 Still Assaulting Spaces:

6 7 7 7

A Design Department Legacy Checked Out: The Drama School Library Takes a Final Bow Dwight/Edgewood Project 2008 Summer Cabaret Becomes Part of the Family Theater Magazine Takes on Censorship Long Term Service Awards

Faculty News

8 8 9 10 10 10 11

Paula Vogel: Keeping Her Day Job Matthew Suttor: Opera Composer Catherine Sheehy in Netherfield Park Welcome Back Neil Mulligan ’01 Same Chair, New Name Welcome Aboard Paul Walsh Yale’s Designer Gets Her Own Spotlight

In Review

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34 NY Holiday Party 2007 35 LA Spring Party 2008 36 Yale Repertory Theatre 2007–08 Season 38 Yale School of Drama 2007–08 Season 40 Yale Cabaret 2007–08 Season

Alumni News

42 44 46 50 52 54 74

Graduation Prizes, Fellowships and Scholarships Alumni Faculty and Honors In Memoriam Bookshelf The Art of Giving Class Notes Contributors

Features 12

Life is a Cabaret, Old Chum: Forty Years in Yale’s Most Inspiring Basement

By Mark Blankenship ’05

18

After the Annex: The Living Legacy of YSD Designers

By Miriam Felton-Dansky ’09 and Jason Fitzgerald ’08

24

From Playwriting to Book Reviewing: An Unlikely Journey

By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt ’59

26

Radicalizing Effects: An Interview with Richard Foreman ’62

By Joseph P. Cermatori ’08

28

Elements of Style: Joan Kron ’48

By Rebecca Phillips ’09

30

Mr. Wilson’s Profession: Edwin Wilson ’57

By Rebecca Phillips ’09

31

Alumni Weekend 2008

By Jorge Rodríguez ’10

On York Street

News from Yale School of Drama

Not Just Break and Schedule: The Art of YSD Stage Management As the Production Stage Manager for the 2008 Carlotta Festival, Jo McInerney ’08 knows that taking blocking notes or taping the floor with the shape of the set is only part of her job. She’s also working to build community, ensure safety, and keep everybody on track as opening day looms. Her dedication and clear understanding of her role, on the eve of her graduation, are evidence of a training program that fosters not just expert rule-keepers but full-blooded theatre artists.

Of course, a stage manager’s education focuses on the nuts and bolts of the profession—the documentation and managerial skills that are needed on a daily basis. For McInerney, this means attending budget meetings, adjusting complex schedules involving up to a third of YSD students, and coordinating the stage managers for each of the festival’s three productions.

But according to Yale Repertory Theatre Production Stage Manager James Mountcastle ’90 (Faculty), the faculty’s primary goal is to train their students to become “independent artists and thoughtful custodians of the artistic process,” a refrain I heard repeatedly during interviews. A Yale stage manager—the only collaborator to live inside a production from early meetings to closing night—learns to listen to the entire work of art. “It’s not just break and schedule,” says Karen Hashley ’10, who decided to become a stage manager because she loves the job’s clout and its heavy responsibility.

This artistic involvement is most apparent during technical rehearsals. In a highly charged atmosphere, the stage manager begins to take control, striving to create a space in which every artist feels safe. According to Amanda Spooner ’09, the stage manager must maintain a positive attitude in the room even as stress levels increase. This involves guiding the production and personnel through the choppy waters of tech-week, constantly balancing the needs of, say, the

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(From left to right) Jessica Barker ’10, Mary Hunter (Faculty), and Jo McInerney ’08 watch over a technical rehearsal for the Carlotta Festival’s I Am a Superhero. Photo by Joan Marcus. carpenters against the lighting designer against the actors. The set has to be built, the light cues written, and the characters created, often simultaneously. As Jessica Barker ’10 says, managing tech can be a daunting and nearly “impossible job,” but it’s fulfilling when, thanks largely to its stage manager’s level-headedness, the production opens without a hitch.

The Yale stage managers’ dancer-like ability to manage a jumble of responsibilities is cultivated by their busy schedules. Monday through Saturday, from 2:00 p.m. until 11:00 p.m. (and later to type reports), student stage managers are usually in rehearsal—prepping the room; scheduling actors, vocal coaches, and movement instructors; taking notes on blocking; and, most important of all, observing what’s around them. Monday through Friday they’re also studying everything from “Law in the Arts” to fight choreography to theatre history. And Sunday? If it’s Sunday, that means it’s time for Cabaret productions, homework, and, if they can find the time, a personal life.

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“You have to teach them what mental and physical capabilities it’s going to take for them to sustain,” says chair Mary Hunter (Faculty), who is proud of the tone she has set for her department. In fact, she can be proud that Stage Management is a department at all—when she arrived at Yale thirteen years ago, the stage managers were a sub-section of the Theater Management department (and before that the Technical Design and Production and the Directing departments), but she fought to give them their own space and resources. She’s since had the pleasure of following her former students into thriving professional careers.

“Our students are always working,” she beams, and the fact that they “do a wide variety of different things—Broadway, regional theatre, event management, opera—speaks to our ability to give them skill sets to take on any employment they seek.”

Echoing several of his students, and Hunter herself, Mountcastle uses religious terminology to describe a career in stage continued on next page

News from Yale School of Drama

management: He sees it as a transformational “artistic and spiritual quest” that must be “authentic to the individual” who undertakes it. So at Yale School of Drama, these students are learning more than a trade. They’re preparing to be stewards of a creative process, blending technical skill and aesthetic sensitivity to help the theatre thrive. And if it sometimes feels like climbing a mountain, for students like McInerney, Hashley, Spooner, and Barker, there’s a world of fulfillment in the ascent.

Matt Cornish ’09

Yale School of Drama 2008 – 2009 Season Man = Man

By Bertolt Brecht Directed by Erik Pearson ’09 October 28–November 1, 2008

Jelly’s Last Jam Directed by Patricia McGregor ’09 February 13–18, 2009

The Carlotta Festival of New Plays

The Robbers

By Friedrich Schiller Adapted by Becca Wolff ’09 and Jacob Gallagher-Ross ’09 Directed by Becca Wolff ’09 December 13–18, 2008

New works by graduating playwrights: Madeline Brickman ’09 Matt Moses ’09 Gonzalo Rodriguéz-Risco ’09 May 8–17, 2009

Still Assaulting Spaces: A Design Department Legacy Every design student since 1969 has endured the criticism of Ming Cho Lee (Faculty), but few have had to watch their own children under his incisive gaze. In January 2006, not long after graduating from college, Scott Dougan ’09 visited Lee’s apartment with a model he’d built for The Cherry Orchard to ask if the great design professor thought he was ready to apply to graduate school. His mother, Suzanne Palmer Dougan ’76, was with him.

“It was hard for me to listen to,” she said.

Scott remembers, “Ming said, ‘I can’t even look at this.’” (The wise professor advised him to apply so long as he completely remade the model.) For Suzanne Dougan, Amherst College Professor of Set and Costume Design and Director of Theatrical Production, nothing Lee said was a surprise—she had recognized her son’s amateur mistakes long before he arrived in New York—but she felt it wasn’t her job to teach him: “I’m his mother. It never would have worked. [His idea] would have developed into something else.” Still, Scott didn’t talk to his mother for the rest of that afternoon.

The story has a happy ending, of course: Scott is now in his third year in the School of Drama design department, the only “legacy” to pass through Professor Lee’s tenure. “Scott

Scott Dougan ’09 and Suzanne Dougan ’76 standing outside the University Theatre. Photo by Jason Fitzgerald ’08.

YSD 2008

is not a cookie-cutter copy of Suzanne,” Lee reflects, “but he brings a lot of the qualities of a great family,” including his mother’s “love of ideas.” Suzanne, who has sent many of her own students to the Drama School over the years, is pleased to see how things have changed since she graduated. “It’s much more organized… Now there’s more support for the way the designers work through the process in production.” For Scott, being part of a legacy has meant an embarrassing story or two from Lee about his mother’s student days, but he also has another reason to be grateful to Yale—it’s where his mother met his father, Clark Dougan ’76 grd, a history professor.

As she did during Scott’s visit with Lee, Suzanne has tried hard to be a mother first and a teacher second. She says that, if anything, it’s her job to teach him “discipline,” to make sure he’s done his research and that he corrects his drawing. And yet, aesthetics and genetics are not far apart. Scott remembers his faculty interview, when Michael Yeargan (Faculty) held up one of his sketches and said, “You draw like your mother!”

“Most of my stuff is big,” Suzanne says of her work. “I tend to assault spaces.” Scott, whose recent multi-story set for The Ghost Sonata was one of the more overwhelming designs to fill the University Theatre in a few years, meekly responds, “I guess that’s genetic.”

Jason Fitzgerald ’08

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On York Street Checked Out: The Drama School Library Takes a Final Bow On a Friday afternoon last May, the Yale School of Drama Library smelled of catering.

Linen tablecloths and purple lilacs spruced up an elaborate buffet, and revelers chatted happily while they ate. Yet there was palpable sadness in the air. After all, this was a goodbye party—at summer’s end, the Library was scheduled to move its entire collection to the newly expanded Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library.

All Lydia Garcia ’08 could think was, “I hope they put everything back the way Pam likes it.”

She was referring, of course, to Pamela Jordan, who served as the room’s purple-clad librarian and den mother for 32 years. In his speech, Dean James Bundy ’95 called the gathering a “subterfuge” to celebrate Jordan’s “three decades of service,” winning her extended applause. Her face, always a stony hieroglyph, betrayed not so much closure as stoic acceptance.

Ruth Feldman, Dean James Bundy ’95, and Librarian Pamela Jordan in the Drama Library.

Photo by Maggie Elliot.

It was the rest of the crowd who needed a mourning ritual. For them the Drama Library was not just a place to find books. It was a sanctuary, offering comfort with its cracked wooden tables and ancient yellow couches.

After more than a decade of negotiations, the relocation had come to seem a threat that, waited out, would disappear.

Among the crowd was Allen Townsend, Arts Library Director and representative of a

more optimistic take on the future: a beautiful multi-storied addition to the Architecture building that includes a spacious café and reading areas, a new Special Resources collection, a renovated Digital Media Center, and an integrated Arts Library incorporating Art, Architecture, Drama, Visual Arts, and Arts of the Book resources. At the Drama Library goodbye party, Townsend reminded the crowd that the decision to relocate long preceded his tenure, which began in 2007.

Jordan will miss the freedom and virtual sovereignty of heading the Drama Library’s circulation desk, but she will nonetheless have a prominent place in the new library, a saving grace for students and alumni unwilling to say goodbye. As Dean Bundy reminded her, “Your spirit, your generosity, your dedication to the students and the school will make the new space as important to us as the one we leave behind.” After the applause finally died down, Jordan turned to the crowd and, reliably, responded: “Well, I don’t have anything to say. I told people I would lock myself in the cage, so you couldn’t find me!”

Jason Fitzgerald ’08

Dwight/Edgewood Project 2008

The Dwight/Edgewood Project mentor Barret O’Brien ’09 looks on as Angel Estrada works on his play. Photo by Ruth Feldman.

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A dragonfly and a mosquito team up to escape from under the windshield wiper that trapped them. An Egyptian pharaoh from the future, lonely in his pyramid neighborhood, looks for an apartment in New York City. A basketball player searches for the magic ball that will help him win his next tournament. These are a few performance highlights from this year’s Dwight/Edgewood Project (D/EP), a four-week, intensive playwriting program for middle-school students.

This summer, ten sixth and seventh graders from New Haven’s Troup Magnet Academy were paired with School of Drama actors, directors, designers, dramaturgs and playwrights who worked as their mentors each afternoon after school. Under the leadership of Managing Director Meghan Pressman ’10 and Associate Managing Director Alyssa Anderson ’10, they guided the students in the writing of two plays, the second of which was produced at the end of the program. After a week of games designed to teach the basic elements of theatre-making, the program welcomed Megan Sandberg-Zakian, former Associate Artistic Director of 52nd Street and daughter of Bob Sandberg ’77, as its new Playmaking Teaching Artist.

On June 20th and 21st, four weeks and one weekend camping trip (to nearby Camp Wightman) after the students first arrived, D/EP presented More Than Your Usual Drama, two nights of performances that each showcased five different plays. Parents, family members, friends, and visitors from the School of Drama and New Haven communities attended these sold-out shows. Commented the proud father of a playwright, “It was great. It’s a program that truly moves today’s youth to dream and to fulfill their dreams.”

Jorge J. Rodríguez ’10, D /EP Presidential Fellow/Mentor

YSD 2008

News from Yale School of Drama

Long-Term Service Awards

Mike Donahue ’08 and Michael Barker ’09 outside of 217 Park Street. Photo by Scott Dougan ’09.

Summer Cabaret Becomes Part of the Family In its 37-year history, the Summer Cabaret has produced season after season of passiondriven projects that showcase the best of student-produced work. Founded in 1970 as the nonprofit Ensemble Company for the Performing Arts (ECPA), Summer Cabaret has continued to function as a separate entity from Yale School of Drama, with a separate board and budget, even though most of the work onstage has been unquestionably “YSD.” The close relationship between the School and Summer Cabaret finally became official this year, when ECPA officially dissolved, as it could no longer operate a liquor license independent from Yale. So, this summer was an opportunity to reintroduce Summer Cabaret to the New Haven community as a full partner with Yale. With Artistic Director Michael Donahue ’08 and Managing Director Michael Barker ’09 bridging the transition (Donahue also led Summer Cabaret 2007), this year’s Summer Cabaret at Yale included a sold-out production of The Who’s Tommy, two worldpremiere comedies, and a modern dance piece.

Michael Barker ’10

Contrary to popular belief, for members of the Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theatre community, the year’s best party doesn’t take place at an opening night or a fundraising gala (as fabulous as those events may be). It takes place in the Yale Rep Lounge, and it is celebrated not with champagne and aperitifs but with pounds of pizza from Eli’s and miles of cake from Lucibello’s: It’s the annual Long-Term Service Recognition Awards celebration, which took place on February 8, 2008. This year’s recipients included one staff member, beloved nighttime security officer Jake Thompson, who has not missed one day of work in his 35 years of service. Dean James Bundy ’95 calls the festive annual event “not only a wonderful way to get to know our community better, but also a very meaningful opportunity to share our appreciation for so many of our staff who make it possible for us to function as well as we do.” Amidst the merrymaking,

President Rick Levin grd ’74 with Jake Thompson. he paid tribute to each employee with a special gift commemorating their years of service. Acknowledged for their dedication to Yale were: Deborah Berman (5 years); Elizabeth Bolster (5 years); Marguerite Elliot (5 years); Nancy Genga (5 years); Brian MacQueen ’06 (5 years); London Moses (5 years); Katherine Burgueño ’90 (10 years); Janet Cunningham (10 years); Susan Clark (15 years); Mary Zihal (15 years); Brian Cookson (20 years); William Reynolds ’77 (25 years); Claire Shindler (30 years); and Jake Thompson (35 years).

Jason Fitzgerald ’08

Yale’s Theater Magazine Tackles Theatre Censorship Every fall, first-year Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism students in Tom Sellar’s ’97, ’03 dfa (Faculty) Theater magazine workshop must pitch Sellar, who is the Yale journal’s editor-in-chief, an idea for a special themed issue. They dream up tables of contents, identify prospective contributors, track down article subjects, and rummage around for neglected artists. For many, the assignment is a rewarding thought experiment — a chance to hone editorial skills or explore a tantalizing topic.

But for Miriam Felton-Dansky ’09, it was the beginning of two years’ research and writing, which will culminate in fall 2008 with the publication of Theater’s special issue on “Censorship and Performance.”

Intrigued by Felton-Dansky’s initial proposal of an issue examining theatre’s fraught relationship with censorship today, Sellar asked her to keep investigating. Over the ensuing months, the two compiled accounts of suppressed performances in the U.S. and around the globe.

The class of 2010 got involved too. Sellar used the project to teach vital journalistic skills like fact-checking, interviewing, manuscript editing, and database research. Each student in the editorial workshop pursued a media lead exposing an act of censorship somewhere around the world, chasing web links, and uncovering news sources—to produce a polished piece of reporting. These dispatches will be published in the issue, alongside anecdotal reports and personal testimony from artists and scholars from Boston to Beirut to Burma.

Jacob Gallagher-Ross ’09 Theater is published three times a year by the Yale School of Drama and Duke University Press.

More information can be found at www.theatermagazine.org.

YSD 2008

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Faculty News Paula Vogel Keeping Her Day Job Paula Vogel (Faculty) is probably best known as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of plays like How I Learned to Drive, Baltimore Waltz, and The Long Christmas Ride Home. But for the past twenty-four years, she has pursued a parallel career teaching playwriting at Brown University, where she has had peerless success cultivating young writers. Her former students include literary lights Bridget Carpenter, Jordan Harrison, Adam Bock, Lynn Nottage ’89 (Faculty), plus Pulitzer winner Nilo Cruz and MacArthur Fellow Sarah Ruhl (Yale Rep Associate Artist).

And now her pedigree has a new line: New Haven. In July 2008, Vogel began a five-year appointment as Eugene O’Neill Professor (Adjunct) and Chair of the Playwriting Department at Yale School of Drama, bringing along a trove of pedagogical experience and a fierce commitment to encouraging singular voices.

Paula Vogel (Faculty) teaching playwriting students at Yale School of Drama. Photo by Joan Marcus.

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Vogel’s appointment represents a triumphal return: Turned down from admission to YSD’s playwriting department when she was just 21, Vogel has devoted her teaching life to providing beginning playwrights with the kind of institutional support she never had.

The hallmark of her instruction is her devotion to a writer’s individuality. Adam Bock, who has become a regular presence in the biggest Off-Broadway theatres, says, “Paula’s a brilliant teacher. What she does is make her students realize that there are many different ways to tell a story. She exposes them to all types of theatre and devices. She made me realize that I don’t need to put a play in a kitchen. I’m always looking for a different place to put a play. Suddenly it looks new to people and they can hear again because they’re not used to it. When you think of the Brown playwrights—Sarah Ruhl, Nilo Cruz and Jordan Harrison—we all take those risks…She believes in the personal voice. She always asks what would happen if you pushed yourself a little.”

For Vogel, teaching also has political importance—perhaps now more than ever, as grants for writers dry up and glacier-paced development programs stymie new plays.

She has said, “I feel that more than when I started [the Brown playwriting program], this country has not embraced its obligations to artists, and that is a very politically and spiritually dangerous avoidance of our social responsibility. Art is a necessity, not a luxury. How healthy we are as a society is related to how expressive we are.”

Thanks to a new grant from the Robina Foundation underwriting the expansion of Yale Repertory Theatre’s new-play commissioning program, the Yale Center for New Theatre, Vogel has also been named Playwright-in-Residence at Yale Rep. But while she’ll always be a playwright first, Vogel says teaching has been “one of the best day jobs in the world.” In the years to come, the Drama School’s playwriting students will undoubtedly be glad she’s kept it.

Jacob Gallagher-Ross ’09

YSD 2008

Composer Matthew Suttor (Faculty) works on his new opera The Trial of the Cannibal Dog with conductor Peter Scholes. Photo by Robert Catto.

Matthew Suttor Opera Composer Presenting New Zealand audiences with a new opera about James Cook is risky enough. But when Matthew Suttor (Faculty) turned the story of Cook, the English adventurer who is New Zealand’s equivalent of Columbus, into a postmodern epic involving medical surgeries, men dressed like dogs, enormous piles of trash, and a combination of the English and Maori languages, the result was polarizing: “Some people loved it, some people wanted me shot at dawn.”

The Trial of the Cannibal Dog, composed by Suttor in collaboration with John Downie (libretto) and longtime collaborator Christian Penny (director), is based on Anne Salmond’s book of the same name. While Salmond presents a historical study of Cook’s overseas voyages, Suttor and Downie make a broader comment about the legacy of colonialism and cultural exchange that Cook represents.

They were inspired by a conversation with Salmond, who told them that Cook “became infected by the South Pacific.” They gave a major role to Cook’s wife, about whom little is known, to act as a witness to the opera’s events. They also played up metaphors of bodily transformations (the heart surgery, which begins and ends the opera) and animal passions that exceed cultural boundaries (envisioning islanders and shipmates as dogs).

The production, which played at the 2008 New Zealand International Arts Festival, was continued on next page

News from Yale School of Drama

hard for some audiences to swallow, but for others it was a revelatory new take on New Zealand’s colonial past.

After a career as a composer of various performance and theatre pieces, Suttor has finally succumbed to the opera bug. He is fascinated by an art form that “brings together theatre artists in a way nothing else does,” a gesamt sensibility for which he credits his time at the School of Drama. Suttor has also used the writing process of Cannibal Dog as a teaching tool in his Department of Sound Design courses, a decision that may have influenced Sarah Pickett ’08 and Jana Hoglund ’08 to write operas for their thesis projects. In the meantime, Suttor has begun to collaborate with Anna Jones ’06 on his

latest opera project, Virgins in Venice. “The rewards are great,” he says of his newest passion. “This is what I want to do.”

Jason Fitzgerald ’08

Save the Date!

Yale School of Drama 2009 Alumni Events

Spring Party At the home of Jane Kaczmarek Los Angeles, CA March 8, 2009

Holiday Party

A production shot from Matthew Suttor’s (Faculty) new opera The Trial of the Cannibal Dog. Photo by Robert Catto.

Yale Club of New York December 7, 2009

Catherine Sheehy in Netherfield Park If you were a commuter on the infamous Metro-North Railway between New Haven and New York City back in 1992, you might remember a young, recently graduated School of Drama student surviving the trip by burying herself in a Jane Austen novel. Catherine Sheehy ’92, ’99 dfa (Faculty) read Austen’s entire canon during the several months she worked at American Theatre in New York City while living in Connecticut. Fifteen years later, she’s turned her pleasure reading into a creative boon, bringing Pride and Prejudice to the stage in a new adaptation.

The script was commissioned by Asolo Rep as part of its program, “Beyond the Book.” After the show premiered in March 2007, Stan Wojewodski, Jr. (Former Dean) mounted a production at Dallas Theater Center, where it opened in September 2007. For Sheehy, the process of adapting Austen was “a humbling experience” as she struggled to “give the sweep of her comic

Kathleen McElfresh ’06 and David Matranga ’06 in Dallas Theater Center’s recent production of Pride and Prejudice.

Sheehy created a theatricalist dramaturgy in which letter exchanges become ballroom dances, and Elizabeth Bennett becomes narrator as well as heroine. novel its true due, not reducing it to a simple boy-disaffects-girl-until-her-eyes-are-opened-forher love story.” Wanting to preserve Pride and Prejudice as the incisive study of a social system held together by veils, vows, gossip, and reputation, Sheehy created a theatricalist dramaturgy in which letter exchanges become ballroom dances, and Elizabeth Bennett becomes narrator as well as heroine.

The experience of her two productions was also, in Sheehy’s words, “a Yale Family extravaganza.” The Asolo production was directed by her YSD classmate Mark Rucker ’92, with costumes by her partner Katherine Roth ’93 and sets by Ola Maslik ’06. The Dallas Theater Center mounting also featured costumes by Roth, sets by John Coyne ’97, lights by Paul Whitaker ’02, and sound design by Brian “Fitz” Patton ’01. It was stage managed by Adam Ganderson ’06, and starred Kathleen McElfresh ’06 as Elizabeth and David Matranga ’06 as Darcy. For the young woman on the Metro-North train, the play’s climactic final kiss brings more than one love affair to a tender, satisfying conclusion.

Jason Fitzgerald ’08

YSD 2008

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Faculty News Welcome Back Neil Mulligan ’01

Same Chair, New Name Ben Sammler ’74

To paraphrase George Moore, a man travels the world over in search of what he needs, and returns to Yale to find it. Immediately after graduating from Yale School of Drama, Neil Mulligan ’01 became Assistant Professor (Adjunct) of Technical Design and Production and Technical Director of Yale Repertory Theatre. “Yale was the only world I knew,” he remembers. In fear of missing other opportunities, Mulligan left New Haven in 2004 to become Project Engineer at Hudson Scenic Studio. It took only two seasons, though, before he “realized the regional theatre was where I wanted to be…

I missed being part of the whole process.”

After briefly working as Technical Director of the Goodspeed Opera House, Neil found his old positions were reopened at Yale Rep. He returned in summer 2007 and has now officially taken on his new—old—appointment. As he rushed into his next budget meeting, he told me, smiling, “It’s great to be back.”

Jason Fitzgerald ’08

The Technical Design and Production Department’s weekly “Beers” party in B-1 was slightly delayed on October 5, 2007, but for a very good cause. Faculty, staff, and students met in the Rep Lounge to celebrate the TD&P department’s long-time chair, Ben Sammler ’74 (Faculty), in his new title as the Henry McCormick Professor (Adjunct) of Technical Design and Production. With this appointment, Sammler becomes only the fourth faculty member at Yale School of Drama to be named to an endowed chair, one of the University’s highest honors. Congrats, Ben! Jason Fitzgerald ’08

Neil Mulligan ’01 (Faculty) instructs students in his Stage Rigging class last fall. Photo by Joan Marcus.

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Ben Sammler ’74 (Faculty) exchanges a laugh with YRT shop carpenter Matthew Gaffney.

Photo by Deborah Berman.

Welcome Aboard Paul Walsh Yale School of Drama also welcomes Paul Walsh (Faculty) to the Department of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism as its newest Associate Professor (Adjunct). In addition to his work within the department, his main responsibility is professor of Drama 6, the theatre history survey course required of every School of Drama student. The class Paul Walsh (Faculty). Photo courtesy of has proven demanding for even the most Paul Walsh. resilient professors, who are given one year to introduce an impossibly wide range of dramatic forms, historical periods, major critical writings, and significant playwrights to every student of every department. Combine this challenge with the students’ already harrowing first-year schedules, and the professor’s task becomes Olympian.

But Walsh is confident in the course’s value: “Our future “My goal is not to try to solve the past is tied to our history just as but to begin to map a path through it...” our understanding of the past is tied to our hopes for the future. Because I care deeply about the future of theatre and performance in America… I am thrilled by this opportunity to spend some quality time with the brightest and most talented young professionals in the country…. My goal is not to try to solve the past but to begin to map a path through it, or through a bit of it, and see what we might learn along the way.”

Fortunately, Walsh brings years of expertise to support his latest endeavor. Since 2005 he has been the Director of the Graduate Program in Theatre at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, a program that he has raised to increasingly greater prominence during his tenure. Before that, he spent many years as resident dramaturg and director of humanities at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater. There he translated many Ibsen and Strindberg plays for production, and he has continued to translate throughout his professional life. He is also artistic director of the New Harmony Project, a new play development residency program in New Harmony, Indiana.

Jason Fitzgerald ’08

YSD 2008

News from Yale School of Drama

Yale Repertory Theatre 2008 –2009 Season Passion Play

By Sarah Ruhl (Yale Rep Associate Artist) Directed by Mark Wing-Davey September 19–October 11, 2008 Happy Now?

By Lucinda Coxon Directed by Liz Diamond (Faculty) October 24–November 15, 2008 Rough Crossing

By Tom Stoppard, from an original play

by Ferenc Molnar Directed by Mark Rucker ’92 November 28–December 20, 2008 Lydia

By Octavio Solis Directed by Juliette Carrillo ’91 February 6–28, 2009

Jennifer Tipton (Faculty). Photo by Lois Greenfield.

Yale’s Designer Gets Her Own Spotlight: Tipton Receives MacArthur Award Jennifer Tipton (Faculty) has earned many prizes—two Tony Awards, an Olivier Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, to name a few. And she has become accustomed to finding adulatory epigraphs attached to her name in print, such as the recent article in The New York Times that referred to “the great lighting designer Jennifer Tipton.” But when a representative from the MacArthur Fellows Program called in mid-September to pronounce her a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, she was stunned.

“Thank God [the program representative had] told me to sit down. I couldn’t respond!” she says of the phone call. Considering her nearly five decades as a professional lighting designer, the MacArthur Foundation has called the 71-year-old Tipton “one of the most versatile designers working today,” noting that her “distinctive designs have redefined the relationship between lighting and performance.”

The honor is accompanied by a $500,000 prize, with no strings attached.

Tipton is not the first member of the YSD family to earn the fellowship. Lynn Nottage ’89 (Faculty) and Sarah Ruhl (Yale Rep Associate Artist) are recent winners, and

Notes from Underground

By Robert Woodruff and Bill Camp Adapted from the novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky Directed by Robert Woodruff March 20–April 11, 2009

Richard Foreman ’62 became a fellow in 1995. Tipton is, however, the first ever stage designer to be so honored—a position she does not take lightly, particularly with regard to the world of lighting design. “I’m basically a rather shy person,” she says, “but I’ve put myself out there for lighting because it’s low on the totem pole. People think you’re a technician, and I’m a terrible technician. I hope this award will show people that lighting design is an art, and that’s a good thing.”

Of course, for those who know her, Jennifer Tipton is more than a symbol of her profession, or a model for her numerous and loyal students. She has been and continues to be a uniquely creative artist, and a generous and much-beloved individual. Speaking from Paris, where she was working on a Jerome Robbins tribute for the Paris Opera in the days after her fellowship was announced, Tipton admitted she was glad that her absence had “softened” the inundation of congratulations and well wishes from friends, family, and colleagues. It was the same modesty that had informed her phone call with the MacArthur Foundation the previous week. When the gentleman who called asked for a response, she stammered, “I know I’m the first stage designer to earn the award.”

He responded, “I don’t know about that, but you are the first Jennifer Tipton.” First, and only.

Jason Fitzgerald ’08

YSD 2008

Death of a Salesman

By Arthur Miller Directed by James Bundy ’95 April 24–May 23, 2009 Yale Repertory Theatre presents

World Performance Project A New Series of International Work International Dance Festival Featuring Yasmeen Godder, Opiyo Okach, and Yvonne Rainer November 11–15, 2008 New Theater the break/s Written and Performed by Marc Bamuthi Joseph January 22–24, 2009 University Theatre Witness to the Ruins Mapa Teatro March 26–28, 2009 New Theater

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Life is a Cabaret, Old Chum: Forty Years in Yale’s Most Inspiring Basement

By Mark Blankenship ’05

At Yale School of Drama,

I was a dramaturg and a critic. At Yale Cabaret, I was a playwright, a director, a rapper, and a talking piece of hair. And though I did spontaneously rap in a few of my classes, my time in New Haven would have been much less interesting without the hours I logged in that amazing basement theatre.

Having just celebrated its fortieth anniversary, the Cabaret commands similar respect from countless YSD alumni.

A student-run theatre that produces a different show on almost

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every weekend of the academic year—and serves dinner and drinks before performances—it’s the ultimate evocation of the School’s energy. (And then there’s the Summer Cabaret, which has kept the off-season lively since 1974.)

Most School of Drama graduates have outrageous Cabaret stories, so on a mission to hear them, I spoke to a broad spectrum of alumni. The fruits of my quest are below, and while every tale is different, they share a common thread: They evoke the spirit of a beloved artistic home.

Phillip Owen ’09 and Aubyn Philabaum ’08 in Bone Songs directed by Paul Carey ’08.

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2 1

3

5

1 David Prittie ’81, Thomas Derrah ’80, David Alan Grier ’81, and William Mesnick ’82 during the ’79–80 season.

2 Jane Ann Crum ’85 and Christopher Noth ’85 in the Cabaret’s production of When You Comin’ Back Red Ryder?

3 Tony Shalhoub ’80, Joan Berliner ’75 yc, Steve Lawson ’76, Polly Draper ’80, ’77 yc, and Geoffrey Pierson ’80 in We’ve Got to Stop Meeting Like This, Yale Cabaret, ’78–79 season.

4 Daniel J. Rubin ’93 and Paul Giamatti ’94, ’89 yc in The Spectacular Laugh Riot at Yale Cabaret, ’91–92 season.

5 Malcolm Gets ’92 and Douglas Dickson ’88 mus in Full Circle, ’91–92 season.

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An (Appropriately) Haphazard History of the Yale Cabaret facts compiled by Devon Smith ’10 and Christopher Mirto ’10 with special thanks to Pamela Jordan

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Wild Times

Of course, the Cabaret has been known to bewitch the institution.

Every so often, a show finds its way to a major production. Take The 1940’s Radio Hour, which began at the Summer Cabaret and ended up on Broadway in 1979. The original musical by Tim Acito ’02, Zanna Don’t!, traveled from the basement to a commercial Off-Broadway run in 2003, and many plays by Christopher Durang ’74— including an early version of The Marriage of Bette and Boo—began as Cabaret babies.

The wild imagination in these shows is often the product of necessity. With a new piece to produce every week, unusual choices are almost demanded. “Everyone was hungry to produce, eager to explore and challenge themselves—as well as each other—with what now seems like reckless abandon,” says Michael Kinghorn ’91 (ad ’89 – ’90). “Artistic constraints were few, save the hour-length limit. Consequently, what audiences witnessed tended to be rough, raw, energetic and exciting.”

Everyone agrees that in the Cabaret, rules go out the window. Steve Lawson ’76 (Artistic Director ’73 –’74) says, “It was the cutting-edge place, a haven where you could blow off steam. It was invaluable for this DFA, whose days were spent on critical theory and theatre history, but whose nights offered the opportunity for his imagination to cut loose.

Henry Winkler ’70 adds, “There was really something wonderful about being in Macbeth [at Yale Repertory Theatre], and then running across the street and around the corner, and doing a short Tennessee Williams play.”

For Trip Cullman ’02, ’97 yc (ad ’00 –’01), the Cabaret offered a unique artistic freedom. “Whereas school productions emphasized creating work that would fit into an institutional or regional theatre’s season,” he says, “the Cabaret functioned as a petri dish for the students’ most outlandish and risky impulses. The most artistically successful shows at the Cabaret were those that no larger institutional theatre in its right mind would ever produce.”

Get Out of Your Box

Mark Linn Baker ’79 and Anneke Gough ’79 in Adaptation, Yale Cabaret, 1979.

The schedule also lets people stretch beyond their usual artistic disciplines. Through the Cabaret’s looking glass, directors become designers, stage managers become singers, and people who normally shun the spotlight become stars.

Jim Peskin ’82 (ad ’81–’82) remembers, “None of us knew about David Alan Grier’s ’81 comic ability until we saw him or used him in Cabaret shows. Keith Reddin ’81 (ad ’80–’81), a playwright, turned out be a wonderful actor and that is where he was able to perform.”

Echoing that surprise, Jeremy Smith ’76 recalls, “A particularly memorable moment was a performance by Sigourney Weaver ’74, singing the title song in Chris Durang’s play Better Dead Than Sorry while receiving shock treatments. The audiences howled with laughter at the inspired situation and her energized performance in particular.”

For me, an annual highlight was the show entirely performed by students from Technical Design and Production. I can still remember Tan Falkowski ’05 as a department store employee in David Sedaris’ The Santaland Diaries, screeching about the stains that hired elves

Early 1968

November 6, 1968

Winter 1968

January 1970

After Phi Gamma Alpha closes its doors at 217 Park Street due to lack of membership, the building is converted to a coffee house, with plans for artistic presentations by YSD, YRT company members, and the non-Yale community.

First official performance Yale Cabaret: An evening of songs

by Kurt Weill, starring Martha Schlamme and Alvin Epstein.

“Committee of 21,” a group of YSD students, demands student control over Cabaret productions. By February 1969, the Cabaret is completely student-run.

The Cabaret has an early hit with Cocaloony Tennessee, which stars Henry Winkler ’70 and Jill Eikenberry ’70.

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Mark H. Dold ’96 in Nirvanov, Yale Cabaret 1994.

Bridget Jones ’06 in The Boss in the Satin Kimono, Yale Cabaret 2005.

were leaving in their costumes. Tan was usually so good-natured.

Who knew she had it in her?

“One production stands out in my mind,” says Beau Coleman ’89.

“The Mikado. The cast was huge, and it was 90% non-actors. There was such delight in everyone’s eyes when they were performing. It seemed to epitomize what the Yale Cabaret stands for—a home for all YSD students to come together to create, collaborate and celebrate their discoveries with the audience.”

Political Action But if the Cabaret were just a weekly love-in, it wouldn’t be nearly as important to the culture of the school. “You didn’t feel like you had to ‘define yourself’ there, [but] that’s not to say people weren’t judging,” says Connie Grappo ’95 (ad ’93–’94). “It is, after all, the Drama School, where everyone has an opinion about everything and doesn’t hesitate to share. The shows opened every Thursday, and every Friday, word was out.”

Word is not always good, though Cullman feels that’s valuable. “I remember [that] even when the selections caused intense controversy, the Cabaret sparked important dialogue in the community,” he says. “For example, when there was a feminist outcry over a planned production of Miss Julie—the actress cast as Miss Julie decided the part was too misogynist and refused to go on—several dramaturgy students held a series of talkbacks before and after performances to generate a debate about the alleged woman-bashing in Strindberg’s text. Also, several students, from dramaturgs to directors to stage managers, went on as Miss Julie in the lead actress’ stead.”

For Marshall Williams ’95 (ad ’93 –’94), helpful conflict arose over the nature of the Cabaret itself. “In my years, it was not really a political forum, which it definitely had been when it started,” he says. “In our year, there was an anniversary celebration for the Cabaret and a few ‘founders’ came back for it, and gave us a taste of how the Cabaret was started. I remember one of them saying, ‘Well, if it’s just going to be a song-and-dance evening of fun, that’s not what the

March 1971

1971–1972

Summer 1974

1974 –1975

Robert Brustein’s ’51 New York Times article “Can We Give Up the Theater?” mentions Yale Cabaret for the first time in the national press.

The Cabaret establishes its current schedule of performances Thursdays through Saturdays, with a new production each week.

The Summer Cabaret is officially created by a group of students including Christopher Durang ’74, Meryl Streep ’75, Walton Jones ’75, Mitchell Kurtz ’75, and James Ingalls ’76.

Christopher Durang ’74 premieres ’dentity Crisis. Yale Cabaret earns its first liquor license.

(Right) Ernie Hudson ’76 and Ron Recasner ’74 in the Cabaret’s 1973 production of Being Hit (Middle right) Wendy Wasserstein ’76, Albert Innaurato ’74, and Christopher Durang ’74

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Cabaret means to me. We were always trying to say something that needed to be said.’ That has stuck with me. The Cabaret was really trying to serve as a voice.”

My Cabaret experience involved unabashed political agitation. In 2002 I was co-author, co-director, and co-star of The Pins and Needles Project, an adaptation of Harold Rome’s 1937 pro-union musical revue Pins and Needles. When we did the show, the entire campus was buzzing about an impending strike by several groups of University employees, and we used our show to support their demands. In the midst of all the tension, we performed to a room crammed with Yale employees, who booed our agit-prop caricature of university president Richard Levin. Barely into my twenties, I felt like I was making truly important theatre for the first time in my life.

The Show Must Go On (Right?)

“I’m sure we all thought that we were advancing some kind of profound agenda,” says Kinghorn. “The biggest, the best, the most innovative projects with the greatest artistic integrity, or something like that. The real accomplishment, however, was more practical: managing to produce a new show each week while attending classes and conducting the regular work of YSD productions.”

In her first weeks as artistic director in 2004, May Adrales ’06 (ad ’04 –’05) survived the “practical challenges” that Kinghorn describes.

She had decided to produce Wallace Shawn’s eighty-character comedy The Hotel Play, and she needed eighty cast members. “We spent hours chasing after people in bars, after classes, on the street, in the bookstore, trying to get them to act in the play,” she says. “At the eleventh hour, we lost our lead—he was cast in a school play, and wasn’t allowed to be in our show—and we threw in the towel. We stood in the Cabaret, [surrounded by] the newly painted set, and after a few whiskeys, we decided that the only thing to do was re-envision it all. We decided to do a 24-hour play festival called The Hotel Plays, and it was, by some miracle, a success.”

Plenty of Cabaret memories involve barely averted disaster. “I do remember being in a show called The Dragon in my second year,” says Jim Noonan ’06 (ad ’05 –’06). “A two-person scene, complete with witty and fast dialogue, was reduced to a simple and searching monologue by just one actor, because the other actor had completely

The Family chorus in Die Sieben Todsünden, Yale Cabaret, 2007.

From Left to Right: Brian Mummert ’09 yc, Ethan Heard ’06 yc, Jesse Obbink ’09 yc, Casey Breves ’09 yc

1981–1982

1984 –1985

1990–1991

April 1995

Membership to Yale Cabaret costs $5 –10, with a minimum $2.50 food charge per performance.

York Streets, satirical pre-shows for the late Thursday night incrowds, begin around this time.

Pambo by Bill Corbett ’89, ’82 yc, a violent vignette of life in the Drama Library, may be the only extant script.

The 4th production of the season, Straight to the Helms!, responds to the recent NEA scandal, in which the NEA demanded an “obscenity pledge” from its grant recipients after being sued for funding controversial art exhibits. The show featured a large cast with writers as disparate as Samuel Beckett, Karen Finley, and Liev Schrieber ’92.

Dean James Bundy ’95 directs Mystery Date, by Melissa James Gibson ’95 and Rachel Sheinkin ’95. Bundy is the first dean of the School of Drama to have formerly directed in the Cabaret.

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1 Michael Braun ’07 in The Love of Don Perlimplin for Belise in the Garden in ’04–’05 season.

2 Bryan Henry ’08 in In the Cypher: A Poetry Slam, Yale Cabaret, 2007.

3 Enrico Colantoni ’93 in Unveiling, Yale Cabaret, 1992.

4 William Francis McGuire ’91 and Liev Schreiber ’92 in Go On, Yale Cabaret, ’90–91 season.

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1999–2000

Spring 2001

December 2006

After decades of avoiding the inevitable, Cabaret is staged at the Cabaret.

Zanna, Don’t!, an original musical by Tim Acito ’01 that will find commercial success, premieres at the Cabaret.

Yale Cabaret featured in The New Yorker “Critic’s Notebook,” when Hilton Als recommends Run, Mourner, Run by Tarell Alvin McCraney ’07.

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(Right) Tom E. Russell ’07 in Run, Mourner, Run in 2006.

forgotten every single one of his lines. I’m not even sure the audience noticed. But I do believe that the lost lines were a result of a visit to the GPSCY [the on-campus bar, just down the path from the Cabaret] during the break between shows.”

Meanwhile, an entire subgenre of Cabaret lore could be dedicated to the New Haven fire marshal, who must verify the safety of every set before the show can go on. “I remember the first cabaret I directed [was] Noonday Demons by Peter Barnes,” says Grappo. “The whole show was almost canceled hours before the first performance because there was a four-foot-high pile of [fake] feces in the middle of the cave that was the set. The fire marshal could have probably gotten it to light if he’d tried, but luckily he was too grossed out by what it represented to hold his lighter there very long. It prepared me for the constant trouble-shooting that you do when producing professional theatre.”

Lessons in the Basement The Cabaret teaches many lessons like those Grappo describes.

Sometimes, the shows produced there go on to professional runs, and the creative team learns to transport the Cabaret’s energy to a more traditional space. Sometimes, the skills developed at a 1 a.m. rehearsal just come in handy.

Margaret Glover ’88, ’81 yc is Senior Lecturer in Screenwriting at the London Film School. She says, “I try to engender the spirit of the Cabaret in my students. It’s more complicated in film—[there are] more rules and regulations, higher risks—but when your ambitions exceed your budget—which was always the case in Cabaret shows— you’ve got to beg, borrow and steal. In the end, the Cabaret taught me that you’ve always got to balance the budget.”

“I used to do all the shopping for Tommy the chef,” says Peskin, who’s now the Executive Director of the Montclair Arts Council in New Jersey. “In a funny way, working for the kitchen taught me how to prepare for large events and how to do strategic planning.”

Lawson adds, “After New Haven, I did a lot of cabaret. Those hours spent in the basement also had a major bearing on the writing I’ve done for Manhattan Theatre Club, Williamstown Theatre Festival, and elsewhere.”

Even for a recent graduate like Adrales, the Cabaret has had a professional impact. “The Cabaret holds so much life and creativity,” she says. “I thought then that I would try to create that kind of space with

5,6,7,8 from the 2005–2006 season.

my own theatre company one day. Hopefully, I’m on my way. I began working at The Public Theatre as an Artistic Associate soon after graduation with that goal in mind.”

But of all the respondents, Brendan Hughes ’04 (ad ’02–03) defines the Cabaret’s legacy in the boldest terms. He declares, “The Cabaret, and particularly Thursday late night performances for the Drama School, have ruined me for proscenium theatre forever. It was like a tent meeting. Walking into the Cabaret and putting your finger into the socket of that energy—everyone gossiping and laughing, glaring at rivals across the room, holding forth on that afternoon’s verse project, or baseball—was like getting the same feeling you get as a kid, being the only one who will actually ingest pop rocks and CocaCola. The feeling of daring and menace and community in there is so delicious and sinister, that everything afterwards—all the regional theatre in the world—ends up feeling like a command performance for the politbureau.”

It’s worth mentioning that Hughes is the one who cast me as a talking piece of hair in Gip Hoppe’s satire A New War. It was my first month at the YSD, and I had just finished performing an original rap song at the school’s variety show when he asked me if I’d like to be in his production. I barely knew what the Cabaret was, but I signed up anyway. I’m grateful I did.

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September 2007

Summer 2008

2008–2009

For the Cabaret’s 40th anniversary season, Alvin Epstein reprises “Mack the Knife” from the Weill revue that launched the Cabaret.

The Summer Cabaret officially falls under the auspices of Yale School of Drama (see “On York Street”).

The Yale Cabaret tradition continues with its 41st season, under artistic director Patricia McGregor ’09 and managing director Aurelia Fisher ’09.

After the Annex: The Living Legacy of YSD Designers

By Miriam Felton-Dansky ’09 and Jason Fitzgerald ’08

At the age of ten, some kids have mastered Guitar Hero. Others rule on the Little League field. Set designer John Conklin ’66, ’59 yc was conquering Puccini.

“I have a picture of myself as a ten-year-old holding a little model of Madame Butterfly,” he says. “It must be [Butterfly], because there’s Mount Fuji in the background.”

Conklin, who recently returned to Yale Repertory Theatre to design Daniel Fish’s production of Tartuffe, isn’t unusual. Many of the Drama School’s most successful set design graduates—those who frequently work on Broadway, off-Broadway, and in other prominent venues—say their work grabbed them early.

“I wanted to be a set designer when I was seven years old,” says Tony Award-winner John Lee Beatty ’73, and Heidi Ettinger ’76 remembers experimenting with every theatrical discipline as a kid. Riccardo Hernandez ’92—whose design for Yale Rep’s production of The Evildoers garnered a 2008 Connecticut Critics Circle Award—dreamed of his career while growing up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where his father was a professional opera singer. Similarly, Michael Yeargan ’73 (Faculty) remembers being in fourth grade and seeing his first opera, La Bohème, when the Met visited his hometown of Dallas, Texas.

“The curtain went up on that garret,” he remembers, “and I thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world. I was fascinated to know how everything was made … and I knew I wanted to do that for the rest of my life.”

Given the aspirations of department chair Ming Cho Lee (Faculty) for the program, that pattern of lifelong devotion makes sense. At Yale School of Drama, Lee says, “We are training people who are real theatre artists— individual artists, rather than just people who do well in the industry.”

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Derek McLane ’84 sits on his set for Rafta, Rafta.

Photo courtesy of Derek McLane.

I was fascinated to know how everything was made … and I knew I wanted to do that for the rest of my life.

Michael Yeargan ’73

Of course, few children, imagining their lives as designers, considered the grown-up challenges of the professional theatre world. Since the tension between being an “individual” and remaining professionally active shapes every designer’s path, the Design department’s greatest long-term achievement may be the generations of designers who have adapted to the changing demands of a life in the theatre, while maintaining real ownership over their work and careers.

Adrianne Lobel ’79 believes “a designer should… not be limited by his or her capabilities. If you think, ‘this needs to be a set that is super super real,’ then you need to know your architecture. If the approach that develops is abstract, then you need to be able to create your own vocabulary in a non-literal world.” Not surprisingly, Lobel’s design credits range from her well-known work with Peter Sellars (Marriage of Figaro, The Mikado) to the Broadway credits Passion and A Year With Frog and Toad (for which she also holds a producer credit).

Yeargan, similarly, cites the variety of his work, which has spanned regional theatre to European avant-garde to Broadway, as his proudest accomplishment. His disarming career mantra: “I hope it doesn’t all look alike.”

And consider Hernandez’s current slate.

Asked about his upcoming projects, he thinks for a moment, then rattles off a remarkable hodgepodge: a Broadway revival of August Wilson’s Fences directed by Suzan-Lori Parks, Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker at Baltimore’s Center Stage, an opera based on the film Il Postino (starring Placido Domingo as Pablo Neruda), and, for American Repertory Theatre, an adaptation of The Seagull with Hungarian director János Szász.

Then there’s Derek McLane ’84, who recently flew to California to open Moises Kaufman’s 33 Variations, then back to New York for the tech of the New Group’s dramedy Rafta, Rafta.

Next, he designed the drama Good Boys and

(From top) Michael Yeargan ’73 (Faculty) at his home in Milford, CT. Photo by Andrew Boyce ’09.

Todd Rosenthal ’93 at his studio in Chicago, Ill. Photo courtesy of Todd Rosenthal.

Riccardo Hernandez ’92 on the set of Bring in Da Noise Bring in Da Funk in 1995. Photo

by Michal Daniel.

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True by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa ’03 at New York’s Second Stage, then he sped to Virginia’s Signature Theatre for a production of Kander and Ebb’s musical The Visit.

“Each project takes you into a different world, historically and visually and archaeologically,” says Ettinger, who just designed Romeo and Juliet at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.

“With each project you’re forced to really educate yourself about brand-new universes.”

Of course such mercurial rosters are not all variety for variety’s sake. Many designers are quick, like Lobel, to admit of their choices, “Some of this has to do with money.” Beatty sighed during our conversation: “Designers— what a low-paying profession!” He pointed out that most non-profit theatres, and even many commercial theatres, expect designers to have other sources of income. Creativity is often required of those committed to making a living from design. Sometimes one show will make it financially possible to do two or three more.

Other times a radical move will pay off, such as Beatty’s latest resume item—restaurant design.

(Visit Bond 45 in Times Square to sample the work of a Tony winner and a plate of shrimp scampi.) “You have to be a bit of a business man,” says Beatty, “to be a designer.”

And you have to be able to communicate clearly, regardless of the territory. McLane says his Yale training taught him “to draw in a conversation, to be able to doodle an idea almost instantly,” which has proven essential with the variety of directors he has worked with.

Many of these designers have chosen, in turn, to inspire new generations of young designers through teaching: Conklin, for instance, lectures at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, while Michael Yeargan has taught alongside Ming Cho Lee since the late 1970s. Todd Rosenthal ’93, who designed the set for Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winner August: Osage County, helms classes at Northwestern and finds teaching as invigorating as any other part of his career.

“The most important thing I’ve learned from teaching is that every idea is valuable,” he says.

“Even really bad ideas are valuable. Knowing what something ‘isn’t’ is as crucial as knowing what it is.”

Despite such wide-ranging opportunities, type-casting plays a role in many career paths,

and it brings a mixed blessing—easier access to work that matches one’s “type,” and a need for greater vigilance to keep other doors from closing. Santo Loquasto ’72 remembers the day his high-profile productions of The Cherry Orchard and American Buffalo opened simultaneously, and yet, after Orchard, it seemed like every director and producer “wanted twelve tons of that.” He found respite in the regional theatre.

“In New York, you’re hired based on what you’re good at. It’s in the regionals where you get to do Joe Orton and Peer Gynt in the same season.”

Loquasto’s relationship with the “regionals,” though, may also be a product of his generation.

Conklin, Loquasto, Beatty, Yeargan, and, a little bit later, Lobel graduated when the non-profit theatre was bursting with potential and eager for young blood. Upon graduating, Conklin immediately left to work with Hartford Stage, founded by former classmate Jacques Cartier ’61, whom Conklin met while at Yale College.

The theatre became a professional home for Conklin for many years thereafter. “The way designers get work is the directors they know,” he explains, “and so many of those directors I knew were involved in this regional theatre idea.” Ming Cho Lee reflects how, when he took over the department, “the goal was not to go to Broadway or to get a Tony,” but to follow artists and theatres one was excited about. “Today,” he continues, “Broadway is a career focus … we talk about ‘industry’—but what does ‘industry’ have to do with the individual artist?”

Conklin often feels that he is doing work young designers should be doing, but the risk-averse production climate makes taking a chance on a young artist extraordinarily difficult. “I feel often guilty, actually, because there are, I guess, literally fewer opportunities and literally more designers.”

Still, despite the tougher odds, young designers continue to thrive. Hernandez credits Yale for an unexpected passion that has proven career gold. When he arrived in New Haven, he intended to focus on opera, but he was assigned the premiere of Suzan-Lori Parks’s abstract, poetic play The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, and the production got him permanently excited about new work. It also fostered a lasting relationship with Parks, who asked him to be a part of her directorial debut of Fences.

Considering the number and range of successful careers by Yale designers provides a daunting picture of Yale’s legacy of success and vocation. It’s an aerial view not unlike the one Michael Yeargan had while accepting his first Tony Award, in 2005, for The Light in the Piazza.

Despite the shock of his first win, after thirty years in the field—“I feel like I made it just under the wire”—what he remembers most vividly is recognizing, from his perch on the stage, that the vast majority of design nominees were Yale School of Drama alumni. They spanned five decades, from Pat Collins ’58 (design lighting nominee for Doubt) to Scott Pask ’97 (scenic design winner for The Pillowman), and included many of his own former students (Loquasto and Beatty were also nominated that year, for Glengarry Glen Ross and Doubt, respectively). Having seen so many fellow and former students become colleagues and close friends, he knew better than anyone that Broadway was just a small, if significant, corner of the vast field of work that Yale designers have accumulated under their collective belt. For Yeargan, seeing them all together was “the greatest thrill.”

(From top) Santo Loquasto ’72 at home in New York.

Photo provided by David LeShay of the Theatre Development Fund.

Adrianne Lobel ’79. Photo by Ken Howard.

It’s in the regionals where you get to do Joe Orton and Peer Gynt in the same season. Santo Loquasto ’72 YSD 2008

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From Playwriting to Book Reviewing: An Unlikely Journey

By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt ’59

How do you go from being a playwriting major at Yale School of Drama to spending three decades-plus writing daily book reviews for The New York Times?

This is the sort of question you find yourself asking as the years advance, even if the advance of those years isn’t so enfeebling as to confine you to doing nothing but asking such questions. (I recently got a birthday card announcing that “150 is the new 100.”)

I arrived at Yale in the fall of 1956 in part because the chief playwriting teacher then, John Gassner (Former Faculty),

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had apparently taken it into his head that a possible fresh source of talent might be English majors from top-flight colleges. I had just graduated from Swarthmore.

The person who told me about Gassner’s theory was the first friend I made at the Drama School, Ralph Allen ’60, who had starred academically at Amherst and then dropped out of the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship program at Princeton

Stunned by my classmates’ reaction to my play, I was forced to ask myself a question that had never before occurred to me: What

exactly is a play?

when, he said, his first assignment there was to write an essay based on a reading of the complete works of James Fenimore Cooper.

Ralph preferred to return to a Philadelphia detective agency he had worked for the previous summer and to write tragic plays on the side. One of his first, Winter’s End, Ralph told me, had actually been produced and directed by Jose Quintero, who in that autumn of 1956 when we arrived at Yale was staging the first production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. That reminded Ralph of a review of Winter’s End he would often gloomily quote, as I recall it: “Lust, lunacy, incest and fratricide but light years away from Eugene O’Neill.” Ralph had enlisted in the Drama School to sharpen up his skills.

Boy, was Gassner wrong about our talents for bringing new life to the stage! Fresh from Swarthmore’s Honors Program in English Literature myself—where I had learned to track the play of lightness and darkness metaphors in Othello, or to expatiate on the ambiguity of the word “nature” in King Lear—I undertook as my first assignment at Yale to write a one-act adaptation of Tolstoy’s mordant short story, “The Death of Ivan Illitch.”

I began to sense that my ideas of stagecraft weren’t working when, after an hour-long reading of my opening scene (in which I had tried to bring to dramatic life the sort of intricate symbolic meanings of cancer that decades later Susan Sontag would dismiss as “blaming the victim” in her book Illness as Metaphor), I looked up and found my fellow students staring at me slack-jawed and glassyeyed.

“Wasn’t Tolstoy writing about people?” one of them had the nerve to ask. (Ralph Allen, who was marginally closer to a sense of reality than was I, chose as the subject of his opening assignment the Biblical story of King Saul. The title of his three-hour one-act play was, as I recall, Saul’s Death or maybe The Death of Saul. Being young and stuffed to the gullets with literature, we were both much taken with death.)

Stunned by my classmates’ reaction to my play, I was forced to ask myself a question that had never before occurred to me: What exactly is a play? In more time than I care to admit it took me, I arrived at an answer: A story told through dialogue. This in turn raised a far more vexing question that even after years of reading books and studying literature had eluded me: What exactly is a story?

Although countless people seem to know the answers to those questions without ever having to ask them, I have been puzzling over them ever since.

At Yale, I found some relief by reading what has survived of Aristotle’s Poetics, even though it is more about Greek tragedy than the

art of storytelling, and even though I felt secretly ashamed at finding such an ancient work so useful, when surely many volumes had been written on the subject in the meantime. (They hadn’t been, as it turns out; theoreticians of the art of dramatic narrative, from Nietzsche to Joyce to the critic Walter Kerr, have had surprisingly little to add to Aristotle.)

I also discovered at Yale how diabolically difficult it is to write a decently good play. Make a tiny miscalculation in the first act and it will sink the entire enterprise by the end of act three. For very good reasons had great writers who dreamed of success in the theatre like Henry James, Thomas Mann and Robert Frost, among others, failed utterly at the challenge.

Unlikely to earn a living by writing plays, after graduating from Yale I considered the offer of a job of running a college theatre department. But that would have meant directing students in plays, so I succumbed to my fascination with storytelling by taking a job as an editor in a publishing house. One position quickly led to another in the game of musical chairs that the book business was in those days, and, after two more jobs in publishing, I found myself first an editor on The Sunday Times Book Review and then the senior daily book reviewer for the paper. Forty years quickly went by.

Meanwhile, my classmate Ralph Allen, more daring than was I, pursued the theatre and caught it by teaching and lecturing. Cursed with total recall along with his Eeyore sense of gloom, Ralph drew on a memory fund built up in his youth when his father used to take him regularly to burlesque shows. He wrote the riotous and wildly successful Broadway review Sugar Babies, starring Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller. He had come a long way from Saul’s Death.

Did I ever get the itch to improve on The Death of Ivan Illitch or any of the other plays I wrote at Yale that brought new meaning to the expression “closet drama,” or plays not meant for staging but instead (and only just maybe) reading aloud?

From time to time ideas for stories have occurred to me, and I have played with them, trying to keep in mind such hard-to-realize Aristotelian precepts as a tragedy being “an imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself.”

One of my ideas was: What would happen to a legislator if he tried to have illicit drugs legalized? Another concerned a children’s summer-camp Indian program run by a man who took the history of Native Americans at the hands of the white man a little too seriously.

But instead of plays, two published novels resulted, A Crooked Man (Simon & Schuster; 1995) and The Mad Cook of Pymatuning (Simon & Schuster; 2005).

Writing mere novels is really much much easier.

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Radicalizing Effects An Interview with Richard Foreman ’62

By Joseph P. Cermatori ’08

It’s on the top floor of a Soho building, but the apartment of Richard Foreman ’62 looks like a library in an underground bunker. As far as the eye can see, there are stacks upon stacks of books, bathed in fluorescent light. Clearly, Foreman does not accept the precept that a dramaturg should be the most well-read collaborator in the rehearsal room.

I’m trying to absorb the space as I sit on an old sofa, fumbling with the recording software on my laptop. It’s malfunctioning, and Foreman is pressed for time: In half an hour, he has to leave for a performance of Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland, the latest production in his storied career.

“To be perfectly honest,” the busy director tells me, “I forgot you were coming.”

Of course, even two days wouldn’t let us cover everything. Forty years after founding the now legendary Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, Foreman still occupies a vital position in the American avant garde. He has written and directed more than fifty works for the theatre, and he is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from Brown University, seven OBIE Awards, a Lifetime Achievement in the Theater Award from the NEA, grants from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. And that’s just the surface of his career.

Once our interview begins, however, it’s surprisingly easy to cover serious ground. Foreman proves an affable conversationalist, filling our half hour with memorable anecdotes and insights. Below, I present the highlights of our conversation.

Joseph P. Cermatori Tell me about your memories of Yale School of Drama.

Richard Foreman My memories of Yale are basically of John Gassner (Former Faculty), who taught the playwrights. He was the most rigorous teacher I ever had, and my biggest influence at the Drama School. He told me once, “Richard, you know, you have a lot of talent. You have one

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problem. You get an effect that you like, and then you don’t want to let go of it.” And I thought about that, and I said, “Well I better work on that.”

But then I thought, well if that’s my tendency why don’t I radicalize that instead, and really make that so-called weakness the center of my art, which is what I did and what I’ve been doing for the last forty years.

Also—of course Yale was a very different school in those days—I remember being in the first-year directing class that all the playwrights had to partake of and volunteering for the first exercise, which was creating a stage picture. I got five of my playwright associates to sit in chairs in very stolid poses, and just maybe hold up a hand awkwardly. The people that preceded me did all kinds of big, swooping stage pictures, and Nikos Psacharopoulos (Former Faculty), who directed the class, praised them all. The curtain went up on my tableau, and there was dead silence. And Nikos said, “Oh my God. That should be an aspirin commercial. It gives me a headache.” And the class roared.

And for the rest of the year, I was too embarrassed ever to volunteer for a directing project. Needless to say, I’m the one member of that class of sixty or so who ever became a successful director in the theatre.

“But then I thought, well if that’s my tendency why don’t I radicalize that instead, and really make that so-called weakness the center of my art, which is what I did and what I’ve been doing for the last forty years.”

What are your thoughts about the future of your work, and what will your next steps be?

Using film in my work has changed things completely. This year, I’m doing my third play with video projections, and I’m now so interested in it, that I think I’m going to use some of the material I’m generating now just to make film, and see if I can do it. I’ve been working so differently than I did back in the seventies, when I made my last film.

Also, it’s had a big effect on how I’m working in the theatre. I’m taking more risks in terms of doing things that have less spectacular attractions, that are less frantic, that are more meditative.

What do you think about the theatre today?

My whole life I’ve had an ambivalent relation to the theatre. I started going to the theatre when I was thirteen. I would see a couple of things every year that I liked, but they were not the big hits.

I saw everything up through the time when I was in my later thirties, and then I just couldn’t take it anymore. I started seeing less and less, and now I just don’t go to the theatre. I don’t deny that maybe if I went to see fifty things there would be one that would knock me out, but I cannot endure sitting through the other forty-nine anymore. I’ve had it.

What role does the theatre play in downtown culture nowadays, if “downtown” can even be said to exist anymore?

Well, yes it can. I mean obviously I work with a lot of young people. We have a lot of interns and the people who play the parts in my theatre and do everything in my theatre are all young enough to be my kids and often my grandkids. So I’m aware of what they’re talking about, what’s going on, and there seems to be a fairly active community of people trying to make somewhat experimental art, but as for the role that theatre plays in that culture, I haven’t got a clue.

How do you continue to remain contemporary over forty years? How do you feel about your career right now?

I’m sure there are some people who don’t think I’m contemporary. I think I am because I think I’m still trying to do something more personal and more radical in terms of an idiosyncratic personal vision than anybody else in the theatre is trying to do. I do not believe in art as a collaborative venture—oh my God, I should be banished from the theatre, that’s heresy!—but I always wanted to make theatre like a painter paints a painting. I wanted to control all the elements and make it extremely personal. That’s what I do, and there aren’t many people, for various reasons, who do that, either by choice or necessity. And I think the world needs it. We’re obviously living in a world where the bottom line, more and more, is all that counts, where pleasing your fellow human beings more and more, therefore, is all that counts, and, to me, that produces entertainment, not art.

Last question: There’s a whole crop of artists who have recently graduated from Yale School of Drama and entered into this “real world” environment. Do you have thoughts or advice for them?

Yeah. Just one piece of advice: courage.

Nine-tenths courage. Courage to really stay with your vision, to really understand that if you don’t have a response right away, if you believe in it, if you keep at it, eventually people will come around. I really think that’s more important. But, it’s not going to work if you make these little compromises that start diluting your vision… Assuming you have a vision.

Joel Israel, Stefanie Neukirch, Christopher Mirto ’10, and Stephanie Silver in Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead! directed by Richard Foreman ’62.

Photo by Paula Court.

(Opposite) Foreman in his New York apartment. Photo by Joseph P. Cermatori ’08.

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By Rebecca Phillips ’09

Elements of Style Joan Kron ’48

“I’m eighty years old,”

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Joan Kron ’48 announced. “You know that.” I did, but sitting across from this impeccably groomed, razor-sharp contributing editor at Allure magazine, I had a hard time believing it. Although Kron, who has made a career as a writer, claims that she hasn’t really “done anything” with the training she received at Yale School of Drama 60 years ago (she graduated with a Certificate in Design in 1948), it is clear that her unexpected and unconventional professional path has been a perpetual investigation of style—a style all her own.

At Yale, Kron (known then as Joan Feldman) was famous among her classmates for one of her design projects, a “circus parade” in bold, explosive pinks, greens, blues and golds on 75 or so black boards. The faculty prominently displayed these sketches of performers, acrobats and animals in motion throughout the halls of the Drama department buildings. So it came as no surprise to her friends when, after graduating from Yale, Kron was offered her dream job as a circus designer with the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus. “And then I made the worst decision of my life, maybe,” she says with a laugh. Engaged to a doctor from Philadelphia, Kron was about to leave the wardrobe department at NBC to prepare for her wedding, and so she did not take the job.

Instead of joining the circus, Kron got married, and created several costume designs for small theatres in Philadelphia where, against the wishes of some of her employers at the outrageous Mummers Parade, but true to her Yale training, she “never put glitter on the sketches.”

After the birth of her first child, Kron became one of the founding members of the Arts Council at the YM/YWHA Philadelphia, where she was the chairman from 1959 to 1968. Her relationships with artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein allowed her to manufacture limited edition art objects from 1965 to 1973—she still has a few Pop Art

(Below) Joan Kron ’48 outside the University Theatre circa 1947; (right) Production of First in Heart at Yale School of Drama, with costumes by Joan Kron. “I bought all those fabrics on a shoestring in New Haven and made everything from scratch.”

(Opposite) Photo by Erika Larsen.

pillows from one of the collections, all of which were hand-embroidered by her mother in black and white.

But it was through another unexpected—and tragic—twist of fate that Kron first discovered her talent for writing. While she and her family were abroad in southeast Asia, Kron’s daughter fell ill and died. Returning to her previous life in Philadelphia became all but impossible. At the suggestion of a friend, Kron began researching the (then) new field of grief therapy, and writing about what she found.

She began to publish at Philadelphia, discovering very quickly that she had a knack for the creative process of writing, which she doesn’t consider so different from design—she chooses her words as carefully as she once chose articles of clothing, for their clarity and originality.

After divorcing her first husband and moving back to New York, Kron became a style contributor and eventually a senior editor and lifestyle feature writer at New York Magazine, then Chief Reporter for The New York Times Home Section in its premiere year. Kron continued to publish work there and in The Washington Post, The Washington Star, and The Wall Street Journal, writing on design, the home, fashion and beauty.

Always inspired by the sociology of style as it relates to psychology and identity—she is particularly drawn to the work of Erving Goffman—Kron found her “beat” as a journalist, investigating the presentation of self through design. Her 1983 book Home-Psych: The Social Psychology of Home and Decoration merged these interests. HighTech: The Industrial Style and Source Book for Home followed in 1987; it created a sensation by coining the term “high-tech” and exploring modernist design in home decorating, which remains a personal fascination. While living in Philadelphia, Kron “was always in the

papers,” both for her work with the Arts Council and for her home, where she had hung theatrical track lighting in her living room.

Even now, her apartment is an eclectic blend of Baroque, Rococo, and sleek modern pieces that create a surprisingly unified décor in a strict black, white, and chrome palette. (The tour de force is an enormous black and white striped rolled armchair that is Kron’s favorite perch in the room—“a truly theatrical chair,” she says with pride.)

After taking a job as a beauty feature writer at Allure in 1991, Joan was approached by the newly created cosmetic surgery section to write “Shopping for a Face Lift,” an investigative piece that turned into Lift: Wanting, Fearing, and Having a Face Lift, published in 2000. In Lift, Kron gives an account of her own face lifts (she has had two), as well as the scientific and psychological factors for women to consider before they have the procedure. Today, as Allure’s “Scalpel News” columnist, Kron fuses her passion for design and beauty with her relentless search for the truth to inform her readers about an inconstant, and sometimes dangerous, industry.

Now, she says, “I wonder what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.” She talks about the “image police,” how a potential employer will (consciously or unconsciously) hire someone based on physical appearance. Perhaps this is one reason for Kron’s continued interest in plastic surgery and in what she calls “the psychology of beauty,” the inmost layer of personal style. From costumes to home design to beauty to the skin, Joan Kron has, for over sixty years, investigated in ever-deepening degrees the ways in which people self-identify through aesthetic choices. “Style,” she instructs, “is the heart of everything.” Spoken like a true designer.

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Mr. Wilson’s Profession: Edwin Wilson ’57

By Rebecca Phillips ’09

In a sun-drenched

corner of the Yale Club of Manhattan, Edwin Wilson ’57 sits quietly in an armchair. With his soft, southern-inflected voice and slightly askew bow tie, there is little that betrays the exacting scholar and demanding critic who, in 1958, was awarded Yale’s first Doctor of Fine Arts degree. But then his gaze sharpens, he leans forward to me, and he demands to know what kind of a piece I’m writing, anyway. “My life can’t be summed up in just one paragraph, you know.”

Wilson’s dissertation, later published under the title Shaw on Shakespeare, was the first book that combined George Bernard Shaw’s critical writing with a new analysis of his approach. One of the first scholars to connect the two playwrights, Wilson noticed a previously unexamined dichotomy in Shaw’s thinking—while Shaw was highly critical of Shakespeare and often hated his political ideas, the proud critic greatly admired the Bard’s dramaturgy and language, praising his “word music.”

Originally enrolled in the playwriting department, Wilson chose to take advantage of the newly instituted DFA program because he knew he wanted to teach theatre. “If I had been a Tennessee Williams or a Eugene

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O’Neill, I might have been a playwright. But I’m not.” He was, however, getting married, and he wanted the security of a teaching career, which he found at the CUNY Graduate Center. Because of his training at the Drama School, where he also taught playwriting (among his students were John Guare ’63 and A.R. “Pete” Gurney ’58), Wilson found a wide variety of work in the theatre as a teacher, scholar, director, producer, and critic for The Wall Street Journal. “Of course,” he says with a sigh of nostalgia, “the theatre has changed a lot since I started” in the fifties and sixties.

Early in Wilson’s career at CUNY, the newly instituted “open enrollment” policy brought with it new kinds of students from much more diverse backgrounds, students who weren’t connecting to the standard theatre history textbooks. Wilson began crafting lectures around photocopies of articles and developing his own approach to reaching these students. When he brought his new ideas to McGraw Hill, they agreed in 1975 to publish The Theater Experience, now in its eleventh edition, the book that would become one of the most widely used theatre textbooks in the United States.

The Theater Experience is unlike anything that came before it. Whereas most books “present the theatre as an art form that was there to be looked at or listened to,” says Wilson, his approach emphasized the audience’s point of view, embracing a more approachable writing style that was never stiff, academic, or overly formal, even including tools like sports metaphors, making “use of things that [the students] would relate to.” The book contains nearly 300 photographs, many of which are original production shots, and it was the first college theatre text to use Broadway and regional productions as part of its curriculum. Wilson is also the author of Living Theatre: A History, and Theater: The Lively Art, all of which boast the same commitment to merging rigorous scholarship with accessible writing.

In the early 1990s, Wilson hosted a televised interview program on PBS called “Spotlight” where he interviewed playwrights, actors, directors, and artists including Neil Simon, Jules Feiffer, André Bishop, Al Hirschfeld, George C. Wolfe, Lynn Redgrave, Eric Bentley, and others. Now that he has “slowed down a little,” Wilson has returned to writing plays, a career he admits “kind of passed me by.”

But, he says, he has been lucky to have such a long “double career” in the theatre, a career that has allowed him to live in New York City as a teacher and critic, in the same apartment, for forty years. Yale School of Drama prepared him for that kind of life in a profession that, Wilson admits, has a way of redirecting people who “start out as playwrights or designers and end up doing something else.” But for Ed Wilson, that something else—his enormous body of published work—has allowed him to reach millions of readers, teaching them to think differently about the “lively art” Wilson loves so much.

alumni weekend

Stephen Godchaux ’93

2008 by jorge j. rodríguez ’10

Photos by Harold SHapiro

With the presidential election only a few weeks away, the relationship between politics and theatre was at the center of the Yale School of Drama Alumni Weekend, held on October 10 –12, 2008.

Susan Hilferty ’80

Anne Cattaneo ’74

Aaron Copp ’98 (foreground), Michael Walkup ’06

Paula Vogel, Eugene O’Neill Professor (Adjunct) of Playwriting and Chair, delivered the keynote address, stressing the importance of the dramatic arts amidst the political spectacles lately visible across America. Joking that the free market has proven a terrible model for both theatres and banks, she explained how her career as a playwright was helping her confront the current economic crisis. Vogel then encouraged the School’s alumni to pressure the candidates running for office to support the arts and to contribute to the future of American theatre.

The second day began with an address from Dean James Bundy ’95. Bill Conner ’68 said afterwards that his speech “was the highlight and reason for attending Alumni Weekend. James presented the state of the School, showing it to be healthy and vibrant and thriving in spite of even greater challenges.” Alumni had the opportunity to converse between sessions with Dean Bundy and Deputy Dean Victoria Nolan (Faculty), to ask questions about the future of the School and of Yale Repertory Theatre.

Theatre’s capacity to effect social change was examined in three panel discussions: Green Theatre, The Drama of Politics and the Politics of Art, and What Makes a Play Have an Impact on the World?, moderated by Jim Simpson ’81, Michael Sheehan ’76 and Anne Cattaneo ’74 respectively. The panelists, including artists from every theatrical discipline, debated whether their craft could truly

alter the course of a nation. Despite their disagreements over methodology, they conceded that in times of political unrest, theatre becomes a socially relevant occasion to articulate the change desired for the world.

A number of alumni also participated in a workshop, Laughing Voice, led by Pamela Prather (Faculty). Magaly ColimonChristopher ’98, who was thrilled to get a refresher course on Prather’s vocal techniques, left the workshop beaming about its effectiveness: “Everyone should try it: on your way to an audition, start laughing. You’ll be working out your diaphragm, releasing endorphins, and you might even inspire people around you to smile.”

Other highlights of the weekend included the opportunity to attend Yale Repertory Theatre’s production of Passion Play by Sarah Ruhl (Yale Rep Associate Artist), directed by Mark WingDavey, as well as Chekhov’s Three Sisters, the second-year acting project, directed by Ron Van Lieu (Faculty). Throughout the weekend, current and former students connected, sometimes exploring the possibility of future collaborations. Cliff Warner ’87 was grateful for the exposure to new students, adding “I always return from Yale [Drama School] events with a new sense of pride, proud to be a part of such an important community.”

alumni weekend

2008 John Coyne ’97

Dean James Bundy ’95

Victoria Peterson ’89

Jim Simpson ’81, Jeff Burroughs, Matthew Welander ’09

Michael Diamond ’90

Paula Vogel (Faculty)

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Roberta Pereira da Silva ’07

Obi Ndefo ’97, Bob Barnett ’89, Asaad Kelada ’64

Paul Black ’00 (foreground), Robin Miles ’94, ’86 yc

Greg Copeland ’04

“

Calvin Christopher, Magaly Colimon-Christopher ’98

I always return from Yale [Drama School] events with a new sense of pride, proud to be a part of such an important community.”

Cliff Warner ’87

Table centerpieces, designed by Scott Dougan ’09 Bill Halbert ’70 and David Christian YSD 2008

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InOnReview York Street

Holiday Party In December 2007, alumni gathered at the annual Holiday Party at the Yale Club in New York City.

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1

Photos by Anita and Steve Shevett

3

4

1 Phyllis Warfel ’55, Joe Grifasi ’75, and

Dean James Bundy ’95.

2 Merope Lolis and Yannis Simonides ’72, ’69 YC. 3 Members of Class of 2008.

4 David Conte ’72 and Carmen Delavala

(Former Faculty).

5 Vicki Shagoian (Faculty) and David Nugent ’05.

6 Robert Russell ’89, Walter Bilderback ’87,

Mark Wade ’88, Patrick Kerr ’87, and Sharon Washington ’88.

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The Phyllis Warfel Award for Outstanding Alumni Service The award is named for Phyllis Warfel ’55, editor of the Drama Alumni Newsletter for fifteen years. Its purpose is to “honor individuals who have contributed to the well-being of the entire Yale Drama Alumni community.” Joe Grifasi ’75 was this past year’s winner.

Previous recipients are:

1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996

1997 1998

Phyllis Warfel ’55 Sally Bullock ’48 Neil Mazzella ’78 John Badham ’63, ’61 yc Talia Shire Schwartzman ’69 Arthur Pepine, former Financial Aid Officer at YSD Fran Kumin ’77 Asaad Kelada ’64

1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

Dick ’42 and Mickey ’44 Fleischer Richard Maltby ’62, YC ’59 Philip Isaacs ’53 Henry Winkler ’70 Bronislaw “Ben” Sammler ’74 Marc Flanagan ’70 Edward Trach ’58 Jane Kaczmarek ’82 Joe Grifasi ’75

Alumni Events

News from the Yale School of Drama

L.A. Party In March 2008, Jane Kaczmarek ’82 and Bradley Whitford once again welcomed alumni into their home for the annual West Coast gathering.

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Photos by Ryan Miller, Capture Imaging

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7 Rachel Myers ’07, Malcolm Darrell ’07, Bridget Jones ’06, and Stephen Moore ’05.

8 Jane Kaczmarek ’82 with husband Bradley Whitford.

9 (from left to right) Patti Lewis ’98 with Sofia,

Tessa Auberjonois ’98, Joanna Gorlick ’99, David Grillo ’95, Sarah Rafferty ’96 with Oona Sepala, Julian with his father Adrian Larourelle ’99, and Andres Wright.

10 Robert Cohen ’64, Asaad Kelada ’64, and Daniel Travanti ’64.

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11 Greg Copeland ’04, Jami O’Brien ’04, Heather Mazur ’03, and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa ’03.

12 Alexis Chiu, Matthew Humphreys ’03, Michael Gross ’73 with his wife Elsa Gross.

13 Dean James Bundy ’95 and Jane Kaczmarek ’82.

14 John Amicarella, Stephanie Nash ’88, Louis Plante ’69, and Abba Elfman ’86.

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➌ ➊

Yale Repertory Theatre

2007–2008 Season

➋

By Krista Corcoran Williams ’09

Tensions ran high on the stage of Yale Repertory Theatre this season. Re-imagined classics and world premieres navigated everything from political hierarchies to drawingroom social mores, from affairs of state to affairs of the heart.

With a fervent political dialogue surrounding the approaching presidential elections, Yale Rep kicked off its season with Shakespeare’s politically tumultuous Richard II. Under the direction of Evan Yionoulis ’85, ’82 YC (Faculty) and with Jeffrey Carlson in the role of the impulsive young king, we witnessed Richard II’s spectacular fall from power and the subsequent rise of his adversary Henry Bolingbroke (King Henry IV), played

by Billy Eugene Jones ’03. With the specters of past kings hanging literally overhead as bronze statues, we followed Richard’s devolu-

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tion from a bombastic monarch to a petulant youth curled on the floor.

Fraught with its own rivalries, Alice Childress’ Trouble in Mind took a peek backstage at a 1950s Broadway rehearsal process, where an African-American actress questions her perpetually stereotypical casting in roles of maids and mammies. Ironically, Trouble in Mind was slated to make Childress the first African-American woman to have her work produced on Broadway —but since she refused the producers’ demand to sweeten her play’s ending, the moment never came.

Director Irene Lewis ’66 staged the play as Childress originally wrote it: a searing inquiry into questions of identity, ambition, prejudice, and integrity.

With Tartuffe, in association with McCarter Theatre Center, director Daniel Fish created a

YSD 2008

visually disarming staging of Molière’s classic comedy, updated for an age that is increasingly under surveillance. From corsets and histrionics to sweatpants and sarcasm, actors literally crossed between the two worlds Fish created: an opulent, baroque 1664 and a stark, wired 2007. Throughout the performance, an on-stage videographer magnified intimate moments into vast live projections, emphasizing how a family is nearly undone by the machinations of a watchful, manipulative imposter.

In the world premiere of The Evildoers, playwright David Adjmi and director Rebecca Bayla Taichman ’00 fiercely probed the tortured lives of four well-off New Yorkers.

Seated around the dinner tables of upscale restaurants and immaculate leather-and-glass Manhattan apartments, two couples experi-

➊ Geordie Johnson and Bryce Pinkham ’08 in A Woman of No Importance. Photo by Carol Rosegg. ➋ Gary Perez and Adriana Sevan in Boleros for the Disenchanted. Photo by Joan Marcus.

➌ Jeffrey Carlson as Richard II in Richard II. Photo by Joan Marcus. ➏

➍ Stephen Barker Turner, Matt McGrath, and Johanna Day in The Evildoers. Photo by Joan Marcus. ➎ Kevin O’Rourke, E. Faye Butler, Starla Benford, and Garrett Neergaard in Trouble in Mind. Photo

by Joan Marcus. ➏ Zach Grenier and Christopher Donahue (onscreen) in Tartuffe. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

➎

➍

enced personal crises that erupted into devastating public catastrophes. Idle chatter about sexuality, diamond rings, and literature gave way to a quest for survival as apocalyptic floods and death invaded their pristine worlds.

A Woman of No Importance introduced us to the obligations and scrupulous manners of the nineteenth-century British “social season.”

In the stoic drawing-rooms and curated gardens populated by ladies with parasols and men with walking sticks, director Dean James Bundy ’95 and his cast winkingly exposed the absurdities, both superficial and devastating, of such elaborate social hierarchies.

Boleros for the Disenchanted, the newest play

by Academy Award-nominee José Rivera, explored the nature of love as it evolves over a forty-year marriage. We followed a couple from their passionate courtship in 1950s

Puerto Rico to a series of bedridden confessions in 1990s Alabama. The nature of enchantment and disenchantment was explored on both national and personal levels, as questions of emigration and assimilation fused with the desire for love and forgiveness.

The play’s messages of care and commitment answered a season of socio-political challenges, a kind of reminder that to evaluate the contemporary moment—from its leaders to its prejudices to its hypocrisies—is to treat the nation as a home, and to be the best family member one can be.

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➌ ➊

Yale School of Drama

2007–2008 Season

➋

By Jennifer L. Shaw ’09

This year, you could hardly take a step in downtown New Haven without passing a poster for the latest Yale School of Drama production. The advertising blitzkrieg was necessary because, for the first time in recent history, all YSD productions were open to the public. The posters worked, filling seats with a diverse audience for YSD’s season of directors’ theses, verse projects, and new play festivals.

The season opened with a five-day party: Baal, the thesis production of director Snehal Desai ’08. Brecht’s first play, Baal tells the tragic tale of its title character, who spreads depravity and destruction as he seeks fulfillment in earthly delights. The set design by Timothy Mackabee ’09 transformed the University Theatre into a German nightclub, seating patrons at bars and old cabaret tables.

Free wine flowed, creating a celebratory

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atmosphere that was excellently corrupted by Bryce Pinkham ’08 as Baal, who became a violent, over-indulgent antihero.

Director Shana Cooper ’08 struck a more mystical chord with her production of Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata. The set, by Scott Dougan ’09, re-imagined the UT’s stage as a cemetery-like mansion, full of discarded souls, while costumes by Katherine O’Neill ’09 left an otherworldly impression. Fueled

by Cooper’s physical direction, the show tapped the eerie beauty of a play about gaining access to an imagined heaven, only to find a nightmarish hell.

In Peer Gynt, Mike Donahue ’08 brought an entirely different type of life onstage—two goats. Ibsen’s epic sprawled across multiple countries and four hours, fueled by a thirteenmember ensemble that handily navigated the livestock. Donahue made great use of the

YSD 2008

New Theater’s flexibility (and the Technical Design and Pro­duc­tion department’s rigging abilities), launching almost every actor into the air. The famous drowning scene was especially beautiful, with both men “bobbing” in the “waves” of the lighting design by Chaun Chi Chan ’10.

Verse projects Pericles, Romeo and Juliet, and Troilus vs. Cressida tested the Bard’s elasticity with imaginative reinventions from secondyear directors Erik Pearson ’09, Patricia McGregor ’09, and Rebecca Wolff ’09, respectively. Pearson’s grotesquely comedic Pericles brought deserved attention to the littleknown gem, playfully setting the story on a wunderkammern set by Sarah Pearline ’09.

McGregor’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, set in New Orleans, reinforced the universality of Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers by reimagining the warring families as the Creoles and

➊ Caitlin Clouthier ’08 in The Ghost Sonata.

Photo by Jesse Belsky ’09. ➋ Erika Sullivan ’09 and Barret O’Brien ’09 in Peer Gynt. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

➌ Austin Durant ’10 holding Laura Esposito ’09 behind a plexiglass wall with Nikki Berger ’08 in front in I Am a Superhero by Jennifer Tuckett ’08. Photo by Carol Rosegg. ➍ John Patrick Doherty ’10 and Liz Wisan ’10 in The Good Egg by Dorothy Fortenberry ’08.

Photo by T. Charles Erickson. ➎ (left to right) Joby Earle ’10, Christina Maria Acosta ’10, Zach Appelman ’10, Teresa Avia Lim ’09, and Rachel Spencer ’10 in Grace, or the Art of Climbing by Lauren Feldman ’08. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

➍

➏ Luke Robertson ’09, Chris McFarland ’09

➐

and Eric Bryant ’09 in Pericles.

➐ The cast of Troilus vs. Cressida. ➎

➏

Uptown Black communities. Wolff, meanwhile, took to the field and staged Troilus vs.

Cressida as a high school football rivalry in an all-male adaptation.

The Thornton Wilder Festival of One Acts presented first-year playwrights’ work: Lone Pilots of Roosevelt Field by Kim Rosenstock ’10, The Art of Preservation by Susan Soon He Stanton ’10, and Learning Russian by Michael Mitnick ’10. Lone Pilots mingled humor and compassion as we followed a young woman who tries to reconnect with her father before she heads to boot camp.

Stanton brought a piece of Hawaii into New Haven in The Art of Preservation, suggesting that saving library books from a flood is akin to saving culture from modernity. In Learning Russian, Mitnick played with the idea of time, introducing a self from yesterday to a self from tomorrow. All three sparkled with wit and creativity, promising two

more years of intelligent work from YSD’s newest scribes.

Second-year playwrights Mattie Brickman ’09, Gonzalo Rodriguez-Risco ’09, and Matt Moses ’09 premiered their new work at the Langston Hughes Festival.

Brickman’s If Found, Please Return to Charles Darwin crossed time boundaries and explored cultural taboos by staging parallel —and romantic—relationships between two sets of cousins, one of whom was the famous Darwin. Rodriguez’s play Dramatis Personae staged a collision between historical and personal events, as three friends weathered the 1996 Japanese Embassy hostage situation in Peru. The Covering Skyline is Nothing ended the Festival on a note of revolution, as Moses’ play posited a world of perfect, factory-made babies available to the highest bidder, until one worker calls for rebellion.

The YSD season ended with the Carlotta

YSD 2008

Festival of New Plays, showcasing third-year playwrights Jennifer Tuckett ’08, Lauren Feldman ’08, and Dorothy Fortenberry ’08.

Tuckett’s I Am A Superhero considered the power needed for one child to put her world back together after her father’s sudden death.

In The Good Egg, Fortenberry wondered how far one woman should go to create the perfect family, as she debates testing her embryos for the same debilitating manic-depression that afflicts her brother. Finally, Feldman’s heroine in Grace, or the Art of Climbing learned what it takes to climb a mountain and, at the same time, to conquer her personal demons.

After producing a season of work both difficult and uplifting, with loud ovations and sold-out shows, graduating and continuing students alike were filled with anticipation for the next season, whether at Yale or in their professional careers.

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➊

Yale Cabaret

2007–2008 Season

➋

By Maya Cantu ’10

For its 40th anniversary, the Yale Cabaret engaged the intersection of the political and personal, as artists explored how larger societal forces can mold even the most intimate details of our lives. Remarkably, nearly all the eighteen productions and four special events—programmed by co-artistic directors Erik Pearson ’09 and Rebecca Wolff ’09 and Managing Director Jacob Padrón ’08—were new works.

Early in the season, the American suffragette movement provided the backdrop of the play Bicycling for Ladies, in which a housewife attempts to pedal to personal liberation in 1895 New Haven. The musical, by Dorothy Fortenberry ’08 and Colin Wambsgans, helped mark this year’s Cabaret as a destination for thought-provoking, socially conscious musical theatre.

Continuing the trend, Ken Robinson ’09 debuted Dancing in the Dark. Robinson not only adapted the piece from the novel by Caryl Phillips, but he also starred as the legendary Antiguan-born, African-American vaudevillian Bert Williams, whose relationship with his partner George Walker was strained by the pressure of entertaining white audiences in blackface. The show was garnished—often to ironic effect—with popular songs of the day.

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Another unconventional musical, Sidewalk Opera, explored the tightly bound issues of race, class, and social injustice. The illuminating “docu-musical” was written by sound designer Jana Hoglund ’08, who interviewed homeless individuals at St. Thomas More Center’s soup kitchen and, over the next twelve months, wove their words into songs that reflected natural vocal patterns. While some productions this year opened into distant worlds, Sidewalk Opera focused our gaze onto our own neighborhood. And, like Dancing in the Dark, it was directed by 2008-09 Cabaret artistic director Patricia McGregor ’09.

In Amerigo in Wonderland, an ancient explorer clashed with both modern America and the Lewis Carroll classic. Created by Sarah Bishop-Stone ’10 and Suzanne Appel ’10—and performed almost entirely by Theater Management students—the show imagined how 15th century Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci might fare today in the diverse and chaotic land he claimed to have discovered.

Charise Smith ’10 lyrically interpreted the Hades and Persephone myth through a CubanAmerican lens in Estrella Cruz [The Junkyard Queen], in which Demeter was transformed into an émigré inventor, and Persephone YSD 2008

became a young girl in the process of defining herself.

The Apocryphal Project—written by playwright Lauren Feldman ’08 and actor Brian Hastert ’09, and dynamically staged by Michael Walkup ’06—took an imaginative look at the Bible. Or rather, it pondered unofficial scripture that failed to make the final cut, suggesting a hilarious alternate dimension to Christian dogma. (In the process, it also raised parallels to modern censorship.)

Presented as a spring Special Event, The Home­coming Project explored topics that some mainstream news outlets ignore. Conceived and directed by Jason Fitzgerald ’08, and featuring short pieces by Yale School of Drama students, the show powerfully charted the difficult transition from soldier to civilian, while mourning the lives lost in Iraq.

With such a stellar line-up of shows, Yale Cabaret’s 40th anniversary season reminded me why the Cabaret was founded: It is a theatrical laboratory, and each production is a beautifully ephemeral experiment. May the next forty years be just as rich in invention and adventure.

➊ Alex Knox ’09 and Brian Hastert ’09 in The Apocryphal Project directed by Michael Walkup ’06, written by Lauren Feldman ’08. ➋ Erica Sullivan ’10 in Perk, Pussy, Pathos, directed by Laura Esposito ’09, written by Kevin Artigue. ➌ Eddie Brown ’09 and Ken Robinson ’09 in Dancing in the Dark directed by Patricia MacGregor ’09, written by Caryl Phillips and adapted by Ken Robinson ’09.

➌

➍ Jacob Gallagher-Ross ’09 in Blood Box directed by Matt Cornish ’09, adapted and translated by Rebecca Phillips ’09.

➎ Nicholas Carriere ’08 in Mr. and Mrs. Hollywood written and directed by Barret O’Brien ’09.

All photos by Erik Pearson ’09.

➍

➎

YSD 2008

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In the Wings

Congratulations to our newest alumni— the Class of 2008!

Doctor of Fine Arts Gordon Anthony Carver Rachel Madeline Rusch

Master of Fine Arts/ Certificate in Drama Acting Nicole Berger Ashley Leanne Bryant Brian Robert Burns Nicholas Carrière James Qing-Ren Chen Caitlin E. Clouthier Christopher Grant Alexander Louis Major Gamal Jason Palmer Joseph Parks Brooke Annette Parks* Aubyn Dayton Philabaum Bryce A. Pinkham Jamel S. D. Rodriguez* Amanda Warren Design Ola Bråten Paul Philip Carey, Jr. Yuri Cataldo Ji-youn Chang Brenda Davis Anya Klepikov Miu Chi Lai Michael Locher Melissa A. Mizell Nicholas Ashley Rastenis Lauren E. Rockman Melissa Ellen Trn Sound Design Jana Lynn Hoglund Veronika Anna-Nina Vorel Sarah J. Pickett Directing Shoshana Ela Cooper Snehal R. Desai Michael Morgan Donahue

Dramaturgy Joseph Paul Cermatori Jason Thomas Fitzgerald Lydia Genoveva Garcia Drew Lichtenberg Playwriting Lauren Michele Feldman Dorothy Fortenberry Justin Sherin Jennifer Ann Tuckett Stage Management Danielle Louise Grace Federico Joanne Elizabeth McInerney Sarah Hodges Olivieri Lisa-Marie Shuster Technical Design & Production Christopher Parker Brown Jason Grant John Fremont Hilley Justin Lee McDaniel Steven Wells Neuenschwander Christopher Michael Peterson Brian Michael Swanson Aaron H. Verdery Jonathan Larimer Willis Theater Management Paola Allais Hannah Grannemann-Isaac Heide Lisa Janssen Jacob G. Padrón Roberta Maia Pereira Da Silva David Jordan Roberts Rachel Louise Smith Stephanie Andrea Ybarra Technical Internship Certificate Sarah Beata DeLong Bona Lee Nicholas John Pope Melissa A. Sibley Kathryn Jane Sirco Patricia Rose Sorbi

*Certificate recipient

Yale School of Drama’s graduating class of 2008. Photo by Debbie Ellinghaus.

GRADUATION PRIZES Prizes are given each year to members of the graduating class as designated by the faculty.

The ASCAP Cole Porter Prize Dorothy Fortenberry ’08 The Edward C. Cole Memorial Award Justin Lee McDaniel ’08 Brian Michael Swanson ’08 The John W. Gassner Memorial Prize Miriam Felton-Dansky ’09 The Bert Gruver Memorial Prize Joanne Elizabeth McInerney ’08 The Allen M. and Hildred L. Harvey Prize Justin Lee McDaniel ’08 The Morris J. Kaplan Award Hannah Aileen Grannemann-Isaac ’08 The Dexter Wood Luke Memorial Prize James Qing-Ren Chen ’08 The Julian Milton Kaufman Memorial Prize Shoshana Ela Cooper ’08 The Jay and Rhonda Keene Prize Melissa Trn ’08 The Leo Lerman Graduate Fellowship in Design Anya Klepikov ’08

The Donald and Zorka Oenslager Travel Fellowship Miu Chi Lai ’08 Ji-youn Chang ’08 The Pierre-André Salim Prize John Fremont Hilley ’08 Frieda Shaw, Dr. Diana Mason OBE and Denise Suttor Prize Sarah J. Pickett ’08 The Oliver Thorndike Acting Award Bryce A. Pinkham ’08 The Herschel Williams Prize Brooke Annette Parks ’08

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT’S PUBLIC SERVICE FELLOWSHIPS Fellowships are awarded on a competitive basis to Yale students to provide opportunities to work on behalf of economic development, human development, and neighborhood revitalization with public sector and nonprofit organizations in the City of New Haven.

Jorge Rodríguez ’10 (2008–2009)

The Class of 2008

YALE SCHOOL OF DRAMA FELLOWSHIPS AND SCHOLARSHIPS The recipients for the 2007–2008 Academic Year were:

The John Badham Scholarship Snehal Desai ’08 Erik Pearson ’09 The George Pierce Baker Memorial Scholarship Gonzalo Rodriguéz-Risco ’09 Drew Lichtenberg ’08 Miriam Felton-Dansky ’09 The Herbert H. and Patricia M. Brodkin Scholarship Eric Bryant ’09 Aubyn Philabaum ’08 Alex Teicheira ’09 The Patricia M. Brodkin Scholarship Joanne McInerney ’08 Danielle Federico ’08 Kristofer Longley-Postema ’09

The Gordon Knight Scholarship Sarah Pickett ’08 The Lotte Lenya Scholarship Ken Robinson ’09 Chris McFarland ’09 The Lord Memorial Scholarship Stephanie Ybarra ’08 The Virginia Brown Martin Scholarship Caitlin Clouthier ’08 Alex Knox ’09 The Stanley R. McCandless Scholarship Jesse Belsky ’09 Ji-youn Chang ’08 Melissa Mizell ’08 The Alfred L. McDougal and Nancy Lauter McDougal Scholarship Ashley Bryant ’08 Bryce A. Pinkham ’08 The Benjamin Mordecai Memorial Scholarship Hannah Granneman-Isaac ’08

The Kenneth D. Moxley Memorial Scholarship Christopher Peterson ’08 Brian Swanson ’08

The Richard Harrison Senie Scholarship Luke Brown ’09 Paul Carey ’08 Melissa Trn ’08

The Donald M. Oenslager Scholarship in Stage Design Brenda Davis ’08 Michael Locher ’08

The Michael Sheehan Scholarship David Roberts ’08

The Donald and Zorka Oenslager Scholarship in Stage Design Yuri Cataldo ’08 Anya Klepikov ’08 Sarah Pearline ’09 Lauren Rockman ’08 The Eugene O’Neill Memorial Scholarship Mattie Brickman ’09 The Mary Jean Parson Scholarship Rebecca Wolff ’09 The Scholarship in Playwriting Matt Moses ’09

The Howard Stein Scholarship Jennifer Tuckett ’08 The Leon Brooks Walker Scholarship Joseph Parks ’08 The Richard Ward Scholarship Jacob Padrón ’08 The Constance Welch Memorial Scholarship Brian Burns ’08 Carter Gill ’09 Teresa Avia Lim ’09 Jamel Rodriguez ’08 The Rebecca West Scholarship Alex Major ’08 Luke Robertson ’09

The Paul Carter Scholarship Justin McDaniel ’08 The Cheryl Crawford Scholarship Lauren Feldman ’08 The Holmes Easley Scholarship Andrew Boyce ’09 Scott Dougan ’09 Paul Gelinas ’09 Tim Mackabee ’09 The Eldon Elder Fellowship Kyong Jun Eo ’09 Jacob Gallagher-Ross ’09 Miu Chi Lai ’08 Roberta Pereira Da Silva ’08 Nondumiso Tembe ’09 Jennifer Tuckett ’08 The Annie G.K. Garland Memorial Scholarship Donald Claxon ’09 The Randolph Goodman Scholarship Heidi Hanson ’09 F. Lane Heard III Scholarship Barret O’Brien ’09 The Jay and Rhonda Keene Scholarship Moria Clinton ’09 The Ray Klausen Design Scholarship Amanda Seymour ’09

The Acting Class of 2008 performs in The Commedia Project. Photo by Erik Pearson ’09.

YSD 2008

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Spotlight On

Alumni and Faculty Honors and Awards 2007 Audio Publishers Association Audie Awards ® May 2006 Audiobook of the Year Angela Bassett ’83, ’80 YC Narrator Winner, Inspired by…The Bible Experience: New Testament

Judges Award: Politics Stefan Rudnicki ’69 Narrator Winner, Hubris 39th Annual Joseph Jefferson Awards November 2007 Directing Anna D. Shapiro ’93 Steppenwolf Theatre Company Winner, August: Osage County Scenic Design Todd Rosenthal ’93 Steppenwolf Theatre Company Winner, August: Osage County James Schuette ’89 Goodman Theatre Nominee, Oedipus Complex Walt Spangler ’97 Goodman Theatre Nominee, King Lear Costume Design Linda Cho ’98 Chicago Shakespeare Theater Nominee, The Two Noble Kinsmen

14th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards® January 2008 Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries John Turturro ’83 Nominee, The Bronx is Burning Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series Christian Clemenson ’84 Nominee as a member of the cast, Boston Legal

Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series Maulik Pancholy ’03 Nominee as a member of the cast, 30 Rock Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Comedy Series Tony Shalhoub ’80 Nominee, Monk 2007 Barrymore Awards October 2007 Clear Sound Award for Outstanding Sound Design Brian “Fitz” Patton ’01 Philadelphia Theatre Company Nominee, Nerds://A Musical Software Satire 10th Annual LMDA Prize in Dramaturgy: Elliot Hayes Award June 2008 Ilana Brownstein ’02

Lighting Design Robert Wierzel ’84 Chicago Shakespeare Theater Nominee, Troilus and Cressida

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YSD 2008

The cast of August: Osage County directed by Anna Shapiro ’93 and set design by Todd Rosenthal ’93. Photo by Joan Marcus.

2008 Lucille Lortel Awards May 2008 Outstanding Play Tarell Alvin McCraney ’07 Nominee, The Brothers Size David Ives ’84 Nominee, New Jerusalem: The Interrogation

of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656

Outstanding Director Annie Dorsen ’00, ’96 YC Nominee, Passing Strange Outstanding Scenic Design Scott Bradley ’86 Nominee, Eurydice

Outstanding Costume Design Jenny Mannis ’02, ’96 YC Nominee, The Drunken City Outstanding Sound Design Daniel Baker ’04 Nominee, The Four of Us 2008 Drama Desk Awards May 2008 Outstanding Actress in a Play Frances McDormand ’82 Nominee, The Country Girl Outstanding Director Anna D. Shapiro ’93 Winner, August: Osage County

Derek McLane ’84 Nominee, 10 Million Miles

Outstanding Set Design Scott Bradley ’86 Nominee, Eurydice

Scott Pask ’97 Nominee, Blackbird

Santo Loquasto ’72 Nominee, Trumpery

Awards

Scott Pask ’97 Winner, Les Liaisons Dangereuses

35th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards® June 2008

Derek McLane ’84 Nominee, 10 Million Miles

Outstanding Achievement in Costume Design for a Drama Series Katherine Roth ’93 Nominee, All My Children

Takeshi Kata ’01 Nominee, Adding Machine

Outstanding Drama Series Directing Team William Ludel ’73 Nominee, General Hospital

Michael Yeargan ’73 Winner, South Pacific Outstanding Costume Design William Ivey Long ’75 Nominee, Young Frankenstein Outstanding Lighting Design Donald Holder ’86 Nominee, South Pacific 62nd Tony Awards® June 2008 Best Direction of a Play Anna D. Shapiro ’93 Winner, August: Osage County Best Scenic Design of a Play Scott Pask ’97 Nominee, Les Liaisons Dangereuses Todd Rosenthal ’93 Winner, August: Osage County Best Scenic Design of a Musical Michael Yeargan ’73 Winner, South Pacific

Princess Grace Awards 2008 Statue Recipient Alec Hammond ’96 The cast of South Pacific at Lincoln Center Theater. Set design by Michael Yeargan ’73, costume design by Catherine Zuber ’84, and lighting design by Donald Holder ’86. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Michael Merritt Award for Excellence in Design and Collaboration David Budries (Faculty)

Connecticut Critics Circle Awards June 2008 Outstanding Set Design Riccardo Hernandez ’92 Yale Repertory Theatre Winner, The Evildoers Outstanding Costume Design Anya Klepikov ’08 Yale Repertory Theatre Winner, A Woman of No Importance

Best Costume Design of a Musical Catherine Zuber ’84 Winner, South Pacific

Outstanding Ensemble Lucia Brawley ’02 Yale Repertory Theatre Winner as a member of the cast,

Best Lighting Design of a Play Donald Holder ’86 Nominee, Les Liaisons Dangereuses

Boleros for the Disenchanted

39th Annual Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards March 2008 Costume Design Maggie Morgan ’92 Center Theatre Group Nominee, Sleeping Beauty Wakes 59th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards® August 2007 Oustanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series Tony Shalhoub ’80 Nominee, Monk

2007 Ovation Awards November 2007

Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series Christian Clemenson ’84 Winner, Boston Legal

Costume Design Linda Fisher ’72 La Mirada Theater for the Performing Arts Nominee, Greater Tuna

Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series Kate Burton ’82 Nominee, Grey’s Anatomy

Sound Design David Budries (Faculty) Center Theatre Group Nominee, Souvenir

Outstanding Variety, Music, or Comedy Special Lewis Black ’77 Nominee, Lewis Black: Red, White, and

Screwed

YSD 2008

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In Memoriam Butch Cassidy, Humanitarian: Paul Newman ’54

Paul Newman. Photo courtesy of the Westport Country Playhouse.

Paul Newman ’54 once imagined his epitaph: “Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.”

These were the words of a man who wanted to leave a legacy deeper than his handsome face and baby blue eyes. The swirl of obituaries and memoriams in the wake of Newman’s passing, on September 26, 2008, age 83, of cancer, shows how thoroughly he succeeded. David Letterman said of him, “If you wanna talk about legacy… he knew what he had to do as a human being on this planet was to take care of his fellow humans, and he never faltered from that commitment,” and Roger Ebert devoted so much of the Chicago Sun-Times obituary to Newman’s character that his wife asked him, “Why didn’t you write more about his acting?” Indeed, Newman’s impressive film resume—Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Verdict, The Color of Money, Road to Perdition—is matched by his philanthropic achievements: Newman’s Own (a charity foundation disguised as a food company), The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp (for children with lifethreatening illnesses), the Scott Newman Center (to prevent youth substance abuse), the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy, the Safe Water Network, and countless donations and outpourings of support to causes around the world.

Though he spent only a year at Yale School of Drama, as a directing student, before an understudy role in a New Haven try-out turned into a lead role in a Broadway smash (the play was Picnic), he always kept Yale close to his heart. A generous contributor and frequent visitor, he was given an honorary degree in 1968, the same year he became a Calhoun College Fellow. Two of his films, Butch Cassidy (1969) and Slap Shot (1977) premiered in New Haven.

Robert Brustein ’51 dra, ’66 hon (Former Dean), who in the early days of Yale Repertory Theatre received from Mr. Newman the largest donation in the School’s history at that time, called Newman “a vanishing American—a man who knew what he owed to his profession, and even more, what he owed to the world.” Bob Barr ’52, a classmate of Newman’s who remembers how they sold Encyclopedia Britannica editions door-to-door together to earn spending money, shares, “All the stories about Paul are and were true: he was straight-forward, hard-working, honest and talented.”

“He knew what he had to do as a human being on this planet was to take care of his fellow humans, and he never faltered from that commitment.”

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YSD 2008

Richard Beebe ’85

Delbert Mann with Richard Thomas on the set of All Quiet on the Western Front, 1979.

Delbert Mann ’48 The huge number of Yale School of Drama graduates who have had successful film and television careers is no new phenomenon—as the career of Delbert Mann ’48, who made his mark during “The Golden Age of Televi­sion,” proves. When Mann, who died in Los Angeles on November 11, 2007, graduated from Yale and followed his friend and mentor Fred Coe to NBC in the spring of 1949, the words “live television” were a novelty, and the budding industry was turning to theatre artists to shape the look and feel of the medium. Mann directed dramas for such now-forgotten series as “Philco Playhouse,” “Goodyear Television Playhouse,” and “Producers’ Showcase,” earning an Emmy nomination in 1954 for his musical adaptation of Our Town. But it was the following year that would permanently place him in the national spotlight. He became the first director to win an Oscar for Best Direction for his debut film, Marty, Paddy Chayefsky’s tender celebration of an awkward romance between a plain-looking schoolteacher and an unassuming butcher. The film, created on a dime budget as a tax write-off for United Artists, was the surprise critical and commercial hit of the season. Mann spent the rest of his career balancing television and film projects, serving as a great mentor and friend for the new generations of talent that followed him and, as President of the Directors’ Guild of America from 1967 to 1971, protector of their future in the industry. He cared deeply for his late wife, Ann, whom he nursed through a long illness, and he is survived by three sons and seven grandchildren.

Dick Beebe ’85 died Friday, June 20, 2008 in Benedictine Hospital in Kingston, New York, from complications associated with brain cancer. He was 54. Beyond Dick’s gifts as a writer, he had a real talent for friendship and will be missed by friends and colleagues, not only from his time at Yale but also from his youth and college years in Boston, his working life in New York and Los Angeles, and his time in Saugerties, a small town in upstate New York where he spent the last years of his life. Dick set the bar as a playwright while at Yale. His plays were wildly ambitious, wickedly funny and always human.

Actors and directors adored working on Dick’s plays. After Yale, Dick went to Los Angeles, where he quickly made a name for himself writing for film and television. He was particularly proud of “The Lazarus Man,” a successful television series he created starring Robert Urich. Dick also began drinking again during this time after having been sober for many years. His battles with alcoholism continued in and out of rehab until he settled in Saugerties, where he was finally able to return to sobriety. Dick had just begun to write again when he was diagnosed with cancer. The irony of recovering from alcoholism only to be stricken with cancer did not escape him, nor did it seem to disillusion him. Indeed, Dick went on to live as long and as happily as he was able, aided by his always sardonic wit and by his friends from Alcoholics Anonymous, who looked after him around the clock during his last days. Dick is survived by his wife, Barbara, and by a sister, also named Barbara, who was at his bedside, along with his friends from AA, when he died.

Quincy Long ’86

Alvin Colt ’37 New York City lost one of its premier costume designers when Alvin Colt ’37 died on May 4, 2008. He was 91. Remembered by his Emmywinning protégé Bob Mackie as “always a gentleman and . . . certainly . . . a hero of mine,” Colt was known for his ability to make comedy out of clothing. “When my lyrics or scenes weren’t that funny, his costumes would get the laughs,” said Gerald Alessandrini, creator of Forbidden Broadway, the satirical Broadway revue for which Alvin had been designing since 1992­­(one of his last costumes was a send-up of Patti LuPone’s matronly garb in Gypsy). Though Colt’s most famous design was for the original Broadway production of Guys and Dolls, others include On the Town (his 1944 Broadway debut), Finian’s Rainbow, Pipe Dream (Tony award), Li’l Abner, and Jerome Robbins’ Broadway—highlights from a Broadway resume that grew steadily and uninterrupted through 2001, a nearly 60-year span. But Colt made New York theatre history as a charter member of the Phoenix Theatre, one of the earliest off-Broadway companies. An exhibition of Colt’s work, “Costumes and Characters: The Designs of Alvin Colt,” was presented at the Museum of the City of New York in 2007.

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In Memoriam Katherine De Hetre ’71 On December 29, 2007, Katherine De Hetre ’71, was killed in a car accident while driving along Route 101 in Northern California on her way to her family’s new home in Southern Oregon. She was 61. As a student at YSD, she played Bunny Barnham in Terrence McNally’s Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone? After Yale, Katherine performed on Broadway in The Love Suicides at Schofield Barracks, by Romulus Linney ’58, and understudied the role of Letta in a revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Her work in television included roles in “Murder, She Wrote” and “Quincy, M.E.” Katherine’s husband, actor Charles Levin ’74 ’71 yc , writes that she “was a brilliant actor, a wild and crazy mom, and the gypsy in my soul.”

Jeffrey Dennstaedt ’87 Jeffrey Viet Dennstaedt ’87 passed away suddenly at his home in Minneapolis, Minn., on February 5, 2008. He was 47. Friends and colleagues remember Jeff’s professional talents and his personal warmth.

Longtime friend Tim Fricker ’89, who followed Jeff from his undergraduate years at Towson University, to their time together at YSD, to Jeff’s first post-Yale position as Technical Director at the University of Virginia Theatre Arts Program, remembers, “While Jeff was always a consummate and dedicated professional, he also understood and helped others understand the importance of having a life outside of work.” On reconnecting with Jeff in Virginia, Tim shares, “I learned things [from Jeff] about technical direction that I carried with me for the rest of my career. Simple things, but Jeff set a good example in many aspects of [our] work, and I will always be grateful for the time I spent working with him there and elsewhere, and most of all, grateful for his friendship.”

From 1993–2001, Jeff was Technical Director at McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, N.J. Tom Muza, General Manager, said, “To his friends Jeff had a gentle manner, an easy smile and warm heart. No one could plan a better bike route or encourage us to make it that last mile. Jeff challenged us with conversation and, believe it or not, he asked many of us to bring him back dirt and sand samples from our travels. Did he have a scale model of the world in his basement?

Ride on, my friend.”

In January of 2001, Jeff became Technical Director for the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minn. Joe Dowling, the Guthrie’s Artistic Director, reflected on Jeff’s role in the design and construction of the Guthrie’s new space (opened in summer 2006), when he spoke at Jeff’s memorial service: “Jeff had an extraordinary capacity to solve problems. He relished in the complex designs that were presented before him. I know that in the creation of this building, Jeff’s input was invaluable. He knew instinctively and from experience how important it was that however iconic the architecture, the long-term health and success of this theater depended on the decisions that were taken at the planning stage. And if mistakes were made—and indeed there were—it was largely because, whether through budgetary reasons or because we simply didn’t listen, we didn’t actually pay attention to his advice. He is one of the true heroes of this new building, of the Guthrie, and we will remember him for a very long time.”

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Rosemary Ingham ’67 Costume designer Rosemary Ingham ’67, who died on July 13, 2008, will be missed for many qualities—her talent, her devotion to her craft—but not least among them is the vivacity and bravery she brought to her long career. She loved staking out new ground in which theatre could bloom, whether it be the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, or the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona, Minnesota, along with the fabric store and workshop Clothworks in Charlottesville, Virginia. Ingham designed costumes all over the country, though she was most well known for her period designs, particularly for Shakespeare productions. She has also nurtured generations of young designers from her years as a professor at Southern Methodist University and, later, University of Mary Washington. Even more impressive are the students she has influenced from afar, thanks to her four books on design—three of them written with colleague Liz Covey—which have been among the most influential tomes on the subject. In 2006 she received the U.S. Institute for Theatre Technology Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award. Greater than all these achievements, though, was Ingham’s family—her four sons (all with her late husband, playwright and actor Robert Ingham) and four grandchildren—who will miss her most of all.

Roxanne Kadishov Nicholson ’71 Roxanne Kadishov Nicholson ’71 passed away suddenly at the age of 60 after a brief illness on September 24, 2007. After graduating from Yale, Roxanne began her stage lighting career in New York City. She co-founded and operated Alumifax, a company that specialized in commercial lighting supplies. She continued her career in Las Vegas, designing in many of the hotel showrooms, including those at Caesar’s Palace, the Hilton, and Harrah’s. Roxanne also studied photography and became an accomplished landscape photographer. Her husband Lynn Nicholson said, “In the hearts of those of us who knew her well, we miss her greatly, and will forever cherish each moment we spent with her, knowing that we were in the presence of a rare soul.

Roxanne was a perfect living example of peace, happiness, and love.

It was the greatest gift to spend 15 years with her.”

Alumni News

Mary van Dyke (Former Faculty) Mary van Dyke (Former Faculty), the woman who Charles S. Dutton ’83 said “taught me how to talk,” passed away on December 29, 2007. She was 99. As a professor and voice consultant in the Acting department from 1974 to 1982, van Dyke influenced a wide range of students under her tutelage. Elizabeth Norment ’79, who calls her former teacher “my oldest and wisest friend,” shares her thoughts below.

As all who studied with Mary can attest, her teachings were never just about voice, speech, text, scansion (though she was an invaluable taskmaster in all those areas); they were also about depth, truth, idiosyncrasy, capturing the essence of a soul and sculpting it into a performance. She taught us to scavenge lovingly from life, and she offered abundant examples from her own odyssey through the

complex layers of the “club sandwich” she called her life in the arts.

Our adventures together continued over the years—in New York, in Ashland, in Ireland, many times at her farm in Vermont—and there was never an opinion she expressed that didn’t clarify or debunk or unlock something I’d been grappling with, and always in her terse, droll, suffer-no-fools style. I came to depend on her wisdom as I steered through my own club sandwich, and she kept teaching me, til the end. As she passed in age all milestones known to me, we navigated uncharted territory together. I felt my way through pockets of her fading memory, helping where I could and annoying her as little as possible when I couldn’t. The rhythms of our conversations changed; I learned to wait more patiently for the ends of her paragraphs, which, miraculously, always arrived, with the same force as ever.

She was indefatigable. She touched countless lives. She was determined to live to be a hundred, and damn near made it.

Elizabeth Norment ’79

Farewell Dick Beebe ’85 6.20.2008

George Hersey ’54 art ’64 10.23.2007

Delbert Mann ’48 11.11.2007

Mark J. Richard ’57 3.3.2008

Ralf Bode ’66 2.27.2001

Mildred W. Hoadley ’45 12.15.2007

Chris Markle ’79 7.28.2008

Pierre-André Salim ’09 11.18.2007

Norman E. Cohen ’59 7.19.2008

John D. Hough ’57 7.14.2008

Charles McCallum ’50 8.31.2007

Louise Saurel ’38 2.23.2008

Alvin Colt ’37 5.4.2008

Rosemary Ingham ’67 7.13.2008

James R. Miller ’65 8.06.2008

William Snyder, Jr. ’55 3.12.2008

Katherine DeHetre ’71 12.29.2007

Irma S. Johnson ’35 12.3.2007

Tad Mosel ’50 8.24.2008

Bros Giles Turbee ’65 9.15.2000

Jeffrey V. Dennstaedt ’87 2.5.2008

Joan Pollak Kan ’48 7.3.2007

Albert John “A.J.” Moulfair ’65 12.14.2007

Mary Van Dyke, Former Faculty 12.29.2007

Gene Diskey ’61 3.29.2008

Jane Kimbrough ’61 7.15.2007

Gary Munn ’59 12.11.2007

Edwin L. Vergason ’42 3.27.2007

Andrew H. Drummond ’66 7.31.2005

Stanley Kloth ’55 8.28.2007

Paul Newman ’54 hon ’88 9.26.2008

Zack L. York ’42 3.17.2008

Dorcas D. Durkee ’46 10.23.2007

Fritz Andre Kracht ’53 10.18.2005

Eva E. Feldman ’62 6.7.2007

Juda L. Levie ’53 1.28.2008

Roxanne Kadishov Nicholson ’71 9.24.2007

Brita Brown Grover ’59 2.20.2008

Barbara Mackenzie ’56 2.16.2006

Rebecca Hargis-Turner ’45 05.23.2004

George Mallonee ’59 12.4.2007

Francine Parker ’59 11.8.2007 Felice Anthony Polito ’68 10.19.1991 Boyce Price ’39 11.1.2007

YSD 2008

49

Bookshelf

Publications by Yale School of Drama Alumni

Theatre Craft

Non Fiction Cult Films: Taboo and Transgression

By Allan Havis ’80 University Press of America, 2008

Mechanical Design for the Stage

By Alan Hendrickson ’83 (Faculty) & Colin Buckhurst ’04 Elsevier Science & Technology Books, 2007 Shakespeare’s Language: A Glossary of Unfamiliar Words in His Plays and Poems, 2nd Edition

By Eugene F. Shewmaker ’49 Checkmark Books, 2008 They’re Playing Our Song: Conversations with America’s Classic Composers, Revised and Expanded Edition

By Max Wilk ’41, ’41 YC

Blood on the Stage Sherlock Holmes on the Stage

By Amnon Kabatchnik ’57 Scarecrow Press, 2008 Beyond the Golden Door: Jewish American Drama and Jewish American Experience

By Julius Novick ’66 Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Writers in Paris: Literary Lives in the City of Light

By David Burke ’61, ’58 YC Counterpoint Press, 2008 No city has attracted so much literary talent, launched so many illustrious careers, or produced such a wealth of enduring literature as Paris. From the 15th century through the 20th, poets, novelists, and playwrights, famed for both their work and their lives, were shaped by this enchanting locale. From natives such as Molière, Genet, and Anaïs Nin, to expats like Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, and Gertrude Stein, author David Burke follows hundreds of writers through Paris’s labyrinthine streets, inviting readers on his grand tour. Unique in scope and approach, Writers in Paris crosses from Right Bank to Left and on to the Ile de la Cité as it explores the alleyways and haunts frequented by the world’s most storied writers.

Memory, Testimony, and Allegory in South American Theatre: Upstaging Dictatorship

By Ana Elena Puga ’98, ’02 DFA Routledge, 2008

Fiction Spiderman: Peter Parker: Back in Black

By Robert Aguirre-Sacasa ’03, Matt Fraction, and Sean McKeever Marvel Enterprises, 2008

Telling Stories: A Grand Unifying Theory of Acting Techniques

By Mark Rafael ’86 Smith & Kraus, 2008 Telling Stories: A Grand Unifying Theory of Acting Techniques is an essential resource for professional actors, acting students and teachers, or anyone who wants to better understand the evolution of modern acting theory. This guidebook provides a history of acting theories and training and describes techniques that enable an actor to inhabit a character. In the book are numerous acting exercises that illustrate each method, as well as advice on performing Shakespeare and on developing scripts.

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YSD 2008

Messiahs of 1933: How American Yiddish Theatre Survived Adversity through Satire

By Joel Schechter ’72 Temple University Press, 2008

Toehold

By Stephen Foreman ’67 Simon & Schuster, 2007 Erotomania: A Romance

By Francis Levy ’73 Two Dollar Radio, 2008

Alumni Notes Fiction

Memoirs

Plays The English Channel: An Original Play About Shakespeare

By Robert Brustein ’51, HON ’66 (Former Dean) Sheep Meadow, 2008

Shanghai

By David Rotenberg ’76 Viking Canada, 2008

Adopt a Sailor

By Charles Evered ’98 Broadway Play Publishing, 2008

The Spare Wife

By Alex Witchel ’82 Knopf, 2008

Capote in Kansas: A Ghost Story

By Kim Powers ’84 Westview Press, 2007 Truman Capote and Harper Lee were children when they met. Twenty-five years later, Capote had taken New York’s literary world by storm, while Lee struggled to put pen to paper and sweat out the story of her childhood in the same city. They would reunite in the desolate plains of Kansas to create In Cold Blood. And they would start talk of an even greater mystery: What happened between them—and who really wrote To Kill a Mockingbird? How did two innocents from a backwoods Southern town achieve such fame, and why did they stop speaking to one another? Capote in Kansas is an unforgettable “what might have been”—a fantasia of ghosts seeking resolve and revenge, and memories and regret for a past that was, that will never be again.

Writing for Love and/or Money: Outtakes from a Life on Spec: The Early Years

By Frank D. Gilroy ’53 Smith and Krauss, 2007 At fourteen, a boy in the Bronx, addicted to gambling (craps, horses, ball games, cards), moved by forces unknown to him, writes a one-page story that his aunt, who works on The World Telegram, asks a reporter to assess. The reporter sends it back with the notation: “The boy has narrative ability. Tell him to stay away from journalism.”

Twenty-six years later the reporter (Ed Wallace) interviews the “boy” when he wins a Pulitzer prize for playwriting. What happened to the “boy” in those intervening years (including World War II, Dartmouth College, Mexico, and Hollywood) is the stuff dreams, and occasional nightmares, are made of.

Making an Exit: A Mother-Daughter Drama with Alzheimer’s, Machine Tools, and Laughter

By Elinor Fuchs (Faculty) Henry Holt & Co, 2006 Collections of Nothing

By William Davies King ’81, ’83 DFA, ’77 YC University of Chicago Press, 2008 The Bishop’s Daughter: A Memoir

By Honor Moore ’70 W.W. Norton, 2008

Crazy Mary

By A.R. Gurney ’58 Broadway Play Publishing, 2008 Coyote Tales

By Daniel Elihu Kramer ’91 Baker’s Plays, 2008

Earthquake Chica

By Anne García-Romero ’95 Broadway Play Publishing, 2007

Finished from the Start and Other Plays

By Juan Radrigá

By Ana Elena Puga ’98, ’02 DFA (translator) and Mónica-Núñez Parra (translator) Northwestern University Press, 2007 Annushka’s Voyage

By Edith Tarbescu ’76 PlayScripts, 2008

Miss Witherspoon & Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge: Two Plays

By Christopher Durang ’74 Grove Press, 2006 Christopher Durang, the criminally funny author of Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, returns to the scene of his prime with two raucous new plays about death, religion, and a creamy Christmas pudding. In Miss Witherspoon— named one of the Ten Best Plays of 2005 by both Time and Newsday—Veronica, a recent suicide whose cantankerous attitude has not improved in the afterlife, discovers that the one thing worse than the world she left behind is having to go back for seconds. Ordered to cleanse her “brown tweedy aura,” Veronica resists being reincarnated (as a trailer-trash teen or an overexcited Golden Retriever), only to find that she may be mankind’s last, best hope for survival. In Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge, a sassy ghost once again attempts to shake Scrooge from his holiday humbug, but the whole family-friendly affair is deliciously derailed

by Mrs. Cratchit’s drunken insistence on stepping out of her miserable, treacly role. Morals are subverted, starving yet plucky children sing carols, and somebody’s goose is cooked as Durang lovingly skewers A Christmas Carol, It’s a Wonderful Life, and many more to create a brand-new, cracked Christmas classic.

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The Art of Giving at YSD Dawn M. Greene: A Woman With a Vision “Without good actors, we will not have good theatre,” asserts Dawn M. Greene, and as President and CEO of The Jerome L. Greene Foundation, Inc., Mrs. Greene has taken a monumental step toward supporting new generations of theatre performers. In November 2007, the Foundation made a gift of $3.235 million to Yale School of Drama to endow in perpetuity the Jerome L. Greene Scholarship, to be awarded annually to thirdyear students in the Acting department. This scholarship will cover the tuition, living expenses and medical insurance for four students each year. “The depth and breadth of the training at Yale School of Drama have distinguished the School throughout its history,” Green said, “and The Jerome L. Greene Foundation is pleased to participate in the School’s continued mission to train future generations of the most promising young artists.”

Greene, an avid theatergoer and arts patron, is continuing a long tradition of philanthropy in education and the arts begun by Jerome L. Greene, her late husband, who created three endowed scholarships at the Juilliard School, funded the Jerome L. Greene Science Center at Columbia University, and was a benefactor of the Columbia School of Law, the Montefiore Medical Center, and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Greene’s gift is the single largest ever made to endow a scholarship fund at Yale School of Drama. “The Foundation’s visionary and inspired understanding of the theatre,” reflected Dean James Bundy ’95, “particularly the challenges that young actors face as they enter a profession where economic rewards are not always commensurate with artistic excellence, ­is reflected in this singular act of cultural leadership.”

Dawn Greene

A New Investment from an Old Friend When James Binger ’38 yc died in November 2004, the lights on Broadway were dimmed in his honor. Binger, a lawyer and entrepreneur, turned the love of theatre that he discovered as a Yale student into a lifelong commitment to improve the art form. He is best known as the founder of Jujamcyn Theatres (name for his three children: Judy, James, Cynthia), but he was also a director of the Vivian Beaumont Theaters, a member of the executive committee of the League of American Theaters, and a lifetime member of the board of the Guthrie Theater, in his hometown of Minneapolis. The Robina Foundation, created by Binger in the year of his death, has taken up the major causes of his life, and with their recent gift to Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theatre, Binger’s legacy of directly transforming the theatrical scene is set to continue. The $2.85 million gift supports the Yale Center for New Theatre, a new initiative to commission, develop, and produce new plays and musicals at Yale Rep through an increased focus on residencies, readings, workshops, and full productions. In a unique provision of the grant, a portion of the money will support the production of commissioned works at other non-profit theatres, ensuring that Yale Rep will build upon its reputation as an enviable home for burgeoning writers. The funding also provides for the Playwriting continued on next page

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YSD 2008

James Binger

department to further develop its curriculum in writing for the musical theatre, with additional funds allocated to playwrights’ residencies and lectures at Yale School of Drama. “This generous gift…is a direct investment in the future of American theatre, and ensures that the Yale Rep will continue to have a significant and lasting impact on the

development of new work for the stage,” said Yale University President Richard C. Levin ’74 yc. Reflecting Binger’s love of both theatre and higher education, Robina Foundation president Gordon M. Aamoth shared that he is “pleased to participate in Yale School of Drama and Yale Repertory Theatre’s commitment to providing playwrights with the means

True Believer: David Johnson

Snyder describes as “a renaissance woman,” is modest about her own accomplishments. A graduate of Yale College and the Parsons School of Design, she is alternately an interior designer, a mother, and a philanthropist. From her grandfather and mother she has inherited a philanthropic legacy, which she continues as a board member of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and the Lincoln Center Institute, and as a manager of her family’s foundation, which focuses on arts education and Jewish causes. When she and her husband realized their young son was a special-needs student, and that local school systems were not well equipped to serve him, they created a school for their son and similarly challenged children— Role Model: the school’s current enrollment is 60 Esme Usdan students, and they hope to have as many Leaving the Saturday night performance as 108 by fall 2009. Usdan’s gift to Yale of the 2008 Dwight/Edgewood Project School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theatre presentations, Esme Usdan ’77 yc combines her interests both in the arts marvels at the talent displayed by and in mentoring young people by the evening’s middle-school aged supporting the annual Dwight/Edgewood playwrights. “I really believe in mentors,” Project and the Will Power! education Usdan muses. “I always program. “The School think if I’d had a mentor in of Drama fits into our life I would’ve gone further. mission,” she says, “and I They provide children an love drama. It feels great opportunity to be able to to enable children to have see, to open their eyes to more opportunities.” And something they might be besides, this renaissance good at, something to give woman continues, “I them confidence.” Usdan, always wanted to be a whom her husband James writer.”

Esme Usdan not seem to aspire to make a difference.”

He hopes the Center for New Theatre will “provide a focus to develop writers with a voice, who have something important to say and want to inspire change.” An avid art collector and Co-Chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, Johnson appears to be living the dream, blurring the lines that separate philanthropy and art, work and personal fulfillment. His reasoning couldn’t be more clear: “Art is a visual expression of our values that stirs each of us intellectually and emotionally. It helps us to understand our place in the world, to think critically and to make us more fully human.” In other words, “it’s us.”

Photo by Jason Fitzgerald ’08

“People can and should think about things differently because of art,” says David Johnson ’78 yc, without a blush of cynicism, as he discusses his decision to support the Yale Center for New Theatre. Though he began his life as a corporate lawyer, Johnson’s faith in the political and cultural power of art led him first David Johnson to an executive position at MGM and then to becoming a partner in the independent film entertainment company Johnson-Roessler Company, LLC, not to mention the boards of a number of service organizations, including Children Now and the Dream Foundation. While he used to spend his days discussing corporate mergers, he now gushes about films like Rolling, a documentary he and his wife are independently producing, which follows the lives of three individuals with physical handicaps. “You really do change the way you think about disability when you watch this,” he says. Johnson sees his gift to Yale School of Drama as part of his legacy of engendering socially intelligent work. “At my company we read many screenplays; most are well written but do

to actively pursue careers in the theatre at a time when more lucrative forms of media may lure them away… Supporting them in a university environment, in particular, offers a unique and especially creative venue for developing plays and for nurturing their talents and imagination.”

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Around the World

40s

............................

Millie Kuner ’47 writes, “At present I am hoping to finish my book on three writers (the publisher is getting a bit impatient) by the end of the year, and I am also serving as dramaturg for our small theatre group in Ithaca.

If all plans work out, a visit to China will be in the offing. Meanwhile I’ve been seeing plays in New York and have been particularly impressed by Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County and by the marvelous, inspired revival of Sunday in the Park with George because it has been so enhanced by the new theatre tech­nology. It owes a lot to the pioneering efforts of the late George Izenour (Former Faculty), whose work at the Drama School I remember when I was a student there.”

Max Wilk ’41 is proud to have his ASCAP Deems Taylor Award-winning Best Book on American Popular Music reissued for his They’re Playing Our Song: Conversations with America’s Classic Composers, originally published in 1973 and recently re-released (see “Bookshelf”).

50s

............................

Bob Barr ’52 has officially become a member of Actors’ Equity, and he is still acting. He is currently rehearsing Third, by Wendy Wasserstein ’76, at Deep Dish Theatre in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. After that, he will head to Phoenix, Arizona, where The Phoenix Theatre has scheduled his play, Matchmakers, for two readings in early ’09, with hiatus for rewrites. Another play of his, Inconstancy, recently had a reading at Man Bites Dog Theatre in Durham, and The Tiger’s Skin is circulating to a number of theatres for development.

Ronald Bazarini ’55 writes, “My play Mrs. Gaskell’s Lover won the 9th National Readers Theatre competition of 2007. From April 17 to May 3, The Open Book presented it as an Equity Showcase at the 78th Street Theatre Lab in Manhattan with a first-rate director,

54

Alumni Notes Marvin Kaye, and an exceptionally good cast.”

Joy Carlin ’54 shares that her production of Terry Johnson’s Hysteria at the Aurora Theatre turned out to be a family affair, with her daughter Nancy Carlin playing the disturbed Jessica and Nancy’s husband Howard Swain playing Salvador Dali. Joy went on to direct Kathleen Clark’s Southern Comforts at Theatre­works in Palo Alto, where she was also in a staged reading of a new play by Joe DiPietro called Creating Claire, as part of Theatreworks’ new play development series.

Fay Moore Donoghue ’51 is working towards a lifetime retrospective of her work as a painter and muralist. The exhibit will be presented in March 2009 at the International Museum of the Horse, Lexington, Kentucky.

Geoffrey Johnson ’55, currently a Trustee of the Noël Coward Foundation, has been to England twice recently to attend Foundation meetings. The Coward Foundation has been set up to advance the name of Noël Coward for future generations as well as to grant funds to organizations with a connection to the theatre. On his first trip abroad, Geoffrey participated in a reading of The Letters of Noël Coward (published by Knopf and Methuen) at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds with the cast of the new Kneehigh Theatre stage version of Brief Encounter, which was trying out there. He also saw a performance of the recently uncovered 1921 Coward play, The Better Half, in London and a revival of Present Laughter with Alex Jennings at the National Theatre. On his second trip, he was a guest at the National’s Star Quality: Aspects of Noël Coward, to which he had contributed material. He also lectured at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama where the students were in rehearsal for the seldom-done 1926 SemiMonde.

Other highlights of the year included participating in readings of The Letters at the Kravits Cen­ter in Palm Beach, the Players Club in New York, and the Port Washington Library Literary Series. Geoffrey also enjoyed an evening with a fellow classmate, Carol Thompson Hemingway ’55, which included a pre-performance dinner with some of the Ernest Hemingway family before the opening

YSD 2008

of The Fifth Column at the Mint Theatre.

Marillyn Barker Johnson ’50 shares, “I continue writing and winning poetry awards in state and national contests. I teach a weekly class called ‘How to Write Your Personal History so Someone Will Want to Read It.’ My twin sister, who also attended Yale in 1948 to 1950 in the Music School, is a composer who has had her works performed by many different symphonies in this country and abroad.

Currently she is working on a new work and has asked me to write a poem for inspiration for another symphony. We have collaborated on four others. I also teach a monthly study group for a group of women studying different ancient world civilizations. This year we have studied the Mayas, the Aztecs in Central America, and the Incas of Peru. My husband Dale Johnson has been busy golfing and has made 10 holes-in-one here in Utah since 1995.

Both of us keep busy in our retired years.”

In June 2008, Amnon Katatchnik ’57 had two reference books published simultaneously by Scarecrow Press (see “Bookshelf”).

The first covers 80 milestone plays of crime, mystery and detective drama produced between 1900 and 1925, the first volume in a set. Playwrights covered include Maxim Gorky, John Millington Synge, John Masefield, Lord Dunsany, Jacinto Benavente, Georg Büchner, Karel Čapek, Ernst Toller, Elmer Rice, and Eugene O’Neill. The second cites the many theatrical appearances of the Great Detective since his debut in a one-act musical satire in 1893, with plays written by Arthur Conan Doyle and by other hands. Both collections recount plot summaries, production details, and more. Amnon writes, “Directing is my profession and I have been a fanatic collector of suspense literature since a tender age. So these books are truly a labor of love.”

Lucile Makowsky Lichtblau ’56 writes, “My short play On the Beach opened Proctor’s 440 Theater in Schenectady, N.Y. this past fall.

My play Seems Like Old Times was the subject of a documentary made by Public Access TV (Great Neck, N.Y.) and was shown in the N.Y. / L.A. Indepen­dent International Film Festival last year where it was awarded two prizes, The Film Achievement Award for Best

Alumni Notes Documentary (L.A.) and another for Best Director (N.Y.). The play alone went on to win the Northeast Public Access TV awards for Best Comedy and Best Drama, 2007. On the Beach is also appearing in the 8th Annual National Play Reading Festival in Boca Raton, Fla., and in New York City at Polaris North. My husband Sheldon is well and is still working at Mt. Sinai Hospital, N.Y. To date we have eight grandchildren ranging in age from 18 to 1. Our eldest is at MIT and our youngest lives in Montreal with his three older siblings. In between are two boys in Princeton who keep us all busy and hopping and a teenager in Illinois who wants to be an actor. My e-mail is llichtblau@earthlink.net and I’d be delighted to hear from classmates near and far.”

Ed Loessin ’54 continues to review the arts scene in Hampton Roads, Va., exclusively for WHRO-FM, where he has been since 1993.

Addi­tionally, he’s selling his watercolors through a local gallery and currently “hangs” in more than 20 states. He and his wife recently moved into a retirement center in an apartment a few doors down from the bar— really makes life free of care!

Michael Onofrio ’53 is in retirement, but he continues to work as an interpreter at Kylduit Rockefeller Family Estate in Pocantico Hills, N.Y. Sue Ann (Young) Park ’52 continues her work as Director of Teacher Training for The Arthur Lessac Institute (Kinesensic Voice and Body Training). She celebrated her 90th Birthday in 2007 at White Horse Village Retirement Com­munity near Philadelphia, where she lives with a black toy poodle named Pogo and is mentoring and writing a teacher’s manual for Lessac Kinesensic Training.

Zelma Weisfeld ’56 established the Zelma Weisfeld Scholarship in Costume Design at Yale School of Drama, which was awarded for the first time this year to Heidi Leigh Hanson ’09.

This past summer we presented Olympia Dukakis in her own adaptation of The Tempest, Staying In Touch and called Another Side of the Island, in which she Reconnecting with Classmates starred as Prospera alongside her husband Louis Zorich, brother Apollo, and me. In addiHow can we reach you if we don’t know where tion, Henry Winkler ’70 joined us for the you are? Please be sure to keep us updated third in our series of An Evening With . . . proon all contact changes, especially mailing grams. Last season we were privileged to have addresses, email addresses, phone numbers John Lithgow debut his one-man show, John and work information. Write to us at ysd.

Lithgow: Stories by Heart, which recently alumni@yale.edu. Or update your info played at the Mitzi Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center. We also have added two more directly through the Association of Yale Alumni members to our Hon­orary Board, playwright at www.aya.yale.edu.

Arthur Kopit and actress Rebecca Luker. Our Not a member of AYA? Join now—it’s free! annual Yuletide Affair fundraiser featured As a member, you can register for the School Greg Naughton, son of James Naughton ’70, of Drama Listserv where you can post and and Greg’s lovely wife Kelli O’Hara, who is receive notices intended for YSD alumni. Many radiant in the current revival of South Pacific at Lincoln Center. We plan to take another huge other services, including the online Alumni step in 2009, and that is to expand our season Directory and the Yale Career Network, are to include winter and spring productions. available at www.aya.yale.edu.

We’re hoping that some of these will be origiAttention all Facebook users (and those nal work. I feel so fortunate to be doing what I yet to join): Please be sure to join the official love in one of the loveliest spots on Earth.

Please, come and see me.”

Yale School of Drama Facebook Group. This Stephen Arnold ’60 retired in 2001 and setis another great way to network and keep in tled in Malvern, Pa. He writes that he has travtouch with your classmates and stay in touch eled extensively in Europe, Africa, Asia, and with the School.

Latin America—enabling him to practice his Coming soon…The Yale School of Drama fluency in German, Spanish, and French!

Alumni Webpage will soon be available on Dr. Anthony S. Beukas ’65 has retired after 43 years as Chairman and Artistic Director of our website, drama.yale.edu. We’ll keep you the Communications and Theatre posted!

Department at Yeshiva University in New York City. During his tenure, he directed and designed sets, costumes, and lights for 84 productions. He lives in Dumont, N.J., and has two sons and three grandchildren.

Rod Bladel ’61 played a dean at John Wilkes Booth College in Ishmael Reed’s Body Parts at ager, and directing an occasional reading. The Nuyorican Poets Café in November 2007, group changed its name to Electric Theatre directed by Rome Neal.

Company in July 2008 but continues to presBeverly Brumm ’65 has been teaching an ent at The Performance Space at the Hotel acting class at The Actors Institute in New Jermyn in downtown Scranton.”

York City. She directed Caryl Churchill’s A Gian Pietro Calasso ’65 writes, “Right now Number for Clockwork Theatre, which perI’m teaching ‘Digital Directing’ at Rome formed at Theatre Row, this past September.

Univer­sity La Sapienza. I’m also finishing a ............................

David Burke ’61, ’58 yc celebrated the book, entitled Los Angeles, Nowhere, Now Here. release of his new book in May (see It’s a new approach to drama and photography, David Ackroyd ’68 shares, “Alpine Theatre “Bookshelf”). which I call ‘Film in Stills.’ It is partially Project (ATP) continues to grow at an astoundJohn Beck ’63 writes, “My adaptation of financed and sponsored by Rome University ing rate, so you must forgive me if I’m a bit Boucicault’s The Poor of New York, morphed as artistic research.” breathless as we race headlong toward our into The Poor of Scranton, was the George Dicenzo ’65 is teaching in New York fourth sum­mer season. If you happen to be Christmastime production of The Northeast City and Philadelphia and is working on “the including Glacier Park or anywhere else in the Theatre in 2006. In June 2007, I retired as pres- occasional picture when a kind and humane beautiful Northwest in your vacation plans, ident of the Theatre’s Board of Directors. I director calls my agent.” His most recent film please stop by for a performance at ATP (www. continue to contribute as I can by designing was A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006), alpinetheatreproject.org) in Whitefish, Mont. programs and posters, acting as literary manwith Chaz Palminteri and Robert Downey, Jr.

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Around the World Stephen Foreman ’67 recently published a new book (see “Bookshelf”). His next novel, Watching Gideon, is forthcoming.

Ron Gural ’67 was appointed Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Festival at Tulane in the spring of 2007. That year marked the 14th season for the festival, and productions included Henry V, Macbeth, and Coriolanus, which Ron directed. He has since directed a production of The Taming of the Shrew for the Festival’s annual production for the New Orleans public schools. A remount of Shrew will open the 2008 summer season. Set in New Orleans in the Italian American community of the 1950s, the production earned praise from the Times Picayune.

Lee Kazcheim ’63 writes, “For some reason, I’m a big hit in Japan. Two of my plays produced there and two more on the way! They have been so welcoming and are actually interested in stimulating content, so here’s to the sushi circuit!”

Ray Klausen ’67 shares, “I designed the sets for My Fair Lady at Avery Fisher Hall with the New York Philharmonic and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Broadway with James Earl Jones, Phylicia Rashad, Terrence Howard and Anika Noni Rose. My Off-Broadway production of My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish & I’m in Therapy just went into its second year, and I have recently worked on two musicals: The Music Man with Shirley Jones and Patrick Cassidy at the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts in Hartford, Conn., and Yank!, which will be Off-Broadway.”

John Krich ’61 writes that he is “continuing to enjoy life here in Victoria, B.C., on Vancouver Island. I retired several years ago after teaching for over thirty years at the University of Victoria Department of Theatre.

Still acting and directing professionally at regional theatres in the area. Most recently played Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street at the Chemainus Theatre Festival, an exciting and thriving theatre company in the village of Chemainus about 80 kilometers north of Victoria.”

Gayle K. Landers ’69 writes that he “appeared in a new play, Hot Flashes, in the New York Fringe Festival, summer 2007. Good writing, wonderful cast—what a blast!”

Jeffrey Milet ’69 is a professor of theatre at Lehigh University, where he co-directs the IDEAS (Integrated Degree in Engineering Arts and Sciences) programs. He is also a partner with George C. Izenour Associates, theatre acoustical and design consultants. Jeff and his

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wife Lynn Milet have two daughters, Rachel and Meredith, who live in Arlington, Virginia, and Berkeley, California, respectively. They also have three grandsons, aged four, three, and one.

S. Joseph Nassif ’63 is Professor Emeritus at Rollins College. He spent twenty-five years as the Director of Fine and Performing Arts and Warden Professor of Theatre Arts, and he has since retired to Iowa on a peaceful scenic farm.

He looks forward to continuing his role as Class Agent for the 43rd year!

Julius Novick ’66 has published a new book (see “Bookshelf”). Julius shares, “It’s about how Jewish playwrights have dramatized the tension between Old World heritage and New World opportunity—with implications for all ethnicities in this nation of immigrants. This is my second book; my first was published 40 years ago, when I was 29. In between, I was a theatre critic at The Village Voice, The New York Observer, and other publications, meanwhile working my way up through the academic ranks to retirement as Professor Emeritus of Literature and Drama Studies, Purchase College, State University of New York.”

Richard Olson ’69 and his partner, dancer/ choreographer Jennifer Neff, performed short dance /theatre pieces in the Performance Lab Series at Steps on Broadway and in Movement Research’s Open Performance series at Dance Theater Workshop, both in Manhattan. In March they performed a full-length work, Yes, Really!, at Triskelion Arts in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Olson is also writing a libretto, based loosely on the form of Japanese Noh drama, for composer Brian Schober. For further information, go to http://web.mac.com/ mancat.

Howard Pflanzer ’68 had his play On the Border, about the German-Jewish cultural

Update Us Please remember to update us on address, email, and phone changes. And, if you know alumni who aren’t receiving mail from Yale School of Drama, please tell us!

Contact the Development and Alumni Affairs Office at ysd.alumni@yale.edu or (203) 4321559. Y ou can also find us on Facebook! Look for the group “Yale School of Drama.”

YSD 2008

critic Walter Benjamin’s last night on Earth in 1940, presented by Medicine Show Theatre and directed by Barbara Vann in November 2007. The play was the winner of Medicine Show’s annual JumpStart new play competition.

Jim Read ’62 was re-elected for a third term as President of the American Society of Theatre Consultants (ASTC) at their annual 2008 business meeting. He writes, “Over the past twenty years ASTC has played a major role in the updating of building codes that affect new theatre construction, and it has recently become involved with many of the theatre equipment standards being developed.” In addition to guiding ASTC into a virtual partnership of over fifty members, Jim continues his theatre consulting practice as a George C. Izenour Associates partner.

Jean Richards ’63 has taken a hiatus from theatre but continues to do voice-overs and write childrens book.

Carolyn L. Ross ’69 shares, “For the past few years, when traveling in Greece, I have done travel paintings of Byzantine Churches of the Mani area south of Kalamata. They are about 15" x 22" on paper. When I started I wanted to have a book published, but I soon found that it was too much color for most publishers and too small a market. However this year Matt Dean, who publishes a very nice magazine called Inside the Mani, asked me to write a short article on the churches and my paintings. It has just come out and I am very pleased. His website is www.insidemani.gr.”

Roger Hendricks Simon ’67 co-produced, with The Players Club, a June reading of Charles Marowitz’s comedy Stage Fright, which also featured Paul Hecht and June Gable—it was “quite special.” Roger also recently played the lead role in two new award-winning independent films, including Sublet, directed by Georgiana Nestor.

Susan Yankowitz ’68 is pleased to announce that her new play Night Sky was presented in September by the Mo`olelo Performing Arts Com­pany as part of their year-long tenure as La Jolla Playhouse’s first Resident Theater Company. The play, about an astronomer’s struggle with traumatic brain injury and aphasia, was presented in partnership with The San Diego Brain Injury Foundation and in memory of Joe Hiel, late husband of board member Elaine Hiel and a constant source of inspiration to the Mo`olelo family.

Alumni Notes

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In March, Princeton colleagues Michael Cadden ’76, ’79 dfa, ’71 yc (Former Faculty) and Tim Vasen ’93, ’87 yc took a group of Prince­ton undergraduates to Greece as part of an acting course called “Re: Staging the Greeks.” He writes, “Having read all of Greek tragedy and comedy before their departure, students and teachers visited a number of ancient sites in Athens and environs and worked with a number of Greek theatre professionals, including directors Theodoros Terzopolous and the truly inspiring Martha Frintzila. They look forward to producing Agamemnon and Iphigenia at Aulis on the McCarter’s Berlind stage in November (with Tim directing). In the true spirit of Athenian democracy, Tim, Michael and the students voted on which plays to perform after a lengthy discussion in their hotel’s rooftop garden, which looks up at the Acropolis. When the vote proved too close to call, they put the ballots in a pillowcase and drew—letting ‘the gods’ make the choice.”

Joseph Capone ’70 writes, “For the last several years, I have been busy developing a theatre company. Classics @ the Point Theatre Ensemble is located upstate in the village of Catskill, N.Y. We present two productions annually depending on grant funding received each year. Produc­tions have been presented in a historic warehouse (built in 1893) as well as outdoors on the scenic banks of the beautiful Hudson River.”

Lani London Click ’73, owner and designer of Palm Beach Purses (www.palmbeachpurses.com) and Ecochic Purses (www.ecochicpurses.com), had an opening in March ’08 of her new collection at Susan Handsen’s “Pluto in Leo Fine Art Gallery” in Hobe Sound, Fla. David M. Conte ’72 led a panel titled “Good to Go!” that dealt with design issues and scenic construction methods and hardware for touring at the 2008 USITT (United States Institute for Theatre Technology) Conference in Houston in March. David was joined by John Lee Beatty ’73, Tom Sullivan ’88, and David Boevers ’96.

Christopher Durang ’74 recently enjoyed the first major New York revival of The Marriage of Bette and Boo at the Roundabout Theatre (costumes by Susan Hilferty ’80 and lights by Donald Holder ’86). Beyond Therapy was given a summer co-production by

(From left to right) David Boevers ’96, David M. Conte ’72, John Lee Beatty ’73, Tom Sullivan ’88 at the USITT Conference in Houston. All four alums participated in a panel titled “Good To Go!” that dealt with design issues and scenic construction methods and hardware for touring.

Williamstown Theatre Festival and Bay Street duction of Don Juan in Prague, directed by Theatre (starring Darrell Hammond, Kate David Chambers ’71 (Faculty), between its Burton ’82, Matt McGrath, and Bryce Prague opening and performances at BAM’s Pinkham ’08; with sets by Walt Spangler ’97, Next Wave Festival in December 2006. I spent costumes by Emily Rebholz ’06, and sound by nearly six months at Dallas Theater Center in Brian “Fitz” Patton ’01). Finally, the cast 2007, working both with David Kennedy ’00 recording of his new musical Adrift in Macao, and Richard Hamburger ’72, and this year I written with composer Peter Melnick, was stage managed Othello at the Alley in Houston recently released by LML Music.

(I feel like an honorary Texan!), which was Denise Gordon ’78 writes, “I continue to designed by Walt Spangler ’97. jump between directing television and feaAfter a number of years away from South tures, web-isodes and commercials, comedy Coast Repertory (SCR), I returned there at the and drama, as Hollywood continues its inevibeginning of this year to stage manage A table paradigm shift. The more I am asked to Feminine Ending by Sarah Treem ’05, ’02 YC, do better work with fewer resources, the more directed by Timothy Douglas ’86, with his the YSD training pays off, and we rediscover Yale classmate Amy Aquino ’86 and recent less can be more. I just did an enormous projgrad Jedadiah Schultz ’05, with lighting by ect in five 10-hour days at the Warner’s Ranch, Peter Maradudin ’84. I am working at SCR and the crew was thrilled to be back at work again on Ayckbourn’s Taking Steps, being lit after five months of unemployment. On a hapby Geoff Korf ’91. I was so sorry to miss the pier note, my adaptation of the U.K. bestseller, spring party at the home of Jane Kaczmarek A Special Relationship, is finally getting some ’82—an event that I so enjoy—but I’m seeing traction, and we hope to shoot in 2009.” classmates and other Yalies all over the counJulie Haber ’77 shares, “It’s been a busy coutry! I’ve managed to run into classmate Lewis ple of years for me, freelance stage managing Black ’77 on both coasts in the past year or so, around the country. A couple of months in always a fun surprise.”

New Haven in 2006, doing The Front Page at William Hauptman ’73 writes that “in the Long Wharf (with Chris Henry Coffey March 2008, there was a showcase of my play ’99 as Hildy). I was able to talk to the YSD Domino Courts at the WorkShop Theater stage management class while I was there, Company in New York, by a new company and again in the fall when I rehearsed a prothat calls itself Hot Grease Productions.

YSD 2008

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Around the World On opening night, I was joined at the theatre

by Wynn Handman, former artistic director of the American Place Theater, where it was originally produced in 1977 and won an OBIE for Distinguished Playwriting.”

Jon Huberth ’70 is proud that the OffBroad­way play he has directed, A Jew Grows in Brooklyn, “is now very much Off Broadway, knockin’ ’em dead in West Palm Beach.

Figuratively, we hope.” Jon is also ramping up his film company, launching a new website: www.sunnysidefilms.com.

Andrew Jackness ’79 shares, “I continue to work in theatre and film, and my marriage to Candice Donnelly ’85 is going on 21 years.

We live in New York and have relationships with many of our friends from Yale as well as all the folks we’ve worked with for so many years. Most recently, I designed the upcoming film Killshot, directed by John Madden, to whom I was assigned as a second-year student for the Yale Rep production of Wings. We are still close friends and collaborators. It was very sad to hear of the death of Caris Corfman ’80, as she was a friend, classmate, and was in that production.”

Barnet Kellman ’72 writes in March, “Life is just returning to L.A. in the aftermath of the writers’ strike. Lots of Yalie communication about that what with Alan Rosenberg ’73 (President of Screen Actors Guild) at the

center of the storm and others like John Rothman ’73 and Amy Aquino ’86 nearby. So much noise it’s hard to concentrate on the tennis game I play every Sunday with Stephen Mendillo ’71. I loved seeing David Epstein ’69 play Surface to Air at the Symphony Space in New York directed by Jim Naughton ’70. ‘Notes from the Underbelly,’ the ABC series I was producing and directing, did not survive the strike. I’m currently directing episodes of the TBS series ‘My Boys.’ I did the pilot of it two seasons ago, and we’re still kicking. Also directed a couple of episodes of ‘Samantha, Who?’” Walt Klappert ’79 writes, “Produce sprouting from Yale Cabaret Hollywood (YCH) filled my plate this year. I might not have suggested that the YCH sanctioned the reading of The Beats Trip, the play developed with classmate Paavo Hall ’79, had I known that the longsought deal at the Heritage Square Museum for a reading of my Mark Twain adaptation would follow hot on the heels of our mock secret bohemian reading at O’Melveny Gallery. Yet, in retrospect, I am thrilled with the way it went.”

Steve Lawson ’76 spent his summer planning the big 10th anniversary season for the Williams­town Film Festival, of which he is executive director. He has also directed a screenplay reading in tandem with the

The Yale Cabaret Hollywood’s cast and company before reading a play adapted from Mark Twain in the Perry Mansion at the Heritage Square Museum. (front row) Devon Michaels ’95 yc, Elissa Marie Kerhulas, Talya Mirkin, Julie Estrada Evans. (middle row) Nicholas Hormann ’73, Ava Dupree, Sam Wise. (back row) Oscar Basulto, Walt Klappert ’79, Dyanne Asimow ’67, Darius Dudley. Photo by Bob Hankins.

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YSD 2008

Jon Huberth ’70 Williamstown Theatre Festival and moderated an “American Express Insider” discussion with Gotta Dance director Dori Berinstein ’96 for the Tribeca Film Festival. In September his adaptations of Tennessee Williams’ letters into a one-man show will be going on the road, first to Williams’ birthplace Columbus, Mississippi, with A Distant Country Called Youth (drawn from the early correspondence) in rep with Blanche and Beyond (the letters of his maturity), and three weeks later to the Kennedy Center with Blanche. The actor in both plays is Richard Thomas. Between them these shows have played in ten states, Canada, and Ireland.

Francis Levy ’73 has published a new novel (see “Bookshelf”). He writes, “I am the Director of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplin­ary Study of Imagination at the New York Psycho­analytic Institute, where we run roundtables on diverse subjects. This past autumn we sponsored a roundtable entitled ‘The Critic as Thinker,’ which included Robert Brustein ’51 dra, ’66 hon (Former Dean) and Stanley Kauffmann (For­mer Faculty). I have embarked on a number of spiritual disciplines, one of which is traditional Japanese karate. I recently became a Sandan, or third-degree black belt. The online edition of the Wall Street Journal did a profile of my workout routines in June 2007. I’m married and have two grown sons.”

Robert Long ’76, Ted Ohl ’77, and John Coyne ’97 were among 60+ panelists to participate in the debut North American Theatre Engineering and Architecture Conference (NATEAC) at New York City’s Pace University this past July 20th and 21st. The conference

Alumni Notes Regents Award for Faculty Excellence at Iowa and feel like a genuine member of a commuName, Address or E-mail Change nity I admire.”

We love to see you at our Alumni parties and George Moredock ’70 shares, “I finally celebrations—but we can’t invite you if we retired after twenty years at Stamford Center don’t know where you are! If you’ve recently for the Arts, ending my career as Artistic Director. I moved to Phoenix for the sun and moved, changed your name or updated your so forth and was so bored that I have gone email address, let us know! Contact us at ysd. back to school, pursuing another master’s alumni@yale.edu or at 1-800-YSD-CLUES degree—a Master of Science in Counseling, (973-2837) and we’ll update your record with an eye to a second career as a drug and for you. You can also make changes to your alcohol counselor. Never too late for an old dog to learn new tricks.” contact information online through your Yale Patricia Norcia ’78 writes, “I am still peralumni account at www.aya.yale.edu. forming with my dancing horses! In June, I was the rider in a film about tai-chi and riding, and four of my horses performed with me. My collaboration with the dancers continues, too. provided an opportunity for leaders in the We performed a beautiful piece with four architecture, engineering, and consulting fields horses and six dancers in January at to connect with one another and share their Connecticut College with The Dancing Horses expertise. Panel discussions and forums were Company.” accompanied by keynote speeches, case studWilliam Otterson ’76 shares, “After 35 years ies, performances, and backstage tours of behind the camera as producer, director, direcmajor New York City performance landmarks tor of photography, and editor, I’ve been coaxed in the intensive two-day event. into acting again. I’ve appeared in over twenty Barbara Mackay ’72 shares, “I’m working films, TV shows and pilots in less than a year. for the D.C. Examiner, writing criticism for My latest is an Indiana Jones mockumentary: theatres in Washington, D.C., northern I’m featured in The Dark Side of Indy. It’s a Virginia, and Maryland. I’m also writing promo commissioned by MySpace. They’re occasional freelance articles on theatre for a predicting over 25 million hits in just a few local magazine called élan. My son is now weeks.” fourteen, so I spend a lot of time driving and Dunya Ramicova ’77 writes, “I have spent entertaining teenagers—and loving every the last four years as the founding faculty of moment of it!” the new University of California in Merced. I Alan MacVey ’77 writes, “It’s been quite a was hired initially (for two years) as the one while since I last wrote, in part because I’ve and only arts faculty on campus in charge of stayed in one place—or rather, two places—for building all the arts (not just theatre or cosa long time. For the last 17 years I’ve been Chair tume design) at UC Merced: a daunting task, of the Theatre Arts Department at the as well as a lonely one. Though I now have two University of Iowa, and for the past two I have colleagues, they are both Ph.D.s (historians) so also served as Director of the Division of I still feel like a unicorn. For the first time in Performing Arts. During the summers, since my life I am in daily contact with scientists 1986, I’ve been Artistic Director of the Acting and other non-theatre academics, which is a Ensemble, an unusual Equity company in resi- very interesting experience. As a founding facdence at Bread Loaf, a graduate school of ulty member of a new university, I find myself Middlebury College. Adding yet another job, looking back to my years spent at YSD, first as I’m now President of the National Association a student and later as a faculty member. I have of Schools of Theatre—something I certainly realized what great and inspiring visionaries didn’t expect when I finished at Yale. I’ve Robert Brustein ’51 dra, ’66 hon (For­mer found a very satisfying life at the intersection Dean) and Lloyd Richards (Former Dean) of the university and the professional theatre. were, and I am grateful for what they taught In fact, my long-term administrative goal has me. It’s all coming handy in my daily struggle been to provide outstanding artists with oppor- to create an arts program for the 21st century.” tunities to develop new works in university setHoward Rogut ’71 writes, “I recently sold tings; and to provide myself and other faculty my co-op at 41 Central Park West in members with the opportunity to continue Manhattan and purchased a condo on the working professionally. I recently received the ocean in Boca Raton, Fla.”

YSD 2008

John Rothman ’75 is playing a recurring character in the new NBC series “Kings,” starring Ian McShane and Dylan Baker ’85, and which is shot in New York. He also played a part in the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still with Keanu Reeves, worked on “Damages” with Glenn Close, made a few indie movies, and did a play called Tender on Off-OffBroadway. At New York Stage and Film, he played the Chairman of HUAC in Finks, a new play by Joe Gilford, about his parents Jack and Madeline Gilford and the blacklist. He served on the Screen Actors Guild negotiating committee, where he worked hand and hand with his old classmate Alan Rosenberg ’74, trying to come to terms with the AMPTP. In addition, he is currently working with Joe Grifasi ’75 on the Yale School of Drama actor mentoring project. In May, he visited New Haven to attend the graduation of his daughter Lily Rothman ’08 yc, a history major and head of costumes for the Yale Dramat.

David Rotenberg ’76 celebrated the publication of his latest novel in Canada and Australia in May; it will soon be available in the U.S. (see “Bookshelf”). He also recently directed a new adaptation of The Great Gatsby.

Bob Sandberg ’77 writes, “It’s been a happy theatre year in our family. My daughter Megan Sandberg-Zakian directed a critically acclaimed production of The Etymology of Bird

by Zakiyyah Alexander ’02 at the Providence Black Rep, where Megan is Associate Director.

I’m writing IRL (in real life) for George Street Playhouse, and What Can’t Be Seen was developed at the Province­town Playhouse. The Judgment of Bett, commissioned by A.R.T. and Discovering Justice, was part of New Visions/ New Voices at the Kennedy Center.”

Joel Schechter ’72 continues to teach theatre history at San Francisco State University.

He has recently published a new book about American Yiddish theatre (see “Bookshelf”).

Roy B. Steinberg ’78 directed Jo Beth Williams in Life In General/Greenville General, which can be seen on the web at www.strike.tv.

Roy also played a Hollywood producer in an independent feature called Jack Rio and in a parody of the Swift Boat commercials. He can be seen on www.superdeluxe.com.

David Stifel ’74 writes, “I recently completed a run as Marat in Marat/Sade at the Knights­bridge Theatre in L.A. Last year, I got installed as part of a new attraction at Disneyland in Anaheim—the voice and face of a new audio animatronic Pirate on Tom Sawyer’s Island. (The shoot was an interesting technical acting problem—full-out facial and

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Around the World vocal mobility with absolute stillness in body, neck and head. All those odd acting class exercises actually did help me prepare for such an assignment.) Finally, I had a nice scene with Jim Carrey in The Number 23. It’s always an adventure!”

Edith Tarbescu ’76 has published her new play (see “Bookshelf”). The play, adapted from her children’s book of the same name (Annushka’s Voyage), published by Houghton Mifflin, is for young people and runs 40-50 minutes (five actors with doubling). To read about her work, see her website: www.home. earthlink.net/~tarbescu.

Charles Turner ’70 shares, “I’m shooting a film—an indie—which is fun. I have a leading role—a minister who’s a bit shady. (smile) A godfather to the community however. Last summer I did the Avignon and Edinburgh Festivals with my one-man show on Frederick Douglass, In Frederick’s Footprints (Douglass in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales back in the 1840s). I was also the Narrator in The Gospel According to Broadway in London with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the old and wonderful Hackney Empire Theatre (East End) where Charlie Chaplin, Moms Mabley, and ye olde vaudevillians hit the boards back in the early 1900s. This past season,

Leave Your Legacy By including Yale School of Drama in your financial plan, you make a significant commitment that will strengthen the School and, through faculty and students, touch and inspire countless lives.

A life income gift can offer you the best of many worlds: dependable income for you and your family, current and future tax savings, and a means to support scholarships and the unique programs that have made Yale School of Drama a leader in arts training for more than eighty years.

Whether planning for retirement, the educational expenses of children, or the care of loved ones, life income gifts are an excellent way to balance your goals. . . . for you and for the School.

To learn about these opportunities, please call Debbie Ellinghaus at (203) 432-4133 or debbie.ellinghaus@yale.edu.

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The Author and Grandfather in Fugard’s Valley Song in Saratoga, and Aeschylus in The Seven, the hip hop musical (Will Power, Jo Bonney, and the fantastic Bill T. Jones collaborating) at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego. I look forward to coming up to YSD for work, functions and just being there is great!! Health and joy to all the families and friends. Love and Peace.”

Stephen R. Woody ’76 shares, “I have returned to South Korea a second time as a Teacher of English, until February 2009. I teach at Sinbang­hak Middle School. My role is to teach conversational English to students in the first and second years of middle school (ages 14 and 15). English has been identified as the international language of business, and it may become mandatory that all Korean students begin learning English in school from the first grade.

One technique that we are exploring is the use of ‘role play’ as a tool for teaching conversational language. I have been calling on my 30+ years in the theatre in writing the class dialogues and in explaining the use of body language and vocal inflection to convey the meaning behind the words to students. It comes after the textbook part of the class and is becoming popular. They are beginning to urge me to get to this part of class sooner.

This time I am not living within the walls of an English village as I did before. I live in the northeast side of the city of Seoul; I walk the streets and ride the subways and buses and buy fruit and vegetables from the local street market. Except for the fact that they drive and park on the sidewalks here, I find that people are, at the core, just people. I have seen this in every country that I have lived, worked or visited. There is a lot of laughter here. There is a great deal of collegial support and encouragement. Since I have, in looking briefly over my shoulder, discovered that I have some gypsy instincts, I seem to be at home wherever I am, with few links to places from my past. So, for now, this is ‘home.’”

Deborah (van Drimmelen) Wooldridge ’79 writes, “I’m currently Chair of the Rhetoric Department at Coe College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. We’re in the process of updating one of our majors, Communication, to include more digital production and broadcasting, so my Drama School experience is once again proving valuable. I’m also the new manuscript coordinator for Vestnik, the annual English version of the Russian Communication Association. Finally, we’re in the process of adopting our three-year-old granddaughter Alexis, whom we’ve had since age six months.”

YSD 2008

R. Scott Yuille, Jr. ’77 shares that he has “recently remarried. Her name is Ann, and she is a chef here in New Hampshire’s Upper Valley.”

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Joseph Barna ’81 writes, “I have not contributed to the alumni news previously, but most of my post-YSD years were spent writing theatre software (from Artsoft through Tickets. com) and not particularly newsworthy. Lately, however, I have been back in ‘real’ theatre and have news. I spent two years with the Unofficial New York Yale Cabaret as a board member and technical advisor. I designed lights and set for The Terrorist, directed by Howard Pflanzer ’68, among other productions. I’ve been doing off-Broadway work as well, including set design for David Willinger’s production of Job’s Passion at the Theater for the New City, lights for On The Border and Hooray For What at the Medicine Show Theatre, and miscellaneous tech work.

I’ve also been surviving by doing publicity for Spring Awakening, thanks to Pun Bandhu ’01, one of the show’s producers.

But my most exciting news is performing my one-man show in October 2007, on the exact 50th anniversary of the launching of Sputnik. Sputnik: A Personal Trajectory is a monologue about being the first person in the continental U.S. to see Sputnik—I saw it as an unidentified strange object in the early morning sky over Vermont before it was announced—and the profound effect that that sighting had on my life and work. My hope is to develop it into a full piece for the Fringe Festival or some other venue. I’d be happy to share the story with anyone who’s interested.

My brother died unexpectedly and left me with another Keeshond, for those of you who remember Zonker, the dog I had during my YSD years. My new dog won’t get to attend YSD classes like Zonker did, but he enjoys going to the fall Mandatory Fun at Ben and Laraine’s.”

Robert (Bob) Barnett ’89 shares, “2007-2008 finds me splitting time between Los Angeles and New York, pursuing projects on both coasts, artistic and otherwise. Old friends from my pre-Yale New York days have retired and now spend six weeks at a time winter and summer at various Club Meds… leaving me their apartments. It may mean snow in February and humidity in July (I am a

Alumni Notes been produced at Arena Stage and La Jolla Playhouse and is expected to move to Broadway in the fall of 2008. Mark was previously at Arena Stage, where he served as Senior Dramaturg and Director of New Play Development for four years. During his final 2007-2008 new play development season at Arena Stage, Mark brought in Yale School of Drama alumni playwrights Roberto AguirreSacasa ’03, Dorothy Fortenberry ’08, and Marcus Gardley ’04, among others.

Mark Brokaw ’86 writes, “It’s been a good and busy year. I directed American Buffalo at the Gate Theatre in Dublin (although I have to confess I much prefer for sentimental reasons the production I directed in the Cabaret in 1983 with Chris Noth ’85, Dylan Baker ’85, and Don Harvey ’85), and the new John Waters musical Cry-Baby at La Jolla Playhouse—and now in New York City at the Marquis Theatre (with YSD alums Scott Pask ’97, Catherine Zuber ’84, and David Chase ’86 yc).”

Terry Dwyer ’88 shares, “I’ve been at the Orange County Performing Arts Center for a little over two years. Broadway, jazz, cabaret, chamber music, ballet, and modern dance

series are going extremely well. We’ve also recently launched a major new festival, Fall for Dance, featuring the best contemporary dance from around the world. An ‘off-center’ series of contemporary performance was also recently initiated featuring a free movie series, contemporary performance art (Old Trout Puppet Workshop, Mike Daisey, 500 Clown, Groovaloos, etc). We also started a very cool new series showcasing the best independent bands whose performances have been consistently selling out. Other highlights include a residency by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the upcoming premiere of a piece we co-commissioned with American Ballet Theatre featuring choreography by Twyla Tharp and music by Danny Elfman. I’d be pleased to welcome any colleagues and classmates to the Center if they ever find themselves in Southern California . . . they can expect the red-carpet treatment.”

Wendy Rolfe Evered ’89 and Charles Evered ’91 report from Princeton, N.J., that their two children, Margaret, 8, and John, 7, “are growing up way faster than they would like.” Charles just directed his first feature film, Adopt a Sailor, which stars Bebe

Alex Witchel ’82 It didn’t take Alex Witchel long to realize she was on the wrong side of the curtain. After graduating from the Theater Management program in 1982, she went to work for her professors Bernie Jacobs and Jerry Schoenfeld as a house management apprentice at the Shubert Organization. “I was not happy at all,” she remembers. So she turned to The New York Times classifieds.

As she sought a journalism job, a colleague advised her that she’d never get an entry-level position with a Master’s from Yale and three years with the Shubert—so she made an alternate resume and omitted her MFA. Soon after, a gig as a glorified secretary during Elle magazine’s American launch led to a job assisting Elle’s interim editor.

Witchel eventually became an Assistant Editor at Elle, and for a time was Entertainment Editor there.

In 1990, Witchel became a staff writer for the The New York Times, where she met her husband Frank Rich, then the paper’s lead theatre critic. She now writes a monthly food column for the paper, as well as features for the The New York Times Magazine. Her first book, Girls Only, based on columns she wrote for the Times about her mother and sister, appeared in 1996, followed by a novel, Me Times Three in 2002. The Spare Wife, a satiric potboiler about upper-crust Manhattan, will be out in paperback in February 2009.

In her journalism and in her books, Witchel’s constantly writing in a new voice, from the detached narration of a profile to the personal tone of food writing. “It’s important to learn new things, keep mixing it up,” she says.

Meanwhile, both Witchel and Rich remain active and passionate audience members, and they serve as mentors for Theatre Development Fund’s Open Doors program, taking high school math and science majors to the theatre. “When you love the theatre, you want other Sarah Bishop-Stone ’09 people to love the theatre,” she says.

Photo: F.R. Conrad

California boy, so weather is still an alien phenomenon) but it also means the Upper West Side, a block away from Zabars, and as much theatre as I can afford and squeeze into my schedule. I’ve also had the good fortune to spend time with old friends from my two separate times at Yale, including Susan Vitucci ’76 and Carol Kaplan ’89. In fact, I was able to see a workshop of Small Fish, Susan’s new puppet operetta that continues the adventures of La Pulcina Piccola, at New York Theatre Work­ shop in November. I also put together a reading of my own play, Olympic Notions & Supply, last August at Manhattan’s Shetler Studios, which a number of local Yalies attended.

Next up will be a production of my double bill The Fugue Series/Symphony Pastorale at the New York International Fringe Festival this August, produced by Connecticut-based New Zenith Theatre. Meanwhile on the West Coast, I’ve joined up with Jennifer Riker ’01 to produce a short film based on my one-act comedy Four Straight Women Watching Gay Porn. We’re working with the producer-director team of Antonio Brown and Stewart Wade, whose credits include Coffee Date and Tru Loved, both favorites on the film festival circuit.

With my bicoastal bouncing, I’ve left much of the Yale Cabaret Hollywood (YCH) reins in the more than capable hands of Walt Klappert ’79, with Dyanne Asimow ’67 assisting him. This year’s YCH highlights included a workshop of The Beats Trip (with a heavily YSD cast); Corrupt­ing Heritage Square, Walt’s rollicking adaptation of the Mark Twain short story, “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg;” a reading of Stephen Belber’s Fault Lines with Elijah Alexander ’01, Sarah Rafferty ’96, and Joe Reynolds ’97; a production of Michael Zetler’s Waiting for Mert at M Bar, directed by Steve Zuckerman ’74 with Stephen Mendillo ’71 in the cast; and a hushhush musical cabaret featuring songs of an iconic French songwriter.”

Mark Bly ’80 has been named Senior Drama­turg and Director of New Play Development for the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas, effective July 1, 2008. As part of his new position Mark will participate in the creation of a new conservatory relationship between the Alley Theatre and the University of Houston. He has been appointed a Distinguished Professor of Theatre at the University of Houston, where he will teach courses in dramaturgy and playwriting. Mark is also continuing to dramaturg Moises Kaufman’s new play, 33 Variations, which has

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Around the World year has been a wonderful time in my life. My oldest son Ivar has decamped to Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., while younger son Alec has made a relatively smooth transition from middle to high school (Alec has Asperger’s Syndrome, which makes any manner of change challenging). My wife Lesley and I celebrated our 28th anniversary in August, and she has received tenure in her school district, securing her job as surely the best children’s lit reading and media specialist in the country. I keep telling her she needs to start publishing a blog or newsletter review of kids’ lit and turn her encyclopedic knowledge into retirement rhino.

In 2007 I spent the winter back at Florida Stage in Palm Beach doing a world premiere of A House with No Walls by Thomas Gibbons and then went straight to the Cincinnati Playhouse for Murderers by long-time chum Jeffrey Hatcher. I had planned to take the sumEve Gordon ’81 and Mitchell Lichtenstein ’81. mer off but received a last-minute call from the Chester Theatre Company in the Berkshires to Neuwirth, Peter Coyote, and Ethan Peck. recount in Florida. My husband, Todd Waring, replace an actor in a production of Jeff Hatcher’s two-hander Mercy of a Storm— Wendy continues to perform in various projis involved in member voting for SAG (started which I had done some years earlier. ects when she has time away from full-time

by Amy Aquino ’86, with Kate Burton ’82 and Mercifully, with only four days’ rehearsal, the mothering. others). If you have a SAG card, or care about lines came back and what appeared to be an Terry Frankenberger ’88 writes, “Extraordi­ the future of SAG, please visit the website oncoming train wreck transformed itself into nary that it’s been almost twenty years since I www.workingactorsvoice.com. I’d love to hear the hit of the CTC season, winning the #3 graduated from the Drama School. I think from old friends at eventodd@aol.com. mention in the Berkshire Eagle’s top 10 picks back on those years and remember them very, And to all the friends of Rusty Magee, I’m for 2007 alongside such heady company as very fondly. While I am no longer involved happy to tell you that his son, Nat, was Hartford Stage, Williamstown and Berkshire professionally in the theatre, I am an avid the- accepted by the school of his dreams, Theatre Festivals, as well as the Barrington atergoer and occasional investor. I left Chapman in So Cal, with a scholarship for Citigroup about a year ago to join the J.P. ‘extraordinary talent’. The apple didn’t fall far Stage Co.” Richard Houpert ’80 writes, “I am currently Morgan Private Bank, where I manage assets from the tree. Some of his videos are on the off-production steward for Mr. Scorsese’s for individuals, corporations, foundations, YouTube; search for Nat Magee. And Rusty’s new film Ashecliffe, which is the third Dennis and non-profits. My partner David and I will widow, Alison Fraser, is opening on Broadway Lehane novel (the book is called Shutter Island) also be celebrating twenty years together in in Gypsy as I write this.” turned into a movie (Mystic River and Gone October. He is a restaurateur and currently has Allan Havis ’80 has published a new book Baby Gone were the first two). In the last year I an interest in four restaurants located in vari(see “Bookshelf”). Allan shares, “It’s a 90-year have also been on the ‘prop-making’ crew (a ous parts of Manhattan. This coming year will select survey of noteworthy or strange cult prop can be a house as well as sets) for 21, 27 provide me with an opportunity to visit New films from American and world cinema. It’s a Dresses and Pink Panther Deux. The Art Director, Haven much more frequently. I recently joy to teach cult films to large classes at UC Rick Butler ’88, is ‘one of us.’” joined the Board of the New Haven Symphony San Diego. My new play, The Tutor, will have a Kirk Jackson ’88 shares, “Bumping into Orchestra, which was founded by my greatworkshop production the beginning of June Teresa Eyring ’89 at the Humana Festival great-great grandfather in 1894. I plan to be in in San Diego at the Lyceum Theatre (Vox brought back many YSD memories. I continue New Haven at least once a month for meetings, Nova). and I hope to get to a performance at the Drama My wife Julia Fulton ’84 will be featured in to teach at Bennington College (since 2001) and am presently enjoying sabbatical. Recent School or the Yale Rep while I’m in town. I the four-character drama that echoes the directing projects include two productions of hope everyone from the Class of ’88 is healthy threat of violence vis-à-vis Columbine High Take Me Out (one received the 2005 Helen and prosperous, and I wish everyone a happy School. Julia continues to teach adjunct (actHayes Award for Outstanding Production), 20th Reunion.” ing and film studies) at UC San Diego. I’m and one each of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Eve Gordon ’81 writes, “I’ve been popping completing my second year as provost at Dead (with Liam Craig), The Busy World is up on TV shows lately (‘Cold Case’, ‘Monk’, Thurgood Marshall College, UC San Diego, Hushed and Kiss of the Spider Woman (at Actors ‘Grey’s Anatomy’, ‘Two and a Half Men’) and and teach part time in the MFA playwriting Theatre in Arizona, where Matthew Wiener had a lot of fun playing Kevin Spacey’s wife in program.” ’98 is the Producing Artistic Director), Uncle the HBO film Recount, about the 2000 election Steve Hendrickson ’81 writes, “This past

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Alumni Notes Vanya, Art and The Internationalist. I’ve also continued my association with Ivo van Hove, assisting on his latest U.S. production, The Misanthrope, at New York Theatre Workshop.”

Susan Jonas ’89 was recently appointed Producing Director at Classical Theatre of Harlem. She is also teaching theatre at New York University.

Jane Kaczmarek ’82 writes, “So much fun to have 200 alums in my backyard again (Spring Party). Starting work on a new legal drama from Stephen Bochco for TNT called ‘Raising the Bar.’ My daughter Frances sits next to Charlotte, daughter of Kate Burton ’82, in the 4th grade at the Polytechnic School in Pasadena! My foundation Clothes off Our Back continues to flourish. We sell celebrity clothing online to benefit children’s charities. Just sold Keira Knightley’s green dress from the movie Atonement for $46,000 and have raised over 2 million dollars since our inception in 2002. Check out clothesoffourback.org.”

Peter Lewis ’87 writes, “Last January, after 20 years in New York, I finally decided to try my luck out on the West Coast, and it’s been an interesting year . . . I have had three feature films released in 2008: A lead role opposite Diane Lane in the Lakeshore Entertainment/ ScreenGems thriller, Untraceable, which was released in Jan­uary, and two Judd Apatow comedies, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Pineapple Express, which will be released later this year. Also received a nomination for Best Actor in a Comedy (Chuck Mee’s Limonade Tous Les Jours) from the 29th Annual L.A. Weekly Theatre Awards, which were announced in April. Great seeing everyone at the Yale alumni gathering in March!”

Mark Leib ’80 writes, “I was delighted to see my newest play American Duet given a wellrehearsed staged reading by Gorilla Theatre in Tampa in early April. My six-year-old son Jeremy made it through most of act one before deciding he’d rather stage his own play elsewhere. I continue to write weekly theatre reviews for Creative Loafing, the major alternative weekly newspaper in the Tampa Bay area and Sarasota. And I’ll be teaching playwriting and Intro to Literature this summer at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg before resuming my work at the University of South Florida in the fall. One more landmark: my wife Elizabeth has an article in the June 2008 issue of Southern Living magazine. So there’s much to be grateful for.”

Ken Marks ’84 writes, “The highpoint of the last year has certainly been the birth of our second kid, Clarissa, on September 28th.

Clarissa was born right here in our home in Brooklyn, and everything went beautifully.

Our 4-year-old Eleanor got to hold her little sister just moments after she was born and has been a terrific big sister ever since. Also over the last year I appeared on Broadway in Spring Awakening, Tom Stoppard’s Rock ’N Roll, and now Hairspray, playing Wilbur Turnblad opposite George Wendt’s Edna. If only Wesley could see me now. Regards to my mates from the class of ’84 (Yikes!). My email is jazzboy321@yahoo.com.”

Gayle Maurin ’85 recently celebrated her 10th anniversary with PBS Thirteen/WNET New York as Director, National Sponsorship.

Gayle is responsible for securing corporate funding and implementing national sponsorships for ongoing PBS series, such as American Masters, Arthur, Charlie Rose, Cyberchase, George Shrinks, Great Performances, Nature, P.O.V., Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, and Wide Angle, as well as specials such as the Stage on Screen, Mysterious Human Heart, Oprah’s Roots, Curious, and Looking for Lincoln. Gayle is currently Chairman of the Activ­ities Committee and member of the Council of the Yale Club of New York City. Gayle also maintains active interests in the New York Junior League and the Delta Delta Delta Foundation.

Paul Douglas Michnewicz ’87 is the Artistic Director of Theater Alliance in Washington, D.C. (www.theateralliance.com), where he has had the fortune to work with Timothy Douglas ’86 on his production of Insurrection: Holding History, which received two Helen Hayes nominations (one for Best Director and one for Best Ensemble). He continues as Director of the Playwright Dis­covery Program at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts/VSA arts and teaches acting at the University of Maryland Opera Studio. To see his website, go to www.pdm100.com.

Cheryl Mintz ’87 is in her eighteenth season, fourteenth as Resident Stage Manager, at McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, N.J. This milestone year for Cheryl marked her 20th production with director and playwright Emily Mann, a collaboration that began in 1992. She takes great pleasure in mentoring and following the successes of past McCarter Theatre Stage Management interns. Cheryl just finished her 15th year as an Executive Board Member of the Stage Managers Association and lives in Prince­ton with her husband, Harris Richter, and three-year-old son, Jake Moses.

David Moore ’87 writes, “Hello, friends. My theatre commitments presently focus on

YSD 2008

board membership with Minneapolis’ Walker Art Cen­ter (WAC), for which I’m co-chairing a growing patrons’ program for contemporary performance. This year, in WAC’s state-of-theart Herzog & De Meuron-designed McGuire Theater, veteran curator Philip Bither is presenting—and in some cases (co)commissioning—groundbreaking works by: Back to Back Theatre (Australia), Jerome Bel (France), Cloud Gate (Taiwan), Gob Squad (U.K./Germany), Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (Belgium), Faustin Linyekula (Congo), and New York’s Trisha Brown, Miguel Gutierrez, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Meredith Monk/Ann Hamilton, David Neumann, and The Team.

Was sorry indeed to miss last year’s memorial of Dick Gilman (Former Faculty); his imprint on YSD will be felt through generations to come. Recently saw Mark Lord ’87, whose directing and dramaturgy in Philadelphia and teaching at Bryn Mawr continue successfully.

Creatively, I’ve returned to my own pre-Yale painting and drawing, which goes gradually and very well. Warm greetings from the center of the country. Email@DavidMooreJr.org” It’s boy for Christopher Noth ’85! He and Tara Wilson welcomed Orion Christopher Noth in January.

Mark Rafael ’86 has published a new book (see “Bookshelf”). Mark shares, “I continue to act and teach in San Francisco, having just shot the independent film, Tenderloin, and will be starting rehearsals on Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes for Golden Thread Productions. I also continue teaching at the University of San Francisco and the Academy of Art University.”

Michael Vaughn Hayden Rogers ’98 was married to Kimberly Suzanne Ellis on October 20, 2007. They reside on Roosevelt Island in New York City.

John Gould Rubin ’80 was named Co-Artistic Director/Executive Director of LAByrinth Theater Company in New York City. In June, he directed their production of Penalties & Interest by Rebecca Cohen as part of the Public/LAB series at The New York Shakespeare Festival. As he reports, “I’ve directed five shows with LABryinth over the years and produced three along with their commercial transfers, but this is a big change in my life.”

Steven Saklad ’81 shares, “I designed a tiny little feature in 2007 called Juno, which turned into an unexpectedly big deal in 2008 with four Oscar nominations. The production design career continues to move forward. Next up is Swing Vote, starring Kevin Costner, followed

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Around the World

by Drag Me to Hell, directed by Sam Raimi.

(We’re not expecting any Oscar attention for these two . . .) On the home front, my partner Paul and I celebrated 16 years together this February. Hugs to our friends back on the east coast!”

Micki Selvitella ’86 writes, “Greetings from Portland, Ore.! It’s been a busy couple of years. I spent a lot of time in 2006 in Seattle, directing and doing an SDCF Observership with Jon Jory ’65 at the Intiman Theatre. I also was working hard at my craft business, Northern Heart Designs. I’ve been doing a bit of acting lately, working as a Standardized Patient for a couple of medical schools. I was in L.A. at the Directors Lab West in 2007 and will be going back to present a workshop for them this year. 2007 also brought another surprise—I wrote my first screenplay! It was a joyous process, and I had two great and informative readings in the North­west. So, I’ve been focusing on film a lot lately. I have some producers who are interested, and I will also be directing! I’m busy at work on my second script, which deals with my Fulbright experience in Taiwan. Also got to go to my first Yale Alumni party in L.A. this year—so nice to see so many old friends!”

Tony Spiridakis ’85 shares that he was “recently in an episode of ‘House’ and learned that the woman playing my wife would be another Yale Drama alum, Eve Gordon ’81.

We had a great time working together.

Christine Vachon of Killer Films (Boys Don’t Cry, Happiness) will be producing my screenplay The Strong One with Tony Goldwyn directing and Ben Kingsley starring in one of the roles. Another screenplay, Where’s Willie, will be directed by Chazz Palminteri (A Bronx Tale). I survived the writers’ strike and am hoping for a good year . . . for all!”

Bradford Wayne Smith ’87 has created an entertainment financing company in Beverly Hills, Calif. Partnered with Michael Benaroya and Taylor Kephart, Benaroya Pictures has financed and produced New York I Love You (which was shot in New York City this past spring) and will be shooting Lawrence Kasdan’s Rose Diane and Bella this fall in Michigan. Bradford is currently producing Julia Roberts’ The Friday Night Knitting Club and Academy Award nominated writer Timothy Sexton’s The Ends of the Earth. He continues to worship his private family life with his beautiful wife and four children.

Bradford still finds time to hang with Ivan Menchell ’87 and Nicholas Rockefeller ’87 law on the West Coast.

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Frances and Maximillian Blank, children of Martin Blank ’94.

Stephen Strawbridge ’83 (Faculty) shares, “I created the lighting for the incisive Yale Reper­tory Theatre production of David Adjmi’s The Evildoers, directed by Rebecca Taichman ’00 with a talented group of collaborators including set designer Riccardo Hernandez ’92, sound designer Bray Poor and costume designer Susan Hilferty ’80.”

Stephen’s other recent projects include the Lynn Ahrens/Stephen Flaherty musical The Glorious Ones directed by Graciela Daniele for Lincoln Center Theater; Craig Lucas’ Prayer for My Enemy directed by Bartlett Sher for the Long Wharf and Intiman Theatres (with Julie Boyd ’84); Persistence of Memory for Pilobolus Dance Theatre; A Dream Play directed by Roman Paska for Stockholm’s Stadsteater (on the 100th anniversary of the first production); the opera Wakonda’s Dream by composer Anthony Davis and poet Yusef Komunyakaa, directed by Rhoda Levine (Former Faculty); Beethoven en Camera for the Schauspielhaus, Vienna, Austria; Bernarda Alba (Lucille Lortel nomination) with set by Christopher Barreca ’83 and costumes by Toni-Leslie James for Lincoln Center Theater; and Souls of Naples with John Turturro ’83, with set and costumes by Donna Zakowski ’83, at Theatre for a New Audience and the Mercadante, Naples, Italy. Stephen’s wife, Ruth Weissberger, a physician at the Hospital of Saint Raphael in New Haven, has had her

YSD 2008

novel, a medical mystery titled The Cure for Remembering, published by Melville House.”

Robert Wierzel ’84 is proud to announce his recent and upcoming projects: A Little Night Music, directed by Mark Lamos (Yale Rep Asso­ciate Artist), scenery by Riccardo Hernandez ’92, CENTERSTAGE, Baltimore, 3/08; Rusalka, directed by Eric Simonson, Minnesota Opera, 4/08; La Bohème, directed by Tomer Zvulum, Opera Cleveland, 4/08; The Comedy of Errors, directed by Barbara Gaines, Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, 4/08; Pride & Prejudice, directed by Mark Cuddy, Geva Theatre Center, 5/08; Il Matrimonio Segreto, directed by Jonathan Miller, BAM Opera, 5/08; ’Tis a Pity She’s a Whore, directed by Carey Perloff, A.C.T. (American Conservatory Theatre), San Francisco, 6/08; Giulio Cesare, directed by Robin Guarino, Glimmerglass Opera, 7/08; Aida, directed by Robin Guarino, scenery by Michael Yeargan ’73 (Faculty), Seattle Opera, 7/08; Sleeping Giant, a new work choreographed by Larry Goldhuber, Mass MOCA, 8/08; Rock & Roll, West Coast premiere, directed by Carey Perloff, A.C.T., San Francisco, 9/08; A Quarreling Pair, BTJ/AZ Dance Company, BAM Next Wave 2008 season, 9/08; Don Giovanni, directed by Robin Guarino, Canadian Opera, Toronto, 10/08; Arjuna’s Dilemma, a staged oratorio, directed

by Robin Guarino, BAM, 12/08.

Joseph Urla ’85 shares, “I recently finished

Alumni Notes teaching another semester at the National Theatre Institute. Really love it. I had a recurring role on The Wire this year on HBO, and I am about to begin rehearsals for the role of composer George Antheil in the new play Frequency Hopping here in New York.”

Durinda Wood ’85 just finished working as Costume Designer for two films: Six Wives of Henry Ufay starring Tim Allen, and Brothers starring Natalie Portman, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Tobey McGuire, and directed by Jim Sheridan.

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Dallas Adams ’93 is the Regional Account Manager for a health care company in Las Vegas, Nevada, and has two children, Tristan, age 4, and Victoria, age 6.

Claudia (Arenas) Rosenshield ’99 shares that, since graduating, “I’ve since married a diplomat, and I’ve had a very interesting time teaching theatre in universities overseas. Now we are in London enjoying life here, and theatre, very much.”

Martin Blank ’94 writes, “It’s been a great year. On September 24, 2007, my wife Penny gave birth to our son, Maximilian. His big sister Frances is now three. In 2007, I was commissioned by the Georgetown Theatre Company to write a new play, Hamlet #44, which they produced in July of ’07 in Washington, D.C. My new play A New York Miracle was produced in December of ’07 by The Jewish Theatre Workshop in Baltimore.”

Elizabeth Bennett ’97 writes, “I continue to work in the New York City Department of Cul­tural Affairs and have really enjoyed branching out beyond theatre and working with museums, music and dance groups, and arts in education programs. I have enough time to do freelance dramaturgy projects, including some long-term projects for LA Theatre Works and reading plays for a few theatre companies. Most frequently, my freelance adventures mean helping out Preston Lane ’96 at Triad Stage in Greensboro, N.C. Earlier this year, we tackled Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profes­sion and continue to rework drafts of Preston’s terrific new play, Bloody Blackbeard.

When Josh Foldy ’98 was in Doubt at Triad, he, Janet Allard ’97, Preston and I had fun hunting down great North Carolina BBQ and other authentic Appala­chian culture. We’re hoping to meet Dolly Parton this fall in Los Angeles.

Eleanor Holdridge ’97 was in New York this

spring, directing a David Grimm (Former Faculty) play that starred Evan Parke ’97 as a really hilarious, heartfelt Idi Amin. I’ll also go just about anywhere to see Mark H. Dold ’96 onstage and am looking forward to seeing him in Amadeus in a couple of months.”

Ed Blunt ’99, founder of BluntArtistry, is speaking and training nationally and internationally, helping businesses and organizations reconstruct their realities for more impactful and compelling futures. Ed just returned from Salt Lake City, Utah, training the people that design our missile defense system, and from London, England, for the launch of his international personal development company! He writes, “It’s amazing how the skills we learned as YSD can help so many people in ways I never imagined!”

Kathryn (Parrella) Calnan ’99 writes, “Since leaving my job as Director of Development at Providence Performing Arts Center in 2005 to spend more time at home with my two young daughters, I have inadvertently fallen into two part-time jobs that each allow me to work from home on my own time and schedule. I am a Client Services Coordinator for Horizon Finan­cial Group—a surprisingly good fit given my Theater Management background, since we primarily focus on offering 403(b) plans to employees of

non-profit organizations. I have also started working with the New England Center for the Performing Arts as a fundraising consultant. They are embarking on an exciting new project to build a $30 million state-of-the-art facility in Franklin, Mass., less than ten minutes from my home, and I am thrilled to be a part of their efforts! My girls are now ages 6 (Kaitlyn) and 3 1/2 (Caroline) and are both doing well. I have enjoyed reconnecting with so many YSD alums on LinkedIn this year and hope this note finds all my classmates doing well!”

Edward Check ’90 shares, “This past fall I took a leave from teaching at Smith College and returned to New York to art direct Sex and the City: The Movie. In my wildest dreams I never thought accepting a job back in 1997 would follow me for the next ten years! Many thanks to the Drama School for helping me along the way.”

Elizabeth Hope Clancy ’91 has had a great year of work in costume design. Dance: RoS Indexical by Yvonne Rainer, Documenta Festival in Germany and Performa ’07 in New York; Intimacy of Strife by Pat Catterson, Seattle Dance Project. Theatre: Passing Strange on Broadway, directed by Annie Dorsen ’00; The Breach by Tarell McCraney ’07, Catherine Filloux, and Joe Sutton at Seattle Rep; The

YSD goes to the South! Alumni gathered at Triad Stage in Greensboro, North Carolina. (left to right) Janet Allard ’97, Josh Foldy ’98, Rich Whittington ’98, Elizabeth Bennett ’97, Preston Lane ’96, Christi Weikel ’99.

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Around the World Cook by Eduardo Machado at Seattle Rep, directed by Juliette Carrillo ’91; To Kill a Mockingbird at Intiman Theatre; Fences at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, directed by Leah Gardiner ’96. Opera: Griffelkin by Lukas Foss, directed by Linda Brovsky at Manhattan School of Music. Her son Aidan is growing up fast—just turned five!

Enrico Colantoni ’93 has returned to television to portray Sgt. Gregory Parker in the new CBS serigies, “Flashpoint.” The series also returns him to Toronto, where the show is filmed and produced, and where Enrico was born and raised.

Aaron Copp ’98 shares, “My most recent projects include designing works for Laurie Anderson (co-design with U2’s designer Willie Williams), Yo-Yo Ma and former Del Fuegos lead singer Dan Zanes. Upcoming projects include two new ballets for Eliot Feld at the Joyce Theater and another Dan Zanes season at the New Victory Theater. 2007 took me to 14

Alumni attended the USITT Conference in Houston, Texas, in March 2008

Mary Hunter (Faculty) and Denise Hopkins Tooch ’99 at the conference.

Bill Reynolds ’77 and John Huntington ’90 at USITT. Photos by Mario Tooch ’00.

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countries, so I look forward to a little quiet time with my plants in 2008.”

Al Espinosa ’94 played Lennie in Of Mice and Men at The Pasadena Playhouse this past May. Preparing for the production, he writes, “I’m terrified but very excited as well. I continue to have a recurring role on ‘House’ (Fox), but they haven’t called me lately.”

Donald Fried ’95 and Abigail Herron were married in Manhattan on May 10, 2008. They live in New York City, where Herron is a resident at St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital Center, and Fried continues his career as a stage manager.

Jenny Friend ’98 writes, “It has been a fantastic year for us watching our little one grow and figure out the world around her. Greta Charlotte Bolling turned one on April 21, and from what we’ve seen so far, it promises to be a feisty, adventurous year ahead! I went back to work at the end of last July, and The Children’s Theatre Com­pany has been so wonderful in helping us figure out the balance between theatre and parenting. Erik is still enjoying his time as the Lead Esti­mator (or ‘Lord Estimator’ as I like to call him) at the Stage Equipment Company of America (SECOA)—they keep putting him in charge of more things, so he continues to be challenged and engaged. Feel free to stop by if you’re ever in Minneapolis— it’s a great town.”

Julie-Anne Franko ’96 writes, “My literary partner Vasyl Mytsko and I formally created The Anthrobus Convention—a Lviv (Ukraine)based troupe of actors, artists, designers, directors and publishers who contribute to the development, publication, and performance of our translations. Our work together started when I was a Fulbright Scholar in Lviv; we translated Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth as a means to address the lack of American dramas in Ukrainian translation. Since that time we have continued to work on our own translations (mostly Beckett), while also translating works for independent American theatre projects in Ukraine—for Bill Reichblum’s production of The Revealed One, based on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe (produced jointly

by Kadmus Theatre with the Lviv Les Kurbas Theatre); and for Dan Rothenberg’s Hell Meets Henry Halfway by Adrian Schaplin (Pig Iron Theatre). Most recently, The Anthrobus Convention’s original project, “The Happy Mediums of Charles M. Schulz,” translated and produced the Schulz Museum’s exhibition “Inside Peanuts;” Clark Gesner’s musical, You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown; and our bilingually written book Worlds of Charlie

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Brown—a guide to Schulz’s creations and their adaptations to other art forms. After a break (and maybe after getting back to Beckett), we aim to create a national tour of Good Man. For pics and other info: www.malecha.lviv.ua.

P.S: Vasyl, who is also an actor, asked me to pass on his greetings to John Turturro ’83, for whom he stood in during the filming of The Truce in Lviv.”

Eyal Goldberg ’99 writes, “I am happy to catch up with you all. I am currently the Artistic/Managing Director of Tair Theater— Israel’s Jewish Repertory Theater located in the wonderful city of Tel Aviv. Aside from being troubled with the events in the Middle East, I am grateful for having a theatre where I can create vital and relevant productions. I invite you all to come and visit Israel and be a part of our vision. I am also collaborating with my wife Inbal on a new screenplay that she wrote (in English), so all you actors prepare… I miss the United States, my friends, and being a part of the professional theatre community there and can only hope that one day our paths will come together once more. Meanwhile, I will be busy with my three boys, Yanatan, Amir, and Ron.” Michael Goodfriend ’96 writes, “Hey friends! I’m in D.C. performing in the premiere of David Adjmi’s new play Stunning at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre, where Jeffrey Herrmann ’99 is Managing Director. I rode the train from New York with David, who was coming from New Haven after the last performance of The Evildoers, which premiered at the Yale Rep. I continue to produce Left Jab on XM Satellite Radio, featuring guests from YSD including D.B. Woodside ’96 and Keith Reddin ’81, whom I met while performing in Intimate Apparel at City Theatre in Pittsburgh, where I was reunited with Carlyn Aquiline ’95, ’99 DFA. Keith’s play Missionary Position was premiering there and was perfect fodder for progressive talk radio. Danny Glover was a guest on the show after I met him at Triad Stage in Greensboro, where I played Milo in Sleuth, and where Preston Lane ’96 is artistic director and Rich Whittington ’98 is managing director. Mr. Glover was an honored guest at Triad’s annual fundraising event. Also, I had the pleasure of working on Monk this year and shared an afternoon on the set with Tony Shalhoub ’80. So you see, all roads lead to YSD!” Eric Scott Gould ’98 directed alums Jennifer Riker ’01, Joe Reynolds ’97 (as Jack Kerouac) and Paul Tigue ’99 in the Beat Generation reading, The Beats Trip, at Yale

Alumni Notes Cabaret Hollywood (YCH). A few months later, Nicholas Hormann ’73 and Devon Michaels ’95 YC took reading parts in Corrupting Heritage Square, with fellow YCH Board Member Dyanne Asimow ’67 giving the curtain speech. A special thanks also goes to David Bardeen ’05, Brian Robinson ’00, and Nathanael Johnson ’03 who helped by reading the earliest versions of the scenes from what is now called Beat. A full-length version of this play is now up for consideration at theatres in Los Angeles and New York as well as Yale.

Karol Siegel Griffiths ’91 writes, “After twelve years of working in Los Angeles in film and television, my husband John and I wanted a change and decided to move to the U.K. We have been here since November and are still settling in. It’s wonderful to be back in a city with such a strong theatre community, and I intend to get back to my roots! I also hope to continue work in film, but everything is new to me here, so I shall just have to see what the future brings. If any of you old friends ever find yourselves in London— Please get in touch! Or just email me to say hi … ksgriffs@yahoo.com.”

Adriane (Levy) Heflin ’99 writes, “The last six months have been quite a roller coaster!

On October 24, 2007, my husband and I welcomed our son Maxwell Levy Heflin to our family. Max is, by far, my greatest production!

Only three weeks after returning to work from maternity leave, I was shocked and saddened by the sudden and unexpected death of my boss, Jeff Dennstaedt ’87. I worked closely with Jeff for the last seven years and still can’t believe he is gone. The most recent change, though, is that after spending nine years as the Assistant Tech­nical Director at the Guthrie Theater, I have accepted the Technical Director position at the Children’s Theatre Company here in Minneap­olis.

While I will miss my friends at the Guthrie, I am definitely excited for this new challenge!”

John Huntington ’90 shares, “I completed work on the third edition of my book, Control Systems for Live Entertainment (info at http:// www. controlgeek.net/bookinfo/) last summer, and the book was released in fall 2007. I did a signing of the book at USITT alongside Alan Hendrickson ’83 (Faculty).”

Jennie Israel ’96 shares, “My fiancé Stephen and I welcomed our first child—Liam Scott Curtis on September 7th, 2007. Liam is an absolute love, and he can’t wait to meet his future prom date . . . Oona Gray Seppala!”

Clark Jackson ’97 writes, “I’m playing the

Liam Scott Curtis (son of Jennie Israel ’96)

role of Lacey and understudying in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Broadway with James Earl Jones, Terrence Howard, Phylicia Rashad, Anika Noni Rose, and other luminaries. So far I’ve gotten to go on as Doc Baugh and expect to do Gooper and Reverend Tooker as well!

Our director Debbie Allen is a hoot, and I really have enjoyed being a part of this production and getting to know these people.

I’m learning so much—like how to be humble and grateful!”

Sam Kelley ’90 is proud to have had his play, Faith, Hope, and Charity: The Mary McLeod Bethune Story, given a run at the Nuyorican Poets Café this past spring.

Raymond Kent ’99 was recently awarded two USITT Peggy Ezekiel Awards for Theatre Consul­ting for the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts in Bethel, N.Y. (the home of the 1969 Woodstock Festival), and the State Theater in State College, Pa. Raymond was also recently promoted to Associate at Westlake Reed Leskosky and is the new Director of Technology Design for the firm. He is currently working with Rick Martin ’93 on the renovation of the Hanna Theater in Cleveland, Ohio, for the Great Lakes Festival.

Stephen Klein ’99 is proud to announce, “In the summer of 2006, I moved to Redlands, Calif., from New York City, following my sweetie, Lillian I. Larsen.”

Daniel Elihu Kramer ’91 directed Kitchen Hamlet, a feature film setting of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a domestic setting, in summer 2008, and he has a post-production residency in the Media Lab at the Wexner Center for the Arts.

His production of The Pillowman for the Contempo­rary American Theatre Company was named Best Play or Best Drama by all three papers in Columbus, Ohio. He has also published a new play (see “Bookshelf”).

Mark Kupferman ’96 is now Director of Consumer Insights & Analytics for NBC Uni­ versal Orlando Resort in Orlando, Fla., where

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he continues to love life with his wife Elizabeth.

Sarah Lambert ’90 writes, “As always, much on the ‘to do’ list. Projects from this last season include: The Children of Vonderly (MaYi), Falset­toland (NAATCO), Sweet Songs of the Soul (Cross­roads), Two Pianos, Four Hands (Penguin Rep), and Tartuffe (ESU). I will be guest teaching and designing up at Cornell in ’08/’09, just for the year—The Importance of Being Earnest, Love’s Labors Lost and The History Boys—as well as continuing with a couple of on-going, long term, ever-evolving projects—The People’s Temple (next at ATC in Chicago), Fly (LCI), and Casa Cushman (Tectonic, About Face, and The Orchard Project… so far!).”

Mahayana Landowne ’98, based in New York, is directing prolifically. Her most recent productions include: Mixed by Maya Lilly in Los Angeles; I and Me and You and I by Michi Yamamura, Off-Broadway; and Turn of the Screw at Ancram Opera House, staged environmentally in upstate New York. As Resident Director for her local New York City chapter of Billionaires for Bush, she has enjoyed creating political musicals, including Summer in the Hummer and Dick Cheney’s Holiday Spectacular. She is currently developing an original work, The Picasso Project, a play that uses Picasso’s paintings as a storyboard to explore the core of creativity. It presents the question, “How do we give ourselves permission to create?”

As a director, Mahayana is using her skills to do creative grassroots organizing for social issues including Metropolis in Motion, which is working to overturn the “Cabaret Laws” (http://www.metropolisinmotion.org); the New York City Dance Parade, which brings together over one hundred dance organizations to dance down Broadway (http://www.danceparade.org), and many art action activities that promote urban environmental awareness. Her work can be found at http://yana.landowne.org.

She is excited about developing new collaborative projects and as always delights in finding illuminating connections to expand our human potential, to celebrate possibilities and manifest hope. She sends her love and wishes you all the best in your adventures.

Laura Brown MacKinnon ’93 (Faculty) continues to lecture in Yale School of Drama’s stage management department and chase around her two children (ages 6 and 3).

Wade McIntyre ’98 writes, “Hello everyone who recognizes my name and cares to read about my news. I’m still living and writing in

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Around the World Graham Shiels ’99 on the set of True Blood with Anna Paquin. Photo courtesy of Graham Shiels.

Los Angeles with my wife Samantha and our two kids. Did I say ‘kids?’ I meant cats.

Thinking about having some humans, too.

They’re just as easy to take care of, right?

Anyway, my recent writing projects include an hour-long drama for Fox (‘The Oaks’), a feature-length documentary about organic food (Food Fight), and a variety of crazy game shows and specials for G4 (Ninja Warrior, Unbeatable Banzuke). Other hobbies include: writing a humor column for Script magazine, playing tennis, and going on strike.”

Robert Murphy ’96 shares, “I’ve been writing! Currently taking a playwriting class with Julie McKee at HB Studio, which has been a blast. I’ve finished a large chunk of the first draft of my first full-length script, which is a mess; I’m hoping to spend the summer writing a more cohesive second draft. And then we enter the exciting, dynamic world of script submission . . .”

Allison Narver ’98 is happily living in Seattle with her husband Jim Chesnutt ’89 YC and their 7-year-old daughter Kate Chesnutt. After six years as Artistic Director of Seattle’s Empty Space Theatre, Allison is delighted to be a freelance director once again.

Recent world premiere productions at The Empty Space Theatre include the following: 1984 (with Tessa Auberjonois ’98 and Adrian LaTourelle ’99), The Valley of The Dolls, Inflagrante Gothicto, Vera Wilde (music and lyrics by Chris Jeffries ’87 YC), 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother (originally titled G-D Doesn’t Pay Rent Here) and Bust by Lauren Weedman.

Other projects include Leaving Queens [by Kate Moira Ryan with music by Kim Sherman (Former Faculty)] at Portland Stage Company and The Women’s Project, and Texarkana Waltz in Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York. Most recent directing projects

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include Bad Dates (Theresa Rebeck) and Memory House (Kathleen Tolan with lighting

by Marcus Doshi ’00) at The Seattle Repertory Theatre, The Clean House at ACT, and The 100 Dresses at Seattle Children’s Theater. Upcoming projects include a remount of Bust at City Theatre in Pittsburgh, Eurydice at ACT, and BlueNose at Seattle Children’s Theatre. Allison is currently developing three commissioned projects: Curveball and Maggie Cassidy (adapted from Jack Kerouac’s novel) with long time collaborator Chris Jeffries, and a new piece with Lauren Weedman.

Paul Niebanck ’97 shares, “This past autumn I participated in the Sundance Institute/Public Theatre workshop of . . . and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi by Marcus Gardley ’04. I spent the winter in Chicago playing Iago at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, directed by Marti Maraden, and I had a blast!”

D.W. Phineas Perkins ’90 has left Disney companies after seventeen years and joined Birket Engineering as their Senior Project Manager. Phineas’ primary focus over the next year-and-a-half will be managing the design, construction, and installation of technical systems for multiple theme park attractions in Singapore. Projects in Dubai and other parts of Asia are a few months in trail.

While still officially living in Orlando, he seems to be sleeping as much on United as in his own bed these days.

Todd Rosenthal ’93 won the 2008 Tony Award for Best Set Design of a Play for August: Osage County, which he designed for Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago.

Todd continues to work as Chicago-based freelance designer, creating many sets for Steppenwolf, while also teaching at Northwestern University as Assistant Professor of Design.

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Liev Schreiber ’92 shares, “I am working in Australia pushing the boundaries of action and facial hair in a prequel to the sequel of the X-Men saga. In bigger news, eight months ago Naomi gave birth to our son Alexander Pete Schreiber (we call him Sasha). Like his father, Sasha has a touch of the idiot savant in front of the camera but more than makes up for it with his uncanny ability to grow hair . . .”

Graham Shiels ’99 shares, “My parents celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary this year. I’m single. Professionally, I’m guest starring in episodes #1, #2, #3, and #7 of Alan Ball’s new series for HBO, True Blood—Alex Woo ’97 is a staff writer on the show! I will also be acting opposite Jim Carrey in his upcoming Yes Man in December. I’ve been actively volunteering with the Yale In Cinema Series at The Newport Beach Film Festival to try to create a home for Yalie filmmakers. If you want to know more about it, please email me at grahamshiels@sbcglobal.net.”

Kris Stone ’98 writes, “I have been working non-stop for the past ten years, but I have managed to woo Christopher Studley, a wonderful lighting designer, into marrying me in spite of my insane schedule. I recently had three shows to tech before they all opened in April. They included: Steve & Idi by David Grimm at The Rattlestick staring Evan Dexter Parke ’97, directed by Eleanor Holdridge ’97, lighting by Les Dickert ’97, and costumes by Jessica Ford ’04; The Scene by Theresa Rebeck, a co–production between George Street Playhouse and Hartford Stage, lit gorgeously by Robert Wierzel ’84, and costumes by Miranda Hoffman ’00; and Paul Niebanck ’97, right, as Iago in Chicago Shakespeare’s production Othello. Photo by Liz Lauren.

Liev Schreiber ’92 with son Sasha.

Alumni Notes have joined AMS Planning & Research in Fair­ field, Conn., as Project Managers. Prior to coming to AMS in January, Josh worked for five years at Long Wharf Theatre, serving as General Manager, Associate Managing Director, and Interim Man­aging Director. Ted most recently worked as Associate Director of Finance at Yale School of Drama. He will be relocating to AMS’s office in Petaluma, Calif., in June. AMS was founded in 1988 by Theater Management alumnus Steven Wolff ’81, and it is one of the nation’s leading arts management consulting practices, specializing in guiding the planning and development of arts facilities and in the creation of strategic and long-range plans for arts programs and projects.

Erin Chainani ’05 gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl, in March. Uma Imogen was born late on March 11th and Kaveen Odin was born early March 12th (yes, they have different birthdays!). The whole family is happy and doing well, and Mommy and Daddy are learnEmily, Daniel, Alex, and Connor Weida (children of Chris Weida ’95) ing how to cope on much less sleep.

Amanda Leigh Cobb ’05 will star as Baby in Marshall Williams ’95 lives just an hour then a re-mount of God’s Ear by Jenny the forthcoming national tour of Dirty Schwartz, previously produced by New Georges from New Haven in Westerly, R.I. He writes Dancing —The Classic Story on Stage. She arts features and reviews for the Westerly Sun at CSC, now being produced at the Vineyard. recently understudied for the role of Nancy in and other publications, and he has been assoEarlier this year I designed Maria Stuarda at the Broadway revival of The Country Girl. ciated with the Granite Theatre in Westerly The Baltimore Lyric Opera with Chris Van Sarita Covington ’07 shares, “I’m doing a and the Flock Theatre in New London, CT. In Alstyne ’00 and will begin working on a new short film! With Roz Coleman ’90 of Red Wall April he played Mr. DePinna in You Can’t Take play for A.R.T. as soon as I’m back from the Productions, who also happened to have been It With You at the Barker Playhouse in honeymoon.” my mentor from Yale thanks to the introducProvidence, R.I. He would love to hear from all Chris Weida ’95 writes, “Rosanne and I are tion of Joseph Grifasi ’75. I’m thankful and his friends: marshallwilliams@mac.com. still living in our hometown of Milwaukee. excited for what’s to come.”

We welcomed Daniel Robert to our family last Keith Davis ’00 finished a run in December June 5. Danny joins Alex (age 8), Connor (age 2007 at the Cherry Lane Theatre of Hoodoo 6), and Emily (age 4) in making our house very ............................ Love, which Robin Vest ’02 designed. He also full (but extremely fun and rewarding). When attended Berlin International Film Festival in New York City in April, I was able to see Talent Campus as a director/actor with various Shira Beckerman ’06 writes, “I’m happy to Rob Zoland ’95, his wife Jocelyn, and their projects in February. And in April he attended let you know that in September 2007 I transicute baby boy Matthew.”

Tribeca All-Access with a feature-length docutioned from my role as General Manager at Christy Weikel ’99 shares, “I spent the last mentary film he’s producing and editing The Pearl Theatre Company in the East Village two years building a Stage Management procalled Evolution of a Criminal, which is being of New York City (where I began work four gram at Ball State University. In March I days after graduation!) to the role of Managing joined David Kennedy ’00, Adrian LaTourelle ’99, Matt Richards ’01, Junghyun Director. I’ve been thrilled with the new responsibilities and am truly enjoying a chalGeorgia Lee ’01, and Brian “Fitz” Patton ’01 lenging season, full of every possible advenin a production of The Misanthrope at the Dallas Theater Center. In May I moved back to ture you could imagine! We’re New York’s only off-Broadway classical repertory company Greensboro, N.C., to be the Production Manager at Triad Stage, where Avery Preston supporting a Resident Acting Company, and we’re currently gearing up for our 25th Lane ’96, Rich Whittington ’98, and David Anniversary Season. I hope everyone can Byrd ’06 are running a beautiful operation. come downtown and see one of our fantastic Not to make any of us feel old but Alex, who productions. I was happy to host Arthur was 3 when I started school, is now 15, Bailey Nacht ’06 and his wife and Merle at one of our is 9 and Dylan is 7.” opening nights this past winter and look forLisa Wilde ’91 and husband Dr. Philip Erin Chainani ’05 with her twins, Uma Imogen Vilardo welcomed a son Gabriel Peter on January ward to seeing more Yalies at The Pearl.” and Kaveen Odin.

Joshua Borenstein ’02 and Ted DeLong ’07 27, 2007.

00s

YSD 2008

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Around the World Festival, Working Man’s Clothes Productions, projects at: www.wingspace.com/gia.

NYC); a cross-gender casting of The Jewish Wife Adam Ganderson ’06 writes, “After having

by Bertolt Brecht (Stone Soup Theatre Arts, worked in the regions (Dallas Theater Center NYC); Heart’s Desire by Caryl Churchill (The and Syracuse Stage) for much of the year, I’ve Atlantic Theatre Company, NYC, Conserva­ finally made Chicago my home. I walked right tory); Remounting of I Want What You Have by into a production with the Chicago Opera Saviana Stanescu (Women’s Project: Gala Theater, and I am loving the town and the theEvent, again at Pace University, Make Mine a atre scene. Anyone in the area should drop me Million Event, and at World Financial Center, a line.”

Women’s Project’s Girls Just Want to Have Melissa Huber ’01 shares, “Prospect Theater Fund$, NYC); Love Person by Aditi B. Kapil (Marin Company (founded the summer before I Theatre, Calif., NNPN Rolling World started at YSD) is celebrating its 10th season!

Premiere); E-Dating by Saviana Stanescu (Lee We’ve created a niche for ourselves by producStrasberg Institute, NYC); Blue Before Morning ing new musicals in New York City by emergby Kate McGovern (TerraNOVA Collective, ing artists. We’re celebrating our anniversary NYC). Ongoing: Gia teaches acting and offers this fall by reviving one of our favorites: Illyria, private coaching sessions for actors preparing adapted from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, by audition material, singers and performing art- Peter Mills and Cara Reichel. Over the years ists of any discipline, and public speakers. She we’ve had the good fortune to work with also offers workshops in One-Thought-Onemany YSD folks (way too many to name Action©: a detailed, physical approach to here!).” engaging text. Visit her webpage for selected Brendan Hughes ’04 continues to live in Los Angeles with actress Liz Beckham, scribbling and directing various film projects. He also teaches a scene study class every Thursday night at Warner Loughlin Studios, while Marcus Gardley ’04 maintaining a steady list of international cli“Mister Marcus, Mister Marcus, that’s the inciting ents through his burgeoning webcam acting incident!” These days, you’re as likely to find Marcus coach business. In the summertime, Brendan Gardley ’04 in a classroom as in a rehearsal room, returns to the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater and he’s happy either way. After teaching jobs and on Cape Cod, where he serves as “Impressario” commissions that have criss-crossed the country in the of the newly minted “TheatreBar,” which is past few years, and with five or six projects in various modeled after the Yale Cabaret! While resisting stages of development (sometimes he has trouble the temptation to direct theatre in L.A., he has remembering them all), the busy playwright begins a tenure-track professorship this fall at UMass Amherst.

From inner-city New Haven-area youth at Connecticut agricultural charter school Common Ground, to Ivy League undergrads at Columbia, to students of performing arts and social justice at the University of San Francisco, Gardley says, “You learn so much as a writer by teaching.”

Gardley credits his Bay Area roots—his uncle was a founding member of the Black Panthers—for his conviction that theatre can be a vehicle for social change. “I don’t believe that just creating work makes it political,” he says. “I really like plays to actually do something in the community that you can see—now we have neighbors who have something to talk about.” In 2005, Berkeley’s Shotgun Players called Gardley, looking for a local playwright to create a play about their city. Love is a Dream House in Lorin, said one local critic, “turned a neighborhood into art,” and set Gardley off on a series of Bay Area city plays. Next up: Richmond, where his play about women workers in the famous World War II shipyards, will kick off the official dedication of Rosie the Riveter State Park in a site-specific production in 2010.

Meanwhile, Gardley is settling down for a bit—geographically, at least. This fall, he takes on a new batch of students, passing along his passions for history, myth, and storytelling to a new generation of artists. Don’t call him a mentor, though: “What I prefer is when they become my peers.”

Camille Assaf-Doshi ’04 and Marcus Doshi ’01 on their wedding day in France, August 2007.

Sarah Bishop-Stone ’10

Photo: Joan Marcus

executive produced by Spike Lee. He is currently teaching in the under­grad film & television department at NYU. More info at his website: www.keithldavis.com.

Camille Assaf-Doshi ’04 and Marcus Doshi ’01 were married in France, on August 3rd, 2007. They live in Brooklyn, N.Y., and continue their design careers in the theatre.

Ashley (Elder) Bishop ’02 writes, “I normally don’t reply to these e-mails, but I thought it might be worth a mention that my husband and I just returned from a backpacking and rock-climbing trip to the Patagonia region of Argentina where we completed eight summits and trekked 60 miles. Otherwise, I still work for ShowMotion Inc. as the Production Manager­­—a job that I find exceedingly satisfying.”

Gia Forakis ’04 has been having a very busy season. Recent projects include: Gates of Equality by Stanton Wood (Urban Stages, NYC); Hot Damn by Casey Wimpee (The Binge

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YSD 2008

Alumni Notes

Karyn Lyman ’05 with her husband David O’Connor on their wedding day in Pennsylvania. directed the occasional staged reading for Noah Wiley’s Blank Theatre with casts including Justin Kirk, Rachel Boston, and several members of the cast of “General Hospital.”

Joseph Huppert ’07 is happily ensconced in idyllic San Diego as the Sound Supervisor for La Jolla Playhouse and the University of California San Diego (UCSD) Department of Theater and Dance as of October 2007.

Denver Latimer ’00 has just finished law school in New York City and is going back to California to practice criminal defense, review plays, and re-join the board of a theatre company he founded over fifteen years ago.

Suzanne Kim Lee ’07 is “happy to report that I have a new play going up as part of the Ma-Yi Theatre Company’s Annual Labfest of staged readings; it’s a modern re-telling of Samson and Delilah. It’ll go up in New York on May 8.”

Pu Lin ’00 is the Design Manager at Linfair Engineering Group in Taipei, Taiwan.

Karyn Lyman ’05 shares, “On June 3, 2007, after 7+ years of dating, I married David O’Connor (YRT Master Electrician in the 2003-04 season) at the Pen Ryn Mansion in Bensalem, Pa. It was a wonderful celebration—in attendance were Anne Trites (Faculty), Beth Morrison ’05, Rosey Strub ’05, Elisa Spencer ’05, Ari Teplitz ’05, and

Ken Lin ’05, who wrote a special reading for the ceremony. We live in Philadelphia (we just purchased our first home!), where I have been Managing Director at Lantern Theater Company for three years, and where David has been teaching creativity classes at Temple Uni­versity, while also directing around town (next season, The Government Inspector at the Lantern and The Seafarer at the Arden). Philly has its share of YSD alums—hope to connect with anyone who passes through or relocates!”

Elena Maltese ’03 shares, “Not many notes from up in New Hampshire. I am now the Director of Special Projects at The Music Hall.

I oversee the restoration of an American treasure. This winter we started a new multi-million dollar project that will help us support our goals as the Seacoast’s leading performing arts center. I thought this movie might show the restoration work I am doing: http:// www.youtube.com/watch? v=Uq6yL-vjUvs. I was also in an accident in Jan­uary and have been working on the art of walking again.

Currently my hobble is stellar—it would make Wesley Fata (Professor Emeritus) proud, or Chris Bayes (Faculty).”

Brian McManamon ’06 played the title role in Hamlet at Burning Coal Theater in Raleigh, N.C., in the fall of 2007. In January 2008, Brian performed with fellow YSD alums Nathan Hinton ’95, Stephen Conrad Moore ’05, and Sarita Covington ’07 in new plays

inspired by the work of Eugene O’Neill in the O’Neill Festi­val at 10 at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York City. Brian worked with director May Adrales ’06 in Thicker than Water at the Ensemble Studio Theater in New York City. He also played opposite Sarita Covington ’07 in Shakespeare: The Remix at Capital Repertory Theater in Albany, N.Y. Stephen Conrad Moore ’05 recently appeared in the off-Broadway production of Emancipation, a world premiere by OBIEwinning actor Ty Jones, directed by Christopher McElroen at the critically acclaimed Classical Theatre of Harlem.

Beth Morrison ’05 formed a producing company in New York City in 2005 called Beth Morrison Projects, which commissions, develops, and produces bold, contemporary music theatre works. She has gone on to produce projects at the New York Musical Theatre Festival (2005 and 2007), Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, Performance Space 122, New York Public Library Live!, the Estates National Theatre of Prague, and on the streets of Orvieto, Italy.

Upcoming 2008-09 productions include Soldier Songs by David T. Little at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge, Sleeping Beauty directed by Yana Ross ’06 at the Seoul Performing Arts Festival, and Binibon by Elliott Sharp and directed by Tea Alagic ’07 at New York’s iconic avant-garde music venue, The Kitchen.

Additional projects include music theatre

Ashley Elder Bishop ’02 rock climbing in Argentina.

YSD 2008

71

Around the World

Christina Geyer Phillips ’00 on her wedding day with Michael Parrella ’00 and his wife Kristen, Terri Ciofalo ’00, and Cindy Kocher ’00. commissions with YSD alumni David Nugent ’05 and Marcus Gardley ’04. www. bethmorrisonprojects.org.

Naomi Okuyama ’07 is currently Develop­ ment and Marketing Manager for the Da Camera Society, a site-specific chamber music presenter bringing intimate performances of classical and jazz music to architecturally significant sites throughout Los Angeles.

Vincent Olivieri ’01 shares, “Sarah Hodges Olivieri ’08 and I have moved to Southern California, where I have joined the faculty in the brand new Sound Design program at University of California-Irvine. We’re loving the sun and the warmth—a far cry from the grey days in New Haven! In addition to my work at the University, I am continuing my freelance career, having designed and/or scored theatre productions around the country with companies including South Coast Rep, The Public Theater, Portland Center Stage, Pittsburgh Public Theatre, Ensem­ble Theatre of Cincinnati, and more. The move across the country was taxing on us (particularly since Sarah and I were living on opposite coasts this year as she finished her MFA), but we’re both glad to have reconnected with many former classmates who are now our neighbors, including Aga Kunska ’02, Michael Field ’02, Lori Monnier ’01, Fred Kinney ’02, and Shannon Flynn ’02.”

Rey Pamatmat ’03 writes, “A lot going on for me this summer . . . Pure, originally an Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Science and Tech­nology Project commission, received a workshop as part of E.S.T.’s 2008 First Light Festival in May. The presentation was featured in Scientific American (http:// www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id= alan-turingcomes-alive&sc=rss). A reading of the play was

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also presented, again in May, in Ma-Yi Theater Company’s 2008 LabFest. Thunder Above, Deeps Below was presented in June at the AsianAmerican Theater Conference in Minneapolis, Minn., directed by May Adrales ’06. It then received a workshop at the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference in July.

Finally, I received a 2008 NYFA Playwriting Fellowship.”

Maulik Pancholy ’03 was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award this past year for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series for “30 Rock.” “Sadly,” he reports, “we lost to ‘The Office.’”

Blythe Pittman ’05 and Aris Winger were married on June 1, 2008, in Emory, Va. Blythe is the resident assistant lighting designer for the Baltimore Opera, and she recently became an assistant professor of drama at Spellman College, Atlanta. Winger is an assistant math professor at Emory & Henry College.

Rio Puertollano ’01 has worked OffBroadway and Off-Off Broadway at Actors’ Playhouse, the Public Theatre, New York

Shakespeare Festival, New York Theatre Workshop, Pulse Ensemble Theatre, HERE, Ma-Yi Theatre Ensemble, The Vineyard, and Jewish Repertory Theatre, among others. He has written, produced and directed the short film Sueños, starring Adriana Gaviria ’01, which was one of the Featured Films on IFC’s Media Lab and Festival De Cine Corto, AOL Latino Film Festival. His short film The Bakery has been screened at the Cinemanila International Film Festival, Asian American International Film Festival, Visual Communications Film Fes­tival, and Film Arts Film Festival. Rio has also worked for HBO and Paramount Pictures and with various producers including Six Frames, Red Panda, Invisible Ink, and the Michaels Producing Group. He produced the short film Spoonful of Sugar, which aired on Showtime. Check out Sueños at IFC’s Media Lab—http://www.medialab.ifc.com; check out his short films at http:// www.youtube.com/riverpuerto.

Alicia Roper ’00, ’89 yc and Rob Devaney ’00 welcomed Maxwell James Devaney into the

Kathryn Hahn ’01 The first night the cast of Boeing Boeing performed for a Broadway audience, says Kathryn Hahn ’01, something threw them off. “We were like, ‘what is that?’ There was so much noise coming from the audience!” The runaway success of Boeing Boeing—topped by a 2008 Tony Award® for Best Revival of a Play—came as a welcome, if not entirely unlikely, surprise.

“Of course the cast is just amazing,” Hahn says, “and I knew it had gotten great reviews in England.” But the rehearsal process was “so not funny—it was very serious business.” From the start of rehearsals, with doors in the rehearsal room numbered one through six, the cast buckled down, concentrating on the considerable technicalities of constructing a farce, and hoped the funny would come through on its own. Their dedication paid off. The show is “like champagne,” says Hahn. “We’re all just playing the play, and I think that’s what comes through.”

Performing the role of a sexy stewardess six nights a week is, for Hahn, a triumphant return to New York. She moved to Los Angeles directly after graduation for a role in NBC’s “Crossing Jordan,” which, she says, “was like grad school all over again—for TV acting.” Six years on that show culminated in Hahn’s giving birth, on and off screen. It was “a dream come true,” as husband Ethan Sandler played the father of her TV baby, and when her on-screen doctor needed help with her lines, she read from a script placed between Hahn’s legs. “Lots of laughs,” Hahn says. “On screen it lasts like five seconds. God, I wish it was that easy.”

While filming Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road in Connecticut last year, Hahn had a chance to wax nostalgic about her Yale School of Drama days. “I have dreams of waking up, going to get my coffee and a muffin, and knowing I didn’t have a scene going up and could just watch my classmates. I learned so much about myself as a person, not just as a performer—it was such an important thing to do in this ridiculous business. You can lose sight of what made you fall in love with it at the beginning. And so I think going to school, it was kind of a really beautiful, rigorous three years, where I could think of nothing but doing what I love.”

Sarah Bishop-Stone ’10

YSD 2008

Alumni Notes world on October 23, 2007. He was 8 lbs, 13 oz and is already being scouted by the Bears, Jets, and Raiders.

Christopher “Kit” Sanderson ’05 writes, “Since deploying with the US Navy in July, I have been working in Kuwait with my unit, Inshore Boat Unit 22, to provide antiterrorism force protection on 34’ patrol boats in the Persian Gulf. And, while here, I have been invited to give two lectures to Kuwaiti and Gulf State students at the American University of Kuwait. One lecture was for the general student body on my theatre company, Gorilla Rep. The other was to the advanced English class on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I expect to be back in June. I feel truly enriched by the experience so far, though the work on the boat is hard. The students were so engaged and curious that it was a really refreshing break to speak with them.”

Elisa Spencer ’05 writes, “After two years in Chicago as Managing Director of Shattered Globe Theatre, it felt like time for a personal and professional change. In August, I packed up my stuff and moved back East to accept a position as General Manager for York Theatre, an off-Broadway company that develops new musical theatre and preserves lesser known

Class Year Affiliation Change Does Yale School of Drama categorize you in the wrong class year? Did your thesis drag on much longer than expected? Did you get your Certificate converted to a MFA? While you can’t change your official graduation year, you can be affiliated with your classmates. For example, if you attended the Drama School from fall of 1976 to the spring of 1979—but didn’t receive your actual degree until 1980—you are considered part of the Class of 1980. However, YSD’s Alumni Affairs office can update your affiliation to the Class of 1979.

This way, we’ll make sure to put your correct class year affiliation on your name tag at events and you’ll receive contact from the correct Class Agent. To request an affiliation change, contact us at ysd.alumni@yale.edu or via mail at Yale School of Drama, Alumni Affairs Office, PO Box 208244, New Haven, CT 06820-8244.

The cast of Sarah Treem’s A Feminine Ending at South Coast Rep: (back row, left to right) Sarah Treem ’05, Alan Blumenfield, Amy Aquino ’86, and director Timothy Douglas ’86. (front row, left to right) Peter Katona ’01, Brooke Bloom, and Jedadiah Schultz ’05.

works from the past. The company does great work, the staff is wonderful, and it has been awesome to reconnect with all the New Yorkbased Yalies.”

Alec Tok ’03 shares, “I just completed shooting for my first feature film, Angel, in Shanghai. I wrote the screenplay last summer, raised the money in the fall, and wrapped the shoot amidst the worst snowstorms to hit China in decades. How’s that for a year well spent? Watch out for it! (And now, back to the theatre.)”

Sarah Treem ’05 ’02 yc writes, “I’ve been writing and producing a TV show on HBO called ‘In Treatment,’ and I’m just beginning my first screenplay for Miramax. My play, A Feminine Ending, was produced at Playwrights Horizons, South Coast Rep, and Portland Center Stage in the 2007-2008 season. I was also chosen to participate in the 2008 Sundance Institute Theatre Lab for my play, Orphan Island. So it was a good year. But next year, who knows?”

Heather Violanti ’02 won the Brinly-Hardy Fellowship in Playwriting at the Mary Anderson Center, an artists’ colony in Mount St. Francis, Indiana.

Bradlee Ward ’05 shares, “The past year has been a busy one for me. After working for two years in Las Vegas as Lead Audio Tech for The Beatles’ Love by Cirque du Soleil, I have moved

YSD 2008

to New York City, where I am working as a designer for Acoustic Dimensions. I am very excited to be living in the City and look forward to seeing many of my classmates. While working for Cirque, I maintained one of the largest sound systems in the world and had the privilege of working with George and Giles Martin, who were the musical directors for the show, which won two Grammy awards this year. While in Las Vegas, I was also the Artist in Residence at the Nevada Conservatory Theatre, where I designed Fiddler on the Roof, directed by Mindy Cooper, and You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, directed

by Glenn Casale. I was an adjunct faculty member in University of Las Vegas’ graduate theatre department, where I taught Intro­ duction to Sound Design in the fall. Last summer for Cockroach Theatre in Las Vegas, I designed The Methuselah Tree, directed by Sarah Norris. This production also went to the Minnesota Fringe Festival. Last summer, my design for Miss Julie at the Yale Repertory Theatre was one of the designs selected to represent the U.S. at the Prague QA Scenofest.

This exhibit is now on tour in the U.S. Please visit my website at www.Brad Ward.net for more info or for my contact info.”

Tan (Falkowski) Wells ’05 and Nathan Wells ’06 are happily married and live in Las Vegas.

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Contributors Contributors to Yale School of Drama Annual Fund 2007/08 Class Agents highlighted in bold

1930s Jane M. Alexander ’36 Paul Baker ’39 True C. Giffen ’37 Clinton P. King, Jr. ’39 Bertram N. Linder ’39 Louise H. Saurel* ’38

1940s Lawrence D. Amick ’49 Olive A. Chypre ’48 Edith Dallas Ernst ’48 Sarah C. Ferry ’41 Patricia F. Gilchrist ’44 Alfred S. Golding ’49 David Gorton ’48 Elinor Randolph Graper ’43 Nancy K. Holland ’43 Agnes B. Hood ’44 Albert Hurwitz ’49 Joan Kron ’48 Mildred C. Kuner ’47 George E. Nichols III* ’41, ’38 yc Emma Lou K. Nielson ’43 Louis R. Ormont ’49 John W. Paul ’48 Pamela Stiles Roberts ’46 Dorothy B. Rostov ’43 Julia Meade Rudd ’47 Eugene F. Shewmaker ’49 Miriam S. Tulin ’40 Anne C. Washburn ’45 Max Wilk ’41 Yun C. Wu ’49

1950s William H. Allison ’52 Patricia Harris Backlar ’55 Robert A. Baldwin ’55 Cornelia H. Barr ’58 Robert M. Barr ’52 Gloria B. Beckerman ’53 Jack W. Belt ’53 Albert S. Bennett ’51 Ezekial H. Berlin ’53 Melvin Bernhardt ’55 Richard E. Bianchi ’57 Phillip H. Bruns ’56 Robert Brustein ’51 ’66 m.a.h.

Rene Buch ’52 Ian W. Cadenhead ’58 William F. Carden ’50 Sami Joan Casler ’59 Cosmo A. Catalano, Sr. ’53 Joseph Chomyn ’53 Margaretta M. Clulow ’56 Miss Patricia J. Collins ’58 Alfred B. Connable ’58 Kathleen R. Conneely ’57 Sue Ann Gilfillan Converse ’55

George Corrin, Jr. ’51 John W. Cunningham ’59 Jose A. Diaz ’52 William F. Dowling ’52 D. William Duell ’52 David B. Ebbin ’57 Mildred N. Ebbin ’57 Philip R. Eck ’59 Sonya G. Friedman ’55 Joseph Gantman ’53 Alfred S. Geer ’59 Robert W. Goldsby ’53 David Zelag Goodman ’58 Barbara K. Goodwillie ’51 James W. Gousseff ’56 Bigelow R. Green ’59 Eugene Gurlitz ’57 Albert R. Gurney ’58 Phyllis O. Hammel ’52 Marian E. Hampton ’59 Margaret E. Hand ’57 David W. Hannegan ’53, ’50 b.a.

Louise Rudd Hannegan ’53 Hugh M. Hill ’53 Betsy N. Holmes ’55 Carol V. Hoover ’59 Evelyn H. Huffman ’57 Helen T. Hurwitz ’51 James Earl Jewell ’57 Geoffrey A. Johnson ’55 Marillyn B. Johnson ’50 Donald E. Jones, Jr. ’56 Amnon Kabatchnik ’57 Lloyd A. Kaplan ’58 James D. Karr ’54 Jay B. Keene ’55 Arthur J. Kelley, Jr. ’53 Roger L. Kenvin ’59 ’61 dfa Bernard Kukoff ’57 David Jeremy Larson ’50 Margaret J. Linney ’58 Romulus Linney ’58 Edgar R. Loessin ’54 Henry E. Lowenstein ’56 Paul David Lukather ’53 Elizabeth Lyman ’51 Jane B. Lyman ’51 Volodymyr Lysniak ’58 Richard G. Mason ’53 Beverly W. May ’50 David Ross McNutt ’59 Harvey M. Medlinsky ’58 Robert J. Miller ’57 Ellen L. Moore ’52 George Morfogen ’57 Tad Mosel ’50 Marion V. Myrick ’54 Franklin M. Nash ’59 Paul L. Newman ’54 ’88 hon Grace T. Noyes ’54 Michael A. Onofrio, Jr. ’53, ’50 yc Kendric T. Packer ’52 Wallace A. Peyton ’55 Eilene C. Pierson ’50 Virginia F. Pils ’52 David Rayfiel ’50 Mary B. Reynolds ’55

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YSD 2008

Harry M. Ritchie ’55 ’60 d.f.a.

David A. Rosenberg ’54 Philip Rosenberg ’59 A. Raymond Rutan, IV ’54 Raymond H. Sader ’58 Stephen O. Saxe ’54 Alvin Schechter ’59 William T. Schneider ’56 Ernest J. Schwarz ’59 Forrest E. Sears ’58 James A. Smith ’59 Kenneth J. Stein ’59 Pamela D. Strayer ’52 Jack Sydow ’50 Robert S. Telford ’55 Edward Trach ’58 Shirin Devrim Trainer ’50 Fred Voelpel ’53 Phyllis C. Warfel ’55 William B. Warfel ’57, ’55 yc Betsy B. Watson ’53 John Ransford Watts ’53 Zelma H. Weisfeld ’56 Cynthia A. Williams, Ph.D. ’59 Marjorie M. Williams ’55 Barbara M. Young ’53 Joseph W. Young ’52

1960s David E. Ackroyd ’68 Richard Ambacher ’65 dfa Leif E. Ancker ’62 Barbara B. Anderson ’60 Rita Aron ’69 Mary Ellen O’Brien Atkins ’65 Thomas R. Atkins ’64 Robert A. Auletta ’69 Jan Van Etten Austell ’65 James Robert Bakkom ’64 Philip J. Barrons ’65 Warren F. Bass ’67 John Beck ’63 Jody Locker Berger ’66 Edward Bierhaus, Jr. ’69 dfa Jeffrey A. Bleckner ’68 Arthur W. Bloom ’66 Carol Bretz Murray-Negron ’64 Arvin B. Brown ’67 James Burrows ’65 Donald I. Cairns ’63 Dennis Carnine ’65 Raymond E. Carver ’61 Mary-Jane Cassidy ’69 Suellen G. Childs ’69 Sarah E. Clark ’67 Katherine D. Cline ’60 Patricia S. Cochrane ’62 Robert S. Cohen ’64 dfa John M. Conklin ’66, ’59 yc Kenneth T. Costigan ’60 Peggy Cowles ’65 Stephen C. Coy ’63, ’69 dfa Laila S. Dahl ’65 F. Mitchell Dana ’67 Mary Lucille DeBerry ’66 Ramon L. Delgado ’67 George R. DiCenzo ’65

Charles Dillingham ’69, ’65 b.a.

Gene E. Diskey* ’61 Robert J. Donnelly ’64 John A. Duran ’74 Robert H. Einenkel ’69 Elisa Ronstadt Eliott ’62 David H. Epstein ’68 Leslie D. Epstein ’67 dfa, ’60 yc Jerry N. Evans ’62 John D. Ezell ’60 Ann Farris ’63 Richard A. Feleppa ’60 William H. Firestone ’69 Hugh Fortmiller ’61 Keith F. Fowler ’69 dfa David Freeman ’68 Richard D. Fuhrman ’64 Bernard L. Galm ’63 Anne K. Gregerson ’65 John E. Guare ’63 Ann T. Hanley ’61 Jerome R. Hanley ’60 Harold G. Harlow ’62, ’58 yc Richard A. Harrison ’66 Patricia Helwick ’65 Stephen J. Hendrickson ’67 Elizabeth Holloway ’66 John Robert Hood ’61 Derek Hunt ’62 Peter H. Hunt ’63, ’61 yc Laura Mae Jackson ’68 John W. Jacobsen ’69, ’67 yc Paul Jaeger ’67 Cynthia Lee Jenner ’64 Lee H. Kalcheim ’63 Asaad N. Kelada ’64 Abby B. Kenigsberg ’63 Carol Soucek King ’66 Marna J. King ’64 Raymond Klausen ’67 Richard H. Klein ’67 Donald D. Knight ’65 Raymond T. Kurdt ’64 Robert W. Lawler ’67 Peter J. Leach ’61 Stephen R. Leventhal ’69 Bradford W. Lewis ’69 Irene Lewis ’66 Fredric A. Lindauer ’66 Frank R. Lopez ’61 Janell M. MacArthur ’61 David Madden ’61 Marcia Madeira ’68 Cynthia J. Maguire ’66 Richard E. Maltby, Jr. ’62, ’59 yc Sandra Manley ’68 Patricia D. McAdams ’61 Margaret T. McCaw ’66 Robert A. McDonald, Jr. ’68 Bruce W. McMullan ’61 Banylou Mearin ’62 Donald Michaelis ’69 Jeffrey R. Milet ’69 H. Thomas Moore ’68 Donald W. Moreland ’60 Robert B. Murray ’61

Gayther L. Myers, Jr. ’65 David A. Nancarrow ’63 S. Joseph Nassif ’63 Ruth Hunt Newman ’62 Dwight R. Odle ’66 Janet Oetinger ’69 Richard A. Olson ’69 Sara Ormond ’66 Joan D. Pape ’68 Kenneth L. Parker ’61 Thomas J. Peterson ’68 Howard Pflanzer ’68 Louis R. Plante ’69 Michael B. Posnick ’69 Brett Prentiss ’68 Barbara Reid ’62 Barbara E. Richter* ’60 Mary Dupuy Roane ’61 Carolyn L. Ross ’67 Clarence Salzer, Jr. ’60, ’55 yc Peter Edward Sargent ’63 Lucia C. Scala ’61 Isaac H. Schambelan ’67 dfa Georg Schreiber ’64 Talia Shire Schwartzman ’69 Winifred J. Sensiba ’63 Carol M. Sica ’66 Roger H. Simon ’67 E. Gray Smith, Jr. ’65 Helena L. Sokoloff ’60 Mary C. Stark ’61 Louise Stein ’66 John Wright Stevens ’66 G. Erwin Steward ’60 David F. Toser ’64 Batya Tova ’69 Russell L. Treyz ’65 Richard B. Trousdell ’67 ’74 dfa Thomas S. Turgeon ’68 dfa Joan Van Ark ’64 Charles H. Vicinus ’65 Ruth L. Wallman ’68 Steven I. Waxler ’68 Gil Wechsler ’67 J. Newton White ’62 Peter White ’62 Robin Benensohn-Rosefsky Wood ’69 Porter Stevens Woods ’65 dfa Albert J. Zuckerman ’61 ’62 dfa

1970s Sarah Jean Albertson ’71 ’75 art Annette R. Ames ’76 Michael L. Annand ’75 Ursula Belden ’76 Sandra K. Boynton ’79, ’74 yc Thomas R. Bruce ’79, ’75 yc Martin E. Caan ’72 Michael William Cadden ’76 ’79 dfa, ’71yc Ian Calderon ’73 Victor P. Capecce ’75 Lisa Carling ’70 Cosmo A. Catalano, Jr. ’79 James A. Chesnutt III ’71 Lani L. Click ’73

Yale School of Drama Alumni Fund

William R. Conner ’79 David M. Conte ’72 Jonathan S. Coppelman ’70 Marycharlotte C. Cummings ’73 Charles Andrew Davis ’76 Julia L. Devlin ’74 Ian W. Dickson ’77 Thomas Di Mauro ’78 Dennis L. Dorn ’72 Nancy Reeder El Bouhali ’70 Eric S. Elice ’79 Peter Entin ’71 Dirk Epperson ’74 Femi Euba ’73 Douglass M. Everhart ’70 Abigail J. Franklin ’78 Reynold F. Frutkin ’72 ’73 d.f.a.

Robert Gainer ’73 Jess Goldstein ’78 Suzanne L. Gooch ’77, ’79 m.b.a.

Wray Steven Graham ’77 Joseph G. Grifasi ’75 Michael E. Gross ’73 William B. Halber ’70 Charlene Harrington ’74 Barbara B. Hauptman ’73 William T. Hauptman ’73 Jane C. Head ’79 Jennifer Hershey-Benen ’77 Nicholas A. Hormann ’73 Cynthia P. Kaback ’70 Barnet K. Kellman ’72 Alan L. Kibbe ’73 Dr. Dragan M. Klaic ’76 , ’77 dfa Fredrica A. Klemm ’76 Andrew J. Kufta ’77 Frances E. Kumin ’77 Mitchell L. Kurtz ’75 Thomas E. Lanter ’75 Michael John Lassell ’76 Stephen R. Lawson ’76 Charles E. Letts III ’76 Francis N. Levy ’73 Alan N. Lichtenstein ’76 Martha C. Lidji ’77 George N. Lindsay, Jr. ’74 Jennifer K. Lindstrom ’72 Robert Hamilton Long II ’76 Santo R. Loquasto ’72 Donald B. Lowy ’76 William Ludel ’73 Patrick F. Lynch ’71 Thomas P. Lynch ’79, ’75 yc Elizabeth M. MacKay ’78 Lizbeth P. Mackay ’75 Alan Mokler MacVey ’77 Brian R. Mann ’79 Christopher J. Markle ’79 Jonathan E. Marks ’68 b.a. ’72 ’84 dfa Peggy Ann Marks ’71 b.a. ’75 Craig T. Martin ’71 Deborah Mayo ’73 John A. McAndrew ’72 Brian R. McEleney ’77 Kate McGregor-Stewart ’74 Patricia M. McMahon ’72 ph.d.

Lynne Meadow ’71 Stephen W. Mendillo ’71 Jonathan Seth Miller ’75 Lawrence S. Mirkin ’72, ’69 yc Thomas Reed Mohan ’75 James Naughton ’70 Patricia C. Norcia ’78 Elizabeth L. Norment ’79 Robert J. Orchard ’72 Richard Ostreicher ’79 Jay P. Parikh ’78 Jeffrey Pavek ’71 William M. Peters ’79 Stephen B. Pollock ’76 Daniel H. Proctor ’70 William Purves ’71 Arthur I. Rank III ’79 Pamela Ann Rank ’78 Ronald P. Recasner ’74 Ralph R. Redpath ’75 William J. Reynolds ’77 Steven I. Robman ’73 Howard J. Rogut ’71 Alan D. Rosenberg ’74 John M. Rothman ’75 Bronislaw J. Sammler ’74 Robert Sandberg ’77 Suzanne M. Sato ’79 Joel R. Schechter ’72, ’73 dfa John Victor Shea III ’73 Michael D. Sheehan ’76 Richard R. Silvestro ’76 Benjamin Slotznick ’73, ’70 yc Jeremy T. Smith ’76 Maura Beth Smolover ’76 Marshall S. Spiller ’71 Charles N. Steckler ’71 Roy Bennett Steinberg ’78 Jaroslaw Strzemien ’75 Edith R. Tarbescu ’76 Russell Vandenbroucke ’77, ’78 dfa Carol M. Waaser ’70 David J. Ward ’75 Eugene D. Warner ’71 Lynda Lee Welch ’72 Carolyn Seely Wiener ’72 John H. Wolf ’79 ’81 Stephen R. Woody ’76 Stephen E. Zuckerman ’74

1980s Michael G. Albano ’82 Amy L. Aquino ’86 Clayton Mayo Austin ’86 Dylan Baker ’85 Robert James Barnett ’89 Christopher H. Barreca ’83 Robert P. Barron ’83 Spencer P. Beglarian ’86 James B. Bender ’85 Todd William Berling ’89 William J. Beer Bletzinger ’83 Anders P. Bolang ’87 Katherine R. Borowitz ’81, ’75 yc Sara Hedgepeth ’87 Mark Brokaw ’86

Claudia M. Brown ’85 William J. Buck ’84 Richard W. Butler ’88 Benjamin Cameron ’81 Jon E. Carlson ’88 Anna T. Cascio ’83 Joan Channick ’89 Nan Cibula-Jenkins ’83 Patti Clarkson ’85 Christian D. Clemenson ’84 Dana S. Croll ’87 Jane Ann Crum ’85 Donato Joseph D’Albis ’88 Richard Sutton Davis ’83,’03 dfa Kathleen K. Dimmick ’85 Merle Gordon Dowling ’81 Michael D. Fain ’82 Jon Robert Farley ’83 Terry Kevin Fitzpatrick ’83 Anthony M. Forman ’83 Raymond P. Forton ’85 Walter M. Frankenberger III ’88 Brackley S. Frayer ’80 Randy R. Fullerton ’82 Judy Gailen ’89 Steven J. Gefroh ’85 Mary Louise Geiger ’85 Michael J. Giannitti ’87 Jeffrey M. Ginsberg ’81 Charles F. Grammer ’86 Rob Greenberg ’89 John E. Harnagel ’83 Donald Patrick Harvey ’85 Allan Havis ’80 James W. Hazen ’83 Mary Dwight Hazzard ’82 Heather A. Henderson ’87 ’88 dfa Roderick Lyons Hickey, III ’89 Donald S. Holder ’86 Catherine MacNeil Hollinger ’86 Charles R. Hughes ’83 Thomas K. Isbell ’84 Kirk Roberts Jackson ’88 Chris P. Jaehnig ’85 Walker Jones ’89 Jane Kaczmarek ’82 Jonathan F. Kalb ’85, ’87 dfa Carol M. Kaplan ’89 Nancy Lee Kathan ’86 Elina Katsioula-Beall ’86 Bruce Abram Katzman ’88 Edward A. Kaye ’86 Richard Kaye ’80 Patrick Kerr ’87 Colette Ann Kilroy ’88 David K. Kriebs ’82 William Kux ’83 Wing Lee ’83 Sasha Emerson Levin ’84 Kenneth J. Lewis ’86 Jerry J. Limoncelli, Jr. ’84 Gail A. London ’87 Mark D. London ’89 Quincy Long ’86 Mark E. Lord ’87 Andi Lyons ’80 Peter Andrew Marshall ’89, ’83 yc

Peter Richard Mason ’86 Joan M. McMurtrey ’84 Katherine Mendeloff ’80 Cheryl G. Mintz ’87 Grafton V. Mouen ’82, ’75 yc Brennan Murphy ’88 Mary Elizabeth Myers ’89 Tina C. Navarro ’86 Regina L. Neville ’88 Thomas J. Neville ’86 Christopher D. Noth ’85 Arthur E. Oliner ’86 Erik Alexander Onate ’89 Carol Susan Ostrow ’80 Pamela Marie Peterson ’86 Robert J. Provenza ’86 Carol Anne Prugh ’89 Michael D. Quinn ’84 Ross Sumner Richards ’88 Joumana Rizk ’87 Joan E. Robbins ’86 ’91 dfa Laila V. Robins ’84 Lori Robishaw ’88 Constance Elisabeth Romero ’88 Russ Lori Rosensweig ’83 Andrew I. Rubenoff ’83 Kevin J. Rupnik ’81 Ellen J. Russell ’84 Steven A. Saklad ’81 Kenneth Schlesinger ’84 Larry Schwartz ’83 Kimberly A. Scott ’87 Alexander Scribner ’80 Anthony M. Shalhoub ’80 Charlotte Ann Sheffield ’87 William P. Skipper ’83 Steven A. Skybell ’88, ’84 yc Teresa L. Snider-Stein ’88 Neal Ann Stephens ’80 Marsha Beach Stewart ’85 Forrest M. Stone ’85 Mark L. Sullivan ’83 Thomas Phillip Sullivan ’88 Bernard J. Sundstedt ’81 John M. Turturro ’83 Courtney Vance ’86 Rosa Vega Weissman ’80 Adam N. Versenyi ’86, ’90 dfa, ’80 yc Craig F. Volk ’88 Deneda Lynn Wafer ’89 Jaylene Graham Wallace ’86 Clifford L. Warner ’87 Sharon Washington ’88 Darryl S. Waskow ’86 Geoffrey J. Webb ’88 Susan West ’87 Dana B. Westberg ’81 Matthew Marc Wiener ’88 Robert M. Wierzel ’84 Robert M. Wildman ’83 Catherine M. Wilson ’84 Alexandra R. Witchel ’82 Steven A. Wolff ’81 Evan D. Yionoulis ’85, ’82 yc Catherine J. Zuber ’84

YSD 2008

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1990s Narda Elaine Alcorn ’95 Nephelie M. Andonyadis ’90 Angelina Avallone ’94 Margaret A. Bauer ’91 Mark C. Bauer ’92 Emily Jean Beck ’95 Elizabeth Jeanne Bennett ’97 Sarah Eckert Bernstein ’95 Debra Booth ’91 John Cummings Boyd ’92 Tom Joseph Broecker ’92 Margaret Anne Brogan ’98 Shawn Hamilton Brown ’90 Laura M. Brown MacKinnon ’93 James Bundy ’95 Kathryn A. Calnan ’99 Vincent James Cardinal ’90 Adrienne Lisa Carter ’99, ’96 yc Esther K. Chae ’99 Max Chalawsky ’96 Edward M. Check ’90 Myung Hee Arlene Cho ’95 Enrico L. Colantoni ’93 Aaron M. Copp ’98 Robert C. Cotnoir ’94 Susan Mary Cremin ’95 Sean James Cullen ’90 Scott T. Cummings ’85, ’94 dfa Sheldon Deckelbaum ’92 Leslie Shaw Dickert III ’97 Alexander Timothy Dodge ’99 Henry S. Dunn ’94 Frances Louise Egler ’95 Tiffany Anne Ellis ’96 Cornelia Anne Evans ’93 Glen Richard Fasman ’92 Rodrick D. Fox ’99 David William Gainey ’93 Shawn Marie Garrett ’96, ’06 dfa Neil F. Gluckman ’92 Stephen L. Godchaux ’93 Michael Gabriel Goodfriend ’96 Greer Goodman ’95 Naomi S. Grabel ’91 Constance Marie Grappo ’95 Elisa R. Griego ’98 Regina Guggenheim ’93 Susan Hamburger ’97 Alexander Taverner Hammond ’96 Scott Christopher Hansen ’04 Douglas Rodgers Harvey ’95 James T. Hatcher ’94 Kevin Scott Henderson ’96 Christopher B. Higgins ’90 John C. Huntington ’90 Raymond P. Inkel ’95 Laura J. Janik Cronin ’96 Kristin Johnsen-Neshati ’92, ’02 d.f.a.

Debra Jane Justice ’92 Elizabeth A. Kaiden ’96 Samuel L. Kelley ’90 Ashley York Kennedy ’90 L. Azan Kung ’91 Michelle N. Lee ’98

*deceased

Contributors Chih-Lung Liu ’94 Sarah Long ’92, ’85 yc Suzanne R. Cryer Luke ’95, ’88 yc Craig P. Mathers ’93 Michael William McCarty ’90 B. Christine McDowell ’98 Robert A. Melrose ’96 Marjorie Craig Mitchell ’97 Richard R. Mone ’91 Daniel Evan Mufson ’95, ’99 dfa Kaye I. Neale ’91 Martha Josephine New ’92 Jane E. Padelford ’99 Dw Phineas Perkins ’90 Lisa Jeanne Porter ’95 Amy Joyce Povich ’92 James W. Quinn ’94 Sarah Gray Rafferty ’96 Lance S. Reddick ’94 Joe Reynolds ’97 Martin E. Rimes ’95 Douglas Ray Rogers ’96 Reginald Hunt Rogers ’93 Melina W. Root ’90, ’83 yc Mary Margaret Sasso ’99 Robert W. Schneider ’94, ’97 dfa Jennifer C. Schwartz ’97 Paul Francis Selfa ’92 Thomas W. Sellar ’97, ’03 dfa Jeremy M. Shapira ’97 Jane M. Shaw ’98 Rachel Sheinkin ’95 Graham A.W. Shiels ’99 Vladimir Shpitalnik ’92 Michael Vaughn Sims ’92 Paul Spadone III ’99, ’93 yc Douglas Spitz ’91 Kris E. Stone ’98 Erich William Stratmann ’94, ’93 yc Christopher Paul Swanson ’97, ’01 dfa David Loy Sword ’90 Patti W. Thorp ’91 Paul Charles Tigue III ’99 Deborah L. Trout ’94 Michael R. Van Dyke ’92 Erik William Walstad ’95 Anthony C. Ward ’94 Christopher Robert Weida ’95 Lisa A. Wilde ’91, ’95 dfa Marshall Butler Williams ’95 Robert Michael Zoland ’95

2000s Roberto F. Aguirre-Sacasa ’03 Liz Susana Alsina ’06 Remy-Luc J.M. Auberjonois ’01 Alexander G. Bagnall ’00 Samantha Joanne Baker ’07 Sarah K. Bartlo ’04 James C Bellavance ’00 Sarah Elaine Bierenbaum ’05, ’99 yc Ashley E. Bishop ’02 Cynthia T. Brizzell-Bates ’00,’07 dfa Erin Colleen Buckley’06

Give to the Annual Fund!

Jonathan Stewart Busky ’02, ’94 yc David Bryant Byrd ’06 Claudia W. Case ’01 ’07 dfa Hillary Joyce Charnas ’05 Wilson W. Chin ’03 Kristen Nora Connolly ’07 Gregory W. Copeland ’04 Edgar M. Cullman III ’02, ’97 b.a. ’97 yc Katherine Mary Cusack ’06 Michael Francis D’Alessandro ’06 Malcolm Kishner Darrell ’07 Emily Ryan Dorsch ’07 Janann B. Eldredge ’06 Jenifer E. Endicott ’00 Miriam Rose Epstein ’02 Rachel Lynn Fink ’00 Alexandra Jane Fischer ’00 Mike David Floyd ’06 Shannon Colleen Flynn ’02 Sarah McColl Fornia ’04 Stephen Ernest Fried ’05 Marion R. Friedman ’05 Marcus Dean Fuller ’04 Robyn D. Ganeles ’03 Jackson Grace Gay ’03 Sandra Goldmark ’04 Alan Anthony Grudzinski ’04 John J. Hanlon ’04 Judith Ann Hansen ’04 Amy Carol Herzog ’07, ’00 yc Amy S. Holzapfel ’01, ’06 dfa James Guerry Hood ’05 Allison Ann Horsley ’01 David Carr Howson ’04 Melissa Huber ’01 Brendan Patrick Hughes ’04 Matthew Joel Humphrey ’03 Rolin Jones ’04 Fred Thomas Kinney ’02 Wade Laboissonniere ’03 Nico M. Lang ’05 Emily W. Leue ’03 Jennifer Chen Hua Lim ’04 Derek Francis Lucci ’03 Michael James Mavazakis ’04 Peter Andrew Malbuisson ’05 Sabrina McGuigan ’04 Ann M.K. McLaughlin ’03 Jennifer Yejin Moeller ’06 Lorraine M. Monnier ’01 Elizabeth Deanne Morrison ’05 Arthur F. Nacht ’06 Andrew M. Nagel ’06 Christianna I. Nelson ’05 Katherine Ann Nowlin ’01 Adam N. O’Byrne ’04, ’01 yc Nicholas Stephen Pepper ’01 Andrew Charles Plumer ’02 Clara J. Rice ’02 Kevin Michael Rich ’04 Brian Wayne Robinson ’00 Thomas Russell ’07 Christopher Carter Sanderson ’05 Charles William Schultz ’01 Shawn B. Senavinin ’06 Alena Marion Smith ’06

76

YSD 2008

Katharine E. Spencer Doak ’00 Mikiko Suzuki ’02 Ari M. Teplitz ’05 Katherine Gloria Tharp ’07 Melissa L. F. Turner ’05 Carrie E. Van Hallgren ’06 Elliot Carmelo Villar ’07 Elaine M. Wackerly ’03 Bradlee M. Ward ’05 Jennifer Lena Mannis Wishcamper ’02, ’96 yc Bess Wohl ’98, ’02 ArtP Tamilla C. Woodard ’02

Friends John Beinecke Deborah and Bruce Berman Catherine Black Sterling and Clare Brinkley Mary L. Bundy CEC Artslink Tony Converse Philip A. Corfman Edgar Cullman, Jr. Scott Delman Mary Elder The John Golden Fund Sharon Goodman Joan F. Gourley Donald Granger Jerome L Greene Foundation F. Lane Heard III Ruth and Stephen Hendel Christine K. Jahnke David Johnson Merrill Kramer Lois S. Kramer Nathan Lipofsky* Deborah McGraw David Milch Edward John Noble Foundation Walter F. Parkes Michael and Carol Poster Belinda Robinson Linda Frank Rodman The Shubert Foundation Matthew Suttor Christopher Suttor Jadwyn Suttor John C.M. Suttor Eileen M. Suttor Kathrine J. Suttor Richard Guy Suttor Jennifer Tipton Esme Usdan

In-kind Sasha Emerson Levin ’84 Fred Iseman ’74 Jane Kaczmarek ’82 Michael Sheehan ’76 Contributions received from July 1, 2007 through June 30, 2008 Class Agents highlighted in bold. *deceased

What do these gifts support?

Annual gifts to the School of Drama Alumni Fund are directed to the School’s most valuable asset—the students.

These gifts help to increase financial aid, offsetting the cost of professional study at Yale.

Why participate in annual giving to the Alumni Fund?

Year after year, consistent support from alumni has helped the School of Drama maintain its high standards and continue to bring together the most talented students, regardless of their financial needs. Just as alumni gifts once helped fund your time at Yale, you can now take pride in knowing your generosity is helping those who are here now.

Please consider making a gift to the Annual Fund today. If you have questions about the Annual Fund, or other ways you can support YSD, please contact Debbie Ellinghaus, Senior Associate Director of Development and Alumni Affairs, at debbie.ellinghaus@yale.edu or (203) 432-4133.

Debbie Ellinghaus

Graduation 2008 Photos by Debbie Ellinghaus, Heidi Janssen ’08, Stephanie Ybarra ’08, and Melissa Trn ’08.

1 The class of 2008 waits patiently on old

campus for their processional

2 David Roberts ’08 and Anya Klepikov ’08 3 Ron Van Lieu (Faculty), Shoshana Cooper ’08,

and Bryce Pinkham ’08.

4 Heide Janssen ’08 and Caitlin Clouthier ’08

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