YSD Annual Magazine 2009

Annual Magazine of Yale School of Drama Winter 2009 –10

Yale school of Drama

Alumni Transforming Communities Sustainable Staging A Talent for Change Plus

Lewis Black: Pay Attention!

Report from the Institute for Music Theatre

Dear Alumni and Friends:

Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theatre

“The most complete creative community in the American theatre.”

That’s how my colleague, Edward Martenson, Chair of the Theater Management program, described the School of Drama and Repertory Theatre to me not long after he returned to the School in 2006. Ed’s a smart man, so I borrow his formulation all the time. The School and the Rep are unique in their breadth of student, faculty and alumni aesthetic interests, in their scope of training and production, and in their reach to constituencies throughout the world.

What excites me about this formulation is not that it posits the existence— or asserts the primacy of—a Yale Mafia; or that it confirms a prophetic triumphalism in the School’s admission processes or training methods. Rather, it describes the thrilling opportunities we have as artists and managers: here in New Haven—and wherever you are—students, faculty, staff, guest artists and alumni of YSD are engaged in virtually every question of importance to the future of our art form, to dramatic storytelling in media, to cultural policy, and to the way people live their lives on a daily basis.

Everywhere you look in this magazine—from Yale Cabaret to the National Endowment for the Arts—you’ll see leadership in action: members of our community employing the subversive intuitions and arguments of art to foster change, whether it’s personal, communal, or societal. You’ll see ideas that are impassioned and often visionary. Because of the talent and work ethic of so many people in our extended community, it is inspiring to me to see so many of them recognized publicly, and vitally important for our broader community to understand their work in action.

Truly, there is more news than we can fit in print. We can only describe a fraction of what’s actually going on here at the School and beyond. It is one kind of challenge to capture the excitement of how students work with each other in the Cabaret, at the School, and with guest artists at Yale Rep—the lessons are many, and often more personal than we can convey. It is another to describe the vital creativity of faculty and alumni around the world. Of that community of over 3000 souls, we simply cannot tell the whole story.

As the Chorus in Henry V enjoins the audience, “piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.” You can extrapolate from what you’ll read here to imagine an extraordinary cohort, collaborating with other artists and managers around the world, to illuminate the human condition, to ask challenging questions, and to work for change. That image and the stories herein remind me powerfully of the School’s mission—the exploration of our art form—and of its highest aim: to train leaders in every discipline of the theatre.

Enjoy your reading, and please keep in touch to let us know what you are up to.

Sincerely yours,

James Bundy

James Bundy ’95 Dean, Artistic Director Victoria Nolan Deputy Dean/Managing Director Joan Channick ’89 Associate Dean

Yale School of Drama Leadership Council Neil A. Mazzella ’78, Council Chair Amy Aquino ’86 John Badham ’63, yc ’61 John Lee Beatty ’73 John B. Beinecke yc ’69 Clare Brinkley Sterling Brinkley yc ’74 Kate Burton ’82 Patricia Clarkson ’85 Tony Converse yc ’57 Sue Ann Gilfillan Converse ’55 Peggy Cowles ’65 Trip M. Cullman III ’02, yc ’97 Scott Delman yc ’82 Michael Diamond ’90 Polly Draper ’80, yc ’77 Charles S. Dutton ’83 Heidi Ettinger ’76 Marc Flanagan ’70 Donald P. Granger, Jr. yc ’85 David Marshall Grant ’78 Ruth Hendel, Producer Catherine MacNeil Hollinger ’86 Asaad Kelada ’64 Sasha Emerson Levin ’84 Mark Linn-Baker ’79, yc ’76 Sarah Long ’92, ’85 yc Elizabeth Margid ’91, yc ’82 Drew McCoy David Milch yc ’66 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

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

On the Cover

Andrew Kelsey ’11, Luke Robertson ’09, Erica Sullivan ’09, Max Moore ’11, Will Connolly ’10, Rachel Spencer ’10 and Alexandra Henrikson ’11 in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet directed by Christopher Mirto ’10, adapted by Mirto and Brian Valencia ’10.

Contents

Winter 2009–10

12 26

Departments

28 18

Features 12 Playing the Neighborhood: YSD Alumni Use Theatre to Transform Communities

By Ryan Davis ’11 and Matt Cornish ’09

18 A Talent for Change

By Tom Sellar ’97, ’03 dfa (Faculty)

22 Sustainable Staging … Thoughts on “Greening” the Theatre

By Matthew Welander ’09 and Jim Simpson ’81

26 Lewis Black: Pay Attention!

By Kristina Corcoran Williams ’09

28 They Write the Songs: Yale Institute for Music Theatre

By Jason Fitzgerald ’08 and Barry Jay Kaplan

On York Street

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3 Guest Lecturers Light Up Rep Lounge 4 New Leadership for New Theatre 4 Off York Street: Memory Lane, Plus Samovar 5 Theater receives TMU Grant 6 The Commedia Project 6 A New Paradigm in Design Training 7 Recognizing Ruth Feldman 7 Off York Street: Obama-Inspired Drama 8 Super Librarian Takes Off Her Cape 8 Extreme Makeover at The UT 8 Off York Street: Rocco Landesman Heads the NEA

Faculty News

9 A Major Player’s Take on a New Role 10 My Favorite Teacher 10 Another Extraordinary Accomplishment for Ben Sammler 11 Paula Vogel Pays It Forward

In Review 30 New York Holiday Party 31 West Coast Alumni Party 32 Yale Repertory Theatre 2008–09 Season 34 Yale School of Drama 2008–09 Season 36 Yale Cabaret 2008–09 Season

Alumni News

38 Graduation Prizes, Fellowships and Scholarships 40 Alumni and Faculty Honors and Awards 43 In Memoriam 46 Bookshelf 48 The Art of Giving 50 Alumni Notes 72 Contributors

Dear Friends: It’s been a green year. The weather since last spring has been rain rain rain—bad for tomatoes but great for the grass. On the few sunny days we had, it was a pleasure to walk my dog through the New Haven Green on my way to School of Drama. Thinking about how lush and gorgeous it was outside wasn’t much of a leap to thinking about the Green movement and saving the planet and working for others and wondering how we in the theatre can do things to make a difference in the world.

At the Magazine, we got to thinking that this might be a theme to follow, to poke our heads out from the figurative red velvet curtain of Theatre, and take a look at the world outside.

A lot of our alumni apparently have been thinking along the same lines. As you’ll read in the article “Sustainable Staging,” Jim Simpson and Carol Ostrow, the hands-on artistic and producing directors of The Flea Theatre in Lower Manhattan, are all about reducing the size of their carbon footprint while continuing to produce theatre in New York City. In the same article Matt Welander gives specific technical tips about how theatres in America and Europe are going green. Other alumni are giving theatre back to their communities, taking the play off the stage and into the neighborhood: The 52nd Street Project, Chicago’s Albany Park Theatre Project, the Cornerstone Theatre all bring together the people in their neighborhoods to create and produce theatre of, by and for those people. Others—Jane Kaczmarek, Jill Eikenberry, Jim McLaren—use their sustainable celebrity to raise awareness and money for important causes that energize and empower those who need it most.

This has also been a year of belt tightening and the kind of creativity that happens when funds are limited but imagination is endless. It’s the kind of situation that goes along with conserving resources, or using them in ways that stretch their natural capabilities and this applies to imagination as well.

We might call the decade to come the Greening of the Imagination. In that way, we can make sure the theatre itself is a sustainable resource.

annual MAGAZINE YALE SCHOOL OF DRAMA Winter 2009–10, Vol. LIV

Editorial Staff Deborah S. Berman Editor Debbie A. Ellinghaus Managing Editor Jason Fitzgerald ’08 dfa Associate Managing Editor Barry Jay Kaplan Associate Editor Matt Cornish ’09 Associate Editor Susan Kim ’11 Assistant Editor Sue Clark Editorial Coordinator Jennifer Nelson Copy Editor

Contributors Maya Cantu ’10 Walter Byongsok Chon ’10 Snehal Desai ’08 Anne Erbe ’11 Alex Grennan ’06 Ali Pour Issa ’11 Colin Mannex ’10 Christopher Mirto ’10 Jorge J. Rodriguez ’10 Tom Sellar ’97, dfa ’03 (Faculty) Jennifer L. Shaw ’09 Jim Simpson ’81 Matthew Welander ’10 Krista Corcoran Williams ’09

Design Jack Design, jackdesignstudio.com

Deborah S. Berman Corrections We apologize for last year’s misidentification of Barbara Hauptman ’73 (page 16) and Austin Jones ’99 (page 31). We also want to recognize Donald Holder ’86 for his 2008 Tony Award® for Best Lighting Design of a Musical (South Pacific), which was inadvertently omitted.

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YSD 2009–10

On York Street

News fromYale School of Drama

Guest Lecturers Light Up Rep Lounge Seven professionals from Broadway and Hollywood, many of them alumni of the School of Drama or the University, took center stage in Yale Repertory Theatre’s basement lounge last winter to share advice, anecdotes, and their inspiring artistry.

Scheduled over a period of six weeks, the informal talks stressed YSD students’ professional development after they leave Yale.

The first speaker was Nick Pepper ’01, Director of Current Programming at ABC Entertainment, who came in mid-January.

He said that the storytelling skills he learned at YSD have served him well in Hollywood.

Pepper not only invited students to friend him on Facebook, but also to send scripts and meet with him in Los Angeles.

Tony Award-winning dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones spoke in early February.

He encouraged students to strive for purity of artistic expression. (Jones also received an honorary DFA from Yale University at commencement this year.)

Director and playwright George C. Wolfe, and lyricist Susan Birkenhead, appeared a week later in tandem with the YSD thesis production of their musical Jelly’s Last Jam, directed by Patricia McGregor ’09. The two artists brought a dynamic yin and yang of competing energies: Wolfe bluntly candid,

Emmy Award ®-winning television producer and writer David Milch ’66 yc. Photo by Deborah Berman.

Nick Pepper ’01, ABC Entertainment’s Director of Current Programming. Photo by Deborah Berman.

Birkenhead calmly restrained. Wolfe advised young artists not to fear confrontation with collaborators when working toward a shared vision. Such conflict, he said, involves “not two weak people surrendering, but two astonishing people colliding; something emerges above them both.”

The following week the featured guest was OBIE Award-winner Roger Guenveur Smith ’83, known for his solo theatre piece The Huey P. Newton Story, and his work in such films as Do the Right Thing. Smith spoke of the challenges and rewards of solo performance, and of creating work “that resonates with the reality of who I am, particularly in this place called America.”

Writer, director, and producer David Milch ’66 yc, talked to students in February.

YSD 2009–10

Co-creator of NYPD Blue, Milch spoke with humor and frankness, describing his victory over drug addiction and urging young artists to write personally meaningful stories.

The following week, producer Tom Jacobson ’75 yc, former co-President of Paramount Pictures, related how making films as a Yale undergraduate helped launch his career. He reminded listeners that, given the variables of luck and chance, success is often based on a series of thoughtful decisions.

As YSD students move on to careers in theatre and film, they will remember such words of experience and encouragement, and hopefully return to New Haven to share some of their own.

Maya Cantu ’10

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On York Street New Leadership for New Theatre Yale Repertory Theatre welcomes its new Literary Manager, Amy Boratko ’06. The position was created this year to support the Yale Center for New Theatre, established in 2008 by a $2.85 million gift from the Robina Foundation.

With a staggering 17 Amy Boratko ’06 new projects currently under commission and unprecedented funding in place to develop them, Boratko brings the extra elbow grease needed to help Dean/Artistic Director James Bundy ’95 and Associate Artistic Director Jennifer Kiger

transform this new material into groundbreaking plays and productions. “We needed more boots on the ground scouting new talent, more people supporting this program,” reflects Boratko.

Boratko and husband Alex Speiser moved to New Haven in 2003. After graduating from the Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism Department, she spent two seasons in the fellowship position she inaugurated—Artistic Coordinator for Yale Repertory Theatre— where she assisted in season planning, script reading, and the nitty-gritty of line producing. She describes the job as a “crash course in the dramaturg as artistic producer…really fleshing out what that is.”

On a given day in her new, expanded role, Boratko might find herself doing anything from arranging a studio recording of a musical-in-progress, to planning a workshop

in New York City, to advising commissioned playwrights—from brand-new writers to established theatre luminaries—on evolving drafts. Eclecticism is built into the job description: “Our mission is to develop according to the needs of our playwrights,” Amy says. “So at this point, we don’t have a set structure of how we develop new plays.

Instead, we listen to our artists and do whatever we can to give them exactly what they need.”

Although the development track at the Center is highly individualized, Boratko ultimately has her eye on building a holistic learning community, where “commissioned writers can all feed off each other’s creativity and feed off the creativity of the school…making connections between Yale Center for New Theatre, Yale School of Drama, and Yale Rep.” Anne Erbe ’11

Off York Street Memory Lane, Plus Samovar: A Three Sisters Cast Remembers Its Alma Mater Filling out the cast of a major new production of Three Sisters, which opened February 2009 at the Classical Theatre of Harlem, were a surprising number of Yale School of Drama alumni: Reg E. Cathey ’81 (Chebutykin), Phillip Christian ’94 (Solyony), Billy Eugene Jones ’03 (as Andrey), Sabrina LeBeauf ’83 (Olga), Roger Guenveur Smith ’83 (Vershinin), Amanda Mason Warren ’08 (Masha), as well as Carmen de Lavallade (Former Faculty) as Anfisa.

After the closing performance, four of these performers gathered in the lobby, where reminiscences about their days at Yale flowed like tea in Moscow. Representing over three decades of Drama School history, their conversation revealed just how dynamic that history is, each generation setting the standards for those that follow. Smith began by telling de Lavallade, whose celebrated career includes not only her years with the Alvin Ailey Dance Company and the Metropolitan Opera, but also with Yale Repertory Theatre, “I had a poster of you in Midsummer Night’s Dream before I even dreamed of going to Yale.” De Lavallade, who was a choreographer, faculty member, and performer-in-residence at Yale in the 1970s, spoke fondly of that production before sharing her own stories. Christian chimed in, remembering, as a student, watching Reg Cathey in Suzan-Lori Parks’ The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World on the Yale Repertory Theatre stage.

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YSD 2009–10

Warren, the newest member of the alumni family, acknowledged feeling deeply privileged at the company she was keeping.

As Masha, Warren may not have made it to Moscow, but the success of the cast in Three Sisters bodes well for the continuing future of School of Drama actors.

Jason Fitzgerald ’08

Roger Guenveur Smith ’83, Carmen de Lavallade (Former Faculty), Amanda Warren ’08 and Phillip Christian ’94. Photo by Jason Fitzgerald ’08.

News from Yale School of Drama

Theater receives TMU Grant

TMU’s generosity also allows Theater to bring artists and scholars to New Haven for one-week residencies, engaging School of Drama students through play readings, lectures, symposia, and master classes. Theater has already brought two international scholars to the School with TMU’s help.

Andrea Tompa, a theatre critic and research-

Thanks to the work of hundreds of Yale School of Drama students and faculty throughout its 40-year history, Theater magazine stands as a preeminent force in the field of theatre scholarship and research. Editor-in-Chief Tom Sellar ’97, dfa ’03 (Faculty) will now have the chance to further Theater’s stellar repu“… with little written in English about these tation of international coverage with productions, they remain mere rumors in the the help of a $30,000 grant from the international arts community, whereas they Trust for Mutual Understanding (TMU). should be widely acknowledged, debated, The grant enables artists and scholars from the U.S. and Eastern Europe to coland studied.” Tom Sellar laborate, allowing Theater staff to travel to Georgia, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, er specializing in Hungarian and Romanian and Ukraine. The result is a five-issue theatre, exposed students to the works project documenting the current state of of directors Árpád Schilling and Attila Eastern European performance art.

Vidnyánszky, among others. Ivan Medenica, Sellar explains why such research and a Serbian scholar, discussed theatre in exchange is crucial: “While the sweeping Belgrade, including the work of playwright political and cultural transformations in Biljana Srbljanovíc and Eastern Europe have been, choreographer and director and continue to be, docuSonja Vukícevíc. mented by American jourTheater begins its 40th nalists and academics, the year of publication with a resulting cultural identity volume of feature articles, crises have not. Theatre interviews, and panel disartists have responded to cussions with acclaimed these amazing changes with choreographers and dancsome of the most deeply ers from around the world. compelling, groundbreaking Andrea Tompa, theatre critic This special issue has productions ever created. and editor of the Hungarian been created in collaboraBut with little written monthly theatre publication tion with Yale’s World in English about these Színház, giving a lecture Performance Project. productions, they remain on new theatre in Hungary Theater is published three mere rumors in the interand Romania at Yale School times a year. More informanational arts community, of Drama, Spring 2008. tion can be found at www. whereas they should be theatermagazine.org.

Photo by Tom Sellar ’97, widely acknowledged, deAlex Grennan ’06 bated, and studied.” dfa ’03 (Faculty)

“Groundbreaker”

Adding another feather to Yale Repertory Theatre’s cap, Artistic Director and YSD Dean James Bundy ’95, pictured here with Deputy DeanVictoria Nolan, was honored by the Arts Council of Greater New Haven as an artistic “groundbreaker.” Among the achievements cited by the Arts Council were Yale Rep’s WILL POWER! and accessibility programs, and the more than 20 world, American, and regional premieres—including two Pulitzer Prize finalists—produced during Bundy’s tenure. Bundy received his award on December 5, 2008, at a luncheon sponsored by the Coordinated Financial Resources/Chamber Insurance Trust and Ruth Lapides. Photo courtesy of Judith Rosenthal.

YSD 2009–10

Off York Street

Sasha Emerson ’84 hosted graduating students of the Acting Department and a panel of industry professionals at her home this past May. Pictured: David B. Woodside ’96, Paris Barclay, Joseph Middleton, Drew McCoy and Jane Kaczmarek ’82.

Photo by Iris O’Brien ’09.

Long-term Service Awards Another year, another celebration of staff who have reached milestone years of service at Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theatre. This year’s Long-Term Service Recognition Awards were handed out on January 12, 2009 in the Yale Rep Lounge. Recipients, from left to right, standing to kneeling, were: Richard Abrams (10 years), Kathy Driscoll (5 years), Paul Bozzi (5 years), Traci Baldini (15 years), Janna Ellis (5 years), Pamela Jordan (40 years), David Schrader (20 years), Eric Sparks (15 years), Steven Padla (5 years), Ruth Feldman (5 years), and Maria Leveton (30 years). Photo by Deborah Berman.

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On York Street

News from Yale School of Drama

The Commedia Project: from York Street to New York Even Maybe Tammy, a commedia created in class by third-year acting students taught by Christopher Bayes (Faculty), was a cottage “production,” featuring paper butterflies on sticks, a tattered curtain, costumes assembled from the actors’ closets, a piano, a drum set, and a set of stunning masks.

Frances Black ’09 became the show’s biggest fan. “I felt there was nothing more exhilarating than seeing a show wake up an audience both physically—through laughter and tears—and emotionally—through creative and sensitive storytelling,” she says. “It reminded me of the unique offerings theatre has in the crowded and competitive entertainment marketplace.”

A week after the show closed in New Haven, Frances met with Chris Bayes and Tammy actors Carter Gill ’09 and Barrett O’Brien ’09 and they decided the show had to have a longer life. “We were all committed to this goal,” Frances says though she, Barrett and Carter were short on time and energy due to their upcoming graduation.

Chris was all for it too but didn’t want to set a precedent that every year the commedia project cast would have an expectation of transferring to New York. “It’s all up to you to make it happen,” he told them.

(from left) Luke Robertson ’09, SiSi Johnson ’09, Alex Teichera ’09, Barrett O’Brien ’09, Teresa Lim ’09, Erica Sullivan ’09, Laura Esposito ’09, Eric Bryant ’09, Christopher McFarland ’09 The triumvirate of Frances, Carter and Barrett used their enthusiasm to get others at Yale involved. “The YSD faculty and staff came together to support us,” Frances says. “Vicki Nolan (Deputy Dean) got us insured by Yale. Joan Channick ’89 (Associate Dean) helped us with our contracts. Steven Padla (Senior Associate Director of Communications) advised us on press strategy. Maggie Elliott (Marketing and Publications Manager) designed the postcard announcement of the show. Ben Sammler ’74 (Faculty) let us borrow the sets, properties and costumes.”

For a venue, Catherine Sheehy ’92 (Faculty) suggested Frances contact Jim Simpson ’81 and Carol Ostrow ’80 at The Flea Theatre in downtown New York. “The space was perfect for us,” Frances says but money had to be raised if the production was going to move to a theatre. Frances’ family lent the production enough to begin the process. Chris brought in actor Jeff Binder who became the first associate producer and investor, along with Cade Massey (Faculty).

The remaining funds were raised from YSD faculty and friends and families of the cast.

At The Flea, Carol and Jim were a great help. “They did everything they could to make our show a success,” Frances says, “including adjusting the calendar to fit us in and providing us with marketing ideas and support. All 11 original cast members signed on to perform at The Flea from June 3–13, just weeks after our graduation.”

Opening Night played to a sold-out crowd.

Broadway producers came. YSD alumni came. The venture was an artistic triumph and even turned a profit. (Frances’ family was paid back in full.) The success of Even Maybe Tammy proved that the competitive marketplace always has room for another crowd-pleaser.

Barry Jay Kaplan

A New Paradigm in Design Training

Farewell to Claire Shindler

Victoria Nolan (Faculty), Claire Shindler, Joan Channick ’89 (Faculty), and Edward Martenson (Faculty) at Claire’s retirement party. At the party, alumni, faculty, and students praised Claire for her kindness, calmness, and organizational skills. “She was a mother away from home.

Her retirement will leave a void in the department,” said Channick, who met Shindler when interviewing for the Theater Management program 23 years ago. Claire worked as the senior administrative assistant for the Theater Management Department for 24 years. “Don’t worry,” Claire said, promising, “I’ll still be around.” Photo by Susan Kim ’11.

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YSD 2009–10

In summer 2009, Yale School of Drama inaugurated the first annual Summer Design Intensive, composed of summer courses that augment regular classroom instruction and production experience. Courses were offered in hand and computer drafting, drawing, rendering and water coloring, and digital imaging. Stephen Strawbridge ’83 (Faculty), Design Department Co-Chair, explains that “the demands of our production calendar and the increasing complexity of computer software such as Photoshop and VectorWorks have made it more and more difficult for us to address questions about drafting or rendering techniques in the context of class projects or production work. To have the time to focus on these skills without production deadlines or other pressures was a real benefit to the students.” According to Dean James Bundy ’95, the Design Intensive “will help better prepare students for professional work in the field.” The Design Intensive was partially underwritten

by Heidi Ettinger ’76, a scenic designer who has many won many awards for her outstanding work, including several Tony Awards®.

Matt Cornish ’09

News from Yale School of Drama

Recognizing Ruth Feldman Ruth Feldman, Director of Education and Accessibility Services at Yale Repertory Theatre, won not one, but two awards this past year that recognized her outstanding service to the New Haven community.

In October, Feldman received the Raymond E. Baldwin Award, established in 1983 by the Connecticut Board of Education and Services for the Blind (BESB) for “outstanding contributions made for the betterment and enrichment of the lives of visually impaired and blind persons in Connecticut.” Under Feldman’s direction, Yale Rep now offers Ruth Feldman open-captioned and audio-described performances, large print and Braille programs, and a direct TTY (teletype) line to the Box Office.

At the Ivy-Elm Awards, established to promote ties between the city of New Haven and Yale University, Feldman was praised for her work on WILL POWER!, an education initiative that connects local schools’ curricula to a Yale Rep production; and the Dwight/ Edgewood Project, an after-school playwriting collaboration between School of Drama students and local middle school students. In both these programs, Feldman’s goal is to pass down an appreciation of theatre to the next generation, providing access to the arts for those who otherwise might not have the opportunity.

Matt Cornish ’09

Save the Date!

Yale School of Drama 2010 Alumni Events

West Coast Alumni Party Sunday, March 14, 2010 At the home of Darlene Kaplan yc ’78 and Steve Zuckerman ’74

Off York Street

Wen-Chuan Dai ’08 yc, Tom E. Russell ’07, and Tiffany Rachelle Stewart ’07 in “The Obama Interviews,” a scene in Obama Drama adapted by Tiffany and directed

by Nelson T. Eusebio III ’07. Photo by Deidre Schoo.

Obama-Inspired Drama With unpredictable plot twists leading to a triumphant climax, the 2008 presidential election was a tense and prolonged theatre of politics. Is it any surprise, then, that its protagonist has inspired passionate political theatre?

Obama Drama, consisting of seven short plays, was first performed at New York’s Access Theatre, October 23–25, and then as a celebratory encore at the 45th Street Theatre, January 15–17. The show was jointly conceived in the summer of 2008 by Nastaran Ahmadi ’06, Nelson Eusebio ’07, and Kelly L. Miller, as the inaugural production of Creative Destruction (of which Miller and Eusebio are co-artistic directors). The playwrights were commissioned to “explore an aspect of [Barack] Obama in which they were interested.” Eusebio

Barack Obama’s “generosity of spirit and sense of community”

were the guiding principles for Obama Drama... says that the goals for his team went beyond preaching or cheerleading, striving instead for a more complex conversation—“A Theatrical Town Hall” delving into Obama’s self-proclaimed role as a “reflector” of citizens’ ideals and concerns.

The large cast and creative team were studded with YSD alumni, including four playwrights—Ahmadi, Sarita Covington ’07, Zakiyyah Alexander ’02, and Tiffany Rachelle Stewart ’07. Ashley Bryant ’08 and Tom E. Russell ’07 were among the show’s actors, while Ji-Youn Chang ’08 designed lights, Kate Cusack ’06 costumes, and Sharath Patel ’06 sound. As Eusebio remarks, “Part of the reason you go to Yale School of Drama is to walk out with great collaborative people to work with.”

Barack Obama’s “generosity of spirit and sense of community” were the guiding principles for Obama Drama, Eusebio said, though Obama is a character in only one of the plays. The show’s style varied from dance and musical theatre to comedy and spoken word poetry. Eusebio also notes that, during the show’s January remount, some of the pieces drew relieved laughter instead of the goose bumps they raised before the election.

Maya Cantu ’10

YSD 2009–10

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On York Street Super Librarian Takes Off Her Cape: Pam Jordan Retires After 42 Years Pam Jordan’s long reign as Yale School of Drama’s personal librarian has drawn to a close. During her fortythree year tenure, Pam, dressed perennially in purple, watched 2,145 students graduate, and chances are she remembers most of their names. On Monday, May 22nd, the YSD community—faculty, staff, current and past students—came together to celebrate Pam’s work and her impending retirement. In the new Study at Yale Hotel Dean James Bundy ’95 and Pam on Chapel Street, guests munched on purple M&Ms, Jordan. Photo by Maggie Elliott. sipped purple champagne, and listened as University Librarian Alice Prochaska and Dean James Bundy ’95 sang Pam’s praises.

For these forty-three years, Pam has been a tremendous resource for the community, pointing the way to the books, articles, and other materials students needed to enlighten their thinking and deepen their art. More than that, she provided students with a home. As Dean Bundy noted in his speech, Pam allowed students to eat, drink, sleep, and hold raucous meetings amid the stacks of books and magazines. Actors do not tend to dedicate their performances to librarians, but Charles “Roc” Dutton ’83 dedicated his performance as Willy Loman, in this year’s production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman at Yale Repertory Theatre, to the one and only Pam. There was also a special surprise at the retirement party: Thanks to more than two-hundred (and counting) contributors, Dean Bundy announced that the School of Drama has permanently endowed the Pamela Jordan Scholarship, a fund that will improve the life of a student at the School of Drama each year. If you are interested in making a donation to the Scholarship, please call the Development office at (203) 432-7559.

Matt Cornish ’09

Extreme Makeover at The UT The Yale School of Drama Library closed its doors on the third floor of the University Theatre for the final time in August of 2008.

A construction crew moved in and the renovation was completed a year later. About onethird of the area is now a twenty-four-hour lounge, complete with tables and chairs, soft

The new student lounge on the third floor of the University Theatre.

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chairs for napping, a kitchenette, computer stations, a separate conference room, and a long-wished for amenity: a rest room.

Perhaps the biggest adjustment will be for Deputy Dean and Yale Repertory Theatre Managing Director Victoria Nolan (Faculty).

Though she moves from her small secondfloor digs into a spacious office with big windows on the new third floor, she says: “I’ll miss my corner office on the second floor. It’s been home to Yale Rep managing directors for more than 40 years.” Associate Dean Joan Channick ’89 will also move to new offices on the third floor, as will Theatre Management Chair Edward Martenson (Faculty). The Technical Design and Production faculty, staff, and students will expand their office space to the entire second floor.

All these changes have combined to make the UT a more accessible, workable, and vibrant space.

Matt Cornish ’09

YSD 2009–10

Off York Street Rocco Landesman Heads the NEA On May 13, Rocco Landesman ’72 mfa, ’76 dfa, the President of Jujamcyn Productions, was appointed by President Obama to be the new Chair of the National Endowment of the Arts. In his years as a Tony Award–winning producer, Landesman was responsible for such ground-breaking shows as Angels in America, The Producers, Grey Gardens, Spring Awakening, Jelly’s Last Jam and the plays of August Wilson. At Yale School

Rocco Landesman ’72 mfa, ’76 dfa of Drama, he was an assistant professor of Dramatic Literature, 1972 to 1976, and the editor of Theater magazine, 1972 to 1977. A long time advocate for the arts, he sits on the boards of the Municipal Arts Society, The Actors Fund and the Educational Foundation of America.

In the New York Times announcement of Landesman’s appointment, playwright Tony Kushner was quoted as saying that it was “potentially the best news the arts community in the United States has had since the birth of Walt Whitman.”

Though the Broadway scene will certainly miss him, Landesman is expected to be a forceful and enthusiastic advocate for the arts. In a recent speech he gave to a group of arts grant-makers, he exuded great optimism as he coined the new NEA motto: “Art works.”

Barry Jay Kaplan

Faculty News A Major Player’s Take on a New Role Joan Channick “I hope students will come talk to me about anything,” Joan Channick ’89 said in a recent interview. And she means it! In February 2009, Channick’s title went from Adjunct Professor of Theatre Management to Associate Dean of Yale School of Drama.

Her role, a new one for the School, will focus on YSD’s administrative and strategic affairs, with an emphasis on student life. Because of the breadth of her job she has been actively “listening, learning, and re-learning” since she started full-time.

Channick brings with her a wealth of experience and professional connections she hopes will help students’ professional development. She has a strong background in teaching (she has taught her popular course “Law and the Arts” at Yale since 1989), as a lawyer in Boston, and in management, as Associate Managing Director of Center Stage in Baltimore and, until this year, Managing Director of Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven. She also served as Managing Director of Theatre Communications Group (TCG), and if you want an opinion on lighting design—she started out as a lighting designer in high school!

Although Channick has been a professor at Yale for twenty years, she is thrilled to work with students outside the Theater Management department and is prepared to embrace the challenges of her new position, with high hopes for future innovations. “We should be leaders of thought in our field,” she says. For Channick, this idea unfolds on a global level: “We live in a world that is simultaneously interconnected and fractured. The arts—and live theatre in particular—can be extraordinarily powerful in helping people find shared values, mutual respect, and understanding in the midst of differences.”

She recognizes that Yale University is a global school and feels it imperative that Yale School of Drama have a similar view. In her ideal world, each School of Drama student would have the opportunity for an international experience while they are enrolled.

While at TCG, she was also the Director of the International Theatre Institute (ITI), aggressively engaging in a significant amount of international connections and relationships. For Channick, international exchange is the wave of the future for theatre artists who want to continue to learn and expand their horizons.

In the past few months, Channick has been working closely with Dean James Bundy ’95 and Deputy Dean Victoria Nolan (Faculty) to develop other long-term strategies for the school. Channick is on the financial aid committee and on the board of Yale Cabaret. She is also the Title IX Officer for the School, promoting diversity and considering discrimination concerns.

After the first months in her new role, it has become clear that Channick will step in to take care of the little things students need help with, while simultaneously sculpting a future with larger possibilities. She loves to listen and has great stories to tell; she is determined to keep learning and working to improve Yale School of Drama as it leads the next generation of theatre artists into the future.

Christopher Mirto ’10

Yale Repertory Theatre 2009– 2010 Season The Master Builder

By Henrik Ibsen Translated by Paul Walsh (Faculty) Directed by Evan Yionoulis ’85, ’82 yc (Faculty) September 18–October 10, 2009 Eclipsed

By Danai Gurira Directed by Liesl Tommy October 23–November 14, 2009 POP! Book and lyrics by Maggie-Kate Coleman Music by Anna K. Jacobs Directed by Mark Brokaw ’86 November 27–December 19, 2009 Compulsion

By Rinne Groff Directed by Oskar Eustis Co-production with The Public Theater and Berkeley Repertory Theatre January 29–February 28, 2010 The Servant of Two Masters

By Carlo Goldoni Adapted by Constance Congdon From a translation by Christina Sibul Directed by Christopher Bayes (Faculty) March 12–April 3, 2010 Battle of Black and Dogs

By Bernard-Marie Koltès Translated by Michaël Attias Directed by Robert Woodruff (Faculty) April 16–May 8, 2010

Joan Channick ’89. Photo by Maggie Elliott.

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Faculty News My Favorite Teacher: Elinor Fuchs Earns Betty Jean Jones Award If you’ve ever discussed plays with recent graduates of Yale School of Drama’s Department of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism, you might have heard them referring to the plays as “landscapes,” or watched them hunt for evidence of “theatricalism,” or been scolded for thinking too “characterologically.” Or they might have described a semi-religious ritual that involves molding the play into a ball, holding it out at arm’s length, and “squinting” at it. The unique language these dramaturgs share can be traced to a single source: Elinor Fuchs (Faculty), this year’s recipient of the 2009 Betty Jean Jones Award, a prestigious award for the teaching of American dramatic literature, facilitated by the American Theatre and Drama Society.

It is no exaggeration to say that since joining the Drama School faculty in 1994, Fuchs has changed the way her students think, talk, and write about the theatre.

After receiving this latest honor Fuchs reflected, “I think it’s the experience of every teacher to wonder, ‘Is this reaching anyone?’” She adds, “It’s rewarding, at this stage of my career, to be reminded that someone is listening.” Fuchs, who has also taught at Emory,

“There is something about the level of focus, interest, perceptiveness, and hard work of Yale Drama students that is unmatched.

The students make the work rewarding.” Elinor Fuchs Columbia, Harvard, and New York University, was particularly honored to be recognized for her work at the School of Drama. “There is something about the level of focus, interest, perceptiveness, and hard work of Yale Drama students that is unmatched. The students make the work rewarding.”

Fuchs was nominated for the award by her former students Mark Blankenship ’05, Joseph P. Cermatori ’08, Jacob Gallagher-Ross ’09, Miriam Felton-Danksy ’09, and Jason Fitzgerald ’08. Each of the students’ nominating letters spilled over with respect, gratitude, and love for their teacher and mentor. As Blankenship put it: “Perceptive, lively, and committed, Elinor Fuchs is the kind of professor that every student needs and no student forgets.”

Jason Fitzgerald ’08

Elinor Fuchs (Faculty). Photo courtesy of Elinor Fuchs.

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Ben Sammler ’74 (Faculty) delivers his acceptance speech at the 2009 USITT Annual Conference. Photo courtesy of USITT.

Another Extraordinary Accomplishment for Ben Sammler Ben Sammler ’74 (Faculty), Henry McCormick Professor (Adjunct) of Technical Design and Production, recently received the 2009 Distinguished Achievement Award in Technical Production from the United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT). USITT is an association of design, production, and technology professionals with about 3,800 members in the performing arts and entertainment industry. USITT began presenting its Distinguished Achievement Awards in 1998 to recognize the accomplishments of designers and technicians with established careers.

Award presenter Dennis Dorn ’72 praised Sammler for his leadership as creator of the Tech Expo at the USITT conference (a chance to demonstrate unique production elements and devices), editor of Technical Briefs, author of award-winning books, and mentor to hundreds of students during his long tenure at Yale School of Drama. “Ben’s remarkable achievement,” Dorn said, “is that his program offers students access to numerous professionals, as well as a network of alumni that numbers close to 300.”

Matt Cornish ’09

News from Yale School of Drama

Paula Vogel Pays It Forward Paula Vogel (Faculty) was at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in April to receive the Stephen and Christine Schwarzman Legacy Award for Excellence in Theater, given to a distinguished artist for lifetime achievement in theatre and unparalleled commitment to the future of the art form through teaching. Previous recipients of this prestigious award include Ming Cho Lee (Faculty) and Lloyd Richards (Former Dean).

Though pleased and flattered, Vogel admitted that it felt strange to receive a lifetime achievement award. “I’m honored,” she said, “but I’m also wondering: Has it already been a lifetime?”

Vogel certainly has been no stranger to playwriting awards: an Obie (1992), the Pulitzer Prize (1998), the Susan Blackburn Prize (1998) and the Award for Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters (2005). The Schwarzman Legacy Award differs from these in that it honors her career as a teacher: 20 years leading the graduate playwriting program and play festival at Brown University, and since 2008 as the Chair of the Playwriting Program at Yale School of Drama. Her teaching career is crowded with successful former students: MacArthur Fellow Sarah Ruhl (Yale Rep

“I’m honored, but I’m also wondering: Has it already been a lifetime?” Paula Vogel Associate Artist) and Pulitzer Prize winners Nilo Cruz (Former Faculty) and Lynn Nottage ’89 (Faculty), to name a few.

This latest award is a special mark of success because “it allows me to pay it forward,” Vogel explains. The award comes with a $10,000 scholarship in her name, which she presented to Christina Anderson ’10, one of her current MFA students. “I not only believe in Christina’s future, I believe in her in the present moment,” Vogel said. “She needs time in order to balance her plays in production with the plays she is currently writing.”

Christina Anderson ’10 and Paula Vogel (Faculty). Photo by Susan K. Shaffer.

Anderson is a two-time winner of the KCACTF Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award. Her play Inked Baby opened in March 2009 at Playwrights Horizons. She praises Vogel’s generosity as both teacher and mentor: “She has shown me that a writer’s legacy doesn’t exist solely on the page; it thrives among students, peers, and friends with whom you exchange thoughts, ideas, and laughter.” Receiving Vogel’s scholarship has practical as well as emotional repercussions for Anderson. “It’s really wonderful to receive recognition and support from someone I respect and admire,” she said. “This award will provide resources to complete several writing projects.”

And so, Paula Vogel’s idea of “paying it forward” has thus set a new creative journey in motion.

Barry Jay Kaplan

YSD 2009–10

Yale School of Drama 2009– 2010 Season Phèdre

By Jean Racine Directed by Christopher Mirto ’10 October 27–31, 2009 La Ronde

By Arthur Schnitzler Directed by Jesse Jou ’10 December 12–17, 2009 Orlando by Virginia Woolf Adapted by Sarah Ruhl (Yale Rep Associate Artist) Directed by Jen Wineman ’10 January 26–30, 2010

The Carlotta Festival of New Plays New works by graduating playwrights: Michael Mitnick ’10 Susan Stanton ’10 Kimberly Rosenstock ’10 May 7–15, 2010

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Albany Park Theater Project Chicago

52nd Street Project New York

Cornerstone Theater Company Los Angeles

(Clockwise from top) Albany Park Theatre Project’s production of God’s Work, photo courtesy of Albany Park Theatre Project.

Cornerstone Theater’s production of Touch the Water, photo by John Luker. Carol Ochs ’84 and the children of The 52nd Street Project at the Block Island Writing Retreat.

Photo courtesy of The 52nd Street Project.

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Throughout its history, Yale School of Drama has graduated artists and administrators who see theatre as a means of community growth, particularly when the artistic process is motivated by a concern for their neighborhood and the people who live there. Many of these artists are reaching out locally. From coast to coast, they can be found committing their talents and skills — honed and refined during their three years spent between York and Park Streets — to communities in need of artistic outlets to stimulate a sense of themselves and their world.

Playing the Neighborhood: YSD Alumni Use Theatre to Transform Communities

By Ryan Davis ’11 and Matt Cornish ’09

In

the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City, Carol Ochs ’84 runs the 52nd Street Project, introducing youngsters to the creative exuberance and sense of accomplishment that comes with writing for the stage. David Feiner ’95, at the Albany Park Theater Project on the northwest side of Chicago, works with young artists to stage vibrant productions that address teenagers’ lives as immigrant and working-class Americans. In the diverse metropolis of Los Angeles, Juliette Carrillo ’91, Shay Wafer ’89, and Geoff Korf ’91 have spent years working with Cornerstone Theater, weaving theatrical tapestries of civic exchange and shared understanding.

These alumni devote themselves to fostering the artistic expression of people who might otherwise never make theatre, and to eliciting and staging personal stories that capture the hardships and dreams of marginalized American communities. The result is mutual service: these communities find a platform for self-expression, and the theatre institution itself discovers unknown aesthetic traditions as well as the urgency and resonance of fresh ideas.

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A Creative Space…

Carol Ochs ’84.

Photo courtesy of The 52nd Street Project.

52nd Street Project With its brightly colored posters, lockersized cubbyholes, and kitchen in familial disarray, the Clubhouse at the 52nd Street Project looks like any afterschool care center. A look of pride glows from Executive Director Carol Ochs as she surveys the room. Then she puts on a hardhat, turns on her heel, and walks one block north to check on the construction site that will be the Project’s new, expanded home.

Founded in 1981 by MacArthur grantwinning actor and playwright Willie Reale, the 52nd Street Project is devoted to providing the kids of Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood with a creative space all their own. There, at-risk youths (ages 9 –18) learn how to put their zaniest imaginings on the stage, encouraged by a tireless staff and a group of loyal volunteer artists. (The list of staff and volunteers has included Billy Crudup, Peter Dinklage, Edie Falco, Frances McDormand ’82, Oliver Platt, and Wendy Wasserstein ’76).

The Project is set up to give each child individual guidance as he or she is introduced to the process of creating theatre. Budding playmakers advance through a series of nine week-long courses in dramatic writing, culminating in an out-of-town retreat to complete their plays. Each play is cast with professional actors and performed in an off-Broadway theatre. “The goal of the Project is to give these kids the

The 52nd Street Project was the inspiration for Yale School of Drama’s Dwight/Edgewood Project, a program with similar aims and methods. Run by Ruth Feldman (Staff), the Dwight/Edgewood Project matches School of Drama student mentors with children, all prospective playwrights, from area schools. After helping the middle-school students write plays, the School of Drama students perform them publicly for appreciative audiences.

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experience that something they create can be a success,” says Ochs, who was enticed to the Project by the prospect of fostering each child’s recognition of his or her potential. According to Ochs, that’s the allure the Project continues to have for its talented pool of volunteers: “It’s not about them. It’s about the kids.”

The allure was particularly strong for Reg Flowers ’93, who was Associate Artistic Director of the Project from 2005 until May 2009. At 52nd Street, Flowers ran the Teen Project, where adolescents tackle the challenges and rewards of performing Shakespeare, and every year take a production on tour. In the past, the teens have taken their shows to places like Lorgues, France and London, England. This year they’ll be performing King Lear for audiences in the arts community of Marfa, Texas.

After nearly 30 years of introducing inner-city kids to the stage, the 52nd Street Project is about to undergo a major expansion: The Clubhouse headquarters is slated to move into brand-new facilities.

“I never thought I’d be so involved in constructing a building,” laughs Ochs. “That was not part of my training at Yale School of Drama. Now I live and breathe it.” The new space, the result of a capital campaign that raised $19 million, will boast a computer lab, a study balcony to complement the Project’s academic mentoring initiative, rehearsal studios to increase the capacity of course offerings, and a theatre to showcase the kids’ works.

There are concerns that with the troubled economy and shrinking funding pool the Project will face difficulties meeting operation costs for the new space, as well as for the expanded programming. As of April 2009, roughly half a million dollars toward the endowment remained to be raised. Despite the uncertainties, Ochs remains optimistic. Definitely something of a “mama duck” at the Clubhouse, Ochs hopes to continue the Project’s teen employment and scholarship programs, initiatives that teach life lessons beyond the stage. The aim of this year’s fundraiser—a spring gala called Packing Peanuts: A Moving Experience with the 52nd Street Project—was to raise enough money to ensure that the big beautiful facility will have adequate financing.

Ochs maintains faith in the enthusiasm and generosity the Project inspires among Yale School of Drama students and alumni, who have a long history of donating their time as volunteers to the young artists who have gone through the Project’s curriculum. More importantly,

“

Ochs has faith in the immense treasure that the 52nd Street Project offers its community as a wellspring of confident and eager individuals—not to mention talented new artists who will contribute to the future of theatre.

Where Theatre Can Take Flight…

Albany Park Theater Project The children bounce around the stage to rippling electronic music, memorizing Bible verses. They rock back and forth, little balls of energy dressed alike in light gray clothing. But this is no light-hearted evocation of a gymnastic childhood; this is a play. Adapted by the teenage artists of the Albany Park Theater Project in Chicago from the life story of a fellow student, God’s Work is about child abuse and religious fanaticism. The children’s punishment if they fail the memorization exercise will come swiftly and surely from the hand of their father.

God’s Work opened in 2006 after two years of preparation, just one example of the theatre produced by APTP, where works of art also open previously unattainable horizons for the multicultural teens who tell their stories.

David Feiner yc ’95, ’90 and Laura Wiley ’94, the founders of Albany Park Theater Project, met while studying dramaturgy (Feiner) and theatre management (Wiley) at Yale School of Drama. “Laura introduced me to community-based theatre, to theatre for social change,” Feiner says. “Our partnership, the vision for APTP, was hatched in the old Drama School library.” They married in 1995, and since Wiley hailed from Chicago, the couple moved there after graduation. “When I left the School of Drama, I saw myself studying cultural anthropology, the role of local movements in the preservation of cultures,” Feiner says. He soon found that he enjoyed making work more than studying it. “Two weeks before starting a graduate program at the University of Chicago, I had a change of heart.”

Feiner and Wiley began the journey that resulted in APTP by looking for an artistic and personal residence in one of the many neighborhoods of Chicago. “We wanted to discover how we could be of the most use,” Feiner says. They established a number of principles to help them achieve their goals, the most important being permanence.

“With a long-term presence, the theatre could earn the authority to tell the stories of a community, to represent the world through the community’s eyes,” Feiner says. “Permanence would also enable the institution to make an enhanced impact beyond its art. Besides, we were nesters; we wanted a home.”

A number of their colleagues suggested Albany Park, in the northwest part of the city. Albany Park has traditionally been the first place many immigrants move to after coming to America. This culturally diverse community includes families from, among other places, Vietnam, Guatemala, and Poland, often living in the same apartment building—unlike the de facto segregation that often occurs in more established urban neighborhoods. There is also a high population of teenagers with little or no access to after-school programming or the

With a long-term presence, the theatre could earn the authority to tell the stories of a community, to represent the world through the community’s eyes ...

Permanence would also enable the institution to make an enhanced impact beyond its art.”

David Feiner ’95, ’90 YC, Albany Park Theater Project

arts. Feiner and Wiley spent nine months talking to parents, students, officials, and local police about the best ways to create a theatre for social change in the community. They also worked hard to raise money through grants and other solicitations: “We wanted this to be a real job, a way of making a living,” Feiner says. “We wanted to provide the community with well-trained professionals.” In 1997, they found a workable space to move into—an under-utilized field house building in Eugene Field Park—and Albany Park Theater Project was born.

Sadly, Laura Wiley ’94 passed away on June 18, 2007. Her memory and work continue on at APTP, where she retains the title of co-founder.

Today, their theatre ensemble boasts an audience of theatre lovers from all over the city, as well as from the neighborhood. APTP has staged 18 productions and roughly 60 performance pieces. Their budget has grown from $35,000 to $500,000. They have four yearround employees (two of whom are APTP alumni), with 55 artists on their payroll at the busiest times. They’ve hosted guest artists like Phelim McDermott of Improbable Theatre and David Rousseve of the REALITY dance company. Their designers also work for the Goodman, Steppenwolf, and Looking Glass theatre companies.

APTP offers free workshops year-round, attracting many students from the community. Teenagers typically spend between two and seven years as members of the ensemble, growing into a tight-knit, trusting community—though anybody can walk in and “play.” The teens who stay work with Feiner and professional designers, as they did with God’s Work, to develop a story, write the script, and stage their play. Actors are drawn from the ensemble of teens who have been involved with the process. Feiner strives to make APTP a place where, he says, “the greatest artists in Chicago and 15-year-old high school students can come together, giving one another the resources to tell stories on the stage in the best way they can dream up.”

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Though the theatrical work is essential, it community. Also shared by the trio is a feeling of isn’t the program’s only goal. “A couple of years restlessness. It is axiomatic that a theatre artist into APTP, kids began their senior year of high leads a nomadic life, but these artists’ itinerant school, so they started asking questions about existence derives from an eagerness to go where college,” Feiner says. “It would have been malthe work is needed. practice to give them a place to start dreamKorf shuttles between teaching as Head of ing, and then not help them to move on and Design at University of Washington School of continue their journey.” APTP’s program now Drama, designing productions at the Oregon includes college guidance, artistic retreats, and Shakespeare Festival, and working with Laura Wiley ’94 and David a book discussion group. The rate of college Cornerstone in Los Angeles. Wafer recently Feiner ’95 matriculation among their alumni is over six left her long-time post at Cornerstone to help times higher than the general population of open the new August Wilson Center for African Chicago’s public school system—and their American Culture in Pittsburgh, and to serve alumni are eight times more likely to graduate as its Vice President of Programs. Carrillo has from college once they get there. crisscrossed the country for the last year, directThis past summer, the students in APTP’s ing productions of Lydia, written by her close colensemble once again set about collecting material for a future produclaborator Octavio Solis (making a stop at the Yale Repertory Theatre tion, studying food and the role it plays in family life, culture, and for the East Coast premiere in spring 2009). Recently, Carillo returned society. They are looking for old recipes, and for stories of starvation, to her home base at Cornerstone in Los Angeles to stage a new play rationing, genocide, traditional agriculture, factory farms, and local that dramatizes local residents’ concerns about environmental justice restaurants. They’re also going to make jam, soup, and stew the same and the fate of the Los Angeles River. Cornerstone’s appeal for these way they make art—together. “We’re interested in food as a nexus alumni lies in the way it marries social responsibility, based on comof health, environment, economy, and human rights. We hope to munication and exchange, to the theatre’s inherent attraction to a humanize big, thorny issues through the rich, textured stories of indivariety of places, people, and stories. viduals,” Feiner says. As with God’s Work, this new endeavor promises The Cornerstone Theater Company was formed in 1986 by director to result in personal, charged theatre: a way for teens to transform Bill Rauch (Yale Repertory Theatre Associate Artist) and playwright themselves, and their community.

Alison Carey with the aim of engaging communities that traditionAs Feiner puts it, “theatre is the heart and soul of the project.” This ally want for a theatrical voice. Riding on a spirit of community-based focus is why APTP works so well. “When you’re talking about teens— work, Cornerstone spent its first five years traversing the country, and especially poor teens—of color, or undocumented immigrants, finding collaborators in 12 rural locales and adapting classics to you get a pervasive sense from them that they don’t matter, that serve as expressions of their unique concerns. In 1991, Cornerstone they’re insignificant. When you’re making a work of theatre, you’re united these various communities to create a musical adaptation engaged in creating a representation of the world as you see it. And of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, re-dubbed An Interstate Adventure, you get to stand on stage in front of an audience, who watch what which they produced in Washington, D.C. The Managing Director at you’ve created with rapt attention. What the kids come to see is that the time, Dean James Bundy ’95, who is still an Associate Artist of they’ve done something that has made a difference in someone’s life, the company, says that this work “helped me begin to think about the and in the community. It’s a game changer.” most immediate relationship that classic plays and artists could have with their audiences, about how one might create discoveries for a contemporary audience which are similar to the moments that the On the Road and In Local Neighborhoods… original audience might have experienced.”

At first, the company sought to collaborate with communities defined by the conventional terms of geographic and ethnic association.

“Make a difference in the community” might be the motto of the “Theatre is most effective if it has to do with a place and a people,” Cornerstone Theater Company. A sort of godfather among theatres Korf says, “a notion very much at the heart of the regional theatre.” doing community-based work, it has long been home to a number of Los Angeles was an ideal location in which to finally settle, thanks to Yale School of Drama alumni employing their theatrical talents in the its kaleidoscopic cultural perspectives, which provided the company service of others, including lighting designer Geoff Korf ’91; former with opportunities to team up with a number of under-represented Managing Director Shay Wafer ’89; and director Juliette Carrillo ’91. groups. Cornerstone has been able to develop vibrant, challenging It is no coincidence that the three spent their formative years as theatre in a variety of makeshift venues, while partnering with comtheatre professionals at Yale School of Drama under Lloyd Richards munities bound together by common neighborhoods, languages, (Former Dean), who believed in the theatre’s potential to speak for its faiths, and even occupations and birthdays.

Cornerstone Theater Company

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Over the years, Cornerstone has developed a singular method for its theatrical brand of community activism. Departing from traditional seasonal programming, the company’s ensemble tackles large questions that affect local communities with a series of plays produced over the span of several years. Each play has its genesis in the gatherings of the ensemble with constituents of the communities to be represented, meetings called Story Circles. Over the course of these Story Circles, members of the group relate personal experiences and ideas, and a playwright compiles material for the composition of a drama to be acted by the contributors.

Cornerstone is currently in the midst of its Justice Cycle, which examines the myriad complexities and social consequences of American law, raising questions about citizenship, reproductive rights, and environmental policy. Touch the Water: A River Play, by Julie Hébert, looks to the population of the industrially modified Los Angeles River for insight into the debate over modern society’s exploitation of nature. “It’s a tramp river,” director Carrillo explains. “Its path is always changing, bubbling up from underneath the concrete, and forcing people to reckon with its presence.” Created with local river residents, engineers, biologists, environmentalists, activists, advocates, and everyday citizens, the play continues Cornerstone’s tradition of redefining community beyond geographic classification.

In addition to its social aims, Cornerstone is committed to the continuing development of theatre artists. Exploring alternative funding resources to sustain the company’s undertakings, Wafer helped conceive and implement the Cornerstone Institute, an educational initiative designed to expose individuals to community-based theatre work. Realizing the value of communities as fonts from which to draw inspiration, the Institute, as Wafer describes it, “offers young artists and students practical experience with Cornerstone’s methods. For six weeks they go into the community and participate in a dialogue set up by the Cornerstone ensemble.”

Cornerstone consistently demands growth and excellence from its resident artistic team, and Korf is keenly aware of the ways Cornerstone has challenged him as an artist. “Grad school was significant, but Cornerstone has been equally significant in helping me shape my identity as a designer. It doesn’t allow you to live in a world of assumptions.” Very often his work with the company requires him to light unfamiliar venues or site-specific facilities ill-equipped for theatrical production. This can be frustrating but inspiring. “Limits propel artists to find expansive solutions,” he says. “And every new show at Cornerstone, no matter what, forces the designers to stay on their toes.”

From New York to Chicago to Los Angeles—and in many communities in between—Yale School of Drama alumni are helping to change the lives of people in their local neighborhoods. The number of budding playwrights, college graduates, and audiences served by these companies is impressive, lives have been touched and changed for the better. But statistics do not reflect the transformative aspect of companies like the 52nd Street Project, Albany Park Theater Project, and Cornerstone: the creation of live theatre with, by, and for their communities. Y

Over the course of these Story Circles, members of the group relate personal experiences and ideas, and a playwright compiles material for the composition of a drama to be acted by the contributors.

The ensemble rehearses for Cornerstone Theater’s Touch the Water: A River Play. Photos by Lane Barden.

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When Jane Kaczmarek ’82 was at a high point

Jane Kaczmarek ’82

A Ta l e n t f o r

Change School of Drama graduates say making a difference takes every skill they’ve got

By Tom Sellar ’97, DFA ’03 (Faculty)

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Photo courtesy of The Heart Truth, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

in her acting career, starring in the successful television series Malcolm in the Middle, she unexpectedly found a second calling: philanthropy.

Clothing and accessory designers were sending all kinds of freebies home to Kaczmarek, hoping the actress would be photographed at awards ceremonies wearing their creations. “It was an embarrassment of riches,” says Kaczmarek. “You name it: purses, gift bags, cosmetics, tuxes.”

Kaczmarek, who describes herself as “a Polish girl from the Midwest,” says she grew up in a frugal household “where nothing went to waste.” She worked her way through college and got through Yale School of Drama with full scholarships and a lot of hours working in the costume shop. “Yale opened up so many doors for me,” says the mother of three. “I had always worked as an actress, and suddenly when I was in my 40s I was in the spotlight. I realized I had to give back.” She was shocked to see how many of the gorgeous designer gowns she and her colleagues received were only worn once and tossed away. She had also recently read Marian Wright Edelman’s book The Measure of Our Success, and now the pragmatic Wisconsin native had an idea: what if these items had a life after the red carpet?

Suddenly an online auction was born. She worked her rolodex to procure other donations from friends and colleagues in television. The first auction sold one Dior gown for $50,000. (Jennifer Aniston had worn it to the Emmy Awards.) That translated into 50,000 inoculations for children in Africa. Kaczmarek was hooked. Today, her organization, called Clothes Off Our Backs, is a full-fledged foundation with a professional staff, its own website (clothesoffourbacks.org), and regular partnerships with companies like Honda and Swarowski.

Henry Winkler ’70

(Above) Henry Winkler ’70 with young fans of his Hank Zipzer book series.

(Left) Winkler ’70 reads from Hank Zipzer, the World’s Greatest Underachiever.

Photos courtesy of Henry Winkler.

Since its founding

in 2002, Clothes Off Our Backs has raised nearly $4 million for local, national, and international children’s charities, helping brutalized former child soldiers in Congo’s civil war, preventing hunger and malnutrition through the organization Feeding America, and supporting projects like Smile Train, which provides free cleft palate corrective surgery to children in developing nations.

Kaczmarek is one of a number of School of Drama graduates who have settled into parallel or second métiers in activism, social work, or philanthropy. Many are finding that trying to make a difference in their chosen area requires just as much creativity and discipline as they apply to other areas of their lives. And creativity is a critical resource for philanthropies, which face unprecedented challenges and struggle to reinvent their models in the 21st century.

For some grads, these projects fulfill a sense of social responsibility or offer a rewarding supplement to busy careers. For other School of Drama alumni, this work can become as absorbing, personally challenging, and creatively demanding as anything else they’ve done.

Whatever the time commitment, School of Drama alumni say these activities are a natural extension of their professional lives, requiring artistry, managerial discipline, strategic thinking, and sometimes personal courage.

“Being an actress helps me to reach out and affect people,” says Kaczmarek, who has even applied her costume shop skills to steaming, wrapping, and devising color combos to showcase the “celebrity finery” for auction. In her public awareness campaigns, she tries to communicate the urgency of children’s needs, “to grab you and make you think, just as I always wanted people to walk out of the theatre feeling moved.”

“Empathy is the greatest thing you get in training as an actress. You have to be able to empathize with people’s situations. The thought of being a mother not able to feed her children or pay her medical bills is horrifying—if I weren’t actively involved in helping I don’t think I could live in Hollywood.”

Many graduates

first identify with an issue or organization because of a personal connection. The actor and producer Henry Winkler ’70, well known for his stage and television roles, had long struggled in school with undiagnosed dyslexia. “I was 31 when my stepson was diagnosed with dyslexia,” Winkler says. “I was asking him questions about it, and I went ‘Wow, that’s me!’”

That realization set him on a new career path: Winkler can now add “best-selling children’s author” to his résumé. The series Hank Zipzer, the World’s Greatest Underachiever, which Winkler co-authors with Lin Oliver, has sold more than three million copies in the United States alone, with the seventeenth book in the series (Hank Zipzer: A Brand-New Me!) arriving in 2010. The disaster-prone young hero of the series—Henry “Hank” Zipzer—has to deal with learning challenges, a topic very close to the author’s heart.

Winkler has become an ardent advocate for those with learning disabilities, recently becoming the Youth Ambassador for the United Kingdom charity Dyslexia Action. “As soon as I knew I had it, I started talking about it. I just want to say ‘Look, here it is. Just because we learn differently, doesn’t mean we can’t succeed.’” These days he donates much of his time to philanthropic pursuits—particularly children’s charities. In 1990, Winkler and his wife Stacey were among six families who co-founded the Children’s Action Network. “The first thing we did was provide free immunizations across the country for

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Jill Eikenberry ’70.

Photo by Bennett Danaby/Patrick McMullen.

to read Hank Zipzer’s adventures to children’s audiences. Winkler recounts: “I tell the kids, ‘When I was sitting where you are now, in third, fourth, fifth grade, I was in the bottom 3% of the country academically. So don’t worry too much about how you learn. Figure out what your greatness is, dig it out, and give it to the world.’”

For Jill Eikenberry ’70, timing was everything. Two

Michael Tucker, Iris Dankner (chair of NYC Race for the Cure) and Jill Eikenberry ’70. Photo by Leslie Yerman. three-year old children. We also have a mentor program in L.A., an organization that feeds 9,000–10,000 children a year after school,” he says.

Winkler also works with the Teaching Awards Trust in the UK, which recently instituted the “Henry Winkler Teaching Award for Special Needs” for teachers who have made a difference in special needs education. “Teaching is one of the most difficult professions at this moment. Teachers have to be both parent and disciplinarian…we ask a lot of them.” Winkler and co-author Oliver also work with the Young Storytellers Foundation, an organization dedicated to developing literacy, self-expression, and self-esteem in elementary school children. The co-authors travel to schools across the United States

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years after Eikenberry received a breast cancer diagnosis in 1986, filmmaker Linda Otto has asked her to co-produce a prime-time television documentary on the disease. Otto had breast cancer too. Eikenberry had been diagnosed between the pilot and the second episode of the hit series L.A. Law. Now she was a TV star. Going public required a leap of faith. “I had been very secretive about my cancer,” she says. “I didn’t want people to think of me as ‘the actress with cancer.’ But Linda got to me at the right time. I knew I had to go public.”

Eikenberry interviewed hundreds of survivors and focused on the emotional issues surrounding breast cancer. In addition to comforting women who received the diagnosis, she wanted to alert the public that breast cancer could be survived if caught early—she needed to convince women to check themselves regularly. Eikenberry recalls: “For Destined to Live I interviewed over 100 women and one man. Some of the women were famous like Nancy Reagan and Gloria Steinem and some were not, like my Aunt Treva in Ohio who had had breast cancer 40 years before when the treatment was barbaric. She had a double radical mastectomy that took part of the chest wall, endured months of terrible radiation, but then got back on her tractor and raised her 8 kids. And I never knew about it until I came out of the closet, and we sat on the tractor together and shared our experience.

My husband, Michael Tucker was in the film too, talking about his reactions as a spouse—his fears about losing me and having to raise our kids by himself.”

When the documentary aired on NBC, Eikenberry grasped the power of television. “So many people were helped by seeing others who had gone through it. We were approached by people all the time who told us their stories, or their mother’s or their sister’s or their wife’s story. After that I was motivated to keep talking about it.” She and Michael became national spokespeople for the Susan G. Komen Foundation—and currently remain in those roles for the New York City branch. For 20 years, they have traveled throughout the U.S. sharing experiences and hearing others’ stories.

Eikenberry thinks that her professional background has “absolutely” been an asset in this work. “My acting training has made it much easier to tell my story in front of large groups,” she says.

“It’s still always scary to get up there and reveal my doubts and fears, but I’ve got a lot of communication skills by now and they are invaluable.”

Other things never get easier. “The most difficult part of telling my story is always letting strangers know that I’m not as together as I appear: opening myself up. I’m anxious about it every time. But the rewards are many, because after we finish our talk, many people want to tell their stories, whether publicly or privately. And sometimes we are able to put people in the audience together with others in that same room who have something to offer them. Like the woman whose husband had shut down so completely after her diagnosis that she couldn’t reach him at all. When she stood up during the Q and A and told her story, a man in the audience invited her to bring him to a support group for spouses, and we learned later that it really turned their marriage around.”

It would be hard to imagine any School of Drama graduate more truthful and selfless than writer, motivational speaker, and philanthropist Jim MacLaren ’89, ’85 yc. Just out of college—where he earned a degree in theatre studies while playing defensive end for the Yale Bull Dogs—and eager to start his life as an actor, MacLaren found his life plans suddenly altered. Riding his motorcycle home from a rehearsal at Circle in the Square Theater, he was broadsided by a New York City bus and arrived comatose at Bellevue Hospital. There doctors amputated his left leg below the knee. That didn’t slow Jim down for long: After a remarkable recovery, he resumed his graduate studies at the School of Drama and also began training for triathlon competition. He soon became one of the fastest amputee athletes in the world, setting records at the Boston Marathon in 1988 and the Hawaii Ironman triathlon in 1989 and becoming an inspiration for young disabled athletes.

Then, in 1993, MacLaren was struck by a van during the biking segment of a triathlon in Mission Viejo, California. His C5 and C6 vertebrae broken, he was diagnosed a quadriplegic. With great endurance, he managed to regain partial motor function of his limbs and a degree of independence.

Many would not be able to surmount ordeals of that magnitude.

But MacLaren has not just survived—with immense grace, he transformed the self-understanding gained from personal tragedy into a generous mission to help others. He began pursuing a Masters and PhD in Mythological Studies and Depth Psychology from the Pacifica Graduate Institute and, through his studies and reflection, he has come to treat every aspect of life as a gift. “Part of this calling has been self-knowledge. People are so busy, but I get to sit in the wheelchair and reflect, and that is something so taken for granted,” he says. “Some people can breeze through life, but just like Socrates says, the unexamined life isn’t worth living. I choose living.”

MacLaren has gone on to a second career as a prominent motivational speaker, helping others to the same holistic, affirmative philosophy—something for which his theatre training at Yale helped to prepare him. “It definitely has its roots in the Yale experience. Unlike at other training programs that emphasize technique exclusively, at Yale you had to find it inside before you could get onstage and do it…

Yale saved my life in a lot of ways…I had to get real with myself and honest. I couldn’t avoid the gut stuff.”

His remarkable success is another measure of his determination. MacLaren serves as a mentor in various organizations for the disabled. He’s spent thousands of hours on the phone with disabled people and their families, “doing what I can to coach them through all the difficulties that come with their situation.” In 2005, after receiving the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the Annual Espy Awards, he was inspired by presenter Oprah Winfrey to create the Choose Living Foundation. The Foundation supports activities, including the Challenged Athletes Foundation, which provide disabled athletes with prosthetics, racing equipment, coaching, and travel expenses to compete in national and international events. The foundation also supports Camp Good Days and Special Times, the nation’s largest camp for children and families touched by cancer and AIDS. All of this, he acknowledges, he has accomplished while coping with his own chronic pain, infections and ailments, and limited mobility.

“I spent eight months of the last year in a nursing home recuperating from surgery,” he says.

MacLaren, however, has always been one to rise to a challenge. He says he looks at each new day as something that engages his whole

“Some people can breeze through life, but just like Socrates says, the unexamined life isn’t worth living. I choose living.”

Jim MacLaren ’89, yc ’85

person. “I may not be living the life that everyone else is living, but whenever you compare yourself, you just end up stuck. It’s your own journey,” he says. “Rather than overcoming adversity, it’s a journey about living with adversity.”

This holistic vision is shared by many Yale School of Drama alumni in all fields and from all backgrounds. They are finding that helping others and working for change flows naturally from other careers, with unexpected challenges and rewards along the way. Y Reporting for this article was also contributed by Ryan Davis ’11 and Tanya Dean ’11.

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Sustainable Staging...

Thoughts on “Greening” the Theatre

By Matthew Welander ’09 and Jim Simpson ’81

A schematic for an expanded and revamped Arcola Theatre, in London, courtesy of the Arcola Theatre Photo Gallery.

It is undeniable that our culture is currently undergoing a “green” revolution.

Against the background of global warming, even major television networks and automobile companies are promoting themselves as friendly to the environment. But what does it actually mean to pursue environmental sustainability—and how can the theatre contribute?

At Yale School of Drama’s Alumni Weekend in October 2008, Jim Simpson ’81 and Matthew Welander ’09 participated in a panel called Green Theatre, which investigated the role of theatre artists in the ongoing fight to preserve our national resources. Welander, who earned his MFA in Technical Design and Production, wrote his thirdyear thesis on LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Certification of Performing Arts Buildings. Simpson has been the artistic director of off-off-Broadway’s The Flea Theater since he co-founded it with Carol Ostrow ’80 in 1996. We asked each of them to share his thoughts on theatre and the environment.

Matt Welander ’09 For the past fifteen years I have been fortunate enough to work as a theatre technician and have often found the two most exciting moments of my job to be the day I start working on a new show and the day I strike it. The excitement and challenge of budgeting and building the scenery soon give way to the anticipation of tearing it down and throwing it out to make room for the next production. We work at a furious pace to get a show on stage, we pause for a moment to catch our breath, and then we Matt Welander ’09. do it all over again. It is easy to get so caught Photo courtesy of Matt up in the act of creating theatre, however, Welander. that too often we don’t stop to think about the impact our creative process has on the world beyond the wings. Once I began to realize the environmental impact of our productions, I started looking for ways to make the whole process more sustainable.

There are many theatre companies making simple changes in how they operate to reduce their environmental impact. Both Berkeley Repertory Theatre and Mo`olelo Performing Arts Company post their green guidelines on their websites, making it easier for other organizations to become more sustainable. The Arcola Theatre in London has pledged to become the first carbon-neutral theatre in the world and is making significant progress toward that goal. Showman Fabricators, a professional scene shop in Long Island City, has developed a green production philosophy that includes taking back scenery to recycle, reuse, or give to other organizations. Two of the best sources for information are the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts and the Green Theatre Initiative, organizations dedicated to providing resources and support to help arts organizations become ecologically and economically sustainable. Greening Up Our Houses (Drama Book Publishers, 1995), by Larry K. Fried and Theresa J. May, is also an

excellent resource for ecologically sound practices for every department in a theatre organization.

In the course of my research, I was also surprised to find that when it comes to energy consumption the biggest culprits are theatre buildings themselves. According to an ongoing study conducted by the office of the Mayor of London, almost 75% of the carbon emissions in the London theatre industry comes from lighting, heating, and cooling the non-production areas of the building. Inaugurated in 1998 in the United States, the LEED building certification program provides a framework and third-party verification for sustainable buildings, and more theatre companies are pursuing LEED certification for their buildings.

Simply put, we can dramatically reduce our environmental impact by making the buildings we work in more efficient. Sometimes it’s as easy as changing a light bulb; Stagecrafters, a theatre organization in Philadelphia, replaced the incandescent bulbs in their offices and non-production spaces with compact fluorescent lighting and reduced their monthly energy consumption by 15%. Most of the energy wasted in a building is used to heat, cool, and illuminate empty rooms.

Suggestions to save energy include: install programmable thermostats to automatically adjust temperatures when the building is unoccupied; switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs and install occupancy sensors to automate lighting in rehearsal rooms, offices, and other non-performance spaces.

These examples are a good start, but there is a lot more work to do.

Whether we see ourselves as theatre artists or theatregoers, we should all take a close look at the organizations we interact with, demanding and seeking new ways to make our art compatible with our planet.

Sometimes the hardest part is getting started, but theatre companies that want to get on board don’t have to reinvent the wheel. In addition to the organizations already mentioned, there are others, such as the

“

Whether we see ourselves as theatre artists or theatregoers,

we should all take a close look at the organizations we interact with, demanding and seeking new ways to make our art compatible with our planet.”

Matt Welander ’09

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Arcola Theatre’s production of Enemy of the People used low-energy lighting in April 2008. Photo from the Arcola Theatre Photo Gallery.

ecoTheatre blog, which lays out frameworks for going green. Visit the websites of those who are already engaged in sustainability, talk with colleagues and collaborators, and come up with an action plan that best fits your theatre’s needs. Each change in practice, no matter how small, is one more step on the road to ecological sustainability and well-being.

Jim Simpson ’81

I run a small theatre with Carol Ostrow ’80 called The Flea in downtown New York City. We have two stages and although our seating capacity is small, our output is large. We do all kinds of performance: theatre, dance, music, and alternative work. A typical week at The Flea will have two New Music concerts alongside at least two plays performing in repertory, a dance presentation, and weekend workshops. We believe that a dark theatre is a shameful one.

We also expend a fair amount of energy and Jim Simpson ’81, thought in finding the means to continue Founder and Artistic our work, especially in these trying Director of The Flea. economic times. We’re busy. But this is the Photo by Ivano Pulito. hurly-burly of activity and creativity that drew many of us to this field.

Now we have an additional concern to add to our already full plates: how do we address issues of climate change in our practice?

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The apocalyptic nature of climate change is daunting. When I read a recent forecast in The Lancet on the major effects of climate change worldwide, I wanted to stick my head in the sand. But it’s more useful to consider the advice of Frances Beinecke yc ’71, for ’74, head of the Natural Resources Defense Council: We humans created these problems; we should be able to solve them.

Fortunately, one of the things that the theatre has going for it is over 2000 years of sustainable practice. We’ve only had air conditioning since the 1920s. Broadway used to take the summer months off; in Japan, ghost plays were performed in the dog days of summer because

This image of Jim’s bike in front of the theater is part of the logo of The Flea.

Photo by Ivano Pulito.

their cooling chills enticed audiences indoors to see the shows. We’ve also had hundreds of years of vivid theatre without electric lighting. Our common history reveals that the most sophisticated work was often accomplished with low-tech means.

Investigating and evaluating our use of energy here at The Flea has produced some surprises. We discovered that air conditioning, not stage lighting, is our major culprit.

An easy fix: We use our zoned system much more carefully. Our small staff knows that when summer comes, it’s going to be warm Carol Ostrow ’80, in The Flea offices—Carol now wields Producing Director of a Japanese fan in meetings. Luckily, the The Flea. Photo by Ivano offices are in a sub-basement, which is natuPulito. rally a few degrees cooler than the concrete sidewalks above us. We’re also switching our incandescent exit signs to more efficient LED units. These signs are on 24/7, and there are a surprising number of them. Their constant drawing of power really adds up.

The Flea’s shoe-string economy is sympathetic to a sustainable approach. Even before the economic downturn, we had to work hard to bring in funding for our efforts. Now we squeeze every nickel and in the process conserve energy. Our water heater is already insulated.

Our offices are lit by low energy fluorescents. We vigorously recycle, not only because it is the right thing to do, but because in New York City it is the law, and the fines are significant for a small theatre. We troll Craigslist for our furniture needs. We recycle flats and have used the same chairs onstage for the past four years. Actors like them, they fit our room, we repaint them. I am secretly (well not anymore)

“

Stimulating imaginations and evoking emotions are easier when there is less onstage.

That was The Flea’s aesthetic even prior to Al Gore’s call to action.

Jim Simpson ’81

referencing Chinese theatre practice where a chair exists as many possibilities. I am a believer in Grotowski’s theatre algebra: theatre = actor + spectator. Everything else is extra, even extraneous. Stimulating imaginations and evoking emotions are easier when there is less onstage. That was The Flea’s aesthetic even prior to Al Gore’s call to action. Everybody loses when the set plays out an extended run in a landfill. Also, dumpsters cost a bundle.

We theatre workers would like to think of ourselves as good guys.

But the truth is that the theatre as currently practiced is—ecologically speaking—an extravagant use of resources. When actors light up an herbal cigarette onstage, sensitive members of the audience often cough in protest; they don’t want that second-hand smoke. The day is not too far away when audiences will also take note of our use of resources and question why we well-meaning theatre folk generate heavy carbon footprints to create something that should be pro-people, pro-existence, and progressive. We’re being watched. We don’t get a pass for being well intentioned.

A reconsideration of our methods might result in new ways of working. Who knows? We also have an opportunity to be public leaders in a major awakening and change in human behavior. It’s exciting. Y

Here are some useful links to get you started:

Gerry Bamman, holding onto a recycled chair, in Dawn by Thomas Bradshaw, directed by Jim Simpson ’81. Photo by Joan Marcus.

The Green Theater www.thegreentheater.org The Mayor of London Green Theatre Plan www.greeningtheatres.com The LEED green building certification program www.usgbc.org The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts www.sustainablepractice.org The Green Theatre Initiative www.greentheaters.org Mo `olelo Performing Arts Company www.electrictemple.net/green.php Berkeley Repertory Theatre www.berkeleyrep.org/about/greenroom.asp Showman Fabricators www.showfab.com/green_index.html Arcola Theatre www.arcolaenergy.com ecoTheatre ecotheatre.wordpress.com

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Lewis Black: Pay Attention!

By Kristina Corcoran Williams ’09

Yale School of Drama alumnus and eternal

contrarian Lewis Black ’77 espouses nothing and denounces everything. He is not impressed by academia. He is not enchanted by theatre. He does not believe in panaceas. He is not particularly hopeful about the future. And he is truly disgusted with the absurdities that constitute daily life. But at the heart of Black’s seething vitriolic frustration lie fundamentally high standards for the American public. He’s so angry because he knows that, really...we all should know better.

Lewis Black, introduced to many when he began making his blustery appearances on The Daily Show in 1996, has since built a formidable comedic canon of his own. Currently, Black serves as “judge, jury and executioner” on his own Comedy Central series, The Root of All Evil, where, after welcoming his guests to his “litterbox of jurisprudence,” he presides over feuding guest comedians who act as litigators representing various villains competing to win the mantle of most evil. Who has caused society the most harm?, Black considers. Donald Trump or Viagra? Dick Cheney or Paris Hilton? Kim Jong-il or Tila Tequila? YouTube or porn?

Evil—both in its traditional forms (international dictators) and its absurdly insidious ones (reality television)—is a particular preoccupation of Black’s.

His refusal to tolerate the routine institutional and cultural incompetence to which so many have become compliant has led to some fraught relationships with authority starting with his time as a playwright at YSD.

Black does not, to put it mildly, romanticize his time at Yale School of Drama: “Three Years of Hell” was the title of the chapter in his book Nothing’s Sacred devoted to his time at YSD. He describes life at Yale as “about as far away from the real world as you can get outside of living on LSD.” “They tried to kick me out,” he says of the Yale administration, as we spoke over bagels and lox at an Upper West Side diner in New York. He also discussed his time as a Yale playwright with a dismal sort of mirth. “They said I was scattered...that I hadn’t written enough...I mean, a lot of it had to do with the fact that I wouldn’t shut up.” But Black fought back and, as you might imagine, he won. And he stayed. When asked if he remembers his class at Yale as politically active, he laughs. “No. We hung out at the dirty bookstore and played pinball while we waited around to trap Richard Gilman so we could ask him questions.” Despite his own political interests, he rejects the idea that artists need to be politically engaged. “They just need to pay attention,” he says. “It’s important to get out of your head. It’s the trauma of drama school.”

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Lewis Black ’77. Photo by Jef Neira. opposite Photo by Traci Gilland.

Any advice for artists graduating into this booming economy?

“Yeah! Kill yourselves!” he laughs, adding fiendishly, “The good news is, most artists aren’t losing anything in this economy because they have nothing to lose.” Black recalls his own post-graduation life and the hostel-like living situation of his first year in New York, bunking with half a dozen fellow alumni. He advises roughly, but he smiles while remembering: “If you want to live alone, get out of the theatre.”

Black has stayed fiercely faithful to many from his graduating class, forming companies with them after graduation, and producing their work to this day. “Find a community of people so you don’t lose your mind,” he recommends. “It’s not easy. New York or L.A., they’re not easy towns, but it’s never easy. It’s never been easy on any level.”

It certainly wasn’t easy for Black. His postgraduation years working as a playwright in New York eviscerated what respect he had left for the established theatre community. Black worked as playwright-in-residence in the downstairs theatre bar at the West Bank Cafe in New York, which became his artistic home for eight years. During that time he worked on more than 1,000 new American one-act plays, many of them his own.

He and his friends were making good art, but as he says, “No one would write about us.”

He loved what he was doing, but found himself dead-ending into the prejudices, incompetence, and basic stupidity of others, which finally led him to leave theatre altogether. Despite the frustration and loss of faith caused by those years, Black still advocates for more work like the theatre he made with his friends in the West Bank Cafe: “Forget the sets, forget the props, forget the lights, just put it up. Have some beer. Enjoy yourselves. You’re not going to the f*%#ing opera!” And his advice to young artists: “If someone else won’t produce your work, do it yourself. Find a space, get the people who will do it with you and put it up. We did a full-scale massive production in the middle of a park in Colorado Springs and we were all totally broke. You can do it. You just have to have time.”

Black’s deep respect for the work of his friends and collaborators in the theatre balances the striking ineptitude he finds in the broader field. Describing a typical experience dealing with a regional theatre producing one of his plays, Black says, “Every step of the way it was like, really? This is it? This is the way we’re doing it?” Black hit a financial low in 1990 while working on a musical he’d written with Rusty Magee, a comrade from his School of Drama days. When the theatre in Texas producing the show stopped paying for his lodging, Black headed across town to a comedy club looking to just earn enough money so he could stay around for the run of his show. After performing fifteen minutes of stand-up—“I killed,” he recalls—he had earned as much money as he had in the previous four years of his life as a playwright. Or, as he sees it, “A drunken manager of a comedy bar had more respect for my work than anyone in the theatre.”

And so it began: a career in comedy. To date, Black has earned a Grammy for The Carnegie Hall Performance; an Emmy nomination for his HBO special Red, White and Screwed; and he continues to perform both on-screen and in front of sold-out houses for two hundred nights a year. He jokes that in order to become a published playwright he has

had to create an entire career as a successful stand-up comedian so he could tuck his plays into the back of his two best-selling books.

Black the comedian skewers the social and political issues of the day with uncanny precision, but when asked if he thinks comedians have a special relationship to politics, he answers definitively: “No. We’re all just pigs. The only thing you think about is getting a laugh.

That’s the only barometer.” The relationship isn’t between politics and comedy, he insists; it is between facts and comedy. The reason The Daily Show viewers are better informed on current events than viewers of other news sources, Black explains, is because Daily Show audiences are active; they’re laughing. “There’s a passiveness to just watching the news,” Black says, “but comedy engages you.”

As does anger. And Black uses both to purge our culture’s latent toxins and share the love of outrage. In one of his many long tangents during our conversation, Black began to decry the evils of Calvin Klein briefs. Somehow—and this speaks to his comic genius—Black’s emotional investment in the outrage of over-priced underwear does less to reveal his own insanity and more to expose the rest of us non-ranters as criminally complacent, immune to the designerlabeled harbingers of our culture’s descent into greed and consumerism. He insists American rapacity has increased exponentially since he was young, and his comedy can often be experienced as a cry for vigilance against an increasingly absurd status quo.

Black’s anger, in this way, operates as shockingly effective social activism. He is not didactic. No soapboxes here, just bullhorns.

Black’s crusade, he would argue, is simply to make us laugh, but the laugh only comes through consciousness, or as he says, engagement.

Laughter itself can be a political act. Despite his lauded cynicism, Black is also deeply involved in charities both artistic and political: The 52nd Street Project, Autism Speaks, Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, the Children’s Health Fund, The Rusty Magee Clinic for Families and Health, and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. He also auctions off golf trips with himself to support writing programs for economically disadvantaged kids in New York. Such work belies a hidden faith in people’s ability, both individually and collectively, to change the world around us.

Laughter itself can be a political act.

Before hearing one of Black’s monologues, you may experience daily life as a benign drama, but afterwards you may see it as a dangerous farce. That’s because Black, through his work, seeks to wake a stultified American public out of its stupor with endless variations on the theme: this can’t be right! Seeing life as a series of pernicious absurdities does not lead Black to hopeless inertia but rather to the righteous anger that drives his comic brilliance. No resignation here: Black continues to engage. He engages with his community through extensive and diverse charity work. He engages with his art as he writes, performs, and collaborates. And he engages with politics.

He reads the news and he still cares enough to be really really angry about it. Y

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They Write the Songs: Yale Institute for Music Theatre

2

by Jason Fitzgerald ’08 and Barry Jay Kaplan

While researching ideas for a large event to be

staged at Yale Bowl for Yale’s tercentennial, School of Music Dean Robert Blocker made a startling discovery: in the year 2000, 60% of the musical productions on Broadway had prominent Yale connections—producers, performers, designers, directors. Several years later, Dean Blocker met with School of Drama Dean James Bundy ’95 to talk about how the two schools might work together.

There was some precedent, occasions when School of Drama designers had done sets for an opera at the School of Music, or when musicians had performed for Yale Rep’s production of Brundibar, but there was as yet no mutual programmatic agenda.

After Dean Blocker’s discovery, he and Dean Bundy began to talk seriously about how their two schools could join forces. “We had,” says Dean Bundy, “what Peter Brook called ‘a formless hunch.’ We wanted to give opportunities to young writers and composers to do work on a high level.” And so the Yale Institute for Music Theatre, a historic collaboration between Yale School of Drama and Yale School of Music, came into being. For their first “test” excursion in this cooperative venture, they came up with a specific and practical mission: to provide a two-week workshop, combining professionals and students, for three emerging music theatre writers.

Initially there were no pre-formed ideas as to what this first attempt at the two Schools collaborating would be. “We wanted to identify writers at a point where they had promise but not yet the support to see it develop,” says Dean Bundy, “so we limited the pool of potential writers to those within five years of graduation.”

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1

The Deans were cognizant of the difficulties of working in the musical theatre form. “It is uniquely American and uniquely complicated to write a musical,” says Dean Bundy. “It is a form that doesn’t translate to other environments.” Both Deans admitted that they had expectations “but not related to production,” Dean Bundy says. “This was not meant to be a launching pad for new musicals.

We wanted writers and composers to be in a room with gifted directors and actors working to bring the work to life and make it clear what their next challenges would be.” Dean Blocker adds: “We envisioned the Institute as having an impact, not only in New York and Los Angeles but globally. We saw it as a way to advance artistic enterprise to have a profound effect on culture.”

To oversee the day-to-day operations, Mark Brokaw ’86 was a natural fit for the Artistic Director’s job. His background included directing plays and musicals on and off-Broadway and in regional theatres, as well as teaching in the Yale summer program. Beth Morrison ’05 was chosen as Producer, one of the rare persons of her generation who is actively engaged in musical theatre as a producer, with her own production company, specializing in producing new and innovative music theatre projects. Returning to Yale School of Drama had special meaning for both Brokaw and Morrison. “What I learned when I was a student at Yale, was how to

5

3

1 Jamie O’Leary, Katya Stavislavskaya, David Loud, and Anna K. Jacobs at a rehearsal for POP! 2 Danny Binstock ’11 and Emily Jenda yc ’10 in Sam I Was. 3 Company members of Invisible Cities: Abigail Fischer, Amelia Watkins, Tracy Wise, Stephen Salters, Amanda Hall ’10 mus, Elizabeth Picker ’09 yc, Joseph Mikolaj ’10 mus, Vince Vincent ’10 mus. Photo

by Karen Hashley ’10.

4 POP! reading: Cristen Paige as Edie Sedgwick and Luther Creek as Andy Warhol. Photo by Karen Hashley ’10.

5 Luther Creek, Paul Anthony Stewart, Ken Robinison ’09, and Brian Charles Rooney in POP!

4

collaborate,” Brokaw says. “So it was a feeling of déjà vu to return to campus on such an intensely collaborative project.”

It was left to the two of them to come up with the details of how things would be run. “We came on at the end of October, 2008,” says Brokaw, “and then we had to have a mission statement, guidelines, a logo, everything from the ground up within two and a half weeks, when the invitation for submissions was sent out.” The collaborators quickly established their goals: serve a variety of music theatre forms, including conventional book musicals; tailor each workshop to the specific needs of the project; and make sure the authors’ interests were always primary.

The first Yale Institute for Music Theatre workshop took place in New Haven, June 7–21, 2009, with a number of current Yale School of Drama students in a variety of active roles during the Institute’s residency, including actors Ken Robinson ’09 and Danny Binstock ’11; associate producer Belina Mizrahi ’10; and stage managers Jenna Woods ’10, Lindsey Turtletaub ’11, and Jessica Barker ’10 .

“The writers really were the stars of the event,” says Brokaw.

“It was about helping them get as far as they could.” Each of the three pieces­—the opera Invisible Cities, with score and libretto by Christopher Cerrone mus ’09; Sam I Was, with music, book, and lyrics by Sam Wessels; and POP! with book and lyrics by Maggie-Kate

“

We wanted writers and composers to be in a room with gifted directors and actors working to bring the work to life and make it clear what their next challenges would be.”

Yale School of Music Dean Robert Blocker

Coleman and music by Anna K. Jacobs—underwent many changes: librettos were rewritten, acts were reshaped, new songs were added, scenes were thrown out, new ones written, and in one case a whole new act was created. “The workshop also posed some new questions,” Dean Bundy adds, “but these were the kinds of questions the writers could only answer on the way to a production.”

For Deans Bundy and Blocker, the first collaboration of their respective schools was extremely encouraging. And as a bonus— a thrilling one at that—out of the Institute’s first summer, POP! has emerged, ready for production, and will take its place, directed

by Mark Brokaw, as part of the 2009–10 Yale Repertory Theatre season. Y

YSD 2009–10

29

InOnReview York Street

New York Holiday Party Photos by Shevett Studios

2

1

3

4

1 Timothy Mackabee ’09, Stephen Strawbridge ’83 and Andrew Boyce ’09.

2 Laila Robbins ’84, Dennis Green ’84, Susan Cameron ’85, Campbell Dalglish ’86 and David R. Grillo ’95.

3 Susan Vitucci ’76, Jeremy Smith ’76, Christine Estabrook ’76, Jaroslaw Strzemien ’75 and Anya Strzemien.

4 Geoffrey Johnson ’55, Sue Ann Converse ’55 and Tony Converse YC ’57.

5 Holiday reveling at the Yale Club.

6

5

6 Eric Gilde ’07, YC ’04, Rey Lucas ’04, Liz Alsina ’06, Gregory Winkler ’05 and Carrie Silverstein ’04.

7 Front row, left to right: Rey Lucas ’04, Phyllis Johnson ’04, Kate Cusack ’07, Snehal Desai ’08, Nelson Eusebio ’07, LeRoy McClain ’04, Tijuana Ricks ’04. Back row, left to right: Jordan A. Mahome ’05, Jennifer Lim ’04, Peter Kim ’04.

7

Alumni Events

News from the Yale School of Drama

West Coast Alumni Party

8

Photos by Ryan Miller/Capture Imaging

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9

8 Angela Bullock, Rafael Clements ’90, Cheryl Reeves-Hayes, Mike Reyes and Steven Blye ’85.

9 Daniel J. Travanti ’64 and Asaad Kelada ’64.

10 Sasha Emerson Levin ’84 and Tom Moore ’68.

11 Pam Rank ’78, Jeff Rank ’79, Erika Klappert, Alys Holden ’97 and Walt Klappert ’79.

11 The Phyllis Warfel Award for Outstanding Alumni Service Named for Phyllis Warfel ’55, former editor of the Drama Alumni Newsletter, this award pays tribute to individuals who have contributed to the well-being of the entire Yale School of Drama community. This year, Sasha Emerson Levin ’84 received the honor for her exemplary commitment to graduating students. Since 2003, Sasha has generously hosted a dinner and panel presentation for third-year actors. This muchanticipated event introduces students to industry representatives and other professional artists and has helped launch the careers of many new graduates.

1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996

1997 1998 1999 2000 2001

Phyllis Warfel ’55

Sally Bullock ’48

Neil Mazzella ’78

John Badham ’63, yc ’61

Talia Shire Schwartzman ’69

Arthur Pepine, former

Financial Aid Officer at YSD

Fran Kumin ’77 Asaad Kelada ’64 Dick ’42 and Mickey ’44 Fleischer Richard Maltby ’62, YC ’59 Philip Isaacs ’53

2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008

Henry Winkler ’70 Bronislaw “Ben” Sammler ’74 Marc Flanagan ’70 Edward Trach ’58 Jane Kaczmarek ’82 Joe Grifasi ’75 Sasha Emerson Levin ’84

➌ ➊

Yale Repertory Theatre

2008–2009 Season

➋

By Colin Mannex ’10

This season’s offerings at Yale Repertory Theatre delivered bold statements about national history, race, immigration and class consciousness. Each of the six productions called audiences to witness and reconsider meaning in even the most familiar dramatic situations.

In Passion Play by Sarah Ruhl (Yale Rep Associated Artist), directed by Mark WingDavey, the ensemble cast moved through three acts in three distinct historical periods: Elizabethan England, Nazi Germany, and the Reagan years in the U.S. In each act, pious Christian townspeople stage the foundational story of their faith, as Elizabeth I, Hitler, and Reagan (all played by Kathleen Chalfant) seek to harness this religious awe for their own nationalist agendas. Designer Allen Moyer’s imagery—of fish on land, and ships in the

32

sky—created a cohesive, yet unsettling aura in each act. Passion Play’s unlikely confluence of historical leaders delivered a cautionary message about the allure and dangers of political charisma.

Happy Now?, by Lucinda Coxon, pinpoints a modern professional woman’s toils and discontents. Liz Diamond’s (Faculty) staging guided audiences through Kitty’s (Mary Bacon) restlessness as she moves among home, work conferences, and dinners with dysfunctional friends. Domestic bliss remains perpetually beyond Kitty’s reach; to illustrate this point, scenic designer Sarah Pearline ’09 dangled kitchen tables and appliances on strings above the stage. Temptation arises in the form of Kitty’s garrulous, cocktail-swilling colleague (David Andrew Macdonald), whose sexual advances offer the potential for relief.

YSD 2009–10

Following the everyday trials of Happy Now? came Rough Crossing, Tom Stoppard’s fanciful trans-Atlantic misadventure (adapted from an original play by Ferenc Molnár) about two playwrights, Turai (Reg Rogers ’93) and Gal (Greg Stuhr), who spend four frantic days aboard an ocean liner trying to finish writing their musical before they dock in New York.

With lavish wordplay and running gags, Stoppard’s play, under the direction of Mark Rucker ’92, made full use of all the Broadway tropes it lovingly lampoons. Designers Timothy Mackabee ’09, Luke Brown ’09, Phillip Owen ’09, and Jesse Belsky ’09 created a colorful world where chorus girls and persnickety playwrights could all step to the play’s nimble language.

Language has special significance for the 1970s Mexican-American family at the center

➊ Susannah Schulman, Reg Rogers ’93, Sean Dugan and Greg Stuhr in Rough Crossing.

Photo by Joan Marcus.

➋ Kelly AuCoin, Brian Keane, Mary Bacon and Quentin Maré in Happy Now?. Photo by Joan Marcus. ➌ The company of Passion Play. Photo by Joan Marcus.

➏

➍ Merritt Jansen and Bill Camp in Notes from Underground. Photo by Joan Marcus.

➎ Kimberly Scott ’87, Charles S. Dutton ’83, Billy Eugene Jones ’03 and Oto Essandoh in Death of a Salesman. Photo by Joan Marcus.

➏ Onahoua Rodriguez in Lydia. Photo by Carol Rosegg.

➎

➍

of Octavio Solis’s new play, Lydia. Director Juliette Carrillo ’91 found captivating rhythms in the bilingual interactions and subtle, wordless communication of a family harboring tormenting secrets—incest, homosexuality, alcoholism, and domestic abuse. In one sequence, the hanging laundry in the family’s living room became a makeshift fort where the siblings break into a childhood game only they understand. Later, different fantasies take hold: teenage brothers Misha (Carlo Alban) and Rene (Tony Sancho) vie for the attention of their disabled sister’s new caregiver, the beautiful and mysterious Lydia (Stephanie Beatriz). To their surprise, Lydia tends not to their romantic overtures but to the traumas of their past, and sparks occasions for poetry where there had been only pain.

Unresolved memories also haunt the solitary,

unnamed figure in Notes from Underground, adapted from Dostoevsky’s novella by the internationally acclaimed Robert Woodruff (Faculty) and OBIE Award-winning actor Bill Camp. Withdrawn from the rest of the world, the Underground Man finds a new medium to express his bilious views of himself and society—the internet. Camp manifested a grotesque physical vocabulary, directing his anger at the audience as much as at his webcam, creating a terrifying theatrical experience. True to Dostoevsky’s novella, however, the character’s vulnerabilities mitigated his self-destruction and vengeance.

In the final play of the season, Dean James Bundy ’95 created a new social context for Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman by setting the play in an African-American household.

Charles Dutton ’83 brought ferocious,

wounded energy to the title role. Dutton interpreted his character as a great man for whom great things never happened. In a world of post-war opportunity and potential wealth, Dutton’s Willy Loman sees his dreams manifested everywhere but in his own home. With the production’s African-American cast, Bundy invited audiences to see the collapse of an ordinary man amid new and vivid circumstances.

The Yale Rep season was certainly challenging. Each production—whether a classic or a new play—called upon its audience to reconsider our national history, holding up the past to the light, testing timeworn values and precepts.

YSD 2009–10

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➌ ➊

Yale School of Drama

2008–2009 Season

➋

By Jorge J. Rodrîguez ’10

The challenge is to produce the most interesting, creative theatre possible; this past season at Yale School of Drama pushed the limits of theatrical representation, as students staged two musicals, three festivals of new plays, and several contemporary renderings of classics, among other productions.

The season kicked off with the third-year directors’ thesis productions. In Bertolt Brecht’s Man=Man, Erik Pearson ’09 demonstrated that an individual’s sense of character can be disassembled and reassembled like a machine.

Introducing audiences to Galy Gay, a dutiful dock worker converted into a brutish soldier, Pearson depicted the ultimate malleability of identity. Becca Wolff ’09 traveled alongside a gang of 18th-century bandits in her interpretation of Friedrich Schiller’s The Robbers.

Erica Sullivan ’09 played both Karl, the hero, and Franz, the villain, in a virtuosic performance that invited audiences to consider

34

whether humans are intrinsically good or evil. Patricia McGregor ’09 remodeled the stage of the University Theatre into an early 20th-century jazz hall for her bold restaging of George C. Wolfe and Susan Birkenhead’s Jelly’s Last Jam. While chronicling the life of jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton, McGregor created a dream world in which memories of a somber past blended with lively music and dance.

The Shakespeare Repertory Projects (formerly the Verse Projects) showcased the work of the second-year directors. Jesse Jou ’10 transported Love’s Labour’s Lost to an overnight camp full of teenage shenanigans and pop songs, lending immediacy to the playfulness and innocence of this intricate comedy. Chris Mirto ’10 delivered a thought-provoking and even humorous reconstruction of Hamlet, co-adapted with dramaturg Brian Valencia ’10, combining the infamous “bad quarto” and the more

YSD 2009–10

familiar version of the script, subverting our understanding of what constitutes an “original” Shakespeare play. With her staging of The Tempest, Jen Wineman ’10 sent audiences on a journey to a land where sticks and fabric become royal ships and enchanted creatures, reminding us that there is as much magic in theatrical representation as in Prospero’s powers.

The first-year playwrights, actors, directors and dramaturgs joined together in Drama 50, a fall semester course for which they developed three short pieces centered on the topic of race.

Out of those projects were born the plays for the spring’s Thornton Wilder Festival of New Plays. With Ah, Americans!, Meg Miroshnik ’11 delivered a dark satire of blind patriotism and irrational fear of the world outside the U.S.A. Christina Anderson’s ’11 Man in Love took audiences back to the Great Depression, when difficult financial times were compli-

➊ Man = Man directed by Erik Pearson ’09. ➋ Alexandra Henrikson ’11 in American Catnip

by Mattie Brickman ’09, directed by Becca Wolff ’09.

➌ Max Moore ’11 in The French Play by Gonzalo Rodríguez Risco ’09, directed by Patricia McGregor ’09. ➍ Aja King ’10, Nondumiso Tembe ’09 and Emily Jenda ’10 YC in Jelly’s Last Jam directed by Patricia McGregor ’09.

➎ Erica Sullivan ’09 and Austin Durant ’10 in The Robbers, directed by Becca Wolff ’09, adapted

by Wolff and Jacob Gallagher-Ross ’09. ➏

➏ Rachel Spencer ’10 and Zach Appelman ’10 in 99 Ways to F*%k a Swan by Kimberly Rosenstock ’10, directed by Jesse Jou ’10.

Photos by Erik Pearson ’09

➍

➎

cated by conflicts of race, class, and sexual orientation. Dipika Guha ’11 delved into gender relations in The State of Affairs as she portrayed a group of women and their elusive interactions with the men in their lives.

The Langston Hughes Festival of New Plays featured the work of the second-year playwrights. In 99 Ways to F*%k a Swan, Kim Rosenstock ’10 wove together four different stories inspired by the Greek myth of Leda and her swan lover—each set in a different century, yet coexisting on the same stage.

The Current War, a new musical by Michael Mitnick ’10, dramatized the battle between AC and DC currents and how the victor was determined by the invention of the electric chair—all seen through the eyes of the first man electrocuted on the device. A young woman becomes inexplicably pregnant in Susan Soon He Stanton’s ’10 Cygnus, set entirely in her parents’ garage, where she

undergoes a journey of discovery as she becomes convinced that her child is the result of divine intervention.

The fourth annual Carlotta Festival of New Plays closed the YSD season with three new shows by the graduating playwrights. In The French Play, Gonzalo Rodríguez-Risco ’09 blended homicide, sadomasochism, and the well-made play to create a meta-theatrical comedy that brought down the house—first with laughter, and then literally as the set progressively came apart. McGregor, taking the director’s seat once again, gracefully wove together a 19th-century melodrama with backstage drama among modern-day actors. Matt Moses ’09 also mixed genres in The Bedtrick, a play that begins as a romantic comedy tracing a young couple’s flirtation, and ends as a gritty drama as their marriage became plagued by betrayal and murder. On a cold silver stage, director Pearson choreo-

YSD 2009–10

graphed the ups and downs of their relationship with the fluidity of a dance piece. Set in a roller rink, Mattie Brickman’s ’09 American Catnip captured the dysfunctional friendship between two women as they reminisced about the slap bracelets, glucose tablets, and catfights that characterized their childhood. Director Wolff infused the show’s rhythm with much ferocity as the two friends’ bickering devolved from frantic name-calling into a violent fight.

Throughout the season, Yale School of Drama students continued to redefine what it means for a play to come alive onstage.

With each production, they stretched the theatrical means available to them, finding inventive solutions for complicated texts—a pattern that will undoubtedly endure as they embark on new projects both at the School and in the professional world.

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➌ ➊

Yale Cabaret

2008–2009 Season

➋

By Walter Byongsok Chon ’10

In its 41st season, the Yale Cabaret’s artistic theme was Icons and Iconoclasts. Under the leadership of artistic director Patricia McGregor ’09, associate artistic director Donesh Olyaie ’10, and managing director Aurelia Fisher ’09, the Cabaret presented 20 productions.

The season launched with a recreation of one of Billie Holiday’s last performances in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, in which Christina Acosta ’10 shared the ups and downs in the life of Lady Day. Holiday’s songs and story seemed to converse with the ghosts of cabaret itself.

16 Bars // Soundtrack of our Minds, written and performed by Kevin Daniels ’10, looked deep into the psyche of an African-American’s struggle for his artistic ego in an ethnically conscious world.

The Cabaret season did not limit its inspirations to American icons but stretched out to

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international contents and forms. Bones in the Basket, conceived by Alexandra Henriksen ’11 and performed entirely by first-year Drama 50 participants, lured spectators into an eerie and monstrous world of Russian fairy tales. For Mask Ritual: Electra, audiences joined the exorcism of Electra’s grudge over being denied judgment for the murder of her mother, Clytemnestra.

Mask Ritual, adapted by Minsun Jung ’09 from Euripides’s Electra, sought to restore Electra’s lost voice through a Korean shamanistic ritual.

Yale School of Drama playwrights also tested the limits of social decorum and theatrical verisimilitude. Gonzalo Rodríguez-Risco’s ’09 Gay Play told the story of drag queen Didi and her best mate Joseph, who—much to his surprise—finds himself in love with a woman. In Matt Moses’s ’09 Pamela Precious, two teachers fight over a third, until their rivalry turns into

YSD 2009–10

an unexpected partnership, involving a misguided castration operation and a life-anddeath struggle to retrieve the missing . . . er . . . ball.

The Cabaret also encouraged experiments by students working outside their academic disciplines. Theater Management student Frances Black ’09 conceived and directed Hold for Beauty.

On a fashion show catwalk, the performers executed everyday activities at varying speeds while reacting to different light cues, thus abstracting the behaviors from their usual contexts and forcing the audience to examine them anew. Funy as Hell, created by Technical Design and Production student Brian Dambacher ’11, presented an industrial purgatory occupied by Satori Circus, a clown-like progeny of technology, bringing Dante’s journey sardonically into our own times.

35th Anniversary Season

Yale Summer Cabaret

2009

By Matt Cornish ’09

This year’s Yale Summer Cabaret, under Artistic Director Kim Rosenstock ’10 and Managing Director Whitney Estrin ’10 featured three productions pushing the boundaries of humor: LATE: A Cowboy Song,

by Sarah Ruhl (Yale Rep Associate Artist) and directed by Jen Wineman ’10; The Mystery of Irma Vep by Charles Ludlum and directed by Michael Walkup ’06; and the brand-new musical Fly-By-Night by Will Connolly ’10, Michael Mitnick ’10, and Kim Rosenstock ’10, directed by Erik Pearson ’09. In LATE, Da’ Vine Joy Randolph ’11 portrayed a singing lesbian cowboy in Pittsburgh, stepping into, and changing, the lives of a married couple. Austin Durant ’10 and Max Moore ’11 brought the madcap world of Ludlam’s Irma Vep to life, playing multiple characters of different genders and species. In Fly-By-Night, Will Connolly falls in love with his wife’s sister (Sarah Sokolovic ’11), his wife (Alexandra Henrikson ’11) attempts a Broadway career, and his father (Austin Durant ’`10) finds happiness through the opera La Traviata.

➏

➎ ➍

➊ Grace Han yc ’09, Rachel Spencer ’10, Christina Acosta ’10 and Wonjae Lee yc ’10 in Mask Ritual: Electra adapted by Minsun Jung ’09 from Euripides’ Electra, directed by Jesse Jou ’10. Photo by Erik Pearson ’09.

➋ Blake Segal ’11, Danny Binstock ’11, Ben Horner ’11, Dipika Guha ’11 and Stephanie Hayes ’11 in Bones in the Basket: An Hour of Russian Fairy Tales conceived by Alexandra Henrikson ’11, directed by Devin Brain ’11.

Photo by Scott Dougan ’09.

➌ Kevin Daniels ’10 in 16 Bars//Soundtrack of our Minds written by Daniels, directed by Brenna Palughi ’10. Photo by Erik Pearson ’09.

➍ John Doherty ’10 and Michael Walkup ’06 in Gay Play written by Gonzalo RodríguezRisco ’09, directed by Michael Walkup. Photo by Erik Pearson ’09. ➎ Ryan Hales ’11, Russell A. Taylor and Darlene McCullogh in Funy as Hell created by Brian Dambacher, Russell A. Taylor, and Dave Dambacher, directed by Brian Dambacher ’11 and Russell A. Taylor. Photo by Erik Pearson ’09. ➏ Matt Moses ’09, Brian Hastert ’09 and Rachel Spencer ’10 in Pamela Precious: A Balls Out Love Story written by Matt Moses, directed by Devin Brain ’11. Photo by Erik Pearson ’09.

YSD 2009–10

Max Moore ’11 (above) as Lady Enid and Austin Durant ’10 (below) as Nicodemus Underwood in Charles Ludlum’s The Mystery of Irma Vep, directed by Michael Walkup ’06.

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In the Wings

Congratulations to our newest alumni— the Class of 2009!

Master of Fine Arts / Certificate in Drama Acting Eddie Robert Brown Eric Bryant Laura Woodward Esposito Carter Pierce Gill Brian Hastert Sisi Aisha Barbara Johnson Alexander Justin Knox Teresa Avia Lim Christopher Michael McFarland John Barret O’Brien Luke Rivas Robertson Kenneth Paul Robinson Erica Renée Sullivan Alexander Manuel Teicheira Nondumiso Tembe Adria Marie Vitlar Design Jesse Walker Belsky Andrew Boyce Luke Aaron Brown Moria Sine Clinton Scott James Dougan Paul Theodore Gelinas Heidi Leigh Hanson Min Sun Jung Timothy Richard Mackabee Katherine Elizabeth O’Neill Sarah E. Pearline Amanda Seymour Sound Design Charles Coes Phillip Dawson Owen Directing Patricia Tina McGregor Erik Lane Pearson Rebecca Anne Wolff

Dramaturgy Matthew Richard Cornish Miriam E. Felton-Dansky Jacob Gallagher-Ross Rebecca Kate Phillips Jennifer Louise Jude Shaw Kristina Corcoran Williams Playwriting Madeline Kronen Brickman Matthew Moses Gonzalo Rodríguez-Risco

Miriam Felton-Dansky ’09, Rebecca Phillips ’09, Matt Cornish ’09, Jacob Gallagher-Ross ’09 and Catherine Sheehy ’92 (Faculty). Photo by Pam Jordan.

Stage Management Donald Eugene Claxon Kristofer Ryan Longley-Postema Iris Dawn O’Brien Amanda Spooner

GRADUATION PRIZES

Technical Design & Production Thomas R. Delgado Kyoung-Jun Eo Joel Furmanek John J. McCullough Samual Alexander Michael Andrew F. Southard Michael Aaron Vandercook Matthew Taylor Welander Theater Management Frances Anne Black Aurélia K. Fisher Kay Perdue Meadows Rebecca May Falk Rindler Sergio Torres Pozo Technical Internship Certificate Bona Lee Junghoon Pi Nicholas John Pope Adrian G. Rooney Steward Savage

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

ASCAP Cole Porter Prize Matthew Moses ’09 Edward C. Cole Memorial Award John J. McCullough ’09 John W. Gassner Memorial Prize Jacob Gallagher-Ross ’09 Bert Gruver Memorial Prize Kristofer Ryan Longley-Postema ’09 Allen M. and Hildred L. Harvey Prize Andrew Howard Becker ’09 Morris J. Kaplan Award Kay Perdue Meadows ’09 Julian Milton Kaufman Memorial Prize Patricia Tina McGregor ’09 Jay and Rhonda Keene Scholarship Prize Luke Aaron Brown ’09 Leo Lerman Graduate Fellowship Award Moria Sine Clinton ’09 Amanda Seymour ’09 Dexter Wood Luke Memorial Prize Donald Eugene Claxon ’09

Donald and Zorka Oenslager Fellowship Award Andrew Boyce ’09 Scott James Dougan ’09 Pierre-André Salim Prize Thomas R. Delgado ’09 Kyoung-Jun Eo ’09 Joel Furmanek ’09 John J. McCullough ’09 Samual Alexander Michael ’09 Andrew F. Southard ’09 Michael Aaron Vandercook ’09 Matthew Taylor Welander ’09 Frieda Shaw, Dr. Diana Mason OBE and Denise Suttor Prize Charles Coes ’09 Phillip Dawson Owen ’09 Oliver Thorndike Acting Award Brian Hastert ’09 John Barret O’Brien ’09 George C. White Prize Sergio Torres Pozo ’09 Herschel Williams Prize Erica Renée Sullivan ’09

The Class of 2009

YALE SCHOOL OF DRAMA FELLOWSHIPS AND SCHOLARSHIPS

The Foster Family Graduate Fellowship Belina Mizrahi ’10 Brian Valencia ’10

The recipients for the 2008–2009 Academic Year were:

The Annie G.K. Garland Memorial Scholarship Iris O’Brien ’09

The John Badham Scholarship Rebecca Wolff ’09 The John Badham Scholarship in Directing Erik Pearson ’09 The George Pierce Baker Memorial Scholarship Matthew Cornish ’09 The Herbert H. and Patricia M. Brodkin Scholarship Joby Earle ’10 The Patricia M. Brodkin Scholarship Donald Claxon ’09 The Virginia Brown Martin Scholarship John Doherty ’10

The Randolph Goodman Scholarship Sanghee Kim ’10 The Jerome L. Greene Endowment Brian Hastert ’09 Teresa Lim ’09 Luke Robertson ’09 Erica Sullivan ’09 The F. Lane Heard III Scholarship Aaron Moss ’10 The Jay and Rhonda Keene Scholarship for Costume Design Valerie Bart ’10 The Ray Klaussen Design Scholarship Lisa Loen ’10

The Alfred L. McDougal and Nancy Lauter McDougal Endowed Scholarship Fund Patricia McGregor ’09 John Barret O’Brien ’09

The Richard Harrison Senie Scholarship Moria Clinton ’09 Luke Brown ’09 Katherine Day ’10

The Benjamin Mordecai Scholarship for Theater Managers Suzanne Appel ’11

The Daniel and Helene Sheehan Scholarship for Yale School of Drama Katherine Perdue Meadows ’09

The Kenneth D. Moxley Memorial Scholarship Matthew Welander ’09

The Howard Stein Scholarship Michael Mitnick ’10

The Donald M. Oenslager Scholarship in Stage Design Scott Dougan ’09

The Leon Brooks Walker Scholarship Austin Durant ’10

The Donald and Zorka Oenslager Scholarship in Stage Design Sarah Pearline ’09 Amanda Seymour ’09

The Richard Ward Scholarship Jane Jung ’10

The Eugene O’Neill Memorial Scholarship Matthew Moses ’09

The Zelma Weisfield Scholarship for Costume Design Heidi Hanson ’09

The Mary Jean Parson Scholarship Christopher Mirto ’10

The Constance Welch Memorial Scholarship Eric Bryant ’09 Aja King ’10

The Paul Carter Scholarship John McCullough ’09

The Gordon F. Knight Scholarship Fund Katherine Buechner ’10

The Barbara E. Richter Scholarship Fund Amanda Spooner ’09

The Rebecca West Scholarship Alex Teicheira ’09 Zach Appelman ’10

The Caris Corfman Scholarship for Students at Yale School of Drama Charise Smith ’10

The Lotte Lenya Scholarship Fund Liz Wisan ’10

The Scholarship for Playwriting Gonzalo Rodríguez Risco ’09

The Lord Memorial Scholarship Aurélia Fisher ’09

The Pierre-Andre Salim Memorial Scholarship Hsiao Ya Chen ’11

The Audrey Wood Scholarship Kimberly Rosenstock ’10 Susan Stanton ’10

The Cheryl Crawford Scholarship Madeline Brickman ’09 The Edgar and Louise Cullman Scholarship Jesse Jou ’10

The Stanley R. McCandless Scholarship Jesse Belsky ’09

The Cullman Scholarship in Directing Michael McQuilken ’11 The Holmes Easley Scholarship Fund Timothy Mackabee ’09 Andrew Boyce ’09 The Eldon Elder Fellowship Nondumiso Tembe ’09 Jacob Gallagher-Ross ’09 Luis Abril ’10 German Cardenas ’10 Kyoung-Jun Eo ’09 The Wesley Fata Scholarship Fund Adria Vitlar ’09

The Class of 2009 queues up for the procession. Photo by Susan Kim ’11.

YSD 2009–10

39

Spotlight On Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Program

Alumni and Faculty Honors and Awards The Audio Publishers Association Audie Awards® 2008 May 2008 Audiobook of the Year

Angela Bassett ’83, YC ’80 Narrator Nominee, Inspired by . . .The Bible Experience: Old and New Testaments

Audiobook Adapted From Another Medium

Stacy Keach ’66

Narrator Winner, The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas Collection 11

Kate Burton ’82

Narrator Nominee, Selected Shorts: Pets!

Achievement in Production

Angela Bassett ’83, YC ’80

Narrator Nominee, Inspired By . . .The Bible Experience: Old Testament Children’s Titles for Ages up to 8

Meryl Streep ’75, HON ’83

Narrator Nominee, The One and Only Shrek!

Inspirational/Spiritual

Angela Bassett ’83, YC ’80

Narrator Nominee, Inspired By . . . The Bible Experience: Old Testament Short Stories/Collections

Stefan Rudnicki ’69 Narrator Nominee, Big Country

Multi-Voiced Performance

Angela Bassett ’83, YC ’80

Narrator Winner, Inspired by . . . The Bible Experience: Old Testament

Stacy Keach ’66

Narrator Nominee, The Word of Promise New Testament Audio Bible

Dylan Baker ’85

Narrator Nominee, The Ultimate David Sedaris Box Set

60th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards® September 2008

James Anderson ’93

Writer Nominee, Saturday Night Live

Robert Klein ’65

Writer Nominee, Saturday Night Live

2008 Raymond E. Baldwin Award presented by the Connecticut Board of Education and Services for the Blind October 2008 Ruth Feldman (Staff)

The 40th Joseph Jefferson Awards October 2008

2008 Ovation Awards (Los Angeles) November 2008 Lead Actor in a Musical

Allen E. Read ’05

Pasadena Playhouse Nominee, Mask Lead Actress in a Play

Amy Aquino ’86

Black Dahlia Theatre Nominee, Secrets of the Trade

2008 Arts Award presented by the Arts Council of Greater New Haven December 2008 James Bundy ’95 (Dean)

Scenic Design – Large

E. David Cosier ’88

The Goodman Theatre Winner, The Trip to Bountiful Lighting Design – Large

Philip S. Rosenberg ’59

Chicago Shakespeare Theater Nominee, Cymbeline

Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series

Michael Engler ’85 “Rosemary’s Baby” Nominee, 30 Rock

Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series

Tony Shalhoub ’80 Nominee, Monk Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie

Paul Giamatti ’94, YC ’89 Winner, John Adams Outstanding Made for Television Movie

David Binder (Faculty)

Executive Producer Nominee, A Raisin In The Sun

Kimberly Scott ’87 and Charles S. Dutton ’83 in Death of a Salesman at Yale Repertory Theatre. Photo by Joan Marcus.

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YSD 2009–10

Awards

66th Annual Golden Globe Awards ® January 2009

Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series

Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama

Nominee, Boston Legal

Meryl Streep ’75, HON ’83 Nominee, Doubt Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy

Frances McDormand ’82 Nominee, Burn After Reading

Meryl Streep ’75, HON ’83 Nominee, Mamma Mia! Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series – Musical or Comedy

Tony Shalhoub ’80 Nominee, Monk Best Performance by an Actor in a Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Paul Giamatti ’94, YC ’89 Winner, John Adams

Christian Clemenson ’84 Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series

Maulik Pancholy ’03 Winner, 30 Rock

81st Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science Awards February 2009 Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role

Meryl Streep ’75, HON ’83 Nominee, Doubt

2009 Distinguished Achievement Award in Technical Production from the United States Institute for Theatre Technology March 2009 Ben Sammler ’74 (Faculty)

15th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards ® January 2009

25th Helen Hayes Awards April 2009

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role

Outstanding Costume Design, Resident Production

Meryl Streep ’75, HON ’83 Winner, Doubt

Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture

Meryl Streep ’75, HON ’83 Nominee, Doubt Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries

Paul Giamatti ’94, YC ’89 Winner, John Adams Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Comedy Series

Tony Shalhoub ’80 Nominee, Monk

Rey Lucas ’04 and Mateo Gomez in The Old Man and the Sea at Long Wharf Theatre. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Miranda Hoffman ’00

Shakespeare Theatre Company in association with McCarter Theatre Center Nominee, Twelfth Night Outstanding Director, Resident Play

David Muse ’03, YC ’96 The Studio Theatre Nominee, Blackbird

David Muse ’03, YC ’96

Shakespeare Theatre Company Nominee, Romeo and Juliet

Rebecca Bayla Taichman ’00

Shakespeare Theatre Company in association with McCarter Theatre Center Nominee, Twelfth Night Outstanding Lead Actor, NonResident Production

Brian Tyree Henry ’07

The Studio Theatre Nominee, The Brothers Size

The Kennedy Center Winner, Frost/Nixon

New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award May 2009

Outstanding Set Design, Resident Production

Tarell Alvin McCraney ’07

Stacy Keach ’66

Walt Spangler ’97

Signature Theatre Nominee, Les Misérables

Winner, The Brothers Size

54th Annual Drama Desk Awards May 2009

Outstanding Supporting Performer, Non-Resident Production

Sofia Jean Gomez ’06

Outstanding Play

Lynn Nottage ’89 (Faculty) Winner, Ruined

Shakespeare Theatre Company Nominee, Argonautika

Outstanding Set Design of a Play

Derek McLane ’84

Lucille Lortel Awards May 2009

Nominee, 33 Variations

Walt Spangler ’97 Nominee, Desire Under the Elms

Outstanding Play

Lynn Nottage ’89 (Faculty)

Outstanding Set Design of a Musical

Winner, Ruined

Thomas Lynch ’79, YC ’75 Nominee, Happiness

Outstanding Scenic Design

Marina Draghici ’88

Scott Pask ’97

Nominee, Fela! A New Musical

Nominee, 9 to 5

James Schuette ’89

Scott Pask ’97

Nominee, Wig Out!

Nominee, Hair

Outstanding Costume Design

Marina Draghici ’88

Outstanding Costume Design

William Ivey Long ’75

Winner, Fela! A New Musical

Nominee, 9 to 5

Outstanding Lighting Design

Marcus Doshi ’00

Carrie Robbins ’67

Nominee, Othello

Nominee, Irving Berlin’s White Christmas

Outstanding Sound Design

Outstanding Lighting Design in a Play

Marcus Doshi ’00

Jane Shaw ’98

Nominee, The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd

YSD 2009–10

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Theatre for a New Audience Nominee, Hamlet

63rd Tony Awards ® June 2009 Best Revival of a Musical

Andrew D. Hamingson (Faculty)

36th Annual Daytime Emmy® Awards August 2009

Nominee, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone Best Scenic Design of a Musical

Scott Pask ’97

Nominee, Pal Joey

Connecticut Critics Circle Awards June 2009 Outstanding Actress in a Play

Kimberly Scott ’87

Linda Loman Nominee, Death of a Salesman Outstanding Actor in a Play

Charles S. Dutton ’83

Willy Loman Nominee, Death of a Salesman

Thriller / Suspense

John Bedford Lloyd ’82

Narrator

by C.J. Box Nominee, Blue Heaven Children’s Titles for Ages 8 – 12

Tony Shalhoub ’80

Narrator Nominee, The Cricket in Times Square

by George Selden Humor

Lewis Black ’77

Narrator Nominee, Me of Little Faith

by Lewis Black

Reg Rogers ’93

Narrator Nominee, Gang Leader for a Day

by Sudhir Venkatesh Original Work

Stefan Rudnicki ’69

Narrator Nominee, Metatropolis by John Scalzi, Elizabeth Bear, Jay Lake, Tobias Buckelle and Karl Schroeder

Stacy Keach ’66

Narrator Nominee, The New Adventures of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer by Various Writers History

Karen White ’84

Narrator Nominee, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by James Campbell Judges’ Award: Politics

Michael Moore ’59

Narrator Nominee, Mike’s Election Guide

by Michael Moore

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Outstanding Debut

Best Scenic Design of a Play

Michael Yeargan ’73

Non-Fiction

Nominee, Around the World in 80 Days

Rey Lucas ’04

Winner, 33 Variations

The Audies® 2009 May 2009

David Levy ’84

Co-Producer Winner, Hair

Derek McLane ’84

Dr. Joel E. Rubin ’51 is the 2009 recipient of the “Wally” Award, given to an individual who exhibits a strong sense of leadership, a commitment to technological innovation, and a career of service to the lighting industry. The award will be formally presented during the Broadway Lighting Master Classes in New York in late May, 2010. Joel is principal consultant of the consulting firm, Joel E. Rubin and Associates, which provides services in theatre planning and theatre equipment planning and is the co-founder and a past president of the United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT).

Photo courtesy of Dr. Joel E. Rubin ’51.

Outstanding Sound Design

Outstanding Director of a Play

Nominee, The Old Man and the Sea

Outstanding Culinary Program

Chris Collins ’03

Executive Producer Nominee, Gourmet’s Diary of a Foodie Outstanding Special Class Special

John Ross ’63

Producer Nominee, Life on the Edge: A Global Crisis Outstanding Drama Series Writing Team

Anna Theresa Cascio ’83 Associate Head Writer Nominee, One Life to Live

2009 New York Innovative Theatre Awards July 2009 Outstanding Director

Gia Forakis ’04

James Bundy ’95 (Dean)

Nominee, Blue Before Morning

Outstanding Lighting Design

Outstanding Actress in a Featured Role

Michael Chybowski ’87

Phyllis Johnson ’04

Nominee, Death of a Salesman

Nominee, The Old Man and the Sea

Nominee, Blue Before Morning

Stephen Strawbridge ’83 Nominee, Coming Home

2009 Wally Russell Award

Stephen Strawbridge ’83

Dr. Joel Rubin ’51

Nominee, Death of a Salesman Outstanding Costume Design

Ilona Somogyi ’94

Nominee, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism

Ilona Somogyi ’94

Marc Robinson ’90, DFA ’92 (Faculty)

Nominee, Passion Play

In Memoriam

Musse photo by Alex Jeffrey; Stitt photo courtesy of Susan Miller; and Mosel photo provided by Ted Walch and reprinted from Tad Mosel’s Befriended by Books.

Learning How to See Tharon Musser ’50 The death of Tharon Musser ’50, “the dean of Broadway lighting designers,” on April 19, 2009, brought to a close one of the most prolific and influential careers in American theatrical design history. It is easy to forget that in 1956, Musser could not be nominated for the design that made her famous—Long Day’s Journey into Night—because there was not yet a category for lighting design. Musser advocated all her life for the recognition of lighting design as a distinct profession, and her innovative artistry, recently collected in The Designs of Tharon Musser (United States Institute for Theatre Technology, Inc., 2007), is her primary evidence.

Fame and accolades were never her goals; first-class work was. When, in 1956, she received a phone call from a Broadway producer asking if she would come to New York to discuss lighting the original production of A Long Day’s Journey into Night, she replied, “I can’t. I’m in the middle of a dance festival.” Fortunately, director José Quintero had seen Musser’s designs for the José Limon Dance Company and insisted on hiring her.

Beginning with that production, her Broadway debut, Musser would have at least one lighting design credit on Broadway every year between 1956 and 1989. (Her final design was in 1999 for The Lonesome West.) Her career also included thirteen seasons at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Connecticut, and an impressive range of off-Broadway, regional, and international work in theatre and dance. She was nominated for ten Tony Awards and won three times. Musser is perhaps most widely known for her collaboration with director-choreographer Michael Bennett, from Follies in 1971 to Dreamgirls ten years later, and including her legendary design for A Chorus Line. It was in that 1975 production that Musser introduced the first computerized electronic lighting board, which gave designers a much wider vocabulary of movement and effects.

Though Musser always insisted she was not a teacher, many successful designers credit their own sense of artistry to her mentorship, while many others claim her work as a direct inspiration for their own. Jennifer Tipton (Faculty) is among those who have traced their careers along lines established by Musser. “She was in the generation before me and as such was a wonderful pioneer,” says Tipton. “Her guts, her fortitude, her no-nonsense grace made her an example of the possibilities of what a woman could be in a field where toughness was appreciated. I have always felt that the look of her work showed a way to marry showbiz glitz with taste and beauty. What she had to teach could be well learned by so many today.” Jason Fitzgerald ’08

Serious about Playwriting Milan Stitt ’66 Milan Stitt ’66, whose play The Runner Stumbles was a Broadway success in 1976, died on March 18, 2009. Milan not only attended Yale School of Drama in playwriting, he went on to become chair of the program from 1987 to 1993, where he served as mentor to such budding playwrights as Lynn Nottage ’89 and Elizabeth Egloff ’89. He also created and ran the Play Development Program at the Circle Repertory Theatre, where he served as dramaturg and sometime mentor to playwrights Bill C. Davis, Albert Innaurato ’74, Arthur Kopit, Paul Zindel, and David Mamet.

Milan William Stitt was born in Detroit on February 9, 1941. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1963 where he studied with legendary playwriting teacher Kenneth Rowe. He wrote many plays, including Back in the Race; Places We’ve Lived; the libretto for The Nutcracker, co-written with Terrence Orr, which continues in repertory at the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre; and Labor Day, which he wrote for Christopher Reeve and directed at Circle Rep. His lasting fame as a playwright is based mainly on The Runner Stumbles, which debuted on Broadway on May 18, 1976, and was named best Broadway Play of 1976 in the annual Best Plays book.

Of The Runner Stumbles, Brendan Gill wrote in The New Yorker: “It is a serious, well-made, and continuously interesting American play, all the more worthy of our attention because it comes at a time when most of what is new on Broadway is not serious, most of what is serious is not well made, most of what is well made is not interesting, and most of what is interesting is not American. Let us therefore praise the author, Milan Stitt, for providing us with what amounts to an event as well as a play.”

Barry Jay Kaplan

Family Stories Tad Mosel ’50 “It was the stillness before you went on the air that was so dramatic,” Tad Mosel ’50 once said, recalling the experience of making live television. “It was a great thrilling moment and you suddenly loved every actor, and you just wanted them all to be rich and have children and go to happy graves.” The memory captures two sensibilities at once: love of making live art, whether on TV or on stage; and empathy for the drama of family life, with its quiet triumphs and everyday tragedies. These dual passions were fused in Tad Mosel, born George Ault Mosel, Jr. in 1922. It fits his character to have earned the Pulitzer Prize for the 1960 Broadway play All the Way Home (adapted from James Agee’s novel A Death in the Family) about a family coping with the sudden death of its husband and father. It also fit him to have spent the prize

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In Memoriam

In the Most Delightful Way Harry S. Gold ’97 Harry S. Gold ’97, who helped secure Disney’s presence on the Great White Way, lost his long battle with cancer on October 10, 2008. He was 50.

Gold, who at the time of his death was the Executive Director of business and legal affairs for Disney Theatrical Productions, took a circuitous route to Yale School of Drama. By the time he enrolled in the Department of Theater Management in 1994, he had already earned his J.D. and had worked for many years in Washington, D.C., as a litigation attorney.

A long-time love affair with the theatre came to professional fruition when he joined Niko Associates/Marvin A. Krauss Associates, a general management firm, as a management associate. This position gave him the opportunity to work on many plays and musicals, including BAM Salutes Sondheim, the national tour of Deathtrap, The Gershwins’ Fascinating Rhythm, and Victor/Victoria. Amazingly, this period coincided with his time at Yale School of Drama.

He left the School after three semesters and quickly found his place at Disney Theatricals, just as The Lion King was changing the game for Disney on Broadway. Colleague Andrew Flatt, Vice President of Broadway Marketing at Disney Theatrical, counts himself “lucky enough to [have] receive[d] the benefit of Harry’s many gifts: his incredible intellect, his tireless work ethic, and his wicked sense of humor, among others. He’s extremely missed here, but I have to believe that he’s somewhere eating chocolate while watching a Julie Andrews movie.”

Jason Fitzgerald ’08

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A Treasure Robin Wood ’69 “Robin was a big person in a very small frame.

She touched the lives of many, she changed the lives of many and she saved the lives of some,” said Jane Moulding, head of the Cambridge School of Weston, a coeducational day and boarding school for grades 9-12. She was speaking of Robin Benensohn Rosefsky Wood ’69, a graduate of the Directing Program, who joined the Cambridge faculty in 1970 and became chair of its theatre department in 1976. Wood’s passing, on February 23, 2009, at the age of 64, saddened the hearts of Cambridge School faculty, staff, students, and alumni, all of whom will miss her enthusiasm, her innovative mind, and her passionate commitment to her students.

“When Robin decides that something is important, that it is going to get attention, that it is going to happen,” wrote colleague Rhona Carlton-Foss, “watch out! She puts her energy and focus on something, and it happens.” Wood’s legacy bears out her reputation. When she began directing productions at the School, students performed in the gymnasium with primitive technology. Thanks to Wood’s spirited campaign for a new facility, the students now perform works like Execution of Justice, The Boys from Syracuse, and The Three Penny Opera in the Mugar Center for the Performing Arts. Wood was also an advocate for hearing-impaired students and audiences. She helped create the School’s American Sign Language (ASL) program, and all mainstage productions at the School are now signed. Wood also cofounded the Children’s Garden, an infant-toddler center fully integrated into the rest of the campus. All the while, her skills as a theatre practitioner and educator left their mark on her students. Remembers Eileen Prefontaine, a former student, “She saw how much we were capable of, and really took us seriously as people, and helped us to create something that we would remember and treasure in ourselves.”

Wood is survived by her husband Jeremy, and her three children Alexis, Jonas, and Augusta. Two announcements at the June 14th Cambridge School celebration of Wood’s life and work are a testament to her lasting contribution to the school. The first announcement was the creation of the Robin Wood Theater Fund, which will be used to further enrich the theatre program in Robin’s honor. The second announcement: The main theatre of the Mugar Center for the Performing Arts has been renamed The Robin Wood Theatre.

Jason Fitzgerald ’08

Succeeding in New Haven and Hollywood Joseph Linsalata ’69 Joseph “J.J.” Linsalata ’69 went from performing in Joseph Heller’s We Bombed in New Haven at Yale Repertory Theatre (1967), to serving as an assistant director on X-Men 2 and other Hollywood films.

Linsalata died April 27, 2009; he was 64.

Beginning his career on the East Coast, Linsalata married Theodosia Barron in New York in 1976, and later moved to Los Angeles, where he became a member of the Directors Guild of America. Linsalata spent 43 years working in the performing arts. He served as an assistant director, second unit director or visual effects director on a wide range of feature films, including Towelhead, Killer Diller, Balls of Fury, and Kindergarten Cop. In television, he worked on Beverly Hills, 90210, Charmed, The Big Blue Marble, and—his favorite—the quirky

Gold photo courtesy of Disney Theatrical Productions; Wood photo courtesy of the Wood family; and Theirse photo courtesy of Mary Theirse Jenkins.

money on a giant party for the cast, crew, producers, and staff of his play.

After serving as a sergeant in the Army Air Forces Weather Service during World War II, Mosel’s taste for the stage took him to Yale School of Drama with aspirations of being a playwright. Ironically, it also drove him to leave Yale, to perform for a full year in the Broadway play At War with the Army.

While theatre was Mosel’s first love, television was his longest lasting. He is often spoken of alongside Paddy Chayefsky, Horton Foote, Gore Vidal, and J.P. Miller as an architect of the 1950s’ “Golden Age of Television,” when live dramatic series like Studio One, Playhouse 90, and Goodyear Television Playhouse struck ratings gold. Among the stars who appeared in Mosel’s teleplays were Humphrey Bogart, Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Paul Newman ’54, Kim Stanley, Eileen Heckart, Tony Randall, and Patricia Neal. Nearly every teleplay was an intimate family drama. Mosel also wrote the screenplays for Dear Heart (1964) and Up the Down Staircase (1967), and earned an Emmy nomination in 1977 for an episode of the PBS series The Adams Chronicles. The following year, he paid homage to one of his childhood stage heroes when he co-wrote, with Gertrude Macy, Leading Lady: The World and Theatre of Katharine Cornell.

Mosel died August 24, 2008, in New Hampshire.

Jason Fitzgerald ’08

Alumni News police comedy Bakersfield P.D. He also gave back to his community as the arts commissioner of Thousand Oaks, CA, where he helped found and run the Conejo Teen Video Festival.

At Linsalata’s memorial Tom Moore ’68 remembered how his former classmate influenced his early career, convincing him to direct a musical Moore at first considered too commercial. Taking Linsalata’s advice, Moore directed Grease in its initial New York run.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Linsalata is survived by a son, Joseph Linsalata; a brother, Mark Linsalata; and two sisters, Anita RogerFields and Marie Roszko.

Matt Cornish ’09

Movies With Friends Darryl Theirse ’92 Darryl Theirse liked to laugh. A lot. A graduate of Brown University before attending Yale School of Drama, Darryl long enjoyed hosting “old movie nights” with friends and fellow alumni of Yale. Whether to watch Auntie Mame with Rosalind Russell or reruns of The Golden Girls, Darryl brought people together to watch and rewatch moments of acting genius. Michael Potts ’92 remembers, “Darryl would rent two or three videos to watch. We’d spend three hours watching the first one because of constant rewinding. Then I’d be ready to go home and he’d beg me to stay and watch the next one. We’d start and he’d promptly fall asleep. Without fail.”

Of course, Darryl didn’t just watch acting. After graduation from Yale, he performed in Playboy of the West Indies at the Lincoln Center, before leaving for a featured role in the miniseries Heaven and Hell:

North and South Part II. He soon moved to Los Angeles, where he lived until his death. His favorite role was in the television series George and Leo in 1997, and he was a regular on The Jeff Foxworthy Show (also 1997) and Jesse (1998–2000), among many others.

Darryl was born on July 25, 1967 and passed away on September 11, 2009. He is survived by his mother Mary Theirse Jenkins, his father Thomas Ellis, many aunts and uncles, and two godchildren.

Matt Cornish ’09

A Dazzling Designer Lawrence King ’72 While a student at Yale School of Drama, Lawrence King ’72, who died on July 3, had the unique distinction of designing the first production for Yale Repertory Theatre in its current space on Chapel Street: The Rivals, directed by Alvin Epstein (Former Faculty).

Lawrence was raised in Wichita, Kansas, and attended Wichita State University before being accepted at Yale School of Drama. After graduating from YSD, he went on to design sets for the Hartford Stage Company and was co-designer of many plays and operas with his life partner Michael Yeargan ’73 (Faculty). His work on Broadway as Set and/or Costume Designer includes the Terrence McNally comedies Bad Habits (1974) and The Ritz (1975), the Tom Stoppard double bill Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land (1977). In 1982 he began designing sets for the television series As the World Turns, for which he won an Emmy award in 1990. He left the show in 1995 and worked full-time with Yeargan on many award-winning productions, including Broadway’s Light in the Piazza, South Pacific and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.

Barry Jay Kaplan

Farewell Jane Alexander ’36 2.18.2009

Harriet W. Fallon ’36 3.25.2009

Joseph Linsalata ’69 4.27.09

Louis R. Ormont ’49 11.15.2008

Harriet N. Allen ’58 3.12.2009

David Fulford ’51 1.20.2009

Robert J. Miller ’57 1.5.2009

Milan Stitt ’66 3.12.2009

Ursula Belden ’76 1.14.2009

Judith O. Godfrey ’56 6.29.2004

Patrice Moore’54 3.8.2008

Dai R. Thompson ’74 2.12.2009

John Edward Blankenchip ’43 4.1.2009

Harry S. Gold ’97 10.10.08

Tad Mosel ’50 8.24.2008

Darryl Theirse ’92 9.11.2009

Miriam R. Brooke ’33 3.22.2009

Gertrude M. Henderson ’50 11.5.2008

Tharon Musser ’50 4.19.2009

Donald B. Tirell ’54 11.1.2008

Eugenia H. Cowan ’49 10.13.2008

Clissold Hill ’58 11.20.2008

Christine Nelson ’53 2.2.2009

Thomas J. Walker, Jr. ’51 5.23.2008

Harry Davidson ’47 6.28.2008

Hugh Hill ’53 11.3.2009

Fred N. Nelson ’61 8.18.2006

Elisa Ronstadt Elliott ’62 10.20.2008

Lawrence King ’72 7.3.2009

Margaret P. Oakley ’41 12.09.2008

Robin Benensohn Rosefsky Wood ’69 2.23.2009

Austin Engel ’54 10.2.2008

Richard Lawson ’57 11.19.2008

YSD 2009–10

Tunc Yalman ’50 3.4.2006

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Bookshelf

Publications by Yale School of Drama Alumni

Theatre Craft

Memoirs

Non Fiction

Fiction Captain Trips: A Graphic Novel Adapted from Stephen King’s The Stand

By Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa ’03 Marvel Comics, 2009

Curtain Call: Celebrating a Century of Women Designing for Live Performance Edited by Alexis Greene, Curated by Barbara Cohen-Stratyner and Carrie Robbins ’67 Companion to exhibit at New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Spring 2009. Available at http://theatrewomen. org

Bridge of Sand

By Janet Burroway ’63 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009 Watching Gideon

By Stephen Foreman ’64 Simon & Schuster, 2009 Rivington Street: Yiddish Culture in Comic Strips

By Joel Schechter ’72, DFA ’73 and Spain Rodriguez Kropotkin Club of Northern California, 2009

Sugarless

By James Magruder ’88, ’92 DFA, ’84 MA GRD (Faculty) Terrace Books, 2009 Things look bad for Rick Lahrem, a high school sophomore in a cookie-cutter Chicago suburb in 1976. His mother’s second husband eats like an ape, his stepsister is a stoner slut, and his father is engaged to a Southern belle. Rick’s only solace is his collection of original Broadway-cast LPs. After he brings his class to tears by reading a story aloud, Rick is coaxed into performing a dramatic interpretation of a controversial play about homosexuality. Rick begins winning tournaments and making friends. He also discovers the joys of sex with a speech coach from a rival school. James Magruder’s Sugarless offers a ruefully entertaining take on the struggles of coming-out, coming-of-age, and coming-to-Jesus.

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The Contract: A Life for a Life

By Joseph Kutrzeba ’56 iUniverse, 2009

The Tainted Muse: Prejudice and Presumption in Shakespeare and His Time

By Robert Brustein ’51, HON ’66 (Former Dean) Yale University Press, 2009

The American Play: 1787–2000

By Marc Robinson ’90, DFA ’92 (Faculty) Yale University Press, 2009 In this brilliant study, Marc Robinson explores more than 200 years of plays, styles, and stagings of American theatre. Mapping the changing cultural landscape from the late 18th century to the start of the 21st, he explores how theatre has—and has not—changed and offers close readings of plays by O’Neill, Stein, Wilder, Miller, and Albee, as well as by important but perhaps lesser known dramatists such as Wallace Stevens, Jean Toomer, Djuna Barnes, and others. Robinson reads each work in an ambitiously interdisciplinary context, linking advances in theatre to developments in American literature, dance, and visual art. He avoids neatly categorizing 19th- and 20th-century plays and depicts a theatre more restive and mercurial than has been recognized before. Robinson proves both a fascinating and thought-provoking critic and a spirited guide to the history of American drama.

Alumni Notes Poetry

Plays

Play Collection The Tutor

By Allan Havis ’80 Broadway Play Publishing, 2008

Holy Faces, Holy Places

By Vienna Cobb Anderson ’67 Dementi Milestone Publishing, 2008 The Rev. Dr. Vienna Cobb Anderson has authored a beautiful coffee table book of poetry and photography that takes the reader on a journey of renewal, enrichment, and hope.

The book, Holy Faces Holy Places, features images taken from around the world by the author, each of which is complemented with poetry offering spiritual insight. . . Vienna takes you to traditional holy places on all seven continents. She also introduces you to many holy faces, young and old, who reveal the beauty and mystery of lives challenged with a certain intimacy that only Vienna could capture in her images and poetic words. Vienna’s holy faces descry the human spirit, while holy places reveal the spiritual meaning of both recognized holy ground and everyday places in our world today.

This disquieting drama visits a shockingly dysfunctional family and its truly troubled teen. The tables turn several times in this intense, suspenseful one-act. Especially intriguing is the fact that we never quite know at the end what really happened, or what will happen next. Is the kid really a bad seed? Did this amoral adolescent, under the tutor’s tutelage, actually develop a conscience and a sense of remorse? Will the tutor live? Havis isn’t telling.

Based on a Totally True Story The Weird: A Collection of Short Horror and Pulp Plays

By Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa ’03 Dramatists Play Service, 2008

American Magic and Pharmacopeia: The Most Lamentable Tragedy of William Payne, M.D.

By Gil Kofman ’90 Broadway Play Publishing, 2008

Flying Crows: A Play Adapted from the Novel by Jim Lehrer

By James Glossman ’88 Dramatic Publishing, 2008

Human Error

By Keith Reddin ’81 Dramatists Play Service, 2008

Strictly Academic

By A.R. Gurney ’58 Broadway Play Publishing, 2008 ALICE: Tales of a Curious Girl

By Karen Hartman ’97, YC ’92 Playscripts, 2008

Antigone Project: A Play in Five Parts

By Tanya Barfield, Karen Hartman ’97, ’92 YC, Chiori Miyagawa, Lynn Nottage ’89, and Caridad Svich NoPassPort Press, 2009

Collected Plays

By Anne Garcia-Romero ’95, preface by Juliette Carrillo ’91 NoPassport Press, 2009

Lorca: Six Major Plays Translated by Caridad Svich, Preface by James Leverett (Faculty), Introduction by Amy Rogoway ’01 NoPassport Press, 2009

Can’t Believe It

By R.N. Sandberg ’77 Dramatic Publishing, 2008 The Black Eyed & Architecture

By Betty Shamieh ’00 Broadway Play Publishing, 2008 A Feminine Ending

By Sarah Treem ’05, ’02 YC Samuel French, 2008

Norton Anthology of Drama Edited by J. Ellen Gainor ’83, Stanton B. Garner, Jr., and Martin Puchner Contributing editor Art Borreca ’86, ’93 DFA; Editorial consultant Bert Cardullo ’85 W.W. Norton, 2009

Aviators

By Ruth Wolff ’57 Broadway Play Publishing, 2008

Yellow Face

By David Henry Hwang ’83 Dramatists Play Service, 2008 The Other Woman and Other Short Pieces

By David Ives ’84 Dramatists Play Service, 2008

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The most comprehensive and distinctive collection of its kind, the Norton Anthology of Drama offers 65 major plays—including three 20thcentury plays not available in any other drama anthology—carefully prepared introductions, annotations, and play texts, and a convenient two-volume, one-column format for ease of reading and carrying. Less expensive than rival anthologies, The Norton Anthology of Drama is a book that students will keep long after the class is over.

The Art of Giving at YSD Iseman Theater Takes a Bow As the chair and CEO of CI Capital Partners, LLC, Frederick Iseman ’74 yc manages billions of dollars in assets, investing in middle market industry and media corporations across North America. As a philanthropist, Iseman deploys his cultural and monetary resources to vigorously promote his interests in globalization and the arts. His active support, as a trustee, extends to the Metropolitan Opera, Alex O’Neill, Ellen Iseman ’76 yc, Henry the Municipal Iseman, Fred Iseman ’74 yc, Dean James Art Society, and Bundy ’95 and Eugenie Iseman.

Carnegie Hall, among others. At Yale, he is a member of the Yale Tomorrow Campaign Committee, the University Council, and the Sterling Fellows.

On May 30, 2009, Yale School of Drama’s black box theatre, formerly called the New Theater and located at 1156 Chapel Street, was dedicated as the Iseman Theater. “The dedication of the Iseman Theater marks the first named performance space in the history of Yale School of Drama and Yale Repertory Theatre and represents Mr. Iseman’s passionate support of theatre and the performing arts here at Yale and around the world,” said Dean James Bundy ’95. “The entire community celebrates his deep commitment and is grateful for his generosity.”

In operation since 2000, the theater was designed by Ming Cho Lee (Faculty) and Bronislaw Sammler ’74 (Faculty) with architect Deborah Berke. The flexible space supports a variety of theatrical and dance productions, including Yale School of Drama’s Carlotta Festival, the World Performance Project, and the Undergraduate Playwriting Festival.

At the dedication, Iseman said that “the focused, driven, entrepreneurial efforts of Dean James Bundy, the heads of the other Yale art schools, and President Richard C. Levin to make Yale the preeminent major university in the world in the arts

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have succeeded. I am honored to have my name affiliated with this illustrious drama school, which strives continuously to achieve work that is lasting, influential, transcendent, and sublime. What a pleasure to do my bit to abet Yale’s remarkable Matt Cornish ’09 work.”

A Surprise for George White George White It was a surprise for George White ’61 yc ’57 (Former Faculty) when he walked into the Belasco Room at Sardi’s Restaurant on May 12 and saw it filled with old friends, colleagues and former students, glasses lifted in toast to him. It was even more of a surprise—and an emotional one too—when he learned the gathering was to honor his many years of educating theater management students at the School and the groundbreaking work he set down in theatre management at Yale.

A quintet of George’s former students—Abigail Evans ’87, Meredith Freeman ’88, Flora Stamatiades ’94, Kathy Houle ’88, and Laura Wilts Perlow ’93—surprised George again by announcing the establishment of the George White Prize: to honor “an extraordinary theatre artist, producer and teacher who has generously devoted a lifetime of talent to the theatre, and has graciously guided and inspired a multitude of YSD students and theatre professionals.”

The Prize was given for the first time at Commencement in May to Sergi Torres ’09.

With the establishment of this prize, George’s legacy of excellence in teaching Back row, from left to right: Abigail Evans and commitment to ’87, Scott Richards yc ’82, Laura Wilksthe field will play a Perlow ’93, Meredith Freeman ’88, significant role in the Kathy Houle ’88, Flora Stamatiades ’94, Dean James Bundy ’95. Front row, from left lives of its recipients. to right: Elizabeth Darling White, George White ’61 yc ’57, Juliette White Hyson yc ’89.

Barry Jay Kaplan

Iseman photo by Tony Fiorini; White photo by Herb Scher ’86; Richard photo courtesy of Nicholas Lemesh; Trask photo courtesy of Emily Trask; Kaye photo courtesy of Dena Kaye.

Frederick Iseman

Making Musical Theatre Matter The Sylvia Fine Kaye and Danny Kaye Foundation Throughout her life, Sylvia Fine Kaye promoted the art of musical comedy. As a lyricist and composer for her husband, the 1940s movie star Danny Kaye, she wrote music and lyrics for movies like Up in Arms (1944), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), and The Court Jester (1956).

Over her long career, she was nominated for two Academy Awards and two Emmy Awards. Mrs. Kaye, who died in 1991 at the age of 78, estimated that she wrote more than 100 songs for her husband, like the patter song “Anatole of Paris”: “And why do I sew each new chapeau / With a style they look most positively grim in? / Strictly between us, entre-nous / I hate women!”

In 1975, she offered a Yale College seminar—“History (Top) Emily and Analysis of Trask ’11 Musical Comedy”— (Bottom) Danny & because she believed Sylvia Fine Kaye new singers and songwriters could no longer absorb style and technique, as she had, simply by attending the theatre, which had grown prohibitively expensive. “I feel I owe it to the youngsters,” she explained to the New York Times. Mrs. Kaye even recorded a television version of her Yale course on PBS, with a star “faculty” that included Carol Burnett and Ethel Merman.

Before she died, the philanthropic Mrs. Kaye donated her enormous collection

Always a Writer of important American music recordings Mark Richard to the Library of Congress, endowed An original “Mad Man,” Mark John the Sylvia Fine Kaye Chair in Musical Richard ’57 passed away in March, Theater at Brooklyn College, and, among 2008. Though he other projects, financed the worked for 30 years restoration of The Playhouse at as a commercial Hunter College. Mrs. Kaye’s work producer at continues through the Danny Grey Worldwide and Sylvia Fine Kaye Foundation, Advertising, run by daughter Dena Kaye. The eventually retiring Foundation has made significant as a Vice President, contributions to the arts and he never forgot the humanitarian organizations Mark Richard ’57 theatre. Bringing worldwide. In February 2009 the a theatrical Foundation established the Sylvia perspective to the ad Fine Kaye Scholarship Fund at Yale world, he produced award-winning School of Drama. The fund will support, in commercials featuring stars such as perpetuity, students pursuing professional Barbra Streisand, Jane Powell, and theatre training, with preference given to Jane Russell. In addition to his work those with an interest and demonstrated in advertising, Richard produced talent in musical theatre. several plays in London and New This scholarship comes at a propitious York, and wrote a musical revue time. Recently, Yale School of Drama has about three divas titled Triplets, been increasing its support of musical which had its premiere at TheatreFest theatre—in the 2008–09 season, a thesis ’98 at Montclair State University in project (Jelly’s Last Jam) and a secondNew Jersey. Reflecting his lifelong year playwright production (The Current passion for theatre and performing War) were both musicals, as were several arts, Richard decided to leave a major Cabaret productions. And in June 2009, portion of his assets to Yale School of the newly created Yale Institute for Music Drama. Nicholas Lemesh, friend and Theatre, co-founded by the School of co-executor of Richard’s estate, says, Drama and Yale School of Music, held “Mark bemoaned the fact that so many workshops for three original music of the young actors he met during his theatre works; one of them, POP!, will be lifetime were lacking theatre history produced in the 2009–2010 season at the knowledge, something he valued Yale Repertory Theatre. so much from his training at Yale.”

Emily Trask ’11, a musical theatre With Richard’s bequest, the School of performer since high school and the first Drama established a scholarship in to receive the Sylvia Fine Kaye scholarship, his name to support students in the says, “I am extremely honored to have playwriting department. been chosen as the inaugural recipient Matt Cornish ’09 of this scholarship. Musical theatre is a significant part of the American theatrical voice, though it is often overlooked as a serious category of the dramatic arts.”

After all these years, Sylvia Fine Kaye is still giving back to “the youngsters.”

Matt Cornish ’09

YSD 2009–10

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Alumni Notes

40s

50s

Jack Jacobs ’47 regrets that he missed the alumni party due to a broken hip, and though he lost his wife recently, he has not lost his sense of humor.

Joan (Feldman) Kron ’48 is still working as contributing editor-at-large of Allure magazine. In January, she spent two weeks in Dubai and Abu Dhabi looking into plastic surgery and cultural differences in standards of beauty in the Middle East. This fall, she appears in an HBO documentary titled Youth Knows No Pain: Better Living Through Plastic Surgery.

Tom Bartis ’59 recently appeared in A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters, which opened to rave reviews at the Herb Strauss Schoolhouse Theater on Sanibel Island, FL. Robert Brustein ’51, mah ’66 (Former Dean) has six grandchildren ranging in age from eight months to twenty-five years. He also has two new plays about Shakespeare: Mortal Terror and The English Channel.

Joy Carlin ’54 directed Jack Goes Boating at the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley, CA. Her next project, Awake and Sing, is the first play of Aurora’s new season. She directed Awake and Sing at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre twenty-six years ago.

Gene Gurlitz ’57 is pleased to report that

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From Nazi Germany to Denver Civic Theatre: How Henry Lowenstein ’56 Made Theatre Happen A full retelling of Henry Lowenstein’s ’56 CDR road to Yale School of Drama would raise even the most world-weary eye­ brows. Lowenstein went from listening to Kurt Weill practicing the tunes for Three Penny Opera on his parents’ piano in their Berlin flat, to fleeing from the Nazis and, before he even gained American citizenship, joining the U.S. Air Force. Upon his dis­ charge in 1953, Lowenstein applied to Yale School of Drama with only an art portfolio and a passion for the arts. “I never missed an opportunity to go to the theatre in London while I lived in England as a refugee during WWII and later when I came to America as a typical immigrant with no education and no money,” he said in an interview.

Lowenstein was far from the “typical immigrant,” however, and his application to the School of Drama had him traveling to New Haven to start school just a few weeks after his discharge.

“The School of Drama had accepted me on the strength of my art portfolio, but now I was in an environment where everyone, and I mean everyone, had many years of theatre education and experience beginning with elementary school, while I had none whatsoever.”

He soon overcame his lack of experience and was recruited by theatre actress and entrepreneur Helen Bonfils to work at the prestigious Bonfils Theatre in Denver after graduation. From 1956 to 1975 Lowenstein designed hundreds of plays, operas, and ballets and became general manager of the Bonfils Theatre in 1967. In 1986 he left to found the Denver Civic Theatre, where he designed and produced more than 90 shows before retiring in 1995. The Denver Public Library honored Lowenstein’s life’s work in 2009 with a retrospective exhibition entitled, “The Art of Henry: 25 Years of Scenery and Costume Design.” The exhibit attracted thousands of viewers and high­ lighted Lowenstein’s remarkable creative output.

Jennifer Shaw ’09

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YSD 2009–10

Jay Keene ’57 married B. Jean Griffin on May 11, 2009 in Scottsdale, AZ.

on June 23, 2009, the first of what hopefully will be future Yale School of Drama North Carolina reunions was held at Spice Street, a Chapel Hill eatery. In attendance were: Gene, Robert Long ’76, theater consultant; Hannah Grannemann-Isaac ’08, Managing Director, UNC Playmakers Theater; Tony Armento ’98, CPA; and Bob Barr ’52, actor and playwright.

A half-dozen additional alumni sent regrets with promises to attend future events. The group will try to meet again in the autumn.

Jay Keene ’57 is pleased to announce his marriage to B. Jean Griffin on May 11, 2009, in Scottsdale, AZ. Lucile M. Lichtblau’s ’56 full-length play Car Talk was commissioned by Stageworks, an Equity regional theater in Hudson, NY, and was produced on its main stage July 22 to August 9.

Gordon Micunis ’59 and Jay Kobrin ’59 recently celebrated their 50 years together by marrying, thanks to new Canadian legislation. The ceremony was performed by Rabbi Corey Weiss at The Fairmont Royal Hotel in Toronto, Canada, on November 18, 2008.

Gordon and Jay met at Yale studying under Donald Oenslager (Former Faculty) and Frank Bevan (Former Faculty). Their careers as designers include opera scenery and costumes, Seventh Avenue fashion, restaurant and space design, graphics, and art jewelry. Gordon is showing his new line of art jewelry this summer at Scottsdale’s Joan Cawley Gallery and Santa Fe’s Gallerie Estaban. They reside in New York City and Santa Fe, NM. Mary Wilkinson ’50 has retired after working as an actress, real estate broker, and teacher. She is active in church activities,

Lowenstein photo courtesy of Henry Lowenstein

Around the World

Alumni Notes

Joan Van Ark ’64 in Knot’s Landing.

writes a column in the Honolulu Advertiser, and volunteers at the Hawaii Kai Retirement Community.

60s

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Joan van Ark ’64 played a desperate housewife of Orange County in My Name is Earl, received a 2009 TV Land Award with the cast and producers of Knots Landing, and filmed her second episode of Nip/Tuck (playing a cougar).

Thomas Atkins ’64 and Mary Ellen O’Brien Atkins ’65 celebrated their 45th wedding anniversary this past April. They were married in New Haven while both were Yale School of Drama students. Tom’s novel, The Chinaberry Tree, is currently circulating among publishers. He also has a new website—www.southernapparitions.com—containing a serialized story based on his experiences as a teenager living on his father’s banana plantation in British Honduras.

Robert Auletta ’69 spent time in May of this year with Rebecca Nelson ’79 and Ken Ryan ’76, visiting Howard Stein (Former Faculty) and his wife Mary Ann. Howard’s wit, spirit, wisdom, and memory stand him well. In the midst of lunch and a few glasses of wine, the group found itself drawn back to the Brustein years, remembering the ferocious energy, rebellion, and unbridled creativity that marked that period. Ken and Becky are

working on a play of his called Early On, trying to put it together as a staged reading.

Warren Bass ’67 was the screen director of the multimedia stage production In Conflict (produced in collaboration with stage director Doug Wager) which played Long Wharf, the Edinburgh Fringe, and off-Broadway’s Barrow Street Theatre in 2008. He remains Chair of the Film & Media Arts Department at Temple University. His recent films include At the Wall, a documentary on the civil rights struggle (which received recognition in twelve international film festivals over the past year, and four international awards); Black Soldiers in Blue, on the training of black troops in the Civil War; and Tsunami Stories, a featurelength documentary on the disaster that claimed 295,000 lives, filmed in Sri Lanka with his wife Zilan. Two of his daughters also went there to work in the relief effort. From 1999 to 2006 he visited or passed through New Haven about once or twice a month while his oldest daughter Amal Bass yc ’03 and Harvard Law ’06 attended school. Last year Amal gave birth to identical twins, which makes him and his wife grandparents!

Jeff Bleckner ’68 recently directed the Hallmark Hall of Fame movie Loving Leah, and is currently in development on an independent feature that will shoot in New England in the next year or two. He is now the grandfa-

ther of six children, two girls and four boys, all under the age of six.

Arthur W. Bloom ’66, grd ’66 was recently awarded the John Thomas Bevivino award by Bucks County Children and Youth Social Services Agency for his work in helping Bucks County, PA, foster children get into college and obtain enough scholarships to attend the schools of their choice. He has mentored youth currently at the Culinary Institute of America, West Chester University, University of Denver, Temple University, Moravian College, Arcadia University, and Kutztown University.

Janet Burroway ’63 saw the production of her first mini-musical Netbling! in June, with a score by Cris Wo, as part of the workshop sequence at Theatre Building Chicago. Her play Medea With Child is scheduled for production by the Chicago company Sideshow in spring of 2010. Iowa City Symphony performed a second festival weekend of her children’s book, The Giant Jam Sandwich. She’s also scheduling readings of her new book Bridge of Sand (see www.janetburroway.com).

Vienna Cobb ’67 has traveled for most of the year. In the spring of 2008, she spent five weeks sailing the entire coast of West Africa from the Cape of Good Hope to Gibraltar, then spent two weeks journeying through Cappa­ docia in Turkey, followed by a trip on the

Members of the directing class of 1965 reunited in New York in March 2009: clockwise from left to right: Russ Treyz ’65, Beverly Brumm ’65, Chuck Vicinus ’65, and Pam Hawthorn ’65. All are still active in theatre, directing and teaching.

YSD 2009–10

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Around the World

Ramon Delgado ’67 (left) and Thomas Parente at the concert reading of Delgado’s The Fabulous Jennie, presented at Westminster Choir College in February 2009.

Trans-Siberian Railroad from Vladivostok to Moscow and into Mongolia. Next, she sailed the Baltic Sea from St. Petersburg to Copenhagen. After a two-month break, she sailed the Persian Gulf for two weeks. To all her classmates, Vienna sends love and thanks for the wonderful days they shared at Yale.

Robert Cohen ’64 concluded his 44th year on the drama faculty of UC Irvine this past June, directed School for Wives at the Utah Shakespearean Festival last summer, and gave workshops at the Shanghai Theatre Academy and the Grotowski Institute in Poland this past fall and spring. He directed a new play, Eve’s Rapture, at the Hayworth Theatre in Los Angeles and saw a production of his new translation of Molière’s The Misanthrope—just published by Eldridge Press—in San Antonio.

He’s now working on the ninth edition of his introductory textbook Theatre, which will be out next year with McGraw-Hill, and finished proofreading the seventh edition of his book Acting Professionally—now co-authored with his former student James Calleri of Calleri Casting in New York.

Kenneth Costigan ’60 was elected to a 2nd term as Vice President of I.A.T.S.E. Local 306, Motion Picture Projectionists, Video Technicians, Theatrical Employees and Allied Crafts, New York City. His son, Kevin Costigan, was elected to the Executive Board of the same I.A.T.S.E. Local.

Katherine Crone ’60 had two of her miniature sculptures in a group exhibition, Economies of Scale, presented at a gallery in Chelsea . Her work Tokyo Sunday is included in the 11th edition of Art Fundamentals: Theory and Practice by Ocvirk, Stinson, Wigg, Bone, and Cayton. The text is published by McGrawHill Higher Education, and is used in a section

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on Three-Dimensional Applications of Time Kenneth Freedman ’67 received his degree and Motion. in counseling psychology in 1998 from Ramon Delgado ’67 wrote the book and lyr- Prescott College, with a focus on Gay, Lesbian, ics for The Fabulous Jennie, a musical set in the Bi-oriented, Trans-, and Inter-gender studies.

Victorian era, revolving around the courtship Since then, he has had a private practice in of Jennie Jerome from Brooklyn and British Anchorage, AK, and has kept his AEA card. aristocrat Randolph Churchill (parents of Stanley Harrison ’60 continues to teach Winston Churchill). A concert reading was and act in New York, most recently on The presented at Westminster Choir College in Sopranos.

February 2009 with music composed by Derek Hunt ’62 has completed six years as a Thomas Parente, Associate Professor of Piano trustee of Northern Stage in White River at Westminster. Plans are developing for a full Junction, VT. Presently he serves on the board production next year. of directors of Capital Center for the Arts in George DiCenzo ’65 is still teaching acting Concord, NH. He recently returned to Hong in New York City at Shetler Studios and in Kong, where he was a member of the accrediPhiladelphia at Mike Lemon Casting. tation and validation committee for the Hong Robert Einenkel ’69 continues to teach act- Kong Academy of Performing Arts. This was ing and direct at Nassau Community College, his sixth trip to Hong Kong for various prowhere he is a full Professor and chairs the gram evaluations and accreditations that College-Wide Curriculum Committee. This began in the early 1990s when HKAPA began year he directed a series of Chekhov one-acts, offering undergraduate degrees. one of which, The Proposal, was a second-year Ray Klausen ’67 designed sets for Liza’s at project of his while he was a student at Yale the Palace and Burn the Floor on Broadway; School of Drama. This spring he directed Inventing Avi at the Abingdon Theatre and Simon Gray’s Stage Struck. Last summer, he Yank! at the York Theater, both Off Broadway; directed a workshop of Oh Virgil! at the and the pre-Broadway tryout of Rest, In Pieces Woodstock Fringe. at the Charles Wood Theater in Glens Falls, Leslie Epstein ’67 saw the second producNY. He also had a showing of his sculpture at tion of the play he adapted from his 1979 the Nader Gallery in New York City. novel King of the Jews. The first was by the Allen Klein ’62 was the recipient of the Boston Playwrights Theater in Boston in the Doug Fletcher Lifetime Achievement Award at winter of 2007; the other was produced last the annual conference of the Association for spring by the Olney Theater in MD. Applied and Therapeutic Humor in Las Vegas.

Richard Foreman ’62 presented, through For over twenty years, he has been a profeshis Ontological-Hysteric Theater, a new opera sional speaker, showing audiences worldwide Astronome, composed by John Zorn, which he how to use and find humor in unlikely places. designed and directed. He continues to film He is the author of The Healing Power of Humor, material (in nine countries so far) for his The Courage to Laugh, and fourteen other Bridge Workshop, for which he has almost books. completed editing his first feature-length film Bob Lawler ’67 is back at MIT, working titled Speaking for Dead People. He has also with Marvin Minsky, his mentor and colbeen in rehearsal for his new play Idiot Savant, league, with whom he earned his PhD many staring Willem Dafoe, for a co-production years ago. Minsky is credited with creating the with the Public Theater. His latest book of plays, Bad Boy Nietzsche, was published last John Marsteller year. His focus in the future will be on film. ’62, yc ’59 Stephen Foreman ’64 saw his new novel, Watching Gideon, published on November 10, 2009.

Keith Fowler ’64, dfa ’69 continues to head the directing program at the University of California, Irvine. He recently directed Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and is preparing to stage his second production of The Threepenny Opera this fall. Keith enjoyed a tour of the Galapagos Islands last winter and is recovering nicely from his recent spinal surgery.

YSD 2009–10

Alumni Notes computer HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001.

Ev Lunning, Jr. ’69, yc ’67 appeared last summer in a production of The Bat with Austin Lyric Opera. He was bitten by the opera bug and began taking lessons with a teacher at the Lyric Opera School. He presented a recital with a soprano, singing duets from Mozart, Puccini, and Lehar. Last November he appeared in the Mary Moody Northern Theatre production of Three Sisters in the role of Dr. Chebutykin. In June he and his colleague Patricia Pearcy produced Long Day’s Journey into Night under the Equity Members’ Project Code at The Off Center in Austin, playing Mary and James Tyrone, and directed by Dr. Lucien Douglas of the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin.

John Marsteller ’62, yc ’59 is still a Lighting Consultant, after 50 years of design! In the late 60s he went to Asia to design a light sculpture for the new Manila headquarters of Meralco, the principle power and light company of Luzon, capital island of the Philippines. He decided to stay on in Asia and opened an office in Hong Kong, making his company the first in Asia specializing exclusively in lighting design. Since then his company has been doing lighting design for the majority of the luxury hotels in Southeast Asia, and many in the Middle East and Europe, including Hyatt properties in Paris and Milan.

He created lighting for the Taj Group in India and in Bangkok and was responsible for the transformation of the oldest European-style building in Thailand into a luxury hotel.

Stephen Keep Mills ’69 needed help with a set for his short film Liminal, and Yale School of Drama put him in touch with Rachel Myers ’07. The piece was shot in Hollywood at Ben Kitay Sound Stages, on 35mm in black and white. It has screened at 40 festivals world-wide and so far has won 11 awards.

Stephen’s 18-year-old son Wyatt graduated from Crossroads in Los Angeles and will be attending the School of Visual Arts in New York, where Robert Auletta ’69 teaches writing.

Tom Moore ’68 has been filming a documentary called The Flying Trapeze, focusing on the great aerialists of the last century.

Shooting has taken him all over the country, and will take him to Paris in the fall. He’s also serving on the Executive Board of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. This is their 50th anniversary, and Tom is co-chair of the 50th Initiative Committee.

S. Joseph Nassif ’63 is fully retired as Professor Emeritus of Theatre Arts at Rollins

Alejandra Gollas plays Ina in Liminal by Stephen Keep Mills ’69. Set design by Rachel Myers ’07. Photo by Michael Alba.

College. He resides in Chautauqua, NY, and Winter Park, FL. He is guest-directing this fall at Coe College in Iowa and Rollins College, Florida. He serves on two advisory boards for the Florida Arts Council and the American College Theatre Festival, as well as on the ASC (Alumni Schools Committee) and as Yale School of Drama Class Agent for 1963.

Richard Olson ’69 performed the dancetheatre piece The Meaning of Life with his partner Jennifer Neff in the New Dance Group’s Exchange series, and in the Hatch series at Jennifer Muller/The Works, both in Manhattan. In December, he directed Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors at The Little Church Around the Corner. K(now), a new opera by Brian Schober, for which Richard wrote the libretto, will premiere in New York sometime in 2010. For more information, visit http://web.me.com/mancat.

Howard Pflanzer ’68 was a writer on the theatrical revue Pleasures of Peace at the Medicine Show Theatre in June 2008, contributing an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Perilous Play. A reading of his play Jersey Nights was presented by The Living Theatre in New York City in January 2008, and he had one-acts on the bills of UFO Story and The Flowers Sing: Strindberg’s Dream, at the same theatre in December 2008. He had a staged reading of his new play, Living with History: Camus Sartre De Beauvoir at the Medicine Show Theatre in May 2009, and will be doing a lecture on “Alternative Theatre in US” at the Malta International Theatre Festival, and another, “Jerzy Grotowski, Judith Malina, and The Living Theatre: Alternative Theatrical Paths,” under the auspices of The Theatre of the Eighth Day, both in Poznan, Poland, the last week of June 2009.

Paul Pierog ’68 has for several years been playing clubs, theaters, and television in various satiric personae. He has also further developed his education project, Wordspaceit!

Edward Pomeranz ’60 saw, in the last year,

YSD 2009–10

three staged readings of his plays: Dancing on Quicksand, an evening of six short plays with songs, at the Hayworth Theatre in Los Angeles, with Paul Mazursky; A Tune Beyond Us or What a Revoltin’ Development This Is!, at the Theatre at St. Clements in New York City; and The Goddess of Filthy Things, at the Edgemar Theatre Center in Santa Monica. His one-act play, The Peacekeeper, was a finalist for the 2008 Actors Theatre of Louisville Heideman Award.

Jonathan Price ’68 has been teaching content management and information architecture online through the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is also doing web content for Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, and working on his big garden.

Carrie (Fishbein) Robbins ’67 designed 200 to 300 costumes for the Alley Theatre’s production of American in Paris, Ken Ludwig’s adaptation of the MGM musical. She was the co-curator of an exhibit at the Oenslager Gallery: “Curtain Call: Celebrating a Century of Women Designing for Live Performance,” an exhibit featuring the work of 162 designing women and their set, costume, lighting, and projection work for theatre, opera, and dance, with over 500 sketches and production photos from 1903 to the present, over 70 garments, and a dozen set models. Carrie also designed costumes for White Christmas, a musical based on the movie of the same name, and received a Drama Desk nomination when the play opened on Broadway.

Michael Elliot Rutenberg ’60, dfa ’65 is Professor of Theatre at Hunter College of the City University of New York, and the author of Edward Albee: Playwright in Protest, as well as a recent adaptation of Seneca’s Oedipus.

He directed the world premiere of Death in Mozambique, a drama by Jonathan Alexandratos, at the Cherry Pit Theatre in

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) 432-1559. Y ou can also find us on Facebook! Look for the group “Yale School of Drama.”

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Around the World Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles. He also teaches a professional acting workshop and gets together on occasion with fellow alumnus Barnet Kellman ’72. He spends a great deal of time recruiting for his alma mater, Kenyon College.

Ray Warner ’66 has spent most of his career in advertising as a writer/producer/creative director. He sold his agency in the late 1990s, though he still works as a creative and marketing consultant. He was elected to the American Advertising Federation’s Hall of Fame in 2004 and received their Silver Award for community service in 2005. In 2009 Ray was invited to participate as an installation artist in the “Gestures” exhibit at The Mattress Factory Museum; he called his contribution “Bricks for Bread: The Pittsburgh Community Brick Oven Project.” Ray performs in the Irish traditional band Hooley, and wrote two songs recorded by the late and renowned Irish tenor Frank Patterson. In 2008 he wrote and produced the short film Tommy and Me to raise awareness for the homeless.

His short play Night Song premiered in June 2009, as part of The Source Festival of new plays in Washington, D.C. His full-length play

Total Theatre: James Flannery ’61 James Flannery ’61 enjoys taking on different roles: scholar, director, actor, artistic director, recording artist. He came to Yale School of Drama in the 1960s as an actor. While in New Haven, however, Flannery found himself more compelled by the School of Music than the Drama School. As he would later realize, his tendency to stray from his original discipline sprung from a longing for a theatre that used language as an equal component—along with mime, dance, masks, imagery, music, and other art forms—to more richly portray the human experience. This curiosity would eventually lead him to find a kindred spirit in W.B. Yeats.

“Yeats once described his work as ‘a memory and a prophecy,’” Flannery has written, “meaning that it draws its inspiration from the classical traditions of world drama while pointing the way to a visionary ‘total theatre’ embracing an avant-garde of continually evolving forms.” This spring, Flannery will have the opportunity to bring this “total theatre” to life at the Abbey Theatre, where he has been asked to develop the Yeats Project, a joint collaboration with University College, Dublin, that will involve, among other components, training young theatre artists to meet the vocal and gestural demands of Yeats’s plays.

The Yeats Project is only the latest in Flannery’s long history of accomplishments. He has headed theatre programs in Ottawa and Rhode Island, and in 1982 founded the Theater Studies program at Emory University, which he modeled after Yale School of Drama. He has directed more than 60 productions and published six books on Yeats, including the definitive W.B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre.

Flannery has even found time to follow up on his musical proclivities: He is currently working on a sequel to his critically praised recording Dear Harp of My Country: The Irish Snehal Desai ’08 Melodies of Thomas Moore.

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YSD 2009–10

SumiSami and several one-acts are scattered around, so playwriting continues to be a major pursuit.

70s

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Lani Click ’73 is the Palm Beach Director of the Work-Life Balance Institute and Balance Magazine, which offers personal growth advice for women. She also invites you to check out Palm Beach Purses (palmbeachpurses.com), which has a new division, EcoChic Purses (ecochicpurses.com), which is Florida-based and manufactures green fashion/eco-friendly purses. Finally, Laniclickconsulting.com designs websites and strategic marketing plans.

Jim Crabtree ’71 continues in his thirtythird season at Cumberland County Playhouse in Tennessee, where he has been on staff since 1976, and CEO/Producing Director since 1981. The company draws 150,000 visits a year to Crossville (pop. 10,000), and programming includes 400 performances of twelve productions of new and established plays and musicals, as well as 1,600 dance, music, and theatre classes.

Walter Dallas ’71 continues to travel every year or so to Ghana where he writes, sees theatre, and visits with playwright Emanuel Yirenkyi ’71. In America, Walter directed several productions in the last few years, including his own gospel opera, Lazarus, Unstoned at Freedom, at the Freedom Theatre in Philadelphia. He was also lead writer for the movie Standing in the Shadows of Motown, which won “Best Non-Fiction Film” from the New York Film Critics Circle, as well as four Grammy Awards. After leaving his position as Artistic Director of the Freedom Theatre, Walter took a position as Senior Artist-inResidence in the University of Maryland College Park’s Theatre Department, where he will also serve as Co-Director of a new MFA in Performance program.

Lewis Folden ’77 considers edging toward retirement to be one of his primary activities Walter Dallas ’71 Flannery photo courtesy of Jim Flannery

New York City. He is also now listed in the 2009–2010 Who’s Who in America.

Gladden Schrock ’64 retired from Bennington College after fifteen years teaching playwriting and directing. He continues to write fiction and plays, is still based on the coast of Maine, and recently embarked on a six-month tour of New England with Voices: Schrock and Schrock, an evening of music and reading in combination with his daughter, Kate Schrock.

Leslie Stark ’62 played nine roles in the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse 2008 holiday production of the Philip Grecian radio adaptation of the Frank Capra classic, It’s a Wonderful Life. She also worked on two plays for the 2009 short play festival at the Katharine Cornell Theatre, where she has directed and performed for the past three years. She has presented a series of classic jazz appreciation programs at several venues on the Island and on the Cape as well. Her upcoming programs will be jazz treatments of Broadway show tunes and the greatest jazz performances of works by Gershwin.

Ted Walch ’66 is happily directing plays and teaching film studies and acting at

Alumni Notes Heritage Square Museum. In it, Gregory Berger-Sobeck ’98 taught ballet to his real-life acting student under the direction of Eric Scott Gould ’98. Attitude came after Walt’s third indulgence of The Hobbit, producing the reading of Tolkien this time for the Crescenta Valley Arts Council. Bob Barnett ’89 got Walt to help with his Cabaret Show French Songs as did Barbara Bragg ’87 for her one-woman piece True West Girl, directed by Bruce Katzman ’88. The YCH’s 2008 season began by producing the reading of Charles Bartlett’s ’90 That Perfect Moment at Theatre West with Steve Mendillo ’71. Walt also produced for Julius Galacki ’98, who directed the first Readers’ Theatre “Play-In-The-Park” in Pershing Square in June 2009. In May, Macrovision, the company that fired Walt in September, hired him back.

Robert Long ’76 believes that in spite of the challenging economy, it is a great time to William Otterson ’75 (left) and Billy Wheelan in Exigent Theatre’s production of Henri Gabler that build a theatre, and he and his collaborators are busy with a list of new projects. ran in March and April 2009. Photo courtesy of Exigent Theatre.

Elizabeth Norment ’79 played the lead in Wendy Wasserstein’s ’76 Third in the Bay these days. A few years back he bought a cantheir children, Darrow and Anna.

Area, followed by Milwaukee Repertory vas and did a painting which led to another Barnet Kellman ’72 has had a tumultuous Theater’s world premiere of Charles Randolph and still more. He was pleased to find the year, but continues to direct TV shows— Wright’s The Night is a Child, directed by paintings salable. He’s now sold several hunincluding Notes from the Underbelly, My Boys, Timothy Douglas ’86. In late summer, dred and is working on more and larger pieces. and Monk—and is now teaching film full-time Elizabeth portrayed Eleanor Roosevelt in a Voilà—a retirement income combined with at the University of Southern California and one-woman show by Rhoda Lerman, Eleanor: artistic satisfaction! He’s extremely pleased the American Film Institute.

Her Secret Journey, at the Berkshire Theatre that he can achieve the same sense of creativDragan Klaic ’76, dfa ’77 continues teachFestival. She understudied for Christine ity and intellectual contentment that theatre ing cultural policy at the Central European Ebersole and Jayne Atkinson ’85 in Blithe has always brought him. He currently has sev- University in Budapest and at the universities Spirit on Broadway, followed by The Year of eral plays going, including one at Catholic of Leiden and Bologna. From his home base in Magical Thinking at Milwaukee Repertory in University, and will be opening an art exhibiAmsterdam he crisscrosses Europe with freSeptember. tion in D.C. at the private gallery of Covington quent seminars, lectures, workshops, and conWilliam Otterson ’75 has been in over fifty & Burling. ference speeches. He leads the European TV and film productions and commercials in Ralph Garrow ’77 is serving as Chairman Festival Research Project, examining the ongothe last two years. His roles include the main of the Antioch (CA) Chamber of Commerce, ing festivalization of daily life in Europe character’s father in The College Humor Show Treasurer of the Delta Association of Realtors, through semiannual research workshops as on MTV, and the Bearer of the Crown in NBC’s and State Director of the California Asso­ well as publications in books, magazines and ciation of Realtors. online at www.efa-aef.eu. In April, Dragan celeRobert Gulack ’78 presented readings of his brated his birthday at a New York City party play One Thousand and One at the Abingdon that brought together 25 of his old Yale Theatre in New York City and 12 Miles West friends, former students, theatre colleagues, in Bloomfield, NJ. He also recently completed and fellow post-Yugoslav exiles and expatria trilogy of full-length plays in which the dia- ates. His occasional travelogues and other logue is entirely in rhyme. The first play in the activity updates can be found at www.dratrilogy, Six Husbands of Elizabeth the Queen, pre- ganklaic.eu. miered off-off-Broadway in July 2008. His Walt Klappert ’79 treated unemployment most recent work is a double bill of plays as an opportunity to produce more work at about the Roman Empire: Cato at Utica, a trag- Yale Cabaret Hollywood (YCH). In April, there Gregory Berger-Sobeck ’98 teaches Emily Foxler acting and ballet in Attitude X Three by edy freely adapted from Joseph Addison’s 1713 was a reading of Beat, which he is co-writing Dyanne Asimow ’67, directed by Eric Scott verse play; and Mark Antony Entertains, an with classmate playwright Paavo Hall ’79, in Gould ’98, produced by Walt Klappert ’79 for original comedy featuring music by Emmy®the LA Arts District, directed by Steve winning composer Larry Hochman. He lives Zuckerman ’74. Beat was preceded by Attitude the Yale Cabaret Hollywood, read at the in Fair Lawn, NJ, with his wife Zdena, and X Three by Dyanne Asimow ’67, read at the Heritage Square Museum.

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Around the World

From left to right: (front) Robert Long ’76, theater consultant; Hannah GrannemannIsaac ’08, ’08 SOM, Managing Director, UNC Playmakers Theater; Tony Armento ’98, CPA; (rear) Gene Gurlitz ’57, designer; Bob Barr ’52, actor/playwright.

Kings. In the theatre, he played Judge Brack in the premiere of Henri Gabler, an adaptation by Alexander Burns of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. He continues to run his film and TV production company, which recently made eleven commercials celebrating Lincoln Center’s fiftieth anniversary.

Steve Pollock’s ’76 firm, Auerbach Pollock Friedlander, was recognized with a USITT Architecture Merit Award for its work on The Pearl at the Palms Hotel, a 2,100-seat venue for popular music, comedy headliners, and UFC cage bouts. Though he has recently been receiving treatment for prostate cancer, he is happy to report that he’s feeling pretty great and that he has a good prognosis. He encourages all men to have an annual prostate exam.

Bill Purves ’71 continues with Harris Goldman Productions in San Diego, producing industrial shows, meetings, and events nationally. Though the recession has hit the meetings and events business, he hopes to see some recovery in 2010. Bill married his partner of 17 years, Donald F. Schmidt, in September 2008. He enjoys staying in touch with YSD alumni, many of whom populate the San Diego theatre scene.

Pat Quinn ’76 founded a company, Quinn Media Management, which advises on new media revenue sources, with clients including U.K. production companies and television distributors. She is focusing on programming acquisitions and co-productions for Western European broadcasters.

John Rothman ’75 played the chairman of HUAC in Finks, a new play by Joe Gilford at New York Stage and Film, the minister of

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Finance to Ian McShane’s King in Kings for NBC, the CEO of an international bank in Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Henry Paulson in a radio drama for the BBC and starred in a short film called New Media, which won an Audience Award at the Independent Feature Project. He also played husband to Meryl Streep ’75, dfa hon ’83 in a new play, Good Smoke, at the Public Theater. John was elected to the New York Board of SAG, where he was often in conflict with his old classmate and SAG president Alan Rosenberg ’74. His daughter Lily graduated from Yale College in 2008, went to work for the Obama campaign and was hired as Liaison for Youth in the Obama transition. His son will graduate from Franklin and Marshall in 2010. He lost his father, founder of Baltimore Center Stage; the theatre has dedicated their next season to his memory.

Bob Sandberg ’77 saw his son Eric Sandberg law ’10, ’07 get married in October.

Daughter Megan is pursuing freelance work after the Providence Black Repertory Company, where she was Associate Artistic Director, suspended their theatre season for financial reasons. In the spring of 2009, George Street Playhouse did the premiere tour of Bob’s IRL: In Real Life. First Stage Milwaukee’s young company produced his adaptation of The Body of Christopher Creed.

And he began writing a new piece: an international cyber romantic sex comedy.

Suzanne Sato ’79 returned to Hawaii in 2003 to care for her aging mother and to send her two children to Punahou School (her alma mater—and President Obama’s). Professional theatre in Hawaii is a scarce commodity, so she is now working in development for Punahou, at a beautifully green 76-acre beehive of youthful energy (from grades k–12) with one of the best-equipped theatre production facilities in the Islands. She remains a Board member for the 54-year-old Honolulu Theatre for Youth, whose recent production of Goodnight Moon broke all records. They are looking forward to two new plays next season by local playwrights Lee Tonouchi and Dan Kelin, and to artistic director Eric Johnson’s season of science discovery planned for 2010–2011.

Joel Schechter ’72, dfa ’73 recently published Rivington Street, a collection of comic strips on Yiddish culture that he wrote and that Spain Rodriquez illustrated. Joel continues to teach theatre history and literature at San Francisco State University.

John Shea ’73 has been named Artistic

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Director of the Nantucket Theatre Workshop, the 70-year old organization dedicated to bringing theatre to the island population.

John made his professional debut there in 1968 in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, getting paid $10 a performance. He is currently appearing on Gossip Girl and has written the screenplay Grey Lady, a mystery thriller he’ll direct for Beacon Pictures.

Roy B. Steinberg ’78 is the new Artistic Director of Cape May Stage, where he hired Neal Lerner ’86 to join the cast of Social Security. Roy is eager to hear from Yale School of Drama actors, designers, stage managers, and writers to join him at this Equity company on the shore in Southern New Jersey. Go to capemaystage.com for more information and contact him at roy@capemaystage.com. Royal also directed Life in General, on strike.tv, which has been nominated for five Spirit Awards.

Jarek Strzemien ’75 retired from academia two years ago after teaching acting and directing for almost 30 years at University of Connecticut and Central Connecticut State University. Last year he directed two operas for the Connecticut Lyric Opera: Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin.

Next spring he is directing, for the same company, Karol Szymanowski’s opera King Roger, which has been recently produced by several opera companies in Europe, including the Opera Bastille in Paris. He is also involved in translating American drama into Polish.

Recently, Polish National Television produced Jerry Sterner’s Other People’s Money in Jarek’s translation. He is also looking for a place in the New Haven area to be closer to his daughter Anya, who lives in Brooklyn and is the editor of Style for The Huffington Post.

Edith Tarbescu ’76 had a second production of her one-woman play Suffer Queen at the Algonquin Theatre in New York. She is seeking other venues and can be reached at tarbescue@comcast.net.

Mark Travis ’70 has been touring Europe since last summer, teaching filmmaking at film schools in Dublin, Munich, Amsterdam, Lillehammer, Copenhagen, London, and the States. He consulted on two Hollywood films, Not Forgotten and The Stoning of Soroya M., which opened last summer. He is also writing his third book on directing, The Director’s Bag of Tricks. He developed and directed two solo shows, Pay Attention with Frank South, and Next Exit: Beautiful Life with Taffy Wallace.

Mark is also writing two original screenplays, one of which, The Nap, he will direct by the end of 2009.

Alumni Notes Charles Turner ’70 has, over the past few seasons, played Gloucester in King Lear, directed by Hal Scott at Yale Repertory Theatre; Norman in On Golden Pond at the Cort Theatre; The Man opposite Marian Seldes in The Play about the Baby; Dr. Sykes in the recordbreaking production of To Kill a Mockingbird at Hartford Stage with Matthew Modine; been in the Tony-nominated Dividing the Estate company at the Booth on Broadway; and, most recently, been in Horton Foote’s Orphans’

Home Cycle at Hartford Theatre Company and the Signature Theatre in New York City. His daughter, Dr. Shairi Turner-Davis, was just appointed Deputy Secretary of Health for the state of Florida, and his son Kai is developing the website for the London Olympics in 2012.

Jeff Wanshel ’72 has been teaching Playwriting at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY, for Michael Posnick’s Dance & Theatre Department. He also substitute teaches at SUNY Purchase. Last year he

Nancy El Bouhali ’70 with her daughter Leyla.

Naphtali Daggett.

Artist Unknown, XVIII Century. Courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery.

Did You Know?: An Alumna’s Historical Factoid Next time you’re looking to improve your Yale University trivia knowledge, ask Nancy (Reeder) El Bouhali ’70 to tell you about her great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Naphtali Daggett, D.D. 1748 YC, who not only held Yale’s first profes­sorship of divinity, but the first named professorship in the school’s history.

After serving as a Presbyterian pastor in Smithtown, Long Island, Daggett was called back to Yale in 1755 to become Livingston Chair of Divinity. Two years later, Daggett became the first pastor of the newly founded Yale College Church. Daggett was a man of passionate loyalty to God, country, and College. Modest and with no taste for controversy, he became President of Yale College pro tempore after his conservative and contentious predecessor, Thomas Clap, was forced to resign. Daggett served in that capacity for eleven years, without once asking for the pro tempore to be removed from his title.

Daggett is chiefly remembered, however, for an act that was out of character. In July 1779, as a group of Yale students prepared to defend New Haven against an invading British force, one student was shocked “to see Dr. Daggett riding furiously by us on his old black mare with his long fowling piece [a light shotgun for shooting birds] in his hand ready for action” (Sprague’s Annals of the American Pulpit by Elizur Goodrich 1779 YC). After standing his ground against the British army, Daggett was captured, beaten, and forced to march, barefoot and in sweltering heat, through the city and onto the Green. A Loyalist friend interceded on his behalf; he was saved and eventually returned to preach at Yale, but he never fully recovered from his wounds.

Daggett died in 1780.

Great-great-great-great-great granddaughter El Bouhali never spoke about her famous ancestor while a design student at Yale School of Drama, but years later she brought her daughter Leyla back to New Haven to visit Daggett Street, the only visible reminder, aside from his gravesite in Grove Street Cemetery, of Daggett’s heroism in defense of a city he loved. She’s especially proud of one of her ancestor’s accomplishments during his presidency: abolishing the policy of ranking Yale students by their fathers’ social positions and listing them alphabetically instead. Yale School of Drama should also be proud of another accomplishment: At a time when either attending or taking part in a theatrical production was officially forbidden by the law of the College, Daggett looked the other way as student literary societies presented some of the first Jason Fitzgerald ’08 plays on Yale’s campus.

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brought acquaintances Derek Walcott and Edward Albee to his Playwriting 2 class there.

Jeff’s play Ophelia (published by Playscripts) enjoyed a couple of productions around the country this year and last.

Scott Yuille ’77 is still in the Upper Connecticut River Valley in New Hampshire.

Last month he was asked to work with Scott Silver ’96 in the final rigging and set-up of Dartmouth College’s production of Grapes of Wrath. Due to the economy, he has had to cut back on his riding, but hopes to own his own land and horses in a couple of years.

Laura Zucker ’75 continues her work as Executive Director of the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, and at the same time is the new director of the Masters in Arts Management program at Claremont Graduate University.

Steve Zuckerman ’74 has written episodes of television shows According to Jim, Hannah Montana, and a new show, Ruby and the Rockits.

He directed the premiere of Garry Marshall’s Everybody Say at the Falcon Theatre in Los Angeles. He also directed the reading of Beat and a production of Michael Zettler’s Waiting for Mert starring Steve Mendillo ’71, for Yale Cabaret Hollywood. He also took the first two plays in Shem Bitterman’s (2008 PEN Award Winner) Iraq War trilogy to New York.

80s

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Billy Aronson ’83 has new plays that will be produced by Ensemble Studio Theatre, SF Playhouse/Z Space Studio, and Philadelphia’s 1812 Productions. A children’s musical for which he wrote the book will also premiere at the Lucille Lortel. billyaronson.com Mark Bly ’80 (Former Faculty) continues his work as Senior Dramaturg and Director of New Play Development for Houston’s Alley Theatre, in addition to his appointment as Distinguished Professor of Theatre at the University of Houston. In the spring of 2009, Mark also served as dramaturg for the Broadway production of 33 Variations, directed

by Moisés Kaufman and starring Jane Fonda.

This past season at the Alley, Mark was dramaturg for The Farnsworth Invention, directed by OBIE Award-winner David Cromer; and Eurydice by Yale Rep Associate Artist Sarah Ruhl, directed by Gregory Boyd. Mark has also been a part of the Alley Theatre’s expanded commitment to new plays.

Sharon Brady ’88 is still teaching at Point

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Around the World Park in Pittsburgh. She had the lead role in Amy Hartman’s Disinfecting Edwin, and soon will be celebrating 28 years of marriage to Vidya. Her daughter Oona is graduating from high school and is going to Occidental College in L.A. Rich Butler ’87 was Production Designer for the new independent feature, Gigantic, and for the ABC series The Unusuals. Currently he is designing the new comedy series for HBO, Bored to Death. He attended a first-year design class with his former teacher Ming Cho Lee (Faculty), and then a follow-up visit to Ming’s “Clambake” at the Lincoln Center Library of the Performing Arts. Rich’s daughter Niamh is a drawing and painting major at the Lyme Academy in Old Lyme, CT; his son Devin excels in track and will finish high school next year.

Staying In Touch and Reconnecting with Classmates How can we reach you if we don’t know where you are? Please be sure to keep us updated on all contact changes, especially mailing addresses, email addresses, phone numbers and work information. Write to us at ysd. alumni@yale.edu. Or update your info directly through the Association of Yale Alumni at www.aya.yale.edu.

Not a member of AYA? Join now—it’s free!

As a member, you can register for the School of Drama Listserv where you can post and receive notices intended for YSD alumni. Many other services, including the online Alumni Directory and the Yale Career Network, are available at www.aya.yale.edu.

Attention all Facebook users (and those yet to join): Please be sure to join the official Yale School of Drama Facebook Group. This is another great way to network and keep in touch with your classmates and stay in touch with the School.

Coming soon…The Yale School of Drama Alumni Webpage will soon be available on our website, drama.yale.edu. We’ll keep you posted!

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Bill Clarke ’87 has worked on Secret Order at the Alley and Schmucks at the Wilma. He also won the Independent Reviewers of New England Award for set design in the 2007– 2008 season for A Delicate Balance at Merrimack. More recent projects include the summer season at Dorset Theatre Festival, Amadeus at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, Seafarer at Merrimack, The Lady with All the Answers at Milwaukee Repertory Theater, Twelve Angry Men at Pioneer, and Misalliance in New York City at the Pearl.

Campbell Dalglish ’86 is currently on sabbatical from CCNY, where he teaches screenwriting and directing in the MFA/BFA Film programs. Check out his film company at www.darcproductions.org, or his new Indianowned company at redwarriorfilms.com. Next year Campbell will be touring Indian reservations in the United States, filming interviews with tribal elders to gather stories to be developed into feature screenplays for global theatrical release. He is also completing a PBS documentary on an alternative energy home, Ahalani, where he lives with his wife, Catherine, and son Milo (16 months).

Timothy Douglas ’86 has directed two different adaptations, since last summer, of Pride and Prejudice: for PlayMakers Repertory and University of Michigan. He has also directed Robert O’Hara’s Good Breeding for American Conservatory Theater; Trouble in Mind for Milwaukee Repertory Theater; and the world premiere of Line in the Sand for Virginia Stage Company. He returned to the stage as an actor playing the King of France in All’s Well That Ends Well at Shakespeare & Company.

Jon Farley ’83 traveled to New Haven for the alumni weekend last October, where he held a mini-reunion with Don Youngberg ’83, Cathy Hazlehurst ’83, and Tony Foreman ’83. Though he continues to write software for lighting and effects systems, he also spent five weeks in Toronto as a student in Sue Morrison’s “Clown Through Mask” workshop.

Eileen Fischer ’80, dfa ’81 reports that her new play, The Perfect Medium, is in Best American Short Plays, 2007–2008, published by Applause Books. She continues to teach at NYC College of Technology, CUNY. Judy Gailen ’89 is still designing for regional theatre and opera, as well as doing graphic design and teaching as adjunct faculty at Bowdoin College (where Roger Bechtel ’89 has this year become Chair of the Theater & Dance Department). She and her family are

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Campbell Dalglish ’86 still living in Portland, ME. Guy Gallo ’82 married another writer, Jeannine Dominy, and they have two children, eight and three. He is still writing screenplays but has recently written his first play in a decade. He’s teaching screenwriting at Barnard and in the Columbia Film Division and living in New York.

Margaret Glover ’88, yc ’81 sends greetings from Covent Garden, where she teaches screenwriting and oversees the development and production of graduation projects at the London Film School. Holly Hayes ’86, May Wu Gibson ’86, and she make sure their English children don’t lose their American roots with 4th of July and Thanksgiving celebrations.

Eve Gordon ’81 was flown to Africa to shoot an episode of The Philanthropist, and took her daughter Grace (13). Since Eve had to shoot only one scene, they had two weeks in Cape Town and the Kruger National Park, seeing sights and going on safari. Eve also recently completed a short film for Michael Apted, and a wild web series pilot called Versailles, which she hopes will see the cyber-light of day. She worked on Mitchell Lichtenstein’s ’81 recent film Happy Tears. Her husband Todd Waring is working hard to improve the union with Unite For Strength, aiming for a merger with AFTRA and combined clout with the other industry unions.

Charles Gordon (OyamO) ’81 was appointed full professor at the University of Michigan. The Court Theatre at the University of Chicago commissioned him to adapt Maryse Condé’s novel I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, for production in the 2010–2011 season.

He delivered the keynote address at the Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago for their

Alumni Notes first Ignition Festival, and judged the Ann Arbor Civic Theatre’s playwriting contest. The choreographer Donald McKayle has asked Charles to adapt his ballet, District Storyville, for Broadway—he’ll call his adaptation White Hot Black Spice. In May 2008, the Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit performed his Sing Jubilee, based on the history of the Fisk Jubilee Singers during the 1870s. For Black History Month 2009, two pieces of his libretto for Somebody’s Calling My Name, a black spiritual music revue, were performed at the Detroit Public Library. Charles is also enjoying his new grandson.

Linda-Jo Greenberg ’84 is getting ready for her 26th season as PSM at Seattle Children’s Theatre. She recently helped the company give a month-long presentation of an Iranian performance artist, rewrite their employee handbook, and develop new work based on Norse mythology, as well as a new piece for toddlers. Linda-Jo just got back from an Alaskan cruise and moved into a new apartment.

Steve Hendrickson ’81 starred in Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure before returning to the Chester Theatre to replace an actor in Blackbird—with only four days’ rehearsal! In September, he returned to the History Theatre in the Twin Cities to play Tony Guthrie in the world premiere of Jeffrey Hatcher’s Tyrone and Ralph. He then performed in Endgame at Ten Thousand Things Theater, which toured area prisons, homeless shelters, and drug rehab centers prior to its public run. Next, he played Porfiry in the Twin Cities’ premiere of the Curt Columbus and Marilyn Campbell adaptation of Crime and Punishment at the Jungle Theatre, followed by Agatha Christie’s Spider’s Web at Park Square. This summer he performed and taught in the theatre company at

the Bread Loaf School of English in Middlebury, VT, then spent a week in London and a week on the west coast of Scotland, bird and whale watching.

Richard F. Houpert, Jr. ’80 has been a member of the I.A.T.S.E. for a few decades and is currently building the zoo for the upcoming Zoo Keeper. He still works for Hawaii Opera Theatre every chance he gets, and he would love to hear from friends.

Kirk Jackson ’88 continues to teach at Bennington College with Michael Giannitti ’87 and Jean Randich ’94. 2008 afforded him a sabbatical in which he directed The Busy World is Hushed at Actors Theatre of Phoenix, Uncle Vanya at University of San Diego, The Internationalist at Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C., and ART at Capital Repertory Theatre in Albany, NY. Returning to Bennington, he directed Uncle Vanya again.

During Bennington’s winter break he partnered with a senior student to mount A Life in the Theatre by David Mamet. The summer found him staying in Vermont to perform with The Dorset Theatre Festival in Kaufman & Connelly’s Merton of the Movie and The Hollow by Agatha Christie.

David Jaffe ’84, having moved on from the directorship of the National Theater Institute at the O’Neill Center, finds himself at Wesleyan University as the Frank B. Weeks Visiting Professor of Theater. He thanks G.W. “Skip” Mercier for the tip. David’s son Jake is 16 and 6'3" and a high school senior, and his other son, Jonathan, is nine and loving life.

Two of his NTI alums are currently at the Drama School, Andrew Kelsey ’11 and Jake Jeppson ’12.

Susan Jonas ’87, dfa ’89 has been teaching at New York University for the last five years.

She has developed new courses in the History

The TD&P dinner in October. From left to right: Don Youngberg ’83, Jon Farley ’83, Ben Sammler ’74, Tony Forman ’83, and Catherine Hazlehurst ’83. Photo courtesy of Jon Farley.

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of Comedy, Practical Dramaturgy, Producing Classics and, closest to her heart, Classic Plays

by Women (from Hrotsvitha to Hansberry).

She is editing an anthology of these plays with essays contributed by scholars, dramaturgs, playwrights, and directors. With the League of Professional Theatre Women, she is updating “The Report on the Status of Women in Theatre,” which she co-wrote in 2002 under the aegis of the New York State Council on the Arts.

Tamara K. (Heeschen) Gaglioti ’85 moved from New Jersey to Saint Paul, MN, in early 2009. She and husband Paul have a daughter, Kathryn, who is now five.

Kerro Knox ’87, yc ’79 is in his twelfth year of teaching in the Department of Music, Theatre, and Dance at Oakland University, outside Detroit, where he is the Theatre Program Director and teaches lighting design and theatre history. He also does lighting for the student and professional dance companies and plays in the African Drum and Xylophone Ensemble and the Steel Band, which has released two CDs, one featuring his arrangements of the Nutcracker Suite for steel drum.

For the next three years he will be the co-chair of Region 3 of the American College Theatre Festival.

Benjamin Lloyd ’88 appeared in A Tuna Christmas at The Walnut Street Theatre in 2008 and in Scorched by Wajdi Mouawad at the Wilma Theater in 2009 (both in Philadelphia).

He teaches at Temple University and is working on a sequel to his book, The Actor’s Way. He directed Bill di Canzio’s ’84 play Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier in June 2009.

Gail (Burns) London ’87 is the new Director of Long Island Admissions for the Usdan Center for the Creative and Performing Arts in Huntington, NY. Usdan is a summer day camp for the visual and performing arts, for kids in kindergarten through 12th grade, tucked away in the woods of Long Island. Her husband Mark London ’89 is Vice-President of Operations and Systems for the Lighting Design Group; he had a very busy year in 2008 with lighting projects that ranged from election night coverage around the country for NBC, CNN, Fox, and WCBS to the Beijing Olympics. He also designed and installed broadcast lighting systems for new studios at Fox News, Reuters bureaus in NY and London, as well as a new live performance space for WNYC public radio. He’s just started designing a large multi-studio complex in Abu

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Around the World Dhabi. Their two biggest family events were son Ian’s admission to the Queens High School for the Sciences, and daughter Rachel’s admission to Yale. She has just finished her freshman year in Trumbull College and is already a very active member of the Yale Dramat. The London theatre legacy at Yale continues!

Quincy Long ’86 was commissioned by Canadian producers to write the book for Loulou, a musical, and was also commissioned to write the libretto for a one-act opera, Buried Alive, for the American Lyric Theater in New York City. His new play, The Huntsmen, won a Time Warner award from the Sundance Institute this spring. Quincy continues work on the book for Loulou with Canadian producer John McKellar and director Kelly Robinson. At the same time, he’s writing the libretto for The Embalmer’s Daughter, his adaptation of Poe’s The Premature Burial, commissioned by the American Lyric Theater. Finally, Quincy will resuscitate his acting career by playing the title role in The Anarchist Banker, an independent German film shooting in Berlin this summer. He and Kathleen Dimmick ’85 were married June 5, 2006, at the Municipal Building in New York.

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.

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Lynn Nottage ’89 receives the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in Drama from Lee C. Bollinger, President of Columbia University. Photo by Eileen Barroso/Columbia University.

Wendy MacLeod ’87 was invited to write a short play along with Terrence McNally, Albert Innaurato ’74, and Jeffrey Hatcher, among others, for Standing on Ceremony, which was done at the Jane Wagner/Lily Tomlin Performing Arts Center in Los Angeles. It was an anti-Proposition-Eight event that will benefit the Human Rights Campaign. Wendy was in the first group of playwrights to be commissioned by the O’Neill Stages program, which is modeled after New Connections at the National Theater in London.

James Magruder ’88, grd ’84 (Faculty) remains an Associate Artist at Center Stage in Baltimore, where he lives with his partner, Steve. After a couple of years away, he returned to the rehearsal hall last August as dramaturg for Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, directed by Irene Lewis ’66, designed by Riccardo Hernandez ’92, Candice Donnelly ’85, and Pat Collins ’58, and featuring recent grad Michael Braun ’07, yc ’00 as Cornelius Hackl. Jim has also recently served as dramaturg for two Des McAnuff productions: the Broadway revival of Guys and Dolls and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario. He continues to teach production dramaturgy at Swarthmore College and Translation/ Adaptation at Yale School of Drama. Jim expects to read from his new novel, Sugarless,

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in every city in America that has an independent bookstore. Forewarned is forearmed.

Jody McAuliffe ’80 was accepted as a faculty fellow in Innovating Forms, the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute’s Seminar at Duke University for 2009–10. Last fall, she traveled to Russia to document interviews with Gulag survivors and prepare for her production of Gulag Follies, her adaptation of Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales with music. She reviews New York theatre regularly for Norwegian Shakespeare and Theatre Magazine and this summer heads to Norway to give a presentation on Gulag Follies at the Nomadikon conference. This fall, she will direct a staged reading of Marlane Meyer’s new play The Rule of Fate at Manbites Dog Theater in Durham, NC. Her theatrical adaptation of Frank Lentricchia’s novel The Italian Actress opened at Manbites in September.

Ivan Menchell ’87 is co-executive producer and writer on the Disney Channel series, Jonas, starring the Jonas Brothers. He wrote a film for Warner Brothers and is currently writing another for Walden Media. He wrote the book to a new musical, Bonnie & Clyde, which will be opening at the La Jolla Playhouse in November. During the WGA strike, he was the writer on Barnum & Bailey’s Boom-A-Ring circus, touring the country and playing Coney Island this past summer.

Cheryl Mintz ’87 is going into her 19th sea-

Alumni Notes son as the Resident Stage Manager/ Production Stage Manager for McCarter Theatre in Princeton, NJ. Highlights of her 2008–2009 season included Herringbone, starring B.D. Wong; the premiere of Eclipsed by Danai Gurira; and the world premiere of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s ’07 trilogy of The Brother/Sister Plays, which included In the Red and Brown Water directed by Tina Landau ’84 yc. Yale School of Drama alumni involved in The Brother/Sister Plays included Brian Tyree Henry ’07 as Oshoosi Size and The Egungun, scenic designer James Schuette ’89, Director of Production David York ’80, Literary Manager Carrie Hughes ’03, and current student Kristin Fiebig ’12. Cheryl resides in Princeton with her husband Harris Richter and their 4-year-old son, Jake Moses.

Sharon Aleta Mitchell ’84 performed several roles in Lisa Loomer’s Distracted offBroadway at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre.

Serge Ossorguine ’84 is still immersed in the audio post-production fray of mid-town Manhattan. Serge Audio is in its eighth year, and recently composed an entry for the Sonopedia Sound Design Competition.

Judged by three Academy Award-winning sound designers, Serge competed against soundsmiths from around the world; his piece ranked in the top ten. Still playing his electric guitar, Serge makes notes from underground. The wife and kids are doing great.

Kate O’Toole ’85 was in season three of

Showtime’s The Tudors playing Lady Salisbury. She played Yvonne Egan in Eden, an Irish film shown at last year’s Tribeca film festival, just finished working in Texas on a horror film about javelinas, performed in School for Scandal at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and appears regularly as a panelist on RTÉ’s The View, the national broadcaster’s principal arts discussion program. Kate is the chairman of the Galway Film Fleadh, which takes place every July.

Robert Russell ’89 made his Off-Broadway debut at the Daryl Roth Theatre in The Quarrel by David Brandes and Joseph Telushkin, directed by Robert Walden.

Steve Saklad ’81 has kept very busy production designing for the last year. Juno was the big hit last winter; Swing Vote did less well.

Most of the past year was spent designing Sam Raimi’s return to horror films, Drag Me to Hell. September was filled with additional photography on Twilight, as well as the George Clooney film Up in the Air, directed by Juno’s Jason Reitman, due out in 2010. He and his husband Paul re-married last September in San Francisco’s City Hall, where they first tied the knot in 2004.

Tim Saternow ’87 has left teaching and is painting in New York City. Tim had his first solo show of his paintings at the George Billis Gallery, West 25th St., New York, in March.

Tim’s paintings have also been exhibited at the Ogilvy & Mather Corporate Headquarters, Studio 57 Gallery, and at the Manhattan

Yvonne Joyner Levette ’90 and Shay Wafer ’89.

YSD 2009–10

Scott Wheeler ’82

Borough President’s Offices Gallery. His work can be seen at TimSaternow.com.

Bernardo Solano’s ’88 play Speak Spanish to Me was produced and directed by Matthew Wiener ’88 at Actors Theatre of Phoenix last spring. His play Zorro was also produced last year at Theatreworks in Colorado Springs.

Zorro2 (the new title) will be published this year by Broadway Play Publishing. Lost was produced a few months ago at Company of Angels in Los Angeles. A new play commissioned by Towne St. Theatre and Robey Theatre Company in Los Angeles, called Langston & Nicolas, will be produced early in 2010. Suenos Sin Fronteras was produced by Cornerstone Theater/Teatro Jornalero in September 2009. Bernardo is still teaching at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, in the Theatre Department.

Robert Wierzel ’84 created the lighting design for Don Giovanni at the Boston Lyric Opera in April 2009. He received a Connecticut Critics Circle Award for his lighting design for Of Mice and Men at Westport Country Playhouse. He is looking forward to working on Fondly Do We Hope— Fervently Do We Pray, a new project by the BT J/AZ Dance Company; La Traviata at Glimmerglass Opera; Grace Jones—The Hurricane Tour at the Hollywood Bowl; and Fela!, produced by Hendel/Gabay productions and opening on Broadway in the fall of 2009.

Shay Wafer ’89 left the Managing Director position at Cornerstone Theatre Company in November 2007 to become the Vice President of Programs for the August Wilson Center for African American Culture, located in Pittsburgh (AugustWilsonCenter.org). The August Wilson Center is an exciting new project dedicated to the presentation and preservation of the arts, culture and history of African Americans in Western Pennsylvania, and of people of African descent throughout

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Around the World of their son, Noah Matan. Big sister Malka is thrilled with her new “baby doll.” Narda also took a break from The Lion King in order to stage manage the revival of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone on Broadway.

Martin Blanco ’91 continues to be a stay-athome parent in Newtown, CT. He lives with his wife Barbara, who is a partner in a radiology practice, and his children Kathryn (10) and Matthew (7). He produces, directs, and writes a live variety show in his hometown Angela and Carl Wittenberg ’85. called The Flagpole Radio Cafe. The last show of the premier season was broadcast live on the world. Shay’s work continues on Colored WPKN radio in CT, and he looks forward to Girl Productions (CGP), which Yvonne Joyner season two. Martin is also producing and Levette ’90 and she established in Phila­ directing Irish Authors Held Hostage for the delphia. Lynn Nottage ’89 is writing the book Washington, D.C. Fringe Festival. and lyrics of their first commission, Sweet Martin Blank ’94 received a staged reading Billy and the Zooloos. Shay’s daughter, Xosha of his new play The Long Road Home at First Roquemore, graduated in 2007 from NYU, Stage in Los Angeles in May 2009.

Tisch School of the Arts, as a drama major.

Ed Blunt ’99 saw Blunt Artistry successfully Scott Wheeler ’82 received his black belt in partner with Success University and Seido Karate on June 5.

Worldventures to impact lives around the Carl Wittenberg ’85 left his job as Director world in leadership, business, travel, and of Development for the Vanderbilt University ongoing personal development. He’s traveling Diabetes Center to manage a team of four pro- the beaches of the world doing what he loves posal writers for a company that provides to do, helping people build their dreams. He is health care to inmates. Carl was there almost also working on his second book, and spoke at five years until March, when he was recruited a leadership conference in Trinidad. Ed’s to join a competitor—Armor Correctional “Recession-Proof Your Life” seminars are now Health Services. He works from home and being produced around the world. He is gratetravels to Miami other cities as necessary. He ful for all the training he received at Yale. and his wife Angela have five boys: Jacob (21), David Boevers ’96 became a tenured associa junior at Middle Tennessee State University, ate professor of drama at Carnegie Mellon majoring in Philosophy and Anthropology; University.

David (17), starting his senior year in high Kathryn A. (Parrella) Calnan ’99 is pleased school, wants to be an actor, probably on his to announce that she and her husband way to the University of Tennessee next year; Michael welcomed their third daughter, Isaac (14), headed toward Eagle Scout; Isaiah Megan Elizabeth Calnan, into their family on (10), just started taking karate and proceeding Tuesday, March 10, at 8:48 a.m. Megan was toward his orange belt; and Sam (4). Carl born at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center hopes to make it to the next reunion. in Boston weighing 7 pounds, 7 ounces, and measuring 19.5 inches long. She was welcomed home warmly by her two older sisters, ............................ Kaitlyn Michelle (7) and Caroline Grace (4 1/2).

Despite the initial sleep deprivation, they Narda E. Alcorn ’95 and her partner, Shelli have enjoyed their transition to a family of Aderman, are thrilled to announce the arrival five!

Juliette Carrillo ’91 had an extraordinary experience directing Lydia (by Octavio Solis) at Yale Repertory Theatre this winter. She Narda Alcorn ’95, Peter went on to direct a production of Lydia at Francis James (Faculty), Mark Taper Forum with different designers Lisa Porter ’95 and Dean and a somewhat different cast. She’s also just James Bundy ’95 at the openfinished working on Touch the Water, by Julie ing night of The Third Story.

Hebert, about the Los Angeles River, perPhoto courtesy of Lisa Porter. formed on the river with the river communi-

90s

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YSD 2009–10

ties, and produced by Cornerstone Theater Company, of which she is a member. There are also upcoming projects stirring in the pot for both theatre and film.

Esther Chae ’97 and her family have been together in L.A. since her mother’s stroke in 2007. She has finished writing her political solo performance piece, So the Arrow Flies, which features the character Mrs. Park as an ode to Mom. The play, about a North Korean spy and the Korean-American FBI Agent who pursues her, took Esther all over the world: the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Ars Nova Theater Festival (New York City), and the World Women’s Forum (Seoul, South Korea).

She’s extremely honored that the play has been invited to TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) Conference, CUNY’s Martin Segal Theater, and NYU’s Performance Studies.

Marjorie Goodsell Clark ’91 and Darren Clark ’92 live in Hamden, CT, with their two girls Hannah (11) and Emma (8), along with Hagrid, a labradoodle. Marjorie is the owner of Little Fish Studios Web Design and Online Promotion. Her company is now ten years old and thriving with great new development and communication tools (www.littlefishstudios. com). Darren will be celebrating his ninth year at HB Communications as a senior A/V design engineer. He recently became LEED AP certified.

Magaly Colimon-Christopher ’98 is the Executive Producer and Creator of a new web series called BN4 REAL, an off-beat web series about the members of the Mayer clan—a nontraditional, multi-racial New York family.

Sean Cullen ’90 played Commander Bill Harbison in Bart Sher’s Tony®-winning production of South Pacific, at Lincoln Center

Name, Address or E-mail Change We love to see you at our Alumni parties and celebrations—but we can’t invite you if we don’t know where you are! If you’ve recently moved, changed your name or updated your email address, let us know! Contact us at ysd. alumni@yale.edu or at 1-800-YSD-CLUES (973-2837) and we’ll update your record for you. You can also make changes to your contact information online through your Yale alumni account at www.aya.yale.edu.

Alumni Notes Theater. During the year-plus run of the show, he has also had a recurring role on One Life to Live and appeared as a guest star on Law & Order: S.V.U. Sean’s play, Safe Home, was presented in a workshop at New York’s CAP 21, in June 2008, and was last read at Lincoln Center Theater in December 2008.

Michael Diamond ’90 is currently working as Senior Vice President of Marketing with Time Warner Cable, and running the Corporate Marketing initiatives around Marketing Strategy, Research, Competitive Intelligence, Marketing Analytics, and Marketing Solutions. He also serves as a member of the Yale School of Drama Leadership Council and as a Board Member at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.

Mark H. Dold ’96 missed the East Coast winter of 2008-09 while playing Robyn Poley in the U.S. premiere of The School of Night by Peter Whelan at The Mark Taper Forum. Also in the cast were Alice Roper ’00, yc ’89 and Adrian LaTourelle ’99. Traveling further down the coast, he performed in the West Coast premiere of Opus by Michael Hollinger at the Old Globe.

Jon Ecklund ’99 is living in New York, where he runs his own video production company, Dream Out Loud Media, which provides High Definition video tailored to any budget. He is still acting and is a volunteer at Manhattan Theatre Source, a non-profit arts service and producing organization now in its tenth season.

Frances Egler ’95 has finished a peripatetic decade that took her from New York to performing arts centers in Pittsburgh, Charlotte, and Fort Lauderdale. She has been back in

New York since July 2008 as Vice President of Programming for Broadway Across America, booking tours around the U.S. and Canada.

Charles Evered ’91 saw the feature film he directed, Adopt a Sailor starring Peter Coyote and Bebe Neuwirth, have its world premiere at the Williamstown Film Festival last October. It has since been chosen by more than fifteen domestic and international film festivals and will be released commercially in 2010. Chuck also directed a short film, Visiting, which premiered at the Palm Springs International ShortFest in June 2009. He is now back in Princeton writing a new script and happy to be near Wendy Rolfe-Evered ’89 and their two amazing little ones, Margaret (10) and John (9), both of whom are growing up way too fast.

Donald Fried ’95 was the PSM for the OffBroadway production of Lynn Nottage’s ’89 Ruined at Manhattan Theatre Club. In other news he and his wife celebrated their first year anniversary! She is about to finish her residency and begin a two-year fellowship at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.

Julius Galacki ’98 received a reading of his plays A Shadowed Cross and The Master and the Magician under the auspices of the Dramatists Guild’s Friday Night Footlights West. The cast for A Shadowed Cross included David Bardeen ’05, Rafeal Clements ’90, and Jennifer Riker ’01; the cast for The Master and the Magician included Nathan Johnson ’03, Jennifer Riker, and Gabrielle Castellini ’04. Julius is still working at 20th Century Fox Film Corporation, in their Business Affairs department.

Shawn-Marie Garrett ’96, dfa ’99 is living

Tiffany Ellis ’96, Charles S. Dutton ’83, Jake Thompson and Candace Jackson ’00.

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in New York, raising her four-year old son Samuel with her husband Martin, writing, teaching, and feeling astonished by our rapidly changing world.

Michael Goodfried ’96 returned to the Woolly Mammoth in D.C., after performing in the premiere of David Adjmi’s Stunning, to do Measure for Pleasure, where he had the chance to work with David Grimm (Former Faculty). He played Orsino in the Pearl Theatre’s production of Twelfth Night, with sound design by Amy Altadona ’07. Sirius XM Radio picked up his show, Left Jab, for a fourth year, on which Tom McCarthy ’95 promoted The Visitor. Best of all, he married actress Nancy Rodriguez, who gave birth to their son Noah on January 9, 2009.

Naomi Grabel ’91 spent two years in Australia as Director of Marketing and Development at Sydney Opera House. She returned to New York in March 2008 to follow her husband Neil Kutner, who now serves as BAM’s Production Manager. She spent six months freelancing for her friend Teresa Eyring ’89 at TCG, and in January 2009 began as Director of Marketing & Creative Services at Carnegie Hall. In an avocational capacity, she has served on the board of Doug Varone and Dancers and the League of Professional Theater Women since returning to New York, and began her term as co-president of the League in July 2009.

Elizabeth Greer ’97 is still in Los Angeles, acting, mommying, and doing some career coaching. Her little girl is five years old now!

Elizabeth worked on My Own Worst Enemy, being saved by Christian Slater. She did an interesting role in Transformers 1.5: The Featurette, and is working on a couple of independent shorts.

Stephen Haff ’92 is living and working in Bushwick, Brooklyn, running a grassroots literacy program.

Jeffrey Herrmann ’99 left the great white north after eight seasons as Producing Director of Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, Alaska. He is now Managing Director of Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in D.C. On August 31, 2008, he married Sara Waisanen in Seattle, with several YSD alums in attendance, including Janet Allard ’97, Kathryn Calnan ’99, Josh Foldy ’98, Wier Harman ’99, Bruce Miller ’99, and Alison Narver ’98. In D.C., Jeff often sees Chris Jennings ’97 and Rachel Tischler ’00, and the President of Woolly’s Board, Catherine MacNeil Hollinger ’86. They all get together

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Around the World and sing “Boola Boola” on a regular basis.

Kevin Hines ’95 and his wife Diane welcomed a daughter, Katharine Isabel, on January 23. Kevin is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Carnegie Mellon School of Drama in Pittsburgh.

Clark Jackson ’97 was in two Broadway shows this past year, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and All My Sons, directed by Simon McBurney. He was also in Fringe on Fox-TV, back on Law & Order, and just shot the independent film Forged in Scranton, PA. He is now developing a solo show, The Life and Death of Objects, at the artists’ community Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY, as well as other projects.

Kimberly Jannarone ’96, dfa ’00 just got tenure as an Associate Professor of Theater at UC Santa Cruz, where she teaches directing, theatre history, and dramaturgy. Her book, Artaud and His Doubles, is scheduled for publication in early 2010. She was lucky enough to spend some time going through archives and attending the Avignon Festival in France last year. This year, she’ll emerge from the solitude of book-writing and move to San Francisco, whose theatre scene beckons. She’s also looking forward to directing a collaborative project with UC Santa Cruz’s Digital Arts and New Media MFA students, and is planning a book on crowd theory and mass theatres.

Chris Jennings ’97 is enjoying his fifth year at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. He was promoted to the position of Managing Director last year, just as the economy went into crisis. The theatre is doing well, however, and he continues to see many Yale School of Drama alumni come through its doors as guest artists, in addition to full-time Shakespeare Theatre staff such as David Muse ’03, yc ’96, Mark Prey ’03 and Marty Desjardins ’94.

Raymond Kent ’99 is continuing his work as the Director of Innovative Technology Design for Westlake Reed Leskosky, currently working on projects for the State Department, Office of the Architect of the Capital, The Las Vegas Mob Museum, the Yorktown Civil War Museum, and the Cleveland Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

David Koppel ’98 founded the Shakespeare on the Square festival last year in downtown San Jose with his company, Arclight Repertory Theatre. In February, Arclight presented a free radio version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, performed live, in 1930s radio-studio style. In addition to its artistic programs, Arclight piloted its arts education outreach

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workshop with Del Roble Elementary School in East San Jose. Arclight will continue to expand its education outreach to offer assembly performances, theatre activities, and Shakespeare workshops to underserved, atrisk K–12 students throughout Santa Clara County. Alumni interested in submitting scripts or project ideas for Arclight are encouraged to contact David Koppel (dkoppel@arclightrep.org) or check out Arclight’s website at www.arclightrep.org.

Daniel Elihu Kramer ’91 is beginning a new position teaching directing and acting at Smith College, where he’ll be joining Len Berkman ’70 and Ed Check ’90. His new stage adaptation of James Thurber’s Many Moons was produced this spring in Columbus, and his independent feature, Kitchen Hamlet, is finishing post-production this summer.

Sarah Lambert ’90 finished a year of sabbatical replacement teaching and designing at Cornell University as well as continuing workshops for Cushman and for Gerda’s Lieutenant. Fall and winter plans include Servant of Two Masters at Cornell, Fly at Crossroads Theatre, Master Harold… and the Boys at Cape May Stage, Feather in Portland, OR, and probably another workshop or two of Cushman and Gerda.

Mahayana Landowne ’98 is directing, based in New York City. Recent productions include This Is Way Beyond My Remote Control, with set designs by Yoki Lai ’08; Mixed by

Maya Lilly in Los Angeles and in NY; I and Me and You and I by Michi Yamamura, off-Broadway; and Turn of the Screw at Ancram Opera House, in upstate New York. This spring she started a multimedia theatre collective, The Fairytale Experiment, whose mission is to question assumptions underlying our consciousness and reclaim the endless exuberance of the magical realms of our youth. She is currently developing an original work, The Picasso Project, and is also using her skills as a director to do creative grassroots organizing for social issues—including Metropolis in Motion, working to overturn the Cabaret Laws; the NYC Dance Parade, where 4,000 people danced down Broadway to celebrate the diversity of dance in NYC; and many art action activities that promote urban environmental awareness. Her work can be found at http://yana.landowne.org.

Suzanne (Cryer) Luke ’95, yc ’88 and husband Greg welcomed Guthrie Wood and Daisy Jane Luke into the world on March 11.

The twins arrived five weeks early but are healthy and doing well. Suzanne is busy doing television work, but spends most of her hours with the babies strapped to her.

Feeding twins is a full-time job.

Maggie Morgan ’92 was the costume designer for Mauritius at the Pasadena Playhouse; Enchanted April at Center Rep in Walnut Creek, CA; The Heiress at South Coast Repertory with sound designer Vincent

Paul Niebanck ’97 with Maria Dizzia in In the Next Room at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Photo courtesy of Kevin Berne.

YSD 2009–10

Alumni Notes Oliveri ’01; Enchanted April at Arizona Theatre Company with actor Al Espinosa ’94. She was happy to have design work included in the exhibition “Curtain Call” at Lincoln Center Library, and is pleased to be working with Marya Mazor ’92 on the premiere of Goliath at The Open Fist Theatre in Los Angeles, and delighted to see the design work of many classmates, friends, teachers, and colleagues at “The Clambake” in New York City.

Paul Niebanck ’97 just finished the world premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s new play In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and is currently working on Joan D’Arc at The Goodman.

Segun Ojewuyi ’98 continues to travel exhaustively in the United States and Europe, working as a director in regional and university spaces, and giving presentations at conferences as a university professor. Last year he convened a successful international symposium, “Muse and Mimesis: Wole Soyinka, Africa and the World,” with scholars from Europe, North America, and Africa. This year he worked at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival where he met alumni Peter Macon ’03, Tyrone Wilson ’84, Shana Cooper ’08, and Lydia Garcia ’08. He has not been back to Nigeria since New Haven; his cultural prism remains strongly Yoruban, while his creative lexicon is richly global. Now for the first time in twelve years, Segun is planning to return as a member of the artistic delegation representing the United States to the World Black Arts Festival in Dakar, Senegal, in December 2009.

His company’s production plate includes a performance art piece and the play Home by Sam Art Williams. After Dakar, he will take his company to Kenya for the safari and then to Nigeria, before returning to the U.S. Anna Oliver ’92 left New York City and moved back to California to freelance in regional theaters. She worked on The Lieutenant of Inishmore for the Berkeley Repertory Theatre and Cyrano and Coriolanus for the summer festival at the Old Globe in San Diego. Next winter, she will travel to the Welsh National Opera with Abduction from the Seraglio, in a production that originated at The Houston Grand Opera in 2002. In 2008, she became the proud aunt of Griffin Beck Oliver, son of her brother, Soren Oliver and her sisterin-law, Jennifer Beckendorf Oliver ’98.

Dawn Robyn Petrlik ’94 has been working steadily on various Broadway shows as first scenic assistant, off-Broadway as a designer, on several television gigs, and in collaboration with Pilobolus Dance Company as a touring

Emily, Connor, Danny, and Alex Weida with dad Chris ’95

designer. Her live installations in fine art galleries garnered quite a bit of press (“The Lonely Death of Esmin Green” and “A Photo Op with Sarah Palin” were among the works debated in the media), and for two summers she served as the sculpture teacher/class monitor at the Art Students League, where she is a member. She also served two years as the head designer for the Radio City Christmas Spectacular and five years as the art director for the Tony Awards, before chucking it all and moving to a farm in the Catskills. While still exhibiting fine art sculptures and paintings, she is establishing an artists’ retreat and horse rescue at Rosemary Farm, the 114-acre historic site that she owns with her husband. She is still freelancing on commercial projects and preparing for a solo art show in the summer of 2010.

Lisa Porter ’95 is now an Associate Professor at the University of California, San Diego, where she has been a Lecturer since 2005. She brought the new Charles Busch play The Third Story to the Lucille Lortel Theatre this past winter. The cast included Sarah Rafferty ’96.

Attending the opening night festivities were James Bundy ’95 (Dean), Narda Alcorn ’95, and Peter Francis James (Faculty). Lisa’s latest project is the new Claudia Shear play, Restoration, at the La Jolla Playhouse, directed

by Christopher Ashley.

Shannon Rhodes ’94, formerly PSM for the Flying Karamazov Brothers (1995–1998) and a regional stage manager (1997–2001), retired from theatre to return to her other love: science. She has since worked at the public policy “think tank” RAND in their Health division and returned to school to get her PhD. Shannon now works at UCLA as a genetic epidemiologist studying the causes of

YSD 2009–10

Parkinson’s disease. She and her partner Alan Golightly recently purchased a home in Venice, CA, where the dogs can play in the backyard and the humans can each have an office. Occasionally she misses doing theatre; most of the time she is grateful for so many opportunities.

Claudia J. Arenas Rosenshield ’99 is in London for two years with Mark’s work as a diplomat. She can be seen in the various parks there playing with her girls Maya (6) and Ilana (3). She’s also taking a yoga teacher certification course at TriYoga, and she’s done some acting in local commercials. Namaste to her dear classmates.

Kris Stone ’98 is currently designing Elmer Gantry, a new opera for the Florentine in Milwaukee, with the same team from the Don Giovanni production that’s currently touring.

Next stop for Don Giovanni is Cleveland in November. This summer she will be at Chautauqua Theatre, along with costume designer Jen Moeller ’06, designing The Winter’s Tale. Recently, she opened a new production of Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha in Memphis at the Orpheum. In the fall, she and Matt Frey ’96 returned to Dublin for the Theatre Festival with the Corn Exchange Company. Kris’s work, along with many female designers from the past century, was on exhibit at the New York Public Library in the Oenslager Gallery at Lincoln Center.

Deanna Stuart ’94 traveled to LA with her daughters in August for the wedding of Tracy Lewis ’94 and Bonnie McDonald ’93, now Tracy and Bonnie Stark. Deanna saw lots of Technical Design and Production alumni, like old housemate Doug Harvey ’95 and his family (including new baby Lula). Deanna’s daughters are now four and eight, and life

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Around the World remains very full. They went back to China last June to visit Xiu’s home province, Guangxi. Deanna continues at the Brooks School north of Boston as the Technical Director.

Terry Terzakis ’94 and his wife welcomed their second child this year. Alexander Larson Terzakis was born in February and joins big sister Valerie, now three.

Tony Ward ’94 writes that his most noteworthy production of the last year has been that of a baby boy, Emmett Cutter Ward (his first), who arrived at the end of January. Tony finished the Roundabout tour of 12 Angry Men, did a Booth Tarkington piece at the Keen Company, took six weeks off to stay at home as a new family, and then covered two Britons in The Norman Conquests at Circle in the Square.

Chris Weida ’95 is still in Milwaukee, although he did change employers last year and is now at Novum Structures, a specialty contractor for high-technology steel and glass structures. He and Rosanne are still very busy raising their four kids: Alex (9), Connor (7), Emily (5), and Danny (2). While passing through New Haven on a business trip in April, he visited the School of Drama for the first time since graduating and was able to see the Iseman Theater and other wonderful changes!

Great news for a member of the YSD Magazine’s own family! The Critical Condition, a pop culture and criticism blog created by former assistant editor Mark Blankenship ’05, has earned a substantial grant from the Art Matters Foundation.

The grant will allow Mark to travel internationally to make original video projects with foreign pop culture critics. In his own words: “The most thrilling thing is that The Critical Condition is absolutely my dream project, and now an organization I respect has chosen to honor it. Live your dreams, people! Sometimes they come true!”

Congratulations Mark!

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Brandy Zarle ’97 had an amazing year playing the wicked stepsister, Joy, in the international production of Cinderella, starring Lea Salonga. They started in the Philippines, then toured through cities in China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Singapore. A cast album was released by Sony Records at Christmas.

at Reed College in Portland, OR. Michael Broh ’00 is celebrating his 10th year as Production Manager at American Players Theatre, and preparing to celebrate the Theatre’s 30th anniversary. He has also been serving as the project manager for their brandnew Touchstone Theater, which had its first public performance at the end of June.

Chris Brown ’08 is working at Hudson ................................... Scenic Studio, in their Automation Department, in Yonkers, NY. He and his wife May Adrales ’06 received the TCG Next Katie had a baby boy in June!

Generation grant for Future Leaders and will Ashley Bryant ’08 just got back from South be in residence at the Lark Play Development Africa doing a project called Sheila’s Day, proCenter from 2008–2010. In the fall of 2008, she duced by the Market Theatre in Johannesburg directed an original adaptation of Odon von and Crossroads Theatre in New Jersey. The Horvath’s Faith, Hope and Charity in show tracks two stories: one in South Africa, Charleston, SC. In the fall of 2009, she directed one in America, and discusses apartheid and a new play by Thomas Bradshaw, recipient of the civil rights movement. the 2009 Guggenheim award, at Partial David Byrd ’06 took a new job in North Comfort Productions in New York. She will Carolina this past December as Director of also be directing Emily Mann’s Mrs. Packard at Marketing & Communications at the Fordham University.

American Dance Festival in Durham, NC. Kraig Blythe ’00 is now Director of Show Living in Durham has also been a nice change Design and Production at Walt Disney of pace for his partner, Jeff Stanley, who is the Imagineering (WDI) in Los Angeles. Kraig was Company Manager at Playmakers Repertory lucky enough to entice Jason Davis ’00 away Company alongside Managing Director, from theatre consulting and hire him as a Hannah Grannemann ’08.

Production Manager for WDI in February of 2008. Kraig and wife Leigh are expecting their first child in November 2009.

Cindy (Brizzell) Bates ’00, ’07 dfa is now Leave Your Legacy an Assistant Professor of the Arts at Empire By including Yale School of Drama in your State College in Schenectady, NY. In this new financial plan, you make a significant position, she has many opportunities to build bridges and engage in collaborative projects commitment that will strengthen the School between Empire State College and other orgaand, through faculty and students, touch and nizations, universities, and theatre professioninspire countless lives. als. Contact her at Cynthia.bates@esc.edu.

A life income gift can offer you the best of Josh Borenstein ’02 is living in Hamden, CT, many worlds: dependable income for you and and working at the arts consulting practice your family, current and future tax savings, AMS Planning & Research, led by Steve Wolff ’81. Josh and his wife Kate have a two-year-old and a means to support scholarships and the daughter, Naomi, who loves looking at books. unique programs that have made Yale School Perhaps she’ll be a member of the dramaturgy of Drama a leader in arts training for more class of 2031. than eighty years.

Kate Bredeson ’02, ’06 dfa has, in the past Whether planning for retirement, the six years: had a Fulbright in Paris, lived at an educational expenses of children, or the care artists’ colony on the Mediterranean, enjoyed a postdoctoral fellowship in Halifax, Nova of loved ones, life income gifts are an excellent Scotia, taught a Baroque Theatre course in the way to balance your goals. . . . for you and for Czech Republic, and spent a year in Chicago, the School. where she worked at Court Theatre with To learn about these opportunities, please Elaine Bonifield Wackerly ’03 and Dawn call Debbie Ellinghaus at (203) 432-4133 or Helsing ’01. In the summer of 2009 she made debbie.ellinghaus@yale.edu. another move, and will be starting a new job as tenure track Assistant Professor of Theatre

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YSD 2009–10

Alumni Notes

In late January 2009, Snehal Desai ’08 brought his memorably titled solo show, Finding Ways to Prove You’re NOT an Al-Qaeda Terrorist When You’re Brown (and other stories of the gIndian) to HERE Arts Center, over a year after its premiere at the Yale Cabaret. The creative team of the HERE production included: Erik Pearson ’09 (director), Stephanie Ybarra ’08 (producer), Timothy R. Mackabee ’09 (set designer), Burke Brown ’07 (lighting designer), Kate Cusack ’07 (costume designer), Jana Hoglund ’08 (sound designer), Jason Fitzgerald ’08 (dramaturg and stage manager).

Claudia (Wilsch) Case ’01, dfa ’07 is Assistant Professor of Theatre at the City University of New York, where she teaches theatre history and dramatic literature courses at Lehman College and in the PhD Program in Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center. She and her husband Andrew Case have a two-year old son, David, and are expecting their second child this summer.

Claudia can be reached at claudia.wilsch@aya. yale.edu.

Andy Cassano ’01 was recently promoted to Vice President of Artistic Operations for the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra.

Ji Youn Chang ’08 recently designed the sets for Medea and the sets and lights for Glass Menagerie at Columbia University.

Terri Ciofalo ’00 is the Assistant Production Manager at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, part of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She teaches in the stage management program with Karen Quisenberry (Former Faculty), who is the head of the Stage Management Program as well as the Production Director at KCPA. Valerie Oliveiro ’04 also works at KCPA as the Resident Photographer and manages special projects for the Associate Director of the center. Terri and Val stage managed together at the Edinburgh International Festival in August 2009.

Keith Davis ’00 recently appeared as a

guest star on Law & Order and is an adjunct professor in the undergraduate film and television department at NYU. As an editor he is currently working with filmmaker Spike Lee on several short projects, including work for Nokia and a documentary about Barack Obama on Election Day. Keith attended the Sundance Screenwriters Lab in June 2009 to workshop his screenplay, The American People, marking his feature debut as a writer/director.

Brenda Davis ’08 had a baby, Josephine Rose Davis, born November 29, 2008! Brenda is taking time off for now.

Ted DeLong ’07 and Sarah DeLong ’08 welcomed Isabel Laurel DeLong on September 26, 2008. Isabel was born at home in Petaluma, CA, and had a great time attending the YSD Alumni Party in Los Angeles this past March.

Snehal Desai ’08 has spent most of this past year touring his solo show Finding Ways to Prove You’re NOT an Al-Qaeda Terrorist When You’re Brown (and other stories of the gIndian). He has presented it in New Haven, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and in New York City at the HERE Arts Center. He is Project Director for The Spitting Game, a new play commissioned by Emory University, and presented a workshop of his new play Sita/Sati Part I: Apu A-Sleep in NYC with Desipina Theater Company.

Nelson T. Eusebio III ’07 started a theatre company, Creative Destruction (www.

CreativeD.org) and produced their first show, Obama Drama: A Political Theatrical Spectacular! He was also a resident director at Ensemble Studio Theatre, as well as a member of the 2009 Lincoln Center Theater Director’s Lab. He recently received a 2009 NEA/TCG Career Development Grant!

Rachel L. Fink ’00 has been officially chosen as the U.S. delegate for the British Council’s pilot year of the Cultural Leadership International Programme. Over the next nine months, she’s planning to concentrate on two areas: (1) the implementation and impact of established international cultural policy practices, and (2) a comprehensive leadership development for the next wave of American cultural leaders. She’ll spend time this fall working on National Arts Strategies’ launch of its Future Leadership program and the British Council’s independent study on international cultural policy.

In January, she will travel to four to five countries to meet with ministers of culture and community leaders to learn about the implementation and impact of their cultural policies. She’s planning to document the process in a blog.

Susan Finque ’03 is living in the historic community of Evansville, WI. She and Maria went to California and got married this year, just before the election in which Prop 8 was passed, and they have since been active in the fight to keep their marriage legal. They are now foster parents of four kids, ages eight to fifteen. Susan’s career continues to search for direction. She was happy to do some acting recently, playing older sister Claire in Proof in Madison. She directed and taught in the University of Wisconsin system this year, and is actively searching for a full-time teaching position. She and Maria recently put their little coffeehouse and their home, a former girls’ boarding school, on the market.

Jason Fitzgerald ’08 is living in Brooklyn and working on a prospectus for his DFA dissertation, while warming up to the idea that

Ted DeLong ’07, daughter Isabel and wife Sarah DeLong ’08

YSD 2009–10

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Around the World he wants to be a full-time academic. He is a teaching fellow at Yale College and Yale School of Drama, a freelance theatre reviewer with Back Stage, and an editor of this magazine. This spring, he will co-teach a Yale College Seminar on “The Diva in Opera and Music Theatre” with Joseph Cermatori ’08.

Shannon Flynn ’02 just wrapped her third season of the Disney Channel hit show Hannah Montana. Coincidentally, she also wrapped her third pregnancy! Kelly, Molly, Jack, and Shannon welcomed daughter Nora into the world in summer 2009. Shannon gets to see her fellow Long Beach Yale School of Drama alumni every once in a while.

Dorothy Fortenberry ’08 has seen her Carlotta Festival play, Good Egg, given readings at Ars Nova and the Geva Theatre. She joined Youngblood at EST in October, and has had a couple short plays produced there. This April, The Management produced her new play Caitlin and the Swan, directed by Joshua Conkel, and starring Brian Burns ’08.

John Hanlon ’04 is directing the theatre program and teaching humanities courses at a private high school in Jackson Hole, WY. He continues to translate the work of contemporary Russian playwrights, including Maksym Kurochkin. The translation of his play Vodka, F*%king, and Television appeared in the Winter/Spring 2008 issue of TheatreForum and will be part of the Center for International Theatre Development’s New Russian Drama festival in Maryland this fall.

Adrien-Alice Hansel ’03 is in her fifth season as Director of New Play Development at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, where she helps select the Humana Festival of New

(From left) Nathan Wells ’06, David Calica ’08, Jonathan Willis ’08, Grace Pavuk ’04 holding Evan Pavuk, Shawn Senavinin ’06, Laura Sewell American Plays. This year, her own work was on stage—she and Artistic Director Marc Masterson adapted the poetry of Wendell Berry into Wild Blessings: A Celebration of Wendell Berry. Even more exciting was her wedding to Jessica Leader in August (their first two years of dating were while Adrien was at Yale School of Drama).

Dawn Helsing ’01 was recently hired as the managing director of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater.

Ben Merrick’s ’06 twin girls, McKayla Jocelyn Merrick (left) and Samantha Marie Merrick (right)

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Brendan Hughes ’04 continues to serve as “Impresario of the Harbor Stage” for the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater on Cape Cod, directing all the shows and developing an aesthetic with a company of actors. For the rest of the year, he makes his home in a guest house behind the Hollywood Hills home of film critic Bill Harris. He is currently hard at

Dawn Helsing ’01.

Alumni Notes work on a feature film about his parents’ love story.

Anna G. Jones ’06 founded Bone Orchard in July 2007 with Roweena Mackay ’05. They have just completed their third full-length production, TIMES 365:24:7, which examined the impact of the news on journalists, their subjects and their audience. TIMES 365:24:7 played at The Brick Theater for five weeks in March and April 2009. Maiko Chii ’07 designed the set. They worked with David Giambusso, a freelancer for The New York Times and The Newark Star Ledger, and did field trips to various news sites around the city including MSNBC, The New Yorker, and The Financial Times. Their next steps include gaining more traction as an institution and developing their producing and fundraising efforts to continue to make visceral contemporary theatre. For more information, please see www.boneorchard.org or contact anna@boneorchard.org or roweena@ boneorchard.org.

Peter Katona ’01 recently hosted Ashton Kutcher’s Pop Fiction, and he is producing a travel show called The Escape Artists Going Global.

Jennifer Lim ’04 was cast as the lead in This Isn’t Romance by Verity Bargate Award winner In-Sook Chappell and directed by Lisa Goldman at the Soho Theatre in London. She played Ophelia in a Chinese production of Hamlet from Shanghai, directed by Richard Schechner for the Grotowski Festival in Wroclaw, Poland. The cast included Benjamin Mosse ’04.

Michael Locher ’08 designed the set for the Guthrie Theater’s new production of Beckett’s Happy Days, directed by Rob Melrose ’96.

Claire Lundberg ’01 started a new job in December, as the New York book and theatre Jennifer Lim ’04 and Mo Zainal in This Isn’t Romance.

Photo by Simon Kane.

Nathan McLaughlin, son of Ann (Hamada) McLaughlin ’03 scout for MGM and United Artists. The studio has recently revamped itself under the leadership of Mary Parent, and Claire is enjoying working there; their first release, the remake of Fame, brought back memories of acting in the Yale Cabaret version years ago. She also got married this past July to Matt Valley, at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. There were some Yale School of Drama alumni there: Matt Richards ’01, Tak Kata ’01, Fitz Patton ’01, Georgia Lee ’01, and Glynis Rigsby ’01.

She’s continuing to work on producing film and theatre projects independently as well, and is currently working with Jesse Eisenberg on his play The Revisionist.

Neveen Mahmoud ’00 is working on the stage version of Dirty Dancing in Los Angeles.

Kathleen McElfresh ’06 did a production of The Women at The Old Globe this past year.

In January, May Adrales ’06 invited her to do a workshop of Olives and Blood at The Lark Theatre, and she and Bill Camp, along with some musicians, did a reading for Nine Circles Chamber Theatre of the new theatre/ music piece Falling Bodies. Kathleen has been a guest artist teacher for The National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped for the past two years, and this summer she got married!

Ann (Hamada) McLaughlin ’03 and husband Chad welcomed Nathan Robert in May 2009. He has brought them enormous joy.

Ben Merrick ’06 and his wife, Alison (who worked as Properties Assistant for five years) had twin girls on June 12: McKayla Jocelyn Merrick and Samantha Marie Merrick.

Derek Milman ’02 was recently seen in the Emmy and Golden Globe Award winning John Adams miniseries on HBO. He also filmed a role in a new Fox pilot, White Collar, and a new movie, The Rebound, a romantic comedy

YSD 2009–10

written and directed by Bart Freundlich, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Beth Morrison ’05 and her production company Beth Morrison Projects produced Binibon by Elliott Sharp and Jack Womack at The Kitchen in NYC in May 2009, and the piece included Yale School of Drama alumni: Tea Alagic ’07 directed; Zane Pihlstrom ’06, Gina Scherr ’06, and Jen Moeller ’06 designed; actors Joe Tapper ’06, Jedadiah Schultz ’05, and Ryan Quinn ’06 performed.

Beth Morrison Projects also produced Making of Americans at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; the New York premiere of a oneman opera at Le Poisson Rouge, Soldier Songs; the Asian tour of Sleeping Beauty, a Yale Cabaret piece directed by Yana Ross ’06 for the Seoul Performing Arts Festival; and two major Lincoln Center concerts. In addition, Beth was named producer of the new Yale Institute for Music Theatre. The inaugural season finished on June 20th and was a resounding success!

Katherine Hampton Noland ’01 and husband William had a baby boy on March 14, 2009, named Leslie James.

David Nugent ’05 saw a production of his

Leave Your Legacy By including Yale School of Drama in your financial plan, you make a significant commitment that will strengthen the School 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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Around the World senter, and continues to work in marketing for UCLA Arts and as a freelance cultural producer. She is also Associate Director of the Miles Playhouse, an historic theatre in Santa Monica serving nonprofit performing arts organizations in the Los Angeles area.

Sarah Olivieri ’08 moved to California and settled in Long Beach with husband Vinnie Oliveri ’01. Last fall, she started working as a DGA Trainee with the Assistant Directors Training Program in L.A. The organization moves her around between different TV shows and films, where she works as what amounts to a Second Second Second AD. Her first show was My Name is Earl on NBC. Grace (O’Brien) Pavuk ’04 and husband Troy are excited about the birth of their son, Evan, last August. Troy continues to work for Cirque du Soleil, and Grace stays home with Evan.

Roberta Pereira ’08 and David Roberts ’08 are Associate Producers at SITI Company in New York City. With SITI, they produced the American premiere of Virginia Woolf’s

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Freshwater at the Julia Miles Theatre, directed

by Anne Bogart (costume and set design by James Schuette ’89; assistant costume design

by Melissa Trn ’08). They also produced the world premiere of Charles Mee’s Under Construction at the 2009 Humana Festival of New American Plays, also directed by Anne Bogart (set design by Neil Patel yc ’86, costume design by Schuette; assistant costume design by Trn).

Sarah Pickett ’08 worked as a composer on Much Ado About Nothing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; a sound designer on Death of a Salesman at the Yale Repertory Theatre; and a composer on Othello (nomiIzumi Ashizawa: Bridge between the West, nated for a Lucille Lortel Award) presented by the East and the Middle East the Theatre for a New Audience. She looks for“Despite conflicts between the countries, we connect in the form of ward to working as a composer and sound arts,” says Izumi Ashizawa ’02, highlighting the importance of designer on The Winter’s Tale at the Asolo bringing Iranian and American theatre artists together. Amid the Repertory Theatre; composer and sound contentious political relations between Iran and the U.S., she has designer on Aliens with Extraordinary Skills, created works in both countries using Persian mythology and presented by the Women’s Project; and sound Japanese and American theatrical devices to bring mutual designer on Santaland Diaries at Syracuse Stage. understanding and cultural exchange between the West, the East Bryce Pinkham ’08, since graduating, perand Iran. formed in Beyond Therapy at Williamstown “I learned about the collaborative spirit at Yale and the Bay Street Theater, directed by Alex School of Drama, which helps me to enter any Timbers ’01 yc, with Matt McGrath, Darryl culture in the world,” says Izumi. She has worked as Hammond, Katie Finneran, Darren Goldstein, a theatre artist and professor in Iran, the U.S., and Kate Burton ’82. He also played Romania, Turkey, and Japan. While completing the Rodolpho in A View From the Bridge at the art-residency program at Institut International de la Guthrie Theater with John C. Lynch. Recently, Marionnette in France in 2007, a part of her he was featured in Bloody Bloody Andrew UNESCO-Aschberg award, she wrote her first Iranian Jackson at the Public Lab. performance text, Zahak. The piece is based on one of Rio Puertollano ’01 saw his short film, Zahak, created by Izumi Ashizawa the stories of Shahnameh, the national epic of Iran, Tamarind, become the winner of Reel 13 Shorts ’02. Photo by Mehr Paper. written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi around 1000 and air on WNET/Channel 13. Adriana C.E. She directed Zahak with ten Iranian actors at the Gaviria ’01 was assistant director. Tamarind, Women’s Theater Festival in Iran, intertwining her exquisite movement techniques with which also screened at the Chicago Filipino marionette and mask manipulations and original Persian live music.

American Film Festival, is about two people Her most recent work, Gilgamesh, is centered on the ancient Mesopotamian poem Epic of who connect over the sweet and sour taste of Gilgamesh. During the spring of 2008, Gilgamesh toured within the U.S., and in the fall she and tamarind. her students traveled to Slovenia, where they presented the performance and taught an acting Thomas Russell ’07 continues to work on workshop. Wherever Ashizawa’s artistic sensibility takes her next, the breadth of her work, behalf of the Yale School of Drama on the both aesthetic and geographic, will continue to build a necessary bridge between two cultures Board of Directors of the Yale Alumni Fund Ali Pour Issa ’11 desperately in need of such a bond. (currently the only Board member from the

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YSD 2009–10

Ashizawa photo by Jeff Fay

indie-rock musical Open the Dark Door, directed by Matt August, as part of the New York Musical Theatre Festival. The piece was originally commissioned and developed at the Stratford Festival of Canada.

Barret O’Brien ’09 wrote in to say that he, Nikki Berger ’08, Shana Cooper ’08, Scott Dougan ’09, Drew Lichtenberg ’08, Katie O’Neill ’09, Joseph Parks ’08, Kay Perdue ’09, and Bryce Pinkham ’08 have founded a new theatre company called New Theatre House.

Their inaugural production of Victor Cazares’s The Whale Play took place over a five-week residency at Amherst College in August.

Naomi Okuyama ’07 is curator for a cultural events series for the new Annenberg Community Beach House for the City of Santa Monica. This new destination repurposes the historic Marion Davies beach estate, and will showcase a mixture of lectures, readings, and concerts this summer. Since graduation Naomi has managed external affairs for The Da Camera Society, a chamber music pre-

Alumni Notes School of Drama;). Tommy just finished a new farce, On the Night of Anthony’s 30th Birthday Party...Again, at the Manhattan Theatre Source.

He is currently employed at a legal staffing firm.

Lee Savage ’05 helped re-launch the website of design collective Wingspace in February and founded the Wingspace Design Studio, located in the Old American Can Factory in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn. Current Wingspace members include: Alixandra Englund ’05, Burke Brown ’07, Christina Bullard ’07, Christine Mok ’05, Emily Rebholz ’06, Gia Forakis ’04, Hillary Charnas ’05, Jennifer Moeller ’06, Miriam Crowe ’05, Scott Bolman ’03, Susanna Gellert ’06, Thom Weaver ’07, and Zane Pihlstrom ’06. www.wingspace.com.

Elisa Spencer ’05 is approaching the twoyear mark in her position as General Manager for off-Broadway’s York Theatre Company, where she has found the work to be both challenging and rewarding. The company has had a great year, particularly with Enter Laughing: The Musical, which got lots of attention during the 2009 awards season. She became engaged to composer/ musician/ director Russell Kaplan in December 2008, and they are planning away for a February wedding in Brooklyn. She met Russ through her classmate Rosey Strub ’05 and Rosey’s husband Jim Knable ’98 yc, so she has to thank Yale for helping her find the love of her life!

Cat Tate ’06 married John Starmer ’06 on May 9, 2009, in Brooklyn. In attendance: Marion Friedman ’05, Nelson Eusebio ’07, Burke Brown ’07, Sarah Bierenbaum ’05,

Emily Dorsch ’07 and Elliot Villar ’07 were married August 22, 2009 in Lakewood, Ohio. In attendance were (back row from left) — Alec Beard ’07, Tommy Russell ’07, Erin Felgar ’07, Tiffany Rachelle Stewart ’07, Erick Gilde ’07 (front row from left) Joseph Gallager ’07, Charles Semine ’07, Emily and Elliot.

Jeff Rogers ’07, the newly appointed Managing Director of Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, Alaska.

Kate Cusack ’06, Chloe Chapin ’05, Ola Braten ’08, Lily Twining ’06, Sandra Goldmark ’05, and Mike Banta ’03.

Melissa Trn ’08 is in New York designing costumes for shows at The Abingdon, The Lion Theater, and Columbia University. She has also assisted for The Kennedy Center and SITI Company and is the resident Costume Designer for The Calhoun School in NYC. Jennifer Tuckett ’08 was recently awarded a U.K. Arts Council Award to develop her play I Am a Superhero with York Theatre Royal, after jointly winning the Old Vic New Voices Theatre 503 Award in 2008. She is also currently on attachment with Aberystwyth Arts Centre, and a writer with the Old Vic New Voices company. She recently worked with Poisson Rouge Pictures and the BBC, and is a lecturer in Creative Writing and head of the MA in Creative Writing program at the University of Salford in the U.K. Carrie (Van Deest) Van Hallgren ’06, her husband Sam, and their one-year old son David moved in August from their beloved Milwaukee to North Carolina, where Carrie will serve as Production Manager and Lecturer in Theatre at Davidson College. She’ll join Josh Peklo ’02 at Davidson, where he is the Technical Director. In May, The Artists Formerly Known as Milwaukee Shakespeare put together a staged reading of Othello in a local gallery space. Mark Dold ’96 came in from New York to play Iago.

Veronika Vorel ’08 currently divides her time between New York City and Washington, D.C. Most recently, she worked on the sound design staff for West Side Story in New York,

YSD 2009–10

and Civil War at Ford’s Theatre in D.C. Upcoming: sound design for Bread of Winter (Theatre Alliance, D.C.), Arcadia (Folger Theatre, D.C.), and Fever/Dream (Woolly Mammoth, D.C.).

Brad Ward ’05 designed a production of Brecht’s Baal for Columbia University. He will be designing a production of Company for Williams College in November, and he continues to work as a sound system designer for Acoustic Dimensions. Check out his website for more info and samples of his work at www.

BradWard.net.

Amanda Mason Warren ’08 has, since graduating, appeared in a staged reading of Bernard Weinraub’s Above the Fold directed by Will Frears ’01 (2008 NY Stage & Film/ Powerhouse Theatre) opposite Reg Rogers ’93 and Famke Janssen. Most recently Amanda played Masha in Three Sisters at the Classical Theatre of Harlem/Harlem Stage. On TV, she has a recurring role on Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

Carrie (Silverstein) Winkler ’04 married Greg Winkler ’05 on October 10 at the Tribeca Rooftop in NYC, surrounded by all of their family and friends. Greg is finishing up his second year teaching technical theatre at Barnard College. Carrie continues to enjoy working as production manager at Hudson Scenic Studio.

Stephanie Ybarra ’08 joined the new offBroadway company, The Playwrights Realm, as Producing Director in March and facilitated a breakout session at the Theatre Communications Group conference in June with Jacob Padron ’08. Y

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Contributors Contributors to Yale School of Drama Annual Fund 2008/09 Class Agents highlighted in bold

1930s Mary W. Judson ’37 Bertram N. Linder ’39 Virginia Weaver Russell ’39

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 Don A. Haldane* ’41 Nancy K. Holland ’43 Albert Hurwitz ’49 Joan Kron ’48 Mildred C. Kuner ’47 Emma Lou K. Nielson ’43 John W. Paul ’48 Pamela Stiles Roberts ’46 Julia Meade Rudd ’47 Eugene F. Shewmaker ’49 Joe Steinberg ’44 Yun C. Wu ’49

1950s William H. Allison ’52 Cornelia H. Barr ’58 Robert M. Barr ’52 Jack W. Belt ’53 Ezekial H. Berlin ’53 Melvin Bernhardt ’55 Richard E. Bianchi ’57 Robert Brustein ’51, mah ’66 Rene Buch ’52 Ian W. Cadenhead ’58 Joy G. Carlin ’54 Sami Joan Casler ’59 Cosmo A. Catalano, Sr. ’53 Joseph Chomyn ’53 Patricia J. Collins ’58 Forrest S. Compton ’53 Alfred B. Connable ’58 Kathleen R. Conneely ’57 George Corrin, Jr. ’51 John W. Cunningham ’59 Allen Davis III ’56 Jose A. Diaz ’52 John J. Dolan ’55 William F. Dowling ’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 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 Russell T. Hastings ’57 Carol Thompson Hemingway ’55 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 James D. Karr ’54 Jay B. Keene ’55 Arthur J. Kelley, Jr. ’53 Bernard Kukoff ’57 David Jeremy Larson ’50 Romulus Linney ’58 Edgar R. Loessin ’54 Henry E. Lowenstein ’56 Paul David Lukather ’53 Elizabeth Lyman ’51 Jane B. Lyman ’51 Richard G. Mason ’53 Beverly W. May ’50 David Ross McNutt ’59 Robert J. Miller* ’57 Ellen L. Moore ’52 George Morfogen ’57 Marion V. Myrick ’54 Franklin M. Nash ’59 Peter J. Nelson ’53 Grace T. Noyes ’54 Michael A. Onofrio, Jr. ’53, yc ’50 Kendric T. Packer ’52 Eilene C. Pierson ’50 Gladys S. Powers ’57 David Rayfiel ’50 Mary B. Reynolds ’55 Mark J. Richard* ’57 Harry M. Ritchie ’55, dfa ’60 David A. Rosenberg ’54 Philip Rosenberg ’59 A. Raymond Rutan, 4th ’54 Raymond H. Sader ’58 Stephen O. Saxe ’54 Alvin Schechter ’59 William T. Schneider ’56 Forrest E. Sears ’58 James A. Smith ’59 Kenneth J. Stein ’59 Pamela D. Strayer ’52

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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, yc ’55 Betsy B. Watson ’53 Zelma H. Weisfeld ’56 Marjorie M. Williams ’55 Barbara M. Young ’53 Joseph W. Young ’52

1960s David E. Ackroyd ’68 Lois D. Aden ’60 Richard Ambacher dfa ’65 Leif E. Ancker ’62 Barbara B. Anderson ’60 Mary Ellen O’Brien Atkins ’65 Thomas R. Atkins ’64 Robert A. Auletta ’69 John M. Badham ’63, yc ’61 James Robert Bakkom ’64 Philip J. Barrons ’65 Warren F. Bass ’67 John Beck ’63 Jody Locker Berger ’66 Edward Bierhaus, Jr. dfa ’69 Roderick L. Bladel ’61 Jeffrey A. Bleckner ’68 Carol Bretz Murray-Negron ’64 Oscar Lee Brownstein ’60 James Burrows ’65 Donald I. Cairns ’63 Dennis Carnine ’65 Raymond E. Carver ’61 Suellen G. Childs ’69 Sarah E. Clark ’67 Patricia S. Cochrane ’62 Robert S. Cohen dfa ’64 John M. Conklin ’66, yc ’59 Kenneth T. Costigan ’60 Stephen C. Coy ’63, dfa ’69 Laila S. Dahl ’65 F. Mitchell Dana ’67 Mary Lucille DeBerry ’66 Ramon L. Delgado ’67 George R. DiCenzo ’65 Charles Dillingham III ’69, yc ’65 Robert J. Donnelly ’64 John A. Duran ’74 Robert H. Einenkel ’69 Joyce Elliott ’62 David H. Epstein ’68 Leslie D. Epstein dfa ’67, yc ’60 Jerry N. Evans ’62 John D. Ezell ’60 Ann Farris ’63 Richard A. Feleppa ’60 William H. Firestone ’69 Hugh Fortmiller ’61

YSD 2009–10

Keith F. Fowler DFA ’69 F. Kenneth Freedman ’67 David Freeman ’68 Richard D. Fuhrman ’64 Bernard L. Galm ’63 Anne K. Gregerson ’65 John E. Guare ’63 David A. Hale ’61 Ann T. Hanley ’61 Jerome R. Hanley ’60 Harold G. Harlow* ’62, yc ’58 Richard A. Harrison ’66 Patricia Helwick ’65 Elizabeth Holloway ’66 John Robert Hood ’61 Derek Hunt ’62 Peter H. Hunt ’63, yc ’61 Laura Mae Jackson ’68 John W. Jacobsen ’69, yc ’67 Lee H. Kalcheim ’63 Asaad N. Kelada ’64 Abby B. Kenigsberg ’63 Charles M. Kimbrough ’61 Carol Soucek King ’66 Marna J. King ’64 Raymond Klausen ’67 Richard H. Klein ’67 Harriet W. Koch ’62 Raymond T. Kurdt ’64 Peter J. Leach ’61 Stephen R. Leventhal ’69 Irene Lewis ’66 Fredric A. Lindauer ’66 Keith E. Lockhart ’64 Frank R. Lopez ’61 Everett M. Lunning, Jr. ’69, yc ’67 Janell M. MacArthur ’61 Marcia Madeira ’68 Cynthia J. Maguire ’66 Richard E. Maltby, Jr. ’62, yc ’59 Kenneth L. Martin ’69 Thomas O. Martin ’68 Patricia D. McAdams ’61 B. Robert McCaw ’66 Margaret T. McCaw ’66 Robert A. McDonald, Jr. ’68 Bruce W. McMullan ’61 Banylou Mearin ’62 Donald Michaelis ’69 Dr. Ronald A. Mielech ’60 Karen H. Milliken ’64 H. Thomas Moore ’68 Donald W. Moreland ’60 Robert B. Murray ’61 Gayther L. Myers, Jr. ’65 S. Joseph Nassif ’63 Ruth Hunt Newman ’62 Dwight R. Odle ’66 Richard A. Olson ’69 Miss Sara Ormond ’66 Joan D. Pape ’68 Kenneth L. Parker ’61 Howard Pflanzer ’68

Louis R. Plante ’69 Michael B. Posnick ’69 Barbara Reid ’62 H. Lisa Steele Roach ’65 Mary Dupuy Roane ’61 Lucy G. Rosenthal ’61 Carolyn L. Ross ’69 Clarence Salzer, Jr. ’60, yc ’55 Isaac H. Schambelan dfa ’67 Georg Schreiber ’64 Talia Shire Schwartzman ’69 Winifred J. Sensiba ’63 Suzanne Sessions ’66 Paul R. Shortt ’68 Carol M. Sica ’66 Roger H. Simon ’67 E. Gray Smith, Jr. ’65 Helena L. Sokoloff ’60 Mary C. Stark ’61 James Beach Steerman ’62, dfa ’69 Louise Stein ’66 John Wright Stevens ’66 G. Erwin Steward ’60 David F. Toser ’64 Russell L. Treyz ’65 Richard B. Trousdell ’67, dfa ’74 Thomas S. Turgeon dfa ’68 Joan Van Ark ’64 Stephen F. Van Benschoten ’69 Charles H. Vicinus ’65 Ruth L. Wallman ’68 Steven I. Waxler ’68 Gil Wechsler ’67 Charles R. Werner, Jr. ’67 Peter White ’62 Robin Benensohn-Rosefsky Wood* ’69 Porter Stevens Woods dfa ’65 Albert J. Zuckerman ’61, dfa ’62

1970s Sarah Jean Albertson ’71, art ’75 Michael L. Annand ’75 John L. Beatty ’73 Lewis Black ’77 Michael William Cadden ’76, dfa ’79, yc ’71 Ian Calderon ’73 Victor P. Capecce ’75 Lisa Carling ’70 Cosmo A. Catalano, Jr. ’79 W. David Chambers ’71 Lani L. Click ’73 William R. Conner ’79 David M. Conte ’72 Marycharlotte C. Cummings ’73 Julia L. Devlin ’74 Thomas Di Mauro ’78 Dennis L. Dorn ’72 Franchelle S. Dorn ’75 Nancy Reeder El Bouhali ’70 Eric S. Elice ’79

Yale School of Drama Alumni Fund

Peter Entin ’71 Dirk Epperson ’74 Heidi P. Ettinger ’76 Femi Euba ’73 Douglass M. Everhart ’70 Marc F. Flanagan ’70 Robert Gainer ’73 Oscar M. Giner ’78, dfa ’87, yc ’75 Wray Steven Graham ’77 Joseph G. Grifasi ’75 Michael E. Gross ’73 William B. Halbert ’70 Charlene Harrington ’74 Barbara B. Hauptman ’73 Jane C. Head ’79 Robert C. Heller ’78 Jennifer Hershey-Benen ’77 Nicholas A. Hormann ’73 Cynthia P. Kaback ’70 Barnet K. Kellman ’72 Alan L. Kibbe ’73 Fredrica A. Klemm ’76 Daniel L. Koetting ’74 Andrew J. Kufta ’77 Frances E. Kumin ’77 Mitchell L. Kurtz ’75 Michael John Lassell ’76 Stephen R. Lawson ’76 Charles E. Letts III ’76 George N. Lindsay, Jr. ’74 Jennifer K. Lindstrom ’72 Robert Hamilton Long II ’76 Donald B. Lowy ’76 William Ludel ’73 Patrick F. Lynch ’71 Thomas P. Lynch ’79, yc ’75 Elizabeth M. MacKay ’78 Lizbeth P. Mackay ’75 Alan Mokler MacVey ’77 Brian R. Mann ’79 Jonathan E. Marks ’72, dfa ’84, yc ’68 Craig T. Martin ’71 Neil A. Mazzella ’78 John A. McAndrew ’72 Caroline A. McGee ’78 Kate McGregor-Stewart ’74 Stephen W. Mendillo ’71 Jonathan Seth Miller ’75 Lawrence S. Mirkin ’72, yc ’69 Thomas Reed Mohan ’75 George Moredock III ’70 James Naughton ’70 Patricia C. Norcia ’78 Elizabeth L. Norment ’79 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 Bronislaw J. Sammler ’74 Robert Sandberg ’77 Suzanne M. Sato ’79 Joel R. Schechter ’72, dfa ’73 H. Asante Scott ’78 Michael D. Sheehan ’76 Richard R. Silvestro ’76 Benjamin Slotznick ’73, yc ’70 Jeremy T. Smith ’76 Marshall S. Spiller ’71 Charles N. Steckler ’71 Roy Steinberg ’78 Meryl Streep ’75, dfah ’83 Jaroslaw Strzemien ’75 Edith R. Tarbescu ’76 Eva M. Vizy ’72 Carol M. Waaser ’70 Eugene D. Warner ’71 Lynda Lee Welch ’72 Carolyn Seely Wiener ’72 Stephen E. Zuckerman ’74

1980s Michael G. Albano ’82 Amy L. Aquino ’86 Christine M. Arnold ’85 Clayton Mayo Austin ’86 Bruce W. Bacon ’84 Dylan Baker ’85 Christopher H. Barreca ’83 Robert P. Barron ’83 Spencer P. Beglarian ’86 James B. Bender ’85 William J. Beer Bletzinger ’83 Anders P. Bolang ’87 Katherine R. Borowitz ’81, yc ’76 Michael E. Boyle ’90 Sara Hedgepeth ’87 Andrew Jon Brolin ’89 Claudia M. Brown ’85 William J. Buck ’84 Richard W. Butler ’88 Jon E. Carlson ’88 Sandra L. Carlson ’89 Anna T. Cascio ’83 Lawrence Casey ’80 Joan Channick ’89 William A. Cohen ’84 Dana S. Croll ’87 Jane Ann Crum ’85 Donato Joseph D’Albis ’88 Richard Sutton Davis ’83, dfa ’03 Kathleen K. Dimmick ’85 Timothy E. Douglas ’86 Merle Gordon Dowling ’81 Charles S. Dutton ’83

Terrence William Dwyer ’88 Abigail W. Evans ’87 Mary Teresa Eyring ’89 Michael D. Fain ’82 Jon Robert Farley ’83 Terry Kevin Fitzpatrick ’83 Joel C. Fontaine ’83 Alison Ford ’82 Anthony M. Forman ’83 Molly M. Fowler ’84 Brackley S. Frayer ’80 Meredith Rand Freeman ’88 Randy R. Fullerton ’82 Tamara Heeschen Gaglioti ’85 Judy Gailen ’89 J. Ellen Gainor ’83 Steven J. Gefroh ’85 Michael J. Giannitti ’87 May Wu Gibson ’86 Ryan Devereux Gilliam ’88 Jeffrey M. Ginsberg ’81 Christopher J. Grabowski ’89 Charles F. Grammer ’86 Rob Greenberg ’89 John E. Harnagel ’83 Donald A. Harvey ’85 Allan Havis ’80 James W. Hazen ’83 Heather A. Henderson ’87, dfa ’88 Alan Hendrickson ’83 Roderick Lyons Hickey, III ’89 Donald S. Holder ’86 Catherine MacNeil Hollinger ’86 Nadine R. Honigberg ’86 Kathleen Ann Houle ’88 Thomas K. Isbell ’84 Kirk Roberts Jackson ’88 Chris P. Jaehnig ’85 Jane Kaczmarek ’82 Jonathan F. Kalb ’85, dfa ’87 Carol M. Kaplan ’89 Karen W. Kaplan ’87 Bruce Abram Katzman ’88 Edward A. Kaye ’86 Richard Kaye ’80 Patrick Kerr ’87 David K. Kriebs ’82 William Kux ’83 Edward H. Lapine ’83 Sasha Emerson Levin ’84 Jerry J. Limoncelli, Jr. ’84 Gail A. London ’87 Mark D. London ’89 Mark E. Lord ’87 Sara Beth Low ’89 Andi Lyons ’80 James G. Macak ’87 Wendy MacLeod ’87 James Magruder ’88, yc ’84, dfa ’92 Peter Andrew Marshall ’89, yc ’83 Peter Richard Mason ’86 Gayle E. Maurin ’85

Give to the Annual Fund!

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.

*deceased

YSD 2009–10

73

Contributors Robert D. McClintock ’82 Thomas John McGowan ’88 Katherine Mendeloff ’80 Sharon A. Mitchell ’84 David E. Moore ’87 Grafton V. Mouen ’82, yc ’75 Brennan Murphy ’88 Stephanie Bridgman Nash ’88 Tina C. Navarro ’86 Regina L. Neville ’88 Thomas J. Neville ’86 Arthur E. Oliner ’86 Erik Alexander Onate ’89 Carol Susan Ostrow ’80 Cheryl A. Perry ’88 Pamela Marie Peterson ’86 Kim Powers ’84 Robert J. Provenza ’86 Carol Anne Prugh ’89 Michael D. Quinn ’84 Deborah J. Reissman ’87 Ross Sumner Richards ’88 Joan E. Robbins ’86, dfa ’91 Laila V. Robins ’84 Lori Robishaw ’88 Michael V. Rogers ’98 Constance Elisabeth Romero ’88 Russ Lori Rosensweig ’83 Andrew I. Rubenoff ’83 Cecilia M. Rubino ’82 Steven A. Saklad ’81 James D. Sandefur ’85 Frank Sarmiento ’81 Herbert E. Scher ’86 Kenneth Schlesinger ’84 Kimberly A. Scott ’87 William P. Skipper ’83 Teresa L. Snider-Stein ’88 Barbara Somerville ’83 Douglas O. Stein ’82 Neal Ann Stephens ’80 Mark Stevens ’89 Forrest M. Stone ’85 Stephen C. Strawbridge ’83 Mark L. Sullivan ’83 Bernard J. Sundstedt ’81 John I. Tissot ’81 John M. Turturro ’83 Rosa Vega Weissman ’80 Adam N. Versenyi ’86, dfa ’90, yc ’80 Craig F. Volk ’88 Mark Anthony Wade ’88 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. Wildman ’83 W. Courtenay Wilson ’85

Alexandra R. Witchel ’82 Carl Wittenberg ’85 Steven A. Wolff ’81 Evan D. Yionoulis ’85, yc ’82 Catherine J. Zuber ’84

1990s Narda Elaine Alcorn ’95 Bruce Altman ’90 Nephelie M. Andonyadis ’90 Angelina Avallone ’94 Charles Wesley Bartlett ’90 Elizabeth Jeanne Bennett ’97 Sarah Eckert Bernstein ’95 Martin A. Blanco ’91 Edward L. Blunt ’99 Debra Booth ’91 John Cummings Boyd ’92 Tom Joseph Broecker ’92 Shawn Hamilton Brown ’90 James Bundy ’95 Kathryn A. Calnan ’99 Vincent James Cardinal ’90 Adrienne Lisa Carter ’99, yc ’96 Esther K. Chae ’99 Enrico L. Colantoni ’93 Aaron M. Copp ’98 Robert C. Cotnoir ’94 Susan Mary Cremin ’95 Sean James Cullen ’90 Sean P. Cullen ’94 Scott T. Cummings ’85, dfa ’94 Sheldon Deckelbaum ’92 Stephen Victor Derosa ’95 Michael Lloyd Diamond ’90 Alexander Timothy Dodge ’99 Frances Louise Egler ’95 Cornelia Anne Evans ’93 Glen Richard Fasman ’92 Joshua McNeel Foldy ’98 Rodrick D. Fox ’99 David William Gainey ’93 Shawn Marie Garrett ’96, dfa ’06 Neil F. Gluckman ’92 Stephen L. Godchaux ’93 Stephan Golux ’97 Naomi S. Grabel ’91 Regina Selma Guggenheim ’93 Alexander Taverner Hammond ’96 Scott Christopher Hansen ’04 April Marie Hartsook ’97 Brian Clement Haynsworth ’97 Samantha R. Healy ’97 Michael Bertin Heinlein ’80, dfa ’93 Mercedes Z. Herrero ’95 Jeffrey C. Herrmann ’99 Christopher B. Higgins ’90 John C. Huntington ’90 Raymond P. Inkel ’95 Jennie E. Israel ’96 Laura J. Janik Cronin ’96

74

Kimberly M. Jannarone ’96, dfa ’00 Kristin Johnsen-Neshati ’92, dfa ’02 Ann Johnson ’90 Debra Jane Justice ’92 Elizabeth A. Kaiden ’96 Cindy E. Katz ’90 Samuel L. Kelley ’90 Ashley York Kennedy ’90 Stephen Lars Klein ’99 James Allen Kleinmann ’92 L. Azan Kung ’91 James William Larkin ’96 Julie F. Lawrence-Edsell ’93 Malia Rachel Lewis ’97 Patricia Ann Lewis ’98 Chih-Lung Liu ’94 Sarah Long ’92, yc ’85 Suzanne R. Cryer Luke ’95, yc ’88 Emmanuel E.M. Madlansacay ’96 Maria E. Matasar-Padilla ’99, dfa ’05 Craig P. Mathers ’93 Mary F. McCabe ’94 Mark L. McCullough ’91 B. Christine McDowell ’98 Julie Ann Mckee ’96 Paul S. McKinley ’96 Robert A. Melrose ’96 Framji D. Minwalla ’91, dfa ’00 Marjorie Craig Mitchell ’97 Richard R. Mone ’91 Daniel Evan Mufson ’95, dfa ’99 Kaye I. Neale ’91 Martha Josephine New ’92 Peter J. Novak ’98, dfa ’01 David A. Olivenbaum ’90 Lori Ott ’92 Jane E. Padelford ’99 Scott Douglas Pask ’97 Jill Ryder Patterson ’90 Dw Phineas Perkins ’90 Laura W. Perlow ’93 Lisa Rigsby Peterson ’92 Michael A. Potts ’92 Amy Joyce Povich ’92 James W. Quinn ’94 Sarah Gray Rafferty ’96 Joe Reynolds ’97 Shannon L. Rhodes ’94 Elizabeth Theobald Richards ’90 Martin E. Rimes ’95 Reginald Hunt Rogers ’93 Melina W. Root ’90, yc ’83 Mary E. Rose ’96 Philip Joseph Santora ’92 Robert W. Schneider ’94, dfa ’97 Jennifer C. Schwartz ’97 Paul Francis Selfa ’92 Thomas W. Sellar ’97, dfa ’03 James Eric Shanklin Jr. ’97

YSD 2009–10

Jeremy M. Shapira ’97 Jane M. Shaw ’98 Catherine Ann Sheehy ’92, dfa ’99 Rachel Sheinkin ’95 Graham A.W. Shiels ’99 Vladimir Shpitalnik ’92 Michael Vaughn Sims ’92 Paul Spadone III ’99, yc ’93 Flora M. Stamatiades ’94 Erich William Stratmann ’94, yc ’93 Michael Eric Strickland ’95 Sy C. Sussman ’94, yc ’87 David Loy Sword ’90 Janet Yuki Takami ’96 Louisa Logan Thompson ’98 Patti W. Thorp ’91 Paul Charles Tigue III ’99 James Edward Triner ’92 Deborah L. Trout ’94 Erik William Walstad ’95 Thomas S. Werder ’90 Richard G. Whittington ’98 Lisa A. Wilde ’91, dfa ’95 Marshall Butler Williams ’95 Lila L. Wolff-Wilkinson ’90, dfa ’94

2000s Monica Achen ’06 Timothy Joseph Acito ’02 Paola Allais ’08 , mba ’08 Liz Susana Alsina ’06 Alexander G. Bagnall ’00 Sarah Elaine Bierenbaum ’05, yc ’99 Paul Vincent Black ’00 Mark G. Blankenship ’05 Deborah H. Bloch ’06 Amy Michelle Boratko ’06 Joshua Borenstein ’02 Catherine Jane Bredeson ’02, dfa ’06 Madeline Kronen Brickman ’09 Cynthia T. Brizzell-Bates ’00, dfa ’07 Ilana Michelle Brownstein ’02, dfa ’06 Jonathan Stewart Busky ’02, som ’02, yc ’94 Claudia W. Case ’01, dfa ’07 Joseph P. Cermatori ’08 James Q. Chen ’08 Wilson W. Chin ’03 Kristen Nora Connolly ’07 Gregory W. Copeland ’04 Edgar M. Cullman III ’02, yc ’97 Katherine Mary Cusack ’06 Anne Taychman Davison ’02 Derek Michael DiGregorio ’07 Michael M. Donahue ’08 Emily Ryan Dorsch ’07

Jenifer E. Endicott ’00 Miriam Rose Epstein ’02 Dustin Owen Eshenroder ’07 Kristan Falkowski ’05 Alexandra Jane Fischer ’00 Jason T. Fitzgerald ’08 Gia Forakis ’04 Sarah McColl Fornia ’04 Stephen Ernest Fried ’05 Marion R. Friedman ’05 Marcus Dean Fuller ’04 Sandra Goldmark ’04 Hannah A. Grannemann ’08, som ’08 Alex Downing Grennan ’06 Emily Ruth Gresh ’06 John J. Hanlon ’04 Adrien-Alice L. Hansel ’03 Caitlin Marie Hevner ’07 Amy S. Holzapfel ’01, dfa ’06 James Guerry Hood ’05 Allison Ann Horsley ’01 David Howson ’04 Melissa Huber ’01 Brendan Patrick Hughes ’04 Matthew Joel Humphreys ’03 Rolin Jones ’04 Anne Morrow Kenney ’04 Peter Young Hoon Kim ’04 Fred Thomas Kinney ’02 Jacob H. Knoll ’05 Nico M. Lang ’05 Emily W. Leue ’03 Drew Lichtenberg ’08 Jennifer Chen Hua Lim ’04 Laura Jean MacNeil ’03 Michael James Madravazakis ’04 Peter Andrew Malbuisson ’05 Elena Moreno Maltese ’03 Heather Elizabeth Mazur ’03 Patricia Kathleen McElfresh ’06 Sabrina McGuigan ’04 Joanne E. McInerney ’08 Ann M.K. McLaughlin ’03 Jennifer Yejin Moeller ’06 Lorraine M. Monnier ’01 Elizabeth Deanne Morrison ’05 Neil W. Mulligan ’01 Rachel Sara Myers ’07 Arthur F. Nacht ’06 Liv E. Nilssen ’06 David Stephen L. Nugent ’05 Adam N. O’Byrne ’04, yc ’01 Meredith Lee Palin ’03 Maulik Pancholy ’03 Brian Fitz Patton ’01 Zane Rich Pihlstrom ’06 Andrew Charles Plumer ’02 James Donald Reynolds ’04 Kevin Michael Rich ’04 Glynis Ann Louise Rigsby ’01 Brian Wayne Robinson ’00 Amy Lynn Rogoway ’01

Yale School of Drama Alumni Fund

Joanna Sara Romberg ’07 Rebecca A. Rugg ’00, dfa ’05 Rachel Madeline Rusch ’05, dfa ’08, yc ’00 Thomas Russell ’07 Shawn B. Senavinin ’06 Alena Marion Smith ’06 Katharine E. Spencer Doak ’00 Mikiko Suzuki ’02 Ari M. Teplitz ’05 Carrie E. Van Hallgren ’06 Elliot Carmelo Villar ’07 Heather Jeanne Violanti ’02 Elaine M. Wackerly ’03 Kathryn Alice Walat ’03 Michael C. Walkup ’06 Bradlee M. Ward ’05 Amanda Wallace Woods ’03 Stephanie Ybarra ’08

Friends John B. Beinecke Deborah and Bruce Berman Catherine Black Sterling and Clare Brinkley Mary L. Bundy Bianca Calabresi Converse M. Converse Priscilla and Bob Dannies Scott M. Delman Mary Elder The John Golden Fund Donald P. Granger, Jr. Jerome L. Greene Foundation F. Lane Heard III Ruth and Stephen Hendel David Johnson Romaine Macomb John and Rebecca McCullough David S. Milch Paul and Maureen Moses Edward John Noble Foundation Linda Frank Rodman Gordon M. Rogoff The Shubert Foundation Jennifer Tipton Esme Usdan

In-kind John and Julia Badham Barbara Cushing Sasha Emerson Levin

Contributors to the Pamela Jordan Scholarship

Timothy Joseph Acito ’02 Paola Allais ’08, som ’08 Bruce Altman ’90 Robert P. Barron ’83 Tom Beckett ’91 Jesse Belsky ’09

Elizabeth Jeanne Bennett ’97 Deborah S. Berman Sarah Eckert Bernstein ’95 Frances Black ’09 Lewis Black ’77 Paul Vincent Black ’00 Mark G. Blankenship ’05 Deborah H. Bloch ’06 Elizabeth A. Bolster Amy Michelle Boratko ’06 Katherine R. Borowitz ’81, yc ’76 John Cummings Boyd ’92 Susan Brady Catherine Jane Bredeson ’02, dfa ’06 Madeline Brickman ’09 Josie Brown Ilana Michelle Brownstein ’02, dfa ’06 James Bundy ’95 Michael William Cadden ’76, dfa ’79, yc ’71 Vincent James Cardinal ’90 Sandra L. Carlson ’89 Claudia W. Case ’01, dfa ’07 Joseph P. Cermatori ’08 Joan Channick ’89 Meiling Cheng ’90, dfa ’93 Susan C. Clark Donald Claxon ’09 Moria Sine Clinton ’09 Magaly Colimon ’98 William R. Conner ’79 Matthew Cornish ’09 Sean James Cullen ’90 Edgar M. Cullman III ’02, yc ’97 Scott T. Cummings ’85, dfa ’94 Donato D’Albis ’88 Richard Sutton Davis ’83, dfa ’03 Anne Taychman Davison ’02 Elizabeth A. Diamond Charles S. Dutton ’83 Patricia Egan Deborah A. Ellinghaus Marguerite Elliott Gwen Ellison Jenifer E. Endicott ’00 Laura Woodward Esposito ’09 Michael D. Fain ’82 Glen Richard Fasman ’92 Ruth D. Feldman Miriam Felton-Dansky ’09 Alexandra Jane Fischer ’00 Aurelia K. Fisher ’09 Jason T. Fitzgerald ’08 Joshua McNeel Foldy ’98 Alison Ford ’82 Molly M. Fowler ’84 Elinor Fuchs Tamara Heeschen Gaglioti ’85 Judy Gailen ’89 J. Ellen Gainor ’83 Jacob Gallagher-Ross ’09

Shawn Marie Garrett ’96, dfa ’06 Doug Gary ’92 Elizabeth Giamatti ’95 Paul Giamatti ’94, yc ’89 Carter Pierce Gill ’09 Neil F. Gluckman ’92 Alex Downing Grennan ’06 Joseph G. Grifasi ’75 Regina Selma Guggenheim ’93 John J. Hanlon ’04 Adrien-Alice L. Hansel ’03 Heidi Leigh Hanson ’09 Donald A. Harvey ’85 Brian Hastert ’09 Brian Haynsworth ’97 Jane C. Head ’79 Michael Bertin Heinlein ’80, dfa ’93 Heather A. Henderson ’87, dfa ’88 Mercedes Z. Herrero ’95 Susan Hilferty ’80 Sharon K. Hirsch Donald S. Holder ’86 Amy S. Holzapfel ’01, dfa ’06 Nadine R. Honigberg ’86 Allison Ann Horsley ’01 David Carr Howson ’04 Melissa Huber ’01 Matthew Joel Humphreys ’03 Marcia and Emil Isaacs Thomas K. Isbell ’84 Jennie E. Israel ’96 Kirk Roberts Jackson ’88 Chris P. Jaehnig ’85 Kimberly M. Jannarone ’96, dfa ’00 Sisi Aisha Johnson ’09 Ann Johnson ’90 Carol L. Jones Rolin Jones ’04 Joyce W Josephy Jane Kaczmarek ’82 Elizabeth A. Kaiden ’96 Carol M. Kaplan ’89 Cindy E. Katz ’90 Samuel L. Kelley ’90 Mary Jane Kelsey Anne Morrow Kenney ’04 Patrick Kerr ’87 Jennifer L. Kiger Daphne Klein ’99 Stephen Lars Klein ’99 Alexander Justin Knox ’09 David K. Kriebs ’82 Frances E. Kumin ’77 William Kux ’83 James William Larkin ’96 Julie F. Lawrence-Edsell ’93 Beverly T. Lett m.div. ’79 James Leverett Maria Leveton Sasha Emerson Levin ’84

Yale School of Drama Legacy Partners

We invite you to join fellow alumni and friends who have included YSD in their estate plans or made other planned gifts to the School.

Through Yale School of Drama Legacy Partners you can directly influence the future of Yale.

You are eligible for membership in Yale School of Drama Legacy Partners if you have named the School as a beneficiary of your will or trust, life income gift, IRA or other retirement plan, life insurance policy, or other planned gift.

2009–2010 YSD Legacy Partners Donald I. Cairns ’63 Raymond Carver ’61 Eizabeth S. Clark ’41* David M. Conte ’72 Tony Converse YC ’57 Sue Ann Converse ’55 Eldon J. Elder ’58* Peter Entin ’71 Albert Gurney ’58 Robert L. Hurtgen Dawn and Jim Miller Thomas H. Moore ’68 Tad Mosel ’50*

George E. Nichols III ’38* Mark Richards ’57* Barbara Richter ’60* William Rothwell, Jr. ’53* Forrest E. Sears ’58 Eugene Shewmaker ’49 Erwin G. Steward ’60 Edward Trach ’58 Phyllis C. Warfel ’55 William B. Warfel ’57 YC ’55 Wendy Wasserstein ’76* Zelma H. Weisfeld ’56 Edwin Wilson ’57 *deceased

To learn more about making a planned gift to Yale School of Drama, please contact Deborah S. Berman, Director of Development and Alumni Affairs at (203) 432-2890 or deborah.berman@yale.edu.

YSD 2009–10

75

Contributors Malia Rachel Lewis ’97 Teresa Anne Lim ’09 Gail A. London ’87 Kristofer Longley-Postema ’09 Mark E. Lord ’87 Suzanne E. Lovejoy Suzanne R. Cryer Luke ’95, yc ’88 Andi Lyons ’80 James G. Macak ’87 Wendy MacLeod ’87 Emmanuel E.M. Madlansacay ’96 James Richard Magruder ’88, dfa ’92, yc ’84 Maria E. Matasar-Padilla ’99, dfa ’05 Gayle E. Maurin ’85 Patricia Kathleen McElfresh ’06 Christopher Michael McFarland ’09 Elizabeth McGuire Julie Ann Mckee ’96 Paul S. McKinley ’96 Ann M.K. McLaughlin ’03 Teresa J. Mensz Framji D. Minwalla ’91, dfa ’00 Sharon A. Mitchell ’84 Matthew Moses ’09 Neil W. Mulligan ’01 Brennan Murphy ’88 Arthur F. Nacht ’06 Tobin Nellhaus Regina L. Neville ’88 Thomas J. Neville ’86 Martha Josephine New ’92 Danuta A. Nitecki Victoria Nolan and Clark Crolius Peter J. Novak ’98, dfa ’01 David Stephen L. Nugent ’05 John Barret O’Brien ’09 David A. Olivenbaum ’90 Erik Onate ’89 Richard Ostreicher ’79 Carol Susan Ostrow ’80 Lori Ott ’92 Phillip Dawson Owen ’09 Steven Padla Scott Douglas Pask ’97 Jill Ryder Patterson ’90 Brian Fitz Patton ’01 Sarah E. Pearline ’09 Erik Lane Pearson ’09 Katharine Warner Perdue ’09 Cheryl A. Perry ’88 Rebecca Kate Phillips ’09 Nicholas John Pope ’09 Michael A. Potts ’92 Amy Joyce Povich ’92 Kim Powers ’84 Sergio Torres Pozo ’09 Pamela S. Prather-Millman Ken Prestininzi James Donald Reynolds ’04

Bill and Sharon Reynolds ’77 Kevin Michael Rich ’04 Gonzalo Rodriguez Risco ’09 Joan E. Robbins ’86, dfa ’91 Luke Rivas Robertson ’09 Laila V. Robins ’84 Kenneth Paul Robinson ’09 Michael V. Rogers ’98 Reg Rogers ’93 Gordon M. Rogoff yc ’52 Amy Lynn Rogoway ’01 Constance Elisabeth Romero ’88 Melina W. Root ’90, yc ’83 Mary E. Rose ’96 Jacob Gallagher Ross ’09 Andrew I. Rubenoff ’83 Rebecca A. Rugg ’00, dfa ’05 Rachel Madeline Rusch ’05, dfa ’08 , yc ’00 Thomas Everett Russell ’07 Ben and Larraine Sammler ’74 James D. Sandefur ’85 Suzanne M. Sato ’79 Kenneth Schlesinger ’84 Robert W. Schneider ’94, dfa ’97 H. Asante Scott ’78 Paul Francis Selfa ’92 Kimberly A. Scott ’87 Thomas W. Sellar ’97, dfa ’03 Shawn B. Senavinin ’06 Vicki Shaghoian James Eric Shanklin Jr. ’97 Jennifer Louise Jude Shaw ’09 Catherine Ann Sheehy ’92, dfa ’99 Rachel Sheinkin ’95 Graham A.W. Shiels ’99 Claire Shindler Marla Beck Richard R. Silvestro ’76 Toni Ann Simiola William P. Skipper ’83 Alena Marion Smith ’06 Jeremy T. Smith ’76 Teresa L. Snider-Stein ’88 Barbara Somerville ’83 Andrew Southard ’09 Paul Spadone III ’99, yc ’93 Eve Spencer Katharine E. Spencer Doak ’00 Amanda Spooner ’09 Douglas O. Stein ’82 Roy Bennett Steinberg ’78 Mark Stevens ’89 Meryl Streep ’75, dfah hon ’83 Michael Eric Strickland ’95 Erica Renee Sullivan ’09 Bernard J. Sundstedt ’81 Sy C. Sussman ’94, yc ’87 Janet Yuki Takami ’96 Alexander Manuel Teicheira ’09 Nondumiso Tembe ’09 Jacob Thompson, Jr. Louisa Logan Thompson ’98

76

John I. Tissot ’81 Laura O. Torino Allen K. Townsend Sylvia S. Traeger Anne Trites John M. Turturro ’83 Ron Van Lieu Rosa Vega Weissman ’80 Adam N. Versenyi ’86, dfa ’90, yc ’80 Heather Jeanne Violanti ’02 Adria Marie Vitlar ’09 Craig F. Volk ’88 Mark Anthony Wade ’88 Kathryn Alice Walat ’03 Michael C. Walkup ’06 Clifford L. Warner ’87 Robert M. Wildman ’83 Marshal Williams ’95 Alexandra R. Witchel ’82 Stanley J. Wojewodski mah ’92 Rebecca Anne Wolff ’09 Lila L. Wolff-Wilkinson ’90, dfa ’94 Evan D. Yionoulis ’85, yc ’82 Mary Zihal

Contributors to the George White Prize Christine M. Arnold ’85 Martin A. Blanco ’91 Sara Hedgepeth ’87 Andrew Jon Brolin ’89 James Bundy ’95 Joan Channick ’89 Victoria Nolan Michael Lloyd Diamond ’90 Charles Dillingham III ’69, yc ’65 Terrence William Dwyer ’88 Jenifer E. Endicott ’00 Abigail W. Evans ’87 Mary Teresa Eyring ’89 Meredith Rand Freeman ’88 May Wu Gibson ’86 Ryan Devereux Gilliam ’88 John E. Guare ’63 Catherine MacNeil Hollinger ’86 Kathleen Ann Houle ’88 Karen W. Kaplan ’87 Sara Beth Low ’89 Edward Martenson Gayle E. Maurin ’85 Mary F. McCabe ’94 Sherry L. Mordecai Kaye I. Neale ’91 Laura W. Perlow ’93 Lisa Rigsby Peterson ’92 Carol Anne Prugh ’89 Deborah J. Reissman ’87 William J. Reynolds ’77 Elizabeth Theobald Richards ’90 Lori Robishaw ’88

YSD 2009–10

Gordon M. Rogoff yc ’52 Philip Joseph Santora ’92 Suzanne M. Sato ’79 Herbert E. Scher ’86 Claire Shindler Flora M. Stamatiades ’94 James Edward Triner ’92 Thomas S. Werder ’90 Robert M. Wildman ’83 W. Courtenay Wilson ’85 Alexandra R. Witchel ’82 Carl Wittenberg ’85

Contributions received from July 1, 2008 through June 30, 2009 Class Agents highlighted in bold. *deceased

YSD 2009–10

77

Sabrina Le Beauf ’83, Pat Skipper, Julie Fulton ’84 YC ’81, Phillipa Keil ’83, Keith Grant ’82, and Rusty Magee in a production photo from Summer Cabaret’s The Real Inspector Hound by Tom Stoppard, 1981.

Can you identify the actors in this photograph? (See answers below.)

From the YSD Scrapbook

Yale school o

ANNUAL MAGAZINE YALE SCHOOL OF DRAMA Yale School of Drama P.O. Box 208244 New Haven, CT 06520-8244

Non-Profit Org. U.S. Postage Paid New Haven, CT Permit No. 167