Yale School Of Drama Presents CARLOTTA FESTIVAL OF NEW PLAYS 5/7-16

YALE SCHOOL OF DRAMA (James Bundy, Dean; Victoria Nolan, Deputy Dean; Paula Vogel, Chair of Playwriting; Ken Prestininzi, Associate Chair) presents the Fifth Annual Carlotta Festival of New Plays, May 7 to 16 at the Iseman Theater, 1156 Chapel Street, New Haven. The Carlotta Festival is comprised of three fully-produced plays by graduating playwrights performed in repertory with twelve performances over ten days.

The Festival is named for Carlotta Monterey, the widow of Eugene O'Neill, who chose Yale University Press as the publisher of her late husband's masterpiece Long Day's Journey into Night. The proceeds from this publication support playwriting at Yale University.

The plays featured in the Fifth Annual Carlotta Festival of New Plays are elijah by Michael Mitnick, the things are against us [les choses sont contre nous] by Susan Soon He Stanton, and Every Other Hamlet In The Universe by Kimberly Rosenstock.

elijah
By Michael Mitnick
Directed by Christopher Mirto
Set Design by Po Lin Li
Costume Design by Aaron Mastin
Lighting Design by Laura Eckelman
Sound Design by Scott Nielsen
Dramaturgy by Anne Seiwerath

Cast: William DeMeritt, Lucas Dixon, Miriam A. Hyman, Brian Lewis, Irene Sofia Lucio, Seamus Mulcahy, Lupita Nyoung'o, Alexandra Trow, and Adina Verson

1922: Elijah, a broke student from Brooklyn, arrives in Paris and becomes an accidental Don Juan overnight. While hunting his idol, a reclusive composer of ballets, Elijah is swept into a life-changing summer of sex, opium, and blackmail.

Michael Mitnick's recent plays include Babs the Dodo, a voyage through home shopping and loneliness (developed at Babel Theater Project and The Blank in LA); Learning Russian, a story of identity theft (produced at Hangar Theatre; published in 2008 by BPPI); and Spacebar: A Broadway Play by Kyle Sugarman, a play about a bar in outer space (developed by Studio 42). Recent music theatre works include Fly-by-Night (Yale Summer Cabaret) and The Current War, the true story of the race to light up the globe (Yale School of Drama). He received the 2004 Best Comedy Award for his short film Winning Caroline at the Ivy Film Festival and the 2007 Robert Sherman Award for Best Comedy Songwriting from Broadcast Music Inc.; and he was a 2009 Theater Master in Aspen. His short play, Life Without Subtext, will be published in a new anthology by Vintage in 2011. His upcoming projects include Pencils Down, written with Simon Rich; Sex Lives of Our Parents (The Kennedy Center); and The Current War, directed by Sam Buntrock. He is currently working on a commission from The Denver Center for a new multimedia play about the end of death.

the things are against us
[les choses sont contre nous]

By Susan Soon He Stanton
Directed by Jesse Jou
Set design by Jung Kim Griffin
Costume design by Summer Lee Jack
Lighting design by Alan Edwards
Sound design by Michael Skinner
Dramaturgy by Kee-Yoon Nahm

Cast: Danny Binstock, Hallie Cooper-Novack, Chris Henry, Michael Place and JillIan Taylor

A tale of disappearing sisters, Lorca, and a young man trying to unearth the dark secrets of his grandfather's past. All roads lead to a mysterious house with a mind of its own. There are bones in the basement. The Spreckle house invites you to spend the night.

Susan Soon He Stanton's plays have been produced or developed by The Kennedy Center, Ontario's Kitchener Festival, Kumu Kahua, Honolulu Theater for Youth, London's Institute of Contemporary Art, InkWell, Miles Memorial Playhouse, New Sounds Theatre, and The Unicorn Theatre. Yale School of Drama and Yale Cabaret productions include Art of Preservation, Cygnus, and The Underneath. In 2009, Kumu Kahua Theatre produced two of her plays in rep, Whatever Happened to John Boy Kihano? and a remount of Art of Preservation. The Underneath, workshopped at The Kennedy Center, is a commission by Kumu Kahua and will be produced in 2011. Her play, The Navigators, a commission from the Honolulu Theatre for Youth, will be produced this year. She has a feature-film development grant and best screenplay award from the Sloan Foundation for her full-length screenplay, Rosalind's Helix, and a commission from Red Sky Films. In 2003, she became the Literary Manager of New Sounds Theatre, which commissioned her to write Edible Restaurant (Joe's Pubb, 2007), a food-based musical with Australian composer Greta Gertler. She is a regular contributor for Audrey Magazine. Susan has a BFA from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts Dramatic Writing. She is from Honolulu, Hawai'i.

Every Other Hamlet In The Universe

By Kimberly Rosenstock
Directed by Jen Wineman
Set design by DeDe Ayite
Costume design by Ana Milosevic
Lighting design by Alan Edwards
Sound design by Junghoon Pi
Video Design by Sarah Lasley
Dramaturgy by Elliot Quick

Cast: Tomas Andren, Trai Byers, Will Cobbs, Laura Gragtmans, Fisher Neal, Sarah Sokolovic and Shannon Sullivan

Marcel, Sr.'s Hamlet would have been the greatest Hamlet of all time-if he'd ever performed it. Instead, ten years after his death, it's his computer programmer son who finds himself inadvertently playing the Melancholy Prince: in the basement of the family home for an audience of just his mom. Every Other Hamlet In The Universe is a play about the mantles we carry for our flesh and blood, and the roles we throw ourselves into when life becomes a kind of calamity.

Kimberly Rosenstock's Yale School of Drama-produced plays include 99 Ways To Fuck A Swan and Lone Pilots of Roosevelt Field. She served as Artistic Director for the 2009 season of Yale Summer Cabaret for which she conceived and co-wrote the original musical Fly By Night. Her plays have been developed by Portland Center Stage's JAW Festival, The Kennedy Center, The Old Vic in association with The Public Theater, Ars Nova, New York Stage & Film, The Playwrights Realm and Theater Masters. In 2009 she was a finalist for the Wasserstein Prize and the recipient of Yale's Eugene O'Neill Memorial Scholarship. This spring her play, Tigers Be Still, will be part of Portland Stage Company's Little Festival of the Unexpected and will subsequently receive its world premiere production at Roundabout Underground in Fall 2010. Prior to pursuing playwriting, she worked for several years in Manhattan as Associate Producer of Ars Nova where she developed and produced new works of music, comedy, and theatre. A graduate of Amherst College, she first began writing plays under the mentorship of Constance Congdon. She is originally from Baldwin, Long Island.

The Carlotta Festival productions will be performed in rotating repertory so that all three plays can be seen in as little as two days. 

A pass to all three Carlotta Festival plays is just $30.00! (Offer expires May 6.)

Tickets to individual plays start at $13.00 and $10.00 for students. Tickets may be purchased online at drama.yale.edu, or by calling 203-432-1234. They may also be purchased in person at the Yale Repertory Theatre Box Office at 1120 Chapel Street (at York Street).

Please visit the following websites for more information about the Fifth Annual Carlotta Festival of New Plays at Yale School of Drama:

http://drama.yale.edu/carlotta/index.html

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