INDECENT, PEERLESS, THE MOORS World Premieres, Dianne Wiest Set for Yale Rep's 2015-16 Season
By: BWW News Desk Mar. 20, 2015
Yale Repertory Theatre announces its 2015-16 Season, which will include three world premieres and two classics.
The season opens with three world premieres: INDECENT, a deeply moving new play created by Yale Rep's Pulitzer Prize-winning Playwright-in-Residence Paula Vogel and director Rebecca Taichman; PEERLESS, a blistering contemporary comedy by Jiehae Park, directed by Margot Bordelon; and THE MOORS, an absurdly funny new play by Jen Silverman, directed by Jackson Gay.
In the spring, OBIE Award-winning Resident Director Evan Yionoulis stages a new production of William Shakespeare's CYMBELINE, and two-time Academy Award winner Dianne Wiest returns in Samuel Beckett's HAPPY DAYS staged by Artistic Director James Bundy.
"I am thrilled by the voices of the writers-and the vision of the directors-whose work will be seen at Yale Rep in the coming year, as well as by the opportunity to welcome one of the world's great actors, Dianne Wiest, back to our stage in a majestic play of iconic wit and soulfulness," says Artistic Director James Bundy. "These artists and their ambitions represent the highest aspirations of our theatre: all of us at Yale Rep will be honored to share their adventuresome work with our audiences throughout the season."
The events for Yale Rep's annual No Boundaries performance series will be announced at a later date.
ABOUT THE 2015-16 SEASON:
World Premiere
INDECENT
Written by Paula Vogel
Created by Paula Vogel and Rebecca Taichman
Directed by Rebecca Taichman
A Co-Production with La Jolla Playhouse
October 2-24, 2015
University Theatre (222 York Street)
Pulitzer Prize winner Paula Vogel and Rebecca Taichman's deeply moving new play with music is inspired by the true events surrounding the controversial 1923 Broadway debut of Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance-a play seen by some as a seminal work of Jewish culture, and by others as an act of traitorous libel. Indecent charts the history of an incendiary drama and the path of the artists who risked their careers and lives to perform it.
Paula Vogel's play, How I Learned to Drive, received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Lortel Prize, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and New York Drama Critics Awards for Best Play, as well as her second OBIE Award. Other plays include Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq, The Long Christmas Ride Home, The Mineola Twins, The Baltimore Waltz, Hot 'N' Throbbing, Desdemona, And Baby Makes Seven, The Oldest Profession, and A Civil War Christmas. In 2004-05, she was the playwright-in-residence at New York's Signature Theatre. TCG has published four books of her work: The Mammary Plays, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays, The Long Christmas Ride Home, and A Civil War Christmas. Most recent awards include the Theatre Hall of Fame, Lifetime Achievement Award from the Dramatists Guild (2011), and the 2010 William Inge Festival Distinguished Achievement in the American Theatre Award. She is honored to have two awards to emerging playwrights named after her: the Paula Vogel Award, created by the American College Theatre Festival in 2003, and the Paula Vogel Award in Playwriting, given annually by the Vineyard Theatre since 2007. Ms. Vogel won the 2004 Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the OBIE for Best Play in 1992, the Rhode Island Pell Award in the Arts, the Hull-Warriner Award, The Laura Pels Award, the Pew Charitable Trust Senior Award, a Guggenheim, an AT&T New Plays Award, the Fund for New American Plays, the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center Fellowship, several National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the McKnight Fellowship, and the Bunting Fellowship from Radcliffe College. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was recently awarded a Thirtini from 13P in New York. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Double UCross Colony, as well as Yaddo. She has taught for 24 years at Brown University and for five years at Yale School of Drama where she was the Eugene O'Neill Professor of Playwriting. She is honored by Philadelphia Young Playwrights and Quiara Hudes, who is curating the Paula Vogel Mentors Project.
Rebecca Taichman's previous Yale Rep credits include Iphigenia at Aulis and the world premieres of Familiar by Danai Gurira and David Adjmi's The Evildoers and Marie Antoinette. Her Off-Broadway credits include The Oldest Boy by Sarah Ruhl (Lincoln Center Theater); The Luck of the Irish (LCT3); Stage Kiss, Milk Like Sugar (Playwrights Horizons); Orlando (Classic Stage Company); Orpheus (New York City Opera); Dark Sisters (Music Theater Group, Gotham Chamber Opera); Rappaccini's Daughter (Gotham Chamber Opera); Marie Antoinette (Soho Rep); The Scene (Second Stage, Humana Festival of New Plays); and Menopausal Gentleman (Ohio Theatre). Regional credits: Sleeping Beauty Wakes, Milk Like Sugar (La Jolla Playhouse); Time and the Conways (The Old Globe); Marie Antoinette (A.R.T.); She Loves Me (Oregon Shakespeare Festival); The Winter's Tale (McCarter Theatre Center, Shakespeare Theatre Company); Cymbeline, Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare Theatre Company); Twelfth Night, Sleeping Beauty Wakes (McCarter); Dead Man's Cell Phone, The Clean House (Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company). Upcoming: Twelfth Night at The Old Globe and Familiar at Playwrights Horizons. She received her MFA from Yale School of Drama.
World Premiere
PEERLESS
By Jiehae Park
Directed by Margot Bordelon
November 27-December 19, 2015
Yale Repertory Theatre (1120 Chapel Street)
In an ordinary Midwestern high school, twin sisters M and L are competitive with every one-except each other. When the failsafe combination of perfect academics, killer extracurriculars, and calculated self-identification fails to impress The College's early-decision admissions board, they hatch a sinister Plan B to secure their future. Jiehae Park's peerless is a blisteringly funny new comedy about the unbreakable bond between sisters whose vaulting ambition will not be deferred at any cost.
Jiehae Park is a writer and actor based in New York. Her play Hannah & The Dread Gazebo won the Princess Grace Award and Leah Ryan Prize in 2013, and was on the first annual Kilroys List. Her work has been developed or presented by Playwrights Horizons, Soho Rep.'s Writer/Director Lab, Berkeley Rep's Ground Floor, The Public Theater's 2015 Emerging Writers Group, Dramatists Guild Fellowship, Ojai Playwrights Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, 52nd Street Project, 24 Hour Plays on Broadway, and the Ma-Yi Writers Lab. Residencies: MacDowell, Yaddo, and Hedgebrook. She is a proud facilitator for New York Theatre Workshop's Mind the Gap intergenerational playwriting workshop. Upcoming: readings of her plays Here We Are Here (NYTW), The Good Ones (The Public), and Hannah & The Dread Gazebo (Local Lab 2015), as well as performances with Tiny Little Band (actor, Ghost Stories). As a performer, her credits include La Jolla Playhouse, NYTW, Studio Theatre, Prelude, REDCAT. Education: BA, theater, Amherst College; MFA, acting, UCSD.
Margot Bordelon is a New York-based freelance director. Her recent projects include workshop productions of peerless by Jiehae Park for the Cherry Lane Mentor Project and Okay, Bye by Joshua Conkel for Steppenwolf Theatre Company. In New York, she's directed for Clubbed Thumb, Ars Nova, Target Margin, The Playwrights Realm, The Bushwick Starr, Theater Masters, Stella Adler Institute, and AracaWorks. Margot moved east after spending six years in Chicago working as a director, writer and performer. She is a founding member of Theatre Seven of Chicago and spent four seasons working at Lookingglass Theatre, where she served as Literary Manager and Company Dramaturg. She received her BFA in theatre from Cornish College of the Arts and her MFA from Yale School of Drama, where she directed Sagittarius Ponderosa by MJ Kaufman, Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill, and This. by Mary Laws.
World Premiere
THE MOORS
Directed by Jackson Gay
January 29-February 20, 2016
Yale Repertory Theatre (1120 Chapel Street)
The bleak moors of England. The bleakest. Two spinster sisters-one desperately unhappy, the other resolutely miserable-live with their elder brother and their mastiff in a gloomy, old mansion. When a governess is summoned to their isolated home, teeming with secrets and desires, what price might they pay for love? Inspired (perhaps) by certain 19th-century gothic romances, and the sisters who wrote them, Jen Silverman's The Moors courses with a distinctly contemporary, darkly comic sensibility.
Jen Silverman's work has been produced by The Playwrights Realm (Crane Story), Clubbed Thumb (Phoebe in Winter), and Actors Theatre of Louisville (The Roommate, Humana Festival 2015). She is an affiliated artist with New Georges, Ars Nova, The Playwrights Realm, and The Lark, and developed work with Playwrights Horizons, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Williamstown, Playpenn, the O'Neill, Seven Devils, New York Theatre Workshop, and The New Harmony Project. She's a two-time MacDowell fellow, and recipient of the Kennedy Center's Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and a New York Foundation for the Arts grant. Her play The Moors has received a Leah Ryan/ Lilly Award and an Otis Guernsey New Voices Award from the William Inge Center. The Hunters was selected for the Cherry Lane Mentor Project (mentor Lynn Nottage) and Still won the Yale Drama Series Award and was published by Yale University Press. Education: Brown University, Iowa Playwrights Workshop, The Juilliard School.
Jackson Gay's Yale Rep credits include Elevada by Sheila Callaghan (2015), These Paper Bullets! adapted by Rolin Jones (2014; Outstanding Director Award, Connecticut Critics Circle), and The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow by Rolin Jones (2004; Outstanding Production of a Play Award, Connecticut Critics Circle). Recent projects include The Insurgents by Lucy Thurber (Labyrinth Theater Company); 3C by David Adjmi (Rattlestick Playwrights Theater/piece by piece/Rising Phoenix); Kingdom City by Sheri Wilner (La Jolla Playhouse); Arlington by Victor Lodato with music by Polly Pen (San Francisco's Magic Theatre); Lucy Thurber's Where We're Born, part of the 2014 OBIE Award winning The Hilltown Plays (Rattlestick), and Scarcity (Atlantic Theater Company); Rolin Jones' s The Jammer and The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow (Atlantic Theater Company); A Little Journey (Mint Theater Company; Drama Desk nomination, Outstanding Revival of a Play). Jackson is a founding member of New Neighborhood. She is the Director of Artistic Programming for Fuller Road Artist Residency in Vermont and teaches directing at Columbia University. Originally from Sugar Land, Texas, Jackson received her BFA in acting from the University of the Arts and MFA in directing from Yale School of Drama.
CYMBELINE
Directed by Evan Yionoulis
March 25-April 16, 2016
University Theatre (222 York Street)
A faithful princess escapes house arrest in search of her young husband, a prideful commoner banished for his love. A once-beautiful kingdom is soaked in the blood of a war incited by its power-hungry queen. Treachery and betrayal loom at every turn. OBIE Award-winning Resident Director Evan Yionoulis brings Shakespeare's dizzying romance, Cymbeline, to Yale Rep for the first time.
Evan Yionoulis is a resident director at Yale Rep where her productions include Owners, Stones in His Pockets, Bossa Nova, The Master Builder, Richard II, Black Snow, The People Next Door, The King Stag, Heaven, and Galileo. New York credits include Howard Brenton's Sore Throats, Adrienne Kennedy's Ohio State Murders (Lucille Lortel Award, Best Revival) at Theatre for a New Audience; Daisy Foote's Him (Primary Stages) and Bhutan (Cherry Lane Theatre); as well as Richard Greenberg's The Violet Hour (Broadway), Everett Beekin (Lincoln Center Theater), and Three Days of Rain (Manhattan Theatre Club, OBIE Award). She directed Tom Stoppard's Hapgood starring Kate Burton at Williamstown Theatre Festival. With frequent collaborator, composer/lyricist Mike Yionoulis, she has written and directed the short film Lost and Found (Cleveland International Film Festival) and is developing the Dread Pirate Project about Identity and the Dark Web. Other credits include productions at such theatres as the Mark Taper Forum, South Coast Rep, Huntington Theatre Company, New York Shakespeare Festival, Vineyard Theatre, Second Stage, Dallas Theater Center, Actors Theatre of Louisville, and Denver Center. She has directed presentations of the documentary play Seven, which tells the stories of seven extraordinary women who work for human rights in New York, Boston, Washington, London, New Delhi, and Deauville, France. She is the recipient of a Princess Grace Foundation Fellowship and the Foundation's prestigious statuette. She is a professor in Yale School of Drama's Departments of Acting and Directing.
Please note: Cymbeline is Yale Rep's 2015-16 WILL POWER! production. The run includes 10:15AM performances April 5-7, available only to middle and high school groups.
Dianne Wiest in
HAPPY DAYS
Directed by James Bundy
April 29-May 21, 2016
Yale Repertory Theatre (1120 Chapel Street)
Two-time Academy Award winner Dianne Wiest returns to Yale Rep in Samuel Beckett's masterpiece, Happy Days, staged by Artistic Director James Bundy. With her husband increasingly out of reach and the earth itself threatening to swallow her whole, Winnie's buoyant optimism shields her from the harsh glare of the inevitable in this absurdly funny and boundlessly compassionate portrait of the human spirit.
Dianne Wiest previously appeared at Yale Rep in Hedda Gabler and A Doll House. She was most recently seen in The New Group's production of Rasheeda Speaking directed by Cynthia Nixon. Her other New York theatre credits include The Cherry Orchard (Classic Stage Company), Arthur Miller's All My Sons on Broadway, The Seagull (CSC), Third, Memory House, Salome and Oedipus with Al Pacino, The Shawl, Hunting Cockroaches, After the Fall, Beyond Therapy, and The Art of Dining. Her film credits include Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York; A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints; Hannah and Her Sisters (Academy Award); The Purple Rose of Cairo; Radio Days; September; Bullets Over Broadway (Academy Award); Parenthood (Academy Award nomination); Rabbit Hole; Footloose; Edward Scissorhands; and The Birdcage. Upcoming films include Five Nights in Maine, in which she stars opposite David Oyelowo; Sisters directed by Jason Moore and starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler; and The Humbling opposite Al Pacino, directed by Barry Levinson. She received Emmy Awards for her performances in The Road to Avonlea and the HBO series In Treatment.
James Bundy is in his 13th year as Dean of Yale School of Drama and Artistic Director of Yale Repertory Theatre. In his first 12 seasons, Yale Rep has produced more than 30 world, American, and regional premieres, eight of which have been honored by the Connecticut Critics Circle with the award for Best Production of the year and two of which have been Pulitzer Prize finalists. During this time, Yale Rep also has commissioned more than 40 artists to write new work and provided low-cost theatre tickets to thousands of middle and high school students from Greater New Haven through WILL POWER!, an educational program initiated in 2004. In addition to his work at Yale Rep, he has directed productions at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Great Lakes Theater Festival, The Acting Company, California Shakespeare Festival, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, and The Juilliard School Drama Division. A recipient of the Connecticut Critics Circle's Tom Killen Award for extraordinary contributions to Connecticut professional theatre in 2007, Mr. Bundy served from 2007-13 on the board of directors of Theatre Communications Group, the national service organization for nonprofit theatre. Previously, he worked as Associate Producing Director of The Acting Company, Managing Director of Cornerstone Theater Company, and Artistic Director of Great Lakes Theater Festival. He is a graduate of Harvard College; he trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and Yale School of Drama.
Yale Repertory Theatre, the internationally celebrated professional theatre in residence at Yale School of Drama, has championed new work since 1966, producing well over 100 premieres -- including two Pulitzer Prize winners and four other nominated finalists -- by emerging and established playwrights. Twelve Yale Rep productions have advanced to Broadway, garnering more than 40 Tony Award nominations and eight Tony Awards. Yale Rep is also the recipient of the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre.
Established in 2008, Yale's Binger Center for New Theatre has distinguished itself as one of the nation's most robust and innovative new play programs. To date, the Binger Center has supported the work of more than 40 commissioned artists and underwritten the world premieres and subsequent productions of 21 new American plays and musicals at Yale Rep and theatres across the country -- including next season's Indecent created by Paula Vogel and Rebecca Taichman, peerless by Jiehae Park, and The Moors by Jen Silverman. For more information, including a complete list of Yale Rep commissioned artists, visit yalerep.org/center.
Yale Repertory Theatre offers a variety of subscription packages, starting at less than $35 per ticket for the general public and $14 for students. Subscriptions are available online at yalerep.org, by phone at (203) 432-1234, and in person at the Yale Rep Box Office (1120 Chapel Street). Individual and group tickets for the entire season will go on sale on August 31.
Yale Repertory Theatre is supported in part by the Connecticut Office of the Arts.
Photo Credit: Walter McBride
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