ELECTRA AMERICA World Premiere, Newly Adapted THE SEAGULL and More Set for Yale Rep 26-27 Season
The season will also feature the world premiere of Quisqueya on the Hudson by Guadalís Del Carmen, directed by Knud Adams.
Yale Repertory Theatre has revealed its 2026-27 season. Five productions connect ancient and contemporary perspectives in the first season presided over by incoming Artistic Director Evan Yionoulis, who begins her tenure on July 1.
2026-27 kicks off with August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (October 2-24), a penetrating portrait of the pressures of racism and exploitation on Black artists , rendered in a combustible 1927 Chicago recording session of the eponymous blues legend and a band of musicians. The play returns to Yale Rep for the first time since its world premiere in 1984. Timothy Douglas (Off-Broadway: The Color Purple, Frankenstein), who directed the world premiere of Wilson’s Radio Golf at Yale Rep in 2005, returns to take on Wilson’s classic.
Nature Theater of Oklahoma founding member and two-time OBIE Award winner Anne Gridley comes to Yale Rep with the hit Soho Rep production of Watch Me Walk (November 14-December 5). Building on her decades-long legacy of bold experimental theater-making, Gridley creates a space onstage for unruly possibility, comic frankness, and taboo-breaking, wrapped in her experiences since being diagnosed with Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), a rare degenerative neurological disease which her mother and grandmother also had. Soho Rep director Eric Ting (Yale Rep: Between Two Knees), whose recent work has celebrated iconic downtown artists in Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! and Charles Ludlum’s Galas with Anthony Roth Costanzo, directs.
Kate Attwell weaves ancient drama and the violence of contemporary life in Electra America (January 14-February 6). Sivan Battat (Yale Rep: Wish You Were Here; Off-Broadway: In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot) directs this world premiere commission from Yale Rep that reconsiders Greek tragedy in the maelstrom of religious zealotry. In this season of groundbreaking new work and classics that haven’t lost their bite, Electra America is both at once.
The last time Yale Rep presented a full Chekhov production was Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of The Three Sisters in 2011, and its only previous staging of The Seagull was in 1978, in a then-new version by Jean-Claude van Itallie. The theater presents Yura Kordonsky’s new version of The Seagull (March 5-27), Chekhov’s incisive masterwork focused on the intersecting and clashing desires of artists. Kordonsky serves as both adaptor and director—as he did for his acclaimed 2025 adaptation and staging of Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector.
Concluding the season is another world premiere commission, Quisqueya on the Hudson by Guadalís Del Carmen, in a production from Knud Adams. Del Carmen made her Off-Broadway debut with the bachata-suffused Bees & Honey, about a Dominican American couple in Washington Heights. In Quisqueya on the Hudson, she again locates affecting Dominican American experiences in the fraying fabric of New York life: this time, in 1961, in the apartment of a family in San Juan Hill—the community demolished to build Lincoln Center.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
By August Wilson
Directed by Timothy Douglas
University Theatre (222 York Street)
October 2-24
Chicago, 1927. Tensions and temperatures rise over the course of a blistering recording session as the legendary “Mother of the Blues,” Ma Rainey, and her ambitious trumpeter, Levee, engage in a fiery battle of wills over control of her music exposing the emotional and economic exploitation faced by Black artists in America. An exploration of dreams deferred, cultural identity, and the power of the blues, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom returns in a brand-new production more than 40 years after it first raised the roof of the American theater in its world premiere at Yale Rep.
Watch Me Walk
Written and performed by Anne Gridley
Directed by Eric Ting
Yale Repertory Theatre (1120 Chapel Street)
November 14-December 5
Anne has a disease you’ve probably never heard of and that doesn’t have a cure. Her doctor says it shouldn’t define her, but she’s going to define it for you. Direct from a critically acclaimed Off-Broadway run, Watch Me Walk is a hilarious, biting, and compassionate new play about disability, pity, injustice, and family mythologies that will stay with you long after the curtain—or Anne—falls.
Electra America
World Premiere
By Kate Attwell
Directed by Sivan Battat
Commissioned by Yale Repertory Theatre
Yale Repertory Theatre (1120 Chapel Street)
January 14-February 6
Agamemnon is dead, and the House of Atreus is now home to three generations of women. As Clytemnestra prepares for a vow ceremony with her new Evangelical husband Aegisthus, she has her hands full with her aging mother, two grown daughters, and an infant. Electra, still grieving the loss of her father, is suspicious of her mother’s motives and will stop at nothing to halt the proceedings. Electra America is a darkly comic, propulsive, and haunting new play that reimagines the ancient Greek tragedy as an edge-of-your-seat thriller for the 21st Century.
Development and production support for Electra America provided by Yale’s Binger Center for New Theatre.
The Seagull
By Anton Chekhov
Newly adapted and directed by Yura Kordonsky
Yale Repertory Theatre (1120 Chapel Street)
March 5-27
A group of artists gathers at a lakeside community for a summer holiday. Among them, a famous actress; her lover, a celebrated novelist; and her playwright son, desperate to win her approval and the heart of a young woman who has her own sights set on the stage. Yura Kordonsky’s new adaptation of The Seagull––Anton Chekhov’s bittersweet tale of unrequited love and thwarted ambitions––explores the exquisite agony of finding your own voice, the generational tensions between tradition and innovation, and the hopelessly tangled ties that bind.
Quisqueya on the Hudson
World Premiere
By Guadalís Del Carmen
Directed by Knud Adams
Commissioned by Yale Repertory Theatre
Yale Repertory Theatre (1120 Chapel Street)
April 23-May 15
1961. The De La Cruz family’s apartment building in San Juan Hill, once the vibrant epicenter of Black and Caribbean culture in Manhattan, is set for demolition to pave the way for a brand-new performing arts complex. As Quisqueya and her WWII veteran husband Roberto struggle to find an affordable new home uptown and set up their teenage son for a successful future, a cousin fleeing political persecution in the Dominican Republic arrives on their doorstep. Pulsing with history, heartbreak, and humor, Quisqueya on the Hudson is a deeply moving portrait of a family at a crossroads.
Development and production support for Quisqueya on the Hudson provided by Yale’s Binger Center for New Theatre.
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