New Haven Students Take Eugene O'Neill to the Edge

A group of New Haven students who adapt plays by Eugene O’Neill to make them personally relevant will perform their most recent works at Yale’s Off-Broadway Theatre, 41 Broadway, on June 16-17 as part of the Arts & Ideas/New Haven Festival.

The students are members of O’Neill After School Improvisational Script-writing (OASIS), a program in which young people adapt dramas by one of America’s greatest playwrights to portray real life situations many of them grapple with today.

Working with professional New York-based actors, the youth perform their adaptations, which capitalize on the lifelong alcohol addiction and family dysfunction that marked O’Neill’s own life and that he dramatized in his most compelling plays.

On Sunday, June 16, and Monday, June 17, two programs will present the fruits of this year’s OASIS project in “The Edge,” New Haven’s new fringe festival in conjunction with Arts & Ideas/New Haven.

On Sunday, June 16, at 7:30 p.m., and Monday, June 17, at 3 p.m., the students will perform “Before and After Breakfast,” based on O’Neill’s “Before Breakfast.” The program includes the hour-long play “Before Basketball,” written by New Haven students John Whitely III and Nathaniel Morgan, as well as a performance of an excerpt from the original O’Neill play. The presentation will feature Ajua Leigh Bobo and Melissa Pitter (both 14 years old), and New York actors Howard Gardner and Eileen Little. Little will perform the selection from “Before Breakfast.”

The presentation on Monday, June 17 at 7:30 p.m., is “Tomorrow and Beyond,” a reading of “Tomorrow,” O’Neill’s only short story, and a performance of the OASIS variation, “Reality Girl,” by 13-year-old Lavisia Sam of New Haven. Her play takes teen-age pregnancy and abortion as its themes. Appearing in Monday’s program are Bobo and Yale drama student Phyllis Johnson with Howard Gardner and Brian Hickey, both from New York’s Actors Studio.

These performances are jointly sponsored by ALSO-Cornerstone and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s O’Neill at Yale Project (OAY). Now in its fifth year, OAY plans to present over several years O’Neill’s entire canon of 50 completed works in the order in which they were written.

To reach Yale’s Off-Broadway Theatre, enter through the courtyard in the back, on the walkway between Mory’s on York Street and the Yale Bookstore on Broadway. Patricia C. Willis, curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature, chairs the project.

The programs are open to the public without charge, but seat reservations are necessary. E-mail request for reservation or more information to rcallahan@alsoinc.org or call 203-787-2111.