In her final year at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale (then known as the Yale School of Drama), Meryl Streep ’75 M.F.A. had major roles in five of the six main stage shows at Yale Repertory Theatre.
The world premiere of “Master Harold…and the Boys,” starring Danny Glover, debuted at the theater, known as Yale Rep, in 1982, and opened in New York just five weeks after it closed in New Haven.
When word went out that Paul Giamatti ’89, ’94 M.F.A. would headline the Rep’s production of “Hamlet” in 2013, tickets for the show’s entire run sold out well before the first preview.
These are just a few of the tantalizing tidbits of theater lore sprinkled throughout “The Play’s the Thing” (Yale University Press), a new detailed history of the first 50 years of the Yale Rep by the playwright, dramaturgist, and novelist James Magruder ’88 M.F.A., ’92 D.F.A.
James Magruder
Magruder, himself a graduate of Yale’s drama school, also taught translation and adaptation at the school for more than a decade and had two of his adaptations produced at the Rep.
In the new book, Magruder dives into the theater’s history by chronicling how each of its four artistic directors to date — each of whom concurrently served as dean of the drama school — left their individual marks on its spirit, flavor, and scope.
The book is rich with photos, many of them featuring such distinguished talents as James Earl Jones, Christopher Walken, Frances McDormand, and Dianne Wiest.
“What started out as a money gig became a labor of love,” Magruder said of the eight-year project. “I felt like this was an important thing to be doing.”
Magruder sat down to talk with Yale News about recreating the details of productions gone by, a play set around and in a swimming pool, and Yale Rep’s capacity for rising to a challenge. The conversation has been condensed and edited.
One of the most notable things about the book is how you’re able to provide vivid details of productions that are long in the past. Tell me how you went about gathering those details.
Pam Jordan (Photo by Allan Havis)
James Magruder: Pam Jordan, who was the drama school librarian for 30-some years, kept scrapbooks. Anything that related to anything that happened at the drama school or the Rep, every single review, every alumnus who was appearing in New York, she would set the clippings aside and then collect them in scrapbooks. There are around 38 scrapbooks. And in those scrapbooks, I saw every Yale Daily News review, all the Yale bulletins, the reviews from all over, feature articles with the playwrights and the designers. By reading all those I was able to get a better picture of how the shows operated. And of course, I know the plays, and the ones that I didn’t know I read. I also went to the Manuscripts and Archives at the Yale library because they have audio recordings of all the shows. So that’s how I went about it.
Robert Brustein was hired in 1966 as dean of the School of Drama, as it was then known. He came in wanting to start a theater immediately, which is how the Rep was born. What was he trying to achieve?
Magruder: He believed that the best form of theater, at least for the Western world, was based on a European model of a repertory theater where a company of actors performed a series of roles throughout a season so they could stretch and grow. And the audience would become familiar with the actors. The other thing was that the repertory system allows big flops to close ahead of time or not come back, and a real hit like, say, Christopher Walken in “Caligula” in 1971, with popular and critical acclaim, they could bring back at the end of any season. So the idea is that nothing would ever permanently close.
One of the most memorable productions done on Brustein’s watch was “The Frogs,” which was staged around the pool at the Payne Whitney Gymnasium in 1974. It posed more than a few challenges. Would you describe the production?
Magruder: The premise was to put on Aristophanes’ “Frogs,” which in the original features a battle between Aeschylus and Euripides. Who is the better dramatic poet? And can we bring them back from the dead to save Athens? Burt Shevelov, who was a Yalie, had previously directed it around the pool, the same month as Pearl Harbor. Brustein invited him to do that again. In his adaptation, Shevelove substituted Bernard Shaw and Shakespeare for the Greek tragedians. And he got Stephen Sondheim to write a new score. Sondheim had just done the triple crown of “Company,” “Follies,” and “A Little Night Music,” so this was huge news.
Meryl Streep (Photo by Michael Marsland)
It was like a cast of around 80. The swim team dressed as frogs. There were cigarette fumes because everybody from Broadway smoked and they allowed them to do it, which of course was otherwise forbidden there. And then they discovered that all the chlorine gas made the paint on the sets peel. They had to redo them. Also, nobody had counted on actors emerging from the pool slipping on the tile. Carmen de Lavallade had to adjust her choreography so nobody would break a leg. And Alma Cuervo, who was in the chorus along with Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver and Christopher Duran, remembers Shevelov barking out his directorial orders through a megaphone because the acoustics, of course, were horrible. And then the New York glitterati —Leonard Bernstein and all those famous friends of Sondheim — came up to see it without having reserved seats. So there was a scramble for seats.
It was a storied production. But it’s the kind of thing that Yale Rep could do and wanted to do.
Lloyd Richards (Photo courtesy of Yale University Library)
After Brustein, Lloyd Richards came in as dean and artistic director. He was the first Black man to head a professional school at Yale. He was eager to promote the work of the emerging Black and women playwrights. In support of that goal, he devised Winterfest. What was Winterfest?
Magruder: Richards was artistic director of the O’Neill Playwriting Conference in Waterford, Connecticut, so he had access to, like, 300 scripts a year to bring to Yale. He created Winterfest as a rotating repertory of new plays featuring, for the most part, very young writers. What Lloyd extended to these playwrights was something more than a staged reading, like they would get at the O’Neill Center, but less than a full production because the budgets were small and there wasn’t enough time. The taste was kind of eclectic. There were deeply strange plays, and there were completely conventional American family drama plays. That was due to Lloyd trusting his dramatists to find the best that was out there.
Courtney B. Vance and James Earl Jones in “Fences.” (Photo © Ron Scherl, 1985)
Let’s talk about another standout production: “Pentecost,” produced under the third artistic director, Stanley Wojewodski, in 1995. What made that production such a challenge?
Magruder: David Edgar had written “Pentecost” out of the response to the falling of the Berlin Wall and the liberation of Eastern Europe. There was that great moment of triumph, and everyone was excited about democracy and then it quickly all turned. The play was especially difficult because it was a large cast, and much of the cast had to speak a foreign language, like Pashto or French or an African language with a German accent. This challenge fell very hard on Barbara Somerville, who was the speech coach. She said it was the hardest thing she ever had to do. Making language tapes for the actors to learn how to speak in all these languages and with these accents. It was the kind of challenge that Yale Rep can rise to and does again and again.
Wojewodski was responsible for launching an important initiative that continues today: the Dwight/Edgewood project for New Haven middle-schoolers.
Stan Wojewodski, Jr. and Catherine Sheehy at a Yale Repertory Theatre celebration in October 2016. (Photo © T. Charles Erickson)
Magruder: Stan had met with Willie Reale, who started New York’s 52nd Street Project, which empowers disadvantaged youth by teaching them about the magic of live theater as well as teaching them life skills. Stan brought in Willie to help replicate this success in New Haven. Now, over the course of several weeks in the spring, the project mentors eight middle-school students as they write two plays each and then workshop one of them. They work with Yale drama students, actors, directors, and dramaturgists to improve their plays. And finally, the plays are presented in the theater behind Mory’s and Toad’s Place on York Street. What has happened, especially in the last decade or so, when so many more drama students identify themselves as social justice activists, is it has become a coveted thing to get into the Dwight/Edgewood Project as a project manager. The program provides tremendous satisfaction for the middle-schoolers, their families, and the Yale students who work on it.
Another important initiative emerged under the school’s current dean, James Bundy, and that is the Binger Center for New Theater, which commissions new work.
Magruder: Binger commissions lead the field in terms of compensation. It even gives money to theaters to do a second production of something that’s premiered at Yale, and for shows that were commissioned by Binger but that Yale elected not to produce. So that’s pretty great.
Since you have attended and taught at the drama school and have experience with the Rep, is there a particular personal memory or reflection you’d like to share?
Magruder: In 2016, after I got the gig to write this book, it was the 50th anniversary of Yale Rep and they held a symposium and a party. Because I was going to be writing this book, they invited me to host a panel discussion with nine eminences, from Brustein and Carmen de Lavallade and Michael Yeargan all the way up to Bundy and Sarah Ruhl and Catherine Sheehy. So I was sitting there with, I calculate, 345 years of theatrical experience. I felt like I was in the slipstream of time. I felt very proud to have gone to the drama school, that it had been a special, important thing, and that now I would be giving back. That was a great moment.
