The Care & Keeping YOUof
Writtenby
Directedby EmilyBreeze DestyneMiller
NOVEMBER 11–15, 2024
DAVID GEFFEN SCHOOL OF DRAMA AT YALE
James Bundy, Elizabeth Parker Ware Dean Florie Seery, Associate Dean
Chantal Rodriguez, Associate Dean Carla L. Jackson, Assistant Dean Nancy Yao, Assistant Dean
Anne Erbe and Marcus Gardley, Co-Chairs, Playwriting
PRESENTS
THE LANGSTON HUGHES FESTIVAL OF NEW WORK
The Care and Keeping of You Pages 76–77
By Emily Breeze
Directed by Destyne
R. Miller
Creative Team
Production Dramaturg
Elliot Valentine
Fight and Intimacy Director
Michael Rossmy
Stage Manager
Caileigh Potter
Cast
Cassandra
Edoardo Benzoni
Claude
Hiếu Ngọc Bùi
Genevieve
Ariyan Kassam
Nicole
Grayson Richmond
Taryn
Erik Manuel Robles
Kimbo
Julia Sears
There will be a 10-minute intermission.
This production is supported by The Benjamin Mordecai III Production Fund.
Artistic
Production Stage Manager
Adam Taylor Foster
Costume Consultant
Herin Kaputkin
Assistant Stage Manager
Payton Gunner
Production
Technical Supervisor
Meredith Wilcox
Properties Manager
Shannon Dodson
Associate Safety Advisors
Steph Lo 盧胤沂 and Kay Nilest
Associate Production Manager
Bryant Heatherly
Production Crew
Tojo Rasedoara and Alex Theisen
Run Crew
Caleb Krieg and Nia Akilah Robinson
Administration
Associate Managing Director
Jeremy Landes
Assistant Managing Director
Mithra Seyedi
Management Assistant
Alesandra Reto Lopez
House Manager
Maura Bozeman
Production Photographer
Maza Rey
David Geffen School of Drama productions are supported by the work of more than 200 faculty and staff members throughout the year.
Yale acknowledges that indigenous peoples and nations, including Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian speaking peoples, have stewarded through generations the lands and waterways of what is now the state of Connecticut. We honor and respect the enduring relationship that exists between these peoples and nations and this land.
We also acknowledge the legacy of slavery in our region and the enslaved African people whose labor was exploited for generations to help establish the business of Yale University as well as the economy of Connecticut and the United States.
The Studio Projects are designed to be learning experiences that complement classroom work, providing a medium for students at David Geffen School of Drama at Yale to combine their individual talents and energies toward the staging of collaboratively created works. Your attendance meaningfully completes this process.
THE BENJAMIN MORDECAI III
PRODUCTION FUND , established by a graduate of the School, honors the memory of the Tony Award-winning producer who served as Managing Director of Yale Repertory Theatre, 1982–1993, and as Associate Dean and Chair of the Theater Management Program from 1993 until his death in 2005.
Special Thanks
Kelsey Carthew, Sara Culver, Directing ‘26 Cohort (Jasmine & Andreas), Lana Gaige, Becky Ho, Elizabeth Nearing, Violeta Picayo, Bobbin Ramsey, Brent L. Smith, Danielle Skraastad, Elyse Steingold, Arielle Yoder.
The Nature of Camp
“‘Ideal girls’ camp, high in the mountains, in a pine forest on a beautiful lake. July 1 to Sept. 1.”
So reads the June 1917 edition of The New York Times, advertising Camp Farwell, the first summer sleepaway camp for girls. With the conception of adolescence as a life stage arose the earliest complaints against it—with these children’s preoccupations with theaters, novels, and useless fads, the preteens and teens of the early twentieth century were too antisocial and materialistic.
The solution to this was camp.
“The only real trouble with Jane is that she had been turned away from the Girl Scouts,” a 1920 article from The New York Times insisted. “There her idleness would be filled, her solitude banished. Instead of the trumped-up adventure on the screen…Jane would herself go on hikes, learn camping, swimming, woodcraft.” Camp was a place where girls could work with their hands, socialize with others, and connect with a bygone pioneer womanhood of white American myth. Summer camps idealize nature—not just the wilderness, but the true nature lying at the core of every child, unfettered by commodity culture, the un-material girl. The Care and Keeping of You Pages 76-77 explores what happens when a third kind of “nature” is added to the equation: the nature of changing preteen bodies, in all their messy guts and glory.
Puberty strikes around the preteen years, marked by intense physical and emotional changes that anneal a child’s body, mind, and heart into adulthood in endlessly mortifying ways. To make
For those curious about the play’s title, take a look at the book in the lobby.
matters worse, adolescence is a crucial time for identity development, when teens begin to understand their own autonomy and try to sculpt the adult they are becoming. A preteen’s identity is constantly elusive, being shaped by social interactions and the culture around them at every moment. The Care and Keeping of You Pages 76–77 captures the horror of trying to discover who you are while your insides are tearing themselves apart.
Although millions of preteens and teenagers contend with this horror, their frustrations are often dismissed. Women’s opinions about their own bodies are also frequently delegitimized in the eyes of the U.S. government, compounding the stress for girls. Around the U.S., they are denied health education, bodily and reproductive autonomy, and even essential menstruation products. Over the 20th century, 70,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized, mostly Black women, Indigenous women, and disabled women. In the past year, two-thirds of women living below the poverty line in the U.S. reported difficulty in affording essential menstrual products. Today, at least twenty-one states have bans and restrictions on abortion, at least twentysix states restrict access to gender-affirming care, and eight states have begun attacking contraceptive access.
In a world like this, the changes puberty brings can feel both ubiquitous and isolating, exhilarating and terrifying. Despite how much time has passed since our adolescence and despite our distance from or closeness to girlhood, this much remains the same.
—Elliot Valentine, Production Dramaturg
For more ways to support, visit the Center for Reproductive Rights (reproductiverights.org, globally campaigning for reproductive rights) or the Pad Project (thepadproject.org, providing menstrual products to communities in need.)