Annual Magazine of Yale School of Drama Fall 2007
Yale school of Drama
Erasing the Line Between Student and Professional balancing act: kate burton’s Harmonious Double Life
YSD Salutes Wesley Fata Remembering Richard Gilman and George C. Izenour
Dear Friends, Seeing this magazine take shape each year is one of the serial pleasures of our work at the School of Drama and Yale Rep, a rite of summer that complements the ritual of Commencement. As sixty gifted young artists emerge from their formal training, we can both look back on their accomplishments, and cast an admiring eye out to the work and experience of generations of artists who have gone before them. It has been many decades since the work of the School stopped in summer—the relative quiet of the classrooms and rehearsal halls is balanced by the hum of preparations for the next year, and by the reverberations of the work our students and graduates are doing around the world. Current students are at work as close as the Summer Cabaret on Park Street, and as far away as China. Recent graduates have joined the staff of the School and of Yale Rep, and are pursuing opportunities from the Delacorte and Williamstown to the Middle East. And our alumni, as you will read here, have spent the past year working on an array of projects, professional and personal, that is dizzying in its creative and geographic scope. This is transformational energy at work—the demonstrated imaginative capacity of our graduates and their colleagues to respond to their changing world, from the accelerating forces of globalism and technology to the divergent behaviors and tastes of new generations of audiences. As one wise alumnus said to me recently, “In this business, you have to be able to reinvent yourself.” Reinvention is evident in the celebratory collaborations of students at the School, and in their ability to have immediate professional impact on the field—while they’re still in training, no less! At the same time, countless alumni are reinventing themselves: forging new paths in artistry and management, finding new opportunities, and adapting to new challenges. Alumni work embraces commercial and non-profit theatre, film, television, interactive media, and many other fields; and whether alumni work individually or institutionally, they are often defining new kinds of collaborative relationships for themselves and their professions. And so, one of the consistent delights of my work is to meet alumni who find themselves thriving in new roles: as writers, actors, activists, directors, producers, trustees and educators. You are all inspiring reminders to me: of the extraordinary potential of our alumni to create original art, of your unique role in enhancing the scope and quality of artistry wherever you live and work, and of the School’s vital responsibility to prepare students in all disciplines for a lifetime of reinvention. That is what we attended to this summer—preparing the School to reinvent itself for the Class of 2010 by taking stock of those improvements we can make in our program that best serve our students, our faculty and our field. Many of you have been instrumental in this effort through your advice, advocacy, contributions of time and money, and moral support. All of us here thank you for your participation in our ongoing project, and we wish you the greatest joy in your lives and work! Sincerely,
James Bundy
Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theatre James Bundy ’95 Dean/Artistic Director Victoria Nolan Deputy Dean/Managing Director
Yale School of Drama Leadership Council Neil A. Mazzella ’78, Council Chair Amy Aquino ’86 John Badham ’63, ’61 yc John Lee Beatty ’73 John Beinecke ’69 yc Kate Burton ’82 Patricia Clarkson ’85 Tony Converse ’57 yc Sue Ann Gilfillan Converse ’55 Peggy Cowles ’65 Trip Cullman ’02, ’97 yc Scott Delman ’82 yc Michael Diamond ’90 Polly Draper ’80, ’77 yc Charles S. Dutton ’83 Sasha Emerson ’84 Heidi Ettinger ’76 Marc Flanagan ’70 Donald P. Granger, Jr. ’85 yc David Marshall Grant ’78 Ruth Hendel Asaad Kelada ’64 Mark Linn-Baker ’79, ’76 yc Sarah Long ’92, ’85 yc Elizabeth Margid ’91, ’82 yc Drew McCoy David Milch ’66 yc Sheila Nevins ’63 Chris Noth ’85 Carol Ostrow ’80 Amy Povich ’92 Liev Schreiber ’92 Tony Shalhoub ’80 Michael Sheehan ’76 Edward Trach ’58 Courtney B. Vance ’86 Henry Winkler ’70
Yale School of Drama Alumni Association Asaad Kelada ’64 Co-Chair Elizabeth Margid ’91, ’82 yc Co-Chair Henry Winkler ’70, Co-Chair, Drama Alumni Fund Jane Kaczmarek ’82, Co-Chair, Drama Alumni Fund
On the Cover
Elliot Villar ’07, Brian Tyree Henry ’07 and Gilbert Owuor ’07 in the Yale School of Drama Production of The Brothers Size by Tarell Alvin McCraney ’07, directed by Tea Alagic ’07. Photo by Christian Koneko Carter.
Contents
Fall 2007
Features
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The Future Starts Now: Erasing the Line Between Student and Professional
by Mark Blankenship ’05
annual MAGAZINE YALE SCHOOL OF DRAMA Fall 2007, Vol. LII
16
Professor, Inspiration, and Friend: Honoring Richard Gilman
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by Catherine Sheehy ’92, ’99 DFA (Faculty) and Sasha Emerson ’84
18
Balancing Act: Kate Burton’s Harmonious Double Life
by Amy Boratko ’06, DFA Candidate
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20
Audrey Wood’s Legacy
by Joseph Cermatori ’08
22
So Unreal It’s Real: The Career Odyssey of Cliff Warner
by Drew Lichtenberg ’08
26
Remembering George C. Izenour
by Mark Blankenship ’05 and William Warfel ’57, ’55 yc
28 Champions Adjust:
YSD Salutes Wesley Fata
28 On York Street
2 ...... Hats Off to Dr. Julie Harris! 3 ...... Sylvia, We Wish You Well 3 ...... Yale in China 4 ...... Profile: Victoria Nolan,
Manager with Imagination 5 ...... Dwight/Edgewood Project 5 ...... Welcome Back!
by Mark Blankenship ’05
In the Wings
32 ...... Donor Profiles 34....... Graduation 2007 35 ...... Graduation Prizes,
Fellowships, and Scholarships
Around the World
37 ...... Alumni and Faculty Honors
and Awards
40 ...... Alumni Connection 42 ...... In Memoriam 44 ...... Bookshelf 46 ...... Alumni Notes and News 66 ...... Contributors
Editorial Staff Deborah S. Berman Editor Mark Blankenship ’05 Contributing Editor Debbie A. Ellinghaus Managing Editor Ann M.K. McLaughlin ’03 Managing Editor Susan Clark Development Associate Michael Barker ’09 Development Assistant Laura Torino Development Assistant Tom Everett Russell ’07 Development Assistant
Contributors Michael Barker ’09 Mark Blankenship ’05 Amy Boratko ’06 dfa Candidate Joseph Cermatori ’08 Michael Diamond ’90 Debbie A. Ellinghaus Senior Associate Director of Development and Alumni Affairs Sasha Emerson ’84 Ruth Feldman Manager of Education and Accessibility Services Miriam Felton-Dansky ’09 Jacob Gallagher-Ross ’09 David Kaplan ’79 Drew Lichtenburg ’08 Ann M.K. McLaughlin ’03 Senior Associate Director of Development, Yale Repertory Theatre Jeffrey Rogers ’07 Roberta Pereira ’08 Michael Walkup ’06 dfa Candidate
Design Jack Design, jackdesignstudio.com
On York Street
News from Yale School of Drama
Hats Off to Dr. Julie Harris!
where it goes when it goes. The source can dry up and they are dead. But Julie knows. She works with herself as a conscious artist Julie Harris ’47 has held many distinctions works with his materials. She’s the only one and accolades for her artistry, including mulof them who is sure to grow, who is sure to be tiple Emmy and Tony awards and nominaa star for the rest of her life.” tions. As of May 2007, Julie can also count Grow she did. That year, Julie performed opposite James Dean in East of Eden. She went on to perform Emily Dickinson in both the stage and television versions of The Belle of Amherst and has appeared in over ninety television shows and movies, and over thirty shows on Broadway. Her numerous accolades include three Emmy Awards and eight Emmy nominations, a 2004 National Medal of the Arts Dean James Bundy placing a doctoral hood upon Julie Harris ’47 at her and the 2005 Kennedy home in May 2007. Center Honor for exemplary lifetime achievement in the performthe distinction of receiving an honorary ing arts. The only actress to date to receive Doctorate of Fine Arts from Yale University. ten Tony Award nominations, winning At eighteen, Julie arrived in New Haven five times, she also was the 2002 Lifetime and studied at the School of Drama for one Achievement Tony Award recipient. year before being “discovered.” In 1945, she Julie was unable to attend the was cast in It’s a Gift on Broadway and withCommencement ceremony, and received drew from the School of Drama to take the her Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts at her role. The show didn’t last long, so she began home in April 2007. At Commencement, studying at the Actors Studio in New York Yale’s President Richard C. Levin ’74 grd said while taking small roles in Broadway shows. of Julie, “No matter what the medium, your In 1950, she found her Broadway stardom remarkable imagination, luminous complaying a twelve-year-old girl in A Member mand and generosity of spirit have won you of the Wedding, reprising the role for the film the hearts of innumerable audiences and version. In 1955, she was featured on the countless collaborators…you are America’s cover of Time magazine, with a portrait of leading lady.” Julie playing Joan of Ark in Lillian Hellman’s Ann M.K. McLaughlin ’03 adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s The Lark on Broadway. In the Time article, Joseph Anthony, who directed Julie in The Lark, said, “The most talented of our young actors are all unpredictable stuff. They don’t know where their inspiration comes from when it comes, or
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Yale Repertory Theatre 2007–2008 Season Richard II By William Shakespeare Directed by Evan Yionoulis ’85, ’82 yc September 21–October 13, 2007 Yale Repertory Theatre Trouble in Mind By Alice Childress Directed by Irene Lewis ’66 October 26–November 17, 2007 Yale Repertory Theatre Tartuffe By Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Molière Directed by Daniel Fish November 26 –December 22, 2007 Yale Repertory Theatre The Evildoers By David Adjmi Directed by Rebecca Bayla Taichman ’00 World Premiere January 18–February 9, 2008 Yale Repertory Theatre A Woman of No Importance By Oscar Wilde Directed by James Bundy ’95 March 21–April 12, 2008 Yale Repertory Theatre A Sixth Play to be Announced April 25–May 17, 2008 Yale Repertory Theatre Yale Repertory Theatre presents
World Performance Project A New Series of International Work
The Veiled Monologues Written and Directed by Adelheid Roosen October 23–27, 2007 New Theater Peru Negro January 30 and 31, 2008 University Theatre Sclavi / The Song of an Emigrant April 3–5, 2008 University Theatre
News from Yale School of Drama
Sylvia Traeger Retires On May 31st, Yale School of Drama staff, faculty and alumni gathered to wish Sylvia Traeger well as she retires from her forty-year career in arts management. Originally from West Virginia, Sylvia began working in the 1960s when regional theatre was just taking off. She was instrumental in the beginnings of Indiana Repertory Theatre, where she worked with Victoria Nolan (Deputy Dean), Ben Cameron ’81 (Faculty), and the late Benjamin Mordecai (Former Faculty). Ben Cameron noted, “Sylvia brought order to financial chaos, soothing words to the ruffled, patience to the impetuous. She became mother confessor, advocate, fan, cook, family to us all.” Sylvia’s long and storied career includes stints at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Glimmerglass Opera, and the Whole Theatre (with Olympia Dukakis), among
David Nugent ’05, Sylvia Traeger (Staff), and Marcus Gardley ’04 at Sylvia’s retirement celebration. others, ending with the last ten years at Yale Repertory Theatre working in audience services. Sylvia’s husband, Charles, is also
a member of the Yale School of Drama family, and neither missed a Yale Cabaret performance during their time in New Haven. At her retirement celebration, Dean James Bundy ’95 presented Sylvia with the official School of Drama scarf and “An Ode to Sylvia on the Occasion of Her Retirement (with Apologies to Anyone Who Cares About Poetry).” Vicki Nolan shared celebratory words as well, and presented Sylvia with a memory book of over 100 good wishes and memories from her friends and colleagues over the years. Playwrights Marcus Gardley ’04 and David Nugent ’05 joined in the merriment, each reading his contribution to Sylvia’s memory book. We wish Sylvia and Charles well as they retire to Pennsylvania, though we suspect that the theatre will see them again soon! Ann M.K. McLaughlin ’03
Yale in China Chinese President Hu Jintao spoke at length about strengthening cultural ties and educational exchange between China and the United States during his April 2006 visit to Yale University. To bolster the two countries’ relationship, he invited one hundred delegates from Yale to visit China. In May 2007, Yale University President Richard Levin led the “Yale 100” trip to mainland China. Four members of the Yale School of Drama and Yale Repertory Theatre community were included as part of the delegation: Jennifer Kiger (Associate Artistic Director), Tom Sellar ’97, ’03 DFA (Faculty, Theater magazine Editor), Shana Cooper ’08 and Roberta Pereira ’08. During the ten-day trip, the group traveled to Beijing, Xi’an, and Shanghai where they visited historical sites such as the Great Wall and the Terracotta Warriors. They also visited some of China’s premier schools, including Peking University in Beijing and Shanghai’s Fudan University. Highlights of the trip included a special visit with the Chinese Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs; a private tour of the Garden of the Palace of Established Happiness; a newly reconstructed garden within the Forbidden City in Beijing; and home visits with students in Xi’an, where delegates enjoyed home-cooked meals and got a real sense of the lives of Chinese students. The trip ended with a cruise on the Huangpu River where the delegation enjoyed beautiful views of the Shanghai skyline at night, reminisced about the trip, and attempted some karaoke. Roberta Pereira ’08
Yale School of Drama “Yale 100” delegation in Shanghai: Roberta Pereira ’08, Shana Cooper ’08, Tom Sellar ’97, ’03 DFA (Faculty), and Jennifer Kiger (Associate Artistic Director).
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On York Street Profile
Victoria Nolan, Manager with Imagination Walk into a class, office, or theatre where Victoria Nolan is working, and you will find a manager who practices what she teaches. For fourteen years, she has been not only the Managing Director of Yale Repertory Theatre and an Adjunct Professor of Theater Management, but also a living model of how evolution keeps the theatre thriving. The future has always guided her professional vision. When Stan Wojewodski, Jr. (former Dean) brought Vicki to Yale in 1993, she immediately established a class that let her impart the skills she gained from working in regional theatres. Managing the Production Process, which she continues to teach, asks Theater Management, Directing, Technical Design and Production, and Stage Management students to form a hypothetical company. The collaboration does not always end in the classroom. Vicki notes, “Several real theatre groups have emerged out of that class.” Vicki’s teaching doesn’t end in the classroom either. Theater Management students work in semester- or year-long rotations throughout many departments at the Rep, and Vicki tries to energize those positions with practical, valuable lessons. Carrie Van Hallgren ’06, Managing Director of Milwaukee Shakespeare, often calls upon her experience as the Rep’s Associate Managing Director, especially when facing challenges in her current job. She says, “Vicki was always able to navigate complicated situations and hear everyone at the table.” Students and Rep artists often note Vicki’s artist-first management style, and describe her as a collaborator in the theater’s decisionmaking processes more than simply a facilitator. In 1994 Vicki published an article in American Theatre magazine titled “What Makes a Manager?” She describes the sea change in management she witnessed during her early career, writing: “The old adage— artistic director as visionary, managing director as enabler—is no longer applicable. The managing director must have an imagination, too. I have come to believe
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Victoria Nolan that the most important aspect of successful management is in fact the manager’s ability to dream.” Tony Kushner and Maurice Sendak’s collaboration on Comedy on the Bridge and Brundibar, a 2006 co-production with Berkeley Repertory Theatre, directed by Tony Taccone, demanded managerial dreaming. “In a co-production you’re dealing with the different cultures of two theatres,” she observes. “They work best when the theatres have similar values.” Navigating their way around countless potential roadblocks— for one thing, the plays featured thirty children—Vicki and Susan Medak, Managing Director of Berkeley Rep, helped to create a production that became one of the best attended in recent Yale history. Soon after playing in New Haven, Brundibar moved to New York’s New Victory Theater, where it received two Drama Desk Nominations. Currently, Yale Rep is working to offer top-notch compensation to its artists and to commission and premiere scripts by promising new playwrights. Vicki has adapted to fulfill those commitments, prioritizing artist payroll in the budget and finding new ways to finance relationships with an ever-growing number of playwrights. On top of all this, Vicki serves as Deputy Dean of Yale School of Drama, a title she
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assumed in 2002. She values the additional connection to the School, but it raises the question: Are three full-time positions too much? “I can’t think which part of my job I’d be willing to give up,” she says. Her attitude suggests something everyone at Yale knows: Part of Vicki’s adaptability comes from her good humor. Just consider May 2006, when she attended Yale Cabaret’s Drama School Night to announce the following year’s Cabaret leadership. All around her, shots were poured, and the crowd yelled the same command to everyone who got up to speak: “Take off your shirt!” Vicki jumped to the stage, downed her liquor, pantomimed a striptease, and cheered along with the approving crowd. Her eyes glowed with the mischief of the moment, as though she were tipping all three of her hats to the School. Michael Walkup ’06 DFA Candidate
Yale School of Drama 2007–2008 Season Baal By Bertolt Brecht Directed by Snehal Desai ’08 October 29 – November 3, 2007 The Ghost Sonata By August Strindberg Directed by Shana Cooper ’08 December 13 – 14 and 18 – 19, 2007 Peer Gynt By Henrik Ibsen Directed by Mike Donahue ’08 February 4 – 9, 2008
The Carlotta Festival of New Plays New works by graduating playwrights: Lauren Feldman ’08, Dorothy Fortenberry ’08 and Jennifer Tuckett ’08 May 9 – 18, 2008
News from Yale School of Drama
Dwight/Edgewood Project For many, the months of May and June signify an opportunity to take a break from the halls of the School of Drama. For others they herald the start of, or for some a return to, something very special—spending four weeks working with a number of New Haven’s young people as part of the Dwight/ Edgewood Project (dep). Created in 1995, dep is a joint community outreach program of Yale Repertory Theatre and Yale School of Drama, and is modeled after New York City’s 52nd Street Project. Each June, dep pairs students from New Haven’s Troup Magnet Academy Middle School with Yale School of Drama students
Amanda Warren ’08 with a Dwight/Edgewood student.
who serve as mentors, directors, dramaturgs, designers, and program managers in this intensive four-week after-school playwriting program. The project culminates with ysd mentors performing original plays written by the Troup students for friends and family at New Haven’s Off Broadway Theatre. This year, work began in February, when Jeffrey Rogers ’07 and Meghan Pressman ’09 assembled the Drama School participants. This year’s team is made up of actors, playwrights, dramaturgs, and Brian Hastert ’09, Eric Gilde ’07 and Michael Bernard reading a participant’s play.
DEP pairs students from New Haven’s Troup Magnet Academy Middle School with Yale School of Drama students who serve as mentors, directors, dramaturgs, designers, and program managers in this intensive four-week after-school playwriting program. designers dedicated to working with the young Troup playwrights. dep is also fortunate to have Michael Bernard, former Associate Artistic Director of the 52nd Street Project, as part of the team. Now in his fourth dep season, Michael
joined the program during its second week, teaching the Playmaking component. At the end of week two, the campers and mentors spend an incredible weekend away at Camp Wightman, which continues to be a highlight of the program. Week three is dedicated to fashioning props out of foam core and rehearsing, and week four remains the ever-busy week of tech rehearsal. But in the end, there’s nothing more rewarding than watching the face of each playwright as his or her play comes to life. Ruth Feldman, Manager of Education and Accessibility Services
Save the Date!
Welcome Back! Debbie A. Ellinghaus, Senior Associate Director of Development and Alumni Affairs at Yale School of Drama, who spent the past two years in this capacity working for Yale Repertory Theatre, has recently returned from maternity leave (Madeline Cayla was born March 11, 2007). She looks forward to working more closely with alumni! Welcome to Ann McLaughlin ’03, Senior Associate Director of Development for Yale Repertory Theatre. Ann comes to YRT from the Huntington Theatre Company where she was a TCG New Generations Fellow and Associate General Manager. This January, she was featured as one of five up-and-
Yale School of Drama Upcoming Alumni Events
Holiday Party Yale Club of New York Monday, December 3, 2007 6:00pm
Winter Party
Debbie Ellinghaus (left) and Ann McLaughlin
Los Angeles, CA Sunday, March 9, 2008
coming theater managers by American Theatre magazine. We are delighted to welcome Ann back to Yale!
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Yale Repertory Theatre
➋
2006 –2007 Season
the Yale Rep cast including Joseph Parks ’08, began an Off-Broadway run at Second Stage Theatre in New York in May 2007. Written by Elizabeth Meriwether ’04 yc and directed by Mark Rucker ’92, The Mistakes Madeline Made is a more ironic take on youthful alienation. Edna, Meriwether’s young protagonist, works for a family so wealthy and fastidious that she spends her days packing identical snacks and handiwipes for children she never sees. Meanwhile, she is haunted by thoughts of her brother, a journalist in Iraq, and struggles to navigate a series of affairs with equally lost young men. Set in the family’s vast, antiseptic storeroom, Meriwether’s post-college, pre-adulthood world crafts a sharp and cynical picture of disaffection.
This season at Yale Repertory Theatre, directors and playwrights explored themes of alienation and estrangement, along with, paradoxically, the warmth and humor that can be found under even the harshest of circumstances. In Eurydice, playwright Sarah Ruhl carries the myth of the original star-crossed lovers into the twenty-first century. Directed by Les Waters, the heroine meets an intriguing stranger on her wedding day and tumbles down endless stairs into a brightly colored, watery underworld where stones taunt her and memories dissolve. As she longs for an Orpheus she can barely remember, she revives her relationship with her father —ultimately forcing a new, and even more painful, choice. The production, featuring
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Black Snow, Keith Reddin’s ’81 adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel, follows the efforts of a depressed Soviet novelist to penetrate the Russian theatre of Stanislavsky’s time. On the verge of hanging himself, Sergei rebounds after discovering that a producer plans to make his novel into a play. But when Sergei navigates the labyrinthine Soviet theater system—placing his play in the hands of a producer not unlike the great Stanislavsky—a comic clash of artistic egos ensues. With vibrant sets and deft acting, the play was directed by Evan Yionoulis ’85, ’82 yc (Faculty) and led by Alvin Epstein (Former Faculty), making his return to Yale Rep after twenty years away. 2007 began with another exploration of how modern women can be made to feel
➊ (Left to right) Joseph Parks ’08 as Orpheus and Maria Dizzia as Eurydice in Eurydice. Photo by Joan Marcus. ➋ Aubrey Dollar as Edna and Colleen Werthmann as her boss, Beth, in The Mistakes Madeline Made. Photo by Joan Marcus.
➌ Tamilla C. Woodard ’02 (Ludmilla), Alvin Epstein (Former Faculty) (Ivan Vasilievich) and David Lapkin (Yermolai) in Black Snow. Photo by Carol Rosegg. ➍ Nikkole Salter and Danai Gurira in In the Continuum. Photo by James Leynse. ➎ Brienin Bryant (Lulu) and John Bedford Lloyd ’82 (Dr. Ludwig Schön) in Lulu. Photo by Carol Rosegg. ➏ Paul Vincent O’Connor (Don) and Kelly
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Hutchinson (Jane) in The Unmentionables. Photo by Joan Marcus.
➏ ➍
like “others.” In the Continuum, a two-actor piece created and performed by Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter, explores the struggle of women living with HIV/AIDS both in Africa and in L.A.’s African-American community. Using interwoven monologues performed on a nearly-bare stage, the two actors create dozens of characters to tell the stories of two women whose lives become a nightmare of secrets after they’re diagnosed with HIV. Ultimately, though their communities are different, their experiences are unsettlingly similar. Formal and aesthetic alienation dominated Associate Artist Mark Lamos’ production of Lulu, an amalgamation of three “Lulu” plays written by the notorious (and frequently censored) German playwright
Frank Wedekind. Lulu is an unremitting temptress, luring every man in her path to his destruction. In the highly theatrical production, framed by a recurring cabaret act and set beneath an imposing green runway, she became both a character and a larger-than-life figment of the collective male imagination. Another kind of collective imagination turned dangerous is in Bruce Norris’ new play The Unmentionables, directed in its East Coast premiere by Anna D. Shapiro ’93. Here, American “others” impose themselves on an unnamed African country. Tensions and threats escalate when the Westerners are forced to confront issues of religion, colonialism, racism, and poverty. Employing savage humor and incisive, direct
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storytelling, Norris uses a foreign setting to do what all theatrical alienation does best: estrange well-known subjects and familiar situations, dissecting them on-stage so we can experience them anew. Miriam Felton-Dansky ’09
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Emily Dorsch ’07 and Tiffany Rachelle Stewart ’07 in The Seven Deadly Sins, directed by Joseph Cermatori ’08.
Yale Cabaret Retrospective
2006 –2007 Season
All Cabaret Photos by Erik Pearson ’09
On Friday, February 23rd, 2007, a man walked up to the Yale Cabaret box office and asked for a ticket to see The Donny Hathaway Story. Joanna Romberg ’07, the managing director, asked him how he had heard about the show. He told her that friends had just called him from inside the theatre. I doubt many theatres benefit from this kind of immediate word of mouth. The Donny Hathaway Story was the dream of Ken Robinson ’09. Just after classes started in the fall of 2006, he came to see me, as I was the Yale Cabaret’s artistic director this season. Ken told me about Donny Hathaway, the now nearly-forgotten R&B legend who committed suicide by jumping out of a high-rise window. Ken wanted to tell Donny’s story through his music, and he had already begun writing the book that would weave Donny’s songs into a narrative. As Ken elaborated on his vision for the piece, I knew we were in for something great. Ken wasn’t the only one this season who wanted to create a piece from the bottom
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Gamal Palmer ’08 in In the Cypher: Slam, directed by Patricia McGregor ’09.
up. Bryce Pinkham ’08 performed in a collaboratively-created mime piece in the spring of 2006, and I asked him to think about a similar piece for the early fall. It wasn’t long before he came to me with an idea—a clown performance that he would stage in the Yale Cabaret garden. The garden? There were rumors that shows had once been performed in the garden, but it hadn’t happened in memorable history. Where do you put a stage? How do you serve dinner? And most perplexing—what do you do if it rains? Those questions faded as Bryce’s vision of three clowns charging up and down the rusty fireescape and clamoring along the wrought-iron fence became clear. Bryce and Ken set the bar high, and plenty of others lined up for their chance at clearing it. The first-year class of theater managers staged Steve Martin’s WASP. Dustin Eshenroder ’07, a set designer, directed his own adaptation of Chikamatsu’s The Love Suicides at Sonezaki. More than half of the playwriting department performed their own personal monologues.
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Joseph Cermatori ’08, a dramaturgy student, staged Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s cabaretscale opera The Seven Deadly Sins. And of course the directors got in on the act, staging Tony Kushner’s adaptation of Corneille’s The Illusion, Mac Wellman’s Sincerity Forever, a one-hour version of Ibsen’s epic Brand, and a collaboratively-created poetry slam about skin color and racial identity. We even hosted five young New Haven playwrights and their families in a redux of the 2006 Dwight/ Edgewood Project. Taken together, a remarkable artwork emerges from this season. I like to think of the Yale Cabaret not as twenty different projects on twenty different weekends, but instead as a single dramatic effort—like a monolithic canvas on which the brushstrokes of countless artists intersect in a beautifully dysfunctional harmony. It’s the work of a collective—of a communion of souls whose voices rise up together in one glorious song. Jeffrey Rogers ’07
Joseph Parks ’07, Tom Everett Russell ’07 and Gilbert Owuor ’07 in Run, Mourner, Run, adapted and directed by Tarell Alvin McCraney ’07.
Michael Barker ’09, Aurélia Fisher ’09, Matt Moses ’09 and Kay Perdue ’09 in WASP, directed by Meghan Pressman ’09.
Eric Bryant ’09 and Joseph Gallagher ’07 in The Illusion, directed by Erik Pearson ’07.
Ashley Bryant ’08, Eddie Brown ’09 and Ken Robinson ’09 in The Donny Hathaway Story by Ken Robinson, directed by Tea Alagic ’07.
Gilbert Owuor ’07 and Katherine Owour (PhD candidate, YSM) in The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, directed by Dustin Eshenroder ’07.
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Yale School of Drama’s
2006 –2007 Season
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Playing History Yale School of Drama had history on its mind this year. In their thirdyear productions, directors and playwrights ruminated on the theatre’s ability to summon memories and interrogate historical ghosts, to tell stories both vast in scale and instantly familiar. Public jostled private on the school’s stages as civil war, revolution, and colonialism vied for space, and sometimes overlapped, with autobiography and memory play. Director Tea Alagic’s ’07 Zero Hour, a devised work that is part memoir and part social document, staged a subjective history of the Bosnian war. Alagic’s own recollections — she was exiled in Germany during the carnage — were contrasted with her mother’s, who stubbornly waited out the violence in their hometown. Culled from hours of interview transcripts, the play’s text was refined through an improvisatory rehearsal process with a group of Drama School actors. The result drew a vivid picture of lives wrecked by war and the persistence of human virtues amid destruction. Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade was a twentieth century theatrical landmark: lauded as a synthesis of Brecht and Artaud, it both showed — and aesthetically embodied — the clash between ratiocination and brute feeling that lies beneath the revolutionary impulse, whether social or artistic. In Nelson Eusebio’s ’07 production, the action of the play was transposed to the 1960s — the time of its composition and of the celebrated Peter Brook staging. A live band updated Marat/Sade’s songs into jangling rock, and concert-style lighting saturated the stage. These elements helped critique the lapsed idealism of the 1960s, while Eusebio’s mordant conclusion (the rioting asylum inmates were summarily slaughtered by a SWAT team) made a stark assertion that violence has now saturated our political outlook. The complicity between theatricality and empire also informed Jessi D. Hill’s ’07 rendering of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus. Historically, colonial powers have transformed conquered peoples into spectacles of strangeness, even as they’ve treated whole continents as empty stages for the performance of their own pageantry of power. The provocative brilliance of Venus is to re-imagine Saartjie Baartman — an African
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woman brought to Europe and displayed as the much-fetishized “Venus Hottentot” — as both a victim and accomplice of this colonialist theatre. Driven by venal desire, she is alternately an agent and an object of history. Aided by the set design of Michael Locher ’08, the audience sat on the University Theatre’s stage and was confronted by an empty auditorium. Hill implicated spectators in the Venus’ objectification, never letting us forget that history’s crimes are abetted by silent witnesses. Coming-of-age stories linked the 2007 Carlotta Festival’s two fulllength plays: in Amy Herzog’s ’07 The Wendy Play, Wendy, a playwriting teacher at a summer arts “conservatory” (its staff refuses to call it a camp), must examine her principles when she is asked to censor a raucous update of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that she writes for her students to perform. As young actors perform the travails of puberty while suffering them offstage, Wendy confronts the pragmatic pressures of the world outside the ivory tower, her involvement with one of her students, and weighing artistic freedom against human caprice. The eponymous hero of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s ’07 Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet is the eye of a gathering storm — both literal and psychic — in a housing project in Louisiana. Frightened by his desire for men and hungry for facts about his absent father, Marcus works to bring the past into accommodation with the present, and his secret self into harmony with his public face. The Festival also featured Speaking Our Mind, a special workshop presentation of autobiographical monologues by seven Yale School of Drama playwrights and one playwriting faculty member — Mattie Brickman ’09, Lauren Feldman ’08, Dorothy Fortenberry ’08, Amy Herzog ’07, Matt Moses ’09, Gonzalo Rodriguez Risco ’09, Jennifer Tuckett ’08 and John Fisher (Faculty) — that transformed raw recovered experience into delicately wrought storytelling. The ensemble — and indeed, the entire season — reminded us of the theatre’s potential as a forum for scrutinizing histories both personal and geopolitical. Jacob Gallagher-Ross ’09
➊ (Left to right) Above: Lisa Birnbaum ’07 (center) with Eric Gilde ’07 (left) and Bryce Pinkham ’08 in The Zero Hour; Erin Felgar ’07 as Tea. Photos by Joan Marcus. ➋ (Left to right, on opposite page) Joseph Parks ’08 (center) as Jean-Paul Marat with Brooke Parks ’08, Gamal Palmer ’08, Aubyn Philabaum ’08, Alex Major ’08, and Amanda Warren ’08 in Marat/Sade; Aubyn Philabaum ’08 with Joseph Parks ’08. Photos by Joan Marcus. ➌
➌ Sarita Covington ’07 (center) as Venus with (from left) Charles Semine ’07, Jamel Rodriguez ’08, Bryce Pinkham ’08, Tom Everett Russell ’07, Tiffany Rachelle Stewart ’07, Emily Dorsch ’07, Caitlin Clouthier ’08, Joseph Parks ’08, and Amanda Warren ’08 in Venus. Photo by Joan Marcus.
➍ The Wendy Play. ACES Educational
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Center for the Arts students Michelle O’Brien, Elizabeth McKnight, Isaac Shub and James Lewis with Nikki Berger ’08. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.
➎ Speaking Our Mind. Foreground: Brooke Parks ’08. Background: Amanda Spooner ’09, Brian Hastert ’09, Lauren Coppola ’07 YC, Luke Robertson ’09 and Alex Knox ’09. Photo by Joan Marcus.
➏ Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet. Nondumiso Tembe ’09, Ashley Bryant ’08 and Gamal Palmer ’08. Photo by Joan Marcus.
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The Future Starts Now: Erasing the Line Between Student Professional
Gilbert Owuor ’07 in The Brothers Size. Photo by Christian Koneko Carter.
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By Mark Blankenship ’05 Where does the student end and the professional begin? That’s a question everyone enrolled at Yale School of Drama must eventually ask, since the School’s stated purpose is to train future leaders in every theatrical field. From the first day of class, there’s an awareness that the School of Drama is less a final destination than a push into a new artistic life. Being a student on York Street means perpetually blending learning with some type of doing. That preparation can be daunting. Along with classwork and the endless stream of school-related productions, the School of Drama dangles the constant allure of working outside its walls. After all, there are always seasoned pros roaming the halls with tales of their latest projects, and many students have preexisting careers to invigorate with what they’re learning. So how do you thrive at Yale School of Drama while nurturing the career it’s preparing you for? For some, the answer is obvious: hurl yourself into the School and emerge with the experience to start working.
been, he or she can just say “The Annex.” Cleverness like that is an invaluable asset in the theatre. A section of the YSD website on student productions cites Gordon Carver ’06 for founding the company Spankin’ Yanks in 2004. The troupe — made almost entirely of Yale School of Drama alumni — has taken two shows by Drama School playwrights to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and their 2004 production of The Jammer by Rolin Jones ’04 was given a prestigious Fringe First Award. Carver’s classmate Yana Ross ’06 also spent part of her Yale years directing, translating, and producing shows in Europe. And then there’s The Brothers Size, which has involved a cadre of Yale School of Drama students in professional work that has achieved national scope. The project began in fall 2005 with the in-school workshop of The Brothers Size, a lyrical play by Tarell Alvin McCraney ’07 about the limits of brotherly love. Management student Stephanie Ybarra ’08 was moved by what she saw. “It was the first time I’d walked out of a Drama School production and thought, ‘Oh my God, this is the magic of this place,’” she says. Her classmate David Roberts ’08 agreed, and as they left the theatre, they made one of those familiar agreements to keep the script in their thoughts. But their promise wasn’t idle. Soon enough, they were in talks with McCraney and Tea Alagic ’07, who had directed the workshop, about launching the play’s professional life. After drafting the original student actors and designers — and receiving faculty blessing — Ybarra and Roberts convinced Malcolm Darrell ’07 to become the third producer in Bulldog Independent Group, a coalition created specifically to promote The Brothers Size. The group was remarkably successful. A 2006 industry showcase led to interest from New York’s Foundry Theatre. After that, Bulldog Independent Group stepped back, and in early 2007 the Foundry took the production—including the original Yale School of Drama creative team—to The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival. Beneath the Foundry’s banner, the show is slated to appear at Washington, D.C.’s Studio Theatre in January 2008. The consensus among the students involved is that, although it was incredibly time consuming, making the
Being a student on York Street means “ perpetually blending learning
with some type of doing.”
For others, though, contentment at the School of Drama means learning how to balance academic and professional life. The methods the students devise are often harbingers of how they’ll approach their careers. Consider the seven current design students who opened The Annex. Housed on Audubon Street in New Haven, it’s a consignment shop for clothes, jewelry, and artwork created by the designers and their classmates. Between set model building and late nights in the costume shop, these Drama students are experimenting with a group method of entrepreneurship that will likely help them as they hustle through the collaborative world of design. Shrewdly, the students have named their business after the campus building where many design classes are held and where most design students have their studio space. That way, if a faculty member asks where a designer has
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The Producing Team: producer David Roberts ’08, playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney ’07, director Tea Alagic ’07, producer Stephanie Ybarra ’08 and producer Malcolm Darrell ’07. Photo by Christopher Grant ’08.
“ Value is so important.
If we don’t think we’re worth something, we open ourselves to abuse.
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”
professional leap with The Brothers Size was worthwhile. Ybarra says, “The experience was as valuable as my entire education up to that point. It taught me so much, not only about producing, but also about who I want to be as a producer.” Roberts says leaving the School of Drama environment was crucial to his development. “It’s a professional school, and I believe if the school wants to train professionals, it has to let them go out and experiment,” he explains. Because everyone’s time was hindered by school obligations, The Brothers Size team was incredibly dependent on collaboration. At the industry showcase, for instance, Darrell threw off his producer’s hat and played percussion. McCraney played an integral role in wooing potential funders, and the actors—Brian Tyree Henry, Gilbert Owuor, and Elliot Villar, all class of 2007—delivered hundreds of fliers about the early performances. “Eventually,” Roberts says, “our combined effort made us realize it should be more than ‘Hey, let’s go out and shop this show.’ We wanted to showcase the entire company.” While no one suggests this was the first group of artists to collaborate, Darrell hopes the particular intensity and openness of The Brothers Size project can inform his entire career. He explains, “When it comes down to it, we’re all artists, and we can fill in gaps. We get so caught up in the rigmarole of ‘I’ve got to get these contracts’ or ‘I’ve got to finish this play’ that we don’t understand each other’s worlds, but projects benefit from a close collaboration that blurs lines. I know I’m being optimistic, but I feel like I have to demand that level of collaboration now.” McCraney, who sat across the table from Darrell during our interview, agrees. “The model of collaboration we used on Size, and the collaboration skills learned here (at Yale), they have to be maintained. For me, it’s about selecting directors and producers and theatres who are going to understand that.” He’s certainly had the chance to test his theories about making theater. McCraney’s numerous recent awards and productions include the world premiere of In the Red and Brown Water, a drama playing next season at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, where he won the Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Competition. Working with two other playwrights, he’s also created The Breach, a Katrina-inspired piece that will premiere in fall 2007 at New Orleans’ Southern Rep before moving to Seattle Repertory Theatre. Plus,
Opening Night of The Brothers Size at the Public Theater. (Back row, from left to right) Sarah Hodges ’08 (Stage Manager), David Roberts ’08 (Producer), Burke Brown ’07 (Lighting Design), Anne Erbe (Producer, Foundry Theatre), Gilbert Owuor ’07 (Ogun Size), Malcolm Darrell ’07 (Producer), Tarell Alvin McCraney ’07 (Playwright), Elliot Villar ’07 (Elegba), Stephanie Ybarra ’08 (Producer); (Front row, from left to right) Brian Henry ’07 (Oshoosi Size), Tea Alagic ’07 (Director).
in July 2007 he collaborated with Tony-nominated director Michael Mayer at Utah’s Sundance Institute Theatre Lab on Wig Out, an exploration of urban drag culture. Meanwhile, New Jersey’s McCarter Theatre staged a reading of The Brothers Size last February. Throughout this career explosion, McCraney says he has clung to the ethos he developed while working with his classmates. Along with across-the-board collaboration, a cornerstone of this philosophy is making sure no one works for free. Everyone who participated in that industry showcase, for instance, got a check. Darrell explains, “Value is so important. If we don’t think we’re worth something, we open ourselves to abuse.” McCraney adds, “None of us are shying away from the fact that we live in a commercial world. None of us are money grubbing, but we all need to eat. Nobody carries that false, mythic notion that starving is a great way to pursue your art.” “In no way is the battle over,” he continues, “and I’m still waiting to get paid for a few things. We know these things we want are going to come at a cost, but we’re ready to pay.” Y Mark Blankenship ’05, Contributing Editor, is a freelance theatre critic and arts writer based in New York City. He regularly contributes to Variety, and his work has recently appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice, and American Theatre. Mark’s pop music blog, “I Totally Hear That,” has been featured in The Los Angeles Times and is accessible through his website at www.markgblankenship.com.
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Honoring Richard Gilman
Professor, Inspiration... With Groucho, he made no attempt at imitation (as he occasionally did with W.C. Fields, Jimmy Durante or even Sesame Street’s Grover). He simply gave himself over to gleeful admiration, smoothed the hair across his forehead, and quoted: “Outside of a dog, a book is a boy’s best friend. Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read.” That was one of his favorites—not just for its deft reversal from the figurative to the literal, but because it expressed, from homey beginning to ridiculous end, a signature truth for him. Throughout his life, Dick Gilman (Former Faculty) loved books. They fired his 12-cylinder imagination as a boy, as he devoured adventures like Over the Rockies with the Air Mail. They consoled him as a young man keeping his head down in the Pacific theatre of World War II, where Proust was the companion of his shellhole. They moved him in strange, even miraculous, ways as he tells the story in his memoir, Faith, Sex, Mystery, of being drawn physically toward a quaint and curious volume of 14th-century practice precipitating his conversion to Catholicism. But this bibliophily didn’t define Dick entirely. His passions resisted binary allocation to either the worldly or the intellectual. Membranes separating these two were, if not nonexistent, then extremely permeable for him. The arc of a Phil Simms pass and a Susan Sontag essay both hit him where he lived. He sought continually to obliterate the disconnect between idea and sensation, as he did that between form and content. Imagine his delight then when, by a rather circuitous route, he discovered drama. His whole being was in sympathy with the very nature of this genre, for here were ideas embodied. The pairing was so natural, so logical; it was the perfect battery—my metaphor, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, is taken from baseball. He admired some of the received masters—Ibsen, Strindberg, Brecht, Beckett, and most of all
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When in agony at the theatre, don’t leave. It’s dark and cozy. Just take a nice nap. 16
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Chekhov—as many before him had, but he also championed lesser known (particularly in this country) writers like Buechner, Hebbel, Mueller, Handke. He saw in all of these artists, insisted for them, what few others had: the gift of anachronism, their out-of-timeness. They did not just evolve in accordance with what he called “the presumed laws of cultural development.” These writers were unprecedented, became precedent themselves by virtue of their Kierkegaardian leaps into the unknown. Such acts of artistic courage, more than a knee-jerk fascination with the “new,” drew Dick Gilman’s admiration above all else. Until 1967, this admiration announced itself primarily in print; then Robert Brustein ’51 ’66 mah, then Dean of the Drama School, called his friend Dick Gilman to Yale, where admiration crystallized into curriculum. If that sounds idiosyncratic, it was. But during Dick’s tenure at the Drama School impassioned idiosyncrasy was never to be despised. When he coaxed Gordon Rogoff (Faculty) to return to Yale, his invitation was, “Teach what you want!” Inevitably he shaped the dramaturgy and playwriting programs that way, by teaching what he wanted and inviting his department-mates to do the same. Of course, it helped enormously that he had such a fine ear and talented circle of colleagues. Dick taught dramatic literature seminars by guiding students through his great favorites, while smoking little cigarillos, changing from one pair of glasses to another, and flipping through yellowing index cards full of typed and scribbled insight all at the same time. With the smokes and glasses a constant, he set aside the index cards to teach playwriting and criticism workshops by leading students through his experience of their work in tremendous detail. As all of us who reencountered our own writing under his scrutiny know, such sessions were frequently bruising in the moment, but for nearly all of us it forever changed our work for the better. The value he placed on daring honesty—or was it honest daring?—is what made Dick Gilman such an influential teacher of writers, and makes his loss so great to the School of Drama. We acknowledge with sadness that current and future students can know him only in his extraordinary writing and our (mostly) true anecdotes. As Robert Brustein said, “Student writers would arrive at Yale as conventional realists, reliving their family conflicts in imitation of Miller, Williams, and Inge, and leave three years later as fabulists, absurdists, and surrealists…” For more than three decades at Yale School of Drama, Dick Gilman exhorted his students to find their own voices, to take their own leaps, to make drama, and make it “matter...as a source of consciousness.” His students (several of us now teaching here in the department he shaped) can honor his memory best in accepting his exhortation as our responsibility. Y Catherine Sheehy ’92, ’99 DFA (Faculty) is Department Chair of Dramaturgy at Yale School of Drama, and Resident Dramaturg of Yale Repertory Theatre.
...and Friend My first memory of Dick Gilman is from 1981. I was a senior at Brown and had driven down from Providence for my Dramaturgy program interview. I was what they call a “slip of a girl,” and I wore my hair in long braided plaits wrapped around my head like an Ivy League Heidi. I was twenty. I was Shakespeare obsessed. Beyond that, I had little idea what my future as a dramaturg might hold. I arrived and met the faculty: Dick, Stanley Kauffmann, Michael Cadden, and Joel Schechter. All were smiling, albeit somewhat demonically. Near the end of the interview, Stanley asked me to name my favorite playwrights … and I went blank. I paused for so long that they must have been afraid I had lost consciousness. Which indeed I had. I could not think of any writer living or dead. As the pause extended beyond space and time, I could see Dick’s eyes, twinkling behind his enormous Swifty Lazar glasses. I met his gaze and saw his lips mouth a name. Chekhov. I blurted out “Chekhov!” in a fierce tone. Dick had made my pause seem intentional and witty and secure. In class Gilman scoffed at our writing, our thoughts, and our utterly idiotic dramaturgical note taking, yet no one defended us with more love. He prodded us to be more alive to plays, writing, films, life. He made a commitment to art seem cool and unpretentious, and he did so with humor and an infectious insanity. I cannot sit in a theatre without hearing Richard Gilman’s snorting, angry sigh, and I often think of how he shifted his long, gangly legs in the dark, punctuating the drama with his unrest. Two years ago, I suffered through a terrible production of The Cherry Orchard, and I thought of the time Dick came to pick me up at my parents’ apartment to take me to the theatre. He explained to my mother, “When in agony at the theatre, don’t leave. It’s dark and cozy. Just take a nice nap.” And so I did. I now picture Dick in a place like Chekhov’s writing dacha. It is a stunning combination of spartan and luxe. There is nothing but a table, a chair, and a single bed, yet the bed is covered with a red woven tapestry. On the table is a vase filled with wildflowers and cherry blossoms, and a pair of fine boots is by the door. In a place like this, Dick can continue to dream his ideas and sigh his deep sighs. Those sighs became a symbol for scores of students like myself—a symbol that someone cared about language and artistry and us. We are all richer for it. Sasha Emerson ’84 is a freelance producer and designer based in Los Angeles, and is a member of Yale School of Drama’s Leadership Council.
t c a g n i c n a l ba kate burton’s harmonious double life
Kate Burton’s life has found a new kind of harmony. Arguably at her current professional peak, she also works closer to her loved ones than ever before. That balance is particularly remarkable, since it has emerged from circumstances that many people would expect to derail her work altogether. In 1998, for instance, two things happened to Burton that are supposed to slow an actress’ career for good. She gave birth to her second child—just think of all the time away from auditions!—but she also turned forty-one, an age when many women get hustled into roles that require fake warts and houses full of cats.
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By Amy Boratko ’06 18
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But for her, this was the start of a renaissance. At the end of the year, Burton was cast as the replacement lead in the Broadway run of Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane. By 2002, she became the third actor in history to be nominated for two Tonys in the same season. (One nod was for the title role in Hedda Gabler, and the other was for a supporting turn in The Elephant Man.) Since then she has tackled iconic heroines like The Cherry Orchard ’s Ranevskaya and originated leads in plays like Theresa Rebeck’s The Water’s Edge. Not bad for a new mother who was supposed to be past her prime. Ironically, Burton almost avoided performing altogether. At Brown University, she studied Russian and had dreams of becoming an ambassador. When she did consider acting, her father, the legendary Richard Burton, disapproved. Her calling persisted, though, and she eventually pursued the family trade at Yale School of Drama. She remembers her time in New Haven with mixed emotions. Life at Yale was tumultuous as Lloyd Richards began his tenure as dean and artistic director, and Burton seriously considered leaving the program after her first year. However, a few favorite teachers and classmates kept her there. She fondly recalls studying acting with Earle Gister (Former Faculty) and watching Frances McDormand ’82 dazzle audiences at the Cabaret. More than anything else, the rockiness of YSD prepared her for the ups and downs of life as a professional actor, particularly one who wants to have a family. Consider the unexpected upheaval of 2005: Burton’s prominence in the New York theatre world was complicated when her husband Michael Ritchie was named artistic director of the Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles. Though she followed him west, she was uncertain what awaited her there. “I am shocked to report that I love L.A.,” she reports. That is partly because she landed the recurring role of Dr. Ellis Grey on the popular ABC series “Grey’s Anatomy.” The show is not only rewarding, but it also lets Burton work in her hometown. This summer, at Williamstown Theatre Festival, she was even closer to her brood. Her co-stars in the period drama The Corn is Green were none other than her daughter Charlotte and her son Morgan. Ultimately, that production embodied Burton’s perspective on her remarkable recent success. “If you are happy in your life, you will be happy in your career,” she says, “Your family is the most important thing in your life. Nothing will amount to a hill of beans if you don’t have someone to come home to.” Y
(Above) Kate Burton as Madame Ranevskaya and Mark Blum as Gaev, in the Huntington Theatre Company’s production of The Cherry Orchard, directed by Nicholas Martin. (Opposite) Burton as Madame Ranevskaya. Photos by T. Charles Erickson.
Amy Boratko ’06 is a DFA candidate and is an Artistic Coordinator at Yale Rep.
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Audrey Wood’s Legacy By Joseph Cermatori ’08
Next year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Audrey Wood Scholarship Fund, which has helped generations of playwrights ease the financial burden of attending the School of Drama. The Fund was spearheaded by playwright, screenwriter, author, and Yale School of Drama alumnus Max Wilk ’41 in honor of Ms. Wood, who was not only literary agent to some of America’s most celebrated playwrights — Arthur Kopit, William Inge, and Tennessee Williams, to name but a few — but who also counted among her friends and business partners Elia Kazan ’33, ’59 dfa hon, Jerome Robbins, Robert Altman, James Mason, Wallace Shawn, Jessica Tandy, and Marlon Brando. Her centrality to the twentieth century theatre is most evident, however, in the Audrey Wood Scholarship Fund’s glittering and variegated list of donors, which includes Katharine Hepburn, Tommy Tune, and Sir John Gielgud, among many others: all rallied to endow the fund after Wood suffered a massive stroke on April 30th, 1981, and fell into an irreversible coma.
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At the time, Wood was without any immediate family members to carry out her wishes for end-of-life care: put into the custody of the State of Connecticut, her coma stretched on for four and a half years. Many of her friends felt powerless until Wilk approached Lloyd Richards, then Dean of the School of Drama, about starting a scholarship in Wood’s name to continue her work in assisting Yale playwrights. Within a week, Wilk had raised enough to establish the Fund, which continues to grow today, supporting playwrighting students annually. Wood’s life and career give a remarkable glimpse into almost sixty years of American theatre history. Despite strides taken by the likes of Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Rachel Crothers, Susan Glaspell, and Sophie Treadwell, she came of age in a time when the theatre was still largely a male profession. Since she was the child of Broadway producer William H. Wood, she often battled being dismissed as “her father’s daughter.” In the early 1920s, though, she began legitimizing
her own career by arranging to meet with Yale School of Drama Dean George Pierce Baker and asking for the opportunity to represent his playwriting students. Wood described the encounter in her memoir, Represented by Audrey Wood: “In retrospect, his response to my bold query — [was] truly amazing. Instead of commenting on my boldness and demanding my credentials, Baker not only said he would put me on the Drama School mailing list so I could
“She made us her family.” —Max Wilk on Audrey Wood
see which plays were being produced there, but he would also let me know whenever a new play was being done where the author had no agent. It was much more than I had ever expected. Triumphantly, I returned to New York. I had begun my career as agent for new playwrights!” Some years later, Wood met Wilk through his father, a story editor at Warner Brothers. Their relationship solidified in the 1960s, when Wood invited Wilk to join Lloyd Richards on the staff of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in Waterford, Connecticut, which she helped create with Center founder George White ’61, ’57 yc. Wilk and Wood became extremely close, eventually collaborating on Represented by Audrey Wood, published just before she fell into her coma at age 76. Recently, Wilk recalled Wood’s gentleness and soft-spoken quality, her indefatigability, and the love she gave her collaborators. “She made us her family.” Wood’s memoir ends with a handful of testimonials, collected by Wilk after her stroke, that celebrate her kindness. According to Katharine Hepburn, she “was a tireless and imaginative caretaker for her writers — a mother … . Audrey was a real agent. There haven’t been many.” Arthur Kopit writes, “She was what we knew we could always count on. She was immutable.” However, it was Wood’s thirty-one-year partnership with Tennessee Williams that has earned her the most notoriety. She discovered the young writer in 1939, his work recommended to her by her good friend Molly Day Thatcher, wife of Elia Kazan. The two shared much success until Williams began an extended breakdown that threatened his writing. Wood expressed her concern for the quality of Williams’ work,
A letter from Katharine Hepburn, one of the donors to the Audrey Wood Scholarship Fund.
prompting him to fire her in 1971 and hire a more pliable agent. (Wilk later dramatized the break-up in the play Mr. Williams and Miss Wood, which premiered at the O’Neill.) Ten years later, after Wood’s stroke, Williams recanted. In his postscript to her memoir, he writes: “Thirty-one years is a long time for any kind of relationship to last between two very complex persons such as Audrey Wood and myself. I doubt that any writer has remained with a representative any longer than that. Slowly, painfully, most deep relationships wear out. Afterward, our understanding comes back slowly, and finally no bitterness remains … . Audrey Wood’s profession is one that has never been properly appreciated. Theatrical clients are often impossible people. No one understood them better than Audrey or knew so well that understanding was so essential to their existence.” Y Joseph Cermatori ’08 is a third-year student.
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the career odyssey of Cliff Warner By Drew Lichtenberg ’08 22
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It sounds likes science fiction, but it is absolutely
Exterior perspective sketch of Ski Dubai
real: Cliff Warner ’87 makes his living by creating new worlds. As co-founder and current CEO of Thinkwell Design & Production, Cliff works with partners to design what he calls “experiential entertainments” and “immersive environments,” and his projects have been erected all over the globe. His work proves that what students train for at the School of Drama may prepare them for something wildly unexpected. Warner’s career odyssey began in 1993. Having moved to Los Angeles with the intention of becoming a film producer, he took a job as a stage manager at Universal Studios Hollywood. “There was some big film strike,” Warner recalls. “Everyone was taking steps backward in the film and television industry—so I figured I’d ride the summer out doing theme park stuff. It could be fun.” He never left. “I discovered that, wow—they really do spend money on these things. It was an opportunity to manage something that had a large budget,” he explains. That initial experience led to jobs with Disney and additional gigs at Universal. “All my theatre training fell naturally into it,” Warner says. His theme park work required a collaborative process that he continued at Thinkwell, and he credits his comfort in such situations to that hallmark Yale experience, the Drama 50s. “Luckily, we were exposed to working with the artists,” he continues, “and, really when you become a producer, your job is to know how to keep those people focused and moving forward.” Among the School of Drama alums now working at Thinkwell are Glenn Sturgis ’06 and Gene Rogers ’02, both of whom Warner praises for their ability to collaborate creatively and work on multiple projects at the same time. He notes, “We do so much stuff from the blank paper forward, and everybody on the team participates. All the Yalies at Thinkwell understand the collaborative process. It’s taught and it’s preached, and now some of us live it.” The international range of Thinkwell’s unique attractions is equaled by their outlandish appeal. For instance, Ski Dubai, a fully enclosed indoor ski mountain, replicates snowy nature in the desert. And iPort, a Singapore-based entertainment complex—still in the planning stage with film director James Cameron—will synthesize the high-end hotel and retail experience with a virtual casino. More traditional entertainments include 2003’s Temple del Fuego, a Universal Studios Spain attraction that places customers thirty feet away from jets of
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All the Yalies at Thinkwell understand the collaborative process. It’s taught and it’s preached, and now some of us live it.
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(Left to right) Temple del Fuego (Universal Studios, Spain); Yalies at Thinkwell: Gene Rogers ’02, Glenn Sturgis ’06, Tanya Loh ’00 YC, and Cliff Warner ’87; Ski Dubai.
flame in a “collapsing temple,” while 2010 will bring the massively ambitious MGM Movie Resort. In it, customers will walk down “Hollywood Way,” a boulevard of Tinseltown simulacra, or have a MasterCard “branding experience,” in which they personalize and subsequently experience their very own “priceless moments.” However disparate they are, of course, all these projects are highly theatrical. They center on a fundamental narrative and rely on an interaction between the paying customer and a responsive, artificial reality furnished by the company. They are sets made into reality, theatrical designs realized with technological aplomb and inhabited by real people instead of trained performers. “We’re still doing theatre,” Warner says, “just on a different scale. It’s still entertainment, we just happen to not use actors.” Warner, who once intended to produce large-scale films, now finds himself fulfilling largely the same function in a different genre. His projects occupy unique spaces of their own invention, halfway between reality and its artificial flipside. According to Warner, this is merely smart business. He explains, “As a company, we’ve realized that if we were just to live off the ups and downs of the theme park industry, we’d have a lot of lean years. But if we take our skills and offer them to other industries, it opens a lot more markets to us, and keeps us busy.” Of course, as they diversify their portfolios, the staff at Thinkwell also are extending theatrics beyond the stage. For their customers, what they’ve created isn’t fiction. It’s a different kind of reality. Y Drew Lichtenberg ’08 is a third-year student.
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Izenour with a model of the Loeb Drama Center interior at Harvard University that he designed.
Remembering
George Izenour He gave us the technology to lower the lights, and now we must lower them for him. On March 24, 2007, George Izenour, D.F.A., Professor Emeritus of Theater Design and Technology and Director Emeritus, Mechanical Laboratory, Yale School of Drama, passed away at age ninety-four. George was one of the modern theatre’s most influential inventors and designers, and artists across the world continue to benefit from his remarkable vision. His many inventions include the first electronic dimming system for stage lighting and an electronic winch system created to move scenery by remote control. Visitors to Harvard’s Loeb Drama Center, home of the American Repertory Theatre, can still see one of George’s most revolutionary creations: a stage that can be converted from a proscenium to a thrust in fifteen minutes. Among the hundreds of other performance spaces he conceived are the National Theatre of Greece and the Dallas Theater Center. George’s legacy has been further confirmed by his many publications, awards, and honors. Two of his three books—Theater Design and Theater Technology—remain in print, and in 2004, he won the prestigious Wally Russell Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the art of lighting. In the Yale School of Drama community, George will be remembered both for his professional achievements and his reputation as a kind and vivacious man. From 1939 to 1977, he directed the Electro-Mechanical Laboratory, a “hands-on” classroom that he created 26
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in an abandoned squash court in the School’s Annex. His work in the lab resulted in twelve patents, and it enriched hundreds of students’ lives. Robert Long ’76 remembers, “I entered the Yale Drama School with the intention of becoming a Technical Director, and I graduated three years later as a fledgling Theatre Consultant. George Izenour is responsible for leading me toward a career that I have thoroughly enjoyed for over thirty years. I took all his courses, whether they were required or not. I worked in his design laboratory and later, after graduation, in his design office. In a footnote of one of his books, Mr. Izenour credits me with being the last student to pass through his theatre engineering program. That single reference continues to hold tremendous value for me, as I recognize all the other students who came before me who, too, were so greatly affected by what this man had to say.” Recently described by Robert Brustein (Former Dean) as “a really rock-ribbed American with the best values who lived the life he wanted.” George is survived by his grandson, John Izenour, his granddaughters, Ann Kristin Stefany and Tessa Izenour, and his great-grandchildren Anya Stefany, Ella Izenour, and Steven Izenour. In a private memorial, his ashes, along with those of his wife Hildegard and his son John, were scattered at sea. Y Mark Blankenship ’05, Contributing Editor, is a freelance theatre critic and arts writer based in New York City.
I met George Izenour over the telephone, and it was anything but
Electro-Mechanical Laboratory at the Yale Drama School c. 1948. The initial 3.5-kilowatt switcher-dimmer is in the center; the traveling model of the system, at right. From Theater Technology by George Izenour. (Background) Longitudinal section of the University Theatre showing installation of the first full-scale electronic stage lighting control system. From Theater Technology by George Izenour.
pleasant! In the spring of 1955, I was a senior in Yale College and a member of the Yale Dramat. I was given the exalted position of “console operator,” running light cues on George Izenour’s first, hand-made, ten-scene electronic control system. I had never met Mr. Izenour, and I had only a vague notion of how the board did what it did, but I knew how to make it run light cues and I certainly knew Rule #1: never, ever open the board, even just to look inside. On opening night the board went berserk. Cues came up in every which order; the preset selector seemed to select things at random, and what got onto the stage was wrong every time. I thought the selector might be fixable from within, so (gasp) I opened it up. It didn’t work. I think we finished the performance running the board manually. I do know I got a headache and a really upset stomach and my wife-to-be recalls me throwing up in trash cans all the way down Chapel Street to her apartment house. The next day I received the phone call which was my first contact with George. He proceeded to chew me out for opening the board and messing with things I could not possibly understand. Hanging up, I was grateful I already had my letter of admission to the School of Drama! What is even more interesting is that our production was the last one that board would run. It was scheduled to be demolished after our graduation weekend performances and replaced. I was the last person to run it. I will never know exactly why we had to have that scene over the telephone, or what happened during the summer, but as it turned out, those were the only hard words that ever passed between us. When I returned in the fall everything had changed. I found myself welcomed into the world of the Izenour laboratory where I learned as much, if not more, than I did in any other part of my Drama School experience. I worked in the lab off and on, and during the next summer on the new patch panel and the expanded dimmer bank on the Main Stage, all under George’s direction. When I returned to Yale to teach, I called upon George often to speak to my students. I wanted them to know him and to let him throw out a challenge or two, which he loved to do. The question and answer sessions were priceless. Finally, late in my own career, I overheard someone ask him if he was still giving lectures at Yale, and he said that he was and that he would “…as long as Bill is still there.” Not bad for a friendship that started with a first-class verbal dressing down. Y
William Warfel ’57, ’55 YC is Professor Emeritus of Theatre Design at Yale School of Drama.
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By Mark Blankenship ’05
Photographs by Anita and Steve Shevett
Champions Adjust:
YSD Salutes Wesley Fata
(left to right) Wesley Fata; Frances McDormand ’82, her husband Joel Cohen, and their son Pedro; Christopher Bayes (Faculty), Annie Piper, Remy Auberjonois ’01 and Pun Bandhu ’01
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YSD 2007
If you’re saying
goodbye to Wesley Fata (Faculty), you’ve got to have pizzazz. After all, he taught for thirty-two years on the acting faculty of Yale School of Drama, where his talent and ability to inspire were matched only by his energy. His send-off needed similar fireworks, or at least an enormous sign made of light. The latter is just what he got. The party celebrating Wesley’s time at Yale was held in a spacious New York loft, and one wall sported his name in gleaming white bulbs. Much like the person it celebrated, the sign got everyone’s attention, and it made the room feel alive. Similar electricity raced through the crowd, which boasted more than three decades of acting alumni. Amid the flurry of greetings and “how have you beens,” there was talk of favorite Fata memories and a constant stream of Wesley impersonations. A highlight came when three of his former students— Malcom Gets ’92, Stephen DeRosa ’95 and Tom Beckett ’92—performed a “York Street” that had debuted at the Cabaret. In the short scene, Martha Graham, one of Wesley’s teachers and a regular reference in his class lectures, is dying. Her next-to-last
“Your work lives on in the hundreds of students you have inspired.”
—Dean James Bundy on Wesley Fata
wish is to see Mr. Fata himself, so her emissary pulls him out of class and hurries him to her feet. Her last wish? “Wesley, stop misquoting me!” Of course, the party wasn’t all jokes and champagne. Just before a DJ began blasting pop hits on the dance floor, Dean James Bundy ’95 saluted Wesley with an official tribute. He told him, “Your labor at the School of Drama has ended, but your work lives on in the hundreds of students you have inspired.” The Dean also announced that Wesley’s association with the School continues through his appointment as Professor Emeritus of Acting and that the Wesley Fata Scholarship, funded by contributions from his former Acting students and YSD faculty, will endow scholarships for Acting students in perpetuity. Visibly moved, Wesley told the crowd he was thrilled to have a legacy. “And of course you’re all inside me,” he said, “You’re all very deep inside me.” Then the dance floor filled up, with everyone lit by Wesley’s glowing name. Y
( from top) Wesley Fata; Wesley Fata and Liev Schreiber ’92; Malcolm Gets ’92, Tom Beckett ’92, Stephen DeRosa ’95 performing in the “York Street.”
If you would like to contribute to the fund for the Wesley Fata Scholarship, please contact Debbie Ellinghaus at (203) 432-4133 or debbie.ellinghaus@yale.edu.
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(left to right) Malcolm Gets ’92 and Wesley Fata; Mark Blankenship ’05, Anitha Gandhi ’05, Allen Read ’05 and Peter Kim ’04; David Marshall Grant ’78 and Richard Bey ’76
(left to right) Julie Lawrence Edsel ’93, Evan Yionoulis ’85, ’82 YC (Faculty), Wesley Fata, Joey Parsons ’99, and Drew Richardson ’93; Mark Linn-Baker ’79; Wesley Fata with his colleague Carmen de Lavallade (Former Faculty) and guests
(left to right) Elliot Villar ’07, John Turturro ’83; (Back Row) Kevin Henderson ’96, Elijah Alexander ’96, James Hallett ’95, Michael Eaddy ’96, Earl Baker ’95, Thomas McCarthy ’95 (Middle Row) Mercedes Herrero ’95, Susan Cremin ’95 (Front Row) Vicki Pesetti ’95, Sarah Rafferty ’96, Jennie Israel ’96, Clark Jackson ’97; Nicholas Pepper ’01 and Maulik Pancholy ’03
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Contributors to the Wesley Fata Scholarship Fund
4 Jane Kaczmarek ’82, Patricia Clarkson ’85, Dylan Baker ’85, Frances McDormand ’82, and John Rothman ’75
Laila Robins ’84 and Dean James Bundy ’95
Wesley Fata with his partner, Christopher Beach (to Wesley’s left), and family
Janet Allard ’97 Elijah Alexander ’96 Bruce Altman ’90 Heather Lea Anderson ’03 Sheryl Lynn Anderson ’98 Amy L. Aquino ’86 and Drew McCoy Jayne Atkinson ’85 René Augesen ’96 Regina H. Bain ’01, ’98 YC Becky and Dylan Baker ’85 Earl Baker ’95 Pun Bandhu ’01 Rick Bank Jeffrey John Barry Jr. ’05 Charles Bartlett ’90 Alec Beard ’07 Robert L. Beatty, Jr. ’91 Tom Beckett ’91 James C Bellavance ’00 Nicole Berger ’08 Richard W. Bey ’76 Lisa Birnbaum ’07 Jacob C. Blumer ’03 Anders P. Bolang ’87 Katherine R. Borowitz ’81, ’76 YC Lucia Brawley ’02 Meg Brogan ’98 Shawn Brown ’90 Ashley Bryant ’08 Erin C. Buckley ’06 James Bundy ’95 Brian Burns ’08 Kate Burton ’82 Nicholas Carriere ’08 Adrienne Carter ’99, ’96 YC Daniel Chace ’87 Esther K. Chae ’99 James Chen ’08 Jane C. Cho ’01 Patricia Clarkson ’85 Christian D. Clemenson ’84 Rafeal Clements ’95 Caitlin Clouthier ’08 Chris Henry Coffey ’99 William A. Cohen ’84 Magaly Colimon ’98 Dan R. Colman ’06 Sue Cremin ’95 Peter B. Crombie ’79 Amy Cronise-Mead ’97 Sean Cullen ’90 Gail A. Dartez ’88 Charles Andrew Davis ’76 Stephen DeRosa ’95 Thomas L. Derrah ’80 Rob Devaney ’00 Mark Henry Dold ’96 Emily Ryan Dorsch ’07 Polly Draper ’80, ’77 YC Michael Eaddy ’96 Michael A. Early ’91 Sasha Emerson ’84 Thomas M. Ericson ’91, ’85 YC Christine Estabrook ’76 Marilyn Sommer Feinstein ’83 Gregory Felden ’03 Erin Felgar ’07 Alexa Fischer ’00 Dara Fisher ’01 Bridget Flanery ’02 Joshua McNeel Foldy ’98 Mandy Fox ’96 Rodrick D. Fox ’99 Julie Ann Fulton ’84, ’81 YC Joseph T. Gallagher ’07 Anitha Gandhi ’05 Robyn D. Ganeles ’03
Laurence P. Gewirtz ’77 Jeff Ginsberg Deborah Goldberg ’90 Cordelia Gonzalez ’84 Michael Goodfriend ’96 Eric S. Gould ’98 Christopher Grant ’08 David Marshall Grant ’78 Karron Graves ’03 Dennis R. Green ’84 David Grillo ’95 and Stephanie Bast Kathryn Hahn ’01 Donald P. Harvey ’85 Mercedes Z. Herrero ’95 Donald Holder ’86 Matthew Humphreys ’03 Thomas K. Isbell ’84 Jennie E. Israel ’96 Clark Jackson ’97 Kirk Jackson ’88 David B. Jaffe ’84 Mikelle T. Johnson ’05 Nathanael J. Johnson ’03 Phyllis A. Johnson-Recoura ’04 Austin Jones ’99 Jane Kaczmarek ’82 Cindy E. Katz ’90 C. Phillips Kaufmann ’90 David C. Keith ’82 Colette Kilroy ’88 Peter Young Hoon Kim ’04 David Koppel ’98 Nina Landey ’94 James Lapine Sanaa Lathan ’95 Adrian LaTourelle ’99 Tessa LaTourelle ’98 Julie F. Lawrence-Edsell ’93 Donna L. Leavy ’80 C.S. Lee ’98 Sasha Emerson ’84 Patti Lewis ’98 Peter Gray Lewis ’87 Mitchell W. Lichtenstein ’81 Martha Gaylord Lidji ’77 Jennifer Lim ’04 Mark Linn-Baker ’79, ’76 YC Lael Ann Logan ’00 Brad Love ’07 Derek Lucci ’03 Suzanne Cryer Luke ’95, ’88 YC Alex Major ’08 Michael Manuel ’92 Roxanna A. Manuel ’93 Ken L. Marks ’84 Peter Marshall Heather Mazur ’03 Brendan McCall Thomas McCarthy ’95 Michael McCarty ’90 Brian R. McEleney ’77 Brian James McManamon ’06 Fred Melamed School of Dance David Keith Miller ’79 Sharon Aleta Mitchell ’84 Philip Moon ’87 Stephen Conrad Moore ’05 Brennan Murphy ’88 Stephanie Bridgman Nash ’88 Obi Anthony Ndefo ’97, ’94 YC Christianna I. Nelson ’05 Rebecca Nelson ’79 Martha J. New ’92 Paul Niebanck ’97 Kristine E. Nielsen ’80 Victoria Nolan and Clark Crolius Ronald Dean Nolen ’00 YSD 2007
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Jim Noonan Jr. ’06 Elizabeth L. Norment ’79 Edward O’Blenis, Jr. ’01 Quentin O’Brien ’89 Adam N. O’Byrne ’04, ’01 YC Erik Onate ’89 Carol Ostrow ’80 Gamal Palmer ’08 Maulik Pancholy ’03 Brooke Parks ’08 Joseph Parks ’08 Joey L. Parsons ’99 Nancy K. Parsons ’02 Jill Ryder Patterson ’90 Aubyn Philabaum ’08 Geoff M. Pierson ’80 Bryce Pinkham ’08 Amy Povich ’92 Ryan Quinn ’06 Sarah Rafferty ’96 Allen Eugene Read Jr. ’05 James Donald Reynolds ’04 Joe Reynolds ’97 Kevin Rich ’04 Drew E. Richardson ’93 Tijuana Ricks ’04 Laila V. Robins ’84 Heather Anne Robinson ’99 Joshua Robinson ’98 Jamel Rodriguez ’08 Michael Rogers ’98 Reg Rogers ’93 Alicia Roper ’00 Marcell F. Rosenblatt ’76 Claudia Arenas Rosenshield ’99 John M. Rothman ’75 John J.G. Rubin ’80 Tom Everett Russell ’07 Kenneth Ryan ’76 Marilyn A. Salinger ’90 Cammy Sanes ’92 Adam Saunders ’05 Gabriele Schafer-Fracaro ’84 Liev Schreiber ’92 Charles A. Semine ’07 Jeanine Serralles ’02 James Shanklin Jr. ’97 Graham Shiels ’99 Linda Maurel Sithole ’91 Pat Skipper ’83 Dana Smith-Croll ’87 Jeremy T. Smith ’76 Melissa Y. Smith ’82, ’79 YC Johnny L. Sparks ’98 Douglas Spitz ’91 Roy Bennett Steinberg ’78 Susan Elizabeth Stevens ’96 Tiffany Rachelle Stewart ’07 David L. Stocker ’87 Meryl Streep ’75, ’83 DFA HON Michael Eric Strickland ’95 Bernard J. Sundstedt ’81 Jeffrey K. Talbott ’96 Joe Tapper ’06 Ashlee A. Temple ’94 Carlos M. Tesoro ’04 Paul Charles Tigue III ’99 Stefani K. Tomczak ’04 John M. Turturro ’83 Ron Van Lieu Elliot Carmelo Villar ’07 Amanda Warren ’08 Sharon Washington ’88 Walton Wilson Bess Wohl ’02 Evan Yionoulis ’85
Contributions received from July 1, 2006 through June 30, 2007
The Art of Giving at YSD
A scene from Adam Bock’s Swimming in the Shallows, directed by Trip Cullman at 2econd Stage.
All in the Family: The Cullman Scholarship The Cullman family has a long and distinguished legacy at Yale and the Drama School has been a grateful recipient of the family’s generosity. This year, Trip Cullman ’02, ’97 yc and his father, Edgar Cullman, Jr. ’68 yc, have made a new gift to the School by endowing the Cullman Scholarship in Directing, underscoring their dedication to theatre at Yale. Edgar Cullman, Jr. has served his alma mater in countless ways, including as a member of the University Council Committee on Theater. Trip, a New York theatre director, earned critical acclaim for his 2005 productions of Adam Bock’s Swimming in the Shallows at 2econd Stage and Bert V. Royal’s Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead at the Century Center for the Performing Arts. In 2006, he directed five Off- Broadway shows, including Terrence McNally’s Some Men at 2econd Stage Theater. He has also worked with noted directors Mike Nichols and Joe Mantello. Trip, who is a member of YSD’s Leadership Council, was motivated to make this gift because of his own experience as a student at YSD. “I felt that by establishing the scholarship, I could help others have the training that I found to be absolutely necessary to my own development as an artist.” Dean James Bundy ’95 looks forward to the impact this gift will have on the future of training at the School. “We encourage artists to be bold and to create works that matter,” he said, “but embarking upon a life in the theater can be challenging. A young director who receives a Cullman Scholarship can begin his or her career without the kind of debt that dampens risk-taking. I am so grateful to the Cullman family for this extraordinary gift.”
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Weisfeld photo by Anita Shevett; Cullman photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
Trip Cullman
Helping Students Prepare A 1976 graduate of the Theater Management program at the Yale School of Drama, Michael Sheehan ’76 started his career as the general manager of Washington, D.C.’s Folger Theatre Group, and was Associate Producer by the time he left the company. With Capitol Hill a few short steps from the Folger, Michael became a sought-after communications consultant to members of the House and Senate seeking to improve their public speaking styles and enhance their media relations skills. In 1981, Michael founded Sheehan Associates, Inc., a communications training firm highly regarded for its work with CEOs, international corporate executives and most major figures and candidates in the Democratic Party, including former President Bill Clinton. A member of the School’s Leadership Council, this year Michael challenged recent graduates to participate in the Drama Alumni Fund by matching each dollar donated. And, in memory of his parents, Michael and his wife Riki established the Daniel and Helene Sheehan Scholarship for Yale School of Drama students. Michael said, “Riki and I wanted to set up this scholarship not just to perpetuate two names, that of my mom and dad, but one idea—the idea that outstanding training can prepare someone for a career no matter which unexpected turns it might take.”
A legacy of Mentoring at YSD Zelma Weisfeld ’56, Professor Emeritus of Theatre Design at the University of Michigan, has established the Zelma Weisfeld Scholarship for students at the School of Drama. A dedicated alumna, Zelma has rarely missed a YSD New York holiday party. Her enthusiasm for mentoring young artists prompted her to make this special gift. “One of the most important influences in my education has been the role of my mentors. I was very fortunate to have marvelous mentors both as an undergraduate at Temple University and at the Drama School. Paul ‘Pop’ Randall ’31, an early Drama School alumnus, guided me through my Zelma Weisfeld four years at Temple…with Pop’s recommendation, I was admitted to the costume design program at Yale, on probation! I had no idea if I would be offered a second year, but I was! I owe who I am to Yale School of Drama and to Pop Randall. Together they fostered my enduring love of theatre and the desire to pass on what I learned over the years. Now it is time to give back to the Drama School. I am very happy that I am in a position to endow this scholarship in my name.”
Michael Sheehan and Riki Sheehan
A Sentimental Payback After graduating Yale School of Drama in 1955, Jay Keene ’55 spent 40 years designing sets, costumes, and lights for nearly 300 productions for Off-Broadway, regional, academic, and summer theatres while maintaining a full-time career as a professor of theatre design at Stephens College (MO), Skidmore College (NY), and Jay Keene at Queens College (NY), from where he retired in 1992. After his retirement, Jay and his wife Rhonda, a costume designer and artist, moved from New York to Rio Rico, AZ, where they lived and worked in a home and studio they designed together. When Rhonda passed away in December, 2006, after a valiant battle with ALS, Jay decided to give a gift to Yale to honor his wife’s memory. He established the Jay and Rhonda Keene Scholarship for Costume Design and the Jay and Rhonda Keene Prize for Costume Design, which were awarded to YSD students for the first time in 2007. When asked about his inspiration for his generosity, Jay said, “…a friend once told me that the two best things he did in his life were to go to Yale and to marry his wife. I agree with that sentiment and so combined the two with the Jay and Rhonda Keene Scholarship for Costume Design and the Jay and Rhonda Keene Prize for Costume Design. I figured it was time for a payback.”
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In the Wings
Graduation 2007
Photos by Michael Barker ’09
The Theater Managers of 2007 (back to front): Joanna Romberg, Deeksha Gaur, Naomi Okuyama, Ted DeLong and Malcolm Darrell.
Ben Stark showing off the TD&P graduation caps
The 2007 Stage Management Graduates (left to right): Katrina Olsen, Nicole Rossini, Ryan Durham and Derek DiGregorio
The Acting Class of 2007
Gilbert Owuor (Acting) and Andrew Gitchel (TD&P)
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The Class of 2007
Congratulations to our newest alumni— the Class of 2007! Doctor of Fine Arts Cynthia Taylor Brizzell-Bates Claudia Wilsch Case
Master of Fine Arts/ Certificate in Drama Acting Alec Beard * Lisa Beth Birnbaum Michael Sean Braun Kristen Nora Connolly Sarita Vanessa Covington Emily Ryan Dorsch Erin Leigh Felgar Joseph T. Gallagher* Eric Richard Gilde Brian Tyree Henry William Bradford Love Gilbert Owuor Tom Everett Russell Charles A. Semine Tiffany Rachelle Stewart Elliot C. Villar Design Phillip Burke Brown Christina Lorraine Bullard Maiko Chii Dustin Owen Eshenroder Rumiko Ishii Rachel Sara Myers Deb O Thomas R. Weaver, Jr. Sound Design Amy Lauren Altadonna Greg Henry Hennigan David Andrew Thomas Directing Tea Alagic Nelson Teng Eusebio III Jessica Dawn Hill
Dramaturgy Carla Marie Mastraccio Jeffrey Ryan Harris Rogers Playwriting Amy Carol Herzog Suzanne Kim Lee Tarell Alvin McCraney Stage Management Derek Michael DiGregorio Ryan Campbell Durham Katrina Lynn Olson Nicola Lantheaume Rossini Technical Design & Production David Alexander Calica Gregg Robert Carlson Andrew J. Gitchel Joseph Philip Hamlin Kathryn Anne Cutler Krier Jonathan A. Reed Benjamin Robert Stark Katherine Gloria Tharp Theater Management Malcolm Kishner Darrell Theodore Russell DeLong Deeksha Gaur Isa Naomi Okuyama Joanna Sara Romberg Technical Internship Certificate Samantha Joanne Baker Caitlin Marie Hevner Joseph Huppert Keri Lynn Kriston *Certificate recipient
Yale School of Drama’s Class of 2007 on Beinecke Plaza
GRADUATION PRIZES Prizes are given each year to members of the graduating class as designated by the faculty.
The ASCAP Cole Porter Prize Tarell Alvin McCraney The Edward C. Cole Memorial Award Andrew J. Gitchel Jonathan A. Reed The John W. Gassner Memorial Prize Jacob Gallagher-Ross The Bert Gruver Memorial Prize Derek Michael DiGregorio The Allen M. and Hildred L. Harvey Prize Benjamin Robert Stark
The Donald and Zorka Oenslager Travel Fellowship Maiko Chii Dustin Owen Eshenroder Rumiko Ishii The Oliver Thorndike Acting Award Gilbert Owuor Elliot C. Villar The Herschel Williams Prize Michael Sean Braun
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT’S PUBLIC SERVICE FELLOWSHIPS
The Dexter Wood Luke Memorial Prize Malcolm Kishner Darrell
Fellowships awarded on a competitive basis to Yale students to provide opportunities to work on behalf of economic development, human development, and neighborhood revitalization with public sector and nonprofit organizations in the City of New Haven.
The Julian Milton Kaufman Memorial Prize Tea Alagic
Barret O’Brien ’09 (2007 – 2008) Ken Robertson ’09 (2007 – 2008)
The Morris J. Kaplan Award Theodore Russell DeLong
The Jay and Rhonda Keene Prize Deb O The Leo Lerman Graduate Fellowship in Design Christina Lorraine Bullard Rachel Sara Myers
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We apologize for last year’s omission of Tom Everett Russell ’07, one of the recipients of the 2006 Presidential Public Service Fellowship. Congratulations, Tommy!
In the Wings
2006–2007 Fellowships and Scholarships
YALE SCHOOL OF DRAMA FELLOWSHIPS AND SCHOLARSHIPS The recipients for the 2006–2007 Academic Year were:
The John Badham Scholarship Tea Alagic ’07 The Mark Bailey Scholarship Carla Mastraccio ’07 The George Pierce Baker Memorial Scholarship Joseph Cermatori ’08 Tarell McCraney ’07 The Herbert H. and Patricia M. Brodkin Scholarship Eric Gilde ’07 Gamal Palmer ’08 The Patricia M. Brodkin Memorial Scholarship Derek DiGregorio ’07 Lisa Shuster ’08 The Paul Carter Scholarship Andrew Gitchel ’07
Gilbert Owuor (Acting) and Tarell Alvin McCraney (Playwriting)
The Cheryl Crawford Scholarship Amy Herzog ’07 The Holmes Easley Scholarship Dustin Eshenroder ’07 The Eldon Elder Fellowship Deeksha Gaur ’07 Mui Chi Lai ’08 Gilbert Owuor ’07 Jennifer Tuckett ’08 The Foster Family Graduate Fellowship Michael Braun ’07 Amy Herzog ’07 The Annie G. K. Garland Memorial Scholarship Joanne McInerney ’08 The Ray Klausen Design Scholarship Lauren Rockman ’08 The Gordon F. Knight Scholarship Amy Altadonna ’07 The Lotte Lenya Scholarship Nicholas Carriere ’08 Bryce Pinkham ’08 The Lord Memorial Scholarship Joanna Romberg ’07 The Virginia Brown Martin Scholarship Brian Henry ’07
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The Stanley R. McCandless Scholarship Ji-Youn Chang ’08 Melissa Mizell ’08 Thom Weaver ’07 The Alfred L. McDougal and Nancy Lauter McDougal Scholarship Emily Dorsch ’07 Tiffany Stewart ’07 The Benjamin Mordecai Memorial Scholarship Naomi Okuyama ’07 The Kenneth D. Moxley Memorial Scholarship Nelson Eusebio III ’07 Jonathan Reed ’07 The Donald M. Oenslager Scholarship in Stage Design Rumiko Ishii ’07 The Donald and Zorka Oenslager Scholarship in Stage Design Brenda Davis ’08 Paul Gelinas ’08 Michael Locher ’08 The Eugene O’Neill Memorial Scholarship Justin Sherin ’07 The Mary Jean Parson Scholarship Jessi Hill ’07 The Richard Harrison Senie Scholarship Christina Bullard ’07 Anya Klepikov ’08 Rachel Myers ’07 Deb O ’07 The Leon Brooks Walker Scholarship Amanda Walker ’08 The Richard Ward Scholarship Malcolm Darrell ’07 The Constance Welch Memorial Scholarship Ashley Bryant ’08 Nicole Berger ’08 Brooke Parks ’08 Tom Everett Russell ’07 The Rebecca West Scholarship Sarita Covington ’07 Christopher Grant ’08 The Audrey Wood Scholarship Lauren Feldman ’08 Suzanne Kim ’07
In the News
News from Yale School of Drama
Alumni and Faculty Honors and Awards
38th Annual Joseph Jefferson Awards November 2006
64th Annual Golden Globe Awards ® January 2007
New Work
Lonnie Carter ’69
Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture— Musical or Comedy
Victory Gardens Theater Nominee, Wheatley
Meryl Streep ’75 HON Winner, The Devil Wears Prada
New Adaptation
Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series—Musical or Comedy
David Ives ’84
2006 Audio Publishers Association Audie Awards ® May 2006
58th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards ® August 2006
Frances McDormand ’82
Outstanding Leading Actor in a Comedy Series
Narrator Winner, Hidden Kitchens
Connecticut Critics Circle Awards June 2006 Outstanding Actor/Musical
Tony Shalhoub ’80 Winner, Monk
2006 Barrymore Awards October 2006
Malcolm Gets ’92 Nominee, Finian’s Rainbow
Charlotte Cushman Award for Outstanding Leading Actress in a Play
Westport Country Playhouse
Rosalyn Coleman ’90
Outstanding Set Design
Philadelphia Theatre Company Nominee, Intimate Apparel
Maurice Sendak ’97 HON and Kris Stone ’92 Nominee, Comedy on the Bridge and Brundibar Yale Repertory Theatre Outstanding Costume Design
Linda Fisher ’72 Winner, David Copperfield Westport Country Playhouse
Jane Greenwood (Faculty) Nominee, The Front Page
Chicago Shakespeare Theater Winner, A Flea in Her Ear
Tony Shalhoub ’80 Nominee, Monk
Scenic Design
Todd Rosenthal ’93 The Goodman Theatre Nominee, The Clean House
79th Annual Academy Awards ® February 2007
Lighting Design
Mark McCullough ’91
Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role
Court Theatre Nominee, Man of La Mancha
Meryl Streep ’75 HON Nominee, The Devil Wears Prada
38th Annual Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards March 2007 Lead Performance
Joel Polis ’76 Odyssey Theatre Nominee, Pound of Flesh
2006 Princess Grace Awards November 2006
Costumes, Wigs and Make-Up
Michael Braun ’07
Maggie Morgan ’92
Grace Le Vine Theater Award
2006 Ovation Awards November 2006
South Coast Repertory Nominee, Bach at Leipzig
Michael Braun ’07
13th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards ® January 2007
Long Wharf Theatre
Set Design
Outstanding Lighting Design
Geffen Playhouse Nominee, All My Sons
Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role
Costume Design
Meryl Streep ’75 HON Nominee, The Devil Wears Prada
James F. Ingalls ’76 Nominee, After the Quake Long Wharf Theatre Outstanding Sound Design
Arielle Edwards Winner, dance of the holy ghosts Yale Repertory Theatre Outstanding Ensemble
Nominee, dance of the holy ghosts Yale Repertory Theatre
Robert Blackman ’70
William Ivey Long ’75 Center Theatre Group—Ahmanson Theatre Nominee, Curtains
Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series
Catherine Zuber ’84
Nominee as a member of the cast, 24
Center Theatre Group—Mark Taper Forum Nominee, The Cherry Orchard
Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series
Jayne Atkinson ’85
Maulik Pancholy ’03 Nominee as a member of the cast, Weeds
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In the News
Awards
2007 Lucille Lortel Awards May 2007
2007 Drama Desk Awards May 2007
61st Tony Awards ® June 2007
Outstanding Musical
Outstanding Musical
Best Musical
Rachel Sheikin ’95 Nominee, Striking 12
Pun Bandhu ’01 Winner, Spring Awakening, Producer
Pun Bandhu ’01 Winner, Spring Awakening, Producer
Outstanding Revival
Outstanding Revival of a Play
Best Revival of a Play
John Guare ’63 (Faculty) Nominee, Landscape of a Body
Judith Hansen ’04 Nominee, Talk Radio, Producer
Outstanding Lead Actor
Outstanding Actor in a Play
Peter Frances James (Faculty) Winner, Stuff Happens
Liev Schreiber ’92 Nominee, Talk Radio
Outstanding Play
Outstanding Actress in a Play
A.R. Gurney ’58 Nominee, Indian Blood
Meryl Streep ’75 Nominee, Mother Courage and Her Children
Outstanding Lead Actress
Outstanding Set Design of a Play
Laila Robins ’84 Nominee, Sore Throats
Bob Crowley and Scott Pask ’97 Winner, The Coast of Utopia
Outstanding Scenic Design
Scott Pask ’97 Nominee, Blackbird
Yale Repertory Theatre Winner, Eurydice
Outstanding Set Design of a Musical
Hartford Stage Nominee, Fences
Eugene Lee ’86 Nominee, The Hairy Ape
Kris Stone ’98 Nominee, Brundibar/But the Giraffe
Outstanding Costume Design
Outstanding Costume Design
Susan Hilferty ’80 Nominee, Spring Awakening
William Ivey Long ’75 Nominee, Curtains
Outstanding Lighting Design
Santo Loquasto ’72 Nominee, Suddenly Last Summer
Outstanding Sound Design
Martin Desjardins ’94 Winner, columbinus Playwrights’ Sidewalk Inductee
Christopher Durang ’74 Edith Oliver Award for Sustained Excellence
Rick Sordelet (Faculty)
2007 OBIE Awards May 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award
Alvin Epstein (Former Faculty)
Photo by Monique Carboni
Lynne Meadow ’71 Nominee, Translations, Producer
Derek McLane ’84
Connecticut Critics Circle Awards June 2007 Outstanding Set Design
Scott Bradley ‘86
Derek McLane ’84 Winner, The Voysey Inheritance
Christopher Akerlind ’89 Nominee, KAOS
Judith Hansen ’04 Nominee, Talk Radio, Producer
Catherine Zuber ’84 Winner, The Coast of Utopia Outstanding Lighting Design
Paul Gallo ’77 Nominee, Blackbird
34th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards ® June 2007 Outstanding Drama Series – Directing Team
William Ludel ’73 Nominee, General Hopsital Outstanding Achievement in Costume Design
Katherine Roth ’93 Nominee, All My Children
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YSD 2007
Alexander Dodge ‘99 Westport Country Playhouse Nominee, Archbishop’s Ceiling Outstanding Lighting Design
Russell H. Champa
Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play
Liev Schreiber ’92 Nominee, Talk Radio Best Scenic Design of a Play
Bob Crowley and Scott Pask ’97 Winner, The Coast of Utopia Best Costume Design of a Play
Jane Greenwood (Faculty) Nominee, Heartbreak House Santo Loquasto ’72 Nominee, Inherit the Wind Catherine Zuber ’84 Winner, The Coast of Utopia Best Costume Design of a Musical
Yale Repertory Theatre Winner, Eurydice
Susan Hilferty ’80 Nominee, Spring Awakening
Mark McCullough ‘91
William Ivey Long ’75 Winner, Grey Gardens
Long Wharf Theatre Nominee, Man of La Mancha Outstanding Actress in a Play
Danai Gurira
Best Lighting Design of a Musical
Christopher Akerlind ’89 Nominee, 110 in the Shade
Yale Repertory Theatre Nominee, In the Continuum Tom Killen Memorial Award
James Bundy ‘95 Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theatre
Two productions which had their starts at Yale Repertory Theatre received national recognition this year: Radio Golf, which originally premiered at Yale Rep in 2005 received a 2007 Tony nomination for Best Play, and Brundibar/But the Giraffe (originally performed as Comedy on the Bridge and Brundibar at Yale Rep in 2006) received a Drama Desk Award nomination for Unique Theatrical Experience.
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Theater
The Veiled Monologues will come
Photo: The Veiled Monologues, Antwerp, 2006. © Inge Guffens
to Yale Repertory Theatre during the 2007 – 2008 season in conjunction with Yale’s World Performance Project.
from “World Bodies: Adelheid Roosen” and “The Veiled Monologues” by Tom Sellar ’97, ’03 dfa
“Two and a half years ago Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues toured the Netherlands,” reads the script of The Veiled Monologues (composed in 2003). “These monologues led to the idea of interviewing women with an Islamic background. The interviews were both tentative and passionate. A journey as a tourist in your own land.” In 2002 and 2003, Dutch actor and director Adelheid Roosen actually undertook this journey, traveling throughout the Netherlands with her collaborators interviewing these women, who were born in Muslim-majority countries where they spent part or all of their childhood: Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Morocco, Turkey, Mali, Iraq, and Iran. All now reside in Holland. She wove their stories, rituals, and thoughts into twelve monologues and ultimately configured the piece for four performers, themselves from Islamic backgrounds (three were born in Turkey but moved to Holland, and one is second-generation). The monologues make visible —live, in real time, in close physical proximity—women, emotions, and beliefs hidden from the non-Muslim world and which, some would argue, are often confined within Islamic culture itself. Many Westerners see only observant women who conceal or hide their bodies from public sight; they know that these women live deeply private lives at home, with little interaction with their new nations, but for them these women remain invisible, veiled in more than one sense. For anyone who has wished to have a conversation, an exchange with someone so different, The Veiled Monologues lifts this veil temporarily, as if it were a stage curtain revealing a drama never seen before, not only bringing Muslim women’s sexuality—and the pain it can cause—into public view, but making its visibility a point of happiness.
From the pages of the Summer 2007 issue of Theater magazine, published by Yale School of Drama and Duke University Press (Volume 37, Number 2)
to subscribe to Theater magazine visit www.dukeupress.edu/theater E-mail: subscriptions@dukeupress.edu Phone: 888-651-0122 (toll-free in the U.S. and Canada)
Alumni On YorkConnection Street
Holiday Party In December 2006, alumni gathered at the annual Holiday Party at the Yale Club in New York City.
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Photos by Anita and Steve Shevett
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1 Gordon Rogoff (Faculty); Catherine Sheehy ’92, ’99 DFA (Faculty); Victoria Nolan (Deputy Dean) and Magaly Colimon ’98 2 Back Row (L-R) Phyllis Johnson-Recoura ’04,
Jill Lawrence ’97, Magaly Colimon ’98, Tiffany Ellis Butts ’96, Malcolm Darrell ’07. Front Row (L-R) Jordan Mahome ’05, Leroy McClain ’04, Tijuana Ricks ’04, Stephen Moore ’05 and Candace Jackson ’00
3 Stephen Rowe ’75, Chris Rowe,
Dick D. Zigun ’78, Kristine Nielson ’80, David Kaplan ’79 and Brent Langdon
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4 Bernard Engel ’60 and Ken Costigan ’60 5 Geoffrey Johnson ’55, Edward Trach ’58 and
John Rothman ’75
6 Calvin Butts IV, Calvin Butts V and
Tiffany Ellis Butts ’96
7 Anne Himebaugh White, Frank Boros ’69 and
J. Newton White ’62
8 Jake “the Snake” Thompson (Staff) and
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Claire Shindler (Staff)
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YSD 2007
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Alumni Events
News from the Yale School of Drama
L.A. Party In March 2007, Jane Kaczmarek ’82 and Bradley Whitford once again welcomed alumni into their home for the annual Los Angeles gathering.
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Photos by Ryan Miller
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9 Jane Kaczmarek ’82, Drew McCoy, Amy Aquino ’86, and Tony Shalhoub ’80 10 Joan Van Ark ’64 and Marc Flanagan ’70 11 Darlene Kaplan ’78 YC, Sasha Emerson ’84,
Oliver Mann, and Brian Mann ’79
12 Dean James Bundy ’95 presenting Wesley Fata
(Former Faculty) with a crystal bowl engraved with “Movement Never Lies, Passion and Clarity, and Champions Adjust” in honor of Wesley’s retirement. Also featured is Wesley’s dog, Bandit.
13 Jane Kaczmarek ’82 receiving the Phyllis Warfel Award
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14 Bridget Flannery ’02, Nathanael Johnson ’03, Robyn Ganeles ’03 and Jeff Barry ’05
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The Phyllis Warfel Award for Outstanding Alumni Service The award is named for Phyllis Warfel ’55, editor of the Drama Alumni Newsletter for fifteen years. Its purpose is to “honor individuals who have contributed to the well-being of the entire Yale Drama Alumni community.” Previous recipients are: 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998
Phyllis Warfel ’55 Sally Bullock ’48 Neil Mazzella ’78 John Badham ’63 Talia Shire Schwartzmann ’69 Arthur Pepine, former Financial Aid Officer at YSD Fran Kumin ’77 Asaad Kelada ’64
1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006
Dick ’42 and Mickey ’44 Fleischer Richard Maltby ’62, YC ’59 Philip Isaacs ’53 Henry Winkler ’70 Bronislaw “Ben” Sammler ’74 Marc Flanagan ’70 Edward Trach ’58 Jane Kaczmarek ’82
YSD 2007
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In Memoriam Pearce H. Baker ’61 2.1.2007
Shirley S. Mulle ’47 1.9.2007
Robert G. Barry ’43 2.28.2006
Carrie Nye ’60 7.14.2006
Robert J. Bonini ’61 9.1.2006
W. Oren Parker ’40 1.29.2007
Thomas Leo Bottone ’58
Henry Charles Pearson ’38 12.3.2006
Patton Campbell ’52, ’50 yc 9.28.2006 Dorothy L. Chace ’64 5.11.2006 Robert M. Chace ’43 5.18.2006 Caris Corfman ’80 1.13.2007 Norman Davidson ’48 10.29.2006 Phil Dixson ’67 11.10.2006 Marsha P. Gannon ’66 1.11.2007 Richard Gilman, Professor Emeritus 10.28.2006
Helen G. Poverman ’56 12.2.2002 Howard L. Ramey ’50 12.14.2006 Thomas E. Ribbink ’51 9.24.2006 Barbara E. Richter ’60 7.25.2006 Margery C. Sayre ’40 5.8.2007 Hazel Shuster ’48 4.14.2007 Michael Shurtleff ’52 1.28.2007 Edgar Z. Steever IV ’41, ’36 yc 11.26.2006
Frances Gordon ’40 6.23.2006
James P. Struthers ’62 1.15.2004
Hugh E. Hegh ’42, ’40 yc 9.22.2000
Amy Sullivan ’90 6.10.2007
Jeffrey W. Higginbottom ’72 10.31.2006
Arnold Sundgaard ’35 10.22.2006
Lee M. Hollingsworth ’57 1.6.2007
Robert Louis Unger ’51 10.7.2006
George C. Izenour ’61 dfa hon 3.24.2007
William Walstrom ’48 1.11.2007
Franklin T. King ’71 12.13.2002
Laura Wiley ’94 6.18.2007
Dexter Lyndersay ’65 12.18.2006
Alan Wolfson ’38 12.21.2006
Ferdinand L. Manning ’51 2.21.07
Jack K. Wood ’50 2.18.2007
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YSD 2007
Caris Corfman ’80 Caris Corfman ’80 passed away at home in Rockville, Maryland on January 15, 2007, following a stroke. She was 51. Her talent as an actress and her beauty are memorable, especially her performance as Nina in Robert Brustein’s production of The Seagull at Yale Rep. Soon after graduation, she appeared on Broadway in Amadeus. In 1993, doctors diagnosed Caris with a brain tumor. An operation meant to alleviate her condition led instead to the loss of her pituitary functions. Her weight rollercoastered. She lost her shortterm memory, so much so that she forgot the death of her beloved mother. Caris moved to Maryland for rehabilitation, and eventually was able to live alone. Her father, physician Phillip A. Corfman, watched over her care. She couldn’t recall whether she’d taken her medicine, but some core part of Caris’ brain retained the words of the parts she’d played. Encouraged by Rebecca Nelson ’79 and Washingtonbased director Brad Watkins, Caris created a play for herself by combining the monologues she remembered with the story of her life. During performances, she used cue cards to help her recall what happened after her operation. Caris’ Peace premiered at Maryland’s Olney Theater. In October 2005, it played at the Flea Theatre in Manhattan with Carol Ostrow ’80 and Jim Simpson ’80 producing. The New York Times, marveling at the purity of Caris’ acting, reported her reciting her Yale audition (from thirty years before) without once glancing at her cue cards. Afterward, she couldn’t remember that any performance had happened at all. David Kaplan ’79 Since 2001, Rebecca Nelson ’79 has been working with filmmakers Gaylen Ross and Steve Skrovan, and the Human Arts Association on the documentary Caris’ Peace. The film tells the story of Caris’ struggle to return to work as an actress after her career was abruptly halted when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1993 and the journey to her one woman show, Caris’ Peace. Featured in the film are interviews with David Marshall Grant ’78, Kate Burton ’82, Joe Grifasi ’75, and Lewis Black ’77. Caris’ Peace will be released in December, 2008. In memory of Caris, her family has generously established the Caris Corfman Scholarship Fund for Yale School of Drama students who, like Caris, excel in performance. If you would like to contribute to this fund, please contact Debbie Ellinghaus at (203) 432-4133 or debbie. ellinghaus@yale.edu.
Alumni News
Carrie Nye ’60 Carrie Nye ’60 passed away in Manhattan at the age of 69. She appeared on Broadway in the 1980 revival of The Man Who Came to Dinner and the 1972 production of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, among other shows, and received a Tony nomination for Best Supporting Actress in a Musical for Half a Carrie Nye in A Streetcar Sixpence (1963). She was also a Named Desire at regular at Williamstown Theatre Cincinnati Playhouse Festival during the 1960s and 70s (1972–1973 season). and, in addition to her numerous Broadway roles, Carrie appeared in the films The Group, The Seduction of Joe Tynan, and Creep Show. In 2003, she began her role as the evil Carolyn Carruthers on “The Guiding Light.” Carrie met her husband, Dick Cavett ’58 YC, who was a Yale senior, at the Drama School. They married in 1964.
Norman Davidson ’48 Norman Davidson ’48 passed away in October 2005 in Great Neck, New York, after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 81. Norman was best known as a commercial artist and illustrator, and a pioneer in the early days of network television. Norman was a distinguished veteran of World War II, where he served as a gunnery instructor and technical director on several Army shows. After the Army, Norman went on to earn a degree in Design at Yale School of Drama. While attending Yale, Norman also worked as an actor and technical director at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village. Norman began as a scenic designer with the fledgling ABC television network. Then, for nearly forty years, Norman was an art director and scenic designer at NBC where he made vital contributions to such classic shows as “Howdy Doody,” “The Home Show,” “The Eternal Light,” and “Huntley-Brinkley Report.”
Amy Sullivan ’90 It is a painful but honorable task to write the obituary of a friend and contemporary. We are not of an age that we should die. We are wives and mothers. We are husbands and fathers. We are lovers. The heartbreaking news of Amy Sullivan’s death touched us all—her friends old and new, near and far—with profound sadness. She was a vibrant life force, remembered by her contemporaries in the Theater Management Program as a guiding light—wise, sophisticated, capable and experienced, with a supporting and calming influence. We admired Amy as a woman who continually re-fashioned and re-invented herself—but managed to stay true to what she believed in, and what she knew to be right. We celebrate a life that was constantly seeking after beauty and truth, but a life that had its feet planted firmly in the real world. For me especially, she was one of a treasured set of friends who buoyed me along on my discovery of America and the theatre when I first arrived at Yale. I remember particularly being brought into her circle—when she invited me up to Ivoryton—staying with some wealthy friends in a gorgeous house overlooking the Connecticut River and then spending a day in and around the beautiful home of Katharine Hepburn, before attending a play up at the Ivoryton Playhouse. For all of us, she was a touchstone to a wonderful period of American theatre—a student of Sanford Meisner, an actress in Zoe Caldwell’s Medea—a stylish, worldly, beautiful friend. She became in her professional life a very accomplished executive—a leader in the important areas of play development and theatre training—and through this and many other gifts she left her mark on our theatre community. We offer our sincerest condolences to Bruce and Dan—like us they were blessed to know her and share many experiences with her. But they also knew her greatest gifts—her love, her life. We will miss her. Michael Diamond ’90
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Bookshelf
Publications by Yale School of Drama Alumni
Theatre Craft
Fiction Analyzing Shakespeare’s Action: Scene vs. Sequence By Charles A. Hallett ’67 and Elaine S. Hallett Cambridge University Press, 2006
Acting One/Acting Two By Robert Cohen ’64 McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/ Languages; 5th Edition, 2007
Tarzan: The Making of a Broadway Spectacular By Michael Lassell ’76 Disney Editions, 2007
Theatre Management: Producing and Managing the Performing Arts By David M. Conte ’72 and Stephen Langley Entertainment Pro, an imprint of Quite Specific Media Group, Ltd., 2007
Lessons: The Craft of Acting By Tom Isbell ’84 Meriweather Publishing, 2006
The Actor’s Lab Book: A Practical Supplement for the Beginning Actor By Sheldon Deckelbaum ’92 with Art Grueneberger Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 2006
The Actors’ Way: A Journey in Self-Discovery Through Letters By Benjamin Lloyd ’88 Allworth Press, 2006
Control Systems for Live Entertainment By John Huntington ’90 Focal Press, 2007 With a unique combined focus on computers, art and practice, this book offers an in-depth examination of control for lighting, lasers, sound, video, film projection, stage machinery, animatronics, special effects and pyrotechnics for theatre, concerts, theme parks, themedretail, cruise ships, museums, corporate and other events.
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YSD 2007
The Commercial Theater Institute Guide to Producing Plays and Musicals Edited by Frederic B. Vogel and Ben Hodges Neil A. Mazzella ’78, Contributor Applause Books, 2007
The Making of The Sound of Music By Max Wilk ’41 Routledge Press, 2007
Eighth Wonder of the World By Leslie Epstein ’67, ’60 yc Handsel Books, 2006 The Mad Cook of Pymatuning By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt ’59 Penguin Group, 2007
The History of Swimming By Kim Powers ’84 Avalon Publishing Group, Inc., 2006 A History of Swimming details Kim Powers’ frantic search for his twin brother Tim who disappears from Manhattan one weekend while in his late 20s. Kim imagines that the clues to Tim’s whereabouts have been planted in a series of letters written by Tim over the years. Now, Kim uses the letters as a sort of roadmap that takes him to Texas, the setting of their greatest triumphs and tragedies. The History of Swimming was selected by Barnes & Noble as a “Discover Great New Writers” book and was nominated for a LAMBDA Literary Award for Best Gay Memoir of the Year.
Alumni Notes Non Fiction
The Zebra Murders: A Season of Killing, Racial Madness, and Civil Rights By Prentice Earl Sanders and Bennett Cohen ’84 Arcade Publishing, 2007 The story, told by San Francisco’s first black police chief, of the raciallymotivated serial killings—black on white—that terrorized the city in the winter of 1973–4, and how it was solved by black detectives.
Millennial Stages: Essays and Reviews 2001–2005 By Robert Brustein ’51, ’66 MAH, Former Dean Yale University Press, 2006 Reflections on Life: Why We’re Here and How to Enjoy the Journey Parentlaughs: Quips, Quotes and Anecdotes about Raising Kids Teacherlaughs: Quips, Quotes and Anecdotes about the Classroom Worklaughs: Quips, Quotes and Anecdotes about Making a Buck By Allen Klein ’62 Gramercy Books, a division of Random House, 2006 My Body: New and Selected Poems By Joan Larkin ’63 Hanging Loose Press, 2007
Biographies
Friends: A Love Story By Angela Bassett ’83, Courtney B. Vance ’86 and Hilary Beard Kimani Press, 2007 Mrs. Leslie Carter By Dr. Craig Clinton ’72 McFarland & Company, 2006
Plays
Retrospective
Bad Boy Nietzsche! and Other Plays By Richard Foreman ’62 Theatre Communications Group, 2007
Charles Steckler: Stage Design— A Retrospective Exhibition (’71) By the Mandeville Gallery at Union College Rachel Seligman, Director & Curator Koren Lazarou, Exhibitions Assistant Union College, 2006
This new anthology collects plays written and performed over six years, including Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty, Maria del Bosco, Panic (How to Be Happy!), Bad Boy Nietzche!, Bad Behavior and King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe. Blanche and Beyond By Steve Lawson ’76 Samuel French 2007
Children’s
Reflections/Riflessioni By Peter Wexler ’61 US Equities Realty of Chicago, 2007
Satyajit Ray: Interviews Edited by Bert Cardullo ’85, ’89 DFA University Press of Mississippi, 2007 Best and Worst Travels: An Anecdotal Exploration by an Upper Middle Class Adventurer, Traveling to Old and New Worlds, Desiring Comfort, Safety, Good Weather, Good Company, Good Food, Means of Controlling Heat and Cold, and Shelter for the Night By Raymond Carver ’61 iUniverse, 2007 Tennessee Williams in Provincetown By David Kaplan ’79 Hansen Publishing Group, 2006
DVDs
Sasha and Babushka By Connie Evans ’93 and Vladimir Shpitalnik ’92 Illustrated by Vladimir Shpitalnik Soundprints, Inc., 2007 Hank Zipzer: The World’s Greatest Underachiever—The Curtain Went Up, My Pants Fell Down By Henry Winkler ’70 and Lin Oliver Penguin Group (USA), 2007
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Twelfth Night (DVD) Performed in American Sign Language and English By William Shakespeare Directed by Peter Novak ’98, ’01 dfa Gallaudet University Press, 2007
Around the World
40s
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Alfred S. Golding ’49 shares, “After more than fifty years of working in the theatre as an actor, director and historian—and upon my retirement several years ago—I turned to my other specialty, which began during World War II. I was a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies where I studied colloquial Arabic at Columbia University. Subsequently after the war, I studied anthropology with Margaret Mead. In my book It’s in the Culture: Why We Don’t Understand the Middle East and Its Terror, published in 2002, I combined these interests. The result was a wakeup call to give proper attention to the tribalism that still dominates the region; a recognition which, sadly, our savants, press or public seem to ignore in our often misdirected foreign policy there. My latest book, now being considered for publication, is Multiculturalism, America and the Middle East. It was prompted by the disregard on the part of many liberalminded Americans of the terror threat which endangers America and the reasons for that inattention.” Joan Kron ’48 writes, “My husband, John Marder, a retired Executive Vice President of Grey Global, died in December 2005. Though long ago I traded costume design for journalism, I’m still a workaholic. After stints at New York magazine, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications, I am the Contributing Editor at Large of Conde Nast’s Allure magazine, covering cosmetic surgery. This beat makes me extremely popular with people who want anti-aging advice—but yet don’t want anyone to know that they asked about it! My column ‘Scalpel News’ runs every other month, and I write features several times a year. In April 2007, I was the keynote speaker for the annual meeting of the Society of Plastic Surgical Skin Specialists, taking them ‘Behind the Scenes with a Cosmetic-Surgery Reporter.’ “My book High-Tech: The Industrial Style and Source Book for the Home, co-authored with Suzanne Slesin, was revisited last year
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Alumni Notes with a four-month exhibition at the New School’s Parsons School of Design. (Suzy and I have been credited in the Oxford English Dictionary with giving new meaning to the obscure term ‘high tech!’) I am also involved in a family bison operation, Belle-Air Farms. That’s full of drama (but a different kind!) “I was sad to learn of the death of Norman Davidson ’48—we worked together with another YSD classmate, the late Mel Bourne ’48, in the summer of 1946 at Cherry Lane Theatre in a mostly Yale group called ‘The Spur,’ led by Carmen Capalbo ’48 and Leo Lieberman ’48. Carmen, Peter Larkin ’47, and I still keep in touch.” A revision of Shakespeare’s Language by Eugene Shewmaker ’49 went to the printers in March 2007, with the first edition having enjoyed a ten-year run.
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Albert Brenner ’50 writes, “I came out of retirement again last year to do a film for Garry Marshall—Georgia Rule with Jane Fonda, Felicity Huffman and Lindsay Lohan. After the film, my wife and I took an amazing trip to Asia. The film I did for Garry came out in May 2007 and I started a new one for him at the end of March 2007—so much for going back into retirement! My wife and I recently traveled to Southeast Asia. We started off in Thailand, visiting Bangkok, Ayuthaya and Chiang Rai, where we went to Watrongkhun, the most gorgeous white mirrored wat/temple, then crossed into Laos. We took a two-day trip down the Mekong River to Luang Prabang to be with our friends for four days, living their life and visiting many of the 30+ wats there. It’s a very gentle and surprisingly international town, now a UNESCO site. It was quite wonderful being there. We then flew to Hanoi and also went to Halong Bay, staying on a boat for two days enjoying the spectacular rock formations, floating villages and caves there, before continuing on to Hoi An and then Saigon. From there we went to Siem Reap in Cambodia, which is truly breathtaking. As
YSD 2007
Lost Alumni: 1940s We’ve lost touch with the following alumni! If you know how to reach them, please pass on their contact information by e-mailing ysd.alumni@yale.edu or calling 1-800-YSD-CUES. George Abelson ’44 Donald Acker ’49 David Allen ’48 John Althoff ’48 Glenn Alvey, Jr. ’48 Margaret Anderson ’40 Ubaldo Anglada ’49 Elizabeth Armstrong ’44 Anita Baumbach ’41 Charles Baxter ’48 J. Maurice Beaton ’49 Gene Benton ’47 June Boyer ’47 Virginia Brearton ’44 Emanuel Brookman ’48 Oden Browne ’48 Robert Busch ’40 Janet Campbell ’45 Carmen Capalbo ’48 Byrle Cass ’48 Melie Chen ’48 Arthur Chung ’49 Barbara Cobell ’48 Jane Cope ’41 Bradford Crocker ’42 Clementina De Barrios ’42 Willard Dengler ’48 Mary Lou Denton ’48 Jane Douglass ’44 Marcia Dworsky ’47 Val Faggett ’44 Mark Farrington ’41 Michael Ferrall ’47 Earl Fowler ’49 Corine Frevert ’40 H. Francis Gaunt ’41 Wilber George ’42 Priscilla Green ’43 Jess Gregg ’44 Elizabeth Hahn ’44 Robert Hart ’41 Neil Hartley ’49 J. Finlay Herman ’48 Mildred Hoadley ’45 Newton Hodgson ’40 Adna Karns ’41 Byron Kelley ’41 Abraham Kopilovitch ’40 Robert Lesberg ’44 Milton M. Levinson ’44 Dione Lewis ’45 Leo Lieberman ’48
Sybil Lubarr ’43 Hilda MacKichan ’49 Melisand March ’40 Ralph McGoun ’40 Lucille McGuire ’40 Carolyn Jean McKee ’44 Donald Medford ’43 Beatrice Metzl ’40 Seymour Milbert ’49 Bernard Miller ’48 Sten Modeen ’48 Margaret Morgenstern ’47 Stanley Moss ’48 Ann Musgrave ’41 Mina Parris ’48 Mary Pearson ’47 Zita Pierce ’43 Nyna Polumbaum ’49 E. Jean Ramsay ’42 Thelma Rantilla ’43 Norman M. Reid ’40 Charles Rittenhouse, Jr. ’40 Charles Rowe ’42 Carl Shain ’43 Enid Smiley ’43 Patricia Stevens ’43 Florence Stevenson ’48 Lewis Stoerker ’47 Beth Strode ’49 Norman Thomson ’40 Margaret Ting ’42 Amilcar Tirado ’47 Adeline Vigelis ’47 Keng Wang ’47 Ruth Williams ’49 Caroline Wolf ’43 Edward Wolf ’42 Robert Yeaton ’42 Helena Yurman ’44
Alumni Notes with all great ancient ruins, the mastery in the creation of Angkor Wat and the other exquisite, massive temples is awe-inspiring. They are beautiful, spiritual and timeless, not only in the way they were built but also in the way nature is reclaiming them. This was an extraordinary adventure for us.” Robert Brustein ’51 , ’66 mah (Former Dean) had his play Spring Forward, Fall Back produced at the Vineyard Playhouse last summer, and by Theatre J in Washington, D.C. last fall. The English Channel, his play about Shakespeare, Marlowe, Southampton and the Dark Lady, was read at the Shakespeare Society and the Vineyard Playhouse. It will be produced by the C.J. Walsh Theatre in Boston in September 2007. His book Why Shakespeare Matters will be published in 2008. He is the proud grandfather of Robert Sebastian Brustein (three years old), Ezra Beinart (one year old) and Sasha Stern (six months old). He is teaching at American Repertory Theatre’s Institute for Advanced Theatre Training and is a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Suffolk University. Joy Carlin ’54 writes, “This is going to be a busy few months ahead as I begin to direct the wondrous Bosoms and Neglect by John Guare ’63 (Faculty) as the final play in the Aurora Theatre’s season in Berkeley, California. I then turn around to direct Aurora’s first play of the 2007-2008 season, Terry Johnson’s Hysteria. After a few breaths, I take on Mrs. Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge by Christopher Durang ’74 at the San Francisco Playhouse, where I directed The Ride Down Mt. Morgan last
season. No one asks me to act so much these days. I guess they think I can’t remember lines because of my advanced age—though that’s a dirty lie! I like directing tremendously and have no complaints. I am on the board of the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, where I see first hand the work of the amazing Jim Kleinmann ’92, who has recently taken over the position of Managing Director and is doing a brilliant job.” Thelma Jones ’55 recently presented the 257th performance of the one-woman play, Magdalene. The Commune of Assisi, Italy, has sponsored performances for the last four years. She sends special greetings to all of her classmates. Jay Keene ’55 continues to live on his ranch in Rio Rico, AZ. His wife Rhonda passed away in December 2006 and, in her memory, he established The Jay and Rhonda Keene Scholarship for Costume Design and The Jay and Rhonda Keene Prize for Costume Design at YSD. In March, he attended the USITT conference where he connected with fellow YSD alums. Gordon Micunis ’59 will be opening the fifth in his series of art installations at El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe in New Mexico. Following successes at New Canaan’s Silvermine Gallery with “Homage to My Brothers,” Albuquerque’s Artopia Gallery with “The 500 Davids,” Santa Fe’s Red Dot Gallery with “Old Masters Made New,” and last year’s “500 Mona Lisas” at El Museo, Gordon will open with “The 1,001 Buddhas,” a mixed-media collaged monoprint installation in June 2007.
Bob Barr ’52 For the many Yale School of Drama alumni who work outside the theatre after graduating, Bob Barr may be an inspiration. After he earned his MFA in Playwriting in 1952, he and his wife Phyllis were “very much penniless and apartment-less and obstetricianless and everything else-less that you can be, and the necessary thing was to get a job, clearly.” Forty-four successful years in business followed, most of them at United Rebuilders, Inc. But once he left the business world, Barr discovered he was not ready to retire. He promptly moved back to North Carolina—where he had been an undergraduate—and took an acting class, launching a new career as a performer. As of this writing, he has appeared in nearly thirty productions and gathered thirty-five weeks toward the fifty necessary for an Actors’ Equity card. He says, “I guess in some way there’s a sense of achievement associated with that. It’s sort of a justification for all the years I didn’t do it.” Barr has also reinvigorated his writing career. His latest play is called The Tiger’s Skin. And in an unexpected turn, a song Barr co-wrote in the mid-1950s, “The World Was Mine,” was recently included on the album The Johnny Hartman Collection 1947–1972. The reappearance of the song is oddly appropriate for the new phase in Barr’s life—the world is his all over again. Jason Fitzgerald ’08
Lost Alumni: 1950s Doris Allen ’58 Roxanne Almond ’58 Mary-Ellen Anderson ’59 Edya Arzt ’52 James Asp ’52 Mary Axelson ’53 Bertram Barer ’54 Rodolfo Basalo ’58 Grant Bishop ’58 George Blake ’50 Dan Blue ’59 Jerome Borgos ’53 Edward Breen ’59 Joseph Caldwell ’58 Joseph Carner ’55 Edwin Chadick ’58 Donal Chill ’53 Polly Clark ’53 Norman Cohen ’59 David Conroy ’56 Leland Croghan ’59 Rafael Emeric ’55 Keith Cuerden ’57 Edward DeRoo ’50 G. Philippe De Rosier ’51 Edward Devany ’55 Alan J. Distler ’57 Joseph Donohue, Jr. ’59 Cornelius Dutcher ’53 Jean Evers ’56 Gerald Ewing ’50 June Farrand ’54 Elida Foote ’58 William Francis ’56 Jonathan Frid ’57 C.K.N.C. Fusselle ’52 W. Francis Gallagher ’51 Charles Ganzer ’59 Jose Gonzalez ’50 Nilda Gonzalez-Monclova ’54 Joan Gordon ’54 Russell Green ’56 Louise Greenberg ’57 Christian Gruber ’54 Donald Gunn ’52 William Guthrie ’52 Eugenio Guzman ’57 Herbert Haft ’57 Charles Hampton, Jr. ’59 Frederic Handschy ’52 Lo Hardin, Jr. ’51 Joseph Hardy ’58 Fred Harmon ’50 Robert Harper ’57 Leonard Heideman ’50 Robert Henney ’53 Jack Hensley ’59 James Herlihy ’57 Thomas Hill, Jr. ’51 Hastell Hollis ’50 William Hricz ’54 Richard Hudson ’51 Andrew Jones ’52 Perry Jubelirer ’50 Lila Kahn ’51 William Keith ’59 Alvin J. Keller ’50 Paul Kirschner ’54 Edward Kittredge ’54 Lawrence Klein ’51 Ruth Kline ’56 David Lutyens ’54 George Mallonee ’59 Valgene Massey ’55
James Maxwell, Jr. ’52 Virginia McGuire ’53 Gaylord Meech ’59 Hector Mendoza ’58 Robert Mohr ’56 Wallace Moore ’57 Diana Morgan ’57 Robert Morris ’54 Leon Munier, Jr. ’55 Alice Murray ’58 William Myers ’50 Cherie Neale ’55 Anibal Otero ’51 Frank Pacelli ’51 Mary Padden ’58 Barbara Page ’57 Elizabeth Palmer ’52 George Palmer ’51 H. Wynne Pearce, Jr. ’54 J. Hans Pedersen ’57 John Peters ’59 Edwin Phelps ’55 Demarest Polacheck ’50 Gertrude Poland ’51 Martha Posey ’50 Joan Pryor ’57 Joseph Purdom ’58 Alice Rabinowitz ’56 Clyde Rainwater ’53 Lloyd Reckord ’55 Raul Reyes ’52 Richard Riggan ’55 John Roberts ’50 Saul Rosing ’55 Stephen Ross ’59 Marie Russell ’54 William Schaefer ’51 Ruth Schafranek ’57 Jack Schwanke ’57 Leonore Senfield ’54 Allen Shapiro ’59 Arthur Sharr ’50 Herma Shore ’55 Carol Slott ’54 Jay Smith II ’58 Sue Smith ’54 Felicity Snelgar ’51 David Spence ’58 Sara Stadelman ’55 Irvine Stirton ’52 Rune Stylander ’50 Joyce Talal ’53 Ellen Terry ’57 Robert Thayer ’50 Preben Thomsen ’54 Robert Treser ’52 Richard Valentine ’58 Maurice Vaneau ’53 Thomas Victor ’57 Vida Vliet ’58 Sergio Vodanovic ’58 Harold Wallace ’56 Donald Wallen ’55 John Walsh ’54 William Wente ’56 H. Theodore Werner ’57 Robert Whitaker ’58 Elizabeth White ’55 Donal Wilson ’52 Philip Wiseman ’54 Patricia Wright ’52 James Xanthos ’52 Tunc Yalman ’50 Alvaro Zarate ’56 Henry Zeiger ’58
Around the World George Morfogen ’57 received the Actors’ Equity Association Shakespeare Award for his portrayal of the Duke of York in the Classic Stage Company’s production of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Sue Ann (Young) Park ’52 received the award for Career Achievement in Academic Theatre at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) Convention in Chicago in August 2006 and the Life Achievement Award from the Lessac Institute for Training and Research at its conference in Denver in January 2006. Sue Ann has retired as the Director of the Lessac Intensive Workshops. Joel Rubin ’51 shares, “I re-established my own consulting firm in theatre planning, following over a decade as Managing Director and Principal Consultant with Artec Consultants in New York City. Lighting & Sound in America published a long interview with me in their February 2007 issue, dealing largely with my parallel career in not-for-
profit organizations such as USITT and OISTAT.” Zelma Weisfeld ’56 received the 2007 Joel E. Rubin Founder’s Award from the United States Institute for Theatre Technology. The honor is given to USITT members in recognition of outstanding and continued service to the Institute. Joe Weishar ’59, ’54 yc writes, “Other than being an active member of The Players Club and attending theatre, the various skills I learned at Yale have been used by me in the profession of store merchandise presentation. My second book, The Aesthetics of Merchandise Presentation, pays homage to the learning at Yale School of Drama with Donald Oenslager (Former Faculty), and in the Art School with Josef Albers. I am now in my 45th year of my profession which started as a company designing stores and displays. Interestingly, in that business I employed many of my classmates from the Drama School. In fact my partner for the first dozen years was Bigelow
Ike Schambelan ’64, ’67 DFA In a small rehearsal room on West 43rd Street, a group of actors hold a tablework session for the latest production of Theater by the Blind, a company that mixes actors who are sighted, visually disabled, and blind in interpretations of classic and new plays. The group pauses for a heated discussion of utilitarianism, identity politics, and Thomas Hobbes while one actor’s seeing-eye dog, Blake, nibbles a company member’s shoes. His master reads from a large Braille script, and another actress steadies the wheelchair beside her. When the discussion is over, Holly, a sighted actress, reads the first lines of the next scene: “I see!” The creative energy in the room is alternately fed and focused by founding artistic director Ike Schambelan. The play is The Rules of Charity, by the late John Belluso, a playwright who was himself disabled. Schambelan remembers the day he met Belluso at the Public Theater and the playwright told him, “Theater by the Blind is important for all disabled performers because it does first-class art.” Schambelan says, “If you want to talk about the history of the twenty-eight years since we were founded in May of 1979, it is all about the increasing quality of the art.” He began working with actors who have varying levels of vision loss at Jewish Guild for the Blind in the late 1970s. “I just felt like I needed a niche,” he explains. Schambelan has directed nearly every play in the company’s history—his “reward” for the endless amount of fundraising required to stay afloat. With its recent graduation to Off-Broadway status, along with a new inflow of audience development grants, Theater by the Blind is ready for an exciting new chapter. Schambelan quips, “It took 28 years. That’s what people don’t talk about, that it takes whatever it takes to get there, but you get there!” To learn more about Theater by the Blind, visit http://www.tbtb.org/. Jason Fitzgerald ’08
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Ann Farris ’63, Jane Kimbrough ’61 and Elisa Rondstadt Elliott ’62 celebrating Ann’s 70th birthday.
Green ’59. Richard (Dick) Casler ’58, Gordon Micunis ’59 and Jay Kobrin ’61 were some of my buddies and classmates who worked with me to create some outstanding store designs and displays. “A few years ago, I gave up the manufacturing part and concentrated on the lecturing and consulting. My clients were quite varied—from Ralph Lauren to Kmart. I am currently traveling around the world making presentations on the art of merchandise presentation. I still rely heavily on the teachings of my Yale professors. I have even offered my time to speak to the Drama students about side - tracking my education. It is still a great way to be creative without selling out. I have never acted in front of the curtain, but I have brought tears to the eyes of the people who hired me when I explained the rules of customer behavior using the insights from my own schooling.”
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Jim Bakkom ’64 was the Production Designer for Sweetland, a 2007 Spirit Award winner. Jim also had a cameo role in the film as the Station Master. Harvey F. Bellin ’69, ’66 yc was a Yale University Department of Psychology Research Affiliate from 2003 through 2005. He was the Project Director of the United States Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences from 2003 through 2006, working on developing, testing and refining My Magic Story Car, a video/DVD-based program of intrinsically motivating learning games to strengthen emergent literacy skills of preschool children from disadvantaged families in any childcare setting. The video was made in conjunction with Professor
Alumni Notes Jerome Singer and Dr. Dorothy Singer of Yale University’s Department of Psychology. More information can be found at http://homepage. mac.com/mediagroupct. Lonnie Carter ’69 shares, “My play The Lost Boys of Sudan was done at the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis in March and April of 2007. My play The Romance of Magno Rubio, which won eight Obies in 2003, will be re-mounted at The Culture Project in New York City in May and June of 2007 with most of the original cast, directed again by Loy Arcenas. The play has enjoyed eight major productions at theatres around the country, including Victory Gardens in Chicago, Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, and Laguna Playhouse, as well as in the Philippines. I continue to teach at New York University in the Tisch School for the Arts and the Goldberg Dramatic Writing Program.” Raymond Carver ’61 is featured in Hometown Heroes: Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things, published by Harper Collins in April 2007. His book Best and Worst Travels: A Travel Anthology was published in March 2007 by iUniverse Press. He continues to write for the Living Room Theatre of Salado, Texas, which is in its twelfth season. Robert Cohen ’64 reports, “I directed and produced a six-week run of my play Machiavelli: The Art of Terror at the Hayworth Theatre in Los Angeles during the Summer of 2006. Just before that, I toured my production of Bryan Reynolds’ new play, Railroad, to the Sibiu International Theatre Festival in Romania and to the National Theatre of Romania. Spring 2007 brought a tour of Reynolds’ next play Blue Shade to Prague and three cities in Poland. My new combined book Acting One/Acting Two (revised versions of two earlier books, one of which was published separately) was published in February 2007.” The art of Katherine D. Crone ’60 was recently exhibited in “Material Difference: Soft Sculpture and Wall Works” at the Chicago Cultural Center; “Intimate Eye” at the Phoenix Gallery in New York City; “Toast 2007” at the TriBeCa Open Artist Studio Tour and “Pulp Function” at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, MA. Richard “Dick” Devin ’69 shares, “I’ve recently retired after twenty-six years with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival as its Lighting Designer, and having spent the past seventeen years as its Artistic Director. After the first month of freedom from fundraising, I’m delighted to be back in freelance designer mode and am planning travel and relaxation
intermingled with some design work. All the best to old friends!” Charles Dillingham ’68 is in his sixteenth season as Managing Director of Center Theatre Group, now in its 23rd season, in Los Angeles, operating the Mark Taper Forum, Ahmanson Theatre and the new Kirk Douglas Theatre. He writes, “We have 3,100 seats to fill a night, year-round! Since I arrived, we have renovated the Ahmanson, built the Douglas and, this July, we will begin a nine-month total renovation of the Taper. Needless to say, many Yale School of Drama graduates have
worked with us, which is a constant reminder of the excellence of the School. I still feel the loss of Ben Mordecai (Former Faculty). He and I rarely spoke less than weekly, and often daily for months at a time, working on many projects. I miss him deeply.” Leslie Epstein ’67, ’60 yc shares, “I adapted my long-ago novel King of the Jews to the stage. It was given a marvelous production in Boston by the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and has been nominated for an Elliot Norton Award. My latest novel is Eighth Wonder of the World, published by Handsel Books.”
Lost Alumni: 1960s We’ve lost touch with the following alumni! If you know how to reach them, please pass on their contact information by e-mailing ysd.alumni@yale.edu or calling 1-800-YSD-CUES. Michael Abel ’60 Michael Ackerman ’64 Ibrahim Al-Khatib ’64 Jerome Anello ’69 Robert Anton ’66 Julie Baker ’63 T. Scott Balderston ’66 Morgan Barber, Jr. ’60 David Barrette ’67 Ralph Bates ’65 Franz Bautz ’65 Elizabeth Bayhon ’60 Joan Bayliss ’69 Rafael Benavente ’61 Barry Berg ’66 Magda Berg ’63 Stephen Berns ’67 Rudolf Beyer ’60 Robert Binder ’69 Ralf Bode ’66 Barbara Boisvert ’65 Harry Brauser ’61 J. David Bray ’62 John Calhoun ’66 Thomas Calkins ’64 John Callahan, Jr. ’60 Peter Cameron ’69 Nancy Cardenas ’61 Franklyn Carr ’66 Richard Castrodale ’64 Paul Cherry ’69 Kimberly Cohen ’66 Fletcher Coleman II ’60 Joseph Coleman ’61 Thomas Cooke ’60 Peter Dee ’64 Linneu Dias ’61 Gungor Dilmen ’63 Helen Dupont ’62 William Durkee ’61 Robert Dyer, Jr. ’68 Jeanne Eaton ’63 John Edwards ’62 Scott Elliott ’65 Maxine Ellis ’63 J. Alfred Euringer ’61 Patrick Farrelly ’60
Thomas Figenshu ’67 John Fink ’65 Mary Finley ’62 Harvey Firari ’62 Gordon Firth ’61 Karen Flynn ’69 David Fradin ’67 Jon Garness ’64 Peter Gessner ’64 Theodore Gilliam ’62 F. Peyton Glass ’65 William Glikbarg ’69 Mary Goin ’64 Clelia Goodyear ’64 Tom Grainger ’67 Joseph Guadagni ’65 William Guild ’67 Marvin Hall ’61 Jenn Hamburg ’67 Nola Harrison ’62 James Hashim ’67 Robert Heaton ’68 Aurton Heeman ’65 Francis Hefferen ’65 Henry Heinold ’64 Douglas Higgins ’68 Cynthia Hitchens ’62 Stephen Jarrett ’69 Claire Johnson ’64 Pramod Kale ’65 Edward Kant ’66 Takashi Kawawa ’66 Edward Keating ’60 Margaret Kenline ’63 Jung Kim ’62 W. Alan Kirk ’67 Michael Koslow ’67 Martin Kushner ’68 Katherine Kwesell ’67 Joan Larkey ’61 Peter Larsen ’66 Richard Laurenzi ’67 Ana Leichtner ’63 Jean Levine ’69 Laurence Lewis ’62 Wayne Lindberg ’68 Wolfe Lowenthal ’63
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Leland Lowther ’65 John Ludwig ’63 Margaretta Lundell ’65 Linus Lynch ’64 Eugenia Macer ’68 Lawrence Madison ’68 Ernesto Malbran ’65 Marlene Manifold ’68 Robert Margolis ’61 Mary Mason ’63 Michael Mathias ’68 Peter McCandless ’64 Marilyn McDonald ’64 Robert McFarland ’62 Terry McHose ’69 Madge McKinley ’68 Claude McNeal ’65 Lenny Meyer ’63 James Miller ’65 Stewart Moss ’62 Carlos Moura ’66 Susan Murray ’62 Robert Nagle ’68 James Newton, Jr. ’66 Barbara Oka ’68 John Osborne ’68 Raymond Panighetti ’60 Harry Passoth ’64 Richard Place II ’68 Stephen Pokart ’68 Felice Polito ’68 Robert Pusilo ’66 Thomas Rasmussen ’69 Barbara Read ’64 Walter Reed ’64 Louis Rivers ’60 Francis Rizzo ’61 James Rogers ’67 James Rose ’63 Stephen Rosenberg ’63 Pamela Rosetti ’68 Thomas Rosica ’67 Leon Rottner ’68 Elsa Roussel ’66 Joanna Russ ’60 Sonya Ryan ’64 Adam Sage ’68
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Masayuki Sano ’66 Stephen Sbarge ’65 Sanford Schaffer ’61 Jed Schlosberg ’68 Ester Schwartz ’62 Carol Shapiro ’63 Joseph Shaver ’64 Benjamin Shecter ’65 Donald Sheffield, Jr. ’68 Roy Sheppard ’64 Larry Sherman ’67 Norman Silverman ’64 John Smith ’65 Ronald Sommer ’63 Gail St. Martin ’66 Peter Steinberg ’69 Gordon Stewart ’67 Robin Strasser ’65 John Strickler III ’66 Paul Sullivan ’61 Sonia Susskind ’62 Dean Taylor ’65 Timo Tiusanen ’65 Louise Tompkins ’65 Bertel Torne ’67 Eleanor Toth ’68 Patricia Trapp ’63 Edward Turpin ’67 Vassilis Vassilikos ’62 Theodore Walch ’66 Gary Waldhorn ’67 Lois Waldhorn ’67 Janet Walter ’61 Stephen Wangh ’68 Donald Warfield ’69 Leor Warner II ’66 Michael Welch ’62 Joan Welles ’67 A. Norton Wettstein ’65 Richard Wilkinson ’61 George Williams ’63 Lynette Willson ’61 John Wilson ’63 Donald Winkler ’64 Egon Wolff ’61 Angela Wood ’61 Judith Wright ’67
Around the World So, it has been a rich life and only promises to be more so. I live full-time in the Catskill Mountains; my marriage to Jamie Donnelly is going into its 29th year; I have a son in college and a daughter only another year away. After years of writing for film and television, I had come to believe that Hollywood might be a life sentence. However, Toehold, my novel, is being published in October 2007 by Simon and Schuster. A new career after all this time—what a kick! Boola boola!” Analyzing Shakespeare’s Action by Charles Hallett ’67 and his wife, Elaine, has been reissued in paperback by Cambridge University Press. Peter Hunt ’63 reports, “On August 6, 2006, I directed a staged reading of Billy Wilder’s script for Sunset Boulevard at the Hollywood Bowl. An all-star cast performed while the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra played Franz Waxman’s background music under the baton of John Mauceri ’70 musc, ’67 yc, a Yale graduate who also taught at Yale School of Music for fifteen years. At present, I am directing a new musical, He, based on the classic play He Who Gets Slapped. The book and lyrics are by Ray Sipherd ’57 yc, and the music is by Arthur Rubinstein ’58 musc. He will premiere at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Lastly, I am planning to direct a oneman play about Benjamin Franklin, Ben, with Stacy Keach ’66.” Everett Lunning, Jr. ’69, ’67 yc is the Artistic Director of the Mary Moody Northern Theater of St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. For its 2006–2007 season, Ev directed Parade and appeared as Nat Miller in Ah,
Peter Hunt ’63, ’61 YC standing in front of the now-demolished Adams Memorial Theatre where he worked for thirty-seven years as a lighting designer, actor, director and Artistic Director of the Williamstown Theatre Festival.
Wilderness!, for which Susan Branch ’92 designed the costumes. He also played V.I. Lenin in Travesties at the Austin Shakespeare Festival in June 2007. Bruce McMullan ’61 recently returned from a busy four days serving on a validation panel convened by the Hong Kong Council for Academic Accreditation. The panel evaluated a submission by the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts to initiate a MFA program in Theatre and Entertainment Arts. Christopher Barreca ’83, who is currently the Head of Design in the School of Theatre at Cal Arts, also served on the panel. Over the past year, Richard Olson ’69 and his partner, dancer/choreographer Jennifer Neff, have been creating surreal and humorous performance pieces, ranging from theatre to dance and sometimes using music. Their work was performed at Charles Moore Dance Theater and Studio 111 in Brooklyn; Green Space in Long Island City; and Jennifer Muller/The Works in Manhattan. Howard Pflanzer ’68 received a staged reading in February 2007 of his new play On the Border, about the last night on earth in 1940 of Walter Benjamin, the GermanJewish cultural critic. It will be produced by Medicine Show during their 2007–2008 season. Edward “Eddie” Pomerantz ’60 writes, “I had two events in May 2007. Lorraine Bracco was in a staged reading of two of my one-act plays at the Players Club: A Change of Pace, originally published by Ms. magazine and included in the anthology 35 in Ten, and I Hate When It Gets Dark So Early, a finalist
“Bold Strokes and Finesse: The Stage Designs of John Ezell” ’60 was presented at the 2007 USITT Annual Conference and Stage Exposition. The exhibition included sketches, painter elevations, and designs encompassing John’s work in regional and international theatres. In the exhibition are several designs created for productions at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. John has received the Award for Experimental Television Art in Milan, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Award for Excellence, and eleven Critics’ Circle Awards. He was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and serves as a consultant to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. John is currently the Hall Family Foundation Professor of Design, teaching at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. Richard Foreman ’62 writes, “My latest play Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead! was produced at my Ontological-Hysteric Theatre during the Spring of 2007. I’m filming material for my plays with my new Bridge Film Project; footage includes Australia, Portugal, England, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Austria and Denmark (so far). Text, design and staging for the opera What to Wear, with composer Michael Gordon, had a sold-out run at the Redcat Theatre in Los Angeles in September 2006. I was also elected an Officer of The Order of Arts and Letters of France. My latest book of plays, Bad Boy Nietzsche!, was published by Theatre Communications Group in Spring 2007.” Stephen Foreman ’67 writes, “I don’t remember the last time I wrote, nor do I even remember whether I have ever written at all. Certainly, it’s at least been a couple of decades. Jennifer Neff and Richard Olson ’69 in performance in J & R Live!
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Alumni Notes for the 2005 Heideman Award at Actors Theatre of Louisville. The publication of Shmegeggi and the Four Kvetches, a children’s picture-book story written by my 9-year-old grandson, Jesse Pomerantz Vining, and me, was published in Up the Beanstalk, a children’s literary journal. Once again, I had the pleasure of being a Creative Advisor at the Moonstone Screenwriting Lab in Germany and the Toscano Foundation Screenwriting Lab in Mexico.” In March 2007, Michael Rutenberg ’60, ’65 dfa presented “Teaching Acting and Directing in Israel: A Small Step Toward World Peace” at the Comparative Drama Conference at Loyola Marymount University in Marina del Rey, California. Michael also received a Fulbright as an Artist/Writer-in-Residence to Israel in 2005; a New York City Chancellor’s Award for Scholarly Achievement in 2004 and 2005; and a Hunter College President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2006. His short play Payback was part of the 2007 Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Short Play Festival at the American Theatre for Actors in New York City. Thanks to Roger Hendricks Simon ’67 and Daniel Hendricks Simon, Poughkeepsie residents can see television broadcasts of new plays and short films as part of a Time Warner Cable television show “Simon Studio Presents.” This new theatre-for-television project is titled “From Stage to Screen,” and features projects first developed by The Simon Studio and/or those associated with the studio. Additional broadcasts will be announced shortly for Cablevision (Dutchess and Ulster Counties), Suscom Public Access Television (Putnam and Westchester County), and the Manhattan Neighborhood Network.
Using the Technology of Today To share information immediately and to cut back on postage costs, the Alumni Affairs office is communicating with our alumni via e-mail whenever possible. This includes the solicitation of class notes for this publication. Please let us know how to reach you electronically and include us whenever you change your e-mail address. Think we have your address? Share it anyway! Write to ysd.alumni@yale.edu or update your e-mail address through www. aya.yale.edu.
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Lost Alumni: 1970s
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We’ve lost touch with the following alumni! If you know how to reach them, please pass on their contact information by e-mailing ysd.alumni@yale.edu or calling 1-800-YSD-CUES.
Lewis Black ’77 returned to the Yale University campus in February 2007 to perform in the Winter Arts Festival. He is currently involved in “The Daily Show” as a performer and behind-the-scenes contributor. Rich Bynum ’79 writes, “We had to close Hawkeye Scenic Studios at the end of 2006 due to shrinking volume and margins and rising debt. In spite of some exciting projects, including a lot of work on the pre-Broadway run of The Pirate Queen in Chicago, we could not keep going under the circumstances. We had twenty-one good years, however. On a happier note, Jennifer has sold a third book in her series before the first two have even made it into the stores! They will now come out all three in a row: in January, February and March 2008.” David Chambers ’71 (Faculty) shares, “In December 2006, I opened my adaptation of Don Giovanni—called Don Juan in Prague—to sold-out houses and standing ovations at BAM’s Harvey Theatre. In October, the production played in Prague at the Stavovske Divadio where Mozart premiered the original opera in 1787; standing on that stage during the raucous curtain call is certainly one of my life’s greatest thrills. Numerous Yale School of Drama alumni were on the production team and the live digital arrangements of Matthew Suttor (Faculty) were a key part of the production. The same week as the BAM performance, The Good Shepherd, the film directed by Robert DeNiro with Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie, opened; I served as the Theatrical Staging Supervisor for several scenes in the movie, assisted by former student Kara-Lynn Vaeni ’04, who also assisted on the opera. Thus ended an insane two-year work binge and I am now back with my family and Yale School of Drama directing students on a more regular basis, a relief to us all (I hope).” Lani Click ’73 writes, “I am the Palm Beach Affiliate Director of the Work-Life Balance Institute for Women. We are the premier networking group for women in South Florida. I am also the owner and designer of Palm Beach Purses (www.palmbeachpurses. com), which have been featured in Balance magazine. “My play The Buddha and the Bellydancer won an award from Palm Beach Dramaworks a few years ago. I also do editing for a well-known writer who lives in Palm Beach. And, I’m Secretary-Treasurer of the Yale Club of the
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Peter Andrews ’72 Koula Antoniadou ’71 Leonard Auclair ’74 Phillip Blumberg ’76 Christine Brachet ’71 Douglas Brenner ’72 James Brick ’71 Christopher Brookes ’70 John Brown ’74 Thomas Bynum ’74 James Cady II ’70 F. Ward Carlisle ’76 Marilyn Carter ’70 Darcy Casteleiro ’72 Perry Caudill ’79 Terrence Chandler ’76 Susan Chase ’72 Christopher Clarens ’77 Noel Coughlin ’70 Laurie Crews ’78 Dan Darling ’73 Carroll Dawes ’71 Robert Dean ’79 Vincent De Marco ’71 Ralph Dennis ’72 Herbert Downer ’72 Donald Eastman ’76 Kenneth Emmanule ’70 Amelia Emory ’71 Erwin Feher ’70 Drew Field ’79 Mary Foley ’74 Austin Gray ’70 Benjamin Halley, Jr. ’77 J. Lane Halteman ’70 Mark Handley ’72 Burl Hash ’70 Darryl Hill ’74 Jon Hoffman ’70 Anne Hormann ’74 Andrew Jackness ’79 Andrew Johnson, Jr. ’72 Helen Marie Jones ’72 Wynston Jones ’75 Peter Jordan ’70
Stephen Keitz ’72 Richard Kinscherf III ’70 Michael Kupferschmid ’75 Thomas Kupp ’76 Peter Lackner ’71 Dawn Latham ’78 Adriana Lawrence ’74 Robert Mandel ’70 Brian Martin ’78 Nancy Mayans ’79 Jack Messinger ’70 Allan Migicovsky ’74 Laurel Nadel ’74 Susan Nanus ’74 Valerie Neale ’76 Antonio Negron ’74 Steven Nowicki ’76 Marianne Owen ’79 Suzanne Palmer ’79 Steven Pasternack ’79 Hannibal Penney, Jr. ’73 Susan Pinsker ’72 Richard Ploetz ’73 Dean Radcliffe ’72 Theodore Ravinett ’71 Lesley Roberts ’71 Lewis Roberts ’74 Michael Shane ’72 Stephen Shapiro ’74 Laurel Sibley ’73 Danny Smith ’73 Frank Speiser ’71 Rosemary Stewart ’72 Gordon Swift ’71 Delbert Thompson ’72 John Van Dyke ’72 Esteba Vega ’72 Eugene Ward ’79 Edgar White ’74 Ruth Wilson ’75 Peter Winter ’70 Emmanuel Yirenchi ’71 Paul Zalon ’71
Lewis Black ’77 at Yale’s Winter Arts Festival in February 2007. Photo by Matt Lucas.
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Around the World Palm Beaches. And, of course, I also have a real estate license in South Florida, as most of us do. “My husband David graduated from Yale College ’69, Yale Law ’73 and has a Masters in Economics ’74 from Yale. He was recently selected as one of the top 100 ‘Super Lawyers’ in Florida. His specialty is Estate Planning and Wills and Trusts. One of our sons, Adam, recently graduated from Yale and worked as the City Editor for the Yale Daily News. He is currently working as a paralegal in New York City.” David M. Conte ’72 shares, “I’ve just written a book—Theatre Management: Producing and Managing the Performing Arts. It’s an update and renovation of the late Stephen Langley’s seminal text, Theatre Management and Production in America. The new book is both a text for arts administration and theatre management classes, and a reference to those operating small- to medium-sized performing arts facilities or companies. I’m currently working on Broadway as the manager of the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre (formerly the Plymouth Theatre) where A Chorus Line is playing to packed houses.”
Your Permanent Yale E-mail Address Tired of notifying friends and colleagues every time your e-mail address changes? Want to show your Yale pride? We have the solution for you! Free of charge, Yale University provides alumni with a permanent e-mail forwarding address. This means you can have a permanent address such as yourname@aya.yale.edu that will forward mail to any e-mail address you choose. (Note: the permanent Yale address does not receive or store any e-mail messages; it only forwards messages to the e-mail address you specify.) Share your aya.yale.edu e-mail address with everyone. When you change your e-mail address, simply update the address where your aya.yale.edu e-mail should be forwarded to—and you’re all set! Go to www.aya.yale.edu and click on “Virtual Yale Station” in the left-hand column to sign up today!
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David Copelin ’72 dfa writes, “I’m currently a visiting production dramaturg at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, working on Tom Stoppard’s On The Razzle, David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole, August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean and Moliere’s Tartuffe. I still live in Toronto, where I am Artistic Director of Some Strange Reason Theatreworks. My award-winning play Bella Donna was published in 2006 by Playwrights Canada Press and received its second professional staging in April 2007 at the RCA Theatre in St. John’s, Newfoundland. I teach playwriting at Brock University as well as through my own ‘Practical Playwriting’ seminars. I am also Chair of Canada’s Public Lending Right Commission. Like seventeen other countries around the world, Canada compensates published writers for their work that is in public libraries and is therefore read by people who pay no royalties. The Commission oversees the annual payment program. In my free moments, I am revisiting the most recent draft of a new comedy, The Rabbi of Ragged Ass Road.” Charles Andrew Davis ’76 is the speech coach for Ian Ynda-Hummel, who is the Academic Decathlon’s #1 student in the United States. He shares, “My designer brother John Floyd Davis did story boards for The Departed, The Good Shepherd, Charlotte’s Web and is currently working on an independent feature in New York. Joel Polis ’76 played Ezra Pound in Pound of Flesh at The Odyssey out here. My Garfield High School Academic Decathlon Speech Team took 2nd Place in Los Angeles—nine kids out of 750,000 students. We’re really proud of them!” John Doolittle ’77 and his wife, Kimberly Farr, shared, “We just wanted to let you know what a beautiful afternoon we had at the home of Jane Kaczmarek ’82 on March 11th. It was so generous of Jane to volunteer to host the party two years in a row—and to suggest that we all take home a floral arrangement (we did)! I reconnected with several classmates that I hadn’t seen since I graduated, and others we haven’t seen since the last gettogether. Thanks and kudos to all who helped plan the party, and to Jane and her family for making us all feel so welcome.” Kathleen Gray ’70 writes, “I’m writing to you from my desk at Cedars/Sinai, where I am newly ensconced at the Dual Diagnosis Intensive Outpatient Program. After a year of working at the Eating Disorders Center of California, I left to work on chemical dependency and other mental health issues. My daughter, Diana Stadlen, has finished
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The Frugal Repast by Ron Hirsen. Directed by Joe Grifasi ’75 at the Abingdon Theatre Company. (From left to right) Lizbeth McKay ’75, Dawn Luebbe, Frank Liotti ’02, David Wohl, Julie Boyd ’84, Harold Todd, Roberto de Felice and Kathleen McElfresh ’06. her year at Le Cordon Bleu and is cooking at teaching culinary arts at Chef Eric’s. My son, Peter Stadlen, is acting in New York City.” In January and February of 2007, Joe Grifasi ’75 directed The Frugal Repast by Ron Hirsen at the Abingdon Theatre Arts Complex in New York City. The cast included Julie Boyd ’84, Frank Liotti ’02, Lizbeth Mackay ’75, and Kathleen McElfresh ’06, with a set designed by Ray Recht ’72. William Hauptman ’73 shares, “On December 3, 2004, a dinner in honor of the late Dick Gilman was held at Café Madeleine for his former students and associates living in the New York area. As the dinner progressed, an informal sharing of memories began. “Everyone agreed that Dick had a strong critical vision they would never forget. Favorite quotes of Dick’s were read—about works of art being axes to break the ice within us, and about the power of silence in modern drama. Several people remarked how difficult, and even dark, Dick could be—but how invaluable he was as a teacher. “I think what surprised us all was how long we kept talking—it was like a discussion in B-1 of the old Drama School after Dick had left the room. In our memories, he will always be present.” Jon Huberth ’70 recently directed the off-Broadway play A Jew Grows in Brooklyn. He commented, “It’s taken me 37 years since graduation from Yale to make it to OffBroadway, but wait till you see the next 37 years!” David Kaplan ’79 had his book Tennessee Williams in Provincetown published last year. He is now the curator of the annual Tennessee Williams Theater Festival in Provincetown during the last week of September. (www. twptown.org) At this year’s Festival, Kate Mendeloff ’80 will direct a production of
Alumni Notes my busy coaching/teaching career. I was in Bulgaria during October and November of 2006, working with Marisa Tomei as a coach on the John Cusack sequel to Grosse Point Blank. My best adventure was during the spring of 2006 when my daughter Chloe and I walked the famous pilgrimage trail across Spain to Santiago de Compostela. We walked approximately 500 miles in thirty-seven days. Now I am longing for a fun role as a series regular—please keep me in mind!” William “Bill” Purves ’71 continues in San Diego with Harris Goldman Productions, producing industrials for conventions, meetings and special events around the country. He enjoys running into YSD alums, Williams’ adaptation of The Seagull by Anton which happens a lot in San Diego and on Chekhov. Christopher Markle ’79 and his his New York visits. He especially enjoyed graduate students from Northern Illinois running into Rhoda and Herman Krawitz University will also be presenting Strindberg (Former Faculty) at a New Year’s Eve party one-acts. in 2006. Walt Klappert ’79 shares, “My wife, Alan Rosenberg ’74 is the President of the Yolanda Liepa Klappert ’77 musc and I Screen Actors Guild, the nation’s largest labor produced three play readings this year for union representing working actors. the Yale Cabaret Hollywood (YCH) and Yale John Rothman ’75 writes, “I was in Prelude Connection at the Topanga Canyon Gallery to a Kiss at Roundabout Theatre Company at the Brewery Art Colony near downtown Los Angeles. The plays were Marduk by Paavo earlier this year. I also managed to shoot a scene in a movie with Uma Thurman called Hall ’79, directed by Laura Stribling ’97 and Accidental Husband between a matinee and cast by Robert Barnett ’89; Flowering Spurge evening performance! I am about to play directed by Asaad Kelada ’64 with reader Philip Seymour Hoffman’s dentist in a new Brian Robinson ’00; and Fate Delayed, an Charlie Kaufman movie called Synecdoche afternoon of short plays by Julius Galacki New York. On the Yale front, at the request ’98 with readers David Bardeen ’05, Bridget of Richard Nelson (Faculty), I came to new Flanery ’02, Nathanael Johnson ’03, Louis Haven to talk with three of the Drama School Plante ’69, and Jennifer Riker ’01. Yolanda and I also made a short video for YCH’s ‘Flicks playwrights. I later came back to see the Among Friends—Yale Edition’ called The Seven Carlotta Festival, which I attended with my daughter, Lily, who is a junior at Yale College Minute Howl. Hey, Jonathan Miller ’75—that majoring in History and a playwright in means I finally finished my sound project the ‘O’Neill at Yale’ project. The plays I saw from our class! Kind regards and the best to were amazing. I also enjoyed the Wesley Fata all.” celebration in March.” Robert Long ’76 writes, “I am in my 30th Stephen Rowe ’75 says, “Last fall, I year of consulting on the design of performing played the mercurial Dr. Miranda in Ariel arts buildings and I still enjoy almost every Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden at Baltimore’s day of it. Some current projects include a CENTERSTAGE. In March, I worked on the new home for the long-running PBS program ‘Austin City Limits’ in Austin, Texas, and a new West End-to-Broadway transfer of Frost/Nixon starring Frank Langella and Michael Sheen. recital hall for the Rockport Chamber Music Film work includes The Pink Panther, Spinning Festival in Rockport, Massachusetts. I was Into Butter, Awake and a lovely indie Red Doors saddened to learn of the passing of George about a quirky Chinese-American family Izenour (Former Faculty), who introduced (2005 Tribeca Film Festival Award for Best me to my career.” Narrative).” Jonathan Marks ’72, ’84 dfa, ’68 yc Robert (Bob) Sandberg ’77 writes, “Our (Former Faculty) has been serving as Interim son, Eric, graduated from Yale College in June Dean of the College of Visual and Performing 2007 and begins Yale Law School in the fall. Arts at Texas Tech since the end of 2005. Our daughter, Megan, is now the Associate Kate McGregor-Stewart ’74 writes, “Life Artistic Director at the Providence Black is good! I continue to work as an actress Repertory Company where she directed the despite my advanced years and I also love The poster for Fate Delayed by Julius Galacki ’98, produced by Yale Cabaret Hollywood.
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premiere of my play Done. A selection from my play In Between, produced by the George Street Playhouse and published by Playscripts, is in Best Stage Scenes 2006 and I won ART’s ‘Discovering Justice’ contest with my play The Trials of the Massachusetts Servants.” Katharine Stapleton ’71 is acting in films after raising her two girls as a single mom. She’s completed over twenty independent projects, two of which—In the Soup, a comedy pilot, and Happy Holidays—are now being distributed for release. Meryl Streep ’75, ’83 dfa hon gave a lecture at Princeton University in December 2006. Tickets to the conversation sold out in a matter of minutes. Michael Cadden ’76, ’71 yc, director of the Program in Theater and Dance at Princeton, introduced her to the student crowd. Edith Tarbescu ’76 is the author of four children’s books and also continues to write plays for adults. Her latest work is a one-woman show titled Suffer Queen, which takes place in Dublin, Ireland, with the protagonist playing five characters, including her husband. The play was performed at The Vortex Theatre in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A New York agent called it a “fine one-hander with a great role for an actress.” Edith asks, “If anybody is looking for a one-woman play, please contact me at tarbescu@comcast.net.” Donald Thomas ’75 shares, “I continue to work as a lighting designer, now based out of Baltimore. In May 2007, I designed Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette for Michigan Opera Theatre in Detroit. I’ll be back with Michigan Opera Theatre again in October to design the lights for the world premiere of Cyrano, based on Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac with music composed by David DiChiera. “During the past season, I’ve had the pleasure of designing a couple of plays and musicals as well. I designed the world premiere of Irene Wurtzel’s play In the Mood at the Olney Theatre Center in Maryland, and productions of Ira Levin’s Deathtrap and the musical The Man of La Mancha at the MaltzJupiter Theatre in Florida. I’ve also spent time this year teaching a lighting design class for the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.” Mark Travis ’70 just returned from directing a documentary on the Micronesian Island of Satawal. Approaching Twilight documents the life of the Grand Master Navigator Pius “Mau” Pialiug, who has single-handedly revived the art and craft of Polynesian non-instrument navigation. The film will be aired on PBS in the fall of
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Around the World 2007. Mark also teaches film directing all over Europe and Asia. He is the author of the best-seller Directing Feature Films and is currently consulting on several film projects in Los Angeles and Cornwall, England. www. markwtravis.com. Jeff Wanshel ’72 shares, “This is my first e-mail update. We are dragged, kicking and screaming, into the new age. I recently had two plays, Diamond Cut Diamond and Ophelia, published by Playscripts, Inc. (and playscripts. com); had a new play, Modern Entrepreneur, consisting of two one-acts, read at Hudson Stage Company in Briarcliff Manor, New York; and had a short story, String Man, published by the fledgling Westchester Review. I’m also teaching playwriting at Manhattanville College and ‘American Theatre in Our Time’ at SUNY Purchase. I went to Yale School of Drama in May to take in a play from the Carlotta Festival—extraordinarily professional and well done. Congratulations to all involved.” Deborah (Van Drimmelen) Wooldridge Bill Aronson ’83, his wife Lisa Vogel, and their ’79 is still teaching Rhetoric at Coe College children, Anna and Jake. in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She had a lifetime dream last summer: two weeks in Moscow and St. Petersburg to present on a panel for the Russian Communication Association. She ............................ writes, “Before you get too impressed, the field is very much in its infancy in Russia so we are Bill Aronson ’83 shares, “The News, a onetrying to support them as they try to develop act that I wrote, was produced as part of and grow. Otherwise, Jim and I are in reverse Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Marathon 2007. My empty-nesting as one son is living at home to new full-length play was commissioned by save for graduate school and we’re responsible San Francisco’s Magic Theatre. I’ve also been for raising a granddaughter (not his). Not sure writing for Nickelodeon’s The Wonder Pets.” if chasing a two-year-old ages you sooner or Phillip Baldwin ’87 sends greetings from keeps you young, but it does limit theatre Singapore, where he finds lots of film and activities.” culture funding for projects! Robert (Bob) Barnett ’89 writes, “Yale Cabaret Hollywood (YCH) continues to consume much of my time and creative energy. We kicked off our 2006-2007 season with Bulldog Follies, our retro revue complete with songs, skits, and monologues at M Bar, which was peopled with numerous alumni including Phil Proctor ’62 yc; Joe Reynolds ’97 (YCH Board member); Sheryl Arenson ’98; Fred Sanders ’95 yc; Devon Michaels ’95 yc; Adrienne Carter ’99, ’96 yc; Julius Galacki ’98; Stephanie Nash ’88; with Barbara Bragg ’87 making a surprise visit as Dick Cheney. YCH Board member Brian Robinson ’00 emceed the event. As always Walt Klappert ’79 (also a YCH Board member) coordinated publicity and programs for the evening. Mark Travis ’70 on the island of Satawal in “Walt also stepped forward to help select, Micronesia, directing the film Approaching schedule, and coordinate our play and Twilight. screenplay reading series, which was our
80s
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major production initiative for the season. The reading series kicked off with Marduk by Paavo Hall ’79, directed by Laura Stribling ’97 with Devon Michaels and Allison Barcott ’91 yc in the cast. This was followed by Flowering Spurge, directed by Asaad Kelada ’64; If I Had a Hammer, a screenplay by Steve Zuckerman ’74 about The Weavers, which was directed by Fred Sanders; and Fate Delayed, a program of short plays by Julius Galacki with Bridget Flanery ’02, Louis Plante ’69 and Jennifer Riker ’01 in the cast. “We also started an ongoing series of short film screenings at M Bar under the moniker Flicks Among Friends, producing three programs including a special ‘Yale Edition’ presented the evening of the annual Winter Party. The short films highlighted the acting, directing, producing and writing talents of Meg Brogan ’98, Dyanne Asimow ’67, Stephanie Nash, Joe Reynolds, Asaad Kelada, Brian Robinson, Julius Galacki, Graham Shiels ’99, Jon Ecklund ’99, JJ Hickey ’95, Walt and Yolanda Klappert ’77 musc, Obi Ndefo ’97, D.B. Woodside ’96, and Michael Goodfriend ’96. Brian Robinson hosted all three evenings. “We’re wrapping up our season with a workshop production of Dyanne Asimow’s punk rock musical rocksong, which I will be directing and features Jennifer Riker, Devon Michaels, Kathleen Gray ’70 and Joe Reynolds in the cast. “Meanwhile, I’m enjoying playing the ‘sub’ for Stephanie Nash, stepping in to teach her ‘Directing for Film’ class at Pasadena’s prestigious Art Center College of Design when she’s out for auditions and acting gigs. I’m also working on a big hush-hush corporate writing job for the Saudis, which keeps my head spinning.” Angela Bassett ’83 and Courtney B. Vance ’86 share, “We indeed are well and ‘busy as bees!’ If you haven’t heard, the family has grown by two—yes, we were blessed in January 2006 with the gift of twins—Bronwyn Golden (girl) and Slater Josiah (boy)! They are very well and seem to thrive on changing our lives. Just when we thought we had the ‘marriage thing’ figured out—wham! Twins! Of course, we wouldn’t have it any other way. In fact, we scarcely remember life without them. But if that wasn’t enough change in our lives, in 2005 we decided to write a book about how we got to the point where we decided to say, ‘I do.’ Entitled Friends: A Love Story, our book charts how we navigate the choppy, shark-infested waters of Hollywood where many a marriage has ended up beached
Alumni Notes
Teresa Eyring ’89, the new Executive Director of Theatre Communications Group. or on the rocks. We also relate our journey to parenthood and even have a word or two for singles! But we have survived and thrived in this town because we have made a commitment that our marriage is more important than what we do. The book was published in February of 2007.” As Director of New Play Development for Arena Stage, Mark Bly ’80 has recently commissioned new plays from Yale School of Drama alumni Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa ’03, Kenneth Lin ’05, Marcus Gardley ’04, and James Magruder ’88. Mark just completed a three-week workshop as dramaturg for Moises Kaufman’s 33 Variations, which will premiere in the fall of 2007 at Arena. Mark is also working on Arena premieres of a musical adaptation of Gloria Naylor’s Women of Brewster Place by Tim Acito ’02 and an adaptation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol by James Magruder, which is now set in Washington, D.C., in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. He moderated a panel at Georgetown University entitled 21st Century Issues in Playwriting that featured Nilo Cruz (Former Faculty), David Henry Hwang ’83, Charles Randolph-Wright and Karen Zacarias. The panel’s transcript was published by American Theatre in April 2007. Kate Burton ’82 recently starred as Madam Ranevskaya in the Huntington Theatre Company’s production of The Cherry Orchard,
translated by Richard Nelson, (Faculty). Donald Holder ’86 designed the lights for the show. Richard “Rick” Butler ’87 has had a busy year as Production Designer for the new NBC series “The Black Donnellys,” being filmed in New York. He traveled to the Venice International Film Festival for the opening of his second movie for actor/director Ethan Hawke entitled The Hottest State, which will be in theatres in August 2007. His designs for Rocket Science were on display at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (the movie won the Director’s Prize), and it will also be on the big screen later this year. Flakes, a comedy set in New Orleans with Christopher Lloyd and Zoe Deschanel that takes place in the pre-Katrina days, opened in March 2007 at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas. Ben Cameron ’81 (Faculty) became the Program Director, Arts at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation in New York in 2006, supervising a $15.6 million grants program focusing on organizations and artists in the theatre, contemporary dance, jazz, and presenting fields. Previously, he served for more than eight years as the Executive Director of Theatre Communications Group. In April 2007, he was inducted into The College of Fellows of the American Theatre at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, an honorary organization comparable in theatre to the National Academy of Sciences. Previous inductees include Jennifer Tipton (Faculty), Ming Cho Lee (Faculty), and the late Lloyd Richards. Bennett Cohen ’84 wrote that a book he co-wrote with Prentice Earl Sanders, the first African-American Chief of the San Francisco Police Department, is being published in September 2007 by Arcade Publishing. The title is The Zebra Murders: A Season of Killing, Racial Madness, and Civil Rights. More about the book can be found at www.arcadepub.com or by e-mailing Bennett at bencohen@earthlink. net. After four years, Marion Koltun Dienstag ’83 left the post of Executive Director at Dance Theatre Workshop in New York to become the National Director of Major Gifts for the Jewish Tehological Seminary’s William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education. Teresa Eyring ’89 is the new Executive Director of Theatre Communications Group (TCG). She was most recently the Managing Director of The Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis. Marcus Giamatti ’87 has a recurring role on the new HBO series “Tell Me You Love Me.” He
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Lost Alumni: 1980s We’ve lost touch with the following alumni! If you know how to reach them, please pass on their contact information by e-mailing ysd.alumni@yale.edu or calling 1-800-YSD-CUES. Elizabeth Adams ’86 Wendy Ayers ’87 Mary Ball ’88 Peter Bartholomew ’84 Patricia Benoit ’81 D. Stuart Browne ’82 Barbara Carroll ’85 Daniel Cork ’81 Thomas Costello ’85 David Cunningham ’86 Anne Doughty ’85 Danna Doyle ’85 John Durst ’87 Michael Engler ’85 Linda Funsten ’88 Elizabeth Geertruida ’89 Keith Grant ’82 Gordon Gray ’83 Hope Hartup ’82 Sharon Helsel ’85 Bruce Hurlbut ’84 Amy Hurlow ’83 Seth Jacobs ’84 Tama Janowitz ’83 Michael Johnson ’87 Ann Justin ’84 Philippa Keil ’83 Lenore Kletter ’83 Raymond Kluga ’81 Joshua Kovar ’89 Gene Lakin ’82 William Lang ’86 Louis Lappin ’81 David Layman ’84 D. Michael Lazo ’86
Judith Lewis ’82 Keh-Hua Lin ’89 Jan Matlis ’80 Theresa McElwee ’86 Melvern McKenzie ’87 Michael Michalski ’88 Isabell Monk ’81 Julie Moore ’89 Philomena Muinzer ’80 David Nelson ’86 Sue Nilsson ’86 Howard O’Brien ’82 Philip O’Donnell ’80 Won Park ’87 A. Ivan Polley ’86 Tamara Revels ’88 Roxanne Rogers ’86 Laurence Schwartz ’84 Gail Shapiro ’89 George Sharp ’89 Lynn Siefert ’83 Mark Simon ’86 Cameron Smith ’89 Roger Smith ’83 Mark Stradinger ’80 Jeffrey Tagher ’86 Carolyn Talarr ’88 Tamara Turchetta ’88 Susan Wigger ’85 David Wiles ’80 Rose Winters ’86 Craig Wolfe ’87 Judy Zanotti ’82
is also working as a professional session and live bass guitarist in Los Angeles. Anne Hamburger ’86 reports, “I have now been at Disney for six and a half years as the Executive Vice President of Creative Entertainment for Disney Parks and Resorts. It has been a terrific experience, bringing in great creative theatrical writers, directors, composers and designers to work in the parks. Our most recent show was Finding Nemo: The Musical. Bobby Lopez (of Avenue Q fame) and his wife, Kristen Anderson-Lopez, wrote the book, lyrics and score. Peter Brosius directed and it included a terrific group of designers including Skip Mercier ’83. We’ve also worked with scores of other Yale School of Drama alumni designers including Myung Hee Cho ’95, Matt Frey ’96, Donald Holder ’86, and Walt Spangler ’97. I’m enjoying life
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Around the World in Southern California with my husband, Rafe, and 9-year-old twins, Hannah and Owen.” Steve Hendrickson ’81 shares, “I write this from Palm Beach where, when I’m not lolling on the dunes, I’m appearing in the world premiere of Thomas Gibbon’s A House With No Walls at Florida Stage. When that closes, I immediately decamp for Murderers at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. 2006 was a fun year which kept me in Minneapolis for the full twelve months. I started the year doing Shadow Language for Michael Bigelow Dixon, as part of the Guthrie’s Construction Zone new play reading series.
Then followed the Minneapolis premiere of Caryl Churchill’s A Number at the Illusion Theater; the world premiere of Anon(ymous), Naomi Iizuka’s adaptation of The Odyssey at the Children’s Theatre Company; and Iolanthe at the Skylark Opera. I took a summer break to take my son Ivar on a college tour (he likes Hampshire, Bard, Evergreen, Carleton and Macalester—hates Yale) and then returned to open the Dowling Theatre at the new Guthrie with The Falls, a special piece conceived by Bill Rauch (Yale Rep Associate Artist), written by Jeffrey Hatcher, and directed by Michael John Garcés. I just finished the year by returning to Ten Thousand Things, where
Terrence Witter ’85 Terrence Witter could fill a book with what he’s seen in his ten years as stage manager of the Broadway hit Chicago. Like the time an audience member caught a piece of a lighting instrument that was knocked off the stage. Or the blizzard of 2003, when eight company members were snowed out of Manhattan, and Witter had to pull together a cast from swings and past performers in a matter of hours. Or the difficult days after 9/11, when the entire cast raised $4,000 for the Fire House on 48th Street and 8th Avenue. “The litmus test for leaving the show has always been that I would stay as long as I was proud of what was happening on stage,” he says. Witter has been a stage manager on Broadway since Fences, the 1987 Pulitzer winner that happened to be his thesis production when he was at Yale School of Drama. He almost turned down Chicago, which was supposed to be a four-month engagement at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. Asked why he loves working on the Great White Way, he describes Chicago’s opening night: “The audience just will not stop applauding. It’s like they don’t even want to leave the building—long after the curtain call is over. You just don’t feel that anywhere else.” He also enjoys the small size of the Broadway community, telling friends from his Virginia hometown, “I bet I run into more people on the streets of Manhattan that I haven’t seen in God knows how long than you ever do in your small town.” Witter credits the School of Drama for preparing him for the challenges of a long Broadway run. “It just forced me to be more flexible, which I think makes you more valuable when you Jason Fitzgerald ’08 get out of there.” Terrence would love to hear from classmates and friends; he can be reached at tjwitty@aol.com.
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I played Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. I continue to do the odd voiceover and have helped to transform www.lipservicetalent.com, the only actor-owned AFTRA/SAG voiceover guild in the country, into a complete virtual entity. My dear wife continues to thrive as an elementary media specialist and younger son, Alec, starts high school this fall. I’m always keen to hear from my classmates, so give a shout to stevehendrickson@mac.com.” Richard Houpert ’80 writes, “Currently, I reside in Mansfield, MA. My wife, a Yale Ph.D. in Slavics ’83, is the head of German and Russian at Wheaton College in Norton. I am a member of the I.A., working in New England under the auspices of Local 481, New England Motion Picture Mechanics. I have been on crews for The Departed, Mystic River, Empire Falls and What Lies Beneath, among others. I am also a member of Local 665, Honolulu, where I regularly work for the Hawaii Opera Theatre, and have worked on Lost, The North Shore, and Joe vs. the Volcano, and with Hawaiian musician Henry Kapono and others. My current address is PO Box 2031, Norton, MA 02766 and my cell and work phone is (808) 371-8166. I would love to hear from old friends.” Tom Isbell ’84 tells us, “It’s been a busy year for me. Meriwether Press published my acting book Lessons: The Craft of Acting. In fall 2006, my children’s musical Teddy Roosevelt and the Treasure of Ursa Major was produced at the Kennedy Center’s Family Theater. I wrote the book and political satirist Mark Russell wrote the songs. The show will go on national tour beginning in January 2008. “This past January, I was awarded the Kennedy Center Gold Medallion from the Kennedy Center’s American College Theater Festival. I’m still a professor at the University of Minnesota, Duluth—just completing my thirteenth year!—where I live with my wife, Pat, and our cats, Smokey and Bandit.” Walker Jones ’89 performed in The Good German by David Wiltsie, directed by James Glossman ’88, which was a co-production of the Shadowland Theatre in the Catskills and Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey. This play will be part of the inaugural season of the American National Theatre in New York City where Sean Cullen ’90 is Artistic Director. Jane Kaczmarek ’82 shares, “I’m happy to report I am doing absolutely nothing but being a mom to Frances, age 9; George, age 7; and Mary Louisa, age 4. I’m taking an art class at the Armory and having coffee with Kate Burton ’82 until we drop our daughters off at the Polytechnic School here in Pasadena
Alumni Notes where they’re in the third grade together. Unbelievable! I do keep busy running my foundation Clothes Off Our Back (www. clothesoffourback.org), which auctions celebrity clothes online for children charities. You know the saying that there are three seasons in Los Angeles: fires, mudslides and award shows? I stay plenty busy!” Rebecca “Beckie” Kravetz ’86 writes, “After eighteen years with the Los Angeles Opera, working as the resident mask-maker, principal makeup artist and assistant wig master, I left Los Angeles to focus on my fine art work. I continue to create masks for theatre, but have expanded my work to include non-wearable art masks, installations using masks and figures, and sculpture in bronze and ceramic. I am represented in galleries in Santa Fe and Tucson, and have exhibited in museums, galleries and opera houses across the country. My computer portfolio can be seen online at www. bksculpturestudio.com. “I have been living in Arizona with my husband, journalist Alan Weisman. This summer, we are delighted to be moving back to the East Coast. We are planning to settle in the Massachusetts ‘hill towns,’ where I will set up a new studio and sculpture garden. Having spent the past two years mostly working alone in the studio, I miss the camaraderie and inspiration of live performance, so I will be going back to part time work as an opera makeup artist. I also welcome any opportunities to teach mask and makeup workshops, or to collaborate with directors and designers on mask productions.” Benjamin Lloyd ’88 reports, “I recently published a book about acting called The Actor’s Way: A Journey In Self-Discovery Through Letters (Allworth Press, 2006). On stage, it has been all about drag this season. I played Louise (and other roles) in Lillian Groag’s production of The Imaginary Invalid at The People’s Light and Theatre Company in Pennsylvania, which was translated by YSD classmate James Magruder ’88, ’92 dfa. In April 2007, I will appear as Katarina in an all-male production of The Taming of the Shrew at the Lantern Theater Company in Philadelphia, where Karyn Lyman ’05 is the Managing Director. I must be growing womanly in my old age! I also enjoy teaching at the University of Arts in Philadelphia, and with my classmate Mark Wade ’88 at Arcadia University.” After a two-year odyssey, Mark London ’89 has accepted an offer to return to the Lighting
Design Group (LDG) as a limited partner. He shares, “It was great to hook up with so many fellow alumni during my time away from LDG and I encourage all of you to drop me a line at london@ldg.com. My wife, Gail (Burns) London ’87, is busy teaching in the New York City public schools and is also taking on some freelance grant writing. On the home front, Gail and I are looking at colleges for our oldest daughter, Rachel, and we’re helping our son, Ian, prepare for the NYC Specialized High School exam. Gail can be reached at gailalondon@yahoo.com.” Jim Macak ’87 just completed his first year as Assistant Professor for TV writing and screenwriting at Emerson College in Boston. His play, The Watertown Primary, which he wrote while a playwriting student at YSD, had a staged reading on August 13th in Los Angeles. Originally performed at YSD in 1986, the reading featured Collete Kilroy ’88 and Patrick Kerr ’87—both of whom starred in the original production at YSD in 1986—and Bruce Katzman ’88. Wendy MacLeod ’87 writes, “My new play Birnham Woods is premiering at Magic Theatre in San Francisco next year, and my play Things Being What They Are opened at the Bay Street Theatre in May 2007, directed by Leonard Foglia. An independent film of my play Schoolgirl Figure is due to start filming in the summer of 2007.” John Marean ’84 shares, “I have begun working with the Long Island Film Expo (www.longislandfilm.com) as a Technical Consultant. We preview 400–500 films of all types every year, and show about 150 of them. I have also begun teaching stagecraft at my high school and am working on making it a career and technical education program, which would entitle us to federal funding.” Patrick McIntyre ’87 had a reading of Slippery Jo, his 1987 Drama 50s one-act adaptation, in Manhattan at the Actor’s Chapel in February 2007. Katherine Mendeloff ’80 shares, “I have been teaching and directing at the University of Michigan since 1990, and my work has moved increasingly in the area of environmental performance. I brought an original play, fusing Chekhov’s The Seagull and Tennessee Williams’s The Notebook of Trigorin, to the 2005 Chekhov International Festival in Moscow. At the invitation of curator David Kaplan ’79, I am remounting the production at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival in September 2007. I am also in the seventh year as Artistic Director of the popular Shakespeare in the
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Class Year Affiliation Change Does Yale School of Drama categorize you in the wrong class year? Did your thesis drag on much longer than expected? Did you get your Certificate converted to a MFA? While you can’t change your official graduation year, you can be affiliated with your classmates. For example, if you attended the Drama School from fall of 1976 to the spring of 1979—but didn’t receive your actual degree until 1980—you are considered part of the Class of 1980. However, YSD’s Alumni Affairs office can update your affiliation to the Class of 1979. This way, we’ll make sure to put your correct class year affiliation on your name tag at events and you’ll receive contact from the correct Class Agent. To request an affiliation change, contact us at ysd. alumni@yale.edu or via mail at Yale School of Drama, Alumni Affairs Office, PO Box 208244, New Haven, CT 06820-8244.
Arb, summer productions which literally move through the expansive settings of the University Arboretum. I also developed and produced an original play about Darwin in the University Natural History Museum. This past year, I was delighted to finally reconnect with fellow directors David Kaplan and Christopher Markle ’79, as well as visit with my old friend, actress Rebecca Nelson ’79.” Devora Millman ’86 reports, “I am teaching in Chicago, though I’m currently in a job search for a professorship in a college or university. In the last few years, I have lived in Sarasota, Florida; Fort Collins, Colorado; New York City; and Los Angeles. I am still single; I guess I move around too much to have a family, though I do have two quaker parrots, one black lab, and one kitty. I miss my friends from Yale School of Drama.” OyamO ’81 tells us, “In January 2006, my play Killa Dilla was directed by Andre DeShields at The Players Theatre in Greenwich Village. My commissioned musical adaptation of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was performed at Seattle Children’s Theatre in December 2005 and January 2006. Club Paradise, a take on the first chapter of Milton’s Paradise Lost, was workshopped
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Around the World and performed at Manhattanville College in January 2007. The Alliance Theatre’s Collision Program toured this spring with a piece I wrote in collaboration with fifteen high school students, titled The True Chronicle History of Hip Hop Lear, a kind of hip hop version of King Lear. The Collision Program and the collaborative play are being featured in the Spring 2007 issue of Southern Theatre. “In February 2007, I gave a lecture at the Detroit Public Library entitled ‘Black Theatre (An Obituary).’ The Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit commissioned me to write a play about the 1960s turmoil in Detroit, a play which I titled City in a Straint, and it is scheduled to open in May 2007 at the Detroit Institute of the Arts. I’m also currently commissioned by Mosaic to write a play based on the Fisk Jubilee Singers. “In March 2007, I will be part of a roundtable discussion at the University of Michigan’s opening of the Arthur Miller Theatre in our spanking brand new Walgreen Drama Center. “This year, the Oregon Literary Review will publish my play, Mundele Ndombe, based on an African-American missionary who worked in the Congo from 1890–1920.” Pamela Peterson ’86 won the 2006 Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction/Set Decoration/Scenic Design for the “Martha” show. She is currently designing interiors for the “green” renovation of Rhode Island’s historic Weekapaug Inn. Kim Powers ’84 has a “day job” working as a writer for “Primetime Live” at ABC News. In his other life, he’s the author of The History of Swimming (which got a near-rave from The New York Times Book Review). He also has an upcoming novel entitled Capote in Kansas, a fantasia about Truman Capote and Harper Lee,
Alumni Services If you have questions regarding the School of Drama, your classmates or alumni events, we’re here to help! The Office of Alumni Affairs can always be reached at ysd.alumni@yale.edu or via phone at 1-800-YSD-CUES (973-2837). Many other alumni services, including the online Alumni Directory and the Yale Career Network, are available at www.aya.yale.edu.
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in which the ghosts of the murdered Clutters from In Cold Blood come back to haunt them. Both books are published by Carrol and Graf and more information can be found at www. thehistoryofswimming.com. Jane Savitt Tennen ’80 writes, “I recently began as the Director of Development of the Creative Arts Team (CAT), the educational theatre company in residence at the City University of New York. CAT is a phenomenal program—an international leader in drama-ineducation with a robust additional program stream of artist and teacher education—and was my consulting client for a number of years in the 1990s. “On a personal note, my husband, Steve, celebrated his 21st anniversary as Executive Director of Arts Connection; my daughter, Laura, graduated from Wells College with a B.A. in Performing Arts and a minor in English in May 2007; and my son, Gabe, will be a sophomore at Eugene Lang College of the New School in the fall. And yet, in many ways, my time at the Drama School feels like yesterday!” Deborah Simon ’81 shares, “In 2004, we closed The Waygoose, a store of American handcrafts located in Rockville, Maryland, due to an eminent domain project. A mere ten months later, we re-opened in Bethesda in a wonderful area known as Bethesda Row. My business partner of fourteen years retired in spring 2007, so I’m now on my own and am preparing to open a second store as part of the newly redeveloped Rockville Town Square. It will be located at two blocks from the original location and I even managed to get our original phone number back. While I officially retired from the theatre, many of the skills I learned at Yale School of Drama still serve me well. I still hang lights, work out budgets, hire and schedule labor and do a fair amount of set dressing!” Adam Versenyi ’86, ’90 dfa, ’80 yc writes, “This has been a year of both highs and lows. My wife, Sue Versenyi, died of breast cancer with bone metastasis on August 30th. Memorial contributions can be made in her name to the Resource Center for Women and Ministry in the South, an organization that meant a lot to her during her last few years, at 1202 Watts Street, Durahm, NC 27701; www. rcwms.org. “On a happier note, my translation of contemporary Mexican playwright Sabina Berman’s play Heresy was produced by the Immigrant’s Theatre Project at HERE Arts Center in New York during December 2006. I am currently launching a new venture, The Mercurian: A Theatrical Translation Review, a
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Lost Alumni: 1990s We’ve lost touch with the following alumni! If you know how to reach them, please pass on their contact information by e-mailing ysd.alumni@yale.edu or calling 1-800-YSD-CUES. Eloise Albrecht ’91 Christine Benton ’91 Susan Branch ’92 Sharon Challenger ’96 Lisa Diamond ’93 Melody Garrett ’93 Gillian Mahoney ’93 Gregory McClure ’93 C. Morrison-Neuhauser ’91
Leigh Mundy ’90 Caryn Neman ’92 Gloria O’Connell ’94 Jo Ann Ratliff ’93 Kimberly Ross ’98 Katherine Snider ’94 Stephanie Towner ’92 Kevin Wood ’96 Jean Zimmerman ’91
journal that will publish translations of plays and performance pieces from any language into English, as well as articles on the theory of theatrical translation, production histories of translations, rants, polemics, manifestoes, position papers or anything else having to do with translation for the theatre. Those wishing to subscribe or submit material can contact me at anversen@email.unc.edu.” Robert Wierzel ’84 has been designing lights for many projects, including The Grapes of Wrath at the Minnesota Opera; Giulio Cesare at the Seattle Opera; The Heidi Chronicles by Wendy Wasserstein ’76 at Arena Stage; Lincolnesque, a new play by John Strand with sets by Todd Rosenthal ’93, at Cleveland Playhouse; Richard III, directed by Mark Rucker ’92 at California Shakespeare Theatre; and Orphee et Eurydice, with sets designed by John Conklin ’66, at Glimmerglass Opera.
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Janet Allard ’97 is happily married to Joshua Foldy ’98. Upcoming projects for Janet include a production of Vrooommm!: A NASComedy in the Summer Play Festival in New York City. Vrooommm! will also be published by Samuel French this summer. Her Guthrie commission, Fashionistas, received a staged reading directed by David Lee ’96 in Orlando, Florida, and was recently published in Dramatics Magazine and by Playscripts, Inc. The JCC in Springfield, MA produced Crossing Israel by Martin Blank ’94. The play was originally commissioned by Theater Ariel in Philadelphia.
Alumni Notes Loni Berry ’92 writes, “I am happy to report Theatre’s (ANT) inaugural season in that I am now an expatriate. After starting November 2007 in New York. He shares, “ANT Oakland School for the Arts and serving as has made national headlines with its mission director for five years, I relocated to Thailand to present distinguished new American plays in January. I am having a most fulfilling time and musicals with their original companies teaching English and Theatre, reading books and creative teams at a theatre center in I’ve always wanted to read, finishing two New York. One of the plays being considered plays that have been in my head for six years, for the first season is David Wiltse’s The and composing new music. Asia is treating Good German, which was directed by James me very well.” Glossman ’88 and starred Walker Jones Ed Blunt ’99 can be seen in two upcoming ’89 in its Playwrights Theatre production films: Doris and Bernard, with Ralph Fiennes, in Madison, NJ. I’m also playing George and the independent film The Northern Clooney’s brother in Michael Clayton, a new Kingdom in which he plays the lead. He film being written and directed by Tony is successfully motivating the masses in Gilroy, which is set to open nationwide on corporate settings, training seminars, colleges September 14th.” and universities. Ed’s company, Blunt Artistry Jon Ecklund ’99 shares, “Writing a western (www.bluntartistry.com), also does volunteer for a small film company in Colorado, presentations for youth groups, churches and auditioning, and enjoying being back in New adults who are working on a second chance York!” and a fresh start. Al Espinosa ’94 writes, “I just finished Ed Check ’90 writes, “I still enjoy my a one-month mini tour of Noël Coward’s full-time teaching job at Smith College in Private Lives for L.A. TheatreWorks. We Northampton, MA. Professionally during the traveled mostly up and down the East Coast summer months, I have been designing sets and I saw some wonderful towns that I’d for Shakespeare & Co. in Lenox, MA—Hamlet, never seen before. I’ll be appearing in the The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Taming of upcoming Steven Soderberg film, Guerilla, the Shrew and King John. At New Century with Benecio Del Toro.” Theatre, here in Northampton, my set design Cornelia (Connie) Evans ’93 and Vladimir credits include Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Shpitalnik ’92 share, “Since we last wrote, The Heidi Chronicles, How the Other Half Lives, our family has grown. We have four children and Copenhagen. Along with my theatrical now: two from Vladimir’s prior marriage— work, I am currently designing a permanent Anna, 20 and Liz, 22; and two from our exhibit space at the Flynt Center of Early New marriage: Alexandra, 9 and Liev, 2. Anna England Life in historic Deerfield, MA.” is now a third-year student at the Moscow Elizabeth Hope Clancy’s ’91 recent Art Theatre School, where Vladimir was a costume design credits include Purgatorio student when he came to help remount the by Ariel Dorfman, Private Lives by Noël production of Chekhov’s Ivanov in 1990—the Coward, and The Lady from Dubuque by joint MXAT/YRT production starring William Edward Albee at Seattle Repertory Theatre; Hurt. and Shakespeare’s Richard III directed by “Connie now works as the Director of Bartlett Sher with Kristin Flanders ’91, Development at Long Wharf Theatre, serving Moonlight and Magnolias with Tom Beckett with Joan Channick ’89 (Faculty), Managing ’91 at Intiman Theatre; A Few Good Men, Director, and Joshua Borenstein ’02, starring Rob Lowe, in London’s West End; Associate Managing Director.” Acts of Mercy by Michael John Garces, directed Charles Evered ’91 is in pre-production to by Gia Forakis ’04; and Sally Silvers and direct a feature film version of his play Adopt Dancers’ 25th Anniversary concert last year at a Sailor, starring Bebe Neuwirth. The play will P.S. 122. “Please check out my new website at be published by Broadway Play Publishing http://web.mac.com/ehclancy. Best wishes to all!” with a release date of September 2007. Butterscotch and Fudge, a new play by Charles wrote an episode of USA Network’s Magaly Colimon ’98, was accepted in the Monk, starring Tony Shalhoub ’80, that Downtown Urban Theatre Festival in New aired in December 2006 and is also currently York. developing a one-hour drama. Charles and Sean Cullen ’90 wrote to us from Oregon’s his wife, Wendy Rolfe-Evered, divide their Portland Center Stage, where he was about time between Princeton, NJ, and Los Angeles. to open The Pillowman, playing Tupolski. Jenny (Friend) ’98 and Erik Bolling He shared that he and his colleagues were ’99 welcomed their first baby girl, Greta planning to launch the American National Charlotte, on April 21, 2007. They share, “We
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are still loving our lives in Minneapolis at The Children’s Theatre Company and SECOA (respectively).” Michael Goodfriend ’96 says, “It’s been a year of musicians, assassins, blessing, farmers, princes and nations, beginning with playing Vivaldi at Symphony Space in New York. Then I shot David B. (“DB”) Woodside ’96 in his film First, where I play a Serbian assassin carrying out the orders of Jim Shanklin ’97. I blessed believers and converted doubters as the disciple Thaddeus in an A&E special about the early spread of Christianity in the Middle East. I took a turn as the moody Dane in productions of Hamlet at Irondale Ensemble in Maine and New York. I sang about farm life in Wisconsin at Madison Rep’s New Play Festival and am now portraying a Syrian-born Canadian who is mistaken for a terrorist in Arrivals at Bank Street Theatre. I continue to produce Left Jab on XM Satellite Radio and am always looking for trouble! Love to all!” Jessica Mann Gutteridge ’94 tells us, “Corin Gutteridge ’96 and I are still happy living in Port Washington, NY, where our son, Rafe, is getting ready to start kindergarten in the fall. He was joined in June 2006 by his baby brother, Lucas, who was born on my birthday. I am counsel at Cablevision where I work on all matters relating to marketing, advertising and intellectual property.” Eleanor Holdridge ’97 shares, “I directed Hamlet at Shakespeare & Co. and Macbeth at Milwaukee Shakespeare, both beautifully designed with costumes by Jessica Ford ’04 and lights by Les Dickert ’97. I also worked
Name, Address or E-mail Address Change We love to see you at our Alumni parties and celebrations – but we can’t invite you if we don’t know where you are! If you’ve recently moved, changed your name or updated your e-mail address, let us know! Contact us at ysd.alumni@yale. edu or at 1-800-YSD-CUES (973-2837) and we’ll update your record for you. You can also make changes to your contact information online through your Yale alumni account at www.aya.yale.edu.
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Corin and Jessica Gutteridge, ’96 and ’94 respectively, at Jim Larkin’s (also ’96) wedding. on Noises Off at Triad Stage with Brandy Zarle ’97 as Belinda and Preston Lane ’96 playing the director Lloyd Dallas.” The paintings and biography of Suzanne Jackson ’90 have been featured in numerous publications, including ARS FEMINA 2— International Women Artists’ Art Annual, and Who’s Who in American Art: 1976–2007. Jackson’s works are scheduled for a 2008 exhibition in the Main Gallery at the Albany Museum in Albany and a 2009 exhibition is scheduled in the South and Esbenshade Galleries of The Parkersburg Art Center in West Virginia. Her work can be found online at www.suzannefjackson.com. Karen (Lordi) Kirkham ’92 writes, “An event-filled year! I directed the world premiere of Andre Gregory’s Bone Songs at Pendragon Theater in Saranac Lake, New York; got married; and had a baby girl! My new e-mail address is kirkhamk@dickinson. edu.” David Koppel ’98 relocated to San Jose where he continues to produce illuminating and imaginative plays with his professional, nonprofit Arclight Repertory Theatre Company (www.arclightrep.org). Arclight’s most recent production of Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story was directed by Andrew Utter ’97 at the Exit Stage on Taylor in San Francisco. Arclight’s next production A Write to Heal is a documentary theatre piece dealing with domestic violence and abuse. The play ran for two nights (July 14 and 15) at the BRAVA Theatre in San Francisco. David also assists the Arts Council of Silicon Valley with
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its advocacy, marketing and financial support of small and medium-sized arts organizations throughout Silicon Valley. He is the founder and lead organizer for Artists 4 Obama ’08. Daniel Elihu Kramer ’91 shares, “In 2006, my new play Love Suicide was workshopped during my residency at Cleveland Public Theatre as part of their Big [Box] series, and had a reading in Boston as part of Boston Theatre Works’ Unbound series. My production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Boston Theatre Works ran in February and March of 2007. It featured a cast of only eight, and doubled Theseus with Titania, and Hippolyta with Oberon. The Boston Globe called it, ‘An enchantment of delights…it manages to cast the spell that can elude more lavish stagings.’ I’m teaching at Kenyon College in Ohio, where last year I directed Juvenilia written by my Kenyon colleague Wendy MacLeod ’87.” Sarah Lambert ’90 writes, “2006– 2007…busy as ever! Designed a batch of musicals—Hair at Perseverance Theatre in Alaska; Desperate Measures at the New York Musical Theatre Festival; One Mo’ Time at Crossroads Theatre Company in New Jersey; Tim and Scrooge at Queens Theater in the Park; as well as another production of The People’s Temple, a play with music, this time at the Guthrie. Plays without music include The Pavilion at Penguin Rep; The Old Law at Marymount Manhattan College; and The Taming of the Shrew at New York University’s Experimental Theatre Wing. Other projects include two new dance pieces with Dzul
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Dance; event designs for Ithaca College and Texas A&M (The Herson Group); and in spring 2007, a guest teaching position at Naropa University’s graduate program in performance studies. Current works in progress include Fly being developed by Lincoln Center Institute; Playing Alexina, developed by Theater of Necessity and being read by Orlando Shakespeare Festival’s Play Fest 2007; and a new piece about Charlotte Cushman, being developed by the Tectonic Theater Project. And, of course, the ongoing renovation and restoration of our new/old house in Port Jervis, NY!” Malia Lewis ’97 shares, “After eight years in Chicago (including stints at Victory Gardens Theatre, the Goodman Theatre, and as a stay-at-home mom cum general contractor), I moved to Cleveland when Margot got a job at the Cleveland Clinic. Two years later, Claude and Ella are thriving in elementary school and I have started a new phase of my professional life. This new (for-profit!) venture into landlording has taken off as Blue Real Estate, and I am relishing the prospect of gutting two bathrooms and a kitchen before this issue goes to press. Please look me up if you are anywhere near Cleveland! I can be reached at malia.lewis@sbcglobal.net or (216) 371-1024. We have plenty of room for visitors, and I promise not to make you do any work!” Laura Brown MacKinnon ’93 (Faculty) writes, “I am still teaching in the Stage Management department at Yale School of Drama (my fifth year!).” Maria Matasar-Padilla ’99, ’05 dfa shares, “I’m still in New York City with my husband, Matt Matasar, and our toddler, Catrina, who was born in 2005. I’ve been working in television for the past seven years, first at ABC News and, most recently, in long-form documentaries with The Documentary Group. It turns out that being a good producer is surprisingly similar to being a good dramaturg—go figure! I’m always eager to get in touch with old friends, so feel free to drop me a line at matasar101@yahoo.com.” Rob Melrose ’96 writes, “The Cutting Ball Theater continues to thrive. We were voted ‘Best of San Francisco 2006’ by the SF Weekly. Last season, I directed Suzan-Lori Parks’ The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World and then spent the summer in Italy studying Commedia dell’Arte with Antonio Fava. This season, we did a production of my new translation of Woyzeck and we have been developing Kevin Oakes’ new play Mr. Fujiyama’s Electric Beach with a company of six actors. In 2007, I will be directing
Alumni Notes plays by three of my favorite playwrights: Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (with set design by Fred Kinney ’02); the world premiere of Fujiyama with The Cutting Ball; and then Beckett’s Happy Days at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.” Paul Niebanck ’97 tells us, “A banner year for 2007: six productions! Three of them were Off-Broadway, and three were regional productions. Wonderful people and a fantastic range of roles—truly blessed. I seem to be the “go-to” guy for in-a-clinch casting. Most recently understudying Bill W and Dr. Bob at New World Stages, which was an event, more than a play, about the guys who started AA. Dan Meeker ’98 did the lights. My wife, Jess, just took over as Associate General Manager at Lincoln Center Theater. We’ll probably spend most of the summer at Chautauqua Theater Company, where she is the Managing Director, too.” Anna R. Oliver ’92 is based in California at the moment. She recently designed costumes for The Pillowman at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, directed by Les Waters and will be designing Man and Superman for California Shakespeare Festival in summer 2007, directed by Jonathan Moscone ’93. Anna was nominated for a Helen Hayes Award for Don Juan, which was remounted at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., in January 2006, directed by Stephen Wadsworth. She was also nominated for her work in Restoration Comedy, a new play by Amy Freed and directed by Sharon Ott at Seattle Rep and California Shakespeare Festival in 2006. Laura Wilts Perlow ’93 is now the Foundation Relations Manager for the Lyric Opera of Chicago. She shares, “I started in January 2007 and am having a great time. Our boys are getting big—Alec is 9 and a huge Harry Potter fan. Ethan is 5 and is just loud; maybe he has a future in opera! If you’re in Chicago, look me up—I can be reached at lperlow@lyricopera.org.” Jane Shaw ’98 writes, “It has been a great year. I am on the NEA/TCG Career Development Program, which led me to assist on the Utopia plays at Lincoln Center Theater; American Opera Projects; and a video project with David Byrne. Sound designs have varied from Big Dance Theater’s Other Here at the Japan Society (with Jennifer Tipton (Faculty) designing the lights) to The Merchant of Venice with F. Murray Abraham (Linda Cho ’98 designed the costumes) to Target Margin Theatre’s As Yet We Are Young and Rash. Good luck to this year’s graduates!”
Asolo Rep in Florida recently produced the world premiere of Pride and Prejudice, adapted by Catherine Sheehy ’92,’99 dfa (Faculty). It was directed by Mark Rucker ’92 with sets by Aleksandra (Ola) Maslik ’06 and costumes by Katherine Roth ’93. Catherine was also the dramaturg for Trouble in Mind at Baltimore’s CENTERSTAGE, directed by Irene Lewis ’66 with Leroy McClain ’04 in the cast. Liev Schreiber ’92 is currently starring in Talk Radio on Broadway. Neil Mazzella ’78 served as Technical Supervisor and Judith (Judy) Hansen ’04 was one of the production’s producers. Julia Smeliansky ’97 writes, “I’m still here in Cambridge at the American Repertory Theatre (ART), where I am the Administrative Director of the ART Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard University. Lately I’ve also been translating for the stage. Over the past year, my translations by contemporary American and European playwrights have been produced at major
Russian theatres including the Moscow Art Theatre, the Pushkin Theatre of Moscow, and the Komissarzhevskaya Theatre of St. Petersburgh, among many others. In May 2007, my translation of Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman will have its Russian premiere at the Moscow Art Theatre.” Chris Weida ’95 shares, “Checking in from the Upper Midwest! Personally, Rosanne and I are still in Milwaukee and very excited that we are adding a fourth child to the family in early June 2007. S/he will join Alex, Connor and Emily in rounding out the younger end of the family. Professionally, I am now the Director of Project Management for the TJ Hale Company, a manufacturer of higher-end store fixtures, where I have been for the past five years. While this new position is more responsibility, it also means a little less travel.”
Vincent J. Cardinal ’90 Robert Perry ’99 Cynthia Kocher ’00 Pablo Souki ’05 When Vince Cardinal ’90 became chair of the University of Miami Department of Theater Arts in 2001, he brought together the best faculty he could find for the undergraduates in his charge. That group includes three additional School of Drama alumni—Cynthia Kocher ’00, Associate Pablo Souki ’05, Vincent J. Cardinal ’90, Chair and Professor of Stage Management; Cynthia Kocher ’00 and Robert Perry her husband Robert Perry ’99, Visiting Assistant Professor of Lighting Design; and ’99 at the University of Miami. Pablo Souki ’05, Production Manager and Technical Director of the Jerry Herman Ring Theater. “I think when you have a team with similar standards and similar experiences,” Cardinal says, “it’s easier to create the context for young artists to work in; so when I see that somebody’s from Yale, and I have a sense of what they’re coming from, it helps us know what to expect.” Cardinal, Perry, Kocher, and Souki all admit that Yale provided a living illustration for their educational work. “I modeled quite a few of my classes off of Jennifer [Tipton]’s technique,” Perry says, while Kocher brings the same philosophy of cross-disciplinary education that she found at the School of Drama to her stage managers. As for Souki, he expects all his students to be “neat and workmanlike—ask any TD&P what ‘neat and workmanlike’ is all about.” While Cardinal is a theatre education veteran, having taught at NYU, Ohio University and Circle Repertory, education has been a new challenge for his colleagues. Kocher explains, “I feel like I just left Yale School of Drama with such a strong base education, that for each new adventure that I go into, each new job, maybe I don’t know exactly how to do it, but I have the education and the toolbox of skills to figure it out.” Jason Fitzgerald ’08
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May Adrales ’06 currently works as an Artistic Associate at The Public Theater. She is a member of the Women’s Project Director’s Lab 2006–2008, Soho Rep’s Writers/Directors Lab 2006–2007, and is a directing fellow for New York Theatre Workshop. In May 2007, she directed Ophelia: Opera in Blue, originally developed at the Yale Cabaret, at Prospect Theatre Company, where Melissa Huber ’01 is the Managing Director. She also directed Jose Rivera’s Cloud Tectonics for The Pure Theatre in Charleston, SC, in March 2007. Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa ’03 writes for the Sensational Spider-Man series for Marvel comics. His play Rough Magic, a modern take on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, was performed as part of the “Shakespeare in Washington” series in Washington, D.C. He’s also working on the big-screen version of his play Dark Matters for Warner Brothers. In March 2007, Heather Lea Anderson ’03 worked on Naomi Iizuka’s Strike-Slip at the Humana Festival, directed by Chay Yew. She also played Lady Percy in Henry IV, Part I at Milwaukee Shakespeare Company, directed by Stephen Fried ’05 with Jeffrey Withers ’05 as Hal. Heather’s husband, Michael Boll, now runs Robert Stark Lighting, an events
Alex Speiser and Amy Boratko ’06 on their wedding day. lighting company. Heather and Michael live in Astoria, Queens. Amy Boratko ’06 and Alex Speiser were married on December 30, 2006, at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. Monica Achen ’06, Alex Grennan ’06, and Michael Walkup ’06 attended. Amy is pursuing her DFA and is an
Shannon C.M. Flynn ’02 with her husband, Kelly, and their daughter, Molly.
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Artistic Coordinator at Yale Rep and a teaching fellow at Yale College. Michael Broh ’00 shares, “Not much has changed for me in recent years. I am currently the Production Manager at American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin, where I live with my wife, Stacy Wood, and my children, Johan, Rebecca and Joshua. I also serve locally as a volunteer EMT. This summer, I will be working with a variety of YSD graduates, including Takeshi Kata ’01, Georgia Lee ’01, Fitz Patton ’01, and Todd Rosenthal ’93.” Courtney (Todd) DiBello ’02 writes, “Hello, friends! I have been very busy with my biggest production ever…my baby girl! Waverly Rose was born July 2, 2006. My husband, Joe, and I are very proud of this accomplishment. Though she keeps me very busy, I am still an active stage manager with local professional theatres and, believe it or not, I have found myself sitting in the director’s chair on several occasions. The position seems to suit me rather well! Overall, life since Yale has been good to me. I do miss all of the amazing people that I had the honor of learning with and from. I look forward to everything that lies ahead.” Janann Eldredge ’06 writes, “I am enjoying settling into life in the Rocky Mountains. After graduation in May 2006, I moved westward to assume the position of Assistant Production Manager for the Denver Center Theatre Company (DCTC). Recently, I was
Alumni Notes
Rishi and Rachana (Singh) Garg’s ’01 newest production: Syan Rishi Garg. also given the role of New Play Coordinator for DCTC. In February 2007, we produced our second New Play Summit, where we showcased four new scripts, presented a panel discussion about playwriting across boundaries, and showcased our world premiere of Jason Grote’s new play, 1001. It has been a pleasure to come across other YSD alumni during my brief time here, including Nicholas Avila ’06 and Jeanine Serralles ’02.” Susan Finque ’03 shares, “The highlight of my year in terms of the theatre was the Jeff Awards in Chicago. My production of the musical Kiss of the Spiderwoman at the Bailiwick Theatre (some may remember that I proposed this show for my thesis before I settled on the Marivaux) was nominated for eight awards. We swept in all categories, including a duet of Best Actor awards for the two principal actors, and a directing award for me. Another five minutes of fame. Sigh. “My partner Maria and I are still living in Southern Wisconsin, in the historic town of Evansville. Our little coffeehouse (our town’s one and only) flourishes both as a business
and as a center for the community. We Dialogue/Acting Coach since the first season. have added a tapas and wine night, and still In Summer 2007, I’ll be directing another produce live music a couple of times a month. episode. Much thanks to Steve Zuckerman A newer headline would read that we started ’74, Assad Kelada ’64, James Burrows ’65, foster-parenting, and are currently caring Steve Robman ’73 and Tom Moore ’68 for for a brother and a sister who are eleven and their insight and encouragement. thirteen. Some of the most challenging work “Kelly and I still work with our theatre I’ve ever done. Wisconsin passed legislation company, The Hunger Artists. Last season, I that makes it illegal to recognize our life directed the world premiere of The Pledge partnership, and this was a devastating blow Drive by Jason Lindner ’02, an adaptation for those of us who worked so hard with Fair of Kafka’s The Hunger Artist (the story from Wisconsin to defeat this mean-spirited attack which our theatre gets its name). This season, against equal civil rights for all. We are not I worked on Ingmar Berman’s Nora, his sure how long we will stay in Wisconsin. We adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. We have live quite openly, and given the visibility the privilege of working with a number of of our business, we are greatly appreciated Yale School of Drama alumni, including Gene in our community. So the contradiction Rogers ’02, Aga Kunska ’02, Corrine Larson between the new ‘law’ and our daily ’03, Michael Field ’02, Daniel Urlie ’02, experience in town is a constant puzzlement. Simone Nelson ’01 and Amy Morse ’00.” Stay tuned. Something is in store for Maria Stephen Fried ’05 shares, “Things are going and I, and who knows, maybe our paths will pretty well with me—I’m still at Shakespeare cross with yours. Hope you are all doing well.” Theatre, where I’m currently directing the Shannon Flynn ’02 tells us, “I’ve had a acting interns in a production of Moliere’s busy year both professionally and personally. The School for Wives. In my spare time, I’m Kelly and I welcomed our daughter, Molly, working on a one-man show about Edwin into the world on July 27th. Words can’t Booth that opens at the National Portrait describe the wonder we feel; she continues Gallery in March 2007. Soon I’ll be off to to amaze us! In May 2006, I directed my first Milwaukee Shakespeare to direct Henry episode of television for the Disney Channel’s IV, Part I then back to Washington, D.C., to ‘Hannah Montana,’ where I’ve worked as the remount Michael Kahn’s production of
Using the Technology of Today To share information immediately and to cut back on postage costs, the Alumni Affairs office is communicating with our alumni via e-mail whenever possible. This includes the solicitation of class notes for this publication. Please let us know how to reach you electronically and include us whenever you change your e-mail address. Think we have your address? Share it anyway! Write to ysd.alumni@yale.edu or update your e-mail address through www. aya.yale.edu.
The opening night celebration for Henry IV, Part 1 at Milwaukee Shakespeare Festival. From L-R: Aleksandra (Ola) Maslik ’06 (Set Designer), Jeffrey Withers ’05 (Hal), Heather Lea Anderson ’03 (Lady Percy), Stephen Fried ’05 (Director) and Carrie (Van Deest) Van Hallgren ’06 (Managing Director). Not pictured is Jennifer Moeller ’05 (Costume Designer).
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Around the World Love’s Labour’s Lost—and then off to Illinois Shakespeare to do a Love’s Labour’s Lost of my own.” Adam Ganderson ’06 writes, “Having moved to New York City, I’ve just completed work on an Off-Broadway production of Anon with at Atlantic Theater Company. Other collaborators included Costume Designer Anne Kenney ’04, and actors Remy Auberjonois ’01 and Kate Nowlin ’01. I am about to embark on a showcase directed by Benjamin Mosse ’04 with sound design by Sharath Patel ’06. Needless to say, I’m keeping busy and enjoying the fruits of my Yale School of Drama experience carried out into the world at large.” John Hanlon ’04 writes, “I am teaching English, including senior seminars in 20thCentury American Drama and Modern European Drama, at a prep school in the San Francisco Bay area. I also continue to translate and promote the work of Ukranian/ Russian playwright Maksim Kurochkin. We have had workshops and staged readings at the Lark Play Development Center in New York and Dad’s Garage in Atlanta. I’m returning to acting during the spring in 2007, playing Raskolnikov in the new adaptation of Crime and Punishment at a small theatre in San Jose.” Brendan Hughes ’04 shares, “I have been living in Los Angeles for the last year, pursuing directing in television and film. Through Rolin Jones ’04, I worked on season three of Showtime’s ‘Weeds’ as on-set assistant to director Craig Zisk. I have also been teaching acting at various schools throughout the city, of which there are a ton. There is a large, tight-knit contingent of recent YSD grads out here and life couldn’t be better!”
The groomsmen at the wedding of Amber and Kevin Rich ’04: Bryan Bear, Rolin Jones ’04, the groom, Adam Kempenaar, Steve Rich, Jeff Hallquist, Sam Van Hallgren (husband of Carrie (Van Deest) Van Hallgren ’06), Brendan Hughes ’04, and the bride.
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Ann McLaughlin ’03, Joe Urla ’85, Joe Grifasi ’75, Mary McCabe ’94, Jim Quinn ’94, and Peggy Sasso ’96 at the remembrance for Lloyd Richards at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in July 2007. The Humana Festival of New American Plays produced “The Open Road Anthology,” with plays by Rolin Jones ’04, A. Rey Pamatmat ’03 and Kathryn Walat ’03. Rolin’s currently a writer and producer for Showtime’s “Weeds”; Rey is a resident playwright at Ma-Yi’s Writers’ Lab and has an Ensemble Studio Theatre/Sloan Commission for a play about Alan Touring; and Kate’s most recent play Victoria Martin: Math Team Queen was recently produced by the Women’s Project in Manhattan. Tamar (Klausner) Klein ’06 has designed scenery for Othello and The Taming of the Shrew at the Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival. She assisted Donald Eastman on A Christmas Carol at Westport Country Playhouse and Il Signor Bruschino with the Gotham Chamber Orchestra. Most importantly, she celebrated her wedding to Jeff Klein with friends including Emily Rebholz ’06, Kanae Heike ’06, Mike Floyd ’06 and Jedadiah Schultz ’05. Kenneth Lin ’05 was one of seven playwrights featured in South Coast Rep’s 10th Annual Pacific Playwrights Festival. His play Po’ Boy Tango, which was in the Festival, was also commissioned by SCR. Elena Maltese ’03 tells us, “2006 and 2007 have been great for me professionally and personally. I am in New Hampshire as the Special Projects Manager for The Music Hall, which was named an American Treasure in 2003. I am overseeing a major restoration of this historic site. The theatre remains open during the restoration, and has hosted such great acts as Dan Brown and Alan Alda in our literary series ‘Writers on a New England Stage,’ as well as featured performers such as Seu Jorge and Patti Lupone. I’ve also taken
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to running, and finished my first ‘Reach to the Beach’ race in the fall of 2006, a 208-mile team race. And I’ve purchased my very first convertible—a Volkswagon Cabriolet!” Maulik Pancholy ’03 writes, “This year’s been busy, mainly with television work. I’ve played parts on NBC’s ‘30 Rock’ and Showtime’s ‘Weeds’ (Rolin Jones ’04 is one of the brilliant writers and is also a producer on the show). We’re now in the third season of ‘Weeds’; the second season brought the cast (including myself) a SAG Award Nomination for Outstanding Ensemble in a Comedy Series.” Nicholas Pepper ’01 is the Director of Current Drama Series for ABC. He oversees “Desperate Housewives,” “Lost,” “Ugly Betty,” and “Brothers and Sisters” for the network. He writes, “In my free time, I’ve been flipping houses in Los Angeles and I manage a few apartment buildings that I own. I am very happy to regularly see several classmates including Jane Cho ’01, Patrick Huey ’01, Kathryn Hahn ’01, and Peter Katona ’01.” Zane Pihlstrom ’06 designed the costumes for Bambiland by Efriede Jelinek at the National Theatre of Lithuania. Kevin Rich ’04 shares, “Amber Zettler and I got hitched on November 4, 2006 in Wausau, WI. YSDers in attendance were Brendan Hughes ’04, Rolin Jones ’04, Greg Copeland ’04, Marion Friedman ’05, Carrie (Van Deest) Van Hallgren ’06, and Judy Hansen ’04. Amber is a behavior analyst who works with children with behavior disorders in Waterford, WI. We recently bought a house in nearby Kenosha, where I joined the adjunct theatre faculty at Carthage College. Kenosha’s a great little town right on Lake Michigan within a commutable distance of both
Alumni Notes
Lost Alumni: 2000s We’ve lost touch with the following alumni! If you know how to reach them, please pass on their contact information by e-mailing ysd.alumni@ yale.edu or calling 1-800-YSD-CUES. Elizabeth Mills ’01 Ellen Pierce ’01 Christiane Salomon ’00
Milwaukee and Chicago, and has allowed me to work as an actor in both cities, most recently at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre and Milwaukee Shakespeare (where Carrie Van Hallgren ’06 is Managing Director). I’m still trying to crack the nut at Milwaukee Rep…wish me luck! Right now I’m spending the summer at Shakespeare & Company, playing Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Eleanor Holdridge ’97. LeRoy McClain ’04 and Christianna Nelson ’05 are out here with me, and we’re all having a blast. And in July, our little pug Boise will join me out here—he’s going to love the Berkshires even more than I do! Hope all is well with everyone—drop me a line at chicago1227@ yahoo.com!”
Jennifer Riker ’01 shares, “I was a recent guest star on ‘Close to Home.’ I have completed a new demo reel, which I am shopping around in search of new representation and can be seen on MySpace. com. I am living in West Hollywood and look forward to making more connections this year in California.” Brian Robinson ’00 writes, “My son, August, was three months old when we moved to New Haven for me to attend Yale School of Drama. By the time you read this, he will be ten and Theo, who was born in New Haven, will be eight! I’m working for Yahoo! (emphasis theirs) doing boring (evil) corporate stuff (market research) while fighting the good fight in my spare moments. I’m creating short humorous videos critiquing consumer culture and posting them online at www.contrary4percent. org. If you visit the site, you will see videos that include appearances by Meg Brogan ’98 and my wife Elizabeth Fenner, who, when not appearing in my videos, is writing a novel. I’m still doing fun stuff at Yale Cabaret Hollywood with Bob Barnett ’89, Walt Klappert ’79, Joe Reynolds ’97 and many others.” Christopher Carter Sanderson ’05 writes, “This year, I have directed Maxim Gorky’s Vassa Zheleznova for Horizon Rep at the
Amanda Wallace Woods ’03 and her husband, Eric Wasserstrom, at their wedding in October 2006 at the Central Park Boathouse.
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Duo Theatre in New York, which featured Jacob Knoll ’05 in a leading role. Jacob also joined Gorilla Rep (my New York theatre company) as the head of its acting company and we’ve recently received a grant from the Tony Randall Theatrical Foundation. Among other projects, I directed a reading of Cheever Tyler’s new play Mount Pleasant Farm at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, which dramaturg Roweena MacKay ’05 worked on.” Alec Tok ’03 shares, “We had a very exciting year in 2006—‘we’ meaning myself, Jennifer Lim ’04, Ryan King ’04 and Camille Assaf ’04. We took a project called Three Children, which we had worked on at Yale as part of a Collaborative Workshop Project (CWP) in 2003, to Hong Kong and played to sell-out audiences at the Hong Kong Fringe Club, one of the most exciting theatre venues there. We then brought the production to the Korean International School and the Chinese International School, and also raised money for The Springboard Program, a luncheon to benefit children of the international community with special needs. I then went on to Shanghai to direct a Chinese-language version of Three Children in collaboration with graduates of the prestigious Shanghai Theatre Academy.” Carrie Van Deest ’06 married Samuel Hallgren in Milwaukee. Liv Nilssen ’06 was one of the bride’s attendants, with Kevin Rich ’04 as one of the groom’s attendants. Heather J. Violanti ’02 recently returned to the United States. In June 2006, she dramaturged Valiant at the Unofficial New York Yale Cabaret and Susan and God at the Mint Theater. In January 2007, she was a guest critic/dramaturg at Region V of the American College Theatre Festival, and she was one of the Mint Theater panelists at the Theatre Library Association Conference in February 2007. Kathleen (Cogbill) Warr ’01 writes, “I am beginning my seventh season with Miami City Ballet as their Principal Stage Manager. Even after all these years, I still love working in ballet and The Nutcracker!” Thom Weaver ’07 designed the lights for the Signature Theatre Company’s recent production of August Wilson’s King Hedley II. Amanda Woods ’03 married Eric Wasserstrom in October 2006. Ann (Hamada) McLaughlin ’03, Elaine (Bonifield) Wackerly ’03, Casey Reitz ’03, Juan Carlos Salinas ’03, Nico Lang ’05, and Sallie Sanders ’02 were in attendance for the happy occasion. Y
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Contributors Contributors to Yale School of Drama Annual Fund 2006/07 Class Agents highlighted in bold
1930s Jane M. Alexander ’36 Paul Baker ’39 True C. Giffen ’37 Clinton P. King, Jr. ’39 Bertram N. Linder ’39 Virginia Weaver Russell ’39 Louise H. Saurel ’38
1940s Lawrence D. Amick ’49 Virginia A. Blakeslee ’48 Olive A. Chypre ’48 Edith Dallas Ernst ’48 Sarah C. Ferry ’41 Mary Fleischer ’44 Patricia F. Gilchrist ’44 Alfred S. Golding ’49 David Gorton ’48 Nancy K. Holland ’43 Joan Kron ’48 Mildred C. Kuner ’47 Louis R. Ormont ’49 W. Oren Parker* ’40 John W. Paul ’48 Pamela Stiles Roberts ’46 Dorothy B. Rostov ’43 Julia Meade Rudd ’47 Eugene F. Shewmaker ’49 Anne W. Shropshire ’49 Joe Steinberg ’44 Miriam S. Tulin ’40 Anne C. Washburn ’45
1950s William H. Allison ’52 Cornelia H. Barr ’58 Robert W. Barr ’53 Gloria B. Beckerman ’53 Jack W. Belt ’53 Ezekial H. Berlin ’53 Melvin Bernhardt ’55 Richard E. Bianchi ’57 Robert Brustein ’51, ’66 MAH Rene Buch ’52 Ian W. Cadenhead ’58 William F. Carden ’50 Joy G. Carlin ’54 Sami Joan Casler ’59 Cosmo A. Catalano, Sr. ’53 Joseph Chomyn ’53 Margaretta M. Clulow ’56 Patricia J. Collins ’58 Forrest S. Compton ’53 Alfred B. Connable ’58 Kathleen R. Conneely ’57 Sue Ann Gilfillan Converse ’55 George Corrin, Jr. ’51 John W. Cunningham ’59 Jose A. Diaz ’52 John J. Dolan ’55
William F. Dowling ’52 William Duell ’52 David B. Ebbin ’57 Mildred N. Ebbin ’57 Philip R. Eck ’59 Marcus Eisenstein ’59 Sonya G. Friedman ’55 Joseph Gantman ’53 Alfred S. Geer ’59 Robert W. Goldsby ’53 David Zelag Goodman ’58 Barbara K. Goodwillie ’51 James W. Gousseff ’56 Bigelow R. Green ’59 Brita Brown Grover ’59 Dolly D. Guinther ’53 Eugene Gurlitz ’57, Phyllis O. Hammel ’52 Marian E. Hampton ’59 David W. Hannegan ’53, ’50 YC Russell T. Hastings ’57 Carol Thompson Hemingway ’55 Hugh M. Hill ’53 Betsy N. Holmes ’55 Carol V. Hoover ’59 Evelyn H. Huffman ’57 James Earl Jewell ’57 Geoffrey A. Johnson ’55 Marillyn B. Johnson ’50 Donald E. Jones, Jr. ’56 Amnon Kabatchnik ’57 Lloyd A. Kaplan ’58 James D. Karr ’54 Jay B. Keene ’55 Arthur J. Kelley, Jr. ’53 Roger L. Kenvin ’59, ’61 DFA Bernard Kukoff ’57 David Jeremy Larson ’50 Christopher Lehmann-Haupt ’59 Margaret J. Linney ’58 Romulus Linney ’58 Edgar R. Loessin ’54 Henry E. Lowenstein ’56 Paul David Lukather ’53 Elizabeth Lyman ’51 Volodymyr Lysniak ’58 Lewis R. Marcuson ’54 Richard G. Mason ’53 Beverly W. May ’50 Charles R. McCallum, Jr. ’50 David Ross McNutt ’59 Harvey M. Medlinsky ’58 Robert J. Miller ’57 Ellen L. Moore ’52 George Morfogen ’57 Marion V. Myrick ’54 Franklin M. Nash ’59 Paul L. Newman ’54, ’88 HON Grace T. Noyes ’54 Michael A. Onofrio, Jr. ’53, ’50 YC Kendric T. Packer ’52 Eilene C. Pierson ’50 Virginia F. Pils ’52 David S. Pomeran ’55 Gladys S. Powers ’57 Howard L. Ramey* ’50 David Rayfiel ’50 Mary B. Reynolds ’55 Harry M. Ritchie ’55, ’60 DFA
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David A. Rosenberg ’54 Philip Rosenberg ’59 A. Raymond Rutan IV ’54 Raymond H. Sader ’58 Stephen O. Saxe ’54 Alvin Schechter ’59 William T. Schneider ’56 Ernest J. Schwarz ’59 Forrest E. Sears ’58 Michael Charles Shurtleff* ’52 James A. Smith ’59 Pamela D. Strayer ’55 Kenneth J. Stein ’59 Jack Sydow ’50 Robert S. Telford ’55 Donald B. Tirrell ’54 Edward Trach ’58 Shirin Devrim Trainer ’50 Fred Voelpel ’53 Phyllis C. Warfel ’55 William B. Warfel ’57, ’55 YC Betsy B. Watson ’53 Zelma H. Weisfeld ’56 Joseph Weishar ’59, ’54 YC Cynthia A. Williams, Ph.D. ’59 Marjorie M. Williams ’55 Barbara M. Young ’53 Arthur Zigouras ’56
1960s David E. Ackroyd ’68 Lois D. Aden ’60 Richard Ambacher ’65 DFA Leif E. Ancker ’62 Barbara B. Anderson ’60 Cletus R. Anderson ’66 Mary Ellen O’Brien Atkins ’65 Thomas R. Atkins ’64 Robert A. Auletta ’69 Jan Van Etten Austell ’65 James Robert Bakkom ’64 Philip J. Barrons ’65 Warren F. Bass ’67 John Beck ’63 Jody Locker Berger ’66 Edward Bierhaus, Jr. ’69 DFA Jeffrey Bleckner ’68 Arthur W. Bloom ’66 A. James Bravar ’62 Carol Bretz Murray-Negron ’64 Arvin B. Brown ’67 Oscar Lee Brownstein ’60 James Burrows ’65 Donald I. Cairns ’63 Lonnie D. Carter ’69 Raymond E. Carver ’61 Mary Jane Cassidy ’69 Suellen G. Childs ’69 Sarah E. Clark ’67 Katherine D. Cline ’60 Robert S. Cohen ’64 DFA John M. Conklin ’66, ’59 YC Edward Cornell ’68 Kenneth T. Costigan ’60 Peggy Cowles ’65 Stephen C. Coy ’63, ’69 DFA Lewis A. Crickard ’63 Laila S. Dahl ’65 F. Mitchell Dana ’67
Ramon L. Delgado ’67 George R. DiCenzo ’65 Charles Dillingham ’69, ’65 YC Gene E. Diskey ’61 Rev. Robert J. Donnelly ’64 Carolyn Browne Dundes ’60 John A. Duran ’74 Robert H. Einenkel ’69 Elisa Ronstadt Eliott ’62 Joyce Elliott ’62 David H. Epstein ’68 Leslie D. Epstein ’67 DFA, ’60 YC Jerry N. Evans ’62 John D. Ezell ’60 Ann Farris ’63 Richard A. Feleppa ’60 William H. Firestone ’69 Hubert C. Fortmiller, Jr. ’61 Janet Bell Fowler ’64 Keith F. Fowler ’69 DFA David Freeman ’68 Richard D. Fuhrman ’64 Bernard L. Galm ’63 Minnie G. Gaster ’66 Anne K. Gregerson ’65 John E. Guare ’63 Ann T. Hanley ’61 Jerome R. Hanley ’60 Richard A. Harrison ’66 Patricia Helwick ’65 Elizabeth Holloway ’66 John Robert Hood ’61 Derek Hunt ’62 Peter H. Hunt ’63, ’61 YC Laura Mae Jackson ’68 John W. Jacobsen ’69, ’67 YC Paul Jaeger ’67 Cynthia Lee Jenner ’64 Lee H. Kalcheim ’63 Asaad N. Kelada ’64 Kenneth Kelman ’62 Abby B. Kenigsberg ’63 Charles M. Kimbrough ’61 Jane Kimbrough ’61 Carol Soucek King ’66 Marna J. King ’64 Raymond Klausen ’67 Richard H. Klein ’67 Donald D. Knight ’65 Robert W. Lawler ’67 Peter J. Leach ’61 Gerard J. Leahy ’67 Stephen R. Leventhal ’69 Irene Lewis ’66 Janell M. MacArthur ’61 David Madden ’61 Marcia Madeira ’68 Cynthia J. Maguire ’66 Richard E. Maltby, Jr. ’62, ’59 YC Kenneth L. Martin ’69 Patricia D. McAdams ’61 B. Robert McCaw ’66 Margaret T. McCaw ’66 Robert A. McDonald, Jr. ’68 Bruce W. McMullan ’61 Banylou Mearin ’62 Donald Michaelis ’69 Jeffrey R. Milet ’69 Karen H. Milliken ’64
H. Thomas Moore ’68 Donald W. Moreland ’60 Robert B. Murray ’61 Gayther L. Myers, Jr. ’65 S. Joseph Nassif ’63 William M. Ndini ’65 Ruth Hunt Newman ’62 Dwight R. Odle ’66 Janet Oetinger ’69 Richard A. Olson ’69 Sara Ormond ’66 John Osander ’62 Joan D. Pape ’68 Kenneth L. Parker ’61 Thomas J. Peterson ’68 Howard Pflanzer ’68 Louis R. Plante ’69 Michael B. Posnick ’69 Brett Prentiss ’68 Barbara Reid ’62 Carolyn L. Ross ’67 Janet G. Ruppert ’63 Clarence Salzer, Jr. ’60, ’55 YC Lucia Scala ’61 Isaac H. Schambelan ’67 DFA Georg Schreiber ’64 Talia Shire Schwartzman ’69 Winifred J. Sensiba ’63 Suzanne Sessions ’66 Paul R. Shortt ’68 Carol M. Sica ’66 Roger H. Simon ’67 Helena L. Sokoloff ’60 Mary C. Stark ’61 Louise Stein ’66 John Wright Stevens ’66 G. Erwin Steward ’60 John Henry Thomas III ’62 David F. Toser ’64 Russell L. Treyz ’65 Richard B. Trousdell ’67, ’74 DFA Thomas S. Turgeon ’68 DFA Charles H. Vicinus ’65 Ruth L. Wallman ’68 Steven I. Waxler ’68 Gil Wechsler ’67 Peter White ’62 Richard Kent Wilcox ’61 Robin Benensohn-Rosefsky Wood ’69 Albert J. Zuckerman ’61, ’62 DFA
1970s Sarah Jean Albertson ’71, ’75 ART Michael L. Annand ’75 John L. Beatty ’73 Ursula Belden ’76 Sandra K. Boynton ’79, ’74 YC Michael William Cadden ’76, ’79 DFA, ’71 YC Ian Calderon ’73 Lisa Carling ’70 Cosmo A. Catalano, Jr. ’79 James A. Chesnutt III ’71 Lani L. Click ’73 Joseph M. Colclaser ’73 William R. Conner ’79 David M. Conte ’72 Jonathan S. Coppelman ’70
Yale School of Drama Alumni Fund
Marycharlotte C. Cummings ’73 Julia L. Devlin ’74 Thomas Di Mauro ’78 Franchelle S. Dorn ’75 Nancy Reeder El Bouhali ’70 Eric S. Elice ’79 Peter Entin ’71 Dirk Epperson ’74 Heidi P. Ettinger ’76 Femi Euba ’73 Douglass M. Everhart ’70 Marc F. Flanagan ’70 Abigail J. Franklin ’78 Robert Gainer ’73 Ralph R. Garrow, Jr. ’77 Joseph G. Grifasi ’75 Michael E. Gross ’73 William B. Halbert ’70 Charlene Harrington ’74 Barbara B. Hauptman ’73 William T. Hauptman ’73 Jane C. Head ’79 Robert C. Heller ’78 Jennifer Hershey-Benen ’77 Cynthia P. Kaback ’70 Barnet K. Kellman ’72 Alan L. Kibbe ’73 Dragan M. Klaic ’76, ’77 DFA Fredrica A. Klemm ’76 Daniel L. Koetting ’74 Frances E. Kumin ’77 Mitchell L. Kurtz ’75 Rocco Landesman ’76 Thomas E. Lanter ’75 Michael John Lassell ’76 Stephen R. Lawson ’76 Charles E. Letts III ’76 Francis N. Levy ’73 Alan Lichtenstein ’76 George N. Lindsay, Jr. ’74 Jennifer K. Lindstrom ’72 Robert Hamilton Long II ’76 Santo R. Loquasto ’72 Donald B. Lowy ’76 William Ludel ’73 Patrick F. Lynch ’71 Thomas P. Lynch ’79, ’75 YC Elizabeth M. MacKay ’78 Lizbeth P. Mackay ’75 Alan Mokler MacVey ’77 Brian R. Mann ’79 Christopher J. Markle ’79 Jonathan E. Marks ’72, ’84 DFA, ’68 YC Craig T. Martin ’71 Deborah Mayo ’73 Neil A. Mazzella ’78 Patricia M. McMahon ’72 Lynne Meadow ’71 Stephen W. Mendillo ’71 Jonathan Seth Miller ’75 Lawrence S. Mirkin ’72, ’69 YC Thomas Reed Mohan ’75 George Moredock III ’70 James Naughton ’70 Patricia C. Norcia ’78 Elizabeth L. Norment ’79 Richard Ostreicher ’79 Jay P. Parikh ’78
Jeffrey Pavek ’71 Stephen B. Pollock ’76 Daniel H. Proctor ’70 William Purves ’71 Arthur I. Rank III ’76 Pamela Ann Rank ’78 Ronald P. Recasner ’74 Ralph R. Redpath ’75 William J. Reynolds ’77 Steven I. Robman ’73 Alan D. Rosenberg ’74 Mark C. Rosenthal ’76 Robert Sandberg ’77 Suzanne M. Sato ’79 Joel R. Schechter ’72, ’73 D.F.A. Carol Schlanger ’70 John Victor Shea III ’73 Michael D. Sheehan ’76 Charles E. Siegel ’70 Richard R. Silvestro ’76 Benjamin Slotznick ’73, ’70 YC Jeremy T. Smith ’76 Maura Beth Smolover ’76 Marshall S. Spiller ’71 Charles N. Steckler ’71 Roy Bennett Steinberg ’78 Jaroslaw Strzemien ’75 Ted Tally ’77, ’74 YC Edith R. Tarbescu ’76 Russell Vandenbroucke ’77, ’78 DFA Eva M. Vizy ’72 Carol M. Waaser ’70 Jeff Wanshel ’72 David J. Ward ’75 Eugene D. Warner ’71 Lynda Lee Welch ’72 Carolyn Seely Wiener ’72 Comm. Stanley E. Wiklinski ’70 Stephen E. Zuckerman ’74
1980s Kimberleigh Aarn ’86 Michael G. Albano ’82 Amy Aquino ’86 Clayton Mayo Austin ’86 Dylan Baker ’85 Steven Alan Balk ’88 Paul G. Barash, M.D. ’82 Robert P. Barron ’83 Spencer P. Beglarian ’86 James B. Bender ’85 Todd William Berling ’89 William J. Beer Bletzinger ’83 Anders P. Bolang ’87 Katherine R. Borowitz ’81, ’76 YC Sara Hedgepeth ’87 Claudia M. Brown ’85 William J. Buck ’84 Richard W. Butler ’88 Anna T. Cascio ’83 Joan Channick ’89 Nan Cibula-Jenkins ’83 Patricia D. Clarkson ’85 Melissa Rick Cochran ’81 Dana S. Croll ’87 Jane Ann Crum ’85 Donato Joseph D’Albis ’88 Richard Sutton Davis ’83, ’03 DFA
Kathleen K. Dimmick ’85 Merle Gordon Dowling ’81 Teresa Eyring ’89 Michael D. Fain ’82 Edmund B. Fisher ’87 Terry Fitzpatrick ’83 Joel C. Fontaine ’83 Brackley S. Frayer ’80 Randy R. Fullerton ’82 Judy Gailen ’89 Steven J. Gefroh ’85 Michael J. Giannitti ’87 Jeffrey M. Ginsberg ’81 William A.L. Glenn ’87 Charles F. Grammer ’86 Rob Greenberg ’89 Anne R. Hamburger ’86 James W. Hazen ’83 Mary Dwight Hazzard ’82 Roderick Lyons Hickey III ’89 Susan Hilferty ’80 Donald S. Holder ’86 Catherine MacNeil Hollinger ’86 David H. Hwang ’83 Thomas K. Isbell ’84 Chris P. Jaehnig ’85 Michael D. James ’89 Jane Kaczmarek ’82 Jonathan F. Kalb ’85, ’87 DFA Carol M. Kaplan ’89 Bruce Abram Katzman ’88 Edward A. Kaye ’86 Richard Kaye ’80 Kiernan M. Kelly ’87 Patrick Kerr ’87 David K. Kriebs ’82 William Kux ’83 Sasha Emerson Levin ’84 Kenneth J. Lewis ’86 Peter Gray Lewis ’87 Jerry J. Limoncelli, Jr. ’84 Becky London ’82, ’79 YC Gail A. London ’87 Mark D. London ’89 Quincy Long ’86 Mark E. Lord ’87 Andi Lyons ’80 Gayle E. Maurin ’85 Cheryl G. Mintz ’87 Grafton V. Mouen ’82, ’75 YC Brennan Murphy ’88 Mary Elizabeth Myers ’89 Tina C. Navarro ’86 Regina L. Neville ’88 Thomas J. Neville ’86 Christopher D. Noth ’85 Lynn Nottage ’89 Arthur E. Oliner ’86 Erik Alexander Onate ’89 Carol Ostrow ’80 Pamela Marie Peterson ’86 Robert J. Provenza ’86 Carol Anne Prugh ’89 Michael D. Quinn ’84 Joan E. Robbins ’86, ’91 DFA Laila V. Robins ’84 Lori Robishaw ’88 Russ Rosensweig ’83 Andrew I. Rubenoff ’83
Kevin J. Rupnik ’81 Steven A. Saklad ’81 Heidi M. Schultz ’86 Larry Schwartz ’83 Kimberly A. Scott ’87 Alexander Scribner ’80 Anthony M. Shalhoub ’80 Charlotte Ann Sheffield ’87 Deborah A. Simon ’81 William P. Skipper ’83 Teresa Snider-Stein ’88 Neal Ann Stephens ’80 Forrest M. Stone ’85 Mark L. Sullivan ’83 Thomas Sullivan ’88 Bernard J. Sundstedt ’81 Patrice A. Thomas ’81 Louis Tobian ’86 John Turturro ’83 Rosa Vega Weissman ’80 Adam N. Versenyi ’86, ’90 DFA, ’80 YC Craig F. Volk ’88 Clifford L. Warner ’87 Sharon Washington ’88 Darryl S. Waskow ’86 Geoffrey J. Webb ’88 Susan West ’87 Matthew Wiener’88 Robert M. Wierzel ’84 Robert M. Wildman ’83 Alexandra R. Witchel ’82 Evan Yionoulis ’85, ’82 YC David R. York ’80 Catherine J. Zuber ’84
1990s Narda Alcorn ’95 Bruce Altman ’90 René Michelle Augesen ’96 Angelina Avallone ’94 Emily Jean Beck ’95 Elizabeth Jeanne Bennett ’97 Sarah Bernstein ’95 Jenny R. Bolling ’98 Debra Booth ’91 John Cummings Boyd ’92 Tom Joseph Broecker ’92 Shawn Hamilton Brown ’90 James Bundy ’95 Kathryn A. Calnan ’99 Adrienne Carter ’99, ’96 YC Max Chalawsky ’96 Chris Henry Coffey ’99 Enrico L. Colantoni ’93 Aaron M. Copp ’98 Robert C. Cotnoir ’94 Susan Mary Cremin ’95 Sean James Cullen ’90 Sean P. Cullen ’94 Scott T. Cummings ’85, ’94 DFA Sheldon Deckelbaum ’92 Michael Diamond ’90 Maureen Dunleavy ’99 Michael Eaddy ’96 Michael A. Early ’91 Frances Egler ’95 Cornelia Evans ’93 Glen Fasman ’92
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Nicole J. Fix ’98 Rodrick D. Fox ’99 David William Gainey ’93 Shawn Marie Garrett ’96, ’06 DFA Neil F. Gluckman ’92 Stephen L. Godchaux ’93 Deborah Lee Goldberg ’90 Michael Gabriel Goodfriend ’96 Eric S. Gould ’98 Naomi S. Grabel ’91 Elisa R. Griego ’98 Regina Guggenheim ’93 Susan Hamburger ’97 Alexander Hammond ’96 Scott Hansen ’04 Karen Suzanne Hartman ’97, ’92 YC Douglas Harvey ’95 Brian Haynsworth ’97 Samantha R. Healy ’97 Denise J. Hudson ’93 Raymond P. Inkel ’95 Laura Cronin ’96 Kristin Johnsen-Neshati ’92, ’02 DFA Debra Justice ’92 Elizabeth A. Kaiden ’96 Samuel L. Kelley ’90 Ashley Kennedy ’90 Daphne Camerer Klein ’95 L. Azan Kung ’91 James Larkin ’96 Patricia Lewis ’98 Chih-Lung Liu ’94 Sarah Long ’92, ’85 YC Suzanne Cryer Luke ’95, ’88 YC Robin Macduffie ’97 Elizabeth Margid ’91 B. Christine McDowell ’98 Charles McNulty ’93, ’95 DFA Amy Mead ’97 Robert A. Melrose ’96 Susan Mendelsohn ’90 Richard R. Mone ’91 Ricardo Morris ’97 Laura E. Naramore ’95 Kaye I. Neale ’91 Margaret L. Neville ’97 Martha New ’92 Lori Ott ’92 Jane E. Padelford ’99 Scott Pask ’97 Michael W. Patterson ’98 DW Phineas Perkins ’90 Michael A. Potts ’92 Amy Povich ’92 Jeffry Stephen Provost ’95 James W. Quinn ’94 Sarah Gray Rafferty ’96 Joe Reynolds ’97 Reginald Rogers ’93 Melina W. Root ’90, ’83 YC Peggy Sasso ’99 Jennifer C. Schwartz ’97 Paul Francis Selfa ’92 Jeremy M. Shapira ’97 Jane M. Shaw ’98 Rachel Sheinkin ’95 Graham A.W. Shiels ’99
*deceased
Contributors Michael Vaughn Sims ’92 Ilona K. Somogyi ’94 Paul Spadone III ’99, ’93 YC William Wallace Spangler ’97 Douglas Spitz ’91 Erich William Stratmann ’94, ’93 YC Amy S. Sullivan ’90* Sy C. Sussman ’94, ’87 YC Christopher Paul Swanson ’97, ’01 DFA David Loy Sword ’90 Janet Takami ’96 Benjamin Thoron ’92 Paul Charles Tigue III ’99 Deborah L. Trout ’94 Michael R. Van Dyke ’92 Erik William Walstad ’95 Anthony C. Ward ’94 Christopher Weida ’95 Thomas S. Werder ’90 Marshall Williams ’95 Robert Zoland ’95
2000s Roberto F. Aguirre-Sacasa ’03 Liz Alsina ’06 Richard Hopkins Bank Jr. ’00 Michael Banta ’03 James C. Bellavance ’00 Sarah Bierenbaum ’05, ’99 YC Ashley E. Bishop ’02 Joshua Borenstein ’02 Cynthia T. Brizzell-Bates ’00, ’07 DFA Colin E. Buckhurst ’04 David Byrd ’06 Claudia W. Case ’01, ’07 DFA Hillary Charnas ’05 Gregory Copeland ’04 Trip Cullman ’02, ’97 YC Katherine Cusack ’06 Janann B. Eldredge ’06 Jenifer E. Endicott ’00 Miriam Epstein ’02 Andrew Farrow ’06 Alexandra Fischer ’00 Mike Floyd ’06 Gia Forakis ’04 Sarah Fornia ’04 Marion R. Friedman ’05 Marcus Dean Fuller ’04 Robyn D. Ganeles ’03 Sandra Goldmark ’04 Alan Grudzinski ’04 John J. Hanlon ’04 Judith Hansen ’04 Amy S. Holzapfel ’06, ’01 YC James Hood ’05 David Howson ’04 Melissa Huber ’01 Candace Jackson ’00 Rolin Jones ’04 Fred Kinney ’02 Wade Laboissonniere ’03 Amanda LaFollette ’01 Nico M. Lang ’05 Jennifer Lim ’04 Michael Madravazakis ’04 Peter Malbuisson ’05 Sabrina McGuigan ’04 Ann M.K. McLaughlin ’03
Brian McManamon ’06 Lorraine M. Monnier ’01 Elizabeth Morrison ’05 Amy Morse ’00 Arthur F. Nacht ’06 James Michael Noonan Jr. ’06 Colleen Pickett Oakley ’01 Maulik Pancholy ’03 Nancy K. Parsons ’02 Brian Fitz Patton ’01 Zane Rich Pihlstrom ’06 Andrew Charles Plumer ’02 Gregory S. Purcell ’00 Kevin Rich 04 Rachel Rusch ’05, ’00 YC Charles Schultz ’01 Shawn B. Senavinin ’06 Alena Marion Smith ’06 Elisa Spencer ’05 Erik Sunderman ’06 Mikiko Suzuki ’02 Ari M. Teplitz ’05 Mario A. Tooch ’05 Carrie E. Van Hallgren ’06 Elaine Wackerly ’03 Bradlee M. Ward ’05 Tamilla C. Woodard ’02 Amanda Wallace Woods ’03
Friends The American Theatre Wing and New Time Productions in honor of Lauren Doll and Howard Sherman Eileen Baker Mr. and Mrs. John Beard John Beinecke Mr. and Mrs. David Birnbaum Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Calica Mr. and Mrs. William Connolly Tony Converse Jack M. Dalgleish Scott Delman Peter and Mary Elder The John Golden Fund Joan F. Gourley Donald Granger Ruth and Stephen Hendel Mr. and Mrs. Richard Kirston Mr. and Mrs. William Love David Milch NJNG Productions, LLC Edward John Noble Foundation The Shubert Foundation Sylvan Seidenman Sylvia and Charles Traeger Hannelore Wilsch
In-kind Mary Bundy Blaine Butler ’58 MUS, ’56 YC Sasha Emerson ’84 Jane Kaczmarek ’82 Robert Simonds ’85 YC Contributions received from July 1, 2006 through June 30, 2007 Class Agents highlighted in bold. *deceased
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Give to the Annual Fund! What do these gifts support? Annual gifts to the School of Drama Alumni Fund are directed to the School’s most valuable asset—the students. Drama alumni provide essential funds for financial aid, helping to offset the financial burden of professional study at Yale. Why participate in annual giving to the Alumni Fund? Year after year, consistent support from alumni has allowed the School of Drama to maintain its high standards and to continue bringing together the most talented students, regardless of their financial needs. Just as alumni gifts once helped fund your time at Yale, you can now take pride in knowing your generosity is helping those who are here now. Please consider making a gift to the Annual Fund today. For more information, contact Debbie Ellinghaus at debbie.ellinghaus@yale.edu or (203) 432-4133.
Leave Your Legacy By including Yale School of Drama in your financial plan, you make a significant commitment that will strengthen the School and, through faculty and students, touch and inspire countless lives. A life income gift can offer you the best of many worlds: dependable income for you and your family, current and future tax savings, and a means to support scholarship and the unique programs that have made Yale School of Drama a leader in arts training for more than eighty years. Whether planning for retirement, the educational expenses of children, grandchildren, or the care of loved ones, life income gifts are an excellent way to balance your goals….for you and for the School. To learn about these opportunities, please call Debbie Ellinghaus at (203) 432-4133 or debbie.ellinghaus@yale.edu.
Dear Alumni and Friends, What a year this has been! Whether at our Winter Holiday Party at the Yale Club; our L.A. party so graciously hosted by Jane Kaczmarek ’82; the USITT conference in Phoenix; or in New York in May, when Wesley Fata’s former students and friends gathered to honor him on his retirement, YSD alumni were out in force. Almost 1,000 of you came together to reconnect, reunite and celebrate. This has also been an auspicious time for your generosity. The School of Drama is one of a handful of Yale graduate and professional schools that surpassed its goal for alumni giving. Even more importantly, you increased our participation from 23% to 29%! With your gifts to the Alumni Fund, YSD scholarship support has attained a new level. And, as the Yale Tomorrow Capital Campaign ends its first public year, I am pleased to share with you that we have raised more than $3,000,000 in new endowment funds. This magazine is full of examples of how the Drama School community continues to work together on York Street and beyond. We hope you enjoy catching up with your classmates and reconnecting. I especially look forward to another year of getting to know you—our talented alumni. Thank you for all you do.
Sincerely,
Deborah Berman Director of Development and Alumni Affairs Yale School of Drama
Yale school o
Yale School of Drama P.O. Box 208244 New Haven, CT 06520-8244
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