As dean of the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University and artistic director of Yale Repertory Theater, James Bundy wields a remarkable influence on American theater. Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, Lupita Nyong’o and Liev Schreiber studied in the school’s acting program, while alumni from the playwriting division include Christopher Durang, Jeremy O. Harris and Tarell Alvin McCraney. The eight programs on offer span all aspects of theatermaking, including the design disciplines.
As for Yale Rep, the professional on-campus company has sent a number of plays to Broadway, including August Wilson’s “Radio Golf,” Paula Vogel’s “Indecent” and Amy Herzog’s “Mary Jane.” This fall, it brought to life Zora Neale Hurston’s long-forgotten play “Spunk.”
“One way of thinking about how our theater operates is that we’re analogous to a teaching hospital and its relationship to a medical school,” said Bundy, whose own revival of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” is set to begin on Friday and runs through Dec. 20. “So the people who are studying end up involved in aspects of the production. For instance, all the designers of ‘Hedda Gabler’ are third-year M.F.A. candidates in set design, costume design, lighting design and sound design.”
Bundy will step down from his leadership positions, which he has held since 2002, in June. Until then, he continues to juggle a dizzying number of tasks from his perch in New Haven, Conn. “The nice thing of being heavily scheduled is I don’t actually have to think very much — I just have to show up,” Bundy, 66, said with a laugh. “If I’m present and committed, we’ll get something done.” These are edited excerpts from phone and email interviews.
Sunday: Students at Work
I took the train into New York to see “Are the Bennet Girls OK?” It’s by Emily Breeze, a third-year student in our playwriting program. She got an offer of a professional production while she was still in school, and it seemed like an important milestone for her, so we gave her permission to attend rehearsals, et cetera. I probably see between 40 and 50 shows in New York each year.
Monday: Celebrating the Magic Makers
I did a remote call with the creative team of “Hedda Gabler” from New York. In the evening I went to a reception for more than 200 of our alumni who live in the tristate area. We were giving an award to Alan Hendrickson, a celebrated technical designer and professor who designed, for instance, some of the complicated mechanical stage effects for “Aladdin,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Lion King.” Then I went back to New Haven.
Tuesday: Building the Future
First thing in the morning, I interviewed a candidate. We’re in a search for a professor of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism. Then I talked to a team from KPMB Architects — we’re in the process of designing a new home for the School of Drama and the Repertory Theater. It’s a 200,000-plus-square-foot building that will go up in downtown New Haven. We hope to open in 2030.
That day we had a student matinee performance of “Spunk,” with about 400 middle and high school kids. To see a big cast of almost exclusively Black actors was an electrifying experience for New Haven public school children. They rushed the stage like it was a rock concert at the curtain call.
Wednesday: In Academia
My first meeting of the day was the university cabinet, which comprises the officers of the university and deans of Yale College and the graduate and professional schools. It’s a challenging time for higher education, so we’re looking at what we can do to both address legitimate concerns and make the case for the ways in which higher education has transformed and enhanced our society over the past several hundred years. I also met with the program chairs at the school — there are eight programs and we have to work quite closely to coordinate all their activities. Then I had a five-hour “Hedda” rehearsal.
Thursday: Meet ‘Hedda’
For every production we have a meet-and-greet at which the entire school basically turns out to hear what the artists are working on, what kind of case the production is trying to make. Today was the one for “Hedda.” It was a really magnificent afternoon in which you could see brilliant young designers and dramaturges basically wowing their peers with ideas. After that I went to a staging rehearsal.
Friday: A Dance Competition for the Gods
Breakfast with some wonderfully generous donors. Then I walked over to my text-analysis class with second-year actors. We’re looking granularly at the text in “Hamlet” for the preoccupations of the characters, which are often revealed simply in their vocabulary. We’re about to move on to “Tartuffe” by Molière.
I went straight from class to welcome prospective students to our visitor day. They meet with the chairs of the programs that they’re interested in applying to, have a question-and-answer session with current students, and they can visit rehearsals and see both student-produced work and repertory theater work in the evening.
More rehearsal, then I went to an original play called “A Spider Learns to Dance” in the student-run Yale Cabaret. It’s a postapocalyptic piece in which humankind has been wiped out and all of the 18,000 gods in human history meet to have a dance competition. At the 11 o’clock performance on Fridays, much of the audience talks back to the production. It’s a little bit like “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” except that everybody is responding for the very first time, trying to make the actors laugh and break character.
Saturday: ‘Spunk’ Says Goodbye, for Now
A full, long day of rehearsal, then in the evening I went to the closing of “Spunk.” It was one of the best-selling shows in the recorded history of our box office — basically Shakespeare, Chekhov, Tennessee Williams and Zora Neale Hurston are the top four. We’re thinking hard about where we might find a partner in New York City to get the work to a wider audience. What a gift to see a play from the 1930s that feels like a part of our culture that hasn’t been represented onstage very much, and that bears the stamp not only of her very original authorial voice, but also of her research and the people that she listened to and observed closely.
The post Living, Breathing, Seeing and Teaching Theater appeared first on New York Times.
