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12/28/2016 11:01 PMJames Bundy is looking to the future of Yale Repertory Theatre and the Yale School of Drama in a big way.
The artistic director of the Rep and the dean of its drama school (whose alumni include actors such as Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, and Lupita Nyong’o) was reappointed for an unprecedented fourth five-year stint by Yale president Peter Salovey during the Rep’s 50th anniversary celebrations earlier this year.
Bundy, 57, is already the longest serving head of the Rep. Founding artistic director Ribery Brustein’s tenure was for 13 years; Lloyd Ruicghareds was for 11, and Stan Wojewodski’s was for 12. The new appointment will take Bundy through the ’21-’22 season.
During his 15 years at the Rep and the drama school, Bundy has attracted more than $20 million in support for new work, thanks to the gifts from the Robina Foundation that endowed the Binger Center for New Theatre. The Binger Center has nurtured works at Yale such as Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses, Rolin Jones’s These Paper Bullets!, and Paula Vogel’s Indecent. All three moved onto New York and other theaters across the country.
New works continue to be one of the hallmarks of Bundy’s tenure, where he is assisted by associate artistic director Jennifer Kiger and longtime managing director Victoria Nolan. Where many theaters allow for one or two premieres a season—new titles are traditionally a more difficult sell—the Rep has regularly filed its line-up with unseen and often-times challenging works by new and established playwrights.
Three of the plays in of The Rep’s current five-show season are world premieres, including this season’s opener, Sarah Ruhl’s. Scenes from Court Life or the whipping boy and his prince, a playful political piece about the Bush family that received mixed reviews. This was followed by a stunningly re-imagined production of Seven Guitars by August Wilson, many of whose works were first developed at the Rep. Next up are premieres of Aditi Brennan Kapil’s Imogen Says Nothing (Friday, Jan. 20 to Saturday, Feb. 11) and Amy Herzog’s Mary Jane (April 28 to May 20).
In the spring Bundy will direct a revival of Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman’s Assassins (March 17 to April 8). Under Bundy’s tenure, new musicals and plays with music—always an expensive endeavor—have premiered including Pop!, These Paper Bullets!, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
Bundy has also brought in top talent as part of its visiting or regular faculty. The new chair of the playwriting department is Tarell Alvin McCraney, a ‘07 grad from the program, an established playwright and recipient of an Obie Award, a MacArthur “genius” grant, and a six-figure Windham-Campbell Prize. The recent acclaimed film Moonlight is based on a work he wrote just before he arrived at Yale. McCraney succeeds such high-profile department chairs such as Paula Vogel, Richard Nelson, and Jeanie O’Hare.
One of Bundy’s goals for his fourth five-year stint is for a new state-of-the-art theater and modern facilities for all of its teaching programs, including its renowned design department.
Bundy says he feels supported in this drive by the Yale leadership, which has already transformed the physical plants of its other arts schools.
“We need a theater that can bring out on stage the full range of contemporary stagecraft,” says Bundy.
Past Yale president Richard Levin says one of his disappointments of his 20-year leadership of Yale was that the School of Drama did not receive the upgrade that other of the arts schools received.
The University Theater the school and Rep uses—as well as programs by the undergraduate Dramat—was built in 1925. The Rep’s main home is a 1871 church that was converted into a theater in the late ’60s by Robert Brustein, who founded the Rep when he became dean.
Bundy also says he wants to make the school and the Rep an even more inclusive place. At a time when theaters across the country are being criticized for the lack of diversity, including the low percentage of female playwrights, directors, designers, and staffers, Bundy has been a leader in programming plays and productions of women artists. Three of this season’s five plays are by women and last season the figure was four, with many of them staged by female directors.
A banquet in early October celebrated the Rep’s anniversary and its leaders over the decades, including the Rep’s founding artistic director Robert Brustein, ’89. Stan Wojewodski, who was dean and artistic director in the ’90s, was also saluted. Scott Davenport Richards represented his father, Lloyd Richards, who died in 2006 at the age of 87, and who was dean and Rep head in the ’80s.
Producer Rocco Landesman, a graduate of the School of Drama and the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, announced that he and his former wife, Heidi Ettinger, another graduate of the Yale program, have endowed a new scholarship in dramaturgy in Brustein’s name.
This will contribute to another one of Bundy’s goals: to get more financial aid to students at the school and to reduce their debt once they leave Yale and continue their careers in the arts.
Frank Rizzo is a freelance journalist who lives in New Haven and New York City. He has been writing about theater and the arts in Connecticut for nearly 40 years.