the week of june 28 - july 2, 2021
2 fast 2 furious 2 funded by billionaires
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YSD is now free and we should still abolish billionaires
The Yale School of Drama announced this week that current and future students will no longer pay tuition, thanks to a $150 million gift from billionaire media tycoon David Geffen. The school will also be renamed the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University.
I don’t think anyone should go into debt for college, and removing financial barriers to access is a necessary step — but I’m allergic to fawning over billionaires and the upper echelons of affluence made possible by an immoral and inequitable system. You can’t amass that level of wealth without profiting off of exploitative models and labor practices. An affordable graduate arts education shouldn’t be contingent on the charitable whims of one man. (Just tax billionaires properly and make college free for everyone!)
The real question here is why wasn’t YSD already tuition-free? There are plenty of MFA programs that offer tuition remission and graduate assistantships at universities with less fruitful coffers. (Yale currently has the second-largest endowment in the world at $31.2 billion, with a 6.8% investment return.) It’s hard to believe that this couldn’t have happened without Geffen’s money — and while I’m thrilled for future students, the industry and system are both broken and this only reinforces ingrained structural and philosophical issues.
audio & digital theatre
Noelle Viñas's I Feel the Spirit is available from Colt Coeur until July 6th. The made-for-Zoom play, directed by Elizabeth Carter, is “a multi-faceted meditation on spirituality and the past year, asking all of us to consider the ways God has shown up in our own lives.”
George Brant’s solo drama Tender Age starts streaming July 2nd at Studio Theatre. Directed by Henry Godinez and starring Bobby Moreno, the play follows a security guard at a makeshift detention center for migrant children near the Texan border.
2021-22 season updates
Cleveland Play House announced its 2021-22 season. Projects include Brian Quijada’s Where Did We Sit On The Bus? (directed by Matt Dickson), Jason Michael Webb and Lelund Durond Thompson’s Light It Up (directed by Christopher Windom), Catherine Bush’s adaptation of The Three Musketeers (directed by AD Laura Kepley), Emily Mann’s adaptation of Antigone (directed by Lauren Keating), and the world premiere of Charly Evon Simpson’s I’m Back Now.
Geffen Playhouse announced its 2021-22 season. The line-up includes Dominique Morisseau’s Paradise Blue (directed by Stori Ayers), Paul Grellong’s Power of Sail (starring Bryan Cranston and directed by Weyni Mengesha), Lindsay Joelle’s TRAYF and Anna Ouyang Moench’s Man of God (both directed by Maggie Burrows), and David Kwong’s immersive puzzle and cryptology experience The Enigmatist. The Geffen also announced that Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance (directed by Mike Donahue) will be part of the 2022-23 season.
ArtsEmerson announced its 2021-22 season. The live and digital line-up includes Thaddeus Phillips and Steven Dufala’s interactive event Zoo Motel, Toshi Reagon’s Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Charlotte Meehan and Boston-based company Sleeping Weazel’s Everyday Life and Other Odds and Ends, Travis Alabanza’s BURGERZ, and Alanna Mitchell/The Theatre Centre's Sea Sick.
Round House Theatre announced its 2021-22 season. The line-up includes Octavio Solis’ Quixote Nuevo (directed by Lisa Portes), Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap (directed by Jennifer Chang), Natasha Gordon’s Nine Night (directed by Timothy Douglas), and Jocelyn Bioh’s Nollywood Dreams (directed by Raymond O. Caldwell). The company will also launch the National Capital New Play Festival, anchored by the world premieres of Charly Evon Simpson’s it’s not a trip it’s a journey (directed by Nicole A. Watson) and Tim J. Lord’s “We declare you a terrorist…” (co-directed by AD Ryan Rilette and Jared Mezzocchi).
City Theatre Company announced its 2021-22 season. The Pittsburgh company’s line-up includes The Universes’ Live from the Edge, SITI Company’s The Medium (conceived and directed by Anne Bogart), Dominique Morisseau’s Paradise Blue (directed by Kent Gash), Lindsay Joelle’s The Garbologists (directed by Monteze Freeland), and the world premiere of Matt Schatz’s musical An Untitled New Play by Justin Timberlake (directed by Reginald L. Douglas),
The Donmar Warehouse announced its 2021-22 season. Projects include Inua Ellams’ audience-led poetry event Search Party, the world premiere of Cordelia Lynn’s Love and Other Acts of Violence (directed by Elayce Ismail), Tim Price’s new stage adaptation of Force Majeure (directed by AD Michael Longhurst), Henry V (directed by Max Webster), and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Marys Seacole (directed by Nadia Latif).
the regional theatre game of thrones
Geva Theatre Center artistic director Mark Cuddy announced his retirement. Cuddy, who has led the Rochester, NY company for 27 years, will step down in July 2022.
playwright news
Victory Gardens announced new members and plans for its Playwrights Ensemble. Marisa Carr, Keelay Gipson, Isaac Gómez, and Stacey Rose will join the ensemble for a three-year term, which includes a world premiere production, Ignition reading, and artistic support and access to department and board meetings. (J.R. Pierce wrote more on how new AD Ken-Matt Martin is reimagining VG’s programs and structures to center artists and institutional transparency for American Theatre.)
the most important thing is family
Vin Diesel is "dying” to do a musical of The Fast & The Furious. Time to manifest my destiny: I will rearrange my whole dumb life to dramaturg this project, one quarter mile at a time.
Today’s newsletter was almost delayed because I opted to see F9 last night instead of compiling season updates and I have zero regrets:
F9 had everything I want in an action movie: fast cars and explosions, a convoluted plot, constant violations of time and space and physics, Shakespearean level daddy issues, two men standing very close to one another and not kissing so you can yell "KISS" at the screen
Thirsty sluts for capitalism is a hilarious way to put it. I am genuinely thrilled for the students and keep trying to hold that feeling in my heart and mind but am ultimately having very complicated feelings about the change to David Geffen School of Drama. What I’ve observed from working at YSD is the Endowment is mostly for the undergrad colleges. Some of it is doled out to the grad/prof schools but generally they must provide their own raincoat and boots under the umbrella of Yale. A few are endowed on their own like Med, Law, Environment, and the Music school is also tuition free.
Ultimately Yale only wants to invest in a graduate/professional school that is going to produce alumni that will turn around and give millions back to the school. You are correct, it’s a shitty white supremacist model and YSD, Public Health, Athletics, Art, Architecture, Music (and others) historically don’t produce many of those alumni. In fact I recently learned that the school of Public Health gets less money than we do at YSD and I didn’t think that was possible. Considering how much they’ve leaned on Public Health in the last year, I think it's pretty shameful.
Since the Great Recession Yale has been *very* cautious about the Endowment, cutting budgets, and talking endlessly about rainy days. We had gained some ground back before the pandemic and then boom it’s gone back to ITS RAINING DOOM. Cut. Everything. So enter DG SR to save the day. From my perspective the people in charge are not imaginative enough to reinvent the wheel so their solution is to slap some shiny rims on and just keep rolling. Which considering all we’ve been through this last year (and how much anti-racism work we've been been doing at YSD for the last 5 years) is just depressing AF.
Your concise summation echos my feelings on the subject, so thank you and I hope my comment answered some of your questions. In my opinion (again someone who just works there, though our leadership is pretty transparent about our budgets which is why I feel comfortable making this comment) this would have *never* happened without Geffen's money. We had almost gotten to tuition free around the time of the Great Recession (when President Salovey was Provost) and it's been a gradual backslide to putting more and more monetary burden on our students with less and less resources while tangentially becoming aware we need to step it up in quality of education. Much of that has had to do with what is the economy + who is the Provost (and whether the Provost thinks we're worthy of money or not) and some has to do with bigger+more=better thinking of our direct leadership/theatre in general. Hopefully future leaders will steer us towards a more moral budget and business model but at least for now this lifts a burden off of our students.