Announcing Our 2025-26 Season!
Zora Neale Hurston’s
SPUNK
Directed by Tamilla Woodard
OCTOBER 3–OCTOBER 25, 2025
Hedda Gabler
By Henrik Ibsen
Translated from the Norwegian by Paul Walsh
Directed by James Bundy
NOVEMBER 28–DECEMBER 20, 2025
A Woolly mammoth theatre company Touring Production
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Created and performed by Julia Masli
Directed by Kim Noble
JANUARY 20–FEBRUARY 7, 2026
Rhinoceros
By Eugene Ionesco
Translated by Derek Prouse
Adapted by Frank Galati
Directed by Liz Diamond
MARCH 6–MARCH 28, 2026
FURLOUGH’S paradise
By a.k. payne
Directed by abigail jean-baptiste
APRIL 24–MAY 16, 2026
Zora Neale Hurston’s
spunk
Directed by Tamilla Woodard
October 3–October 25, 2025
University Theatre (222 York Street)
A tall, handsome stranger strolls into town looking for work. With undeniable charisma and divine musicianship, Spunk sets tongues to wagging with admiration and envy. The laws of man, the power of hoodoo, and the divinity of love all collide when he locks eyes with Evalina, already married to the local conjurer’s son. A fable about the triumph of love, Zora Neale Hurston’s rediscovered play, Spunk, reaches the stage for the first time, brimming with humor, romance, and music.
Yale Rep’s 2025–26 WILL POWER! education program will include 10AM performances of Spunk on October 21 and 22 for high school students from New Haven Public Schools, entirely free of charge. For more information on the program, please contact Senior Artistic Producer Amy Boratko at amy.boratko@yale.edu.
Zora Neale Hurston (Playwright) 1891-1960, one of the foremost writers of the 20th century, was raised in Eatonville, Florida, one of America’s first incorporated Black townships. She was a major force in the Harlem Renaissance documenting African American life in the South. Hurston, an alumna of Howard University, co-founded the school’s historic newspaper The Hilltop; later, she became the first Black graduate of Barnard College. In 1939, she joined North Carolina Central University’s drama faculty. In 1997, the Library of Congress’s librarians found Hurston’s unpublished cache, including Spunk, in their holdings. Hurston co-wrote sketches, performed in Fast and Furious (1931), and choreographed The Great Day (1932) on Broadway. In 1936 she wrote her most famous work, the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston died in January 1960, consigned to an unmarked grave. In 1971, writer Alice Walker commissioned a gravestone for Hurston which now reads “Zora Neale Hurston: ‘A Genius of the South’: Novelist, Folklorist, Anthropologist.”
Tamilla Woodard (Director) is the Chair of the Acting Program at David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University, and a resident director at Yale Repertory Theatre. Tamilla has directed at theaters nationally including at the Alliance Theatre, the Guthrie, Baltimore Center Stage, American Conservatory Theater, Folger Theater, WP Theater, Classical Theater of Harlem, and Clubbed Thumb among others. At Yale Rep: the ripple, the wave that carried me home. Recent: the site-specific work The Democracy Project at Federal Hall by Tanya Barfield, Lisa D’Amour, Larissa FastHorse, Melissa James Gibson, Michael R. Jackson, and Bruce Norris. Tamilla is represented in film and other media by the concert film Weightless by The Kilbanes; Where We Stand (Steppenwolf NOW); Theater for One’s Here We Are series by Nikkole Salter and DeLanna Studi; The Parsnip Ship and MCC Theater’s audio sci-fi This is Where We Go. Tamilla is a proud board member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers. She received her M.F.A. in acting from David Geffen School of Drama.
Hedda Gabler
By Henrik Ibsen
Translated from the Norwegian by Paul Walsh
Directed by James Bundy
November 28–December 20, 2025
Yale Repertory Theatre (1120 Chapel Street)
Freshly arrived from her honeymoon to her elegant, newly purchased villa, Hedda Tesman (née Gabler) wasn’t born and raised for a life of contented domesticity. When a former lover returns to town, her husband’s academic career and finances suddenly hang in the balance, along with her social standing. A propulsive, fiery, and often funny meditation on romantic dreams and bourgeois ambitions, Hedda Gabler is the portrait of a woman who will stop at nothing to gain control over her own destiny.
Henrik Ibsen (Playwright) 1820-1908, often considered the father of modern European drama, continues to have a rich life on global stages. Yale Rep has produced Ibsen seven times in its history including, most recently, An Enemy of the People in 2017 and The Master Builder in 2009.
Paul Walsh (Translator) Professor in the Practice of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, Walsh has worked as dramaturg, translator, and co-author at theater companies across the country, including nine years as dramaturg at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Six of his translations of plays by Henrik Ibsen (A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, and John Gabriel Borkman) have been produced at such theaters as the Yale Repertory Theatre, the American Conservatory Theater, Seattle Repertory Theatre, the Williamstown Theatre Festival, and the Stratford Festival. With Theatre de la Jeune Lune in Minneapolis, he collaborated on award-winning productions such as Children of Paradise: Shooting a Dream, 1789, Don Juan Giovanni, Germinal, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Walsh received a Ph.D. from the Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama at the University of Toronto.
James Bundy (Director) has served as Elizabeth Parker Ware Dean of David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and Artistic Director of Yale Repertory Theatre since 2002. He teaches in the Acting and Directing programs at the School and in the Theater Studies program in Yale College. During his tenure, Yale Rep has produced more than 30 world, American, and regional premieres, nine of which have been honored by the Connecticut Critics Circle as Best Production and two of which have been Pulitzer Prize finalists. Through WILL POWER!, an educational program initiated in 2004, Yale Rep has provided low-cost theater tickets and classroom visits to thousands of middle and high school students from Greater New Haven. The Binger Center for New Theatre, founded in 2008, has enabled the theater to commission more than 75 artists to create new work. James has directed productions at the Mark Taper Forum, Theater for a New Audience, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Great Lakes Theater Festival, The Acting Company, California Shakespeare Festival, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, and The Juilliard School Drama Division. He served from 2007–13 on the board of directors of Theatre Communications Group. Previously, he worked as Associate Producing Director of The Acting Company, Managing Director of Cornerstone Theater Company, and Artistic Director of Great Lakes Theater Festival. James is a graduate of Harvard College and David Geffen School of Drama; he also trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
A Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company Touring Production
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Created and performed by Julia Masli
Directed by Kim Noble
January 20–February 7, 2025
Yale Repertory Theatre (1120 Chapel Street)
All Julia Masli wants to do is solve people’s problems and win the Nobel Peace Prize. But this plan keeps going awry as she receives accolade after accolade for comedy. The celebrated clown debuted ha ha ha ha ha ha ha at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where it was named “best of the year” by The Guardian. A sold-out sensation at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and greeted with thunderous laughter and more rave reviews in New York and D.C., the show is entirely different every night based on audience participation. Now it’s coming to New Haven. Something bothering you? Julia is ready to help!
Julia Masli (Creator, Performer) is an award-winning clown from Estonia, based in London. It was bad enough when she was the winner of the Malcolm Hardee Award for Comic Originality in 2019, and her debut show Choosh—about a migrant’s struggles in the USA—was one of the most acclaimed comedy shows of the Edinburgh Fringe in 2022.
Kim Noble (Director) was a critically acclaimed artist and performer from London. He used to be quite good at stuff like theatre. He got an award. And he does some directing. The New York Times described him as “Annoying”. He is re-writing a book and recently had to move back into his mum’s flat due to financial difficulties.
Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (Producer) The Tony Award-winning Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company creates badass theatre that highlights the stunning, challenging, and tremendous complexity of our world. For over 40 years, Woolly has maintained a high standard of artistic rigor while simultaneously daring to take risks, innovate, and push beyond perceived boundaries. One of the few remaining theaters in the country to maintain a company of artists, Woolly serves an essential research and development role within the American theater. Plays premiered here have gone on to productions at hundreds of theaters all over the world and have had lasting impacts on the field. Currently co-led by Artistic Director Maria Manuela Goyanes and Managing Director Kimberly E. Douglas, Woolly is located in Washington, D.C., equidistant from the Capitol and the White House. This unique location influences Woolly’s investment in actively working towards an equitable, participatory, and creative democracy.
RHINOCEROS
By Eugene Ionesco
Translated by Derek Prouse
Adapted by Frank Galati
Directed by Liz Diamond
March 6–March 28, 2026
Yale Repertory Theatre (1120 Chapel Street)
An ordinary Sunday in a small French town. Berenger and his friend enjoy a drink on a café terrace. Suddenly a rhinoceros charges across the square, crushing everything in its path. A drunken dream… or…? As neighbors and friends begin sprouting hides and horns, the shy, shambolic Berenger must make a choice: take a stand against–or join–the rampaging herd. Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros is his tragicomic cri de cœur, imploring each of us to resist the call to fall in line.
Eugene Ionesco (Playwright) was born Nov. 26, 1909, in Slatina, Romania, and died March 28, 1994, in Paris, France. He studied in Bucharest and Paris, where he lived from 1945. His first one-act antiplay, The Bald Soprano (1950), inspired a revolution in dramatic techniques and helped inaugurate the Theatre of the Absurd. He followed it with other one-act plays in which illogical events create an atmosphere both comic and grotesque, including The Lesson (1951), The Chairs (1952), and The New Tenant (1955). His most popular full-length play, Rhinoceros (1959), concerns a provincial French town in which all the citizens are metamorphosing into rhinoceroses. Other plays include Exit the King (1962) and A Stroll in the Air (1963). He was elected to the Académie Française in 1970.
Derek Prouse (Translator) 1922–1996, was a writer and actor known for translating Eugene Ionesco’s works, including The Future is in Eggs, The Leader, and–with Donald Watson–The Bérenger Plays.
Frank Galati (Adaptor) was born in Highland Park, Illinois in 1943. His adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath began at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, and went on to Broadway, where it won Best Play and Best Direction Tony Awards in 1990. He was also nominated for another Tony, for his direction of the original production of Ragtime in 1998. As Associate Director of the Goodman Theatre, he directed The Winter’s Tale and wrote and directed She Always Said, Pablo, text adapted from Gertrude Stein and images of Pablo Picasso, which went on to a successful run at the Kennedy Center. He was Artistic Associate at the Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Florida, where he adapted and directed the musical Knoxville, from James Agee’s novel A Death in the Family. He directed at the Metropolitan Opera, The Lyric Opera of Chicago, and San Francisco Opera, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay for The Accidental Tourist in 1988. Galati was Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University for over 25 years. Before his passing in 2023, he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.
Liz Diamond (Director) has served as Resident Director at Yale Repertory Theatre since 1992, and her upcoming production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros will mark her 20th production here. Productions at Yale Rep include Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone; William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale; Marcus Gardley’s dance of the holy ghosts; August Strindberg’s Miss Julie; Sunil Kuruvilla’s Fighting Words and Rice Boy; Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy; Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle and St. Joan of the Stockyards; and Suzan-Lori Parks’ The America Play (world premiere), The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, and Father Comes Homes From the Wars, Parts 1, 2 & 3. She has also directed new plays, adaptations, and classical works at theaters across the United States, including the Alliance Theatre, American Repertory Theater, Arena Stage, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The Public Theater, Theatre for a New Audience, Vineyard Theatre, and Westport Country Playhouse. She has won the OBIE and the Connecticut Critics Circle Awards for Outstanding Direction. Liz’s additional projects at Yale include stagings of her translation of Igor Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat, in a joint David Geffen School of Drama/Yale School of Music production at Carnegie Hall, as well as a musical adaptation of Blaise Cendrar’s epic poem, La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, for the Beinecke Library’s 50th-anniversary celebration. Liz has served as a Professor of Directing since 1992, and as Chair of the Directing Program since 2002 at David Geffen School of Drama, where she has taught and learned from generations of gifted directors whose work is advancing the art of directing theater and serving communities around the world.
FURLOUGH’s paradise
By a.k. payne
Directed by abigail jean-baptiste
April 24–May 16, 2026
Yale Repertory Theatre (1120 Chapel Street)
There’s been a drought on their childhood’s road and two cousins come home dry-eyed and grieving. Sade, on a three-day furlough from prison. Mina, departing a strangely idyllic west coast. As all time ticks towards the correctional officer’s arrival, these two wrestle with all they have never said, with the fallibility of memory itself, and with visions of a future they are bound to create. Winner of the prestigious 2025 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, a.k. payne’s Furlough’s Paradise is a lyrical meditation on grief, home, kinship, and a utopia yet to be realized.
a.k. payne (Playwright) is a playwright and theatermaker with roots in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Their plays love on and engage Black lives and languages beyond the confines of linear time to find/remember stories that might create conditions for our collective liberation(s). They hold a B.A. in English and African-American Studies from Yale College and an MFA in Playwriting under Tarell Alvin McCraney from David Geffen School of Drama at Yale (formerly known as Yale School of Drama). Their work has been a finalist for the L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award. She is a three-time finalist and the 2025 winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the largest and oldest international award for women+ writers. She is currently a resident artist/fellow with National Black Theatre’s I AM SOUL Playwrights Residency and Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh Foundation). They are a grandchild of the Great Migration; a queer & non-binary abolitionist affected in community by the “New Jim Crow;” and of a great lineage of Black women storytellers and living-room archivists; all of which deeply informs, uplifts, and amplifies their work as a playwright, community organizer, and spacemaker.
abigail jean-baptiste (Director) is a generative artist born & based in New York City. Guided by questions around Blackness, isolation, and kinship, their storytelling uses nonlinear language and repeatable gestures in a search to build nonsensical ways of being. Recent directing credits include: Chiaroscuro: a light and dark skin comedy by Aishah Rahman (NBT/The Flea), Ti Jean & His Brothers by Derek Walcott (Princeton University), King James by Rajiv Joseph (Northern Stage), and Fefu and Her Friends by María Irene Fornés (Atlantic Theater/NYU). abigail has developed work with: Playwrights Horizons, New Georges, JACK, National Black Theatre, Soho Rep, The Bushwick Starr, Roundabout, Mercury Store, and Northern Stage (BOLD Circle). abigail is a Lilly Award Winner and was named a Powerhouse Women+ Director by Playbill in 2020.
Biographies are submitted by the artists and edited for common house style by Yale Rep.