Announcing Our 2023–24 Season!
2023–24 SEASON
Wish You Were Here
By Sanaz Toossi
Directed by Sivan Battat
OCTOBER 5–OCTOBER 28, 2023
World Premiere
The Salvagers
By Harrison David Rivers
Directed by Mikael Burke
Commissioned by Yale Rep
NOVEMBER 24–DECEMBER 16, 2023
ESCAPED ALONE
By Caryl Churchill
Directed by Liz Diamond
MARCH 8–30, 2024
The Far Country
By Lloyd Suh
Directed by Ralph B. Peña
2023 Pulitzer Prize Finalist
APRIL 26–MAY 18, 2024
Wish You Were Here
By Sanaz Toossi
Directed by Sivan Battat
October 5–October 28, 2023
It’s 1978 and protests are breaking out across Iran, encroaching on the suburb where a tight-knit circle of girlfriends plans weddings, trades dirty jokes, and tries to hang onto a sense of normalcy. But as the forces of revolution escalate, each woman must choose whether to join a wave of emigration or to remain in their country, where the future is uncertain. With breathtaking humanity and cutting wit, 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner Sanaz Toossi chronicles a decade of life during and after war, as best friends forever become friends long lost—scattered and searching for home.
Production support for Wish You Were Here is provided by Yale’s Binger Center for New Theatre.
Sanaz Toossi is an Iranian-American playwright from Orange County, California. Her plays include the critically acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize-winning English (co-production Atlantic Theater Company/Roundabout Theatre Company) and Wish You Were Here (Playwrights Horizons; Williamstown/Audible, released 2020). She is currently under commission at Atlantic Theater Company (Launch commission; Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation grant), Roundabout Theatre Company, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Manhattan Theatre Club, South Coast Repertory, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival (American Revolutions Cycle). In television, Sanaz was recently staffed on Invitation to a Bonfire (AMC); A League of Their Own (Amazon); Five Women (Marielle Heller/Big Beach); and sold an original idea, The Persians, to FX with Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields attached as Executive Producers. Sanaz was the 2019 P73 Playwriting Fellow, a recipient of the 2020 Steinberg Playwright Award, the 2022 recipient of The Horton Foote Award and, most recently, the 2023 recipient of the Best New American Play Obie Award. M.F.A., NYU Tisch.
Sivan Battat (she/they) is originally from Woodbridge, Connecticut, in Greater New Haven and is a proud alum of ACES Educational Center for the Arts on Audubon Street. Now based in New York City, Sivan is a theatre director and cultural organizer, and is the Director of New Work Development at Noor Theatre Company. Recent credits include Layalina (world premiere, Goodman Theatre), Heroes of the Fourth Turning (Studio Theatre), Brass Knuckles (Ensemble Studio Theatre), Trouble in Mind (Assistant Director, Broadway). Sivan has developed work with companies including the Roundabout, the Park Avenue Armory, NYTW, Drama League, Atlantic, Ars Nova, National Queer Theatre, New Georges, New York Stage & Film, Cape Cod Theatre Project, Mercury Store, Long Wharf, MCC, and more. Fellowships: Roundabout Directing Fellow, Drama League Musical Directing Fellow, TCG Rising Leaders of Color. Sivan is thrilled to be returning to New Haven, the city that introduced her first to the power of theater.
World Premiere
The Salvagers
By Harrison David Rivers
Directed by Mikael Burke
Commissioned by Yale Rep
November 24–December 16, 2023
Meet the Bosemans Salvage: 37-year-old Senior and 23-year-old Junior, at odds under the same roof during a snowy Chicago winter. Their icy relationship is further strained as potential romances for both father and son compel them to reckon with the past. The Salvagers is a beautifully observed and humorous play about the second, third, and fourth chances that may be possible when hard truths are delivered in love.
Development and production support for The Salvagers is provided by Yale’s Binger Center for New Theatre.
Harrison David Rivers is an award-winning playwright, librettist and television writer based in St. Paul, Minnesota. His works include we are continuous (Williamstown Theatre Festival, Geva Theatre Center, New Conservatory Theatre Center), the bandaged place (Roundabout, NYSF), This Bitter Earth (NCTC, Penumbra, About Face, Theater Alliance, Richmond Triangle Players, The Road, InterAct, TheatreWorks Hartford, Seattle Public, Blank Page), among others, and the musicals Five Points with Douglas Lyons and Ethan Pakchar, We Shall Someday with Ted Shen and I Put a Spell on You with Nubya Garcia. His television credits include One of Us Is Lying (Peacock), The Nevers (HBO) and Wytches (Amazon). Harrison is a recipient of McKnight, Jerome and Van Lier Fellowships, residencies with the Siena Art Institute, NYTW, Williamstown, Geva and Duke University, and commissions from Roundabout, Transport Group, Penumbra, Geva, La Jolla Playhouse and Minnesota Opera. He sits on the Board of Directors of The Movement Theatre Company and the Playwrights’ Center. MFA: Columbia University.
Mikael Burke is a Chicago-based director, deviser, and educator. A Princess Grace Award winner in Theatre and Jeff Award-nominated director, Mikael has worked with Goodman Theatre, About Face Theatre, Victory Gardens Theatre, Northlight Theatre, Raven Theatre, Jackalope Theatre Company, First Floor Theater, American Theatre Company, Chicago Dramatists, The Story Theatre, and Windy City Playhouse in Chicago, and regionally with Theatreworks Hartford, Forward Theatre Company, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, Indiana Repertory Theatre, Asolo Repertory Theatre, Geva Theatre Center, Third Avenue Playworks, and Phoenix Theatre Indianapolis. Mikael previously served as Associate Artistic Director of About Face Theatre and has taught at DePaul University, Roosevelt University, and Butler University. Recent directing credits include Two Mile Hollow by Leah Nanako Winkler, the American premiere of Routes by Rachel De-Lahay, The Wanderers by Anna Ziegler, Shakespeare’s Richard III, the world and Chicago premieres of The Magnolia Ballet by Terry Guest (2022 Jeff Award Winner – Production, Short Run), and Fireflies by Donja R. Love (Black Theatre Alliance Award – Best Direction of an Ensemble).
Escaped Alone
By Caryl Churchill
Directed by Liz Diamond
March 8–30, 2024
Three old friends and a neighbor. A verdant backyard on a summer afternoon. Tea and catastrophe. Caryl Churchill’s convention-defying play, Escaped Alone, sets in comic and devastating counterpoint the consolations of a good chat and the looming weight of disasters both intimate and global.
Caryl Churchill was born on September 3, 1938, in London and grew up in the Lake District and in Montreal. She was educated at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Downstairs, her first play written while she was still at university, was first staged in 1958 and won an award at the Sunday Times National Union of Students Drama Festival. Caryl Churchill’s plays include Owners, Traps, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Cloud 9, Top Girls, Fen, Serious Money, Ice Cream, Mad Forest, The Skriker, Blue Heart, This is a Chair, Far Away, A Number, Drunk Enough To Say I Love You?, Seven Jewish Children, Love & Information, Here We Go and Escaped Alone. Music theatre includes Lives of the Great Poisoners and Hotel, both with Orlando Gough. Caryl has also written for radio and television.
Liz Diamond is a Resident Director at Yale Repertory Theatre and serves as Chair of the Directing program at David Geffen School of Drama. Productions at Yale Rep include The Winter’s Tale; Lucinda Coxon’s Happy Now? (also at Primary Stages in New York); Marcus Gardley’s dance of the holy ghosts (world premiere); Strindberg’s Miss Julie; Sunil Kuruvilla’s Fighting Words and Rice Boy (world premiere); Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy; 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 (world premiere), and Father Comes Homes From the Wars, Parts 1, 2 & 3. She has directed new plays, adaptations, and classical works at theatres including the Alliance, American Repertory Theater, The Public Theater, Vineyard Theatre, Theatre for a New Audience, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Westport Country Playhouse, and has won the OBIE and the Connecticut Critics Circle Awards for Outstanding Direction. Additional projects at Yale include Diamond’s staging of her translation of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat, in a joint Yale School of Drama/Yale School of Music production at Carnegie Hall, as well as Matthew Suttor’s and Timothy Young’s musical adaptation of Blaise Cendrar’s epic poem, La Prose du Transibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France for the Beinecke Library’s 50th-anniversary celebration.
The Far Country
By Lloyd Suh
Directed by Ralph B. Peña
2023 Pulitzer Prize Finalist
April 26–May 18, 2024
In the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act, an unlikely family carries invented biographies and poems of longing on an arduous journey from rural Taishan to Angel Island Detention Center, in hopes of landing in San Francisco Bay. Intimate and epic, The Far Country weighs the true cost of selling the past for the hope of a brighter future.
The Far Country will be Yale Rep’s 2023–24 WILLPOWER! production. Yale Rep’s annual education initiative includes three morning matinee performances of The Far Country for high school students from New Haven Public Schools, entirely free of charge, May 14, 15, and 16. For more information on the program, please contact Senior Artistic Producer Amy Boratko at amy.boratko@yale.edu.
Production support for The Far Country is provided by Yale’s Binger Center for New Theatre.
Lloyd Suh is also the author of The Heart Sellers, which premiered in February at Milwaukee Rep, and will play at the Huntington Theatre in November. Other plays include The Chinese Lady, Bina’s Six Apples, Charles Francis Chan Jr.’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery, American Hwangap, and more, and have been produced across the country, with Ma-Yi, Atlantic, The Public, Alliance, Children’s Theatre Company, Magic, Long Wharf, Denver Center, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and more, including internationally at the Cultural Center of the Philippines and with PCPA at the Guerilla Theatre in Seoul, Korea. He is the recipient of the Steinberg Playwright Award, the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, the Horton Foote Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a Resident Playwright at New Dramatists and was elected in 2016 to the Dramatists Guild Council.
Ralph B. Peña is an OBIE Award-winning theater maker based in New York City. Recent directing credits include the world premiere of Lisa Sanaye Dring’s SUMO at La Jolla Playhouse; Lloyd Suh’s The Chinese Lady at The Public Theater, Indiana Rep, Long Wharf Theater, Barrington Stage (Drama Desk, Lortel, NY Outer Critics, CT Critics Circle nominations); Michael Lew’s Tiger Style! at South Coast Repertory; and Daniel K. Isaac’s ONCE UPON A (korean) TIME for Ma-Yi Theater Company, where he is currently Producing Artistic Director. For Ma-Yi he has directed the world premieres of Hansol Jung’s Among the Dead (New York Times Critic’s Pick), Michael Lew’s microcrisis, Lloyd Suh’s The Wong Kids (Off Broadway Alliance Best Children’s Play) and Children of Vonderly (both also NYT Critic’s Picks). He wrote and directed the short film Vancouver (Cannes World Film Festival, L.A. Indie Festival, NY International Film Award for Best Short and Best Director, 2023 UNIMA Citation of Excellence), and the documentary Twenty Years of Asian American Playwriting for PBS / ALL ARTS.