THE PLAY'S THE THING

An opportunity to go behind the scenes—literally—at a groundbreaking, standard-setting theatrical institution.

As Rocco Landesman points out in his introduction, playwright, dramaturg, and fiction writer Magruder takes on the formidable challenge of writing “a history of something ephemeral, that exists for a moment then disappears into the ether”—that would be the roughly 200 productions at the Yale Repertory Theater, from Dynamite Tonite in 1966 to Scenes From Court Life; or the whipping boy and his prince in 2016, with a procession of dramatis personae including Meryl Streep, Paul Giamatti, Tony Shalhoub, James Earl Jones, Frances McDormand, Dianne Wiest, and many more. Using breathtaking still photos from the productions (you could buy this book just for the pictures), plus 127 interviews, 40 linear feet of scrapbooks, and other archival odds and ends (some featured in entertaining sidebars of their own), Magruder (Yale MA ‘84, MFA 88, DFA ‘92) sets himself a Horatian goal, “to instruct and delight,” and does he ever. Bringing his encyclopedic knowledge, his delightful vocabulary, and his witty, exquisitely wrought prose style to bear, Magruder offers a wide-ranging class not just in Yale Rep, but in the history and culture of the theater. He ranges from the role of Luigi Pirandello as the granddaddy of fourth-wall-breaking metatheatrical flourishes to the importance of the American Family Play, branching from Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill through Sam Shepard to fascinating-sounding modern productions called War and Lydia. In an aside, he scorns British director Trevor Nunn as the man responsible for what Magruder terms “the global contagion of Cats and Les Misérables.” Often his sentences contain so many layers of information and analysis that how much you learn from them depends only on how much time you have to spend with them, e.g., “As with Stoppard or Kushner or Churchill, a well-done Shaw can leave an audience giddy with thought.”

We are left giddy with thought.