Yale Rep announces 2024-25 season featuring new plays and updated classics
The Yale Repertory Theatre has returned to its roots for the upcoming 2024-25 season.
The theater is back to producing five main-stage shows for the season after doing four in the 2023-24 and 2022-23 seasons and just three in 2021-22.
The season will open with the world premiere of “Falcon Girls” by Hillary Bettis, directed by May Adrales, from Oct. 10 through Nov. 2.
“Falcon Girls” is a semi-autobiographical play about a group of teens on a horse judging team hoping to make the national finals.
Bettis is the playwright and screenwriter whose variation on Strindberg’s “Miss Julie,” “The Queen of Basel,” was done at TheaterWorks Hartford last year.
Adrales graduated nearly 20 years ago from the Yale School of Drama and has taught there and at other universities. She directed the acclaimed 2016 New York premiere of Qui Nguyen’s “Vietgone.”
Theater review: Themes of bigotry, culture shock gently explored in ‘The Far Country’ at Yale Rep
Whitney White’s “Macbeth in Stride,” running Dec. 5-14, is brought to Yale by a co-production team of the Philadelphia Theatre Company, Shakespeare Theatre Company and Brooklyn Academy of Music.
White adapted the show, which is a soul/pop concert take on Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth exploring Black female power.
The play, which premiered in 2021, is co-directed by Taibi Mager and Tyler Dobrowsky with choreography by Raja Feather Kelly, who did the dance moves for “Girls” at Yale Rep in 2019.
“Eden,” by renowned 20th century Black playwright Steve Carter, is at Yale Rep Jan. 16 through Feb. 8, 2025. The play is a sort of “Romeo & Juliet” drama of a Black Southern youth who falls in love with a Caribbean immigrant woman.
“Eden” is directed by New York director/actor Brandon J. Dirden.
“The Inspector,” scheduled for March 7-29, 2025, is a new version of Nikolai Gigol’s classic social satire “The Inspector.”
The play is adapted and directed by Russian-born theater artist Yura Kordonsky, who currently teaches at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and has previously taught in Connecticut at Wesleyan University and the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center.
Mara Vélez Meléndez’s “Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members,” on April 25 through May 17, 2025, was produced off-Broadway in 2022. That production at the Soho Rep was promoted as “a drag show about decolonizing places and people.” The Yale Rep describes it as “a revenge saga giving existential drag extravaganza.”
This new production will be directed by Javier Antonio González.
Most of the shows in the season run for around three weeks, while “Macbeth in Stride” runs for 10 days.
The Yale Repertory Theatre was founded in 1966 as a professional regional theater which serves as a training ground for students in Yale’s graduate drama programs. There have only been four artistic directors in the theater’s 58-year history. The artistic director also serves as dean of the drama school.
Yale Rep’s founder Robert Brustein, who left in 1979, died earlier this year at the age of 96. Since 2002, the artistic director has been James Bundy.
Season subscription deals are available. For more information on the upcoming 2024-25 Yale Repertory Theatre season, go to yalerep.org.
