THE SALVAGERS World Premiere & More Set for Yale Repertory Theatre 2023-24 Season

Yale Repertory Theatre has announced its 2023-24 season of four plays.

The season will open with Wish You Were Here by Sanaz Toossi, directed by Sivan Battat. The deeply human and humorous journey of a close-knit circle of girlfriends set during and in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 will run October 5-October 28.

The world premiere of The Salvagers by Harrison David Rivers, directed by Mikael Burke, will play November 24-December 16. Yale Rep commissioned this powerful portrait of a father and son who learn how to navigate the path to second, third, and fourth chances in life.

Next up will be Escaped Alone, Caryl Churchill's genre-defying play of afternoon tea and catastrophe. Staged by Yale Rep Resident Director Liz Diamond, it will be performed March 8-30.

The season will conclude with The Far Country by Lloyd Suh, directed by Eric Ting. The intimate and epic passage of an unlikely family from rural China to San Francisco in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act, will run April 26-May 18.

"I am delighted that all of us can look forward to a season of remarkable scope and imagination led by such visionary playwrights and directors," said Artistic Director James Bundy. "The four extraordinary plays they will bring to life traverse continents, centuries, and artistic sensibilities. With stunning theatricality and deep humanity, these plays pose urgent questions about our past, reflect our present, and imagine our future."

All 2023-24 Season plays will be performed at Yale Repertory Theatre (1120 Chapel Street).

Subscriptions for Yale Rep's upcoming season will go on sale in the coming weeks. Individual tickets will be available in late summer.

ABOUT THE SEASON

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, Wish You Were Here 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, award-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 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 is a member of Youngblood and the Middle Eastern American Writers Lab at the Lark, and an alum of Clubbed Thumb's Early Career Writers' Group. She 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. MFA: NYU Tisch

Sivan Battat (she/they) is a theatre director and cultural organizer, and the Director of New Work Development at Noor Theatre. Sivan has developed work with companies including Roundabout, the Park Avenue Armory, NYTW, the Atlantic, Ars Nova, National Queer Theatre, New Georges, Goodman, New York Stage & Film, Cape Cod Theatre Project, Mercury Store, Long Wharf, MCC, and more. 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). Fellowships include: Roundabout Directing Fellow, Drama League Musical Directing Fellow, TCG Rising Leaders of Color, The Workshop JOCSM Arts Fellowship. As an organizer, Sivan works regularly with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) and has curated several iterations of Salon Al-Mahjar صالون المهجر, a performance salon for queer and trans MENASA artists. sivanbattat.com

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 harrisondavidrivers.com

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). mklburke.com

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 Eric Ting
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 examines the true cost of selling the past for the promise 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.

Eric Ting directed the world premiere of Lloyd Suh's The Far Country at Atlantic Theatre Company in 2022, the same year he staged Between Two Knees by the 1491s at Yale Rep. His Off-Broadway credits include work at Manhattan Theatre Club, Soho Rep, Public Theater, Signature Theatre, and Brooklyn Academy of Music. Regional: Oregon Shakespeare Festival, California Shakespeare Theater, Denver Center Theatre Company, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Berkeley Rep, Long Wharf Theatre, Cincinnati Playhouse, Mark Taper Forum, Goodman Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Alliance Theatre, American Repertory Theater, Round House Theatre. International: Singapore Repertory Theatre, Singapore International Festival of Arts, NYU Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Center, Holland Festival. Awards: OBIE Award, TBA Awards, Connecticut Critics Circle Awards.

ABOUT YALE REPERTORY THEATRE

Yale Repertory Theatre, the internationally celebrated professional theatre in residence at David Geffen School of Drama, has championed new work since 1966, producing well over 100 premieres-including two Pulitzer Prize winners and four other nominated finalists-by emerging and established playwrights. Seventeen Yale Rep productions have advanced to Broadway, garnering more than 40 Tony Award nominations and ten Tony Awards. Yale Rep is also the recipient of the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre. Established in 2008, Yale's Binger Center for New Theatre has distinguished itself as one of the nation's most robust and innovative new play programs. To date, the Binger Center has supported the work of more than 70 commissioned artists and underwritten the world premieres and subsequent productions of more than 30 new plays and musicals at Yale Rep and theaters across the country-including next season's Wish You Were Here by Sanaz Toossi, The Salvagers by Harrison David Rivers and The Far Country by Lloyd Suh.

To post a comment, you must register and login.