Darko Tresnjak will be the artistic director of Hartford Stage at least through the 2018-19 season. The three-year extension of his initial five-year contract was announced Dec. 5 by Sue Ann Collins, president of the theater’s Board of Directors.
Tresnjak has been Hartford Stage’s artistic director since July 2011. Connecticut theatergoers knew his work long before that, when he directed shows at the Long Wharf Theatre, Goodspeed Opera House and Westport Country Playhouse.
“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder,” directed by Tresnjak during his first full season as artistic director at Hartford Stage, went to Broadway and won Tonys for Best Musical and Best Director. “Anastasia,” which Tresnjak staged at Hartford Stage earlier this year, will be on Broadway this spring. This season in Hartford, Tresnjak will direct Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors” and George Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan.”
In a statement regarding his contract extension, Hartford Stage credits Tresnjak with “reaffirming its commitment to the works of William Shakespeare, building on the theatre’s mission to develop new works for the American Theatre, and successfully launching musical theatre as a programming priority.”
‘Moonlight’ Playwright Joins Yale
The Yale School of Drama has hired one of the most acclaimed playwrights in the country to head its playwriting program.
Tarell Alvin McCraney has been named the new chair of the school’s Department of Playwriting. He starts at Yale on July 1. He’s currently teaching Theatre and Civic Engagement at the University of Miami and promoting the acclaimed new film “Moonlight,” which was based on his play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.”
Jeanie O’Hare stepped down from the Yale playwriting post in June to become director of new work development at the Public Theater in New York. Yale Repertory Theatre Associate Artistic Director Jennifer Kiger has served as interim chair since O’Hare left.
When McCraney was a student in the playwriting program a decade ago — at a time when the leadership of the department changed from Mark Bly to Richard Nelson — he was already an established writer and performer. As soon as he graduated from the Yale School of Drama in 2007, his plays were being done at the Public Theater, The Young Vic in London and elsewhere. McCraney became an ensemble member of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 2010. In 2013 he received two of the most prestigious (and lucrative) awards any writer can hope for: a MacArthur “genius grant” and a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize.
McCraney is best known for his “Brother/Sister Plays” trilogy: “Marcus, of the Secret of Sweet,” “In the Red and Brown Water” and “The Brothers Size.” All three plays were first produced as student projects at Yale.
Fun At The FoFest
I spent the evening of Dec. 8 celebrating the legacy of Dario Fo and Franca Rame with fellow fans at the Buttonwood Tree in Middletown. Fo, the radical playwright and accomplished clown, died in October at the age of 90. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997. (If you think Bob Dylan winning that prize this year was controversial, look up the reaction to Fo’s getting it.)
Franca Rame, who died in 2013 at age 83, was a great writer and performer as well, known for dramatic monologues as well as comedy. Fo and Rame were married for nearly 50 years.
At the Buttonwood Tree event, Ron Jenkins — the Wesleyan Theater professor who has translated many of Fo’s works and served as his onstage English translator at live performances — shared rare footage of Fo performing his signature piece “Mistero Buffo” in 1986, during his first visit to America. Members of Middletown’s ARTFARM theater company read scenes from Fo and Rame’s plays. There was a strong feeling in the room that these great artists should not be forgotten and that their plays should be read and performed often. (Hint, hint.)
TV Stage Notes
“Riverdale,” a new live-action TV series based on characters from the Archie comic books, will premiere Jan. 26 on the CW network. Greg Berlanti is the show’s executive-producer and has a stable of comics-based TV shows including “Arrow,” “Flash,” “Supergirl” and “Legends of Tomorrow.” “Riverdale”‘s main creative force, however, is Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa.
I saw several of Aguirre-Sacasa’s plays when he was a student at the Yale School of Drama in the early ’00s. Among them was a classroom reading of his radical reworking of the Archie mythos titled “Archies Weird Fantasy.” The play was eventually produced in Atlanta, but not before the names of the characters were changed in order to head off threatened litigation from the Archie company.
After he graduated from the School of Drama, Aguirre-Sacasa’s plays “Dark Matters” and “Good Boys and True” were developed at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford (in 2003 and 2007 respectively). His spiritualized supernatural drama “The Mystery Plays” was staged at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2004. In New York, he’s best known for Broadway musicals — a revision of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” and the book for “American Psycho.”
Aguirre-Sacasa was a writer/producer on the shows “Glee,” “Big Love,” “Supergirl” and “Looking,” and also wrote the screenplays for “The Town That Dreaded Sundown” and the 2013 remake of “Carrie.” He also serves as chief creative officer for Archie Comics Publications. Besides taking Archie in new directions with comics such as “Afterlife With Archie” and “Archie Meets ‘Glee’,” Aguirre-Sacasa has written for Marvel Comics (Spider-Man, Fantastic Four).
Also coming to the small screen in the new year: “Trial and Error,” a new crime/legal drama starring John Lithgow and Krysta Rodriguez. Lithgow wrote in his 2011 autobiography about the importance of New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre in shaping his acting career. He appeared in the Long Wharf’s 1972 U.S. premiere of David Storey’s “The Changing Room,” winning a Tony when the production moved to Broadway. He also starred at Long Wharf in the stage adaptation of Rod Serling’s “Requiem for a Heavyweight” in 1984, and performed at a gala benefit for the theater in 2014. Krysta Rodriguez, who originated the role of Wednesday in the “Addams Family” musical and appeared in both the original Broadway production and the recent Deaf West revival of “Spring Awakening,” was in “The Boyfriend” at the Goodspeed Opera House. In recent summers. Rodriguez has starred in public readings of some new musicals at the Yale Institute of Music Theatre, including “Clouds Are Pillows for the Moon” and “The White City.”
