The 1960s at the Yale School of Drama

James Magruder—

The Yale School of Drama (YSD) began in 1925 when George Pierce Baker, unable to convince Harvard to offer a degree in playwriting, defected to Yale to teach his Drama 47 workshop to Tyro playwrights. The University Theater was built in the same year with funds from Edward Harkness (Yale College (YC) 1897). The department awarded its first MFA degree in 1931, and in 1955 it was reorganized as a separate professional school, the first in the Ivy League.

Institutions of all stripes flourish or wither through a combination of internal forces and external pressures. As it approached its fifth decade of existence, the YSD found itself in a state of powerlessness. The acting dean, Edward Cyrus Cole, who played W. Curtis Canfield, was not a scientist but a theater technician. Some of the original teachers were still in the classroom. A playwriting professor had begun repeating his lectures verbatim. The head of acting confused her students with former graduates. Playwrights had no guarantee of productions of their work. Many notable names in American theater, including Paul Newman, Elia Kazan, Richard Foreman, Julie Harris and Robert Brustein, chose not to complete their studies there. The “Yale Mafia,” as it then existed, was more about helping graduate students obtain their first teaching positions than their first professional theater jobs.

Playwright John Guare (’63) remembers watching a rehearsal of Macbeth, where the director had the cast listen to recordings of Maurice Evans to find their roles. John Conklin (’66), now one of America’s foremost set designers, remembers the atmosphere at YSD under Canfield as petrified, uninteresting, and out of touch. “Canfield did his blocking with golf tees on set models; everything was worked out in advance. There was no intersection with the text or the meaning of the piece.” New recruit Nikos Psacharopoulos was a breath of fresh air for the students, but Conklin felt that drama school productions were ‘impossibly retrograde and complacent, in the old Theater Guild way’. Irene Lewis was a third-year directing student in the fall of 1965. She had started acting training; a fellow student told her she was “taking a man’s place” when she switched degrees. The time for institutional change was overdue. “We were outraged by the turn of events, and remember, this was a time of protest. The Vietnam War was moving closer to the middle class. The young people who came in my third year were very vocal, because many of them were fleeing conscription.”

One evening in November there were seven students: Lewis; another third-year director, Alan Leicht (’66); and five freshmen – met at the home of designer Robert E. Taylor. The agenda was quickly set: “Let’s get these people out!” The group of seven invited the entire student body to a late evening meeting on November 21 (see above), and the fuse of a revolution was lit.

Lewis pushes the concept of risk aside. “They may have stopped me from graduating, but it was the sixties and the thing about that age, it’s like, ‘Fuck you, we pay a thousand dollars a year here, and there’s no one in the building connected is with professional theatre.’ except the ‘O’ (Donald Oenslager) and Nikos (Psacharopoulos)!’”

Newsweek would later report: “A year ago, 154 of 194 students signed a petition to Kingman Brewster, calling for radical changes to the drama school’s curriculum and practice, and hinting at mass withdrawals.” The dissidents found it surprisingly easy to arrange a meeting with a receptive president. “Kingman Brewster knew Yale,” Lewis says. “He was a classy man, a patrician who could nevertheless listen to us, hear us, yet pass through the crowd in bow ties walking through the room.”

Brewster agreed to look for a new dean. A few months later, Brustein came to New Haven and gave a presentation to the entire school. “Whether he was accepted for the job or not,” says Lewis, “we didn’t know, but no one else showed up. It was exciting; he was exciting.”

Brustein’s transition would not be easy, but it was safe to say that a second act had been given to the YSD. So from small pieces of paper, great things can happen. Decades later, Irene Lewis, class of 1966, kept that mimeographed invitation on her desk at Center Stage in Baltimore, where she was artistic director for 20 years, as a reminder that change is possible and that all emperors may not wear clothes. .

By The play is the thing: fifty years of Yale Repertory Theater (1966-2016) by James Magruder, foreword by Rocco Landesman. Other primary creator Marguerite Elliott. Published by Yale University Press in 2024. Reproduced with permission.

James Magruder has longstanding ties to Yale: three advanced degrees; an award-winning dissertation, Three French Comedies, published by Yale University Press in 1996; two adaptations produced at the Yale Repertory Theater; and fourteen years teaching translation and adaptation at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. He has also published four novels, including Love Slaves of Helen Hadley Hall, set at Yale in 1983-84, and had two musicals reach the Broadway stage.