The first production of the season will be Jean Racine's Phèdre, running Oct. 27-31 in the University Theatre. Christopher Mirto directs the Ted Hughes translation of the work in which "the gods wield love as a weapon, using it to turn the world upside down. To ravish it. Queen Phèdre, dying from an uncontrollable love for her stepson Hippolytus, savagely wages war against herself and her own fate. Politics and passions, the mind and the body contaminate each other as a cursed family struggles to navigate a labyrinth of dangerous secrets and unspoken desires. When love unleashes the monster within, is there any hope of salvation?" Jesse Jou will stage Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde, in the University Theatre from Dec. 12-17. Carl R. Mueller translates the ten-scene work "where prostitutes cavort with counts, wives seduce louche young gentlemen, and husbands cheat with Sweet Young Things. Schnitzler's penetrations into the tangle of sex, love, and power – That Thing – affirm La Ronde as a humanist masterpiece. Today, post-Freud, That Thing is like a particle in quantum physics whose nature eludes every attempt to describe it. Cracking Schnitzler's atom will set off not a nuclear explosion, but a cascade of glittering shrapnel that will reflect the desperation and joy of being human."
The new year launches with the stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, running Jan. 26-30, 2010, in the Iseman Theater. Jen Wineman directs the production from playwright Sarah Ruhl (In the Next Room, Eurydice). "One lifetime isn't enough. One body isn't enough. After living 200 years as a handsome English nobleman, Orlando falls asleep and awakens — as a woman. In a dream or in reality, Orlando must now continue on in a body she does not recognize, but perhaps always sensed was her own. Sarah Ruhl's adaptation of Virginia Woolf's semi-autobiographical novel examines time's relentless drive forward and our instinct to fill each moment of life with poetry, imagination, passion, and eroticism."
For tickets phone (203) 432-1234, or visit Drama.Yale.edu.
