Author Archives: Akbar Ahmed

Last week, the Yale Repertory Theatre announced its 2012-’13 season, which features productions with themes ranging from the French aristocracy to American immigration politics. Tied to the School of Drama, the Rep produces six shows each year and has won eight Tony Awards since its establishment in 1966. The News spoke with James Bundy, dean »

After four years as a student at Yale, poet and self-described activist Kenneth Reveiz ’12 said he wants to use a new play to express his view that Yale inducts undergraduates into a hegemonic system and rewards limited styles of creative expression. “People [at Yale] want antiquity, neoclassicism, pastoral fetishism, which are so entwined with »

With St. Patrick’s Day just around the corner, the theater community has its sights on bringing a slice of the Green Isle to Yale, in the form of two shows by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh. Two plays by McDonagh, “A Skull in Connemara” and “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” opened as independent student productions on »

On Tuesday, founding members and fellows of the Whitney Humanities Center gathered to take stock of the interdisciplinary institution’s history since its conception in February 1981. Peter Brooks, the Center’s founding director and a Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, joined three of the Whitney’s first fellows to discuss their experiences developing the Center and »

Attics, off-campus houses and Old Campus yurts have been past haunts of Control Group, Yale’s only undergraduate experimental theater company. But come Saturday, they will break with their penchant for obscure venues, putting up a new production in one of the most public settings on campus. In a turn for the traditional, the group will »

In early April, the projection design program at the Yale School of Drama will admit two students to the class of 2015, the third class admitted since the concentration was established in fall 2010. With the three-year program filled for the first time, the 18-month-old concentration is still seeking to define itself. The youngest Master »

With applications for fall 2012 admission to the Yale School of Drama received and counted, administrators said the school is continuing a three-year high in application levels. By the school’s final application deadline in early February, 1,369 applications had been received for places in the school’s nine Master of Fine Arts degree programs, according to »

This past Saturday, the stage of Morse Recital Hall played host to a conversation instead of a symphony. Three experts in the field of music — a Yale School of Music alumnus, the executive producer of National Public Radio Music and the project architect of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra — spent two hours discussing the »

On Jan. 24, Kathryn Krier DRA ’07 was named the new head of the Office of Undergraduate Production, a position that was left vacant for a full semester after the departure of Jim Brewczynski DRA ’86 over the summer. Krier, who was appointed by Associate Dean for the Arts Susan Cahan, said that in her »

Yalies accustomed to seeing Shakespeare’s Macbeth kilted, Celtic and far-removed from their daily lives may have to reconsider their image of the iconic killer. A new production of “Macbeth” opens this Thursday at the Whitney Theater, intertwining vignettes from American history with the plot of the classic revenge play. Sam Lasman ’12, the production’s director, »

Starting Monday, a whole bunch of Yale women just gained a whole lot of sisterhood. After an intense weekend rush period, Yale’s three sororities issued bids to their newest members Monday afternoon in the Woolsey Rotunda. Caroline McCullough ’14, a member of Yale’s Panhellenic Council, told Cross Campus that around 195 girls signed up to »

Earle Gister, an influential Yale theater professor who pioneered a new method for training actors, passed away in his sleep Sunday at his New Haven home. He was 77. A charismatic educator, Gister was among the most prominent leaders of conservatory acting training in the late 20th century. He helped coordinate previously disparate drama programs »