Эван Йионулис вернулась в Йель: стала первым женщиной-директором школы драмы и театра Йелл Репертори

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Evan Yionoulis ’ first semester as dean of the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre began a couple of weeks ago. These are new jobs for her — she’s just fifth person and the first woman to hold the dual position since the Yale Repertory Theatre was founded over 60 years ago — but the environment is familiar. Yionoulis was a Yale University undergraduate, then she went to the Yale School of Drama and then she taught there for 20 years. Eight years ago, Yionoulis left Yale to become the head of the drama program at the Juilliard School in New York. Her last day at Juilliard was at the end of June, and her first day in her return to Yale was on July 1. “I’m continuing to settle in,” she said. “I’m waiting for the couch in my office to arrive.” Yionoulis and her husband Donald Holder, the famed Broadway designer who now heads the the lighting design concentration at the Geffen School and is the lighting design advisor at the Yale Repertory Theatre, are renting a furnished house in Branford until the transition back to Connecticut slows down a bit. Meanwhile, the Yale theater season is in full swing. A meet-and-greet between the cast of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” at the Yale Repertory Theatre Oct. 2-24 and the drama school students (some of whom will be working on the production) just happened, and several student productions are ramping up as well. Yionoulis wasn’t involved in programming the 2026-27 Yale Repertory Theatre season — that was done by James Bundy, who stepped down as dean/artistic director in June after 22 years — and wont’ be directing any of the shows in it. But she is already thinking about the 2027-28 season and said she would be directing then. Besides the current season, Yionoulis inherited all the work Bundy did toward conceiving, funding and designing a brand new building complex to house the Yale Repertory Theatre and the school. The 217,000-square-foot Dramatic Arts Building project, which will also incorporate the Yale undergraduate theater program, a smaller performance space, studios, classrooms and offices, is underway and expected to open in 2030. Yionoulis said she had no hesitation taking the Yale job when she was offered it. “It’s an incredible opportunity. I really care about this place. I have a chance to help it go where it wants to go.” She said the combined forces of “a professional theater as well as amazing students” was irresistible. “It’s an incredible model.” As for being the first female leader of the school and the theater, Yionoulis listed many women who helped shape American theater in the 20th and 21st centuries, among them Broadway producer Margo Lion and off-Broadway pioneer Ellen Stewart of La Mama Experimental Theater Club. She also noted that Hallie Flanagan, who’ oversaw the Federal Theater Project for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression, was once a candidate to run the Yale School of Drama. Yet Yionoulis does not downplay the fact that she is the first woman to hold these roles at Yale and part of a wave of female leadership at Connecticut theaters in general. She said she has known Melia Bensussen, artistic director of Hartford Stage, for decades. She also workshopped a show once at Goodspeed Musicals, where Donna Lynn Hilton is now the artistic director. The Yale Repertory Theatre was founded in 1966 by Robert Brustein, who had rethought the drama school as a training ground to prepare actors, directors, designers, managers and others for work in the fast-growing world of regional theaters. Having a professional theater on campus was central to the drama school’s educational process. As the theater landscape changed, and as graduates of the school became as well known for TV and movie work as for live theater, the school kept adjusting its teaching methods. A recent podcast, “Oh, the Drama!” covered the drama school and the Yale Repertory Theatre as they respectively turn 100 and 60 years old. “In terms of wearing the two hats, it’s a big job,” Yionoulis said. “The Rep is a professional theater helping in the development of new writers and theater artists, and it’s also serving as a sort of teaching hospital which offers opportunities for students to work. We are fully preparing our students to enter the profession.” She doesn’t anticipate making any big changes right away in how the school and the theater operate. There are staff positions to be filled. Marcus Gardley, co-chair of the playwriting department, is leaving to work on the TV adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel “The Trees,” which will star Yale drama grads Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Winston Duke. When the Yale Repertory Theatre began, it was an actual repertory company, with a core group of actors that lived in the community and worked alongside each other in most of the plays. Other Connecticut theaters including Hartford Stage and the Long Wharf Theatre also began as repertory companies, but like the Yale Repertory Theatre, gave up that model in the 1970s. Yionoulis said the drama school’s annual spring Carlotta Festival, which does full productions of the thesis projects by the playwriting students involving student directors, actors, designers and stage managers as well, may be “the only thing that remains of the the technical idea of a repertory company, since those students have been working together for years, but in general we do create an ensemble company not just of actors but of technicians and managers. “The question is ‘What is foundational?’ We train students to think like artists — thinking deeply, writing cogently, developing all the elements of the craft,” she said. “We teach the embodied practices of theater but need to balance that with the need to keep up with current technology.” The school’s programs in sound design, lighting design and projection design seem to be constantly affected by new technologies and techniques. As a resident director at the Yale Repertory Theatre for 20 years, Yionoulis demonstrated an extraordinary range, from a contemporary comedy such as “Stones in Their Pockets” to the 18th century fantasy “The King Stag” to the world premiere of Kristen Greenidge’s “Bossa Nova” to the dark and violent “Heaven” by George F. Walker to classics by Shakespare, Ibsen and Brecht. Does she naturally come to these varied works or is she expressly looking to challenge herself? “Everything I did at the Rep was something I had an affinity for, a connection with, or a suspicion about,” she said. Such creative risk-taking made her an inspiration for her students when she was the chair of the acting program at the drama school and will again now that she is running the whole school. In turn, she said, it’s the school that gives her that energy. “That is what being a resident director at a theater company allows you to do,” Yionoulis said. “There is a special opportunity that Yale Rep has with adventurous audiences and students who need a range of material. Adventurousness is a responsibility.”