This week, I interview author, playwright and teacher James Magruder, who has written the book, The Play’s the Thing.
The coffee-table sized book is a serious and entertaining chronicle of the first fifty years of the Yale Repertory Theatre. He includes dozens of theater artists who have played parts in the evolution of one of the country’s leading regional theaters. Each of its four chapters is dedicated to one of the Yale Rep’s artistic directors to date: Robert Brustein, Lloyd Richards, Stan Wojewodski Jr., and James Bundy. The book is full of indelible descriptions of crucial moments in the Rep’s history, is based in part on interviews with some of America’s most respected actors about their experiences at the Rep, including Paul Giamatti, James Earl Jones, Frances McDormand, Meryl Streep, Courtney B. Vance, Dianne Wiest, and Henry Winkler—among many others.
More than just a valentine to an important American theater, The Play’s the Thing is a story about institution-building and the force of personality; about the tug-of-war between vision and realpolitik; and about the continuous negotiation between educational needs and artistic demands.
THIS EPISODE WILL BE AVAILABLE APRIL 11.
ABOUT JAMES MAGRUDER
A Baltimore resident for thirty years, JAMES MAGRUDER was born in Washington, D.C., and moved with his family five times before settling down in Chicagoland. These early and frequent dislocations, combined with a brutish stepfather, a burgeoning queer identity, and a veeeery late puberty, have provided him with a backlog of humiliating grist and many outstanding scores to settle.
He went off to Cornell University, spent his junior year in Paris, served time as a grad student in the Yale French department, then defected to the Yale School of Drama, where he received his doctorate. His dissertation, THREE FRENCH COMEDIES (Yale University Press), was named an “Outstanding Literary Translation of the Year” by the American Literary Translators Association. Today, his versions of Molière, Marivaux, Lesage, Labiche, Gozzi, Hofmannsthal, Dickens, and Giraudoux have been produced across the country and earn him tens of dollars. He also wrote the book for the Broadway musical TRIUMPH OF LOVE (1997) and co-wrote the recent HEAD OVER HEELS (2018), for which he received a nomination for Outstanding Book of a Musical by the Outer Critics Circle.
He began writing fiction in 2002. His stories have appeared, or are forthcoming, in StoryQuarterly, The Idaho Review, The Hopkins Review, New England Review, The Gettysburg Review, Bloom, Subtropics, The Normal School, and elsewhere, and the anthologies BOY CRAZY and NEW STORIES FROM THE MIDWEST. His debut novel, SUGARLESS, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and was shortlisted for both the VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize and the 2010 William Saroyan International Writing Prize. Northwestern University Press published his first collection of stories, LET ME SEE IT, in 2014. LOVE SLAVES OF HELEN HADLEY HALL, nineteen years in the making, was published by a now-defunct indie press in 2016 and reissued in 2017 by Chelsea Station. VAMP UNTIL READY, a summer stock novel set in upstate New York in the 1980’s, was published in September, 2021.
A five-time MacDowell Fellow, Magruder’s work has also been supported by the Maryland State Arts Council, the New Harmony Project, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Ucross Foundation, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Jerome Foundation. He has taught dramaturgy at Swarthmore College, adaptation at Yale School of Drama, and fiction at the University of Baltimore.
SEE ALSO:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Magruder
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