School Notes: David Geffen School of Drama
May/June 2009

Play about Guantanamo wins Drama Series Award

A play about a former Guantanamo Bay detainee has been selected as the winner of the third annual Yale Drama Series Award. Playwright Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig will receive the David C. Horn Prize of $10,000 for her play Lidless, which will be published by Yale University Press and receive a reading at the Yale Repertory Theatre in September.

Lidless, chosen from over 650 submissions, is Cowhig's play about a former Guantanamo Bay detainee who journeys to the home of his female U.S. Army interrogator 15 years after his detention, demanding half her liver for the damage she wreaked on his body and soul during her interrogations. Cowhig, a graduate of Brown University and the International School of Beijing, will receive her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin this May.

The Yale Drama Series Award, jointly sponsored by Yale University Press and Yale Rep, was inaugurated in 2007 to support emerging playwrights.

Professor recognized for technical production achievement

Ben Sammler ’74MFA, chair of the technical design and production department and production supervisor at the Yale Rep, received the 2009 Distinguished Achievement Award in Technical Production from the United States Institute for Theatre Technology, Inc. (USITT), the association of design, production, and technology professionals in the performing arts and entertainment industry. Sammler was honored at USITT's 49th annual conference and stage expo in March.

"USITT's Distinguished Achievement Awards are designed to recognize those who have achieved outstanding success not once, but throughout their careers," said Carl Lefko, president of USITT. "Mr. Sammler's work has made a lasting contribution to the American theater by revolutionizing production-based training."

Music theater institute to workshop three plays

Three new works have been chosen to inaugurate the Yale Institute for Music Theatre in June. The musicals will receive two-week workshops at the institute, which was established last year by the School of Drama and the School of Music.

The three selected works are Cancer? the musical, an autobiographical new work with music, book, and lyrics by Sam Wessels, a 2008 graduate of the University of Utah Actor Training Program, where he received his BFA; Invisible Cities, an opera about Marco Polo and the downfall of Kublai Khan's empire, with score and libretto by Christopher Cerrone, who is currently pursuing his doctorate at Yale School of Music; and POP!, a musical re-imagining of the events leading up to the shooting of Andy Warhol as a pop-art murder mystery show, with book and lyrics by Maggie-Kate Coleman and music by Anna K. Jacobs.

The Yale Institute for Music Theatre seeks to identify distinctive and original music theater works by emerging writers and composers, and to serve those writers by matching them with directors, music directors, and actors/singers who can help them further develop their work.