Left to Right: Jesse Jou, Jen Wineman, and Christopher Mirto. Photo by Erik Pearson.
This year our three graduating directors take on The Big Three: Sex, Love, and Death. To do so they have chosen three radically different and equally provocative plays about what it means—and what it costs—to desire, to love, and to be truly alive. Christopher Mirto will direct Racine’s 17th century masterpiece, Phèdre, whose eponymous heroine’s fatal passion destroys everything in its path. Jesse Jou will direct Schnitzler’s lusty and lyrical La Ronde, in which energetic lovers, despite their moral qualms, thrive on sex, with or without love. Jen Wineman will direct Sarah Ruhl’s enchanting adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s biographical novel Orlando, whose hero is transformed in a lifetime spanning centuries of breathtaking social change. Through these projects, these gifted directors, each in possession of a singular, strong directorial vision, will wrestle, in a most urgent and personal way, with questions that touch us all.
Liz Diamond Chair, Directing
PHÈDRE
By Jean Racine
Translated by Ted Hughes
Directed by Christopher Mirto
Love is fierce. And still we crave it.
In Phèdre, Jean Racine's 17th-century “fairy tale for fools,” 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?
Visit the Phèdre production page
LA RONDE
By Arthur Schnitzler
Translated by Carl R. Mueller
Directed by Jesse Jou
"Girls, you know you better watch out.
Some guys are only about That Thing."
- Lauryn Hill, Doo Wop (That Thing)
In ten amorous dialogues, La Ronde captures the erotic world of fin de siècle Vienna, 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.
Visit the La Ronde production page
Virginia Woolf's
ORLANDO
Adapted by Sarah Ruhl
Directed by Jen Wineman
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.
Visit the Orlando production page