The Master Builder

Program Notes

James Bundy

"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn."
—Henry David Thoreau


Welcome to The Master Builder, at the dawning of Yale Repertory Theatre’s new season!

To borrow one of Henrik Ibsen’s most famous metaphors, the complexity and range of the playwright’s works can be compared to an onion: peel away one layer, and discover another and another, from the poetry and romanticism of the early plays Brand and Peer Gynt; to the steely social conscience of Ghosts and An Enemy of the People, to the compressed psychological and spiritual inquiry of The Wild Duck and When We Dead Awaken. In their variety of form and scope of content, Ibsen’s plays are vivid signs of an artist who dedicated his life to reawakening himself and his audiences. Astonishingly, they are direct ancestors of virtually all western drama in the last century.

To revive a play merely because of its lineage, however, is not the job of the contemporary theatre. The Master Builder is crackling entertainment in a classical sense. It holds us between compelling ideas: the beliefs that lift us up and the doubts that cast us down. Less often produced than A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder revisits and transforms many of the social themes of those earlier, more famous, plays, while privileging a more explicit and theatrical investigation of the human psyche. In the unique space and time of this performance, translator Paul Walsh, director Evan Yionoulis, and the company have an opportunity to set the play before you with the same freshness with which it might have met its first audiences in Norway, evoking the timeless desires and fears that any of us might have felt, or feel right now.

If you are a frequent attendee, you know that Yale Rep is committed to producing great works that make immediate connections with contemporary audiences. In addition to The Master Builder, this season also includes the commedia dell’arte masterpiece The Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Goldoni, directed by Christopher Bayes; and Bernard-Marie Koltès’s Battle of Black and Dogs—among the most influential plays in contemporary European drama, but little-seen in this country—directed by Robert Woodruff.

We will also present three new works by emerging playwrights: the acclaimed play Eclipsed by Danai Gurira, co-author of In the Continuum (seen at Yale Rep in 2007), directed by Liesl Tommy; the world premiere of Compulsion by Rinne Groff, directed by Oskar Eustis, in a co-production with The Public Theater and Berkeley Repertory Theatre; and the world premiere of the new musical POP! by Maggie-Kate Coleman and Anna K. Jacobs, set in Andy Warhol’s legendary Factory, directed by Mark Brokaw.

Please join us for the entire season. Each play promises one remarkable night at the theatre. Together, they represent an extraordinary range of human perspectives and experiences—
a kind of collective wake-up call—that is energized by your participation, as I am by the wonderful e-mails you send me at james.bundy@yale.edu. Thank you for joining us, and please, spread the word of this new dawn.

Sincerely,

James Bundy Signature

James Bundy
Artistic Director