Play's the Thing

James Magruder has long-standing Yale ties: three advanced degrees; an award-winning dissertation, Three French Comedies, published by Yale University Press in 1996; two adaptations produced at Yale Repertory Theatre; and fourteen years’ teaching translation and adaptation at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. He has also published four novels, among them Love Slaves of Helen Hadley Hall, set at Yale in 1983–84, and had two musicals reach the Broadway stage.

“Gorgeous. James Magruder’s account of the theater’s first fifty years is enthralling, suspenseful, very funny, very moving, elegantly and lucidly organized, and beautifully written. Much more than a chronological account of an institution, Magruder offers brilliant readings of classic and contemporary plays, summarizing the work and careers of important playwrights, directors, actors, designers, dramaturgs, technicians, managers, and even drama critics with insight, discernment, and generosity. He makes his readers almost see what audiences once saw in long-gone, legendary productions, while evoking the aching impermanence and haunted loss that’s an essential aspect of theater. Few significant American theater artists are missing from The Play’s the Thing; these pages constitute one of the most thoughtful, thought-provoking, seriously delightful and entertaining books about theater I’ve read.”—Tony Kushner“This is an elegantly conceived and beautifully written book. Magruder’s wit, rooted in his deep understanding of the Rep’s repertoire and in the human comedy of artistic collaboration, gives the book its momentum and deceptively light touch.”—Marc Robinson, Yale University“The Play’s the Thing is a chronicle of joy, vision and knowledge, gossip and witty truths, a party with August Wilson and Sarah Ruhl and Anton Chekhov, and no one who loves theater, history or human beings will want to leave before the last page.”—Amy Bloom“James Magruder’s The Play’s the Thing is THE guide to the past fifty years of Yale Repertory Theater. The highs, the lows, the sublime, the ugly—nothing escapes his shrewd storytelling. Like the best evenings at the theater, it makes you think and it makes you feel too.”—Rachel Shteir, author of Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter“James Magruder uses the voice of an idiosyncratic but amusing theater crony—but one so well informed and tartly opinionated that he remains enjoyable company throughout the remarkable fifty-year journey of Yale Repertory Theatre.”—Allen J. Kuharski, Swarthmore College