Some of the finest playwrights of the 20th and 21st centuries left us in 2025.
Four monumental talents — Richard Foreman, Athol Fugard, William Finn and Tom Stoppard — left their mark not just on Broadway and London’s West but on the thriving Connecticut regional theater scene, which promoted and supported these artists at pivotal times in their careers.
Hartford Stage, Yale Repertory Theatre, Long Wharf Theatre and theaters and schools throughout the state are mourning the loss of these extraordinary writers.
The New York-based founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater company and 1962 graduate of the Yale School of Drama, Foreman died in January at the age of 87.
Forman was known for his incisive, intense, uncompromising modern theater pieces. His style was drawn from provocative stage artists from the Dada and Surrealist art and performance movements of the early 20th century, Bertolt Brecht, French filmmaker Robert Bresson, Gertrude Stein and contemporary experimentalists such as John Zork.
Foreman’s reputation extended far beyond the purposefully cramped spaces he staged his works in New York. When fast-rising 1990s playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, who would go on to write “Topdog/Underdog,” the epic “Father Comes Home from the Wars Parts 1, 2 and 3” and the even more substantial “365 Days/365 Plays” project and the Spike Lee film “Girl 6” crafted a historical drama about the Hottentot Venus, an African woman exhibited as a sideshow curiosity, Foreman — who tended to only direct new plays if he’d written them himself — was sought to direct it.
“Venus” premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1996 before transferring to the New York Public Theater. It was a suitably dark, disorienting and mysterious production that drew comparisons to David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man” but was really a singular vision about racism and misogyny in society.
Richard Foreman’s production of Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Venus” at Yale Repertory Theater. The line across the photo is a string boundary across the stage, a Foreman trademark. The actor at the left is future “The Office” star Rainn Wilson. (Kathleen Cei)
Just a year later, in 1997, Foreman’s production of his own script “Pearls for Pigs” played Hartford Stage as part of a multi-theater co-production, a sort of mini-tour to introduce regional audiences to the work of this legendary New York theater icon. In Hartford at least, the play proved polarizing, with numerous subscribers walking out of performances and animated arguments in the theater lobby.
The furor over “Pearls for Pigs” in particular was disheartening. The distress that longtime Hartford Stage-goers (quite a few of whom canceled their subscriptions) felt when seeing this unexpectedly wild work seemed to assure that experiments on that level would not return to Hartford Stage anytime soon and that Foreman would not be welcomed with open arms into the regional theater realm again. But the debate was part of the point. That level of social interaction and analysis over a fantasmagorical, non-linear, visually overwhelming and psychologically disturbing piece of live performance is rare and special. Foreman’s work may not have been easily explicable, but it was unforgettable.
Fugard, the South American playwright who died in March at the age of 92, could be said to have helped put Connecticut regional theater on the map. His breakthrough international success “The Blood Knot” was done in 1971, about a decade after its initial success, but the racial drama was still a bold choice at the time.
In the 1980s, Fugard made the Yale Rep his home base, directing his own plays “A Lesson from Aloes,” “Master Harold… and the Boys,” “Blood Knot” and “A Place with the Pigs.” The Yale Rep’s world premiere of “Master Harold…” transferred to Broadway and was made into a film twice, in 1985 and 2010.
Fugard returned to Long Wharf in the 2010s for a string of premieres that included the AIDS-themed “Coming Home” in 2009; the drama of social awkwardness “Have You Seen Us?,” also in 2009 starring Sam Waterston, “The Train Driver,” starring a young Colman Domingo in 2010 and Fugard himself starring in his musing on mortality “The Shadow of the Hummingbird” in 2014.
In recent years, Darko Tresnjak did an intriguingly modernistic production of “A Lesson from Aloes” at Hartford Stage in 2018 and Hartford’s HartBeat Ensemble did an exemplary intimate production of “My Children! My Africa!”
Darko Tresnjak’s 2018 production of Athol Fugard’s “A Lesson from Aloes” at Hartford Stage. (T Charles Erickson)
While he was working on “Shadow of the Hummingbird” at Long Wharf, Fugard attended a performance of the wacky Shakespearean rock comedy “These Paper Bullets!” at Yale Rep where, in one of the show’s gags about visiting celebrities, his face was projected on a large screen in the theater to the amazement of those who knew this playwright’s face.
Fugard was known in New Haven for his openness and generosity and charitable nature. He was kind to the panhandlers on Chapel Street, and in one instance was mistaken for one himself to the chagrin of the local police. He touched many lives with his meditative wisdom and his reflections on such pressing social issues as racism and political revolt.
Finn, who died in April in 1973, provided Hartford Stage with one of the most fondly remembered musicals it ever produced, decades before the theater became known for launching “Anastasia” and “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder.”
I spent a lot of time in Greenwich Village in my late 20s, which led me to see Finn’s groundbreaking musicals “In Trousers,” “March of the Falsettos” and “Falsettoland” when they were produced off-Broadway. In 1991, Hartford was the first theater to take these two short musicals, which featured pretty much the same bunch of characters, and combine them into a single evening. The production was directed by the New York director/choreographer Graciela Daniele. While that production did not move on to New York, its success directly affected a differently edited and directed combination of the plays which were collectively renamed “Falsettos” that opened on Broadway in 1992 and had a Broadway revival in 2016.
A stunning effect at the end of “Falsettos” at Hartford Stage was the unveiling of the AIDS quilt. (Courant file photo)
In 2016, Howard Sherman, who worked at Hartford Stage at the time, wrote a piece called “Before Broadway, Hartford Stage’s ‘Falsettos’ Changed Lives” for American Theatre magazine in which he described the production as “beautiful, sad, simple, funny, and transcendent.”
The excitement was palpable over a show that, as Sherman noted in his article, was somewhat of a risky proposition, dealing with the realities of big-city gay life and the drama of a husband leaving his wife because he’s fallen in love with a man.
“March of the Falsettos & Falsettoland” was Finn’s Hartford triumph, but Connecticut — and every other state in the union — know him better for the extremely popular 2004 musical “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” which has music and lyrics by Finn and a book by Rachel Sheinkin. The community-centered social comedy about wise kids and their overbearing parents had a lengthy off-Broadway run and also went to Broadway and on tour. But the show’s overwhelming popularity really began when the rights to perform it trickled down to small theaters, college theaters and community theaters. Locally, “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” has probably been done dozens of times throughout Connecticut, including at Playhouse on Park in West Hartford and Seven Angels in Waterbury.
Stoppard, who gave public lectures at Yale twice, once in the ’80s and once in the 2010s, was a dazzling speaker. He gave a perfectly paced description of a fantastic Peter Brook production of “Midsummer Night’s Dream” that he used to conjure up the magic of live theater. The punchline to a lavish recap of every magical image in one moment of the production was the actual Shakespeare stage direction was “Puck exits.”
Stoppard was, and is, a titanic presence in modern theater: His plays are famously smart, funny (not just witty) and tantalizingly challenging to design and stage and perform. You can get a crash course by listening to the recently released collection of BBC radio productions of 14 Stoppard plays.
British playwright Tom Stoppard at home in Dorset, England, Aug. 12, 2022. In works like “Travesties” and “Arcadia,” the playwright embraced the really big questions and wrestled words into coherent, exhilarating shape. (Charlie Gates/The New York Times)
Connecticut may be the only state in the U.S. where not only have two separate major regional theaters attempted Stoppard’s delirious adaptation of Ferenc Molnár’s “The Play at the Castle” retitled “Rough Crossing” (Hartford Stage in 2000 and Yale Rep in 2008) but where other theaters hosted important productions of other playwrights’ adaptations of the same Molnar script, the Shubert Theatre in New Haven for a touring version of P.G. Wodehouse’s “The Play’s the Thing” in 1928 (later done by Long Wharf in 1968) and Paul Slade Smith’s “Theatre People” at Westport Country Playhouse just this year.
Many Stoppard works have graced Connecticut stages, especially in New Haven. Yale Rep offered Stoppard’s adaptation of Vaclav Havel’s “Largo Desolato” in 1990, “Rough Crossing” in 2008 and the grand decades-spanning “Arcadia” in 2014. The Long Wharf Theatre did the history mix “Travesties” (starring Sam Waterston) in 2005, “Dalliance” (based on Arthur Schnitzler’s “Liebelei”) in 1993 and an elaborate, elegant take on Stoppard’s breakthrough work “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead” in 2001, directed by Trejnak a decade before he became artistic director of Hartford Stage. It was Hartford Stage in 1981 that staged the American premiere of Stoppard’s adaptation of another Schnitzler play, “Das weite Land.”
Words fail when describing Stoppard’s impact on world theater. His writings are studied and analyzed and digested thoroughly but where would we be without industrious regional theaters like those in Connecticut to see how these imposing, articulate literary documents actually play live? The Long Wharf’s “Travesties,” directed by Gregory Boyd had a scope and an energy that was exhausting as well as exhilarating. So did the expansive “Arcadia” at Yale Rep directed by James Bundy, which played up both the romance and the intellectual ambitions of the play. Expect Stoppard to live on at Connecticut theaters as his work is rediscovered and devoured following his death just three weeks ago.
