Stanford partners with New York's Public Theater on new plays

Stanford University will partner with New York's Public Theater to create an incubator for new plays by emerging playwrights and accomplished dramatists, university officials said Monday.

The project will create a residency at Stanford for playwrights working on new shows for the Public Theater designed to bring in students and faculty for workshops and discussions.

The two organizations will also team up to commission new plays and sponsor fellowships for Stanford students to promote more diversity in American theater companies.

"In society now, where everything is judged by its relationship to the marketplace and its ability to sell, the university is the last bastion, a place that understands there are values that can't be measured by the marketplace," Oskar Eustis artistic director of the Public Theater said.

The Public Theater is probably best known for free outdoor productions of Shakespeare's plays staged each summer in New York's Central Park. It also has produced such plays and musicals as Sticks and Bones, That Championship Season, A Chorus Line, Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk, Take Me Out and Caroline, or Change.

"The university would likely contribute up to $500,000 per year to the project depending on the scale of the works in progress, said Bryan Wolf, co-director of the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts.

David Henry Hwang, a graduate of Stanford, is set to launch the partnership in February with open rehearsals and staged readings of his new play, Yellow Face a satire of racial politics in the theater.

"It's going to be beneficial for both institutions," said Hwang, the first Asian-American to win the Tony for best play, his 1988 drama M. Butterfly. "The Public gets funding to do the workshops, and Stanford gets to be a part of the life of one of the most important theaters in America."

In a very real way, this is a double homecoming for Hwang, whose first play, F.O.B., began as a project at Stanford's Okada House (the Asian American theme dorm, then known as Junipero House), and then later was produced by the Public, where it won an Obie.

``Personally, this means a lot to me,'' said the playwright, who lives in New York. ``I wrote my first play in the dorms there.''

The cast and crew of Yellow Face will settle in at Stanford for about two weeks in February to participate in open rehearsals and staged readings that will be open to the public. They aim to put the finishing touches on the piece before it opens at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles this spring.