Culture & Community | Dwight/Edgewood Project | Education & Youth | Arts & Culture | Theater | Yale School of Drama | Barnard Environmental Science & Technology School
Top: Actors Sboniso Thombeni and kimberly vilbrun-françois in Majesty Bonsu's Looking for Happiness. Bottom: Mark Yarde, playwright Za'Nhya Goins, and Catherine Young in The Pink Cow Plan. Lucy Gellman Photos.
A huge, glinting pair of sunglasses teaches a shiny-scaled, blue-haired mermaid to be brave. A frog, dressed in green cheerleading gear with a maniacal grin, hatches a plan as a furry, purple ferret slinks off in the distance. Two human-sized toadstool mushrooms, dressed head to toe in red and white, bicker bitterly on stage.
A pink alien abducts a cow, and teaches him how to see himself in an entirely new light. An eyeball comes shyly out to their sibling, the words caught somewhere in their throat. Athena and Poseidon duke it out over Ancient Greece, and then remember how to share.
Those scenes, acted out in loud and vibrant color, are part of the 29th annual Dwight/Edgewood Project (D/EP), a collaboration between the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale (DGSD) and Barnard Environmental Studies & Technology Magnet School that pairs DGSD graduate students with Barnard fifth through seventh graders to write, rehearse, stage, and fully produce short plays. While the program is technically in its 31st year, it took two hiatuses: one during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, and one in 2024, after Emalie Mayo’s sudden passing.
This year, 12 young people and their mentors have created some of the most quirky, whimsical, interesting, emotionally intelligent and inventive theater New Haven has seen all year (does your stage have two dogs who are figuring their lives out at summer camp?). Focused on the uncomfortable, messy, sometimes-giggle-flecked process of growing up, the show is aptly titled Unique, Nostalgia Desperation! Performances run at the Off-Broadway Theatre June 18 and 20, with 4 and 8 p.m. showings on both days.
Tickets, which are free, and more information are available here.
Top: Jocelyn Lopez-Hagmann and Francisco Morandi Zerpa introduce the plays during Wednesday's run. Bottom: Surrey Houlker and kimberly vilbrun-françois in E'vah McCoy's The AMAZING Summer Camp Since 1999.
“You’ve created something wonderful, don’t forget that,” said Francisco Morandi Zerpa, a teaching artist and recent DGSD graduate who has been part of D/EP since his first year of graduate school. “Your voices matter, and your ideas deserve enthusiasm … It takes a huge effort to be vulnerable, patient and confident with yourselves as you traversed the writing process, but you guys were brave and bold enough to empathize with characters in worlds that you created.”
“Carry that empathy with you, please,” Zerpa added. In the dark blue-black of the theater, the message felt right on time: this year, performances are dedicated to DGSD graduate Malik James, a dedicated mentor in the program who died suddenly last year.
Every single one of the students, and a large creative team of mentors, directors, producers and designers, has done just that. As lights faded to black and crew members slipped into their seats at a tech rehearsal Wednesday, characters took their places for Autumn Quaye Hudson’s The Brave Best Friends, which travels from the turquoise depths of the ocean to a sandy, warm beach along a strip of towering white houses.
As an animated, blue-rimmed pair of sunglasses named Bobe (Christian Jordan Smith) bobbed gently through the water, he came across Rabbit (mentor Rebecca Rivera), a mermaid with the big, bright dreams of a 1989 Ariel (without any of the messed up body issues, thank you D/EP) and an emotional anxiety fully of the present. As she moved towards him, she seemed one-part actor, two-parts magic: long, cotton-candy-colored hair spilled past her shoulders and down her back, over a green-and-pink costume that proofed out and sparkled at the shoulders and toes.
Playwright Autumn gets her well-deserved moment in the spotlight.
Rabbit, treading water as her arms moved in bird-like motion, listened as Bobe described his journey from a shopping mall to the wide ocean, the result of falling off a woman’s head as she swam deeper and deeper into the water. Despite a life of creature comforts in that space, “I want to explore!” he said, a smile palpable at the edges of his voice.
“I want to explore too,” started Rabbit, before catching herself. It was all so new. Not even another sentence in, she began to sniffle. When Bobe offered help, eyes wide and soft, Rabbit pushed back.
“Just because you understand doesn’t mean you’re scared!” she offered tearily, and the words were so relatable that a person could feel them deep in their chest. Her arms rarely stopped treading, that undulating grace moving from shoulder to elbow, elbow to wrist, methodical. How often, we in a small audience asked, have those seemed like exactly the right words for a moment in the in-between?
Bobe stood up a little straighter, arms still comically wrapped around a striped pool donut, and took a new approach. New things are scary, he agreed. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth doing.
“I take things little by little every day,” he said. As the two moved near each other, a few murmurs of Mmm and Ah! rose from the front two rows, where students sat shoulder-to-shoulder in a corner of the audience. “I’m going to teach you how to be brave.”
Together, the two tried counting to ten. When that didn’t work, Bobe suggested thinking about a parent who has become a safe place. On stage, the lights had bloomed and shifted into beachy, nautical projections that looked like Barb and Star had had a run in with Hayao Miyazaki, and everything was going swimmingly (shout out to projection designer Nate Britton and associate projection designer Thisbe Wu). Even from the audience, a person could all but feel Rabbit’s muscles unclenching as she moved toward the shore. Shoulders seemed to lower across the room.
“How did you help me be brave?” Rabbit asked. Where a shiny skirt of scales had been, there were green shorts, the color of key lime pie and fluorescent ice pops. In the audience, even graduate students remembered the basics: to count to ten and breathe a little more deeply.
“I have a lot of practice,” Bobe answered.
Top: DGSD Education and Community Programs Manager Elizabeth "Biz" Nearing with E'vah. Bottom: Junah Jang as Mushroomet in London Smith's The Mushrooms That Went Downhill. The title is a play on words, referring to the trick that one mushroom plays on another.
This is part of the wonder of D/EP: actors, who are training in one of the best and most rigorous programs in the country, get to be gentle and silly and smart, from costume choices influenced by teatime, princess dresses, and a perennial interest in fungi, cows (there is always a cow), musical theater, and Percy Jackson. To walk into any one play, let alone 12, is to enter a surrealist dreamscape, where dueling Greek gods, cheerleading frogs, and cannibalistic half-ghosts may all share a stage with each other.
In A’Layah Barr’s The Betrayal, for instance, DGSD students Sboniso Thombeni and Mark Yarde fully commit to their characters —Tim and Pink, a bunny and rabbit respectively—hopping around the stage in frilly-edged socks and gingham house dresses for the entirety of a 10-minute show.
In T Harris’ The Coming of Age of the Eyes, two humanoid eyeballs (Catherine Young and Aaron Magloire as Millie and Kylie) orbit each other around the stage, trying not to bring attention to how deeply this belongs in a Buñuel sequence that never happened. When they sit against the backdrop of a projected, animated Pistachio cafe or slide onto the make-believe carpet of a cozy, projected living room, it’s enough to make it seem like this could happen in New Haven.
Wednesday, Young broke character only for a moment, turning their head to the side as they laughed, then directed their attention back to the giant eyeball in front of them. Seated on the floor, they wore an 80s-style, green tracksuit, with a matching blue one nearby.
Students soak in their creations as they spring to life with costumes, projection, and lighting and sound design.
And yet, that silliness (brought to life by costume designers Zendell Addai and Sveta Morozova, who lean all the way in) never negates a focus on mental health, friendship, loneliness, and social anxiety. It just lives alongside it, in a universe that is both New Haven and somewhere else, where more expansive and sustained play is entirely possible.
These characters have complicated relationships with their parents and siblings, learn how to resolve conflict, and ask for help, even when it’s not the easiest thing to do.
“You don’t always know what to write,” said E’vah McCoy, who worked with mentor Surrey Houlker to craft her play The AMAZING Summer Camp Since 1999, about two dogs (Houlker as Rose and kimberly vilbrun-françois as Rosie) who bond, beef, and then bond some more. As Barnard students worked with their mentors, she was surprised—and delighted—to write a whole universe into being.
Many students were. In Jazmin Hernandez’ The Past of A Friendship - Part Two - The Final Chapter, characters Burtisha (a diabolical Junah Jang) and Emerald (Ángela Sofía Caro) are constantly in conflict with each other. The blame rests solely on only one of them: Burtisha is the Regina George of the animal kingdom, captain of the cheerleading team with a sleek green and white outfit that is as neat as a pin.
Top: Ángela Sofía Caro and Junah Jang in The Past of A Friendship - Part Two - The Final Chapter. Bottom: Actors Andrew Rincón and Tyler Clarke Williams in Gracey's Mathieu's The Challenge of the Gods.
When Emerald—a lipgloss-sporting ferret with purple fur and a thick, luxurious tail—declares “I’m sweet and kind and I don’t deserve to be bullied for the way I look!” and nearly wails “I wanna go home! It’s my only comfort,” we in the audience can feel it, because we were that kid at one point or another. As Burtisha hatches a plan that will bring only more hurt, we in the audience squirm uncomfortably, because maybe we’ve been that person, too.
Jazmin, a second-year D/EP student who is in the seventh grade at Barnard, looked to the play as a chance to close a loop. Last year, she presented The End of a Friendship, inspired by a real-life bully, in which two characters fell gracelessly away from each other as high school unfolded around them. This year, she wanted to revisit the subject, to explore what redemption looked like for high school’s queen bee (or more aptly, queen frog). It ends in singing that puts the second Wicked movie to shame.
“I was Emerald” at one time, Jazmin explained during an intermission in rehearsal. Last year, a girl kept bullying her, for reasons that Jazmin did and does not understand. That situation didn’t end well, she said. But in the D/EP universe, she wanted to show that a better relationship between the characters was possible. “I know people can be good,” she said.
“It’s been amazing and inspiring,” added Caro, who worked in early childhood education for years as she was building up her dramatic resume. “I wanted to get involved with the New Haven community, and this … it has really blessed me. I’ve learned a lot.”
Top: Andrew Rincón and Christian Jordan Smith in Genuinely Brothers. Bottom: Mark Yarde in The Pink Cow Plan.
It seems like everyone has. Nova Jones, a sixth grader at Barnard, knocks the audience’s collective socks off with Genuinely Brothers, a play about two long-lost brothers in which lines like “when someone’s loved one passes, they pass too, like a swan” and “sometimes you have to set your heart ablaze” remain in the air long after they’ve been spoken.
Barnard seventh grader Za’Nhya Goins set out to build a play about self-confidence, and found a pink-loving alien, giant inflatable cow and wild, whimsical projections to get there. T, a fifth grader at Barnard, figured out how to use eyeballs to tell a coming out story. When her character Millie announces that “I think I might like eyeballs of all colors,” T sticks the landing.
For both students and mentors in the program—as well as a leadership team that has helped keep it running smoothly from start to finish—the work has been months in the making. Earlier this year, graduate students Zerpa and Jocelyn Lopez-Hagmann, with DGSD Education and Community Programs Manager Elizabeth “Biz” Nearing, did classroom visits at Barnard, thanks to a close relationship with Reading Intervention Specialist Kelley Dearborne.
During those visits, students wrote four-sentence plays, feeling out whether the program was right for them. Ultimately, nine came onboard—a number that is higher than it’s been since 2019. Then three more joined from Edgewood and Mauro-Sheridan. In late May, they started learning about playmaking, working with mentors as they began to world-build. Then two weeks ago, students and mentors went on a writing retreat at Camp Wightman. Those two days in the woods gave them space to write their plays.
Top: Caro as Timmy in The Mushrooms That Went Downhill. Bottom:
As she finished a popsicle before Wednesday’s final rehearsal, A’Layah said she was excited to be part of the project. After seeing The Little Mermaid and acting in The Wizard of Oz at Barnard last year, “I really wanted to write my own play,” she said. “I guess I was like, ‘I can act, I like writing,’” and she decided it was the logical next step. When she saw Thombeni and Yarde in full costume an hour later, hopping between cardboard and papier-mâché trees and a bright, animated backdrop, her jaw nearly dropped. She let out a giggle of delight before joining the duo for bows onstage.
“Your imaginations are worth it, and so are you,” Zerpa had said before performances, and the words stuck. “Remember to live life at the speed of fun, which is faster than your worry and louder than your critic … practice any art, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, sculpture, poetry, fiction, essays, doing what Anisa does, reportage, no matter how well or badly you do it, not to get money or fame, but to experience becoming. I think you all know what that means this summer. You've become a little bit more of yourselves.”
Playwright Anisa Turay (at center) with actors Surrey Houlker and Aaron Magloire in I Really Really Wanna Stay at Your House. Was there ever a title more appropriate to middle school?
Read more about all of the playwrights here.