Yale Dramatic Association records

The Yale University Dramatic Association -"the Dramat"- was founded in the 1899-1900 school year at the instigation of Harry Westcott, Class of 1901, and with the help of William Lyon Phelps of the English Department. An undergraduate club, it was Yale's first organization to receive permission from the faculty to present plays in public on a regular basis. Originally, the Dramat's goals were "to study the drama, and once a year to produce a standard English play … of any dramatist who commands the respect of literary men"; but soon after 1900 the Dramat began not only to increase the number of plays it presented each year, but to expand its repertoire to include the masterworks of American and Continental drama. The Dramat's first production, 23 May 1900, was a double bill of the Second Shepherd's Play and a student adaptation of Chaucer's pardoner's Tale; since then it has produced, among other things, the American premieres of Ibsen's The Pretenders (1907), Gogol's Revizor (1908), Tolstoy's The Fruits of Culture (1912), Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (1916), Marlowe's Tamburlaine (1919), Euripides' Rhesus (1922), Galsworthy's The Roof (1930), Wilder's The Long Christmas Dinner (1931), Bulgakov's In the Days of the Turbins (1934), Camus' Caligula (1947), Anouilh's Colombe (1953), and, in 1967, the English language premiere of Eugène Ionesco's Hunger and Thirst. The Dramat has also encouraged the efforts of student playwrights. Cole Porter, Steven Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, and alumnus Phillip Barry all wrote for the Dramat.

Since its birth, the Dramat has been administered by a board of undergraduate directors who are more or less closely supervised by a faculty advisory board. Day-to-day operations have been overseen by a series of student managers, and artistic direction has been administered jointly by the student Executive Boards and directors they have hired. The Dramatic Association was incorporated in 1909, and, except for the last eighteen months of World War II, it has been in continuous operation since its founding.

Since 1926 the Dramatic Association has housed its productions and its administrative offices in the Yale University Theatre at 222 York Street. The theatre was the gift to Yale of Edward S. Harkness. The donation that built the theatre also created the Yale Department of Drama, now the Yale School of Drama, with which the Dramat has always shared the theatre. Before moving to the Yale University Theatre, the Dramat staged its New Haven productions on the Old Campus, in College Street Hall, in the Yale Bowl, at the New Haven Lawn Club and the Hotel Taft, and in the Hyperion and Shubert Theatres. Beginning in 1907, the Dramatic Association also toured many of its productions. The Dramat has also sponsored the New Haven presentations of various lecturers, theatrical companies, and other special performers. It has also occasionally collaborated with other schools to produce plays (with Vassar, in 1931, for example, and with Sarah Lawrence in 1937). From 1957 to 1974 it sponsored some seventeen Yale Festivals of Undergraduate Drama, playing host to theatre students from all over the United States and Canada.

Dramatic Association alumni have made names for themselves in many professions. Some who have made careers in the theatre and allied arts are Charles Hopkins, '07, Cole Porter, '13, Monty Woolley, '11, Donald Ogden Stewart, '16, John Hoysradt (Hoyt), '26, T. Edward Hambleton, '34, C. Bowen "Sonny" Tufts, '35, James Whitmore, '44, George Roy Hill, '43, Bradford Dillman, '51, James Franciscus, '54, Rex Robbins, '57, George White, '50, Dick Cavett, '58, Peter Hunt, '61, Sam Waterston, '62, Austin Pendleton, '61, John Conklin, '59, and Perry King, '70. Among the Dramat alumni who are famous in other fields are John Farrar, '18, and Chester Kerr, '36, both in publishing, Stewart and Joseph Alsop, '36 and '37, and August Heckscher, '36, all in journalism, S. Dillon Ripley, '36 and Robert Griffith, '36, museum administrators, diplomat William Bullitt, '12, chaplain T. Lawrason Riggs, '10, and academics Sylvan Barnet, '40, Merrill Knapp, '56, and A. Bartlett Giamatti, '60.

In 1922 a group called the Playcraftsmen was formed under the direction of Jack Randall Crawford of the Sheffield English faculty. The Playcraftsmen were intended to complement the Dramatic Association by developing new playwriting and technical talent. The two groups produced separately—though their memberships overlapped considerably—until 1929, when they merged under the Dramatic Association name. The Dramat Papers contain materials pertaining to the Playcraftsmen even before the merger.

Most of the material in the Yale Dramatic Association Archive was moved from the Dramatic Association offices in the University Theatre to Sterling Memorial Library in the summer of 1974, but some material, particularly the first three scrapbooks and the earliest administrative records, appears to have been donated to the library as early as 1911. Materials about the 1960 musical production of Tom Jones were donated by its authors, Austin Pendleton, Peter Bergman, Joseph Matthewson, and Robert Archer. The material from the Dramat had been allowed to accumulate in the University Theatre since 1926, and its condition suggests that it received only sporadic attention there. It is safe to assume that some materials were lost.