New play explorations in the twenty-first century 1

In the spring of 2002 a graduate student in the Yale School of Drama’s Playwriting Program wrote a play that featured a Soho-hip party where the festive, poetic spirit of Immanuel Kant, Frank O’Hara, e.e. cummings, and Gertrude Stein collided impishly. I scheduled the new play for a reading in my Drama 47 class, a six-semester advanced course for the graduate Playwriting students. Before launching into what happened to the play, perhaps a word about my approach to working on new plays in Drama 47 would be beneficial.