Michael Downs

The Yale Repertory, an institution of American theater, celebrated its 50th anniversary eight years ago, in 2016. James Magruder’s book about the Rep’s history was first dreamed of as a way to mark that anniversary, but for many reasons (including a pandemic), the book is only now arriving on bookshelves. No matter. The Play’s the Thing: Fifty Years of Yale Repertory Theatre (1966-2016) is well worth the wait.

“Dudes of a certain age,” Michael B. Tager says, “weren’t necessarily taught how to socialize in real and meaningful ways.” Instead, such dudes bonded over pop culture: bands and sports and movies and TV and video games. And by pop culture, Tager means everything from The Fast and the Furious to David Attenborough nature shows.

For decades John W. Ruark has told the story at cocktail parties: how on a November night in 1977, as a student at what was then Towson State University, he took Truman Capote’s arm and led the inebriated, incoherent, profanity-spewing writer off stage. “Mr. Capote,” he told him, “It’s time to go.” A crowd of about 1,800 people had come to the university’s Towson Center to hear Capote read from his work, according to a report that week in The Towerlight, the school newspaper.