Events

jumping crowd

Photo by Larry Levanti

Two-time Obie Award-winning playwright and Class of 2006 Princeton alum Branden Jacobs-Jenkins‘ new adaptation of Euripides’ classic of the Greek stage, The Bacchae, in a contemporary setting with a DJ, dance music, cell phones and live feed video; directed by Princeton alum and Obie Award-winner Lileana Blain-Cruz ’06.

Tickets are $8 students, $12 seniors; $12 general admission in advance; $17 general admission day of the event.

PLEASE NOTE: Opening weekend tickets for Gurls are currently sold out, however a standby list will be available 30 minutes prior to the event start time. Please visit the welcome desk/box office in the Forum at the Lewis Arts complex no earlier than 30 minutes prior to start time to have your name added for standby tickets. Limit of 2 tickets per individual. Please remain in that general area to listen for your name to be called if tickets become available.


Commissioned by the Program in Theater through the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Playwright-in-Residence Fund as part of A Festival of the Arts at Princeton, celebrating the opening of the new Lewis Arts complex.

 

ABOUT

branden jacobs-jenkins headshot

Photo courtesy John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

BRANDEN JACOBS-JENKINS’ plays include Everybody (Signature Theater), Neighbors (Public Theater), An Octoroon (Soho Rep, OBIE Award for Best New Play), Appropriate (Signature Theater, OBIE Award for Best New Play, Outer Critics Circle nominee), Gloria (Vineyard Theater, 2015), and War (Yale Rep, forthcoming). His plays have been performed at such venues as Lincoln Center Theatre/LCT3, Soho Rep, the Public Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, Actors Theater of Louisville, Center Theatre Group, Victory Gardens Theatre, Woolly Mammoth Theater, The Matrix Theater, CompanyOne, Theater Bielefeld in Germany and the HighTide Festival in the UK. He is currently a Residency Five playwright at Signature Theatre and master-artist-in-residence in the Playwriting MFA program of Hunter College, City University of New York. Other honors include a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, the Paula Vogel Award, a Fulbright Arts Grant, a Helen Merrill Award, the Dorothy Strelsin playwriting fellowship, and the inaugural Tennessee Williams Award. He is a Princeton alum from the Class of 2006, holds an MFA in Performance Studies from NYU, and is a graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at Juilliard.

 


 

Lileana Blain-Cruz headshot

Photo courtesy Lileana Blain-Cruz

LILEANA BLAIN-CRUZ is a director from New York City and Miami. She is a recent recipient of a New York Theatre Workshop 2050 Fellowship and a 2017 Obie Award for directing The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World at Signature Theatre. Recent projects include Christina Anderson’s Hollow Roots which premiered this past January in the Under the Radar Festival at the Public Theater and A Guide to Kinship and Maybe Magic, a collaboration with choreographer Isabel Lewis and playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins at Dance New Amsterdam. She is the co-founder and director of the ensemble company Overhead Projector, which devises new work. She received her MFA in directing from the Yale School of Drama, where she directed Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, The Taming of the Shrew, Tall Skinny Cruel Cruel Boys, Buffalo Maine, Cavity and Fox Play as part of the Carlotta Festival of New Plays. She was one of the co-artistic directors of the 2011-2012 Yale Cabaret, where she directed Funnyhouse of a NegroVaska Vaska Glöm, and SALOME. She received both the Julian Milton Kaufman Memorial Prize and the Pierre-Andre Salim Prize for her leadership and directing. She was an Artistic Associate of The Exchange and The Orchard Project, a member of the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab, and an Allen Lee Hughes Directing Fellow at Arena Stage. She is a graduate of Princeton University. Lileana recently directed a new translation of The Bakkhai at the Fisher Center of Performing Arts at Bard College and is currently working on an adaptation of the Alejandro Jodorowsky film, EL TOPO.

PRODUCTION PHOTOS

IN THE NEWS

GIRLS at Yale Rep — October 4 – 26, 2019

After The Bacchae by Euripides
By Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Choreography by Raja Feather Kelly
Directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz

Event Archive

View or download the Program for the production.

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