Toni Dorfman

Director of Undergraduate Theater Studies (DUS) Associate Professor (Adj) of Theater Studies

toni.dorfman@yale.edu

Toni Dorfman has also taught at the Spence School, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Columbia University (from which she holds an MFA in theater arts, 1990), and Ohio University, where she directed the School of Theater 1993-1998. She attended Carleton College and has a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Iowa. She was a cofounder of the Shade Company, a repertory theater, in her twenties; the Shade was a cofounder of the Off Off Broadway Alliance, now called ART/NY. She is a member of the Women's Project, SAG, Actors Equity, SDC, and Dramatists Guild and has served on the editorial board of Shakespeare Bulletin. She has acted and directed in New York, Dallas, Kansas City, Cleveland, Williamstown, and at the Long Wharf. She directed Judith Malina and Manon Halliburton in Brecht's Mother Courage in 1998. At Yale since 1999 she has directed plays by Beckett, Stoppard, Pinter, Orton, Shakespeare, Wilder (Our Town for the Yale Dramat in 2007), and Chekhov (The Cherry Orchard, in 2009). She cofounded the Yale Playwrights Festival in 2003. Her first play, Rounding Cassiopeia, was optioned by the Bridewell Theater in London and produced as a workshop at Yale in 2003; other plays include Family Wolf, Ring of Fire, with Beckett actor Bud Thorpe One of the Damned Few (which premiered at Yale in the World Performance Project in 2009), and a one-act comedy, Third Wave Fems, which opened in NYC in 2011. For the Yale Baroque Opera Project she has stage-directed a series of Venetian baroque operas -- Cavalli's Giasone (2009), Sacrati's La Finta Pazza (2010, American premiere), and Cavalli's Scipione Affricano (2010, East Coast premiere) -- in collaboration with colleagues Ellen Rosand, Richard Lalli, Michael Rigsby, Robert Mealy, and Grant Herreid. 

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