Peer Gynt
Director Mike Donahue DRA ’08

Director Mike Donahue DRA ’08 has directed Titus Andronicus, Bibles and Candy, and Ways You Can Survive the World at Yale School of Drama and Electronic City and Brand at the Yale Cabaret. He was Executive Producer of the 2007 Summer Cabaret, where he also directed God Is A DJ and The Vote: Bacchae. Other directing credits include The Oresteia, She Loves Me, The Physicists, Hedda Gabler, Tartuffe, and Closer, all at Harvard. He received a B.A. in Performance Studies and Directing from Harvard University in 2005.

1. What are you most excited about for this production?

The total freedom it allows all of us to play, explore and imagine- there are so many worlds and characters to bring to life. It is key to Peer's journey that they be as different from one another as possible so as to fully realize a life lived in service of experience, appetite and self-fulfillment (and the consequences, good and bad, of such a path). It's not every play that asks you to go from weddings and life-or-death chases through the mountains of Norway, to the kingdom of the trolls, to Northern Africa / Arabia, through an asylum run by German Nuns, through two shipwrecks and back home again, many decades later to conflicting versions of the after-life. (And I'm also very excited that we get to work with the flying!)

2. What are some of your inspirations in directing this piece?

The work I've been seeing in Berlin over the past few years in theatre, dance, and contact improv (for it's mess, epic-ness, and physical athleticism); work we did with Tina Landau in class last semester (ideas of simultaneous action and split focus); the photography of David Hilliard; music from all over the place; New Haven; anything and everything on television and YouTube; Godard's Weekend; Walmart; photographs of cities at night, covered in snow, or after it's rained.

3. What is the craziest trip you have ever taken?

This past summer I drove between New Haven and St. Louis, where I grew up, three times. Each time we only had the vaguest of ideas as to our route and where we'd be spending the night. On one trip we spent three days driving around Ohio alone. I went to the CAC (Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati) a few times. I was in 5 states for the first time. We went to amusement parks, chain restaurants on the side of the highway, the beach, cities, stopped at random hiking paths on the road. We came across, waterfalls, got lost in the mountains – it was the perfect series of trips for short attention spans, escapism, and impulsive decision-making.

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