Toni Dorfman

For 23 years Toni Dorfman has taught full-time at Yale. She holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, earned mostly at Carleton College and then at the University of Iowa, and a master of fine arts degree in directing from Columbia University. In 2003 she cofounded the annual Yale Playwrights Festival.  At Yale in addition to teaching classes in acting, directing, and playwriting, she’s taught seminars in revenge tragedy and moral ambiguity, biography and drama, representations of the underworld, “The Deep: Representations of the Sea” (in spring 2022), and early opera. In summer she’s taught Sophocles’ Antigone in the Yale Warrior-Scholar Project helping enlisted veterans prepare for college. In July 2019, at the invitation of the then artistic director of the National Theater of Greece, Stathis Livathinos, in Delphi she led an international workshop for professional actors on performing Greek tragedy. 

 

Since 2009 she has stage-directed nine major productions of 17th-century opera for the Yale Baroque Opera Project, including Cavalli’s Il Giasone, Scipione Affricano, La Didone, and Doriclea (going up in May 2023); Sacrati’s La finta pazza (American premiere); and all three of Monteverdi’s extant operas, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, L’incoronazione di Poppea, and Orfeo (in May 2022), all in collaboration with musical director Grant Herreid. Her interest in ancient Greek myth, epic, and drama – the inspiration for much early baroque opera – is lifelong. What in particular she loves about early opera is not only the expressive beauty of its music but also its casts of human and divine characters, bringing together two worlds in the same space.  

 

Her own plays, including Rounding Cassiopeia, Family Wolf, Third Wave Fems, One of the Damned Few (with Bud Thorpe), and The King of the Cimbri, have been developed and presented in London, New York, Santa Fe, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New Haven at Yale Rep and the Long Wharf Theater.    

 

In her twenties she cofounded The Shade Company, a repertory theater on Canal Street and a charter member of what is now the Alliance of Resident Theaters/New York.  She’s served on the editorial board of Shakespeare Bulletin and the national board of the University/Resident Theater Association. As an actor she’s played Lady Macbeth, Titania, Helena, Aldonza, Grusha, Dorine, Hesione Hushabye, Pirate Jenny, Kagekiyo’s Daughter, Mother Courage, and Clytemnestra, among scores of other roles; in film she’s played Queen Marie in Ionesco’s Exit the King (1976) and Candace in Edward Columbia’s The Page Burner (2022), with dozens of television commercials in between.

 

She is married to Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis. They live in East Rock with a pollination garden, designed by Eliza Shaw Valk, her daughter, in front for butterflies and bees.