The Last Five Years

Two young, ambitious artists meet and fall in and out of love over the course of five years. In Jason Robert Brown’s tender yet restless musical, Cathy tells her story backwards while Jamie tells his story chronologically; their timelines intersect once in the middle.

The Creative and Performing Arts (CPA) grants support on-campus dramatic, musical, dance, video or film productions, literary publications, and visual arts exhibitions in Yale College. CPA-supported performances take place in venues across campus including in The Dome at Yale Schwarzman Center! This special space has hosted undergraduate ballet, concerts, plays, and new work.

Special thanks to Saybrook College and David Koskoff for their generous sponsorship. 

Director's Note: 

T.S. Eliot famously called April the cruellest month and Alex Dimitrov said Spring arrives regardless. I'm no poet, but I did learn about seasonal depression when I moved from perpetually sunny California to the moodier New Haven, Connecticut for college. I learned how seasons can rearrange your inner life, that after the reckless, sugar-rushed decision-making of Halloween comes the cold, and with it a permission to hibernate with your angst and heartbreak. Spring arrives like clockwork, with equal cruelty and inevitability. Sometimes the sun evaporates my problems and I am magically made whole and happy. Some years, though, on that one day when everyone abandons their coats and coalesces on Cross Campus, I feel like the weather is taunting me.

The Last Five Years works the same way. Its central formal innovation is time: Cathy narrates the relationship backward, while Jamie tells it chronologically. I think of this as structural dissent—Jason Robert Brown fractures time so that sadness and happiness, guilt and pride, betrayal and loyalty bleed into each other, each made more complex by the presence of the other. It puts the show in canonical lineage with musicals I love: Company, Maybe Happy Ending, 36 Questions. The chronological pattern creates an emotional whiplash that reminds me of the change of seasons, abrupt but comfortingly inevitable. Like the first day of Spring, this musical holds cynical, heteropessimist sentiment and the idealistic rom-com first date in every lingering moment. 

"April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain." (The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot)

"Blue-gold on night's branches
what part do we take in the play?
Whose turn is it to perform competence
and knowledge in the absence of both?
Unable to feel anything against the wind
I know it is spring. Time tells me so.
Never (equally as unconvincing)
have I been someone with faith in order
and human law. Love is unpredictable.
Spring arrives regardless." (MARCH, Alex Dimitrov)

More than once during my time at Yale I thought: I like this musical, I want to direct it. Every time, I was quickly inundated with support from friends, professors, Saybrook College, the Yale Schwarzman Center, the Yale Dramatic Association, and more. Making this show has felt indulgently selfish, and I feel so fulfilled to be ending my time at Yale here. These are the best collaborators, and I am lucky to have been part of this community for four years. 磊

- Alastair Rao

Select works from past CPA recipients working with Yale Schwarzman Center: