Rarely do Shakespearean sonnets remind us that the Bard too must have screwed, shat and pissed.

If there’s one takeaway from “A Chorus Line,” it is best summed up by Cassie when she describes her fellow dancers to their director, exclaiming, “They’re all special!” The classic musical — set during an unusually personal audition for the chorus line of an unnamed show — reveals that even seemingly interchangeable members of a chorus line are actually unique as each character comes forth to tell his or her life story through song and dance.

A few months ago, a student production of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” was only the tiny seed of an idea in the mind of Maggie Burrows ’10. But the path from the thought to the theater — “Spelling Bee” premiers this weekend — has been fraught with difficulties.

An overly-pensive prince and a tempest-tossed, cross-dressing maiden currently share the stage at the Whitney Theater, but their names are not Hamlet or Viola.

It is rare at Yale to see the “revival” of a play that means just that— a new life for an underperformed work. Most revivals here lay claim to the obviously undead; Shakespeare and Shepard, Wilder and Wilde, are the favored corpses of campus theater. But a performance on Wednesday afternoon was a clear exception.

The Yale Cabaret’s mission statement this year is “a gauntlet thrown in the face of our future.” But its current production, “The Surrender Tree,” more aptly portrays the gauntlet thrown in the face of our past. The play is a staged-adaptation of a Spanish and English children’s book by Margarita Engle about the Cuban War of Independence.

Phaedra, the title role in Jean Racine’s “Phèdre,” is probably one of the world’s first drama queens.

“America has gone mad about vampires,” Sterling Professor of the Humanities Harold Bloom complained to his “Art of Reading a Poem” seminar. As if to prove his point, “BITE ME BABY One More Time: Twilight: The Britney Musical,” premiered yesterday.

Most people have never heard of Artie Kornfeld. But without a doubt, they’ve experienced the impact he’s had on music in one way or another. They’ve heard songs that he wrote played on the radio, listened to bands that he’s produced or promoted, and certainly know of his most memorable creation — Woodstock.

A giant melting clock, right out of Dali’s painting “The Persistence of Memory,” sets the stage for “Once Five Years Pass,” a play by Federico García Lorca and translated by director Gary Jaffe ’10. This image becomes the play’s dominant theme, as Jaffe brings this disturbing, confusing and intriguing world to life.

Jay, a Theater Studies major from the day he stepped onto Yale’s campus, exudes the passion for drama and dance that one would expect from a person who has been involved with 25 Yale productions and countless others since age 7. But, as Gabrielle explains, “He doesn’t have the ego that you associate with directors.” His megawatt smile and seemingly boundless energy don’t hurt either. He’s a charmer, even in simple jeans and a button-up shirt late in the evening two days before the most important show he’ll put on at Yale: his senior project.

You two are the first Yale students I’ve ever picked up from that place,” said our cab driver, with laughter in his voice. It was easy to believe him; “that place” was the Fairmount Theater, the local adult movie house. Given that it’s just an $11 cab ride away from Old Campus, in East Haven, one might expect at least the occasional Yalie to undertake the journey, if only for the experience. Having been inside, however, I greeted his comment with relief.

“The whole show can fit into an overhead compartment,” director Michael McQuilken says, referring to “A Day in Dignation,” a sketch opening this weekend at the Yale Cabaret. And indeed, the show’s physical bulk is limited to one short and skinny actor — Rex (Will Connolly) — and a projector loaded with a few CDs.

Thursday, Jan. 19, 1995:
On a typically nippy New Haven evening, an eager audience poured into Woolsey Hall for what was to be a heartwarming performance of concertos and overtures by Yo-Yo Ma. But just as Ma was about to take the stage, the night took a chilling turn.

The way in which Pridamant (Michael Laskin ’12) cries out, “A light, please, I’m blind” in Tony Kushner’s “The Illusion” is disquieting and desperate. The production, directed by Oren Stevens ’11, excels in its emotive use of light and color, but, like Pridamant, sometimes feels as though it is groping in the dark. While there are moments when the show achieves the brilliance embedded in Kushner’s writing, it ultimately runs out of steam on that precarious divide between truly moving theater and idle entertainment.

“The Winter’s Tale,” which opened yesterday and runs until Saturday at the Yale Repertory Theater, progresses like the fucked-up dream you had the other night, the one that you’re convinced means something by sheer virtue of its enigmatic weirdness. It starts out normal enough, but as it builds to a climax, it morphs into a surrealist romp full of body paint and glam rockers and bears.

There’s a lot of talk about towers in the Yale Repertory Theater’s new production of Henrik Ibsen’s “Master Builder” at the University Theater. Even the stage itself, which is constructed to look like a building tipped on its side, conjures up an image of a tower as it seems to recede upstage into the sky backdrop. Despite its palpable artistic ambition, however, the production as a whole never really gets off the ground.

Befitting a production that condemns a simplistic view of sexuality and gender, “The Student Body” evades classification. It is both performance art and play, both historical re-creation and original narrative. Although it is sometimes more provocative than constructive, it is ambitious and thoughtful throughout. Because the movie has impressive direction and stellar acting, its faults are easily forgiven.

There’s a ton of Yale theater going up this weekend, and it’s not your typical tried-and-true classics. In the next few days, audiences will witness two modern works by some of the most edgy and interesting artists out there, including David Mamet’s “Romance” and Neil LaBute’s “Bash: Latter-Day Plays.”