Duo takes us through 'a Year with 13 Moons' at Yale Rep (video)

Published: Friday, April 19, 2013
By Donna Doherty

http://www.nhregister.com/articles/2013/04/19/entertainment/arts/doc5171c9a1acdeb745766304.txt

NEW HAVEN — Rainer Werner Fassbender is not your garden variety director/playwright/actor, which makes him the perfect inspiration for Robert Woodruff and Bill Camp, two collaborators who wouldn't walk across the street for ordinary.

The two have been collaborating on theater projects for more than a decade now, and this time, it's Fassbender's New German Cinema mind-blower "In a Year with 13 Moons," which has its world premiere Friday at Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Woodruff. The work was commissioned by the Rep with support from Yale's Binger Center for New Theatre and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Camp says it's one of the more challenging roles he's tackled, and that's saying something, even for those who have only seen him in their last collaboration at the Rep, "Notes from Underground," based on Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground."

A simple plot synopsis would describe it as one woman's search for love. But, when the woman is a transgender with a complicated past, including a wife and child, it becomes a complex journey that traverses into a parallel universe of the LGBT zeitgeist. That also makes it quite contemporary, and, as Woodruff points out, shows the amazing prescience of Fassbender, who made the film in 1978.