B-BOY AT YALE
EVERYTHING THAT RUDI GOBLEN HAS DONE AS AN ARTIST SEEMS SOME where between unlikely and impossible. Growing up as a kid from Nicaragua in a working-class Miami neighborhood, he and some buddies taught themselves to break dance, becoming a world-traveling champion b-boy crew. He then fell in love with dance theatre and performance, becoming an integral part of Miami’s close-knit experimental scene. And though he’s a high school dropout who had never taken a formal writing or theatre class, he was soon writing one-person shows treating such dense themes as mortality and intimacy.
None of these passages seems as unlikely, though, as the one that has brought Goblen, 38, to the MFA program in playwriting at the Yale School of Drama, the storied theatre program at an Ivy League institution with an image as a quintessential bastion of upper-class tradition, power, and privilege.
Certainly he has had his pinch-me moments, thinking: Wow, I’m at Yale.
“Well, didn’t you, when you got here last night?” Goblen asks me, laughing, as we sit in a campus coffee shop where he often writes, surrounded by 20-somethings staring intently at their laptops. “You think, Wouldn’t it be awesome to be an astronaut? And then, shit, I’m on the moon.”
But he went immediately from amazement to exhilaration at the prospect of expanding his art and his creative circle, and of channeling his unique, multilayered history into a new theatrical world.
“I wasn’t intimidated,” Goblen said. “It’s just another process that I have to dedicate myself to. I feel thankful and blessed to be here.” All his classmates, he said, are “beautiful voices. If they’re what theatre is now and what theatre is going to be, I’m super excited for the future.”
Goblen, it turns out,
