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Dramaturg Natsuko Ohama speaks of her experience working with playwright and translator, Virginia Grise, saying, “One starts with not knowing. Not understanding. Looking at versions then wrestling the meanings, looking in various stalls where the words are defined… The plays are meant to be played. If it brings kids in closer, bring it on.”
Playwright
Virginia Grise
Virginia Grise is a recipient of the Alpert Award in the Arts, Yale Drama Award, Whiting Writers’ Award, Princess Grace Award in Theatre Directing, and the Playwrights’ Center’s Jerome Fellowship. Her published work includes Your Healing is Killing Me (Plays Inverse Press), blu (Yale University Press), The Panza Monologues co-written with Irma Mayorga (University of Texas Press) and an edited volume of Zapatista communiqués titled Conversations with Don Durito (Autonomedia Press). She is a founding member of a todo dar productions, an alum of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, the Women’s Project Theatre Lab & the NALAC Leadership Institute. In addition to plays, she has created a body of work that is interdisciplinary and includes multimedia performance, dance theater, performance installations, guerilla theater, site specific interventions, and community gatherings. Virginia has taught writing for performance at the university level, as a public school teacher, in community centers, women’s prisons and in the juvenile correction system. She holds an MFA in Writing for Performance from the California Institute of the Arts and is the Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence at Cara Mia Theatre and a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.
Dramaturg
Natsuko Ohama
Natsuko Ohama is a professor of theatre practice at the USC School of Dramatic Arts. Trained under legendary voice teacher Kristin Linklater, she is a Master teacher of the Linklater approach to voice as well as a Louis Colainni designated speech teacher. Ohama is a founding member and permanent faculty member of Shakespeare and Company Lenox, Mass. She is a senior artist at Pan Asian Rep New York and was the director of training at the National Arts Center of Canada. She also on the Board of Trustees for the Kristin Linklater Center in Orkney, Scotland.
She has taught at numerous institutions all over North America, including the NYU Experimental Theater Wing, Cal Arts, Columbia University, the Sundance Institute, New Actors Workshop, the Wooster Group Summer Institute in New York and the Stratford Festival. Internationally, she recently taught in Shanghai, China; Zurich Switzerland, Stromboli, Italy; Istanbul, Turkey; and Orkney, Scotland. She also has an extensive workshop and private teaching practice in New York and Los Angeles.
As a Drama Desk-nominated actress, she has portrayed the roles of Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Hamlet and Prospero (Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company), and has been featured in the action film Speed and in the cult series Forever Knight and American Playhouse on PBS. She has been seen on screen in Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and on stage as Imelda Marcos in the Kirk Douglas Theatre’s production of Dogeaters. Polonius in the LAWSC production of Hamlet at the Odyssey Theatre and Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days at The Theatre @ Boston Court in Pasadena. She was also in Oregon Shakespeare Festival Acting Company 2018 (Snow in Midsummer and Black Swan Lab) and this year at the Public Theatre in New York in Out of Time and will be seen in the upcoming film Little Brother directed by Sheridan O’Donnell.
Ohama’s play Geisha of the Gilded Age-Miyuki Morgan was staged at the Ventford Theater in Lenox, Mass and performed by her at CSU Summer Arts Fresno. Her credits for directing include The Press and FACE for Visions and Voices at USC and Macbeth 3 at the HERE Theatre in New York, starring Lisa Wolpe. She is the recipient of the Playwright’s Arena Outstanding Contribution to Los Angeles Theatre Award and appears in the recent publication Voice and Speech Training in the New Millennium (Conversations with Master Teachers) by Nancy Saklad. Ms. Ohama is also involved in the 300 for 300 project for young women in Louisville, KY. She heads the voice progression for the MFA acting program at USC. For more information, visit www.natsukoohama.com.
In Print
All's Well That Ends Well
This translation of Shakespeare’s overlooked play will captivate contemporary readers.
Virginia Grise takes on one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays in her translation of All’s Well That Ends Well. It is a play that has challenged actors, directors, and audiences for four-hundred years, and in this edition, Grise updates Shakespeare’s language for modern ears.
