Fill out our script request form so we can send you a script to peruse and more info about what these translations look like in production.
Translator Andrea Thome was drawn to the play’s travel between worlds and its mystical, complicated quality. She says, “I took on the crazy, wild, messy beast of Cymbeline because I love this play—and its mess. I love its wild ride, its unhinged, unapologetic sense of play, and overflows with human feeling and imaginative vitality. People complain that Cymbeline is all over the place, but I relish how un-neat it is in language and form, like its characters’ hearts, leaking and exploding and healing again. What else is life? It splits itself open, exposes all our essential (and embarrassing) parts and needs, and doing so, finds wholeness.”
Playwright
Andrea Thome
Andrea Thome is a Chilean/Costa Rican-American playwright who grew up navigating the multiple landscapes and languages that inhabit her plays. Her play Pinkolandia received a rolling world premiere at INTAR Theater (NYC), Austin’s Salvage Vanguard Theater, Two River Theater (NJ), and 16th Street Theater (Chicago). It was awarded the Lark/Mellon Foundation’s Launching New Plays Fellowship, and was translated into Russian and presented at Moscow’s Meyerhold Center. Other current plays in progress include Purgatorio (developed through SPACE on Ryder Farm and Keen Company), and an untitled play about an 11th-century astronomer from Muslim Spain, commissioned by Ensemble Studio Theatre/The Sloan Foundation.
Andrea’s playwriting often experiments with the nature of theatrical collaboration. She was recently commissioned by En Garde Arts to write Undocumented, created from her interviews and ongoing conversations with undocumented immigrants. Collaborating with composer Sinuhé Padilla-Isunza and director José Zayas, they shared a developmental reading at Joe’s Pub (at the Public Theater) in November 2017, and are in the process of developing a full-length version in conversation with both theaters and community organizations. For the Public Theater, Andrea created Troy in collaboration with director Laurie Woolery and Public Works’ ACTivate Ensemble. This year and a half-long process, in which the community ensemble helped generate and also performed the material, culminated in a full production at the Public in June 2016. She has also been developing a unique collaborative process with director Lisa Rothe, composer Amir Khosrowpour and a collaborating ensemble of performers and storytellers to create a multidisciplinary, musical piece, The Necklace of the Dove. Weaving together stories about love from a medieval Muslim Spanish book and a modern immigrant community in Queens, the piece has been developed through Mabou Mines’ Resident Artist Program, Fulcrum Theater, The Lark and New Georges’ Audrey Residency.
Andrea’s other plays include Undone (Whitman Award; developed at Queens College, Victory Gardens, Lark), Worm Girl (Cherry Red Productions), various short plays and many collaborative projects. Her play translations (including Guillermo Calderón’s Neva) have been produced by the Public Theater, CTG, La Jolla Playhouse and others. She co-created and has directed the Lark’s México-US Playwright Exchange Program since 2006, which brings together Mexican and US playwrights to create theatrical translations of new Mexican plays and build lasting collaborative relationships and dialogue. Andrea co-founded fulana, an all-Latina satire collective that creates cutting-edge political & cultural parodies online and beyond (www.fulana.org), and she spent 5 formative years in San Francisco, where her Red Rocket Theater Company created and produced an original play each month, and where she worked with artists including Latina Theatre Lab, Campo Santo, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Brava.
She has received fellowships and residencies from NYFA, MacDowell Colony (awarded Thornton Wilder fellowship), New Voices/New York, the Camargo Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, SPACE on Ryder Farm’s Working Farm group, the City of Oakland, New York University (MFA Fellow), Women’s Project Lab, and Keen Company. Andrea was a New Dramatists resident playwright from 2009-2016.
Dramaturg
John Dias
John Dias assumed his position as Artistic Director of Two River Theater in 2010 after working as a producer and dramaturg in New York for over 20 years. In partnership with Managing Director Michael Hurst he has brought new acclaim and vitality to the 28-year-old theater, expanding the theater’s campus in August 2019 with the three-story Center for New Work, Education and Design. Dias launched Two River’s first literary department and commissioning program; during his tenure Two River has produced 15 world premieres (including Hurricane Diane by Playwright-in-Residence Madeleine George, which enjoyed an Obie Award-winning Off-Broadway run, and Be More Chill by Joe Iconis and Joe Tracz, the theater’s first Broadway and London production) and developed numerous other plays and musicals. He has spearheaded new initiatives for the theater including the Crossing Borders (Cruzando Fronteras) summer festival of plays and music by Latine artists; an annual musical theater cabaret in partnership with New York University’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing program; a commitment to producing all ten plays in August Wilson’s “American Century Cycle;” and the popular education program “A Little Shakespeare,” which introduces the works of Shakespeare to hundreds of young people each year. Under his leadership, Two River serves thousands of students and community members each season through arts and humanities programs at the theater, in schools, and throughout Monmouth County. He is the co-author and was the director of Two River’s musical The Ballad of Little Jo, which he wrote with composer Mike Reid and lyricist Sarah Schlesinger. Throughout his career, John has been a leading advocate for bold new American plays and stimulating productions of the classics, including the Broadway productions of Lisa Kron’s Well and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. For 12 seasons, he worked in a variety of capacities at The Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival, and he co-founded Affinity Company Theater and The Playwrights Realm. John is an Associate Professor at Columbia University. He has been a Tony Award nominator, a consultant for the National Endowment for the Arts and numerous other organizations, and he has taught at New York University and Yale University. John received his BA from George Washington University and his MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
In Print
Cymbeline
One of Shakespeare’s late plays rewritten in contemporary language.
In her modern translation of Cymbeline, Andrea Thome takes up one of Shakespeare’s most complex plays. Thome’s update brings the play’s language into the present, highlighting new resonances and providing a more accessible version of Shakespeare’s play for today’s audiences. One of Shakespeare’s final plays, Cymbeline tells the story of the British king Cymbeline and his daughter, Imogen. It is a tale of deceit and jealousy, with accusations of infidelity that often draw comparisons to Othello and The Winter’s Tale.
