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“This play about race and prejudice is more devastating and relevant when an audience understands in real time what the characters are saying….At the play’s core, one feels the engine of humanity, its belief in our potential for equity and mercy in our treatment of each other, and how often we fall short, as we watch the distortion racism produces in all the characters.” Elise Thoron, playwright
Playwright
Elise Thoron
Elise Thoron is a playwright and director, working cross-culturally abroad and within the United States. She collaborates with poets, fine artists, musicians to create performances in multiple languages, described in her book The Way of Washi Tales. She is Co-founding Artistic Director of Literature to Life, a highly successful theater literacy program, in its third decade nationwide, adapting books into solo performances with facilitated discussion to spark a passion for reading in young people. For over twenty years, Elise created cross-cultural exchanges with Russian and American theater artists; adapted and directed The Great Gatsby in Russian at a The Pushkin Theater in Moscow, where it played for over nine years. Her translations of Russian plays have been published and produced in USA and Canada.
Dramaturg
Julie Felise Dubiner
Julie Felise Dubiner is the former Associate Director of American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle. While at OSF, Julie served as dramaturg for Beauty and the Beast; The Wiz; Sweat, The Cocoanuts; The Liquid Plain; and Party People. At Actors Theatre of Louisville, she collaborated on more than 40 productions and projects in the regular season and the Humana Festival, and co-created Rock & Roll: The Reunion Tour. In Philadelphia, she was project manager of the musical The Rosenbach Company and dramaturg at the Prince Music Theater. In Chicago, Julie freelanced with Defiant Theatre, blue star performance company, Steppenwolf Theatre Company and others. She has been a guest dramaturg at the Kennedy Center and KCACTF, the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, the New Harmony Project and elsewhere. Julie is the co-editor of two anthologies of Humana Festival plays; co-author of The Process of Dramaturgy: A Practical Guide; and a contributor to The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, Innovation in Five Acts: Strategies for Theatre and Performance, HowlRound, the LMDA Source Book; and is a Kilroys nominator. Julie holds a BA from Tufts University and an MFA from Columbia University.
In Print
The Merchant of Venice
An updated version of The Merchant of Venice that speaks to our contemporary reckoning with racism and injustice.
Elise Thoron’s translation of Shakespeare’s searing The Merchant of Venice cuts straight to the heart of today’s fraught issues of social justice and systemic racism. Thoron’s clear, compelling contemporary verse translation retains the power of the original iambic pentameter while allowing readers and audiences to fully comprehend and directly experience the brutal dilemmas of Shakespeare’s Venice, where prejudice and privilege reign unchallenged. As the author of three acclaimed music-theater works on the Jewish experience and informed by her work directing cross-cultural projects in locations as different as Russia, Japan, Cuba, and New York City, Thoron brings to her Merchant an immediacy that speaks directly to the present reckoning with race in America.
