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Playwright Kenneth Cavander has describes his translation as “respectful but not reverent; bold, but not vandal; it meant going out on a limb and being willing to crawl back to the safety of the main trunk when I heard the sound of creaking.”
Playwright
Kenneth Cavander
Kenneth Cavander’s plays, adaptations and translations have been widely performed both in the U.S. and abroad. In the U.S. he has been represented on Broadway and at many regional theatres, including the Guthrie Theatre, Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., the Yale Repertory Theatre, the Williamstown Theatre Festival. In the U.K., his work has been presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company and in London’s West End. His television plays and documentaries have been aired on PBS and network television and, in the U.K., on BBC Radio and BBC One, garnering several awards and nominations. In 2023 he will complete two new projects: the first, a double bill of films on the life of C.S. (The Narnia Chronicles) Lewis, on which he collaborated with the British film director Norman Stone, to be shot in and around Oxford in 2023; and a new adaptation of Sophokles Antigone, commissioned by the Westport Playhouse, that goes back to the original Greek text and highlights the raw political and suspense elements of the original.
Dramaturg
Lue Douthit
During her 25 years at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Douthit oversaw a full service literary department as Director of Literary Development and Dramaturgy.
Play on! began in 2012 as a pilot program under her supervision. She was the Production Dramaturg for more than 50 productions, including 15 world premieres including: Hannah and the Dread Gazebo; Head Over Heels; Family Album; The Unfortunates; Throne of Blood; and Equivocation.
She has also worked on over two dozen Shakespeare productions. She is the co-adapter of a six-actor Macbeth and seven-actor Measure for Measure, which were both produced at OSF and elsewhere. She was the co-producer of the Black Swan Lab in 2009, going on to produce the lab from 2010 to 2016.
Douthit is the recipient of the 1999 Literary Manager & Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA) Prize in Dramaturgy: The Elliott Hayes Award.
She received a PhD at the University of Washington, an MFA from Trinity University, and an MA from University of Arizona.
In Print
Timon of Athens
In a respectful, but not reverent, adaptation, Kenneth Cavander reimagines Timon of Athens for the twenty-first century.
Never performed in Shakespeare’s lifetime, Timon of Athens presents an intriguing puzzle for contemporary audiences. The disjointed plot and many gaps in the story have led scholars to believe it was a collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton, a younger writer known for his satires, and productions for decades have faced choices about the most effective way to present the play. In this translation, Cavander acts as a third playwright in this collaborative process. Wrangling the voices of Shakespeare and Middleton on the page, Cavander unveils poetic lines and phrases that have sat stubbornly in the cobwebs, cutting these voices through the time barrier and into the world as we know it.
