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“Translation strives to open portals to understanding; it is an act of possibility because the more we understand each other and ourselves, the more compassionate we become, and the more love we can share and spread around. We share in the possibility that the future is worth investing in and that the works of Shakespeare are worth carrying forward.” Tracy Young, Playwright
Playwright
Tracy Young
Tracy Young is a theatre director and playwright. Tracy developed several original plays with The Actors’ Gang in Los Angeles, including the musicals Hysteria (Ovation Award), Euphoria (Ovation and LA Weekly Awards) and A Fairy Tale (Garland and GLAAD Image Awards), as well as Dreamplay, a meditation on Carl Jung’s theories of collective unconscious. She created several adaptations of classic plays and novels, including the critically acclaimed Candude, or The Optimistic Civil Servant (from Voltaire’s Candide for Cornerstone Theatre Company), The Servant of Two Masters and The Imaginary Invalid for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (with co-adaptor Oded Gross), and most recently a theatrical adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time. Her most challenging and joyful work to date is Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella (with co-adaptor Bill Rauch), a simultaneous telling of Euripides’ Medea, Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella. Earlier forays into Shakespearean translation include productions of The Taming of the Shrew and The Merry Wives of Windsor at Idaho Shakespeare Festival.
Dramaturg
Ben Pryor
Ben Pryor is the Provost and CEO of Antioch University Seattle. Before serving as a dramaturge for Play On!, Pryor was a founder and longtime member of the Glacity Theatre Collective in Toledo, Ohio. As an actor with GTC he appeared in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Breathing Corpses, Eurydice, Suburban Motel, All’s Well, Betrayal, Waiting for Godot, Exhibition, Hunting Cockroaches and Circle Mirror Transformation. Pryor joined the GTC for the Toledo Symphony’s production of Stoppard and Previn’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour at Carnegie Hall in 2011.
Pryor is originally from southern California where he attended the Johnston Center of the University of Redlands where he played Ferdinand in The Tempest. He has worked with the South Coast Repertory Theatre and has appeared in short films and a children’s television production for ABC. Pryor has a Ph.D. in Philosophy.
In Print
The Winter's Tale
Tracy Young offers a new version of Shakespeare’s difficult tale of jealousy and redemption.
The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s most challenging explorations of redemption and rebirth. Driven by extreme jealousy, Leontes, the King of Sicily, accuses his wife Hermione of infidelity and orders his newborn daughter to be abandoned. Sixteen years later, Leontes must reckon with the consequences of his rash decisions. Tracy Young’s version of The Winter’s Tale transforms the theatergoing experience from Shakespeare’s time to ours. This translation updates Shakespeare’s language, wordplay, and wit to engage audiences the way they would have been engaged in the early modern theater.
