Translations

“Henry VI Part III is a play in which language is crucial to the plot. From letters sent from England to France, to verbal deception between family members fighting for a crown, to Richard’s brilliant and devious confessionals to the audience, language is a weapon in this play. Douglas Langworthy was the goldilocks of language.…

“A key function of dramaturgy, I feel, is to voice confusion or uncertainty. A play does not need to satisfy its dramaturg’s understanding, but I do believe that raising questions in a thoughtful manner leads to discussions that can transform the piece itself, or further meld the visions of the artists making it. This is…

“My understanding of the plays and characters had deepened through the action of the translation… In the process of discovering what I did not know, and digging into the text to transpose the incomprehensible into the comprehensible, I fell deeper in love with the language, the characters and their stories… The stated purpose of the…

“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…

Playwright Tim Slover claims “the language of Kinsmen is famous among scholars for its difficulty.” While writing the translation of this text, full of metaphors and complicated syntax, he “began to feel a surprising empathy with Fletcher and Shakespeare. They rendered a story written by Chaucer two hundred years before their time into the language…

Dramaturg Kate McConnell says that in playwright Amelia Roper’s translation of the text, “the clumsily abrupt or shallow-feeling changes of direction and emotion shown by Shakespeare’s characters are translated to the supercharged ups and downs of adolescent boys, all-too-relatable and quite theatrically effective.” She says this translation offers “a new sort of life to these…

“To return to Twelfth Night, behind the romance and comedy of the play are all-encompassing clouds and rivers of death-inspired grief. But the characters fight on, grab onto what they need to stay breathing and afloat, and rebuild their lives. They imagine something better and bring it into being.” Alison Carey, Playwright

Playwright Lillian Groag says the play “struck me as arguably Shakespeare’s most shockingly ‘modern’ play. One feels the chill of an immediately recognizable 21st-century cynicism, which doesn’t stop at an indictment of war but goes further to a devastating indictment of the human heart itself. There is a sense that nothing lasts, that nothing takes…

Playwright Amy Freed says that Titus Andronicus “operates on a compelling elemental and mythic plane” that begins “in a world of pre-linguistic primitivism—he’s a tired-out, used-up killing machine who only finds his voice as a human being when his dearest child is mutilated and returned to him.” It is a play, she says, that is…

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.”