![]() ![]() In fall 2016, Douthit invited me to join a convention of Play on! playwrights and dramaturgs at OSF to discuss translation challenges and talk about my research on the history of updating Shakespeare’s language-standard practice from the 17th century well through the 19th. The first stage of my conversion was to the process. I went in with trepidations: Would Shakespeare’s complexity be lost? Would my favorite lines disappear? Could the translator’s voice still come through? To my surprise, however, I came out a Play on! convert. I’ve heard two of these full translations (Ranjit Bolt’s Much Ado About Nothing and Jeff Whitty’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) in readings at the Portland Shakespeare Project, where I’m the scholar-in-residence, along with snippets of others (Amy Freed’s The Taming of the Shrew, Mfoniso Udofia’s Othello, Alison Carey’s Twelfth Night, Kenneth Cavander’s The Tempest, Ellen McLaughlin’s Pericles, Douglas Langworthy’s Henry VI trilogy, Octavio Solis’s Edward III) at events around Oregon. (Seven of the translations have already been produced at Shakespeare theatres from San Francisco to Prague, and the translation project, which started as Play on! under OSF’s auspices, has since become an independent nonprofit called Play On Shakespare.) Over the next month, Play on! will present staged readings of all 39 translations at Classic Stage Company in the order Shakespeare likely composed them, from Two Gentleman of Verona (translated by Amelia Roper) on May 29 through Two Noble Kinsmen (Tim Slover) on June 30 complete schedule below. Three and a half years later, New York audiences can judge for themselves. “It might even end Western civilization as we know it.” Elise Thoron, Migdalia Cruz, Andrea Thome, Hansol Jung, Lue Douthis, Taylor Bailey, Ellen McLaughlin, and Kenneth Cavander at a Play on! demo and fundraiser at Ars Nova in 2016. “This might end my career,” she said, with a shrug. Douthit seemed excited to find out what playwrights would learn on their spelunking expeditions. The project combined Douthit’s expertise in new play development with a Silicon Valley taste for experimentation. Funding came from the Hitz Foundation, run by a tech entrepreneur who learned that Shakespeare is often translated into contemporary speech in other languages and was curious to hear how that would sound in English. They’d have companion dramaturgs, too, but playwrights would be at the center. Douthit called it “spelunking with Shakespeare.” There was something radical, she thought, about asking dramatists to work through every choice in Shakespeare’s lines and bring their feel for style, scene, character, and structure to help those 400-year-old scripts sing anew. (Count Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, Paula Vogel’s Indecent, and Robert Schenkkan’s All the Way among its successes.) Play on! would take the scope, diversity, and cohort model from American Revolutions and invite artists instead to dive into Shakespeare’s plays. ![]() OSF already had a commissioning project, the American Revolutions cycle, that funded artists to create 37 new plays on the scale of Shakespeare’s canon. Why constrain innovative playwrights to that lexical spadework?ĭouthit saw it differently. I’ve heard “stale” from Antony and Cleopatra rendered, aptly, as “urine,” and “gamut,” a musical term in The Taming of the Shrew, quietly updated as “scale,” without anyone in the audience demurring. ![]() Why not let their talents loose? Scholars already dig through obscure phrases, searching for intelligible equivalents, as I’d done when I worked on editing the Norton Shakespeare, trying to concoct glosses for lines like “Aroint thee, witch, the rump-fed runnion cries.” Directors and dramaturgs often do it too, choosing from early publication variants and swapping out archaic words for performance. Unlike some critics, who found the very idea of the project shocking, even heretical, I thought it sounded too conservative. The playwrights on the payroll were dazzling: Ellen McLaughlin, Marcus Gardley, Hansol Jung, Taylor Mac, Migdalia Cruz-the majority of them women, the majority artists of color. Only adjust what’s necessary to let a 21st-century audience experience the plays with the emotional immediacy that a 16th-century audience would have enjoyed. If the language works, don’t mess with it. Keep the verse, the rhyme, the heightened language, the metaphors, the imagery. Douthit laid out its parameters: Do no harm. We were chatting at a gathering of dramaturgs in Portland in Fall 2015, a few weeks before the Play on! translation project was to be announced. When Lue Douthit, longtime literary director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, told me that she had hired 36 playwrights to translate Shakespeare’s scripts into contemporary English, I didn’t get it. ![]()
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