Adaptation and Translation

In 2014, Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble embarked on a decade-long project translating and producing Anton Chekhov’s plays. Kate Purdum details how this project used fresh translations and imaginative theatrical landscapes to affirm the playwright’s relevance to contemporary audiences.

Arab Voices convened Arab and Arab American artists in Beirut for a series of staged readings and workshops—but it was cut short when an Israeli attack triggered deadly explosions of electronic devices. Co-producer Catherine Coray shares the project’s successes and the group’s intention continue what they’ve begun. 

Translator and playwright Amanda L. Andrei offers a beginner’s guide to translation for theatre, with tips on everything from securing translation rights to finding the right community to support your work.

Theatrical translation demands cross-cultural collaboration. Henning Bochert traces these collaborative vectors by illuminating the scope and funding structures of a number of projects, reaching from German theatres to European Union cultural initiatives and beyond.

A decade ago, translators dreamt of a formalized network for the promotion of theatrical translation in the United States. Neil Blackadder and Adam Versényi write about the ways this effort now feeds into a variety of development and production strategies for works in translation.

Translation lives in the slippery area between texts, people, cultures, languages, and sources. In this conversation, Jean Graham-Jones and Caridad Svich engage with expansive understandings of translation and adaptation and apply those ideas to their own myriad translation projects. 

From awards shows to rehearsal rooms, the work of translation for theatre is invisibilized in the United States. Jeremy Tiang explores the reasons for this lack of recognition and makes the case not just for more translation, but for the increased presence of translators.

In Plexus Polaire’s Moby Dick, the line between the performers and the puppets they control sometimes blurs. Lucy Haskell explores the way that the shifting animacy of humans and objects on stage disrupts the audience’s expectations of where life resides.

In Keiko Green’s The Bed Trick, a new adaptation of All’s Well That Ends Well, issues of consent in both the bedroom and the theatre classroom are explored in the modern context of college. Erin Murray explains how the show creates a theatrically slippery and inquisitive space which prompts audience members to examine their own role in a society that fosters rape culture. 

Amelia Parenteau sits down with Sarah Cameron Sunde, who has translated and directed six of Jon Fosse’s plays, to mark the occasion of Fosse being awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. Their conversation pays tribute to Sarah and Jon’s longstanding creative relationship, examines the plays’ Norwegian context as it is translated internationally, and uplifts the need for American audiences to see more dramatic work in translation.

Amelia Parenteau chronicles the process of translating Eva Doumbia’s Autophagies from French to English and producing its tour in the United States, a project that unfolded across four years.