Exploring Advocacy Strategies to Increase Works in Translation on United States Stages

This season’s Broadway hits have included plays translated from Russian (Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya) and Norwegian (Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People). This might suggest that plays in translation can thrive in US theatre, but that is only true for a limited number of playwrights, most of them not contemporary writers. Yasmina Reza of France, author of Art and God of Carnage, is the exception that proves the rule. Playwrights of enormous stature in their own countries, including Nobel Prize winners Elfriede Jelinek, Peter Handke, and Jon Fosse, have had few United States productions in both the nonprofit and commercial sectors.

We are both theatre scholars and teachers who have also long been committed to translating exciting contemporary drama to promote the production of plays in translation on stages in the United States. Adam translates from Spanish, focusing on Latin American playwrights, and many of his translations have been produced and published. Neil translates German-language and Francophone drama, and his translations have been staged in New York, Chicago, and other cities; he also directed student productions of several of his translations at Knox College. We and many fellow translators, along with directors and dramaturgs with a particular interest in international work, have been striving to introduce more plays in translation to theatre in the United States. We formed the Theatre in Translation Network (TinT), a network that has been active for over a decade, and Adam created the journal the Mercurian: A Theatrical Translation Review back in 2007. Together and separately, we have spoken at the conferences of a variety of organizations and forged connections with many theatres and cultural associations.

In 2012, Adam organized Theatrical Translation as Creative Process: A Conference Festival at the University of North Carolina and Duke University. Over four days, participants from several countries discussed theatrical translation with particular focus on four translated plays presented in staged readings. Those conversations led Adam to publish the essay “The Creation of a National New Works in Translation Network” on HowlRound, proposing a network modeled in part on the National New Play Network. “What would happen,” Adam asked, “if we were to think of new translations of plays, both classical and contemporary, into English the same way that we think of new plays written in English?”

A network of the kind we had envisioned never came into being, yet we learned much about just how hard it is to make significant and lasting change to the landscape of US theatre.

That idea met with a promising response, leading to a convening at the Studio Theatre in Washington, DC in summer 2013, which brought translators together with artistic directors, literary managers, agents, and representatives of cultural organizations. Working groups were formed to focus on specific areas like fundraising and liaising with embassies. And a follow-up meeting took place a year later at the Lark in New York. We had plans to launch a website presenting comprehensive lists of past productions and readings of plays in translation, including those at universities and colleges, as well as information about how to find scripts. We imagined workshops to encourage theatres to consider translated plays, as well as translators to translate plays, applications for funding, an advisory board, and so on. But all the enthusiastically engaged people already had great demands placed on them by their primary jobs, and it was hard to sustain the momentum we had built up. A network of the kind we had envisioned never came into being, yet we learned much about just how hard it is to make significant and lasting change to the landscape of US theatre.

Adam had made another important contribution to the promotion of play translation when he founded the Mercurian, responding to the dearth of journals willing to publish drama in translation (especially since the demise of Modern International Drama in 1996). Since 2007, the Mercurian has featured 143 plays translated into English from twenty-nine languages and thirty-six different countries, as well as articles on theatrical translation, interviews with translators, and book reviews. In keeping with our shared emphasis on bringing about productions, translators wishing to submit a script to the Mercurian must have seen and heard the translation presented in at least a reading if not a full staging. A core idea behind the journal’s conception has always been to move published translations into production, with some success. For instance, Salvadoran playwright Jorgelina Cerritos’s On the Other Side of the Sea as translated by Margaret Stanton and Anna Donko had been presented in a staged reading at Sweet Briar College in 2015 before being published in the Mercurian in 2016, and it was subsequently produced at Cherry Arts in Ithaca, New York in 2020. Meanwhile, excerpts from plays in translation appear more often than before in journals such as Asymptote (whose drama editor Caridad Svich is also a member of the Mercurian’s advisory board) and Another Chicago Magazine (where Neil serves as translations editor).