The typical Shakespeare production follows an odd convention: a contemporary setting with Elizabethan language. What if we flipped that? Contemporary language with an Elizabethan setting. What might we learn about the plays from putting them through that lens?

Hosted by Associate Artistic Director, Jenni Stewart, this episode explores Shakespeare in Modern Translation with Lue Douthit, Founder and Creative Director of Play On Shakespeare. In the fall of 2015, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced a new commissioning program called Play on! 36 playwrights translate Shakespeare. The project was simple yet enthusiastically ambitious in its original conception: to commission 36 playwrights (with one lucky playwright taking on all three Henry VIs) to translate 39 plays attributed to Shakespeare (including Two Noble Kinsmen and Edward III) into contemporary, modern English over the course of three years. At the end of Play On!’s three-year tenure at OSF, energized by its overwhelming scope and success, the project’s producing team secured funding to form their own, new not-for-profit company. On January 1, 2019, they established Play On Shakespeare, an organization funded by the Hitz Foundation that seeks to enhance the understanding of Shakespeare’s plays for theater professionals, students and audiences by engaging with contemporary translations and adaptations

*Please note the originally scheduled production of Twelfth Night at Shakespeare Dallas in January 2022 was canceled due to Covid-19.