Unearthing Your Languages

HowlRound Theatre Commons: How can someone write in a language they don’t understand but that lives in their bones? How do playwrights who are heritage language learners (HLLs)—people historically or personally connected to ancestral languages who may not necessarily understand those languages—write their plays or portions of their plays in their heritage languages?

Staging Bilingual Classical Theatre

HowlRound Theatre Commons: In the first wave of pandemic theatre, bilingual and semi-bilingual renditions of the canonized classics have figured prominently, from the Brave New Shakespeare Challenge at New York City’s the Public, which included sonnets and scenes partly or entirely in Spanish, to the bilingual shows Balcony Scene in Quarantine from the Latinx theatre company TEATRX in Houston and Dos Familias/Two Families at Central Florida Community Arts, to the recent Boston Foundation grant awarded to Queen Mab to create a combined spoken word/ASL version of The Tempest. In 2020, playing Shakespeare at least partially in another language became the thing.

Language In Production

SoundGirls.org: Microaggression is a form of bias that can occur in everyday language, often subtle and said inadvertently. Language can be problematic when it’s a common phrase or saying and people avoid understanding its origins or implications. We use language to express ourselves, and even when we have the best intentions some phrases, wording, and terms, in general, are no longer applicable or widely accepted.

Oriza Hirata's "In the Heart of a Forest": Mastering Multilingual Performance

The Theatre Times: Tokyo’s cozy 60-odd-seat Komaba Agora Theater isn’t perhaps where you would expect a cutting-edge multilingual drama experiment to be staged, but that’s just where Oriza Hirata has chosen to work his latest magic.

If You Think You Hate Puns, You're Wrong - In Defense of Puns

www.esquire.com: he English language is almost nightmarishly expansive, and yet there is no good way to respond when someone drops a bad pun in casual conversation.

“Stop” seems ideal, but it’s too late—they already did it. If your esophagus cooperates, you can mimic a human chuckle, or you can just steamroll through, ignoring the elephant now parked in your conversational foyer. Either way, having to deal at all with the demand that wordplay be acknowledged is probably the reason so many people think they hate puns.

Those people are wrong.

Theatre's missing accents

Exeunt Magazine: In ‘I bet Nicholas Hynter doesn’t have to do this’, a brilliantly titled chapter of Glory and the Garden (eds. Ros Merkin & Kate Dorney) , Gwenda Hughes chronicles the complaint letters she received as artistic director of The New Vic, then The Victoria Theatre in North Staffordshire. Amongst these are a series of moans directed at Northern Broadsides’ Shakespeare, including one outraged-of-Cheshire writer who felt horrified at the bard’s words being so unsuitably intoned by those with (gasp) regional accents.