ABSTRACT
Virtually every university has a two-course sequence in theater history that includes texts from Ancient Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Russian, German, Norwegian, Swedish, and Italian as well as from Asia. The same breadth applies to directing: for example, I have directed translations from twelve different original languages. Moreover, the process of producing a play is itself an act of translation: taking an author’s words and making them available to a larger audience in a manner that is intended to be simultaneously the same and yet transformed. This chapter addresses both the classroom and the rehearsal hall. It examines teaching strategies for both environments in three different sets of circumstances: those in which professors have a good working knowledge of the original language, those in which they have efficiency but not proficiency, and those in which they must rely completely on the skills of the translator.
