The best contemporary plays from other countries can bring a strikingly fresh point of view to our English-language stages. Often, they can expand our sense of the playwriting form.
For a decade, the Cherry Artists’ Collective in Ithaca, NY, have sought out and developed new and unusual plays from across the globe that speak to English-language artists and audiences.
This collection gathers together six award-winning plays in translation hailing from Belgium to El Salvador, France to Mexico and Germany to Québec. Each of the translations has been refined through a full professional rehearsal and production process, and each play sparks an important exploration into the diverse ways in which contemporary issues are currently being explored by great theatre writers from around the world.
George Kaplan (Frédéric Sonntag, France) follows a famously fictional spy into a dizzying and darkly hilarious investigation of how conspiracy theories can shape our political realities; On the Other Side of the Sea (Jorgelina Cerritos, El Salvador) is a magical, minimalistic two-hander about documentation and belonging; The Wetsuitman (Freek Mariën, Belgium) begins as a Scandinavian noir crime thriller, and unpeels like an onion to reveal a vitally important story of our time; A Day (Gabrielle Chapdelaine, Quebec) refracts through a microscopic lens the humor and pathos of four ordinary lives; The Weight of Ants (David Paquet, Quebec) follows a pair of misfit students at "the worst High School in Quebec" as they take matters into their own hands; and Testosterone (Rebekka Kricheldorf, Germany), is a pitch-dark parable about toxic masculinities and the limits of liberal do-goodery in extreme times.
This book provides theatre programmers and educators with the materials to program new global theatre writing that is exciting and engaging as well as offering English-language writers, actors and readers a vital stepping-stone into new forms of dramaturgy.
