By Robert Viagas for Playbill, 15 October 2015 Bill Rauch, the artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, took to the pages of American Theatre magazine to explain and defend his plans to have contemporary playwrights “translate” all 39 of William Shakespeare‘s plays into modern English. The massive project aims to make Shakespeare’s works more understandable for modern audiences, with all 39 […]
By James Shapiro for The New York Times, 7 October 2015 THE Oregon Shakespeare Festival has decided that Shakespeare’s language is too difficult for today’s audiences to understand. It recently announced that over the next three years, it will commission 36 playwrights to translate all of Shakespeare’s plays into modern English. Many in the theater community have known that this day was coming, […]
By Daniel Pollack-Peizner for The New Yorker, 6 October 2015 Last week, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced that it had commissioned thirty-six playwrights to translate all of Shakespeare’s plays into modern English. The backlash began immediately, with O.S.F. devotees posting their laments on the festival’s Facebook page. “What a revolting development!” “Is there really a need to translate English into Brain […]
Image from The Wall Street Journal‘s ‘A Facelift for Shakespeare’ A Facelift for Shakespeare By John McWhorter for The Wall Street Journal, 25 September 2015 The Oregon Shakespeare Festival will announce next week that it has commissioned translations of all 39 of the Bard’s plays into modern English, with the idea of having them ready to perform in three years. Yes, translations—because […]
From NPR, 20 September 2015 Actress Bonnie Milligan should be belting out songs in a production of Head Over Heels at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. But belting and smoke don’t mix — and that’s causing problems this year at one of the country’s oldest and most respected theater festivals. Wildfires have been raging across the Pacific Northwest. In Washington State they’ve consumed […]
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