Word Drunk, World Savvy

For Kate Loewald's Play Company, producing plays in translation is a tool of global insight

By Randy Gener

From left, Steven Boyer, Joseph Midyett, Kira Sternbach and Jessica Almasy in Play Company’s production of Enjoy, by Toshiki Okada; Caesar Samayoa, Ed Vassallo, Brandon Miller, Michi Barall, Emily Donahoe and David Wilson Barnes in Yoki Sakate’s The Attic, at PlayCo in 2007 (photos by Carol Rosegg)

The play hails from Japan. The director, actors and nonprofit producer do not.

In the spring of 2010, the Play Company of New York City mounted Toshiki Okada's word-drunk play Enjoy in a cleverly unpretentious production that set a benchmark for English-language productions of new Japanese plays. How unassuming was the show? The ensemble of dressed-down, mostly white young actors looked so slacker-class, they chattered in such exaggeratedly flat lingo ("It hasn't really sunk in for real, the fact that I'm 30, or like, to be honest, yeah, honestly I am panicked, or it's not just that I'm panicked but..."), and they slouched around a linoleum-lined employees' break room so gray and so empty that they might have been standing in line for a brilliant audition for Reality Bites or Clerks. As remade by Samuel Beckett. Or Edward Albee. For the Naught Decade.

Right, right (borrowing Okada-speak), that might not be precisely right, what I mean is, this Japanese play compels...these depressed overeducated horny underemployed navel-gazers in a manga café located in the middle of Shinjuku (which is kind of like the epicenter of recession-racked Tokyo)...the play boils down to hyperrealist minimalism...they're stuck in this zeitgeisty purgatory of turning 30, Japan's so-called lost generation....

PlayCo's American take on Enjoy gave a band of non-Asian actors the rare license to portray animé bookstore habitués. Interestingly, not everyone in the New York cast was Caucasian; sprinkled among them were an African American and an Asian American. This sort-of-mixed-race casting—a subtle yet signal gesture that had gotten great traction in PlayCo's first U.S. production of a cutting-edge play from Japan (Yoji Sakate's heartbreaking The Attic, directed by Ari Edelson in 2007)—disconcerts those of us accustomed to taking in foreign plays with foreign actors and English supertitles. And for those with a more politically correct turn of mind, the people-of-color peppering naturally raises other niggling questions: Would it not have made more sense to cast Enjoy with all Asian Americans? How far does one need to "neutralize" a Japanese play when reconfiguring it for New York actors and audiences? Might there be culturally nuanced messages in this hipster comedy that would get lost in translation even if you did cast American-born actors of Asian descent?

Right, right, that might be a gratuitous remark, maybe rhetorical...think back on PlayCo's spare, lucid production of Sakhram Binder...that Indian domestic drama play was cast with all South Asian actors, it ran three hours but was spellbinding...New York–based director Maria Mileaf and her actors penetrated the politics of the bedroom, these intense scenes of physical lust and violence, dramatizing a system of de facto enslavement of women in postcolonial India...though written in 1974 (by Vijay Tendulkhar, who recently died), that play felt urgent...the Indian-ness does not get in the way at all....

"PlayCo," states its founding producer Kate Loewald, "is dedicated to advancing an international view of contemporary playwriting. We're a producing company, but we are writer-driven—we always start with the play. We are also a mission-focused theatre because of our international view, which is what really drives us and what distinguishes us," Loewald goes on, honing her point. "I think of the word 'international' as crossing boundaries. We mount American productions of plays from other parts of the world. We encourage artists and audiences to view American plays within that international context. We take a world view of new writing in the theatre."

Okada's writing couldn't be more ideal fodder for world-viewing. He calls the way his plays speak "tedious meandering Japanese." Kudos for the offhanded brilliance of the transposed idiom in Enjoy goes to New York–based playwright Aya Ogawa, whose translation is fluid and delicious. Ogawa describes the circuitous thought patterns of Okada's characters as "no-punctuation talk, a literary thing with no periods attached." His characters, she says, "just talk and talk and talk. Tangential thoughts wind around and end up nowhere. His plays are difficult to translate because those thought patterns are really tied to the grammar and syntax of the Japanese language."

So while the story and sensibility of Enjoy are quintessentially Japanese, Ogawa gives Okada's rambling dialogue a charming American-slang spin. Her hyper-colloquial translation perfectly captures the awkward restlessness and over-articulated hesitations of Enjoy's thirtyish Japanese slackers, all of whom are long-term part-timers who've grown older as they stay afloat in an unstable work climate. Gossiping and lollygagging, with way too much time to think, these self-conscious ramblers also speak to several sets of listeners at once—to each other, to us in the audience and to themselves. Actor 1, in the very first line of dialogue, sputters, "We'll begin with Act 1...." Little meta-theatre kicks like this, explains Linda Bartholomai, PlayCo's artistic associate, gave Enjoy's creative team permission to raise the perplexity volume—but not so much that the decibels of strangeness become deafening.

"When we stage works in translation," says Bartholomai, who has worked with PlayCo as associate producer, dramaturg and company manager since 2004, "we have to make certain decisions. How much of the play remains in the country of origin? What changes do we have to do to make it relatable to a New York audience? There are no rules. In Enjoy, we decided not to change the Tokyo setting, yet we did not cast Asian actors in it. There are certain metatheatrical aspects to the play, so the casting worked out really well. But those decisions have to be made anew for every new play, and it's always a learning experience."

Adds Loewald: "Enjoy is about the economic plight of the younger generation of Japanese. After we decided to do Enjoy, the U.S. economy collapsed, and the play became even more relevant to our society. We often say that we don't want our audiences to sit back and think they are seeing a play about events happening 'over there'—we want to find that commonality without losing the original impulse, voice and flavor of the play. Often casting offers us a way of exploring the question of how we tell a culturally specific story. How many references do we want to keep that are specific to the culture they come from? We want to figure out the bridges we need to build theatrically so that our audiences get the most of the experience of these plays from abroad."

What's impressive about Enjoy is how generously it rewards close listening. The Philadelphia–based director (and Pig Iron Theatre Company co-founder) Dan Rothenberg and his actors have transformed the inarticulateness of Okada's speeches and dialogue into dazzling mumblecore poetry. The actors-of-color accentuation trips over our traditional casting mind-set just as effectively as the characters' foreign-sounding names—"Kawakami," "Kato," "Mizuno," "Shimizu" (as maintained in the translated dialogue)—slightly disorient English-speaking audiences. Rothenberg's super-low-key production wants to have its stylized cake and eat it, too: He does not falsely jazz up the original work's studied nonchalance, nor does he disrespect or deface its Japanese material to the point of bastardization, like those Hollywood makeovers of popular foreign films that render their sources utterly unrecognizable.

"When I saw PlayCo's production in New York," says Okada (who first staged Enjoy for the New National Theatre of Tokyo in 2006), "I was struck by the intimacy that the show created with the audience. It was the absolute opposite of what I had attempted to create with my production. Was I disappointed by the result? Not at all. I would venture to say that Dan [Rothenberg]'s direction of this piece, which takes great care in communicating with the audience, is perhaps much more successful a production than the version I had directed myself. Of course, it's impossible to draw a fair comparison, given that the theme of this play—the unsettled state of young working people—is becoming a more serious issue in the U.S. now, and the various contexts in the play resonate quite differently in New York and Tokyo."

With its neutral-sounding name and its discerning avidity for plucking out fresh new visions from the U.S. and abroad, Loewald's Play Company excels in putting up a savvy offensive against a producing shibboleth that actively discourages us from seeing foreign plays. Plays from abroad can be commercially successful (think of the cachet enjoyed by the plays of Yasmina Reza), and yet despite our age of so-called globalization, most New York producers resist the idea of bringing new translations of contemporary plays from abroad into the marketplace. They have their excuses, of course. A persistent (but not very convincing) explanation is that American theatregoers are, for some reason, put off by translations. Another argument holds that putting them over commercially involves too much expense and work, because both the play and production must be shored up by unwieldy dramaturgical materials that connect audiences to the national and cultural contexts from which the plays originate. The gestation time needed to discover how an American director would stage a foreign play may perhaps be another factor, but so does the first production of any American play. Of course, ignoring new plays in translation simply leads to a chicken-and-egg conundrum: Is a limited theatregoing audience for translations the reason so few are produced in New York? Or is it that the audience seems limited because U.S. producers don't have the guts and competency to provide us with translated plays that have strong legs?

Twice a season, PlayCo has mounted instructive glimpses of new playwriting trends from Poland, Japan, Romania, India, Germany, Russia, France, the British Isles and the U.S., while at the same time doggedly keeping its showbiz head on straight. This enterprising outfit takes real cross-cultural risks—it gives us greater access to spunky, puckish, often buoyantly punk new writings from around the world. At a PlayCo show, you sometimes aren't quite sure where you are, but you always know that the playwrights it has selected for production write with brains, humor and heart.

Consider the PlayCo show presently on the boards: the U.S. premiere of the Swedish playwright and novelist Jonas Hassen Khemiri's Invasion!, as staged by Erica Schmidt at Walkerspace in SoHo. Unless you've racked up enough frequent flyer miles to regularly take you to Sweden or Germany, you've likely never heard of this dazzling young writer. Despite the unstoppable rise of Swedish detective fiction in U.S. book sales, few Swedish plays (save the late Ingmar Bergman's productions and the rare August Strindberg revival, usually starring famous British actors) have managed to cross over into the Anglophone theatrical market: Too cold, too heavy, too Nordic, too gloomy, too hard a sell are the frequent appraisals.

Bristling with free-wheeling wit and hip comedy, Invasion! pulls the rug out from under all those hoary Scandinavian stereotypes. A runaway hit in the Swedish capital of Stockholm, where it ran for two seasons after its 2006 debut, Invasion! arrives in New York after splendidly received productions in France, Norway, Great Britain and Germany. "I found that play while I was trailing the websites of German theatre companies," enthuses Bartholomai, who speaks German and first brought Invasion! to Loewald's attention. "The title and description looked very interesting, so I got the script."

One reason for Invasion!'s international legs is that Khemiri trafficks in freshly pertinent themes, nonwhite characters and scintillating treatment of language. Using an entertaining, sketch-like format, his play follows a group of present-day Swedish teenagers who are obsessed and confused over the mystery of "Abul Kasem." As each of Khemiri's dozen characters exploit for their own purposes the name of this exotic oriental figure, the chain of misrepresentation about his identity morphs and enlarges to become a wild and dangerous urban legend: Who is this Abul Kasem? A gay disco dancer, someone blurts out. A TV talk-show panel of Euro-American intellectual experts (some with CIA and FBI affiliations) claims he is a terrorist. When a middle-aged Iranian refugee, hiding from Swedish immigration authorities, starts receiving multiple phone calls from one "Abul Kasem," the play's sharp satire shifts into paranoid and ominous gears. In terrorist-fearing societies, Middle Easterners aren't as free to reinvent themselves as effortlessly as Swedes and other Westerners.

Says Loewald, "Jonas has broken new ground in Swedish theatre and literature with both his themes and his beautiful love of language. He has written a play about Arab identity in a non-Arab society. It has all the things I like—it deals with a serious subject in a playful and engaging way."

As excited as she is about the plays she selects, Loewald admits that producing foreign works can be a crapshoot. "Part of what's hard is we don't have stars," she explains. "We're asking audiences to take a chance on unknown writers and actors who are not box-office names and new plays that are untested. And now we're also saying, 'Here is a play from Sweden. Here is a play from Japan.' Not everybody is going to jump above the fence to see those kinds of work. We try to scrape away all those hindrances and resistances that people have to a work that is foreign or is in translation—of course, without erasing the play itself. In my experience, the obstacles are never about the play itself."

"In terms of box-office," says Lauren Weigel, PlayCo's executive producer, "we have found very little difference between new American works and new foreign works. Every show is unique, appealing to a specific audience, written or performed in a particular style, so they don't compare evenly across the board. Overall, our best-selling shows over the years have been foreign. Gaining attention for our work is largely about word-of-mouth, press attention and community building. Producing a play from another part of the world gives us a hook, actually. We can talk about our writer's country of origin. We can reach out directly to that community of expatriates and others who take a specific interest in that country."

Enjoy and Invasion! are the first two translations that PlayCo has commissioned as part of its new Universal Voices Translation Program. They are touchstone works for this culturally cosmopolitan outfit, which in the past has depended on already existing translations, frequently coming from the new-translation initiatives of foreign cultural centers in New York. "Cultural organizations sometimes provide grants to support our productions," Weigel says. "They work with us to raise awareness and reach audiences in their communities."

PlayCo's expertise in foreign plays grew out of patient learning-by-experience and through constant research, as well as the strategic building of a network of international contacts and informants. In 2006, for example, PlayCo's collection of short plays Romania, Kiss Me! was the first U.S. showcase of Romania's new wave of young writers (Nicoleta Esinencu, Bogdan Georgescu, Vera Ion, Iona Moldovan and Cristian Panaite) who grew up angst-ridden and disaffected after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu's rule. Many of these young Romanians are members of dramAcum, a movement of writer/directors that offers a writer-based alternative to the director-driven and stately institutional theatres that still predominate there.

Loewald came upon new Romanian theatre in summer '06 when the Immigrants Theatre Project and Roberta Levitow collaborated with the Romanian Cultural Institute to bring a group of playwrights to New York. Loewald took part in artistic dialogues with the playwrights and invited both Saviana Stanescu, coordinator of the Romanian Cultural Institute's New Drama Support program, and theatre critic Iulia Popovici to submit scripts by other young Romanian writers. "I was struck by the vitality of this work and the explosion of artistic energy in Romania right now," Loewald says. "It was a moment of real transformation in a place we in the U.S. know very little about."

Another example is PlayCo's 2008 offering, the U.S. premiere of a scabrous Polish comedy about post-Communism, Made in Poland, by then 33-year-old Przemyslaw Wojcieszek. This became the flagship production of the Polish Cultural Institute in New York's "Made in Poland" festival at 59E59. Although Polish theatre is hardly a new species in New York, this festival was the city's first sustained introduction to the provocative new currents of Polish playwriting after 2000, a contentious moment of artistic foment, personal struggle and political re-definition for Poles. An undisputed rising star in Polish theatre and cinema, Wojcieszek owes more to the influence of the post-dramatic German and French theatre schools and the British New Brutalist playwrights than to the conceptual, director-driven works of Jerzy Grotowski and Krzystof Warlikowski.

Commissioning writers Aya Ogawa and Rachel Willson-Broyles to translate Enjoy and Invasion!, respectively, strengthened the cultural exchange component of the company's mission. In most cases of cross-national production, involving foreign playwrights in the process isn't a priority. "For us, it's central," Loewald says. "When we stage American plays, we are very much concerned with the traditional process of figuring out what the writer has envisioned and getting this voice on stage. If the play comes from another country, it's important to hear directly from that person as well. When they start, our actors and directors usually don't know much about the context for the play or the impulse, but the text has been refined in a production process already. It's important for them that the writer be present as much as possible so that we get off on the right foot."

The real secret of PlayCo's producing acumen is that, at its core, it is a company of smart dramaturgs. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, Bartholomai started working with PlayCo in 2004 as dramaturg and company manager for Mileaf's staging of the powerful Sakhram Binder. Associate producer Melissa Hardy has variously worked as a literary agent and dramaturg on new plays. Matt M. Morrow, the development manager, has worked as a literary director for Amas Musical Theatre. Now in her fifth year with PlayCo, Weigel has produced new plays for the Foundry Theatre and the Manhattan Theatre Club, where she first met Loewald.

Loewald founded PlayCo in 1998 in cahoots with MTC associate artistic director Jack Temchin, who died in 2003, and British director Mike Ockrent, who died in 1999. A Yale graduate, Loewald worked for the Broadway producer Margo Lion prior to heading MTC's literary department in the 1990s. As a literary-minded offshoot of MTC, PlayCo went into a long incubation process of refining and redefining before landing upon its true mission; from 1999 to 2002, Loewald mainly put on staged readings and conversations with writers, modeled after MTC's "Writers in Performance." It was not until 2003 (when Mileaf staged French writer Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran) that PlayCo began in earnest to regularly season its artistic programming with plays from abroad. Loewald elaborates: "One thing I learned from [MTC artistic director] Lynne Meadow when I was her dramaturg is that the play should always stand on its own. One shouldn't have to support it or explain it. I believe in that. I don't fill the program with dramaturgical stuff. I know some people miss it, but that's how I feel."

Scores of theatre companies in the U.S. take risks on American writers, just as PlayCo does. Its breakthrough productions of Smashing, Edgewise and American Hwangap (the latter in a co-production with Ma-Yi Theater Company) helped put Brooke Berman, Eliza Clark and Lloyd Suh, respectively, on the map. But how many nonprofit theatre companies consistently throw the full weight of their resources into producing exciting new writers who are still emergent in their native countries? What other New York theatre company regularly hires American actors, directors and designers to tackle new foreign scripts? Which among the commercial producers and nonprofit companies in the U.S. commit such unbridled acts of brashly utopian, dramaturgy-centered intercontinental optimism? New York City is often touted and much envied as a veritable United Nations of ethnicities and foreign cultures. In terms of translating contemporary foreign writing, however, the U.S. lags behind other countries, and in terms of productions of translated works, New York presents an unpredictable, if not inhospitable, terrain. In an international environment that can often be noisy and competitive, PlayCo is a breath of fresh air.

"I'm a world-affairs junkie, but somehow I'm in the theatre," Loewald says. "When we started PlayCo, we felt American theatre was very inward-looking. I dream of an American theatre where plays from other parts of the world would a real part of the mix. At the risk of sounding naïve or utopian, I believe that with the makeup of our country, New Yorkers need a theatre where they can consistently see fresh new writing from around the world. If we want to attract new audiences, we need to open up the conversation."

blog comments powered by Disqus

View our comments policy