Robin Kello interviews UCLA Professor Michael Hackett for The Mentidero, DTC’s new project which offers the inside scoop on how theater is made through interviews with scholars and theater professionals.
In Lope de Rueda’s La tierra de Jauja (The Land of Jauja, 1547), the rivers flow with chocolate and nobody has to work! This adaptation tells the story of two scheming tricksters who bamboozle naive travelers to get what they want. Recommended for ages 10+. Running time: 9 minutes and 15 seconds.
We are delighted to share that Diversifying the Classics’ collaborator and UCLA TFT alum Jean
Carlo Yunén Aróstegui will be directing Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s Amar después de la
muerte at Repertorio Español in New York City.
On May 17, Diversifying the Classics and noted Spanish-language children’s bookstore LA Librería hosted a theater workshop. Students ages 6 to 12 performed a Spanish-language children’s adaptation of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño written by UNAM Professor Gabriela Villanueva and Rachel Kaufman as part of our Mex-Clásicos initiative.
Diversifying the Classics and UNAM’s Seminar on the Early Modern Period are excited to announce the Call for Papers for our colloquium on classical theater titled “De los textos a las tablas: El teatro de la modernidad temprana (s. XVI-XVII) en su proyección geográfica, mediática y temporal.” The colloquium will be held September 3-5, 2025 at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (FFyL) at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City. The colloquium will take place in conjunction with UNAM’s Festival Internacional de Teatro Universitario (FITU). We invite papers on aspects of the ongoing adaptation of classical theater across geography, genre, and history.
On May 18th, at the Teatro Echegaray in Málaga, Jóvenes Clásicos, the Málaga-based theater company, will present a musical adaptation of Calderón de la Barca’s Amar después de la muerte. This production marks the company’s fourth collaboration with Diversifying the Classics and its third with Radio Comedia.
In January, DTC’s Mex-Clásicos and its collaborator, the Seminar on the Early Modern Period at la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City, launched a call for a new artist residency and theatrical laboratory initiative: Nuevas Dramaturgias del Teatro Clásico Hispánico. The project encourages artists to produce contemporary adaptations of theatrical texts from the early modern period. Five applicants were chosen to participate in the initiative, which involves a series of courses, workshops, and master classes delivered by comedia specialists who aid in nurturing the writing and production processes of the selected plays. The initiative will culminate in works-in-progress performances at UNAM’s Festival Internacional de Teatro Universitario (FITU) which will take place September 4-14, 2025.
On April 8th, Barbara Fuchs joined UCLA ArtsBridge’s director Perry Daniel and her class of undergraduate artist-educators to discuss comedia, adaptation, translation, and early modern visions of the world. This engaging discussion was part of DTC’s ongoing project, now entering its third year, to bring comedia to LAUSD students in collaboration with ArtsBridge and the Bresee Foundation. We are thrilled to work with such creative artist-educators to continue supporting students in our community in making Hispanic classical theater their own.
In collaboration with La Librería, the noted Spanish-language children’s bookstore in Los Angeles, Diversifying the Classics will be hosting a theater workshop for kids ages 6-11 on May 17! Reprising our 2023 workshop, this event will teach young students about comedia in a bilingual art-making environment. Students will have the opportunity to learn theater techniques—how to tell stories with their bodies and voices, how to design costumes, how to make a set—and to put these skills to use in the production of a short play. This year’s play will be La vida es sueño by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, which DTC has adapted into both a children’s book and a shorter dramatic text.
This February, members of Diversifying the Classics visited UCLA’s 6th-12th grade school, Geffen Academy, to share their work with Upper School Spanish students. The visit was perfectly timed, as students in the Advanced Spanish course were studying Spanish Golden Age literature.READ MORE