Listen to Part II of Robin Kello’s Interview with UCLA Professor Michael Hackett Now!

Tune into Part II of Robin Kello’s interview with UCLA Professor Michael Hackett for DTC’s The Mentidero, a series of interviews with theater scholars and professionals. In the interview, Prof. Hackett discusses the details of adapting for scenes from the Diversifying the Classics’ translation of Ana Caro’s The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs to the screen.

Although they had already received a grant to direct a fully-staged production of the play, the Covid-19 pandemic required Hackett and collaborators Michael Bauer and Kate Schott to shift course. Their solution was to redirect the funds toward filming scenes from the play to be featured on the Diversifying the Classics website. Drawing from the performance strategies of early live television and an aesthetic from the mid-twentieth century, Hackett says they “didn’t want to diminish the theatricality” of the original experience of attending a comedia. That experience comes through on screen as characters address the audience directly in whispering asides or convey intimacy by speaking through a curtain.

While the four scenes are filmed separately, Hackett notes that they are unified by a common language of movement—and one that is especially exciting in the scenes with swordplay! Punctuated by what Aristophanes called “happy accidents,” such as the moment a veil just happened to fall over the face of the hero Leonor, watching these scenes in concert offers viewers the “heartbeats of the full play.” This conversation also demonstrates what a joy and gift it has been for Diversifying the Classics to collaborate with Michael Hackett over the years.

Listen to Part II here: https://diversifyingtheclassics.humanities.ucla.edu/?page_id=26845&preview=true

Watch the scenes here: https://diversifyingtheclassics.humanities.ucla.edu/recordings/scenes/