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October 15, 2024

DTC Celebrates LA Escena 2024 by Rebecca Ogden Smith

From September 12-17, 2024, LA Escena held its fourth biennial festival at UCLA’s historic, recently renovated Nimoy Theater, the festival’s largest venue yet. This year, LA Escena brought together artists from all over the US, Spain, and Mexico to perform 11 cutting-edge productions, the most in the festival’s history. An extraordinary joint conference of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater (AHCT) and the Asociación Internacional de Teatro Español y Novohispano de los Siglos de Oro (AITENSO) took place at UCLA in conjunction with the festival. LA Escena artists participated in roundtables and other presentations at the conference, while comedia scholars were able to attend LA Escena performances.

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October 14, 2024

Golden Tongues Redux: Unhappily Married in Valencia

Laurel Ollstein’s Unhappily Married in Valencia, originally commissioned for the second Golden
Tongues festival in 2014, will have a staged reading on Saturday, November 2 at 2:30 pm, at the
Broadwater Theatre (6322 Santa Monica Blvd). Drinks to follow at the Broadwater Bar!

Laurel’s hilarious farce is inspired by Guillén de Castro’s Los malcasados de Valencia (1618).

Laura Muñoz and Veronica Wilson subsequently translated the original for DTC.

Hope to see you there!

August 28, 2024

Get Your Tickets to LA Escena 2024 Today!

Diversifying the Classics will be hosting LA Escena 2024 from September 12th to 17th at the newly renovated Nimoy Theater in Westwood. Come see original presentations of classical Hispanic works by acclaimed artists from LA, NYC, Mexico City, and Madrid. Tickets are free but space is limited, so reserve today! READ MORE

May 25, 2024

Congratulations to Golden Tongues Playwright Lina Patel on Receiving the Cornelia Street American Playwriting Award!

The annual award is named for Cornelia Street in New York’s West Village, which has hosted some of the nation’s greatest playwrights. It recognizes an emerging playwright “of exceptional work ethic, character, and talent.”

We couldn’t be prouder! We are honored to have collaborated with Lina on Traces of Desire, her marvelous adaptation of Lope de Vega’s The Widow of Valencia, commissioned for the 2022 LA Escena festival and soon to be published by Bloomsbury in our forthcoming Golden Tongues anthology.

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May 9, 2024

RSA Grant for Collaboration with Red Bull Theater

DTC has received a Renaissance Society of America grant for Public Engagement Projects in Renaissance Studies, supported by the Gladys Kriebel Delmas Foundation. The grant, under the direction of Prof. Javier Patiño, will support our next collaboration with our long-term partners, Red Bull Theater of New York. As part of LA Escena 2024, Red Bull will present—in person in NYC and online—a staged reading of The Beast of Hungary, our brand-new translation of Lope’s exploration of female sexuality, the nature/nurture question, and what truly makes a family. Stay tuned!

May 6, 2024

Annotating Performance by Barbara Fuchs

Theatre dybbuk’s illuminated lecture format, which weaves together a scholarly lecture and performances by actors, recently offered me the opportunity to present Cervantes’ El retablo de las maravillas/The Marvelous Puppet Show to an audience unlikely ever to have encountered the text. Known for its deep dives and carefully considered productions under the able direction of Aaron Henne, theatre dybbuk uses the format as a research tool, and also makes the resulting recordings available through their podcast. Their most recent full production, The Merchant of Venice (Annotated) or In Sooth I Know Not Why I Am So Sad (2023), relied on a similar combination of text and commentary, with wonderfully inventive annotations offered by actors breaking the fourth wall, audio clips, and so forth.

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April 26, 2024

Preview: Grumelot’s Amar por ver amar

On Tuesday, April 23, Diversifying the Classics welcomed Carlota Gaviño, Iñigo Rodríguez-Claro, and José Pablo Polo of Grumelot Teatro for an online roundtable about their new production, Amar por ver amar o recuperar lo perdido. At the event, Grumelot performed a preview of their work-in-progress, an exploration of love and loss inspired by Lope de Vega’s comedy, El perro del hortelano. After the preview, we held a Q&A about Grumelot’s process and their next steps as they prepare to bring the production to LA Escena, DTC’s biennial theater festival taking place this September. Thank you again to Hispanex for making this production possible!

April 25, 2024

Setting A Precedent Takes Courage: Directing the first bilingual production at a PWI by Sylvia Cervantes Blush

Producing comedias is often a challenging discussion amongst my Latiné community  because of the irreparable harm brought on by Spanish colonialism, especially when  producing them at predominately white institutions (PWIs). Yet by not doing them we are silencing the collection of progressive works by artists like Ana Caro, who challenged political agendas, religious  ideologies, and societal norms and whose plays encourage present-day artists and patrons to look inward for personal and communal change. So, when Professor Margaret E. Boyle (specialist in Hispanic women’s literature and comedia history) invited me to work with her and her colleagues Professor Ireri Chávez-Bárcenas (musicologist in the early modern period) and Professor Germán Cárdenas-Alaminos (scenic designer) on Valor, agravio y mujer, the first bilingual theatrical  production in Bowdoin College’s 230-year history, I couldn’t say yes fast enough. Their passion and kindness jumped beyond the Zoom screen with a joyous welcoming spirit that promised a rewarding creative adventure.  

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