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Panel on adapting plays for the world stage
April 15, 2016, 5.30 – 6.30pm
in English and German
free and open to the public
German playwright Philipp Löhle, directors Matthew Jocelyn and Ashlie Corcoran and translator Birgit Schreyer Duarte in conversation around international theatre. We are bringing together four international theatre makers to discuss how drama can or must adapt when translated from one language to another and transplanted from one culture to another.
Theatre Smash and Canadian Stage are collaborating on presenting an English translation and cultural adaptation of Löhle’s award-winning play on globalization for Canadian stages and audiences.
Philipp Löhle is a guest of the Goethe-Institut for the North American premiere of his ambitious social comedy Das Ding (The Thing). The play spans an interconnected world that binds the fates of the African cotton farmer Siwa, Chinese business people Li and Wang, Romanian pig-breeders and two young newlyweds Katrin and Thomas. As a global crisis attaches itself to the smallest marital problems on a deeply personal level, all are forced to consider whether such a thing as coincidence can exist in a globalized world. Meanwhile, the eponymous ‘thing’ – a cotton fibre in its apparently endless iterations – looks on humanity, amazed. Löhle has worked closely with the Theatre Smash and Canadian Stage artistic team in preparation for this Canadian production.
Canadian Stage Artistic Director Matthew Jocelyn has been at the helm of Toronto’s largest theatre for seven years. Prior to this appointment, Jocelyn was the artistic and general director of the Atelier du Rhin in Alsace, France for a decade, for which he was awarded the Chevalier des Art et des Lettres. He has produced widely in Europe, including Germany, and collaborated with the Goethe-Institut on his first direction for Canadian Stage, Tankred Dorst’s Fernando Krapp Wrote Me this Letter.
Ashlie Corcoran is a Canadian theatre and opera director and Artistic Director of the Thousand Island Playhouse Gananoque and Artistic Producer of Toronto’s Theatre Smash. In 2016, Das Ding (The Thing) is being produced in Toronto by Canadian Stage and Theatre Smash and in Gananoque by the Thousand Islands Playhouse. Corcoran has previously co-produced with the Goethe-Institut Lukas Bärfuss’s The Bus, Marius von Mayenburg’s The Ugly One (which won the Outstanding Production Dora Award) and Igor Bauersima’s Norway.Today. Corcoran has degrees from Queen’s University, Kingston, and Goldsmiths College at the University of London. In 2007, Ashlie was the first Canadian theatre artist to be accepted into the Goethe-Institut’s directing residency at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin.
Munich-born Toronto-based dramaturg Birgit Schreyer Duarte translated Das Ding (The Thing) for the Goethe-Institut in collaboration with Löhle and is involved in the creation of the translation’s first staging in Canada. Previous translations for Canadian productions include works by Roland Schimmelpfennig, Lukas Bärfuss, Max Frisch, Friedrich Durrenmatt, Pascal Mercier, Bertolt Brecht, Marieluise Fleisser and Felicia Zeller. She holds a degree in Dramaturgy from Munich University and a PhD in Drama from U of T. Birgit is currently the Dramaturg and Artistic Associate at Canadian Stage. Her upcoming translation for the Goethe-Institut is Dirk Laucke’s social drama Seattle.
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