T3 Translates
T3 Translates
T3Translates offers a path to production for playwrights working beyond the English language while building a bridge for contemporary audiences to experience works from across the globe. Whether a faithful translation or an adaption that offers a new perspective on an old classic, T3 seeks explore every corner of this great big theater world.
Plays in the Series
Our first foray into bringing newly translated works to new audiences was Leonid Andreev’s The Black Masks. A dramaturgical cocktail hour and invited reading of Allison Horsley’s translation The Black Veils.
The second being El maleficio de la mariposa by by Federico García Lorca newly translated and finished by Dante Flores.
And the most recently our 2024 production of The Seagull by Anton Chehkov adapted by Blake Hackler.
Who is Allison Horsley?
A native of Texas, Allison has primarily worked as a dramaturg and literary manager in America and New Zealand. After graduating with degrees in Theatre and Russian from University of Denver, she earned her MFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from the Yale School of Drama. She has served as dramaturg on new plays, classics, and musicals for theatres across the United States.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival commissioned Allison in 2004 to create literal Russian-to-English translations of Chekhov’s major plays for adaptation by OSF Artistic Director Emerita Libby Appel. She plans to translate Andreev’s other stage works in conjunction with writing a biography on his Russian, French, and American extended families.
Allison has also been featured as a guest on our podcast Uptown Drama:
Ep 06 Talking with the Future special guest Allison Horsley
Who is Leonid Andreev’s
Leonid Andreev was a Russian playwright, novelist and short-story writer, who is considered to be a father of Expressionism in Russian literature. He is regarded as one of the most talented and prolific representatives of the Silver Age period. Andreyev’s style combines elements of realist, naturalist, and symbolist schools in literature. He is known as “the Russian Edgar Allen Poe”, his work is known for its evocation of a mood of despair and absolute pessimism.
He began a career as a dramatist in 1905. His most successful plays—Zhizn cheloveka (1907; The Life of Man) and Tot, kto poluchayet poshchyochiny (1916; He Who Gets Slapped)—were allegorical dramas, but he also attempted Realist comedy.
Who is Dante Flores?
Dallas, TX native, Dante Flores, is truly a product of the DFW theatre community. As an actor he made his professional debut at the age of 9 in A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM as the foundling child as well as part of the ensemble in Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare Dallas, followed by Titus Andronicus at Kitchen Dog Theatre a few years later. At T3 he was part of the original cast of the musical ON THE EVE. Dante matriculated through Dallas’ own Junior Players where he played Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing, and Bottom in a Midsummer Night’s Dream. He attended Booker T Washington High School for the Performing and Visual arts where he was awarded a Thompson & Knight Academic Scholarship upon graduation. During his college years he served as an Artistic Fellow at Dallas Theatre Center, Executive Director of The Emerson Shakespeare Society and was a regional finalist for Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas/Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival for his work on Pride & Prejudice. After Graduating from Emerson College with a BA in Theatre Studies he was awarded a Literary Fellowship at ARENA STAGE in Washington D.C. Throughout his career he has has served as a reader for Kitchen Dog Theatre’s New Works Festival, The Kennedy Center and was a dramaturgy assistant at HOWLROUND and The Latino Theatre Hub. As T3’s Literary Associate, Dante serves as in-house dramaturg, and is the author of T3’s study guides for the entire season. He has taught Latin-American Theatre studies/dramaturgy at his alma mater, Booker T Washington.
Who is Federico García Lorca?
When El maleficio de la mariposa, debuted in 1920, it was booed and heckled offstage; a short verse play about unrequited love between insects, it ran for just a few nights before closing (Lorca would disown it as his first play in favor of his second, Mariana Pineda). It is an unfortunate irony that a play about being misunderstood should itself be misunderstood: the themes one finds in Lorca’s later works – tragic love, the use and misuse of poetry, and the struggle to live an authentic life – are all present, in a larval form, in El maleficio.
What’s more, despite the comic setting of the play, Lorca treats these themes with dire urgency: all the characters, as Lorca writes of the protagonist, are waiting for something mysterious and grand to set the trajectory of their lives. The other side of this, of course, is that his characters are dealing with disappointment and uncertainty; the old ways of thinking and living and making art are oppressive and useless – what comes next? Does anything come next? As we face a similar exhaustion, and similar tipping points in world events, these questions are as urgent as if they had been asked not one hundred years ago, but just yesterday.
Who is Blake Hackler?
Blake Hackler is a writer and actor originally from Texas. As an actor, Blake has appeared in productions on Broadway, Off-Broadway and in regional theatres throughout the country as well as in TV and film.
Blake’s adaptation of Hedda Gabler was hailed by Terry Teachout of the Wall Street Journal as “deft …one of the best productions of this play I’ve ever seen.” His play What We Were, a finalist for the O’Neill, the Bay Area Playwright’s Festival, and a winner of the 2017 Ashland New Play. Other plays include: The Necessities Nominee, Harold and Mimi Steinberg Award Enemies/People, Best Play of 2018 Dallas Observer; This Sweet Affliction – Yale Cabaret, Primary Stages workshop, The Boss in the Satin Kimono – New York International Fringe Festival, 10 Reasons I Won’t Go Home With You (lyrics) – Midtown Theatre Festival, Winner Best of Fest, The Lady in Red – Gene Frankel Theatre, Mother Courage of Westchester – NYTE, Barry Horowitz: A Jewish Fantasia on Catholic Themes – Prospect Theatre and The Wasp Woman – a musical written with Phillip Chernyak.
He is a member of the esteemed BMI/Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Writing Program, and is the recipient of the Harrington Award for Excellence in Musical Theatre Writing. He holds an MFA in Acting from the Yale School of Drama, a two-time Fulbright Senior Scholar, and a 2018 MacDowell Fellow.