"Shakespeare Needed to Sit Front and Center": A Conversation with Naomi Iizuka about Translating "Richard II"
Richard II (Jeunée Simon) and Henry Bolingbroke (Juan Amador) struggle over the crown. Photo by Jay Yamada for Magic Theatre.
Play On Shakespeare’s translations, first announced in 2015, are finally making their way to American stages. This project, originally associated with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival but now spun off into its own organization, commissioned contemporary American playwrights and dramaturgs to “translate” Shakespeare’s canon—making the language of the plays more accessible to a modern audience. At the same time, the translations must respect Shakespeare’s formal qualities as much as possible: the verse, the metaphors, the heightened rhetoric.
This month, I was fortunate enough to see two excellent Play On productions—Sean San José’s translation of Coriolanus, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Naomi Iizuka’s translation of Richard II, at the Magic Theatre—and even more fortunate to be able to interview Naomi about her work. Having translated a poetic, heightened verse drama myself (Cyrano de Bergerac), I loved speaking with someone else who understands the choices and nuances that go into our tricky little artform.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why did you choose Richard II as your Play On translation project? Were there any others that you were considering?
So, it’s been a while. As I recall, it was a mutual back and forth of “which play would you want to do?” And I entered into the process being quite open, even to being assigned. Richard II, I was very excited by, in part because I had memories of bits and pieces of it over the years. There's so many iconic passages. And then I also almost immediately thought “That’s rough! Because you're going to be working to translate this play that people have really strong associations with.” I imagine there are people who could rattle off certain of Richard's speeches by memory. So I just thought, “Oh, this is intimidating. You need to figure out a way to both honor the work that was created centuries ago, and also honor the mission of the Play On project, which is to reinvigorate, and find anew, the play inside the play.”
I actually noticed that there was less translation needed in those big famous speeches, than in some of the more… well, the whole play is in verse, but some of it is more “prosaic,” where they’re talking about bureaucratic stuff like where the army is going to go. In those sections, it seems to me that there are actually more substitutions of words and things.
It's true. And I had a very light touch. And I want to say, also, that I really did not embark on this project alone. There’s Lue Douthit, who runs Play On, and Joy Meads, who is at ACT. And now of course, Karina Gutiérrez [the director of the Magic Theatre production] and Edris [Cooper-Anifowoshe, the dramaturg], and the actors too. There were a lot of really, really smart people who had a hand in making this translation what it is.
Definitely. But, you know, I remember when Play On got announced in 2015. It caused a big stir, because I think people took it as: “They’re trying to make these plays sound hip and modern, and it’s going to be really cringeworthy.” But I thought “well, let’s see what they come up with.” And, I mean, you don’t need to change “For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings.”
Right! One hundred percent.
That’s beautiful, and you don’t need to do anything with it.
You don’t. And, I haven't read all of the Play On translations, but I know that Lue was really clear about the difference between an adaptation and a translation. Really, the Shakespeare needed to sit front and center. And that did not mean that our contemporary moment and the voices of our contemporary moment needed to recede from view—quite the opposite. It's just that it wasn't about using Shakespeare as a jumping-off point. It was really about engaging with Shakespeare and keeping Shakespeare in front of mind.
The week before I saw your Richard II, I saw Coriolanus at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which they’re doing in the Play On translation by Sean San José. That was the first one of these I've seen. I was impressed because that one, too, is still heightened, and formal, and respects the verse. Maybe it brings our contemporary moment in a little more, because it’s such a political play, and there are so many scenes of protest… But yeah, it’s not trying to make them sound like fully contemporary people. It’s still got Shakespearean inverted syntax as long as we can still understand that syntax.
That’s right. And it’s a project that I hope will continue to be of use to artists and communities because I think that it was undertaken with a certain kind of humility and enthusiasm.
So you’ve mentioned a lot of the people involved with this project—the dramaturgs, directors, actors, who helped shape the play. But I'm also curious whether there were other translators or works of literature that you looked to for inspiration as you were working on this translation of Richard II.
The short answer is, unconsciously, yes. The longer answer, is I was working with Joy over a period of years, partially because we don't live in the same city. Sometimes we would be in person, sometimes we would be on Zoom, and the work was really incremental and we would [look at] multiple editions of the play. And I remember this really large Oxford English Dictionary—I can literally visualize the book because Joy would take it out [of her bag]. And it wasn’t even a book bag. It was too big for a book bag. It was basically like a tote bag, a satchel!
So you actually used the OED to like, see when a word was first used and whether it would make sense in the context of your translation? That’s so cool!
Yeah, one hundred percent. Which I think is another reason why it took such a long time. You know, both Joy Meads and I are kind of earnest people by temperament. We would sit there and then we would talk about it and then we would try something and then we would look at it again from another angle. It just took a very long time. So when you ask “were there other influences?”, I think we had our plate full just with the Shakespeare itself!
I get that. Another thing about Richard II… Well, in terms of length it’s somewhere in the middle—it’s not like you chose to translate either the longest or the shortest Shakespeare play. But it’s got those famous passages that you mentioned. And it’s unique in that it’s one of the only plays that has no prose at all, and it has something like 20% rhyme. So that’s definitely a challenge: you have to write every single line in iambic pentameter and you have to rhyme 20% of them. Did you realize that going in, and how did you deal with that challenge?
I did not realize that going in. One thing that helped a little with that is, I’m working on a music theater piece—in fact this week the composer is here with me in Encinitas. We’ve worked on songs together, and my collaborator turned me on to various tricks for figuring out rhymes. Some of that was not useful because it felt too contemporary, but I had a little bit of practice in how to find a rhyme. Because it really is a puzzle, you know. I remember Joy and I talking with Lue and it was like “Thank God both of us like puzzles.” We like thinking “How do we get from here to there?”
And then there’s also—I think you alluded to this earlier—deciding where to preserve the syntax as-is, versus where you have this kind of “spaghetti syntax.” Where even with the most experienced and nuanced actor, you’ll still probably have to struggle with the thread, and maybe not struggle in a way that you want the audience to struggle in this moment. You want them to struggle about something else. So there were constant judgment calls.
But I think embedded in and sort of adjacent to your questions… if you’re asking what was the process and what were the influences… Well, I’m not saying anything particularly original, but I think we’ve been living in some pretty volatile and turbulent times, the last few years. And I had no way of knowing when we embarked on this process how timely the play would be. And it continues to unfold and be timely in a multitude of ways—in a whole other way this election year. It’s kind of mind-blowing. I attribute it, candidly, to the Shakespeare. I know it sounds very corny, but I think there's a reason why this work has the kind of staying power that it does.
King Richard II (Jeunée Simon, center) surrounded by his courtiers (Ogie Zulueta, Nora El Samahy, Kina Kantor, Mia Tagano, Catherine Castellanos, Juan Amador). Photo by Jay Yamada for Magic Theatre.
Yeah, in her speech on opening night, Karina Gutiérrez mentioned that she was interested in doing this in an election year and exploring the political implications. There are so many intriguing things about this play apart from the language. But, you know, I was planning to ask you whether engaging with Shakespeare’s text has influenced your own writing at all. It sounds like it has, since you mentioned this musical theater piece where you can bring your experience with rhyme and verse.
I’m realizing that Shakespeare and music theater are very much connected—there is a very charged, coded, and elliptical kind of storytelling that happens in both of them. I didn’t have that depth of knowledge of either until I began to embark on these projects. Now, I have a new appreciation for it. When it’s done well, it’s so powerful because it’s not prosaic, it’s associative… there are these dramatic leaps that you can only have where the interstitial moments fall away and suddenly you’re in another place, or frame of mind, or emotional state. It's really fascinating and mysterious.
Yeah, as I said earlier, that’s what I appreciated most about both of the Play On translations I’ve seen. Shakespeare is heightened, and I think a lot of people were afraid that these translations would make the plays un-heightened and prosaic, but that’s not what happened. And, going back to what you were saying about the syntax, maybe that explains why there's fewer emendations and changes in Richard's soliloquies than there are in, like, the conversations back and forth about the army. Because the point of a soliloquy is to trace the thread of Richard’s thoughts. If they’re in some weird, twisted syntax, we’re willing to follow along with him in his mind. Whereas if you’re just trying to move the plot along, maybe you want to make it a bit clearer.
Right, I think that’s very well said. And it’s always a sort of editing process—I think editing happens no matter what. Even previous to Play On. It’s just a question of how you go about it.
Well, I do have a question about the editing. I know you translated the whole play, but the Magic's version is a lot shorter. It’s 95 minutes, no intermission. I’m wondering how much of a hand you had in that. And I do have a question about one of the cuts.
I did not have a hand in that. And I was not able to go for opening, or be involved in the rehearsal process, because I had other work and family obligations. But I knew it was going to be in great hands, especially because I know a number of these actors. Either from Garuda’s Wing [an Iizuka play that the Magic produced earlier this year with many of the same actors] or, I mean, I’ve known Catherine [Castellanos] for decades. So I’m excited because, candidly, I feel like they're all so much more experienced with Shakespeare than I am. I’ll be there closing weekend and I just wanna see what they made, you know.
Well, my question was, the Magic’s script is definitely cut down, but it has nearly all of the famous passages, the greatest hits—except it doesn’t have John of Gaunt’s “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England” speech. So I was curious about that.
Well, that’s more a question for Karina or Edris or even Philippa [Kelly], who I actually was on a radio show with yesterday… I think that they would be able to answer that.
OK, cool. Another thing I wanted to ask about is the experience of being a woman translating this, and then doing it with a mostly female cast. And, to be frank, it’s not one of those Shakespeare plays where any of the women’s roles are all that interesting. You know, toward the end of the play, York calls his wife a “foolish woman” several times, and there was actually some laughter when that happened. Because before that, we totally accepted that like, Jeunée Simon as a woman is playing a king named Richard and that’s all good. Did you think about gender at all when you were translating this?
It’s odd, but when we were working on the text, I wasn't particularly keyed into gender. I was keyed in more to generational differences. And status differences, power differentials—that’s what’s animating the text. You’re right that gender is not the main event of the play. But one of the reasons I think Play On is genius, is that it’s offering an invitation, not only to writers, but also to actors, who might not have been thought of as having much to say about the world of Shakespeare or his characters.
Both of the Play On productions I've seen have had a Black woman in the leading role that is usually played by a white man. I know that wasn't the main goal of the project, it’s a secondary effect, but it’s cool. In fact, several years ago I was in an indie theater production of this midcentury comedy, The Desk Set, with Jeunée, so it’s incredible to see her get to play King Richard the Second. I never could have predicted that!
Yeah, she’s brilliant. I did not know her before Garuda’s Wing, but I’m singing her praises now. I know it’s sort of a cliché, but she’s a powerhouse. I mean, you just wanna hear her say those words, you know? What you just identified as blowing open the doors of who gets to play what is really important. Intuitively it's important and intellectually it's important and I think it cracks something open in the text. That's very exciting.
Thank you again to the Magic Theatre, to Play On, and to Naomi Iizuka. Their production of Richard II is playing through September 15, 2024. More information and tickets here.