Friday Noons: Play on Shakespeare with Lue Douthit and Dave Hitz

About This Event

What happens when 36 living playwrights translate every Shakespeare play into modern verse? Play On Shakespeare began in 2015 with a commission to translate Timon of Athens into contemporary verse. It grew into a national nonprofit that asked 36 playwrights, most of them women and artists of color, to translate all 39 plays. They kept Shakespeare’s plots, characters, structure and verse, and reworked the original Shakespeare language for a modern audience. ABOUT LUE Lue spent 25 seasons at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival leading new play development and dramaturgy, worked on more than 50 productions including 15 world premieres, and won the LMDA Prize in Dramaturgy. She’ll talk about how the translations were made, what they reveal about the originals, and where the project is headed. ABOUT DAVE: Dave and his brother Ken run the Hitz Foundation, which focuses on theater, archaeology, cultural heritage, and global sustainability. The Hitz Foundation launched Play On Shakespeare, which commissioned 74 playwrights, poets, and scholars to translate all of Shakespeare’s plays into contemporary English verse. The foundation continues to support Play On and also sponsors theatrical productions and podcasts of these translations. The foundation funds Global Digital Heritage (GDH), which captures 3D scans of museum collections and heritage sites and shares them with the world at no cost. GDH’s LidArc initiative does geo-scale scans covering thousands of square miles to discover and learn about previously unknown cities and sites. Dave has served on charitable boards including Deep Springs College, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Play On Shakespeare, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford. Dave co-founded NetApp, a Silicon Valley data management company, and worked there for 27 years as a programmer, evangelist, architect, strategist, and VP of engineering. Dave dropped out of high school and attended George Washington University, Swarthmore College, Deep Springs College, and Princeton University, where he received a BSE in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. ABOUT PLAY ON SHAKESPEARE: A nonprofit co-founded in 2018 by Dave and Lue. Its mission is to understand Shakespeare in performance through translations and adaptations.

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