Bitter Fruit: A Roundtable on Drama in Translation

A scholarly roundtable featuring playwright Héctor Levy-Daniel (zoomed in from Argentina), translator Philip Boehm (artistic director of Upstream Theatre), Virginia Braxs (faculty, Washington University), and Gad Guterman (faculty, Webster University), with interpretation by Sara Brenes Akerman (graduate student, Washington University in St. Louis)

This event is supported by a grant from the Center for Literary Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. A reception immediately following the Q&A is co-sponsored by the Performing Arts Department, the Comparative Literature Program, and the Hispanic Studies Program in the Romance Languages & Literatures Department.

Philip Boehm's career zigzags across languages and borders, artistic disciplines and cultural divides. As a theater director fluent in several languages he has staged dozens of professional productions at theaters in Poland, Slovakia, and the United States. As a dramatist his produced plays include Mixtitlan, Soul of a Clone, Alma en venta, The Death of Atahualpa, and Return of the Bedbug. For this work he has received awards from the Mexican-American Fund for Culture and the NEA. Locally he has received Kevin Kline Awards both as a director and as a playwright.
He is also the author of more than thirty translations of novels and plays by German and Polish writers, including Nobel laureate Herta Müller, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, and Hanna Krall. For his work as a translator he has received prizes from a number of institutions including the American Translators Association, the U.K. Society of Authors, the Polish Cultural Institute, the Goethe Institute, PEN USA, the Austrian Ministry of Culture, and the Texas Institute of Letters, as well as fellowships from the NEA and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Originally from Texas, Mr. Boehm studied at Wesleyan University (CT), Washington University in St. Louis, and the State Academy of Theater in Warsaw, Poland. He is a frequent invited speaker and has worked as a guest artist at several universities, most recently as a playwriting mentor for the Yale Playwrights Festival. He has served on juries for literary prizes both in the US and abroad, and has published reviews and other articles in various journals including American Theatre and The New York Times. https://www.upstreamtheater.org/