Opheliamachine

Ophelia's story in a way you've never heard it before, and seven more ways as well.

Ophelia is trapped, stuck inside the machinery that has created her consciousness, fighting to be heard. Hamlet, overwhelmed by the ceaseless flood of media, mindlessly watches TV, consuming a mish-mash of beauty and horror; a daily soup of innocence and violence. The two of them hopelessly confined, and separated by the Atlantic Ocean.

A polemic response to Heiner Mueller's Hamletmachine, Opheliamachine is a postmodern tale of love, sex and politics in a fragmented world of confused emotions and global, virtual sexuality. Since its premiere in 2013, Magda Romanska's celebrated experimental play has been performed and studied around the world, with each culture and language feeding into and responding to Opheliamachine's collage of modern existence.

This edited collection brings together eight different translations of the play, offering English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Romanian and Polish language interpretations of Romanska's original text. Along with two introductory essays, these different versions of Opheliamachine provide academics, artists and teachers the opportunity to study a fascinating intersection of Shakespeare, translation, adaptation, feminism and avant-garde theatre.


About the Author
Magda Romanska is a playwright, dramaturg, and theatre scholar. She is a professor of theatre at Emerson College, in Boston, MA and principal researcher at metaLAB (at) Harvard. As a playwright, she is a recipient of the MacDowell Fellowship, the Mass Council Artist Fellowship for Dramatic Writing, the Apothetae and Lark Theatre Playwriting Fellowship from the Time Warner Foundation, and PAHA Creative Arts Prize. Her play, The Life and Times of Stephen Hawking was developed at the Lark Theatre and presented at the Roundabout Theatre Reverb Festival, and at Queens Theatre in Brooklyn, NY. Life Is Elsewhere received a production at the Speakeasy Theatre Company in Boston. Her popular writing appeared in Big Think, The Reed Magazine, The LA Review of Books, The Boston Globe, The Conversation, Salon, PBS, and The Cosmopolitan Review. She has taught at Harvard University, Yale School of Drama, and Cornell University. She's a graduate of Stanford, and of Cornell's doctoral program.