FULL ARTICLE TO COME: BELOW PARAGRAPHS ARE FROM ANTAEUS' PRODUCTION OF ALARCON'S THE LIAR

Yet for all this, Alarcón--the first American playwright--is barely known by English-speaking readers and hardly ever produced for English-speaking audiences. Even in cultural centers with huge Latino populations like Los Angeles, few students at any level learn about Alarcón in their classes, and even fewer theatre-goers have seen one of his plays. The Antaeus Company hopes to right this wrong with its world premiere production of Dakin Matthews' acclaimed new rhyming verse translation.

"What I have tried to do," says Matthews--a celebrated film, television, and stage actor here in Los Angeles, as well as a playwright, dramaturge, and Shakespeare scholar--"is to translate Alarcón's wonderfully witty seventeenth-century Spanish into contemporary and very speakable English, while maintaining the complex verse-forms of the original. It's a crazy idea, I know, and a little like undertaking a massive crossword puzzle for which there may be no solution; but his plays are so wonderful, his dramaturgy so modern, and his style--at once racy and poetic--so striking, that I felt he deserved the best shot I could give him."

Matthews has been translating Golden Age plays into rhyming verse for six years and has published four of them--two more by Alarcón and one by Moreto--but not without first putting them to the test by bringing them twice --in staged readings with Antaean actors--to the annual conference of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theatre, a group of scholars and experts in Golden Age Theatre that meets at the same time as the International Siglo de Oro Festival at the Chamizal Theatre in El Paso.

The experts were so impressed that the Association and the Chamizal are helping to underwrite the costs of this production and its tour to the Festival in March. And the Los Angeles County Arts Commission is also supporting the Company's effort to bring classical Mexican plays to Los Angelenos by offering a two-year partial support grant.