Editor’s Note

Welcome to the Spring 2026 issue of The Mercurian! The issue opens with Elton Uliana’s translation of contemporary Brazilian playwright Andréa Bassit’s one-act The Evicted Soul.  The Evicted Soul is an award-winning solo piece depicting a seventy-year-old woman has died, but still lingers in her house, vacillating between memory and confession as she tells the…

The Evicted Soul

Photo by João Cladas By Andréa Bassitt Translated from Portuguese by Elton Uliana Introductory Note The Evicted Soul (Alma Despejada) begins with a fairly simple premise: a seventy-year-old woman has died, but she has not yet left her house. As movers prepare to empty the rooms where she lived her entire life, Teresa lingers between…

Run!

Photo by Antonio Tiedra By Yolanda García Serrano Translated from Spanish by Jessica Rainey Run! (¡Corre!)is a two-person play centred on a series of prison visits between a brother, behind bars, and his sister, a music teacher. There are occasional one-sided dialogues with other unseen characters—a social worker, a coach, Emma’s husband—but the play is…

Traffic Jam

By Alina Nelega Translated from Romanian by Jozefina Komporaly Hotbed Festival Cambridge (UK), 19-21 July 2024 Alina Nelega’s Traffic Jam (În trafic) received the UNITER Award for Best Drama in 2013, and the author herself directed the text with the Romanian company of the Târgu Mureș National Theatre in 2014. The play consists of the…

Knight Errant

By Florent Carton Dancourt Translated from French by James Magruder Over the course of my life, I have made tens of dollars by translating stage comedies, mostly French, all but one in the public domain. Two of them, Marivaux’s Le Triomphe de l’amour (1732) and Lesage’s Turcaret (1709)were, when I translated them for my Yale…

Review of The Methuen Drama Book of Contemporary Uruguayan Plays

The Methuen Drama Book of Contemporary Uruguayan Plays, ed. Sophie Stevens and William Gregory. Trans. Stephen Brown, William Gregory, Catherine Boyle, Rachel Toogood, Kate Eaton, and Sophie Stevens. Methuen Drama Play Collections, London: Methuen Drama, 2025. Reviewed by Sarah M. Misemer, Texas A&M University This latest translation project by Sophie Stevens and William Gregory features…

Editor’s Note

Welcome to the Fall 2025 issue of The Mercurian! We begin with Henning Bochert’s translation of Özlem Özgül Dündar’s play body without borders.  The translation has its genesis in a collaboration between Jospeh Megel, Artistic Director of UNC’s the Process Series, and Bochert that began with Theatrical Translation as Creative Process: A Conference Festival here…

body without borders

Photo by Maximilian Borchardt By Özlem Özgül Dündar Translated from German by Henning Bochert Özlem Özgül Dündar is a German playwright from Solingen, born in 1983. Her play an grenzen, which I translated into English, narrates the continued history of violence against the foreign workers from South European countries who were hired to build Germany’s…