Few people would imagine that the translation of ancient Greek drama was a field for which there was either career growth for the translator or much demand from the customer. After all, not many professional theatres specialize in classical drama, and there are already lots of good translations of Greek drama to be found in bookstores.

Yet Nicholas Rudall, formerly the artistic director of the Court Theatre and a professor of classics at the University of Chicago, is premiering new classical translations as if he were churning out pulp fiction.

Rudall’s take on Euripides’ The Iphigenia Cycle premiered at the Court during the 1998-99 season, and was also just seen in New York. The same director, JoAnne Akalaitis, is producing Rudall’s new version of Euripides’ The Trojan Women next month at the Shakespeare Theatre in washington, D.C. And Rudall has agreed to newly translate Medea, also by Euripides, for the planned American Theatre Company production (starring Carmen Roman) in Chicago this fall.

Last, this weekend at The Viaduct (a funky emerging performance space at the corner of Western and Belmont Avenues) you can see not one but two new Rudall translations in their world premieres. Under the direction of Joanna Settle, a fringe company called Thirteenth Tribe is producing Blood Line: The Oedipus/Antigone Story, which is actually contemporary renderings of two canonical dramas by Sophocles: Oedipus the King and Antigone. Currently in previews, the show opens on Saturday.

That makes five new Rudall translations (which have been – or soon will be – published by the independent and impressive Chicago-based press, Ivan R. Dee Publishing) seeing the light of day within about a year, at theatres both big and small. So what’s this grand old man of the Chicago theatre out to prove?

“I like designing translations with specific theatres and productions in mind,” Rudall says. “I suppose that a lot of people have been coming to me all of a sudden.”

There are several good reasons for that. Anyone who has seen his work will tell you that Rudall crafts texts that play very well in live performance. Unlike many of his competitors (who work from literal translations done by language specialists), Rudall works directly from the Greek. But this particular scholar is not drawn to stuffy classicism or archaic bombast, preferring “words that sound good in the mouth of American actors.” He’s also laudable willing to work with largely unknown troupes like Thirteenth Tribe, whose creative passions far outweigh their financial resources.

“I don’t add or take anything away from the original text,” Rudall says. “I just try to write brief, pungent English sentences, even though Greek tends to run on in long sentences. And I try to individuate the characters as much as possible.”

Settle, the artistic director of Thirteenth Tribe, who views Akalaitis as her mentor, says that she had originally intended to produce only Antigone, but because the events of that play flow directly from the familial crises that take place within Oedipus, she decided to do both plays – and Rudall obliged with both translations.

“Nick’s versions of the two plays are radically different from one another,” Settle says.

A very serious ensemble whose previous work has been esoteric and intellectually complex but also exceptionally well-crafted, Thirteenth Tribe has been rehearsing Blood Line for more than seven weeks. Although it is a bleak and industrial space from the outside, The Viaduct is a very interesting place to see theatre because the space therein is so huge and flexible.

“It’s like a small airplane hangar,” says Settle, whose last directorial endeavor was a $6 million South American tour of the musical Grease. “We have the audience on three sides and carpet and gravel will be our mythic landscape.” There will also be a Greek chorus of 10 crunching around on the stones, and a large total cast made up of 25 Chicago-based actors.

Despite building something of a following among trendy theatre aficionados, Thirteenth Tribe has yet to put together a full season.

“We wait until we can put things up right,” she says. “And we make the work in terms of how the work needs to be made.”

- Chris Jones -