The perils of Writing a Play in Latin

Having written a play in Latin, I can say I would not suggest it.

Unless you have lots of friends who are somehow both zany theater kids who weep over Sondheim lyrics and competent Latin speakers, you won’t be able to cast it. You can’t really just have one or the other. The more studious Latin students or professors are not going to be game for the kinds of shenanigans in the script. Maybe they don’t even approve of the active use of Latin! They aren’t going to sing and dance, at least not willingly, or get why you are dressing them in Glinda’s ridiculous floofy costume that references the opening scene from Wicked (stage version, of course). All your careful little jokes about Guys and Dolls or Phantom are going to be lost on them. But if you call the kids you did community theatre with as a teenager it’s not like they can even read the script well enough to grasp what’s going on. Write the stage directions in English, sure; if they don’t understand Latin they can’t play a part, even with a literal translation to help them get a sense of what they are saying, because they still won’t know the nuances of the language or understand the point you are trying to make with word order.

You need Latinists who dreamed of playing Elphaba or “Sky” Masterson on Broadway as middle schoolers and, alas, those are hard to find. The pool is just too limited. So you’ll have to find someone else. Who can travel? Who has time to rehearse? Who is willing to be silly on stage, in a dead language that maybe their own professors insist nobody can actually speak? Happily, Latin teachers themselves often must learn some theatrical skills (mime, mostly) when teaching Latin in Latin. A lack of shame also helps when you are wildly gesticulating at a map to get a room of very bored people to say where “Brundisium” is. Still, standing up before a room of students or even lecturing over Zoom is not the same as being on stage. The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd, etc.

Luckily for me, actors were found in the end, albeit in vastly different countries and wholly without the possibility of in-person rehearsals, if not the day or week of the play itself.

My play, Luciolus sive progressus curiosi, will be performed in Braga, Portugal in August 2026, at something called THALIA, unless of course some unavoidable disaster leads us all to drop out of the actual competition.