In September, two new Shakespeare adaptations used the Bard’s canonical plays as jumping-off points to bring stories infused with Hispanic culture to Dallas audiences.
Echo Theatre’s world-premiere production of El Rey del Pollo by Anna Skidis Vargas, an adaptation of King Lear, and Shakespeare Dallas’ The Taming of the Shrew used the Spanish language to build settings and characters. It was both entertainment and evidence of a cultural shift: In Texas’ strictest English-only schools, students were punished for speaking Spanish through the 1970s; on these stages, Spanish is spoken proudly alongside Elizabethan English poetry. Experimenting with language and plot, these adaptations each hold a conversation with Shakespeare’s original scripts, revising them to tell stories for audiences of 2025.
