Steven Capsuto
Translator

A full-length contemporary play. Translated from Catalan by Steven Capsuto through a grant from the SGAE Foundation. Professional performance rights available.

America played in Barcelona in 2022–2023 at the Villarroel Theater to positive reviews before going on tour. It returned to the Villarroel in late 2023.
 

SYNOPSIS:

KAYLA, a young Black woman from Barcelona, is a drama student who works in a pub in London. Her boyfriend MAX, also Spanish, is a rich white undergrad studying finance. KAYLA is invited to his parents’ mansion outside Barcelona for Max’s birthday: a small gathering in the garden next to the former stables.

Max’s father, ANTONI, a billionaire hotel magnate from an old-money family, distrusts Kayla and is appalled at his son’s new progressive ideas. Whenever the conversation gets too tense, Max’s mother, CRISTINA, changes the subject and drinks more alcohol.

Over dinner, Max’s grandmother, who has the beginnings of dementia, lets slip that the family’s generational wealth originated in the slave trade, something Max has never mentioned to Kayla.

From there, the play rams head-on into Spain’s longtime role in enslavement and the fact that some of today’s richest families in “respectable” industries first became wealthy by enslaving people of color. In this story, “America” is not just a continent: it’s also the name that was imposed on ENITAN, a 19th-century enslaved woman who appears in a few scenes.

The script also touches on issues of urban renewal and the endless acquisitiveness of some people who already have far more than they could ever need.
 

PRAISE FOR THE ORIGINAL PRODUCTION:

“**** Great theater.” –Time Out Barcelona

“A brilliant reflection on Catalonia’s slave-trading, slave-owning past.” –Marcos Goikolea, Teatre Barcelona

“Pompermayer depicts a toxic family environment with a frivolous, drunken mother; a cynical, unfaithful, manipulative father; a thoroughly naive son still very much an adolescent; and a grandmother with disabilities who becomes the catalyst for the conflict, establishing the link between past and present to powerful effect.” –Ara (Barcelona newspaper)

“Avoids the romanticized narrative often used to justify Catalonia’s role in [enslavement]… A fine piece of theater at the Villarroel, essential in every sense.” –Xavi Pijoan, Teatre Barcelona

A full-length contemporary comedy. Translated from Catalan to English by Steven Capsuto through a grant from the Catalandrama Project. Professional performance rights available.

This hit play premiered in Barcelona in 2022 to positive reviews before playing three seasons in Madrid. A Buenos Aires production opened in 2024. Other stagings have opened or been announced in Peru, Argentina (Cordoba), Colombia, Mexico, Ecuador, Bulgaria, and Greece.

THE CRITICS SAY:

“The twist ending delighted the audience.” –Diario Crítico, 2023

“A solid boulevard comedy… The audience has so much fun that after each scene, they burst into applause as if the actors had just sung an aria.” –Time Out Barcelona, 2023

“Pathos, humor, drama, and subtle irony combine in a script exploring human insecurities.” –El Periódico, 2022

“The kind [of comedy] that gets you both laughing and thinking.” –La Nación, 2024

SYNOPSIS:

Overbearing celebrity baker TONY ROCCO has a cultlike following. His life-changing retreats for adults combine bread making, self-help, and unpredictable mind games. Tony’s three current students are BRUNO (an earthy-crunchy spoiled rich kid), LAURA (an earnest, naive young conservative Christian), and NINA (a pragmatic, cynical cardiologist). They all have secrets, and not everyone is who they claim to be.

While inspiring raucus laughter, In It for the Dough explores questions about the need to believe in something or someone, and how easily we self-sabotage by pursuing shiny, unfulfilling goals.

An illustrated ten-volume anthology of Jewish cultural and historical texts spanning more than 3,000 years. Yale University Press, 2012–2028.

I’m part of a huge team of translators working on this project. I have 17 translations in volume 5 (Early Modern Era, 1500–1750) and will have still more in volume 4 (Late Medieval Era, 1200–1500), which comes out in 2027. Since 2019, I’ve been the Posen Library’s main Ladino-to-English translator, and they’ve also hired me to translate medieval and early modern literary, religious, scientific, and historical documents from Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish. These are sizable books: volume 5, for instance, contains more than 1,300 pages.

 

A full-length contemporary drama. Translated from Catalan to English by Steven Capsuto through a grant from the Catalandrama Project. Professional performance rights available.

In this well-crafted play, residents of a small apartment building almost come to blows over whether to install a wheelchair ramp that one of their younger neighbors needs.

The London professional production of my English translation (Cervantes Theatre, 2022) received enthusiastic reviews.

PRAISE FOR THE LONDON AND BARCELONA PRODUCTIONS:

“Astonishingly compelling… The ninety minutes flew by in this edgy and intense production.” – LondonTheatre1, 2022

“Not to be missed… One of the most beautiful stories I’ve seen recently… The characters are complex and full of contradictions, just like in life.” – El País, 2017

“The script never loses steam. It approaches its sensitive subject without any of the mawkish preachiness that could have undermined it. The playwright leaves theatergoers wondering what they would do in this situation.” – El Periódico (Barcelona), 2017

“A moving play… [presented in a] beautifully succinct translation by Steven Capsuto.” – Latino Life UK, 2022

“Hard cases make bad law, but as Marilia Samper’s play (beautifully translated by Steven Capsuto) proves, they can make good drama.” – Broadway World UK, 2022

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Members of the New Play Exchange can find out more about this script at https://newplayexchange.org/script/3227259/happiness-by-marilia-samper.

A contemporary full-length drama. Translated from Spanish to English by Steven Capsuto through a grant from the Catalandrama Project. Professional performance rights available.

SYNOPSIS:

Though set in the past, this drama by Denise Duncan (a Spanish playwright originally from Costa Rica) deals with issues that are distressingly timeless: racism, racial profiling, and the experience of being an involuntary immigrant—unable to return to your country of birth but uncertain whether you can stay where you are.

Spain, 1915: African American prizefighter JACK JOHNSON, fleeing from US law enforcement after a racist conviction, has found a temporary haven in Catalonia with his wife LUCILLE.

A striking figure in Barcelona society, Johnson is tall, debonair, and equally at home in fashionable night spots, seedy dives, and boxing rings. He’s a stylish sport, making friends, living large, fighting for prize money when he can, and battling ghosts from his past.

His favorite dive, the Excelsior Cabaret, becomes the setting for an impressionistic exploration of his battles, from childhood to the courtroom, and from love affairs to the racially fueled Fight of the Century (against the “Great White Hope,” JIM JEFFRIES) and beyond. THE KNOCKOUTS, a trio who sing and tend bar at the cabaret, double as people from Jack’s life and as a Greek chorus.

As Johnson explains in his autobiography: “My life… has been filled with tragedy and romance… poverty and wealth, misery and happiness… I know the horror of being hunted and haunted. I have dashed across continents and oceans as a fugitive, and I have matched my wits with the police and secret agents seeking to deprive me of one of the greatest blessings man can have—liberty.”

PRAISE FOR THE ORIGINAL BARCELONA PRODUCTION:

“An outstanding script.” – Vista teatral, 2021

One of the “Best Plays to See in Barcelona.” – Time Out Barcelona, 2020

“Denise Duncan has turned boxer Jack Johnson into a Shakespearean figure.” – Viva Jaén, 2021

“The Beckett’s most ambitious production of its new era… also represents an almost Copernican shift in Catalan theater, given that the author–director Denise Duncan, born in Costa Rica and based in Barcelona, and the leading man Armando Buika are both Black… [This matters amid] controversies over who gets to play who onstage and especially about whose voices get amplified, the power of storytelling and whether Barcelona theater is too white and middle-class.” – La Vanguardia, 2020

Between Wanderings Collection, 2021. Translated from Yiddish to English by Steven Capsuto.

I don’t usually translate from Yiddish because there are other people who do that far faster than I can. But business was quiet during lockdown and I had time, so I translated these three wonderfully contrasting stories set around the Jewish holiday of Passover and I put them out as a short ebook.

The collection begins with a satiric tale: “An Early Passover” is a fish-out-of-water story about a Hasidic refugee from Eastern Europe who suddenly finds himself living among middle-class Reform Jews in 1908 Germany and must find a way to earn a living there. “A Village Passover,” a poetic story, explores the idyllic friendship between a little Jewish boy and a little Christian boy in the Ukrainian countryside, amid conflicts between their parents during Passover and Easter. It touches on themes of Jewish survival and on questions about what it means to be a Jew. “The Lovebirds” is a genre unto itself: a Passover horror fantasy involving food, death, and kidnapping.

The book concludes with excerpts from the author’s own Passover letters to family members, expressing his longing to have “everyone, absolutely everyone, together at the Seder.”

A full-length contemporary drama. Translated from Spanish to English by Steven Capsuto through a grant from the Catalandrama Project. Professional performance rights available.

A WOMAN and a MAN, about forty years old, have been a couple for three years. She has just told him the relationship is over. He wants to know why. The play depicts their last conversation together.

The tone is comedic at first, mostly due to his reaction to this news, but it shifts gradually as the disturbing backstory emerges. We learn, eventually, that they knew each other in high school and went on one date when she was 15. It ended with him raping her. When she told her parents and a psychologist, they treated her as delusional, and so the trauma remained. Even decades later, her mother still refuses to take the matter seriously.

A few years ago, the WOMAN and MAN ran into each other again and she found he had matured into a sweet, caring person. She convinced herself that maybe, if they made new happy memories together, the trauma would heal. They fell in love and moved in together. But over time, living with him and with their perpetual silence about what happened long ago has made things worse, and now she just has to leave for her own well-being. She realizes that what she most needs is for him to do what no one else has been willing to do: acknowledge that the rape happened.

PRAISE FOR THE ORIGINAL BARCELONA PRODUCTION:

“A wonderful play.” -Imma Sust, El Periódico, 2021

“Its impact lies in how tight the play feels: it runs just an hour and ten minutes. So by the end, you still remember that opening scene with its unsettlingly unexpected humorous edge.” -Marcos Ordóñez, El País, 2021

“A must-see production for both men and women. Especially men.” -Marta Gambin, El Nacional, 2021

“Short but intense. Really intense. No amplification, lighting effects, or scenery… Just dialogue and two skilled actors conversing in real time without a net. And that’s plenty. This stark production’s performers convey profound emotion through words.” -Oriol Osan i Tort, Nuvol, 2022

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Members of the New Play Exchange can find out more about this script at https://newplayexchange.org/script/3226051/things-we-dont-say-by-marilia-samper.

Moben, 2020, 155 pp. Translated from Spanish to English by Steven Capsuto.

A novella by Mois Benarroch, an award-winning Israeli Sephardic author born in Morocco in 1959.

Reeling from the deaths of two loved ones, an Israeli writer travels to Spain—his ancestors’ homeland—for a conference of Sephardic Jews. In Seville, he finds a scarf that comforts him for thirteen days. Then, just as suddenly, it vanishes in Madrid. For the writer, the scarf becomes a symbol of loss: of goodbyes to things and people. He says farewell to the dead, and to all the people he never became and never will be.

But just as he is letting go of his dreams, he meets a group of Spanish Jews who were lost in the Amazon for 150 years, whom he once wrote about in a novel. Did he merely make them up? Can imagination shape reality?

Narrated through many voices and viewpoints, Brown Scarf Blues is a novella that spans countries—Morocco, Brazil, the United States, and Israel—and languages—Hebrew, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and especially Haketia: the Moroccan Judeo-Spanish speech that hangs on like a living-dead remnant of a vanished culture… the words and expressions left behind by a lost world.
 

Between Wanderings Collection, 2018. 223 pp. Translated from French to English by Steven Capsuto.

The author of these charming stories grew up in a picturesque Yiddish-speaking village in 1830s France. His tales evoke the people and folkways of a rural Jewish world that was vanishing quickly.

In these stories, we meet Salomon, Yedele and their loved ones. We share their joys, losses, courtships and holiday celebrations. We also meet traditional Alsatian storytellers who recount Yiddish folk tales of ghosts and sorcery, and of “wonder rabbis” who could banish demons and lift curses.

This new English translation restores the Yiddishisms and Jewish wording that the author deleted in the 1850s when reworking the stories for a largely Gentile audience. This edition also adds illustrations by Alphonse Lévy, a 19th-century Alsatian Jewish artist whose drawings and etchings mesh perfectly with the tales.
 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Auguste Widal (1822-1875), who used the pen name Daniel Stauben, was born in Wintzenheim in the Alsace region of eastern France. He studied in Colmar and Paris and spent his professional life as a professor of classics and modern languages. His “Letters on Alsatian Customs” began appearing in the French Jewish magazine Archives Israélites in 1849. Widal used the pseudonym Daniel Stauben when he expanded the stories into Scenes of Jewish Life in Alsace. He also used that pen name for his French translations of Leopold Kompert’s Jewish story collections Aus dem Ghetto (In the ghetto) and Böhmische Juden (Jews of Bohemia). Widal died in Paris at the age of fifty-three.
 

A full-length play. Translated from Catalan to English by Steven Capsuto through a grant from the Catalandrama project. Professional performance rights available.

Kill the Boy debuted in 2015 in Barcelona at the Sala Flyhard in the original Catalan and in 2018 in Madrid at the Teatro Intemperie in Spanish. It won the 38th Annual Born Prize for Playwriting (the Premi Born).

SYNOPSIS: A professor has beaten a student to death with a tennis racket, imitating the plot of a popular grisly crime novel called Then Blow Your Damn Brains Out. After the professor goes to prison, his wife appears on the novelist’s doorstep, accusing him of inspiring the crime. The play explores questions about the relationship between life, art, and personal responsibility, as the characters’ interactions veer from comic to disturbing to almost paranormal.

“With hints of theater of the absurd… [the play is] innovative, very well written… a dark comedy that surprises audiences with its inventive structure.” —Culturamas magazine, 2018

A full-length play. Translated from Spanish to English by Steven Capsuto. Professional and amateur performance rights available.

Set in Madrid, this classic 1940 comedy is a send-up of old Hollywood suspense thrillers, complete with creepy mansions, hidden rooms, furtive butlers, eccentric relatives, a scientist doing secret experiments, and a young couple investigating a murder.

In Spain, this play occupies roughly the same cultural space that Arsenic and Old Lace does in the US: a 1940s suspense comedy that, seemingly, almost every high school has staged at one time or another. Eloise has had frequent professional revivals in Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries.

My translation first appeared in an anthology of Spanish plays in the 1990s. I revised it for a 2015 professional staged reading in London and a 2016 limited-run production in Dublin.

Egales, 2016. Translated from Spanish to English by Steven Capsuto.

In 1979, the year when Spain finally decriminalized homosexuality, a student in Madrid wrote his doctoral thesis about the precarious state of gay rights in his country, documenting the history of Spain’s recently founded Gay Liberation groups. The university approved the thesis topic and the approach, but once his paper was complete, he was told that this was an unacceptable topic after all and he would need to write a new thesis on a different subject. He refused and never got his doctorate.

Thirty-three years later, Egales (the leading Spanish publisher of LGBTQ+ books) published his 1979 thesis along with a new introduction and essay by the author, putting that 1970s document in the context of what had happened in the intervening decades. In 2015, I was asked to translate it into English for an ebook release.

The book’s style and tone are what you’d expect: it’s a 1970s academic thesis. But it’s also one of the few sources available in English documenting the manifestos and goals of Gay Liberation organizations during Spain’s transition to democracy.
 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Manuel Ángel Soriano-Gil was born in Madrid, Spain, in 1948. He holds an undergraduate degree in Psychology and a professional diploma in Clinical Psychology from the Complutense University of Madrid. Since 1972, when he began his career in this field, he has worked as a psychotherapist and in human resource management companies. In 1978, Zero-ZYX published his first book: Homosexualidad y represión (Homosexuality and repression). Egales has published his queer self-help volumes Tal como somos (As we are – 2007) and La juventud homosexual (Gay youth – 2012), as well as his book about the lives of older LGBTQI+ people in Spain: La tercera edad LGTBIQ+ (2024). Throughout his career, he has written articles on social exclusion and on topics related to human resources.
 

Between Wanderings, 2016. 338 pp. Translated from Spanish and Ladino to English by Steven Capsuto.

In 1903, four centuries after Spain expelled the Jews, a Spanish senator launched a campaign to have his country reopen relations with their descendants, the Sephardic Jews. To promote the campaign, he wrote this classic book, now available in a new annotated translation.

Eager to let Jews speak for themselves, he devoted a third of the book to photos and letters from Sephardim in different countries, describing their communities, synagogues, schools, families, literature and aspirations. They also wrote to him about Ladino—the Judeo-Spanish language that many of them still used at home and in worship. The book documents Sephardic life at a turning point: the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when many young Sephardim were starting to reject the Spanish language that their ancestors had passed down from generation to generation since 1492. Senator Pulido’s writings, lectures, and organizing earned him the nickname “the Apostle of the Sephardic Jews.” His books on this topic continue to be cited frequently by scholars of Sephardic history.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ángel Pulido Fernández (1852-1932) was an eminent Spanish physician, senator, forensic anthropologist, journalist and author. He championed causes ranging from human rights to public health, from social justice to religious tolerance, and from child safety to services for the blind. Besides cofounding the Madrid Press Association, he was, at various times, chairman of the Madrid Board of Physicians, director of Spain’s Department of Health, head of the Madrid School of Midwifery, secretary of the Madrid Anthropology Museum, and president of the Spanish Child Protection Council.

From the 1900s to 1920s, this member of Parliament successfully campaigned for Spain to reestablish ties with its exiled Jewish offspring: the Sephardic Jews, whose ancestors the country had banished four centuries earlier. He lectured extensively on the topic and helped create organizations to promote friendship with Sephardim and make it easier for Jews to immigrate to Spain. His other Sephardic-themed books include Españoles sin patria y la raza sefardí (Spaniards without a country and the Sephardic race, 1905) and Mica: homenaje a la mujer hebrea (Mica: An homage to the Jewish woman, 1923).