In 1943, Britain had been at war with Nazi Germany for over three years. The USSR had become a rather unlikely British ally in 1941, and after two years of brutal conflict had begun to gain an advantage against German troops, who were demoralized by the fierce Russian winter and a lack of supplies. With this as a backdrop, on 21 February 1943, more than two thousand participants performed a large-scale pageant called Salute to the Red Army at the Royal Albert Hall in London to commemorate Red Army Day and celebrate the Soviet–British alliance against Nazi aggression. British cities such as Cardiff, Manchester, and Bristol also honored Britain's Russian allies with marches, rallies, and other celebrations. The pageant was London's contribution to these nationwide festivities. Although the audience at the Royal Albert Hall event comprised selected and invited guests, enormous crowds attended other regional events, as did prominent military dignitaries, members of local councils, local members of Parliament, and Russian military guests. This multicity event is one demonstration of how the extremes of war produce unlikely bedfellows.

In late 1982, a documentary drama entitled Ceremony in Bohemia was produced Off-Off Broadway at the Greenwich House Theatre in New York. The play offered U.S. audiences a glimpse behind the closed doors of a tiny courtroom on Spálená Street in Prague in Czechoslovakia. The production presented an account of the recent trial of six Czechoslovak activists who had been found guilty of “subversion of the Republic” and been sentenced, collectively, to nineteen-and-a-half years in top-level prisons. Their only crime was that they had protested unjust trials like their own. The press and all foreigners were barred from the trial. Only a few witnesses were allowed inside the courtroom to observe the trial, which lasted only two days.

In early modern Italy, an unusual form of exchange between Jewish and Christian communities materialized in Mantua: Jews in Mantua were required to perform an annual play as a tribute to their Gonzaga rulers. Elsewhere in the Italian peninsula, far more onerous “performances” were extorted from the Jews during carnival, but in the Mantuan performances, several communities—the ruling Gonzaga family, the Jewish community, and Christian audience members—interacted. I consider these performances a form of taxation because the full cost, which was extensive, was borne by the Jewish community. However, the performances were more than mere payment; they also gave the Jewish community a degree of autonomy and expression and enabled performers to develop their artistic skills, albeit always as the members of the company of “the Jews,” a group that was set apart from the rest of society in early modern Mantua. These theatrical performances can be seen as a public reification of the Jewish community as a distinctively marked but legitimate component of Mantua's economy and social landscape. This dynamic continued in Mantua even as Jews in other parts of Italy were subjected to extremely harsh conditions during the Counter-Reformation and the Catholic Inquisition.

In 2011 and 2012, I undertook a two-part survey to answer some large questions about the use of plays in translation in the higher education drama classroom in Anglophone North America and to test my ideas regarding the simultaneous ubiquity and invisibility of translation there. My project here is to report on that survey and to make clear why translation studies is ready to take a prominent role in theatre studies. U.S. colleges and universities constitute one of the largest single markets in the world for drama translated into English. Most U.S. theatre history classes include plays from the world canon, and many specialized classes in theatre departments focus on plays from non-Anglophone cultures. In English departments, where other genres in translation (e.g., the novel) may be approached with caution, drama seems to be offered a “pass” because the notion of being dramaturgically literate depends on some knowledge of a sizable canon of non-Anglophone plays. Yet despite its ubiquity, translation is often so normalized as to be invisible to those who depend on it. As Laurence Senelick notes, “For most students, a work exists wholly in its translated form, spontaneously generated.” Translation, as the survey confirmed, is part of the DNA of theatre studies. As such, I argue, it needs to be brought to the foreground of the field. In saying this, I am not unaware of the rich work undertaken by scholars, editors, and practitioners who are enmeshed in the difficult issues involved with translating plays, which include pressing for greater attention to cultural sensitivity and literacy. My focus here is on the academy and the classroom, where, for better or worse, the vast majority of future dramaturgs and audience members will cut their teeth on a critical mass of plays and where no single language or production entity or publisher can claim pride of place.