In the university and repertory theatres where I work, a crucial step in preparing high-quality performances is harnessing the imaginative energy generated by location. Location, after all, is a prime mover in mapping what Stanislavski calls a play's “given circumstances” (Benedetti 152). Precisely locating a production puts it in a position to profit from American Method techniques of acting and directing, which help the theatre professionals I know communicate and coordinate their best efforts for making shows succeed. Location translates drama off the page and onto the stage.

As a dramaturge passionately committed to seeing the Comedia succeed onstage in the United States today, I am challenged by the dramatic possibilities encoded within Golden Age plays’ locales. Translating the performance cues that classic Spanish scripts store in their locations – the dramatic depthcharges packed into geographical, political, and social settings – strikes me as a uniquely promising strategy for empowering re-production. Translating location can forge connections between seventeenth-century playwriting conventions and twenty-first-century staging practices, making the stageworthiness of Golden Age dramaturgy visible to US producers, and shrinking the “no translations” blind spot that continues to keep the Comedia all too absent from American stages (Weber, “Foreign Drama” 269).

I hope to inspire more stageable translations of Golden Age plays by challenging you, the reader, to think about location in new ways. I will touch here on just three lines of inquiry. First, I will ask you to (re)consider how location functions in the making of classic Spanish drama, using El burlador de Sevilla (The Trickster of Seville) as a case in point. Next, I will invite you to examine how strategically relocating a Golden Age script can refresh its impact onstage. Preparing Cervantes's La elección de los alcaldes de Daganzo (The Election of the Magistrates of Daganzo) for performance in present-day north Florida will serve as a case study for this stage of the argument.

Finally, I will urge you to imagine how practicing translation as a process of rigorous relocation can open opportunities for translators to transmit Spanish theatre's stageworthiness (and not just its stage wording) into English.