Moment no. 1: It's the mid-1970s. I'm in graduate school at the University of Kansas. Ron Willis, a student of Brock's at Iowa in the 1960s and a brilliant, wise man, is teaching his class “The History of the Theatrical Event”; the required texts include Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (the midseventies were more or less the tail end of the sixties). We begin with the Greeks, and Ron asks, “How much was entry into the theatre?” Of course I'm prepared and know the answer. I jump in: “Two obols.” Then he says, “How much was a loaf of bread?” My head explodes. This was a moment when I got something about not just the economies of theatre, but about its ecology as well—its situatedness. I know my realization is a no-brainer rather than a mind-blower, but for me, given the year and my background, it was germinal.

I recently translated and then served as dramaturge on the English-language world premiere of Patricia Suárez's Matchmaker (Casamentera), a contemporary Argentine play about the early twentieth-century sex trade in Jewish women imported from Eastern European villages to Buenos Aires brothels. Matchmaker was published in an anthology I edited, Spectacular Bodies, Dangerous Borders: Three New Latin American Plays, along with my translation of The Girls from the 3.5 Floppies (Las chicas del tres y media floppies) by the Mexican playwright Luis Enrique Gutiérrez Ortiz Monasterio (who goes by the acronym LEGOM) and Heather McKay's translation of Passport by the Venezuelan playwright Gustavo Ott. In February 2012, Matchmaker was staged in the Thurber Theatre at The Ohio State University. The production was directed by Lesley Ferris.