Los Angeles, September 17, 2026. The Association for Hispanic Classical Theater opened its Annual Spanish Golden Age Theater Symposium today on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, held in collaboration with the LA Escena festival and with UCLA’s Diversifying the Classics project. The opening ceremony was led by the president of the association, Valerie Hegstrom, who thanked UCLA’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese for its hospitality and reminded those present of the open call of Comedia Performance: papers presented at the symposium may be submitted to the journal until August 15, 2027, for publication in 2028.
The first session, Golden Tongues: Adapting Comedia in Los Angeles, moderated by Diana Echeverría Palencia (UCLA), brought together the playwrights Abe Zapata Jr. and Roger Mason, two of the three authors whose adaptations will be read this weekend at the festival. Zapata presented Donde comen dos, comen tres, a version of El perro del hortelano set on a farm in the Los Angeles of the nineteen forties, and Mason The Liars, a reading of La verdad sospechosa moved to a New York of privilege and of access as currency. Both spoke to the distinction between translation, adaptation and what Mason called cultural translation, and to the structural role of the death of the patriarch as the engine of their plots. The third of the set is Beast Among Men, by Nicholas Pilapil, on La vida es sueño, who was unable to attend the panel.
Two sessions ran in parallel. The panel Mexican Baroque, moderated by Margaret Boyle (Bowdoin College), with Araceli Rebollo Hernández (UNAM/INBAL), Bruce Burningham (Illinois State University) and Barbara Fuchs (UCLA), presented the first Festival Internacional de Teatro Barroco y Disección Escénica of Mexico City, organized to mark the 330th anniversary of the death of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and opened the discussion on the limits of adaptation and on how to sustain these repertories over the long term.
The session Making Theater Happen, moderated by DeLys Ostlund (Portland State University), gathered three papers on training, mediation and production: José Carlos Cuevas (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) traced in “Lope, eternamente joven” the course of the Escuela de Teatro Clásico and of the Joven Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico, in whose twenty-three productions Lope appears in more than half; Jonathan Wade (Brigham Young University) made the case for the graphic novel of La vida es sueño (2018) as a way into the comedia and as a way of making interpretation visible; and Alejandra Juno Rodríguez Villar (Hanover College) offered in “Entre el repertorio y el proyecto” a comparison of repertory and project-based production models in France, Germany, England and Spain, and opened for discussion what can be expected today of a national classical theater company and whom it works for.
The academic day closed with the screening of Fuenteovejuna 2026, the popular production staged in Fuente Obejuna, Córdoba, from August 18 to 22 and directed by José Carlos Cuevas and Pedro Hofhuis, followed by a conversation with the audience. This year’s version is built as a mise en abyme: the frame story shows Lope de Vega directing Fuenteovejuna in a corral de comedias, while in another space of the square the performance itself unfolds, in a more naturalistic register that contrasts with the declamatory tone of the troupe rehearsing with Lope. Declared a Bien de Interés Cultural in 2018, the performance has been carried since 1992 by the people of the town: close to three hundred residents of Fuente Obejuna who put all their passion and all their art at the service of the comedia.
In the afternoon, the LA Escena festival opened its program at Macgowan Hall with Historias amorosas no tan ejemplares, o Lo que pasa en el sarao se queda en el sarao, a piece by Paola Izquierdo drawn from the novellas of María de Zayas. It is a monologue in which the character of a maidservant tells the stories that entertain Zayas’s saraos, combining narration with farce and clown technique and with an explicit message in favor of the dignity of women.
Following the discussion of the graphic novel and the comedia, the AHCT invites its members to send materials for a new section of resources on comedias.org: graphic novels and comics published on classical theater, along with the comics and visual scripts made by students in the classroom. The site already holds the association’s old notebooks and guides to its own performances, and the new section aims to gather these materials as a teaching tool for school and secondary audiences as well.
The symposium continues on Friday, September 18, and Saturday, September 19, with the Donald T. Dietz plenary lecture by Barbara Fuchs, Cutting-Edge Comedia, and the awarding of the Founders’ Prizes.
