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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Play On Shakespeare expands its programming by launching new partnerships – including with the award-winning Ojai Playwrights Conference – to commission contemporary playwrights as part of a rigorous translation process that engages Shakespeare’s works as new plays.
In the pursuit of expanding access to these timeless stories, Play On Shakespeare sets out to build deep and meaningful partnerships with mission-aligned organizations to create contemporary modern-verse Shakespeare translations that offer the linguistic immediacy of a new play.
“What we’ve learned over the past ten years is that translation is not a novelty, but a vital artistic practice necessary to the vibrance of the Shakespeare experience and to audiences’ connection to the story,” says Play On Shakespeare’s new Executive Director, Taylor Bailey. “The discoveries writers make when they walk with Shakespeare are not incidental — they are essential. Theater is stronger, braver, and more honest when more voices, aesthetics, and lived experiences are invited into this work.”
Play On Shakespeare’s partnership with Ojai Playwrights Conference will commission four modern verse Shakespeare translations. The award-winning commissioned playwrights include:
- Julia Izumi translating The Winter’s Tale
- JuCoby Johnson translating Romeo & Juliet
- MJ Kaufman translating Henry IV, Part 1
- Anne Washburn translating Richard III
This new playwright cohort will convene for the first time in Ojai, CA this winter in a residency co-facilitated by Play On Shakespeare and OPC. The mission of Ojai Playwrights Conference is to create a body of brilliant new plays that reflect our diverse, dynamic, and ever-changing world. “In the Ojai Playwrights Conference we have found a partner who shares our commitment to creative rigor, and as an organization, is as human-first as we are. A big part of the joy of Play On Shakespeare is the way we take care of artists,” Bailey explains. “By commissioning new work with partners across the field, we’re building a living repertoire of translations that theaters can choose from, each one shaped by a different playwright’s encounter with Shakespeare. Ojai Playwrights Conference meets our mission with the dramaturgical expertise of new plays. We are thrilled for Ojai to become one of our newest partnerships and to develop four new translations in collaboration with their team.”
“Over the past three years, Ojai Playwrights Conference has partnered with a set of incredible producing theaters to support the development of bold new work, including: Center Theater Group, Outside/In, Loft Ensemble, and and now our amazing partners at Play On Shakespeare. To gather these four brilliant dramatists to help launch these translations and see them all the way through to full scripts is thrilling for us,” shares Producing Artistic Director, Jeremy B. Cohen. “In a moment where non-profit theater needs new models of support and exchange, OPC is stepping forward into LA and around the country to ensure vital new plays find their way to stages around the country.”
This project will build on Play On Shakespeare’s established ecosystem of modern-verse translations created by playwrights and dramaturgs aspiring to secure and sustain the continued production of Shakespeare. Additional commissions are in the works as Play On Shakespeare continues its effort to normalize Shakespeare in translation and bring living playwrights back into the Shakespeare production process.
About Play On Shakespeare
We are an artistic partner that funds and supports contemporary modern verse Shakespeare in theatrical practice, productions, and education. Through partnerships with artists and organizations worldwide, we deliver these translations via theatrical productions, workshops and trainings, podcasts, publications, and film. Play On Shakespeare is made possible through generous support of the Hitz Foundation.
About Ojai Playwrights Conference
The mission of Ojai Playwrights Conference (OPC) is to create a body of brilliant new plays that reflect our diverse, dynamic, and ever-changing world. We support playwrights with unique resources and a nurturing environment to develop new stories for the stage through our annual summer Conference & New Works Festival in Ojai, and partnerships with theater organizations in Southern California and across the country. Our learning and mentorship programs focus on nurturing the next generation of theatrical storytellers. Plays developed at OPC have been produced on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and at theaters across the country, including Primary Trust by Eboni Booth (Pulitzer Prize, 2024) and Dog Day Afternoon by Stephen Adly Guirgis (premiering on Broadway, 2026).
Playwright Biographies
Julia Izumi (she/her) is a writer, performer, translator, and educator who makes plays, musicals, theatrical nonsense, and everything in between. Her work has been developed at Manhattan Theatre Club, Clubbed Thumb, Bushwick Starr, Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Portland Center Stage’s JAW New Play Festival, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ojai Playwrights Conference, Seattle Rep, Great Plains Theatre Conference, and the NNPN/Kennedy Center MFA Playwrights’ Workshop. She received the inaugural OPC Dr. Kerry English Award, KCACTF’s Darrell Ayers Playwriting Award, and Theater Masters’ Visionary Playwright Award. Former LMCC Workspace Resident, Civilians R&D Group Member, and Clubbed Thumb’s Early-Career Writers’ Group Member. Current New Dramatists Resident. Current commissions: True Love Productions, MTC/Sloan, Playwrights Horizons, Seattle Rep 20×30. MFA: Brown University. juliaizumi.com.
JuCoby Johnson (he/him) is a New York-based playwright, actor, and screenwriter originally from Jacksonville, Florida. Johnson is a second-year playwright in The Juilliard School’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program. As an actor, he has performed at the Guthrie Theater, Theater Latté Da, Ten Thousand Things Theater, and many more. His plays have been featured in conferences and organizations such as IAMA Theater, the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Seven Devils, the International Black Theater Festival, Ojai Playwrights Conference, and many more. His screenwriting credits include The Runarounds (Amazon). Johnson is the recipient of McKnight and Jerome Hill Artist Fellowships, is a member of the 2026 Page 73 Writers Group, was a member of the 2022 Sony Pictures Television Diverse Writers Program, and was part of the inaugural artist cohort at the Jungle Theater in Minneapolis. jucobyjohnson.com.
MJ Kaufman’s (he/they) plays have been seen at the Mark Taper Forum, the Public Theater, WP Theater, NAATCO, Clubbed Thumb, Colt Coeur, Williamstown Theater Festival, InterAct Theater and numerous other theaters and schools around the country as well as in Russian in Moscow and in Australia. MJ has received funding from The NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theatre Fund, a Helen Merrill Emerging Writers Award, Jane Chambers Prize in Feminist Theatre, and residencies at the New Museum, MacDowell Colony and New Dramatists. MJ’s film THERAPIST CRUSH won the Audience Choice Best Film Award at TRANSlationsfilm festival. MJ has also written for Netflix. MJ co-founded Trans Lab Fellowship, a program to support emerging transgender theater artists which ran from 2018-2022 and now serves on the core community of Breaking the Binary Theatre. MJ teaches in the Dramatic Writing Department at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. mjkaufman.com
Anne Washburn (she/her) is a New York-based playwright. Her work has been produced nationally and internationally, and has premiered with 13P, Actors Theater of Louisville, the Almeida, American Repertory Theatre, Cherry Lane Theatre, Classic Stage Company, Clubbed Thumb, The Civilians, Dixon Place, Ensemble Studio Theater, The Fogler, Playwrights Horizons, Soho Rep, Two River Theater Company, Vineyard Theater and Woolly Mammoth. Honors include an Alpert Award, a Guggenheim, a PEN/Laura Pels award for artist in mid-career, twice a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn, a Whiting, and residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo.
