Elise Thoron: About the Artist

Click here to listen to her interview.

Click here for her dramaturg, Julie Felise Dubiner

Elise Thoron is a playwright, director, translator, her plays have been produced in the United States, Europe, Japan, Cuba: Green Violin, music by Frank London, (Nine Contemporary Jewish Plays); Prozak and the Platypus, music by Jill Sobule (CD/graphic novella); Charlotte: Life? Or Theater? based on paintings by Charlotte Salomon. Recycling: washi tales an ongoing collaboration with distinguished Japanese paper artist, Kyoko Ibe. For over twenty years, Elise created cross-cultural exchanges with Russian and American theater artists; she adapted and directed The Great Gatsby in Russian at a The Pushkin Theater in Moscow, where it played for over nine years. As Associate Artistic Director at American Place Theatre, Elise co-founded, Literature to Life, a highly successful theater literacy program now nationwide. Among books she’s adapted and directed for Literature to Life: Diaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, Zora Neale Hurston’s Folktales, Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street. She developed Tony award winning spoken word poet Lemon Andersen’s ToasT and County of Kings at the Public Theater, which also performed at the Spoleto Festival and venues around the world. Her latest work Hatuey Memory of Fire a Cuban nightclub opera in Yiddish, with music by Frank London, had its inaugural production at Opera de la Calle in Havana, March, 2017. Elise had a Sterling Fellowship in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale, where she taught Chekhov; her translations of Russian plays are produced and published in the United States and Canada.  www.elisethoron.com