Overview

The first English-language translation of the 1968 activist play about inequality and access to education In The Inheritor, surrealist imagery and experimental forms convey the uncanny experience of attending an institute of higher education without knowledge of the unwritten rules that dictate campus culture. We follow two students, the Inheritor and the Non-Inheritor, as they prepare for a high-stakes exam, and observe how their life experiences have positioned them very differently to navigate higher education. Revealing a world of privilege where “there is no such thing as luck,” the play features a boisterous chorus of professors depicted as a flock of squawking birds, a beheaded knight, a Louvre picnic, and a talking record player. The play was created by ThÉÂtre de l’Aquarium, a company then composed entirely of students, and based on sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron’s Inheritors: French Students and Their Relations to Culture. It proved a powerful success when it premiered in May 1968 amid student and worker protests in Paris, and it continues to speak forcefully to education inequity on campuses across anglophone countries today.

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9780810147829

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Reviews

Kate Bredeson and Thalia Wolff have retrieved and offered to us a fine, spunky translation of an exemplary work of militant theatre from the annals of the latest French ""revolution"": May '68. They have also, and pertinantly, penned stimulating introductory essays to contextualize the piece and detail their own process in translating and staging a reading. The combination should galvanize arts activists, students of French culture, and thoughtful people everywhere worrying about the great chasm between the privileged and everyone else.""— Judith G. Miller, New York University ""With their bracing, breakneck translation of The Inheritor, Kate Bredeson and Thalia Wolff’s translation captures all the menacing absurdism, acid humor, and barely contained chaos of the original, in a contemporary English that zips nimbly from casual to ritual and back again. Bredeson and Wolff have gifted the Anglophone theatre world with a powerful and remarkably timely resource. The Inheritor is required reading for students, theatre makers, activists, and anyone who believes in the theatre’s power to make change."" —Ryan Anthony Hatch, California Polytechnic State University ""The Inheritor offers a sparkling translation of a complex and provocative text that captures the spirit of student protests in Paris in 1968.""—Daniel Smith, Michigan State University

"Kate Bredeson and Thalia Wolff have retrieved and offered to us a fine, spunky translation of an exemplary work of militant theatre from the annals of the latest French ""revolution"": May '68. They have also, and pertinantly, penned stimulating introductory essays to contextualize the piece and detail their own process in translating and staging a reading. The combination should galvanize arts activists, students of French culture, and thoughtful people everywhere worrying about the great chasm between the privileged and everyone else.""— Judith G. Miller, New York University ""With their bracing, breakneck translation of The Inheritor, Kate Bredeson and Thalia Wolff’s translation captures all the menacing absurdism, acid humor, and barely contained chaos of the original, in a contemporary English that zips nimbly from casual to ritual and back again. Bredeson and Wolff have gifted the Anglophone theatre world with a powerful and remarkably timely resource. The Inheritor is required reading for students, theatre makers, activists, and anyone who believes in the theatre’s power to make change."" —Ryan Anthony Hatch, California Polytechnic State University ""The Inheritor offers a sparkling translation of a complex and provocative text that captures the spirit of student protests in Paris in 1968.""—Daniel Smith, Michigan State University"

Author Information

Kate Bredeson (she/her) is a theater historian, director, and dramaturg. Her project as a scholar is to research, write about, and practice the ways in which theater can be a tool for radical activism and protest. She is the author of Occupying the Stage: The Theater of May '68 (finalist, George Freedley Award) and the editor of The Diaries of Judith Malina, both published by Northwestern University Press. She is a professor of theater at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Thalia Wolff (she/her) is an interdisciplinary theater maker, teaching artist, and storyteller. She is an MA candidate in Emerson College’s Theatre Education and Applied Theatre program.

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