Events

The LA Escena Festival of Hispanic classical theater will be back September 12–17, 2024. The fourth edition of Diversifying the Classics’ biennial festival will bring fresh takes on the comedia to UCLA’s newly renovated Nimoy Theater in Westwood, Los Angeles.

LA Escena is Los Angeles’ first Hispanic classical theater festival, organized by UCLA’s Diversifying the Classics, which is part of the Division of Humanities. Since the inaugural edition in 2018, LA Escena has brought the best of Southern California theater together with acclaimed performers from around the world to celebrate the comedia in performance and adaptation.

This year LA Escena will offer productions at the Nimoy Theater by the internationally recognized Spanish theater company Grumelot, three new adaptations from our popular Golden Tongues series, and a new performance of our translation of Sor Juana’s Love is the Greater Labyrinth by director Sarah Grunnah. We will also be premiering our latest initiative, Mex-Clásicos, with three new versions of comedia by renowned Mexican theater artists, along with Pedro Osuna’s musical transformation of Ana Caro’s The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs, and theatre dybbuk’s “illuminated lecture” of Cervantes’ The Marvelous Puppet Show. To conclude the festival, Red Bull Theater will present a virtual reading of Diversifying the Classics’ latest translation, Lope de Vega’s The Beast of Hungary, as a part of our ongoing collaboration, Hispanic Golden Age Classics.

See full schedule at Diversifying the Classics.