Is Theater Seeing a Squid Game Effect?

Netflix has taught us so much. Among the recent things that spring to mind: that to show their love, some couples place locks on bridges (season three of Love is Blind); that Jeffrey Dahmer could have been a dreamboat (Dahmer), and that there’s a beach with sand in Westfield, N.J. (I’m pretty sure there isn’t, but there is one on The Watcher.).

Over the last several years, streaming services have also conditioned us to appreciate foreign language television. Though some people might change their settings to dubbed, for the most part we’ve opened our eyes to subtitles on a regular basis in order to enjoy shows like Squid Game, Money Heist, Babylon Berlin, Call My Agent, Fauda, and Lupin.

That has, of course, translated to movie theaters. A torrent of exciting foreign films are being released this fall. It’s surely connected to the great success of Parasite, which won the Oscar in 2020, and Drive My Car, nominated for Best Picture last year, not to mention films from distributors like A24 and Neon. Also, the fewer number of American films made during the pandemic surely created room on screens and in conversation for international cinema.

Just some of the must-see films on the smorgasbord this fall include: Corsage (Austria), starring an electric Vicky Kreips as Empress Elisabeth with ennui; Decision to Leave (South Korea), a strange potboiler about a detective’s experience with love and obsession; Holy Spider (Denmark), a thriller about a serial killer in Iran; Saint Omer (France), which won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice; One Fine Morning (France), Mia Hansen-Love’s latest, featuring a knockout performance by Lea Seydoux, and EO (Poland), the buzziest movie about a donkey in recent memory.

It just so happens that some of the most exciting theater options of the fall season are also in foreign languages. At the Barbican, in London, the Royal Shakespeare Company is presenting a stage adaptation of Miyazaki's cult animated film My Neighbor Totoro. The play is in English, and the stunning puppetry from Basil Twist is in the global language of "wow," but several songs, performed by a live singer and band, remain untranslated in Japanese. In New York, there’s Ivo Van Hove’s adaptation of the American novel A Little Life—in Dutch with subtitles—which began October 20 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The following week brings to BAM’s Harvey Theater a long-awaited Hamlet, in German translation, from the cult director Thomas Ostermeier. Also, just around the corner are the K-Pop-infused Trojan Women in mid-November from the National Changgeuk Company of Korea and the musical simply titled K-Pop on Broadway as well as a return of the Joel Grey-directed production of Fiddler on the Roof, performed in Yiddish.

While BAM has always been a home for international theater, both A Little Life and Hamlet have more performances scheduled than shows of their ilk before. For instance, in 2014 van Hove’s Dutch production of Angels in America played for three nights in the smaller Harvey Theater. A Little Life has seven at the much larger Howard Gilman Opera House.

David Binder, the Artistic Director at BAM, says the writing has been on the wall these last few years. “We at BAM felt like the audience was bigger for foreign language work. We sensed the same thing you’re sensing," he says. “I just think people have gotten more adventurous. A foreign language is not a barrier to new work. People are hungry for it.”

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