Natalya Baldyga, Ph.D.

Episode 8: The King Stag

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Natalya Baldyga wears many theatrical hats. Although she is primarily an educator, theatre historian, and director, she occasionally finds her way onstage or in front of the camera. She is also a translator and adaptor of plays who has recently started writing original material as a means of transcending pandemic-based isolation.

Natalya holds degrees in theatre and theatre historiography from Middlebury College, the University of Wisconsin—Madison, and the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities. She has taught theatre history, theory, literature, and performance at the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities, Gustavus Adolphus College, the Savannah College of Art and Design, the Florida State University, and Tufts University, as well as teaching U.S. and world history at Phillips Academy, Andover. Teaching is one of her greatest joys and she delights in following her former students’ myriad and wide-ranging accomplishments.

As a scholar, Natalya’s research focuses on theatre historiography, cultural identity, and the performing body in eighteenth-century Europe. In 2018, she and her colleagues Wendy Arons and Sara Figal received the Excellence in Digital Scholarship Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) for the online version of their new translation of G. E. Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy; theirs is the only fully complete English translation available. A print edition, published by Routledge in 2019, contextualizes Lessing’s work for the reader through three supplemental essays (and through Natalya’s 50,000 words of endnotes).

As a theatre director, Natalya is drawn to works that use visceral and non-naturalistic language, and to collaborative physical theatre that explores intersections of movement, imagery, and the spoken word. Since moving to the Boston area in 2011, she has directed for Sleeping Weazel (Picture This), at Tufts University (bobrauschenbergamerica; From Orchids to Octopi; The King Stag), for Whistler in the Dark’s Playwright Incubator Program (Shadow Trees), and at Opera House Arts in Stonington, Maine (Orlando; The Lady from the Sea; I Have Seen Horizons: Ruth Moore’s Stories from Maine).

Natalya’s love affair with the work of Carlo Gozzi dates back thirty years, and she has presented nationally and internationally on his work. Her original translation and adaptation of Carlo Gozzi’s King Stag had its world premiere at Tufts University in 2017, and her article “A Cultural Pastiche of Fantasy, Satire, and Citrus: Gozzi’s The Love of Three Oranges in its German Afterlife” will be published next year in the forthcoming anthology Three Loves for Three Oranges: Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev (Indiana UP).

Currently, Natalya divides her time between managing the hybrid schooling of her highly theatrical nine-year-old son, and working on a script entitled Blood, Breath, and Bone: Meditations on the Body During a time of Plague.