Professor-Student Team Translate The Inheritor
Prof. Kate Bredeson and Thalia Wolff ’22 collaborated on the first English-language translation of the play about class inequality and access to higher education.
Prof. Kate Bredeson [theatre] and Thalia Wolff ’22 collaborated on the first English-language translation of a 1968 French play about class inequality and access to higher education. Northwestern University Press published their book in fall 2024. The play uses didacticism and absurdism to convey what it’s like to be a student at an elite institution and not know the many unwritten rules and behaviors that dictate campus culture. Structured around the high-stakes entrance-exam preparations of two students, the Inheritor and the Non-Inheritor, the plot explores how their life experiences have positioned them very differently to navigate the university environment. Showcasing a world of privilege where there is no such thing as “good luck,” the play features a boisterous chorus of professors, who in this world are squawking birds; a beheaded knight; a picnic in the Louvre museum; and a talking record player.
The Inheritor made a forceful statement in May 1968, when the student company Théâtre de l’Aquarium performed it for striking students in Paris during countrywide protests, and, more recently, when students on the Reed campus participated in public staged readings in 2021 and in the 2024–25 academic year. The Inheritor continues to speak to education inequality on campuses across Anglophone countries today. In their separate introductions to the play, professor-student team Bredeson and Wolff draw from their experiences in academia, share the history and context of the Aquarium’s process and 1968 premiere, and discuss what it was like to work on this play with current students. This publication began as a Ruby-Lankford summer grant project for the pair, and other Reed contributors include Anne Gendler ’81, project editor at Northwestern University Press, and Sizheng Song ’23, the illustrator who drew the cover art.
Wolff is now in graduate school in the theatre education and applied theatre program at Emerson College, and Prof. Bredeson returned this semester from a sabbatical during which she completed four awarded artist residencies, including a prestigious spring fellowship at Loghaven, and worked on a book project supported by a Furthermore foundation grant. Her forthcoming book is a four-volume edited collection of the diaries of Judith Malina (1926–2015), an actress, director, and writer who cofounded with Julian Beck the experimental theatre company The Living Theatre. Malina, mother to Garrick Beck ’71, and her company performed at Reed in 1969.