Remember the last time you saw a play in a foreign language? That irritating feeling of getting lost in the nuances, the double entendres, the jokes that made everyone laugh except you. An annoying mix of frustration and isolation that can ruin even the most brilliant performance. In New York, however, something is changing: multilingual theater is no longer a chimera.
It's called "Perfect Crime," it's the longest-running theatrical mystery in the Big Apple, and it just introduced a system of simultaneous translations powered by artificial intelligence. An experiment that is a trailblazer not only for the experience of foreign spectators, but for the entire theater ecosystem, at a time when many Off-Broadway productions are struggling to fill theaters.
Technology at the service of accessibility
Audiences attending “Perfect Crime” at the Theater Center can do something previously unthinkable: scan a QR code, select one of 60 languages, and listen to the real-time translation through headphones as the show unfolds onstage.
Arabic, Afrikaans, Polish and dozens of other language options are available to the public, and that's not all: the translated text also appears on the smartphone screen, a valuable option for those who are hard of hearing or simply prefer to follow along this way.
Considering that the majority of viewers of “Perfect Crime” are tourists visiting New York, between 25 and 30 people use the service during the eight weekly performances. A number that, according to Catherine Russell (the theatre's general manager and star of the show), allows tickets to be sold to people who would otherwise never have considered the option. I am particularly struck by the fact that spectators have selected a wide range of language options, without any one language dominating over the others: this is multilingual theatre in the truest sense of the word.
Multilingual Theatre, a Competitive Advantage in the Post-Pandemic Era
While Broadway shows have largely recovered from the pandemic crisis (during which New York theaters were closed for 18 months), Off-Broadway productions and regional theaters they continue to struggle in filling theaters and generating profits. In this context, technological innovation is not a wishful thinking, but a possible lifeline.
“A lot of people don’t go to the theater because it’s not accessible,” Russell says. “If they don’t understand English well, they don’t even consider it an option.” A banal yet illuminating observation: For years, we’ve assumed that theater is a linguistically exclusive experience, and not just in the U.S. And we’ve relegated non-native speakers to the role of second-class audience members.
Russell also hopes the translation service will give his multilingual theater an edge over nearby musicals, which tend to be more popular than plays. AI technology will surely reach musicals and Broadway, he said, but it will take time. “Off-Broadway can be more agile. We can do things that Broadway can’t do,” he added with a hint of pride.
How Multilingual Theatre Works
The multilingual theater works by capturing the voices of actors (who wear microphones) and transferring them through an audio mixer to a cloud-connected computer of a startup specializing in AI translation.
The system transcribes the audio into text, translates it into the desired language using a series of AI models (the specific model depends on the language), and delivers the result to the users in 3-5 seconds. In practice, it is faster than having a simultaneous translator sitting next to you.
The debate on quality
As with any innovation, there is no shortage of skeptics. Bliss Griffin, a New York theater consultant, raises legitimate concerns: Playwrights spend a lot of time choosing specific words, regionalisms, and idioms, and some of that work could get lost in machine translation. “The word-for-word translation that a machine is likely to provide is not a high-quality or inclusive experience,” he noted.
Ma Russell he argues that while an AI-generated translation may not be perfect, the essence of the show remains. And isn’t that the heart of the theatrical experience? Compromising a little on linguistic precision to open the theater’s doors to a global audience might be an acceptable, even noble, sacrifice in an age when art desperately needs new audiences to survive.
Ultimately, multilingual theatre is just the latest chapter in the millennial evolution of an art that, to stay alive, has always been able to reinvent itself. And this time it does so by speaking all the languages of the world.
