LET'S MAKE A DREAM by Sacha Guitry Published in English

Play Club has published Let's Make a Dream, Jack Kelly Bellue's English translation of Sacha Guitry's 1916 comedy Faisons un rêve. The play premiered at Paris's Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens on October 3, 1916. Bellue's translation first appeared in Asymptote Literary Journal, the international journal of literature in translation, and is now available as a standalone paperback.

The play begins when a married couple visits a bachelor who is secretly in love with the wife. After the husband leaves, the bachelor emerges from hiding and declares his feelings. Their planned evening together becomes an overnight affair, followed by a morning in which a single careless remark threatens to undo their romantic fantasy.

Guitry (1885-1957), a French playwright, actor, and filmmaker, built the comedy around the evasions, improvisations, and sudden reversals of conversation. Bellue's translation preserves the play's four-act structure, including its final act, in which the woman writes a letter confronting the terms of the relationship and the limits of the life she has imagined with her lover.

In his translator's note, Bellue describes discovering Guitry while teaching himself French through the playwright's films. His approach to the translation attends to the rhythms of spoken language and to details that resist direct transfer into English, including the distinction between the French forms of address tu and vous.

Let's Make a Dream is Play Club's first publication. Founded by Bellue, Play Club is a New York theatrical reading organization focused on plays as literary texts, with programming at the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library of the New York Public Library.

The paperback is available for purchase through all major booksellers.

Read the translation in Asymptote Literary Journal:
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/drama/lets-make-a-dream-sacha-guitry/