Galway born actor, translator, writer and director Caraid O’Brien is known for her "
lithe, exceptionally actable translations" of the daring Yiddish playwright Sholem Asch. Her debut translation,
god of vengeance, opened in a strip club in Times Square and "set Show World aflame" according to the Village Voice.
Variety dubbed her second Asch translation, Motke Thief,
"not your bubbe's Yiddish theater." Caraid has translated seven of Asch's dramas, three of which are available in
Sholem Asch: Underworld Trilogy from White Goat Press. You can listen to her translations of
The Dead Man (Carnegie Hall's Voices of Hope Festival) and
On the Road to Zion, Asch's first full length play which was his response to Chekhov's The Sea Gull. Caraid received three new play commissions from the Foundation for Jewish Culture, was a translation fellow at the Yiddish Book Center and was commissioned by Theater J and Solas Nua in DC to translate and adapt Sholem Asch's drama
Rabbi Doctor Silver. Her solo show
Land of My Soul: The Theater of Sholem Asch premiered at the Museum of Jewish Heritage and continues to tour. Caraid worked with Sholem Asch’s great grandson, David Mazower to curate
the theater section for the Yiddish Book Center’s acclaimed new exhibit
Yiddish: A Global Culture. She also developed a series of audio highlights for the exhibit including recreating the voices of Y.L. Peretz’s Warsaw literary salon at the turn of the twentieth century. Caraid staged and adapted scenes from Chava Rosenfarb’s World War II drama “The Bird of the Ghetto” for Di Froyen Conference of Yiddish women writers. You can listen to Caraid perform her translation of Klara Klebanova's memoir about the first Russian Revolution,
The Last Maximalist. She has hosted many radio programs on WBAI, most notably
Radio Bloomsday, marathon performances of James Joyce's Ulysses where she performed the complete three hour
Molly Bloom, available to listen to in its entirety
here and
here. In addition to their New York City premieres, Caraid’s translations have been performed at Theater J in DC, Berkeley’s Yiddish Theatre Ensemble, Theatre Ariel in Philadelphia, The Justice Theater Project in North Carolina and at Brown University and Augustana College. For ten years, Caraid studied Yiddish theater with
Luba Kadison, the last surviving member of the famed Vilna Troupe and for six years, she studied Yiddish musical theater with crooner
Seymour Rexite while performing in the store front theaters of NYC’s Lower East Side. She writes and performs in English and Yiddish. Contact her at caraidobrien@gmail.com
