Translating the Labyrinth: Adapting Tennessee Williams’s ‘Out Cry’

by Vasantha Wakkumbura

Tennessee Williams did not just write dialogue; he wrote the architecture of human neurosis.
While classics like A Streetcar Named Desire are deeply embedded in the theatrical canon, his later work, Out Cry (also known as The Two-Character Play), is a completely different beast. It is a dense, claustrophobic, and deeply psychological exploration of two siblings—abandoned by their theater troupe, locked in a freezing theater, and forced to perform a play within a play to an audience that may or may not exist.

Currently in pre-production under the direction of Susanga Kahandawalaarchchi, my role as the Script Writer handling the Sinhala adaptation of this masterpiece is an exercise in navigating the unraveling mind.

Adapting Out Cry from English into Sinhala is not a standard translation job. The characters, Felice and Clare, are trapped in a loop of their own words, desperately trying to construct a reality to keep their mounting panic at bay. Translating their dialogue is less about syntax and more about capturing the collapse of their symbolic reality. The Sinhala script must maintain the poetic, Southern Gothic desperation of Williams’s original text, while adopting a cultural and linguistic rhythm that feels authentic to a local theater audience.
When characters are teetering on the edge of a psychological break, their language fractures. Finding the exact Sinhala phrasing to represent that specific kind of existential dread, paranoia, and inescapable isolation is a heavy, thrilling challenge. The text serves as a blueprint for madness, and getting that blueprint right in the pre-production phase is critical for the actors who will soon have to inhabit it.

Bringing this psychological labyrinth to the Sri Lankan stage is going to be a fascinating journey.

To my friends in theater, literature, and psychology: what do you think is the most difficult human emotion or psychological state to translate across different languages and cultures?