This event will premiere LIVE  from the Shiva at the Public Theater on Monday, October 5, 2026 at 7:00 PM ET.  A recording will available from Tuesday, October 6 at 7:00 PM ET through Sunday, October 11 at 11:59 PM ET. Open captions will be available from Wednesday, October 7 at 7:00 PM ET through Sunday, October 11 at 11:59 PM ET.

THE CAST

ABOUT THE PLAY

Lope de Vega’s play The Travels of Teodor (La doncella Teodor) recounts the many adventures of a brilliant young Spanish woman named Teodor. Written by Hispanic theater’s most renowned and prolific playwright between 1610 and 1615, Teodor retells a story that most likely originated in medieval Baghdad. In Lope’s adaptation, Teodor is an educated scholar from Toledo who uses her impressive intellect to escape every kind of danger, from kidnappings to shipwrecks, all around the Mediterranean, in classic romance fashion. While Teodor is dazzling the world with her brilliance, her fellow student Félix gets mixed up in a series of conflicts that take him from North African courts to Constantinople and finally Persia. Will Teodor’s wit and learning actually give her any say over her own fate? Will she end up with a man who appreciates her talents? One of the most widely read stories of the medieval and early modern world, in Lope’s rendering Teodor continues to thrill for how it celebrates women’s intellectual accomplishments, while examining men’s suspicion of them. 

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ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT

Luis Vélez de Guevara (1579-1644) was a prolific dramaturg and poet of the Spanish Golden Age. After some early ventures into court poetry, young Vélez served as a soldier until 1603, when he returned to Spain and joined the royal court of Philip IV, finding a place with the Sandoval family, whose star member was the Duke of Lerma, the King’s favorite. Vélez served the Duke of Lerma’s second son, the Count of Saldaña, who was a patron of the arts and kept company with some of the Golden Age’s most celebrated writers. 

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Vélez’s connection to the royal court shaped his literary career: his early plays and poetry were often written to praise a specific nobleman or courtly celebration, perhaps to pledge literary allegiance to a specific patron and earn their financial backing. Vélez’s abundant production--more than 400 plays over the course of his life--earned him the respect of his contemporaries, including Miguel de Cervantes and Lope de Vega. 

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Vélez’s court plays reveal a deep fascination with aristocratic pomp and circumstance. No uncritical admirer, however, Vélez was most celebrated for work that satirized courtly mores. His 1622 play Reinar después de morir, for example, critiques dynastic marriage by making a tragic love story out of the historical affair between Don Pedro, prince of Portugal, and his beloved, a woman of illegitimate birth. Likewise, El diablo cojuelo, a satirical novel published in 1641, uses the figure of a limping devil and naive student to critique the widespread dissimulation and ensuing suspicion in Spanish society. The unlikely duo fly above Madrid, alighting on rooftops to spy on the city’s inhabitants and reveal the dissonance between their public personas and private habits. A biting satire on the customs of his time, Vélez’s El diablo cojuelo remains his most famous work. 

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The era’s heightened scrutiny dogged Vélez’s own public persona, for he was plagued by rumors that he was a converso, a Christian of Jewish heritage. Conversos were systematically excluded from many privileges, and faced the difficult challenge of proving their religious, cultural, and social fealty before their old Christian peers. Perhaps for this reason Vélez both celebrated virtuous leaders and challenged the prestige of lineage. Read in this light, El rey naciendo mujer becomes another in a series of texts to offer a nuanced, humanistic approach to leadership. 

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*The Working Group translators are: Marta Albalá Pelegrín, Raquel Cruz, Diana Echeverria Palencia, Barbara Fuchs, Brenda Saraí, Jaramillo Rachel Kaufman, Ruth Lopez, Laura Muñoz, Javier Patiño Loira, Victoria Rasbridge, Rhonda Sharrah, Rebecca Ogden Smith, Jesslyn Whittell, Sofía Yazpik​​