BEOWULF
BEOWULF — From a Modern Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley
An ancient monster story re-told for our monstrous times. Lizzie Calogero performs Maria Dahvana Headley’s award-winning modern translation, with all its blood, guts, gold and fire — and menacing foes we still recognize today. This sly, feminist take upends the masculine heroics and asks what a life spent chasing glory and treasure is worth.
Conceived to be an intimate, elemental return to oral storytelling, BEOWULF bursts to life with the powerful violin scoring of Irene Sazer, and the production support of a diverse team of Bay Area theatre professionals.
In October of 2025, we held a workshop performance of Act Three of our story: the narrative of the Dragon and her horde. The work continues, developing the rest of the script and preparing for a full production in 2027.
I am proud and grateful to have the fiscal sponsorship and support of San Francisco’s Independent Arts & Media which will allow me to accept tax-free donations. If you’d like to be one of the first to support this work financially, please click on the “donate” button. You will be deeply appreciated!
Performer: Lizzie Calogero is an English-American actor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Born in Tehran, she grew up in Bedfordshire UK, and earned her Bachelor’s with Honors in English and Theatre Studies at Warwick University. Since moving to the US she has worked extensively with companies around the Bay Area, including SF Playhouse, Marin Theatre Company, Magic Theatre, San Jose Repertory, Center Rep, San Francisco Shakespeare Co, Woman’s Will, and many seasons with the Tony Award-winning San Francisco Mime Troupe, where she is a former Collective Member. Known for her comedic work, Lizzie is drawn to theatre that creates community, stimulates empathy, and gives audiences a visceral experience of lives that are otherwise inaccessible to them. Shared storytelling is a fundamental human need, and Lizzie is proud to be part of a tradition that traces back for as long as there have been people.
Director: Elizabeth Carter is a regional director based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Some of her favorite productions include FAT HAM (Oregon Shakespeare Festival), Confederates (Repertory Theatre of St. Louis), WOLF PLAY (Shotgun Players), SWEAT and THE LEGEND OF GEORGIA MCBRIDE (Center REPertory Co.), STEEL MAGNOLIAS (TheatreWorks SV), AS YOU LIKE IT (California Shakespeare Festival), Stoop Stories (Aurora Theatre Co.), FOR COLORED GIRLS… (African American Shakespeare Co.) and the new musical SIGN MY NAME TO FREEDOM (SF Bay Area Theatre Co.). She was associate director on the ripple the wave that carried me home (Berkeley Rep/Goodman Theatre) and assistant director on HOW I LEARNED WHAT I LEARNED (Oregon Shakespeare Festival). She directed the groundbreaking 2020 virtual King Lear (SF Shakespeare Festival) and FEEL THE SPIRIT (Shotgun Players/Colt Couer NYC). Her directorial film debut BOTTLED SPIRITS won Best Narrative at the London Pan African Film Festival. She was the inaugural SDCF Lloyd Richards New Futures Resident Director at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is a current Lucas Arts Fellow. As a Black queer director, Elizabeth is passionate about creating theater that examines and celebrates the complexity of identity and the joy of embodied liberation.
Musician Irene Sazer: Known internationally as a founding member of Turtle Island String Quartet, Sazer is an acclaimed soloist, recording artist, composer and educator. An in-demand genre-hopping violinist , she founded Real Vocal String Quartet in 2005. In 2019 Sazer was awarded a Gerbode Special Award in the Arts for cultural collaborative work and continues to create with artists around the world. She has recorded/performed with Ali Akbar Khan, Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Smoky Robinson, David Grisman, Linda Rondstadt, and Bjork and performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. Creating eco-art films with original soundtracks has become a passion project.
Stage Manager: Atusa Assadi is an Iranian American stage manager from the Bay Area who collaborates most often with Golden Thread Productions and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. She loves storytelling and playing with creative and unexpected story forms, so she can’t wait for audiences to see this very exciting production of BEOWULF. While not running around the Bay working on various theater productions, Atusa is a cinema and screenwriting student at San Francisco State University.
Maria Dahvana Headley is the New York Times-bestselling, World Fantasy and Hugo Award-winning author of eight books, most recently Beowulf: A New Translation (FSG, 2020), which won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and The Mere Wife (FSG, 2018), a contemporary novel adaptation of Beowulf. Her full cast musical adaptation of The Aeneid, titled Vergil: a Mythological Musical, came out from Audible in 2023. She delivered the Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature at Oxford in 2023, and has taught writing at Sarah Lawrence and Bennington, among many others.
Headley grew up in the high desert of Idaho on a survivalist sled dog ranch, where she spent summers plucking the winter coat from her father’s wolf.