Test also has a contract to publish the academic translation of the play. His next step is to produce a short video – including the new music – to promote the play for future productions. The full orchestral score is lost, but Test asked a musician to re-create a score based on the extant piano pieces. Back in 2018, when Test was researching in Madrid, he found two pieces of piano music from an 1875 opera based on the original 1626 play.

“What we worked on in London this summer is a much better script than what was read in 2019, and the final script is much improved from the Zoom script from April 2021.

Two years of COVID delay were actually beneficial, Test said because they allowed the script to “percolate longer.” “The energy in the room each day was amazing,” he added, giving credit to company director Paul O’Mahoney “for bringing together an amazing group of actors who embraced the project wholeheartedly.” “Zoom could never match working with actors face-to-face in a room,” Test said. He worked with the actors all day, then wrote for hours each night, rewriting or reworking scenes. In the summer of 2022 – delayed two years by the pandemic – Test brought his translation to London for a weeklong workshop at the British American Drama Academy. During the pandemic, Test worked on the script via Zoom with a London theatre company and led Boise State theatre students who workshopped the play remotely with professional actors. In fall 2019, Test staged its first live reading in Boise with the help of local and visiting actors, and members of the Boise State faculty. Mac Test, a professor in the School of the Arts, translated the 400-year-old play from Spanish into English for the first time in 2018 with co-translator, Marta Albalá Peregrin. Pope Urban VIII gave a papal dispensation to de Erauso so that he could live as a man. King Felipe IV granted de Erauso a military pension. de Erauso jumped aboard a ship with conquistadors and fought in wars in Chile and Peru for 17 years. Born as a woman in 1592, de Erauso escaped a nunnery, adopted the name Antonio and began dressing as a man. To call de Erauso’s story remarkable is selling it short. The playwright based his work on de Erauso’s fantastical autobiography, “Memoir of a Basque Lieutenant Nun Transvestite in the New World.” The play “Comedia Famosa de la Monja Alférez” (“The Famous Comedy of the Lieutenant Nun”), written by Juan Pérez de Montalbán in 1625, tells the true story of Catalina de Erauso. Mac Test (left) and actors rehearse in London.

Erauso lieutenant nun