Copyright 2013 Dark Lady Players
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midsummer madness
a reading of a new play by john hudson & bella poynton
at the central park bandshell
i don't believe in shakespeare
part devised movement theatre / part flashmob
with a new short play by john hudson
at figment festival on governors island
Elizabeth Weitzen, Mimi Hirt, and Alexandra Cohen Spiegler in a scene from Romeo and Juliet parodying the annunciation of the Virgin Mary.
Directed by Jenny Greeman
Costumes by Elizabeth Weitzen
Props by Larisa Tracy
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Performances by:
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The start of our recurring lecture cabaret series at Cornelia
Street Cafe! Introductions and context from Artistic Director
John Hudson and Director Jenny Greeman, followed by
performances from original pieces by John Hudson &
Bella Poynton, readings from The Poetry of The Dark Lady,
and selections from the plays
Directed by Jenny Greeman
Performances by:
Tanya Kot
The exciting, absurd, post-Patriot Act story of three precocious, reclusive teenagers at a very particular kind of private institution - one for the maladjusted. In other words, instead of sending juvenile offenders to jail, they are sent to theatre program for rehabilitation. Performing Shakespeare is their sentence. With the help, however, of their teacher - a rogue authorship theorist - the young delinquent geniuses discover the true author of "Shakespeare's" plays, while extreme danger - from M.I.16, the secret government organization with the sole job of keeping the lie of "The Bard" alive - lurks nearby.
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Scenes from our interactive performance at The Figment Festival included Alexandra Cohen Spiegler as a carnival barker, Mimi Hirt as The Dark Lady, Pëtra Denison as an "everyman," and Elizabeth Weitzen as Titus Caesar.
annunciation parodies
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scenes from:
twelfth night
romeo and juliet
othello
hamlet
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on annunciation day
at the center at westpark
Olivia, Juliet, Desdemona, and Ophelia -
are played by Mimi Hirt,
the Angels by Elizabeth Weitzen,
and the clowns
Shykia Fields
Monica Miller
Matthew J. Willings
"As an evening of theater, it is gorgeous."
Dark Lady Players © 2014 All Rights Reserved; Site Design by Elizabeth Weitzen
"TimeOut NY
Photo of the Week"
Petra Salander, Mimi Hirt, and Alexandra Cohen Spiegler
in one of nine "exhibits" from the museum-style tour,
replete with docent guides (here Meaghan Cross), and staged as an immersive, site-specific experience inside of Westpark Church. Here, a parody of the Annunciation of the Virgin
Mary hidden within the nurse's scene from Romeo & Juliet.
Yet none of the plays ends in Paradise. Why do the Marys (Juliet, Ophelia, Desdemona) die before giving birth to the savior? Why are the Messiah figures (Laertes, Shylock, Bottom/Pyramus) defeated? Why is the playwright PARODYING the stories of The Gospels? Like Marlowe, Shakespeare regards the Gospels as a Roman literary creation --- a view that is being rediscovered by modern New Testament scholars.
We took nine Shakespeare scenes - each one parodying a different episode in the Gospels - and places these tableaus (each an exhibit in our tour) in a different part of an amazing 1890s church. As with any museum exhibition, our audience was free to investigate each piece as they chose, in any order or watching the same one multiple times. Among the parodies were the Three Magi (from "Titus Andronicus"), the Trials of Jesus (from "Merchant of Venice"), and the Crucifixion (the death of Bottom/Pyramus from "A Midsummer Night’s Dream"). There were docents to guide visitors through the exhibits and a video companion tour available for mobile devices.
Shakespeare’s plays contain:
14 resurrections
12 Apocalypses
5 Virgin Mary allegories
at least 40 Christ figures
3,000 other religious references
They were written using
14 different translations of the Bible!
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as you like it: The big flush
in the midtown international theater festival
at where eagles dare theatre space
The play absolutely holds coherent allegories. It tells the story of the Roman-Jewish war and Biblical Jewish history, from Eden to the Flood. The play also turns out to be a Jewish toilet joke written using double allegories - with Jaques/Jakes (Elizabethan for toilet), and the character whose pocket watch identifies him as Sir John Harrington, the inventor of the flush toilet (which pre-dates the play by a couple years)!
What are these characters, a dunghill, and many references to excrement doing in this play? Why does As You Like It end with Jaques warning that Noah's flood is coming? Why are there other flood references, like Hercules cleansing the Augean stables of manure? Why does Touchstone go off to the ark with Audrey, who is named after St Ethelreda, the woman who was saved from a flood? Could this be the Last Day? And who is Touchstone (in Greek the Bassanos)?Could he be an allegory for Amelia Bassano herself? A hint: The clown William (who Touchstone wants to kill), turns out to be an allegory for William Shakespeare.
"The best piece of creative theater I have seen in many years"
"It is challenging to convey these ideas, but the Dark Lady Players production achieves this."
Standard scholarship denied this play contained allegories, that the allegorical elements held meaning, and that a coherent story could be found in those allegories. In 2008, The DLP proved otherwise. Our radical techniques allowed us to put the pieces together. Oh! What we discovered:
a midsummer night's dream
at the abingdon theatere arts complex
and the Smithsonian American Art Museum
in Washington, D.C.
For more detail read John Hudson's briefing for the actors in the production,
his thesis at the Shakespeare Institute, his article on Midsummer in the Birmingham Journal for Literature and Language, and his exciting exoneration of Ms. parker in The Clyde Fitch Report.
In this clip, Oberon reveals the true meaning of the "flower."
In the photo, Kirsta Peterson as Bottom, Monica Cortez as the Bee, and Megan McGrath and Amanda Bruton as soldiers.
Puck and the Faeries.
"a treasure trove..."
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"Something revolutionary..."
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"...like a light going on..."
Directed by
Mahayana Landowne
Assistant Directed
by Jenny Greeman
Performances by:
Amanda Bruton
Monica Cortez
Megan McGrath
Kirsta Peterson
Building on work by Stanford professor Patricia Parker, in 2007 the DLP showed that this play contains an underlying allegorical layer of meaning - including a parody of the crucifixion and references to the Roman-Jewish War - which completely transform the meaning of the play:
Bottom = Pyramus = Jesus
Flute = Thisbe = the Church
Titania = Titus Caesar, destroyer of Jerusalem
Oberon = Yahweh (Jehovah), the Hebrew God
Puck = Robin = the Devil
The Wall = the partition between Earth and Heaven
The Little Indian (Changeling) Boy = the Jewish Messiah
The little boy’s Votress mother = the Virgin Mary
...and more!
shakespeare's virgin marys
Directed by
Jenny Greeman
Performances by:
Anna Wood
"This work opens new and breathtaking performance avenues for professional companies and a multitude of possibilities for researchers” -Professor Kelly Morgan, Chair, American College Theater Festival
We continued our re-thinking
and re-inventing of Shakespeare’s
plays in 2009—with Othello, Romeo & Juliet,
and Hamlet . Once more, we identified
‘unthinkable’ innovative solutions that others
had missed. We took the academic research
that had shown these plays contain allegories
of the Virgin Mary, and demonstrated that they
are comic parodies, as described in ‘Shakespeare’s Virgin Mary Spoofs.’ worked out how to perform them—by over-turning traditional dramaturgy
and assumptions. The photograph illustrates how the nunnery and sewing scenes from Hamlet, together with the references to maggots in a dead dog, imply that Ophelia gets pregnant as the
Virgin Mary got pregnant by the Holy Ghost.
For more information read The Virgin Mary Parodies and Shakespeare’s Virgin Marys or watch slides of the show!
hamlet's apocalypse
Directed by
Jenny Greeman
Performances by:
Alexandra Cohen-Spiegler
as Hamlet
the Anti-Christ
Mimi Hirt
as Ophelia
the woman crowned with thesun/the Virgin Mary
Shykia Fields
as Claudius
the Beast
Petra Denison
as Gertrude
the Whore of Babylon
Megan McGrath
as Polonius
God the Father
Lindsay Tanner
as Laertes
the Resurrected Christ
Bella Poyton
as Horatio
Funded in part by the Ada G. and Stanley L. Halbreich Foundation and based on work by Shakespeare scholar Linda Hoff, this production shows that the play is not a tragedy but a black comedy which parodies Doomsday in the Book of Revelation. A background article on the Jewish religious allegories in Shakespeare’s plays can be found here.
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Ophelia is a parody of both the Virgin Mary and the Woman Crowned with the Sun; Gertrude is a parody of the Whore of Babylon; Laertes is Christ; King Claudius a parody of the 7 headed Beast. Hamlet has multiple allegories including the Beast from the Sea, (the original Anti-Christ), Emperor Nero (the first human Anti-Christ) and Martin Luther (the second anti-Christ). But in this Apocalypse everything goes wrong, the Rule of God (that’s what Osric means) all goes wrong, and at the end instead of Jerusalem a city of gold, we get its comic equivalent from the Arabian Nights, a fort-in-brass.
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Watch the slide presentation, read the forthcoming tv interview on Hamlet’s Apocalypse.
DLP is made possible in part through the sponsorship of The Field, with funding provided by
ART New York Nancy Quinn Fund, the Halbreich Foundation, & individual donors.
In 2014, as part of a DLP festival weekend including film screenings, play readings, and
lectures, the DLP also fully staged an all women production of ‘Writing Othello,’ an
'Othello' adaptation that inserts the author - Amelia Bassano Lanier - as a character.
Our script intersperses scenes fom Othello with scenes of the play's conception by its author,
an onstage Emilia Bassano Lanier, as well as the parallel moments from her life that inspired her writing.
We posit that her many layered work is a parody of the gospels and that Desdemona parallels
the Virgin Mary, while Othello in his jealousy parodies her jealous Joseph husband from the
mystery plays. We also explained the identity of the all
important handkerchief.
Our production at New Perspectives showed that the
figure of the maid Emilia is an allegory for author Amelia
Bassano herself, and furthermore that the she was
utterly feminist and well ahead of her time in the ideas
she conveyed. To learn more, read the article about it
in Howlround.
W R I T I N G O T H E L L O
a N A D A P T A T I O N B Y J O H N H U D S O N A N D J E N N Y G R E E M A N
Directed by Jenny Greeman
Stage Manager Lauren Arneson
Costumes by Elizabeth Weitzen
Performances by:
Emily Bentley
Mary Sheridan
In February 2014, DLP had a pilot event at Kávé - an immersive, multi-disciplinary, burlesque, salon, rave, party, theatre explosion. Featuring a cast and crew of more than twenty collaborators, sponsored by Absente Absinthe and Shag Shop in Brooklyn, and conceived and created by resident DLP designer Elizabeth Weitzen, the event was attended by more than 350 revelers. Keep a look out - this one will come back!
Dark Lady Players © 2019 All Rights Reserved; Site Design by Elizabeth Weitzen