|
|
| Sunday, March 22, 2009 09:50 AM |
| On the Stage - William Shakespeare's Land of the Dead |
 by Fëanor |
As I mentioned in the previous post, I saw this show last night with a bunch of friends at the Plays & Players theater in Philly. It was pretty clever. It opened with a couple of women in period garb handing out big plastic sheets to the first three rows, warning them to be sure to cover up when zombies were on stage, to avoid being spattered with blood and gore! (When a play has a splash zone, you know it's going to be good.) After this a screen was set up and some very funny titles were projected onto it, advertising T-shirts and preparing us for what we were about to see. The screen was set back up before the start of the second act and this time the projections asked us some trivia questions about Shakespeare, and again advertised the T-shirts. These projected titles were arguably the funniest parts of the play. Very clever, witty, Monty Python-style humor with some very up-to-date pop culture references thrown in.
The play itself is set backstage at the Globe Theater when it was brand new, right after the first production of Henry V. Shakespeare's former star player, Will Kemp, shows up and they spar with each other a bit; Shakespeare is still fuming from the way Kemp betrayed him, his words, and the character he was playing: Falstaff. Shakespeare was so upset about it he killed off Falstaff and removed Kemp from the company. Later Sir Francis Bacon shows up with a play he's written called Falstaff in Love, apparently an early version of The Merry Wives of Windsor. He can't be known to have written the play, but if he commissions Shakespeare to put his own name on it and produce it, with Kemp returning to the role of Falstaff, he hopes he will gain the favor of the Queen. Shakespeare is loath to bring back Kemp and Falstaff for various reasons, but Bacon's money is good, and he feels backed into a corner.
But all of that becomes a bit less important when the Globe is besieged by the Afflicted: raging, mindless, undead cannibals who are clearly zombies. Shakespeare, Bacon, Kemp, and a number of the other players end up trapped in the Globe along with Queen Elizabeth, her guards and ladies in waiting, and Doctor John Dee. Dee is convinced he knows the reason for the contagion (an overbalance of the humors), and even believes that a vial of metaphysic in his house would cure it. Bacon is wholly against venturing out of the theater to acquire this unlikely cure, but Shakespeare and some of the others decide it's worth a shot. But only one of them is able to sneak out before Bacon shuts down the plan. All that's left to do after that is wait and hope and try to survive the onslaught.
The play is funny and smart, incorporating many lines from Shakespeare's plays into the dialogue, and managing to make the rest of the lines sound reasonably authentic. The fact that it's set backstage at a playhouse is very appropriate, as its focus is entirely on the theater: plays, their nature and longevity; playwrights and actors, how they interact, and who is the true author of a play (examined through the rocky relationship between Shakespeare and Kemp); and authenticity and authorship in general. There are some clever jokes about the controversy over who wrote Shakespeare's plays, via the subplot with Francis Bacon and Falstaff in Love.
And of course, there are also zombies! Sadly, the zombie fighting is clumsy and obviously fake, and the blood effects are not the greatest. Poppy and I both wanted a lot more blood and gore. Still, I wasn't expecting Hollywood blockbuster-level effects and fight choreography, and was willing to overlook a lot of the faults in this area.
Some spoilers: everyone dies at the end! Because of the historical connection, this surprised me a bit, but I guess I should have seen it coming. It's a story about zombies, after all. And anyway you can't help but enjoy the outrageous ending wherein the whole cast performs "Thriller," with dancing and lip-syncing and everything.
The play has moments of hilarity, brutal cold-bloodedness, romance, heroism, and self sacrifice. I'm not sure what the message is ultimately, but it's fun, smart, and thought-provoking, and we all had a good time. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jim Genzano's books on Goodreads
