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Review of Dark Lady Players' Allegorical Midsummer Night's Dream
Review of Dark Lady Players' Allegorical Midsummer Night's Dream
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M. George Stevenson
Dark Lady Players' "Midsummer"
March 28 to April 1
Abingdon Theatre Arts Complex, 312 W. 36th St., first floor.
Presented by the Dark Lady Players
Wed-Sat at 8:00 pm, Matinees Sat and Sun at 3:00 pm
$16 general admission. Ticketing: SMARTTIX (212) 868-4444, www.smarttix.com
Runs 75 minutes.
(This play is not a production of The Abingdon Theater Company, Inc.)
Midsummer Night's Dream: A Comic Jewish Satire'' to highlight the text, subtexts, and
intertexts that show how such familiar characters as Puck, Bottom, Peter Quince and Fairy King
and Queen Oberon and Titania are in fact a complex allegory about the falsity of the Gospels
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that was concocted by a ex-lover of Christopher Marlowe named Amelia Bassano Lanyer, a
woman who is also the Dark Lady of the Sonnets and the first woman in England to publish
poetry under he own name.
But what Mr. Hudson's case has that other theories lack (and I say this as a devout
''Stratfordian,'' one who believes ''Shagspere'' wrote Shakespeare) is not just temporal
plausibility -- most of the standard candidates died long before the last original Shakespeare
play was licensed for production, whereas Amelia Bassano outlived him by some 30 years:
Unlike the anti-Stratfordians who clutch their pearls at the idea that a low-born country
bumpkin was the greatest writer of all time and seek a more socially acceptable author, Mr.
Hudson was doing graduate work on Biblical typologies in the plays and found that there was a
good deal that was not only not Catholic (Hudson subscribes to the recent scholarship
suggesting that ''Shagspere'' was among Elizabethan England's Roman refuseniks), but actively
Jewish.
all the additions add to the Jewish satire,'' Mr. Hudson says.
Mr. Hudson's commitment to demonstrating how central the satire is to ''A Midsummer Night's
Dream'' led him to form the Dark Lady Players, initially via a series of workshops. The chief
task was finding a way to, as Mr. Hudson puts it, ''Let the audience see with Elizabethan eyes.
It's similar to what [actor/director] Mark Rylance is doing at the Globe [Theater in London],
building on what he's done. We're not adding 12-foot fairies or 20-foot chandeliers, just simple
Renaissance conventions of illustrating the text that were lost in the transition to the more
naturalistic style of the proscenium stage.
''Nobody could have performed the allegory in Elizabethan times because they would have been
killed as traitors,'' Mr. Hudson adds. ''But the allegories are easily playable within the
conventions of [medieval] mystery plays and, later, [Bertolt] Brecht.''
Assistant director Jenny Greeman sees what they're doing as ''trying to bring [Mr. Hudson's]
footnotes to life: ‘Look! An intertextual reference!' There's a lot of signage, which is a fun,
visual way to put a spotlight on the references to poets and mythology and, certainly, the
Bible.'' It's completely different from modern, internalized techniques of acting, she says, ''but
I've always had a suspicion that [those approaches] didn't work for Shakespeare anyway. It's too
verbal; there's no fourth wall. So it's been freeing to be told you must work in a more
presentational form.''
Mr. Hudson is almost certainly the first Authorship Controversy theorist to put his research
literally on its feet: However much Orson Welles may have believed in the Earl of Oxford
theory, there was nothing ''Oxfordian'' about his Shakespeare productions. For Mr. Hudson, it's
simply as another part of the research process. ''I don't pretend to do anything other than start a
new line of inquiry,'' he says. ''There's an immense amount of work left to do, but it's a good
start.''
So far, he's pleased with the results: ''I'm very, very happy
with the actors we have. They're very young and not
being paid but they do believe in it. The quality of the
acting, because they know what we're talking about, is
very, very good and we've only been together a few
months.'' /His vision includes more performances of the
current production -- scenes from which they played last
week at Mr. Hudson's lecture on the Bassano theory at the
Smithsonian Institution -- and beginning workshops for a
future version of ''The Tempest.''
A scene in ''A Midsummer Night's Dream.'' Photo by
Koen Machielse. Ms. Greeman sees what they're doing as ''using our
theatrical knowledge to try to bring to life what John has discovered. If you're playing Titus
Caesar [according to Mr. Hudson's allegorical reading, Fairy Queen Titania represents the
Roman Emperor Titus], it's going to inform your body movement in a much different way than
if you‚re playing Titania with a pink dress and a tiara.'' Still, she offers, ''The main difference is
working on such a familiar piece of material in a completely different way, and it's been
amazing how we've been able to find them so easily – it's [started to seem] odd that it's not what
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© M. George Stevenson
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