A Fantasy Theatre Season

I have a scathingly brilliant idea.

What if I proposed a season of four plays, and 15–18 of you volunteered to be in all four shows and we just rehearsed them and put them out there?

Wait, where are you going? Did I mention that all four plays are either about or by William Shakespeare?

our friend bill

Fine, I’ll just do it by myself.

We’ll open with Jane Anger, by Talene Monahan. Jane Anger, a lower class woman of color in 1606, has a cunning plan to get her manifesto on the rights of women published by getting Willy Shakespeare to sign a letter to a publisher that he wants it published. Alas, the plague immediately descends on London. She has to climb through his apartment window to get access, where she finds Willy and a servant, Francis, who wants to play Juliet despite not being 16 in any way shape or form. Jane helps Willy through his writer’s block to write King Lear — that’s L-E-A-R, not L-E-I-R. Then Anne Hathaway (aka Mrs. Shakespeare) shows up, crawling through the window. Hilarity and much Pythonesque bloodshed ensue before we get to a bizarre albeit satisfying conclusion. [N.B.: Jane Anger was an actual person.]

Then we’ll do Fortinbras, by Lee Blessing. We open with the final scene of Hamlet, with Hamlet dying in Horatio’s arms. The English ambassador attempts to give his report, but before he can finish “…to tell him that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are —,” Fortinbras strides onto the stage and promptly things skid off the rails. “They all just kill each other or what?” He rejects the truthful account offered by Horatio — no one would believe it, right? — and decides he will pin the disaster on a “Polish spy” so he can send his Norwegian (Danish? Norwanish? Danweegian?) army to the border to threaten Poland before turning around and coming back. Hilarity ensues: The ghosts of the final scene are hanging around (and he can see them); the army keeps going until they reach India, liberating everyone they come across; and his comfortable ideas about ruling (and his identity) are completely overturned.

I am a bit conflicted about the order of the other two plays.

There’s The Book of Will, by Lauren Gunderson, in which Henry Condell and John Heminges, buds and company members with Shakespeare, are reminiscing fondly about their late friend, reveling in the language and power of his plays. When Richard Burbage, the King’s Players’ chief tragedian, dies unexpectedly, Heminges and Condell realize that most of the plays are just… gone. They embark on finding as many scripts as they can to publish the First Folio. It’s a slog, complete with plot twists and fortuitous discoveries, but they succeed: We would now not have half the plays if they had not succeeded. The final scene is glorious: as they take a copy down to Stratford to give to Anne, she asks them to read it to her — “Isn’t it supposed to be read aloud?” — and as they oblige, we see and hear actors from across four and a half centuries performing those texts.

So my question is: Do we do an actual Shakespeare third, and let Book of Will send us off into the future with warm fuzzies? Or do we do Book of Will third and let Bill’s actual work send us off into the future?

Pericles, Act IV scene 6, from a 1987 production by newnan community theatre company. l–r: Brady butler, dean jackson, jamie mcpherson, denise meacham, glenn rainey

And which work? The wittiest choice would be Pericles if it’s last, because it’s a running gag in Book of Will that Pericles wasn’t really by Will, he just collaborated on it, and so they omitted it. But if we do Lear — hearkening back to Jane Anger — it could go either third or fourth (and I have a really interesting idea for a deconstructed Lear). Or we could choose one of the other plays I haven’t directed yet. (We did Pericles in 1987, for example.)

I think I’ll let the company decide. That’s sensible, right?

So there’s a complete season, riotous, disrespectful, soul-enriching, tear-inducing, a whole universe. In other words, Shakespeare. Turn, turn, kick, turn — yes, it will work!!

(We might even consider The Complete Works of Wm. Shakespeare (abridged), by Adam Long, Daniel Singer, and Jess Winfield as a fifth show, in which three actors do all the shows wham bam thank you ma’am in highly amusing formats. More decisions for the company to make.)