As You Like It: The Big Flush

As You Like It: The Big Flush (classic/experimental)
by Amelia Bassano Lanier a.k.a. William Shakespeare
directed by Stephen Wisker
featuring: The Dark Lady Players
with Kate Murray as Rosalind, and Kirsta Peterson as Touchstone, the basanos.
http://www.darkladyplayers.com
Running time; 1 Hour 30 minutes

The Dark Lady Players, one of the world's most experimental Shakespeare companies, are remaking Jewish history. They perform the allegorical level of the Shakespearean plays to show that they were written by England's only Jewish poet the so-called 'Dark Lady', Amelia Bassano Lanier (1569-1645), who is now listed by the Shakespearean Authorship Trust as one of the top ten authorship candidates. Mistress to the man in charge of the English theater, and the first woman to publish a book of original poetry in England, she has never before been considered as a likely author, simply because of her sex and the color of her skin.

Articles on our work have appeared over the last year in Jewish Week, New Jersey Jewish News, the Jewish Daily Forward, on Jewcy.com as well as full page articles in The Villager and Village Voice. (All available in the press cuttings section at www.Darkladyplayers.com). Articles are about to appear in the UK journal Jewish Renaissance and Lilith Magazine.

Our work shows that, like the other plays, As You Like It was written as Jewish revenge literature using a a structure of double allegories found in Elizabethan writings. The play is a Jewish toilet joke about Christianity and the Roman-Jewish war. That is why this adaptation highlights the two characters called Jaques/Jakes (Elizabethan for toilet), and the character whose pocket watch identifies him as Sir John Harrington, the inventor of the flush toilet!

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?

What exactly is this strange 'forest' with its many peculiar features? The author has left us clues! Guess what actually was surrounded by a 'circle', was a 'temple', turned into a 'desert', where everyone was starving, where there was a massacre of 'greasy citizens', people were hung on trees, where a 'lodge' was indeed burnt, and where there was a real 'Roman Conqueror'? Yes indeed, this detailed description fits only one historical circumstance-the siege of Jerusalem by the Romans 66-70C.E.! The play was written as a satirical allegory against Vespasian Caesar, the Roman conqueror of the Jews, who appears as the satanic Duke Senior. At the end, both he and his children (Titus and Domitian Caesar, who also make an allegorical appearance in the play), will be flushed away in an act of fantastic comic revenge by the English Jewish poet Amelia Bassano- who is the basanos or Touchstone, a misunderstood poet like Ovid--- wearing her allegorical disguise of the inventor of the toilet!

Further details, and information about the forthcoming biography The Dark Lady: the Woman who Wrote Shakespeare are available from Darkladyplayers@aol.com.

Show times are as follows;

Sunday 20 July at 4.30pm
Saturday 26 July at 3.45pm
Sunday 3 August at 7.30pm
www.midtownfestival.org
WHERE EAGLES DARE THEATER,
347 WEST 36TH STREET (8/9) NYC
TICKETS; 212-279-4200
http://www.ticketcentral.com/showdetails2.asp?showid=1746


STEPHEN WISKER is an English Theatre director who received a MFA in Directing Shakespeare from the University of Essex and trained at the Royal National Theatre's Studio Directors Course. He has been the Shakespeare teacher for Atlantic Acting School/ NYU Tisch School of the Arts. New York Shakespeare directing credits include Something Is Rotten on W37th: A Modern Adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet at The Zipper Theater and The Tempest at The Belt Theatre. Recent productions in Europe include: Love's Mistress at Shakespeare's Globe, Shakespeare e Il Gentil Sesso at the Edinburgh Festival, Antony and Cleopatra at the Birmingham School of Acting, an all-female Julius Caesar at The Man in The Moon, and Pyramus and Thisbe, a devised piece with an international cast, at the Actors Centre which was performed at the Edinburgh Festival. He first came to New York in 2002 to direct two World Premieres: Charles Evered's Adopt A Sailor and J. Dakota Powell's Exodus at the Brave New World Festival: New York Theatre Responds to 9-11 on Broadway, and directed the Spring 2005 production of Can't Pay! Won't Pay! at the Loft. Before moving to New York Stephen taught Shakespeare at the Actor's Centre in London. A devotee of clowning, self-conscious theatricality, and non-traditional casting, his work explores storytelling with physical as well as verbal language.

JOHN HUDSON is Artistic Director and Dramaturg to the Dark Lady Players. He has an MA in Shakespeare and Theatre from the University of Birmingham, The Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-Upon-Avon. In Spring 2007 his production of Midsummer Night's Dream; A Comic Jewish Satire led the Shakespearean Authorship Trust in the UK to support Amelia Bassano Lanier as one of the top ten candidates for the Shakespearean Authorship.