The Dark Lady Players - Allegory in Performance

Allegory in Performance

In 2007 the Dark Lady Players performed the world's first allegorical production of any Shakespearean play, ''A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Abingdon Theater in New York. The allegory was based on work by Professor Patricia Parker in her article 'Murals and Morals; A Midsummer Night's Dream' (1998). She believes that Pyramus and Thisbe were an allegory for Jesus and the Church, the Wall is the Partition that comes down on the day of Apocalypse, Peter Quince is Saint Peter, and Puck is the Devil. In addition, the production used work by John Hudson, in his 2008 thesis at the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham, to show the allegorical identity of all the other characters. The result was a consistent religious allegory—but one that was Jewish in nature rather than Christian—because it ends with a Jewish Apocalypse featuring a dew blessing, after the comic re-union in Quince's play-within-the-play ended in the deaths of both protagonists.

In 2008 the Dark Lady Players performed two different versions of As You Like It, which draws on the allegory first hypothesized by Richard Knowles. The workshop production was directed by Greeman as part of the Shakespeare Symposium at ManhattanTheaterSource. The subsequent production in summer 2008 at the Midtown International Theatre Festival was directed by the English Shakespeare director Stephen Wisker. A Manhattan Spotlight Special was made for Manhattan cable television on the production. The work was presented at Eastern Connecticut State University on 11 November 2009, and their lecture Who Wrote Shakespeare? is available at the University website. On 15 December 2009 at Manhattan Theater Source they produced a festival of short plays written about Amelia Lanier by nine New York City playwrights. Playwright Bella Poynton was the festival winner, and then commissioned by the company to write a full length play detailing Lanier's life.

In September 2009 the Dark Lady Players produced a piece titled Shakespeare's Three Virgin Marys, which examined the allegorical Mary figures identified in the academic literature by researchers such as Chris Hassel, Linda Hoff, and Steve Sohmer. Extracts from the production were featured in a TV news feature on the Dark Lady Players that was broadcast on The Jewish Channel on September 11, 2009. The Dark Lady Players produced Hamlet's Apocalypse, an allegorical version of Hamlet in November 2010 at Manhattan Theatre Source in Greenwich Village.

In 2011, the company performed a site-specific museum-style tour of Shakespeare's Gospel Parodies, subtitled "A Medieval Mystery Tour" at The Center at West-Park Church, in repertory with the Woodshed Collective's The Tenant. The show featured docents, played by actors, who led audience members on tours through 12 scenes from Shakespeare. In 2012 the DLP presented a one-night lecture event on Shakespeare's Annunciation Parodies, featuring scenes from Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, and Othello. The Dark Lady Players entered an ensemble piece roughly titled "Shakespeare Flash Mob" for the 2012 Figment Festival on Governors Island in Massachusetts, and performed a full-length original play by Bella Poynton, Midsummer Madness, in August 2012 at the Central Park Bandshell.

"Some directors anachronistically set the plays at the North Pole or in outer space or in a Mafia village. They therefore destroy and suppress the allusions that the plays contain and make them impossible to discern. I understand why directors who do not understand the plays might resort to such misleading devices. But they should do so no longer, and should use their staging to reveal what the author really meant." —John Hudson, Shakespeare Institute

Current company members include Melisa Annis, Megan McGrath, Alexandra Cohen Spiegler, Mimi Hirt, Elizabeth Weitzen, Petra Denison and Bella Poynton.