The Dark Lady Players

Darkladyplayers@aol.com

BUSINESS PLAN 2009/2010

A PLAN FOR TRANSFORMING SHAKESPEAREAN PERFORMANCE

1.Introduction
In summer 2008, the investigative journalist Michael Posner wrote a 15 page article on
our work which appeared as the cover story in the Canadian arts magazine The Queen’s
Quarterly. He called it ’Rethinking Shakespeare’ and described the beginning of an
initiative that is transforming how the plays are understood and performed.

2.The Need We Address

Theaters today perform the surface level of the Shakespearean plays, focusing on the
plot, the ability of the actors to simulate real emotions, the set design, lighting etc. But
directors, actors, and theater critics alike are almost completely unaware that these
plays contain multiple layers of meaning, in particular deep religious allegories that
provide the underlying meaning of the play---which the author intended that audiences
should decipher. Because modern theater staff are not educated in deciphering those
allegories themselves, let alone skilled in creating kinds of performance that will reveal
them to the audience, and because audiences do not know what they are missing,
Shakespeare performances today communicate little of the depth of the plays. As
theater critic Mike Daisey noted in his essay ‘Empty Spaces’ many theaters are
“mashing up Shakespeare until it is a thin lifeless paste that any reasonable person
would reject as disgusting.” It is one reason why attendance at Shakespeare productions
is in long-term decline. The mission of the Dark Lady Players is to help change this.

3.Project Description
We are a small theater company in New York City, now in our third year of operation.
Our performances of the Shakespearean plays have significant implications both for the
performing arts and for Jewish culture, because we;

• reveal the underlying Jewish religious allegories in the plays, and

• employ a unique approach to performing them, which

• supports one of the lesser known alternative authorship theories.

The Dark Lady Players are the only theater group in the world that uses performance to
help audiences rethink the underlying meanings of the Shakespearean plays in this way.
The outcomes have extraordinary cultural implications.

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We are seeking funding to enable the Company to produce our allegorical
Shakespearean Miscellany, and a production of Othello in 2010. Both of these will build
upon the Company’s current work Shakespeare’s Three Virgin Mary Allegories, an inter-
textual piece about Ophelia, Desdemona and Juliet, which will have its first reading as
part of ManhattanTheaterSource’s PlayGround Development Series this August,
followed by a site-specific workshop production in September 2009. This document
provides detail about our approach to the plays, the cultural and historical importance of
our work, the reception of previous work, how our work is evaluated, the audiences we
reach, our personnel and project budget.

4.Our Approach to the Plays

Most Shakespeare productions aim at saying the verse beautifully, making the
characters lifelike, and creating an emotionally realistic performance. They avoid
illustrating the text, and often employ a visually entertaining ‘high-concept’ setting in a
proscenium arch theater. Nothing could be more utterly foreign to the Elizabethan stage
for which these plays were first written. It is our fundamental assumption that the
performance of a Shakespearean play should not be judged by anachronistic modern
criteria like the set design, the lighting, the costuming, whether actors are stars, or
display realistic emotions, but by whether the performance helps the audience to
comprehend its underlying allegorical meaning.

That is what the Elizabethan theater did. Realism did not exist. Performances were on a
thrust stage, there was minimal scenery, and acting was highly stylized and meta-
theatrical. Actors were required to ‘illustrate’ the text and there were manuals of
oratorical gestures to enable them to do so. Only the most ignorant members of their
audience would limit their attention to the plot and the “honeyed sweetness of the verse”.
Any educated Elizabethan would understand that the actors were merely ‘puppets’ and
would seek out the underlying allegory that the playwright was conveying. The Dark
Lady Players adhere as far as possible to these Elizabethan conventions. As one cast
member aptly remarked, we treat the play like an enacted three-dimensional crossword
puzzle to be solved in real time---just like on the Elizabethan stage. It is our experience
that this process can facilitate complex insights and startling discoveries about material
which audiences thought they already knew.

5.Cultural and Historical Significance

The Company’s work has global cultural significance for the following reasons:

(a) Allegories: The Dark Lady Players use leading edge scholarship to demonstrate that
the plays contain religious allegories which reveal meanings that are usually confined to
obscure academic literature and never normally shown on-stage. These allegories are
performed onstage using a mixture of Medieval and Renaissance performance
techniques. Parts of them have been previously tested at the New Perspectives Theater
Shakespeare Directors Workshop.

(b) Authorship: The plausibility of a new solution to the authorship problem has grown
in recent years. In a front-page article on April 17, 2009, the Wall Street Journal noted
that 66% of the active Supreme Court Justices are no longer convinced by the evidence
for Mr. Shakespeare. Meanwhile according to a 2007 survey, 17% of English professors
think that the authorship is not resolved, and 5% regard this area as an “exciting
opportunity” with “profound implications”.

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In particular, for many years the allusions in the plays to the Mishnah and the Talmud, as
well as their use of Hebrew puns and occasional words of spoken Hebrew, have been
impossible to explain within the traditional authorship model. The recently discovered
Jewish nature of the allegories in the plays proves to be the decisive evidence to support
an alternative authorship candidate.

Our work supports one of the top authorship candidates to have been recently listed by
the UK Shakespearean Authorship Trust, the feminist poet, Amelia Bassano Lanier
(1569-1645). Her family were Venetian Marrano Jews of Moroccan origin, who became
musicians at the Elizabethan court and subsequently played music for the theater
company that performed the Shakespearean works. One of them composed most of the
surviving music for the Shakespearean plays. Coming from a family described in their
police records as ‘black’, Lanier was the so-called ‘dark lady’ of the sonnets, the mistress
to the man in charge of the English theater, and the first woman to publish a book of
original poetry Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). In addition, her ‘literary signatures’, a
device used in classical literature, have been found on half a dozen of the plays.

(c) Non Realistic Performance: The Dark Lady Players uniquely use an early
Renaissance meta-theatrical performance style, in which the actors are presentational
rhetorical figures, through which the allegory can be discerned. These productions are
much more complicated to stage than usual because of their intensive use of props and
because actors perform multiple additional allegorical characters and dramatize
passages that are not normally dramatized. By bringing the sources on stage, in
dialogue with the Shakespearean text, the audience is able to see how the playwright
modified those sources, and this brings new understanding of the author’s meanings.

This unique bridging of Shakespearean scholarship and theatrical performance,

engages the audience in the process of solving the underlying allegories that the plays
contain. For instance, a short work sample available on the Web as Youtube The Dark
Lady Players - Midsummer Clip shows how the productions ‘point’ specifically to the
allegorical meanings, in this instance Oberon uses a pedagogical style to demonstrate
the specific identity of the ‘flower’ that Puck fetches as the Gospel (in Elizabethan
England ‘flower’ could mean a book).

6.Reception of Previous Work

General articles on our work have appeared in the Times of India, the London Jewish
News, the Forward, Ha’aretz, Lillith, and most recently in the June/July issue of
Hadassah Magazine. There has also been significant coverage in other languages
especially Italian.

Presentations on our work have been made at venues including the Smithsonian,
the Oxfordian Shakespeare conference, the Harlem Arts Alliance, New York University,
Stony Brook University, the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, the
Shakespearean Authorship Trust in London, Creative New York, synagogues in
Westchester and New York, and the Manhattan Jewish Community Center.

The outcomes from our work are significant in changing perception. In 2008, Manhattan
TheatreSource produced a three-day Shakespeare Symposium by the Dark Lady
Players. The formal audience feedback surveys showed that: 87% of the audience
improved their understanding of the underlying allegories in the plays, 83% improved
their understanding of Shakespearean authorship issues and 70% “significantly

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increased” their interest in learning more about Shakespeare.

The Dark Lady Players have done two major demonstration allegorical productions.
• Our production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was demonstrated at the
Smithsonian Institution as part of the Washington Shakespeare Festival in 2007
and then ran at the Abingdon Theater in NYC. An extract is available on the Web
as Youtube The Dark Lady Players - Midsummer Clip. This production was the
subject of a front-page story in the New Jersey Jewish News, as well as full-page
articles in The Villager, the Village Voice and Jewish Week. M. George
Stevenson from the New York Sun called it “a fascinating production performed
with contagious zest and surprising pathos” and the New Jersey Jewish News,
wrote that it had “uproariously funny moments, punctuated by scenes of violent
carnage and deep, spiritual pathos.”

• Our As You Like It was staged at Manhattantheatersource and then at the

Midtown International Theater Festival in 2008. A 30-minute television program
on the production was screened on 4/22/2009 at 9:30 PM, on channel 34 TWC
and on 4/26/2009 at 12 PM, on channel 57 TWC, and can be found on the Web
under the title AS YOU LIKE IT:Interview on Manhattan Entertainment. The use
of innovative techniques throughout the play led Philip Langner, director of the
Theatre Guild, to call this production "the best piece of creative theatre I have
seen in many years."

A 15-minute demonstration tv documentary on the work made by Mitchell Riggs, then at

Stony Brook University Drama Department, was screened in 2008 on Manhattan cable
and can be found on the Web in several places including Youtube The Dark Lady
Discovery and has been viewed over 6,000 times.

7.Academic Reception
The primary purpose of our work is to educate theater professionals and students by
turning obscure academic scholarship into performance. Our change strategy is
intended to make an impact on young acting professionals and theatergoers, rather than
upon the slow-moving world of academia and Shakespeare scholarship. However the
Dark Lady Players have been invited to give the University Lecture and workshops on
last year’s productions of As You Like It at Eastern Connecticut State University in
November 2009, at the invitation of Professor Ellen Brodie and Professor David
Pellegrini of the drama department.

Academics who have already come out in favor of the work include Professor Kelly
Morgan at Fitchburg State College, a former Associate Artistic Director of the Riverside
Shakespeare Company and the founder of the Mint Theater. He states that the research
opens up “breathtaking new avenues” for performance and will restage the Dark Lady
Players’ production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2009. Dr. Catherine Alexander,
who is the Editor of the Cambridge Shakespeare Library and a Fellow of the
Shakespeare Institute, calls the work a “legitimate new area for scholarship”. A two hour
debate on the research with Stratfordian professor Tom Dale Keever was recorded in
April 2009 as a radio program and is available on the Tribeca Radio website.

This research will hopefully have its first academic publication in a 5000 word article
“Amelia Bassano Lanier; A New Paradigm for the Shakespearean Authorship” that was

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commissioned by The Oxfordian, the only journal dedicated to the authorship question. It
will eventually be followed by the print publication of a 250,000 word book The Dark
Lady; the Woman who wrote Shakespeare which is currently available as an E-book,
and is used as a manual by the actors in the Dark Lady Players. An advance review of
this book which appeared as an article ‘Rethinking Shakespeare’ in The Queen’s
Quarterly in summer 2008, concluded that the case for Lanier is “as plausible as
Shakespeare’s”.

8.Project Evaluation Plan

Because our work is an exercise in ‘applied theater’, this project will include an outreach
campaign to create a dialogue among the theater community. Our academic advisors
Professors Brodie, Clarke and Morgan will be involved in designing and evaluating this
process. Our desired outcomes are to have a very high impact on our theater audience’s
understanding of the meaning of the plays, in the same range of 70-85% demonstrated
in our work last year.

For both productions in 2009-10, our success in achieving these outcomes will be
evaluated by a paper based survey. This will use a Likert scale ranking to assess the
contribution that the event made to each respondent’s understanding of the allegories in
the plays, their understanding of the authorship issue, the impact on their future interest
in learning more about Shakespeare, and their ratings of how they expect this allegorical
solving to impact their creativity, imagination, and overall problem-solving capacity in the
future.

9.Personnel
The director of the project will be John Hudson, who is artistic director of the Dark Lady
Players, an ensemble of actors, most of whom trained either at Royal Academy of
Dramatic Arts or at the London Academy of Music and the Dramatic Arts. He has a M.A.
with merit in Shakespeare and Theatre from The Shakespeare Institute, University of
Birmingham, Stratford-Upon-Avon, a B.A. with first class honors specializing in the
sociology of literature, and a M.Sc. in management from the London School of
Economics. He has over 20 years experience in creating innovative business models
and in project management in the communications industry. He has co-authored two
books on Shakespeare, written half a dozen articles, and his radio play on the
authorship question, ‘The Shakespeare Show’ was broadcast on NYC radio in June
2009.

10.Budget and Audience

Although the work of the Dark Lady Players is of historical and cultural importance, and
is changing how we comprehend Shakespeare’s plays, it can only be produced if it
receives foundation and donor support. Because of the current funding environment, it
seems unlikely we will be able to raise the funds even to do ‘Showcase’ level
productions. We therefore have built our 2009/10 budget on doing festival productions
such as Midtown International Theater Festival or the Planet Connections Festival.
These have the lowest up-front costs in theater rental, but the theater operator takes
almost all of the house revenue. We would ideally have greater resources but because
our focus is different from other Shakespeare productions---we focus on enabling
audiences to understand the deepest allegorical meanings of the plays---we can achieve
this objective, if necessary, even with minimal resources and young, unknown,
classically trained actors. Indeed our work over the last 3 years demonstrates that we
can use small investments to achieve exceptional impact.

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Moreover, the performance is only a step towards creating the video and web
distribution that is essential to reach a wider audience. For instance, our Shakespeare
Symposium attracted perhaps 150 people, but the related video Youtube The Dark Lady
Discovery is posted on the web in several places where over 6,000 people have
watched it. We would anticipate similar online audience ratios for the productions
covered in this document. Our work will also be posted on Scribd.com, the world’s
largest publisher, where our past working papers were viewed over 3,000 times in the
first month of posting. In those weeks more people read articles about our production of
As You Like It, than had attended our sold out performances in 2008. Indeed our papers
on the individual plays are currently some of the most viewed Shakespearean
documents on Scribd.com. In addition, a 2 hour program about our work on Tribeca
Internet Radio attracted 8,000 downloads, and a program on our AYLI on Manhattan
CATV also attracted thousands of viewers. So although the number who will see our
work live in 2010 will be small, within a year or so many more people will encounter
some version of it in other media. Together these efforts will slowly begin to change the
way that people perceive the plays, so that their full meaning can be understood.