Organizational Profile Of The Dark Lady Players

A.R.T. NEW YORK ORGANIZATION PROFILE: THE DARK LADY PLAYERS www.darkladyplayers.com I. CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND The Dark Lady Players are a small, three year old, experimental theater ensemble dedicated to demonstrating the religious allegories in the Shakespearean plays. In doing so we make use of existing academic scholarship that is usually confined to the scholarly journals. Our productions are both extremely experimental and extremely Elizabethan, and offer audiences an entirely new kind of theatrical experience. Unlike other Off Off Broadway ensembles, all our productions begin with a very long research and development process, and the creation of a new script that resembles a scholarly edition of the play. We then typically go through 20 to 25 major script revisions, initially in the leadership team, then with the actors as table work, then in the rehearsal room. Our overall objective is to evolve new kinds of dramaturgy that will bring the allegorical meanings on stage as a kind of living footnote, in order to stimulate new audience insight into the meaning of the plays. II. DEFINING THE CENTER A. The Leadership The artistic director and dramaturg responsible for the new scholarship that underpins the Dark Lady Players is John Hudson. He has a 25 year track record of developing innovative industry models and in pioneering major organizational change. He has a M.A. in Shakespeare and Theater from the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, where he wrote a thesis on experimental allegorical dramaturgy. The resident director is Jenny Greeman who directed our Shakespeare's Three Marys as part of the Where Eagles Dare Short Subjects Festival, As You Like It workshops at Manhattan Theater Source in March 2008 and assistant directed our 2007 Dream. She has over a decade of NYC theatre experience as an actor, producer, director and arts administrator. In Spring 2009 Hudson and Greeman wrote The Shakespeare Show, a play about the Shakespearean authorship which was broadcast on "Steal This Radio" (nytalkradio.net), and this Fall they will be giving a lecture and workshop at Eastern Connecticut State University. B. Beliefs, Core Values and Philosophy The core belief of the Dark Lady Players is that the Shakespearean plays contain religious allegories, which are Jewish in nature, and that this makes it likely they were at least partly written by England’s only Jewish poet, Amelia Bassano Lanier. In 2007 the Shakespearean Authorship Trust in the UK listed her as one of the top 8 authorship candidates. The

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first major academic article on her as the likely author of the plays (by John Hudson), will appear in November 2009 in the special issue of the peer reviewed journal, The Oxfordian, which is dedicated to analyses of the top authorship candidates. The Dark Lady Players want to promote the case for Lanier by demonstrating these Jewish allegories on stage and publicizing their existence to create public debate and bring about a social change in the perception of the plays, as complex allegorical works. This will require a multi-generational cultural and organizational change process over several decades and we have a multi-pronged approach. This starts with the creation of a social network of trained theater professionals currently in their 20’s. As their careers progress they will be in a position to take our approach to other communities. In addition, we are creating relationships with academic organizations, established theatre companies/producers, and the Jewish community. The creation of such relationships as part of our second and third planning circles is critical to support the Company and depends on establishing networking relationships and broadening our exposure. C. Aesthetic/Curatorial/Programmatic Framework The Dark Lady Players have a low cost, minimalist aesthetic that derives from ‘poor theater’ and the Elizabethan stage. The major props in our last production were pieces of cardboard and colored cloth. However, we are interested in incorporating multi-media and new media resources as finances allow. Our programmatic framework is to reveal the underlying Jewish allegories in the Shakespearean plays, and to invite audiences to consider how they got there. We are using the plays to stimulate audience inquiry. In order to do this, we employ a performance style that is highly meta-theatrical, that presents the plays as constructed objects. It makes the construction visible by alerting the audience to the existence of relevant inter-textual allusions, and allegories that impact the meaning as the play progresses. Our purpose is to perform the underlying allegories in the play--not the surface of the play itself—as an exercise in applied educational theater. Because we consider our work to be of historic importance we take time to document our productions and make our materials publicly available to others who can use them and spread the word. We collaborate wherever possible with film makers, journalists and others interested in recording our work without cost to ourselves. For instance the 15 minute 2008 documentary ‘The Dark Lady Discovery’ on YouTube has been viewed 6,000 times. All our working papers are put on the publishing site Scribd.com, where they have been viewed 17,000 times in the last four

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months. We are currently working with 9 NYC playwrights who are writing short plays about Amelia Bassano Lanier, for a reading of plays on her life at a one day festival in December 2009. D. Working Values Because we want our audiences to think deeply about the Shakespearean plays, our critical working value is that members of the Dark Lady Players themselves should be interested in studying the texts deeply and also open minded about new possibilities. We have an unusually long process of table work before we get into the rehearsal room, in order train actors in the relevant scholarship. Our preference in recruiting actors is that they have conservatory training in Shakespeare, ideally at RADA,LAMDA, BADA or at Shakespeare and Co. Having an ensemble of actors who are already classically trained makes it easier to go more deeply into the text, and it enables the actors to participate in the lengthy process of script adaptation. This also creates stronger bonds between the actors than usual and makes the actors more knowledgeable advocates for our work. Our normal selection process begins by a review of resumes. In addition to specific Shakespearean training we look for experience on nonUniversity productions of Shakespeare or other Renaissance playwrights. Selection is by interview to assess whether there is a ‘fit’ with our approach; followed by a theatrical audition. We also believe that actors should receive at least a minimal payment for their work, and will be entitled to a share in any downstream profits (if any materialize), in the long term. Wherever possible actors are recruited with a view to participating in productions over a couple of years. III. RANGE OF PROGRAMS Productions. The Dark Lady Players have done adaptations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (60 minutes) and of As You Like It (90 minutes), and Shakespeare’s Three Marys, a 50 minute ‘cabaret’ or miscellany of scenes from multiple plays, all of which showed Shakespearean heroines as allegorical parodies of the Virgin Mary.

Staged readings/Illustrated lectures. The Dark Lady Players did their first lecture with extracts from our production of Midsummer Night's Dream at the Washington Shakespeare Festival in 2007 and were invited to present at the 2008 NYU Shakespeare Theatre Conference. This was followed by a free lecture and workshop at Manhattan Theater Source in 2008 on our production of AYLI. In 2009 we did 2 free afternoon performances with a talkback. One of these began in Washington Square Park and then led a procession to the nearby theater.

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Academic workshop. This fall, the leadership of the Dark Lady Players will be doing an interactive workshop with students in the drama department at Eastern Connecticut State University. This will include showing video footage from last year’s productions. IV. OVERARCHING GOALS The goals of the Dark Lady Players are to help audiences to understand the allegories in the Shakespearean plays, to create a public dialogue about what their existence implies for the authorship of the plays, and to create a kind of performance aesthetic in which the allegories can be demonstrated onstage. In the short term our key goal is to recruit an audience and supporters to enable us to get a balanced budget, so that our work is self-financing. In the longer term, by creating interest in this approach and documenting our work, we want to encourage other theaters to put on their own allegorical productions, and to build interest at JCCs, Hillels, and centers of Jewish learning. Ultimately we want to find a home at an institution like a university, museum or major theater to assure the continuity of our work. V. MEASURES OF SUCCESS One critical measure is whether we are able to attract an audience separate from those who come through our personal networks, and the cost of sale per audience member. The most successful approach so far at reaching new audiences has been performing at ManhattanTheaterSource which to some extent has a built in audience that attend plays there and has their own methods of outreach, which keep the cost of audience recruitment low. However, as these performances so far have been free they do not add to the sustainability of the company. We measure the impact of the Dark Lady Players on our audience using paper and pencil surveys for at least two performances from each production. Our primary measure is to what extent the performance helped the audience understand the allegories in the plays. For our 2009 production this was 79%. For our 2008 workshop it was 83% for a general theater going audience, and 91% for a specialist audience of theater professionals. We also assess whether audiences find the production enlightening, which has been constant in the range 66 to 69% for the last two years. This year we have begun to assess the personal impact on audience members, 46% of whom said it made them feel more imaginative and 38% that it made them feel more creative.

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