HERE WE GO

After a week to scramble, a cast has been assembled for Murdering Marlowe.

We had auditions then conducted some callbacks (rare for me) and were finally able to put together a group of talented people.

Tonight we'll meet to read the play and go over introductions. This will give us roughly 9 weeks to get this play in shape. That should be enough and with the commitment of everyone involved, this should be another exciting show.

Currently, I've been tossing around the idea of staging this play with a film-noir/neo-noir style. Charles Marowitz, the playwright, says the play is above all a thriller rather than a period drama. I would agree. He actually has a wonderful mock interview with Will Shakespeare that sheds some light on moving classical plays to different time periods.

CM: Does it bother you to have your plays radically reinterpreted, their time periods changed, the characters costumed in attire ranging from the Stone Age to the 21st century?

WS: Why should it? I did the same in my own time. We played in "modern dress," you know -- or what was modern in the l6th and l7th centuries. It doesn't matter to me what the clothes look like, or the settings. What does bother me is when these wiseacres impose a new story on to mine which disintegrates the original and makes a mush of both. It's like a bad organ transplant; the original organism rejects the new heart or liver and the fusion only draws attention to the incompatibility of both. Now that really does get my goat!

CW: So you don't mind being freely "reinterpreted"?

WS: Being reinterpreted is the only way my work can possibly survive. It almost perished in the Victorian era because a few fussbudgets were determined to protect and defend me against distortion -- but what they called "distortion" was really the Present interacting with the Past, which is the bounden duty of the Present to do. God forfend that I should fall into the hands of the Purists, the Scholars, and the Academics! They're the New Puritans and we have to fight them as staunchly today as I did five centuries ago.

Interesting stuff. And I couldn't agree more. The plays won't survive if we don't constantly play with them in order to discover what lies beneath the text. Or what new worlds are waiting for us to wake up.