New Shakespeare Author

Remember I posted a comment a while ago about Amelia Bassano possibly being the real Shakespeare? Well here is the first play she wrote - which will be performed at the Midtown International Theatre Festival in NYC in July.

she wrote
As You Like It; The Big Flush (classic/experimental)
by Amelia Bassano Lanier a.k.a. William Shakespeare
directed by Stephen Wisker MFA
presented by John Hudson & Jenny Greeman
featuring: The Dark Lady Players, Workshop Production
Non Equity
http://www.darkladyplayers.com
Running time; 1 Hour 30 minutes

A Jewish toilet joke written using double allegories-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 they, 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!

The Dark Lady Players, one of the world's most experimental Shakespeare companies, bring scholarship alive! They perform the allegorical level of the Shakespearean plays to show that they were written as Jewish revenge literature. This workshop production will demonstrate the validity of the latest of the top ten theories to be accepted by the Shakespearean Authorship Trust, that the plays were written by England's only Jewish poet the so-called 'Dark Lady', Amelia Bassano Lanier (1569-1645). To watch an extract from a forthcoming documentary go to http://www.darkladyplayers and click on Watch Video. Look for forthcoming article, perhaps on 19 May, in the Globe &Mail. A national and international tour for 2008/9 is being planned.

Show times for As You Like It; The Big Flush are as follows;

Sunday 20 July at 4.30pm
Saturday 26 July at 3.45pm
Sunday 3 August at 7.30pm
For tickets contact 212-279-4200 or www.ticketcentral.com
We are part of the Midtown International Theatre Festival in NYC
www.midtownfestival.org

About the Director; 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.