BEDLAM:
Making Shakespeare Pop Culture Again

            This craft talk recounts the creation of the Shakespeare mash-up web-series BEDLAM (2021), detailing the collaborative process through which my co-writer, the off-Broadway director and series creator Eric Tucker, myself, and a fearless team of actors and film crew attempted to bring experimental Shakespeare into a genuinely popular medium: television.

            BEDLAM twists together the stories and characters of King Lear and The Merry Wives of Windsor in an HBO-style series set in a gritty, small-time, crime world. While our show takes great freedom with Shakespeare’s plays, we draw heavily on key features of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. Juxtaposing plots gives BEDLAM the tonal variety so distinctive to Shakespeare’s work, swerving from low-life con men plotting in the urinals to moments of strange magic. In melding characters— for example, combining the self-interested scammer Falstaff with the faithful Fool—we are adopting one of Shakespeare’s most innovative insights for creating the illusion of interiority: characters who behave in contradictory ways seem more like real people.            

            While King Lear and Merry Wives form the core of the expanded plot, our series incorporates dialogue from fifteen other plays and a dozen poems. This pastiche script underscores how deeply Shakespeare’s plays speak to each other, exploring different versions of conflicts between parents and children, rulers and subjects. Combining theatergrams from multiple sources in a new arrangement creates something like the experience of repertory, in which the previous roles of actors inform their current characters. The insertion of contemporary slang tricks the ears of the audience, making the verse sound as natural as modern speech. In this spirit, Edmund (Ryan Quinn) delivers his “bastardy” monologue as a stand-up comedy act. Rev. Evans’s double entendre heavy Latin lesson becomes a masturbatory Zoom call. We invited the composer Ahmond to set a half-dozen sonnets to new music in contemporary genres—country, hip hop, post punk—embedded diagetically in the dive bar open mic nights, car radios, and singing telegrams of tawdry Windsor City.

            We wanted to give viewers a version of Shakespeare in which they could recognize themselves. Audiences, particularly younger viewers, feel more seen and spoken to when somebody soliloquizing looks like them. Pitching our series to networks such as Netflix, we stressed the value of inclusive, color-conscious casting that invites audiences to see themselves in the stories they watch without perpetuating damaging stereotypes. To counter the straightwashing so pervasive in modern productions of Shakespeare we fill our Windsor City with queer people, regendering roles to match the identities of performers, and reimagining Dover as a queer squat full of teen runaways, a reparative place of mutual aid and chosen family where love “take[s] up what is cast away.” BEDLAM treats Shakespeare as a raw and malleable piece of shared culture available for use. Our series refashions Shakespeare’s plays for post-Trump America. It is a show about narcissists with power; about how abusive dynamics within families are inflicted on the outside world; about the divide between those who look after others and those who look out for themselves.

Bio: Dr. Musa Gurnis (PhD Columbia) is a theater scholar and practitioner. She is the author of Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling: Theater in Post-Reformation London, co-published by the University of Pennsylvania Press and the Folger Shakespeare Library (2018). She is a co-editor of Publicity and the Early Modern Stage: People Made Public (Palgrave 2021). Musa’s articles appear in academic journals such as Shakespeare, Shakespeare Studies, and, most recently, in the Arden Shakespeare’s essay collection The Changeling: State of Play (2022). She has held fellowships from the Andrew C. Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library, and the Folger Shakespeare Library; and taught early modern English drama extensively while an Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Musa has dramaturged projects such as the devised piece Shakespeare Is A White Supremacist (Fractal Theater Collective, DC); nude performances of Hamlet and The Rover in Prospect Park (Torn Out Theater, NY); Romeo and Juliet (Gate Theatre, Dublin); and As You Like It (Abbey National Theatre, Dublin). For Bedlam Theatre (NY), Musa has dramaturged the The Crucible, King Lear, and The Winter’s Tale. The company has a production of her new adaptation of Jane Eyre in development. As an actor, Musa has trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (London), The Shakespeare Theatre Company (DC), The Red Bull Theater (NY), and HB Studios (NY). In the Shakespeare mash-up webseries BEDLAM, which she co-wrote with Eric Tucker, she plays Regan.