A quick glance at the titles of the next two JDT Lab productions at Guild Hall might lead one to expect works from the 16th-century English authors Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare. But look closer and you’ll see that Friday evening’s free workshop production is “The Daerie Queene,” a new play by Savannah Hankinson.
“The Daerie Queene” follows Cara (Ms. Hankinson) and her brother, Pete (Trevor Strader), as they try to plan their father’s funeral, encountering along the way an ex-lover, a hot Tinder date, and an overly optimistic funeral director. The play “explores the hilarity of grief,” according to a release.
“The Dairy Queen, the actual ice cream place, is important,” said Ms. Hankinson. “It was a joyful destination in the small town where I grew up until, a few years ago, it closed and was converted into a funeral parlor. That sparked the whole idea for the show.” The funeral home where Cara and Pete take their father after his death is a former Dairy Queen.
The comedy is interwoven with the underlying story of the two siblings. Cara, the more emotional of the two, became her father’s caregiver during the year before his death, while Pete, the more intellectual, received a Fulbright fellowship that took him away until it was time for the final preparations.
Ms. Hankinson, a writer and actor who divides her time between Bridgehampton and Brooklyn, was an English major at Princeton. “I read ‘The Faerie Queene’ and really liked it. I think balancing something that’s very joyful and emotional with something that’s so intellectual is where I was going with the title.”
As a one-act play, “The Daerie Queene” won the Spring One Act Festival at the Manhattan Repertory Theater. Daniel Rattner directs the performance, which is set for 8 p.m.
One of Shakespeare’s more controversial characters takes center stage in “The Tragedie of King John Falstaff,” a new play by Michael C. O’Day that will receive a free reading at Guild Hall on Monday evening at 7. In Mr. O’Day’s reworking of Shakespearean history, Henry V is reduced to a footnote, while Sir John reigns as England’s king. The entire play is written in verse, some of it modern English, some Elizabethan.
Mr. O’Day, an actor and playwright who also directs the production, was inspired by a series of readings in which he assumed the role of Falstaff, and by the television series “The Leftovers,” which hinges on the concept of an alternative universe.
As Mr. O’Day explains in a blog entry, “The thought occurred to me, what if Owen Glendower [a character in the Henry plays with supposedly magic powers] got his revenge on the Henries by using his magic to send everybody into an alternate timeline? The most grotesque, impossible timeline there could be? A timeline in which, by some chance, it was Falstaff who wound up on the throne?”
He proceeds to link his play to the current political climate by asking, “What happens when a nation decides that such a personification of Vice is a truly authentic voice, and takes him for its leader?” But it’s only a play, and no reflection on Josh Gladstone, the artistic director of Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater, who will play Falstaff, the fat, vain, disreputable comic figure who leads Prince Hal astray.