4. Some Things You Need to Know Before the World Ends (A Final Evening with the Illuminati)

Book: Some Things You Need to Know Before the World Ends (A Final Evening with the Illuminati)

Author: Larry Larson and Levi Lee

Number of pages: 45

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two posts in one day?

Double prizes!

I wanted to catch up with my tri-monthly blog. These past couple weeks have been ridiculous. We actually open Little Women tonight, so I’ve had no extra time to do anything outside of school, work, and theater. I actually finished reading this play before writing on As You Like It. So it ended up happening that between writing that and this post, I’ve had zero time to watch or play anything. I am going through videogame withdrawal and hoping for a large dose this weekend.

Keeping record, I’m going 0-3 for books that I want to keep. Looking at my remaining plays, I wanted to pick one out that looked promising. Some Things You Need to Know Before the World Ends (A Final Evening with the Illuminati) caught my eye. The title rivals A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying –okay, after typing these out, I can see it far surpasses – as a play title bordering on the ridiculously lengthy side. Throw in hints at apocalypse and cult conspiracy theories and this sounds like an interesting read. I was curious to see what this play is about.

I always like looking at the page in a script when it talks about the original production. Turns out the entire cast is two people: Larry Larson and Levi Lee. I’m inferring that either these two guys were actors who needed a show to perform, so they just wrote their own or they were writers who couldn’t find any actors, so they just performed on their own. The entire production company was pretty compact. The director, stage manager, and the two actor-writers also shared all the costume work. There’s also a typo on the page: “The play was subsequently presented…in February of 1986 with the original cat” (3).

Act I opens to a crudely furnished and decaying church. Reverend Eddie takes some pills and has a vision of “a black-hooded figure of Death stand[ing] at the foot of the cross, holding a basketball in both hands” (5). The play doesn’t waste any time being weird. The lights go out and he gets paranoid really fast. He starts shouting about JFK’s assassination and nerve gas, and then he recites some prayers. At one point he cries out, “I stepped on a foot! A bare foot! Someone else is here! I stepped on a foot. (Pause.) And someone stepped on my foot! (Pause.) Someone stepped on my foot and I stepped on someone else’s foot at the same time! (Pause.) They’re both my feet. (Pause.) I’m stepping on myself. I thought it was a big coincidence” (6). I admit, it made me laugh. This first speech actually makes a decent audition monologue. There is a lot to play within it. I was curious to see where the play would go.

Brother Lawrence comes in and explains that the power went out because of a small animal getting caught in the generator. He assumes the animal did so purposefully and starts contemplating the animal’s state of mind to drive it to suicide. Again, it started off pretty funny. However, Larson and Lee stretch the joke out for over two pages of dialogue. After one page, the joke was old. After two, it was dead.

Anyway, Eddie is pretty much the short-tempered straight man and Lawrence is the good-humored halfwit.¹ Lawrence tells Eddie of a vision he had, and Eddie treats Lawrence like crap. The scene switches to Eddie’s vision of country western singers (played by Larson and Lee) singing a song about how “Jesus was a Lutheran” (15). It’s kinda funny and kinda offensive – which, so far, is what the whole play has been.

At one point, there was some surprise racism when Eddie shouts at Lawrence, “I’m talking about the devil, Lawrence! The one the black people call ‘de debil.’ Satan” (18). Was that really necessary? Why is he using an outdated dialect stereotype? Is he mocking it? Why does he say “the black people”? I don’t get why that line is in the play.

Eddie and Lawrence talk about the same stuff for awhile until the next scene. In it, someone is applying for sainthood. He needs to have performed three miracles. The punchline of the scene is that his third miracle is him being able to fold a roadmap. I admit, it didn’t make me laugh. The scene was slow and stretched over five pages. Then there is a boring scene about Eddie explaining to Lawrence the need for self-flagellation in order to “score points” for salvation (26). The play remains kinda offensive, but it lost its funniness.

Next is a scene between St. Paul and Timothy as if they were New York construction workers.² St. Paul is written to be performed as Paul Lynde, which is an old reference that I actually get. The show is full of bad puns. Here’s one of them:

PAUL. Do you have the Oregano?

TIMOTHY. (Looks in box.) Sure. Here.

PAUL. Thanks. Have you got the Rosemary?

TIMOTHY. Yea. There ya go!

PAUL. Have you got the Thyme?
            TIMOTHY. (Checking watch.) It’s 12:15. (29)

Paul and Timothy go on to make some sexist jokes centering around where women should belong. I’m growing bored by the script; all the potential I saw at the beginning of the play is nonexistent. Eddie mentions St. Genesius, which is an even older reference that I still get. Larson and Lee incorporate breaking for intermission into the script as if the audience is the congregation taking intermission in a church service. I did enjoy that. It was kind of clever, but on the whole, did little to re-spark my interest.

            In Act II, Eddie grows more paranoid of the Illuminati and has worse outbursts. There’s a weird dumb-show scene of Eddie giving all his possessions to a carnival barker who turns out to be Death. The show goes back to more of Eddie flipping his shit over the Illuminati’s assumed presence in the church. He pulls out a gun, loses it, and pulls out another hidden gun. He almost shoots Lawrence by accident.

            Next, Eddie is playing basketball with Death and loses. Eddie calls Death the “Grim Faggot Reaper” (44). Ugh…Was that necessary either? He just these sudden uncalled for outbursts of racism and homophobia. The play ends with Lawrence finding Eddie dead and discovering Eddie’s prepared sermon, comparing life to basketball. It was lame. It was uninspiring and lacked closure for the play.

            There’s not much more to say about Some Things You Need to Know Before the World Ends (A Final Evening with the Illuminati). I had my hopes up that I would like this one, and it started interestingly enough. Soon I was disappointed, and after that, I was long bored by it. The whole play was one bad joke.

 

Verdict (Is the book staying or going?): Going. This one had me at the beginning, but its hold did not last long. Oh yeah, where was anything about the world ending? Total mislead.

 

Notes

1. Like Abbot and Costello, George and Lennie, Laurel and Hardy (well, Hardy and Laurel), Ricky and Lucy, Martin and Lewis, etc. There are countless double acts.

2. I don’t get the point of modernizing this scene. Having them as New York construction workers doesn’t add any humor. I can’t see any social commentary that Larson and Lee may have intended. The modernization just doesn’t work here.

 

Work Cited

Larson, Larry and Levi Lee. Some Things You Need to Know Before the World Ends

(A Final Evening with the Illuminati). New York: Dramatists Play Service,

1986. Print.

3. As You Like It

Book: As You Like It

Author: William Shakespeare

Number of pages: 39

What I’m watching: TV: Cadfael, Once Upon a Time, Community, South Park, The Colbert Report

What I’m playing: Bioshock: Infinite, Catan, Skyrim, Bioshock, Uncharted 3, Halo 4

Little Women rehearsals have been going long, college courses are in the midst of projects and tests, and I had to beat Bioshock Infinite. Even reading only short plays, my life has slowed down my blogging. But here I am with a new book.

At some point during this adventure through my personal library,¹ I’ll be spending quite a bit of time reading through my copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. I have read a good number of his plays, but when I get to it, I’m going to read all the rest. I have a few extra stand-alone copies of his plays. I thought I’d read them now and get them out of the way for later. So, that idea brought me to Shakespeare’s As You Like It for my next play.

I opened up to the first page to find an editor’s note. Turns out “this version of As You Like It, as arranged by Mr. B Iden Payne for performance at the Globe Theatre in the Century of Progress, 1934, plays thirty-seven minutes” (3). My reaction was “WTF?” I’ve seen a few Shakespeare plays performed. They usually run at least 2-3 hours. I found this cool site explaining how to approximate each play’s run-time that puts As You Like It over 2 ½ hours.² How the crap did Mr. B Iden Payne get it to just over half an hour?! That’s 80% of the show being cut! And it looks like this company gave a similar treatment to other plays listed in the front inside cover, including Macbeth, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet.³

Turns out now I’m not even going to be able to cross the play off my list when I get to the complete works, because I’m only reading a fraction of it. Not being able to get over how ridiculous such a cutting of the play had to be, I compared it to the full play in my copy of the complete works. Turns out the whole script is pretty fucked up. The sequence of scenes is as follows:

Act I, scenes 2 and 3. Act II, scenes 3, 1, 7, and 4. Act III, scenes 2, 3, and 4. Act IV, scene 1. Act V, scene 1. Back to Act IV, scene 3. Act V again, scenes 3, 2, and 4.

This version cut out eight whole scenes. The scenes that got kept are super abridged and not even in the right order! Act V is the only act that has some part of all its scenes still in, but Mr. B Iden Payne threw some of Act IV in the middle.

This is what Mr. B Iden Payne did to Shakespeare.

A whole list of characters got cut, which I’m pretty sure reduced some complicated love triangles into simple love stories. Characters names in the script are even abbreviated: Orlando’s lines are prefaced with Orl, Charles is Cha, Amiens becomes Ami, Corin is Cor. Really? Was that absolutely necessary? The play is presented in one act with some scenes staged in front of a curtain to help the pace keep moving for any scene changes.

Okay, just one more thing I want to mention before I talk about the play itself. The stage manager played the Banished Duke. Maybe only I think that’s interesting. I think it’s neat.

The play begins with a wrestling match between Charles and Orlando. Rosalind and Celia watch. Orlando wins, and he and Rosalind fall in love at first glance. But Rosalind gets banished by Celia’s father, the Duke, for I don’t know what reason – I assume the explanation got cut. Celia decides to go with Rosalind to the nearby forest because they’re friends. They decide to disguise themselves – again, I don’t know why. Rosalind dresses up as a man.

The Banished Duke, or Duke S, and his friends are all in the forest too. Then Orlando shows up swinging a sword and asking for food. Why is he in the forest? I don’t know. I guess the reason wasn’t important enough to keep in the story.

There’s no denying that the language Shakespeare uses is very poetical and brilliant. One outstanding image is from the Duke Senior saying “And churlish chiding of the winter’s winds, / Which, when it bites and blows upon my body, / Even till I shrink with cold, I smile” (With the sequence of scenes being a mangled up, tangled up mess, I’m not bothering to search for scene lines. The quote’s on page 14). As You Like It also holds one of Shakespeare’s most famous monologues: his “All the world’s a stage” speech. It’s spoken by Jacques, a name which my friend Hugh said is pronounced in the play as “Jay-kweez.”

Anyway, the banished folk let Orlando join them and they sing half a song. After that, Orlando starts wandering alone in the forest. He runs into Rosalind and Celia, but doesn’t recognize them. He tells them he is madly in love with Rosalind, and Rosalind pretends to be a counselor offering to cure Orlando of his love.

I always had trouble suspending my disbelief with Shakespeare’s convention of disguises. How is it not obvious?

He’s deeply in love with Rosalind and cannot tell the man he’s talking with is really her? I just saw Measure for Measure in Chicago earlier this month, and one of the characters put on a pair of glasses as a disguise. His close associate fails to recognize him until he removes the glasses. It’s so stupid, but the associate’s exaggerated realization was so over the top that it was hilarious because even the actors were like, “Yeah, it’s dumb, but just go with it.”

Anyway, Rosalind tells Orlando that the cure for loving Rosalind is to pretend that he/she is Rosalind and have Orlando express his love to him/her. So Orlando pretends that Rosalind is Rosalind, not realizing that Rosalind is Rosalind. Touchstone falls in love with a girl named Audrey and has to fight off another guy named William. One day, Orlando doesn’t show up to fake-woo Rosalind. His brother Oliver runs in to tell her and Celia that Orlando was injured fighting a lion off Oliver. Apparently, Oliver used to be a mean brother until Orlando saved his life. Touchstone marries Audrey. Rosalind marries Orlando. Celia and Oliver end up marrying, too. Why? I don’t know. He’s on third, and I don’t care.

As You Like It has a lot of good lines, either funny or beautiful, but sometimes Shakespeare overdoes it. At one point Celia is overcome and exclaims “O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful! and yet again wonderful, and after that” (20). This 1930s company felt the need to cut out over half the show, but had to keep this whole line? Celia’s line reminds me of The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (abridged), when Adam sums up Juliet’s “Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds” soliloquy with “’O night night night night…Come come come come come!’ (aside to audience) I didn’t write it” (Borgeson, Long, and Singer 21).

Ultimately, too much of the story and the comedy was lost from the play in this copy of As You Like It. Hopefully, when it comes time to read the whole thing, all these mixed up pieces of the play will come together for a better comedy.



Like a puzzle, when someone knows what he or she's doing.

 

Verdict (Is the book staying or going?): Going. I have the entire play in the complete works. This copy doesn’t have any explanatory notes to help either, so it doesn’t add anything more than the complete works.

Notes

1. Maybe this summer.

2. http://www.playshakespeare.com/study/57-play-lengths

3. Apparently, 1930s people had really short attention spans. After 40 minutes of Shakespeare, it was too much for them.

Work Cited

Borgeson, Jess, Adam Long, and Daniel Singer. The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr

(abridged). Ed. J. M. Winfield. New York: Applause Books. 1994. Print.

Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Ed. Thomas Wood Stevens. New York:

Samuel French, 1935. Print.

 

2. Red Carnations

Book: Red Carnations: Comedy in One Act
Author: Glenn Hughes
Number of pages: 12
What I’m watching: TV: Once Upon a Time, Pinky and the Brain Movies: The Perks of Being a Wallflower
What I’m playing: Uncharted 2, Uncharted 3, Skyrim, Bioshock: Infinite, The Walking Dead: Episode 1

 

            Red Carnations is a short stand-alone scene about two guys who show up at the same place to meet a girl. The humor comes from both of them being in the exact same situation: they each met a masked woman at a costume ball who promised to meet him in the park and would recognize him by a red carnation in his lapel.

 And when one woman finally shows up, the two men have such identical traits that she cannot distinguish which one she promised. It seems she mistakenly promised to meet both men, so she must decide who to go with, frustrating the younger man to the point of leaving. The young man then learns that it was all a ruse: the other man is the girl’s father who was playing the trick to act as a chaperone as the two met in the park.

            Red Carnations is mediocre. Maybe if this scene were staged, a director and actors and everyone else could add humor to it, but I don’t find the script itself all that funny. I don’t have much to say because it was so short and boring. At first, I had an inkling that the scene would involve time traveling. An older man meets a younger man in the park before an encounter with a woman. They both dress similar, and the older man seems talks familiarly with the younger man. At first, I thought the older man was an older version of the other guy. Sadly, Red Carnations is a lackluster 1925 comedy that draws one joke out for ten minutes.

Verdict (Is the book staying or going?): Going.

Bibliography

Hughes, Glenn. Red Carnations: Comedy in One Act. New York: Samuel French, Inc, 1925. Print.