Much Ado About Nothing During a Zombie Apocalypse: Retelling Shakespeare's plays through Contemporary Culture... a conference presentation coming soon

I'm heading to a conference!  This one fell in my lap - I was discussing comic books and rifftrax with our department's library liason, Rob, when the topic turned to zombies.  "Oh!  I just directed Much Ado during a zombie apocalypse!" I said.  Rob gave me a look and said, "You know I teach a class on zombies."  I did, but I had forgotten.  Two days later I received an email asking if I would be interested in presenting on my Shakespeare/zombie mash-up.  Today, I wrote the following abstract and received an acceptance letter from the conference just a few hours later.

For contemporary audiences, the work of William Shakespeare can be a hard piece of literature to understand and follow because of the four hundred year gap between cultures.  When given the task of drawing in new audiences for a youth production of a Shakespearean play, I chose Much Ado About Nothing because of the clear plot-lines and easier-to-follow prose, but rather than just giving the play a contemporary setting, I wanted to take it further and appeal to an entirely new demographic: I added zombies.  Plays written in poetic verse combined with the early stages of modern English from the late 1500's leave some readers/viewers confused or lost.  It is the responsibility of those performing the bard's plays on stage to make it accessible to contemporary audiences and in most cases, this means editing the length for shorter attention spans and/or changing the setting to something other than a traditional Elizabethan or Jacobean time period.  We have seen a Nazi-like Richard III, King Lear set the Wild West, and a host of other plays in modern settings.  Zombie culture has exploded in popularity in recent years and while the thought of Shakespeare might deter a potential audience member from seeing a performance, the addition of zombies may intrigue them either as a fan of the supernatural or by the simple curiosity about what a mash-up between the bard and the undead might look like.  The show was a huge success, but why would a theatre consider such a virus to infect a Shakespearean play?  This presentation will explore the idea of the zombie/theatre mash-up and the potential for new audiences.