We open the curtain on King Lear who is getting lost in a storm, raging against his disloyal daughters, and expressing the feelings of his Inner Child:
“Oh let me not be mad, sweet heaven” -- by which his Inner Child means “Let me not be neuro-variant, sweet safe place”
Adding that “Old fools are babes again”, he stresses that “older differently-abled adults are just as good as newborns”
Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, Hamlet upon seeing the ghost of his murdered father, is wondering:
“Whether to suffer the slings and arrows of this escalatory shit-storm, or whether 'tis woker in the mind to leverage against a sea of its positionality, and by un-friending, de-platform it.”
King Richard by contrast has no doubt about how to win a battle. He on his own battlefield would give up what Hamlet's uncle wouldn't, confirming that he'd prefer a horse to a crown. “My kingdom for a horse,” he assures us, meaning “my traditional territory for an electric all-terrain-vehicle in which to roar across the landscape”
From here our medley switches to a scene in Italy where the Capulet and Montague families are having an ancestral feud. “A plague on both your high-rise low-carbon urban appropriately eco-dense condos”, responds one onlooker. Meanwhile a member of one of the families, Juliet, is trying to contact a member of the other:
“Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art though Romeo?” she texts, while muttering under her breath “why are you being such an elitist privileged misogynist?”
Miranda, after witnessing a Tempest that struck her island homeland, is having better luck with a new immigrant, Prince Ferdinand. After a life spent with only one manic-depressive father for company and one distant neighbour who was … alternative, she fell in love with this first new guy to come along. Finding he had relatives in tow plus a bunch of alcoholic mariners, she expressed wonder: "oh brave new international order," she exclaimed, "that has such multicultural intersectional identity groups in't!"
And as our play comes to an end, three omnivorous old foodies appear and stir a pot in a cooking demonstration for the benefit of Lord Macbeth who, feeling victimized by their harassment, insults them in very sexist ageist terms, even alleging they smell like filthy old people-experiencing-poverty.
Then, clearly himself a person experiencing depression (due partly to his wife tasking him with a too-actionable ask) Macbeth announces that it's time to “out out” all kinds of societal bad actors, plus the brief green-battery low-energy flashlight that lights his way to death. In an obvious fit of post traumatic stress disorder he concludes that “on the coming event-horizon (in fact, three of them) our brief green-battery flashlight will go out-out, and every poor click-baiting content-providing social media influencer too will strut but an hour of performativity upon the platform, and then be blocked".
At this the curtain falls, upon sincere pre-emptive apologies from the cast to whomever might have been offended by their speech.
