‘Ghost’ Whisperer
Friday, October 3rd by scott malia
The theatre-going world is, by now, used to plays that speculate about different aspects of Shakespeare’s life. Such historical fictions can be played for humorous purposes, or to push some kind of critical agenda (ahem, authorship) that the playwright wishes to impart upon the audience. Some of these plays are one-man shows, whose historical conceit is often a thinly veiled vehicle that allows an actor to scale Shakespeare’s versed heights and show off some linguistic pyrotechnics.
Lately, plays have taken a more indirect route, as emphasized by the recent revival of Barrymore’s Ghost a one-man show written by the late playwright and actor Jason Miller. If you’re not familiar with Miller, that’s not totally surprising; he was an actor who only appeared in films sporadically and a playwright whose oeuvre was brief. Still, he made quite the splash in the early seventies by writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning play and giving an Oscar-nominated performance in his film debut (as a troubled priest in a spooky little thriller called The Exorcist. Maybe you’ve heard of it?). In his later career, Miller wrote Barrymore’s Ghost, a solo piece that imagines the great Shakespearean actor John Barrymore in purgatory for his tumultuous life and wasted talents.
It’s a piece with instant showboat potential as Barrymore, despite being hailed for the realism he brought to The Bard, was the very definition of larger than life. He was brilliant and troubled, the perfect double whammy for the theatre. Perhaps Miller identified hell as a lack of artistic fulfillment. Given how much hell and purgatory figure in Miller’s work, perhaps he would know.
