Stage Notes: Beowulf - A Thousand Years of Baggage

This musical songplay, a co-production of Brooklyn’s Banana Bag & Bodice and San Francisco’s Shotgun Players, played to sold-out crowds in Berkeley for six weeks and won the Bay Area’s Best Play of 2008. Written by B B & B’s artistic director, Jason Craig, with music by Dave Malloy (the most recent winner of the Jonathan Larson Grant), and directed by Rod Hipskind, the show is a raucous but loving look at an ancient folk tale, turning it into a funky, rock opera entertainment. I spoke with Craig.

Hi Jason. I vaguely remember Beowulf, from high school history or literature class.
You’ve got the common relationship to the poem.

What are you trying to do with it here?
The play is an attempt to fuse passion back into an 8th-Century poem, something that has been lacking in the classroom in the last few centuries. We’ve got a live seven-piece band, and the play has got a lot of life and energy, and it’s fun.

Remind me of some of the characters.
It’s got Grendel, the monster that has been terrorizing a village in Denmark for 50 years. Beowulf is called into the scene, from Sweden. He’s a mercenary soldier and he comes in to undo this evil. There’s a giant battle and he tears off Grendel’s arms.

Ouch.
Then he has another fight with Grendel’s mother. She lives underwater, so we have five fish tanks for the underwater battle. He kills her too. Then he returns to Sweden and becomes an old king, and his final fateful fight is with a dragon. We have a wall of 35 box fans for the dragon battle.

That sounds like a lot of action. How do you present it in a two-hour, two-act show?
The show opens with three academics giving a lecture on their take on the poem. It’s relatively dry, but humorous. As the poem progresses, these academics become the three demons (Grendel, his mom and the dragon). So it’s a commentary on how the academics have distorted the poem over the ages.

And then of course there is the Beowulf character.
Yes, and there are two Everyman warriors, played by two women actors, who are also the chorus and who also dance. Then there’s King Hroghar, he’s the band leader/composer (Dave Malloy), the ruler of the kingdom and the ruler of the band. The show is 50 percent music and 50 percent scenes. There are 14 people on stage at all times.

Well, it sounds great. How did you happen to come up with this as a subject?
Dave and I were approached by the Shotgun Players. We had worked together before. And I literally looked up on the shelf and saw the book, “Beowulf," and I said, “Why not that?” and they said, “OK,” and then I took the book down and read it for the first time.

Abrons Art Center, 466 Grand St., (212) 352-3101. Previews Mar. 31, opens Apr. 5- 18. Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m. $25.

Photos by Jessica Palopoli