DARK LADIES is an explosive meditation on death and laughter cast as both a Menippean masque and a user's guide to the tragicomic. Mixing erudition with illogicality and vaudeville vulgarity it pays homage to Shakespeare by both erasure and incorporation. Preserving the end rhymes of all 154 of his sonnets, in mirrorreverse order, and embedding stage directions from his comedic and tragic plays, it offers a grotesque repurposing of the bard's great...