Dances of Life - and Death (Unabridged‪)‬

Dances of Life - and Death is adapted from Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death. Poe wrote the Masque as a sort of horror story and it is written entirely in the third person as told by a narrator, no background and no dialogue. This play frames the story as a morality play, set in the time of the Plagues and the Renaissance. Though set in the past it is, also, about the present. Camus, in his great novel La Peste, wrote about a fictional plague in Oran in the 1940s. He used “plague” as a metaphor for war, and life in Nazi occupied France during WWII. Similarly, the plague, here, is a metaphor for life in Syria, Iraq, Columbia, Guatemala, Nigeria, and Somalia, etc. leading desperate refugees to flee from violence and war. But the reaction of those in safer countries is to withdraw behind their walls, close their borders and their eyes, to keep out the “plague” of feared death and disorder. But such human afflictions can never be enduringly locked out. There is always a price to pay for such cowardice.