GORY, FREAKY AND DOWNRIGHT ALARMING
The West Coast Premiere of the Off-Broadway production, The Wake of Dick Johnson, performed live and in person by writer and director Luke Walker, will be part of the 2021 Hollywood Fringe Festival.
In this pitch black one-man comedy, Dick Johnson lies in an open casket, surrounded by flickering candles, dead flowers, and a red neon cross nailed above him. In this small, claustrophobic and intimate room, the audience are the attendees of his wake, when he returns from the other side for one last bottle of his beloved hooch, to enlighten us about grim realities we all face in the afterlife, and have a conversation with his pedophilic Uncle Willy.
Challenging an audience’s threshold for taboo language and graphic imagery, The Wake of Dick Johnson is a darkly humorous and morbid look that the agony of life and torture of an alternate universe afterlife, where quantum entanglement challenges concepts of the terrestrial laws of physics. Dick espouses that the afterlife is a grim, eternal, and inescapable astral plane, where the misdeeds of all mankind, throughout all ages, replays on an eternal loop in the 4th-dimension.
Time Out New York selected The Wake of Dick Johnson as one of its top-thirteen Halloween theater events along-side then current New York productions of The Glass Menagerie, Little Shop of Horrors and Sleep No More.
Walker is a former journalist who’s written and directed two feature films including the adaptation of The Wake of Dick Johnson. He’s produced and directed several music videos for emerging artists, has authored many plays and feature length screenplays and worked for several major New York media outlets including The Examiner, and Thefix.com. A feature film was adapted for the screen from the 2016 play. The film, which Walker wrote, directed, produced and starred in under the same title, was produced by Alt Variety and distributed by Amazon.
photo of Luke Walker by Brian Bowen Smith
The Wake of Dick Johnson
2021 Hollywood Fringe Festival
Hudson Theatres, 6539 Santa Monica Blvd. in Hollywood
August 5 through 26, 2021
Thursday, August 5 at 8pm, Friday, August 6 at 8pm
Monday, August 16 at 8pm, Tuesday, August 17 at 8 pm, Wednesday, August 18 at 8pm
Monday, August 23 at 8pm, Tuesday, August 24 at 8pm, Wednesday, August 25 at 8pm
for tickets and info, visit http://hff21.co/7066
intended for mature audiences only
