‘Beowulf’ update slays onstage
Beowulf lands in the 1920s and faces foes on stage in a production of the musical “Bernie Wolf” tonight and Saturday night at Texas A&M University-Texarkana.
Written by A&M-Texarkana Assistant Professor of English Dr. Brian Billings, the play is directed by Corinne Billings and presented as part of the university’s Program for Learning and Community Engagement. The play’s first showing was last night, and it continues tonight and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in Eagle Hall.
“It basically marries a few things, really,” the writer explained. There’s the original epic, but also mixed in here within his adaptation is the play “Deirdre of the Sorrows. “Then the third component is the hardboiled detective fiction aspect of it that kind of ties it all together and makes it a little bit more accessible for many people.”
Most of the action takes place in 1929, and it mirrors the plot of the Old English classic “Beowulf” and its battle with Grendel, battle with Grendel’s mother and the battle with a dragon.
Billings originally wrote it as part of his master’s degree and later reworked it. He wanted to write something different, not
with the usual action and fight sequences.
“It is a musical, of course, and so Jazz Age stuff is going to come into play there, as well,” he said.
Billings sees a direct link between Beowulf and its ideals to the Age of Chivalry and on to detective fiction.
“Where the warrior now becomes the fellow in the trench coat with the gun who’s going after the bad guys,” he said.
He liked the ’20s as a setting, with the historical parallels available to him as a writer, such as the economy and wealth concentrated at the top.
“A lot of those details come in,” he said, mentioning immigration fears. “Privileging certain types of people coming into the country at the expense of others.”
In Billings’ version of the Beowulf story, Grendel and his mother are Italian. “They came over with the first wave and now they’re seeing all of these things being pressed in,” the author said about immigration unrest and persecution.
He enjoys adapting a classic text like “Beowulf” to the modern day.
“Trying to find the parallels, trying to find where you can touch the same points. There’s that old saying that the closest distance between two points is time,” Billings said. “And I think that’s true: being able to find how the wheel has now repeated and then bringing that to bear so people can notice that and be able to make those comparisons.”
His story follows certain hardboiled detective story conventions, too, such as the downon-his-heels detective, the femme fatale and an evil force that represents capitalism run amok, Billings said. In his story Beowulf is a detective, Bernie, who lost his partner years ago during a stakeout.
“So he’s always on the lookout for who did it,” Billings said, noting that the cast has about a dozen actors, ranging from teenage years onward.
Some of the cast are veterans of other A&M-Texarkana drama productions.