Staff Writers Lorelei Gorton and Luken Sloan attended KCST’s Fear It, an original play centered around the stories of Shakespeare’s women.

King’s Crown Shakespeare Troupe (KCST), Columbia’s theater company dedicated to all things Shakespeare, kicked off their season this October with Fear It. An original production written and directed by Maya Shore (BC ‘25), and produced by Noel Ullom (BC’27), Fear It featured a combination of female characters (daughters, specifically) from across Shakespeare’s plays. Fans of The Tempest would have recognized Miranda, who, rather fittingly, sported swim goggles. Juliet, Hero, and all three King Lear sisters were of course present, along with characters from lesser-known plays like Pericles’ Marina and Titus Andronicus’ Lavinia. The play had a total cast of thirteen (twelve daughters and an entirely pre-recorded male voice), a suitably unlucky number. 

The story hinged on what may be Shakespeare’s most famous female character, Ophelia, whom the Fear It team described in an Instagram promotion post as “stuck and moving towards her inevitable drowning while being haunted by Shakespeare’s forsaken daughters and their stories.” Haunted is certainly the right word. As the title hints, the production injects classic horror tropes into the narrative, including flickering lamps, a horrifying, cultish scene where the daughters chant Ophelia’s name while devouring raw meat (sources have revealed it was in fact cake), and the lurking, darker horror of Hamlet’s disembodied voice, which Ophelia—though she cuts the power and rips the wires of her telephone—cannot escape. 

The costumes, set, and design of the show were campy and cute, featuring 2000s-style lace tops and a rhinestone-bedazzled stereo. Ophelia’s bathtub, which she both begins and ends the play in, was filled with real water, lending a physicality to the production as it splashed over a few audience members. The light and sound cues were beautifully precise, abrupt sensory stimuli that brought the horror effects to a new level. A particularly crafty set piece was a staircase constructed in the corner of the theater space. At the top of the staircase was a door that opened to reveal a translucent, yet teasingly opaque sheet of paper. When the disembodied male voice—alternatively reading the lines of Laertes, Polonius, or Hamlet, but all spoken by the same actor—spoke, the door would jolt open seemingly of its own accord, revealing a glowing abyss. It was a powerful visual and psychological effect, a remark on the godlike, commanding patriarchal structures that pressured and destroyed the psyche of female identity. 

The action of the show was complex and emotional. One friend described it as “if all the girls in Shakespeare’s play got together and had a sleepover. And then went mad,” which isn’t a bad summary, although maybe misses some of the intricacy present in the construction. The play doesn’t have a traditional theatrical narrative: there’s no sense of “this character talks” and “this character responds.” Instead, it’s composed of little vignettes, interactions between two or three girls, all of whom are constantly milling about. At any given time in the play, there would be about five different interactions happening at the same time, a sea of movement that kept the audience’s attention swirling. Dialogue almost always overlapped. The play was also staged in the round, which made it difficult at times to follow or even see all the storylines. It was certainly a production that would have benefited from multiple viewings, to catch every detail and character.

In one of the most grabbing scenes of the production, Miranda, locked outside of Ophelia’s house during a rainstorm, says “I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer – a brave vessel / (Who had no doubt some noble creature in her).” The audience is urged to consider Ophelia and the other Shakespearean daughters who slowly succumb to their fates (Lavinia’s hands are bloodied when she smashes them through the TV, Goneril poisons Regan’s red Solo cup) as prisoners of their bodies and their scripts, but still possessors of an innate dignity. Miranda, who is forever alone and lacking any female companionship (“I do not know / One of my sex, no woman’s face remember / Save from my glass mine own,” she says) is a hopeless bystander, a representation of the audience, unable to save Ophelia and her friends and, ultimately, unable to save herself. The mirrors that pervade the play, which are reminders of beauty standards as much as they are tools of self-recognition, have turned against her.

The play ended as it began, with Ophelia prone in the bathtub. The cyclical structure was classically, tragically satisfactory, reminding the audience of the inevitability of Ophelia’s fate and the prison of her few, scripted lines. What the horror elements of the show added to the narrative, though, was a darker complexity—an emphasis on the raw terror, not the sweet and passive singing, flowers, and femininity often associated with Ophelia’s madness. Her descent was uncomfortable, tense, and anxiety-inducing.

Fear It demands that the female identity in Shakespeare’s works be re-examined and retold by new and empowered voices. These characters exist not only within the confines of their status and their scripts, but as symbols and role models of female morals, values, and identities. Modern interpretations can shed new light on and craft new dimensions for these characters–but what we should truly fear is a maintenance of the status quo.

Fear It set via Bwog Staff