Casting light on 'Black Death'

Not everyone could -- or would -- write a musical comedy about the Black Plague, but for Sonoma County playwright and lyricist Jane Kelly Hirsh, it's business as usual.

"Huzzah! -- A Lighter Side of the Black Death," opening Saturday in Sebastopol, is the sixth show Hirsh has written with local composer Gordon Stubbe.

"I formed the American Dream Theatre in 1999, and we've been doing full-length original musical comedies," Hirsh said. "That's what we love."

So far the troupe has produced an intriguing series of irreverent entertainments:

"Hemp," a salute to a substance beloved by some and vilified by others.

A Western spoof titled "Lassos, Likker and Lead."

"All Hallows," which combined politics, religion, a crime spree and Halloween.

"Warp '60s," set in a San Francisco commune, which now has two music videos on YouTube: "Cats Are Better Than Boyfriends" and "Incarceration Rag."

"Little Love Bites," a romantic comedy about two cynical sisters pressured by their mother to find husbands.

Now, Hirsh and company salute the lighter side of Europe's bubonic plague epidemic in the 1300s, with "Huzzah!"

"I read a lot, and what struck me is that the Black Plague was really what ended the old feudal system in Europe, because everybody died -- the masters, the barons, the lords, the priests, right along with the peasants," Hirsh said.

"So that's really the lighter side, that it created a more egalitarian society."

Comic characters include a knight who pays a substitute to fight his battles for him and a corrupt friar who urges the faithful to pay for their sins in advance -- preferably in cash.

Hirsh even wrote a song about Medieval medicine, which goes, "For every known disease, we have an antidote: a pot of mandrake root or the horn of a goat."

The playwright-songwriter combines a comic outlook with a scholarly background. She holds a master's degree in dramatic arts from the University of Connecticut. And, raised in the Boston area, she comes from a family of published scholars and authors, including sister M.E. Hirsh, who wrote the best-selling novel "Kabul."

After she settled in Sonoma County in the '80s, "Janey" -- as her theater collaborators know her -- taught high school and junior high classes briefly, and then turned to writing and producing her shows full time.

In 1992, she and three others founded the Bodega Theater Company, which lasted seven years. Next came American Dream Theatre, which performed in various venues all over the county before settling at the Sebastopol Community Center a couple of years ago.

In addition to its half-dozen full musicals, the company has produced numerous programs of original skits and songs, building up a mailing list of some 700 fans.

Hirsh is already writing her next show, a send-up of film noir and hard-boiled detectives, set in San Francisco in 1954.

While the author may pass along some of her education, reading and research to the audience during the course of an evening, she mainly just wants everyone to have a good time.

"I want the show to be a gift to the audience," Hirsh said. "People have so many stresses. When they come into a show, they're uptight from their day. The whole goal is that by the end of the show, they're laughing and happy."

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at 521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com.