Maria Rodriguez Bross

Two hippos walk into a bar and are refused service by a fly.
A human intervenes. Will the hippos buzz off?

Edgar’s Living Funeral is a full-length play, tragicomedy, that follows a deeply religious family as they gather to mourn the loss of Edgar, a father, son, brother, and friend. This play explores the painful process of changing our beliefs in order to progress upwards in our individual lives and at the cost of losing our families.
The family is unaware that their own reluctance to seek professional help for Edgar, especially with his obsession with Shakespeare’s plays, was partly due to the religious teachings that prayer alone would be enough to heal Edgar’s mental health. Rosalind, Edgar’s daughter, who is suffering from delusions of seeing her father, the Ghost of Edgar, must make a decision about whether she will join her family’s extreme religious beliefs without her father.

In Act I, the Ghost of Edgar appears at the funeral to refute his family and friends' eulogies and he does this through hip-hop rhymes and Shakespearean prose. By Act II, we understand that the Ghost of Edgar has many regrets in the afterlife. He tries desperately to aid Rosalind by allowing her to see him as an apparition. The Ghost of Edgar soon realizes that his presence is making her life worse and feels powerless to help her. He’s confronted by his own ghostly father to sever ties with Rosalind and feels like his life meant nothing. By Act III, Rosalind confronts the family one last time to let them know that she’s had an abortion. The family rejects her choice and refuses to accept her unless she conforms to their expectations. Rosalind decides to leave the family, but only after she declares and invites the Ghost of Edgar to be at her side. By the end of the play, the Ghost of Edgar happily accepts to be her guiding spirit.

While the play deals with mental illness, it is quite funny in every scene as is true in life and in the Shakespearean tradition.

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