The Wake of Dick Johnson

Maggie Mae's Pub, New York City

About the Show

The spirit of Dick Johnson lives on after his death, and at his wake Dick is able to re-animate his corpse, grab a bottle of his beloved booze and enlighten attendees about the nature of the spirit world he’s been visiting.
Since Dick was a foul-mouthed, racist, misogynistic alcoholic, the afterlife according to Dick is a grim, eternal, inescapable astral plane where the consequence of human misdeeds is an endlessly replaying loop of one’s most terrible memories of life on Planet Earth—in Dick’s case, often involving his pedophilic Uncle Willy, who tortured him in terrestrial life and appears in the next to embellish Dick’s commentary, which resembles nothing so much as a “terrifying childhood campfire horror story—one narrated by a brooding psychopath.”

The Wake of Dick Johnson, written, directed and acted by Luke Walker, is a multi-media production that brings the audience into the atmosphere of a real wake to explore the juxtapositions of life and death, good and evil, body and spirit.