When Christopher Walken wrote a strange play depicting Elvis Presley’s afterlife
Since his Academy Award-winning portrayal of the shell-shocked Vietnam War veteran Nick Chevotarevich in Michael Cimino’s 1978 film, The Deer Hunter, Christopher Walken has become a Hollywood household name. Over the past 40 years, the New York-born actor has enjoyed lead and supporting roles in timeless classics from The Dead Zone to Pulp Fiction and Catch Me If You Can to Seven Psychopaths.
Most recently, the 79-year-old actor has teamed up with British comedy writer and actor Stephen Merchant for his BBC One crime thriller comedy The Outlaws, in which he portrays Frank Sheldon, a former conman who lives with his estranged daughter and grandchildren while he serves a community service term in Bristol.
While acting on stage and screen has been Walken’s bread and butter throughout his illustrious career, he has made quieter moves into the realm of playwriting. His first playwriting effort came in the form of Him, a 1995 play based on the strange afterlife of Elvis Presley.
In his teen years, like many of his generation, Walken idolised Elvis from a young age. Nearly two decades after the King’s death, Walken looked to honour his musical hero with Him, which debuted at the New York Shakespeare Festival.
In the play, Walken imagines Presley’s afterlife as a limbo of sorts filled with Presley look-alikes. As he roams this strange eternity, Elvis becomes displeased with the questionable antics of his identical twin brother, Rob (Jesse Presley in real life), who was stillborn 35 minutes before Elvis.
In the play, Elvis realises that his twin has been responsible for sending look-alike ghosts back down to the cold streets of Earth to play tricks on his old fans. As Walken depicts, the real-life conspiracies that claim Elvis never died can be explained by his perfidious older brother.
Elsewhere in the disjointed narrative, Elvis relives his death in lamentation and becomes angry that the doctors decided to terminate his life support. Later, Elvis’ death is retold as a deft disappearing act, allowing the star to travel to Morocco for a sex change operation to change from “him” to “her”. This segment was narrated by a truck driver who recognises Elvis, who is now a waitress at a roadside diner and becomes conflicted with feelings of sympathy and sexual desire.
The play was run as a workshop over three weeks of previews and thirteen official performances. It received mixed reviews during its run, with many skewering the nonsensical composition and bland writing, despite a seemingly gripping scene in which a foam Elvis model was thrown around the stage.
A scathing review from New York Magazine’s John Simon referred to the play as “garbage” and self-indulgent “maudlin masturbation”. “We got a series of pretentious and unfunny vaudeville sketches that dimly and distortingly alluded to Elvis’s life and work, but without either analyzing or satirizing him, or making any kind of comprehensible point,” Simon wrote. “The whole thing just maundered on smugly and murkily, reminding me of the joke: What do you get if you cross a mafioso with a deconstructionist? An offer you can’t understand.”
For a little balance, The New York Times reached for positivity: “Christopher Walken’s woozily conceived, fantastical new play… In the sharpness and wit of the writing and in the performances by Mr. Walken and Mr. Heyman, this sequence gives you some idea of what the rest of Him might have been.”
However, after complimenting the “wit” of Walken’s writing, it notes that the play “begins with a certain amount of dizzy promise and ends, approximately 75 minutes later, with the only sequence in the play that comes close to realizing it. In between, Him is cluttered with murky thoughts expressed in windy speeches, illustrated by anecdotes that have no point, though the general idea seems not to be a foolish one.”
