Review of the Wooster Group's Hamlet
by Elizabeth Johnstone
It is frequently said that there are no new ideas - only new ways to present them. In the spirit of this, the Wooster Group, a NYC experimental theatrical collective known for their oddball performances, decided last year that they wanted to revamp one of theaters most over-performed pieces: Hamlet.
The show is currently in performance at the Public Theater at 425 Lafayette, but I had the opportunity to first see the production last April in its final rehearsal stage at St. Ann's Warehouse. While the interpretation of the tragedy didn’t quite move me to Aristotelian levels of "pity and fear," seeing it again this month did prompt a few thoughts.
Before the play begins, the stage is empty aside from a raised platform, a bizarre chair on wheels and a massive TV screen that might be better suited in a frat boy’s apartment. It’s a perfect mimicry of the 1964 Broadway performance starring Richard Burton—but wait! There's Richard Burton himself on the massive TV screen, frozen in time. Then you notice the video cameras... and the two TV screens on either side of the stage... and the smaller TV screen on a pole in the middle of the mammoth one. When Hamlet, played by Scott Shephard, arrives onstage and sits down in front of the video camera, you see him - and then you see him again, on the video screen. And then somebody pushes play.
There's a method to this madness, but the audience doesn't realize it until somebody pushes play and this Hamlet starts jerking his head in time with the Hamlet on the screen. Every move Shephard makes, every word he utters matches and meshes perfectly with Richard Burton's. In fact, we find that every actor on stage has managed (with copious rehearsal, of course) to perfectly time their actions to sync with the actions of their corresponding character on the screen. If it sounds complicated, well, it is.
It's Hamlet. Everybody gets Hamlet; okay, it's one of those plays you're required to read at least three times over in your life. But under the direction of Elizabeth LeCompte, Shakespeare's masterpiece has become one of those plays that make you feel like you're just missing something totally obvious, like the key to understanding just what the heck is going on - it's in there somewhere, but you're just too stupid to get it. And so to save face, you exclaim, "It's so different!"
"Different" in this case doesn't translate to good. The Wooster Group claims in their press notes that this weirdness is on purpose: "Channeling the ghost of the 1964 performance, the Group descends into a kind of madness, intentionally replacing its own spirit with the spirit of another." It's avant-garde! It's experimental! But it's not good.
The synchronization of the live theater and the film, while interesting in theory, is incredibly distracting here and so over the top that it's hard to know where you should be looking at any given time. You can’t enjoy Sam Shephard’s surprisingly decent portrayal because it feels like it's not really his, but merely a complete digestion of Burton's style. The same goes for the rest of the cast; these are solid actors literally trapped in this performance.
I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that I fell asleep for the entire first act when I first saw it. I didn't feel quite as badly when, during intermission the second time around, a woman in her late thirties that I struck up a conversation with while getting some coffee told me she had just done the exact same thing.
"It's over-stimulation," she said. "I just couldn't take it. I fell asleep."
"But didn't the loud noises wake you up?" I asked. For some unknown reason, Laertes sings some loud quasi-emo pop music at one point, and there are frequent jarring sounds of static, not to mention overlapping dialogue.
"Oh no," she said. "I was out completely."
Even though I disliked the performance both times I saw it, the Wooster Group does deserve some modicum of praise for staging this. It must have taken countless hours for the actors to memorize their choreography - the entire play is performed as a sort of dance to the tune of the fragmented editing on the tape. For example, that means when the camera swings around and a chair goes from upstage to further downstage, the chair on stage in also quickly moved downstage to match its position on screen. Make sense? Yeah, I still don't really get it, either.
If you absolutely love Hamlet, I don't know if I'd recommend seeing this. The story gets lost somewhere in the attempt to be wildly experimental. However, Kate Valk, who plays both Ophelia and Gertrude, is a gem. She follows the rules, playing along with the film, but she's strong and engaging enough to keep our focus while the others stumble trying to live up to their black-and-white counterparts. Polonius was unexciting, Laertes was bizarre and sang quasi-emo pop, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were as indistinguishable as ever.
The point was to take something old and breathe new life into it. The idea was good. I believe, however, that the point of live theater is audience engagement, the feeding off of mutual energies... and they alienated everyone completely. The audience was dead; people were shifting around, looking at the ceiling, texting on their cell phones, sleeping, leaving early-anything to avoid actually having to look at the spectacle going on. And that, my friends, is the real tragedy of this play.
The Wooster Group's Hamlet. Tuesday, October 9 - Sunday, November 18. The Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street. Tickets $50-60, with student tickets available in advance, at the box office only, for $25. To purchase tickets, please call (212) 967-7555.
