Watching or reading Hamlet for the first time or the twentieth, an observer cannot help being struck, I think, by how much of the play has passed into our common language. Indeed, as many commentators have observed, the experience of Hamlet is almost always that of recognition, of recalling, remembering, or identifying some already-known phrase or image. It could be said that in the context of modern culture – global culture as well as Anglophone culture – one never does encounter Hamlet “for the first time.” Instead the play provides a resonant cultural echo, both forming and reflecting concepts – turns of speech, types of characters, philosophical ideas – that seem to preexist any single experience of the play, and at the same time to be disseminated from it.

– Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare for All

An examination of various productions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet – a stage   history – can perhaps most easily discuss performance. In this particular production, this particular performance, is the version of the Danish prince presented to us, the audience, truly mad, or is it pretense? Is he indecisive, as is often thought, or simply confronting the grave situation in which he finds himself with the appropriate, shall we say, gravitas? Is his rage at Gertrude and Polonius driven by incestuous desire, or is it a matter of authority overthrown and political power seized? Once these questions are posed, then arises the topic of responsibility for the interpretation at hand: Is the source the director or the actor, or some combination of the two? Scholars dissect the performances of centuries past, and in more recent eras, newspapers reviewers and writers for obscure arts journals and the New York Review of Books have their day. But the attempt to anatomize, explain, or analyze a performance one has not seen seems to this most unscholarly of writers to be a not particularly seductive task. For isn’t that the aim, the purpose, the point of the theater – to seduce, to lure us into another world? Theater has, to be sure, innumerable purposes, but this, to me, seems first and foremost. Although books, films, and visual art can also pull us into the great beyond of another consciousness, another reality, there seems to be an ineffable something about live performance: I am here, in this chair, in the flesh, hearing rustlings of coats and candy wrappers, wiping something from my eye, music starts, curtain (if there is one) is raised, bodies of performers appear.

Several alternatives to the in-the-flesh experience present themselves. Films offer a way to see a live performance – both filmed versions of a play and films created from the play. But they do not offer “the real thing,” in playwright Tom Stoppard’s words. (Inevitably, there are those who are argue that there is no such beast as a “real thing,” that all is real, or conversely, that nothing is realer than anything else.) Filmed versions of a play require that the director make all kinds of choices that spectators, in my view, might better make for themselves – pay attention to the audience, the exterior of the theater, the curtain going up? or simply laser-focus on the action onstage? Films adapted from a play are almost another creation altogether, perhaps only a distant cousin to the original. When we do archival research, delving into contemporaneous accounts of bygone days, decades, centuries, we are relying on the perspective of others. For someone who has been schooled/raised/immersed/come to consciousness in an age where subjectivity is king (or at least prince, if not queen), where truth is contested every day, in every way, it is difficult to depend on the perceptions of another. (Sometimes, as in the previous sentence, it is difficult even to choose a verb.) Did John Gielgud, Roger Rees, Jean-Louis Barrault, Stacy Keach, Ian McKellen, Christopher Plummer, Richard Burton, Mark Rylance really make the decision about which way to move when saying that line or about which word to emphasize in some other line? Or was it rather the director’s choice, instruction, wish? When we read a work such as Marvin Rosenberg’s Masks of Hamlet, we are relying on the author’s perspective, of course, but that perspective is itself often reliant on contemporaneous recountings. So we are left with a series of nesting dolls, taking us farther and farther from the truth, whatever that may be.

This writer has chosen an approach that might be termed scattershot or random[1] but that might also be viewed as reflecting one human being’s lived experience of the play Hamlet: A search for productions of Hamlet taking place within easy access of Washington, DC, during the spring of 2015 yielded four live productions (in New York City, Philadelphia, and the greater Washington, DC, area). A fifth, recreated from memory, was produced and seen on the far Upper West Side of New York in 1969.

Some Notes on Watching

Perhaps exposed to too much performance art, installation art, and minimalist painting at too young an age and/or for too long, I became used to absorbing often-confounding art works in a kind of mute, unquestioning way.[2] When I was about 18, rather than leaving my hometown of New York and going off to college as my upbringing had prepared me to do, I got a job at an weekly paper, dubbed “alternative” because it wasn’t the New York Times and was located in and covered a district that had for some years been a semi-deserted, semi-industrial wasteland. I remember seeing a performance in which a dancer – I was told she was a dancer, or else I never would have known – repeatedly step onto a raised platform (wooden, I think), walk across it with slow, deliberate movements, step off, circle around, and then repeat the whole loop over and over again. I became very conscious of my body, my breathing, the itchy tag on my shirt, my need to pee. I had not yet heard of John Cage or Merce Cunningham, although I am sure the performer had. The word “mindfulness” was not yet part of current usage. I found a way to react to this confounding art: Although I was and am, then and now, prone to analysis in and of all things, I would not seek to analyze, to come up with a why or wherefore. I would simply let it all “wash over me.” That is the phrase I used then and have continued to use throughout the years.

This system or technique proved a useful way in, a useful mode, and I have applied it, over time, to works as varied as Al Held’s black paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Performance Group’s opaque and elliptical theatrical reworkings of Brecht and so many others, and Robert Wilson’s production of Madama Butterfly at the Opéra Bastille in Paris. When I began to write reviews for the aforementioned “alternative” paper, I aped the style of my older and more experienced colleagues: description, lots and lots of description. While this may, at times, have been a case of the reviewer hiding a lack of understanding or knowledge, it may equally well have been an apt means of communicating to the reader obscure work for which there were no obviously, easily available words. Some art and theater works, as Archibald MacLeish would have it about a poem, don’t mean but be. (This very subject – how difficult it is to talk about certain art works – came to mind recently on reading the New York Times critic Roberta Smith’s article about the hard-to-categorize artist Joan Jonas, age 78, whose installation has just opened at the Venice Biennale. As it happens, Jonas was very much a part of the art and theater world of the time discussed above.)

But this washing-over technique is not useful in thinking in precise and finely calibrated ways about a piece of theater, whose evanescence is an integral part of its being. As a reviewer, I eventually learned to bring a notepad with me to the theater, but in viewing the performances I saw for this essay, I thought to do this only once. Interestingly, when the lights came up and I stared at the scrawl on my pad, there was very little, mostly well-known lines in the play that had jumped out at me for various reasons – because of the way their meaning had changed over the years or because they brought me back to some other place and time or because I was struck by how much they have become part of our culture and consciousness. Now, in thinking back to these productions, I find that what sticks in my mind is not line readings or blocking sequences but rather music, costume, props. I have never found these elements of a play to be the substance of the matter, and wondered at why this should be so. One possible reason might be that a director who doesn’t wish to rewrite or do radical surgery on Shakespeare has, after working with actors on interpretation, only these elements with which to play.

Always Already There

At one point in reading Hamlet, my eyes kept returning to certain lines in Act 2, Scene 2. Reading over the lines that sounded in my head almost like a psalm, I kept hearing a melody, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I tried to ignore it, but on the nth rereading, I realized it was no hymn, but rather a snatch of a song from the 1967 musical Hair. I searched online and found, mirabile dictu, a grainy clip of the 1969 Tony Awards on You Tube. Yet further testament to the cultural Rorschach test that is Hamlet, the composer-lyricist team of James Rado, Gerome Ragni, and Galt MacDermot made Shakespeare’s lines scan to their music – or perhaps it would better be said, vice-versa – with only one small alteration in the order of the words: “I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth” comes after the paean (mournful, but still a paean) to the world’s beauties: “ … this goodly frame, the earth …; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire.” It is only after the soaring sweet notes of this set-up that the musical’s Hamlet figure offers his plaint, his loss of mirth. Here, his existential query, echoes with the concerns of the musical’s time and place: the Vietnam war, the country riven by that war, student unrest on campuses, the civil rights movement erupting, the women’s movement starting, a huge chasm opening up between kids and their parents. I found it difficult to watch this clip, introduced by a tux-clad Harry Belafonte, so young it brought tears to my eyes, to see the anachronistic afros of the actors Ben Vereen and Melba Moore, and not think of how far we’ve come and, at the same time, how long we have left to go: Barack Obama in the Oval Office, and at the same time, every day, or so it seems, another Michael Garner, another Freddie Gray.

Every era interprets a great work – a mysterious term by which I suppose I mean, among other things, a lasting work – in its own way. Some of those interpretations can fade into sepia-toned relics, but Hair’s use of Hamlet’s words remains powerful, deeply affecting.

I was 11 in 1969, two years after Hair made its debut at the Public Theater in New York, and somewhat insanely, several miles uptown in the same city, hard by Columbia University and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and the wonderful Mondel’s candy shop run by unsmiling mittel European Jewish refugees ever on the lookout for shoplifters and the West End bar where Kerouac and Ginsberg drank, a woman named Shirley Harrison, my fifth grade teacher, led her class in production of Hamlet. I wasn’t even in the play, didn’t have a part; I had to take to Facebook to ask if anyone out there knew what, in fact, Mrs. Harrison had seen fit to entrust me with. The answer, embarrassingly, is: the lighting. The “insanity” of Mrs. Harrison’s effort is what is always stressed in the telling of this story, and I have always objected to that characterization, yet I just repeated it.

But here’s what’s not so insane. From that fifth-grade year onaward, the words, the lines, the phrases, the action, the plots and subplots of the play, were in my head. Whenever I heard or read them, they were already in my consciousness, already there. I may not have understood all at the time– indeed, I probably fully understood little – but yet, Hamlet was in my brain, and whenever I would come across the play, it was there, waiting to be recognized, seen and heard again, in new and different ways. There is something to encountering a work of art at a young age, just as there is something to the now-unfashionable educational technique of memorization. Practice may not make perfect, but it gets you close, or closer. Repetition, the act of practicing (be it memorizing lines of Shakespeare, playing the piano, carpentry, or sautéing chicken) would seem to engrave the act or information in your mind. So when, after many years, I encountered the words of Hamlet once again, I was able to recognize both words I knew I knew (such as the “To be or not to be” speech) but also those I hadn’t thought of as belonging to this play or even to Shakespeare (such as “The time is out of joint” and “… there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”). I was able to quickly reapprehend them, to embrace both their familiarity and their unfamiliarity (in the Freudian sense of the uncanny), to begin to let thoughts fly.

What to Do With the Prince?

 Mounting yet another production of a much-performed, much-read play such as Hamlet seems an unsurmountably daunting task. Three paths lie before directors and performers: to mount a fairly “classic” version of the play, with line readings faithful to whichever version of the text is chosen, as well as period sets and costumes (whose execution will without fail reflect at least something of the time and place and cultural moment of the production); to mount a radically different production (which might, for example, involve an unusual set, huge chunks cut from the text, or an unusual emphasis or perspective, such as either ignoring or leaning heavily on the incest plot strand); or a third way that attempts to present a fairly conventional iteration of the play but with a few tweaks here or there, either in an attempt to modernize or to make a mark upon the play.

The Classic Stage Company in New York took this third way in a production directed by Austin Pendleton, with Peter Saarsgard as a somewhat spiritless, spineless Hamlet and Harris Yulin in a fully embodied, masterful portrayal of Claudius. Saarsgard delivered his lines in a casual, conversational style that worked well, although his manner was affected and snippy, as if he had wandered into a cocktail party that he found lacking. As the New York Times said, “Mr. Sarsgaard speaks the verse in an easily digested colloquial style that fits snugly within the production’s modern-dress context.” The modern dress was subtly contemporary fancy dress, and the stage was bedecked with all the accouterments of a gala affair – champagne and other liquor, an elegant tiered wedding cake, a striking overhead stage hanging possibly meant to suggest a wedding bouquet. (As the Times noted, all this suggested a post-Claudius-Gertrude nuptials fête.) These elements together created a sense of timelessness – we knew we weren’t in Shakespeare’s Denmark, but neither were we just around the corner from home, yesterday or tomorrow. But when at one point Hamlet pointedly snorts a noseful of cocaine, the subtlety crashes to the ground. There was no need for this moment, and there was nothing else equally jarring in the production that might have given context to the incident.

A Female Hamlet

Casting women and people of color can mean two very different things in the theater. In one case, the director may be making a point, intentionally playing with the ways the role was written and/or is usually cast; in another, the actor in question may simply be the one thought best-suited to the role. Playing with gender in casting Shakespeare seems especially interesting, given that boys played women’s roles in his lifetime, and it seems especially relevant in our own time owing to the way transgender issues are increasingly taking center stage in our cultural conversation.

In the spring of 2015 at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, director Blanka Zizka cast Sierre Leonian actress Zainab Jah as Hamlet. While a female King Lear would set off a chain of fascinating reverberations (and I am here speaking of a female actor playing a female monarch, not a female actor playing King Lear exactly as he was written), it was not at all clear at the Wilma what Jah’s gender and race did to, for, or with the play. Jah, clad in black leather, cut an androgynous figure. She jousted and philosophized with the best of them. But the audience saw her as Hamlet, a man, as he has always been. She did not did not bring to the fore any enticing ideas about female agency, which roil under the surface for a contemporary audience: What would Hamlet look like if it was a woman confronting her consciousness, confronting questions of death, betrayal, revenge? Furthermore, given the way women and female characters have, like Ophelia, all too often been relegated to madness, how would a truly female Hamlet and her director deal with the matter of Hamlet’s madness (real, feigned, or some admixture)?

The Wilma focused attention on the history of female Hamlets by mounting an exhibition in its lobby. In 1882, Anna Dickinson, an abolitionist and women’s rights activist who was also an actress, played the role – to some controversy and a mixed reception. Tony Howard, in Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction, cites one contemporaneous admirer of Dickinson as thinking that she was an “ideal Hamlet,” and her performance a “great intellectual and artistic triumph,” while the critic William Winter faulted her for possessing “neither male ‘dignity’ nor womanly grace,” saying that her “voice was ‘monotonous,’ ‘unsympathetic,’ and ‘feeble’ ” – and, as if all that weren’t enough, Winter adds that she appeared to be afraid of her own sword (Howard 87-89)! None other than Sarah Bernhardt played the role in Paris and London in 1899 and then in a silent film in 1900. The Danish actress Asta Nielsen took on the role in a silent film in 1920, and coming closer to our own own time, Eva LeGallienne and Diane Venora have also played the prince. Some might wonder at their motivation. According to Howard, “Once Hamlet was accepted as the greatest role in Western drama, some independent actresses were bound to attempt it, and when they did it became a war zone, because the great ‘feminine’ protagonist was male property – the role that that legitimised the two-dimensionality of the Mother/Whore and Virgin by annexing ‘feminine’ sensibilities and psychological complexities into a hero” (Howard 25).

Shaking It Up – Just a Little Bit

Certain conventions of the theater are such a given, so expected that the spectator doesn’t remark on their presence or absence until they are gone or changed in some marked way. When actors move among our seats (as happened at a recent, delightful performance of Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn), we realized this does not usually happen. When we enter a location to see a theatrical performance and instead of being seated in front of a stage are left to wander through an undemarcated space, as is typical in the current vogue for so-called immersive theater, we realize (as we ask ourselves: Is this a disused factory? How big is anyway? Where are the bathrooms? How will we know where to go?) that this too is not the norm.[3] The Classic Stage presented its elegant if insipid production in a theater-in-the-round (or rather, theater-in-the-square) but made no good use of the format. (It seemed to only create awkwardnesses in blocking.) The Wilma used a traditional proscenium arch but added a kind of raised circular platform in front of it and the stairs leading up to it seemed only an effect with no real purpose. But images of these other stages flood the viewer’s mind on entering the tiny, no-stage space of the equally minuscule Taffety Punk theater company in the Washington neighborhood of Capitol Hill. Folding chairs banked on either side of the completely level area circumscribe the actors’ playing field. Before the watchmen even see their ghost, we know that every morsel of anger, broken-heartedness, insanity, questioning, and political chess-playing must be played out in this small space, between the two human bookends of the audience.

This production’s calling card is that it derives from the First Quarto (Q1, the so-called Bad Quarto). A recording of a Washington band called Beauty Pill provided an original, haunting neo-rock score, a nice touch. The ghost – or Ghost – wore dark goggles that made him look like a combination of deep-sea diver and coal miner, placing him somewhere on the spectrum between ominous and hilarious. Some half-hearted attempts to use a wall covered in slate as a blackboard yielded graffiti that was mostly meaningless, although one set of tall chalky letters read “CORAMBIS,” the Q1 name for the character who evolved into Polonius, serving to remind non-Shakespearean scholars in the audience of what, exactly, we were seeing and how it might differ from the other two major texts of Hamlet. Some choreographed movement – difficult to call it dance – preceded both Acts I and II. The post-intermission choreography, highly militaristic and right in our faces (some of the marching actors entered in very close proximity to certain viewers’ chairs) was frightening, perfectly setting us up for the debacle of Act II.

Oddly (or perhaps not so oddly), it was this shoestring-budget version of the play, sans stars or noteworthy casting, that created one of the strongest impressions of this group of productions.

Coming Full Circle: How Young Is Too Young?

When my son was about 3 – maybe 2 – his striding striking handsome tall capable gorgeous Amazon of a preschool teacher killed herself. A sage and comforting local minister (a concatenation of Buddhist and Baptist) comforted and advised the stricken parents, offering not only wisdom pearls but practical advice as well. One gem that has stayed with me ever since (and, believe it or not, pertains to the notion of children performing Shakespeare) is: When children are young, you have to tell them over and over and over again about two big things – sex and death. You think you’ve done it once, that it’s done, the big job over, but no. They may not remember, they may not take it in, they may not understand. You have to tell them again, have the talk again, delve into the hard-to-explain stuff yet again. And then they just have to grow into it, into the knowledge, into the experience.

So it may be with Shakespeare as well. My son, almost 16, is a member of a Washington, DC, area youth theater company called Lumina Studio Theatre. Here, the kids are always referred to as “actors,” never as “children” or, heaven forfend, “kids.” This season’s production, Hamlet, brings with it death of all kinds (murder, suicide, poisoning, drowning, revenge, accidental – take your pick) and sex of a couple of kinds (sweet, incestuous, bawdy [“country matters”], and yearningly lustful [“the shot and danger of desire”]). These are the minister’s Two Big Things, which the young actors will learn over and over again – along with the rhyme and meter of the play’s language, the images, the motivations, the ideas – all that was planted in my own head so many years ago.

The Lumina performance itself? At three hours, fairly interminable, with the addition of an interleaved, implausible plot involving a dollhouse and dolls (no, the director, David Minton, wasn’t trying to invite Ibsen to the party; rather, he has an ever-present need to integrate a group of younger actors into each production in order to keep the organization in the black). Some of the actors were quite good, the dollhouse set (done by an adult) quite amazing, the Philip Glass music quite familiar (by now, he’s the Mantovani of the new music scene), but none of that is the point. This production, like the one done in 1969 in the shadow of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, is put on for its actors, not for its audience. Right now, Shakespeare’s words – Hamlet’s, Ophelia’s, Claudius’, Gertrude’s – are sneaking around the young actors’ neural pathways, taking up residence, taking up space, becoming part of how they face their lives. One afternoon or one morning, years from now or decades in the future, sitting at a desk or out walking in a park, they may find themselves seeing or hearing a line or two – perhaps “ … there is something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out” – and musing, on the words’ meaning, their beauty, their infinite puzzle.

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Works Cited.

Garber, Marjorie, Shakespeare for All. New York: Pantheon Books. 2004.

Glusker, Anne, “The Best Seats for This Play Are Moving Fast.” New York Times. 17 December 2006. Web.

Howard, Tony. Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge U Press. 2007.

Isherwood, Charles. “ ‘Hamlet’ as an After-Party That Got Out of Hand.” New York Times. 15 Apr 2015.Web.

Rado, James, Jerome Ragni, and Galt MacDermot, Hair. New York: Public Theater, 1967. Video clip of 1969 Tony awards ceremony retrieved from the Web: https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_1000534747&feature=iv&src_vid=eGx7IBn7HCM&v=xlCilKlqrI

Rosenberg, Marvin. Masks of Hamlet. Newark: U of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses. 1992.

 Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. New York: Signet Classics/New American Library. 1998.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Dir. Shirley Harrison. St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s School, New York, unknown dates, 1969.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Dir. Joel David Santner. Taffety Punk Theatre. Washington, DC. May 2-23, 2015.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Dir. Blanka Zizka. Wilma Theater, Philadelphia, PA, Mar. 25-Apr. 26, 2015.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Dir. Austin Pendleton. Classic Stage Company, New York, Theater, Mar. 27-May 10, 2015.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Dir. David Minton. Lumina Studio Theatre, Silver Spring, MD, May 1-10, 2015.

Smith, Roberta. “Joan Jonas’s Venice Biennale Pavilion Is a Triumph.” New York Times. 8 May 2015. Web.

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[1] The author and academic Phyllis Rose chose somewhat the same modus operandi for her 2014 book, The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading, in which she did exactly what the title says – read one particular shelf of books in the library.

[2] The writer would here like to acknowledge that she is at this point in the essay beginning to use the non-academic personal pronoun. Although this may not be forgiven, said writer would like to state that a herculean effort at its avoidance was undertaken. The choice to opt for the autobiographical “I” was made only after considerable thought.

[3] Interestingly, the title of the long-running New York show by the British company Punchdrunk, one of the leading lights of immersive theater, is Sleep No More, a very loose riff on Macbeth that is just further testament to Marjorie Garber’s idea that Shakespeare is always already with us.