To be or to not be a crazed assassin, that’s the query on the bloody coronary heart of the world premiere adaptation of “Hamlet” opening Wednesday on the Mark Taper Discussion board with Patrick Ball within the central position, recent off his star-making flip as Dr. Frank Langdon within the Max hit collection “The Pitt.”
Co-starring Gina Torres from “Suits,” this adaptation from director Robert O’Hara spins one in all theater’s most well-known performs right into a modern-day world of decaying Hollywood glamour. There’s a mansion on the coast and the remnants of a Thirties soundstage. Hamlet’s household runs a film studio. The Danish prince is Hollywood royalty, and fairly than being a tragic hero, his sanity and motive for homicide are interrogated “CSI”-style in a bracing second act that flips the script on the primary 90 minutes, that are seen solely from Hamlet’s perspective.
There are added scenes and loads of salty language, with dialogue that shifts from classical to twenty first century vernacular.
To be on this place in any respect — together with his face on billboards, bus benches and streetlight banners throughout town — is a “miracle,” Ball says. He was a relative unknown earlier than scoring a starring position on the zeitgeisty medical drama “The Pitt,” which premiered in January and averaged greater than 10 million viewers per episode, changing into one in all Max’s high 5 unique collection premieres of all time.
Previous to that his solely display screen expertise was a single episode of “Law & Order.” He had, nevertheless, spent a decade “grinding,” he says, “auditioning for film and TV, getting close but never happening.” He additionally spent 4 years touring for regional theater, performing in reveals together with “Romeo & Juliet,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “The Lover” in locations like Washington, D.C., St. Louis, Boston and San Diego.
Patrick Ball throughout a break in rehearses for “Hamlet” on the Mark Taper Discussion board.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Instances)
“I had settled upon the fact that that was going to be it for me. And I was happy with that,” Ball says. “And the dream of Hollywood was something that I had let go of, and I made peace with the fact that that wasn’t going to be my life.”
Then rapidly “The Pitt” occurred — and it felt like kismet. The North Carolina native’s mom is an emergency room nurse and his father is a paramedic. The tales informed on the Noah Wyle-led drama resonated with him. His dad and mom learn by way of the pilot episode and mentioned, “This checks out. This is real medicine,” Ball says, recalling how excited they have been for him. To have the ability to inform tales which are significant to the neighborhood he grew up in, he says, appears like a blessing.
So does working with seasoned professionals like O’Hara and Torres. O’Hara, who can be a longtime playwright, acquired a Tony nomination in 2020 for steering Jeremy O. Harris’ critically acclaimed “Slave Play,” which set a box-office report throughout its West Coast premiere on the Taper, grossing $1.4 million in 5 weeks. Ball says that after seeing the present in New York, he spent the subsequent 4 hours straight discussing it with the pal he went with.
O’Hara is obsessive about true-crime reveals like “48 Hours,” wherein culprits keep on with their tales of innocence even when confronted with video replays of their guilt, so he constructed the second act of his manufacturing in a moody, film-noir, flashback model, with a detective questioning characters after the play’s end-of-show bloodbath. Suppose David Lynch meets Alfred Hitchcock with a Salvador Dali-painted set.
“I think that the audience watching will go: ‘Wait a second, really, you put poison in his ear? Who puts poison in an ear?” O’Hara says throughout an interview after rehearsal, whereas Ball and Torres sit laughing beside him. “And where are you guys getting all this poison? Poison in the glass, poison on the sword. This is something I didn’t make up, but somehow Claudius has a stash of poison.”
And what about that ghost?
Shakespeare’s Hamlet sees a ghost who tells him that his uncle Claudius murdered his father; O’Hara’s Hamlet might or might not have seen a ghost. He would possibly simply be a loopy individual pretending to behave additional loopy with a view to get away with homicide. Within the extremely stylized universe of Hollywood noir, glamour and psychological sickness stroll hand-in-hand; entitlement and privilege run amok.
Shakespeare hardly ever writes about frequent individuals, O’Hara notes. “Which goes back to the L.A.-ness of it all,” Ball chimes in. “My title is ‘prince,’ right? And what’s the American equivalent of that? It’s celebrity. The Elsinore of America is Hollywood. So to be able to tell this story, in that way, in this town, is a very cool opportunity.”
To Ball’s shock, O’Hara hadn’t seen “The Pitt” when he determined to forged Ball as Hamlet. O’Hara, fairly, reacted to the power of Ball’s audition, which Ball self-taped on his telephone in a frenetic model that Ball later felt was “insane.”
“You have to have confidence, you have to have the audacity to believe that you are going to do Hamlet — and that you can do Hamlet,” O’Hara says. “Because if I had to deal with someone who I had to pump up, or I had to make him believe that he can do it, it would be a whole different process.”
“My first thought was, ‘I don’t know if my peri-menopausal brain can do this,” Gina Torres says of her flip as Gertrude in “Hamlet.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Instances)
O’Hara knew one factor for certain: He needed Torres to play Hamlet’s mom, Gertrude. He beloved her in “The Matrix” sequels and in addition because the formidable lawyer Jessica Pearson on “Suits.” He was so sure that he didn’t even ask her to audition. Torres, nevertheless, had reservations.
“My first thought was, ‘I don’t know if my peri-menopausal brain can do this,’” she says, laughing. However then she learn O’Hara’s script and he or she was bought. “I was so seduced by the idea that we get to see a Gertrude that we’ve never seen before.”
Torres’ display screen resume is miles lengthy however her stage credit, not a lot. Which is humorous, she says, as a result of as a New York native, her solely purpose was to be a Broadway star. However she bought forged in a recurring position on a cleaning soap opera, after which a pilot and away she went.
“Talk to any New York actor, and they’re like, ‘I’m just doing enough TV so that I can go back home and do theater.’ I hear it all the time. And then eight years go by,” she says.
There may be an electrical second between the time a stage supervisor calls “places” and the curtain rises, Torres says. That’s the sensation actors dwell for.
“We just fly,” she says. “And we’re chasing that sense of flight and connecting on stage, and if something goes wrong, we’re using it. We’re not starting over, we’re not gonna stop. There’s no safety net.”
That feeling is one thing O’Hara sought to harness together with his adaptation. He doesn’t ask for a couple of run-through a day. He desires to maintain issues recent, with the opportunity of freedom and breakthroughs. The forged, he says, will need to have room to seek out the play.
“I don’t want it to be drilled in,” he says. “I want there to be a little bit of titillating and vibration going on.”
‘Hamlet’
The place: Mark Taper Discussion board, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.
When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 2:30 and eight p.m. Saturdays, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sundays, by way of July 6; test for exceptions
Tickets: Begin at $45.25
Data: (213) 628-2772 or centertheatregroup.org
Working time: 2 hours (no intermission)
