Playwright and director Robert O’Hara has turned his puckish consideration to “Hamlet,” treating Shakespeare’s tragedy not as an august cultural treasure that has held the world’s consideration for greater than 400 years however as a squeaky plaything that may be exploited for eccentric enjoyable and video games.
It goes with out saying that his new adaptation of “Hamlet,” which had its premiere Wednesday on the Mark Taper Discussion board, isn’t for purists. However Shakespeare’s drama can stand up to even probably the most brazen assault.
Oh, the loopy stagings I’ve seen! None extra so than the 1999 New York manufacturing by efficiency theorist and director Richard Schechner that turned the play right into a pop-cultural hallucination, that includes a weed-smoking Hamlet with a Jamaican lilt, ghostly reminders of Marilyn Monroe and Shirley Temple and a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern costumed as rats.
By this normal, O’Hara is continuing fairly tamely. Some is perhaps startled that his Hamlet (Patrick Ball from Max’s “The Pitt”) goes from pleasuring a lusty Ophelia (a gritty Coral Peña) in public to getting scorching and heavy together with his visiting school buddy Horatio (Jakeem Powell). However O’Hara’s movie noir method has precedent in none apart from Laurence Olivier’s Academy Award-winning 1948 film, nonetheless probably the most prestigious display adaptation of the play, regardless of how dated it may appear to us right now.
To set the temper, the difference begins with a roll of cinematic credit. A grand staircase dominates Clint Ramos’ set. The clear, gleaming surfaces depart an impression of what Elsinore fort is perhaps like as a coastal McMansion on one of many “Real Housewives” sequence.
Footage of the ocean serves as a lyrical backdrop. The setting is extra California than Denmark, however location is handled subjectively in a primary act that intently follows Hamlet’s perspective. Projection designer Yee Eun Nam shifts the temper as Hamlet meets the ghost of his father on display (Joe Chrest) after which spirals right into a mania that’s accompanied by surreal visible thrives that appear indebted to the Netflix sequence “Stranger Things.”
Patrick Ball and Coral Peña in “Hamlet” on the Mark Taper Discussion board.
(Jeff Lorch)
The manufacturing, which runs two hours, is carried out with out intermission. O’Hara’s audacious antics are stimulating at first, however there’s not sufficient dramatic curiosity to maintain such a grueling journey.
The primary two-thirds of the difference supply a fast run-through of tragic occasions. The actors at instances appear to be speed-reading their strains, dashing by the notoriously lengthy play to get to the great bits. O’Hara simplifies vocabulary, reassigns strains and excises components that don’t curiosity him, however in any other case sticks to Shakespeare’s template.
The revisions in language, completed for causes of accessibility, diminish the poetry. Shakespeare might be ridiculously obscure to trendy audiences however tweaking such a well known play is like altering lyrics in a revival of “Oklahoma!” The phrase substitutions show jarring even after they’re not veering off into raunchy slang. (I’ll forgo mentioning the selection verbiage O’Hara employs when Hamlet, confronting his mom in her chamber, turns into enraged by the sight of her unsavory marital mattress.) The clumsy use of voice-overs is extra embarrassing nonetheless.
However these are superficial distractions in a manufacturing that hasn’t discovered why it’s revisiting Shakespeare’s play. O’Hara is in a riffing mode. Outrageousness is an integral a part of his sensibility, as his performs “Barbecue” and “Bootycandy” have made unabashedly clear.
As a director, he enjoys boldly iconoclastic strokes whether or not staging new work, comparable to Jeremy O. Harris’ “Slave Play,” or basic drama, comparable to Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun.” However in “Hamlet” he appears content material to toy round with Shakespeare’s story with out probing its miraculous depths.
Within the remaining third of this “Hamlet,” O’Hara takes the playwriting reins from Shakespeare and invents a novel character, Detective Fortinbras, a gumshoe fixer in a trench coat, who is available in to research the tragedy’s spree of fatalities. Introduced in by the board to protect the Elsinore Image Corp. from damaging publicity, he units out to find out what actually occurred, solely to concoct a believable narrative that gained’t get the corporate canceled.
Hamlet, it’s defined after his dying, was an overage movie pupil pursuing “an over-budget period film noir piece of crap.” And all of the discuss succession and the throne appears to have been about company management inside a cartoonishly messed-up household.
Who knew?
I gained’t spoil all of the humorous particulars, however the intermittent amusement can’t conceal the elemental incoherence of O’Hara’s venture. The extent of creative self-indulgence on show is spectacular. “Hamlet” will survive as will O’Hara, however I’m much less assured concerning the Taper.
What pleasures there are to be obtained from this ill-conceived “Hamlet” are fleeting. The actors provide most of them. Ball, prancing handsomely across the stage in a leather-based jacket and see-through membership shirt, leaves a trendy impression when in movement. However he appears fully adrift when talking his strains. He inflects Hamlet’s superb speeches with trendy shade however little which means. The textual content turns into a straitjacket for a princely son who doesn’t appear accustomed to Shakespearean rigors.
Patrick Ball, left, and Ramiz Monsef in “Hamlet” on the Mark Taper Discussion board.
(Jeff Lorch)
Gina Torres’ Gertrude has no such hassle. She instructions the stage with rhetorical finesse, making it all of the extra disappointing that her character isn’t extra complexly deployed by O’Hara.
Peña’s formidable Ophelia is perhaps the manufacturing’s saving grace. Fiercely impartial, she solutions to nobody’s morality however her personal. I used to be delighted that she was granted a outstanding place within the adaptation’s second act, however it’s a disgrace that, like all of the characters, she turns into a pawn in O’Hara’s prankish plot.
If this description appears harsh, maybe I ought to point out the cocaine revel Claudius (Ariel Shafir) instigates with the First Participant (Jamie Lincoln Smith), Polonius (Ramiz Monsef) and a model of Rosencrantz (Ty Molbak) and Guildenstern (Danny Zuhlke) who could be proper at house in a “Dumb and Dumber” film. These nimble performers gamely rise to the event, however the comedian adrenaline at this level has a numbing impact.
In case you’re going to do “Hamlet,” not less than probe a few of the play’s ethical and psychological mysteries. O’Hara is extra drawn to the plot puzzles which have inspired interpreters to weigh in with their very own crackpot notions. He would have been higher suggested to do what James Ijames did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Fat Ham” — reply to Shakespeare’s basic by a totally autonomous murals.
Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” provokes countless fascination exactly due to its unresolved nature. T.S. Eliot famously referred to as Shakespeare’s tragedy “the ‘Mona Lisa’ of literature.” O’Hara does little greater than graffiti a mustache on this inexhaustible theatrical canvas.
‘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. Ends July 6
Tickets: Begin at $40.25
Contact: (213) 628-2772 or CenterTheatreGroup.org
Working time: 2 hours (no intermission)
