Double Feature -- Part 2

If you're joining our story already in progress, Thursday night I went to see the National Theatre Conservatory's production of Tartuffe. It was the first of two shows they're performing in rep, and the evening was an entertaining but odd mix of good, bad, and strange. But it was, despite some cross-gender casting, ultimately a production that felt more or less like a full-fledged theatrical production -- something you might see outside of the "student environment."

Friday night's Hamlet was some other hybrid sort of entity. It bore the constant stamp of a staging being mounted primarily for educational purposes. With only 10 graduates, there was a lot of doubling up of roles. This isn't in and of itself odd for Shakespeare in general, nor especially for Hamlet in particular; the play has many more roles than you'd probably actually want to cast different actors for anyway. Why not double up a character with only one scene in the final act with another character used more liberally throughout the show?

But some of the doubling choices were awkward at times. Doubling of the actor playing Guildenstern meant that at times, Rosencrantz stood on stage alone. Sure, abridgement of the text meant Rosencrantz had no dialogue anyway (one seldom sees an unabridged Hamlet anymore), but nevertheless, it seems to me a rather major compromise of the spirit of the characters to show one without the other. (If you don't know why, I'm going to assume you've never seen or read Hamlet. Perhaps you should skip out on this blog and go rent one of the many film versions of it.) Put simply, the double casting of actors appeared to be more about giving each student his or her "fair share" of the play rather than doing what was best for the play as a piece of theater. But I'll come back to this in a moment.

There were odd moments of business interjected into the play for no apparent reason other than to let a student showcase some niche talent picked up during the Conservatory's intensive training. For example, Ophelia dangled from a low-flying trapeze twice during the play -- once for her introduction, and once as a sort of dream-like vision as Laertes learns of her death. A bit of a head-scratcher, if you ask me. (And you did. You're reading this.)

But here's the strangest choice of all: the play would better have been called "Hamlets" and not "Hamlet." The role of the melancholy dane was split up for four different actors to perform. I learned of this choice the night before, looking at the shared program for Tartuffe and Hamlet, and seeing credits listed for Hamlet 1, Hamlet 2, Hamlet 3, and Hamlet 4. It was easy to recognize this separation for what it was: giving multiple graduates the chance to take a crack at the meatiest role (in terms of the sheer amount of dialogue, at least) in all of Shakespeare.

So I basically spent 24 hours wondering how this would be approached. Was it to be a purely chronological thing, making no attempt to hide the true reason for the device? Or was there some way you could thematically deconstruct the role of Hamlet into four pieces? Would perhaps one performer take the part for scenes of a certain nature, then another step in when the tone shifted? Perhaps that would be needlessly confusing, but perhaps that would validate the choice for dramatic, not educational reasons?

Well, as it turned out, the Hamlet hand-offs were a mostly sequential matter. Each performer took the role for one quarter of the performance, then stepped down center as the next performer came in behind to perform a sort of "demonic possession" or "essence transfer" bit of physicality to take over the role. It all culminated in the final sword fight with Laertes, in which each one of the four Hamlets took a turn playing one touch against him. All four then appeared on stage together to hold Cladius by the arms and stab him collectively as a group. I will say, that final moment was actually rather effective, but I'm still not sure it was worth the odd journey through four Hamlets.

Who played the different Hamlets... now there's an interesting subject. First up was the man I'd found so unexpectedly compelling the night before in Tartuffe (Sean Lyons). By Shakespeare's five-act text, he played the bulk of the first, including the confrontation with the ghost of Hamlet's father. He was fairly great in this performance too, though I felt the intensity of his opening monologue a bit over the top. I thought to myself, no actor would ever come out swinging this fiercely if he had an entire two-and-a-half hours of this ahead of him; he simply wouldn't have the stamina. Having only a 40 minute piece to take on, though...

But he absolutely killed it in the confrontation with the ghost. In an inspired choice of staging, this exchange was portrayed as an act of spiritual possession of Hamlet himself by the ghost. The one actor played both parts (with a small assist from an audio effect, but mostly through a powerful physicality). The only thing about this that wasn't perfect is that it was retroactively undermined later in the performance. At this point in time, the audience hadn't seen how the four Hamlets would hand off the role to one another. Once we had seen it? Well, it looked rather a lot like this scene with the ghost. Had the production not been trying to sustain the multiple-actor gimmick, the ghostly possession would have been a home run.

Hamlet 2 came on for the bulk of act two, encompassing the famed "to be or not to be" speech, and taking everything through "the play's the thing / Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king." (Which is also where this production placed its intermission.) This Hamlet was played by a woman (Rebecca Martin). I probably should have mentioned her from the previous night's Tartuffe, but her role there was so minor -- she played Loyal, for those familiar with that play -- that it slipped my mind. She was actually quite good for her few minutes on stage, but that impression got lost in the whole two-plus hours.

Of course, this is probably the only time in her life she'll play Hamlet. And there was maybe a moment or two in her performance where she attacked it like that, over-aggressive, a performance pitched to last only 40 minutes and not for an entire play. But these moments were few; for the most part, this Hamlet 2 was strong. You might argue she had the worst chunk of the play to work with. Yes, you get Shakespeare's most famous soliloquy, but it's also the stretch of the story where Hamlet is frozen with indecisiveness. He's been charged to act by the ghost, but doesn't actually do much of anything.

On comes Hamlet 3 to steer the role through the presentation of the play to King Claudius, the confrontation with his mother Gertrude, and the murder of Polonius. This Hamlet was the actor who made me cringe the night before as Tartuffe himself (M. Scott McLean). I was pleased to see an entirely different performance here. Whatever odd choice, be it his or the director's, that had led to such an outlandishly impish Tartuffe had no parallel in his Hamlet. The actual staging of Polonius' murder was almost laughably awkward, but it's no fault of the actor's. He handled the confrontation with Gertrude wonderfully.

Finally came Hamlet 4, and here's where it got even more interesting. Hamlet 4 was also supposed to have been a woman -- the very same woman who, the night before for Tartuffe -- had completely lost her voice and was "dubbed" by another actor. You might be able to get away with that for a light-hearted comedy, but there was simply no way that was going to work for a powerful tragedy like Hamlet. But still -- there is no understudy.

Or so I thought. According to the sign in the lobby, Andrew Schwartz was taking over the role. I may never know for sure who this guy was. He's not in the graduating class. Perhaps he's a second-year student in the Conservatory? Perhaps he's played Hamlet before somewhere? (Probably in this production I found a short write-up about online? I notice it was directed by the same director who put together this production.) In any case, it seems to me there's no way this guy didn't learn his entire role in about 48 hours or less, including all the dialogue, blocking, and fight choreography for the big finish. And even if he had played Hamlet somewhere before and had some memory of the lines rolling around in his head, he still had to learn the part of Guildenstern -- that's how this particular role was double-cast.

So my hat's off to this actor. If I hadn't been told anything, I would have just assumed he was the guy for the role all along. In fact, on one level, I'd say he was actually the best of all four of the Hamlets. His was the one performance that, from beginning to end, felt properly "of a piece" with the entire play. Where the other three all had moments that seemed pitched too high, to "make the most of my piece of the play," Hamlet 4 was the one performer who seemed to be tracking the whole play on an arc. Like I said, maybe he played it before. Or maybe he was just more spontaneous and natural, holding on for dear life trying to remember lines he'd just learned. However he did it, this guy rocked it.

I've spent a lot of time now talking about the Hamlets, so unfortunately I might give short shrift to some of the other aspects of the production. I will say that the Dorine I liked from Tartuffe the night before (Kelli Crump) was great again in Hamlet, taking the role of Horatio. It was a much smaller role, but she found moments of levity and intensity within it.

Another bright spot was this evening's Polonius (Joseph Yeargain). The night before, he'd played Valere in Tartuffe -- a rather stock, silly role in which he made little impression on me either way. But as Polonius, he nailed the blowhard to perfection. There are laughs throughout Shakespeare -- even the tragedies -- but often only those very familiar with the text will catch them. When a large chunk of the audience laughs, and at something that's not a sight gag, you know it's because the actor has powered through the language barrier and really made everyone understand it. This actor did so with great skill.

The darkest spot on this occasion was the concept. Oh, not the four Hamlets conceit I've already expounded on at length. This mounting of the play was conceived of as a graphic novel, in the mold of Sin City. The director even wrote a few short paragraphs about it for the program -- he was inspired by seeing teens in a bookstore enthralled by the Watchmen to make a Hamlet that might somehow reach them in the same way. His Hamlet became a monochromatic void, lit harshly (sometimes hardly at all), and punctuated by discordant musical stings (for a sense of what it sounded like, check out the end of Weezer's "Undone -- The Sweater Song").

Put simply, this concept did not work. Admittedly, I'm no enthusiast of graphic novels, but I'll still make this bold statement -- the most important aspect of the medium is the framing. You see this every time some filmmaker translates a graphic novel into a movie, conspicuously meticulous camera angles designed to look like a painting. You're meant to see a panel in a graphic novel in this one specific way, with every detail precisely chosen and placed by the artist.

You simply cannot do this in a theatrical production. In a play, the audience, not the director, writer, or artist, is king. We'll look where we want to, see what we want to, "frame" our "shots" in the manner we see fit. You can encourage us to look in a certain place and see a certain thing by set design, staging, costumes, and other elements -- but you can't force that. So put in all the harsh lighting and fog effects you want. I'm not going to say, "ooo, isn't that artistic?" I'm going to say, "I can't see a damn thing." It's hard to complain about a stage actor who can't find his light when there's almost no light anywhere to be found.

The costuming of this production was also an attempt to modernize and "Sin City-ize" the play. Hamlet (all four of them), sported cargo pants, a leather jacket, a "Wittenberg" T-shirt, and a hoodie. In short, they all looked almost exactly like the Hamlet presented in the first season of the Canadian TV series Slings and Arrows. I just watched that recently, making this feel to me like a particularly obvious and distracting theft of an idea from another source. (Hmmm... perhaps I should write about my thoughts on Slings and Arrows some time...)

And then there was the final, climactic battle between Hamlet and Laertes. Put simply, it was staged as a lightsaber duel. The stage was pumped with fog thick enough that flashlight beams cut a very visible swath through the air. The performance and technical realization of this was actually pretty amazing. With incredibly crisp fight choreography, the performers would actually clash swords, stopping their beams of light so perfectly that you truly could see where the "blades" would impact one another. Each time the blades touched, a perfectly timed sound effect of two fencing foils scraping would play. The mind boggles to think at the rehearsal that went into making this work (particularly for Hamlet 4, who probably only learned the moves a day before).

The problem is, George Lucas, for good or ill, has destroyed this concept for all eternity. As soon as the first attack began, a woman one row behind me (who, by the way, is going to the "special hell" reserved for people who talk in a theater) says "ooo, it's lightsabers!" Thanks. We know. Precisely the point. We all know. For that one moment, we're thinking not of Hamlet, but of Star Wars. It doesn't matter that a moment later, we're all wowed by how skillfully this is being performed by both actor and sound operator; first came that moment where we were ripped out of the narrative and thinking about something else. More thievery.

In summation, this Hamlet was one where the actors had to overcome a lot -- artificial choices made because it was a production for MFA students... a bizarre and awkward theatrical concept... this jackass group of six in the back row who brought kids under 10 to the play and then proceeded to explain what was happening on stage all throughout the first act! (Culture your kids on your own damn time. Only take them to the theater when you're sure they -- and YOU -- won't talk during the performance. And if you think the plot is going to confuse them, explain the story to them before you go! /end rant.) Nevertheless, the actors did, on the whole, demonstrate what they have learned in their time at the Conservatory program, giving effective performances within these odd limitations.

Perhaps when next year's graduating class is performing this time next year, I'll make the effort to see their productions. It was a wild and distinct experience quite unlike any other I've had at the theater.