Madness, method in chancy ‘Hamlet’
It’s the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and Shotgun Players has a surprise. Berkeley’s bold indie theater company is playing roulette with his “Hamlet” in a mind-bending new production that opened Wednesday, April 20, at a sold-out Ashby Stage.
Created by director Mark Jackson, this high-stakes “Hamlet” is cast differently each night, via an onstage drawing. The seven formidable actors — each of whom knows all 13 roles (some are doubled or tripled) — have five minutes to prepare before essentially BASE jumping into Elsinore.
Founding Artistic Director Patrick Dooley thought it was the perfect way to open Shotgun’s 25th season, and an intriguing challenge for the company. “Part of the (hiring) process was picking people that not only were going to be good actors, but had the mental toughness to do something like this,” he said in a phone interview.
Dooley and Jackson chose Shotgun stalwarts Kevin Clarke, Nick Medina, Megan Trout and Beth Wilmurt, plus guest artists El Beh, Cathleen Riddley and David
Sinaiko, for the admittedly overwhelming mission. “There was a lot of fear early on,” Dooley says. “One actor said, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’ ”
They prepared through months of workshops, eight weeks of round-robin rehearsals and 14 previews (most Shotgun shows get five), and go to extremes to keep all the roles in working memory. Some rehearse until 3 a.m., Dooley says, and “I see them walking around the neighborhood talking to themselves, running the lines of the entire play.”
Their daily workout is a 45-minute fight practice, when each actor duels all the others with imaginary rapiers and sound effects cued live by stage manager Nikita Kadam. Dooley keeps them in the game by providing food, massage and acupuncture. “It’s like working at Google,” he quips.
The actors can’t rehearse all of the 5,040 possible ensembles, so chemistry has to develop onstage; about 20 minutes in, you can feel them settle into their new roles and relationships. The effectiveness of any night’s casting ends up depending on your affinity for given actors and their affinity for given roles. Multiple viewings reveal much about both; I saw the April 13 preview as well as opening night.
Medina, for example, has a deep understanding of Shakespeare’s text and an easy, natural diction; in the preview, he informed Polonius with a dawning awareness of all that was rotten, and torment slowly overtook his opening-night Ophelia/Horatio.
Trout was a reserved opening-night Gertrude and a marvelously brooding preview Hamlet, while on opening night, Sinaiko was all manic gesture and wink-wink sarcasm in the title role. Beh seemed more at ease as an aggressive opening-night Polonius than as the vulnerable Ophelia/Horatio, and in both cases seemed hung up on the meter, rather than the meaning, of the text.
Clarke is an exquisite physical actor; as the April 13 Gertrude, he conveyed worlds of emotion in each sidelong glance. On opening night, his talents were hamstrung by the Ghost/Gravedigger’s rigid blocking; stand-still staging limits the actors overall.
Would Riddley have been a less courtly Claudius opposite a different Gertrude? Wilmurt was Laertes at both review performances — would her Gravedigger be comical or morose? Tonight could be the night we find out.
If the play’s your thing, take heed that Jackson and the actors adapted it based on themes they wanted to explore and the exigencies of the format; most significantly, Fortinbras did not survive the cut. The women also take on other characters’ lines. “We were all tired of seeing Ophelia as a damsel in distress,” says Jackson. “It was a way to make her more credible in a production where the aim is to highlight the diversity of possibilities.” His often snarky direction in the first act can feel refreshing or tiresome.
Regardless of your casting and script preferences, the actors’ ability to pull off this “Hamlet” is simply awe-inspiring. And the format makes you examine your preconceptions of both the play and the nature of theater: All lines of gender, age and race will be crossed at some point, but the randomness subverts any notion of intention. It’s left to us to infer significance, or not to.
Nina Ball’s clean-lined set and Christine Creek’s costumes sketch out the castle and characters. The production couldn’t succeed without Heather Basarab’s dynamic lighting and Matt Stines’ sound design.
And because this “Hamlet” isn’t challenge enough, several actors will play roles in Shotgun’s four upcoming productions and perform them in repertory — another company first — through January. It be madness, indeed.