Youth is served in this ‘Hamlet’ staging
In his Friday, June 1, curtain speech before Marin Shakespeare Company’s “Hamlet,” director Robert Currier told audiences, “We’ve got a guy who’s the right age.”
Unlike so many productions, in which actors in their 30s, 40s, even 50s essay the title role of Shakespeare’s tragedy, this one features, in Nate Currier (the director’s son), a performer who actually looks like a college-age prince.
Especially if you’re on your umpteenth “Hamlet,” that casting gives the play new credibility. In his labyrinthine path toward avenging the murder of his father (Barry Kraft) by killing his uncle Claudius (Rod Gnapp), Hamlet tears through guises. He’s variously “antic” and petulant, lugubrious and diabolical, self-loathing and self-
righteous, among infinite other shades. When an older actor navigates those aboutfaces, the result can look choppy, unjustified — as if James Earl Jones all of a sudden tried to affect a bullying “haw-haw” from Nelson on “The Simpsons.”
But all those swerves sit naturally in the energy of youth. A younger actor reminds you that for all Hamlet’s poetry and wit, all his perceptiveness and charisma, the prince is still at times a little boy clamoring for the notice of his mother, Gertrude (Arwen Anderson), or his sometime beloved Ophelia (Talia Friedenberg). Of course, he huffs and pouts and charges into insults he doesn’t wholly intend. Of course, he dons funny voices and refuses to stand up with his family after Gertrude and Claudius’ “o’erhasty” and “incestuous” marriage. That’s what little boys do when they’re having tantrums, what teenagers do when they’re having hissy fits. It’s the behavior of someone not yet mature enough to know that you don’t want attention on yourself all the time.
Yet if the young Currier’s casting is felicitous in that respect, in the play’s second half (where so many productions of “Hamlet” lose momentum), he too often defaults to a twitchy disdain that does little more than proclaim, in blanket statement, “I’m angry and sad and possibly possessed!”
Other performances fall short as well. The usually reliable Gnapp makes for a blocky Claudius, chugging through lines as if buoyed by the iambic pentameter and nothing more. Hunter Scott MacNair, as the fiery Laertes, communicates sudden ambivalence about killing Hamlet in a fencing match by shifting his eyes back and forth — it’s like he’s literally underlining his feeling for us. If Friedenberg begins the play with refreshing pluck and sass for a part usually played for woebegone submission, her Ophelia goes jarringly musical theater in her own scene of madness. She so belts out her character’s gossamery verses that it’s hard to believe she’s lost her senses. You rather expect her to beckon in a chorus line.
There’s a homey quality to Marin Shakes’ Forest Meadows Amphitheatre that makes you look charitably on flaws, though. It’s the kind of place where Robert Currier’s freewheeling preshow lectures take on a yarn-spinning, stand-up comedy vibe; where box office and communications manager Trevor L. Hoffman, clad in a jester’s hat, backflips across the stage at intermission if he sells all his raffle tickets; where one audience member might clamber across rows of seats in the middle of a scene to give another audience member a coat as night sets in. Unlike some arts organizations, there’s not a whiff of institutional coldness here. Even when an individual production doesn’t achieve all it might, Marin Shakes as a whole is a sui generis gem.