Hamlet

[July 18th, 2007]

[BARDOLATRY] Two questions pop up over and over again in the first two acts of the longest and most performed of Shakespeare's plays: How crazy is Hamlet, and why? Everyone has an answer: Polonius thinks it's lovesickness gone awry, Gertrude believes her "o'erhasty" remarriage has blown his mind, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern think he's power-hungry, and Ophelia is of the opinion that he's just plain loony.

For Conner Kerns, director of Quintessence Theatre's seven-person, vaguely Victorian production, the answers seem to be "very" and "all of the above." Where many directors choose to impose some method on Hamlet's raving, making it part of the prince's revenge scheme, Kern has him berate Polonius, practically rape Ophelia, and thrash about onstage in the grips of a lurid nightmare while unknown spirits breathe heavily backstage. Even though the audience knows he isn't making up the ghost sighting—we see the apparition, too, after all—we aren't given much reason to believe he isn't thoroughly wacko.

Perhaps that's for the best. For all its timelessly beautiful language, this is a play about a 30-year-old grad student who's moved back in with his parents and manages to completely botch a simple revenge plot. Kerns emphasizes the ridiculousness of the character by saddling him with an ugly embroidered satchel and sticking him in a cardboard castle splashed with a case of Rust-Oleum and decorated with alchemical signs.

These nightmarish trappings are well suited to the supernatural events that underpin the play, but they don't jive well with the production's central concept: In this staging, Horatio, decked out like a second-rate undertaker, serves as a narrator who reads the story from Hamlet's journal after the tragic events have taken place. This awkward conceit requires some rewriting and restructuring, some of which is welcome—thanks to numerous cuts, the production clocks in at just over two hours—but silly stunts, like staging the "to be or not to be" speech as a dialogue between Hamlet and Ophelia, are annoying.

There is some excellent acting in this production—notably by Debbie Hunter (Ophelia, Gravemaker, Player), who puts an aggressively crazy spin on usually waifish Ophelia—but most scenes feel rushed, as if the cast, and especially Stephan Henry's ham-fisted, bellowing Hamlet, have somewhere important to be after curtain. Their hastiness, along with Kerns' stew of directorial concepts, makes for cacophony. .