The Actors' Shakespeare Project Hamlet
The Actor's Shakespeare Project opened their third season this past Thursday, with Hamlet, starring founding member Ben Evett in the title role. Other veterans included Marya Lowry as Gertrude, Sarah Newhouse as Guildenstern, and a couple minor roles, and Ken Cheeseman as the ghost, the Player King, and the gravedigger. Many of the other roles were played by newcomers to the ASP stage, although not newcomers to the stage in general -- the guy who played Claudius, Johnny Lee Davenport, has a goal of performing in every single Shakespeare play -- and he's nine plays away from doing it. He also does film and television. So, as you can see, ASP continues to attract top-notch actors to work with them -- all the members of the cast in major roles have resumes like that.
Now, full disclosure: Hamlet is not one of my favorite plays. I've seen a half-dozen productions throughout my life -- four on stage, two movies -- and, in many ways, I'm Hamlet-ed out. It's a difficult play, anyway -- it's one of Shakespeare's longer ones, the versions we have could possibly have been written to be read rather than performed (it's a theory, anyway -- don't know if I believe it or not), and the character of Hamlet is . . . confusing to say the least. He sometimes acts like a teenager, but we know he's at least a few years older than twenty-three. (Yorick's been buried 23 years, and Hamlet knew him well enough to remember getting piggyback rides from him, so Hamlet's got to be at least 25, 26, maybe older.) It's never clear how insane he is, and how insane he isn't. And it's not even clear why his strategy is to pretend to be insane -- in the original story, there's a superstition that, if you kill a madman, you go crazy, so nobody is willing to kill Hamlet so long as people think you're nuts, but I don't know if Shakespeare knew that superstition, or Shakespeare's audience knew that superstition, and I know that we modern audiences don't know that. So, in order to put on a production of Hamlet, you have to:
1. Decide how crazy Hamlet actually is, why he's pretending to be crazy, how action-packed he actually is, how over-thoughtful he is, and why. How did he feel about his father, how did he feel about his uncle before he found out his uncle killed his father, does he love his uncle, did he ever love his uncle? How does he actually feel about Ophelia, how did he feel about Ophelia before this all happened? He's got a massively confusing and complicated character, which is why people LIKE playing him, but it's totally not easy to figure out.
2. Decide what Claudius is really like -- how he feels about Hamlet, how he feels about Gertrude, how he feels about his brother, all sorts of things that can be played in all sorts of different ways.
3. Decide what Gertrude is like -- how she feels about Claudius, how she feels and felt about the former king, what she had to do with her former husband's murder, if anything -- lots of stuff.
4. What's Polonius like? Is he smart, or foolish? Does he love his children? Does he love Denmark? Does he like being a power behind the throne? Hell, you could imagine a backstory for him in which he and Claudius jointly decided to off the old king to grab more power. I don't know of anyone who actually has gone in that direction with him, but it could be cool.
5. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern -- hapless dupes? Co-conspirators in trying to bring Hamlet down? Did they know the content of the note they were carrying?
You know, you could perform the play such that EVERYBODY who died, except Ophelia and Hamlet, had a hand in killing the old king. . . never seen anyone do it, but it'd be interesting.
That's challenge number one. The second challenge is that everybody does Hamlet, so what can you bring to your play that is both original enough to make the play worth putting on, yet not SO different that it's alienating to your audience?
So, how does the ASP do with both of these question -- how do they do with their interpretations of characters, and have they found things to do that are original, but not too original?
Well, let's go through the cast.
Horatio, played by Willie E. Teacher, was strong. There wasn't much unexpected in his performance, but he played "strong, smart, loyal, decent, and upright" well. I kind of see Horatio as a bit of a Boy Scout -- if there's a real, genuine good guy in the play, it's probably he. And that's what Teacher delivered, and well.
I really liked Ken Cheeseman's interpretation of all three of the roles he played -- the ghost, the head of the troupe of actors, and the gravedigger. He was appropriately otherworldly and, pardon the pun, grave as the ghost of the old king, and, as Lis pointed out, having the Player King and the Ghost played by the same actor gives you a kind of a neat thrill, since the murder in the play-within-a-play, you realize, looks pretty much exactly like the real murder must have looked. He always turns in a wonderful performance as a Clown -- being funny without being overbearing, and recognizing appropriate gravity in the characters without sacrificing humor, and his Gravedigger was a fine example of how he pulls off that balance.
Johnny Lee Davenport's performance of Claudius was, I think, the highlight of the play. He portrayed a villain with sympathetic qualities, and a believable internal life, who is nonetheless sufficiently vile that you feel he has to die. While I've always seen Claudius as killing the king to take over the kingdom, and marrying Gertrude as part of his bid to consolidate power, his Claudius committed his crimes as much to gain the queen as the country. And the deep and passionate love he feels for Gertrude is reciprocated.
That was the main note that Marya Lowry brought to the character -- her passion for Claudius. I saw her as a victim, pushed around by circumstances, and wasn't really sure who she was -- did she have a hand in her husband's death? Her feelings for Claudius would have given her a motive, but I can't really believe it of her Gertrude. So I didn't really understand who she was, what her motivations were, how she really felt about her former husband. And that made it confusing to me.
Edward O'Blenis's Laertes also failed to blow me away (although Lis quite liked his performance). I felt that he had a tendency to chew the scenery a bit much (which, admittedly, so did Davenport, but Davenport did it with style). Laertes felt. . . overacted. He has a hell of a lot of emotional stimulus to react to, and reacting to all of it at the top of his lungs was exhausting, and, to me, less believable. His quieter moments at the beginning of the play, I felt, were better -- I really liked his reactions to Polonius, and how he and Marianna Bassham developed the Laertes-Ophelia brother-sister dynamic. That felt real. And his death speech really moved me. But there was a lot of stuff in the middle that left me cold.
So what of Marianna Bassham's Ophelia? If there is one character in the play that you truly feel for, it's she. And this performance brought that facet forward and polished it to a high shine. Ophelia, as Bassham played her, is pure emotion, and perhaps, pure love. She exists in her relationships with other characters -- and that's why she's so fragile. Her performance was downright heartbreaking.
Polonius -- Robert Walsh. I don't think I've ever seen a less sympathetic, less likable Polonius. Walsh created a Polonius that you didn't mourn for when Hamlet killed him. It was a really interesting effect, and I don't know whether I liked it or not. I think of Polonius as pedantic, maybe foolish, an old man with some wisdom, a somewhat grandfatherly type. Walsh played a Polonius who was calculating and cold in his professional life, and baffled and emotionally distant when dealing with his family. It is no wonder that Ophelia was so fragile that she could be driven into insanity -- she was raised in an emotionally sterile household by a withdrawn father who was unable or unwilling to support her when she needed him most. It was a disturbingly believable interpretation, and one that is forever going to color my perception of the character.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, played by Ted Hewlett and Sarah Newhouse, were, more or less, non-entities. Which is a totally legitimate way to play them, but makes it hard to say too much about the performances. They were pretty clearly victims of circumstance, pushed around by people much more powerful than themselves, without a hell of a lot of control over their own destinies. It's hard to believe that they deserved to die, but, well, it's also hard to get too upset over them.
So, that brings us to Ben Evett's Hamlet. It was, simply put, perfectly reasonable. But I've seen him be brilliant before (Cassius in Julius Caesar, Edmund in King Lear, so "perfectly reasonable" was a bit of a letdown. He did a lot really well. I genuinely felt that he was faking being insane to start with, but that, at some point, he started to crack, and, as the play went along, the amount he was faking insanity vs. the amount he actually WAS insane ebbed and flowed, but with a general "more insane as time goes on" trend. But, in general, the performance didn't do that much for me.
So now we get to "what did the ASP do differently", and this, ladies and gentlemen, is what's called "burying the lede." Because THIS is the important part.
The Strand Theater in Dorchester is a beautiful 1918-vaudeville/movie palace, which seats 1400 people. It was a deteriorating, cruddy mess when it closed in the late sixties, at which point, the City of Boston claimed it by eminent domain, and fixed it up and turned it into a center for arts and performance.
This presented a real challenge for the ASP -- they use interesting neighborhood spaces, and use the quirkiness of the space, its unique and odd characteristics, to help influence how they put the play on. This is what they're good at -- finding a way that a story, and actors, and a funky space can all work together to create something.
Besides, 1400 seats? The ASP is a community project. The idea is to create great art that people can feel a part of. They don't really like to perform for more than maybe a couple hundred people at a time -- and that's the HIGH end. I get the sense they like to be able to be aware of every member of the audience individually, rather than just as a mass.
The ASP is the only troupe I can think of which would consider the chance to perform in a building designed for the purpose to be a challenge to be overcome.
How the hell can the ASP use an actual, real live THEATER? It's a fantastically gorgeous space. How can the ASP use a fantastically gorgeous proscenium arch theater which seats one point four thousand people to create an intimate theater experience?
Answer? Backwards.
The seating is all on the back parts of the stage. Most of the action takes place on the front part of the stage. And behind them, the cavernous, empty space formed by fourteen hundred seats, a sloping sea of seats, with a balcony above and ANOTHER sea of seats . . .
The best part of the play was the opening. The ASP always does AMAZING starts to their plays, and I'm loath to say to much about it, because it was so amazingly effective. Let's just say that Hamlet starts with guards on watch, in bitterly cold weather, completely on edge because, first, there are rumors of war with Norway and/or Poland, and, second, there's a FRIGGIN' GHOST HAUNTING THE GODDAMNED BATTLEMENTS and scaring the shit out of everyone.
And, well, I, at least, was cold and on edge by the end of the scene. The vast space of seats feels empty and cold and creepy. If you've ever been in an empty theater -- especially an OLD empty theater -- you know that they feel . . . haunted. All of them do. There's something about a big theater with nobody in it that feels . . . wrong, eerie, creepy. Maybe holy, in a scary way.
The ASP used that fact. They made that feeling the setting of their play. It is the feeling of the play Hamlet. And that's what they did.
Oh, and also, half the actors are black, which was a deliberate choice, as Dorchester is a primarily black neighborhood, the ASP's mission is to get more people to watch Shakespeare, especially folks who don't usually watch Shakespeare. Having black actors is a way of sending the message to black folks who live nearby, "Hey, this Shakespeare stuff belongs to you as much as it belongs to anyone."
http://www.actorsshakespeareproject.org/season3/hamlet.html
The show started last Thursday, and is running through November 12, in the sort of standard "Thursday through Saturday nights, with matinees on weekends, which meas two shows on Saturdays" pattern. Tickets are $40, $35 on Thursdays, and there are student and senior discounts. I heard a rumor that they've got a discount for Dorchester residents, too, but I don't know details.
It's at the Strand Theater at 543 Columbia Rd in Dorchester, and you're allowed to park in the bank parking lot next door in the evenings. Also, there are a bunch of buses that run along there, but I don't know the details, since Dorchester is out of my usual stomping grounds.
Now, full disclosure: Hamlet is not one of my favorite plays. I've seen a half-dozen productions throughout my life -- four on stage, two movies -- and, in many ways, I'm Hamlet-ed out. It's a difficult play, anyway -- it's one of Shakespeare's longer ones, the versions we have could possibly have been written to be read rather than performed (it's a theory, anyway -- don't know if I believe it or not), and the character of Hamlet is . . . confusing to say the least. He sometimes acts like a teenager, but we know he's at least a few years older than twenty-three. (Yorick's been buried 23 years, and Hamlet knew him well enough to remember getting piggyback rides from him, so Hamlet's got to be at least 25, 26, maybe older.) It's never clear how insane he is, and how insane he isn't. And it's not even clear why his strategy is to pretend to be insane -- in the original story, there's a superstition that, if you kill a madman, you go crazy, so nobody is willing to kill Hamlet so long as people think you're nuts, but I don't know if Shakespeare knew that superstition, or Shakespeare's audience knew that superstition, and I know that we modern audiences don't know that. So, in order to put on a production of Hamlet, you have to:
1. Decide how crazy Hamlet actually is, why he's pretending to be crazy, how action-packed he actually is, how over-thoughtful he is, and why. How did he feel about his father, how did he feel about his uncle before he found out his uncle killed his father, does he love his uncle, did he ever love his uncle? How does he actually feel about Ophelia, how did he feel about Ophelia before this all happened? He's got a massively confusing and complicated character, which is why people LIKE playing him, but it's totally not easy to figure out.
2. Decide what Claudius is really like -- how he feels about Hamlet, how he feels about Gertrude, how he feels about his brother, all sorts of things that can be played in all sorts of different ways.
3. Decide what Gertrude is like -- how she feels about Claudius, how she feels and felt about the former king, what she had to do with her former husband's murder, if anything -- lots of stuff.
4. What's Polonius like? Is he smart, or foolish? Does he love his children? Does he love Denmark? Does he like being a power behind the throne? Hell, you could imagine a backstory for him in which he and Claudius jointly decided to off the old king to grab more power. I don't know of anyone who actually has gone in that direction with him, but it could be cool.
5. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern -- hapless dupes? Co-conspirators in trying to bring Hamlet down? Did they know the content of the note they were carrying?
You know, you could perform the play such that EVERYBODY who died, except Ophelia and Hamlet, had a hand in killing the old king. . . never seen anyone do it, but it'd be interesting.
That's challenge number one. The second challenge is that everybody does Hamlet, so what can you bring to your play that is both original enough to make the play worth putting on, yet not SO different that it's alienating to your audience?
So, how does the ASP do with both of these question -- how do they do with their interpretations of characters, and have they found things to do that are original, but not too original?
Well, let's go through the cast.
Horatio, played by Willie E. Teacher, was strong. There wasn't much unexpected in his performance, but he played "strong, smart, loyal, decent, and upright" well. I kind of see Horatio as a bit of a Boy Scout -- if there's a real, genuine good guy in the play, it's probably he. And that's what Teacher delivered, and well.
I really liked Ken Cheeseman's interpretation of all three of the roles he played -- the ghost, the head of the troupe of actors, and the gravedigger. He was appropriately otherworldly and, pardon the pun, grave as the ghost of the old king, and, as Lis pointed out, having the Player King and the Ghost played by the same actor gives you a kind of a neat thrill, since the murder in the play-within-a-play, you realize, looks pretty much exactly like the real murder must have looked. He always turns in a wonderful performance as a Clown -- being funny without being overbearing, and recognizing appropriate gravity in the characters without sacrificing humor, and his Gravedigger was a fine example of how he pulls off that balance.
Johnny Lee Davenport's performance of Claudius was, I think, the highlight of the play. He portrayed a villain with sympathetic qualities, and a believable internal life, who is nonetheless sufficiently vile that you feel he has to die. While I've always seen Claudius as killing the king to take over the kingdom, and marrying Gertrude as part of his bid to consolidate power, his Claudius committed his crimes as much to gain the queen as the country. And the deep and passionate love he feels for Gertrude is reciprocated.
That was the main note that Marya Lowry brought to the character -- her passion for Claudius. I saw her as a victim, pushed around by circumstances, and wasn't really sure who she was -- did she have a hand in her husband's death? Her feelings for Claudius would have given her a motive, but I can't really believe it of her Gertrude. So I didn't really understand who she was, what her motivations were, how she really felt about her former husband. And that made it confusing to me.
Edward O'Blenis's Laertes also failed to blow me away (although Lis quite liked his performance). I felt that he had a tendency to chew the scenery a bit much (which, admittedly, so did Davenport, but Davenport did it with style). Laertes felt. . . overacted. He has a hell of a lot of emotional stimulus to react to, and reacting to all of it at the top of his lungs was exhausting, and, to me, less believable. His quieter moments at the beginning of the play, I felt, were better -- I really liked his reactions to Polonius, and how he and Marianna Bassham developed the Laertes-Ophelia brother-sister dynamic. That felt real. And his death speech really moved me. But there was a lot of stuff in the middle that left me cold.
So what of Marianna Bassham's Ophelia? If there is one character in the play that you truly feel for, it's she. And this performance brought that facet forward and polished it to a high shine. Ophelia, as Bassham played her, is pure emotion, and perhaps, pure love. She exists in her relationships with other characters -- and that's why she's so fragile. Her performance was downright heartbreaking.
Polonius -- Robert Walsh. I don't think I've ever seen a less sympathetic, less likable Polonius. Walsh created a Polonius that you didn't mourn for when Hamlet killed him. It was a really interesting effect, and I don't know whether I liked it or not. I think of Polonius as pedantic, maybe foolish, an old man with some wisdom, a somewhat grandfatherly type. Walsh played a Polonius who was calculating and cold in his professional life, and baffled and emotionally distant when dealing with his family. It is no wonder that Ophelia was so fragile that she could be driven into insanity -- she was raised in an emotionally sterile household by a withdrawn father who was unable or unwilling to support her when she needed him most. It was a disturbingly believable interpretation, and one that is forever going to color my perception of the character.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, played by Ted Hewlett and Sarah Newhouse, were, more or less, non-entities. Which is a totally legitimate way to play them, but makes it hard to say too much about the performances. They were pretty clearly victims of circumstance, pushed around by people much more powerful than themselves, without a hell of a lot of control over their own destinies. It's hard to believe that they deserved to die, but, well, it's also hard to get too upset over them.
So, that brings us to Ben Evett's Hamlet. It was, simply put, perfectly reasonable. But I've seen him be brilliant before (Cassius in Julius Caesar, Edmund in King Lear, so "perfectly reasonable" was a bit of a letdown. He did a lot really well. I genuinely felt that he was faking being insane to start with, but that, at some point, he started to crack, and, as the play went along, the amount he was faking insanity vs. the amount he actually WAS insane ebbed and flowed, but with a general "more insane as time goes on" trend. But, in general, the performance didn't do that much for me.
So now we get to "what did the ASP do differently", and this, ladies and gentlemen, is what's called "burying the lede." Because THIS is the important part.
The Strand Theater in Dorchester is a beautiful 1918-vaudeville/movie palace, which seats 1400 people. It was a deteriorating, cruddy mess when it closed in the late sixties, at which point, the City of Boston claimed it by eminent domain, and fixed it up and turned it into a center for arts and performance.
This presented a real challenge for the ASP -- they use interesting neighborhood spaces, and use the quirkiness of the space, its unique and odd characteristics, to help influence how they put the play on. This is what they're good at -- finding a way that a story, and actors, and a funky space can all work together to create something.
Besides, 1400 seats? The ASP is a community project. The idea is to create great art that people can feel a part of. They don't really like to perform for more than maybe a couple hundred people at a time -- and that's the HIGH end. I get the sense they like to be able to be aware of every member of the audience individually, rather than just as a mass.
The ASP is the only troupe I can think of which would consider the chance to perform in a building designed for the purpose to be a challenge to be overcome.
How the hell can the ASP use an actual, real live THEATER? It's a fantastically gorgeous space. How can the ASP use a fantastically gorgeous proscenium arch theater which seats one point four thousand people to create an intimate theater experience?
Answer? Backwards.
The seating is all on the back parts of the stage. Most of the action takes place on the front part of the stage. And behind them, the cavernous, empty space formed by fourteen hundred seats, a sloping sea of seats, with a balcony above and ANOTHER sea of seats . . .
The best part of the play was the opening. The ASP always does AMAZING starts to their plays, and I'm loath to say to much about it, because it was so amazingly effective. Let's just say that Hamlet starts with guards on watch, in bitterly cold weather, completely on edge because, first, there are rumors of war with Norway and/or Poland, and, second, there's a FRIGGIN' GHOST HAUNTING THE GODDAMNED BATTLEMENTS and scaring the shit out of everyone.
And, well, I, at least, was cold and on edge by the end of the scene. The vast space of seats feels empty and cold and creepy. If you've ever been in an empty theater -- especially an OLD empty theater -- you know that they feel . . . haunted. All of them do. There's something about a big theater with nobody in it that feels . . . wrong, eerie, creepy. Maybe holy, in a scary way.
The ASP used that fact. They made that feeling the setting of their play. It is the feeling of the play Hamlet. And that's what they did.
Oh, and also, half the actors are black, which was a deliberate choice, as Dorchester is a primarily black neighborhood, the ASP's mission is to get more people to watch Shakespeare, especially folks who don't usually watch Shakespeare. Having black actors is a way of sending the message to black folks who live nearby, "Hey, this Shakespeare stuff belongs to you as much as it belongs to anyone."
http://www.actorsshakespeareproject.org/season3/hamlet.html
The show started last Thursday, and is running through November 12, in the sort of standard "Thursday through Saturday nights, with matinees on weekends, which meas two shows on Saturdays" pattern. Tickets are $40, $35 on Thursdays, and there are student and senior discounts. I heard a rumor that they've got a discount for Dorchester residents, too, but I don't know details.
It's at the Strand Theater at 543 Columbia Rd in Dorchester, and you're allowed to park in the bank parking lot next door in the evenings. Also, there are a bunch of buses that run along there, but I don't know the details, since Dorchester is out of my usual stomping grounds.