Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Mark Taper Forum
Through July 6
There are a number of engaging elements in director Robert O’Hara’s odd hybrid adaptation of Hamlet, now at CTG’s Mark Taper Forum where it’s billed as a story of “madness, murder, and mayhem” and a brisk and intense excavation of the classic text.” Whether or not you concur (and for me that would be a stretch), there’s no taking away from the production’s impressive tech, which serves up both a grandiose setting for the story and a reflection of the interior workings of the tormented prince’s mind.
But that doesn’t mean the production succeeds. Far from it.
The play is divided into two parts. Its enveloping conceit is that what we are seeing has been produced by the Elsinore Production Company, and it opens with a comic replica of the introductory frames of an old-timey film from the 30s, replete with rousing score (sound designer and composer of original music Lindsay Jones) and a projection design (Yee Eun Nam), in black-and-white, that features the cast and other credits of the film to come.
Following that, and before we are launched into an echoic but language-modified rendering of Shakespeare’s text, there is an erotic scene in deep shadow between a woman, Ophelia (Coral Peña), who acts as the playful seducer, and a man, Hamlet (Patrick Ball), who responds as the eagerly seduced. The scene plays out for several extended moments with only their silhouettes visible, and involves cunnilingus.
Then the lights come up (lighting designer Lap Chi Chu) on an impressive interior, again courtesy of Yee Eun Nam’s marvelous projection design: the grand hall of a palatial-type mansion, suitable for a story that aspires to cinematic grandeur. We are at the royal court, presided over by and inebriated and officious King Claudius (Ariel Shafir), accompanied by his now wife, Gertrude (Gina Torres). Polonius (Ramiz Monsef) and Laertes (Ty Molbak) are present when a skulking Hamlet rejects Claudius’s blandishments and communicates to his mother his displeasure at her marriage.
The tech and sensory elements of the production continue to dominate as the story moves forward. Soon after, we have Hamlet’s scene with the Ghost (Joe Chrest). This vituperative specter appears solely on video, his enraged and vengeful image plastered ceiling-high across the back of the stage, his bellowing commands thundering throughout the venue. It’s bizarre, and dramatic, and a telling representation of what might be happening inside the head of a fiercely raging but pathologically indecisive individual namely, Hamlet. (The image strikes one rather like the results of a brain scan, with various dyes indicative of a slew of emotions flooding the organism.)
Continuing on, this first section of O’Hara’s adaptation hews, with modification, to Shakespeare’s original. The text has been contemporized and there are added plot points — for example, a bisexual Hamlet and a promiscuous Horatio (Jakeem Powell) are having an affair. Regardless, the most arresting element of the show remains its visuals, along with the sound and lighting effects which accompany them. Alas, the performances, and especially Ball as Hamlet, seem dwarfed by their surroundings — mere languishing specks in a macrocosm of the senses. Even as you are enjoying the production’s technical theatrics, the power and intensity that is at the core of the original story, usually filtered through a human being speaking some of the greatest lines ever written, is absent.
But that is of minor unsettling consequence relative to what comes next. Because about two-thirds into this two-hour production (which, inexplicably, is played without intermission), there is a radical shift. No longer are we imagining ourselves at the royal court in Denmark circa the 14th century. We are now very much in the 21st, in the here and now, and the story now pivots on the investigation by a Detective Fortinbras (Chrest, in person) who has been called in to investigate a series of murders. Fortinbras, it turns out, is not actually a police detective, but rather a fixer hired by Elsinore Studios to get to the bottom of the crime. (There are four dead bodies in the next room, he notes.) The victim most of consequence is the movie studio CEO— i.e., Claudius, who succeeded to the job after his brother, the former CEO, was also slain. Hamlet is the main suspect (at which point you wonder, Is this a Succession spinoff?), and those around him are being interrogated for evidence. Horatio, in particular, is grilled for his possible complicity.
It’s possible (arguably) to see how this scenario, presented as a separate, self-contained satire, might prove entertaining. But as Act 2 of an adaptation of Shakespeare’s towering tragedy — and the first act does qualify as such despite its tweaks and its self-consciously sexual meanderings from the original plot — it’s a total bust.
The production has other assets. Costume designer Dede Ayite has conjured some eye-catching outfits, for Gertrude especially. Jaime Lincoln Smith delivers a whip smart cameo as “the player,” standing in for the entire troupe of players who traditionally act out Hamlet Sr’s murder. Shafir has some booming moments as Claudius. And it’s not a leap to surmise that other members of the ensemble might be perfectly able thespians who would showcase better in another production.
But in the end the apparent irrelevance of this adaptation to anything meaningful, its vacuous take on some of the profound and universal human conflicts that, one way or another. really do affect us all, does it in.
Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown LA. Tues.-Sat., 8pm, Sat., 2:30 pm, Sun., 1 pm and 6:30 pm; thru July 6. www.centertheatregroup.org Running time: two hours with no intermission.
