David Melville in “Hamlet (Solus)” (Photo by Gretel Cortes)

Mike Waltzing with Hamlet

“Hamlet (Solus)” and “The Unraveling”

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Words. What’s the point of them? The Signal chat debacle, and the Trump administration’s defense of it (no war plans were texted on an unsecure server, they weren’t “war” plans, they were “attack” plans, nothing illegal here, nothing to see, nothing to investigate), is brazenly cavalier, reckless and dangerous to national security. Let’s add hypocritical, when contrasted against countless partisan investigations of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server (for what was later proven to be non-classified info when she was Secretary of State). The scandal takes the old quip, “You lie like the blue sky” into a fifth dimension.

The belligerent nonsense mouthed by Secretary of Defensiveness Pete Hegseth makes a mockery of language itself. The last time the world seemed to be falling apart so rapidly, following the detonations of the atomic bomb in Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the wake of World War II, playwright Eugene Ionesco opined on the meaningless of language and how, in an age of cosmic absurdity (reflected in his Theatre of the Absurd), words are less instruments of truth as shields from it — mere blankets providing comfort for old and oft-repeated platitudes. Hence, one of his plays (The Bald Soprano) consisted entirely of clichés lifted from an English-lesson primer with an array of characters all named Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Mr. and Mrs. Martin.

So we’ve been here before. The linguistic sewage lands on our shores in waves. It’s fair to say that, at present, we’re drowning in it. At the turn of the 17th century, Shakespeare felt that he, too, was drowning in it. In Hamlet, the newly anointed King Claudius has just murdered the former King, who just happened to be his own brother, before swiftly marrying the former queen, who just happened to be his former sister-in-law. Near play’s opening, the newlywed Claudius gives a grand speech to the Danish court.  It starts like this:

“Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death
The memory be green, and that it us befitted
To bear our hearts in grief, and our whole kingdom
To be contracted in one brow of woe. . . “

Claudius is the Pete Hegseth of ancient Denmark. Nowhere does Claudius suggest, let alone mention, that he is the killer of “our dear brother,” in a nation now “contracted in one brow of woe.” It is a boldface lie of omission, like that of Hegseth when he announces to the world that no crimes were committed when he himself, with the panache of a drunk adolescent, texted detailed “attack plans” on a foreign nation over an unsecured, easily hackable server, thereby breaching the very specific policy of the department he was hired to run, and thereby brashly, needlessly, endangering the lives of his countrymen carrying out his orders. (They’re now calling it a “successful operation” while ignoring all the other stuff.)

One difference between Claudius and Hegseth is that there is no evidence of Claudius’s murderous deed when the King makes his speech to the royal court. In fact, the driving impulse of the play is Hamlet’s strategies to get to the truth. Not so with Hegseth, whose fidelity to the truth is about as pure as his marriage to competence. His texts were eventually published by the editor of The Atlantic Magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, who had been accidentally invited by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz into the group chat discussing the “attack plans” — if this were a play, nobody would . . . no, let’s not.

Only after the entire administration attacked Goldberg, the messenger, as a “sleazebag,” did Goldberg publish the texts, because, Goldberg, silly man, believed that somebody out there should understand the truth, the folly and the scale of it. He demonstrated far more restraint than members of Trump’s Cabinet. Goldberg initially withheld revealing the texts that were rolling into his cellphone, so as not to endanger American lives.

Goldberg couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing on his phone while he sat in his car in a parking lot. It seemed so implausible, so patently stupid that he would be privy to the details of top-level battle plans, within hours of those plans being executed. This is very much Hamlet’s reaction after he learns “first hand,” from the Ghost of his father, details of the former king’s assassination. Perhaps this is all just a trick, Hamlet muses, an entrapment, the devil disguised as his father, a demon guide to the underworld, or in Goldberg’s case, professional ruin. Let’s call Goldberg the Hamlet of Signal.

Claudius is the first character to appear in Hamlet (Solus), a solo performance created and performed by David Melville at the Atwater Village studio theater of Independent Shakespeare Company. From Claudius, Melville morphs into Hamlet, has a discourse with a ghost of his father, also played by Melville while sitting at spinet piano facing a side wall, while a camera beams his face onto the back wall. The older generation (the Ghost and Claudius) speaks in a Scottish brogue, while Gertrude (also played by Melville) and Hamlet are more London neutral. Melville’s gravedigger is, understandably, a cockney; the Player King, south of England. And so on.  The many characters he portrays are distinctive, in both vocal timbre, dialect, and body language, making it easy to discern a dialogue from a monologue, all enhanced by Melville’s intuitive gift for comic timing.

Though Hamlet is a brooding revenge melodrama, or can be, it’s not entirely so in Melville’s hands, and those of his director Cary Reynolds.

Let’s take this from the top: BinhAn Nguyen’s set consists of that piano on one side, a large props-containing packing chest stage center, and Yorick’s skull perched on a stand on the other side. Yorick is a puppet with a jaw activated by a foot pedal. Yorick, i.e. death, frames this interpretation, which opens and closes with the remains of the corpse.

Here’s Yorik’s opening ditty, sung by Melville, who also strums accompaniment on a ukulele after making a quip about “de-composing.” So this is death framed inside a musical hall aesthetic:

“It’s a good spot,

What I’ve got,

No-one to bother me

The neighbors are all quiet”

etc.

There is also a series of chains suspended from the ceiling. At the end of one is a wind chime; of another, a bell — the windbag Polonius will crash into both, a small moment invoking Peter Sellers’s Detective Clouseau in The Pink Panther.

 Some twenty years ago, Melville played Hamlet in a full production of the play, produced by this company, outdoors in Griffith Park. The interpretation of the lead was that of a standup comedian akin to Eddie Izzard, from the South of England, maybe performing on the Brighton Pier.

Hamlet (Solus) is far more refined, including much of that comedy, but blending it with a level of anguish that displays how this actor, and this company, have matured in 20 years, have grown to appreciate the virtues of nuance, and of contradictory and contrapuntal tones.

On the stage, there’s also a stand holding a guitar (strummed by Melville in the play). The guitar is itself a stand-in for Hamlet’s girlfriend Ophelia, who (or which) doesn’t make a story-appearance until after her apparent suicide. A large sheet that Melville holds in front of his body, but not his face, hides Hamlet’s accidental stabbing of Ophelia’s dad, Polonius. In Hamlet, this killing is one of the factors that leads to Ophelia’s madness and death, but here it’s the only factor, which is a substantive trim. This is because the other factor is her being hectored by both her brother, Laertes, and her dad, Polonius, to avoid Hamlet, and even to return his gifts (which infuriates him). This is a breakup scene in Shakespeare’s play that here doesn’t exist.

So Shakespeare’s storytelling is given shorter shrift than needed to understand the complexities of Hamlet’s journey towards his own demise. For audiences unfamiliar with the source material, there’s no way to know who Ophelia is, or was, or why her death would matter. Because we don’t meet her until after she’s dead, and there’s scant word of explanation of all she meant to him.

Of less import to this adaptation is the absence of Horatio, Laertes, and Fortinbras, because the larger point that Melville is driving to is mortality, rather than the entire saga retold. This is a pathos-filled music hall song-and- dance about the end of things, opening and closing with Yorick.

Melville composed/wrote the original music and lyrics, though some of the lyrics are squibbed from Ophelia’s “mad” scene, used here in tender juxtaposition against the mechanics of the plot’s unveiling.

This production hits full potency in the recitations of Shakespeare’s existential arias about the meanings of life and death. “To be or not to be . . .” is a kind of song, recited against chords that Melville strikes on the piano as he speaks, a dissonant and beautiful accompaniment.

Language may have no meaning, but poetry sure does. Poetry and dance and music. That’s where the truth lies. How telling it is that Hamlet gets to the heart of the murder mystery by putting on a play. In a world of lies, it’s the theater that reveals the truth of things.

Circe Skips Town

Over at The Broadwater, Katharine Noon and her Ghost Road Company have created/devised an adaptation of the ancient Greek legend of Circe, perhaps the first herb-swilling “witch” in Western lit, who in Homer’s The Odyssey, turned sailors into swine for her amusement.

The piece, called The Unraveling, is technically dreamy, with choreography (Christine Breihan and Adam Dlugolecski) attached to pulsing rhythms, a chorus (Breihan, composer Liz Eldridge, and Raven Pinkston) who drum on a table. There are manifestations of video games with actors portraying action heroes (Ronnie Clark, Sika Conner, and Brian Weir) with meticulous dexterity, against the backdrop of Cricket Myers’s techno-authentic sound design, all enhanced by Brandon Baruch’s lighting.

Here, Circe is Susan (Ann Noble), a classics professor who has dropped out to live in the woods, off the grid, growing food and herbs. Why did she leave academia? The college administration? The Trump administration? Or some intersection of the two?

(The Guardian recently reported on Yale Professor and scholar of fascism, Jason Stanley, who is fleeing the United States to teach in Canada.)

No. Rather, Susan’s issue is with her students, their fixation with their cellphones and their willful ignorance. Is this petty of Susan? No. Is her reason to drop out sufficient? Probably. Though there is considerable pushback to the frequent accusations that Gen Z is ill-informed and self-absorbed, focused on their online popularity and their spring break parties, while ignoring calls for social/political activism, not to mention voting, Susan’s disgust is, or has been, commonly felt. Like most truths, it’s probably a half-truth.

Noble’s Susan is a brittle, gray-haired woman of short patience, not unlike the struck-down-by-cancer, classical poetry-reciting English professor, Dr. Vivian Bearing, in Margaret Edson’s Wit. Will her students come to visit her in hospice, after the imperious way she’s treated them?

In the woods, Susan learns that a young man, Felix (Kevin Morales), is her neighbor. They have a fractious relationship that grows closer, which is how she slowly enters his video gaming world.

Note, there are flashbacks of her trying to convey the wisdom and beauty of The Odyssey to her disinterested students. This is ironic because the game he’s playing appears to be based on Homer’s epic. Susan is nothing if not curious, and so their worlds merge.

Meanwhile, he has a game-designer girlfriend — let’s say contact — Penelope, with whom he forges a testy, playful rapport. She grows increasingly smitten with him online, and agrees, finally, to risk an in-person interaction.

Camila Rozo’s rich-voiced, earthy Penelope has charisma offset by vulnerability, and a certain guardedness. She shows up to meet Felix, then is shocked to confront the witch, Susan, in his isolated dwelling. Penelope is the daughter, literally Susan’s daughter, who could never meet Susan’s expectations and whom Susan ultimately abandoned. Is tough love really love’s absence?

Penelope feels she’s been conned, by Felix and by her mother working in tandem. For her,  this meeting, this affection she feels for Felix, is all a joke at her expense.

The unfolding of the story is well-crafted, in the tradition of ancient Greek literature, which always comes back to family, even though it ostensibly seems to be about wars between and among, nations and city-states  — and about how we destroy our own while trying to strengthen them so they can endure life’s relentless cycles of hostility and apathy.

And these ancient legends do seem to circle back to the theme of coming home, or trying to. The Unraveling flirts with that in the way that Felix and Penelope flirt, and the way that Felix and Susan flirt.

This production is way too smart to be sentimental and far too sumptuous to permit us to look away.

HAMLET (SOLUS) Independent Shakespeare Company, 3191 Casitas Avenue, #130, Atwater; Thurs.-Sat., 7:30 pm, Sun., 2 pm; thru April 13. https://iscla.org.

THE UNRAVELING  Ghost Road Company at The Broadwater Main Stage, 1076 Lillian Way, Hollywood; Thurs.-Sat., 8 pm,  Sun., 3 pm; thru March 30. www.ghostroad.org