Hamlet: A Terrifying Coward

Some Hamlets are just pure cowards. And what’s worse—they know it. It is with sinking heart that they deliver the lines, “O cursed spite/ that ever I was born to set it right,” when they hear of their fate, because they are well aware that they are too scared to do it. But it’s not just the reality of actually taking a life to avenge their father’s death that frightens them, they are knock-kneed at the thought of the confrontation that is necessary and inevitable before the final decision to enact revenge can be made. In the play, Shakespeare has Hamlet delay by feigning lunacy; he has him avoid simply asking Claudius outright to answer to the ghost’s charge of "murder most foul" by having him put on a play to test Claudius (and his father's ghost) instead. It is the boldest choices that Christian Camargo, who plays Hamlet in the latest Theatre for a New Audience production, makes in the role—sitting down in a chair with its back turned to Claudius and Gertrude, or adopting the fetal position when the ghost delivers the details of his murder—that create a Prince of Denmark literally unable to confront anything. He has no choice but to find some power by handling his women with a terrifyingly rough touch.
In direct contrast to his inability to call Claudius on the truth without the use of bratty huffing and puffing or innuendo, Camargo (of TV's Dexter fame) uses an excessive (I would say abusive) amount of physical strength to grab Ophelia from behind, muzzle her mouth with his hand and then almost throw her off her feet as if she is some rag doll with no capacity for physical, let along emotional, pain. Then he straddles Ophelia (played here by the diminutive Asian actress, Jennifer Ikeda), his more than 6-foot” bulk making her tiny, birdlike frame seem even more vulnerable, in order to tell her “Get thee to a nunnery.”
In comparison, Alyssa Bersnahan makes a blissfully unaware, giddily glamorous, and maddeningly empowered Gertrude. Unlike Ophelia, here is a woman who is comfortable with her sexuality. She wears it on her sleeves—a fact that her many silver-hued gowns and stilettos only serve to highlight. (This is a modern production of Hamlet with the Prince of Denmark in black collar shirt, jeans and boots and Ophelia in a 1940s-style dress until she goes made and runs around in her knickers). Gertrude's physical presence incites great lust in Claudius who cannot keep his hands off her (and one would hope so considering the lengths he has gone to marry her). Yet the same pent up powerlessness sees Hamlet take Gertrude by the throat and smear her red lipstick, psycho killer-style, across her mouth, almost as if to cross her out.
This Hamlet’s madness is not strong enough to create confusion as to whether he is actually losing his marbles. Camargo clearly shows the audience that he is merely acting loopy. Ophelia may lament, “What a noble mind is here o’erthrown,” but why that same noble mind, now done with its cover of craziness, not use its reason to calmly express anger and disappointment at Gertrude’s swift marriage to Claudius, and suspicion over the circumstances of the king’s death without resorting to what begins to resemble an almost-rape remains a question.
Ophelia has historically had a hard time in this play. If she is allowed to actually speak all of the comparably few lines that Shakespeare assigned her, it is still merely to tell us something about Hamlet. Director David Esbjornson has Ophelia tell us that her Liege is murderously furious with his mother—and taking it out on her first.
The absence of Fortinabras in this production is Esbjornson's way of focusing on the domestic situation in Elsinore. So the bigger and more difficult question is: Is Esbjornson perpetuating this tendency for men to use women as their scapegoats, or is he laying it bare for us to recognize how it works? You will have to decide for yourself.
Hamlet is on at The Duke on 42nd Street

Q: Why do we go after the ones who run away?

A: Immaturity.

I saw Dangerous Liaisons on Broadway, starring Laura Linney and Ben Daniels (making his marvelous Malkovich-ian debut). Also making her Broadway debut: Mamie Gummer, who is going to have to work very hard to step out from under her mom, Meryl Streep's, shadow. I think Mamie will ultimately be a wonderful actress. She's young and she needs practice, but she certainly has some magic already.
This production was astounding. The set and the costumes were magnificent and the transitions between scenes flawless. (Some say that's the true measure of a great director). There was crackling sexual tension on the stage, and just the right amount of gratuitous sex scenes.The director, Rufus Norris, used to be an actor himself which might speak to his smooth direction. And the dialogue. Oh. The dialogue. Perfection.

In fact, I was inspired,right after the play, to go straight to Kim's DVDs on St Marks Place to hire Dangerous Liaisons starring John Malkovich, Glenn Close, Michele Pfeiffer, Uma Thurman and Keanu Reeves. It was exceptional.

The Seagull

Alan Cumming is marvelous as Boris Alexeyevich Trigorin in Chekhov's The Seagull, directed by Viacheslav Dolgachev. And Kelli Garner (she plays Nina Mikhailovna) is one to watch. You may remember her as Margo from the film Lars and the Real Girl. She is the picture of innocence in her lace dresses. The Seagull is such a timeless story, but I didn't like Diane Wiest in the role of Irina Nikolayevna. She seemed too old to be believable as the woman who manages to keep her man in the face of youth's bloom. My sister said she saw the play in Central Park a few years ago with Meryl Streep in the role. Now that would have been interesting.

I read a funny story about a lunch where Chekhov when to see Leo Tolstoy to get feedback on his play. Tolstoy spoke about everything but the play and as the lunch dragged on, Chekhov began to despair that his mentor didn't like his work. Eventually he plucked up the courage to ask him what he thought of the play and he said: "It's almost as bad as Shakespeare." Hear, hear.

The Seagull has extended its run for another few weeks at the Classic Stage Company.

Friendship Against All Odds

I went to see Two Men Talking at the Barrow Street Theater in the West Village last night. Paul Browde and Murray Nossel, the two men talking, hail from Johannesburg. This is unscripted theater where Paul and Murray confront issues in their lives that would make the average person's toes curl. The two men went to King David High School and Wits University. And then each faced their homosexuality, came out and moved to New York City. Except since 1974, when each man was 14 and they were paired off by their teacher to tell one another a story, they hadn't spoken. (They'll tell you why). These were parallel journeys. Paul, only a few years after coming out, became HIV+. He is now a psychiatrist with a practice on 102nd Street, and he openly declares his status. (He tells me that even from his empowered and privileged standpoint, he still feels the stigma).
Murray met Paul when Paul's French-Canadian boyfriend was hired to direct Murray's play. Murray is a qualified but non-practicing clinical psychologist and an Oscar-nominated film maker. These days he's a full time story teller, offering the art to corporations through his company Narrative Inc.
Imagine their surprise -- to discover one another again, in a different time, a different place, a different sexuality. The two have been best friends ever since. Paul introduced Murray to his partner of 15 years, also a doctor living with HIV. And Two Men Talking has been performed around the world for the past 10 years. When they took the play to South Africa, King David High School wouldn't allow them to perform it for the students (yawn), but Paul and Murray took it into the Soweto and Alexandra townships and into Aids organizations in the Western Cape.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, had this to say: "Storytelling is a powerful medium for communication. Especially in situations where the message is too painful, too embarrassing, too secret to speak it. Storytelling can then become a journey to the truth. Paul Browde and Murray Nossel have been telling their story on stage to acclaim. They speak of being gay, homophobia, racism and HIV/AIDS, subjects that should be acknowledged and discussed but which are too often avoided or denied."

Murray and Paul joined us for dinner after the show. At the end of the evening, Murray said: "Paul and I will do Two Men Talking until one of us dies."

In New York, the show runs at the Barrow Theater on 7th Avenue and Barrow Street until May 3. See it.

It's Always Been About the Hair

The actress Jean E. Taylor came into my friend Aliza's Greenpoint living room last night (that's Greenpoint in Brooklyn, not Greenpoint in Cape Town) and turned it into an alternate universe. The Wild Hair Living Room Tour is an example of "basement art making," she says. "Exploring how possibility may emerge from a gloomy sense of nothing, we discovered scrap cardboard and string to be handy tools for constructing the world of our piece."
With a roll of tape, a doctor's coat, a chalkboard, and the aforementioned string and cardboard, Taylor (Ophelia disguised as a museum docent) began her highly entertaining "lecture" about the Wild Hare as part of the so-called Museum of Natural History's Outreach Program. This soon morphed into a tale of Wild Hair (read: non-conformists) and Dark Castles...a fairy tale about a thwarted love affair between a prince and a maiden, a dark place filled with immoral people and a young woman who needs to find the courage to step into the unknown. Of course this was all a metaphor for much deeper stuff.
Taylor is an energetic and talented performer and there is something about theater inside a living room that takes away the sometimes unbearable intimacy that I usually feel in a much larger theater. Or perhaps because it's in the living room there is no need to feel that intimacy as something "other".
At the end of the performance, there was a video made where the audience was asked to share an experience of being a "Wild Hair". Of course I had to get involved...told my story of leaving Elle (Dark Castle) when most thought I had a dream job. No regrets there.
For more info: http://wildhairlivingroomtour.com/index.php