VIDEO: Shotgun Players' HAMLET Roulette Has Actors Trading Roles Every Night

"Every actor is right for HAMLET, because there is something of Hamlet in every human being."

Those words, spoken by English actor Steven Berkoff after a critic declared him miscast as Shakespeare's vengeful prince, now serve as the inspiration for the Shotgun Players' current production of the English language's most famous play.

Referred to as HAMLET Roulette, all seven members of the Berkeley, California company's ensemble are required to learn every role in their scaled down production. Five minutes before each performance, the cast stands before the audience dressed in white and each draws a slip of paper out of Yorick's skull to find out which track of roles he or she will be playing that night.

The high-concept method is the brainchild of director Mark Jackson and the company's artistic director Patrick Dooley.

"The show is radically different every night, and you don't really get it until you've seen it multiple times," Dooley tells American Theatre.

"It really makes you appreciate how many possibilities there are for this play," Jackson says, adding that the unpredictable matchups "made us rethink everything about what we do and how we communicate with the audience."

When casting the ensemble, the two agreed that they wanted a company that reflected their diverse community. The group contains four women and three men of varying ages, ethnicities, and sexual orientations.

"When a white guy as Hamlet pushes an African-American woman as Ophelia up against a wall, everything changes," Jackson says. "The actors respond differently based on who they are, so you don't have to do much to make it different every night."

"And when you have Ophelia's mad scene being played by man who is almost 60-and we do it seriously, not campy- it is a little ridiculous but it is also beautiful," adds Dooley.

They also looked for people they felt had the "mental toughness" to charge through the inevitable stress that would accompany the concept.

"They had to be dynamic actors, but we needed marathoners who would be there for each other," says Dooley. "If they didn't take the magnitude of the challenge seriously enough-that everything else in their life would have to become No. 2-that was a red flag."

Additionally, Jackson says, "Everybody had to be just a little bit crazy."

The first step was cutting the play from four hours to two-and-a-half and creating multiple-role tracks.

Then the cast had to start learning their parts. All of them.

"I was excited, but I wasn't thinking about the practical details," says actor Megan Trout. "Nothing prepares you for memorizing the whole play, blocking each scene from every character's perspective."

Her cast-mate, El Beh, felt overwhelmed. "I told myself at one point I'd learn two pages a day, but the stress was so much that I was putting in the hours but my brain was not absorbing the words," she says, adding that the support from her cast members relaxed her and eventually the words sank in.

Jackson created round robin rehearsals where the actors would pull names out of a hat for each role and do a scene, give notes, and then rotate. An approach called "schizoiding" was applied, in which two actors handled one part, with one doing the lines and one developing the movements until they eventually combined forces and took on both words and action collectively.

A template for the blocking was created that allowed each actor to come up with variations."

"We decided things collectively, but there was always wiggle room," Beh says. "I've decided to play Gertrude as if she knows almost everything about what Claudius did, but some have decided she does not know anything."

Jackson also decided to have each actor carry the script onstage, even using it as a prop (for instance, it is the Gravedigger's shovel). This acknowledgment of theatrical artifice, Trout says, "makes a play that's intimidating to audiences more relatable."

Along with the title character, the actor playing Laertes is the only other one that doesn't double-up. Instead, that actor sits offstage ready to feed lines to anyone who needs help. Additionally, if an actor completely blanks, he or she can say, "Take it," and Laertes will read a longer stretch while the onstage actor performed the movements, putting the "schizoiding" technique to good effect.

The first preview was for an audience of students, with Trout playing the lead. She went up on her lines just twice, both for the simplest of phrases, "Aha," and "I am dead, Horatio," the latter request inspiring laughter that cut the tension of the fight's climax.

"I felt if I could have had one more go I would have done even better, and now I don't know when I'll be Hamlet again," she says. "I now realize repetition is such a luxury in the theatrical process."

Dooley said there were fewer calls for lines on the second night, but that wasn't necessarily a good thing. "They seemed more cautious, as if they were making sure to say the words instead of throwing themselves at the wall. But by the third night they were back at it."

Audience members began making return visits almost immediately to see the different combinations.

"Megan is a competitive gymnast and a super physical actor, so her Hamlet makes a different show than Nick Medina, who is more cerebral," says Dooley.

"I think I'm a really intense Hamlet," Beh says, adding that the audience becomes more contemplative for a thoughtful Hamlet or more energized for a more manic protagonist. "They ride the energy," she says. Either way, Beh says, she hopes audiences "find a little messiness exciting."

"The whole first show was a bit of a train wreck," says Jackson, "but we got a standing ovation. People want something authentic and alive at the theatre. They want to see there's a real risk someone will fail-and when you do, the audience is on your side because they see how hard this is and they see you get back up and keep going."

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