Review: HAMLET at Mark Taper Forum

Lights, camera and …roll opening credits! Off we merrily go as a movie screen lights up with names and acknowledgements for this, the latest release by Elsinore Pictures. As the names scroll, out from behind the curtain emerges a young man, followed by a lady. Clearly very much into each other, these two don’t seem to give a flip about what’s on screen. In short order, she’s discarding her underwear and luring him on, and he’s up underneath her skirt. The sultriness is interrupted by the arrival of the King (played by Ariel Shafir) and Queen Gina Torres) who give us that ceremonial reminder that the old King is dead that the Queen has married her dead husband’s brother, that the son of a friend to the court (one Laertes) has leave to depart, but that the King and Queen would like her son to stick around for awhile and not return to school. To which he grudgingly consents. Because in case you haven’t figured it out yet, this is HAMLET even if it’s most decidedly not your father or your grandfather’s…

But hold up here! Of course it’s not. After how many centuries of “to be-ing or not to be-ing” now have people been remarking on the experiments and the risks of productions that are “not your father’s HAMLET”? What are we even talking about here? Director Robert O’Hara’s adaptation/interpretation of the work for the Mark Taper Forum – concluding the first Center Theatre Group season programed by Artistic Director Snehal Desai - is a break with the 3.5 hour doublet and hose tradition certainly. This production is erotic, evocative, lean as a bone and, at a certain point, leaves HAMLET behind entirely. In opening up his own line of questions with Shakespeare’s play, O’Hara - the acclaimed writer of INSURRECTION: HOLDING HISTORY and director of SLAVE PLAY both on Broadway and at the Taper – cracks HAMLET open, exposes it to the sun and then keeps on probing. The tagline: “There will be blood” simultaneously evokes a well-known film and keys us into the idea that we’re supposed  to be experiencing a play within a film, or maybe it’s the other way around. Either way, this is dark noir-ish film, a gritty whydunnit of sorts.

Shadowy, this production certainly is. A line of slate gray clouds float over the landscape of Yee Eun Nam’s opening video montage. In scenic designer Clint Ramos’s construction, that video screen (which gets a ton of use) is fronted by a pair of staircases. The production’s aesthetics, references, costumes are contemporary even when the language is not.   

In the annals of HAMLETS past, there have been more than a few (many of the solo variety) positing that the action takes place completely inside the titular prince’s head. O’Hara’s HAMLET is operating along that wavelength. This dude has his encounters with friends, family, schoolmates and lovers, and is given plenty of occasion to reflect on what he and he alone has seen, heard or felt. But until we reach the point in the action where (could this possibly be a spoiler alert?) our hero shuffles off this mortal coil, he does not leave the stage.  Meaning anything Hamlet does not directly experience - e.g. the watch first spotting the Ghost, the arrival of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Ophelia’s mad scene to name but a few – we don’t see. We can assume that these events have actually transpired based on the information that reaches Hamlet, but maybe not?

Yes, but people have questions. O’Hara has questions. Hamlet (when he is alive) has questions. As does an individual who comes in, surveys the body count and tries to piece things together.  

Since we are spending a lot of time in the company of Hamlet, it’s a good thing this one’s a wildcard. Patrick Ball (of TV’s THE PITT), delivers a Dane who is maybe a bit entitled, maybe with some royal ambition of his own. Showrunner, plotter, nepo baby, lover (gender of partner: unimportant), possessed of a great head of hair, here’s a guy with a penis obsession (quite a lot of “sword” and “pipe” jokes) and little practical use for that public “mad” act. Within some of those celebrated soliloquies, certain words or phrases are delivered with a different voice as though Hamlet is actually having a discussion with an inner demon. 

Is he in fact seeing ghosts who are pushing conspiracy theories and urging murderous thoughts? The ghost is embodied by a quartet of spirits who form a kind of processional leading him off into an area of seclusion where Hamlet can listen to the murky and disembodied voice supplied by Joe Chrest. As one of his points of departure, O’Hara has posited that listening to a ghost who may not exist, turns Hamlet into a serial killer. Or, as we later learn, if Hamlet, Horatio (Jakeem Powell) and others were lying, maybe there’s another explanation for these “things in heaven and earth”.

The production runs a thrifty two hours, which means a lot of characters lose a lot of language. Which does not in the least bit phase Ramiz Monsef whose rapacious, coke-fueled Polonius is a scream. Some of the same, er, demons are driving Ariel Shafir’s Claudius (remember: this is Hollywood).

As a result of O’Hara’s construction, several of the characters other than Hamlet are playing a couple versions of themselves – those who Shakespeare wrote and those who we encounter later. Coral Pena is especially deft giving us both the Ophelia screwed over by Hamlet who breaks our heart, and the one who plays the game to protect herself.

CTG regulars may recall what O’Hara did with Jeremy O. Harris’s SLAVE PLAY a few years back. HAMLET took me back even further, to an outstanding production of O’Hara’s play BARBECUE staged in 2016 at The Geffen Playhouse. Like this HAMLET, that dark comedy also got twisty as it played around with the gap between what we thought we were witnessing and what was actually taking place.

Shakespeare eternally needs shaking up, and it’s cool that Robert O’Hara is there with the earthquake. His HAMLET is a lot of things, but it’s never bloodless.

HAMLET plays through July 6 at 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles.

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