Theater Review: Is Theresa Rebeck Interested in Sarah Bernhardt, or Only Pretending to Be?
7 / 10
While von Stuelpnagel seems intent on out-Heroding Herod, McTeer and Rebeck are caught in a trap that's at once more difficult and more sympathetic. They're torn between the seduction of Bernhardt's myth and the more unknowable essence of her humanity - between the compulsion to hold up this spectacular woman from history as both an artistic legend and a feminist hero, and the less flashy, much more personal impulse to tell the story of a woman of the theater who's wrestling with ego, uncertainty, mortality, and Shakespeare. I know which story interests me more, but Bernhardt/Hamlet never fully makes the leap. Instead, it spends its time plucking low-hanging fruit and getting its characters into arguments that feel like cul-de-sacs. It can't decide whether it wants to ridicule or re-envision Hamlet's lack of resolve, and in the meantime, it never quite finds its own.
