“Brevity is the soul of wit,” wrote Shakespeare. In the hands of director Ellen Beckerman, brevity is also the soul of drama. Beckerman’s spirited, 90-minute adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet at HERE favorably trims the lengthy tragedy to its most essential plot points: Hamlet madly ponders whether “to be or not to be”; Polonius is murdered; Ophelia drowns; and the curtain still falls on the bodies of Laertes, Claudius, Gertrude and Hamlet.
Purists may take offense at this condensed version of Hamlet, but Beckerman does not seem concerned about angering fanatics who can recite soliloquies in their sleep. This production is for people who don’t mind that The Donkey Show adds disco to A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream or that The Bomb-itty of Errors interjects rap into Shakespeare’s A Comedy of Errors.
Downtown audiences, it seems, prefer to have their Bard bastardized. Over the past year, open-minded theatergoers have seen Romeo and Juliet making love in an alley way outside of the Present Company’s Theatorium, and Shakespeare himself lusting after a young man in Naked Will at P.S. 122. This current, stark presentation of Hamlet places the gifted seven-member ensemble, lead by James Saidy in the title role, upon a bare stage filled with Michael O’Connor’s dynamic lighting, and a musical score featuring classical compositions, industrial sounds, jazz, ’80s pop and heavy metal.
The music is not always used successfully. Choosing not to underscore most of the dialogue, Beckerman’s musical selections occasionally stop abruptly, creating a sharp, inappropriately jarring cut between the text and the production’s less traditional elements. Watching Beckerman’s Hamlet is like channel swapping between PBS’ Great Performances and MTV’s Fashionably Loud. The entire cast displays an expressive talent for movement, but the mid-show addition of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”–complete with bits of the video’s original choreography–is a questionable lapse in directorial judgment. Nevertheless, Beckerman has a tremendous sense of space, movement and direction, so the decision to use “Thriller” is one that can be easily forgiven.
