Review: In Becoming Hamlet, You Are the Prince of Denmark

If I had to choose only one character from Shakespeare who most speaks for contemporary theater audiences, it would be King Lear. But if I could select a second character to represent that smaller part of the audience composed of their children who also love the theater (when they can afford it), it would be Hamlet.

The melancholy prince of Denmark is intelligent enough to know he has been cheated out of his inheritance by a conspiracy of the old, but too indecisive to do much about it beyond passive-aggressively staging a play. Still plugging away at that doctorate at Wittenberg, Hamlet is the very model of the downwardly mobile Millennial (or, even more tragically, Gen X) elite.

Damon Horowitz suggests a similar perspective with his participatory adaptation, Becoming Hamlet, now making its off-Broadway premiere with the Directors Company at Five Angels Theater. Horowitz and director Sybille Bruun invite viewers to speak lines from Shakespeare’s play and even step into the action.

“We here gathered tonight, we are the age and body of our time,” says Horowitz near the top of the play. “And tonight, we are Hamlet. I am Hamlet; and you are Hamlet; and you are Hamlet…and you and you and each of you,” he says, pointing to various members of the audience like a Stanford-educated Harold Hill.

Horowitz has the aura of a high-class corporate motivational speaker, and I was unsurprised to learn that he previously served as Google’s in-house philosopher and has given multiple TED talks. He brings that muted charisma to his performance as “Hamlet Guide,” a first-among-equals role that perfectly encapsulates the soft Orwellianism of Silicon Valley: We are all Hamlet, but some animals are more Hamlet than others.

We learn how Hamlet’s Uncle Claudius (David H. Littleton), following the sudden death of his brother the King, married his widowed sister-in-law (an emotionally guarded Désirée Baxter in the role of Gertrude) and seized the throne for himself. Claudius urges Hamlet to stay at court, develop his relationship with his girlfriend Ophelia (Judith Marian Feingold), and take his position as his son, the medieval Danish equivalent of an invitation to pay your dues and wait for your turn. But the ghost of the dead King (a genuinely ghoulish Equiano Mosieri) has another idea: revenge.

Viewers who consent to participate are handed cards with lines to read from their seats. Mine was “One may smile and smile and be a villain,” which made me think fondly of the late Tim Curry. And that’s OK. The subjective read we have on this 425-year-old text, the psychological baggage we bring with us into the theater, seems to be very much the point of Horowitz’s experiment. Like a cabaret cover of a great song, it is meant to reveal not just the elasticity of the material, but something about the personality of the performer.

Braver viewers have the opportunity to step onstage and appear alongside Horowitz in key scenes, a conceit that works surprisingly well in a town full of amateur actors. The way one such volunteer growled the word “mother” as he icily stared into Gertrude’s eyes conveyed a whole lifetime of psychoanalysis. It was thrilling.

There are drawbacks. With lines coming every which way from the audience and onstage, the actors are rarely able to direct their gaze in a sustained way as they address Hamlet’s multitudes. But this competent cast is mostly able to finesse that lack of focus, and the four “facilitators” charged with cueing the audience ensure that there are few awkward pauses.

They are very much the culprits, however, of the strangest part of the production, when we are encouraged to echo certain words or phrases. “More than kin,” they hiss, looking at us expectantly and waving their arms to encourage us to join in. It feels a lot like attending mass for the first time and not knowing the call-and-response.

Bruun has directed an attractively spare cult meeting, with Amit Gajwani’s essential costumes helping us keep the characters straight, and Maryam Sweirki’s lighting directing our eyes. Yijun Yang has designed a set of empty platforms backed by hanging rectangular mirrors upstage, which seems like an obvious choice. But the production is never better than when Marlon Feld’s original music sneaks up under the speech of an audience volunteer, creating a magical cinematic moment they are sure to remember for a long time.

Still, it’s difficult to see the audience participation in Becoming Hamlet as much more than a gimmick. Horowitz doesn’t explicitly tie the themes of the play to our modern moment, relying instead on the audience to bring our existential dread into the theater with us, which we would do in any old production of Hamlet.

At least this 100-minute cut is much brisker than most stagings of Hamlet, which typically take over three hours to complete. Horowitz and Bruun send us on our way before 10pm, back to our busy lives of scrolling and dithering, the activities that pass as “to be” in 2026.