Hamlet

The Wooster Group’s Hamlet is an archaeological excursion into America’s cultural past, looking for archetypes that shadow forth our identity. The group has been drawn to Richard Burton’s Hamlet, a 1964 Broadway production which was recorded in live performance from 17 camera angles and edited into a film that was shown for only two days in 2000 movie houses across the US. The idea of bringing a live theater experience to thousands of simultaneous viewers in different cities was trumpeted as a new form called “Theatrofilm”, made possible through “the miracle of Electronovision.” The Wooster Group’s Hamlet attempts to reverse the process, reconstructing a hypothetical theater piece from the fragmentary evidence of the edited film, like an archeologist inferring an improbable temple from a collection of ruins. Channeling the ghost of the legendary 1964 performance, the Group descends into a kind of madness, intentionally replacing its own spirit with the spirit of another.