Máquina Hamlet

In a series of episodes ? made lucid by jarring, disembodied voices, actors manipulating macabre puppets and dolls of myriad shapes and sizes, and a menacing interaction with the audience that invokes the fears of dictatorship ? a distraught Hamlet bears bewildered witness to the violent fall-out of apocalyptic events like the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of Eastern European borders, and the end of Socialism. “Who am I?” he anguishes, having been stripped of every self-defining context. Omnipresent, both veiled and revealed in the work, are the chaos and sinister realities of the dictatorial past and present-day Argentina. The work’s sparse text, uttered in Spanish, is communicated through a physical theatricality that supersedes language: in this production, actions speak infinitely louder than words. El Periférico de Objetos’ conceptually radical Máquina Hamlet, adapted by Dieter Welke, is part of BAM’s Next Wave Festival.