9-29-06
A Color-Blind Hamlet
Mike Nussbaum,Barbara Robertson,Bruce A.Young and Ben Carlson in Chicago Shakespeare’s Hamlet. (Photo: Steve Leonard) I went to Hamlet and had back problems for days.
If you’ve never attended a show at the new Navy Pier facility, be warned that there are certain seats that present a viewing challenge. I sat in D102 and, when facing forward, was staring at another section of audience in Chicago Shakespeare’s thrust configuration. In order to watch the action and not the audience, I had to turn my head about 45 degrees to the left.
For almost three hours.
The resulting stiff neck and attendant back spasms made this a Hamlet to remember. However, not all my reactions to this Hamlet are tied up in my sore back and neck. Yes, the script appears to be uncut, leading to a tidy two hour, forty-five minute running time, including intermission. But there’s a strong visual idea going on and some good performances to recommend the production.
Chicago Shakespeare invited British director Terry Hands to come in and direct Shakespeare’s best known play, and in so doing got an approach that can best be described as stark. In the much longer first act, Hamlet appears in his traditional black garb. On a black set. Everyone else revels in white, suggesting their clothing choices are still being informed by Gertrude’s recent marriage to Claudius. The second act occurs after Hamlet’s departure for England, and when he returns he is all in white, while everyone else appears in black, mourning the death of Polonius. The set’s still black, except for the occasional rise of the back wall that reveals a bright white background. Only the players in their play-within-a-play break the motif, costumed in red for their murderous story, and after a few hours of hueless Shakespeare, I longed for their return.
But the visual choice does make sense and certainly pulls Hamlet out of the society that surrounds him, arguably a key point in Shakespeare’s play. The glossy black back wall reflects the actors, leading to some interesting stage pictures – even when Hamlet stands alone on stage. Hands also serves as lighting designer, and he uses excessive amounts of white top-light, casting characters in shadow and further emphasizing his austere take on this world.
In the central role of Hamlet, Ben Carlson does an excellent job mining his character’s many levels. One suspects, from early on, that this Hamlet is already a bit mad, and his assumption of a mantle of insanity only layers a manic mask over an already deeply troubled man. He mines a great deal of dark humor and is clearly at his best in the first act, portraying Hamlet’s desperate struggle with himself to act on the ghost’s warning. Indeed, turning that interior struggle, on which the play rests, into an exterior one that the audience can follow is an accomplishment of the first order.
In the second act, when Hamlet assumes a more active, almost heroic posture, Carlson doesn’t quite manage as well, and the climactic sword fight is something of a disappointment. Nonetheless, his supporting players are mostly good, particularly Mike Nussbaum as Polonius, who walks the edge of caricature and comes out the other side with a real person. There are some disappointments, particularly Lindsay Gould’s Ophelia and Bruce A. Young’s Claudius, both of whom fail to deliver the text with the kind of clarity required.
This isn’t a revelatory Hamlet, nor is it technically very complex. Indeed, many of the design choices made could easily be pulled off in one of the city’s small storefronts. But Hands makes a strong choice and runs with it, and it’s worth attending just to see Carlson’s take on Hamlet. Just don’t sit in D102.
Hamlet – Chicago Shakespeare Theatre
Chris Jones, Tribune – “For better and to some degree worse, this fast-paced, crystal-clear Hamlet from the former artistic director of Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company, Terry Hands, is a Hamlet utterly and completely dominated by Hamlet. Claudius (Bruce A. Young), Gertrude (Barbara Robertson), Polonius (Mike Nussbaum) and the rest are creatures of the bourgeoisie – at times, they resemble the upper-class twits found in Derek Jarman’s Edward II. Hamlet, on the other hand, is one of us. That’s a wholly reasonable interpretation of the text, and it also boils the play down so that this becomes, if not an interpretation for the ages, an ideal first Hamlet for young people and an enjoyable one for everyone else.”
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times – “Hands’ dramatically lit black-and-white production, awash in the pewter gloom of the sea-swept Danish coast, is not just modern on the surface, though it suggests some of the strict geometry of architect Mies van der Rohe. More crucially, it is modern because Ben Carlson, the highly individualistic and technically brilliant Canadian-bred actor at its center – is far from the classic romantic hero. In fact, with a face and voice that recalls the young Albert Brooks, Carlson gives us a sarcastic, self-mocking, palpably brilliant, unexpectedly funny, fast-talking neurotic, with soliloquies delivered at something approaching the speed of light.
Barbara Vitello, Daily Herald – “In Hands’ very capable hands, humor arises spontaneously like the play’s more somber speeches, which this high-caliber cast delivers gracefully and with a marked lack of pretense. It comes from well-timed asides and well-executed stage business evident in the play’s opening moments when a soldier accidentally startles the guard he is to relieve, or in Horatio’s jittery response to Hamlet’s comment about seeing a ghost. It’s evident in the effortless banter between Ben Carlson’s erudite Hamlet and Roderick Peeples’ clever gravedigger.”
Lawrence Bommer, Reader – “This efficient, concept-free staging by veteran British director Terry Hands is more intelligent than passionate: he refuses to belabor the obvious or the notorious in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Free of doubt even when he’s indecisive, Ben Carlson’s Hamlet broods brilliantly. He makes few discoveries before our eyes but knows so perfectly what he’s saying, as well as why, that surrendering spontaneity to clarity feels right… If there are few surprises in Mike Nussbaum’s dithering Polonius and Andrew Ahrens’s angry Laertes, at least familiarity here doesn’t breed contempt.”
Fabrizio O. Almeida, New City – ”[W]hat is most memorable about British director Terry Hands’ work here, especially for those who resist Shakespeare on the grounds that it is overlong, is that he has produced – with the most minimal of textual cuts to its five acts – a Hamlet that clocks in at just under three hours. Spoken at a relentless tempo and staged so that scenes dovetail into the next, this is a locomotive of a production that sadly sacrifices the poetry and musicality of Shakespeare’s language for pace. This could be overlooked if the production had some strong directorial concept, but Mr. Hands had no larger vision for the play or at least could not express it.”
Louis Weisberg, Free Press – “In British director Terry Hands’ Chicago debut, the play’s the thing. He avoids gimmickry and ‘fresh’ interpretations and instead focuses laser-like on the story, leaving the flairs and flourishes to the Bard. Rather than pondering the question of whether to be or not to be a great Hamlet, Hands has decided to just let his Hamlet be. As a result, this production never quite soars but it seldom stumbles. Aficionados of the work might leave the theater a bit disappointed, but those less familiar with it should find Hands’ treatment eminently accessible and satisfying.”
Catey Sullivan, Windy City – “There’s an exquisitely unbearable tension in the moments just before Hamlet and Laertes launch the blood bath that ends this production. You know how the joust will end, yet in the frozen seconds before the frenzy is unleashed, the intensity becomes so heightened, the suspense so fraught, you feel your skin is going to fly off. Such is the power and exhilarating theatricality of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Hamlet… Director Terry Hands makes them resonate in a lightning-paced, razor-wire production that illuminates the harshest aspects of a stark world defiled by greed, ambition and feral-eyed vengeance.”
The Exonerated – Raven Theatre
Kerry Reid, Tribune – “What Greg Kolack’s staging for Raven Theatre lacks in star power, it makes up with intimacy and intensity. From all corners of the small stage, the characters and their families who lived through a near-brush with execution relate the living hell of wrongful conviction. Jensen and Blank make no pretense of their anti-death penalty beliefs, but it’s hard to imagine even a die-hard proponent of capital punishment being unmoved by these accounts of justice delayed, distorted and denied.”
Justin Hayford, Reader – “This docudrama by the husband-wife writing team of Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen is based on interviews with death row inmates who were eventually freed after being found wrongfully convicted. The interwoven monologues that make up the play relate the characters’ brutal, degrading experiences, but because the script leaves no room for irony, ambiguity, doubt, or suspicion, there’s little drama… Director Greg Kolack’s unsophisticated production, with its mechanical blocking and mostly unsubtle acting, exacerbates the script’s weaknesses.
Fabrizio O. Almeida, New City – “Director Greg Kolack’s busy yet cinematic staging (split focus, cross cutting, shifting spotlights) helps keep the interweaving narrative threads clear and the dialogue as a whole from becoming amorphous, but the piece is weighed down with 10 times more acting than it needs (histrionics and hysterics dictate most of the dramatizations) and a more matter-of-fact and unsentimental approach could have driven home Sunny’s message and emphasized that quiet triumph of the human spirit over the anger. Trust the text and tell the story. Only then can The Exonerated transcend its state of living journalism into palpable moving drama.”
Jenn Q. Goddu, Free Press – “Issues of race, class and gender do come into play, but the ensemble’s performance of the people held prisoner and their loved ones are what make this so dramatic and unsettling. It’s not all grim reality – LaNisa Renee Frederick, for instance, provides some much-needed levity as a disgruntled ex-inmate’s wife. But the honesty of actors such as Chuck Spencer and JoAnn Montemurro in portraying innocents who lose decades of their lives to mistakes or lax investigating, or Jeremy Glickstein as a manipulative killer or a murder victim, make this show compelling.”
Emily Lee, Gay Chicago – “Having a strong cast doesn’t hurt, and director Greg Kolack has amassed a fine group of non-Equity performers. Raven ensemble members Jeremy Glickstein, JoAnn Montemurro and Chuck Spencer do some of their best work here, obviously taking this important subject matter to heart. They are complemented by Arch Harmon, as Delbert Tibbs, arrested and convicted of a murder simply because he and the murderer happened to be black. Tibbs serves as narrator to the piece and Harmon handles some very difficult transitions with ease… Let’s hope all this light is enough to illuminate this still needy subject.”
Catey Sullivan, Windy City – ”[A]s urgent and authentically harrowing as it is, The Exonerated is a flawed drama. Ironically, the playwrights succeed in letting politics upstage the humanity of the piece. As sure as a right-wing politician at an anti-abortion rally, The Exonerated lets you know exactly where your morals on the death penalty should be. That also focuses a hot-button political issue on the human beings behind the politics. The Exonerated isn’t preachy. But there’s no doubt that we’re being told exactly where we should stand on the death penalty. For a theater piece, that’s problematic: Most of us bristle mightily when told what to believe – even if we already believe it.”
Long Day’s Journey Into Night – The Gift Theatre Company
Chris Jones, Tribune – “This is far from a great Long Day’s. Gary Wingert’s patriarch Tyrone – James – lacks the rage and force of personality that lends the character tragic proportion. Alexandra Main remains a tad young to play Mary. The boys don’t tumble as far into hell as they should. And given the diminutive, shallow stage, the customary visual interest of the work is not with us. But the night is very far from being a total bust. Great plays shouldn’t be avoided – their brilliance helps all productions along. And in this case, you’re seeing a sincere rendition that manages to illuminate at least some of the script’s myriad observations of the condition of the American family under stress.
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times – “For the director and actors of Long Day’s Journey – which arrived Monday night in an ambitious storefront revival by the Gift Theatre – time also is crucial. Finding the right pace and pacing for this massive emotional voyage – which in this case stretches to close to four hours – is key. Michael Patrick Thornton’s staging of the work takes a while to settle into its proper rhythm. But when it finally starts to hit its mark, well into the evening’s second half, it grows ever more fascinating. Even those who have seen this play before might hear or sense certain things about it for the first time.”
Kerry Reid, Reader – “Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical tragedy about a washed-up actor, his morphine-addicted wife, and their troubled sons has certainly received grander stagings than this one in a small, boxy storefront. But seldom has the play’s suffocating atmosphere been so convincingly evoked: under Michael Patrick Thornton’s direction, every glance and tic is freighted with dread in this nearly four-hour production, which builds to an emotionally devastating last act.”
Catey Sullivan, Windy City – “First and most glaringly unforgivable: Director Michael Patrick Thornton has cast the pivotal role of opiate addict Mary Tyrone with an actress who looks at least 20 years too young for the part. Even sporting a (badly fitting) grey wig, Alexandra Main looks more like the Catholic schoolgirl of Mary Tyrone’s distant past than the mother of two grown sons… The cognitive disconnect that hits every time the three are on stage together would be enough to remove you from the play even if you could overlook the ridiculously exaggerated tics and twitches ostensibly intended to indicate Mary’s withdrawal symptoms.”
Mother Courage and her Children – Vitalist Theatre
Kerry Reid, Tribune – “David Hare’s translation of Bertolt Brecht’s masterpiece, Mother Courage and Her Children, was first staged in England in the mid-1990s, but it feels perfectly tailored to these troubling times. Vitalist Theatre’s production doesn’t boast the klieg-light appeal of Meryl Streep, who just played the title role for the New York Shakespeare Festival. But Elizabeth Carlin-Metz’s canny staging and her smart and assured ensemble deliver a powerful, if occasionally exhausting, journey with Anna Fierling and her doomed trio of children through an Everyland torn apart equally by war and greed.”
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times – “Director Elizabeth Carlin-Metz has arrived in Chicago with a Vitalist Theatre production each fall for years now, and they are invariably smart, original and bold in their use of movement and music. Her Mother Courage is another splendid piece of work. And sure, a recent New York production of this hugely demanding play starred Meryl Streep. But Lori Myers, an actress who moonlights with the punk-rock gypsy band Mucca Pazza, is sensational. She is far younger than the usual Courage. But she has the emotional weight and charisma to drive this huge theatrical wagon, as well as the throaty voice, self-assurance, braininess and stamina.”
Lawrence Bommer, Reader – “It’s a combustible mix: adapter David Hare’s sardonic, corrosive dialogue with Bertolt Brecht’s devastating indictment of renegade capitalism and soulless profiteering in a time of ‘total fear.’ The resulting play is tragically topical – eclectic, stylized, and riveting in Elizabeth Carlin-Metz’s staging for Vitalist Theatre. Making the hardest bargains possible and thriving on others’ misery, our antiheroine sacrifices everything that matters to survive for nothing. Lori Myers as this ‘hyena of the battlefield’ is relentless, and so are Kevin O’Donnell’s Stomp-like score and set designer Craig Choma’s assemblage of Dadaist detritus. Seldom have eight actors created a world so full.”
Mary Shen Barnidge, Windy City – ”[D]irector Elizabeth Carlin-Metz has drilled her athletic ensemble to razor-edged precision. Lori Myers, youthful physique notwithstanding, engages our sympathies as the amoral Mother Courage, while Kelly Lynn Hogan’s Kattrin projects a mighty-mouse spunkiness that likewise wins our support. A company of versatile character players – Rom Barkhordar, Winston Evans, Vincent L. Lonergan, Anne Sheridan Smith, Christopher Hibbard and Jeremy Clark – zip through an array of distinctive personae and dialects so seamlessly that we are astounded, at curtain call, to see only eight people emerge to take their well-deserved bows.”
Quote of the Fortnight:
“Is fat really a feminist issue?” – Hedy Weiss reviewing Profiles Theatre’s production of Fat Pig in the Sun-Times.