[NEohioPAL]Review of "Hamelt" at the Beck Center

[marcus at designerglass.com]

Hamlet
Written by William Shakespeare
Directed by David Hansen

Running September 29 - October 22, 2006

The Beck Center for the Arts
17801 Detroit Avenue
Lakewood, Ohio 44107
216/521-2540

Sarah Morton gives an outstandingly nuanced performance that the Beck 
Center=B4s intimate Studio Theater allows the whole audience to 
appreciate. The play itself is a substantial re-interpretation of 
Shakespeare, opening, and then continuing through the performance, 
with silent movie subtitles projected on a wall, followed by the 
beginning fragment of the grave-digger scene, a stylized silent movie 
acting interlude explaining the gender-change thirty years before, 
and then moving on to the court scene that usually follows 
Shakespeare=B4s opening on the battlements of Elsinore with Horatio, 
the guards, and the Ghost.

Nick Koesters plays a Horatio role that Director David Hansen=B4s 
editing of the play expands into a very different significance. 
Koesters and Morton are given time to develop the Hamlet/Horatio 
"thing", as Hansen calls it in the Director=B4s Notes, from the 
liege/liegeman male bond to an interestingly eroticized attraction by 
Hamlet for Horatio. Hansen changes the exchange between Hamlet and 
Horatio by giving almost all Rosencrantz=B4s and Guildenstern=B4s lines 
to Horatio, and eliminating them altogether. Morton=B4s and Koesters=B4s 
playing enliven that exchange. Morton=B4s Hamlet is clearly taken with 
Horatio in a way Horatio finds discomfiting. Koesters=B4s Horatio takes 
refuge in the laconic stoicism of the liegeman, drawing back where 
Morton=B4s Hamlet presses in, because Horatio=B4s eyes are all for 
Ophelia, played by the sweetly-voiced and convincingly emotive Rachel 
Lee Kolls. 

Watch for the quickly-passing moment when Claudius (Mark Cipra, 
playing a large and oily-friendly used car salesman of a king in 
public scenes, and a guilty and tormented man in private moments, so 
that even Claudius seems human after all) interferes with Horatio=B4s 
intense intent to safeguard the afflicted Ophelia, just before 
Ophelia escapes to commit suicide. Koesters=B4s body language, his 
face, and his voice combine Horatio=B4s consent to the King and despair 
at Ophelia=B4s escape, to show how he=B4s torn between duty and love - 
and sets up his later leap into Ophelia=B4s grave to challenge her 
brother Laertes (Joshua D. Brown) in professions of love for her. 
That is the one moment of eye-popping discord as Horatio, instead of 
Hamlet, charges Laertes in Ophelia=B4s grave, but Koesters has so well 
convinced us that Horatio is completely taken with Ophelia that the 
discord is brief - a startling example of Koesters=B4s technique and 
Hansen=B4s direction.

Sarah Morton brings a fresh music to the soliloquies included here. 
There is none of the strange bombast most actors bring to these 
famous set pieces. Morton transitions into reflection in front of and 
to the audience, and back into the action of the play, with great 
facility. Hamlet=B4s thoughts seem naturally to occur rather than 
interrupt the action. 

George Roth does a fine job finding the every-day humanity in the 
aped-aristocratic manner of Polonius. It=B4s a difficult role, and Roth 
catches its spirit well. Polonius clearly thinks he=B4s a good deal 
smarter than he really is, but Roth, instead of playing him for an 
old fool of a windbag, which is the easy way out, shows Polonius=B4s 
eagerness to please grows out of honesty and love, not mere 
pretension and ambition. Well done.

Rachel Lee Kollis, in the role of hypoteneuse in the love triangle 
among Hamlet, Horatio, and Ophelia, brings a naturalness to the tough 
role of Shakespearean daughter/lover/madwoman. She slides down the 
continuum from confusion to grief to despair to madness to suicide 
convincingly, and with an impressive economy of means. She has, I 
think, the fewest lines of the three lovers, but she makes the most 
of them. It often seems Ophelia=B4s death is only there to enrage 
Laertes in some productions, but here Kollis makes us feel her fall 
apart as she is overpowered by the blows of fate, all oblivious to 
Horatio=B4s interest.

Anne McEvoy as Gertrude has a tough role, too: to humanize the silly 
old cow Gertrude, but she=B4s up to it. Gertrude=B4s motivations are as 
hazy in this version as in Shakespeare=B4s original, but McEvoy gets us 
past that quickly, and shows Gertrude to be tugged back and forth 
between the demands of Mark Cipra=B4s Claudius=B4s manipulative 
salesmanship and maneuverings, and her love of Hamlet. 

Don McBride=B4s set is ingenious: suggesting a sort of Danish-modern 
castle, and making it easy for the actors to use the oddly-configured 
Studio Theater stage. The lighting, by Jeremy K. Benjamin, never 
failed to subtly and accurately direct the audience=B4s attention 
without interfering in the action. 

The performances are terrific; knowing and seeing these actors, 
they=B4d have been just as terrific and, I think, a lot more resonant, 
were they performed within a more traditional order of the events of 
the play. But see it for yourself: it=B4s worth the trip.