~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hamlet

adapted by Charles Marowtiz
review by Michael Scott Moore in SF Weekly, February 10, 1999

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Theater of the Sensitive

The opening shows in this year’s Absurdist Season at the Exit are
a pair of bizarre reworkings of sensitive-prince tragedies. Hamlet,
by Charles Marowitz, is a short but wild take on Shakespeare’s
Prince of Hesitancy; and Subject to Fits is based on The Idiot,
Dostoevski’s novel about the epileptic Prince Myshkin, who stands
out as a Christian simpleton in St. Petersburg’s backbiting high
society. Both shows locate the nihilism at the foundation of the
older masterpieces, and dredge up something not just absurd but
downright odd. Subject to Fits adds operatic songs for which you
may want to bring earplugs, and Hamlet shows the young prince
romancing his mother and pursued by his sister, while Ophelia gets
molested by Claudius, directly contradicting most scholars’
considered opinions on the matter of who-screws-whom before
everyone dies in Denmark.

Marowitz published this rearrangement of Hamlet in the ’60s,
when absurdism was especially hip. His idea was to build a collage
of what Hamlet himself sees after coming home “to find his father
dead, his mother remarried, a court full of treachery, a state
threatened by invasion, and every imaginable pressure forcing him
towards an act he is temperamentally incapable of.” Scenes and
speeches are shuffled, spliced, repopulated. Different characters
say familiar words to other different characters. Nothing makes
sense. One scene has Gertrude, the queen, giving Polonius’
famous advice (“Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” etc.) to
Hamlet, Guildenstern, Ophelia, and the Clown. Like a schoolmarm
she raps out the meter with a blackboard stick, and makes her
audience recite. Ophelia’s a little Jezebel; Uncle Claudius looks
like a pimp. Hamlet swings his sword at Claudius’ neck while he
prays alone, on his knees; the lights go out and the Clown falls
dead from behind an arras, wearing Polonius’ beard.

The play is an impressionistic mishmash of the contents of
Hamlet’s crazed head. Though it be madness there’s method in’t,
and hard Freudian reasons for all the sex. Marowitz’s version
steams out the old pathos and exaggerates the meaningless pain.
It’s wacky but mercifully short and, in this case, well-acted. Val
Hendrickson does a fine ghost, hard-voiced and haunting; Roberto
“Peligroso” Robinson plays an authoritative Fortinbras; Cat
Schaulis is a feline Ophelia; Phil Worman is perfectly cast as
Rosencrantz, though I was wondering where his usual Whistleaire
partner was for Guildenstern; and Kurt Kroesche does Hamlet
with a nicely confused intensity. If the cast were not this good the
play would be boring, but the actors’ energy turns Marowitz’s
intellectual exercise into a fun night out.

Hamlet. By Charles Marowitz. Directed by Jonathan
Gonzalez. Starring Christina Augello, William Boynton,
Val Hendrickson, Kurt Kroesche, and Cat
Schalis-Thompson. At Exit Stage Left, 156 Eddy (at
Taylor), through Feb. 27. Call 673-3847.

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