~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I Am Hamlet

by Mark Jackson, Art Street Theatre
review in SF Weekly April 3, 2002 (Michael Scott Moore)

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The Pimp of Drama
Actors who love Hamlet too much, and the playwright who laughs at them
BY MICHAEL SCOTT MOORE

I think I've found the source of inspiration
for Mark Jackson's new play, I Am
Hamlet, and I apologize in advance if this
review sounds wonkish. (All I can say is that
Jackson drove me to it.) One of W.H.
Auden's Shakespeare lectures opens with
the following meditation on actors aspiring to
play Hamlet: "Curiously, everyone tries to
identify with Hamlet, even women. ... One
does not [normally] say, '"This is me'; one
says, '"I am more like Claudius, perhaps,
than I am like Laertes,' 'or "I would rather
be Benedick than Orsino.' But when a
reader or spectator is inclined to say, '"This
is me,' it becomes slightly suspicious. It is
suspicious when all sorts of actors say,
'"This is a part I would like to do,' not, '"This
is a part I have a talent to do.' I would
question whether anyone has succeeded in
playing Hamlet without appearing
ridiculous."

Mark Jackson makes fun of the long
tradition of Hamlet-playing actors and
Hamlet-excavating grad students who hang
their careers on ever more unique and
personal interpretations of the brooding
Danish prince. He does it not just by lobbing
jokes in a metatheatrical show -- though the
play is metatheater, and he does lob jokes
-- but by posing as Hamlet himself, in the
afterlife, reflecting on his long history as a
character for the stage.

The afterlife here looks like a prison cell.
Hamlet addresses the audience from an
all-black box with chalk scores on the wall.
The marks could be a prisoner's record of
his days in jail, but they really represent all
the versions of Hamlet ever written or
performed. "I have become the pimp of
world drama," Hamlet says, and university students have churned out "tens of
thousands of master's feces. Theses." Along with the bitter commentary, we
get a running performance of the play, with Hamlet imagining himself in the
stage role, narrating his own thoughts while a cartoonish production moves
invisibly around him. Sometimes the play comes into focus, and other
characters speak their lines, so he speaks his. In these bits Jackson has to
hustle, because he's up there alone -- Jackson/Hamlet plays everyone from
Claudius and Gertrude to Osric, like a Shakespearean one-man band.

"The point about Hamlet," said Auden, "is that he is an actor, and you can't
act yourself. You can only be yourself." Jackson tries to solve this problem
by letting Hamlet play everyone else. The result is a hilarious show with
flashes of brilliance. Jackson shapes his speeches and scenes (as both writer
and performer) like an expert craftsman; his movement is careful and
choreographed, and he knows how to carry the audience from a meditative
sample of Shakespeare into wild rants about Stanislavsky, the Yale Drama
School, and theater in San Francisco. In one or two speeches he seems to
veer out of control, and you think he might say anything about anyone.
Watching these tantrums I realized that I haven't seen a performer on the
edge of restraint (in an original script, where I had no idea what would
happen) in far too long.

But the play can't help being self-conscious. It has a master's-thesis quality of
poking at Hamlet for more significance than Shakespeare ever gave him.
Jackson is aware of this aspect of his show -- near the end he chalks another
mark on the wall -- but he can't transcend it: I Am Hamlet remains a piece of
metatheater, instead of a surprising and original new play. (By metatheater, I
mean a piece that comments on performance itself.) All of Jackson's scripts
for his little company, Art Street Theatre, seem to comment on performance
by tweaking a monumental work from the traditional canon; last year's Io:
Princess of Argos! took a minor character from Prometheus Bound and
placed her in a modern cabaret. Io stood by itself, though. The sweet songs,
offbeat heroine, and bizarre soap opera of Zeus raping a princess (and
turning her into a cow) made for a highly original show. I Am Hamlet needs
an audience that knows its Hamlet.

Still, Jackson used to write metatheater that was less accessible, and much
closer to the pure movement of Anne Bogart's recent experiments, Room
and Bob, which the Magic Theatre produced last month. (Jackson once took
classes at Bogart's SITI school, in upstate New York.) Comparing the work
of student and teacher can be fruitful: Jackson's physical skills don't match
those of the actors in Room or Bob -- he isn't nearly as disciplined -- but his
scripts are a lot more entertaining, because he's worked so hard to put formal
movement at the service of a good story. Room and Bob were plotless
abstractions, impressive but not warm; I Am Hamlet is very funny movement
for the masses, or at least the masses who paid attention in English lit.

"Hamlet," said Auden, "indicates what Shakespeare might have done if he
had had an absolutely free hand: He might well have confined himself to
dramatic monologues." Auden thought the monologues in Hamlet were
masterful but unintegrated -- detachable from the play. I Am Hamlet has the
opposite problem: It's one long speech that will never stand on its own.

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