As a recent transplant to Los Angeles, I was thrilled to learn that every weekend in July, the famed Hollywood Forever Cemetery is hosting outdoor evening performances of Shakespeare's Hamlet. This past Friday night found me camped out on the green, along with other Shakespeare enthusiasts eager to get their Bard-of-Avon on. The staging is a collaborative effort between the cemetery and Tall Blonde Productions, founded by Katharine Brandt and Brianna Lee Johnson -- two New York City thespians who moved to Los Angeles last year, and are intent on putting their innovative stamp on the local theater community.
They're well on their way to doing so with this project. Staging Hamlet in a cemetery -- in front of the tomb of Douglas Fairbanks, no less -- is positively inspired. What could be more satisfying than viewing the famous "Alas, poor Yorick" gravedigger's scene in such a setting? The staging was inventive, making good use of the Fairbanks tomb and the reflecting pool in front of it, and Sarah Utterback gave a standout performance as one of the best Ophelias I've seen in recent memory.
Sure, there were glitches here and there: it was tough to hear some of the dialog in the outdoor setting, for instance, and the resident ducks made a cameo appearance. It wasn't so bad when they marched past, single-file, during the gravedigger's scene. But when Hamlet expired after saying, "All the rest is silence," the ducks responded with a cacophony of quacking that rather undermined the gravity of the performance -- even though it added to the overall novelty of the experience.
I suspect I'll enjoy the company's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in August much more, mostly because, despite its stellar reputation, Hamlet is among my least favorite of Shakespeare's plays. Here, in no particular order, are the Top Ten Things I Hate About Hamlet:
1. Bad Timing. Has anyone noticed that when Horatio joins the guards and first sees Hamlet's father's ghost, it's just rounding the stroke of midnight? And yet within two minutes of doing so, the cock crows and suddenly it is dawn, so the ghost must disappear? I'm all for condensing events into shorter time frames for plotting purposes, but at least try to make it reasonably convincing. The willing suspension of disbelief will only take you so far.
2. Pointless Plotting. Is it really necessary to have Hamlet go to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, when most of that trip happens offstage? As the rest of the play proves, Claudius and Laertes are perfectly capable of concocting plots for Hamlet's demise without sending him overseas. And what's with this Fortinbras dude? His only purpose seems to be to show up at the end of the climactic bloodbath and take over the Danish throne, uttering the play's least evocative lines and undercutting the dramatic power of what came before. Hamlet ends not with a bang, but a whimper.
3. Superfluous Characters. The very first scene of the changing of the guard features a guard whose only reason for being is to say, "Okay, I'm outie. See ya!" We never see that guard again. Hamlet would benefit greatly from a belated introduction to Occam's Razor: "Do not multiply minor characters beyond necessity."
4. That Damned Indecisiveness. "To be or not to be," blah, blah, blah. No one would ever accuse Hamlet of acting impetuously (apart from accidentally stabbing Polonius through the arras); he's the quintessential procrastinator. The harsh truth is that it's very difficult to write a play about indecision and keep the plot moving along sufficiently to hold an audience's attention. Chekhov's The Three Sisters suffers from a similar malady: how many scenes can you endure with long-winded whining that they simply must go to Moscow, before someone jumps up in their seat in frustration and hollers, "Oh, for Christ's sake, just pack the bags and go already!"? At some point, you've got to stop talking about revenge and take concrete action. Uncut, Hamlet runs a good five hours -- that's an awful lot of existential waffling to endure before we finally get the payoff with Claudius' death. Which brings me to the next point:
5. Self-Pity is Never Attractive. Dude, seriously -- enough with the melancholy navel-gazing. Granted, your private life is a million kinds of suck. But you're rich, you're privileged, and you're the prince of the realm! Many, many babes are into that -- provided you don't act like a jackass making sexual innuendos to young court virgins in the middle of a play.
6. Shhh! Quiet Please! You know those people who can't sit through a movie without offering some opinion or insight about it? Hamlet is one of Those People. He goes to all this trouble to stage a play to confront his uncle about the king's murder, and then can't shut up during the performance. He keeps jumping up to explain the history, the themes, and even what's about to happen next. I'm surprised the traveling actors didn't stab him on the spot for ruining their performance.
7. Frailty, Thy Name is Woman. For a playwright known for his strong female characters (Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing is my all-time favorite), Shakespeare kind of dropped the ball on this one. Ophelia is sympathetic, to be sure, but clearly lacking in strength of mind or will. And Gertrude is surprisingly passive and colorless, especially compared to characters like Portia or Rosalind.
8. Ten Words Aren't Always Better than One. Much fun is had at Polonius' expense, depicting him as a meandering, long-winded old fool. But a lot of the characters suffer from verbal diarrhea, even when merely summing up the background story. There's also Shakespeare's fondness for puns. I appreciate clever wordplay as much as anyone, but Shakespeare simply can't pun just once. He has to riff on a given word or phrase until he's run through every possible punning permutation. (Don't believe me? Check out this annotated index to puns in Hamlet.)
9. Sacred Cow Syndrome. Hamlet is considered one of the greatest plays in the English language, and every actor knows it. So there's an unspoken reverence upon approaching the role that, more often than not, has a deleterious effect on any given performance. The actor invariably becomes self-conscious, and the audience, in turn, is aware that they are watching a performance -- rather than being transported into an imaginary world. As the poet Carl Sandburg wrote in his poem "They All Want to Play Hamlet": "They are acting when they talk about it and they know it is acting to be particular about it and yet: They all want to play Hamlet."
10. Quote-Mining Run Wild. Years ago, a friend of mine took her cousin to see her first Shakespeare play: Hamlet. Afterwards, when asked how she liked it, the cousin sniffed, "It was okay, but there were so many clichés!" It's easy to chuckle patronizingly about the cousin's literary naivete, but it illustrates perfectly one final problem with Hamlet: its text has been stripped bare by rampant quote-mining. No turn of phrase is too insignificant to escape the quote-miner's eagle eye, all of it seeping into our collective cultural subconsciousness so seamlessly, half the time we don't even realize we're alluding to Hamlet. (Or we misunderstand the quotation's context, like the pretentious college sophomore in Clueless who attributes the line "To thine own self be true" to the Melancholy Dane, and sneers when Cher, the seemingly airhead high schooler, tries to correct her: "I think I remember Hamlet correctly." Ripostes Cher: "Well, I remember Mel Gibson, and he didn't say that. It was that Polonius guy.")
The end result: it's incredibly difficult to make the play's language seem fresh and original to a modern audience. Fortunately, the play makes up for this with the complexity of its characterizations. For all my kvetching, I must give Hamlet some props: in terms of its depiction of dysfunctional family dynamics, it's pretty much timeless. That's why it still resonates so powerfully hundreds of years later. Seriously, these people represent just about every psychological disorder outlined in that therapist's Bible, the DSM.
You've got a spoiled, 20-something child of privilege suffering from general ennui and lack of direction in life, chafing under the judgmental gaze of his stern, domineering father, who clearly disapproves of his son's lack of backbone -- even from beyond the grave. Hamlet's got that deadly combination of low self-esteem and narcissistic entitlement, with hints of a budding bipolar disorder -- vacillating between melancholic thoughts of suicide and stages of manic acting out to get people's attention.
Mom Gertrude can't quite cut the apron strings, manipulating her son against going to college out of state. No wonder Hamlet's got some serious mommy issues: he's uncomfortable acknowledging that she might be sexual being, and resentful of how quickly his revered father was replaced in her bed. The fact that Mom didn't wait too long to throw herself into the arms of her brother-in-law suggests that she wasn't entirely fulfilled in her marriage to the king, and may have had the hots for Claudius even while her husband was still alive.
Hamlet also suffers from intimacy and commitment issues, leading him to first seduce, them spurn Ophelia when things start to get too "serious." Don't even get me started on all the homoerotic overtones with Hamlet's "brothers in arms," especially Horatio. Can you say "over-compensating closet case"? For her part, Ophelia is the quintessential WASP debutante, far too sheltered, and still in thrall to the "someday my prince will come" myth. What happens when your prince turns out to be a cad? Screw the nunnery. That girl needs to backpack around Europe by herself or something to assert her independence and gain some self-respect. There's also something not-quite-fraternal in the attentions from Ophelia's brother, Laertes, especially his obsession with protecting his sister's "purity."
Meanwhile, Claudius is the stereotypical younger brother, jealous of his elder sibling's power and achievement, and (clearly) coveting his brother's wife, to the point of committing murder. The fact that it all leads up to one big family showdown where just about everyone dies isn't much different (apart from the poison and bloodshed) than people throwing chairs around on Jerry Springer, or getting into huge fights at Thanksgiving dinner.
The upshot: Someone should get these Danish whackos into family counseling, pronto, possibly filming the sessions in progress as a reality TV show. I can see it now: Hamlet, Part Deux: Finding Closure. Let the healing begin.