Hamlet Exacts a Princely Toll, Which Many Will Pay

By Celia Wren
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, January 7, 2007

Hamlet famously wished that his too too solid flesh would melt, but during the Shakespeare in Washington festival over the next half-year, the area will be teeming with incarnations of the Danish prince.

The playwright's arguably most demanding role, it seems, is constantly in demand.

In March, Israeli actor Itay Tiran will play the character in the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv's Hebrew-language "Hamlet," hosted by Signature Theatre. Synetic Theater's artistic director, Paata Tsikurishvili, will reprise his turn as the melancholy royal in May, in the troupe's acclaimed wordless piece "Hamlet . . . The Rest Is Silence." Days later, Jeffrey Carlson tackles the heir of Elsinore for the Shakespeare Theatre Company. And he'll have some competition:

New York-based Tiny Ninja Theater, known for interpreting the Bard's great plays with tiny plastic figurines, will bring its "Hamlet" to the Kennedy Center in June. That same month, opting for a more-the-merrier approach, the D.C.-based interdisciplinary ensemble Musica Aperta will offer "Six Degrees of Hamlet." (Drawing on "Hamlet"-inspired music by Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, William Byrd and others, the performance will feature a singing Ophelia, a dancing Ophelia and an acting Ophelia, with three matching versions of her blue-blooded suitor.)

The University of Maryland will present "Hamlet" on film. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy will oversee an audience-participatory trial of Hamlet, co-produced by the Shakespeare Theatre Company and the Kennedy Center. Hamlet will even crop up in a modern play in May, when the Studio Theatre mounts Tom Stoppard's Shakespeare riff "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," with Marshall Elliott portraying the courtiers' noble pal.

Depicting the prototypical Man in Black, however, remains a daunting proposition.

The role of Hamlet is often considered the Everest of the acting profession, and it has lured such legendary performers as Laurence Olivier, Edwin Booth, John Barrymore, John Gielgud, Richard Burton, even Sarah Bernhardt. It can be nerve-racking to follow in such footsteps, particularly when considering all the interpretive decisions the role entails:

Is Hamlet chronically indecisive, or resolute and cunning -- or too volatile to be either? Is he a courtly poet-philosopher or a cynical, self-destructive rebel? And what principally stokes his angst -- an overactive intellect? Disillusionment? Grief? An Oedipus complex?

And then there's the trauma involved in channeling the guy's psychological turmoil. As Shakespeare scholar Robert Hapgood has noted, many actors in recent times have described how grueling -- even debilitating -- it can be to play Hamlet.

Olivier warned fellow artists that the role "will devour you and obsess you for the rest of your life." Daniel Day-Lewis withdrew from a run of the tragedy, which he said brought him "closer to the abyss than anything else." Mel Gibson called the part "an assault on your personality" -- and look what happened to him.

Tiran agrees that depicting Hamlet is exceedingly taxing. "You're, like, married to this play, it's so demanding," he said from Tel Aviv.

He found rehearsals to be particularly strenuous. "You ask yourself about life, death, love -- every basic issue in life. It can be very, very heavy," says Tiran, adding that after the Cameri Theatre production premiered in 2005, his life became a cycle of anticipation and adrenaline-fueled insomnia.

"It's impossible to play a myth, and Hamlet became a myth long ago," observes Tiran, recalling his initial reservations when director Omri Nitzan offered him the role. Then only 23, Tiran thought himself too inexperienced, but Nitzan argued that immaturity itself could be fodder for the portrait.

"He was interested in telling a story about someone who is 'becoming a human being.' I thought that was very interesting," Tiran says. "I'm becoming a man, and an actor, so I can allow myself to reveal my flaws."

Jeffrey Carlson, too, is trying to sidestep the Hamlet myth as he prepares for his Shakespeare Theatre Company engagement.

"I make no bones about it: It's very intimidating," Carlson said from New York, where he lives.

All sorts of preconceptions color people's attitude toward Hamlet, Carlson explains, and an actor must make an effort to ignore such cliches. "People put 'madness' and 'intellect,' and so many adjectives on this young man," he says. "When I was reading and working on it, initially, I tried to knock all those things out of my head."

As for the burden of illustrious predecessors, the actor says, "I'm trying to think of it as I would any role, where you have to say, 'It's my turn to tackle this story.' "

Not that Carlson is easily spooked by challenges. The actor starred in the Shakespeare Theatre's 2005 "Lorenzaccio," a rarely performed French play sometimes compared to "Hamlet." And on the TV soap "All My Children," he's now playing a transgendered character negotiating a shift between identities. That latter gig might not be a bad warm-up for "Hamlet" -- Carlson points out that his television persona, Zarf, and the introspective Dane "both have their own struggle for their own truths."

One way to pry Hamlet free from his inhibiting aura is to work a radical variation on the play itself. That's what Synetic Theater did in 2002 when it launched "Hamlet . . . The Rest Is Silence," a 90-minute work directed by Tsikurishvili. The production relates the narrative through imagery -- mirrors, doors, a sword that transforms into a cross -- and movement, which unfolds to music by Georgian composer Giya Kancheli.

"When I announced the idea, everybody was telling me: Am I crazy or what? How dare I touch Shakespeare's text?" Tsikurishvili recalled in an interview at the company's Arlington base.

Ultimately, the gamble paid off. Synetic's "Hamlet" won three Helen Hayes Awards. (That success has prompted the director and his colleagues to repeat the experiment. The company's wordless "Macbeth" premieres Thursday at the Rosslyn Spectrum.)

Tsikurishvili believes that Synetic's mute productions capture Shakespeare's truth at a pre-verbal level. Asked how, as a non-speaking actor, he can convey the essence of a character who is renowned for flights of words, the actor-director takes the example of Hamlet's most famous monologue.

" 'To be or not to be' -- before he opens his mouth, I believe he has emotions going on," says Tsikurishvili, adding that Synetic's style of "visual storytelling" allows an actor to express those emotions.

This approach is impressionistic, Tsikurishvili notes, and it works only because viewers bring their own familiarity with "Hamlet" to the performance. "What I try is to find symbols and suggest ideas, and then you, as an audience, participate," Tsikurishvili says. "You figure out, "Oh, that's 'To be or not to be'!"

The audience's knowledge of the Bard is also critical to the work of Tiny Ninja Theater. A "Hamlet" enacted by inch-high figurines packs a real aesthetic wallop for spectators brought up to consider the play the zenith of English literature.

Dov Weinstein, who manipulates the figurines and provides the voices for Tiny Ninja productions, says that when it comes to Shakespeare tragedies, his company is to the manner born. "The ninjas have a certain kind of gravitas which is best served by this stuff," he says solemnly.

Tiny Ninja Theater made its name with stagings of "Macbeth" and "Romeo and Juliet." "Hamlet," a more recent addition to the roster, differs from those productions in incorporating live video projections. " 'Hamlet' is so much about who's watching who; who knows what; who's overhearing this. That intrigue stuff. It seemed a good way to do it," Weinstein says.

There's another goal: Much of the footage specifically represents Hamlet's point of view, providing a visual gauge of how fully the character's personality dominates the play. For much of the show, the audience sees not the figure of the prince, but rather the images that the prince himself is seeing.

The rest of the time, the role will be filled by a small plastic ninja.

"He's dressed in black, as Hamlet always is," Weinstein says. Since long monologues are not the forte of such miniature statuettes, Weinstein has abridged and edited the script so as to "front-load the action."

All that mayhem at Elsinore Castle simply had to enter the Tiny Ninja repertoire sooner or later. " 'Hamlet' becomes the pink elephant in the room at a certain point," Weinstein says. "If you're not doing it, you're avoiding doing it."