The cast of the participatory new Shakespeare adaptation Becoming Hamlet start by swapping lines from Hamlet’s Act 3 advice to the traveling players who will mount the drama’s conscience-catching play-within-a-play. That’s an apt beginning since lead actor/adapter Damon Horowitz’s central idea is to draft the audience to share the role of the Bard’s famously indecisive title character. Horowitz, looking like a still-boyish younger brother of Kevin Kline, does much of the heavy verbal lifting as the Danish prince. But theatergoers are frequently invited to thrust themselves into the character’s headspace as well as his voice. “We show up here as ourselves, to discover parts of ourselves, in Hamlet,” Horowitz explains in a direct address near the top of the show. “This is the journey you and we are invited to take.”
Sometimes, participation means repeating a few words from what Horowitz or another cast member has just uttered, like an annoying 3-year-old parroting adult speech without the ability to remember whole sentences. Other times, it requires reading a sentence or two from laminated cards presented to those in the first few rows from black-clad “facilitators.” On still other occasions, individual theatergoers are led on stage to recite longer passages projected onto screens placed at opposite sides of the simply dressed stage. You can decline to participate, if you prefer, though many at my performance joined in at some point, often as a kind of echo chorus.
The approach may be welcome for a certain type of theater kid (or Shakespeare student) who feels they can only understand material if they’re able to place themselves physically into the action. And there are moments, as during the prince’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, that benefit from creating an actual dialogue between two different voices grappling with the character’s conflicted feelings about his situation and how he should respond.
But too often, the approach turns Shakespeare’s poetry into little more than a high school cheer squad’s call-and-response routine. We seldom get an entire speech in its entirety. Instead, the cast presents a truncated greatest-hits version of the play that focusing on its most famous lines (“The play’s the thing!” “Time is out of joint!”) which are repeated like shouted slogans at a pep rally. As a result, we never get to settle into any one Hamlet’s thinking, to fully imagine ourselves as the character and puzzle out how we might react in such a situation. Much is also lost in bulldozing the text down to an intermissionless one hour, 40 minutes. Brevity is the soul of wit, as Polonius famously tells his children, though Jim Pratzon’s Polonius never gets to the utter the lines here.
Our responses, as “Hamlet” or just as an audience member, are complicated by the uneven performances under Sybille Bruun’s direction. Equiano Mosieri makes a memorable dual turn as the ghost and the gravedigger, while Desirée Baxter brings a maternal fussiness to Hamlet’s concerned mother, Gertrude. But much of the cast tends to play too broadly, from David H. Littleton’s foot-stomping Claudius to Steven Lamont’s eye-bulging Laertes to Truman Gaudion’s glad-handing university pal Guildenkranz (a two-in-one version of Rosencrantz and Guidlenstern who in this revival emerges unscathed from Hamlet’s killing spree and witnesses the final bloodbath).
The physical production is simple but elegant. Yijun Yang’s set, often lit in bold colors by Maryam Sweirki, features giant mirrors on the main back wall to better implicate the audience in the proceedings. And Amit Gajwani’s modern-dress costumes have a bedazzled stylishness worthy of a contemporary royal court. But the let’s-all-play-Hamlet conceit proves to be more performative than profound. The audience is neither actor nor observer, more like understudies who might be called on at any moment. By bringing us into the action in fits and starts, we’re paradoxically removed from the business of absorbing and appreciating the story. Like poor mad Ophelia, we are left divided from ourselves, and from our fair judgment. ★★☆☆☆
BECOMING HAMLET
Five Angels Theater, Off Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through October 3 for $29 to $129