Bill Lattanzi

Almost entirely built of Shakespeare's text - with interpolations - this adaptation aims to get at what might have been the spirit of the original, built on research and close reading, delivering a Hamlet like nothing you've seen before. It starts with the notion of a play about generational conflict, and one with immediate appeal for all.

Here's the blurb: Generations collide, rules get broken, everybody's in show biz, and everything you know is wrong. Shakespeare cut and shuffled, plus sex, lies, tik-toks, go-go boots and power chords. Set in Swingin' London, 1966, and the present.

For the deeper dive, here's the program note from the Wilbury Theater Group's presentation in February 2020.

NOTE:
All the changes in this adaptation are aimed at the nearly impossible task of seeing Hamlet fresh. We’re trying for a production that plays the way I imagine Hamlet must have played to its first audiences, before it was a monument: entertaining, funny and dark, with contemporary references, context, and jokes clear to all – a production with immediate appeal not only to the elite, but to everyday people as well.

Our production wipes away the Hamlet traditions of the Romantic hero, the Victorian intellectual, and the neurotic Freudian, all of which were established long after Shakespeare’s day. In fact, one of the earliest recorded references to the play is a joke within another Elizabethan play. A character dashes across the stage repeatedly. “Who are you, Hamlet?” is the punch line, suggesting the original was a manic, active Dane.

A close reading of all the Hamlet texts, including the 'bad' quarto, suggested unusual stage directions and new clues to character. A dive into the archives brought more clues in the form of historical details. I learned that then as now, bright but poor townspeople were given scholarships to university; that the children of servants played and schooled with children of royalty. And that the play itself might have been originally received not as a study of character, but as a political tale, akin to the history plays.

We wanted immediacy at all costs. Any joke that wasn’t still funny, line that wasn’t easily understood, or emotional situation that was buried under dense language had to change. It could be cut, explained in some way, or replaced with a contemporary analogue. We hope that the result, including out-of-time comic, serious, and bawdy moments, will bring a liveliness that the original surely had before the passing of 400 years obscured it.

Finally, working with Davis Alianiello, Devra Levy and the deeply talented, hard-working and inspiring group at The Wilbury, we sought to address the gender politics, or to say it plainly, the misogyny in the play. Ophelia is just so badly treated. Our adaptation draws out that treatment, and speaks back to it, imagining how a young woman like Ophelia might react today. This last set of changes are in some sense ‘against Shakespeare,’ but in this most strange of revenge plays, a little revenge seems in order.

Hamlet is forever, and affords a thousand different readings. I look forward to hearing yours.

(1W, 2M) Cynthia, whip-smart undergrad, finds herself trapped in a web of men: her father, her middle-aged lover (and disgraced theater professor), and the young actor who shows up for a rehearsal no one can remember. Across the span of a single chaotic afternoon, games are played, secrets are spilled, violence erupts, and comedy turns dark. What does it take to break free of the script the past lays down?

An estranged wife holds a gun on her husband as he demands she sign the divorce papers. Enter the critic, bitterly complaining about the quality of the writing. Poor playwright Roy is beset by both his characters and his inner critic as he tries to write. The characters take over, point out that the critic is in reality Roy's disapproving father. Roy breaks down, father and son reconcile and exit, and the characters can finally play their scene. A post-mod play whose thesis is that no post-mod play can be successful... but is successful.

Two months after her kidnapping by a small band of revolutionaries, 19 year-old heiress Patricia Hearst condemned her parents, took a new name, and joined her captor's cause. "The self," a psychiatrist stated at her trial for bank robbery two years later, "turns out to be a fragile thing." Pictures of Patty Hearst is a fictive theatrical journey based on the public record. In a swirl of non-linear scenes, the Hearst saga is presented by an ensemble cast of six, all of whom save Patty herself play multiple characters, sometimes shifting within a scene. From the role-playing revolutionaries who met in acting class, to the religious experiences of Patty's youth, to her ultimately mysterious conversion and renunciation, the play explores the the deep-seated human desire for absolute answers in an uncertain world.

The setting is abstract. A shadow screen is the only fixed element, though many set pieces and props -- a bathtub, a barrel full of disguises and weapons -- roll on and off stage. The shadow screen is used at different times in the play to suggest both the reductive frame of the television set and of expansive unknowable mysteries. Scene changes are sometimes made by actors changing character. Theatrical styles within the play shift from naturalistic to presentational to poetic. Satirical, political, violent, dramatic and comic moods sit side by side; are sometimes simultaneous. Sound will play an important role, some of it loud and unpleasant. Finally, Patty finds a way out -- she becomes a delightful, well-liked talk show guest, the past neatly tied up into a televisual morsel. Except that it keeps escaping its box.