If Denmark is rotten, don't blame the prince

JOHN YI/YH Did Hamlet invent the swordfight? Harold Bloom thinks so, dear.

Without a doubt, there is some tour de force acting on stage at the Educational Center for the Arts, where the Yale Undergraduate Shakespeare Company (YUSC) is presenting Hamlet--but that's not the question. Neither is the question, if you're a director of Hamlet at this particular school at this particular time, the staging, the set, or the arc of the play. The question is really whether or not you would feel comfortable inviting Professor Harold Bloom to the play's performance.

If you're Andrew Stigler, GRD '02, apparently you do. Convinced, like Bloom, that Hamlet "speaks profoundly to so much of what we are" and that "human nature would not be the same today" without the play, Stigler pledges allegiance to the Hamlet-as-founder-of-modern-consciousness school in his lengthy (and grammatically incorrect) program notes to the new production. The problem is, if Hamlet is as natural as human nature itself, why is his story directed here with so many stilted contrivances?

So much of this Hamlet's three hours and 15 minutes are spent bucking what comes naturally to the play that one almost wants to blame the prince's madness on the play's uneven direction and not on Claudius at all. Stigler casts Rosencrantz as a female for the sole purpose of making one "fortune is a shrew" pun. Actors walk behind furniture when there's only one piece of it on stage. Horatio is twice left to divine the Ghost's presence behind his back, while the climax finds Laertes taking hostages as poor Gertrude flails in near-death for what seems like half an hour. There is a magnetic attraction between the actors' knees and the floor, and a group obsession with putting their hands on each other's shoulders. Scene changes, meanwhile, are underscored by music selections so forced they include Philip Glass minimalism, Eastern pop, Irish folk, and Disney's "Lavender Blue, Dilly, Dilly."

Stigler has one honey of a get-out-of-jail-free card, however, in Daniel Larlham, SM '00, a triumphant Hamlet who gloriously practices the naturalism that the program preaches. Naturalism is, in fact, too artificial a concept to describe Larlham's performance as a subtle and confessional prince who seems mortally confused that everyone else on stage is an actor when he is a human being. The lack of affectation in his Hamlet is a revelation: it presents a whole new breed of stage presence, capitalizing on inner electricity rather than larger-than-life posturing.

Other actors see his ante, culling from his novel portrayal of madness truer performances than Yale commonly witnesses. Ophelia, played by Mary Sheridan, BR '99, stumbles into schizophrenia not because of her father's murder, but because she tries to rationalize Hamlet's madness. Jeanne Goodman's, BR '99, Gertrude almost toasts Hamlet's breakdown for the vibrancy it returns to his demeanor. Jeremy Strong, TC '01, as Polonius, does not need to force the comic relief he so generously effuses; it is the natural extension of his incompetent meddling. Adam O'Byrne, TC '01, as Laertes, and Tom Hooven, TC '01, as Horatio, are also quite strong.

Together, the actors strive for a strikingly modern reading of the play, one that might make even Bloom proud. Larlham works hard to give us a Hamlet for the millennium, a man whose madness stems from his ability to analyze his sanity, for whom psychiatrists aren't needed but obsolete. How strange, then, that Stigler's production follows YUSC's unspoken policy in setting his Hamlet in some timeless void. Is Claudius meant to be a despotic dictator? Are Cornelius and Marcellus family friends or Agents 007 and 008? The production feels strangely archaic, with only Siddhartha Shukla's, DC '00, costumes reflecting the '90s sheen Larlham radiates.

One wishes this Hamlet came as a highlights reel, in which the actors abandoned the framing devices that fail them and simply dazzled us with their innovations: Ophelia's sly glances at Claudius as she goes insane, Polonius's running commentary on The Players' show, Horatio's urgent revelation about the Ghost. Even this reel, however, would be slight on moments from Act Two, when the frame's pieces become so disjointed, one must think back to Mel Gibson to remember how they all fit together.

To declare that Hamlet shapes human nature and then not to trust human nature to tell the story is an insupportable tactic. The actors try hard to support it anyway and frequently succeed. But after three-plus hours, "frequently" is not a tremendous consolation. Nor, as Bloom's critics will tell you, is a frequently supportable thesis a proven one.

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