William Shakespeare
Directed by Adrienne Major

June 24-27, 2010
Rotary Amphitheater, Living Memorial Park
Brattleboro, VT
Admission $5 for all performances
**The Creamery Bridge on Western Avenue will be closed to vehicles.
To drive to the Park, you must go via Maple and Guilford Streets.
Follow the detour signs beginning at the Western Avenue
entrance to the bridge.**

July 2 & 3
Shea Theater
Turner’s Falls, MA
$12 adults/$10 students and seniors

July 9 & 10
Patch Park
Charlestown, NH
Admission by donation

The Royal Family of Denmark

Dennis Molesky        Claudius—the usurper King, political and power-hungry.
Heidi Fagan        Gertrude—widow to one king, wife to the next.  Mother of Hamlet.
Colin Hinckley        Hamlet—the wronged son, wants to return to college, among other things.
Burt Tepfer        Ghost—Hamlet’s murthered father.  Double cast as Player King.

The Lord Chamberlain and his Family

Robert Wellington    Polonius—the twisted advisor, ageless.
Timothy Patterson    Laertes—Hamlet’s contemporary and son to Polonius.
Joey Macri        Ophelia— Hamlet’s rebellious girlfriend and daughter to Polonius

College Friends of Hamlet

Jay Gelter        Horatio—the trusted friend and confidante
Katy Emond        Rosencrantz—girlfriend of Gildentstern
Elias Burgess      Guildentstern—boyfriend of Rosencrantz

Players

All players will also be courtiers, attendants and traveling players when needed

Veda Crewe-Joseph (Player Queen, Voltemand, English Ambassador)
Greg Phillips (Marcellus, Lucianus, Grave digger)
Mike Jerald  (Fransisco, Osric)
Amanda Gelter (Bernardo, Fortinbras)
Elizabeth McCullom (Cornelius, Reynaldo, grave digger)
Sam Empey (messenger, player, etc.)

Notes from the Director

Adrienne Major

Why I chose the play
Hamlet strikes me as a young man’s tragedy—the very same young men, as a matter of fact, as I work with every day as a college professor.  Hamlet is on the one hand so audaciously clever and on the other makes such rash, impatient and young decisions!  Having been a Hamlet fan since first reading the play when I was myself in college, I thought I’d like to direct it while I have the energy and drive to undertake such a multivalenced work.  Besides, I more or less want to rescue Hamlet from his own accusations of inaction: Hamlet constantly berates himself during the course of the play for not acting, for holding back.  Since the dawn of psychoanalysis, we’ve been treated to theories that support Hamlet’s self-loathing.  However, earlier interpretations of the part portray Hamlet as a thinking person’s action hero—someone who throws himself bodily into the fray of the Danish court when forced to, making decision after decision in order to pursue his purposes while at the same time upholding his scholar’s instincts.   Around him, the Danish court convulses in dreams of its own with such deadly force that “no cataplasm so rare…can save the thing from death.” 

Who is Hamlet this time?
This is a play about a college student.  A youth on the threshold of manhood endowed with striking intelligence, low-burning anger, antic humor and a streak of visciousness.   But even more—he’s in line for the throne of Denmark, at the death of a beloved father, and kept both from his inheritance and from his return to college by the collusions of his mother, with whom his relationship is…complicated…and his uncle, whom he loathes.  During the course of the play Hamlet works through his grief, nourishes his anger, and, in a series of lightning decisions, moves to determine whether or not he should be the judge and jury of his Uncle’s perfidy.  A trained critical thinker, Hamlet does not immediately jump to conclusions based on the words of an incorporeal spirit, but rather seeks in a series of proof tests to determine to his own satisfaction that what he thinks to be true can be proven so.  This is not a Hamlet who can’t make up his mind, but rather a Hamlet whose intelligence is trained to hypothesize, to question, to determine and to act.   The problem is, of course, that both Hamlet’s court culture and our own expectations lead us each to conclude that Hamlet is losing the name of action in his preoccupation with thought.  This production seeks to emphasize both Hamlet’s inherent intelligence and his sense of justice in not attempting immediate and retributive revenge without meaningful evidence.

What about Laertes?
In order to enforce this interpretation, this production presents Laertes as an anti-Hamlet.  All that Hamlet refuses to do (with good reason) during the play, Laertes does with only emotional motivation and an easily swayed mind to support his actions.  Because Laertes does not listen to reason, but rather allows his emotions to be worked over by Claudius, the play itself ends in tragedy for everyone.  Shakespeare tends to create people rather than saints and villains, and Laertes, as Hamlet, is finely nuanced.  He loves and wishes to protect his sister, but accepts her teasing about his double standards.  He honors his family name such that the motivation for his revenge is that the ceremonies for his father’s death are oddly botched.  Due to that he jumps to the conclusion (not unwarranted) that Claudius has killed his father and rushes back to Denmark in order to assassinate Claudius.  Convinced by Claudius that Hamlet is the killer, he resolves that not only would he be willing to break sanctuary in order to kill him (something which Hamlet, in considering the murder of Claudius, is unwilling to do) but further volunteers to poison Hamlet during a cheating bout of fencing.  He and Claudius are well matched conspirators, each outdoing the other in how low they are willing to go in achieving their purposes.

The Power behind the Play: Claudius & Gertrude
The tale of success in the tragedy of Hamlet is the marriage and rule of Claudius and Gertrude.  Whether or not Gertrude actively colludes with Claudius in the death of old Hamlet remains an open question.  However, we have firmly situated Claudius and Gertrude’s relationship with each other to be that of long-standing mutual attraction on all levels.  Gertrude is not unhappy to replace a political marriage with one so gratifying to herself both sexually and politically.  Claudius, too, gains in a single stroke all that has been witheld from him due to the mischance of birth order.   Claudius is a careful ruler, safegarding his country from threatened attack by young Fortinbras both in preparations for war and through diplomacy.  He keeps Hamlet under his eye at the court in order both to please Gertrude and to keep an eye on a potentially popular claimant to the throne.  When it becomes evident that Hamlet has discovered his guilt and is willing to act upon that discovery, he takes steps to remove Hamlet while preserving Gertrude’s affections.  Gertrude and Claudius, as with any mature couple, recognize each other’s faults and hurt each other savagely, but also love each other deeply with an affection that carries them throughout the play.

What this production tries to do
I was asked recently, when confessing to directing Hamlet this summer, how I could say anything new through this play.  That, I told my interlocutor, was not something that I was trying to do.  Hamlet has been around for upwards of 400 years in almost continual production in almost any language and country that you care to mention.  Any attempt at newness of vision must be a lost cause.  In the end, Hamlet is a play about stories trying to be told that, ere they can be formed, end in silence.  We see in Hamlet the death of thought itself in the turning over of an entire kingdom to the young, brash and power-hungry Fortinbras.  If there is a lesson from Hamlet for today, it is that thought matters, that care matters, and the more that we can educate ourselves and our young people to think carefully about actions, the less we’ll end up hurting each other.  Neither Shakespeare nor I am altogether sanguine that the human psyche will ever be fully receptive to this message.  Hence the depth and the power of this tragedy.  The stories of everyone on the stage are human stories, valenced, beautiful, unique and for every character, tragic.  What we hope to do is to tell these very human stories with honesty and truth, and invite our audiences to participate in both their pleasures and their pain.

A word about Manga
Manga comes to us from Japan, and is the still or graphic novel version of Anime.  Its lines are clean and sparse, its style bridges the future/past divide and playfully incorporates elements of fantasy with ideas from science fiction.  Using Manga as my inspiration for the design elements of this production allowed my costume designers to create fanciful, not-quite period costumes that move the play out of a set time and into an any time.  It also allowed me to use both iphones and letters, e-readers and books, guns and swords, and to allow the audience the absolute suspension of disbelief that accompanies a good fantasy.  Furthermore, in keeping with the action hero trope, Manga places the emphasis on the visuality and the action of the play while maintaining the integrity of its marvelous language.

Many Thanks
I owe a debt of gratitude to my students at Landmark College for introducing me to Anime and Manga concepts, and for inspiring the set design of the play.  Who knew where doodling during British Literature would lead!  I also want to thank Casey Paris, Hannah Curtain, Vivian K. Smith, Veda Crewe Joseph and Zoe Grele for helping to bring my inchoate vision to life.  AT&T in Brattleboro helpfully donated many of the phones in use during the production.  Landmark College and SIT both graciously allowed the use of their facilities for rehearsal space.  Bob Kramsky and the Brattleboro Highschool helped significantly with costume, props, scenery pieces and paint supplies.  Heidi Fagan and River Theatre made possible the Charlestown production.  (this list is ongoing!)