Look: It's Another Hamlet!

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Bard & Bourbon

People are idiots. We’re always making mistakes. What makes us fun, though, is that we’re always making different mistakes. Sometimes you murder your brother and marry his wife. Sometimes you decide to seek out the ghost of your dead father. Sometimes you make the wrong career choice and some moron ends up gazing into your skull trying to make sense of it all. Sometimes, like an idiot, you write Hamlet. You think you’re being really clever and everything, but you’re not. Scholars and critics will think you’re really clever for having written it, but they’re just as stupid as you are. The script is so good that there’s no way on earth that there’s ever going to a thoroughly satisfying production of it. I’ve seen 6 productions of it in the past 7.5 years. I haven’t been entirely satisfied with any one of them. I just don’t think that a decent staging of the tragedy can be done.

Bard & Bourbon might not agree with me on this point, but they are having a good time with it. The thing is so absurdly difficult to get right that they’re simply shrugging and having fun with it. In the process of having fun with it, they may actually have gotten closer to a satisfying production than any of the other five attempts that have been made on the script since November of 2007. The idea behind B & B is clever. Each performance has a different member of the cast taking several shots of liquor (onstage in front of everyone) before the show. Last Friday night, the drunk was Tawnie Thompson, who plays Hamlet’s mother, a gravedigger and one of the players Hamlet employs to catch the conscience of his uncle. Possibly the smallest and lightest in the ensemble physically, it was hard not to sympathize with Thompson. It adds a level of tension as Thompson brings a compelling vulnerability to the stage, so we were all a little concerned as the shots were lined-up. She had difficulty getting all three shots down before the show started. It was a nice, little random element that got thrown-in with the rest of the moving parts that made up this particular trip to ancient Denmark.

It’s an intimate stage that they’re working with. A flag is affixed to a wall of cream city brick in the background. There are a few chairs. A few bits of costuming. No one is ever really backstage. It’s a fun atmosphere. There’s real emotion. There’s real passion. There’s real drunkenness.

Once Thompson had her last shot, the show tumbled to life with Katie Merriman haunting the stage as the ghost of Hamlet’s father. I feel like being really progressive and not mentioning that the only guy in the cast is the one who played the title character. So I won’t make a big deal about it or anything. Merriman has a respectably commanding presence onstage, which works for Claudius as well as it does for the ghost.

Ethan Hall has a respectable grasp of things as Hamlet and even manages a few rather good moments. Again--Shakespeare seems to think he was being clever by writing such an absurdly difficult role to bring to the stage. He wasn’t. He was an idiot (or maybe just a jerk) for writing a role like this. (Really...he should have known better. That’s all I’m saying.)

Hayley Cotton has a pretty wide range here as Ophelia and a Gravedigger and Guildenstern (among others.) She and Grace DeWolff make a pleasant impression as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  Honestly I’d be happy to see someone bring on the Tom Stoppard with these two. They’re fun.

Bard & Bourbon’s production of Hamlet runs March 5-15 at Theatre Unchained on 1024 S. 5th Street. For ticket reservations, visit bardandbourbon.com. Tawnie Thompson is probably off the hook for the rest of the run of the show. The performances this coming weekend feature others in the ensemble getting drunk, but there is an opportunity for audiences to vote for the actor they would most like to see drunk one more time at the end of the show’s run.