This evening, the Shotgun Players hosted an event to celebrate the release of Playing Hamlet Roulette: Failure, Expectation, Possibility, & Democracy.
This felt like a reunion of sorts--the main “regulars” were there, along with several members of the company (staff, artists, etc.), including the director and 5 of the actors. (Nick has apparently moved to Portland, OR; I’m not sure why Megan wasn’t there.) The audience seats were mostly full. Mark Jackson [director, and editor of the book (and author of most of it)] read a few excerpts from the book, and then there was a sort of panel discussion: Mark, a critic who had come to see the show a few times, and 4 of the actors: El, Kevin, David, and Cathleen. The audience asked various questions, and the concept of failure was discussed at length.
Some of us signed each other’s books (El actually asked me to sign a book for her mother!), and I had some lovely conversations with everyone. It felt good to reflect back on the experience--we fans were feeling a bit nostalgic--and also to think through things with a bit more distance from it. I want to reread the book and add my own notes to it. One of the points that came up is how the audience participates in creating meaning out of a performance--that’s not just the job of the actors. And this should extend to the book--readers have to make their own meaning out of it, they have to participate in it. (This is true when reading fiction, too.)
We fans are going to try to get together again in the next few weeks. I miss Hamlet roulette!
This was the last performance! (sniff) (previous posts about Hamlet roulette) (chronologically)
The final configuration of this outrageous fortune experiment:
El Beh played Polonius, the priest, and Osric
Kevin Clarke played Claudius and Rosencrantz
Nick Medina played Gertrude and Guildenstern
Cathleen Riddley played the ghost and gravedigger (not randomised)
David Sinaiko played Laertes
Megan Trout played Ophelia and Horatio
Beth Wilmurt played Hamlet
It was an excellent performance and an enthusiastic audience--including a surprisingly large number of people seeing it for their first time.
I had been hoping for Hamlet to be played by either David (who hadn’t played the lead in ages) or Megan (because one of the regulars hadn’t seen her in that role in the 15 times she came). But in the end this was a very good configuration--everyone played a role I like them in.
In some ways, this was Beth’s strongest performance as Hamlet--she was very playful in many of the scenes. However, during the “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I” speech, she blanked out and needed repeated prompting, which made her a little bit tentative for the rest of the scene. Still, as one of the other regulars pointed out, it was fittingly self-referential that the section where she needed the most prompting was the one where Hamlet was talking about a “player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion...”. What clearer way to emphasise that she is herself a player than by having her request help with her lines? As I’ve said before, the illusion is pretty thin in this production anyway.
In any case, she was at the top of her game up until that point, and then again for the play-within-the-play scene. She seemed to bring out more of the humor than she had in past performances, but without losing Hamlet’s moodiness and strong feelings.
I’m sorry I didn’t get to see David in a larger role lately, but his Laertes was satisfyingly hotheaded in the second half. The swordfight was absolutely perfect.
Cathleen is still limping, but her ghost was particularly powerful tonight. She spoke with the authority of a king, the human pain of a man betrayed by his widow, and the creepiness of a supernatural being.
I was very happy to see Kevin as Claudius again--his portrayal of fear, insecurity, and selfishness in a powerful man was intense, and Nick’s Gertrude worked well with him. Their relationship was well-developed: both their trust and nonverbal communications in the first half, and the breakdown of trust in the second half. Their exchange just before she drank the poison managed to be simultaneously poignant, funny, and horrifying.
We were all laughing almost continuously during Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s first conversation with Hamlet. [And there was some irony in the fact that Nick was playing Guildenstern, given that he’s the director for the staged readings of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead that will be showing the next 3 nights!]
El was hilarious both as Polonius and as Osric. In fact, the audience actually applauded on Osric’s exit, which I don’t think has happened before.
And of course, I was pleased to see Megan as Ophelia for the final performance. Her reactions to the whole conversation between Polonius and the King and Queen were very real. Her explicitly feigned madness is still one of my favorite things about this production [okay, I have a lot of favorite things about this production], but her last song in the “mad” scene brought me to tears: this was her goodbye, and Ophelia was really going to be dead after this, because it was the final performance.
Yonder cloud: Beth’s Hamlet compared it to a porcupine (El’s Polonius did not even bother to look before agreeing to it), a weasel (as in the original), and a water snake.
Afterwards, we regulars consoled each other. We’re all going to see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, but not on the same day. We exchanged contact information and chatted about the journey we’ve been on, and agreed to get together to see more plays. It’s such a neat thing to have made friends through fandom for a theatrical production. Super-Fan doesn’t know how many times she saw it (I would guess 35, since she was ahead of me by 6 or 7 at some point, but she missed a few performances that I went to after that, and I haven’t missed any performances since early summer).
I can hardly believe it is over.
The development director gave me a T-shirt-- the board had had them made for the cast, and they got one for me as well. Very sweet of them! The front has the design that’s on the poster (with all 7 Hamlets), next to the words “Shotgun Players presents HAMLET”. On the back it says “THE READINESS IS ALL.”
I suppose it couldn’t have continued indefinitely. “If it be not now, yet it will come...”
Thank you, Shotgun Players, for having the ambition, creativity, conviction, and commitment to bring this wonderful, complex, radical project to life!
echojar replied to your post “Hamlet roulette, 31”
...as weird as this sounds... i'm a little sad too. thanks for sharing this experience with us via the internet~
Thanks for continuing to read all the reviews even though you never got to come see the show yourself!
I had another few thoughts about Hamlet roulette today:
On gender: There was a sort of spectrum of approaches that the actors took in dealing with gender. Nick and Beth, for example, basically played each character without specifically performing the gender even if it was different from their own. Toward the other end of the spectrum, El performed masculinity when playing Hamlet or Claudius, while Kevin not only performed femininity as Gertrude but also masculinity as Claudius. (Note, though, that none of the performances of gender were exaggerated or campy.) All of these approaches worked--but if you think about it, they were also all rather radical. To say that these characters essentially exist as characters without genders--that’s radical. (And it conflicts a little for Ophelia, because her character’s situation is very gendered. But this approach just brings that fact into relief.) Also, having a woman swaggering around in a way that is convincingly masculine--that’s radical. Having a man portray a woman having to endure misogynistic treatment--that’s radical. And in this context, in which there were opportunities to see all the other choices, it was even radical to see a man performing masculinity rather than just assuming his own effortless maleness would do that job for him.
On meta: I started thinking about the prelude to the show: the director (or some other member of the company) introduced the show, called the actors to come on stage, and had the audience pull actors’ names out of Yorick’s skull to determine who would play which role. The actors came running out on stage, not in costume, ostensibly as themselves. But... were they performing themselves? They weren’t in costume as their characters, since they didn’t yet know whom they would play. But they were in costume; a white shirt and white trousers, with black boots. And they knew they had an audience. They ran onto the stage with very high energy. Of course, they were probably more nervous than before performing other plays, just because of the uncertainty of what they would have to do. But how much effort was involved in their jocularity and excitement? Were their reactions to their names being pulled spontaneous and genuine? Were they ever disappointed with the roles they got? They never acted like it.
On math: the distribution of who played what is, asymptotically, uniform. That is, if there were a “very large” number of performances, each actor would play each role approximately the same number of times (or each role would be played by each actor approximately the same number of times). In reality, things were slightly complicated by there being an understudy who only played one role and by Cathleen’s injury constraining her to play only the ghost and gravedigger for the final few weeks. But even if I don’t consider Cathleen or Laertes, things were pretty uneven among the performances I saw. I only saw Megan as Gertrude twice, while I saw Nick play Gertrude 8 times. I also saw Kevin as Polonius 8 times--interestingly, then, I saw Kevin and Nick play one another’s favorite roles 8 times, and only saw them play their own favorite roles 4 times. tl;dr: 31 is not a “very large” number.
As a fairly glorious postscript to their 25th anniversary season, Shotgun Players did a staged reading (i.e., with only about 20 hours of rehearsal to prepare it) of this Tom Stoppard masterpiece tonight, directed by Nick Medina (who’d been in Hamlet roulette).
[spoilers below the cut]
The cast included Caleb Cabrera (the Laertes understudy) as Guildenstern, and Kevin Clarke and Cathleen Riddley from Hamlet roulette as Claudius and Gertrude, respectively. (Of course, they were more exaggerated here, but this was a casting combination I saw over the summer and loved.) Kevin and Cathleen were also among the Tragedians (and seemed to be enjoying themselves tremendously), along with many people I didn’t know and a few of the front-of-house staff from the theatre, plus one of the Hamlet roulette regulars who is also on the Shotgun Players board.
It was the perfect antidote to my post-Hamlet-roulette grief. Not only because the play is full of references to Hamlet, but because most of these were handled as loose references to the Hamlet roulette staging. They kept the Hamlet set (which is minimalist anyway), and many of the costume elements were included--Alfred wore Laertes’ stripy sweater; Osric’s colorful outfit was deconstructed and spread out (tie, jacket, shirt) among the Tragedians; Hamlet, Ophelia, Claudius, and Gertrude wore those characters’ costumes; and of course Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wore costumes that echoed those from Hamlet.
The play is very funny, and it being a staged reading (scripts in hand) made it even more meta... which felt consistent not only with the script but with Hamlet and their production of it--in which the actors carried scripts labeled with their characters’ names on them.
In a weird way, I felt like the play sort of has a political message... about drifting along without taking real action. Like, yes, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were “marked for death”, and it’s all inevitably leading there. But as Guildenstern says, there must have been a moment when they could have said no. Well, maybe we missed our chance to say no--the election was lost, the Scumbag-in-Chief has taken office--but I’d like to think we can start resisting/taking action now and still have a chance of affecting the outcome. R&G’s fatal mistake was to let others make all the decisions, determine the “facts”, etc. We must not make that mistake.
It feels weird that I’m not going back to see it again tomorrow and the next day!
After over a week, it felt great to be back at Hamlet. I can’t believe there are only 3 more performances. What will Super-Fan and I do???
(previous posts about Hamlet roulette) (chronologically)
Cathleen is still out, which is a shame.
El Beh played Hamlet
Caleb Cabrera played Laertes (not randomised)
Kevin Clarke played Gertrude and Guildenstern
Nick Medina played the ghost and gravedigger
David Sinaiko played Polonius, the priest, and Osric
Megan Trout played Ophelia and Horatio
Beth Wilmurt played Claudius and Rosencrantz
We were so close to getting Kevin as Gertrude opposite El as Claudius, which is something I am dying to see! But of course, I would never complain about El as Hamlet. [possible spoilers below the cut]
The pacing was good tonight, despite several in-character requests for prompting on lines. The dynamic between Gertrude (Kevin) and Polonius (David) was absolutely perfect, with Gertrude swallowing her annoyance whenever he spoke over her. The deterioration of the relationship between Gertrude and Claudius (Beth) in the second half was also nicely drawn, and the scene between Hamlet and Gertrude (when he kills Polonius) was just... really intense, especially the way Kevin plays Gertrude’s reaction to the ghost. He really conveys her feeling of being emotionally wrung out by her son’s abuse of her and then the sight of her first husband’s ghost.
David’s Polonius was very funny--but his interactions with Laertes were actually sweet, and his somewhat strained relationship with Ophelia felt absolutely real.
I enjoyed the pairing of El as Hamlet with Megan as Ophelia and Horatio. They’re the two youngest women in the show, and they had good chemistry both as friends and as lovers. In the “get thee to a nunnery” scene, where Ophelia is forced to confront Hamlet while knowing that her father, Claudius, and Gertrude are eavesdropping, she seemed to be trying to convey something more than her words to Hamlet. He seemed to recognise that fact, but he didn’t know what she was trying to say nonverbally until he heard something and realised that there was an audience for this conversation, and then he was too hurt and angry to care. Ophelia’s speech after he left showed that she understood why he suddenly got so aggressive toward her--he was talking about suicide before she interrupted him, and now he clearly felt she had betrayed his trust. Still, the next time she saw him she was not cowed. She came out fearless, ready to perform the play-within-the-play with him.
The friend I’d brought with me to see it this time said that she usually doesn’t find Shakespeare accessible, but that El’s performance made the language more clear for her.
Yonder cloud: El compared it to an ostrich, a blue dolphin, and a fuzzy teddy bear, which was delightful! (Fuzzy!)
On a more personal note, I had a few nice surprises tonight! Super-Fan gave me a gorgeous plant, and the development director at Shotgun Players had the audience wish me a happy birthday and gave me a gift--before calling the actors on stage to find out their roles (and they came out wishing me a happy birthday too!). The gift consisted of a squishy Yorick skull and a really beautiful poster. Their artist had made 7 different versions of the poster for the show (one for each actor as Hamlet); but they’ve now put all 7 of those designs on one long poster, and they gave me one signed by all the actors! Very sweet. I’m still not sure how they knew it was (the day after) my birthday.
I stayed and chatted to Kevin briefly afterwards, but my friend was very tired after having had a very long day, and she was giving me a ride home, so I didn’t stay to wait for the others--but I’m going back tomorrow night (or, you know, tonight, as it is now past 1am).
Some of us are already in mourning. Only one more performance left!
(previous posts about Hamlet roulette) (chronologically)
Tonight’s configuration:
El Beh played Claudius and Rosencrantz
Kevin Clarke played Laertes
Nick Medina played Hamlet
Cathleen Riddley played the ghost and gravedigger (not randomised)
David Sinaiko played Gertrude and Guildenstern
Megan Trout played Ophelia and Horatio
Beth Wilmurt played Polonius, the priest, and Osric
It was a slightly lower-energy performance than Saturday, but still good. Tonight both Hamlet and Ophelia were typecast, while all other roles were cast against type in gender, age, or both. [possible spoilers below]
I was happy to see that Cathleen is back for the last couple performances. She is still too injured to be randomised, but at least she will close the show with the rest of the ensemble. Today her gravedigger sang “Where have all the flowers gone”. (One of the other regulars wants to make a mixtape of all the songs the various gravediggers have sung, which would be very cool!)
This is only the second time I have seen Kevin, who is middle-aged, play Laertes (last time was at the end of July; that was my first character bingo), and I was impressed at how young he seemed, particularly in the first couple of scenes. In the second act, he was positively sputtering with rage, which made for a good contrast with El’s extremely smooth and unruffled Claudius, who was thoroughly prepared to manipulate and exploit Laertes’ hotheadedness for his own advantage.
Beth’s Osric was particularly silly and light, and Nick mocked her gestures subtly in their conversation.
I loved the way that Megan played Ophelia’s lying to her father about Hamlet coming to her and acting crazy. She got really into her story, but it was also clear she was kind of making it up as she went along, and glancing at Polonius to see whether he was buying it [spoiler: he was]. Like last time, I noticed her delight at having gotten a reaction out of Claudius through the play-within-the-play. Now I only have more chance to notice how she leaves while Hamlet is exhorting the audience to applaud and taunt Claudius, because I again forgot to keep my eye on her during that.
Yonder cloud watch: same as last time, because purist Nick goes with the original script.
Most of the regulars were there tonight, and as I said above, we’re all rather distraught at the fact that there’s only one more performance to go. Only one of the 7 actors will get to play Hamlet again! I hope it will be Megan, because one of the regulars still hasn’t seen her. But one thing I thought about tonight was the fact that how I feel about the performance depends less on who plays Hamlet (all of them are very good, though not necessarily in the same ways) and more on who plays the other roles. The director (Mark Jackson) said that he wanted to take the focus off of the “famous actor playing Hamlet saying the famous words”, and put it back on the whole play. This project has definitely done that for me--partly just from seeing it so many times and getting into it so deeply, but also partly because of the different actors’ variations in interpretations in the other roles.
So: the closing performance will be Sunday. Then on Monday, I’m going to a staged reading of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (directed by Nick Medina!). I should try to read it before then--I haven’t seen or read it in at least a decade or two.
(previous posts about Hamlet roulette) (chronologically)
All the regulars were there tonight. We were basically all in agreement that we wanted to see Nick as Hamlet (I think he hadn’t done so since June). Two of the regulars were in the front row, which meant they got to pull actors’ names from the skull. So we joked that we were holding them responsible! Of course, a different person pulls each name out, so it’s not like it could really be rigged. But luck was on our side!
El Beh played Ophelia and Horatio
Caleb Cabrera played Laertes (not randomised)
Kevin Clarke played Polonius, the priest, and Osric
Nick Medina played Hamlet
David Sinaiko played the ghost and gravedigger
Megan Trout played Claudius and Rosencrantz
Beth Wilmurt played Gertrude and Guildenstern
I’m at the point now where every single performance feels like it was the best it’s ever been. SuperFan pointed out afterwards that all of the actors have grown incredibly as artists during this experiment, and that she felt that was really on display tonight. I don’t think I could necessarily say which of last night or tonight was better, but they were both spectacularly good. More observations, with possible spoilers, below the cut.
I hadn’t seen Beth play Gertrude since the 8th of May, my fourth time! That was way back when she was still struggling a lot with learning the lines, so I’m glad I got to see her again now that she’s more confident. I liked her (often nonverbal) interactions with Ophelia, and the scene where Hamlet kills Polonius was also very strong. When Claudius came in, Beth’s Gertrude summoned her wits and resolutely lied to him.
Megan’s Claudius was particularly good tonight. The speech that starts with “My offense is rank” showed how much his guilt torments him. She did an excellent job of performing masculine power (she was absolutely commanding throughout), as well as his abusive and controlling behavior in the second half. Yet in the final scene, she portrayed him as absolutely grief-stricken at Gertrude’s death. He was almost a sympathetic character.
Caleb, the understudy, only has to play Laertes, so there’s less variability in his performance (which is why I rarely comment on him, though he’s always excellent), but I noticed that he said a couple of lines differently this time, and I was glad to see him deepening his understanding of the role. The scene with Laertes, his sister, and his father was illuminating. The relationship between the siblings was particularly sweet; even Laertes’ advice about Hamlet was clearly intended to protect his sister. In contrast, Kevin portrayed Polonius’ relationships to his son and to his daughter as strikingly different. He was affectionate to Laertes, trying to impart some wisdom to him before saying goodbye--but he was absolutely cold and controlling toward Ophelia, who responded with suppressed rage, and later with deceit, disobedience, and scandalous behavior.
El’s Ophelia watched Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech with some alarm and concern, and she was paying such close attention that it was clear that it influenced her choices later. I also noticed something I hadn’t really looked for before: at the end of the play-within-the-play, Ophelia was just as delighted to have gotten a reaction out of Claudius as Hamlet was. On the other hand, as Hamlet then got the audience standing and jeering at Claudius, I did not see her slip away.
Meanwhile, El’s Horatio tonight was such a good friend that I wished that I knew him!
Nick’s Hamlet was a good mix of brooding and outraged. He managed to make one of the less organic gestures (holding both hands up in the “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt” speech) look comparatively natural. He modulated his voice enough to make the “To be or not to be” speech less hypnotic than I sometimes find it, and his despair was absolutely palpable.
The scene between Osric and Hamlet was even funnier than usual. Kevin’s hair as Osric cracks me up before he even says anything--and of course he speaks the lines in a distinctive and amusing way. Then Nick made it even funnier by having Hamlet mimic Osric’s affected speech mannerisms, which I think was a new idea. This is the penultimate scene in the play, and my mother felt that playing up the comedy so much immediately before the end made Hamlet’s death even more tragic.
One of Nick’s strengths (in any of the roles) is that he doesn’t rush anything, so his speech is very clear, while still sounding natural. He is also a bit of a purist, so, for example, even though the other actors say “This prayer but prolongs thy sickly days”, he says “This physic but prolongs thy sickly days”, as Shakespeare wrote it. I assume the change was made to render the line more accessible, but the idea is probably clear from context even for those who are less familiar with the play.
Yonder cloud: Because Nick is a purist, he compared the cloud to a camel, a weasel, and a whale, as written by Shakespeare.
I still find this production really uplifting somehow!
(Sorry, this got very long! I think I am trying to make the most out of these last few performances by remembering as many details as possible.)
