Hamlet vs. Me

We're about to get underway with preproduction of Kung Fu Hamlet, a play created over half-priced wings at the Green Mill on Grand Ave. in Saint Paul by my No Refunds Theater Co. cohorts, Matt Dawson, Chris Howie and myself. We've done the show several times in the past to universal acclaim. It's like Cliff's Notes on crack.

There’s this episode in the last season of Northern Exposure where Chris in the Morning is doing a verbal defense of his dissertation on Casey at the Bat as a metaphor for the inevitable decline of western global dominance. The University of Alaska has sent two professors of literature to conduct the defense. One is a traditionalist, who believes in Chris’s analysis is symptomatic of the destruction of aesthetic appreciation of classic literature. The other is a deconstructionist who loves every word Chris utters and hates everything white and Eurocentric about culture. The two profs hate each other and almost wind up in a fist fight.

Late in the episode there’s a dream sequence where Chris is a soldier, pinned down in a tiny building with the remaining members of his regimen: Van Gogh, Beethoven, Poe and Shakespeare. He gets a call over the radio, “What? They just took out the western canon! Melville! Talk to me!”

Shakespeare grabs his rifle. “They’ve gone too far!” And he rushes out the door only to be gunned down!

Chris catches him, “No, Shakes, no!”

And Shakespeare groans, “’Tis a far, far better thing I do…”

Chris says, “Shakes, that’s Dickens.” But Shakes’ eyes roll back in his head and he dies.

Chris grabs his gun in a fury and runs out the door. Firing like mad, he dodges explosions and rolls across the ground, crawling. He hears footsteps and jumps to his feet pointing his rifle at his enemy – And it’s HIMSELF!

He’s assaulting and defending the classics at the same time.

In the end he takes the two professors out to a baseball diamond, recites the poem and strikes one of them out. Illustrating that what the poem is really about is the feeling of striking out. It's about baseball, and the opportunity for greatness on the line with every at bat.

I don't really see Kung Fu Hamlet as an assault on classic literature. Hamlet is a story that Shakespeare told better than anyone else, but like many of his plays, it had been told before.

There was a Nordic Tale recorded in Latin in 1200 AD about a prince named Amleth who pretends to be crazy in order to outwit his uncle who has murdered his father and married his mother. Amleth kills a spy in his mother's bedroom and is sent to England to be secretly executed, but he outwits everyone, murders his uncle and becomes king.

I feel that stories need to be retold, they need to be kept alive, and sometimes they need to have a little kung fu sprinkled on top to make them really kick-ass.

Twelfth Night at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery

I wanted to do another post about Hamlet, but every time I thought about it I was gripped with a passionate malaise and I wound up writing a bunch of nonsense.

Strange.

I went to a production of Twelfth Night at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery this weekend. It was pretty good.

They screen movies at the cemetery at midnight during the summer months and I've never been. I'm not much for midnight movies anymore. I tend to fall asleep. Also I don't really enjoy watching movies while sitting outdoors either. There are all sorts of discomforts -- moisture, critters, chilliness -- and I'd rather be inside and warm and cozy. That's a sure sign of aging, isn't it?

But Twelfth Night was being performed in a little theater that was a converted chapel. It's a nice space for this show. The seats were set up around the perimeter and all the action was in the middle. It was a matinee, so there was a little column of light cascading in from a stained glass window, not unlike the light that falls into the map room in Indiana Jones and points the way to the well of souls.

The comedy in this production was pretty awesome. Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and the mayhem they caused was fun, but it was really Charles Janasz as Malvolio who stole the show. His oppressive grimace was spot-on and watching him piece together the contents of the forged love letter was like watching Chico interpret Harpo's whistle-narrated semaphores telling him that they have to stop Groucho from being seduced by the blonde bombshell before Margaret Dumont catches him and the sweet kid who's depending on them will lose her family hotel/sanitarium/opera house/department store.

Actually, the production was like a Marx Brothers movie in a lot of ways. You sort of had to meander through the underwhelming Olivia - Viola - Orsino love triangle in order to get to the marvelous comedy. The same is true in a number of Marx Brothers movies where Zeppo or Allan Jones has some yawntastic love story that you tolerate because the goofy is so very pleasing.

There was also live music accompanying the show (in addition to the Fool plucking away at intervals). But there was a hipster quality to the costuming and style of the show and that spilled over into the music, which worked all right for some of the tunes, but when it came to the end of the show... well, frankly it was sad. And Twelfth Night is not a show that should leave you sad. I guess that's what happens when Malvolio is the character we love the most and in the last scene he marches off stage in tatters proclaiming that he will be revenged upon everyone.

The last line of the play should be filled with joy and revelry and a promise for future delights:

But that's all one, our play is done,

And we'll strive to please you everyday. (5:1)

But the odd, ethereal melody made it a little bit disconcerting. I sort of didn't want them to strive to please me everyday if this was the music they were going to use. Moody indie-rock was an appropriate selection for the scene in the kitchen when the fool plays for Sir Toby and Sir Andrew. It is set up thusly:

FOOL: Would you have a love song or a song of good life?

TOBY: A love song, a love song.

ANDREW: Ay, ay, I care not for good life. (2:3)

I don't know though. Sir Andrew does have a good point. As John Cusack says in High Fidelity: "Which came first, the music or the misery?" Love and melancholy are too closely intertwined. Maybe it's more appropriate in modern times that even in a happy ending, we are sad. It's not like the Fool falls in love at the end of the play, so if he's going to sing a song, it should be a minstrel's lament. He's a wayfaring clown, and it's his lot to wander and witness the bliss of everyone his comedy touches. But he has no access to that bliss himself. Like Michael Landon in Highway to Heaven, his wings are constantly eluding him.

       Maybe they'll be there, around the corner, in the next town, on the next stage, in the next session of comic romance where he facilitates love and mocks misery with his sad bastard music and his rocky wit.

OPHELIA!!!!!!!!!

My younger sister Rachel used to write me emails in ALL-CAPS when I was in college. Email was relatively new technology at the time -- I had yet to sign up for my first hotmail account (mcninja64@hotmail) -- and so proper electronic correspondence decorum was not yet widely established.

I had a pretty rotten spell in college, feeling isolated and missing my glory days in high school where I’d been prefect, star soccer player and egomaniacal dictator of an extra-ineffectual student government. I knew Rachel looked up to me, cause I was her big brother. She went to the same prep school that I went to on the same scholarship I’d received. She and I used to play soccer together in the backyard of our house for hours and hours in the summertime after we’d watch reruns of Wings on USA. I tried to be a good role model, I did. But for some stupid reason, when it came to those emails, I was a real jerk.

One night -- when I was feeling sad about some misery of my own making – I got an upbeat email from her, in all-caps that spoke excitedly about something or other in her life and told me to be happy or cheer up or something, and I replied and went on a tirade about how the all-caps were annoying and how she didn’t understand that life wasn’t always fun and happy and that sometimes you had to just be mad about things. It was angsty and cynical and I’m sure I felt like I was teaching her an important lesson about the real world. But I was being a bad big brother. She must have been fourteen or fifteen at the time. Her emails came less frequently after that. Fewer exclamation marks. Unenthusiastic subject lines. Proper capitalization.

Why do we hurt the ones we love?

Hamlet abuses Ophelia, tells her to get to a nunnery to avoid bearing children who may be boys, for boys will be sinners and dishonest like he is. He says horrible, nasty things to her, then he kills her father and unlike Othello, it is not the unnatural nearness of the moon to the Earth that makes Ophelia mad. It’s the natural douchebaggery of man.

But then, after she dies and Hamlet sees Laertes and his modes of grief, he leaps to, not to be outdone.

I loved Ophelia – forty thousand brothers

Could not with all their quantity of love

Make up my sum. (5:1)

How could he dare say such a thing! Laertes was a pretty good brother. He was looking out for Ophelia’s virtue in cautioning her to stay away from Hamlet and his many tenders of affection. He loved Ophelia.

We’ve been in Hamlet’s position too. When you’re in love with a girl, and all your emotions are tied to hers, you think that it’s more profound than any love her family could provide. But of course that’s wrong.

I made a depressing mistake once and read the online journal of my ex half a year after we’d seen each other last. Searching through the archives, I found the chronicle of the night she left. How she drove from my arms to her dad’s embrace, and he held her and comforted her and made her feel safe. That used to be my job. But I didn’t do it right, I wanted more things for myself. She would always have his arms. And her mother’s. And she would have the ears of all her friends who despised me for taking her away from them.

My love was inferior.

If Hamlet could have found Ophelia’s blog and read the strange, floral ramblings she executed after he murdered her father, he might have learned the same lesson. Not that it would have mattered. At this moment in the play Hamlet has already declared his thoughts to be bloody. He’s killed Polonius and orchestrated the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. His virtual insanity smacks of actual insanity as his corrupt moral compass wavers. Too close to the magnetic destination of his vengeance.

When revenge is the motive, there will be innocent casualties. When we can’t cope with our own dissatisfaction, love’s umbrella breaks down. And someone always gets hurt.

Why do we hurt the ones we love?

They just happen to be the closest thing.

Elsinore, Wisconsin

             In 2003 the Lakeside Players in Kenosha, Wisconsin staged William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Before the run was complete a marriage was over, someone checked into a mental hospital and one of the most interesting directorial decisions I’ve heard of regarding this play dissolved largely unseen into the over-tread floorboards of the Rhode Opera House in historic downtown Kenosha. A stone’s heave from the birthplace of Orson Welles.

            The husband-wife directing team had unrealistic expectations to say the least. They believed there would be such a clamor to see the show that people would be lining up around the block for tickets. If you know anything about Kenosha (and you can probably make some accurate assumptions if you stretch your imaginary muscle) you know that Kenoshans never really line up for anything unless it was to file for unemployment after the Chrysler lakefront assembly plant closed down in ‘89. Lee Iacocca had promised to keep the plant running for at least five years after Chrysler bought American Motors, but after only a year it was announced that 5,500 autoworkers would lose their jobs. Shipping died soon thereafter, the dock's primary use became fishing, and Kenosha grabbed hold of its bootstraps.

            The Rhode Opera House stood in the shadow of that lakefront plant for decades. The plant was an eyesore, a giant brick and rust structure blocking any decent view of Lake Michigan. As if someone had planted an old Death Star on the Harbor. But it was our Death Star. And now it’s been replaced by modestly occupied, high-end condos.

            One would think the condos would bode well for the Lakeside Players and downtown consumer culture. But losing jobs means losing money. No money means no leisure time. And no leisure time means no idle quests for poetic enrichment. Thus the thought that staging a 400 year-old play in Kenosha’s wayward economy was going to be profitable was strange indeed. Borderline maniacal if you want to be dramatic about it. And that accounts for the mental hospital aspect of this story.

            Hamlet might have played well in Kenosha if they had run it like Little League and cast different teams of children in the individual acts, and given eager parents the opportunity to direct or run the spotlight and purchase photos of their performing offspring at inflated prices. Every child's costume could boast advertisements from local businesses: Ruffalo’s Pizza, Mars Cheese Castle, Captain Mike’s Bar.

Or if they could have gotten Brett Favre to play the perplexed Dane. A moratorium would have been placed on cheeseheads being worn during performances so as not to impede anyone’s view. Favre has proven himself all too in tune with Hamlet’s indecisive nature. And when they choose to act at the climax, both Hamlet and Favre find themselves throwing tragic interceptions and disappointing those who love them most.

But onto that bit about dissolved genius.

In the first act Hamlet is visited by the Ghost of his father, who has come from hell to tell his son that he was murdered by his brother and that Hamlet must seek revenge for this foul and unnatural act. The Ghost calls Hamlet to action and it’s his design that brings the house of Elsinore crashing down. He is the architect of all the proceeding violence:

Thus was I sleeping by a brother’s hand

Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched,

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,

Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled,

No reckoning made but sent to my account

With all my imperfections on my head.

O horrible, O horrible, most horrible!

If thou hast nature in thee bear it not,

Let not the royal bed of Denmark be

A couch for luxury and damned incest. (1:5)

On the Lakeside stage in 2003, the Ghost’s call for revenge was more than a call. He had a physical hand in every murder in the play. His hand is upon Hamlet’s when Hamlet stabs Polonius in the closet. Ophelia’s suicide was played as a murder, with the Ghost coming onstage and strangling her. It’s that image in particular: Ophelia, the innocent, the girl corrupted and controlled by the men around her, struggling against the gray grip of the Ghost’s hands around her neck… that was genius.

 Hamlet has probably been staged hundreds of thousands of times, so it’s possible that someone else stumbled upon this idea before our Kenosha comrades. It’s certainly symptomatic of some pretty serious daddy issues. But it was a perfect moment. And my head is forever hatless to the directing team's effort.

As a blue-collar kingdom, Kenosha thrived for almost a century. Ramblers started coming off the line in 1902. Later this year they’re going to close down the only remaining Chrysler Engine Plant in town, the last vestige of our automotive heritage. 800 more workers will lose their jobs. The state legislature has just voted to pay for the cleaning of the polluted land under the plant after it’s demolished. 100 acres for “future economic development.” But what are a people who don’t manufacture anything? 

There’s resilience in the hearts of Wisconsinites. We’ll build coffee shops and restaurants and open bookstores if that’s what they tell us we should do. We’ll take capitalistic risks, and enjoy the American dreams of being your own boss, and working 80 hours a week without health insurance or pension. We'll stage over-ambitious theater with furious sound. We’ll pull and yank on our bootstraps until our callused hands tear and our children have all gone to California in search of riper industry. 

But there are icy fingers around our throats, the ghosts of villains long-vanished from our daily activity.  How long will Lee Iacocca's broken promise haunt us? Sundering families and calling us to desperate investment? Not until all of our bodies are piled up in Kenosha Harbor and Fortinbras waltzes in to take over the kingdom. 

Whoever the hell Fortinbras is in this ridiculous analogy.

I don't like to make light of divorce because it's a subject that colored the cynicism of my twenties, so as for the directing team's marriage that ended with this production of Hamlet... I don't really know what happened between them. I'm sure there have been other couples whose vows fell victim to the bard. I guess sometimes two people come together for a while, they create something beautiful like a play or a family, and that kind of perfection just can't be permitted to endure.

Here's my sister Cassie in 2001 looking at the back of the Rhode Opera House

in Kenosha, home of the Lakeside Players. That empty field there used to be 

filled with part of the American Motors Assembly Plant. It is still a vacant field today.