Ill-Conceived “Hamlet” Adaptation Flaunts Shakespeare’s Commands

As perhaps the most well-known and oft-produced play in history, Hamlet has been adapted in too many ways to count. But that doesn’t stop people from trying to come up with something new.

So it goes with James Rice and Amanda Karr, who 20 years ago reimagined Hamlet as a story that (to quote from  Rice’s director notes) “represent[s] a journey in Hamlet’s mind with personalities” — five different ones, each played by a different actor — “representing his emotions.” While I can’t say for sure whether there’s any way to make this more than a bad idea, what’s certain is that, in his direction of the iteration onstage now at Long Beach Playhouse, Rice comes nowhere close.

Opening in a mental asylum holding a patient (Sarah Green, listed in the program as playing “Hamlet (Core)”) who we’re told can only process life as a production of Hamlet, we quickly move into Hamlet itself, where Green is joined by four other aspects of Hamlet: Innocence (Sophia Gonzales), Vengeance (Roberto Williams), Justice (Autumn Yesterday), and Wisdom (Carmen Tunis). 

What’s that you say: you don’t understand why five, or what makes Core core, or how Vengeance and Justice aren’t part of a single aspect, or what Innocence has to do with Hamlet or why it gets a slot but Ambition — which more than once Hamlet himself names as a driving force — is left out,? Believe me, we’re just scratching the surface of the questionable logic of Rice & Karr’s work. And the deeper we go, the more problems we find.

One that consistently plagues the entire show is the divvying up of Hamlet’s lines between the quintet. Presumably the idea is to assign sentiments emanating from a particular aspect to the actor playing such. But although sometimes this is the case — for example, Williams gets the lion’s share of lines about revenge — not only is this wildly and randomly inconsistent, but on several occasions some or all of the five give their lines in tandem or collectively (give the actors credit for staying in synced when they do this), with no rhyme or reason to why those particular aspects (to the exclusion of others) are teaming up for those particular lines. Worse yet is when the actors hand off lines mid-sentence like a baton in a relay race. It seems Rice could not do more to advertise how inconsistent the internal logic of this adaptation is…except he does, like also having Hamlet’s father’s ghost played by multiple actors — sometimes four, sometimes two.

As if all of this isn’t bad enough, Rice commits the cardinal sin of Shakespeare productions in general, one that Shakespeare goes out of his way to explicitly advise against in Hamlet itself by using Hamlet as his mouthpiece:

[D]o not saw the air too much with your hand thus, but use all gently, for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it a smoothness. O! it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears for the groundlings. [… S]uit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance: that you overstep not the modesty of nature; for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature […].

Although these lines have not been cut from the production, under Rice’s direction the cast consistently violates Shakespeare’s dictum as if intentionally flaunting it. 

What more to say?

Hamlet at Long Beach Playhouse
Times: Fri–Sat 8:00 p.m., Sun 2:00 p.m.
The show runs through May 4.
Cost: $20 to $30
Details: (562) 494-1014; LBplayhouse.org 
Venue: Long Beach Playhouse, 5021 E. Anaheim St., Long Beach