Shakespeare’s dictum, “all the world’s a stage and we are merely players,” however belabored, is appropriate to his favored setting for his plays: the royal court, a scene of subterfuge and sweeping exits, where acting out is quick relief from deadly stasis and the rigors of hierarchy. In Hamlet, questions about the means and ends of performance inform the action. The title character both feigns madness and wonders at his inability to feign grief. Indeed, while watching an actor produce tears and perform what he cannot, Hamlet summarizes the art of acting in three lines:
Is it not monstrous that this player here
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion
Could force his soul so to his own conceit?
And this revelation, of course, inspires him reveal his father’s killers by staging a second play within the one he merely occupies.
Usually set in a castle in Denmark during the Middle Ages, Robert O’Hara’s reinvention of Hamlet brings our current century to the play, yet it remains a period piece. Or rather, a piece of many periods, depending on who’s doing the talking. Edited to a brief two hours and relocated to a ghostly mansion in Malibu, Shakespeare’s words and syntax are maintained for the first two thirds of the running time. The play’s authority figures—Gertrude (Gina Torres), Claudius (Ariel Sharif), Polonius (Ramiz Monsef)—run Elsinore Pictures, and exist in a film noir time warp when a major motion picture studio was a kingdom unto itself and not just a line item in a much larger corporate portfolio or a waystation feeding Netflix’s algorithm. The younger generation—Hamlet (Patrick Ball), Horatio (Jakeem Powell), Ophelia (Coral Peña), Rosencrantz (Ty Molbak), Guildenstern (Danny Zuhlke)—occupy a more contemporary space, and—with the exception of Ophelia—are mostly presented as feckless, selfie-taking casualties of the drama at hand.
One reason to deconstruct a classic might be to inject a degree of levity into the proceedings, cancelling the tragedy but reaching an understanding of the script through humor. (See James Ijames’s Fat Ham). But O’Hara’s jokes lack subtly and sophistication. Many of the characters are prodigious partiers and regularly partake of a bump or a line, to cartoonish effect. When Hamlet demands that a kneeling Horatio “swear by my sword,” he thrusts his crotch into a willing Horatio’s face. Shortly after the “readiness is all” line, the characters drop the iambic pentameter and revert to California English and dialog written by O’Hara. An interrogation of Horatio by “Detective” Fortinbras (Joe Chrest) becomes an opportunity for camp as the now-deceased players return to recap their actions. Channeling Dunaway as Crawford in Mommie Dearest, Gertrude reads Claudius the riot act by explaining she knows where all the bodies are buried because she put them there.
O’Hara’s version ends with an eerie, deterritorializing coda—better seen than talked about—a simulation of things to come in these last years of human sentience and agency.
Hamlet is at the Mark Taper Forum through July 6. See info and links below for details.
HAMLET
Written by William Shakespeare
Adapted and directed by Robert O’Hara
World Premiere
Through July 6
Mark Taper Forum
135 North Grand Avenue, downtown Los Angeles
centertheatregroup.org/taper/hamlet
Hamlet (William Shakespeare, adapted and directed by Robert O’Hara), Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, May 28–July 6, 2025, from top: Gina Torres and Patrick Ball; Jakeem Powell and Ball; Ty Molbak (left) and Danny Zuhlke; Ball and Ramiz Monsef; Ariel Shafir and the company; Ball; Jaime Lincoln Smith; Ball and Coral Peña; Ball (standing), Monsef, and Torres;
Photographs by Jeff Lorch, courtesy the Center Theatre Group.
