Critics say Hamlet is a perfect play, maybe even the perfect piece of art because it doesn’t just speak to us, it shapes us. So what does South Coast Repertory’s newest version say about America right now? And how will it make you different?

PHOTO by HENRY DIROCCO

1. Mona Lisa Mountain
Have you ever seen the Mona Lisa? Not a reproduction in an art book, or a poster of it, or a 300 dpi version on art.com, or in an ad for The Da Vinci Code, or in an old Hershey bar commercial, or in Salvador Dali’s famous mustached parody of it, but the actual, factual portrait painted by the real Leonardo Da Vinci that’s housed in the Louvre, in Paris?

I have. Though I didn’t really see it. I mean, I saw it, I was there, I walked up the stone steps of the museum, I followed the signs that said, “This way to the Mona Lisa,” and after a labyrinthine journey of mounting anticipation in a building that must be as big as the Pentagon (here it comes, La Gioconda, just around the corner . . . ), I arrived in a beautifully appointed room filled with tourists all huddled around a . . . I don’t know, a sort of small painting, encased in glass, that was so familiar that it may as well have been the coffee table in my apartment. It looked like the Mona Lisa, pretty much. Was it, as I’d been taught, the greatest portrait ever painted? Was her smile the profound mysterious enigma everybody said it was? Frankly, I didn’t have a clue. There were too many people around looking to properly look, too many storied pictures in my head to compare it to. I had lived too long in the age of mechanical—and now digital—reproduction to really see the thing beneath the ubiquitous images of the thing.

This is the oldest story in the postmodern playbook by now, but it’s a good story because it asks, “Is it possible to have real (i.e. spontaneous, unself-conscious) artistic experiences anymore? Or are we sort of doomed nowadays to pre-experience things in the media before we experience them ‘live’”? It may be too obvious to ask, but I’ll ask anyway: How many commercials for the new Pirates sequel will you see before you put your money down? And how does the hype change your experience of the film? Is our “experience of a film” or our “experience of a painting” now inextricable from the hype surrounding it? Does it matter? Should it?

I don’t mean to get all metaphysical on you upfront, but this story is about Hamlet, about the new production that Costa Mesa’s South Coast Repertory is mounting June 1, and I assume that if you’re interested enough to read a story about this play, you’re going to be interested in such questions. Hamlet is, yes, a play about a college kid who comes home from school when his father dies only to discover, from a ghost, that his father has been murdered, and that his mother has married the murderer. It’s about his endless procrastination when the ghost tells him to avenge his father’s death. But it’s also about people who confuse the real and the image—that which is real “within” and that which “passes show” as our image of ourselves—a signal postmodern problem. Finally, Hamlet turns out to be the Mona Lisa of world theater, a play that’s been swallowed up by its own fame, a play that you’ve seen a thousand times even if you haven’t seen it once. I’ll bet you my ticket to opening night that SpongeBob SquarePants has done an underwater version of the “To be or not to be” speech in one episode or another, and I bet you my fiancée’s ticket that you’re familiar with about 30 phrases from Hamlet even if you’ve never read it (“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” “Ay, there’s the rub.” “Conscience doth make cowards of us all.” “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” etc.). Dozens of paintings represent scenes from it (e.g. Millais’s Ophelia), literary works take their titles from it (plays: Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; novels: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest; films: Vincent Ward’s What Dreams May Come), and theater itself has more or less adopted the image of Hamlet’s gazing at Yorick’s skull as a symbol of what tragic theater does (which is, to put it bluntly, to try to look death in the face).

The everywhere-ness of Hamlet’s cultural influence isn’t a superficial matter of phrases, titles, or images, either. Some of the weightiest thinkers of the last century believe that Hamlet has reached farther down into our language, our thinking, our being, than anything else. No less than Harold Bloom, the literary critic who stands to become the Samuel Johnson of our time, has made the outrageously grand claim that Shakespeare, in Hamlet and a few other plays, “invented the human,” that is, created a new kind of representation of human being—self-conscious and self-reflective, able to change as a result of witnessing himself think—which is what we recognize as “human” in the modern world. And then there’s James Joyce, who punned himself to the extraordinary thought that the author of Hamlet was “Great Shapesphere”—not just a writer, but the shaper of our sphere, the Earth, and therefore a kind of creator-god of us all

So, how are we, the jaded, supersaturated audience, supposed to see, take in, experience a play that’s so everywhere in the culture, yet so fundamental to who we are? That’s the task that any major theater company takes on when they decide to mount it, and South Coast Rep is a major theater company.

Of course, no one at SCR conceives of the challenge in this fashion (way too much pressure). When I asked SCR’s Artistic Director Martin Benson why they decided to produce Hamlet for the first time in their 43-year history, he was, as you might expect, pragmatic. “It all comes down to the staff you put together.” The company had batted around the idea for years, he said, but they needed “two real pillars”—a great director and a charismatic lead actor—before they could think of hoping to stand up a production. “I’ve known Dan [Sullivan, the Tony-winning director] ever since college, and I’m a great admirer of Hamish Linklater”—who’ll play Hamlet—“ever since he did The Violet Hour for us.” When these two got on board, the play was a go, and could draw more top-flight talent, like Robert Foxworth, Dakin Matthews and Michael Urie, to its staging. “Hamlet and Lear are the two greatest mountains in the theater,” Benson says, “and you don’t run up a mountain unless you’ve got the horses.”

OK, so they’ve got the horses, admittedly. But what about that mountain? Who or what do you hope to find once you climb to its summit?

2. The Horses
Shakespeare could never stick with a single metaphor for anything—there were always seven or eight others buzzing around his head—so why should we? Hamlet, let us posit, is not merely the Mona Lisa, nor is it just a mountain. It is a sponge. As critic Jan Kott put it, “Unless it is produced in a stylized or antiquarian fashion, [Hamlet] immediately absorbs all the problems of its time.” And if you don’t buy Kott, let’s go directly to the source, Hamlet himself, who says, when he puts on his writer-director hat to instruct the actors of his play-within-the-play, that a play must “hold a mirror up to nature,” that it’s “an abstract and brief chronicle of the time,” and that it will “show . . . the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”

With prescriptions like that, we’re back to jacking up the pressure on people giving us a new Hamlet. Because what Kott and Shakespeare are saying is that Hamlet, ideally, is us, and that any new production of Hamlet will say more about us than it will about Shakespeare. What will the new production say about us, then? What’s the mirror going to reflect? Well, we won’t know until the play debuts this weekend, but till then we can talk to the horses, director Daniel Sullivan and star Hamish Linklater, for some insights.

Not that they’re going to tricked into answering such questions directly. Theater types can’t afford to get too theoretical. Sitting one afternoon with Linklater in an SCR boardroom, Sullivan dodged when I asked questions about what the play meant to us now. “One has to get beyond the scholarly contradictions that people glory in Hamlet and really just find a way to do it,” Sullivan insisted. Fair enough. Sullivan has been doing it—directing serious theater, very successfully, on Broadway and off—for more than a third of a century, so he’s got a right to his impatience with academic questions. His credits go back, believe it or not, to being assistant director of the hippie musical Hair in 1972, and since then he’s directed classics by Shaw, O’Neill, and Shakespeare, as well as forged relationships with some of the most prominent playwrights in the country, among them Wendy Wasserstein (for whom he directed The Heidi Chronicles and The Sisters Rosensweig) and Jon Robin Baitz (The Substance of Fire). He’s been nominated for a Tony six times, and was awarded one in 2001 for Proof.

Sullivan dislikes coming to a play, particularly this one, with a lot of preconceived ideas about what it’s about. “Putting on a play is a process of discovery. I don’t like to impose ideas from the beginning. Very often they just trap people.” Then he stops for a moment: there’s one idea that he does want to impose. “I think you have to have an approach to it that it’s about the theater in some ways, that it’s all about acting. I think that idea is something that in rehearsals we can explore, we can make visible.”

“Explore what?” I say. “That life is about acting?”

“Life is about acting. People are constantly performing, and people are constantly watching the performance. That’s basically what’s going on in this [play].”

Linklater, listening respectfully nearby, doesn’t seem to even want that much imposed on him. “I don’t know,” he says. “I think what’s amazing is how accommodating the play is—and the role is—to whoever steps into it. I think the more simply and honestly you attack each one of those scenes or soliloquies or whatever, who you are, whatever world you walked into the theater from, it’s going to inform that. And the play lets that happen.”

Hamish (pronounced with a long “a”) Linklater is, as Hamlet would say, a piece of work. For starters, he’s tall, dark, and handsome, with a hawing satyr-like laugh and a face that’s rubbery enough to be dashingly virile one moment and disarmingly goofy the next. (The goofball face gets a workout in his role as Matthew in Julia Louis-Dreyfuss’s sitcom, The New Adventures of Old Christine.) It’s easy to imagine him changing the emotional temperature simply by walking into a room. He’s got loads of presence and charm, but carries it in a peculiarly American way—he’s slouchy, hunches his shoulders and hangs his head while munching on a salad, and lets his thick black hair go wild, like a young Lear on the heath. He starts sentences without having any idea where they’ll end up, riding huge stores of roiling passion that sometimes lead him into syntactical cul-de-sacs he bulldozes out of with some quick witticism or observation that explodes out of him. Eyes mischievous and flaring, he steers clear of all pretense—he says that the bodies that heap up at the play’s conclusion is “Terminator-y”—and makes light of the fact that he’s in the enviable position of taking high profile and lucrative TV and movie roles (he also starred in Fantastic Four) at the same time that he got plucked from hundreds of actors to play the most famous role in Western theater.

“I mean the coverage [of Hamlet] at a Hollywood meeting,” he laughs, “would be, ‘Oh, man, it meanders. I don’t know what this guy is thinking, we gotta cut cut cut . . . ’”

Sullivan plays along: “How can you do a play about a guy who doesn’t do anything?”

“Exactly,” Linklater says. “But what’s great is—given how accommodating the play—you really don’t want to go in there and say, ‘I really gotta say this speech this way for it to be true.’ Because there’s something objectively and absolutely true about these speeches, so you can do it spontaneously.”

Sullivan now agrees. The play’s “always going to change. It changes in terms of what you bring to it from your own life, it changes simply because it makes such an accommodation, always refracting a different light. What happens [on stage] one night sends you out for a soliloquy the next night that’s completely different from the one the night before. You have to be open to that. That’s why it’s exciting to work on. It’s constant and unending. Every time you say, ‘Oh, I get this,’ something happens and the play says, ‘Well, maybe not.’”

Linklater finishes up: “It’s like when you do the soliloquies. I studied the other guys—Gielgud, Burton, Gibson, Simon Russell Beale—and when they do the speeches, when they’re doing them, on stage, in the moment, they’re trying to get to the answer of these speeches, and this character, and themselves.”

Ah, OK, I think. For Sullivan and Linklater, doing Hamlet is a process of discovering Hamlet. Not just in rehearsals, but spontaneously, intuitively, on stage, letting one own’s life flow into one’s acting, before an audience, each night. Which, if I’m not mistaken, just happens to be what Hamlet seems to be doing in his own life. He’s got a plot to enact—kill the new king—and a script to follow, a part to play, but he keeps letting the spontaneous in, the stray “regard” of his own thought, doubt, reflection, so that “enterprises of great pitch and moment,/With this regard their currents turn awry,/And lose the name of action.” Hamlet’s allowing his “off-stage” life—the life of a scholar-philosopher, playwright, and lover—to bleed into the plotted life he’s forced to live, and it keeps changing the plot. Sullivan and Linklater are trying to do Hamlet, evidently, the way Hamlet himself might do Hamlet.

Yes?

Or, as Sullivan would say, “maybe not.” There are more things in this play than is dreamt of in this bit of philosophizing. Linklater, in any case, is anxious to deflate it. “I mean, I know when I do the ‘to be or not to be’ speech, I’m going to stand on my head and urinate down my torso. But that’s just me.”

3. The Undiscovered Country Every Night
There’s a scene in Act 4 when Hamlet, who’s been sent away from Elsinore after he kills Polonius, comes across young Fortinbras, the brash Norwegian who’s getting ready to cut a swath of carnage through the Polish army. Fortinbras, whose own father has also been killed by usurpers, can act vengefully—without Hamlet’s endless “thinking too precisely on th’ event.” Why can’t Hamlet? “I do not know,” he groans, “Why yet I live to say, ‘This thing’s to do,’/Sin[ce] I have cause, and will, and strength, and means/To do it.” With every reason in the world to kill the king, he continues to delay, his mind crowded by endless questions: what it means to be human; what “the undiscovered country” of eternity might be; what the place of one’s own reason should be when confronted by an irrational presence beyond the grave; what friendship, love, or family mean when they can be so easily stained by betrayal; and the seeming rank absurdity of a being—man—who might conquer the world during his life but, his body turned to loam in the grave, could turn up years later as a cork in a beer barrel.

Sullivan, Linklater, and their band of players can say with Hamlet, “I do not know,/why yet I live to say, ‘This thing’s to do.’” They can’t answer the question, “What’s this play about?” and that’s just fine with them, because for them, Hamlet, which Sullivan calls an “anti-play,” is about not knowing, and the undiscovered country is the stage on which they enact the crowd of questions and doubts that attend them on the way to the play’s blood-soaked conclusion.

And that’s a good enough answer for me about what’s at the top of the play’s summit: it’s putting on the play in the spirit of the main character. Whether it “works” will depend on how deep the players go each night into the play’s mysteries. It will depend, that is, on their nightly aliveness to those mysteries, as staged in front of the witnesses of a live audience. Linklater put it nicely: “If you’re a musician, you can go and practice in your room; if you’re a painter, you can go and practice in your studio, by yourself. In the theater, you really need to have that audience. And when you get the audience, then you have a canvas, then you have that instrument, then you can actually ply your craft. Otherwise, it’s impossible. With theater acting, you get to make a painting each night with that audience.”

A new Mona Lisa, maybe—if you’re damn good, and you’re lucky—unfettered by the old.

• • •

Shakedown
Where to get your fill of the Bard this summer

Compiled by Patrick Dooley

CAPISTRANO SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL Camino Real Playhouse | San Juan Capistrano | caminorealplayhouse.org/Shakespeare.html
A Comedy of Errors
July 12-29 @ 7:30pm
$10-15
The Twelfth Night At Charlie’s Diner (a rock musical)
July 13 & 20 @ 8pm; July 14-15 & 21-22 @ 2pm
$10
Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)
July 27-28, August 3- 4 & 10-11 @ 8pm; July 29, August 5 & 12 @ 12pm
$10-15
All’s Well That Ends Well
August 3-5, 10-12 & 17-19 @ 7:30pm
$15

DANA POINT THEATER COMPANY Heritage Park | Dana Point | dptheaterco.org
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
August 17-18, 24-25 @ 6pm; 19 & 26 @ 4:30pm
Free w/ canned food donation

THE OLD GLOBE The Old Globe Theater | Balboa Park | theoldglobe.com
Hamlet
June 16-September 30 @ 8pm
$39-62, depending on day
Two Gentlemen of Verona
June 20-September 20 @ 8pm
$39-62, depending on day
Measure for Measure
June 23-September 28 @ 8pm
$39-62, depending on day

SHAKESPEARE BY THE SEA playing at 15 alternating park venues | shakespearebythesea.org
Taming of the Shrew
June 14-August 11, show times vary
Free
Merchant of Venice
June 21-August 10, show times vary
Free

SHAKESPEARE ORANGE COUNTY The Festival Amphitheatre | Garden Grove | shakespeareoc.org
Taming of the Shrew
July 12-28 (Thursdays-Saturdays @ 8:15pm)
$27-29
Romeo and Juliet
August 9-25 (Thursdays-Saturdays @ 8:15pm)
$27-29

Tags: hamlet, shakespeare, south coast repertory, Theater