HAMLET AND WOOSTER

For anyone who doesn’t know them, the Wooster Group are an experimental theatre troupe who command a mainstream-sized audience and a comparable level of interest. Founded by Willem Defoe, Spalding Gray and Kate Valk among others, the ensemble is committed to using innovative sound and video design to enhance what are often exhilarating and challenging theater pieces. I saw their staging of Emperor Jones, a production that was re-mounted after an amazing run in ’93, in which Kate Valk dons black face and tells the story of a slave who becomes an ‘emperor’ of a small island of native Africans. The production was simply astounding. Kate Valk was thunderous, powerful, frightening, ferocious, and commanded what was easily one of the finest and most exciting productions I’ve ever seen. It was the kind of elemental theater-making that comes along a handful of times a generation, which scores itself into the brain of anyone fortunate enough to see it, and which is talked about as legend for years afterwards. The prospect of the Wooster Group tackling Hamlet, one of my favorite plays (honestly, who doesn’t like Hamlet?), intrigued me and I was ready for, if not a legendary performance, at least something memorable.

Sadly, the show was a masturbatory indulgence of theater insiderism, snarky gimmickry, and empty gesticulation signifying nothing. According to the group, “We were drawn to Richard Burton’s Hamlet, a 1964 Broadway production recorded live” which was to be shown in theaters across America for two days and then destroyed. Somehow, a copy of the play survived and the Wooster Group “attempt[ed] to reverse the process by reconstructing a hypothetical theater piece from the fragmentary evidence of the edited film...[to replace] our own spirit with the spirit of another”.

As is ever the danger with post-modern tinkering, the misguided director Elizabeth LeCompte decided to gut Hamlet of everything that makes it dear to us. All emotion and intention was purposefully drained from the play, lines became sarcastic, winking, aren’t-these-soliloquies-kind-of-corny commentaries on Shakespeare’s beautiful imagery and ideas. There’s no better way to alienate an audience than to remove the human core of a production. Isn’t the purpose of art to examine our emotional lives, to experience and share the human condition in all its ironies and paradoxes? The Wooster Group, in an act of cynical and theatrical violence, delivered robotic line readings that turned Shakespeare’s glorious language into leaden drivel, and which reduced the power and conflict of the story to empty plot points devoid of pathos. The audience was restless, unengaged, and bored silly. Were we supposed to sit through two and a half hours of clumsy gadgetry? While the sound effects that sometimes accompanied the play were interesting, they never amounted to any kind of meaningful insight into why we are the way we are. There's no question that video and sound can be a powerful compliment to theater. But if the technical flourishes don't enhance some principal dramatic idea, or hypothesis, or investigation, if they only exist for their own benefit and not to further some dramatic objective, they're a waste and indulgence. Could it be that LeCompte and the actors were intimidated by Shakespeare? What are they afraid of? Maybe it's just easier to slip into retrograde irony than to actually find a new way to interpret Hamlet. Or maybe the Wooster Group's just lazy.

The idea of resurrecting a play from the sixties is interesting, but what is Wooster trying to say to us by projecting the film behind the exact same scenes re-enacted on stage and then clearly mocking them? The sixties were melodramatic? There’s nothing new under the sun? Richard Burton talks funny? And what to make of Hamlet’s interruptions from the text to tell the technician manning the video to ‘fast-forward’ through Opehlia's scenes because they're boring? And what to make of the actors moving their body in synchronicity with the glitches, hops and gyrations of the fragmented film? In what way does this contribute to our understanding of, well, anything?

In the end, the Wooster Group failed to create any dramatic reason for their experiment other than the artistically toxic and otherwise noxious ‘wouldn’t it be cool if…’ justification to which immature artists (particularly in college) frequently succumb. It’s a shame, because Shakespeare could use a good take-down; Bardolotry is ripe for ridicule and nothing is sacrosanct in art. It’s too bad the best the Wooster Group could manage was to roll their eyes, rock their Fischerspooner soundtrack (Laertes sounds like that guy from Postal Service!) and fill the stage with the sound of static. Nihilism thy name is…yawn. Shakespeare demands a wittier and more compelling excoriation than that.