By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
It’s always great to meet up with Hamlet.
It doesn’t matter if it’s in a park, or the swanky atmosphere of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. The moody Dane is always good for some thought provoking angst and ample blood letting.
Matters not whether the actor wearing the tights is famed of stage, or even screen, or known just from chance encounters at the local coffee shop, the Dane is never less than riveting.
That holds true in this newest incarnation of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” that will be staged Thursday, Aug. 22, through Saturday, Aug. 24, at 8 p.m. in the sanctuary of the Trinity United Methodist Church, 200 N. Summit St., Bowling Green. The performance is free. Donations are welcomed.
In this case, Hamlet is portrayed by a woman, Christina Hoekstra, a veteran of many local Shakespeare productions. That cross-gender casting barely merits mention in Bowling Green where women often wear the pants in productions of the Bard’s work. It’s Hoekstra’s fine acting that merits mention. She makes for an intriguing Hamlet — sullen, then excitable, scheming while always at the mercy of the unsavory doings about him. He’s both a danger and in danger.
The production is being directed by Kris Krotzer, a Bowling Green State University junior studying acting and directing and musical theater. He also plays the ghost of Hamlet’s father.
Krotzer is writing a thesis on the play and it’s continuing relevance, and what better way to demonstrate that than to stage it.
This isn’t just an academic endeavor. It’s a full blooded presentation of Shakespeare’s script, albeit abridged to a 150-minute run time.
When we first encounter Hamlet he’s in a mood. His father died just two months ago, but his mother Gertrude (Bethany Wethington) has already remarried to his uncle Claudius (Pat Mahood) who has usurped the crown.
Get over it, they tell Hamlet, everyone has lost a father including that long line of dead fathers.
Claudius tells him: “throw to earth this unprevailing woe, and think of us as of a father.”
Instead Hamlet soliloquizes about wishing to be free of “this too solid flesh,” and rages against his mother’s sliding between those “incestuous sheets.”
All this before he encounters, on a windy barricade, the ghost of his father who reveals he was indeed murdered by his uncle and wrests from his son a promise to avenge his death.
So Hamlet starts to plot, this charge heavy on his mind, and in the course, wreaks collateral damage on all about him.
Most tragically this includes Ophelia (Chelsea Justice) whom he loves until he pushes her aside in the interest of his feigned madness, a madness so intense it’s hard to distinguish from real madness.
Yet Hoekstra makes clear the love and passion that remains and that Hamlet’s cruelty is in its twisted way born of love.
Ophelia’s brother Laertes (Paisley Greenlees) gives a prescient warning of what loving Hamlet will involve. Ophelia cannot help herself, and goes mad both by Hamlet’s rebuke and his accidental killing of her father Polonius (Angelica Cooley). Polonius was killed as he spied from behind a curtain on Hamlet’s confrontation with his mother.
Spying on Hamlet, and trying to figure out what’s going on, is a constant. Claudius brings in two of Hamlet’s friends from school, Rosencrantz (Joseph Boehler) and Guildenstern (Matthew Johnston), who cozy up to him and then report back to Claudius and Polonius the nonsense Hamlet feeds the dim-witted pair.
Horatio (Jeremy Wilkes) is Hamlet’s one true friend and confidante, and the one left standing at the final curtain.
Jacqueline DeFriece and Lynne Wagner round out the cast. DeFriece takes on three roles, including the gravedigger. She brings a rare element of comic relief. As the leader of the acting troupe, she seems to amuse even Hamlet, not so much that he’d crack a smile though. Of course, that melancholy is part of why we love him so much, and why his return is so welcomed.
