Giving up the Ghost

After much teeth-gnashing, I have come to realize that I cannot review—nor see, I guess—the Public Theater’s upcoming revival of Hamlet at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. To be clear, it’s not the casting that swells me with terror—certainly not with the stunningly gorgeous Lauren Ambrose playing Ophelia as a follow-up to her dazzlingly insightful Juliet in the Public’s Romeo and Juliet last year. And the idea of seeing the legendary Sam Waterston—who played the title role in the Public’s last Central Park revival of Hamlet over three decades ago—in the role of Polonius is undoubtedly going to be a thrill. And I can imagine what the stupendously gifted Michael Stuhlbarg, who devastated both the heart and the mind in Martin McDonagh’s play The Pillowman on Broadway a few seasons ago, will do with the title role.

But at the moment, I am acutely suffering from a medical condition caused by too many Hamlets. It’s true that there have always been too many Hamlets. In fact, if you look on the Internet Broadway Database, as I did in my research, you’ll see there have been no fewer than 64 productions of the play on Broadway alone, not to mention thematic variations like Tom Stoppard’s nifty Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead or Paul Rudnick’s I Hate Hamlet, which some say cures my illness better than tea.

But lately, my condition has gotten worse. I can hardly walk, talk, eat or sleep without a bit of Hamlet somehow crowding my thoughts. Last year, I had to see the Wooster Group’s Hamlet over at the Public Theater downtown, a fanciful multimedia homage to Richard Burton’s famous 1964 revival of the play. And then there was a straightforward Hamlet at off-Broadway’s Pearl Theatre Company, where an ensemble member named Sean McNall (who just won an Obie for his acting) took the demands of the Dane in stride. Then there was a piping-hot Hamlet delivered by the Gorilla Repertory Theater Company, which is mostly known for producing free Shakespeare in city parks during the summer; but for this show, they took things inside for a three-hour, no-intermission whack at the play. For that show, director Christopher Carter Sanderson, an old school chum of mine, openly encouraged the audience to simply walk in and out of the play-space between bathroom breaks or whenever boredom began bearing down. And then there was a Hamlet performed by the puppeteers of the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater on a carousel in Dumbo. Naturally.

The last two years, in fact, has been a heady time for hopeless Hamlet-oholics. In last year’s New York International Fringe Festival, there was Hamlet: A Stand-Up, which it turns out isn’t the only solo version of the play out in the universe. There is also Hamlet (solo), a piece by actor Raoul Bhaneja and director Robert Ross Parker of off-off-Broadway’s Vampire Cowboys Theatre Company. And there is apparently a one-man Hamlet being touted as an educational experience by a group in British Columbia called Theatre Inconnu. In 2006, the New York Fringe hosted a triple-decker of the doleful Dane: A One Man Hamlet by actor Andrew Cowie, imported direct from Brisbane; Revenge of a King, a “hip-hop multicultural musical” derived from the prince’s travails; and a twisted take on the tale entitled Ophelia.

Last year, too, as part of the Pretentious Festival at the Brick Theater in Williamsburg, there were two doses of the Dane, as if one wouldn’t have been sufficient. The first was Ian W. Hill’s Hamlet, which used images of yachts, the trappings of wealth and the threat of high-WASP accents to poke merciless fun at the ways in which Shakespeare tends to be popularized among the unwashed masses. And there was Q1: The Bad Hamlet, which was actually the first quarto version of Hamlet—the one that scholars tend to deride as terrible—which was acted with gusto and without cuts or elisions. There was also a prim, pert piece called Heart of My Mystery—The Hamlet Project. In that show, two academics, Barbara Bosch and Mark Ringer, eviscerated Hamlet like last year’s Thanksgiving turkey pig and forced a cadre of actors to perform scores of footnotes, commentaries and annotations about Hamlet by more than 30 commentators.

In 2007, I also went to the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. to see actor Jeffrey Carlson—known for his Broadway roles in Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? and the musical Taboo—play a Hamlet that was torrentially fey, with a hint of dye job in his hair and a great big dollop of androgyny wafting across the stage.

Did I forget to mention Hamlet: The Manga, which was performed by something called the Slayers Players a few years ago? Or that Jude Law played Hamlet last year in London?

I could mention all the revivals of King Lear that have come through New York in the last few years as well—Kevin Kline at the Public, Alvin Epstein at La Mama, Christopher Plummer at Lincoln Center Theater, Andre De Shields at the Classical Theater of Harlem. I could even imagine how crazy things might get were there to be as many productions of King Lear as there have been of Hamlet. Picture it: The Gondo-Lears set in Italy; The Lava-Lears set in the Stone Age.

I could also make the point—as the British director Matthew Warchus audaciously did back in the late 1990s—that there ought to be a 10-year moratorium of Shakespeare. In later interviews, Warchus never did answer the question as to whether violating the ban would, say, be punishable by death. But I think it might do the trick.

But I won’t do any of those things. Instead, I want to share a bit of my research into my illness. Specifically, I’m pleased to share two documents. The first is an open letter from a theater critic that dates back to 1609. The second…oh, just read it.

From 1609—Author Unknown Friends, Romans, Big Apple-dwellers, I implore thee to consider my plea, to lend an ear to my prayer, to judge not the admission I am offering to you without due consideration of the burdens afflicting my soul. Fear not that I no longer wish to consecrate at the sacred altar of Bardolatry—of one more Hamlet, this one occurring on fine and humid night at the Globe in London. Oh, fie! Fie to the thought of it!

My friends, I must take my leave of the Globe’s revival of Hamlet before I suffer a thousand natural deaths from overindulgence in the play—rich gifts, it is said, wax poor when givers prove unkind. While this admission shall position me the object of fuming derision and scathing scorn, I am, of course, a theater critic. ’Tis therefore to be expected.

Shall I compare Hamlet to a summer’s day? No, I mustn’t, for I have withstood far too many Hamlets in my lifetime: Hamlet in the dark, Hamlet in the light; Hamlet in the heat, Hamlet in the cold; Hamlet in the theater, Hamlet in the square; Hamlet by the sun, Hamlet by the Moon; clothed Hamlet, nude Hamlet, all-male Hamlet, all-woman Hamlet; the all-nun habit-wearing Hamlet.

No, for me to see Hamlet this summer I would be taken for a fool—and the fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool. No, ’tis I who hath seen far too much of Shakespeare’s fine play; ’tis I, I fear, who hath become more sinned against than sinning. Yes, I hear your cries: “The critic doth protest too much, methinks!” But ’tis Hamletitis the malady I suffer—abstinence it’s only cure.

Without distance between my heart and head and the Globe’s Hamlet, I shall remain a man who arises in the morn ever-equating the pace of my shuffling footfalls with iambic pentameter. I shall remain a man who behind every retracted curtain cannot dream of more than the fate of poor Polonius, quivering behind an arras as Hamlet, awash in the severest delirium tremens, savagely impales the old man with dagger, right in the kisser. Ah, perchance to dream of something new, something different—of a Mamet play of quality! But not yet one more Hamlet, I implore you, and let me take my leave.

From 2047—A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney Explanatory note: Taking advantage of my time-travel machine, I am looking at an email from the year 2047. It’s written by Andy Rooney, who is 128 years old and in his 69th year of offering “A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney” every week on 60 Minutes. (He is not, by the way, the oldest correspondent on the show—that would be 129-year-old Mike Wallace.) The email contains the script for Rooney’s next segment—about Hamlet. Clearly nothing has changed.

(Fade in.)

I hate Hamlet. You know that play, that play written by William Shakespeare? I thought you might have heard of him. One or two people have. I want to know why there are so many productions of Hamlet all the time. It’s not like people don’t know the ending, unless endings aren’t for you. In the last two weeks, I’ve heard about more productions of Hamlet than ever—Hamlet on a crater of the Moon; a one-act Hamlet set to 1990s rap songs; a Hamlet performed with dolphins in the middle of the Pacific Ocean; a Hamlet that you wear special glasses to see because the performance occurs inside a conch shell, with bacteria playing all the roles. Apparently the “To be or not to be” speech is played by an unstable virus.

(Close up.)

I get lots of flyers for Hamlet, too. I used to get a lot of flyers once, but that was when there were trees.

(Medium shot.)

This flyer was apparently designed just for me. It’s for The 67-Year-Long Hamlet, which I expect to live long enough to see in its entirety. It all began last February when a group of unemployed actors piled into an interplanetary traveler and took off for the new American colony on Jupiter.

(Close up.)

I always thought the colony here was better suited for The Taming of the Shrew.

(Long shot.)

People always send me copies of Hamlet, too. That is, people who still own books. I own a lot of them, but no one else does.

(Picks up copy.)

Here’s Hamlet sent to me by someone in Colorado. See, the cover is made from the skin of a cloned lamb.

(Pats the book.)

Mmmm.