Theater: Cry Ophelia

Why did Teddy Bergman, co-founder and co-artistic director of the Woodshed Collective, situate his ambitious production of Caridad Svich’s Twelve Ophelias within the vast and creepy bowels of the McCarren Park Pool in Williamsburg?

Maybe it’s ghosts. Svich’s play, after all, is practically suffused with them, much in the same way that Shakespeare’s original Hamlet asks the title character—and audiences—to believe that he’s acting upon his dead father’s dictates. Bergman makes a statement by plunking the play into a comparatively tiny sliver of the long-neglected hulk, which was touted as the world’s largest public pool when Robert Moses and Fiorello LaGuardia opened it in 1936. Sense, if you can, the ghosts of yesteryear’s happy kiddies.

The play begins when Ophelia—the lovely and otherworldly Pepper Binkley—pops out of a dark brown plastic puddle at the center of the performance area, a mini-pool resembling nothing so much as primordial muck. As she wanders, we wonder: Could this be the “muddy death” that Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, describes in Hamlet? In the brittle lyrical landscape Svich constructs, whisking us off to the afterlife for Ophelia, Shakespeare’s most famous suicide hardly seems out of character.

Besides, everything is so different now. Just as those Depression-era children are now wisps of memory, so too are Ophelia’s recollections of the Elsinore court, back when she was merely a girl, perhaps bipolar, and smitten with the melancholy Dane. And Gertrude—played by a sulky, sullen Kate Benson—is a Machiavellian she-bitch running a brothel. Even Hamlet is in an altered state: Played by Dan Cozzens as a wild-haired galoot, the boy who would be king has dissipated his charms, appeal and even his name. Now he’s the Rude Boy, and despite his inability to keep his hands off Ophelia, he eventually finds ways to illustrate his moniker.

Hamlet’s friend Horatio, meanwhile, is a smidgen more moral. Played by Ben Beckley, the character’s name has been reduced to H, as in hotshot; the dude thinks nothing of gut-punching or wrestling Rude Boy down to keep him subservient. And then there are Hamlet’s other pals, those fools Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, their names miniaturized to R and G and shrunk down to cackling choristers and kibitzers. Their identities are further blurred by Grace McLean’s bouncy R and Preston Martin’s flitty G, each one a cheeky experiment in gender bending.

The reason Ophelia can’t smell anything rotten in Denmark is because she’s in Appalachia, or so the actors’ grimy accents make clear. It’s where she finds Mina—a floozy in Daisy Duke short-shorts worn by Jocelyn Kuritsky—parading her libido around like the barn’s cockiest hen.

Picture all this in a play that breezes through the basics of Hamlet and Twelve Ophelias may seem like a deconstructed masterstroke. In many ways, it is. The final element is the Jones Street Boys, a thrumming local band whose styles shift from rock to soul to rockabilly, all set to Svich’s lyrics. Unfortunately, the tunes are too much honky, too little tonk—Bergman hasn’t really tamed the acoustics of a space never intended for live performance. (The empty pool is also being used for concerts, with reconstruction to begin next year.)

As you struggle to hear the tunes, they nevertheless act like scepters of mood that anoint the scene, full of genius dissonant harmonies but a garbled effect on the narrative. It can be thrilling when summer winds kick up and you taste moisture in the air, or it can simply confuse.

For all of Bergman’s whimsical, fantastical staging concepts—a windswept love shack for Gertrude’s boudoir, a rickety river pier—the question isn’t whether there are 11 more Ophelias meandering around this playhouse purgatory. It’s whether the ghosts of the pool are chattering too cacophonously for us to fully receive their message.

Through Aug. 22. McCarren Park Pool, Lorimer St. at Bayard St., Williamsburg, Free.