On the way into the Carousel Theatre to see “Hamlet,” I was thinking about the coronavirus. During intermission, I chatted with my seat neighbor about the potential lockdown of the entire nation. As I walked out of the theatre, I spoke with a professor about the challenges of moving classes online.
But for each of the 150 minutes that the incredibly talented cast of professional and amateur actors were on stage, the pandemic and the ensuing frenzy of logistical nightmares faded from my mind and were replaced with the 400-year-old tale of Danish murder and revenge.
That a story so old it was performed in the days of Spanish influenza and so familiar that its best lines have become clichés could still send chills down my neck and transport me away from the chaos of the current moment is a testament both to Shakespeare and the production team behind Clarence Brown Theatre’s newest show, which will run through March 15.
The production emphasizes the visceral, physical grief of its characters, and the intimate Carousel Theatre, wherein one can see the glint of every tear and quiver of each lower lip, aids in the sorrowful interpretation.
With lush soundscapes of ghostly whispers and deep pools of shocked gold and teal lighting, the play manages to be genuinely unnerving at times, without ever losing its vital human element.
It is an unusually fragile and emotional rendering of the ubiquitous tragedy, for which many directors choose to highlight its hardened comedic or dramatic aspects. Director John Sipes, however, demonstrates a deep understanding of his characters as fluid and breakable humans, people who are overtaken with loud despair and still shocked by their own potential for wickedness.
At the center of the production is Charles Pasternak, whose performance as Hamlet makes the canon’s most dynamic character somehow new, delightfully strange in his madness and almost drunk with giddy despair.
Dancing, clutching and jumping across the stage throughout the lengthy play, Pasternak fulfills each of the various personas of the titular character that audiences expect: scholar, lover, madman, analyst and actor, all without losing the believability of Hamlet as one man, struggling through the grief of his father’s murder and his mother’s betrayal.
In moments of glee, Pasternak — dressed in the black leather jacket and shoes of a moody millennial — is able to play the crowd’s laughter like an instrument, causing it to erupt and then fade abruptly with the delivery of his next line, traveling between the various faces of Hamlet’s “antic disposition” as the story’s caffeinated conductor.
The rest of the cast, though less hyper than Hamlet, carry the side effects of proximity to murder in their taut faces and, like Pasternak, deliver every line in the famously verbose script as if it were their only.
As the tormented and shame-filled Queen Gertrude, Abbey Siegworth delivers perhaps the standout supporting performance, emitting in consecutive breaths the shrieks of a forlorn mother and the maledictions of a lusty wife. Her confusion about her rotted and two-faced circumstance sits on her face like a mask, constantly warping with new information.
The entire cast pay such meticulous attention to each other that I was often unsure of where to look. Like watching the groom’s sad-glad face rather than the bride herself, I was unable to look away from Laertes, played with subdued rage by Collin Andrews, even as his mud-smeared sister crumbled into insanity before him, herself wearing what once was a very clean white dress.
Outside of the performances, what surprisingly commanded most of my attention were the costumes. As the story unfolded, I began to obsess over the clothing of the performers in a way that could only reflect obsessive attention to detail on the part of costume designer Bill Black.
The first thing to notice about the costumes is that they are modern, not at all the dress of 13th-century Denmark. But the costumes are by no means chosen this way out of laziness. The entire cast is dressed as modern Danes, placed with great care in the correct setting rather than simply tossed into our own times in a gesture of smug appropriation.
Hamlet and his companions wear stark Scandinavian coats and gloves, giving them the appearance of young professionals walking the streets of Copenhagen, while King Claudius and his obsequious bureaucrats wear the pin-striped suits and sparkling military habits of the Christiansborg Palace.
The costumes also serve to drape the actors in symbolic renderings of their own characters. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wear the cheery professorial suits of England, the land in which they will meet their unexpected fate, and Ophelia appears for the first time in a perfectly pressed Easter dress, headband and chastity belt securely fastened and awaiting manic, twiggy disruption.
Every choice, sartorial or other, comes so obviously from an understanding of Shakespeare’s text, that, even without the stunning utilization of the theatre space, “Hamlet” is sure to succeed.
But the added strength of the Carousel Theatre is its invitation for viewers to step into the physical details of the story, which the cast is always willing to supply in great abundance, from the twitching eye filling with a royal tear to the projectile cloud of saliva from a percussive soliloquy.
It is sometimes difficult to rationalize the time and money required to sustain the arts in a time of global crisis. But if any play were worth diverting funds for in a time of pandemic, it would be CBT’s “Hamlet,” with its crackling energy and chilling performances.
And when the constant stream of news and rumor depicts a world that seems to be gasping for air or otherwise ripping to shreds, it may just be the break we all need.
