Word: hamlets
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True, ostensibly decent people turn up now and then in literature, but they almost never get depicted as being swept away by impulses to sweetness. They are more often set up for a comedown. On one end of the literary spectrum, Hamlet might have been a pleasant fellow if Shakespeare had not handicapped him with that belief in ghosts, plus suicidal and homicidal tendencies. On the other end, given the way authors are, Jack is bound to wind up falling all over himself every time he tries to fetch a pail of water. In truth, the world's literary...
...have been the first, chronologically, just meanders, with no discernible destination. A telegram announces the death of Timmy, for instance, and Timmy's ghost (David Ferry) appears onstage to explain in interminable detail how he was blown to pieces on Saipan. Shakespeare pulled the same corny trick in Hamlet, but his ghost had a purpose. Wilson's does...
...waxes nostalgic about the days when "they called specials 'spectaculars' and everyone talked about the wonderful future ahead." Thus some of his sharpest barbs are reserved for network executives who do not even try to fulfill that glowing forecast. Says he: "You can't expect Hamlet every night, but you can expect a Roots every year or so, something that really knocks your socks...
THIS SURVEY OUGHT to suggest that the ART does not play dirty with dramatic texts--or, as senior actor Jeremy Geidt put it when the company was still moving in, "We don't set Hamlet in Upper Silesia just because Upper Silesia happens to be fashionable. Yet the cry of academic theatergoers, at Harvard or anywhere else, resounds with the same refrain: stick to the text. And herein lies the root trouble with Brustein's vision of harmony between university and theater...
...capacity to follow someone else's approach on the live stage. He is always comparing what is before him to what his imagination remembers, and no matter what is before him, it falls short. At the most ludicrous, he becomes the playgoer who cannot fully enjoy the soliloquies of Hamlet without silently mouthing them to himself as the actor's speech rattles...