Word: ophelia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Success exacted its most customary price. Hwang's wife Ophelia stayed back in Los Angeles through most of the months of rehearsals and tryouts, and the fledgling marriage broke up soon after. Ever since, Hwang has lived a luxurious if somewhat work-obsessed life in Manhattan, in a rented midtown apartment with spectacular wraparound views. The place came furnished -- not even the throw pillows are his -- but he vows to decorate in style a newly purchased Manhattan triplex to which he will move in October. He rarely cooks or eats at home; instead he deftly table-hops at fashionable restaurants...
...lighting and a movable back wall that is by turns opaque, reflective or transparent. The first act begins with an elaborate dinner party glimpsed from an antechamber; the second starts with a gaudily dressed, Kabuki-like version of the play within a play; the third, with Ophelia's funeral. In each case, the ceremony heightens the sense of falseness and decay against which the prince rebels...
Some of his entries are speculative: Ophelia may have been the Katharine Hamlet who drowned in the Avon river in 1579. But other cases are beyond argument. Harold Skimpole, the "damaged young man . . . who had undergone some unique process of depreciation" in Bleak House, was the poet Leigh Hunt. A boasting letter from Charles Dickens is exhibit A: "The likeness is astonishing. I don't think it could be more like (Hunt) himself." Dickens tempered his Victorian portrait with humor, but George Eliot was made of sterner stuff. Apologizing to a clergyman who had recognized an unflattering likeness in Scenes...
Charlie, played by Linus Gelber, has the roles of both Osric and Ophelia in Hamlet. He is especially funny in drag as Ophelia, the facetious lover of both Laertes and Hamlet, and performs her death scene with drawn-out agony...
...between what might have been drama, several supporting players, less perverted by innovation, give several memorable performances. Katherine Robin gives the most consistently impressive performance as Ophelia, giving us the most genuinely poignant sense of tragedy. For indispensible comic relief, don't miss Andrew Watson as the bumbling Polonius and Jim Caudle as the irreverent Gravedigger...