The Play Within the Play Within the Padded Walls: Must-See "Hamlet" at Theatre SC - a review by Arik Bjorn

“Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad

would amount to another form of madness.”

~ Pascal, Pensées

There is one place, surely, that Hamlet does not belong—he, who, more than any other character in literature defines modern consciousness and consciences, and from whose troubled lips and bare bodkin tongue issue more coarsely-witted words-words-words than nary a cock can crow at a russet mantle morn.

And that place is a madhouse.

So, then, let us put him there and see what happens!

Let us see if the Prince of Denmark, condemned to an asylum, can drive Ophelia sane.   Let us see if the play within the play within the padded walls of Elsinore makes madness into method.   Such is the daring spectacle that USC associate professor and director Robert Richmond has unveiled for audiences at USC 's Drayton Hall Theatre during the next two weeks (April 18-26), with the Theatre South Carolina season finale, Hamlet.

“You can do Hamlet in ruffles and codpieces, and in the right place, at the right time, it’s exactly the right thing to do,” explains Richmond in pres material.  “But—”

The former associate artistic director of the Aquila Theatre Company, who for the third time is venturing as director to the rotten kingdom of Denmark, need not say more.  Michel Foucault wrote in Madness and Civilization:  “On all sides, madness fascinates man.”  And that, theatergoers, is reason enough.

Reason enough to trade Elizabethan collars for head cages, doublets for straightjackets, Claudius’ throne for a wooden wheelchair.  Reason to transform the Globe Theatre stage into a fantastical sanitarium borne from the imagination of Terry Gilliam and Dante’s Inferno, complete with googly-eyed sock puppets and slide whistles.  Reason to fashion costumes that impossibly join the worlds of Mad Max and Foyle’s War (applause for MFA student costume designer April Andrew), plus soundscapes that magically transport audience members into an eerie Myst-like wonderland (kudos to sound designer Britt Sandusky).

Reason enough to cackle.  To roil.  To twitch.  To gambol in a clown nose.  Perchance to drool.

For four centuries, scholars and critics, actors and audiences, have toyed with Hamlet’s feigned madness—when all this time Shakespeare and other formidable authors like Joseph Heller (Catch-22) and Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) have simply been trying to tell us that while the world might be a stage, it’s also a nuts as knickers loony bin.  Despite civilization’s best efforts to segregate the sane from the insane, the outside world is itself one great big round Marat/Sade.

Throughout the profound experimental success of Richmond’s Hamlet, one is confronted with narrative dilemmas—which are intriguing even when they hit dead ends.  In a ruffle and codpiece Hamlet, all characters have readily-identified roles with respect to Claudius and Gertrude’s court.  But in an asylum Elsinore, the characters have fresh designations as either staff members or inmates.

I applaud Richmond’s choices.  Nearly every player is a detainee.  The few exceptions include Polonius, who, while traditionally played as a babbling pedant, here loosely is crowned warden of the nuthouse, Keeper of the Keys in bloodstained scrubs, and is played with Stanley-Tucci-Devil-Wears-Prada-butchery deft by second year MFA student Trey Hobbs.  Also, Horatio, played with staccato objectivity by second year MFA student Kate Dzvnonik, is a photojournalist of sorts granted unrestricted access to the Elsinore grounds.  Horatio’s camera is present throughout much of the production, recording all, occasionally changing hands, eventually finding Horatio again.

The two other staff members—perhaps it’s better to label them as malleable bureaucrats—are the under-the-radar characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who ultimately inherit Polonius’ key ring following his dinner date with the worms at the hand of Hamlet.  Once R&G exeunt for good, so do the madhouse keys, and with them all hope for Elsinore’s deranged population.  (I could write an essay just on that keychain.)

The experimental nature of Richmond’s production—which excels on every technical level (and for which assistant technical director Christine Jacky and Theatre SC Artistic Director Jim Hunter deserve umpteen accolades)—forces interesting re-readings.  For instance, Claudius might be King of Denmark, but he is no less an inmate than McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  Yet in sanitarium Hamlet, Claudius is freed from his normal role as an immobile agent of fratricide, and stalks the stage as a ferocious tattooed sociopath, played expertly and with Hannibal Lecter energy by guest artist and Royal Academy of Dramatic Art-trained actor Richard Sheridan Willis.

On the other side of the re-reading spectrum, the character of Ophelia has less definition in unhinged Hamlet.  Though played masterfully by second year MFA student Laurie Roberts in full spectrum mania descent, from mop bucket shampoos to sock puppet solos, Ophelia’s familial connection to the warden Polonius (and this goes for Laertes too) as well as her romantic association with Hamlet are somewhat difficult to map.

Even the audience itself has a renewed role.  While Horatio’s camera might serve as a metaphorical Panopticon (defined as a circular prison with cells arranged around a central well, from which prisoners could at all times be observed), it is the individual in the seat who truly serves as Denmark’s omnipresent surveillor, free to judge all players as well as Hamlet’s stability.  This makes for intriguing penetrations of the fourth wall, as each soliloquy can be interpreted as a character staring into the inviolable lens of a security camera and communicating one-way with an unseen master.

(As an aside—and be honest, you want to know—I was disappointed in the obvious quality of Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” speech, as played to the Panopticon, but was mesmerized by the “what a piece of work is man” monologue, played roughly in the same manner.  Another interesting turn of the experiment.)

And, finally, we come to the title character.  Second year MFA student James Costello is the most talented USC student actor I have seen since Demetrios Troy.  One has few opportunities to play Hamlet, but you would have to look to James Earl Jones’ King Lear or Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus to find an actor pour more energy and intent into a role.  Costello’s Prince of Denmark, more Mel Gibson than Kenneth Branagh, also is reminiscent of Brad Pitt’s Jeffrey Goines in Twelve Monkeys:  one minute lucid, then instantly flipping to apoplectic possession at the hands of the Scarecrow-Sock Monkey Ghost.  Whether comically turning a book into a flying birdie or grappling in blood sport chains with Laertes, Costello has complete control of the Panopticon—the mark of any successful Hamlet, and well worth the price of admission itself.

Well, almost finally.  I want to give a lexical standing ovation to every member of the Theater SC technical crew who helped turn the stage itself into a memorable character.  From the human cage vents to the trap door maws, not since The Muppet Show has a stage been so anthropomorphic.  Elsinore herself lives and breathes.  Achtung!

Director Richmond’s Hamlet is a superlative example of educational theater and in my opinion is the first absolute-must-see production in Columbia since he directed Elephant’s Graveyard at Trustus Theatre.  Every flaw is forgivable and quickly forgotten—even the exclusion of the minor character Fortinbras, who to my mind is as structurally critical to Hamlet as Hecate is to Macbeth.  Alas.

I have never seen a Shakespeare production that so consciously reminds me that all of its voices originated in one single human mind.  My ultimate reading of Richmond’s experiment is that Hamlet, in the right light, exposes the mad, mad, mad, mad, sane mind of one William Shakespeare.

As Harold Bloom once wrote, “All that matters is Hamlet’s consciousness of his own consciousness, infinite, unlimited, and at war with itself.”

What a piece of work is a man!   The paragon of animals!

Yet, also: A beast. No more.

~ Arik Bjorn

Hamlet at USC's Drayton Hall Theatre runs April 18-26.  Show times are as follows:  Friday, April 18: 8 pm; Saturday, April 19: 7 pm; Wednesday-Friday, April 23-25: 8 pm; Saturday, April 26: 7 pm and 11 pm (half-price for late night performance).  There is no performance on Sunday, April 20 because of the Easter holiday.

Tickets are $18 for general public, $16 for USC faculty/staff, military and seniors 60+, and $12 for students.  USC Drayton Hall Theatre is located at 1214 College Street on the USC-Columbus campus (on College Street between Sumter and Greene Streets).  Call 803.777.2551 for more information or to reserve tickets.

To read more, visit:  http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/thea/2014/hamlet.html

Directing Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" at USC - a guest blog by Louis Butelli

So, here I am, about to eat dinner at Al-Amir restaurant in beautiful downtown Columbia, and prepare for one last, pre-tech run-through of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia with the company of actors and artists at USC’s Theatre SC.  We’ve been on quite a journey to get to this point. Having spent weeks reading, studying, and blocking the play in a rehearsal hall, and then having spent this week on stage at Drayton Hall as the set grew up around us, we are now on the verge of sharing this play with the public. As the show’s director, I couldn’t be more excited.

A little bit of background. I’ve been working as an actor, director, educator, and writer for the past 17 years. Back in 1998, I booked a job as an actor for a touring Shakespeare company which, at the time, was in residence at USC. For a couple of years, we would come to Columbia to rehearse, and then open our shows at the Koger Center before taking them all over the country. Those early years were very happy times, and it was through working for this company that I met director Robert Richmond, with whom I have continued to collaborate ever since, frequently at the Folger Theatre in Washington DC, where we have broken attendance and box office records, and been nominated for (and won!) several Helen Hayes Awards.

Here in Columbia, Robert and I created a theater piece based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, called A Tale Told By An Idiot. A comic book-inspired mash-up of the Scottish play with the story of original English terrorist Guy Fawkes, it played at USC’s Lab Theater on Wheat Street, and featured the talents of USC undergraduate theater students. People loved it. Some years later, I founded a theater company, Psittacus Productions, in Los Angeles and chose A Tale Told By An Idiot as our inaugural show. Robert came out to direct, we opened as part of the first annual Hollywood Fringe Festival, then transferred to the Son Of Semele Ensemble Theater, where we sold out and extended. The press was excellent, and we received an LA Weekly Theatre Award for our efforts.

My point in all of this is that, for the past fifteen years, I have felt a deep connection to USC, to Theatre SC, and to the great city of Columbia. When department Chair Jim Hunter invited me back down to direct Arcadia, I jumped at the opportunity.

For me, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia is a very special play. To begin, it appeals to two very distinct parts of who I am, both as an artist and as a human being, about which more will follow.

In the play, we encounter two sets of characters inhabiting the same drawing room in anestate on the English countryside. The first set is living in the year 1809. We meet a brilliant 13-year old girl, her randy tutor, her elegant mother, and various hangers-on. The whole household is scandalized – one of the guests, a minor poet, has been cuckolded by the tutor. There are allegations, handwritten challenges to duels, love notes passed, all while the young girl makes an important mathematical discovery, many years before the rest of the world would catch up. Additionally, everyone is in a tizzy because of a visit from that most famous of Romantics, Lord Byron, who is lurking, offstage, throughout the show.

The second set of characters live in the year 2013 – or, at least, in “the present day.” Here on the estate, we meet the noble descendants of the family from 1809. There are three siblings – a twenty-something male who is an Oxfordian mathematician, a saucy teenaged girl, and a fifteen-year-old boy who hasn’t spoken since age 5. Visiting the family, to research her next book, is a thirty-something author. Into this idyll charges a hotheaded, fame-hungry professor in his late thirties. He believes he is on the verge of a new discovery that will shake the foundations of English literary studies, particularly on the subject of Lord Byron. Gradually, the artifacts left behind from 1809 start showing up in 2013, and we watch the present day characters getting quite a few of the details wrong…while inching ever closer to the truth.

Certainly, the play is populated by very intelligent, hyper-articulate people, who spend quite a lot of time talking – about theory, about math, about landscape gardening, about art, about poetry. More interestingly, though, they also discover that no matter how sure one may seem about their place in the world, it is love – and lust, and the terrifying un-knowability of other people – that throws a wrench in the works every time. As the mathematician Valentine says in the play, these things are “the attraction that Newton left out.” They are the flies in the ointment of a deterministic universe governed by “free will.”

As I said, this appeals to me personally in two ways. First of all, I am a pretty huge nerd. I love teasing apart big ideas. I love intellectual sparring and heated conversation. I love to read, and I love to research. That said, I am also an actor and a flesh and blood male. As follows, I also love the irrational. I know what it is to feel swept up with passion. I know what it is to run away with the circus. This play presses both of those buttons for me, and I hope that it will for you, too.

“Well, good for him,” you might think in reading along. “But so what?”

My point, I suppose, is to say that, in coming to direct this play – or, in fact, any play – one must find a point of entry. One must attempt to answer the question “why produce this play, and why now?” In the current climate of economic fragility, global unrest, mass shootings, a shrill and polarized news media, and a deadlocked government, why would one choose to put on a play that is simultaneously a “big idea” play, and a classic English farce?

There are two potential ways of answering that question, one of which is complex, and one of which is…less complex.

The complex, or at least the “literary” answer goes something like this: Stoppard, particularly in this play, reminds me of two literary titans from the history of drama, Shakespeare and Chekov. To be a bit reductive, both of those playwrights were conversant in creating drama during times of – and through the lens of – great social upheaval. Shakespeare wrote sprawling, imaginative plays against the backdrop of Elizabethan England, a place full of religious conflict, wars against the Spanish, bouts of plague, and a linguistic explosion. Chekov wrote stories about families languishing at a remove from society and, ultimately falling apart, in the years directly preceding the Russian Revolution. Both playwrights are concerned with people wrestling with lofty ideas while simultaneously unable to escape some of the baser parts of their own humanity.

At nine years old, Stoppard, a Jewish, Czech national, moved to England with his mother and English stepfather who, according to the stories once said to young Tom, “Don’t you realize I made you British?” Having been displaced by World War II, and having embraced England, and indeed Englishness, Stoppard has created a literary world that is characterized by rapid-fire wit, philosophizing, and issues of human rights, censorship, and political freedom. And sex.

As for his literary debt to Chekov, one might consider his play cycle, “The Coast of Utopia, which addresses social philosophy in pre-Revolutionary Russia and won the Tony Award for Best Play. As far as Shakespeare goes, I suggest that one re-watch the movie Shakespeare In Love, for which Stoppard won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

Intimidated yet? I certainly was!

Here’s the less complex answer. This play is really, really fun. Yes, it’s very talky. Yes, it’s very heavy on ideas. Yes, it isn’t packed with a huge amount of “event.” Sounds a bit like an episode of Seinfeld, no?

Seriously, though. When I think about the question of “why this play, and why now?” I keep returning to the Internet. One of the things that sets our little moment on earth apart from any other throughout all of history is the presence of the Internet – not just in our lives, but in our pockets, and on our nightstands, 24 hours a day, every single day.

When I think of my own propensity to click along, chasing a notion or idea from link to link, from graphic to video to article to image, ad nauseum – it reminds me of following Tom Stoppard’s characters as one idea leads to the next, and we bounce between 1809 and the present day, until those worlds collide and overlap in the last scene of the play.

And yet…this is a piece of theater. For me, what the theater does, that no other art form does, is bring a whole bunch of strangers together in real time, under one roof, to trade these ideas with artists themselves. We’re all breathing the same air. You can see and hear us, to be certain. But we can also see and hear you. You impact our performance. Moreover, without you, we simply couldn’t make this work of art come to life at all. In short, theater, by its very definition, needs you to be there with us.

I suppose that’s a really long-winded way of gently pleading with you to buy a ticket to see our show. We’ve all become sort of fascinated by the weird, time-traveling world of this play, and have started seeing little idea nuggets from this play everywhere we look – be it noticing the way the beautiful tendrils of milk stir into uniform color and heat in a coffee at Cool Beans, or the way the tree trunks extend to branches and into leaves and into veins-in-leaves ad infinitum while strolling along the Horseshoe.

You might like our show, or you might find it a spectacular bore. Regardless: if we can all share a few laughs, and you come away with some food for thought, and some things you might want to chat about with friends afterwards, or Google when you get home, then the experiment was worthwhile.

Won’t you come experiment with us?

To close, I’ll just say that working on this play has made me obsessed with fractals. I’m not a good enough writer to unpack fractal theory here, so I’ve included a link to a video animation (click HERE.)  In short, fractals are at the heart of the theory that our 13-year old girl discovers in 1809, and that our mathematician in 2013 extrapolates.

The video is another metaphor for Arcadia. Sometimes seeing a thing unfold makes more intuitive sense than hearing some nerdy director talk about it. So, click this link, and watch this video animation of fractals. If it exhilarates you, then you should definitely come and see our show.

Thanks for reading! See you at the theater!

~ Louis Butelli

Born and raised on Long Island, New York, Louis has spent the past seventeen years working as an actor, teacher, director, and writer. From 1998-2008, he was Artist-In-Residence and Company Clown for the Aquila Theatre Company. During that time, he played in over 25 productions of the works of William Shakespeare and other classical playwrights, appearing Off-Broadway, at major regional houses, on tour in the US to 49 states and across Europe; taught over 300 masterclasses; wrote, adapted and appeared in a new production of Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Other credits include Folger Theatre; La Jolla Playhouse; LA Shakespeare Festival; Shakespeare Theatre Co, DC; Alabama Shakespeare Festival; Yale Rep; Long Wharf; Orlando Shakes; Pasadena Playhouse; Two River Theater, NJ; Alpine Theater Project, MT; Seaside Shakespeare of Nantucket; La Scala Opera’s West Side Story in Milan, Beirut, Nagoya, Fukuoka, Osaka, and Tokyo; many others. TV: The Unusuals, and All My Children (ABC), Law & Order, and L&O: Criminal Intent (NBC). He is co-founder and Executive Director of Psittacus Productions, for whom he has produced A Tale Told By An Idiot (LA Weekly Theater Award), and CYCLOPS: A Rock Opera (NYMF Award for Excellence, 3 LA Weekly Award Nominations, Pulitzer Prize Juror Nominee) which played a sold-out and extended run at the 2011 New York Musical Theatre Festival, and the World Premier of the company’s latest show, A True History, which had a workshop at the Obie Award-winning Vineyard Theatre in New York City. He is honored every day he is able to go to work in the service of a great story.

Arcadia opens Friday, September 27 at USC's Drayton Hall Theatre, and runs through Saturday, October 5.   Show times for Arcadia are 8 PM Wednesdays-Fridays, 7 PM Saturdays and 3 PM on the first Sunday. Tickets for the production are $12 for students, $16 for USC faculty/staff, military personnel and seniors 60+, and $18 for the general public. Tickets can be purchased in advance by calling 803-777-2551 or by visiting the Longstreet Theatre box office, which is open Monday-Friday, 12:30 -5:30 PM.  Drayton Hall Theatre is located at 1214 College St.  For more information, contact  Kevin Bush at 803-777-9353, or bushk@mailbox.sc.edu.

Cast in this production are graduate acting students James Costello, Kate Dzvonik, Trey Hobbs, Josiah Laubenstein, Cory Lipman, Melissa Reed, Laurie Roberts and Leeanna Rubin, as well as undergraduate students Jason Fernandes, Grayson Garrick and Liam MacDougall.  Acting instructor David Britt will also appear in the production.   Graduate students Xuemei Cao and Sean Smith will design the set and costumes, respectively.   Guest artist Baxter Engle will create the sound design.  Instructor Eric Morris will design lighting.  Guest artist Todd Stuart will craft the show's intricate props.