The Off-Broadway Theatre Review: “Becoming Hamlet” Searches for Hamlet Inside Shakespeare’s Words
By Ross
I wanted to believe that Becoming Hamlet could unlock something thrilling about Shakespeare’s most famously conflicted character. The idea is certainly compelling: invite an audience to inhabit Hamlet, give them the words, and ask them to experience what it might feel like to carry the Prince of Denmark inside our heads for a bit. But as Damon Horowitz’s interactive adaptation, produced by Oracular Theatre, unfolds, that intriguing experiment gradually gives way to a production that feels increasingly disconnected from the very text it wants us to inhabit. “Be not too tame,” we are told, as actors and facilitators spend considerable time with the audience, encouraging us to take on Hamlet’s words. “Stay with it,” they also invite us to do. I tried. Yet almost immediately, the production, as directed by Sybille Bruun, asks us to divide our attention, searching among too many faces for our Hamlet while Claudius speaks to shifting versions of the character.
That fractured focus becomes the production’s defining problem. Voices emerge from different corners, some deeper and some more pronounced, while Shakespeare’s lines are whispered, repeated, and passed around until the poetry begins to feel like a series of bumper stickers being held up for recognition. At times, the sheer chaos of the energy and layered words made me think of the witches from Macbeth invading this production of Hamlet, gleefully breaking apart the play for their own amusement. As if this is payback for not calling their play the greatest of Shakespeare’s. The audience participation feels like an oversimplified gimmick, and the repetition of lines keeps redirecting attention away from the precision of Shakespeare’s language. Somewhere inside the production, there is an interesting perspective buried in its attempt to externalize Hamlet’s psychological conflict, but it never develops into a cohesive theatrical experience. The problem becomes particularly apparent when an actor must shift attention from one face to another, leaving the performers searching for the emotional response they are supposed to receive from the person holding Hamlet’s cue cards at that particular moment.
There are actors here who are clearly aching to do something substantial with this play and with Shakespeare’s beautiful words. Désirée Baxter brings real feeling to Gertrude, while Jude Feingold, Tyler Moss and David H. Littleton find moments of genuine engagement with the language. Feingold’s Ophelia carries a heartfelt pain, trembling with discomfort, but even that vulnerability is repeatedly interrupted by the mechanics of the experiment. Steven Lamont, Truman Gaudoin, and Equiano Mosieri push outward in their performances, reaching for connection and attention in ways that often sacrifice nuance, and the result can feel as though they are operating on an entirely different theatrical plane. Damon Horowitz, as our Hamlet Guide and the person sharing the title role with the audience, has conceived an ambitious framework for approaching the character, but his handling of the text often feels intellectually imposed upon it and miscalculated. At times, the audience members taking on Hamlet seem to find a more instinctive relationship with the words. That is disappointing, because there are flashes throughout Becoming Hamlet suggesting that the performers could have done much more with the full text if the experiment had allowed them to stay inside the actual language long enough to discover its emotional currents.
The same can be said of Yijun Yang’s scenic design, Amit Galjwani’s costumes, Maryam Sweirki’s lighting, and Harrison Walsh’s sound, all of which work to support the central idea while finding moments of theatrical magic within the experiment. But the journey through is flat, and lacking the intensity needed.
And I just couldn’t help myself. I found myself continually returning to the final episode of the first season of ‘Slings and Arrows’, where Shakespeare’s language is embraced with a sense of love, precision, danger, and genuine theatrical belief. Becoming Hamlet reaches toward its own kind of discovery, and I can appreciate the desire behind that attempt. The problem is that the constant shifting of focus, repetition, and participation keeps interrupting the very connection the production is trying to create. By the time we are asked to understand what it means to be Hamlet, we all have spent too much of the experience trying to figure out where Hamlet was. The Prince is supposed to be wrestling with a world he cannot quite make sense of, and there is a potentially fascinating theatrical idea in making an audience share that uncertainty. Here, though, the experiment leaves the audience wrestling with the production itself, while Shakespeare’s words struggle to be heard clearly enough to take hold.
