Just Not To Be

A SERIES OF EMOTIONAL expectorations worthy of the best screen tests, engrossing MTV styled entrances to the tune of Frankie Goes To Hollywood, pasted jackets and florescent ties, costumes fit for any Spring Garden Party, ghosts portrayed with techniques most shamelessly existed from a horror Film seen this year-yes, Brad Dalton's... whatever? is all of this, three and one-half hours of all of this. Generally well-choreographed, often amusing, absurdly comic, emotionally unencumbering, less tedious than its length suggests, it has that same cheeky appeal as Duchamp's "Mona Lisa" or a bust of George Washington with a tinted-blue Mohawk: it makes us laugh well enough but makes us feel nothing.

Hamlet offers a paradoxical challenge for directors: as much a part of our universal educational lives as our first ruby-colored Monarch's Notes, it is the Pop in Fresh Dough of theatre: break open the cover, add water or conscious actors and you have your crescent role or your first-rate drama. And there's the rub: Cousin Pearl may like the prefabricated rolls, but the real credit, you know, belongs to the doughman, not you. Throw a dozen or so actors in front of an audience--even have them read their lines from their dog-cared Riverside edition--and the audience claps wildly--for Bill, not pour vous Unless the sirens of Harvard drama beckon from somewhere beyond Brattle Street, you innovate.

SHAKESPEARE'S SCRIPI COMES with everything: incest, murder, madness, invasions, court intrigue, a setting luxurious enough for Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, and an unrivaled richness of language. Ask anyone gazing into Larry "J.R." Hagman's eyes some Friday night: could anyone beat the tale of Claudius (Christopher Keyser) who murders his brother King Hamlet, marries his widow Gertrude (Thea Henry), revels in his incest-purchased court luxury, and dies at the hands of his ungrateful stepson, Prince Hamlet (Andrew Sullivan). Of the plot, I'll say no more--the midwestern English profs who pen Monarch Notes probably have children to support.

What makes this play, usually, more than the sum of its decadence is the tragedy of Prince Hamlet, the sense of loss that teaches for our hearts and squeezes hard That Hamlet dies is a pity, that Hamlet indecisiveness reminds us of our own is painful, but that's all, folks. What makes pity into despair and pain into anguish and Hamlet, the proto-Dallas, into a classic is: Hamlet's tragedy, his failure to achieve what we feel could have been true greatness. As Fortinbras says in the final act, "For he was likely, had he been put on. To have prov'd most royally...."

Dalton's Hamlet misses that tragedy in its lust for innovation. Enter Claudius and court, and Frankie Goes To Hollywood's "Relax" echoes inside Leverett Old Library. Let Hamlet speak--whether of lust, love, murder, revenge, proto-angst, what have you--and make him wear a "Relax" button. Enter stage left characters with conspicuously placed Lee jeans patches. Somewhere under the seductive tones of "Relax" I could hear the equally seductive call, all the more insidious for its subtletly, "Innovate."

BUT COME ON NOW, where car this take us? Visually, Dalton gives us a three-dimensional video that conveys only one-dimensional ideas, a Jungle Book understanding of human nature.

ANDREW SULLIVAN plays Hamlet as a self-parody of the Perpetually Aspiring Male Actor (PAMA) of the 80's: if you're mad, shout; if you're sad, pout. Hamlet seems less like a boy obsessed with his father's death and mother's incest than some Valley Boy complaining about getting a Trans Am and not a Porsche for his 16th birthday. This Hamlet is hardly a great man-but a bratty boy only a child psychologist could love, for $100 an hour. What one imagines could be superlative acting seems almost pretentious, as If any five minute scene were the screen lost and hence models every emotional permutation. For all his stage presence and manifest dramatic range, Sullivan does not let us sympathize with the prince. Were one to call for a division of the House which Sullivan asks, "To be or not to be?" the outcome would be unclear.

Bad, bad King Claudius indeed looks sleazy, but in a pedestrian way, less like some evil know who kills his brother than some gauche Miami tourist who wears a lavender polyester suit to a polo match with the Queens. Christopher Keyser makes Claudius look so banally evil for so long that his final confession of guilt rings hollow.

In 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.

For three and a half hours that is not enough. Dalton's innovation, give its about fifteen minutes of chuckles, but for three-and-a-quarter they sap Hamlet of its lasting place in our, collective consciousness. Skip this production, read the original with your roommates, look for the upcoming video.

Oh, and ree-lax.