Art House Productions Upends Hamlet

Everybody knows what happens in Romeo & Juliet.  Most people are aware of the broad outlines of Macbeth, too. The gist of The Taming of the Shrew is right there in the title.

Hamlet is a different matter. Though it contains some of William Shakespeare’s most famous language, it does not have Shakespeare’s most famous plot. Readers have been arguing about its themes and its deeper meaning for decades. Is it a portrait of an existential crisis? An allegory about the ugly end of the Tudor line? A play abut the seductive lure of revenge and suicide? Or is it simply the story of a young man who can’t bear to see his mother share a bed with his uncle? The malleability of the play encourages theaters to keep staging it. Hamlet provides its directors with interpretive latitude uncommon in canonical literature.

And my gosh has C. Rashee Stevenson taken that latitude. The director, whose surreal, corrosive, energetic and frequently funny take on Hamlet will run at Art House Productions (345 Newark Ave.) until October 26, feels designed to madden the Shakespearean traditionalists and dizzy up the rest of us. Elements of the story are shuffled, subverted, or eliminated altogether. Murderers are assigned different murderees than the ones you might remember from English class. Stevenson plays, brazenly, with anachronism, introducing toy weaponry, cellphones, Crocs, and syringes filled with drugs into a story set in Reformation-era Denmark. The director stitches passages from Chinua Achebe, poetry by Federico Garcia Lorca, verse by Jean Genet, and several vintage rock and roll songs into Shakespeare’s script, and pointedly refuses to iron out the seams. One character is a stuffed animal. 

Click here for the full Jersey City Times review by Tris McCall