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    Review: This ‘Hamlet’ Under the Stars Is No Walk in the Park

    The Public Theater’s alfresco production has plenty to offer audiences who know the play already. But it may not be so easy for newcomers.For those who remember the 2019 Shakespeare in the Park production of “Much Ado About Nothing” — as I do, fondly — the sight that awaits them at this summer’s “Hamlet” in the same location is disturbing.Entering the Delacorte Theater, you are immediately faced with what looks like a copy of the earlier show’s set, which depicted the handsome grounds of a grand home in a Black suburb of Atlanta. But now it is utterly ruined. The facade is atilt, the S.U.V. tipped nose-first in a puddle, the Stacey Abrams for President banner torn down and in tatters. The flagpole bearing the Stars and Stripes sticks out of the ground at a precipitous angle, like a javelin that made a bad landing.For the director Kenny Leon and the scenic designer Beowulf Boritt, both returning for this “Hamlet” — the Public Theater’s fifth in the park since 1964 and 13th overall — it’s a coup de théâtre, if an odd one. However smartly the setting provokes a shiver of dread in those who recognize it, and dread is certainly apt for a play in which nine of the main characters die, it can only produce a shrug from anyone else. An approach that had been designed to welcome audiences to a new way of looking at Shakespeare in 2019 now seems destined to exclude them.I’m afraid the same holds for the production overall: It is full of insight and echoes for those already in the know, and features lovely songs (by Jason Michael Webb) and a few fine performances that anyone can enjoy. (Ato Blankson-Wood brings a vivid anger to the title role.) But this “Hamlet” has been placed in a frame that doesn’t match what the production actually delivers, leaving me glad to have seen it but wishing for something more congruent.Part of the problem is that the frame — both Black and military as in Leon’s “Much Ado” — is so prominent at the start and irrelevant thereafter. Instead of beginning the play as written, with the ghost of Hamlet’s father, Leon stages his funeral as a prologue, with Marine Corps pallbearers, a praise team singing settings of Bible verses and Ophelia (Solea Pfeiffer) channeling Beyoncé.Only after this welcoming opening do we get the awful scenes in which the dead king, appearing to Hamlet, urges revenge on the brother who murdered him and then married his wife. As his giant funeral portrait comes to life through psychedelic special effects, Hamlet confusingly lip-syncs his beyond-the-grave voice, provided by Samuel L. Jackson in Darth Vader mode.But don’t be misled by that martial tone, any more than by the set, the Marines and the military cut of Jessica Jahn’s costumes for the men. (For the women they are colorful and gorgeous.) The war story they seem to promise is not in fact told in this production, as almost all the material concerning Denmark’s beef with Norway, and the consequent need to assure the royal succession, has been cut.Well, something had to be. Uncut, “Hamlet,” the longest of Shakespeare’s plays, would likely run more than four hours without an intermission; here it’s two hours and 45 minutes with one. How different directors make the trims is, in effect, their interpretation. Is the play a dysfunctional family melodrama? A moral inquiry into suicide and murder? A satire of royal courts and courtiers? All are in there.Leon focuses on the interior drama of Hamlet himself, inevitable when you cherry-pick the famous soliloquies. Blankson-Wood delivers them well, if not yet with the easeful expression that turns them into free-flowing thoughts-as-actions instead of words, words, words to be worked on.Still, because the soliloquies follow each other so closely, giving the staging the herky-jerky feeling of a musical without enough book, we get a clear sense of his Hamlet as someone whose interiority and sullenness precede the excuse of his father’s murder. You are not surprised when he turns Bad Boyfriend on Ophelia after (accidentally) killing her father. Ophelia herself is hoist with the same petard. Her descent into insanity, never clearly delineated in the text, is even more sudden with the cuts taken.Something similar happens to many of the other characters, like the interchangeably bro-y Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who make a first impression then all but disappear. The Players are similarly reduced, their version of “The Mousetrap,” with which Hamlet intends to “catch the conscience of the king” now a mime show. And Horatio barely seems to show up in the first place, even though he’s the character Shakespeare leaves standing at the end: enjoined, as Hamlet says dying, to “tell my story.”The show recreates the set from the 2019 Shakespeare in the Park production of “Much Ado About Nothing,” which depicted the grounds of a home in a Black suburb of Atlanta, but now utterly ruined.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIf that story is a bit foggy in this production, others are absolutely clear. As Claudius, John Douglas Thompson brings his usual grave authority to bear but also a fascinating note of insecurity that helps explain the character’s ruthlessness. Daniel Pearce makes of Polonius a hilariously pedantic desk jockey and bad idea bear. (The downside: You don’t mind when he gets knifed.) In Nick Rehberger’s rendering of Laertes, the character’s grief, fury and forgiveness all ring true, even though, as cut, they are nearly simultaneous.And Lorraine Toussaint is an exceptionally subtle, emotionally intelligent Gertrude, grieving her husband’s death but alert to the necessity of loving his killer. For me, she is the center of this production’s tragedy, giving fullest expression to Claudius’s observation that “When sorrows come, they come not single spies,/But in battalions.”That’s an unusual path to cut through the play, but having seen it so many times, I’m happy to go for a ride on its less-traveled roads. Throughout this production I heard arresting poetry I’d somehow missed before (“a pair of reechy kisses”) and saw old ideas revivified by bright new details. (When Polonius sends Laertes off with his tired advice, he also slips him an N95 mask, as other fathers might slip their child condoms.)Yet I worried that those less familiar with “Hamlet,” let alone those more invested in a traditional rendition, would be left unanchored on its heaving sea of meaning. Though performed, and often well, under the open sky of Central Park, its thoughts (as Claudius says) “never to heaven go.” They’re atilt like the house, and, like that javelin, too strangely angled.HamletThrough Aug. 6 at the Delacorte Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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    Shakespeare in the Park Will Stage ‘Hamlet’ This Summer

    Ato Blankson-Wood will star as the aggrieved prince in a modern-dress production directed by Kenny Leon.Winter has just begun in New York, but already the Public Theater is looking toward summer: The nonprofit announced on Thursday that in June it would begin presenting an extended run of Shakespeare’s great tragedy “Hamlet” in Central Park.The production, which will be the fifth “Hamlet” in the 61 years of Free Shakespeare in the Park, will star Ato Blankson-Wood, a 38-year-old actor who was a member of the ensemble in a production of “Hair” in the park in 2008, and who has since starred there in musical adaptations of “Twelfth Night” and “As You Like It.” In 2020, Blankson-Wood was nominated for a Tony Award for “Slave Play.”Kenny Leon, a much-in-demand director who this season directed revivals of “Topdog/Underdog” and “Ohio State Murders” on Broadway, will helm the production, returning to the park after winning plaudits for his direction of “Much Ado About Nothing” during the summer of 2019.“Hamlet” will be the only show in the park this summer — a reduction from the usual two-show schedule prompted by plans to renovate the Delacorte Theater, the open-air amphitheater where Free Shakespeare in the Park takes place. “Hamlet” will run for nine weeks, from June 8 to Aug. 6, after which the major renovation work is expected to begin; this winter, work in some ancillary areas is already underway.The Public’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis, said he had been so impressed by Leon’s work on “Much Ado” that he asked him to pick a play he wanted to do next, and they settled on “Hamlet.” “It’s the greatest play ever written,” Eustis said, “so let’s give him a crack at Everest.”Eustis also said he had high hopes for Blankson-Wood. “He’s a gorgeously charismatic performer, and the complexity of his inner life, and his ability to connect with an audience, is going to make him an extraordinary Hamlet,” he said. (Blankson-Wood has a background in musical theater, and the credits for this “Hamlet” include music composition by Jason Michael Webb. “I suspect his beautiful singing voice will not be completely wasted,” Eustis said of Blankson-Wood.)Eustis said that the production would “have a contemporary feel,” but that the exact time and place where it will be set have not yet been determined. He said the cast would be diverse, but that it was “absolutely meaningful to Kenny and to me that our Hamlet is a young Black man who is torn between ideals of revenge and violence and ideals of forgiveness and understanding and even rationality, and in the pairing between those things is finding himself paralyzed.”Eustis said his thinking about “Hamlet” had been influenced by “Fat Ham,” the most recent Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, which is a riff on the Shakespeare play set in the American South, and which will be running on Broadway this spring, produced in part by the Public. “I’m sure hoping that we’re going to be running ‘Fat Ham’ and ‘Hamlet’ at the same time,” Eustis said, “because those two plays talk to each other in a most beautiful way.”In prepandemic years, the Shakespeare in the Park season was followed by a short-run Public Works production, usually on or around Labor Day weekend, which was a musical adaptation of a classic story employing a mix of professional and amateur actors. The last new Public Works production there was “Hercules,” in 2019, but Eustis said there were three in development. He said he expected there would be a Public Works production staged this summer, although he did not yet know when or where it would take place. More

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    A Reimagined ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ for the Covid Era

    Robert O’Hara directs a trimmed-down revival of Eugene O’Neill’s classic, with a colorblind cast and a weary eye on the pandemic and the opioid crisis.Of the time-honored classics of American theater, Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is one that usually takes its own concept of time seriously. A four-act work based on the playwright’s own dysfunctional parents, it follows the disintegration of the Tyrone family — by disease, ego, addiction and codependency — through the course of a claustrophobic August day at their seaside home in Connecticut. Widely considered O’Neill’s masterpiece, it typically runs just under four hours.The writer and director Robert O’Hara, a Tony nominee for his direction of “Slave Play,” is doing it in under two.Presented without an intermission by Audible at the Minetta Lane Theater, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” has reunited O’Hara with fellow “Slave Play” alums, the actor Ato Blankson-Wood and the designer Clint Ramos, for a shortened production that confronts the play’s themes head on and brings them into 2022.“There is so much velocity in the writing that it moves at a fast clip, and with so much richness,” O’Hara said after a rehearsal last week. “The family doesn’t get an intermission throughout this one long day, so it’s quite interesting to get to sit with them in real time.”The decision to trim the material happened early and organically, O’Hara explained. “Once you put the knife in, you’re just like, ‘Are we going to pretend that we’re not editing this?’” he quipped. It was then bolstered by his wariness of having people gather for too long, given the latest Covid-19 variant.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“For me, it feels like a Covid production of ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night,’ built for right now,” he said. “We didn’t want to ask an audience to sit for four hours in a theater, just because that’s the way it’s usually done. If anyone’s coming in looking for that experience, they should know that it’s not this.”He began conceiving the production, now in previews and opening Jan. 25, before the pandemic. Initially he was hesitant to tackle the play because of the demands placed upon producing classics.“It’s difficult to get these big chestnuts if you’re going to do it Off Broadway,” he said, referring to the challenges of securing production rights. “You can ask, but someone’s usually holding them in order to bring them back in a big way.”O’Hara credits the actress Elizabeth Marvel, who portrays the morphine-addicted mother, Mary, as instrumental to getting the production off the ground.“We started just talking about this play, but then the world made its urgency all the greater,” Marvel said. “I’ve seen probably 11 or 12 productions in my lifetime, and it’s always the same: in the same drawing room with billowing curtains, and with period corsets.“But there’s absolutely no reason,” she continued, “it can’t be right here, right now. It very much speaks to this moment, when a lot of people are having to return home to their families, dealing with addiction and codependency during a crisis, while not being able to get out.”In addition to contemporary allusions to the opioid crisis, reflecting Mary’s own addiction, the production is set amid the coronavirus pandemic. The youngest Tyrone son, Edmund (Blankson-Wood), afflicted by what is traditionally hinted to be tuberculosis, now wears a face mask. Projections at the beginning of the play display C.D.C. announcements and news footage from the early days of the pandemic, including surreal revelations like the Bronx Zoo tiger testing positive for the virus.“We wanted projections to be a dreamlike window into Mary’s psychological space, especially when she succumbs to her addiction,” Ramos said on a video call. “The visual landscape, through Yee Eun Nam’s projections, gets very dreamy and dense to directly represent that.”Marvel, left, as the morphine-addicted mother, Mary, and Blankson-Wood as her sickly son Edmund.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMarvel’s husband, the actor Bill Camp, plays the family’s patriarch, James, and he was cast as the eldest son, Jamie, in a 1996 production at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. The edited script, he said, “became about distilling the story’s actions rather than experiencing the longness of the situation.”“The family’s desires and dysfunctions are streamlined in a way that is already in the writing; we just hit it really fast,” he added. “It’s in your face, just like everything that is happening is in our faces now, and we don’t have time to sit around and meander our way into those things; they’re immediate.”Jason Bowen rounds out the Tyrone clan as Jamie: a colorblind casting choice (Bowen and Blankson-Wood are Black, Camp and Marvel are white) that O’Hara said is intentional, though not one he wanted to factor into the DNA of the production.“I was never going to do this play with all white people; it wasn’t anything that I had to think about,” O’Hara said. “Elizabeth had mentioned Ato, being a fan of his, so we only held auditions for Jamie, and Jason killed it. There was no manufacturing of the cast’s racial dynamics for any reason other than wanting the best actors we could find.”Bowen notes that the heft of the story’s themes, as written, override any possible racial interpretation the cast could’ve envisioned.“It’s a play about a family as they navigate addiction, and that’s something that transcends any racial aspect that we could even attempt to investigate,” Bowen said. “The play’s not about that. Robert could’ve come in with some conceptual idea he wanted to introduce, but it’s still going to boil down to these relationships.”Blankson-Wood, who was performing a return engagement of his Tony-nominated role in “Slave Play” while rehearsals for “Long Day’s Journey” took place during the day, said that being able to act in a production that did not take his own race into account was “liberating.”“The fact that I do not have to carry how I, as a Black person, fit into this family is just pure acting to me, because it focuses only on the imaginative truth of the work,” he said. “From an outsider’s perspective, I get the impulse to want to understand the racial dynamic, but that’s something I’m excited for the audience to do; that’s their job.”O’Hara, who directed an audio production of another American classic, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” as part of Williamstown Theater Festival’s Audible season in 2020, will direct an audio presentation of the production once the Minetta Lane run closes Feb. 20. He said Audible’s expansive reach helped in securing the rights to the radically altered production, which might have been denied to a regional theater.“What’s amazing about this turn to streaming and digital is the democratization of theater, so more people will be able to access it,” Blankson-Wood said. “Though I do feel pretty strongly about sitting in a dark room with other human beings. But, with an audio production like this, when you take all the scenery and stuff away, and there’s only talking and listening, it deepens the work.” More