“Hamlet” (Opened July 13, 2017) at the Public’s Anspacher Theater, 420 Lafayette Street

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Oscar Isaac
Photo credit: Carol Rosegg

Plenty of characters die in William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” but plenty of them live long enough to make us laugh at their misfortunes, smile at their misguided assumptions, and maybe even smirk at their misplaced loyalties in controversial director Sam Gold’s vision/version of this great tragedy. I think we can agree that this is not the way the play is generally expected to hit you. In some ways, “Hamlet” has always been an entertainment.  

As an entertainment, the production now at the Public Theater relies heavily on Gold’s presumption that the audience comes prepared with knowledge of what is going on or what is supposed to be going on in the rotten state of Denmark. It worked fine enough for me as well presumably for the large group of theater students from Las Vegas (I asked an usher) who were there at the performance I attended to primarily see film and TV star Oscar Isaac give what actually turned out to be a terrific portrayal of the famously melancholy Dane. Running just under four hours including two intermissions, this “Hamlet” scores heavily with its theatrical pretentions and much less so with its ability to involve us emotionally.

Gold starts the play with the audience in the dark (realistically not metaphorically) as he also did with his recent mesmerizing staging of “Othello,” as we simply listen to the opening scene in which appears the ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father (Ritchie Coster.) Coster returns not only as the ghost but as the dead king who is placed on a folding table atop a pile of artificial flowers. Coster also plays most wily, although with the same visible body tattoos, the dastardly Uncle Claudius, who has hurriedly married Hamlet’s duplicitous mother Gertrude (passively played by Charlayne Woodard.)

Notwithstanding the growing trend with actors to not conceal body art (an unfortunate trend), the outer attire designed by Kaye Voyce for Hamlet and Ophelia (Gayle Rankin) is distractingly faux funk. And I’m not particularly taken by Isaac parading around for much of the play in a black t-shirt and color-coordinated undershorts. My reaction to Rankin’s bi-polar performance is further compromised by her unattractively braided hair. For some unfathomable reason, Gold has made Ophelia, as he did his also braided Desdemona in “Othello,” appear as unattractive  as possible. Most clever conceits in the play are having Ophelia sing her mad scene, drown herself with a shower hose dragged from the toilet and then throw herself into the grave with Polonius. What a stunner to see them arise side by side having morphed into the two gabby gravediggers. This tragi-comical diversion works perfectly in abetting Gold’s imaginatively conveyed perversity.

More unseemly than untimely is the curious use of a toilet metaphorically as a throne for Polonius (a wonderfully wry Peter Friedman.) He gets a laugh as does Hamlet who delivers lines with a paper toilet seat hung around his neck. It’s a wonder, nevertheless,  that all of Hamlet’s lines ring out with an impressive clarity of thought and execution. Isaac’s exquisite phrasing of the famous soliloquies - “To be or not to be,” “Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt” - is palpable and made extremely personal.

To exhibit true and terrifying madness amidst the free-wheeling wackiness of Gold’s variations on Shakespeare’s play probably wasn’t such a stretch for the actor who rose to fame in films “Inside Llewyn Davis” and “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” Standout support comes from Anatol Usef as Laertes, Keegan-Michael Key expertly playing both Horatio and with comical panache the Player King. Perhaps we are meant to have a good time at "Hamlet" knowing as we do that the point, even when its dipped in poison, is deconstruction.

Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance July 23.

Performances through September 3, 2017

“Marvin’s Room” Opened at the American Airlines Theatre on June 29, 2017

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Celia Weston and Lili Taylor

Will Broadway be receptive to a revival of “Marvin’s Room?” It has its best shot with the largely subscription audience that comes with this fine Roundabout Theatre Company production under the direction of Anne Kauffman. With leading roles played by the equally outstanding Janeane Garofalo, Lili Taylor and Celia Weston, the sad/funny play by Scott McPherson, with a plot dealing with chronic physical disability, mental disorder, and the process of dying, isn’t the downer you might expect.

It has been twenty-five years since I first saw this play at Playwrights Horizons. It remains a touching consideration of all of the above. The core of it is given to a remarkable pivotal character named Bessie (Lilly Taylor) who reaffirms for us the value of unselfish giving and the blessing in avoiding martyrdom. Although the play is principally about Bessie, a 40 year-old spinster who has devoted the better part of her adult life caring for her terminally ill father (the title character) and his ailing sister, it also revolves around an extended family circle forced to deal with physical and emotional transitions.

Marvin, the totally paralyzed victim of strokes and advanced cancer, is never seen but is revealed through a screen as an occasionally shrieking shadow whenever his daughter Bessie and his aging and innocently forgetful sister Ruth (splendid work by Celia Weston) make their regularly scheduled administering visits, often entertaining him with a display of lights that appear to bounce off the wall.

Things don’t improve when an over-tired Bessie is diagnosed with Leukemia in an unexpectedly funny scene at a medical clinic presided over by a flaky and flagrantly incompetent doctor (Triney Sandoval.) Bessie turns for help to her estranged, unmarried, cosmetology-trained sister Lee (a terrific Janeane Garofalo), a noticeably bi-polar woman saddled with two even more emotionally troubled sons, one a teenager under treatment at a mental institution for burning down his home.

Lee makes the trek from Ohio to Florida accompanied by Hank (Jack DeFalco) who has just been conditionally released in her care and Charlie (Luca Padovan), a severely myopic introvert who faces life head down in a book. Splendid work from both DeFalco and Padovan. The joy and the power of the play comes from watching Bessie neutralize the negative energy around her and triumph over the neurotic self-centeredness of her support group. On close inspection, McPherson’s play delivers a defiantly positive prognoses.

Neither depressing nor altogether absurdist with its assertively comical tract, “Marvin’s Room” welcomes the gently empowering lift it gets from Kauffman’s unforced direction and from a cast that doesn’t miss a heartbeat of the play’s inherent poignancy or the compulsively funny sick room jokes.

Taylor, who doesn’t appear often enough on Broadway or Off-B’way, is wonderful as a pathetic figure of stooped and scrawny resignation. She somehow grows beautiful before our eyes as she is forced to summon up hidden resources of strength dealing with her self-absorbed sister, the troubled sons, the aunt whose brain has been wired to alleviate the pain in her back, her father and, of course, her own mortality. Designer Laura Jellinek’s modernist revolving setting gets us from one emotionally cathartic scene to next.

“Marvin’s Room”

Roundabout's American Airlines Theatre 227 West 42nd Street
Tuesday through Saturday evening at 8:00PM with Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2:00PM.

Reviewed by Simon Saltzman on 07/07/17
From 6/08/17; opening 6/29/17; closing 8/27/17