To Be, or Not to Be? At ‘Becoming Hamlet,’ the Audience Gets to Decide
By: James Manely A new Off-Broadway experiment removes Hamlet from the stage and puts Shakespeare’s famously conflicted prince somewhere less predictable: in the audience. For more than four centuries, actors have stepped onto stages and attempted the daunting task of becoming Hamlet. This September in New York, no actor will. Instead, Hamlet will be played by everyone in the room. That is the unusual premise of “Becoming Hamlet,” a new adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy by Damon Horowitz, directed by Sybille Bruun, beginning performances Sept. 5 at the Five Angels Theater in Midtown Manhattan. The production does not merely invite an audience to watch Hamlet wrestle with grief, love, betrayal and indecision. It places them inside that struggle. The professional actors play Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, Polonius, Laertes and the other familiar inhabitants of Elsinore. But at the center of the story is an intentionally vacant space. Hamlet belongs to us. “Rather than passively watching Hamlet,” Horowitz said, “you actually feel what it is like to be Hamlet.” That distinction puts “Becoming Hamlet” somewhere between a Shakespeare production, a theatrical experiment and a very large collective act of imagination. It is participatory theater, though its creators are careful to distinguish the concept
