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 from the immersive productions that have proliferated in recent years.
There are no masks to wear, characters to invent or hallways to wander through. Audience members remain audience members. But some will speak Hamlet’s words, prompted by facilitators stationed throughout the theater. Others may stand, move, or interact directly with the actors. Collectively, their voices form Shakespeare’s prince.
Participation is also optional.
Bruun has divided the house into three kinds of seating. The Lords Chairs offer the greatest involvement, with audience members potentially speaking text, moving, and interacting individually with performers. The Chorus Chairs allow spectators to become part of a collective Hamlet, guided by facilitators. And the Citizens Chairs require no participation at all.
From there, one can simply watch what happens when your fellow theatergoers suddenly find themselves confronting Claudius or answering Ophelia.
“This is truly a case in which if there is no audience, there is no play,” Bruun said.
That idea sounds deceptively simple. It also creates a directing problem Shakespeare never had to consider: What happens if Hamlet changes every night?
One audience member may speak a line angrily. Another may discover sadness in it. A third might hesitate or laugh. And the professional actors must respond to whichever Hamlet has materialized in front of them.
The unpredictability is not an obstacle to the production. It is the production.
Actors, Bruun said, must remain unusually alert, listening not for a predetermined reading but for the person delivering Shakespeare’s words at that particular moment. The result is a “Hamlet” in which the emotional temperature can shift from performance to performance, and sometimes from person to person.
The approach is especially intriguing because Hamlet may be the character in Western drama most famous for talking to himself.
His thoughts spill continually into language: questioning, reconsidering, contradicting and revising themselves. Generations of actors have treated the soliloquies as opportunities to reveal one singular interpretation of that consciousness.
“Becoming Hamlet” proposes almost the opposite.
Instead of asking one performer to contain Hamlet, it disperses him among dozens of people.
Horowitz, a philosopher and educator whose career has taken him from Silicon Valley and TED to teaching at San Quentin State Prison, sees Hamlet as what he calls a “hero of consciousness,” a character whose difficulty turning thought into action feels particularly recognizable now.
The production makes that conflict literal. An audience member offered a line must make a small Hamlet-like decision: Do I speak, or remain silent? Step forward, or stay where I am?
It is participation stripped of theatrical showmanship. Nobody is expected to memorize text or demonstrate acting ability. The stated goal is almost the reverse: to allow people to respond without pretending.
Bruun, executive director of The Shakespeare Forum and a director and Shakespeare coach for more than 25 years, said much of the development process involved learning how to make that invitation feel safe rather than coercive.
“If I, as a director, can create a space in which people feel seen and welcome,” she said, “then their humanity will take over.”
That word, humanity, recurs frequently when the creators discuss the project.
At a moment when stories, conversations and even human voices can increasingly be generated or mediated by technology, Horowitz and Bruun are interested in something theater still stubbornly requires: people occupying the same room at the same time.
“As technology is threatening to colonize our very sense of ourselves,” Horowitz said, “what remains uniquely human is our quality of presence.”
“Becoming Hamlet” does not make artificial intelligence its subject. Its response is more elemental. A roomful of strangers must listen to one another. An actor must react to a person whose response cannot be predicted. Shakespeare’s words leave the page, travel through an unfamiliar voice and disappear.
Nothing can be repeated exactly.
That ephemerality has always been one of theater’s defining characteristics. Here, it becomes the organizing principle.
The production preserves Shakespeare’s language and narrative while limiting the audience’s perspective largely to Hamlet’s own. We see what he sees. Other characters address us. Their affection, anger, fear, and manipulation come directly toward us rather than toward a prince safely contained onstage.
The question gradually shifts from What is Hamlet thinking? to something more uncomfortable:
What would I do?
Bruun hopes the answer may be different for everyone. Some may leave understanding Shakespeare’s notoriously tangled plot more clearly. Others may recognize Hamlet’s indecision or question choices they once accepted from a distance.
And some may discover that speaking words written more than 400 years ago can feel unexpectedly personal.
“Perhaps,” Bruun said, “through being Hamlet we can only hope that audiences can walk away a little changed, that being someone else might make us more clearly see ourselves.”
Which may be the most Shakespearean twist of all.
For once, Hamlet’s famous question will not belong to the actor.
It will belong to the house.
“Becoming Hamlet” begins performances Sept. 5, 2026, through Oct. 3 at the Five Angels Theater, 789 10th Avenue at West 52nd Street, Manhattan. The production is presented by The Directors Company and executive produced by Leah M. Michalos and Victoria Cairl. Tickets and additional information are available at BecomingHamlet.com.
