Hamlet by William Shakespeare, and: Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hamletby William Shakespeare, and: Saint Joanby George Bernard Shaw Rachel Evans HAMLET. By William Shakespeare. Directed by Eric Tucker. McCarter Theatre Center, Berlind Theatre, Princeton, New Jersey: 01 28, 2017. SAINT JOAN. By George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Eric Tucker. McCarter Theatre Center, Berlind Theatre, Princeton, New Jersey: 01 28, 2017. Although Emily Mann, artistic director of the McCarter Theatre Center, had the New York–based Bedlam Theatre on her radar for several years before giving them in-residence status in New Jersey, audiences in Texas, Massachusetts, and Maryland had already been introduced to the company's work. In fact, starting in 2012, Bedlam's productions of Saint Joanand Hamletwere subcontracted to, co-produced by, and/or sponsored at resident theatre companies multiple times before occupying a valuable slot in the McCarter's 2016–17 season. By choosing to present Bedlam's Saint Joanand Hamletin repertory, Mann made equal commitments to both shows, expecting each to possess enough artistic merit to stand on its own, as well as having an engaging cohesion when considered in tandem. What may have been underestimated was the creative endurance and aesthetic stamina needed to support what amounted to six hours of stage time. Bedlam's artistic director Eric Tucker directed both offerings, proclaiming that he and his artistic team could tackle such iconic classics despite the heavy baggage of weighty expectations. While [End Page 92]more traditional repertory theatre ensembles might have used multiple productions to highlight actors' strengths, Bedlam's repertory only used four performers. This meant that there was plenty of stage time to go around; each actor played both leading and supporting roles in both productions. It was notable that Tucker served as one-fourth of the rep's performers, casting himself as Hamlet and an array of Joan's men. Andrus Nichols, who co-founded Bedlam with Tucker and previously served as the company's producing director, was another fourth of the cast, playing Joan, Ophelia, Gertrude, and a few of Hamlet's male characters, as needed. That left two others to undertake the remaining roles: Edmund Lewis and Tom O'Keefe. Together, this foursome revealed Bedlam's values through consistent use of certain storytelling strategies. One of the dominant characteristics was the flexible spatial relationship between actors and audience. A fourth wall was never established; instead, deconstructing the onstage/offstage areas produced a raw, accessible, and visible theatricality. The number of intermissions in the rep tallied four. During them, seating areas were reconfigured, granting viewers multiple intimate perspectives from which to experience Shaw and Shakespeare. With such closeness, Bedlam relied upon audience members to read-in lines of incidental characters (like Claudius's messengers sent to Norway), to stand-in as furniture (using an audience member's head as the table for Hamlet's fifth-act goblet), and to be the brunt of jokes (with their Joan-like garb-of-poverty pointed out). Tucker, Nichols, Lewis, and O'Keefe possessed a deep dramaturgical understanding of the plays' mechanisms. Their comprehensive study in rehearsal led to discoveries of oft-overlooked clues for nuance, textual richness, and humor. The result was that meaningful dualities were often held in contrast to each other, whether that be extreme darkness versus full light in Les Dickert's lighting design or close proximity versus distance in staging decisions. With the exception of the two titular characters and few others, no one Bedlam performer owned a role; many were shared by at least two actors. Correspondingly, any clarity of character was undercut with intentionally questionable terms of identity. The undoing of certain conventions created the Bedlamic antidote to tradition: playing spaces in, among, and across the audience; a minimalistic world of the play; and a general relaxed ease sans artifice in performance and production. This made director Tucker's unclouded delineation of Shaw's account of the Maid of Orleans all the more important, from the first scene's miracle of the eggs to the epilogue's canonization. In-between, there were heady debates and wordy passages. The production made good use of Nichols's ability to chart the course of Joan's outward and internal growth. In...