Theater: The Public Theater / 425 Lafayette Street, New York, NY, 10003
Synopsis:
Public Theater Artistic Director Oskar Eustis stages the first Shakespeare in the Park production of the summer, with Michael Stuhlbarg in the title role.
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June 18, 2008: There is one breathtakingly poignant moment in the flat-footed “Hamlet” that opened Tuesday night at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. It’s the sad spectacle of seeing a human mind genuinely o’erthrown, of someone losing his hold on reality so completely that you gasp in pity and terror and think, “That could be me someday.”
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June 18, 2008: The Danish prince first appears bitter and brooding, swathed in black from his foot to his hair, which is slicked back with the precision of an irrepressible obsessive-compulsive. Sitting on his suitcase and pondering those universe-twisting infelicities that always float through Hamlets' minds, he's the very picture of denial. No, his eyes scream during the rare occasions he looks up from his dazed reverie, this can't be happening. What young man hasn't felt the same upon his own father's death? Granted, not every college student must cope with his father's brother assuming the throne and his mother marrying the new king before her husband's body is cold, but those are just details, details, details.
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June 19, 2008: Even by the standards of Things You Might See in Central Park at Night, the scenery David Korins has designed for the Public’s revival of Hamlet is perverse. He has erected amid all that green loveliness a massive whitish wall, topped by a black metal catwalk, running the entire width of the Delacorte stage. At once squat and looming, it’s so ruinous of the blissed-out harmony that Shakespeare’s words and the park’s splendor create every summer that we might as well be in midtown.
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June 17, 2008: Two summers ago, the Public Theater opened its Shakespeare in the Park season with a "Macbeth" that forcibly attempted to twist that drama of power, madness and ambition into a play about war. Looking again to emphasize contemporary relevance at the expense of dramatic integrity, Public a.d. Oskar Eustis' bloodless retelling of "Hamlet" awkwardly reshapes an intimate tale of death and revenge into one of political conflict and disillusionment with the military-minded ruling class. As reasoned as the interpretation may be, it dulls the melancholy human heart of the play -- a problem exacerbated by Michael Stuhlbarg's inconsistent characterization as the brooding Dane.
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June 24, 2008: It was a balmy night in Central Park, and it must have put me in a ruminative mood. As I wandered back toward the West Side after three-plus hours of Hamlet at the Delacorte, I couldn't help wondering what someone who'd never seen or heard of the play would make of Oskar Eustis's production. And I worried—I tend to worry when I get ruminative—about what these innocents would think of the show. They might be considerably puzzled about what happens in it—and why it's generally thought to be so great.
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