troisoiseaux

I recently hit a bit of a book slump, so I ended up reading a couple of plays instead: Osamu Dazai's A New Hamlet (1941) and Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938). (Although, technically, I think A New Hamlet is a novel written in the form of a script...? But if it waddles and quacks, at what point is it no longer a duck?)

A New Hamlet was... interesting? It is, as the title suggests, an adaptation of Hamlet, although "remix" might be a more apt description. The first couple of scenes are more or less a direct "modern" translation of Hamlet's Act I, Scene 2 and 3— I pulled up the original online, for a line-by-line comparison— although, actually, it's twice translated: from its original Shakespearean English to mid-20th century Japanese, and then from Japanese to English circa the 2010s. Owen Cooney's translation is an interesting blend of sounding natural as contemporary English, having a certain cadence(?) where it's more obvious that it was translated from a different language, and - mostly in Ophelia's case - intentionally anachronistic, even Shakespearean, phrasing.

After that, ( the plot is different. )

Our Town is technically a re-read; I'd studied it in 9th grade English, but to be honest, it hadn't left a particularly strong impression on me at the time.* What made it interesting, this time, was that the edition I borrowed had a bunch of "bonus content" about the play's history, inspirations (surprisingly, classical Greek and Chinese theater?), and Wilder's writing process, including changes that were made between drafts— e.g., in an early draft, young George Gibbs had political ambitions, but this was cut for not being in line with Wilder's goal of "an allegorical representation of all life." There was also apparently some behind-the-scenes drama between Wilder and Our Town's original director, Jed Harris; a list of changes Wilder demanded to Harris' direction boiled down to "stop changing the lines" and "everyone's acting should be like 60% less weepily sentimental."

( Footnote )

James Ijames' Fat Ham is a modern, queer, Black, Southern, meta, and outrageously funny adaptation of Hamlet; I saw it this weekend at DC's Studio Theatre. Plot-wise, the first half tracks closely onto Hamlet— the ghost of a murdered father demanding revenge; the mother's too-soon wedding to her husband's brother; the son's scheme to test his uncle's guilt— while the second half diverges, changing certain plot points and adding new ones. The fundamental difference is that it's a story about breaking The Cycle instead of a revenge tragedy, where The Cycle breaks everyone involved.

Instead of the throne of Denmark, the main character, Juicy, is heir to a family-owned barbecue joint and generational trauma ("Your pop went to jail, his pop went to jail, his pop went to jail ... and what's before that? Slavery!"); he's doing an online degree in human resources and quotes Shakespeare ("You quote that dead ass white man one more time," his mom snaps, at one point; "You watch too much PBS") and spends most of the show wearing a t-shirt that reads mamma's boy in rhinestones. Juicy's father, Pap,* and uncle-turned-stepfather, Rev, are played by the same actor, as swaggering men who like to make him flinch and say "soft" like they're saying the other F-word; his mom, Tedra, makes an effort but is torn between being able to stand up for Juicy and the fact she's "not built to be alone." Laertes is now Larry, a closeted Marine who longs to be soft, the very thing that Juicy's father and uncle despise him for; Ophelia is Opal, a brash young lesbian who chafes against her mom's expectations; and Polonius is Rabby, a church lady who handles the climactic reveal** that both of her kids are gay surprisingly well. The Horatio stand-in is Juicy's stoner cousin, Tio, who misses most of the plot but steals the show with his recital of— to quote another review***— a "gonzo stoned fantasy involving fellatio and gingerbread men." The entire play is set at Tedra and Rev's backyard wedding cookout; Juicy's "mousetrap" scheme involves a game of charades.

In a tangent I promise is relevant, the first production of Hamlet I saw live staged his first soliloquy (Act 1, Scene 2) in a way that's stuck in my head for years: instead of Claudius et al. exiting the stage, everyone froze and the lights changed to indicate that this was Happening Inside His Head, and Hamlet fell to his knees and just screamed in grief and rage before going into the whole bit about too, too solid flesh, pacing through the frozen tableau as he spoke. This show basically did the same thing— using purple lighting and the live-theater version of a freeze-frame to, like, flip a switch from the Action to Soliloquy Mode— in a way that broke not just the fourth wall but the second or third one, too. Other characters unfreeze to converse with Juicy when he's still in Soliloquy Mode (or, in the case of Pap, to rage silently in the background); twice, when the Action resumes, the parent he interrupted a conversation with demands, "what you tell them?". The best use of Soliloquy Mode occurs halfway through Juicy's karaoke performance of Radiohead's "Creep", when he goes from half-hearted, please don't make me do this mumbling to heartfelt belting that brought the house down.

Juicy's monologues, delivered in Soliloquy Mode, are mostly Ijames originals, but Fat Ham includes two Hamlet speeches wholesale: one ("I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play...") delivered straight (at least until ending with "...wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king— preacher. He's a preacher in this play") and one ("what a piece of work is man") in a wildly different context, expressing Juicy's admiration of Larry after a tender moment between them, with a slight but significant twist on the last line ("man delights not me, nor woman neither, though by my smiling I seem to say so").

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