Archive for March 16th, 2007

Did you ever have one of those Great Ideas? You know the kind.… it’s two in the morning and just for kicks you and your friends are taking turns finding obscure movies on the Internet. The weirder the better. You stumble upon a bit of ephemera so strange and heady it gets better with each viewing. And the more you watch it, the more you want to comment on it, to interject your own ideas. Egging each other on, you take turns reenacting your favorite scenes, pushing it to new levels of quirkdom. You are hysterical and utter geniuses. You have to bring your brilliance to the masses. Everyone loves it. —For the first twenty minutes or so, that is. Then the shtick wears thin. That’s the feeling you get watching The Wooster Group’s “Hamlet.” The concept is inspiringly innovative, and even the execution is praiseworthy—but the play goes on so long that the nuances that at first make it clever become wearing on your senses.

Here’s what The Wooster Group has to say about the weird ephemera that got their creative juices flowing:

We were drawn to Richard Burton’s “Hamlet,” a 1964 Broadway production which was recorded in live performance from 17 camera angles and edited into a film that was shown for only two days in 2000 movie houses across the US.

The idea of bringing a live theatre experience to thousands of simultaneous viewers in different cities was trumpeted as a new form called “Theatrofilm,” made possible through “the miracle of Electronovision.”

Cool. The Metropolitan Opera recently did something similar.

Okay, now take an aspirin ’cause here comes the difficult-but-smart concept behind The Wooster Group’s “Hamlet”:

Our “Hamlet” attempts to reverse the process, reconstructing a hypothetical theater piece from the fragmentary evidence of the edited film, like an archeologist inferring an improbable temple from a collection of ruins.

What this all means is that Burton’s legendary film is projected in the background while live actors simultaneously reenact it. Or at least most of it. Not meticulously faithful to the original film, the players repeatedly request certain parts of the film to be skipped or fast-forwarded. Still, the play goes on for three hours, with only a fifteen-minute intermission, so not too much of the film is missed. Given this room for deviation, it’s curious that Director Elizabeth LeCompte didn’t edit out a bit more of the play to create a stronger piece.

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