Michael Laurence and Annette O’Toole/Photo: Tristan Fuge
Have you ever read a fortune cookie and added that ubiquitous joke phrase to the ending of your plucked aphorism: “in bed”? This small, silly joke lends sexual innuendo to the most straightforward of messages. (Cf. “Appearances can be deceiving . . . in bed.”) It undermines the seriousness with which fortune cookies traditionally take themselves. You and your family laugh around the dinner table. You move on.
The Rattlestick Playwrights Theater production Hamlet in Bed is like an hour-and-a-half long fortune cookie game, without the fun.
Hamlet is—save for the Bible—the most written-about work of literature. It has prompted its own field of academia. It has been adapted in dozens of films, from Laurence Olivier’s iconic portrayal to The Lion King, not to mention book and television versions. All this to say: there’s not a lot that hasn’t been thought or said about Shakespeare’s masterpiece.
What Hamlet in Bed seems to be bringing to the table is solely that addition of sexual innuendo in our cookie game. It’s primarily focused on making the subtext of the play, well, text, which both capitalizes on our cultural preoccupation with sexuality and reduces an infinitely complex drama to one puerile theme—the most boring of the play’s many threads.
Michael Laurence plays Michael, a 39-year-old man obsessed with Hamlet, who, during his weekly acquisition of any and all Hamlet-related material, stumbles on an old diary written by a former Ophelia, who just may be his unknown mother. Tracking down the woman who gave him up has been a ruinous and fruitless search so far in Michael’s life. He pursues this promising new lead to discover Anna (Annette O’Toole), now in her late 50s and a desperately sad inebriate.
Hamlet itself is the play-within-a-play in Hamlet in Bed, as Michael lures Anna closer by promising her the role of Gertrude in his new adaptation of the play—where every scene will be played with a mattress in the room. (The mattresses are all dingy and motel-black-light-worthy, which appropriately adds to the rundown quality of the production.) Michael tells Anna he feels the essential scene of the play is the bedroom scene from Hamlet: the mother and son confrontation over her marriage to Claudius. Because of this, they’ll have to spend extra rehearsals getting it right.
In between these uncomfortable and stilted rehearsals, Michael and Anna live their lonely lives, delivering monologues in the manner of beat poetry. There is some lovely language in these fourth-wall-breaking speeches that hints at a greater talent than that to which the play speaks. Mr. Laurence, who also wrote the play, presents some wonderful sentences: Anna tells us that her apartment is so small “you can’t cuss a cat without getting a whisker in your mouth.”
When it comes to the delivery of the Hamlet scenes, Laurence and O’Toole are serviceable as Hamlet and Gertrude, if as obvious as the rest of the proceedings. As an indicator of how clumsy things get, Laurence is actually wearing a locket with his father’s likeness and wildly gesticulates to O’Toole’s corresponding locket of Claudius when he recites “See, what a grace was seated on this brow;/ Hyperion’s curls; the front of Jove himself; . . . Look you now, what follows:/ Here is your husband; like a mildew’d ear.” In a black box production where the mise en scène consists of a lone disco light, some mattresses, and very few props, this is considerably overboard.
Reading an Oedipal attraction toward Gertrude into the original play is certainly not inapt; after all, as noted above, their confrontation does actually take place in a bedroom (the only scene to do so). But nihil sub sole novum. T. S. Eliot glanced across the idea of it in a 1919 essay. Olivier’s Hamlet was overtly sexual toward Gertrude back in 1948. Unfortunately, this production does nothing interesting with the material, relying on aggressive bluntness. O’Toole most nearly approaches something like nuance, projecting a quiet terror underneath her sly bravado.
Time is not out of joint in this production, as the literal, projected writing on the wall frequently grounds us in exactly how much time has gone by: “One month ago,” “one week ago,” et cetera. It’s unnecessary in an atmospheric play such as this, and leads the viewer to imagine something is going to happen when we get to the end of this countdown. It doesn’t. Not much does. It’s a long-form exercise in sad-sackery, elegantly written but without message. As Gertrude herself might ask from this production, “More matter with less art.”
Hamlet in Bed can be seen at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in New York through October 25, 2015.