At the close of a particularly rich rehearsal session, Bob Falls spoke very clearly about the new production of ”Hamlet” he is about to open at Wisdom Bridge Theatre:
”I`ve been thinking and talking about this for a long time as a kind of
`Hamlet` for a new generation, or Shakespeare for the `80s, or some dunderhead thing like that. But as I`ve worked on it, I find that the only thing I want is to get through to the text, to make it clear, and to be faithful to Shakespeare.
”So much of directing is traffic management, I know; but the other night in rehearsing the closet scene between Hamlet and Gertrude, I felt that we were getting through to something, and that maybe I was helping to provide that connecting link between the actor and the text, to give a little of the inspiration that the actors need to make the leap. And it was very exciting.”
Next Thursday, after more than a year of preparation and six weeks of rehearsal (including one week of previews), we shall see exactly how exciting this ”Hamlet” can be.
It`s dangerous, of course, to predict the outcome of any venture in the theater, but up front, this show does appear to have a lot going for it.
It also involves a lot of risks.
Originally scheduled for a six-week run, the production is virtually sold out (including Wednesday school matinees) before it opens, and consequently has been positioned by Jeffrey Ortmann, Wisdom Bridge managing director, so it can be extended for up to four weeks. With a budget of more than $150,000, it may be the most expensive production in the history of small Off Loop theaters. It most surely is the costliest show in the history of a 200-seat theater named Wisdom Bridge located above a hardware store at 1559 W. Howard St.
Falls, Wisdom Bridge`s 30-year-old artistic director, had been wanting to do the play for several years, partly because he wanted to test himself with the greatest play in the English language and partly because he wanted to collaborate on a big project once again with designer Michael Merritt, who had contributed so strikingly to Falls` memorable 1981 production of Bertolt Brecht`s ”Mother Courage.”
Last year, Falls attended one of the sessions of the Chicago Shakespeare Workshop conducted by actress Barbara Gaines for Chicago actors at a North Side rehearsal hall. There, he saw Aidan Quinn act a short scene from
”Hamlet,” and, he says, ”I knew I had found Hamlet.”
Quinn, at 25, has had a brief but extraordinary acting career. An electrifying actor who is an alumnus of the Piven Theater Workshop in Evanston, he began his stage work in 1981 in Chicago, and soon was signed with actress Daryl Hannah to the film ”Reckless,” a 1984 flop that nonetheless gained him some good reviews.
Last summer, while Quinn was in New York City appearing in the Off Broadway production of Sam Shepard`s ”Fool for Love,” Falls flew out to have lunch with him and to ask him if he would play ”Hamlet.”
”It`s a play I`ve been thinking about since the day I read it, when I was 17,” Quinn recalls of that first meeting, ”so though part of me said maybe I couldn`t do Shakespeare, the other part told me to go ahead and do it.”
Before long, Quinn and Falls were on the phone regularly, talking about interpretation of the role. Quinn undertook special vocal and fencing classes to prepare himself, and Falls was ”reading everything I could lay my hands on” about the play. (He paid special attention, however, to ”Shakespeare, Our Contemporary,” the landmark book of criticism by Jan Kott.)
To ready the play, Falls asked for and got permission from his board of directors to rehearse his cast of 16 actors for 6 weeks, double the usual time and therefore double the usual cost.
He worried incessantly over the casting, making his final choices only after many, many auditions. In the dual role of the ghost of Hamlet`s father and the player king, he cast Byrne Piven, Quinn`s friend and mentor; and as Polonius, he picked Del Close, best known for his work as an actor and director with the comedy of Second City. John Copeland, a young actor who gave a striking audition, was chosen to portray Horatio, and Lisa Dodson, already cast in the lead of one show at another theater, left that cast to play Ophelia. Peter Burnell, new to Chicago, and Deanna Dunagan, an actress whose work has been consistently impressive in a variety of roles, were selected as King Claudius and Queen Gertrude.
In forming their own vision of the play, neither Quinn nor Falls had the benefit of ever seeing a full performance on stage. However, they both had seen Laurence Olivier`s film ”Hamlet” (whose infamous prefatory statement,
”This is the story of a man who could not make up his mind,” caused Quinn to snort, ”That`s ridiculous. Hamlet makes up his mind every two seconds.”). Falls, especially, had read of past famous performances by everybody from John Gielgud to David Warner, and he learned, he says, ”It`s a play that reflects every generation that produces it.”
On his view of the role, Falls says, ”I saw it initially as a very political, contemporary image, as a young man who had been trained for leadership who wants to talk about the state of the world. Then he comes back from college to find his father dead and his mother married to this man he can`t stand, and he goes wild.”
To Quinn, ”Hamlet at the beginning is crushed by what his mother has done. He has been away at school trying to become enlightened. He probably is a bit of a prankster and not a philosopher. His time with his parents has been spent mostly on idyllic summer holidays, so perhaps his father is more a subject of hero worship than a real father to him. He`s deeply depressed by the events at home, but he`s excited by being depressed, too. And he has this fascination with darkness.”
This, in any event, was the concept before the start of rehearsals. Once plunged into the play, Falls and his actors began changing, revising and expanding their views of the work. With the luxury of the added rehearsal times, scenes were reworked in several ways. One segment, Hamlet`s advice to the players, began as if it were taking place in the casual atmosphere of a rehearsal room, with Hamlet and the actors horsing around slightly as he talked; later, Quinn tried a simpler, more direct approach.
A daring actor not afraid to take risks, even Quinn was amazed at some of the things Falls wanted him to dare. ”We are really improvising tonight,” he said, with a mixture of awe and surprise after a particularly vigorous bit of action performed to a Rolling Stones recording.
And always at Falls` back was his production manager, asking him when he expected to finish rehearsing the second act. ”I don`t know,” Falls said, only half kidding, in the middle of one long scene experiment. ”Maybe sometime in previews.”
As rehearsals went on, Falls kept adding sections that he had originally intended to cut. ”There`s so much juxtaposition of the comic and tragic and of the bizarre and the realistic in this play,” he explains, ”that if you use one element you have to balance it by using all the others.”
Meanwhile, Merritt, who has designed sets, lights and costumes, was busy creating a contemporary yet stylized look for the production. Two small triumphal arches form central parts of the scenery, but there will be slide projections and video displays, as well. And lighting, from the brightest bright to the depths of darkness, will be an important design element. (To reveal more than that would destroy much of the visual surprise that Falls and Merritt have fashioned.)
For better or worse, it is going to be quite a show. (And apparently a very long one. At last count, the play was running about four hours.)
”It`s almost like climbing a mountain; you think you`re never going to reach the top,” Quinn says. ”We`re all having anxiety attacks over it. But you have to do it all the way, or it`s not worth doing.
”So what if we fall flat on our faces? We`ll do it again in another five years, and we`ll do it better.”