Theater: Hamlet Without The Napping

While I love seeing Shakespeare plays, it's not un-heard-of, during the longer ones, for my brain to start whispering to me, "You know, it's really dark. If you closed your eyes for just a few minutes, odds are nobody would notice."

That wasn't an issue tonight. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival's first 2010 performance of Hamlet was a Zero Napping Event. The issue wasn't keeping my eyes open, it was deciding which actor to keep them on.

Dan Donohue was Hamlet. I keep thinking of him as a comic actor, and I keep being reminded that his is a multipurpose toolkit. The elements that I think of as being comedy assets - the perfect timing, the chameleon voice and face, the whole space-alien morphing thing that he uses to transform from the geeky weakling in one play to the towering fighting man in his prime in another - they're all just as valuable, I realize over and over, in drama and tragedy.

Donohue's Hamlet was powerful, desperate, and funny, and he scooped up the audience and carried them on that ride with him. No whining. No waffling. No wishing, on the audience's part, that he'd just get over it. And when I say "funny", I don't mean that he added inappropriate comedy; I'm talking about that black, irrational laughter that sometimes bubbles up at a funeral or a disaster.

Susannah Flood as Ophelia was a geeky, awkward adolescent, not the traditional forgettable Victorian watercolor. I believed in her. I liked her. I winced for her when her troubles were human-sized, and I was arrested by the power in her later madness.

I'd go on, but I'd just keep on going. This isn't one of those plays with dead-weight performances that don't quite fit with the rest, so I'd have to talk about everyone. I'll stop here and just advise: Go see it.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.