here arts center, august 2015 / rochester fringe festival, september 2015
In a new devised piece, the cast of HamletGhosts rips apart Hamlet and reconstructs it for a modern audience. Through a series of vignettes mixing Shakespeare with clowns, drag, internet help sites, and personal narratives, the show gives life to the themes and emotional guts of Hamlet without any plot to get in the way. HamletGhosts forces audience members to question their own complicity in the acts of madness and violence played out in front of them.
Directed and conceived by Cody Holliday Haefner
Assistant directed by Rebecca Clark
Created and performed by Claudia Givings, Alex Hare, Julia Izumi, Emily Kaplan, Kaitlin Kaufman, Jake Lasser, Olivia Levine, Theo Maltz, Matthew McShane
“This show does the impossible, in that it genuinely does make you think about ‘Hamlet’ in a different way. A thousand revivals since the 1600s have failed to do this, but a scrappy group of New York actors managed it. Bravo.”