New Hamlet Q: To Beef, Or Not To Beef?

Student leaders and Shakespeare theater-makers came together to create a new performance of Hamlet that was part social justice theater, part violence prevention program — and all heart.

Hamlet hovers over King Claudius, who — his father’s ghost has told him — has committed murder, together with his mother Queen Gertrude. He plots their demise. He drowns in grief. He faces a sense of his own psyche cracking. To be or not to be: the dichotomy in the immortal line, still more desperate than its status as a cliche can ever diminish, is given full staging by the fact that Hamlet is played, so ably, by two people at the same time.

That scene is part of Ice the Beef​’s and Elm Shakespeare​’s production of Hamlet, unveiled at a weekend run at Bregamos Community Theater on Blatchley Avenue this Saturday and Sunday, the result of a four-month collaboration in which Ice the Beef President Chaz Carmon, Elm Shakespeare Director of Education Sarah Bowles, and student leaders came together to create a performance that was part social justice theater, part violence prevention program — and all heart.

The Bregamos run is the beginning of a series of shows, as Ice the Beef and Elm Shakespeare plan to take Hamlet to schools and other communities throughout the spring, then to the International Festival of Arts and Ideas in June, and then perhaps to an outdoor stage in the summer, according to Bowles. ​“The whole point is that we want as many young people to see it as possible,” she said. ​“It might make a difference.” Maybe, she said with humility, ​“someone might think of us before going out for revenge and creating more senseless violence in the community.”

The Hamlet production is the latest result of a long-running relationship; Elm Shakespeare and Ice the Beef did Romeo and Juliet together two years ago. ​“They came back to us and said, ​‘let’s do another one,’ ” Bowles recalled. ​“We settled on Hamlet because it’s a story of revenge, and Ice the Beef is an anti-gun violence activist group.” 

In Hamlet, the collaborators wanted to explore a core question: ​“what’s the difference between revenge and justice?” — which, in the play, is an open-ended question. ​“We don’t necessarily present any definitive answers,” Bowles said, ​“because we understand that the feeling behind wanting to get revenge is natural, especially when you’ve been so wronged to the point of a family member being killed. That’s what we’re talking about with Hamlet.” It’s ​“not invalid to have anger about that, but what you do with that — your actions,” are what matters.

“Our thesis is that revenge comes with a very costly price. More people end up hurt or dead if you go on a singular journey for revenge. That’s what happens with Hamlet. He gets so consumed by his journey for revenge that five people end up dead, including himself, and those people are innocent. That’s not including the guy he was going after. It’s his mother, his girlfriend, his girlfriend’s mother and father, and himself.”

In the hands of the Ice the Beef and Elm Shakespeare collaboration, Hamlet becomes something of a cautionary tale, an admonition to ​“take a breath before you go on this rampage of violence,” Bowles said. ​“Those are strategies that Ice the Beef goes around New Haven spreading to young people all the time,” about ​“taking a different route” away from revenge.

In hoping to impart a message, Ice the Beef and Elm Shakespeare are putting an atypical spin on one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, which is famously about a character who takes, if anything, too long to take action. Hamlet has been called the first modern play in that it focuses on Hamlet’s indecision, his internal struggles; his monologues in many ways are the drama. Part of the difference in focus for Ice the Beef and Elm Shakespeare stems from the fact that they have edited the play down considerably. If performed in its entirely, Hamlet runs about four hours. Their version takes about 90 minutes, so Hamlet ​“seems more like a man of action here,” Bowles said.

In ​“a super-nerd moment,” she added, there is actually an alternate version of Hamlet, called Quarto 1, that was published in 1603, a year after the Hamlet we know. Its origins are a mystery. Some say it’s a pirated version of the original; others argue that it’s a first draft, or that Shakespeare intended it for a touring production that required fewer actors. Regardless, its most salient feature, aside from a few altered plot points, is that it is much shorter than the canonical Hamlet and ​“more action-packed.”

In this Hamlet production, shortening the play and focusing on Hamlet’s actions, rather than the tangled mental processes that got him there, led to a fresh and thought-provoking take on the classic. Aiding in the spin on the play was a conceit of having two actors — Manuel Camacho and Catherine Wicks — play Hamlet at the same time. Bowles explained at the play’s beginning that this was partially borne of necessity, as there wasn’t time for a single actor to learn all of Hamlet’s lines. But it worked to two key effects.

First, it helped bring out some of the comedy in Hamlet (yes, parts of it are quite funny, if done right), which set the play on a fleet foot and also made its turn into catastrophe that much more wrenching when it happened. Second, it dramatized Hamlet’s monologues as dialogues, allowing Camacho and Wicks to embody Hamlet’s war with himself, his struggles with his grief, and his curdling revenge. Camacho’s cooler, measured delivery and Wicks’s more animated style brought out the friction in Shakespeare’s words, and made their unified outbursts, as Hamlet loses control of himself, that much more startling.

In another highly effective move, after Hamlet kills Polonius (whether believing him to be Claudius, one of the targets of his rage, or whether jumping at shadows), the cast shifted to a wordless montage, set to music, in which we see the grief at Polonius’s death ripple outward, through his daughter Ophelia, whose grief drives her to suicide, and through his son Laertes, who, in his despair, then seeks his own revenge. This wordless move was so effective that this reporter wondered whether more productions of Hamlet should use it. It sharply and movingly traced the consequences of Hamlet’s actions, how his own anger created a wave of violence that would soon engulf far too many people in its path.

Camacho and Wicks ably carry the audience through the story by taking them on Hamlet’s harrowing journey. JT Evans (playing three characters), AJ Johnson (as Horatio) Jaylen Newell (as Marcellus) and James Jones (as Polonius) engage and entertain, bringing the light that’s needed to contrast with the coming darkness. As the ghost of Hamlet’s father, Wayne Phelps commands without saying a word. Ronisha Moore and Eliza Vargas are an imperious yet fragile Queen Gertrude and Claudius. Mekhi Robertson, in a physical performance, makes us feel Laertes’s anger. Zahra Hutchinson is devastating as Ophelia.

Mixing Old School With New

Following Hamlet, the cast then enacted three short scenes. In the first, two groups of friends find themselves at odds, in a way that could tip over into violence. In the second, a group of young men plot revenge for a friend who’s been shot to death. In the third, two young men seethe in their own anger, not sure how to manage it. In each case, an intervention stops the negativity from boiling over into physical harm. In the first, a peer is able to smooth over the tensions between the two groups, reminding them that they’re family. In the second, the slain friend’s mother tells them revenge isn’t the way, and that they can honor their friend’s death by graduating high school. In the third, one person cools his anger by calling a friend. The other does it by mindfully looking within. If Hamlet’s the cautionary tale, the three scenes at the end show the ways out.

Chaz Carmon, president of Ice the Beef, talked about the changes he sees in both the students who participate in Ice the Beef and their peers who come to see their shows. ​“To be able to take something like Shakespeare, and then also spin it — be part of something that’s phenomenal, and then add those scenes at the end, totally resonates with them,” he said. ​“It’s powerful to be able to take something old-school and mix the new school together with it,” especially for ​“modern kids” in the audience who ​“get to see people like them.” 

For Carmon, the connections between Shakespeare and today are apparent, and he seeks to make those apparent to everyone. ​“You want those light bulbs going off,” Carmon said. He hopes the audience sees ​“where the swords could be guns,” and how the conflicts Shakespeare portrays are their conflicts, too.

The collaboration is also part of Ice the Beef’s larger work of violence prevention and conflict resolution. ​“We take wrestling and spin it. We take Shakespeare plays and spin it. We take rap music and spin it. The goal for us is violence prevention, but you have meet them where they are. Anything they like, we spin it. That’s the draw.” His goal is to ensure that the students in the program ​“have coping strategies.” For Carmon, violence prevention work touches on a multitude of areas, from mental health to paying attention to social dynamics. ​“We teach them skills for the entire year that we’re together,” he said, whether it’s learning calm and mindfulness, helping support a friend, or conflict resolution.

In the case of Hamlet, Carmon said he saw it all come together in a rehearsal just a couple days before the performance. ​“It’s like in school, when you’re helping a student with math. They did it 50 times, and all of a sudden, boom, they just got it. When that light bulb goes off — that is the moment for an educator, or a director,” Carmon said. ​“That light bulb goes off, and you’re understanding Shakespeare. You can take a book and just go read it, and understand what’s going on. And the delivery of Shakespeare teaches you how to make sure we know what’s going on in the audience. Now those light bulbs are going off for Shakespeare. Now they’re going off for social justice. Now they’re going off for forgiveness and love.” Not just in the theater, he added, but ​“in life.”