Hamlet

The Off-Off Broadway Experience

William Shakespeare's "Hamlet" performed entirely in candlelight at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Chelsea, NYC, October 31 to November 22, 1975, with Bill Maloney as Hamlet, directed and designed by Donald L. Brooks

It is legend that few productions of Hamlet are without thespian hubris -- many a production of the Shakespeare play is not only produced, but directed by the actor playing Hamlet. There are sensible actors who eschew directing themselves and engage a competent individual to do so. Laurence Oliver was talented enough to not only direct and star in the 1948 film of Hamlet, but to edit Shakespeare down to a manageable cinematic presentation for the masses.

I remember Dame Judith Anderson at age 72 playing the role in a rather odd production at Carnegie Hall; Richard Burton jumping up and down on a large easy chair (pre-Tom Cruise by 40 years) during the "To be or not to be" monologue. Nichol Williamson played the role in a stark nightmare of a production, later he played Barrymore playing Hamlet in a production of a play entitled "I Hate Hamlet". Mel Gibson did his turn on the role as an extension of "Braveheart" or so it would seem. I suggested to Austin Pendleton, fellow classmate from the Stella Adler Studio, that he assay the role and some too many years later, he did so, although I did not see the event. Several other productions of the play elude my memory at the moment.

However, as an actor, I always had delusions of playing the role, fully intending at one point to not only act the role, but direct and design the production. When I morphed from actor to director, shedding my vain skin of self-presentation, I was still haunted by the play itself.

After a rather tumultuous first half of the 70s, I settled into St. Peter's Episcopal Church on 20th Street in Manhattan, a stone carved wood, Tiffany glass clock-towered wonder as their Sexton. This was not a theatre, but had functioned for a long time as same for the husband-and-wife acting couple Natalie Rogers and Harold Herbstman, under the name of The Dove Theatre Company, who retired from the theatre the previous year for other pursuits, leaving St. Peter's to purely ecclesiastical functions.

Having presented "Xircus, the Private Life of Jesus Christ" under the aegis of The Dove Theatre Company at St. Peter's in the early 70s, I approached the Pastor in reference to a possible use of the sanctuary for good clean family-rated Shakespeare, with Hamlet as a first production. Agreed.

This was simply a church -- there were absolutely no accoutrements for theatre. Sunday services were held with regularity and the congregation expected no interference with their schedule. Therefore, the simplest of productions was the answer, resulting in a presentation of Hamlet which I fully intended to resemble the touring companies that barnstormed the old west in the mid-1800s. Candlelight became our illumination, which necessitated an actor who's main function was to attend to the flames, relighting, extinguishing, replacing, quietly, in half-time to the movement of the play itself; albeit, alert to need for speedy action.

The music for the play was composed by George Prideaux for the church organ, augmented by trumpet. The costumes were contemporary, but simple, with accessories appropriate to the play, capes, drapings, etc., and the setting was a simple twenty-foot tall white gauze curtain painted with a vortex, serving at the appropriate time, for the arras.

This was Hamlet as a liturgical high mass for the dead who still live!