Campus Event Experience

Earlier in the semester I went to see Hamlet at the Waltmar theater.

Well, I went to see it, then there was a power outage throughout the entire school. To find my car in Lastinger I had to use the flashlight on my phone.

I did see it though, just the day after that for an unscheduled performance to accommodate everyone who bought a ticket. I can't imagine the actors were super thrilled to have to put on another show, but they didn't make it seem that way. The show must go on, even if it must go on a day later than planned.

My reasons for attending were mixed - my friend had a small roll, and I like live theater in general. I'm just not entirely sure I really like Hamlet. No, wait - I'm entirely sure. I don't really like Hamlet.

Experience number one with Hamlet was reading it in high school and nearly failing a horrendously difficult "find that quote" test. Experience number two with Hamlet after throwing that test in the trash and never thinking about it again, more or less, was this play.

The play was better. But there were still some things in it that I would have preferred they throw in the trash, too.

Don't get me wrong. The acting was all great. There were just a few stylistic choices that if they were choosing to be or not to be, I would go for not to be.

First of all, the costumes were all aesthetically interesting, but not all in a good way. For the first act, Gertrude wore a dress that for all intents and purposes looked like an upside down lava lamp - long, black, and flared with flames on the bottom. Later on it became a matching lava lamp suit. The rest of the costumes were a mashup that my non-theatrically educated eye did not quite understand. Laertes was dressed like a high school jock, and the gravekeeper was supposed to be playing an electric guitar. The other characters were pretty much dressed normally for what one would expect from a shakespeare play, robes and coats.

The artistic choice for the ghost of the king was both unique and honestly kind of terrifying. The three friends I went to see the play with, to use a phrase Shakespeare wouldn't understand, were not having it.

Instead of making the ghost of the king one character, about ten actors recited the lines in a chant all at once, with a heartbeat track playing over their words. Every now and then, a specific actor would say a choice line while the group went quiet, then they would rejoin the group recital. In each scene they had some sort of minimal but eerie choreography, with hand motions or swaying from side to side in unison. The entire effect was powerful, and unsettling to say the least. We were all squirming in our seats in every ghost of the king scene.

Both my terrible score on the high school Hamlet quiz and the fact that it was so long ago definitely played a part in some of my not having a clue what was going on. I without a doubt know that Ophelia, in the book, doesn't run on from out in the audience and scream in one of your friend's ears who happened to be sitting in prime scream location. The play's a little long. It woke us up.

The play's the thing, I would say, over my reading experience.