In director Kenny Leon’s 2019 production of Much Ado About Nothing, the play was performed under a banner reading STACEY ABRAMS 2020. The choice was optimistic, pointing to the future.  The same slogan resurfaces in his current production of Hamlet, but this on a half-buried sign, an object from the past that causes one to wince at that optimism.  There would be no Stacey Abrams 2020, or Stacey Abrams 2022, and there would be no Shakespeare in the Park for two years.  Hamlet, about the ruin of a family and a kingdom, seems an appropriate text to work through the last few years.

I was disappointed, then, that the production didn’t seem to follow through here.  The interpretation suggested by the set, which includes other remnants of the 2019 production, is absent in everything that followed.  In fact, the scenes that emphasize the internal struggle and the loss of control over the nation—the first scene (“Who’s there?”) and the end of the last one, when Fortinbras enters the castle—are cut.  There is actually little sense of any point of view, and therefore the drama unfolds without much sense of purpose or urgency.  So while the actors are strong, there is a lack of energy and vitality that a strong perspective can bring.  Meanwhile, both Gertrude (Lorraine Toussaint) and Ophelia (Solea Pfeiffer) are sidelined, given little that is interesting to do.

There is a germ of an idea here that is compelling, but both the editing of the text and the staging of the action fail to cohere around that idea.

Hamlet runs through August 6th at the Delacorte Theater.  81 Central Park West  New York, NY. 2 hours 30 minutes. One intermission. Photograph by Joan Marcus.