Tuesday / October 15 / 2019
Written by Maria

“He uses words that exercise your brain and your mouth—it’s amazing.”

Today we picked up where we left off in Act 3 Scene 3 and dove into reading Act 3 Scene 4, where Hamlet confronts his mother.

“I almost get the feeling that [Hamlet’s] listening in and spying on them a lot in this play,” said one woman as we discussed the way that Hamlet enters the scene. “If Hamlet was spying, he knows that’s not the king [hiding behind the curtain],” said another. We also started to wonder about Hamlet’s mental state at this moment. He has just left the king alive, and, according to one woman, he is running in at 100 on anger; we can see that Gertrude is really afraid of her son. “I feel like he wants to roll up a newspaper and smack her on the nose,” one woman said. Another reminded us that there are a lot of ways that a line could be said, and that various interpretations all work within the scene. We just have to decide which one we want to go with.

If Hamlet was spying on Gertrude and Polonius, is he confronting her compliance with the plot to murder his father? Is he not thinking at all and letting his emotions take control now that he has verified the Ghost’s story to be true? Does he want someone to pay and doesn’t really care who that person is? One of our leaders pointed out that “it’s always necessary to go back to the beginning and [see how Hamlet has changed]. Once he knows this is the truth, he snaps, and now he knows for sure.” As we sit around our circle and discuss a scene, sometimes it can be easy to forget the journey of the characters and the play—it all moves so much faster when it’s all put together, especially after we make lots of cuts!

We then agreed to put the scene on its feet, but, because there is so much lengthy dialogue between Gertrude and Hamlet (which can sometimes be intimidating), we decided that any time someone was done playing a character, they could tap out and someone else would jump up to take their place. This also gave an opportunity for us audience members to capitalize on inspiration if we wanted to try something with a certain character in the moment.

“The two women in the play are being used more than utilized,” one women commented. Another immediately and strongly jumped in: “I agree, but I don’t think they’re ignorant.” Almost everyone in the group has agreed that Gertrude knows something about the old King Hamlet’s death. One returning member didn’t agree, but midway through the scene, everything changed for her. Jumping up (and interrupting the scene), she exclaimed, “Why did Gertrude send Polonius away? She knows!” She then tapped in to play Gertrude with this new revelation. “She knows that Hamlet knows that she knows what happened” agreed another woman.

“This is the most oniony thing I’ve ever encountered,” one woman said. She is being paroled soon, and she lamented that she would not be around to see our performance of this play—though, laughing, she said that she wouldn’t stick around just so she could! “The only thing more confusing about this play are our thoughts about this play!” she concluded.

When we ran the scene again, we decided to focus on the interaction between Hamlet, Gertrude, and the Ghost. Does Gertrude see the Ghost? How does her seeing or not seeing the Ghost inform how she interacts with her son? The Ghost comes to Gertrude’s defense, but that doesn’t mean that she is innocent—maybe he still loves her even after her betrayal. “The two women in this play are being used for prey. They have no voice in the play, but they still have knowledge,” one woman reflected. “They can see, just not do anything about it.”

Friday / October 18 / 2019
Written by Emma

A couple of times every season there comes a session that, for one reason or another, has lower attendance than normal. These small rehearsals can yield some truly incredible discussions and idea-swapping that feel a bit more down to earth than when we meet in larger numbers. Tonight happened to be one of those evenings. All in all, there were eight ensemble members present by the time we finished check-ins to lower the ring. Our troupe, though small in numbers, would prove to be mighty in textual analysis!

On Tuesday, the group had run Act III scene 4 two times with slight tweaks: once with Gertrude not seeing the Ghost, and once with Gertrude seeing the Ghost but not reacting. For readers not incredibly familiar with the play (and I must admit that I am a member of that group!), 3.4 is the scene where Hamlet confronts his mother, Gertrude, about having so swiftly re-married her late husband’s brother after his death. Hamlet additionally stabs and kills Polonius, who is eavesdropping from behind a curtain and trying to get information regarding Hamlet’s perceived insanity (though, as one woman so perfectly put it last week, “Who is in [Hamlet’s] corner?”). One ensemble member suggested that we start the day by doing 3.4 a third way, with Gertrude seeing and reacting to the ghost of her deceased husband.

A group of mostly returning members volunteered to act. One woman seems to have really taken a shine to Hamlet, and she hopped up to read almost immediately. We talked briefly about staging, and dove right in. One newer member was reading as Gertrude. She held her hand up throughout the scene as though she was toting a grail, even as her jaw dropped upon seeing the ghost of her husband. The actor playing the Ghost also seemed to be playing with physical traits of the character. She glided around the other actors, as though she was trying to actually float. It was an interesting effect, even as the rest of the scene seemed to lose some steam.

When we finished, I asked everyone how they felt about it. “When I close my eyes and imagine this scene, [Gertrude] doesn’t see the Ghost,” a new member said. We went back and read some of the dialogue to see if there were any clues as to whether Gertrude was really seeing the Ghost or not. After a bit of discussion we decided that, like with so much of Gertrude’s character, it’s really unknown how much she legitimately knows. This will be an interesting moment for whoever’s playing Gertrude to come back to later in the season!

We settled back into our circle for some more reading. The next two scenes of the play, Act IV Scenes 1 and 2, are incredibly short, especially when compared to some of the purely behemoth scenes that come before it. We made a plan to work through each one reading and on its feet, then see if we could do them back-to-back on their feet. In 4.1, a shocked Gertrude tells Claudius that Hamlet has just killed Polonius, and Claudius reacts to the news. 4.2 finds Hamlet after disposing of the body, with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern trying to pump him for information. These scenes are collectively four or five pages and really do fly by.

Starting with 4.1, one of our newer members (who has described herself as being anxious about reading and performing) quickly raised her hand to read for Claudius. A returning member read for Gertrude. The scene went by quickly, and we stopped to break down the nuts and bolts of what was going on here. “Their [Claudius and Gertrude] relationship--this scene gives a lot of that,” one woman chimed in. Expanding on this, I pointed out that there weren’t many other places in the play where we get to see Gertrude and Claudius truly on their own--even in this scene, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern pop in and out briefly. Still, they are given almost an entire (albeit, short) scene to talk alone. Why would Shakespeare do this? We decided that this is a tool to put Gertrude and Claudius’ characters in the spotlight. “Claudius is just looking out for his title of the king,” one woman stated, pointing out how seemingly cavalier he is about the death of his right hand man. “There is an element that Polonius isn’t an important figure in their court,” another woman agreed.

After running 4.1 on its feet, we moved on to reading 4.2. This scene is, more or less, Hamlet acting erratic and calling out his friends for being two-faced and spying on him. One of our returning members, who stated at the top of the season she didn’t want a large speaking role, read for Hamlet. Smiling, another member said, “Why do I feel like in three months you’re gonna be sayin’ ‘I wanna do Hamlet’?” Some neat staging ideas also came up while we were reading 4.2. One woman shared that she had a vision of the stage being literally divided--that a theme she kept coming back to was “Hamlet Vs The World”, and that this would be a way to visually represent the pain and isolation he is feeling. We also talked about getting a gauze or tulle fabric to be used as “fog” for when the ghost is present.

We read 4.2 twice, then stood up to act it out. In the middle of our first standing run-through, a woman who had had to leave earlier walked back into the classroom. She slowly made her way to her seat, not taking her eyes off the action. When we wrapped, she said, “I’m seeing a lot of Kramer in Hamlet right now.” People around the room smiled, and I excitedly asked her if she would like to give it a shot. She gladly obliged. We were quickly running out of time, so we decided to run 4.1 and 4.2 back-to-back and see how it went.

The second Kramer-Hamlet stepped out onstage, bobbing her head and talking to herself, we were all obsessed. She delivered the dialogue in a choppy, sporadic way that somehow worked perfectly. We ran out of time to get deep into discussion about what worked and what didn’t, but suffice to say that there are a lot of fantastic ideas accumulating!