Friday / November 15 / 2019
Written by Kyle S.

After the first big snow storm of the season on Tuesday canceled our session for us, both the ensemble members and the facilitators were itching to get back into the play. After we all settled and checked in with each other, we took a moment to celebrate that, as of last week, we had finished reading through the play! Hamlet is a loooonnngg play and Act 5 is a loooonnngg act, so it was quite an accomplishment to get through it as quickly as we did.

The play ends with everyone’s plans for vengeance realized (and some accidental poisonings and drownings), resulting in the deaths of Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Ophelia (oof!). As the ensemble reflected on our thoughts about the play as a whole, we found that there were definitely some different reactions; one returning member came away with a very sympathetic view on our hero after his death—“Hamlet saved Denmark from Claudius”—and a newer member felt...less moved. Her reaction? “It ticked me off that everybody died at the end.”

After our conversation, we tried moving on to playing some improv games, with little success. The consensus around the room was that the ensemble wanted to put the final scene up on its feet instead. Act 5, Scene 2 is long and complicated, so we split it up into sections. It begins with Hamlet recounting to Horatio how he foiled Claudius’s plan to have him killed, and sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to the chopping block instead. Then, Osric informs Hamlet that Laertes has challenged him to a fencing match, which Hamlet accepts against Horatio’s urging. One of our newer members played Hamlet, but expressed that she was having trouble finding ways to move around during blocks of long text. One of our returning ensemble members quelled her worries by reassuring her that “it’ll come to you the more you know your character,” while another offered this wise piece of advice: “If you have an idea, use it. If it doesn’t work, we’ll save it for later.”

Then we moved on to the fencing match. Claudius’s poisoned glass and Laertes’s poisoned rapier made the event deadlier than intended, resulting in the death of not only their target, Hamlet, but of themselves and of Gertrude. The ensemble had a lot of fun with the sword fighting, and took on the challenge of timing out a scene in which four characters die at different times, all monologuing while they do it.

After we finished putting the whole play on its feet, we moved back to Act 1, Scene 3. We realized that the ensemble members who joined at the end of October never got to meet Polonius and never knew an un-maddened Ophelia. This scene lets us see Laertes’s relationship with his sister before he leaves for France, and gives us a pretty good lens into Ophelia’s complicated relationship with her father. A longtime member offered to read as Ophelia, and played her as a rebellious teenager, which gave us a very new way to look at the character. The woman who played her father, Polonius, was given kudos for her balancing act of authoritarian to concerned father. This scene took us to the end of our session, but it opened up the door for us to start exploring these characters in new and exciting ways as we get ready to cast our show.