The Peruvian company Teatro La Plaza’s “Hamlet” starts with a silent video clip projected huge on the upstage wall. Onscreen, a baby is born, slippery and wailing. The infant is wiped off, cleaned up. A measuring tape is placed around the baby’s head.
Then, onstage, a young man puts a crown on his own head, and a young woman — playing his mother — approaches. Cherishingly, she touches his face and says, “Welcome, my dear Hamlet.”
A defiant affirmation of life lies at the heart of this “Hamlet,” a refraction of Shakespeare’s play that has traveled the world since it was first performed in 2019. Written and directed by Chela De Ferrari, it was created with and stars an ensemble of eight actors with Down syndrome and learning disabilities.
If that focus makes you worry this might be sappy or condescending, not artistically worthwhile, let me stop you right there. None of that is true of this bold production, presented by Theater for a New Audience at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn.
Performed in Spanish with English supertitles (translation is by Sebastián Eddowes), it splices bits of “Hamlet” with scenes in which cast members talk about their lives, work, art, dreams. It is as consumed as Shakespeare’s version with questions of mortality and existence, desire and agency, and the dynamics between adult children and their parents.
The pervasive unease of the Prince of Denmark — a role the actors trade off throughout — looks different when channeled through artists who know how it feels to be socially marginalized, their worth minimized.
“The world will always see you as a child,” Hamlet (Octavio Bernaza) tells Ofelia (Ximena Rodríguez), brushing off her affection with a mixture of anger and self-loathing. “You will never escape the gaze of others.”
And when Ofelia’s father, Polonio (Manuel García), notes that Hamlet “has to act according to his birth,” he adds: “When he says he loves you, you must remember he cannot fulfill any of his promises. He can only do what his parents allow.”
This polished, assured and charming company reminded me how much the pleasure of theater comes not just from the risk of live performance but also from its triumph when it works. This absolutely does.
A “Hamlet” that confronts darkness and death, it ends with a dance party, not a stage full of corpses. Joyous revelry is this show’s choice. Never does it take life lightly.
Over in Manhattan, the same cannot remotely be said of Shakespeare’s ultimate gore fest, “Titus Andronicus” — you know, in which one character gets her hands lopped off and her tongue ripped out, and the barbarous culprits end up baked in a pie that’s served to their mother. Good times.
It would of course be nice if a drama about such extreme, unhinged violence and heedless tit-for-tat vengeance didn’t feel quite so applicable to the world we’re living in. Then again, Patrick Page, who adapted the script and plays the titular Roman general, and his director, Jesse Berger, have seized a moment when the depraved grotesqueries of this bombastically bloody tragedy can’t be easily dismissed.
Produced by Red Bull Theater at the Pershing Square Signature Center, the play has an opening that is the polar opposite of De Ferrari’s “Hamlet”: not the birth of one child but the death of several. Titus, their father, has fed his soldier sons into the maw of war. Returned from battle, he and his remaining children bury their fallen with ceremonial pomp.
Even then, the family finds time for a spot of murder, killing the firstborn son of Titus’s Goth queen prisoner Tamora (Francesca Faridany) in front of her. Thus the vain Titus sets in motion all of the gruesome harm that comes to his family. Do not hold your breath for him to recognize that fact.
“I’ll find a day to massacre them all,” Tamora vows. Her manospheric sons Demetrius (Adam Langdon) and Chiron (Jesse Aaronson) eagerly join her cause.
Lavinia (Olivia Reis), Titus’s ostensibly beloved daughter, is as much a pawn to him as are his sons. Still, when Tamora’s sons rape and mutilate her, he is undone — though that is more about the damage to his pride than to her very being.
Given how sharp-minded and assertive Lavinia is before the attack, partly because Page’s adaptation has apportioned her lines to emphasize those qualities, it’s strange that afterward she seems abruptly witless, rather than alert inside a body that can no longer speak or write.
Page, though, is great fun to watch as the deranged yet charismatic Titus, merrily plotting revenge by way of cannibal pie. He wears chef’s whites to serve it up at a banquet, as an instrumental version of “What a Wonderful World” plays.
And honestly, it’s awfully satisfying to see those creeps made into meat filling. Even if their mother, with a plate of them in front of her, would disagree.
Hamlet Through April 4 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn; tfana.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.
Titus Andronicus Through April 19 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; redbulltheater.com. Running time: 2 hours.
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