Is the uncanny timing of Shakespeare Theatre Company’s staging of “Hamnet” an asset or an imposition? That’s a matter of perspective for an adaptation that was setting up in D.C.’s Harman Hall just as Jessie Buckley was knocking down her Oscars competition.
The acclaim heaped on director Chloé Zhao’s film version — which yielded eight Academy Award nominations and earned Buckley the best-actress statuette — is a marketing boon for the stage spin of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 historical fiction about the death of William Shakespeare’s only son. But for a production that premiered in 2023 at Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company, Zhao’s transfixing telling now sets a bar that the stage show struggles to clear.
Although both versions follow the same beats, their rhythms are decidedly different. The Lolita Chakrabarti-penned play dwells more on the mysticism of Kemi-Bo Jacobs’s Agnes, the rumored daughter of a forest witch, as she forges a bond with Rory Alexander’s playwright-to-be William. Hamnet (Ajani Cabey) and his twin sister, Judith (Saffron Dey), may not appear until the first act’s conclusion, but Agnes’s clairvoyance ensures that the pair and their older sibling, Susanna (Ava Hinds-Jones), seem omnipresent during a play flooded with the whispers of unborn children and premonitions of tragedy.
It’s a clever flourish for a tale that underscores the otherworldly connection a mother shares with her children. Tom Piper’s immaculate set design — the scaffolding of London’s Globe Theatre is seamlessly repurposed to evoke a fog-flooded forest, a wedding chapel and myriad other locales — helps director Erica Whyman drench the proceedings in unsettling atmosphere and evocative imagery.
Unfortunately, the unlikely courtship between the herbal healer Agnes and the Latin tutor William proves more obligatory than enchanting. The same goes for their parallel stories of familial strife. “Hamnet” finds purpose once its second act surges forward a decade, offering welcome glimpses of the children’s sweet rapport and William’s creative mind at work (alongside a bickering troupe of thespians, including Bert Seymour’s amusing take on Richard Burbage). Yet Hamnet himself is hardly humanized before the plague tears him away.
For the “Hamnet” film, Buckley conceived of a devastating moment in which Agnes summons her late son’s memory and extends a compassionate hand — alongside dozens of Globe Theatre spectators — to the actor playing the Danish prince in the first performance of “Hamlet.” The stage version also ends with a rendition of “Hamlet” at the Globe, and it, too, ruminates on art as a vessel for grief. But where the film’s finale shrewdly fastened its threads of love and loss and artistic ambition, the play unravels in the absence of such a scene. Thus this “Hamnet” lands not with a wallop but with a whimper.
Hamnet Through April 12 at Shakespeare Theatre Company, 610 F St. NW. About 2 hours 30 minutes. shakespearetheatre.org.
Here’s a roundup of four other productions on D.C.-area stages:
‘Jonah’
“Jonah,” playwright Rachel Bonds’s unflinching meditation on abuse, trauma and trust, keeps your head spinning from the start. As boarding school teen Ana (Ismenia Mendes) tolerates the company of the disarming day student Jonah (Rohan Maletira) on an evening candy run, the actors stroll and zip and weave through Studio Theatre’s intimate space. Up one aisle, down the other. A few lines onstage, a few lines off.
The endearing meet-cute may telegraph one kind of play, but director Taylor Reynolds wants to keep the audience on its toes. Soon enough, there’s a flash of the fantastical. As Bonds cycles through different phases of Ana’s life and the men she encounters — Quinn M. Johnson’s volatile Danny and Louis Reyes McWilliams’s sweetly neurotic Steven — linear storytelling gives way to time-hopping ambiguity. Consider the script’s stated setting: “The past and the present. But everything is slippery.”
To know much more about the play’s enigmatic plotting would be to undermine its premise. But let me assure you, Bonds layers every disorienting twist and unnerving turn with surgical purpose. Along the way, Mendes deftly navigates Ana’s decades-spanning journey from a distressed 16-year-old to a nervy college kid to a guarded adult. It’s a sensational play that requires — and gets — a sensational star turn.
Jonah Through April 19 at Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW. About 1 hour 50 minutes. studiotheatre.org.
‘Inherit the Wind’
It’s not difficult to imagine why Arena Stage and director Ryan Guzzo Purcell would want to revisit “Inherit the Wind,” Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s 1955 play that fictionalizes the infamous 1925 Scopes trial. Starring Dakin Matthews as a big-shot lawyer prosecuting a small-town educator for teaching evolution, plus a magnetic Billy Eugene Jones as the swashbuckling defense attorney, the courtroom drama carries renewed resonance amid today’s tug-of-war over science, religion and what belongs in school curriculums.
Despite Purcell’s best efforts to shake the dust off the play — musical interludes showcase Rebecca Madeira’s lovely voice, and scenic designer Tanya Orellana dreamed up a striking desert set — the revival now playing on Arena’s Fichandler Stage reads like a relic. Sure, there’s a place for archetypal heroes, easy villains and reliable applause lines. But in these challenging times? Such pat drama is all too tidy.
Inherit the Wind Through April 5 at Arena Stage, 1101 Sixth St. SW. About 2 hours 10 minutes. arenastage.org.
‘As You Like It’
Folger Theatre’s staging of “As You Like It” is a similarly well-intentioned but scattershot attempt at reinvention. As developed by Folger artistic director Karen Ann Daniels and directed by Timothy Douglas, Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy — centered on the banished Rosalind (Tsilala Brock) and her love, Orlando (Manu Kumasi) — has gotten a vibrant, D.C.-centric makeover. Now, Capitol Hill ruthlessness stands in for the ruling kingdom, and U Street splendor represents the Arcadian forest Arden.
It’s a brilliant conceit, and one that works best when Kokayi’s go-go-inspired score livens the proceedings. The execution, however, is lacking for a production that doesn’t do enough to foreground its capital city influence and too often turns to anachronistic quips for cheap laughs. If the biggest reactions in a Shakespearean comedy come from undercutting the Bard, something’s gone amiss.
As You Like It Through April 19 at Folger Theatre, 201 East Capitol St. SE. About 2 hours 20 minutes. folger.edu.
‘Eureka Day’
Those seeking a good giggle need look no further than director Hayley Finn’s superb staging of “Eureka Day” at Theater J. Jonathan Spector’s 2018 play, about vaccine skepticism at a hyperprogressive California day school, includes an online town hall gone awry that ranks among modern theater’s more hysterical scenes.
Prodding at the funny bone without taking any violent jabs, Spector has unspooled a slick satire that preaches empathy for opposing (probably irrational) viewpoints while ultimately coming down on the side of cold, hard reason. Considering that this laugher premiered before the pandemic — and includes a single, spot-on allusion to covid-19 — Spector deserves some kind of retroactive Pulitzer Prize for prescience.
Eureka Day Through April 5 at Theater J, 1529 16th St. NW. About 1 hour 40 minutes. edcjcc.org/theater-j.
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