Wear black and talk softly, withdraw from the crowd and train your mind on higher things—it’s strange how much of the etiquette of grief is also a shortcut to cultivating an aura of sexy mystery. Maybe that’s the logic behind casting Ato Blankson-Wood, an increasingly and justly busy actor around New York, in the title role of the new Shakespeare in the Park production of “Hamlet,” at the Delacorte. Blankson-Wood has a world-class sulk—onstage, he pouts and rolls his eyes and projects intense dissatisfaction before he ever delivers a line. A few years ago, in Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play,” he played Gary, a gay Black man whose partner couldn’t—or, more precisely, wouldn’t—acknowledge the repercussions of their racial differences. Gary was a magnetic malcontent, for whom pain and sex appeal went hand in hand and seemed to spring from the same source.
There’s something similar happening with Blankson-Wood’s depiction of the theatre’s most famous mourner. His Hamlet is bereft but flirtatious, abusive in speech but stylish in dress, lividly angry but under his own perfect control, mixed in emotion and motive and utterly impossible to read. This is less a take on Hamlet—an assertion that he’s mad, or juvenile, or the only truly sane character in the kingdom—than a further blurring of the many colors that the play provides. There’s “mirth in funeral” and “dirge in marriage,” and, in Blankson-Wood’s interpretation, a hint of eros that plays against the chaos that comes after death. That eroticism is often aimed in odd, Oedipal directions: in this rendering of the text, Hamlet seems to have absolutely no past or present interest in Ophelia (Solea Pfeiffer), to whom he’s been sending declarations of love, but speaks with a strikingly emphasized suggestiveness to his mother, Gertrude (Lorraine Toussaint), and to his uncle, Claudius (John Douglas Thompson), the new king and Gertrude’s new husband.
New York audiences were recently treated to the German director Thomas Ostermeier’s “Hamlet,” starring Lars Eidinger, who eats cemetery dirt and gets wet in the rain and plays wall-breaking games with the audience. Blankson-Wood’s Hamlet would never. He’s undone but strangely put together—his mourning clothes look designer. We’re being tricked, but I’m not sure exactly how, or in which direction. With a few exceptions, Hamlet’s “hectic” blood is strangely cool.
Blankson-Wood’s multifaceted, ultimately unsettled approach may be an outflow of the tendencies of his director, Kenny Leon, who never misses an opportunity to let that hundredth flower bloom. The production is set, we’re told in the program notes, in Atlanta, in 2021. Hamlet’s father was—as we gather from a huge painted portrait that looms upstage—a member of the United States Marine Corps. In a kind of prologue to the action of the play, at the father’s funeral, people come up, one by one or in solemn pairs, to the casket where his body lies, apparently still intimidated by him in death. Off to the side of the stage, in what looks like a ruined lawn (Beowulf Boritt designed the set), is a capsized “Stacy Abrams 2020” banner—a holdover from Leon’s Shakespeare in the Park production of “Much Ado About Nothing,” in 2019. A praise team sings in tight harmony to send the great man off. The production seems to want to say something about a decadent America skipping past opportunities for hope on its way down a nihilistic drain, but that line of meaning is never fully pursued.
Instead of a unitary idea, Leon—whose specialty is spectacle—offers a wide-ranging, endlessly inclusive Gesamtkunstwerk, in which song and dance can appear to be just as important as Shakespeare’s text. The setting looks like a spoiled upper-middle-class utopia, a horrified Alpharetta, Georgia, of the mind, where, in better days, a family like Hamlet’s would sit in an air-conditioned living room, sipping lemonade and listening to Sade. Sometimes the production seems to want to tip over into a full musical, with songs playing contrapuntally against the story of the Dane.
At points, the show is more of a cabaret than a narrative aimed like a dagger at the heart. The advantage of that loose approach is that each of the actors in the ensemble surrounding Blankson-Wood gets to put their own best foot forward, rather than following any strong thread of interpretation put forward by Leon. I’ve never felt more sympathy for the murderous Claudius than I did in this production, in which he’s carved by Thompson down to hand-wringing human size. Toussaint’s Gertrude is thrillingly vulnerable—her fear and guilt and trepidation are, at every point, visible in her body and audible in her speech. Daniel Pearce’s Polonius becomes heartwarming comic relief, his prolix speeches running together into an anxious, often hilarious slurry. Poor Ophelia is portrayed soulfully by Pfeiffer; Laertes, Ophelia’s vengeful brother, is played with admirable intensity by Nick Rehberger.
I was especially tickled by Warner Miller’s take on Hamlet’s dependable pal Horatio—here, he’s an around-the-way guy, not easily excitable, the kind of dude who’s standing on the corner when you leave for work and somewhere near the same spot when you’re on your way home. You know he’s had an active day, full of talk and business, but you’d never think to ask after each of his moves. If he gives you advice, you shut up and gratefully take it.
When, early on, Hamlet and Horatio are up late, looking out for Hamlet’s dad’s ghost, you trust that the errand isn’t frivolous precisely because cool Horatio’s there, taking part. When the spectre does arrive, bearing the fratricidal news of his final hour, one of the best and most focussed moments of Blankson-Wood’s performance follows. Instead of using another actor to fill the father’s figure, Leon shows Hamlet being possessed by his dead father—Blankson-Wood mouths the ghost’s portentous speech. His slinky physicality suddenly becomes regal and strange. His eyes roll back into his head. Fire might as well be spouting from the tips of his fingers. That’s another unexpected thing about grief, how it coaxes you into an attempt at becoming the other, taking on their tics and savoring how they used to talk, fishing a ring out of their jewelry box and stuffing it onto your finger—all evidence of a great hope that, by embodying those details, you might permanently save them.
Leon’s interest in creating a kind of party onstage has its charms, but I ended up wishing that this production had followed the curious, perhaps narrower path laid out by Blankson-Wood’s performance. As it stands, Hamlet’s great monologues seem like grand but fatuous excuses for his chaotic vigilantism, not language born organically from the parallel pressures of sadness and filial loyalty.
Listening to the music of the conversations between Hamlet and Horatio, I kept thinking about the King and Queen’s constant admonishments that Hamlet go abroad—he needs a bit of travel, the idea goes, to help him cool off and shake the worst of his sorrow. For the first time, I thought that his mom and stepdad might be right. I can imagine a quieter play, off to the side of Shakespeare’s but doubling its themes, showing this contemporary American Hamlet on the road. He might go sleep in a friend’s extra room in L.A., or seek shelter in a New England summer home, or take his black carry-on bag across the Atlantic, sowing tears like seeds in lonely hotel rooms all over Europe.
Blankson-Wood has all the goods to play that lost young man, not adrift amid sudden songs but trying to sort out the cacophony of anger and pain, recrimination and confusion, paranoia and sexual suggestion that’s clanging around inside his head. He might come back even more unscrewed, but one would hope that the trip could mark a reëntry into society. The way back from the graveside to the wider world is strewn with petals fallen from the flower of love. You might need to be alone, far from your family, to bend down and gather them, one by one. ♦
