HAMLET
Central Park
Delacorte Theater
Tuesday – Sunday through August 6, free, 8:00
shakespeareinthepark.org

Don’t let the recent parade of Hamlets stop you from seeing Kenny Leon’s incisive adaptation that opened last week at the Public’s Delacorte Theater in Central Park.

There has been a surfeit of faithful versions and unique reimaginings of William Shakespeare’s 1599–1601 tragedy in New York City since 2015, from Robert Icke’s staging at Park Ave. Armory with Alex Lawther in the title role, Yaël Farber’s variation at St. Ann’s Warehouse starring Ruth Negga, and James Ijames’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Fat Ham at the Public and on Broadway with Marcel Spears to the Public Theater Mobile Unit’s traveling show with Chukwudi Iwuji, Michael Laurence’s Hamlet in Bed at Rattlestick, and Thomas Ostermeier and Theater Schaubühne Berlin’s iteration at BAM with Lars Eidinger.

Tony winner Leon turns this Hamlet into a kind of sequel to his 2019 Delacorte triumph, a rollicking modern-day interpretation of Much Ado About Nothing that took place at a Georgia estate prominently displaying “Abrams 2020” banners, referring to two-time former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. Set designer Beowulf Boritt is back, tearing the estate in half; one part of the house is sinking into the ground, an Abrams poster sticking out at an angle, like a lonely, overturned grave marker, while a black SUV is stuck in the mud on the other side. It is as if a tornado, or a dangerous presidency, ripped through the land, leaving America in tatters, the white tiles on the grass evoking a cemetery. (The Delacorte itself will be torn down after this summer’s Hamlet and Public Works presentation of The Tempest to undergo a major renovation; it is scheduled to reopen in 2025.)

The central facade features a large portrait of a military hero in full dress uniform, looking like a dictator: the previous king’s funeral is just getting underway as a quartet performs three biblical hymns alongside a flag-draped coffin. “When you go, you’ll have to go alone / When you go, you’ll have to go alone / No one in this world / Can take your journey / When you go, you’ll have to go alone,” they sing. Leon adds in Harry Belafonte’s “Day-o,” an out-of-place tribute to the recently deceased artist and activist, but he also gives us a lovely introduction to Ophelia (Solea Pfeiffer), who offers, “You and Me (No Love Stronger).” Ophelia is given more agency than usual in this adaptation as she considers her affection for Hamlet (Ato Blankson-Wood).

“For Hamlet, and the trifling of his favor, / Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood, / A violet in the youth of primy nature, / Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting, / The perfume and suppliance of a minute, / No more,” Laertes (a firm Nick Rehberger) warns his sister before leaving.

Ophelias’s father and Claudius’s chief counsel, Polonius (Daniel Pearce), admonishes, “In few, Ophelia, do not believe his vows, / I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth / Have you so slander any moment leisure / As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet. / Look to ’t, I charge you. Come your ways.”

The dead king’s brother, Claudius (John Douglas Thompson), has quickly gained the throne by marrying his brother’s widow, Gertrude (Lorraine Toussaint). Deeply affected by this turn of events, Hamlet feels like he is alone. “A little more than kin and less than kind,” he whispers to the audience about his new stepfather. Blankson-Wood is brilliant as Hamlet slowly descends into madness, with Leon exploring the character’s state of mind more insightfully than I can remember ever seeing before.

Hamlet is soon visited by the ghost of his father, who appears like a distorted monster, projected onto the gable of the house, his otherworldly voice (recorded by Samuel L. Jackson) explaining to his son that Claudius murdered him; he proclaims, “Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.” At one point Allen Lee Hughes’s lighting casts the shadow of Hamlet’s head across his father’s portrait, suggesting that he will never be able to escape from the former king’s legacy. (The lighting is by Allen Lee Hughes, with sound by Justin Ellington and projections by Jeff Sugg.)

Claudius calls for Hamlet’s old friends Rosencrantz (Mitchell Winter) and Guildenstern (Brandon Gill) to spy on him. Meanwhile, Hamlet arranges for a traveling troupe of players (Mikhail Calliste, Lauryn Hayes, LaWanda Hopkins, and Colby Lewis) to put on a show that will reveal to the king that Hamlet knows that he is a liar and a murderer. “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king,” he says. The players perform a rap song, Jason Michael Webb’s “Cold World,” which features such un-Shakespearean lyrics as “Days are precious when you’re livin’ in a warzone / Tryna live, heart heavy like a diamond / City’s cold, but the streets are even colder / Gotta get out ’fore they say my time is over.” When Hamlet describes the plot, with its murder and marriage, Claudius gets up and storms off. The battle is on.

Leon (Topdog/Underdog, A Soldier’s Play) streamlines the play to a mere two hours and forty-five minutes with intermission, eliminating the subplot of the Norwegian crown prince Fortinbras, who mounts a challenge to Hamlet after Hamlet’s father slays his father. We don’t see Barnardo (Trí Lê), Horatio (Warner Miller), and Marcellus (Lance Alexander Smith) initially encounter the ghost. There is no mention of any state being “rotten,” no “to the manner born,” no “thoughts be bloody,” but none of that is missed.

Polonius is wonderfully portrayed by Pearce (Mother of the Maid, Timon of Athens) as a persnickety, bow-tied southern gentleman in a seersucker suit. Thompson, one of our greatest classical actors whether doing Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice), Eugene O’Neill (The Iceman Cometh), or August Wilson (Jitney), is stirring as Claudius, commanding the stage with a moving vulnerability, while Toussaint (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Stuff Happens) is a worthy cohort, finding compassion for her son even as her husband grows more combative. Greg Hildreth (Company, Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow) nearly steals the show as the gravedigger, who uses skulls like bowling balls.

The staging does supply some significant problems. As opposed to Leon’s Much Ado About Nothing, which was set in modern-day Atlanta, it is not clear when and where his Hamlet unfolds, in Denmark, Georgia, or a different location. While Much Ado had an all Black and brown cast, Hamlet has several Caucasian actors. There are subtle references to what is happening in Trump-era America, the dialogue is spoken with a flowing style, and Jessica Jahn’s costumes are contemporary dress, from Claudius’s blue suit to Laertes’s dungaree jacket to Hamlet’s hoodie and Ophelia’s revealing bustier. So impressive in Much Ado, the car now seems like an excess prop. Leon might be attempting to meld past with present, but it can cause confusion, as when letters are delivered during a time when SUVs and 2020 placards are present.

Following in the footsteps of such actors as Sarah Bernhardt, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Nicol Williamson, Mel Gibson, Kenneth Branagh, and Ethan Hawke — and, at the Delacorte itself, Michael Stuhlbarg in 2000, Sam Waterston in 1975, Stacy Keach in 1972, and Albert Ryder in 1964 — Blankson-Wood (Slave Play, The Total Bent) is a Hamlet for these times. His journey into madness has a method in it, a young man troubled by what he sees going on all around him, with his parents, his girlfriend, and the ruling class.

“I will be brief. Your noble son is mad. / ‘Mad’ call I it, for, to define true madness, / What is ’t but to be nothing else but mad?” Polonius says to Claudius. Blankson-Wood’s Hamlet is no skulking college student or shy mama’s boy; he is a prince trying to find his way in a complex and dangerous world, one that provides no sympathy. He delivers six of Hamlet’s seven soliloquies (“How all occasions do inform against me” has been cut) with a thoughtful, understated tenderness, not demanding attention to himself but instead to the character’s search for an unreachable inner peace.

It’s heartbreaking but, after all, Hamlet is a tragedy, no matter where or when it is set.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]