Dramaturg’s Note
By: Kim Greenawalt, Gamut Theatre Dramaturg
March of 2020: move home from working with a jousting company, their contract outside of Miami having been cut short due to a disease called COVID-19.
Fast forward to March 2021: I am now cleaning out a desk, finally able to return to in-person work at Gamut Theatre with vaccines on the horizon, not only for myself but for my family. While taking stock of what was in the drawers of this new desk, I stumbled upon student artwork for Hamlet--the same play Gamut would be presenting for Free Shakespeare in the Park in June of 2021.
Hamlet. Where to even start? Why not with student artwork? The drawings I found appeared to be posters, created by Gamut Theatre Summer Academy students working on this particular play. Thematically, these posters were great; the students clearly understood the major events and images presented in the play. Many featured knives or swords dripping with blood. Others featured a single flower. Some featured poison. Others had the iconic skull associated with Yorrick and Hamlet’s graveyard scene. Two even punned off the name Hamlet, utilizing pigs. I would pay good money to see a mashup of Animal Farm and Hamlet. But I digress.
How would these posters be different if they were drawn in 2020, 2021, and beyond? We’ve all been irrevocably changed by a global pandemic that has claimed 3.32 million lives worldwide and approximately 560,000 lives in the United States.
To me, in this almost-but-not-quite post-pandemic world, Hamlet’s grief hits differently. Children losing parents, siblings, hasty funerals--its all now too familiar. Hamlet’s quest to prove his father was murdered by his uncle, regardless of the consequences, becomes much more plausible as, in our nation’s haste to place blame for the virus on the Chinese, we enabled a surge of hate crimes against Asian Americans. Denmark as a prison has new meaning with travel bans and anti-intellectualism rears its head in Claudius and Gertrude’s request that Hamlet does not return to university. After all, Wittenberg’s most famous alumnus was Martin Luther--the man who overthrew the Catholic Church. We have all experienced the gaslighting of Ophelia--I loved you not--as politicians claimed the pandemic was no worse than the flu, claimed election fraud despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and downplayed the Capital insurrection. Hamlet’s murder of Polonia, for which he faces no repercussions by the state on top of the already planned deportation smarts of the non-violent apprehension of white male mass shooters. Laertes knowing, with the contraction of poison--or a disease--that he’s been sentenced to die,--those not with us today may have known that feeling this past year. I could go on, but surely I’ve made my point.
Kids are smart: their posters would be different now. Should ours be different now? No amount of set dressing, fabrics, and 80’s music can obscure that we live in a different world than that of one to two years ago. I hope Hamlet can give this new world some meaning for our audiences and that folks can take what they need from this production, whether it be time to grieve what’s been lost, time to giggle at puns, or time to commune with the outdoors and with other humans.