"Hamletmachine"
✭✭✭1/2
Heiner Muller's "shrunken head of the Hamlet tragedy," as the playwright once described it, takes the bones of Shakespeare's tormented Danish prince and covers them in raw poetry and hallucinatory imagery. Seeing it onstage is like watching a Francis Bacon portrait come to life, waltzing while juggling switchblades. Elegant and scabrous, fearsome and ironic, and — let's face it — far from everyone's cup of tea, it's pretty much tailor-made for the sensibilities of Trap Door Theatre and director Max Truax.
Truax, one of the most visually, well, visionary directors in Chicago's storefront scene, has upped the ante for this seldom-produced piece from 1977 even more by staging it as a chamber opera. Jonathan Guillen's spare but insinuating score serves as a threnody for the lost souls of Hamlet, Ophelia, and Gertrude — the first of whom is played by three actors and the second by two. And in the process, it also becomes a dirge for the 20th century's age of chaos and irreparable ruptures.
Identities aren't merely split in Muller's text (translated by Carl Weber) — they are practically annihilated. "I was Hamlet. I stood at the shore and talked with the surf, the ruins of Europe in back of me" repeats Antonio Brunetti's version of the prince at the outset. Later, David Steiger's incarnation, who has mostly been standing statue-still, launches into a long monologue about witnessing an uprising from behind bullet-proof glass. "I'm not Hamlet. I don't take part anymore," he claims. Rich Logan's brooding Dane eventually turns himself into Ophelia, clad in a transparent plastic dress (Nevena Todorovic's costumes and Zsofia Otvos' makeup designs are perfectly in sync with Truax's epic grunge motifs), while Sadie Rogers and Tiffany Joy Ross trade off as the doomed girl — the former hypnotic in her baby-faced vulnerability, the latter angular and edgy. Lyndsay Rose Kane turns her Gertrude into a venomous coquette one moment, an anguished victim of circumstance the next.
Not all the actors are assured singers — but pretty isn't the point here. And Truax partners with production designer Richard Norwood to turn Trap Door's shoebox stage into a sparse wasteland peppered with arresting metaphors, from the red crosses arrayed at the edge of the map of Denmark painted on the floor to the translucent plastic curtains that become the watery grave of Ophelia.
Make no mistake — if you're looking for a simple dissection of Shakespeare's themes of action vs. inaction, Muller's not your man. But if you're willing to suspend the need for soothing narrative clarity, Truax's "Hamletmachine" might haunt you days later.
Through Feb. 12 at the Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W. Cortland Ave.; tickets are $20 at 773-384-0494 or trapdoortheatre.com