Thursday, October 26, 2006
A wayward take on 'Hamlet'
Review: Rude Guerrilla's staging shows the upsides and downsides of avant-garde German playwright's approach to theater.
By ERIC MARCHESE
Special to the Register

Like a bicycle whose parts are eventually replaced to the point where the original bike no longer exists, theater can be deconstructed to the point where it's no longer theater as we know it.
Call it daring or avant-garde or whatever other terms you wish to apply. Where would any art form be without experimentation?

For better or worse, German playwright, director, poet and prose writer Heiner Müller long ago began tearing at the fabric of conventional theater, starting with something akin to Brecht and moving more toward the absurdist works of Samuel Beckett. Now on stage at Rude Guerrilla Theater Company, Müller's drama "Hamletmachine" is an interdisciplinary exercise combining acting, poetry, music and choreography with elements of German Expressionism.

Often innovative, the production is a surreal experience that can only be described as quasi-absurdist Expressionism. Toss in its blend of other art forms and what you've got is basically 80 minutes of performance art. By the time he penned "Hamletmachine" (1977), Müller had sought to give directors, choreographers and designers of his plays wider latitude than you normally find in the world of theater, with each new production entirely different from preceding ones.

At Rude G, director Erika Tai and company use well-crafted video montages to amplify the play's essentially Marxist political statements. It's a daring staging with creativity to spare. In the end, though, the work is a sui generis whose disparate elements are more powerful than the evening as a whole.
Any resemblance to Shakespeare's "Hamlet," by the way, is almost incidental. Like so many absurdist works, this one offers no plot to speak of. The essential framework features Steven Parker as a nameless actor seemingly trapped in the lead role of an eternal, and infernal, production of "Hamlet."
Müller gives Parker's character the bulk of the spoken text – monologues, mostly, with only snippets of dialogue – all invested with anger, outrage, grief and madness by Parker. During much of their stage time, Parker, Jessica Topliff (as an actress portraying Ophelia) and the five-woman chorus are nude, a device whose only possible dramatic purpose might be interpreted as characters having nothing behind which to hide.

Tai and dramaturge Stephen Ludwig interpolate a stark, postmodern industrial landscape and, through Tai's silent video montages of World War II and the Iraq war, grotesque images of violence that allude to Müller's roots in postwar East Germany. In the same vein, Tai's dance steps pointedly incorporate the goose step and harsh, slashing movements presumably meant to convey the spirit of violence. Derrick Chan-sew's generally melancholy score and harsh sound effects provide an aural component that complements Tai's choreography.

>From a visual standpoint, the staging falls shy of its full potential. The video montages ricochet between images of President Bush and those of Adolph Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, eventually attacking the empty-headedness of American pop culture. While the latter is a blatantly obvious cliché, it's at least more potent than the political statement, whose point (that the president is a dictator) is pretty clear until Hussein and bin Laden appear – a bold yet wayward attempt at metaphor that sums up the flaws of this "machine."

Parker's scene design alludes to a 21st-century U.S. that's as much an embattled, impoverished post-Communist state as the Europe that surrounded Müller some 60 years ago – an intriguing construct the text fails to bear out. Just the same, the symbolism of the set, featuring a tattered American flag and a red, white and blue poster with the slogan "Freedom is never free," would be all the more powerful were the script attuned to similar concepts.

CONTACT US: Freelance writer Eric Marchese has covered entertainment for the Register since 1984. emarchesewriter@gmail.com

OC Weekly

To Be Liked or Not to Be Liked

Hamletmachine renders the point moot

By TOM CHILD

Thursday, November 2, 2006

Rude Guerrilla's production of Heiner Mueller's Hamletmachine is, if nothing

else, certainly one of the most naked presentations to appear on an Orange

County stage NOT advertised in the back pages of this paper. In keeping with the

company's reputation, many of the actors spend more time nude than clothed, but

the titillation factor wears off rather quickly when the naked actress in

question is wearing a paper Marx mask, reciting quotations about Capitalist

class structure and pointing a mirror in your face.

Your appreciation of Hamletmachine will hinge upon your tolerance for theater

that is utterly self-conscious, deliberately difficult, alienating and German.

If you've already groaned in incredulity multiple times at this description,

well . . . mission accomplished.

The play's desire to challenge one's expectations about what capital-t theater

is gives it an artistically dubious ambiguity that renders it impervious to

criticism. Didn't like the play? Found it pretentious and boring? Well, that's

precisely the point! Loved the play? Found it entertaining and intellectually

challenging? Well, that's precisely the point, too.

And I did find it worthwhile--though, like many a psychedelic experience, the

thoughts and emotions it provoked in me seemed far less profound the morning

after. The dialogue's fast pace and oblique references force the viewer to

surrender any desire for narrative coherency and instead focus on what emotions

and thoughts are provoked by whatever snippets of imagery one CAN grasp.

The audience's mind is forced to work nearly as hard as the performers onstage

and, in the end, you're left with more questions about artistic meaning and

human nature than you had coming in. But are these questions really worth

spending time investigating--or is Hamletmachine little more than intellectual

masturbation, as useless in practical application as the books of philosophy by

which the lead actor is assaulted during the opening scenes? Either way,

Hamletmachine fulfills its intent. All it demands is that we feel one way or

another about it, and it certainly achieves that. Is it a good play? I thought

so. You may not. And in the eyes of Hamletmachine, we're both wrong.