Hamlet at the Great Lakes Theater

Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich (Ohio State University, Mansfield)

Cleveland’s Great Lakes Theater, a regional company dedicated to bringing “the pleasure, power and relevance of classic theater to the widest possible audience,” rarely performs Shakespeare in early modern dress and tends to set productions in modern eras. [1] But for the seventh Hamlet in its history, the company costumed actors in Elizabethan dress and transformed its thrust stage into a semi-Globe or Blackfriars Theater to focus instead on its “dual Hamlets,” one male and one female, who alternated performances.

In his program notes, Director Charles Fee speculates that the role of Hamlet transcends any one interpretation, and he suggests that alternating Hamlets might reveal the character’s “divided soul.” But the two Hamlets produced a substantially different effect. The presence of another Hamlet on a different night encouraged the audience to understand the character as multi-faceted, but the two versions advanced a single interpretation of Hamlet as an antic character implicated in his culture’s misogyny. As the two Hamlets presumably urged a more intense focus on the title character, the production actually implied that Hamlet’s personality and actions might not matter to the play’s unfolding or the world around him.

The two actors playing Hamlet seem to have worked together to achieve similar portrayals. Laura Welsh Berg’s Hamlet was…