Ophelia by Bread and Puppet Theater at Theater for the New City (review)

Reviewed by: Opheliaby Bread and Puppet Theater at Theater for the New City Geoffrey Lokke OpheliaPresented by Bread and Puppet Theater at Theater for the New City, New York, NY. 8–1812 2022. Directed by Peter Schumann. With Ziggy Bird, Teresa Camou, Adam Cook, Gideon Crevoshay, Maura Gahan, Alicia Gerstein, David Guzman, Peter Hamburger, May Hathaway, Ira Karp, Esteli Kitchen, Ariella Mandel, Idith Meshulam, Damian Norfleet, Raphael Royer, Elsa Saade, Maria Schumann, Dalila Trottola, and others. Bread and Puppet, a Vermont-based company that has been led by founder Peter Schumann since the early 1960s, has had a marked influence on contemporary puppetry in America and beyond. Schumann's many acolytes and collaborators include major puppetry-based artists such as Julie Taymor, Roman Paska, and Massimo Schuster; likewise, according to puppetry historian John Bell, a number of significant theater companies have been directly inspired by Schumann's giant puppetry, theatrical circus, stilt dancing, and/or community-based Leftist politics, including Amy Trompetter's Redwing Black Bird Theater, Chicago's Redmoon Theater, and Les Échassiers de Baie-Saint-Paul, which later became Cirque du Soleil. In recent years, Schumann's productions have ranged from didactic cabarets with skits focused on police brutality, reparations, industrial action, and Israeli apartheid, to more confounding and, in a sense, exegetically demanding adaptations of classical plays, including Aeschylus's The Persians, a work of lament staged directly following the death of Schumann's wife and collaborator, Elka. Bread and Puppet Theater's recent Hamletadaptation, entitled Ophelia, was also an elegiac piece, which, as my partner Lachlan Brooks noticed, set the last moments of its heroine's life to a sepulchral, choral arrangement of Gluck's aria "Che farò senza Euridice" from his 1762 opera Orfeo ed Euridice. Before the twentieth century, according to Ralph Berry, Shakespearean doubles were not considered to be "conceptual"; rather, the doubling of roles for a single actor was done simply out of necessity (due to limitations in the number of actors), or as a vehicle for a performer to demonstrate his or her virtuosity (204). Conceptual doubling, however, "brings a hidden relationship to light," in which the meaning of the production depends on viewers engaging this relationship (208). Radical or avant-garde doubling, then, requires viewers to make senseof the proposed relationship, and invites the audience to assess the legitimacyof the linkage. Moreover, experimental forms of doubling necessarily do something to Shakespeare's words and their perceived substance. Opheliawas perhaps more radical [End Page 281]than most, and its mesmerizing effects both transformed the genre of Hamlet's utterances from lyric to oracle, and frustrated viewers like myself as we self-consciously engaged the enmindment of doubled performers. The doubling at the heart of Opheliawas between the title character and Hamlet. Throughout the performance, Schumann's grandson, Ira Karp, a fifteen-year-old boy who recited Hamlet's better-known soliloquies, wore a large placard with "OPHELIA" written out by hand upon it. Karp, who has Trisomy 21 Down syndrome, did not speak any of Ophelia's words as found in Shakespeare's play. Curiously, none of Ophelia's speech appeared elsewhere in the production, nor did any of Hamlet's dialogue spoken to or directly about her. (Gertrude's news of Ophelia's death, however, were included and transposed for Karp.) This Ophelia/Hamlet was eventually joined onstage by three giant papier-mâché puppets: two appeared to be the dead king, whose head repeatedly tumbled away, with his brother Claudius standing naked behind him. Soon after, another naked figure appeared, badly scorched or perhaps covered in earth, with the scrawled text of Hamlet's "O, that this too too sullied flesh" soliloquy cascading down its body. Whenever Karp spoke Hamlet's words, he was always accompanied by Adam Cook, who supplemented and emended Karp's occasional pauses, elisions, and slurred speech. Later, Cook, this time without Karp, brought out a wooden schoolteacher's pointer and slowly atomized the words on the sullied flesh, obliterating both iambic pentameter and, above all else, the text's substance through his labored inventory of every which lexeme and syllable. According to some of the company...