Playwright: William Shakespeare,
adapted by David Zak
At: Deaf Bailiwick Artists at Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont Ave.
Phone: (773) 883-1090; $20
Runs through: April 19
David Zak's stripped-down account of murder and intrigue in the Danish Court would be playable in any context. All of Shakespeare's Greatest Hits—the soliloquies, the duel, the players, Polonius' platitudes, the Mommie-Dearest confrontation in the queen's boudoir, the 'get thee to a nunnery' split-up—are preserved intact. Missing are most of the auxiliary characters (to the disappointment of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern fans), their onstage time devoted to scenes making clear Hamlet's relationship to Ophelia—our first sight of them is of lovers lying next one another in cozy, if chaste, intimacy—and his sacrifice in the course of bringing his wicked uncle to justice.
So it would have been easy to simply tuck a pair of sign-language interpreters into a corner of the stage, forcing hearing-impaired playgoers to shift their visual focus away from the play's action in order to follow the text. But this Deaf Bailiwick Artists production takes the more difficult challenge of integrating the simultaneous translation into the very staging of the play. And since visual and aural communication always take focus over verbal—we see and hear long before we learn to speak, after all—soon even hearing audience members find themselves concentrating on the kinetic, rather than the spoken, dialogue.
Robert Schleifer, with vocal assistance from Aaron Preusse, contribute a bravura performance as the Melancholy Dane, the customary demands of that role exacerbated by abridgments greatly curtailing his offstage time. Likewise engaging is the quick-tempered Laertes played by Michael J. Stark and voiced by Derek Czaplewski, the teamwork of the four men rendering Aaron Christensen's choreography in the climactic duel as suspenseful as if we didn't know the outcome. And while Candace Hart and Beth Lipinksi together make a winsome Ophelia, the former's silent lament emerges as all the more heartbreaking without the intellectual distraction of speech.
'Words! Words! Words!' scoffs Hamlet at one point, dismissing the contents of his book as so much persiflage. To be sure, some of the exclusively speaking actors (notably, Joseph E. Hudson's Claudius) seem a trifle neglected in this production. But never have words been so unnecessary as in this familiar classic made fresh as if newly minted.