Review: Death By a Thousand Cuts

"Hamlet," Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, May 28- July 6, 2025

June 7, 2025 | By Bruce R. Feldman

In Brief: If you go to see Hamlet at the Mark Taper Forum, it’s likely you won’t get what you expect. It’s also a good bet that whether you approve of what Robert O’Hara has done with – or to – Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy will depend on your age and how well you know the play.

Patrick Ball as Hamlet at the Mark Taper Forum (Photo: Jeff Lorch)

O’Hara’s “adaptation” of Hamlet starts out more or less as the Bard wrote it, though with a few notable changes and some big emphasis shifts.

The text has been truncated to an hour in length, removing a few minor characters and some major speeches and scenes. Polonius’ advice to Laertes (“To thine own self be true”) is gone, as is Hamlet’s death scene and Horatio’s farewell speech ("Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest").

Instead of the usual opening in which Bernardo and Marcellus encounter the ghost of the dead king, Hamlet’s father, the first thing we see when the lights come up, before any words are spoken, is a torrid, explicit love scene between Hamlet and Ophelia.

Later we learn that, in this version, Hamlet has a thing for his friend Horatio, too. Who knew?

And O’Hara frames everything as an Elsinore Pictures Production, with a projected movie title sequence and a castle that looks more like Norma Desmond’s creepy mansion in Sunset Boulevard than the dark medieval fortress from Olivier’s Hamlet.

Yes, this is a modern, "relevant," American gloss on Shakespeare, with kitschy contemporary costumes, flashy digital effects and projections, hip-hop music, sexual ambiguity, and a mostly capable multi-racial cast.

The ghost of Hamlet's father appears as a projection (Photo: Jeff Lorch)

All of these convulsions, which last about an hour, turn out to be merely a foretaste of the muddle to come.

In the second half, O’Hara abandons Shakespeare altogether by writing his own take on what happened that night. He introduces a new character, a trench-coat attired detective (Joe Chrest), to question some of the players.

It turns out that the murders didn’t occur at Elsinore, but at the Elsinore Pictures studio lot, and the board of directors is concerned that their stock and reputation might suffer if the details get out.

At this point we are wondering if we are watching Shakespeare or Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap or CNBC – and why?

The  melancholic prince is mostly absent during this second half, as O’Hara makes painfully clear that he is less interested in the character’s descent into revenge and madness and more concerned with an unclear invention of his own making.

It takes a mighty talent to pull something like this off.

Some have succeeded in rewriting or reframing Shakespeare. Tom Stoppard’s inspired Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead comes to mind, as does Cole Porter’s masterful Kiss Me, Kate, which always seems to be successfully revived somewhere, as it currently is in a lauded new London production.

It’s to their credit that the cast takes this gobbledygook seriously, starting with Patrick Ball, an intense, charismatic actor who excels in the title role and would make a very satisfying Hamlet in a more traditional production.

Jakeem Powell makes a favorable impression as Hamlet’s main man Horatio, as does Gina Torres as Hamlet’s faithless mother. The actors playing Claudius, Polonius, and Ophelia are less compelling.

Sitting through this two-hour with no intermission production takes some effort, at least for the older audience members in the center section who didn’t laugh much at the humor, some of which seemed unintentional.

The young people in the back and on the sides appeared to enjoy the show more. Did they know the play? Did they have preconceived notions of what the play should or could be? Perhaps neither. Or perhaps they didn’t care. It is, after all, their world now.

“Hamlet,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 628-2772, www.centertheatregroup.org