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| Rachel Luann Strayer |
Water is a powerful agent. It is a lubricant. It is an adhesive. It can cleanse. It can kill you.
The use of actual water onstage can be as disorienting as nudity. Each, handled in appropriately, can take you out of the production.
Because water is an uncertain element. You can slip. You can fall. And then there's the whole just being wet part.
In Bloody Poetry, as John Polidori I had to enter wet. I had fallen out of a boat (offstage) and had to enter dripping. For Lysistrata, buckets of water were dumped on people, so much so that one hot weekend an actual fog was generated onstage due to the water and the heat.
That last production was produced at Cleveland Public Theatre, where I have seen a great deal of water used on stage, in Melissa Crum's haunting production of The Drowning Girls, and in several of Rayond Bobgan's devised works. I recall Open Mind Firmament, which concludes with W.B. Yeats (Brett Keyser) sweeping torrents of water into the air, caught by the light, sweeping in fractured arcs.
Hamlet is an inscrutible play. Shakespeare is usually pretty straight-forward. If someone is sad, it is because we just saw what has made them sad or, failing that, they will just tell us why they are sad.
Hamlet, the man, in spite of all his talk, leaves things out. Or he doesn't make sense. We are missing bits. Unfortunately, trying to divine his motivation has made people question the motivation of everyone else in this play, in spite of their more traditional Shakespearean behavior.
Ophelia tells her father that Hamlet has courted her in "honorable fashion." We should believe her, but few do. His smutty talk at the play leaves many to assume they have had sex, but it's his smutty talk. Later, she sings bawdy songs which many take to believe as commenting on their carnal experience, even going so far as to suggest that she is pregnant. Shakespeare is usually more unfront about such things.
Why does Ophelia go mad? It is because her lover rejected her and then murdered her father. Her lover murdered her father, Occam's razor.
Strayer's Drowning Ophelia is a survivor's tale, of a woman's journey to rise above the brokenness and betrayal one feels when abused by a beloved family member, one whose departure makes confrontation impossible.
Ophelia never had the opportunity to confront her abuser, and so Hamlet gets to move forward feeling as though he got something wrong and feel bad about it. Strayer's protagonist also grapples to attain peace through action, fighting madness, and we are left to hope that she some day will.
Who should I read tomorrow?
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