Hamlet by Jack Kerouac - or - You Crazy Dane

Professor Street Theater

Guerrilla Theater Company opened the doors at the Professor Street Theater thirty years ago today, on Friday, October 23, 1992. Our production was called You Have the Right to Remain Silent! which was fashioned as a game show, with the audience playing games to select from a list of titles which of twenty-one short plays we would perform next.

If that sounds like the Neo-Futurists, you're not wrong. Anyone performing short plays in a random order could be accused of the same, but the plays were original, and so were we.

That night we actually recorded the show on cassette tape. The performance sounds a bit rough, but it was opening night and I am still amazed we got through it. We were so young, and callow.

The show started with two plays, back-to-back, about toxic masculinity. Like, they both feature men shouting horrible things at women. Makes me wonder if some members of the audience were concerned about what they’d gotten themselves into.

Then there’s Hamlet by Jack Kerouac, which some might have heard before, even if they’d never been to Guerrilla, as I cannibalized the entire piece for These Are the Times. It’s one of two pieces I had written which were in the half of the performance that was recorded. It’s just the kind of cerebral drollery you might expect from a theatrical hipster.

The less said about the other piece I had written, the better. Let’s just say the propensity for young Cleveland actors to complain about their being shut out of local professional theater companies is nothing recent.