Few sights are as chilling as the ghost of Hamlet, Sr. in silhouette moving slowly through the arabesque in Waterwell’s excellent production of Hamlet at the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture. Wearing a tall hat befitting an Arab prince, this figure has presence and authority, a Hyperion among satyrs, to riff on his son’s description, especially as compared to Claudius, the king’s brother who, looking a bit like the town tailor, rendered him a specter by pouring poison in his ear. Hamlet’s burden is to avenge his father’s murder. No spoiler here. Almost everyone is familiar with the plot of Shakespeare’s play; however, in language spiced with Farsi, the creative team – particularly, the star Arian Moayed who adapted this play and director Tom Ridgely— mixes themes of identity and geography with the familiar Freudian spin. Set in pre-WWI Persia, the play’s political leap into modernity, its cycles of violence, progress and reactionary force, parallel Persia becoming Iran.

The program supplies a hint as to what’s at stake: cast members and crew noted first by country of origin and then by year of arrival in America, this insistence upon knowing history timely indeed. And just to pick on another way this Hamlet makes you look at the play anew: the women, Gertrude and Ophelia. With Sherie Rene Scott as Gertrude, an Anglo, blond, like a ‘50’s wife her options are limited. In Hamlet’s view she’s a deceitful whore. Here she plays her part with her new husband when he gifts her a Victrola that plays “Please Be Kind” and she seems merry in dance with Claudius. In the famous bedroom scene, she is anguished that Hamlet’s gone mad. A transplant from another time and place, what choices does she have to change anything about her circumstance? And Ophelia, in every version seems struck down by Hamlet’s insistence upon the nunnery. In this one, Hamlet seems merely to wish to shelter her from this world of “seems” or more in today’s lingo, alternative facts.

A word about the music: the stage is in the round. A small ensemble performs Mohsen Namjoo’s music, with Yahya Alkhansa, from one corner. The ethnic flavor ought to signal our debt to world culture, and embrace its inclusion all the more.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura