Bedlam at McCarter: An OK 'Hamlet' - and a masterpiece with 'Saint Joan'

Bedlam is a high-talent, New York theater company that won me as a fan the first time I saw them perform. Their Sense and Sensibility is a wildly "devised" adaptation of Jane Austen's comedy of manners, and you couldn't ask for a more delectable, theatrical, inventive, and completely charming show.

But Hamlet is not a comedy of manners; it's not even a tragedy of manners, and so this Bedlam show, running in repertory with their production of Shaw's St. Joan at the McCarter Theatre Center, is a whole different story.

Why do a three-hour Hamlet with only four actors? Three answers spring to mind:

Number 3 has its advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes the audience laughed appreciatively at the split-second switches -- clap a hat on Laertes' head and he becomes Horatio -- but this admiration breaks the dramatic moment.  The deeper danger lies in Claudius' accusation: We are given no genuine sorrow, but "a painting of sorrow." The irony that it's Claudius who delivers this accusation is somewhat lost, as there isn't much character development: What you see at the start is what you get.

Erik Tucker (who also directed) plays a highly emotional Hamlet as a very young man who is so distraught over his dysfunctional family's carryings-on -- his uncle poisons his father and marries his mother, usurping Hamlet's right to the throne -- that he lacks any metaphysical depth. His "get thee to a nunnery" scene with Ophelia is fabulously frenzied, although his delivery generally is inclined to the sarcastic -- a kind of teen-styled rage. This is a production heavy on angst, light on gravitas.

Andrus Nichols plays a colorless Ophelia whose timid pathos is all of her personality. Thus her victimization by father and suitor and her grief over her father's murder are rendered trite. Nichols also plays Gertrude: The famous closet scene offers lots of impassioned weeping.

Edmund Lewis, who has an excellent stage voice, takes multiple roles, including Polonius and Horatio and Laertes.  Tom O'Keefe plays a stentorian and louche Claudius as well as an excellent gravedigger.

The grave -- a heap of dirt dumped onto the floor out of a trash bag -- is used to much advantage. Dead Ophelia jumps up out of her grave and becomes Gertrude, and the struggle between Laertes and Hamlet turns into a ludicrous and messy farce. But once again there is the sense of the major being trivialized.

Because some audience members are seated on the stage, there is cute business involving them; for example, during the fatal duel near the end, a man's head is used as a tabletop for the poisoned goblet. This necessarily involves laughter  -- or at least smiling -- as the man gamely plays along. But what about all those dead bodies on the floor? Tragedy sacrificed for show business.
                                                                                                              — Toby Zinman

Bedlam's Saint Joan, now on stage at the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, is a flat-out masterpiece. Take SEPTA to Trenton, change trains, go up to Princeton Junction, take the Dinky into town, and walk to the Berlind Theatre. I don't care how you go, just go.

As  Toby Zinman ably shows, Bedlam didn't quite hit Hamlet, but their rendering of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, perhaps the most worldly play ever written involving religion, is aglow with humanity, wisdom, and a tragic awareness of history.  It's the story of Joan of Arc's epic last two years of life, 1429-31, rising from obscurity to lead French victories in the Hundred Years' War, at last to be burned at the stake. Bedlam preserves the crackling tension throughout, particularly in the fabulous Act 3, a mini-play in which Joan's destroyers argue out their clashing reasons. It could be a disaster on stage, but Bedlam infuses it with hair-raising force.

With an irresistible, can-do glint in her eye, Andrus Nichols plays Joan as wide-open, forthright, humorous, difficult -- and, like everyone else in this play, tragically deaf to other viewpoints. Nichols skillfully creates a Joan who is complex yet innocent. (On the stand, Joan is shocked, undone, when it hits her that they really will burn her.) At the end, in the afterlife (or is it?), Joan at first exults at being made a saint (in 1920) and then deflates, accepts being rendered alone forever, leading to her resounding final line: "O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?"

Eric Tucker, founder and director, is especially wondrous as Warwick, the English nobleman bent on Joan's execution. In a green tweed jacket, his Warwick is an Eton-bred, clubby upper-cruster, all mild surface and murderous essence. He is (rightly) afraid Joan's individualism and nationalism threaten his old feudal order. Tucker again is fine as Jack Dunois, Bastard of Orleans, a little in love with Joan, in awe at her soldierly prowess, yet resolved to abandon her if she goes too far.

Edmund Lewis takes a stellar double turn as the hapless Dauphin and the rough-hewn, very stupid John de Stogumber. And Tom O'Keefe is tremendous as both Peter Cauchon, the bishop who helps condemn Joan, and the Archbishop of Reims, a true Catholic Church company man, anxious at any mystic who'd reach out to God without, so to speak, going through the front office of the church.

This production surrounds us in forces none can control. That includes miracle. Indolent soldiers blow bubbles near a river … and the bubbles change direction and carry toward the audience, a sign Joan has prayed for the wind to change so a great battle can begin. We can say, with Dunois, "Forgive us, Joan: we are not yet good enough for you." 
                                                                                         — John Timpane

Hamlet/Saint Joan. Performed in rotating repertory by Bedlam. Through Feb. 12 at Berlind Theatre, McCarter Theatre Center, 91 University Place, Princeton. Tickets: $25-$96.50. Information: 609-258-2787, mccarter.org.