Stage: The Dane Next Door

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FOR DIRECTOR Michael Kahn, staging perhaps the most familiar play in the English language requires a sort of brain surgery.

"You have to give yourself a kind of artistic lobotomy, to forget everything and to start fresh," he said during a break in rehearsals for "Hamlet," the Shakespeare Theatre Company's final contribution to the Shakespeare in Washington festival.

"Hamlet" may have seen 400 years of stage and screen productions, discussions in classrooms and even some parody, but its story still demands attention. To emphasize the play's contemporary relevance, Kahn has put the actors in modern dress but is keeping the text pure.

"The story is enduring because it's about young people facing dilemmas that they really don't have the equipment or the experience for. ... Not understanding the consequences of your actions or not having the equipment to handle the things that come up is as relevant to me as anything," Kahn said.

Of course, Hamlet's dilemmas are especially difficult: His father is murdered by his uncle Claudius (Robert Cuccioli), who marries Hamlet's mother (Janet Zarish), who may or may not have been complicit in the murder. And the reason he knows this is because his father's ghost (Ted van Griethuysen) told him so.

It's enough to make anyone start talking to himself. Good thing Hamlet's portrayer is an actor who's accustomed to taking on complex characters. Jeffrey Carlson, who played the soap opera world's first transgender character, Zarf/Zoe on "All My Children," brings a contemporary touch to the brooding prince.

"He's skillful, youthful, physical, imaginative ... he's able to be volatile ... and he's very much a person of his generation, which was important to me for this production," Kahn said.

Carlson and his cast mates will need to work especially hard to ignore the "echoes" of previous incarnations of the play to produce a successful version of their own.

"We have to approach it as if we have never seen, read or heard of the play before, so that you're having a dialogue with the playwright, as opposed to a dialogue with past productions," Kahn said.

» Shakespeare Theatre Company, 450 7th St. NW; through July 29, $19-$76.25; 202-547-1122. (Archives)

Written by Express contributor Erin Trompeter
Photo courtesy Carol Rosegg