Having Helen Merino return to the role of Hamlet for Austin Shakespeare now – the production runs Sept. 22-Oct. 9 at the Long Center’s Rollins Theatre – isn’t in itself unusual. A few dozen blocks away, Emily Erington, Kelsey Kling, and Rebecca Robinson are back together as the sisters in Marion Bridge (see Elizabeth Cobbe’s review), a play they first performed at Hyde Park Theatre in 2002 under director Ken Webster, who revisits past parts himself fairly often. Actors reprise roles all the time. What’s curious about Merino slipping back into the inky cloak of the melancholy Dane is the timing: It’s 10 years to the month of her initial stab at the role (a point chronicled on our Sept. 28, 2001, cover). Given all the recent remembrances of the tragic events of that September, Merino’s return to Denmark sounds a strange echo of the first.
To my ears, anyway – I was in that earlier production of Hamlet, along with my wife, Barbara Chisholm, and our daughter, Rosalind, then just 8. My memories of it will be forever linked to 9/11 because the tragedy occurred two days before our Hamlet was to open. That day and the next, those of us in the show had no idea if people would want to see any play, much less one trafficking in as much blood and misery as Hamlet. Still, we were show folk, so we did what show folk do: rehearse and trust that somebody would show up on opening night. And much to our amazement, somebody did. Not in great numbers, but people came, and they seemed not only to want to be there but to need to be there – to be with others, sharing the pain they felt in a public place. Moreover, they needed to share a healing experience that would balance that shattering experience the entire country had shared. Hamlet may seem a curious choice for a balm, but its exploration of murder, of revenge, of grief, of our fragile mortality, all treated with such humanity, made it a cleansing drama in that moment. The play seemed to address us directly, never more so than when Claudius tells his countrymen how it befitted them “to bear our hearts in grief and our whole kingdom to be contracted in one brow of woe.” He may have been referring to the death of King Hamlet, but the words so poignantly described our national sorrow that cast and audience both were moved by them and bound more tightly together through the play.
Too often we forget that communal quality of the performing arts. As with so many aspects of our society, the focus on the individual obscures our view of the collective; “What show am I seeing?” trumps “What show are we seeing?” September 11 shifted that in the theatre and concert hall as elsewhere, but since the national unity we felt then eventually faded, it isn’t surprising that it faded in the arts as well. In the decade since, I’ve experienced that affecting bond among audience members a handful of times – during The Laramie Project at Zach Theatre, Blue Lapis Light’s Requiem, Forklift Danceworks’ The Trash Project, the Rude Mechs’ Decameron Day 7: Revenge!, Rubber Repertory’s Biography of Physical Sensation and The Casket of Passing Fancy – but mostly that’s been because the creators have made an explicit effort to incorporate into the work a sense of community, and even active participation.
That wasn’t quite the case with september play, an original work made by students in the University of Texas Department of Theatre & Dance. Maybe because it dealt explicitly with 9/11 and was performed on the anniversary, the audience seemed to approach it in the spirit of unity that followed the event itself. A sense of the audience as one buzzed among the hundreds of bodies packed into Anna Hiss Gym that night. They brought that into the space, and it struck me that audience members could – and should – be more responsible for that awareness of their collective experience. We do it all the time on airplanes. Shouldn’t we think about the journey we take together in the theatre at least that often?
It’s easy enough to do. Whenever you hear that ubiquitous message to silence your cell phone, take a few seconds to look around at your fellow travelers in the theatre and hold onto your awareness of them as the lights dim. We don’t need a national tragedy to unite us there. We only need Hamlet.
This article appears in September 23 • 2011.