What We’re Seeing: "Hamlet: La Telenovela"
“An ensemble tour-de-force transforming one of the Bard’s best known works into endless, uncontrived belly laughs”
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(Photo by Miguel Garzon Martinez)
The practice of multitasking as a means of intaking information is practically second nature to today’s consumer audience; just ask Subway Surfer college lecturers or the 70% of Gen Z who watch TV with closed captions. But it’s not just limited to media consumption. Depending where you look, demographics of age, ability, and language shift within American theater-making communities, and as a result, artist and audience disdain (rooted in a privilege of dominant culture accessibility) for so-called “distracting” or “superfluous” split-attention practices like video or text caption projection fall to the wayside. Instead, trailblazing theatre practitioners incorporating dual-focus storytelling tactics emerge to answer a variety of dramaturgical or design callings.
In my own journey of building a hearing and language accessible show for international audiences, I’ve discovered a slew of such best practices, including Deafinitely Theatre’s Creative Captioning, Repertorio Español’s back-of-the-seat closed captioning, and Theater Breaking Through Barriers’ recent God of Carnage with supertitle captioning and audio description integrated onto the set design. Despite incorporating the practice for different reasons, each innovates, integrates, and enriches their respective show’s DNA for their audience through captioning, thus proving a compelling artistic facet of production that deserves closer examination. This year, another show joins their envelope-pushing ranks: Hamlet: La Telenovela playing its final months-long residency performance at The Kraine in the East Village on December 15.
Hamlet: La Telenovela presents itself as the titular television broadcast complete with English captions running on a side screen for those not brushed up on their Spanish. The experience of watching the subtitles is fluid and intuitive, granted you sit near enough not to strain around audience heads in the tight space. Placed on a small screen house right, the subtitles play out in sync, and, even if there’s a delay, the intonation and context of Shakespeare’s classic story carries you so far in the show that you get swept up and carried easily by the cast of expert textual and emotional navigators.
The potentially kitschy framing device of a telenovela is delivered with masterful comedic chops and surprising side-splitting splendor by Something From Abroad. The theatre collective, composed of immigrants and artists from across the Spanish-speaking diaspora, ricochets off each other’s energy, delivering an ensemble tour-de-force transforming one of the Bard’s best known works into endless, uncontrived belly laughs rooted in the absurdity of the source material circumstances.
Hamlet itself is flush with varied personalities, a 400-year-old playground rife with the extremities of human motive and emotion. And led by dual-duty director/Hamlet Federico Mallet, playing is exactly what this cast is able to do. José María Ruano de la Haza’s translation and literary adaptation mines the piece for moments of indulgent wit and whimsy, with Mallet’s careful construction of an exaggerated world letting the audience bask in the cathartic guilty pleasure of over-the-top personas clashing and rehashing family drama over the course of a brisk two hours. Despite the iconic plot, given the new framing device one becomes flush with anticipation wondering what these zany characters will do next. Break out into song? Striptease? Murder?
Mallet’s Hamlet is the perfect debonair “sad boi,” a fiery ball of energy who drives the show with the smirks, charm, and effortless persuasion of a telenovela star. There’s Martha Preve Ayora as Hamlet’s puppy-dog-eyed loyal BFF Horatio, a geeky nervous wreck, teeth clattering with apprehension as a faithful observer resigned to the chaos. Fernanda Hidalgo’s Laertes is relentlessly macho, capitalizing on the uncomfy nature of the brother dearest’s overprotective familial privilege and proximity by getting in everyone’s faces in true TV showdown style. Andres Gallardo Bustillo’s King Claudio is aloof and poised, an untouchable symbol for maddening just-out-of-reach revenge. Pelayo Álvarez as the Sepulturero (Gravedigger) and various roles is a jack of all trades, imbuing scenes with infectious energy that keeps the show moving at a clipping, carefree pace.
In a charismatic sendup of the maxim-spewing Polonius, Cástor G. Sánchez-Pepper’s Apololonia steals the show in a fluid, gendered exaggeration of histrionic mama bear tropes, doling advice and a piece of mind whether you wanted it or not. Rarely without a fan to flaunt, Sánchez-Pepper commands the stage with ease, and their comedic instincts are much to admire.
While the troupe’s moments of gender-bending add layers of physical and socially contextual humor akin to Shakespeare’s original casting practices, Something From Abroad’s use of the melodramatic format interestingly also frees the traditionally cast female characters to excavate particularly new truths in their famously underdeveloped character arcs by moving away from intellectualized verse into embodied emotions. In the heartbreakingly earnest hands of Shlomit Oren, Ofelia’s mad croons become genuine, mascara-smudged ballads and tantrums, dressed to the nines in the lounge dresses of a scorned lover. Silvana Gonzalez’s Gertrudis is an alcoholic floozy on autopilot, oozing a clingy, socially-conditioned desperation to hold onto marriage as the only semblance of power granted to women; Gonzalez’s Gertrudis perfectly exudes the caged-bird MILF dichotomy of being a woman above a certain age, akin only in my mind to Thomas Ostermeier’s production that highlighted, however briefly, the capacity for female rage alongside ragers.
Played out on the captions screen, interstitials made up of exaggerated character outros with the hilariously on-brand music of soap opera mystery and intrigue punctuate the play, an ingenious maximizing and enhancing of the usual dead space of scene changes. Playing out on the stage there’s also a show-stealing segment dedicated to commercial product placements, quoting directly from the Shakespeare to tickle true enthusiasts in a clever twist.
Were it a real series, Hamlet: La Telenovela would have you glued to your seat, devouring a new episode of these eye-widening zanies every week. The show is a refreshing breath of fresh air in a theatrical scene otherwise inundated with three-hour-take-itself-too-seriously-hot-button-issue plays, when the truth is that comedy can reveal the darkness and absurdity of human nature just as well. What Something From Abroad has achieved is a triumphant UNO-reverse of expectations, masterfully mining the human truths of the original dramatic text, exacerbating them to new culturally comedic contexts, and emerging with a bellyache laugh melodrama one of the most refreshing interpretations that shows just how silly and “what a piece of work is a man.”
Production credits
FRIGID New York in collaboration with Something from Abroad & Quemocion present
“Hamlet: La Telenovela”
Written by William Shakespeare
Translated to Spanish by José María Ruano de la Haza
Directed by Federico Mallet
The cast features Andy Price, Silvana González, Federico Mallet, Martha Preve, Gabriel Rosario, Shlomit Oren, Castor Pepper, and Pelayo Álvarez.
The creative team includes Lydia Brinkmann (Lighting design), Josh Weidenbaum (Sound design), Alexandra Gomez (Subtitles), and Gabriel Rosario (Fight Choreographer).
“Hamlet: La Telenovela” originally ran July 21-30, extended through September 16-December 15, 2023 at The Kraine Theater (85 E 4th St, New York, NY 10003). Performances are also available to livestream from home. The running time is approximately 2 hours, with a 10-minute intermission. For more information, please visit frigid.nyc.