Lean Version of ‘Hamlet’ Is Served in O.C.

“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines.” --William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” Bard watchers won’t hear these famous lines in the Eastern Boys Productions’ version of “Hamlet,” which continues this weekend at the Santa Ana City Hall Police Annex.

Call it Shakespeare Lite, but Eastern Boys is presenting the great tragedy via vignettes, designed to introduce culture without pain to people who think they might struggle under the full weight of a traditional Shakespearean production.

The Orange-based theater troupe has reduced Shakespeare’s classic tragedy from a performance that usually runs up to four hours to a play that is shorter than many made-for-television movies. The show runs just 1 1/2 hours plus intermission.

That means the play loses entire scenes, some lines from famous soliloquies and some of the show’s small but key characters.

Eastern Boys founder Roosevelt A. Blankenship Jr., who worked on the adaptation for a year and also stars in “Hamlet,” studied Lawrence Olivier’s film adaptation and other versions of the play before revising it.

Blankenship says while he purposely cut the play to move more like fast-paced, action-packed TV, Shakespeare’s poetry, structure and plot remain intact. He believes the approach will attract a more diverse audience to the show.

“We’re really trying to reach people who haven’t seen ‘Hamlet,’ along with those who have seen it but have been put off or intimidated by it,” Blankenship says.

Fellow cast member Robert Blankenship (no relation), who plays Polonius in the show, said the Eastern Boys’ production should help dispel the Shakespeare-phobia of audience members who believe the bard’s work is reserved for theater-going intellectuals.

“People think when they go see Shakespeare that it’s like trying to jump onto a moving train,” says Robert Blankenship, who along with actress Marsha Epstein-Sanders directed the final weeks of rehearsal. “This is more palatable and the show certainly moves. It’s lights up and lights down and on to the next.”

The approach seems to be working.

“Someone who came to see the show (last weekend) was surprised that they could understand Shakespeare,” Roosevelt Blankenship says. “She said it wasn’t boring and it didn’t put her to sleep.”

And so far, even initiated audiences don’t seem to miss the cuts.

“The scene I was afraid most people would miss was the gravediggers’ scene,” when Hamlet first returns to Denmark, Roosevelt Blankenship says. “But no one has said a thing.”

Notably cut from the production are Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, two of Hamlet’s sidekicks, who earned their own play in Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead.”

In another creative adjustment, the ghost of Hamlet’s father, whose contact with the prince from beyond the grave is the catalyst for the story’s tragic events, is performed by an offstage voice.

Epstein-Sanders, who appears as the Player Queen, says that because of Blankenship’s cuts, “Hamlet” is no longer a one-man show. Other characters emerge more strongly than they appear in the original, giving audiences more to sympathize with.

The audience will no longer experience “Hamlet” as just “a bunch of soliloquies” but may recognize something of themselves in “a love-tragedy that involves the relationships of many people,” Epstein-Sanders explains.

Eastern Boys is a 4-year-old, not-for-profit, low-budget troupe that produces three to four shows a year, rehearses in Roosevelt Blankenship’s garage and borrows costumes and props from other theater companies.

Last year the group’s production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” raised eyebrows when the director updated the play by casting a black actor in the role of Stanley Kowalski and a white actress in the role of Blanche Dubois.

But Roosevelt Blankenship says that, for the most part, he would rather concentrate on the artistic than the controversial. “Hamlet” is the Eastern Boys’ first Shakespearean production and also the first taste of Shakespeare for many cast members.

“As long as an actor can develop a character, he should be able to play any part regardless of race, creed or color,” he says.

This approach offers “something that Orange County (actors and audiences) really need,” says Robert Blankenship. “(Roosevelt) tackles some of the hardest plays there are.”

The Eastern Boys Productions’ vignettes from “Hamlet” continue tonight and Saturday at 8 p.m. in the Santa Ana City Hall Police Annex Auditorium, 23 Civic Center Plaza, Santa Ana. Tickets: $10 general admission; $8 seniors and students; $6 for groups of 10 or more. Information: (714) 998-2199.