Another act of vandalism in downtown L.A. as Robert O’Hara defaces ‘Hamlet’ at the Taper

Playwright and director Robert O’Hara has turned his puckish attention to “Hamlet,” treating Shakespeare’s tragedy not as an august cultural treasure that has held the world’s attention for more than 400 years but as a squeaky plaything that can be exploited for eccentric fun and games.

It goes without saying that his new adaptation of “Hamlet,” which had its premiere Wednesday at the Mark Taper Forum, isn’t for purists. But Shakespeare’s drama can withstand even the most brazen attack.

Oh, the crazy stagings I’ve seen! None more so than the 1999 New York production by performance theorist and director Richard Schechner that turned the play into a pop-cultural hallucination, featuring a weed-smoking Hamlet with a Jamaican lilt, ghostly reminders of Marilyn Monroe and Shirley Temple and a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern costumed as rats.

By this standard, O’Hara is proceeding quite tamely. Some might be startled that his Hamlet (Patrick Ball from Max’s “The Pitt”) goes from pleasuring a lusty Ophelia (a gritty Coral Peña) in public to getting hot and heavy with his visiting college buddy Horatio (Jakeem Powell). But O’Hara’s film noir approach has precedent in none other than Laurence Olivier’s Academy Award-winning 1948 movie, still the most prestigious screen adaptation of the play, no matter how dated it might seem to us today.

To set the mood, the adaptation begins with a roll of cinematic credits. A grand staircase dominates Clint Ramos’ set. The clean, gleaming surfaces leave an impression of what Elsinore castle might be like as a coastal McMansion on one of the “Real Housewives” series.

Footage of the sea serves as a lyrical backdrop. The setting is more California than Denmark, but location is dealt with subjectively in a first act that closely follows Hamlet’s perspective. Projection designer Yee Eun Nam shifts the mood as Hamlet meets the ghost of his father on screen (Joe Chrest) and then spirals into a mania that’s accompanied by surreal visual flourishes that seem indebted to the Netflix series “Stranger Things.”

Patrick Ball and Coral Peña in “Hamlet” at the Mark Taper Forum.

(Jeff Lorch)

The production, which runs two hours, is performed without intermission. O’Hara’s audacious antics are stimulating at first, but there’s not enough dramatic interest to sustain such a grueling journey.

The first two-thirds of the adaptation offer a quick run-through of tragic events. The actors at times seem to be speed-reading their lines, rushing through the notoriously long play to get to the good bits. O’Hara simplifies vocabulary, reassigns lines and excises parts that don’t interest him, but otherwise sticks to Shakespeare’s template.

The revisions in language, done for reasons of accessibility, diminish the poetry. Shakespeare can be ridiculously obscure to modern audiences but tweaking such a well-known play is like changing lyrics in a revival of “Oklahoma!” The word substitutions prove jarring even when they’re not veering off into raunchy slang. (I’ll forgo mentioning the choice verbiage O’Hara employs when Hamlet, confronting his mother in her chamber, becomes enraged by the sight of her unsavory marital bed.) The clumsy use of voice-overs is more embarrassing still.

Entertainment & Arts

For Subscribers

Lloyd Wright’s Wayfarers Chapel: Inside the rescue of a national landmark

More details emerge for Lloyd Wright’s beloved glass-and-timber ‘tree chapel’ and its proposed new location. Backers lay out their vision and a timeline to reassemble the landmark wrecked by the Rancho Palos Verdes landslide.

June 4, 2025

But these are superficial distractions in a production that hasn’t figured out why it’s revisiting Shakespeare’s play. O’Hara is in a riffing mode. Outrageousness is an integral part of his sensibility, as his plays “Barbecue” and “Bootycandy” have made unabashedly clear.

As a director, he enjoys boldly iconoclastic strokes whether staging new work, such as Jeremy O. Harris’ “Slave Play,” or classic drama, such as Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun.” But in “Hamlet” he seems content to toy around with Shakespeare’s tale without probing its miraculous depths.

In the final third of this “Hamlet,” O’Hara takes the playwriting reins from Shakespeare and invents a novel character, Detective Fortinbras, a gumshoe fixer in a trench coat, who comes in to investigate the tragedy’s spree of fatalities. Brought in by the board to shield the Elsinore Picture Corp. from damaging publicity, he sets out to determine what really happened, only to concoct a plausible narrative that won’t get the company canceled.

Hamlet, it is explained after his death, was an overage film student pursuing “an over-budget period film noir piece of crap.” And all the talk about succession and the throne seems to have been about corporate control within a cartoonishly messed-up family.

Who knew?

I won’t spoil all the humorous details, but the intermittent amusement can’t conceal the fundamental incoherence of O’Hara’s project. The level of artistic self-indulgence on display is impressive. “Hamlet” will survive as will O’Hara, but I’m less confident about the Taper.

What pleasures there are to be obtained from this ill-conceived “Hamlet” are fleeting. The actors supply most of them. Ball, prancing handsomely around the stage in a leather jacket and see-through club shirt, leaves a stylish impression when in motion. But he seems completely adrift when speaking his lines. He inflects Hamlet’s glorious speeches with modern color but little meaning. The text becomes a straitjacket for a princely son who doesn’t seem accustomed to Shakespearean rigors.

Patrick Ball, left, and Ramiz Monsef in “Hamlet” at the Mark Taper Forum.

(Jeff Lorch)

Gina Torres’ Gertrude has no such trouble. She commands the stage with rhetorical finesse, making it all the more disappointing that her character isn’t more complexly deployed by O’Hara.

Peña’s formidable Ophelia might be the production’s saving grace. Fiercely independent, she answers to no one’s morality but her own. I was delighted that she was granted a prominent place in the adaptation’s second act, but it’s a shame that, like all the characters, she becomes a pawn in O’Hara’s prankish plot.

If this description seems harsh, perhaps I should mention the cocaine revel Claudius (Ariel Shafir) instigates with the First Player (Jamie Lincoln Smith), Polonius (Ramiz Monsef) and a version of Rosencrantz (Ty Molbak) and Guildenstern (Danny Zuhlke) who would be right at home in a “Dumb and Dumber” movie. These nimble performers gamely rise to the occasion, but the comic adrenaline at this point has a numbing effect.

If you’re going to do “Hamlet,” at least probe some of the play’s moral and psychological mysteries. O’Hara is more drawn to the plot puzzles that have encouraged interpreters to weigh in with their own crackpot notions. He would have been better advised to do what James Ijames did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Fat Ham” — respond to Shakespeare’s classic through a completely autonomous work of art.

Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” provokes endless fascination precisely because of its unresolved nature. T.S. Eliot famously called Shakespeare’s tragedy “the ‘Mona Lisa’ of literature.” O’Hara does little more than graffiti a mustache on this inexhaustible theatrical canvas.