Kevin Black, a producer, writer and director who is also a professor of
practice at the University of Arizona’s
School of Theatre, Film and Television,
has loved Hamlet for decades. In 2018,
though, he started to get serious about
doing a unique, multimedia production
of the show, featuring film clips, projections, and an immersive audience experience—all set in a fictional Denmark
surveilled by artificial intelligence.
When he heard BRINK Foundation
was launching Pidgin Palace Arts, a
“contemporary art gallery and pan-generational media lab,” he thought it was a
good match. He reached out to Danny
Vinik, the “creative czar” of BRINK and
executive director of BRINK Foundation, and the idea for what would
become Hamlet: Fine Revolution started
to grow.
But when COVID-19 took the world
by storm, they paused. Vinik held a
virtual opening for Pidgin Palace in
summer 2020 instead, and Black and his
team put together a seven-minute snapshot of the show. Since then, they’ve
been working carefully, patiently,
devotedly, on getting the show ready to
present to a live audience—and for live
audiences to be safely allowed to see it.
2018, 2019, early 2020…. They often
feel like so distant it’s like they’re a part
of not just another century, but another dimension. And so, there’s a particular
comfort these days that comes with
consuming timeless pieces of art.
Shakespeare’s work is among the best
examples. People today still fall hopelessly and ridiculously in love just as
Romeo and Juliet did. We make things
more complicated than they ever needed to be, like the characters in Twelfth
Night. And, like Hamlet, we sometimes
find ourselves throwing up our hands
and wondering whether the whole
thing might not just be futile.
“He had this marvelous, uncanny
ability to write a play that was open
to modes of telling,” says Black, who
produces, directs and stars in the show.
“It’s not that it’s a new story every time,
but it’s open to different methods of telling the story, and it travels time really,
really well. I think it’s been commonly
established for, actually, centuries: You
can do Shakespeare in whatever you’re
wearing that day.”
And it was Hamlet in particular, the
show that brought us “To be or not to
be” and “to thine own self be true” that
Black was most excited to, as he calls it,
“remix.”
“The more you look at it, the more
layered it is,” he says. “And what it’s
kind of famous for is raising questions.
It’s just this fascinating combination
of incredibly exciting revenge tragedy
with all these explorations and considerations of what it means to be alive.”
In case you didn’t read Hamlet in
high school, or since, the premise:
Prince Hamlet’s father recently died,
and his uncle Claudius swooped in IMMEDIATELY to marry Hamlet’s mom
and take over the ruling of the country
of Denmark. Suspicious. Then Hamlet’s
father appears to him as a ghost and
asks him to avenge him.
In this production, which received
funding from the UA College of Fine
Arts and Office of Research, Innovation
and Impact, the audience will literally
be in the middle of the show, sitting in
swivel chairs so they can turn to see action wherever it’s happening. (Black was
careful to block it in a way that wouldn’t
give anyone whiplash.) The characters
use handheld devices. People in the
castle are being constantly surveilled.
For example, in the “Get thee to a nunnery” scene, one of the show’s most famous, traditionally, King Claudius and
an accomplice are watching an interaction between Hamlet and his beloved,
Ophelia, from behind a pillar or curtain.
In this production, the scene is played
on a television screen, and King Claudius joins the audience in watching the
video unfold on a television screen, as
though everyone is watching a live feed
from another area of the castle.
Black’s concept—combining the
timelessness of Hamlet’s story with
ultra-modern depictions of surveillance—fits in well with Pidgin Palace’s
mission, which, according to Vinik, is to
educate people about the way internet
algorithms can leave them in “filter
bubbles” of sensationalized content,
and about the dangers and impact of artificial intelligence—which is no longer
in the distant future, but surrounding
us today. These lessons are especially
important, he says, in such polarized
times.
“Humanity’s always been kind of yin
and yang,” Vinik says. “Even the very
nature of the internet is composed of
ones and zeros for binary.”
Total immersion in a theatrical experience is a stark contrast to the past few
years, during which we’ve all Zoomed
to death, or as Black puts it “pivoted to
the point of nausea.”
“We’re trying to make sure it’s not
something that’s framed or far away,”
he says. “I want the closeness to be
something that’s exciting and revelatory about the story.”
This article appears in Mar 10-16, 2022.