‘Hamlet’ Director Robert O’Hara on Doing Shakespeare as Noir in L.A.

This will not be your father’s “Hamlet” — or even your dead-king father’s “Hamlet” — when writer-director Robert O’Hara’s reinterpretation of the Shakespeare perennial opens at the Mark Taper Forum this week. O’Hara, who was Tony-nominated for directing “Slave Play” (which he also brought out to L.A. at the Mark Taper), says he is thrilled to be getting a too-rare chance to direct a work from the classical theater canon, but no one will mistake this for a traditional rendering. Not when O’Hara has remodeled it as a contemporary story set in L.A. and rife with film noir influences, and with some twists that cast further doubt on the reliability of Hamlet’s point of view as a literally haunted protagonist.

David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” is a touchstone being mentioned for a rethinking is bound to be the talk of the L.A. theater world as O’Hara’s “Hamlet” runs through July 6, with Patrick Ball, costar of “The Pitt,” in the lead. (Read Variety‘s separate interview with Ball here, as he talks about doing “Hamlet” and season 2 of his hit series simultaneously.) We connected with O’Hara — whose other provocative credits include the original plays “Insurrection: Holding History,” “Bootycandy” and “Antebellum” — as rehearsals were moving into the Taper.

What was the origin point of doing a rethinking of “Hamlet”?

I rarely get a chance to do classical work, especially Shakespeare, because for most of my career I’ve done contemporary plays, so whenever I’m offered an opportunity to do that, it’s exciting. I had a phone call with Snehal Desai, the artistic director (of the Center Theatre Group), asking me if I would like to do something for this season. There were a number of plays that were on my list. When we settled on this, I instantly wanted to do something that felt L.A.-centric, so then I got to thinking about film noir and Hitchcock and David Lynch, whose work is really a descendant of film noir. So that’s how it came about, from just thinking about setting it in L.A. And it is a murder mystery. I mean, half the cast ends up dead at the end of the play, so that was interesting to play with.

A lot of noir films do have a very significant body count.

Exactly. I did a workshop of the project last November, and we watched a ton of film noir, so it was a lot of fun getting connected to those films.

Apart from the stylistic flourishes and modern dress, is the text being rewritten, or are you playing it straight as far as the Shakespearian language goes?

Well, there’s a mixture. I mean, Shakespeare is always adapted. It’s always put someplace, even if it’s a place that he originally imagined it, as some sort of adaptation, and everyone’s always cutting and slicing Shakespeare. So there’s a lot of Shakespeare and then there’s some of my own language in it. I think mostly it’s still Shakespeare’s language, actually, and the adaptation is in the editing of the story and then the combination of film noir being introduced into the story…. It’s set today in modern-day L.A., somewhere on the coast in a palatial mansion, which is a very sort of film noir setting. There’s a little bit of deconstruction involved and theatricality because, of course, in Shakespeare there’s a lot of soliloquies, talking to oneself or talking to the audience, so it’s great to break the fourth wall every now and then.  

In some previous teasers or the show, you mentioned Hitchcock, Lynch and “Perry Mason” as influences, but also Salvador Dali. How does that in with the others.

Salvador Dali worked on one of Hitchcock’s movies (a dream sequence in 1945’s “Spellbound”), and I remembered seeing how Salvador Dali went inside a character’s psyche… Because my interpretation really leans into the mind of Hamlet, I want to of take the audience into what his motives are and what have you, so we’re using a sort of dreamscape in a way to illuminate that, scenically. … (‘Spellbound”) is one of those great movies and then all of a sudden Dali shows up, and you’re like, wow! And it works, actually.

We couldn’t help but notice in the casting that the character of Fortinbras is now billed as Detective Fortinbras.

Yes. Fortinbras usually comes in at the end and sort of takes over the kingdom and becomes a hero afterwards. Supposedly, he’s the person who’s going to lead us into the future. In my version there’s a little tricky exception to that, in that Fortinbras is also a detective.

So someone is unraveling the back story, late into the play, after we’ve seen a lot of the traditional elements of “Hamlet.”

Yes. I mean, we have someone in the play that eventually will go, “So tell me about this ghost again.” Because the whole play is sort of set off by him seeing a ghost. So it leans into a sort of interrogation, that detective story of how did we get here, actually? How did the dead bodies end up in the other room? And so there’s a lot of things that are like that, actually, in the adaptation.

You’ve talked about how a lot of the action in “Hamlet” hinges on the instigation of an unreliable ghost. When we think about ghosts in drama, often they’re trying to warn somebody against something bad happening, from their wise afterworld perspective. And it seems like you’re pointing out that, in this play, the ghost is just wreaking more havoc, basically.

Yeah. The ghost wants Hamlet to avenge him. But the crazy thing — and I didn’t make this part up — is, in “Hamlet,” (the murdered character) goes to sleep and then his brother apparently pours poison into his ear. And so, wait a second… If you were asleep, how do you know who killed you? That’s a fundamental question. And if avenging you means killing the king, so then what happens after that? There’s this directive towards this man who just showed up for his father’s funeral and ended up seeing his mother’s wedding, and now his father’s ghost tells him, “Avenge me.” So his world is torn apart.

Also, it takes a long time, usually, for Hamlet to actually get to the business of avenging his father. Usually Hamlet takes about four hours to do what this ghost asks him to do. And we’ve sort of telescoped that and truncated that down to two, and sort of really identified the (crux of the) play. The adaptation really focuses on Hamlet’s point of view, what he went through this over this ordeal.

Any other favorite films of yours that were in the back of your mind to skew this toward?

Well, “Mulholland Drive” is a work of genius. “The Big Clock” is something that has been a very big influence. “Double Indemnity” was a really big influence. So those three, really. And then I was a huge fan of the sort of Perry Mason “gotcha” moments where he would just drill down and someone all of a sudden would have to go, “Yes, I did it, I did it. I killed her.”

That’s sort of a moment that’s in the play. Because when you end up with a bunch of people dead, there are also survivors. And so we sort of deal with who is left.  Because “Hamlet” is famous for the entire government of the story being dead — the king, the queen, the prince, the handlers, Polonious, his daughter, his son, all those people are dead. So who’s gonna run this kingdom? And so there’s an idea of like, how do we interrogate not just Hamlet but the story of Hamlet, and the madness that we’re supposed to believe with the ghosts, the poison, the brother-in-law, the mother… and the mother doesn’t even see the ghost. Hamlet sees and talks to the ghost, but the ghosts don’t even appear to his own wife. So there’s all these things that I’ve always had questions with, and this adaptation allows me to actually ask those questions — not answer them, but to ask them.

It’s interesting that you note that it’s mostly the minor characters that are left as  survivors to figure out what this sort of escalating massacre was all about. You could think of “Out of the Past,” where basically all the principal cast is dead by the climax, and then you have a denouement where the minor characters come back to try to get some context on what happened.

Yes, totally. That’s exactly where we’re going. Absolutely!

With Patrick Ball as your Hamlet, what do you see him bringing to the role?

Patrick is classically trained, and there is just an incredible amount of energy that he brings to Hamlet. And I am putting a lot on Hamlet, because it’s really sort of like mainlining Hamlet right into your system, the way we’ve done so much editing around the other scenes so that we’re just sort of following Hamlet. Usually, Hamlet shows up a few scenes in and then there’s a few other scenes and then Hamlet shows back up, and then there are a few more scenes (without him), and then Hamlet shows back up again. And whoever is playing hi just usually has to be on 10 every time he comes in, and has to remind us “My father’s dead, I have to avenge him,” every time. But Patrick is actually able to sort of calibrate what the manic-depressive behavior exhibits.

Because he’s reinvisioning that Hamlet is having an episode, basically. And not only is he having an episode, he’s also pretending to be crazy. And so at the same time that you are dealing with all this stuff externally, you are also have this internal scheme that’s not going to be helpful, and the last thing you need to see is a ghost of your dead father in the state that you’re in. So Patrick has all of that to navigate, and it’s really lovely to see him find his way through this, because of his facility with the language and just the amount of concentration that he has moment to moment, which is really lovely to see.

What did you have in mind when you were casting the women in the play?

Gina Torres (as Gertrude) is doing a fantastic job, because we cast someone who can play how we have given her a sense of her own sexuality — that she’s not just the widow of the dead king. You know, there’s a lot of misogyny in the play. There’s a lot of Hamlet saying, “Mother, how could you do this? You’re sleeping with my uncle,” and the women sort of have to take it. The first scene in the actual “Hamlet” that Shakespeare wrote is when we see Hamlet and Ophelia, the first thing is: “Get to a nunnery,” which is sort of crazy because it’s supposed to be this love affair. So with the women in this adaptation, I’ve tried to give more agency to their storylines, so as to not just sort of have them be pawns on the way to killing his uncle. So Gina and Coral Peña (as Ophelia) are doing fabulous work in that regard.

This is your first time back at the Music Center since you directed “Slave Play.” You must have felt like you had a good experience there with that, that you were eager to come back.

Oh, absolutely. And that was a different regime. But, you know, I’ve known Snehal (Desai) for decades, since he was in college, actually, and so it’s really a lot of fun to see what he’s doing with the place and his take on theater and the voices that he’s bringing into the conversation.

Sometimes, after directing for so long, you have to get up and go across the country and reintroduce yourself to people while you are introducing yourself to another piece of narrative. But this has been really exciting. I mean, even though “Hamlet” is a monster to direct, it has been really rewarding and, oddly, I feel really renewed and refreshed. I’ve heard about directors being sort of weighed down by having to navigate “Hamlet,” but it’s been a joy, actually.

Directing at the Taper is nearly like directing for an in-the-round presentation. Does that present unique joys or challenges for you?

Well, to me, because it’s a three-quarters thrust, it is actually perfect for classical work. That’s what Shakespeare had; he had a thrust stage at Globe. It mirrors that. And I don’t usually get either a chance to do classical theater nor a chance to operate in a three-quarters thrust of this size. So it both expands it and brings an intimacy to it, where language can really pop off the page.

We were talking about this the other day: Fom three-quarters of the stage, your back is to somebody in the audience, and it requires a different type of acting than if you were just projecting straight out to an audience, like a proscenium. So you have to sort of throw your voice in a different way and act with your back, in many ways. You can’t just fade into the background, because you’re standing right next to someone, mostly, when you’re on a three-quarters thrust and your back is to them. So it’s exciting to see how that activates the script.

And overfamiliarity is not a problem when you’ve changed the setting and story up this much.

People come already knowing the story. Everyone knows about Hamlet and his mother and the ghost and they’ll be dead at the end and whatever. But it’s how you get there which is sort of exciting, not sort of having to concentrate on making sure that the audience knows what the story is. You have to be in front of the audience as much as possible when you’re doing something like “Hamlet.” And it’s almost like a mini-series, there’s so many tangents and so many avenues inside “Hamlet,” and also so many famous lines. You know, every time I hear “to be or not to be,” I’m just like, wow, I’ve heard that so many times, and now I’m in a rehearsal room and the actor is literally saying it. So what does it mean in this moment? It is always exciting as an artist to find a new meaning in the moment of lines that you’ve heard over and over forever. And even if you don’t know it, the play is a fantastic story — a crazy story, but a fantastic story.

People will come and not understand some of the language, because it’s poetry and it’s words that we don’t normally use now. But if you get the intention right, I think you will understand it and be more comfortable with it. It’s when I see Shakespeare and people are doing this highfalutin accent and just going through it as if I’m supposed to know what they’re talking about, while nothing is happening in front of me, when I become confused, because I feel dumb a little bit. I feel like, “Oh, I don’t really know what’s going on and they’re not actually speaking anything that I can understand, and they assume that I do know what’s going on.” We talked a lot about that in rehearsal, that it’s so easy just to do the language of Shakespeare, but what is it to do the language with the circumstances of coming home and having to witness your father’s funeral and your mother’s wedding — how does that change the language that you’re saying? And what does it cost you? We’ve talked a lot in rehearsals about what does each of these soliloquies cost you at that moment? What are you carrying with the language? And Patrick is really amazing at it.