Last Night at soloNOVA: Week Two
Last night launched the second week of the fifth annual soloNOVA festival at PS 122, a two-week festival featuring eight solo performers. More accurate, perhaps, would be to call it a closing of the first week, rather than an opening of the second, as both of last night's shows presented their final festival performances.
The night began with Hamlet (solo), a new vision of Shakespeare's classic play, with one actor inhabiting every role in one and a half hours on stage. Canadian actor Raoul Bhaneja, with director Robert Ross Parker (Vampire Cowboys Theatre Company), has been developing the show for nearly eight years. After performances in Canada and the U.K., including the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, soloNOVA offered the U.S. debut of Hamlet (solo).
Bhaneja stands alone on a black stage, dressed in black, and delivers a clear and straightforward telling of the familiar text. But even though you know the story, the play is made completely new in the retelling. Some of the text has been cut, and there are no props, no lighting cues, no sound design, no costume changes. Bhaneja remains on stage, alone, changing from one role to the next with only a subtle gesture or accent, and becomes any of 17 different characters seamlessly throughout.
At first, I wondered why an actor would choose to turn a multi-character play like this into a one-man show. But then it became almost obvious, in the case of Hamlet -- as the Danish prince slips deeper into vengeful madness, and as the sweet Ophelia mirrors that insanity, Bhaneja's morphing interpretation adds to a sense of schizophrenia and madness on its own.
Bhaneja's motivation is less theatrical than that, he says. "The story of Hamlet is really that of a journey to become an individual, and what it means to be a human being in this world. Shakespeare being Shakespeare, he does not really allow that debate to overwhelm the action or the drama (or the comedy for that matter), but it is in the quest for understanding of self: 'To be or not to be.' 'What a piece of work is a man.' 'The readiness is all.' The solo format lends itself to that in a very special way.
"As I am alone in the theatre with YOU, hopefully we share in the most intimate of ways the experience of discovering our humanity, through Shakespeare and the remarkable journey of many of his characters (including Hamlet of course)."
Bhaneja frenetically transitions from a raving lunatic to a frightened friend, from commanding king to meek queen, and inhabits the bodies of both the dying Polonius and the rueful Hamlet in one scene, or two sides of the climactic duel in another, with a sure-footed grace.
"For many of us," Bhaneja says, "our most powerful experience with the play Hamlet occurred on our first reading of it -- outside the theatre -- where we, alone, had to conjure up the setting, characters, and drama. In this production, the audience is guided through the actual text, almost in the way an ancient storyteller might do, where the actor/storyteller provides an outline of a character that the viewer extrapolates upon."
In his official Back Stage review, Ron Cohen notes: "As characters talk back and forth and scenes follow one another without a pause, an audience unfamiliar with the play might sometimes be confused at certain moments as to who's speaking." This is undeniably true, but I found that it did nothing to detract from the overall clarity of the story. After all, I'm not much of a Shakespeare fan myself, although I am certainly familiar with Hamlet, and I actually found that Bhaneja's fast-paced take, while at times confusing, ended up focusing on exactly what Bhaneja views as the three most essential elements of theatre: the actor, the text, and the audience.
"It really embodies what the festival is about, which is the storytelling," says soloNOVA producing artistic director Jennifer Darling. "Hamlet is running Central Park right now, and there's all these big celebrities and big production values. Ours is the exact opposite of that, in that it is very stripped down, very simple, and it's a very crisp and concise version."
After the show, Bhaneja was on a flight back to his native Canada, where he had just finished shooting a TV pilot for the Sci-Fi Channel. He had arrived in New York at 4 a.m. yesterday morning, took a nap at the Dramatists' Guild, and made it to PS 122 in time to take the stage. He says that he hopes to bring Hamlet (solo) back to the U.S. for new audiences in the near future.
"I don't want to make my Off-Broadway debut with this show when I'm 50," he says, "so I gotta get on it!"
Read the official Back Stage review of Hamlet (solo) here.
Following Hamlet (solo) was Christen Clifford's final soloNOVA performance of her new show (What I Know About) My Parents' Sex Life. Although the show is still in its early stages of development and was created for this year's festival, Clifford is a confident presence on stage. Even when discussing shockingly off-limit topics (like her parents' sex life), the story is not told simply for shock value. There is a universal message underneath the sex talk, as strengthened by Clifford's use of video and her interaction with the audience.
To read more about Clifford, her new show, and her other one-woman show show BabyLove (currently in an extended run at 45 Bleecker in NYC), click here.
Or read about last week's opening night at soloNOVA here, and more about the festival here. The fifth annual soloNOVA festival runs through July 22 at PS 122 in NYC.
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