Theatre in Review: Hamlet in Bed (Rattlestick Playwrights Theater)

	Michael Laurence, Annette O'Toole. Photo: Tristan Fuge

The minute he steps on a stage, Michael Laurence sends out a powerful force field of neurosis; he's a walking double bind, sending a white-hot mixed message that screams "Don't look at me; no, look at me!" With his lean, lanky frame, that oddly angular face and scruffy beard, and eyes frozen in a permanent state of shock, not to mention a low baritone voice that turns every speech into a whispered confession, he always seems to have just emerged from some personal abyss. If he conveys these qualities in plays by other writers, such as The Few or Horsedream, they really come to the fore in his own works, such as Krapp, 39, in which he plays a version of himself, an actor in midlife with a middling career and no personal life, eaten alive with ambition and self-loathing.

He trots out this persona again in Hamlet in Bed, which takes his personal obsessions to new levels of psychodrama. He begins by teasing us about the veracity of what is to follow. "Anyway. This play. I wrote this play. It's a true story. Or maybe 'based on truth,' as they sometimes say." Well, if Hamlet in Bed is a true story, Laurence's problems are much bigger than I ever imagined.

Laurence plays Michael, an actor who, approaching 40, is still torn up about the mother who abandoned him at birth. "Been searching for her all my life," he says -- until now, when, thanks to a bizarre series of coincidences, she seems tantalizingly within reach. A street bookseller, who keeps Michael supplied with volumes about Hamlet (his professional obsession), produces his latest find: the diary of Anna, a young actress who played Ophelia in a mid-'70s revival of The Danish Play. Michael pores over each page, soaking up every detail: Anna is over the moon about the gig, not least because she is sleeping with her Hamlet. But, as so often happens, her little showmance goes awry: the young man is dogged by mental problems, and she finds herself pregnant. In the last entry, she reluctantly turns over her baby to a lawyer to broker a gray-market adoption.

At this point, Hamlet in Bed would have you believe that the final entry in Anna's diary is dated one day before the day of Michael's birth. It would also have you believe that Michael, convinced that Anna is his long-lost mother, would track her down through the Manhattan phone book. And it would have you believe that, even though Anna is now a lowly, aging office worker and abusive drunk who hasn't been on a stage since the dying days of the Ford Administration, she would take up Michael's offer to play Gertrude in a showcase production of Hamlet. Apparently, the play's the thing, to catch the conscience of the queen.

If you can buy all this and aren't repelled by Michael's psychological stalking of the unwitting Anna, Hamlet in Bed builds to a slam-bang climax in which they furiously run through Hamlet's closet scene, a rehearsal that becomes the staging ground for more than one mother-son drama. Before then, however, the piece marks time while exhaustively investigating their personal demons -- Anna's anger-management problems and her love of the bottle, and Michael's self-obsession and inability to maintain a relationship. Some of this is vividly wrought: Anna, who can barely deal with people, feeds her neighborhood's feral cats. We get a hair-raising depiction of her hellish office existence. ("The fluorescent lights are buzzing hypnotic. I tear off two little shreds of kleenex, wad them up in my ears.") There's a particularly sordid account of Anna's one-night stand with a stranger who doesn't really attract her. Or, as she says, "His moustache creeps me out but he's sweet in the way men are sweet just before they get what they want." And Anna makes a pathetic visit to the offices of Actor's Equity, to whom she hasn't paid dues in 40 years.

Meanwhile, Michael's relationship is coming undone; as his girlfriend scaldingly comments, "You're the only person I know who can fuck someone and call it flirting." Michael's emotional avoidance skills are highly accomplished, however. His reaction to this brutal encounter with the woman he allegedly loves? "I jumped into my new suit and ran off to see an experimental puppet show on the Lower East Side."

None of this is as compelling as one would wish; Laurence is so adept at portraying Michael and Anna as basket cases that he forgets to make their downward trajectories matter; their narcissism shuts us out. As a result, Hamlet in Bed marks time until the main event -- - that closet scene -- which, at least, does not disappoint. Laurence speaks the verse fluently, and even if, as Anna points out, he's a little long in the tooth for the role, I suspect that, even now, his talent at evoking inner torment might make him a Hamlet to remember. Annette O'Toole captures Anna's alcohol-fueled furies and her pitiless self-estimations, but there's a slight awkwardness, a fidgety quality , to much of her work in the early scenes, as if she doesn't quite believe what she is saying. She shines in the climax, however, and, discovering Michael's true intentions, she produces a bone-rattling scream that is easily one of the most disturbing sounds I have heard in a theatre in many a moon.

Lisa Peterson's direction at least keeps the piece moving at a fast clip, shifting deftly between Michael and Anna, and her highly physical staging of the climax has the harrowing feel of hearts being shattered. I wish she had managed to persuade Laurence that neither he nor O'Toole really needed to speak into microphones so often, as if they were participants in a poetry slam; this is a downtown-theatre affectation that is becoming overused -- it is positively ludicrous in a theatre as small as Rattlestick -- and it does away with one of theatre's greatest attractions: the sound of an unamplified human voice.

But in other respects, Peterson provides Hamlet in Bed with a highly supportive production. Rachel Hauck's bare stage, with a single black upstage drop, is exactly what the script calls for, and it is lit with sensitivity and variety by Scott Zielinski. Dave Tennent's projections -- of neon bar signs, skyscrapers, fire escapes, clouds of cigarette smoke, and other New York images -- - are subtly handled. Jessica Pabst's costumes include a stylish leather doublet and pants for Laurence's Hamlet. Bart Fasbender has provided some melancholy original music and such sound effects as sirens, accordions, breaking glass, and gunshots.

There's a powerful, if contrived, idea at the center of Hamlet in Bed, but, until it finally explodes in a blistering dramatic confrontation, it resides too firmly in the separate echo chambers of its protagonists' miseries. Anna and Michael are a pair of case studies, their interest more clinical than compelling. As Gertrude herself notes in Hamlet, what is wanted is more matter, less art. -- David Barbour