STAGE WEST: "A Room in the Castle" at Moxie Theatre

Left to right: Lyric Boothe, Vanessa Dinning and Dianne Yvette in "A Room in the Castle."  Photo courtesy of Moxie Theatre

            Toward the conclusion of “A Room in the Castle,” Lauren Gunderson’s script carries home the utmost point that her deconstruction of “Hamlet” is trying to make: that another way to look at Shakespeare’s most famous (and most argued about) work is to regard its principal female characters, Queen Gertrude and young Ophelia, not as women who are in the play only to respond to or suffer the consequences of the melancholy Dane, but as fully realized human beings in their own right.
            Actually, that point is made, in more implicit fashion, early on and throughout “A Room in the Castle,” which Moxie Theatre is giving its West Coast premiere. But you know – just in case you aren’t getting it …
            Gunderson is reportedly the most produced playwright in America, and with good reason. Her plays include “I and You,” “The Book of Will” and several that have been produced by San Diego theaters, like “Silent Sky,” “Emilie: La Marquise du Chatelet Defends Her Life Tonight,” “The Half-Life of Marie Curie” and “The Revolutionists,” which Moxie staged in 2017. She’s a champion for women characters, a writer who shines a light on and emphasizes their intelligence, strength and self-determination.
            “A Room in the Castle,” which was commissioned by the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company and co-produced with the Folger Theatre in Washington, D.C., takes the both manipulated and victimized Ophelia and Queen Gertrude and gives them agency certainly not present in “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.” Gunderson utilizes the original play as a backdrop, reinventing its most crucial moments – the Players Scene, the “Get thee to a nunnery!” admonition, the accidental murder of Polonius, Ophelia’s mad scene, et al – and in so doing empowers Ophelia and Gertrude. The playwright, for the most part, liberates them from victimhood, enabling them to choose and pursue their own destinies independent of and in defiance of men (the Dane most of all) who are oppressing them. They may rebel against what has been decreed in the court for them: “Obey, agree, assist.”
            This is an undertaking that might well have been written, as “Hamlet” originally was, for five hours’ worth of tragedian theater. The resourceful Gunderson required only 90 minutes to tell her revenge story, and what’s more hers is rife with clever lines and even bits of comedy. (The prime example of that would be the scene in which the Queen, Ophelia and Ophelia’s fiercely loyal hand maid Anna, played with spark by Vanessa Dinning, break out bottles of wine and party down, Elsinore-style. It’s then that their contempt for the self-indulgent Prince and the patriarchy of the court crystallize.)
            “Hamlet” is hardly ignored in “A Room in the Castle.” Quite the opposite – it’s omnipresent. Gunderson’s tale is supposed to be taking place as the events of Shakespeare’s magnum opus are unfolding, and the name (or princely title) of the most tortured, most famous protagonist in dramatic theater is ever on the lips of all three women. So Gunderson’s play is not an alternative “Hamlet.” It’s not, to evoke “Seinfeld,” a “bizarro world” view of the original either.
            “A Room in the Castle” is set concurrently with “Hamlet’s” Elizabethan era but it definitely has a contemporary sensibility. (Gunderson’s script references direct lines from Shakespeare, but the language is colloquial and current English – Hamlet is derided by Ophelia at one point as “a dick,” for example.) The Queen (Dianne Yvette) is first seen dressed in a power suit, commanding with the swagger and authority of a CEO presiding over a board meeting. Ophelia (Lyric Boothe), with her flowing hair, acoustic guitar and fey little musical ditties, could be some anachronistic Flower Child. Anna, endowed by Gunderson with a fiery resolve and back story well beyond the ladies-in-waiting of most of Shakespeare’s canon, wears power blue suit with confidence, and in fiercely protecting Ophelia is not afraid to defy the dominating Gertrude.
            Ophelia is ostensibly the play’s central character (the action takes place in her chambers at the castle, where she’s all but locked in), but it’s Queen Gertrude who pulls the levers of rebellion, and, frankly it’s Anna who is quickest to identify and decry Prince Hamlet’s exploitation and ill treatment of both mother and his intended.
            This is where “A Room in the Castle” falters. If Anna is the true instigator, what does that say about the newly realized power of Gertrude and Ophelia? And as for Gertrude, the character’s motives and sympathies change much too abruptly for credibility. Even Ophelia’s initial disillusionment with the Prince, prompted by a vaguely dramatized intrusion into her chambers, is without the impact it should have had.
            How the three women decide to rewrite Ophelia’s prescribed fate – a watery grave – is unworthy of Gunderson’s usual inventiveness. The climax of “A Room in the Castle,” then, is a disappointment. I did not expect a “Hamlet”- or “King Lear”-like bloodbath, but the play builds righteously and ominously toward a conclusion more befitting some streaming teleplay reimagination of Shakespeare’s classic.
            Yvette is a stalwart and engaging Gertrude, in every scene the most present woman in the room. The explanation for the Queen’s quick marriage to the murderer of her first husband, the King, is less than buyable, but as she does throughout the production, Yvette forges ahead purposefully.
            Boothe is an experienced musical theater performer, an asset here, as is her acknowledged relative unfamiliarity with “Hamlet”: Her Ophelia is neither informed nor prejudiced by Shakespeare’s source material. That “A Room in the Castle’s” madness scene for her is noisy and frantic rather than suitably devastating is, as with Yvette’s character’s motivations, not the actor’s fault.
            Dinning, as noted earlier, enjoys an Anna (a character that Gunderson created for this play) who is equal among the three in outrage and action. Had there been an “Anna” in “Hamlet,” who knows? Ophelia at least might have been able to tell off her mad betrothed before she met her fate.
            What director Kim Strassburger has brought to “A Room in the Castle” is its chief invention: closed-circuit television that screens for the audience the conflicts onstage, creating the illusion that Ophelia’s chambers and all that goes on within them are under surveillance from the patriarchal big brother outside its walls. It’s as though Ophelia is in jail – and she is.
            The TVs are also employed in transitions between the play’s primarily short scenes, transmitting static and scrambled images that provide mega-second glimpses of the men of all generations who’ve used, abused and sought to dominate women. They are powerful, practically subliminal visuals (created by Michael Wogulis). Too loud in the theater, but perhaps they needed to be.
            In spite of Moxie’s earnest production, “A Room in the Castle” feels as if playwright Gunderson didn’t exactly swing and miss with her “Hamletian” play but, to belabor the baseball metaphor, fouled one off. As one who loves all things Shakespeare, even recontextualizing of it, I had higher hopes.
            “A Room in the Castle” runs through June 7 at Moxie Theatre in Rolando.