It often takes actors years of study or theatrical experience to be in a performance of “Hamlet.” At an upcoming production in Northampton, all you need to do is walk on stage.
Hilary Dennis will bring her one-woman “Hamlet” adaptation, “Sweet Prince,” back to 33 Hawley on Thursday, Aug. 27, from 7 to 8 p.m.
The original Shakespeare play is about Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, whose uncle, Claudius, kills Hamlet’s father — something Hamlet learns when his father’s ghost pays him a visit one night. Claudius then marries Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, and Hamlet fakes insanity and stages a play inspired by the murder to prove his uncle’s guilt. As he puts it, “The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” Suffice it to say, the rest of the show takes a number of darker turns.
“He’s stuck because he can’t express himself the way he wants to to the people around him,” Dennis said. “He can’t process his grief in a healthy way because he doesn’t know if he can trust the people around him, and the relationships are all crumbling … so he turns to the audience, and the audience is the one entity that he can trust, so that format lends itself to a one-person show.”
That said, audiences expecting a production like “Vanya,” an “Uncle Vanya” adaptation where Andrew Scott plays every single character, will be in for something quite different, because “one-woman show” is a slight misnomer. While Dennis will have the majority of the lines as Hamlet, nearly all of the other roles are performed by audience members.
At the start of the show, Dennis greets the audience the same way that Hamlet addresses the actors he hires, advising them to “suit the action to the word, the word to the action.” Nametags for other characters hang above paper props behind her as she performs.
Co-producer Costanza Bugiana then makes an appearance to help Dennis create a tableau. At a performance at Williams College this spring, that prompt was “a cat climbing Mount Everest.”
“My co-producer and I kind of make fools of ourselves first to set expectations,” Dennis said.
Next, audience members are invited to join to create tableaus inspired by “Romeo and Juliet,” “Macbeth,” and “Hamlet,” respectively; the latter transitions into the start of the show, and Bugiana invites more volunteers to choose characters to play. When it’s time for the volunteers to take the stage, she gives them their lines on premade cue cards.
“My impression is that people are a little skeptical at first of how it’s going to work and if it will work, and then, by the end of the performance, they’re not only really excited about what just happened in the room, but they’re also really proud of themselves being involved,” Dennis said.
One of her favorite parts of the show is where audience members create the play-within-a-play “The Murder of Gonzago.”
“They’ve done some of the funniest stuff, and I just sit back and watch them and cackle, because it’s just magical what people do,” Dennis said. “Some of them are actors, but some aren’t, and it’s such a nice way to see the play come alive that’s different every night.”
Dennis first started studying the character of Hamlet when she was a conservatory student. Her professor assigned her to learn, then perform, one of his monologues in just a few days. With roughly 1,500 lines depending on the edition, Hamlet has the most lines of any Shakespearean character.
“I remember thinking, ‘This is crazy. But also … let me just see what happens. Let me do this,’” Dennis said. She wasn’t yet a Shakespeare fan at that point, but she learned the speech, and “it sort of fell into me like music does for people. It came really easily to me. I understood how to activate it and to personalize it.”
Classmates would ask her to help them with their own Shakespeare monologues, and a teacher even told her, “I think you’re going to play Hamlet one day, so you should start learning all of the soliloquies,” she recalled.
In 2019, Dennis and a friend co-founded the theater company Junkyard Shakespeare, so named because her and her partner’s backyard was full of junk when they bought their house. Her partner cleared it all out, though, creating a “beautiful woodland wonderland,” Dennis said. “As he was developing this, I was like, ‘This would be the perfect place for a Shakespeare play.’”
She also liked the name because “there’s, like, a raw, kind of unfinished vibe to the shows that I produce,” she said. “I am hoping that one day, we can bring a show back to the backyard.”
This fall, the company will take “Sweet Prince” on tour to Boston; New York City; Portland, Maine; and Scranton, Pennsylvania.
“I keep learning new things about the character every time I perform it,” Dennis said. “I think the whole character is really like a meditation on mortality and death and how we deal with the tribulations of being human and what life brings us, and he does such a good job at articulating what grief is, what life means. … I think it’s this trove of interesting material that you can keep mining.”
Tickets to “Sweet Prince” are pay-what-you-can via nohoarts.org/sweet-prince. For more information about Dennis, visit hilarygdennis.com.
