Chicago Shakes has partnered with the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance (CLATA) to bring a truly remarkable production of Hamlet to their intimate Upstairs black box space. Lima, Peru’s Teatro La Plaza did not get the current US administration memo that we need to purge from our culture ideas about disability, sense of belonging and inclusion: this show was devised and is performed by a cast of eight actors with Down syndrome and cognitive disabilities. When Hamlet’s sense of disconnection and trauma is recontextualized by the lived experience of these actors it completely transforms the story. I will never hear Hamlet’s soliloquy about being or not being in the same way, after hearing it spoken by people whose genetic makeup often caused families to consider abandoning or institutionalizing them. A generation ago, when a baby with Down’s syndrome was born, a mom might be told to send the baby away and forget about them and have another baby; today people still terminate pregnancies that will result in a child with an extra chromosome. These talented and self aware actors weave their lives, their activism, their raps, their dances, their identities as people with differences and their powerful joy into the story of a son avenging his father’s murder. The show ends with an onstage dance party that the audience is exhorted to join.
The show is entirely in Spanish with English supertitles but there are portions of the show that are completely visual.
The show incorporates stirring visuals by Lucho Soldevilla that includes a mother giving birth to a baby with Down syndrome, and clever and sophisticated use of live video feed, including what may be a camera in Yorick’s skull. One of the most moving and beautiful moments in the show is where the three women become Ophelias and give alternative dream lives, ending with the drowning with a white dress floating down from the rafters and onto a woman while blue water projections rise on the screen.
I have always maintained that Shakespeare’s plays have a universal thread of humanity that makes them ever fresh and relevant and this show takes that thesis to an entirely new level. Your understandings of so many topics will shift by experiencing this production.
You do not have a lot of time, it’s a very short run before the show moves to NYC and Lincoln Center and then London: the Teatro La Plaza Hamlet is only at Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Chicago’s Navy Pier until Sunday March 23, 2025. For tickets and information go to https://www.chicagoshakes.com/productions/2425-hamlet/
For more reviews go to https://www.theatreinchicago.com
Comments