Becoming Hamlet
The Practical Details
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The Show
The Theatre
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Stage Door
Full guide →When to go. Head straight out at curtain call. Two-show days are the worst bet at both performances — the cast rests through the matinee and is spent by the evening. A Sunday matinee is the best single bet, because it is a one-show day. In bad weather the barricades sometimes never go up at all.
Who comes out. Anywhere from nobody to most of the cast. Nobody can tell you in advance which three — not us, not the theatre. Treat any list that claims otherwise with suspicion.
What to bring. Tonight’s Playbill and a fine-tip Sharpie, held open to the page you want signed. Ask before you photograph anyone, and keep the pavement clear — it is a working door, not a red carpet.
Where to Buy Tickets
The Lowdown
Here is the deal: you walk into the Five Angels Theater, Hamlet happens around you, and at certain points the play stops and asks you what Hamlet should do next. Not rhetorically. It actually asks.
Damon Horowitz — a philosopher who has taught ethics at Stanford and Google, which explains a great deal — adapted Shakespeare into a 100-minute participatory version in which the audience weighs in on the choices Hamlet is agonizing over. Should he kill Claudius at prayer? Your call. Sybille Bruun directs a company of 13, and Horowitz is up there too, alongside David H. Littleton, Désirée Baxter and Jim Pratzon.
It is a strange idea and it mostly works, because the questions Hamlet asks himself are the ones you would actually argue about in a bar. Previews began September 5 and it runs through October 3 at the Five Angels Theater, a 158-seat black box on Tenth Avenue a short walk from the Hudson.
Tickets run $20 to $129, which is a wide spread for a room that small. The cheap ones go first.
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