218: Act V
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From W.B.E.C. Chicago, it's his American life, America's class. Okay, here's something that we did not expect. Check this out. This was recorded on a stage in Brooklyn, St. Francis College. To be or not to be, that is the question. Same month in Hawaii, on the island of Oahu. To be or not to be, that is the question, whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against the sea of troubles and by opposing end them. Same month, a professional company in Boston, Massachusetts at the Public Theater. Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. In Colorado, at Camp Shakespeare, you can actually hear the sneakers of the Teenaged Hamlet squeaking. Why do you go about to recover the wind of me? Oh my lord, it might duty be to bolt. And at the Bay Area Shakespeare camp, presented by the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, the kids put on a production that they have concocted that is made up entirely of death scenes from different Shakespeare plays. That seems because kids love death scenes. No, no, the drink's the drink. Oh my dear Hamlet, the drink's the drink I am poisoned. Eight-year-old Marissa Graham grabs her throat like a cat in a violent cartoon. One of the productions is eight, except for Polonius, who's six. There's actually no way to tell how many productions of Hamlet are up in any given month. In summer 2002, when we first broadcast today's show and we made these recordings, the American Theater website listed 12 theaters during Shakespeare's Hamlet. 11 productions of the play "I Hate Hamlet," one production of something called Hamlet Dreams and one theater doing the dreadful and feared Hamlet Machine. Of course, Hamlet itself is kind of a weird play. The central character is in a situation that very few of us are ever going to find ourselves in. His uncle killed his father and then married his mother in order to become the king. The play is four hours long. The main conflict of the play is a guy debating in long, complicated monologues whether or not he should kill somebody. What is there in that for most of us to relate to? Unless of course we happen to be murderers. And what would the play be like if it were actually performed by murderers and other violent criminals? What would they see that the rest of us do not? Well today in our program we answer that question and the answer is a lot. Over the course of six months, reporter Jack Hit visited prisoners at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center, which is a high security prison, from their first rehearsal to their last performance of Act 5 of Shakespeare's Hamlet. We're devoting our entire program today to the drama that he found there. Our program today, Act 5, we bring you what we believe is one of the most evocative productions of Shakespeare done anywhere in 2002. When you would have had a hard time getting tickets to, there's only performed in prison. Here's Jack Hit.
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