Hamlet:
2011 Hamlet was performed @ The Plaza Black Box Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts
The inaugural production of The Psych Drama Company was a contemporary, psychology-driven interpretation of Hamlet, using Shakespeare's original language but playing extensively with subtext. Original music composed by Boston indie band Varsity Drag will added to the play's contemporary, edgy feel.
To live balanced, productive lives and to sustain healthy relationships, we all must balance the need to reflect with the need to act. This Hamlet production will explore this necessary dialectical tension between reflection and action within and between all of the characters in the play. We will study how the loss of this necessary dialectic leads to a deterioration in the individual characters' psyches and in their relationships with one another, inevitably leading to the tragedy that unfolds. As we explore subtext, this production of Hamlet will also delve deeply into the multiple facets of the personalities of the characters and the complexities of competing agendas and loyalties in the relationships they have with one another.
Our production featured a female bisexual Hamlet. As such, the oedipal dynamics between Hamlet and Gertrude remain intact. For both the heterosexual male and the homosexual female, the original childhood love object remains the same: it is the mother. Furthermore, when Hamlet is a woman, her feelings about Gertrude and Ophelia are inextricably bound up with her own self-loathing.
Our production took place in the present day. It takes place in an exceedingly wealthy, emotionally disturbed family with the few social connections that surround them. They have created an isolated world based on archaic, irrelevant titles and bizarre family rituals that are, at times, quite divorced from reality. There must be a reckoning with ghost(s) from the past: "remember me." The location is anywhere, everywhere.
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The Psych Drama Company combines psychological insight with dramatic art
to explore the timeless complexities of the human soul.
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