David Barlow as Hamlet and Robert Emmet Lunney as Claudius

                                                     by Eugene Paul

If you haven’t heard of Howard Barker, the playwright of Gertrude: The Cry, don’t fash yourself; millions in Great Britain, his home territory, are in the same condition of ignorance.  However, if you were to mention his name in artistic circles in Europe and in North America, Howard Barker is someone to be reckoned with.  In England, his own company, “The Wrestling School”, produces his plays exclusively.  (They named themselves thus because it was and is a struggle to put on a Barker play.)  There are many Barker plays, sixty some of them.  In the U.S.A., the Potomac Theatre Project – PTP- has been producing Barker plays for twenty-seven years, along with other playwrights old and new in their annual academic summer staging. (Their “mother” Is Vermont’s Middlebury College.) There are rewards and challenges.  And adjustments to be made.

 In this, their eighth season in New York of repertory, PTP/NYC have devoted their considerable college and commercial resources in mounting two theater pieces which could not be more different in content and intent: this, Howard Barker’s re-examination of Hamlet’s adulterous mother, Gertrude, and in the other play, playwright David Elgar’s multiplotted adventure, Pentecost, an art mystery as well as a war story of ravaged peoples,, the political, religious, emotional forces involved.  Gertrude is certainly the apparently easier focus of our attentions though far more difficult no matter how closely you parse Barker’s intentions.  Because he doesn’t give a damn about your moralizing, your civility, your commitments to community, he just wants your attention for his “Theatre of Catastrophe”, his own invention, a substitute for Tragedy.

 
Pamela J. Gray as Gertrude and David Barlow as Hamlet
Photos by Stan Barouh

And he gets right to it.  If you remember your Hamlet, you know that Hamlet’s father is murdered by his brother, Claudius, who pours poison into his ear while he is asleep.  What you have not known until now is that Barker, in his play, starkly proposes that Gertrude (Pamela J. Gray) has furiously, passionately urged her totally besotted lover, Claudius (Robert Emmet Lunney) to “Kill him!  Kill him!” But not why. And once Claudius does his brother in, she whips off her clothes and demands they make love naked, standing over her husband’s corpse.  Which they do.  Sort of.  Well, there’s just so far playwright Baker can push director Richard Romagnoli.  Romagnoli splits the difference between Barker and decorum, allowing Gertrude to strip totally but keeping Claudius clad, miming an obscured penis in feverish fornication. 

Since it’s early in the show – the beginning, in fact – certain untutored members of the audience titter. Romagnoli and company ride over any such uncouth nonsense and the titters die away and soon thereafter we meet a helplessly garrulous Hamlet (David Barlow) addressing us privately about his cares but somehow, these semi-soliloquies do not hold a patch on the ones we’ve grown accustomed to from Shakespeare.  Barker doesn’t give a hoot. He doesn’t like Hamlet anyway, thinks he’s pusillanimous.

The Cry 5 (L-R): Meghan Leathers as Ragusa and Bill Army as Albert

They multiply.  Barker introduces Isola (Kathryn Kates), mother of fratricide Claudius and, of course his now dead sibling.  She is also the grandmother to Hamlet and she doesn’t much like any of them but she’s cowed by Gertrude’s seething sexual persona which runs hot, unabated, unsatisfied by clothed Claudius, so Isola introduces young, passionate Duke of Mecklenberg (Bill Armey), half Gertrude’s age,  vibrant with his hots for her.  Grandmother Isola also abets Hamlet’s marriage to Ragusa (Meghan Leathers) who finds it more convenient to marry a king than not.  (In Barker’s version of something rotten in Denmark there is no marriage of Claudius to his sister-in-law, Gertrude.) And, let’s see, oh yes, Hamlet and Ragusa bring forth a baby Princess.  Barker has dark plans for them all.

The PTP/NYC company are directed to carry on adeptly, fervently, with considerable aplomb in Mark Evanchos’ monumental setting, amid  some of the best and lavish costume changes – by Danielle Nieves --ever seen Off-Broadway, including Gertrude’s, most of the time, that is. She sure does know her way around black silk stockings, on and off. Well, you may not titter but you certainly don’t yawn.  And that’s a blessing.  Come to think of it, Barker doesn’t much like blessings, either.

Gertrude:The Cry. At Atlantic Stage 2, PTP/NYC, 330 West 16^th Street..  Tickets: $35, $18 students, seniors, PTPNYC.org or 1-866-811-4111. 2 hrs, 20 min.  Thru Aug 10.