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Know Theatre Company: "Hamlet"

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It’s probably not giving much away to remind you that just about every character in “Hamlet” dies by the final curtain.

The Know Theatre Company takes a different track by killing off everyone before the play even begins, which this production does with the prince’s famous final words, “The rest is silence,” spoken by Christopher Guthrie.

“It starts the moment before he dies and his entire life flashes before his eyes,” Guthrie said. “It could play in a loop if you would let it. It could go on forever.”

And in an odd way, it does. As one of the Bard’s most-quoted and frequently-produced plays, there’s probably at least one “Hamlet” going on somewhere in the world at any given moment. But this adaptation by the Know’s artistic director Jason Bruffy promises a multi-media re-invention.

The text is the same, maybe mashed up a little bit, but this “Hamlet” takes place in “an entirely different world” from a conventional production, Guthrie said: “Ours is a much more nebulous place. You don’t just move from room to room in the palace for everything, you see it through Hamlet’s eyes” using 10 on-stage monitors “to delineate between the things going on in Hamlet’s head and what is actually happening.”

Although this is the Know’s first production of anything by Shakespeare, Guthrie is an old hand in classic theater, having moved to Cincinnati in 2001 to join the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival (now Company). He also played Rosencrantz in that company’s paired productions of “Hamlet” and “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” in 2004, earning a CEA nomination for the latter.

 

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