Hipster Hamlet had just been sentenced to the most dire of exiles.
“Prepare thyself,” a suit-clad Claudius said, “for Jersey.”
This, after Hamlet gave his “to be or not to be” speech while leaning against a wall in flannel and jorts, sipping a Bud Light, and after the fate of poor Polonius, the king’s adviser, was put up to an audience vote. If they sent him to heaven, he got a shot of Jack Daniel’s; to hell, and he was dispatched with a cup of warm boxed wine.
After much raucous cheering, hell won, and the audience — half-cocked from their own drinking — went wild.
“You feel like one of the groundlings,” says Suzy Hunt, 32, of Williamsburg, who played along. “It feels like something Shakespeare would approve of.”
A return to the days of the groundlings — those rowdy folks in the cheap seats at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre — is part of the idea behind the Hamlet Project’s production, which debuted Sunday night at Harley’s Smokeshack Westside on 44th Street. The performance is a modern twist on the Bard’s classic, substituting Midtown for Denmark, Wesleyan for Wittenberg, a spectral subway beggar for Cladius’ ghost and a sock puppet for Guildenstern.
The Bard’s original was trimmed by about a third to keep it under two hours, but it’s largely Shakespeare’s own language, peppered with modern references.
All that is nothing compared to the show’s drinking games. Audience members take a drink every time a character says “king” or “drink.” When anything is repeated three times — “Words, words, words . . . with friends,” Hamlet says, mixing a famous line from the play with the popular word game — you take a big chug. By the time Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, you’re more than a little tipsy. (Full disclosure: I drank along with every boozy cue, and felt quite the midsummer night’s drunk by the end.)
But why booze up one of the greatest works in English literature?
“People show up expecting to laugh and drink beer,” says the play’s director, Beth Gardiner. “And then all of a sudden this amazing story told by brilliant actors creeps up on them. And then there’s ‘Hamlet’ happening, in a bar.”
The play is sprinkled with local in-jokes: Claudius shames himself on the front page of AM New York with an embarrassing Twitter picture (projected on the back wall), and the play Hamlet stages to trip up his uncle uses the usual suspects from Times Square, including the Naked Cowboy.
The whole performance is casual and loose, with the goal of engaging everyone in the room: the bar’s pool table is used as a prop, and an audience member (a female one, in this case) is selected to fill the role of Polonius, which adds a level of meta humor to it all. Ophelia, Hamlet’s love interest, enters in an “Occupy Shakespeare” shirt, and her fratty brother Laertes faces off against Hamlet in a climactic game of beer pong.
By the final scene on Monday, about 50 audience members were standing and cheering, surrounded by empty pitchers, shot glasses and cups of sangria.
“It’s Shakespeare — it’s the best writing of all time,” says David Hudson, the Equity performer who plays Hamlet. “There’s something so great about getting to do that in a new, fresh, exciting way that’s so accessible.”
Up next: the group plans a “Romeo and Juliet” next month, featuring a face-off between the Montagues and Capulets — in a flip-cup game.
The Hamlet Project continues Sunday, Monday and Tuesday at 8 p.m. at Harley’s Smokeshack, 356 W. 44th St. Admission is $10; drinks are on you.