To cut, or not to cut...

On Tuesday we had a the first run of the play, and it was… let's just say it ran long. Now I'm not one of these people who thinks that theatre needn't be long, so long as it is good. I recently sat through a production at the Met of Handel's opera Giulio Cesare which ran a thrilling 4-1/2 hours. And let's face it, this is "Hamlet." It's SUPPOSED to be long, right? It's literally ABOUT delay. 

We went into this project knowing that we wanted a reasonably lean, fast-paced production that focused on the revenge plot and eliminated the Fortinbras sections. That meant cutting a major soliloquy as well as re-thinking portions of the ending. So long, "How all occasions do inform against me / And spur my dull revenge." Happy trails, "Go, bid the soldiers shoot." By my calculation, dramaturg Kristin Vieira and I cut the play from 32,000 words to 25,000 words, or 22% of the play.  Further trims were made in rehearsal as things read too long, and a few (not many) lines were put back in. 

A confession: I went into rehearsals with a script that I knew was too long, because I feel that different actors might latch onto material differently. Perhaps one Claudius will make "like a man to double business bound" the most brilliant, key moment of his big III.iii monologue. Better to cut it later rather than before.

And now, the "later" is upon us. This week we all felt that the play was too long. The cast felt it because they looked at their watches backstage. I felt it because, as an audience member, I started to feel restless, started to feel the play go a little slack. I made notes of the times in which I felt these things, which provided me with guideposts to judge what to cut, what to speed up, and how to watch future runs.

The artist in me thinks that a play or production needs to be however long it needs to be. To quote from Peter Schaffer's Amadeus, when the Emperor tells Mozart there are "too many notes," he responds, "There are just as many notes, Majesty, as are required. Neither more nor less." But what to do about that pesky audience? What if my radar as an audience member is biased? What if Charleston audiences are less patient than New York ones? What if our production (*gasp!*) can't sustain the length?

I decided to handicap my radar. I decided that, in addition to working the pacing (which was, as any first run is, too slow at many points) and trimming a few sections, a good deal more cuts were necessary. Also, at this early period of the "late" stage, we must now choose what is most important to spend our time resources on. Yes, I'm sure that we could have gotten the section in I.iv about the Danes being drunkards to be brilliant -- but at what expense to the rest of the production? And is that section important to the story OUR production is telling?

Shakespeare, especially in this play, wrote long. Many scholars have remarked upon the fact that Shakespeare repeats concepts and doubles characters throughout "Hamlet." In his Prefaces to Shakespeare, Tony Tanner writes of this "compulsive doubling, as though Shakespeare will not use one word when he can think of two." Part of my job is to trim extraneous doublings down, in order to highlight the essential ones.

I received suggestions from some of the cast members, and made my own cuts as well, many of them difficult but necessary. I also sat down with my Hamlet (David Lee Nelson) and went through the entire play, deciding on many internal Hamlet cuts. In the end, I feel like everyone had to sacrifice something for the good of the production. Gone is "like a man to double business bound." Much shortened is Reynaldo, that wily servant. And don't get me lamenting the "crowing of the cock."

The production script is now about 21,000 words, or 65% of the full play, and a few more cuts may come. These cuts are necessary, and are part of what makes this production distinctly our own.