MANSFIELD — It didn’t take long for the sheer magnitude of playing the lead role in “Hamlet” to sink in for Josh Carpenter.
“I first read it when I was a junior in high school and my ego told me I could do that,” the 23-year-old Mansfield native said Monday evening before a Mansfield Shakespeare Co. dress rehearsal at South Park.
“When it was announced, I told myself I was going to be first in line to audition. Then we had our first read-through … it kind of sunk in what this role was really going to entail,” said Carpenter, who recently graduated from Ashland University with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing, English and religion.
“It has been a very draining (rehearsal) experience, but I think it’s worth it.”
The local group is offering its third year of “Shakespeare in the Park” with free productions of perhaps The Bard’s most famous and culturally influential play on Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3:30 p.m. at 100 Brinkerhoff Ave.
What you need to know about “Hamlet”: (Spoiler alert for 400-year-old play!)
Set in Denmark, Shakespeare’s Hamlet follows a young prince consumed by grief and vengeance. After the ghost of Hamlet’s father reveals he was murdered by his own brother, Claudius — who has already seized the throne and married the queen — Hamlet vows revenge.
To hide his intentions, Hamlet feigns madness, a tactic that strains his relationship with his lover, Ophelia, and deepens his existential despair. Trapped in indecision, he famously contemplates life and death while seeking concrete proof of his uncle’s guilt.
When Hamlet accidentally kills the royal advisor, Polonius, he triggers a chain reaction of tragedy: Ophelia descends into true madness and drowns, and her brother, Laertes, seeks dual vengeance. Everything culminates in a rigged fencing match engineered by Claudius.
In a devastating final scene, the royal court is wiped out by poison and steel, leaving Hamlet to accomplish his revenge just moments before his own death.
Carpenter and the entire cast and crew worked early Monday evening at the scenic park under dark blue skies in unseasonably cool temperatures.
Despite his age, Carpenter is a 10-year local theater veteran who has performed in the past two summer park shows.
Hamlet, as perhaps Shakespeare intended, has been the most trying.
“I haven’t left a rehearsal going, ‘Man, I feel ready to do that again.
“I leave exhausted, but I always come back, and that’s kind of helped with the role of Hamlet. He himself is developing over time and I have gotten to live in that for the last six weeks of rehearsals,” he said.
Carpenter said fhs character’s manic role is one he has chased throughout preparations for the show.
“I don’t know when Hamlet is ‘acting.’ I don’t know to what degree his emotions are real. When I was a kid, my dad passed away, and I’ve carried that for a long time. Claudius tells (Hamlet) that it is unmanly grief. I can carry that as as a person because I’ve experienced it,” Carpenter said.
“I think everybody has had that moment where they feel alone, so everybody can kind of get what Hamlet’s going through.”
There are historically famous lines in the show, including “To be or not to be.”
But the one that has resonated most with Carpenter is, “Get thee to a nunnery.”
That’s the moment Hamlet has just realized Ophelia (played by Leanna Uselton) is being used as bait by her father and King Claudius to spy on him.
Feeling deeply betrayed by the woman he loved, he lashes out. It’s one of the most famously bitter lines in the play. To an Elizabethan audience, it carried a double meaning that perfectly captured Hamlet’s spiral into fury and paranoia.
By using a word that meant both a place of ultimate sexual purity and a place of ultimate sexual corruption in Elizabethan slang, Hamlet mocks Ophelia’s innocence. He implies that she is either too pure for this dirty world and needs to lock herself away, or that she is a deceptive actress selling herself to help the King.
“For a majority of the (rehearsal) run, I had my script in hand. So I was able to get into what was going on, but not to the extent where it’s at now. When Leanna and I started running it without the book in my hand … almost like night and day … it started coming together,” Carpenter said.
“Both of us were in a spot where it’s like ‘there’s something missing.’ And the something missing was not having anything between us and just feeling that scene,” he said.
‘I think Ophelia is a lot more complex than I first gave her credit’
Thr 24-year-old Uselton, who also recently graduated from AU with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing, is performing in her second “Shakespeare in the Park” production in Mansfield.
While Hamlet’s “madness” is famously calculated and acts as a shield, Ophelia’s breakdown is genuine, devastating, and absolute.
She is the true tragic victim of the rotting state of Denmark, crushed by the psychological warfare of the men around her.
“It’s just finding those moments within the show that kind of trigger the madness in the scenes that she’s given. I’ve just tried to find all these little nuances throughout, even from the beginning, when she’s this perfect ideal woman and what that really means to her.
“She’s really young, and she’s kind of thrown into the society and these ideas are thrust upon her, so how that affects her mental state, too,” Uselton said.
She said veteran director Joe Fahey wanted to establish a strong dynamic among Ophelia, her brother, Laertes, and her father, Polonius.
“We wanted to clearly show their relationship at the beginning, versus how they are at the end. She wants to please them, she wants to be loyal to them, and so that really drives a lot of her objectives and her actions in the play,” Uselton said.
“But then she also has this dynamic with Hamlet, because they’re in love. What is she going to choose? Hamlet? Or her family?” she said.
“It’s just flip …. between kind of a rock and a hard place … and I think Joe does a pretty good job at making that a very clear line.”
Uselton came in with no preconceived notions for her character — or the show.
“Actually, I had never read Hamlet until about a few weeks before the auditions,” she said with a laugh. “I knew who Ophelia was and I knew of the characters in the show. I just was not as familiar with (“Hamlet”) as I was with other Shakespeare shows.
“I think Ophelia is a lot more complex than I first gave her credit for when I read it on the page. With that dynamic of the expectations put on her, I think there’s just a lot of juicy moments with her,” Uselton said.
“I see her as a very kind character. I think she’s a little different. I don’t think she is as selfish as some of the characters. I think all of her motivations purely come from a good place of love and commitment and loyalty.
“I just really hope (the audience) takes away that there are a lot of people like that in the world and just don’t take them for granted,” Uselton said.
(Below are photos and a video from a Monday night rehearsal of “Hamlet” at South Park in Mansfield, which opens Friday night. The story continues below the photos and video.)
‘It doesn’t end well and frankly, it never looks like it’s going to end well’
Another veteran local performer, Steve Russell, takes on the villainous role of Claudius.
The 55-year-old English native said “Hamlet” is probably the “most famous play with the most famous lines in it,” but it’s not the most oft performed.
“It’s not actually put on as much as some of the others, and partly that’s because, I think people are more inclined to go for the comedies,” Russell said.
“There’s always comedy in Shakespeare, though. Although this isn’t technically one of his comedies, there are laughs in it, without a doubt.”
Russell makes no apologies for the character he portrays.
“(Claudius) is a terrible person in most ways. But he’s also a weak man who’s got himself out of his depth.
“There’s just one moment in the play where you get to see the curtain pulled back and you basically see him address himself, or address the invisible audience as it were, and you see the worried, panicked and desperate man underneath,” Russell said.
“But for the rest of the play, he becomes increasingly desperate. If you’re being generous, you could call it a cunning plan. It’s a plan for sure.
“The audience will have to decide the level of cunning. But it doesn’t end well and frankly, it never looks like it’s going to end well,” Russell said.
He points out Shakespeare ratchets up the classic conflict between stepfather and stepson by the fact the older has killed the younger’s real father, a murder Hamlet discovers.
“Hamlet’s approach to that is not to have this kind of out-and-out confrontation, but to basically fake madness … with the feeling he can kind of move around and operate as he chooses and everyone just dismisses his actions as that of just being a lunatic,” Russell said.
Growing up in England, Russell was fan of Shakespeare, at least within the confines of the plays he performed in high school.
“I enjoyed them a lot of the time. I was lucky enough growing up that we were close enough to London that we could all kind of get on the train and see some of the West End productions.
“I loved that, but then I never really came back to it after I left school,” Russell said.
It that relationship with Shakespeare he rejoined after coming to the United States and living in Columbus.
“I hadn’t really seen one of these outdoor productions and it’s a great way to see it. It just seems like a natural setting for a lot of his plays, and it’s a little less off-putting to people who don’t go and see Shakespeare very often or at all, or even go to the theater,” Russell said.
“You can just turn up with your folding chair and you’ve got something to munch on and you know you can have a little picnic and you can sit in the park. I think that’s a little bit more inviting. I found that down in Columbus, so I loved going to those,” he said.
“When I started acting in Mansfield, it wasn’t really happening much locally until the Mansfield Shakespeare Company came along. I thought, ‘Oh, this is great, and the park is fantastic and we don’t charge,” he said with a laugh.
‘Being able to be part of it, I think is a real honor and a great challenge’
It all comes together under the watchful eye of Fahey, an associate professor of theater and the director of the theater program at OSU-Mansfield.
“Having it out in the park for the first night (Monday) is always a great fun adventure. One, it’s just lovely to know that soon the audience will be here and they’ll be really helping to make it what it’s supposed to be.
“But also we know that things will trip us up and we have four nights to kind of figure those things out,” said Fahey, who has been directing theatrical performances in a myriad of venues for 35 years.
“Performing outside is a unique experience and so all those little like hiccups, we get to joyously work together and solve. But it’s a delight. We’ve got good weather, which is always awesome, and we have set where we want it and a good group of people.
“So we’re excited,” Fahey said.
It’s a larger cast than normal for the park with more than 20 actors.
“Every cast is different. I think what’s really unified them is they’re all just good people. They’re good to work together and generous to support each other. They all came in at least knowing of the play, many of them knowing it very well, and realizing that this is a unique opportunity.
“For many directors and many actors, ‘Hamlet’ is the Mount Everest of theater productions. Being able to be part of it in any way, I think is a real honor and a great challenge.
“The audience will come in, many of them knowing key lines, some knowing even more than that. Being able to bring to life a play that most audience members have only read or maybe seen in a film version …
“That’s really a wonderful adventure.”
