I saw a show called “Hamlet | Toilet” and said to myself, ‘I have to go!’
Prior to Columbia County, I lived in the East Village of NYC from 1987 until 2009. With multiple NYU Drama School friends and roommates, I’ve sat through more than my fair share of black box avant garde theater performances. After a while, you understand that similar to impressionist paintings, you watch performance art and contemplate the feelings and emotions that the piece provokes – not necessarily the storyline.
You have to just go with that.
Hamlet | Toilet might be hard to digest for some audiences. The show opens with farting noises and Hamlet on a human toilet bowl, constipated because his father is stuck in his colon. Ophelia is portrayed by a “dad-bod” man with a large headdress made of toilet paper rolls. There’s a lengthy, repetitive, angry debate when one man calls out for his mother to wipe him, and the other man – with a reference to Schrodinger’s cat – asks, how do you know if you’re dirty if you don’t check first? Without checking, is it possible that your butt can be both dirty and clean at the same time, like Schrodinger’s cat being both alive and dead inside the box? This scene reminded me of Tom Stoddard’s absurdist play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, when the coin toss lands on heads seventy-six times. We begin to question, is anything really what we think it is? Is Hamlet descending into madness or are we?
The finale was a twenty foot PVC pipe lowered from the side curtain, over the head of one of the performers, who wore a hard hat. Small white stones fell from the PVC pipe onto his head, while another performer stood behind him, in a prayer position, and giggled.
The entire performance was in Japanese, with translation on two side video screens. At the beginning, we were told is was an eighty minute production.
The black box theater of PS 21 was packed, almost every seat taken, with over one hundred people in attendance. It was a Friday evening. We sat in a theater space in the middle of a field watching Shakespeare’s Hamlet performed to fart humor. I thought I knew Columbia County, but during this show, I asked myself, ‘who are all these people?’ and ‘why are they here?’ and ‘how is this going to continue for eighty minutes?!?’
I (re)started my position on the City of Hudson’s Common Council as 4th Ward Councilperson. This week, there were about a dozen people watching the Informal Council meeting virtually, a paltry number compared to people watching Hamlet | Toilet in person. I wondered why.
If we added fart jokes at Hudson’s Common Council meetings, maybe we could have more people engaged in local government.
