Playwright Paul Rudnick has plenty of reason to hate “Hamlet.”
More accurately, he has reason to hate his own comedy, “I Hate Hamlet,” for all the angst, inadvertently, it has caused him.
But he doesn’t, and he shouldn’t. “I Hate Hamlet,” which opens Monday at the Royal George Theatre, is a very funny comedy and a marvelous homage to the art of acting, past and present.
Since the play was first produced, in 1991, Rudnick has become famous for his stage comedy (and, later, movie) “Jeffrey” and for his screenplay for “Addams Family Values.” And with his characteristic flair for gender-bending, he writes a column for Premiere magazine under the pseudonym Libby Gelman-Waxner. But “I Hate Hamlet” should have been his claim to fame, instead of a strange kind of short-lived infamy.
Many people will remember “I Hate Hamlet” forever for the antics of its Broadway star, Nicol Williamson, who stabbed his co-star–for real–in the midst of one supposedly fake sword fight during the run. On the night in question, the scene became a real duel: Williamson’s swordplay drew blood from co-star Evan Handler, who left the theater at intermission and, though not seriously injured, never came back. (His understudy took over for the rest of the brief run at the Walter Kerr theater.)
Williamson, meanwhile, stayed on, and, as Rudnick tells it, continued to cause untold mischief.
“He is a world-class lunatic,” Rudnick says. “I’ve written in the published edition of the play, `Though the role of John Barrymore (played by Williamson) is that of an alcoholic madman, it is not absolutely necessary to cast one.’
“(Williamson) was truly crazed, and an alcoholic on an Olympic level,” Rudnick continues. When reminded of libel, Rudnick retorts, “Find me a court of law!”
All of it made “Hamlet” a momentary cause celebre. The day after the duel, the New York Post devoted its entire front page to the affair. Rudnick was more fortunate with the New York Times, which bumped its front-page “Hamlet” story for one about the death of author Jerzy Kosinski. Rudnick says, “I was saddened that Kosinski died, but eternally grateful for his timing.”
“The madness,” meanwhile, as Rudnick refers to the Williamson saga, “began before the reviews, anyway, and continued after the duel. He’d give curtain speeches after some shows, or lead the audience in a rendition of `Happy Days Are Here Again.’ One of the saddest things is that his habits actually caused him trouble with his lines.”
The play ran only a few more months after the duel. “It was marvelous publicity on one hand, giving us a real tabloid buzz,” Rudnick says. “On the other hand, it’s not the kind of thing that actually inspired people to rush out and buy tickets. I worried it would turn the play into an anecdote, but luckily people didn’t respond that way. It has been done all over the world.”
If nothing else, Williamson was ideally cast, and all the misadventures a case of life imitating Rudnick’s art. “I Hate Hamlet” is about a young modern actor fresh from a canceled TV series, about to star as “Hamlet” in Central Park. Coincidentally, he rents Barrymore’s former New York City apartment, and the ghost of the legendary Shakespearean and dipsomaniac shows up to give advice, encouragement and a bit of confessional biography.
“I Hate Hamlet,” in other words, is all about genius, art, madness, self-destruction and the brave attempt to go on–Williamson was ideal for the part in more than his Shakespearean eloquence.
“He certainly had the right bravado,” Rudnick admits, “and on certain nights, he was unforgettable. There was a wonderful madness to the performance, but a sadness also, and it affected so many other people in ways not helpful or sane.”
Breaking new ground
Rudnick recovered from it all quite admirably. “Jeffrey”–which defied conventional wisdom and succeeded as an AIDS play that dared to be a comedy–won an Obie Award (the off-Broadway equivalent of the Tony Award) only two years after “Hamlet.” By then, Rudnick had scored in Hollywood, too, by doctoring the script for “The Addams Family” and officially authoring the successful sequel. The movie version of “Jeffrey”–though earning only $3 million at the box office so far–has recently been proclaimed an art-house hit by Entertainment Weekly, thanks to its minuscule budget.
“All of the actors (including “Wings” star Steven Weber, Patrick Stewart and Sigourney Weaver) worked for scale,” Rudnick says of the film, which came out this fall. “All we offered them were folding chairs and Dixie Cups, but I think that contributed to the atmosphere. Everyone was wonderful, in part, I think, because AIDS has been so devastating to the arts.”
Though $3 million may strike some as paltry, Rudnick says he’s pleased with the result. He doesn’t see the movie’s lack of mainstream success as an indication producers will back off gay subject matter.
“What’s important is that there have now been so many gay plays and increasingly gay-oriented movies that the culture can afford diversity and a wide array of results. No one film has to carry the burden of social concern or the economic burden of making it. We’re past the days when (the movie) `Making Love’ would financially bomb and discourage gay subjects for years. `Philadelphia’ did extremely well, while `Angels in America’ won Tony Awards for best play two years in a row–an astonishing feat. We’re allowed to fail now, too, but that doesn’t mean we’ll go back to being marginal.”
John Barrymore slept here
There is nothing remotely gay about “I Hate Hamlet.” The inspiration for the play was purely incidental.
“I was looking for an apartment, and I saw an ad for a `medieval duplex.’ I was curious what the medieval meant–could it be the plumbing, for instance? So I checked it out, and it turned out to be an apartment Barrymore actually lived in in Greenwich Village in 1917, renovated into a Gothic retreat he called `The Alchemist’s Corner.’ It had survived pretty much untouched, and once I began living there, the apartment demanded a play.
“Usually you write from your life or childhood,” he adds. “I call this a real-estate bonus.” There was an odd coincidence too. “A friend described the apartment before I ever moved in,” he says. “She was an older woman, and she had had an affair with Diana Barrymore’s husband, John’s son-in-law, in that very apartment many years ago.”
In his play, Rudnick has it that the actor’s agent had an affair with Barrymore himself. They have a fetching reunion, and there are thus several kinds of ghosts in the story.
Art vs. commerce
At base, though, “Hamlet” is about a clash of values–the actor, named Andrew, is torn between the lucrative allure of Hollywood–still beckoning with follow-up offers after the series–and the ageless demands of art. It was a battle Barrymore himself fought, abandoning his own stage career to go to Hollywood, and even Rudnick has faced the same question in his stage and film careers.
“I think the dilemma is actually easier for writers,” he says. “Someone from Hollywood in the play says, when Andrew claims he wants to make art, that `Art isn’t something you do. Art is something you buy.’ That attitude does exist out there, but a lot of people today do come back and forth and work in the theater as well as movies–Alec Baldwin, for instance. But people can talk themselves into very wrong decisions and become so addicted to that lifestyle and level of income that it imprisons them. `I’ve got to do a mini-series to pay for my pool,’ for instance.” Andrew’s old TV director, Gary, arrives in the story and refers to death as “the third coast.”
“But beyond the choice between commerce and art, what Andrew needs to do and what I wanted the play to say is something about challenging yourself, about fighting complacency,” Rudnick says. “In life, you should do what scares you, what you might not be capable of doing. That is what `Hamlet’ is for him, and Barrymore’s there to work him through it.”
“Hamlet” is fraught with that kind of amiable sentiment and Rudnick’s feisty knack for one-liners. The 37-year-old Rudnick, who says he descended from “a long line of New Jersey Jews,” attended Yale University. His father was a physicist who late in life found a second career as editor for Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, where he edited one of the first books on AIDS. Did his humor come from his childhood?
“Was I always this insufferable, do you mean? I come from a funny family. They valued humor as a worthwhile antidote to self-pity. It was a way of getting through the Passover Seder. You might say I was always encouraged in the most irritating parts of my personality.”
