July 8, 1977 Gusto cover story: Shakespeare in Delaware Park

 

A Gusto cover story takes a look behind the curtain at the preparations for the second season of Shakespeare in Delaware Park. 

July 8, 1977

Hamlet 

          The fooling around gets a little too free and easy in the play within a play scene and this rehearsal run-through of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” is suddenly in an uproar.

          Mark Donohue, who plays King Claudius, tries to throw a punch at Jim McGuire, who plays Hamlet. The two are restrained. Donohue flares up again and storms off the stage.

          “I don’t have to take that,” he bellows. The other actors follow him out to the hallway of UB’s Harriman Hall, trying to calm him down.

          Director Saul Elkin watches all this with incredible detachment, writing in his notebook but not intervening. McGuire carries on, singing a mocking song. Donohue continues to rage in the hall.

          Peek at the script and you see why Elkin’s so serene. Donohue and the others played the scene pretty much the way it was written.

          No, Shakespeare didn’t write it this way. This is an updated “Hamlet,” a reworked version of the multimedia, modernized “Hamlet” Joseph Papp staged in New York City in the mid ‘60s. And it’s full of surprises.

          Elkin’s regrooved it slightly for the ‘70s. The emphasis has shifted from war to politics. The division between antique modes and modern antics is blurrier. Central to the updating, however, is a new musical score by musical director Ray Leslee, who threw out the old one.

          “I looked at it and saw that it wouldn’t do,” says pianist Leslee, a former member of Jay & the Americans (he joined right after Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen and Walter Becker left the group). The new music for “Hamlet” will be part of his master’s degree project.

          “Saul and I went away to Vermont after school let out and just talked about the play for four days,” he says. “There was no music, nothing. We just wanted to understand the play first. The play’s the thing, you know. This way it grows organically.”

          For Shakespeare fans, this play is definitely not a case of love at first sight. It can be pretty unsettling.

          “I’ve taught ‘Hamlet’ three times,” says Mary Richert, a thin, dark-haired singer who teaches English at Williamsville East High School and who plays the part of Ophelia. “When I first read this, I went into a state of shock.”

          That’s one of the reasons why director Elkin chose this “Hamlet” for the Shakespeare in Delaware Park project. The play is so familiar, he says, that the soliloquies have become like singalongs. Everybody knows the words, he maintains, and everybody’s forgotten what they’re saying.

          There’ll be plenty to see and hear. Film strips and slides will illuminate the soliloquies. Ophelia sings hers in front of a rock band led by Leslee, with the palace guards giving her street corner harmony.

          Leslee has to shush some youngsters watching it from the sidelines during an afternoon music rehearsal, then stops the singing to correct one of the guards.

          “Wait a minute,” he says. “It’s a weak time to do that because we need your note for the top chord.”

          They do it again and it’s better. Leslee tells them to take five. “Our first rehearsal,” he says, “we just sat in my car with the tape player and listened to the Persuasions.”

          Then there’s the costumes. Designer Anna Marie Brooks, who says her job this year has been “retrenched,” is fashioning Hamlet as prince, peanut vendor and Freddie Prinze. Rosencranz (Richard Wesp) and Guildenstern (Larry Turner), called Rossencraft and Gilderstone in this version, wear brightly-colored warm-up suits with their names on the backs.

          “We decided to do coordinated wildness,” she says as she stitches Ophelia’s shawl in the steamy basement workshop. “We’re painting a skirt for Ophelia, but we don’t know whether we’ll get it done.”

          Time has been a pressing factor. Elkin gave himself four weeks to pull it together. That’s meant weekends for himself and Jim McGuire, a graduate assistant in drama and an inspired comic actor. His job as Hamlet is to be the spark that touches off the fuse of the play.

          McGuire keeps a notebook of Elkin’s instructions. What they’re down to in the afternoon workouts is timing. They go over and over a scene with Gregg Maday, who’s Polonius.

          “The thing is we lose the pace of the ending,” Elkin instructs. “It has to be: ‘Ex-CEPT my wife.’ I think we’ve still got to think vaudeville here, pure Smith and Dale.”

          “Right, we’ve got to get that vaudeville rhythm,” Maday agrees. “Hey-hey-hey.”

          The evening being the second run-through, it will be Elkin’s barometer of how tough things will be between now and the Tuesday premiere.

          “Listen, we’ll do the second act all the way through,” he instructs the cast, “but if things go – sigh – rockily in a scene, then we’ll go over it. I’m particularly interested in transitions between scenes. If it starts to run long, we’ll break.”

          He makes a chopping motion, but he doesn’t have to use that motion much this night. The second act seems to have its own power of movement. Elkin takes notes and hops onstage whenever his part comes up.

          He’s cast himself as the Ghost of Hamlet’s father. Leslee says he’s getting appropriate ghost music on the synthesizer that bassist Peter Piccirilli built. Elkin turns out to be the only one who has to read his lines from the book. The rest get by with an occasional prompt from stage manager Peter Kalven.

          The rough spots are the party scene and the deaths. Part of the problem is where people fall as they fulfill Shakespeare’s intention of littering the stage with bodies. But overall, Elkin is pleased. His final assessment is full of praise.

          “It just went superwell tonight,” he says. “Superwell. The difference from two nights ago was like night and day. Jim McGuire was just cookin’ tonight.”

          McGuire clutches his notebook, still a bit out of breath. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” he says.

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IN THE PHOTOS: From the newspapers.com archives, the photos that accompanied the story in 1977. At top, Jim McGuire as Hamlet and Mary Richert as Ophelia. Bottom, Saul Elkin in his salad days.

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FOOTNOTE: In 2013, when Saul Elkin was staging “Hamlet” for the fifth time in Delaware Park, he confessed to Buffalo News critic Colin Dabkowski, “It was my notion, back then, that was the direction theater was going. … I thought I had to throw everything in, and I did.” Saul has just stepped down as artistic director after 47 seasons.

          Ray Leslee continued as music director through 1990, went to New York City, and is now considered to be the world’s foremost composer of music for Shakespeare. His other works include “Avenue X,” an award-winning a cappella musical that’s played in theaters in more than 50 cities.

          Mary Richert is familiar to folks in Buffalo literary circles. A poet, fiction writer and teacher, she is a past recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for Creative Non-Fiction and a two-time Western New York Writers-in-Residence competition winner.