Mauro-Sheridan Takes On The Dark Prince

On the stage Saturday afternoon at Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School — in preparation for the school’s performance of Hamlet on Tuesday, June 4, at 6 p.m. — Luna Candelario, as Hamlet, was getting some advice from co-directors Sarah Bowles and Michael Hinton on the best way to stab a man behind a curtain.

There were questions about how to draw the sword. How to approach the curtain. How to slide the blade through and (seemingly) into Charles Jeffery as Polonius. And then, once Jeffery had slumped to the floor, how to not actually hurt him as Candelario completed the rest of her scene. Finally, in a decision that every production of Hamlet faces, there was the question of how to get the body offstage and out of sight.

Jeffery, Hinton said, had to be dragged quickly and completely backstage and out of sight of the audience. ​“I don’t want to see a corpse walk across here,” Hinton said, referring to a small gap in the scenery where actors made their entrances and exits.

Saturday marked one of the final rehearsals for Hamlet at Mauro-Sheridan, and those were kinds of minute details everyone was down to. After all, the big stuff was already in place. The actors had their lines, and were fine-tuning their performances. The blocking was set, the scenery in place, the costumes sorted and ready to go. Even the choreographed fight scene toward the end was a deadly dance, each character knowing who they were fighting and why.

Mauro-Sheridan’s production of Hamlet also has an innovation. In this performance, the title character is played by five different actors: in addition to Candelario, Kallen Poole, Martin Duff, Zyana Campbell, and Jason Calogine. The move was in part born of necessity.

“It’s a lot easier,” Poole said. ​“Originally Hamlet has over 300 lines.”

Hinton agreed. ​“It’s too much for a lot of professional actors,” he said.

But the decision also represented an opportunity, and not only for five different actors to have a shot at playing Hamlet, as Bowles pointed out. It gave the actors a chance to collectively embody Hamlet’s famous indecision.

“Each one of us is a part of his brain,” Poole said. Calogine explained that the five actors were constantly talking about their role backstage, figuring out how to further nuance their performances as one or the other of them had ideas for how to dig deeper into the role.

They also strategically began shading their own performances by leaning into their own personalities, playing to their personal strengths to make Hamlet calm and collected in one moment and obviously angry the next, as he plotted his revenge against Claudius, King of Denmark for killing his father and marrying his mother to take the throne.

“This was the first time I got to experience rage,” Candelario said.

The Mauro-Sheridan Shakespeare Players are now in their 10th year of production (see an article on last year’s production), and Jodi Schneider, the program’s producer and coordinator, said that ​“this is the most challenging of all the plays we’ve ever done.”

This is in part because the production is the program’s biggest yet, involving 27 students as actors, in a time when, as Bowles pointed out, extracurricular activities are seeing their budgets cut. Once again, students from the Hopkins School, guided by teacher Michael Calderone, created sets and props. The costumes come from Elm Shakespeare — as do Bowles and Hinton, who work in the theater company’s education wing.

But the challenges also lie in the material itself: Hamlet is ​“only probably the most perfect work in Western art ever,” Hinton deadpanned.

“And yet they relate,” Bowles said of the actors in the show. Often older actors take on the role of Hamlet, seeing it as a pinnacle of a long career. But the character of Hamlet is actually a younger man of about 30. ​“The sense of right and wrong is so strong” in the play, Bowles said. And there is the fact of Hamlet’s indecision. ​“The fact that we have five Hamlets lends itself to dramatizing that,” Bowles said.

The question of the play isn’t just to be or not to be. It’s ​“more about ​‘what can I do?’” Hinton said. ​“And each of them gets to ask.”

So in addition to Candelaria’s fiery take, there was Campbell’s more collected angle to the role.

And then there was Duff’s determined Hamlet, even squaring off against James McAchern’s defiant Laertes. Keldan Aronsen got the arrogance and defensiveness in his Claudius. Luciana Campoverde captured Gertrude’s paralysis and, in time, piteousness.

The gravediggers — Perla Gutierrez, Stephen Julian, Yadiel Ortiz, Marquez Savage, and Isabella Violante — found the humor their scene needed, before Hamlet’s famous soliloquy with the skull of departed jester Yorick.

And Genesis Guillen haunted as the doomed Ophelia.

That the production came together as it did is a testament to the way Mauro-Sheridan’s Shakespeare program has grown over the years. Younger students watch the older students perform, and want to be a part of it. ​“The school has done Shakespeare for 10 years,” Bowles said. ​“It’s part of the culture.”

After the rehearsal, Bowles and Hinton handed out notes. They had directions. Some lines should be delivered at greater volume. Others with maybe a little more passion. Still other performances maybe should be dialed back a bit. A couple scene transitions could be tighter. But all in all, as Bowles said of the run-through, ​“that was lit.”

Hinton agreed that it was ​“solid.” ​“We know that we can do it.” he said. But had one more note to add for Candelaria.

“Don’t smile when you murder Polonius,” he said. The company laughed.

Hamlet will be performed at Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School, 191 Fountain St., at 6 p.m.