« Vol 4, Issue 2, Fall 2004

Community-Making and Madness:Hamlet: Blood in the Brain

How might The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark play in Oakland's infamously violent Acorn Projects in the 1980s?

That is the question which two collaborating artists—nationally renowned playwright Naomi Iizuka, and Sean San José, actor and project director for San Francisco's Intersection for the Arts' Campo Santo theater—first asked each other in 2002. How could California's diverse communities make their way into Shakespeare's classic text? "It's daunting," says Iizuka. "The play is so beautiful, so central to the Western canon, and yet so alien to so many people today. How can we find our way into this text with so many layers?"

Nonetheless, the challenge of transplanting Hamlet's Elsinore into one of Oakland's roughest housing projects continued to haunt them. Then Jonathan Moscone, artistic director of Berkeley's California Shakespeare Theater (Cal Shakes)—already well-known for its innovative productions and outreach to the Bay Area—was drawn into the conversation. Soon, Hamlet: Blood in the Brain became the first major project of Cal Shake's New Works/New Communities initiative, which was created to develop productions that bring different communities together around the making of new theater inspired by classic literature. The collaboration will culminate with a March 2006 premiere of the play written by Iizuka, directed by Jonathan Moscone, and co-produced with Campo Santo at Intersection for the Arts.

Iizuka's play will relocate Elsinore to the drug-ravaged world of an impoverished Oakland community in the late 1980s, a time of historically violent upheaval and transition. Avoiding strict one-to-one parallels with Shakespeare's play, she instead will focus on the intense sociological pressures that occur in a community following an extreme act of violence. Hamlet: Blood in the Brain will open up the experience of a young man who, confronted by loss, must carry the history of his community and his own corrupt lineage. It will explore the tensions within families and between territorialized communities mired in blood oaths, sullied ideals, and monstrous notions of honor.

The play is growing from conversations among several distinct communities-both theaters' audiences and Oakland residents-in a collaborative process. The hope is that through this process, nearly 1,000 diverse participating residents will break through barriers of socio-economic isolation and cultural misperception to realize a more inclusive sense of community.

The project received a $100,000, two-year grant from Irvine in June 2004. By connecting several of the Bay Area's diverse communities—with each other as well as with theater—and by strengthening the ties between arts organizations and the area's artists and underserved communities, Hamlet: Blood in the Brain is a perfect match for the goals of Irvine's Arts program: to enhance understanding among diverse, racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups through cultural engagement. "As California undergoes unprecedented demographic change in the next few decades," says Jim Canales, President and CEO of Irvine, "the sort of intra-community communication that Hamlet: Blood in the Brain should create will prove to be an invaluable asset to us all."

The project builds upon a model Iizuka and San José employed in Campo Santo's 2002 production 17 reasons (why). Campo Santo—Spanish for "sacred ground" or "graveyard"—cultivates writers through working in a small space with actors, designers, directors, and strongly multi-ethnic audiences. Iizuka wrote 17 reasons (why), about the multilayered history of San Francisco's Mission District, by first gathering and sifting the stories and lore of as many residents as possible. "How do you unearth the history of a place that has seen so many different waves of immigrants?" asked Iizuka. "You talk to as many people as you can. The way in which a community is defined gets enlarged in the process."

Hamlet: Blood in the Brain will emerge by similar method. Iizuka has begun conducting interviews with Oakland residents, historians, and artists during several extended site visits, which will continue through 2005. "I've had the opportunity to attend town-hall meetings and have met with neighborhood activists, artists, and youth. I've been driven around neighborhoods, been walked through funeral homes and crime sites. It's a very immediate process. For example, at ManAlive I met with a group of men who had once committed violent acts and who now participate in a rigorous rehabilitation process involving the exploration of the moment of their violence; for me, that experience provided intense, unsentimental insight into the psychology of Hamlet. These are not people I would have otherwise met. There's an amazing confluence of different voices. The play is being informed and enriched by them all."

The play-development process brings together a great array of opportunities for cultural engagement:

• In summer 2004, a panel of locals gathered to examine Oakland's history from several points of view—historian, social activist, and artist. Iizuka has also conducted individual interviews and small-group writing workshops with Oakland community organizations to discover source material, and participants in turn were invited to see a performance of Cal Shakes' 2004 production of The Importance of Being Earnest.
• Iizuka will meet with former Cal Shakes Board member and noted Shakespearean scholar Hugh Richmond to help her delve more deeply into Shakespeare's original play.
• At regular intervals, project partners will join in organized "Community Conversations," creating an opportunity for residents to relate their stories of Oakland past and present.
• Interdisciplinary performances with Oakland-based artists are planned to explore how Shakespeare's Hamlet translates into contemporary art forms like Hip Hop, Solo Performance, and Spoken Word.
• In July 2005, key project artists will participate in New Voices/New Visions, an annual summer theater lab established by Iizuka at UC Santa Barbara, where she is a Professor of Dramatic Arts. The two-week workshops will allow the project's artists to develop the piece further, working with scholars from multiple disciplines (e.g., urban studies and psychology), as well as with UCSB students and community members. Iizuka will then complete a draft of the play for a five-day performance workshop at Cal Shakes in November 2005.
• In April 2006, after the play's production, a final "Community Conversation" event will allow participating community members, organizations, artists, and the playwright to reflect on the value of the experience, and how successful the project was in realizing its collective community-building aspirations.

The hope is to combine the institutional and artistic strengths of each partner and break through conventional boundaries to a shared investment. Cal Shakes will benefit from working with Campo Santo by integrating the latter's hands-on, collaborative approach to developing new work. In turn, Campo Santo and Iizuka will gain from Cal Shakes' expertise in interpreting the classics and staging these works in ways that speak to broadly diverse, modern audiences. All program partners are convinced of the collaboration's potential to create a thriving cultural eco-system that will bring together people who might not otherwise be in dialogue.

At this point in the project's evolution, it may be the richness of the collaborative itself that presents the greatest challenge. Both theaters are ascending a learning curve as they encounter both anticipated and unexpected challenges, from coordinating simple logistics between two active theater companies to joining two organizational cultures into one, cohesive endeavor. Nonetheless, the partners report that the process is exciting and affirming—and that they will be the stronger for the project, with more to offer the Bay Area communities they serve.

top of page