Done

The final project for my bachelor's degree at Bard College, the impishly-titled Done was a short theatre piece about creative failure. Lampooning my over-ambitious attempt to develop a piece about Hamlet, textuality, and artistic creation, I instead devised a meta-theatrical world of the remains of this initial project, an empty world of fragmented text in which the only figures struggle to find (or create) meaning, roles, or an appropriately performative atmosphere.

The initial concept was an explosion of the most well-known play in the English language, Hamlet, through the lens of la critique génétique (genetic criticism), a school of literary criticism analyzing the genesis, i.e. creation, of works of art. While many are at least cursorily familiar with Shakespeare's chef d'oeuvre, that he likely got the story from François de Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques remains little known, and even less so is the ultimate (written) source for the Hamlet legend, the story of Amleth in the 12th century work Gesta Danorum (Deeds of the Danes) by Saxo Grammaticus, beyond which the trail vanishes into the mist of history. The strong similarities to Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy are also noted, and some scholars speculate that Shakespeare may have even contributed a monologue to Kyd's play, one only found in later printings.

The concept was to create a theatre piece which would itself be a work of genetic criticism, uncovering the layers of different textual versions of the story, undermining the monolithic reputation Hamlet has come to have in modern culture, while attempting to eke out something about the creative process itself. It's a lovely little idea, if I do say so myself, and one I'd still be glad to work on, but at the time, I overburdened myself (brain) with research and my own writing, while simultaneously wanting to lead the devising of a piece by an interested and collaborating group of actors, rather than directly performing anything I had merely written myself. When it came to it, I had neither the resources, nor a clear enough vision to execute something that functioned as the original idea. On the suggestion of my (sensibly exasperated, probably) advisor, I ended up repurposing my own creative process as the basis for a piece, and appropriated the sum total of research notes, source material, and aborted drafts as the text from which to draw. I found two other actors with enough spare time to not know what they were getting in to, and together, we devised a series of abstract scenes of characters trying to find their purpose in the collapsing world of the original concept, populated by blank sheets, empty signifiers, and reams of scraps—fragments of the text. This 'devising' involved me putting my two actors through a rather unusual set of ropes, neither of whom had much theatrical experience but likely both of whom wondered if I did either. Probably the patience of everyone else involved is not to be understated.

Nevertheless, for a first piece created, it turned out okay. It involved a set of ideas and modes—namely, the self-aware characters, 4th-wall breaking, and metafiction that a lot of fascinating pieces of art have been made with—which I would still like to work with, though preferably intentionally from the start. It was also a piece that was made for its audience: a small group of fellow students and professors, all of whom knew me and many of whom were at least somewhat familiar with my work. There was really little point in making it otherwise. But it would be less legible to anyone outside of that particular time and place, to which there are plusses and minuses; but should the reader's curiosity be piqued, there is an imperfect recording of the piece (a missing minute in the middle, some action not visible):