Ovation Fellows are current students or recent alumni from Los Angeles area universities.  Fellows are paired with a Mentor, currently serving as an Ovation Award voter, and see productions and meet artists around Greater Los Angeles throughout the year.  Their articles, posted on LAStageBlog, are intended to be their personal responses to their experiences, and not as critical reviews or representing the views of LA Stage Alliance.

Tyler McClain is an Ovation Fellow from Loyola Marymount University.

The first time I really saw Shakespeare, and I mean really enjoyed his work, was when I read Hamlet in high school. It was dark and sad and it appealed to my most grandiose fantasies about brooding over a kingdom and war – real, big issues that I was most likely never going to have to concern myself. Reading Hamlet finally felt like I was doing the footwork for my English class, like I was finally learning about the canon. I was taken aback by how daunting a task writing an essay about it seemed – how was I ever going to cut through something so impossibly rich, and so pricelessly sad? What would I ever have to say on the subject that hadn’t already been said, and then said again?

As it turns out, I don’t think I succeeded much in those efforts. In fact, I’m fairly confident the essay was miserable. I was happy then, when I was given a second chance for the same English class (Dr. Gaye McCollum-Nickles’, who I might add, was my original reason for writing anything at all) when we were assigned an essay on Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern… which is the more meanderingly existential and sad, had me riveted. It was a masterpiece of creative liberty, of appropriation, and it taught me to be encouraged by the old masters instead of intimidated by them. To be as cliché as possible – which is always my goal, I was in total awe that someone had not only appropriated something as epochal as Hamlet, but that he had something new to say. As it turns out, he had a lot of something new to say, and I was listening eagerly.

Jill Van Velzer as Gertrude

But this post isn’t about Stoppard. In fact, this post isn’t even about Shakespeare. This post is about Stein, Deborah Stein – the playwright and true visionary behind God Save Gertrude, another revisionist take on Hamlet that just had its premiere at the Boston Court Theater in Pasadena under the direction of Michael Michetti.

Scrapping Stoppard’s existentialism in favor for good ol’ punk rock, Gertrude is a romping, stomping “play with songs” that sort-of retells the Hamlet story from Gertrude’s perspective. Oh, and she’s a former punk rock, Patti Smith type. It’s not a musical, although there is singing and wailing and a fair amount of Shakespearean misery.

The most striking thing about watching Gertrude was how much fun I had.  There are some televisual video elements, a lot of fog, some rock-show lighting; it’s all very fresh and creative. That’s what astounded me the most, that’s what got me a little shaken up: that there was really new territory, and that a contemporary artist had successfully figured out how to effectively give that shape on stage, and really work.

As an artist and writer, I lose sleep (don’t worry, I don’t lose sleep) over worrying about how to find my footing amid so much greatness. Where do I belong in the theater world, a culture so bogged down by lineage and history that it’s hard to make your voice heard or even feel like what you have to say deserves to be listened to? In talking to Ms. Stein after the performance, I think the more important point is simply that we try. Art is messy, and good art is built on the carnage of failures. So we try, and we try again, and then one more time, and then more after that. But let’s try hard not to be concerned with “our place” in the arts, and simply commit to participating, to being a member of the cultural community and represent ourselves with our best efforts. Thoughts like these flash through my brain in the aftermath of witnessing true risk-taking, true creative bravado, and Gertrude is certainly that.

For more information on God Save Gertrude or the Theatre @ Boston Court, click here!