Terpening-Romeo's Vanity Project

The proliferation of small theater companies in Portland is creating fertile ground for vanity projects like Anon It Moves and String House's current production of Hamlet.

Driving this production is early career director and Anon It Moves co-founder Erica Terpening-Romeo's desire to play Hamlet and not a lot else. This might be excusable if Terpening-Romeo had the chops for Shakespeare's iconic character, but, more's the woe, she hasn't.

This Hamlet opens with a dumb-show presentation of a loving family, until the King disappears leaving his crown floating mid-air. The cast continues to explore the relationships established in this scene through the duration of the play: Hamlet and Ophelia's (Crystal Ann Muñoz) decaying love, Hamlet's sacrificial relationship with her dead father (played by a masked chorus), and her fraught relationship with her mother (Ethelyn Friend) and uncle/step-father (Jamie Peck). Director Elizabeth Watt elevates Ophelia's importance by staging a relationship between her and her spectral father (Chris Porter), and of course her importance to Laertes (Heath Hyun Houghton) is given in the text.

These relationships constitute the framework for Watt's directorial premises: "before the murderous act that began an irreversible unraveling, this was a love-filled world." Watt's program note continues, "The project was seeded with Erica [Terpening-Romeo]'s image of a strong female Hamlet." This could be a great idea to call attention to the patriarchal world out of which Shakespeare's canon springs, or about the gender neutrality of emotional malaise, or any number of intriguing things. It might even work as a platform for a great actor, although we just saw that formula crash and burn with Portland Shakespeare Project's Tempest. Unfortunately, Terpening-Romeo's not a strong enough actor to carry this particularly challenging play in that even more challenging role. She seems to be out of her depth and played a superficial Hamlet, breathy and fast. She got lost in the pedigree of the role, and, except for one brilliantly genuine moment in the fifth act, bombed. Since her desire for the role dominated everything and everybody else, there was hardly an opportunity for any one else's contributions to redeem the play.

It's to be expected, however, that we will be getting uninteresting vanity projects like this one in Portland's ballooning fringe theater scene. Small groups of friends banding together and performing for their friends create the perfect condition for work done for the artists not the audience or community. Why would anybody else be interested in seeing an early-career director play Hamlet just because she can?