Philadelphia Weekly

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The Lantern Theater Company concludes its 2008-’09 season with Shakespeare’s legendary but often misunderstood tragedy Hamlet.

Lantern’s artistic director Charles McMahon (who helms the production) acknowledges that not everyone’s first experience with Hamlet is a happy one. Although referred to as the greatest play in the English language, Hamlet has bored generations of high school students and theatergoers for ages. The result is that instead of a masterpiece, many view Hamlet as an overlong work about a prince who spends his time whining and procrastinating over how to avenge his father’s murder.

McMahon, of course, doesn’t see it that way. Instead of a melancholy and passive figure, he views Hamlet as a dogged detective searching for truth in a world undergoing a dramatic transformation.

“The play is a potboiler,” McMahon says, explaining Hamlet’s origin as a revenge tragedy. But instead of simply avenging his father’s death, McMahon says, Hamlet is fundamentally trying to gain control over his life.

And though fate demands that Hamlet must exact revenge, how he does it is up to him. When the opportunity to kill his murderous uncle presents itself, Hamlet waits, not because he is irresolute, says McMahon, but because he has a far more ambitious agenda.

Evoking McMahon’s vision of a dynamic Hamlet is local actor Geoff Sobelle. One of the city’s most creative theater artists, Sobelle is a highly physical performer who is best known for his work with the company rainpan 43 (which Sobelle founded with Trey Lyford) and the acclaimed experimental troupe Pig Iron Theatre Company. Although Sobelle’s projects with rainpan 43 evoke the theater of the absurd, he’s proven himself adept at Shakespeare, having garnered a Barrymore Award nomination for his performance in Lantern’s exuberantly inventive production of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors.

Of the Danish prince, Sobelle says, “The play isn’t a portrait of a procrastinator. At the beginning he is moping around the castle, but by the end he’s become a Jedi. If we do our job right the play isn’t a story of a guy who can’t make up his mind but a story of a guy who is dead set on doing something. Hamlet is banging his head against the wall because he’s trying to eke out some meaning in his life.”

McMahon understands the challenges of presenting a play that people think they already know, but hopes Lantern’s new production will allow theatergoers to see Hamlet in a different light. “There are a lot of assumptions about the play,” says McMahon. “We’re told in high school English class that Hamlet is indecisive, but the script suggests that he’s frustrated, like a Porsche stuck in traffic. We’re not taking a radical new approach to the play, but I’m hoping that people will find it more vital and dramatic than they may remember it.”

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Moral History: John Patrick Shanley’s 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning one-act play Doubt is a perfect model of dramatic construction. Following Doubt as the second play in Shanley’s proposed trilogy is the similarly structured 90-minute drama Defiance, which is having its local premiere at Bristol Riverside Theatre. The story is set in 1971 North Carolina on a marine base beset by racial unrest. Hoping to quell the unease, the camp’s ranking officer (Edward Keith Baker) enlists the aid of a black captain (Lindsay Smiling) who reluctantly agrees to accept the position of second in command. Like Doubt, Defiance is interested in moral integrity, but the play wastes time getting to the point. Sixty minutes pass before it finally captures our attention with an abuse of power by a seemingly unimpeachable authority figure. Defiance pales in comparison to the trilogy’s first installment, but the final 30 minutes are gripping and BRT’s production is buoyed by a magnificently unnerving performance from Clayton Dean Smith as a chaplain with uncertain motives. (J.C.R.) Through April 12. $29-$37. Bristol Riverside Theatre, 120 Radcliffe St., Bristol. 215.785.0100. www.brtstage.org