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HAMLET: BLOOD IN THE BRAIN. By Naomi Iizuka. Directed by Jonathan Moscone. Intersection for the Arts, Campo Santo, and the California Shakespeare Festival, Intersection for the Arts Theatre, San Francisco. 27 October 2006.
From the moment the needle hit the record in the premiere production of Naomi Iizuka's new play Hamlet: Blood in the Brain, we knew we were not in Elsinore anymore. The production opened with an explosion of rap and choreography expressing that something is rotten in a place far removed from Shakespeare's Danish palace, namely 1989 Oakland, California.
Iizuka's new play, created collaboratively with members of the San Francisco-based theatre ensemble Campo Santo and produced in conjunction with the California Shakespeare Theater, situates one of the Western world's most important dramas in a drug-ravaged, violent, gang-infested Oakland neighborhood. Although Hamlet: Blood in the Brain completely reworks Shakespeare's original, its skeleton remains intact in Iizuka's play: Hamlet is now just "H" and has returned home, although not from a university but from prison, to find that his stepfather, Oakland's drug kingpin, has been murdered. G, his mother, has married C, his stepfather's brother. Seemingly this is where the similarities between Shakespeare's Hamlet and Iizuka's end. After all, Iizuka's C is a hardcore, shrewd drug dealer; O, H's love interest, is hardly Shakespeare's shrinking violet Ophelia; the characters dance at clubs, drive Impalas, and are involved in drive-by shootings. Yet even with the specificity of issues for 1989 Oakland, powerful themes of familial loyalty, obligation, and honor reminiscent of Shakespeare's play still resonate. Ultimately, Iizuka's play depicts the devastating effects violence has on a specific community while using the...