(Photo courtesy of Ruby Wang.)
Audiences were immersed in the time-traveling, expectation-defying Hamletmachine #2026 this past Friday and Saturday, a senior thesis conceived and directed by Jane Su ’26. The project, performed in the ‘62 Center for Theatre and Dance Directing Studio, was inspired by the 1977 German play Hamletmachine by Heiner Müller, a 9-page series of monologues based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Hamletmachine #2026 follows four archeologists as they delve into an archive of freshly excavated history, tackling alternative narratives within the history of communism and gender inequality. It explores Shakespeare’s original work, while also examining how we reckon with our pasts in the digital age.
Of the four performers, Diliara Sadykova ’26, Saumya Shinde ’26, Coco Zhang ’26, and Hung Ha ’26, three also play a version of Hamlet. The fourth, Ha, plays Ophelia. Throughout the performance, the characters reflect on their roles in Shakespeare’s original work, and consider their place in a contemporary context. At several points, they seem to break the fourth wall, reflecting on their own lives as actors.
Although Müller’s original work is often considered abstruse, Su was drawn to the idea of making meaning from the cryptic text. “I was very intrigued by the feeling of being lost, and trying to figure out the fragmented meanings from the unknown,” Su said. “That beautiful opacity of the script is what I’m really driven to.”
Su was first exposed to German plays and staging while studying theatre abroad at Bard College’s Berlin campus. “In general, this continental European style of playwriting is precisely about how text is only an entry point and a prompt for you to get into it, and then right away start to deconstruct it, and to create new meanings for it.” Su said.
Su worked with her cast to interpret and rewrite Müller’s original work. Sadykova, Shinde, Zhang, and Ha co-wrote Hamletmachine #2026 through a series of dynamic improvisational explorations, according to Su.
Su encouraged the performers to bring personal stories and memories into the writing room. Because all of the collaborators are international students, this included writing lines in the performers’ native languages: Russian, Marathi, and Chinese. “Devising and reconstructing the text was the main agenda,” Sadykova said. “It was rewriting through our personal vulnerabilities … [We were] diving deeper into our interpersonal relationships.”
Dance and projections were especially important given the international backgrounds of the cast, Su explained. “English is our second language,” she said. “For me, it’s not the medium that I feel most intimate with … Visual language, for me, is my native language.”
Beyond the text of the script, physical movement plays a significant role in the storytelling of Hamletmachine #2026. Choreography and movement are woven throughout the play, including a risque dance break set to ambient techno in the middle of the performance. “Physical vocabulary sort of replaces the text and still serves an equal level, or even better, delivery of meanings than speaking the text aloud,” Su said.
Visual language, she added, is universal. Hamletmachine #2026, Su said, responds to the fragmented and non-linear structure of Müller by filling the gaps of language with dance and embodied performance.
Set in a blackbox theatre with risers nearly on the stage, the performance included three large projection screens suspended over a dirt dirt floor evocative of Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring. On the right side of the stage, there was a table crowded with items, including a bust of Lenin, a crown, and a roll of film. The performance involved several on-stage cameras, creating what felt like a fourth dimension to the play.
Hamletmachine #2026 sits in an abstract space between the concrete texts of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Müller’s Hamletmachine, made concrete by the personal narratives brought into the mix by the cast members and co-writers.
Several piles of objects sat scattered on the dirt floor like freshly-dug artifacts, including an old harmonica, funerary paper flowers, and an oil lamp. These objects did not come from the ’62 Center for Theatre & Dance props storage, but rather from the performers themselves. Su requested that, on their trips home for winter break, the cast members retrieve objects which personally relate to their families. Specifically, she was interested in artifacts that relate to their mother, their father, to funerals, and to weddings. “These four prompts are exactly mapped with [the characters in Hamlet,” Su said. “It’s a way for us to make meanings out of this dead family relationship from Shakespeare’s texts.”
For Sadykova and Zhang, the inclusion of personal items created deeper connections to the show. Sadykova brought her mother’s wedding dress from home to include in the production. “It kind of connects this play to our personal families,” Sadykova said.
Zhang, who made the paper flowers used for funerals in her cultural tradition, described the show as a family album. “It’s a historical record,” she continued. “It’s an archive. It’s everything.”
For Su, Hamletmachine #2026 resists the historical record as we know it. “[The archive] dictates the narration of history, how we narrate our past,” she said. Müller’s writing style encourages a rebellion against the archive as it was constructed, according to Su. “There is a way to alter the way we preserve history and therefore disrupt or challenge the power in which you tell a story,” she said.
In directing Hamletmachine #2026 as a contemporary retelling, Su aims to ask how we can reclaim history by viewing our personal history in a different light.
Her cast members fully bought into this mission. “Whenever we study history, we’re looking at the present through it,” Zhang said.
