{"id":1589059,"date":"2025-10-01T15:02:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-01T19:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/observer.com\/?p=1589059"},"modified":"2025-10-06T12:16:54","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T16:16:54","slug":"theater-review-jeremy-mccarter-audio-hamlet-shakespeare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/observer.com\/2025\/10\/theater-review-jeremy-mccarter-audio-hamlet-shakespeare\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeremy McCarter\u2019s Audiodrama Puts Us Inside Hamlet\u2019s Head"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"A<\/a>
McCarter’s audio adaptation of Hamlet<\/em> embraces audio experimentation to renew one of theater\u2019s most familiar texts. Courtesy Make-Believe Association and the Tribeca Festival<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For early modern audiences<\/a>, the question of how to represent Hamlet\u2019s dead father was answered by trapdoors, white flour on an armored face or an actor playing a bloodied corpse. After lighting and sound technology standardized the spectral stage, film answered with the magic of superimposition and the green screen. More recently, the 2023 Public Theater production uniquely possessed Hamlet<\/a> by putting the ghost inside him. In a rapturous performance, streaming on Great Performances<\/a> through tomorrow, Ato Blankson-Wood rolls his eyes back into his head, fiercely mouthing his father\u2019s fiery plea.<\/p>\n

In a new audio production<\/a>, Jeremy McCarter, disciple of Oskar Eustis\u2019s Public Theater and founder of the production company Make-Believe Association, goes a step further than the Delacorte staging. <\/i>McCarter places not the ghost but us, the listeners, inside the character of Hamlet. The sounds of his environment merge with the sounds of his body. We hear what he hears.<\/p>\n

Readers might know McCarter as Lin-Manuel Miranda\u2019s co-writer of Hamilton: The Revolution<\/i> and as a public historian in his own right. But since the founding of Make-Believe in 2017, McCarter\u2019s collaborative efforts have centered around original, live audio plays by Chicago writers. With the pandemic, the company shifted to longer form studio productions, including most recently Lake Song<\/i>, which is something of a Waterworld<\/i> for the modern ear. Listening through Make-Believe\u2019s stream, I thought: Is this what would have happened if Studs Terkel, Norman Corwin and Octavia Butler got together and played around with 21st-century recording technology?<\/p>\n

Maybe so. But even today\u2019s listeners will need to warm up to any version of Hamlet<\/i> told only from the main character\u2019s perspective. And McCarter knows this. Episode 1 begins not with the \u201cWho\u2019s there?\u201d of the famous sentinel scene (Hamlet\u2019s absent from it, after all), but instead with listening directions for the modern commuter: \u201cThe tale that you\u2019re about to hear, with its carnal, bloody and unnatural acts,\u201d whispers Daveed Diggs, in a playful pastiche of the playtext, \u201cwill come most vividly to life, if you listen to it\u2026on headphones.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so it does. When we first encounter Hamlet, sound designer Mikhail Fiksel conjures a scene reminiscent of an actor readying to enter a stage. We hear footsteps echo across the solitary silence of the stereo soundscape, a deep inbreath and then a heavy door opening unto Claudius\u2019s coronation scene. Suddenly, the social space\u2014the music, the laughter, the chatter\u2014of Elsinore is upon us. Daniel Kyri, who plays Hamlet with a subtleness rarely afforded to stage actors, pummels himself, right from the get-go, with the wish that \u201cthis too too solid flesh would melt.\u201d Soliloquies, under McCarter\u2019s direction, are not private thoughts uttered aloud but instead long-running interior monologues.<\/p>\n

Adapting Hamlet <\/i>to audio is not a new thing. Orson Welles\u2019s Columbia Workshop<\/i> took it up in fall 1936<\/a>, and the BBC 12 years later<\/a>. These adaptations sound dated to us today, but they were part of a vibrant auditory culture of their time. As Neil Verma has written<\/a>, radio dramatists constructed a fourth wall for listeners at the same time that stage dramatists attempted to break it down for spectators. Contemporary productions on Audible tend to eschew the declamatory style of these earlier works, and also, sadly, their acoustic experimentation. This is where McCarter\u2019s production is a welcome intervention into this overproduced yet underheard play: a return to the imaginative possibilities of the acoustic medium.<\/p>\n

\"Hamlet: