Darragh Kennan as Hamlet, David Pichette as Polonius, and Charles Leggett as Player King (Photo: John Ulman)

For its 20th season, Seattle Shakespeare Company has unveiled a Hamlet (through December 5) that you know from the first minutes will become legend in Seattle theatre, one of those remarkable Seattle Shakes casts joined this time by an extraordinarily purposeful creative team. You cease to be watching Hamlet, the iconic play, and instead join the court, humming and buzzing at the tribulations of these people come to life before you.

That’s in large part due to director John Langs, who, in conspiracy with lighting designer Geoff Korf, turns every soliloquy into a confiding intimacy. This likely wouldn’t work in a larger house–intimacy’s effects, like gravity’s, decrease greatly with distance–but Langs uses the soliloquies as a lever, transforming the audience into bystanders, even having Darragh Kennan’s Hamlet leave the stage to walk the aisle of first-row seats.

A lesser director might insist on “breaking” walls, but Langs erases them, pushing his actors out, and pulling the audience closer. His Hamlet opens in the pitch dark of the night watch, everyone’s eyes adjusting to the gloom, ears homing in on the voices, and already visible distinctions have vanished. When Claudius (Richard Ziman) appears to announce he’s taken Gertrude (Mary Ewald) to wife, Jen Zeyl’s set blazes into klieg-light majesty, and its brightness–everyone blinks in the glare–effaces the line between stage and audience.

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Darragh Kennan as Hamlet (Photo: John Ulman)

At this late date, with so many of Hamlet‘s lines raided for proverbs, lyrics, and titles, it’s a considerable challenge to say what the characters do as if they have just invented the expression. Looking like a “lost” Barrymore, Kennan softpedals the matinée idol scenes, and explores the off-beat moments, giving back Hamlet a sense of humor, while, deeply conflicted and depressed, he learns to express the power of his person. Watch his reaction to the fate of former schoolmates Rosenkrantz (Matt Shimkus) and Guildenstern (Jason Marr) to see royalty shouldered.

Ziman’s bluff Claudius, flashing rogueish bared-teeth grins and puffed up with his new office’s accouterments, is tormented at the way they arrived, but not enough to renounce them. With a basso rumble reminiscent of Stacy Keach, Ziman demands that you see his side of things, his wants, his needs. Charles Leggett makes a feast of several roles, the grim ghost of King Hamlet, a consummate Player King, and a cold-eyed, quick-tongued gravedigger; while David Pichette invests counselor Polonius with a quirky blend of gravitas, ruthless self-interest, and pseudo-philosophical quackery. (Which is not to mention Shawn Law’s Laertes and Mike Dooly’s Horatio–this cast is deep.)

Some Hamlets transport you; this one determinedly performs its way into your heart. From the Danish look of cast (blonds and redheads in a casually gorgeous “Danish collection” of sweaters and coats by Pete Rush), to the unity of set, lighting, and sound (Robertson Witmer and his subterranean subwoofery), to Ophelia (Brenda Joyner) dragging her train of rocks and rags–there’s a unity to what you see and hear, an accumulation of detail in shifting layers that animates the proceedings until it jostles with real-life’s tear-bringing onionings.

That’s partly Shakespearean genius (he gives you a ghost, so that his players can have life; he gives you a traveling band of players, so that his Danes can be non-actors), but here it’s also the result of a staggering amount of work, personified in Kennan and Ziman facing each other and slashing through their lines, as if mouths were swords, and people bled words of justification.

Across town at the University of Washington’s Hughes Penthouse Theater, Shakespeare of a much different tenor is being attempted. UW Drama’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost (through November 7) features PATP students in an early comedy that Shakespeare would later loot good ideas from: a bickering couple having a put-down arms race, a rustic with a burning case of malapropism.

It’s a challenge to put on because its humor has not aged well–hearing the string of wordplay and puns prized as examples of intellectual self-possession is a bit like viewing a collection of insects in amber, when for most of us it’s insects’ ceaseless movement that is the interesting part. What you get at the UW is about what you’d expect from a student production–a wobbly, earnest update–with the exception of one outstanding performance that nearly makes the play’s yawns elsewhere worthwhile.

The story is that a group of well-born, would-be scholars have accepted the King of Navarre’s invitation to a three-year, distraction-free course of study–just as the Princess of France and her ladies-in-waiting are about to arrive for a visit. Also, out of no particular need, there’s a Spanish swordsman inflamed by local sexpot Jacquenetta (Taryn Pearce), and two pedants with an insecure grasp of Latin.

Scott W. Abernethy as Don Adriano De Armado in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (Photo: Frank Rosenstein)

As it turns out, it’s the Spaniard who saves the play. Scott W. Abernethy gives a performance of towering comedic proportions as Don Adriano de Armado, insouciantly rampaging through the English language in creating his own passionate idiom of romantic self-regard. You miss him bitterly when he and his dutiful page Moth (Rachel Brow, as a librarian-pixie) are offstage. Second runner-up is Max Kraushaar, whose run-at-the-mouth clown Costard can be heard protesting his case even after he’s escorted offstage.

The play’s windiness means that the UW actors more often than not are declaiming sections, rather than acting them, while waiting for a plot point to pop up. Only Valeka J. Holt as Rosaline seemed to have a real affinity for the musicality of the verse. But again, there are significant mouthfuls to get past. Here’s the less-than-enthralling argument of Berowne (Barry Cogswell), who only grudgingly accepts his future confinement to the library:

Why, all delights are vain; but that most vain,
Which with pain purchased doth inherit pain:
As, painfully to pore upon a book
To seek the light of truth; while truth the while
Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look:
Light seeking light doth light of light beguile:
So, ere you find where light in darkness lies,
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.
Study me how to please the eye indeed
By fixing it upon a fairer eye,
Who dazzling so, that eye shall be his heed
And give him light that it was blinded by.
Study is like the heaven’s glorious sun
That will not be deep-search’d with saucy looks:
Small have continual plodders ever won
Save base authority from others’ books
These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights
That give a name to every fixed star
Have no more profit of their shining nights
Than those that walk and wot not what they are.
Too much to know is to know nought but fame;
And every godfather can give a name.

Lost you there, didn’t I?

Director Andrew Tsao seems to share that concern, because his chief contribution is to stage high-energy, “wake-up” song-and-dance numbers at the end of key scenes. The women, led by Camille Thornton-Alston as the Princess, are much more successful with their rendition of “These Boots Are Made for Walking” than the men, whose number I have scrubbed from memory.

The most successful scene (not involving Abernethy) comes when the men steal in Muscovite disguise to the women’s camp. Tsao has them updated as Russian gangsta night-clubbers, and it’s black-lighted, audio-visual dynamite in comparison to the rest of the proceedings. 

Tsao’s use of video email and the Kingdom of Navarre search engine is also inventive, and good for a few laughs, but in the end, he never gets his directorial arms around the work as a whole, either to finesse its flawed pacing or help his actors build characters who are engrossing enough to make the blah-blah byplay count for something. I suspect that the complicated choreography ate up a good deal of rehearsal time, so you see the trade-off.