University of South Alabama Opens Fall Theater Season with ‘I Hate Hamlet’

MOBILE, Ala. — The University of South Alabama’s Department of Dramatic Arts kicked off its fall 2011 theater season with a production of “I Hate Hamlet,” the sharp-witted comedy by playwright Paul Rudnick. The show gave South Alabama audiences a season opener built on one of theater’s oldest jokes — an actor terrified of the role every actor is supposed to want — staged by the university’s student performers on the Mobile campus.

The production ran at the Laidlaw Performing Arts Center, the university’s home for music and drama, and opened a season that would carry student actors, designers, and stage crews through the fall with a comedy that demands as much stagecraft as it does comedic timing. Sword fights, after all, do not block themselves.

A Ghost, a TV Star, and a Crisis of Artistic Conscience

The play follows a successful New York television actor who relocates into a storied Manhattan apartment once occupied by the legendary John Barrymore. When Barrymore’s flamboyant ghost materializes, the actor finds himself drawn into an increasingly absurd battle between the allure of Hollywood fame and the deeper rewards of classical theater. Sword fights, romantic entanglements, and a generous helping of theatrical wit ensue.

The central joke lands because of who Barrymore was. In the 1920s, Barrymore was widely regarded as the greatest stage Hamlet of his generation, a matinee idol of the silent film era whose Broadway performance in the role became the benchmark against which every later Hamlet was measured. By the time of his death in 1942, however, his legend had been complicated by a well-publicized decline, and his ghost — as Rudnick imagines him — arrives in the apartment equal parts mentor, menace, and unreformed ham. The modern actor at the center of the play has made his fortune on television, the very medium Barrymore never had to answer to, and the two men spar across a gulf of eras, egos, and artistic standards.

Rudnick uses that collision to ask a question that has never stopped being current: is fame the point of an acting career, or is it the work itself? The television star at the center of the play has been offered the chance to play Hamlet in Central Park, a prestigious stage engagement he has neither the technique nor the nerve for, and the comedy unfolds as the ghost of the man who defined the role tries to coach, shame, and seduce him into greatness. What could be a simple satire of Hollywood shallowness becomes, in Rudnick’s hands, an unexpectedly warm argument for why the classics are worth the effort.

The Playwright’s Own Ghost Story

Rudnick drew inspiration for the script from his own experience living in Barrymore’s former New York apartment, a piece of theatrical real estate that came with its own atmosphere and history. That biographical detail gave the play its DNA: a modern tenant, a legendary predecessor, and a set of four walls that seem to remember everything.

The play earned praise from the Village Voice as “fast mouthed and funny” when it premiered on Broadway in 1991. The production was remembered as much for its backstage drama as its stage life — the original production famously featured a sword fight in which one actor was genuinely injured, a detail that theater people still recount when the show comes up — but the script itself endured as a favorite of regional and university theaters, precisely because it offers juicy roles for a small cast and a built-in showcase for stage combat training.

For a university company, those are real draws. Students in the Department of Dramatic Arts get to work on period-inflected comedy, quicksilver dialogue, and fight choreography — skills that transfer directly to Shakespeare and other classical work — while audiences get a play that requires no homework to enjoy. Rudnick, who went on to write the film adaptation of “Jeffrey” and the screenplay for “Addams Family Values,” built his reputation on dialogue that plays equally well in a living room and a lecture hall, and “I Hate Hamlet” remains one of his most produced scripts.

Performance Details

Performances ran September 23, 24, 25, 29, and 30 as well as October 1 at the Laidlaw Performing Arts Center on the University of South Alabama campus. Evening shows began at 7:30 p.m., with a Sunday matinee at 2:00 p.m. The calendar gave Mobile audiences a full week-and-a-half window and a weekend matinee option for families and students whose evenings were spoken for.

The Laidlaw Performing Arts Center box office, located on the corner of University Boulevard North and USA Drive South, offered tickets at $14 for general admission, $12 for senior citizens and USA faculty and staff, and $10 for students at any level. The pricing kept the production within reach of the broad community audience that university theater depends on — from Mobile theatergoers who follow the season year to year to students looking for an affordable night out within walking distance of their dorms.

For patrons unfamiliar with the campus, the Laidlaw center sits in the heart of the university district, with parking nearby and a lobby that doubles as a gallery space before curtain. University productions there typically run about two hours, and the fall opener traditionally draws a mix of students, faculty, and Mobile’s close-knit community theater crowd, many of whom have their own history with the play being staged.

What the Season Opener Means

A season-opening comedy is a deliberate choice for a university theater program. It fills seats early, it involves a large cast of students across class years, and it sets a tone before the heavier work — the dramas and classics — arrives later in the season. For the Department of Dramatic Arts, which trains students in performance, design, and technical theater while serving the Mobile community as one of the area’s most consistent producing theaters, the fall opener is also a recruitment showcase of sorts, seen by high school students around the region who are weighing where to study theater.

Mobile’s theater scene in 2011 offered plenty of options, from community companies to professional work downtown, but university productions occupy a particular niche: they are laboratories where future professionals cut their teeth and where audiences see ambitious material at accessible prices. A comedy about the fear of great theater, staged by students learning their craft, carries a mild irony that was surely not lost on the department — the play mocks actors who dodge the challenge of Shakespeare, while the production itself asks student actors to do the demanding thing.

With “I Hate Hamlet,” the university opened its fall 2011 season with a work that celebrates and needles the theater in equal measure. Whether audiences came for the sword fights, the ghost, or Rudnick’s rapid-fire one-liners, the department’s message at the top of the season was the same one Barrymore’s ghost delivers in the play: the classics are worth it, and so is the work.

The staging also gave the department’s technical students plenty to do. A Manhattan apartment set, complete with the furnishings of a television star’s success and the faded grandeur of Barrymore’s era, meant scenic artists could work in two contrasting styles at once. Lighting shifts between the modern tenant’s world and the ghostly visits required their own care, and costume design stretched from present-day television casualness to the billowing sleeves of a stage Hamlet. Productions like this one are, in effect, comprehensive exams for a theater program — every department of the company gets tested at once.

The University of South Alabama, founded in 1963 as an extension of the University of Alabama system and now one of the Gulf Coast’s major universities, has long used its performing arts programs as a bridge to the Mobile community. The Department of Dramatic Arts stages a regular season each year, and the Laidlaw Performing Arts Center hosts music, theater, and combined events throughout the academic calendar. For many Mobilians, a university production is their most reliable opportunity to see live theater on a weekday evening without driving out of the city.

The choice of “I Hate Hamlet” also fit the moment in popular culture. Television had entered one of its celebrated eras, and the tension the play stages — between prestige television money and the harder, humbler work of the stage — was being argued in every industry publication. Rudnick’s 1991 script, written when sitcom money first began to pull stage actors west, read two decades later as eerily ahead of its time, which gave the university production a hook for student audiences who had never heard of John Barrymore but knew exactly what it meant to choose between a paycheck and a calling.

For those who missed the fall opener, the university’s season continued after “I Hate Hamlet” with later productions across the academic year, each carrying the same ticket structure and the same community-friendly pricing. The box office at University Boulevard North and USA Drive South handled season subscriptions as well as single-show sales, a system that let regular patrons lock in seats for the full season at a discount while keeping the door open for walk-ups.

The fall 2011 season, in other words, began where good seasons should: with a comedy that fills the house, tests its students, and sends the audience out arguing about art. Barrymore’s ghost, one suspects, would have approved of the sword fights — and of the billing.