Shotgun Players mostly win at “Hamlet” roulette

Berkeley’s bold indie theater company is playing roulette with his “Hamlet” in a mind-bending new production that opened on Wednesday, April 20, at a soldout Ashby Stage.

Founding Artistic Director Patrick Dooley thought it was the perfect way to open Shotgun’s 25th season, and an intriguing challenge for the company.

“Part of the (hiring) process was picking people that not only were going to be good actors, but had the mental toughness to do something like this,” he said in a phone interview.

The actors can’t rehearse all of the 5,040 possible ensembles, so chemistry has to develop onstage; about 20 minutes in, you can feel them settle into their new roles and relationships.

Medina, for example, has a deep understanding of Shakespeare’s text and an easy, natural diction; in the preview, he informed Polonius with a dawning awareness of all that was rotten, and torment slowly overtook his opening-night Ophelia/Horatio.

Trout was a reserved opening-night Gertrude and a marvelously brooding preview Hamlet, while on opening night, Sinaiko was all manic gesture and wink-wink sarcasm in the title role.

Beh seemed more at ease as an aggressive opening-night Polonius than as the vulnerable Ophelia/Horatio, and in both cases seemed hung up on the meter, rather than the meaning, of the text.

On opening night, his talents were hamstrung by the Ghost/Gravedigger’s rigid blocking; standstill staging limits the actors overall.

If the play’s your thing, take heed that Jackson and the actors adapted it based on themes they wanted to explore and the exigencies of the format; most significantly, Fortinbras did not survive the cut.

[...] of your casting and script preferences, the actors’ ability to pull off this “Hamlet” is simply awe-inspiring.