The Hamlet Machine Archives - Pittsburgh Quarterly

2025 Fall The Hamlet Machine

Is it Time to Stop Wearing Our Art on Our Sleeves?

by Stuart Sheppard

Imagine if before the performance of a play, the director stepped on stage and told the audience what it was supposed to think about it. Viewers would be insulted. Or perhaps laugh. Some might even walk out. Yet this kind of didactic inculcation is quite normal in museums today. In fact, because the exhibitive experience …

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Quantum’s “Seagull” Reinvigorates Chekhov

by Stuart Sheppard

Gender-flipping classic roles in theater has become so commonplace that it’s now almost de rigueur. What director wants to go to a hipster cocktail party these days and confess that he or she is casting a white cis male as Hamlet? I’ve seen so many female Julius Caesars that I now expect the play to …

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The Time It Takes Between the Takes

by Stuart Sheppard

In his celebrated writing workshop of the early 1990s, editor and literary guru Gordon Lish taught that one of the best ways to create an effective agon is to place divergent characters in a confined space – and let them act on their own volition, without smothering them in authorial intent. And that’s exactly what …

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Kinetic Theatre’s “Embers” Tells All

by Stuart Sheppard

That Kinetic Theatre Company’s “Embers” is such a moving play should be counterintuitive: it violates one of the most basic rules of art, “show don’t tell.” This is a work that shows nothing and tells everything, which is doubly ironic, as its principal character, who does most of the telling, does not trust language. Based …

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Briefly Noted

by Stuart Sheppard

I was fortunate to attend another remarkable boundary-blurring performance recently: the world premiere of the long-lost “Markus Passion” by Bach. A joint-effort by Chatham Baroque, Renaissance Baroque, The Sebastians, and Joseph Marcell — based on archival interpretations and recreations of a vanished manuscript from the Bach corpus — the performance of this fusion of libretto, …

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Pittsburgh Opera and Chatham Baroque Blur Performative Boundaries

by Stuart Sheppard

These are certainly synergistic days in the arts. Theater companies are staging operas, operas are staging plays, dancers are speaking in ballets, and everyone is projecting video. Museums are mixing it up, too, but then, they always have. It’s certainly been a win for audiences – at least in Pittsburgh – where we have so …

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PICT’s “Miss Julie:” A Triangle with Four Sides

by Stuart Sheppard

Modern adaptations of classic plays often look like someone wearing borrowed clothes: they don’t fit quite right, and it’s obvious that the person wearing them had to struggle to put them on. But when an adaptation of a play like August Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” (1888) really does justice to its antecedent and fits the subject …

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Total War Over Cocktails

by Stuart Sheppard

If there’s a miracle in Pittsburgh Public Theater’s current performance of the 1962 Edward Albee play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — it’s that two well-educated couples can argue drunkenly for over three hours and never once broach the subject of politics. (And these couples are of different generations, no less). Of course, this would …

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The Bitch of Being a Witch

by Stuart Sheppard

Sometime around the turn of the millennium – resulting from what I would ascribe to the rise of social media and cable broadcasting — the term “trope” began to lose its classic and pregnant meaning of “figure of speech,” (i.e. an expression used in a nonliteral sense). It has devolved so that it now indicates …

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Let Us Now Heal Wounded Men

by Stuart Sheppard

One thing, as men, that we rarely talk about, are the experiences we have suffered in the form of sexual abuse or trauma. The National Institute of Health found that 30.7 percent of men report having been the victims of sexual violence . . . and more than half of those before the age of …

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Pittsburgh Opera’s “Armida” Sings in a Language Beyond Words

by Stuart Sheppard

The French New Wave director Francois Truffaut once remarked of Alfred Hitchcock that he was the only director who did not require sound for his films to be understood; in other words, the effect of his visual narrative was so strong that dialogue was not really necessary. In much the same way, I found in …

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Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre Finds Poetry in Dance

by Stuart Sheppard

I should have known something special was happening Downtown on a windy, wet, early-April evening when I saw a 10-year-old girl literally yanking her mother into the box office of the Benedum Center. I hadn’t seen a child this excited to attend a performance since I witnessed a little boy twirling his red matador cape …

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Kinetic Theatre’s “A Sherlock Carol”

by Stuart Sheppard

Earlier this month I happened to rewatch the 1976 film, “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” which I had not seen for many years, and was amazed by the interiority actor Nicol Williamson discovered in the character of Sherlock Holmes. In this story, Holmes teams up with Sigmund Freud – talk about an intellectual buddy adventure – to solve …

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Quantum’s Sleepy “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”

by Stuart Sheppard

In drama, interiority always triumphs over exteriority. Just look at Shakespeare (even his history plays), Beckett, or Sophocles. And mystery is always stronger than explication. Who wants to be told what to think? But with Quantum Theatre’s new production of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” we find an inversion of these principals, in that the …

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Learning to Fly, Again: Pittsburgh Ballet’s “Peter Pan” Makes Children of Us All

by Stuart Sheppard

Marcel Proust may have needed a sip of lime-flower tea imbued with madeleine crumbs to trigger the memory of his idyllic childhood, but I found myself just as deliciously transported back to my six-year-old psyche as I watched Pittsburgh Ballet Theater’s magical production of “Peter Pan” in the Benedum Center last week. Had this performance …

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Serious Daddy Issues: Barebones Delivers a Compelling “Crocodile Fever”

by Stuart Sheppard

One of the most difficult questions a drama critic confronts is how much of the plot should be explicated during a review? I think it’s a disservice to reveal too much of a play’s action, as it denies an organic apprehension of the experience. Imagine seeing the film “Jaws” for the first time with all …

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The Moon is Just a World that Never Heals: Quantum Nails O’Neill

by Stuart Sheppard

It is a precept of Zen art to incorporate the spaces between objects into a creation, and to consider them just as significant as the objects depicted. In flower arrangement, for example, the areas between the branches are just as important – if not more so – than the branches themselves. We find the embodiment …

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Theater Roundup: Barebones and Kinetic Kick Off Strong Summer Season

by Stuart Sheppard

One of the greatest joys in attending a theatrical performance is not knowing anything about the show beforehand. This blessing is generally squandered by reviewers who extol plot explication above all other critical duties. Thus, I am torn in describing two excellent shows currently running in Pittsburgh: Barebones Productions’ “The Animal Kingdom,” and Kinetic Theatre …

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Painting the Audience: Quantum’s “Scenes from an Execution” is Artistic Theater

by Stuart Sheppard

Although we can’t prove that Freud said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” we certainly can admit the wisdom in this adage, especially as it concerns the theater, where interpretation has turned into an industry for directors, dramaturgs, audiences, and especially, critics. So rather than write a quotidian, interpretive review, our critic decided to …

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Pittsburgh Public Theater’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” A Sincerely Funny Play

by Stuart Sheppard

There are certain plays we admire for their timeless quality, that somehow not only survive, but thrive over decades, centuries, and even millennia. “Oedipus Rex” and “Hamlet,” for example, have proven themselves in this respect, while others like “Waiting for Godot,” and “American Buffalo” certainly have the potential to join them. Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance …

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An Enchanting Evening in Another World: Chatham Baroque Transports Us to the Realm of Bach

by Stuart Sheppard

Several years ago, when I lived in Cambridge, I happened to sit next to an eccentric man on a flight to Boston, who had a large musical instrument occupying the seat next to him. Suspecting that it wasn’t a cello, I asked what it might be, and he said a viola da gamba. I replied, …

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Barebones Delivers a Visceral Portrayal of Working America in “Skeleton Crew”

by Stuart Sheppard

Usually, critics try to bury the lead, but I’m going to say outright that Barebones Productions may be the most authentic theater company in America today. This is not to denigrate any other company, nor to say that Barebones is the best theater company, but what they have done over the past couple of years …

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