The opening shows in this year's Absurdist Season at the Exit are a pair of bizarre reworkings of sensitive-prince tragedies. Both shows locate the nihilism at the foundation of the older masterpieces, and dredge up something not just absurd but downright odd. Marowitz published this rearrangement of Hamlet in the '60s, when absurdism was especially hip. Scenes and speeches are shuffled, spliced, repopulated.
Different characters say familiar words to other different characters.
Nothing makes sense. Like a schoolmarm she raps out the meter with a blackboard stick, and makes her audience recite. The play is an impressionistic mishmash of the contents of Hamlet's crazed head. Though it be madness there's method in't, and hard Freudian reasons for all the sex. Marowitz's version steams out the old pathos and exaggerates the meaningless pain.