HELLO, SWEET PRINCE

Breakers come crashing in over the loudspeakers as the audience fills the theater. The surge of the ocean can be lulling, but these waves are too big for that. Both the audience and the still unseen actors are left with the same question: Will Hamlet sweep us out to sea?

We ask nothing less of a drama that traffics in suicide, fratricide, regicide, specters, madness, incest. Horatio in the first act tries to discourage Hamlet from pursuing his father's ghost: "What if it tempt you toward the flood?" But full into the flood Hamlet eagerly plunges-and we in the audience with...