For my part, I am often told by directors that I need to be more “feminine”—which is often difficult for me to grasp: I am female, isn’t anything I do, then, inherently “feminine” in quality?  But that is not what they mean—when we speak of masculinity and femininity, we are speaking from ideas of perception, what we think these constructs are rather than examining them as they exist in the world. 

 

As my feminine Ophelia, I realized that, although she has markedly fewer lines than Hamlet, her strength is not inherently “quiet.”  She chooses when to challenge her lover, and when to concede to his rants.  She sees so clearly that he is no longer the man she fell in love with, and all she wants is to remind him of who he was, before tragedy and loss darkened his demeanor; but she is no longer willing to be his personal whipping post.  While Chase’s Hamlet was hot and aggressive, my Ophelia was cool and guarded, earnest in her entreaties to him. 

 

My Hamlet was at the other end of the spectrum.  Interpreting Hamlet as a woman felt so powerful, so full and hungry.  I was naturally drawn to a more innately sensual interpretation, viewing my lover as a plaything that was mine to use and discard at will.  I felt calculating and manipulative, alternating between fire-hot and ice-cold.  And when I spoke to Ophelia in order to hurt him, I was lithe, serpent-like, and entirely aware of the pain I was inflicting—and the fact that I didn’t care.  I could feel the simmering madness just underneath the surface, and I liked the way it felt. 

 

Chase and I performed the first two iterations of Hamphelia as part of a studio showcase in December 2013.  The feedback we received was incredibly interesting to us.  One of our (female) faculty members, upon seeing our second iteration for the first time, made this remark to me: “Your Hamlet is a bigger dick than his is!”  The irony of that gendered insult was not lost on me.

 

After our first performance, a young female audience member told me that she was put on the defense by Chase’s Hamlet, but that she empathized with mine—she recognized that our words and actions were ultimately the same, and that it was our gender that she was responding to, which unsettled her—that because my Hamlet was a woman, she would have defended my abusive actions against Ophelia because she perceived them to be “justified,” while the actions of Chase’s Hamlet read much more clearly to her as blatant domestic abuse.  This feedback begs the question: did this young female audience member only empathize with my Hamlet because she herself is female, and so she empathized with the woman on stage, regardless of what that woman was doing?  This seems likely. What does this say about our human empathy, that we are possibly already biased in a given circumstance, simply due to our biology or gender identity?  How interesting to us then, as actors, to receive this feedback and compare it to our own experiences embodying these characters.  Our research was no longer just about how we felt and were influenced by stretching the lines of gender constructs—it was being prepared for the honest and visceral responses of our audience to our work, even if they surprised us. 

 

Ultimately, our research has clearly shown that as actors, we approach character through a myriad of means, one of which being the experiences that are endemic to us personally, which are greatly colored by our own cisgender identities.  I cannot look at the role of Ophelia as a woman without associating all of her thoughts and feelings with what it is to be a woman.  Similarly, Chase cannot approach Hamlet as a man without being driven by what it is that makes him a man.  For the final two iterations, we spent a great deal of time exploring the abstract concepts of how masculinity and femininity are defined and embodied through physical exercises, as well as through Greek neutral mask work: the goal of which is to find a universal masculine and feminine that are untainted by human bias (insofar as we are capable of removing that bias from our work).  What we have discovered about ourselves is that neither one of us is a perfect benchmark for universal femininity or masculinity, but we both exhibit traits inherently in line with Western societal ideals of what these two opposites are supposed to be.  Each completed iteration was different, and that had everything to do with the gender assignment of actor to character.  But one thing remained the same—no matter which brain, which heart, which set of personal histories examined these characters, both were created as carefully and discerningly as possible.  Both man and woman experienced full ranges of emotion; both dug into the deepest pits of intellect; both approached the concept of madness, and returned enlightened yet unscathed.  In this incredible respect, neither one of us had the advantage over the other in creating character based on our respective genders.  How we created the characters was different, but the fullness of exploration by each remained in equilibrium. 

 

Hamphelia has been fascinating and revelatory for both Chase and myself, and has helped each of us to grow into stronger performers, as well as strengthening our trust in each other as colleagues.  Hamphelia is not just about exhausting gender stereotypes, or subverting traditional casting: it’s about real, whole, human people and the broken relationship between them.  It’s about understanding that love, pain, fear, and even bloodlust are emotions we are all capable of having.  It is what we do with these that defines us, not the labels we are categorized under.

 

In appropriate closing fashion, I leave you with the wisdom of Ophelia’s earnest response

to Hamlet’s introspection and wavering sanity: