The Hamlet Project

If there’s one thing taking a lot of clown classes will give you, it’s the opportunity to see a lot of clowns fall into this sort of trap. I’ve seen blabbering of lips, crazy dancing and a non-stop torrent of JOKES JOKES JOKES – all of which fall as flat as a glass of seltzer a week after it came out of the bottle.
When you watch someone in this state, something being done authentically does feel as unlikely as a blind man catching a rabbit with his bare hands. The inevitability of failure is as forceful as a tornado heading straight for you.

I’m curious about the WARM part, though. Hot, I’d understand to be a clown on fire, a clown killing, a clown on a roll. I suppose a warm clown is NOT doing those things? Wouldn’t that be a cold clown?
That’s when I start to think about the humors – which generally operate on the extremes – cold being one thing, hot being another – maybe warm is undesirable because it is neither?
It’s just a curious word – because warmth usually has such positive associations and here it is obviously not desirable to be a warm clown. Maybe it’s like a warm spot in a swimming pool. . .not so desirable when you think about it.

Ways this line might be a punchline:

– after the clown takes a sip of someone’s urine that’s been collected in a cup
– after the villain has stuffed his mouth with a lemon, and the clown finally gets a drink of beer
– the clown is presented at a formal dinner, he sits in his uncomfortable suit, he’s doing his best fitting in, until the wine is poured, and he tries to be helpful
– the clown finally gets to kiss the tavern wench and instead of saying the romantic line that’s expected, delivers this one

Dear Santa Claus,

This is my first letter to you. Well, actually, it’s my first letter ever! I’m writing to you because I can’t seem to make my wishes clear any other way. This year, for Christmas, I want a cullison. I don’t care what kind. I’d take a scout badge or a rescue emblem. But I want one to sew right on my right lapel.

I told the guy who wears me and he seems to understand me but he doesn’t DO anything. Every year, I get more threadbare and I still don’t have my cullison. So I’m writing to you, Santa Clause. I’ve never received a Christmas gift of any kind so maybe you could add up all the gifts I haven’t gotten thus far and bring me a really nice cullison. Or a cruddy one. I’ll take any kind I can get.

Love,
The Clown’s Coat

See also, this blog about the place that diminished my fee a week and a half before the gig. That was about a quarter’s wages.

Scene: The Kitchen. Yorick is at the table, eating porridge. Yorick’s brother, Borick, rushes in.
BORICK: Yorick! Come quickly! The mare’s giving birth!

YORICK: Cannot you stay till I eat my porridge?
(laughter)

BORICK: But your wife is with her and she’s fallen, she needs us to carry her to the surgeon.

YORICK: Cannot you stay till I eat my porridge?
(more laughter)

BORICK: The stablehand was giving her a look I wouldn’t trust my cat with.

YORICK: Cannot you stay till I eat my porridge?
(more laughter)

BORICK: Alright, then, give us a spoon.

I love this image. Gentlemen write down the jokes in their notebooks?! And not AFTER the play, no, no, before. They want to be READY for the jokes. I don’t quite understand that impulse. I feel like knowing the jokes ahead of time can kill them a bit. But, I suppose, it’s like a catch phrase – you like to anticipate its arrival – the way I used to wait for Jon Lovitz’s Master Thespian to shout “Acting!”

Writing them down, though. Why?
Just in case you forget what you’re hoping to see?
So you can shout out requests like at a rock concert?
This line conjures a whole world of the culture of theatre going that feels just out of reach and so so interesting.

This line is so often cut, I feel it’s possible I’ve never heard it spoken. The metaphor of a suit of jokes is a little confusing – but the notion of it being his calling card, his means of recognition makes some sense. It’s remarkable to realize that catch phrases were a thing LONG before Saturday Night Live. As a child of the 70s – I thought SNL had invented the catch phrase.

I imagine that a catch phrase could start to become something you wear, like a coat. When people saw Dana Carvey on the street, they said, ”Isn’t that special” – not what he wore. Steven Martin’s probably resembled “Well, excuse me” for quite some time.
And what’s remarkable about most catch phrases is that they are to do with tone, more than text.
Reading ahead, these catch phrases Hamlet mentions are just as banal.

It is definitely irritating when a clown disrupts your work with his audience pandering, no doubt. But villainous? I don’t know. A fool is just doing what a fool does best. We don’t berate the sun for its villainy when it beats down on us in the dead of summer. We can resent it, sure, complain – but it doesn’t make the sun a villain. It just makes it a particularly sunny sun.

With clowns and an audience, it’s the same. You can resent them, complain but rather than calling them names, it seems to me that it becomes necessary to build some structures to defend against excess clowning, in the same way we build shelter to protect us from the excess sun.

We were playing an auditorium full with over a thousand young people in it. I was playing Peter Quince with a group of very funny and delightfully anarchic mechanicals. For months, they’d been delighting audiences around the country with their antics. It fell to me to rein them in, to keep the show from going off the rails. I mostly managed it until this teeming auditorium. This time, I couldn’t make myself heard over the roars of a thousand people. I couldn’t pull it back. We tried to proceed but the farther we’d get, the more antics emerged and the louder and more unmanageable the audience became. I wanted to cry. I might have. And I felt like such a killjoy but I had in mind the “necessary question of the play” and while no one heard me say the lines, I said them anyway. And eventually the play proceeded.

Most clowns I know don’t speak at all. But certainly the ones that do, they’ll talk whenever they like if you give them the opportunity. That is part of the pleasure of them; They are anarchic and unpredictable. I wrote a play in which I wanted that sort of energy. I tried to write it into the character but it doesn’t really translate into words. In order to give it that clown feeling, I had to specify that the actor was welcome to stray from the text when he felt like it.

It’s tricky though, giving clowns free rein. In another play, I gave an actor space to improvise in a couple of key moments. I found, though, that he made something up one night and then just said that same thing over and over again afterwards. I ended up writing him a thing because, while what he’d made up was mildly amusing the first night, it ceased to be amusing with repetition.

But then, too, clowns often thrive in adversarial relationships. Tell a clown he shouldn’t say more than is set down for him and I can almost guarantee you that he will be improvising his balls off, all over your script. Tell him not to swear, there will be a mountain of swears by the end of the night.