DOGG'S HAMLET, CAHOOT'S MACBETH by Tom Stoppard at The Atlantic Stage 2

L-R: Lucy Van Atta, Peter Schmitz, Christo Grabowski, and Connor Wright in DOGG'S HAMLET.  Photo by Stan Barouh.

Potomac Theatre Project (PTP/NYC) was founded in 1987 and moved to New York in 2007.  This year, in association with Middlebury College, it is staging a limited engagement of works by Vaclav Havel, Harold, Pinter, Samuel Beckett, and Tom Stoppard at The Atlantic Stage 2 on West 16th Street in downtown Manhattan.  Half of this season’s program, Havel: The Passion of Thought, consists of three of Havel’s “Vanek plays” – Audience, Private View, and Protest – together with Pinter’s The New World Order and Beckett’s Catastrophe.  Last week, we were fortunate enough to attend a performance of that production and we thoroughly enjoyed it (see our recentpost).

The other half of PTP/NYC’s thirty-third repertory season showcases Tom Stoppard’s Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth.  Now, having attended a performance of that show as well, we are delighted to say that it is just as good.  In fact, it is terrific.

In Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein challenged the generally accepted view of language as being fully explicable in terms of signification – i.e., the idea that all words, in all circumstances, may be understood as simply standing in for the objects, actions or qualities they represent.  That, of course, is the way children learn languages to begin with: they are shown five, red apples or a boy throwing a ball and are thereby taught what the words “five,” red,” “apple,” “boy,” “throw,” and “ball” mean.  But while Wittgenstein never denied that such signification plays an important role in language, he contended that there was far more to language, meaning and communication than that.

As an example, he imagined a situation in which two construction workers – A and B – shared a primitive language consisting only of the four words: “block,” “pillar,” “slab,” and “beam.”  Now if an observer, unfamiliar with the language, were to hear A shout out “Beam!” and then were to see B handing something to A, it certainly would be reasonable for him to conclude that the word “beam” merely signified whatever it was that B handed to A..  But what if it didn’t?  The word “beam,” as A used it and as B understood it, might actually have meant “bring me that object” or, if B were already aware of what A would want next, it might even simply have meant something like “Next” or “Here” or “Ready” or “OK.”

In the late 1970s, Tom Stoppard was so inspired by that passage in Philosophical Investigations and by the blacklisting of the Czechoslovakian playwright Pavel Kohout that he wrote two plays: Dogg’s Hamlet and Cahoot’s Macbeth.  Both were based on Shakespearean classics (much as was Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead); both imagined the ramifications of speakers of different languages using the same words but with different meanings and/or understanding the same words in different ways; and the two plays were meant to be produced together as Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth.  Indeed, Stoppard expressly stated:

“The comma that divides Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth also serves to unite two plays that have common elements; the first is hardly a play at all without the second, which cannot be performed without the first.”

Dogg’s Hamlet is a direct riff on Wittgenstein’s thought experiment regarding the meanings of words based upon their actual use rather than solely on their signification.  In Stoppard’s play, several high school students including Abel (Zach Varricchione), Baker (Connor Wright), and Charlie (Madeline Russell) are preparing a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in English.  The catch is that the students only speak Dogg which uses the same words as English does but with altogether different meanings (“useless,” for instance, means “good day” and “mouseholes” means “egg”) so that to them, what we understand as English is truly a foreign language.   When Easy (Matthew Ball), a deliveryman who speaks English rather than Dogg, arrives with materials to build the play’s set – including bricks, cubes, slabs and planks - all hell breaks loose.

That, of course, is because what Easy means by “brick,” “cube,” “slab,” and “plank” (which is what we and other English-speakers mean by those words) isn’t at all what Abel, Baker, Charlie and other Dogg-speakers mean by them.  To Dogg-speakers, “brick” means what “here” means to Easy; “slab” means “yes” or “okay”; “cube” means “thanks” or “thank you”; and “plank” means “ready.”  A collapsing Tower of Babel would seem inevitable – and it is.

Ultimately, Dogg’s Hamlet does include a performance of a comically abridged version of Hamlet - and then an encore performance of an even more abbreviated version of that.  And, as something of a bonus, Easy (and the audience) manage to learn (or “catch”) a little bit of Dogg to boot.

L-R: Denise Cormier, Christopher Marshall, Lucy Van Atta, and Tara Giordano in CAHOOT'S MACBETH.  Photo by Stan Barouh.

Cahoot’s Macbeth pushes the envelope even further.  Stoppard dedicated this play to the Czechoslovakian playwright Pavel Kohout who, together with others, was prevented from plying his theatrical trade in his native country by the totalitarian Communist Government of Czechoslovakia.  In response, Kahout, Pavel Landovsky, and others formed the “Living-Room Theatre” (LRT) troupe which supported itself by working as street-sweepers and waitresses by day while secretly performing plays in homes at night.

One such performance (of an abridged version of Macbeth), taking place in Cahoot’s Macbeth, is interrupted by the arrival of an Inspector (Tara Giordano) who understandably sees in the troupe’s “acting without authority” a metaphorical attack on the authority of the Communist Government.  And once again, Easy appears – only this time he’s speaking Dogg rather than English!

Stoppard’s double bill is as effective as George Orwell’s 1984 in its depiction of the transcendent importance of language in human society, especially in repressed societies.  Its play on words, its coded references, its metaphorical allusions, all of which we have come to associate with Stoppard, are here used to produce a very effective serio-comic double-barreled tour de force.

All of the members of the PTP/NYC ensemble deserve recognition for jobs very well done, with several of them playing multiple roles in these plays within plays, but I was especially impressed by the performances of Peter Schmitz in his multiple roles as Dogg, Shakespeare and Claudius in Dogg’s Hamlet and as Duncan and Lennox in Cahoot’s Macbeth, Matthew Ball as Easy in both plays, Christo Grabowski as Fox Major and Hamlet in Dogg’s Hamlet and as Banquo and Cahoot in Cahoot’s Macbeth, and Tara Giordano as Lady in Dogg’s Hamlet and as the Inspector in Cahoot’s Macbeth.

And kudos should go out to all of those at PTP/NYC who had the insight to create the combination of Havel’s “Vanek plays” (with a Pinter prologue and a Beckett epilogue) with this Stoppard double-bill, thereby underscoring the issues of freedom of speech, the rights of the individual, and the power of the spoken (or written) word.