Stop your whining, Hamlet

Danish prince, scholar, friend, mourner, narcissist, betrayer, betrayed, mama’s boy, lover,… Danish prince, scholar, friend, mourner, narcissist, betrayer, betrayed, mama’s boy, lover, killer, sissy pants: Hamlet is a jumble of contradictions.

And so, sometimes, Hamlet could use a Xanax.

In Andrew S. Paul’s psychotherapy-inflected production of Shakespeare’s – and the English language’s – best play, the need for mood-enhancing drugs unfortunately becomes apparent very early in the performance.

The play begins auspiciously, with a usefully brief and silent scene of the burial of King Hamlet. This scene, a helpful one not in the original text of the play, lays out the two major relationships in the play: loyal son Hamlet brooding over his dead father, and Gertrude planning her union with Claudius.

From there, however, things tend toward chaos.

The production spins off into melodrama when we get to the first big set piece of the play. When Hamlet and Gertrude share their first of several decidedly Oedipal kisses, the eyes of anyone who has more than a passing familiarity with “Hamlet” (read: pretty much anybody who’s seen the Mel Gibson or Kenneth Branagh versions of “Hamlet,” or even, you know, actually read the play) begin to roll.

Paul seems to think that his audience has never heard of this Shakespeare fellow, and the actions on stage are portrayed with all the subtlety of a cast-iron skillet to the right temple. During the pantomime that opens the play, when Claudius and Gertrude come together and almost kiss, meddling blowhard Polonius steps between them with a reproachful look while Hamlet glowers on.

Ophelia, played with an unsettling naivete, and her big, blustery brother Laertes – who takes after his daddy, it seems – say a smoochy, Angelina Jolie-and-her-creepy-brother goodbye and cling to each other while Polonius yammers on about to thine own self being true.

When the player king enters with the troupe of actors and stuns everyone with the evocative Hecuba monologue, we recognize him as the ghost of King Hamlet.

Whenever something important happens – the “to be or not to be” monologue, or the players’ performance for the royal family, for example – a single note pulses on the soundtrack like on a particularly “dramatic” episode of “ER.”

See what happened there? Do you get it? Are you sure? Because your neighbor has time to explain to you during the long, long pauses between scenes that stretch the first act to a whopping 90 minutes, giving you lots and lots of time to think about what just happened. Sidebar: I had never been to a play where the ushers actually warn the audience about the play’s length. Then again, on the night I attended the play, the majority of the audience were senior citizens. Infer from that what you wish.

Everything in this production of Hamlet is so over the top that the gigantic performances suit it. Scott Ferrara acquits himself nicely as a narcissistic, postmodern Hamlet who reads too much Kierkegaard and doesn’t get enough sunlight or protein. (Ferrara, incidentally, looks like the result of putting Ralph Fiennes, Joseph Fiennes, Jeff Goldblum and a black eyeliner pencil in a blender and pressing “puree.”)

Helena Ruoti turns in a gloriously oversexed performance as Gertrude – she seems equally turned on by her son and her new husband, Claudius, played with the appropriate amounts of condescension and ambition by Darren Eliker. Tessa Klein’s Ophelia is gratingly girlish and naive, and, more creepily, she can’t seem to keep her lips off of Matthew Gaydos’s uncharacteristically grandiose frock-coated and brilliantined Laertes ? though really, who could?

The combination of overblown performances, tedious directorial tics and an incredibly superficial reference to Tom Stoppard’s play, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” combine to make the viewer silently plead, as Gertrude so famously does, “More matter, with less art.”