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At Bregamos, Two Hamlets Ice The Beef

Lucy Gellman | February 17th, 2023

At Bregamos, Two Hamlets Ice The Beef

Bregamos Community Theater  |  Culture & Community  |  Elm Shakespeare Company  |  Fair Haven  |  Ice The Beef  |  Arts & Culture  |  Theater  |  Arts & Anti-racism

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Manny Camacho and Catherine Wicks as Hamlet(s). Lucy Gellman Photos.

At first, it seemed like a trick of the eye. Two Hamlets emerged from Castle Elsinore, one sweeping through each arched doorway. Against the heavy, gray stone, two identical black capes gathered and flowed behind them. Two pairs of feet, both sheathed in shiny black, made their way toward the edge of the stage. “To be, or not to be?” one started. “That is the question,” the other answered. 

But when they spoke, it was two different voices, splitting as if they were circling each other. The lines moved between the two of them, alive and wriggling as they sailed through the air. 

In what may be Shakespeare’s most spectral play, the two Hamlets are in fact Manny Camacho and Catherine Wicks, members of Ice The Beef who have returned to work with Elm Shakespeare Company for the second time in three years. This weekend, they will bring their first run of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Bregamos Community Theater, using theater as a form of conflict resolution.

For both groups, it has become a powerful testament to what happens when violence and revenge remain in a constant, unending cycle with each other.  

Performances, which are free and open to the public, run Saturday Feb. 18 at 3 and 7 p.m. and Sunday Feb. 19 at 5 p.m. at Bregamos Community Theatre. Tickets and more information are available here. The troupe plans to perform it again this summer at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in June. They have a traveling set to do it with, designed by artists David Sepulveda and Amie Ziner. 

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Wayne Phelps as the Ghost of Hamlet's Father.

“It’s a revenge story,” said Sarah Bowles, director of education at Elm Shakespeare. “We’ve been talking a lot about what that difference is between seeking justice and seeking revenge. When it’s revenge, it becomes an obsession. At the end of the play, five people are dead. We ask: was it worth it to get his revenge on people who were innocent?” 

Written on the lip of the seventeenth century, Hamlet tells the story of the eponymous Prince of Denmark (Manny Camacho and Catherine Wicks), who is driven mad by his deep and gnawing grief at his father’s death. Visited by the King’s Ghost (a masterful Wayne Phelps), Hamlet learns that his father was murdered by his Uncle Claudius (an outstanding and villainous Eliza Vargas), who is now married to his mom (Ronisha Moore as Queen Gertrude of Denmark). Cue the plan to avenge his father. 

In the way that Shakespeare is Shakespeare, there is never just one plot, and members of Ice The Beef dive into the layers of drama headfirst. Hamlet is also in love with Ophelia (Zahra Hutchinson), whose own father is the chief counselor to Claudius (James Jones as Polonius) and the doting dad to Laertes (Mekhi Robertson). A play unfolds within a play (props to Robertson, Jaylen Newell, and Jaylen Evans), which bends and plays with the fourth wall as Hamlet catches Claudius in real time. 

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James Jones as Polonius between the Hamlets.

While the language is very 1599, the themes—vengeance, machismo, perturbed spirits, a thirst for power through violence—do not feel so distant from 2023 New Haven. In the first two months of this year, the city has seen five homicides, including one in the first hours of the New Year. When 23-year-old Dontae Myers was shot and killed on Jan. 1 his mother lost her second and only surviving son to gun violence. In the play, a final duel between Hamlet and Laertes feels like it could have been avoided with some deep restorative justice and frank conversation.  

“This play is major because we focus on a lot of things,” said Ice The Beef Director Chaz Carmon. “It’s revenge. It’s justice. It’s mental health. They’re seeing ghosts! It’s about why you should ask for forgiveness and forgive yourself. We live that everyday in our communities, right?” 

“We’re doing positive, good stuff,” he added. “We just keep on pushing. I’m saving lives.” 

In the show, both Bowles and Carmon see a centuries-old warning—that bloodshed cannot beget bloodshed, or it will cause bloodshed until the end of days—as a starting place for the young actors, who are a mix of New Haven and Hamden Public Schools students and recent graduates. Just as their Romeo & Juliet wove in contemporary theater practices, this Hamlet ties in both a preface and an afterword written by the cast. 

In the first, actors introduce the play in their own words, giving a sort of on ramp to Shakespeare’s language. In the second, they act out multiple scenarios that could have ended differently, had physical revenge not been the answer. In between, it is up to them to make the argument against revenge, while telling the story of five fully preventable deaths. 

“Revenge Is A Very Hurtful Thing” 

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Mekhi Robertson as Laertes and Catherine Wicks as Hamlet. In the backround are Eliza Vargas as King Claudius and Ronisha Moore as Queen Gertrude. 

As actors ran their lines on a recent Monday night, those worlds collided, placing past and present on the same stage. At the back of the theater, Camacho and Phelps held up their scripts in the yellow light, lines sailing between them. When Phelps stumbled on the line “Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing,” Camacho was right there to catch him. 

“To what I shall unfold,” he read back, his eyes watching every movement above a black medical mask. He smiled at Phelps through the mask. “Good job. Good job.”  

For both of them, the world of the play felt immediate, jarringly close when they started rehearsals in October of last year. Camacho, a senior at James Hillhouse High School who played a starry-eyed Romeo in 2021, felt a pull from this new character that he hadn’t before. 

In Hamlet, he said, he could see an alternate version of himself. Before his time in Ice The Beef, Camacho was surrounded by gang violence. It was hard to leave when he didn’t know what the alternative was, he said. There have been times, he added, when he is so angry that he has wanted to respond with physical force. Through Ice The Beef, he’s learned other methods of conflict resolution. 

“I was born into it,” he said. “Hamlet is a character that I can experience. I say this at the beginning of the play, that I have been a very vengeful person in my life.”

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Catherine Wicks, Jaylen Evans, and Manny Camacho.

He joined Ice The Beef in 2015, after Carmon suggested he might excel at public speaking. Since that time, he has bloomed into a young leader, becoming the youth president of the organization and a young leader in multiple New Haven arenas. When he’s onstage with Wicks, he said, he’s never alone: he brings the memory of his loved ones who he has lost. 

They include his great grandmother, Ana Figueroa, who he called a guiding force in his life. They also include the young people whose funerals he’s attended one after the other, including Myers’ earlier this year. He remembered going to rehearsal two days later, and having to remind himself of the power he wanted the play to have. 

Phelps, who is 21, nodded as Camacho spoke, as if he could feel the sweet, haunted Prince of Denmark somewhere alongside them in the theater. Each time he steps into character, he said, he’s bringing with him the spirits of those who are no longer physically present, but inform the anti-violence work he does every day. 

“They are always in my heart, in my spirit, in my mind,” he said. 

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Wayne Phelps as the Ghost of Hamlet's Father.

Those include 14-year-old Tyrick B. Keyes, who became a young victim of gun violence in July 2017. Phelps, who described Keyes as a younger brother, carries the loss with him in everything he does. While the king’s Ghost may not be a large speaking role, he said, he sees it as a chance to warn audience members not to choose revenge. The violence will never end if they do.      

“I don’t want to have a family that has experienced that [kind of loss],” he said. 

At one of the theater’s hi-top tables, Jaylen Newell and James Jones caught up after a day at Hamden High School, where both of them are freshmen. Two years ago, Newell joined Ice The Beef after Carmon connected with her mom, and talked about the group’s work. 

She said the play sticks with her because she sees “a lot of, like, drama nowadays” both in and outside of school. 

“Somebody gets mad and tries to fight you,” she said. It might be over a soured relationship or a small material possession, and suddenly students are at each other’s throats. “I suggest that you try to talk it out and see it both ways.” 

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Sarah Bowles and Jaylen Newell.

Across from her, Jones said he is excited to be back on stage after his debut as Friar Lawrence two years ago. At 14, he’s been part of Ice The Beef for half of his life, and often turns to the arts as a form of communication. Polonius gave him a new challenge that he welcomed with open arms, he said. 

When he reads the script, he’s struck by both Polonius’ obsession with power and how mistreated Ophelia is, a pawn in someone else’s game. As she is written, Ophelia is controlled and ultimately ruined by the men in her life, leaving the audience to wonder what would have happened if she had slayed the patriarchy before it got the best of her. 

"He really does abuse his own power," he said of the character before slipping on a silky, white stole woven with shimmering thread and a deep bronze V. "You can look anywhere in the world and know that revenge is a very hurtful thing."

“What Piece Of Work Is A Man!”

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Zahra Hutchinson  as Ophelia. 

In part, that’s where the scenes at the beginning and end of the show came from. In Hamlet, actors have written an introduction and two final scenes in the present, offering alternatives to violence that the characters face. As Bowles turned off the humming thermostat on Monday, characters gathered onstage, their bodies a broad V. Weaving her own words into Shakespeare’s, Wicks stepped forward. 

“Revenge is a never-ending cycle,” she started “Your anger takes over all logic.”

The words swelled around her “There is a difference between seeking revenge and seeking justice,” ventured Johnson, who plays the even-keeled Horatio. “At the end of the day, if you get me, I’m gonna get you back,” said Moore. 

“I have been at times a very vengeful person,” Camacho said. “I wanted something done, and the only way I thought was to do it myself. After all of those decisions delivering what I thought was justice, my anger only increased. Festered. I wasn’t ever satisfied.” 

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Members emotions’ swirled around the stage, laying the groundwork for the play. When, moments later, Phelps appeared in shimmering white, a crown glinting atop his head, it felt as if all his ghosts were in the theater too, watching for his next move. 

The ensemble has provided it, using both the language and select artistic decisions to build a Hamlet that belongs at once to Denmark and New Haven. Actors’ movement, particularly in scenes that have fighting and physical contact, is staged to be intimate and swift, showing in real time the way one cannot retract the act of killing another person. 

When characters die, they shed their clothes to reveal layers of black underneath, leaving heaps of silk and cotton where their warm bodies should still be. Offstage, Bowles has scored several scenes with the beat of a spare, wide-framed drum, her hand steadily beating the instrument to become a heartbeat. 

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Perhaps the greatest risk—that of having two Hamlets—has paid off.  At the show’s wildly beating heart, Wicks and Camacho trade lines but share space, often onstage at the same time or within seconds of each other. Camacho becomes the more lovesick, maudlin, emotional Hamlet, who ultimately cannot deal with the pain he has inflicted. Wicks is calculated and cool, there for scenes with Gertrude and Claudius.

It gives every soliloquy the sense of being deep inside Hamlet’s head, as he tries to reason with an inner self that is increasingly more paranoid from grief. 

Where it might feel heavy-handed or cumbersome with a different cast, these young actors soar. When Wicks declares “What piece of work is a man!,” there’s the strong urge to high-five Hamlet from the front rows, and then urge her to run as fast and far away as possible while there’s still time. When both she and Camacho spit “Bloody, bawdy villain!,” the audience can feel his simmering rage and steep descent into madness in real time. When at the end, breath stills onstage and there are ghosts everywhere, it’s hard not to wonder what ones will follow.  

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Eliza Vargas, Catherine Wicks, and Chaz Carmon. 

There is humor in this world too: Laertes understands and delivers on all the innuendo his character intended. As court jesters, Robertson, Evans and Newell bring it, making the audience remember that even in Shakespeare's tragedies, there are bitter, surprising laugh lines. 

No wonder, then, that when actors morph back into their present selves, they remind the audience that they can still ice the beef in their own lives before it’s too late. While Hamlet may speak for itself—Shakespeare’s cautionary tale is baked in the play—Carmon said that he and Bowles wanted to drive the point home, particularly for any audience members who might need to hear it.   

In one post-Hamlet scene, students resolve conflict in real time, as a fight breaks out between two young women. In a second, a group of young men gather at the funeral of a friend who has been murdered, and decide to avenge him by gunning down his killer. When they are on their way to do so, they see the friend’s mother. She begs them to stop the cycle of violence, or fears that it will never end.  

As actors ran through their second to last rehearsal earlier this week, Vargas said she’s glad to be bringing the message to the community. A 2019 graduate of Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, she now works with Ice The Beef’s Reconstructing Families Initiative and as a substitute teacher in the city’s schools. 

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Ronisha Moore as Queen Gertrude.

Each time she steps into the villain’s role, she feels the weight of what Claudius is doing, she said. Growing up, Vargas said that talking things out, or going to therapy, wasn’t really an option in her home. Now, she’s an advocate for it. If Hamlet had gotten help, the outcome may have looked drastically different. 

“I think it resonates with what we have going on in our city,” she said. “Revenge isn’t always the best option. When people are mad, I like to tell them to take a minute for themselves, to listen to music, to write, to meditate. I talk to God.”

Wicks, who is a student at Johnson & Wales University, said the play has made her think about that fine line between justice and revenge. She joined Ice The Beef when she was 15 years old, after a friend told her about performance opportunities in the group. After joining, she was often there every day after school until 9 p.m. When she took a semester off this year, she returned. 

“I try to bring out my inner crazy but also my inner poet, because with Hamlet it’s hand in hand,” she said. “Like, I relate to Hamlet on a deeper level. It always resonated with me how he made himself crazy.”

“It doesn’t count as justice if someone gets hurt or dies,” she said.

Performances, which are free and open to the public, run Saturday Feb. 18 at 3 and 7 p.m. and Sunday Feb. 19 at 5 p.m. Tickets and more information are available here.