Taking-up these widely interpreted aspects of Shakespeare’s play, Lilac Co and St Johns Theater play off of Shakespeare’s themes and subtexts reinventing the play’s drama through Ophelia’s eyes. Against the linear drama of the original Hamlet, Lilac Co and St Johns Theater’s version offers an evental structure, a dramatic structure which moves from event to event rather than scene-by-scene. These events are interruptive, continuously messing with an audience’s attention.

Fundamental to this event structure is (HH) hamlet house’s language. Written and directed by Sean Lewis, the language of the play is often inflected by “nonsense.” Much of the language is sing-songish recalling limerick and nursery rhyme, yet it also recalls modernist literary experiments such as those of Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Lewis Carol, and Antonin Artaud. By using language that is connotative rather than denotative (that suggests something rather than “saying” something), or that is said for its qualities of expression rather than for its content, Lilac Co and St Johns Theater evokes language as a temporary autonomous zone for meaning. Within such language an audience member can dwell rather than be directed what to think about a narrative progression or a character’s “inner” psychology. Such language affects feelings and ideas actively, if not immediately, in an audience. It proves that temporary autonomous zones are not merely physical spaces, but imaginal, emotional, and intellective states one passes through.