Something else striking about the play’s language is its qualities of contradiction and announcement/presentiment. In one scene we see Ophelia (played by Elisa Matula) having sex with her two Hamlets (Hamlet one and two played by Sean Lewis and Seth Powers). During the scene she moans and screams “I fucking hate you” repeatedly. Like the memorable scene in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2002), in which Betty (played by Naomi Watts) rehearses a soap opera scene twice with completely different affects, Ophelia screaming “I fucking hate you” while fucking the two Hamlets evokes a similarly confusing sense of affect.

In (HH) hamlet house we are neither what we do or what we say, but the desynching of saying and doing, speech and gesture. Even though (HH) hamlet house is live, it presents the now obvious fact that what is said and what is done are virtual to each other. I am reminded of this desynching, too, when Ophelia announces that she will turn green, takes her hands from a bucket of water, and starts painting herself green with a dab of paint. The effect of this action is affecting not just because it is weird (it would be too easy to call this gesture “weird”), but because of its play between what can be imagined at the level of speech (“I will paint myself green”) and what the theater can make real (the act of painting one’s self green). When the possible becomes instantiated (where it once existed only virtually at the level of statement) we wonder and are moved.




_{Photo on the left by Yuki Wakamaki - the cast from the Warsaw show: Sean Lewis, Elisa Matula, Seth Powers, and John Morena}