Another “reading” of (HH) hamlet house might address the play’s perversity, and how temporary autonomous zones often court perverse dynamics. Much of the play is sexually explicit, violent, and prankstering. The play’s language can be taken as “regressive” in the psychoanalytic sense of this term. Among this prankstering and regression, games open up for the audience; we start to play along. Following a particular game logic for a while, the rules of the game shift radically, suddenly. We are in a different universe, a different situation comedy or existential drama (the play seems to play between these two dramatic genres). Ghost (played by John Morena) adds to the televisual shifts of the play’s language by consistently citing language familiar to us through the media. Ghost is a kind of media avatar, or avatar of what one overhears walking around a crowded urban environment. The actors change the channel again and are back in the situation comedy of (HH) hamlet house, as if returning from a commercial break, or a news flash. There is something 70s about (HH) hamlet house’s timing, its event dynamics. Glam rock plays on a small boombox during interludes in which the two Hamlets rock-out together or fight. The actors will occasionally talk through a microphone, as if to amplify the audience’s sense of their mediation.

Meanwhile, the corpse of Hamlet remains on the floor, rotting and unmourned. Mourned only by Ophelia who equivocates between her two Hamlets. The characters kick his body bag, they trip-over it slapstick style. As an audience member I tended to forget about Hamlet’s corpse—the ostensible center of the dram—for a long time, until there was some physical interaction with it. That is, until it became a material obstacle for the performers. As if that corpse were the only thing real in the play. As if it were peeping-out from the “dream” (the play is described as “an Ophelia dream postmortem” in the program). (HH) hamlet house is set in Detroit, one of the most forsaken of all American cities currently, and ripe for allegory by this and other facts. But it is our media speak—the disjunct between doing and saying at the heart of contemporary cultural discourse—that the play is most effective in treating.