Kellams: "Hamlet" will be on stage at The Medium in downtown Springdale later this month. Although abridged, the words remain the same. It's just that you might have a chance to alter what you see on stage. "Crowd Control Hamlet" will be presented by Buzzed Bards Wednesday night, July 29. It's an interactive theatre experience. The audience can, for a mere dollar a pop, make some alterations. Those dollars then benefit Canopy NWA. We asked Jessica Sudduth, Buzzed Bards' creative director, and Houston Hughes, the technical director and host of the production, to come to the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio to talk about "Crowd Control Hamlet."
Sudduth: Well, our original thought was coming out of a drunk Shakespeare, and we've kind of evolved from that. But really it was just this — taking these classic stories and, like, your crazy drunk uncle tells them, right? They're a little silly, they're a little funny, everybody's kind of having a good time together.
Kellams: Next up is "Hamlet." Which, you know, most of us know it — if we can't recite things, we know the arc, we know the tragedy, we know Hamlet's inner struggle. How much of that will we see in this production?
Hughes: About 30 minutes. So we've cut the thing down, so that if we were to run it just front and back, it would be about 30 minutes long. And that was actually a really fascinating process, because both of us had definitely been through the play before. She comes from a very much theater background, I come from literary poetry. So we had familiarity with it, but it's not really till you dig down into it that you see both some of the really big ups and really big downs of Shakespeare that you're otherwise maybe not as familiar with. But we had to cut it down, and part of doing that is you see lines that maybe on first pass you're like, "Oh, that's not important." And then when you're trying to keep a cohesive story, you're like, "Oh, but that can't go," or "Oh, but that line sounds too good when you say it out loud to let that go." But we were able to get it down to a comfortable 30 minutes, which we have to do, because we are going to be interrupting it quite often.
Sudduth: Our original idea was to just start with the interruptions, just tell the funny version. But as we got into the story, we realized there's so much to this that even we didn't really remember parts of characters or things that happen in the story. And so being able to tell the original story alongside getting to play with it and make it something new.
Kellams: Without giving too much away, what happens during the interruptions?
Hughes: So the way the show will work — after an introduction and a kind of explaining of the rules — the actors will go up and do our first scene, and they'll play that as straight as possible, as professionally, as upright as possible. And then afterwards I will stand up and I will say, "Okay, that was great. You've all now had the theatre experience of that. Let's mess with it a bit. Let's make it harder for them. Let's figure out some ways that we can make this more interesting for you as an audience and make it tougher for them as performers."
So we will have a voting system that people can go to on their phones, and the way that you vote is by donating to Canopy NWA. So each dollar that you donate is a vote. And so we will have options for how you can mess with the production. For example, in the last scene, there's a sword fight. Well, you might want to replace their swords with old crusty loaves of French bread, or with lightsabers, or with a long floppy gummy worm. And so we'll have options for that, and the audience there in real time will vote and see who's winning, and it'll kind of be a horse race of it. And as they're doing that, I'll be killing time. We'll have some games, we'll have some interactions. And then after, say, three to five minutes, we'll close down the voting, and then the performers will come back out and do that scene again with those changes.
Kellams: So your actors have to be pretty versatile and pretty much able to go with the audience flow.
Sudduth: Yeah. And the hope is to see them both perform their dramatic, you know, professional, this-could-be-on-the-grand-stage version, but then also to have them have the improv challenges and respond and really make it an interactive performance with the audience.
Kellams: When I first read the concept, I thought, well, can we change the ending? Can Hamlet have a happy ending?
Hughes: No, no. Hamlet cannot have a happy ending. But exactly how he comes to his demise — say what's in the cup, or if it's even a cup — I think, you know, all of that kind of stuff can change, because it can be a lot of fun to just completely rewrite the story. But I think what's even more fun is this idea that it becomes a challenge — the actors are hopefully still trying to play it as seriously as they can while also dealing with these changes. And that, to me, is a lot of what creates the humor: that clash of still trying to take it seriously while having all of these things happen, when audience members are voting
Kellams: And voting with their dollars, they’re contributing to Canopy.
Sudduth: Yeah. Originally we were awarded this InnerSpace grant from the Medium to use the space for this event, and it was really important to be able to have some sort of positive impact and give back to our community through the work. And I think it gives it, for us — working on it gives a lot more purpose to the work that we're doing.
Kellams: And you're messing with it — you're not changing it, but you're messing with it. Can you find out new things about this centuries-old script?
Hughes: Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, going through it — I, coming from the poetry background, am a stickler for the iambic pentameter when it's still there. So sometimes when you're cutting, that can limit you. Shakespeare does a lot where he has a sentence that — he doesn't do the Dr. Seuss thing, where you stop the end of your sentence at the end of your line every time. He'll oftentimes have the sentence end partway through a line, and so you can't make your cut at the end of that sentence, or else you've messed with your rhythm. Or you have to do what we do sometimes — find the end of that, and then find another one that cuts in somewhere else that has the same number of syllables. And I think I was the one who was really like, "No, we have to stick to the rhythm, man."
But I think we also found a lot more lines to appreciate. We found definitely some more wordplay, some places where the words just fit so well together. And by the same token, we found some sections where we were like, "Man, you belabor this point too much, just get on with it, come on."
Sudduth: And I think that's part of what we're uncovering as well — we're centuries removed from Shakespeare, but really this was popular entertainment of the time. It was, you know, rowdy audiences having a fun time, and we want to bring a little piece of that back too.
Kellams: What can you tell me about the actors?
Sudduth: We have a variety of actors. We have some who are students at the university, we have some who are degreed professionals, and some who have taken their acting career and done other things with it but want to come back. And I think that's the fun of getting to bring this troupe together and just create something new with people with a lot of different perspectives.
Kellams: Was it always going to be "Hamlet" for this one? Did you kick around other ideas?
Sudduth: We had a short list, and our hope is that — we started this as part of the InnerSpace grant that we got from the Medium, but the hope is maybe we can keep this recurring as a rotating charity event. Well, the next season we'd be into is Christmas, and we were thinking that Charles Dickens might need a little remake. So maybe it's time for "Crowd Control Christmas Carol."
Kellams: I love it, I'm already thinking of what you could mess with there. All right, thank you both very much, and break a leg.
Sudduth: All right, thank you so much.
Kellams: Jessica Sudduth is Buzzed Bards' creative director, and Houston Hughes is the technical director and host of the upcoming production "Crowd Control Hamlet." It's going to be staged at the Medium in downtown Springdale Wednesday night, July 29. Dollars raised will benefit Canopy NWA. They were both at the Carver Center for Public Radio last week.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
