BY BRETT BROWN
From The Yale Herald, April 16 2006
Fri., Apr. 14: At 8 p.m., 30 Yale students board a bus at Phelps Gate. They are shipped off to an undisclosed off-campus location where they will view, and actively participate in, PSYCHOHamlet, which, as the title indicates, incorporates elements of both Hitch-cock’s Psycho and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.The one-man play—the first collaboration between undergraduates, Yale faculty, and the Yale School of Art—is the senior project of Satya Bhabha, BK ’06, who wrote and performs in it.
Last summer, Bhabha, a Theatre Studies major, started work on his senior project. He knew that he “wanted to do something classical, and also with a small cast” and so happened upon the idea of a one-man Hamlet. As he studied the play, he realized that the ghost of Hamlet may have been created by its protagonist: “As I worked through the script and looked at Act I, my interpretation made clear to me the possibility that Hamlet conjured the ghost,” Bhabha said. He was reminded of another famously tormented character: Psycho’s Norman Bates. As he continued to study Shakespeare’s text, more and more similarities emerged. From superficial parallels in plot—the death of a father, a son obsessed with his mother, murder behind curtains—to the governing effect of the works, Bhabha found that Psycho and Hamlet inhabited the same emotional world and explored similar themes. It seemed natural, then, for Bhabha to combine the two “icons of culture”; in doing so, he enlisted Theater Studies professor Joseph Roach, who directed the show, and Derek Larson, ART ’07, who has made a video installation for it.
But the show is not merely a hodgepodge of play and film; nor is it just a medley of Hamlet and Psycho’s most exciting bits. Rather, it is a new work, which uses the different perspectives of Hitchcock and Shakespeare—and the different media of film and live theater—to explore one world of feeling. “I looked at the script of Hamletand the screenplay of Psychoas two text sources,” Bhabha said. “I sculpted the show not about Hamletor about Psychobut about the sort of tenuous connection between emotion and insanity.” When asked how he achieved this, Bhabha responded, “I’ll not speak to that. [People] will have to come see the show.”
Seeing the show, however, takes some effort. Rather than shuffling over to the Off-Broadway Theater, audience members—no more than 30—meet each night at Phelps Gate at 7:30 p.m. At 7:45, unclaimed reservations are released, and at 8, the bus leaves for an unknown, eerie locale. To be concrete, the would-be theater is not affiliated with Yale. Producer Andrew Law, DC ’08, said cryptically that the space is owned by an “outside corporation” to whom the production paid a rental fee. It is, he said, “a raw space—no piping to hang lights, no sound system.” To be vague and grand—as Professor Roach was—you could call this area “the womb of mechanized death.” However they referred to it, though, all the people involved in the production are thrilled to work in this space.
Roach, a professor in both the Theatre Studies and the English departments, believed that the venue adds a new layer to the theatrical experience. He volunteered to direct Bhabha’s senior project because he believes Bhabha is “exceptionally talented and has great ideas.” And, although Roach thought that Bhabha’s writing and performance would be effective anywhere, he believed that the current location “gives us a chance to step outside the usual expected venues. It is a very evocative space.” For Bhabha, it was important that the audience be placed in an unfamiliar environment, that they be “really challenged.” The show grew out of its location: Bhabha has been working there for over a month.
PSYCHOHamlet is a rare project in combining the diverging perspectives of its various authors with the ideas of its crew. With various media and an unusual venue, Bhabha and his team intend to evoke depression, melancholy, and insanity. It is a production shrouded in secrecy, but one with the potential to come across as inspired, and a little bit psycho.
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