Go on the hunt for answers with 'Hamlet' in Exodus Ensemble's immersive production

Experience “Hamlet” as never before with Exodus Ensemble’s immersive, up-close-and-personal reinvention of William Shakespeare’s classic play.

“We don’t call our work ‘plays.’ We try to avoid language around traditional theater that turns a lot of people off,” April Cleveland, the ensemble’s artistic director, said. “We call them experiences.”

Each week, the first 17 people to sign up online are invited to a funeral for Hamlet’s father at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe. Guests are expected to dress in black, and they move from room to room alongside the characters. The experience is free, although donations are encouraged after the show.

“We’ve updated it, so it’s contemporary,” Cleveland said.

Instead of a Prince of Denmark, Exodus Ensemble’s female Hamlet is a Princeton undergrad.

“Her father died one week ago of a heart attack in her arms, and she is back at the family estate,” Cleveland said. “The play starts with the audience arriving for the funeral for Hamlet senior. Then, the play takes place over the course of the next few days, as Hamlet gets deeper and deeper into her self-driven investigation with her friend Horatio over her father’s death.”

Although the investigation is deadly serious — and the overall tone of the play is that of a psychological thriller, complete with jump-scares — the characters’ youthful inexperience lends an air of absurdity to their activities.

“These two kids are, like, 20 years old. So, in order for them to investigate and be detectives, they’re staying up all night. They’re living on Red Bull. They’re doing blood oaths. They’re watching ‘Breaking Bad’ for clues, yeah? There’s just a huge pounding heartbeat of college energy,” Cleveland said.

She calls it “an extremely raw, college-y, fantastical, madness-ridden, vodka-infused show.”

Kya Brickhouse, who developed and performed the title role with Exodus last year, said she had wanted to play Hamlet for a long time.

“It had been a dream of mine since conservatory in Chicago,” Brickhouse said. “I wanted to take on possibly one of the most epic roles we have in our canon as theatermakers, one that is traditionally played by a white male, and make it my own.”

Brickhouse had never seen a woman play Hamlet, let alone a Black woman like herself.

“We lean on these classical plays in the canon, because they’re so universal. The themes apply to everyone. But we wanted to put our own brushstroke on it, to take what we love from those plays — from those universal themes — and apply it to our bodies,” Brickhouse said.

This year, Brickhouse is passing off the role to another actor, Bailey James, so she can focus on playing the lead in “Bathsheba,” another upcoming Exodus production.

Unlike Brickhouse, James had not been dreaming of playing Hamlet for years.

“I’ve always been scared of Shakespeare because of the text itself and how it simply has to be word-perfect with the rhythm and everything,” James said. “But the fact that this is a modern adaptation, and they were intentionally looking for Black actresses to read for ‘Hamlet,’ I was like, this seems pretty interesting.”

Cleveland called Exodus’ adaptation of “Hamlet” a “pretty intense investigation into madness.” But the ensemble also tries to subvert cliches surrounding mental illness that are present in the original text.

“We question and play with the idea of madness in a way that’s surprising and challenging and full of contradictions,” Cleveland said.

For James, questions about whose stories are believed and whose are deemed delusional are central to the show.

“This version of ‘Hamlet’ really begs the question for the audience, Are the truth-seekers and the truth-tellers the people that we deem as crazy in this world?” she said. “And is a true message only true depending on who’s telling it?”

When it comes to believability, age, race and gender are not irrelevant factors, according to James.

“I think it does say something that it is this young Black woman who’s constantly in pursuit of a truth that everyone else wants to hide or guard or keep from her for their own personal reasons,” James said.

James is younger than Brickhouse — just a few years out of college — which both Brickhouse and Cleveland recognized as an advantage.

“Bailey (James) is a lot closer to the age that Hamlet is in our version. So, that’s really exciting for me to see,” Brickhouse said. “The impulses that she has, I think, are largely due to her life experiences and her age and how she still sees the world. And I want to steal a lot of what she does (for future productions). Getting to see her do it is just teaching me a lot.”

From Cleveland’s perspective, James’ youthful energy does not merely add a different emotional texture to the role, but it brings out different thematic elements.

“Bailey (James) feels extremely ‘college student,’” Cleveland said. “And that’s something I really appreciate, because this Hamlet in our version — and also in Shakespeare’s — is a really young person who’s navigating a world of people who are lying to her, and she has to pursue her high-stakes quest to the end. I think having that authentic, younger energy is a really interesting contrast to the seriousness of the quest that she’s on.”

And the picture of youth that James presents is not all about angstiness or impulsivity.

“I think it’s very easy to think of Hamlet as angsty and constantly on the hunt for answers,” James said. “I mean, of course, right? If it wasn’t life or death, we wouldn’t have a play. However, my version of her is softer, and her investigativeness has a lot of different colors. It is not just shown in angst or anger or explosiveness, but in tenderness and in vulnerability.”

For Brickhouse, seeing James bring a fresh perspective to the role helped her realize that she had created something truly durable.

“For all the times that I’ve doubted the show and thought it didn’t make sense, and thought what I was saying didn’t make sense, and just all the times that I felt insecure about the role that I helped to create, actually getting to see it from the outside — and getting to see Bailey run through the show and ask the same questions that I’ve been asking — has made me so proud of what we created,” Brickhouse said. “It makes me so proud to see that someone else can take this on, and it still has legs, and it stands, and it’s meaty and juicy.”

Exodus Ensemble is a uniquely collaborative repertory company. They develop their shows through a weeks-long improvisational process, which Cleveland describes as “tons of creating content and throwing paint at the wall.”

At first, James was nervous about joining Exodus as an outsider who hadn’t participated in that process, especially when the other actors had been working together for years.

“As a new person, adapting to their well-oiled machine — like, everybody’s so used to working with everyone else — it could be jarring to add someone new into the mix,” James said. “But I felt very invited. I also feel good with the fact that I could vocalize certain thoughts and offer certain suggestions for scene work and stuff. Because as an actor — and as a writer and creator in general — it feels good to be able to bring ideas into the space, and for those to be validated, and for my voice and the way that I think to be validated.”

For anyone who’s considering attending “Hamlet” but who’s nervous about the notion of what an “immersive” experience might entail, Cleveland has this to say: “Immersive doesn’t necessarily mean interactive.”

“We never put anyone on the spot,” she said. “So, people who are introverts can have an experience that works for them, and extroverts can have an experience that works for them.”

What’s immersive about the experience is the audience’s proximity to the actors.

“It means you’re immersed in the theater all around you, because you’re moving through space. You’re not in a traditional context, you’re closer. You’re drinking drinks with the characters,” Cleveland said. “And our actors are really extraordinary, accomplished, well-trained actors. So, if you want to see really great acting right up close, then come to an Exodus show.”

Exodus Ensemble's stages an immersive, contemporary take on Shakespeare's 'Hamlet'