I Hate Hamlet (Characters)

Characters

John Barrymore

The character in this play is the ghost of John Barrymore, an actor who actually lived from 1882 to 1942. Starting in the early 1920s, Barrymore was a hit on the Broadway stage with his performances in Shakespearean dramas, starting with Richard III in 1920 and leading to his portrayal of Hamlet in 1921, which was hailed as one of the finest acting achievements of his generation. After Hamlet, Barrymore, who was as devoted to hard drinking and womanizing as he was to his craft, left the stage and moved to Hollywood to appear in a series of mediocre but well-paying movies.

In this play, the ghost of John Barrymore returns to the apartment that he once rented after he is called forth by a séance and lured with a bottle of champagne. He explains to Andrew Rally that his real reason for returning from the dead is to help Andrew prepare for his upcoming performance as Hamlet, because doing so is a tradition with former Hamlet players. When Andrew is hesitant about his ability to play the role, Barrymore does what he can to make Andrew perform, first comforting and reassuring him and then challenging him until, after they duel with swords, Andrew ends up feeling confident. Similarly, Barrymore gives confidence to Deirdre McDavey, Andrew's girlfriend, who has been hesitant to enter into a sexual relationship with him; when Barrymore makes love to her on the night of Andrew's Hamlet performance, Deirdre does not know what has happened, but she finds herself feeling ready to take her relationship with Andrew further.

When his performance as Hamlet is a failure, Andrew turns on Barrymore, pointing out the fact that, despite his brilliance as Hamlet, he wasted the rest of his life as a washed-up drunk who was willing to act in anything for money. Barrymore admits that is true, but says that it does not weaken his achievement in playing the most difficult role of all. The play ends with the ghost taking a grand bow to the audience, ostensibly to show Andrew how it is done, but obviously reveling in the attention.

Felicia Dantine

Felicia is the real estate agent described in the production notes as having "an almost carnal passion for Manhattan apartments." Although Andrew is hesitant about committing to life in a gloomy old apartment, Felicia is insistent, feeling that the apartment's historical connection to John Barrymore is relevant to Andrew's career as a television actor. While Andrew is ashamed of the television show and commercial that he has done, Felicia is an enthusiastic fan of his most crassly commercial work.

Near the end of the first act, Felicia plays a significant role in moving the plot along when she announces that she has studied spiritualism and has in fact made psychic contact with her dead mother. She is convinced by the other characters to use her ability to contact the spirit of John Barrymore. During the ensuing séance, she chats breezily with her mother, but once the connection is broken she is disappointed to find that she has not reached Barrymore. Although she does not know it, the audience has seen Barrymore's shadow and is aware that Felicia's power as a spiritualist is stronger than she herself suspects. He later materializes after she is gone.

In the second act, Felicia is on stage only briefly, passing through to announce that she is leaving with Gary for Los Angeles. The shallow artistic sensibility that she showed by announcing her enjoyment of the breakfast cereal commercial Andrew once did makes her an ideal companion for the shallow and unartistic Gary, and Felicia's interest in making money is suitably matched to his.

Gary Peter Lefkowitz

Gary is a fast-talking, superficial Hollywood writer-producer-director. He is one of the few people who is able to see the ghost of Barrymore, which is explained as being because he is so self-centered that it would not make any difference anyway, a claim borne out by the fact that Gary's only comment on Barrymore's Shakespeare costume is that it is "retro." In contrast to the opportunity to play Hamlet, Gary offers Andrew the chance to star in a television series, which sounds like a serious role as a teacher in an inner-city school, until Gary adds that the teacher is to have super powers at night. Like many people who work around artists but do not have artistic sensibilities, Gary occasionally feels that he should quit the superficial. When he is enthused about going to the Hamlet performance, he states, naively, "Maybe I should just chuck everything, leave LA, just produce, direct and write Shakespeare." Gary's cheesy artistic sensibilities reflect the tastes of mainstream America; Andrew has a difficult time resisting the money and fame that Gary offers, especially when the Hamlet performance goes poorly.

In the end, when Andrew has turned down the television show Gary is producing, Gary leaves for Hollywood with Felicia, the real estate agent, who has a similar, financially-driven world view.

Deirdre Mcdavey

Deirdre is the long-time girlfriend of Andrew Rally, the play's star. She met him in college, when they were both studying acting. While Andrew is not interested in acting in a Shakespeare play at first, the opportunity is a dream come true for Deirdre. She is described in the stage notes as "irresistibly appealing, a Valley girl imagining herself a Brontë heroine." For Deirdre, the life described in old romantic novels and plays is real life, and the life that she leads in twentieth-century New York is just a distraction: in this way, the romantic, artistic ghost who shows up is more appropriate to Deirdre's view of the world than to Andrew's. She aspires to play Ophelia, the female lead, opposite Andrew's Hamlet, and ends up cast as one of Ophelia's handmaids.

One of the defining characteristics of Deirdre is that, at the age of twenty-nine, she is a virgin. This is played for comedy, as it is opposed to the other characters' modern sensibilities. She explains her old-fashioned stance, that she does not want to have sex with anyone until she is married, but at the same time she refuses to marry Andrew.

On the night of Andrew's debut as Hamlet, Deirdre becomes so sad at the fact that his performance is being ignored — mosquitoes buzz around the actors, and a plane callously flies overhead — that she decides to drown herself in Central Park Lake, like Ophelia did in Hamlet. But she loses her nerve and goes back to the apartment. There, standing on the roof and looking at the moon, she feels a slight breeze at the back of her neck, one which she later describes as feeling like a hand caressing her. The next morning, she wakes up with a rose on her pillow: it is obvious to Andrew, and to the audience, that the ghost of John Barrymore has made love to her. Feeling herself at last ready for sex, she seductively invites Andrew up to the roof with her.

Andrew Rally

Andrew is the play's central character. He is an actor who studied drama in New York, and then quickly reached financial success in Hollywood as young Dr. Jim Corman, rookie surgeon, on the television program "LA Medical." He is most famous, though, for his role in a commercial for a breakfast cereal, "Trailbuster Nuggets," which is memorable because the commercial has a catchy jingle.

When the play opens, "LA Medical" has been cancelled, and Andrew has moved back to New York, where he has arranged to play Hamlet in a "Shakespeare in the Park" production. He contacted a real estate agent, Felicia, before leaving Los Angeles, and she rented an apartment for Andrew that the great actor John Barrymore once lived in. While Felicia seems to think that, being an actor, Andrew would want to be associated with Barrymore, the proximity to a man widely considered to be one of history's greatest interpreters of Hamlet adds to Andrew's sense of insecurity. In addition, Andrew is sexually frustrated: his girlfriend, Deirdre, refuses to have sex before she is married, but she will not marry him.

When the ghost of John Barrymore manifests itself, Andrew initially feels overwhelmed, and for good reason: Barrymore's reputation as an actor and as a ladies' man seems to overshadow anything that Andrew could hope to accomplish. At the end of the first act, though, the two actors duel: in the course of this fight, when Barrymore draws blood, Andrew's aggression grows, and he begins to feel that they are on equal footing and that he is ready to perform Hamlet.

In the second act, Andrew has taken on Barrymore's artistic intensity and his sense of importance. Around humans, it seems as if his change of personality is due to over-preparation. With the ghost, though, there is a bond of camaraderie, with the common element being that they are both performers of the role. When his self-confidence crumbles, just before it is time to leave for the theater for his first performance, Andrew is assured by Barrymore, but then Andrew turns against Barrymore and points out the ways in which the master actor's life was less than solid. Barrymore convinces Andrew that, despite his insecurity, playing Hamlet is something that he must do.

Andrew is harder on his performance than anyone else: his newspaper reviews are negative, but they do not call his performance terrible, as he does. Still, when offered a chance to leave the theater and make an impossibly huge sum of money on a frivolous television show, he turns it down, preferring to labor at his craft. In the end, Andrew and the ghost of John Barrymore have been drawn closer than ever.

Lillian Troy

Lillian is Andrew's agent. She is a very old woman and a chronic smoker. When she visits Andrew at the apartment that was once John Barrymore's, she explains that she has been there before, in the 1940s, when she and Barrymore had an affair. At the end of act I, scene 1, when everyone else has left, Barrymore's ghost is surprised to find that Lillian can see him: as she explains, "I am very old. I see everything." With a little prodding, she makes Barrymore remember their affair in detail. When the curtain falls, they are laughing and about to make love again.