Flash back to the final act of Trinity Rep's 1999 Othello. Scene Opens: Iago (Eric Tucker) on his back, Othello (John Douglas Thompson) crouches over him with a dagger, the audience (several hundred inattentive high school students) snickers and jokes. Action: Tucker suddenly rolls from under the dagger's point to glare at those students nearest the stage. "Do you think I can't hear you just like you can hear me?" he demands. "You're not home clicking the remote to see what else is on TV! You're here, and I'm on every channel! Understand?!" Audience thoroughly unnerved -- and thus highly attentive -- the play resumes.

Fast forward to pre-show at Beowulf Theatre Company's current Hamlet, directed by Tucker, in the basement of Providence's First Universalist Church (through June 23; reservations 421-6619). Scene Opens: staff warns arriving theatergoers: part of tonight's cast and all its musicians are missing; further frustrations loom. Action: Audience members take seats warily; harried crew (cast?) members mill among them. Audience thoroughly unnerved -- and thus highly attentive -- the play proceeds, conjuring surprise and suspense from an unaltered, yet no-longer familiar script.

Tucker's experiences as an actor feed his choices as a director; catching the audience off-guard inspires him. In Hamlet, he and Beowulf co-founders Joanna Beecher and Donald Sheehan turn theatrical production on its head: to watch them tell it, their lack of sets, costumes, even a permanent space, frees rather than fetters, allowing them, as Tucker says, to "just do it." A former Trinity Rep member (and 1998 Conservatory graduate) and former artistic director at Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre, he well knows the benefits of belonging to an established company, but is willing to forego them, at least momentarily, for the luxury of being available to chance.

Tucker's audaciously unmoored productions (his acclaimed Macbeth at SFGT preceded this blown-open Hamlet) get their bearings from the credo that interruption to routine gives everyone -- audience and actors -- the opportunity to apprehend their immediate experience with new, breath-taking acuity. Beowulf's mission is to develop an audience addicted to that stop-time thrill, so that when The Seagull is staged in a pub, or Julius Caesar on the steps of the State Capitol, the endeavor's riskiness will render it not off-putting, but essential.

"A long-running show can feel like a prison to an actor, and yet I love that the lines take you on an emotional journey every night," says Tucker. "Shakespeare's done the work: you say the lines and the play happens. But the audience can't be out there, bored. I want them connected. I want them on their toes."

Issue Date: June 21 - 27, 2002