Chances are that if you spend time at the Folger Shakespeare Library, you know that there is a play called Hamlet that was written by William Shakespeare more than 400 years ago.
But even those with the most rudimentary knowledge of Shakespeare’s masterpiece will appreciate Playwright Lauren M. Gunderson’s latest girl-power drama, A Room in the Castle, a re-examination of Hamlet that puts the women front and center.
Whereas Shakespeare’s tragedy focuses on Hamlet’s descent into madness after his father, the King of Demark, is murdered, A Room in the Castle asks: What if things had been different? Specifically for the women in the play — all two of them. What if the ending didn’t have to be all tragedy for Ophelia, Hamlet’s doomed sweetheart, and his regal mother, Gertrude?
Opening at Folger Theatre on March 4, A Room in the Castle is a co-production with Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, which commissioned Gunderson to write a script focused on a Shakespearean character of her choosing. “Ophelia was a mystery to me so I started looking at her,” Gunderson told DC Theater Arts in a recent Zoom interview. “I realized that Shakespeare put all these secret doors into the play that you can open and find a whole other version of Ophelia. She is a creative, she is a romantic, she’s smart, she’s a little weird and quirky. She’s not this perfect ingénue.”
Gunderson is one of the country’s most prolific and frequently produced playwrights. Her plays, including Ada and the Engine and The Revolutionists, frequently feature female historical figures, offering a new perspective on lives that were discounted due to gender.
“In Hamlet, we don’t see the women in a private space,” Gunderson says. “We only see the mask of the characters they have to be in public. So what happens when they are alone in their rooms?”
Gunderson’s answer to that question became a briskly-paced, comedic one-act in which the men remain in the shadows. The play features just three characters: Ophelia, Gertrude, and a maid named Anna who acts as Ophelia’s confidante and cheerleader. Adding the character of Anna underscores how isolated Ophelia has been in Hamlet and asks how things may have been different if she had had a confidante in the castle.
Limiting the cast to three characters allowed Gunderson to give each woman a depth of character, staying true to Shakespeare’s portrayal of Ophelia and Gertrude while mining the characters’ own strengths and motivations. Ophelia is a singer/songwriter on the cusp of womanhood. “Ophelia’s womanliness is weaponized so quickly against her in Shakespeare’s play that we don’t see the beauty and humor of that shift from girl to woman,” Gunderson observes. And Anna is a fierce protector who is able to hold her own with the Queen and “find great agency from a place of subservience.”
Gunderson’s interpretation of Queen Gertrude takes issue with the character’s historical reputation as a manipulative woman who married her dead husband’s brother for selfish reasons. “Hamlet was written from her son’s perspective, and of course, Hamlet sees the worst version of his mother,” Gunderson says. “But there is no way that her marriage was a lust-driven choice. That was fully about survival and about protecting herself and her son. She is throwing herself on the bomb to save them for sure.”
When asked what Gunderson looks for in choosing new projects, she has a quick answer: Dream and drive. “What makes a good main character is big desire, big want, lots of internal conflict,” she says. “Also characters have to have room to grow. Having that journey from the beginning of a play to the end is imperative. I’m not interested in people who don’t change because why tell that story? Good stories come from the moment when they are forced to or choose to reckon with themselves.”
Hamlet famously ends in a bloodbath with nearly every character in the play dying. Newly empowered through Gunderson’s script, will Gertrude and Ophelia circumvent their tragic fates?
No spoilers here, but Gunderson takes issue with the idea that tragedy is always the highest form of art as it was seen in Shakespeare’s time. “A lot of my work is about doing the harder, braver thing: finding a way out. My favorite stories are not about the consequences of actions but the consequences of resilience and survival.”
Gunderson is grateful for programs like Folger Theatre’s Reading Room Festival, where A Room in the Castle had its first staged reading in 2023, citing the importance of being able to mount plays quickly in response to rapidly changing events in the country. A self-described activist playwright, Gunderson notes that “we will always be in need of plays like this one or like Cabaret which are about desperate moments in time and how people find their way.”
Gunderson hopes that her play will be seen as not “just” a play for women but rather a universal story of bravery and redemption that just happens to have a female protagonist.
“It’s important to show the hard work of survival,” Gunderson adds. “The hard work of maybe not all of us get out but the ones who do, that is a hard hope that we have won.”
Running Time: Approximately 85 minutes with no intermission.
A Room in the Castle plays May 4 through April 6, 2025, at the Folger Theatre in the Folger Shakespeare Library, 201 East Capital Street, SE, in Washington, DC. Tickets range from $20-$84 and are available online or by calling the box office at (202) 544-7077.
A Room in the Castle
by Lauren M. Gunderson
Directed by Kaja Dunn
Co-produced with Cincinnati Shakespeare Company
SEE ALSO:
Folger Theatre to premiere Lauren Gunderson’s ‘A Room in the Castle’ (news story January 30, 2025)
