Oh, Mama! That Queen of Denmark Takes Over ‘Gertrude: The Cry,’ a ‘Hamlet’ Rewrite, at Atlantic Stage 2

Hamlet is indecisive. His mother, however, is a lot more resolute. In the first scene of Howard Barker’s Gertrude: The Cry, being revived by PTP/NYC at Atlantic Stage 2, she orders Claudius to “kill my husband.” Then she strips naked and demands sex from him astride her husband’s corpse. Gertrude, a radical rewrite of Hamlet, is the 10th work by Mr. Barker that PTP/NYC has staged. A British playwright with an uncompromising and often violent aesthetic, Mr. Barker writes provoking epics that explore politics, sexuality and power. In this 2002 work, he’s used Hamlet as a rough template, discarding much of the plot and most of the secondary characters, while inventing his own. Pamela J. Gray’s Gertrude is joined not only by Claudius (a fervent Robert Emmet Lunney) and a moralizing Hamlet (a nicely priggish David Barlow), but also by a mother-in-law (Kathryn Kates), a loyal servant (Alex Draper) and a dashing, panty-sniffing suitor (Bill Army). There’s also an infant daughter, played quite unconvincingly by a bundle of cloth.