A single spotlight, a sullen young prince and the haunting words of “to be or not to be” have moved audiences of William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” for centuries. The speech is regarded as one of the best-known soliloquies in the English language, yet over 500 years of performances, it has never been spoken by a female character. Until now.
Washington and Lee University students brought the “Hamlet 50/50” adaptation to life in Johnson Theatre over three sold-out shows from Nov. 19 to 21.
The cast also performed at the American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton on Dec. 3, wrapping up a semester of tackling “layer upon layer of challenges,” said Jemma Alix Levy, the show’s director.
The adaptation comes from the 50/50 Shakespeare Project, an initiative which sets out to advance gender equity in the world of Shakespearean theater, according to its website.
The program’s leaders, Vanessa Morosco and Peter Simon Hilton, accomplish this by adjusting the gender identification of some characters and re-assigning certain dialogue and action to give female characters more presence and autonomy on stage.
Just like the original play, “Hamlet 50/50” follows the story of Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, as he attempts to avenge his father’s murder. The show retains all its famous lines — and Hamlet’s beloved teenage moodiness and madness — while shifting the gender dynamics around the central prince. The reallocation of power creates an ensemble production out of a traditionally “one-star” play, Levy said.
“So instead of having one student who clearly gets all of the attention, all of the work, all of the accolades, we ended up with a group of students who were working together on much more even footing,” Levy said. “That, I think, is a crucial piece of the educational process: not only learning how to perform, but also learning how to support the performers around you.”
In the original “Hamlet” play, there are only two female characters, and they speak a combined 10% of the words of the show, Morosco wrote in a program for Hamlet 50/50’s premiere at the 2023 Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival. She thinks female performers deserve better.
“I have dedicated most of my professional life to creating productions of [Shakespeare’s] works, but I am also a woman and see it as my basic right to have equal access, in all its forms, to the workplace of his plays,” she wrote.
In practice, the 50/50 approach means more than just tallying lines of dialogue. It means that Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother and the Queen of Denmark, leads her country instead of her husband. It means that Horatio, originally written as Hamlet’s male best friend, is recast as Lady Horatio, Hamlet’s cousin and trusted sidekick. And it means that Ophelia, once silent on the cause of her death, speaks the chilling lines of “to be or not to be.”
“Original Ophelia is very timid and just going off what other people say,” said Alaina Pastore, ’25, who played Ophelia in W&L’s production. “But going into the adaptation, I felt like she had a lot more agency, or at least a lot more space to speak for herself.”
Ava Grace Flory, ’26, who played Lady Horatio, said the most powerful moment for her character was delivering the final lines — an important job never before given to a woman in “Hamlet.”
“That was definitely a really amazing opportunity, but also kind of daunting, to have that responsibility of ending the play,” she said. “But the cool gender element is that it’s implied that the empire of Denmark will fall on Horatio, who will lead as a matriarch.”
Levy said the reimagined story has tangible impacts on Shakespeare’s workplace, giving women more rehearsal time, more interaction with directors, and simply more opportunities to be cast in the show. It also makes the show more approachable for 21st-century audience members who want to see themselves represented on stage, Pastore added.
One of Pastore’s personal goals with the performance, she said, was to make Shakespeare accessible to everyone: whether by singing her lines to the tune of Sabrina Carpenter and Hozier hits or by making TikToks in-character with her castmates.
“Everybody thinks Shakespeare is so, like, high society. But it’s not super fancy or hard to understand. It’s just like ye olde sitcom,” she laughed. “It was meant to be entertaining then, and it still is now.”
Levy agreed. “It’s really important that we make sure that people see that Shakespeare is just stories — stories that are relatable even though they were written so long ago,” she said.
That’s been her philosophy as long as she can remember, Levy said. She saw her first Shakespeare play when she was seven years old, and she remembers shushing her mother every time she tried to lean over the armrest of the theater chair and describe what was happening on stage.
“At that age, I didn’t know that Shakespeare was supposed to be scary or high class or anything like that,” Levy said. “And because of that, there was no barrier for me. I got the story.”
After months of rehearsal — ranging from learning sword-fight choreography to scanning soliloquies for accented and unaccented syllables — the cast felt proud after their final “Hamlet 50/50” performance on the acclaimed Blackfriars stage, Pastore said.
Flory said the last performance was a unique full-circle moment for her. Her elementary school often took field trips to Blackfriars Playhouse, and she said it was “an amazing opportunity and honor” to perform on the very stage she once watched in awe.
Editors’ note: Hana Chang, ’26, played Hamlet in “Hamlet 50/50” and serves as the Ring-tum Phi’s Arts & Life editor. To avoid conflict of interest, Chang did not edit this story.
