by Zane Berzins

A devastated maiden spurned by her lover, Ophelia is, arguably, one of the most piteous characters in Western literature. Well, not any longer!

Rising out of the waters, dreaming of "pop tarts and other sweet things," Ophelia, a "cracked angel for a new-fangled age," is determined to change her destiny. In Caridad Svich's Twelve Ophelias, the heroine refuses her assigned role as hapless, wronged girl.

As produced this spring at BPAC, under the direction of Debbie Saivetz, the play, featuring a remarkable cast of professional actors and Baruch students, takes Shakespeare's Hamlet as its point of departure. Playwright Svich incorporates lines and jests from the original story but tells a substantially different tale. In her rendering, Hamlet is better known as "Rude Boy," Gertrude runs a brothel, and the Rosenkranz and Gildenstern characters are a pair of androgynous sprites, described as "guardians of memory." Throughout the action, they offer wry but perceptive comments on the heroine's progress, while breaking into songs that both mock and celebrate the major characters.

An Equity showcase production, Twelve Ophelias ran for eight performances in the Nagelberg Theatre. All the leading roles were performed by professional actors, with Baruch students assigned to the chorus of (primarily) women, which supports Ophelia throughout the play. Ophelia's story is, to a degree, a universal one: love hurts. "It was interesting finding our own Ophelia-ness," one of the Baruch actors noted during the Q&A that followed a matinee performance.

Several of the students in the production were veteran Baruch thespians, having previously worked with director Saivetz in The Laramie Project. That play was all talk, a machine-gun staccato of words, with each actor playing multiple parts. The contrast with Twelve Ophelias couldn't be more extreme. The chorus moves behind Ophelia like an echo, like a shadow, occasionally murmuring fragments of the "broken songs" that meander through the play.

Stephen Saverance, a Baruch freshman and an alumnus of The Laramie Project, did not appear on stage in this production. Instead, he set the play's scenes to music, playing guitar from his balcony perch. "We had a lot of freedom and flexibility," says Severance, a sometime jazz musician. "It was atmospheric and feeling music." He calls Saivetz, adjunct assistant professor of fine and performing arts at Baruch, "an inspirational director. Her style of working is very free-form. It's like a communal brainstorm. She incorporates a lot of people's ideas."

Although the show had a movement director as well as a choreographer, a great deal of what the chorus actually did was devised by the students themselves. Suneel Nara, a senior, who, like Saverance, appeared in Laramie, had a walk-on, nonsinging role in the chorus. He found it immensely challenging. "It was all gesture," Nara said. "I didn't have any words to hide behind." Of the play, he said, "I just got off on all that creative energy . . . I loved it."

The camaraderie that developed between actors and student-actors was evident during an early rehearsal. "We learned a lot from the professional actors. It was good to be around them," Saverence said. Svich, with whom Savietz has collaborated in the past, was also on hand much of the time to answer questions and help the actors interpret their roles.

And so, Ophelia, a bruised creature of trauma and dissociation, gave birth to a piece of theater in which amateurs and pros, starring roles and walk-ons, drama and comedy, melded into a satisfying and seamless whole.