Last month, I took my daughter, Gabriela, age 11, to that worthy provincial shrine of the Bard, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival (ASF), to behold arguably the most transcendent creation of the Western imagination: “Hamlet.”
Our pilgrimage to this cultural outpost represents no rookie journey: We have attended ASF’s annual “A Christmas Carol” with ritualistic devotion (save for the years ASF skipped that production) and have seen numerous other offerings upon that stage. Yet this visit surpassed our shared history with the venue, thanks to an unexpected stroke of luck.
In my haste, I procured tickets of fortuitous significance, oblivious that these “VIP” passes would situate us not as mere spectators, but as unwitting participants in the dramatic cosmos. We found ourselves on stage with the cast, catapulted into the very heart of Elsinore as witnesses to the prince’s magnificent, existential struggles.
The director set this performance in the 1930s – an interwar era defined by economic turmoil and the rise of totalitarianism – recasting Denmark’s “rotten state” as a historically grounded moment of crisis (while wisely resisting the clichéd impulse to draw facile parallels between Claudius and President Trump).
The truly radical move – placing audience members on stage – stripped away the illusion that theater allows for passive observation from a distance. With that boundary erased, the spell was broken. Gabriela and I were caught in a liminal space, both subjects and objects of the drama.
That dual presence, part of the scene yet not of it, turned us into a living contradiction within the imagined settings, a breach in the aesthetic order.
This staging decision was particularly brilliant considering the play-within-a-play in Act III, Scene 2. "The Mousetrap," which Hamlet stages to “catch the conscience of the king,” exposing Claudius’s hidden guilt, already functions as a doubling of appearance: a theatrical device that shows how fiction can paradoxically reveal truth.
During this scene with audience members on stage, we experienced a triple layering of reality. Gabriela and I were simultaneously 1) supernumeraries outside the fiction, 2) unwitting actors in the stage production, and 3) spectators to the play-within-a-play. We inhabited multiple perspectives that defied resolution into a unified point of view.
The moment profoundly suggested that reality isn’t separate from fiction. It’s shaped both by and like it. Being on stage meant there was no outside perspective, no place to stand or sit apart from the stories we lived inside.
Human existence is like that: We’re already part of the symbolic narratives we believe we’re merely watching. We’re all on stage!
Even more captivating than the play itself was watching Gabriela comprehend that the line between art and life had blurred. She seemed entranced by the notion that she wasn’t just watching but living a story, perhaps even helping author it. Once confined to the page, Hamlet and his father’s ghost entered her imagination, becoming part of her inner world in a moment of luminous recognition.
In the days that followed, I sensed subtle shifts in her: a quieter attentiveness, a gaze that lingered longer on the everyday interactions between people. The play must have planted something within her, as great works often do, reshaping her awareness in ways neither of us could articulate.
Maybe she had begun to glimpse the truth that life is the greatest performance of all, and that her chosen and unchosen role was to become, alas, more fully herself.
Allen Mendenhall is Associate Dean and Grady Rosier Professor in the Sorrell College of Business at Troy University and Executive Director of the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy. Visit his website at AllenMendenhall.com.
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