Greystone Theatre’s latest production doesn’t ask audiences to understand Hamlet, it asks them to confront what happens when meaning, narrative and even identity fall apart in real time.

There are productions that open their doors slowly, inviting the audience to settle into their rhythms, and there are productions that begin by destabilizing the room. Greystone Theatre’s Hamletmachine belongs to the latter. The lighting shifts with a taut deliberateness, the sound environment carries an eerie tone. The space gathers tension, without announcing why. Before a performer speaks, the production has already set itself in motion and established the terms on which it plans to operate, unstable, charged and uninterested in conventional theatrical comfort. 

Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine, written in 1977, is less a theatre production than a rupture. It dismantles any semblance of structure, narrative and identity, moving through fragments left behind by political collapse and intellectual exhaustion. Most directors either lean toward abstraction or toward provocation. Greystone Theatre has seemingly chosen a third route. The production begins with an interpreter, a contemporary and familiar one, ChatGPT, attempting to make sense of Hamlet: an AI whose confidence outpaces its comprehension. This reimagined first act is a bold extension of Müller’s own interest in systems that misread humanity, and it situates the audience inside a crisis of interpretation before the play’s more corporeal unravelling begins. 

ChatGPT attempts to summarize Hamlet with speed and certainty, but the logic is always slightly wrong. Relationships flatten, plot points are reassigned and events accelerate without cause. The mistakes aren’t dramatic overstatements; they feel like the familiar misalignments of a system that processes language without understanding its weight that we have become accustomed to. Brooklyn Bitner, taking on the role of this algorithmic narrator, delivers the misreadings with a composed brightness that sharpens their unease. Her performance gives the early scenes a quiet, disorienting clarity; the stage becomes a place where meaning repeatedly slips just out of reach. 

As the summary continues to collapse in on itself, the production lets the distortions accumulate. Scenes begin abruptly without much explanation, characters drift without stable identities and the stage takes on the atmosphere of a narrative losing its internal memory. The disorientation is intentional, but it isn’t gratuitous. Instead, the show invites the audience to feel the dislocation of being mistranslated, not with jokes, but with a strong and steady erosion of coherence that mirrors Müller’s own distrust of stable narratives. 

When the production eventually moves beyond the AI’s grasp, it shifts into a different register entirely. The digital misreadings recede, replaced by an intensification of bodies, images, historical weight and ramblings of future consciousness. Language either splinters into

declarations and fragments, or into rambling monologues, movement becomes either heavy or fluid. Rather than presenting a sequence of decipherable symbols, the performance offers impressions that land through sensation before thought: the heaviness of gesture, the repetition of certain postures or movements, the echo of familiar political memories without explicit explanation. The piece holds itself on a careful tightrope; the extent of that success is to the liberty of each viewer. It attempts to resist the easy trappings found in abstraction simply for abstraction’s sake, instead creating an environment where the audience can sit inside the difficulty rather than be alienated by it. 

What becomes most evident as the performance unfolds is, despite the messy, chaotic and non-linear nature of the story, the careful, conscious intention behind its construction, a care that emerges, clearly, in conversations with those who built it. 

Brooklyn Bitner did not initially set out to become the voice, and glitching mind, of Greystone’s latest experiment. She is not a theatre major, nor someone who spent years working toward this stage. An education student, she auditioned only because a professor suggested it. Greystone, she quickly learned, welcomes students from across disciplines, and she simply decided to try. “I’m actually not a theatre major or anything,” she said, recalling how unexpected the opportunity felt. What began as a casual suggestion became the cornerstone of the production’s opening movement. 

Bitner hadn’t heard of Hamletmachine before joining the cast. “I knew Hamlet, obviously, everyone reads Hamlet,” she said. “Hamletmachine was new to me.” The unfamiliarity wasn’t a deterrent. It was simply another part of the process, one she approached without the weight of preconception or prior attachment. Once cast, she also learned she wouldn’t be confined to a single role. In the first half of the production, she embodies ChatGPT. In the second, she shifts through duties she jokingly described as “stagehand-slash-philosopher-slash-ensemble person.” 

Working inside a play that rejects linear narrative could have been overwhelming, but Bitner frames the process as collaborative rather than chaotic. “The cast checks in with each other all the time,” she said. One of the most important rehearsals involved no staging at all, just the company sitting together and discussing how they interpreted the text. That conversation helped her understand not only what she was doing onstage, but why she was doing it. The hardest part, she noted, was “trying to be abstract but still telling a story.” The role demands emotional investment rather than traditional character development, a challenge she manages through the group’s ongoing support. 

To Bitner, the show’s relevance lies not in deciphering Müller’s intentions but in recognizing what the production reflects to us. “We’re in this new age of tech and AI and the rise of technology,” she said. “There’s talk about fascism, too, and those issues kind of coincide with new media and AI. So I think people will see those parallels to what’s going on today.” For her, Hamletmachine isn’t necessarily any single message; it’s an invitation to self-inquiry. If audiences leave uncertain but thinking, she considers that an appropriate response. “There’s no ‘correct’ way to interpret the show,” she said. “It’s not telling you what to think, it’s giving you space to explore.” When asked to summarize the experience, she offered just one word, “weird,” not as a criticism, but as a statement of fact. 

If Bitner embodies Hamletmachine’s opening instability, sound designer Rochelle Wright is the one who turns that instability into an environment the audience can’t ignore. Wright approached the production with no illusions about what she was stepping into. “The text is so fragmented and symbolic,” she said. “It doesn’t hand you a clear narrative.” Instead of fighting that, she treated it as her starting point. 

Very early in the process, one idea kept surfacing: the breakdown of technology. “We talked a lot about glitching, distortion, digital decay,” Wright explained. “So I pulled from electronic noise and sounds that feel like a machine is kind of … falling apart.” She wanted a soundscape that felt like the world of the play was actively coming undone. 

Wright’s approach didn’t happen in isolation. Wright adjusted cues as rehearsals evolved, reacting to choices the actors made. “You can’t design in a vacuum with a play like this,” she said. “The actors would do something in rehearsal, and then I’d shift sound cues to match it.” What emerged was a conversation. The performers gave the show its internal temperature, and she “wrap[ped] sound around that so the audience can feel it.” 

Wright does not pretend Hamletmachine is straightforward. When pressed to summarize the production in a single word, she didn’t hesitate: “strange,” she said, cracking a smile before adding, “but in a good way.” For her, the strangeness was its defining feature. 

Her hopes for the audience are direct and echo Bitner. Wright doesn’t expect viewers to decode the play. She doesn’t think clarity is the point. What she wants is reflection. “I hope they reflect, really reflect, on how they relate to technology, to each other, to the world,” she said. More importantly, she wants the show to prompt responsibility. “If even one person walks out thinking, ‘Am I contributing to any of the problems this play is hinting at?’ and  ‘What could I do differently?’ then I think the production succeeded.” 

Hamletmachine is not interested in clarity so much as confrontation. What Greystone’s production demonstrates is that disorientation can be purposeful, and that meaning can emerge not from narrative answers but from the friction of ideas and sensations. 

In a cultural moment obsessed with explanation, Greystone’s Hamletmachine offers something more difficult: space. Space to notice our reflexes, our assumptions, our hunger for narrative control. Space to sit with the discomfort that arises when familiar systems, political,

technological and theatrical, begin to glitch. The production doesn’t offer answers; it reminds us that thinking is an act we are responsible for alone, and not an AI. Leaving the theatre, you may feel uncertain about what you just witnessed. That uncertainty is the point. Hamletmachine, in this incarnation, isn’t a story about collapse. It is collapse, inviting the audience not to sort through and organize the rubble, but to recognize the world already resembles it.