Whidbey Playhouse Comedy Flips Shakespeare With Women Playing Hamlet

Trinity Slowik took the stage at Whidbey Playhouse not as the Danish prince, but as Jessica, an actress who never asked to play him in the first place. That reluctant casting became the engine of Women Playing Hamlet, a meta-comedic riff on Shakespeare's tragedy that opened March 31 under the direction of Kevin Meyer.

Where Hamlet wrestles with whether to be, Jessica wrestles with whether she can pull off Hamlet at all. Slowik's comic timing and emotional investment in that spiral of self-doubt drove the show's humor forward, with Katie Jones and Chai Fortune rounding out the ensemble.

Meyer staged the production as full-throttle meta-theater, repeatedly breaking the fourth wall to fold the audience into the joke. The comedy ranged from conceptually sharp to deliberately absurd, anchored by a scholar character whose outlandish comparisons kept the room reliably off-balance. Physical comedy and risqué humor filled out a script that never seemed interested in playing it safe.

The evening worked as much through ensemble chemistry as individual performance. Laughs arrived in swings: clever one moment, broad the next, and occasionally ridiculous enough to land hard anyway. Audience participation tightened that dynamic, turning the Playhouse into less a theater and more a shared joke among everyone present.

For a cultural institution as embedded in island life as the Whidbey Playhouse, a production like this carries weight beyond a single night out. Community theater on Whidbey supports local artists across experience levels and anchors the island's calendar of events for residents and visitors alike. Women Playing Hamlet fit squarely into that tradition: a show with a comic lens aimed at identity, casting, and theatrical tradition, built to play as a social evening as much as an arts experience.

The show left at least one reviewer without much room for doubt: "To see, or not to see? That's not really a question, you should absolutely see this.