Holy Shakespeare! Hamlet Morphs into Bat-Hamlet!

What, ho? Hamlet slipping into Batman’s tights? ’Tis true!

If seeking an uproarious time – and who isn’t these days? – make haste to the Academy Theatre on Tuesday night for the first staged reading of  “Bat-Hamlet.” It’s a new work from 30-year-old Jordan Pulliam, who could be Avondale Estates’ next hot playwright.

Jill Patrick, managing artistic director of the Decatur-based Working Title Playwrights, calls Pulliam’s weaving of Batman with Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” a “wickedly funny deconstruction” of the tragic anti-hero story, sprinkled with ample doses of comedy – Three Stooges style.

“I will tell you sincerely that everybody who has read this script has just laughed their heads off,” Patrick says.

While the script may be clutch-belly funny, its path to a first reading by professional actors has been frought with fear, worry – and five surgeries.

In the spring of 2007, Pulliam was 26 and working in Savannah when he banged out a first draft of “Bat-Hamlet” in about two weeks. He then visited a doctor for what he thought was a “typical little problem of eye strain.” When advised to get an MRI, he thought: “What a waste of money!”

Diagnosis: a tumor the size of a golf ball, just underneath his brain, pushing against the brain stem. It had been growing for an estimated five to 10 years

“I didn’t have any major symptoms besides a brief headache or losing just a little balance or coordination,” he recalled in a recent interview in the Avondale home where he grew up and now lives.

His surgeries – three to try to reduce the tumor, two to relieve pressure on his brain – were tackled by world-renowned doctors at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, and at Emory University Hospital.

Nowadays, Pulliam says he has “every reason to be optimistic. I’m hanging in there at the moment. I just don’t want to have any more surgeries.”

In Pulliam’s twist on the famous Shakespeare tragedy, “the millionaire playboy prince of Gothic Castle,” morphs into Bat-Hamlet to fight against the evil Jester, the Puffin, and Lord Riddles. Horatio is Bat-Hamlet’s trusty sidekick (his Robin), while Ophelia fills in for Catwoman.

How Jordan Pulliam got the idea to Bat-cize Shakespeare’s tragedy about the brooding Prince of Denmark is itself a good story. Always a big fan of super heroes, in his middle school years (mid-1990s), Pulliam devoured  TV’s “Batman: The Animated Series.” A decade later, as a journalism major at the University of Georgia, he was assigned to study “Hamlet” in no less than three different classes.

“So I got to know and love the play pretty well. It’s iconic in the same way Batman is iconic, with its themes of identity, loyalty and a guy dealing with all these different relationships.”

Pulliam also admired and strove to maintain the “farcical tone with these characters taking themselves so seriously when their world is just so, so silly.”

But there really was one "ah-hah" moment. One day back in 2004 at UGA, Pulliam was hanging out with his then-girlfriend.

“She was reading a magazine and also had this Batman toy, like a prize from a kids’ meal,” Pulliam recalls with a chuckle. “I was making the little Batman dance back and forth on my knee, and I suddenly turned to my girlfriend and said, you know, someone should really write a version of ‘Hamlet’ but with all Batman characters.”

Then-girlfriend reportedly “rolled her eyes and went back to her celebrity gossip magazine, but that idea stuck with me. I’d bring it up with friends from time to time to gauge interest, but no one seemed to like it like I did. From the beginning, I saw it all at once in my head. I saw how neatly it could fit together.

In time his close friends raised their brows, and eventually got together to read “Bat-Hamlet” informally.

“It took us many nights. We couldn’t get through it in one night  because we were laughing so much,” Pulliam recalls.

Those nights of pals reading his script took place at the home of Jim Garner, whose family is behind , Decatur’s longtime Oriental carpet retailer. Garner has been Pulliam’s best friend since second grade.

“He’s my Robin,” Pulliam says. “He’s been a constant support throughout my [medical] ordeal.”

Jill Patrick has hired top metro area actors to bring Pulliam’s script to life for an audience. Larry Davis will tackle the role of Bat-Hamlet, while Robin Bloodworth will read the part of Horatio.

For Pulliam, “Bat-Hamlet” represents  “a perfect crystallization of what my sense of humor is all about.”

He speculates that “a thousand years from now, when studying this time period in America, school kids will be learning about super heroes such as Batman.”

Or maybe they’ll be studying “Bat-Hamlet.” After all, “the play’s the thing.” (To quote a line from “Hamlet,” Act II, Scene II: The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of this king).

• What: “Bat-Hamlet” gets its first professional reading before an audience as part of Working Title Playwright’s (WTP) On Demand series. 
• When: 7p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 8
• Where: Academy Theatre, 119 Center St., Avondale Estates
• Admission: Free to WTP members, all others $5 suggested donation
• Website: http://www.workingtitleplaywrights.com/
• Directions: http://academytheatre.org/Directions.asp