Did you ever have one of those Great Ideas? You know the kind.… it’s two in the morning and just for kicks you and your friends are taking turns finding obscure movies on the Internet. The weirder the better. You stumble upon a bit of ephemera so strange and heady it gets better with each viewing. And the more you watch it, the more you want to comment on it, to interject your own ideas. Egging each other on, you take turns reenacting your favorite scenes, pushing it to new levels of quirkdom. You are hysterical and utter geniuses. You have to bring your brilliance to the masses. Everyone loves it. —For the first twenty minutes or so, that is. Then the shtick wears thin. That’s the feeling you get watching The Wooster Group’s “Hamlet.” The concept is inspiringly innovative, and even the execution is praiseworthy—but the play goes on so long that the nuances that at first make it clever become wearing on your senses.

Here’s what The Wooster Group has to say about the weird ephemera that got their creative juices flowing:

We were drawn to Richard Burton’s “Hamlet,” a 1964 Broadway production which was recorded in live performance from 17 camera angles and edited into a film that was shown for only two days in 2000 movie houses across the US.

The idea of bringing a live theatre experience to thousands of simultaneous viewers in different cities was trumpeted as a new form called “Theatrofilm,” made possible through “the miracle of Electronovision.”

Cool. The Metropolitan Opera recently did something similar.

Okay, now take an aspirin ’cause here comes the difficult-but-smart concept behind The Wooster Group’s “Hamlet”:

Our “Hamlet” attempts to reverse the process, reconstructing a hypothetical theater piece from the fragmentary evidence of the edited film, like an archeologist inferring an improbable temple from a collection of ruins.

What this all means is that Burton’s legendary film is projected in the background while live actors simultaneously reenact it. Or at least most of it. Not meticulously faithful to the original film, the players repeatedly request certain parts of the film to be skipped or fast-forwarded. Still, the play goes on for three hours, with only a fifteen-minute intermission, so not too much of the film is missed. Given this room for deviation, it’s curious that Director Elizabeth LeCompte didn’t edit out a bit more of the play to create a stronger piece.

After all, the audience is attending this adaptation of “Hamlet” not because they are interested in sitting through word-for-word accuracy, but because they want a new vantage point on an old story. After all, “Hamlet” has been done by practically everyone, a fact that The Wooster Group plays up by inserting a scene featuring Charlton Heston as the Player King in Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 film. Ultimately, The Wooster Group’s adaptation has the playfulness of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” without being as camp as “Men in Tights.”

Besides exaggerating the play-within-a-play feature of “Hamlet” in their multimedia frenzy of five screens (Reid Farrington, video), The Wooster Group pokes fun of the very film that inspired them. While reenacting the film production of the play production, the actors (Dominque Bousquet, Roy Faudree, Ari Fliakos, Daniel Pettrow, Scott Shepherd, Casey Spooner, Kate Valk, Judson Williams) act out even the camera angles and blips. When there’s a close up on the screen, the actors get right to the front of the stage; but as the camera pans out, stagehands wheel the furniture toward the rear of the stage. Movement Coach Natalie Thomas successfully trained the actors to capture on stage the blips on the screen. When a character goes to sit down on a chair and the old film footage suddenly skips back for a second, the actor begins to sit then jerks up again before sitting naturally.

Further commenting on the film, the actors on stage point to an actor on the screen saying he was in “Drugstore Cowboy,” the type of cultural winking that goes far these days. The play would have been more successful if it had more of these observations than merely relying on the excessive rendering of blips.

To counterbalance the drawn-dialogue, The Wooster Group tries to rev things up Baz Luhrmann style with contemporary costumes (I so want to ask Claudia Hill and Asta Bennie Hostetter what is up with the gold pants) and music (FISCHERSPOONER done up all Joey Fatone-like, headset and all, yet still poignant).

In the end, The Wooster Group picked the perfect play to experiment with in terms of self-awareness. Hamlet really does seem to have lost his mind as he jerkily moves about the stage, capturing every celluloid blip. However, you might lose your mind, too, as your mind works overtime to adjust for being jerked around.

Since the play is already sold out, which screen adaptation of “Hamlet” will you be watching? Who makes the best Hamlet: Mel Gibson, Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, Ethan Hawke?

Also, we’d love to hear what Great Ideas you’ve come up with that have turned out to be uncool to everyone else.