I’ve gotten out of the habit of reading a daily newspaper. There’s one reliable English language newspaper source in Costa Rica called the Tico Times, which comes out once a week on Fridays. On Saturday at the grocery store, I decided to flip through it to see if I wanted to spend the 600 colones (about a $1.20). The price has gotten a little steep, and with kids, I often end up using it for to hold flower clippings or to catch glitter on crafts without ever getting to the articles.

To my shock, amazement, and thrill there was an add for a theater production of Hamlet. Big deal. Been done, right? Millions of times shall we say? But in Costa Rica? In English! It was as if I was in third grade and someone had told me Bobby Sherman was signing his life-size, pull-out poster down at the corner drug store. I had to go. A few years ago, I saw King Leer by the same British company and was in heaven, regardless of how many characters ended up dead.

Target I miss, but theater I long for like my the smell of my high school sweetheart’s grandmother’s pegorie’s cooking in her oven. It’s something I don’t get enough of anymore.

There is a lot of theater in Costa Rica in Spanish. The problem is my Spanish isn’t good enough to understand the yearnings of Stella or the despair of Willy without getting a headache. I miss a lot when sentences wrap around emotions. And that’s kind of the whole point of theater: wrapping our emotions around language long enough to figure out a little piece of life. Or at least get a good laugh and not be with the kids for a few hours.

This Hamlet production was showing at the Eugiene O’Neil Theater a part of the North American Cultural Center in San Pedro. The center is subsidized by the U.S. It has an art gallery, library, language classes, and other performances in music and dance. I asked my daughter if she wanted to go and even though she’d never heard of the play, she said no because she’d be too scared. (How did she know there was a ghost when she knew nothing about the play?!)

I picked up my nanny (a fine date that, yes, does speak English) and drove through the rain through downtown and into back neighborhoods to land perfectly upon the Center’s front steps. A guy said he’d watch my car (one of the few car-parkers that put’s a price on parking is the theater and event guys - but still, it’s worth the $2.00 he charged). We got in line early and sat front row, center. I held up my camera to take a picture of the stage so Coco could see it, and a guy behind me said, “You’re not going to take pictures all through the performance are you?” I’m not a theater critic for the New Yorker and thought I’d dressed rather “theater-ish,” but I’ve been around enough to know not to take photos, leave my cell phone on, or crinkle little wrappers of candy during performances. Since brevity is the wit of the soul, I surprised myself at how quickly I turned around and told him of course not! I guess neither one of us thought the other too rude as we then had a cheery conversation on the troupe and the other performances they’d done. It took about ten minutes for my mind to sink into the language. Once there, it took everything in me to not slap my knee and chortle at the incredible brilliance of the play.

And yes, almost everyone ended up dead. I think it was a bit of a shock to my nanny. Since it’s one of the longest plays, I got home really late for a mom with a son that likes to get up between five and six. Hamlet could only bring on the most of interesting of dreams. I couldn’t wait to find out.

The rest is silence.