Arizona Theatre Matters
When Churchyards Yawn Study Guide
A study guide for audiences, students, educators, and community groups preparing to
experience When Churchyards Yawn, a divine comedy in which the dead of
Hamlet find themselves in Purgatory, forced to confront sin, grief, self-knowledge,
and the terrifying possibility that salvation is collective.
What if salvation depends not only on personal repentance, but on our ability to forgive,
be forgiven, and recognize that our lives are inseparably bound to one another?
On This Page
About the Production
When Churchyards Yawn is a sharp, strange, funny, and unexpectedly tender afterlife play
that picks up where Hamlet leaves off. The dead characters from Shakespeare’s tragedy —
Hamlet, Gertrude, Claudius, Ophelia, Laertes, Polonius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Hamlet’s father —
find themselves in Purgatory under the watch of a no-nonsense Gatekeeper.
But this is no solemn pageant of private repentance. The play’s central theatrical and spiritual idea
is that no one gets through alone. These characters are bound together. They move, suffer, confess,
argue, remember, and build together. Their path toward Heaven depends on collective reckoning:
each must face sin, but none can pass without the others.
The result is a kind of metaphysical ensemble comedy. Characters who once manipulated, wounded,
idealized, betrayed, and killed one another now have to work side by side, literally constructing
the staircase of their possible ascent. That physical labor matters. The play insists that grace is
not abstract. It must be built, step by step, through truth-telling, humility, and relationship.
but by the painful, comic, collective work of finally telling the truth.
Big Ideas to Listen For
What if no one is saved alone?
The play imagines salvation as collective. These souls move in “pods,” and one person’s freedom depends on everyone else’s willingness to change.
Why Purgatory and not Heaven or Hell?
Purgatory becomes a place of unfinished business: not simple punishment, but process, reckoning, and the terrifying possibility of either ascent or damnation.
Why the Seven Deadly Sins?
Lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride become portals through which the characters must confront not only moral doctrine, but the emotional realities of their lives.
Why is the play so funny?
The comedy is not decoration. Humor becomes a way to survive shame, expose hypocrisy, and make unbearable truths speakable.
How does this change Hamlet?
The play reopens Shakespeare’s tragedy from new angles, especially Gertrude’s, Ophelia’s, Polonius’s, and the so-called minor characters’ perspectives.
What is being built?
The staircase is literal, but it is also spiritual and theatrical. As the souls build upward, they enact the labor of transformation.
Context and Background
This play begins with the world of Hamlet, but it does not simply parody Shakespeare. Instead, it takes his characters
and asks what happens after the curtain falls. Everyone in the room is dead. All have unfinished sin, unfinished hurt,
and unfinished relationships. The action therefore takes place not in Denmark, but in Purgatory: a threshold space
where souls are purified, tested, and prepared — or not — for what comes next.
The play draws on Catholic ideas of purgation, confession, repentance, grace, and the Seven Deadly Sins, but it does so
with irreverence, wit, and theatrical freedom. The Gatekeeper is part bureaucrat, part spiritual functionary, part exhausted
stage manager of human foolishness. She shepherds these characters through portals defined by sin, while refusing sentimentality
about their suffering.
One of the most striking dimensions of the script is how strongly it re-centers the voices of Gertrude and Ophelia.
In Shakespeare’s original, both women are often interpreted through male grief, desire, and judgment. Here, they speak back.
The play makes room for their anger, clarity, memory, and moral intelligence, complicating the version of events Hamlet told himself.
Why this matters now
The play speaks to contemporary questions about accountability, gender, emotional inheritance, institutional religion, and whether healing is possible without shared truth.
Why the physical action matters
The script emphasizes real assembly, not illusion. The staircase must actually be built, making repentance and collective effort visible, risky, and material.
Synopsis
The play opens in Purgatory, where the dead characters of Hamlet gather in confusion, resentment, fear, and unfinished attachment.
Ophelia is initially assigned to Heaven, but refuses to go because her loved ones remain behind. This decision becomes crucial:
the Gatekeeper reveals that they are bound together. Either all will make it through, or all will be damned.
They learn that to move onward, they must pass through the Seven Deadly Sins in a specific order. At each level, they confront
the old injuries of Shakespeare’s story in new ways. Gertrude rebukes Hamlet for his cruelty and sexual judgment. Ophelia rejects
the romantic idealization that erased her humanity. Polonius, Laertes, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern all gain space to articulate
what Hamlet’s pride, wrath, and self-absorption cost them.
Claudius, meanwhile, remains an uncomfortable presence: contrite, guilty, and maddeningly difficult to place within neat moral categories.
Hamlet’s father is also transformed. Rather than a pure wronged king, he becomes another flawed soul whose failures as husband and father
are slowly exposed. The deeper the group goes, the more they discover that sin is not isolated. Their lives shaped one another in ways
both intimate and catastrophic.
A turning point comes when their rage nearly condemns them. Reprieved, they continue upward, forced to confront larger truths:
generational failure, misplaced idealization, gendered suffering, envy, pride, and the terrible limits of the roles they once inhabited.
The play moves toward the final question of whether honesty, humility, and forgiveness can be enough to release them.
Key Characters and Images
Gatekeeper
Hard-boiled, dry, and deeply over it. She manages the traffic of souls with little patience for melodrama, but she also understands more than the others do about what salvation requires.
Hamlet
Still verbal, self-dramatizing, wounded, and clever, but no longer able to control the story. In Purgatory, he must hear what his version of events left out.
Gertrude
Furious, witty, and devastatingly clear. The play gives her one of its strongest moral and emotional arcs, especially as she reinterprets her marriage, motherhood, and grief.
Ophelia
Innocent and furious at once. She is no passive victim here; she becomes one of the play’s sharpest voices of truth, especially about idealization, gender, and harm.
Claudius
Contrite to a maddening degree. His guilt is real, but so is the frustration he provokes in everyone around him.
Hamlet Sr.
No longer simply the righteous ghost of Shakespeare’s play. He too must confront what he failed to see and do in life.
Polonius
Ancient, pompous, and often comic, but also unexpectedly revealing when the play lets his grief and inadequacies surface.
Laertes, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern
These characters widen the moral field of the play. Their complaints, loyalties, weaknesses, and injuries complicate Hamlet’s self-image and the audience’s sympathies.
The Staircase
A central image and action of the play. The staircase is built from the clutter of human life and becomes the literal route upward through the gates.
Themes and Big Ideas
Collective Salvation and Shared Fate
The play’s boldest idea is that souls move together. This means no one can imagine themselves morally independent. Every life has been shaped by others, and every soul’s future is bound up with the rest.
Forgiveness as Work
Forgiveness here is not sentimental. It is difficult, reluctant, uneven, and often resisted. The play suggests that forgiveness cannot happen without truth, and that truth itself can be excruciating.
Rewriting Hamlet from the Margins
Gertrude, Ophelia, Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern gain depth and force in this version. Their perspectives expose the harm caused by Hamlet’s pride, fantasy, and selective interpretation.
Gender, Judgment, and Double Standards
The play sharply critiques the sexual and emotional judgments placed on Gertrude and Ophelia. Hamlet’s assumptions about purity, chastity, and female duty are dismantled in front of him.
Sin as Relationship, Not Just Doctrine
The Seven Deadly Sins are not treated as abstract categories. Each gate reveals how sin actually lives in relationships: through neglect, entitlement, idealization, resentment, cowardice, and self-importance.
Comedy in the Face of Damnation
The play is often very funny, even when the stakes are eternal. That comedy makes the characters more human and allows the play to hold contradiction without collapsing into solemnity.
Embodied Theatrical Labor
Building the staircase is not just a staging device. It turns spiritual labor into physical labor, requiring collaboration, timing, risk, and practical trust between performers and characters alike.
Humility Versus Pride
Pride is not merely vanity here. It is the refusal to see others clearly, the refusal to admit complicity, and the insistence that one’s own suffering explains everything. The play moves steadily toward the dismantling of that stance.
Vocabulary
- Purgatory: In some Christian traditions, a state or place of purification after death.
- Act of Contrition: A prayer expressing sorrow for sin and a desire to change.
- Annular: Ring-shaped or circular.
- Portal: A doorway or gateway; in this play, a stage of passage in the afterlife.
- Seven Deadly Sins: Lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride.
- Avarice: Extreme greed or hunger for possession, wealth, or control.
- Contrition: Sincere remorse for wrongdoing.
- Blasphemy: Speech or action considered irreverent toward the sacred.
- Repentance: Turning away from sin with sorrow and changed intention.
- Autonomous action: Real physical action performed onstage, not mimed or merely suggested; important to this play’s staircase-building concept.
Before You Experience the Production
- What do people owe one another after harm has been done?
- Can forgiveness happen without apology? Can apology matter without real change?
- How do family systems shape individual choices, even when those choices feel personal?
- Who gets to tell the story in a tragedy, and whose perspective is usually sidelined?
- What might it mean for salvation or healing to be collective instead of individual?
During the Experience
- Notice how the physical building of the staircase changes the feeling of each scene.
- Pay attention to who is allowed to define what happened in life, and who pushes back against that version.
- Listen for how humor changes the force of confession, accusation, and shame.
- Consider how Gertrude and Ophelia are reimagined in relation to Shakespeare’s original play.
- Notice when the group behaves like separate individuals and when they start to function like a connected unit.
- Pay attention to the moments when contrition seems genuine, and the moments when it feels performative or incomplete.
- Listen for the shift from blaming others to recognizing complicity.
After You Experience the Production
- Which character changed most in your understanding by the end of the play?
- How did the idea of “soul pods” affect your view of guilt, responsibility, and grace?
- Did the play make you more sympathetic to Hamlet, less sympathetic, or both?
- What did Gertrude’s perspective add to the story that is often missing from productions of Hamlet?
- Why do you think the play uses comedy so consistently in a setting as serious as Purgatory?
- What did the staircase come to represent for you by the end?
- What stayed with you most strongly: a speech, a confession, a joke, a confrontation, an image, or the physical labor of building?
Activities and Writing Prompts
Quick Reflection
Write for five minutes about one moment when a character’s self-understanding shifted noticeably. What did they finally admit, and what changed because of it?
Character Reframing
Choose Gertrude, Ophelia, Polonius, Rosencrantz, or Guildenstern and describe how this play changes your understanding of that character compared to Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Discussion Activity
Discuss the statement: No one in When Churchyards Yawn gets to remain the hero of their own story.
Seven Sins Map
Track how the Seven Deadly Sins function in the play. Which sin felt most literal, and which became more complicated when attached to relationships rather than doctrine?
Creative Writing Prompt
Write a short scene that takes place after the ending, imagining one conversation that still has to happen before the group can fully move on.
Performance Activity
Take a short confrontation scene and perform it two ways: once emphasizing comedy, and once emphasizing grief and spiritual desperation. Reflect on how tone changes the audience’s understanding.
Design and Staging Exercise
Sketch or describe how you would stage the staircase-building in a way that feels real, playable, and symbolically rich. What kinds of objects would you include in the pile, and why?
About Arizona Theatre Matters
Arizona Theatre Matters is a theatre company building universally accessible work from the ground up.
Through performance, education, sound, history, and storytelling, the company creates engaging,
thoughtful experiences that invite audiences into theatre in inclusive and imaginative ways.
This guide is designed to support classroom conversation, community engagement, and deeper reflection
before and after experiencing the production.