THIS MORTAL COIL

Ato Blankson-Wood stars in "Hamlet" in the Park.

- VINSON CUNNINGHAM

Wear black and talk softly, withdraw from the crowd and train your mind on higher things—it’s strange how much of the etiquette of grief is also a shortcut to cultivating an aura of sexy mystery. Maybe that’s the logic behind casting Ato BlanksonWood, an increasingly and justly busy actor around New York, in the title role of the new Shakespeare in the Park production of “Hamlet,” at the Delacorte. Blankson-Wood has a world-class sulk—onstage, he pouts and rolls his eyes and projects intense dissatisfaction before he ever delivers a line. A few years ago, in Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play,” he played Gary, a gay Blackman whose partner couldn’t—or, more precisely, wouldn’t—acknowledge the repercussions of their racial differences. Gary was a magnetic malcontent, for whom pain and sex appeal went hand in hand and seemed to spring from the same source.