"She doesn't really have a name. It depends on what kind of day it is. Sometimes, her name might be a word I heard...like mellifluous," Ophelia said as she stroked the hair on her blonde baby doll. On the bare stage, thick books were stacked up around her bed, and a Webster's Thesaurus leaned against another pile of books in the foreground. I had to laugh. Just the other day, I told someone that "mellifluous" was my favorite word. I could almost see myself in this character -- that is, if I was shut up in my room all day with only an imaginary friend to keep me company.

Throughout, playwright Ashley Minihan blatantly asks us, "Why was Ophelia so isolated? Why wasn't she the heroine of Shakespeare's tragedy?" Feminism askew, Minihan's debut play, Ophelia, is a thinly veiled autobiography. Minihan lives vicariously through her character, trying to show that awkward teenage bookworms need attention too. Ophelia isn't just a minor character here; she is an intelligent, avid reader with an obnoxious interest in botany.

With sublet criticism of nunneries and comparisons of writers to God, Ophelia is clearly written by an arrogant Ivy-League hipster. The play moved like an episode of Everwood -- one of the more awkward shows on WB11 -- and the lines were often coarse and inarticulate, leaving the characters undeveloped.

When Ophelia and Hamlet were alone together for the first time, Ophelia (Emily Allyn Barth) had an embarrassingly cliché conversation with Prince Hamlet (Eric Loscheider). Constantly pushing her black plastic glasses up to the bridge of her nose, Ophelia's beady eyes widened when she realized how much in common she had with the Prince, who was tormented by his father's death. Both of them lost a parent and they both felt alienated around everyone -- except each other, of course. Can you guess what happened next?

Did they kiss? Surprisingly, no. Every time their lips met, Hamlet had to leave or five minutes later, he changed his mind and said, "I want you to remain a bud, not a flower that will eventually wilt and die." Days later, Ophelia attended a ball in a little black dress, and Hamlet immediately regretted ever calling her a rosebud. He was poetically grotesque, a mercurial, clumsy idiot, and Minihan's sophomoric execution of scenes was nauseating.

In this 90-minute play, Minihan moved quickly to get all of Ophelia's quirky eccentricities out in the open. For instance, when Ophelia met the Player, an aspiring writer who decided to write a play about her, she asked, "Do you ever feel sorry for the words you don't use?" And later, she corrected Xenia, her imaginary friend, when she used a metaphor about autumn foliage. However, we cannot forget that this play was written with a larger purpose. It needed substance and insight, and all it really had was Minihan's ego.

By the end though, the playwright remembered why she wrote it in the first place. She wanted to write Ophelia's story, not Hamlet's, and when the Player reveals that Ophelia dies in his play, Ophelia finally learns to be independent. As Ophelia departs from girlhood, the last few lines are poignant and eloquent.

Regrettably, the rest of the play was impassive and not acted very well. Sofia Jean Gomez was wonderful as Xenia, and the Player got the laughs he needed, but the rest of the cast was trapped in their characters' formulaic personalities. While Ophelia's verbose nature was amusing at times, the Fringe Festival, which runs from August 11 to August 27, made a bad choice when they chose Ophelia as one of their opening plays.