On the night I saw “Hamlet,” our preperformance warm-up man was no less a personage than Keegan-Michael Key, half of the inspired comedy team Key and Peele, who asked us to shout out that we were doing all right. (Mr. Key soon rematerialized as a most convincing Horatio, Hamlet’s best friend.)

Then other cast members ambled onto David Zinn’s set, which suggests an out-of-the-way conference room in an office or a school building. There’s a collapsible cafeteria-style table covered with flowers in the center, and what looks like a disassembled organ.

It’s the sort of place where employees might retreat for gossip or a private discussion of creative projects. The performers have a casual, disaffected air and wear what look like contemporary street clothes (in costumes by Kaye Voyce). You might think that these folks, to crib a Lorde lyric, will never be royals.

Even when they start to speak Shakespeare’s words — starting with an opening scene in the pitch dark, set on the castle battlements — they sound very 21st-century. Many of their observations are pitched directly to us, as if the audience were their grievance committee.

This has the effect of declassifying, as it were, speeches so classic that they have calcified in the collective imagination. The language’s beauty is always secondary here to what the characters want — no, need — to express, both to one another and to themselves. And the troubled relationships of the extended family of Elsinore have rarely read so clearly or affectingly.

That’s saying something, given that many of the cast members take on several roles, and that they tend to hang around onstage even during scenes they’re not involved in. Their abiding presence underscores the idea that the royal seat is, after all, a domestic dwelling. And like all homes, no matter how large, it can feel awfully claustrophobic to those who inhabit it.

For this “Hamlet” is, above all, a family drama, emphasizing the ties that bind and strangle, especially when death has suddenly entered the house. The subplot involving the imminent invasion of Denmark by Norway, led by the purposeful Fortinbras, has been eliminated altogether.