Acting is an endurance sport. Don’t believe it? Go to the Grange Hall any Thursday, Friday or Saturday night for the rest of the summer and see one man’s theatrical version of the Ironman Triathlon.

The historic venue has been the three times a week home to I Am Hamlet, an updated, pared-down version of a modestly successful British play, in which Brian Morey (who somehow also manages to run the Children’s Theatre program at the Island Theatre Workshop by day) plays nine Shakespearean characters with unwavering intensity, bearing the burden of the entire arc of the tragedy on his shoulders. After a performance this past Saturday night Mr. Morey looks the part of an endurance athlete, in biking shorts, sneakers, a towel slung over his shoulder and pounding a bottle of water.

“It is intense,” he said. “I’ve completely adapted my nutrition schedule to keep up with this. I never pass out and I feel pretty good after tonight’s show, but I can’t say the same about some of the other ones.”

When a sweat-drenched Mr. Morey teeters and finally collapses towards the close of the play there is a moment of genuine panic in the audience as to whether it was the result of an imagined poison lance at the hands of Laertes or the very real effects of an electrolyte imbalance.

“There were a few moments perhaps when I had just been sweating buckets all night when I’m holding the sword and you might have seen a couple of stumbles backwards where I kind of caught myself,” he said. “I just shake it off and take a deep breath and keep going.”

“This is an action-adventure revenge story.” — Alexandra Eve Schoenfeld

Mr. Morey says it takes him a month to get into Hamlet shape. Apart from the novelty of having one man deliver every soliloquy, I Am Hamlet is an unconventional approach to the material in other ways, a fact that becomes apparent when Mr. Morey grabs a microphone with hair-metal band gusto and shrieks, “There’s something ROTTAY-AN in Denmark!” or when an expressionist-inspired — and slightly disturbing — silent film takes the place of the gypsy players’ mock murder of Hamlet’s father. Mr. Morey says that the approach is a counterweight to the more familiar melancholy and introspective Hamlets, portrayals his director says were shaped by 20th century psychology.

“The biggest thing my director [Joe Siracusa] wanted to achieve was that this is not the brooding, suicidal, woe-is-me Hamlet,” he said. “This is an action-adventure revenge story. It’s a conspiracy, it’s being visited by ghosts, it’s not knowing whether it’s the devil himself, it’s doing whatever you have to do to find out the truth and then seizing the throne of Denmark, taking it back. That is a huge, huge thing and it’s not for this mopey little guy. It’s just a thrill ride.”

It’s also a musical. Mr. Morey wrote the music for the play and the songs range from Joan Jett-like women’s protest anthems to outright power ballads, and when Ophelia is slowly losing her mind at the start of the second half of the play the audience can relate as they take in the spectacle of a bearded man in drag singing falsetto.

Mr. Morey has been performing the material for more than two years, starting with a performance in Aurora, N.Y., before moving on to Toronto, Buffalo and Boston. Having worked for a year memorizing the material, that first performance was more than a little daunting.

“I was offstage in Aurora about to open the show and for 45 minutes before places were called I just sat offstage, Indian-style, just paralyzed in fright,” he said laughing. Now, Mr. Morey says, he doesn’t have to revisit the material even between cities.

“I won’t review it until I step foot onstage opening night and do it,” he said.

Having to spend so much time inhabiting the centuries-old characters, Mr. Morey identifies with all of them, particularly the lead, who he says, for better or worse, exhibits universal traits.

“There are tiny slices of our personalities that are inherent in every person,” he said. “We can trace our DNA tens of thousands of years to the cavemen, so we all came from the same place. Even though people are led by certain circumstances to not make the best decisions at times, all of that is still a part of all of us.”

Mr. Morey’s dual role as an actor/athlete seems particularly punishing this past Saturday night as the Grange Hall’s opened windows did nothing to remedy the crushing heat and humidity, to say nothing of the hour and forty minutes Mr. Morey spent under a spotlight.

While his schedule seems masochistic, it doesn’t even qualify as his most grueling during the play’s run. During one stretch at the Boston Center for the Arts Mr. Morey performed the play six times a week.

“I’ll last the summer,” he reassures.

I Am Hamlet is performed every Thursday through Sunday through Sept. 10 at the Grange Hall in West Tisbury. Tickets are $15.