I CN HAS CAST?!

I have got my full cast for Ian W. Hill's Hamlet. I've been very busy with that, planning the lights for Rachel Cohen's upcoming piece at The Brick, and other Brick work, just keeping the theatre in shape.


I am very, very happy. This cast is a great company of actors I've worked with over the last ten years:


Gyda Arber -- Elsinore Attendant/Norwegian Captain/English Ambassador
Aaron Baker -- Francisco/Player/Sailor/Priest
Peter Bean -- Reynaldo/First Player
Danny Bowes -- Elsinore Attendant/Gravedigger/Fortinbras Soldier
Maggie Cino -- Elsinore Attendant/Woman with Gravedigger/Fortinbras Soldier
Edward Einhorn -- Guildenstern/Fortinbras Soldier
Bryan Enk -- Polonius/Fortinbras
Stacia French -- Gertrude
Jessi Gotta -- Ophelia/Fortinbras Soldier
Ian W. Hill -- Hamlet
Rasheed Hinds -- Horatio
Carrie Johnson -- Marcella
Christiaan Koop -- Voltimand
Jerry Marsini -- Claudius
Daniel McKleinfeld -- Rosencrantz/Fortinbras Soldier
Roger Nasser -- Elsinore Attendant/Osric
Ken Simon -- Bernardo/Player/First Sailor
Adam Swiderski -- Laertes/Player


These are people I've worked with anywhere from once before to long-standing collaborators.

I'm really happy to have Peter Brown (now "Peter Bean" thanks to Equity) here -- he was in my first full NYC production ten years ago to the month from when we open -- Richard Foreman's Egyptology (my head was a sledgehammer). This will be the 17th production I've directed him in. Not the record, though -- it's #18 for both Bryan Enk and Christiaan Koop.

And my first-ever NYC production at all (also June, 1997, as part of the first ForemanFest I produced at NADA) was a staged-reading of Foreman's Lava featuring myself with Edward Einhorn and Daniel Kleinfeld (now "Daniel McKleinfeld" thanks to marriage), so I also have the first two people I directed professionally back with me in this.

While having to wait around The Brick to meet people recently, I've had a chance to spend time blocking things out and working on my performance, which I was a hair unsteady on. I don't feel unsteady anymore. Thus far I've rewatched a number of other Hamlets -- Laurence Olivier, Maximillian Schell, Innokenti Smoktunovsky, Derek Jacobi, Kevin Kline -- and thus far I haven't at all been cowed or made to feel not-up-to-it. Quite the opposite, in fact. I've got my own bag, my own take on this, I know what I'm doing, it's consistent and it works.

Now, back to the horror of scheduling these 18 actors . . . thank goodness for Excel spreadsheets! That's really the only way I'm going to keep this organized this time around.

Empathy Does Not Require Sympathy

I've been having some interesting email exchanges with members of the cast over certain elements of Ian W. Hill's Hamlet, and I've asked their permission to share some with you when appropriate.

A while back, Peter and I wrote back and forth about a number of issues regarding the play, which wound up in a discussion of two things I am trying to do or get across in this production:


1. Hamlet is more than a little bit mentally disturbed for real.
2. I don't particularly like Hamlet, and I don't particularly want the audience to either.


Peter wondered if #1 didn't mitigate #2, as his insanity may make his actions "not his fault" but his disease's, and possibly then generating sympathy for the poor madman. I never answered his thoughts on the matter. So he asked me again today:


. . . have you had any further thoughts on how to keep the audience from sympathizing with Hamlet once they see he's clinically insane?


And my response was:


I'm not sure that "sympathy" will actually be their reaction. Nor should it. "Empathy" however, is fine and desired.

Hamlet is unpleasant, he is a bit of an asshole, sane or not. He is a bit of a monster, but monsters can engender empathy. I think of characters as wide as Macbeth, Travis Bickle, and Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive) -- they are monsters, all, irredeemable, and I'd say at least the latter two are mentally unstable (the first, well, that's an interpretive thing, production-by-production). Their mental instability does not mitigate the monstrousness of their acts, but it does allow a degree of empathy (I cry at the death of poor, sad, sick, evil Diane Selwyn every time I watch the Lynch film). Hamlet is also, on some level, a genius, which makes the insanity harder to take. He can be capable of great and honest love and kindness. But he is a monster. (Horatio is in fact the worst at ignoring the latter because of the former and ultimately as a result, for all his respect and devotion to Hamlet, he is Not A Good Friend to the Prince -- if the audience sympathizes with Hamlet too much, they are making Horatio's mistake)

I think, even if it's not understood consciously, that insanity, even in a genius, does not entirely give a "free pass" to a character onstage, as it doesn't in life. Not all insane people become murderous, and if they do, it is often as much them as it is the disease (as I think is the case with Hamlet).

Also, while Hamlet is "disturbed," I'm not sure his delusions entirely cross the line into full-out paranoid schizophrenia. He is self-possessed enough to know what he's doing is "wrong," in some way (a sharp lawyer could easily get him off, though - "Judge, he believes he was told to do this by the ghost of his father, the great king we all knew and loved, whom he loved even more as father, King, and man. Also, he's been set up his whole life to be king when Old Hamlet was gone, whether he liked it or not, and this one thing he was certain about has been taken away from him. Your Honor, of course he's not himself!").

There is a definite part of this production that is the story of a kingdom in rough shape, trying to pull itself together and regroup following the death of a great and strong king, thrown horribly out of whack by having to deal with a crazed, manic prince bouncing around in its midst, with no one around him knowing quite how DANGEROUS he is until it's too late. Everyone deals with him with kid gloves for a time, because he is The Prince after all, and eventually he pretty much destroys everything around him, deserved or not.

I'm not going at all the same way as Derek Jacobi, but he made a VERY strong choice in his Hamlet in that seeing the Ghost (definitely real, in his production) drove Hamlet absolutely completely batshit insane, and he was in a crazed, manic state for most of the play following. His insanity did not cause you to sympathize with him, but instead to feel incredibly nervous watching him, scared, wondering what the hell he was going to do next (even if you damned well knew the play). I'm going in a different way than him, but the thing I think we share is that you then never ever feel SAFE around this guy -- you can feel for him, but it's hard to feel too much for someone who makes you think he might punch somebody in the face at any moment for no good reason.

After all, [name redacted], that little guy who lived upstairs from NADA you may remember, was clinically insane (and, in fact, a mathematical genius who could even, on rare occasions, be funny and cool), and I sure as hell didn't feel sympathy for the little dangerous bastard when he was threatening my life. But empathy? Yes. I actually did.

That make some sense?

IWH