I CN HAS CAST?!

[collisionwork]

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.

Comments

I know this isn't what you're doing, BUT ...

[justjohn.livejournal.com]

Re: Bryan Enk -- Polonius/Fortinbras

Okay, that's a take I've never contemplated. At the very end, Fortinbras stomps in and is revealed to be ..... Polonius! He holds up something akin to an umpire's chest protector, with a hole and blood stains on it ...

And the Let us haste to hear it,
And call the noblest to the audience. bit is his inversion of Hamlet's play-within-a-play thing.

Okay, this is deliberately perverse, but amusing to contemplate. Polonius/Fortinbras sacrifices his own children to conquer Denmark.

Re: I know this isn't what you're doing, BUT ...

[collisionwork]

No, not what I'm doing, but . . . not that far off in a metaphorical sense. There's method in the madness of this double casting.

A good ten years back, when explaining it to another director -- who wanted me to go for a more abstract, "free" adaptation of the play -- he finally said, "Just combine them into one character and call him "Evil," for god's sake!"

With my Polonius being somewhere in the Kissinger-Rove-Cheney-Rumsfeld style, and a fascist Fortinbras, not all that far off really.

Re: I know this isn't what you're doing, BUT ...

[justjohn.livejournal.com]

And here I was thinking you were being economical, or preventing the actor from going and getting drunk after Polonius got hit.

Okay, even more deranged: Fortinbras turns out to be ... Ophelia!

Re: I know this isn't what you're doing, BUT ...

[collisionwork]

Ha! In another time, maybe. As it is, I think the actress is going to be pleased to be part of Fortinbras' group of violent storm troopers.

And the actor playing Polonius/Fortinbras has threatened going and getting drunk anyway. Poor guy, doesn't quite realize yet that I'm not sure I can give him an exit/re-entrance between the parts, and he may be stuck backstage with no way out the whole time between his bits . . .