The Vision
On September 25, 2008, the fruits of two years of planning, five months of preparation, and five weeks of production were realized when Hamlet opened to a packed house - the first of nine performances.
Getting Into Character
Just about all of the actors came to rehearsals with some idea of how they wanted to approach their character. In Vicinus, Codispoti notes, they found an open mind. “Chuck tends to leave actors to their own interpretations of character,” he says.
“I’m a director, not a dictator,” Vicinus says. “I offer suggestions, but I don’t tell actors how to play their roles.”
That’s not to say he didn’t have a vision for some of the characters, as Asselin notes.
“In our first conversation, Chuck said that he wanted a happy and playful Hamlet. And I agreed with him—the character had to be able to find the humor and irony in things. If Hamlet is melancholy throughout, it becomes boring. I wanted to make him playful and really allow him to discover everything that’s happening around him.”
In her approach to playing Gertrude, Cox says, “I thought about the mother-son connection, which I think is ultimately much stronger than the husband-wife connection.” In considering Gertrude’s connection to her would-be daughter-in-law Ophelia, Cox made the choice that Ophelia is pregnant with Hamlet’s child. According to Cox, the choice increased her emotional investment in Ophelia and “gave me something that I could hook into.”
As Moses approached the role of Claudius, who murders his brother and usurps both his throne and his wife, he resisted the temptation to portray the character as simply evil. “You can’t play a villain by thinking of him in those terms,” he says. “You need to humanize him. My approach to playing Claudius was to give him reasons for why he’s done what he’s done. I thought about what his relationship with his brother might have been like. Maybe he had always been in Hamlet’s shadow growing up; maybe he never had the attention or affection of his parents.”
In her portrayal of Ophelia, Smith also tried to avoid the pitfall of approaching her character as one-dimensional. “It’s easy to think of her as simply a pawn, but I think she’s smarter than how people typically perceive her,” she says. “She realizes what’s happening to Hamlet, what she’s been made a part of, and she has a grasp of what has happened. It all gives reason to her madness.”
Codispoti’s approach to Laertes was to not only consider the similarities between the character and Hamlet, but also one of the fundamental differences: “They are both consumed by revenge for their fathers’ murders, but Hamlet takes time to ponder if this [plotting to kill Claudius] is the right thing to do,” he says. “He retains his humanity, whereas Laertes loses track of his humanity and what it means to be human.”
On September 25, 2008, the fruits of two years of planning, five months of preparation, and five weeks of production were realized when Hamlet opened to a packed house—the first of nine performances.
