“The Play's the Thing”: An Interview with Hamlet Director Carey Perloff

By Simon Hodgson

As a Fulbright Fellow at Oxford University, Carey Perloff saw her first performance of Hamlet and was hooked. “The draw was Shakespeare’s language,” she says. “It was unbelievably seductive.” For the next 30 years, she crossed continents to see imaginative new renditions of the classic: Peter Brook’s version in Paris starring Adrian Lester, Jonathan Goad at Stratford, Jude Law on Broadway, and Diane Venora at The Public Theater. In her final year as artistic director of A.C.T., Perloff takes on Hamlet for the first time. We sat down to get a glimpse into her process, her passion for Shakespeare, and the story of producing Hamlet at A.C.T.

Hamlet Director Carey Perloff dicussing script edits with A.C.T.

Dramaturg Michael Paller. Photo by Elspeth Sweatman.

Why Hamlet now?

As Jan Kott says in Shakespeare: Our Contemporary, Hamlet is a sponge that absorbs all that’s happening politically, socially, and spiritually in a culture. I read the play the morning after Trump’s election, and I could see the landscape of a prince who goes to bed in an ordered kingdom and wakes up in a world where everything is fake news and nothing is to be trusted. It feels resonant. That said, I’m not interested in easy equivalencies, in making Claudius Trump. Our challenge as artists is to keep the metaphors of the play as alive as possible within the landscape of our own experience. Hamlet asks how we understand the relationship of our inner landscape to the world around us. Our inner landscape and the external world are always at odds with each other. That collision is what makes for drama.

Some of the Geary audience will have seen multiple Hamlets and will know the play well. How do you balance that expectation against your storytelling?

How is an audience ever going to hear “To be or not to be” fresh again? You have to figure out what is the catalyst that makes this character need to say these words at this moment. What you want to do for an audience is give them a window into how capacious, enormous, complex, and extraordinary the play is. It can be paralyzing to think, “What do I have to add to this play?” until you start to work on it. And then the play is so rich, you respond to it in the only way you can as human beings living at this moment in the world today.

For some San Franciscans, this may be the first time a new generation sees Hamlet. What do you want them to take away?

First of all, we cannot overestimate what it is for this major African American actor to play Hamlet on that stage. John's as good as it gets. And for a new generation, one of the thrills is hearing things for the first time. I heard it when I saw Julius Caesar in New York’s Central Park this summer. Young people don’t know that when somebody says “It’s Greek to me,” that the phrase was actually coined by a character in Shakespeare. There is nothing like Shakespeare for making those discoveries. Hamlet is full of those. That’s the thrill of it.

Hamlet runs through October 15 at A.C.T.’s Geary Theater. Click here to purchase tickets through our website. To read more of our interview with Carey Perloff, order a copy of Words on Plays, A.C.T.'s in-depth performance guide series.

M.F.A. Actors Go Viral in Clickshare

By Taylor Steinbeck

What Happens Next Will Shock You! 17 Tricks That Will Change Your Life! Clickbait titles such as these have infested the internet landscape. Clickshare, the M.F.A. production running September 28–30 at The Strand, aims to expose the clickable content to which we fall prey everyday. This new comedy, directed by Stephen Brackett, centers on Clickshare, a news media company parodying sites like BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post. At Clickshare, overworked twentysomethings pump out articles about pregnancy rumors and wardrobe malfunctions. But chaos breaks out when a story on Sun Flu—a rapidly spreading disease—goes literally viral.

Artwork for the 2017 M.F.A. production of Clickshare.

In 2016, Macquarie Dictionary named “Fake News” the word of the year, and for good reason. With baseless stories blown up by mainstream media, Americans have grown increasingly wary of journalism. “Clickshare is poking fun at what journalism has become, what stories grab people’s attention now,” says third-year M.F.A. actor Justin Edward Keim. Clickshare writer Lucas Kavner capitalizes on this public mistrust by giving audiences a behind-the-scenes peek at the content creators who clog our Facebook feeds. Kavner himself was a staff reporter for the Huffington Post for three years, inspiring this hyperbolized satire. Keim plays Milano, Clickshare’s otherworldly, androgynous CEO. “It’s a fun character to play,” says Keim. “Milano is part Arianna Huffington, part James Bond villain, part crazy monster.” 

A.C.T. has been involved in Clickshare’s development from page to stage since its early drafts. In its initial in-house reading at A.C.T., Keim played the character of Colin (now played by third-year M.F.A. actor Justin Genna). The cast of M.F.A. actors later had the opportunity to work closely with Kavner as he fine-tuned the script. “It’s always been an enjoyable show, but now it feels more cohesive,” says Keim. “Lucas is a hilarious writer. His rewrites had us cracking up the first time we read them.”

Last spring, Clickshare was performed at the headquarters of the nonprofit tech company Mozilla, as part of Friday Drafts—a new play reading series wherein M.F.A. students present staged readings of new plays for a tech audience during happy hour. Keim, who read stage directions, noticed how receptive Mozilla team members were to Clickshare. Mozilla employees were active participants in the creative process, listening intently and offering feedback to the playwright. This engagement led to Mozilla co-sponsoring Clickshare’s production. “On the very first day of rehearsals we had props that we normally wouldn’t have so early on,” says Keim. “Because of Mozilla’s contribution, we were able to more clearly see what we were trying to create and just dive right into it.”

Lily Narbonne (L) and Justin Edward Keim (R) at the Mozilla hosted staged reading of Clickshare.

Clickshare is a bitingly clever commentary on the internet age and the people consumed by it. Holding a mirror up to our culture, Kavner spares no one as he illuminates the flaws of fast journalism, success-hungry millennials, and efficiency-obsessed corporations. 

Clickshare runs September 28­–30 at A.C.T.'s Strand Theater, 1127 Market Street, San Francisco. Click here to purchase tickets.

“To Be or Not to Be”: The Iconic Speech’s Origins, Interpretations, and Impact

By A.C.T. Publications Staff

The opening line of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy is theater’s most iconic, most referenced quote. What’s less known is the famous speech’s history, with Hamlet’s earliest publications offering varying versions of its language. Also questioned is its meaning—is Hamlet contemplating suicide or is he weighing the consequences of murder? Though definitive answers are unlikely to arise, the questions “To be or not to be” asks have kept audiences, scholars, and actors engaged for centuries.

Hamlet’s "To be or not to be" speech as it appears in the three original editions of the play. Photo by Georgelazenby. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The first edition, or First Quarto (Q1), of Hamlet was published in 1603. Because the text is much shorter than later editions and its language is less poetic, it is nicknamed the “Bad Quarto” by scholars. “To be or not to be” in Q1 reads as:

To be, or not to be—ay, there’s the point.

To die, to sleep—is that all? Ay, all.

No, to sleep, to dream—ay, merry, there it goes

The soliloquy occurs in the play much earlier—in Act Two, just after Polonius arranges for Hamlet and Ophelia to meet—than in the later, more familiar editions of Hamlet which feature the speech in Act Three, scene one. Scholars have theorized that this Bad Quarto might have been produced based on the inaccurate memory of a Hamlet actor who sold the words to a publisher. Others believe that it was Shakespeare’s first draft or was an abridged version used for touring productions.

Both the Second Quarto (1604–05) as well as the First Folio (F1)—which was published seven years after Shakespeare’s death in 1623—present the versions of the text that we know today. Directors usually choose between Q1 or F1 for the script, and make additional cuts as needed. For A.C.T.’s production of Hamlet, director Carey Perloff is working with Q2 using some F1 edits, and has “To be or not to be” where it appears in Q1 in Act Two.

Possibly more confounding than the soliloquy’s origins are its variable meanings, which have inspired much debate. Some actors and scholars interpret this speech as an exploration of life, death, and suicide. Finding himself in a world that he no longer recognizes and burdened with the task of avenging his father’s murder, Hamlet considers taking his own life. He is stopped in this thinking by the fear of what may come after death: “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, / Must give us pause.” Others argue that Hamlet is considering the consequences of killing his uncle, an action that could result in his own death. “Conscience does make cowards of us all,” he says; knowing the consequences of this act, Hamlet hesitates.

Alluded to in everything from algebra jokes (“[2b | !2b] That is the expression.”) to children’s potty-training books (Linda Johns’s To Pee or Not to Pee), Shakespeare’s words can be found everywhere. Though it’s been heard time and time again, whether in-context or not, actors still manage to bring their own spin on the dramatic speech. Below are some of our favorite interpretations to prepare you for John Douglas Thompson’s “To be or not to be” at The Geary later this month.

In The King's Speech (2010) Colin Firth as King George VI recites the soliloquy as an exercise for his speech therapy.

Kenneth Branagh acts and directs in this rendition of Hamlet (1996). 

Prince Charles performs the opening lines of "To be or not to be" alongside actors Paapa Essiedu, Tim Minchin, Benedict Cumberbatch, Dame Harriet Walter, David Tennant, Rory Kinnear, Sir Ian McKellen, and Dame Judi Dench for the Royal Shakespeare Company's 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death celebration, Shakespeare Live!

Hamlet opens September 20 at A.C.T.’s Geary Theater. Click here to purchase tickets through our website. To learn more about the evolution of Shakespeare’s iconic soliloquy, read Dramaturg Michael Paller’s writing in Words on Plays, A.C.T.'s in-depth performance guide series.