Hamlet Part Two (not the movie)

June 18 play#4 Hamlet- Stratford Shakespeare Festival

I've been thinking a lot about Ben Carlson's performance as Hamlet. The more time I give it, the more meaningful it becomes. I often consider the best movies, plays, performances, etc.. are the ones I think about afterwards and his performance as Hamlet is one of those. The clarity in which he handled the text, the connection between the words and the action, the SPEED in which he handled the words and the physical performance were nicely married. I've been spending a lot of time considering/reading about very physical performances of Shakespeare- because so much time and energy is given to the spoken word in Shakespeare, the connection between language and physical performance gets treated as a poor afterthought. I think that to link the humanity of these 400 year old plays and modern audiences relies on the physical nature of performance. That's how these plays live.I think this is what my friend Isabelle Anderson is always getting at. As performers, we need to not only let the words live, but also the language- which is not just words- live as well. I think that's the only way we have a fighting chance to let these plays transcend.

This past winter, I saw Shintoku-Maru at the Kennedy Center. It was done entirely in Japanese, and though much of it was lost on me, the sheer physical and visual nature of the performances connected to me in a true way.