Hamlet & Me (Part VIII)

"Hear the sentence of your movèd prince."
Courtney Brown, Xanthe Tabor, Rich Weiss,
Suzanne L. Miller, David Hansen (Mr. Hansen does not appear.)
"The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet"
Guerrilla Theater Company, 1994

By the time I turned thirty, I had performed in only two Shakespearean productions, three if you count a pre-recorded voice-over.

Junior year at Ohio University, I played Friar John in Romeo and Juliet, who has three lines. For the Guerrilla Theater production I directed, I played the prince, but my voice came from on high, as though from a public address system. This meant, of course, that I needed not be present for every performance.

I later learned this conceit was also employed by John Gielgud in the 1964 Broadway production of Hamlet, arriving as the Ghost in the form of a massive shadow in the shape of a helm.

A video recording of the Gielgud/Burton Hamlet was released in the mid-90s, and I spent the summer of 1998 watching that several times and taking notes.

Having decided to direct a Shakespeare, you need to decide what version of the play you wish to see and hear, and then cut the script to fit your conception.

Stealing edits from others provided my primary education. The cuts from our college production of R&J were the basis for my production. We had taken a paperback and spent a rehearsal having the cuts dictated to us as each of us crossed out the lines in pencil, so I had them all, not just the cuts for my one scene but for the entire play.

"Mark me."
John Gielgud, Richard Burton
(Mr. Gielgud does not appear.)
Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, 1964

In the time before personal computers, this was really the only way to do it. Today I can make the edits on my laptop and provide the company with a show-ready document. But then they wouldn't have the physical script, to see what was eliminated as well as what was kept. That's fine if you don't want your actors requesting to have lines restored, but what if you do?

I had opinions about what additional material I wanted for my production of Hamlet, and what additional lines I wanted to cut, but using this Burton production as a guide gave me great confidence to have something to begin with.

And in the case of Hamlet, who better to steal from than Gielgud? He was his generation’s Dane, surviving audio recordings are a testament to the style, grandeur and pathos he lent to the role, for decades and in numerous productions. It’s a shame we only have a film version of Olivier’s Hamlet and not his.

I watched the 1964 video, making the same cuts as Gielgud made, and in this way learned about which versus a great person of Shakespeare believed were not as necessary as others. Then I cut just a little deeper. Cutting the text is the director’s first pass at directing their actors, before you even know who those actors may be. You can change the motives and intentions of a character by eliminating certain lines of thought and exposition, or what other characters have to say about them.

I was greatly influenced by Pennington’s book to strip away centuries of assumptions about the characters and established tropes of performance. The goal was to focus specifically on the words they say as written on the page, and not the ways they have been said by others in the several productions I had already seen.

Is the Queen correcting the King for getting the names of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wrong, or is she changing the order of address to lend their names equal weight as a form of flattery? Because that is what the King and Queen are trying to do at that moment, convince old friends to betray him. 

Does Hamlet know he and Ophelia are being listened to when he asks, “Where is your father?” or is that another way of inquiring, “Where is your keeper?” Because that is in keeping with everything else Hamlet is saying at that moment, you need looking after.

Alison Garrigan, Tom Cullinan
Promotional Photo for "Hamlet"
Bad Epitaph Theater Company, 1999
Photo: Anthony Gray

There are motivations for these deliveries which are clear and obvious, and then there are those which try to think a step ahead of the playwright and detract from the matter at hand.

I did entertain the notion of having Hamlet echo one of the King’s lines from the first scene after the stabbing and the poisoning; “So much for him.” This I did not do, though I did have Tommy punch Brian in the face on the line, “Follow my mother.”

Like “Welcome to Earth.” If you know, you know.

By fall I had my cut. Hamlet might go quite swiftly in three acts, with two intermissions, like this:

• Act One: In which Hamlet goes from "I don't know what to do" (Too, too solid flesh) to "I know what to do!" (The play's the thing.)
• Act Two: In which Hamlet puts on a play, murders the wrong guy, gets exiled to England, and finds he hasn't accomplished anything. (How all occasions do inform against me.)
• Act Three: In which all occasions literally inform against Hamlet and he dies just as he has evolved into a person who might indeed have made a good ruler. 

The rest is silence.

To be continued.

Troilus & Cressida (rehearsal)

Cressida & Troilus
(Hannah Woodside & Brinden Harvey)

Tonight we ran through the first seven scenes of the play. There are eighteen scenes in this production, but even that’s arbitrary, the final four scenes all run into each other, battle scenes, scenes of chaos and death.

These first seven scenes constitute the first half, setting up the conflict which will end tragically in the second. I’d call it a farce, except for all of the sorrow, unhappiness and death. Unlike Romeo and Juliet, however, which is front-ended with dancing and fighting, followed by two hours of self-pitying wailing, this show holds the best violence for the second half, and at the end, and there’s dance all over the place. There will also be singing.

So, to the point. Here we are, a month from opening, and we have roughly staged the first half! I hope to have the entire thing blocked by Memorial Day.

I love this process, and we have a great team. It’s challenging to co-parent and direct in the evening, that’s really why I don’t do it that often. It is the end of the school year, which means concert and other special, end-of-year events. On those evenings, Cat and Leilani choreograph dance, or Kelly and Josh the fighting.

Troilus & Cressida takes place during the Trojan War. Through necessity and for creative reasons, this adaptation will be contemporary, or nearly so. Dressing everyone in armor, providing all swords, staging grand, one-on-one battle scenes. These things are prohibitive.

Also, we have an opportunity, devising a ninety-minute abridgment of what could easily be a four-hour play, to draw focus to the universal realities of conflict and war, to literally display how yesterday is not that different from today.

Meeting with our costume designer Jenniver, we have selected a palate of uniform and other pieces which reflect the American conflicts of the past decade. Just tonight I met with Lisa, our sound designer, to discuss brief sound and music possibilities, also culled from the early 2000s (see: Spotify playlist, right.)

As I had described earlier, much of the mythology has been stripped from the next. We are focusing on the men and women who are caught up in the fight, and how decisions made affect the lives and relationships of those people.

That also makes for some pacing issues; eliminated scenes make for certain characters exiting then entering again, almost immediately. This was apparently in editing the script, last night I got to see this in action. Or inaction. We’ll fix it.

We have a month!

Join us for PLAY ON! a benefit for the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival in the Speakeasy at Bier Markt in Ohio City, May 20, 2018.

On Direction

We close, we do not end.

Our final two performance of The Great Globe Itself were not public performances, they were held at Elyria High School and Firestone High in Akron. Each crowd was very enjoyable for our men to perform for and the post-show discussions were some of the best we'd had the entire tour.

The discussions themselves are always a challenge for these tours, at least at the beginning. We have a list of potential questions, but we never know how an audience will respond. Some public audiences don't want to be asked questions following the performance, and as moderator I have to take care not to be too pedantic. I mean, I have to be a little pedantic. I am a pedant.

Me and Ted.

Several weeks ago - feels like months - my high school drama coach, Ted Siller, attended a performance in Oberlin. That was a complete surprise, and a happy one. He did this once before, when I was performing I Hate This at Dobama Theatre in advance of the Minnesota Fringe Festival. That was in 2003. 

Ted turns me into Death.

It's hard to reacquaint yourself with the mentors of your youth, you start sounding like a teenager. Regardless, he had very supportive comments following the show, this show I have directed, and it got me thinking of my journey as a director and what I have and have not learned.

My first production was in Kindergarten. Seriously, I told my teacher I wanted to do a play and she asked me what I wanted to do and what I described to her was Stan Freberg's Little Blue Riding Hood. The rest of the afternoon was spent casting the play and my providing lines for everyone and ... I'm not making this up, this really happened.

But my first real attempt at directing was part of an evening of one acts my sophomore year. Sobczak and I performed Woody Allen's Death Knocks. I didn't think much about it during our "process" which at this point consisted mostly of memorization and not much blocking. The day of the first performance, when people had made "wallies" for us for people to sign in the main hall, and everyone was talking up the event, I was struck by a sudden, urgent philosophical quandary:

Who said I was allowed to do this?

It was the first of many times I would be struck by my own completely blind arrogance. For I was not merely director in this case, I was also kind of the producer - I made this happen. You act in a play, and it blows, you can blame everyone, the director, the playwright, the other actors. You direct it, you own it, baby.

At school, there were as many opportunities to direct as act or do anything else. I took a course in Directing 101 (I am sure it was not called that) which was remarkable only in that it further emphasized my ability at that time to do as little serious work as humanly possible. The course was further complicated by the fact that the grad student conducting the course was also herself directing me in her thesis production and I was falling short there as well.

Later that same year I directed my own script, Breaking Point, based on the daily comic strip I had published in the college paper. As a result of that experience - directing my own play - I have entirely avoided directing my own work for over twenty-five years.

It is easy for me to judge myself harshly (and it's on video so I can confirm this) it is neither a very good script nor particularly inspired directing. At that point in the game I would have been much more richly served by doing one or the other. There was little opportunity to edit, though I am glad I took time to rewrite the entire ending, due to the kind, persuasive advice of my stage manager. If I could have sat back and watched, I would have rewritten quite a bit more.

It was several years before I would write another full-length script to be produced - The Vampyres - and at that time I took great delight in editing. Delight is the wrong word, what I mean is it was like having someone reach down my throat and yank at my stomach, but having been told, "This opening monologue doesn't work, rewrite it" at least I was able to concentrate on doing that and it was better. Even better when the piece was a remounted several years later, I cut the monologues altogether and that was much better.


The first time directing Shakespeare was a precarious moment in Guerrilla Theater Co. history and I had to do some convincing and spent a lot of cigarette time bringing people into my camp, into believing that a production of Romeo and Juliet was something I really should do. Once it was agreed upon, I was struck by a sudden, urgent philosophical quandary:

Who said I was allowed to do this?

There was no reason to believe I could DIRECT SHAKESPEARE, it was pure arrogance on my part which is really the only way to attempt anything. Jumping off the high dive is arrogance, submersion is antithetical to being a mammal, who do you think you are?

This production marked my directing phase, as I moved from Guerrilla to Night Kitchen to Bad Epitaph, in ten years time I directed around a dozen productions, without guidance, without mentorship, no one said I was allowed to do this. Some of it worked, some didn't, who cares. My attentions moved to arts education and writing. I found it much more satisfying and a lot less stressful.


I think what I could never enjoy was thinking of directing as a gig. Since 2004 my directing jobs have been by choice, and not assignment. Directing Henry VIII for CleveShakes in 2012 was a gas because there were no expectations, none at all.

This is the thing - I have had to make up everything as I go along. I have learned from directors I have worked with as an actor, but not as an assistant to a director, nor as a stage manager. When the time came to edit Romeo and Juliet, I started with the cutting from a production I had performed in in college - adding bits back I missed and removing others that did not interest me.

When I directed Hamlet in 1999, I started by watching a video of Richard Burton's Broadway production from 1964, making cuts based upon that before then deciding upon my own. It felt like cheating each time, as though I were some Shakespeare fraud, that I didn't really know what I was doing.

What I was really afraid of was removing something someone else would think were important. That in my ignorance I would excise the most important piece from the show, and that it would be apparent to all.

By the time Henry VIII came along, I wasn't afraid any more. I just cut what did not interest me, that didn't tell the story the way I wanted to tell it, end stop.

... I'll come in again.

The Great Globe Itself was the first play I have directed for the outreach tour.  I found it an intense experience, working for three hours (with one short break) with three guys - two of whom I'd never worked with before - to tackle a dense but ridiculous script, telling a somewhat oblique story that spanned four centuries and played fast and loose with true history.

It's what I do.

My script, my direction. At least this time I was able to step back, at least somewhat, to perform some judicious cutting at the outset, once I heard it repeated a small number of times. There were even more cuts after we had opened, one or two lines which offended. With their absence, those complaints stopped. It is a process, and better to make adjustments than to say "it opened, it's out of my hands."

Living Together

Which brings me back to Mr. Siller. He was always extremely accommodating to those who wanted to produce special projects - like an improv show or an evening of one acts. My brother was super involved in Thespians, acting, participating in competition, even directing Alan Ayckbourn's Table Manners (one part of the Norman Conquests trilogy) his senior year, a full-length production between the fall comedy and the spring musical.

When I was a senior, I decided I wanted to attempt everything he had, if I could even going so far as to direct another play in Ayckbourn's trilogy, Living Together - because I do not have the capacity for original thought or ideas.

This wasn't for a grade or extra credit, it was for bragging rights more than anything else, but Siller did request I create a rehearsal journal, which, much like my journal for Directing 101 a few years later, was largely perfunctory. It was the basis for my application to Macalester where I pretty much said, I did this thing and therefore I am qualified. You will notice I do not have a degree from Macalester.

The Great Globe Itself

Learning to direct has by and large been a process of learning how to work with other people. To make plans in collaboration with others, but also to have big ideas and to be excited about bringing them to fruition. For me it has always been a matter of wanting to see something on stage and then doing everything I can to make that happen.

Working with Arthur, James and Rod on The Great Globe Itself was a unique experience, and I will miss the time we spent collaborating on this production. They were each of them focused on their performances, and I am incredibly grateful for the talent and intelligence they each brought to this new work, helping me make it into the production I wanted to see. Collaboration in effect.