A New York Groove (Part Two)

June 23rd, 2008Blog0 comments

I was in NYC doing a workshop so I spent most of the time in the studio. We used a room at Tisch, which was conveniently located across the street from a McDonalds. You know that I’m a junk food junkie. McDonalds breakfast food is some of my favorite breakfast food of all time.

On the same floor as the studio was a room devoted to clowning. It is called the Clown Room. There were people clowning all day in the clown room. I’m not joking. They looked kind of like beardo-ish hippies and were making weird noises and tumbling.

New York City is so huge that it makes sense that somewhere in it is a room devoted to clowning. There are probably two or three, actually.

We got to see Hamlet at the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park. This was seriously the most fun Hamlet I’ve ever seen. The design set Hamlet in an unknown time period — everyone was dressed in 1920s sort of military/regal duds, kind of like the Monopoly Guy. The set was built to look like a prison with Hamlet on the inside, and there were numerous visual/audio references to warfare going on outside the walls. Also, our friend Hoon was Rosencrantz. Normally bald, this time he had hair.

This guy, Michael Stuhlbarg, was a wacky Hamlet. He made weird sound effects and galavanted all over the place doing fun things. It was a nice turn from the standard brooding, cheer-up-emo-kid Hamlet. This makes me realize that if I ever get an opportunity to mount a Hamlet, I would like my Hamlet to be a crazed, hilarious psychopath who lashes out violently at any moment both physically and verbally. That would be ideal for me.

Sam Waterston was Polonius. He was SO GOOD. He was my favorite part of the performance. I had this idea in my head of how he was going to deliver his lines and I was sitting on the edge of my seat waiting to see if reality matched my imagination. He was grandfatherly and goofy and fun, and when Polonius was killed I almost sorta lost interest in the whole endeavor. The best part was when Hamlet asks Polonius if he’s ever been in a play — the audience hooted and clapped, a reference to Sam Waterston’s own turn as Hamlet in 1975.

This was my first time seeing Shakespeare in the Park and it was pretty much a perfect moment. It was an outdoor theater; a storm was brewing above, and every now and then thunder and lightning would boom. When Hamlet died, rain started to tap-tap-tap down… And at curtain call it miraculously stopped.

Afterwards we waited to see Hoon and comment about his hair. And Dan knows Andre Braugher (he was playing Claudius), so we got to meet him. And at that point the clouds opened up — BOOM — and dropped sheets of rain on everything. I got soaked to the bone.

It’s a surreal thing to be huddled under a tiny umbrella running through Central Park with Andre Braugher while rain’s coming down in buckets. I don’t know if that’s just life or if the Big Narrator decided to let the story go off the rails. It was memorable, for sure.