Welcome to The Hamlet Project (version 3.0)

I first read Hamlet in high school and I secretly fantisized in my room about acting the part long before the notion of actually becoming an actor ever entered my mind. I did a close-reading of the play for the first time during my undergraduate studies in English Lit. But in the Fall of 2002, I began a new journey with this play. This time I was reading and researching the play with an eye toward production. The idea of an independent, small budget production was born out of the great desire of a few young, inexperienced and hungry Atlanta actors to produce something different.

The original purpose of this site was to promote an upcoming production of Hamlet (using a cast of only nine Atlanta actors). I edited the script down to just under 2 1/2 hours. I compiled actor-friendly endnotes for my edited script. I sketched out blocking and cheap technical solutions, created a budget, and started gathering props and costume pieces as I could afford them. But funding issues and actor availability kept pushing things back. The last production attempt for the fall of 2004 was thwarted (this time, happily so) by my acceptance into Graduate School at PSU.

Despite the many intrusions of life, I keep coming back to this play at every interval. Near the end of my actor training, I spent a few weeks drafting a critical essay for grad school, an assignment that I used as a convenient excuse to return to my Hamlet research. I distilled some of my ideas into an article entitled, The Man Who Would Be King: a practical, subjective, but textually supported analysis of the character of Hamlet in production (click text). If you are at all curious about what I'm doing here with my spare time, that article is perhaps the best introduction. I also have journal entries (pre-grad school) dating back to 2002, which contain ideas (many of them stolen), research notes, angsty actor moments, etc.

In the latest chapter of my relationship with this play, I found my focus naturally widening as my interest in directing began to grow. I feel like my understanding of the character Hamlet has become richer over the past ten years, but my gut desire to play him has waned. My vision for the play as a whole is now the thing.

I was set to direct my adaptation of William Shakespeare's Hamlet in the studio space at Village Players of Oak Park as a part of their Shakespeare Our Contemporary Series, with performance dates starting in January of 2011. Sadly, the production at Village Players has been cancelled, along with the rest of their season due to financial difficulties at the theatre.