Hamlet

PERFORMANCE

18 February – 11 May 1986:
New York Shakespeare Festival, Estelle R Newman Theatre, Public Theatre, NYC

CAST

Marcellus … Mario Arrambide
Polonius … Leonardo Cimino
Player Queen … Lynn Cohen
Guildenstern … David Cromwell
Francisco/Fortinbras … Peter Crook
Second Gravedigger … William Duell
Voltemand … Ron Faber
Horatio … Richard Frank
Ophelia … Harriet Harris
Bernardo … Richard Michael Hughes
Cornelius … Garry Kemp
Hamlet … Kevin Kline
Rosencrantz … Randle Mell
Laertes … David Pierce
Gertrude … Priscilla Smith
First Gravedigger … Peter Van Norden
Reynaldo … Paul Walker
Ghost/Player King/Osric … Jeff Weiss
Claudius … Harris Yulin

SYNOPSIS

Hamlet (Kline) is in all kinds of existential grief after the death of his father, King Hamlet. Old Hamlet’s ghost appears and says his brother Claudius (the awesome Harris Yulin – he was in Buffy you know!) murdered him in order to take the throne and marry old Hamlet’s widow, Gertrude. Hamlet wants to avenge his father but it turns out to be a bit more complicated than that.

This we would have killed to see: a stellar cast performing Shakespeare’s most complex, possibly most brilliant and certainly most deranged play. And it ends with DHP and Kevin Kline fencing!

DAVID’S ROLE

David said of his performance in this production: “I found every single laugh as Laertes that you can find and only realized later that you really shouldn’t find any at all.” Well, he does lose his entire family and end up killed …

Laertes is the more impetuous, less thoughtful version of Hamlet, who gets right down to revenging when his father Polonius and sister Ophelia die, largely due to Hamlet’s meddling.

The New York Times complained that Laertes and Opehlia’s relationship was “too fond by half.” Ah yes – always best to pack as much incest into Hamlet as possible. (Niles and Bebe though – what genius.)

David spoke about working with director Liviu Ciulei on this play in a televised interview with the American Theatre Wing:

“Has anyone worked with Romanians? I’ve worked with them in productions that they had done before, as part of an entirely new cast, and being told every move, and loving it. Because it is an entirely different process and if you are able to give yourself over to it, and discover your own creativity within those confines, then they back off a little bit … I’ve given some of my best performances, that were in fact my performances, I wasn’t doing y’know, Radevic Whoever-it-was who did it in Slovenia … I did Kevin Kline’s Hamlet, the first time he did Hamlet, and Livui Ciulei directed. And Kevin is absolutely temperamentally not able to work that way, which is a perfectly valid thing. So it was a very conflicted, unpleasant, really interesting experience.”

CRITICAL RESPONSE

“David Pierce’s Laertes is a petulant prep-school boy in beret and velvet collar.” - Mel Gussow, New York Times

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