HBD, WS!

Don't say it

I love this! (But we're not going to talk about it.) Thanks, Chris Webb!

Two (striped) gents

Actors of the same stripe: Johnny and Bruno  Photo: Stratton McCrady Photography

From a dog lover’s – and an actor lover’s – perspective, I’m not sure it gets much cuter than this: John Kuntz (as Launce) and co-star Bruno (as Crab) in Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, which opened last night.

Bringing 'Mortal Terror' to the Stage

I love plays that view historical events and persons through a contemporary prism. I love being in rehearsal with a bunch of really smart, funny, opinionated theater artists. And I love William Shakespeare, who despite being married, possibly bisexual, definitely not Jewish, and almost 400 years dead, is one of the most important men in my life. Like Bob Brustein and Stafford Clark-Price – see blog entries below – I am a Shakespeare nerd. So odds were good that I was going to have a fine time directing Mortal Terror. 

Inside 'Mortal Terror'

Robert Brustein

Mortal Terror is the second play in a Shakespeare trilogy I have been writing, and it concerns the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, an event that bears an uncanny resemblance to the World Trade Center Plot of 2001. (The Jacobean version was meant to blow the twin towers of Parliament into the Thames.) I imagine Shakespeare, during this time, being asked by James I of England, to write a play justifying his right to the throne. Against his conscious will, he writes Macbeth, with its references to witches (James wrote a book about them) and the Gunpowder Plot (in the Porters speech).

I also imagine that Shakespeare and James's Danish Queen Anne came very close to an affair, and that he helped his drinking companions, Ben Jonson and John Marston, out of a lot of trouble with the King when they satirized the Scots.

The play also concerns the conflicts within an artist forced by circumstances to write against his will, and the way that even something intended as propaganda can become a work of art, if the artist is gifted enough. And, most of all, Mortal Terror is about Shakespeare's growing awareness of mankind's inhumanity to man.

- Robert Brustein, Playwright

Will I Am

Stafford Clark-Price, right, in Robert Brustein's The English Channel

Let’s get this out of the way immediately: I am a bit of a Shakespeare nerd. I blame my mother for the love of language and Mrs. Fitch, my 8th grade English teacher, for casting me as Macbeth in our classroom reading of the play. When I was given the opportunity to play Shakespeare in The English Channel in New York, part one in Mr. Brustein’s trilogy, I was thrilled at the opportunity to try and breathe life into such an enigmatic historical figure at the beginning of his career.

In Mortal Terror, we meet Will at a very different time in his life. He is now a successful playwright, having penned Hamlet, Lear, As You Like It and numerous other smash hits. Unlike many artistic geniuses, Shakespeare was celebrated during his lifetime and it is during this period that the curtain rises on our play. Queen Elizabeth has just died and James has just taken the throne, bringing with him a new religion and retinue.