Let's Talk About a Play
I have been joking that I read more about TV than I watch it these days, but in fairness I read a lot, even about pop culture.
PBS has the “Hamlet” from Shakespeare in the Park running through June. (Sorry, non-USians, I hope it’s somehow available to you too.)
I watched it. It is lovely. I confess I was lured in when You Tube showed me a clip of Solea Pfeiffer in it. Pfeiffer was in “Gun & Powder”, one of the last shows I saw pre-pandemic. (I wrote about it here.)
I realized I had read “Hamlet” in high school, I had seen a movie version of it at some point, I have read retellings of it, but I hadn’t seen the actual thing.
And well, yeah, it turns out a play about a dude dealing with the untimely death of his father and sudden remarriage of his mom and the feeling like he should be doing something and yet is also a little stalled because grief is such a morass - well, it hits different when you have lost a parent or two.
Also, kudos to the set designer. There’s a Stacey Abrams sign buried in the ground, a jeep with an Elsinor license plate, and the house is tilted so that it just looks like a haunted house. I was giving myself such credit for getting the Elsinor joke until I remembered that I knew that because it’s mentioned in “Hamilton”. Which hey, knowledge is knowledge.
But great stories get retold and retold for a reason. It was nice to revisit this one.
If you’ve had a chance to see it, feel free to tell me your thoughts.