And i think it is important to honor the tradition of speaking verse and poetry and giving audience poetry that has music to it. But i think it is important not the audience and claim that poetry, but to find a way that it is also contemporary communication. The play talks about how there is a voice inside of your head. That voice is you. But you have all of these other voices colliding in on it. The voices of your parents, your husband, the people in your community telling you what you should be doing. So, she has to stop hearing those voices of other people and hear, really, if i am left to myself, what do i want for myself . The first 12 or 15 minutes, you meet evan. You see him give his first monologue and sing his first song, you get an idea of who this kid is and how in need of some sort of savior he is. You really understand why he falls into this light. Charlie William Shakespeares hamlet is one of the bestknown plays in history. A new production is directed by sam gold. It stars oscar isaac. They first conceived of the project when they were students at juilliard. The production will run until september 3. Im pleased to have oscar isaac and sam gold back at this table. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Charlie how did you guys at juilliard say one day, lets do hamlet together . Sam was there is a directing student. I was there as an acting student. We did all of the hamlet and rosencrantz and guildenstern scenes together. I think it was part of your course, right . I was studying shakespeare and wanted to work on hamlet. Everybody wants to do this play. It was not a strange idea to want to do hamlet. It is the best play ever and Everyone Wants to get your hands on it. I grabbed oscar from his actor training and said on your breaks, will you do hamlet with me . R g scenes. O the is that what they are called . Sam usually, you tackle one of these big meals. I thought it would be fun to start with these friendships scenes. Also, we were students and friends. It seemed kind of appropriate for the vibe at juilliard. Oscar we did that at school. After we graduated, we kept in touch and were always talking about wanting to do shakespeare. We finally were able to get some time. It took about two years of really trying to find a window where we could both have the time to put the play up. We finally did. It was a 15year enterprise. Sam 10 years of talking about doing it, and a couple of years of putting it together. Charlie what makes it is great as it is . Sam it is a bottomless play. You can look at it from a million points of view and each one of them feels like an entire universe. You think, someone else has this other idea about the play when they open up that door. It is another endless the term poem unlimited is a shakespeare term. It has the ambiguity of religious text. A line is crafted in such a way that it feels like it has infinite meaning. One of the funny things sam would say to any question an actor would ask is the opposite is always true. Sam the most frustrating play in the world to direct because you can never get to a choice. Where you are like, this is right. You choose something and someone can always say, wouldnt the opposite also work . And it does. It is like directing in quicksand. You are trying to lay groundwork and get ideas settled. You want things to have a structure, and you want it to be functioning. Every time you get somewhere, you keep digging and digging. You are digging in quicksand. Charlie few people do the entire text. Kenneth branagh did, i think, once. Sam yeah, he did. Charlie you have four hours. Sam it is three hours and 45 minutes, but we have cut quite a bit. I go slow. I have a hard time making it go by fast. Charlie what was the vision you presented to oscar of what you wanted to do . How did you want to make it contemporary and at the same time bare . Sam the great thing is it came from us and our friendship over so many years. It was never like, here is my idea. We started miles and miles from where we ended up. It was what was inspiring us, what was moving us, how we were seeing our lives and ourselves reflected in the play. When it came time to go into production, it was what was on both of our minds. I think what we were both really interested in at the time we started getting into rehearsals was the death of the father. The play starts with the death of hamlets father and about his grief and mourning process and the stages of grief he is going through. The idea of a man who has lost his father and the grief sending him into madness was something i think both of us could really see the play entirely through that lens and do it quite well. Charlie you have spoken of how your mother was dying. And you read from hamlet, long passages. And you were informed by that experience in terms of how you wanted to own the part. We had already decided and figured out when we were going to do the play. We were going to start rehearsals in may. November of last year is when my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It happened quickly with her declining health. I was able to be with her. At the same time, i was preparing for this. Her favorite thing in the world was to see me do shakespeare. She loved it. She came to see me at school when i did romeo and juliet. She loved it so much. When i was sitting with her first at home and in the hospital, i would read it to her. As i was memorizing it, i ended up doing almost the whole play for her. I guess when i say again like , the religious text, there are things in it that feel like parables. Particularly, a meditation on letting go and grief and death. And so, it was very comforting for me and her. There was this one section i read to her about the readiness. If it be not now, yet it will come. She was very moved by that. I thought that was amazing. As it got worse, in february she passed. She never wanted a funeral. She never wanted any of that. We did not do that. As a family, we had our own way to say goodbye. My sister came to see the show. She said it feels like the version of a funeral she would have wanted, to have the space to grieve and tell that story about losing someone you love so much and having this beautiful architecture and beautiful framework and communion with everyone else to tell it. Charlie this guy came with a sheer command. Of elizabethan sam yeah. Oscar, it is a kind of magic trick where he knows the play inside and out and knows what each word means and how to use each word so well that he can do it as if it is contemporary conversation. It is so clear in his mind. It is like when you learn a Foreign Language and you get to the point where you are thinking in the language and not thinking in english anymore. That is how he has gotten with the part. He brings the text alive in a way that is musically very beautiful and also extremely easy to understand and follow. Charlie a lot of people have spoken of that. In terms of the audience and i think audience members have spoken to that as well. It is more compelling for them because they understand it better. Sam i think a contemporary audience is a lot less used to rhetoric and the idea of speaking verse. I think it is really important to honor the tradition of speaking verse and poetry and giving the audience poetry which has music to it. I think it is important not to alienate the audience but to find a way that is also contemporary communication. I like to put a group of people together. 299 people come every night. They are all in a room together. They are all going to communicate some things about grief and suffering. We are all going to be in the room to experience it together. The communication has to make it to the audience. It cannot just be 400yearold poetry. It has to be a contemporary conversation about something everybody in the audience is going through. Oscar hamlet says in the play twice, two different spots, the actors are the abstract and brief chroniclers of the time. And the job of the actor is to show the age and body of the time, its form and pressure. That is about now. The actors role is to reflect to the audience how man is right now, in this moment of time. For us, it was very important to strip away as much artifice as we could and all that representational stuff, trying to convince you we are in denmark in Medieval Times and all those things and try to find a way to make it much more immediate and relatable. Charlie knowing the history of how many productions and continue to be everywhere every year, did you want to make sure you did what did you want to make sure you did . Sam yeah, hamlet is a play that is like a little devil for a director. You have to battle with it because everyone has tried to do their hamlet. And it can really get in your head that you have to add something to that history. That is not a very healthy way to approach working on a play. And so, for me, i tried to not think about any of the productions i had seen and not think about its history at all. Charlie but can you . Yeah. You respond to the people you are in the room with. I get in the room with a group of actors and this beautiful language and you see what happens. You focus on that. What do they have to offer this audience, in this moment, in this room we are all in . It kind of takes over. I tried hard to listen to that. I tried to strip away everything else. I did not come in with a concept. I did not come in with i was not trying to think about a fashion or dictate what is rotten in denmark and try to make some kind of statement about it. I just said we are in an empty room with an audience and these words. Lets see what comes out of our time together. And the essential nature of that helped me from having to be in too much dialogue with concept or history. Charlie do you have to assume hamlet went mad . Because of the killing of his father . Oscar no, not necessarily. I think madness, for me understanding it through the lens of grief became much more relatable because grief feels like a form of madness. It feels like it can easily it is such a shock and such a trauma to lose someone you love so much. That on the other side of that, it is a whole new existence. I think many people that have had to deal with that can feel how easily their mind can get away from them and change, and you see the world differently. And you a lot of pretense falls away. I feel like that in some ways in the play is a euphemism for the feeling of grief. Charlie some actors have said to me after doing hamlet, they have to take off for a while. Oscar it is. It is very overwhelming. The interesting thing that has been so different, in a short, condensed amount of time, so many things happened. The passing of my mother, getting married, the birth of my son. That it is almost like my personal stake in doing hamlet and the play lowered. It did not mean everything to me. It felt more like release than something that needed to be proved or proven. That is a wonderful state to be. As an actor, you always want your personal stakes to be low and the characters stakes to be really high because that gives you freedom. I think i was able to approach it in a strangely in a kind of relaxed way, even doing all the work. But not overburdened with the personal consequences. Charlie if you could sit down with the actors and say to them, this is what i want you to give me, what would you tell them . Sam yeah, truth. To me, it is always about honesty and not pretending. Like, having the thought. I think that is an amazing thing for the audience to watch an actor have a thought. You see the thought that gives birth to the language of the play. You see that ignite in an actors imagination. The audience gets so excited to see that and see someone not faking it, to see it actually happen. Charlie what is that about as an actor . Oscar i think as an actor with an audience, it is about synchronicity. You are trying to synchronize with the other actors and people, so everyone is moving together almost unconsciously. I think when you do have the thoughts and you are approaching it that honestly, your body unconsciously behaves in certain ways that the audience unconsciously picks up. And suddenly, we are all synchronized and moving together. I think that is when you really can feel things are alive. But i think it is about working on it, there is so much puzzlesolving we had to do. Puzzlesolving like, why suddenly go into a soliloquy here . What do these long thoughts mean . Charlie thank you both. At the Public Theater until . Oscar september 4. Charlie september 4. You do not want to miss this. Henry absents 1879 play a slls house henry ibsen 1879 play a dolls house has long been considered a literary classic. The play ends with a one student for housewife walking out on her husband and three young children. The conclusion has inspired much debate and speculation over the last century and a half about what happened to her. A new followup flashes forward 15 years as she returns to her old home to face her family for the first time. Here is a look. Here is another thing that bothers me. [laughter] you dont get angry. Right now, i feel angry. I dont believe you are angry, that you are inside the feeling of feeling angry. I think you are just outside of it looking at it. Like, oh, there is something. [laughter] you dont act constipated. Oh. A dolls house part two is currently running at the john golden theatre. Joining us, the director and two of the stars. I am pleased to have all of them at this table. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Lucas cannot let me begin with you. Did you long think about what was going to happen here and over the aftermath of what happened to the character . Yeah. I have always loved the play. I have seen it in productions. The first thing that came to me was the title. I thought it was an audacious title for a play, a dolls house, part two. It was not until i started writing it that i had to get serious and get past the joke of the title and consider what it means to revisit the story. Charlie what do you think ibsen intended people to think about it and speculate about it . Yeah. Maybe in some ways what i did when against his intentions. I think he wanted that door to slam and us to consider the meaning of nora leaving. But, you know, over 100 years later, i think it is time to revisit that story and think about what does it mean that she left and what would it mean to return and what would bring her back . Charlie was there much debate over how she turned out rather than how she might have turned out . Laurie much debate . I love the fact that lucas when he had the idea of what noras outcome would be, would it be positive or negative, because she had limited options with no skills and no education, the stigma of being a divorced woman in 1879. People thought her options would be negative, so lucas wanted to go in the opposite direction. When i mean in a positive way, successful way. She is a success. Charlie people believe ibsen intended it as a feminist argument . Lucas i think the thing ibsen kept coming back to in all of his plays was, how are we not free and how could we be more free . Is that really truly possible . He was a writer that seemed to yearn for people to be more free, to be less constricted by social norms, social judgment. And so, i think a dolls house is part of his consideration of it. One of the things he is thinking about in this play is the roles men and women all into playing or are forced to play. Noras action at the end is to break out of a certain expectation. Charlie but she comes back for legal reasons. She has to come back. Laurie she has to. Yes. He has a very clever method that brings her back. What is fun for the audience is to find out what made her come back after 15 years of silence, no communication at all, and also what she has been doing in those 15 years. Charlie how does torvald see her . Chris how does torvald see her . as a completely changed person. He does not recognize her. Charlie is he surprised . Chris i think he is dumbfounded. charlie he thought she would go off and drift into nothingness . Chris well, yeah. I think he was convinced she is still living but her outcome, what has happened to her, im sure he has no idea. Charlie why does she leave . Lucas she has gotten into a spot where she is not sure what she wants and she has this strong suspicion the way she is walking through life is without any understanding of who she is as a person. So she thinks she needs to go find out who she is. Charlie her identity. Lucas yeah. She certainly does not think she can find that person if she stays in this house because she will keep falling into patterns of behavior, so she needs literally a change of scenery. Charlie it begs this question, who am i . Lucas yeah. The way the play articulates it, it talks about is a voice inside of your head. That voice is you, but you have all of these other voices colliding in on it. The voices of your parents, your husband, the people in your community telling you what you should be doing. And so, she has to stop hearing those voices of other people and hear really, if i am left to myself, what do i want for myself . Charlie is part of this play not only how they react to her but how she reacts to them . It is an amazing surprise. The door slams in 1879. Since then, we have all been wondering what happens. It is a fun exercise. For this play, you have all of this buildup and excitement about what is going to happen when she comes back. Are people going to flip out . Are they going to welcome her back with open arms . What is she here for . Over the course of the play, you get the series of little meetings between her and the important people in her life where you get the surprise of finding out how they treat her and how she treats them. Charlie some have said you are a minimalist in the design of your theater productions. Sam i like to focus on the words and have the performers do all the work. When i read lucas play, i thought of a boxing match. It has got a lot of rhetoric, a lot of argument in it. I felt like making a production where it could be great actors sparring. That was the basic idea. Charlie where would you rank ibsen . Where do you rank this play . It is one of the most important plays in dramatic literature. One, because it was extremely shocking when it was written, to you know, give a woman the things you were talking to lucas about, to give a woman that inner voice, that decision to leave her family, to leave her children, and leave at the end of the play with the door slamming was an incredibly important moment in cultural history and theater history. It is a great role actors have played forever. You get to watch a great actor play one of the great roles. For this play, it is a chance to get to see someone play nora but also get to see someone in completely new play. It borrows from the old play. But it really is its own play that gets to use some of the context of ibsen. But it is really lucas and lucas voice. Charlie a gift of fascination i guess the fascination is what manner of woman that had the strength to do this . What manner of human being would strike out at a time in which nobody ever left . Laurie i know. Oh, it is a wonderful character. It is fascinating. Even though i have not done the original dolls house. I still havent, really. I am playing nora helmer. But she has reinvented herself in the 15 years she has been away, so i felt i had a free pass to reinvent the character myself. Because, it is the nora we see where everything bottled up in her in the origina