Communication. The way the play articulates is it talks about that there is a voice inside of your head and that voice is you but you have all these other voices colliding in on it. Voices of your parents, of your husband, of 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. One of the most effective things about the show is the first sort of 12, 15 minutes when you get to meet evan and give his first mono log and give the first song you get to see who this kid is, how deep a hole he is in and how deep a saffier he is, and why he fall foos this lie. Rose funding for charlie rose is provided by the following. Bank of america, life better and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. William shakespeares hamlet is one of the best known plays in history. A new production is now running at the Public Theatre, it stars oscar isaac and is directed by sam gold. The two first conceived of the project as students at julliard, production on hamlet will run until september 3rd. Im pleased to have oscar isaac and sam gold back at this table. Welcome. Thank you. Rose how did you at julliard say one day lets do hamlet. I think by doing it at school we decided to do sam was there, as a directing student and i was there as an acting student. And we did all of the hamlet and rosen krats and guildenstern scenes together. I think it was part of your course, right . Yeah, i was studying shakespeare and wanted to work on hamlet. Everybody basically wants to do this play so it wasnt a strange idea to want to do hamlet. Its like the best play ever and Everyone Wants to get their hands on it. And i grabbed os car sort of on his time, the minutes he has down from 24 hours a day as actor training and said on your breaks, would you come down so hamlet with me, well just do the r j scenes. Is that what they call them. They are, you know, usually you tackle, the closet scene or one of these kind of big meals and i thought it would be fun to start with these friendship scenes. And also we were students and friends and it just seemed like seemed kind of appropriate for the vibe at julliard. We did that, yeah, at school. And then after we graduated we kept in touch. We just were always talking about wanting to do hamlet and do some shakespeare and then we finally were able to get some time. And it took about two years of really trying to find a window where we could both have the time to put the play up. And we finally did. That was a 15, almost 15 year process. Like ten years of talking about doing it and a couple of years of actually putting it toblght. Rose what makes it as great as it is . Its bottomless play. You can, you can look at it from a million points of view and each one of them feels like an entire universe. And you think oh, someone else has this other idea about the play when they open up that door. Its another endless, the term poem unlimited is shakespeares term. Poem unlimited. Yeah, it just keeps going. It is a hall of mirrors. You start to look and it reflects it self and has the ambiguity of relige us text where a line is crafted in such a way that it feels like it has infinite meaning. And one of the funny things that sam would say is any question an actor would ask him, the opposite is always true. Any answer that he gives them. It is like 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 yeah, but wouldnt the opposite also work. And it does. So its like directing in quick sand. Youre trying to lay some ground work and get some ideas settled. You want it to have a structure and you want it to be functioning but every time you get somewhere you could keep digging and digging and digging, you are digging into quick sand. Few people do the entire tax. Kenneth bran ag did that once. You have got four hours here. Yeah, show its three hours and 45 minutes but we cut quite a bit. I just, i go slow. I have a hard time making it go by real fast. Rose so what was the vision that you presented to oscar that you wanted to do. What kind of story. How did you want to make it contemporary and at the same time bare. I mean the great thing is it really came from us and our friendship and us talking about the play over so many years that it never was like heres my idea. It was always we started a miles and miles from where we ended up. And it was really what was inspiring us, what was moving us, how we were seeing our lives and our seeing ourselves reflected in the play. And when it came time to actually go that production, it was what was on both of our minds. And i think what we were both really interested in at the time that we started getting into rehearsals was the death of the father. That the play starts with the death of hamlets father and about his grief. And the mourning process and the stages of grief hes going through. And that, the idea of a man whose lost his father and the grief sending him into madness was something that i think both of us could really could really see the play through entirely through that lens and do quite well. I think you have spoken to the point that your mother was dying. And you actually read from hamlet long pass ages. And that you were informed by that experience in terms of how you wanted to own the part. Well, we had already had decided and figured out when we were going to do the play which was we were going to start rehearsals in may, november of last area was when my mother was diagnosed with pan cree attic cancer and it happened quickly, and at the same time i was preparing for this, her favorite thing in the world was to see me do shakespeare. She just loved it, she came to see me in school, when i did romeo and juliet, and loved it so much. And so when i was setting there with her first at home and then at the hospital i would read it to her. Ands a was memorizing it i would do the sol il quees, soliloquies, i ended up doing almost the whole play for her. And it was, i guess when i say the religious text, it felt, because there are things in it that feel like parables and particularly a meditation on letting go and grief and death. And so it was very comforting, i know for me and for her too, there was this one section where i read to her about the readiness is all. And if it be now be not to come it will be now, if it be not now, yet it will come and i remember she just was very moved by that and thought thats amazing. And so then as it got worse and in february, she passed. Having the, she never wanted a funeral. She didnt want any of that. So we didnt do that. We just kind of as a family had other own little thing to say goodbye but nie sister came to see the show and she felt like t feels like this is the version of a funeral she would have wanted is to have the space to grief and tell that story about losing someone you love so much, and having this beautiful architecture and this beautiful framework. And this communion with everyone else to tell it. Rose this guy came with a sheer command of elizabethan. Yeah, i mean oscar, its 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 its contemporary conversation. Its so clear in his mind. Its like, its like when you learn a Foreign Language and you get to that point where you are thinking in the language and are you not thinking in english any more. Thats how he has gotten with the part. And he brings the text alive in a way that is musically very, very beautiful. But also extremely easy to understand and follow because. Rose thats the point, a lot of people have spoken about, in terms of the audience, i think audience members have spoken about as well, it is more comelling for them because they understand it better. I think that a contemporary audience is a lot less used to rhetoric and the idea of speaking verse. And i think its really important to honor the tradition of speaking verse and poetry and giving the audience poetry which has music to it but i think its important not to alienate the audience and to claim that poetry but to find a way that its also contemporary communication. And i like to put a group of people together. You know, we have 299 people come every night and they are all in a room together. And they all, were going to communicate some things about grief and suffering. And were all going to be in the room to experience it together. The communication has to make it to the audience. It cant just be 4 400 year old to poetry. It has it be a contemporary conversation that everybody in the audience is going through. That is something, hamlet says it in the play twice n two different spots. He says the actors are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time. And that the job of the actor is to show the age and body, body of the time, its form and pressure. So thats about now, that the actors role is to reflect to the audience how man is right now in this moment of time. And so for us it was very important to try to strip away as much art i fis as we could. And all that kind of representational stuff. And trying to convince you that we are in else nor and denmark and the medieval times. And the crowns and thrones and all those things and try to find a way to make it much more immediate and relatable. Knowing the history of how many productions have been and continue to be everywhere, every year, did you want to make sure that you did. Yeah, you know, hamlet is this play that is, it kind of, its like a little devil for a director, you know. You have to the ba el with it because every one, every one has, has tried to do their hamlet. And it can really get in your head, that you have to add something to that history. And 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. Rose but can you . Yeah, i think, i think because youre in like what branagh was saying, you respond to the speem, you are in the room with so i get in the room with a group of actors and this beautiful language, and you see what happens. And then you just focus on that, what do they have to offer this audience in this moment in this room that were all in. And it kind of takes over. And i tried really hard to just listen to that. I tried to strip away everything else, so i didnt come in, i didnt come in with a concept. I didnt come in with who, you know, like it wasnt i wasnt trying to think about a fascist dictator or who, what is else nor what is rotten in denmark and make some kind of statement about it, i just said where, were in a room, an empty room with an audience and these words and 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 with history. Rose do you have to assume that hamlet went mad because of the killing of his father . No, not necessarily. I think that madness for me understanding it through the lens of grief became so much more relatable. Because grief feels like a form of madness. It feels like it can easily, its 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. And 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, you, a lot of pretense falls away. And so that i feel like in some ways in the play is a euphemism for the feeling of grief. Some actors have said after doing hamlet for a run in theater, they have to take off for awhile. It is, it is very overwhelming. The interesting thing which has been so different in such a short condensed amount of time, personally, so many things happened with the passing of my mother, getting married, the birth of my son, that its almost like my personal stakes in doing hamlet and the play lowered. It didnt mean everything to me. It felt more like release than something that needed to be proved or something i needed to prove, you know, and thats a wonderful state to be. Because i think as an actor you always want your personal stakes to be low and the character stakes to be really high because that gives you freedom. And so i think i was able to approach it in a strangely in a kind of relaxed way even though doing all the work. But not overburdens where the personal cost. If you could sit down with the actors, whatever production, whether it was shakespeare or not and say to them, this is what i want you to give me, what would you tell them . Yeah, truth, you know. To me its all, always about honesty and not pretending. Like having the thought, i think thats an amazing thing to watch for an audience is to watch an actor have a thought, so you see the thought that gives birth to the language of the play. And you see that ignite in an actors imagination. And i think the audience just gets so excited to see that. And to see someone not faking it, to see it actually happen. What is that about as an actor . Well, i i think as an actor with an audience it is about sin cronicity. You are trying to sin cronnize with the other actors and people so everyone is kind of moving together and almost unconsciously. And i think when you do have the thoughts and when you are approaching it that honestly, your body unconsciously behaves in certain ways that the audience unconsciously picks up. And suddenly were sin syncronized and moving at the same time together. And 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 puzzle solving that we had to do to really, well, well, puzzle solving like, like you know what is, why suddenly go into a soliloquy here. What are we trying to say. What are these long thoughts, what do these things mean and what are we getting toment once those things can be broken down so clearly. Rose is that a collaborative process or singular process. Yeah, we if you take, if you take the idea that the play is not inevitable, like what happens next doesnt have to happen next, it happens next because it happens, why does it happen. Yeah, we sit and come to some, you know, why would hamlet want his girlfriend to go to a nunery. You have to know why in that moment that happens. And we wrestle with that, we really wrestle hard to try to give good answers to those questions that can be enacted. What is amazing with sam and his approach is that even the way he talks about it, you know, its like why are you talking to your girl friend like that. You are really disappointed am are you like oh man, dont act that way, why are you deceiving me. We try to strip a what, weve reverent to the text but were also irreverent by the way we talk about it because we show it enough respect as if it was a real person behind it that made those words that we can just say, what is he trying to say, what is the human thing he is trying to say here. And that, you know, hes got a great bs detecter, sam. You know, he can just kind of call out when you are fronting something or pretending, when you are not approaching it the way you really would. Rose to do this you have to put yourself in terms of the circumstances and the motivation of shakespeare at the time he wrote it. I think for me because most of my career has been in new plays, i work with writers, mostly. Im not used to dead writers. Im used to a person next to me and im like why did you write that, what is going on. So with shakespeare i try to have the same approach even though i couldnt i cant really know what was going on in that guys mind or whether it was really even the guy were calling shakespeare. To me, all of that is kind of nonsense. What is important to me is that i have that conversation enough to be able to get an answer that works for me. And for me, shakespeare was the guy who had just lost his son. And he, and to me he took a existing story of revenge tragedy and he lost his son. And he put his grief into looking at revenge tragedy and saying this is maybe this character cant even get through his own revenge plot because hes in such deep grief. And that idea, that there is a man, shakespeare whose son had really died and who was really as a playwright trying to grap well that grief, whether its true or not, whether if he could get out of his grave and talk to me, he would tell me im totally off base, it helped me stay specific about the world we were making. There is a real person. Hes a person with deep feelings without put those feelings into an imaginary story and we have to bring that story to life. Rose thank you for coming. Thank you for having me. Rose thank you very much, great to see you. At the Public Theatre until september 4th. You do not want to miss this. Henry ibsens 1879 play a dolls house has long been considered a literary classic. The play ends with a once deutful housewife walking out on her husband and three young children. That conclusion has inspired much debate and speculation over the past century and a half about what happened to her. A new followup from playwright lucas hnath flashes forward 15 years as nora helmer returns to her old home to face her family for the first time. Here is a look. Also, also, heres another thing that bothered me. You dont get angry. Of course i do. Maybe once. Right now i feel angry. Right now are you angry. Damn right i am. I dont believe that you are in angry, that are you in i it, that you are inside the feeling of feeling angry, are you outside of it looking out of it, oh, there is you dont act. Con city fated. Rose a dolls house part two is currently running at the john golden theater. Joining me is the playwright lucas hnath, director sam gold and two of its stars Laurie Metcalf and chris cooper who lay plays torvald. Please to have all of them at this table. Welcome, welcome. Let me begin lucas with you. Did you long think about what in the world was going to happen here and over the aftermath of what happened to the character . Yeah, i mean, i have always loved the play. And i had seen it many productions. And i mean the first thing that came to me was the title. I just thought that was an audacious title for a play, a dolls house, part 2 and it wasnt until i started writing it that i had to really get serious and past the joke of the title and really consider what does it mean to revisit the story. Rose what do you think ibsen intended . I think. Rose people to think about it and speculate about it for all the years after. I think so. Maybe in some ways what i did goes against his intention. I think he wanted that door to slam and us to sort of consider the meaning of nora leaving. And plu you know, over a hundred years later, i think its time to sort of revisit that story and think about well, what does it mean that she left and what did it mean for her to return and what would bring her back. Is there much debate over how she turned out rather than how she might have turned out . Much debate . Well, i love the fact that lucas when he had the idea of what noras outcome would be, i this you pulled some of your friends. Wou