WEEK TWENTY TWO

Tuesday / June 13 / 2023
Written by Kyle Fisher-Grant

Tonight was a great night. We are moving right along with the play and integrating the new members into the ensemble. We started out with one ensemble member performing “Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I…” from Act Two. She has been working on it for a few weeks and slowly making her way through the monologue. We were able to give her some notes to work with and are now encouraging her to start memorizing more of the speech.

We moved on to working with Act One, Scene Three, in which Ophelia is lectured by her older brother Laertes, who is lectured by their father Polonius, who then lectures Ophelia after Laertes’ exit. There is a lot of talking in this scene and not much listening, and it can be really interesting to dive into. Immediately after putting the scene on its feet, the ensemble discussed how sad it was now that they know the rest of the play. “Ophelia got the business in this scene!” said one member. We went on to discuss how Ophelia gets handed off by all the men in the play who need her to do their bidding. “There are no other females in the play other than Gertrude,” mused one woman. “[Ophelia] doesn’t have a mom. Maybe if Gertrude took her under her wing more, things would turn out better.”

We moved on to the next two scenes, which seem to run together in a way that it makes it feel like they are the same scene. We started out reading, but in just a few minutes the readers were up on their feet acting out the scene. The woman playing Claudius/the ghost wasn’t feeling well, so we tried to stage the scene with her offstage doing a “voice over.” We had a great time exploring the text and experimenting with different ways of telling the story.

Friday / June 16 / 2023
Written by Kyle Fisher-Grant

Another great night at the Valley with the Shakespeare group. We started the night with one ensemble member reading two essays that she wrote. The first was about the inconsistencies in the text with Hamlet’s age, and the second was about Ophelia. They were both really well put together and it was interesting to hear her take on Ophelia in this new way. She brought up the small number of female characters in the play and the inevitability of comparison between them. She contrasted Ophelia’s madness with Hamlet’s and questioned Hamlet’s faux-madness in comparison with Ophelia’s actual madness. It was a really smart essay and we were happy to hear it. When pressed about what class she wrote that for, she said she didn’t write it for a class or a grade. She’s getting really into the text and wanted to write the essays.

We went on to work through staging Act One, Scene Five, which is both challenging and really fun. It’s challenging because there is the ghost, a location change as Hamlet pursues the ghost, and the ghost interacting with the character from on and off stage– it is fun for all the same reasons!

The line that ghost speaks off stage is “Swear!” and he says it several times.  This time around, we wanted the “Swear” lines to ramp up each time he said them, so we involved the whole ensemble and they all shouted “Swear!” on the last line. It was a great way to incorporate all of the newer members and get them participating.

WEEK TWENTY THREE

Tuesday / June 20 / 2023
Written by Kyle Fisher-Grant

Today was largely about continuing on through the text for our newer members that have not yet finished the play. We read through and discussed most of the beginning of Act Two. Much of the discussion revolved around Polonius and his incessant spying. This starts in the beginning of the play, and there was a clear difference between those who had read the entire play and those who were reading it for the first time. For the first-timers, his behavior didn’t seem all that egregious in these early stages, but the rest of the ensemble saw a clear pattern of behavior that starts early and ends in his death. “This is what gets him killed,” said one member. “Let the spying begin,” said another. “Nothing in this play is taken at face value,” said another.

We moved on to the next scene, one of the longest in the play, and one that needs to be broken up over a couple of sessions. In this scene, Hamlet runs intellectual circles around Rosencrantz and Guildenstern –who have also been sent to spy– and debates the nature of reality. One of my favorite lines in the whole Shakespearean canon is said in this exchange: “There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.” This line prompted a really profound conversation. One member said, kind of out of the blue, “I wake up on an island every day.” I asked what she meant, and she said, “Fantasy Island!” She said that we all have choices about how we are going to live and approach the world. “I’ve been here for twenty years, but my family call me to cheer them up—they’re the ones in prison.” Another member responded, “We connected just now. I needed to hear that.”

Friday / June 23 / 2023
Written by Kyle Fisher-Grant

Tonight was a really great night; one of those special nights when the session picks up momentum and careens towards eight o’clock before anyone knows it. Check-in began with one ensemble member saying how much she loves SIP, and that she feels like we are a “family” and isn’t used to having people care about her like she feels it in the group. Several more agreed, saying things like, “SIP was one of the only places that I feel joy.” We’ve heard those things in previous seasons, but it never gets old, and we encourage that kind of vulnerability as much as we can. 

I challenged the group at the end of the check-in to start working on their scenes. They have gotten in a mindset that work happens in the unit and they present that work to the group as a finished product, but they are working towards bringing whatever they have and working it while in session. It’s a different mindset, but one that gives us a lot more to do while the group is meeting.

Next we decided to play some games. I love it when we start the evening with games, as the group really warms up and is more willing to jump in later—as was the case with tonight's session!

For the rest of the night, we worked on three different scenes and were able to really get into all of them in a really profound way. We started with Act Four, Scene Two, which features “the boys” as the ensemble have been calling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Next, we moved on to Act Three, Scene Four, in which Hamlet confronts Gertrude and accidentally kills Polonius. We finished with a newer member of the group deciding she wanted to try the “To be or not to be…” speech. She tried it several times, working to take notes to get more comfortable with the text. We finished the night with one of our long-time members, who doesn’t always feel comfortable volunteering, signing up to do a scene next week. There was a real sense of momentum tonight, and we all left the session feeling great.

WEEK TWENTY FOUR

Tuesday / June 27 / 2023
Written by Kyle Fisher-Grant

Much of tonight’s session was a continuation of last Friday’s work, and the ensemble made progress identifying the scenes they want to perform when the time comes. 

The ensemble member who worked on “To be or not to be…” on Friday really wanted to return to it and had been working on it all weekend. We tried it a few different ways and challenged her to make some decisions about what she wanted to do with the audience. We talked about how in Shakespeare’s day there wasn’t much of a “fourth wall” or separation from the audience. The relationship with the audience would’ve felt more like stand-up comedy, vaudeville, or a talent show: there is an acknowledgement that the audience is there, and it is woven into the text. This is hard to do because all of those examples are comedic, so it can be tough to shift to something dramatic in nature. But we tried it several ways and really let our actor try it out for herself. It was great to hear the ensemble's reactions. “I could really feel it more,” said one, and the actor said she felt like “a weight had been lifted” after she finished performing.

Friday / June 30 / 2023
Written by Maria Tejada

It’s been a minute since we got back into reading the play, so we all agreed to jump back into Act Two, Scene Two, in which Hamlet starts messing with Polonius and his “buddies,” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. A few ensemble members particularly enjoy those characters, so we were happy to have a chance to play with a fun scene. After briefly chatting about what it would be like to start incorporating backdrops, props, and costumes into a performance and summarizing the previous scenes, we started to read in the circle. When Polonius said, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in it,” the woman reading Rosencrantz said, “That’s my favorite line.” 

We quickly decided that we wanted to play with some characterization on our feet. I suggested to our Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to really go big with a “frat boy” character, as we had all decided that they were not actually close with Hamlet but were trying to get information for the king, while he was just trying to gauge what information they knew. “I feel like Rosencrantz is the smarter-ish,” said the woman playing him. “Does that make you want to be in front more?” another woman watching the scene asked. Rosencrantz agreed, and they adjusted the blocking to incorporate the change in attitude, strengthening the scene and relationships between characters. 

When we got to Hamlet’s “Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I” soliloquy, another woman volunteered to read the speech from her chair. When she finished, she said that she liked it and it didn’t seem to be as long as she thought (at first, she had refused to read the entire speech since it was so long) and that there were a few spots where she could change her attitude. We asked her to read it again to hear these attitude changes, and you could feel the difference as her energy built as she worked her way through the soliloquy. “When Shakespeare makes a list, you build madder and madder…and you did that,” one woman said, referring to something that was discussed on Tuesday.

A different woman, who is aways game to jump in and take on a challenge, volunteered to try the speech next. She raced through it like a horse out of the stable, building with unbridled energy and hardly taking a breath. “Slow down!” one woman enthusiastically implored. Hamlet looked at us, confused, and said, “I thought I was supposed to read fast,” which prompted a wonderful conversation about keeping energy through each thought but using pauses and breath for Hamlet to have realizations and work through his indecision. You could see a light switch on behind her eyes as everyone collaborated on how to make the speech better.   

We finished the evening with a short round of storytelling, a game called “Fortunately, Unfortunately” in which players go around the circle telling a story one sentence at a time, alternating between fortunately and unfortunately. It was quite a dramatic story, beginning with a man who had torn a hole in his pants, to calling the police and ending up in prison. Even though the story ended in tragedy, we were laughing and smiling as we put the ring up on another wonderful session.