DC Theater Arts: Chances are that if you spend time at the Folger Shakespeare Library, you know that there is a play called Hamlet that was written by William Shakespeare about 400 years ago.
But even those with the most rudimentary knowledge of Shakespeare’s masterpiece will appreciate Playwright Lauren M. Gunderson’s latest girl-power drama, A Room in the Castle, a re-examination of Hamlet that puts the women front and center.
2 comments:
My first introduction to Hamlet was in Foundations of Drama last semester. Before that I hadn’t read a single Shakespeare play, but I had read some of his poetry in high school. I wasn’t really a fan of his work. However, I can see the impact and relevance of it, especially the more famous ones like Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet. I also love these sort of productions, where the female characters are given a spotlight. Like Gunderson said, when we actually take the time to focus on female characters such as Ophelia, there are clues that hint at a more complex and fleshed out version of the character. This seems to be becoming more popular, with the jukebox musical & Juliet examining a different version of events where Juliet survived in Romeo and Juliet. I’m sure there are other plays, not just ones by Shakespeare, that could be reexamined and be produced with the female characters as the central characters.
I am lucky enough to have Kaja Dunn as one of my professors here at CMU and her life and passion that she brings to the classroom creates a fantastic environment for learning. From the tidbits I have heard in the classroom about this production and the intricacies of the production, I can only imagine it is a spectacular play. Transforming a play into focusing on essentially background female characters provides depth to the play that would be near impossible for the audience to provide the details and imagine the life of the women in the original production of Hamlet. Focussing on only 3 characters from the original production of around forty lets Laura Gunderson explore the women that essentially none of the other characters had the time to dive as deep into. It would be a treat to be able to go to DC and see the production in action.
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