To play the role of “Hamlet,” one could quote from the Bard’s title character and say, “The readiness is all.”
In the case of Zach Appelman, who takes on the title role in the Hartford Stage production, which begins previews Oct. 16, he’s been ready for some time.
Last year the Yale School of Drama grad played the role of the conflicted prince for the Folger Shakespeare Library audio edition recording of the play. (Appelman even played the role in the fifth-grade in Palo Alto, Calif., but he mostly remembers the swordplay from that heavily abridged production.)
“Now I feel really ready for this role,” he says over drinks at Sorella’s during a break in rehearsals. “I didn’t feel, ‘Oh my gosh, how am I possibly going to do this?’ I have the eagerness and I have the desire.”
This is the 10th Shakespearean play the actor has performed, including “Henry V’ at Folger Theatre in Washington and playing Demetrius in Julie Taymor’ recent stage and film version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
The production also marks the first directing project for Darko Tresnjak since receiving the Tony Award for directing “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.” But even before helming the hit Broadway musical, Tresnjak had a reputation for staging Shakespeare at Hartford Stage (“The Tempest,” “Macbeth,” “Twelfth Night”), where he is artistic director, as well as at theaters across North America.
He staged “Hamlet” once before — but outdoors — in 2007 at the Old Globe Playhouse. “I was proud of it but when you have airplanes and the sounds of animals from the San Diego Zoo mating, well, that’s your production.”
Tresnjak’s version could be called “Hamlet 1.0” because he is basing the order of the scenes from the 1603 texts “most likely the order the play was originally performed [around 1600] so the Ophelia scene and Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be” soliloquy comes much sooner [than usually performed].”
Tresnjak sets his production in the period it was written, stressing the religious context of that Protestant Reformation era and how it influences the action of the play. “The audience [of Shakespeare’s time] would not perceive the play as escapist in any way, shape or form. It’s about religious wars and cycles of revenge and spying and surveillance. And it’s all frightening now as it was then.”
As soon as Tresnjak announced he was going to be directing “Hamlet” a wave of texts and emails came his way but he only invited four actors whose work he had been eyeing to audition.
One was Appelman, who in July was in North Carolina filming an episode of TV’s “Sleepy Hollow” — to be aired at the end of the month — so the actor submitted his audition on video. “The only quiet spot in my hotel room,” says Appelman, “was in the bathroom so I propped up my iPhone at the edge of the bathtub and sat on the floor against the wall, which was the only place where the lighting was halfway decent.”
He pressed “on” and began: “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I…” The clip went to an impressed Tresnjak and, after a conversation with Tresnjak, Appelman was offered the role.
Then the actor started re-learning the immense role throughout his next gig, which was filming an episode of another sci-fi TV series, “Beauty and the Beast.” “I was on the set shooting lighting bolts out of my hands as the villain and then in my dressing room reading, ‘To be or not to be…’ “
Hamlet As Youth
For the Hartford Stage production, Tresnjak definitely wanted a youthful Hamlet, one who might conceivably be a student at Wittenberg U.
“I understand why older actors who have clout can line up productions,” he says. “But then you have to cut all the references to Hamlet being young. It’s in the text that he’s a youth and the speed and the volatility of his character is that of a young man.”
“And he’s a student,” says Appelman, who is in his late 20s. “There’s also something about a young person confronting that first major loss of a parent and how that can be earth-shattering — as opposed to someone in his 40s.”
He acknowledges modern interpretations layering psychoanalysis and diagnoses of neurosis and afflictions on the work “but at the heart of the play it’s about a young man struggling to cope with the death of his father. That’s how the play begins and that was my way in, too.”
Appelman challenges the assumption that Hamlet is the ultimate inaction hero, that of a ever-vacillating man.
“When you look at the language it’s incredibly active,” says Appelman. “He’s a philosopher trying to find out the right thing to do. So here you have a young Lutheran in a time when that was very important being given the task of a pagan revenge killing which was a completely un-Christian thing to do — the Bible prohibited it. Elizabethans believed strongly that ghosts were real creatures from beyond and they could be sometimes benevolent or they could be the devil trying to lure you. So what do you do? It’s a fantastic dilemma.
“The inaction is not of someone who doesn’t want to do something,” says Appelman. “It’s actually a young man trying to figure out what the right thing is to do — which makes it more interesting and fun to play.
Karate Kid
Appelman says his youthful passion for Shakespeare expanded in college and beyond. “I had such a love of the works and so I would spend extra time out of class, focusing on and trying to learn the works, actively trying to steep myself in it all.”
But Appelman wasn’t a theater buff when he was a boy, instead gravitating to sports and especially karate where he earned a black belt in high school. (“As a physically active kid, I loved the Ninja Turtles,” he says.)
It wasn’t until his freshman year in UC Santa Barbara that he took an acting class and loved it enough to set his major to theater. After graduation he went to New Haven to attend Yale’s School of Drama.
The son of a high-tech copyright lawyer and a former grade school teacher, his parents and grandparents shared their appreciation of the arts with him and supported Appelman’s decision “to follow my bliss” and become an actor.
After Yale there were more Shakespeare roles at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater and Chautauqua Theater, a run in Broadway’s “War Horse,” TV gigs in “Homeland,” “Law & Order: SVU” and “Black Box” and films “Kill Your Darlings” and “Eve.”
‘To Be…’ Hamlet
And then there’s the “To be or not to be speech,” arguably the most famous soliloquy in drama.
“There’s’ a real danger of doing things differently for the sake of being different,” says Appelman, “and that you make choices that aren’t actually helpful to the story or supported by the text simply in an effort to make it unique
“I feel with any role — and especially Hamlet — it takes on the personality of the actor playing it and that my Hamlet is going to be very different just because I am who I am and Paul Giamatti [who played the role two years ago at Yale Repertory Theatre] and Hamish [Linklater, who played the role at Long Wharf Theatre in 2004] and Richard Burton [who played it on Broadway in the ’60s] who are who they are — and without me consciously trying to think about doing it differently.
“You have to trust you’re going to bring a lot of uniqueness to it just by bringing yourself to it so by the time I get to the ‘To be or not to be’ my task is — yeah it’s a famous speech now let that go and what’s it about and what are you saying. My task is to find the truth of it and in the story that’s being told with it, rather than how can I surprise people with it.”
Appelman feels a connection to others that have played the role before him. “There’s a camaraderie knowing that there are all these other actors who struggled with this role, too. I also know not every actor gets to do it and knowing that so many deserve to. I feel very fortunate and I’m so happy that it’s happening.
“HAMLET” is in previews from Thursday, Oct. 16, opening to the press on Wednesday, Oct. 22. Performances run through Nov. 16 at 50 Church St., Hartford. Information: 860-527-5151 and www.hartfordstage.org.
