The SunBreak » hamlet

An Off the Boards Discussion of Annie Dorsen’s “A Piece of Work”

StefanDW — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 22:09:45 +0000

SDW: I didn't much enjoy the show -- at least not emotionally. Intellectually I loved it and in no small part because I felt like it failed kind of spectacularly as theatre. This is all the more interesting to me because it feels very close to success. A bit more humanization one way or another could have brought it together.

At On the Boards, A Piece of Work Challenges Noble Reason, Finite Faculty

StefanDW — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 20:01:55 +0000

Great works of theatre often take a thing we know and change small pieces of it in order to help us see it and our world anew. A Piece of Work takes the opposite approach, reordering the context and fabric of the piece to raise questions about larger structures including our understanding of the performer/audience relationship.

Welcome to the Hamletmachine, Says Annie Dorsen

Michael van Baker — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 23:32:29 +0000

Here is what we know. False Peach uses the text of Shakespeare's Hamlet. It stars, in the traditional sense, a single performer: Scott Shepherd (you may remember him from such shows as Gatz, the eight-hour theatrical adaptation of The Great Gatsby). But the creative team that Dorsen has assembled -- the "perfect dinner party" she calls the collaboration -- were all enlisted to create a "hamletmachine" that would perform-parse False Peach differently each night.

Shakespeare Beat: A Horrorstruck “Hamlet” & Loopy “Love’s Labour’s Lost”

Michael van Baker — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 23:18:00 +0000

A lesser director might insist on "breaking" walls, but Langs erases them, pushing his actors out, and pulling the audience closer. His Hamlet opens in the pitch dark of the night watch, everyone's eyes adjusting to the gloom, ears homing in on the voices, and already visible distinctions have vanished.