I Hate Hamlet

A Note from Bill

Who doesn’t love a good sex farce?

It felt almost impossibly fitting to direct I Hate Hamlet as the play that brought the Maltz Jupiter Theatre back to live performance after the long, painful interruption of COVID.

This is a play about an actor deciding whether to step onto a stage and take on something that frightens him. We were making it as theatres everywhere were asking: How do we come back? Why? What makes this thing we do worth fighting for?

Beneath Paul Rudnick’s wit is a serious question: what are we willing to risk to become the artists we are capable of becoming? And who are the mentors who inspire us to greater heights?

Those questions became personal through my collaboration with Tom Hewitt, who played Barrymore. Tom and I first worked together nearly thirty years earlier at Hartford Stage in Julius Caesar, when I was 17. When I needed an actor who was charismatic, dangerous, funny, generous, fearless, and fluent in Shakespeare’s language, I thought immediately of Tom.

I sent him a cold email to let him know that the teenager from Julius Caesar was now a director.

He answered within minutes.

And just like that, we were back in a rehearsal room together.

I loved working on this play with a brilliant company of clowns.

Rudnick lets us laugh at our own theatrical pretensions while reminding us why they exist.

And after two years of loss, it felt so good to laugh again.