In 2018, Oskar Eustis, who runs the Public Theater, where I advise Shakespeare productions, introduced me to the theater director Kenny Leon. He was hoping to persuade Kenny to direct something for Shakespeare in the Park, and asked me to talk with him. I’m a professor with no acting or directing experience, but I am good at cutting four-hour plays down to size, can explain to actors the difference between thee and you, and have written extensively about Shakespeare’s world. And after a decade or so of advising Royal Shakespeare Company and Public Theater productions, I could tell pretty quickly which directors were great at staging Shakespeare; it turns out surprisingly few.
Kenny was, like me, in his mid-60s. I’m a white guy from Brooklyn; he’s a Black man from the South. I knew him only by reputation: a Tony Award–winning director who had acted, run a couple of theater companies, and done a lot of work on television and Broadway, much of it illuminating Black life in America. We talked about which of Shakespeare’s plays he might find appealing and settled on Much Ado About Nothing, a darkish comedy that could accommodate an African American cast and be set in contemporary Georgia (it helped that the play’s locale, Messina, shared a name with a town not far from Atlanta). After only a couple of days of rehearsals, I could see that Kenny had an unrivaled gift for getting at the essence of Shakespeare. His production was thrilling. Most directors don’t like having a scholar in the room, but Kenny made clear that he enjoyed having me around. And I was learning a lot about the play that could never be picked up from books.
After that run, I saw everything Kenny directed on Broadway—A Soldier’s Play, Topdog/ Underdog, Ohio State Murders—always wondering if he’d return to Shakespeare. So I was thrilled in 2021 when he got in touch and said he was interested in directing Hamlet for a Shakespeare in the Park production. We went to work figuring out how to manage a cut that would allow him to, as Shakespeare put it, show “the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” The challenge of making a play first staged in Elizabethan London speak to contemporary Americans was daunting. Watching Kenny direct over the past six weeks, surmounting this challenge, has been among the most gratifying experiences in my career as a Shakespearean. As dress rehearsal approached, I asked Kenny if we could chat while he grabbed a quick dinner in Manhattan’s theater district.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
James Shapiro: I just found an email from you, from February 2021, a month after the attack on the Capitol. And you wrote, “I’m reading Hamlet over breakfast. I do want to do it with an African American cast. Does it make sense to explore this story in a return to the South?” So you’ve been thinking about this play for two years now.
Kenny Leon: Yes. And we indeed set it in Atlanta a year after the start of the pandemic, a little bit after George Floyd’s murder and the racial reawakening. When we spoke, I had also been teaching classes virtually. And I looked into the eyes of the young people, and I saw the fear in them. I saw sadness in them about where our country was, where it was going in terms of politics, religion and almost everything. I realized that this is an opportunity to look at Hamlet through the lens of those students. Can I set this play in 2020, in Atlanta, Georgia, honoring everything that Shakespeare has on the page, only using his words, only substituting original songs that are more contemporary but nothing else? And as I went through that process, I got more and more excited.
Shapiro: And that meant focusing the play on certain of its themes?
Leon: We’re focusing on the relationships. We’re focusing on the domestic part of the play. We’re not focusing on the political, the military part of the play. Because when you get rid of our institutions, our armies and navies, and you get rid of presidents and governors, you’re left with people. People. People make up the military. People make up the government. People. So we focus it down on these people. Now, some of these people may be in positions of power; some may not be not in positions of power. But this is a Hamlet that is, at heart, about people.
Shapiro: There are always going to be those who are purists. A play called Hamlet was staged when Shakespeare came to London in the late 1580s. It wasn’t his Hamlet; it was somebody else’s. I’m sure some Elizabethan purist who came to see Shakespeare’s Hamlet in 1600 walked out of the Globe Theatre saying, “I can’t believe he messed with my favorite play. He made all these changes. How dare he tamper with it in that way?” I’m sure there are going to be people who say that about every Hamlet production they see, yours as well.
Leon: I think Shakespeare left a beautiful road map. I haven’t betrayed his road map. So, you know, he says, there’s a funeral. He says Hamlet’s father is dead. Set it in Atlanta, Georgia, so the funeral’s in southwest Atlanta. These people would sing at the funeral. So as people are walking into the Delacorte [the Central Park theater where Shakespeare in the Park is staged] it’s like, a funeral is in progress. I always wanted Solea Pfeiffer to be Ophelia.
Shapiro: Because of her voice?
Leon: Because of her voice, and because of her look. It was important to me to have Hamlet’s side of the family be Black and Polonius’s side of the family be white or mixed race. That was important, to just get that race dynamic in there. And I knew I needed an Ophelia who could sing, because I know she has those two or three songs in there. And in other productions, I think people get bored or irritated by those songs. So I wanted to establish that Ophelia had a beautiful voice, almost like she’s a singer. And then you fall in love with her, and you feel that love for her early on. So then when we lose her, it means something. I wanted to give the women in the play a little more visible strength than in the past. So you have Lorraine Toussaint as Gertrude, playing it like Michelle Obama. And you have Solea, who has a beautiful singing voice. It gives them a little more strength and gives them a little bite to push back on the men.
Shapiro: You know, there’s somebody who’s not credited in the playbill who figured in a lot of moments, crucial moments, in your rehearsals: Leroy. I was hoping you might give him some credit here.
Leon: Yeah, I have a term, I introduced it … My biological father, Leroy, died about three years ago, and he is a guy who never left Tallahassee, Florida, until a year before he passed. You know, he’s a real basic guy. He’s the type of guy that would go into a New York restaurant and say, “Where the food at, boy? Where’s the food?” So I introduced that to the actors early on and said, “I want a play that Leroy could understand. Someone who’s never been to a play, someone who is an Everyman, and they want to be fed the things that theater has to offer.” We just have to, like you said, get to Shakespeare and lose the Shakespearean. So whenever I shout out the word Leroy! in rehearsals, that means I cannot understand what you’re talking about; I don’t know what you mean. So we have to get clear, make it clear for Leroy. So this is a Shakespeare that we’re trying to make clear for Leroy, a country guy who grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, with outdoor plumbing.
Shapiro: You know, at one point, I heard you ask the actors to “let the culture in.” What did you mean by that?
Leon: I’m always reminded of something August Wilson taught me: It’s that you have to be specific with the story you’re telling, especially culturally. And the more specific you are with the people in the play—who they are, where they come from, what they eat, how they do their hair, what music they listen to—the more specific you are, the better opportunity you have of saying something powerful and impactful and universal for everybody that comes to the Delacorte. So that’s what it’s about. To me, it’s not about reaching Black people or white people or intellectuals or nonintellectuals or theater folks. It’s about reaching human beings, reaching people. And I think by making this specific to Atlanta, Georgia, without changing the words—making the music specific, making the food specific, making their hair specific—we can do that.
Shapiro: John Douglas Thompson, who plays Claudius, told me that he was really struck by how this production is about community rather than Hamlet as an individual. Does that resonate with you?
Leon: Well that’s also because of the cut that you helped me with. It focused on the community, the relationships, the people. So once you focus on the people and you carve around that, it really helps—for one thing, because there’s no way a modern audience is going to sit for a five-hour production.
Shapiro: Well, I hope not, although sometimes they’re forced to. Now, you told me what you needed, and I was the butcher and happy to give you the cut you needed. It was easy because you decided that all this Polish, English, Norwegian, Danish stuff—the European geopolitical parts of the play—didn’t fit the Atlanta story. And once that was gone, we got it down closer to two and a half hours than four-hours plus. And again, it’s all Shakespeare’s language—except for the songs, which, as in Shakespeare’s day, including in Macbeth and Twelfth Night, could be swapped out for newer ones. It seems to me that you’ve been able to bring in more of a cultural story as a result. For example, the Black community’s experience of mourning, of burial, of responding to the dead, of ancestors and their presence in one’s life is particularly striking, and was a revelation for me with my Brooklyn, white, Jewish upbringing. Can you talk about the Ghost a little bit in the context of that?
Leon: The Ghost? Yeah. The Ghost is actually very familiar to my culture. I grew up Black, southern, Christian, but, you know, my culture has a different relationship with the spiritual world. Even if you go to see horror movies we’ve got a different sense of horror movies. We don’t trip down, running away from the monster. Man, we keep going. Or we’re not going to leave the woman in the car, if we think there’s a possibility of a ghost showing up. If you go back to the Caribbean and the African traditions, you can find our relationship to the dead. When Hamlet sees the Ghost, we don’t know if he actually sees it or if the ghost is in him or the ghost is part of him. But we do know that he believes that he is seeing a ghost. And at some point, the Ghost possesses him physically. And I think we pull that off. I think we did a pretty good job of that. But that’s also a culturally specific element that we’re bringing to the show.
Shapiro: Part of that specificity comes through in your choice of Hamlet, Ato Blankson-Wood. I’m just curious, is Ato the Hamlet that was in your head when you cast him?
Leon: You know, when I first met Ato—I ran into him last summer—I was consulting on a project that he and some young people were doing about racial awakening, and he took that “to be or not to be” speech, and he personalized it and made it appropriate for what young Black men were going through in America after George Floyd’s death. And so I knew that was the right quality for our Hamlet. And I sort of felt he could deliver that. And now, after working with him, I think it’s a generational performance. No one has quite found the love in that character like Ato has. No one has found the scary part. One of the things we wanted to explore was that idea and definition of what mental health is in our lives today. And he’s embraced that. It’s a scary emotional journey that he’s taking us through. And I just think that it’s a performance of a lifetime. And I couldn’t ask for a better defining moment for that character.
Shapiro: You know, it’s also a defining moment for Hamlet, all these years after its creation, that it could feel so intended for what he does with it, that there’s no tension between the words he’s saying and the character he’s bringing to the role.
Leon: There was one thing Ato asked me when we first started rehearsing: He said, “Can I bring all of me into this Hamlet?” I said, “Yes.” And I feel that it’s a three-dimensional character with a soul and a spirit and a mind and a future. It actually feels like a brand-new play. It feels like a character I’ve never met before.