Or Not To Be

Scene 2

“It was incredible,” explains Chris Pennock, who was cast as Claudius. “I came on board after they had been rehearsing for maybe three weeks. Gertrude [Claudia Stedelin] told me about it. We’re friends from the Actors Studio. I had just done this wonderful production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? So I thought, okay, let’s do Hamlet. So I came in and auditioned for Aaron Mullen, he gave it to me on the spot, and went into rehearsals the next day. That first rehearsal was a disaster, very technical. He’s a British director, so he doesn’t work very organically, so it’s all on the word and on the text, which is a new way of working for me. I do soap operas, so this was all new for me. So I was curious about the guy Hamlet. I was there 14 or 15 rehearsals before he actually showed up — apparently Francesco was locked up in a hotel room learning his lines. I said, ‘Okay.’ I also heard he was a multimillionaire and there were going to be billboards at $30K apiece, and there was going to be HBO George Clooney/Steven Soderbergh filming us. I said, ‘Okay, we are in.’ Then Hamlet shows up, and I can’t understand a word he’s saying.”

Scene 3

Polonius continues: “Francesco’s a good guy but totally off the track doing what he did. I don’t know what he was doing on the stage. All the other actors were wonderful, young people and people my age, wonderful people, but we all knew what the problem was — Francesco — and we realized he wasn’t putting his efforts into it. We didn’t learn about the billboards until we were a week or so from opening. I thought, why doesn’t he do the thing in Greek? One day he did, and my God, the man is so loose and wonderful when he speaks in Greek. I’m not putting him down for his mistake; I’m not putting him down for taking giant steps before baby ones. I just don’t know what the hell he was thinking. I could have dropped out. At the same time, I’m semi-retired and I liked the people and the doing of it, so I stuck with it. And it just got worse and worse and worse.”

Scene 4

Adds Claudius, “I tried to leave six or seven times, but they kept bringing me back in. Claudia would say, ‘Come on, we can do this, and if you quit, I’ll quit.’ You know what it really was that brought me back — it was George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh.”

Scene 5

“Along came George Clooney doing this half-reality, half-scripted show,” Polonius recalls. “He rented out the theater on Monday nights. He filmed a rehearsal — I didn’t care for that. They paid everybody $115 extra work. They had one of the stars of that TV show [Jennifer Hall in All My Children] step in for Ophelia, then they came back two or three weeks later, and they wanted everybody to shoot the thing in our costumes. I opted out, I told George Clooney no, I’m not going to do this because of the way it was shot. They had extras playing audience members who were walking out of the theater during the play. When he was shooting Francesco, you could see Francesco was terrible. I knew what Clooney was doing. I said, ‘No, I’m not going to be in this. I don’t want to be on TV as part of this asshole theater group.’”

Scene 6

“It’s not a mockery of that production,” insists Grant Heslov, co-executive producer (with George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh) of Section 8 production company. Heslov showed up with Clooney at the Tamarind Theater in mid-February to film an as-yet-untitled series for HBO, scheduled for release in October. (The Tamarind footage awaits its fate at Section 8’s studio.)

“We’d shot a pilot, we already had our actors. One of the storylines was that one of the girls [Hall] gets put into a play [as Ophelia in Hamlet] two weeks before it’s about to open. We didn’t know the Tamarind was actually doing Hamletat the time. That was a total coincidence. We just chose it for the space.”

(Both Heslov and Clooney have experience in local theater going back more than 20 years.)

“When we stepped into their rehearsal, we weren’t looking for anything in particular. We literally didn’t direct anything. We had cameras there, and we just let it play.”

And what about the audience leaving the play? What about the curtain call with Frank Langella as the only remaining audience member applauding?

“That was about her doing a play with more people on the stage than in the audience, it wasn’t a comment on the production. If anybody is trying to do theater, we say, ‘God bless ‘em.’ It was more about an actor’s experience doing Equity Waiver and trying to make that fit.”

Heslov says they all knew that trouble was brewing.