Oscar Isaac is about to Ham(let) it up…
The 37-year-old Guatemalan and Cuban American actor will play William Shakespeare’s melancholy Prince of Denmark in a new production of Hamlet for the Brooklyn-based company Theatre for a New Audience. It’s more than a year off, but the play, to be staged by Sam Gold, will certainly be a big draw for artistic director Jeffrey Horowitz’s celebrated and increasingly ambitious company, which presents in its sleek new headquarters, the Polonsky Shakespeare Center.
Hamlet is slated to begin previews June 4, 2017 for an opening June 22 and run through July 30. The pairing of star (Star Wars: The Force Awakens; A Most Violent Year; Inside Llewyn Davis) director (Tony Award winner for staging the Tony Winning best musical Fun Home) should continue TFNA’s upward profile — and demonstrate that the prospect of a Tony nomination isn’t the only reason marquee actors are drawn to the stage or even to Brooklyn
Isaac and Gold previously worked together on Zoe Kazan’s We Live Here, in 2011.
Hamlet is their first Shakespeare collaboration and their first production with TFNA.
“Oscar is celebrated for the honesty, authenticity, and intensity of his performances,” Horowitz said in announcing the production Sunday afternoon, “and Hamlet marks his long-desired return to theater after an impressive series of starring film and television roles. Sam is renowned for the transparent subtlety and nuance of the theatrical worlds he creates. Together [they] will explore the ‘undiscovered country’ of Hamlet’s world which begins, of course, with the first words of the play, ‘Who’s there?’”
Casting and other creative decisions will be announced later.
