The Flatwater Shakespeare Company is staging "Hamlet" for the first time in nine years. For the first time in nearly a decade, something is rotten at the Flatwater Shakespeare Company. "Hamlet," the Bard's most famous tragedy and his longest play, will get its first Flatwater treatment in nine years when it opens Thursday at the Wyuka Stables.
When you have Shakespeare in your name, "Hamlet" is rather hard to avoid for too long. "I understand this is the third (Hamlet) production that Flatwater has done, so it feels like one every decade," said Ann Marie Pollard, an assistant professor of voice, movement and acting at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who is directing the play. "It's timeless, it's deep.
There's so many themes that you can focus on." Ann Marie Pollard The ones Pollard decided to zero in on include, in part, questions about the afterlife, how the state of Hamlet's father's ghost affects religious beliefs, and explorations of sanity versus insanity. This is Hamlet, after all.
That's not to say Pollard is doing anything different with the story, she said, but it has guided some of her edits to truncate the script down to the two-and-a-half hour run time — "It's certainly a workout for Michael Pritchett-Madden," who plays Hamlet, she said. To do that, Pollard's received advice from Stephen Buhler, a UNL English professor and resident scholar at Flatwater who is also playing Polonius, who went back and forth on changes to the script. "Everything always starts .