Teaching HAMLET

Shakespeare’s Birthday Cocktail Party! Time: Apr 23, 2021 05:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada) Join Zoom Meeting https://us04web.zoom.us/j/76848843667?pwd=djI4Mk91WGpGcUoybCtod0hNd00wdz09 Meeting ID: 768 4884 3667 Passcode: 9W0nfH

Welcome to the first in my series of Sourdough Shakespeare blog posts! Sometimes the best place to escape the realities of our time is a favorite old book whose characters and questions will continue to outlive us all. Or in this case an old play. Specifically one of the most famous plays in the English

Shakespeare is the Literary Sourdough of the Pandemic It’s full of hot air and we don’t quite understand how it works Welcome to a series of blog posts in which I will share some of the delicious Shakespearean morsels I’ve been gobbling up during lockdown. At the beginning of 2021 I was discussing the ubiquitous

The question we have to ask as teachers and theater artists today is, are Shakespeare’s plays still worth it, or should we stop giving them their hours on the stage? “Shakespeare is not spinach. It is not always good for you.” ~ Ayanna Thompson Othello was one of my first Shakespeare plays as a teacher

“Just checking in.”  Sending a “How are you?” text out of the blue; telling someone we’re thinking of them; asking how they are doing with their sick parent, move, job search, the whole “empty nest’ thing, whatever.  Those are forms of checking in, and valuable ones for sure.  But today’s COVID climate calls for a

We should be in Paris right now.          One of my best friends is turning 70 on Saturday and we were going to Paris to celebrate. We’ve been soul sisters, mentor and mentee, confidants and counselors to each other for over 20 years, and have always dreamed of one day being in

THIS BOOK! I would really like to be in a book club discussion of Maggie O’Farrell’s “HAMNET”. But–no offense–with teachers and scholars and pretty serious fans of Shakespeare. Because I want to get really geeked out about the specific choices O’Farrell made about Shakespeare’s life and family.  First off, let me confess, I think she

This month my book baby, Teaching HAMLET as My Father Died, finally entered the world. Let me tell you, that baby was stuck in the birth canal for a really long time. So what now? Take care of the baby? Starting thinking about having another? Maybe I should try figuring out why I wrote it

For years I’ve been doing a deep dive into Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, endeavoring to translate the experience of teaching a play that I knew pretty well while I went through an experience that was completely new to me.  Teaching Hamlet as my father was dying I began to see the truth in scholar Harold Bloom’s