Seeds

I've always found it interesting from what a wide range of sources theatre artists draw their inspiration. There might be a painting, a scrap of song, a particular vista or a childhood memory at the root of any production.

SCT Artistic Associate Rita Giomi has just recently started rehearsals for her adaptation of Hamlet for five actors, and shared with Behind the Curtain one of the seeds of inspiration for her adaptation, this wonderfully evocative quote:

I am trying to recall attention from the things an intellectual adult notices to the things a child or a peasant notices - night, ghosts, a castle lobby where a man can walk four hours together, a willow-fringed brook and a sad lady drowned, a graveyard and a terrible cliff above the sea, and amidst all these a pale man in black clothes with his stockings coming down, a dishevelled man whose words make us at once think of loneliness and doubt and dread, of waste and dust and emptiness and from whose hands to our own, we feel the richness of heaven and earth and the comfort of human affection slipping away.

- C.S. Lewis

One can almost feel themselves on the ramparts of a castle in Denmark, wrapped in mists and accosted by the ghost of a dead king. It strikes just the right tone for the Bard's timeless tale of treachery and revenge.

Hamlet opens January 25th and runs through February 24th at Seattle Children's Theatre.