How Hamlet Inspired Black History!

ACT I

Being in Hamlet at Studio@620 is an affirmation of the success I've had slowly sprouting and budding flowers. Studying Shakespeare from Bob's lens has been transformative as a young black male looking to make a claim in society as an actor and artist.

I've often had the turmoil of my mother and family members asking me what am I going to do for a "living"; training professionally as an actor could only be considered a hobby until it pays the bills. In mentioning this to Bob, he'd graciously recount his time coming to a "Red State" to retire his career with the Key to the city of St. Petersburg and community of loved ones and artists that will continue to support him. I've always had a tremendous deal of respect for Bob, but having worked with him on this project has been an affirmation that it is possible; that being who I am and where I'm from, I can do it because there's someone who has been doing it for twenty years and continues to create opportunities for people of color to work in this space.

“Speak the speech trippingly on the tongue as I pronounced it to you! Do not saw the air with your hands thus”

And although this advice was to the players, the world could've use because in a corporate setting (or the court in Hamlet's time). We’re all performing and we can see clearly how performing madness lead to it manifesting in Hamlet's behaviour. So his knowledge of performance and psychology was vivid and echoes the sentiments of Stanislavsky and Freud. How could we correlate that to professional behaviour?

Performing in this play has been a spiritual experience because Hamlet continues to question the beyond about the Here and Now. Asking his father, asking the Gods, the enemy and the audience what does it means to be ALIVE!

It is so divine to perform as I am writing Black History They Don’t Want You to Know because it is in fact a play about legacy, a play about the discovery of Ancestry and inheritance. How does the Beyond connect to the now. And those that have traversed the beyond, how do they play a role today the here and now if any?