Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont internship, for the Times Argus
PLAINFIELD — Starting on June 18, the Green Mountain Shakespeare Festival will present its production of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” at the Plainfield Town Hall Opera House, and director Tom Blachly couldn’t be more proud.
“I’ve directed many, many plays over the course of my life, and I think this is one of the best casts I’ve ever assembled,” he said.
“Hamlet” begins with the death of Hamlet’s father, the king of Denmark. His father comes to him as a ghost and tells Hamlet that he was murdered by Hamlet’s uncle, who has taken control over the kingdom, and asks Hamlet to avenge his death.
“That’s really the essential dilemma of the play,” Blachly said. “Hamlet’s dilemma is about whether he should take the ghost’s word and avenge his death or not, and so he dithers, and he spends a lot of the time wondering, ‘But what’s the right thing to do?’”
Hamlet, the titular young lord, is played by Fergus Ryan, 26. Blachly has been directing Ryan since he was in high school and has watched him grow. Last year, Ryan made his own directing debut with “King Lear” for the Parish Players.
“‘King Lear’ is another just giant mountain to climb, and he did a great job with it. Taking on a project like that at such an early age shows you the ambition that he has.” Blachly said.
As for Ryan’s current role in “Hamlet,” Blachly states, “He’s really inhabited the role. Every rehearsal, he gets deeper and deeper into this complex role. He’s someone who really goes into himself in a deep, profound and intense way.”
Meanwhile, Michael Keene, once a professional actor, who plays Claudius, was a little reluctant at first.
“He wasn’t sure he could learn lines,” Blachly said. “But he started early. He’s an extremely good actor with great stage presence. That’s another very important role in the play that has to be done well, or the play doesn’t really work.”
Susannah Blachly, Tom Blachly’s wife, is playing Gertrude, the queen and Hamlet’s mother; Alex Yahm-Halberg is playing Ophelia, Hamlet’s love interest; and Evan Lewis, who played Romeo in last year’s Shakespeare Festival, will return as Horatio, Hamlet’s best friend. Finally, Caleb Paige will be playing Laertes, Ophelia’s brother, and will be returning later in the season to play Richard III.
Of Paige, Blachly said, “He’s a phenomenal young actor, almost a prodigy. I feel like I completely lucked out into this cast.”
“Hamlet” is the first of three plays the Green Mountain Shakespeare Festival will present this summer. It will be followed by “Love’s Labor’s Lost” in July and “Richard III” in August.
Blachly is a theater veteran who started acting at age 10 and hasn’t left the theater since. He made his directing debut in 1992 with Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure.”
While this is only the Green Mountain Shakespeare Festival’s second year of operation, it continues a long-running Vermont tradition. In 1959, Edward Feidner, then-director of the University of Vermont theater department, founded the Champlain Shakespeare Festival. It ran for 30 years until his retirement in 1989.
In college at UVM, Blachly acted in several plays presented by the Champlain Shakespeare Festival including “Macbeth,” “Othello,” and “Two Gentlemen of Verona.”
“That’s where I really got hooked on the idea of the Shakespeare Festival. I think Vermont deserves one,” he said.
According to Blachly, Shakespeare’s writing holds up a timeless mirror to human nature, as Hamlet himself says in Act 3, Scene 2.
For anything so o’erdone is from the purpose
of playing, whose end, both at the first and
now, was and is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to
nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her
own image, and the very age and body of the time
his form and pressure.
“Hamlet is every man,” Blachly said. “Hamlet is a composite of humanity. He contains multitudes, and so I think that’s why people have been so focused on him for 400 years. He seems to distill all of the essence of humanity into one role, one creation.”