Spread the Love: Hamlette by Allison Williams

This week we spread the love for Hamlette by Allison Williams. Recorded live at the 2009 Florida State Thespians Conference in Tampa, Florida.

Transcript

Hi! Welcome to this week’s Spread the Love. We are here at the Florida State Thespian conference and this week’s Spread the Love is Hamlette by Allison Williams. Not Hamletty, Not Hamlet, Hamlette.

The reason that we love Hamlette – it’s got a very special place in our hearts – because this is the very first outside author and outside play that we introduced to Theatrefolk way long ago. And it’s not just any old play. What we love about it is that it takes Shakespeare and turns it on it’s ear. It’s Hamlet if Hamlet was played by a girl.

And even more special, we have Allison Williams right here.

It’s like magic! It’s like we’re in a whole new location!

So Allison, so here on Spread the Love, we just basically… we like to talk about why we love the plays in our catalogue, so tell me what you love about this play, aside from the fact that you wrote it.

Aside from the fact that I wrote it… well, I do love Hamlette. It was the first play that I published. It wasn’t the first play that I wrote, and it wasn’t the first play that I had staged, but it’s the first play that I actually published. And it’s really cool as an author to have your play done by strangers, to have your play done by people who aren’t your friends, they aren’t your coworkers, they’re actually people who looked at your play in a catalogue, and went, “Wow! I like that play and I want to do it.”

And they come up to you at conferences and they’re like, “You’re Allison Williams,” and it’s a very cool feeling, right?

Yeah. And I like that a lot. And it’s funny to me because I originally did not set out to write a play with Hamlet as a girl. I set out to write a short, funny Hamlet. And what happened was, of the actors who auditioned for the play, a girl named Lila was the best actor so I made her Hamlet. And it was like, “Well, she’s Hamlet. We should do something with that!” And all of a sudden the whole play as we wrote it became about Hamlet being a girl. And that became the crux of the play. And it was really just an accident because I wrote to the actors that I had. But I love it. I love that Hamlet’s a girl because why shouldn’t women play the greatest roles in the history of literature.

Absolutely. Perfect.

Ok, that’s it for Spread the Love!