Director's Note

Welcome to The Dream Project by Shakespearean Youth Theatre! This season, we are thrilled to be sharing some of Shakespeare’s most iconic works, beginning with Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Each play centers young people confronting and transforming power structures they inherited from their elders - a theme that is brilliantly supported by the natural revolutionary tendencies of this generation of young artists, and this year’s Season 16 Core Ensemble.

I am always delighted by the perspectives, insights, passion, and grit this ensemble of young artists brings to the process. The Tragedie of Hamlet famously challenges directors and actors to answer one question: is Hamlet actually mad?

Throughout the course of rehearsals, this Ensemble has been less interested in answering that question than exploring another, more nuanced question: what does Hamlet’s mental state reveal about the reality of the world around him?

Hamlet is a play about truth, and the fevered dreams that come knocking at our doors when truth breaks down and reality is left to each individual’s subjective experience. Prince Hamlet is an unreliable narrator, to be sure. He may also know far more about the state of the world than any other character in the play. At a time when the idea of truth is challenged daily, I can think of no better story to engage this experience than one that has been held up for centuries as a paragon of “Universal Truth”—which, upon closer examination, requires audiences and artists alike to ask endless questions, and provides few answers.

Logan Verdoorn
Artistic Director