The Last ‘Hamlet’ at Next Act Opens this Week

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Next Act Theatre - The Last White Man

Next Act Theatre will present the world premiere of Bill Cain’s newest play The Last White Man.  It’s the fourth of Cain’s plays to be staged by the company in as many years, but the first it’s helped to develop. Eighteen hours of rehearsal with the playwright last December, and a public reading with audience feedback, produced substantial script revisions. Cain then returned for the entire rehearsal process, editing and sharpening in response to questions by director David Cecsarini and the actors, leading to an April 14 opening.

It’s a play about three white male actors and their Black female director struggling, on many levels, to mount a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, one that the director dreams will so definitive that Western theatre can finally leave it behind. I had the pleasure of reading two drafts. It’s a big, crazy, important philosophical undertaking that Cain has made emotionally and theatrically gripping. And that’s just on the page.

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Photo courtesy Next Act Theatre

Bill Cain

Bill Cain

This is Cecsarini’s next-to-last year as artistic director of the company he founded. He’s been devoted to Cain’s work since 2018 when he staged Cain’s play Equivocation. Shakespeare was a character in that play. Set in 1605, at the time of the Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot to assassinate the new Scottish King James and install a Catholic monarch on Britain’s throne, Cain has the late Queen Elizabeth’s top lord persuade “Shag” to write a hit play to serve as propaganda for the status quo. The result is Macbeth.

The following season, Cecsarini produced Cain’s autobiographical drama How to Write a New Book for the Bible which includes the deaths of both his parents. Next was 9 Circles, modeled on Dante’s Inferno, about the real-life murder trial of an U.S. soldier. Cecsarini will stage a fifth Cain play next season, his last.

A much-awarded playwright, Cain is also a prolific television writer, a Jesuit priest and the founder of the now-deceased Boston Shakespeare Company. “I don’t know anyone who loves Shakespeare and knows Shakespeare better than Bill Cain,” Cecsarini tells me. “And yet he’s struggling with this sense that the time has come to ask why Hamlet is continually lionized. Surely there are other stories worthy to tell, and we need to invest more of our energies in doing so.”

Fathers and Sons, Death and Madness

That’s the position of Xandri, the play’s director character. “The world according to Shakespeare,” she argues, “is fathers and sons. It always ends in death. And madness. And we play this tired old story over and over, venerating it, learning nothing from it, never questioning this premise and teaching children, Children, this is greatness. We can do better. We have to. … I want this to be the last Hamlet. So perfect and so beautiful, so heart-breaking that it will be the very last time we will have to say goodbye to this very sad, very beautiful, very white young man.”

The three actors, on the other hand, grapple with serious personal issues. Add to that the anguish any dedicated actor faces as that Danish prince facing the task of avenging his father’s murder and having to convincingly deliver the most famous lines in Western drama, lines audiences’ already know by heart.

Cain took the bare bones of his plot from a late 1980s production of Hamlet at London’s National Theatre. The actor Daniel Day Lewis, fresh from his Oscar win for My Left Foot, was Hamlet. Having trouble in the role, he quit the show mid-performance. His understudy stepped in and continued until producers cast the Scottish actor Ian Charleson from the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire. Charleson died of AIDS eight weeks after ending his acclaimed run.

In Cain’s fictional version, set in 1989 and played with American accents, the Oscar-winning actor’s troubles with the role are crippling memories of his own dead father. The consequences are drastic. “I think Bill’s sense of it,” Cecsarini says, “is expressed by director Xandri ‘s description of the Ghost: it’s the dirty laundry; the things left undone.”

AIDS remains the plague of the visionary actor hired to replace him. But in the end, it’s the understudy’s transformative journey with all three characters that becomes the play’s heart.

“The human aspects that take over in the playing of the character of Hamlet are primarily what attracted me,’ Cecsarini says. “The philosophy of the director is interesting. I’ve been working through it myself, thinking what do I believe? And I don’t know. Why not a Black Hamlet? Why not open things up? But that’s on a different level than: here’s the same story generated by a white Western culture in a world of privilege and inheritance. I think I can say that, yes, it’s also time to be seeking out other stories.

“I’m very interested to see what our audiences’ reactions will be, particularly in the talkbacks,” he adds. “I’m sure it’ll hit some nerves and it’s kind of fun to air this out. I hope they find some funny places, too, because there are good funny spots. Singing disco in Hamlet is kind of an interesting juxtaposition.”

Performances are April 14-May 8 at Next Act Theatre, 255 S. Water St. Visit nextact.org or call (414) 278-0765 for times, tickets and current safety policies.