A Conversation With the Actor SEAN MCNALL
October 2007
Sean McNall is an actor who is a member of the resident acting company at the Pearl Theatre in New York City where he has performed many roles. His work as Hamlet in the 2007 Pearl Theatre production is discussed in Chapter 4. The following interview focuses on what it means for a young actor to be a member of a resident acting company and McNall’s exploration of the role of Hamlet, his work with the text, and the kinds of choices the actor playing such a role must make. See his photograph as Hamlet in Chapter 4.
STEPHANIE ARNOLD: Would you talk a little bit about your history and training?
SEAN MCNALL: I'm from Los Angeles and I went to Whittier College, a small liberal arts college, on scholarship. I was there for a year and I felt like I didn't want to be in California anymore. I auditioned for Julliard and was accepted, but it was too expensive. So I did an internship with the Actors Theatre of Louisville for ten months and then did the four years at Julliard and graduated in 2000.
SA: How did you get from Southern California to the Actors Theatre of Louisville?
SM: I participated in a college theatre festival where I auditioned for all sorts of different places. Right about the time I left Whittier I got a call from Actors Theatre of Louisville, who had participated as a judge at the festival. I thought, well, perhaps this is the thing for me to do.
SA: And what kinds of things did you get out of being at Louisville?
SM: It was multi-disciplinary. We spent some time in the mornings working on acting as a craft, but the majority of contribution was to all the other elements that make the plays work. I did some understudying and I did some onstage work, but generally you'd spend a month in each department, or two if you were particularly good at something. So I spent a month in the shop, a month with the dramaturgs, a month with the sound designer, a month with lighting. It was a way of introducing people who might be interested in acting to other aspects of the theatre to see if there was something else they'd like to do, or show that there are other ways and opportunities to be creative that people might not be familiar with.
You get the same experience in a college or a conservatory – I had my eye on a conservatory because I knew that I wanted to act – but what I didn't know was whether or not I wanted to be in the professional theatre. I felt like I really needed to have that professional theatre experience. In my mind, because of things that I had read, there was that mythology of the acting apprentice that I had romanticized. I thought, maybe if I go through that experience, at the end of ten months I'll have a clearer answer. I ultimately discovered at the end of ten months that there's nothing very glamorous or romantic about the actual process of getting a play up. It certainly is challenging and wonderful, but there's no glamour in it. Nonetheless, I realized that was the thing I wanted to do. So, Louisville was incredibly beneficial to me.
SA: Tell me about your work on the role of Hamlet. I believe you have been thinking about this for a while.
SM: You have to go back to the beginning of a play like Hamlet, because it's so much a part of our cultural imagination, particularly for young men in the theatre. If you're going to be a classical actor, it's the holy grail of parts that one is going to tackle. With many plays you work on – even Shakespeare – there isn't that degree of familiarity. With Hamlet you have to almost forcefully put yourself in a place where you can be with the play for the first time, and try to read it through line by line and word by word and appraise it as though you'd never seen it before and as if there wasn't a definitive performance. That's the first thing and it takes a while to get to that place. It took a lot of conversation with Shep Sobel to get to that place, and a lot of dialoguing with myself about whether or not things I thought were true about the play were actually true or if they were just interpretations that I inherited.
Shep, the director, approached me and said he wanted me to play Hamlet. We decided we would meet and talk about the play before the rest of it was cast. Somewhere around May of this last year, we met for the first time and read through the play. I tried to avoid characterizing things and generalizing too much, because it's dangerous at any point to make generalizations. We just tried to get down to the essential dilemma of the play, of Hamlet and his predicament. We got to the predicament of a young man torn between two things, and some basic questions: What does he have to do? How is he going to do it? Why is he going to do it? Is it possible for him to do it? Then we could sort of build from the beginning of the play towards the end.
SA: When you're studying and thinking before rehearsals begin, are you making decisions and choices or are you trying to leave things open until you get into the rehearsal process?
SM: The first thing you do with Shakespeare is tackle the verse. There are very specific tools you use to extract from the play what Shakespeare wants you to do with it. There are many rules that are too difficult to cover, but they involve breaking down the verse and discovering the rhythm of the verse and how each line of verse informs what Shakespeare might be saying about the emotional content of the verse, or the context of the speech. So Shakespeare does direct you from beyond the grave, and you bring those directions to the first rehearsal or to the first discussion. Therefore it's impossible to be entirely open.
SA: Could you give an example of something in the text where the idea is shaped in part by the structure of the language?
SM: A famous moment comes in the end of Act II, Sc ii, in the "rogue and peasant slave" speech. It's his biggest soliloquy and his biggest turn. It has to do with his emotional sense and trying to wrangle his emotional sense and move forward just with his brains. There is one particular moment in which he responds to what he has just seen before him – this player demonstrating this incredible passion. So he processes and contemplates this, and allows it to work upon himself and the rhythm of the language – the way it's punctuated, how regular the verse is. In a way, it works upon the actor to drive him to this moment in the speech in which he says "O, vengeance," which is a very important and sort of mythical moment… Shakespeare says at this point, you have to make a big choice here on this line. There is a big caesura, because you have ten beats in this line, and all you have is "O, vengeance," a big pause, and then "Why, what an ass am I." So Shakespeare is telling you at that moment: build to this moment, make a choice at this moment, consider what you have done, and now move forward; "Fie upon foe without my brains." That's a blaring example, where you have to make a choice and it moves you to come to that first rehearsal saying, I know I have to make a choice here, let's see what it is.
SA: So as you're working on the text, the structure of the text is speaking to you. What kind of discoveries did you make during the rehearsal process?
SM: One of the big discoveries I made is in the scene with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet has a variety of relationships in the play – with girlfriends, with friends, with family members, with councilors – and you have this wonderful juxtaposition of Horatio as confidante and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as childhood friends. What is often the case is that the director and actors make a very particular interpretation that Horatio is the "good friend" and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the friends that have been thrust upon him. I think that's useful, but what we discovered in playing it is that if one just goes by the text, it actually takes Hamlet a very long time to put them on the hotspot, and ask them directly if in fact they are working as emissaries of the king. I think that Shakespeare wanted Hamlet at that point to experience a series of betrayals. If Hamlet is too smart for his own good, then you don't get the experience of Hamlet being stuck in a very difficult situation, you just have the arrogant Hamlet who knows what's coming at him. That's not interesting dramatically, nor is it true to a person of that age or of what I feel is Hamlet's sensitivity. So you do have a wonderful intellect and a wonderful mind, but you also have access to him empathetically as well.
This was a big discovery that we made around the table initially, with the particular actors that were playing it. It makes what he ultimately has to do to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the end less the work of some tyrannical, pain in the ass young man than it does to a person who has experienced a betrayal of friendship and actually feels justified in what he's done. That was a very big realization we made in working on the play that only comes from asking very basic questions and not allowing yourself to be prejudiced by the choices of the universe.
SA: You talked about the role with Shep before you started. What was the nature of your conversations before you started, and how did the two of you work together during the rehearsal process?
SM: I think the wrong place to start is with the broad question of what kind of person is Hamlet. I always like to start with the beginning of the play and go to the end, discovering things along the way, because that is in fact how human beings operate. With a part as rich as Hamlet, you do yourself a disservice if you generalize too much. Shep said, "This is the kind of Hamlet that I see, versus the kind of Hamlet that I've seen in the past. I often see a kind of Hamlet who is arrogant, and who knows from the beginning that he is smarter than everyone else onstage. I am much more interested in a Hamlet who is truly at a dilemma from the very beginning," That is a position which I absolutely agree with. So starting from that, we see a man who in the beginning of the play is deeply disturbed by the choice his mother has made, to marry this man who was his father's brother and who is clearly not his father's equal. That's where we begin.
In that sense, it is a domestic play. The politics and the power are of course important, but it is ultimately about a young man in a familial issue. If you begin from that perspective, as opposed to a man whose position has been usurped and it's beyond his power to do anything about it, you are of course going to chart a very different path. So we were immediately able to agree on that, and subsequently we could begin with the play and test that hypothesis and work from moment to moment. At some point the action picks up, and those kind of questions are no longer as important because the play takes over and you simply have to deal with what goes on in the play.
Once we got to the text of the play, it really became a process of parsing the moments. What is the structure of the play? What is the structure of the scene? What do we learn that's new about the character? Who is evolving as we move forward? What is ambiguous and what is definite? What kind of questions is Shakespeare asking at this moment? What are Shakespeare's answers to those questions? What are the answers at he is intentionally leaving open for us in the audience to answer for themselves?
SA: In rehearsal, what was the work like with the other actors, and how did it evolve?
SM: With a play like Hamlet and with the amount of work that I did beforehand, it would have been easy for me to have the ideal Ophelia, the ideal Claudius, the ideal Gertrude, and the ideal Horatio in mind. Then when we all came together, I could project on any one of those people my notion of who that character is or should be for me; what I need. Ultimately, some actors do that and you have a fight that goes on with trying to get the other person to be what you want them to be, which is foolhardy. This ultimately leads to a lack of basic communication onstage, a lack of the intention of rehearsal, which is that everyone's creative spirit should come together and discover things that you didn't know beforehand. By its very nature, it evolves from day to day, ultimately on a scene by scene basis.
You were talking about Jolly (Ophelia) before. I responded to Jolly in the audition process because she had a very strong energy. It spoke to a courage not to fall prey to someone's notion of who Ophelia is, which is sort of weak and waifish. Not everyone else had that energy. There were plenty of wonderful actresses that came in, but I found that she required something of me when we worked on the scene; she didn't demur to me, she demanded something from me, which I found very exciting. So when she actually was cast and we worked together on the scene, I found that while I may have had the upper hand I never felt I did, and it made for a much more active scene, and I allowed her to have that impact on me. Of all the scenes in the play, it was probably the most alive and present on a day-to-day basis because of that. It was a constant discovery with her for that reason.
SA: What do you see as the essence of the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia? The dynamic between them?
SM: I think their relationship depends on what period of the play you are in. Initially we had to settle on the duration of their relationship. Did it start before my father died or after? We settled on it being a relatively new relationship. The nature of a relationship like that is such that when you find yourself grieving and you find someone who you can pour your heart out to, you become emotionally entwined with that person quickly. So we had a very passionate, very emotional relationship very early. Of course we're not playing it as if it were Elizabethan England, but we do have to take a lot of whatever courting would have been for them to be the case for us. So we wouldn't have necessarily had a lot of physical contact, but we certainly had a lot of intimate sharing.
I think what my mother has done, when she marries my uncle – the betrayal – immediately begins to poison my ability to have a relationship. Slowly but surely, my opinion of my mother and of all women starts to affect my opinion of Ophelia, and then you get to the beginning of the play.
As most relationships are, it's a very complicated thing to discuss, and that's a good thing. I feel like if I could give you my statement about it I would probably be in some danger. I think that I desperately want her to be a confidante, and I desperately need her to give me any kind of comfort she can. The other complicated aspect of this is that I can't be honest with her, because she is her father's daughter. Shakespeare has indicated to us that she is devoted to her father, and that is something that I must know. So I can't tell her my secrets, I can't be near her, and at this point I am so distrustful of myself, of women, of all the intentions of men, that I do not even want to conceive of her being with another person, with another man. Everything about the world and world affairs is so wretched and decrepit to me that there is no room for love. Yet, nonetheless, this scene is about a person who desperately needs to be with another person. So there's this wonderful tension that exists between them which suddenly erupts in what is the most ambiguous scene in the play. Ophelia desperately makes attempts to speak to me directly, and it is impossible for me as Hamlet to reveal anything to her. I have to speak only in wordplay, to abuse her, to obfuscate, to punish her, and the moment that I do open up to her, I have to turn around.
I should say that when I started the play, I said that this is the scene that I'm most worried about, and that this is the relationship that confuses me the most, the relationship that Shakespeare was least explicit about. It is also the relationship upon which much of the audience – certainly most of the women in the audience – are ultimately going to use to decide who Hamlet is, and what kind of a person he is.
One woman after a performance kept asking me the question, "Who do you think Hamlet is?" And I couldn't answer it, I couldn't satisfy her. So she took me aside after this talk back and said "I think Hamlet is a spoiled misogynistic brat – look how he treats Ophelia, look what he does to her!" So maybe that's ultimately how it feels. But I think that it is essentially a very honest relationship between young lovers. Passionate young lovers. One of them happens to also have an incredibly refined intellect – Hamlet – and a detrimental amount of control over what he thinks, but not about what he feels. Time and time again, my impulse is to repel Ophelia and to punish her so as to destroy any feelings she may have for me, to save her. But at the same time I have the option in this scene or the opportunity to pour upon her all of my revulsion towards my mother, for all of the relationships between men and women that I have discovered to be untrue and impure and ridiculous and absurd. She becomes the first person in the play about whom I feel that I have the permission, I suppose, to have real feelings.