How Solea Pfeiffer Made Herself at Home in Central Park
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For more than 60 years, the Public Theater has been mounting works by the Bard (among others) in Central Park’s Delacorte Theater as part of its annual Shakespeare in the Park offerings. This year’s production—a Kenny Leon-directed Hamlet, running through August 6—is unique in part because it’ll be part of the final season held in the Delacorte before the theater undergoes renovations.
Of course, Leon’s Hamlet is notable for plenty of other reasons as well. The play is set not in Demark, but in Atlanta, Georgia in the year 2021, and features scenic design by Beowulf Boritt and choreography by Camille A. Brown, as well as a cast including Ato Blankson-Wood in the title role, Lorraine Toussaint as Gertrude, John Douglas Thompson as Claudius, and Solea Pfeiffer as Ophelia.
Here, Pfeiffer chats with T&C about making her Central Park debut, finding the modern meaning in Hamlet, and just how you deal with dying every night on stage.
We last saw you on Broadway in Almost Famous, but this is such a different project—it’s all done outside, to begin with. What was the big draw?
[Our director] Kenny Leon saw me in Almost Famous, and from that performance decided that I fit into his vision for Hamlet. In January I had an audition, and I found out that day that I got the part. I kind of counted myself out of the the circles of actors who do things like Shakespeare in the Park. That to me was such a far off, distant thing, like it was something just for “serious actors.” But it’s such an honor to be part of Shakespeare in the Park’s lineage and performing at the Delacorte—especially since it’s the last production in the space before renovation.
What about Hamlet spoke to you?
Hamlet is timeless because it reckons directly with what it means to be alive. And we’ve set the story in 2021, a year when the world was coming out of a period filled with fear and death all around us. Everyone is grappling with a new consciousness and what it means to go through what we do every day, soldiering on through grief, so this is a play that feels like it’s about deeply universal themes.
This production is also set in Atlanta, with a predominantly Black cast. So, it’s a show about the mental health of Black men—that’s what Kenny wanted to focus on—and placing it in a new place with our cast feels important and like it matters, like we’re in conversation with the world we’re living in right now.
Ophelia’s a character whose experience feels contemporary.
What I realized going into this process was that Ophelia is actually this kind of blueprint; she’s the OG tragic ingenue in a way. What would be boring to me is this wet blanket of a girl who’s told to do something, does it, and then gets sad. But there’s a cool opportunity here, placing the story in 2021, to question what it means to be obedient; for me, so much of this play is about unexpressed grief, and while she’s seen as going mad, maybe it’s not mad to her. Every other character has been ignoring her, telling her what to do, or turning their back on her, but she’s grieving and you’re there to witness it. There’s a lot of strength in her being like, “I am holding your attention whether you like it or not.”
She also has one of theater’s most famous deaths. How do you recover from that kind of heavy material every night?
The material is so dark, but one of the great things about being an actor is that you get to inhabit these dark places and then go back to your life. At the end of the show, before we bow, we all hug. There was one day in rehearsal when we were pretty close to having our first performance when it became very clear that this material was weighing heavy on a few people in our cast, and everyone just came together and held each other for a little while. Now that’s part of the show every night, right before we bow, we connect—and that’s how we always end the show.
It makes a huge difference as an artist when you feel very proud of what you're doing, and I do feel like this matters. Maybe I feel tired at the end of the night, maybe it's running me a little ragged, but I really care.
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