When did you first get interested in Shakespeare’s plays?

Q: When did you first get interested in Shakespeare’s plays, and why?

A: I was never frightened of Shakespeare. I know a lot of people have a bad first experience with his plays for one reason or another, which makes me feel sad. But my introduction was perfect for me, and I’m grateful for that.

In my junior year of high school, I took AP English from a teacher named Gerald Berglund. He had served in the US Army and still conducted himself with military precision. He thought it was important for us to know and follow the rules of grammar and behavior. I’m a rule-follower by nature, and I worked hard to meet his high standards (and my own).

That spring, he assigned us Hamlet because he was planning to lead a class trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland to see it performed. We read and discussed the play in class. He asked us to memorize Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” speech, not so we could speak the lines aloud, but so we could write them accurately, including all the punctuation and line breaks. I loved being able to do that perfectly.

We took the class trip over spring break, riding a bus from central California to Oregon. At the festival, we saw five plays in three days. After each one, we wrote a paper (by hand, kids). For shows we saw in the evening, the paper was due the next morning.

That was my first experience of serious playgoing. Mr. Berglund said the theater and its actors deserved respect. We had to dress nicely (girls wore skirts or dresses, boys wore jackets and ties). We couldn’t eat or drink or chew gum during the play. And we couldn’t even think about setting our feet on the back of the seat in front of us. Blasphemy!

Again, I thrived on working hard and following the rules, though in my diary for that week, I often wrote about being tired. I’m sure we all were (including Mr. Berglund and the chaperones who had to keep track of us.)

But if I had to say what it was about Hamlet that captured my heart that week, no doubt it was the acting. In my diary, I wrote: “Hamlet was awesome, or at least I thought so. Hamlet himself gave a superb performance, funny and tragic and engrossing.”

I looked back at Ashland’s performance record later and found out that an actor named Mark Murphey played him that year. Murphey is an Ashland legend now: He still performs there.

Everyone who loves live theater can remember a performance when an actor took hold of their heart and brought them all the way into a character’s thoughts and feelings. That’s what Murphey did for me. When it happens, you forget that you’re a tired teenager with a crush on some guy who probably doesn’t like you back. Suddenly, you’re the Danish prince, trying to stir yourself to revenge your father’s murder.

That’s the empathetic skill I wanted to capture as I wrote about Peter Dunmore in Blue Mountain Rose. Peter is the kind of actor who can give audiences that rush. It’s a heady thing to experience, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet was the medium by which I first felt that magic. No wonder I’m grateful for his plays.

[photo caption: Actor Mark Murphey of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, whose Hamlet taught Julie Hammonds about the power of great acting. Credit: Oregon Shakespeare Festival]