It feels like so many of the worlds ills could be resolved if we simply learned how to respect a woman’s request for no more. It is astonishingly rare for this sort of request to be heard.

We are trained from an early age to ignore women and encourage men.
We allow men to speak and consistently interrupt women. I say we – because as much as I could hope that I don’t personally have this bias, it is so ingrained in culture, I cannot see how it could have avoided being embedded in me too.

In its extreme, this tendency is what leads to rape. A woman’s request is ignored, just as in conversation, it extends out to where, of course, it is ignored in a context where sexual consent isn’t something men are encouraged to think about. They’re encouraged to push past boundaries – even just simple verbal ones like “No more.”

He is not being sweet right here, mama. No way. Not sweet at all. I know you’d like to remind him that he has the capacity to be sweet but right now…he’s not.

It’s funny how we do this, how we try to call forth someone’s better self like this in moments of distress. We try and remind a violent person that he’s not usually this way.

I think of Tony’s story about passing a man he knew who was in the process of threatening a crowd of people with, like, Molotov cocktails in hand (I can’t recall the weapon now) and Tony’s response, as he passed by, was not to try and stop the man or remind him that he was usually a very sweet man – but to try and be as ordinary as possible – to somehow shake him out of his state – which is a heightened, extraordinarily, at the edges place – and he just said, “Hey, (Whatever his name was) Good Morning!”
Like the mundane might be the way to bring someone back down to earth.
Sweetness almost never works but we almost always try it.

When I don’t want to hear something,
I feel it in my belly.
It feels more like getting kicked in the stomach repeatedly than like getting knifed in the ears.
I like the metaphor a lot. It would be fun to play the Queen and really viscerally feel like Hamlet’s words are daggers. It would, I think, actually help to play this scene. It’s not so much what he says, just the repeated image of daggers every time he speaks.
And probably it’s not what he’s saying but how he’s saying it.
If I were to play the Queen now, I could explore how she is different from me. She would feel in her ears what I would feel in my guts and on that we could hang our difference.
We could build out from there.

If I’m mad or upset enough to say this, it’s really time to stop talking – because the emotional train has left the station and it will only get worse from here. If you keep talking after I’ve asked you to stop, you’re going to get either a major meltdown or a fight that it will take months, maybe years to recover from.
I don’t generally ask people to shut up. I will listen for hours without complaint. If I ask you to stop, the content has pulled the trigger on an emotional gun and I will because a storm of one kind or another. I am slow to anger – but I can feel it build in my guts – I can sense the rise of the tide, the bile or the wind, whichever one is coming.
I’m not saying you’re required to stop speaking if I ask you to – but I am warning you of the consequences.

I’m not gonna lie. This line may have been the hardest one for me to say when I played this role. I just – couldn’t get my head around feeling convinced by that speech. Feel guilty for lusting? Sure, I can understand feeling guilty for loving the wrong dude. But I just couldn’t work out what about any of this sexist, ageist speech was the trigger for her seeing into her soul. Is this true for her?
I think, if I were to play this part again, I’d have to spend a lot of time trying to work out what gets her here.
I’m pretty sure I just responded to my Hamlet’s tone and energy and didn’t think too deeply about what he was saying before finally just saying this line as best as I could – as if I believed it. Which is really the job, I guess. But I can’t help wishing I could have made some sense of it, some internal logic of it, some trigger in it that would have really allowed me to feel as though I were feeling soul stained.

Really dude. You have been talking for 36 lines already. That is a LOT of speechifying. That’s fine when you’re talking to yourself – but if you’re doing that when talking to another person, it’s really not great conversation. I’ve been on the receiving end of many speeches, just as long and they are taxing and trying to the listener. Ask a question sometimes, Hamlet. Try listening on occasion.
And not just to your dad.

The Index.
Normally a quiet document
Cataloging all manners of acts
Tiny
Good
Large
Bad.
A child picks a daisy
A child throws a rock
A man writes a love letter
A man murders his wife
A leader makes a speech
A leader bankrupts the nation
It all just ticks along
The index
It doesn’t have time to judge
It takes too much time to catalogue everything
But occasionally something runs through shouting
It’s really no worse than half the other things in the index
But it makes more noise.

This is the wrong question, Gertrude.
The question is: “Why are you being such a rude asshole to me?”
And the difference in this second question is – you’re not victim blaming yourself.
He’s being a dick and you’re asking what you did to make him behave this way.
This is how people end up in abusive relationships.
They ask, “What did I do that made him hit me?”
You didn’t do anything.
He made a choice. A bad choice, by the way. It is not your fault.
Even if it was –
Even if you did kill your husband (Which, it’s actually pretty clear you didn’t) you still don’t need to blame yourself for someone else being a dick to you.
I’m only telling you this, Gertrude, because I have done the very same thing. I have wondered what I did to encourage someone’s shitty treatment of me. But I can see from this angle that that’s baloney. I had to learn to blame other people sometimes. Everything was not my fault.
I had to learn to ask another way. I’m still learning how to ask better questions. We’ll learn this one together, Gertrude.

I always felt that until this moment, the Queen’s been a little skeptical about this whole madness thing. She knows her son and she knows the circumstances are crappy and she goes along with all the madness talk because it seemed relatively harmless – but here, she starts to wonder. Maybe he is crazy.

The thought of regicide being so very far outside her mind. ..this idea seems like it comes out of nowhere. What the hell is this kind talking about? As kill a king?!
Wtf?!

But I played the Queen as someone entirely ignorant Claudius’ deeds…it would all go very differently if Gertrude had a hand in the murder. We’d be dealing with a very different queen in that case.

I played this line a little impersonally, I think.
I thought of it a little like looking at my kitchen someone made a mess of. Horrified, regretful and a little astonished.
Now I think, if I were to play Gertrude again, I might play with finding how Gertrude scolded Hamlet in his youth. It occurs to me now that there’s a way that parents rarely stop trying to school their children – no matter how old they are.

I taught a class for senior Citizens and there was a mother and her daughter in the class – both senior citizens – and while I did not witness any schooling between those two – I imagine that it is very possible. The 90 year old scolds the 70 year old for how she replaced the salt or something.

And this line – this line could be that primal parental response to seeing a horrible mistake made by your son. She might say it in the same tone she once discovered magic marker all over the bathroom walls.