Cutting-Edge Director Orchestrates Summer Shakespeare Festival
UCSD Professor Directs Hamlet at The Old Globe

Ioana Patringenaru | August 20, 2007

UCSD Professor Darko Tresnjak is the artistic director of The Old Globe's Summer Shakespeare Festival.

He has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company and has directed in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s hometown. His plays have earned glowing reviews from The New York Times. Now, UCSD Theatre Professor Darko Tresnjak is bringing his version of “Hamlet” to a San Diego stage during the 2007 Summer Shakespeare Festival at The Old Globe in Balboa Park.

The festival runs from June 16 to Sept. 30. In addition to “Hamlet,” this year’s playbill includes “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” and “Measure for Measure.” Tresnjak has been the festival’s artistic director for the past four years and has directed at least one play every year. He also has hired UCSD MFA students and alumni to work with him. His role illustrates the balancing act that has defined his time on campus. He is both a dedicated teacher and a well-known director crisscrossing the country and the planet – and that’s fine by him.  “There are people who want to be directors every single day of the year, and I’m not one of them,” he said. Teaching allows him to explore theatre from a completely differently perspective, he said.

“It’s very, very refreshing,” Tresnjak explained. “I love the interactions with my students.”

Teaching can be just as high-pressure as directing – but in a different way, he added. When his students do well, he feels relaxed; when they don’t, he struggles with insomnia. “You take your students’ anxieties with you,” he said. He treats his students as professional actors. “To do otherwise would be doing them a disservice.”

Tresnjak often recruits UCSD MFA students to act as his assistants during the summer festival. He also has hired alumni to star in several plays. But his impact extends beyond students who focus on directing and acting, said UCSD Theatre and Dance Chair Charlie Oates. Tresnjak also works with set and costume designers, stage managers and

“I wanted to explore how,
in a sense, we all are Hamlet.”

When he isn’t teaching, Tresnjak often can be found in New York or London, working on a Shakespeare play, a Mozart opera or one of Tom Stoppard’s works. This spring, his “Merchant of Venice,” starting F. Murray Abraham as Shylock, received rave reviews from The New York Times when it opened off-Broadway at the Theatre for a New Audience. The production – and Tresnjak -- then moved on to Stratford-Upon-Avon for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works Festival. The year-long event brings together companies from all over the world to perform the Bard’s 37 plays.

Lucas Hall as Hamlet (front) and Ryan Quinn as Horatio in The Old Globe’s Summer Shakespeare Festival production of "Hamlet." Photo credit: Craig Schwartz.

Tresnjak said his interpretation of “Hamlet” is partly the result of his conversations with Cicely Barry, the voice coach of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He also has been influenced by “1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare,” a book by James Shapiro that describes the year when Shakespeare wrote “Hamlet.” Of course, Tresnjak’s “Hamlet” follows many others, but he said he is not worried about all these antecedents. “My feeling about it is that Hamlet is always fresh and should always be interesting,” he said.

Tresnjak added he has never asked himself what his Hamlet would be like. He often tells his students that they can’t put themselves before the work they’re going to direct or perform. “That’s just insecurity,” he said. Instead, they should let the text guide them, he explained. “Hamlet, for me, is a symphony,” he went on. “It’s a perfect symphony of a play and so very much what I do is listen to its music and let that guide me.”

The result is a crystal-clear rendition of Shakespeare’s 1603 version of the play, which runs 2 ½ hours. The text is very much front and center and becomes accessible even to those who are not intimately familiar with it. Tresnjak also said he has tried to reconcile the many facets of Hamlet’s character that have emerged on stage and on film over the past six decades. In a way, we’ve gone from Laurence Olivier’s regal portrayal of the prince of Denmark in 1948 to Ethan Hawke’s portrayal of a slacker student in 2000, he said.

Lucas Hall as Hamlet and Celeste Ciulla as Gertrude in The Old Globe’s Summer Shakespeare Festival production of "Hamlet," directed by Darko Tresnjak. Photo credit: Craig Schwartz.

“I wanted to explore how, in a sense, we all are Hamlet,” he said.

Tresnjak and the festival’s company worked hard to realize this vision. All actors are in at least two of the festival’s three plays. They rehearsed for eight hours a day for about 10 weeks before their first performance. They also worked from noon to midnight during technical rehearsals. Tresnjak got up at 6 a.m. every morning to go over every detail of the production. Then he headed to the Old Globe at 10 a.m. for rehearsals.

For the UCSD professor, all this hard work is the realization of a childhood dream. He decided he wanted to be a director when he was just 7. At the time, he lived in the former Yugoslavia and used to put on plays with other children in his neighborhood. He especially remembers one work based on the Olympics, which included medals and a medal ceremony. “Before I even knew the word theater, I was directing,” Tresnjak said.

The Tony Award-winning Old Globe and Emmy Award-winning UCSD-TV have teamed up to create the latest “Backstage at the Globe” program featuring the Globe’s 2007 Summer Shakespeare Festival. The 30-minute program focuses on the process of mounting the festival’s three productions, including “Hamlet,” “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” and “Measure for Measure,” which run in nightly rotation in the Lowell Davies Festival Theatre from June 16 to Sept. 30. Viewers will get a taste of the rehearsal process and hear insights about the play from Festival Artistic Director Darko Tresnjak, as well as cast members and designers. The program aired on UCSD-TV beginning in June 29 and will continue throughout the summer. Future air dates include: daily Aug. 21 to 24, then Aug. 26 and 29, as well as Sept. 3 and 7. UCSD-TV and The Old Globe have worked in partnership to create the “Backstage at the Globe” series since 1999, bringing the creative process to life and taking viewers behind the scenes at one of America's premiere regional theaters.