Bernhardt/Hamlet   

Playwright: Theresa Rebeck
Directed By: Shelby Seeley

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Run Dates: January 10, 2025 - February 2, 2025

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Production Snapshot

Mark Twain wrote: “There are five kinds of actresses: bad actresses, fair actresses, good actresses, great actresses – and then there is Sarah Bernhardt.” In 1899, the international stage celebrity set out to tackle her most ambitious role yet: Hamlet. Theresa Rebeck’s new play rollicks with high comedy and human drama, set against the lavish Shakespearean production that could make or break Bernhardt’s career.

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Meet the Playwright(s)

Theresa Rebeck

Theresa Rebeck is a widely produced playwright throughout the United States and abroad. New York productions of her work include Dead Accounts at the Music Box Theatre; Seminar at the Golden Theatre; Mauritius at the Biltmore Theatre in a Manhattan Theater Club Production; The Scene, The Water’s Edge, Loose Knit, The Family of Mann and Spike Heels at Second Stage; Bad Dates, The Butterfly Collection and Our House at Playwrights Horizons; The Understudy at the Laura Pels Theater in a Roundabout Theatre Company production; and View of the Dome at New York Theatre Workshop. Omnium Gatherum (co-written, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2003) was featured at the Humana Festival, and had a commercial run at the Variety Arts Theatre. Her play Poor Behavior premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 2011. Ms. Rebeck’s other publications are Free Fire Zone, a book of comedic essays about writing and show business. She has written for American Theatre Magazine and has had excerpts of her plays published in the Harvard Review. Ms. Rebeck’s novels, Three Girls and Their Brother and Twelve Rooms With A View, were published by Random House/Shaye Areheart Books. Her third novel, I'm Glad About You, was published by Putnam in February 2016. In television, Ms. Rebeck has written for Dream On, Brooklyn Bridge, L.A. Law, American Dreamer, Maximum Bob, First Wave and Third Watch, and she created the NBC drama Smash. She has been a writer/producer for Canterbury’s Law, Smith, Law and Order: Criminal Intent and NYPD Blue. Her produced feature films include Harriet the Spy, Gossip, and the independent features Sunday on the Rocks and Seducing Charlie Barker, an adaptation of her play The Scene. Awards include the Mystery Writer’s of America’s Edgar Award, the Writer’s Guild of America award for Episodic Drama, the Hispanic Images Imagen Award, and the Peabody, all for her work on NYPD Blue. She has won the National Theatre Conference Award (for The Family of Mann), and was awarded the William Inge New Voices Playwriting Award in 2003 for The Bells. Mauritius was originally produced at Boston’s Huntington Theatre, where it received the 2007 IRNE Award for Best New Play as well as the Eliot Norton Award. Other awards include the PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award, the Athena Film Festival Award, an Alex Award and a Lilly Award, and in 2011 she was named one of the "150 Fearless Women in the World" by Newsweek. Ms. Rebeck is originally from Cincinnati and holds an MFA in Playwrighting and a PhD in Victorian Melodrama, both from Brandeis University. She is a proud board member of the Dramatists Guild, a Contributing Editor to the Harvard Review and an Associate Artist of the Roundabout Theatre Company, and has taught at Brandeis University and Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.
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Open Book Theatre Company presents Bernhardt/Hamlet    - a must-see performance. Get your tickets before they're gone!