Word: hares
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...Hare, 51, is afraid of getting too comfortable in his own skin. Which might explain why, just as the Nicole Kidman vehicle The Blue Room ends its wildly successful run and Judi Dench is busy rehearsing for the April opening on Broadway of his London hit Amy's View, he has decided to climb out on a new limb. This month the auteur turns actor with a 12-week run performing Via Dolorosa, a monologue about, of all things, the Middle East. "I just find the regular concerns of the theater so boring," Hare says. "I just don't want...
British director Stephen Daldry originally sent Hare to the Middle East to write a conventional play. But Hare returned with a different notion: to incorporate his meetings with dozens of people into a monologue. "All his plays are forms of moral discourse in a way," says Richard Eyre, who has directed most of Hare's work over the past 30 years. "How do you live your life, that's really the question, isn't it?" Via Dolorosa emerges naturally from an earlier play about the Church of England, Racing Demon, and also from a bold 1996 lecture Hare gave...
...Dolorosa was generally well received in London, but New York may be different. In a town where Hillary Clinton's mere mention of a possible Palestinian state can provoke outrage, Hare's sympathy toward the Palestinians and his portrayal of some Israelis as conspiracy theorists who believe that Yitzhak Rabin arranged his own assassination to discredit right-wing Jews may come as something of a shock. Says Daldry: "I would just hope people see the whole argument...
Especially as Hare does not always take kindly to criticism. In 1989, when then New York Times theater critic Frank Rich gave his play The Secret Rapture a bad review, Hare wrote a very public letter blasting the power of the paper. Even now, let's just say he noticed that the Times did not adore The Blue Room...
Those who know him, though, say his venture into acting is just further evidence that Hare has reached a new level in his work. "He's just got better and better," says director Eyre. "The more usual shape of the playwright's career is to have huge sunbursts of energy early on and then to rather simmer away." Hare admits, "I find myself with almost an abundance of subject matter." And he writes every day, no matter what. "It's heresy to say so, but the Beckett path--whereby you start out writing many words and you end up writing...