Interview With Kenny Leon About Hamlet, Purlie Victorious, Directing, And More

Just before the Tony Awards, we spoke with Tony-winning director Kenny Leon of both Hamlet and Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch about the similarities between the two shows and how he approached them. 

Both Hamlet and Purlie Victorious are available to stream. 

 

Great Performances: Congratulations on your Tony nomination for Purlie Victorious! 

Kenny Leon: Thank you so much. That was a real honor. 

GP: Both Purlie Victorious and Hamlet are part of our “Broadway’s Best” lineup and will be seen by a national audience. We know these aren’t your first shows to be broadcast on PBS, but how do you feel about that? 

KL: I’m overwhelmed. I mean, the experience that I had in doing Hamlet, and then Much Ado About Nothing and now Purlie Victorious, I couldn’t be happier this summer. It’s like all my friends and family and all those people that didn’t get a chance to visit New York get a chance to see the work all across America, and I couldn’t be happier that thousands more will see what I think is good work, great actors, great music, great laughter. I’m very, very excited. 

GP: We know you directed Hamlet and Purlie Victorious in different timeframes, so we were wondering if there were any similarities and differences working on those two shows? 

KL: Well, I always think that the plays I work on speak to each other when I’m conceptualizing them. So back when I was working on Hamlet, I was thinking about Purlie Victorious. They both have a great sense of poetry. One is totally drama, and one is totally a comedy and political satire, but in many ways, Hamlet is a political satire as well. Both plays are trying to say something to the world about the way we treat each other and about freedom and death, so they’re kind of companion pieces in my mind. And they both were led by two great African American talents. Ato Blankson-Wood was amazing in Hamlet, and Leslie shows you that you can’t find a better person to play Purlie. So they had a lot in common in terms of trying to speak on humanity over hundreds of years. 

 

GP: Those are some great connections. We also wanted to ask about the experience directing for an off-Broadway production versus Broadway. Do you approach those differently?  

KL: Whether it’s a Toni Morrison opera, or off-Broadway, Shakespeare, or on Broadway, I approach them the same way. I usually have the same amount of rehearsal. I usually divide my rehearsal time the same way in terms of what I focus on. The bar, in terms of excellence, is just as high for an off-Broadway play as it is for a play on Broadway.  

GP: Talking a little bit more about Purlie Victorious, the cast seems to speak quite quickly! Can you tell us more about this creative decision? 

KL: One of the keys to pulling off a play that hasn’t been done in 62 years commercially, and probably only three or four times in the country period, it is important to get it right. And political satire is hard. You’re not doing something and presenting it the way it was done in 1961. You’re trying to see: What’s the political climate in our country right now? What’s the tolerance of people listening to anything that may be slightly different than what they may think politically? 

 

I felt that the tempo and the pace of the production needed to be fast enough that it didn’t allow people to get inside of their own heads. So I moved at a pace that allowed them to engage in the humanity of it, the humor of it, and in the things that we have in common. With the pacing, I didn’t want them to think, I just wanted them to engage. That’s why I’ve moved that fast. For me, it’s just about getting to the church scene which is the last scene in the play. I would always tell the actors: This play is Purlie Victorious, but, if I could rename the show, it’s also about “Getting To The Church.” And the last scene of the play is what Ossie Davis really wanted us to hear, like “we need to live in a country of freedom where everyone is free, where everybody is respected, where everyone’s life means the same thing as everyone else’s life.” So that’s why it ran so fast. It’s almost like Shakespeare: If you leaned in a little bit like you do with Shakespeare, you’ll be engaged. 

GP: Moving to Hamlet, we were curious about your decision to set Hamlet in the recent past of 2021 as well as its connection to your 2019 production of Much Ado About Nothing. 

KL: I fell in love with August Wilson before I fell in love with Shakespeare which was late in life, and I found that they had similarities in terms of character development and the use of language and poetry. August Wilson has soliloquies in his plays, we just don’t call them that. We just call them “long monologues.”  So when I do any revival of any play, I’m always trying to say, “What are the audience members sitting in the seats today going to get from this? How is this going to relate to them?”  

 

I did that with Much Ado, by setting it in present day and Hamlet, the same thing. It was about what was going on in the country at that time: It was coming out of  COVID, we were dealing with the racial reawakening, talking about the death of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and so, in my mind I just felt like: Wouldn’t it be interesting if Hamlet was a young Black man who had witnessed everything that young Black folks witnessed in America at that time? So I told it through the eyes of a Black Hamlet. I thought it gave me a specific way to look at Hamlet in a way that had universal implications just because of what was happening in the country. 

The greatest compliment I have from that show would be audience members that said, “I understood everything!” That’s the way Shakespeare is supposed to be. You need to understand everything. There’s no reason for you not to understand. The actors need to be understood and heard. We’re conveying thoughts, we’re not just conveying words and style. Shakespeare’s plays should sound that way and convey what’s being felt in the story. 

GP: Absolutely. Do you have a particular favorite moments from each show?  

KL: There have been moments in every play, but I’m always saying if you don’t have all of the moments, you don’t have the play. In Purlie, I always love that scene when the entire cast is running up to the window upstage and then running back downstage, putting slapstick comedy into play. I remember telling Kara Young that her character was a combination of Eartha Kitt and Lucille Ball and Diahann Carroll all in one. In that scene when there’s like four actors running up and down the stage, I see in my mind 100 artists all from the past: I see all the actors from “Cabin in the Sky,” I see Ethel Waters, I see Roscoe (Lee Browne), I see the Nicholas brothers, I see Eartha Kitt. Just by that two minutes of movement, that’s what I see.  

 

In Hamlet, the soliloquy that Ato did (“To be, or not to be”) I thought he made it his own, made it real, and made it make sense. I’ll always remember just how he delivered it: It made sense given the production with what he was going through mentally. A lot about that Hamlet was about mental health, and I think we made an intentional effort to focus on the mental health of the characters in the play, especially Hamlet. 

GP: What would you like viewers to take away from watching both of these shows now in 2024? 

KL: I want them to take away that the universe or God has given us hundreds of years to get better, to get it right, to treat each other without death or destruction, hate and racism. And I think the universe has urgently given us one more chance. Let’s love on each other a little better. Let’s give freedom to all.