Ethan Hawke heads a one-night evening of readings and remembrances, Tom Stoppard’s Shakespeare, at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn on Monday, November 16 at 7:30pm.
The evening celebrates Tom Stoppard, who died in 2025, and the hold Shakespeare had on him across his career. Isaac Butler directs, and Hawke is joined by Rosaline Elbay, Josh Hamilton and Aasif Mandvi, reading from Stoppard’s plays.
The connection runs deep on both sides of the stage. Hawke earned a Tony nomination in Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia, and Hamilton’s stage credits take in both that trilogy and The Real Thing. Butler, a Brooklyn-based director and cultural historian, wrote The Method: How the 20th Century Learned to Act. Stoppard made his name with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, two minor courtiers from Hamlet pushed to the center of their own play, and later folded Shakespeare into Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth and the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love.
TFANA quotes Stoppard’s own verdict from a 1980 talk: Shakespeare, he said, “observes human nature with a clear eye and understands human behavior with an unclouded mind.”
It is the first event in TFANA’s new Spotlight Series, which will bring theater artists together for dramatic readings, tribute performances and onstage conversations, Playbill reported. The evening is supported in part by Grove Atlantic, Stoppard’s longtime American publisher.
Tickets are on sale from Theatre for a New Audience.
