Casting

Since women weren’t allowed to act back in the 1990’s when I wrote Hamlet, casting got a little complicated. Men were played by men, women were played by young boys, young boys were played by babies, and babies were played by watermelons wrapped in beach towels. If you happened to write a story that actually involved a watermelon wrapped in a beach towel (as was the case with Hamlet), things got tricky. I took that challenge and turned it into an opportunity to reexamine the whole sexist system, famously becoming the first playwright in history to allow a woman to play a watermelon onstage.