Actress/playwright Kate Hamill puts human nature on stage - Boston Herald

Kate Hamill has made a career out of playing weirdos and wild ones on stage.

In “Vanity Fair,” she played cynical, calculating social climber Becky Sharp. In “Sense and Sensibility,” she took on the passionate, oversensitive Marianne Dashwood. Currently, she is rehearsing her role as Renfield, the bug-munching, not-all-there devotee of Count Dracula, for a new off-Broadway production of “Dracula” for the Classic Stage Company in New York.

Hamill has no one to blame, or thank, but herself for these roles. She wrote them all.

Next week, Central Square Theatre will begin its run of Hamill’s “Vanity Fair, An (Im-)morality Play” (Jan. 23-Feb. 23). But Hamill won’t be back as Becky Sharp in her adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s 19th century novel. Now too busy to appear in all her creations (she has made American Theater magazine’s list of the most-produced playwrights three seasons in a row), Hamill is still thrilled Boston has fallen for her work — her take on Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” ran to rave reviews at the American Repertory Theater in 2017.

“I think fewer people have read ‘Vanity Fair’ so people will come with fewer expectations,” Hamill said from New York. “That being said, there will be certain common elements between ‘Sense and Sensibility’ and ‘Vanity Fair.’ I always try to keep things very theatrical, extremely fast moving with actors playing multiple characters. I have a fairly absurd sense of humor so that will be in there.”

“I will say ‘Vanity Fair’ is a rather darker play than ‘Sense and Sensibility,’” she added. “It’s about judgement and how we judge each other, and how we judge the characters we see on stage.”

(121417) The cast of Bedlam’s “Sense & Sensibility” at the A.R.T./photo by Ashley Garrett

Another overlap between the two, and all of Hamill’s output, is they are feminist, female-centric works.

Hamill has become a master of adaptations — having already updated Austen, Thackeray, Bram Stoker, Louisa May Alcott and more, she has forthcoming productions based on Homer and Nathaniel Hawthorne (and hopefully, they all eventually come to Boston). She has also written completely original works. Regardless of where each new creation comes from, everything must relate to the modern world and the role of women in that world.

“When I started writing these adaptations of classics, people would tell me, ‘Oh, that’s how things were then, but now it’s different,’” she said. “But human nature remains human nature. … In ‘Vanity Fair,’ the character of Amelia is someone who believes if she follows the rules and acts like a lady, she’ll be treated justly. Becky is someone who has come from the gutter and decides to break all the rules. Society punishes both of them. Then and today, there are serious drawbacks for women who decide to break the rules and women who decide to follow the rules.”

Hamill will continue to write characters who do both, exploring how little has changed since Austen, Thackeray and Homer. And, even as she becomes one of the nation’s preeminent playwrights, she’ll continue to portray these characters, from weirdos to wild ones.

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“Vanity Fair, An (Im-)morality Play,” at Central Square Theatre, Jan. 23-Feb. 23. Tickets: $15-$68; centralsquaretheater.org.

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Actress/playwright Kate Hamill puts human nature on stage - Boston Herald
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