It's official. Screen star and budding Shakespearean actor, Liev Schreiber, will play the title role in Hamlet at the Public Theater in New York during the 1999-2000 season.
Schreiber made a hit with his last performance for the Public, in Andre Serban's 1998 production of Cymbeline at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park. The actor's performance as Iachimo won him the Joe Callaway Award, a prize given out annually by Actors' Equity to honor the best performance in a classic play.
Serban will also direct Hamlet. Dates for the production have not been settled.
Schreiber's film work has been divided between big studio pictures such as "Ransom" and "Sphere" and independent oddities like "Party Girl" and "The Daytrippers." He is perhaps best known for his role in the teen horror film "Scream" and its sequel. Schreiber made his Broadway debut in 1993's In The Summer House at Lincoln Center.
Ironically, Schreiber will play Laertes opposite Ethan Hawke's melancholy Dane in a film version of Hamlet to be released later this year. Also planned for the Public in 1999-2000 are new plays by Suzan-Lori Parks (Venus), Tina Landau (Floyd Collins) and Nilo Cruz. Marcus Stern will direct Parks' In the Blood. Landau will direct her own Space, described as a "meditation on mankind's place in the universe." No director has been named for Cruz' Two Sisters and a Piano, the story of two sisters living under house arrest in Cuba in 1989.
