Killer's Head | |
---|---|
Written by | Sam Shepard |
Characters | Mazon |
Date premiered | 15 April 1975 |
Place premiered | The American Place Theatre New York City |
Original language | English |
Genre | Drama |
Setting | an execution chamber |
Killer's Head is a 1975 absurdist play by Sam Shepard. It is a one-act monologue by Mazon, a California man about to be executed by electric chair. Mazon contemplates in stream of consciousness fashion his would-be future while he waits for the switch to be flipped.
Killer's Head was performed at The American Place Theatre in New York, as part of a double bill with Shepard's play Action . Nancy Meckler directed, and Richard Gere starred. [1] The play received mixed reviews, critics generally preferring Action. John Simon in New York Magazine panned it as "a bright idea that should have been put out of its misery before it put us into ours." [2] That year, Shepard also directed a performance of the play, also a double bill with Action, at The Magic Theatre in San Francisco.[ citation needed ]
The play was revived in 1997 by the Signature Theatre Company, with Action and a new play, The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing His Wife. Here, the role of Mazon was played by a rotating cast of actors, one per week, including John Diehl. Jamey Sheridan, Bill Pullman, Treat Williams, Scott Glenn, and Dermot Mulroney. [3] The play's last performances starred Ethan Hawke. [4]
Hamlet, also known as Hamlet 2000, is a 2000 American drama film written and directed by Michael Almereyda, set in contemporary New York City, and based on the Shakespeare play of the same name. Ethan Hawke plays Hamlet as a film student, Kyle MacLachlan co-stars as Uncle Claudius, with Diane Venora as Gertrude, Liev Schreiber as Laertes, Julia Stiles as Ophelia, Steve Zahn as Rosencrantz, Bill Murray as Polonius, and Sam Shepard as Hamlet's father.
Ethan Green Hawke is an American actor, author and film director. He made his film debut in Explorers (1985), before making a breakthrough performance in Dead Poets Society (1989). Hawke starred alongside Julie Delpy in Richard Linklater's Before trilogy from 1995 to 2013. Hawke received two nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Training Day (2001) and Boyhood (2014) and two for Best Adapted Screenplay for co-writing Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013). Other notable roles include in Reality Bites (1994), Gattaca (1997), Great Expectations (1998), Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007), Maggie's Plan (2015), First Reformed (2017), The Black Phone (2021) and The Northman (2022).
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