MY BROOKLYN HAMLET: A MESHUGENAH TRUE STORY
Written and Performed by Brenda Adelman
Where: The Marsh San Francisco

November 7, 2012 at 7:30pm

Tickets; $10 – $15

Show Info
415-826-5750

Details at: http://www.themarsh.org/rising.html
Purchase tix by phone
415-282-3055

My Brooklyn Hamlet is based on Brenda Adelman’s true life story, growing up in Brooklyn with an alpha-male Jewish ‘wanna be Italian’ father who taught her how to drive a Cadillac at six and how to shoot a gun at ten and a bohemian artist kooky mom who took her traveling throughout the world and read Shakespeare to her as a bedtime story from the time she was three years old. Big characters and big laughs. Then in 1995 Adelman’s father (whom she adored) shot and killed her mother (her best friend) and then quickly took a new bride, her mother’s sister. Brenda peppers soliloquies from Shakespeare’s Hamlet throughout this very New York story. In the end, Brenda takes a very different path than Hamlet. She learns the power of forgiveness.

Part family comedy, part Greek tragedy, My Brooklyn Hamlet is Brenda’s very true story about loyalty, sex, obsession, love, betrayal, murder and most of all, the awesome power of forgiveness.

Playwright and star performer Brenda Adelman presents an almost unbelievable, insanely twisted one-woman, modern ‘Bronx Tale’ filled with happy memories and tragic outcomes in My Brooklyn Hamlet.” –LA Theatre Review

She morphs effortlessly into both parents and does not spare her audience the gory details of their relationship, or the depths of her own pain… thanks to her winning open personality and the simplicity and candour of her storytelling, nicely leavened with a disarming humour and her great personal charm, the parts add up to a gripping whole.” – All About Jewish Theatre

To watch it unfold is gripping, emotionally draining and uplifting Adelman, brought up by her late mother with a love of Shakespeare, plays on the parallels with Hamlet – in which Claudius murders the hero’s father and marries his mother. The key difference is that while Hamlet is bent on revenge, Adelman ultimately sought to forgive her father. If any kind of remarkable twist were needed for such a story, that is it.”– The Carriageworks, Leeds

This is theater with the lid off, raw but disciplined. Passion, pain, truth and then love, all in an hour.”
–Jewish Renaissance

Bio
Brenda Adelman is an award-winning actor, public speaker, and spiritual life coach. She holds a master’s degree in Spiritual Psychology from The University of Santa Monica, is the recipient of a Hero of Forgiveness Award from the Hawaii International Forgiveness Project & has been interviewed on NPR & Fox TV news. She has performed her award-winning solo-show, My Brooklyn Hamlet & spoken on Forgiveness & Setting Healthy Boundaries in CA, NY, HI, NM, OK, MI, AZ, Leeds & London, England and in Vienna, Austria. She’s recently became an instant mom of a thirteen year old foster child whom she and her partner Dayna had been mentoring and are now in the process of adopting.