The challenge with 'Hamlet' is twofold," says TheatreSquared director Sean Patrick Reilly. "Embracing the fact that it is perhaps the greatest and most oft quoted play in the English language, and to not shy away from that, to make it active storytelling. The second challenge is finding an actor in the lead role who has not only the facility and stamina but the willingness to expose the most inner parts of himself.

"'Hamlet' represents a world historical moment when there leapt into being a sustained depiction of a fully realized and doubting human being whose inner life is turned outward for our consideration," Reilly continues. "I am truly lucky that in Grant Goodman I have found an actor willing to trust me as a director to bring that to life."

Goodman, a graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts Drama Division as well as The National Shakespeare Conservatory, has been working professionally for 19 years. The production of "Hamlet," opening this weekend, is his TheatreSquared debut. Here, he answers three questions for What's Up!

Q. Which came first -- a love for theater or a love for Shakespeare?

A. I suppose I developed a love of theater first. I started at a very young age doing plays and musicals in church and at school. When I was 5 years old I played a wise man in "Three Wee Kings," and I was hooked. ... Playing King Arthur in "Camelot" in high school sealed the deal for me to want to be an actor professionally. The only problem was that my father was a football coach. My football coach, in fact -- and I was being heavily recruited to play in college. The problem wasn't him discouraging me from doing shows and plays; the problem was that none of my teachers wanted to encourage me to follow theater as a professional path, assuming my father would be against it. It took a student teacher from Indiana University who didn't know the atmosphere at my high school to say, when I asked her what I should do with my life: "I think you should move to New York and be an actor."

Q. What are the joys and challenges of any Shakespeare play -- and this one in particular?

A. Part of the joy in performing his plays is the fact that they are so challenging. It takes such extreme detailed thought and energy to sustain his thoughts and images in way that they can be constantly and clearly conveyed to an audience. ... His language is also packed with imagery, metaphor, irony, ambiguity, antithesis and double entendre and is just so rich and juicy to perform. I find the language a vehicle and not an obstacle. It's true what they say: "If you can do Shakespeare, you can do anything." Playing Hamlet has been almost a life-long dream for me. I think I memorized "To be, or not to be ..." my senior year in high school! The challenge, of course, with this role is that I'm almost always on stage!

Q. How did you wind up here, doing this with TheatreSquared?

A. Last spring, I met Bob Ford and Amy Herzberg at a playwriting conference -- one of the nation's best -- called The New Harmony Project. I actually read the part of Roy Elgin in Bob Ford's "The Spiritualist" -- coincidentally the role that our director of "Hamlet," Sean Patrick Reilly, played here in the production last fall. I got to know Bob and Amy, and when they came to New York to audition for "Hamlet," I jumped on the opportunity to audition for them!

-- Becca Martin-Brown

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