For years, Chela De Ferrari, founder of a theater in Lima, Peru, called Teatro La Plaza, had wanted to direct Hamlet, but she couldn’t find the right actor to play the title role. Then one day, an usher in the theater, Jaime Cruz, introduced himself to her as an actor. Cruz has Down syndrome. “I invited him to have coffee with me,” De Ferrari told Seven Days by email. “We sat down and talked, and for some reason, as I looked at him, I suddenly imagined him wearing the prince’s crown.”
What could happen, she asked herself, if the famous words “To be or not to be” were spoken by a person with Down syndrome? She assembled seven actors who have the congenital condition, including Cruz, and one who has a cognitive disability. With their input, she wrote a new version of William Shakespeare’s most famous play.
Teatro La Plaza’s Hamlet has been staged in roughly 60 cities around the world since its 2019 premiere. The cast has never changed. Next week, the actors come to Dartmouth College’s Hopkins Center for the Arts in Hanover, N.H., for two performances. Neither a presentation of Shakespeare’s original work nor a conventional adaptation, the show is performed in Spanish with English supertitles projected above the stage, incorporating video throughout.
At one point in the show, as Cruz worries that he will not play Hamlet well, actors famous for the role appear on screen. In a video, an actor portraying Ian McKellen, who played Hamlet multiple times throughout his career, offers a nervous Cruz advice on playing the prince. In still another scene, about 40 people with Down syndrome fill the screen to augment the defiant energy of the cast members as they sing “No Soy Como los Demás” — “I’m Not Like the Others” — by Peruvian garage-rock band the Manganzoides. The life-affirming show, the New York Times notes, “ends with a dance party, not a stage full of corpses.”
In an email interview with Seven Days, De Ferrari discussed the production that the Guardian called “as playful as it is intellectual.”
Teatro La Plaza’s Hamlet has been called an adaptation of Hamlet. How do you describe it?
I would call it a very free version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The performance moves constantly between Shakespeare and the lives of the actors. Scenes from the play coexist with personal testimonies, music, dance, video and direct conversations with the audience. Perhaps the simplest way to describe it is this: Eight performers take possession of Hamlet and use it to speak about themselves and about the world in which they live.
Why did you choose Hamlet as the basis of the show?
Hamlet is an iconic, extraordinarily powerful work, a play to which we have assigned enormous cultural value. And I was interested in placing a work of such value in the hands of a group of people to whom society has historically assigned very little value. Hamlet is also an iconic role, one that has been played by some of the world’s most celebrated, prestigious and conventionally beautiful actors. I was interested in entering into a dialogue with that tradition. What happens when we place Hamlet in bodies in which we are not accustomed to recognizing beauty, power or virtuosity? Can we find beauty where we have not been taught to look for it? Can we reconsider what we understand as power, beauty and artistic excellence?
Once we began working with the actors, I also discovered extraordinary connections between Shakespeare’s play and their own lives. Hamlet is constantly being watched. People make decisions about him, interpret his behavior and question his capacity to act. The love between Hamlet and Ophelia is supervised. Polonius believes he has the right to decide whom his daughter can love. In different ways, many of our actors recognized those situations immediately.
And then, of course, there is the most famous question in Western theatre: “To be or not to be?” When that question is spoken by people whose very existence has historically been questioned, controlled and even prevented, it acquires another dimension.
Did the actors help write the script?
Yes, although not in the conventional sense of sitting down together and writing a script. The dramaturgy emerged from a long rehearsal process. We talked, improvised, asked questions, shared memories and explored scenes from Shakespeare. We created different exercises and situations in rehearsal that would generate material we could draw from. The actors were at the center of that process: Their stories, their ideas, their interests, their complaints, their humor, even their musical choices became material for the piece.
There was also an associate directing and dramaturgy team, and everyone contributed ideas and helped shape what was emerging in the rehearsal room. So the final piece is a combination of Shakespeare’s text, the material and ideas that came from the actors, and the contributions of the directing and dramaturgy team. In that sense, although I was the person who wrote the script, the work could never have been written without them. ➆
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
The original print version of this article was headlined “To Be Seen | Actors with Down syndrome present a “very free version” of Hamlet”
This article appears in September 23 • 2026.
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