sion. I will be directing most of my focus on Hamlet.
             The setting will be present day Athens, Greece. I chose Athens because Freud refers to Oedipus Rex as the basis of Hamlet's character. Since Oedipus is Greek, putting Hamlet in Athens makes the connection between these characters more direct. There are two reasons why I moved the play to the present day. The first one is the difficulty that modern audiences have with Shakespearean English. My goal is get the audience to hear Freud's Hamlet as clearly as possible without getting lost in Shakespearean language. The second reason has to do with the poor habits of American theater audiences. If the play takes place in another time period than the present, the audience members tend to see the lessons of the story as unrelated to them. Only in bringing the play to the modern day can Freud's lessons connect directly with the repressed lives of the modern theatergoer. I also feel that most men living in the twenty- first century will not admit that during their formative years, sexual desires arose and were naturally directed towards their mother, the object of their most fond l
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