Hamlet

From Current Biography, September 1985:

[The day Sam would play Hamlet] came in the summer of 1975, when Waterston took up the challenge of playing the notoriously difficult role for the New York Shakespeare Festival, under the direction of Michael Rudman. Waterston's Hamlet was, in the view of the majority of critics, more the petulant schoolboy than the traditional "melancholy Dane" and clearly no match for Claudius. But there was nonetheless an appealing catch in his voice that signaled the "autumnal despair", as one reviewer put , "of a young man defeated", and some of his readings offered new insights into the play. By the time the production moved indoors to the stage of the Vivian Beaumont Theatre in Lincoln Center in December, 1975, Waterston had refined and strengthened his characterization to such an extent that one critic-Martin Gottfried of the New York Post-went so far as to call it "one of the most memorable Hamlets" of a lifetime of theatergoing. "This is an actor's Hamlet rather than a performer's," he concluded in his review of December 18, 1975, "a touching, vulnerable Hamlet, believably an individual human being."