"It needs a flying monkey!" admonished Liev Schreiber, his voice heavy with assumed Romanian accent. "Put a flying monkey in it, then they'll understand."

     The day is January 7th, the setting the blackbox theater. Boxes painted with primary colors are arranged haphazardly across the stage. Teachers and students -- seniors, a few juniors and sophomores -- settle in their chairs. To finish off their reading of Hamlet, the seniors had seen Schreiber as Hamlet the night before in a production by Romanian director Andrei Serban. Hamlet is, in Schreiber's opinion, "the greatest thing" he has ever read: Hamlet is ubiquitous, Hamlet is everyone. Schreiber is here to discuss the play itself and the controversial production, which is, of course, replete with flying monkeys.

     He is led to centerstage by English teacher Christina Moustakis, who shakes his hand and cranes her neck, telling the crowd, "When Liev was a student here I looked up to him because of his height. Now I look up to him because of his art." The blackbox theater, which seats about 70, is small and intimate, and Schreiber genially remarks on its low ceilings, the lights just barely grazing his head. He will say later that he values theater and life as a continuum, which "we are all a part of" and of which "we all share something." He learned to recognize this transcendence from his mother, Seder, and silent meeting. As the crowd leans in to hear him, his words resonate; he has captured the audience, his accessibility creating the very aura he speaks of.

     Schreiber, a classically-trained actor who made his big break on film as a transvestite, loves the theater -- its politics, its humanity, its monkeys. In 1998 he won Off-Broadway's highest honor, an Obie awarded by the Village Voice for his work in another Shakespeare play, the tragicomedic Cymbeline. Cymbeline was not his first Shakespeare, however. He may have trained at Yale Drama School, but it was in a low-profile production of Midsummer Night's Dream staged by Friends Seminary in the mid-80's that he found his calling.

     Schreiber came to Friends off of a football injury which had cost him an athletic career at Brooklyn Tech. When he arrived, Schreiber admitted, he was not the most likable guy, always on the offensive, snarling a contentious "What?" at any student that happened to look at him. His childhood had been very hard, much rougher than many of his affluent classmates', and he raised this guard to distance himself from it and from them; a friend of his remarked in a December 13th issue of the New Yorker that Schreiber could have easily ended up in jail. At Friends, however, Schreiber soon learned to channel this anger into acting, vent not against his peers but through his characters -- characters that he, appropriately enough, calls his "peers." Friends Seminary, with its sense of community echoing the community he felt at home, helped redirect Schreiber towards a life of acting.

     Since then, Schreiber has become a staple of independent film, getting little money for movies that brought back huge profits for their distributors. This success has allowed him to move into major studio flicks, appearing as the world-weary Cotton Weary in the Scream franchise, a scientist probing a mysterious craft in Sphere, a member of a righteous Canadian commune in the recent Hurricane, among others. On December 20th he was nominated for a Golden Globe for his role as Orson Welles in HBO's RKO 281, for which he gained twenty-five pounds. Indeed, to nearly all his characters he adds essential, minute touches of personality, one always wearing a tie, another compulsively drinking Pepto-Bismol, Hamlet cutting off his finger during a key monologue. Schreiber has a lot of work in the horizon, too: a film version of Hamlet with Schreiber as Laertes to Ethan Hawke's prince of Denmark is premiering at Sundance this month, and he is talking with Laurence Fishburne about a production of Othello at the Public.

     Still, for all the acclaim he has won in film, theater remains his favorite work, for it is not the passive conduit of entertainment he considers movies and television to be. Theater is forced to entertain, forced to hold an audience and to engage them -- the audience is as integral to the production as the actors, the actors playing off the audience and manipulating the audience's reaction. Theater is an organism, the acting live, the accidents live, the response immediate. It is sociopolitical, too, the staging revealing implied hierarchies and the only thing guaranteeing success is success itself. Nothing is definite in theater, neither interpretations nor reactions.

     And, more simply, being in a movie is boring. Schreiber related to his starstruck crowd of the monotony of movie shoots, reading six lines and getting ten grand, walking down a staircase and getting another thousand. As Cotton Weary, he was told to look into the camera and make a "menacing face," which he promptly displayed, a combination of a quizzical frown and questioning sneer. "More menacing" -- an out-right snarl -- "uh, a little less" -- a bemused smile.

     Theater is naturally based not on such swift directorial edits but on a flow, and it is this flow which often loses the audience's attention. Andrei Serban's production of Hamlet at the Public Theater wanted to disrupt and jar the audience into attentiveness, not lose them to the convolutions of Shakespeare's words. To do this, Serban employed several unconventional and often disjointed staging techniques: the first and second half start off with a stagehand kneeling down and starting a smoke machine; during one scene, posters of other famous Hamlet productions are carried out by the cast, culminating in the Public's photo of Schreiber; Hamlet sports, at one time or another, a pig mask and a blood-covered butcher's apron. Needless to say, Serban's interpretation of Hamlet has its share of detractors -- including an elderly lady who came to nearly every other show to ask Schreiber why he "had to go and mess with Shakespeare like that." Schreiber, as well, did not agree with many of Serban's choices, and actually had many tumultuous fights with him about decisions such as the pig mask. But, in retrospect, he understands Serban's choice to direct Hamlet as he did. Like the Public's production of Hamlet or not, it forces one to think about what one was seeing, forces one to analyze what was going on and then rationalize it -- people exited not shrugging, but pointedly expounding about its brilliance or, as the case may be, its idiocy.

     Which is why Serban included a flying monkey.

     Liev Schreiber did not come to Friends on the 7th to defend Serban's decisions so much as he came to explain them. He did openly admit, after all, how frustrating it was to work with Serban, how frustrating it was to even compromise with Serban. And, not only that, but these debates were reinforced and heightened by the fact that the Public had granted Schreiber hiring power -- he had actually chosen Serban as his director, Schreiber's authority then limited once rehearsals started. Sure enough, Schreiber entered Hamlet with his own reading of the lines, but he "realized the second week of rehearsal, it was not going to be the Hamlet [he] envisioned." Having to eat humble pie was hard for him, especially since he had been given such power in the production, but in the end it did take a detoured path towards his vision. Serban comes from a school of directors influenced by the work of Bertolt Brecht, a German dramatist who undermined the traditional illusion of theater by distancing the actors from their roles and emphasizing the clockwork of backstage. Similar to Serban's philosophy, Schreiber did not want this Hamlet to be a showcase for some actor, as it so often is -- he wanted to emphasize the ebb and flow of theater, the Theater as Organism, reveal the brilliant mechanics of the play. So, while he would debated often with Serban, he never regretted his choice.

     With this admission, Schreiber decides he has nothing to lose. He leans on his knee, confiding in the audience in his body language, letting it in on a trade secret. Shakespeare, he says, looking reproachfully at a few seniors, "did not write Hamlet because he was assigned to -- he wrote it because he had something to say. Male or female -- everyone is Hamlet." The character, in his tragedy, has universal application, is telling a very simple but often forgotten truth. Hamlet reveals that "we are bound by our humanity," that it is this tragedy, this humility, which makes us human. Serban illustrated this point with a flying monkey; Schreiber, his own tragic past detailed in the countless articles, the awesome power of his celebrity a product of media hubris, does not need a flying monkey. One truly believes he is Hamlet, that he lived Hamlet for the run of the play, that is his classical training which gave an otherwise experimental production bearing. He has established a strong repartee with the Friends audience, the talk extends fifteen minutes into class time -- he knowingly winks to the crowd as he is met with a surge of applause.