Bruce Horak (Hemmer) is a long-standing theatre performer. He and some longtime colleagues have come up with an innovative and eccentric Goblin: MacBeth.
Beyond its initial run in Bruce’s hometown of Calgary, the production is scheduled for a two week run at the Stratford Festival in October and is just starting a run at Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach festival.
From the Stratford Festival listing…
“Goblin:Macbeth is a blast of pure creative genius. Unpredictable, unrestrained and uninhibited, it is the stage equivalent of a theme park funhouse ride.” Calgary Herald
Enjoy the Scottish play like never before with Goblin:Macbeth, coming to the Meighen Forum!
In a tale of three goblins stumbling upon the complete works of William Shakespeare, Rebecca Northan, Bruce Horak and Ellis Lalonde blend improvisation, fantasy and tragedy in an electrifying and fresh interpretation of the classic play. When goblins come to the Stratford Festival, anything can happen!
Henry Alonso Myers, one of the SNW executive producers, said in an interview that, " … people are gonna say, “There’s no tension because we know everyone survives.” And we wanted to say, “What if not everyone survives?” And part of that was also to see our characters go through loss."
With TV series, the “kill off a well liked character so that the audience knows this is serious,” approach frustrates me. I think it’s lazy. What I think is difficult is having a strong story with strong writing that makes the audience believe that a character(s) is in peril in the moment. Hemmer’s death did nothing to change that legacy characters (Pike, Spock, Uhura, and more) are not going to die during SNW. Being Star Trek, I have to say that at least they won’t stay dead.
I think that they had lightning in a bottle with Hemmer. That was the time to rethink killing him off. The “seeing the SNW characters go through loss” rationale is shaky and doesn’t ring true to me. From TOS through PIC, the main characters have grieved the deaths of any they cannot save.
The EP explanation of needing Hemmer’s demise in order to grow Uhura as a character is ridiculous. In SNW, Uhura is already dealing with loss. Hemmer being there to help guide her growth through such turmoil makes a lot more sense to me than piling on more grief and loss.
Henry Alonso Myers Interview: Star Trek Strange New Worlds, July 7, 2022
Yeah, I’m a frustrated fan of Hemmer.
Share the feeling.
I personally never buy the fridging a character to ‘make it real’ argument, but it seems to have a great deal of sway with a certain generation of writers.
Unfortunately the EP/writers arguing this are almost always heterosexual cisgendered males and the characters fridged are almost always women, LGBTQ+ or in the case of Hemmer, a person with disability.
And like most systemic bias, they just don’t seem to see the issue. After the backlash from killing off Culber in the first season of Discovery, Akiva Goldsman (and Alex Kurtzman who signs off on the season arcs), should have been more hesitant to repeat the situation with another representation character. I don’t doubt their progressive values, but this can only be understood as an enormous blind spot.