After dinner last Friday night, I took an elegant stroll to Central Park from our Old Louisville condo to clear my head.
I’d intended to go sit on a park bench beneath the monstrous trees filled with birds of prey – my partner and I particularly enjoy hunting for the Great Horned Owls – to brood and read a book my mother gifted me several years ago: Ghosts of Old Louisville. There’s a section in the book about the park’s mercurial history that I’d began weeks earlier and planned to finish while sitting within its subject’s bowels.
It had been a long week filled with various unforeseen stresses, and I’d chosen this specific text to decompress for three key reasons:
(1) It was light reading.
(2) Several nights prior, a bat had found its way into our third-story walk-up and began doing laps around the condo, triggering panic over potential exposure to rabies; a concern aggravated by the sheer incompetence exhibited by the Norton Healthcare Audubon ER team, who negligently administered the PEP protocol (injecting both the Rabies Immune Globulin and the rabies vaccine into the same site of my left arm, which negates the effectiveness of the vaccine, while also injecting some of the RIG into both my butt cheeks: glute muscles do not absorb the RIG as effectively as other muscles, which results in lower antibody stimulation)—a protocol designed to protect me in the off chance I was infected (a story I plan to write about at length in the near future). Nevertheless, the experience seemed to lend itself to the genre of vampires and ghost stories.
(3) Our native son Jonathon Sturgeon – a writer and editor based in New York City – published an exquisitely dark and detailed “Letter from Louisville” in Harper’s June issue, entitled “Sons of Good Fathers: On some killings in Kentucky.” The piece explores in long-form nonfiction, a short history of horrors spawned in our little enclave.
Sturgeon’s lede, “Kentuckiana is cursed,” sets the tone for a sweeping narrative that orbits his tragic connection to and context surrounding his paternal cousin, Connor Sturgeon, who murdered five colleagues (and critically injured one police officer) in the mass shooting at the Old National Bank on April 10, 2023. And who was himself subsequently killed by LMPD.
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Sturgeon’s essay is also a meditation on Kentucky’s all-powerful patriarchs (including the Beshears) – whom his mother dubs “The Daddies” – as well as on nepotism, the long, dismal shadow of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining in the West End and our Commonwealth’s culture of inequality and bloodshed. Moreover, Sturgeon adroitly weaves into his narrative relevant background information surrounding Breonna Taylor’s murder and Quintez Brown’s attempted assassination of Mayor Craig Greenberg that provocatively expands on these themes.
So struck was I by Sturgeon’s bleak and nuanced depiction of our city, I began drafting a pitch to Harper’s to respond to his insider’s gaze—mainly because I fully identified with his unflinching assessments and had not read someone do it so well.
The point being, I hoped sitting down to read Ghosts of Old Louisville would provide me with some casual fodder – i.e. grim anecdotes and fantastical myths – to incorporate into that pitch.
But I never did make it to the park bench. Little did I know where my walk would lead me . . .
Exiting Belgravia’s secret-garden environ, I passed the Pink Palace – a three-story Victorian mansion, once home to both a brothel and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and said to be haunted by a “Southern Gentleman” named Avery. It was here, while turning north onto the stately St. James Court, where I noticed a cluster of women carrying canvas chairs, walking towards the park.
They are headed to the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival, I thought, and decided to forgo the book for a show.
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?
Approaching Central Park’s outdoor amphitheater, abuzz with leashed canines and chattering bipedal primates, I was greeted by a smiling attendant who offered me a program. I thanked her, took a seat, and opened the booklet to see which Shakespeare play I was set to receive. To my satisfaction, and perhaps taken as an omen, there appeared the image of the iconic skull of Hamlet.
I’d arrived just five minutes before curtain. It was still bright and balmy, but the oppressive temperatures and humidity from the heat dome that throughout the week plagued much of the country – and Kentuckiana – had begun to ease.
A strong breeze blew through the trees. Neighbors lounged on quilts with their dogs, sipping hard cider, West Sixth beer and “Players’ Punch” cocktails – a concoction of lemonade, cranberry, and lime juice, spiked with your choice of Old Forester or Tito’s – sold at Will’s Tavern. (Will’s, named after William Shakespeare, shares its space with the Historic Old Louisville Walking Tours and Fourth Precinct LMPD station within the park).
Admittedly, I am not a Shakespeare aficionado, nor did I have time to interview anyone from the company. Therefore, what follows are but a few impromptu impressions from a layman. Nevertheless, I hope they convey some sense of how Shakespeare’s tragic albeit universal themes unexpectedly mirrored my own headspace at the time . . .
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Let me begin by saying, it was a riveting production, directed by Amy Attaway and edited by Gregory Maupin. If you get a chance, go. (Here are the remaining dates.)
In their unique version, set in 1960s Denmark, Prince Hamlet is played by a fiery, plotting woman – Mollie Murk – who is fantastic. In fact, each cast member was compelling: from the gravediggers (Maupin and Mary Baunjoko) to Crystian Wiltshire’s spirited Laertes, who, sporting a picked-out, period-nodding afro, kills Hamlet with a poisoned-tipped foil in a fencing duel to avenge his father’s death – only to be fatally pricked by the same blade.
The Ghost of old Hamlet, played by Tom Luce, was particularly haunting, aided by the sound crew’s ominous voice effects. Kyle Ware delivered a comic, crowd-pleasing Polonius, who is killed by Hamlet after she mistakes him for her uncle Claudius (played by Jon Huffman), upon learning Claudius killed her father to seize both the crown and the queen (played by Jennifer Pennington).
I also really enjoyed Sasha Cifuentes’ powerful performance as Ophelia, Polonius’s daughter and Hamlet’s doomed lover, who goes mad and drowns, under mysterious circumstances after her father’s death and Hamlet’s rejection. As noted, this production of Hamlet is set in the 1960s. Throughout, there are nods to the era’s apparel, aesthetics and slang—in one scene, with flowers in her hair, Cifuentes sings a dramatic soliloquy reminiscent of Joan Baez.
In another scene, a traveling troupe descends from the audience and takes to the stage – a stage literally built around Central Park trees – while performing an entire folk number. The troupe sings Shakespearean iambic pentameter in harmony while playing a banjo, tambourine, harmonica, and percussion instruments. It’s a clever flourish that lightened the Bard’s dense wordplay and played to the Kentucky crowd with Bluegrass in their veins.
During the opening acts, the audience did have to contend with sneezes from summer allergies, mosquito bites (bring spray), uncomfortable benches (bring a cushion or portable seat), un-silenced phones, chatty neighbors, and the intermittent roar of incoming UPS aircraft preparing to land, which occasionally drowned out the actors, who would pause for dramatic effect to wait for the planes to pass. But these were trivial nuisances.
“To be or not to be . . .”
At intermission, Matt Wallace, Kentucky Shakespeare’s Artistic Director, took to the stage to welcome the crowd and celebrate the 65th anniversary—now the longest-running non-ticketed Shakespeare festival in the country. He encouraged the attendees to support the production by visiting the food trucks, the bar, and making donations, which cast members collected directly from the audience.
Three food trucks were parked on the lawn beyond the amphitheater: Con Aji y Café (serving Colombian empanadas and arepas), Four Pegs BBQ, and the most popular at intermission – the Cookie Cabin Creamery. This truck, styled like a tiny log cabin, served cookies, decadent-looking waffle-cone ice cream, and ice cream sandwiches.
While watching throngs of kids run wild on the new Central Park playground and audience members queue for refreshments, I checked my phone. My partner Lisa had just texted, back from running errands. I invited her to join me for the final acts.
As she arrived, the sun dipped, dusk fell and bats took to the sky, darting above us in the dying light to feast on insects. They were a jolting reminder of our week’s earlier terror. I darkly joked, “We killed their cousin.”
Earlier that day, Lisa had us hold hands and pray for the bat – a gesture I didn’t mind, even though we’re both atheists. Pest control had plucked the bat from our crown molding while it slept peacefully perched above a large living room window, while I was busy being jabbed repeatedly with rabies shots at the ER.
The poor bat suffocated in the plastic container pest control trapped it in. Later, I delivered its limp body to the Health and Wellness lab downtown. It was sent on to Frankfort so the state could slice open its brain and test it for rabies.
It didn’t have it.
What a waste.
Life is fucking cruel.
Meanwhile, as the sky turned black, thousands of lightning bugs flew low across the park’s fields where years ago, I hallucinated on mushrooms during a snowstorm, and communed with a horde of sweet-potato-breasted robins. Now the summer fireflies’ glowing neon butts flickered across the darkened landscape like the ghosts my mother’s book warned of, while distant booms from fireworks, like bombs, thundered in the night.
Watching the final acts of Hamlet in the open air – full of betrayal, madness and death – felt oddly clarifying, even comforting. Shakespeare’s unflinching treatment of horror and the comic futility of life gave me plenty to explore in my response to Sturgeon.
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This article appears in Jun 20 – Jul 3, 2025.