Hollywood Star Saul Rubinek To Participate In SOF’s Upcoming Seattle Conference
Avid Oxfordian Saul Rubinek joins us in Seattle!
Well-known Hollywood actor Saul Rubinek—star of the current hit one-man show Playing Shylock—will be participating in the upcoming SOF Annual Conference in Seattle, it was announced this week by Conference Chair Don Rubin. Rubinek will be interviewed live on stage about Playing Shylock, a fascinating take on The Merchant of Venice focused around the subject of anti-semitism.
“We are absolutely delighted that Saul has carved a space in his very busy television and film schedule to be with us,” said Rubin.” Saul is certainly what the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition calls a ‘reasonable doubter’ but, based on the extended intervention he added into the new play’s text about Edward de Vere, he also seems very much an Oxfordian. In the show, he stops the action to speak directly to the audience about both the authorship question and Oxford specifically.
“When my wife and I saw the production in Toronto,” Rubin added, “where Saul originally cut his acting teeth, my wife and I may have been the only people in the sold-out audience to recognize the Oxford name when he mentioned it. We wondered how that got into the script? How have audiences reacted? We’ll all find out in Seattle.”
Saul will be interviewed on stage Saturday afternoon, September 26 from 3:15 to 4:15 p.m. (Pacific Time), a session that will include lots of time for questions from those attending either live or via Livestream.
Discounted advance registration for the conference closes on 23 August. Livestream registration is now open. Register today!
For the record, several Oxfordians saw the production when it played in New York – among them, Roger Stritmatter and journalist William Niederkorn—and both made it a point to speak afterwards to Saul. His upcoming appearance in Seattle is a unique opportunity for all Oxfordians to get to know more about Saul and especially his interest in the SAQ.
In the play, Saul actually performs some of Shylock’s speeches in Yiddish. How did he come to Yiddish? Born in a refugee camp in Germany just after World War II, Saul’s actor father ran a Yiddish-language theater company in Poland. At nine months old, the family arrived in Canada as immigrants with Saul actually speaking Yiddish and French before he spoke English. At seven, he made his first appearance onstage as an actor and later became the youngest member of the Stratford Ontario Shakespeare Festival. A co-founder of the Toronto Free Theatre (now the Canadian Stage Company), among Saul’s recent stage performances was Ethan Coen’s A Play Is a Poem at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.
Saul’s has also appeared in over 60 films including the Coen brothers’ Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and Quentin Tarantino’s Unforgiven. Over four decades, his television work has inclded regular roles in Frasier and Warehouse 13 as well as guest starring roles in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Grey’s Anatomy, Billions and Al Pacino’s new series for Amazon, Hunters, among many others.
Saul has also written several plays including, most recently, All in the Telling, a personal exploration of how the telling of family history stories impacts multiple generations. He has also directed several films including Jerry and Tom co-produced with his wife Elinor Reid. So Many Miracles, his personal account of his parents’ survival growing up in Poland during World War II, was published by Penguin with the book later made into a documentary film by CBC in Canada and PBS in the US.
He currently makes his home in Los Angeles.
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