After the workshop, Pearl Manus, a student at the Care Center’s chapter of Bard Microcollege, talked to me about “Hamlet.” “Even though it’s a very old play there are still the same issues in contemporary life,” she said. “You don’t feel so alone.”

She turned to Ms. Peacock, whom she’d seen as Desdemona in “Othello” last year. “I thought about how you died in two plays and you got slapped in two plays,” she said. “I was stronger. I didn’t cry this time around.”

‘It Taught Me a Lot About Myself’

For the last performance of the week, at Trevor Day School, I watched from backstage, tiptoeing from one wing to the other while Claudius scrolled through his phone and Horatio quickly became Polonius and Ophelia undid her hair for the mad scene and Gertrude grabbed the skulls she needed for the gravedigger and Laertes checked the prop swords and Hamlet stripped down for the fight scene.

The actors had performed the play almost 30 times by now and they had an ease with it, often lip-syncing each other’s lines backstage or breaking into aggressive dance moves before they had to scurry away for an entrance.

I was a theater major in college and did some acting for a year or two after, and in the backstage jostle I remembered, acutely, why I’d loved it — the adrenaline, the manic camaraderie, the phenomenon of having so many eyes and ears trained just on you, the confidence that you could take strange words and make them brilliantly alive. I also remembered why I’m grateful not to do it anymore, for a lot of those same reasons.