Billy Magnussen climbed slowly and silently up an outdoor stairway in northern Manhattan on a blustery afternoon. He stopped briefly to wave to the woman draped in a shawl awaiting him two landings above. But once he reached her, he returned to the bottom of the John T. Brush Stairway, an obscure spot near where the Polo Grounds once stood, named for the long-ago owner of the New York Giants baseball team.
Then, with a camera rolling, he climbed the stairs again and again.
Mr. Magnussen, who earned a Tony nomination for “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” did not speak while filming the scene. There is to be no dialogue, just a voice-over, in which he will declaim his love, reciting Shakespeare’s Sonnet 108: “So that eternal love in love’s fresh case/Weighs not the dust and injury of age/Nor gives to necessary wrinkles place.”
The film is part of an ambitious project to create a short film for each of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, with each movie shot at a different New York City location.
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