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Delicious Danish

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

Joseph Hurley

HAMLET, by William Shakespeare. Directed by Tom Gilroy. Starring Jared Harris, Lili Taylor and Richard Harris (via video clip). The New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, Drew University, Madison, N.J. Through Sept. 2.

The old theatrical expression “phoning it in,” referring to a performance that seems to have been delivered by an actor on the theatrical equivalent of automatic pilot, has developed a new wrinkle, if two examples this season are any indication.

The development in question is the actor who is present only in a series of video clips, while the other performers in the production are actually on the scene.

The first instance in which this new spin made itself known was in the Irish Arts Center’s production of Joseph O’Connor’s “Roses and Petrol,” with the deceased head of the family, played by the writer and sometimes actor Frank McCourt, on the scene through the mechanism of a series of video cassettes he’d left behind.

Now, and considerably more successfully in artistic terms, there is Richard Harris’s participation in the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival’s energetic, imaginative staging of “Hamlet,” with the Limerick-born star playing the slain, wronged Danish King Hamlet the First while his middle son, Jared, stars as his son and namesake, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

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The elder Harris, looking like a Viking chieftain from some lost silent film classic, is, of course, playing the ghost, which makes periodic appearances on the stony battlements of the castle at Elsinore, and the device works because of the excellence and clarity of the results of what the NJSF program calls the “video shoot,” and, on a deeper, subtler level, because of the blood bond linking veteran actor Harris and his son, Jared.

It would all, of course, signify little or nothing if Jared Harris were not delivering a creditable Hamlet on the stage of the F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theatre, the appealing playhouse on the campus of Drew University in Madison, N.J.

As it happens, the second of Richard Harris’s three sons is giving an excellent interpretation of the role, intelligent, witty, inventive and rewardingly accessible in a clear-minded production staged by the playwright and occasional actor, Tom Gilroy.

The younger Harris, last seen in New York at the Vineyard Theatre in the leading role of Davey Holmes’s “More Lies About Jerry,” has at least a respectable history of participation in Shakespearean productions, principally at the New York Shakespeare Festival, where he did standout work in “King Lear” and in “Henry IV,” Parts I and II, this last-named in a controversial production directed at the Public by Joanne Akalaitis.

For the New Jersey production, which opened the festival season on Saturday, Gilroy has assembled a generally strong cast, including Lili Taylor as Ophelia, Maggie Low as Gertrude, Bill Raymond as a slightly offbeat Claudius, and William Bogert as Polonius, the most famous old bore in dramatic literature.

Gilroy’s production begins, before the Prince joins Bernardo, Marcellus and Horatio, who have seen the ghost, on the battlements, with an interpolated scene, brief and wordless, in which Hamlet and Ophelia, both clad in immaculate white, embrace and then vanish behind a huge swag of pristine fabric that had, as the audience filed into the theater, served as a sort of show curtain. As they disappear, the lovers of Elsinore pull the vast expanse of gleaming material down and the play begins.

The production fielded by the festival’s artistic director, Bonnie J. Monte, efficient and workable though it is, bears the marks of a limited budget, from the minimalist set designs by Michael Schweikardt to the serviceable costumes by Miranda Hoffman, some of which bear the look of having been yanked rashly from the theater’s all-purpose wardrobe trunk, velvet gowns for the women and cotton tunics and overblouses, many of them seeming too light for the Elsinore weather, for the men.

The platforms and levels comprising the production’s floor provide ample space for the subtleties of fight director Rick Sordelet’s intentions, some of which come close to landing the actors, particularly Harris, in the laps of patrons in the first row of the auditorium.

Harris’s Prince is both confident and confidential, telling his story in lucid and perceptive terms, never shirking on the rich humor in which the text abounds and which is often slighted in moodier, more solemn stagings. Harris’s Hamlet, to put it mildly, knows where the jokes are, and that fact turns out to be one of the production’s more salient aspects.

The actor also handles the verse with grace and skill, something that cannot always be said of Taylor, who at times seems adrift in the language, although her Ophelia is sympathetic and frequently moving.

Mabou Mines veteran Bill Raymond, whose face is formed into a kind of permanent smile, seems to be experiencing a modicum of trouble isolating the evil in Cladius’s character, although he eventually pulls it off admirably.

Maggie Low’s Gertrude is dignified and self-protective, at least until the closet scene, in which Hamlet undoes her handily.

As Polonius, William Bogert hits his marks and makes his points, as does Eric Hoffman, doubling as the Player King and the First Gravedigger.

Gregory Jackson and Adam Stein do well with, respectively, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, literature’s most celebrated nonentities, with Stein returning in the play’s final scenes as a particularly vivid Osric.

The gates of Drew University welcome New Jersey Shakespeare Festival patrons with a neatly lettered, brightly painted sign advertising “Hamlet” as “Shakespeare’s brilliant tragedy,” an exercise in understatement, considering the fact that the play is widely considered to be the absolute pinnacle of dramatic achievement in any language.

Richard Harris’s electronic participation is effective enough and sufficiently satisfying to make one regret that the actor seems never to have done any Shakespeare until now, either on stage or screen. It could develop that these few taped moments as the ghost of the slaughtered monarch will have to stand as the star’s Shakespearean record, as he leaves the field open for the ongoing achievements of a genuinely promising Shakespearean named Jared Harris.

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