The new St. Petersburg Shakespeare Company is presenting Hamlet at Eckerd College’s Bininger Theater, and though the production isn’t an impressive one, it does offer some glimmers of what this long-needed organization may, in time, become.
More precisely, it offers Betty-Jane Parks as Ophelia, Ginger King as Gertrude and Nicholas J. White as Laertes. All three of these fine actors make perfect sense of their challenging roles. Parks, for example, solves the problem of Ophelia’s eventual madness by playing the character as mentally weak even on a good day. King’s Gertrude answers the inevitable questions about her hasty remarriage by showing herself utterly delighted with Claudius, and not for a moment nostalgic for her first husband. And Laertes comes through as an intrepid anti-Hamlet, as robust and self-confident as his opposite is (or should be) introverted and uncertain. Whenever these actors are on stage, we enjoy a Shakespeare studied closely, interpreted coherently, and as humanly authentic as anything you’ll see anywhere. If SPSC can present more performances of this caliber, there’s no end to the possibilities.
This article appears in Jul 29 – Aug 4, 2010.