BAM Artist Circle Chairs Chuck Nathan and Alisa Levin with John Turturro and wife Katherine Borowitz.

As John Turturro approached the head table, the president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Karen Brooks Hopkins, rose from her seat. “I present to you the consul general of Sicily,” she said in jest, introducing the actor to her tablemates, a group that included South African Consul General George Monyemangene, his wife, Louise Monyemangene, and Mr. Turturro’s better half, Katherine Borowitz.

It was a frigid night, smack in the middle of the city’s latest cold snap. Inside the grand foyer of the Peter Jay Sharp Building, however, the atmosphere was warm and bubbly. Many had braved the elements for BAM’s 2013 Theater Benefit, an evening honoring renowned British theater and film director Peter Brook and celebrating the U.S. premiere of his latest (quite beautiful) production, The Suit.

For his part, Mr. Turturro was very late. He plopped down directly to Shindigger’s right with a clownish wave, just in time for the main course, having already missed a delicious vegan spiced butternut squash and sweet banana soup.

A server rushed to Mr. Turturro’s side. “Are you vegetarian?”

“Um, no!” he shouted, reaching for a hefty portion of red-wine-marinated beef tenderloin over a less-hefty portion of saffron couscous, quickly polishing his plate clean. For a moment, Shindigger was concerned as the actor began eyeing the Mikado yellow floral arrangements. Would he devour those as well? No. He just wanted to wave an approving fork at the bouquet, it seemed.

Turning then to our left, Shindigger wondered if Mrs. Monyemangene was accustomed to sitting so far from her husband, who was positioned at the table’s opposite end.

“Oh, yes, all the time,” she sighed, confessing that this was her first BAM experience. Shindigger assured her that she was in for a treat and even convinced her to trade in a chalice of chenin blanc for the merlot we were drinking.

“Indaba wine is very popular in South Africa,” she explained.

Be that as it may, the merlot was delightfully jammy and eased our still-frostbitten soul; we refilled frequently. Ms. Hopkins soon moved to the podium and, standing beside BAM executive producer Joseph V. Melillo, addressed the room.

We spotted the artist Francesco Clemente, his wife, Alba Clemente, and former dance and theater manager Harvey Lichtenstein—namesake of the glorious Harvey Theater, where we would soon be seeing The Suit.

Eventually, man of the evening Peter Brook took the stage: “Theater is where the past and present meet,” the legend said. “That is something that can only happen in theater. That’s the strange nature of theater.”

When dinner concluded, guests were asked to enjoy dessert and then make haste. Hot beverages were wisely dished out in to-go cups. Before exiting, Shindigger struck up a conversation with Mr. Turturro.

“I live in the neighborhood and have been coming to BAM—” but that was all he could mutter before an elderly patron barged in.

“You’re too young for that part!”

The man, whose name we did not catch, was referring to Mr. Turturro’s upcoming turn as Halvard Solness in Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder, to be performed at BAM this spring.

“Actually, he’s supposed to be my age,” Mr. Turturro responded. “They always cast him a little bit older.”

“Oh, I remember it as Oskar Homolka,” the well-heeled Ibsen fan continued, recalling the late Austrian actor who played the part in a 1957 TV dramatization.

“Nah, it’s supposed to be like a guy 45 to 50,” said Mr. Turturro, now age 55.

“Really!? Feeling that old? Feeling that life is over?”

“Nice to see you,” Mr. Turturro said, turning back to us with a subtle eye-roll.

“I’ve been coming here since I first saw The Gospel at Colonus. I’ve worked here; I’m a supporter and subscriber,” he continued. “I’m looking forward to the performance.”

With that, Shindigger exchanged a glass of merlot for black coffee and headed toward the Harvey Theater beside Consul General Monyemangene.

“We want to really congratulate the cast and producers of The Suit—it’s a fitting honor,” Mr. Monyemangene told Shindigger before boarding a shuttle that was transporting guests the several blocks to the theater to avoid the arctic chill.

After watching the powerful apartheid-era drama, Shindigger caught up with its radiant star, Nonhlanhla Kheswa, at a VIP cast reception in the lobby of the Harvey Theater. “Being welcomed so warmly by everyone has been so rewarding. I’m not a Brooklynite!” she said.

(Knowing that the Soweto native started her career at age 16 in Broadway’s The Lion King, and overflowing with merlot at this point, Shindigger must admit coming dangerously close to asking Ms. Kheswa if she didn’t think we should audition for the role of Simba. But she continued the conversation, mercifully saving us the embarrassment.)

“I like everything about The Suit, mostly, but I love working with Peter Brook. He’s so insightful, so wise,” she said, standing alongside her boyfriend, whom she met at a local restaurant.

“If I could just stay in Brooklyn and not have to live in the city, I would,” she confessed. “I really dislike being in the city.” Judging from the recent cultural explosion in the area surrounding BAM, she may just get her wish.

In his production of The Grand Inquisitor, adapted from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, a man—the Grand Inquisitor—walks across an empty space while someone else—Jesus—is watching him. And so the play begins.

Mr. Brook, you might say, has arrived at the point where he began.

There was life before The Empty Space, however, in which his innovatory productions were broadly defined by their dazzling theatricality rather than their minimalist simplicity. When Mr. Brook was but a prodigy (62 years ago), he directed a spectacular version of The Brothers Karamazov (with a spectacularly miscast Alec Guinness). His life after The Empty Space—from his touchstone A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the epic The Mahabharata and on, has been a constant search for the essence of theater—a form of secular communion, immediate, unadorned, vast in its simplicity and complete.

Such a theater encompasses a true mystery—not a trendy fake one. The production of The Grand Inquisitor—which lasts only 55 minutes—is so stripped of obvious theatricality that some have found it too spare in its austerity. I would argue the opposite—that its theatricality is inherent in the power of its naked simplicity.

IN TODAY'S avant-garde theater of faux magical high-tech effects, it’s as if Peter Brook is still making a revolutionary statement after all these years.

The use of video onstage—any old video—is the prevailing fashion that long since snared Simon McBurney, whose histrionic revival of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons is decked out with numerous theatrical effects in a misguided effort to make the play “modern.” Mr. McBurney is far from alone: The American avant-gardists—led by the Wooster Group with its now familiar banks of TV screens, video tricks and use of distorted sound—have been locked in the same deconstructive technological style for a generation.

Then again, the de rigueur video projections used in Penny Woolcock’s current production of Doctor Atomic at the Metropolitan Opera House are the more surprisingly literal-minded and banal—an airplane, a few clouds, rain—when we remind ourselves that Ms. Woolcock is a film director. (This is her theater debut.) Meanwhile, at the New York Theatre Workshop downtown (where Mr. Brook has staged The Grand Inquisitor in a joint effort with Theatre for a New Audience, who initiated the idea), the house favorite Ivan van Hove recently reveled in staging Molière’s The Misanthrope as an anime cartoon and simulcast video—in other words, a theater piece in virtual reality.

In that avant-garde sense, The Grand Inquisitor—a play about an antichrist—is a stage production that symbolizes Mr. Brook’s anti-technology. Untheatrical? To the contrary, it could only take place in a theater that trusts the unmediated power of our imagination.

Theater, for all its frequent compromise and even ruination, remains our last public forum where beautiful, troubling stories can still be told. In Dostoyevsky’s preamble to the grand inquisitor section in the novel (which isn’t repeated in this stage version), the intellectual atheist Ivan warns his brother, the novice monk Alyosha, that the story he’s about to tell him won’t mean anything if “you are so corrupted by modern realism that you can’t stand anything fantasy. …”

The story is indeed fanciful, and arguably makes an unanswerable case against the existence of God. Dostoyevsky, the novelist who asked how, if God exists, the suffering of a child can even be thinkable, anticipated the arguments of today’s “Death of God” school by more than a century. But his private religious views, though fervent, are notoriously difficult to pin down. Dostoyevsky allows for the possibility of mystery in a world saturated with humanity’s tears and blood. And for those who don’t know the final, ineffable moments of The Grand Inquisitor—which I shouldn’t reveal—he suggests the possibility of salvation through love.

BRUCE MYERS—Mr. Brook’s longtime collaborator—plays both the narrator and inquisitor, and Jake M. Smith is the silent, utterly still Christ. Without any setup or ceremony, Mr. Myers enters the empty stage—empty save for a stool and a box—to tell us as narrator that the action we’re about to see takes place in Spain during the most terrible period of the Inquisition when “in his infinite mercy, Christ comes back to the world in the human form he wore during his 33 years on earth.” He appears in the burning streets of Seville where the previous day the Grand Inquisitor had sent a hundred heretics into the flames, and quietly performs certain miracles—including the resurrection of a 7-year-old child from a white coffin.

The Grand Inquisitor, a cardinal who’s nearly 90, then approaches Christ in the town square and has him arrested. He imprisons Him in a cell, where he now confronts him with the incredulous words, “Is it you? You?”

It’s a story—even the cynical must admit—that grabs us from its astonishing start. And what follows is the parable in which the inquisitor—tyrannical servant of both the pope and Satan—grills the mute Christ for dooming ignorant humanity to suffer. Christ, he argues, thought too highly of pitiful mankind when He ambiguously offered us free will. It’s the church that replaced Him to provide false comfort, false hope: “And as man cannot bear to be without the miraculous, he will create new miracles of his own for himself, and will worship all sort of healers and sorcerers, even if he is a rebel, a heretic and an infidel.”

Mr. Myers’ performance as the frighteningly intelligent Grand Inquisitor is uncannily alive, hypnotic—and reasonable. This is an inquisitor who has no need to press his case; he’s unshakably certain of it. The parallels with today’s religious wars are implied when Mr. Myers turns from Christ to gaze briefly at the audience on the withering words, “Who have you raised to your level?” And again, when pointing out the docile, blind obedience of the devout in God’s name:

“For the sake of worshiping as a community they’ve slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, ‘Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!’ And so it will be to the end of the time. Even when gods have disappeared from the earth; they will bow down before idols just the same.”

It’s unusual at the theater when an audience is so silent you can hear a pin drop. The compelling achievement of Peter Brook’s The Grand Inquisitor is that Dostoyevsky’s readers have now become rapt witnesses.

I’ve just enough space left to celebrate the good news that the return visit of Gregory Burke’s Black Watch to St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn has now been extended to Dec. 21. I acclaimed this extraordinary political play without reservation when I first saw it last season; seeing it again, I find no reason to change my mind. John Tiffany’s production about the fate of a fabled Scots regiment facing death in the quagmire of the Iraq war remains the first docudrama in my theatergoing experience to successfully transform reportage into art.

The imaginative coups de théâtre it springs on us are stunning. One of its secrets is its subtly choreographed momentum; another is its unexpected lyrical tenderness in mime and song and plaintive Gaelic lament; and still another is its most fine ensemble of 10 young actors who re-create the working class Black Watch sqaddies hailing from the bankrupt old mining villages and shipping towns of Scotland—from Dundee and Dunfermline, Kirkcaldy, Perth and Glasgow.

These are the courageous living and dead soldiers who fight our dirty wars for us. And the National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch is a masterpiece.

jheilpern@observer.com

Tierno Bokar firstly astonishes us with its immense, staggering simplicity. If we can meet the extraordinary production halfway, even we urban neurotics of New York will glimpse the possibilities of the serene in the midst of global chaos.

Mr. Brook and his international troupe are telling us the story of a humble and amazing African, the Muslim Tierno Bokar, and what he taught the world. What could be timelier than a play about religious fanaticism and unending war, a modern parable about colonial rule and the nature of sublime tolerance? But rather than write about the achievement of the production, I want to talk about something else that Mr. Brook is doing that's of profound importance to us.

Wishing to make theater accessible to all, he's the first internationally known director to lead the way by insisting that ticket prices must come down. Mr. Brook is saying, in urgent effect, if so many people can no longer afford to go to the theater, what's the point of theater?

It's the most pressing question of all. The cost of tickets is killing the audience. They're also killing the future. Kids can't afford to go. Broadway will always be opportunistic Broadway. The bottom-line choices, the safe, star-driven revivals, are by now normal. We've come to expect no better. But in our proudly multi-ethnic city, the loyal audiences at our big nonprofit institutions remain noticeably white, middle-class and aging.

In terms of both ticket prices and productions, it's actually getting harder and harder to tell the difference between nonprofit and commercial theater. Pandering choices-the phony art of survival-now apply to both. Exceptions are rare and still fighting the good fight. But the unpalatable truth is that an entire movie-going generation of New Yorkers has grown up believing that theater is out of reach, unaffordable, elitist and half-dead.

Mr. Brook has broken with his friends at the Brooklyn Academy of Music-his longtime home here-precisely because its ticket prices remain too high. The higher the prices, the more limited the audience. Mr. Brook has therefore staged Tierno Bokar on the Columbia campus in a converted gymnasium at Barnard. He's played in some unusual places in his time-the Sahara Desert, an abandoned gas works in Denmark, the villages of India, the hills of Persepolis-but this is his first gym.

The irony is that he's interested in almost anything in life except for weightlifting and sports. He has therefore colonized the LeFrak Gymnasium on 117 Street and Broadway and turned it into an intimate 494-seat theater. But this is the thing. Look at his ticket prices:

All Columbia students are entitled to a seat anywhere in the house for $10. Any other student pays $15. For faculty members and producing partners (among them, Barnard College and the Harlem Arts Alliance), the ticket cost is $25. The top price at Tierno Bokar for the general public is $40.

On the other hand, the top ticket price at B.A.M. is an average $70 (followed by $60, $45 and $25). Tickets for students aren't guaranteed. "Student rush tickets" at $10 are subject to availability one hour before the performance.

Mr. Brook has clearly made the young his priority. Then again, all seats for the current Dessa Rose production at the nonprofit Lincoln Center Theater are $75 (or $35 dollars more than Mr. Brook's top ticket price). Student discount tickets are $20.

Let's raise the ante. The top ticket price at the nonprofit Roundabout Theatre's production of A Streetcar Named Desire is a staggering $91.25. (The rear mezzanine, which is believed to be two blocks away, is $36.25). A student can get a 50 percent discount 30 minutes before the show, but again, subject to availability.

The Roundabout's prices are almost on a par with commercial Broadway. Take the star-driven Julius Caesar with Denzel Washington. If you're mad enough to want to see this terrible production, the top ticket is $101.25. The lowest is $51.25. There are no student discounts.

Good old Denzel. He's obviously used all his big-shot Hollywood clout to make certain his grassroots fans can afford a ticket to see his boring Brutus. Or put it this way: Instead of taking your lovely wife to a Broadway show, why not go to Paris for the weekend instead?

Audience subscriptions and membership programs at the nonprofits reduce the prices somewhat (just $15 at the Roundabout). But the cost still remains prohibitively high. The encouragement to the young is grudging or even nonexistent.

Our nervy nonprofit leaders argue that they must charge the high prices in order to produce a minority art. But was ever "art" flown under such false colors? Assuming their argument is sincere, however, what's their real rationale-the survival of the art or the institution?

The real artist gambles every time. He will gamble with his very life. Only then can theater become a truly alive meeting of open hearts and minds. But the institution risks as little as possible. It will fill the theater with crap if necessary. It is only in the survival game.

That is why the now 80-year-old Peter Brook has bypassed the established New York institutions to gamble with something adventurously new on the Columbia campus. Gregory Mosher-the former director of Lincoln Center Theater-is currently director of the university's Arts Initiative, whose purpose is to encourage the arts on campus. He's begun with a bang. The Arts Initiative is the principal producer of Tierno Bokar.

The unexpected partnership of Mr. Brook and Mr. Mosher appears providential. Mr. Mosher is the only U.S. director to have reduced ticket prices in the past. During his tenure at Lincoln Center from 1985-92, he began an exhilaratingly successful $10 ticket price for members who paid $25 annually, or nothing if they couldn't afford it.

The outcome was that he attracted a new audience into the theater who didn't normally go. The low ticket price even triggered the sale of the more expensive seats. The revenue didn't go down, but up. The annual budget of $600,000 grew to a staggering $33 million in just two years. And the re-energized repertory of plays had the leeway to take more risks.

You need luck in life, and the theater needs it a lot. No doubt Mr. Mosher had his share of good fortune during his tenure at Lincoln Center. But reasonable ticket prices help. Today, at the Royal National Theatre in London, its artistic director, Nicholas Hytner, has introduced a new £10 ticket policy. Again, revenue has increased, a new young audience has been found. The place is alive.

Nobody's saying it's easy. But who else is addressing the urgent issue of lowering ticket prices before it's too late? Who will make our theaters available to all?

Tierno Bokar at Columbia is a bold experiment in more ways than one. It is theater of the highest order at the lowest price.

Mr. Brook is saying to us: All are welcome.

The extraordinary production by the British troupe known as Propeller ranks as one of the happiest experiences we could wish for at the theater. It also happens to be one of the funniest shows in town-an astonishing thing, all things considered. After all, everyone in the place is howling with laughter-at what? Shakespeare! Or a farce of romantic love (which can turn on a dime, as young romantic love does). As the theater-loving Duke puts it in the play:

Lovers and madmen have

such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies, that

apprehend

More than cool reason ever

comprehends.

Still, we tend to dread A Midsummer Night's Dream a bit. Not another Dream ! (Substitute at will, not another Twelfth Night / Romeo and Juliet !) How to deal once more with all those fairies, all that dust? The Dream is, famously, a play about real magic, and magic changes everything-including the transforming power of love and theater.

The achievement of Mr. Hall's production is that it really has breathed fresh and astonishing life into the play-compelling us to see it with new eyes.

To say this is a Shakespeare production living in a different league from the middling King Lear at Lincoln Center wouldn't be much of a compliment, I'm afraid; to compare it to the recent Pericles at B.A.M.-which actually managed to reverse the meaning of the play-would be no compliment at all. Let me throw my hat in the air, then, and declare it to be the finest Shakespeare I've seen since Cheek by Jowl's unforgettable As You Like It at B.A.M. a few seasons ago.

It's the same glorious production in its free, spontaneous spirit and the openhearted joy it takes in play (or playfulness), in the infectious aliveness and fun and ultimate tenderness of it all. The As You Like It was an all-male production, too. It wasn't the first (and it won't be the last)-cross-dressing is a British specialty that goes beyond camp to the ambiguous heart of the nation. England's bewigged High Court judges have been known to relax in tutus, of course. But loving ballet is no crime. Boys-or, more likely, young men-played Shakespeare's women, actresses having been banned from the Puritan stage lest they frighten the horses. The Bard appreciated the potential comedy in it: A girl, who's played by a boy, disguises herself as a boy! He seized the opportunity in his comedies to play games with double and mistaken identities. Cross-dressing thus entered the mainstream of English theatrical life-continuing to this day with the traditionally male Widow Twanky of beloved British pantomime.

That said, Mr. Hall's Dream is the first all-male production of the play I've seen, and my initial thought was that it had to be a mere gimmick. Unlike As You Like It , the Dream isn't about the comedy of role-playing and gender. It's about the magic of love, pure and simple (and dangerous). But here's the crucial thing:

The Shakespeare tradition of men playing women is the reason why love between the sexes is described in his plays rather than acted out. It couldn't be otherwise! Mr. Hall believes, rightly, that actors on the Elizabethan stage couldn't express their physical attraction to each other. They had to talk about it instead-and, luckily for them, they had Shakespeare to supply the words for the most beautiful poetry of love and desire ever written.

It is said in Japanese Kabuki theater that only a man can truly play a woman. But the Kabuki actor transforms himself mysteriously and completely into a female. There's no such artifice in Mr. Hall's Dream. The revelation of his production is how the male actors playing the women remain very obviously men. Why, we even have a balding Helena and a hairy-chested Titania! And how apparently ridiculous is that ?

Think of them as a third gender, a force of unruly nature like Pierrot-or a pre-emptive strike against our expectations of what women should be. In one mad, innovative stroke, Mr. Hall and his brilliant costume designer, Michael Pavelka, have banished the romantic, stereotypical image of the play by inviting us to look at it-and hear it-anew.

I will hear that play;

For never anything can be amiss,

When simpleness and duty tender it.

Theseus will "hear"-not "see"-the amateur play about Pyramus and Thisby that's about to be performed for his pleasure. Text is all! (All is in the text.) And simplicity can never be amiss.

My belief is that Shakespeare told us everything about his ideal form of theater through the wonderfully funny bad play performed by the endearing, slow-witted locals, Messrs. Quince, Snug, Bottom, Flute, Snout and Starvling.

Look at Snug's problem with bringing in a wall during the action: "You can never bring in a wall. What say you, Bottom?" And Bottom replies that someone could pretend to be a wall: "Some man or other must present wall …." Then all he need do is open his fingers so that the lovers can speak to each other through a little chink: "…let him hold his fingers thus, and through that cranny shall Pyramus and Thisby whisper."

So you needn't have a wall, and you needn't have a set! It will work "if imagination amend them." We'll see a man "presenting" a wall, just as a man can "present" a woman. For the one nakedly conjures up the magic, while the audience imagines the wall or the woman.

In one of the funniest moments in the amateur play, Moonshine holds up a lantern. He's playing the man in the moon, and the lantern is the moon. "This lanthorn doth the horned moon present," he announces optimistically. He's also holding up a thorn bush and has a toy dog on a lead. But the Duke-a literal-minded theatergoer-thinks Moonshine should be put in the lantern. "How is it else the man i' the moon?"

At which Moonshine explodes. He might be a yokel, but he knows what he's doing! "All that I have to say, is, to tell you that the lanthorn is the moon," he insists indignantly; "I, the man in the moon; this thorn-bush, my thorn-bush; and this dog, my dog."

In other words, Your Lordship, use your imagination !

And Simon Scardifield, the first rate-actor playing Moonshine, looked so hilariously, murderously aggrieved that Moonshine's sunny beams turned to thunder-until he stormed off the stage in sulky protest, dragging his toy dog behind him.

The play within the Dream tells us that, in the ideal production Shakespeare has in mind, the actor-magician hides nothing up his sleeves-like Moonshine, like Wall, like the all-male troupe here:

Thou wall, O wall! O sweet, and

lovely wall!

Show me thy chink to blink through

with mine eyne!

Thanks, courteous wall ….

But in the end (and the beginning), it's a question of talent. Ah, that . The all-male Dream isn't bringing a fresh dynamic to the play by testosterone alone. The troupe of young players is immensely gifted. Special mention, perhaps, of Mr. Scardifield's fine, disciplined work at the helm as Puck while doubling as Moonshine; the furious Helena of Robert Hands; the gilded Hermia of Jonathan McGuinness; and Tony Bell, gentlest of stage-struck Bottoms, most blessedly endowed of donkeys, and well-meant Weaver.

If I have a criticism, I'll whisper it: Feverish midsummer dreams are erotic-with luck. But Mr. Hall prefers to tread the giddy line midway between bawdy and innocence. A bit more honest dirt might have gone down a treat.

It so happens the production that shaped my theatergoing life-and that of an entire generation-was Peter Brook's 1972 A Midsummer Night's Dream . It showed us, quite simply, the magical possibilities of a theater of the imagination. And, as time passed, its legend only increased-like a vision that, once seen, can never be repeated. It is always so in theater. But, I'm glad to say, Edward Hall's new production stands in its own right as a lovely, remarkable achievement. It's the best Dream since Mr. Brook's all those years ago, and one we will always remember.

You don't know me, but I wanted to tell you how very gifted you are and, if I may, offer a little advice. Let me say, firstly, that any young director at the start of their career who can stage As You Like It as wittily as you and the recent Debbie Does Dallas is absolutely the director for me.

All shows are the same show in the impure essentials. What was within your terrific Debbie -fun, speed, discipline, sex, identity problems-is found within the double and triple identities, the comedy and farce of sexual roles, the heaven and hell of love, of your As you Like It at the Public. I see you also designed the costumes for the Shakespeare and adapted Debbie from the hallowed original movie. How great to be intoxicated by the possibilities of all forms of theater. Keep going, whatever you do. We're on your side.

The big surprise of your Debbie Does Dallas for me was that you actually turned it into the world's first production of a saucy Mother Courage . I wrote at the time that you had unearthed an exemplary Brechtian morality tale of opportunism and survival on the body-strewn battlefield of the American sex wars. People thought I was joking. I was. And I wasn't. My point is that where another director might easily have been camp or cheap, you made it fun by secretly taking it seriously.

To use only six actors in As You Like It is delightfully nuts, of course. (And dangerous.) But then, the core of the play is all about illusion and role-playing. Once again, I admired the assurance and comic timing of the troupe-the discipline and glue you brought to the knockabout scenes. Did you know, by the way, that in the all-male As You Like It directed by Clifford Williams in the 1960's, the young Anthony Hopkins played Audrey, the country girl? There you are! As you like it; as it pleases you. Whatever!

I learned two astonishing things from your production. It's possible for an actor to do a back flip into his own hat-and live ! And, as if that weren't miracle enough, a hat-or even an apple-can conjure a character from thin air, provided we allow "imaginary forces to work," as someone named Shakespeare once advised.

My own mentor is Peter Brook, and his mentor is Shakespeare. No matter what kind of show Mr. Brook has directed over the years-highbrow or lowbrow, Broadway or the Mahabharata -sooner or later, Mr. Brook always returns to his Shakespearean touchstone. You have something in common with him: call it an apparent theater of naïveté. For in your As You Like It , the hat held up onstage conjures the illusion of the man who wears it, while the apple thrown from one actor to another is enough to create the character who eats it. As Rosalind says to us in her Epilogue, "My way is to conjure you."

It's a surprising Epilogue, and Rosalind is actually surprised to be giving it. In this play about free will and some melancholy, the implied message in Shakespeare's teasing, joyful afterthought is that now that everything's been resolved, the romances worked out, the couplings made, it's time for us all to go home and fuck our brains out.

I know why you trimmed the text, but what happened to the songs? ("Come hither, come hither, come hither.") Shakespeare's lyrics can be as suggestive as Cole Porter's, and sad as death. Gotta have the songs. To my regret, a lyrical As You Like It was mostly absent. It could be due to your originally staging the production outdoors. Broad comedy plays well in the open; lyricism likes a roof. You're still playing outdoors at the Public, in a sense. You're in a forest. (The Forest of Arden!) But when it comes to Shakespeare's poetry and all the fears that confront the inexperienced performer, remember the golden rule: Let the line color the actor, never the other way round.

I read in the Playbill that you recently worked as Sir Peter Hall's assistant director on Troilus and Cressida . Have you recovered? Years ago, I was his assistant director at the National in England and must say I was mostly bored off my head. Never be an assistant! Direct instead, as you know. I learned that I don't have the patience to be a director. But the time with Peter Hall in the womb of the rehearsal room was immensely valuable. With the script before him on a lectern, marking out the rhythm and beat of a line like a conductor, he's a supreme example of a British director who still believes passionately in the word -in the power and beauty of Shakespeare's language.

A thought about those eunuchs in a whorehouse, the critics. Try not to treat critics as the enemy. It's a paranoid waste of time. The ones I read are mostly dead. G.B. Shaw's essays perk me up, although I often find I disagree with them. I agree with Ken Tynan almost too much; Jan Kott is still an essential guide. Hazlitt's On Actors and Acting is masterly. If you haven't yet read the renowned Hazlitt essay, it will give you an even more perverse, unshakable love for a life in the theater. I return quite frequently to reading Jean Genet's Reflections on the Theatre as an essential reminder of the enormous care and detail that ought to go into staging a play. Genet's gracious notes to Roger Blin during the months of rehearsal in Paris of his epic The Screens are a timeless model. (Blin was also Beckett's principal director.) Genet, the famous renegade dramatist, writes to him at one point:

"At first no one knows anything. The actors have little knowledge, but the man who is teaching them must know nothing and learn everything, about himself and his art, as he teaches them. It will be a discovery for them but also for him."

Try not to please audiences too much. Better to challenge them instead. They need guidance, too, or they will lead you by the nose. Yet the in-house theater critic is the audience. Watch the audience during your shows.

Success is good. Lots of money, also, and land, and country houses. Try to travel. Theater people never seem to go anywhere. They don't even go to the theater. If Broadway success comes your way, grab it, and go on making your own theater. Avoid Broadway-itis at all cost. Broadway-itis is currently killing the work of too many directors masquerading as independent artists.

"The right to fail" is a credo only an Englishman could invent. For only the English know how to fail well. It was George Devine's proud, daring credo when he founded the Royal Court Theatre as its artistic director, and it amounts to an un-American activity. Mundane success and the box-office bottom line aren't really the point.

One day, when Beckett was watching an actor struggling during a rehearsal of one of his plays, he was heard to advise him gently, "Try to fail better."

All artists worth a dime fail. The only test is how close they can get to the summit of their imagination.

There's only good work, yes? Even for its own sake, even in a city where conventional success in the theater is worshipped, in the end there's only good and fine work. Because you believe in it, because you have no choice.

But I didn't intend to go on like this. I embrace your talent and welcome you to the theater with open arms.

Best wishes,

John Heilpern

The guys-including the apparently contented couple who own the apartment but are moving to the burbs, a young actor who's recently come out, a middle-aged manager of opera singers, a sardonic showbiz journalist, a writer of a bad coming-of-age gay sex novel and a hunk with brains (sort of)-will talk about being gay . And as they do so-you know it!-stuff will happen. The unexpected visitor, the nasty revelation, the confessional confrontation …. But Mr. Tolins has anticipated our sense of déjà vu all over again.

Early in the action, Joe, the actor, is looking out the window at the parade below, fancying a shirtless guy in overalls. "Homo on the range," Michael, one of the hosts, comments amusingly. "He's so cute!" adds Joe. "He's just like a real farm boy who's been to an electrolysist."

"Wait!" Charles, the opera queen, will protest. "Look at you, sitting there in the window. You look like you're in a play …. "

"It could be a gay play," he adds. "About gays on Gay Pride Day."

"Just what we need," groans Michael. "Another gay play."

"Don't knock gay theater," Charles replies. "It's very important historically. It used to be the only way we could see ourselves."

"Well, now we're 'Must-See TV,' so get over it," argues Brad, the journalist.

"Exactly," Tom, Michael's partner, concludes. "If I have to sit through one more gay play, I'll scream …. "

To be honest, I'm with Tom, Michael and Brad, though it depends on the play. But Mr. Tolins' Pirandellian play within a play-and all plays within a play are automatically Pirandellian-raises a surprising question for a gay play. What is a gay play?

It took me back to the time I was watching Peter Brook at work with his experimental troupe of actors when, staring intently into space for an eternity, groaning slightly, he surprised everyone by eventually asking, "What is a play?"

No immediate answer was forthcoming. But as Mr. Brook later challenged me to write a play for the troupe, I thought it best to find out what one actually is. "A play," Lou Zeldis, one of his actors, explained in the tones of an oracle, "is anything with me in it."

I made sure he had a star part. By his definition, however, a gay play is anything with several gays in it. That is, anything with several gays in it on the stage . But Mr. Tolins' character Charles is more specific. He defines a gay play as "one with a bunch of gay guys in an apartment or a country house bitching and cracking jokes about what it means to be gay."

"That would never happen," says Brad-an ironist, clearly.

"And all the characters are witty and touching as they laugh through the pain of being reviled," Charles adds for good measure. "That's a gay play."

Hence the daddy of them all, The Boys in the Band. Or Terrence McNally's superior country-house saga, Love! Valor! Compassion! , or anything by Paul Rudnick. But from my point of view, all such definitions ghettoize. There are different plays-black, Jewish and gay, among them-but on balance, there are only plays.

Tom's with me on that one. "I hate classifying everything that way," he says, disagreeing with Charles. "'Gay play.' What's a 'straight play'?"

"Mamet," replies Michael.

"You see?" Charles says. "That's exactly the kind of joke that would be in the play about us."

And since the Mamet joke is made in the play we're watching, there's no arguing with Charles, or Mr. Tolins. But I thought this whole question of gay stereotypes and gay plays was long since over. Tony Kushner's 1993 Angels in America is subtitled "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes." Does that make it a gay play? It spoke to gays and straights. A bisexual play? Its sweep and ambition and brilliance spoke so memorably to everyone. A great play, then-the greatest of our time, speaking to us of a murderous era as no other play within memory.

The first major play on either side of the Atlantic to have an outwardly homosexual hero was written by an Englishman, John Osborne. The willfully renegade, politically incorrect dramatist courted homophobia in his time. But his 1965 A Patriot for Me made history for the Royal Court Theatre and defied the government censor banning homosexuality from the stage as a corrupting "inversion."

Until then, gay characters in English (and American) theater were closeted. The tortured heterosexual lovers in Terence Rattigan's renowned The Deep Blue Sea , for example, are gay lovers in disguise. Rattigan said as much, and greatly regretted it. But A Patriot for Me was no Boys in the Band .

With its 23 scenes and over 80 characters, the epic takes place mostly in Vienna, between 1890 and 1913, and is based on the true story and scandal of Alfred Redl, a spy who betrayed his country. In the end, Osborne's Redl, the homosexual, becomes a patriot for himself-the outsider acknowledging allegiance to his own sexuality. It caused an uproar at the time. Leading gay actors refused to appear in it, John Gielgud among them. The gay actors who risked being cast were encouraged, however, by the appearance of George Devine, the founding artistic director of the Royal Court, who happened to be straight, proudly dressed for the drag-ball scene as Queen Alexandra.

My point of departure with Jonathan Tolins of The Last Sunday in June is that the dated Boys in the Band definition of so-called gay plays rules his own play. He wants to move the stereotypical into the present, but for me, he's putting it to the wrong test. I wonder what that uncompromising, furious civil-rights campaigner, Larry Kramer, who was in the audience the night I attended Mr. Tolins' play, thought of it. Mr. Kramer is the dramatist of the first AIDS play, The Normal Heart of 1985, and perhaps-like the audience as a whole, myself included-he laughed a fair amount with Mr. Tolins' postmodern stereotypes.

"You should at least exchange rings," Charles announces to the cozy couple, encouraging them into a commitment ceremony. "It could be beautiful, and covered in the Styles Section in The Times . Two men decked out in Armani, standing under a floral chupa , the band playing 'Sunrise, Sunset.' A room on Tavern on the Green, with specially commissioned topiaries depicting scenes from the lyric stage …. "

But if The Last Sunday in June doesn't end happily ever after with dancing gays and a group hug, its melodrama and camp, revelations and style, remain too close to Boys in the Band . Mr. Tolins' shrewd, amusing disclaimers within the play are a device to pre-empt criticism. I wish they had. Let me add, at least, that Trip Cullman's production at the enterprising Rattlestick Theatre in Greenwich Village couldn't be better. The ensemble is perfect, no one more so than Susan Pourfar in her witty, terrific cameo as the unfortunate-or blessed-woman in the piece.

Even at the height of the Cold War in the 50's, Russian artists were made welcome in this country. (And a handful did defect, Nureyev and Baryshnikov among them. Aren't you glad?) Great art has no borders, as the nucleus of the Iranian performers showed to all hearts open enough to receive them. But "art" is the wrong word here. The performances of the eternal ritual stories known as Ta'ziyeh of Hor are something better than "art" or even "theater." If you will, it is an artless art, which for me is unpretentiously the best thing of all.

Small wonder the Ta'ziyeh has influenced the likes of Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski in the West. They saw in its transparent simplicity a near-unattainable magic that could transform our understanding of the possibilities of theater. Ta'ziyeh , which means "mourning," tells the story of one of the most sacred events in the history of the Shiite Muslim religion-the Battle of Kerbala, in which Muhammad's grandson, Hussein, and his followers were massacred in A.D. 680. It's a sacred ritual of martyrdom in the sense that the Passion plays re-create the biblical story of Christ.

When the Times critic derides the singing in Ta'ziyeh for seeming like the drone of "an endless bar mitzvah," has he a clue what an insult this is? The blinkered provinciality of our proud American culture takes the breath away. I know that I was far from alone in going to see the Iranian troupe more than once because their plaintive prayers and songs are so beautiful, haunting and divine. They are eternal laments. At the same time, the ritual of Ta'ziyeh , whose roots can be traced back to the 16th century, is a form of popular theater. Part pageant, part spectacle (and even broad comedy), it traditionally takes place in the village squares of Iran before huge, animated crowds who laugh and weep with the well-known Farsi legends, and even join in the songs.

Clearly, we mostly secular Westerners aren't able to do that, and the sacred aspects of the ritual could only be sensed. Though some among the packed audiences under the tent at Damrosch Park would have liked a simultaneous translation-supertitles, perhaps-to help us understand the linguistic nuances, I'm not sure. Regardless of language, it remains a powerful truth of theater that emotion always speaks to emotion. In such timeless ways-and unearthly timelessness is the miracle of Ta'ziyeh -elemental truths about humanity can be universally shared.

It might help to know in advance that the heroes always sing, whereas the villains are confined to mere words, and that all female roles are performed by men in veils. Foreigners are usually dressed quaintly in Napoleonic hats and 19th-century court attire with comic sunglasses. (Coincidentally, in popular African theater, foreigners are dressed as British buffoons in ludicrously stiff colonial outfits.) But I found that I had little difficulty following these epic legends of war and fate, of families and terrible suffering, for the surprise of Ta'ziyeh is that it appears to be as innocent as children's theater.

Shortly before Brecht died, the great innovator told Peter Brook: "You know what my ideal term for the theater would be? It would be 'Theater of Naivety.'" Ta'ziyeh possesses the secret. Its apparent naïveté disarms sophisticated Western eyes schooled in "Art" with a capital A. There is no polished, expert performance. We are thrust into another world from the first sight of the troupe entering the tent to play on the circular stage.

On they came! The adults and children in their robes, walking in a line without pomp or vanity around the stage as if out for a stroll. They seem less like actors than citizens. There are dentists, taxi drivers and merchants among them. To my untutored ears, the musicians-percussionists and trumpet-players-that greet them had the discordant blare of an early street band. A couple of indifferent camels, and a few goats, might join the action like lost souls. How, then, does the magic happen?

All props-swords, shields and cups, along with little piles of straw (straw, we learn, can signal mourning)-are revealed for all to see at the edges of the stage. This is a theater, then, without secrets. A man-we take him to be Hussein-sleeps on a pillow surrounded by his family. Two warriors on horseback gallop round the path surrounding the stage. (The Ta'ziyeh actors are excellent equestrians.) The musicians bring the warriors on; one of them signals the musicians to stop; he challenges Hussein to a deathly dual. The women and the children panic. How to convey it, this sudden vision of inevitable death? The straw! The women and children, whirling round, throw it over themselves until it becomes a blizzard of tears.

Later, a young child will be killed. The youngster playing him flutters his hand on his heart like a crushed butterfly-a shattering metaphor in a fluttering spasm of death. Hussein will battle his enemies on horseback. All theater directors dread fight scenes. (Movie directors don't; movie directors are dopes.) But how to stage a fight scene? Ta'ziyeh doesn't think this way. Nothing it does owes anything to reality, least of all to the realism of films. Ta'ziyeh is the purest form of epic theater, because everything it does is a show. The actual battle scene is token. What is shown is the blood.

Hussein's white shirt and the neck of the horse become spattered with blood. The actor playing an enemy warrior has swiftly thrown a cup of fake blood at them as they passed him on the battlefield. We're meant to see it thrown.

There are no secrets in Ta'ziyeh , as I say-no special effects, no lighting tricks, no "great acting." Brecht's alienation theories of theater were unself-consciously in place in Ta'ziyeh a few hundred years before he thought of them. A baby will be killed by an arrow. Hussein holds the baby high so all can see. (Public theater requires public display.) The baby itself is a symbolic doll wrapped in cloth. An archer takes aim. But his arrow is fired nowhere near the baby. The arrow isn't the point. An arrow shot through the heart of a baby would be too fearfully real. No, the imagined death of the baby is the point, like the lament that follows with the symbolic burial.

In Angels in America, Tony Kushner's memorable angel with the vast white wings famously crashes into the action through the ceiling as the heavens split open to welcome the celestial arrival. (" Very Steven Spielberg!" goes the welcoming line.) In Ta'ziyeh, there's also an angel. He wears a golden crown. But the Iranian actor playing the angel is seen jogging onto the circular stage from the surrounding darkness, where he remains an actor-a mere human--until he sings. Then he sings like an angel.

All I know is, if you can achieve such simple, open honesty in theater, you go to heaven.

the theater's ability to carry on in our grieving, shattered city. What use a

play-a mere play strutted on the stage? How can we laugh and dance when life

has become a nightmare?

My feeling is that at no time in our lives have we needed

the theater more, and my hope is that the suffering theater community itself

will take heart knowing how close it is to our own hearts.

Can any of us imagine a world without theater? Only one of darkness.

When the theaters went dark for two days last week, there was no choice. But

the traumatized city seemed darker still. Theater has always been our eternal

refuge, embrace, hope, solace and home.

When we go to the theater, we actually travel from darkness

to light. Before every performance begins, the lights go down in the

auditorium, and there!-the light of the stage, Artaud's "strange sun," a light

of abnormal intensity, illuminates life for us, including its convulsive

cruelty. At the same time, we go to the theater leaving the real world behind.

In this timeless ritual and rite of passage, we willingly exchange reality for

the illusion of reality. We collude in a game of pretend, the better to understand

the world, to salve our wounds, to escape for a while into the two-hour traffic

of the stage.

Theaters are handmade by dreamers and poets and idealists,

and other dissipated people. They have always been tolerant and truthful,

well-lit places. Which is why, throughout history, despots have always closed

theaters down.

They are the last place on earth where stories are told to a

community. The stories can be fabulous. The opening moment of Peter Brook's

theater version of the Mahabharata begins

when a child enters and goes toward a little pool.

Then a man appears.

"Do you know how to write?" the man asks.

"No, why?" the child replies.

"I've composed a great poem. I've composed it all, but

nothing is written. I need someone to write down what I know."

"What's your name?"

"Vyasa."

"What's your poem

about?" the child asks.

"It's about you."

The man is the

storyteller, and the child is us.

"One should always listen to stories," Vyasa says later.

"It's enjoyable, and sometimes it makes things better."

Shakespeare's Richard

II is the story of a king who becomes a human being by losing a crown in

this "all-hating world." Richard's lines are renowned: "For God's sake, let us

sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the

death of kings."

He tells the sad stories sitting "upon the ground"-closest

to the earth-with his audience encircling him, like all traditional

storytellers through time.

One day, long ago, I was traveling through Nigeria

when a storyteller arrived at a village riding a horse. He was dressed in a

coat of many colors, so no one could miss his flamboyant stage entrance. He was

the local griot, come to tell a story. He spoke in Hausa, but I could follow

what he said at first as he yelled out to the excited crowd surrounding him:

"Listen to me! I will

tell you a story! You will love it!

You have my word . And I will tell you

the story just as soon as you give me money !

MONEY!" At which the villagers slapped a note on his

forehead, which stuck to the sweat of his brow.

We need plays to dive into our broken hearts and minds, and

bring catharsis. Sophocles' tragic heroine Electra , the personification of mortal agony, delivers her opening words

to the gods like a fervent ritual of primal need: "Divine light, sweet air,

hear my pain." But at its center, Electra

is a moral debate about fierce opposites-vengeance and compromise,

forgiveness and betrayal, memory and forgetting. Blood or

peace. How, the drama asks us-and will not stop asking-can we live when

great crimes have been done to us?

It's said that no play or work of art, no Guernica or

Greek tragedy, ever stopped a war or changed the world. But they can help us

see the world differently, they can enrich us. And we can say that theater is

the place where all liberties are possible.

Even in these terrible times of those who died and those who

gave their lives saving lives, even as the whole story of our city is yet to be

told, the theater always offers hope. By nature and design, every performance

becomes a new beginning, every night a fresh start, every show a rebirth.

On the third day of the tragedy last week, the theaters

reopened, and I was glad. I didn't think for a second that life was "back to

normal." I can't even imagine when it will be. But at the last moment last

Thursday night, I thought I'd like to go to the theater just the same-to

support it, in a way.

But which show? I'd been promising myself I'd see Bat Boy for some time, and so the cult

hit musical about a half-boy/half-bat it was. As The New Yorker deftly put it in an

admiring review: "This is the only play in the history of the theater whose

hero ends Act I with a rabbit in his mouth and moves on, in Act II, to an

entire cow's head." But the Union Square Theatre was at best one-fifth

full that somber night, and I couldn't help but fear the worst about the

evening of kitsch and irony that lay ahead.

Yet it was where we wanted to be.  From the outset, everyone was willing the

courageous cast on. And they were just terrific, and would be terrific in any

circumstances. Our bloodsucking, pointy-eared hero turned out to be an Eliza

Doolittle Bat Boy who learns to speak proper and not hang upside down. "A bit

more schooling, a lot less drooling," goes the loving advice. Until things go wrong when Bat Boy falls in

love with his sister, Shelley, though he doesn't know she's his sister at the

time. In days gone by, Shelley's mom accidentally slept with bats, apparently,

and Shelley's dad wasn't too pleased about it, I can tell you.

And so we laughed again, at Bat Boy the musical, whose young composer and lyricist, Laurence

O'Keefe, is surely gifted and fun. And at the curtain, when we gave the cast

our hands, one of the actors-Sean McCourt, who plays evil Dr. Thomas Parker

(Shelley's dad)-stepped forward and thanked us for coming. He said, quite simply,

how they hoped that laughter had given us some solace and how performing had

helped them. And then he asked us to join the cast and sing "God Bless America,"

and together we sang.

I must say, with regrets, that I found the Royal National Theatre production of

Hamlet a very poor one, indeed. It

shall henceforth be known as "The Suitcase Hamlet ."

The motif of John Caird's long, literal, murky production-the bewilderingly

lame idea behind his entire conception of the play-is a suitcase.

The set is dominated by suitcases and trunks of various

shapes and sizes that are moved about like building blocks in the Stygian

gloom. Eyes, and therefore souls, are not deceived. They are strained. Why a

suitcase? That is the question. Why are we looking at a castle of suitcases all

night long? I ask you in all candor: When we think of Hamlet , when we try to grapple anew with its tragic vastness and

meaning, does the image of a suitcase spring to mind? And if sprung, does it

stay?

I can only assume the director, Mr. Caird, and his set

designer, Tim Hatley, were agonizing one day over a brave new concept best

suited to the most produced great play in history, and they thought, and they

thought, and they cried out to the heavens: "Got it! Let's do suitcases!"

And so it was. I'm afraid there was time enough to ponder

their meaning. The evening began at 7:30 p.m. and ended at 11:15. Why a

suitcase? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern-and Hamlet, too-wouldn't need 20 of them

for their fateful journey to England. They are not Elizabeth Taylor. Besides,

the suitcases are in every scene. Could they, by any chance, be a symbol ?

Voilà! We have it!

Hamlet is a young man who must travel from adolescence to manhood, from thinker

to assassin. He's on a journey . Hence

the suitcases! Whether that's an illuminating new concept of Hamlet , I leave to you. If it were left

to me, I'd leave on the next train. Except that Mr. Caird's suitcases aren't

going anywhere. We're stuck with them all night, squinting at them through the

near-permanent darkness of the stage. Suitcase = travel; darkness = tragic

foreboding.

Mr. Caird recently adapted and co-directed Jane Eyre , the musical, which also takes

place in darkness. (Tragic foreboding = Jane Eyre; clippety-clop = sound of

horses.) And we've seen those blessed suitcases before! They were piled up all

those years ago in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Nicholas Nickleby , which Mr. Caird

co-directed with Trevor Nunn.

There's nothing particularly fresh or startling about the

big, conventional production. It meanders in its rhythm and length; the choices

are simple-minded (Gertrude fondling her wedding dress in her bedchamber) or

they're peculiar(anunkingly Claudius with earring and pony tail; a bimbette

Ophelia). The churchy background music milks the cosmos, providing a

faux-celestial "otherness" and "mystery." From the opening, most unthrilling

ghost scene to the last, hackneyed image of a cross, all is not well. The

political aspects of the drama have been cut (no loss), but the production as a

whole remains an average one, in spite of the lauded performance of Simon Russell

Beale.

Mr. Beale is a fine actor, though a portly prince. It's been

said that his short, pudgy physique is of no consequence. But it's been said

too often, including by a defensive Mr. Beale. Acting is acting who you aren't;

acting itself is a glorious illusion. No, it isn't that Mr. Beale looks

mournfully as if he'd like to console himself occasionally with a bag of sticky

buns. It's more that as a mature 40-year-old actor-his beard flecked with gray,

his grief worn like a shroud of long suffering-his markedly adolescent Hamlet

is a stretch. I never acutely sensed the tragic youth, more an acted version of

it.

It is director Caird's notion that Hamlet is about goodness compromised or gone rotten. Maybe so, but

too goody-goody: Is Claudius a good man who lapsed, as he seems to be here?

After all, he usurped the throne, murdered the King, married the Queen two

months later and would have Hamlet assassinated. A good guy? And what of

Hamlet? Was Hamlet born good? Mr.

Beale suggests he was born nice ,

which is less than good. The fire of inner rage and madness doesn't burn in his

performance. There's little or no sense of frightening bitterness or vengeance

thwarted. He's a sweet prince. The readiness is all. But one fears that Mr.

Beale's good-natured Hamlet will never be ready.

He is too much the confused student, too little the would-be

assassin. He delivers the soliloquies tenderly and beautifully, an innate

intelligence in support. Elsewhere, his voice as fine-tuned musical instrument

surprisingly forgets itself, lacking range. His performance is characterized by

a soft romanticism rather than the tragic greatness that has been thrust upon

it. Violent emotion isn't in Mr. Beale here; tears are. They encourage the

sentimental sense of a wounded Everyman, and the star isn't above milking it

the old-fashioned way. As the curtain descended slowly at the end of Act I as

if we were attending a grand opera, the theatrical sobs coming from Mr. Beale's

weepy Hamlet were loud enough to awaken Yorick.

Then again, the ghost was a good old declamatory

19th-century ghost, emoting to the rooftops. Polonius was a bore, as usual; the

gravedigger scene is clownishly so-so, as usual. We had an Ophelia without

poetry (and a pro forma singsong

madness scene). The cowardly, goading Claudius, and the ferocious, compelling

Gertrude who could have eaten him alive for breakfast, were played by the

veteran Shakespeareans Peter McEnery and Sara Kestelmen, and it was good to see

these veteran Shakespeareans again.

I've avoided mentioning the Peter Brook Hamlet that was in Brooklyn only a month ago. If I have a bias in

favor of Mr. Brook's imaginative simplicity, don't forgive me. It's a bias I'm

happy to have. The point I would like to make is only to observe that the two Hamlet productions are found on two

different planets. The Royal National Theatre production is big state theater

on display in the Opera House in Brooklyn. Save for just one of its actors, the

cast is all white. The Brook production is innovatory theater with a multicultural

cast of eight that played in B.A.M.'s intimate second theater. The one

continues a Shakespearean tradition, now grown predictable, growing weaker,

slowly dying. The other reexplores Shakespeare in order to invigorate the

classical theater and renew it. Which of them is truly alive? Which is the way?

I know the road I would sooner follow. The one without the

baggage of the past, the one without the suitcase.

Who was that Voice?

I'm talking with Peter Brook, renowned theater guru, a week before his Hamlet opened at B.A.M., and we're trying to recall a remarkable moment in the theater we were both witness to long ago. A life-changing moment for me. A moment when fire broke out in a crowded theater–and then theater broke out in crowded fire.

A dream-like moment when a play, a Dream –Peter Brook's legendary production of A Midsummer Night's Dream –literally ignited onstage, burst into flame, threatened to turn the Dream into a fiery nightmare. A moment when one voice pierced the smoke, turned the tide, stemmed the incipient, potentially tragic theater-fire panic. A moment when–and this was the strangest thing–after the play resumed, it seemed suddenly to comment on its own fiery interruption.

I don't mean to get all mystical about that moment, about The Voice, but in the three decades since, its mystery has only deepened, grown more dream-like. Did it really happen that way?

When I mentioned it to Peter Brook, his icy blue eyes lit up.

"You know, I was there that night, backstage," he told me. Not only that, he remembered The Voice! He remembered the play "commenting" on the fire!

Let me set the stage for the mystery of that Voice.

The setting: the Billy Rose Theater on Broadway, the night of Jan. 23, 1971. One of the first previews of the New York run of a Dream now celebrated as "mythical," a production that changed the way Shakespeare was played ever after.

I was fortunate to be among the first to see the production when it opened at Shakespeare's birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon, the previous fall. Fortunate because I just stumbled into it a couple years out of college, knowing nothing about Peter Brook or the Royal Shakespeare Company. Fortunate because it was a transformative experience, an experience that changed my life, an experience more exciting than any other I'd had from literature, more exciting than any other I'd had from life until then (except maybe when my college girlfriend dressed up as a nurse).

It was so electrifying, so incandescent, it perhaps shouldn't have been a surprise that it set the theater on fire when it came to New York.

So when I sought out Peter Brook this April, primarily to talk about his Hamlet , I couldn't resist bringing up the fire and the Dream . I'd brought along a copy of the story I'd written about that amazing, blazing moment three decades ago. About the way his Dream company had not just rescued the situation, but turned it into something revelatory and redemptive.

I met Peter Brook in the lounge of the Marriott Brooklyn hotel. As always, I was impressed by his otherworldly calm, his profound civility–and the depth of his belief in Shakespeare's uniqueness. He's someone who has done every kind of theater in virtually every culture in the world, from the ruins of Persepolis in Iran to remote African villages, from Marat/Sade to Mahabarata . But always he's returned to plumbing the bottomless depths of Shakespeare. Not as a culture-bound Bardolator, but as someone who finds in Shakespeare, in the infinite resonances of his language, a phenomenon, a mystery that transcends cultures, something that evokes what Mr. Brook calls an "invisible dimension." Once, in a lecture he gave in Berlin, Peter Brook spoke of the way cracking open a single line of Shakespeare can unleash "infinite energies" akin to those released by splitting the atom, intimations of ultimate mysteries.

I was thrilled that, with all he's seen and done, he remembered that night at the Billy Rose Theater–the night of the fire, the night of that mysterious Voice.

"I can't remember who it was, but what was very remarkable was this person who quietly relaxed everybody." He was flipping through the photocopy of the story I'd written: "I can't remember who, but I know that it was someone who took the whole thing in hand and, just by the tone of voice, changed the mood. It was quite remarkable."

The other remarkable thing, he recalled, was the way, "when the fire was put out, every line seemed to relate to burning."

"Yes!" I said. "When they resumed the play after the sprinkler system had doused the fire, there were ashes and steam drifting out from backstage just as they got to the line about 'hot ice and wondrous strange snow.' Then the line about watching an amateur play that 'made mine eyes water'–just as our eyes were watering from the smoke!"

We returned to the mystery of The Voice.

"I remember now," Mr. Brook said, reading the passage in my piece about the Voice. "This brings it back."

The passage about The Voice, which was in fact first published in The Voice (and is reprinted in my recent nonfiction collection The Secret Parts of Fortune ), describes the crucial first moments when the flames appeared and panicked cries of "Fire!" went up from the audience. Down front in the orchestra seats closest to the smoke, people were rising to their feet and beginning a panicky rush to the exits:

"Just as the first push for the exits begins to break into a full rush," I'd written, "an amazing Voice floats up above the confusion in the orchestra and stops everyone dead in their tracks. The Voice, a woman's, a grand dame 's, just radiates, blankets the place in fact with her presence and authority … 'Everyone. Sit. Down,' the Voice commands. Hands outstretched grandly, she motions them all to be seated …. People … poised for flight a moment ago, began shuffling around, as if to show her they are looking for their seats. My companion informs me we have just heard the voice of the cosmic Girl Scout leader."

Who was that Voice?

I had my candidate. "Was it Sara Kestelman?" I asked Peter Brook.

She was the actress playing Hippolyta the Amazon Queen and Titania, Queen of the Fairies, as well. There was no doubt she was regal, as was her voice. But I didn't have a distinct visual memory that connected her to the voice.

Mr. Brook was noncommittal. He wasn't sure, either.

Fortunately, I discovered, the solution to the mystery might not be beyond reach. It might, in fact, be 200 miles north in Boston, where that same Sara Kestelman was that very moment on stage playing Queen Gertrude in another Hamlet , the Royal National Theater company's production, which was doing an American tour before heading to B.A.M. at the end of May.

Four days later, I was on a plane to Boston.

Tremont Street, Boston. The stage door of the Wilbur Theatre.

I've never waited at a stage door for an actress before. And I've never sent flowers to an actress before (nor to anyone I've interviewed), but I had a dozen roses delivered to Sara Kestelman's dressing room yesterday. Don't get me wrong. It's not like I'm a stalker-type fan; I have an appointment to meet Ms. Kestelman here, duly arranged with the publicist for the Royal National Theatre Hamlet , in which she plays Gertrude to Simon Russell Beale's Hamlet.

Why the flowers? It suddenly occurred to me–a couple days after I spoke with Peter Brook, a couple of days before leaving for Boston to meet Ms. Kestelman–that I wanted to make a gesture of gratitude. That even if she wasn't The Voice, Ms. Kestelman had played an important role in my life. Yes, everyone connected to Peter Brook's Dream had played an important role: The production that turned me ever after into a seeker after Shakespearean mysteries.

But Ms. Kestelman had played the goddess in the Dream ; she had become, over the years, a kind of spiritual godmother figure for me, I guess. And in that incandescent moment when fire broke out onstage and the players–and the play–reached out beyond the curtain to ignite us all, she had played a kind of real-life heroine. If, in fact, she was The Voice–and I was sure she was–she had played an inspirational, initiating role in my life.

Ms. Kestelman was terrific as Gertrude: a subtle performance distinctive for avoiding the cheap Freudianism so many fall for in that role. Regal, maternal, vulnerable, conflicted, she was born to play a queen. But that much was obvious to me the first time I saw her when she played two queens: Hippolyta and Titania. The Peter Brook Dream was famous for "doubling," as it's called, both the Hippolyta and Titania roles and their respective male consorts–although Ms. Kestelman would quite scrupulously point out to me later that it wasn't the very first to do so.

What made their doubling of Hippolyta and Titania unique, she believes, was that she didn't change costumes–she wore the same shimmering green silk shift for each–that they were played as two aspects of the same being, not one actress playing two different roles. Titania was Hippolyta in Mr. Brook's vision, the wild night-time incarnation of the Amazon queen. Mating with an ass was Hippolyta's extreme sex-dream fantasy. ("Peter used to tell us that the ass was supposed to have the largest penis in the animal kingdom," Ms. Kestelman recalled later on.)

Anyway, I'll never forget her first entrance as Titania, descending from the rafters of the theater, riding a lush blood-red magic carpet of feathers, her arms outstretched in an attitude of command, her lush red hair upswept into a crimson crown.

She's still a redhead, although when she emerges from the stage door out of costume, she's less the imperious queen than a kind of elfin redhead type, her pale complexion with its subtle haze of freckles set off by a rakish black velvet slouch hat.

And, as soon as she spoke, there it was, that grand dame voice, a voice with the presence and command to stem the tide of human panic in that blazing theater long ago.

But no, she says, it wasn't her voice. We'd decided to get some snacks at the Ritz nearby, and I raised the question as soon as we got into the car (which, appropriately enough for this unsolved mystery, was driven by a friend of mine who is a Boston private investigator).

The moment was still vivid in her mind–well, the fire, anyway, but not her role in it. "My memory," she said in the car, "is we had candles in these sort of cake tins that we came on with at the very end, and they were bright, bright, bright, and then we blew them out and in the play-within-the-play scene"–the "Tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe," acted out by the Athenian "Mechanicals" for the newlyweds–"all the lights went down so that it was very atmospheric and romantic, and each of us practiced twirling these tins with the candles."

It was at this point, she said, "we'd started the scene, and then I recall hearing someone say, 'Oh my God, fire!' And I thought, 'Really, how ridiculous–so silly!' And then someone else went, 'OH MY GOD–FIRE!!' Then people started getting up and starting to go. And I saw flames coming over the top of the 14-foot set, and at that point Mary Rutherford, who was playing Hermia, started to run offstage. And I remember grabbing her. And as I was grabbing her, in that moment I was thinking, 'Why are you doing this–keeping them on stage when there is a fire raging behind you?' But I knew that it was going to be all right. I just knew it was going to be O.K.

"And at that point, John Kane, who was playing Puck and Philostrate, walked forward and said, 'Ladies and gentleman, please don't panic. I will go into the wings and see what's happening.' By that time the sprinklers had been activated, and he was able to come back onstage and tell everyone that the fire was out. He was very cool, and because he was cool everybody onstage just stayed still. And then he turned to Alan Howard [playing Theseus] and said, 'Where should we start again?' There was all that kind of British stiff-upper-lip business …."

Her account is lovely and moving–up to a point. But it is not complete. It leaves out a crucial element. It leaves out The Voice. The initial voice, the woman's voice that both Peter Brook and I recall first stopped the rush to the exits from turning into a life-threatening panic. The voice I was sure was Sara's.

The Ritz . Perhaps it was the champagne, perhaps it was the presence of a professional private investigator that brought out the interrogator in me, but after we ordered, I pressed my inquiry into the mysterious voice and the missing element in Sara Kestelman's account.

I got out my copy of the piece I'd written, which had the virtue of being a contemporaneous eyewitness account, as opposed to Sara's three-decades-old memory. I pointed out to her the passage that describes a woman's voice (the grande dame voice that, now that I'd been talking to her for a while, sounds awfully familiar), followed by John Kane's intervention. But in Sara's account, the woman's voice disappears!

I think it was her. I think she was The Voice, but that she has either blocked out her role in that fiery moment, or she's incredibly, touchingly modest about it and doesn't want to take credit for her heroism.

When I confronted her with the conflict between my contemporaneous account and her memory (in a lighthearted way–it wasn't a cop-shop interrogation; we were drinking champagne at the Ritz, after all), she fixes me with a searching gaze and says, in her best grand-dame manner:

"You know what I think? I think you should see Copenhagen ."

Copenhagen? I thought to myself. Oh, I get it– Copenhagen , the Michael Frayn play. Sara starred in the Royal National Theatre drama about conflicting accounts of a crucial World War II meeting between Niels Bohr, the Danish atomic physicist, and Werner Heisenberg, then working for Adolf Hitler's nascent atomic-weapons program. What went on at that meeting–whether Heisenberg was trying to help or stall Hitler's acquisition of the bomb in his conversation with Bohr–has become the subject of endless controversy and Rashomon -like postwar interpretations. An instance of the Uncertainty Principle in history.

It was a witty response to the conflicting accounts of the Dream fire and The Voice. Witty, but charmingly evasive–somehow I don't think this was an instance of Heisenbergian uncertainty. I think it was an instance of extraordinary grace and modesty by a superb actress who was pretending not to recall her own heroism.

Or perhaps it was something else, something more mysterious. That occurred to me after hearing her speak of the personal struggle the Dream had been for her. She was 24 at the time, without a vast experience of Shakespeare or any kind of theater; she'd begun her career as a dancer, in fact. She talked about the way being suddenly thrust into the blazing spotlight of one of the most famous and wildly successful Shakespeare productions ever–"people suddenly started flying in on helicopters and Rolls Royces"–had not been easy for her.

"It was a nightmare! I was so frightened, and suddenly there was the most successful thing in the world and I was not feeling clear about what I was doing . I had no confidence, no control over what I was doing onstage, of what made that Titania, that Hippolyta exciting or different."

"That's hard to believe," I said. "You were so commanding …. "

"Well, believe it," she said sharply. "It was an ordeal. After a performance, people would come to my dressing room and say, 'It was so lovely the way your dress shimmered,' and I'd tell them it wasn't shimmering, it was fear ."

And yet, somehow she gave a performance that was, to all outward appearances, fearless. She must have conquered that internal fear somehow, perhaps in some way that was unconscious even to her. And perhaps that's the clue to her conquest of the external panic at the Billy Rose Theater that memorable night. Just as she dealt with her own fear and panic in some way that was not conscious to her, perhaps she dealt with the panicked audience in a similar way–one that therefore might not have left a conscious trace in her memory. She dealt with it like a sleepwalker, a redemptive version of Shakespeare's other sleepwalker queen: Lady Macbeth.

Anyway, that's my theory, and I'm sticking to it.

Because I've come to feel that there's a kind of parable here, about fear and fire, about theater and life: One could look at life itself as a fire-in-a-crowded-theater situation: inherently panic-inducing if one considers too closely upon it. After all, we're all rushing headlong to the Exit, so to speak. The only question is whether we do it with dignity or panic, whether or not we can somehow enjoy the dreamy comedy being staged for our entertainment before the final curtain. Maybe I'm thinking in this gloomy mode because I'm facing some hospital time. Still, I'm grateful to Sara Kestelman, to everyone in that Dream, for dempnstrating how to transform fire in a crowded theater into a kind of redemptive theater in a crowded fire.