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∙NEW YORK CITY. Richard Burton's Hamlet will continue to run for two more weeks on Broadway; during its extended run, Burton's standby, Robert Burr, played Hamlet for Joseph Papp's free Shakespeare group in Central Park in a production that, with Julie Harris as Ophelia, outdistanced the one on Broadway in nearly every respect save the performance of Burton himself. Papp's group is still doing a successful, broad-laugh presentation of A Midsummer Night's Dream from a collapsible mobile theater touring the five Boroughs* (TIME, July 10), and at present in Central Park an excellent production of Othello, with James Earl Jones as a hip-swiveling, primitive Moor. The staging is bold. In the bedroom scene, for example, Desdemona (Julienne Marie) does not just wait to be strangled. She makes a desperate dash to get away. Othello chases her, catches her when she trips on a flight of stairs, carries her, struggling, back to the bed, where he falls on her and chokes off her life.
∙SAN DIEGO. In Balboa Park, the replica Globe Theater contains productions this summer of Measure for Measure. Macbeth and Much Ado About Nothing. The first is notable chiefly because the actors wear codpieces, but San Diego audiences do not comprehend the play's intricate fornications. The second features a good performance by Charles Macaulay, a discovery from television. And the third is memorable because it was directed by B. Iden Payne, 82, a formidable figure in professional and bush theater for more than 60 years. His Much Ado is literal, straightforward, underdirected and onedimensional, which will indicate to any former Payne student that the master has not lost his grip. Some of the actors in Much Ado strike poses like various Barrymores. Small wonder, B. Iden Payne directed Ethel in Déclassé and John in Justice.
∙STRATFORD, CONN. This is the tenth season for Stratford-upon-Housatonic, which once tried to enrich its box office with stars like Jack Palance and Robert Ryan, apparently hoping that audiences would confuse qualitative accomplishment with mere surprise that the stars could say the lines at all. Then in 1962 the Ford Foundation gave $503,000 to Stratford to help finance a wintertime school in speech, dance, fencing and so on, designed to develop a permanent company with all the depth, facility, and technical skill of an English group.
To some extent this paid off in Morris Carnovsky's 1963 Lear, but for the most part the American Stratford is still disappointingly inept. Someone named Tom Sawyer is playing Hamlet there this year. The poor fellow may very well know how to get a fence painted, but he certainly has no idea how to sit on one. Left alone on the stage for soliloquies, he is wooden, stiff-legged and ill at ease. His fencing lessons have resulted in a duel scene that might have been fought between Mrs. Warren Harding and the lady in Ohio. Considering the Gertrude, the Laertes and the Ophelia that surround him, Sawyer is at least letting no one down. The highlight of the production occurs when a procession of supernumeraries enters bearing long poles topped by huge, flaming, antlered skulls. There is no other fire in this Hamlet.