For Guthrie's Haj, 'Pericles' tells a refugee's story

With the opening next week of Shakespeare's "Pericles," theatergoers will at last get a chance to see the stage skills of Joe Haj, who took the helm of the Guthrie Theater as artistic director last July.

Haj has long been a fan of "Pericles." He acted in a production of the play at The Public Theater in New York in the early 1990s. And it was one of the first shows he directed at Playmakers Theater in Chapel Hill, N.C., after taking over as producing artistic director in 2006.

"It really is the story of a young man who thinks he's going to control his destiny," Haj said. "He's going to go to Antioch, he's going to marry the princess, he's going to have 2.4 kids — he has a plan! And then, of course, life happens to him."

Haj described "Pericles" as a refugee play — one man's search for place and family after being forced from his homeland. That the play is so rarely produced is an advantage, to Haj's mind. He said plays like "Hamlet" and "Romeo and Juliet" are burdened by their reputations.

"It's really great to make this 400-plus-year-old play and make it with really no expectations about what it's supposed to be," Haj said. "So we could treat it very much like a new script, which is very exciting."

The show Haj is mounting at the Guthrie is essentially the same show he staged last year at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, with almost entirely the same cast.

Festival director Bill Rauch said that under Haj's direction, the story of Pericles is accessible, entertaining and moving.

"I have rarely sat in a theater watching a Shakespeare play, where everyone around me was crying — and that happens in Pericles, every time I saw it," Rauch said. What distinguishes Haj's directorial style is his obvious love of the text, of actors and the audience, he said.

"I think it's that simple. So as an artist he respects the words and what the playwright's trying to do; he respects the impulses of all his creative partners, including the actors; and he really loves the audience, and he wants to tell the story for the people who've come to hear it," Rauch said.

Most modern scholars believe that Shakespeare wrote only about half of "Pericles," because the writing in the first two acts is not nearly as rich as the rest of the play. Haj is one of the few who believe that Shakespeare wrote the whole story, purposefully simplifying the early writing to reflect the younger, less mature Pericles.

"I think the play deepens and broadens as Pericles himself suffers loss and matures over the course of the play," Haj said. "It seems terrifically intentional to me that the play develops that way."

Similarly, Haj's production deepens over the course of the play. Minimally staged scenes early in the show make way for more fully rendered ones later.

Roy Dicks, a critic for the Raleigh News and Observer, covered "Pericles" and pretty much every other play Haj directed at Playmakers over the past 10 years.

"It's a very humane and warm, emotionally connected directing," he said. "And it just was so much more effective, because it pulled you into the reality of whatever this storyline was, instead of having something be just flashy entertainment."

Haj said the storyline of "Pericles" might at first appear arbitrary. Pericles doesn't do anything particularly wrong to deserve the losses he suffers, nor does he do anything particularly great to deserve the blessings he receives.

"It's the story of a life lived," Haj said. "And that if you live a life of any length there is great tragedy coming to each of us, and there's unspeakable beauty coming to all of us.

"That's the story of the play. It's tuned to a life's rhythm."

"Pericles, Prince of Tyre" is in previews this weekend. It opens Jan. 22 and runs through Feb. 21 at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.