The melancholy Dane plays out his obsessions in front of a period painting in South Coast Repertory’s Hamlet, playing through July 1 and directed by Daniel Sullivan. Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s “Dulle Griet” (Mad Meg) is the backdrop for Shakespeare’s tale of madness, revenge and tragedy.

The famous murder that sets the plot in motion – that of the king, Hamlet’s father, by his brother Claudius (Robert Foxworth) – has driven Hamlet (Hamish Linklater) into depression, rage or insanity, depending on the time of day and his mood. And after seeing and speaking to the ghost of his father (who asserts “murder most foul”), Hamlet vows revenge.

Once the revenge is decided, Hamlet rids himself of amorous thoughts for Ophelia (Brooke Bloom), the lovely and innocent daughter of the king’s minister Polonius (Dakin Matthews), by cruelly claiming “I never loved you” and exhorting her to “get thee to a nunnery.”

But before he sets his vengeful plot in motion, Hamlet wants more proof than a ghost’s possibly unreliable word. When a troupe of wandering players arrives, Hamlet sets up a performance in which the king’s murder will be enacted; if Claudius betrays emotion, Hamlet will consider him guilty and act accordingly.

Hamlet is the bard’s longest, one of his bloodiest and arguably his best plays. It also demands more of the actors than most. Director Daniel Sullivan (who won a Tony for Proof in 2001) took some casting chances with this production and comes up with mixed results.

Linklater (of TV’s “The New Adventures of Old Christine”) looks great as Hamlet – tall, thin, athletic and of royal blood, he looks the type your mother wants you to marry. He also has some experience with this part, having played it in 2004 at Connecticut’s Long Wharf Theatre.

His interpretation has ups and downs. Appealing (‘though hyperactive when he puts on that famous “antic disposition,”) Linklater deliveres his calmer soliloquies almost flatly, his character’s inner turmoil barely registering.

Likewise, the other youngster in the cast, Michael Urie’s Horatio seems to be in some sort of speed-talking contest. His first lines are barely intelligible and stay at warp speed throughout. It’s disappointing and puzzling, especially given his lovely performances in a variety of roles at last year’s Old Globe Shakespeare Festival.

But veterans Dakin Matthews and Robert Foxworth come close to saving the day. Much beloved Old Globe associate Matthews does some serious scene stealing in his role as Polonius, counselor to the king and father of Ophelia and Laertes. Matthews has the phrasing, the pauses and the inflections just right, and though everybody wishes Polonius could express himself more economically, Matthews’ interpretation is so human and rounded that we are genuinely saddened by his unintentional murder.

Foxworth (who played Brutus in last year’s Shakespeare Festival) is stunning as Claudius, the usurper whose conscience gives him away. Here is a royal presence and an actor with real dramatic heft.

Ralph Funicello’s simple but well-planned set consists of a large platform of wooden slats center stage, a bench stage left, a couch and chairs stage right, and a bell at the back that tolls the watch.

Sullivan has made some interesting, if not always successful, directorial decisions. The murder of Polonius is seen from the victim’s point of view; with Hamlet and Gertrude visible in silhouette through the curtain, Hamlet stabs expecting Claudius. The furniture arrangement on either side of the stage allows some of the characters to watch the action when not in a scene. Some of the soliloquies (Hamlet’s “too too solid flesh” is the first) are spoken with the other actors still onstage in a freeze hold. An interesting notion but repeated too often, it begins to look like an outdoor Starlight Opera production, where freeze holds are needed while airplanes pass overhead.

Hamlet plays through July 1 at South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa. Shows Tuesday and Sunday at 7:30 p.m.; Wednesday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. For tickets, call 714-708-5555 or visit www.scr.org.

No one of my generation believed that anything like Hitler’s genocidal intentions toward the Jews could ever be repeated.

We were wrong. Since then we’ve seen genocide in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur (among other places), and very little is being done internationally to stop them.

Catherine Filloux’s Lemkin’s House tells the story of Raphael Lemkin, an unsung and largely unknown hero of the campaign to stop genocide worldwide.

Lemkin’s House plays in repertory through June 17 at 6th@Penn Theatre as part of its Resilience of the Spirit Human Rights Festival.

Born in 1900 of Polish/Jewish descent, Lemkin studied linguistics in Lvov, where massacres of Armenians during World War I and of Assyrians in Iraq in 1933 captured his interest. He decided to study law and after graduation became a prosecutor in Warsaw.

Wounded while fighting the Nazis outside Warsaw, Lemkin escaped to Lithuania and then settled in Sweden. He then migrated to the United States, where he taught law at Duke University. It was here that he wrote the book (Axis Rule in Occupied Europe) in which he coined the word “genocide,” from Greek genos (race) and Latin cide (murder). He also learned that 49 members of his family had lost their lives in the Holocaust.

Lemkin continued to work for the cause until his death in 1959 at the age of 59. He died a pauper, and only seven mourners showed up at the funeral of this man who spent his life trying to save others.

Playwright Filloux kills off her subject at the beginning, then has his spirit ensconced in a crumbling mansion, killing time with New York Times crosswords and home repair. But he’s constantly interrupted by genocide victims (mostly Tutsis and Serbs), those who committed the atrocities, and politicians who somehow didn’t want to do anything to stop them. “When I was alive I was haunted by the dead. Now I’m dead and I’m haunted by the living,” Lemkin (Walter Ritter) notes.

Lemkin is visited by U.S. Sen. Proxmire (Duane Weekly), who announces that, after 3,000 speeches about the genocide convention on the Senate floor, the Bitburg incident at last served as impetus to pass it – in 1988, nearly three decades after Lemkin’s death.

Despite the grim topic, Filloux has managed to insert a fair amount of humor into her script. Connie DiGrazia, playing Lemkin’s mother, notes the obsession her son showed even as a child: “What could we tell our dinner guests when they saw our little boy under the table playing ‘genocide’ in the dark,” she asks, “with spoons running across the floor chased by evil dictators, the knives?”

This is a somewhat confusing piece, with time shifts and 15 characters played by four actors, but Ritter’s Lemkin is a solid unifying presence for Weekly, DiGrazia, Anthony Hamm and Monique Gaffney, who play several roles apiece.

Lemkin’s House is not entertainment; it is political theater and a call to action. The question you are left with is this: Why is it that after all these years, the international community is no better at preventing or stopping genocide than it was centuries ago?

Lemkin’s House plays in repertory through June 17 as part of 6th@Penn Theatre’s Resilience of the Spirit Human Rights Festival. For play schedule and tickets, visit

www.resilienceofthespirit.com.