Shakespeare At The Senior Center

By Nancy K. Crevier

Dramatic actor Richard Clark mesmerized the audience at the Newtown Senior Center for more than an hour, Tuesday, December 9, with a solo performance of several of the better known, and a few of the lesser known, soliloquies and sonnets of William Shakespeare.

Introducing himself to the audience through the words of Shakespeare in Henry V, Mr Clark asked the viewers, “Kindly to judge my play.”

The performance was a blend of education and entertainment, one flowing smoothly into the other. With little more than a high school education, said Mr Clark, William Shakespeare entered into the Elizabethan world of playwrighting to become one of the world’s greatest wordsmiths ever. “He was an unknown upstart. But his genius was divinely inspired. He is,” said Mr Clark, “the God of the Word.” The works of Shakespeare are meant to strip away the superficiality of life, Mr Clark said, and the Bard was always sure to include in his creative concepts a moral lesson.

Mr Clark has been acting for more than 30 years, including regional theater, New York theater, and television. He has appeared several times at the Senior Center, bringing his other one-man shows to delight the audience.

Mr Clark regaled the attentive group with several excerpts from Hamlet, leading off with the famous “To be, or not to be” musings of the young Hamlet as he ponders suicide, and moving on to “the advice speech” in which Hamlet later directs players in the play within the play designed to unveil his father’s murderer.

From the Hamlet character Polonius speaking to his son, Laertes, Mr Clark breathed to life the words of wisdom now known to many, “To thine own self be true,” and wrapped up his tribute to Hamlet with “What a Piece of Work Is Man.”

Richard of Gloucester, said Mr Clark, was one of Shakespeare’s most dastardly characters, whom the writer used to expound one of his two favorite themes, that of power, the other being love. “Now is the winter of our discontent,” fumed Mr Clark as Richard III.

With never a change of costume, using only his voice, facial expressions, and body language, Mr Clark carried the imaginations of the listeners from the twisted mind of Richard III to the sarcastic, yet light hearted rejoinders of Jacques in As You Like It, then on to the devious dark character of Macbeth.

“No self-respecting actor will ever utter the word ‘Macbeth’ in a theater, by the way,” Mr Clark informed Tuesday’s audience. Considered the Curse of Macbeth should such a thing occur, there is nothing more to do but to “bolt into the open air, spin around three times, and scream the worst expletives possible to break the curse.” Fortunately, he was absolved from having to do so by murmuring the forbidden name in the Senior Center, not on a theatrical stage.

Mr Clark’s performance of the love-stricken Romeo elicited chuckles from the crowd, as did his lighthearted performance of Benedict’s reaction to the (untrue) news that he is the beloved of beautiful Beatrice, from Much Ado About Nothing.

In closing, Mr Clark offered several love sonnets by the Bard, and a reminder that “Any great theater is there to make us aware of our own humanity.”