After Riker's Island, Rob Melrose Brings Pericles, Prince of Tyre to the Public Theater

A young man discovers a dangerous secret and is forced to flee his home. He starts on an endless journey from city to city and is beset by hardships. The wife he marries dies in childbirth. His beautiful daughter is sold into prostitution. Reconciliation has never seemed so far off. This is Pericles, Prince of Tyre, one of Shakespeare's late romances, being presented at the Public Theater from November 11-30 after touring the five boroughs as part of the organization's historic Mobile Shakespeare Unit.

Pericles is one of the few plays in the Shakespearean canon that isn't often revived, a fact that director Rob Melrose, the artistic director of San Francisco's Cutting Ball Theatre, attributes to the question of authorship. "We're now pretty sure that the first two acts of the play were written by a guy named [George] Wilkins," he says. "They're good, there's something to them, but the writing is just nowhere near as good as what we're used to from Shakespeare. So that's one of the reasons why this play gets passed over very often." Still, he finds that this play, first published in 1609, has a lot more to it than people realize. "I think his reconciliation scenes — he has two of them in the play — are some of his best writing."

There's a uniquely difficult task placed ahead of the Mobile Shakespeare Unit, a venture that late Public founder Joseph Papp dreamed up decades ago to further the mission of bringing Shakespeare to the people. Directors must create a physical production not only durable enough to tour New York's five boroughs in the back of a few vans, but also accessible enough for its unconventional audiences, prison inmates, and denizens of homeless shelters. The subject matter couldn't have proved more timely. "It's a very hopeful play," Melrose says. "The play is about characters [who] have a lot of obstacles and bad luck thrown their way. It's a great play about reconciliation. It brings a lot of hope, especially to the incarcerated communities. Everybody in those places is thinking about the person they want to be reunited with when they get out."

The production's leading man, Raffi Barsoumian, agrees. "If you endure the strokes of fortune, you might just come to happiness," he says. "It's a beautiful story to take around to some of these places." Even so, it still proves intimidating. "When you're building a play you do a lot of research so when you open you feel like an authority on the subject. Here, the subject is loss, and you're going to a place where the audience is the authority on the subject. They know loss firsthand." However, he has seen the impact. "They get very excited by the reunions and the joy that comes from that. One audience member said, 'I love that scene, it flashed me back to a time in my life when I refound my father.' These are real things that some of these people have experienced."

When the production plays at the Public's Lafayette Street home, it will look similar to what the audience members at Riker's Island and the Park Avenue Armory Women's Shelter will have seen, a set that includes a single Mediterranean rug, a Venetian table, and a series of colorful costumes. "We're not contemporizing, but it looks modern because we're a modern company," Melrose says. "We're telling an ancient story and we're going to use the contemporary tools we have, but we're never going to forget that we have knights and jousting." And given how moved the tour's audiences have been, they have no reason to expect that paying audiences will be any different. "One of the inmates said we brought light into a dark place," Melrose says, "which I thought was pretty amazing."