Making laugh tracks to the Bard’s stage

Part of the comic relief in “Hamlet” is listening to Polonius, the pompous top courtier, give the exasperated Prince Hamlet a hair-splitting disquisition on theatrical genres: “tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastorical, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral ... “ and so on. Now, 400-plus years after “Hamlet” was first performed, a new form pops to mind with the production opening Friday at South Coast Repertory: tragical-sitcomical.

Hamish Linklater is the prince, and Michael Urie plays Horatio, his only true friend in the whole rotten state of Denmark. Millions have been watching them weekly on TV in separate comedies that have attracted good ratings and appreciative reviews. Now they’re leaping from screen to stage for 45 performances that will play to 22,695 people, at most.

On television, Linklater, 30, is Matthew, the lethargic, deadpan-comic slacker brother of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Christine in “The New Adventures of Old Christine” on CBS. Urie, 26, camps it up unrestrainedly Thursday nights on ABC as Marc, the scheming, hyper-sarcastic, gleefully antagonistic gay co-worker of the salt-of-the-earth title character in “Ugly Betty.”

Linklater is tall, dark and handsomely long-faced as befits a melancholy Dane. He notched his first Hamlet in 2004 at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Conn. South Coast audiences know him as the dashing young blueblood book publisher who had Jazz Age Manhattan at his feet in Richard Greenberg’s “The Violet Hour” (2002). Urie is a graduate of the Juilliard School, and his theater credits include three Shakespearean roles at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre. In person, he’s a bright-faced fellow utterly unMarc-ed by the sarcasm of his television character. His small-town Plano, Texas, roots show in a gracious, almost deferential manner.

While Urie got Shakespearean religion young, playing Demetrius, one of the mortal lovers, in a high school production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Linklater belonged to the Bard from birth. His Scottish mother, Kristin Linklater, raised him as a single mom while promulgating her much-used Linklater Method of voice training for actors and co-founding Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass. As a boy of 10 or so, he dreamed of playing Romeo, because in the Lenox productions of “Romeo and Juliet” the leading man “would go running through the audience and climb this balcony that was, like, wicked high.... This stunt was awesome.” Hamlet? “I thought, ‘God, this is really boring, and the sword fighting isn’t until the end,’ so I never had much of an ambition to participate in it.”

Linklater had two Romeos out of the way by age 21 -- on a regional stage in Portland, Ore., and in New York and on a national tour with the Acting Company. His tastes having matured, and his first TV series, the medical drama “Gideon’s Crossing,” having been axed after a single season, playing Hamlet is now his thing.

Get these two together, and war stories from the Shakespearean boards begin to fly. For example, how many ways are there for an actor to embarrass himself during a fatal gang brawl in “Romeo and Juliet?” Urie did it at Juilliard, playing Mercutio in a production with a glistening-pink stage set and a flowing fountain as its centerpiece. Instead of the traditional knives, he was supposed to fire a gun at a Capulet, but one night it went off prematurely, ruining the scene.

Linklater botched his fight when, as Romeo, he accidentally let go of a knife he was supposed to feign throwing, then tuck away while his victim completed the stage illusion by pulling out a dagger and sticking himself before anyone in the audience could be the wiser.

“If you pretend like you’re throwing, the audience’s eyes will go with your momentum,” Linklater says, rising to demonstrate how an aggressive feint can distract playgoers for a split second. “That worked until we hit something like Calumet, Mich., where I was exhausted and my hand was slippery and the knife flew across the stage. Suddenly there were two daggers on the stage and the whole thing was ruined. Suddenly, Tybalt was killing himself.”

“And,” quips Urie with perfect timing, “there’s about 50 kids in Calumet who to this day think Tybalt kills himself.”

Early in the rehearsals for “Hamlet,” Urie says, director Daniel Sullivan had to remind him gently that there is, in fact, no such theatrical mode as tragical-sitcomical. “I’d spent the last 10 months on “Ugly Betty” trying to find the cattiest way to say every line, and I walked in with that. These guys [the midnight guardsmen in the first scene] tell Horatio, ‘We saw a ghost.’ And I say, ‘Oh, really? Sure you did.’ ” I just instinctually tried to find every joke, because that’s what I do in the TV show.”

Sullivan, who won a best-director Tony in 2001 for David Auburn’s “Proof,” is staging the first “Hamlet” of his long career. Linklater came already attached, on the strength of his “Hamlet” in New Haven and his past work at South Coast. That was fine with Sullivan, who didn’t see either of those shows but had admired Linklater in Peter Hall’s production of “Measure for Measure” at the Ahmanson Theatre in 1999. It’s a treat, Sullivan says, to have an actor who’s the right age for Hamlet. “Most of the Hamlets of recent memory have been people in middle age. With all these multicolored facets, the extraordinary genius of the man, it’s difficult for younger actors who aren’t as experienced in life.”

Urie became Horatio by nailing his audition. Sullivan had seen him on “Ugly Betty” but in person found an actor who, while gathering a mass following as a consummate 21st century put-down artist, had both the sensibility to be Hamlet’s steadfast, stoical sounding-board and the chops to plant Shakespearean language in 21st century ears.

Urie has no intention of giving fans of his Marc character any whiff of a gay subtext for Horatio -- not that it hasn’t been done. “You could, but I’m not playing a sexual love,” he says. “Horatio adores Hamlet and is the only person who knows everything. Because of that, he’s incredibly loyal and responsible.”

As for Linklater, “Hamlet” is proving more fun the second time around, even on short sleep as he commutes daily between L.A. and Costa Mesa while sharing nighttime baby-soothing duty with his wife, playwright-screenwriter Jessica Goldberg. Their first child, Lucinda Rose Linklater, was born March 11, shortly after production wrapped on “The New Adventures of Old Christine.”

At Long Wharf, Linklater decided Hamlet was not depressed, self-destructive, suffering from an Oedipal fixation or, as Sir Laurence Olivier famously envisioned him on film, incapable of making up his mind. He was a man trying to find his way through a tunnel, hoping all might yet be well, only to have the opening narrow and the light recede. It was a good theory, Linklater says, but this time he’s relaxed enough not to need one. “I have more faith that the play is as popular as it is for a reason, so you just cling to the moments” and let them unfold.

A while later, they’re in a rehearsal room, running through the play-within-a-play scene. Urie stands by watchfully as faithful, ready Horatio, while Linklater’s Hamlet wobbles and slides about in awkward spasms of activity, giving last-minute advice to the actors he’s counting on to help him “catch the conscience of the king.” He’s the very image of a nervous, novice theater director, moving set-pieces around compulsively and nearly tripping while laying a dropcloth and a pillow for the player-king’s fatal nap. All the while he breathlessly jabbers at the actors, veteran players who clearly are humoring him, if they’re paying attention at all. The bit becomes a surprising and amusing gloss on the high stakes and small annoyances of life in the theater.

The Bard probably would have had fun sizing up today’s acting scene, where careers can zigzag from the disposable but well-paid work of distracting and delighting with sitcom to the demanding business of thrusting audiences into the tragedy of an intriguing, surpassingly eloquent and complex prince whose doom has gripped the world since 1602 or thereabouts and shows no signs of letting go. With the TV cameras turned off for now, Linklater and Urie are sidekicking their way into another thespian category on Polonius’ long list -- one whose name the critic Harold Bloom appropriated a few years ago for the title of his worshipful book on “Hamlet”: “Poem Unlimited.”

mike.boehm@latimes.com

*

‘Hamlet’

Where: South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays, 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays

Runs: Friday through July 1

Price: $28 to $60

Contact: (714) 708-5555